← catalogue

Ursula

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1223 · 484,941 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Ursula
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Ursula

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley


        
Release date: October 20, 2005 [eBook #1223]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1223

Credits: Produced by John Bickers, Bonnie Sala, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK URSULA ***

URSULA


By Honore De Balzac


Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley




DEDICATION

  To Mademoiselle Sophie Surville,

  It is a true pleasure, my dear niece, to dedicate to you this
  book, the subject and details of which have won the
  approbation, so difficult to win, of a young girl to whom the
  world is still unknown, and who has compromised with none of
  the lofty principles of a saintly education. Young girls are
  indeed a formidable public, for they ought not to be allowed
  to read books less pure than the purity of their souls; they
  are forbidden certain reading, just as they are carefully
  prevented from seeing social life as it is. Must it not
  therefore be a source of pride to a writer to find that he has
  pleased you?

  God grant that your affection for me has not misled you. Who can tell?
  --the future; which you, I hope, will see, though not, perhaps.

  Your uncle,
  De Balzac.





URSULA




CHAPTER I. THE FRIGHTENED HEIRS

Entering Nemours by the road to Paris, we cross the canal du Loing, the
steep banks of which serve the double purpose of ramparts to the fields
and of picturesque promenades for the inhabitants of that pretty little
town. Since 1830 several houses had unfortunately been built on the
farther side of the bridge. If this sort of suburb increases, the place
will lose its present aspect of graceful originality.

In 1829, however, both sides of the road were clear, and the master of
the post route, a tall, stout man about sixty years of age, sitting one
fine autumn morning at the highest part of the bridge, could take in at
a glance the whole of what is called in his business a “ruban de queue.”
 The month of September was displaying its treasures; the atmosphere
glowed above the grass and the pebbles; no cloud dimmed the blue of the
sky, the purity of which in all parts, even close to the horizon, showed
the extreme rarefaction of the air. So Minoret-Levrault (for that was
the post master’s name) was obliged to shade his eyes with one hand to
keep them from being dazzled. With the air of a man who was tired of
waiting, he looked first to the charming meadows which lay to the
right of the road where the aftermath was springing up, then to the
hill-slopes covered with copses which extend, on the left, from Nemours
to Bouron. He could hear in the valley of the Loing, where the sounds on
the road were echoed back from the hills, the trot of his own horses and
the crack of his postilion’s whip.

None but a post master could feel impatient within sight of such
meadows, filled with cattle worthy of Paul Potter and glowing beneath
a Raffaelle sky, and beside a canal shaded with trees after Hobbema.
Whoever knows Nemours knows that nature is there as beautiful as art,
whose mission is to spiritualize it; there, the landscape has ideas and
creates thought. But, on catching sight of Minoret-Levrault an artist
would very likely have left the view to sketch the man, so original was
he in his native commonness. Unite in a human being all the conditions
of the brute and you have a Caliban, who is certainly a great thing.
Wherever form rules, sentiment disappears. The post master, a living
proof of that axiom, presented a physiognomy in which an observer could
with difficulty trace, beneath the vivid carnation of its coarsely
developed flesh, the semblance of a soul. His cap of blue cloth, with
a small peak, and sides fluted like a melon, outlined a head of vast
dimensions, showing that Gall’s science has not yet produced its chapter
of exceptions. The gray and rather shiny hair which appeared below the
cap showed that other causes than mental toil or grief had whitened
it. Large ears stood out from the head, their edges scarred with the
eruptions of his over-abundant blood, which seemed ready to gush at the
least exertion. His skin was crimson under an outside layer of
brown, due to the habit of standing in the sun. The roving gray eyes,
deep-sunken, and hidden by bushy black brows, were like those of the
Kalmucks who entered France in 1815; if they ever sparkled it was
only under the influence of a covetous thought. His broad pug nose was
flattened at the base. Thick lips, in keeping with a repulsive double
chin, the beard of which, rarely cleaned more than once a week, was
encircled with a dirty silk handkerchief twisted to a cord; a short
neck, rolling in fat, and heavy cheeks completed the characteristics of
brute force which sculptors give to their caryatids. Minoret-Levrault
was like those statues, with this difference, that whereas they
supported an edifice, he had more than he could well do to support
himself. You will meet many such Atlases in the world. The man’s torso
was a block; it was like that of a bull standing on his hind-legs. His
vigorous arms ended in a pair of thick, hard hands, broad and strong
and well able to handle whip, reins, and pitchfork; hands which his
postilions never attempted to trifle with. The enormous stomach of this
giant rested on thighs which were as large as the body of an ordinary
adult, and feet like those of an elephant. Anger was a rare thing with
him, but it was terrible, apoplectic, when it did burst forth. Though
violent and quite incapable of reflection, the man had never done
anything that justified the sinister suggestions of his bodily presence.
To all those who felt afraid of him his postilions would reply, “Oh!
he’s not bad.”

The master of Nemours, to use the common abbreviation of the country,
wore a velveteen shooting-jacket of bottle-green, trousers of green
linen with great stripes, and an ample yellow waistcoat of goat’s
skin, in the pocket of which might be discerned the round outline of
a monstrous snuff-box. A snuff-box to a pug nose is a law without
exception.

A son of the Revolution and a spectator of the Empire, Minoret-Levrault
did not meddle with politics; as to his religious opinions, he had never
set foot in a church except to be married; as to his private principles,
he kept them within the civil code; all that the law did not forbid or
could not prevent he considered right. He never read anything but
the journal of the department of the Seine-et-Oise, and a few printed
instructions relating to his business. He was considered a clever
agriculturist; but his knowledge was only practical. In him the moral
being did not belie the physical. He seldom spoke, and before speaking
he always took a pinch of snuff to give himself time, not to find ideas,
but words. If he had been a talker you would have felt that he was out
of keeping with himself. Reflecting that this elephant minus a trumpet
and without a mind was called Minoret-Levrault, we are compelled to
agree with Sterne as to the occult power of names, which sometimes
ridicule and sometimes foretell characters.

In spite of his visible incapacity he had acquired during the last
thirty-six years (the Revolution helping him) an income of thirty
thousand francs, derived from farm lands, woods and meadows. If Minoret,
being master of the coach-lines of Nemours and those of the Gatinais to
Paris, still worked at his business, it was less from habit than for the
sake of an only son, to whom he was anxious to give a fine career. This
son, who was now (to use an expression of the peasantry) a “monsieur,”
 had just completed his legal studies and was about to take his degree as
licentiate, preparatory to being called to the Bar. Monsieur and Madame
Minoret-Levrault--for behind our colossus every one will perceive
a woman without whom this signal good-fortune would have been
impossible--left their son free to choose his own career; he might be a
notary in Paris, king’s-attorney in some district, collector of customs
no matter where, broker, or post master, as he pleased. What fancy of
his could they ever refuse him? to what position of life might he
not aspire as the son of a man about whom the whole countryside, from
Montargis to Essonne, was in the habit of saying, “Pere Minoret doesn’t
even know how rich he is”?

This saying had obtained fresh force about four years before this
history begins, when Minoret, after selling his inn, built stables and a
splendid dwelling, and removed the post-house from the Grand’Rue to the
wharf. The new establishment cost two hundred thousand francs, which the
gossip of thirty miles in circumference more than doubled. The Nemours
mail-coach service requires a large number of horses. It goes to
Fontainebleau on the road to Paris, and from there diverges to Montargis
and also to Montereau. The relays are long, and the sandy soil of the
Montargis road calls for the mythical third horse, always paid for but
never seen. A man of Minoret’s build, and Minoret’s wealth, at the head
of such an establishment might well be called, without contradiction,
the master of Nemours. Though he never thought of God or devil, being
a practical materialist, just as he was a practical agriculturist, a
practical egoist, and a practical miser, Minoret had enjoyed up to
this time a life of unmixed happiness,--if we can call pure materialism
happiness. A physiologist, observing the rolls of flesh which covered
the last vertebrae and pressed upon the giant’s cerebellum, and, above
all, hearing the shrill, sharp voice which contrasted so absurdly with
his huge body, would have understood why this ponderous, coarse being
adored his only son, and why he had so long expected him,--a fact proved
by the name, Desire, which was given to the child.

The mother, whom the boy fortunately resembled, rivaled the father in
spoiling him. No child could long have resisted the effects of such
idolatry. As soon as Desire knew the extent of his power he milked his
mother’s coffer and dipped into his father’s purse, making each author
of his being believe that he, or she, alone was petitioned. Desire,
who played a part in Nemours far beyond that of a prince royal in his
father’s capital, chose to gratify his fancies in Paris just as he had
gratified them in his native town; he had therefore spent a yearly sum
of not less than twelve thousand francs during the time of his legal
studies. But for that money he had certainly acquired ideas that would
never had come to him in Nemours; he had stripped off the provincial
skin, learned the power of money and seen in the magistracy a means of
advancement which he fancied. During the last year he had spent an extra
sum of ten thousand francs in the company of artists, journalists, and
their mistresses. A confidential and rather disquieting letter from his
son, asking for his consent to a marriage, explains the watch which the
post master was now keeping on the bridge; for Madame Minoret-Levrault,
busy in preparing a sumptuous breakfast to celebrate the triumphal
return of the licentiate, had sent her husband to the mail road,
advising him to take a horse and ride out if he saw nothing of the
diligence. The coach which was conveying the precious son usually
arrived at five in the morning and it was now nine! What could be the
meaning of such delay? Was the coach overturned? Could Desire be dead?
Or was it nothing worse than a broken leg?

Three distinct volleys of cracking whips rent the air like a discharge
of musketry; the red waistcoats of the postilions dawned in sight, ten
horses neighed. The master pulled off his cap and waved it; he was
seen. The best mounted postilion, who was returning with two gray
carriage-horses, set spurs to his beast and came on in advance of the
five diligence horses and the three other carriage-horses, and soon
reached his master.

“Have you seen the ‘Ducler’?”

On the great mail routes names, often fantastic, are given to the
different coaches; such, for instance, as the “Caillard,” the “Ducler”
 (the coach between Nemours and Paris), the “Grand Bureau.” Every new
enterprise is called the “Competition.” In the days of the Lecompte
company their coaches were called the “Countess.”--“‘Caillard’ could not
overtake the ‘Countess’; but ‘Grand Bureau’ caught up with her finely,”
 you will hear the men say. If you see a postilion pressing his horses
and refusing a glass of wine, question the conductor and he will
tell you, snuffing the air while his eye gazes far into space, “The
‘Competition’ is ahead.”--“We can’t get in sight of her,” cries
the postilion; “the vixen! she wouldn’t stop to let her passengers
dine.”--“The question is, has she got any?” responds the conductor.
“Give it to Polignac!” All lazy and bad horses are called Polignac.
Such are the jokes and the basis of conversation between postilions and
conductors on the roofs of the coaches. Each profession, each calling in
France has its slang.

“Have you seen the ‘Ducler’?” asked Minoret.

“Monsieur Desire?” said the postilion, interrupting his master. “Hey!
you must have heard us, didn’t our whips tell you? we felt you were
somewhere along the road.”

Just then a woman dressed in her Sunday clothes,--for the bells were
pealing from the clock tower and calling the inhabitants to mass,--a
woman about thirty-six years of age came up to the post master.

“Well, cousin,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe me--Uncle is with Ursula
in the Grand’Rue, and they are going to mass.”

In spite of the modern poetic canons as to local color, it is quite
impossible to push realism so far as to repeat the horrible blasphemy
mingled with oaths which this news, apparently so unexciting, brought
from the huge mouth of Minoret-Levrault; his shrill voice grew sibilant,
and his face took on the appearance of what people oddly enough call a
sunstroke.

“Is that true?” he asked, after the first explosion of his wrath was
over.

The postilions bowed to their master as they and their horses passed
him, but he seemed to neither see nor hear them. Instead of waiting for
his son, Minoret-Levrault hurried up to the Grand’Rue with his cousin.

“Didn’t I always tell you so?” she resumed. “When Doctor Minoret
goes out of his head that demure little hypocrite will drag him into
religion; whoever lays hold of the mind gets hold of the purse, and
she’ll have our inheritance.”

“But, Madame Massin--” said the post master, dumbfounded.

“There now!” exclaimed Madame Massin, interrupting her cousin. “You are
going to say, just as Massin does, that a little girl of fifteen
can’t invent such plans and carry them out, or make an old man of
eighty-three, who has never set foot in a church except to be married,
change his opinions,--now don’t tell me he has such a horror of priests
that he wouldn’t even go with the girl to the parish church when she
made her first communion. I’d like to know why, if Doctor Minoret hates
priests, he has spent nearly every evening for the last fifteen years of
his life with the Abbe Chaperon. The old hypocrite never fails to give
Ursula twenty francs for wax tapers every time she takes the sacrament.
Have you forgotten the gift Ursula made to the church in gratitude to
the cure for preparing her for her first communion? She spent all her
money on it, and her godfather returned it to her doubled. You men!
you don’t pay attention to things. When I heard that, I said to myself,
‘Farewell baskets, the vintage is done!’ A rich uncle doesn’t behave
that way to a little brat picked up in the streets without some good
reason.”

“Pooh, cousin; I dare say the good man is only taking her to the door of
the church,” replied the post master. “It is a fine day, and he is out
for a walk.”

“I tell you he is holding a prayer-book, and looks sanctimonious--you’ll
see him.”

“They hide their game pretty well,” said Minoret, “La Bougival told me
there was never any talk of religion between the doctor and the abbe.
Besides, the abbe is one of the most honest men on the face of the
globe; he’d give the shirt off his back to a poor man; he is incapable
of a base action, and to cheat a family out of their inheritance is--”

“Theft,” said Madame Massin.

“Worse!” cried Minoret-Levrault, exasperated by the tongue of his
gossiping neighbour.

“Of course I know,” said Madame Massin, “that the Abbe Chaperon is an
honest man; but he is capable of anything for the sake of his poor. He
must have mined and undermined uncle, and the old man has just tumbled
into piety. We did nothing, and here he is perverted! A man who never
believed in anything, and had principles of his own! Well! we’re done
for. My husband is absolutely beside himself.”

Madame Massin, whose sentences were so many arrows stinging her fat
cousin, made him walk as fast as herself, in spite of his obesity and
to the great astonishment of the church-goers, who were on their way to
mass. She was determined to overtake this uncle and show him to the post
master.

Nemours is commanded on the Gatinais side by a hill, at the foot of
which runs the road to Montargis and the Loing. The church, on the
stones of which time has cast a rich discolored mantle (it was rebuilt
in the fourteenth century by the Guises, for whom Nemours was raised to
a peerage-duchy), stands at the end of the little town close to a
great arch which frames it. For buildings, as for men, position does
everything. Shaded by a few trees, and thrown into relief by a neatly
kept square, this solitary church produces a really grandiose effect. As
the post master of Nemours entered the open space, he beheld his uncle
with the young girl called Ursula on his arm, both carrying prayer-books
and just entering the church. The old man took off his hat in the porch,
and his head, which was white as a hill-top covered with snow, shone
among the shadows of the portal.

“Well, Minoret, what do you say to the conversion of your uncle?” cried
the tax-collector of Nemours, named Cremiere.

“What do you expect me to say?” replied the post master, offering him a
pinch of snuff.

“Well answered, Pere Levrault. You can’t say what you think, if it is
true, as an illustrious author says it is, that a man must think his
words before he speaks his thoughts,” cried a young man, standing near,
who played the part of Mephistopheles in the little town.

This ill-conditioned youth, named Goupil, was head clerk to Monsieur
Cremiere-Dionis, the Nemours notary. Notwithstanding a past conduct that
was almost debauched, Dionis had taken Goupil into his office when a
career in Paris--where the clerk had wasted all the money he inherited
from his father, a well-to-do farmer, who educated him for a notary--was
brought to a close by his absolute pauperism. The mere sight of Goupil
told an observer that he had made haste to enjoy life, and had paid
dear for his enjoyments. Though very short, his chest and shoulders were
developed at twenty-seven years of age like those of a man of forty.
Legs small and weak, and a broad face, with a cloudy complexion like
the sky before a storm, surmounted by a bald forehead, brought out still
further the oddity of his conformation. His face seemed as though it
belonged to a hunchback whose hunch was inside of him. One singularity
of that pale and sour visage confirmed the impression of an invisible
gobbosity; the nose, crooked and out of shape like those of many
deformed persons, turned from right to left of the face instead of
dividing it down the middle. The mouth, contracted at the corners, like
that of a Sardinian, was always on the qui vive of irony. His hair, thin
and reddish, fell straight, and showed the skull in many places. His
hands, coarse and ill-joined at the wrists to arms that were far too
long, were quick-fingered and seldom clean. Goupil wore boots only fit
for the dust-heap, and raw silk stockings now of a russet black; his
coat and trousers, all black, and threadbare and greasy with dirt,
his pitiful waistcoat with half the button-moulds gone, an old silk
handkerchief which served as a cravat--in short, all his clothing
revealed the cynical poverty to which his passions had reduced him. This
combination of disreputable signs was guarded by a pair of eyes with
yellow circles round the pupils, like those of a goat, both lascivious
and cowardly. No one in Nemours was more feared nor, in a way, more
deferred to than Goupil. Strong in the claims made for him by his very
ugliness, he had the odious style of wit peculiar to men who allow
themselves all license, and he used it to gratify the bitterness of
his life-long envy. He wrote the satirical couplets sung during the
carnival, organized charivaris, and was himself a “little journal” of
the gossip of the town. Dionis, who was clever and insincere, and for
that reason timid, kept Goupil as much through fear as for his keen mind
and thorough knowledge of all the interests of the town. But the master
so distrusted his clerk that he himself kept the accounts, refused to
let him live in his house, held him at arm’s length, and never confided
any secret or delicate affair to his keeping. In return the clerk fawned
upon the notary, hiding his resentment at this conduct, and watching
Madame Dionis in the hope that he might get his revenge there. Gifted
with a ready mind and quick comprehension he found work easy.

“You!” exclaimed the post master to the clerk, who stood rubbing his
hands, “making game of our misfortunes already?”

As Goupil was known to have pandered to Dionis’ passions for the last
five years, the post master treated him cavalierly, without suspecting
the hoard of ill-feeling he was piling up in Goupil’s heart with every
fresh insult. The clerk, convinced that money was more necessary to him
than it was to others, and knowing himself superior in mind to the whole
bourgeoisie of Nemours, was now counting on his intimacy with Minoret’s
son Desire to obtain the means of buying one or the other of three town
offices,--that of clerk of the court, or the legal practice of one of
the sheriffs, or that of Dionis himself. For this reason he put up
with the affronts of the post master and the contempt of Madame
Minoret-Levrault, and played a contemptible part towards Desire,
consoling the fair victims whom that youth left behind him after each
vacation,--devouring the crumbs of the loaves he had kneaded.

“If I were the nephew of a rich old fellow, he never would have given
God to ME for a co-heir,” retorted Goupil, with a hideous grin which
exhibited his teeth--few, black, and menacing.

Just then Massin-Levrault, junior, the clerk of the court, joined his
wife, bringing with him Madame Cremiere, the wife of the tax-collector
of Nemours. This man, one of the hardest natures of the little town, had
the physical characteristics of a Tartar: eyes small and round as sloes
beneath a retreating brow, crimped hair, an oily skin, huge ears without
any rim, a mouth almost without lips, and a scanty beard. He spoke like
a man who was losing his voice. To exhibit him thoroughly it is enough
to say that he employed his wife and eldest daughter to serve his legal
notices.

Madame Cremiere was a stout woman, with a fair complexion injured by
red blotches, always too tightly laced, intimate with Madame Dionis, and
supposed to be educated because she read novels. Full of pretensions to
wit and elegance, she was awaiting her uncle’s money to “take a certain
stand,” decorate her salon, and receive the bourgeoisie. At present her
husband denied her Carcel lamps, lithographs, and all the other trifles
the notary’s wife possessed. She was excessively afraid of Goupil, who
caught up and retailed her “slapsus-linquies” as she called them. One
day Madame Dionis chanced to ask what “Eau” she thought best for the
teeth.

“Try opium,” she replied.

Nearly all the collateral heirs of old Doctor Minoret were now assembled
in the square; the importance of the event which brought them was so
generally felt that even groups of peasants, armed with their scarlet
umbrellas and dressed in those brilliant colors which make them so
picturesque on Sundays and fete-days, stood by, with their eyes fixed on
the frightened heirs. In all little towns which are midway between
large villages and cities those who do not go to mass stand about in the
square or market-place. Business is talked over. In Nemours the hour of
church service was a weekly exchange, to which the owners of property
scattered over a radius of some miles resorted.

“Well, how would you have prevented it?” said the post master to Goupil
in reply to his remark.

“I should have made myself as important to him as the air he breathes.
But from the very first you failed to get hold of him. The inheritance
of a rich uncle should be watched as carefully as a pretty woman--for
want of proper care they’ll both escape you. If Madame Dionis were here
she could tell you how true that comparison is.”

“But Monsieur Bongrand has just told me there is nothing to worry
about,” said Massin.

“Oh! there are plenty of ways of saying that!” cried Goupil, laughing.
“I would like to have heard your sly justice of the peace say it. If
there is nothing to be done, if he, being intimate with your uncle,
knows that all is lost, the proper thing for him to say to you is,
‘Don’t be worried.’”

As Goupil spoke, a satirical smile overspread his face, and gave such
meaning to his words that the other heirs began to feel that Massin
had let Bongrand deceive him. The tax-collector, a fat little man, as
insignificant as a tax-collector should be, and as much of a cipher as a
clever woman could wish, hereupon annihilated his co-heir, Massin, with
the words:--“Didn’t I tell you so?”

Tricky people always attribute trickiness to others. Massin therefore
looked askance at Monsieur Bongrand, the justice of the peace, who was
at that moment talking near the door of the church with the Marquis du
Rouvre, a former client.

“If I were sure of it!” he said.

“You could neutralize the protection he is now giving to the Marquis
du Rouvre, who is threatened with arrest. Don’t you see how Bongrand
is sprinkling him with advice?” said Goupil, slipping an idea of
retaliation into Massin’s mind. “But you had better go easy with your
chief; he’s a clever old fellow; he might use his influence with your
uncle and persuade him not to leave everything to the church.”

“Pooh! we sha’n’t die of it,” said Minoret-Levrault, opening his
enormous snuff-box.

“You won’t live of it, either,” said Goupil, making the two women
tremble. More quick-witted than their husbands, they saw the privations
this loss of inheritance (so long counted on for many comforts) would
be to them. “However,” added Goupil, “we’ll drown this little grief in
floods of champagne in honor of Desire!--sha’n’t we, old fellow?” he
cried, tapping the stomach of the giant, and inviting himself to the
feast for fear he should be left out.




CHAPTER II. THE RICH UNCLE

Before proceeding further, persons of an exact turn of mind may like to
read a species of family inventory, so as to understand the degrees
of relationship which connected the old man thus suddenly converted
to religion with these three heads of families or their wives. This
cross-breeding of families in the remote provinces might be made the
subject of many instructive reflections.

There are but three or four houses of the lesser nobility in Nemours;
among them, at the period of which we write, that of the family of
Portenduere was the most important. These exclusives visited none but
nobles who possessed lands or chateaus in the neighbourhood; of the
latter we may mention the d’Aiglemonts, owners of the beautiful estate
of Saint-Lange, and the Marquis du Rouvre, whose property, crippled by
mortgages, was closely watched by the bourgeoisie. The nobles of the
town had no money. Madame de Portenduere’s sole possessions were a
farm which brought a rental of forty-seven hundred francs, and her town
house.

In opposition to this very insignificant Faubourg St. Germain was a
group of a dozen rich families, those of retired millers, or former
merchants; in short a miniature bourgeoisie; below which, again, lived
and moved the retail shopkeepers, the proletaries and the peasantry. The
bourgeoisie presented (like that of the Swiss cantons and of other
small countries) the curious spectacle of the ramifications of certain
autochthonous families, old-fashioned and unpolished perhaps, but who
rule a whole region and pervade it, until nearly all its inhabitants are
cousins. Under Louis XI., an epoch at which the commons first made
real names of their surnames (some of which are united with those of
feudalism) the bourgeoisie of Nemours was made up of Minorets, Massins,
Levraults and Cremieres. Under Louis XIII. these four families had
already produced the Massin-Cremieres, the Levrault-Massins, the
Massin-Minorets, the Minoret-Minorets, the Cremiere-Levraults,
the Levrault-Minoret-Massins, Massin-Levraults, Minoret-Massins,
Massin-Massins, and Cremiere-Massins,--all these varied with juniors
and diversified with the names of eldest sons, as for instance,
Cremiere-Francois, Levrault-Jacques, Jean-Minoret--enough to drive a
Pere Anselme of the People frantic,--if the people should ever want a
genealogist.

The variations of this family kaleidoscope of four branches was now so
complicated by births and marriages that the genealogical tree of
the bourgeoisie of Nemours would have puzzled the Benedictines of
the Almanach of Gotha, in spite of the atomic science with which they
arrange those zigzags of German alliances. For a long time the Minorets
occupied the tanneries, the Cremieres kept the mills, the Massins were
in trade, and the Levraults continued farmers. Fortunately for the
neighbourhood these four stocks threw out suckers instead of depending
only on their tap-roots; they scattered cuttings by the expatriation
of sons who sought their fortune elsewhere; for instance, there are
Minorets who are cutlers at Melun; Levraults at Montargis; Massins
at Orleans; and Cremieres of some importance in Paris. Divers are the
destinies of these bees from the parent hive. Rich Massins employ, of
course, the poor working Massins--just as Austria and Prussia take the
German princes into their service. It may happen that a public office is
managed by a Minoret millionaire and guarded by a Minoret sentinel. Full
of the same blood and called by the same name (for sole likeness), these
four roots had ceaselessly woven a human network of which each thread
was delicate or strong, fine or coarse, as the case might be. The same
blood was in the head and in the feet and in the heart, in the working
hands, in the weakly lungs, in the forehead big with genius.

The chiefs of the clan were faithful to the little town, where the
ties of family were relaxed or tightened according to the events which
happened under this curious cognomenism. In whatever part of France you
may be, you will find the same thing under changed names, but without
the poetic charm which feudalism gave to it, and which Walter Scott’s
genius reproduced so faithfully. Let us look a little higher and
examine humanity as it appears in history. All the noble families of the
eleventh century, most of them (except the royal race of Capet) extinct
to-day, will be found to have contributed to the birth of the Rohans,
Montmorencys, Beauffremonts, and Mortemarts of our time,--in fact they
will all be found in the blood of the last gentleman who is indeed a
gentleman. In other words, every bourgeois is cousin to a bourgeois, and
every noble is cousin to a noble. A splendid page of biblical genealogy
shows that in one thousand years three families, Shem, Ham, and Japhet,
peopled the globe. One family may become a nation; unfortunately, a
nation may become one family. To prove this we need only search back
through our ancestors and see their accumulation, which time increases
into a retrograde geometric progression, which multiplies of itself;
reminding us of the calculation of the wise man who, being told to
choose a reward from the king of Persia for inventing chess, asked
for one ear of wheat for the first move on the board, the reward to be
doubled for each succeeding move; when it was found that the kingdom was
not large enough to pay it. The net-work of the nobility, hemmed in by
the net-work of the bourgeoisie,--the antagonism of two protected races,
one protected by fixed institutions, the other by the active patience of
labor and the shrewdness of commerce,--produced the revolution of 1789.
The two races almost reunited are to-day face to face with collaterals
without a heritage. What are they to do? Our political future is big
with the answer.

The family of the man who under Louis XV. was simply called Minoret was
so numerous that one of the five children (the Minoret whose entrance
into the parish church caused such interest) went to Paris to seek
his fortune, and seldom returned to his native town, until he came to
receive his share of the inheritance of his grandfather. After suffering
many things, like all young men of firm will who struggle for a place in
the brilliant world of Paris, this son of the Minorets reached a nobler
destiny than he had, perhaps, dreamed of at the start. He devoted
himself, in the first instance, to medicine, a profession which demands
both talent and a cheerful nature, but the latter qualification even
more than talent. Backed by Dupont de Nemours, connected by a lucky
chance with the Abbe Morellet (whom Voltaire nicknamed Mords-les), and
protected by the Encyclopedists, Doctor Minoret attached himself as
liegeman to the famous Doctor Bordeu, the friend of Diderot, D’Alembert,
Helvetius, the Baron d’Holbach and Grimm, in whose presence he felt
himself a mere boy. These men, influenced by Bordeu’s example, became
interested in Minoret, who, about the year 1777, found himself with
a very good practice among deists, encyclopedists, sensualists,
materialists, or whatever you are pleased to call the rich philosophers
of that period.

Though Minoret was very little of a humbug, he invented the famous balm
of Lelievre, so much extolled by the “Mercure de France,” the weekly
organ of the Encyclopedists, in whose columns it was permanently
advertised. The apothecary Lelievre, a clever man, saw a stroke
of business where Minoret had only seen a new preparation for the
dispensary, and he loyally shared his profits with the doctor, who was
a pupil of Rouelle in chemistry as well as of Bordeu in medicine. Less
than that would make a man a materialist.

The doctor married for love in 1778, during the reign of the “Nouvelle
Heloise,” when persons did occasionally marry for that reason. His
wife was a daughter of the famous harpsichordist Valentin Mirouet,
a celebrated musician, frail and delicate, whom the Revolution slew.
Minoret knew Robespierre intimately, for he had once been instrumental
in awarding him a gold medal for a dissertation on the following
subject: “What is the origin of the opinion that covers a whole family
with the shame attaching to the public punishment of a guilty member of
it? Is that opinion more harmful than useful? If yes, in what way can
the harm be warded off.” The Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences at
Metz, to which Minoret belonged, must possess this dissertation in the
original. Though, thanks to this friendship, the Doctor’s wife need
have had no fear, she was so in dread of going to the scaffold that
her terror increased a disposition to heart disease caused by the
over-sensitiveness of her nature. In spite of all the precautions taken
by the man who idolized her, Ursula unfortunately met the tumbril of
victims among whom was Madame Roland, and the shock caused her death.
Minoret, who in tenderness to his wife had refused her nothing, and had
given her a life of luxury, found himself after her death almost a
poor man. Robespierre gave him an appointment as surgeon-in-charge of a
hospital.

Though the name of Minoret obtained during the lively debates to which
mesmerism gave rise a certain celebrity which occasionally recalled
him to the minds of his relatives, still the Revolution was so great a
destroyer of family relations that in 1813 Nemours knew little of Doctor
Minoret, who was induced to think of returning there to die, like the
hare to its form, by a circumstance that was wholly accidental.

Who has not felt in traveling through France, where the eye is often
wearied by the monotony of plains, the charming sensation of coming
suddenly, when the eye is prepared for a barren landscape, upon a fresh
cool valley, watered by a river, with a little town sheltering beneath
a cliff like a swarm of bees in the hollow of an old willow? Wakened by
the “hu! hu!” of the postilion as he walks beside his horses, we shake
off sleep and admire, like a dream within a dream, the beautiful
scene which is to the traveler what a noble passage in a book is to a
reader,--a brilliant thought of Nature. Such is the sensation caused
by a first sight of Nemours as we approach it from Burgundy. We see it
encircled with bare rocks, gray, black, white, fantastic in shape like
those we find in the forest of Fontainebleau; from them spring scattered
trees, clearly defined against the sky, which give to this particular
rock formation the dilapidated look of a crumbling wall. Here ends the
long wooded hill which creeps from Nemours to Bouron, skirting the road.
At the bottom of this irregular amphitheater lie meadow-lands through
which flows the Loing, forming sheets of water with many falls. This
delightful landscape, which continues the whole way to Montargis, is
like an opera scene, for its effects really seem to have been studied.

One morning Doctor Minoret, who had been summoned into Burgundy by a
rich patient, was returning in all haste to Paris. Not having mentioned
at the last relay the route he intended to take, he was brought without
his knowledge through Nemours, and beheld once more, on waking from a
nap, the scenery in which his childhood had been passed. He had lately
lost many of his old friends. The votary of the Encyclopedists had
witnessed the conversion of La Harpe; he had buried Lebrun-Pindare and
Marie-Joseph de Chenier, and Morellet, and Madame Helvetius. He assisted
at the quasi-fall of Voltaire when assailed by Geoffroy, the continuator
of Freton. For some time past he had thought of retiring, and so, when
his post chaise stopped at the head of the Grand’Rue of Nemours, his
heart prompted him to inquire for his family. Minoret-Levrault, the post
master, came forward himself to see the doctor, who discovered him to
be the son of his eldest brother. The nephew presented the doctor to
his wife, the only daughter of the late Levrault-Cremiere, who had died
twelve years earlier, leaving him the post business and the finest inn
in Nemours.

“Well, nephew,” said the doctor, “have I any other relatives?”

“My aunt Minoret, your sister, married a Massin-Massin--”

“Yes, I know, the bailiff of Saint-Lange.”

“She died a widow leaving an only daughter, who has lately married a
Cremiere-Cremiere, a fine young fellow, still without a place.”

“Ah! she is my own niece. Now, as my brother, the sailor, died a
bachelor, and Captain Minoret was killed at Monte-Legino, and here I am,
that ends the paternal line. Have I any relations on the maternal side?
My mother was a Jean-Massin-Levrault.”

“Of the Jean-Massin-Levrault’s there’s only one left,” answered
Minoret-Levrault, “namely, Jean-Massin, who married Monsieur
Cremiere-Levrault-Dionis, a purveyor of forage, who perished on the
scaffold. His wife died of despair and without a penny, leaving one
daughter, married to a Levrault-Minoret, a farmer at Montereau, who is
doing well; their daughter has just married a Massin-Levrault, notary’s
clerk at Montargis, where his father is a locksmith.”

“So I’ve plenty of heirs,” said the doctor gayly, immediately proposing
to take a walk through Nemours accompanied by his nephew.

The Loing runs through the town in a waving line, banked by terraced
gardens and neat houses, the aspect of which makes one fancy that
happiness must abide there sooner than elsewhere. When the doctor turned
into the Rue des Bourgeois, Minoret-Levrault pointed out the property of
Levrault-Levrault, a rich iron merchant in Paris who, he said, had just
died.

“The place is for sale, uncle, and a very pretty house it is; there’s a
charming garden running down to the river.”

“Let us go in,” said the doctor, seeing, at the farther end of a
small paved courtyard, a house standing between the walls of the
two neighbouring houses which were masked by clumps of trees and
climbing-plants.

“It is built over a cellar,” said the doctor, going up the steps of
a high portico adorned with vases of blue and white pottery in which
geraniums were growing.

Cut in two, like the majority of provincial houses, by a long passage
which led from the courtyard to the garden, the house had only one room
to the right, a salon lighted by four windows, two on the courtyard and
two on the garden; but Levrault-Levrault had used one of these windows
to make an entrance to a long greenhouse built of brick which extended
from the salon towards the river, ending in a horrible Chinese pagoda.

“Good! by building a roof to that greenhouse and laying a floor,” said
old Minoret, “I could put my book there and make a very comfortable
study of that extraordinary bit of architecture at the end.”

On the other side of the passage, toward the garden, was the
dining-room, decorated in imitation of black lacquer with green and
gold flowers; this was separated from the kitchen by the well of the
staircase. Communication with the kitchen was had through a little
pantry built behind the staircase, the kitchen itself looking into the
courtyard through windows with iron railings. There were two chambers on
the next floor, and above them, attic rooms sheathed in wood, which were
fairly habitable. After examining the house rapidly, and observing that
it was covered with trellises from top to bottom, on the side of the
courtyard as well as on that to the garden,--which ended in a terrace
overlooking the river and adorned with pottery vases,--the doctor
remarked:--

“Levrault-Levrault must have spend a good deal of money here.”

“Ho! I should think so,” answered Minoret-Levrault. “He liked
flowers--nonsense! ‘What do they bring in?’ says my wife. You saw inside
there how an artist came from Paris to paint flowers in fresco in the
corridor. He put those enormous mirrors everywhere. The ceilings were
all re-made with cornices which cost six francs a foot. The dining-room
floor is in marquetry--perfect folly! The house won’t sell for a penny
the more.”

“Well, nephew, buy it for me: let me know what you do about it; here’s
my address. The rest I leave to my notary. Who lives opposite?” he
asked, as they left the house.

“Emigres,” answered the post master, “named Portenduere.”

The house once bought, the illustrious doctor, instead of living
there, wrote to his nephew to let it. The Folie-Levraught was therefore
occupied by the notary of Nemours, who about that time sold his practice
to Dionis, his head-clerk, and died two years later, leaving the house
on the doctor’s hands, just at the time when the fate of Napoleon was
being decided in the neighbourhood. The doctor’s heirs, at first misled,
had by this time decided that his thought of returning to his native
place was merely a rich man’s fancy, and that probably he had some tie
in Paris which would keep him there and cheat them of their hoped-for
inheritance. However, Minoret-Levrault’s wife seized the occasion
to write him a letter. The old man replied that as soon as peace
was signed, the roads cleared of soldiers, and safe communications
established, he meant to go and live at Nemours. He did, in fact, put in
an appearance with two of his clients, the architect of his hospital and
an upholsterer, who took charge of the repairs, the indoor arrangements,
and the transportation of the furniture. Madame Minoret-Levrault
proposed the cook of the late notary as caretaker, and the woman was
accepted.

When the heirs heard that their uncle and great-uncle Minoret was really
coming to live in Nemours, they were seized (in spite of the political
events which were just then weighing so heavily on Brie and on the
Gatinais) with a devouring curiosity, which was not surprising. Was
he rich? Economical or spendthrift? Would he leave a fine fortune or
nothing? Was his property in annuities? In the end they found out
what follows, but only by taking infinite pains and employing much
subterraneous spying.

After the death of his wife, Ursula Mirouet, and between the years 1789
and 1813, the doctor (who had been appointed consulting physician to the
Emperor in 1805) must have made a good deal of money; but no one knew
how much. He lived simply, without other extravagancies than a carriage
by the year and a sumptuous apartment. He received no guests, and dined
out almost every day. His housekeeper, furious at not being allowed to
go with him to Nemours, told Zelie Levrault, the post master’s wife,
that she knew the doctor had fourteen thousand francs a year on the
“grand-livre.” Now, after twenty years’ exercise of a profession which
his position as head of a hospital, physician to the Emperor, and member
of the Institute, rendered lucrative, these fourteen thousand francs a
year showed only one hundred and sixty thousand francs laid by. To have
saved only eight thousand francs a year the doctor must have had either
many vices or many virtues to gratify. But neither his housekeeper
nor Zelie nor any one else could discover the reason for such moderate
means. Minoret, who when he left it was much regretted in the quarter
of Paris where he had lived, was one of the most benevolent of men, and,
like Larrey, kept his kind deeds a profound secret.

The heirs watched the arrival of their uncle’s fine furniture and large
library with complacency, and looked forward to his own coming, he being
now an officer of the Legion of honor, and lately appointed by the king
a chevalier of the order of Saint-Michel--perhaps on account of his
retirement, which left a vacancy for some favorite. But when the
architect and painter and upholsterer had arranged everything in
the most comfortable manner, the doctor did not come. Madame
Minoret-Levrault, who kept an eye on the upholsterer and architect as if
her own property was concerned, found out, through the indiscretion of a
young man sent to arrange the books, that the doctor was taking care of
a little orphan named Ursula. The news flew like wild-fire through the
town. At last, however, towards the middle of the month of January,
1815, the old man actually arrived, installing himself quietly, almost
slyly, with a little girl about ten months old, and a nurse.

“The child can’t be his daughter,” said the terrified heirs; “he is
seventy-one years old.”

“Whoever she is,” remarked Madame Massin, “she’ll give us plenty of
tintouin” (a word peculiar to Nemours, meaning uneasiness, anxiety, or
more literally, tingling in the ears).

The doctor received his great-niece on the mother’s side somewhat
coldly; her husband had just bought the place of clerk of the court, and
the pair began at once to tell him of their difficulties. Neither Massin
nor his wife were rich. Massin’s father, a locksmith at Montargis,
had been obliged to compromise with his creditors, and was now, at
sixty-seven years of age, working like a young man, and had nothing to
leave behind him. Madame Massin’s father, Levrault-Minoret, had just
died at Montereau after the battle, in despair at seeing his farm
burned, his fields ruined, his cattle slaughtered.

“We’ll get nothing out of your great-uncle,” said Massin to his wife,
now pregnant with her second child, after the interview.

The doctor, however, gave them privately ten thousand francs, with which
Massin, who was a great friend of the notary and of the sheriff, began
the business of money-lending, and carried matters so briskly with the
peasantry that by the time of which we are now writing Goupil knew him
to hold at least eighty thousand francs on their property.

As to his other niece, the doctor obtained for her husband, through
his influence in Paris, the collectorship of Nemours, and became his
bondsman. Though Minoret-Levrault needed no assistance, Zelie, his wife,
being jealous of the uncle’s liberality to his two nieces, took her
ten-year old son to see him, and talked of the expense he would be to
them at a school in Paris, where, she said, education costs so much. The
doctor obtained a half-scholarship for his great-nephew at the school of
Louis-le-Grand, where Desire was put into the fourth class.

Cremiere, Massin, and Minoret-Levrault, extremely common persons, were
“rated without appeal” by the doctor within two months of his arrival
in Nemours, during which time they courted, less their uncle than his
property. Persons who are led by instinct have one great disadvantage
against others with ideas. They are quickly found out; the suggestions
of instinct are too natural, too open to the eye not to be seen at a
glance; whereas, the conceptions of the mind require an equal amount of
intellect to discover them. After buying the gratitude of his heirs, and
thus, as it were, shutting their mouths, the wily doctor made a pretext
of his occupations, his habits, and the care of the little Ursula to
avoid receiving his relatives without exactly closing his doors to them.
He liked to dine alone; he went to bed late and he got up late; he had
returned to his native place for the very purpose of finding rest
in solitude. These whims of an old man seemed to be natural, and his
relatives contented themselves with paying him weekly visits on Sundays
from one to four o’clock, to which, however, he tried to put a stop by
saying: “Don’t come and see me unless you want something.”

The doctor, while not refusing to be called in consultation over serious
cases, especially if the patients were indigent, would not serve as a
physician in the little hospital of Nemours, and declared that he no
longer practiced his profession.

“I’ve killed enough people,” he said, laughing, to the Abbe Chaperon,
who, knowing his benevolence, would often get him to attend the poor.

“He’s an original!” These words, said of Doctor Minoret, were the
harmless revenge of various wounded vanities; for a doctor collects
about him a society of persons who have many of the characteristics of
a set of heirs. Those of the bourgeoisie who thought themselves entitled
to visit this distinguished physician kept up a ferment of jealousy
against the few privileged friends whom he did admit to his intimacy,
which had in the long run some unfortunate results.




CHAPTER III. THE DOCTOR’S FRIENDS

Curiously enough, though it explains the old proverb that “extremes
meet,” the materialistic doctor and the cure of Nemours were soon
friends. The old man loved backgammon, a favorite game of the
priesthood, and the Abbe Chaperon played it with about as much skill as
he himself. The game was the first tie between them. Then Minoret was
charitable, and the abbe was the Fenelon of the Gatinais. Both had had
a wide and varied education; the man of God was the only person in all
Nemours who was fully capable of understanding the atheist. To be able
to argue, men must first understand each other. What pleasure is there
in saying sharp words to one who can’t feel them? The doctor and the
priest had far too much taste and had seen too much of good society
not to practice its precepts; they were thus well-fitted for the little
warfare so essential to conversation. They hated each other’s opinions,
but they valued each other’s character. If such conflicts and such
sympathies are not true elements of intimacy we must surely despair of
society, which, especially in France, requires some form of antagonism.
It is from the shock of characters, and not from the struggle of
opinions, that antipathies are generated.

The Abbe Chaperon became, therefore, the doctor’s chief friend. This
excellent ecclesiastic, then sixty years of age, had been curate of
Nemours ever since the re-establishment of Catholic worship. Out of
attachment to his flock he had refused the vicariat of the diocese. If
those who were indifferent to religion thought well of him for so
doing, the faithful loved him the more for it. So, revered by his
sheep, respected by the inhabitants at large, the abbe did good without
inquiring into the religious opinions of those he benefited. His
parsonage, with scarcely furniture enough for the common needs of life,
was cold and shabby, like the lodging of a miser. Charity and avarice
manifest themselves in the same way; charity lays up a treasure in
heaven which avarice lays up on earth. The Abbe Chaperon argued with his
servant over expenses even more sharply than Gobseck with his--if indeed
that famous Jew kept a servant at all. The good priest often sold the
buckles off his shoes and his breeches to give their value to some poor
person who appealed to him at a moment when he had not a penny. When he
was seen coming out of church with the straps of his breeches tied
into the button-holes, devout women would redeem the buckles from the
clock-maker and jeweler of the town and return them to their pastor with
a lecture. He never bought himself any clothes or linen, and wore his
garments till they scarcely held together. His linen, thick with darns,
rubbed his skin like a hair shirt. Madame de Portenduere, and other good
souls, had an agreement with his housekeeper to replace the old clothes
with new ones after he went to sleep, and the abbe did not always find
out the difference. He ate his food off pewter with iron forks and
spoons. When he received his assistants and sub-curates on days of high
solemnity (an expense obligatory on the heads of parishes) he borrowed
linen and silver from his friend the atheist.

“My silver is his salvation,” the doctor would say.

These noble deeds, always accompanied by spiritual encouragement, were
done with a beautiful naivete. Such a life was all the more meritorious
because the abbe was possessed of an erudition that was vast and varied,
and of great and precious faculties. Delicacy and grace, the inseparable
accompaniments of simplicity, lent charm to an elocution that was worthy
of a prelate. His manners, his character, and his habits gave to his
intercourse with others the most exquisite savor of all that is most
spiritual, most sincere in the human mind. A lover of gayety, he was
never priest in a salon. Until Doctor Minoret’s arrival, the good man
kept his light under a bushel without regret. Owning a rather fine
library and an income of two thousand francs when he came to Nemours,
he now possessed, in 1829, nothing at all, except his stipend as parish
priest, nearly the whole of which he gave away during the year. The
giver of excellent counsel in delicate matters or in great misfortunes,
many persons who never went to church to obtain consolation went to the
parsonage to get advice. One little anecdote will suffice to complete
his portrait. Sometimes the peasants,--rarely, it is true, but
occasionally,--unprincipled men, would tell him they were sued for debt,
or would get themselves threatened fictitiously to stimulate the abbe’s
benevolence. They would even deceive their wives, who, believing their
chattels were threatened with an execution and their cows seized,
deceived in their turn the poor priest with their innocent tears. He
would then manage with great difficulty to provide the seven or eight
hundred francs demanded of him--with which the peasant bought himself
a morsel of land. When pious persons and vestrymen denounced the fraud,
begging the abbe to consult them in future before lending himself to
such cupidity, he would say:--

“But suppose they had done something wrong to obtain their bit of land?
Isn’t it doing good when we prevent evil?”

Some persons may wish for a sketch of this figure, remarkable for the
fact that science and literature had filled the heart and passed through
the strong head without corrupting either. At sixty years of age the
abbe’s hair was white as snow, so keenly did he feel the sorrows of
others, and so heavily had the events of the Revolution weighed upon
him. Twice incarcerated for refusing to take the oath he had twice, as
he used to say, uttered in “In manus.” He was of medium height,
neither stout nor thin. His face, much wrinkled and hollowed and quite
colorless, attracted immediate attention by the absolute tranquillity
expressed in its shape, and by the purity of its outline, which seemed
to be edged with light. The face of a chaste man has an unspeakable
radiance. Brown eyes with lively pupils brightened the irregular
features, which were surmounted by a broad forehead. His glance wielded
a power which came of a gentleness that was not devoid of strength. The
arches of his brow formed caverns shaded by huge gray eyebrows which
alarmed no one. As most of his teeth were gone his mouth had lost its
shape and his cheeks had fallen in; but this physical destruction was
not without charm; even the wrinkles, full of pleasantness, seemed to
smile on others. Without being gouty his feet were tender; and he walked
with so much difficulty that he wore shoes made of calf’s skin all the
year round. He thought the fashion of trousers unsuitable for priests,
and he always appeared in stockings of coarse black yarn, knit by his
housekeeper, and cloth breeches. He never went out in his cassock, but
wore a brown overcoat, and still retained the three-cornered hat he had
worn so courageously in times of danger. This noble and beautiful old
man, whose face was glorified by the serenity of a soul above reproach,
will be found to have so great an influence upon the men and things of
this history, that it was proper to show the sources of his authority
and power.

Minoret took three newspapers,--one liberal, one ministerial, one
ultra,--a few periodicals, and certain scientific journals,
the accumulation of which swelled his library. The newspapers,
encyclopaedias, and books were an attraction to a retired captain of the
Royal-Swedish regiment, named Monsieur de Jordy, a Voltairean nobleman
and an old bachelor, who lived on sixteen hundred francs of pension and
annuity combined. Having read the gazettes for several days, by favor
of the abbe, Monsieur de Jordy thought it proper to call and thank
the doctor in person. At this first visit the old captain, formerly a
professor at the Military Academy, won the doctor’s heart, who returned
the call with alacrity. Monsieur de Jordy, a spare little man much
troubled by his blood, though his face was very pale, attracted
attention by the resemblance of his handsome brow to that of Charles
XII.; above it he kept his hair cropped short, like that of the
soldier-king. His blue eyes seemed to say that “Love had passed that
way,” so mournful were they; revealing memories about which he kept such
utter silence that his old friends never detected even an allusion to
his past life, nor a single exclamation drawn forth by similarity
of circumstances. He hid the painful mystery of his past beneath a
philosophic gayety, but when he thought himself alone his motions,
stiffened by a slowness which was more a matter of choice than the
result of old age, betrayed the constant presence of distressful
thoughts. The Abbe Chaperon called him a Christian ignorant of his
Christianity. Dressed always in blue cloth, his rather rigid demeanor
and his clothes bespoke the old habits of military discipline. His
sweet and harmonious voice stirred the soul. His beautiful hands and the
general cut of his figure, recalling that of the Comte d’Artois, showed
how charming he must have been in his youth, and made the mystery of
his life still more mysterious. An observer asked involuntarily what
misfortune had blighted such beauty, courage, grace, accomplishment,
and all the precious qualities of the heart once united in his person.
Monsieur de Jordy shuddered if Robespierre’s name were uttered before
him. He took much snuff, but, strange to say, he gave up the habit
to please little Ursula, who at first showed a dislike to him on that
account. As soon as he saw the little girl the captain fastened his eyes
upon her with a look that was almost passionate. He loved her play so
extravagantly and took such interest in all she did that the tie between
himself and the doctor grew closer every day, though the latter never
dared to say to him, “You, too, have you lost children?” There are
beings, kind and patient as old Jordy, who pass through life with a
bitter thought in their heart and a tender but sorrowful smile on their
lips, carrying with them to the grave the secret of their lives; letting
no one guess it,--through pride, through disdain, possibly through
revenge; confiding in none but God, without other consolation than his.

Monsieur de Jordy, like the doctor, had come to die in Nemours, but he
knew no one except the abbe, who was always at the beck and call of
his parishioners, and Madame de Portenduere, who went to bed at nine
o’clock. So, much against his will, he too had taken to going to bed
early, in spite of the thorns that beset his pillow. It was therefore a
great piece of good fortune for him (as well as for the doctor) when
he encountered a man who had known the same world and spoken the same
language as himself; with whom he could exchange ideas, and who went to
bed late. After Monsieur de Jordy, the Abbe Chaperon, and Minoret had
passed one evening together they found so much pleasure in it that the
priest and soldier returned every night regularly at nine o’clock, the
hour at which, little Ursula having gone to bed, the doctor was free.
All three would then sit up till midnight or one o’clock.

After a time this trio became a quartette. Another man to whom life
was known, and who owed to his practical training as a lawyer,
the indulgence, knowledge, observation, shrewdness, and talent for
conversation which the soldier, doctor, and priest owed to their
practical dealings with the souls, diseases, and education of men, was
added to the number. Monsieur Bongrand, the justice of peace, heard of
the pleasure of these evenings and sought admittance to the doctor’s
society. Before becoming justice of peace at Nemours he had been for ten
years a solicitor at Melun, where he conducted his own cases, according
to the custom of small towns, where there are no barristers. He became a
widower at forty-five years of age, but felt himself still too active
to lead an idle life; he therefore sought and obtained the position of
justice of peace at Nemours, which became vacant a few months before
the arrival of Doctor Minoret. Monsieur Bongrand lived modestly on his
salary of fifteen hundred francs, in order that he might devote his
private income to his son, who was studying law in Paris under the
famous Derville. He bore some resemblance to a retired chief of a civil
service office; he had the peculiar face of a bureaucrat, less sallow
than pallid, on which public business, vexations, and disgust leave
their imprint,--a face lined by thought, and also by the continual
restraints familiar to those who are trained not to speak their minds
freely. It was often illumined by smiles characteristic of men who
alternately believe all and believe nothing, who are accustomed to see
and hear all without being startled, and to fathom the abysses which
self-interest hollows in the depths of the human heart.

Below the hair, which was less white than discolored, and worn flattened
to the head, was a fine, sagacious forehead, the yellow tones of which
harmonized well with the scanty tufts of thin hair. His face, with the
features set close together, bore some likeness to that of a fox,
all the more because his nose was short and pointed. In speaking,
he spluttered at the mouth, which was broad like that of most great
talkers,--a habit which led Goupil to say, ill-naturedly, “An umbrella
would be useful when listening to him,” or, “The justice rains
verdicts.” His eyes looked keen behind his spectacles, but if he took
the glasses off his dulled glance seemed almost vacant. Though he was
naturally gay, even jovial, he was apt to give himself too important
and pompous an air. He usually kept his hands in the pockets of his
trousers, and only took them out to settle his eye-glasses on his nose,
with a movement that was half comic, and which announced the coming of
a keen observation or some victorious argument. His gestures, his
loquacity, his innocent self-assertion, proclaimed the provincial
lawyer. These slight defects were, however, superficial; he redeemed
them by an exquisite kind-heartedness which a rigid moralist might call
the indulgence natural to superiority. He looked a little like a fox,
and he was thought to be very wily, but never false or dishonest. His
wiliness was perspicacity; and consisted in foreseeing results and
protecting himself and others from the traps set for them. He loved
whist, a game known to the captain and the doctor, and which the abbe
learned to play in a very short time.

This little circle of friends made for itself an oasis in Mironet’s
salon. The doctor of Nemours, who was not without education and
knowledge of the world, and who greatly respected Minoret as an honor
to the profession, came there sometimes; but his duties and also his
fatigue (which obliged him to go to bed early and to be up early)
prevented his being as assiduously present as the three other friends.
This intercourse of five superior men, the only ones in Nemours who
had sufficiently wide knowledge to understand each other, explains old
Minoret’s aversion to his relatives; if he were compelled to leave them
his money, at least he need not admit them to his society. Whether the
post master, the sheriff, and the collector understood this distinction,
or whether they were reassured by the evident loyalty and benefactions
of their uncle, certain it is that they ceased, to his great
satisfaction, to see much of him. So, about eight months after the
arrival of the doctor these four players of whist and backgammon made
a solid and exclusive little world which was to each a fraternal
aftermath, an unlooked for fine season, the gentle pleasures of which
were the more enjoyed. This little circle of choice spirits closed
round Ursula, a child whom each adopted according to his individual
tendencies; the abbe thought of her soul, the judge imagined himself her
guardian, the soldier intended to be her teacher, and as for Minoret, he
was father, mother, and physician, all in one.

After he became acclimated old Minoret settled into certain habits of
life, under fixed rules, after the manner of the provinces. On Ursula’s
account he received no visitors in the morning, and never gave dinners,
but his friends were at liberty to come to his house at six o’clock and
stay till midnight. The first-comers found the newspapers on the table
and read them while awaiting the rest; or they sometimes sallied forth
to meet the doctor if he were out for a walk. This tranquil life was not
a mere necessity of old age, it was the wise and careful scheme of a man
of the world to keep his happiness untroubled by the curiosity of
his heirs and the gossip of a little town. He yielded nothing to that
capricious goddess, public opinion, whose tyranny (one of the present
great evils of France) was just beginning to establish its power and
to make the whole nation a mere province. So, as soon as the child was
weaned and could walk alone, the doctor sent away the housekeeper whom
his niece, Madame Minoret-Levrault had chosen for him, having discovered
that she told her patroness everything that happened in his household.

Ursula’s nurse, the widow of a poor workman (who possessed no name but a
baptismal one, and who came from Bougival) had lost her last child, aged
six months, just as the doctor, who knew her to be a good and honest
creature, engaged her as wetnurse for Ursula. Antoinette Patris (her
maiden name), widow of Pierre, called Le Bougival, attached herself
naturally to Ursula, as wetmaids do to their nurslings. This blind
maternal affection was accompanied in this instance by household
devotion. Told of the doctor’s intention to send away his housekeeper,
La Bougival secretly learned to cook, became neat and handy, and
discovered the old man’s ways. She took the utmost care of the house and
furniture; in short she was indefatigable. Not only did the doctor wish
to keep his private life within four walls, as the saying is, but he
also had certain reasons for hiding a knowledge of his business affairs
from his relatives. At the end of the second year after his arrival La
Bougival was the only servant in the house; on her discretion he knew he
could count, and he disguised his real purposes by the all-powerful open
reason of a necessary economy. To the great satisfaction of his heirs he
became a miser. Without fawning or wheedling, solely by the influence of
her devotion and solicitude, La Bougival, who was forty-three years old
at the time this tale begins, was the housekeeper of the doctor and
his protegee, the pivot on which the whole house turned, in short,
the confidential servant. She was called La Bougival from the admitted
impossibility of applying to her person the name that actually belonged
to her, Antoinette--for names and forms do obey the laws of harmony.

The doctor’s miserliness was not mere talk; it was real, and it had an
object. From the year 1817 he cut off two of his newspapers and ceased
subscribing to periodicals. His annual expenses, which all Nemours could
estimate, did not exceed eighteen hundred francs a year. Like most old
men his wants in linen, boots, and clothing, were very few. Every six
months he went to Paris, no doubt to draw and reinvest his income. In
fifteen years he never said a single word to any one in relation to his
affairs. His confidence in Bongrand was of slow growth; it was not until
after the revolution of 1830 that he told him of his projects. Nothing
further was known of the doctor’s life either by the bourgeoisie at
large or by his heirs. As for his political opinions, he did not meddle
in public matters seeing that he paid less than a hundred francs a year
in taxes, and refused, impartially, to subscribe to either royalist or
liberal demands. His known horror for the priesthood, and his deism were
so little obtrusive that he turned out of his house a commercial runner
sent by his great-nephew Desire to ask a subscription to the “Cure
Meslier” and the “Discours du General Foy.” Such tolerance seemed
inexplicable to the liberals of Nemours.

The doctor’s three collateral heirs, Minoret-Levrault and his wife,
Monsieur and Madame Massin-Levrault, junior, Monsieur and Madame
Cremiere-Cremiere--whom we shall in future call simply Cremiere,
Massin, and Minoret, because these distinctions among homonyms is quite
unnecessary out of the Gatinais--met together as people do in little
towns. The post master gave a grand dinner on his son’s birthday, a ball
during the carnival, another on the anniversary of his marriage, to
all of which he invited the whole bourgeoisie of Nemours. The collector
received his relations and friends twice a year. The clerk of the court,
too poor, he said, to fling himself into such extravagance, lived in
a small way in a house standing half-way down the Grand’Rue, the
ground-floor of which was let to his sister, the letter-postmistress
of Nemours, a situation she owed to the doctor’s kind offices.
Nevertheless, in the course of the year these three families did meet
together frequently, in the houses of friends, in the public promenades,
at the market, on their doorsteps, or, of a Sunday in the square, as on
this occasion; so that one way and another they met nearly every day.
For the last three years the doctor’s age, his economies, and his
probable wealth had led to allusions, or frank remarks, among the
townspeople as to the disposition of his property, a topic which made
the doctor and his heirs of deep interest to the little town. For the
last six months not a day passed that friends and neighbours did not
speak to the heirs, with secret envy, of the day the good man’s eyes
would shut and the coffers open.

“Doctor Minoret may be an able physician, on good terms with death, but
none but God is eternal,” said one.

“Pooh, he’ll bury us all; his health is better than ours,” replied an
heir, hypocritically.

“Well, if you don’t get the money yourselves, your children will, unless
that little Ursula--”

“He won’t leave it all to her.”

Ursula, as Madame Massin had predicted, was the bete noire of the
relations, their sword of Damocles; and Madame Cremiere’s favorite
saying, “Well, whoever lives will know,” shows that they wished at any
rate more harm to her than good.

The collector and the clerk of the court, poor in comparison with the
post master, had often estimated, by way of conversation, the doctor’s
property. If they met their uncle walking on the banks of the canal or
along the road they would look at each other piteously.

“He must have got hold of some elixir of life,” said one.

“He has made a bargain with the devil,” replied the other.

“He ought to give us the bulk of it; that fat Minoret doesn’t need
anything,” said Massin.

“Ah! but Minoret has a son who’ll waste his substance,” answered
Cremiere.

“How much do you really think the doctor has?”

“At the end of twelve years, say twelve thousand francs saved each year,
that would give one hundred and forty-four thousand francs, and the
interest brings in at least one hundred thousand more. But as he
must, if he consults a notary in Paris, have made some good strokes of
business, and we know that up to 1822 he could get seven or eight per
cent from the State, he must now have at least four hundred thousand
francs, without counting the capital of his fourteen thousand a year
from the five per cents. If he were to die to-morrow without leaving
anything to Ursula we should get at least seven or eight hundred
thousand francs, besides the house and furniture.”

“Well, a hundred thousand to Minoret, and three hundred thousand apiece
to you and me, that would be fair.”

“Ha, that would make us comfortable!”

“If he did that,” said Massin, “I should sell my situation in court
and buy an estate; I’d try to be judge at Fontainebleau, and get myself
elected deputy.”

“As for me I should buy a brokerage business,” said the collector.

“Unluckily, that girl he has on his arm and the abbe have got round him.
I don’t believe we can do anything with him.”

“Still, we know very well he will never leave anything to the Church.”




CHAPTER IV. ZELIE

The fright of the heirs at beholding their uncle on his way to mass will
now be understood. The dullest persons have mind enough to foresee a
danger to self-interests. Self-interest constitutes the mind of the
peasant as well as that of the diplomatist, and on that ground the
stupidest of men is sometimes the most powerful. So the fatal reasoning,
“If that little Ursula has influence enough to drag her godfather into
the pale of the Church she will certainly have enough to make him leave
her his property,” was now stamped in letters of fire on the brains of
the most obtuse heir. The post master had forgotten about his son in his
hurry to reach the square; for if the doctor were really in the church
hearing mass it was a question of losing two hundred and fifty thousand
francs. It must be admitted that the fears of these relations came from
the strongest and most legitimate of social feelings, family interests.

“Well, Monsieur Minoret,” said the mayor (formerly a miller who had now
become royalist, named Levrault-Cremiere), “when the devil gets old the
devil a monk would be. Your uncle, they say, is one of us.”

“Better late than never, cousin,” responded the post master, trying to
conceal his annoyance.

“How that fellow will grin if we are defrauded! He is capable of
marrying his son to that damned girl--may the devil get her!” cried
Cremiere, shaking his fists at the mayor as he entered the porch.

“What’s Cremiere grumbling about?” said the butcher of the town, a
Levrault-Levrault the elder. “Isn’t he pleased to see his uncle on the
road to paradise?”

“Who would ever have believed it!” ejaculated Massin.

“Ha! one should never say, ‘Fountain, I’ll not drink of your water,’”
 remarked the notary, who, seeing the group from afar, had left his wife
to go to church without him.

“Come, Monsieur Dionis,” said Cremiere, taking the notary by the arm,
“what do you advise me to do under the circumstances?”

“I advise you,” said the notary, addressing the heirs collectively, “to
go to bed and get up at your usual hour; to eat your soup before it gets
cold; to put your feet in your shoes and your hats on your heads;
in short, to continue your ways of life precisely as if nothing had
happened.”

“You are not consoling,” said Massin.

In spite of his squat, dumpy figure and heavy face, Cremiere-Dionis
was really as keen as a blade. In pursuit of usurious fortune he did
business secretly with Massin, to whom he no doubt pointed out such
peasants as were hampered in means, and such pieces of land as could
be bought for a song. The two men were in a position to choose their
opportunities; none that were good escaped them, and they shared the
profits of mortgage-usury, which retards, though it does not prevent,
the acquirement of the soil by the peasantry. So Dionis took a lively
interest in the doctor’s inheritance, not so much for the post master
and the collector as for his friend the clerk of the court; sooner or
later Massin’s share in the doctor’s money would swell the capital with
which these secret associates worked the canton.

“We must try to find out through Monsieur Bongrand where the influence
comes from,” said the notary in a low voice, with a sign to Massin to
keep quiet.

“What are you about, Minoret?” cried a little woman, suddenly descending
upon the group in the middle of which stood the post master, as tall
and round as a tower. “You don’t know where Desire is and there you are,
planted on your two legs, gossiping about nothing, when I thought you on
horseback!--Oh, good morning, Messieurs and Mesdames.”

This little woman, thin, pale, and fair, dressed in a gown of white
cotton with pattern of large, chocolate-colored flowers, a cap trimmed
with ribbon and frilled with lace, and wearing a small green shawl
on her flat shoulders, was Minoret’s wife, the terror of postilions,
servants, and carters; who kept the accounts and managed the
establishment “with finger and eye” as they say in those parts. Like the
true housekeeper that she was, she wore no ornaments. She did not give
in (to use her own expression) to gew-gaws and trumpery; she held to the
solid and the substantial, and wore, even on Sundays, a black apron, in
the pocket of which she jingled her household keys. Her screeching voice
was agony to the drums of all ears. Her rigid glance, conflicting with
the soft blue of her eyes, was in visible harmony with the thin lips
of a pinched mouth and a high, projecting, and very imperious forehead.
Sharp was the glance, sharper still both gesture and speech. “Zelie
being obliged to have a will for two, had it for three,” said Goupil,
who pointed out the successive reigns of three young postilions, of
neat appearance, who had been set up in life by Zelie, each after seven
years’ service. The malicious clerk named them Postilion I., Postilion
II., Postilion III. But the little influence these young men had in the
establishment, and their perfect obedience proved that Zelie was merely
interested in worthy helpers.

This attempt at scandal was against probabilities. Since the birth of
her son (nursed by her without any evidence of how it was possible for
her to do so) Madame Minoret had thought only of increasing the family
fortune and was wholly given up to the management of their immense
establishment. To steal a bale of hay or a bushel of oats or get the
better of Zelie in even the most complicated accounts was a thing
impossible, though she scribbled hardly better than a cat, and knew
nothing of arithmetic but addition and subtraction. She never took a
walk except to look at the hay, the oats, or the second crops. She sent
“her man” to the mowing, and the postilions to tie the bales, telling
them the quantity, within a hundred pounds, each field should bear.
Though she was the soul of that great body called Minoret-Levrault and
led him about by his pug nose, she was made to feel the fears which
occasionally (we are told) assail all tamers of wild beasts. She
therefore made it a rule to get into a rage before he did; the
postilions knew very well when his wife had been quarreling with him,
for his anger ricocheted on them. Madame Minoret was as clever as she
was grasping; and it was a favorite remark in the whole town, “Where
would Minoret-Levrault be without his wife?”

“When you know what has happened,” replied the post master, “you’ll be
over the traces yourself.”

“What is it?”

“Ursula has taken the doctor to mass.”

Zelie’s pupils dilated; she stood for a moment yellow with anger, then,
crying out, “I’ll see it before I believe it!” she rushed into the
church. The service had reached the Elevation. The stillness of the
worshippers enabled her to look along each row of chairs and benches as
she went up the aisle beside the chapels to Ursula’s place, where she
saw old Minoret standing with bared head.

If you recall the heads of Barbe-Marbois, Boissy d’Anglas, Morellet,
Helvetius, or Frederick the Great, you will see the exact image of
Doctor Minoret, whose green old age resembled that of those celebrated
personages. Their heads coined in the same mint (for each had the
characteristics of a medal) showed a stern and quasi-puritan profile,
cold tones, a mathematical brain, a certain narrowness about the
features, shrewd eyes, grave lips, and a something that was surely
aristocratic--less perhaps in sentiment than in habit, more in the ideas
than in the character. All men of this stamp have high brows retreating
at the summit, the sign of a tendency to materialism. You will find
these leading characteristics of the head and these points of the face
in all the Encyclopedists, in the orators of the Gironde, in the men
of a period when religious ideas were almost dead, men who called
themselves deists and were atheists. The deist is an atheist lucky in
classification.

Minoret had a forehead of this description, furrowed with wrinkles,
which recovered in his old age a sort of artless candor from the manner
in which the silvery hair, brushed back like that of a woman when making
her toilet, curled in light flakes upon the blackness of his coat. He
persisted in dressing, as in his youth, in black silk stockings, shoes
with gold buckles, breeches of black poult-de-soie, and a black coat,
adorned with the red rosette. This head, so firmly characterized, the
cold whiteness of which was softened by the yellowing tones of old age,
happened to be, just then, in the full light of a window. As Madame
Minoret came in sight of him the doctor’s blue eyes with their reddened
lids were raised to heaven; a new conviction had given them a new
expression. His spectacles lay in his prayer-book and marked the place
where he had ceased to pray. The tall and spare old man, his arms
crossed on his breast, stood erect in an attitude which bespoke the full
strength of his faculties and the unshakable assurance of his faith.
He gazed at the altar humbly with a look of renewed hope, and took no
notice of his nephew’s wife, who planted herself almost in front of him
as if to reproach him for coming back to God.

Zelie, seeing all eyes turned upon her, made haste to leave the church
and returned to the square less hurriedly than she had left it. She
had reckoned on the doctor’s money, and possession was becoming
problematical. She found the clerk of the court, the collector, and
their wives in greater consternation than ever. Goupil was taking
pleasure in tormenting them.

“It is not in the public square and before the whole town that we
ought to talk of our affairs,” said Zelie; “come home with me. You too,
Monsieur Dionis,” she added to the notary; “you’ll not be in the way.”

Thus the probable disinheritance of Massin, Cremiere, and the post
master was the news of the day.

Just as the heirs and the notary were crossing the square to go to the
post house the noise of the diligence rattling up to the office, which
was only a few steps from the church, at the top of the Grand’Rue, made
its usual racket.

“Goodness! I’m like you, Minoret; I forgot all about Desire,” said
Zelie. “Let us go and see him get down. He is almost a lawyer; and his
interests are mixed up in this matter.”

The arrival of the diligence is always an amusement, but when it comes
in late some unusual event is expected. The crowd now moved towards the
“Ducler.”

“Here’s Desire!” was the general cry.

The tyrant, and yet the life and soul of Nemours, Desire always put the
town in a ferment when he came. Loved by the young men, with whom he was
invariably generous, he stimulated them by his very presence. But his
methods of amusement were so dreaded by older persons that more than one
family was very thankful to have him complete his studies and study
law in Paris. Desire Minoret, a slight youth, slender and fair like his
mother, from whom he obtained his blue eyes and pale skin, smiled from
the window on the crowd, and jumped lightly down to kiss his mother. A
short sketch of the young fellow will show how proud Zelie felt when she
saw him.

He wore very elegant boots, trousers of white English drilling held
under his feet by straps of varnished leather, a rich cravat, admirably
put on and still more admirably fastened, a pretty fancy waistcoat, in
the pocket of said waistcoat a flat watch, the chain of which hung down;
and, finally, a short frock-coat of blue cloth, and a gray hat,--but his
lack of the manner-born was shown in the gilt buttons of the waistcoat
and the ring worn outside of his purple kid glove. He carried a cane
with a chased gold head.

“You are losing your watch,” said his mother, kissing him.

“No, it is worn that way,” he replied, letting his father hug him.

“Well, cousin, so we shall soon see you a lawyer?” said Massin.

“I shall take the oaths at the beginning of next term,” said Desire,
returning the friendly nods he was receiving on all sides.

“Now we shall have some fun,” said Goupil, shaking him by the hand.

“Ha! my old wag, so here you are!” replied Desire.

“You take your law license for all license,” said Goupil, affronted by
being treated so cavalierly in presence of others.

“You know my luggage,” cried Desire to the red-faced old conductor of
the diligence; “have it taken to the house.”

“The sweat is rolling off your horses,” said Zelie sharply to the
conductor; “you haven’t common-sense to drive them in that way. You are
stupider than your own beasts.”

“But Monsieur Desire was in a hurry to get here to save you from
anxiety,” explained Cabirolle.

“But if there was no accident why risk killing the horses?” she
retorted.

The greetings of friends and acquaintances, the crowding of the young
men around Desire, and the relating of the incidents of the journey took
enough time for the mass to be concluded and the worshippers to issue
from the church. By mere chance (which manages many things) Desire saw
Ursula on the porch as he passed along, and he stopped short amazed at
her beauty. His action also stopped the advance of the relations who
accompanied him.

In giving her arm to her godfather, Ursula was obliged to hold her
prayer-book in one hand and her parasol in the other; and this she
did with the innate grace which graceful women put into the awkward
or difficult things of their charming craft of womanhood. If mind does
truly reveal itself in all things, we may be permitted to say that
Ursula’s attitude and bearing suggested divine simplicity. She was
dressed in a white cambric gown made like a wrapper, trimmed here and
there with knots of blue ribbon. The pelerine, edged with the same
ribbon run through a broad hem and tied with bows like those on the
dress, showed the great beauty of her shape. Her throat, of a pure
white, was charming in tone against the blue,--the right color for a
fair skin. A long blue sash with floating ends defined a slender waist
which seemed flexible,--a most seductive charm in women. She wore a
rice-straw bonnet, modestly trimmed with ribbons like those of the gown,
the strings of which were tied under her chin, setting off the whiteness
of the straw and doing no despite to that of her beautiful complexion.
Ursula dressed her own hair naturally (a la Berthe, as it was then
called) in heavy braids of fine, fair hair, laid flat on either side
of the head, each little strand reflecting the light as she walked.
Her gray eyes, soft and proud at the same time, were in harmony with a
finely modeled brow. A rosy tinge, suffusing her cheeks like a cloud,
brightened a face which was regular without being insipid; for nature
had given her, by some rare privilege, extreme purity of form combined
with strength of countenance. The nobility of her life was manifest in
the general expression of her person, which might have served as a model
for a type of trustfulness, or of modesty. Her health, though brilliant,
was not coarsely apparent; in fact, her whole air was distinguished.
Beneath the little gloves of a light color it was easy to imagine
her pretty hands. The arched and slender feet were delicately shod
in bronzed kid boots trimmed with a brown silk fringe. Her blue sash
holding at the waist a small flat watch and a blue purse with gilt
tassels attracted the eyes of every woman she met.

“He has given her a new watch!” said Madame Cremiere, pinching her
husband’s arm.

“Heavens! is that Ursula?” cried Desire; “I didn’t recognize her.”

“Well, my dear uncle,” said the post master, addressing the doctor and
pointing to the whole population drawn up in parallel hedges to let the
doctor pass, “everybody wants to see you.”

“Was it the Abbe Chaperon or Mademoiselle Ursula who converted you,
uncle,” said Massin, bowing to the doctor and his protegee, with
Jesuitical humility.

“Ursula,” replied the doctor, laconically, continuing to walk on as if
annoyed.

The night before, as the old man finished his game of whist with Ursula,
the Nemours doctor, and Bongrand, he remarked, “I intend to go to church
to-morrow.”

“Then,” said Bongrand, “your heirs won’t get another night’s rest.”

The speech was superfluous, however, for a single glance sufficed the
sagacious and clear-sighted doctor to read the minds of his heirs by
the expression of their faces. Zelie’s irruption into the church, her
glance, which the doctor intercepted, this meeting of all the expectant
ones in the public square, and the expression in their eyes as they
turned them on Ursula, all proved to him their hatred, now freshly
awakened, and their sordid fears.

“It is a feather in your cap, Mademoiselle,” said Madame Cremiere,
putting in her word with a humble bow,--“a miracle which will not cost
you much.”

“It is God’s doing, madame,” replied Ursula.

“God!” exclaimed Minoret-Levrault; “my father-in-law used to say he
served to blanket many horses.”

“Your father-in-law had the mind of a jockey,” said the doctor severely.

“Come,” said Minoret to his wife and son, “why don’t you bow to my
uncle?”

“I shouldn’t be mistress of myself before that little hypocrite,” cried
Zelie, carrying off her son.

“I advise you, uncle, not to go to mass without a velvet cap,” said
Madame Massin; “the church is very damp.”

“Pooh, niece,” said the doctor, looking round on the assembly, “the
sooner I’m put to bed the sooner you’ll flourish.”

He walked on quickly, drawing Ursula with him, and seemed in such a
hurry that the others dropped behind.

“Why do you say such harsh things to them? it isn’t right,” said Ursula,
shaking his arm in a coaxing way.

“I shall always hate hypocrites, as much after as before I became
religious. I have done good to them all, and I asked no gratitude; but
not one of my relatives sent you a flower on your birthday, which they
know is the only day I celebrate.”

At some distance behind the doctor and Ursula came Madame de
Portenduere, dragging herself along as if overcome with trouble. She
belonged to the class of old women whose dress recalls the style of the
last century. They wear puce-colored gowns with flat sleeves, the cut of
which can be seen in the portraits of Madame Lebrun; they all have black
lace mantles and bonnets of a shape gone by, in keeping with their slow
and dignified deportment; one might almost fancy that they still wore
paniers under their petticoats or felt them there, as persons who have
lost a leg are said to fancy that the foot is moving. They swathe their
heads in old lace which declines to drape gracefully about their cheeks.
Their wan and elongated faces, their haggard eyes and faded brows, are
not without a certain melancholy grace, in spite of the false fronts
with flattened curls to which they cling,--and yet these ruins are all
subordinate to an unspeakable dignity of look and manner.

The red and wrinkled eyes of this old lady showed plainly that she had
been crying during the service. She walked like a person in trouble,
seemed to be expecting some one, and looked behind her from time to
time. Now, the fact of Madame de Portenduere looking behind her was
really as remarkable in its way as the conversion of Doctor Minoret.

“Who can Madame de Portenduere be looking for?” said Madame Massin,
rejoining the other heirs, who were for the moment struck dumb by the
doctor’s answer.

“For the cure,” said Dionis, the notary, suddenly striking his forehead
as if some forgotten thought or memory had occurred to him. “I have an
idea! I’ll save your inheritance! Let us go and breakfast gayly with
Madame Minoret.”

We can well imagine the alacrity with which the heirs followed the
notary to the post house. Goupil, who accompanied his friend Desire,
locked arm in arm with him, whispered something in the youth’s ear with
an odious smile.

“What do I care?” answered the son of the house, shrugging his
shoulders. “I am madly in love with Florine, the most celestial creature
in the world.”

“Florine! and who may she be?” demanded Goupil. “I’m too fond of you to
let you make a goose of yourself wish such creatures.”

“Florine is the idol of the famous Nathan; my passion is wasted, I know
that. She has positively refused to marry me.”

“Sometimes those girls who are fools with their bodies are wise with
their heads,” responded Goupil.

“If you could but see her--only once,” said Desire, lackadaisically,
“you wouldn’t say such things.”

“If I saw you throwing away your whole future for nothing better than
a fancy,” said Goupil, with a warmth which might even have deceived
his master, “I would break your doll as Varney served Amy Robsart in
‘Kenilworth.’ Your wife must be a d’Aiglement or a Mademoiselle du
Rouvre, and get you made a deputy. My future depends on yours, and I
sha’n’t let you commit any follies.”

“I am rich enough to care only for happiness,” replied Desire.

“What are you two plotting together?” cried Zelie, beckoning to the two
friends, who were standing in the middle of the courtyard, to come into
the house.

The doctor disappeared into the Rue des Bourgeois with the activity of
a young man, and soon reached his own house, where strange events had
lately taken place, the visible results of which now filled the minds
of the whole community of Nemours. A few explanations are needed to make
this history and the notary’s remark to the heirs perfectly intelligible
to the reader.




CHAPTER V. URSULA

The father-in-law of Doctor Minoret, the famous harpsichordist and
maker of instruments, Valentin Mirouet, also one of our most celebrated
organists, died in 1785 leaving a natural son, the child of his old age,
whom he acknowledged and called by his own name, but who turned out a
worthless fellow. He was deprived on his death bed of the comfort of
seeing this petted son. Joseph Mirouet, a singer and composer, having
made his debut at the Italian opera under a feigned name, ran away with
a young lady in Germany. The dying father commended the young man, who
was really full of talent, to his son-in-law, proving to him, at the
same time, that he had refused to marry the mother that he might not
injure Madame Minoret. The doctor promised to give the unfortunate
Joseph half of whatever his wife inherited from her father, whose
business was purchased by the Erards. He made due search for his
illegitimate brother-in-law; but Grimm informed him one day that after
enlisting in a Prussian regiment Joseph had deserted and taken a false
name and that all efforts to find him would be frustrated.

Joseph Mirouet, gifted by nature with a delightful voice, a fine figure,
a handsome face, and being moreover a composer of great taste and much
brilliancy, led for over fifteen years the Bohemian life which Hoffman
has so well described. So, by the time he was forty, he was reduced to
such depths of poverty that he took advantage of the events of 1806
to make himself once more a Frenchman. He settled in Hamburg, where he
married the daughter of a bourgeois, a girl devoted to music, who fell
in love with the singer (whose fame was ever prospective) and chose
to devote her life to him. But after fifteen years of Bohemia, Joseph
Mirouet was unable to bear prosperity; he was naturally a spendthrift,
and though kind to his wife, he wasted her fortune in a very few years.
The household must have dragged on a wretched existence before Joseph
Mirouet reached the point of enlisting as a musician in a French
regiment. In 1813 the surgeon-major of the regiment, by the merest
chance, heard the name of Mirouet, was struck by it, and wrote to Doctor
Minoret, to whom he was under obligations.

The answer was not long in coming. As a result, in 1814, before the
allied occupation, Joseph Mirouet had a home in Paris, where his wife
died giving birth to a little girl, whom the doctor desired should
be called Ursula after his wife. The father did not long survive the
mother, worn out, as she was, by hardship and poverty. When dying the
unfortunate musician bequeathed his daughter to the doctor, who was
already her godfather, in spite of his repugnance for what he called the
mummeries of the Church. Having seen his own children die in succession
either in dangerous confinements or during the first year of their
lives, the doctor had awaited with anxiety the result of a last hope.
When a nervous, delicate, and sickly woman begins with a miscarriage
it is not unusual to see her go through a series of such pregnancies as
Ursula Minoret did, in spite of the care and watchfulness and science
of her husband. The poor man often blamed himself for their mutual
persistence in desiring children. The last child, born after a rest
of nearly two years, died in 1792, a victim of its mother’s nervous
condition--if we listen to physiologists, who tell us that in the
inexplicable phenomenon of generation the child derives from the father
by blood and from the mother in its nervous system.

Compelled to renounce the joys of a feeling all powerful within him, the
doctor turned to benevolence as a substitute for his denied paternity.
During his married life, thus cruelly disappointed, he had longed more
especially for a fair little daughter, a flower to bring joy to the
house; he therefore gladly accepted Joseph Mirouet’s legacy, and gave to
the orphan all the hopes of his vanished dreams. For two years he took
part, as Cato for Pompey, in the most minute particulars of Ursula’s
life; he would not allow the nurse to suckle her or to take her up or
put her to bed without him. His medical science and his experience
were all put to use in her service. After going through many trials,
alternations of hope and fear, and the joys and labors of a mother, he
had the happiness of seeing this child of the fair German woman and the
French singer a creature of vigorous health and profound sensibility.

With all the eager feelings of a mother the happy old man watched the
growth of the pretty hair, first down, then silk, at last hair, fine and
soft and clinging to the fingers that caressed it. He often kissed the
little naked feet the toes of which, covered with a pellicle through
which the blood was seen, were like rosebuds. He was passionately fond
of the child. When she tried to speak, or when she fixed her beautiful
blue eyes upon some object with that serious, reflective look which
seems the dawn of thought, and which she ended with a laugh, he would
stay by her side for hours, seeking, with Jordy’s help, to understand
the reasons (which most people call caprices) underlying the phenomena
of this delicious phase of life, when childhood is both flower and
fruit, a confused intelligence, a perpetual movement, a powerful desire.

Ursula’s beauty and gentleness made her so dear to the doctor that he
would have liked to change the laws of nature in her behalf. He declared
to old Jordy that his teeth ached when Ursula was cutting hers. When old
men love children there is no limit to their passion--they worship them.
For these little beings they silence their own manias or recall a whole
past in their service. Experience, patience, sympathy, the acquisitions
of life, treasures laboriously amassed, all are spent upon that young
life in which they live again; their intelligence does actually take the
place of motherhood. Their wisdom, ever on the alert, is equal to the
intuition of a mother; they remember the delicate perceptions which in
their own mother were divinations, and import them into the exercise of
a compassion which is carried to an extreme in their minds by a sense of
the child’s unutterable weakness. The slowness of their movements takes
the place of maternal gentleness. In them, as in children, life is
reduced to its simplest expression; if maternal sentiment makes the
mother a slave, the abandonment of self allows an old man to devote
himself utterly. For these reasons it is not unusual to see children in
close intimacy with old persons. The old soldier, the old abbe, the old
doctor, happy in the kisses and cajoleries of little Ursula, were never
weary of answering her talk and playing with her. Far from making
them impatient her petulances charmed them; and they gratified all her
wishes, making each the ground of some little training.

The child grew up surrounded by old men, who smiled at her and made
themselves mothers for her sake, all three equally attentive and
provident. Thanks to this wise education, Ursula’s soul developed in
a sphere that suited it. This rare plant found its special soil; it
breathed the elements of its true life and assimilated the sun rays that
belonged to it.

“In what faith do you intend to bring up the little one?” asked the abbe
of the doctor, when Ursula was six years old.

“In yours,” answered Minoret.

An atheist after the manner of Monsieur Wolmar in the “Nouvelle Heloise”
 he did not claim the right to deprive Ursula of the benefits offered
by the Catholic religion. The doctor, sitting at the moment on a bench
outside the Chinese pagoda, felt the pressure of the abbe’s hand on his.

“Yes, abbe, every time she talks to me of God I shall send her to her
friend ‘Shapron,’” he said, imitating Ursula’s infant speech, “I wish to
see whether religious sentiment is inborn or not. Therefore I shall do
nothing either for or against the tendencies of that young soul; but in
my heart I have appointed you her spiritual guardian.”

“God will reward you, I hope,” replied the abbe, gently joining his
hands and raising them towards heaven as if he were making a brief
mental prayer.

So, from the time she was six years old the little orphan lived under
the religious influence of the abbe, just as she had already come under
the educational training of her friend Jordy.

The captain, formerly a professor in a military academy, having a
taste for grammar and for the differences among European languages, had
studied the problem of a universal tongue. This learned man, patient as
most old scholars are, delighted in teaching Ursula to read and write.
He taught her also the French language and all she needed to know of
arithmetic. The doctor’s library afforded a choice of books which could
be read by a child for amusement as well as instruction.

The abbe and the soldier allowed the young mind to enrich itself with
the freedom and comfort which the doctor gave to the body. Ursula
learned as she played. Religion was given with due reflection. Left
to follow the divine training of a nature that was led into regions of
purity by these judicious educators, Ursula inclined more to sentiment
than to duty; she took as her rule of conduct the voice of her own
conscience rather than the demands of social law. In her, nobility of
feeling and action would ever be spontaneous; her judgment would confirm
the impulse of her heart. She was destined to do right as a pleasure
before doing it as an obligation. This distinction is the peculiar sign
of Christian education. These principles, altogether different from
those that are taught to men, were suitable for a woman,--the spirit and
the conscience of the home, the beautifier of domestic life, the queen
of her household. All three of these old preceptors followed the same
method with Ursula. Instead of recoiling before the bold questions of
innocence, they explained to her the reasons of things and the best
means of action, taking care to give her none but correct ideas.
When, apropos of a flower, a star, a blade of grass, her thoughts went
straight to God, the doctor and the professor told her that the priest
alone could answer her. None of them intruded on the territory of the
others; the doctor took charge of her material well-being and the
things of life; Jordy’s department was instruction; moral and spiritual
questions and the ideas appertaining to the higher life belonged to
the abbe. This noble education was not, as it often is, counteracted by
injudicious servants. La Bougival, having been lectured on the subject,
and being, moreover, too simple in mind and character to interfere, did
nothing to injure the work of these great minds. Ursula, a privileged
being, grew up with good geniuses round her; and her naturally fine
disposition made the task of each a sweet and easy one. Such manly
tenderness, such gravity lighted by smiles, such liberty without danger,
such perpetual care of soul and body made little Ursula, when nine years
of age, a well-trained child and delightful to behold.

Unhappily, this paternal trinity was broken up. The old captain died the
following year, leaving the abbe and the doctor to finish his work, of
which, however, he had accomplished the most difficult part. Flowers
will bloom of themselves if grown in a soil thus prepared. The old
gentleman had laid by for ten years past one thousand francs a year,
that he might leave ten thousand to his little Ursula, and keep a place
in her memory during her whole life. In his will, the wording of which
was very touching, he begged his legatee to spend the four or five
hundred francs that came of her little capital exclusively on her dress.
When the justice of the peace applied the seals to the effects of his
old friend, they found in a small room, which the captain had allowed
no one to enter, a quantity of toys, many of them broken, while all
had been used,--toys of a past generation, reverently preserved, which
Monsieur Bongrand was, according to the captain’s last wishes, to burn
with his own hands.

About this time it was that Ursula made her first communion. The abbe
employed one whole year in duly instructing the young girl, whose mind
and heart, each well developed, yet judiciously balancing one another,
needed a special spiritual nourishment. The initiation into a knowledge
of divine things which he gave her was such that Ursula grew into
the pious and mystical young girl whose character rose above all
vicissitudes, and whose heart was enabled to conquer adversity. Then
began a secret struggle between the old man wedded to unbelief and the
young girl full of faith,--long unsuspected by her who incited it,--the
result of which had now stirred the whole town, and was destined to have
great influence on Ursula’s future by rousing against her the antagonism
of the doctor’s heirs.

During the first six months of the year 1824 Ursula spent all her
mornings at the parsonage. The old doctor guessed the abbe’s secret
hope. He meant to make Ursula an unanswerable argument against him.
The old unbeliever, loved by his godchild as though she were his own
daughter, would surely believe in such artless candor; he could not fail
to be persuaded by the beautiful effects of religion on the soul of a
child, where love was like those trees of Eastern climes, bearing both
flowers and fruit, always fragrant, always fertile. A beautiful life is
more powerful than the strongest argument. It is impossible to resist
the charms of certain sights. The doctor’s eyes were wet, he knew not
how or why, when he saw the child of his heart starting for the church,
wearing a frock of white crape, and shoes of white satin; her hair bound
with a fillet fastened at the side with a knot of white ribbon, and
rippling upon her shoulders; her eyes lighted by the star of a first
hope; hurrying, tall and beautiful, to a first union, and loving her
godfather better since her soul had risen towards God. When the doctor
perceived that the thought of immortality was nourishing that spirit
(until then within the confines of childhood) as the sun gives life to
the earth without knowing why, he felt sorry that he remained at home
alone.

Sitting on the steps of his portico he kept his eyes fixed on the iron
railing of the gate through which the child had disappeared, saying as
she left him: “Why won’t you come, godfather? how can I be happy without
you?” Though shaken to his very center, the pride of the Encyclopedist
did not as yet give way. He walked slowly in a direction from which he
could see the procession of communicants, and distinguish his little
Ursula brilliant with exaltation beneath her veil. She gave him an
inspired look, which knocked, in the stony regions of his heart, on
the corner closed to God. But still the old deist held firm. He said
to himself: “Mummeries! if there be a maker of worlds, imagine the
organizer of infinitude concerning himself with such trifles!” He
laughed as he continued his walk along the heights which look down upon
the road to the Gatinais, where the bells were ringing a joyous peal
that told of the joy of families.

The noise of backgammon is intolerable to persons who do not know the
game, which is really one of the most difficult that was ever invented.
Not to annoy his godchild, the extreme delicacy of whose organs and
nerves could not bear, he thought, without injury the noise and the
exclamations she did not know the meaning of, the abbe, old Jordy while
living, and the doctor always waited till their child was in bed before
they began their favorite game. Sometimes the visitors came early
when she was out for a walk, and the game would be going on when she
returned; then she resigned herself with infinite grace and took her
seat at the window with her work. She had a repugnance to the game,
which is really in the beginning very hard and unconquerable to some
minds, so that unless it be learned in youth it is almost impossible to
take it up in after life.

The night of her first communion, when Ursula came into the salon where
her godfather was sitting alone, she put the backgammon-board before
him.

“Whose throw shall it be?” she asked.

“Ursula,” said the doctor, “isn’t it a sin to make fun of your godfather
the day of your first communion?”

“I am not making fun of you,” she said, sitting down. “I want to give
you some pleasure--you who are always on the look-out for mine. When
Monsieur Chaperon was pleased with me he gave me a lesson in backgammon,
and he has given me so many that now I am quite strong enough to beat
you--you shall not deprive yourself any longer for me. I have conquered
all difficulties, and now I like the noise of the game.”

Ursula won. The abbe had slipped in to enjoy his triumph. The next day
Minoret, who had always refused to let Ursula learn music, sent to
Paris for a piano, made arrangements at Fontainebleau for a teacher, and
submitted to the annoyance that her constant practicing was to him. One
of poor Jordy’s predictions was fulfilled,--the girl became an excellent
musician. The doctor, proud of her talent, had lately sent to Paris for
a master, an old German named Schmucke, a distinguished professor who
came once a week; the doctor willingly paying for an art which he had
formerly declared to be useless in a household. Unbelievers do not like
music--a celestial language, developed by Catholicism, which has taken
the names of the seven notes from one of the church hymns; every note
being the first syllable of the seven first lines in the hymn to Saint
John.

The impression produced on the doctor by Ursula’s first communion though
keen was not lasting. The calm and sweet contentment which prayer and
the exercise of resolution produced in that young soul had not their due
influence upon him. Having no reasons for remorse or repentance himself,
he enjoyed a serene peace. Doing his own benefactions without hope of a
celestial harvest, he thought himself on a nobler plane than religious
men whom he always accused for making, as he called it, terms with God.

“But,” the abbe would say to him, “if all men would be so, you must
admit that society would be regenerated; there would be no more
misery. To be benevolent after your fashion one must needs be a great
philosopher; you rise to your principles through reason, you are a
social exception; whereas it suffices to be a Christian to make us
benevolent in ours. With you, it is an effort; with us, it comes
naturally.”

“In other words, abbe, I think, and you feel,--that’s the whole of it.”

However, at twelve years of age, Ursula, whose quickness and natural
feminine perceptions were trained by her superior education, and whose
intelligence in its dawn was enlightened by a religious spirit (of all
spirits the most refined), came to understand that her godfather did
not believe in a future life, nor in the immortality of the soul, nor in
providence, nor in God. Pressed with questions by the innocent creature,
the doctor was unable to hide the fatal secret. Ursula’s artless
consternation made him smile, but when he saw her depressed and sad he
felt how deep an affection her sadness revealed. Absolute devotion has
a horror of every sort of disagreement, even in ideas which it does
not share. Sometimes the doctor accepted his darling’s reasonings as he
would her kisses, said as they were in the sweetest of voices with
the purest and most fervent feeling. Believers and unbelievers speak
different languages and cannot understand each other. The young girl
pleading God’s cause was unreasonable with the old man, as a spoilt
child sometimes maltreats its mother. The abbe rebuked her gently,
telling her that God had power to humiliate proud spirits. Ursula
replied that David had overcome Goliath.

This religious difference, these complaints of the child who wished to
drag her godfather to God, were the only troubles of this happy life, so
peaceful, yet so full, and wholly withdrawn from the inquisitive eyes
of the little town. Ursula grew and developed, and became in time the
modest and religiously trained young woman whom Desire admired as she
left the church. The cultivation of flowers in the garden, her music,
the pleasures of her godfather, and all the little cares she was able to
give him (for she had eased La Bougival’s labors by doing everything for
him),--these things filled the hours, the days, the months of her calm
life. Nevertheless, for about a year the doctor had felt uneasy about
his Ursula, and watched her health with the utmost care. Sagacious and
profoundly practical observer that he was, he thought he perceived some
commotion in her moral being. He watched her like a mother, but seeing
no one about her who was worthy of inspiring love, his uneasiness on the
subject at length passed away.

At this conjuncture, one month before the day when this drama begins,
the doctor’s intellectual life was invaded by one of those events which
plough to the very depths of a man’s convictions and turn them over. But
this event needs a succinct narrative of certain circumstances in his
medical career, which will give, perhaps, fresh interest to the story.




CHAPTER VI. A TREATISE ON MESMERISM

Towards the end of the eighteenth century science was sundered as widely
by the apparition of Mesmer as art had been by that of Gluck. After
re-discovering magnetism Mesmer came to France, where, from time
immemorial, inventors have flocked to obtain recognition for their
discoveries. France, thanks to her lucid language, is in some sense the
clarion of the world.

“If homoeopathy gets to Paris it is saved,” said Hahnemann, recently.

“Go to France,” said Monsieur de Metternich to Gall, “and if they laugh
at your bumps you will be famous.”

Mesmer had disciples and antagonists as ardent for and against his
theories as the Piccinists and the Gluckists for theirs. Scientific
France was stirred to its center; a solemn conclave was opened. Before
judgment was rendered, the medical faculty proscribed, in a body,
Mesmer’s so-called charlatanism, his tub, his conducting wires, and
his theory. But let us at once admit that the German, unfortunately,
compromised his splendid discovery by enormous pecuniary claims. Mesmer
was defeated by the doubtfulness of facts, by universal ignorance of the
part played in nature by imponderable fluids then unobserved, and by his
own inability to study on all sides a science possessing a triple
front. Magnetism has many applications; in Mesmer’s hands it was, in
its relation to the future, merely what cause is to effect. But, if
the discoverer lacked genius, it is a sad thing both for France and
for human reason to have to say that a science contemporaneous with
civilization, cultivated by Egypt and Chaldea, by Greece and India, met
in Paris in the eighteenth century the fate that Truth in the person of
Galileo found in the sixteenth; and that magnetism was rejected and cast
out by the combined attacks of science and religion, alarmed for their
own positions. Magnetism, the favorite science of Jesus Christ and
one of the divine powers which he gave to his disciples, was no better
apprehended by the Church than by the disciples of Jean-Jacques,
Voltaire, Locke, and Condillac. The Encyclopedists and the clergy were
equally averse to the old human power which they took to be new. The
miracles of the convulsionaries, suppressed by the Church and smothered
by the indifference of scientific men (in spite of the precious writings
of the Councilor, Carre de Montgeron) were the first summons to make
experiments with those human fluids which give power to employ certain
inward forces to neutralize the sufferings caused by outward agents. But
to do this it was necessary to admit the existence of fluids intangible,
invisible, imponderable, three negative terms in which the science of
that day chose to see a definition of the void. In modern philosophy
there is no void. Ten feet of void and the world crumbles away! To
materialists especially the world is full, all things hang together, are
linked, related, organized. “The world as the result of chance,” said
Diderot, “is more explicable than God. The multiplicity of causes, the
incalculable number of issues presupposed by chance, explain creation.
Take the Eneid and all the letters composing it; if you allow me time
and space, I can, by continuing to cast the letters, arrive at last at
the Eneid combination.”

Those foolish persons who deify all rather than admit a God recoil
before the infinite divisibility of matter which is in the nature of
imponderable forces. Locke and Condillac retarded by fifty years the
immense progress which natural science is now making under the great
principle of unity due to Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire. Some intelligent
persons, without any system, convinced by facts conscientiously studied,
still hold to Mesmer’s doctrine, which recognizes the existence of a
penetrative influence acting from man to man, put in motion by the will,
curative by the abundance of the fluid, the working of which is in fact
a duel between two forces, between an ill to be cured and the will to
cure it.

The phenomena of somnambulism, hardly perceived by Mesmer, were revealed
by du Puysegur and Deleuze; but the Revolution put a stop to their
discoveries and played into the hands of the scientists and scoffers.
Among the small number of believers were a few physicians. They were
persecuted by their brethren as long as they lived. The respectable body
of Parisian doctors displayed all the bitterness of religious warfare
against the Mesmerists, and were as cruel in their hatred as it was
possible to be in those days of Voltairean tolerance. The orthodox
physician refused to consult with those who adopted the Mesmerian
heresy. In 1820 these heretics were still proscribed. The miseries and
sorrows of the Revolution had not quenched the scientific hatred. It is
only priests, magistrates, and physicians who can hate in that way.
The official robe is terrible! But ideas are even more implacable than
things.

Doctor Bouvard, one of Minoret’s friends, believed in the new faith,
and persevered to the day of his death in studying a science to which
he sacrificed the peace of his life, for he was one of the chief “betes
noires” of the Parisian faculty. Minoret, a valiant supporter of
the Encyclopedists, and a formidable adversary of Desion, Mesmer’s
assistant, whose pen had great weight in the controversy, quarreled with
his old friend, and not only that, but he persecuted him. His conduct
to Bouvard must have caused him the only remorse which troubled the
serenity of his declining years. Since his retirement to Nemours the
science of imponderable fluids (the only name suitable for magnetism,
which, by the nature of its phenomena, is closely allied to light and
electricity) had made immense progress, in spite of the ridicule of
Parisian scientists. Phrenology and physiognomy, the departments of Gall
and Lavater (which are in fact twins, for one is to the other as cause
is to effect), proved to the minds of more than one physiologist the
existence of an intangible fluid which is the basis of the phenomena
of the human will, and from which result passions, habits, the shape of
faces and of skulls. Magnetic facts, the miracles of somnambulism, those
of divination and ecstasy, which open a way to the spiritual world, were
fast accumulating. The strange tale of the apparitions of the farmer
Martin, so clearly proved, and his interview with Louis XVIII.; a
knowledge of the intercourse of Swedenborg with the departed, carefully
investigated in Germany; the tales of Walter Scott on the effects of
“second sight”; the extraordinary faculties of some fortune-tellers, who
practice as a single science chiromancy, cartomancy, and the horoscope;
the facts of catalepsy, and those of the action of certain morbid
affections on the properties of the diaphragm,--all such phenomena,
curious, to say the least, each emanating from the same source, were now
undermining many scepticisms and leading even the most indifferent minds
to the plane of experiments. Minoret, buried in Nemours, was ignorant of
this movement of minds, strong in the north of Europe but still weak
in France where, however, many facts called marvelous by superficial
observers, were happening, but falling, alas! like stones to the bottom
of the sea, in the vortex of Parisian excitements.

At the bottom of the present year the doctor’s tranquillity was shaken
by the following letter:--


My old comrade,--All friendship, even if lost, has rights which it is
difficult to set aside. I know that you are still living, and I
remember far less our enmity than our happy days in that old hovel of
Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.

At a time when I expect to soon leave the world I have it on my heart to
prove to you that magnetism is about to become one of the most important
of the sciences--if indeed all science is not _one_. I can overcome
your incredulity by proof. Perhaps I shall owe to your curiosity the
happiness of taking you once more by the hand--as in the days before
Mesmer. Always yours,

Bouvard.


Stung like a lion by a gadfly the old scientist rushed to Paris and
left his card on Bouvard, who lived in the Rue Ferou near Saint-Sulpice.
Bouvard sent a card to his hotel on which was written “To-morrow; nine
o’clock, Rue Saint-Honore, opposite the Assumption.”

Minoret, who seemed to have renewed his youth, could not sleep. He went
to see some of his friends among the faculty to inquire if the world
were turned upside down, if the science of medicine still had a school,
if the four faculties any longer existed. The doctors reassured him,
declaring that the old spirit of opposition was as strong as ever, only,
instead of persecuting as heretofore, the Academies of Medicine and
of Sciences rang with laughter as they classed magnetic facts with the
tricks of Comus and Comte and Bosco, with jugglery and prestidigitation
and all that now went by the name of “amusing physics.”

This assurance did not prevent old Minoret from keeping the appointment
made for him by Bouvard. After an enmity of forty-four years the
two antagonists met beneath a porte-cochere in the Rue Saint-Honore.
Frenchmen have too many distractions of mind to hate each other long. In
Paris especially, politics, literature, and science render life so vast
that every man can find new worlds to conquer where all pretensions
may live at ease. Hatred requires too many forces fully armed. None but
public bodies can keep alive the sentiment. Robespierre and Danton
would have fallen into each other’s arms at the end of forty-four years.
However, the two doctors each withheld his hand and did not offer it.
Bouvard spoke first:--

“You seem wonderfully well.”

“Yes, I am--and you?” said Minoret, feeling that the ice was now broken.

“As you see.”

“Does magnetism prevent people from dying?” asked Minoret in a joking
tone, but without sharpness.

“No, but it almost prevented me from living.”

“Then you are not rich?” exclaimed Minoret.

“Pooh!” said Bouvard.

“But I am!” cried the other.

“It is not your money but your convictions that I want. Come,” replied
Bouvard.

“Oh! you obstinate fellow!” said Minoret.

The Mesmerist led his sceptic, with some precaution, up a dingy
staircase to the fourth floor.

At this particular time an extraordinary man had appeared in Paris,
endowed by faith with incalculable power, and controlling magnetic
forces in all their applications. Not only did this great unknown
(who still lives) heal from a distance the worst and most inveterate
diseases, suddenly and radically, as the Savior of men did formerly,
but he was also able to call forth instantaneously the most remarkable
phenomena of somnambulism and conquer the most rebellious will. The
countenance of this mysterious being, who claims to be responsible to
God alone and to communicate, like Swedenborg, with angels, resembles
that of a lion; concentrated, irresistible energy shines in it. His
features, singularly contorted, have a terrible and even blasting
aspect. His voice, which comes from the depths of his being, seems
charged with some magnetic fluid; it penetrates the hearer at every
pore. Disgusted by the ingratitude of the public after his many
cures, he has now returned to an impenetrable solitude, a voluntary
nothingness. His all-powerful hand, which has restored a dying daughter
to her mother, fathers to their grief-stricken children, adored
mistresses to lovers frenzied with love, cured the sick given over
by physicians, soothed the sufferings of the dying when life became
impossible, wrung psalms of thanksgiving in synagogues, temples, and
churches from the lips of priests recalled to the one God by the same
miracle,--that sovereign hand, a sun of life dazzling the closed eyes
of the somnambulist, has never been raised again even to save the
heir-apparent of a kingdom. Wrapped in the memory of his past mercies
as in a luminous shroud, he denies himself to the world and lives for
heaven.

But, at the dawn of his reign, surprised by his own gift, this man,
whose generosity equaled his power, allowed a few interested persons to
witness his miracles. The fame of his work, which was mighty, and could
easily be revived to-morrow, reached Dr. Bouvard, who was then on the
verge of the grave. The persecuted mesmerist was at last enabled to
witness the startling phenomena of a science he had long treasured
in his heart. The sacrifices of the old man touched the heart of the
mysterious stranger, who accorded him certain privileges. As Bouvard now
went up the staircase he listened to the twittings of his old antagonist
with malicious delight, answering only, “You shall see, you shall see!”
 with the emphatic little nods of a man who is sure of his facts.

The two physicians entered a suite of rooms that were more than modest.
Bouvard went alone into a bedroom which adjoined the salon where he left
Minoret, whose distrust was instantly awakened; but Bouvard returned
at once and took him into the bedroom, where he saw the mysterious
Swedenborgian, and also a woman sitting in an armchair. The woman did
not rise, and seemed not to notice the entrance of the two old men.

“What! no tub?” cried Minoret, smiling.

“Nothing but the power of God,” answered the Swedenborgian gravely. He
seemed to Minoret to be about fifty years of age.

The three men sat down and the mysterious stranger talked of the rain
and the coming fine weather, to the great astonishment of Minoret, who
thought he was being hoaxed. The Swedenborgian soon began, however, to
question his visitor on his scientific opinions, and seemed evidently to
be taking time to examine him.

“You have come here solely from curiosity, monsieur,” he said at
last. “It is not my habit to prostitute a power which, according to my
conviction, emanates from God; if I made a frivolous or unworthy use
of it, it would be taken from me. Nevertheless, there is some hope,
Monsieur Bouvard tells me, of changing the opinions of one who has
opposed us, of enlightening a scientific man whose mind is candid;
I have therefore determined to satisfy you. That woman whom you see
there,” he continued, pointing to her, “is now in a somnambulic sleep.
The statements and manifestations of somnambulists declare that this
state is a delightful other life, during which the inner being, freed
from the trammels laid upon the exercise of our faculties by the visible
world, moves in a world which we mistakenly term invisible. Sight and
hearing are then exercised in a manner far more perfect than any we know
of here, possibly without the help of the organs we now employ, which
are the scabbard of the luminous blades called sight and hearing. To a
person in that state, distance and material obstacles do not exist, or
they can be traversed by a life within us for which our body is a
mere receptacle, a necessary shelter, a casing. Terms fail to describe
effects that have lately been rediscovered, for to-day the words
imponderable, intangible, invisible have no meaning to the fluid whose
action is demonstrated by magnetism. Light is ponderable by its heat,
which, by penetrating bodies, increases their volume; and certainly
electricity is only too tangible. We have condemned things themselves
instead of blaming the imperfection of our instruments.”

“She sleeps,” said Minoret, examining the woman, who seemed to him to
belong to an inferior class.

“Her body is for the time being in abeyance,” said the Swedenborgian.
“Ignorant persons suppose that condition to be sleep. But she will prove
to you that there is a spiritual universe, and that the mind when
there does not obey the laws of this material universe. I will send her
wherever you wish to go,--a hundred miles from here or to China, as you
will. She will tell you what is happening there.”

“Send her to my house in Nemours, Rue des Bourgeois; that will do,” said
Minoret.

He took Minoret’s hand, which the doctor let him take, and held it for a
moment seeming to collect himself; then with his other hand he took that
of the woman sitting in the arm-chair and placed the hand of the doctor
in it, making a sign to the old sceptic to seat himself beside this
oracle without a tripod. Minoret observed a slight tremor on the
absolutely calm features of the woman when their hands were thus united
by the Swedenborgian, but the action, though marvelous in its effects,
was very simply done.

“Obey him,” said the unknown personage, extending his hand above the
head of the sleeping woman, who seemed to imbibe both light and life
from him, “and remember that what you do for him will please me.--You
can now speak to her,” he added, addressing Minoret.

“Go to Nemours, to my house, Rue des Bourgeois,” said the doctor.

“Give her time; put your hand in hers until she proves to you by what
she tells you that she is where you wish her to be,” said Bouvard to his
old friend.

“I see a river,” said the woman in a feeble voice, seeming to look
within herself with deep attention, notwithstanding her closed eyelids.
“I see a pretty garden--”

“Why do you enter by the river and the garden?” said Minoret.

“Because they are there.”

“Who?”

“The young girl and her nurse, whom you are thinking of.”

“What is the garden like?” said Minoret.

“Entering by the steps which go down to the river, there is the right,
a long brick gallery, in which I see books; it ends in a singular
building,--there are wooden bells, and a pattern of red eggs. To the
left, the wall is covered with climbing plants, wild grapes, Virginia
jessamine. In the middle is a sun-dial. There are many plants in pots.
Your child is looking at the flowers. She shows them to her nurse--she
is making holes in the earth with her trowel, and planting seeds. The
nurse is raking the path. The young girl is pure as an angel, but the
beginning of love is there, faint as the dawn--”

“Love for whom?” asked the doctor, who, until now, would have listened
to no word said to him by somnambulists. He considered it all jugglery.

“You know nothing--though you have lately been uneasy about her health,”
 answered the woman. “Her heart has followed the dictates of nature.”

“A woman of the people to talk like this!” cried the doctor.

“In the state she is in all persons speak with extraordinary
perception,” said Bouvard.

“But who is it that Ursula loves?”

“Ursula does not know that she loves,” said the woman with a shake of
the head; “she is too angelic to know what love is; but her mind is
occupied by him; she thinks of him; she tries to escape the thought;
but she returns to it in spite of her will to abstain.--She is at the
piano--”

“But who is he?”

“The son of a lady who lives opposite.”

“Madame de Portenduere?”

“Portenduere, did you say?” replied the sleeper. “Perhaps so. But
there’s no danger; he is not in the neighbourhood.”

“Have they spoken to each other?” asked the doctor.

“Never. They have looked at one another. She thinks him charming. He is,
in fact, a fine man; he has a good heart. She sees him from her window;
they see each other in church. But the young man no longer thinks of
her.”

“His name?”

“Ah! to tell you that I must read it, or hear it. He is named Savinien;
she has just spoken his name; she thinks it sweet to say; she has
looked in the almanac for his fete-day and marked a red dot against
it,--child’s play, that. Ah! she will love well, with as much strength
as purity; she is not a girl to love twice; love will so dye her soul
and fill it that she will reject all other sentiments.”

“Where do you see that?”

“In her. She will know how to suffer; she inherits that; her father and
her mother suffered much.”

The last words overcame the doctor, who felt less shaken than surprised.
It is proper to state that between her sentences the woman paused for
several minutes, during which time her attention became more and more
concentrated. She was seen to see; her forehead had a singular aspect;
an inward effort appeared there; it seemed to clear or cloud by some
mysterious power, the effects of which Minoret had seen in dying persons
at moments when they appeared to have the gift of prophecy. Several
times she made gestures which resembled those of Ursula.

“Question her,” said the mysterious stranger, to Minoret, “she will tell
you secrets you alone can know.”

“Does Ursula love me?” asked Minoret.

“Almost as much as she loves God,” was the answer. “But she is very
unhappy at your unbelief. You do not believe in God; as if you could
prevent his existence! His word fills the universe. You are the cause of
her only sorrow.--Hear! she is playing scales; she longs to be a better
musician than she is; she is provoked with herself. She is thinking, ‘If
I could sing, if my voice were fine, it would reach his ear when he is
with his mother.’”

Doctor Minoret took out his pocket-book and noted the hour.

“Tell me what seeds she planted?”

“Mignonette, sweet-peas, balsams--”

“And what else?”

“Larkspur.”

“Where is my money?”

“With your notary; but you invest it so as not to lose the interest of a
single day.”

“Yes, but where is the money that I keep for my monthly expenses?”

“You put it in a large book bound in red, entitled ‘Pandects of
Justinian, Vol. II.’ between the last two leaves; the book is on the
shelf of folios above the glass buffet. You have a whole row of them.
Your money is in the last volume next to the salon--See! Vol. III. is
before Vol. II.--but you have no money, it is all in--”

“--thousand-franc notes,” said the doctor.

“I cannot see, they are folded. No, there are two notes of five hundred
francs.”

“You see them?”

“Yes.”

“How do they look?”

“One is old and yellow, the other white and new.”

This last phase of the inquiry petrified the doctor. He looked at
Bouvard with a bewildered air; but Bouvard and the Swedenborgian, who
were accustomed to the amazement of sceptics, were speaking together in
a low voice and appeared not to notice him. Minoret begged them to allow
him to return after dinner. The old philosopher wished to compose his
mind and shake off this terror, so as to put this vast power to some new
test, to subject it to more decisive experiments and obtain answers to
certain questions, the truth of which should do away with every sort of
doubt.

“Be here at nine o’clock this evening,” said the stranger. “I will
return to meet you.”

Doctor Minoret was in so convulsed a state that he left the room without
bowing, followed by Bouvard, who called to him from behind. “Well, what
do you say? what do you say?”

“I think I am mad, Bouvard,” answered Minoret from the steps of the
porte-cochere. “If that woman tells the truth about Ursula,--and none
but Ursula can know the things that sorceress has told me,--I shall say
that _you are right_. I wish I had wings to fly to Nemours this minute
and verify her words. But I shall hire a carriage and start at ten
o’clock to-night. Ah! am I losing my senses?”

“What would you say if you knew of a life-long incurable disease healed
in a moment; if you saw that great magnetizer bring sweat in torrents
from an herpetic patient, or make a paralyzed woman walk?”

“Come and dine, Bouvard; stay with me till nine o’clock. I must find
some decisive, undeniable test!”

“So be it, old comrade,” answered the other.

The reconciled enemies dined in the Palais-Royal. After a lively
conversation, which helped Minoret to evade the fever of the ideas which
were ravaging his brain, Bouvard said to him:--

“If you admit in that woman the faculty of annihilating or of traversing
space, if you obtain a certainty that here, in Paris, she sees and hears
what is said and done in Nemours, you must admit all other magnetic
facts; they are not more incredible than these. Ask her for some one
proof which you know will satisfy you--for you might suppose that we
obtained information to deceive you; but we cannot know, for instance,
what will happen at nine o’clock in your goddaughter’s bedroom.
Remember, or write down, what the sleeper will see and hear, and then go
home. Your little Ursula, whom I do not know, is not our accomplice,
and if she tells you that she has said and done what you have written
down--lower thy head, proud Hun!”

The two friends returned to the house opposite to the Assumption and
found the somnambulist, who in her waking state did not recognize Doctor
Minoret. The eyes of this woman closed gently before the hand of the
Swedenborgian, which was stretched towards her at a little distance, and
she took the attitude in which Minoret had first seen her. When her hand
and that of the doctor were again joined, he asked her to tell him what
was happening in his house at Nemours at that instant. “What is Ursula
doing?” he said.

“She is undressed; she has just curled her hair; she is kneeling on
her prie-Dieu, before an ivory crucifix fastened to a red velvet
background.”

“What is she saying?”

“Her evening prayers; she is commending herself to God; she implores
him to save her soul from evil thoughts; she examines her conscience and
recalls what she has done during the day; that she may know if she has
failed to obey his commands and those of the church--poor dear little
soul, she lays bare her breast!” Tears were in the sleeper’s eyes.
“She has done no sin, but she blames herself for thinking too much of
Savinien. She stops to wonder what he is doing in Paris; she prays to
God to make him happy. She speaks of you; she is praying aloud.”

“Tell me her words.” Minoret took his pencil and wrote, as the sleeper
uttered it, the following prayer, evidently composed by the Abbe
Chaperon.

  “My God, if thou art content with thine handmaid, who worships
  thee and prays to thee with a love that is equal to her devotion,
  who strives not to wander from thy sacred paths, who would gladly
  die as thy Son died to glorify thy name, who desires to live in
  the shadow of thy will--O God, who knoweth the heart, open the
  eyes of my godfather, lead him in the way of salvation, grant him
  thy Divine grace, that he may live for thee in his last days; save
  him from evil, and let me suffer in his stead. Kind Saint Ursula,
  dear protectress, and you, Mother of God, queen of heaven,
  archangels, and saints in Paradise, hear me! join your
  intercessions to mine and have mercy upon us.”

The sleeper imitated so perfectly the artless gestures and the inspired
manner of his child that Doctor Minoret’s eyes were filled with tears.

“Does she say more?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Repeat it.”

“‘My dear godfather; I wonder who plays backgammon with him in Paris.’
She has blown out the light--her head is on the pillow--she turns to
sleep! Ah! she is off! How pretty she looks in her little night-cap.”

Minoret bowed to the great Unknown, wrung Bouvard by the hand, ran
downstairs and hastened to a cab-stand which at that time was near the
gates of a house since pulled down to make room for the Rue d’Alger.
There he found a coachman who was willing to start immediately for
Fontainebleau. The moment the price was agreed on, the old man, who
seemed to have renewed his youth, jumped into the carriage and started.
According to agreement, he stopped to rest the horse at Essonne, but
arrived at Fontainebleau in time for the diligence to Nemours, on which
he secured a seat, and dismissed his coachman. He reached home at five
in the morning, and went to bed, with his life-long ideas of physiology,
nature, and metaphysics in ruins about him, and slept till nine o’clock,
so wearied was he with the events of his journey.




CHAPTER VII. A TWO-FOLD CONVERSION

On rising, the doctor, sure that no one had crossed the threshold of
his house since he re-entered it, proceeded (but not without extreme
trepidation) to verify his facts. He was himself ignorant of any
difference in the bank-notes and also of the misplacement of the Pandect
volumes. The somnambulist was right. The doctor rang for La Bougival.

“Tell Ursula to come and speak to me,” he said, seating himself in the
center of his library.

The girl came; she ran up to him and kissed him. The doctor took her on
his knee, where she sat contentedly, mingling her soft fair curls with
the white hair of her old friend.

“Do you want something, godfather?”

“Yes; but promise me, on your salvation, to answer frankly, without
evasion, the questions that I shall put to you.”

Ursula colored to the temples.

“Oh! I’ll ask nothing that you cannot speak of,” he said, noticing how
the bashfulness of young love clouded the hitherto childlike purity of
the girl’s blue eyes.

“Ask me, godfather.”

“What thought was in your mind when you ended your prayers last evening,
and what time was it when you said them.”

“It was a quarter-past or half-past nine.”

“Well, repeat your last prayer.”

The girl fancied that her voice might convey her faith to the sceptic;
she slid from his knee and knelt down, clasping her hands fervently; a
brilliant light illumined her face as she turned it on the old man and
said:--

“What I asked of God last night I asked again this morning, and I shall
ask it till he vouchsafes to grant it.”

Then she repeated her prayer with new and still more powerful
expression. To her great astonishment her godfather took the last words
from her mouth and finished the prayer.

“Good, Ursula,” said the doctor, taking her again on his knee. “When
you laid your head on the pillow and went to sleep did you think to
yourself, ‘That dear godfather; I wonder who is playing backgammon with
him in Paris’?”

Ursula sprang up as if the last trumpet had sounded in her ears. She
gave a cry of terror; her eyes, wide open, gazed at the old man with
awful fixity.

“Who are you, godfather? From whom do you get such power?” she asked,
imagining that in his desire to deny God he had made some compact with
the devil.

“What seeds did you plant yesterday in the garden?”

“Mignonette, sweet-peas, balsams--”

“And the last were larkspur?”

She fell on her knees.

“Do not terrify me!” she exclaimed. “Oh you must have been here--you
were here, were you not?”

“Am I not always with you?” replied the doctor, evading her question, to
save the strain on the young girl’s mind. “Let us go to your room.”

“Your legs are trembling,” she said.

“Yes, I am confounded, as it were.”

“Can it be that you believe in God?” she cried, with artless joy,
letting fall the tears that gathered in her eyes.

The old man looked round the simple but dainty little room he had given
to his Ursula. On the floor was a plain green carpet, very inexpensive,
which she herself kept exquisitely clean; the walls were hung with a
gray paper strewn with roses and green leaves; at the windows, which
looked to the court, were calico curtains edged with a band of some pink
material; between the windows and beneath a tall mirror was a pier-table
topped with marble, on which stood a Sevres vase in which she put her
nosegays; opposite the chimney was a little bureau-desk of charming
marquetry. The bed, of chintz, with chintz curtains lined with pink, was
one of those duchess beds so common in the eighteenth century, which had
a tuft of carved feathers at the top of each of the four posts, which
were fluted on the sides. An old clock, inclosed in a sort of monument
made of tortoise-shell inlaid with arabesques of ivory, decorated the
mantelpiece, the marble shelf of which, with the candlesticks and
the mirror in a frame painted in cameo on a gray ground, presented a
remarkable harmony of color, tone, and style. A large wardrobe, the
doors of which were inlaid with landscapes in different woods (some
having a green tint which are no longer to be found for sale) contained,
no doubt, her linen and her dresses. The air of the room was redolent of
heaven. The precise arrangement of everything showed a sense of order, a
feeling for harmony, which would certainly have influenced any one, even
a Minoret-Levrault. It was plain that the things about her were dear
to Ursula, and that she loved a room which contained, as it were, her
childhood and the whole of her girlish life.

Looking the room well over that he might seem to have a reason for
his visit, the doctor saw at once how the windows looked into those
of Madame de Portenduere. During the night he had meditated as to
the course he ought to pursue with Ursula about his discovery of this
dawning passion. To question her now would commit him to some course.
He must either approve or disapprove of her love; in either case his
position would be a false one. He therefore resolved to watch and
examine into the state of things between the two young people, and
learn whether it were his duty to check the inclination before it was
irresistible. None but an old man could have shown such deliberate
wisdom. Still panting from the discovery of the truth of these magnetic
facts, he turned about and looked at all the various little things
around the room; he wished to examine the almanac which was hanging at a
corner of the chimney-piece.

“These ugly things are too heavy for your little hands,” he said, taking
up the marble candlesticks which were partly covered with leather.

He weighed them in his hand; then he looked at the almanac and took it,
saying, “This is ugly too. Why do you keep such a common thing in your
pretty room?”

“Oh, please let me have it, godfather.”

“No, no, you shall have another to-morrow.”

So saying he carried off this possible proof, shut himself up in his
study, looked for Saint Savinien and found, as the somnambulist had told
him, a little red dot at the 19th of October; he also saw another before
his own saint’s day, Saint Denis, and a third before Saint John, the
abbe’s patron. This little dot, no larger than a pin’s head, had been
seen by the sleeping woman in spite of distance and other obstacles!
The old man thought till evening of these events, more momentous for him
than for others. He was forced to yield to evidence. A strong wall,
as it were, crumbled within him; for his life had rested on two
bases,--indifference in matters of religion and a firm disbelief in
magnetism. When it was proved to him that the senses--faculties purely
physical, organs, the effects of which could be explained--attained to
some of the attributes of the infinite, magnetism upset, or at least it
seemed to him to upset, the powerful arguments of Spinoza. The finite
and the infinite, two incompatible elements according to that remarkable
man, were here united, the one in the other. No matter what power
he gave to the divisibility and mobility of matter he could not help
recognizing that it possessed qualities that were almost divine.

He was too old now to connect those phenomena to a system, and compare
them with those of sleep, of vision, of light. His whole scientific
belief, based on the assertions of the school of Locke and Condillac,
was in ruins. Seeing his hollow ideas in pieces, his scepticism
staggered. Thus the advantage in this struggle between the Catholic
child and the Voltairean old man was on Ursula’s side. In the dismantled
fortress, above these ruins, shone a light; from the center of these
ashes issued the path of prayer! Nevertheless, the obstinate old
scientist fought his doubts. Though struck to the heart, he would not
decide, he struggled on against God.

But he was no longer the same man; his mind showed its vacillation.
He became unnaturally dreamy; he read Pascal, and Bossuet’s sublime
“History of Species”; he read Bonald, he read Saint-Augustine;
he determined also to read the works of Swedenborg, and the late
Saint-Martin, which the mysterious stranger had mentioned to him. The
edifice within him was cracking on all sides; it needed but one more
shake, and then, his heart being ripe for God, he was destined to fall
into the celestial vineyard as fall the fruits. Often of an evening,
when playing with the abbe, his goddaughter sitting by, he would put
questions bearing on his opinions which seemed singular to the priest,
who was ignorant of the inward workings by which God was remaking that
fine conscience.

“Do you believe in apparitions?” asked the sceptic of the pastor,
stopping short in the game.

“Cardan, a great philosopher of the sixteenth century said he had seen
some,” replied the abbe.

“I know all those that scholars have discussed, for I have just reread
Plotinus. I am questioning you as a Catholic might, and I ask if you
think that dead men can return to the living.”

“Jesus reappeared to his disciples after his death,” said the abbe.
“The Church ought to have faith in the apparitions of the Savior. As for
miracles, they are not lacking,” he continued, smiling. “Shall I tell
you the last? It took place in the eighteenth century.”

“Pooh!” said the doctor.

“Yes, the blessed Marie-Alphonse of Ligouri, being very far from
Rome, knew of the death of the Pope at the very moment the Holy Father
expired; there were numerous witnesses of this miracle. The sainted
bishop being in ecstasy, heard the last words of the sovereign pontiff
and repeated them at the time to those about him. The courier who
brought the announcement of the death did not arrive till thirty hours
later.”

“Jesuit!” exclaimed old Minoret, laughing, “I did not ask you for
proofs; I asked you if you believed in apparitions.”

“I think an apparition depends a good deal on who sees it,” said the
abbe, still fencing with his sceptic.

“My friend,” said the doctor, seriously, “I am not setting a trap for
you. What do you really believe about it?”

“I believe that the power of God is infinite,” replied the abbe.

“When I am dead, if I am reconciled to God, I will ask Him to let me
appear to you,” said the doctor, smiling.

“That’s exactly the agreement Cardan made with his friend,” answered the
priest.

“Ursula,” said Minoret, “if danger ever threatens you, call me, and I
will come.”

“You have put into one sentence that beautiful elegy of ‘Neere’ by Andre
Chenier,” said the abbe. “Poets are sublime because they clothe both
facts and feelings with ever-living images.”

“Why do you speak of your death, dear godfather?” said Ursula in a
grieved tone. “We Christians do not die; the grave is the cradle of our
souls.”

“Well,” said the doctor, smiling, “we must go out of the world, and when
I am no longer here you will be astonished at your fortune.”

“When you are here no longer, my kind friend, my only consolation will
be to consecrate my life to you.”

“To me, dead?”

“Yes. All the good works that I can do will be done in your name to
redeem your sins. I will pray God every day for his infinite mercy, that
he may not punish eternally the errors of a day. I know he will summon
among the righteous a soul so pure, so beautiful, as yours.”

That answer, said with angelic candor, in a tone of absolute certainty,
confounded error and converted Denis Minoret as God converted Saul.
A ray of inward light overawed him; the knowledge of this tenderness,
covering his years to come, brought tears to his eyes. This sudden
effect of grace had something that seemed electrical about it. The
abbe clasped his hands and rose, troubled, from his seat. The girl,
astonished at her triumph, wept. The old man stood up as if a voice had
called him, looking into space as though his eyes beheld the dawn; then
he bent his knee upon his chair, clasped his hands, and lowered his eyes
to the ground as one humiliated.

“My God,” he said in a trembling voice, raising his head, “if any one
can obtain my pardon and lead me to thee, surely it is this spotless
creature. Have mercy on the repentant old age that this pure child
presents to thee!”

He lifted his soul to God; mentally praying for the light of divine
knowledge after the gift of divine grace; then he turned to the abbe and
held out his hand.

“My dear pastor,” he said, “I am become as a little child. I belong to
you; I give my soul to your care.”

Ursula kissed his hands and bathed them with her tears. The old man took
her on his knee and called her gayly his godmother. The abbe, deeply
moved, recited the “Veni Creator” in a species of religious ecstasy.
The hymn served as the evening prayer of the three Christians kneeling
together for the first time.

“What has happened?” asked La Bougival, amazed at the sight.

“My godfather believes in God at last!” replied Ursula.

“Ah! so much the better; he only needed that to make him perfect,” cried
the old woman, crossing herself with artless gravity.

“Dear doctor,” said the good priest, “you will soon comprehend the
grandeur of religion and the value of its practices; you will find
its philosophy in human aspects far higher than that of the boldest
sceptics.”

The abbe, who showed a joy that was almost infantine, agreed to
catechize the old man and confer with him twice a week. Thus the
conversion attributed to Ursula and to a spirit of sordid calculation,
was the spontaneous act of the doctor himself. The abbe, who for
fourteen years had abstained from touching the wounds of that heart,
though all the while deploring them, was now asked for help, as a
surgeon is called to an injured man. Ever since this scene Ursula’s
evening prayers had been said in common with her godfather. Day after
day the old man grew more conscious of the peace within him that
succeeded all his conflicts. Having, as he said, God as the responsible
editor of things inexplicable, his mind was at ease. His dear child
told him that he might know by how far he had advanced already in God’s
kingdom. During the mass which we have seen him attend, he had read the
prayers and applied his own intelligence to them; from the first, he
had risen to the divine idea of the communion of the faithful. The
old neophyte understood the eternal symbol attached to that sacred
nourishment, which faith renders needful to the soul after conveying to
it her own profound and radiant essence. When on leaving the church he
had seemed in a hurry to get home, it was merely that he might once
more thank his dear child for having led him to “enter religion,”--the
beautiful expression of former days. He was holding her on his knee in
the salon and kissing her forehead sacredly at the very moment when his
relatives were degrading that saintly influence with their shameless
fears, and casting their vulgar insults upon Ursula. His haste to return
home, his assumed disdain for their company, his sharp replies as he
left the church were naturally attributed by all the heirs to the hatred
Ursula had excited against them in the old man’s mind.




CHAPTER VIII. THE CONFERENCE

While Ursula was playing variations on Weber’s “Last Thought” to her
godfather, a plot was hatching in the Minoret-Levraults’ dining-room
which was destined to have a lasting effect on the events of this drama.
The breakfast, noisy as all provincial breakfasts are, and enlivened by
excellent wines brought to Nemours by the canal either from Burgundy
or Touraine, lasted more than two hours. Zelie had sent for oysters,
salt-water fish, and other gastronomical delicacies to do honor to
Desire’s return. The dining-room, in the center of which a round table
offered a most appetizing sight, was like the hall of an inn. Content
with the size of her kitchens and offices, Zelie had built a pavilion
for the family between the vast courtyard and a garden planted with
vegetables and full of fruit-trees. Everything about the premises was
solid and plain. The example of Levrault-Levrault had been a warning to
the town. Zelie forbade her builder to lead her into such follies. The
dining-room was, therefore, hung with varnished paper and furnished with
walnut chairs and sideboards, a porcelain stove, a tall clock, and a
barometer. Though the plates and dishes were of common white china, the
table shone with handsome linen and abundant silverware. After Zelie
had served the coffee, coming and going herself like shot in a
decanter,--for she kept but one servant,--and when Desire, the budding
lawyer, had been told of the event of the morning and its probably
consequences, the door was closed, and the notary Dionis was called upon
to speak. By the silence in the room and the looks that were cast on
that authoritative face, it was easy to see the power that such men
exercise over families.

“My dear children,” said he, “your uncle having been born in 1746, is
eighty-three years old at the present time; now, old men are given to
folly, and that little--”

“Viper!” cried Madame Massin.

“Hussy!” said Zelie.

“Let us call her by her own name,” said Dionis.

“Well, she’s a thief,” said Madame Cremiere.

“A pretty thief,” remarked Desire.

“That little Ursula,” went on Dionis, “has managed to get hold of his
heart. I have been thinking of your interests, and I did not wait until
now before making certain inquiries; now this is what I have discovered
about that young--”

“Marauder,” said the collector.

“Inveigler,” said the clerk of the court.

“Hold your tongue, friends,” said the notary, “or I’ll take my hat and
be off.”

“Come, come, papa,” cried Minoret, pouring out a little glass of rum and
offering it to the notary; “here, drink this, it comes from Rome itself;
and now go on.”

“Ursula is, it is true, the legitimate daughter of Joseph Mirouet;
but her father was the natural son of Valentin Mirouet, your uncle’s
father-in-law. Being therefore an illegitimate niece, any will the
doctor might make in her favor could probably be contested; and if
he leaves her his fortune in that way you could bring a suit against
Ursula. This, however, might turn out ill for you, in case the court
took the view that there was no relationship between Ursula and the
doctor. Still, the suit would frighten an unprotected girl, and bring
about a compromise--”

“The law is so rigid as to the rights of natural children,” said the
newly fledged licentiate, eager to parade his knowledge, “that by the
judgment of the court of appeals dated July 7, 1817, a natural child can
claim nothing from his natural grandfather, not even a maintenance.
So you see the illegitimate parentage is made retrospective. The law
pursues the natural child even to its legitimate descent, on the ground
that benefactions done to grandchildren reach the natural son through
that medium. This is shown by articles 757, 908, and 911 of the civil
Code. The royal court of Paris, by a decision of the 26th of January of
last year, cut off a legacy made to the legitimate child of a natural
son by his grandfather, who, as grandfather, was as distant to a natural
grandson as the doctor, being an uncle, is to Ursula.”

“All that,” said Goupil, “seems to me to relate only to the bequests
made by grandfathers to natural descendants. Ursula is not a blood
relation of Doctor Minoret. I remember a decision of the royal court at
Colmar, rendered in 1825, just before I took my degree, which declared
that after the decease of a natural child his descendants could no
longer be prohibited from inheriting. Now, Ursula’s father is dead.”

Goupil’s argument produced what journalists who report the sittings of
legislative assemblies are wont to call “profound sensation.”

“What does that signify?” cried Dionis. “The actual case of the bequest
of an uncle to an illegitimate child may not yet have been presented for
trial; but when it is, the sternness of French law against such children
will be all the more firmly applied because we live in times when
religion is honored. I’ll answer for it that out of such a suit as I
propose you could get a compromise,--especially if they see you are
determined to carry Ursula to a court of appeals.”

Here the joy of the heirs already fingering their gold was made manifest
in smiles, shrugs, and gestures round the table, and prevented all
notice of Goupil’s dissent. This elation, however, was succeeded by deep
silence and uneasiness when the notary uttered his next word, a terrible
“But!”

As if he had pulled the string of a puppet-show, starting the little
people in jerks by means of machinery, Dionis beheld all eyes turned on
him and all faces rigid in one and the same pose.

“_But_ no law prevents your uncle from adopting or marrying Ursula,” he
continued. “As for adoption, that could be contested, and you would,
I think, have equity on your side. The royal courts would never trifle
with questions of adoptions; you would get a hearing there. It is
true the doctor is an officer of the Legion of honor, and was formerly
surgeon to the ex-emperor; but, nevertheless, he would get the worst of
it. Moreover, you would have due warning in case of adoption--but how
about marriage? Old Minoret is shrewd enough to go to Paris and marry
her after a year’s domicile, and give her a million by the marriage
contract. The only thing, therefore, that really puts your property in
danger is your uncle’s marriage with the girl.”

Here the notary paused.

“There’s another danger,” said Goupil, with a knowing air,--“that of
a will made in favor of a third person, old Bongrand for instance, who
will hold the property in trust for Mademoiselle Ursula--”

“If you tease your uncle,” continued Dionis, cutting short his
head-clerk, “if you are not all of you very polite to Ursula, you will
drive him into either a marriage or into making that private trust which
Goupil speaks of,--though I don’t think him capable of that; it is a
dangerous thing. As for marriage, that is easy to prevent. Desire there
has only got to hold out a finger to the girl; she’s sure to prefer a
handsome young man, cock of the walk in Nemours, to an old one.”

“Mother,” said Desire to Zelie’s ear, as much allured by the millions as
by Ursula’s beauty, “If I married her we should get the whole property.”

“Are you crazy?--you, who’ll some day have fifty thousand francs a year
and be made a deputy! As long as I live you never shall cut your throat
by a foolish marriage. Seven hundred thousand francs, indeed! Why, the
mayor’s only daughter will have fifty thousand a year, and they have
already proposed her to me--”

This reply, the first rough speech his mother had ever made to him,
extinguished in Desire’s breast all desire for a marriage with the
beautiful Ursula; for his father and he never got the better of any
decision once written in the terrible blue eyes of Zelie Minoret.

“Yes, but see here, Monsieur Dionis,” cried Cremiere, whose wife had
been nudging him, “if the good man took the thing seriously and married
his goddaughter to Desire, giving her the reversion of all the property,
good-by to our share in it; if he lives five years longer uncle may be
worth a million.”

“Never!” cried Zelie, “never in my life shall Desire marry the daughter
of a bastard, a girl picked up in the streets out of charity. My son
will represent the Minorets after the death of his uncle, and the
Minorets have five hundred years of good bourgeoisie behind them. That’s
equal to the nobility. Don’t be uneasy, any of you; Desire will marry
when we find a chance to put him in the Chamber of deputies.”

This lofty declaration was backed by Goupil, who said:--

“Desire, with an allowance of twenty-four thousand francs a year, will
be president of a royal court or solicitor-general; either office leads
to the peerage. A foolish marriage would ruin him.”

The heirs were now all talking at once; but they suddenly held their
tongues when Minoret rapped on the table with his fist to keep silence
for the notary.

“Your uncle is a worthy man,” continued Dionis. “He believes he’s
immortal; and, like most clever men, he’ll let death overtake him before
he has made a will. My advice therefore is to induce him to invest his
capital in a way that will make it difficult for him to disinherit you,
and I know of an opportunity, made to hand. That little Portenduere
is in Saint-Pelagie, locked-up for one hundred and some odd thousand
francs’ worth of debt. His old mother knows he is in prison; she is
crying like a Magdalen. The abbe is to dine with her; no doubt she wants
to talk to him about her troubles. Well, I’ll go and see your uncle
to-night and persuade him to sell his five per cent consols, which are
now at 118, and lend Madame de Portenduere, on the security of her farm
at Bordieres and her house here, enough to pay the debts of the prodigal
son. I have a right as notary to speak to him in behalf of young
Portenduere; and it is quite natural that I should wish to make him
change his investments; I get deeds and commissions out of the business.
If I become his adviser I’ll propose to him other land investments for
his surplus capital; I have some excellent ones now in my office. If his
fortune were once invested in landed estate or in mortgage notes in this
neighbourhood, it could not take wings to itself very easily. It is easy
to make difficulties between the wish to realize and the realization.”

The heirs, struck with the truth of this argument (much cleverer than
that of Monsieur Josse), murmured approval.

“You must be careful,” said the notary in conclusion, “to keep your
uncle in Nemours, where his habits are known, and where you can watch
him. Find him a lover for the girl and you’ll prevent his marrying her
himself.”

“Suppose she married the lover?” said Goupil, seized by an ambitious
desire.

“That wouldn’t be a bad thing; then you could figure up the loss; the
old man would have to say how much he gives her,” replied the notary.
“But if you set Desire at her he could keep the girl dangling on till
the old man died. Marriages are made and unmade.”

“The shortest way,” said Goupil, “if the doctor is likely to live much
longer, is to marry her to some worthy young man who will get her out
of your way by settling at Sens, or Montargis, or Orleans with a hundred
thousand francs in hand.”

Dionis, Massin, Zelie, and Goupil, the only intelligent heads in the
company, exchanged four thoughtful smiles.

“He’d be a worm at the core,” whispered Zelie to Massin.

“How did he get here?” returned the clerk.

“That will just suit you!” cried Desire to Goupil. “But do you think you
can behave decently enough to satisfy the old man and the girl?”

“In these days,” whispered Zelie again in Massin’s year, “notaries look
out for no interests but their own. Suppose Dionis went over to Ursula
just to get the old man’s business?”

“I am sure of him,” said the clerk of the court, giving her a sly look
out of his spiteful little eyes. He was just going to add, “because I
hold something over him,” but he withheld the words.

“I am quite of Dionis’s opinion,” he said aloud.

“So am I,” cried Zelie, who now suspected the notary of collusion with
the clerk.

“My wife has voted!” said the post master, sipping his brandy, though
his face was already purple from digesting his meal and absorbing a
notable quantity of liquids.

“And very properly,” remarked the collector.

“I shall go and see the doctor after dinner,” said Dionis.

“If Monsieur Dionis’s advice is good,” said Madame Cremiere to Madame
Massin, “we had better go and call on our uncle, as we used to do, every
Sunday evening, and behave exactly as Monsieur Dionis has told us.”

“Yes, and be received as he received us!” cried Zelie. “Minoret and
I have more than forty thousand francs a year, and yet he refused our
invitations! We are quite his equals. If I don’t know how to write
prescriptions I know how to paddle my boat as well as he--I can tell him
that!”

“As I am far from having forty thousand francs a year,” said Madame
Massin, rather piqued, “I don’t want to lose ten thousand.”

“We are his nieces; we ought to take care of him, and then besides we
shall see how things are going,” said Madame Cremiere; “you’ll thank us
some day, cousin.”

“Treat Ursula kindly,” said the notary, lifting his right forefinger to
the level of his lips; “remember old Jordy left her his savings.”

“You have managed those fools as well as Desroches, the best lawyer
in Paris, could have done,” said Goupil to his patron as they left the
post-house.

“And now they are quarreling over my fee,” replied the notary, smiling
bitterly.

The heirs, after parting with Dionis and his clerk, met again in the
square, with face rather flushed from their breakfast, just as vespers
were over. As the notary predicted, the Abbe Chaperon had Madame de
Portenduere on his arm.

“She dragged him to vespers, see!” cried Madame Massin to Madame
Cremiere, pointing to Ursula and the doctor, who were leaving the
church.

“Let us go and speak to him,” said Madame Cremiere, approaching the old
man.

The change in the faces of his relatives (produced by the conference)
did not escape Doctor Minoret. He tried to guess the reason of this
sudden amiability, and out of sheer curiosity encouraged Ursula to stop
and speak to the two women, who were eager to greet her with exaggerated
affection and forced smiles.

“Uncle, will you permit me to come and see you to-night?” said Madame
Cremiere. “We feared sometimes we were in your way--but it is such a
long time since our children have paid you their respects; our girls are
old enough now to make dear Ursula’s acquaintance.”

“Ursula is a little bear, like her name,” replied the doctor.

“Let us tame her,” said Madame Massin. “And besides, uncle,” added the
good housewife, trying to hide her real motive under a mask of economy,
“they tell us the dear girl has such talent for the forte that we are
very anxious to hear her. Madame Cremiere and I are inclined to take her
music-master for our children. If there were six or eight scholars in a
class it would bring the price of his lessons within our means.”

“Certainly,” said the old man, “and it will be all the better for me
because I want to give Ursula a singing-master.”

“Well, to-night then, uncle. We will bring your great-nephew Desire to
see you; he is now a lawyer.”

“Yes, to-night,” echoed Minoret, meaning to fathom the motives of these
petty souls.

The two nieces pressed Ursula’s hand, saying, with affected eagerness,
“Au revoir.”

“Oh, godfather, you have read my heart!” cried Ursula, giving him a
grateful look.

“You are going to have a voice,” he said; “and I shall give you masters
of drawing and Italian also. A woman,” added the doctor, looking at
Ursula as he unfastened the gate of his house, “ought to be educated to
the height of every position in which her marriage may place her.”

Ursula grew red as a cherry; her godfather’s thoughts evidently
turned in the same direction as her own. Feeling that she was too near
confessing to the doctor the involuntary attraction which led her to
think about Savinien and to center all her ideas of affection upon him,
she turned aside and sat down in front of a great cluster of climbing
plants, on the dark background of which she looked at a distance like a
blue and white flower.

“Now you see, godfather, that your nieces were very kind to me; yes,
they were very kind,” she repeated as he approached her, to change the
thoughts that made him pensive.

“Poor little girl!” cried the old man.

He laid Ursula’s hand upon his arm, tapping it gently, and took her to
the terraces beside the river, where no one could hear them.

“Why do you say, ‘Poor little girl’?”

“Don’t you see how they fear you?”

“Fear me,--why?”

“My next of kin are very uneasy about my conversion. They no doubt
attribute it to your influence over me; they fancy I deprive them of
their inheritance to enrich you.”

“But you won’t do that?” said Ursula naively, looking up at him.

“Oh, divine consolation of my old age!” said the doctor, taking his
godchild in his arms and kissing her on both cheeks. “It was for her
and not for myself, oh God! that I besought thee just now to let me live
until the day I give her to some good being who is worthy of her!--You
will see comedies, my little angel, comedies which the Minorets and
Cremieres and Massins will come and play here. You want to brighten and
prolong my life; they are longing for my death.”

“God forbids us to hate any one, but if that is--Ah! I despise them!”
 exclaimed Ursula.

“Dinner is ready!” called La Bougival from the portico, which, on the
garden side, was at the end of the corridor.




CHAPTER IX. A FIRST CONFIDENCE

Ursula and her godfather were sitting at dessert in the pretty
dining-room decorated with Chinese designs in black and gold lacquer
(the folly of Levrault-Levrault) when the justice of peace arrived. The
doctor offered him (and this was a great mark of intimacy) a cup of his
coffee, a mixture of Mocha with Bourbon and Martinique, roasted, ground,
and made by himself in a silver apparatus called a Chaptal.

“Well,” said Bongrand, pushing up his glasses and looking slyly at the
old man, “the town is in commotion; your appearance in church has put
your relatives beside themselves. You have left your fortune to the
priests, to the poor. You have roused the families, and they are
bestirring themselves. Ha! ha! I saw their first irruption into the
square; they were as busy as ants who have lost their eggs.”

“What did I tell you, Ursula?” cried the doctor. “At the risk of
grieving you, my child, I must teach you to know the world and put you
on your guard against undeserved enmity.”

“I should like to say a word to you on this subject,” said Bongrand,
seizing the occasion to speak to his old friend of Ursula’s future.

The doctor put a black velvet cap on his white head, the justice of
peace wore his hat to protect him from the night air, and they walked up
and down the terrace discussing the means of securing to Ursula what her
godfather intended to bequeath her. Bongrand knew Dionis’s opinion as
to the invalidity of a will made by the doctor in favor of Ursula; for
Nemours was so preoccupied with the Minoret affairs that the matter
had been much discussed among the lawyers of the little town. Bongrand
considered that Ursula was not a relative of Doctor Minoret, but he
felt that the whole spirit of legislation was against the foisting into
families of illegitimate off-shoots. The makers of the Code had foreseen
only the weakness of fathers and mothers for their natural children,
without considering that uncles and aunts might have a like tenderness
and a desire to provide for such children. Evidently there was a gap in
the law.

“In all other countries,” he said, ending an explanation of the legal
points which Dionis, Goupil, and Desire had just explained to the heirs,
“Ursula would have nothing to fear; she is a legitimate child, and
the disability of her father ought only to affect the inheritance from
Valentine Mirouet, her grandfather. But in France the magistracy is
unfortunately overwise and very consequential; it inquires into the
spirit of the law. Some lawyers talk morality, and might try to show
that this hiatus in the Code came from the simple-mindedness of the
legislators, who did not foresee the case, though, none the less, they
established a principle. To bring a suit would be long and expensive.
Zelie would carry it to the court of appeals, and I might not be alive
when the case was tried.”

“The best of cases is often worthless,” cried the doctor. “Here’s the
question the lawyers will put, ‘To what degree of relationship ought the
disability of natural children in matters of inheritance to extend?’ and
the credit of a good lawyer will lie in gaining a bad cause.”

“Faith!” said Bongrand, “I dare not take upon myself to affirm that
the judges wouldn’t interpret the meaning of the law as increasing the
protection given to marriage, the eternal base of society.”

Without explaining his intentions, the doctor rejected the idea of a
trust. When Bongrand suggested to him a marriage with Ursula as the
surest means of securing his property to her, he exclaimed, “Poor little
girl! I might live fifteen years; what a fate for her!”

“Well, what will you do, then?” asked Bongrand.

“We’ll think about it--I’ll see,” said the old man, evidently at a loss
for a reply.

Just then Ursula came to say that Monsieur Dionis wished to speak to the
doctor.

“Already!” cried Minoret, looking at Bongrand. “Yes,” he said to Ursula,
“send him here.”

“I’ll bet my spectacles to a bunch of matches that he is the
advance-guard of your heirs,” said Bongrand. “They breakfasted together
at the post house, and something is being engineered.”

The notary, conducted by Ursula, came to the lower end of the garden.
After the usual greetings and a few insignificant remarks, Dionis asked
for a private interview; Ursula and Bongrand retired to the salon.

The distrust which superior men excite in men of business is very
remarkable. The latter deny them the “lesser” powers while recognizing
their possession of the “higher.” It is, perhaps, a tribute to them.
Seeing them always on the higher plane of human things, men of business
believe them incapable of descending to the infinitely petty details
which (like the dividends of finance and the microscopic facts of
science) go to equalize capital and to form the worlds. They are
mistaken! The man of honor and of genius sees all. Bongrand, piqued
by the doctor’s silence, but impelled by a sense of Ursula’s interests
which he thought endangered, resolved to defend her against the heirs.
He was wretched at not knowing what was taking place between the old man
and Dionis.

“No matter how pure and innocent Ursula may be,” he thought as he looked
at her, “there is a point on which young girls do make their own law and
their own morality. I’ll test here. The Minoret-Levraults,” he began,
settling his spectacles, “might possibly ask you in marriage for their
son.”

The poor child turned pale. She was too well trained, and had too much
delicacy to listen to what Dionis was saying to her uncle; but after a
moment’s inward deliberation, she thought she might show herself, and
then, if she was in the way, her godfather would let her know it. The
Chinese pagoda which the doctor made his study had outside blinds to
the glass doors; Ursula invented the excuse of shutting them. She begged
Monsieur Bongrand’s pardon for leaving him alone in the salon, but he
smiled at her and said, “Go! go!”

Ursula went down the steps of the portico which led to the pagoda at
the foot of the garden. She stood for some minutes slowly arranging the
blinds and watching the sunset. The doctor and notary were at the end
of the terrace, but as they turned she heard the doctor make an answer
which reached the pagoda where she was.

“My heirs would be delighted to see me invest my property in real estate
or mortgages; they imagine it would be safer there. I know exactly what
they are saying; perhaps you come from them. Let me tell you, my good
sir, that my disposition of my property is irrevocably made. My heirs
will have the capital I brought here with me; I wish them to know that,
and to let me alone. If any one of them attempts to interfere with what
I think proper to do for that young girl (pointing to Ursula) I shall
come back from the other world and torment him. So, Monsieur Savinien
de Portenduere will stay in prison if they count on me to get him out. I
shall not sell my property in the Funds.”

Hearing this last fragment of the sentence Ursula experienced the first
and only pain which so far had ever touched her. She laid her head
against the blind to steady herself.

“Good God, what is the matter with her?” thought the old doctor. “She
has no color; such an emotion after dinner might kill her.”

He went to her with open arms, and she fell into them almost fainting.

“Adieu, Monsieur,” he said to the notary, “please leave us.”

He carried his child to an immense Louis XV. sofa which was in his
study, looked for a phial of hartshorn among his remedies, and made her
inhale it.

“Take my place,” said the doctor to Bongrand, who was terrified; “I must
be alone with her.”

The justice of peace accompanied the notary to the gate, asking him, but
without showing any eagerness, what was the matter with Ursula.

“I don’t know,” replied Dionis. “She was standing by the pagoda,
listening to us, and just as her uncle (so-called) refused to lend
some money at my request to young de Portenduere who is in prison for
debt,--for he has not had, like Monsieur du Rouvre, a Monsieur Bongrand
to defend him,--she turned pale and staggered. Can she love him? Is
there anything between them?”

“At fifteen years of age? pooh!” replied Bongrand.

“She was born in February, 1813; she’ll be sixteen in four months.”

“I don’t believe she ever saw him,” said the judge. “No, it is only a
nervous attack.”

“Attack of the heart, more likely,” said the notary.

Dionis was delighted with this discovery, which would prevent the
marriage “in extremis” which they dreaded,--the only sure means by which
the doctor could defraud his relatives. Bongrand, on the other hand, saw
a private castle of his own demolished; he had long thought of marrying
his son to Ursula.

“If the poor girl loves that youth it will be a misfortune for her,”
 replied Bongrand after a pause. “Madame de Portenduere is a Breton and
infatuated with her noble blood.”

“Luckily--I mean for the honor of the Portendueres,” replied the notary,
on the point of betraying himself.

Let us do the faithful and upright Bongrand the justice to say that
before he re-entered the salon he had abandoned, not without deep regret
for his son, the hope he had cherished of some day calling Ursula his
daughter. He meant to give his son six thousand francs a year the day he
was appointed substitute, and if the doctor would give Ursula a hundred
thousand francs what a pearl of a home the pair would make! His Eugene
was so loyal and charming a fellow! Perhaps he had praised his Eugene
too often, and that had made the doctor distrustful.

“I shall have to come down to the mayor’s daughter,” he thought.
“But Ursula without any money is worth more than Mademoiselle
Levrault-Cremiere with a million. However, the thing to be done is to
manoeuvre the marriage with this little Portenduere--if she really loves
him.”

The doctor, after closing the door to the library and that to the
garden, took his goddaughter to the window which opened upon the river.

“What ails you, my child?” he said. “Your life is my life. Without your
smiles what would become of me?”

“Savinien in prison!” she said.

With these words a shower of tears fell from her eyes and she began to
sob.

“Saved!” thought the doctor, who was holding her pulse with great
anxiety. “Alas! she has all the sensitiveness of my poor wife,” he
thought, fetching a stethoscope which he put to Ursula’s heart, applying
his ear to it. “Ah, that’s all right,” he said to himself. “I did not
know, my darling, that you loved any one as yet,” he added, looking at
her; “but think out loud to me as you think to yourself; tell me all
that has passed between you.”

“I do not love him, godfather; we have never spoken to each other,” she
answered, sobbing. “But to hear that he is in prison, and to know that
you--harshly--refused to get him out--you, so good!”

“Ursula, my dear little good angel, if you do not love him why did you
put that little red dot against Saint Savinien’s day just as you put one
before that of Saint Denis? Come, tell me everything about your little
love-affair.”

Ursula blushed, swallowed a few tears, and for a moment there was
silence between them.

“Surely you are not afraid of your father, your friend, mother, doctor,
and godfather, whose heart is now more tender than it ever has been.”

“No, no, dear godfather,” she said. “I will open my heart to you. Last
May, Monsieur Savinien came to see his mother. Until then I had never
taken notice of him. When he left home to live in Paris I was a child,
and I did not see any difference between him and--all of you--except
perhaps that I loved you, and never thought of loving any one else.
Monsieur Savinien came by the mail-post the night before his mother’s
fete-day; but we did not know it. At seven the next morning, after I
had said my prayers, I opened the window to air my room and I saw the
windows in Monsieur Savinien’s room open; and Monsieur Savinien was
there, in a dressing gown, arranging his beard; in all his movements
there was such grace--I mean, he seemed to me so charming. He combed
his black moustache and the little tuft on his chin, and I saw his white
throat--so round!--must I tell you all? I noticed that his throat and
face and that beautiful black hair were all so different from yours when
I watch you arranging your beard. There came--I don’t know how--a
sort of glow into my heart, and up into my throat, my head; it came so
violently that I sat down--I couldn’t stand, I trembled so. But I longed
to see him again, and presently I got up; he saw me then, and, just for
play, he sent me a kiss from the tips of his fingers and--”

“And?”

“And then,” she continued, “I hid myself--I was ashamed, but happy--why
should I be ashamed of being happy? That feeling--it dazzled my soul and
gave it some power, but I don’t know what--it came again each time I saw
within me the same young face. I loved this feeling, violent as it
was. Going to mass, some unconquerable power made me look at Monsieur
Savinien with his mother on his arm; his walk, his clothes, even the tap
of his boots on the pavement, seemed to me so charming. The least little
thing about him--his hand with the delicate glove--acted like a spell
upon me; and yet I had strength enough not to think of him during
mass. When the service was over I stayed in the church to let Madame de
Portenduere go first, and then I walked behind him. I couldn’t tell you
how these little things excited me. When I reached home, I turned round
to fasten the iron gate--”

“Where was La Bougival?” asked the doctor.

“Oh, I let her go to the kitchen,” said Ursula simply. “Then I saw
Monsieur Savinien standing quite still and looking at me. Oh! godfather,
I was so proud, for I thought I saw a look in his eyes of surprise and
admiration--I don’t know what I would not do to make him look at me
again like that. It seemed to me I ought to think of nothing forevermore
but pleasing him. That glance is now the best reward I have for any good
I do. From that moment I have thought of him incessantly, in spite of
myself. Monsieur Savinien went back to Paris that evening, and I have
not seen him since. The street seems empty; he took my heart away with
him--but he does not know it.”

“Is that all?” asked the old man.

“All, dear godfather,” she said, with a sigh of regret that there was
not more to tell.

“My little girl,” said the doctor, putting her on his knee; “you are
nearly sixteen and your womanhood is beginning. You are now between your
blessed childhood, which is ending, and the emotions of love, which
will make your life a tumultuous one; for you have a nervous system of
exquisite sensibility. What has happened to you, my child, is love,”
 said the old man with an expression of deepest sadness,--“love in its
holy simplicity; love as it ought to be; involuntary, sudden, coming
like a thief who takes all--yes, all! I expected it. I have studied
women; many need proofs and miracles of affection before love
conquers them; but others there are, under the influence of sympathies
explainable to-day by magnetic fluids, who are possessed by it in an
instant. To you I can now tell all--as soon as I saw the charming woman
whose name you bear, I felt that I should love her forever, solely and
faithfully, without knowing whether our characters or persons suited
each other. Is there a second-sight in love? What answer can I give to
that, I who have seen so many unions formed under celestial auspices
only to be ruptured later, giving rise to hatreds that are well-nigh
eternal, to repugnances that are unconquerable. The senses sometimes
harmonize while ideas are at variance; and some persons live more by
their minds than by their bodies. The contrary is also true; often minds
agree and persons displease. These phenomena, the varying and secret
cause of many sorrows, show the wisdom of laws which give parents
supreme power over the marriages of their children; for a young girl is
often duped by one or other of these hallucinations. Therefore I do not
blame you. The sensations you feel, the rush of sensibility which has
come from its hidden source upon your heart and upon your mind, the
happiness with which you think of Savinien, are all natural. But,
my darling child, society demands, as our good abbe has told us, the
sacrifice of many natural inclinations. The destinies of men and women
differ. I was able to choose Ursula Mirouet for my wife; I could go to
her and say that I loved her; but a young girl is false to herself if
she asks the love of the man she loves. A woman has not the right which
men have to seek the accomplishment of her hopes in open day. Modesty is
to her--above all to you, my Ursula,--the insurmountable barrier which
protects the secrets of her heart. Your hesitation in confiding to me
these first emotions shows me you would suffer cruel torture rather than
admit to Savinien--”

“Oh, yes!” she said.

“But, my child, you must do more. You must repress these feelings; you
must forget them.”

“Why?”

“Because, my darling, you must love only the man you marry; and, even if
Monsieur Savinien de Portenduere loved you--”

“I never thought of it.”

“But listen: even if he loved you, even if his mother asked me to
give him your hand, I should not consent to the marriage until I had
subjected him to a long and thorough probation. His conduct has been
such as to make families distrust him and to put obstacles between
himself and heiresses which cannot be easily overcome.”

A soft smile came in place of tears on Ursula’s sweet face as she said,
“Then poverty is good sometimes.”

The doctor could find no answer to such innocence.

“What has he done, godfather?” she asked.

“In two years, my treasure, he has incurred one hundred and twenty
thousand francs of debt. He has had the folly to get himself locked up
in Saint-Pelagie, the debtor’s prison; an impropriety which will always
be, in these days, a discredit to him. A spendthrift who is willing to
plunge his poor mother into poverty and distress might cause his wife,
as your poor father did, to die of despair.”

“Don’t you think he will do better?” she asked.

“If his mother pays his debts he will be penniless, and I don’t know a
worse punishment than to be a nobleman without means.”

This answer made Ursula thoughtful; she dried her tears, and said:--

“If you can save him, save him, godfather; that service will give you a
right to advise him; you can remonstrate--”

“Yes,” said the doctor, imitating her, “and then he can come here, and
the old lady will come here, and we shall see them, and--”

“I was thinking only of him,” said Ursula, blushing.

“Don’t think of him, my child; it would be folly,” said the doctor
gravely. “Madame de Portenduere, who was a Kergarouet, would never
consent, even if she had to live on three hundred francs a year, to
the marriage of her son, the Vicomte Savinien de Portenduere, with
whom?--with Ursula Mirouet, daughter of a bandsman in a regiment,
without money, and whose father--alas! I must now tell you all--was the
bastard son of an organist, my father-in-law.”

“O godfather! you are right; we are equal only in the sight of God. I
will not think of him again--except in my prayers,” she said, amid the
sobs which this painful revelation excited. “Give him what you meant to
give me--what can a poor girl like me want?--ah, in prison, he!--”

“Offer to God your disappointments, and perhaps he will help us.”

There was silence for some minutes. When Ursula, who at first did not
dare to look at her godfather, raised her eyes, her heart was deeply
moved to see the tears which were rolling down his withered cheeks. The
tears of old men are as terrible as those of children are natural.

“Oh what is it?” cried Ursula, flinging herself at his feet and kissing
his hands. “Are you not sure of me?”

“I, who longed to gratify all your wishes, it is I who am obliged to
cause the first great sorrow of your life!” he said. “I suffer as
much as you. I never wept before, except when I lost my children--and,
Ursula--Yes,” he cried suddenly, “I will do all you desire!”

Ursula gave him, through her tears a look that was vivid as lightning.
She smiled.

“Let us go into the salon, darling,” said the doctor. “Try to keep
the secret of all this to yourself,” he added, leaving her alone for a
moment in his study.

He felt himself so weak before that heavenly smile that he feared he
might say a word of hope and thus mislead her.




CHAPTER X. THE FAMILY OF PORTENDUERE

Madame de Portenduere was at this moment alone with the abbe in her
frigid little salon on the ground floor, having finished the recital of
her troubles to the good priest, her only friend. She held in her hand
some letters which he had just returned to her after reading them; these
letters had brought her troubles to a climax. Seated on her sofa beside
a square table covered with the remains of a dessert, the old lady was
looking at the abbe, who sat on the other side of the table, doubled up
in his armchair and stroking his chin with the gesture common to
valets on the stage, mathematicians, and priests,--a sign of profound
meditation on a problem that was difficult to solve.

This little salon, lighted by two windows on the street and finished
with a wainscot painted gray, was so damp that the lower panels showed
the geometrical cracks of rotten wood when the paint no longer binds it.
The red-tiled floor, polished by the old lady’s one servant, required,
for comfort’s sake, before each seat small round mats of brown straw, on
one of which the abbe was now resting his feet. The old damask curtains
of light green with green flowers were drawn, and the outside blinds had
been closed. Two wax candles lighted the table, leaving the rest of
the room in semi-obscurity. Is it necessary to say that between the two
windows was a fine pastel by Latour representing the famous Admiral de
Portenduere, the rival of the Suffren, Guichen, Kergarouet and Simeuse
naval heroes? On the paneled wall opposite to the fireplace were
portraits of the Vicomte de Portenduere and of the mother of the old
lady, a Kergarouet-Ploegat. Savinien’s great-uncle was therefore the
Vice-admiral de Kergarouet, and his cousin was the Comte de Portenduere,
grandso

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/1223