LIBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Mr - H. H. Kiliani
 
 UCSB LIBRARY
 
 H. DE BALZAC 
 
 THE COMEDIE HUMAINE
 
 M1NORET-LEVRAULT, THE POSTMASTER IN QUESTION, WAS 
 OBLIGED TO SHADE HIS EYES WITH HIS HAND.
 
 H. DE BALZAC 
 
 URSULE A^IROUET 
 
 AND OTHER STORIES 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 CLARA BELL 
 
 WITH A PREFACE BY 
 
 GEORGE SAINTSBURY 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 THE GEBBIE PUBLISHING Co., Ltd. 
 1898
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 rAGB 
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 URSULE MIROUE'T 
 
 I. THE HEIRS IN ALARM I 
 
 II. THE MINORET PROPERTY 136 
 
 MADAME FIRMIANI 257 
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN 280 
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS 329
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 MINORET-LEVRAULT, THE POSTMASTER IN QUESTION, 
 WAS OBLIGED TO SHADE HIS EYES WITH HIS 
 
 HAND (p. 2) Frontispiece 
 
 PACK 
 
 HE TOOK MINORET'S HAND AND WITH HIS OTHER HAND 
 
 HE TOOK THAT OF THE WOMAN IN THE CHAIR . . . 7 1 
 
 " WHAT AILS YOU, CRUEL CHILD ? " HE SAID . . . . IOI 
 
 HE GAZED IN ADMIRATION AT URSULE 144 
 
 " YOU STOLE THE THREE CERTIFICATES " 237 
 
 Drawn by D. Murray-Smith.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 "URSULE MIROUET," dedicated by Balzac to his niece, 
 Sophie Surville, and avowedly written " in the fear of the 
 young person," or, as the author more elegantly puts it, "in 
 uncompromising respect of the noble principles of a pious 
 education," exposes itself by the very fact to two different 
 sorts of prejudice. It is sure to be cried up by one set of 
 judges as " wholesome," and to be cried down by another as 
 "goody." 
 
 The latter charge is certainly unfair, for Balzac has by no 
 means written the book in rose-pink and sky-blue only, nor 
 has he been afraid to show things more or less as they are. 
 Nevertheless, it is difficult not to admit that evidences of 
 restraint and convention do exist. Ursule even more than 
 Eugdnie, who becomes a person on at least two occasions, her 
 struggle with her father, and her revanche over her cousin is 
 a thing of shreds and patches, an ideal being in whom that 
 mysterious "candor," to which the French attach such 
 excessive value in a girl, and which they make such haste to 
 do away with altogether in a woman, seems to shut out all 
 positive individuality. She is very nice ; but she is not very 
 human. 
 
 Nor can the machinery of dreams, hypnotism, Swedenbor- 
 gianism, and whatnot, which Balzac, following out one of 
 his well-known manias, chose to work into the book, be said 
 to add very largely to its verisimilitude. It contrasts too 
 sharply with the extremely prosaic, if not always very prob- 
 able, details of Minoret-Levrault's theft of the will, and of 
 the jealousy of the heirs, which it is interesting to contrast 
 with Dickens' management of the same subject in " Great 
 
 (ix)
 
 x PREFACE. 
 
 Expectations." How far this combination is artistically pos- 
 sible or advisable is a question of abstract criticism into 
 which we need not enter. I think it does not require much 
 argument to prove that Balzac has not, as a matter of fact, 
 quite shown the possibility or the desirableness here. I do 
 not know in the work of a man of genius a more striking 
 instance of the wisdom of the principle, Nee Deus inter sit, 
 to which, in our day, Horace would certainly have given the 
 form, " Keep the supernatural in fiction out, unless you can't 
 manage with the natural." 
 
 However, even this may be a question of opinion ; and it 
 is at least worth while to point out that in this book Balzac 
 has anticipated, very curiously and interestingly, a large class 
 of English fiction of a later day, which, in its turn, has been 
 imitated in France. The whole scheme, indeed, of " Ursula 
 Mirouet," by no means owing only to its respect of the young 
 person, though doubtless partly owing to this, is far more 
 that of an English novel than of a French. The absence of 
 the usual " triangle," and of all courtship of married women, 
 together with the difficulty (which a Frenchman even now, to 
 some extent, experiences, and experienced much more in 
 Balzac's days), of making very much of "honest" love 
 scenes between man and maid, put Balzac's always fertile 
 invention upon hunting out and setting to work other sources 
 of interest, which, with the possible exception of the dream- 
 and-vision part of the book, he has, as a rule, engineered 
 very happily. Even the love affair between Ursule and Sav- 
 inien de Portenduere is not to be contemptuously spoken of; 
 and the figure of Savinien is very pleasantly touched. It is 
 to be noted that even Balzac's favorite heroes of unprincipled 
 convention Marsay, Rastignac, and the rest exhibit them- 
 selves less theatrically in their dealings with the youthful 
 Vicomte than in almost any other of their numerous appear- 
 ances. Marsay's theory of debt may be amusingly and 
 advantageously contrasted with the opposite, but in a certain
 
 PREFACE. xi 
 
 sense complementary, remarks of George Warrington on 
 the same subject in "Pendennis." Madame de Portenduere, 
 too, is good, and not overdone. 
 
 On the cabals against Ursule opinions may perhaps differ. 
 It is not easy to say that anything is improbable in the case 
 of a stupid malefactor like Minoret-Levrault ; and odisse 
 quern laseris is an eternal verity. Still, one would rather 
 have been inclined to suppose that the postmaster, having 
 been so completely successful in his theft, would instinctively 
 feel that it was wiser to let Ursule alone. The malignity of 
 Goupil, too, seems a little overdone, and the whole character 
 of this agreeable lawyer's clerk again presents mutatis mutan- 
 dis something of the eccentric extravagance of Dickens, 
 between whom and Balzac the parallel is perpetually fasci- 
 nating, because of its constant intermixture of likenesses and 
 contrasts. 
 
 But the comic personages generally must be said to be very 
 good. They are not overdone, as the great English novelist 
 just referred to would probably have overdone them ; indeed, 
 Balzac has been distinctly sober and sparing in the delineation 
 of their "humors." Dickens certainly, and most English 
 novelists probably, would have been tempted to bring much 
 more to the front poor Madame Crmiere's linguistic pecu- 
 liarities. These will remind everybody of Mrs. Malaprop, 
 though they are more like a historical but much less famous 
 example, the " Lingo Grande," which Southey in divers 
 letters to Grosvenor Bedford puts into the mouth of his sister- 
 in-law, Mrs. Coleridge. The doctor, the magistrate, the cur6, 
 the public prosecutor, and all the powers that be play their 
 parts well, and more than a mere good word is deserved by 
 Desire Minoret, to whom Balzac has been rather cruel. 
 
 The doctor himself is a more problematical character. 
 His conversion smacks a little of the stage ; and it certainly 
 might seem that such an experienced personage, well aware 
 of the ferocity of the fortune-hunters who surrounded him,
 
 xii PREFACE. 
 
 would have taken rather more pains to put the future of Ursule 
 out of danger by lodging a duplicate will somewhere, or 
 availing himself of some of the devices in which French law, 
 even under the Code Napoldon, is nearly as fertile as English. 
 But the testamentary unreason of mankind is a sufficiently 
 well-authenticated fact to justify Balzac. 
 
 Altogether, the book, if not exactly in the first-class for 
 power, takes high rank for variety of interest and for the 
 peculiar character of its scheme. It has no duplicate in its 
 author's work, and we could not spare it. " Ursule Mirouet" 
 first appeared in a newspaper, Le Mcssagcr, in the issues of 
 August 25 to September 23 inclusive ; and when next year it 
 was published in two volumes by Souverain, it had, as it had 
 in the periodical, twenty-one chapters with headings. Yet 
 another year, and it lost these chapters, and all divisions 
 except the two part-headings of " The Heirs in Alarm " and 
 "The Minoret Property," and took place in the third edition 
 of the " Scenes de La Vie de Province," and the first of the 
 " Com6die " generally. 
 
 The three short stories which follow the title story are each 
 quite characteristic of the author's style and manner. The 
 various descriptions of the heroine in "Madame Firmiani " 
 have a point and sparkle which are almost peculiar to the not 
 quite mature works of men of genius, and the actual story 
 has a lightness which perhaps would have disappeared if 
 Balzac had handled it at greater length. " A Forsaken 
 Woman " partakes more of the character of an anecdote than 
 that of a story ; yet, withal, the account of the first meeting 
 of Madame de Beaus6ant and M. de Nueil is positively good ; 
 and the introduction, with its sketch of what Balzac knew or 
 dreamed to be society, has the merit of most of his overtures. 
 " The Imaginary Mistress " may be called somewhat fantastic, 
 and the final trait, whether false or not to nature, will pro- 
 voke some critics. But the devotion of Paz is exactly one 
 of those things which suited Balzac best, and which he could
 
 PREFACE. xui 
 
 handle most effectively. " Madame Firmiani " was first pub- 
 lished in the Revue de Paris for February, 1832 ; then 
 became a " Conte Philosophique," and still in the same year 
 a " Scene de la Vie Parisienne." It was in the 1842 collec- 
 tion that it took up its abode in the " Scenes de la Vie 
 Privee." " A Forsaken Woman " appeared in the same pe- 
 riodical in September of the same year, was a " Scene de la 
 Vie de Province" next year, and was shifted to the "Vie 
 Privee" when the " Com6die " was first arranged. "The 
 Imaginary Mistress" made its appearance about the same 
 period, and took position in the " Scenes de la Vie Priv6e. 
 
 G. S.
 
 URSULE MIROUET 
 
 To Mademoiselle Sophie Surville. 
 
 It is a real pleasure, my dear niece, to dedicate to 
 you a book of which the subject and the details have 
 gained the approbation so difficult to secure of a 
 young girl to whom the world is yet unknown, and 
 who will make no compromise with the high principles 
 derived from a pious education. You young girls are 
 a public to be dreaded ; you ought never to be suffered 
 to read any book less pure than your own pure souls, 
 and you are forbidden certain books, just as you are not 
 allowed to see society as it really is. Is it not enough, 
 then, to make a writer proud, to know that he has 
 satisfied you ? Heaven grant that affection may not 
 have misled you ! Wfw can say ? The future only, 
 which you, I hope, will see, though he may not, who is 
 your uncle 
 
 DE BALZAC. 
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 
 
 As you enter Nemours coming from Paris, you cross the 
 canal of the Loing, whose banks form a rural rampart to the 
 pretty little town, and afford many picturesque walks. Since 
 1830, unfortunately, many houses have been built beyond the 
 bridge. If this suburb increases, the aspect of the town will 
 lose much of its attractive originality. 
 
 But in 1829 the country on each side of the road lay open,
 
 2 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 and the postmaster, a tall, burly man of about sixty, as he sat 
 on the highest point of the bridge one fine morning, could 
 command a view of what he would have called a ribbon-road. 
 
 The month of September was lavishing its wealth. The 
 atmosphere quivered with heat above the grass and stones, 
 not a cloud flecked the ethereal blue, of which the vivid trans- 
 parency was uniform to the very horizon, showing the extreme 
 rarity of the air. Indeed, Minoret-Levrault, the postmaster 
 in question, was obliged to shade his eyes with his hand not 
 to be quite dazzled. Out of patience with waiting, he looked 
 now at the lovely meadows spreading away to the right, where 
 his after-crop was growing apace, and now at the densely 
 wooded hills to the left, stretching from Nemours to Bouron. 
 And in the valley of the Loing, where the noises on the road 
 came back echoed from the hill, he could hear the gallop of 
 his own horses and the cracking of his postillions' whips. 
 
 Could any one but a postmaster get out of patience with 
 gazing at a field full of cattle, such as Paul Potter painted, 
 under a sky worthy of Raphael, by a canal overhung with 
 trees, like a picture by Hobbema? Any one who knows 
 Nemours, knows that nature there is as beautiful as art, whose 
 mission it is to spiritualize nature; the landscape there has 
 ideas, and suggests thoughts. 
 
 Still, on seeing Minoret-Levrault, an artist would have left 
 his place to sketch this country townsman ; he was so original 
 by sheer force of being common. Combine all the charac- 
 teristics of the brute and you get Caliban, who certainly is a 
 great creation. Where matter predominates, sentiment ends. 
 The postmaster, a living proof of this axiom, had one of 
 those countenances in which the student finds it hard to dis- 
 cern the soul through the violent purple hues of the coarsely 
 developed flesh. His little gored blue cap, with a peak, fitted 
 closely to a head so huge as to prove that Gall's science of 
 phrenology has not yet dealt with the exceptions to his rules. 
 The shining gray hair, which formed a fringe to the cap,
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 3 
 
 showed that white hairs may be the result of other causes 
 than overworked brains or severe grief. His large ears were 
 almost bursting round the edges from the fulness of too abun- 
 dant blood, which seemed ready to spurt out after the 
 smallest exertion. His complexion showed purple blotches 
 under a brown pigment, the result of constant exposure to 
 the sun. His gray eyes, restless and deep set, hidden under 
 two black bushes of eyebrow, were like the eyes of the Kal- 
 mucks seen in Paris in 1815 ; if they glistened now and then, 
 it could only be under the influence of a covetous idea. His 
 nose, squat at the base, took a sudden turn up like the foot 
 of a kettle. Thick lips harmonized with an almost disgusting 
 double chin, rough with the stubble of a beard shaved scarcely 
 twice a week, which rubbed a dirty necktie into a state of 
 worn string; a very short neck, in rolls of fat, and puffy 
 cheeks, completed this image of stupid strength, such as 
 sculptors give to their caryatides. Minoret-Levrault was like 
 one of those statues, with the difference, however, that they 
 support something, while he had quite enough to do to 
 support himself. 
 
 You will meet with many an Atlas like him. The man's 
 torso was a huge block, a bull standing on his hind legs. 
 Powerful arms terminated in thick, hard hands, broad and 
 strong, apt at wielding the whip, the reins, and the pitchfork, 
 hands which were no joke in the eyes of his postillions. The 
 enormous stomach of this giant rested on legs as thick as the 
 body of a full-grown man, and feet like an elephant's. Rage 
 was no doubt rare in this man, but when it broke out it would 
 be terrible, apoplectic. Though he was violent and incapable 
 of reflection, the man had done nothing to justify the sinister 
 threats of his appearance. When any one trembled before 
 the giant, his post-boys would say, " Oh, he's not a bad 
 fellow!" 
 
 The " Master" of Nemours, to make use of an abbrevia- 
 tion common in many countries, wore a shooting jacket of
 
 4 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 bottle-green velveteen, trousers of striped green duck, and a 
 vast yellow mohair waistcoat. In the waistcoat pocket an 
 enormous snuff-box was evident, outlined by a black ring. 
 That a snub nose argues a big snuff-box is a rule almost with- 
 out exception. 
 
 Minoret-Levrault, as a son of the Revolution, and a spec- 
 tator of the Empire, had never concerned himself with 
 politics ; as to his religious opinions, he had never set foot in 
 a church but to be married ; as to his principles in domestic 
 life, they were contained in the Civil Code. He thought 
 everything permissible that was not forbidden or indictable 
 by law. He had never read anything but the local newspaper 
 and some manuals relating to his business. He was regarded 
 as a skillful agriculturist, but his knowledge was purely em- 
 pirical. 
 
 In Minoret-Levrault, then, the mind did not give the lie 
 to the body. He spoke rarely, and before delivering himself 
 he always took a pinch of snuff to gain time to find, not ideas, 
 but words. If he had been talkative, he would have seemed 
 a failure. 
 
 When you think that this sort of elephant, without a trunk 
 and without intelligence, was called Minoret-Levrault, must 
 you not recognize, with Sterne, the occult power of names, 
 which sometimes mask and sometimes label the character of 
 their owners? In spite of these conspicuous disadvantages, 
 in thirty-six years, the Revolution helping, he had made a 
 fortune of thirty thousand francs a year in meadow-land, 
 arable land, and woods. 
 
 Though Minoret, who had shares in the Nemours Messa- 
 geries Company and an interest in the Gatinais Company at 
 Paris, was still hard at work, it was not so much from habit 
 as for the sake of his only son, for whom he wished to prepare 
 handsome prospects. This son, who, in the peasants' phrase- 
 ology, had become a gentleman, had just ended his studies 
 for the law, and on the reopening of the courts was to be
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 5 
 
 sworn as a qualified attorney. Monsieur and Madame 
 Minoret-Levrault for behind the colossus a woman is evi- 
 dent, a wife, without whom such a fortune would have been 
 impossible had left their son free to choose his career, as a 
 notary at Paris, as public prosecutor in some country town, 
 as receiver-general, stockbroker, or postmaster. What fancy 
 might he not allow himself, to what profession might he not 
 aspire, as the son of a man of whom it was said from Mont- 
 argis to Essonne, " Father Minoret does not know how much 
 he has?" 
 
 This idea had received fresh confirmation when, four years 
 since, after selling his inn, Minoret built himself a splendid 
 house and stables, and removed the posting business from the 
 High Street to the river-side. The new buildings had cost 
 two hundred thousand francs, which gossip doubled for thirty 
 miles round. The posting-stage at Nemours required a great 
 number of horses ; it worked as far as Fontainebleau on the 
 Paris side, and beyond the roads to Montargis and Montereau ; 
 the relays were long, and the sandy soil about Montargis 
 justified the imaginary third horse, which is always paid for 
 and never seen. A man of Minoret's build and of Minoret's 
 wealth, at the head of such a concern, might well be called 
 without abuse of words the Master of Nemours. Though he 
 never gave a thought to God or the devil, and was a practical 
 materialist as he was a practical agriculturist, a practical 
 egoist, a practical miser Minoret had hitherto enjoyed un- 
 mixed happiness, if a merely material existence may be 
 regarded as happy. On seeing the pad of flesh which covered 
 the man's top vertebrae and pressed on his occiput, and 
 especially on hearing his shrill, thin voice, which contrasted 
 ludicrously with his bull-neck, a physiologist would have 
 understood at once why this great, coarse, burly countryman 
 adored his only son, and perhaps why he had so long awaited 
 his birth as the name given to the child, Desir6, sufficiently 
 indicated. In short, if love, as betraying a rich physical
 
 6 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 nature, is the promise of great things in a man, philosophers 
 will understand the causes of Minoret's failure. 
 
 His wife, whom the son happily resembled, vied with his 
 father in spoiling the boy. No child's nature could hold out 
 against such idolatry. And, indeed, Desire, who knew the 
 extent of his power, was clever enough to draw on his mother's 
 savings-box and dip his hand in his father's purse, making 
 each of his fond parents believe that he had not applied to the 
 other. Desir6, who played at Nemours a far more grateful 
 part than that of a prince in his father's capital, had indulged 
 all his fancies at Paris just as he did in his little native town, 
 and had spent more than twelve thousand francs a year. But 
 then, for this money, he had acquired ideas which would 
 never have come into his head at Nemours ; he had cast his 
 provincial skin, he had learned the power of money, and had 
 seen that the legal profession was a means of rising in the 
 world. During the last year he had spent ten thousand francs 
 more by forming intimacies with artists, journalists, and their 
 mistresses. 
 
 A somewhat alarming confidential letter might have ac- 
 counted, in case of need, for the postmaster's anxious lookout, 
 a letter in which his son asked his sanction for a marriage ; 
 but Madame Minoret-Levrault, fully occupied in preparing a 
 sumptuous meal in honor of the success and the return of the 
 fully-fledged lawyer, had sent her husband out on the road, 
 desiring him to ride forward if he saw no signs of the dili- 
 gence. The diligence by which this only son was to arrive 
 usually reached Nemours at about five in the morning, and it 
 was now striking nine ! What could cause such a delay ? 
 Had there been an upset ? Was D6sir6 alive ? Had he even 
 broken a leg ? 
 
 Three volleys of cracking whips rattle out, rending the air 
 like the report of firearms ; the red waistcoats of the post- 
 boys are just in sight, ten horses neigh at once ! The master 
 takes off his cap and waves it ; and he is seen. The best
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 7 
 
 mounted of the postillions, who is returning with two dappled 
 gray post-horses, touches up the beast he is riding, outstrip- 
 ping five sturdy diligence horses, and the Minorets of the 
 stable, three carriage horses, and comes up to the master. 
 
 " Have you seen the ' Dueler? ' ' 
 
 On the high-roads all the coaches have names fantastical 
 enough : they are spoken of as the " Caillard," the " Dueler " 
 (the diligence between Nemours and Paris), the "Grand- 
 Bureau." Every new company's coach is the " Rival." At 
 the time when the Lecomtes ran coaches, their vehicles were 
 known as the " Comtesses." 
 
 "The ' Caillard ' did not overtake the ' Comtesse,' but the 
 ' Grand-Bureau ' caught her skirts, anyhow ! The ' Caillard ' 
 and the 'Grand-Bureau ' have done for the ' Francaises ' " the 
 coaches of the Messageries Fransaises or royal mails. If you 
 see a post-boy going fit to split, and refusing a glass of wine, 
 question the guard ; he will cock his nose and stare into space, 
 and reply, " The Rival is ahead ! " "And we cannot even 
 see her ! " adds the postillion. " The wretch ! he has not 
 given his passengers time to eat ! " "As if he had any! " 
 retorts the guard. "Whip up Polignac ! " All the worst 
 horses are called Polignac. These are the standing jokes and 
 subjects of conversation between the postillions and the guards 
 on the top of the coaches. In France every profession has its 
 own slang. 
 
 " Did you see inside the ' Dueler? ' " 
 
 "Monsieur Desire?" says the postillion, interrupting his 
 master. "Why, you must have heard us ! Our whips gave 
 due notice of her. We made sure you would be on the road." 
 
 " Why is the diligence four hours late ? " 
 
 "The tire of one of the wheels came off between Essonne 
 and Ponthierry. But there was no accident; Cabirolle for- 
 tunately discovered it as we were going up the hill." 
 
 At this instant a woman in her Sunday best for the bells 
 of all the churches of Nemours were summoning the inhab-
 
 8 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 itants to mid-day mass a woman of about six-and-thirty, ad- 
 dressed the postmaster. 
 
 "Well, cousin," said she, "you would not believe me! 
 Our uncle is in the High Street with Ursule, and they are 
 going to mass." 
 
 In spite of the license of modern romance in the matter of 
 local coloring, it is impossible to carry realism so far as to 
 repeat the horrible abuse, mingled with oaths, which this news, 
 so undramatic as it would seem, brought from the wide mouth 
 of Minoret-Levrault ; his thin voice became a hiss, and his 
 face had the appearance which the country-folk ingeniously 
 refer to as " sunstroke." 
 
 "Are you certain?" he asked after his first explosion of 
 rage. 
 
 The postillions as they went by touched three hats to the 
 master, who seemed neither to see nor hear them. Instead 
 of waiting for his son, Minoret-Levrault returned up the High 
 Street with his cousin. 
 
 "Did I not always tell you so?" she went on. "When 
 Doctor Minoret has fallen into his dotage, that sanctimonious 
 little slut will make a bigot of him ; and as those who rule 
 the mind rule the purse, she will get all our money." 
 
 "But, Madame Massin," said the postmaster, quite con- 
 founded. 
 
 " Oh, yes ! " cried Madame Massin, interrupting her cousin, 
 " you will say as Massin does : ' Is a girl of fifteen likely to 
 invent and execute such a plot ? To make a man of eighty- 
 three, who never set foot in a church excepting to be married, 
 give up all his opinions ? A man who has such a horror of 
 priests that he did not even go to the parish church with the 
 child the day of her first communion.' But, I say, if Doctor 
 Minoret has such a horror of priests, why, for the last fifteen 
 years, has he spent almost every evening of the week with the 
 Abbe Chaperon ? The old hypocrite never fails to give Ursule 
 twenty francs to pay for a taper when she presents the wafer
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 9 
 
 for the mass. Why, do you not remember the gift TJrsule 
 made to the church as a thank-offering to the cure for having 
 prepared her for her first communion ? She spent all her 
 money on it, and her godfather gave it back to her doubled. 
 You men pay no heed to anything ! When I heard all these 
 details : ' Put away your baskets,' said I, ' the grapes are not 
 for you ! ' A rich uncle does not behave in that way to a 
 little hussy he has picked out of the gutter unless he means 
 something by it." 
 
 " Pooh ! cousin," replied the postmaster, " the good man 
 is escorting her as far as the church by mere chance. It is a 
 fine day, and he is going to take a walk." 
 
 " I tell you, cousin, our uncle has a prayer-book in his 
 hand ; and he looks so smug ! However, you will see 1 " 
 
 " They have been playing a very sly game," observed the 
 burly postmaster, "for old Bougival told me that there never 
 was any religious discussion between the doctor and the Abbe 
 Chaperon. Besides, the vicar of Nemours is the best man on 
 earth ; he would give his last shirt to a beggar ; he is incapa- 
 ble of a mean action, and to filch an inheritance is a " 
 
 "It is robbery ! " said Madame Massin. 
 
 " It is worse ! " cried Minoret-Levrault, exasperated by his 
 voluble cousin's remark. 
 
 " I know," she went on, " that the Abbe" Chaperon, though 
 he is a priest, is an honest man. But he is capable of any- 
 thing for the poor. He must have undermined Uncle Min- 
 oret, and the doctor has fallen into bigotry. We were easy 
 in our minds, and now he is perverted. A man who never 
 believed in anything, and who had principles ! Oh, we are 
 all done for ! My husband is dreadfully upset." 
 
 Madame Massin, whose speeches were so many arrows that 
 stung her stout cousin, made him walk as briskly as herself in 
 spite of his size, to the great amazement of the people who 
 were going to mass. She wanted to catch up with Uncle 
 Minoret and show him to the postmaster.
 
 10 URSULE MIR O LET. 
 
 On the Gatinais side of Nemours the town is commanded 
 by a hill, along the base of which the river Loing flows, and 
 the road runs to Montargis. The church, on which time has 
 cast a rich mantle of gray, for it was certainly rebuilt in the 
 fourteenth century by the Guises, in whose honor Nemours 
 gave its name to a duchy and peerage, stands at the end of 
 the town beyond a large archway, as in a frame. For build- 
 ings, as for men, position is everything. Shaded by trees 
 and shown to advantage by a neat little square, this lonely 
 church has quite an imposing effect. As they came out on to 
 the square, the postmaster could see his uncle giving his arm 
 to the young girl they had called Ursule, each carrying a 
 prayer-book, and just entering the church. The old man 
 took off his hat in the porch, and his perfectly white head, 
 like a summit covered with snow, shone in the soft gloom of 
 the great doorway. 
 
 "Well, Minoret, what do you say to your uncle's conver- 
 sion?" cried the tax-receiver of Nemours, whose name was 
 Crdmiere. 
 
 "What do you expect me to say?" replied the postmaster, 
 offering him a pinch of snuff. 
 
 "Well answered, Father Levrault. You cannot say what 
 you think, if a certain learned writer was correct in saying 
 that a man must necessarily think his words before he can 
 speak his thought," mischievously exclaimed a young man 
 who had just come up, and who played in Nemours the part 
 of Mephistopheles in "Faust." 
 
 This rascally fellow, named Goupil, was head clerk to Mon- 
 sieur Cr6miere-Dionis, the notary of the town. Notwith- 
 standing the antecedents of an almost crapulous career, Dionis 
 had taken Goupil into his office when absolute destitution 
 hindered him from remaining any longer at Paris, where the 
 clerk had spent all the money left him by his father, a well-to- 
 do farmer, who meant him to become a notary. Only to see 
 Goupil was enough to tell you that he had made haste to enjoy
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 11 
 
 life; for, to procure himself pleasure, he must have paid 
 dearly for it. Though very short, the clerk, at seven-and- 
 twenty, had a form as burly as that of any man of forty. 
 Short, thin legs, a broad face with a mottled, muddy skin, like 
 the sky before a storm, and a bald forehead, gave emphasis to 
 this strange figure. His face looked as if it belonged to a 
 hunchback, whose hump was an internal deformity. A pecu- 
 liarity of this sour, pale face confirmed the notion of this 
 invisible malformation. His nose, hooked and twisted, as is 
 often the case with hunchbacks, had a crossway slope from right 
 to left, instead of dividing the face down the middle. His 
 mouth, pinched at the corners the sardonic mouth was 
 always eager for irony. His thin, reddish hair fell in dank 
 locks, showing the head through here and there. His great 
 hands and clumsy wrists, at the end of overlong arms, were 
 like talons, and very seldom clean. Goupil wore shoes only 
 fit to be thrown into the dust-heap, and rusty-black, spun-silk 
 stockings ; his black coat and trousers, rubbed perfectly 
 threadbare, and almost greasy with dirt ; his abject waistcoats, 
 with buttons from which the mould had slipped out ; the old 
 bandana he wore as a cravat every part of his dress pro- 
 claimed the cynical misery to which his passions condemned 
 him. 
 
 This aggregate of sinister details was completed by a pair 
 of goat's eyes, the iris set in yellow rings, at once lascivious 
 and cowardly. No man in Nemours was more feared or more 
 respectfully treated than Goupil. Strong in pretensions which 
 his ugliness allowed, he had the detestable wit that is peculiar 
 to persons who take every liberty, and he made use of it to be 
 revenged for the mortifications of his permanent jealousy. 
 He rhymed satirical couplets such as are sung at the Carnival, 
 he got up farcical demonstrations, and himself wrote almost 
 the whole of the local newspaper gossip. Dionis, a keen, 
 false nature, and therefore a timid one, kept Goupil as much 
 out of fear as on account of his intelligence and his thorough
 
 12 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 knowledge of family interests in the neighborhood. But the 
 master so little trusted the clerk that he managed his accounts 
 himself, did not allow him to lodge at his house, and never 
 employed him on any confidential or delicate business. The 
 clerk flattered his master, never showing the resentment he 
 felt at this conduct ; and he watched Madame Dionis with an 
 eye to revenge. He had a quick intelligence, and worked 
 well and easily. 
 
 " Oh you ! You are laughing already at our misfortunes," 
 said the postmaster to the clerk, who was rubbing his hands. 
 
 As Goupil basely flattered every passion of Desire's, who for 
 the last five years had made him his companion, the postmaster 
 treated him cavalierly enough, never suspecting what a horrible 
 store of evil feeling was accumulating at the bottom of 
 Goupil's heart at each fresh thrust. The clerk having come 
 to the conclusion that he, more than any one, needed money, 
 and knowing himself to be superior to all the good townsfolk 
 of Nemours, aimed at making a fortune, and counted on 
 Desire's friendship to procure for him one of the three good 
 openings in the place the registrarship of the law courts, the 
 business of one of the ushers, or that of Dionis. So he 
 patiently endured the postmaster's hectoring and Madame 
 Minoret-Levrault's disdain, and played an ignominious part 
 to oblige Desire, who, for these two years past, had left him 
 to console the Ariadnes he abandoned at the end of the vaca- 
 tion. Thus, Goupil ate the crumbs of the suppers he had 
 prepared. 
 
 " If I had been the old fool's nephew, he should not have 
 made God my co-heir," retorted the clerk, with a hideous 
 grin that showed his wide-set and threatening black teeth. 
 
 At this moment Massin-Levrault, junior, the justice's 
 registrar, came up with his wife, and with him was Madame 
 Cr6miere, the tax-receiver's wife. This man, one of the 
 crudest natives of the little town, had a face like a Tartar, 
 small, round eyes like sloes under a sloping forehead, crinkled
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 13 
 
 hair, an oily skin, large flat ears, a mouth almost without 
 lips, and a thin beard. His manners had the merciless 
 smoothness of the usurer whose dealings are based on fixed 
 principles. He spoke like a man who has lost his voice. To 
 complete the picture, he made his wife and his eldest daughter 
 write out the copies of verdicts. 
 
 Madame Cremiere was a very fat woman, doubtfully fair, 
 with a thickly freckled complexion ; she wore her gowns too 
 tight, was great friends with Madame Dionis, and passed as 
 well informed because she read novels. This lady of finance 
 of the lowest type, full of pretensions to elegance and culture, 
 was awaiting her uncle's fortune to assume " a certain style," 
 to decorate her drawing-room, and "receive" her fellow- 
 townsfolk ; for her husband refused to allow her clockwork 
 lamps, lithographs, and the trifles she saw in the notary's wife's 
 drawing-room. She was excessively afraid of Goupil, who 
 was always on the watch to repeat her capsulingics* this was 
 her way of saying lapsus lingua. One day Madame Dionis 
 said to her that she did not know what water to use for her 
 teeth. 
 
 "Try gum water," said she. 
 
 By this time most of old Doctor Minoret's collateral rela- 
 tions had assembled in the church square, and the importance 
 of the event which had agitated them was so universally un- 
 derstood, that the groups of peasants, men and women, 
 armed with red umbrellas and clad in the bright hues which 
 make them so picturesque on f&te-days as they tramp the 
 roads, all had their eyes turned on the doctor's presumptive 
 heirs. In those little towns, which hold a middle rank be- 
 tween the larger villages and the great cities, people who do 
 not attend mass linger in the square. They discuss business. 
 
 At Nemours the hour of mass is also that of a weekly 
 money-market, to which come the residents in the scattered 
 
 * Madame Crdmidre's " capsulingies " are impossible to translate ; an 
 equivalent is all that can be attempted.
 
 14 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 houses from a mile and a half round. This accounts for the 
 mutual understanding of the peasants as against the masters, 
 on the price of produce in relation to labor. 
 
 "And how would you have hindered it ?" said the master 
 to Goupil. 
 
 " I would have made myself as indispensable to him as the 
 air he breathes. But you did not know how to manage him 
 to begin with. An inheritance needs as much looking after 
 as a pretty woman, and for lack of care both may slip through 
 your fingers. If my master's wife were here, she would tell 
 you how accurate the comparison is," he added. 
 
 " But Monsieur Bongrand has just told me we need not be 
 uneasy," said the justice's registrar. 
 
 "Oh! there are several ways of saying that," replied 
 Goupil, with a laugh. " I should have liked to hear your 
 cunning justice say that ! Why, if there were nothing more to 
 be done ; if I, like him for he lives at your uncle's knew that 
 the game was up, I should say with him, 'Don't be at all 
 uneasy.' ' 
 
 And as he spoke the words, Goupil smiled in such a comical 
 way, and gave them so plain a meaning, that the inheritors at 
 once suspected the registrar of having been taken in by the 
 justice's cunning. The receiver of taxes, a fat little man, as 
 insignificant as a tax-collector must be, and as witless as a 
 clever wife could wish, demolished his co-heir Massin with : 
 "Didn't I tell you so?" 
 
 As double-dealers always ascribe their own duplicity to 
 others, Massin looked askance at the justice of the peace, who 
 was at this moment standing near the church with a former 
 client, the Marquis du Rouvre. 
 
 " If only I were sure of it ! " said he. 
 
 " You could nullify the protection he extends to the Mar- 
 quis du Rouvre, who is within the power of the law, and 
 liable to imprisonment ; he is deluging him with advice at 
 this moment," said Goupil, insinuating an idea of revenge to
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 15 
 
 the registrar. " But draw it mild with your chief; he is very 
 wide awake ; he must have some influence over your uncle, 
 and may yet be able to prevent his leaving everything to the 
 church." 
 
 " Pooh ! we shall not die of it," said Minoret-Levrault, 
 opening his huge snuff-box. 
 
 " You will not live by it either," replied Goupil, making 
 the two women shiver ; for they, more rapidly than their 
 husbands, interpreted as privation the loss of the inherit- 
 ance on which they had counted for comfort. " But we will 
 drown this little grievance in floods of champagne, in honor 
 of Desire's return, won't we, gros plre ? " he added, tapping 
 the colossus in the stomach, and thus inviting himself for fear 
 of being forgotten. 
 
 Before going any farther, the precise reader will perhaps be 
 glad to have here a sort of preamble in the form of a pedi- 
 gree, which indeed is very necessary to define the degrees of 
 relationship in which the old man, so suddenly converted, 
 stood to the three fathers of families or their wives. These 
 intermarriages of kindred race in provincial life may be the 
 subject of more than one instructive reflection. 
 
 At Nemours there are not more than three or four noble 
 families, of no great rank or fame ; among them, at the time 
 of our story, shone that of the Portendueres. These exclu- 
 sive families visit the nobility who possess lands and chateaux 
 in the neighboring country the D'Aiglemonts, for instance, 
 owners of the fine estate of Saint-Lange, and the Marquis du 
 Rouvre, on whose property, eaten up with mortgages, the 
 townsfolk kept a greedy eye. The nobility who live in the 
 towns have no wealth. Madame de Portenduere's whole 
 estate consisted of a farm, yielding four thousand seven hun- 
 dred francs a year, and her house in the town. In the oppo- 
 site scale to this miniature Faubourg St. Germain are half 
 a score of rich citizens, retired millers and tradespeople, in
 
 16 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 short, a miniature middle class, below whom struggle the 
 small shopkeepers, the laboring class, and the peasants. This 
 middle class affords here, as in the Swiss cantons and other 
 small communities, the curious phenomenon of the dispersal 
 of a few families native to the soil, perhaps ancient Gaulish 
 clans, settling on a district, pervading it, and making all the 
 inhabitants cousins. At the time of Louis XI., the period 
 when the third estate at last took the by-names they were 
 known by as permanent surnames, some of which presently 
 mingled with those of the feudal class, the citizens of Nemours 
 were all Minoret, Massin, Levrault, or Cremierq. By Louis 
 XIII. 's time these four families had given rise to Massin- 
 Cremiere, Levrault-Massin, Massin-Minoret, Minoret-Minoret, 
 Cremiere-Levrault, Levrault-Minoret-Massin, Massin -Levrault, 
 Minoret-Massin, Massin-Massin, and Cremiere-Massin ; all 
 further diversified by "junior" and "eldest son;" or by 
 Cr^miere- Francois, Levrault-Jacques, and Jean-Minoret, 
 enough to madden a Father Anselme, if the populace ever 
 needed a genealogist. 
 
 The changes in this domestic kaleidoscope with four sep- 
 arate elements were so complicated by births and marriages, 
 that the pedigree of the citizens of Nemours would have 
 puzzled even the compilers of the "Almanac de Gotha," not- 
 withstanding the atomic science with which they work out the 
 zigzags of German alliances. For a long time the Minorets 
 held the tanneries, the Crmieres were the millers, the Massins 
 went into business, the Levraults remained farmers. 
 
 Happily for the country, these four stocks struck out rather 
 than round the trunk, or threw out suckers by the expatri- 
 ation of sons who sought a living elsewhere : there are Min- 
 orets, cutlers, at Melun, Levraults at Montargis, Massins at 
 Orleans, and Cremieres who have grown rich at Paris. Very 
 various are the destinies of these bees that have swarmed 
 outside the native hive. Rich Massins employ laboring Mas- 
 sins, just as there are German princes in the service of Austria
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 17 
 
 or Prussia. In the same department may be seen a Minoret 
 millionaire protected by a Minoret soldier with the same 
 blood in their veins ; but having only their names in common, 
 these four shuttles had unceasingly woven a human web, of 
 which each piece turned out a gown or a clout, the finest 
 lawn or the coarsest lining. The same blood throbbed in 
 their head, feet, or heart, in toiling hands, damaged lungs, or 
 a brow big with genius. The heads of the clan faithfully clung 
 to the little town where the ties of relationship could be re- 
 laxed or tightened, as the results of this community of names 
 might dictate. 
 
 In every country, with a change of names, you will find 
 the same fact ; but bereft of the poetry with which feudality 
 had invested it, and which Sir Walter Scott has reproduced 
 with so much talent. 
 
 Look a little higher, and study humanity in history. All 
 the noble families of the eleventh century, now almost all 
 extinct excepting the royal race of Capet, must have co-oper- 
 ated towards the birth of a Rohan, a Montmorency, a 
 Bauffremont, a Mortemart of the present day; at last, all 
 would coexist in the blood of the humblest man of really 
 gentle birth. In other words, every citizen is cousin to other 
 citizens,, every noble is cousin to other nobles. As we are told 
 in the sublime page of Biblical genealogy, in a thousand 
 years the three families of Shem, Ham, and Japhet could 
 people the whole earth. A family can become a nation ; and, 
 unfortunately, a nation may become one single family. To 
 prove this we have only to apply to a family pedigree in 
 which the ancestors multiply backwards in geometrical pro- 
 gression the sum worked out by the sage who invented the 
 game of chess. He claimed, as his reward from the Persian 
 king, an ear of corn for the first square on the board, two for 
 the second, and so on, doubling the number every time, and 
 proved that the whole kingdom could not pay it. This net- 
 work of the nobility entangled in the network of the middle 
 2
 
 18 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 class, this antagonism of blood the one class protected by 
 rigid traditions, the other by the active endurance of labor 
 and the craft of trade instincts brought about the Revo- 
 lution of 1789. The two strains, almost united, are to be 
 seen to-day face to face with collaterals bereft of their inher- 
 itance. What will they do ? Our political future is big with 
 the reply. 
 
 The family of the man who, in Louis XV. 's time, was the 
 representative Minoret, was so large, that one of the five 
 the very Minoret whose coming to church was making such 
 a sensation went to seek his fortune in Paris, and appeared 
 in his native town only at long intervals, whither he came, no 
 doubt, to acquire his share of the inheritance at the death of 
 his grandparents. After suffering a great deal, as all young men 
 must who are gifted with a strong will and desire a place in 
 the brilliant world of Paris, this son of the Minorets made a 
 career more splendid perhaps than he had dreamed of at the 
 beginning ; for he devoted himself to medicine, one of the 
 professions in which both talent and good-luck are needed, 
 and good-luck even more than talent. Supported by Dupont 
 (of Nemours), brought by a happy chance into contact with 
 the Abbe Morellet (whom Voltaire nicknamed Mords les), 
 and patronized by the encyclopedists, Doctor Minoret at- 
 tached himself with fanatical devotion to the great physician 
 Bordeu, Diderot's friend. D'Alembert, Helvetius, Baron 
 d'Holbach, and Grimm, to whom he was a mere boy, ended, 
 no doubt, like Bordeu, by taking an interest in Minoret, who 
 in 1777 had a fine connection among the deists, encyclope- 
 dists, sensualists, materialists call them as you will the 
 wealthy philosophers of that day. Though he was very little 
 of a quack, he invented a famous remedy, Lelievre's balsam, 
 which was cried up in the Mercure de France, and which was 
 permanently advertised on the last page of that paper, the 
 encyclopedists' organ. The apothecary Lelievre, a clever 
 man of business, discerned a success where Dr. Minoret had
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 19 
 
 seen nothing more than a preparation to be included in the 
 pharmacopoeia; he honestly divided the profits with the 
 doctor, who was Rouelle's pupil in chemistry, as he was 
 Bordeu's in medicine. It would have needed less to make 
 him a materialist. 
 
 In 1778, when Rousseau's " Nouvelle Heloise " was the 
 rage, and men sometimes married for love, he married the 
 daughter of Valentin Mirouet, the famous harpsichord player, 
 herself a fine musician, but weakly and delicate, who died 
 during the Revolution. Minoret was intimate with Robes- 
 pierre, to whom he had once caused a gold medal to be 
 awarded for a dissertation on these questions: "What is the 
 origin of the opinion by which part of the shame attaching 
 to the disgraceful punishment of a guilty man is reflected on 
 all his family ? Is this opinion generally useful or mischiev- 
 ous ? And supposing it to be mischievous, by what means 
 can we avert the disastrous results?" The Academy of Arts 
 and Sciences at Metz, to which Minoret belonged, must still 
 have the original copy of this discourse. Although, thanks 
 to this friendship, the doctor's wife had nothing to fear, she 
 lived in such dread of being sent to the scaffold that this 
 invincible terror aggravated an aneurism due to a too sensitive 
 nature. In spite of all the precautions a man could take who 
 idolized his wife, Ursule met the truck full of condemned 
 victims, and among them, as it happened, Madame Roland. 
 The spectacle caused her death. Minoret, who had spoiled 
 his Ursule, and refused her nothing, so that she had led a life 
 of extravagant luxury, at her death found himself almost a 
 poor man. Robespierre appointed him first physician to a 
 hospital. 
 
 Although the name of Minoret had been somewhat famous 
 during the vehement discussions to which mesmerism had given 
 rise, a fame which had recalled him now and then to his rela- 
 tions' memory, the Revolution was so powerful a solvent, and 
 broke up so many family connections, that in 1813 no one at
 
 20 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 Nemours knew even of Doctor Minoret's existence, when an 
 unexpected meeting suggested to him the idea of returning, 
 as hares do, to die in his form. 
 
 In traveling through France, where the eye is so soon 
 fatigued by the monotony of the wide plains, who has not 
 known the delightful sensation of discerning, from the top of 
 a hill where the road turns or descends, and where he ex- 
 pected to see a dull landscape, a green valley watered by a 
 stream, and a little town sheltered under a cliff, like a hive in 
 the hollow of an old willow-tree? As he hears the postillion's 
 cry of " Come up ! " while he walks at his horse's side, the 
 traveler shakes off sleep, and admires as a dream within a 
 dream some lovely scene which is to the stranger what a fine 
 passage in a book is to the reader a brilliant idea of nature. 
 This is the effect produced by the sudden view of Nemours 
 on the road from Burgundy. It is seen from the height in an 
 amphitheatre of naked rocks, gray, white and black, like those 
 which are scattered throughout the forest of Fontainebleau ; 
 and from among them shoot up solitary trees, standing out 
 against the sky, and giving a rural aspect to this sort of 
 tumble-down rampart. This is the end of the long wooded 
 slope which rises from Nemours to Bouron, sheltering the 
 road on one side. At the foot of these cliffs spreads a meadow- 
 land, through which the Loing flows, in level pools ending 
 in little waterfalls. This exquisite tract of country, cut 
 through by the Montargis road, is like an elaborate opera 
 scene, the effects seem so carefully worked up, and brought 
 out in strong contrasts. 
 
 One morning the doctor, who had been sent for by a rich in- 
 valid in Burgundy, and who was hastening back to Paris, not 
 having mentioned at the last change of horses which road he 
 wished to take, was unwittingly brought through Nemours, 
 and between two naps saw once more the landscape familiar 
 to his childhood. The doctor had by this time lost many of 
 his old friends. The disciple of the Encyclopedia had lived
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 21 
 
 to see La Harpe a convert, had buried Lebrun-Pindare, and 
 Marie-Joseph de Chenier, and Morellet, and Madame Hel- 
 vetius. He had seen the quasi overthrow of Voltaire under the 
 attacks of Geoffroy, Freron's successor. Hence he was think- 
 ing of retiring. And when the post-chaise stopped at the top 
 of the High Street of Nemours, his good feeling prompted 
 him to inquire after his family. Minoret-Levrault himself 
 came out to see the doctor, who recognized in the postmaster 
 his eldest brother's son. This nephew introduced as his 
 wife the only daughter of old Levrault-Cremiere, who, twelve 
 years ago, had left her the posting business and the hand- 
 somest inn in Nemours. 
 
 "Well, nephew," said the doctor, "and have I any other 
 heirs?" 
 
 " My Aunt Minoret, your sister, married a Massin-Massin." 
 
 "Yes, the intendant at Saint-Lange." 
 
 "She died a widow, leaving one daughter, who has lately 
 married a Cremiere-Cr6miere, a very nice fellow, who so far 
 has no appointment." 
 
 "To be sure ; she is my own niece. Now, as my brother 
 at sea died unmarried, and Captain Minoret was killed at 
 Monte-Legino, and I am here, that is an end of my father's 
 family. Have I any relations on my mother's side ? She 
 was a Jean-Massin-Levrault." 
 
 " Of the Jean-Massin-Levraults," replied Minoret-Levrault, 
 " only one daughter survived, who married Monsieur Cr- 
 miere-Levrault-Dionis, a dealer in corn and forage, who died 
 on the scaffold. His wife died of a broken heart, and quite 
 ruined, leaving one girl, married to a Levrault-Minoret, a 
 farmer at Montereau, who is doing well ; and their daughter 
 has just married a Massin-Levrault, a notary's clerk at Mon- 
 targis, where his father is a locksmith." 
 
 " So I have no lack of inheritors," said the doctor cheerfully, 
 and he determined to walk round Nemours in his nephew's 
 company.
 
 22 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 The Loing meanders through the town, fringed with ter- 
 raced gardens and neat houses that look as if happiness should 
 inhabit there rather than elsewhere. When the doctor turned 
 out of the High Street into the Rue des Bourgeois, Minoret- 
 Levrault pointed out the property of Monsieur Levrault, a 
 rich ironmaster at Paris, who, he said, was lately dead. 
 
 "There, uncle," said he, "is a pretty house to be sold, 
 with a beautiful garden down to the river." 
 
 " Let us go in," said the doctor, seeing a house at the far- 
 ther side of a paved courtyard, shut in by the walls of houses 
 on either side, hidden by clumps of trees and climbing plants. 
 
 "It is built on cellars," said the doctor as he went in, up 
 a high outside stairway, decorated with blue and white earthen- 
 ware pots in which the geraniums were still in bloom. The 
 house, like most provincial residences, was pierced by a pas- 
 sage down the middle, leading from the courtyard to the gar- 
 den ; to the right was a single sitting-room with four windows, 
 two to the yard, and two to the garden ; but Levrault-Levrault 
 had turned one of these into an entrance to a long conserva- 
 tory built of brick, leading from the room to the river, where 
 it ended in a hideous Chinese summer-house. 
 
 "Very good ! " said the doctor. "By roofing and floor- 
 ing this conservatory I could make a place for my books, and 
 turn that amazing piece of architecture into a pretty little 
 study." 
 
 On the other side of the passage, looking on to the garden, 
 was a dining-room, decorated in imitation of lacquer, with a 
 black background and green and gold flowers ; this was 
 divided from the kitchen by the staircase. A little pantry 
 behind the lower flight led from the dining-room to the 
 kitchen, which had barred windows looking out on the court- 
 yard. On the first floor were two sets of rooms, and above 
 that wainscoted attics, quite habitable. After a brief inspec- 
 tion of this house, which was covered with green vine-trellis 
 from top to bottom, on the courtyard front as well as on the
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 23 
 
 garden side, with a terrace to the river edged with earthen- 
 ware flower-vases, the doctor remarked 
 
 " Levrault-Levrault must have spent a good deal here ! " 
 
 "Oh, his weight in gold!" replied Minoret-Levrault. 
 " He had a passion for flowers such folly ! ' What profit 
 do they bring ? ' as my wife says. As you see, a painter came 
 from Paris to paint his corridor with flowers in fresco. He 
 put in whole plate mirrors everywhere. The ceilings were 
 done up with cornices that cost six francs a foot. In the 
 dining-room the floor is of the finest inlay such folly ! The 
 house is not worth a penny the more for it." 
 
 " Well, nephew, buy it for me. Let me know when it is 
 settled ; here is my address. The rest my lawyer will attend 
 to. Who lives opposite? " he asked as they went out into the 
 street. 
 
 "Some emigres" said the postmaster; "a Chevalier de 
 Portenduere." 
 
 When the house was bought, the distinguished physician, 
 instead of coming to live in it, wrote orders to his nephew to 
 let it. Levrault's Folly was taken by the notary of Nemours, 
 who sold his business to Dionis his head clerk, and who died 
 two years after, leaving the doctor burthened with a house to 
 let just at the time when Napoleon's fate was being sealed in 
 the neighborhood. The doctor's heirs, somewhat taken in, 
 had at first supposed his wish to return to be a rich man's 
 whim, and were in despair when, as they imagined, he had 
 ties in Paris which kept him there, and would rob them of 
 his leavings. However, Minoret-Levrault's wife seized this 
 opportunity of writing to the doctor. The old man replied 
 that as soon as peace should be signed, the roads cleared of 
 soldiers, and communications free once more, he meant to 
 live at Nemours. He made his appearance there with two of 
 his clients, the architect to the hospital, and an upholsterer 
 who undertook the repairs, the rearrangement of the rooms, 
 and the removal of his furniture. Madame Minoret-Levrault
 
 24 URSULE MIR OUST. 
 
 proposed to him as caretaker the cook of the departed notary, 
 and this he agreed to. 
 
 When the heirs learned that their uncle, or great-uncle 
 Minoret, was really going to live at Nemours, their families 
 were seized by an absorbing but almost legitimate curiosity, 
 in spite of the political events which just then more especially 
 agitated the district of the Gatinais and Brie. Was their 
 uncle rich ? Was he economical or extravagant ? Would he 
 leave a fine fortune or nothing at all ? Had he invested in 
 annuities ? All this they at last came to know, but with in- 
 finite difficulty, and by means of much backstairs spying. 
 
 After the death of his wife Ursule Mirouet, from 1789 to 
 1813, the doctor, who in 1805 had been appointed consulting 
 physician to the Emperor, must have made a great deal of 
 money, but no one knew how much; he lived very simply, 
 with no expenses beyond a carriage by the year, and a splen- 
 did apartment ; he never entertained, and almost always dined 
 out. His housekeeper, furious at not being asked to go with 
 him to Nemours, told Zdlie Levrault, the postmaster's wife, 
 that to her knowledge he had fourteen thousand francs a year 
 in consols. Now, after practicing for twenty years in a pro- 
 fession which such appointments as head physician to a hos- 
 pital, as physician to the Emperor, and as member of the 
 institute could not fail to have made lucrative, these fourteen 
 thousand francs a year as dividends on repeated investments 
 argued no more than a hundred and sixty thousand francs in 
 savings ! And to have laid by no more than eight thousand 
 francs a year, the doctor must have had many vices or virtues 
 to indulge. Still, neither the housekeeper, nor Zelie, nor any 
 one else could divine the secret of so small a fortune. Min- 
 oret, who was greatly regretted in his own neighborhood, was 
 one of the most liberal benefactors in Paris, and, like Larrey, 
 kept his acts of benevolence a profound secret. 
 
 So it was with the liveliest satisfaction that his heirs watched 
 the arrival of their uncle's handsome furniture and extensive
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 25 
 
 library, and knew him to be an officer of the Legion of 
 Honor, and made Chevalier of the Order of Saint-Michael by 
 the King, in consequence, perhaps, of his retirement, which 
 made way for some favorite. But the architect, the painters, 
 and the upholsterers had finished everything in the most com- 
 fortable fashion, and still the doctor came not. Madame Min- 
 oret-Levrault, who watched the upholsterer and the architect as 
 though her own property were at stake, discovered, through 
 the inadvertence of a young man sent to put the books in 
 order, that the doctor had in his care an orphan named 
 Ursule. This news caused strange dismay in the town of 
 Nemours. At last the old man came home in about the 
 middle of January, 1815, and settled down without any fuss, 
 bringing with him a little girl of ten months and her nurse. 
 
 " Ursule cannot be his daughter ; he is seventy-one years 
 old ! " cried the alarmed expectants. 
 
 " Whoever she may be, she will give us plenty of bother," 
 said Madame Massin. 
 
 The doctor's reception of his grandniece on the mother's 
 side was cold enough ; her husband had just bought the place 
 of registrar to the justice of the peace, and they were the first 
 to venture on any allusion to the difficulties of their position. 
 Massin and his wife were not rich. Massin's father, an iron- 
 worker at Montargis, had been obliged to compound with his 
 creditors, and worked now, at the age of sixty-seven, as hard 
 as a young man ; he would have nothing to leave. Madame 
 Massin's father, Levrault-Minoret, had lately died at Mon- 
 tereau of grief at the results of the fighting his farmhouse 
 burnt down, his fields destroyed, and his cattle killed and eaten. 
 
 " We shall get nothing out of your great-uncle," said 
 Massin to his wife, who was expecting her second baby. 
 
 But the doctor secretly gave them ten thousand francs, with 
 which the registrar, as the friend of the notary and of the 
 usher of Nemours, had begun money-lending ; and he made 
 the peasants pay such usurious interest that, at this later day,
 
 26 URSULE MIROUET, 
 
 Goupil knew him to possess about eighty thousand francs of 
 unconfessed capital. 
 
 As to his other niece, the doctor, by his influence in Paris, 
 procured the post of receiver of public moneys at Nemours 
 for Crmiere, and advanced the necessary security. Though 
 Minoret-Levrault wanted nothing, Zelie, very jealous of her 
 uncle's liberality to his two nieces, came to see him with her 
 son, then ten years old, whom she was about to send to school 
 in Paris, where, as she said, education was very costly. As 
 physician to Monsieur de Fontanes, the doctor obtained a 
 half-scholarship at the College of Louis le Grand for his 
 grand-nephew, who was placed in the fourth class. 
 
 Cr6miere, Massin, and Minoret-Levrault, all three very 
 common men, were condemned beyond appeal by the doctor 
 during the first two or three months, while they were trying 
 to circumvent their future prospects rather than himself. 
 Persons who act by instinct have this disadvantage as com- 
 pared with those who have ideas they are more easily seen 
 through. The inspirations of instinct are too elementary, 
 and appeal too directly to the eye, not to be detected at once ; 
 while to penetrate ideas, the devices of the mind, equal intel- 
 ligence is needed on both sides. 
 
 Having thus purchased the gratitude of his heirs, and to 
 some extent stopped their mouths, the wily doctor alleged his 
 occupations, his habits, and the care he gave to little Ursule, 
 so as not to receive their visits, without, however, shutting his 
 door to them: "He liked to dine alone; he went to bed 
 and rose late ; he had come back to his native place to enjoy 
 repose and solitude." These whims in an old man seemed 
 natural enough, and his expectant heirs were satisfied to pay 
 him a weekly visit on Sundays between one and four, to which 
 he vainly tried to put a stop by saying 
 
 " Only come to see me when you want me." 
 
 The doctor, though he did not refuse his advice in serious 
 cases, especially among the poor, would not become physician
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 27 
 
 to the little asylum at Nemours, and declared that he would 
 no longer practice. 
 
 " I have killed enough people ! " said he, laughing, to the 
 Cure Chaperon, who, knowing his benevolence, pleaded for 
 the poor. 
 
 " He is quite an oddity." 
 
 This verdict on Doctor Minoret was the harmless revenge 
 of wounded vanity, for the physician formed a little society 
 for himself of persons who deserve to be contrasted with the 
 heirs. Now, those of the town magnates who thought them- 
 selves worthy to swell the court circle of a man wearing the 
 black ribbon of Saint Michael, nourished a ferment of jealousy 
 against the doctor and his privileged friends which, unhappily, 
 was not impotent. 
 
 By a singularity which can only be explained by the saying 
 that "extremes meet," the materialist doctor and the priest 
 of Nemours very soon were friends. The old man was very 
 fond of backgammon, the favorite game of the clergy, and 
 the abbe was a match for the physician. This game thus 
 became the first bond between them. Then Minoret was 
 charitable, and the cure" of Nemours was the Fenelon of the 
 Gatinais. They were both men of varied information ; thus, 
 in all Nemours, the man of God was the only man who could 
 understand the atheist. In order to discuss any matter, 
 two men must understand each other to begin with. What 
 pleasure is there in saying sharp things to any one who does 
 not fe'el them? The doctor and the priest had too much 
 good taste, and had seen too much good company, not to 
 observe its rules ; they could therefore carry on the little war- 
 fare that is so necessary to conversation. Each hated the 
 other's opinions, but they esteemed each other's character. 
 If such contrasts and such sympathies are not the essential 
 elements of intimacy, must we not despair of society, since, 
 especially in France, some antagonism is indispensable to it? 
 Contrariety of characters, not antagonism of opinions, is what
 
 28 URSULE MIKOUET. 
 
 gives rise to antipathies. So the Abbe Chaperon was the 
 doctor's first friend at Nemours, and this friendship endured 
 unfalteringly to the last. 
 
 This priest, now sixty years of age, had been cur6 of 
 Nemours ever since the re-establishment of Catholic worship. 
 He had refused promotion to be vicar-general of his diocese 
 out of attachment to his flock. If those who were indifferent 
 to religion thought the better of him for it, the faithful loved 
 him all the more. Thus venerated by his flock, and esteemed 
 by the community, the cure did good without inquiring too 
 closely as to the religious views of those who were unfor- 
 tunate. His own dwelling, scarcely supplied with furniture 
 enough for the strictest necessities of life, was as cold and 
 bare as a miser's hovel. Avarice and charity betray them- 
 selves by similar results ; does not charity lay up in heaven 
 the treasure that the miser hoards on earth? The Abbe 
 Chaperon took his servant to task for every expense, more 
 severely than Gobseck ever scolded his if, indeed, that 
 notorious Jew ever had a servant. The good priest often 
 sold his silver shoe-buckles and breeches-buckles to give the 
 money to some poor wretch he had found destitute. On see- 
 ing him come out of church with the tongues of his knee- 
 straps pulled through the buttonholes, the devout ladies of the 
 town would trot off to look for the cure's buckles at the one 
 jeweler's and watchmaker's shop in Nemours, and reproach 
 their pastor as they restored them to him. He never bought 
 himself linen or clothes, and wore them till they were drop- 
 ping to pieces. His underclothing, thick with darns, fretted 
 his skin like a hair-shirt. Then Madame de Portenduere, or 
 some other good soul, plotted with his houskeeper to replace 
 his old shirts or cloth clothes by new ones while he slept ; 
 and the priest did not always immediately perceive the ex- 
 change. He dined off pewter, with iron forks and spoons ; 
 when, on great occasions, he had to receive his subordinate 
 clergy and other cures, a duty that falls on the heacl of a dis-
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 29 
 
 trict, he borrowed silver and table-linen from his friend the 
 atheist. 
 
 " My plate is working out its salvation," the doctor would 
 say. 
 
 His good deeds, which were sooner or later found out, and 
 which he always reinforced with spiritual comfort, were 
 carried out with sublime simplicity. And such a life was all 
 the more meritorious because the abbe was full of erudition, 
 as vast as it was various, and a man of superior abilities. In 
 him refinement and elegance, the inseparable attributes of 
 simplicity, added charm to elocution worthy of a prelate. 
 His manners, his character, and his conduct gave to his 
 society the exquisite flavor of all that is at once candid and 
 subtle in a lofty intellect. Enjoying pleasantry, in a draw- 
 ing-room he was never the priest. Until Doctor Minoret's 
 arrival, this worthy man left his light under a bushel without 
 a regret ; but he no doubt liked him the better for calling it 
 into play. 
 
 Possessed of a fairly good library and two thousand francs 
 a year when he came to Nemours, in 1829, the cur6 had noth- 
 ing left but the income from his church, and that he gave 
 away almost entirely year by year. A man of good judgment 
 in delicate affairs or in misfortune, more than one of those 
 who never went to church in search of consolation went to 
 the priest's house in quest of advice. An anecdote will suf- 
 fice to complete this portrait of a character. Certain pea- 
 sants, seldom it is true, but bad folks at any rate, said they 
 were in danger of imprisonment for debt, or had themselves 
 sued falsely, to stimulate the abbess beneficence. They de- 
 ceived their wives; and the women, seeing themselves threat- 
 ened with eviction and their cows seized, by their innocent 
 tears deceived the poor cur6, who would find the seven or 
 eight hundred francs demanded, which the peasants would 
 spend on a little plot of ground. When some pious persons, 
 church-wardens, pointed out the fraud, begging the cur6 to
 
 30 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 consult them for the future, that he might not be the victim 
 of greed, he replied 
 
 " Perhaps those men would have committed some crime to 
 get their acre of land, and is it not a form of good to hinder 
 evil?" 
 
 The reader may perhaps find pleasure in this sketch of a 
 figure, remarkable because science and literature had entered 
 that heart and that capable brain without corrupting them in 
 any way. 
 
 At sixty years of age the Abb6 Chaperon's hair was per- 
 fectly white, so keenly was he alive to the sufferings of others, 
 and so deeply had the events of the Revolution affected him. 
 Twice imprisoned for having twice refused to take certain 
 oaths, he had twice (to use his own expression) said his In 
 manus. He was of middle height, neither stout nor thin. 
 His face, deeply furrowed, hollow-cheeked, and colorless, 
 attracted the eye at once by the perfect calm of the lines and 
 the purity of its outline, which looked as if fringed with 
 light. There is a mysterious kind of radiance from the face 
 of a perfectly chaste man. Brown eyes, with bright pupils, 
 gave life to irregular features, under a powerful forehead. 
 His gaze exercised a dominion that may be explained by its 
 sweetness, which did not exclude strength. The arches of 
 his brows were like deep vaults, shadowed by thick gray eye- 
 brows, which frightened no one. As he had lost many teeth, 
 his mouth was shapeless, and his cheeks were hollow ; but this 
 ruin was not without charm, and his kindly wrinkles seemed 
 always to be smiling at you. 
 
 He walked with difficulty, having very tender feet, without 
 being gouty ; so in all weathers he wore soft calf-skin shoes. 
 He thought trousers unsuitable to a priest, and always ap- 
 peared in stout, black, worsted stockings, knitted by his 
 housekeeper, and black cloth knee-breeches. He did not go 
 out in his priest's gown, but in a brown overcoat and the 
 three-cornered hat he had always bravely worn, even in the
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 81 
 
 worst times. This fine and noble old man, whose face was 
 always beautified by the serenity of a blameless soul, was 
 destined to have so great an influence on men and things in 
 this narrative that it was necessary to go to the sources of his 
 authority. 
 
 Minoret took in three papers one liberal, one ministerial, 
 and one ultra some periodical magazines and scientific 
 journals, of which the accumulation swelled his library. 
 These journals, the encyclopedist, and his books were an 
 attraction to a retired captain of the Royal Swedish Regiment, 
 Monsieur de Jordy, a gentleman, a Voltairean, and an old 
 bachelor, who lived on sixteen hundred francs a year, partly 
 pension and partly an annuity. After reading the papers for 
 some days, through the intervention of the cur6, M. de Jordy 
 thought it becoming to call and thank the doctor. From his 
 very first visit the old captain, formerly a professor in the 
 military college, won the doctor's good graces, and the visit 
 was promptly returned. 
 
 Monsieur de Jordy, a lean, dry little man, but tormented 
 by blood to the head, though he had a very pale face, was 
 striking-looking by reason of a fine forehead, like Charles 
 XII., over which his hair was cropped short like that of the 
 soldier-king. His blue eyes, which would make one think 
 "Love has passed that way," though they were deeply sad, 
 were interesting at first sight, for their gaze betrayed remem- 
 brance ; but on this point he kept his own secret so com- 
 pletely that his old friends never detected him in any allusion 
 to his past life, nor ever heard one of the exclamations which 
 are sometimes called forth by a similarity in misfortune. He 
 hid the painful mystery of his past under philosophical gaiety ; 
 but when he thought himself alone, his movements, weighted 
 by a slowness evidently deliberate rather than senile, bore 
 witness to an ever-present painful thought. The abbe, in- 
 deed, had called him " The Christian without knowing it." 
 
 Always wearing a blue cloth suit, his somewhat stiff de-
 
 32 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 meaner and his style of dress betrayed old habits of military 
 discipline. His voice, soft and musical, spoke to the soul. 
 His fine hands, and the shape of his face, recalling that of 
 the Comte d'Artois, by showing how handsome he must have 
 been in his youth, made the mystery of his life even more 
 impenetrable. It was impossible not to wonder what was the 
 disaster that had stricken a man so handsome, with courage, 
 grace, learning, and all the most delightful qualities of heart 
 which had formerly been united in his person. Monsieur de 
 Jordy always shuddered at the name of Robespierre. He 
 used a great deal of snuff, but, strange to say, he gave it up 
 for little Ursule, who at first showed a dislike to him in con- 
 sequence of this habit. Whenever he saw the child, the 
 captain would gaze at her with lingering, almost passionate 
 looks. He was so devoted to her games, and took so much 
 interest in her, that this affection drew still tighter his tie to 
 the doctor, who, on his part, never dared say to the old 
 bachelor 
 
 " Have you, too, lost children ? " 
 
 There are beings, good and patient as he was, who go 
 through life with a bitter memory in their hearts, and a smile, 
 at once tender and sorrowful, on their lips, bearing in them 
 the answer to the riddle, but never allowing it to be guessed 
 out of pride, or scorn, or perhaps revenge having none 
 but God to trust in or to comfort them. At Nemours, whither, 
 like the doctor, he had come to die in peace, Monsieur de 
 Jordy visited nobody but the cur<, who was always at the 
 service of his parishioners, and Madame de Portenduere, who 
 went to bed at nine o'clock. Thus he, weary of the struggle, 
 had at last taken to going to bed early too, notwithstanding 
 the thorns that stuffed his pillow. Thus it was a happy chance 
 for the doctor, as well as for the captain, to meet a man who 
 had known the same society, who spoke the same language, 
 with whom he could exchange ideas, and who went to bed 
 late. When once Monsieur de Jordy, the Abbe Chaperon,
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 33 
 
 and Minoret had spent an evening together, they found it so 
 pleasant that the priest and the soldier came in every evening 
 at nine o'clock, when, little Ursule being in bed, the old man 
 was free. And they all three sat talking till midnight, or one 
 o'clock. 
 
 Before long the trio became a quartette. Another man, 
 who knew life well, and who had acquired in his profession 
 that large-mindedness, learning, accumulated observation, 
 shrewdness, and power of conversation which the soldier, the 
 physician, and the priest had gained in dealing with souls, 
 with diseases, and with teaching the judge of the district, 
 Monsieur Bongrand got wind of the pleasures of these even- 
 ings, and made himself acquainted with the doctor. 
 
 Before being appointed a justice at Nemours, Monsieur Bon- 
 grand had for ten years been attorney at Melun, where he 
 himself had pleaded in court, as is usual (in France) in towns 
 where there is no bar. At the age of forty-five he found 
 himself a widower ; but feeling too active to do nothing, he 
 had applied for the appointment as justice of the peace at 
 Nemours, which had fallen vacant some months before the 
 doctor's arrival. The keeper of the seals is always glad to 
 find a practical lawyer, and particularly a well-to-do man, to 
 hold these important posts. Monsieur Bongrand lived very 
 simply at Nemours on his salary of fifteen hundred francs, and 
 could thus devote the rest of his income to his son, who was 
 studying for the bar at Paris, and at the same time working 
 up legal procedure under Derville, the famous attorney. 
 
 The elder Bongrand was a good deal like a retired brigadier; 
 his was a face, not naturally pale, but washed out, where busi- 
 ness, disappointment, and disgust had left their marks; it was 
 wrinkled by much thought, and also by the pinched look of 
 a man who is constantly forced not to say all he thinks ; but 
 it was often illuminated by the smiles peculiar to men who, by 
 turns, believe everything or believe nothing, who are accus- 
 tomed to see and hear everything without surprise, to sound 
 3
 
 34 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 the depths which self-interest reveals at the bottom of men's 
 hearts. Under his hair, which was faded rather than gray, 
 and brushed in smooth waves on his head, rose a sagacious 
 brow, its yellow tint harmonizing with that of his thin locks. 
 His face, being rather short, gave him some resemblance to a 
 fox, all the more so because his nose was short and sharp. 
 As he spoke, his wide mouth, like that of all great talkers, 
 sputtered out a spray of white foam-stars, which made his 
 conversation so showery that Goupil used to say, maliciously : 
 "You want an umbrella while you listen to him," or, "The 
 justice of the peace rains decisions." 
 
 His eyes seemed keen behind his spectacles, but if he took 
 them off his expression was dulled, and he looked stupid. 
 Though lively, and even jovial, by his manner he gave him- 
 self rather too much the airs of a man of importance. His 
 hands were almost always in his trousers' pockets, and he only 
 took them out to settle his spectacles on his nose with a sort of 
 mocking gesture, preliminary to some acute remark or clinch- 
 ing argument. These movements, with his loquacity and his 
 innocent pretentiousness, betrayed the country lawyer; but 
 such slight defects were merely superficial ; he made up for 
 them by an acquired geniality, which an exact moralist might 
 define as the indulgence inherent in superiority. And if he 
 had somewhat the look of a fox, he was also supposed to be 
 extremely wily, without being dishonest. His cunning was 
 the exercise of perspicacity. Do we not call folks cunning 
 who can foresee results, and avoid the snares laid for them ? 
 The lawyer was fond of whist, a game which the doctor and 
 the captain played, and which the priest soon learned to play 
 with equal proficiency. 
 
 This little party created an oasis for themselves in Minoret's 
 drawing-room. The Nemours town doctor, who was not 
 deficient in education or manners, and who respected Minoret 
 as an ornament to the profession, was also admitted ; but his 
 business and fatigues, which compelled him to go to bed early
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 35 
 
 that he might rise betimes, hindered him from being so regu- 
 lar a visitor as the doctor's three friends were. 
 
 The meetings of these five superior men, who alone in all 
 the town had enough general culture to understand each other, 
 accounts for Minoret's aversion for his heirs; though he 
 might have to leave them his fortune, he could not admit 
 them to his society. Whether the postmaster, the registrar, 
 and the receiver understood this distinction, or were reassured 
 by their uncle's loyal nature and benefactions, they ceased at 
 any rate to call on him, to his very great satisfaction. 
 
 The four old players of whist and backgammon had, within 
 seven or eight months of the doctor's settling at Nemours, 
 formed a compact and exclusive little circle, which came to 
 each of them as a sort of autumnal brotherhood, quite un- 
 looked for, and therefore all the sweeter and more enjoyable. 
 This family party of choice spirits found in Ursule a child 
 whom each could adopt after his manner : the priest thought 
 of her soul, the lawyer made himself her protector, the soldier 
 promised himself that he would be her tutor ; as for Minoret, 
 he was father, mother, and doctor in one. 
 
 After acclimatizing himself, as it were, the old man fell 
 into habits of life, regulated as it must be in all provincial 
 towns. With Ursule as an excuse, he never received any one 
 in the morning, and asked nobody to dinner; his friends 
 could join him at six o'clock, and remain with him till mid- 
 night. The first comers found newspapers on the drawing- 
 room table, and read while waiting for the others, or some- 
 times went to meet the doctor if he were out walking. These 
 quiet habits were not merely the requirement of old age ; 
 they were also a wise and deep-laid precaution on the part of 
 a man of the world to prevent his happiness being troubled 
 by the restless curiosity of his relations, or the petty gossip of 
 a country town. He would concede nothing to the capri- 
 cious goddess public opinion, whose tyranny one of the 
 curses of France was about to be established, and to make
 
 36 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 our whole country one single province. So as soon as the 
 little girl was weaned and could walk, he sent away the cook 
 whom his niece, Madame Minoret-Levrault, had found for 
 him, on discovering that she reported to the postmistress 
 everything that went on in his house. 
 
 Little Ursule's nurse, the widow of a poor laborer owning 
 no name but that he was christened by, and who came from 
 Bougival, had lost her last baby at the age of six months; and 
 the doctor, knowing her to be an honest creature, engaged 
 her as wet nurse, in pity for her destitution. Having no 
 money, and coming from La Bresse, where her family lived in 
 poverty, Antoinette Patris, widow of Pierre dit de Bougival, 
 naturally attached herself to Ursule, as foster-mothers do 
 attach themselves to a sucking child as it grows up. This 
 blind motherly affection was reinforced by domestic attach- 
 ment. Warned beforehand of the doctor's intentions, La 
 Bougival learned to cook on the sly, made herself tidy, and 
 fell into the old man's ways. She took the greatest care of 
 the furniture and the rooms ; in short, she was indefatigable. 
 Not only did the doctor insist that his private life should be 
 screened from the world ; he had reasons of his own for keep- 
 ing all knowledge of his affairs from his heirs. Thus by the 
 time he had been at Nemours a year there was no one in his 
 house but La Bougival, on whose discretion he could abso- 
 lutely rely, and he disguised his real reasons under the all- 
 powerful plea of economy. To the great joy of his family, 
 he became miserly. Without underhand wheedling, solely as 
 a result of her solicitude and devotedness, La Bougival, who 
 at the time when this drama opens was forty-three years old, 
 was housekeeper to the doctor and his little protege^ the 
 pivot on which the whole house turned, in fact, his confi- 
 dential servant. She had been named La Bougival in conse- 
 quence of the impossibility of calling her by her Christian 
 name of Antoinette, for names and faces must follow a law of 
 harmony.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 37 
 
 The doctor's avarice was not an empty word ; but it was 
 for a purpose. From 1817 he gave up two of his newspapers, 
 and ceased to subscribe to periodical magazines. His annual 
 outlay, which all Nemours could reckon, was not more than 
 eighteen hundred francs. Like all old men, his requirements 
 in linen, clothing, and shoes were a mere trifle. Every six 
 months he made a journey to Paris, no doubt to draw and 
 invest his dividends. In fifteen years he never said a word 
 that had anything to do with his affairs. His confidence in 
 Bongrand was of later date ; he never spoke to him of his 
 plans till after the Revolution of 1830. These were the only 
 things in the doctor's life known at that time to the townsfolk 
 and his heirs. As to his political opinions, as his house was 
 rated at no more than a hundred francs in taxes, he never 
 interfered, and would have nothing to say to subscriptions on 
 either the Royalist or the Liberal side. His well-known 
 horror of priests and his deism so little loved demonstrations, 
 that when his nephew, Minoret-Levrault, sent a traveling 
 bookseller to his house to propose that he should buy the 
 "Cure Meslier" and "General Foy's Addresses," he turned 
 the man out of the house. Tolerance on such terms was quite 
 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 Crmiere-Cremiere who shall be 
 called simply Cremiere, Massin, and Minoret, since such 
 elaborate distinctions are only needed in the Gatinais these 
 three families, too busy to create another centre, met con- 
 stantly, as people only meet in small towns. The postmaster 
 gave a grand dinner on his son's birthday, a ball at the Car- 
 nival, and another on the anniversary of his wedding-day, 
 and to these he asked all the townsfolk of Nemours. The tax- 
 receiver also gathered his relations and friends about him 
 twice a year. The justice's registrar being, as he said, too 
 poor to launch out in such extravagance, lived narrowly in a
 
 38 VRSULE MIROU&T. 
 
 house half-way down the High Street, of which the ground 
 floor was let to his rister, the mistress of the letter-post 
 another benefaction of the doctor's. But in the course of 
 the year these three inheritors or their wives met in the town 
 or out walking, at the market in the morning, on their door- 
 steps, or on Sunday, after mass, on the church square, as at 
 this moment, so that they saw each other every day. 
 
 Now for the last three years more especially, the doctor's 
 age, his miserliness, and his fortune justified allusions or 
 direct remarks relating to their prospects, which, passing 
 from one to another, at last made the doctor and his heirs 
 equally famous. For these six months not a week had 
 passed without the friends and neighbors of the Minoret' 
 family speaking to them with covert envy of the day when 
 the old man's eyes would be closed and his money-boxes 
 opened. 
 
 " Doctor Minoret may be a physician, and have come to 
 an understanding with death," said one; "but only God is 
 eternal." 
 
 " Bah ! he will bury us all ; he is in better health than we 
 are," one of the expectant heirs would reply hypocritically. 
 
 " Well, if you don't get it, your children will unless that 
 little Ursule " 
 
 " He will not leave her everything? " another would reply, 
 interrupting the last speaker. 
 
 Ursule, as Madame Massin had prognosticated, was the 
 real bugbear of the family, the Damocles' sword ; and 
 Madame Cremiere's favorite last word, " Those who live 
 will know," showed plainly enough that they wished her ill 
 rather than well. 
 
 The tax-receiver and the registrar, who were poor by com- 
 parison with the postmaster, had often, by way of conversa- 
 tion, calculated the doctor's property. As they walked along 
 by the canal or on the high-road, if they saw their uncle 
 coming they looked at each other piteously.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 39 
 
 " He has provided himself with some elixir of life, no 
 doubt," said the one. 
 
 " He is in league with the devil," said the other. 
 
 " He ought to leave us the lion's share, for that fat Minoret 
 wants for nothing." 
 
 " Oh, Minoret has a son who will get rid of a great deal of 
 his money for him! " 
 
 " How much, now, do you suppose the doctor's fortune 
 may run to? " said the registrar. 
 
 "Well, at the end of twelve years, twelve thousand francs 
 saved every year come to a hundred and forty-four thousand, 
 and compound interest will have produced at least a hundred 
 thousand francs more; but as, under his Paris lawyer's advice, 
 he must have turned his money to advantage now and again, 
 and as he would have invested up to 1822 at eight or seven 
 and a half per cent, in government securities, the old fellow 
 must at this time have about four hundred thousand francs to 
 turn over, to say nothing of his fourteen thousand francs at 
 five per cent., worth one hundred and sixteen at the present 
 moment. If he were to die to-morrow and leave Ursule an 
 equal share, we should get seven to eight hundred thousand 
 francs, not to mention the house and furniture." 
 
 " Well, a hundred thousand to Minoret, a hundred thou- 
 sand to the little girl, and three hundred thousand to each of 
 us. That would be the fair thing." 
 
 " Yes, that would keep us in shoe-leather." 
 
 "If he should do that," cried Massin, "I would sell my 
 appointment and buy a fine estate. I would try to be made 
 judge at Fontainebleau, and be elected deputy." 
 
 " I would buy a stockbroker's business," said the tax- 
 receiver. 
 
 " Unfortunately, that little girl on his arm and the cure 
 have so blockaded him that we cannot get at him." 
 
 " At any rate, we are quite certain that he will leave noth- 
 ing to the church."
 
 40 URSULE MIROUET 
 
 It may now be understood that the heirs were in agonies at 
 seeing their uncle going to mass. The most stupid have wit 
 enough to imagine injury to their interests. Interest is the 
 moving spirit of the peasant as of the diplomat, and on that 
 ground the most stupid in appearance may perhaps prove the 
 sharpest. Hence this terrible argument: "If that little 
 Ursule is able to bring her protector within the pale of the 
 church, she will certainly have power to secure her own in- 
 heritance," blazed out in letters of fire in the mind of the 
 most obtuse of the inheritors. The postmaster had forgotten 
 the enigma in his son's letter in hurrying to the square ; for 
 if the doctor were really in church following the order of 
 prayer, they might lose two hundred and fifty thousand francs. 
 It must be admitted that their fears were based on the strongest 
 and most legitimate of social sentiments, namely, on family 
 interest. 
 
 "Well, Monsieur Minoret," said the mayor a retired 
 miller who had turned Royalist, a Levrault-Cremiere " when 
 the devil was old, the devil a monk would be ! Your uncle, 
 I am told, has come over to us." 
 
 "Better late than never, cousin," replied the postmaster, 
 trying to conceal his annoyance. 
 
 " How that man would laugh if we were disappointed ! 
 He is quite capable of making his son marry that cursed 
 little hussy. May the devil get his tail round her ! " cried 
 Cr6miere, shaking his fist at the mayor as he went in under 
 the porch. 
 
 "What on earth is the matter with old Cremiere?" said 
 the butcher, the eldest son of a Levrault-Levrault. "Is he 
 not pleased to see his uncle take the road to paradise? " 
 
 " Who would ever have believed it?" said the registrar. 
 
 " It is never safe to say to the well, ' I will never drink of 
 your water!'" replied the notary, who, seeing the group 
 from afar, left his wife to go on to church alone. 
 
 "Now, Monsieur Dionis," said Cremiere, taking the
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 41 
 
 lawyer by the arm, "what do you advise us to do in these 
 circumstances? " 
 
 "I advise you," said Dionis, addressing the expectant 
 heirs, " to go to bed and get up at the usual hours, to eat your 
 soup before it gets cold, to put your shoes on your feet and 
 your hat on your head ; in short, to go on exactly as if 
 nothing had happened." 
 
 "You are a poor comforter ! " said Massin with a cunning 
 glance. 
 
 In spite of his short, fat figure, and his thick, crushed- 
 looking features, Cremiere-Dionis was as slippery as silk. To 
 make a fortune he was in secret partnership with Massin, 
 whom he no doubt kept informed when peasants were in diffi- 
 culties, and which plots of ground he might devour. So the 
 two men could pick and choose, never letting a good chance 
 escape them, and dividing the profits of this usury on mort- 
 gage, which delays, though it cannot hinder, the action of the 
 peasantry on the land. Hence Dionis felt a keen interest in 
 the doctor's will, less on account of Minoret the postmaster 
 and Cr6miere the tax-receiver than for his friend the regis- 
 trar's sake. Massin's share would, sooner or later, come to 
 swell the capital on which the partners traded in the district. 
 
 " We must try to find out, through Monsieur Bongrand, 
 who has fired this shot," replied the lawyer in a low voice, as 
 a warning to Massin to lay low. 
 
 "What are you doing here, Minoret?" was suddenly 
 heard from a little woman who bore down on the group, in 
 the midst of which the postmaster was visible as a tower. 
 " You do not know what has become of Desir, and you seem 
 to have taken root there on your two feet when I fancied 
 you were on horseback ! Good-morning, ladies and gentle- 
 men ! " 
 
 This spare little woman, pale and fair, dressed in a cotton 
 gown white, with a large flowered pattern in chocolate- 
 color in an embroidered cap trimmed with lace, and a small
 
 42 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 green shawl over her flat shoulders, was the postmistress, who 
 made the stoutest postillions quake, the servants, and the 
 carters ; who kept the till and the books ; and managed the 
 house with her finger and eye, as the neighbors were in the 
 habit of saying. Like a true, thrifty housewife, she had not 
 a single article of jewelry. She did not " favor frippery and 
 trash," as she put it; she liked what was durable, and, in 
 spite of its being Sunday, she had on her black silk apron 
 with pockets, in which a bunch of keys jingled. Her shrill 
 voice was ear-splitting. In spite of the sweet blue of her 
 eyes, her hard gaze was in evident harmony with the thin lips 
 of a tightly set mouth, and a high, projecting, and very 
 despotic brow. Her glance was sharp, sharper still were her 
 gestures and words. " Zelie being obliged to have will enough 
 for two, had always had enough for three," Goupil used to say ; 
 and it was he who noted the successive reigns of three young 
 post-boys, very neatly kept, whom Zelie had set up after 
 seven years' service. Indeed, the spiteful clerk always called 
 them Postillion I., Postillion II., and Postillion III. But the 
 small influence exerted in the house by these young men, and 
 their perfect obedience, proved that Zelie had simply and 
 purely taken an interest in really good fellows. 
 
 "Ay, Zelie values zeal," the clerk would reply to any one 
 who made such a remark. 
 
 This piece of scandal was, however, improbable. Since the 
 birth of her son, whom she nursed herself, though it was im- 
 possible to see how, the postmistress had thought only of add- 
 ing to her fortune, and devoted herself without respite to the 
 management of her immense business. To rob her of a truss 
 of straw or a few bushels of oats, to detect her in error in the 
 most complicated accounts, was a thing impossible, though 
 she wrote a cat's scrawl, and knew nothing of arithmetic 
 beyond addition and subtraction. She walked out solely to 
 inspect her hay, her oats, and her after-crops ; then she would 
 send her man to fetch in the crops, and her postillions to pack
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 43 
 
 the hay, and tell them within a hundredweight how much 
 they could get off this or that field. Though she was the soul 
 of the huge body known as Minoret-Levrault, and led him by 
 his idiotically snub nose, she was liable to the frights which 
 more or less constantly agitate those who quell and lead wild 
 beasts, and she quarreled with him frequently. The post- 
 boys knew by the rowings they got from Minoret when his 
 wife had scolded him, for her rage glanced off on to them. 
 But, indeed, Madame Minoret was as shrewd as she was 
 avaricious. 
 
 "Where would Minoret be without his wife?" was a by- 
 word in more than one household in the town. 
 
 " When you hear what is happening to us you will be beside 
 yourself too, " replied the Master of Nemours. 
 
 "Well, what is it?" 
 
 "Ursule has taken Doctor Minoret to mass." 
 
 Zelie Levrault's eyes seemed to dilate; for an instant she 
 was silent, yellow with rage; then crying, " I must see it to 
 believe it," she rushed into the church. The Host was just 
 elevated. Favored by the general attitude of worship, she 
 was able to look along each row of chairs and benches as she 
 went up past the chapels to the place where Ursule knelt, and 
 by her side she saw the old man bareheaded. 
 
 If you can recall the portraits of Barbe-Marbois, Boissy- 
 d'Anglas, Morellet, Helvetius, and Frederick the Great, you 
 will have an exact idea of the head of Doctor Minoret, who in 
 his green old age was a good deal like these famous personages. 
 These heads, struck as it might seem from the same die, for they 
 lend themselves to the medalist's art, present a severe and 
 almost puritanical profile, cold coloring, a mathematical brain, 
 a certain narrowness of face, as if it had been squeezed, astute 
 eyes, grave lips, and something aristocratic in sentiment rather 
 than in habits, in the intellect rather than in the character. 
 They all have lofty foreheads, receding a little at the top, 
 which betrays a tendency to materialism. You will find all
 
 44 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 these leading characteristics of the head, and the look of the 
 face, in the portraits of the encyclopedists, of the orators of 
 the Girondins, and of the men of that time whose religious 
 belief was almost a blank, and who, though calling themselves 
 deists, were atheists. A deist is an atheist with an eye to the 
 off-chance of some advantage. 
 
 Old Minoret had a forehead of this type, but furrowed with 
 wrinkles, and it derived a sort of childlike ingenuousness 
 from the way in which his silvery hair, combed back like a 
 woman's at her toilet, curled in thin locks on his black coat ; 
 for he persisted in dressing, as in the days of his youth, in 
 black silk stockings, shoes with gold buckles, knee-breeches 
 of rich silk, a white waistcoat, across which lay the black rib- 
 bon of Saint Michael, and a black coat with the red rosette 
 in the buttonhole. This characteristic head, its cold pallor 
 softened by the ivory-yellow tone of old age, was under the 
 full light from a window. At the moment when the postmis- 
 tress came in, the doctor's blue eyes, with slightly reddened 
 lids and pathetic lines, were fixed on the altar ; new convic- 
 tion had given them a new expression. His spectacles, laid 
 in his prayer-book, marked the page where he had ceased to 
 read. With his arms folded across his breast, the tall, spare 
 old man, standing in an attitude which proclaimed the full 
 power of all his faculties, and something immovable in his 
 faith, never ceased from gazing at the altar with a humble 
 look, rejuvenescent through hope ; not choosing to see his 
 nephew's wife, who stood rooted almost face to face with him, 
 as if to reproach him for this return to God. 
 
 On seeing every face turned to look at her, Zelie hastily re- 
 tired, and came out on to the square again less precipitately 
 than she had gone into the church ; she had counted on that 
 inheritance, and the inheritance was becoming problematical. 
 She found the registrar, the tax-receiver, and their wives in 
 even greater consternation than before. Goupil had taken 
 pleasure in tormenting them.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 45 
 
 " It is not here, on the square, and under the eyes of the 
 whole town, that we can discuss our private affairs," said the 
 postmistress; "come to my house. You will not be in the 
 way, Monsieur Dionis," she added to the lawyer. 
 
 So the probable disinheritance of the Massins, the Cre- 
 raieres, and the postmaster was to become the talk of the 
 country. 
 
 Just as the heirs and the notary were about to cross the 
 square on their way to the house, the clatter of the diligence 
 arriving at top-speed made a tremendous noise ; it stopped at 
 the coach-office, a few yards from the church, at the top of the 
 High Street. 
 
 " Why, like you, Minoret, I had forgotten DesireV' said 
 Zelie. " Let us go to meet him ; he is almost a lawyer now, 
 and this business is partly his concern." 
 
 The arrival of a diligence is always a diversion, and when 
 it is behind time something interesting may be expected ; so 
 the crowd rushed to see the " Dueler." 
 
 "There is Desire," was a general cry. 
 
 At once the tyrant and the ringleader of fun in Nemours, 
 Desire's visits always brought some excitement to the town. 
 A favorite with the young men, to whom he was liberal, his 
 presence was to them a stimulant ; but his pleasures were so 
 much dreaded, that more than one family was glad that his 
 studies for the law should be carried on in Paris. Desir6 
 Minoret, slight, thin, and fair like his mother, with her blue 
 eyes and colorless complexion, smiled at the crowd from the 
 coach door, and jumped out to embrace her. A slight sketch 
 of this youth will explain Zelie's flattered pride on beholding 
 him. 
 
 The young law student wore neat little boots, white English 
 drill trousers with patent-leather straps, a handsome cravat 
 carefully folded, and a still handsomer pin, a smart fancy 
 waistcoat, and in its pocket a flat watch with a dangling 
 chain ; a short blue cloth overcoat, and a gray hat. But
 
 46 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 vulgar riches were betrayed in the gold buttons to his waist- 
 coat, and a ring worn outside his gloves of purplish kid. He 
 carried'a cane with a chased gold knob. 
 
 "You will lose your watch," said his mother as she kissed 
 him. 
 
 "It is worn so," said he, submitting to his father's em- 
 brace. 
 
 "Well, cousin, so you will soon be a full-blown lawyer," 
 said Massin. 
 
 "I am to be sworn when the x courts reopen," said he, 
 waving an acknowledgment of the friendly greetings of the 
 crowd. 
 
 "Then we shall have some fun?" said Goupil, shaking 
 hands with him. 
 
 " Ah ! there you are, old ape ! " answered Desire. 
 
 " Having worked for your license, you think you may take 
 it, I suppose ! " retorted the clerk, mortified at being so 
 familiarly treated before so many people. 
 
 "For his lies? Take what?" asked Madame Cremiere of 
 her husband. 
 
 " You know all my things, Cabirolle ! " cried Desire to the 
 old purple and pimply-faced conductor. " Have them all 
 taken down to the house." 
 
 "Your horses are in a lather," said Zelie roughly to Cabi- 
 rolle. " Have you no sense at all that you drive them like 
 that ? You are a greater brute than they are." 
 
 "But Monsieur Desire insisted on getting on as fast as 
 possible, to relieve your anxiety." 
 
 "As there has been no accident, why risk killing your 
 horses?" said she. 
 
 Friendly greetings, hand-shaking, and the eagerness of his 
 young acquaintance surrounding Desire, all the incidents of 
 arrival, and details as to the accident which had occasioned 
 the delay, took up so much time that the party of inheritors, 
 increased by their friends, got back to the church just as mass
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 47 
 
 was ended. By a trick of chance, which allows itself strange 
 caprices, Desire saw Ursule under the church porch as he 
 passed, and was quite startled by her beauty. The young man 
 suddenly paused, and necessarily checked the movements of 
 his parents. 
 
 Ursule had taken her godfather's arm, which obliged her to 
 hold her prayer-book in her right hand and her parasol in the 
 left ; and, in doing so, she displayed the native grace with 
 which graceful women manage to get over the little difficulties 
 of their dainty womanhood. If the mind betrays itself in 
 everything, it may be said that her demeanor expressed her 
 exquisite ingenuousness. 
 
 Ursule wore a white muslin dress, shaped loosely like a 
 dressing-gown, with blue bows at intervals ; the cape, trimmed 
 with similar ribbon run into a wide hem, and fastened like 
 the dress with bows, suggested the beauty of her figure; her 
 throat, of ivory whiteness, was thrown into charming relief 
 by all this blue the true cosmetic for fair complexions. 
 
 A blue sash, with floating ends, marked a girlish waist and 
 what seemed a pliant figure, one of the most seductive graces 
 of woman. She wore a rice-straw hat, simply trimmed with 
 ribbons to match those on her dress. It was tied with a 
 bow under her chin ; and this, while enhancing the excessive 
 whiteness of the hat, did not detract from that of her lovely 
 complexion. 
 
 Her fine, bright hair, which she herself dressed in wide 
 plaits, fastened into loops on each side of her face a la Berthc, 
 caught the eye by the shining bosses of the crossing tresses. 
 Her gray eyes, soft, though proud, harmonized with a well- 
 moulded brow. A delicate color flushed her cheeks like a 
 rosy cloud, and gave life to a face that was regular without 
 being insipid, for nature had bestowed on her the rare priv- 
 ilege of a pure outline with an expressive countenance. 
 
 The virtue of her life was written in the perfect accordance 
 of her features, her movements, and the general expression
 
 48 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 of her individuality, which might serve as a model of trust- 
 fulness or of modesty. 
 
 Her health was excellent, but not coarsely robust, so that she 
 looked elegant. Her light gloves left it to be inferred that 
 she had pretty hands. Her arched and slender feet were shod 
 with dainty little bronze kid boots, trimmed with a fringe of 
 brown silk. Her blue sash, in which a little flat watch made 
 a boss, while a blue purse with gold tassels hung through it, 
 attracted the eye of every woman there, and gave cause for 
 remark. 
 
 " He has given her a new watch," said Madame Cremiere, 
 squeezing her husband's arm. 
 
 "Why, it is Ursule ! " exclaimed Desire. "I did not 
 recognize her." 
 
 "Well, my dear uncle, this is an event ! " said the post- 
 master, pointing to where the whole town had fallen into two 
 lines along the old man's way. " Everybody wants to see 
 you." 
 
 "Is it the Abbe Chaperon or Ursule who has converted 
 you, uncle?" said Massin, bowing with Jesuitical obsequious- 
 ness to the doctor and his companion. 
 
 "It is Ursule," said the old man curtly, and without stop- 
 ping, as a man who is annoyed. 
 
 The evening before, as he finished his rubber with Ursule, 
 the town doctor, and Bongrand, he had said, " I shall go to 
 mass to-morrow;" and even if the justice had not then re- 
 plied, "Your heirs will never have another night's sleep ! " a 
 single glance now would have sufficed to enable the sagacious 
 and clear-sighted old man to read the temper of his heirs in 
 the look of their faces. Zlie's irruption into the church, the 
 flash he had caught in her eye, the meeting of all the inter- 
 ested parties on the square, and the expression of their coun- 
 tenances on seeing Ursule all revealed freshly revived hatred 
 and sordid fears. 
 
 "This is your doing, mademoiselle," said Madame Cr6-
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 49 
 
 miere, interposing with a low courtesy. " It is no trouble to 
 you to work miracles." 
 
 "The miracle is God's, madame," replied Ursule. 
 
 " Oh, indeed ! God's," exclaimed Minoret-Levrault. " My 
 father-in-law used to say that God was a name for many a 
 dark horse." 
 
 " His ideas were those of a horse coper ! " said the doctor 
 severely. 
 
 " Now, then," said Minoret to his wife and son, "are you 
 not coming to pay your respects to my uncle ? " 
 
 " I could not contain myself face to face with that sneaking 
 slut ! " exclaimed Zelie, leading away her son. 
 
 "You would be wise, uncle," said Madame Massin, " not 
 to go to church without a little black velvet cap ; the parish 
 church is very damp." 
 
 " Pah ! niece," said the old man, looking round at his fol- 
 lowers. "The sooner I am laid to rest, the sooner you will 
 dance." 
 
 He walked on, dragging Ursule with him, and seeming in 
 such haste that they were left to themselves. 
 
 "Why do you answer them with such hard words? It is 
 not kind," said Ursule, shaking his arm with a little refrac- 
 tory gesture. 
 
 " My hatred for hypocrites has always been the same, be- 
 fore as well as since my conversion. I have done them all 
 kindness, and I do not ask for gratitude ; but not one of all 
 those people sent a flower on your birthday, the only day I 
 keep." 
 
 At some little distance from the doctor and Ursule, Ma- 
 dame de Portenduere was dragging herself along, overwhelmed, 
 as it seemed, with suffering. She was one of those old women 
 in whose dress we may still trace the spirit of the last century, 
 who wear pansy-colored gowns with tight sleeves of a cut now 
 only to be seen in portraits by Madame Lebrun ; black lace 
 scarfs, and bonnets of extinct shapes, in harmony with their 
 4
 
 50 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 slow and solemn gait ; as if they still walked in hoops, and 
 felt them about them, as those who have had an arm cut off 
 sometimes move the limb they have lost. Their long, pale 
 faces, with deeply shadowed eyes and blighted brows, are not 
 devoid of a certain melancholy grace in spite of a front of 
 dejected curls ; they drape their heads in old lace, which now 
 has no light flutter over their cheeks ; but over the whole 
 mass of ruins predominates an indescribable dignity of man- 
 ner and look. 
 
 This old lady's red and puckered eyes plainly showed that 
 she had wept during the service. She walked like a person 
 in some anxiety, and seemed to be expecting somebody, for 
 she looked back. Now, that Madame de Portenduere should 
 look back was an event as serious as Doctor Minoret's conver- 
 sion. 
 
 "To whom can Madame Portenduere owe a grudge?" said 
 Madame Massin, as she came up with the heirs, who were 
 dumfounded by the doctor's retorts. 
 
 "She is looking for the cure," said Dionis, striking his 
 forehead like a man suddenly struck by a remembrance or 
 some forgotten idea. "I have it! I see my way; the in- 
 heritance is saved ! Come, we will all breakfast cheerfully 
 with Madame Minoret." 
 
 The eagerness with which the whole party followed the 
 notary to the posting-house may easily be imagined. Goupil 
 clung to his comrade, taking his arm, saying in his ear with a 
 revolting smile : " There are crayfish ! " 
 
 "What do I care?" replied the son of the house with a 
 shrug. " I am madly in love with Florine, the most heavenly 
 creature in the world." 
 
 "What on earth is Florine without a surname?" asked 
 Goupil. "I am too much your friend to allow you to be 
 made a fool of by hussies." 
 
 " Florine is adored by the famous Nathan, and my folly is 
 of no use, for she positively refuses to marry me."
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 51 
 
 " Girls who are rash with their bodies are sometimes pru- 
 dent with their brains," said Goupil. 
 
 " If you could but see her, only once, you would not make 
 use of such expressions," said Desire languishingly. 
 
 "If I saw you destroying your prospects for what can be 
 only a fancy," retorted Goupil, with a warmth that might 
 perhaps have taken in Bongrand, "I would go and wreck 
 that doll as Varney wrecked Amy Robsart in Kenilworth ! 
 Your wife ought to be a d'Aiglemont, a Mademoiselle du 
 Rouvre, and open your way to being a deputy to the Cham- 
 ber. My future is mortgaged to yours, and I will not allow 
 you to play the fool." 
 
 " I am rich enough to be content with happiness," replied 
 Desire. 
 
 " Well, what are you two plotting? " said Zelie to Goupil, 
 hailing the two young men, who were standing together in 
 the wide stable-yard. 
 
 The doctor turned down the Rue des Bourgeois, and walked 
 on, as briskly as a young man, to his house, where, in the course 
 of the past week, the strange event had taken place which was 
 just now the ruling thought of all the town of Nemours, and 
 of which some account must be given to render this story, 
 and the notary's singular remark to the heirs, more perfectly 
 intelligible. 
 
 The doctor's father-in-law, the famous harpsichord player 
 and instrument-maker, Valentin Mirouet, one of our most 
 celebrated organists, died in 1785, leaving a natural son, the 
 child of his old age, whom he had recognized and called by his 
 name, but who was a thorough scapegrace. He had not the 
 consolation of seeing this spoilt child when on his death-bed ; 
 Joseph Mirouet, a singer and composer, after coming out in 
 Italian opera under an assumed name, had run away to Ger- 
 many with a young girl. The old instrument-maker recom- 
 mended this lad, who was full of talent, to his son-in-law,
 
 52 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 explaining that his object in not marrying the boy's mother 
 was to protect the interests of his daughter, Madame Minoret. 
 The doctor promised to give the unfortunate youth half of 
 the property left by the old man, whose stock and business 
 were bought up by Erard. 
 
 He set to work diplomatically to find his natural half- 
 brother, Joseph Mirouet; but one evening Grimm told him 
 that, after enlisting in a Prussian regiment, the artist had de- 
 serted, and, taking a false name, had escaped all search. 
 
 Joseph Mirouet, gifted by nature with an enchanting voice, 
 a fine figure, and a handsome face, being a composer of taste 
 and spirit into the bargain, led for fifteen years the Bohemian 
 existence which Hofmann of Berlin has so well described. 
 But at the age of forty he was reduced to such misery that in 
 1806 he seized the opportunity of becoming a Frenchman 
 again. He then settled at Hamburg, where he married the 
 daughter of a respectable citizen, who, being music-mad, fell 
 in love with the singer, whose fame was still in the future, and 
 who devoted herself to its attainment. But after fifteen years 
 of penury, Joseph Mirouet's head could not stand the wine 
 of opulence; his extravagant nature reasserted itself; and, 
 though he made his wife happy, in a few years he had spent 
 all her fortune. Misery again came upon them. The house- 
 hold must indeed have been living wretchedly for Joseph 
 Mirouet to come down to enlisting as one of the band in a 
 French regiment. 
 
 In 1813, by the merest chance, the surgeon-major of this 
 regiment, struck by the name of Mirouet, wrote to Doctor 
 Minoret, to whom he owed some obligation. The reply came 
 at once. In 1814, before the capitulation of Paris, Joseph 
 Mirouet had found a home there, and there his wife died in 
 giving birth to a little girl whom the doctor named Ursule, 
 after his wife. The bandmaster did not long survive his wife ; 
 he, like her, was worn out by fatigue and privation. On his 
 death-bed the hapless musician bequeathed his little girl to the
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 53 
 
 doctor, who was her godfather, in spite of his repugnance for 
 what he called church mummeries. 
 
 After losing every child, either by miscarriage, at the time 
 of its birth, or within the first year of its life, the doctor had 
 anxiously looked forward to their last hope. But when a 
 sickly, nervous, delicate woman begins with a miscarriage, it 
 is common enough to see her successive failures, as in the case 
 of Ursule Minoret, in spite of her husband's care, watchful- 
 ness, and learning. The poor man had often blamed himself 
 for their persistent desire to have children. The last of the 
 little ones born to them, after an interval of more than two 
 years, died in 1792, the victim of constitutional nervousness, 
 inherited from its mother, if we may believe the physiologists, 
 who say that, in the inscrutable phenomena of generation, a 
 child takes its blood from the father and its nervous system 
 from the mother. The doctor, compelled to forego the joys 
 of his strongest feelings, no doubt found in benevolence some 
 indemnity for disappointed fatherhood. 
 
 All through his married life, so cruelly agitated, he had 
 wished above everything for a little fair girl, one of those 
 flowers which are the delight of a household ; so he gladly 
 accepted his half-brother's bequest, and transferred all his 
 vanished hopes and dreams to the little orphan. For two 
 years he watched over the minutest details of Ursule's life, as 
 Cato over Pompey ; he would not have her fed, or taken up, 
 or put to bed without his superintendence. His experience 
 and his science were all devoted to this child. After endur- 
 ing all the pangs, the alternations of fear and hope, the 
 anxieties and joys of a mother, he was so happy as to find 
 vigorous vitality and a deeply sensitive nature in this child of 
 the flaxen-haired German mother and the artistic Frenchman. 
 The happy old man watched the growth of that yellow hair 
 with the feelings of a mother first pale down, then silk, then 
 light, fine hair, so caressing to the touch of caressing fingers. 
 He would kiss the tiny feet, the toes through whose fine skin
 
 54 URSULE MIROU&T. 
 
 the blood shows pink, making them look like rosebuds. He 
 was crazy over the child. 
 
 When she tried to speak, or when she fixed her lovely, soft 
 blue eyes on the objects about her, with the wondering look 
 which would seem to be the dawning of ideas, and which she 
 ended with a laugh, he would sit in front of her for whole 
 hours, and he and Jordy would try to find out the reasons 
 which to many have seemed mere caprices concealed under 
 the smallest manifestations of that delightful phase of life 
 when the child is at once flower and fruit, a bewildered intel- 
 ligence, perpetual motion, and vehement desire. Little 
 Ursule's beauty and sweetness made her so precious to the 
 doctor that for her he would gladly have changed the laws of 
 nature ; he would sometimes tell his friend Jordy that he 
 suffered from pain in his teeth when Ursule was cutting hers. 
 
 When old men love a child there is no limit to their pas- 
 sion ; they adore it. For this tiny creature's sake they 
 silence their pet manias, and recall every detail of their past 
 life. Their experience, their forbearance, their patience, all 
 the acquisitions of life a treasure so painfully amassed are 
 poured out for this young life by which they grow young 
 again, and they make up for motherliness by intelligence. 
 Their wisdom, always on the alert, is as good as a mother's 
 intuition ; they remember the exquisite care which in a 
 mother is divination, and infuse it into the exercise of a 
 pitifulness whose strength is great, no doubt, in proportion to 
 that excessive weakness. The slowness of their movements 
 supplies the place of maternal gentleness. And then, in 
 them, as in children, life is reduced to the simplest expres- 
 sion ; if a mother is a slave from feeling, the negation of all 
 passion and the absence of all self-interest allow the old man 
 to sacrifice himself wholly. Hence it is not uncommon to see 
 children and old men make great friends. 
 
 The old officer, the old cur, and the old doctor, happy in 
 TJrsvile's caresses and caprices, were never tired of answering
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 55 
 
 her or playing with her. Her childish petulance, far from 
 fretting them, was their delight ; and they indulged all her 
 desires, while making everything a subject of instruction. 
 Thus the little girl grew up in the midst of old men, who 
 smiled on her, and were to her like so many mothers, all 
 equally attentive and watchful. Thanks to this learned educa- 
 tion, Ursule's soul developed in a congenial sphere. This 
 rare plant found the soil that suited it, inhaled the elements of 
 its true life, and assimilated the flood of its native sunshine. 
 
 "In what faith will you bring this child up?" asked the 
 Abbe Chaperon of Minoret, when Ursule was six years old. 
 
 " In yours," replied the doctor. 
 
 He, an atheist after the pattern of Monsieur de Wolmar in 
 the " Nouvelle Heloi'se," did not see that he had any right to 
 deprive Ursule of the benefits offered by the Catholic faith. 
 
 The physician, just then sitting on a bench outside the 
 window of the Chinese summer-house, felt his hand warmly 
 pressed by that of the cure. 
 
 "Yes, cure, whenever she asks me about God, I shall refer 
 her to her friend ' Sapron,' " said he, mimicking Ursule's baby 
 accent. " I wish to see whether religious feeling is innate. 
 So far, therefore, I have done nothing either for or against 
 the tendencies of this young soul ; but I have already, in my 
 heart, appointed you her spiritual director." 
 
 " It will be accounted to you by God, I trust ! " said the 
 cure, gently patting his hands together, and raising them to 
 heaven, as though he were putting up a short mental prayer. 
 
 So, at the age of six, the little orphan came under the 
 religious influence of the cure", as she had already under that 
 of her old friend Jordy. 
 
 The captain, formerly a professor in one of the old military 
 schools, and interested in grammar and the divergencies of 
 European tongues, had studied the problem of an universal 
 language. This learned man, patient as all old teachers are, 
 made it his pleasure to teach Ursule to read and write, in-
 
 68 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 strutting her in French, and in so much arithmetic as it was 
 needful that she should know. The doctor's extensive library 
 allowed of a choice of books fit to be read by a child, and 
 adapted to amuse as well as to instruct her. The soldier and 
 the priest left her mind to develop naturally and easily, as the 
 doctor left her body. Ursule learned in play. Religion in- 
 cluded reflection. 
 
 Thus left to the divine culture of a nature guided by these 
 three judicious teachers into a realm of purity, Ursule tended 
 towards feeling rather than duty, and took as her rule of life 
 the voice of conscience rather than social law. In her, beauty 
 of sentiment and action would always be spontaneous ; her 
 judgment would come in to confirm the impulse of her heart. 
 She was fated to do right as a pleasure before doing it as an 
 obligation. This tone is the peculiar result of a Christian 
 education. These principles, quite unlike those to be incul- 
 cated in a man, are suited to a woman, the soul and conscience 
 of the family, the latent elegance of home life, the queen, or 
 little less, of the household. 
 
 They all three acted in the same manner with this child. 
 Far from being startled by the audacity of childish innocence, 
 they explained to Ursule the purpose of things and their 
 known processes, without ever giving her an inaccurate impres- 
 sion. When in her questioning about a plant, a flower, or a 
 star, she went directly to God, the professor and the doctor 
 alike told her that only the cure could answer her. Neither 
 of them intruded on the ground of the other. Her godfather 
 took charge of her physical progress and the matters of daily 
 life; her lessons were Jordy's affair; morality, metaphysics, 
 and all higher matters were left to the cure. 
 
 This excellent education was not counteracted by bad ser- 
 vants, as is sometimes the case in wealthier houses. La Bou- 
 gival, well lectured on the subject and, indeed, far too 
 simple in mind and nature to interfere did nothing to mar 
 the work of these great spirits.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 57 
 
 Thus Ursule, a privileged creature, had to nurture her three 
 good genii, who found their task easy and pleasant with so 
 sweet a nature as hers. This manly tenderness, this serious- 
 ness tempered by smiles, this freedom without risk, this in- 
 cessant care of mind and body, had made her, at the age of 
 nine, a delightful and lovely child. Then, unfortunately, the 
 fatherly trio was broken up. In the following year the old 
 captain died, leaving it to the doctor and the cure to carry 
 on his work, after he had achieved the most difficult part of 
 it. Flowers would spring up naturally in a soil so well pre- 
 pared. The good gentleman had, during these nine years, 
 saved a thousand francs a year, and left ten thousand francs 
 to his little Ursule, that she might have something to remem- 
 ber him by all her life through. In his will, full of pathetic 
 feeling, he begged his legatee to spend the four or five hun- 
 dred francs a year of interest on this little capital exclusively 
 on dress. 
 
 When the justice placed seals on his old friend's possessions, 
 he found, in a closet which no one had ever been allowed to 
 enter, a quantity of toys, most of them broken, and all used ; 
 toys of the past, piously treasured, which Monsieur Bongrand 
 himself was to burn, by the poor captain's desire. 
 
 Not long after this, Ursule was to take her first communion. 
 The Abbe Chaperon devoted a whole year to instructing the 
 young girl, in whom heart and brain, so early developed, but 
 so wisely dependent on each other, required a specific spiritual 
 nourishment. And this initiation into a knowledge of divine 
 things was of such a nature that from this period, when the 
 soul takes its religious mould, Ursule became a pious and 
 mystical young creature, whose character was always superior 
 to events, and whose heart could triumph over adversity. 
 Then it was that a secret struggle began between infidel old 
 age and fully-believing youth ; a struggle of which she who 
 had challenged it was long unaware, but of which the issue 
 had set the town by the ears, while it was destined to have
 
 58 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 great influence on Ursula's future life, by unchaining against 
 her the doctor's collateral relations. 
 
 During the first six months of the year 1824, Ursule almost 
 always spent the morning at the cure's house. The old doctor 
 divined the abbe's intention ; he wanted to make Ursule 
 herself an invincible argument. The unbeliever, beloved by 
 his god-daughter as though she were his own child, would 
 believe in her simplicity, and be attracted by the touching 
 effects of religion in the soul of a girl whose love, like the 
 trees of the tropical forest, was always loaded with flowers 
 and fruit, always fresh, and always fragrant. A beautiful life 
 is more powerful than the most cogent arguments. It is 
 impossible to resist the charm of certain images. And 
 the doctor's eyes filled with tears, he knew not why, when he 
 saw the child of his heart set out for church dressed in a 
 frock of white gauze, with white satin shoes, graced with 
 white ribbons, a fillet of white round her head tied on one 
 side with a large bow, her hair rippling in a thousand 
 waves over her pretty white shoulders, her bodice trimmed 
 with a pleating mixed with narrow bows, her eyes shining 
 like stars, from new hopes, loving her godfather all the 
 more since her soul had risen to God. When he perceived 
 the idea of eternity supplying nourishment to the soul 
 hitherto wrapped in the darkness of childhood, as the sun 
 brings life to the world after the night is past, he felt 
 vexed to remain alone at home, still without knowing why. 
 Seated on the balcony steps, his eyes remained long fixed on 
 the bars of the gate through which his godchild had passed, 
 saying, " Why are you not coming too, godfather? Am I 
 to be happy without you? " 
 
 Though shaken to the foundations, the encyclopedist's 
 pride did not once give way. However, he went out to 
 look at the little procession, and saw his little Ursule 
 radiant with exaltation under her veil. She flashed an 
 inspired look at him, which struck to the stoniest corner
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 59 
 
 of his heart, the spot closed against God. Still the deist 
 was firm. " Mummery ! " he said to himself. "To imagine 
 that if a Maker of worlds exists, such an Organizer of 
 infinitude can trouble Himself about this foolish trumpery!" 
 
 He laughed, and pursued his walk along the heights 
 which overhang the road through the Gatinais, where the 
 church bells, ringing loud peals, announced the gladness of 
 many a home. 
 
 The clatter of backgammon is intolerable to those who 
 do not know the game, one of the most difficult that exist. 
 Not to disturb his little girl whose extreme delicacy of ear 
 and nerves aid not allow of her enduring this rattle and their 
 talk without apparent meaning the cure, old Jordy during 
 his lifetime, and Dr. Minoret postponed their game till the 
 child was in bed or out walking. It often happened that it 
 was unfinished when she came in again, and she then sub- 
 mitted with the best possible grace, and sat down by the 
 window to sew. She disliked the game, which at the begin- 
 ning is no doubt dry and dull, to many minds repellent, and 
 so difficult to master, that those who have not become accus- 
 tomed to it in their youth find it almost impossible to learn 
 in later life. 
 
 Now on the evening after her first communion, when 
 Ursule came back to her guardian and found him alone 
 for that day, she set the backgammon board in front of 
 the old man. 
 
 " Now whose throw will it be ? " said she. 
 
 "Ursule," said the doctor, "is it not sinful to make 
 game of your godfather on the very day of your first com- 
 munion ? " 
 
 "I am not making game," said she, seating herself. "I 
 must think of your pleasure you who are always thinking of 
 mine. Whenever Monsieur Chaperon was pleased with me, 
 he gave me a lesson in backgammon, and he has given me so 
 many that I am prepared to beat you. YOU will not have to
 
 60 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 put yourself to inconvenience for me. I have conquered 
 every difficulty, not to interfere with your amusement, and I 
 really like the rattle of the dice." 
 
 Ursule won the game. The cure came in, taking them by 
 surprise, and enjoyed her triumph. 
 
 Next day Minoret, who had hitherto refused to allow the 
 girl to learn music, went to Paris, bought a piano, and made 
 arrangements with a mistress at Fontainebleau, submitting to 
 the annoyance which Ursule's constant practicing could not 
 fail to cause him. One of his lost friend Jordy's phrenolog- 
 ical prognostics proved true the girl became an excellent 
 musician. The doctor, proud of his god-daughter, now got 
 an old German named Schmucke, a learned professor of music, 
 to come from Paris once a week, and paid the cost of an art 
 which he had at first contemned as perfectly useless in home 
 life. Unbelievers do not love music, that heavenly language 
 worked out by Catholicism, which found the names of the 
 seven notes in one of its hymns. Each note is called by the 
 first syllable of the seven first lines of the hymn to St. John. 
 
 The impression produced on the old man by Ursule's first 
 communion, though vivid, was transient. The calm content- 
 ment which acts of resolution and prayer diffused in her 
 young soul were also examples of which he took no account. 
 Minoret, having no subjects for remorse or repentance, 
 enjoyed perfect serenity of mind. Doing all his acts of benev- 
 olence without any hope of an eternal harvest, he thought 
 himself superior to the Catholic, who, as he always said, was 
 merely making a profitable bargain with God. 
 
 "And yet," the Abb6 Chaperon would say, "if all men 
 went in for this business, you must admit that society might 
 be perfect. There would be no more misery. To be benev- 
 olent on your lines, a man must be a great philosopher. You 
 raise yourself to your principles by reason you are a social 
 exception ; now you need only be a Christian to be benevo- 
 lent on ours. With you it is an effort ; with us it is natural,"
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 61 
 
 " Which is as much as to say, cure, that I think and you 
 feel. That is all." 
 
 Meanwhile, having reached the age of twelve, Ursule, 
 whose womanly tact and shrewdness were brought into play 
 by a superior education, and whose sense, now in its blossom, 
 was enlightened by a religious spirit, fully understood that her 
 godfather believed not in a future life, nor in the immortality 
 of the soul, nor in Providence, nor in God. The doctor, 
 pressed by her innocent questioning, found it impossible any 
 longer to hide the terrible secret. Ursule' s naive consterna- 
 tion at first made him smile ; but then, seeing that she was 
 sometimes sad, he understood how great an affection this 
 dejection revealed. Unqualified love has a horror of every 
 kind of discord, even in things which have no connection 
 with itself. The old man would sometimes lend himself, as to 
 a caress, to the arguments of his adopted child, spoken in a 
 gentle and tender voice, and the outcome of the most pure 
 and ardent feeling. But believers and unbelievers speak two 
 different languages, and cannot understand each other. The 
 young girl in pleading the cause of God was hard upon her 
 godfather, as a spoilt child is sometimes hard upon its 
 mother. 
 
 The cure gently reproved her, telling her that God reserved 
 to Himself the power of humbling such proud spirits. The 
 young girl answered the abb6 by saying that David slew 
 Goliath. These religious differences, these sorrows of the 
 child who longed to lead her guardian to God, were the only 
 griefs of their home-life, so simple and so full, and hidden 
 from the gaze of the inquisitive little town. 
 
 Ursule grew up and developed into the modest, Christianly 
 trained maiden whom Desire had admired as she came out of 
 church. The culture of the flowers in the garden, music, 
 amusing her guardian and all the attentions she paid him 
 for Ursule had relieved La Bougival by taking care of the old 
 man all filled up the hours, days, and months of this tranquil
 
 62 VRSULE MIROUET. 
 
 existence. For a year past, indeed, some little ailments of 
 Ursule's had made the doctor anxious; but they did not 
 disturb him beyond making him watchful of her health. 
 Meanwhile, however, the sagacious observer and experienced 
 practitioner fancied he could discern that to her physical 
 disorders there was some corresponding disturbance in her 
 mind. He watched her with a mother's eye, but, seeing no 
 one in their circle worthy to inspire her with love, he made 
 himself easy. 
 
 Under these circumstances, just a month before the day 
 when this drama had its beginning, an event occurred in the 
 doctor's intellectual life one of those incidents which plough 
 into the subsoil, so to speak, of our convictions, and turn up 
 its very depths. But it will first be necessary to give a brief 
 account of some facts of his medical career, which will also 
 lend fresh interest to this narrative. 
 
 At the end of the eighteenth century science was as deeply 
 rent by the apparition of Mesmer as art was by that of Gluck. 
 After his rediscovery of magnetism, Mesmer came to France, 
 whither from time immemorial inventors have resorted to 
 find protection for their discoveries. France, thanks to the 
 lucidity of her language, is as it were the trumpeter of the 
 world. 
 
 "If homoeopathy gets to Paris, it is safe ! " said Hahne- 
 mann. 
 
 "Go to France," said Metternich to Gall, "and if they 
 laugh at your ' bumps,' you are a made man." 
 
 Mesmer, then, had his disciples and his antagonists, as 
 ardent as the Piccinists against the Gluckists. Scientific 
 France was stirred, and a serious debate was set on foot. 
 Until judgment should be pronounced, the faculty of medi- 
 cine, in a body, proscribed what they called Mesmer's quack- 
 ery, his tub, his conduct! ng^ wires, and his theories. But it 
 must be said that the German compromised his splendid dis-
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 63 
 
 covery by preposterous pecuniary demands. Mesmer failed 
 through unproven facts, through his ignorance of the part 
 played in nature by imponderable fluids not as yet investi- 
 gated, and through his inability to study all sides of a science 
 which has three aspects. Magnetism has more applications ; 
 in Mesmer's hands it was in relation to its future develop- 
 ment what a principle is to results. But though the discoverer 
 lacked genius, it is sad for human reason and for France to 
 have to own that a science contemporaneous with the earliest 
 civilization, cultivated in Egypt and Chaldea, in Greece and 
 in India, met in Paris at the high-tide of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury with the same fate as the truth embodied in Galileo in 
 the sixteenth ; and that magnetism was put out of court by 
 the twofold attainder of religious believers and of materi- 
 alist philosophers, both equally alarmed. Magnetism, the 
 favorite science of Jesus, and one of the powers conferred on 
 the apostles, seems to have been as little recognized by the 
 church as by the followers of Jean-Jacques and Voltaire, of 
 Locke and Condillac. Neither the encyclopedia nor the 
 priesthood could come to terms with this ancient human force 
 which seemed to them so novel. The miracles of the convul- 
 sionnaires were smothered by the church and by the indiffer- 
 ence of the learned, in spite of the valuable works of Carre de 
 Montgeron ; still, they were the first summons to make ex- 
 periments on the fluids in the human body which supply the 
 power of calling up enough spontaneous forces to nullify the 
 pain caused by an external agency. But it would have neces- 
 sitated the recognition of fluids that are intangible, invisible, 
 and imponderable, the three negations which science at that 
 time regarded as the definition of a vacuum. 
 
 To modern science a vacuum is impossible. Given ten feet 
 of vacuum, and the world is in ruins ! To materialists espe- 
 cially the world is absolutely full, everything is closely linked 
 and connected, and acts mechanically. 
 
 "The world," said Diderot, "as a result of mere change
 
 64 VRSULE MIROUET. 
 
 is more intelligible than God. The multiplicity of causes, 
 and the immeasurable number of throws that chance presup- 
 poses, sufficiently account for creation. Given the ' ^Eneid ' 
 and all the letters necessary to set it up, if you grant me time 
 and space, by dint of tossing the letters, I should bring out 
 the combination forming the ' JEneid.' ' These wretched 
 men, who would deify everything rather than confess a God, 
 shrank no less from the infinite divisibility of matter which is 
 implied in the nature of an imponderable force. Locke and 
 Condillac at that time delayed by fifty years the immense 
 advance which natural science is now making under the con- 
 ception of unity which we owe to the great Geoffroy Saint- 
 Hilaire. 
 
 Some honest minds, devoid of system, convinced by the 
 facts they had conscientiously studied, persisted in holding 
 the doctrine of Mesmer, who discerned the existence in man 
 of a penetrating influence, giving one individual power over 
 another, and brought into play by the will ; an influence 
 which is curative when the fluid is abundant, and which acts 
 as a duel between two wills the evil to be cured and the 
 will to cure it. The phenomena of somnambulism, hardly 
 suspected by Mesmer, were detected by MM. de Puys6gur 
 and Deleuze; but the Revolution brought a pause in these 
 discoveries, which left the men of learning and the scoffers in 
 possession of the field. 
 
 Among the small number of believers were some physi- 
 cians ; these seceders were persecuted by their brethren till 
 the day of their death. The respectable faculty of doctors in 
 Paris turned against the Mesmerists with all the rigor of a 
 religious warfare, and were as cruel in their hatred as it was 
 possible to be in a period of Voltairean tolerance. The 
 orthodox physicians refused to meet in consultation with those 
 who adhered to the Mesmerian heresy. In 1820, these re- 
 puted heresiarchs were still the object of this unformulated 
 proscription. The disasters and storms of the Revolution did
 
 THE HEIRS IX ALARM. 65 
 
 not extinguish this scientific hostility. None but priests, 
 lawyers, and physicians can hate in this way. The " gown " 
 is always terrible. But are not ideas certain to be more 
 implacable than things? Doctor Bouvard, a friend of Min- 
 oret, accepted the new creed, and to his dying day persisted 
 in the scientific faith to which he sacrificed the peace of his 
 whole life for he was the pet aversion of the Paris faculty. 
 Minoret, one of the bravest supporters of the encyclopedists, 
 and the most redoubtable adversary of Deslon, Mesmer's 
 chief disciple, since his pen had great weight in this dispute, 
 quarreled beyond remedy with his old comrade; he did 
 worse, he persecuted him. His behavior to Bouvard must 
 have caused him the only repentance that can have clouded 
 the serenity of his declining life. 
 
 Since Doctor Minoret's retirement to Nemours, the science 
 of imponderable agents the only name applicable to magnet- 
 ism of which the phenomena ally it so closely with electric- 
 ity and light had made immense progress, in spite of the 
 unfailing mockery of the Paris world of science. Phrenology 
 and physiognomy, the sciences of Gall and Lavater, twins, of 
 which one is to the other as cause to effect, demonstrated to 
 the eyes of more than one physiologist certain traces of the 
 intangible fluid which is the basis of the phenomena of human 
 will, giving rise to passions and habits, to the forms of the 
 features and of the skull. Magnetic facts too, the miracles of 
 somnambulism, and those of divination and ecstasy, allowing 
 us to enter into the world of spirit, were multiplying. The 
 strange tale of the apparitions seen by Martin, a farmer, 
 which were amply proved, and that peasant's interview with 
 Louis XVIII.; the statements as to Swedenborg's intercourse 
 with the dead, seriously accepted in Germany ; Walter Scott's 
 narratives of the results of second-sight ; the amazing facul-' 
 ties displayed by some fortune-tellers, who combined into one 
 science chiromancy, card-reading, and horoscopy ; the facts 
 of catalepsy, and of the peculiar action of the diaphragm 
 5
 
 66 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 under certain morbid influences ; all these phenomena, curi- 
 ous, to say the least, and all emanating from the same source, 
 undermined much doubt, and led the most indifferent into the 
 province of experiment. Minoret knew nothing of this 
 movement of mind, vast in Northern Europe, though still 
 small in France, where, nevertheless, certain facts occurred 
 which superficial observers called marvelous, but which fell 
 like stones to the bottom of the sea in the whirlpool of events 
 in Paris. 
 
 At the beginning of this year the anti-mesmerist was greatly 
 disturbed by receiving the following letter : 
 
 " MY OLD COMRADE : Every friendship, even a lost friend- 
 ship, has rights which it is not easy to set aside. I know that 
 you are still alive, and I remember less of our hostilities than 
 of our happy days in the little dens of Saint-Julien-le-pauvre. 
 Now that I am about to quit this world, I cling to a hope of 
 proving to you that magnetism is destined to be one of the 
 most important of sciences unless, indeed all science should 
 not be regarded as one. I can wreck your incredulity by posi- 
 tive proofs. Perhaps I may gain from your curiosity the 
 happiness of once more clasping your hand as we used to 
 clasp hands before the days of Mesmer. Always yours, 
 
 " BOUVARD." 
 
 The anti-mesmerist, stung as a lion by a gadfly, rushed off 
 to Paris and left his card on old Bouvard, who lived in the 
 Rue Ferou, near Saint Sulpice. Bouvard sent a card to his 
 hotel, writing on it, " To-morrow at nine o'clock, Rue St. 
 Honorg, opposite the Church of the Assumption." 
 
 Minoret, grown young again, did not sleep. He went to 
 call on the old physicians of his acquaintance, and asked 
 them if the world were turned upside down, if there were 
 still a school of medicine, and if the four faculties still existed. 
 The doctors reassured him by telling him that the old spirit
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 67 
 
 of resistance still survived ; only, instead of persecuting the 
 new science, the academies of medicine and of sciences 
 roared with laughter, and classed magnetic demonstrations 
 with the tricks of Comus, Comte, and Bosco, as jugglery, 
 sleight-of-hand, and what is known as amusing physics. 
 
 These speeches did not hinder Minoret from going to the 
 rendezvous appointed by old Bouvard. After forty-four years 
 of alienation the antagonists met again under a courtyard 
 gate in the Rue St. Honore. 
 
 Frenchmen live in too constant a change to hate each other 
 very long. In Paris, especially, events expand space and 
 make life so wide in politics, in science, and in literature 
 that men cannot fail to find countries in it to conquer where 
 their demands find room to dwell and rule. Hatred requires 
 so many forces always in arms that those who mean to hate 
 persistently begin with a good supply. And then, only bodies 
 of men can bear it in mind. At the end of forty-four years 
 Robespierre and Danton would fall on each other's neck. 
 
 Neither of the two doctors, however, offered to shake 
 hands. Bouvard was the first to say to Minoret (with the 
 familiar tu of French good-fellowship) 
 
 " You are looking very well." 
 
 "Yes, not so badly; and you?" said Minoret, the ice 
 being broken. 
 
 " I as you see me." 
 
 " Has magnetism kept you from dying? " asked Minoret in 
 a bantering tone, but not bitterly. 
 
 " No ; but it has almost kept me from living." 
 
 "You are not rich then ?" said Minoret. 
 
 " Rich ? " said Bouvard. 
 
 "Well, but I am rich ! " cried Minoret. 
 
 " It is not your fortune, but your conviction, that I aim at. 
 Come," replied Bouvard. 
 
 "Obstinate fellow! " exclaimed Minoret. 
 
 The believer in Mesmer led his incredulous friend into a
 
 68 URSULE MIROUhT. 
 
 dark stairway, and made him mount cautiously to the fourth 
 floor. 
 
 At this time there was in Paris an extraordinary man en- 
 dowed by faith with stupendous powers, and a master of mag- 
 netic forces in every form of their application. Not only 
 did this great unknown, who is still living, cure unaided, and 
 at any distance, the most painful and inveterate diseases cure 
 them suddenly and radically, as of old did the Redeemer of 
 man but he also could produce at any moment the most 
 curious phenomena of somnambulism by quelling the most 
 refractory wills. The countenance of the unknown, who, like 
 Swedenborg, declares himself to be commissioned by God 
 and in communion with the angels, is that of a lion ; it is 
 radiant with concentrated and irresistible energy. His feat- 
 ures, of a singular cast, have a terrible and overwhelming 
 power ; his voice, coming from the depths of his being, seems 
 charged with magnetic fluid, and enters the listener by every 
 pore. 
 
 Disgusted with the ingratitude of the public after thousands 
 of cures, he had thrown himself into unapproachable solitude, 
 voluntary annihilation. His all-powerful hand, which has 
 restored dying daughters to their mothers, fathers to their 
 weeping children, adored mistresses to lovers crazed with 
 love ; which has cured the sick when physicians have given 
 them over, and caused thanksgivings to be sung in the syna- 
 gogue, in the conventicle, and in the church by priests of 
 different creeds, all brought to the same God by the same 
 miracle ; which has mitigated the agony of death to those for 
 whom life was no longer possible that sovereign hand, the 
 sun of life which dazzled the closed eyes of the sleep-walker, 
 he now would not lift to restore the heir of a kingdom to a 
 queen. Wrapped in the memory of the good he has done as 
 in a luminous shroud he has shut his door on the world, and 
 dwells in the skies. 
 
 But, in the early days of his reign, almost startled by his
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 69 
 
 own powers, this man, whose disinterestedness was as great as 
 his influence, allowed a few inquirers to witness his miracles. 
 The rumor of his fame, which had been immense, and which 
 might revive any day, aroused Doctor Bouvard on the brink 
 of the tomb. The persecuted believer in Mesmer could at last 
 behold the most brilliant manifestation of the science he 
 cherished, like a treasure, in his heart. The old man's mis- 
 fortunes had touched the great unknown, who granted him 
 certain privileges. So Bouvard, as they climbed the stairs, 
 took his old adversary's banter with malicious satisfaction. 
 He made no reply but, "You will see, you will see," with 
 the little tosses of the head that mark a man sure of his case. 
 
 The two doctors entered a suite of rooms of the plainest 
 simplicity. Bouvard went to speak with the master for a 
 moment in a bedroom adjoining the drawing-room, where he 
 left Minoret, whose distrust was now aroused. But Bouvard 
 immediately came back, and led him into the bedroom, where 
 he found the famous Swedenborgian with a woman seated in 
 an armchair. The woman did not rise, and seemed not to 
 observe the arrival of the two old men. 
 
 "What, no tub?" said Minoret, with a smile. 
 
 "Nothing but the power of God," gravely replied the 
 Swedenborgian, whom Minoret supposed to be a man of about 
 fifty. 
 
 The three men sat down, and the stranger made conversa- 
 tion. They spoke of the weather and indifferent matters, to 
 old Minoret's great surprise ; he fancied he was being fooled. 
 The Swedenborgian questioned his visitor as to his scientific 
 views, and was evidently taking time to study him. 
 
 "You have come here out of pure curiosity, monsieur," he 
 said at length. " I am not in the habit of prostituting a 
 power which, it is my full conviction, emanates from God ; 
 if I made a frivolous or evil use of it, it might be taken from 
 me. However, Monsieur Bouvard tells me our aim is to be 
 the conversion of an opinion antagonistic to ours, and the
 
 70. URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 enlightenment of a man of learning and good faith. I shall 
 therefore satisfy you. The woman, you see there," he went 
 on, pointing to the armchair, " is in a magnetic sleep. From 
 the accounts and revelations of all such somnambulists, the 
 state is one of great beatitude, during which the inner being, 
 set free from the fetters by which visible nature hinders the 
 full exercise of its faculties, wanders through the world which 
 we erroneously call invisible. Sight and hearing are then far 
 more perfectly active than in the state which we call being 
 awake, and independent, perhaps, of the medium of those 
 organs which are but as a sheath to the blades of light that 
 we call sight and hearing. To a man in that condition dis- 
 tance and material obstacles have ceased to exist, or are 
 pierced through by an internal vitality of which our body is 
 the container, the necessary fulcrum, a mere wrapper. Terms 
 are lacking for results so recently rediscovered ; for the words 
 imponderable, intangible, invisible have no meaning in rela- 
 tion to the fluid whose action is perceptible through magnet- 
 ism. Light is ponderable by heat, which, when it penetrates 
 a body, increases its volume ; and electricity is only too tangi- 
 ble. We have passed judgment on things instead of blaming 
 the imperfection of our instruments." 
 
 "She is asleep?" asked Minoret, examining the woman, 
 who seemed to him of the lower class. 
 
 " Her body is in a certain sense annihilated," replied the 
 Swedenborgian. "Ignorant persons mistake this state for 
 sleep. But she will prove to you that there is a spiritual 
 world, where the spirit does not obey the laws of the physical 
 universe. I will send her to any region whither you may 
 choose that she shall go, twenty leagues away, or as far as 
 China; she will tell you what is happening there." 
 
 " Send her only to my house at Nemours," replied Minoret. 
 
 "I will not interfere between you," said the mysterious 
 man. " Give me your hand ; you shall be at once actor and 
 spectator, cause and effect."
 
 HE TOOK MINORET'S HAND AND WITH HIS OTHER HAND 
 
 HE TOOK THAT OF THE WOMAN IN THE CHAIR.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 71 
 
 He took Minoret's hand, Minoret yielding ; he held it for 
 a minute with an apparent concentration of thought, and with 
 his other hand he took that of the woman in the chair ; then 
 he placed the doctor's hand in the woman's, signing to the 
 old skeptic to sit down by the side of this Pythoness without 
 a tripod. Minoret observed a slight thrill in the excessively 
 calm face of the woman when the Swedenborgian placed them 
 in contact ; but the movement, though marvelous in its re- 
 sults, was in itself extremely simple. 
 
 "Obey this gentleman," said the unknown, extending his 
 hand over the head of the woman, who seemed to inhale light 
 and life from him. " And remember that all you do for him 
 will please me. Now, you can speak to her," he said to 
 Minoret. 
 
 "Go to Nemours, Rue des Bourgeois, to my house," said 
 the doctor. 
 
 " Give her time ; hold her hand till she shows by what she 
 says that she is there," said Bouvard to his old friend. 
 
 " I see a river," replied the woman in a low voice, and 
 seeming to be looking attentively within herself, in spite of 
 her closed eyes. " I see a pretty garden." 
 
 "Why have you begun by the river and the garden?" 
 asked Minoret. 
 
 " Because they are in the garden." 
 
 "Who?" 
 
 "The young lady and her nurse, of whom you are think- 
 ing." 
 
 "What is the garden like? " asked Minoret. 
 
 " As you go into it by the steps that lead to the river there 
 is a long gallery to the right, built of brick, in which I see 
 books, and at the end there is a little gazebo trimmed up with 
 wooden bells and red eggs. The wall on the left is covered 
 with creepers Virginia creeper and yellow jasmine. There 
 is a little sun-dial in the middle ; there are a great many pots 
 of flowers. Your ward is looking at the flowers and showing
 
 72 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 them to her nurse ; she makes holes with a dibble and sows 
 some seeds. The nurse is raking the path. Though the girl 
 is as pure as an angel, there is a dawning of love in her, as 
 faint as the first light of morning." 
 
 "For whom?" asked the doctor, who had so far heard 
 nothing that any one might not have told him without being 
 a clairvoyant. He still believed it was a trick. 
 
 " You know nothing of it, though you were somewhat anx- 
 ious not long since as she grew up," said the woman, smiling. 
 " The instincts of her heart followed the development of her 
 nature." 
 
 "And it is quite a common woman who speaks thus?" 
 exclaimed the old doctor. 
 
 "In this state they all speak with peculiar lucidity," re- 
 plied Bouvard. 
 
 " But who is it that Ursule loves? " 
 
 " Ursule does not know that she is in love," answered the 
 woman, with a little shake of her head. " She is too angel- 
 ically innocent to be conscious of desire, or of love in any 
 kind ; but she wonders over him, she thinks of him ; she 
 even forbids herself to do so, and returns in spite of her 
 determination to avoid it. Now she is at the piano " 
 
 "But who is he?" 
 
 "The son of the lady who lives opposite." 
 
 " Madame de Portenduere? " 
 
 "Portenduere, did you say?" replied the clairvoyant. 
 " I daresay. But there is no danger ; he is not at home? " 
 
 " Have they ever spoken to each other? " 
 
 " Never. They have looked at each other. She thinks 
 him charming. And he really is very good-looking, and he 
 has a good heart. She has watched him out of her window, 
 and they have seen each other at church ; but the young man 
 thinks no more about it." 
 
 "What is his name?" 
 
 " I cannot tell you unless I should read it or hear it
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 73 
 
 His name is Savinien ; she has just spoken it ; she likes the 
 sound of it ; she had looked in the calendar for his saint's 
 day, and had marked it with a tiny red spot. Childish ! Oh, 
 she will love very truly, and with a love as pure as it is strong. 
 She is not the girl to love twice ; love will color her whole 
 soul, and fill it so completely, that she will reject every other 
 feeling." 
 
 " Where do you see that ? " 
 
 "I see it in her. She will know how to bear suffering ; 
 she has inherited that power, for her father and mother suffered 
 much." 
 
 The last words overset the doctor, who was surprised rather 
 than shaken. It is desirable to note that ten or fifteen min- 
 utes passed between each of the woman's statements; during 
 these her attention became more and more self-centred. He 
 could see that she saw ! Her brow showed peculiar changes ; 
 internal effort was to be seen there ; it cleared or was knit by 
 a power whose effects Minoret had never seen but in dying 
 people at the moment when the prophetic spirit is upon them. 
 She not unfrequently made gestures reminding him of Ursule. 
 
 " Oh, question her," said the mysterious master to Minoret. 
 " She will tell you secrets that none but yourself can know." 
 
 " Does Ursule love me?" said Minoret. 
 
 "Almost as she loves God," replied the sleeper, with a 
 smile. " And she is very unhappy about your infidelity. You 
 do not believe in God, as if you could hinder His being ! 
 His voice fills the world ! And so you are the cause of the 
 poor child's only distress. There ! she is playing her scales ; 
 she wishes to be a better musician than she is, and is vexed 
 with herself. What she thinks is : ' If I only could sing 
 well, if I had a fine voice, when he was at his mother's it 
 would be sure to reach his ears ! ' 
 
 Doctor Minoret took out a note-book and wrote down the 
 exact hour. 
 
 " Can you tell me what seeds she has sown ?"
 
 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 " Mignonette, sweet peas, balsams " 
 
 "And lastly?" 
 
 "Larkspur." 
 
 " Where is my money?" 
 
 " At your lawyer's ; but you invest as it comes in without 
 losing a day's interest." 
 
 " Yes ; but where is the money I keep at home for the half- 
 yearly housekeeping ? " 
 
 " You keep it in a large book bound in red, called ' The 
 Pandects of Justinian,' vol. ii., between the two last pages; 
 the book is above the sideboard with glass doors, in the divi- 
 sion for folios. There is a whole row of them. The money 
 is in the last volume at the end next the drawing-room. By 
 the way, vol. iii. is placed before vol. ii. But it is not money 
 it is in " 
 
 " Thousand franc notes? " asked the doctor. 
 
 " I cannot see clearly ; they are folded up. No, there are 
 two notes for five hundred francs each." 
 
 " You can see them ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "What are they like?" 
 
 "One is old, and very yellow; the other is white, and 
 almost new." 
 
 This last part of the interview left Doctor Minoret thunder- 
 struck. He looked at Bouvard in blank amazement ; but 
 Bouvard and the Swedenborgian, who were accustomed to 
 the astonishment of skeptics, were conversing in an undertone, 
 without showing any surprise or amazement. 
 
 Minoret begged them to allow him to return after dinner. 
 The anti-mesmerist wanted to think it over, to shake off his 
 extreme terror, so as to test once more this immense power, to 
 submit it to some decisive experiment, and ask some questions 
 which, if answered, could leave no shadow of a doubt. 
 
 "Be here by nine o'clock," said the unknown. "I shall 
 be at your service."
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 75 
 
 Minoret was so violently agitated that he went away with- 
 out taking leave, followed by Bouvard, who called after him 
 
 "Well? Well?" 
 
 "I believe I am mad," replied Minoret, as they reached 
 the outer door. "If that woman has told the truth about 
 Ursule, as there is no one on earth but Ursule who can know 
 what the sorceress has revealed you are right. I only wish I 
 had wings to fly to Nemours and verify her statements. But 
 I will hire a post-chaise and start at ten this evening. Oh ! I 
 am going crazy ! " 
 
 "What would you think, then, if you had known a man 
 incurable for years made perfectly well in five seconds ; if you 
 could see that great magnetizer make a leper sweat profusely ; 
 or make a crippled woman walk? " 
 
 " Let us dine together, Bouvard, and stay with me till nine 
 o'clock. I want to devise some decisive and irrefutable test." 
 
 " Certainly, old friend," replied the Mesmerian doctor. 
 
 The reconciled enemies went to dine at the Palais Royal. 
 After an eager conversation, which helped Minoret to escape 
 from the turmoil of ideas that racked his brain, Bouvard said 
 to him 
 
 "If you discern in this woman a real power to annihilate 
 space, if you can but convince yourself that she, here, from 
 the Church of the Assumption, can see and hear what is going 
 on at Nemours, you must then admit all other effects of mag- 
 netism ; they are to a skeptic quite as impossible as these. 
 Ask her, therefore, one single proof that may satisfy you, for 
 you may imagine that we have procured all this information. 
 But we cannot possibly know, for instance, what will happen 
 this evening at nine o'clock in your house, in your ward's 
 bedroom. Remember or write down exactly what the clair- 
 voyant may tell you, and hasten home. Little Ursule, whom 
 I never saw, is not our accomplice ; and, if she shall have 
 done or said what you will have written down, bow thy head, 
 proud infidel ! "
 
 76 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 The two friends returned to the Swedenborgian's rooms, 
 and there found the woman, who did not recognize Doctor 
 Minoret. Her eyes gently closed under the hand which the 
 master stretched out to her from afar, and she sank into the 
 attitude in which Minoret had seen her before dinner. When 
 his hand and hers were placed in connection he desired her 
 to tell him all that was happening in his house at Nemours at 
 that moment. 
 
 " What is Ursule doing? " he asked. 
 
 " She is in her dressing-gown ; she has finished putting in 
 her curl-papers ; she is kneeling on her prie-Dieu in front of 
 an ivory crucifix fastened on to a panel of red velvet." 
 
 " What is she saying ? " 
 
 "Her evening prayers; she commends herself to God; 
 she beseeches Him to keep her soul free from evil thoughts ; 
 she examines her conscience, going over all she has done 
 during the day to see whether she has failed in obedience to 
 His commandments or those of the church ; she is stripping 
 her heart bare, poor dear little thing." There were tears in 
 the clairvoyant's eyes. " She has committed no sin ; but 
 she blames herself for having thought too much of Monsieur 
 Savinien," she went on. " She stops to wonder what he is 
 doing in Paris, and prays to God to make him happy. She 
 ends with you, and says a prayer aloud." 
 
 " Can you repeat it ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Minoret took out his pencil and wrote at the woman's 
 dictation the following prayer, evidently composed by the 
 Abb Chaperon 
 
 "'O God, if Thou art pleased with Thy handmaid, who 
 adores Thee and beseeches Thee with all love and fervor, 
 who strives not to wander from Thy holy commandments, 
 who would gladly die, as Thy Son died, to glorify Thy name, 
 who would fain live under Thy shadow, Thou to whom all 
 hearts are open, grant me the mercy that my godfather's eyes
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 77 
 
 may be unsealed, lead him into the way of life, and give him 
 Thy grace, that he may dwell in Thee during his latter days; 
 preserve him from all ill, and let me surfer in his stead ! 
 Holy Saint Ursule, my beloved patron saint, and thou, 
 mother of God, queen of heaven, archangels, and saints in 
 paradise, hear me ; join your intercessions to mine, and have 
 pity on us ! ' " 
 
 The clairvoyant so exactly imitated the child's innocent 
 gestures and saintly aspirations that Doctor Minoret's eyes 
 filled with tears. 
 
 " Does she say anything more ? " he asked. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Repeat it." 
 
 " ' Dear godfather ! Whom will he play backgammon 
 with in Paris ? ' She has blown out her light, lays down her 
 head, and goes to sleep. She is gone off! She looks so 
 pretty in her little night-cap ! " 
 
 Minoret took leave of the great unknown, shook hands with 
 Bouvard, ran downstairs, and hurried off to a stand of coaches, 
 which at that time existed under the gateway of a mansion 
 since demolished to make way for the Rue d'Alger. He 
 there found a driver, and asked him if he would set out forth- 
 with for Fontainebleau. The price having been agreed on, 
 the old man, made young again, set out that very minute. 
 As agreed, he let the horse rest at Essonne, then drove on till 
 they picked up the Nemours diligence, and dismissed his 
 coachman. 
 
 He reached home by about five in the morning, and went 
 to bed amid the wreck of all his former notions of physiology, 
 of nature, and of metaphysics ; and he slept till nine, he was 
 so tired by his expedition. 
 
 On waking, the doctor, quite sure that no one had crossed 
 the threshold since his return, proceeded to verify the facts, 
 not without an invincible dread. He himself had forgotten 
 the difference between the two bank-notes, and the displace-
 
 78 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 ment of the two volumes of "The Pandects." The somnam- 
 bulist had seen rightly. He rang for La Bougival. 
 
 "Tell Ursule to come to speak to me," said he, sitting 
 down in the middle of the library. 
 
 The girl came at once, flew to his side, and kissed him ; 
 the doctor took her on his knee, where, as she sat, her fine fair 
 tresses mingled with her godfather's white hair. 
 
 " You have something to say to me, godfather ? " 
 
 "Yes. But promise me, on your soul, to reply frankly, 
 unequivocally, to my questions." 
 
 Ursule blushed to the roots of her hair. 
 
 " Oh ! I will ask you nothing that you cannot answer," he 
 went on, seeing the bashfulness of first love clouding the 
 hitherto childlike clearness of her lovely eyes. 
 
 "Speak, godfather." 
 
 " With what thought did you end your evening prayers last 
 night ; and at what hour did you say them ? " 
 
 " It was a quarter-past nine, or half-past." 
 
 " Well, repeat now your last prayer." 
 
 The young girl hoped that her voice might communicate 
 her faith to the unbeliever ; she rose, knelt down, and clasped 
 her hands fervently ; a radiant look beamed in her face, she 
 glanced at the old man, and said 
 
 "What I asked of God last night I prayed for again this 
 morning, and shall still ask till He grants it me." 
 
 Then she repeated the prayer with fresh and emphatic 
 expression ; but, to her great surprise, her godfather inter- 
 rupted her, ending it himself. 
 
 " Well, Ursule," said the doctor, drawing her on to his 
 knees again, " and as you went to sleep with your head on the 
 pillow, did you not say, ' Dear godfather ! Whom will he 
 play backgammon with in Paris ? ' ' 
 
 Ursule started to her feet as though the trump of judgment 
 had sounded in her ears ; she gave a cry of terror ; her 
 dilated eyes stared at the old man with fixed horror.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 79 
 
 " Who are you, godfather ? Where did you get such a 
 power?" she asked, fancying that as he did not believe in 
 God, he must have made a compact with the angel of hell. 
 
 " What did you sow in the garden yesterday? " 
 
 " Mignonette, sweet peas, balsams " 
 
 " And larkspurs to end with ? " 
 
 She fell on her knees. 
 
 " Do not terrify me, godfather ! But you were here, were 
 you not?" 
 
 " Am I not always with you ? " replied the doctor in jest, 
 to spare the innocent child's reason. 
 
 " Let us go to your room." Then he gave her his arm and 
 went upstairs. 
 
 "Your knees are quaking, godfather," said she. 
 
 "Yes; I feel quite overset." 
 
 "Do you at last believe in God?" she exclaimed, with 
 innocent gladness, though the tears rose to her eyes. 
 
 The old man looked round the neat and simple room he 
 had arranged for Ursule. On the floor was an inexpensive 
 green drugget, which she kept exquisitely clean ; on the walls 
 a paper with a pale-gray ground and a pattern of roses with 
 their green leaves ; there were white cotton curtains, with a 
 pink border, to the windows looking on the courtyard ; be- 
 tween the windows, below a tall mirror, a console of gilt 
 wood with a marble slab, on which stood a blue Sevres vase 
 for flowers ; and opposite the fireplace a pretty inlaid chest 
 of drawers with a top of fine marble. The bed, furnished 
 with old chintz, and chintz curtains lined with pink, was one 
 of the old duchesse four-post beds which were common in the 
 eighteenth century, ornamented with a capital of carved 
 feathers to each of the fluted columns at the corners. On 
 the chimney-shelf was an old clock, mounted in a sort of 
 catafalque of tortoise-shell inlaid with ivory; the marble 
 chimney-piece and candelabra, the glass, and the pier, painted 
 in shades of gray, had a remarkably good effect of tone, color,
 
 80 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 and style. A large wardrobe, the doors inlaid with land- 
 scapes in various kinds of wood, some of them of greenish 
 tint, hardly to be met with in these days, no doubt contained 
 her linen and her dresses. 
 
 The atmosphere of this room had a fragrance as of heaven. 
 The careful arrangement of everything indicated a spirit of 
 order, a feeling for the harmony of things, that would have 
 struck any one, even a Minoret-Levrault. It was, above all, 
 easy to see how dear to Ursule were the things about her, and 
 how fond she was of the room which was, so to speak, part 
 of all her life as a child and a young girl. 
 
 While looking round at it all as an excuse, the guardian 
 convinced himself that from her window Ursule could see 
 across to Madame de Portenduere's house. During the night 
 he had considered the line of conduct to be taken with regard 
 to the secret he had discovered of her budding passion. To 
 question his ward would compromise him in her eyes ; for 
 either he must approve or disapprove of her love ; in either 
 case he would be awkwardly situated. He had therefore de- 
 termined that he would study for himself the relations of 
 young Portenduere and Ursule, to decide whether he should 
 try to counteract her inclination before it had become irre- 
 sistible. Only an old man could show so much prudence. 
 Still gasping under the shock of finding the magnetic revela- 
 tions true, he turned about, examining the smallest things in 
 the room, for he wished to glance at the almanac which hung 
 by a corner of the chimney-piece. 
 
 " These clumsy candlesticks are too heavy for your pretty 
 little hands," he said, taking up the marble candlesticks, 
 ornamented with brass. 
 
 He weighed them in his hands, looked at the almanac, 
 unhooked it, and said 
 
 " This, too, seems to me very ugly. Why do you hang 
 this common calendar in such a pretty room? " 
 
 " Oh, leave me that, godfather ! "
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 81 
 
 " No, no ; you shall have another to-morrow." 
 He went downstairs again, carrying away the convicting 
 document, shut himself into his room, looked for Saint 
 Savinien, and found, as the clairvoyant had said, a small red 
 dot at the igth of October; he found such another at Saint 
 Denis' day, his own patron saint ; and at Saint John's day 
 that of the curd. And this dot, as large as a pin's head, the 
 sleeping woman had discerned in spite of distance and obsta- 
 cles. The old man meditated till dusk on all these facts, 
 more stupendous to him than to any other man. He was 
 forced to yield to evidence. A thick wall, within himself, as 
 it were, crumbled down ; for he had lived on the double 
 foundation of his indifference to religion and his denial of 
 magnetism. By proving that the senses a purely physical 
 structure, mere organs whose effects can all be explained 
 were conterminous with some of the attributes of infinity, 
 magnetism overthrew, or at any rate seemed to him to over- 
 throw, Spinoza's powerful logic : The finite and the infinite, 
 two elements which, according to that great man, are incom- 
 patible, existed one in the other. However great the power 
 he could conceive of the divisibility and mobility of matter, 
 he could not credit it with almost divine characters. And he 
 was too old to connect these phenomena with a system, to 
 compare them with those of sleep, of vision, or of light. All 
 his scientific theory, based on the statements of the school of 
 Locke and Condillac, lay in ruins. On seeing his hollow 
 idols wrecked, his incredulity naturally was shaken. Hence 
 all the advantages in this struggle between Catholic youth and 
 Voltairean old age was certain to be on Ursule's side. A 
 beam of light fell on the dismantled fortress in ruins ; from 
 the depths of the wreckage rose the cry of prayer. 
 
 And yet the stiff-necked old man tried to dispute his own 
 
 doubts. Though stricken to the heart, he could not make up 
 
 his mind ; he still strove with God. At the same time his 
 
 mind seemed to vacillate ; he was not the same man. He 
 
 6
 
 82 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 became unnaturally pensive; he read the "Pensdes" oi 
 Pascal, Bossuet's sublime " Histoire des Variations;" he 
 studied Bonald ; he read Saint Augustine ; he also read 
 through the works of Swedenborg and of the deceased Saint- 
 Martin, of whom the mysterious stranger had spoken. The 
 structure raised in this man by materialism was splitting on 
 all sides ; a shock alone was needed ; and when his heart was 
 ripe for God, it fell into the heavenly vineyard as fruits drop. 
 Several times already in the evening, when playing his game 
 with the priest, his goddaughter sitting by, he had asked 
 questions which, in view of his opinions, struck the Abbe 
 Chaperon as strange ; for as yet he knew not of the moral 
 travail by which God was rectifying this noble conscience. 
 
 "Do you believe in apparitions?" the infidel suddenly 
 asked his pastor, pausing in his game. 
 
 " Cardain, a great philosopher of the sixteenth century, 
 said that he had seen some," replied the cur6. 
 
 "I know of all those that the philosophers have seen; I 
 have just re-read Plotinus. At this moment I ask you as a 
 Catholic : I want to know whether you think that a dead 
 man can return to visit the living." 
 
 "Well, Jesus appeared to His apostles after His death," 
 replied the priest. " The church must believe in the apparition 
 of our Lord. As to miracles, there is no lack of them," 
 added the Abbe Chaperon with a smile. " Would you like 
 to hear of the latest ? Some were wrought in the eighteenth 
 century." 
 
 "Pooh!" 
 
 "Yes; the blessed Maria-Alphonzo de Liguori knew of 
 the pope's death when he was far from Rome, at the moment 
 when the holy father expired, and there were many witnesses 
 to the miracle. The reverend bishop, in a trance, heard the 
 pontiffs last words, and repeated them to several persons. 
 The messenger bringing the news did not arrive till thirty 
 hours later "
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 83 
 
 " Jesuit ! " said Minoret with a smile ; " I do not ask you 
 for proofs ; I ask you whether you believe it." 
 
 " I believe that the apparition depends greatly on the 
 person seeing it," said the cure, still laughing at the skeptic. 
 
 " My dear friend, I am not laying a trap for you. What is 
 your belief on this point?" 
 
 "I believe that the power of God is infinite," replied the 
 abb6. 
 
 "When I die, if I am at peace with God, I will entreat 
 Him to let me appear to you," said the doctor, laughing. 
 
 "That is precisely the agreement made by Cardan with his 
 friend," replied the cure. 
 
 "Ursule," said Minoret, " if ever a danger should threaten 
 you, call me I would come." 
 
 " You have just put into simple words the touching elegy 
 called ' Neere,' by Andre Chewier," replied the cur6. " But 
 poets are great only because they know how to embody facts 
 or feelings in perennially living forms." 
 
 "Why do you talk of dying, my dear godfather?" said 
 the young girl sadly. " We shall not die, we who are Chris- 
 tians ; the grave is but the cradle of the soul." 
 
 " Well, well," said the doctor with a smile, " we are bound 
 to quit this world ; and when I am no more, you will be very 
 much astonished at your fortune." 
 
 " When you are no more, my kind godfather, my only con- 
 solation will be to devote my life to you." 
 
 " To me when I am dead ? " 
 
 " Yes. All the good works I may be able to do shall be 
 done in your name to redeem your errors. I will pray to 
 God day by day to persuade His infinite mercy not to punish 
 eternally the faults of a day, but to give a place near to Him- 
 self among the spirits of the blest to a soul so noble and so 
 pure as yours." 
 
 This reply, spoken with angelic candor and in a tone of 
 absolute conviction, confounded error and converted Doctor
 
 84 VRSULE MIROUET. 
 
 Minoret like another Saint Paul. A flash of internal light 
 stunned him, and at the same time this tenderness, extending 
 even to the life to come, brought tears to his eyes. This sud- 
 den effect of grace was almost electrical, The cur6 clasped 
 his hands and stood up in his agitation. The child herself, 
 surprised at her success, shed tears. The old man drew him- 
 self up as though some one had called him, looked into space 
 as if he saw an aurora ; then he knelt on his armchair, folded 
 his hands, and cast down his eyes in deep humiliation. 
 
 " Great God ! " he said, in a broken voice, and looking up 
 to heaven, " if any one can obtain my forgiveness, and lead 
 me to Thee, is it not this spotless creature? Pardon my 
 repentant old age, presented to Thee by this glorious child ! " 
 
 He lifted up his soul in silence to God, beseeching Him to 
 enlighten him by knowledge after having overwhelmed him 
 by grace ; then, turning to the cur6, he held out his hand, 
 saying 
 
 " My dear father in God, I am a little child again. I am 
 yours; I give my soul into your hands." 
 
 Ursule kissed her godfather's hands, covering them with 
 tears of joy. The old man took her on his knee, gaily calling 
 her his godmother. The cure, much moved, recited the 
 Veni Creator in a sort of religious transport. This hymn was 
 their evening prayer as the three Christians knelt together. 
 
 "What has happened?" asked La Bougival in astonish- 
 ment. 
 
 "At last my godfather believes in God ! " cried Ursule. 
 
 " And a good thing too ; that was all that was wanting to 
 make him perfect ! " exclaimed the old peasant-woman, cross- 
 ing herself with simple gravity. 
 
 " My dear doctor," said the good priest, " you will soon 
 have mastered the grandeur of religion and the necessity for 
 its exercises ; and you will find its philosophy, in so far as it 
 is human, much loftier than that of the most daring minds." 
 
 The cur6, who displayed an almost childlike joy, then agreed
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 85 
 
 to instruct the old man by meeting him as a catechumen twice 
 a week. 
 
 Thus the conversion ascribed to Ursule and to a spirit of 
 sordid self-interest had been spontaneous. The priest, who 
 for fourteen years had restrained himself from touching the 
 wounds in that heart, though he had deeply deplored them, 
 had been appealed to, as we go to a surgeon when we feel an 
 injury. Since that scene every evening Ursule's prayers had 
 become family prayers. Every moment the old man had felt 
 peace growing upon him in the place of agitation. And 
 viewing God as the responsible editor of inexplicable facts 
 as he put it his mind was quite easy. His darling child told 
 him that by this it could be seen that he was making progress 
 in the kingdom of God. 
 
 To-day, during the service, he had just read the prayers 
 with the exercise of his understanding ; for, in his first talk 
 with the cure, he had risen to the divine idea of the com- 
 munion of the faithful. The venerable neophyte had under- 
 stood the eternal symbol connected with that nourishment, 
 which faith makes necessary as soon as the whole, deep, glori- 
 ous meaning of the symbol is thoroughly felt. If he had 
 seemed in a hurry to get home, it was to thank his dear little 
 goddaughter for having brought him to the Lord, to use the 
 fine old-fashioned phrase. And so he had her on his knee in 
 his drawing-room, and was kissing her solemnly on the brow, 
 at the very moment when his heirs, defiling her holy influence 
 by their ignoble alarms, were lavishing on Ursule their coarsest 
 abuse. The good man's haste to be at home, his scorn, as 
 they thought it, for his relations, his sharp replies as he left the 
 church, were all naturally attributed by each of the family 
 to the hatred for them which Ursule had implanted in him. 
 
 While the girl was playing to her godfather the variations 
 on La dernitre Pensee musicals of Weber, a plot was being 
 hatched in Minoret-Levrault's dining-room, which was des-
 
 86 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 tined to bring on to the stage one of the most important actors 
 in this drama. The breakfast, which lasted two hours, was as 
 noisy as a provincial breakfast always is, and washed down by 
 capital wine brought to Nemours by canal, either from Bur- 
 gundy or from Touraine. Zelie had procured some shell-fish 
 too, some sea-fish, and a few rarer dainties to do honor to 
 Desire's return. 
 
 The dining-room, in its midst the round table of tempting 
 aspect, looked like an inn-room. Zelie, satisfied with the 
 extent of her household offices, had built a large room between 
 the vast courtyard and the kitchen-garden, which was full of 
 vegetables and fruit-trees. Here everything was merely neat 
 and substantial. The example set by Levrault-Levrault had 
 been a terror to the countryside, and Zelie had forbidden the 
 master-builder's dragging her into any such folly. The room 
 was hung with satin paper, and furnished with plain walnut- 
 wood chairs and sideboards, with an earthenware stove, a 
 clock on the wall, and a barometer. Though the crockery 
 was ordinary plain white china the table shone with linen 
 and abundant plate. 
 
 As soon as the coffee had been served by Zelie, who hopped 
 to and fro like a grain of shot in a bottle of champagne, for 
 she kept but one cook ; and when Desire, the budding lawyer, 
 had been fully apprised of the great event of the morning and 
 its results, Zelie shut the door, and the notary Dionis was 
 called upon to speak. The silence that fell, the looks fixed 
 by each expectant heir on that authoritative face, plainly 
 showed how great is the influence exercised by these men over 
 whole families. 
 
 " My dear children," he began, " your uncle, having been 
 born in 1746, is at this day eighty-three years old ; now old 
 men are liable to fits of folly, and this little " 
 
 "Viper! " exclaimed Madame Massin. 
 
 "Wretch! " said Zelie. 
 
 "We will only call her by her name," said Dionis.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 87 
 
 "Well, then, a thief," said Madame Cremiere. 
 
 "A very pretty thief," added Desire Minoret. 
 
 "This little Ursule," Dionis went on, "is very dear to 
 him. I have not waited till this morning to make inquiries 
 in the interest of you all as my clients, and this is what I have 
 learned concerning this young " 
 
 " Spoiler ! " put in the tax-collector. 
 
 " Underhand fortune-hunter," said the lawyer's clerk. 
 
 " Hush, my friends, or I shall put on my hat and go, and 
 good-day to you." 
 
 " Come, come, old man ! " said Minoret, pouring him out 
 a liqueur glassful of rum. " Drink that ; it comes from Rome, 
 direct." 
 
 "Ursule is no doubt Joseph Mirouet's legitimate offspring. 
 But her father was the natural son of Valentin Mirouet, your 
 uncle's father-in-law. Thus Ursule is the natural niece of 
 Doctor Denis Minoret. As his natural niece, any will the 
 doctor may make in her favor may perhaps be void, and if he 
 should leave her his fortune, you may bring a lawsuit against 
 her ; this might be bad enough for you, for it is impossible to 
 say that there is no tie of relationship between the doctor and 
 Ursule ; still, a lawsuit would certainly frighten a defenseless 
 girl, and would result in a compromise." 
 
 " The law is so rigorous as to the rights of natural children," 
 said the newly-hatched lawyer, eager to display his learning, 
 " that by the terms of a judgment of the Court of Appeals of 
 July 7, 1817, a natural child can claim nothing from its natural 
 grandfather, not even maintenance. So, you see, that the 
 parentage of a natural child carries back. The law is against 
 a natural child, even in his legitimate descendants; for it 
 regards any legacies benefiting the grandchildren as bestowed 
 through the personal intermediary of the natural son, their 
 parent. This is the inference from a comparison of Articles 
 757, 908, and 911 of the Civil Code. And, in fact, the Royal 
 Court of Paris, on the 26th of December, only last year,
 
 88 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 reduced a legacy bequeathed to the legitimate child of a 
 natural son by its grandfather, who, as its grandfather, was as 
 much a stranger in blood to his natural grandson as the doctor 
 is to Ursule as her uncle." 
 
 "All that," said Goupil, "seems to me to relate only to 
 the question of bequests made by grandparents to their 
 illegitimate descendants ; it has nothing to do with uncles, 
 who do not appear to me to have any blood relationships to 
 the legitimate offspring of these natural half-brothers. Ursule 
 is a stranger in blood to Doctor Minoret. I remember a 
 judgment delivered in the Supreme Court at Colmar in 1825, 
 when I was finishing my studies, by which it was pronounced 
 that the illegitimate child being dead, his descendants could 
 no longer be liable to his interposition. Now Ursule's father 
 is dead." 
 
 Goupil's argument produced, what in reports of law cases 
 journalists are accustomed to designate by this parenthesis : 
 {Great sensation). 
 
 "What does that matter?" cried Dionis. "Even if the 
 case of a legacy left by the uncle of an illegitimate child has 
 never yet come before the courts, if it should occur, the rigor 
 of the French law towards natural children will be all the 
 more surely applied, because we live in times when religion is 
 respected. And I will answer for it that, in such a suit, a 
 compromise would be offered ; especially if it were known 
 that you were resolved to carry the case against Ursule even 
 to the court of last resort." 
 
 The delight of heirs who might find piles of gold betrayed 
 itself in smiles, little jumps, and gestures all round the table. 
 No one observed Goupil's shake of dissent. But, then, this 
 exultation was immediately followed by deep silence and dis- 
 may at the notary's next word 
 
 But " 
 
 Dionis at once saw every eye fixed on him, every face 
 assuming the same angle, just as if he had pulled the wire of
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 89 
 
 one of those toy theatres where all the figures move in jerks 
 by the action of wheel-work. 
 
 " But there is no law to hinder your uncle from adopting 
 or marrying Ursule," he went on. "As to an adoption, it 
 might be disputed, and you would, I believe, win the case ; 
 the high courts are not to be trifled with in the matter of 
 adoption, and you would be examined in the preliminary 
 inquiry. It is all very well for the doctor to display the rib- 
 bon of St. Michael, to be an officer of the Legion of Honor, 
 and formerly physician to the ex-Emperor ; he would go to 
 the wall. But though you might be warned in case of an 
 adoption, how are you to know if he marries her ? The old 
 fellow is quite sharp enough to get married in Paris after 
 residing there for a year, and to secure to his bride a settle- 
 ment of a million francs under the marriage contract. The 
 only thing, therefore, which really jeopardizes your inherit- 
 ance is that your uncle should marry the child." Here the 
 notary paused. 
 
 " There is another risk," said Goupil, with a knowing air. 
 " He may make a will in favor of a third person, old Bon- 
 grand for instance, who would be constituted trustee for 
 Mademoiselle Ursule Mirouet." 
 
 "If you worry your uncle," Dionis began again, cutting 
 short his head clerk, " if you are not all as nice as possible to 
 Ursule, you will drive him either into a marriage or into the 
 trusteeship of which Goupil speaks ; but I do not think he is 
 likely to have recourse to a trust ; it is a dangerous alterna- 
 tive. As to his marrying her, it is easy to prevent it. 
 Dsir6 has only to show the girl a little attention ; she will 
 certainly prefer a charming young fellow, the cock of the 
 walk at Nemours, to an old man." 
 
 " Mother," said the postmaster's son in Zelie's ear, tempted 
 both by the money and by Ursule's beauty, " if I were to 
 marry her, we should get it all." 
 
 "Are you mad? YOU who will have fifty thousand francs
 
 90 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 a year one of these days and who are sure to be elected 
 deputy ! So long as I live you shall never hang a millstone 
 round your neck by a foolish marriage. Seven hundred thou- 
 sand francs ? Thank you for nothing ! Why, monsieur, the 
 mayor's only daughter will have fifty thousand a year, and 
 they have already made overtures. ' ' 
 
 This reply, in which, for the first time in his life, his mother 
 spoke roughly to him, extinguished in Desire every hope of 
 marrying the fair Ursule, for his father and he could never 
 gain the day against the determination written in Zelie's 
 terrible blue eyes. 
 
 "Yes; but, I say, Monsieur Dionis," cried Cre'miere, 
 whose wife had nudged his elbow, " if the old man took the 
 matter seriously, and let his ward marry Desire, settling on 
 her the absolute possession of his property, good-by to our 
 chances ! And if he lives another five years, our uncle will 
 have at least a million." 
 
 " Never," cried Zelie ; " never so long as I live and breathe 
 shall Desire marry the daughter of a bastard, a girl taken in 
 out of charity, picked up in the streets ! What next, by 
 heaven ? At his uncle's death my son will be the representa- 
 tive of the Minorets ; and the Minorets can show five centuries 
 of good citizenship. It is as good as a noble pedigree. 
 Make your minds easy. Desire shall marry when we see what 
 he is likely to do in the Chamber of Deputies." 
 
 This arrogant pronouncement was seconded by Goupil, who 
 added 
 
 " With eighty thousand francs a year, Desir may rise to be 
 president of a supreme court, or public prosecutor, which 
 leads to a peerage. A foolish marriage would be the ruin of 
 his prospects." 
 
 The heirs all began to talk at once, but they were silenced 
 by the blow of his fist that Minoret struck on the table to 
 enable the notary to speak on. 
 
 " Your uncle is an excellent and worthy man," said Dionis.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 91 
 
 " He believes himself immortal ; and, like all clever men, he 
 will allow death to overtake him before he has made his will. 
 My opinion, therefore, for the moment, is that he should be 
 induced to invest his capital in such a way as to make it diffi- 
 cult to dispossess you; and the opportunity now offers. 
 Young Portenduere is in Sainte Pelagie, locked up for a hun- 
 dred and odd thousand francs of debts. His old mother 
 knows he is in prison ; she is weeping like a Magdalen, and 
 has asked the Abbe Chaperon to dinner, to talk over the 
 catastrophe, no doubt. Well, I shall go this evening and 
 suggest to your uncle to sell his stock of consolidated five per 
 cents., which are at a hundred and eighteen, and lend the 
 sum necessary to release the prodigal to Madame du Porten- 
 duere on the farm at Bordieres and her dwelling-house. I am 
 within my rights as a notary in applying to him on behalf of 
 that little idiot of a Portenduere, and it is quite natural that 
 I should wish him to change his investments ; I get the com- 
 mission, the stamps, and the business. If I can get him to 
 take my advice, I shall propose to him to invest the rest of 
 his capital in real estate. I have some splendid lands for sale 
 in my office. When once his fortune is invested in real estate 
 or in mortgages on land in this neighborhood, it will not 
 easily fly away. It is always easy to raise difficulties in the 
 way of realizing the capital if he should wish to do so." 
 
 The heirs, struck by the soundness of this logic, much 
 more skillful than that of M. Josse, expressed themselves by 
 approving murmurs. 
 
 " So settle it among yourselves," added the notary, in con- 
 clusion, " to keep your uncle in this town, where he has his 
 own ways, and where you can keep an eye on him. If you 
 can find a lover for the girl, you will hinder her marrying." 
 
 " But if she were to marry him?" said Goupil, urged by 
 an ambitious instinct. 
 
 " That would not be so bad after all ; your loss would be 
 set down in plain figures, and you would know what the old
 
 92 VRSULE MIROUET. 
 
 man would give her," answered the notary. "Still, if you 
 set Desire at her, he might easily play fast and loose with her 
 till the old man's death. Marriages are arranged and upset 
 again." 
 
 "The shortest way," said Goupil, "if the doctor is likely 
 to live a long time yet, would be to get her married to some 
 good fellow, who would take her out of the way by settling 
 with her at Sens, or Montargis, or Orleans, with a hundred 
 thousand francs down." 
 
 Dionis, Massin, Zelie, and Goupil, the only clear heads of 
 the party, exchanged glances full of meaning. 
 
 " He would be a maggot in the pear," said Zelie in Massin's 
 ear. 
 
 " Why was he allowed to come ? " replied the registrar. 
 
 " That would just suit you ! " exclaimed D6sir6 to Goupil ; 
 "but how could you ever keep yourself decent enough to 
 please the old man and his ward ? " 
 
 " You don't think small beer of yourself! " said Minoret, 
 understanding Goupil at last. 
 
 This coarse jest was greeted with shouts of laughter. But 
 the lawyer's clerk glared at the laughers with such a sweeping 
 and terrible gaze that silence was immediately restored. 
 
 "In these days," Zelie whispered to Massin, "notaries 
 think only of their own interests. What if Dionis, to get his 
 commission, should take Ursule's side?" 
 
 "I know he is safe," replied the registrar, with a keen 
 twinkle in his wicked little eyes ; he was about to add, " I 
 have him in my power," but he abstained, deeming it the 
 more prudent course. 
 
 " I am entirely of Dionis' opinion," he said aloud. 
 
 "And so am I," exclaimed Zelie, though she already sus- 
 pected the notary and Massin to be in collusion for their own 
 advantage. 
 
 " My wife has given our vote," said the postmaster, sipping 
 a glass of spirits, though his face was already purple with
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 93 
 
 digesting the meal and from a considerable consumption of 
 wines and liqueurs. 
 
 "It is quite right," said the tax-collector. 
 
 "Then will I call on him after dinner?" asked Dionis, 
 good-naturedly. 
 
 "If Monsieur Dionis is right," said Madame Cre'miere to 
 Madame Massin, " we ought to go to see your uncle, as we used 
 to, every Sunday evening, and do all Monsieur Dionis has 
 just told us." 
 
 "Yes, indeed! To be received as we have been," ex- 
 claimed Zelie. " After all, we have an income of over forty 
 thousand francs ; and he has refused all our invitations. We 
 are as good as he is. I can steer my own ship, thank you, 
 though I cannot write prescriptions ! " 
 
 " As I am far from having forty thousand francs a year," 
 said Madame Massin, nettled, "I am not anxious to lose ten 
 thousand ! " 
 
 " We are his nieces ; we will look after him ; we shall see 
 what is going on," said Madame Cremiere. " And some day, 
 Cousin Zelie, you will be beholden to us." 
 
 " Be civil to Ursule ; old Jordy left her his savings," said 
 the notary, putting his right forefinger to his lip. 
 
 " I will mind my P's and Q's," said Desire\ 
 
 " You were a match for Desroches, the sharpest attorney in 
 Paris," said Goupil to his master, as they quitted the house. 
 
 "And they dispute our bills," remarked the notary, with a 
 bitter smile. 
 
 The heirs, seeing out Dionis and his head clerk, found 
 themselves at the gate, all with faces heated from the meal, 
 just as the congregation came out from vespers. As the 
 notary had foretold, the Abbe Chaperon had given his arm 
 to old Madame de Portenduere. 
 
 " She has dragged him to vespers ! " cried Madame Massin, 
 pointing out to Madame Cr6miere Ursule coming out of the 
 church with her uncle.
 
 94 URSULE M1ROUET. 
 
 "Let us go and speak to him," suggested Madame Cr6- 
 miere, going forward. 
 
 The change which the conclave had produced in all their 
 countenances astonished Doctor Minoret. He wondered what 
 the cause could be of this friendliness to order, and out of 
 curiosity he favored a meeting between Ursule and these two 
 women, who were eager to address her with exaggerated sweet- 
 ness and forced smiles. 
 
 " Uncle, will you allow us to call on you this evening?" 
 said Madame Cremiere. " We sometimes think we are in the 
 way ; but it is long now since our children have paid their 
 respects to you, and our daughters are of an age to make 
 friends with dear Ursule." 
 
 " Ursule justifies her name," said the doctor ; " she is not 
 at all tame." 
 
 " Let us tame her," said Madame Massin. " And besides, 
 my dear uncle," added the prudent housewife, trying to con- 
 ceal her scheming under a semblance of economy, " we have 
 been told that your charming goddaughter has such a talent 
 for the piano, that we should be enchanted to hear her play. 
 Madame Cremiere and I are rather inclined to have her master 
 to teach our girls ; for if he had seven or eight pupils he might 
 fix a price for his lessons within our means " 
 
 " By all means," said the old man ; " all the more, indeed, 
 because I am thinking of getting a singing-master for Ursule." 
 
 "Very well; then this evening, uncle; and we will bring 
 your grand-nephew Desir6, who is now a full-fledged attor- 
 ney." 
 
 " Till this evening," replied Minoret, who wished to study 
 these mean souls. 
 
 His two nieces shook hands with Ursule, saying with affected 
 graciousness, "Till this evening." 
 
 "Oh, dear godfather, you can read my heart, I believe ! " 
 cried Ursule, with a grateful look at the old man. 
 
 " You have a good voice," he said. " And I also mean to
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. tt 
 
 give you drawing and Italian lessons. A woman," he added, 
 looking at Ursule as he opened the gate of his own courtyard, 
 " ought to be educated in such a way as to be equal to any 
 position in which she may be placed by marriage." 
 
 Ursule blushed as red as a cherry ; her guardian seemed to 
 be thinking of the very person she herself was thinking of. 
 Feeling herself on the point of confessing to the doctor the 
 involuntary impulse which made her think of Savinien, and 
 refer all her strivings after perfection to him, she went to sit 
 under the bower of creepers, against which she looked from a 
 distance like a white and blue flower. 
 
 "Now you see, godfather, your nieces were kind to me; 
 they were very nice just now," said she, as he followed her, 
 to mislead him as to the thoughts which had made her pensive. 
 
 " Poor little thing ! " said the old man. He laid Ursule's 
 hand on his arm, patting it gently, and led her along the 
 terrace by the river, where no one could overhear them. 
 
 " Why do you say, ' Poor little thing? ' " 
 
 " Can you not see that they are afraid of you? " 
 
 "But why?" 
 
 " My heirs are at this moment very uneasy about my con- 
 version ; they ascribe it, no doubt, to your influence, and 
 fancy that I shall deprive them of their inheritance to make 
 you the richer." 
 
 "But you will not?" said Ursule with simplicity, and 
 looking in his face. 
 
 "Ah, divine comfort of my old age," said the old man, 
 lifting her up, and kissing her on both cheeks. " It was for 
 her sake and not for my own, O God, that I besought Thee 
 just now to suffer me to live till I shall have given her into 
 the keeping of some good man worthy of her ! You will see, 
 my angel, the farce that the Minorets and the Cremieres and 
 the Massins are going to play here. You want to prolong 
 and beautify my life. They ! they think of nothing but my 
 death!"
 
 96 VRSULE MIROUET. 
 
 " God forbids us to hate ; but if that is true oh, I scorn 
 them I " cried Ursule. 
 
 " Dinner ! " cried La Bougival, from the top of the steps 
 which, on the garden side, were at the end of the gallery. 
 
 Ursule and the doctor were eating their dessert in the 
 pretty dining-room, painted to imitate Chinese lacquer, which 
 had ruined Levrault-Levrault, when the justice walked in. 
 The doctor, as his most signal mark of intimacy, offered him 
 a cup of his own coffee, a mixture of Mocha with Bourbon 
 and Martinique berries, roasted, ground, and made by his 
 own hands in a silver coffee-pot of the kind patented by 
 Chaptal. 
 
 " Well, well," said Bongrand, putting up his spectacles, 
 and looking at the old man with a sly twinkle, " the town is 
 by the ears ! Your appearance at church has revolutionized 
 your relations. You are going to leave everything to the 
 priests and to the poor ! You have stirred them up, and they 
 are astir ! Oh ! I saw their first commotion on the church 
 square ; they were as fussy as a nest of ants robbed of their 
 eggs." 
 
 "What did I tell you, Ursule? " exclaimed the old man. 
 " Even at the risk of grieving you, my child, am I not bound 
 to teach you to know the world, and to put you on your guard 
 against undeserved enmity." 
 
 "I wanted to say a few words to you on that subject," said 
 Bongrand, seizing the opportunity of speaking to his old 
 friend about Ursule' s future prospects. 
 
 The doctor put a black velvet cap on his white head, and 
 the justice kept on his hat as a protection against the dew, 
 and they walked together up and down the terrace, talking 
 over the means of securing to Ursule the little fortune the 
 doctor proposed to leave her. Bongrand knew the opinion 
 of Dionis as to the invalidity of any will made by the doctor 
 in Ursule's favor, for Nemours was too inquisitive as to the 
 Minoret inheritance for this question not to have been dis-
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 97 
 
 cussed by the wise heads of the town. He himself had 
 decided that Ursule was an alien in blood as regarded Doctor 
 Minoret ; but he was fully aware that the spirit of the law 
 was adverse to the recognition of illegitimate offspring as mem- 
 bers of the family. The framers of the Code had only antici- 
 pated the weakness of fathers and mothers for their natural 
 children ; it had not been supposed that uncles or aunts 
 might have such tender feelings for an illegitimate relation as 
 to favor his descendants. There was evidently an omission 
 in the law. 
 
 " In any other country," said he to the doctor, after set- 
 ting forth the state of the law which Goupil, Dionis, and 
 Desire had just explained to the heirs, " Ursule would have 
 nothing to fear. She is a legitimate child, and her father's 
 disabilities ought only to affect the money left by Valentin 
 Mirouet, your father-in-law. But in France the bench is 
 unluckily very clever and very logical ; it insists on the spirit 
 of the law. Pleaders will talk of morality, and prove that 
 the omission in the Code arises from the single-mindedness 
 of the framers, who never foresaw such a case, but who never- 
 theless established a principle. A lawsuit would be lengthy 
 and costly. With Zelie on the other side it would be carried 
 to the court of appeal ; and I cannot be sure that I should 
 be still living when the case was tried." 
 
 "The strongest case is not certain to stand," cried the 
 doctor. " I can see the documents on the subject already : 
 'To what degree of relationship ought the disabilities of 
 natural children in the matter of inheritance to extend?' and 
 the glory of a clever lawyer is to gain a rotten suit." 
 
 "On my honor," said Bongrand, "I would not take it 
 upon myself to assert that the judges would not widen the 
 interpretation of the law so as to extend its protection of 
 marriage, which is the everlasting foundation of society." 
 
 Without explaining his intentions, the doctor rejected the 
 idea of a trust. But as to the notion of marrying her, which 
 7
 
 98 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 Bongrand suggested as a means of securing her his for- 
 tune 
 
 "Poor little thing! " cried the doctor. "I may live fif- 
 teen years yet. What would become of her ? ' ' 
 
 " Well, then, what do you propose?" said Bongrand. 
 
 "We must think about it. I shall see," replied the old 
 doctor, evidently at a loss for an answer. 
 
 At this instant Ursule came to tell the friends that Dionis 
 wished to see the doctor. 
 
 " Dionis already ! " exclaimed Minoret, looking at the jus- 
 tice. "Yes," he said to Ursule ; " let him be shown in." 
 
 "I will bet my spectacles to a brimstone match that he is 
 your heirs' stalking-horse. They breakfasted together at the 
 posting-house, and something has been plotted there." 
 
 The notary, following Ursule, came out into the garden. 
 After the usual civilities and a few commonplace remarks, 
 Dionis begged for a moment's private conversation. Ursule 
 and Bongrand went into the drawing-room. 
 
 "We must think about it ! I shall see ! " said Bongrand 
 to himself, echoing the doctor's last words. " That is what 
 clever people think ; then death overtakes them, and they leave 
 those who are dearest to them in the greatest difficulties." 
 
 The distrust a man of business feels of a man of talent is 
 extraordinary. He cannot admit that the greater includes the 
 less. But this very distrust, perhaps, implies praise. Seeing 
 these superior minds inhabiting the high peaks of human 
 thought, men of business do not believe them capable of de- 
 scending to the infinitely small details which, like interest in 
 the world of finance, or microscopic creatures in natural his- 
 tory, at last accumulate till they equal the capital, or consti- 
 tute a world. It is a mistake. The man of feeling and the 
 man of genius see everything. 
 
 Bongrand, nettled by the doctor's persistent silence, but 
 urged, no doubt, by Ursule's interests, which he feared were 
 compromised, determined to protect her against her rivals.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 99 
 
 He was in despair at not knowing what was going on between 
 the old man and Dionis. 
 
 " However pure-minded Ursule may be," thought he, as he 
 looked at her, " there is one point on which young girls are 
 wont to have their own ideas of jurisprudence and morality. 
 Let us try ! " " The Minoret-Levraults," said he to Ursule, as 
 he settled his spectacles, " are quite capable of proposing that 
 you should marry their son." 
 
 The poor child turned pale. She had been too well brought 
 up, and had too much perfect delicacy, to go and listen to 
 what her uncle and Dionis were saying ; but after a short 
 deliberation she thought she might go into the room, thinking 
 that if she were in the way her godfather would make her 
 understand it. The Chinese summer-house, which was the 
 doctor's private study, had the shutters of the glass door left 
 open. Ursule's idea was that she would go herself to close 
 them. She apologized for leaving the lawyer alone in the 
 drawing-room ; but he smiled and said 
 
 "Do so, do so." 
 
 Ursule went to the steps leading from the Chinese summer- 
 house down to the garden, and there she stood for some min- 
 utes slowly closing the Venetian shutters and looking at the 
 sunset. Then she heard this answer spoken by the doctor as 
 he came towards the summer-house 
 
 " My heirs would be delighted to see me possessed of real 
 estate and mortgages. They fancy that my fortune would be 
 much more safely invested. I can guess all they could say ; 
 and you, perhaps, are their representative. But, my dear sir, 
 my arrangements are unalterable. My heirs will have the 
 capital of the fortune I brought here with me ; they may 
 accept that as a certainty, and leave me in peace. If either 
 of them should make any change in what I believe it to be 
 my duty to do for that child" (and he pointed to his god- 
 daughter), " I will come back from the other world to torment 
 him ! So Monsieur Savinien de Portenduere may remain in
 
 100 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 prison if his release depends on me," added the doctor. " I 
 shall not sell any of my securities." 
 
 As she heard the last words of this speech, Ursule felt the 
 first, the only grief she had ever known. She rested her 
 forehead against the shutter, and clung to it for support. 
 
 "Good heavens! what ails her?" cried the old doctor; 
 " she is colorless. Such emotion just after dinner might kill 
 her!" 
 
 He put out his arm to hold Ursule, who fell almost faint- 
 ing. 
 
 "Good-evening, monsieur; leave me," he said to the 
 notary. 
 
 He carried his goddaughter to a huge easy-chair, dating 
 from Louis XV., which stood in his study, seized a phial of 
 ether from his medicine store, and made her inhale it. 
 
 " Go and take my place, my friend," said he to Bongrand, 
 who was alarmed ; " I must stay with her." 
 
 The justice walked to the gate with the notary, asking him, 
 but without any show of eagerness, " What has come over 
 Ursule ? " 
 
 "I do not know," said Monsieur Dionis. "She was 
 standing on the steps listening to us ; and when her uncle re- 
 fused to lend the necessary sum to release young Portenduere, 
 who is in prison for debt for he had not a Monsieur Bon- 
 grand to defend him as Monsieur du Rouvre had she turned 
 pale and tottered. Does she love him ? Can there be ? " 
 
 "At fifteen ! " said Bongrand, interrupting Dionis. 
 
 "She was born in February, 1814. In four months she will 
 be sixteen." 
 
 " But she has never seen her neighbor," replied the justice. 
 " No, it is just an attack." 
 
 " An attack of the heart," said the notary. 
 
 Dionis was much delighted by his discovery ; it would 
 avert the dreaded marriage by which the doctor might have 
 frustrated the hopes of his heirs, while Bongrand saw his
 
 " WHAT AILS YOU, CRUEL CHILD?" HE SAID
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 101 
 
 castles in the air in ruins ; he had long dreamed of a marriage 
 between his own son and Ursule. 
 
 " If the poor child should be in love with that youth, it 
 would be unfortunate for her. Madame de Portenduere is a 
 Bretonne, and crazy about noble birth," replied the justice, 
 after a pause. 
 
 "Happily for the honor of the Portendueres," said the 
 notary, who had nearly betrayed himself. 
 
 To do the worthy and honorable lawyer full justice, it must 
 be said that, on his way from the gate to the drawing-room, 
 he gave up, not without regret for his son's loss, the hope he 
 had cherished of one day calling Ursule his daughter. He 
 intended to give his son six thousand francs a year as soon as 
 he was appointed deputy recorder ; and if the doctor would 
 have settled a hundred thousand francs on Ursule, the young 
 couple should have been patterns of a happy household. His 
 Eugene was a loyal and accomplished young fellow. Perhaps 
 he had a little over-praised Eugene, and perhaps old Min- 
 oret's suspicions had been aroused by that. 
 
 " I will fall back on the mayor's daughter," thought Bon- 
 grand. " But Ursule without a penny would be better than 
 Mademoiselle Levrault-Cremiere with her million. Now we 
 must see what can be done to get Ursule married to this 
 young Portenduere, if, in fact, she loves him." 
 
 After closing the doors on the side next the library and the 
 garden, the doctor led the girl to the window that looked 
 over the river. 
 
 " What ails you, cruel child ? " he said. " Your life is my 
 life. Without your smile what would become of me? " 
 
 " Savin ien in prison!" answered she, and with these 
 words a torrent of tears burst from her eyes, and she began to 
 sob. 
 
 "Now all will be well," said the old man to himself, as he 
 stood feeling her pulse with a father's anxiety. " Alas ! she 
 has all my poor wife's nervous sensibility ! " he thought; and
 
 102 VRSULE MIROUET. 
 
 he brought a stethoscope, which he placed over Ursule's heart 
 and listened. " Well, there is nothing wrong there," he said 
 to himself. " I did not know, my sweetheart, that you loved 
 him so much already," he went on, as he looked at her. 
 " But think to me as if to yourself, and tell me all that has 
 occurred between you." 
 
 " I do not love him, godfather ; we have never spoken to 
 each other," she sobbed out; "but to know that the poor 
 young man is in prison, and to hear that you, who are so 
 kind, refuse sternly to help him out " 
 
 " Ursule, my sweet little angel, if you do not love him, 
 why have you put a red dot to the day of Saint Savin ien as 
 you have to that of Saint Denis? Come, tell me all the 
 smallest incidents of this love affair." 
 
 Ursule colored, and swallowed down a few tears; for a 
 minute there was silence between them. 
 
 " Are you afraid of your father, of your friend, your mother, 
 your physician, your godfather, whose heart has within these 
 few days become even more soft and loving than it was? " 
 
 "Well, then, dear godfather," said she, "I will open my 
 soul to you. In the month of May, Monsieur Savinien came 
 to see his mother. Till that visit I had never paid the least 
 attention to him. When he went away to live in Paris I was 
 a little child, and I saw no difference, I swear to you, between 
 a young man and others like you, excepting that I loved 
 you, and never imagined I could love any one better, whoever 
 he might be. Monsieur Savinien arrived by the mail-coach 
 the night before his mother's birthday without our knowing 
 of it. At seven next morning, after saying my prayers, as I 
 opened the window to air my room, I saw the open windows 
 of Monsieur Savinien's room, and Monsieur Savinien himself 
 in his dressing-gown engaged in shaving himself, and doing 
 everything with such grace in his movements in short, I 
 thought him very nice. He combed his black mustache, 
 and the little tuft on his chin, and I saw his throat white and
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 103 
 
 round. Oh ! must I say it all ? I noticed that his fresh neck, 
 and his face, and his beautiful black hair were quite unlike 
 yours when I see you shaving yourself; and something rose 
 up in me from I know not where like a mist rushing in 
 waves to my heart, to my throat, to my head, and so violently 
 that I had to sit down. I could not stand ; I was trembling. 
 But I longed so much to see him that I pulled myself up 
 on tiptoe ; then he saw me, and for fun he blew me a kiss 
 from the ends of his fingers, and " 
 
 "And " 
 
 " And I hid myself," she went on, " equally ashamed and 
 happy, without understanding why I was ashamed of my 
 happiness. This feeling, which bewildered my soul while 
 giving it an unexplained sense of power, came over me each 
 time that I saw his young face again in fancy. Indeed, I 
 liked to have that feeling, though it was so painfully agitating. 
 As I went to mass an irresistible force made me look at Mon- 
 sieur Savinien giving his arm to his mother, and his way of 
 walking, and his clothes everything about him, to the sound 
 of his boots on the pavement, seemed so pretty. The least 
 thing about him, his hand in its fine kid glove, had a sort of 
 charm for me. And yet I was strong enough not to think of 
 him during the service. As we came out I waited in the 
 church to let Madame de Portenduere go first, so as to walk 
 behind him. I cannot tell you how much I was interested in 
 all these little things. On coming in, as I turned round to 
 shut the gate " 
 
 " And La Bougival ? " asked the doctor. 
 
 "Oh, I had let her go to the kitchen," said Ursule inno- 
 cently. " So I could, of course, see Monsieur Savinien stand- 
 ing squarely to look at me. Oh, dear godfather, I felt so 
 proud as I fancied I saw in his eyes a sort of surprise and 
 admiration, and I do not know what I would not have done 
 to give him cause to look at me. I felt as though henceforth 
 I ought to think of nothing but of how to please him. His
 
 104 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 look is now the sweetest reward of all I can do right. From 
 that moment I have thought of him incessantly and in spite 
 of myself. Monsieur Savinien went away that evening, and 
 I have not seen him since ; the Rue des Bourgeois has seemed 
 quite empty, and he has taken my heart away with him, as it 
 were, without knowing it." 
 
 " And that is all ? " asked the doctor. 
 
 "Yes, all, godfather," she said with a sigh, in which 
 regret at having no more to tell was lost in the grief of the 
 moment. 
 
 "My dear child," said the old man, drawing Ursule on to 
 his knee, "you will soon be sixteen years old, and your life 
 as a woman will begin. You are now between your blissful 
 childhood, which is coming to an end, and the agitations of 
 love, which will make life stormy for you, for you have the 
 highly strung nerves of an excessively sensitive nature. It is 
 love, my child, that has come upon you," said the old man, 
 with a look of deep pathos, " love in its holy simplicity, love 
 as it ought to be, involuntary and swift, coming like a thief 
 that takes all yes, all ! And I was prepared for it. I have 
 studied women carefully, and I know that, though with most 
 of them love does not wholly possess them till after many 
 proofs, many miracles of affection, if such as these do not 
 speak nor yield till they are conquered, there are others who, 
 under the sway of a sympathy which can now be accounted 
 for by magnetic fluids, are vanquished in a moment. I can 
 tell you now : as soon as I saw the lovely woman who bore 
 your name, I felt that I should love her alone and faithfully 
 without knowing whether in our characters or our persons we 
 should prove suitable. Is there a second-sight in love ? How 
 can the question be answered, when we see so many unions, 
 which have been sanctioned by such a sacred contract, de- 
 stroyed afterwards, and giving rise to almost eternal hatred 
 and intense aversion ? The senses may be in affinity while 
 minds are discordant, and some persons perhaps live more by
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 105 
 
 the mind than by the senses. On the other hand, characters 
 are often suited in persons who cannot please each other. 
 
 "These two opposite phenomena, which would account for 
 many catastrophes, demonstrate the wisdom of the law which 
 leaves to parents supreme control over the marriage of their 
 children ; for a young girl is often the dupe of one of these two 
 hallucinations. And, indeed, I do not blame you. The feel- 
 ings you experience, the emotional impulse which rushes from 
 its hitherto unknown focus to your heart and to your brain, 
 the joy with which you think of Savinien, are all quite natural. 
 But, my adored child, as our good Abbe Chaperon will have 
 told you, society demands the sacrifice of many natural im- 
 pulses. The destiny of men is one thing, the destiny of 
 women another. It was in my power to choose Ursule Mirouet 
 for my wife, to go to her and tell her how much I loved her, 
 whereas a young girl is false to her virtue when she solicits the 
 love of the man she loves; a woman is not, as we are, at 
 liberty to follow up in broad daylight the fulfillment of her 
 hopes. Thus, modesty is in women, and especially in you, 
 the insurmountable barrier which guards the secrets of your 
 heart. Your hesitation to confide even to me what your first 
 emotions had been shows me plainly that you would suffer 
 the worst torments rather than confess to Savinien " 
 
 " Oh, yes ! " she exclaimed. 
 
 " But, my child, you must do more. You must repress these 
 impulses of your heart, you must forget them." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " Because, my little darling, you must love no man but 
 him who will be your husband ; and even if Monsieur Savinien 
 de Portenduere should love you " 
 
 " I had not thought of such a thing." 
 
 " Listen to me. Even if he should love you, even if his 
 mother were to ask me to give him your hand, I would not 
 consent to the marriage till I had subjected Savinien to a long 
 and mature course of proof. His recent conduct has placed
 
 106 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 him under a cloud in every good family, and raised such 
 barriers between him and any young girl of fortune as it will 
 be hard to break down." 
 
 A heavenly smile checked Ursule's tears, as she said, 
 " Misfortune has its good uses ! " 
 
 The doctor found nothing to say to her artlessness. 
 
 " What has he done, godfather ? " she inquired. 
 
 " In two years, my darling, he has run into debt in Paris to 
 the sum of a hundred and twenty thousand francs ! He has 
 been so clumsy as to let himself be taken and imprisoned at 
 Sainte-Pelagie, a blunder which disgraces a young man for 
 ever in these days. A spendthrift who can bring his mother 
 to grief and penury would kill his wife with despair, as your 
 poor father did." 
 
 " Do you think he might amend his ways ? " she asked. 
 
 " If his mother pays his debts, he will be left without a 
 penny, and I know no harder punishment for a nobleman than 
 to be penniless." 
 
 This reply made Ursule thoughtful ; she wiped away her 
 tears, and said to her godfather 
 
 " If you can save him, do so, godfather. Such a service 
 will give you the right to admonish him ; you will remon- 
 strate with him " 
 
 " And then," said the doctor, mimicking her tone, " he 
 may perhaps come here, and the old lady too, and we shall 
 see them, and " 
 
 "At this moment I am thinking only of him," replied 
 Ursule, coloring. 
 
 "Think of him no more, my poor child. It is madness," 
 said the doctor gravely. " Never would Madame de Porten- 
 duere a Kergarouet if she had but three hundred francs a 
 year to live on, consent to see the Vicomte Savinien de 
 Portenduere, grand-nephew of the late Comte de Portenduere, 
 lieutenant-general of the King's naval forces, and son of the 
 Vicomte de Portenduere, ship's captain, married to whom?
 
 THE IJEIRS IN ALARM. 107 
 
 Ursule Mirouet, the daughter of a regimental bandmaster, 
 without a fortune ; and whose father now is the time to tell 
 you was the bastard son of an organist, my father-in-law." 
 
 " Yes, godfather, you are right. We are equals only in 
 the eyes of God. I will think of him no more except in 
 my prayers ! " she exclaimed through the sobs with which she 
 received this information. " Give him all you intended to 
 leave me. What can a poor girl like me want of money ! 
 and he, in prison ! " 
 
 "Lay all your distresses before God, and He perhaps will 
 intervene to help us." 
 
 For some minutes silence reigned. When Ursule, who 
 dared not look at her godfather, presently raised her eyes to 
 his face, she was deeply moved by seeing tears flowing down 
 his withered cheeks. The tears of an old man are as terrible 
 as those of a child are natural. 
 
 "What, oh, what is the matter with you?" she cried, 
 falling at his feet and kissing his hands. " Do you not 
 trust me? " 
 
 " I, who only wish to satisfy your every wish, am compelled 
 to cause the first great sorrow of your life ! I am as much 
 grieved as you are ! I never shed a tear but when my children 
 died and my Ursule. There, I will do anything you like! " 
 he exclaimed. 
 
 Ursule, through her tears, gave her godfather a look that 
 was like a flash of light. She smiled. 
 
 " Now, come into the drawing-room and contrive to keep 
 your own counsel about all this, my child," said the doctor, 
 and he went out, leaving her alone in the study. 
 
 The fatherly soul was so weak before this smile that he was 
 about to speak a word of hope which might have deluded his 
 goddaughter. 
 
 At this moment Madame de Portenduere, alone with the 
 cur6 in her chilly little ground-floor drawing-room, had just
 
 108 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 finished confiding her woes to the good priest, her only 
 friend. She held in her hand some letters which the abbe 
 had returned to her after reading them, and which had been 
 the crown of her misery. Seated in an armchair, on one side 
 of the square table covered with the remains of the dessert, 
 the old lady looked at the cure, who, on the other, huddled 
 into a deep chair, was stroking his chin with that strange 
 gesture peculiar to the stage valet, to mathematicians, and 
 priests, as betraying meditation on a problem difficult of 
 solution. 
 
 The little room, lighted by two windows looking on the 
 street, and lined with wainscoting painted gray, was so damp 
 that the lower panels displayed the geometrical crackle of de- 
 caying wood when it is no longer held together by paint. 
 The floor, of red tiles rubbed smooth by the lady's only ser- 
 vant, made little round hempen mats a necessity in front of 
 each chair, and on one of these mats were the abbe's feet. 
 The curtains, of light-green flowered damask, were drawn, 
 and the shutters closed. Two wax-candles lighted the table ; 
 the rest of the room was half-dark. Need it be said that 
 between the windows a fine pastel by Latour showed the por- 
 trait of the famous Admiral de Portenduere, the rival of Suf- 
 fren, of Kergarouet, of Guichen, of Simeuse? On the wain- 
 scot opposite the chimney might be seen the Vicomte de Por- 
 tenduere and the old lady's mother, a Kergarouet-Ploegat. 
 
 Savinien, then, was great-nephew to Vice-Admiral Ker- 
 garouet and cousin to the Comte de Portenduere, the admi- 
 ral's grandson, both of them very rich. The vice-admiral 
 lived in Paris, and the Comte de Portenduere at his chateau 
 of the same name in Dauphine. The Count, his cousin, rep- 
 resented the elder branch, and Savinien was the only scion 
 of the younger branch of the Portendueres. 
 
 The Count, a man of past forty, married to a rich wife, had 
 three children. His fortune, augmented several times by in- 
 heritance, brought him in, it was said, sixty thousand francs a
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 109 
 
 year. He represented the department of the Isere as deputy, 
 spending the winter in Paris, where he had repurchased the 
 mansion of the Portendueres with the indemnity paid him 
 under Villele's act. The vice-admiral had lately married his 
 niece,* Mademoiselle de Fontaine, solely to settle his fortune 
 on her. Thus the young Vicomte's errors had perhaps de- 
 prived him of the interest of two powerful friends. 
 
 Savinien, young and handsome, if he had entered the navy, 
 with his name and the interest of an admiral and of a deputy 
 to back him, might perhaps at three-and-twenty have been 
 already first-lieutenant ; but his mother, averse to seeing her 
 only son engage in a military career, had had him educated 
 at Nemours by one of the Abbe Chaperon's curates, and had 
 flattered herself that she might keep her son at her side till her 
 death. She had hoped to marry him very prudently to a 
 demoiselle d'Aiglemont, with twelve thousand francs a year ; 
 the name of Portenduere, and the farm-lands of Bordieres, 
 justifying his pretensions to her hand. This moderate but 
 judicious scheme, which might have re-established the family 
 in another generation, had been frustrated by events. The 
 d'Aiglemonts were now ruined, and one of their daughters, 
 Helene, the eldest, had vanished without any explanation 
 being offered by the family. 
 
 The tedium of a life devoid of outdoor interests, of pur- 
 pose, and of action, with nothing to support it but the love of 
 a son for his mother, so wearied Savinien that he burst his 
 bonds, light as they were, and vowed he would never live in 
 a country town ; discovering, somewhat late, that his future 
 did not lie in the Rue des Bourgeois. So at one-and-twenty 
 he left his mother to introduce himself to his relations, and 
 try his fortune in Paris. 
 
 The contrast between life at Nemours and life in the capital 
 could not fail to be fatal to a youth of one-and-twenty, per- 
 fectly free, with no one to contradict him, of course greedy 
 
 * See " Le Bal de Sceaux."
 
 110 UKSULE MIROUET. 
 
 for pleasure, and to whom the name of Portenduere and the 
 wealth of his connections opened every drawing-room. Con- 
 vinced that his mother had somewhere stored the savings of 
 twenty years, Savinien had soon squandered the six thousand 
 francs she had given him to spend in Paris. This sum did 
 not defray the expenses of the first six months, and by that 
 time he owed twice as much to his lodging-keeper, his tailor, 
 his bootmaker, to a man from whom he hired carriages and 
 horses, to a jeweler, in short, to all the tradespeople who 
 supply the luxury of youth. He had hardly achieved making 
 himself known, had hardly learned to speak, to enter a room, 
 to wear and choose a waistcoat, to order his clothes and tie 
 his cravat, when he found himself possessed of thirty thousand 
 francs of debts, and had not yet gotten farther than trying to 
 find an insinuating phrase in which to declare his passion to 
 Madame de Serizy, the sister of the Marquis de Ronquerolles, 
 an elegant woman still, whose youth had shone through the 
 empire. 
 
 "And how did you fellows get out of the scrape?" said 
 Savinien one day after breakfast to some young men of fashion 
 with whom he was intimate, as even at this day young men 
 become intimate when their pretensions in all respects tend to 
 the same ends, and when they proclaim an impossible equality. 
 " You were no richer than I ; you live on without a care, you 
 support yourselves, and I am already in debt." 
 
 "We all began in the same way," they replied, with a 
 laugh Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempre, Maxime de Trailles, 
 Emile Blondet, the dandies of that clay. 
 
 "If de Marsay was rich at beginning life, it was a mere 
 chance ! " said their host, a parvenu named Finot, who tried 
 to rub elbows with these young men. "And if he had been 
 any one else," he added, bowing to Marsay, "his fortune 
 might have been his ruin." 
 
 "You have hit the word," said Maxime de Trailles.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. Ill 
 
 "And the idea too," replied Rastignac. 
 
 "My dear boy," said de Marsay gravely to Savinien, 
 "debts are the sleeping partners of experience. A good 
 college education, with masters for the ornamental and the 
 useful, from which you learn nothing, costs sixty thousand 
 francs. If the education the world gives you costs double, it 
 teaches you life, business, and politics; to know men and 
 sometimes women." 
 
 Blondet capped the lecture by a parody on a line of La 
 Fontaine's 
 
 " The world sells us dear what we fancy it gives ! " 
 
 But instead of reflecting on the good sense in what the 
 most skilled pilots of the Paris shoals had said, Savinien took 
 it all as a jest. 
 
 " Take care, my dear fellow," said de Marsay, " you have 
 a fine name, and if you cannot acquire the fortune your name 
 demands you may end your days as quartermaster to a cavalry 
 regiment, 
 
 " ' For nobler heads than thine have had a fall,' " 
 
 he added, quoting Corneille, and taking Savinien's arm. " It 
 is about six years," he went on, " since a certain young Comte 
 d'Esgrignon came among us, who did not live more than two 
 years in the paradise of fashion ! Alas, his career was as that 
 of the sky-rocket. He rose as high as the Duchesse de Mau- 
 frigneuse, and he fell into his native town, where he is now 
 expiating his sins between a snuffling old father and rubbers 
 of whist at two sous a point. Go, then, and frankly explain 
 your position to Madame de Serizy ; do not be ashamed ; 
 she will be of great use to you ; whereas, if you play a charade 
 of first love, she will pose as a Raphael Madonna, play inno- 
 cent games, and send you a most expensive excursion round 
 the ' Pays du Tendre ' " (Country of Sentiment). 
 
 Savinien, still too young and too sensitive to a gentleman's
 
 112 URSULE M IRQ VET. 
 
 honor, dared not confess the state of his fortunes to Madame de 
 Serizy. Madame de Portenduere, at a moment when her son 
 knew not which way to turn, sent him twenty thousand francs, 
 all she had, in answer to a letter in which Savinien, taught by 
 his companions the tactics of assault by sons on their parents' 
 strong-boxes, hinted at bills to meet, and the disgrace of dis- 
 honoring his endorsements. With this help, he got on to 
 the end of the first year. During the second year, as a cap- 
 tive at the wheels of Madame de Serizy's car for she had 
 taken a serious fancy to him, and was teaching him his paces 
 he availed himself of the perilous aid of money-lenders. A 
 deputy, named des Lupeaulx, who was his friend, and a friend 
 of his cousin de Portenduere, introduced him one miserable 
 day to Gobseck, to Gigonnet, and to Palma, who, being duly 
 and fully informed as to the value of his mother's property, 
 made things easy for him. The money-lenders, by the delu- 
 sive aid of renewals, gave him a happy life for about eighteen 
 months more. Without daring to neglect Madame de Serizy, 
 the hapless boy fell desperately in love with the young Com- 
 tesse de Kergarouet, a prude, as all young women are who are 
 waiting for the death of an old husband, and who are clever 
 enough to save up their virtue for a second marriage. Savi- 
 nien, unable to understand that virtue based on reasons is 
 invincible, paid his court to Emilie de Kergarouet with all 
 the display of a rich man ; he was never missing from a ball 
 or a theatre if she was to be there. 
 
 " My boy, you have not enough powder to blow up that 
 rock ! " de Marsay said to him one evening, with a laugh. 
 
 This young prince of Paris fashion vainly attempted, out of 
 commiseration, to make the lad understand Emilie de Fon- 
 taine's character, only the gloomy light of disaster and the 
 darkness of a prison could enlighten Savinien. A bill of 
 exchange, rashly assigned to a jeweler in collusion with the 
 money-lenders, who did not choose to take the odium of 
 arresting him, led to Savinien de Portenduere being con-
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 113 
 
 signed to Sainte-Pelagie, unknown to his friends. As soon 
 as the news was known to Rastignac, de Marsay, and Lucien 
 de Rubempre, they all three went to see Savinien, and, find- 
 ing him absolutely destitute, each offered him a note for a 
 thousand francs. His own servant, bribed by two creditors, 
 led them to the apartment where Savinien lodged in secret, 
 and everything had been seized but the clothes and a few 
 trinkets he had on him. 
 
 The three young men, fortified by a capital dinner, while 
 they drank some sherry that de Marsay had brought with him, 
 catechised Savinien as to the state of his affairs, ostensibly to 
 make arrangements for the future, but in reality, no doubt, to 
 pass sentence on him. 
 
 "When your name is Savinien de Portenduere," cried 
 Rastignac, " when you have a future peer of France for your 
 cousin and the Admiral de Kergarouet for your grand-uncle, 
 if you are such a blunderer as to let yourself be sent to Sainte- 
 Pelagie, at any rate you must get out of it, my dear fellow ! " 
 
 "Why did you say nothing about it to me?" cried de 
 Marsay. " My traveling carriage was at your orders, ten 
 thousand francs, and letters for Germany. We know Gob- 
 seek and Gigonnet, and the other beasts of prey ; we would 
 have brought them to terms. To begin with, what has brought 
 you to drink of these poisoned waters?" asked de Marsay. 
 
 " Des Lupeaulx." 
 
 The three young men looked at each other, communicating 
 the same thought, a suspicion, but without speaking it. 
 
 "Explain your resources; show us your hand," said de 
 Marsay. 
 
 When Savinien had described his mother and her cap and 
 bows, her little house with its three windows fronting on the 
 Rue des Bourgeois, with no garden but a yard with a well, 
 and an outhouse to hold fire-logs ; when he had estimated the 
 value of this dwelling, built of rough stone set in reddish 
 cement, and that of the farm of Bordieres, the three dandies 
 8
 
 114 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 exchanged glances, and, with a look of deep meaning, quoted 
 the word spoken by the abbe in Alfred de Musset's play " Les 
 Marrons du feu" for his "Contes d'Espagne" had just 
 come out 
 
 "Dismal!" 
 
 "Your mother would pay in response to a skillful letter?" 
 said Rastignac. 
 
 "Yes; but after ?" cried de Marsay. 
 
 "If you had only been put into the hackney coach," said 
 Lucien, "the King's government would give you a berth in 
 a foreign mission ; but Sainte-Pelagie is not the anteroom to 
 an embassy." 
 
 "You are not up to the mark for life in Paris," said Ras- 
 tignac. 
 
 "Let's see," de Marsay began, looking at Savinien from 
 head to foot as a horse-dealer examines a horse. " You have 
 good blue eyes well set, you have a well-shaped white fore- 
 head, splendid black hair, a neat little mustache which looks 
 well on your pale skin, and a slight figure ; your foot bespeaks 
 a good breed, shoulders and chest strong, and not too like a 
 coal-heaver's. I should call you a good specimen of a dark 
 man. Your face is in the style of that of Louis XIII.; not 
 much color, and a well-shaped nose ; and you have besides 
 the thing that appeals to woman, the indescribable something 
 of which men themselves are never conscious, which is in the 
 air, the walk, the tone of voice, the flash of the eyes, the 
 gesture, a hundred little things which women see, and to 
 which they attach a meaning which eludes us. You do not 
 know yourself, my dear fellow. With a little style, in six 
 months you could fascinate an Englishwoman with a hundred 
 thousand francs, especially if you use the title of Vicomte de 
 Portenduere to which you have a right. My charming mother- 
 in-law, Lady Dudley, who has not her equal for skewering 
 two hearts together, will discover the damsel for you in some 
 alluvial district of Great Britain. But then you must be able
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 115 
 
 to stave off your debts for ninety days, and know how to do 
 it by some skillful stroke of high finance. Oh ! why did you 
 say nothing of it to me ? At Baden these money-lenders 
 would have respected you, have served you perhaps ; but after 
 clapping you in prison they despise you. The money-lender 
 is like society, like the mob on his knees to a man who is 
 clever enough to take advantage of him, and pitiless to a lamb. 
 In the eyes of a certain set, Sainte-Pelagie is a demon which 
 takes the shine off a young man's soul to a terrible extent. 
 Will you have my opinion, my dear boy? I say to you as I 
 did to little d'Esgrignon : Pay your debts cautiously, keeping 
 enough to live on for three years, and get married in the 
 country to the first girl who has thirty thousand francs a year. 
 In three years you will be sure to have found some suitable 
 heiress who will gladly hear herself called Madame de Porten- 
 duere. These are the words of wisdom. Let us have a drink. 
 I propose a toast : ' To the girl with money ! ' ' 
 
 The young men did not leave their ex-friend till the official 
 hour of parting, and on the threshold of the gate they said to 
 each other, "He is not game ! He is very much crushed! 
 Will he pick himself up again ! " 
 
 The next day Savinien wrote to his mother, a general con- 
 fession covering twenty-two pages. Madame de Portenduere, 
 after crying for a whole day, wrote first to her son, promising 
 to get him out of prison, and then to the Comtes de Por- 
 tenduere and de Kergarouet. 
 
 The letters the cure had just read, and which the poor 
 mother now held in her hand, moist with her tears, had 
 reached her that morning, and had almost broken her heart. 
 
 "PARIS, September, 1829. 
 " To Madame de Portenduere. 
 
 "MADAME: You cannot doubt the great interest which 
 the admiral takes in your troubles. The news you write to 
 M. de Kergarouet distresses me all the more because my house
 
 116 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 was open to your son ; we were proud of him. If Savinien 
 had had more confidence in the admiral, we would have taken 
 him in charge, and he would now have a suitable appoint- 
 ment ; but the unhappy boy told us nothing ! The admiral 
 could not possibly pay a hundred thousand francs ; he is him- 
 self in debt, and has involved himself for me, for I knew 
 nothing of his pecuniary position. He regrets it all the more 
 because Savinien, by allowing himself to be arrested, has for 
 the moment tied our hands. If my handsome nephew had 
 not felt for me some foolish passion which smothered the 
 voice of relationship in the arrogance of a lover, we might 
 have sent him to travel in Germany while his affairs here were 
 being arranged. M. de Kergarouet might have asked for a 
 place for his grand-nephew in the naval department ; but 
 imprisonment for debt cannot fail to paralyze the admiral's 
 efforts. Pay off Savinien's debts, let him go into the navy ; 
 he will then make his way like a true Portenduere ; he has 
 their fire in his fine black eyes, and we will all help him. 
 
 " So do not despair, madame ; you still have friends, 
 among whom I beg to be accounted one of the sincerest, and 
 I send you my best wishes with every respect. From your 
 very devoted servant, 
 
 "EMILIE DE KERGAROUET." 
 
 " PORTENDUERE, August, 1829. 
 " To Madame de Portenduere. 
 
 "My DEAR AUNT: I am as much vexed as pained by 
 Savinien's scapegrace doings. Married, as I am, the father 
 of two sons and a daughter, my fortune, moderate indeed in 
 comparison with my position and expectations, does not allow 
 of my reducing it by such a sum as a hundred thousand francs 
 to ransom a Portenduere captive to the Lombards. Sell your 
 farm, pay his debts, and come to Portenduere ; you will here 
 find the welcome due to you from us, even if our hearts were 
 not wholly yours. You will live happy, and we will find a
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 117 
 
 wife for Savinien, whom my wife thinks charming. This dis- 
 aster is nothing ; do not let it distress you ; it will never be 
 heard of in our remote district, where we know several girls 
 with money nay, very rich who will be enchanted to belong 
 to us. 
 
 " My wife joins me in assuring you how happy you would 
 make us, and begs you to accept her hopes that this plan may 
 be carried out, with the assurance of our affectionate respect. 
 
 " LUC-SAVINIEN, COMTE DE PORTENDUERE." 
 
 "What letters to write to a Kergarouet! " cried the old 
 Bretonne, wiping her eyes. 
 
 " The admiral does not know that his nephew is in prison," 
 said the Abbe Chaperon presently. " Only the Countess has 
 read your letter, and she alone has answered it. But some- 
 thing must be done," he added after a pause, " and this is the 
 advice I have the honor to offer you. Do not sell your farm. 
 The present lease is nearly out ; it has been running four-and- 
 twenty years ; in a few months you can raise the rent to six 
 thousand francs, and demand a premium equal to two years' 
 rent. Borrow from some honest man not from the towns- 
 people, who make a traffic of mortgages. Your neighbor, 
 now, is a worthy man, a man of the world, who knew the 
 upper classes before the Revolution, and who from being an 
 atheist has become a Catholic. Do not feel any repugnance 
 for coming to call on him this evening ; he will be deeply 
 sensible of your taking such a step ; forget for one moment 
 that you are a Kergarouet." 
 
 " Never ! " said the old mother in a strident tone. 
 
 " At any rate, be an amiable Kergarouet. Come when he 
 is alone; he will only take three-and-a-half per cent., perhaps 
 not more than three, and he will do you the service in the 
 most delicate manner. You will be quite satisfied with him. 
 He will go himself to release Savinien, for he will be obliged 
 to sell some securities, and he will bring him home to you."
 
 118 URSULE M1ROUET. 
 
 "Do you mean that little Minoret?" 
 
 " Little Minoret is eighty-three years of age," replied the 
 abbe with a smile. " My dear lady, have a little Christian 
 charity ; do not hurt his feelings, as he may be useful to you 
 in more ways than one." 
 
 "How, may I ask?" 
 
 "Well, he has living with him an angel, the heavenliest 
 young girl " 
 
 " Yes, that little Ursule. Well, and what then ? " 
 
 The poor cure dared say no more as he heard this inflected 
 interrogation. 
 
 " Well, what then ?" Its harsh severity cut short before- 
 hand the proposal he had been about to make. 
 
 "Doctor Minoret is, I believe, exceedingly rich " 
 
 " So much the better for him." 
 
 "You have already been the indirect cause of your son's 
 present misfortunes by giving him no opening in life. Beware 
 for the future," said the abbe sternly. " Shall I announce 
 your proposed visit to your neighbor? " 
 
 "But why, if he were told that I want him, should he not 
 come to me?" 
 
 " Well, madame, if you go to him, you will pay three per 
 cent., and if he comes to you, you will pay five," said the 
 abb6, hitting on this argument to persuade the old lady. 
 "And if you should be forced to sell your farm through 
 Dionis the notary, or Massin th.e clerk, who would refuse to 
 advance money in the hope of profiting by your disaster, you 
 would lose half the value of Les Bordieres. I have not the 
 smallest influence over the Dionis, the Massins, the Levraults, 
 rich country folks who covet your farm, and know that your 
 son is in prison." 
 
 " They know it ! They know it ! " she cried, throwing up 
 her hands. " Oh, my poor friend, you have let your coffee 
 get cold. Tiennette ! Tiennette ! " 
 
 Tiennette, an old Brittany peasant of sixty, in the jacket
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 119 
 
 and cap of her province, hastened in and took the cure's 
 coffee to heat it again. 
 
 " Wait a minute, Monsieur le Recteur," said she, seeing 
 that the cure was about to drink it. " I will heat it in a bain- 
 marie, and it will be none the worse." 
 
 "Very well, then," the priest began again, in his persuasive 
 voice, "I will give the doctor notice of your intended visit, 
 and you will come." 
 
 The old lady still would not give in till at the end of an 
 hour's discussion, during which the cure was forced to repeat 
 his arguments ten times over. And even then the haughty 
 daughter of the Kergarouets only yielded to these last words 
 
 " Savinien would go ! " 
 
 " Then it had better be I," said she. 
 
 Nine o'clock was striking when the little door in the great 
 gate was closed behind the cure, who forthwith rang eagerly 
 at the doctor's entrance. The Abbe Chaperon escaped Tien- 
 nette to fall on La Bougival, for the old nurse said to him 
 
 "You are very late, Monsieur le Cure"." Just as Tiennette 
 had said, " Why have you left madame so early when she is 
 in trouble?" 
 
 The cure found a large party in the doctor's green and 
 brown drawing-room ; for Dionis had been to reassure his 
 heirs on his way to see Massin, and repeat to him his uncle's 
 words. 
 
 "Ursule," said he, "has I suspect a love in her heart 
 which will bring her nothing but sorrow and care. She seems 
 to be romantic " the word applied by notaries to a sensitive 
 nature "and she will long remain unmarried. So do not be 
 suspicious ; pay her all sorts of little attentions, and be the 
 humble servants of your uncle, for he is sharper than a hun- 
 dred Goupils," added the notary, not knowing that Goupil is 
 a corrupt form of the Latin wipes, a fox. 
 
 So Mesdames Massin and Cr6miere, their husbands, the 
 postmaster and Dsir, with the town doctor and Bongrand,
 
 120 VRSULE MIROUET. 
 
 formed an unwonted and turbulent crowd at the old doctor's. 
 As the abbe went in he heard the sound of a piano. Poor 
 Ursule was ending Beethoven's sonata in A. With the art- 
 fulness permissible to the innocent, the girl, enlightened by 
 her godfather, and averse to the family, had selected this 
 solemn music, which must be studied to be appreciated, to 
 disgust these women with their wish to hear her. The finer 
 the music, the less the ignorant enjoy it. So, when the door 
 opened, and the Abbe Chaperon put in his venerable head, 
 "Ah ! here is Monsieur le Cure! " they all exclaimed, de- 
 lighted to have to rise and put an end to their torment. 
 
 The exclamation found an echo at the card-table, where 
 Bongrand, the town doctor, and the old man himself were 
 victims to the audacity with which the tax-collector, to court 
 his great-uncle, had proposed to take the fourth hand at whist. 
 Ursule came away from the piano. The doctor also rose as 
 if to greet the priest, but in fact to put a stop to the game. 
 After many compliments to their uncle on his goddaughter's 
 proficiency, the heirs took their leave. 
 
 " Good-night, friends," cried the doctor, as the gate shut. 
 
 "So that is what costs so dear ! " said Madame Cremiere 
 to Madame Massin, when they had gone a little way. 
 
 " God forbid that I should pay any money to hear my 
 little Aline make such a noise as that in the house !" replied 
 Madame Massin. 
 
 "She said it was by Beethoven, who is supposed to be a 
 great composer," said the tax-collector. "He has a great 
 name." 
 
 "My word ! not at Nemours," cried Madame Cremiere. 
 
 " I believe my uncle arranged it on purpose that we should 
 never go there again," said Massin. "For he certainly 
 winked as he pointed out the green volume to that little 
 minx." 
 
 " If that is the only tune they care to dance to, they are 
 wise to keep themselves to themselves," said the postmaster.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 121 
 
 " The justice must be very fond of his game to listen to 
 those rigmarole pieces," said Madame Cr6miere. 
 
 " I shall never be able to play to people who do not under- 
 stand music," said Ursule, taking her seat near the card-table. 
 
 "In persons of a rich organization feeling can only express 
 itself among congenial surroundings," said the cur6. "Just 
 as a priest can give no blessing in the presence of the evil 
 one, and as a chestnut tree dies in a heavy soil, so a musician 
 of genius feels himself morally routed when he is among 
 ignorant listeners. In the arts we need to receive from the 
 souls in which our souls find their medium as much power as 
 we can impart. The axiom, which is a law of human affec- 
 tions, has given rise to the proverbs : ' We must howl with 
 the wolves;' 'Like to like.' But the discomfort you must 
 have felt is known only to tender and sensitive natures." 
 
 "Ay, my friends," said the doctor, "and a thing which 
 might only annoy another woman could kill my little Ursule. 
 Ah ! when I am no more, raise up between this tender flower 
 and the world such a sheltering hedge as Catullus speaks of 
 Ut flos, etc." 
 
 " And yet the ladies were flattering in their remarks to you, 
 Ursule," said the lawyer, smiling. 
 
 " Coarsely flattering," observed the town doctor. 
 
 " I have always felt such coarseness in insincere praise," 
 replied Monsieur Minoret. "And why?" 
 
 "A true thought has its own refinement," said the abb6. 
 
 "Did you dine with Madame de Portenduere ? " said 
 Ursule, questioning the Abbe Chaperon, with a glance of 
 anxious curiosity. 
 
 "Yes; the poor lady is in much distress, and it is not 
 impossible that she may call on you this evening, Monsieur 
 Minoret." 
 
 " If she is in trouble and needs me, I will go to her," said 
 the doctor. " Let us finish the first rubber."
 
 122 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 Ursule pressed her uncle's hand under the table. 
 
 "Her son," said the justice, "was rather too simple to 
 live in Paris without a mentor. When it came to my knowl- 
 edge that inquiries were being made of the notary here about 
 the old lady's farm, I guessed that he was borrowing on his 
 reversion." 
 
 " Do you think him capable of that? " said Ursule, with a 
 terrible flash at Monsieur Bongrand, who said to himself, 
 "Yes, alas ! she is in love with him." 
 
 " Yes and No," said the town doctor. " There is good in 
 Savinien, and the proof of it is that he is in prison. A 
 thorough rogue never gets caught." 
 
 "My friends," said old Minoret, "enough of this for this 
 evening. We must not leave a poor mother to weep for a 
 minute longer when we can dry her tears." 
 
 The four friends rose and went out. Ursule accompanied 
 them as far as the gate, watched her godfather and the cure 
 while they knocked at the door opposite ; and when Tiennette 
 had admitted them, she sat down on one of the stone piers in 
 the courtyard, La Bougival standing near her. 
 
 "Madame la Vicomtesse," said the cure, going first into 
 the little room, " Doctor Minoret could not allow you to have 
 the trouble of going to his house " 
 
 " I am too much of the old school, madame," the doctor 
 put in, " not to know what is due from a man to a person 
 of your rank, and I am only too happy to think, from what 
 Monsieur le Cur6 tells me, that I may be of some service to 
 you. ' ' 
 
 Madame de Portenduere, on whom the arrangement she 
 had agreed to weighed so heavily, that, since the abbe had 
 quitted her, she had thought of applying rather to the notary, 
 was so surprised by Minoret's delicate feeling, that she rose to 
 return his bow, and pointed to an arm-chair. 
 
 "Be seated, monsieur," said she, with a royal air. " Our 
 dear cur6 will have told you that the Vicomte is in prison for
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 123 
 
 debt a young man's debts a hundred thousand francs. If 
 you could lend him the sum, I would give you as security my 
 farm at Bordieres." 
 
 "We can talk of that, madame, when I shall have brought 
 you back your son, if you will allow me to represent you in 
 these circumstances." 
 
 " Very good, monsieur," replied the old lady, with a bow, 
 and a glance at the cure, which was meant to convey : " You 
 are right; he is a man of good breeding." 
 
 " My friend, the doctor, as you see, madame, is full of devo- 
 tion to your family." 
 
 "We shall be grateful to you, monsieur," said Madame 
 de Portenduere, with a visible effort, "for at your age to 
 venture through Paris on the tracks of a scapegrace's mis- 
 deeds " 
 
 "Madame, in '65, I had the honor of seeing the illustrious 
 Admiral de Portenduere at the house of the worthy Monsieur 
 de Malesherbes, and at that of the Comte de Buffon, who 
 was anxious to question him as to various curious facts in 
 his voyages. It is not impossible that Monsieur de Porten- 
 duere, your late husband, may have been there too. The 
 French navy was then in its glory ; it held its own against 
 England, and the captain contributed his quota of courage to 
 the game. How impatiently, in '83 and '84, did we await 
 news from the camp of Saint-Roch ! I was very nearly joining 
 as surgeon to the King's forces. Your grand-uncle, Admiral 
 de Kergarouet, who is still living, fought his great battle at 
 that time, for he was on board the ' Belle Poule.' ' 
 
 "Ah ! if he knew that his grand-nephew was in prison?" 
 replied Madame de Portenduere. 
 
 " The Vicomte will no longer be there two days hence," 
 said old Minoret, rising. 
 
 He put out his hand to take the old lady's, who allowed 
 him to do so ; he kissed it respectfully, bowed low, and went 
 out ; but he came in again to say to the cur6
 
 124 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 " Will you, my dear abbe, secure a place for me in the dili- 
 gence for to-morrow morning? " 
 
 The cure remained another half-hour to sing the praises of 
 the doctor, who had intended to conquer the old lady, and 
 had succeeded. 
 
 "He is wonderful for his age," said she. " He talks of 
 going to Paris and settling my son's affairs as if he were 
 no more than five-and-twenty. He has moved in good so- 
 ciety." 
 
 " In the best, madame ; and at this day, more than one 
 son of an impoverished peer of France would be very happy 
 to marry his ward with a million of francs. Ah, if such a 
 notion should enter Savinien's brain, times are so altered that 
 the chief difficulties would not be raised on your side after 
 your son's conduct ! " 
 
 It was the intense amazement with which the old lady heard 
 this speech that allowed the priest to finish it. 
 
 " You have lost your wits, my dear Abbe Chaperon." 
 
 "Think it over, madame; and God grant that henceforth 
 your son may behave in such a way as to acquire that old 
 man's esteem ! " 
 
 "If it were not you, Monsieur le Cure," said Madame de 
 Portenduere ; " if it were any one else who spoke to me in 
 these terms " 
 
 "You would never see him again," said the abb, smiling. 
 " We must hope that your dear son may enlighten you as to 
 what is doing in Paris in the matter of marriages. You will 
 consider Savinien's happiness, and, after compromising his 
 future, you will surely not interfere with his making himself a 
 position?" 
 
 " And it is you who say this to me ! " responded Madame 
 de Portenduere in amazement. 
 
 "If I did not, who would?" cried the priest, rising and 
 beating a prompt retreat. 
 
 The cure saw Ursule and her godfather walking up and
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 125 
 
 down the little courtyard. The submissive doctor had been 
 so teased by his ward that he had at last yielded ; she wanted 
 to go to Paris, and had found a thousand pretexts. He called 
 the cure, who joined them, and the doctor begged him to 
 engage the coupe of the diligence for that very night if the 
 coach-office were still open. 
 
 At six o'clock on the following afternoon the old man and 
 the young girl reached Paris, and the doctor went, the same 
 evening, to consult his lawyer. Political events looked threat- 
 ening. The justice at Nemours had been telling the doctor 
 the day before, several times in the course of their conversa- 
 tion, that he would be nothing less than mad to keep a penny 
 in the funds so long as the quarrel between the Court and the 
 Press should remain unsettled. Minoret's notary approved 
 of the advice indirectly given by Bongrand. So the doctor 
 took advantage of his visit to Paris to sell out his commercial 
 investments and state securities, which were all at a premium, 
 and to deposit his capital in the bank. The lawyer also advised 
 his old client to sell the shares left to Ursule by Monsieur Jordy, 
 which, as a good trustee, he had invested. He promised to 
 set to work, with the help of a very knowing agent, to come to 
 terms with Savinien's creditors ; but, to achieve every success, 
 it was necessary that the young man should spend yet a few 
 days in prison. 
 
 " Hurrying on these matters costs at least fifteen percent.," 
 said the lawyer to the doctor. " And at any rate you cannot 
 get at your money for seven or eight days." 
 
 When Ursule learned that Savin ien would be in prison at 
 least a week longer, she entreated her guardian to let her go 
 there with him, if only for once. Old Minoret refused. The 
 uncle and niece were lodging at an hotel in the Rue Croix- 
 des-Petits-Champs, where the doctor had taken a suitable set 
 of rooms ; and knowing his ward's religious honor, he made 
 her promise never to go out while he was absent on business. 
 The kind old man took her for walks about Paris, showing
 
 126 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 her the arcades, the shops, the Boulevards but nothing 
 interested or amused her. 
 
 " What do you want ? " asked he. 
 
 "To see Sainte-Pelagie," she persistently replied. 
 
 Then Minoret hired a hackney coach, and took her to the 
 Rue de la Clef, where the vehicle drew up in front of the 
 squalid building an ancient convent turned into a prison. 
 The sight of the high gray walls, where every window was 
 closely barred, of the low door, not to be entered without 
 stooping dreadful lesson ! the gloomy mass standing in a 
 neighborhood full of poverty, where it rises in the midst of 
 deserted streets, itself the supreme misery ; the whole com- 
 bination of dismal ideas choked Ursule, and made her shed 
 tears. 
 
 " How is it," said she, " that young men can be imprisoned 
 for money? How is it that a debt gives to a money-lender 
 such power as the King himself does not possess ? And he is 
 there!" she exclaimed. "Where, godfather ?" she added, 
 looking from one window to another. 
 
 "Ursule," said her godfather, "you make me commit 
 follies. This is not forgetting him ! " 
 
 " But," said she, " even if I must give him up, must I feel 
 no interest in him ? I may love him, and marry no one." 
 
 "Oh ! " cried the old man, "there is so much method in 
 your madness, that I repent of having brought you." 
 
 Three days later the old man had the receipts in due form, 
 the title-deeds, and all the documents which were necessary to 
 liberate Savinien. The liquidation, including the agent's 
 commission, had been effected for the sum of eighty thousand 
 francs. The doctor had in hand eight hundred thousand 
 francs, which, by his lawyer's advice, he placed in treasury 
 notes, so as not to lose too much interest. He kept twenty 
 thousand in bank-notes for Savinien. 
 
 The doctor himself went to release him on Saturday at two 
 o'clock, and the young Vicomte, already informed by a letter
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 127 
 
 from his mother, thanked his deliverer with sincere effusive- 
 ness of feeling. 
 
 " You must not delay in coming home to see your mother," 
 said old Minoret. 
 
 Savinien replied, in some confusion, that even in prison he 
 had contracted a debt of honor ; and he told the doctor of 
 the visit of his three friends. 
 
 " I suspected you might have some personal debts," said 
 the doctor with a smile. " Your mother has borrowed a 
 hundred thousand francs, but I have paid no more than eighty 
 thousand ; here is the remainder, use it with thrift, monsieur, 
 and regard what is left as your stake on the green cloth of 
 fortune." 
 
 During the past week Savinien had reflected on the times 
 he lived in. Competition on all sides demands severe labor 
 from those who hope to make a fortune. Illegal methods 
 require more talent and underhand manoeuvres than enter- 
 prise under the light of day. Success in the gay world, far 
 from securing a position, absorbs time and a great deal of 
 money. The name of Portenduere, omnipotent according to 
 his mother, was nothing in Paris. His cousin the deputy, the 
 Comte de Portenduere, cut but a small figure in the midst of 
 the elective Chamber in comparison with the peerage and the 
 court, and had no more influence than enough for himself. 
 Admiral Kergarouet existed only in the person of his wife. 
 He had seen orators, men who had risen from a social rank 
 beneath the nobility or the simple gentry, become personages 
 of importance. In short, money was the pivot, the only 
 means, the only motor of a society which Louis XVIII. had 
 tried to form in imitation of that of England. 
 
 On his way from the Rue de la Clef to the Rue Croix-des- 
 Petits-Champs, the young gentleman summed up his medita- 
 tions, and laid them before the old doctor, in accordance with 
 de Marsay's advice. 
 
 " I must let myself be forgotten," said he, "for three or
 
 128 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 four years, and try to find a career. Perhaps I may make a 
 name in political diplomacy or in moral statistics, by some 
 treatise on one of the great questions of the day. At any rate, 
 while finding some young person whom I may marry, and 
 whose position may qualify me for election, I shall work in 
 silence and obscurity." 
 
 The doctor studied the young man's countenance, and saw 
 in it the fixed purpose of a man who, having been wounded, 
 hopes for revenge. He greatly approved this scheme. 
 
 " My young neighbor," said he, " if you have cast the skin 
 of the old nobility which is not found to be good wear 
 nowadays after three or four years of a steady industrious 
 life, I will undertake to find you a superior girl, pretty, amia- 
 ble, pious, and with a fortune of seven or eight hundred 
 thousand francs, who will make you happy, and of whom you 
 may be proud, though she has no nobility but that of the 
 heart." 
 
 " Eh, doctor ! " cried the young man, " there is no nobility 
 left only an aristocracy." 
 
 " Go and pay your debts of honor, and return here. I will 
 go to engage the coupe of the diligence, for my ward is with 
 me," said the old man. 
 
 That evening, at six o'clock, the three travelers set out 
 from the Rue Dauphine by the " Dueler." Ursule, who wore 
 a veil, spoke not a word. After blowing her the kiss in an 
 impulse of trivial flirtation, which had upset Ursule as much as 
 a whole book of love, Sa,vinien had totally forgotten the 
 doctor's ward in the torments of his debts ; and, indeed, his 
 hopeless adoration of Emilie de Kergarouet did not suffer him 
 to bestow a remembrance on the glances he had interchanged 
 with a mere little girl at Nemours. So he did not recognize 
 her when the old man made her get first into the coach and 
 sat next her, dividing her from the young Vicomte. 
 
 "I have accounts to settle with you," said the doctor to 
 the youth ; "I have all your papers here."
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 12$ 
 
 "I was within an ace of not getting away," said Savinien. 
 " I had to order clothes and linen ; the Philistines have 
 robbed me of everything, and I am in the state of the prod- 
 igal son." 
 
 However interesting the subjects of conversation between 
 the old man and the young one, however pertinent some of 
 Savinien's remarks, the young girl sat in silence till it was 
 dark, her green veil hiding her face, and her hands folded over 
 her shawl. 
 
 "You do not seem to have found Paris very delightful, 
 mademoiselle," said Savinien at last, somewhat piqued. 
 
 "I am glad to return to Nemours," she replied, in an 
 agitated voice, putting up her veil. 
 
 In spite of the gloom, Savinien now recognized her by 
 her thick plaits of hair and brilliant blue eyes. 
 
 "And, for my part, I can leave Paris without regret to 
 bury myself at Nemours, since I there shall find so fair a 
 neighbor," said he. "I hope, Monsieur le Docteur, that 
 you will allow me to visit you ; I am fond of music, and I 
 remember hearing Mademoiselle Ursule's piano." 
 
 " I hardly know, monsieur," said the doctor gravely, 
 "whether your mother will be pleased that you should come 
 to see an old man who is obliged to have a mother's care 
 of this dear child." 
 
 This measured reply gave Savinien much to think about ; 
 he now recollected that kiss, so lightly wafted. 
 
 It was now night ; the heat was oppressive ; the doctor 
 and Savinien were the first to fall asleep. Ursule, who re- 
 mained a long time awake, her head full of plans, succumbed 
 about midnight. She had taken off her little hat of coarse 
 straw plait. Her head, in a little cap of embroidered muslin, 
 presently dropped on to her godfather's shoulder. At day- 
 break, near Bouron, Savinien woke the first. He saw Ursule 
 in the untidy state produced by the jolting of the coach ; her 
 cap was tumbled and askew ; her hair had come unpinned, 
 9
 
 130 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 and the plaits fell about her face, which was rosy with the 
 heat ; but in this disorder, which is horrible in a woman to 
 whom dress is indispensable, youth and beauty are triumphant. 
 The sleep of innocence is always lovely. Her parted lips 
 showed pretty teeth ; her shawl, thrown back, allowed him to 
 observe, without offense to Ursule, the grace of her figure 
 under the folds of a full bodice of flowered muslin. And 
 through the countenance shone the purity of the maiden's 
 soul, all the more visible because no other expression mingled 
 with it. Old Minoret, who presently woke, arranged her 
 head against the corner of the coach to make her more com- 
 fortable ; and she did not even feel what he did, so soundly 
 was she sleeping, after spending so many nights in thinking 
 of Savinien's misfortunes. 
 
 "Poor little thing ! " said he to his companion, "she sleeps 
 like a child as she is." 
 
 "You should be proud of her," said Savinien, " for she 
 seems to be as good as she is pretty." 
 
 " Ah ! she is the light of the house ! If she were my 
 daughter, I could not love her better. She will be sixteen on 
 the 5th of February next. God grant I may live to see her 
 married to a man who will make her happy ! I wanted to 
 take her to the play in Paris, where she had never been be- 
 fore ; she would not go ; the cure at Nemours had forbidden 
 it. 'But,' said I, 'when you are married, if your husband 
 wishes to take you ? ' 'I shall do whatever my husband 
 desires, 1 said she. ' If he should ask me to do anything 
 wrong, and I should be so weak as to obey him, he will be 
 held responsible before God ; but I should find strength to 
 resist in his interest, of course.' " 
 
 As they reached Nemours, at five in the morning, Ursule 
 woke up, quite ashamed of her untidiness, and of meeting 
 Savinien's gaze of frank admiration. During the hour which 
 the diligence took to drive from Bouron, where it had stopped 
 a few minutes, the young man had fallen in love with Ursule.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 131 
 
 He had studied the innocence of her soul, the beauty of her 
 person, the whiteness of her complexion, the delicacy of her 
 features, and the sweet voice which had spoken the brief ex- 
 pressive phrase in which the poor child had told everything 
 while intending to tell nothing. In short, I know not what 
 presentiment led him to think of Ursule as the wife the 
 doctor had suggested to him, set in a gold frame by the 
 magical words "Seven or eight hundred thousand francs." 
 
 "In three or four years she will be twenty; I shall be 
 twenty-seven. The good man spoke of struggles, of work, of 
 good behavior. However cunning he may be, he will end by 
 telling me his secret." 
 
 The neighbors parted before their respective houses, and 
 Savinien put much meaning into his leave-taking, with a 
 glance at Ursule full of imploring invitation. 
 
 Madame de Portenduere left her son to sleep till noon. 
 The doctor and Ursule, in spite of their fatiguing journey, 
 went to high mass. 
 
 Savinien's release, and his return in the doctor's company, 
 had explained the object of his journey to the parochial poli- 
 ticians and to his heirs, who had met in council in the church 
 square, as they had done a fortnight since. To the great 
 surprise of all parties, on coming out of church, Madame de 
 Portenduere stopped old Minoret, who offered her his arm, 
 and conducted her home. The old lady wished to invite him 
 and his ward to dinner that same day, telling him that the 
 cure would be her other guest. 
 
 " He wanted to let Ursule see Paris," said Minoret-Levrault. 
 
 " Damnation ! The old man cannot stir a step without 
 his little housekeeper," cried CrSmiere. 
 
 "There must have been some very private transactions 
 between them, for Mother Portenduere to take his arm," 
 observed Massin. 
 
 " It has not occurred to you that your uncle has sold his 
 investments and taken the young 'un out of quod ! " cried
 
 132 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 Goupil. " He refused my master, but he did not refuse his 
 
 madame Ah ! your goose is cooked ! The Vicomte 
 
 will propose a marriage-contract instead of a promise to pay, 
 and the doctor will make the husband settle on his god- 
 daughter all the money he will have to give her to secure such 
 a match." 
 
 " It would not be such a bad stroke of business to marry 
 Ursule to Monsieur Savinien," said the butcher. "The old 
 lady is having them to dine with her to-day ; Tiennette came 
 over to me at five in the morning to secure a fillet of beef." 
 
 " Well, Dionis, this is a pretty piece of work ! " said Mas- 
 sin, hurrying to meet the notary, who came out on to the 
 square. 
 
 "Why, what's wrong?" said the notary. "All is well; 
 your uncle has sold his securities, and Madame de Porten- 
 duere has asked me to go to her house to witness a deed 
 acknowledging a loan of a hundred thousand francs from your 
 uncle on a mortgage of her estates." 
 
 "Yes; but if the young folks were to marry each other?" 
 
 " You might as well say if Goupil were to be my successor," 
 said the notary. 
 
 " Neither case is impossible," said Goupil. 
 
 On returning from mass, the old lady sent Tiennette to 
 desire her son to come to her room. 
 
 The little house had three rooms on the ground floor. 
 Those of Madame de Portenduere and of her deceased husband 
 were on the same side of the house, divided by a dressing- 
 room with a borrowed light, and a small anteroom opening 
 on to the stairs. The window of the third room, which had 
 always been Savinien 's, looked out on the street, as did that 
 of his father's. The staircase lay behind it in such a way as 
 to leave space for a little dressing-room adjoining, with a 
 small round window to the courtyard. 
 
 Madame de Portenduere's room, the gloomiest in the house,
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 133 
 
 also looked on the yard ; but the widow spent her life in the 
 sitting-room on the ground floor, which communicated by a 
 passage with the kitchen built on the farther side of the court- 
 yard ; so that this room did duty both as drawing-room and 
 dining-room. 
 
 The room that had been Monsieur de Portenduere's re- 
 mained in the state in which it had been left on the day of 
 his death ; the dead man alone was missing. Madame de 
 Portenduere herself had made the bed, and laid upon it the 
 captain's uniform, with her husband's sword, red ribbon, 
 orders and hat. The gold snuff-box out of which the Vicomte 
 had taken his last pinch of snuff was on the table by the bed, 
 with his prayer-book, his watch, and the cup he used to drink 
 out of. His white hair, arranged in a frame in a single thick 
 curl, hung above the crucifix and holy-water cup over the bed. 
 Finally, the trifling objects of his daily use were all in their 
 place his papers, furniture, Dutch spittoon, and field-glass 
 hanging over the fireplace. The widow had stopped the 
 antique clock at the hour of his death, which it thus recorded 
 in perpetuity. The scent of his powder and snuff still hung 
 in the air. The hearth was as he had left it. To go into the 
 room was like seeing him again, on finding all the things that 
 thus spoke of his habits. His tall cane with its gold knob 
 still lay where he had left it, and his large doeskin gloves 
 close beside it. On the console stood a vase of solid gold, 
 coarsely executed, but worth a thousand crowns, a present 
 from the port of Havana, which he had protected during the 
 war of American Independence from an attack of the English, 
 holding his own against a superior force, after getting the 
 vessels under his convoy safe into harbor. As a reward the 
 King of Spain had made him Knight of the Spanish Orders. 
 For this achievement he was promoted on the first oppor- 
 tunity to the command of a squadron, and received the order 
 of the Legion of Honor. 
 
 Then, on his next leave, he married his wife, with a for-
 
 134 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 tune of two hundred thousand francs. But the Revolution 
 stopped all further promotion, and Monsieur de Portenduere 
 emigrated. 
 
 "Where is my mother?" asked Savinien of Tiennette, on 
 making his appearance. 
 
 " She is waiting for you in your father's room," said the old 
 Bretonne. 
 
 Savinien could not repress a little shudder. He knew how 
 rigid were his mother's principles, her worship of honor, her 
 loyalty, her faith in noble blood, and he foresaw a scene. So 
 he went as if to lead a forlorn hope, his heart beating and 
 his face almost pallid. In the twilight that filtered through 
 the Venetian shutters he saw his mother dressed in black, and 
 wearing a solemn mien in harmony with this chamber of the 
 dead. 
 
 " Monsieur le Vicomte," she said, rising as he entered and 
 taking his hand to lead him to the bedside, " there your 
 father died a man of honor ; died without having anything 
 to reproach himself with. His spirit is above. He must 
 indeed have groaned there to see his son disgraced by im- 
 prisonment for debt. Under the old monarchy you would 
 have been spared this mud-stain, by craving a lettre de cachet, 
 by which you would have been shut up for a few days in a 
 state prison. However, you now stand before your father, 
 who can hear you. You, knowing all you had done before 
 being taken to that squalid prison, can you swear to me, be- 
 fore that shade, and before God who sees all things, that you 
 have done no dishonorable action, that your debts were the 
 consequence of a young man's follies in short, that your 
 honor is unspotted ? If your blameless father were there, 
 alive, in that armchair, if he could call you to account for 
 your conduct, would he, after hearing you, embrace you 
 still?" 
 
 " Yes, mother," said the young man, with the most respect- 
 ful gravity.
 
 THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 135 
 
 She opened her arms and clasped her son to her heart, 
 shedding a few tears. 
 
 "Then let all be forgotten," said she; "we have lost 
 nothing but the money. I will pray to God that it may be 
 restored to us ; and since you still are worthy of your name, 
 kiss me, for I have suffered greatly." 
 
 "I swear to you, my dear mother," said he, holding out 
 his hand over the bed, " never again to give you the least 
 trouble of the same kind, and to do all in my power to repair 
 my past errors." 
 
 " Come to breakfast, my child," she said, and she left the 
 room. 
 
 If the laws of the stage are to be applied to narrative, 
 Savinien's arrival, by introducing at Nemours the only actor 
 as yet missing from the personages of this little drama, here 
 completes the prologue.
 
 n. 
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 
 
 The action began with a scene so hackneyed in literature, 
 whether old or new, that no one would believe in its effect in 
 1829 if the principal figure were not an old lady of Brittany, 
 a Kergarouet, and an emigree. But it must at once be made 
 clear that in 1829 the nobility had reconquered in society 
 some of the ground it had lost in political influence. More- 
 over, the feeling which governs grandparents when matri- 
 monial suitability is in question, is imperishable ; it is closely 
 implicated with the existence of civilized society, and founded 
 in family spirit. It is supreme at Geneva as at Vienna, and 
 as at Nemours, where Zelie Levrault had refused her consent 
 to her son's marrying the daughter of a bastard. 
 
 Still, every social law has its exceptions. Savinien proposed 
 trying to bend his mother's pride before Ursule's innate no- 
 bility. The battle began forthwith. As soon as he was 
 seated at table his mother began to tell him of the dreadful 
 letters, as she called them, written to her by the Kergarouets 
 and the Portendueres. 
 
 " The family has ceased to exist, my dear mother," replied 
 Savinien. " Nothing is left but the individual. The nobility 
 no longer forms a compact body. Nowadays no one asks if 
 you are a Portenduere, or if you are brave, or a statesman ; 
 all that any one inquires is, * How much do you pay in rates 
 and taxes?' " 
 
 "And the King? " asked the old lady. 
 
 " The King stands between the two Chambers, like a man 
 between his lawful wife and his mistress. So I must contrive 
 to marry some rich girl whatever her family may be a peas- 
 ant's daughter if she has a million of francs, and if she is 
 (136)
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 137 
 
 fairly well brought up; that is to say, if she comes from a 
 convent-school." 
 
 " This is quite another matter ! " said the old lady. 
 
 Savinien knit his brows over this reply. He knew that 
 granite will, called Breton obstinacy, which characterized his 
 mother; and was anxious to know, as soon as possible, what 
 her views were on this delicate subject. 
 
 "And so," said he, " if I should fall in love with a girl 
 say, for instance, our neighbor's ward, little Ursule you 
 would oppose my marrying her ? " 
 
 "To my dying day," said she. "After my death you 
 alone will be responsible for the honor and the blood of the 
 Portendueres and the Kergarouets." 
 
 " Then you would leave me to die of hunger and despair 
 for the sake of a chimera which, in these days, can only be- 
 come real by acquiring the splendor of wealth." 
 
 "You can serve France and trust in God." 
 
 " You will postpone my happiness till the day after your 
 death." 
 
 "It will be horrible on your part, that is all," calmly re- 
 plied his mother. 
 
 " Louis XIV. was very near marrying Mazarin's niece a 
 parvenu." 
 
 " Mazarin himself opposed it." 
 
 " And the widow Scarron ? " 
 
 " She was a d' Aubign6 ! Besides, the marriage was secret. 
 But I am a very old woman, my son," she added, shaking her 
 head. " When I am gone, you can marry to please your own 
 fancy." 
 
 Savinien loved and respected his mother; but at once, 
 though in silence, he set against the obstinacy of the daughter 
 of the Kergarouets, an obstinacy equal to her own, and de- 
 termined never to have any wife but Ursule, to whom this 
 opposition gave all the charm of a forbidden joy as always 
 happens in such cases.
 
 138 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 When, after vespers, Doctor Minoret, with Ursule, dressed 
 in pink and white, entered the chilly sitting-room, the poor 
 child was seized with nervous trembling, just as if she had 
 found herself in the presence of the Queen of France, and 
 had some favor to ask of her. Since her talk with the doc- 
 tor, the little house had assumed, to her, the proportions of 
 a palace, and the old lady all the social importance that a 
 duchess must have had in the eyes of a villein's daughter in 
 the middle ages. Never had Ursule measured more hope- 
 lessly the distance which divided a Vicomte de Portenduere 
 from the daughter of a bandmaster, a singer in the opera, the 
 natural son of an organist, herself living on the bounty of a 
 physician. 
 
 "What ails you, child?" said the lady, making her sit 
 down by her side. 
 
 " Madame, I am overcome by the honor you condescend 
 to pay me. ' ' 
 
 "Why, child," replied Madame de Portenduere in her 
 most vinegary accent, " I know how much your guardian loves 
 you, and I wish to do what is agreeable to him, for he has 
 brought home the prodigal son." 
 
 "But, my dear mother," said Savinien, for it went to his 
 heart to see Ursule's deep blushes, and the terrible effort by 
 which she repressed her tears, " even if you were under no 
 obligation to Monsieur Minoret, it seems to me we might 
 be gratified by the pleasure mademoiselle is good enough to 
 do us by accepting your invitation." And the young man 
 pressed the doctor's hand with meaning as he added 
 
 " You, monsieur, wear the order of Saint Michael, the oldest 
 French order, which in itself confers nobility." 
 
 Ursule's great beauty, to which her almost hopeless love 
 had, within the last few days, given the depth of expression 
 which the greatest painters have always stamped on those 
 portraits in which the soul is made strongly visible, had sud- 
 denly struck Madame de Portenduere, and led her to suspect
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 139 
 
 some ambitious interest under the doctor's generosity. And 
 the speech to which Savinien had replied was uttered with a 
 pointedness that wounded the old man in what was dearest 
 to him. Still, he could not forbear from smiling as he heard 
 himself addressed as " Chevalier" by Savinien, and discerned 
 in this audacious exaggeration a lover's fearlessness of the 
 ridiculous. 
 
 "The order of Saint Michael, to obtain which so many 
 follies were committed of old, is fallen, Monsieur le Vicomte," 
 replied the old court physician. " Fallen, like so many other 
 privileges ! It is no longer bestowed on any but doctors and 
 poor artists. And so kings have done well to unite it to that 
 of Saint Lazarus, a saint who was, I believe, an unhappy 
 wretch brought back to life by a miracle ! Viewed in this 
 light, the order of Saint Michael and Saint Lazarus to us may 
 be symbolical." 
 
 After this reply, full of irony and dignity, silence reigned, 
 no one caring to break it ; and it was becoming uncomfort- 
 able, when a knock was heard. 
 
 "Here is our good cure," said the old lady, rising, and 
 leaving Ursule to herself, while she went forward to receive 
 the priest an honor she had not paid to Ursule or the doctor. 
 
 Minoret smiled as he looked from his ward to Savinien. 
 To complain or to take offense at Madame de Portenduere's 
 bad manners was a rock on which a small mind might have 
 run aground ; but the old man had too much breeding not 
 to avoid it. He began talking to the Vicomte of the danger 
 Charles X. was in at that time, after intrusting the direction 
 of his policy to the Prince de Polignac. When a long enough 
 time had elapsed to obviate any appearance of retaliation on 
 the old lady by speaking of business matters, he handed to 
 her, almost jestingly, the documents of the prosecution and 
 the receipted bills which proved the accounts drawn up by 
 the lawyer. 
 
 "My son acknowledges them?" she asked with a glance
 
 140 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 at Savinien, who bowed in reply. " Well, then, they can be 
 handed to Dionis," and she pushed away the papers, treat- 
 ing the affair with the contempt due in her eyes to money 
 matters. 
 
 To look down on wealth was, in Madame de Portenduere's 
 opinion, to enhance nobility, and leave the middle class with- 
 out a foot to stand on. 
 
 A few minutes later Goupil called on behalf of his master, 
 to ask for the accounts as between Savinien and Monsieur 
 Minoret. 
 
 " And what for ? " asked the old lady. 
 
 " To serve as a basis for the mortgage deed ; there is no 
 direct payment of money," replied the clerk, looking inso- 
 lently about him. 
 
 Ursule and Savinien, who looked in this odious person's 
 face for the first time, felt such a sensation as is produced by 
 a toad, aggravated by a sense of ill omen. They both had 
 that indefinable and vague anticipation of the future which has 
 no name in speech, but which might be accounted for by an 
 impulse of that inner self of which the Swedenborgian had 
 spoken to Doctor Minoret. A conviction that this venomous 
 Goupil would be fatal to them made Ursule quake ; but she 
 got over her agitation as she perceived with unspeakable joy 
 that Savinien shared her feelings. 
 
 "Monsieur Dionis' clerk is not a handsome man," said 
 Savinien, when Goupil shut the door. 
 
 " What can it matter whether people of that class are ugly 
 or handsome?" said Madame de Portenduere, with an eleva- 
 tion of her eyebrows. 
 
 " I have no objection to his ugliness," said the cure, " but 
 only to his malignity, which is unbounded, and he adds to it 
 by villainy." 
 
 In spite of his wish to be amiable, the doctor grew cold 
 and dignified, the lovers were uncomfortable. But for the 
 simple good-humor of the Abbe Chaperon, whose gentle
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 141 
 
 cheerfulness made the dinner lively, the position of the doctor 
 and his ward would have been almost intolerable. 
 
 At dessert, seeing Ursule turn pale, he said to her, " If you 
 do not feel well, my child, there is only the street to cross." 
 
 " What ails you, my dear? " said the old lady to the girl. 
 
 "Unfortunately, ruadame," said the doctor severely, ''her 
 soul feels chilled, accustomed as she is to see nothing but 
 smiles." 
 
 "A bad education, monsieur," said Madame dc Porten- 
 duere. " Do you not think so, Monsieur le Cure? " 
 
 " Yes, madame," Minoret put in, with a glance at the cure, 
 who could not say a word. " I have, I see, made life impossi- 
 ble to this seraphic nature if she were to be cast on the world ; 
 but before I die, I will find means to protect her from cold- 
 ness, indifference, and hatred " 
 
 " Godfather ! I beg of you that is enough. I feel nothing 
 unpleasant here," she said, ready to meet Madame de Porten- 
 duere's eye rather than lend too much meaning to her words 
 by looking at Savinien. 
 
 " Whether Mademoiselle Ursule is uncomfortable I know 
 not, madame," said Savinien to his mother, "but I know that 
 you are torturing me." 
 
 On hearing this speech, wrung from the generous young 
 man by his mother's behavior, Ursule turned pale ; she begged 
 Madame de Portenduere to excuse her, rose, took her guardian's 
 arm, courtesied, and went out. Then, as soon as she was at 
 home, she rushed into the drawing-room, and, sitting down by 
 the piano, hid her face in her hands and burst into tears. 
 
 " Why will you not leave it to my long experience to guide 
 your feelings, cruel child?" cried the doctor in despair. 
 "The nobility never think themselves under any obligation 
 towards us of the middle class. In serving them, we do no 
 more than our duty, that is all. Besides, the old lady per- 
 ceived that Savinien looked at you with pleasure ; she is afraid 
 lest he should fall in love with you."
 
 142 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 "At any rate, he is safe ! " she said. "But to try to set 
 down such a man as you are ! " 
 
 "Wait till I come back, my child." 
 
 When the doctor returned to Madame de Portenduere's he 
 found Dionis there, and with him Monsieur Bongrand, and 
 Levrault the mayor, the witnesses required by law to give 
 validity to acts drawn up in communes where there is no 
 official above a notary. Minoret led Dionis aside and spoke 
 a word in his ear, after which the notary read the deed of 
 mortgage ; Madame de Portenduere pledged all her property 
 until the hundred thousand francs loaned by the doctor to the 
 Vicomte should be repaid, with the interest, calculated at five 
 per cent. When reading this clause, the cure looked at 
 Minoret, who answered the abbe by an approving nod. The 
 good priest went to speak a few words to the lady in a low 
 voice, and she replied quite audibly 
 
 " I do not choose to owe anything to people of that kind." 
 
 "My mother leaves the pleasantest part to me," said 
 Savinien to the doctor. " She will pay you all the money, 
 and leave it to me to be grateful. ' ' 
 
 "But you will have to find eleven thousand francs the first 
 year," observed the cure, " to pay the law costs." 
 
 " Monsieur," said Minoret to Dionis, "as Monsieur and 
 Madame de Portenduere are not in a position to pay for the 
 registration, add the costs to the capital sum, and I will pay 
 them." 
 
 Dionis made some calculations, and the whole sum was 
 fixed at a hundred and seven thousand francs. When all the 
 documents were signed, Minoret pleaded fatigue, and with- 
 drew at the same time as the notary and the witnesses. 
 
 " Madame," said the abbe, who remained with the Vicomte, 
 " why affront that excellent Minoret, who has saved you at 
 least twenty-five thousand francs in Paris, and who had the 
 good feeling to leave twenty thousand in your son's hands for 
 his debts of honor ? "
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 143 
 
 "Your Minoret is a sly fox," said she, taking a pinch of 
 snuff. " He knows very well what he is about." 
 
 " My mother fancies that he wants to force me to marry his 
 ward by swallowing up our farm, as if a Portenduere and the 
 son of a Kergarouet could be made to marry against his 
 will." 
 
 An hour later Savinien made his appearance at the doctor's, 
 where the heirs had come together, moved by curiosity. The 
 arrival of the young Vicomte produced a great sensation, all 
 the more because in each person it proceeded from a different 
 emotion. Mesdemoiselles Cr6miere and Massin whispered 
 together, and stared at Ursule, who blushed. The mothers 
 murmured to Desire that Goupil was very likely in the right 
 as regarded the marriage. The eyes of all were then centred 
 on the doctor, who did not rise to greet the young nobleman, 
 but merely gave him a curt bow, without setting down his 
 dice-box, for he was playing backgammon with Monsieur 
 Bongrand. The doctor's cold manner surprised them all. 
 
 " Ursule, my dear," he said, "give us a little music. 
 
 The young girl was only too happy to have some occupation ; 
 and on seeing her hurry to the piano and turn over the green- 
 bound volumes, the expectant heirs resigned themselves with 
 expressions of pleasure to the torment and silence about to be 
 inflicted on them, so eager were they to detect what was going 
 on between their uncle and the Portendueres. 
 
 It happens not unfrequently that a piece, poor enough in 
 itself, but played by a young girl under the stress of deep 
 feeling, may produce more impression than a grand overture 
 pompously given by a fine orchestra. In all music there lies, 
 besides the idea of the composer, the soul of the performer, 
 who, by a privilege peculiar to this art alone, can lend purpose 
 and poetry to phrases of no great intrinsic value. Chopin, in 
 our day, proves the truth of this fact on the piano, a thankless 
 instrument, as Paganini had already done on the violin. 
 This great genius is not so much a musician as a soul, which
 
 144 VRSULE MIROUET. 
 
 becomes incarnate, and which could express itself in any form 
 of music, even in simple chords. 
 
 Ursule, by her exquisite and perilous organization, belonged 
 to this school of rare genius ; but old Schmucke, the master 
 who came to her every Saturday, and who, during her stay in 
 Paris, had gone to her every day, had developed his pupil's 
 gifts to the utmost perfection. " Rousseau's Dream," the 
 piece Ursule now selected, one of Herold's youthful compo- 
 sitions, is not lacking in a certain fullness which the player can 
 bring out ; Ursule gave it a variety of agitated feeling which 
 justified the title of Caprice, which the fragment bears. By 
 her playing, at once mellifluous and dreamy, her soul spoke to 
 the soul of the young man, and wrapped him, as it were, in a 
 cloud of almost visible thoughts. He, seated at the end of 
 the piano, his elbow resting on the top, and his head sup- 
 ported by his left hand, gazed in admiration at Ursule, whose 
 eyes, fixed on the wainscot beyond, seemed to be questioning 
 some mystic world. A man might have fallen desperately in 
 love for less. 
 
 True feelings have a magnetic power, and Ursule intended 
 to reveal her soul to some extent, as a coquette dresses herself 
 to attract. Savinien was admitted to that beautiful realm, 
 carried away by her heart, which, in order to express itself, 
 borrowed the power of the only art which speaks to the mind 
 through the mind, without the aid of words, of color, or of 
 form. Candor has the same power over men as childhood has, 
 the same charms and irresistible attractions ; and Ursule had 
 never been more candid than at this moment, when she was 
 waking to a new life. 
 
 The cur6 came to snatch the young man from his dreams 
 by asking him to take the fourth hand at whist. Ursule went 
 on playing ; the heirs left, with the exception of Desire, who 
 remained to investigate the intentions of his uncle, of the 
 Vicomte, and of Ursule. 
 
 "You have as much talent as feeling, mademoiselle," said
 
 HE GAZED IN ADMIRATION AT URSULE.

 
 THE Ml NO RET PROPERTY. 145 
 
 Savinien, when the young girl closed the piano, and came to 
 sit down by her godfather. " Who is your master ? " 
 
 "A German who lives quite close to the Rue Dauphine, on 
 the Quai-Conti," said the doctor. "If he had not been 
 giving Ursule a lesson every day during our stay in Paris, he 
 would have been here this morning." 
 
 "He is not only a great musician," said Ursule, "but a 
 man of the most adorable simplicity." 
 
 " Such lessons must cost very dear ! " cried Desir6. 
 
 The players exchanged ironical glances. When the game 
 was ended, the doctor, who had been thoughtful all the even- 
 ing, turned to Savinien with the expression of a man grieved 
 to fulfill a painful duty. 
 
 " Monsieur," he said, "I am much gratified by the feeling 
 which has prompted you to call on me so immediately ; but 
 your mother ascribes to me a double purpose of an ignoble 
 kind, and I should give her the right to do so if I did not beg 
 of you to come here no more, in spite of the honor your 
 visits do me, and the pleasure I should take in cultivating 
 your society. My honor and my peace of mind require that 
 we should give up all neighborly intercourse. Pray tell your 
 mother that if I do not request her to honor us my ward 
 and myself by dining with us next Sunday, it is because I 
 am perfectly certain that on that day she would be indisposed." 
 
 The old man offered his hand to the Vicomte, who pressed 
 it respectfully, and merely said, " You are right, monsieur." 
 
 He went away, not without bowing to Ursule with an ex- 
 pression of regret rather than of disappointment. Desire left 
 the room at the same moment, but he could not speak a word 
 vith him, for Savinien rushed home. 
 
 For two days the coolness between the Portendueres and 
 he doctor was the sole subject of conversation among the 
 heirs, who did justice to the acumen of Dionis, and be- 
 lieved that the inheritance was safe. And thus, in an age 
 rvhen ranks are leveled, when the mania for equality puts all 
 10
 
 146 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 individuals on the same footing, and threatens every institu- 
 tion, even military discipline the last entrenchment of power 
 in France ; when, consequently, passion finds no obstacles to 
 be overcome but personal antipathies or inequality of fortune, 
 the obstinacy of an old woman and the dignity of Doctor 
 Minoret had raised between these two lovers barriers which, 
 as usual, were fated to strengthen rather than to destroy their 
 love. To an impassioned man a woman is worth just what 
 she costs him ; now Savinien, foreseeing a struggle, efforts, 
 and suspense, which already made the young girl precious to 
 him, was determined to win her. Perhaps our feelings obey 
 the law of nature as to the duration of all her creations a 
 long life has a long childhood. 
 
 Next morning, on waking, Ursule and Savinien had the 
 same idea. This community of feeling would give birth to 
 love if it were not the most delightful proof of its existence. 
 When the young girl opened her curtains a little way, so as to 
 give her eyes exactly space enough to look across to Savinien's 
 room, she saw her lover's face above the window-fastening 
 opposite. When we remember the immense service done to 
 lovers by windows, it seems quite natural that they should be 
 taxed. After thus protesting against her godfather's hard- 
 heartedness, Ursule let the curtains fall to again, and opened 
 the window to close the Venetians, through which she could 
 see without being seen. She went up to her room at least 
 seven or eight times in the course of the day, and always saw 
 the young Vicomte writing, tearing up papers, and writing 
 again to her, no doubt ! 
 
 Next morning, when La Bougival woke Ursule, she handed 
 her the following letter : 
 
 " To Mademoiselle Ursule. 
 
 "MADEMOISELLE: I am under no misapprehension as to 
 the suspicion of which a young man must be the object when 
 he has placed himself in the position from which your guar-
 
 I 
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 147 
 
 dian rescued me. I henceforth must offer better guarantees 
 than another man ; hence, mademoiselle, it is with the great- 
 est humility that I throw myself at your feet to avow my 
 love. This declaration is not prompted by passion ; it is 
 based on a certainty which will last my life through. A mad 
 passion for my young aunt, Madame de Kergarouet, brought 
 me to imprisonment ; will you not regard as a mark of the 
 sincerest love the complete effacement of every memory, the 
 substitution for that image in my heart of your own ? From 
 the moment when I saw you asleep, and so lovely in your 
 childlike slumbers, at Bouron, you have filled my soul as a 
 queen holds possession of her realm. I will have no wife but 
 you. You have every perfection I can look for in the woman 
 who is to bear my name. The education you have received 
 and the dignity of your soul qualify you for the highest posi- 
 tion. But I am too diffident of myself to attempt to paint 
 you to yourself; I can only love you. After hearing you 
 play last night, I remembered these lines, which seem to have 
 been written on you : 
 
 " 'Made to attract the heart and charm the eye, at once 
 gentle and intellectual, witty and reasonable, as polished as 
 though she had spent her life at courts, as simple as the re- 
 cluse who has never seen the world, the fire of her soul is 
 tempered in her eyes by divine modesty.' 
 
 " I have felt the value of the beautiful soul which reveals 
 itself in you by the smallest things. This is what gives me 
 the courage to ask you if as yet you love no one to allow 
 me to prove to you, by my care and my conduct, that I am 
 worthy of you. My life depends on it ; you cannot doubt 
 that all my powers shall be employed not merely to please 
 you, but yet more to merit your esteem, which will to me 
 outweigh that of all the rest of the world. In this hope, 
 Ursule, if you will permit me so to name you in my heart 
 as one I worship, Nemours will be my paradise, and the most 
 difficult undertakings will only bring me joys which I shall
 
 148 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 lay at your feet, as we lay all at the throne of God. Tell me, 
 then, that I may call myself YOUR SAVINIEN." 
 
 Ursule kissed this letter ; then, after reading it again, and 
 clasping it with rapturous gestures, she dressed to go and 
 show it to her godfather. 
 
 "Gracious heaven ! I was on the point of going without 
 saying my prayers ! " she exclaimed, turning back and 
 kneeling down on her prie-Dieu. 
 
 A few minutes later she went down to the garden, where 
 she found her guardian, to whom she gave Savinien's letter 
 to read. They sat down together on a bench under the 
 clump of creepers facing the Chinese pavilion. Ursule waited 
 for the old man to speak, and he sat meditating much too 
 long a time for an impatient girl. Finally, the outcome of 
 their secret conference was the following letter, which the 
 doctor had no doubt dictated in part : 
 
 " MONSIEUR : I cannot fail to be much honored by the 
 letter in which you offer me your hand ; but at my age, and 
 in accordance with the rules I have been brought up in, I had 
 to lay it before my guardian, who constitutes my whole 
 family, and whom I love as both a father and a friend. 
 These, then, are the painful objections he has raised, and 
 which must serve as my reply. 
 
 "I, Monsieur le Vicomte, am but a poor girl, whose future 
 fortune depends entirely not only on my godfather's good-will, 
 but also on the doubtful issue of the measures he can take to 
 evade the ill-will towards me of his next-of-kin. Though I 
 am the legitimate child of Joseph Mirouet, bandmaster to the 
 45th Infantry Regiment, as he was my guardian's illegitimate 
 half-brother, a suit, however unreasonable, may be brought 
 against a young girl, who will then be defenseless. You see, 
 monsieur, that my slender prospects are not the worst of my 
 misfortunes. I have many reasons for humility. It is for
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 149 
 
 your sake, and not for my own, that I lay before you these 
 considerations, which often weigh but lightly on loving and 
 devoted hearts. But you must take into consideration the 
 fact that if I did not represent them to you, I might be 
 suspected of wishing to induce your affection to overlook 
 obstacles which the world, and, above all, your mother, would 
 think insurmountable. In four months I shall be sixteen. 
 You will perhaps acknowledge that we are, both of us, too 
 young and too inexperienced to struggle with the penury of a 
 life begun on no fortune but what I possess through the kind- 
 ness of the late Monsieur de Jordy. Besides, my guardian 
 wishes that I should not marry before the age of twenty. 
 Who can tell what fate may have in store for you during these 
 four years, the best of your life ? Do not spoil it for the sake 
 of a poor girl. 
 
 " Having thus explained to you, monsieur, the reasons 
 given by my dear guardian, who, far from opposing my hap- 
 piness, desires to contribute to it with all his power, and who 
 hopes to see his protection which will soon be but feeble 
 replaced by an affection equal to his own, it only remains for 
 me to say how deeply I am touched by your offer and the 
 warm compliments you have added to it. The prudence 
 which dictates this answer is that of an old man who knows 
 life well ; but the gratitude I must express is that of a young 
 girl whose soul no other emotion has as yet entered. 
 
 " I can therefore in all truth sign myself your faithful 
 servant, URSULE MIROUET." 
 
 Savinien did not reply. Was he trying to influence his 
 mother? Had her letter extinguished his love ? A thousand 
 such questions, all unanswerable, tortured Ursule, and by re- 
 flex action the doctor, too, for he suffered under the slightest 
 agitation that disturbed his dear child. Ursule often went up 
 to her room and looked across at Savinien, whom she could 
 see seated at his table, deep in thought, and often turning to,
 
 150 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 glance at her windows. It was not till the end of the week 
 that she received this letter from Savinien, whose delay was 
 explained by an increase of his love : 
 
 "To Mademoiselle Ursule Mirouet. 
 
 " DEAR URSULE : There is something of the Breton in 
 me, and when once I have made up my mind, nothing can make 
 me alter it. Your guardian whom may God long preserve ! 
 is perfectly right. But am I to blame, then, for loving 
 you ? And all I ask is to know whether you love me. Tell 
 me, if only by a sign, and then these four years will indeed 
 be the best of my life ! 
 
 "A friend of mine has conveyed to my uncle, Admiral de 
 Kergarouet, a letter, in which I asked his influence to get me 
 into the navy. The kind old man, touched by my mishaps, 
 has answered that the King's nomination would be contrary 
 to rule if I wished to take rank. However, after three months 
 of study at Toulon, the minister can place me in a ship as 
 foreman of the steerage ; then, after a cruise against Algiers, 
 with whom we are at war, I can pass an examination and 
 become a naval cadet. If I should distinguish myself in the 
 expedition to be sent against Algiers, I should certainly be 
 made sub-lieutenant ; but how soon ? No one can tell. But, 
 at any rate, the regulations will be made as elastic as possible 
 to reinstate the name of Portenduere on the navy-list. 
 
 " I can win you only through your guardian, I see, and 
 your respect for him makes you the dearer to my heart. So, 
 before replying, I will seek an interview with him ; on his 
 answer my whole future must depend. Come what may, 
 believe me that, rich or poor, the daughter of a bandmaster 
 or of a king, you are to me her whom the voice of my heart 
 has chosen. 
 
 "Dear Ursule, we live at a time when prejudice, which of 
 old would have parted us, has no longer power enough to 
 hinder our marriage. All the feelings of my heart are yours,
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 151 
 
 and to your uncle I will give such guarantees as may assure 
 him of your happiness. He docs not know that I have loved 
 you more in a few minutes than he has loved you in fifteen 
 years ! Till this evening." 
 
 " See here, godfather ! " said Ursule, holding out the letter 
 with an impulse of pride. 
 
 " Ah ! my child," cried the doctor, after reading the letter, 
 " I am more glad than you are. By this determination the 
 Vicomte has made up for all his misdeeds." 
 
 After dinner, Savinien called upon the doctor, who was 
 just then walking with Ursule by the balustrade of the river- 
 terrace. The Vicomte had received his clothes from Paris, 
 and the lover had not omitted to enhance his personal advan- 
 tages by dressing as carefully, as elegantly, as though it were 
 to charm the handsome and haughty Comtesse de Kergarouet. 
 On seeing him advance from the outside steps, the poor 
 child clung to her uncle's arm exactly as if she were trying to 
 save herself from falling into an abyss, and the doctor heard 
 the deep, hollow throbbing of her heart ; it made him 
 shudder. 
 
 "Leave us, my child," he said to his ward, who went to 
 sit down on the steps of the pavilion after suffering Savinien 
 to take her hand and kiss it respectfully. 
 
 "Monsieur, will you give that dear creature to a ship's 
 captain?" said the young Vicomte to the doctor in a low 
 voice. 
 
 " No," said Minoret with a smile, " we might have too long 
 to wait; but to a ship's lieutenant." 
 
 Tears of joy stood in the young man's eyes, and he grasped 
 the old man's hand very warmly. 
 
 " Then I shall go," he said, " to study, and try to learn in 
 six months what the pupils of the naval college learn in six 
 years." 
 
 "Go?" cried Ursule, flying towards them from the steps.
 
 152 URSULE MIROUET, 
 
 " Yes, mademoiselle, to deserve you. So, the more haste 
 I put into it, the more affection I shall show for you." 
 
 " To-day is the 3d of October," said she, looking at him 
 with infinite tenderness. " Start after the ipth." 
 
 "Yes," said the old man; "we will keep the feast of 
 Saint-Savinien." 
 
 "Then, good-by," exclaimed the youth. "I must spend 
 this week in Paris to take the preliminary steps, make my 
 preparations, and buy the books and the mathematical instru- 
 ments I need ; to make my way, too, in the minister's good 
 graces, and win the most favorable conditions possible." 
 
 Ursule and her godfather went with Savinien to the gate. 
 After seeing him go into his mother's house, they saw him 
 come out again, followed by Tiennette, carrying a little port- 
 manteau. 
 
 " Why, if you are rich, do you compel him to serve in the 
 navy? " said Ursule to the doctor. 
 
 " I believe you will soon think it was I who contracted his 
 debts!" said her uncle, smiling. "I do not compel him. 
 But, my darling, a uniform and the "cross of the Legion of 
 Honor won in battle will wipe out many a smirch. In four 
 years he may rise to command a ship, and that is all I ask 
 of him." 
 
 "But he maybe killed," she said, showing the doctor a 
 white face. 
 
 " Lovers, like drunkards, have a Providence of their own," 
 replied the doctor lightly. 
 
 The poor child, unknown to her godfather, cut off at night 
 enough of her beautiful long fair hair to make a chain ; then, 
 two days later, she persuaded her music-master, old Schmucke, 
 to promise that he would see that the hair was not changed, 
 and that the chain should be finished for the following 
 Sunday. 
 
 On Savinien's return, he informed the doctor and his ward 
 that he had signed his papers ; he was to be at Brest by the
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 153 
 
 25th. As the doctor invited him to dinner on the i8th, he 
 spent almost the whole of two days at his house ; and, in spite 
 of the most prudent warnings, the lovers could not hinder 
 themselves from betraying their mutual understanding to the 
 cure, the justice, the town doctor, and La Bougival. 
 
 " Children," said the old man, " you are risking your 
 happiness by not keeping your secret to yourselves." 
 
 At last, on the fdte day, after mass, during which they had 
 exchanged glances, Savinien, watched for by Ursule, crossed 
 the street and came into the little garden, where they found 
 themselves almost alone. To indulge them, the good man sat 
 reading his paper in the Chinese pavilion. 
 
 " Dear Ursule," said Savinien, " will you give me a greater 
 boon than my mother could if she were to give me life a 
 second time?" 
 
 "I know what you would ask me," said Ursule, interrupt- 
 ing him. " Here, this is my answer," she added, as she took 
 out of the pocket of her apron the chain made of her hair, 
 and gave it him with a nervous trembling that betrayed her 
 excessive joy. " Wear this for my sake," she said. " May 
 my gift avert from you every peril by reminding you that my 
 life is one with yours ! " 
 
 " Ah, the little rogue ! she is giving him a chain of her 
 hair," said the doctor to himself. " How could she do it? 
 Cut her beautiful fair hair ! Why, she would give him my 
 blood ! " 
 
 "And will you think it very odious of me if I ask you, be- 
 fore we part, to give me your formal promise that you will never 
 have any husband but me? " said Savinien, kissing the chain, 
 and looking at Ursule, while he could not restrain one tear. 
 
 " If I have not told you so too plainly already I who went 
 to gaze at the walls of a prison when you were inside," she 
 answered with a deep blush, " I repeat it now, Savinien. I 
 shall never Jove any one but you, and will never marry any 
 one else,"
 
 154 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 Seeing that Ursule was half-hidden among the creepers, the 
 young man could not resist the pleasure of clasping her to his 
 heart and kissing her forehead; but she gave a low scream 
 and dropped on to the bench ; and when Savin ien sat down 
 by her, imploring her pardon, he saw the doctor standing in 
 front of them. 
 
 "My good fellow," said he, "Ursule is a sensitive plant; 
 a hard word might kill her. For her sake you should mod- 
 erate the expression of your love. Ah ! if you had loved her 
 for fifteen years, you would have taken her word," he added, 
 in revenge for the last words of Savinien's letter. 
 
 Two days later Savinien left. In spite of the letters he 
 wrote regularly to Ursule, she was a victim to a malady that 
 had no evident cause. Like a fine fruit attacked by a maggot, 
 one thought was eating her heart out. She lost her appetite 
 and her bright color. When her godfather first asked her how 
 she was feeling 
 
 " I want to see the sea," she said. 
 
 "It is difficult to take you to a seaport in the month of 
 December? " said the old man. 
 
 "Then shall I go?" said she. 
 
 If the wind was high, Ursule was in agonies, believing, in 
 spite of the learned observations of her godfather, the cure, 
 and the justice, that Savinien was warring with a hurricane. 
 The justice made her happy for a few days with a print repre- 
 senting a naval cadet in his uniform. She read the news- 
 papers, believing that they would give her news of the cruise 
 in which Savinien was engaged. She devoured the seafaring 
 novels of Cooper, and learned the meaning of sea words. 
 These proofs of a fixed idea, so often affected by other women, 
 were so perfectly natural in Ursule that she foresaw in a dream 
 every letter from Savinien, and never failed to predict their 
 arrival by relating the premonitory dream. 
 
 "Now," said she to the doctor, on the fourth occasion
 
 THE MINOR ET PROPERTY. 155 
 
 when this had happened without the doctor and the cure 
 being at all surprised; "now, lam easy; however far away 
 Savin ien may be, if he were wounded, I should feel it at the 
 same moment." 
 
 The old physician sat plunged in deep meditation, which, 
 to judge from the expression of his face, the justice and the 
 cure thought must be sorrowful. 
 
 "What is wrong?" they asked him, when Ursule had left 
 them together. 
 
 "Will she live?" replied the old doctor. "Can so frail 
 and tender a flower withstand the anguish of her heart?" 
 
 Meanwhile the "little dreamer," as the cur6 called her, 
 worked indefatigably ; she understood the importance to a 
 woman of the world of extensive information ; and when she 
 was not studying singing, harmony, or composition, she spent 
 her time in reading the books chosen for her in her godfather's 
 extensive library. 
 
 While leading this busy life she suffered much, but she did 
 not complain. Sometimes she would sit for hours gazing at 
 Savinien's window opposite. On Sunday, as she came from 
 church, she followed Madame de Portenduere, watching her 
 tenderly, for in spite of her sternness she loved her as being 
 Savinien's mother. Her piety was doubled ; she went to mass 
 every morning, for she firmly believed that her dreams were a 
 special grace from God. 
 
 Alarmed by the ravages of this nostalgia of love, on 
 Ursule' s birthday her godfather promised to take her to 
 Toulon to see the departure of the fleet for Algiers without 
 announcing their purpose to Savinien, who was sailing with it. 
 The justice and the cure kept the secret of the doctor's inten- 
 tions with regard to this journey, which seemed to be under- 
 taken for the benefit of Ursule's health, and which puzzled 
 the heirs very greatly. 
 
 After having seen Savinien once more in his uniform, and 
 after going on board the fine flagship of the admiral, to whom
 
 156 URSULE MIROUKT. 
 
 the minister had especially recommended young Portenduere, 
 Ursule, at her friend's desire, went to inhale the soft air of 
 Nice, and traveled along the Mediterranean coast as far as 
 Genoa, where she had news of the arrival of the fleet before 
 Algiers and a good report of the landing. The doctor would 
 gladly have continued the journey across Italy, as much to 
 divert Ursule's mind as to complete her education and enlarge 
 her ideas by comparing manners and scenery, and by the 
 delights of a land where the greatest works of art are to be 
 seen, and where so many civilizations have left glorious traces ; 
 but the news of the opposition to the throne shown by the 
 electors of the famous Chamber of 1830 called him back to 
 France, whither he brought his ward home in a blooming state 
 of health, and happy in the possession of a small model of 
 the ship on which Savinien was serving. 
 
 The elections of 1830 gave cohesion to the Minoret heirs; 
 for, by the advice of Goupil and of Desire Minoret, they 
 formed a committee at Nemours, by whose efforts the Liberal 
 candidate was returned for Fontainebleau. Massin exerted 
 immense influence over the country voters. Five of the post- 
 master's farmers also had votes. Dionis represented more than 
 eleven votes. By meeting at the notary's, Cremiere, Massin, 
 the postmaster, and their adherents got into a habit of assem- 
 bling there. On the doctor's return, Dionis' room had thus 
 become their camping ground. 
 
 The justice and the mayor, who then combined to resist 
 the Liberals of Nemours, were beaten by the Opposition in 
 spite of the efforts of the gentry in the neighborhood, and 
 their defeat bound them very closely together. When Bon- 
 grand and the Abbe Chaperon told the doctor of the result of 
 this antagonism, which had divided Nemours, for the first time, 
 into two parties, and had given importance to his next-of-kin, 
 Charles X. was actually leaving Rambouillet for Cherbourg. 
 Desire Minoret, whose opinions were those of the Paris bar, 
 had invjted fifteen of his friends, with Goupil at their head.
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 157 
 
 to come from Nemours ; the postmaster gave them horses to 
 hurry to Paris, where they joined Desir6 on the night of the 
 28th of July. Desire and Goupil led this little troop to 
 assist in the seizure of the Hotel de Ville (Town Hall). 
 
 Desir6 Minoret received the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, 
 and was appointed deputy to the public prosecutor at Fon- 
 tainebleau. Goupil won the cross of July. Dionis was 
 elected mayor of Nemours, in the place of the Sieur Levrault, 
 and the town council was then composed of Minoret-Levrault, 
 deputy-mayor, of Massin, Cremiere, and all the followers of 
 Dionis. 
 
 Bongrand only kept his appointment as justice by the influ- 
 ence of his son, who was made public prosecutor at Melun, 
 his marriage with Mademoiselle Levrault seeming at that time 
 probable. 
 
 When three per cents, were down to forty-five, the doctor 
 set out by post to Paris, and invested five hundred and forty 
 thousand francs in certificates to the bearer. The rest of his 
 fortune, amounting to about two hundred and seventy thousand 
 francs, placed likewise in the funds, yielded nominally fifteen 
 thousand francs a year. He invested in the same way the 
 money left to Ursule by the old professor, as well as the 
 eight thousand francs of nine years' accumulated interest, 
 which, with the help of a small addition on his part to 
 make it up to a round sum, brought in fourteen hundred 
 francs a year to his ward. In obedience to her master's 
 advice, La Bougival also would get three hundred and fifty 
 francs a year by investing in the same way her five thousand 
 and odd francs of savings. These prudent steps, as planned 
 by the doctor and his friend Bongrand, were taken in perfect 
 secrecy under favor of the political excitement. When calm 
 was more or less restored, the doctor purchased a little house 
 adjoining his own, and pulled it down, as well as the wall of 
 his courtyard, to construct on the ground a coach-house and 
 stables. That he should spend capital bearing a thousand
 
 158 URSULE M1ROUET. 
 
 francs interest seemed to all the Minoret heirs pure insanity. 
 This supposed craziness was the beginning of a new era in the 
 doctor's life; at a moment when horses and carriages were 
 being almost given away, he brought from Paris three fine 
 horses and a chariot. 
 
 The first time the old man came to mass in a carriage, on 
 a rainy day at the beginning of November, 1830, and got out 
 to give his hand to Ursule, all the townsfolk rushed to the 
 square, as much to see the doctor's carriage and cross-question 
 the coachman, as to comment on his ward, to whose excessive 
 ambition Massin, Cremiere, and the postmaster ascribed their 
 uncle's follies. 
 
 " A chariot ! heh, Massin ? " cried Goupil. " Your inherit- 
 ance promises well, hein ! ' ' 
 
 "You asked good wages, I suppose, Cabirolle?" said the 
 postmaster to the son of one of his guards, who took charge 
 of the horses, " for it is to be hoped that you will not see many 
 horseshoes worn through in the service of a man of eighty. 
 How much did those horses cost ? " 
 
 "Four thousand francs. The chariot, though second-hand, 
 cost him two thousand ; but it is a good one. The wheels 
 have the patent axle-box." 
 
 "What do you call it, Cabirolle?" asked Madame Cre- 
 miere. 
 
 " He says they have latent axle-hocks," replied Goupil. 
 "It is an English notion ; they invented those wheels. Look 
 how neat it is ; all covered up, nothing to be seen, nothing 
 to catch, no ugly square iron peg projecting beyond the axle." 
 
 "What does axer-hock mean, then?" asked Madame Cre- 
 miere very innocently. 
 
 "Surely," said Goupil, "you need hardly axe that." 
 
 "Ah ! I understand," said she. 
 
 "No, no; you are a good soul," said Goupil. "It is a 
 shame to take you in. The real word is patent axe-locks, 
 because you must axe how it is fastened."
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 159 
 
 "That's it, madame," said Cabirollc, who was himself 
 taken in by Goupil's explanation, the clerk spoke with such 
 gravity. 
 
 "It is a handsome carriage, at any rate," said Cremiere, 
 " and he must be rich to set up in such style." 
 
 "She is going ahead, that little girl ! " remarked Goupil. 
 "But she is right; she is showing you how to enjoy life. 
 Why have you not fine horses and chariots you, Father 
 Minoret? Will you submit to be humiliated? In your place 
 I would have a coach like a prince's." 
 
 "I say, Cabirolle," said Massin, "is it the little girl who 
 puts my uncle up to all this luxury ? " 
 
 "I don't know," replied Cabirolle, "but she is, so to 
 speak, mistress of the whole place. And now master after 
 master comes from Paris. She is to learn to paint, they say." 
 
 "I will take the opportunity of having my likeness done," 
 said Madame Cremiere. Country folks still speak of having 
 a likeness done instead of a portrait taken. 
 
 "But the old German is not dismissed," said Madame 
 Massin. 
 
 "No, he is here to-day," replied Cabirolle. 
 
 " There is safety in numbers," observed Madame Cremiere, 
 making everybody laugh. 
 
 "You need no longer count on the inheritance," cried 
 Goupil. " Ursule is nearly seventeen; she is prettier than 
 ever ; traveling forms the youthful mind, and she knows the 
 length of your uncle's foot. The coach brings her five or 
 six parcels a week, and dressmakers and milliners are always 
 coming to try her gowns and things. My mistress is furious, 
 I can tell you. Just wait till Ursule comes out, and look at 
 her little neckerchief a real India square, that must have 
 cost six hundred francs." 
 
 If a thunderbolt had fallen in their midst, it could not 
 have produced a greater effect on the group of inheritors than 
 this speech from Goupil, who rubbed his hands.
 
 160 VRSULE MIROUET. 
 
 The doctor's old green drawing-room was redecorated by 
 an upholsterer from Paris. Judged by the prodigality of his 
 outlay, the doctor was accused first of having concealed the 
 amount of his fortune and of having sixty thousand francs a 
 year, and then of spending his capital to humor Ursule. He 
 was regarded alternately as a millionaire and a spendthrift. 
 " He is an old fool ! " summed up the opinion of the neigh- 
 bors. The misguided verdict of the little town had this ad- 
 vantage : it deceived the next-of-kin, who never suspected 
 Savin ien's love for Ursule, which was the real cause of the 
 doctor's expenditure, for he was enchanted to accustom his 
 goddaughter to play her part as a vicomtesse ; and having an 
 income now of fifty thousand francs, he indulged himself in 
 the pleasure of beautifying his idol. 
 
 In the month of February, 1832, on the day when Ursule 
 was seventeen, as she rose in the morning she saw Savinien at 
 his window in his sub-lieutenant's uniform. 
 
 " How is it that I knew nothing about it? " she asked her- 
 self. 
 
 After the taking of Algiers, where Savinien had distin- 
 guished himself by a deed of valor that had won him the 
 cross, the corvette on which he sailed having remained at sea 
 for many months, he had been quite unable to send a letter 
 to the doctor, and he did not choose to retire from the service 
 without consulting him. The new government, wishing to 
 keep so illustrious a name on the navy-list, had taken advan- 
 tage of the general scramble of July to promote Savinien. 
 Having obtained a fortnight's leave, the young lieutenant had 
 come by mail from Toulon in time for Ursule's birthday, and 
 to ask the doctor's advice at the same time. 
 
 " He is come ! " cried the girl, rushing into her godfather's 
 room. 
 
 "That is well," he replied. "I can guess his reason for 
 quitting the service; he can now remain at Nemours."
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 161 
 
 "This is my birthday treat! It is all in those words!" 
 she exclaimed, throwing her arms arouud the doctor's neck 
 and kissing him. 
 
 In reply to a signal she made him, Savin ien came across at 
 once. She wanted to admire him ; he seemed to her changed 
 for the better. In fact, military discipline gives to a man's 
 gestures, gait, and demeanor a mixture of gravity and decis- 
 ion, a certain rectitude, which enables the most superficial 
 observer to recognize a soldier under a civilian's coat ; noth- 
 ing can more clearly prove that man is made to command. 
 Ursule loved Savinien all the more for it, and felt a child's 
 delight in walking arm in arm with him in the little garden, 
 while she made him tell her the part he had played " in his 
 capacity of naval cadet" in the siege of Algiers. Evidently 
 it was Savinien who had taken Algiers. She saw everything 
 red, she declared, when she looked at Savinien's decoration. 
 The doctor, who, while dressing in his room, watched the pair, 
 presently joined them. Then, without telling the Vicomte 
 everything, he explained to him that in the event of Madame 
 de Portenduere's consenting to his marriage with Ursule, his 
 goddaughter's fortune was such as to make his pay superfluous 
 in any rank he might be promoted to. 
 
 " Alas ! " said Savinien, " it will take a long time to over- 
 come my mother's opposition. Before I left, when she had 
 the alternative of keeping me near her if she would agree to 
 my marrying Ursule, or of seeing me only at long intervals, 
 and knowing that I was exposed to the risk of my profession, 
 she let me go " 
 
 "But, Savinien, we shall be together," said Ursule, taking 
 his hand and shaking it with a kind of irritation. 
 
 That they should see each other and never part was to her 
 the sum-total of love ; she saw nothing beyond ; and her 
 pretty impatience and the petulance of her tone expressed 
 such perfect innocence that the doctor and Savinien were 
 touched. 
 11
 
 162 URSVLE M1ROUET. 
 
 Savinien, after his consultation with the doctor, sent in his 
 letter of resignation, and Ursule's birthday was crowned with 
 joy by her lover's presence. 
 
 A few months later, by the beginning of May, Doctor 
 Minoret's home life had settled into calm regularity again, 
 but with another constant visitor. The young Vicomte's 
 assiduity was at once interpreted as that of a future bride- 
 groom ; all the more so since, whether at mass or out walk- 
 ing, his manner and Ursule's plainly betrayed the mutual 
 understanding of their hearts. Dionis remarked to the heirs 
 that the old man never claimed interest from Madame de 
 Portenduere, who already owed it for three years. 
 
 " She will be forced to give in, to consent to her son's mar- 
 rying beneath him," said the notary. " If such a misfortune 
 should happen, it is probable that the larger part of your 
 uncle's fortune will prove, as Basile says, an irresistible argu- 
 ment." 
 
 When the expectant heirs understood that the old man's 
 preference for Ursule was too great for him not to secure her 
 happiness at their expense, their wrath became as cunning as 
 it was deep. Every evening since the revolution of July had 
 seen them meet at Dionis' house, and there they cursed the 
 lovers ; and the evening hardly ever ended without their hav- 
 ing tried in vain to hit on some way of thwarting the old 
 man. Z6lie, who had, no doubt, like the doctor, taken 
 advantage of the fall in the funds to invest her enormous sav- 
 ings, was the most furious against the orphan and the Porten- 
 dueres. One evening, when Goupil who, however, as a 
 rule, took care not to spend his evenings too dully had 
 come in to pick up some information as to the affairs of the 
 town, which were under discussion, Zelie had a recrudescence 
 of hatred. She had that morning seen the doctor, with 
 Ursule and Savinien, returning from a drive in the neighbor- 
 hood, with an appearance of intimacy that told all. 
 
 " I would give thirty thousand francs, gladly, if only God
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 163 
 
 would take our uncle to Himself before that Portenduere and 
 that little minx could be married," said she. 
 
 Goupil walked home with Monsieur and Madame Minoret ; 
 and when they were in the middle of their vast courtyard, he 
 said, looking suspiciously about him to make sure that they 
 were alone : 
 
 " Will you give me money enough to buy Dionis out of his 
 business, if I will see that the marriage of Monsieur de Por- 
 tenduere is broken off? " 
 
 " How? " asked the colossus. 
 
 "Do you think I am fool enough to tell you my plan?" 
 replied the clerk. 
 
 " Well, my boy, make them quarrel, and we will see," said 
 Zelie. 
 
 " I am not going to plunge into such a job on the strength 
 of 'we will see.' The young gentleman is hot-headed, and 
 might kill me ; and I must be well rough-shod, and his match 
 with the rapier and pistol. Set me up in life, and I will keep 
 my word." 
 
 "Stop the marriage, and I will set you up," retorted the 
 postmaster. 
 
 " For nine months now you have been debating whether 
 you will lend me a wretched fifteen thousand francs to buy 
 Lecoeur's business the usher's and you expect me to take 
 your word ? Get along ! You will lose your uncle's fortune ; 
 and serve you right ! " 
 
 " If it were only a matter of fifteen thousand francs and 
 Lecreur's business, I should not say no," replied Zelie; "but 
 to be security for fifty thousand crowns ! " 
 
 "But I will repay you," said Goupil, with a fascinating 
 leer at Zelie, which the postmistress met with an imperious 
 stare. 
 
 It was like vitriol on steel. 
 
 " We will wait," said Zelie. 
 
 " Possessed by the genius of evil ! " thought Goupil. "If
 
 164 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 ever I get hold of these two," said he to himself as he went 
 away, " I will squeeze them like lemons ! " 
 
 Savinien, while cultivating the society of the doctor, the 
 justice, and the cur, showed them the excellence of his char- 
 acter. The young man's love for Ursule, so absolutely dis- 
 interested, so constant, appealed so strongly to the three 
 friends that they no longer separated the two young people in 
 their thoughts. Before long the monotony of this patriarchal 
 life, and the confidence the lovers felt in their future, had 
 given their affection a fraternal aspect. The doctor often left 
 Savinien and Ursule together. He had rightly estimated the 
 admirable young man who kissed Ursule's hand when he 
 entered, and would never have asked such a privilege when 
 alone with her, so deep was his respect for the innocence and 
 candor of the child ; and the extreme sensitiveness which she 
 had often betrayed had taught him that a harsh word, a cold 
 look, or alternations of gentleness and roughness might kill 
 her. The utmost boldness of the lovers always showed itself 
 in the presence of the old men in the evening. 
 
 Two years, full of secret delight, thus slipped away, un- 
 broken by any event but the useless efforts of the young man 
 to obtain his mother's consent to his marriage with Ursule. 
 He would sometimes talk for the whole morning, his mother 
 listening to his entreaties and arguments, but making no reply 
 but by the obstinate silence of a Bretonne or by curt refusals. 
 
 At nineteen, Ursule, elegant, well educated, and an excel- 
 lent musician, had nothing more to learn ; she was perfection. 
 And she had a reputation for beauty, grace, and information 
 which reached far and wide. One day the doctor had to 
 refuse the proposals of the Marquise d'Aiglemont, who would 
 have married her to her eldest son. Six months later, in spite 
 of the absolute silence preserved by Ursule, by her guardian, 
 and by Madame d'Aiglemont, Savinien heard by chance of 
 this affair. Touched by such delicate conduct, he spoke of it
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 165 
 
 as an argument to overcome his mother's aversion, but she 
 would only say 
 
 "If the d'Aiglemonts choose to marry beneath them, is 
 that any reason why we should?" 
 
 In the month of December, 1834, the worthy and pious 
 old man was visibly breaking. As they saw him come out of 
 church, his face pinched and yellow, his eyes dim, all the 
 town began to speak of his approaching end, for the good 
 man was now eighty-eight years of age. 
 
 " Now you will know where you stand," they said to the 
 heirs. 
 
 The doctor's death had, in fact, the fascination of a prob- 
 lem. But the old man did not think that he was ill ; he had 
 illusions on the subject, and neither poor Ursule, nor Savinien, 
 nor Monsieur Bongrand, nor the cur6, could, in decency, 
 explain his danger to him ; the town doctor of Nemours, who 
 came to see him every evening, dared prescribe nothing more. 
 Old Minoret felt no pain ; he was gently burning out. In 
 him the intellect remained clear, strong, and exact. In old 
 men of this stamp the soul is potent over the body, and gives 
 it strength to die standing. To postpone the fatal hour, the 
 cure granted his parishioner a dispensation from attending' 
 mass at church, and allowed him to read prayers at home, for 
 the doctor carefully fulfilled all his religious duties ; the nearer 
 he was to the grave, the more he loved God. 
 
 At the New Year, Ursule persuaded him to sell his carriage 
 and horses, and dismiss Cabirolle. The justice, whose un- 
 easiness as to Ursule's prospects was far from being lulled by 
 the old man's half-confidences, touched on the delicate 
 question of his fortune, explaining to him one evening the 
 necessity for making Ursule independent by law, by declaring 
 her to be of age. She would then be competent to receive 
 an account of his guardianship and possess property; this 
 would enable him to leave her money. In spite of this
 
 166 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 opening, the old man, though he had formerly consulted the 
 justice, did not confide to him what his purpose was with 
 regard to Ursule ; however, he formally declared her of age. 
 The more eager the lawyer showed himself to know what 
 steps his old friend had taken to provide for Ursule, the 
 more suspicious the doctor became. In short, Minoret was 
 actually afraid to confide to the justice the secret of the 
 thirty-six thousand francs in bonds payable to the bearer 
 on demand. 
 
 "Why," said Bongrand, "set chance against you?" 
 
 "Of two chances," replied the doctor, "one must avoid 
 the most risky." 
 
 Bongrand carried through the matter of the " emancipa- 
 tion ' ' so briskly that Mademoiselle Mirouet was legally 
 independent on the day when she was twenty. This anni- 
 versary was destined to be the last festival kept by the old 
 doctor, who, feeling no doubt some presentiment of his 
 approaching end, celebrated the occasion magnificently by 
 giving a little ball, to which he invited the young people 
 of the four families of Dionis, Cremiere, Minoret, and Mas- 
 sin. Savinien, Bongrand, the cure and his two assistant 
 priests, the town doctor, Mesdames Zelie Minoret, Massin, 
 and Cr6miere, with old Schmucke, were his guests at a grand 
 dinner before the dance. 
 
 " I feel that I have not long to stay," said the old man to the 
 notary towards the end of the evening. " I beg you to come 
 to-morrow to draw up the report and accounts I have to hand 
 over to Ursule as her guardian, so as to avoid all complica- 
 tions after my death. Thank God, I have not robbed my 
 heirs of a sou, and have spent nothing but my income. 
 Messieurs Cremiere, Massin, and my nephew Minoret are 
 the family trustees appointed for Ursule, and they must be 
 present at the auditing of the account." 
 
 These words, overheard by Massin, and repeated in the 
 ballroom, filled the three families with joy, after they .had
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 167 
 
 spent three years in constant alternations of feeling, believing 
 themselves sometimes rich and sometimes disinherited. 
 
 "It is a lamp flying out," said Madame Cremiere. (She 
 meant dying out.) 
 
 When, at about two in the morning, no one remained in 
 the room but Savinien, Bongrand, and the Abb6 Chaperon, 
 the old doctor said, as he pointed to Ursule, lovely in her 
 ball-dress, having just said good-night to the young Cr6miere 
 and Massin girls 
 
 " I place her in your hands, my friends. In a few days I 
 shall no longer be here to protect her; stand between her 
 and the world until she is married I am afraid for her " 
 
 These words made a painful impression. The account 
 drawn up and read a few days later in the presence of a family 
 council proved that Doctor Minoret was indebted to Ursule 
 in the sum of ten thousand six hundred francs, partly as 
 arrears of the shares bearing interest to the amount of 
 fourteen thousand francs, which was accounted for by the 
 investment of Captain de Jordy's legacy, and partly as a 
 small capital of five thousand francs derived from certain 
 gifts made to his ward during the last fifteen years, on their 
 respective birthdays or namedays. 
 
 This authenticated schedule of the account had been ad- 
 vised by the justice, who feared what might be the result of 
 the old man's death ; and, unhappily, not without reason. 
 The day after the account was passed which made Ursule the 
 mistress of ten thousand six hundred francs in shares and of 
 fourteen hundred francs a year, the doctor had an attack of 
 weakness which compelled him to keep his bed. 
 
 It spite of the caution which shrouded the house, a rumor 
 spread in the town that he was dead, and the heirs flew about 
 the streets like the beads of a rosary of which the thread is 
 snapped. Massin, who came to inquire, heard from Ursule 
 herself that the old man was in bed. Unfortunately, the 
 town doctor had prognosticated that when Minoret took to
 
 168 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 his bed he would die at once. From that moment the whole 
 family stood posted in the street, in the square, or on their 
 front doorsteps, in spite of the cold, absorbed in discussing 
 the long-expected event, and waiting for the moment when 
 the cure should carry to the old man the last sacraments with 
 all the ceremony usual in provincial towns. Hence, when 
 two days later the Abbe Chaperon crossed the High Street, 
 accompanied by his curate and the choir boys, the inheritors 
 followed him to take possession of the house and prevent any- 
 thing being removed, and to clutch with greedy hands all the 
 imaginary treasure. When the doctor saw, beyond the clerics, 
 all his heirs on their knees, and, far from praying, watching 
 him with gleaming eyes as bright as the twinkling tapers, he 
 could not repress a mischievous smile. The cure looked 
 round, saw them, and read the prayers very slowly. The 
 postmaster was the first to rise from his uncomfortable atti- 
 tude, his wife followed his example ; Massin, fearful lest Zelie 
 and her husband should lay a hand on some little possession, 
 went after them to the drawing-room, and there, a few minutes 
 later, all the party had assembled. 
 
 "He is too honest a man to steal extreme unction," said 
 Crdmiere ; " so we may be easy." 
 
 "Yes; we shall each have about twenty thousand francs a 
 year," replied Madame Massin. 
 
 "I have gotten it into my head," said Zelie, "that for 
 the last three years he has not been investing ; he liked to 
 hoard the money " 
 
 "The treasure is in his cellar no doubt? " said Massin to 
 Cr6miere. 
 
 "If we are so lucky as to find anything at all ! " observed 
 Minoret-Levrault. 
 
 " But after what he said at the ball," cried Madame Massin, 
 " there can be no doubt." 
 
 " Whatever there may be," said Cremiere, "how shall we 
 proceed? Shall we divide? Or put it into the lawyer's
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 169 
 
 hands ? Or distribute it in lots ? For, after all, we are all 
 of age." 
 
 A discussion, which soon became acrid, arose as to the 
 method of procedure. At the end of half an hour a noise of 
 loud voices, above them all Zelie's shrill tones, rang across 
 the courtyard out into the street. 
 
 " He must be dead," said the curious crowd that had col- 
 lected there. 
 
 The uproar reached the doctor's ears, who could hear these 
 words 
 
 " But there is the house ; the house is worth thirty thousand 
 francs ! " shouted, or rather bellowed, by Cremidre. 
 
 " Very well, we will pay for it as much as it is worth," re- 
 torted Zelie sharply. 
 
 " Monsieur le Cure," said the old man to the abbe", who 
 had remained with his friend after the sacrament, " let me die 
 in peace. My heirs, like those of Cardinal Ximenes, are 
 capable of pillaging my house before I am dead, and I have 
 no monkey to make restitution. Go and explain that I will 
 have no one in the house." 
 
 The cure and the physician went downstairs and repeated 
 the dying man's orders, adding, in their indignation, some 
 severe words of reproof. 
 
 "Madame Bougival," said the town-doctor, "shut the 
 gate, and let no one in ; a man cannot even die quietly, it 
 would seem. Make a cup of mustard, to apply plasters to 
 Monsieur Minoret's feet." 
 
 "Your uncle is not dead; he may live some time yet," 
 said the abbe to the family who had brought all their children. 
 "He desires perfect silence, and will have no one near him but 
 his ward. What a difference between that young creature's 
 conduct and yours ! " 
 
 "Old hypocrite!" cried Crmire. " I will keep guard. 
 It is quite possible that he may plot something against our 
 interests."
 
 170 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 The postmaster had already disappeared into the garden, 
 intending to watch over his uncle with Ursule, and to gain 
 admission into the house as her assistant. He came back on 
 tiptoe without his boots making a sound, for there were car- 
 pets in the passages and on the stairs. He thus came close 
 to his uncle's door without being heard. The cure and the 
 physician had left; La Bougival was preparing the mustard 
 plasters. 
 
 " Are we quite alone ? " said the old man to his ward. 
 
 Ursule stood on tiptoe to look out on the courtyard. 
 
 "Yes," said she, "Monsieur le Cure shut the gate as he 
 went out." 
 
 " My darling child," said the dying man, " my hours, my 
 minutes are numbered. I have not been a doctor for nothing ; 
 the mustard plasters recommended by the apothecary will not 
 carry me through till to-night. Do not cry, Ursule," he said, 
 finding himself interrupted by his ward's sobs, " but listen to 
 me : the point is that you should marry Savinien. As soon 
 as La Bougival comes up with the sinapism, go down to the 
 Chinese pavilion ; here is the key ; lift up the marble top 
 of the Boule cabinet, and under it you will find a letter 
 addressed to you ; take it, and come up and show it to me, 
 for I shall not die easy unless I know that it is in your hands. 
 When I am dead, do not at once announce the fact ; first 
 send for Monsieur de Portenduere, read the letter together, 
 and swear to me in his name and in your own that you will 
 obey my last injunctions. When he has done what I desire, 
 you can announce my death, and then the comedy of the 
 inheritance will begin. God grant that those monsters may 
 not ill-use you." 
 
 "Yes, godfather." 
 
 The postmaster did not wait for the end of the scene ; he 
 took himself off on tiptoe, remembering that the locked door 
 of the pavilion opened from the book-gallery. He himself 
 had been present at the time of a discussion between the
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 171 
 
 architect and the locksmith, who had insisted that if there 
 were to be a way into the house through the window looking 
 out on the river there must be a lock to the door leading 
 into the book gallery, the pavilion being a sort of summer- 
 house. 
 
 Minoret, his eyes dim with greed and his blood singing in 
 his ears, unscrewed the lock with a pocket-knife as dexter- 
 ously as a thief. He went into the pavilion, took the packet 
 of papers without stopping to open it, replaced the lock and 
 restored order, and then went to sit in the dining-room, wait- 
 ing till La Bougival should be gone upstairs with the mustard 
 plaster, to steal out of the house. This he achieved with all 
 the greater ease because Ursule thought it more necessary to 
 see that the mustard was applied than to obey her godfather's 
 injunctions. 
 
 " The letter, the letter," said the old man in a dying voice. 
 " Do as I bid you there is the key. I must see the letter in 
 your hands. ' ' 
 
 He spoke with such a wild look that La Bougival said to 
 Ursule: " Do as your godfather tells you, at once, or you'll 
 be the death of him." 
 
 She kissed his forehead, took the key, and went down, but 
 was immediately recalled by a piercing cry from La Bougival, 
 and ran back. The old man glanced at her, saw that her 
 hands were empty, sat up in bed, and tried to speak and 
 then died with a last fearful gasp, his eyes staring with terror. 
 
 The poor child, seeing death for the first time, fell on her 
 knees, and melted into tears. La Bougival closed the old 
 man's eyes and laid him straight. Then, when she had 
 "dressed the corpse," as she said, she went to call Monsieur 
 Savinien ; but the heirs, who were prowling at the top of the 
 street, surrounded by an inquisitive crowd, exactly like a flock 
 of crows waiting till a horse is buried to come and scratch up 
 the earth, and ferret with beak and claws, came running in 
 with the swiftness of birds of prey.
 
 172 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 The postmaster, meanwhile, had gone home to master the 
 contents of the mysterious packet. This was what he read : 
 
 " To my dear Ursule Mirouet, daughter of my illegitimate 
 brother-in-law, Joseph Mirouet, and of his wife, Dinah 
 Grollman. 
 
 "NEMOURS, January 15, 1830. 
 
 "MY LITTLE ANGEL: My fatherly affection, which you 
 have so fully justified, is based not merely on the promise I 
 swore to your poor father to fill his place, but also on your like- 
 ness to Ursule Mirouet, my late wife, of whom you constantly 
 remind me by your grace and nature, your artlessness and 
 charm. 
 
 "Your being the child of my father-in-law's natural son 
 might lead to any will in your favor being disputed ' ' 
 
 " The old rascal ! " exclaimed the postmaster. 
 
 "My adopting you would have given rise to a lawsuit. 
 Again, I have always been averse to the notion of marrying 
 you myself to leave you my fortune, for I might have lived to 
 a great age and spoilt your future happiness, which is delayed 
 only by the life of Madame de Portenduere. Having regard 
 to the difficulties, and wishing to leave you a fortune adequate 
 to a handsome position " 
 
 " The old wretch, he thought of everything ! " 
 
 " Without doing any injury to my heirs " 
 
 '" Miserable Jesuit ! As if we had not a right to his whole 
 fortune ! " 
 
 " I have put aside for you the sum-total of my savings for 
 the last eighteen years, which I have regularly invested by my 
 lawyer's assistance, in the hope of leaving you as happy as 
 money can make you. Without wealth your education and 
 superior ideas would be a misfortune ; besides, you ought to 
 bring a good dowry to the excellent young man who loves 
 you. So look in the middle of the third volume of the
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 173 
 
 'Pandects,' in folio, bound in red morocco, the last volume 
 on the lower shelf above the library cupboard, in the third 
 division on the drawing-room side, and you will find three cer- 
 tificates to bearer of three per cent, consols, each for 12,000 
 francs." 
 
 " What a depth of villainy ! " cried the postmaster. " Ah, 
 God will not permit me to be thus thwarted ! " 
 
 "Take them at once, with the small savings left at the 
 moment of my death, which are in the next volume. Re- 
 member, my darling child, that you are bound to obey blindly 
 the wish that has been the joy of my whole life, and which 
 will compel me to appeal for help to God if you should dis- 
 obey me. But to guard against any scruple of your dear 
 conscience, which is, I know, ingenious in tormenting you, 
 you will find with this a will in due form, bequeathing these 
 certificates to Monsieur Savinien de Portenduere ; so, whether 
 you own them, or they are the gift of your lover, they will be 
 legitimately yours. Your godfather 
 
 "DENIS MINORET." 
 
 Subjoined to this letter, on a sheet of stamped paper, was 
 the following document : 
 
 " THIS is MY WILL. 
 
 " I, DENIS MINORET, Doctor of Medicine, resident at 
 Nemours, sound in mind and body, as the date of this will 
 proves, dedicate my soul to God, beseeching Him to forgive 
 my long errors in favor of my sincere repentance. Then, 
 having discerned in the Vicomte Savinien de Portenduere a 
 sincere affection for me, I bequeath to him thirty-six thou- 
 sand francs in perpetual consols at three per cent., to be paid 
 out of my estate as a first charge. 
 
 " Made and written all by my own hand at Nemours, Jan- 
 uary n, 1831. 
 
 " DENIS MINORET."
 
 174 UXSULE MIROUET. 
 
 Without a moment's hesitation the postmaster, who, to 
 make sure of being alone, had locked himself into his wife's 
 room, looked about for the tinder-box ; he had two warnings 
 from heaven by the extinction of two matches which would 
 not light. The third blazed up. He burnt the letter and 
 the will on the hearth, and took the needless precaution of 
 burying the ashes of the paper and wax in the cinders. Then, 
 licking his lips at the idea of having thirty-six thousand francs 
 unknown to his wife, he flew back to his uncle's house, spurred 
 by one idea the single fixed idea that his dull brain could 
 master. On seeing his uncle's dwelling invaded by the three 
 families, at last in possession of the stronghold, he quaked 
 lest he should be unable to carry out a project which he gave 
 himself no time to think over, considering only the obstacles 
 in the way. 
 
 "What are you doing here?" he said to Massin and Cre- 
 miere. " Do you suppose that we are going to leave the 
 house and papers to be pillaged ? There are three of us ; we 
 cannot encamp on the spot. You, Cremiere, go at once to 
 Dionis and tell him to come and certify the death. Though 
 I am an official, I am not competent to draw up the death 
 certificate of my own uncle. You, Massin, had better ask 
 old Bongrand to seal up everything. You," he added to his 
 wife, Madame Massin, and Madame Cremiere, " you should 
 sit with Ursule, ladies, and so nothing can be taken. Above 
 all, lock the gate, so that no one can get out." 
 
 The women, who felt the weight of this advice, went at 
 once to Ursule's room, where they found the noble girl, 
 already the object of such cruel suspicions, on her knees in 
 prayer, her face bathed in tears. 
 
 Minoret, guessing that they would not remain long with 
 Ursule, and suspicious of his co-heirs' want of trust in him, 
 hastened to the library, saw the volume, which he opened, 
 took out the three certificates, and found in the other thirty 
 bank-notes. Notwithstanding his base nature, the big man
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 175 
 
 fancied a whole chime was ringing in each ear, the blood 
 hissed in his brain, as he achieved the theft. In spite of the 
 cold weather, his shirt was wet with perspiration down his 
 back ; and his legs shook to such a degree that he dropped 
 into an armchair in the drawing-room as if he had been 
 struck on the head with a sledge-hammer. 
 
 " Dear me, how glib the idea of a fortune has made old 
 
 Minoret ! " Massin had said, as they hurried through the 
 
 town. "Did you notice it?" he observed to Cr6miere. 
 
 ' Come here, and go there ! ' How well he knows the game, 
 
 and how to play it ! " 
 
 " Yes, for a fat-head he had a style " 
 
 "I say," said Massin in alarm, "his wife is with him. 
 They are two too many. Do you run the errands ; I will go 
 back again." 
 
 So just as the postmaster had seated himself, he saw the 
 registrar's hot face at the gate, for he had run back with the 
 nimbleness of a ferret. 
 
 "Well, what is it? " asked the postmaster, as he let in his 
 co-heir. 
 
 " Nothing; I came back to witness the sealing," replied 
 Massin, glaring at him like a wildcat. 
 
 " I wish it were done, and that we could all go quietly 
 home," said Minoret. 
 
 " And we will put some one in charge," said the registrar. 
 " La Bougival is capable of anything in the interest of that 
 little minx. We will put in Goupil." 
 
 " Goupil ! " cried Minoret ; " he would find the hoard, 
 and we should see nothing but smoke." 
 
 "Let us see," replied Massin; "this evening they will 
 watch by the dead. We shall have everything sealed up in an 
 hour, so our wives will be on guard themselves. The funeral 
 must be to-morrow at noon. The inventory cannot be made 
 till after a week." 
 
 "But, "said the colossus smiling, "we can turn out that
 
 176 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 minx, and we will engage the mayor's drummer to stop in the 
 house and guard the property." 
 
 " Very good," said the registrar, "see to that yourself ; you 
 are the head of the Minorets." 
 
 " Now, ladies, ladies, be so good as to wait in the drawing- 
 room. You cannot be off to dinner yet j we must witness 
 the affixing of the seals for our common interest." 
 
 He then took Zelie aside to impart to her Massin's idea 
 about Ursule. The women, whose hearts were full of vengeance, 
 and who longed to turn the tables on "the little hussy," 
 hailed the idea of turning her out of the house with glee. 
 
 When Bongrand arrived he was indignant at the request 
 made to him, as a friend of the deceased, by Zelie and 
 Madame Massin, to desire Ursule to leave the house. 
 
 " Go yourselves and turn her out of the home of her father, 
 her godfather, her uncle, her benefactor, her guardian ! Go 
 you who owe your fortunes to her nobility of character 
 take her by the shoulders thrust her into the street in the 
 face of the whole town ! You think her capable of robbing 
 you ? Well, then, engage a guardian of the property ; you 
 have a perfect right to do so. But understand clearly that I 
 will put seals on nothing in her room ; it is her own, all that 
 is in it is her property ; I shall inform her what her rights are, 
 and advise her to place everything there that belongs to her. 
 Oh ! in your presence ! " he added, hearing a murmur of 
 disapproval. 
 
 "What? " cried the tax-receiver to the postmaster and the 
 women, who were struck speechless at Bongrand's angry 
 address. 
 
 "A pretty magistrate ! " said Minoret. 
 
 Ursule, on a low chair, half-fainting, her head thrown back, 
 her hair undone, was sobbing from time to time. Her eyes 
 were heavy, their lids swollen ; in short, she was in a state of 
 moral and physical prostration, which might have touched the 
 heart of the fiercest creatures excepting heirs.
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 177 
 
 "Ah, Monsieur Bongrand, after my happy f&te, here are 
 death and despair," she said, with the unconscious poetry of 
 a sweet nature. "You know what he was. In twenty years 
 he never spoke an impatient word to me ! I thought he 
 would live to a hundred! He was a mother to me," she 
 cried, "and a kind mother! " 
 
 The utterance of her broken ideas brought on a torrent 
 of tears, broken by sobs, and she fell back half-senseless. 
 
 " My child," said the justice, hearing the inheritors on the 
 stairs, "you have the rest of your life to weep in, and only a 
 moment for business. Bring into your own room everything 
 in the house that belongs to you. The heirs insist on my 
 affixing seals " 
 
 " Oh, his heirs may take everything ! " cried Ursule, start- 
 ing up in a spasm of fierce indignation. " I have here all 
 that is precious to me ! " and she struck her bosom. 
 
 "What? what? " asked the postmaster, who, with Massin, 
 now showed his horrible face. 
 
 " The memory of his virtues, of his life, of all his words, 
 the image of his heavenly mind," she replied, her eyes and 
 cheeks flaming as she raised her hand with a proud gesture. 
 
 "Ay, and you have a key there too," cried Massin, going 
 on all fours like a cat to seize a key which slipped out of the 
 folds of her bodice as she lifted her arm. 
 
 "It is the key of his study," she said, coloring. " He was 
 sending -me there just when he died." 
 
 The two men exchanged a hideous smile, and turned to the 
 justice with a look that expressed a blighting suspicion. 
 Ursule saw and interpreted the look, malignant on Minoret's 
 part, involuntary on Massin's, and drew herself up, as pale as 
 if all her blood had ebbed ; her eyes glistened with the light- 
 nings that can only flash at the cost of vitality, and in a 
 choking voice she said 
 
 " Ah, Monsieur Bongrand, all that is in this room is mine 
 only by my godfather's kindness; they may take it all; I have 
 12
 
 178 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 nothing about me but my clothes ; I will go out of it and 
 never come in again." 
 
 She went into her guardian's room, and no entreaties could 
 bring her forth for the heirs were a little ashamed of their 
 conduct. She desired La Bougival to engage two rooms at 
 the Old Posting Inn till she should find some lodging in the 
 town, where they might stay together. She went into her 
 room only to fetch her prayer-book, and remained all night 
 with the cure and another priest and Savinien, weeping and 
 praying. Savinien came in after his mother had gone to bed, 
 and knelt down without speaking by Ursule, who gave him 
 the saddest smile, while thanking him for coming so faithfully 
 to share in her sorrows. 
 
 " My child," said Monsieur Bongrand, bringing in a large 
 bundle, " one of your uncle's relations has taken out of your 
 wardrobe all that you need, for the seals will not be removed 
 for some days, and you will then have everything that belongs 
 to you. In your own interest I have placed seals on your 
 things too." 
 
 " Thank you," she said, pressing his hand. " Come and 
 look at him once more. You would think he was sleeping." 
 
 The old man's face had at this moment the transient bloom 
 of beauty which is seen on the face of those who have died 
 without pain ; it seemed radiant. 
 
 " Did he not give you anything privately before he died ? " 
 asked the justice of Ursule in a whisper. 
 
 " Nothing," she replied. " He only said something about 
 a letter " 
 
 "Good! that will be found," said Bongrand. "Then it 
 is lucky for you that they insisted on the seals." 
 
 At daybreak Ursule bade adieu to the house where her happy 
 childhood had been spent, and above all to the room where 
 her love had had its birth, and which was so dear to her that 
 in the midst of her deep grief she had a tear of regret for 
 this peaceful and happy nook. After gazing for the last time
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 179 
 
 on her windows and on Savinien in turn, she went off to the 
 inn, accompanied by La Bougival, who carried her bundle ; 
 by the justice, who gave her his arm ; and by Savinien, her 
 kind protector. 
 
 And so, in spite of every precaution, the suspicious lawyer 
 was in the right ; Ursule would be bereft of fortune, and at 
 war with the heirs-at-law. 
 
 Next day the whole town followed Doctor Minoret's funeral. 
 When they heard of the conduct of the next-of-kin to Ursule, 
 most people thought it natural and necessary ; there was an 
 inheritance at stake ; the old man was miserly j Ursule might 
 fancy she had rights ; the heirs were only protecting their 
 property ; and, after all, she had humiliated them enough in 
 their uncle's time he had made them as welcome as a dog 
 among ninepins. Desire Minoret, who was doing no great 
 things in his office, said the neighbors who were envious of 
 the postmaster, came for the funeral. Ursule, unable to 
 attend, was in bed, ill of a nervous fever, brought on as much 
 by the insults offered her as by her deep grief. 
 
 "Just look at that hypocrite in tears," said some of the 
 faction, pointing to Savinien, who was in great sorrow for 
 the doctor's death. 
 
 " The question is whether he has any good cause for tears," 
 remarked Goupil. " Do not laugh too soon ; the seals have 
 not yet been removed." 
 
 "Pooh!" said Minoret, who knew more than he did, 
 " you have always frightened us for nothing." 
 
 Just as the procession was starting for the church, Goupil 
 had a bitter mortification ; he was about to take Desire's arm, 
 but the young man turned away, thus denying his comrade in 
 the eyes of all Nemours. 
 
 "It is of no use to be angry," said the clerk to himself; 
 "I should lose all chance of revenge," and his dry heart 
 swelled in his bosom like a sponge. 
 
 Before breaking the seals and making the inventory, they
 
 180 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 had to wait for the public prosecutor's commission, as public 
 guardian of all orphans, to be issued to Bongrand as his 
 representative. Then the Minoret property, of which every 
 one had talked for ten days, was released, and the inventory 
 was made and witnessed with every formality of the law. 
 Dionis made a job of it ; Goupil was glad to have a finger in 
 any mischief; and as the business was a paying one, they 
 took their time over it. They generally breakfasted on the 
 spot. The notary, the clerks, heirs, and witnesses drank the 
 finest wines in the cellar. 
 
 In a country town, where every one has his own house, it is 
 rather difficult to find lodgings ; and when any business is for 
 sale, the house commonly goes with it. The justice, who was 
 charged by the court with the guardianship of the orphan 
 girl, saw no way of housing her out of the inn but by buying 
 for her, in the High Street, at the corner of the bridge over 
 the Loing, a small house, with a door opening into a passage ; 
 on the ground floor was a sitting-room with two windows on 
 the street, and a kitchen behind it, with a glass door looking 
 into a yard of about a hundred square feet. A narrow stair, 
 with a borrowed light from the river-side, led to the first floor, 
 containing three rooms, and to two attics above. 
 
 Monsieur Bongrand borrowed two thousand francs of La 
 Bougival's savings to pay the first installment of the price of 
 this house, which was six thousand francs, and he obtained a 
 delay for the remainder. To make room for the books which 
 Ursule wished to buy back, Bongrand had a partition pulled 
 down between two of the first-floor rooms, having ascertained 
 that the depth of the house was sufficient to hold the book- 
 shelves. He and Savinien hurried on the workmen, who 
 cleaned, painted, and restored this little dwelling with such 
 effect, that, by the end of March, Ursule could move from 
 the inn and find in the plain little house a bedroom just like 
 that from which the heirs had ejected her, for it was full of
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 181 
 
 the furniture brought away by the justice at the removal of the 
 seals. La Bougival, sleeping overhead, could be brought 
 down at the call of a bell which hung by her young mistress' 
 bed. 
 
 The room intended for the library, the ground-floor sitting- 
 room, and the kitchen, as yet unfurnished, were colored, 
 repapered, and painted, awaiting the purchases the young girl 
 might make at the sale of her godfather's household goods. 
 
 Though they well knew Ursule's strength of character, the 
 justice and the cur6 both dreaded for her the sudden transi- 
 tion to a life so devoid of the elegance and luxury to which 
 the doctor had always accustomed her. As to Savinien, he 
 fairly wept over it ; and he had secretly given the workmen 
 and the upholsterer more than one gratuity in order that 
 Ursule should find no difference, in her own room at least, 
 between the old and the new. But the young girl, who found 
 all her happiness in Savinien's eyes, showed the sweetest 
 resignation. In these circumstances she charmed her two old 
 friends, and proved to them, for the hundredth time, that 
 only grief of heart could give her real suffering. Her sorrow 
 at her godfather's death was too deep for her to feel the bitter- 
 ness of her changed fortunes, which, nevertheless, raised a 
 fresh obstacle in the way of her marriage. Savinien's dejec- 
 tion at seeing her brought so low was such that she felt obliged 
 to say in his ear, as they came out of church the morning of 
 her moving into her new abode : 
 
 " Love cannot live without patience; we must wait." 
 
 As soon as the preamble to the inventory was drawn up, 
 Massin, advised by Goupil, who turned to him in his covert 
 hatred of Minoret, hoping for more from the usurer's self- 
 interest than from Zelie's thriftiness, foreclosed on Madame 
 and Monsieur de Portenduere, whose term for payment had 
 lapsed. The old lady was stunned by a summons to pay up 
 129,517 francs 55 centimes to the heirs-at-law within twenty- 
 four hours, and interest from the day of the demand, under
 
 182 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 penalty of the seizure of her landed estate. To borrow money 
 to pay with was impossible. Savinien went to consult a lawyer 
 at Fontainebleau. 
 
 " You have had a bad set to deal with who will make no com- 
 promise ; their point is to drive you to extremities and take 
 possession of the farm at Bordieres," said the lawyer. "The 
 best thing will be to effect a voluntary sale so as to avoid costs." 
 
 This melancholy news was a blow to the old Bretonne, to 
 whom her son mildly remarked that if she had but consented 
 to his marriage during Minoret's lifetime, the doctor would 
 have placed all his possessions in the hands of Ursule's hus- 
 band. At this moment they would have been enjoying wealth 
 instead of suffering misery. Though spoken in no tone of 
 reproach, this argument crushed the old lady quite as much as 
 the notion of an immediate and violent eviction. 
 
 Ursule, hardly recovered from her fever and the blow dealt 
 her by the doctor's next-of-kin, was bewildered with dismay 
 when she heard of this fresh disaster. To love, and be unable 
 to help the person beloved, is one of the most terrible pangs 
 that the soul of a high-minded and delicately constituted 
 woman can suffer. 
 
 "I meant to buy my uncle's house," she said. "I will 
 buy your mother's instead." 
 
 "Is it possible?" said Savinien. "You are under age, 
 and cannot sell your securities without elaborate formalities, 
 to which the public prosecutor would not give his consent. 
 And, indeed, we shall attempt no resistance. All the town 
 will look on with satisfaction at the discomfiture of a noble 
 house. These townsfolk are like hounds at the death. Hap- 
 pily, I still have ten thousand francs, on which my mother can 
 live till this deplorable business is wound up. And, after all, 
 the inventory of your godfather's property is not yet com- 
 plete. Monsieur Bongrand still hopes to find something for 
 you. He is as much surprised as I am to find you left penni- 
 less. The doctor so often spoke to him and to me of the
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 183 
 
 handsome future he had prepared for you, that we cannot at 
 all understand this state of things." 
 
 " Oh," said she, " if I can but buy the books and my god- 
 father's furniture, that they may not be dispersed or pass into 
 strange hands, I am content with my lot." 
 
 "But who knows what price those rascally people may not 
 set on the things you wish to have ! " 
 
 From Montargis to Fontainebleau the Minoret heirs, and 
 the million they hoped to find, were the talk of the country; 
 but the most careful search made throughout the house since 
 the removal of the seals had led to no discovery. The hun- 
 dred and twenty-nine thousand francs of the Portenduere 
 mortgage, the fifteen thousand francs a year in three per cents., 
 then quoted at sixty-five, and yielding a capital of three hun- 
 dred and eighty thousand, the house, valued at forty thousand 
 francs, and the handsome furniture, amounted to a total of 
 about six hundred thousand francs, which the outer world 
 thought a very consoling figure. 
 
 Minoret had at this time some moments of acute uneasiness. 
 La Bougival and Savinien, who, like the justice, persisted in 
 believing in the existence of a will, came in after every day's 
 cataloguing to ask Bongrand the result of the investigations. 
 The doctor's old friend would exclaim, as the clerks and the 
 heirs-at-law quitted the premises: "I cannot understand it?" 
 
 As, in the eyes of many superficial observers, two hundred 
 thousand francs apiece to each inheritor seemed a very fair for- 
 tune for the provinces, it never occurred to any one to inquire 
 how the doctor could have kept house as he had done on an 
 income of no more than fifteen thousand francs, since he had 
 never drawn the interest on the Portenduere mortgage. Bon- 
 grand, Savinien, and the cure alone asked this question in 
 Ursule's interest, and, on hearing them give it utterance, the 
 postmaster more than once turned pale. 
 
 " And yet we have certainly hunted everywhere they to 
 find a hoard, and I to find a will, in favor probably of Mon-
 
 184 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 sieur de Portenduere," said the justice the day the inventory 
 was finished and signed. "They have sifted the ash-heap, 
 raised the marble tops, felt in his slippers, pulled the bed- 
 steads to pieces, emptied the mattresses, run pins into the 
 counterpanes and coverlets, turned out his eiderdown quilt, 
 examined every scrap of paper, every drawer, dug over the 
 ground in the cellar ; and I was ready to bid them pull the 
 house down." 
 
 "What do you think about it ?" asked the cure. "The 
 will has been made away with by one of them." 
 
 "And the securities?" 
 
 " Try to find them ! Try to guess what such creatures 
 would be at as cunning, as wily, and as greedy as these 
 Massins and Cr6mieres. Make what you can of such a fortune 
 as this Minoret's ; he gets two hundred thousand francs for 
 his share, and he is going to sell his license, his house, and 
 his interest in the Messageries for three hundred and fifty 
 thousand ! What sums of money ! To say nothing of the 
 savings on his thirty-odd thousand francs derived from real 
 estate. Poor doctor !" 
 
 "The will might have been hidden in the library ! " said 
 Savinien. 
 
 "And, therefore, I did not dissuade the child from buying 
 the books. But for that, would it not have been folly to let 
 her spend all her ready money in books she will never look 
 into?" 
 
 The whole town had believed that the doctor's godchild 
 was in possession of the undiscoverable securities ; but when 
 it was known beyond a doubt that her fourteen thousand 
 francs in consols and her little personalty constituted her 
 whole fortune, the doctor's house and furniture excited the 
 greatest curiosity. Some thought that bank-notes would be 
 found in the stuffing of the chairs ; others that the old man 
 must have hidden them in his books. The sale accordingly 
 afforded the spectacle of the strange precautions taken by the
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 185 
 
 heirs. Dionis, as auctioneer, explained with regard to each 
 article put up for sale that the heirs-at-law were selling the 
 piece of furniture only, and not anything that might be found 
 in it; then, before parting with it, they all submitted it to the 
 closest scrutiny, pinched it, tapped it, shook it ; and then 
 gazed after it with the fond looks of a father parting with his 
 only son for a voyage to the Indies. 
 
 "Oh, mademoiselle," said La Bougival, on her return from 
 the first morning's sale. " I will not go again. Monsieur 
 Bongrand is right ; you could not bear to see it. Everything 
 is upside down. They come and go as if it were the street ; 
 the handsomest furniture is used for anything that is wanted ; 
 they stand upon it ; there is such a mess that a hen could not 
 find her chicks ! You might think there had been a fire. 
 Everything is turned out into the courtyard, the wardrobes 
 all open and empty ! Oh, poor, dear man, it is lucky for him 
 he is dead ! This sale would have been the death of him ! " 
 
 Bongrand, who was buying for Ursule the things of which 
 the old man had been fond, and which were suitable for her 
 small house, did not appear when the library was sold. 
 Sharper than the heirs-at-law, whose greed would have made 
 him pay too dear for the books, he gave a commission to a 
 second-hand book-dealer at Melun, who came to Nemours on 
 purpose, and who managed to secure several lots. As a 
 consequence of the suspicions of the heirs, the books were 
 sold one by one. Three thousand volumes were turned over, 
 shaken one by one, held by the boards and fluttered, to make 
 any paper fly out that might be hidden between the leaves ; 
 finally, the bindings and backs were closely examined. The 
 lots secured for Ursule mounted up to about six thousand five 
 hundred francs, half of her claims on the estate. 
 
 The bookcase was not delivered over until it had been 
 carefully examined by a cabinetmaker, noted for his experi- 
 ence of secret drawers and panels, who was sent for expressly, 
 from Paris. When the justice gave orders that the bookcase
 
 186 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 and books should be conveyed to Mademoiselle Mirouet's 
 house, the heirs-at-law felt some vague alarms, which were 
 subsequently dissipated by seeing that she was no richer than 
 before. 
 
 Minoret bought his uncle's house, which the co-heirs ran 
 up to about fifty thousand francs, imagining that the post- 
 master hoped to find a treasure in the walls. And the deed 
 of sale contained stipulations on this point. A fortnight after 
 the conclusion of the whole business, Minoret, having sold 
 his post-horses and his business to the son of a wealthy farmer, 
 moved into his uncle's house, on which he spent considerable 
 sums in improvements and repairs. So Minoret condemned 
 himself to live within a few yards of Ursule. 
 
 " I only hope," said he to Dionis the day when Savinien 
 and his mother had notice of the foreclosure, "that now we 
 shall be rid of this precious nobility. We will turn them out, 
 one by one." 
 
 " The old lady, with her fourteen quarterings, will not 
 stay to witness the disaster," said Goupil. "She will go 
 to die in Brittany, where, no doubt, she will find a wife 
 for her son." 
 
 " I don't think so," replied the notary, who, that morning, 
 had drawn up the agreement of purchase for Bongrand. 
 " Ursule has just bought the widow Richard's little house." 
 
 "That cursed little fool does not know what to do next to 
 annoy us ! " cried Minoret, very rashly. 
 
 " Why, what can it matter to you if she lives at Nemours?" 
 asked Guopil, astonished at the vehement disgust shown by 
 the great simpleton. 
 
 " Do you not know," said Minoret, turning as red as a 
 poppy, " that my son is fool enough to be in love with her? 
 I would give a hundred crowns to see Ursule well out of 
 Nemours." 
 
 From this it is easy to understand how much Ursule, poor 
 and resigned as she was, would be in Minoret's way, with all
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 187 
 
 his money. The worry of securities to be realized, of selling 
 his business, the expeditions consequent on such unwonted 
 affairs, his disputes with his wife over every little detail, and 
 the purchase of the doctor's house, where Zelie wished to live 
 quite plainly for her son's sake all this turmoil, so unlike 
 the quiet course of his usual life, prevented the great Minoret 
 from thinking of his victim. But a few days after he had 
 settled in the Rue des Bourgeois, about the middle of May, 
 on returning from a walk, he heard the sounds of a piano, 
 and saw La Bougival sitting in the window, like a dragon 
 guarding a treasure ; and at the same moment he heard an 
 importunate voice within himself. 
 
 An explanation of the reason why, in a man of his temper, 
 the sight of Ursule, who did not even suspect the theft he 
 had committed to her injury, became at once unendurable, 
 why the sight of her dignity in misfortune filled him with the 
 desire to get her out of the town, and why this desire assumed 
 the character of hatred and passion, would lead perhaps to a 
 complete moral treatise. Perhaps he felt that he was not the 
 legitimate possessor of the thirty-six thousand francs while 
 she to whom they belonged was so close to him. Perhaps he 
 thought that by some chance his theft would be discovered, so 
 long as those he had robbed were within reach. Perhaps, 
 even, in a nature so primitive, so rough-hewn as his was, and 
 hitherto always law-abiding, Ursule's presence awoke some 
 kind of remorse. Perhaps this remorse was the more poig- 
 nant because he had so much more wealth than had been 
 legitimately acquired. 
 
 He no doubt ascribed these stirrings of his conscience 
 wholly to Ursule's presence, fancying that if she were out of 
 sight these uncomfortable pangs would vanish too. Or per- 
 haps, again, crime has its own counsel of perfection. An ill 
 deed begun may demand its climax, a first blow may require 
 a second a death-blow. Robbery, perhaps, inevitably leads 
 to murder. Minoret had committed the theft without a mo-
 
 188 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 ment's pause for reflection, events had crowded on so swiftly ; 
 reflection came afterwards. Now, if the reader has fully pic- 
 tured the appearance and build of this man, he will under- 
 stand the prodigious results on him of an idea. Remorse is 
 more than an idea ; it is the outcome of a feeling which can 
 no more be smothered than love can, and which is tyrannous 
 too. But just as Minoret had not hesitated for an instant 
 to possess himself of the fortune intended for Ursule, so he 
 mechanically felt the need of getting her away from Nemours 
 when the sight of her cheated innocence stung him. Being 
 an imbecile, he never considered consequences ; he went on 
 from danger to danger, urged by his instinctive cupidity, like 
 a wild animal which cannot foresee the wiles of the hunter, 
 and trusts to its swiftness and strength. 
 
 Before long the richer townspeople, who were wont to meet 
 at the notary's office, observed a change in the manners and 
 demeanor of the man who had always been so light-hearted. 
 
 "I cannot think what has come over Minoret," said his 
 wife, to whom he had never revealed his bold stroke. " He 
 is ill anyhow." 
 
 The world at large accounted for Minoret's being sick of 
 himself for in his face the expression of thought was one 
 of boredom by the fact that he had absolutely nothing to 
 do, and by the transition from an active to an indolent life. 
 While Minoret was scheming to crush Ursule's life, La Bou- 
 gival never let a day pass without making to her foster-child 
 some allusion to the fortune she ought to have had, or com- 
 paring her humble lot with that which the late " Monsieur " 
 had intended her to enjoy, and of which he had spoken to 
 her La Bougival. 
 
 "And besides," said she, "it is not out of greediness; 
 but would not monsieur, so kind as he was, have left me some 
 little money? " 
 
 "Am I not here?" Ursule would reply, and forbid any 
 further words on the subject.
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 189 
 
 She could not bear the taint of any self-interested thought 
 to touch the loving, melancholy and sweet memories which 
 clung round the image of the old doctor, of whom a sketch 
 in black and white chalk, done by her drawing-master, hung 
 in her little sitting-room. To her fresh and strong imagina- 
 tion the sight of this sketch was sufficient to bring her god- 
 father before her ; she thought of him constantly, and was 
 surrounded by the objects he had loved his deep armchair, 
 the furniture of his study, his backgammon-board, and the 
 piano he had given her. The two old friends who remained 
 to her, the Abbe Chaperon and Monsieur Bongrand, the only 
 persons whose visits she would receive, were like two living 
 memories of the past in the midst of the objects to which her 
 regrets almost gave life of that past which was linked to the 
 present by the love which her godfather had approved and 
 blessed. 
 
 Ere long the sadness of her thoughts, insensibly softened 
 by time, cast its hue on all her life, bringing everything into 
 indefinable harmony ; exquisite neatness, perfect order in the 
 arrangement of the furniture, a few flowers brought every 
 morning by Savinien, pretty nothings, a stamp of peace set 
 on everything by the young girl's habits, and which made 
 her home attractive. After breakfast and after church she 
 regularly practiced and sang ; then she took her embroidery, 
 sitting in the window towards the street. At four o'clock 
 Savinien, on his return from the walk he took in all weathers, 
 would find the window half-open, and sit on the outer sill to 
 chat with her for half an hour. In the evening the cur6 or 
 the justice would call, but she would never allow Savinien to 
 accompany them. Nor would she accept a proposal from 
 Madame de Portenduere, whom her son persuaded to invite 
 Ursule to live with her. 
 
 The young girl and La Bougival lived with the strictest 
 economy ; they did not spend, on all included, more than 
 sixty francs a month. The old nurse was indefatigable ; she
 
 190 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 washed and ironed, she cooked only twice a week, and kept 
 the remains of the cooked food, which the mistress and maid 
 ate cold ; for Ursule hoped to save seven hundred francs a 
 year to pay the remainder of the price of her house. This 
 austere conduct, with her modesty and resignation to a penuri- 
 ous life, after having enjoyed a luxurious existence, when her 
 lightest whims were worshiped, gained her the regard of cer- 
 tain persons. She was respected, and never talked about. 
 The heirs, once satisfied, did her full justice. Savinien ad- 
 mired such strength of character in so young a girl. Now 
 and again, on coming out of church, Madame de Porten- 
 duere would say a few kind words to Ursule ; she invited her 
 to dinner twice, and came herself to fetch her. If it were 
 not indeed happiness, at any rate it was peace. 
 
 But a successful transaction, in which the justice displayed 
 his old skill as a lawyer, brought to a head Minoret's persecu- 
 tion of Ursule, which had hitherto smoldered, and not gone 
 beyond covert ill-will. As soon as the old doctor's estate was 
 fairly settled, the justice, at Ursule's entreaty, took up the 
 cause of the Portendueres, and undertook to get them out of 
 their difficulties ; but, in calling on the old lady, whose oppo- 
 sition to Ursule's happiness made him furious, he did not 
 conceal from her that he was devoting himself to her interests 
 solely to please Mademoiselle Mirouet. He selected one of 
 his former clerks to plead for the Portendueres at Fontaine- 
 bleau, and himself conducted the appeal for a decree against 
 foreclosure. He intended to take advantage of the interval 
 of time which must elapse between the granting of this decree 
 and Massin's renewed appeal to re-let the farm at a rent of 
 six thousand francs, and to extract from the lessee a good 
 premium and the payment of a year's rent in advance. 
 Thenceforth the whist parties met again at Madame de Por- 
 tendure's, consisting of himself and the cure", Savinien and 
 Ursule, for whom the justice and the abb6 called every even- 
 ing, and they saw her home again.
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 191 
 
 In June, Bongrand got his decree annulling the proceedings 
 taken by Massin against the Portendueres. He at once signed 
 a new lease ; got thirty-two thousand francs from the farmer, 
 and a rent of six thousand francs a year for eight years ; then, 
 in the evening, before the transactions could get abroad, he 
 went to Zelie, who, as he knew, was puzzled for an investment 
 for her savings, and suggested to her that she should buy 
 Bordieres for two hundred and twenty thousand francs. 
 
 " I would clinch the bargain on the spot," said Minoret, 
 " if only I were sure that the Portendueres were going to live 
 anywhere than at Nemours." 
 
 "Why?" asked the justice. 
 
 "We want to be quit of nobles at Nemours," frankly an- 
 swered Minoret. 
 
 ' ' I fancy I have heard the old lady say that if she could 
 settle matters, she could live nowhere but in Brittany on what 
 would be left. She talks of selling her house." 
 
 "Well, sell it to me then," said Minoret. 
 
 " But you talk as if the money were yours ! " said Z6lie. 
 " What are you going to do with two houses?" 
 
 " If I do not settle the matter of the farm with you this 
 evening," said the justice, "our lease will become known ; 
 we shall have fresh proceedings against us in three days, and 
 I shall fail to pull the thing through. My heart is set on it ; 
 I shall go on, this very hour, to Melun, where some farmers I 
 know will take Bordieres off my hands with their eyes shut. 
 Then you will have lost the opportunity of an investment at 
 three per cent, in the district of Le Rouvre." 
 
 " And why then did you come to us ? " said Zdlie. 
 
 " Because I know you to be rich, while my older clients 
 will want a few days to enable them to hand over a hundred 
 and twenty-nine thousand francs. I want no delays." 
 
 " Get her away from Nemours, and they are yours*! " said 
 Minoret. 
 
 "You must see that I cannot pledge the Portendueres in
 
 192 URSULE MIR VET. 
 
 any way," replied Bongrand, "but I feel sure that they will 
 not remain at Nemours." 
 
 On this assurance Minoret, to whom Z61ie gave a nudge, 
 undertook to pay off the Portendueres' debt to the doctor's 
 estate. The contract for the sale was made out by Dionis, 
 and the justice, very content, made Minoret agree to the 
 terms of the renewed lease, though he perceived rather late, as 
 well as Zelie, that the rent was payable a year in advance, 
 leaving the last year, in point of fact, rent free. 
 
 By the end of June, Bongrand could take Madame de 
 Portenduere a receipt in full and the remnant of her fortune, 
 a hundred and twenty-nine thousand francs, which he advised 
 her to invest in state securities at five per cent., as well as 
 Savinien's ten thousand ; this yielded an income of about six 
 thousand francs a year. Thus, instead of having lost, the old 
 lady had gained two thousand francs a year by the sale of her 
 estate. She and her son therefore remained at Nemours. 
 
 Minoret thought he had been tricked, as if the justice could 
 possibly have known that it was Ursule's presence that was 
 intolerable to him, and felt a deep resentment, which added 
 to his hatred of his victim. Then began the covert drama, 
 terrible in its effects, the struggle between two persons' 
 feelings : Minoret's, which prompted him to drive Ursule to 
 leave Nemours ; and Ursule's, which gave her the fortitude to 
 endure a persecution of which the cause for long remained 
 inexplicable, a singular state of things to which previous 
 events had all led up and conduced, and to which they had 
 been the prologue. 
 
 Madame Minoret, to whom her husband presented plate 
 and a dinner service worth altogether twenty thousand francs, 
 gave a handsome dinner every Sunday, the day on which her 
 son brought friends over from Fontainebleau. For these 
 banquets Zelie would send for some rare dainties from Paris, 
 thus inciting Dionis the notary to imitate her display. 
 Goupil, whom the Minorets did their utmost to banish as a
 
 THE MINOREt PROPERTY. 193 
 
 man of ill-repute and a blot on their magnificence, was not 
 invited to the house till the end of July, a month after the 
 retirement into private ease of the old postmaster and 
 mistress. The clerk, quite alive to this deliberate neglect, 
 was obliged to treat even Desire with formality, and drop the 
 familiar tu ; and Desire, since his appointment to official 
 life, had assumed a grave and haughty air even among his 
 family. 
 
 "You have forgotten Esther, then, since you are in love 
 with Mademoiselle Mirouet?" said Goupil to the young 
 lawyer. 
 
 " In the first place, Esther is dead, monsieur. And, in the 
 second, I never thought of Ursule," was the reply. 
 
 "Hey day what did you tell me, Daddy Minoret?" 
 cried Goupil audaciously. 
 
 Minoret, caught in the very act by so formidable a foe, 
 would have been put out of countenance but for the scheme 
 for which he had invited Goupil to dinner, remembering the 
 proposal formerly made by the clerk to hinder Ursule's mar- 
 riage to young Portenduere. His only answer was to lead the 
 clerk abruptly away and out into the garden. 
 
 "You are nearly eight-and-twenty, my good fellow," said 
 he, " and I do not see that you are on the high-road to for- 
 tune. I wish you well ; for, after all, you were my son's 
 companion. Listen to me : If you can persuade that little 
 Mirouet to become your wife she has forty thousand francs 
 at any rate as sure as my name is Minoret, I will give you 
 the money to buy a business at Orleans." 
 
 " No," said Goupil, " I should never become known. At 
 Montargis " 
 
 "No," interrupted Minoret, "but at Sens- 
 
 " Very good, say Sens," replied the hideous clerk. "It 
 is an archbishop's see, and I have no objection to a religious 
 centre. A little hypocrisy helps one to get on. Besides, the 
 girl is very pious ; she will be a success there." 
 13
 
 194 VRSULE MIROUET. 
 
 " It must be quite understood that I only give the hundred 
 thousand francs in consideration of my young relative's mar- 
 riage. I wish to provide for her out of regard for my deceased 
 uncle." 
 
 "And why not out of regard for me? " said Goupil mis- 
 chievously, for he suspected some secret motive for Minoret's 
 conduct. " Was it not information given by me that enabled 
 you to get twenty-four thousand francs in rent from a single 
 holding in a ring fence round the Chateau du Rouvre ? With 
 your meadows and mill on the other side of the Loing you 
 can add sixteen thousand to that. Come, old Burly, will you 
 play your game with me above board ? ' ' 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Well, just to make you feel my claws, I was brewing a 
 plan with Massin to get possession of Le Rouvre park, gar- 
 dens, preserves, timber, and all." 
 
 " You had better ! " exclaimed Zelie, interrupting them. 
 
 "Well," said Goupil, with a viperine glance at her, "if I 
 choose, Massin will have it all to-morrow for two hundred 
 thousand francs." 
 
 "Leave us, wife," said the colossus, taking Zilie by the 
 arm, and turning her about. " We understand each other. 
 We have had so much business on our hands," he went on, 
 coming back to Goupil, " that we have not been able to think 
 of you ; but I rely on your friendship to let us get Le 
 Rouvre." 
 
 "An old marquisate," said Goupil slyly, "which in your 
 hands will soon be worth fifty thousand francs a year more 
 than two millions at the present price of money." 
 
 " And then our boy can marry the daughter of a Marshal 
 of France, or the heiress of some ancient house, which will 
 help him on to be a judge in Paris," said the postmaster, 
 opening his huge snuff-box, and offering it to Goupil. 
 
 "Well, then, all is square and above board?" asked 
 Goupil, shaking his fingers.
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY, 195 
 
 Minoret wrung his hand and said 
 
 " My word of honor." 
 
 Like all cunning men, the clerk fancied, happily for 
 Minoret, that this marriage with Ursule was a mere excuse 
 for making up to him, now he had been playing off Massin 
 against them. 
 
 "It is not his doing," said he to himself. "I know my 
 Zelie's hand ; she has taught him his part. Bah ! Let 
 Massin slide ! Within three years I shall be returned as 
 d6putd for Sens," he thought. 
 
 Then, catching sight of Bongrand on his way to his game 
 of whist over the way, he rushed into the street. 
 
 " You take a great interest in Ursule Miroue"t, my dear 
 Monsieur Bongrand," said he; " you cannot be indifferent 
 to her future prospects. This is our programme. She may 
 marry a notary whose business is to be in a large district 
 town. This notary, who will certainly be depute in three 
 years, will settle a hundred thousand francs on her." 
 
 "She can do better," said Bongrand stiffly. "Since 
 Madame de Portenduere's misfortunes her health is failing. 
 Yesterday she looked dreadfully ill ; she is dying of grief. 
 Savinien will have six thousand francs a year ; Ursule has 
 forty thousand francs ; I will invest their capital on Massin's 
 principle but honestly and in ten years they will have a 
 little fortune." 
 
 " Savinien would be a fool. He can marry Mademoiselle 
 du Rouvre any day he likes, an only daughter, to whom her 
 uncle and aunt will also leave splendid fortunes." 
 
 " 'When love has gotten hold of us, farewell prudence,' 
 says La Fontaine. But who is this worthy notary, for, after 
 all ?" said Bongrand, out of curiosity. 
 
 "I," said Goupil, in a tone that made the justice start. 
 
 "You? " said he, not attempting to conceal his disgust. 
 
 "Very good, sir; your servant," retorted Goupil, with a 
 glare of venom, hatred, and defiance.
 
 196 VRSVLE MIROUET. 
 
 " Would you like to be the wife of a notary who will settle 
 a hundred thousand francs on you ? " cried Bongrand, enter- 
 ing the little sitting-room, and speaking to Ursule, who was 
 sitting by Madame de Portenduere. Ursule and Savinien 
 started as if by one impulse, and looked at each other; she 
 with a smile, he not daring to show his uneasiness. 
 
 "I am not my own mistress," replied Ursule, holding out 
 her hand to Savinien in such a way that his old mother could 
 not see it. 
 
 " I refused the offer without consulting you even." 
 
 "But why?" said Madame de Portenduere. "It seems 
 to me, my dear, that a notary's profession is a very respectable 
 one." 
 
 "I prefer my peaceful poverty," she replied, "for it is 
 opulence in comparison with what I had a right to expect of 
 life. My old nurse spares me many anxieties, and I would 
 not exchange my present lot, which suits me, for an unknown 
 future." 
 
 Next morning the post brought a poisoned dart to two 
 hearts in the shape of two anonymous letters one to Madame 
 de Portenduere, and one to Ursule. This is the letter re- 
 ceived by the old lady : 
 
 " You love your son, you would wish to see him married as 
 beseems the name he bears, and you are fostering his fancy 
 for an ambitious little thing without any fortune, by receiving 
 at your house one Ursule, the daughter of a regimental band- 
 master ; while you might marry him to Mademoiselle du 
 Rouvre, whose two uncles, the Marquis de Ronquerolles and 
 the Chevalier du Rouvre, each having thirty thousand francs a 
 year, intend to settle a large sum on their niece on her mar- 
 riage, so as not to leave their fortune to her foolish old father, 
 M. du Rouvre, who wastes his substance. Madame de Serizy 
 Aunt Clementine du Rouvre who has just lost her only 
 son in Algiers, will no doubt also adopt her niece. Some
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 197 
 
 one who wishes you well believes that Savinien would be 
 accepted." 
 
 This is the letter written to Ursule : 
 
 " DEAR URSULE: There is in Nemours a young man who 
 idolizes you ; he cannot see you at work at your window with- 
 out such emotions as prove to him that his love is for life. 
 This young man is gifted with a will of iron and a persever- 
 ance which nothing can daunt. Accept his love with favor, 
 for his intentions are of the purest, and he humbly asks your 
 hand in the hope of making you happy. His fortune, though 
 suitable even now, is nothing to what he will make it when 
 you are his wife. You will some day be received at court as 
 the wife of a minister, and one of the first ladies in the land. 
 As he sees you every day, though you cannot see him, place 
 one of La Bougival's pots of pinks in your window, and that 
 will tell him that he may appear before you." 
 
 Ursule burnt this letter without mentioning it to Savinien. 
 Two days later she received another, in these terms : 
 
 " You were wrong, dear Ursule, not to reply to him who 
 loves you better than his life. You fancy you will marry 
 Savinien, but you are strangely mistaken. That marriage will 
 never take place. Madame de Portenduere, who will see you 
 no more at her house, is going this morning to La Rouvre, 
 on foot, in spite of the weak state she is in, to ask Made- 
 moiselle du Rouvre in marriage for Savinien. He will finally 
 yield. What objection can he make ? The young lady's 
 uncles will settle their fortune on their niece at her marriage. 
 That fortune amounts to sixty thousand francs a year." 
 
 This letter tortured Ursule's heart by making her acquainted 
 with the torments of jealousy, pangs hitherto unknown, which, 
 to her finely organized nature, so alive to suffering, swamped 
 the present, the future, and even the past in grief. From the
 
 198 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 moment when she received this fatal missive, she sat motion- 
 less in the doctor's armchair, her eyes fixed on vacancy, and 
 lost in a sorrowful reverie. In an instant the chill of death had 
 come on her instead of the glow of exquisite life. Alas ! It 
 was worse ; it was, in fact, the dreadful awakening of the 
 dead to find that there is no God the masterpiece of that 
 strange genius Jean Paul. Four times did La Bougival try to 
 persuade Ursule to eat her breakfast ; she saw the girl take up 
 her bread and lay it down again, unable to carry it to her 
 lips. When she ventured to offer a remonstrance, Ursule 
 stopped her with a wave of the hand, saying Hush ! in a 
 terrible tone, as despotic as it had hitherto always been sweet. 
 La Bougival, watching her mistress through a glass door be- 
 tween the rooms, saw her turn alternately as red as if fever 
 were consuming her, and then blue, as though an ague fit had 
 followed the fever. By about four o'clock, when Ursule rose 
 every few minutes to look whether Savinien was coming, and 
 Savinien came not, she became evidently worse. Jealousy 
 and doubt destroy all the bashfulness of love. Ursule, who 
 till now had never allowed her passion to be detected in the 
 least gesture, put on her hat and her little shawl, and ran into 
 the passage to go out and meet Savinien ; but a remnant of 
 reserve brought her back into the little sitting-room. There 
 she wept. 
 
 When the curd came in the evening, the poor old nurse 
 stopped him on the threshold. 
 
 " Oh, Monsieur le Cur6, I do not know what ails mademoi- 
 selle ; she " 
 
 "I know," said the priest sadly, silencing the frightened 
 attendant. 
 
 The abbe then told Ursule what she had not dared to ask : 
 " Madame de Portenduere had gone to dine at Le Rouvre." 
 
 "And Savinien?" 
 
 "He too." 
 
 Ursule shuddered nervously a shudder which thrilled the
 
 THE MINOR ET PROPERTY. 199 
 
 Abbe Chaperon as though he had received a shock from a 
 Leyden jar, and he felt a painful turmoil at his heart. 
 
 4 ' So we shall not go to her house this evening," said he. 
 " But, indeed, my child, you will be wise never to go there 
 again. The old lady might receive you in a way that would 
 wound your pride. We, having brought her to listen to the 
 idea of your marriage to Savinien, cannot imagine what ill- 
 wind has blown to change her views in an instant." 
 
 " I am prepared for anything ; nothing can astonish me 
 now," said Ursule in a tone of conviction. " In such ex- 
 tremities it is a great comfort to feel that I have done nothing 
 to offend God." 
 
 "Submit, my dear daughter, and never try to inquire into 
 the ways of Providence," said the cur6. 
 
 " I do not wish to show any unjust suspicion of M. de Por- 
 tendudre's character " 
 
 " Why do you no longer call him Savinien?" asked the 
 abbe, observing a certain bitterness in Ursule's tone. 
 
 " My dear Savinien ! " she went on, with a burst of tears. 
 "Yes, my good friend," she said, sobbing, "a voice assures 
 me that his heart is as noble as his birth. He has not merely 
 told me that he loves me ; he has proved it in a thousand 
 delicate ways, and by heroically controlling the ardor of his 
 passion. Lately, when he took my hand that I held out to 
 him, when Monsieur Bongrand proposed to me for a notary, 
 I declare to you that it was the first time I had ever offered it 
 to him. Though he began, by a jest, blowing me a kiss across 
 the street, since then our affection has never once, as you 
 know, overstepped the strictest limits ; but I may tell you 
 you who read my whole soul excepting the one spot which is 
 open only to the angels well, this affection is in me the 
 foundation of many virtues. It has enabled me to accept 
 my poverty ; it has, perhaps, softened the bitterness of the 
 irreparable loss for which I mourn now more in my garments 
 than in my heart ! Yes, I have done wrong for my love
 
 200 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 has been greater than my gratitude to my godfather ; and 
 God has avenged him ! How could I help it? What I valued 
 myself for was as Savinien's wife. I have been too proud ; 
 and it is that pride, perhaps, that God is punishing. God 
 alone, as you have often told me, ought to be the spring and 
 end of all we do." 
 
 The cure was touched as he saw the tears rolling down her 
 cheeks, already paler. The greater the poor girl's confidence 
 had been, the lower she had fallen. 
 
 " However," she went on, "reduced once more to my or- 
 phaned state, I shall be able to accustom myself to the proper 
 frame of mind. After all, could I bear to be a stone round 
 the neck of the man I love ! What should he do here? Who 
 am I that I should aspire to him ? Do I not love him with 
 such perfect love that it is equal to a complete sacrifice of my 
 happiness, of my hopes? And you know I have often blamed 
 myself for setting my love on a tomb, and looking forward 
 to the morrow of that old lady's death. If Savinien can be 
 rich and happy through another woman, I have just money 
 enough to purchase my admission to a convent, to which I 
 shall at once retire. There ought not to be two loves in a 
 woman's heart, any more than there are two Lords in heaven. 
 The religious life will have its charms for me." 
 
 " He could not allow his mother to go alone to Le 
 Rouvre," said the kind priest gently. 
 
 " We will talk no more of it, my dear Monsieur Chaperon. 
 I will write to him this evening to give him his liberty. I 
 am glad to be obliged to close the windows of my sitting- 
 room." 
 
 She then told him about the anonymous letters, saying that 
 she would offer no encouragement to this unknown suitor. 
 
 "Ah! then it is an anonymous letter that has prompted 
 Madame de Portenduere's expedition to Le Rouvre!" ex- 
 claimed the cure. "You are, no doubt, the object of some 
 malignant persecution."
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 201 
 
 "But why? Neither Savinien nor I have injured any one, 
 and we are doing no harm to any one here." 
 
 " Well, well, my child. We will take advantage of this 
 tornado which has broken up our little party to arrange our 
 poor old friend's books ; they are still piled in disorder. 
 Bongrand and I will set them straight, for we had thought of 
 hunting through them. Put your trust in God ; but remem- 
 ber, too, that in the justice and myself you have two devoted 
 friends." 
 
 "And that is much," she said, walking to the end of the 
 little alley with the priest, and craning her neck like a bird 
 looking out of its nest, still hoping to see Savinien. 
 
 At this instant Minoret and Goupil, coming home from a 
 walk in the country, stopped as they were passing, and the 
 heir-at-law said to Ursule 
 
 "What is the matter, cousin? for we are still cousins, are 
 we not? You look altered." 
 
 Goupil cast such ardent eyes on Ursule that she was fright- 
 ened. She ran in without replying. 
 
 " She is a wild bird," said Minoret to the cure". 
 
 " Mademoiselle Mirouet is quite right not to talk to men 
 on her doorstep; she is too young " 
 
 "Oh!" said Goupil; "you must be well aware that she 
 does not lack lovers ! " 
 
 The cur6 bowed hastily, and hurried off to the Rue des 
 Bourgeois. 
 
 "Well," said the lawyer's clerk to Minoret, "the fat is 
 burning. She is as pale as death already; within a fortnight 
 she will have left the town. You will see." 
 
 " It is better to have you for a friend than for an enemy," 
 said Minoret, struck by the horrible smile which gave to 
 Goupil's face the diabolical expression which Joseph Bridau 
 gave to Goethe's Mephistopheles. 
 
 " I believe you ! " replied Goupil. " If she will not marry 
 me, I will make her die of grief."
 
 202 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 " Do so, boy, and I will give you money enough to start 
 in business in Paris. Then you can marry a rich wife " 
 
 "Poor girl! why, what harm has she done to you?" 
 asked the clerk in surprise. 
 
 " I am sick of her," said Minoret roughly. 
 
 " Only wait till Monday, and you shall see how I v:ill make 
 her squirm," replied Goupil, studying the postmaster's coun- 
 tenance. 
 
 Next morning La Bougival went to see Savinien, and as she 
 gave him a note, she said, " I don't know what the dear child 
 has written to you about, but she looks like a corpse this 
 morning." 
 
 Who, on reading this letter to Savinien, can fail to picture 
 the sufferings Ursule must have endured during the past night? 
 
 " MY DEAR SAVINIEN : Your mother wishes you to marry 
 Mademoiselle du Rouvre, I am told ; perhaps she is right. 
 You see yourself between a life almost of poverty and a posi- 
 tion of wealth, between the wife of your heart and a woman of 
 fashion, between obedience to your mother and obedience to 
 your own choice for I still believe that I am your choice. 
 Savinien, since you must decide, I wish that you should do so 
 in perfect freedom. I give you back your word given not 
 to me, but to yourself, at a moment which I can never forget, 
 and which, like all the days that have passed since then, was 
 angelically pure and sweet. That memory will be enough for 
 me to live on. If you should persist in adhering to your 
 vows, a dark and dreadful thought would always trouble my 
 happiness. In the midst of our privations, which you now 
 take so lightly, you might afterwards reflect that, if you had 
 but followed the rules of the world, things might have been 
 very different with you. If you were the man to utter such a 
 thought, it would be my death-warrant in bitter anguish ; and 
 if you did not say it, I should be suspicious of the slightest 
 cloud on your brow. Dear Savinien, I have always cared for
 
 THE Ml 'A ,0 RET PROPERTY. 203 
 
 you more than for anything on earth. I might do so ; for 
 my godfather, though jealous of you, said to me, ' Love him, 
 my child ! you will certainly be his, and he yours some day.' 
 When I went to Paris I loved you without hope, and that love 
 was enough for me. I do not know whether I can revert to 
 that state of mind, but I will try. What are we to each other 
 at this moment ? A brother and sister. Let us remain so. 
 Marry the happy girl, whose joy it will be to restore to your 
 name the lustre due to it, which I, according to your mother, 
 must tarnish. You shall never hear me mentioned. The 
 world will applaud you ; I, believe me, shall never blame you, 
 and shall always love you. So, farewell." 
 
 " Wait ! " cried the young man. He made La Bougival 
 sit down, and, going to his desk, he hastily wrote these few 
 lines : 
 
 " MY DEAR URSULE : Your letter breaks my heart, for you 
 are inflicting on yourself much useless pain, and for the first 
 time our hearts have failed to understand each other. That 
 you are not already my wife is because I cannot yet marry 
 without my mother's consent. After all, are not eight thou- 
 sand francs a year, in a pretty cottage on the banks of the 
 Loing, quite a fortune ? We calculated that, with La Bougi- 
 val, we could save five thousand francs a year. You allowed 
 me one evening in your uncle's garden to regard you as my 
 promised wife, and you cannot by yourself alone break the 
 ties which bind us both. Need I tell you that I plainly 
 declared, yesterday, to Monsieur du Rouvre that, even if I 
 were free, I would not accept a fortune from a young lady 
 whom I did not know ? My mother refuses to see you any 
 more ; I lose the happiness of my evenings, but do not 
 abridge the brief moments when I may speak with you at 
 
 your window. Till this evening, then Nothing can 
 
 part us."
 
 204 URSULE M1ROUET. 
 
 " Go now, my good woman. She must not have a moment's 
 needless anxiety." 
 
 That afternoon, on his return from the walk he took every 
 day on purpose to pass by Ursule's dwelling, Savinien found 
 her somewhat the paler for all these sudden agitations. 
 
 " I feel as though I had never till this moment known what 
 a happiness it is to see you," said she. 
 
 " You yourself said to me," replied Savinien, with a smile, 
 " that ' Love cannot exist without patience ; I will wait ' 
 for I remember all your words. But have you, my dear child, 
 divided love from faith ? Ah ! this is the end of all our dif- 
 ferences. You have always said that you loved me more than 
 I could love you. But have I ever doubted you? " he asked, 
 giving her a bunch of wildflowers chosen so as to symbolize 
 his feelings. 
 
 "You have no reason to doubt me," she replied. "Be- 
 sides, you do not know all," she added, in a tone of 
 uneasiness. 
 
 She had given orders that no letters to her by post should 
 be taken in. But without her being able to guess by what 
 conjuring trick the thing had been done, a few minutes after 
 Savinien had left her, and she had watched him round the 
 turning of the Rue des Bourgeois out of the High Street, 
 she found on her armchair a piece of paper on which was 
 written 
 
 " Tremble ! the lover scorned will be worse than a tiger." 
 
 Notwithstanding Savinien's entreaties, she would not, out 
 of prudence, trust him with the dreadful secret of her fears. 
 The ineffable joy of seeing him again, after believing him 
 lost to her, could alone enable her to forget the mortal chill 
 which came over her. Every one knows the intolerable tor- 
 ment of awaiting an indefinite misfortune. Suffering then 
 assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is certainly 
 infinitude, to the mind. To Ursule it was the greatest 
 anguish. She found herself starting violently at the slightest
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 205 
 
 sound ; she distrusted the silence ; she suspected the walls of 
 conspiracies. Her peaceful sleep was broken. Goupil, with- 
 out knowing anything of her constitution as fragile as that 
 of a flower had, by the instinct of wickedness, hit on the 
 poison that would blight it kill it. 
 
 The next day, however, passed without any shock. Ursule 
 played the piano till very late, and went to bed almost re- 
 assured, and overpowered by sleep. At about midnight she 
 was roused by a band, consisting of a clarionet, a hautboy, a 
 flute, a cornet-a-pistons, a trombone, a bassoon, a fife, and a 
 triangle. All the neighbors were at their windows. The 
 poor child, upset by seeing a crowd in the street, was struck 
 to the heart on hearing a hoarse, vulgar man's voice crying 
 out 
 
 " For the fair Ursule Mirouet, a serenade from her lover ! " 
 At church next morning all the town was in a hubbub ; 
 and as Ursule entered and quitted the church, she saw the 
 square filled with groups staring at her, and displaying the 
 most odious curiosity. The serenade had set every tongue 
 wagging, for every one was lost in conjecture. Ursule got 
 home more dead than alive, and went out no more, the cur6 
 having advised her to say vespers at home. On going in she 
 saw, lying in the passage paved with red brick that ran from 
 the street to the courtyard behind, a letter that had been 
 slipped under the door ; she picked it up and read it, prompted 
 by the desire for some explanation. The least sensitive reader 
 can imagine her feelings as she saw these terrible words : 
 
 "Make up your mind to be my wife, rich and adored. I 
 will have you. If you are not mine alive, you shall be, dead. 
 You may ascribe to your refusal misfortunes which will not 
 fall on you alone. HE WHO LOVES YOU AND WILL SOME DAY 
 POSSESS YOU." 
 
 Strange irony! at the moment when the gentle victim
 
 206 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 of this conspiracy was drooping like a plucked flower, 
 Mesdemoiselles Massin, Dionis, and Cremiere were envying 
 her lot. 
 
 "She is a happy girl," they were saying. "Men are 
 devoted to her, flatter her taste, are ready to quarrel for her. 
 The serenade was delightful, it would seem ! There was a 
 cornet-a-pistons ! " 
 
 " What is a cornet-a-pistons ? " 
 
 "A new sort of musical instrument there as long as 
 that ! " said Angelique Cremiere to Pamela Massin. 
 
 Early the next day Savinien went off to Fontainebleau to 
 inquire who had ordered the musicians of the regiment 
 stationed there ; but, as there were two men to each instru- 
 ment, it was impossible to ascertain which one had gone to 
 Nemours, since the colonel prohibited them from playing 
 for private persons without his leave. Monsieur de Porten- 
 duere had an interview with the public prosecutor, Ursule's 
 legal guardian, and explained to him the serious effect such 
 scenes must have on a young girl so delicate and fragile as she 
 was, begging him to find out the instigator of this serenade 
 by means that the law could set in motion. 
 
 Three days later, in the middle of the night, a second 
 serenade was given by three violins, a flute, a guitar, and a 
 hautboy. On this occasion the musicians made off by the 
 road to Montargis, where there was just then a troupe of 
 actors. Between two pieces a strident and drunken voice 
 had proclaimed : 
 
 "To the daughter of Bandmaster Mirouet." 
 
 Thus all Nemours was apprised of the profession of Ursule's 
 father, the secret the old doctor had so carefully kept. 
 
 But this time Savinien did not go to Montargis ; he received 
 in the course of the day an anonymous letter from Paris con- 
 taining this terrible prophecy : 
 
 " You shall not marry Ursule. If you wish her to live, 
 make haste and surrender her to him who loves her more than
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 207 
 
 you do ; for he has become a musician and an artist to please 
 her, and would rather see her dead than as your wife." 
 
 By this time the town doctor of Nemours was seeing Ursule 
 three times a day, for this covert persecution had brought her 
 to the point of death. Plunged, as she felt herself, by a 
 diabolical hand into a slough of mud, the gentle girl behaved 
 like a martyr; she lay perfectly silent, raising her eyes to 
 heaven, without tears, awaiting further blows with fervent 
 prayer, and hoping for the stroke that might be her death. 
 
 " I am glad to be unable to go downstairs," said she to 
 Monsieur Bongrand and the abbe, who stayed with her as 
 much as possible. "He would come, and I feel unworthy 
 to meet the looks with which he is in the habit of making me 
 blest. Do you think he doubts me ? " 
 
 "Why, if Savinien cannot discover the moving spirit of all 
 this shameful business, he means to ask for the intervention of 
 the Paris police," said Bongrand. 
 
 " The unknown persons must know that they have killed 
 me," she replied. " They will be quiet now." 
 
 The cure, Bongrand, and Savinien puzzled themselves with 
 conjectures and suppositions. Savinien, Tiennette, La Bou- 
 gival, and two devoted adherents of the curd's constituted 
 themselves 'spies, and were constantly on the watch for a 
 whole week ; but Goupil could never be betrayed by a sign, 
 he pulled all the wires with his own hand. The justice was 
 the first to suspect that the author of the evil was frightened 
 at his own success. Ursule was as pale and weak as a con- 
 sumptive English girl. The spies relaxed their efforts. There 
 were no more serenades nor letters. Savinien ascribed the 
 cessation of these odious means to the secret energy of the 
 law officers, to whom he had sent the letters written to Ursule, 
 to himself, and to his mother. 
 
 The armistice was of no long duration. When the doctor 
 had checked the course of Ursule's nervous fever, just as she
 
 208 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 was recovering her spirit, one morning, about the middle of 
 July, a ladder of ropes was found attached to her window. 
 The postillion who had ridden with the night mail deposed 
 that a little man was in the act of coming down it just as he 
 was passing ; but in spite of his wishing to stop, his horses, 
 having set off down hill from the bridge, at the corner of 
 which stood Ursule's little house, had carried him some way 
 out of Nemours. 
 
 An opinion, suggested in Dionis' drawing-room, attributed 
 these manoeuvres to the Marquis du Rouvre, at that time in 
 great need of money, who, it was supposed, by hastening 
 Savinien's marriage with his daughter, would be able to save 
 the Chateau of Le Rouvre from his creditors. Madame de 
 Portenduere also, it was said, looked with favor on anything 
 that could discredit, dishonor, and blight Ursule ; but when 
 the young girl seemed likely to die, the old lady was almost 
 conquered. 
 
 This last stroke of malice so much distressed the Cure 
 Chaperon that it made him ill enough to compel him to 
 remain at home for some days. Poor Ursule, in whom this 
 cruel attack had brought on a relapse, received by post a 
 note from the cure, which was not refused, as his writing 
 was familiar. 
 
 " My child, leave Nemours, and so discomfort the malice 
 of your unknown enemies. Perhaps what they aim at is to 
 imperil Savinien's life. I will tell you more when I can go 
 to see you." This note was signed, "Your devoted friend 
 Chaperon." 
 
 When Savinien, almost driven mad, went to call on the 
 priest, the poor man read and re-read the letter, so much was 
 he horrified at the perfection with which his writing and 
 signature had been imitated, for he had written nothing, and, 
 if he had written, he would not have employed the post to 
 carry a letter to Ursule. The mortal anguish to which this 
 last villainy reduced Ursule compelled Savinien once more to
 
 THE MINOR ET PROPERTY. 209 
 
 apply to the public prosecutor, showing him the forged letter 
 from the abb6. 
 
 " It is murder," said the young man to the lawyer. " Mur- 
 der is being committed by means not provided against by law, 
 on the person of an orphan placed under your protection by 
 the Civil Code." 
 
 "If you can discover any means of interfering," replied 
 the public prosecutor, " I am ready to adopt them ; but I 
 know of none. This rascally anonymous letter gives the best 
 advice. Mademoiselle Mirouet must be sent to the care of 
 the Ladies of the Adoration. Meanwhile, by my order, the 
 commissary of police at Fontainebleau will authorize you to 
 carry weapons in your own defense. I myself have been to 
 Le Rouvre, and Monsieur du Rouvre is justifiably indignant 
 at the suspicions that have attached to him. Minoret, my 
 deputy's father, is in treaty for the purchase of his chateau. 
 Mademoiselle du Rouvre is to marry a rich Polish count. 
 Monsieur du Rouvre himself was about to leave the neighbor- 
 hood on the day of my visit, to escape being seized for debt." 
 
 Desire, questioned by his chief, dared not say what he 
 thought ; he recognized Goupil in all this. Goupil alone 
 was capable of conducting a plot which should thus shave 
 close to the Penal Code without being amenable to any of its 
 provisions. The impunity, the secrecy, the success of it, in- 
 creased Goupil's audacity. The terrible man had set Massin, 
 who had become his dupe, on the tracks of the Marquis du 
 Rouvre, to compel that gentleman to sell the rest of his land 
 to Minoret. After opening negotiations with a notary at 
 Sens, he determined to try a last stroke to gain possession of 
 Ursule. He thought he could imitate some young men of 
 Paris, who owed their wife and fortune to an elopement. His 
 services done to Minoret, Massin, and Cr6miere, and the pro- 
 tection of Dionis, mayor of Nemours, would allow of his 
 hushing the matter up. He at once determined to cast off his 
 mask, believing that Ursule was incapable of resistance in the 
 14
 
 210 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 state of weakness to which he had brought her. However, 
 before risking the last card of his base game, he thought it 
 well to have an explanation at Le Rouvre, whither he went 
 with Minoret, who was going there for the first time since the 
 agreement was signed. 
 
 Minoret had just received a confidential letter from his 
 son, asking him for information as to what was going on with 
 regard to Ursule, before going himself with the public prose- 
 cutor to place her in a convent safe from any further atrocity. 
 The young lawyer besought his father to give him his best 
 advice, if this persecution were the work of one of their 
 friends. Though justice could not always punish, she would 
 at last find everything out and make good note of it. Min- 
 oret had achieved his great end ; he was now the immovable 
 owner of the Chateau du Rouvre, one of the finest in all the 
 Gatinais, and he could derive forty-odd thousand francs a 
 year from the rich and beautiful land surrounding the park. 
 The colossus could laugh at Goupil now. Moreover, he 
 meant to live in the country, where the memory of Ursule 
 would haunt him no more. 
 
 " My boy," said he to Goupil, as they paced the terrace, 
 " leave my little cousin in peace ! " 
 
 "Pooh ! " said the clerk, who could make nothing of his 
 capricious behavior, for even stupidity has its depths. 
 
 " Oh, I am not ungrateful : you have helped me to get, for 
 two hundred and eighty thousand francs, this fine mansion of 
 brick and hewn stone, which certainly could not now be built 
 for nearly five times the price, with the home farm, the park, 
 the gardens, and timber Well, yes, I will, on my word I 
 will give you ten per cent. twenty thousand francs, with 
 which you can buy a bailiffs practice at Nemours. And I 
 guarantee your marriage with one of the Cremiere girls the 
 elder." 
 
 "The one who talked of the cornet-a-pistons?" cried 
 Goupil.
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 211 
 
 "But her mother will give her thirty thousand francs," 
 said Minoret. "You see, my boy, you were born to be a 
 bailiff, just as I was made to be a postmaster, and we must all 
 obey our vocation." 
 
 " Very well," said Goupil, fallen from his high hopes, 
 " here are the stamps ; sign me bills for twenty thousand 
 francs, that I may make my bargain cash in hand." 
 
 Eighteen thousand francs were due to Minoret, the half- 
 yearly interest on securities of which his wife knew nothing ; 
 he thought he should thus be rid of Goupil, and he signed 
 the bills. Goupil, seeing this huge and stupid Machiavelli 
 of the Rue des Bourgeois in a fit of seignorial fever, took 
 leave of him with an " Au revoir," and a look that would 
 have made any one but a parvenu simpleton tremble as he 
 looked down from a high terrace on the gardens, and the 
 handsome roof of a chateau built in the style fashionable 
 under Louis XIII. 
 
 "You will not wait for me?" he cried to Goupil, seeing 
 the clerk set out on foot. 
 
 "You can pick me up on the road, old man," replied the 
 prospective bailiff, thirsting for vengeance, and curious to 
 know the answer to the riddle presented to his mind by the 
 strangely tortuous conduct of this old man. 
 
 Ever since the day when the most infamous calumny had 
 darkened her life, Ursule, a prey to one of those unaccount- 
 able maladies whose seat is in the soul, was hastening to the 
 grave. Excessively pale, speaking rarely a few weak, slow 
 words, looking about her with a gentle, indifferent gaze, 
 everything in her appearance, even her brow, showed that she 
 was possessed by a consuming thought. She believed that 
 the ideal crown of pure flowers, with which in every age and 
 nation the brow of a maiden has been supposed to be crowned, 
 had fallen from hers. In the void and silence she seemed to 
 hear the slanderous remarks, the malignant comments, the 
 mean laughter of the little town. The burden was too heavy
 
 212 VRSULE M1ROUET. 
 
 for her; her innocence was too sensitive to endure such a 
 stoning. She did not complain, a melancholy smile lay on 
 her lips, and her eyes were constantly raised to heaven as 
 though to appeal to the Lord of Angels against the injustice 
 of men. 
 
 When Goupil got back to Nemours, Ursule had been 
 brought down from her room to the ground floor, leaning on 
 the arm of La Bougival and of the doctor. This was in honor 
 of a great event. Madame de Portenduere, having heard that 
 the young girl was dying as the ermine dies, though her honor 
 was less cruelly attacked than that of Clarissa Harlowe, had 
 come to see her and to comfort her. The sight of her son, 
 who had been talking all night of killing himself, had been 
 too much for the old lady. Madame de Portenduere, indeed, 
 found it quite becoming to her dignity to carry encourage- 
 ment to so pure a creature, and regarded her own visit as an 
 antidote to all the ill done by the gossips of the place. Her 
 opinion, so much more influential, no doubt, than that of the 
 vulgar, would consecrate the power of the nobility. 
 
 This step, announced by the Abbe Chaperon, had produced 
 a revulsion in Ursule which revived the hopes of the physi- 
 cian, who had been in despair, and had talked of holding a 
 consultation with the most eminent Paris doctors. Ursule 
 had been placed in her old guardian's armchair, and the 
 character of her beauty was such that in mourning and in 
 suffering she looked more lovely than at any time in her 
 happy days. When Savinien came in, with his mother on 
 his arm, the young invalid's color mounted to her cheeks 
 once more. 
 
 "Do not rise, my dear," said the old lady, in a tone of 
 command. " However ill and feeble I may be myself, I was 
 determined to come and tell you what I think of all that is 
 going on. I esteem you as the purest, saintliest, and sweetest 
 girl in the G^tinais, and regard you as worthy to make a 
 gentleman of family happy."
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 213 
 
 At first Ursule could make no reply ; she held the withered 
 hands of Savinien's mother and kissed them, dropping tears 
 upon them. 
 
 " Ah, madame ! " she answered, in a weak voice, " I should 
 never have been so bold as to think of raising myself so far 
 above my position if I had not been encouraged by promises, 
 and my only claim was a love without limits ; but means 
 have been found to separate me for ever from him whom I 
 love. I have been made unworthy of him. Never!" she 
 exclaimed, with a vehemence of tone that startled the listeners 
 painfully " never will I consent to give to any man a hand 
 
 so vilified, a reputation so tarnished ! I loved too well 
 
 I may say it now, wreck that I am ; I love a creature almost 
 as much as God. And so God " 
 
 " Come, come, child, do not calumniate God. Come, my 
 daughter," said the old lady, making a great effort, " do not 
 exaggerate the importance of an infamous jest which no 
 one believes in. You shall live I promise it live and be 
 happy." 
 
 " You shall be happy ! " cried Savinien, kneeling by 
 Ursule, and kissing her hand. " My mother calls you her 
 daughter ! " 
 
 "That will do," said the doctor, who was feeling his 
 patient's pulse. "Do not kill her with joy." 
 
 At this instant Goupil, who had found the gate into 
 the alley ajar, pushed open the drawing-room door and 
 showed his hideous face, beaming with the thoughts of 
 revenge that had blossomed in his heart in the course of 
 his walk. 
 
 " Monsieur de Portenduere," said he, in a voice like the 
 hiss of a viper at bay in its hole. 
 
 " What do you want?" said Savinien, rising. 
 
 " I want to say two words to you." 
 
 Savinien went out into the passage, and Goupil led him 
 into the yard.
 
 214 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 " Swear to me by the life of Ursule whom you love, and 
 by your honor as a gentleman which you prize, so to be- 
 have as though there were nothing known between us of 
 what I am going to tell you, and I will explain to you the 
 sole cause of the persecutions turned against Mademoiselle 
 Mirouet." 
 
 " Can I put an end to them?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Can I be revenged?" 
 
 "Yes, on the prime mover not on the instrument." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " The instrument is I am the instrument." 
 
 Savinien turned white. 
 
 "I just caught sight of Ursule " the clerk began 
 
 again. 
 
 "Ursule?" said Savinien, with a look at the clerk. 
 
 "Mademoiselle Mirouet," said Goupil, made respectful by 
 Savinien's tone; "and I would shed all my blood to undo 
 what has been done. I repent. If you were to kill me 
 in a duel or in any other way, of what use would my blood 
 be to you ? Could you drink it ? At this moment it would 
 poison you." 
 
 The man's cool reasonableness and his own curiosity 
 quelled Savinien's boiling blood ; he glared at this hunch- 
 back spoiled, with an eye that made Goupil look down. 
 
 "And who set you on the job?" asked the young 
 man. 
 
 "You swear?" 
 
 "You wish to escape unharmed?" 
 
 "I wish that you and Mademoiselle Mirouet should forgive 
 me." 
 
 " She will forgive you. I never will ! " 
 
 " Well, you will forget ? " 
 
 How terrible is the force of logic seconded by interest ! 
 Two men, each longing to rend the other, were standing
 
 THE MIKORET PROPERTY. 215 
 
 there, close together, in a little yard, forced to speak to each 
 other, united by one feeling in common. 
 
 " I will forgive you, but I shall not forget." 
 
 " Of no use whatever," said Goupil, coldly. 
 
 Savinien lost patience. He dealt the clerk a slap on the 
 cheek that rang through the yard ; it almost upset Goupil, and 
 he himself staggered back. 
 
 " I have gotten no more than I deserve," said Goupil. " I 
 have been a fool. I thought you a finer fellow than you are. 
 You have taken a mean advantage of the opportunity I offered 
 you. You are in my power now! " he added, with a flash 
 of hatred at Savinien. 
 
 "You are a murderer ! " exclaimed Savinien. 
 
 "No more than the knife in the assassin's hand," replied 
 Goupil. 
 
 " I ask your forgiveness," said Savinien. 
 
 " Are you sufficiently revenged ? " said the clerk with savage 
 irony. " Will you now rest satisfied ? " 
 
 "Forgive and forget on both sides," replied Savinien. 
 
 " Your hand on it ? " said Goupil, holding out his. 
 
 "Here it is," said Savinien, swallowing the indignity out 
 of love for Ursule. " But speak : who was behind you?" 
 
 Goupil paused, considering the two dishes of the scale, so 
 to speak, with Savinien's slap on one side, and on the other 
 his hatred of Minoret. For two seconds he doubted ; then a 
 voice said to him : " You can be a notary ! " and he replied, 
 "Forgive and forget? Yes, on both sides, monsieur," and 
 he clasped Savinien's hand. 
 
 "Who is it, then, that is persecuting Ursule?" said Sav- 
 inien. 
 
 "Minoret. He would like to see her dead and buried. 
 Why, I do not know ; but we will find out the reason. Do 
 not mix me up in the matter. I can do nothing more for you 
 if once I am suspected. Instead of attacking Ursule, I will 
 defend her ; instead of serving Minoret, I will try to spoil his
 
 216 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 game. I live only to ruin him, to crush him. And I will see 
 him under my feet, I will dance on his dead body, I will 
 make dominoes of his bones ! To-morrow, on all the walls of 
 Nemours, of Fontainebleau, of Le Rouvre, the words shall 
 be seen in red chalk Minorct is a thief ! Oh, I will do it, 
 by all that is holy ! I will blow him to the four winds ! 
 Now, we are allies by my having peached. Well, if you like, 
 I will go on my knees to Mademoiselle Mirouet, and tell her 
 that I curse the insane passion which drove me to kill her. I 
 will entreat her to forgive me. That will do her good. The 
 justice and the cure are there ; those two witnesses are enough ; 
 but Monsieur Bongrand must pledge his word that he will not 
 damage me in my career. For I have a career now," con- 
 cluded Goupil. 
 
 " Wait a moment," replied Savinien, quite bewildered by 
 this revelation. 
 
 "Ursule, my child," said he, going back to the drawing- 
 room, " the cause of all your misery has lived to feel the 
 horror of his work ; he repents, and would be glad to ask your 
 pardon in the presence of these gentlemen, on condition that 
 all shall be forgotten." 
 
 "What! Goupil?" exclaimed the cure, the justice, and 
 the doctor in a breath. 
 
 "Keep his secret," said Ursule, putting a finger on her 
 lips. 
 
 Goupil heard her words, and saw the gesture, and it touched 
 him. 
 
 "Mademoiselle," he said, with feeling, "I wish that all 
 Nemours might hear me confess to you that a fatal passion 
 turned my head, and suggested to me a series of crimes deserv- 
 ing the blame of all honest folks. What I have said I will repeat 
 everywhere, deploring the evil result of my practical jokes, 
 though they may, in fact, have hurried on your happiness," he 
 added, a little maliciously, as he rose, " since I see Madame 
 de Portenduere here."
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 217 
 
 "That is right, Goupil," said the cure; "Mademoiselle 
 forgives you. But do not forget that you have been very near 
 committing murder." 
 
 " Monsieur Bongrand," Goupil went on, turning to the 
 justice, " I am going this evening to try to bargain with Le- 
 cceur for his place as summonsing officer. I hope this con- 
 fession will have done me no injury in your mind, and that 
 you will support my candidature among the superior lawyers, 
 and to the ministry." 
 
 The justice gravely bowed, and Goupil went off to treat 
 for the better of the two appointments in Nemours. The 
 others remained with Ursule, and endeavored that evening to 
 restore calmness and peace in her mind, which was already 
 relieved by the satisfaction given her by the clerk. 
 
 "All Nemours shall know it," said Bongrand. 
 
 " You see, my child, God was not against you," said 
 the cure. 
 
 Minoret returned late from Le Rouvre, and dined late. 
 At about nine in the evening he was sitting in his Chinese 
 pavilion digesting his dinner, his wife by his side, and laying 
 plans with her for Desire's future prospects. Desir6 had 
 quite settled down since he had held an appointment ; he 
 worked steadily, and had a good chance, it was said, of suc- 
 ceeding the public prosecutor of the district of Fontainebleau, 
 who was to be promoted to Melun. They must find him a 
 wife now, a girl wanting money, but belonging to some old 
 and noble family ; then he might rise to a judgeship in Paris. 
 Possibly they might be able to get him elected depute for 
 Fontainebleau, where Zelie thought it would be well to settle 
 for the winter, after spending the summer at Le Rouvre. 
 Minoret, very much pleased with himself for having arranged 
 everything for the best, had ceased to think of Ursule at the 
 very moment when the drama he had so clumsily begun had 
 become so fatally complicated,
 
 218 VRSULE MIROUET. 
 
 "Monsieur de Portenduere would like to speak to you," 
 said Cabirolle, coming in. 
 
 " Bring him here," said Zelie. 
 
 The shades of dusk prevented Madame Minoret's seeing 
 her husband suddenly turn pale ; he shuddered as he heard 
 Savinien's boots creak on the inlaid flooring of the passage, 
 where the doctor's books had formerly lined the wall. A 
 vague presentiment ran like a congestive chill through the 
 spoiler's veins. 
 
 Savinien came in. He stood still, keeping his hat on, his 
 stick in his hand, his arms folded motionless, face to face 
 with the couple. 
 
 "I have come to know, Monsieur and Madame Minoret, 
 the reasons which have led you to torture in the most infamous 
 manner the young girl who is, to the knowledge of all Ne- 
 mours, my future wife ; why you have tried to brand her 
 honor ; why you wish her dead ; and why you have abandoned 
 her to the insults of such a creature as Goupil ? Answer." 
 
 " What a queer notion, Monsieur Savinien," said Zelie, 
 " to come and ask us our reasons for a thing which is to us 
 inexplicable ! I do not care for Ursule one snap. Since 
 Uncle Minoret's death I have no more given her a thought 
 than to an old smock ! I have never breathed her name to 
 Goupil and a queer rascal he is, whom I would not trust 
 with the interests of my dog. Well, Minoret, why don't you 
 answer? Are you going to let monsieur attack you and 
 accuse you of rascality that is beneath you ? As if a man 
 who has forty-eight thousand francs a year in landed estate 
 round a chateau fit for a prince would demean himself to such 
 folly ! Wake up, man sitting there like a dummy ! " 
 
 " I don't know what monsieur would be at," said Minoret 
 at last, in his thin voice, of which the clear accents betrayed 
 its trembling. " What reason could I have for persecuting 
 the girl ? I may have said to Goupil that it vexed me to 
 know that she was in Nemours ; my son Desire had taken a
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 219 
 
 fancy to her, and I would not have him marry her, that 
 was all." 
 
 " Goupil has confessed everything, Monsieur Minoret." 
 
 There was a moment's silence a terrible moment, while 
 these three persons watched each other. Zelie had detected 
 a nervous movement in the broad face of her colossus. 
 
 " Though you are but vermin, I intend to be publicly re- 
 venged on you," the young nobleman went on. " I shall not 
 ask satisfaction from you, a man of sixty-seven, for the insults 
 heaped on Mademoiselle Mirouet ; but from your son. The 
 first time Monsieur Minoret, junior, sets foot in Nemours, we 
 meet. He will have to fight me, and he shall fight ! Or he 
 shall be so utterly disgraced that he will not dare to show his 
 face anywhere ; if he does not come to Nemours, I will go to 
 Fontainebleau ! I will have satisfaction. It shall never be 
 said that you have basely tried to bring shame on a defense- 
 less girl." 
 
 " But the calumnies of such a fellow as Goupil really 
 are not " said Minoret. 
 
 "Would you like me to confront you with him?" cried 
 Savinien, interrupting him. " Believe me, you had better 
 not noise the matter ; it is between you and Goupil and me ; 
 leave it so, and God will decide the issue in the duel to which 
 I shall do your son the honor of challenging him." 
 
 " But things cannot go on like that ! " cried Zelie. "What? 
 Do you suppose that I shall allow Desire to fight with you, a 
 naval officer, whose business it is to use the sword and pistol ? 
 If you have a score against Minoret, here is Minoret ; take 
 Minoret, fight with Minoret ! But why should my boy, who, 
 by your own confession, is innocent of it all, suffer the penalty ? 
 I will set a dog of mine to hinder that, my fine gentleman ! 
 Come, Minoret, there you sit gaping like a great idiot ! You 
 are in your own house, and you allow this young fellow to 
 keep his hat on in your wife's presence ! Now, young man, 
 to begin with, take yourself off. Every man's house is his
 
 220 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 castle. I do not know what you are at with all your rhodo- 
 montade, but just turn on -your heel ; and if you lay a finger 
 on Desire, you will have me to settle with you and your 
 precious slut, Ursule. " 
 
 She rang violently, and called the servants. 
 
 "Remember what I have said," repeated Savinien, who, 
 heedless of Zelie's diatribe, went away, leaving this sword of 
 Damocles suspended over their heads. 
 
 " Now, Minoret, will you tell me the meaning of all this? " 
 said Zelie to her husband. " A young man does not come 
 into a decent house and kick up all this tremendous dust for 
 nothing, and insist on the blood of an only son and heir." 
 
 " It is some trick of that nasty ape, Goupil ; I had prom- 
 ised to help him to be made notary if he would get Le Rouvre 
 on reasonable terms. I gave him ten per cent., twenty thou- 
 sand francs, in bills of exchange, and I suppose he is not sat- 
 isfied." 
 
 " Yes ; but what previous reason can he have had to get up 
 serenades and rascalities to trouble Ursule?" 
 
 " He wanted to marry her." 
 
 "A girl without a sou? He? Fiddlesticks ! Look here, 
 Minoret, you are cramming me with nonsense, and you are 
 by nature too stupid to make it take, my man. There is some- 
 thing behind it all, and you must tell it me." 
 
 " There is nothing." 
 
 " There is nothing ? Well, I tell you that is a lie, and we 
 shall see." 
 
 " Will you leave me in peace ? " 
 
 " I will turn on the tap of that barrel of poison, Goupil, 
 whom you know, I think ; and you will not get the best of 
 the bargain then." 
 
 " As you please." 
 
 " Certainly, it will be as I please ! And what I please, first 
 and foremost, is that no one shall lay a finger on Desir ; 
 if anything happens to him there, I tell you, I should do
 
 THE MIX RET PROPERTY. 221 
 
 something that would take me to the block. Desir6 ! Why ! 
 And there you sit without stirring ! " 
 
 A quarrel thus begun between Minoret and his wife was not 
 likely to end without long domestic broils. The thieving 
 fool now found his struggle with himself and Ursule made 
 harder by his blundering, and complicated by a fresh and 
 terrible adversary. Next day, when he went out to go to 
 Goupil, hoping to silence him with money, he read on all the 
 walls : Minoret is a thiff ! Every one he met pitied him, and 
 asked him who was at the bottom of this anonymous placard- 
 ing, and every one overlooked the evasiveness of his replies 
 by ascribing it to his stupidity. Simpletons gain more ad- 
 vantages from their weakness than clever men get from their 
 strength. We look on at a great man struggling against fate, 
 but we raise a fund for a bankrupt grocer. Do you know 
 why? We feel superior when we protect an idiot, and are 
 aggrieved at being no more than equal to the man of genius. 
 A clever man would have been ruined if, like Minoret, he had 
 stammered out preposterous replies with a scared look. Zelie 
 and the servants effaced the libelous inscription wherever 
 they saw it ; but it weighed on Minoret's conscience. 
 
 Though Goupil had, only the day before, given the sum- 
 monsing officer his word, he most audaciously refused now to 
 sign the agreement. 
 
 " My dear Lecceur, you see I am in a position to buy 
 Dionis' practice, and I can help you to sell yours to some one 
 else. Put your agreement in your pocket again. It is the 
 loss only of a couple of stamps. Here are seventy centimes/' 
 
 Lecceur was too much afraid of Goupil to make any com- 
 plaints. All Nemours was forthwith informed that Minoret 
 had offered his guarantee to Dionis to enable Goupil to pur- 
 chase his place. The budding notary wrote to Savinien re- 
 tracting all his confession regarding Minoret, and explaining 
 to the young nobleman that his new position, the decisions of 
 the supreme court, and his respect for justice forbade his
 
 222 VRSVLE MlROUET. 
 
 fighting a duel. At the same time, he warned him to take 
 care henceforth how he behaved, as he Goupil was prac- 
 ticed in kicking, and at the first provocation would have the 
 pleasure of breaking his leg. 
 
 The walls of Nemours spoke no more. But the quarrel 
 between Minoret and his wife continued, and Savinien kept 
 angry silence. Within ten days of these events the marriage 
 of the elder Mademoiselle Massin to the future notary was 
 publicly rumored. Mademoiselle Massin had eighty thou- 
 sand francs and her ugly face ; Goupil, his misshapen body 
 and his appointment ; so the union seemed suitable and prob- 
 able. 
 
 At midnight, as Goupil was quitting the Massins' house, he 
 was seized in the street by two strangers, who thrashed him 
 soundly and disappeared. Goupil never breathed a word 
 about this nocturnal scene, and gave the lie to an old woman 
 who, looking out of her window, fancied she had recognized 
 him. 
 
 All these great little events were watched by the justice, 
 who clearly saw that Goupil had some mysterious power over 
 Minoret, and promised himself that he would find out the 
 reason of it. 
 
 Though public opinion in the little town acknowledged 
 Ursule's perfect innocence, she recovered but slowly. In this 
 state of physical prostration, which left her soul and mind 
 free, she became the passive medium of certain phenomena of 
 which the effects indeed were terrible, and of a nature to 
 attract the attention of science, if science had only been 
 taken into the secret. Ten days after Madame de Porten- 
 duere's visit, Ursule had a dream which presented the charac- 
 teristics of a supernatural vision, as much in its moral facts 
 as in its physical conditions, so to speak. 
 
 Her godfather, old Doctor Minoret, appeared to her, and 
 signed to her to follow him ; she dressed and went with him,
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 223 
 
 through the darkness, as far as the house in the Rue des Bour- 
 geois, where she found everything, to the most trivial details, 
 just as they had been at the time of her godfather's death. 
 The old man wore the clothes he had had on the day before 
 he died; his face was pale, not a sound was heard as he 
 moved ; nevertheless, Ursule distinctly heard his voice, though 
 it was faint, as if repeated by a distant echo. The doctor 
 led his ward into the Chinese pavilion, where he made her 
 raise the marble top of the little Boule chiffonier, as she had 
 done the day of his death ; but instead of finding nothing 
 there, she saw the letter her godfather had desired her to fetch. 
 She unsealed it and read it, as well as the will in Savinien's 
 favor. 
 
 " The letters of the writing," she said to the cure 1 , "shone 
 as though they had been traced with sunbeams ; they scorched 
 my eyes." 
 
 When she looked up at her uncle to thank him, she saw a 
 kindly smile on his pale lips. Then, in his weak but quite 
 clear voice, the spectre showed her Minoret in the passage 
 listening to his secret, unscrewing the lock, and taking the 
 packet of papers. Then, with his right hand, he took hold 
 of the girl and obliged her to walk with the tread of the dead 
 to follow Minoret home to his house. Ursule crossed the 
 town, went into the posting-house, and up to Z61ie's room, 
 where the spectre made her see the spoiler unsealing the 
 letters, reading and burning them. 
 
 " He could only make the third match burn," said Ursule, 
 " to set light to the papers, and he buried the ashes among 
 the cinders. After that, my godfather took me back to our 
 house, and I saw Monsieur Minoret-Levrault steal into the 
 library, where he took out of the third volume of the 'Pandects' 
 the three bonds bearing twelve thousand francs a year, as well 
 as the money saved in the house, all in bank-notes. Then 
 my guardian said to me : 'All the torments that have brought 
 you to the brink of the grave are his work, but God wills that
 
 224 URSULE MIROU&T. 
 
 you shall be happy. You will not die yet ; you will marry 
 Savinien. If you love me, if you love Savinien, you will ask 
 for the restoration of your fortune by my nephew. Swear 
 that you will.' " 
 
 Shining like the Lord at His Transfiguration, the spectre 
 had had such a violent effect on Ursule's mind, in the 
 oppressed state in which she was at the time, that she prom- 
 ised all her uncle asked her to be rid of the nightmare. She 
 woke to find herself standing in the middle of her room, in 
 front of the portrait of her godfather, which she had had 
 brought there when she was ill. She went to bed again, and 
 to sleep after great excitement, remembering this strange 
 vision when she woke; but she dared not speak of it. Her 
 refined good sense, and her delicacy of feeling, took offense 
 at the thought of revealing a dream of which the cause and 
 object were her own pecuniary interests ; she naturally attrib- 
 uted it to La Bougival's chat, as she was going to sleep, of the 
 doctor's liberality, and the convictions her old nurse still 
 cherished on the subject. 
 
 But the dream returned with aggravated details, which made 
 her dread it greatly. The second time her godfather laid his 
 ice-cold hand on her shoulder, causing her the acutest pain, 
 an indescribable sensation. "The dead must be obeyed !" 
 he said in sepulchral tones. 
 
 "And tears," she added, "fell from his hollow blank 
 eyes." 
 
 The third time the dead man took her by her long plaits 
 of hair, and showed her Minoret talking with Goupil, and 
 promising him money if he would take Ursule to Sens. Then 
 she made up her mind to tell her three dreams to the Abbe 
 Chaperon. 
 
 "Monsieur le Curd," she said to him one evening, "do 
 you believe that the dead can walk ? " 
 
 "My child, sacred history, profane history, modern history 
 bear witness in many passages to their appearing. Still, the
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 225 
 
 church has never made it an article of faith; and as to 
 science, in France it laughs it to scorn." 
 
 " What do you believe ? " 
 
 " The power of God, my child, is infinite." 
 
 "Did my godfather ever speak to you of these things?" 
 
 "Yes; often. He had completely changed his views of 
 such matters. His conversion dated from the day, as he told 
 me twenty times, when a woman at Paris heard you, at Ne- 
 mours, praying for him, and saw the red dot you had made 
 on the calendar at the name of Saint Savinien." 
 
 Ursule gave a scream that made the priest shudder ; she 
 remembered the scene when, on his return from Paris, her 
 guardian had read her heart, and had taken away her calendar. 
 
 "If that is the case," said she, " my visions are possible. 
 My godfather has appeared to me as Jesus appeared to His 
 disciples. He stands in a golden light, and he speaks to me. 
 I wanted to beg you to say a mass for the repose of his soul, 
 and to beseech the interposition of God to stop these appari- 
 tions which overwhelm me." 
 
 She then related her three dreams in every detail, insisting 
 on the absolute truthfulness of the facts, the freedom of her 
 own movements, and the clear vision of an inner self which, 
 as she described it, followed the guidance of her uncle's 
 spectre with perfect ease. What most surprised the priest, to 
 whom Ursule's perfect veracity was well known, was her exact 
 description of the room formerly occupied by Zelie Minoret at 
 the posting-house, into which Ursule had never been, and 
 which, indeed, she had never even heard mentioned. 
 
 "By what means can these strange apparitions be pro- 
 duced? " said Ursule. " What did my godfather think ? " . 
 
 "Your godfather, my child, argued from hypotheses. He 
 acknowledged the possible existence of a spiritual world, a 
 world of ideas. If ideas are a creation proper to man, if they 
 subsist and live a life peculiar to themselves, they must have 
 forms imperceptible to our external senses, but perceptible to 
 15
 
 226 URSULE M1ROUET. 
 
 our interior senses under certain conditions. Thus your god- 
 father's ideas may enwrap you, and you perhaps have lent 
 them his aspect. Then, if Minoret has committed these ac- 
 tions, they are dissolved into ideas ; for every action Is the 
 outcome of several ideas. Now, if ideas have their being in 
 the spiritual world, your spirit may have been enabled to see 
 them when transported thither. These phenomena are not 
 more strange than those of memory ; and those of memory 
 are as surprising and as inexplicable as those of the perfume 
 of plants, which are perhaps the plants' ideas." 
 
 " Dear me ! how you expand the world ! But is it really 
 possible to hear a dead man speak, to see him walk and act ?" 
 
 " Swedenborg, in Sweden," replied the abbe, "has proved 
 to demonstration that he held intercourse with the dead. 
 But, at any rate, come into the library, and in the life of the 
 famous Due de Montmorency, who was beheaded at Toulouse, 
 and who certainly was not the man to invent a cock-and-bull 
 story, you will read of an adventure almost like your own, 
 which also occurred, above a hundred years before, to 
 Cardan." 
 
 Ursule and the cure went up to the second floor, and the good 
 man found for her a little duodecimo edition, printed in Paris 
 in 1666, of the " History of Henri de Montmorency," written 
 by a contemporary priest who had known that prince. 
 
 "Read," said the cure, giving her the volume open at 
 pages 175 and 176. " Your godfather often read this passage ; 
 see, here are some grains of his snuff." 
 
 "And he is no more !" said Ursule, taking the book to 
 read this passage : 
 
 "The siege of Privas was remarkable for the loss of some 
 of the persons in command. Two colonels were killed, to 
 wit: the Marquis d'Uxelles, who died of a wound received in 
 the trenches, and the Marquis de Portes, by a gunshot in the 
 head. He was to have been made a marshal of France the 
 very day he was killed. Just about the moment when the
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 227 
 
 Marquis died, the Due de Montmorency, who was sleeping in 
 his tent, was roused by a voice like that of the Marquis, bid- 
 ding him farewell. The love he had for one who was so dear 
 to him caused him to attribute the illusion of this dream to 
 the power of his imagination ; and the toil of the night, which 
 he had spent as usual in the trenches, made him go to sleep 
 again without any fear. But the same voice suddenly broke 
 it again ; and the phantom, which he had only seen in his 
 sleep, compelled him to wake once more, and to hear dis- 
 tinctly the same words that it had spoken before disappearing. 
 The Due then recollected that one day when they had heard 
 Pitrat the philosopher discoursing of the separation of the soul 
 from the body, they had promised to bid each other farewell, 
 whichever died first, if he were permitted. Whereupon, un- 
 able to hinder his dread of the truth of this warning, he at 
 once sent one of his servants to the Marquis' lodgings, which 
 were distant from his own. But before his man could return 
 he was sent for by the King, who caused him to be told, by 
 persons who could comfort him, of the misfortune he had 
 already apprehended. 
 
 " I leave it to the learned to discuss the cause of this event, 
 which I have often heard the Due de Montmorency relate, 
 and which I have thought worthy to be set down for its mar- 
 velousness and its truth." 
 
 "But, then," asked Ursule, "what ought I to do?" 
 
 " My child," said the cure, " the case is so serious, and so 
 much to your own advantage, that you must keep complete 
 silence. Now that you have trusted me with the secret of 
 this apparition, perhaps it will come no more. Besides, you 
 are strong enough now to go to church ; well, then, to-mor- 
 row you can come to thank God, and to pray for the peace 
 of your godfather's soul. Be quite sure, at any rate, that 
 your secret is in safe hands." 
 
 " If you could know in what terror I go to sleep ! What 
 awful looks my godfather gives me ! The last time he held
 
 228 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 on to my dress to see me longer. I woke with my face 
 streaming with tears." 
 
 " Rest in peace ; he will come no more," said the cure. 
 
 Without losing any time the Abbe Chaperon went to Min- 
 oret's house and begged him to grant him a minute's conver- 
 sation in the Chinese pavilion, insisting that they must be 
 alone. 
 
 " No one can hear us ? " asked the priest. 
 
 " No one," said Minoret. 
 
 " Monsieur, my character is known to you," said the worthy 
 priest, looking Minoret mildly but steadfastly in the face. "I 
 must speak to you of some serious, extraordinary matters, 
 which concern you alone, and which you may rely on me to 
 keep a profound secret ; but it is impossible that I should not 
 reveal them to you. When your uncle was alive, there stood 
 
 just there " said the abbe, pointing to the spot, "a little 
 
 chiffonier of Boule with a marble top " (Minoret turned pale), 
 " and under the marble slab your uncle placed a letter for his 
 ward ' ' 
 
 The cure went on to tell Minoret the whole story of Min- 
 oret's conduct, without omitting the smallest detail. The 
 retired postmaster, when he heard of the circumstance of the 
 two matches that went out before burning up, felt his hair 
 creep on his thick-set scalp. 
 
 "Who has invented such a cock-and-bull story?" he said 
 in a husky voice, when the tale was finished. 
 
 "The dead man himself! " 
 
 This reply made Minoret shiver slightly, for he too saw the 
 doctor in his dreams. 
 
 " God is most good to work miracles for me, Monsieur le 
 Curd," said Minoret, inspired by his peril to utter the only 
 jest he ever perpetrated in his life. 
 
 "All that God does is natural," replied the priest. 
 
 "Your phantasmagoria does not frighten me," said the 
 colossus, recovering his presence of mind a little.
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 229 
 
 "I have not come to frighten you, my dear sir, for I shall 
 never speak of this to any living creature," said the cure. 
 " You alone know the truth. It is a matter between you and 
 God." 
 
 " Come, now, Monsieur le Cure, do you believe me capa- 
 ble of such a breach of faith ? " 
 
 "I believe in no crimes but those which are confessed to 
 me, and of which the sinner repents," said the priest in apos- 
 tolic tones. 
 
 " A crime? " exclaimed Minoret. 
 
 " A crime, terrible in its results." 
 
 "In what way?" 
 
 " In the fact that it evades human justice. The crimes 
 which are not expiated here will be expiated in the other 
 world. God Himself avenges the innocent." 
 
 " You think that God troubles Himself about such mere 
 trifles?" 
 
 "If He could not see all the worlds and every detail at a 
 glance, as you hold a landscape in your eye, He would not be 
 God." 
 
 " Monsieur le Cur, do you give me your word of honor 
 that you have heard all this story from no one but my 
 uncle?" 
 
 "Your uncle has now appeared three times to Ursule, to 
 reiterate it. Worn out by these dreams, she confided these 
 revelations to me, under the seal of secrecy ; she herself 
 regards them as so entirely irrational that she will never allude 
 to them. So on that point you may be quite easy." 
 
 " But I am quite easy on all points, Monsieur Chaperon." 
 
 "I can but hope so," said the old priest. "Even if I 
 should regard such warnings given in dreams as utterly 
 absurd, I should still think it necessary to communicate them 
 to you on account of the singularity of the details. You are 
 a respectable man ; and you have earned your fine fortune too 
 legitimately to wish to add to it by robbery. You are, too, a
 
 230 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 very simple man ; remorse would torture you too cruelly. 
 We have in ourselves an instinct of justice, in the civilized 
 man as in the savage, which does not allow of our enjoying 
 in peace anything we have acquired dishonestly according to 
 the laws of the society we live in ; for well-organizad com- 
 munities are modeled on the plan given to the universe by 
 God Himself. In so far, society has a divine origin. Man 
 does not evolve ideas, does not invent forms ; he imitates the 
 eternal relations he finds in all that surrounds him. Conse- 
 quently, this is what happens : no criminal going to the 
 scaffold with the full power of carrying out of the world the 
 secret of his crimes, allows himself to be executed without 
 making the confession to which he is urged by a mysterious 
 impulse. So, my dear Monsieur Minoret, if you are easy I 
 may go away happy." 
 
 Minoret was so dazed that he left the cure to let himself 
 out. As soon as he was alone he flew into the rage of a full- 
 blooded nature ; he broke out in the wildest blasphemies, and 
 called Ursule by every odious name. 
 
 "Why, what has that little wench done to you?" asked 
 Madame Minoret, who had come in on tiptoe after seeing the 
 cure depart. 
 
 For the first and only time in his life, Minoret, drunk with 
 fury and driven to extremities by his wife's persistent ques- 
 tioning, beat her so soundly that when she fell helpless he 
 was obliged to lift her in his arms, and, very much ashamed 
 of himself, to put her to bed. 
 
 He himself had a short fit of illness; the doctor was 
 obliged to bleed him twice. When he was about again, 
 every one, within a short time, noticed that he was altered. 
 Minoret would take walks alone, and often wander about the 
 streets like a man uneasy in his mind. He seemed absent- 
 minded when spoken to he, who had never had two ideas 
 in his head. At last, one day, he addressed the justice, in 
 the High Street, as he was going, no doubt, to fetch Ursule
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 231 
 
 to take her to Madame de Portenduere's, where the whist 
 parties had begun again. 
 
 " Monsieur Bongrand, I have something rather important 
 to say to my cousin Ursule," said he, taking the justice by 
 the arm, "and I am glad that you should be present; you 
 may give her some advice." 
 
 They found Ursule at the piano ; she rose with an air of 
 cold dignity when she saw Minoret. 
 
 " Monsieur Minoret wishes to speak with you on business, 
 my dear," said the justice. " By the way, do not forget to 
 give me your dividend warrants. I am going to Paris, and I 
 will get your six months' interest, and La Bougival's." 
 
 "Cousin," said Minoret, "our uncle had accustomed you 
 to an easier life than you now enjoy." 
 
 "It is possible to be very happy without much money," 
 said she. 
 
 " I have been thinking that money would help to make you 
 happy," replied Minoret, "and I came to offer you some, out 
 of respect for my uncle's memory." 
 
 " You had a very natural course open to show your respect for 
 him," said Ursule severely. "You might have left his house 
 just as it was, and have sold it to me, for you ran the price 
 up so high only in the hope of finding treasure hoarded 
 there " 
 
 "At any rate," said Minoret, evidently ill at ease, " if you 
 had twelve thousand francs a year, you would be in a position 
 to marry the better." 
 
 " I have not such an income." 
 
 " But if I were to give it to you, on condition of your pur- 
 chasing an estate in Brittany, in Madame de Portenduere's 
 part of the country, she would then consent to your marrying 
 her son ? " 
 
 " Monsieur Minoret, I have no right to so large a sum, and 
 could not possibly accept it from you. We are scarcely 
 related, and still less are we friends. I have suffered too
 
 232 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 much already from slander to wish to give any cause for evil 
 speaking. What have I done to deserve such a gift? On 
 what pretext could you make me such a present? These 
 questions, which I have a right to ask you, every one will 
 answer in his own way. It will be interpreted as compensa- 
 tion for some injury, and I decline to recognize any. Your 
 uncle did not bring me up in ignoble sentiments. We can 
 accept gifts only from a friend. I could not feel any affec- 
 tion for you, and should necessarily prove ungrateful, so I do 
 not choose to run the risk of such ingratitude." 
 
 "You refuse! " exclaimed the colossus; the idea of any- 
 body refusing a fortune would never have entered his head. 
 
 " I refuse," repeated Ursule. 
 
 " But on what grounds have you any claim to offer such a 
 fortune to mademoiselle?" asked the old lawyer. "You 
 have an idea; have you an idea? " 
 
 " Well, yes ; the idea of getting her away from Nemours, 
 that my son may leave me in peace ; he is in love with her, 
 and insists on marrying her." 
 
 " Well, we will see about that," replied the justice, settling 
 his spectacles. " Give us time to reflect." 
 
 He escorted Minoret home, quite approving his anxiety as 
 to the future on Desire's account, gently blaming Ursule's 
 hasty decisiveness, and promising to make her listen to reason. 
 As soon as Minoret was within doors, Bongrand went to the 
 posting stables, borrowed a horse and gig, and hurried off to 
 Fontainebleau, where he inquired for Desire, and was in- 
 formed that he was at an evening party at the sous-prefet's. 
 The justice, quite delighted, went on thither. Desire was 
 playing a rubber with the public prosecutor's wife, the wife of 
 the sous-prefet, and the colonel of the regiment stationed 
 there. 
 
 "I have come the bearer of good news," said Monsieur 
 Bongrand to De'sire'. " You are in love with Ursule Mirouet, 
 and your father no longer objects to the marriage."
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 233 
 
 " Ursule Mirouet ! I am in love with her? " cried Desire, 
 laughing. " What put Ursule Mirouet into your head? I 
 remember seeing her occasionally at old Doctor Minoret's, 
 my great grand-uncle, a little girl who is certainly lovely ; but 
 she is outrageously pious ; and if I, like everybody else, did 
 justice to her charms, I never troubled my head with caring 
 for her washed-out complexion," and he smiled at the lady of 
 the house a "sprightly brunette," to use a last-century 
 phrase. " Where were you dug up, my dear Monsieur Bon- 
 grand ? All the world knows that my father is sovereign lord 
 over lands worth forty-eight thousand francs a year, lying 
 round his Chateau du Rouvre, so all the world knows that I 
 have forty-eight thousand perpetual and funded reasons for 
 not caring for the ward of the law. If I were to marry a 
 mere nobody, these ladies would think me a great fool." 
 
 " You have never teased your father about Ursule ? " 
 
 "Never." 
 
 "You hear him, monsieur," said the justice to the lawyer, 
 who had been listening, and whom he now buttonholed in a 
 corner, where they stood talking for about a quarter of an 
 hour. 
 
 An hour later the justice, having returned to Nemours and 
 to Ursule's house, sent La Bougival to fetch Minoret, who 
 came at once. 
 
 "Mademoiselle " said Bongrand, as Minoret came in. 
 
 " Accepts? " Minoret put in, interrupting him. 
 
 " No, not yet," replied the justice, settling his spectacles. 
 "She had some scruples regarding your son's condition, for 
 she had been very much ill-used on the score of a similar 
 passion, and knows the value of peace and quiet. Can you 
 swear to her that your son is crazed with love, and that you 
 have no object in view but that of preserving our dear Ursule 
 from some fresh Goupilleries? " 
 
 " Oh yes, I swear it! " said Minoret. 
 
 " Stop a minute, Master Minoret ! " said the justice, taking
 
 234 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 one of his hands out of his trousers-pocket to slap Minoret on 
 the back, making him start. "Do not so lightly commit 
 perjury." 
 
 " Perjury ! " 
 
 " It lies between you and your son, who, at Fontainebleau, 
 at the sub-prefect's house, and in the presence of four persons 
 and the public prosecutor of the district, has just sworn that 
 he never once thought of his cousin Ursule Mirouet. You 
 must therefore have had other reasons for offering her such an 
 immense sum ? I perceived that you were making very rash 
 statements, and I have been to Fontainebleau myself." 
 
 Minoret stood aghast at his own blunder. 
 
 " Still, there is no harm, Monsieur Bongrand, in offering 
 to a young relative what will facilitate a marriage, which, as 
 it would seem, will make her happy, and in seeking some 
 excuse to overcome her modesty." 
 
 Minoret, who in his extremity had hit on an almost admis- 
 sible plea, wiped his brow, wet with large drops of sweat. 
 
 "You know my motives for refusing," replied Ursule. "I 
 can but beg you to come here no more. Monsieur de Por- 
 tenduere has not told me his reasons, but he has a feeling of 
 contempt, even of hatred, of you, which forbids me to receive 
 you. My happiness is my whole fortune ; I do not blush to 
 own it ; and I will do nothing to compromise it, for Monsieur 
 de Portenduere is waiting only till I am of age to marry me." 
 
 "The proverb, 'Money is all-powerful,' is very false!" 
 said the huge, burly Minoret, looking at the justice, whose 
 observant eyes disturbed him greatly. 
 
 He rose and went away ; but he found the air outside as 
 oppressive as that in the little sitting-room. 
 
 "I must somehow put an end to this ! " said he to himself 
 as he got home. 
 
 " Now, your dividend warrant, my child," said the justice, 
 a good deal surprised at Ursule's calmness after so strange a 
 scene.
 
 THE MINOR ET PROPERTY. 235 
 
 When she returned with her own warrant and La Bougival's, 
 Ursule found the justice walking up and down the room. 
 
 "You have no idea what could have led to that huge lout's 
 offer?" he asked her. 
 
 " None that I can tell you," she replied. 
 
 Monsieur Bongrand looked at her in surprise 
 
 " Then we both have the same notion," he said. " Here, 
 make a note of the numbers of the two warrants, in case I 
 should lose them; that is always a necessary precaution." 
 Bongrand himself noted on a card the numbers of the war- 
 rants. 
 
 " Good-by, my child ; I shall be away two days, but I 
 shall be back on the third for my sitting." 
 
 That night Ursule had a vision of a very strange character. 
 It seemed to her that her bed was in the graveyard of Ne- 
 mours, and that her uncle's grave was at the foot of the bed. 
 The white stone on which she read the epitaph dazzled her 
 eyes, and opened endways like the front cover of an album. 
 She shrieked loudly, but the figure of the doctor slowly sat 
 up. She first saw his yellow head and white hair, that shone 
 as if surrounded by a halo. Under his bald forehead his eyes 
 glittered like beams of light, and he rose as if drawn up by 
 some superior force. Ursule trembled horribly in her bodily 
 frame ; her flesh felt like a burning garment ; and, as she sub- 
 sequently described it, there seemed to be another self mov- 
 ing within it. 
 
 " Mercy, godfather ! " she cried. 
 
 " Mercy? It is too late," he answered in the voice of the 
 dead, to use the poor girl's inexplicable expression when she 
 related this fresh dream to the Abbe Chaperon. " He has 
 been warned. He has paid no heed to the warning. His 
 son's days are numbered. If he does not ere long confess 
 all and make full restitution, he will mourn his son, who is to 
 perish by a horrible and violent death. Tell him this ! " The
 
 236 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 spectre pointed to a row of figures, which flashed on the wall 
 as if they had been written with fire, and said : " That is his 
 sentence ! " 
 
 When her uncle had lain down in the grave again, Ursule 
 heard the noise of the stone falling into place, and then, far 
 away, a strange noise as of tramping horses, and men loudly 
 shouting. 
 
 Next day Ursule was prostrate. She could not get up, this 
 dream had so overwrought her. She begged her old nurse to 
 go at once to the Abbe Chaperon and bring him back with 
 her. The good man came as soon as he had performed mass ; 
 but he was not at all astonished by Ursule's dream. He was 
 convinced of the fact of the robbery, and no longer sought any 
 explanation of the abnormal state of his " little dreamer." 
 He left Ursule, and went straight to Minoret. 
 
 "Dear me, Monsieur le Cure," said Zelie, "my husband's 
 temper is so spoilt, I don't know what is the matter with him. 
 Until lately, he was a perfect child ; but these two months 
 past I hardly know him. That he should have gotten into such 
 a rage as to strike me me, when I am so gentle ! The man 
 must be completely and utterly altered. You will find him 
 among the rocks ; he spends his life there. What does he do 
 there?" 
 
 In spite of the heat it was September, 1836 the priest 
 crossed the canal, and turned up a pathway, where he saw 
 Minoret sitting under a boulder. 
 
 "You are in some great trouble, Monsieur Minoret," said 
 the priest, appearing before the guilty man. "You belong to 
 me, you know, for you are unhappy. Unfortunately, I have 
 come to add, perhaps, to your apprehensions. Ursule has 
 just had a terrible dream. Your uncle lifted up his grave- 
 stone to prophesy misfortune to your family. I have not 
 come to frighten you, believe me, but you ought to be told 
 what he said " 
 
 "Really, Monsieur le Cur6, I cannot be left in peace any-
 
 r*
 
 "YOU STOLE THE THREE CERTIFICATES.
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 237 
 
 where, not even in this wilderness. I want to know nothing 
 of what goes on in the next world," dejectedly replied the 
 miserable old man. 
 
 " I will leave you, monsieur. I have not taken this walk 
 in the heat for my own pleasure," said the priest, wiping his 
 brow. 
 
 "Well, then, what was it the old fellow said?" asked 
 Minoret. 
 
 " You are threatened with the loss of your son. If your 
 uncle could tell things which you alone knew, you must 
 tremble at the things which we none of us know. Restitu- 
 tion, my dear sir, restitution ! Do not lose your soul for a 
 little gold." 
 
 "Restitution of what?" 
 
 " Of the fortune the doctor intended for Ursule. You 
 stole the three certificates ; I now know it. You began by 
 persecuting the poor girl, and you now end by offering her a 
 dowry ; you have fallen so low as lying ; you are entangled 
 in its mazes, and make a false step at every turn. You are 
 yourself clumsy, and you have been badly served by your 
 accomplice, Goupil, who only laughs at you. Make haste, for 
 you are being watched by clever and clear-sighted persons, 
 Ursule's friends. Restitution ! And even if you do not save 
 your son, who may not be in any danger, you will save your 
 own soul, and your honor. In a society constituted as ours 
 is, in a little town where you all have your eyes on each other, 
 and where what is not known is surely guessed, can you hope 
 to hide an ill-gotten fortune ? Come, my son, an innocent 
 man would not have allowed me to say so much ? " 
 
 " Go to the devil ! " cried Minoret. ' " I do not know what 
 you are all at, setting on me. I like these stones better, for 
 they leave me in peace." 
 
 " Good-by. You have been warned by me, my dear sir, 
 without a soul in the world having heard a single word about 
 the matter, either from me or from that poor girl. But
 
 238 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 beware ! There is a man who has his eye on you. God have 
 mercy on you ! " 
 
 The cur6 turned and left him. When he had gone a few 
 steps, he looked back once more at Minoret. He was sitting 
 with his head between his hands, for his head ached. Minoret 
 was a little mad. 
 
 In the first place, he had kept the three certificates ; he did 
 not know what to do with them ; he dared not present them 
 himself; he was afraid lest he should be recognized; he did 
 not wish to sell them, and was trying to hit on some way of 
 transferring them. His day dreams were romances of busi- 
 ness, of which the climax always was the transfer of those 
 cursed certificates. In this dreadful predicament he thought, 
 however, of confessing to his wife, so as to have some advice. 
 Zelie, who had steered her own ship so well, would know how 
 to get him out of this scrape. 
 
 Three per cents, were now quoted at eighty ; thus, with 
 arrears, the restitution in question would amount to nearly a 
 million francs. Give up a million, without any proof against 
 him that he had taken them ! This was no joke. And during 
 the whole of September and part of October Minoret remained 
 a prey to remorse and irresolution. To the amazement of the 
 whole town, he grew thinner. 
 
 A fearful circumstance hastened the imparting of his secret 
 to Zelie ; the sword of Damocles swayed over their heads. 
 Towards the middle of October Monsieur and Madame Min- 
 oret received the following letter from their son Desir6 : 
 
 " My DEAR MOTHER : If I have not been to see you since 
 the vacation, it is because, in the first place, I have been on 
 duty in the absence of my chief, and also because I knew that 
 Monsieur de Portenduere only awaited my going to Nemours 
 to pick a quarrel with me. Tired, perhaps, of the long post- 
 ponement of the revenge he is anxious to take on our family, 
 the Vicomte has been to Fontainebleau, where he appointed
 
 THE MINORET PRO2'ERTY. 239 
 
 to meet one of his friends from Paris, after making sure of 
 the assistance of the Vicomte de Soulanges, brigadier of the 
 hussars quartered here. 
 
 " He called on me very politely, accompanied by these two 
 gentlemen, and told me that my father was undoubtedly the 
 originator of the infamous persecution directed against Ursule 
 Mirouet, his future wife ; he gave me proof by telling me that 
 Goupil had confessed before witnesses, and by giving me an 
 account of my father's conduct ; he, it seems, after refusing 
 at first to carry out his promises to Goupil as the price of his 
 villainous devices, found the necessary funds for acquiring 
 the place of summonsing officer at Nemours, and, finally, out 
 of fear, stood surety to Monsieur Dionis for the purchase of 
 his practice, and so disposed of Goupil. The Vicomte, who 
 cannot fight a man of sixty-seven, and who insists on aveng- 
 ing the insults heaped on Ursule, formally asked satisfaction 
 of me. His purpose, thought out and determined on in 
 silence, was not to be altered. If I should refuse to fight, he 
 meant to meet me in a drawing-room in the presence of those 
 persons whose opinion I most value, and there to insult me so 
 grossly that either I must fight or my hopes in life be at an 
 end. In France a coward is universally contemned. More- 
 over, his motives for demanding such reparation would be 
 laid before me by gentlemen of honor. 
 
 " He was sorry, he said, to be driven to such extremities. 
 In the opinion of his seconds, the wisest thing I could do 
 would be to arrange a meeting, as men of honor are in the 
 habit of doing, in such a way that Ursula's name should not 
 appear in the matter. Finally, to avoid all scandal in France, 
 we could, with our seconds, cross the frontier at the nearest 
 point. Thus everything would be arranged for the best. 
 His name, he said, was worth ten times my fortune, and his 
 prospects of happiness were a greater stake for him to risk 
 than anything I could risk in this duel, which is to be fatal. 
 He desired me to choose seconds and settle the matter. My
 
 240 URSULE M1ROUET. 
 
 seconds met his yesterday, and they unanimously decided 
 that I owe him this reparation. 
 
 " In a week I set out for Geneva with two of my friends. 
 Monsieur de Portenduere, Monsieur de Soulanges, and Mon- 
 sieur de Trailles will go their own way. We fight with 
 pistols; all the details are arranged. Each is to fire three 
 shots, and then, whatever may have come of it, the matter is 
 at an end. To avoid all talk of such a dirty business for I 
 cannot possibly justify my father's conduct I am writing to 
 you only at the last minute. I will not go to see you on 
 account of the violence you might display, which would be 
 quite out of place. To make my way in the world I must 
 obey its laws ; and where a Vicomte finds ten reasons for a 
 duel, the son of a postmaster must have a hundred. I shall 
 pass through Nemours at night, and will there bid you good- 
 by." 
 
 When they had read this letter, there was a scene between 
 Zelie and Minoret, which ended in his confessing the theft, 
 with all the circumstances connected with it, and the strange 
 scenes to which it had everywhere given rise, even in the 
 realm of dreams. The million had the same fascination for 
 Zelie as it had for Minoret, and she did not propose to let it 
 give her any uneasiness. 
 
 " Do you stay quietly here," said Zelie, without the smallest 
 reproach to her husband for his blundering; " I will take the 
 matter in hand. We will keep the money, and Desir shall 
 not fight." 
 
 Madame Minoret put on her shawl and bonnet and hurried 
 off to Ursule with her son's letter ; she found her alone, for 
 it was about twelve o'clock. 
 
 In spite of her audacity, Z6lie Minoret was abashed by the 
 girl's cold looks, but she scolded herself for her cowardice, 
 and took an airy tone. 
 
 " Here, Mademoiselle Mirouet, have the kindness to read
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 241 
 
 this letter, and tell me what you think of it," she exclaimed, 
 holding out her son's letter. 
 
 Ursule felt a thousand conflicting emotions on reading this 
 letter, which proved to her how deeply she was loved, and 
 what care Savinien would take of the honor of the woman he 
 was about to marry ; but she was at once too pious and too 
 charitable to desire to be the cause of death or suffering to her 
 worst enemy. 
 
 " I promise you, madame, that I will hinder this duel, and 
 your mind may be easy ; but I beg you to leave me the letter." 
 
 " Let us see, my beauty, if we cannot do better than that. 
 Listen to me. We have estates to the tune of forty-eight 
 thousand a year round Le Rouvre, which is a real royal chateau; 
 besides that we can give Desire twenty-four thousand francs a 
 year in consols ; seventy-two thousand francs a year in all. 
 You will allow that there are not many matches to compare 
 with him. You are an ambitious little puss and you are 
 very right," added Zelie, noting Ursule's eager gesture of 
 denial. " I have come to ask your hand for D6sir6 ; you 
 will take your godfather's name that will do it honor. 
 Desire, as you may have seen, is a good-looking young fellow; 
 he is very much liked at Fontainebleau, and will soon be 
 public prosecutor. You, who are such a coaxing charmer, 
 will get him to Paris. At Paris we will give you a fine house; 
 you will shine and play a part in society ; for with seventy-two 
 thousand francs a year and the salary of a good appointment, 
 you and D6sir6 will be in the highest circles. Consult your 
 friends; you will see what they say." 
 
 " I need only consult my heart, madame." 
 
 " Pooh, pooh ! Now you will be talking of that little lady- 
 killer, Savinien ! Hang it all ! you will pay very dear for his 
 name, his little mustache twirled into two curly spikes, and 
 his black hair. A pretty boy he is ! A nice business you will 
 make of housekeeping on seven thousand francs a year, and a 
 husband who ran into debt for a hundred thousand in two 
 16
 
 242 URSULE MIROU&T; 
 
 years in Paris. You don't know it yet, my child, but all 
 men are alike; and though I say it that shouldn't, my Desire 
 is every bit as good as a king's son." 
 
 " You are forgetting, madame, the danger that your son is 
 in at this moment, which can only be averted by Monsieur 
 de Portenduere's wish to oblige me. The danger would be 
 quite inevitable if he should learn that you are making such 
 a dishonoring proposal. I may assure you, madame, that I 
 shall be happier with the small income to which you allude 
 than with the wealth you describe to dazzle me. For reasons 
 unknown as yet for everything will be known, madame 
 Monsieur Minoret, by his odious persecution, has brought to 
 light the affection which binds me to Monsieur de Porten- 
 duere, and which I may openly avow since his mother will 
 give us her blessing ; I may tell you that this affection, now 
 sanctioned and legitimate, is all I live for. No lot, however 
 splendid, however elevated, would induce me to change. I 
 love beyond all possibility of repentance or change. Hence 
 it would be a crime, undoubtedly punished, if I were to marry 
 a man to whom I could only bring a heart that is wholly 
 Savinien's. And, indeed, madame, since you drive me to it, 
 I will say more : even if I did not love Monsieur de Porten- 
 dure, I could never make up my mind to go through the 
 sorrows and joys of life as your son's companion. If Monsieur 
 Savin ien has been in debt, you have often paid Monsieur 
 Desire's. Our natures have neither the points of resemblance 
 nor of difference which would allow of our living together 
 without covert bitterness. I, perhaps, should not show him 
 the tolerance that a woman owes to her husband ; I should 
 therefore soon become a burden to him. Think no more of 
 a marriage of which I am unworthy, and which I may decline 
 without causing you the smallest regret, since, with such ad- 
 vantages, you will not fail to find plenty of girls handsomer 
 than I am, of higher rank, and much richer." 
 
 "Swear to me, child," said Zelie, "that you will pre-
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 243 
 
 vent these two young men from taking their journey and 
 fighting." 
 
 " It will, I know, be the greatest sacrifice Monsieur de Por- 
 tenduere can make for my sake. But my bridal wreath must 
 not be claimed by blood-stained hands." 
 
 "Very well, little cousin ; I am much obliged to you, and 
 I hope you may be happy." 
 
 "And I, madame, hope you may realize the promise of 
 your son's future." 
 
 This reply struck to the mother's heart ; she remembered 
 the predictions of Ursule's last dream ; she stood up, her 
 little eyes fixed on Ursule's face so pale, pure, and fair in 
 her half-mourning dress for Ursule had risen, as a hint to 
 her self-called cousin to leave. 
 
 "Then you believe in dreams?" asked Zelie. 
 
 "I suffer from them too much not to believe in them." 
 
 " But then " Zelie began. 
 
 "Good-morning, madame," said Ursule, with a bow to 
 Madame Minoret, as she heard the cure's step. 
 
 The Abbe Chaperon was surprised to find Madame Minoret 
 with Ursule. The anxiety depicted on the retired postmis- 
 tress' pinched and wrinkled face naturally led the priest to 
 study the two women by turns. 
 
 " Do you believe in ghosts ? " Zelie asked the cure". 
 
 "Do you believe in dividends?" replied the cur6, smil- 
 ing. 
 
 " Sharpers all of them ! " thought Zelie ; " they want to 
 get round us. The old priest, the old justice, and that ras- 
 cally little Savinien have arranged it all. There are no more 
 dreams in it than there are hairs in the palm of my hand." 
 She then courtesied twice with curt abruptness, and went 
 away. 
 
 " I know why Savinien went to Fontainebleau," said Ursule 
 to the Abbe Chaperon, and she informed him of the duel, 
 begging him to use his influence to prevent it.
 
 244 URSULE MIRoUET. 
 
 "And Madame Minoret proposed to you to marry her 
 son ? ' ' asked the old man. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Minoret has probably confessed his crime to his wife," 
 added the cur6. 
 
 The justice, who came in at this moment, heard of the 
 proceedings and the offer made by Zelie, whose hatred of 
 Ursule was known to him, and he glanced at the cure as much 
 as to say " Come out ; I want to speak to you about Ursule 
 out of her hearing." 
 
 " Savinien will hear that you have refused eighty thousand 
 francs a year and the cock of the walk of Nemours ! " he 
 said. 
 
 "Is that any sacrifice?" answered she. "Is anything a 
 sacrifice to those who truly love ? And is there any merit in 
 my refusing the son of a man we despise? If others can 
 make a virtue of their aversions, that should not be the moral 
 code of a girl brought up by a Jordy, an Abb6 Chaperon, 
 and our dear doctor ! " and she looked up at the portrait. 
 
 Bongrand took Ursule' s hand and kissed it. 
 
 "Do you know," said the justice to the cur6 when they 
 were in the street, "what Madame Minoret came for?" 
 
 "What?" said the priest, looking at his friend with a keen 
 eye that only revealed curiosity. 
 
 "She wanted to make a kind of restitution." 
 
 " Then, do you think ? " began the Abbe Chaperon. 
 
 "I do not think, I am sure here, only look." The jus- 
 tice pointed to Minoret, who was coming towards them on 
 his way home, for on leaving Ursule's house the two friends 
 had turned up the High Street. 
 
 " Having to plead in court, I have naturally studied many 
 cases of remorse, but I never saw one to compare with this. 
 What can have produced that flaccid pallor in cheeks of which 
 the skin was tight as a drum, bursting with the coarse, rude 
 health of a man without a care? What has set dark rings
 
 THE MINOR ET PROPERTY. 245 
 
 round those eyes, and deadened their rustic twinkle? Could 
 you have believed that there would ever be a wrinkle on that 
 brow, or that that colossus could ever have felt his brain 
 reel ! At last he is conscious of a heart ! I know the phases 
 of remorse, my dear cure, as you know those of repentance. 
 Those that have hitherto come under my observation were 
 awaiting punishment, or condemned to endure it, to settle 
 their score with the world ; they were resigned, or breathed 
 vengeance. But here we have remorse without expiation ; 
 remorse pure and simple, greedy of its prey, and rending it. 
 You are not yet aware," said the justice, stopping Minoret, 
 " that Mademoiselle Mirouet has just refused your son's 
 hand?" 
 
 "But," added the cure, "you may be easy; she will pre- 
 vent his duel with Monsieur de Portenduere." 
 
 "Ah ! my wife has been successful," said Minoret ; " I am 
 very glad. I was more dead than alive." 
 
 "You are indeed so altered that you are not like yourself," 
 said the justice. 
 
 Minoret looked from one to the other to see if the cure 
 had betrayed him, but the abbe preserved a fixity of counte- 
 nance, a calm melancholy, that at once greatly reassured the 
 guilty man. 
 
 "And the change is all the more surprising," the lawyer 
 went on, " because you ought to be perfectly happy. Why, 
 here you are, lord of Le Rouvre, to which you have added 
 Lcs Bordieres, all your farms, your mills, your meadows. You 
 have a hundred thousand francs a year in consols " 
 
 " I hold no consols," said Minoret, hastily. 
 
 " Bah ! " said the justice. '' Why, it is just the same with 
 that as with your son's love for Ursule. One day he will have 
 nothing to say to her, and the next asks her to marry him. 
 After having tried to kill Ursule with misery, you want to 
 have her for a daughter-in-law ! My dear sir, there is some- 
 thing at the bottom of all this ! "
 
 246 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 Minoret wanted to answer ; he tried to find words ; he could 
 only bring out 
 
 "You are funny, Mr. Justice of the Peace. Good-day, 
 gentlemen." 
 
 And with this reply he slowly turned down the Rue des 
 Bourgeois. 
 
 " He has stolen our poor Ursule's fortune. But how can 
 we prove it ? " 
 
 "God grant " said the cure. 
 
 "God has endowed us with a feeling which is now speaking 
 in that man," replied the justice. "But we call that pre- 
 sumptive evidence, and human justice requires something 
 more." 
 
 The Abbe Chaperon kept silent, as a priest. As happens 
 in such cases, he thought much more often than he wished of 
 the robbery Minoret had almost confessed, and of Savinien's 
 happiness, so evidently delayed by Ursule's lack of fortune; 
 for the old lady owned in secret to her spiritual director how 
 wrong she had been not to consent to her son's marriage dur- 
 ing the doctor's lifetime. 
 
 Next day, as he came down the altar steps after mass, he 
 was struck by an idea, which came upon him with the force 
 of a voice calling to him. He signed to Ursule to wait for him, 
 and went home with her without breakfasting. 
 
 "My dear child," said he, "I want to see the two volumes 
 in which your godfather, as you dream of him, says that he 
 placed the certificates and notes." 
 
 Ursule and the cure went upstairs to the library and took 
 down the third volume of the "Pandects." On opening it, 
 the curd observed, not without surprise, the mark left by some 
 papers on the pages, which, offering less resistance than the 
 boards of the binding, still showed the impression made by 
 the certificates ; and in the other volume it was easy to see the 
 readiness to open caused by the long pressure of a packet of 
 papers between two pages of the folio.
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 247 
 
 " Come in, come up ! " cried the abb6 to the justice, who 
 was just passing the house. 
 
 Bongrand entered the room at the very moment when the 
 priest was putting on his spectacles to read three numbers 
 written by the dead doctor's hand on the colored vellum- 
 paper guard placed inside the boards by the binder, and which 
 Ursule had just detected. 
 
 "What is the meaning of that? Our worthy friend was 
 too great a book-lover to spoil the guard of a binding," said 
 the Abbe Chaperon ; " here are three numbers written between 
 a first number, preceded by an M, and another preceded by 
 an U." 
 
 " What do you say ? " cried Bongrand. " Let me look at 
 that. Good God!" he exclaimed, "is not this enough to 
 open the eyes of an atheist, by proving to him the existence 
 of Providence ? Human justice is, I believe, the develop- 
 ment of a divine idea brooding over the universe." 
 
 He seized Ursule and kissed her on the forehead. 
 
 " Oh ! my child, you shall be happy rich and through 
 me!" 
 
 " What is it ? " said the cure. 
 
 " My dear monsieur ! " cried La Bougival, taking the tail 
 of the justice's blue coat, " let me embrace you for what 
 you say." 
 
 "But explain yourself," said the cure, "that we may not 
 rejoice vainly." 
 
 " If, in order to be rich, I must give anybody pain," said 
 Ursule, who had an inkling of a criminal trial, " I 
 
 "But think," said the lawyer, interrupting Ursule, "of 
 the happiness you will give our dear Savinien." 
 
 " But you are mad ! " said the cure. 
 
 " No, my dear cur<,' ' said Bongrand. " Listen. Certifi- 
 cates of consols are numbered in as many series as there are 
 letters of the alphabet, and each number bears the letter of 
 its series; but certificates to bearer cannot have any letter,
 
 248 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 since they are inscribed in no name. Hence, what you here 
 see proves that, on the day when the good man placed his 
 money in state securities, he made a note of the number of 
 his certificate for fifteen thousand francs a year under the 
 letter M for Minoret ; of the numbers of three certificates 
 to bearer ; and of that of Ursule Mirouet under the letter U, 
 number 23,534, which, as you see, immediately follows that 
 of the certificate for fifteen thousand francs. This coincidence 
 proves that these numbers are those of five certificates ac- 
 quired on the same day, and noted by the old man in case of 
 loss. I had advised him to put Ursule's money into certifi- 
 cates to bearer, and he must have invested his own money, 
 the money he intended for Ursule, and her little property all 
 on the same day. I am now going to Dionis to look at the 
 inventory. If the number of the certificate he left in his own 
 name is 23,533, letter M, we may be certain that he invested 
 through the same stockbroker, and on the same day : Firstly, 
 his own money in one lump sum ; secondly, his savings in 
 three sums, in certificates to bearer ; and, thirdly, his ward's 
 money ; the register of transfer will afford irrefutable proof. 
 Ah, Minoret the wisehead, I have gotten you ! Mum's the 
 word, my friends ! " 
 
 The justice left the cur6, Ursule, and La Bougival lost in 
 admiration of the ways by which God brings innocence to 
 happy issues. 
 
 "The finger of God is here ! " cried the Abbe Chaperon. 
 
 " Will they do him any hurt ? " asked Ursule. 
 
 " Oh, mademoiselle," cried La Bougival, "I would give 
 the rope to hang him with ! " 
 
 The justice was by this time at the house where Goupil was 
 already the successor designate of Dionis, and went into the 
 office with a careless air. 
 
 "I want a little information," said he to Goupil, "as to 
 the estate of Doctor Minoret." 
 
 " What is it ? " asked Goupil.
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 249 
 
 " Did the old man leave one or more certificates of invest- 
 ment in three per cents.? " 
 
 "He left fifteen thousand francs of income in three per 
 cents.," said Goupil, "in one certificate. I entered it my- 
 self." 
 
 "Then just look in the inventory," said the justice. 
 
 Goupil took down a box, turned over the contents, took 
 out the document in question, looked through it, and read, 
 "Item, one certificate there, read for yourself number 
 2 3.533 letter M." 
 
 " Be so kind as to hand over to me an extract of the par- 
 ticulars from the inventory before one o'clock. I will wait 
 for it." 
 
 " What can you want it for ? " asked Goupil. 
 
 "Do you wish to become notary?" retorted the justice, 
 looking sternly at the expectant successor to Dionis. 
 
 "I should think so ! " cried Goupil. " I am sure I have 
 eaten dirt enough to earn my title of ' Master.' I beg you 
 to understand, monsieur, that the wretched office clerk known 
 as Goupil has >no connection with ' Master ' Jean-Sebastien- 
 Marie Goupil, notary at Nemours, and husband to Made- 
 moiselle Massin. The two men do not know each other ; 
 they are not even alike in any particular. Do you not see 
 me?" 
 
 Monsieur Bongrand then remarked Goupil's dress. He 
 wore a white stock, a shirt of dazzling whiteness with ruby 
 studs, a red velvet waistcoat, a coat and trousers of fine black 
 cloth and Paris make. He had neat boots, and his hair, 
 carefully combed and smoothed, was elegantly scented. In 
 short, he seemed to have been metamorphosed ! 
 
 "You are, in fact, another man," said Bongrand. 
 
 " Morally as well as physically, monsieur. Wisdom comes 
 with work ; and money is the fountain of cleansing " 
 
 " Morally as well as physically ?" said the justice, settling 
 his spectacles.
 
 250 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 " Dear me, monsieur, is a man with a hundred thousand 
 crowns a year ever a democrat ? Regard me as a respectable 
 man, who has a taste for refinement, and for loving his wife," 
 he added, as Madame Goupil came in. "I am so much 
 altered," said he, " that I think my cousin Madame Cremiere 
 quite witty. I have taken her in hand ; and even her daugh- 
 ter no longer talks about pistons. Why, only yesterday, in 
 speaking of Monsieur Savinien's dog, she said he was making 
 a point. Well, I did not repeat her blunder, though it is a 
 funny one. I at once explained to her the difference be- 
 tween pointing, making a point, and standing at point. So, 
 you see, I am quite another man, and would not allow a 
 client to get into a mess." 
 
 ''Well, make haste then," said Bongrand. "Give me 
 that copy within an hour, and Goupil, the notary, will have 
 done something towards repairing the misdeeds of the clerk." 
 
 After borrowing from the town doctor his cab and horse, the 
 justice went to fetch the two accusing folios, Ursule's certifi- 
 cate, and the extract from the inventory ; armed with these, 
 he drove to Fontainebleau to the public prosecutor there. 
 Bongrand easily proved the abstraction of the three certifi- 
 cates to be the act of one or another of the heirs-at-law, and 
 then demonstrated Minoret's guilt. 
 
 "It accounts for his conduct," said the lawyer. 
 
 Then, as a measure of precaution, he stopped the transfer 
 of the three certificates by a minute to the treasury, he desired 
 Bongrand to ask what was the amount of interest due on the 
 three certificates, and ascertain if they had been sold. 
 
 While the justice went to do all this at Paris, the public 
 prosecutor wrote a polite note to Madame Minoret to beg her 
 to come to the assize town. Zelie, anxious about her son's 
 duel, dressed, had her own carriage out, and drove post-haste 
 to Fontainebleau. The public prosecutor's scheme was simple 
 but formidable. By separating the husband and wife, he felt 
 sure of learning the truth as a result of the terrors of the law.
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 251 
 
 Zelie found the magistrate in his private room, and was 
 absolutely thunderstruck by this unceremonious speech : 
 
 " Madame, I do not imagine that you are an accomplice in 
 a robbery made at the time of Doctor Minoret's death ; jus- 
 tice is now on the traces, and you will save your husband 
 from appearing at the bar by making a full confession of all 
 you know about it. The punishment that threatens your 
 husband is not, indeed, all you have to fear ; you must try to 
 save your son from degradation, and not cut his throat. In 
 a few minutes it will be too late ; the gendarmes are already 
 on horseback, and the warrant for Minoret's apprehension 
 will be sent to Nemours." 
 
 Zelie fainted. When she came to herself, she confessed 
 everything. After proving easily to this woman that she was 
 an accomplice, the magistrate told her that, to avoid ruining 
 her husband and son, he would proceed cautiously. 
 
 " You have had to deal with a man and not with a judge," 
 said he. " There is no charge on the part of the victim, nor 
 has the theft been made public ; but your husband has com- 
 mitted dreadful crimes, madame, which are usually tried be- 
 fore a tribunal less accommodating than I am.. In the present 
 circumstances of the case you will be obliged to remain a 
 prisoner. Oh, in my house, and on parole," he added, see- 
 ing Zelie ready to faint again. " Remember that my strict 
 duty would be to demand a warrant for your imprisonment, 
 and institute an inquiry ; however, I am acting at present as 
 the legal guardian of Mademoiselle Ursule Mirouet, and in 
 her interests, wisely understood, a compromise will be advis- 
 able." 
 
 "Ah ! " said Zelie. 
 
 " Write as follows to your husband." And he dictated this 
 letter to Zelie, who wrote it at his desk, with preposterously 
 bad spelling : 
 
 " Mv DEAR : I am arrested, and I have told all. Give
 
 252 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 up the certificates left by our uncle to Monsieur de Porten- 
 duere by virtue of the will you burned, for monsieur the public 
 prosecutor has stopped them at the treasury." 
 
 " By this means you will prevent his making denials, which 
 would be his ruin," said the lawyer, smiling at the spelling. 
 " We will see about having the restitution carried out in a 
 proper manner. My wife will make your stay at my house as 
 little unpleasant as possible ; I advise you to say nothing to 
 any one, and not to show your distress." 
 
 As soon as his deputy's mother had confessed and been 
 placed in safety, the magistrate sent for Desire, told him 
 point by point the story of the robbery committed by his 
 father, secretly to Ursule's detriment, evidently to that of the 
 co-heirs, and showed him the letter his mother had written. 
 Desire immediately begged to be sent to Nemours, to see 
 that his father made restitution. 
 
 "The whole case is very serious," said his chief. "The 
 will having been destroyed, if the thing becomes known, the 
 co-heirs, Massin and Cremiere, your relations, may intervene. 
 I have now sufficient evidence against your father. I give 
 your mother back to you ; this little ceremony has sufficiently 
 enlightened her as to her duty. In her eyes I shall seem 
 to have yielded to your entreaties in releasing her. Go to 
 Nemours with her, and guide all these difficulties to a happy 
 issue. Fear nobody. Monsieur Bongrand loves Mademoiselle 
 Mirouet too well to commit any indiscretion." 
 
 Zelie and Desire set out at once for Nemours. Three hours 
 after his deputy's departure, the public prosecutor received by 
 express messenger the following letter, of which the spelling 
 is corrected, not to make an unhappy man ridiculous : 
 
 " To the Public Prosecutor of the Court of Assizes at 
 Fontainebleau. 
 
 "MONSIEUR: God has not been so merciful to us as you
 
 THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 253 
 
 have been, and an irreparable misfortune has fallen on us. 
 On arriving at the bridge of Nemours, a strap came unfast- 
 ened. My wife was at the back of the chaise without a ser- 
 vant ; the horses smelt the stable. My son, afraid of their 
 restiveness, would not let the coachman get down, and got 
 out himself to buckle it up. At the moment when he turned 
 to get up again by his mother, the horses started off; D6sir6 
 did not make way quickly enough by squeezing back against 
 the parapet, the iron step cut his legs ; he fell, and the hind 
 wheel went over his body. The messenger riding express to 
 Paris to fetch the first surgeons will carry you this letter, 
 which my son, in the midst of his suffering, desires me to 
 write, to express to you our entire submission to your de- 
 cisions in the business which was bringing him home. 
 
 " I shall be grateful to you till my latest breath for the 
 way in which you have proceeded, and will justify your 
 confidence. 
 
 " FRAN9OIS MlNORET." 
 
 This terrible event upset the whole town of Nemours. The 
 excited crowd that gathered round Minoret's gate showed 
 Savinien that his revenge had been taken in hand by one 
 more powerful than he. The young man went at once to 
 Ursule, and the young girl and the cur6 alike felt more horror 
 than surprise. The next day, after the first treatment, when 
 the Paris doctors and surgeons had given their advice, which 
 was unanimous as to the necessity for amputating both legs, 
 Minoret, pale, dejected, and heart-broken, came, accompanied 
 by the cure, to Ursule' s house, where he found Bongrand and 
 Savinien. 
 
 " Mademoiselle," said he, " I am guilty towards you ; but 
 though all the ill I have done cannot be entirely repaired, 
 some I can expiate. My wife and I have made up our minds 
 to give you, as an absolute possession, our estate of Le Rouvre 
 if we preserve our son as well as if we have the terrible grief
 
 254 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 of losing him." As he ceased speaking, the man melted into 
 tears. 
 
 "I may assure you, my dear Ursule," said the cure, "that 
 you may and ought to accept a part of this gift." 
 
 "Do you forgive us?" said the colossus humbly, and 
 kneeling at the feet of the astonished girl. " In a few hours 
 the operation is to be performed by the first surgeon of the 
 Hotel- Dieu ; but I put no trust in human science ; I believe 
 in the omnipotence of God ! If you forgive me, if you will 
 go and ask God to preserve us our son, he will have strength 
 to endure this torment, and we shall have the happiness of 
 keeping him, I am sure of it." 
 
 " Let us all go to the church ! " said Ursule, rising. She 
 was no sooner on her feet than she gave a piercing shriek, fell 
 back in her chair, and fainted away. When she recovered 
 her senses, she saw her friends, with the exception of Minoret, 
 who had rushed off to find a doctor, all with their eyes fixed 
 on her, anxiously expecting her to speak a word. That word 
 filled every heart with horror. 
 
 " I saw my godfather at the door," she said. " He signed 
 to me that there was no hope." 
 
 And, in fact, the day after the operation, Desire died, 
 carried off by fever and the revulsion of the humors which 
 follows on such operations. Madame Minoret, whose heart 
 held no sentiment but that of motherhood, went mad after 
 her son's funeral, and was taken by her husband to the care 
 of Doctor Blanche for medical treatment, where she died in 
 January, 1841. 
 
 Three months after these events, in January, 1837, Ursule 
 married Savinien, with Madame de Portenduere's consent. 
 Minoret intervened at the signing of the contract to settle on 
 Mademoiselle Mirouet, by deed of gift, his estate of Le 
 Rouvre, and twenty-eight thousand francs a year in consols, 
 reserving of all his fortune only his uncle's house and six 
 thousand francs a year. He has become the most charitable
 
 THE MINORET PROPERTY. 255 
 
 and pious man in Nemours, churchwarden of the parish, and 
 the providence of the unfortunate. 
 
 " The poor have taken the place of my child," he says. 
 
 If you have ever observed by the roadside, in districts 
 where the oak is lopped low, some old tree, bleached, and, as 
 it would seem, blasted, but still throwing out shoots, its sides 
 riven, crying out for the axe, you will have an idea of the old 
 postmaster, white-haired, bent, and lean, in whom the old 
 folks of the district can trace nothing of the happy lout whom 
 we saw watching for his son at the beginning of this tale ; he 
 no longer takes snuff in the same way even ; he bears some 
 burden besides his body. In short, it is perceptible in every- 
 thing that the hand of God has been heavily laid on that form 
 to make it a terrible example. After hating his uncle's ward 
 so bitterly, this old man, like Doctor Minoret himself, has so 
 set his affections on Ursule, that he is the self-constituted 
 steward of her property at Nemours. 
 
 Monsieur and Madame de Portenduere spend five months 
 of the year in Paris, where they have purchased a splendid 
 house in the Faubourg St. -Germain. After bestowing her 
 house at Nemours on the Sisters of Charity to be used as a 
 free school, Madame de Portenduere the elder went to live at 
 Le Rouvre, where La Bougival is the head gatekeeper. Cab- 
 irolle's father, formerly the guard of the " Dueler," a man 
 of sixty, has married La Bougival, who owns twelve hundred 
 francs a year in consols, besides the comfortable profits of her 
 place. Cabirolle's son is Monsieur de Portenduere's coachman. 
 
 When, in the Champs-Elyse'es, you see one of those neat 
 little low carriages, known as escargots (or snail-shells), drive 
 past, and admire a pretty, fair woman leaning lightly against a 
 young man, her face surrounded by a myriad of curls, like 
 light foliage, and eyes like luminous periwinkle flowers, full 
 of love if you should feel the sting of envious wishes, 
 remember that this handsome couple, the favorites of God, 
 have paid in advance their tribute to the woes of life. These
 
 256 URSULE MIROUET. 
 
 married lovers will probably be the Vicomte de Portenduere 
 and his wife. There are not two such couples in Paris. 
 
 "It is the prettiest happiness I ever saw," said the Com- 
 tesse d'Estorade, not long since. 
 
 So give those happy children your blessing instead of envy- 
 ing them, and try to find an Ursule Mirouet a young girl 
 brought up by three old men, and that best of mothers 
 adversity. 
 
 Goupil, who is helpful to everybody, and justly regarded as 
 the wittiest man in Nemours, is esteemed by the little town ; 
 but he is punished in his children, who are hideous, rickety, 
 and hydrocephalous. His predecessor, Dionis, flourishes in 
 the Chamber of Deputies, of which he is one of the greatest 
 ornaments, to the great satisfaction of the King of the 
 French, who sees Madame Dionis at every state ball. Madame 
 Dionis relates to all the town of Nemours the particulars of 
 her reception at the Tuileries, and the grandeurs of the King's 
 court. She is queen at Nemours, by virtue of a king who is 
 certainly popular in that sense. 
 
 Bongrand is president of the court of justice at Melun, and 
 his son is on the high road to becoming a very respectable 
 public prosecutor. 
 
 Madame Cremiere still says the funniest things in the world. 
 She writes tambour tambourg, and says it is because her pen 
 splutters. On the eve of her daughter's marriage, she told 
 her, in concluding her advice to her, that a wife ought to be 
 the toiling caterpillar of her home, and keep a sphinx's eye 
 on everything. Indeed, Goupil is making a collection of his 
 cousin's absurd blunders, a Cremieriana, 
 
 " We have had the grief of losing our good Abbe Chaperon 
 this winter," says the Vicomtesse de Portenduere, who nursed 
 him during his illness. All the district attended his funeral. 
 Nemours is fortunate, for this saintly man's successor is the 
 venerable Curd de Saint-Lange. 
 
 PARIS, June-July, 1841.
 
 MADAME FIRMIANI. 
 
 (To my dear Alexandre de Bcrny,from his old 
 friend De Balzac.} 
 
 MANY tales, rich in situations, or made dramatic by the 
 endless sport of chance, carry their plot in themselves, and 
 can be related artistically or simply by any lips without the 
 smallest loss of the beauty of the subject ; but there are some 
 incidents of human life to which only the accents of the heart 
 can give life ; there are certain anatomical details, so to 
 speak, of which the delicacy appears only under the most 
 skillful infusions of mind. Again, there are portraits which 
 demand a soul, and are nothing without the more ethereal 
 features of the responsive countenance. Finally, there are 
 certain things which we know not how to say, or to depict, 
 without I know not what unconceived harmonies that are 
 under the influence of a day or an hour, of a happy conjunc- 
 tion of celestial signs, or of some occult moral predisposition. 
 
 Such revelations as these are absolutely required for the 
 telling of this simple story, in which I would fain interest 
 some of those naturally melancholy and pensive souls which 
 are fed on bland emotions. If the writer, like a surgeon by 
 the side of a dying friend, has become imbued with a sort of 
 respect for the subject he is handling, why should not the 
 reader share this inexplicable feeling? Is it so difficult to 
 throw one's self into that vague, nervous melancholy which 
 sheds gray hues on all our surroundings, which is half an ill- 
 ness, though its languid suffering is sometimes a pleasure ? 
 
 If you are thinking by chance of the dear friends you have 
 
 lost ; if you are alone, and it is night, or the day is dying, 
 
 read this narrative ; otherwise, throw the book aside, here. 
 
 If you have never buried some kind aunt, an invalid or poor, 
 
 17 (257)
 
 258 MADAME FlRMIANL 
 
 you will not understand these pages. To some, they will be 
 odorous as of musk ; to others, they will be as colorless, as 
 strictly virtuous as those of Florian. In short, the reader 
 must have known the luxury of tears ; must have felt the 
 wordless grief of a memory that drifts lightly by, bearing a 
 shade that is dear but remote ; he must possess some of those 
 remembrances that make us at the same time regret those 
 whom the earth has swallowed, and smile over vanished joys. 
 And now the author would have you believe that for all the 
 wealth of England he would not extort from poetry even one 
 of her fictions to add grace to this narrative. This is a true 
 story, on which you may pour out the treasure of your sensi- 
 bilities, if you have any. 
 
 In these days our language has as many dialects as there are 
 men in the great human family. And it is a really curious 
 and interesting thing to listen to the different views or ver- 
 sions of one and the same thing, or event, as given by the 
 various species which make up the monograph of the Parisian 
 the Parisian being taken as a generic term. Thus you 
 might ask a man of the matter-of-fact type, " Do you know 
 Madame Firmiani?" and this man would interpret Madame 
 Firmiani by such an inventory as this : " A large house in 
 the Rue du Bac, rooms handsomely furnished, fine pictures, 
 a hundred thousand francs a year in good securities, and a 
 husband who was formerly receiver-general in the department 
 of Montenotte." Having thus spoken, your matter-of-fact 
 man stout and roundabout, almost always dressed in black 
 draws up his lower lip, so as to cover the upper lip, and nods 
 his head, as much as to say, "Very respectable people, there 
 is nothing to be said against them." Ask him no more. 
 Your matter-of-fact people state everything in figures, divi- 
 dends, or real estate a great word in their dictionary. 
 
 Turn to your right, go and question that young man, who 
 belongs to the lounger species, and repeat your inquiry.
 
 MADAME FIRMIANI. 259 
 
 "Madame Firmiani?" says he. "Yes, yes, I know her 
 very well. I go to her evenings. She receives on Wednes- 
 days; a very good house to know." Madame Firmiani is 
 already metamorphosed into a house. The house is not a 
 mere mass of stones architecturally put together; no, this 
 word, in the language of the lounger, has no equivalent. 
 And here your lounger, a dry-looking man, with a pleasant 
 smile, saying clever nothings, but always with more acquired 
 wit than natural wit, bends to your ear, and says with a know- 
 ing air: "I never saw Monsieur Firmiani. His social posi- 
 tion consists in managing estates in Italy. But Madame 
 Firmiani is French, and spends her income as a Parisian 
 should. She gives excellent tea ! It is one of the few houses 
 where you really can amuse yourself, and where everything 
 they give you is exquisite. It is very difficult to get intro- 
 duced, and the best society is to be seen in her drawing- 
 rooms." Then the lounger emphasizes his last words by 
 gravely taking a pinch of snuff; he applies it to his nose in 
 little dabs, and seems to be saying: " I go to the house, but 
 do not count on my introducing you." 
 
 To folks of this type Madame Firmiani keeps a sort of inn 
 without a sign. 
 
 " Why on earth can you want to go to Madame Firmiani's? 
 It is as dull there as it is at court. Of what use are brains if 
 they do not keep you out of such drawing-rooms, where, with 
 poetry such as is now current, you hear the most trivial little 
 ballad just hatched out." 
 
 You have asked one of your friends who comes under the 
 class of petty autocrats men who would like to have the 
 universe under lock and key, and have nothing done without 
 their leave. They are miserable at other people's enjoyment, 
 can forgive nothing but vice, wrong-doing, and infirmities, 
 and want nothing but proteges. Aristocrats by taste, they are 
 republicans out of spite, simply to discover many inferiors 
 among their equals.
 
 260 MADAME FIRMIANL 
 
 " Oh, Madame Firmiani, my dear fellow, is one of those 
 adorable women whom nature feels to be a sufficient excuse 
 for all the ugly ones she has created by mistake ; she is be- 
 witching, she is kind ! I should like to be in power to be 
 king, to have millions of money, solely " (and three words are 
 whispered in your ear). " Shall I introduce you to her? " 
 
 This young man is a schoolboy, known for his audacious 
 bearing among men and his extreme shyness in private. 
 
 " Madame Firmiani ! " cries another, twirling his cane in 
 the air. " I will tell you what I think of her. She is a 
 woman of between thirty and thirty-five, face a little passce, 
 fine eyes, a flat figure, a worn contralto voice, dresses a great 
 deal, rouges a little, manners charming; in short, my dear 
 fellow, the remains of a pretty woman which are still worthy 
 of a passion." 
 
 This verdict is pronounced by a specimen of the genus cox- 
 comb, who, having just breakfasted, does not weigh his words, 
 and is going out riding. At such moments a coxcomb is piti- 
 less. 
 
 " She has a collection of magnificent pictures in her house. 
 Go and see her," says another; " nothing can be finer." 
 
 You have come upon the species amateur. This individual 
 quits you to go to Perignon's, or to Tripet's. To him Madame 
 Firmiani is a number of painted canvases. 
 
 A WIFE. "Madame Firmiani? I will not have you go 
 there." This phrase is the most suggestive view of all. 
 Madame Firmiani. A dangerous woman ! A siren ! She 
 dresses well, has good taste ; she spoils the night's rest of 
 every wife. The speaker is of the species shrew. 
 
 AN ATTACHE TO AN EMBASSY. " Madame Firmiani ? From 
 Antwerp, is she not? I saw that woman, very handsome, 
 about ten years ago. She was then at Rome." 
 
 Men of the order of attaches have a mania for utterances a 
 la Talleyrand, their wit is often so subtle that their perception 
 is imperceptible. They are like those billiard players who
 
 MADAME FIRMIANI. 261 
 
 miss the balls with infinite skill. These men are not generally 
 great talkers ; but when they talk it is of nothing less than 
 Spain, Vienna, Italy, or Saint Petersburg. The names of 
 countries act on them like springs; you press them and the 
 machinery plays all its tunes. 
 
 " Does not that Madame Firmiani see a great deal of the 
 Faubourg Saint-Germain?" This is asked by a person who 
 desires claims to distinction. She adds a de to everybody's 
 name to Monsieur Dupin, senior, to Monsieur Lafayette; 
 she flings it right and left and spatters people with it. She 
 spends her life in anxieties as to what is correct ; but, for her 
 sins, she lives in the unfashionable Marais, and her husband 
 was an attorney but an attorney in the King's court. 
 
 " Madame Firmiani, monsieur? I do not know her." This 
 man is of the class of dukes. He recognizes no woman who 
 has not been presented. Excuse him ; he was created duke 
 by Napoleon. 
 
 " Madame Firmiani? Was she not a singer at the Italian 
 opera house?" A man of the genus simpleton. The indi- 
 viduals of this genus must have an answer to everything. 
 They would rather speak calumnies than be silent. 
 
 Two OLD LADIES (the wives of retired lawyers), THE FIRST 
 (she has a cap with bows of ribbon, her face is wrinkled, her 
 nose sharp ; she holds a prayer-book, and her voice is harsh). 
 "What was her maiden name this Madame Firmiani? " 
 
 THE SECOND (she has a little red face like a lady-apple, 
 and a gentle voice). " She was a Cadignan, my dear, niece 
 of the old Prince de Cadignan, and cousin, consequently, to 
 the Due de Maufrigneuse. " 
 
 Madame Firmiani then is a Cadignan. Bereft of virtues, 
 fortune, and youth, she would still be a Cadignan ; that, like 
 a prejudice, is always rich and living. 
 
 AN ECCENTRIC. "My dear fellow, I never saw any clogs 
 in her anteroom ; you may go to her house without com- 
 promising yourself, and play there without hesitation ; for if
 
 262 MADAME FTRMIANL 
 
 there should be any rogues, they will be people of quality, 
 consequently there is no quarreling." 
 
 AN OLD MAN OF THE SPECIES OBSERVER. " You go to 
 
 Madame Firmiani's, my dear fellow, and you find a hand- 
 some woman lounging indolently by the fire. She will 
 scarcely move from her chair ; she rises only to greet women, 
 or ambassadors, or dukes people of importance. She is very 
 .gracious, she charms you, she talks well, and likes to talk of 
 everything. She bears every indication of a passionate soul, 
 but she is credited with too many adorers to have a lover. If 
 suspicion rested on only two or three intimate visitors, we 
 might know which was her gallant slave. But she is all 
 mystery ; she is married, and we have never seen her hus- 
 band ; Monsieur Firmiani is purely a creature of fancy, like 
 the third horse we are made to pay for when traveling post, 
 and which we never see ; madame, if you believe the profes- 
 sionals, has the finest contralto voice in Europe, and has not 
 sung three times since she came to Paris ; she receives num- 
 bers of people, and goes nowhere." 
 
 The observer speaks as an oracle. His words, his anec- 
 dotes, his quotations must all be accepted as truth, or you risk 
 being taken for a man without knowledge of the world, with- 
 out capabilities. He will slander you lightly in twenty draw- 
 ing-rooms, where he is as essential as the first piece in the 
 bill pieces so often played to the benches, but which once 
 upon a time were successful. The observer is a man of forty, 
 never dines at home, and professes not to be dangerous to 
 women ; he wears powder and a maroon-colored coat ; he 
 can always have a seat in various boxes at the Theatre des 
 Bouffons. He is sometimes mistaken for a parasite, but he 
 has held too high positions to be suspected of sponging, and, 
 indeed, possesses an estate, in a department of which the 
 name has never leaked out. 
 
 " Madame Firmiani ? Why, my dear boy, she was a mis- 
 tress of Murat's." This gentleman is a contradictory. They
 
 MADAME FIKMIANI. 263 
 
 supply the errata to every memory, rectify every fact, bet you 
 a hundred to one, are cock-sure of everything. You catch 
 them out in a single evening in flagrant delictions of ubiquity. 
 They assert that they were in Paris at the time of Mallet's 
 conspiracy, forgetting that half an hour before they had 
 crossed the Beresina. The contradictories are almost all 
 members of the Legion of Honor ; they talk very loud, have 
 receding foreheads, and play high. 
 
 "Madame Firmiani, a hundred thousand francs a year? 
 Are you mad ? Really some people scatter thousands a year 
 with the liberality of authors, to whom it costs nothing to 
 give their heroines handsome fortunes. But Madame Firmiani 
 is a flirt who ruined a young fellow the other day, and hin- 
 dered him from making a very good marriage. If she were 
 not handsome, she would be penniless." 
 
 This speaker you recognize ; he is one of the envious, and 
 we will not sketch his least feature. The species is as 
 well known as that of the domestic cat. How is the per- 
 petuity of envy to be explained ! A vice which is wholly 
 unprofitable ! 
 
 People of fashion, literary people, very good people, and 
 people of every kind were, in the month of January, 1824, 
 giving out so many different opinions on Madame Firmiani 
 that it would be tiresome to report them all. We have only 
 aimed at showing that a man wishing to know her, without 
 choosing, or being able, to go to her house, would have been 
 equally justified in the belief that she was a widow or a wife 
 silly or witty, virtuous or immoral, rich or poor, gentle or 
 devoid of soul, handsome or ugly; in fact, there were as 
 many Mesdames Firmiani as there are varieties in social life, 
 or sects in the Catholic Church. Frightful thought ! We 
 are all like lithographed plates, of which an endless num- 
 ber of copies are taken off by slander. These copies 
 resemble or differ from the original by touches so impercepti- 
 bly slight that, but for the calumnies of our friends and the
 
 264 MADAME FIRMIANI. 
 
 witticisms of newspapers, reputation would depend on the 
 balance struck by each hearer between the limping truth and 
 the lies to which Parisian wit lends wings. 
 
 Madame Firmiani, like many other women of dignity and 
 noble pride, who close their hearts as a sanctuary and scorn 
 the world, might have been very hardly judged by Monsieur 
 de Bourbonne, an old gentleman of fortune, who had thought 
 a good deal about her during the past winter. As it hap- 
 pened, this gentleman belonged to the Provincial land-owner 
 class, folks who are accustomed to inquire into everything, 
 and to make bargains with peasants. In this business a man 
 grows keen-witted in spite of himself, as a soldier, in the 
 long run, acquires the courage of routine. This inquirer, 
 a native of Touraine, and not easily satisfied by the Paris 
 dialects, was a very honorable gentleman who rejoiced in a 
 nephew, his sole heir, for whom he planted his poplars. 
 Their more than natural affection gave rise to much evil- 
 speaking, which individuals of the various species of Tour- 
 angeau formulated with much mother wit ; but it would be 
 useless to record it ; it would pale before that of Parisian 
 tongues. When a man can think of his heir without dis- 
 pleasure, as he sees fine rows of poplars improving every day, 
 his affection increases with each spadeful of earth he turns at 
 the foot of his trees. Though such phenomena of sensibility 
 may be uncommon, they still are to be met with in Touraine. 
 
 This much-loved nephew, whose name was Octave de Camps, 
 was descended from the famous Abbe de Camps, so well known 
 to the learned, or to the bibliomaniacs, which is not the same 
 thing. 
 
 Provincial folks have a disagreeable habit of regarding 
 young men who sell their reversions with a sort of respectable 
 horror. This Gothic prejudice is bad for speculation, which 
 the government has hitherto found it necessary to encourage. 
 Now, without consulting his uncle, Octave had on a sudden 
 disposed of an estate in favor of the speculative builders. The
 
 MADAME FIRMIANI. 265 
 
 chateau of Villaines would have been demolished but for the 
 offers made by his old uncle to the representatives of the de- 
 molishing fraternity. To add to the testator's wrath, a friend 
 of Octave's, a distant relation, one of those cousins with small 
 wealth and great cunning, who lead their prudent neighbors 
 to say, "I should not like to go to law with him!" had 
 called, by chance, on Monsieur de Bourbonne and informed 
 him that his nephew was ruined. Monsieur Octave de Camps, 
 after dissipating his fortune for a certain Madame Firmiani, 
 and not daring to confess his sins, had been reduced to giving 
 lessons in mathematics, pending his coming into his uncle's 
 leavings. This distant cousin a sort of Charles Moor had 
 not been ashamed of giving this disastrous news to the old 
 country gentleman at the hour when, sitting before his spacious 
 hearth, he was digesting a copious provincial dinner. But 
 would-be legatees do not get rid of an uncle so easily as they 
 could wish. This uncle, thanks to his obstinacy, refusing to 
 believe the distant cousin, came out victorious over the in- 
 digestion brought on by the biography of his nephew. Some 
 blows fall on the heart, others on the brain ; the blow struck 
 by the distant cousin fell on the stomach, and produced little 
 effect, as the good man had a strong one. 
 
 Monsieur de Bourbonne, as a worthy disciple of Saint 
 Thomas, came to Paris without telling Octave, and tried to 
 get information as to his heir's insolvency. The old gentle- 
 man, who had friends in the Faubourg Saint-Germain the 
 Listomeres, the Lenoncourts, and the Vandenesses heard so 
 much slander, so much that was true, and so much that was 
 false concerning Madame Firmiani, that he determined to call 
 on her, under the name of Monsieur de Rouxellay, the name 
 of his place. The prudent old man took care, in going to 
 study Octave's mistress as she was said to be to choose an 
 evening when he knew that the young man was engaged on 
 work to be well paid for ; for Madame Firmiani was always at 
 home to her young friend, a circumstance that no one could
 
 266 MADAME FIRMIANI. 
 
 account for. As to Octave's ruin, that, unfortunately, was 
 no fiction. 
 
 Monsieur de Rouxellay was not at all like a stage uncle. 
 As an old musketeer, a man of the best society, who had his 
 successes in his day, he knew how to introduce himself with a 
 courtly air, remembered the polished manners of the past, had 
 a pretty wit, and understood almost all the role of nobility. 
 Though he loved the Bourbons with noble frankness, believed 
 in God as gentlemen believe, and read only the Quotidiennc, 
 he was by no means so ridiculous as the Liberals of his depart- 
 ment would have wished. He could hold his own with men 
 about the court, so long as he was not expected to talk of 
 " Moses," or the play, or romanticism, or local color, or rail- 
 ways. He had not gotten beyond Monsieur de Voltaire, Mon- 
 sieur le Comte de Buffon, Peyronnet, and the Chevalier 
 Gluck, the Queen's private musician. 
 
 "Madame," said he to the Marquise de Listomere, to 
 whom he had given his arm to go into Madame Firmiani's 
 room, " if this woman is my nephew's mistress, I pity her. 
 How can she bear to live in the midst of luxury and know 
 that he is in a garret ? Has she no soul ? Octave is a fool to 
 have invested the price of the estate of Villaines in the heart 
 of a " 
 
 Monsieur de Bourbonne was of a fossil species, and spoke 
 only the language of a past day. 
 
 " But suppose he had lost it at play? " 
 
 " Well, madame, he would have had the pleasure of 
 playing." 
 
 " You think he has had no pleasure for his money ? Look, 
 here is Madame Finniani." 
 
 The old uncle's brightest memories paled at the sight of 
 his nephew's supposed mistress. His anger died in a polite 
 speech wrung from him by the presence of Madame Firmiani. 
 By one of those chances which come only to pretty women, 
 it was a moment when all her beauties shone with particular
 
 MADAME FIRMIANI. 267 
 
 brilliancy, the result, perhaps, of the glitter of wax-lights, of 
 an exquisitely simple dress, of an indefinable reflection from 
 the elegance in which she lived and moved. Only long study 
 of the petty revolutions of an evening party in a Paris salon 
 can enable one to appreciate the imperceptible shades that 
 can tinge and change a woman's face. There are moments 
 when, pleased with her dress, feeling herself brilliant, happy 
 at being admired and seeing herself the queen of a room full 
 of remarkable men, all smiling at her, a Parisian is conscious 
 of her beauty and grace ; she grows the lovelier by all the 
 looks she meets; they give her animation, but their mute 
 homage is transmitted by subtle glances to the man she loves. 
 In such a moment a woman is invested, as it were, with super- 
 natural power, and becomes a witch, an unconscious coquette ; 
 she involuntarily inspires the passion which is a secret intoxi- 
 cation to herself, she has smiles and looks that are fascinating. 
 If this excitement which comes from the soul lends attractive- 
 ness even to ugly women, with what splendor does it not 
 clothe a naturally elegant creature, finely made, fair, fresh, 
 bright-eyed, and, above all, dressed with such taste as artists 
 and even her most spiteful rivals must admit. 
 
 Have you ever met, for your happiness, some woman whose 
 harmonious tones give to her speech the charm that is no less 
 conspicuous in her manners, who knows how to talk and to 
 be silent, who cares for you with delicate feeling, whose words 
 are happily chosen and her language pure ? Her banter flat- 
 ters you, her criticism does not sting ; she neither preaches 
 nor disputes, but is interested in leading a discussion, and 
 stops it at the right moment. Her manner is friendly and 
 gay, her politeness is unforced, her eagerness to please is not 
 servile ; she reduces respect to a mere gentle shade ; she never 
 tires you, and leaves you satisfied with her and yourself. You 
 will see her gracious presence stamped on the things she col- 
 lects about her. In her home everything charms the eye, and 
 you breathe, as it seems, your native air. This woman is
 
 268 MADAME FIRMIANI. 
 
 quite natural. You never feel an effort, she flaunts nothing, 
 her feelings are expressed with simplicity because they are 
 genuine. Though candid, she never wounds the most sensi- 
 tive pride ; she accepts men as God made them, pitying the 
 vicious, forgiving defects and absurdities, sympathizing with 
 every age, and vexed with nothing because she has the tact to 
 forefend everything. At once tender and lively, she first 
 constrains and then consoles you. You love her so truly that, 
 if this angel does wrong, you are ready to justify her. Then 
 you know Madame Firmiani. 
 
 By the time old Bourbonne had talked with this woman, for 
 a quarter of an hour, sitting by her side, his nephew was ab- 
 solved. He understood that, true or false, Octave's connection 
 with Madame Firmiani no doubt covered some mystery. Re- 
 turning to the illusions of his youth, and judging of Madame 
 Firmiani's heart by her beauty, the old gentleman thought 
 that a woman so sure of her dignity as she seemed, was inca- 
 pable of a base action. Her black eyes spoke of so much 
 peace of mind, the lines of her face were so noble, the forms 
 so pure, and the passion of which she was accused seemed to 
 weigh so little on her heart, that, as he admired all the pledges 
 given to love and to virtue by that adorable countenance, the 
 old man said to himself, " My nephew has committed some 
 folly." 
 
 Madame Firmiani owned to twenty-five. But the matter- 
 of-facts could prove that, having been married in 1813 at the 
 age of sixteen, she must be at least eight-and-twenty in 1825. 
 Nevertheless the same persons declared that she had never at 
 any period of her life been so desirable, so perfectly a woman. 
 She had no children, and had never had any; the hypothet- 
 ical Firmiani, a respectable man of forty in 1813, had, it was 
 said, only his name and fortune to offer her. So Madame 
 Firmiani had come to the age when a Parisian best under- 
 stands what passion is, and perhaps longs for it innocently in 
 her unemployed hours: she had everything that the world can
 
 MADAME FIRMlANt. 260 
 
 sell, or lend, or give. The attache's declared she knew every- 
 thing ; the contradictories said she had yet many things to 
 learn ; the observers noticed that her hands were very white, 
 her foot very small, her movements a little too undulating ; 
 but men of every species envied or disputed Octave's good 
 fortune, agreeing that she was the most aristocratic beauty in 
 Paris. 
 
 Still young, rich, a perfect musician, witty, exquisite; 
 welcomed, for the sake of the Cadignans, to whom she was 
 related through her mother, by the Princess de Blamont- 
 Chauvry, the oracle of the aristocratic quarter ; beloved by 
 her rivals the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse her cousin, the 
 Marquise d'Espard, and Madame de Macumer, she flattered 
 every vanity which feeds or excites love. And, indeed, she 
 was the object of too many desires not to be the victim of 
 fashionable detraction and those delightful calumnies which 
 are wittily hinted behind a fan or in a whispered aside. 
 Hence the remarks with which this story opened were neces- 
 sary to mark the contrast between the real Firmiani and the 
 Firmiani known to the world. Though some women forgave 
 her for being happy, others could not overlook her respecta- 
 bility ; now there is nothing so terrible, especially in Paris, 
 as suspicion without foundation ; it is impossible to kill it. 
 
 This sketch of a personality so admirable by nature can 
 only 'give a feeble idea of it ; it would need the brush of an 
 Ingres to represent the dignity of the brow, the mass of fine 
 hair, the majesty of the eyes, all the thoughts betrayed by the 
 varying hues of the complexion. There was something of 
 everything in this woman ; poets could see in her both Joan 
 of Arc and Agnes Sorel ; but there was also the unknown 
 woman the soul hidden behind this deceptive mask the 
 soul of Eve, the wealth of evil and treasures of goodness, 
 wrong and resignation, crime and self-sacrifice the Dofia 
 Julia and Haidee of Byron's " Don Juan." 
 
 The old soldier very boldly remained till the last in Madame
 
 270 MADAME FIRMIANI. 
 
 Firmiani's drawing-room ; she found him quietly seated in an 
 armchair, and staying with the pertinacity of a fly that must 
 be killed to be gotten rid of. The clock marked two in the 
 morning. 
 
 " Madame," said the old gentleman, just as Madame Fir- 
 miani rose in the hope of making her guest understand that it 
 was her pleasure that he should go. " Madame, I am Monsieur 
 Octave de Camps' uncle." 
 
 Madame Firmiani at once sat down again, and her agitation 
 was evident. In spite of his perspicacity, the planter of 
 poplars could not make up his mind whether shame or pleasure 
 made her turn pale. There are pleasures which do not exist 
 without a little coy bashfulness delightful emotions which 
 the chastest soul would fain keep behind a veil. The more 
 sensitive a woman is, the more she lives to conceal her soul's 
 greatest joys. Many women, incomprehensible in their 
 exquisite caprices, at times long to hear a name spoken by all 
 the world, while they sometimes would sooner bury it in their 
 hearts. Old Bourbonne did not read Madame Firmiani's 
 agitation quite in this light ; but forgive him ; the country 
 gentleman was suspicious. 
 
 "Indeed, monsieur?" said Madame Firmiani, with one 
 of those clear and piercing looks in which we men can never 
 see anything, because they question us too keenly. 
 
 " Indeed, madame ; and do you know what I have been 
 told I, in the depths of the country? That my nephew has 
 ruined himself for you ; and the unhappy boy is in a garret, 
 while you lire here in gold and silks. You will, I hope, 
 forgive my rustic frankness, for it may be useful to you to be 
 informed of the slander." 
 
 " Stop, monsieur," said Madame Firmiani, interrupting the 
 gentleman with an imperious gesture, " I know all that. You 
 are too polite to keep the conversation to this subject when I 
 beg you to change it. You are too gallant, in the old-fashioned 
 sense of the word," she added, with a slightly ironical
 
 MADAME FIRMIANI. 271 
 
 emphasis, " not to acknowledge that you have no right to 
 cross-question me. However, it is ridiculous in me to justify 
 myself. I hope you have a good enough opinion of my char- 
 acter to believe in the utter contempt I feel for money, though 
 I was married without any fortune whatever to a man who had 
 an immense fortune. I do not know whether your nephew is 
 rich or poor; if I have received him, if I still receive him, 
 it is because I regard him as worthy to move in the midst of 
 my friends. All my friends, monsieur, respect each other; 
 they know that I am not so philosophical as to entertain people 
 whom I do not esteem. That, perhaps, shows a lack of 
 charity; but my guardian angel has preserved in me, to this 
 day, an intense aversion for gossip and dishonor." 
 
 Though her voice was not quite firm at the beginning of 
 this reply, the last words were spoken by Madame Firmiani 
 with the cool decision of Celimene rallying the Misanthrope. 
 
 "Madame," the Count resumed in a broken voice, "I am 
 an old man I am almost a father to Octave I therefore must 
 humbly crave your pardon beforehand for the only question I 
 shall be so bold as to ask you ; and I give you my word of 
 honor as a gentleman that your reply will die here," and he 
 laid his hand on his heart with a really religious gesture. 
 " Does gossip speak the truth ; do you love Octave ? " 
 
 " Monsieur," said she, " I should answer any one else with 
 a look. But you, since you are almost a father to Monsieur 
 de Camps, you I will ask what you would think of a woman 
 who, in reply to your question, should say, Yes. To confess 
 one's love to the man we love when he loves us well, well ; 
 when we are sure of being loved for ever, believe me, mon- 
 sieur, it is an effort to us and a reward to him ; but to any 
 one else ! " 
 
 Madame Firmiani did not finish her sentence; she rose, 
 bowed to the good gentleman, and vanished into her private 
 rooms, where the sound of doors opened and shut in succes- 
 sion had language to the ears of the poplar planter.
 
 272 MADAME FIRMIANI. 
 
 " Damn it ! " said he to himself, " what a woman ! She is 
 either a very cunning hussy or an angel ; " and he went down 
 to his hired fly in the courtyard, where the horses were pawing 
 the pavement in the silence. The coachman was asleep, after 
 having cursed his customer a hundred times. 
 
 Next morning, by about eight o'clock, the old gentleman 
 was mounting the stairs of a house in the Rue de 1' Observance, 
 where dwelt Octave de Camps. If there was in this world a 
 man amazed, it was the young professor on seeing his uncle. 
 The key was in the door, Octave's lamp was still burning; he 
 had sat up all night. 
 
 "Now, you rascal," said Monsieur de Bourbonne, seating 
 himself in an armchair. " How long has it been the fashion 
 to make fools (speaking mildly) of uncles who have twenty- 
 six thousand francs a year in good land in Touraine ? and that 
 when you are sole heir ? Do you know that formerly such 
 relations were treated with respect ? Pray, have you any fault 
 to find with me? Have I bungled my business as an uncle? 
 Have I demanded your respect ? Have I ever refused you 
 money? Have I shut my door in your face, saying you had 
 only come to see how I was? Have you not the most accom- 
 modating, the least exacting uncle in France? I will not say 
 in Europe, it would be claiming too much. You write to me, 
 or you don't write. I live on your professions of affection. 
 I am laying out the prettiest estate in the neighborhood, a place 
 that is the object of envy in all the department ; but I do not 
 mean to leave it you till the latest date possible a weak- 
 ness that is very pardonable. And my gentleman sells his 
 property, is lodged like a groom, has no servants, keeps no 
 style " 
 
 " My dear uncle " 
 
 "It is not a case of uncle, but of nephew. I have a right 
 to your confidence ; so have it out all at once ; it is the easiest 
 way, I know by experience. Have you been gambling? 
 Have you been speculating on the Bourse? Come, say,
 
 MADAME FIRMIANI. 273 
 
 ' Uncle, I am a wretch,' and we kiss and are friends. But if 
 you tell me any lie bigger than those I told at your age, I will 
 sell my property, buy an annuity, and go back to the bad ways 
 of my youth, if it is not too late." 
 
 Uncle " 
 
 " I went last night to see your Madame Firmiani," said the 
 uncle, kissing the tips of all his fingers together. " She is 
 charming," he went on. " You have the King's warrant and 
 approval,. and your uncle's consent, if that is any satisfaction 
 to you. As to the sanction of the church, that I suppose is 
 unnecessary the sacraments, no doubt, are too costly. Come ; 
 speak out. Is it for her that you have ruined yourself? " 
 
 "Yes, uncle." 
 
 " Ah ! the hussy 1 I would have bet upon it. In my day a 
 woman of fashion could ruin a man more cleverly than any 
 of your courtesans of to-day. I saw in her a resuscitation of 
 the last century." 
 
 " Uncle," said Octave, in a voice that was at once sad and 
 gentle, " you are under a mistake. Madame Firmiani de- 
 serves your esteem, and all the adoration of her admirers." 
 
 " So hapless youth is always the same ! " said Monsieur de 
 Bourbonne. "Well, well ! go on in your own way; tell me 
 all the old stories once more. At the same time, you know, 
 I dare say, that I am no chicken in such matters." 
 
 " My dear uncle, here is a letter which will explain every- 
 thing," replied Octave, taking out an elegant letter-case her 
 gift, no doubt. " When you have read it I will tell you the 
 rest, and you will know Madame Firmiani as the world knows 
 her not." 
 
 " I have not my spectacles with me," said his uncle. 
 "Read it to me." 
 
 Octave began : " ' My dear love ' " 
 
 " Then you are very intimate with this woman? " 
 
 "Why, yes, uncle." 
 
 " And you have not quarreled?" 
 18
 
 274 MADAME FIRMIANI. 
 
 "Quarreled!" echoed Octave in surprise. "We are 
 married at Gretna Green." 
 
 " Well, then, why do you dine for forty sous ? " 
 
 " Let me proceed." 
 
 " Very true. I am listening." 
 
 Octave took up the letter again, and could not read certain 
 passages without strong emotion. 
 
 " ' My beloved husband, you ask me the reason of my 
 melancholy. Has it passed from my soul into my face, or 
 have you only guessed it? And why should you not? Our 
 hearts are so closely united. Besides, I cannot lie, though 
 that perhaps is a misfortune. One of the conditions of being 
 loved is, in a woman, to be always caressing and gay. Per- 
 haps I ought to deceive you; but I would not do so, not 
 even if it were to increase or to preserve the -happiness you 
 give me you lavish on me under which you overwhelm me. 
 Oh, my dear, my love carries with it so much gratitude ! 
 And I must love for ever, without measure. Yes, I must 
 always be proud of you. Our glory a woman's glory is all 
 in the man she loves. Esteem, consideration, honor, are 
 they not all his who has conquered everything? Well, and 
 my angel has fallen. Yes, my dear, your last confession has 
 dimmed my past happiness. From that moment I have felt 
 myself humbled through you you, whom I believed to be 
 the purest of men, as you are the tenderest and most loving. 
 I must have supreme confidence in your still childlike heart to 
 make an avowal which costs me so dear. What, poor darling, 
 your father stole his fortune, and you know it, and you keep 
 it ! And you could tell me of this attorney's triumph in a 
 room full of the dumb witnesses of our love, and you are a 
 gentleman, and you think yourself noble, and I am yours, 
 and you are two-and-twenty ! How monstrous all through ! 
 
 " ' I have sought excuses for you ; I have ascribed your 
 indifference to your giddy youth ; I know there is still much 
 of the child in you. Perhaps you have never yet thought
 
 MADAME FIRMIANI. 275 
 
 seriously of what is meant by wealth, and by honesty. Oh, 
 your laughter hurt me so much ! Only think, there is a 
 family, ruined, always in grief, girls perhaps, who curse you 
 day by day, an old man who says to himself every night, " I 
 should not lack bread if Monsieur de Camps' father had only 
 been an honest man." ' " 
 
 " What ! " exclaimed Monsieur de Bourbonne, interrupting 
 him, " were you such an idiot as to tell that woman the story 
 of your father's affair with the Bourgneufs? Women better 
 understood spending a fortune than making one " 
 
 " They understand honesty. Let me go on, uncle ! 
 
 " ' Octave, no power on earth is authorized to garble the 
 language of honor. Look into your conscience, and ask it by 
 what name to call the action to which you owe your riches.' ' 
 
 And the nephew looked at his uncle, who bent his head. 
 
 " ' I will not tell you all the thoughts that beset me ; they 
 can all be reduced to one, which is this : I cannot esteem a 
 man who knowingly soils himself for a sum of money whether 
 large or small. Five francs stolen at play, or six times a 
 hundred thousand francs obtained by legal trickery, disgrace 
 a man equally. I must tell you all : I feel myself sullied by a 
 love which till now was all my joy. From the bottom of my 
 soul there comes a voice I cannot stifle. I have wept to find 
 that my conscience is stronger than my love. You might 
 commit a crime, and I would hide you in my bosom from 
 human justice if I could ; but my devotion would go no 
 farther. Love, my dearest, is, in a woman, the most un- 
 limited confidence, joined to I know not what craving to 
 reverence and adore the being to whom she belongs. I have 
 never conceived of love but as a fire in which the noblest 
 feelings were yet further purified a fire which develops them 
 to the utmost. 
 
 "' I have but one thing more to say: Come to me poor, 
 and I shall love you twice as much if possible ; if not, give 
 me up. If I see you no more, I know what is left to me to do.
 
 276 MADAME FIRMIANI. 
 
 " ' But, now, understand me clearly, I will not have you 
 make restitution because I desire it. Consult your conscience. 
 This is an act of justice, and must not be done as a sacrifice 
 to love. I am your wife, and not your mistress ; the point is 
 not to please me, but to inspire me with the highest esteem. 
 If I have misunderstood, if you have not clearly explained 
 your father's action, in short, if you can regard your fortune 
 as legitimately acquired and how gladly would I persuade 
 myself that you deserve no blame decide as the voice of 
 conscience dictates ; act wholly for yourself. A man who 
 truly loves, as you love me, has too high a respect for all the 
 holy inspiration he may get from his wife to be dishonorable. 
 
 " ' I blame myself now for all I have written. A word 
 would perhaps have been enough, and my preaching instinct 
 has carried me away. So I should like to be scolded not 
 much, but a little. My dear, between you and me, are not 
 you the power? You only should detect your own faults. 
 Well, master mine, can you say I understand nothing about 
 political discussion ? ' 
 
 " Well, uncle ? " said Octave, whose eyes were full of tears. 
 
 " I see more writing, finish it." 
 
 " Oh, there is nothing further but such things as only a 
 lover may read." 
 
 "Very good," said the old man. "Very good, my dear 
 boy. I was popular with the women in my day; but I would 
 have you to believe that I too have loved ; et ego in Arcadia. 
 Still, I cannot imagine why you give lessons in mathematics." 
 
 " My dear uncle, I am your nephew. Is not that as much 
 as to say that I have made some inroads on the fortune left to 
 me by my father ? After reading that letter a complete revo- 
 lution took place in me, in one instant I paid up the arrears 
 of remorse. I could never describe to you the state in which 
 I was. As I drove my cab to the Bois a voice cried to me, 
 ' Is that horse yours ? ' As I ate my dinner, I said to my- 
 self, ' Have you not stolen the food ? ' I was ashamed of
 
 MADAME FIRMIANI. 277 
 
 myself. My honesty was ardent in proportion to its youth. 
 First I flew off to Madame Firmiani. Ah, my dear uncle, 
 that day I had such joys of heart, such raptures of soul as were 
 worth millions. With her I calculated how much I owed the 
 Bourgneuf family ; and I sentenced myself, against Madame 
 Firmiani's advice, to pay them interest at the rate of three per 
 cent. But my whole fortune was not enough to refund the 
 sum. We were both of us lovers enough husband and wife 
 enough for her to offer and for me to accept her savings " 
 
 " What, besides all her virtues, that adorable woman can 
 save money! " cried the uncle. 
 
 " Do not laugh at her. Her position compels her to some 
 thrift. Her husband went to Greece in 1820, and died about 
 three years ago ; but to this day it has been impossible to get 
 legal proof of his death, or to lay hands on the will he no 
 doubt made in favor of his wife; this important document was 
 stolen, lost, or mislaid in a country where a man's papers are 
 not kept as they are in France, nor is there a consul. So, 
 not knowing whether she may not some day have to reckon 
 with other and malignant heirs, she is obliged to be extremely 
 careful, for she does not wish to have to give up her wealth as 
 Chateaubriand has just given up the ministry. Now I mean 
 to earn a fortune that shall be mine, so as to restore my wife 
 to opulence if she should be ruined." 
 
 " And you never told me you never came to me. My 
 dear nephew, believe me I love you well enough to pay your 
 honest debts, your debts as a gentleman. I am the uncle of 
 the fifth act I will be revenged." 
 
 "I know your revenges, uncle; but let me grow rich by 
 my own toil. If you wish to befriend me, allow me a thousand 
 crowns a year until I need capital for some business. I declare 
 at this moment I am so happy that all I care about is to live. 
 I give lessons that I may be no burden on any one. 
 
 "Ah, if you could but know with what delight I made 
 restitution. After making some inquiries I found the Bourg-
 
 278 MADAME FTRMIANI. 
 
 neufs in misery and destitution. They were living at Saint- 
 Germain in a wretched house. The old father was manager 
 in a lottery office ; the two girls did the work of the house 
 and kept the accounts. The mother was almost always ill. 
 The two girls are charming, but they have learned by bitter 
 experience how little the world cares for beauty without for- 
 tune. What a picture did I find there ! If I went to the 
 house as the accomplice in a crime, I came out of it an honest 
 man, and I have purged my father's memory. I do not judge 
 him, uncle ; there is in a lawsuit an eagerness, a passion which 
 may sometimes blind the most honest man alive. Lawyers 
 know how to legitimize the most preposterous claims ; there 
 are syllogisms in law to humor the errors of conscience, and 
 judges have a right to mistakes. My adventure was a 
 perfect drama. To have played the part of Providence, to 
 have fulfilled one of these hopeless wishes : ' If only twenty 
 thousand francs a year could drop from heaven ! ' a wish we 
 all have uttered in jest ; to see a sublime look of gratitude, 
 amazement and admiration take the place of a glance fraught 
 with curses ; to bring opulence into the midst of a family 
 sitting round a turf-fire in the evening, by the light of a 
 wretched lamp. No words can paint such a scene. My 
 excessive justice to them seemed unjust. Well, if there be a 
 paradise, my father must now be happy. As for myself, I am 
 loved as man was never loved before. Madame Firmiani has 
 given me more than happiness ; she has taught me a delicacy 
 of feeling which perhaps I lacked. Indeed, I call her Dear 
 Conscience, one of those loving names that are the outcome 
 of certain secret harmonies of spirit. Honesty is said to pay ; 
 I hope ere long to be rich myself; at this moment I am bent 
 on solving a great industrial problem, and if I succeed I shall 
 make millions." 
 
 " My boy, you have your mother's soul," said the old man, 
 hardly able to restrain the tears that rose at the remembrance 
 of his sister.
 
 MADAME FIRMIANI. 279 
 
 At this instant, in spite of the height above the ground of 
 Octave's room, the young man and his uncle heard the noise 
 of. a carriage driving up. 
 
 "It is she ! I know her horses by the way they pull up." 
 
 And it was not long before Madame Firmiani made her 
 appearance. 
 
 " Oh ! " she cried, with an impulse of annoyance on seeing 
 Monsieur de Bourbonne. " But our uncle is not in the way," 
 she went on with a sudden smile. " I have come to kneel at 
 my husband's feet and humbly beseech him to accept my 
 fortune. I have just received from the Austrian embassy a 
 document proving Firmiani's death. The paper, drawn up 
 by the kind offices of the Austrian envoy at Constantinople, 
 is quite formal, and the will which Firmiani's valet had in 
 keeping for me is subjoined. There, you are richer than I 
 am, for you have there," and she tapped her husband's breast, 
 "treasures which only God can add to." Then, unable to 
 disguise her happiness, she hid her face in Octave's bosom. 
 
 "My sweet niece, we made love when I was young," said 
 the uncle, "but now you love. You women are all that is 
 good and lovely in humanity, for you are never guilty of your 
 faults ; they always originate with us." 
 
 PARIS, February ', 1831.
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 (La Femme Abandonncc.} 
 
 Translated by ELLEN MARRIAGE. 
 
 To Her Grace the Duchessc (TAbranfes, 
 Jrom her devoted servant, 
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC. 
 
 PARIS, August, 1835. 
 
 IN the early spring of 1822, the Paris doctors sent to 
 Lower Normandy a young man just recovering from an 
 inflammatory complaint, brought on by overstudy, or perhaps 
 by excess of some other kind. His convalescence demanded 
 complete rest, a light diet, bracing air, and freedom from 
 excitement of every kind, and the fat lands of Bessin seemed 
 to offer all these conditions of recovery. To Bayeux, a 
 picturesque place about six miles from the sea, the patient 
 therefore betook himself, and was received with the cordiality 
 characteristic of relatives who lead very retired lives, and 
 regard a new arrival as a godsend. 
 
 All little towns are alike, save for a few local customs. 
 When M. le Baron Gaston de Nueil, the young Parisian in 
 question, had spent two or three evenings in his cousin's 
 house, or with the friends who made up Mme. de Sainte- 
 Severe's circle, he very soon had made the acquaintance of the 
 persons whom this exclusive society considered to be "the 
 whole town." Gaston de Nueil recognized in them the invar- 
 iable stock characters which every observer finds in every one 
 of the many capitals of the little states which made up the 
 France of an older day. 
 
 First of all comes the family whose claims to nobility are 
 (280)
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 281 
 
 regarded as incontestable, and of the highest antiquity in the 
 department, though no one has so much as heard of them 
 a bare fifty leagues away. This species of royal family on 
 a small scale is distantly, but unmistakably, connected with 
 the Navarreins and the Grandlieu family, and related to the 
 Cadignans, and the Blamont-Chauvrys. The head of the 
 illustrious house is invariably a determined sportsman. He 
 has no manners, crushes everybody else with his nominal 
 superiority, tolerates the sub-prefect much as he submits to the 
 taxes, and declines to acknowledge any of the novel powers 
 created by the nineteenth century, pointing out to you as a 
 political monstrosity the fact that the prime minister is a man 
 of no birth. His wife takes a decided tone, and talks in a 
 loud voice. She has had adorers in her time, but takes the 
 sacrament regularly at Easter. She brings up her daughters 
 badly, and is of the opinion that they will always be rich 
 enough with their name. 
 
 Neither husband nor wife has the remotest idea of modern 
 luxury. They retain a livery only seen elsewhere on the 
 stage, and cling to old fashions in plate, furniture, and 
 equipages, as in language and manner of life. This is a kind 
 of ancient state, moreover, that suits passably well with pro- 
 vincial thrift. The good folk are, in fact, the lords of the manor 
 of a bygone age, minus the quit-rents and heriots, the pack of 
 hounds and the laced coats ; full of honor among themselves, 
 and one and all loyally devoted to princes whom they only 
 see at a distance. The historical house incognito is as quaint 
 a survival as a piece of ancient tapestry. Vegetating some- 
 where among them there is sure to be an uncle or a brother, 
 a lieutenant-general, an old courtier of the King, who wears 
 the red ribbon of the order of Saint-Louis, and went to Han- 
 over with the Marechal de Richelieu, and here you find him 
 like a stray leaf out of some old pamphlet of the time of Louis 
 Quinze. 
 
 This fossil greatness finds a rival in another house, wealthier,
 
 282 A FORSAKEN WO MAX. 
 
 though of less ancient lineage. Husband and wife spend a 
 couple of months of every winter in Paris, bringing back 
 with them its frivolous tone and short-lived contemporary 
 crazes. Madame is a woman of fashion, though she looks 
 rather conscious of her clothes, and is always behind the 
 mode. She scoffs, however, at the ignorance affected by 
 her neighbors. Her plate is of modern fashion ; she has 
 "grooms," negroes, a valet-de-chambre, and whatnot. Her 
 oldest son drives a tilbury, and does nothing (the estate is 
 entailed upon him); his younger brother is auditor to a coun- 
 cil of state. The father is well posted up in official scandals, 
 and tells you anecdotes of Louis XVIII. and Mme. du Cayla. 
 He invests his money in the five per cents., and is careful to 
 avoid the topic of cider, but has been known occasionally to 
 fall a victim to the craze for rectifying the conjectural sums- 
 total of the various fortunes of the department. He is a 
 member of the departmental council, has his clothes from 
 Paris, and wears the cross of the Legion of Honor. In short, 
 he is a country gentleman who has fully grasped the signifi- 
 cance of the Restoration, and is coining money at the Cham- 
 ber, but his Royalism is less pure than that of the rival house ; 
 he takes the Gazette and the Debats, the other family only 
 reads the Quotidienne. 
 
 His lordship the bishop, a sometime vicar-general, fluctuates 
 between the two powers, who pay him the respect due to 
 religion, but at times they bring home to him the moral 
 appended by the worthy La Fontaine to the fable of the "Ass 
 laden with Relics." The good man's origin is distinctly 
 plebeian. 
 
 Then come stars of the second magnitude, men of family 
 with ten or twelve hundred livres a year, captains in the navy 
 or cavalry regiments, or nothing at all. Out on the roads, 
 on horseback, they rank half-way between the cure bearing 
 the sacraments and the tax-collector on his rounds. Pretty 
 nearly all of them have been in the Pages or in the Horse
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 283 
 
 Guards, and now are peaceably ending their days in worthy 
 manorial duties; more interested in felling timber and the 
 cider prospects than in the monarchy. 
 
 Still they talk of the Charter and the Liberals while the 
 cards are making, or over a game at backgammon, when they 
 have exhausted the usual stock topic of dots, and have married 
 everybody off according to the genealogies which they all 
 know by heart. Their womenkind are haughty dames, who 
 assume the airs of court ladies in their basket-chaises. They 
 huddle themselves up in shawls and caps by way of full-dress ; 
 and twice a year, after ripe deliberation, have a new bonnet 
 from Paris, brought as opportunity offers. Exemplary wives 
 are they for the most part, and garrulous. 
 
 These are the principal elements of aristocratic gentility, 
 with a few outlying old maids of good family, spinsters who 
 have solved the problem : given a human being, to remain 
 absolutely stationary. They might be sealed up in the houses 
 where you see them ; their faces and their dresses are literally 
 part of the fixtures of the town, and the province in which 
 they dwell. They are its tradition, its memory, its quintes- 
 sence, the local genus incarnate. There is something frigid 
 and monumental about these ladies ; they know exactly when 
 to laugh and when to shake their heads, and every now and 
 then give out some utterance which passes current as a 
 witticism. 
 
 A few rich townspeople have crept into the miniature Fau- 
 bourg Saint-Germain, thanks to their money or their aristo- 
 cratic leanings. But despite their forty years, the circle still 
 says of them, "Young So-and-so has sound opinions," and of 
 such do they make deputies. As a general rule, the elderly 
 spinsters are their principal patronesses, and not without 
 comment. 
 
 Finally, in this exclusive little set include two or three 
 ecclesiastics, admitted for the sake of their cloth, or for their 
 wit ; for these great nobles find their own society rather dull,
 
 284 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 and introduce the bourgeois element into their drawing-rooms, 
 as a baker puts leaven into his dough. 
 
 The sum-total contained by all heads put together consists 
 of a certain quantity of antiquated notions; a few new reflec- 
 tions brewed in company of an evening being added from 
 time to time to the common stock. Like sea-water in a little 
 creek, the phrases which represent these ideas surge up daily, 
 punctually obeying the tidal laws of conversation in their 
 flow and ebb ; you hear the hollow echo of yesterday, to-day, 
 to-morrow, a year hence, and for evermore. On all things 
 here below they pass immutable judgments, which go to make 
 up a body of tradition into which no power of mortal man 
 can infuse one drop of wit or sense. The lives of these per- 
 sons revolve with the regularity of clockwork in an orbit of 
 use and wont which admits of no more deviation or change 
 than their opinions on matters religious, political, moral, or 
 literary. 
 
 If a stranger is admitted to the cenaclc? every member of 
 it in turn will say (not without a trace of irony), "You will 
 not find the brilliancy of your Parisian society here," and pro- 
 ceed forthwith to criticise the life led by his neighbors, as if 
 he himself were an exception who had striven, and vainly 
 striven, to enlighten the rest. But any stranger, so ill-advised 
 as to concur in any of their freely expressed criticism of each 
 other, is pronounced at once to be an ill-natured person, a 
 heathen, an outlaw, a reprobate Parisian " as Parisians mostly 
 are." 
 
 Before Gaston de Nueil made his appearance in this little 
 world of strictly observed etiquette, where every detail of 
 life is an integrant part of a whole, and everything is known ; 
 where the values of personalty and real estate are quoted like 
 stocks on the last sheet of the newspaper before his arrival 
 he had been weighed in the unerring scales of Bayeusaine 
 judgment. 
 
 * Guest-chamber.
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 285 
 
 His cousin, Mme. de Sainte-Severe, had already given out 
 the amount of his fortune, and the sum of his expectations, 
 had produced the family tree, and expatiated on the talents, 
 breeding, and modesty of this particular branch. So he re- 
 ceived the precise amount of attention to which he was enti- 
 tled ; he was accepted as a worthy scion of a good stock ; 
 and, for he was but twenty-three, was made welcome without 
 ceremony, though certain young ladies and mothers of daugh- 
 ters looked not unkindly upon him. 
 
 He had an income of eighteen thousand livres from land 
 in the valley of the Auge ; and sooner or later his father, as 
 in duty bound, would leave him the chateau of Manerville, with 
 the lands thereunto belonging. As for his education, political 
 career, personal qualities, and qualifications no one so much 
 as thought of raising the questions. His land was undeniable, 
 his rentals steady ; excellent plantations had been made ; the 
 tenants paid for repairs, rates, and taxes ; the apple-trees were 
 thirty-eight years old ; and, to crown all, his father was in 
 treaty for two hundred acres of woodland just outside the 
 paternal park, which he intended to enclose with walls. No 
 hopes of a political career, no fame on earth, can compare 
 with such advantages as these. 
 
 Whether out of malice or design, Mme. de Sainte-Severe 
 omitted to mention that Gaston had an elder brother; nor 
 did Gaston himself say a word about him. But, at the same 
 time, it is true that the brother was consumptive, and to all 
 appearance would shortly be laid in earth, lamented and for- 
 gotten. 
 
 At first Gaston de Nueil amused himself at the expense of 
 the circle. He drew, as it were, for his mental album, a series 
 of portraits of these folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces 
 and hooked noses, their crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities 
 of dress, portraits which possessed all the racy flavor of truth. 
 He delighted in their " Normanisms," in the primitive 
 quaintness of their ideas and characters. For a short time
 
 286 A FORSAKEN WOMAtf. 
 
 he flung himself into their squirrel's life of busy gyrations in a 
 cage. Then he began to feel the want of variety, and grew 
 tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister, cut short 
 before it had well begun. He drifted on till he reached a 
 crisis, which is neither spleen nor disgust, but combines all 
 the symptoms of both. When a human being is transplanted 
 into an uncongenial soil, to lead a starved, stunted existence, 
 there is always a little discomfort over the transition. Then, 
 gradually, if nothing removes him from his surroundings, he 
 grows accustomed to them, and adapts himself to the vacuity 
 which grows upon him and renders him powerless. Even 
 now, Gaston's lungs were accustomed to the air ; and he was 
 willing to discern a kind of vegetable happiness in days that 
 brought no mental exertion and no responsibilities. The 
 constant stirring of the sap of life, the fertilizing influences 
 of mind on mind, after which he had sought so eagerly in 
 Paris, were beginning to fade from his memory, and he was 
 in a fair way of becoming a fossil with these fossils, and end- 
 ing his days among them, content, like the companions of 
 Ulysses, in his gross envelope. 
 
 One evening Gaston de Nueil was seated between a dowager 
 and one of the vicars-general of the diocese, in a gray-paneled 
 drawing-room, floored with large, white tiles. The family 
 portraits which adorned the walls looked down upon four 
 card-tables, and some sixteen persons gathered about them, 
 chattering over their whist. Gaston, thinking of nothing, 
 digesting one of those exquisite dinners to which the provin- 
 cial looks forward all through the day, found himself justify- 
 ing the customs of the country. 
 
 He began to understand why these good folk continued to 
 play with yesterday's pack of cards and shuffled them on a 
 threadbare tablecloth, and how it was that they had ceased to 
 dress for themselves or others. He saw the glimmerings of 
 something like a philosophy in the even tenor of their per- 
 petual round, in the calm of their methodical monotony, in
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 287 
 
 their ignorance of the refinements of luxury. Indeed, he 
 almost came to think that luxury profited nothing ; and even 
 now, the city of Paris, with its passions, storms, and pleasures, 
 was scarcely more than a memory of childhood. 
 
 He admired in all sincerity the red hands and shy, bashful 
 manner of some young lady who at first struck him as an awk- 
 ward simpleton, unattractive to the last degree, and surpass- 
 ingly ridiculous. His doom was sealed. He had gone from 
 the provinces to Paris ; he had led the feverish life of Paris ; 
 and now he would have sunk back into the lifeless life of the 
 provinces, but for a chance remark which reached his ear a 
 few words that called up a swift rush of such emotions as he 
 might have felt when a strain of really great music mingles 
 with the accompaniment of some tedious opera. 
 
 "You went to call on Mme. de Beauseant yesterday, did 
 you not ? ' ' The speaker was an elderly lady, and she ad- 
 dressed the head of the local royal family. 
 
 " I went this morning. She was so poorly and depressed 
 that I could not persuade her to dine with us to-morrow." 
 
 "With Mme. de Champignelles ? " exclaimed the dowager, 
 with something like astonishment in her manner. 
 
 "With my wife," calmly assented the noble. "Mme. de 
 Beauseant is descended from the House of Burgundy, on the 
 spindle side, 'tis true, but the name atones for everything. 
 My wife is very much attached to the Vicomtesse, and the 
 poor lady has lived alone for such a long while, that " 
 
 The Marquis de Champignelles looked round about him 
 while he spoke with an air of cool unconcern, so that it was 
 almost impossible to guess whether he made a concession to 
 Mme. de Beauseant's misfortunes or paid homage to her 
 noble birth ; whether he felt flattered to receive her in his 
 house, or, on the contrary, sheer pride was the motive that 
 led him to try to force the country families to meet the 
 Vicomtesse. 
 
 The women appeared to take counsel of each other by a
 
 288 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 glance ; there was a sudden silence in the room, and it was 
 felt that their attitude was one of disapproval. 
 
 " Does this Mme. de Beauseant happen to be the lady 
 whose adventure with M. d'Ajuda-Pinto made so much 
 noise?" asked Gaston of his neighbor. 
 
 " The very same," he was told. " She came to Courcelles 
 after the marriage of the Marquis d'Ajuda; nobody visits her. 
 She has, besides, too much sense not to see that she is in a 
 false position, so she has made no attempt to see any one. 
 M. de Champignelles and a few gentlemen went to call upon 
 her, but she would see none but M. de Champignelles, per- 
 haps because he is a connection of the family. They are 
 related through the Beauseants ; the father of the present 
 Vicomte married a Mile, de Champignelles of the older 
 branch. But though the Vicomtesse de Beauseant is supposed 
 to be a descendant of the House of Burgundy, you can under- 
 stand that we could not admit a wife separated from her hus- 
 band into our society here. We are foolish enough still to 
 cling to these old-fashioned ideas. There was the less excuse 
 for the Vicomtesse, because M. de Beauseant is a well-bred 
 man of the world, who would have been quite ready to listen 
 
 to reason. But his wife is quite mad " and so forth and 
 
 so forth. 
 
 M. de Nueil, still listening to the speaker's voice, gathered 
 nothing of the sense of the words ; his brain was too full of 
 thick-coming fancies. Fancies? What other name can you 
 give to the alluring charms of an adventure that tempts the 
 imagination and sets vague hopes springing up in the soul ; 
 to the sense of coming events and mysterious felicity and fear 
 at hand, while as yet there is no substance of fact on which 
 these phantoms of caprice can fix and feed ? Over these fan- 
 cies thought hovers, conceiving impossible projects, giving in 
 the germ all the joys of love. Perhaps, indeed, all passion is 
 contained in that thought-germ, as the beauty, and fragrance, 
 and rich color of the flower are all packed in the seed.
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 289 
 
 M. de Nueil did not know that Mme. de Beause'ant had 
 taken refuge in Normandy, after a notoriety which women for 
 the most part envy and condemn, especially when youth and 
 beauty in some way excuse the transgression. Any sort of 
 celebrity bestows an inconceivable prestige. Apparently for 
 women, as for families, the glory of the crime effaces the stain ; 
 and if such and such a noble house is proud of its tale of heads 
 that have fallen on the scaffold, a young and pretty woman 
 becomes more interesting for the dubious renown of a happy 
 love or a scandalous desertion, and the more she is to be 
 pitied, the more she excites our sympathies. We are only 
 pitiless to the commonplace. If, moreover, we attract all 
 eyes, we are to all intents and purposes great ; how, indeed, 
 are we to be seen unless we raise ourselves above other peo- 
 ple's heads? The common herd of humanity feels an invol- 
 untary respect for any person who can rise above it, and is 
 not over particular as to the means by which they rise. 
 
 It may have been that some such motives influenced Gaston 
 de Nueil at unawares, or perhaps it was curiosity, or a craving 
 for some interest in his life ; or, in a word, that crowd of 
 inexplicable impulses which, for want of a better name, we are 
 wont to call " fatality," that drew him to Mme. de Beausdant. 
 
 The figure of the Vicomtesse de Beausdant rose up suddenly 
 before him with gracious thronging associations. She was a 
 new world for him, a world of fears and hopes, a world to 
 fight for and to conquer. Inevitably he felt the contrast be- 
 tween this vision and the human beings in the shabby room ; 
 and then, in truth, she was a woman ; what woman had he 
 seen so far in this dull, little world, where calculation replaced 
 thought and feeling, where courtesy was a cut-and-dried for- 
 mality, and ideas of the very simplest were too alarming to be 
 received or to pass current ? The sound of Mme. de Beau- 
 slant's name revived a young man's dreams and wakened 
 urgent desires that had lain dormant for a little. 
 
 Gaston de Nueil was absent-minded and preoccupied for the 
 19
 
 290 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 rest of that evening. He was pondering how he might gain 
 access to Mme. de Beauseant, and truly it was no very easy 
 matter. She was believed to be extremely clever. But if 
 men and women of parts may be captivated by something 
 subtle or eccentric, they are also exacting, and can read all 
 that lies below the surface ; and after the first step has been 
 taken, the chances of failure and success in the difficult task 
 of pleasing them are about even. In this particular case, 
 moreover, the Vicomtesse, besides the pride of her position, 
 had all the dignity of her name. Her utter seclusion was the 
 least of the barriers raised between her and the world. For 
 which reasons it was well-nigh impossible that a stranger, 
 however well born, could hope for admittance ; and yet, the 
 next morning found M. de Nueil taking his walks abroad in 
 the direction of Courcelles, a dupe of illusions natural at his 
 age. Several times he made the circuit of the garden walls, 
 looking earnestly through every gap at the closed shutters or 
 open windows, hoping for some romantic chance, on which 
 he founded schemes for introducing himself into this unknown 
 lady's presence, without a thought of their impracticability. 
 Morning after morning was spent in this way to mighty little 
 purpose ; but with each day's walk that vision of a woman 
 living apart from the world, of love's martyr buried in soli- 
 tude, loomed larger in his thoughts, and was enshrined in his 
 soul. So Gaston de Nueil walked under the walls of Cour- 
 celles, and some gardener's heavy footstep would set his heart 
 beating high with hope. 
 
 He thought of writing to Mme. de Beauseant, but, on 
 mature consideration, what can you say to a woman whom you 
 have never seen, a complete stranger ? And Gaston had little 
 self-confidence. Like most young persons with a plentiful 
 crop of illusions still standing, he dreaded the mortifying 
 contempt of silence more than death itself, and shuddered at 
 the thought of sending his first tender epistle forth to face so 
 many chances of being thrown into the fire. He was dis-
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 291 
 
 tracted by innumerable conflicting ideas. But by dint of 
 inventing chimeras, weaving romances, and cudgeling his 
 brains, he hit at last upon one of the hopeful stratagems that 
 are sure to occur to your mind if you persevere long enough, 
 a stratagem which must make clear to the most inexperienced 
 woman that here was a man who took a fervent interest in her. 
 The caprice of social conventions puts as many barriers be- 
 tween lovers as any Oriental imagination can devise in the 
 most delightfully fantastic tale ; indeed, the most extravagant 
 pictures are seldom exaggerations. In real life, as in the fairy 
 tales, the woman belongs to him who can reach her and set 
 her free from the position in which she languishes. The 
 poorest of calenders that ever fell in love with the daughter 
 of the Khalif is in truth scarcely farther from his lady than 
 Gaston de Nueil from Mme. de Beauseant. The Vicomtesse 
 knew absolutely nothing of M. de Nueil's wanderings round 
 her house ; Gaston de Nueil's love grew to the height of the 
 obstacles to overleap ; and the distance set between him and 
 his extemporized lady-love produced the usual effect of dis- 
 tance, in lending enchantment. 
 
 One day, confident in his inspiration, he hoped everything 
 from the love that must pour forth from his eyes. Spoken 
 words, in his opinion, were more eloquent than the most pas- 
 sionate letter; and, besides, he would engage feminine curi- 
 osity to plead for him. He went, therefore, to M. de Cham- 
 pignelles, proposing to employ that gentleman for the better 
 success of his enterprise. He informed the Marquis that he 
 had been intrusted with a delicate and important commission 
 which concerned the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, that he felt 
 doubtful whether she would read a letter written in an un- 
 known handwriting, or put confidence in a stranger. Would 
 M. de Champignelles, on his next visit, ask the Vicomtesse 
 if she would consent to receive him Gaston de Nueil ? 
 While he asked the Marquis to keep his secret in case of a re- 
 fusal, he very ingeniously insinuated sufficient reasons for his
 
 292 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 own admittance, to be duly passed on to the Vicomtesse. 
 Was not M. de Champignelles a man of honor, a loyal gentle- 
 man incapable of lending himself to any transaction in bad 
 taste, nay, the merest suspicion of bad taste ! Love lends a 
 young man all the self-possession and astute craft of an old 
 ambassador ; all the Marquis' harmless vanities were gratified, 
 and the haughty grandee was completely duped. He tried 
 hard to fathom Gaston's secret; but the latter, who would 
 have been greatly perplexed to tell it, turned off M. de 
 Champignelles' adroit questioning with a Norman's shrewd- 
 ness, till the Marquis, as a gallant Frenchman, complimented 
 his young visitor upon his discretion. 
 
 M. de Champignelles hurried off at once to Courcelles, 
 with that eagerness to serve a pretty woman which belongs to 
 his time of life. In the Vicomtesse de Beauseant's position such 
 a message was likely to arouse keen curiosity ; so although her 
 memory supplied no reason at all that could bring M. de Nueil 
 to her house, she saw no objection to his visit after some 
 prudent inquiries as to his family and condition. At the 
 same time, she began by a refusal. Then she discussed the 
 propriety of the matter with M. de Champignelles, directing 
 her questions so as to discover, if possible, whether he knew 
 the motives for the visit, and finally revoked her negative 
 answer. The careful discussion and the extreme discretion 
 shown perforce by the Marquis had seriously piqued her 
 curiosity. 
 
 M. de Champignelles had no mind to cut a ridiculous 
 figure. He said, with the air of a man who can keep another's 
 counsel, that the Vicomtesse must know the purpose of this 
 visit perfectly well ; while the Vicomtesse, in all sincerity, 
 had no notion what it could be. Mme. de Beauseant, in per- 
 plexity, connected Gaston with people whom he had never 
 met, went astray after various wild conjectures, and asked 
 herself if she had seen this M. de Nueil before. In truth, no 
 love letter, however sincere or skillfully indited, could have
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 293 
 
 produced so much effect as this riddle. Again and again 
 Mme. de Beauseant puzzled over it. 
 
 When Gaston heard that he might call upon the Vicomtesse, 
 his rapture at so soon obtaining the ardently longed-for good 
 fortune was mingled with singular embarrassment. How was 
 he to contrive a suitable sequel to this stratagem ? 
 
 "Bah! I shall see her," he said over and over again to 
 himself as he dressed. "See her, and that is everything!" 
 
 He fell to hoping that once across the threshold of Cour- 
 celles he should find an expedient for unfastening this Gordian 
 knot of his own tying. There are believers in the omnipo- 
 tence of necessity who never turn back ; the close presence 
 of danger is an inspiration that calls out all their powers for 
 victory. Gaston de Nueil was one of these. 
 
 He took particular pains with his dress, imagining, as youth 
 is apt to imagine, that success or failure hangs on the position 
 of a curl, and ignorant of the fact that anything is charming 
 in youth. And, in any case, such women as Mme. de Beau- 
 seant are only attracted by the charms of wit or character of 
 an unusual order. Greatness of character flatters their vanity, 
 promises a great passion, seems to imply a comprehension of 
 the requirements of their hearts. Wit amuses them, responds 
 to the subtlety of their natures, and they think that they are 
 understood. And what do all women wish but to be amused, 
 understood, or adored? It is only after much reflection on 
 the things of life that we understand the consummate coquetry 
 of neglect of dress and reserve at a first interview ; and by 
 the time we have gained sufficient astuteness for successful 
 strategy, we are too old to profit by our experience. 
 
 While Gaston's lack of confidence in his mental equipment 
 drove him to borrow charms from his clothes, Mme. de Beau- 
 sdant herself was instinctively giving more attention to her 
 toilet. 
 
 " I would rather not frighten people, at all events," she said 
 to herself as she arranged her hair.
 
 294 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 In M. de Nueil's character, person, and manner there was 
 that touch of unconscious originality which gives a kind of 
 flavor to things that any one might say or do, and absolves 
 everything that they may choose to do or say. Ke was highly 
 cultivated, he had a keen brain, and a face, mobile as his own 
 nature, which won the good-will of others. The promise of 
 passion and tenderness in the bright eyes was fulfilled by an 
 essentially kind heart. The resolution which he made as he 
 entered the house at Courcelles was in keeping with his frank 
 nature and ardent imagination. But, bold as he was with 
 love, his heart beat violently when he had crossed the great 
 court, laid out like an English garden, and the manservant, 
 who had taken his name to the Vicomtesse, returned to say 
 that she would receive him. 
 
 "M. le Baron de Nueil." 
 
 Gaston came in slowly, but with sufficient ease of manner ; 
 and it is a more difficult thing, be it said, to enter a room 
 where there is but one woman than a room that holds a 
 score. 
 
 A great fire was burning on the hearth in spite of the mild 
 weather, and by the soft light of the candles in the sconces 
 he saw a young woman sitting on a high-backed bergere in 
 the angle by the hearth. The seat was so low that she could 
 move her head freely ; every turn of it was full of grace and 
 delicate charm, whether she bent, leaning forward, or raised 
 and held it erect, slowly and languidly, as though it were a 
 heavy burden, so low that she could cross her feet and let 
 them appear, or draw them back under the folds of a long, 
 black dress. 
 
 The Vicomtesse made as if she would lay the book that she 
 was reading on a small, round stand ; but as she did so she 
 turned towards M. de Nueil, and the volume, insecurely laid 
 upon the edge, fell to the floor between the stand and the sofa. 
 This did not seem to disconcert her. She looked up, bowing 
 almost imperceptibly in response to his greeting, without rising
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 295 
 
 from the depths of the low chair in which she lay. Bending 
 forwards, she stirred the fire briskly, and stooped to pick up a 
 fallen glove, drawing it mechanically over her left hand, 
 while her eyes wandered in search of its fellow. The glance 
 was instantly checked, however, for she stretched out a thin, 
 white, all-but-transparent right hand, with flawless ovals of 
 rose-colored nail at the tips of the slender, ringless fingers, 
 and pointed to a chair as if to bid Gaston be seated. He 
 sat down, and she turned her face questioningly towards him. 
 Words cannot describe the subtlety of the winning charm 
 and inquiry in that gesture ; deliberate in its kindliness, 
 gracious yet accurate in expression, it was the outcome of 
 early education and of a constant use and wont of the 
 graciousness of life. Those movements of hers, so swift, so 
 deft, succeeded each other so smoothly that Gaston de Nueil 
 was fascinated by the blending of a pretty woman's fastid- 
 ious carelessness with the high-bred manner of a great lady. 
 
 Mme. de Beauseant stood out in such strong contrast against 
 the automatons among whom he had spent two months of 
 exile in that out-of-the-world district of Normandy that he 
 could not but find in her the realization of his romantic 
 dreams ; and, on the other hand, he could not compare her 
 perfections with those of other women whom he had form- 
 erly admired. Here in her presence, in a drawing-room 
 like some salon in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, full of 
 costly trifles lying about upon the tables, and flowers and 
 books, he felt as if he were back in Paris. It was a real Paris- 
 ian carpet beneath his feet ; he saw once more the high-bred 
 type of Parisienne, the fragile outlines of her form, her 
 exquisite charm, her disdain of the studied effects which do 
 so much to spoil provincial women. 
 
 Mme. de Beauseant had fair hair and dark eyes, and the 
 pale complexion that belongs to fair hair. She held up her 
 brow nobly like some fallen angel, grown proud through the 
 fall, disdainful of pardon. Her way of gathering her thick
 
 296 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 hair into a crown of plaits above the broad, curving lines of 
 the bandeaux upon her forehead, added to the queenliness of 
 her face. Imagination could discover the ducal coronet of 
 Burgundy in the spiral threads of her golden hair ; all the 
 courage of her house seemed to gleam from the great lady's 
 brilliant eyes, such courage as women use to repel audacity or 
 scorn, for they were full of tenderness and gentleness. The 
 outline of that little head, so admirably poised above the long, 
 white throat, the delicate, fine features, the subtle curves of 
 the lips, the mobile face itself, wore an expression of delicate 
 discretion, a faint semblance of irony suggestive of craft and 
 insolence. Yet it would have been difficult to refuse forgive- 
 ness to .those two feminine failings in her ; for the lines that 
 came out in her forehead whenever her face was not in repose, 
 like her upward glances (that pathetic trick of manner), told 
 unmistakably of unhappiness, of a passion that had all but 
 cost her her life. A woman, sitting in the great, silent salon, 
 a woman cut off from the rest of the world in this remote 
 little valley, alone, with the memories of her brilliant, happy, 
 and impassioned youth, of continual gaiety and homage paid 
 on all sides, now replaced by the horrors of the void was 
 there not something in the sight to strike awe that deepened 
 with reflection ? Consciousness of her own value lurked in 
 her smile. She was neither wife nor mother, she was an out- 
 law ; she had lost the one heart that could set her pulses beat- 
 ing without shame ; she had nothing from without to support 
 her reeling soul ; she must even look for strength from within, 
 live her own life, cherish no hope save that of forsaken love, 
 which looks forward to death's coming, and hastens his lagging 
 footsteps. And this while life was in its prime. Oh ! to feel 
 destined for happiness and to die never having given nor 
 received it ! A woman too ! What pain was this ! These 
 thoughts, flashing across M. de Nueil's mind like lightning, 
 left him very humble in the presence of the greatest charm 
 with which woman can be invested. The triple aureole of
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 297 
 
 beauty, nobleness, and misfortune dazzled him ; he stood in 
 dreamy, almost open-mouthed admiration of the Vicomtesse. 
 But he found nothing to say to her. 
 
 Mme. de Beauseant, by no means displeased, no doubt, by 
 his surprise, held out her hand with a kindly but imperious 
 gesture ; then, summoning a smile to her pale lips, as if obey- 
 ing, even yet, the woman's impulse to be gracious 
 
 "I have heard from M. de Champignelles of a message 
 which you have kindly undertaken to deliver, monsieur," she 
 said. " Can it be from " 
 
 With that terrible phrase Gaston understood, even more 
 clearly than before, his own ridiculous position, the bad taste 
 and bad faith of his behavior towards a woman so noble and 
 so unfortunate. He reddened. The thoughts that crowded 
 in upon him could be read in his troubled eyes ; but suddenly, 
 with the courage which youth draws from a sense of its own 
 wrong-doing, he gained confidence, and very humbly inter- 
 rupted Mme. de Beausdant. 
 
 " Madame," he faltered out, "I do not deserve the happi- 
 ness of seeing you. I have deceived you basely. However 
 strong the motive may have been, it can never excuse the 
 pitiful subterfuge which I used to gain my end. But, madame, 
 if your goodness will permit me to tell you " 
 
 The Vicomtesse glanced at M. de Nueil, haughty disdain 
 in her whole manner. She stretched her hand to the bell 
 and rang it. 
 
 "Jacques," she said, "light this gentleman to the door," 
 and she looked with dignity at the visitor. 
 
 She rose proudly, bowed to Gaston, and then stooped for 
 the fallen volume. If all her movements on his entrance had 
 been caressingly dainty and gracious, her every gesture now 
 was no less severely frigid. M. de Nueil rose to his feet, but 
 he stood waiting. Mme. de Beaus6ant flung another glance 
 at him. " Well, why do you not go ? " she seemed to say. 
 
 There was such cutting irony in that glance that Gaston
 
 288 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 grew white as if he were about to faint. Tears came into his 
 eyes, but he would not let them fall, and scorching shame and 
 despair dried them. He looked back at Mme. de Beauseant, 
 and a certain pride and consciousness of his own worth was 
 mingled with his humility ; the Vicomtesse had a right to 
 punish him, but ought she to use her right ? Then he went 
 out. 
 
 As he crossed the ante-chamber, a clear head and wits 
 sharpened by passion were not slow to grasp the danger of 
 his situation. 
 
 " If I leave this house, I can never come back to it again," 
 he said to himself. "The Vicomtesse will always think of 
 me as a fool. It is impossible that a woman, and such a 
 woman, should not guess the love that she has called forth. 
 Perhaps she feels a little, vague, involuntary regret for dis- 
 missing me so abruptly. But she could not do otherwise, 
 and she cannot recall her sentence. It rests with me to un- 
 derstand her." 
 
 At that thought Gaston stopped short on the flight of steps 
 with an exclamation ; he turned sharply, saying, " I have 
 forgotten something," and went back to the salon. The 
 lackey, all respect for a baron and the 'rights of property, was 
 completely deceived by the natural utterance, and followed 
 him. Gaston returned quietly and unannounced. The Vicom- 
 tesse, thinking that the intruder was the servant, looked up 
 and beheld M. de Nueil. 
 
 "Jacques lighted me to the door," he said, with a half-sad 
 smile which dispelled any suspicion of jest in those words, 
 while the tone in which they were spoken went to the heart. 
 Mme. de Beauseant was disarmed. 
 
 " Very well, take a seat," she said. 
 
 Gaston eagerly took possession of a chair. His eyes were 
 shining with happiness; the Vicomtesse, unable to endure 
 the brilliant light in them, looked down at the book. She 
 was enjoying a delicious, ever-new sensation ; the sense of a
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 299 
 
 man's delight in her presence is an unfailing feminine instinct. 
 And then, besides, he had divined her, and a woman is so 
 grateful to the man who has mastered the apparently capri- 
 cious, yet logical, reasoning of her heart ; who can track 
 her thought through the seemingly contradictory workings of 
 her mind, and read the sensations, or shy or bold, written 
 in fleeting red, a bewildering maze of coquetry and self- 
 revelation. 
 
 " Madame," Gaston exclaimed in a low voice, " my blun- 
 der you know, but you do not know how much I am to 
 blame. If you only knew what joy it was to " 
 
 "Ah ! take care," she said, holding up one finger with an 
 air of mystery, as she put out her hand towards the bell. 
 
 The charming gesture, the gracious threat, no doubt, called 
 up some sad thought, some memory of the old happy time 
 when she could be wholly charming and gentle without an 
 after-thought ; when the gladness of her heart justified every 
 caprice, and put charm into every least movement. The 
 lines in her forehead gathered between her brows, and the ex- 
 pression of her face grew dark in the soft candle-light. Then 
 looking across at M. de Nueil gravely but not unkindly, she 
 spoke like a woman who deeply feels the meaning of every 
 word. 
 
 " This is all very ridiculous ! Once upon a time, mon- 
 sieur, when thoughtless high spirits were my privilege, I 
 should have laughed fearlessly over your visit with you. But 
 now my life is very much changed. I cannot do as I like, I 
 am obliged to think. What brings you here? Is it curi- 
 osity ? In that case I am paying dearly for a little fleeting 
 pleasure. Have you fallen passionately in love already with a 
 woman whom you have never seen, a woman with whose 
 name slander has, of course, been busy ? If so, your motive 
 in making this visit is based on disrespect, on an error which 
 accident brought into notoriety." 
 
 She flung her book down scornfully upon the table, then,
 
 300 A FORSAKEN M OMAN. 
 
 with a terrible look at Gaston, she went on : " Because I 
 once was weak, must it be supposed that I am always weak ? 
 This is horrible, degrading. Or have you come here to pity 
 me ? You are very young to offer sympathy with heart 
 troubles. Understand this clearly, sir, that I would rather 
 have scorn than pity. I will not endure compassion from any 
 one." 
 
 There was a brief pause. 
 
 "Well, sir," she continued (and the face that she turned 
 to him was gentle and sad), " whatever motive induced this 
 rash intrusion upon my solitude, it is very painful to me, you 
 see. You are too young to be totally without good feeling, 
 so surely you will feel that this behavior of yours is im- 
 proper. I forgive you for it, and, as you see, I am speaking 
 of it to you without bitterness. You will not come here 
 again, will you? I am entreating when I might command. 
 If you come to see me again, neither you nor I can prevent 
 the whole place from believing that you are my lover, and you 
 would cause me great additional annoyance. You do not 
 mean to do that, I think." 
 
 She said no more, but looked at him with a great dignity 
 which abashed him. 
 
 " I have done wrong, madame," he said, with deep feeling 
 in his voice, "but it was through enthusiasm and thought- 
 lessness and eager desire of happiness, the qualities and de- 
 fects of my age. Now, I understand that I ought not to 
 have tried to see you," he added ; "but, at the same time, 
 the desire was a very natural one " and making an appeal to 
 feeling rather than to the intellect, he described the weariness 
 of his enforced exile. He drew a portrait of a young man 
 in whom the fires of life were burning themselves out, con- 
 veying the impression that here was a heart worthy of tender 
 love, a heart which, notwithstanding, had never known the 
 joys of love for a young and beautiful woman of refinement 
 and taste. He explained, without attempting to justify, his
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 301 
 
 unusual conduct. He flattered Mme. de Beausant by show- 
 ing that she had realized for him the ideal lady of a young 
 man's dream, the ideal sought by so many, and so often 
 sought in vain. Then he touched upon his morning prowl- 
 ings under the walls of Courcelles, and his wild thoughts at 
 the first sight of the house, till he excited that vague feeling 
 of indulgence which a woman can find in her heart for the 
 follies committed for her sake. 
 
 An impassioned voice was speaking in the chill solitude ; 
 the speaker brought with him a warm breath of youth and the 
 charms of a carefully cultivated mind. It was so long since 
 Mme. de Beauseant had felt stirred by real feeling delicately 
 expressed, that it affected her very strongly now. In spite of 
 herself, she watched M. de Nueil's expressive face, and ad- 
 mired the noble confidence of a soul, unbroken as yet by the 
 cruel discipline of the life of the world, unfretted by con- 
 tinual scheming to gratify personal ambition and vanity. 
 Gaston was in the flower of his youth, he impressed her as a 
 man with something in him, unaware as yet of the great 
 career that lay before him. So both these two made reflec- 
 tions most dangerous for their peace of mind, and both strove 
 to conceal their thoughts. M. de Nueil saw in the Vicom- 
 tesse a rare type of woman, always the victim of her perfec- 
 tion and tenderness ; her graceful beauty is the least of her 
 charms for those who are privileged to know the infinite of 
 feeling and thought and goodness in the soul within ; a 
 woman, whose instinctive feeling for beauty runs through all 
 the most varied expressions of love, purifying its transports, 
 turning them to something almost holy ; wonderful secret of 
 womanhood, the exquisite gift that nature so seldom bestows. 
 And the Vicomtesse, on her side, listening to the ring of 
 sincerity in Gaston's voice, while he told of his youthful 
 troubles, began to understand all that grown children of five- 
 and-twenty suffer from diffidence, when hard work has kept 
 them alike from corrupting influences and intercourse with
 
 302 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 men and women of the world whose sophistical reasoning and 
 experience destroy the fair qualities of youth. Here was the 
 ideal of women's dreams, a man unspoiled as yet by the 
 egoism of family or success, or by that narrow selfishness 
 which blights the first impulses of honor, devotion, self-sacri- 
 fice, and high demands of self; all the flowers so soon wither 
 that enrich at first the life of delicate but strong emotions, 
 and keep alive the loyalty of the heart. 
 
 But these two, once launched forth on the vast sea of senti- 
 ment, went far indeed in theory, sounding the depths in 
 either soul, testing the sincerity of their expressions; only, 
 whereas Gaston's experiments were made unconsciously, Mme. 
 de Beauseant had a purpose in all that she said. Bringing 
 her natural and acquired subtlety to the work, she sought to 
 learn M. de Nueil's opinions by advancing, as far as she 
 could do so, views diametrically opposed to her own. So witty 
 and so gracious was she, so much herself with this stranger, 
 with whom she felt completely at ease, because she felt sure 
 that they should never meet again, that, after some delicious 
 epigram of hers, Gaston exclaimed unthinkingly 
 " Oh ! madame, how could any man have left you?" 
 The Vicomtesse was silent. Gaston reddened, he thought 
 that he had offended her ; but she was not angry. The first 
 deep thrill of delight since the day of her calamity had taken 
 her by surprise. The skill of the cleverest roue could not 
 have made the impression that M. de Nueil made with that 
 cry from the heart. That verdict wrung from a young man's 
 candor gave her back innocence in her own eyes, condemned 
 the world, laid the blame upon the lover who had left her, 
 and justified her subsequent solitary drooping life. The 
 world's absolution, the heartfelt sympathy, the social esteem 
 so longed for, and so harshly refused, nay, all her secret 
 desires were given her to the full in that exclamation, made 
 fairer yet by the heart's sweetest flatteries and the admiration 
 that women always relish eagerly. He understood her, un-
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 303 
 
 derstood all, and he had given her, as if it were the most 
 natural thing in the world, the opportunity of rising higher 
 through her fall. She looked at the clock. 
 
 " Ah ! madame, do not punish me for my heedlessness. If 
 you grant me but one evening, vouchsafe not to shorten it, I 
 pray you." 
 
 She smiled at the pretty speech. 
 
 "Well, as we must never meet again," she said, "what sig- 
 nifies a moment more or less ? If you were to care for me, 
 it would be a pity." 
 
 " It is too late now," he said. 
 
 "Do not tell me that," she answered gravely. "Under 
 any other circumstances I should be very glad to see you. I 
 will speak frankly, and you will understand how it is that 
 I do not choose to see you again, and ought not to do so. 
 You have too much magnanimity not to feel that if I were so 
 much as suspected of a second trespass, every one would think 
 of me as a contemptible and vulgar woman ; I should be like 
 other women. A pure and blameless life will bring my char- 
 acter into relief. I am too proud not to endeavor to live like 
 one apart in the world, a victim of the law through my mar- 
 riage, man's victim through my love. If I were not faithful 
 to the position which I have taken up, then I should deserve 
 all the reproach that is heaped upon me ; I should be lowered 
 in my own eyes. I had not enough lofty social virtue to 
 remain with a man whom I did not love. I have snapped the 
 bonds of marriage in spite of the law ; it was wrong, it was a 
 crime, it was anything you like, but for me the bonds meant 
 death. I meant to live. Perhaps if I had been a mother I 
 could have endured the torture of a forced marriage of suita- 
 bility. At eighteen we scarcely know what is done with us, 
 poor girls that we are ! I have broken the laws of the world, 
 and the world has punished me ; we both did rightly. I 
 sought happiness. Is it not a law of our nature to seek for 
 happiness? I was young, I was beautiful. I thought that I
 
 304 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 had found a nature as loving, as apparently passionate. I was 
 loved indeed ; for a little while " 
 
 She paused. 
 
 " I used to think," she said, " that no one could leave a 
 woman in such a position as mine. I have been forsaken ; I 
 must have offended in some way. Yes, in some way, no 
 doubt, I failed to keep some law of our nature, was too lov- 
 ing, too devoted, too exacting I do not know. Evil days 
 have brought light with them ? For a long while I blamed 
 another, now I am content to bear the whole blame. At my 
 own expense, I have absolved that other of whom I once 
 thought I had a right to complain. I had not the art to keep 
 him ; fate has punished me heavily for my lack of skill. I 
 only knew how to love ; how can one keep one's self in mind 
 when one loves ? So I was a slave when I should have sought 
 to be a tyrant. Those who know me may condemn me, but 
 they will respect me too, Pain has taught me that I must not 
 lay myself open to this a second time. I cannot understand 
 how it is that I am living yet, after the anguish of that first 
 week of the most fearful crisis in a woman's life. Only from 
 three years of loneliness would it be possible to draw strength 
 to speak of that time as I am speaking now. Such agony, 
 monsieur, usually ends in death; but this well, it was the 
 agony of death with no tomb to end it. Oh ! I have known 
 pain indeed ! " 
 
 The Vicomtesse raised her beautiful eyes to the ceiling ; 
 and the cornice, no doubt, received all the confidences which 
 a stranger might not hear. When a woman is afraid to look 
 at her interlocutor, there is in truth no gentler, meeker, more 
 accommodating confidante than the cornice. The cornice is 
 quite an institution in the boudoir ; what is it but the con- 
 fessional, minus the priest ? 
 
 Mme. de Beausant was eloquent and beautiful at that 
 moment ; nay, "coquettish," if the word were not too heavy. 
 By justifying herself, by raising insurmountable barriers be-
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 305 
 
 tween herself and love, she was stimulating every sentiment 
 in the man before her; nay, more, the higher she set the 
 goal, the more conspicuous it grew. At last, when her eyes 
 had lost the too eloquent expression given to them by painful 
 memories, she let them fall on Gaston. 
 
 " You acknowledge, do you not, that I am bound to find a 
 solitary, self-contained life ? " she said quietly. 
 
 So sublime was she in her reasoning and her madness that 
 M. de Nueil felt a wild longing to throw himself at her feet ; 
 but he was afraid of making himself ridiculous, so he held his 
 enthusiasm and his thoughts in check. He was afraid, too, 
 that he might totally fail to express them, and in no less terror 
 of some awful rejection on her part, or of her mockery, an ap- 
 prehension which strikes like ice to the most fervid soul. 
 The revulsion which led him to crush down every feeling 
 as it sprang up in his heart cost him the intense pain that 
 diffident and ambitious natures experience in the frequent 
 crises when they are compelled to stifle their longings." And 
 yet, in spite of himself, he broke the silence to say in a falter- 
 ing voice 
 
 " Madame, permit me to give way to one of the strongest 
 emotions of my life, and own to all that you have made me 
 feel. You set the heart in me swelling high ! I feel within 
 me a longing to make you forget your mortifications, to de- 
 vote my life to this, to give you love for all who have ever 
 given you wounds or hate. But this is a very sudden out- 
 pouring of the heart, nothing can justify it to-day, and I 
 ought not " 
 
 " Enough, monsieur," said Mme. de Beaus6ant ; " we have 
 both of us gone too far. By giving you the sad reasons for a 
 refusal which I am compelled to give, I meant to soften it and 
 not to elicit homage. Coquetry only suits a happy woman. 
 Believe me, we must remain strangers to each other. At a 
 later day you will know that ties which must inevitably be 
 broken ought not to be formed at all." 
 20
 
 306 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 She sighed lightly, and her brows contracted, but almost 
 immediately grew clear again. 
 
 " How painful it is for a woman to be powerless to follow 
 the man she loves through all the phases of his life ! And if 
 . that man loves her truly, his heart must surely vibrate with 
 pain to the deep trouble in hers. Are they not twice un- 
 happy ?" 
 
 There was a short pause. Then she rose smiling. 
 
 "You little suspected, when you came to Courcelles, that 
 you were to hear a sermon, did you ? " 
 
 . Gaston felt even farther than at first from this extraordinary 
 woman. Was the charm of that delightful hour due after all 
 to the coquetry of the mistress of the house ? She had been 
 anxious to display her wit. He bowed stiffly to the Vicom- 
 tesse, and went away in desperation. 
 
 On the way home he tried to detect the real character of a 
 creature supple and hard as a steel spring ; but he had seen her 
 pass through so many phases, that he could not make up his 
 mind about her. The tones of her voice, too, were ringing 
 in his ears ; her gestures, the little movements of her head, 
 and the varying expression of her eyes grew more gracious 
 in memory, more fascinating as he thought of them. The 
 Vicomtesse's beauty shone out again for him in the darkness; 
 his reviving impressions called up yet others, and he was en- 
 thralled anew by womanly charm and wit, which at first he 
 had not perceived. He fell to wandering musings, in which 
 the most lucid thoughts grow refractory and flatly contradict 
 each other, and the soul passes through a brief frenzy fit. 
 Youth only can understand all that lies in the dithyrambic 
 outpourings of youth when, after a stormy siege of the most 
 frantic folly and coolest commonsense, the heart finally yields 
 to the assault of the latest comer, be it hope or despair, as 
 some mysterious power determines. 
 
 At three-and-twenty, diffidence nearly always rules a man's 
 conduct ; he is perplexed with a young girl's shyness, a girl's
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 307 
 
 trouble ; he is afraid lest he should illy express his love, sees 
 nothing but difficulties, and takes alarm at them ; he would 
 be bolder if he loved less, for he has no confidence in himself, 
 and with a growing sense of the cost of happiness comes a 
 conviction that the woman he loves cannot easily be won ; 
 perhaps, too, he is giving himself up too entirely to his own 
 pleasure, and fears that he can give none ; and when, for his 
 misfortune, his idol inspires him with awe, he worships in 
 secret and afar, and, unless his love is guessed, it dies away. 
 Then it often happens that one of these dead early loves 
 lingers on, bright with illusions in many a young heart. 
 What man is there but keeps within him these virgin mem- 
 ories that grow fairer every time they rise before him, mem- 
 ories that hold up to him the ideal of perfect bliss ? Such 
 recollections are like children who die in the flower of child- 
 hood, before their parents have known anything of them but 
 their smiles. 
 
 So M. de Nueil came home from Courcelles, the victim of a 
 mood fraught with desperate resolutions. Even now he felt 
 that Mme. de Beausant was one of the conditions of his 
 existence, and that death would be preferable to life without 
 her. He was still young enough to feel the tyrannous fasci- 
 nation which fully developed womanhood exerts over immature 
 and impassioned natures ; and, consequently, he was to spend 
 one of those stormy nights when a young man's thoughts 
 travel from happiness to suicide and back again nights in 
 which youth rushes through a lifetime of bliss and falls asleep 
 from sheer exhaustion. Fateful nights are they, and the worst 
 misfortune that can happen is to awake a philosopher after- 
 wards. M. de Nueil was far too deeply in love to sleep ; he 
 rose and betook to inditing letters, but none of them were 
 satisfactory, and he burned them all. 
 
 The next day he went to Courcelles to make the circuit of 
 her garden walls, but he waited till nightfall ; he was afraid 
 that she might see him. The instinct that led him to act in
 
 308 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 this way arose out of so obscure a mood of the soul, that none 
 but a young man, or a man in like case, can fully understand 
 its mute ecstasies and its vagaries, matter to set those people 
 who are lucky enough to see life only in its matter-of-fact 
 aspect shrugging their shoulders. After painful hesitation, 
 Gaston wrote to Mme. de Beauseant. Here is the letter, 
 which may serve as a sample of the epistolary style pecu- 
 liar to lovers, a performance which, like the drawings prepared 
 with great secrecy by children for the birthdays of father or 
 mother, is found to be insufferable by every mortal except the 
 recipients : 
 
 " MADAME : Your power over my heart, my soul, myself, 
 is so great that my fate depends wholly upon you to-day. 
 Do not throw this letter into the fire ; be so kind as to read it 
 through. Perhaps you may pardon the opening sentence 
 when you see that it is no commonplace, selfish declaration, 
 but that it expresses a simple fact. Perhaps you may feel 
 moved, because I ask for so little, by the submission of one 
 who feels himself so much beneath you, by the influence that 
 your decision will exercise upon my life. At my age, madame, 
 I only know how to love, I am utterly ignorant of ways of 
 attracting and winning a woman's love, but in my own heart 
 I know raptures of adoration of her. I am irresistibly drawn 
 to you by the great happiness that I feel through you ; my 
 thoughts turn to you with the selfish instinct which bids us 
 draw nearer to the fire of life when we find it. I do not 
 imagine that I am worthy of you ; it seems impossible that I, 
 young, ignorant, and shy, could bring you one-thousandth 
 part of the happiness that I drink in at the sound of your 
 voice and the sight of you. For me you are the only woman 
 in the world. I cannot imagine life without you, so I have 
 made up my mind to leave France, and to risk my life till I 
 lose it in some desperate enterprise, in the Indies, in Africa, I 
 care not where. How can I quell a love that knows no limits
 
 A FOKSAKEN WOMAN. 809 
 
 save by opposing to it something as infinite? Yet, if you 
 will allow me to hope, not to be yours, but to win your friend- 
 ship, I will stay. Let me come, not so very often, if you 
 require it, to spend a few such hours with you as those stolen 
 hours of yesterday. The keen delight of that brief happiness, 
 to be cut short at the least over-ardent word from me, will 
 suffice to enable me to endure the boiling torrent in my veins. 
 Have I presumed too much upon your generosity by this 
 entreaty to suffer an intercourse in which all the gain is mine 
 alone? You could find ways of showing the world, to which 
 you sacrifice so much, that I am nothing to you ; you are so 
 clever and so proud ! What have you to fear ? If I could 
 only lay bare my heart to you at this moment, to convince 
 you that it is with no lurking after-thought that I make this 
 humble request ! Should I have told you that my love was 
 boundless, while I prayed you to grant me friendship, if I 
 had any hope of your sharing this feeling in the depths of 
 my soul? No, while I am with you, I will be whatever you 
 will, if only I may be with you. If you refuse (as you have 
 the power to refuse), I will not utter one murmur, I will go. 
 And if, at a later day, any other woman should enter into 
 my life, you will have proof that you were right ; but if I 
 am faithful till death, you may feel some regret perhaps. The 
 hope of causing you a regret will soothe my agony, and that 
 thought shall be the sole revenge of a slighted heart." 
 
 Only those who have passed through all the exceeding tribu- 
 lations of youth, who have seized on all the chimeras with two 
 white pinions, the nightmare fancies at the disposal of a fervid 
 imagination, can realize the horrors that seized upon Gaston 
 de Nueil when he had reason to suppose that his ultimatum 
 was in Mme. de Beausant's hands. He saw the Vicomtesse, 
 wholly untouched, laughing at his letter and his love, as those 
 can laugh who have ceased to believe in love. He could 
 have wished to have his letter back again. It was an absurd
 
 310 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 letter. There were a thousand and one things, now that he 
 came to think of it, that he might have said, things infinitely 
 better and more moving than those stilted phrases of his, 
 those accursed, sophisticated, pretentious, fine-spun phrases, 
 though, luckily, the punctuation had been pretty bad, and the 
 lines shockingly crooked. He tried not to think, not to feel ; 
 but he felt and thought, and was wretched. If he had been 
 thirty years old, he might have gotten drunk, but the innocent 
 of three-and-twenty knew nothing of the resources of opium 
 nor of the expedients of advanced civilization. Nor had he 
 at hand one of those good friends of the Parisian pattern who 
 understand so well how to say Pate, non dolet .' by producing 
 a bottle of champagne, or alleviate the agony of suspense by 
 carrying you off somewhere to make a night of it. Capital 
 fellows are they, always in low water when you are in funds, 
 always off to some watering-place when you go to look them 
 up, always with some bad bargain in horseflesh to sell you ; it 
 is true, that when you want to borrow of them, they have 
 always just lost their last louis at play ; but in all other re- 
 spects they are the best fellows on earth, always ready to 
 embark with you on one of the steep down-grades where you 
 lose your time, your soul and your life ! 
 
 At length M. de Nueil received a missive through the instru- 
 mentality of Jacques, a letter that bore the arms of Burgundy 
 on the scented seal, a letter written on vellum note-paper. 
 
 He rushed away at once to lock himself in, and read and 
 re-read her letter. 
 
 " You are punishing me very severely, monsieur, both for 
 the friendliness of my effort to spare you a rebuff, and for the 
 attraction which intellect always has for me. I put confidence 
 in the generosity of youth, and you have disappointed me. 
 And yet, if I did not speak unreservedly (which would have 
 been perfectly ridiculous), at any rate I spoke frankly of my 
 position, so that you might imagine that I was not to be
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 311 
 
 touched by a young soul. My distress is the keener for my 
 interest in you. I am naturally tender-hearted and kindly, but 
 circumstances force me to act unkindly. Another woman 
 would have flung your letter, unread, in the fire ; I read it, 
 and I am answering it. My answer will make it clear to you 
 that while I am not untouched by the expression of this feel- 
 ing which I have inspired, albeit unconsciously, I am still far 
 from sharing it, and the step which I am about to take will 
 show you still more plainly that I mean what I say. I wish, 
 besides, to use, for your welfare, that authority, as it were, 
 which you give me over your life ; and I desire to exercise it 
 this once to draw aside the veil from your eyes. 
 
 "I am nearly thirty years old, monsieur; you are barely 
 two-and-twenty. You yourself cannot know what your 
 thoughts will be at my age. The vows that you make so 
 lightly to-day may seem a very heavy burden to you then. 
 I am quite willing to believe that at this moment you 
 would give me your whole life without a regret, you would 
 even be ready to die for a little brief happiness ; but at 
 the age of thirty experience will take from you the very 
 power of making daily sacrifices for my sake, and I myself 
 should feel deeply humiliated if I accepted them. A day 
 would come when everything, even nature, would bid you 
 leave me, and I have already told you that death is pref- 
 erable to desertion. Misfortune has taught me to calculate ; 
 as you see, I am arguing perfectly dispassionately. You 
 force me to tell you that I have no love for you ; I ought 
 not to love, I cannot, and I will not. It is too late to yield, 
 as women yield, to a blind unreasoning impulse of the heart, 
 too late to be the mistress whom you seek. My consolations 
 spring from God, not from earth. Ah, and besides, with the 
 melancholy insight of disappointed love, I read hearts too 
 clearly to accept your proffered friendship. It is only in- 
 stinct. I forgive the boyish ruse, for which you are not 
 responsible as yet. In the name of this passing fancy of
 
 312 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 yours, for the sake of your career and my own peace of mind, 
 I bid you stay in your own country; you must not spoil a 
 fair and honorable life for an illusion which, by its very na- 
 ture, cannot last. At a later day, when you have accom- 
 plished your real destiny, in the fully developed manhood 
 that awaits you, you will appreciate this answer of mine, 
 though to-day it may be that you blame its hardness. You 
 will turn with pleasure to an old woman whose friendship will 
 certainly be sweet and precious to you then ; a friendship 
 untried by the extremes of fashion and the disenchanting 
 processes of life ; a friendship which noble thoughts and 
 thoughts of religion will keep pure and sacred. Farewell ; 
 do my bidding with the thought that your success will bring 
 a gleam of pleasure into my solitude, and only think of me 
 as we think of absent friends." 
 
 Gaston de Nueil read the letter, and wrote the following 
 lines : 
 
 " MADAME : If I could cease to love you, to take the chances 
 of becoming an ordinary man which you hold out to me, you 
 must admit that I should thoroughly deserve my fate. No, I 
 shall not do as you bid me ; the oath of fidelity which I swear 
 to you shall only be absolved by death. Ah ! take my life, 
 unless indeed you do not fear to carry a remorse all through 
 your own " 
 
 When the man returned from his errand, M. de Nueil asked 
 him with whom he left the note ? 
 
 "I gave it to Mme. le Vicomtesse herself, sir; she was in 
 her carriage and just about to start." 
 
 " For the town?" 
 
 "I don't think so, sir. Mme. la Vicomtesse had post- 
 horses." 
 
 (( Ah ! then she is going away," said the Baron,
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 313 
 
 "Yes, sir," the man answered. 
 
 Gaston de Nueil at once prepared to follow Mme. dc Beau- 
 s6ant. She led the way as far as Geneva, without a suspicion 
 that he followed. And he ? Amid the many thoughts that 
 assailed him during that journey, one all-absorbing problem 
 filled his mind " Why did she go away? " Theories grew 
 thickly on such ground for supposition, and naturally he in- 
 clined to the one that flattered his hopes " If the Vicomtesse 
 cares for me, a clever woman would, of course, choose Swit- 
 zerland, where nobody knows either of us, in preference to 
 France, where she would find censorious critics." 
 
 An impassioned lover of a certain stamp would not feel 
 attracted to a woman clever enough to choose her own ground ; 
 such women are too clever. However, there is nothing to 
 prove that there was any truth in Gaston's supposition. 
 
 The Vicomtesse took a small house by the side of the lake. 
 As soon as she was installed in it, Gaston came one summer 
 evening in the twilight. Jacques, that flunkey in grain, 
 showed no sign of surprise, and announced "M. le Baron de 
 Nueil" like a discreet domestic well acquainted with good 
 society. At the sound of the name, at the sight of its owner, 
 Mme. de Beauseant let her book fall from her hands ; her sur- 
 prise gave him time to come close to her, and to say in tones 
 that sounded like music in her ears 
 
 "What joy it was to me to take the horses that brought 
 you on this journey ! " 
 
 To have the inmost desires of the heart so fulfilled ! Where 
 is the woman who could resist such happiness as this? An 
 Italian woman, one of those divine creatures who, psycho- 
 logically, are as far removed from the Parisian as if they lived 
 at the Antipodes, a being who would be regarded as pro- 
 foundly immoral on this side the Alps, an Italian (to resume) 
 made the following comment on some French novels which 
 she had been reading : " I cannot see," she remarked, " why 
 these poor lovers take such a time over coming to an arrange-
 
 314 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 ment which ought to be the affair of a single morning." 
 Why should not the novelist take a hint from this worthy 
 lady, and refrain from exhausting the theme and the reader ? 
 Some few passages of coquetry it would certainly be pleasant 
 to give in outline; the story of Mme. de Beauseant's demurs 
 and sweet delayings, that, like the vestal virgins of antiquity, 
 she might fall gracefully, and by lingering over the innocent 
 raptures of first love draw from it its utmost strength and 
 sweetness. M. de Nueil was at an age when a man is the 
 dupe of these caprices, of the fence which women delight to 
 prolong ; either to dictate their own terms, or to enjoy the 
 sense of their power yet longer, knowing instinctively as they 
 do that it must soon grow less. But, after all, these little 
 boudoir protocols, less numerous than those of the Congress 
 of London, are too small to be worth mentioning in the his- 
 tory of this passion. 
 
 For three years Mme. de Beauseant and M. de Nueil lived 
 in the villa on the lake of Geneva. They lived quite alone, 
 received no visitors, caused no talk, rose late, went out to- 
 gether upon the lake, knew, in short, the happiness of which 
 we all of us dream. It was a simple little house, with green 
 shutters, and broad balconies shaded with awnings, a house 
 contrived of set purpose for lovers, with its white couches, 
 soundless carpets, and fresh hangings, everything within it 
 reflecting their joy. Every window looked out on some new 
 view of the lake ; in the far distance lay the mountains, fan- 
 tastic visions of changing color and evanescent cloud ; above 
 them spread the sunny sky, before them stretched the broad 
 sheet of water, never the same in its fitful changes. All their 
 surroundings seemed to dream for them, all things smiled 
 upon them. 
 
 Then weighty matters recalled M. de Nueil to France. 
 His father and brother died, and he was obliged to leave 
 Geneva. The lovers bought the house; and, if they could 
 have had their way, they would have removed the hills piece-
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 315 
 
 meal, drawn off the lake with a siphon, and taken everything 
 away with them. 
 
 Mme. de Beauseant followed M. de Nueil. She realized 
 her property, and bought a considerable estate near Maner- 
 ville, adjoining Gaston's lands, and here they lived together 
 Gaston very graciously giving up Manerville to his mother 
 for the present in consideration of the bachelor freedom in 
 which she left him. 
 
 Mme. de Beauseant's estate was close to a little town in 
 one of the most picturesque spots in the valley of the Auge. 
 Here the lovers raised barriers between themselves and social 
 intercourse, barriers which no creature could overleap, and 
 here the happy days of Switzerland were lived over again. 
 For nine whole years they knew happiness which it serves no 
 purpose to describe ; happiness which may be divined from 
 the outcome of the story by those whose souls can compre- 
 hend poetry and prayer in their infinite manifestations. 
 
 All this time Mme. de Beauseant's husband, the present 
 Marquis (his father and elder brother having died), enjoyed 
 the soundest health. There is no better aid to life than a 
 certain knowledge that our demise would confer a benefit on 
 some fellow-creature. M. de Beausdant was one of those 
 ironical and wayward beings who, like holders of life-annui- 
 ties, wake with an additional sense of relish every morning to 
 a consciousness of good health. For the rest, he was a man 
 of the world, somewhat methodical and ceremonious, and a 
 calculator of consequences, who could make a declaration 
 of love as quietly as a lackey announces that "Madame is 
 served." 
 
 This brief biographical notice of his lordship the Marquis 
 de Beausant is given to explain the reasons why it was im- 
 possible for the Marquise to marry M. de Nueil. 
 
 So, after a nine years' lease of happiness, the sweetest 
 agreement to which a woman ever put her hand, M. de 
 Nueil and Mme. de Beauseant were still in a position quite
 
 316 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 as natural and quite as false as at the beginning of their ad- 
 venture. And yet they had reached a fatal crisis, which may 
 be stated as clearly as any problem in mathematics. 
 
 Mme. le Comtesse de Nueil, Gaston's mother, a straight- 
 laced and virtuous person, who had made the late Baron happy 
 in strictly legal fashion, would never consent to meet Mme. 
 de Beauseant. Mme. de Beauseant quite understood that the 
 worthy dowager must of necessity be her enemy, and that she 
 would try to draw Gaston from his unhallowed and immoral 
 way of life. The Marquise de Beauseant would willingly have 
 sold her property and gone back to Geneva, but she could 
 not bring herself to do it ; it would mean that she distrusted 
 M. de Nueil. Moreover, he had taken a great fancy to this 
 very Valleroy estate, where he was making plantations and 
 improvements. She would not deprive him of a piece of 
 pleasurable routine-work, such as women always wish for their 
 husbands, and even for their lovers. 
 
 A Mile, de Rodiere, twenty-two years of age, an heiress 
 with a rent-roll of forty thousand livres, had come to live in 
 the neighborhood. Gaston always met her at Manerville 
 whenever he was obliged to go thither. These various per- 
 sonages being to each other as the terms of a proportion 
 sum, the following letter will throw light on the appalling 
 problem which Mme. de Beausdant had been trying for the 
 past month to solve : 
 
 " My beloved angel, it seems like nonsense, does it not, to 
 write to you when there is nothing to keep us apart, when a 
 caress so often takes the place of words, and words too are 
 caresses? Ah, well, my love. There are some things that a 
 woman cannot say when she is face to face with the man she 
 loves ; at the bare thought of them her voice fails her, and 
 the blood goes back to her heart ; she has no strength, no 
 intelligence left. It hurts me to feel like this when you are 
 near me, and it happens often. I feel that my heart should
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 317 
 
 be wholly sincere for you ; that I should disguise no thought, 
 however transient, in my heart ; and I love the sweet careless- 
 ness, which suits me so well, too much to endure this embar- 
 rassment and constraint any longer. So I will tell you about 
 my anguish yes, it is anguish. Listen to me ! do not begin 
 with the little ' Tut, tut, tut,' that you use to silence me, an 
 impertinence that I love, because anything from you pleases 
 me. Dear soul from heaven, wedded to mine, let me first tell 
 you that you have effaced all memory of the pain that once 
 was crushing the life out of me. I did not know what love 
 was before I knew you. Only the candor of your beautiful 
 young life, only the purity of that great soul of yours, could 
 satisfy the requirements of an exacting woman's heart. Dear 
 love, how very often I have thrilled with joy to think that in 
 these nine long, swift years, my jealousy has not been once 
 awakened. All the flowers of your soul have been mine, all 
 your thoughts. There has not been the faintest cloud in our 
 heaven ; we have not known what sacrifice is ; we have always 
 acted on the impulses of our hearts. I have known happi- 
 ness, infinite for a woman. Will the tears that drench this 
 sheet tell you all my gratitude? I could wish that I had 
 knelt to write the words ! Well, out of this felicity has arisen 
 torture more terrible than the pain of desertion. Dear, there 
 are very deep recesses in a woman's heart ; how deep in my 
 own heart, I did not know myself until to-day, as I did not 
 know the whole extent of love. The greatest misery which 
 could overwhelm us is a light burden compared with the mere 
 thought of harm for him whom we love. And how if we 
 
 cause the harm, is it not enough to make one die? This 
 
 is the thought that is weighing upon me. But it brings in 
 its train another thought that is heavier far, a thought that 
 tarnishes the glory of love, and slays it, and turns it into a 
 humiliation which sullies life as long as it lasts. You are 
 thirty years old ; I am forty. What dread this difference in 
 age calls up in a woman who loves ! It is possible that, first
 
 318 A FORSAKEN WOMAN, 
 
 of all unconsciously, afterwards in earnest, you have felt the 
 sacrifices that you have made by renouncing all in the world 
 for me. Perhaps you have thought of your future from the 
 social point of view, of the marriage which would, of course, 
 increase your fortune, and give you avowed happiness and 
 children who would inherit your wealth ; perhaps you have 
 thought of reappearing in the world, and filling your place 
 there honorably. And then, if so, you must have repressed 
 those thoughts, and felt glad to sacrifice heiress and fortune 
 and a fair future to me without my knowledge. In your young 
 man's generosity, you must have resolved to be faithful to the 
 vows which bind us each to each in the sight of God. My 
 past pain has risen up before your mind, and the misery from 
 which you rescued me has been my protection. To owe 
 your love to your pity ! The thought is even more painful to 
 me than the fear of spoiling your life for you. The man who 
 can bring himself to stab his mistress is very charitable if he 
 gives her her death-blow while she is happy and ignorant of 
 
 evil, while illusions are in full blossom Yes, death is 
 
 preferable to the two thoughts which have secretly saddened 
 the hours for several days. To-day, when you asked ' What 
 ails you ? ' so tenderly, the sound of your voice made me 
 shiver. I thought that, after your wont, you were reading my 
 very soul, and I waited for your confidence to come, thinking 
 that my presentiments had come true, and that I had guessed 
 at all that was going on in your mind. Then I began to think 
 over certain little things that you always do for me, and I 
 thought I could see in you the sort of affectation by which a 
 man betrays a consciousness that his loyalty is becoming a 
 burden. And in that moment I paid very dear for my happi- 
 ness. I felt that nature always demands the price for the 
 treasure called love. Briefly, has not fate separated us ? Can 
 you have said, ' Sooner or later I must leave poor Claire ; 
 why not separate in time ? ' I read that thought in the 
 depths of your eyes, and went away to cry by myself.
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 319 
 
 Hiding my tears from you ! the first tears that I have shed 
 for sorrow for these ten years; I am too proud to let you see 
 them, but I did not reproach you in the least. 
 
 "Yes, you are right. I ought not to be so selfish as to 
 bind your long and brilliant career to my so-soon worn-out 
 life. And yet how if I have been mistaken ? How if I have 
 taken your love melancholy for a deliberation ? Oh, my love, 
 do not leave me in suspense ; punish this jealous wife of yours, 
 but give her back the sense of her love and yours ; the whole 
 woman lies in that that consciousness sanctifies everything. 
 
 " Since your mother came, since you paid a visit to Mile. 
 de Rodiere, I have been gnawed by doubts dishonoring to us 
 both. Make me suffer for this, but do not deceive me ; I 
 want to know everything that your mother said and what you 
 think ! If you have hesitated between some alternative and 
 me, I give you back your liberty. I will not let you know 
 what happens to me ; I will not shed tears for you to see ; 
 only I will not see you again. Ah ! I cannot go on, my 
 heart is breaking 
 
 " I have been sitting benumbed and stupid for some mo- 
 ments. Dear love, I do not find that any feeling of pride 
 rises against you ; you are so kind-hearted, so open ; you 
 would find it impossible to hurt me or to deceive me ; and 
 you will tell me the truth, however cruel it may be. Do you 
 wish me to encourage your confession ? Well, then, heart of 
 mine, I shall find comfort in a woman's thought. Has not 
 the youth of your being been mine, your sensitive, wholly gra- 
 cious, beautiful, and delicate youth ? No woman shall find 
 henceforth the Gaston whom I have known, nor the deli- 
 cious happiness that he has given me No ; you will never 
 
 love again as you have loved, as you love me now; no, I shall 
 never have a rival, it is impossible. There will be no bitter- 
 ness in my memories of our love, and I shall think of nothing 
 else. It is out of your power to enchant any woman hence- 
 forth by the childish provocations, the charming ways of a
 
 320 A FORSAKEN WOMAN: 
 
 young heart, the soul's winning charm, the body's grace, the 
 swift communion of rapture, the whole divine cortege of 
 young love, in fine. 
 
 " Oh, you are a man now, you will obey your destiny, 
 weighing and considering all things. You will have cares, 
 and anxieties, and ambitions, and concerns that will rob her 
 of the unchanging smile that made your lips fair for me. 
 The tones that were always so sweet for me will be troubled 
 at times ; and your eyes that lighted up with radiance from 
 heaven at the sight of me will often be lustreless for her. 
 And besides, as it is impossible to love you as I love you, you 
 will never care for that woman as you have cared for me. 
 She will never keep a constant watch over herself as I have 
 done ; she will never study your happiness at every moment 
 with an intuition which has never failed me. Ah, yes, the 
 man, the heart and soul, which I shall have known will exist 
 no longer. I shall bury him deep in my memory, that I may 
 have the joy of him still ; I shall live happy in that fair past 
 life of ours, a life hidden from all but our inmost selves. 
 
 " Dear treasure of mine, if all the while no least thought 
 of liberty has risen in your mind, if my love is no burden on 
 you, if my fears are chimerical, if I am still your Eve the 
 one woman in the world for you come to me as soon as you 
 have read this letter ; come quickly ! Ah ! in one moment I 
 will love you more than I have ever loved you, I think, in 
 these nine years. After enduring the needless torture of these 
 doubts of which I am accusing myself, every added day of 
 love, yes, every single day, will be a whole lifetime of bliss. 
 So speak, and speak openly ; do not deceive me, it would be 
 a crime. Tell me, do you wish for your liberty? Have you 
 thought of all that a man's life means? Is there any regret 
 in your mind ? That / should cause you a regret ! I should 
 die of it. I have said it : I love you enough to set your 
 happiness above mine, your life before my own. Leave on 
 one side, if you can, the wealth of memories of our nine
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 321 
 
 years' happiness, that they may not influence your decision, 
 but speak ! I submit myself to you as to God, the one Con- 
 soler who remains if you forsake me." 
 
 When Mme. de Beauseant knew that her letter was in M. 
 de Nueil's hands, she sank in such utter prostration, the over- 
 pressure of many thoughts so numbed her faculties that she 
 seemed almost drowsy. At any rate, she was suffering from 
 a pain not always proportioned in its intensity to a woman's 
 strength ; pain which women alone know. And while the 
 unhappy Marquise awaited her doom, M. de Nueil, reading 
 her letter, felt that he was "in a very difficult position," to 
 use the expression that young men apply to a crisis of this 
 kind. 
 
 By this time he had all but yielded to his mother's impor- 
 tunities and to the attractions of Mile, de la Rodiere, a some- 
 what insignificant, pink-and-white young person, as straight as 
 a poplar. It is true that, in accordance with the rules laid 
 down for marriageable young ladies, she scarcely opened her 
 mouth, but her rent-roll of forty thousand livres spoke quite 
 sufficiently for her. Mme. de Nueil, with a mother's sincere 
 affection, tried to entangle her son in virtuous courses. She 
 called his attention to the fact that it was a flattering distinc- 
 tion to be preferred by Mile, de la Rodiere, who had refused 
 so many great matches ; it was quite time, she urged, that he 
 should think of his future, such a good opportunity might not 
 repeat itself, some day he would have eighty thousand livres of 
 income from land ; money made anything bearable ; if Mme. 
 de Beauseant loved him for his own sake, she ought to be the 
 first to urge him to marry. In short, the well-intentioned 
 mother forgot no arguments which the feminine intellect can 
 bring to bear upon the masculine mind, and by these means 
 she had brought her son into a wavering condition. 
 
 Mme. de Beaus6ant's letter arrived just as Gaston's love of 
 her was holding out against the temptations of a settled life 
 21
 
 322 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 conformable to received ideas. That letter decided the day. 
 He made up his mind to break off with the Marquise and to 
 marry. 
 
 " One must live a man's life," said he to himself. 
 
 Then followed some inkling of the pain that this decision 
 would give to Mme. de Beauseant. The man's vanity and the 
 lover's conscience further exaggerated this pain, and a sincere 
 pity for her seized upon him. All at once the immensity of 
 the misery became apparent to him, and he thought it neces- 
 sary and charitable to deaden the deadly blow. He hoped to 
 bring Mme. de Beauseant to a calm frame of mind by grad- 
 ually reconciling her to the idea of separation ; while Mile. 
 de la Rodiere, always like a shadowy third between them, 
 should be sacrificed to her at first, only to be imposed upon 
 her later. His marriage should take place later, in obedience 
 to Mme. de Beausant's expressed wish. He went so far as 
 to enlist the Marquise's nobleness and pride and all the great 
 qualities of her nature to help him to succeed in this com- 
 passionate design. He would write a letter at once to allay 
 her suspicions. A letter ! For a woman with the most ex- 
 quisite feminine perception, as well as the intuition of pas- 
 sionate love, a letter in itself was a sentence of death. 
 
 So when Jacques came and brought Mme. de Beauseant 
 a sheet of paper folded in a triangle, she trembled, poor 
 woman, like a snared swallow. A mysterious sensation of 
 physical cold spread from head to foot, wrapping her about 
 in an icy winding-sheet. If he did not rush to her feet, if 
 he did not come to her in tears, and pale, and like a lover, 
 she knew that all was lost. And yet, so many hopes are 
 there in the heart of a woman who loves, that she is only 
 slain by stab after stab, and loves on till the last drop of 
 life-blood drains away. 
 
 "Does madame need anything?" Jacques asked gently, as 
 he went away. 
 
 "No," she said.
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 323 
 
 "Poor fellow!" she thought, brushing a tear from her 
 eyes, " he guesses ray feelings, servant though he is ! " 
 
 She read: "My beloved, you are inventing idle terrors 
 
 for yourself " The Marquise gazed at the words, and a 
 
 thick mist spread before her eyes. A voice in her heart 
 cried, "He lies!" Then she glanced down the page with 
 the clairvoyant eagerness of passion, and read these words at 
 
 the foot, "Nothing has been decided as yet " Turning to 
 
 the other side with convulsive quickness, she saw the mind of 
 the writer distinctly through the intricacies of the wording ; 
 this was no spontaneous outburst of love. She crushed it in 
 her fingers, twisted it, tore it with her teeth, flung it in the 
 fire, and cried aloud, "Ah ! base that he is ! I was his, and 
 he has ceased to love me ! " 
 
 She sank half-dead upon the couch. 
 
 M. de Nueil went out as soon as he had written his letter. 
 When he came back, Jacques met him on the threshold with 
 a note. " Madame la Marquise has left the chateau," said 
 the man. 
 
 M. de Nueil, in amazement, broke the seal and read : 
 
 " MADAME : If I could cease to love you, to take the 
 chances of becoming an ordinary man which you hold out to 
 me, you must admit that I should thoroughly deserve my fate. 
 No, I shall not do as you bid me ; the oath of fidelity which 
 I swear to you shall only be absolved by death. Ah ! take 
 my life, unless indeed you do not fear to carry a remorse all 
 through your own " 
 
 It was his own letter, written to the Marquise as she set out 
 for Geneva nine years before. At the foot of it Claire de 
 Bourgogne had written, " Monsieur, you are free." 
 
 M. de Nueil went to his mother at Manerville. In less 
 than three weeks he married Mile. Stephanie de la Rodiere. 
 
 If this commonplace story of real life ended here, it would
 
 324 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 be to some extent a sort of mystification. The first man you 
 meet can tell you a better. But the widespread fame of the 
 catastrophe (for, unhappily, this is a true tale), and all the 
 memories which it may arouse in those who have known the 
 divine delights of infinite passion, and lost them by their own 
 deed, or through the cruelty of fate these things may perhaps 
 shelter the story from criticism. 
 
 Mme. la Marquise de Beauseant never left Valleroy after 
 her parting from M. de Nueil. After his marriage she still 
 continued to live there, for some inscrutable woman's reason ; 
 any woman is at liberty to assign the one which most appeals 
 to her. Claire de Bourgogne lived in such complete retire- 
 ment that none of the servants, save Jacques and her own 
 woman, ever saw their mistress. She required absolute silence 
 all about her, and only left her room to go to the chapel on 
 the Valleroy estate, whither a neighboring priest came to say 
 mass every morning. 
 
 The Comte de Nueil sank a few days after his marriage into 
 something like conjugal apathy, which might be interpreted 
 to mean either happiness or unhappiness. 
 
 " My son is perfectly happy," his mother said everywhere. 
 
 Mme. Gaston de Nueil, like a great many young women, 
 was a rather colorless character, sweet and passive. A month 
 after her marriage she had expectations of becoming a mother. 
 All this was quite in accordance with ordinary views. M. de 
 Nueil was very nice to her ; but two months after his separation 
 from the Marquise, he grew notably thoughtful and abstracted. 
 But then he always had been serious, his mother said. 
 
 After seven months of this tepid happiness, a little thing 
 occurred, one of those seemingly small matters which imply 
 such great development of thought and such widespread 
 trouble of soul, that only the bare fact can be recorded ; 
 the interpretation of it must be left to the fancy of each 
 individual mind. One day, when M. de Nueil had been 
 shooting over the lands of Manerville and Valleroy, he crossed
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 325 
 
 Mme. de Beaus6ant's park on his way home, summoned 
 Jacques, and when the man came, asked him, " Whether the 
 Marquise was as fond of game as ever ? ' ' 
 
 Jacques, answering in the affirmative, Gaston offered him a 
 good round sum (accompanied by plenty of specious reason- 
 ing) for a very little service. Would he set aside for the 
 Marquise the game that the Count would bring? It seemed 
 to Jacques to be a matter of no great importance whether the 
 partridge on which his mistress dined had been shot by her 
 keeper or by M. de Nueil, especially since the latter particu- 
 larly wished that the Marquise should know nothing about it. 
 
 "It was killed on her land," said the Count, and for some 
 days Jacques lent himself to the harmless deceit. Day after 
 day M. de Nueil went shooting, and came back at dinner- 
 time with an empty bag. A whole week went by in this way. 
 Gaston grew bold enough to write a long letter to the Mar- 
 quise, and had it conveyed to her. It was returned to him 
 unopened. The Marquise's servant brought it back about 
 nightfall. The Count, sitting in the drawing-room listening, 
 while his wife at the piano mangled a Caprice of Herold's, 
 suddenly sprang up and rushed to the Marquise, as if he were 
 flying to an assignation. He dashed through a well-known 
 gap into the park, and went slowly along the avenues, stop- 
 ping now and again for a little to still the rapid beatings of his 
 heart. Smothered sounds as he came nearer the chateau told 
 him that the servants must be at supper, and he went straight 
 to Mme. de Beaus6ant's room. 
 
 Mme. de Beauseant never left her bedroom. M. de Nueil 
 could gain the doorway without making the slightest sound. 
 There, by the light of two wax-candles, he saw the thin, 
 white Marquise in a great armchair; her head was bowed, 
 her hands hung listlessly, her eyes gazing fixedly at some 
 object which she did not seem to see. Her whole attitude 
 spoke of hopeless pain. There was a vague something like 
 hope in her bearing, but it was impossible t.o say whither
 
 326 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 Claire de Bourgogne was looking forwards to the tomb or 
 backwards into the past. Perhaps M. de Nueil's tears glit- 
 tered in the deep shadows ; perhaps his breathing sounded 
 faintly ; perhaps unconsciously he trembled, or again it may 
 have been impossible that he should stand there, his presence 
 unfelt by that quick sense which grows to be an instinct, the 
 glory, the delight, the proof of perfect love. However it 
 was, Mme. de Beauseant slowly turned her face towards the 
 doorway, and beheld her lover of bygone days. Then Gaston 
 de Nueil came forward a few paces. 
 
 "If you come any farther, sir," exclaimed the Marquise, 
 growing paler, " I shall fling myself out of the window ! " 
 
 She sprang to the window, flung it open, and stood with 
 one foot on the ledge, her hand upon the iron balustrade, her 
 face turned towards Gaston. 
 
 "Go out! go out!" she cried, " or I will throw myself 
 over." 
 
 At that dreadful cry the servants began to stir, and M. de 
 Nueil fled like a criminal. 
 
 When he reached his home again he wrote a few lines and 
 gave them to his own man, telling him to give the letter him- 
 self into Mme. de Beauseant's hands, and to say that it was a 
 matter of life and death for his master. The messenger went. 
 M. de Nueil went back to the drawing-room where his wife 
 was still murdering the Caprice, and sat down to wait until 
 the answer came. An hour later, when the Caprice had come 
 to an end, and the husband and wife sat in silence on opposite 
 sides of the hearth, the man came back from Valleroy and 
 gave his master his own letter, unopened. 
 
 M. de Nueil then arose, went into a small room beyond 
 the drawing-room, where he had left his rifle, and shot 
 himself. 
 
 The swift and fatal ending of the drama, contrary as it 
 is to all the habits of young France, is only what might have 
 been expected. Those who have closely observed, or known
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 327 
 
 for themselves by delicious experience, all that is meant by 
 the perfect union of two beings, will understand Gaston de 
 Nueil's suicide perfectly well. A woman does not bend and 
 form herself in a day to the caprices of passion. The pleasure 
 of loving, like some rare flower, needs the most careful inge- 
 nuity of culture. Time alone, and two souls attuned each to 
 each, can discover all its resources, and call into being all 
 the tender and delicate delights for which we are steeped in a 
 thousand superstitions, imagining them to be inherent in the 
 heart that lavishes them upon us. It is this wonderful re- 
 sponse of one nature to another, this religious belief, this 
 certainty of finding peculiar or excessive happiness in the 
 presence of one we love, that accounts in part for perdurable 
 attachments and long-lived passion. If a woman possesses 
 the genius of her sex, love never comes to be a matter of use 
 and wont. She brings all her heart and brain to love, clothes 
 her tenderness in forms so varied, there is such art in her 
 most natural movements, or so much nature in her art, that in 
 absence her memory is almost as potent as her presence. All 
 other women are as shadows compared with her. Not until 
 we have lost or known the dread of losing a love so vast and 
 glorious, do we prize it at its just worth. And if a man who 
 has once possessed this love shuts himself out from it by his 
 own act and deed, and sinks to some loveless marriage ; if, 
 by some incident, hidden in the obscurity of married life, the 
 woman with whom he hoped to know the same felicity makes 
 it clear that it will never be revived for him; if, with the 
 sweetness of divine love still on his lips, he has dealt a deadly 
 wound to her, his wife in truth, whom he forsook for a social 
 chimera then he must either die or take refuge in a material- 
 istic, selfish, and heartless philosophy, from which impassioned 
 souls shrink in horror. 
 
 '. 
 As for Mme. de Beausant, she doubtless did not imagine 
 
 that her friend's despair could drive him to suicide, when he
 
 328 
 
 A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 
 
 had drunk deep of love for nine years. Possibly she may 
 have thought that she alone was to suffer. At any rate, she 
 did quite rightly to refuse the most humiliating of all posi- 
 tions ', a wife may stoop for weighty social reasons to a kind 
 of compromise which a mistress is bound to hold in abhor- 
 rence, for in the purity of her passion lies all its justification. 
 
 ANGOULEME, September, 1832.
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 (La Fausse Mattresse.} 
 Dedicated to the Comtesse Clara Maffei. 
 
 IN the month of September, 1835, one of the richest 
 heiresses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Mademoiselle du 
 Rouvre, the only child of the Marquis du Rouvre, married 
 Count Adam Mitgislas Laginski, a young Polish exile. 
 
 I allow myself to spell the names as they are pronounced, 
 to spare the reader the sight of the fortifications of conso- 
 nants by which, in the Slav languages, the vowels are pro- 
 tected, no doubt to secure them against loss, seeing how few 
 they are. 
 
 The Marquis du Rouvre had dissipated almost the whole 
 of one of the finest fortunes of the nobility, to which he had 
 formerly owed his alliance with a Mademoiselle de Ronque- 
 rolles. Hence Clementine had for her uncle, on her mother's 
 side, the Marquis de Ronquerolles, and for her aunt Madame 
 de Serizy. On her father's side she possessed another uncle in 
 the eccentric person of the Chevalier du Rouvre, the younger 
 son of the house, an old bachelor who had grown rich by 
 speculations in land and houses. 
 
 The Marquis de Ronquerolles was so unhappy as to lose 
 both his children during the visitation of cholera. Madame 
 de Se>izy's only son, a young officer of the highest promise, 
 was killed in Africa at the fight by the Macta. In these days 
 rich families run the risk of ruining their children if they 
 have too many, or of becoming extinct if they have but one 
 or two, a singular result of the Civil Code not foreseen by 
 Napoleon. Thus, by accident, and in spite of Monsieur du 
 
 (329)
 
 330 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 Rouvre's reckless extravagances for Florine, one of the most 
 charming of Paris actresses, Clementine had become an heir- 
 ess. The Marquis de Ronquerolles, one of the most accom- 
 plished diplomats of the new dynasty, his sister, Madame de 
 Serizy, and the Chevalier du Rouvre agreed that, to rescue 
 their fortunes from the Marquis' clutches, they would leave 
 them to their niece, to whom they each promised ten thousand 
 francs a year on her marriage. 
 
 It is quite unnecessary to say that the Pole, though a refu- 
 gee, cost the French government absolutely nothing. Count 
 Adam belonged to one of the oldest and most illustrious fami- 
 lies of Poland, connected with most of the princely houses 
 of Germany, with the Sapiehas, the Radziwills, the Mniszechs, 
 the Rzewuskis, the Czartoryskis, the Leszinskis, the Lubomir- 
 skis; in short, all the great Sarmatian skis. But a knowledge of 
 heraldry is not a strong point in France under Louis Philippe, 
 and such nobility could be no recommendation to the bour- 
 geoisie then in power. Besides, when, in 1833, Adam made his 
 appearance on the Boulevard des Italiens, at Frascati's, at the 
 Jockey Club, he led the life of a man who, having lost his 
 political prospects, falls back on his vices and his love of 
 pleasure. ' He was taken for a student. 
 
 The Polish nationality, as the result of an odious govern- 
 ment reaction, had fallen as low as the Republicans had tried 
 to think it high. The strange struggle of movement against 
 resistance two words which thirty years hence will be inex- 
 plicable made a farce of what ought to have been so worthy : 
 the name, that is, of a vanquished nation to which France 
 gave hospitality, for which entertainments were devised, for 
 which every one danced or sang by subscription ; a nation, in 
 short, which at the time when, in 1796, Europe was fighting 
 France, had offered her six thousand men, and such men ! 
 
 Do not conclude from this that I mean to represent the 
 Emperor Nicholas as being in the wrong as regards Poland, 
 or Poland as regards the Emperor Nicholas. In the first place,
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 331 
 
 it would be a silly thing enough to slip a political discussion 
 into a tale which ought to interest or to amuse. Besides, 
 Russia and Poland were equally right : one for aiming at unity 
 of empire, the other for desiring to be free again. It may 
 be said, in passing, that Poland might have conquered Russia 
 by the influence of manners instead of beating her with 
 weapons ; thus imitating the Chinese, who at last Chinesi- 
 fied the Tartars, and who, it is to be hoped, will do the same 
 by the English. Poland ought to have polished the Russians ; 
 Poniatowski had tried it in the least temperate district of the 
 empire. But that gentleman was a misunderstood king all 
 the more so because he did not, perhaps, understand himself. 
 
 How was it possible not to hate the poor people who were 
 the cause of the horrible deceit committed on the occasion of 
 the review when all Paris was eager to rescue Poland ? People 
 affected to regard the Poles as allies of the Republican party, 
 forgetting that Poland was an aristocratic republic. Thence- 
 forth the party of wealth poured ignoble contempt on the 
 Pole, who had been deified but a few days since. The wind 
 of a riot has always blown the Parisians round from north to 
 south under every form of government. This weathercock 
 temper of Paris opinion must be remembered if we would 
 understand how, in 1835, the name of Pole was a word of 
 ridicule among the race who believe themselves to be the 
 wittiest and politest in the world, and its central luminary, 
 in a city which, at this day, wields the sceptre of art and 
 literature. 
 
 There are, alas ! two types of Polish refugees the repub- 
 lican Pole, the son of Lelewel, and the noble Pole of the 
 party led by Prince Czartoryski. These two kinds of Pole 
 are as fire and water, but why blame them ? Are not such 
 divisions always to be observed among refugees whatever 
 nation they belong to, and no matter what country they go 
 to? They carry their country and their hatreds with them. 
 At Brussels two French emigrant priests expressed the greatest
 
 332 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 aversion for each other ; and when one of them was asked his 
 reasons, he replied, pointing to his companion in misery, " He 
 is a Jansenist ! " Dante, in his exile, would gladly have 
 stabbed any adversary of the "Bianchi." In this lies the rea- 
 son of the attacks made on the venerable Prince Adam Czar- 
 toryski by the French radicals, and that of the disapproval 
 shown to a section of the Polish emigrants by the Caesars of 
 the counter and the Alexanders by letters patent. 
 
 In 1834 Adam Mitgislas Laginski was the butt of Parisian 
 witticisms. " He is a nice fellow though he is a Pole," said 
 Rastignac. " All the Poles are great lords," said Maxime de 
 Trailles, " but this one pays his gambling debts ; I begin to 
 think that he must have had an estate." 
 
 And without offense to the exiles, it may be remarked that 
 the levity, the recklessness, the fluidity of the Sarmatian char- 
 acter justified the calumnies of the Parisians, who, indeed, 
 in similar circumstances, would be exactly like the Poles. 
 The French aristocracy, so admirably supported by the Polish 
 aristocracy during the Revolution, certainly made no equiva- 
 lent return to those who were forced to emigrate in 1832. 
 We must have the melancholy courage to say that, in this, the 
 Faubourg Saint-Germain remains Poland's debtor. 
 
 Was Count Adam rich, was he poor, was he an adventurer ? 
 The problem long remained unsolved. Diplomatic circles, 
 faithful to their instructions, imitated the silence observed by 
 the Emperor Nicholas, who at that time counted every Polish 
 emigrant as dead. The Tuileries, and most of those who 
 took their cue from thence, gave an odious proof of this char- 
 acteristic policy dignified by the name of prudence. A 
 Russian prince, with whom they had smoked many cigars at 
 the time of the emigration, was ignored because, as it seemed, 
 he had fallen into disgrace with the Emperor Nicholas. 
 
 Thus placed between the prudence of the court and that of 
 diplomatic circles, Poles of good family lived in the Biblical 
 solitude of Super flumina Babylonis, or frequented certain
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 333 
 
 drawing-rooms which served as neutral territory for every 
 variety of opinion. In a city of pleasure like Paris, where 
 amusement is to be had in every rank, Polish recklessness 
 found twice as many pretexts as it needed for leading a dis- 
 sipated bachelor life. Besides, it must be said that Count 
 Adam Laginski had against him at first both his appearance 
 and his manners. 
 
 There are two types of Pole, as there are two types of 
 Englishwoman. When an Englishwoman is not a beauty, she 
 is horribly ugly and Count Adam belongs to the second cate- 
 gory. His face is small, somewhat sour, and looks as if it had 
 been squeezed in a vise. His short nose, fair hair, red mus- 
 tache and beard give him the expression of a goat ; all the 
 more so because he is short and thin, and his eyes, tinged 
 with dingy yellow, startle you by the oblique leer which Vir- 
 gil's line has made famous. How is it that, in spite of such 
 unfavorable conditions, he has such exquisite manners and 
 style? The solution of this mystery is given by his dress, 
 that of a finished dandy, and by the education he owes to his 
 mother, a Radziwill. If his courage carries him to the point 
 of rashness, his mind is not above the current and trivial 
 pleasantries of Paris conversation ; still, he does not often 
 find a young fellow who is his superior among men of fashion. 
 These young men nowadays talk far too much of horses, in- 
 come, taxes, and deputies, for French conversation to be what 
 it once was. Wit needs leisure, and certain inequalities of 
 position. Conversation is better perhaps at St. Petersburg 
 and Vienna than it is in Paris. Equals need no subtleties; 
 they tell each other everything straight out, just as it is. 
 Hence the ironical laughters of Paris could scarcely discern a 
 man of family in a light-hearted student, as he seemed, who 
 in talking passed carelessly from one subject to another, who 
 pursued amusement with all the more frenzy because he had 
 just escaped from great perils, and who, having left the coun- 
 try where his family was known, thought himself at liberty to
 
 334 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 lead an irresponsible life without risking a loss of considera- 
 tion. 
 
 One fine day in 1834, Adam bought a large house in the 
 Rue de la Pepiniere. Six months later it was on as handsome 
 a footing as the richest houses in Paris. Just at the time 
 when Laginski was beginning to be taken seriously he saw 
 Clementine at the Italian opera, and fell in love with her. A 
 year later he married her. Madame d'Espard's circle set the 
 fashion of approval. Mothers of families then learned, too 
 late, that ever since the year 900, the Laginskis had ranked 
 with the most illustrious families of the north. By a stroke 
 of prudence, most unlike a Pole, the young Count's mother 
 had, at the beginning of the rebellion, mortgaged her estates 
 for an immense sum advanced by two Jewish houses, and in- 
 vested in the French funds. Count Adam Laginski had an 
 income of more than eighty thousand francs. This put an 
 end to the astonishment expressed in some drawing-rooms at 
 the rashness of Madame de Serizy, of old de Ronquerolles, 
 and of the Chevalier du Rouvre in yielding to their niece's 
 mad passion. 
 
 As usual, the world rushed from one extreme to the other. 
 During the winter of 1836, Count Adam became the fashion, 
 and Clementine Laginski one of the queens of Paris. Mad- 
 ame de Laginski, at the present time, is one of the charming 
 group of young married women among whom shine Mesdames 
 de Lestorade, de Portenduere, Marie de Vandenesse, du 
 Gu6nic, and de Maufrigneuse, the very flower of Paris society, 
 who live high above the parvenus, bourgeois, and wire-pullers 
 of recent politics. 
 
 This preamble was needful to define the sphere in which 
 was carried through one of those sublime efforts, less rare 
 than the detractors of the present time imagine pearls hid- 
 den in rough shells, and lost in the depths of that abyss, that 
 ocean, that never-resting tide called the world the age 
 Paris, London, or St. Petersburg whichever you will.
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 335 
 
 If ever the truth that architecture is the expression of the 
 manners of a race was fully demonstrated, is it not since the 
 revolution of 1830, under the reign of the House of Orleans? 
 Great fortunes have shrunk in France, and majestic mansions 
 of our fathers are constantly being demolished and replaced 
 by a sort of tenement-houses, in which a peer of France of 
 July dwells on the third floor, over some newly enriched 
 empiric. Styles are mingled in confusion. As there is no 
 longer any court, any nobility to set a "tone," no harmony 
 is to be seen in the productions of art. On the other hand, 
 architecture has never found more economical tricks for imi- 
 tating what is genuine and thorough, never displayed more 
 ingenuity and resource in arrangement. Ask an artist to deal 
 with a strip of the garden of an old " hdtel " now destroyed, 
 and he will build you a little Louvre crushed under its orna- 
 mentation ; he will give you a courtyard, stables, and, if you 
 insist, a garden ; inside he contrives such a number of little 
 rooms and corridors, and cheats the eye so effectually, that 
 you fancy yourself comfortable ; in fact, there are so many 
 bedrooms that a ducal retinue can live and move in what 
 was only the bake-house of a president of a law court. 
 
 The Comtesse Laginski's house is one of these modern 
 structures, with a courtyard in front and a garden behind. 
 To the right of the courtyard are the servants' quarters, bal- 
 anced on the left by the stables and coach-houses. The por- 
 ter's lodge stands between two handsome gates. The chief 
 luxury of this house consists in a delightful conservatory at 
 the end of a boudoir on the ground-floor, where all the 
 beautiful reception-rooms are. It was a philanthropist driven 
 out of England who built this architectural gem, constructed 
 the conservatory, planned the garden, varnished the doors, 
 paved the out-buildings with brick, filled the windows with 
 green glass, and realized a vision like that in due proportion 
 of George IV. at Brighton. The inventive, industrious, 
 and ready Paris artisan had carved his doors and window-
 
 336 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS, 
 
 frames ; his ceilings were imitated from those of the middle 
 ages or of Venetian palaces, and there was a lavish outlay of 
 marble slabs in external paneling. Steinbock and Francois 
 Souchet had carved the cornices of the doors and chimney- 
 shelves ; Schinner had painted the ceilings with the brush of 
 a master. The wonders of the stairs marble as white as a 
 woman's arm successfully defied those of the famous Hotel 
 Rothschild. 
 
 In consequence of the disturbances, the price of this folly 
 was not more than eleven hundred thousand francs. For an 
 Englishman this was giving it away. All this splendor, called 
 princely by people who do not know what a real prince is, 
 stood in the garden of a contractor a Crcesus of the Revolu- 
 tion, who had died at Brussels a bankrupt after a sudden con- 
 vulsion of the Bourse. The Englishman died at Paris died 
 of Paris for to many people Paris is a disease ; sometimes it 
 is several diseases. His widow, a Methodist, had a perfect 
 horror of the nabob's little house this philanthropist had 
 been a dealer in opium. The virtuous widow ordered that 
 the scandalous property should be sold just at the time when 
 the disturbances made peace doubtful on any terms. Count 
 Adam took advantage of the opportunity ; and you shall be 
 told how it happened, for nothing could be less consonant 
 with his lordly habits. 
 
 Behind this house, built of stone fretted like a melon, 
 spreads the green velvet of an English lawn, shaded at the 
 farther end by an elegant clump of exotic trees, among which 
 rises a Chinese pavilion with its mute bells and pendent gilt 
 eggs. The greenhouse and its fantastic decorations screen 
 the outer wall on the south side. The other wall, opposite 
 the greenhouse, is hung with creepers grown in arcades over 
 poles and cross-beams painted green. This meadow, this 
 realm of flowers, these graveled paths, this mimic forest, these 
 aerial trellises cover an area of about twenty-five square 
 perches, of which the present value would be four hundred
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 337 
 
 thousand francs, as much as a real forest. In the heart of 
 this silence won from Paris birds sing ; there are blackbirds, 
 nightingales, bullfinches, chaffinches, and numbers of spar- 
 rows. The conservatory is a vast flower-bed, where the air 
 is loaded with perfume, and where you may walk in winter as 
 though summer was blazing with all its fires. The means by 
 which an atmosphere is produced at will of the tropics, China 
 or Italy, are ingeniously concealed from view. The pipes in 
 which the boiling water circulates the steam, hot air, what- 
 not are covered with soil, and look like garlands of growing 
 flowers. 
 
 The boudoir is spacious. On a small plot of ground the 
 miracle wrought by the Paris fairy called Architecture is to 
 produce everything on a large scale. The young Countess' 
 boudoir was the pride of the artist to whom Count Adam in- 
 trusted the task of redecorating the house. To sin there 
 would be impossible, there are too many pretty trifles. Love 
 would not know where to alight amid work-tables of Chinese 
 carving, where the eye can find thousands of droll little figures 
 wrought in the ivory the outcome of the toil of two families 
 of Chinese artists ; vases of burnt topaz mounted on filigree 
 stands ; mosaics that invite to theft ; Dutch pictures, such as 
 Schinner now paints again ; angels imagined as Steinbock 
 conceives of them (but does not always work them out him- 
 self); statuettes executed by geniuses pursued by creditors 
 (the true interpretation of the Arab myths) ; sublime first 
 sketches by our greatest artists ; fronts of carved chests let 
 into the wainscot, and alternating with the inventions of 
 India embroidery; gold-colored curtains draped over the 
 doors from an architrave of black oak wrought with the 
 swarming figures of a hunting scene ; chairs and tables 
 worthy of Madame de Pompadour ; a Persian carpet, and 
 so forth. And finally, as a crowning touch, all this splendor, 
 seen under a softened light filtering in through lace curtains, 
 looks all the more beautiful. On a marble slab, among some 
 22
 
 338 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 antiques, a lady's whip, with a handle carved by Mademoiselle 
 de Fauveau, shows that the Countess is fond of riding. 
 
 Such is a boudoir in 1837, a display of property to divert 
 the eye, as though ennui threatened to invade the most rest- 
 less and unresting society in the world. Why is there nothing 
 individual, intimate, nothing to invite reverie and repose ? 
 Why ? Because no one is sure of the morrow, and every one 
 enjoys life as a prodigal spends a life-interest. 
 
 One morning Clementine affected a meditative air, as she 
 lounged on one of those deep siesta chairs from which we 
 cannot bear to rise, so cleverly has the upholsterer who in- 
 vented them contrived to fit them to the curves of laziness 
 and the comfort of the Dolce far niente. The doors to the 
 conservatory were open, admitting the scent of vegetation 
 and the perfumes of the tropics. The young wife watched 
 Adam, who was smoking an elegant narghileh, the only form 
 of pipe she allowed in this room. Over the other door, cur- 
 tains, caught back by handsome ropes, showed two magnifi- 
 cent rooms beyond : one in white and gold, resembling that 
 of the Hotel Forbin-Janson, the other in the taste of the 
 Renaissance. The dining-room, unrivaled in Paris by any 
 but that of the Baron de Nucingen, is at the end of a corri- 
 dor, with a ceiling and walls decorated in a mediaeval style. 
 This corridor is reached, on the courtyard front, through a 
 large anteroom, through whose glass door the splendor of 
 the stairs is seen. 
 
 The Count and Countess had just breakfasted ; the sky was 
 a sheet of blue without a cloud; the month of April was 
 drawing to a close. The household had already known two 
 years of happiness, and now, only two days since, Clementine 
 had discovered in her home something resembling a secret, a 
 mystery. A Pole, let it be repeated to his honor, is generally 
 weak in the presence of a woman ; he is so full of tenderness 
 that, in Poland, he becomes her inferior ; and though Polish 
 women are admirable creatures, a Pole is even more quickly
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 339 
 
 routed by a Parisienne. Hence, Count Adam, pressed hard 
 with questions, had not enough artless cunning to sell his 
 secret dear to his wife. With a woman there is always some- 
 thing to be got for a secret ; and she likes you the better for 
 it, as a rogue respects an honest man whom he has failed to 
 take in. The Count, more ready with his sword than with 
 his tongue, only stipulated that he should not be required to 
 answer till he had finished his narghileh full of tombaki. 
 
 "When we were traveling," said she, "you replied to 
 every difficulty by saying, ' Paz will see to that ! ' You 
 never wrote to anybody but Paz. On my return, every one 
 refers me to the captain. I want to go out. The captain ! 
 Is there a bill to be paidl The captain. If my horse's 
 pace is rough, they will speak to Captain Paz. In short, 
 here I feel as if it were a game of dominoes; everywhere 
 Paz ! I hear no one talked of but Paz, but I can never see 
 Paz. What is Paz ? Let our Paz be brought to see me." 
 
 "Then is not everything as it ought to be?" said the 
 Count, relinquishing the mouthpiece of his narghileh. 
 
 "Everything is so quite what it ought to be, that if we 
 had two hundred thousand francs a year, we should be ruined 
 by living in the way we do with a hundred and ten thou- 
 sand," said she. She pulled the bell-handle embroidered in 
 tent-stitch, a marvel of skill. A manservant dressed like a 
 Minister at once appeared. 
 
 "Tell Monsieur le Capitaine Paz that I wish to speak to 
 him," said she. 
 
 "If you fancy you will find anything out in that way " 
 
 said Count Adam with a smile. 
 
 It may be useful to say that Adam and Clementine, married 
 in December, 1835, a ^ ter spending the winter in Paris, had 
 during 1836 traveled in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. 
 They returned home in November, and during the winter just 
 past the Countess had for the first time received her friends, 
 and then had discovered the existence the almost speechless
 
 340 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 and unacknowledged, but most useful presence of a factotum 
 whose person seemed to be invisible this Captain Paz or 
 Pac. 
 
 "Monsieur le Capitaine Paz begs Madame la Comtesse to 
 excuse him ; he is round at the stables, and in a dress which 
 does not allow of his coming at this minute. But as soon as 
 he is dressed Count Paz will come," said the manservant 
 deferentially. 
 
 " Why, what was he doing? " 
 
 " He was showing Constantine how to groom the Countess 1 
 horse; the man did not do it to his mind," replied the 
 servant. 
 
 The Countess looked at the man ; he was quite serious, and 
 took good care not to imply by a smile the comment which 
 inferiors so often allow themselves on a superior who seems to 
 have descended to their level. 
 
 " Ah, he was brushing down Cora? " 
 
 " You are not riding out this morning, madame? " said the 
 servant ; but he got no answer, and went. 
 
 "Is he a Pole?" asked Clementine of her husband, who 
 bowed affirmatively. 
 
 Clementine lay silent, examining Adam. Her feet, almost 
 at full length on a cushion, her head in the attitude of a bird 
 listening on the edge of its nest to the sounds of the grove, 
 she would have seemed charming to the most blase of men. 
 Fair and slight, her hair curled English fashion, she looked like 
 one of the almost fabulous figures in " Keepsakes," especially 
 as she was wrapped in a morning gown of Persian silk, of which 
 the thick folds did not so effectually disguise the graces of 
 her figure and the slenderness of her waist, as that they could 
 not be admired through the thick covering of flowers and 
 embroidery. As she crossed the brightly colored stuff over 
 her chest, the hollow of her throat remained visible, the white 
 skin contrasting in tone with the handsome lace trimming 
 over the shoulders. Her eyes, fringed with black lashes,
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 341 
 
 emphasized the expression of curiosity that puckered a pretty 
 mouth. On her well-formed brow were traced the character- 
 istic curves of the Paris woman, willful, light-hearted, well- 
 educated, but invulnerable to vulgar temptations. Her hands, 
 almost transparent, hung from each arm of her deep chair ; 
 the taper fingers, curved at the tips, showed nails like pink 
 almonds that caught the light. 
 
 Adam smiled at his wife's impatience, gazing at her with a 
 look which conjugal satiety had not yet made lukewarm. 
 This slim little Countess had known how to be mistress in 
 her own house, for she scarcely acknowledged Adam's admi- 
 ration. In the glances she stole at him there was perhaps a 
 dawning consciousness of the superiority of a Parisienne to 
 this spruce, lean, and red-haired Pole. 
 
 "Here comes Paz," said the Count, hearing a step that 
 rang in the corridor. 
 
 The Countess saw a tall, handsome man come in, well-built, 
 bearing in his features the marks of the grief which comes of 
 strength and misfortune. Paz had dressed hastily in one of 
 those tightly fitting coats, fastened by braid straps and oval 
 buttons, which used to be called polonaises. Thick, black 
 hair, but ill-kempt, covered his squarely-shaped head, and 
 Clementine could see his broad forehead as shiny as a piece 
 of marble, for he held his peaked cap in his hand. That 
 hand was like the hand of the Hercules carrying the infant 
 Mercury. Robust health bloomed in a face equally divided 
 by a large Roman nose, which reminded Clementine of the 
 handsome Trasteverini. A black silk stock put a finishing 
 touch of martial appearance to this mystery of nearly six feet 
 high, with jet-black eyes as lustrous as an Italian's. The width 
 of his full trousers, hiding all but the toes of his boots, 
 showed that Paz still was faithful to the fashions of Poland. 
 Certainly, to a romantic woman, there must have been some- 
 thing burlesque in the violent contrast observable between 
 the captain and the Count, between the little Pole with his
 
 342 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 narrow frame and this fine soldier, between the carpet-knight 
 and the knight servitor. 
 
 "Good-morning, Adam," he said to the Count with 
 familiarity. 
 
 Then he bowed gracefully, asking Clementine in what way 
 he could serve her. 
 
 " Then you are Laginski's friend ? " asked the lady. 
 
 "For life and death," replied Paz, on whom the young 
 Count shed his most affectionate smile, as he exhaled his last 
 fragrant puff of smoke. 
 
 " Well, then, why do you not eat with us? Why did you 
 not accompany us to Italy and to Switzerland ? Why do you 
 hide yourself so as to avoid the thanks I owe you for the 
 constant services you do us? " said the young Countess, with 
 a sort of irritation, but without the slightest feeling. 
 
 In fact, she detected a kind of volunteer slavery on the part 
 of Paz. At that time such an idea was inseparable from a 
 certain disdain for a socially amphibious creature, a being at 
 once secretary and bailiff, neither wholly bailiff nor wholly 
 secretary, some poor relation inconvenient as a friend. 
 
 "The fact is, Countess," he replied with some freedom, 
 " that no thanks are owing to me. I am Adam's friend, and 
 I find my pleasure in taking charge of his interests." 
 
 " And is it for your pleasure too that you remain standing ? " 
 said Count Adam. 
 
 Paz sat down in an armchair near the doorway. 
 
 " I remember having seen you on the occasion of our 
 marriage, and sometimes in the courtyard," said the lady; 
 " but why do you, a friend of Adam's, place yourself in a 
 position of inferiority?" 
 
 " The opinion of the Paris world is to me a matter of 
 indifference," said he. " I live for myself, or, if you choose, 
 for you two." 
 
 " But the opinion of the world as regards my husband's 
 friend cannot be a matter of indifference to me "
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 343 
 
 " Oh, madame, the world is easily satisfied by one word : 
 Eccentric say that." 
 
 After a short pause he asked, " Do you propose coine 
 out?" 
 
 " Will you come to the Bois? " said the Countess. 
 
 " With pleasure," and so saying Paz bowed and went out. 
 
 "What a good soul ! He is as simple as a child," said 
 Adam. 
 
 " Tell me now how you became friends," said Clementine. 
 
 " Paz, my dearest, is of a family as old, as noble, and as 
 illustrious as our own. At the time of the fall of the Pazzi 
 a member of the family escaped from Florence into Poland, 
 where he settled with some little fortune, and founded the 
 family of the Paz, on which the title of Count was conferred. 
 
 "This family, having distinguished itself in the days of 
 our royal republic, grew rich. The cutting from the tree 
 felled in Italy grew with such vigor that there are several 
 branches of the house of the Counts Paz. It will not, there- 
 fore, surprise you to be told that there are rich and poor 
 members of the family. Our Paz is the son of a poor branch. 
 As an orphan, with no fortune but his sword, he served under 
 the Grand Duke Constantine at the time of our Revolution. 
 Carried away by the Polish party, he fought like a Pole, like 
 a patriot, like a man who has nothing three reasons for 
 fighting well. In the last skirmish, believing his men were 
 following him, he rushed on a Russian battery, and was taken 
 prisoner. I was there. This feat of courage roused my 
 blood. ' Let us go and fetch him ! ' cried I to my horsemen. 
 We charged the battery like freebooters, and I rescued Paz, I 
 being the seventh. We were twenty when we set out, and 
 eight when we came back, including Paz. 
 
 " When Warsaw was betrayed we had to think of escaping 
 from the Russians. By a singular chance Paz and I found our- 
 selves together at the same hour and in the same place on the 
 Other side of the Vistula. I saw the poor captain arrested by
 
 344 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 some Prussians, who at that time had made themselves blood- 
 hounds for the Russians. When one has fished a man out of 
 the Styx, one gets attached to him. This new danger threat- 
 ening Paz distressed me so much that I allowed myself to be 
 taken with him, intending to be of service to him. Two men 
 can sometimes escape when one alone is lost. Thanks to my 
 name and some family connection with those on whom our 
 fate depended for we were then in the power of the Prus- 
 sians my flight was winked at. I got my dear captain 
 through as a common soldier and a servant of my house, and 
 we succeeded in reaching Dantzic. We stowed ourselves in a 
 Dutch vessel sailing for England, where we landed two months 
 later. 
 
 " My mother had fallen ill in England, and awaited me 
 there ; Paz and I nursed her till her death, which was acceler- 
 ated by the disasters to our cause. 
 
 "We then left England, and I brought Paz to France; in 
 such adversities two men become brothers. When I found 
 myself in Paris with sixty-odd thousand francs a year, not to 
 mention the remains of a sum derived from the sale of my 
 mother's diamonds and the family pictures, I wished to secure 
 a living to Paz before giving myself up to the dissipations of 
 Paris life. I had discerned some sadness in the captain's eyes, 
 sometimes even a suppressed tear floated there. I had had op- 
 portunities of appreciating his soul, which is thoroughly noble, 
 lofty, and generous. Perhaps it was painful to him to find 
 himself bound by benefits to a man six years younger than 
 himself without being able to repay him. I, careless and 
 light-hearted as a boy, might ruin myself at play, or let my- 
 self be ensnared by some woman ; Paz and I might some day 
 be sundered. Though I promised myself that I would always 
 provide for all his needs, I foresaw many chances of forget- 
 ting, or being unable to pay Paz an allowance. In short, my 
 angel, I wished to spare him the discomfort, the humilia- 
 tion, the shame of having to ask me for money, or of seeking
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 345 
 
 in vain for his comrade in some day of necessity. Dunque, 
 one morning after breakfast,, with our feet on the fire-dogs, 
 each smoking his pipe, after many blushes, and with many 
 precautions, till I saw he was looking at me quite anxiously, I 
 held out to him a bond to bearer producing two thousand four 
 hundred francs interest yearly " 
 
 Clementine quickly rose, seated herself on Adam's knees, 
 and putting her arm round his neck, kissed him on the brow, 
 saying 
 
 " Dear heart, how noble I think you ! And what did Paz 
 say?" 
 
 "Thaddeus? " said the Count; "he turned pale and said 
 nothing." 
 
 " Thaddeus is that his name? " 
 
 "Yes. Thaddeus folded up the paper and returned it to 
 me, saying, ' I thought, Adam, that we were as one in life and 
 death, and that we should never part ; do you wish to see no 
 more of me.' 'Oh,' said I, ' is that the way you take it? 
 Well, then, say no more about it. If I am ruined, you will 
 be ruined.' Said he, ' You are not rich enough to live as a 
 Laginski should ; and do you not need a friend to take care 
 of your concerns, who will be father and brother to you, and 
 a trusted confidant ? ' My dear girl, Paz, as he uttered the 
 words, spoke with a calmness of tone and look which covered a 
 motherly feeling, but which betrayed the gratitude of an Arab, 
 the devotion of a dog, and the friendship of a savage, always 
 ready and always unassuming. On my honor ! I took him 
 in our Polish fashion, laying my hand on his shoulder, and I 
 kissed him on the lips. 'For life and death then,' said I. 
 ' All I have is yours, do just as you will.' 
 
 " It was he who found me this house for almost nothing. 
 He sold my shares when they were high, and bought when 
 they were low, and we purchased this hovel out of the dif- 
 ference. He is a connoisseur in horses, and deals in them so 
 well that my stable has cost me very little, and yet I have the
 
 346 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 finest beasts and the prettiest turn-out in Paris. Our servants, 
 old Polish soldiers whom he found, would pass through the 
 fire for us. While I seem to be ruining myself, Paz keeps my 
 house with such perfect order and economy that he has even 
 made good some losses at play, the follies of a young man. 
 My Thaddeus is as cunning as two Genoese, as keen for profit 
 as a Polish Jew, as cautious as a good housekeeper. I have 
 never been able to persuade him to live as I did when I was 
 a bachelor. Sometimes it has needed the gentle violence of 
 friendship to induce him to come to the play when I was going 
 alone, or to one of the dinners I was giving at an eating-house 
 to a party of congenial companions. He does not like the 
 life of drawing-rooms." 
 
 " Then what does he like? " asked Clementine. 
 
 " He loves Poland, and weeps over her. His only ex- 
 travagance has been money sent, more in my name than in his 
 own, to some of our poor exiles." 
 
 " Dear, how fond I shall be of that good fellow," said the 
 Countess. " He seems to me as simple as everything that is 
 truly great." 
 
 "All the pretty things you see here," said Adam, praising 
 his friend with the most generous security, "have been found 
 by Paz ; he has bought them at sales, or by some chance. 
 Oh ! he is keener at a bargain than a trader. If you see him 
 rubbing his hands in the courtyard, it is because he has ex- 
 changed a good horse for a better. He lives in me ; his de- 
 light is to see me well-dressed, in a dazzlingly smart carriage. 
 He performs all the duties he imposes on himself without fuss 
 or display. One night I had lost twenty thousand francs at 
 whist. ' What will Paz say ? ' thought I to myself as I reached 
 home. Paz gave me the sum, not without a sigh ; but he did 
 not blame me even by a look. This sigh checked me more 
 than all the remonstrances of uncles, wives, or mothers in 
 similar circumstances. ' You regret the money ? ' I asked 
 him. 'Oh, not for you, nor for myself; no, I was only think-
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 347 
 
 ing that twenty poor relations of mine could have lived on it 
 for a year.' 
 
 " The family of Paz, you understand, is quite equal to that 
 of Laginski, and I have never regarded my dear Paz as an in- 
 ferior. I have tried to be as magnanimous in my degree as he 
 in his. I never go out or come in without going to Paz, as if 
 he were my father. My fortune is his. In short, Thaddeus 
 knows that at this day I would rush into danger to rescue him, 
 as I have done twice before." 
 
 "That is not a small thing to say, my dear," remarkeM.he 
 Countess. " Devotion is a lightning-flash. Men devote 
 themselves in war, but they no longer devote themselves in 
 Paris." 
 
 "Well, then," said Adam, " for Paz I am always in war. 
 Our two natures have preserved their asperities and their 
 faults, but the mutual intimacy of our souls has tightened the 
 bonds, already so close, of our friendship. A man may save 
 his comrade's life, and kill him afterwards if he finds him a 
 bad companion ; but we have gone through what makes friend- 
 ship indissoluble. There is between us that constant exchange 
 of pleasing impressions on both sides which makes friendship, 
 from that point of view, a richer joy, perhaps, than love." 
 
 A pretty little hand shut the Count's mouth so suddenly 
 that the movement was almost a blow. 
 
 "Yes, indeed, my darling," said he. " Friendship knows 
 nothing of the bankruptcy of sentiment, the insolvency of 
 pleasures. Love, after giving more than it has, ends by 
 giving less than it receives? " 
 
 "On both sides alike then," said Clementine, smiling. 
 
 "Yes," said Adam. "While friendship can but increase. 
 You need not pout. We, my angel, are as much friends as 
 lovers ; we, at least, I hope, have combined the two feelings 
 in our happy marriage." 
 
 "I will explain to you what has made you two such good 
 friends," said Clementine. "The difference in your lives
 
 348 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 arises from a difference in your tastes, and not from com- 
 pulsory choice; from preference, and not from the necessity 
 of position. So far as a man can be judged from a glimpse, 
 and from what you tell me, in this instance the subaltern may 
 at times be the superior." 
 
 " Oh ! Paz is really my superior," replied Adam simply. 
 "I have no advantage over him but that of luck." 
 
 His wife kissed him for this generous avowal. 
 
 " The perfect skill with which he conceals the loftiness of 
 his soul is an immense superiority," the Count went on. " I 
 say to him, ' You are a sly fellow ; you have vast domains in 
 your mind to which you retire.' He has a right to the title 
 of Count Paz; in Paris he will only be called captain." 
 
 " In short, a Florentine of the middle ages has resuscitated 
 after three centuries," said the Countess. " There is some- 
 thing of Dante in him, and something of Michael Angelo." 
 
 " Indeed, you are right ; he is at heart a poet," replied 
 Adam. 
 
 "And so I am married to two Poles," said the young 
 Countess, with a gesture resembling that of a genius on the 
 stage. 
 
 "Darling child!" said Adam, clasping Clementine to 
 him, " you would have distressed me very much if you had 
 not liked my friend. We were both afraid of that, though 
 he was delighted at my marrying. You will make him very 
 happy by telling him that you love him oh ! as an old 
 friend." 
 
 " Then I will go to dress ; it is fine, we will all three go 
 out," said Clementine, ringing for her maid. 
 
 Paz led such an underground life that all the fashion of 
 Paris wondered who it was that accompanied Clementine 
 Laginski when they saw her driving to the Bois and back 
 between him and her husband. During the drive Clementine 
 had insisted that Thaddeus was to dine with her. This whim 
 of a despotic sovereign compelled the captain to make an
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 349 
 
 unwonted toilet. On returning from her drive Clementine 
 dressed with some coquettish care, in such a way as to pro- 
 duce an effect even on Adam as she entered the room where 
 the two friends were awaiting her. 
 
 "Count Paz," said she, "we will go to the opera to- 
 gether." 
 
 It was said in the tone which from a woman conveys, "If 
 you refuse, we shall quarrel." 
 
 "With pleasure, madame," replied the captain. " But as 
 I have not a count's fortune, call me captain." 
 
 " Well, then, captain, give me your arm," said she, taking 
 it and leading him into the dining-room with a suggestion of 
 the caressing familiarity which usually so greatly enraptures 
 a lover. 
 
 The Countess placed the captain next her, and he sat like 
 a) poor sub- lieutenant dining with a wealthy general. Paz 
 left it to Clementine to talk, listening to her with all the air 
 of deference to a superior, contradicting her in nothing, and 
 waiting for a positive question before making any reply. In 
 short, to the Countess he seemed almost stupid, and her 
 graces all fell flat before this icy gravity and diplomatic dig- 
 nity. In vain did Adam try to rouse him by saying, " Come, 
 cheer up, captain. It might be supposed that you were not 
 at home. You must have laid a bet that you would discon- 
 cert Clementine?" Thaddeus remained heavy and half- 
 asleep. 
 
 When the three were alone at dessert the captain explained 
 that his life was planned diametrically unlike that of other 
 people ; he went to bed at eight o'clock, and rose at day- 
 break; and he thus excused himself, saying he was very 
 sleepy. 
 
 "My intention in taking you to the opera was only to 
 amuse you, Captain Paz; but do just as you please," said 
 Clementine, a little nettled. 
 
 " I will go," said Paz.
 
 350 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 " Duprez is singing in William Tell" said Adam. " Would 
 you prefer the Varietes ? ' ' 
 
 The captain smiled and rang the bell ; the manservant 
 appeared. "Tell Constantine," said Paz, "to take out the 
 large carriage instead of the coupe. We cannot sit comfort- 
 ably in it," he added, turning to the Count. 
 
 "A Frenchman would not have thought of that," said 
 Clementine, smiling. 
 
 "Ah, but we are Florentines transplanted to the north," 
 replied Thaddeus, with a meaning and an expression which 
 showed that his dullness at dinner had been assumed. 
 
 But by a very conceivable want of judgment, there was too 
 great a contrast between the involuntary self-betrayal of this 
 speech and the captain's attitude during dinner. Clementine 
 examined him with one of those keen flashes by which a 
 woman reveals at once her surprise and her observancy. 
 Thus, during the few minutes while they were taking their 
 coffee in the drawing-room, silence reigned an uncomfort- 
 able silence for Adam, who could not divine its cause. 
 Clementine no longer disturbed Thaddeus. The captain, 
 for his part, retired again into military rigidity, and came 
 out of it no more, either on the way, or in the box, where 
 he affected to be asleep. 
 
 "You see, madame, that I am very dull company," said 
 he, during the ballet in the last act of William Tell. "Was 
 I not right to ' stick to my last,' as the proverb says? " 
 
 " On my word, my dear captain, you are neither a cox- 
 comb nor a chatterbox ; you are perhaps a Pole." 
 
 "Leave me then to watch over your pleasures," he replied, 
 "to take care of your fortune and your house; that is all 
 I am good for." 
 
 "Tartufe! begone!" cried Adam, smiling. " My dear, 
 he is full of heart, well informed he could, if he chose, 
 hold his own in any drawing-room. Clementine, do not 
 believe what his modesty tells you."
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 351 
 
 " Good-night, Countess. I have proved my willingness, 
 and now will avail myself of your carriage to go to bed at 
 once. I will send it back for you." 
 
 Clementine bowed slightly, and let him go without re- 
 plying. 
 
 " What a bear ! " said she to the Count. " You are much, 
 much nicer." 
 
 Adam pressed his wife's hand unseen. 
 
 "Poor, dear Thaddeus, he has endeavored to be a foil 
 when many men would have tried to seem more attractive 
 than I." 
 
 " Oh ! " said she, " I am not sure that was not intentional ; 
 his behavior would have mystified an ordinary woman." 
 
 Half an hour later, while Boleslas the groom was calling 
 "Gate," and the coachman, having turned the carriage to 
 drive in, was waiting for the gates to be opened, Clementine 
 said to the Count 
 
 " Where does the captain roost? " 
 
 " Up there," said Adam, pointing to an elegantly con- 
 structed attic extending on both sides of the gateway with a 
 window looking on to the street. " His rooms are over the 
 coach-houses." 
 
 " And who lives in the other half? " 
 
 "No one as yet," replied Adam. "The other little 
 suite, over the stables, will do for our children and their 
 tutor." 
 
 " He is not in bed," said the Countess, seeing a light in 
 the captain's room when the carriage was under the pillared 
 portico copied from that at the Tuileries, and taking the 
 place of the ordinary zinc awning painted to imitate striped 
 ticking. 
 
 Paz, in his dressing-gown, and pipe in hand, was watching 
 Clementine as she disappeared into the hall. The day had 
 been a cruel one to him. And this is the reason : Thaddeus 
 had felt a fearful shock to his heart on the day when, Adam
 
 352 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 having taken him to the opera to pronounce his opinion, he 
 first saw Mademoiselle du Rouvre ; and again, when he saw 
 her in the mayor's office and at Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, and 
 recognized in her the woman whom a man must love to the 
 exclusion of all others for Don Juan himself preferred one 
 among the mille e tre! 
 
 Hence Paz had strongly advocated the classical bridal tour 
 after the wedding. Fairly easy all the time while Clementine 
 was absent, his tortures began again on the return of the 
 happy couple. And this was what he was thinking as he in- 
 haled his latakia from a cherry-stem pipe, six feet long, a gift 
 from Adam: "Only I and God, who will reward me for 
 suffering in silence, may ever know how I love her ! But how 
 can I manage to avoid alike her love or her hatred ? " 
 
 And he sat thinking, thinking, over this problem of the 
 strategy of love. 
 
 It must not be supposed that Thaddeus lived bereft of all 
 joy in the midst of his pain. The triumphant cunning of 
 this day was a source of secret satisfaction. Since the Count's 
 return with his wife, day by day he felt ineffable happiness in 
 seeing that he was necessary to the couple, who, but for him, 
 would have rushed inevitably into ruin. What fortune can 
 hold out against the extravagance of Paris life ? Clementine, 
 brought up by a reckless father, knew nothing of household 
 management, which nowadays the richest women and the 
 highest in rank are obliged to undertake themselves. Who in 
 these days can afford to keep a steward ? Adam, on his part, 
 as the son of one of the great Polish nobles who allowed 
 themselves to be devoured by the Jews, and who was incapable 
 of husbanding the remains of one of the most enormous for- 
 tunes in Poland where fortunes were enormous was not of 
 a temper to restrict either his own fancies or his wife's. If 
 he had been alone, he would probably have ruined himself 
 before his marriage. Paz had kept him from gambling on 
 the Bourse, and does not that say all?
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 363 
 
 Consequently, when he found that, in spite of himself, he 
 was in love with Clementine, Paz had not the choice of leav- 
 ing the house and traveling to forget his passion. Gratitude, 
 the clue to the mystery of his life, held him to the house 
 where he alone could act as r man of business to this heedless 
 couple. Their long absence made him hope for a calmer 
 spirit : but the Countess came back more than ever lovely, 
 having acquired that freedom .of thought which marriage con- 
 fers on the Paris woman, and displaying all the charms of a 
 young wife, with the indefinable something which comes of 
 happiness, or of the independence allowed her by a man as 
 trusting, as chivalrous, and as much in love as Adam was. 
 
 The consciousness of being the working hub of this mag- 
 nificent house, the sight of Clementine stepping out of her 
 carriage on her return from a party, or setting out in the 
 morning for the Bois de Boulogne, a glimpse of her on the 
 Boulevards in her pretty carriage, like a flower in its nest of 
 leaves, filled poor Thaddeus with deep, mysterious ecstasies 
 which blossomed at the bottom of his heart without the slight- 
 est trace appearing in his features. How, .during these five 
 months, should the Countess ever have seen the captain ? 
 He hid from her, concealing the care he took to keep out of 
 her way. 
 
 Nothing is so near divine love as a hopeless love. Must 
 not a man have some depth of soul thus to devote himself in 
 silence and obscurity? This depth, where lurks the pride of 
 a father or of God enshrines the worship of love for love's 
 sake, as power for power's sake was the watchword of the 
 Jesuits; a sublime kind of avarice, since it is perennially gen- 
 erous, and modeled indeed on the mysterious Being of the 
 first principles of the world. Is not their result nature ? And 
 nature is an enchantress ; she belongs to man, to the poet, the 
 painter, the lover ; but is not the cause superior to nature in 
 the sight of certain privileged souls, and some stupendous 
 thinkers? The cause is God. In that sphere of causes dwelt 
 23
 
 354 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 the spirits of Newton, of Laplace, of Kepler, of Descartes, 
 Malebranche, Spinoza, Buffon, of the true poets and saints of 
 the second century of our era, of Saint Theresa of Spain and 
 the sublime mystics. Every human emotion contains some 
 analogy with the frame of mind in which the effect is neg- 
 lected in favor of the cause, and Thaddeus has risen to the 
 height whence all things look different. Abandoned to the 
 unspeakable joys of creative energy, Thaddeus was, in love, 
 what we recognize as greatest in the records of genius. 
 
 "No, she is not altogether deceived," thought he, as he 
 watched the smoke curl from his pipe. " She might involve 
 me in an irremediable quarrel with Adam if she spited me ; 
 and if she should flirt to torment me, what would become of 
 me?" 
 
 The fatuity of this hypothesis was so unlike the captain's 
 modest nature, and his somewhat German shyness, that he was 
 vexed with himself for its haring occurred to him, and went 
 to bed determined to await events before taking any decisive 
 steps. 
 
 Next morning Clementine breakfasted very well without 
 Thaddeus, and made no remark on his disobedience. That 
 day, as it happened, was her day for being "at home," and 
 this, with her, demanded a royal display. She did not ob- 
 serve the absence of Captain Paz, on whom devolved all the 
 arrangements for these great occasions. 
 
 "Well and good!" said Paz to himself, as he heard the 
 carriages rumble out at two in the morning; "the Countess 
 was only prompted by a Parisian's whim or curiosity." 
 
 So the captain fell back into his regular routine, disturbed 
 for a day by this incident. Clementine, diverted by the de- 
 tails of life in Paris, seemed to have forgotten Paz. For do 
 you suppose that it is a mere trifle to reign over this incon- 
 stant city? Do you imagine, by any means, that a woman 
 risks nothing but her fortune playing at that absorbing 
 game?
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 355 
 
 The winter is to a woman of fashion what, of yore, a cam- 
 paign was to the soldiers of the empire. What a work of art 
 of genius is a costume or a head-dress created to make a 
 sensation ! A fragile, delicate woman wears her hard and 
 dazzling armor of flowers and diamonds, silk and steel, from 
 nine in the evening till two or often three in the morning. 
 She eats little, to attract the eye by her slender shape; she 
 cheats the hunger that attacks her during the evening with de- 
 bilitating cups of tea, sweet cakes, heating ices, or heavy slices 
 of pastry. The stomach must submit to the commands of 
 vanity. She awakes late, and thus everything is in contradic- 
 tion to the laws of nature, and nature is ruthless. 
 
 No sooner is she up than the woman of fashion begins to 
 dress for the morning, planning her dress for the afternoon. 
 Must she not receive and pay visits, and go to the Bois on 
 horseback or in her carriage ? Must she not always be prac- 
 ticing the drill of smiles, and fatigue her brain in inventing 
 compliments which shall seem neither stale nor studied ? And 
 it is not every woman who succeeds. And then you are sur- 
 prised, when you see a young woman, whom the world has 
 welcomed in her freshness, faded and blighted at the end of 
 three years. Six months spent in the country are barely 
 enough to heal the wounds inflicted by the winter. We hear 
 nothing talked of but dyspepsia and strange maladies, un- 
 known to women who devote themselves to their household. 
 Formerly a woman was sometimes seen ; now she is perpe- 
 tually on the stage. 
 
 Clementine had to fight her way ; she was beginning to be 
 quoted, and amid the cares of this struggle between her and 
 her rivals there was hardly a place for love of her husband ! 
 Thaddeus might well be forgotten. However, a month later, 
 in May, a few days before her departure to stay at Ronque- 
 rolles in Burgundy, as she was returning from her drive she 
 saw Thaddeus in a side alley of the Champs-Elysdes Thad- 
 deus, carefully dressed, and in raptures at seeing his Countess
 
 356 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 so beautiful in her phaeton, with champing horses, splendid 
 liveries ; in short, the dear people he admired so much. 
 
 " There is the captain," said she to Adam. 
 
 " Happy fellow ! " said the Count. " These are his great 
 treats ! There is not a smarter turn-out than ours, and he 
 delights in seeing everybody envying us our happiness. You 
 have never noticed him before, but he is there almost every 
 day." 
 
 " What can he be thinking of ? " said Clementine. 
 
 " He is thinking at this moment that the winter has cost a 
 great deal, and that we shall save a little by staying with your 
 old uncle Ronquerolles," said Adam. 
 
 The Countess had the carriage stopped in front of Paz, and 
 desired him to take the seat by her side in the carriage. 
 Thaddeus turned as red as a cherry. 
 
 " I shall poison you," he said ; "I have just been smoking 
 cigars." 
 
 " And does not Adam poison me? " she replied quickly. 
 
 "Yes, but he is Adam," replied the captain. 
 
 " And why should not Thaddeus enjoy the same privilege? " 
 said the Countess with a smile. 
 
 This heavenly smile had a power which was too much for 
 his heroic resolutions; he gazed at Clementine with all the 
 fire of his soul in his eyes, but tempered by the angelic 
 expression of his gratitude that of a man who lived solely by 
 gratitude. The Countess folded her arms in her shawl, leaned 
 back pensively against the cushions, crumpling the feathers 
 of her handsome bonnet, and gazed out at the passers-by. 
 This flash from a soul so noble, and hitherto so resigned, 
 appealed to her feelings. What, after all, was Adam's great 
 merit ? Was it not natural that he should be brave and gen- 
 erous ? But the captain 1 Thaddeus possessed, or seemed to 
 possess, an immense superiority over Adam. What sinister 
 thoughts distressed the Countess when she once more observed 
 the contrast between the fine, complete physical nature which
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 357 
 
 distinguished Thaddeus and the frail constitution which, in 
 her husband, betrayed the inevitable degeneration of aristo- 
 cratic families which are so mad as to persist in intermarrying ! 
 But the devil alone knew these thoughts, for the young wife 
 sat with vague meditation in her eyes, saying nothing till they 
 reached home. 
 
 " You must dine with us, or I shall be angry with you for 
 having disobeyed me," said she as she went in. " You are 
 Thaddeus to me, as you are to Adam. I know the obliga- 
 tions you feel to him, but I also know all we owe to you. In 
 return for two impulses of generosity which are so natural, 
 you are generous at all hours and day after day. My father 
 is coming to dine with us, as well as my uncle Ronquerolles 
 and my aunt de Serizy ; dress at- once," she said, pressing the 
 hand he offered to help her out of the carriage. 
 
 Thaddeus went to his room to dress, his heart at once re- 
 joicing and oppressed by an agonizing flutter. He came 
 down at the last moment, and all through dinner played his 
 part of a soldier fit for nothing but to fulfill the duties of a 
 steward. But this time Clementine was not his dupe. His 
 look had enlightened her. Ronquerolles, the cleverest of 
 ambassadors next to Talleyrand, and who served de Marsay 
 so well during his short ministry, was informed by his niece 
 of the high merits of Count Paz, who had so modestly made 
 himself his friend's steward. 
 
 "And how is it that this. is the first time I have ever seen 
 Count Paz?" asked the Marquis de Ronquerolles. 
 
 "Eh ! he is very sly and underhand," replied Clementine, 
 with a look at Paz to desire him to change his demeanor. 
 
 Alas ! it must be owned, at the risk of making the captain 
 less interesting to the reader, Paz, though superior to his friend 
 Adam, was not a man of strong temper. He owed his appar- 
 ent superiority to his misfortunes. In his days of poverty and 
 isolation at Warsaw he had read and educated himself, had 
 compared and thought much ; but the creative power which
 
 368 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 makes a great man he did not possess can it ever be ac- 
 quired ? Paz was great only through his feelings, and there 
 could rise to the sublime ; but in the sphere of sentiment, be- 
 ing a man of action rather than of ideas, he kept his thoughts 
 to himself. His thoughts, then, did nothing but eat his heart 
 out. 
 
 And what, after all, is an unuttered thought ? 
 
 At Clementine's speech the Marquis de Ronquerolles and 
 his sister exchanged glances, with a side-look at their niece, 
 Count Adam, and Paz. It was one of those swift dramas 
 which are played only in Italy or in Paris. Only in these two 
 parts of the world excepting at all courts can the eyes say 
 as much. To infuse into the eye all the power of the soul, 
 to give it the full value of speech and throw a poem or a drama 
 into a single flash, excessive servitude or excessive liberty is 
 needed. 
 
 Adam, the Marquis du Rouvre, and the Countess did not 
 perceive this flash of observation between a past coquette and 
 an old diplomat ; but Paz, like a faithful dog, understood 
 its forecast. It was, you must remember, an affair of two 
 seconds. To describe the hurricane that ravaged the captain's 
 heart would be too elaborate for these days. 
 
 " What ! the uncle and aunt already fancy that she perhaps 
 loves me? " said he to himself. " My happiness then depends 
 only on my own audacity. And Adam ! " 
 
 Ideal love and mere desire, both quite as potent as friend- 
 ship and gratitude, rent his soul, and for a moment love had 
 the upper hand. This poor heroic lover longed to have his 
 day ! Paz became witty ; he intended to please, and in an- 
 swer to some question from Monsieur de Ronquerolles he 
 sketched in grand outlines the Polish rebellion. Thus, at 
 dessert, Paz saw Clementine drinking in every word, regarding 
 him as a hero, and forgetting that Adam, after sacrificing a 
 third of his immense fortune, had taken the risks of exile. 
 At nine o'clock, having taken coffee, Madame de S^rizy kissed
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 359 
 
 her niece on the forehead and took leave, carrying off Count 
 Adam with an assertion of authority, and leaving the Marquis 
 du Rouvre and M. de Ronquerolles, who withdrew ten min-' 
 utes later. Paz and Clementine were left together. 
 
 "I will bid you good-night, madame," said Thaddeus; 
 "you will join them at the opera." 
 
 " No," replied she. " I do not care for dancing, and they 
 are giving an odious ballet this evening, ' The Revolt of the 
 Seraglio.' " 
 
 There was a moment's silence. 
 
 " Two years ago Adam would not have gone without me," 
 she went on, without looking at Paz. 
 
 " He loves you to distraction " Thaddeus began. 
 
 " Oh ! it is because he loves me to distraction that by 
 to-morrow he will perhaps have ceased to love me ! " ex- 
 claimed the Countess. 
 
 " The women of Paris are inexplicable," said Thaddeus. 
 " When they are loved to distraction, they want to be loved 
 rationally ; when they are loved rationally, they accuse a man 
 of not knowing how to love." 
 
 "And they are always right, Thaddeus," she replied with 
 a smile. " I know Adam well ; I owe him no grudge for it ; 
 he is fickle, and, above all, a great gentleman ; he will always 
 be pleased to have me for his wife, and will never thwart me 
 in any of my tastes; but " 
 
 "What marriage was ever without a but?" said Thad- 
 deus gently, trying to give the Countess' thoughts another 
 direction. 
 
 The least conceited man would perhaps have had the 
 thought which nearly drove this lover mad: "If I do 
 not tell her that I love her," said he to himself, " I am 
 an idiot! " 
 
 There was silence between these two, one of those terrible 
 pauses which seem bursting with thoughts. The Countess 
 fixed a covert gaze on Paz, and Paz watched her in a mirror.
 
 360 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 Sitting back in his armchair, like a man given up to digestion, 
 in the attitude of an old man or an indifferent husband, the 
 captain clasped his hands over his stomach, and mechanically 
 twirled his thumbs, Idoking stupidly at their rapid movement. 
 
 " But say something good about Adam ! " exclaimed Clem- 
 entine. " Tell me that he is not fickle, you who know him 
 so well." 
 
 The appeal was sublime. 
 
 "This is the opportunity for raising an insurmountable bar- 
 rier between us," thought the unhappy Paz, devising a heroic 
 lie. "Something good," he said aloud. "I love him too 
 well, you would not believe me. I am incapable of telling 
 you any evil of him. And so, madame, I have a hard part 
 to play between you two." 
 
 Clementine looked down, fixing her eyes on his patent- 
 leather shoes. 
 
 " You northerners have mere physical courage, you have 
 no constancy in your decisions," said she in a low tone. 
 
 "What are you going to do alone, madame? " replied Paz, 
 with a perfectly ingenuous expression. 
 
 " You are not going to keep me company? " 
 
 "Forgive me for leaving you." 
 
 "Why! where are you going ?" 
 
 " I am going to the circus ; it is the first night, in the 
 Champs-Elys6es, and I must not fail to be there ! 
 
 "Why not?" asked Clementine, with a half-angry flash. 
 
 "Must I lay bare my heart?" he replied coloring, "and 
 confide to you what I conceal from my dear Adam, who be- 
 lieves that I love Poland alone ? " 
 
 " What ! our dear noble captain has a secret ? " 
 
 "A disgrace which you will understand, and for which you 
 can comfort me." 
 
 "A disgrace! You? " 
 
 " Yes, I Count Paz am madly in love with a girl who 
 was touring round France with the Bouthor family, people
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 361 
 
 who have a circus after the pattern of Franconi's, but who 
 only perform at fairs ! I got her an engagement from the 
 manager of the Cirque-Olympique." 
 
 " Is she handsome ? " asked the Countess. 
 
 "In my eyes," he replied sadly. " Malaga, that is her 
 name to the public, is strong, nimble, and supple. Why do 
 I prefer her to every other woman in the world ? Indeed, I 
 cannot tell you. When I see her with her black hair tied 
 back with blue ribbons that float over her bare, olive-tinted 
 shoulders, dressed in a white tunic with a gilt border, and silk 
 tights which make her appear a living Greek statue, her feet 
 in frayed satin slippers, flourishing flags in her hand to the 
 sound of a military band, and flying through an enormous 
 hoop covered with paper which crashes in the air when her 
 horse rushes round at a gallop, and she gracefully drops on to 
 him again, applauded, honestly applauded, by a whole people 
 well, it excites me." 
 
 " More than a woman at a ball?" said Clementine, with 
 insinuating surprise. 
 
 " Yes," said Paz in a choked voice. " This splendid 
 agility, this unfailing grace in constant peril, seem to me the 
 greatest triumph of woman. Yes, madame, Cinti and Mali- 
 bran, Grisi and Taglioni, Pasta and Elsler, all who reign or 
 ever reigned on the boards, seem to me unworthy to untie 
 Malaga's shoe-strings Malaga, who can mount or dismount 
 a horse at a mad gallop, who slips under him from the left to 
 reappear on the right, who flutters about the most fiery steed 
 like a white will-o'-the-wisp, who can stand on the tip of one 
 toe and then drop, sitting with her feet hanging, on a horse 
 still galloping round, and who finally stands on his back with- 
 out any reins, knitting a stocking, beating eggs, or stirring an 
 omelette, to the intense admiration of the people, the true 
 people, the peasantry and soldiers. During the walk round, 
 madame, that enchanting Columbine used to carry chairs 
 balanced on the tip of her nose, the prettiest Greek nose I
 
 362 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 ever saw. Malaga is dexterity personified. Her strength is 
 Herculean ; with her tiny fist or her little foot she can shake 
 off three or four men. She is the goddess of the athletes." 
 
 "She must be stupid." 
 
 "Oh!" cried Paz, "she is as amusing as the heroine of 
 'Peveril of the Peak.' As heedless as a gypsy, she says 
 everything that comes into her head ; she cares no more for 
 the future than you care for the halfpence you throw to a 
 beggar, and she lets out really sublime things. Nothing will 
 ever convince her that an old diplomat is a handsome young 
 man, and a million of francs would not make her change her 
 opinion. Her love for a man is a perpetual flattery. Enjoy- 
 ing really insolent health, her teeth are two-and-thirty Ori- 
 ental pearls set in coral. Her ' snout ' so she calls the lower 
 part of her face is, as Shakespeare has it, as fresh and sweet 
 as a heifer's muzzle. And it can give bitter pain ! She re- 
 spects fine men, strong men an Adolphus, an Augustus, an 
 Alexander acrobats and tumblers. Her teacher, a horrible 
 Cassandro, thrashed her unmercifully; it costs thousands of 
 blows to give her such agility, grace, and intrepidity." 
 
 " You are drunk with Malaga ! " said the Countess. 
 
 " Her name is Malaga only on the posters," said Paz, with 
 a look of annoyance. "She lives in the Rue Saint-Lazare, 
 in a little apartment on the third floor, in velvet and silk, like 
 a princess. She leads two lives one as a dancer, and one as 
 a pretty woman." 
 
 " And does she love you? " 
 
 "She loves me you will laugh solely because I am a 
 Pole. She sees in every Pole a Poniatowski, as he is shown 
 in the print, jumping into the Elster ; for to every French- 
 man the Elster, in which it is impossible to drown, is a 
 foaming torrent which swallowed up Poniatowski. And with 
 all this I am very unhappy, madame " 
 
 Clementine was touched by a tear of rage in the captain's 
 eye.
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 363 
 
 "You love the extraordinary, you men," said she. 
 
 " And you ? " asked Thaddeus. 
 
 " I know Adam so well that I know he cz*ld forget me for 
 some acrobatic tumbler like your Malaga. But where did 
 you find her?" 
 
 "At Saint-Cloud, last September, at the fair. She was 
 standing in a corner of the platform covered with canvas 
 where the performers walk round. Her comrades, all dressed 
 as Poles, were making a terrific Babel. I saw her silent and 
 dreamy, and fancied I could guess that her thoughts were 
 melancholy. Was there not enough to make her so a girl 
 of twenty? That was what touched me." 
 
 The Countess was leaning in a bewitching attitude, pensive, 
 almost sad. 
 
 "Poor, poor Thaddeus ! " she exclaimed. And with the 
 good-fellowship of a really great lady, she added, not without 
 a meaning smile, " Go ; go to the circus ! " 
 
 Thaddeus took her hand and kissed it, dropping a hot tear, 
 and then went out. After having invented a passion for a 
 circus-rider, he must give it some reality. Of his whole story 
 nothing had been true but the minute attention he had given 
 to the famous Malaga, the rider of the Bouthor troupe at 
 Saint-Cloud ; her name had just caught his eye on an adver- 
 tisement of the circus. The clown, bribed by a single five- 
 franc piece, had told Paz that the girl was a foundling, or 
 had perhaps been stolen. 
 
 Thaddeus now went to the circus and saw the handsome 
 horsewoman again. For ten francs, a groom they fill the 
 place of dressers at a circus informed him that Malaga's 
 name was Marguerite Turquet, and that she lived in the Rue 
 des Fosss-de-Temple, on a fifth floor. 
 
 Next day, with death in his soul, Paz found his way to that 
 quarter, and asked for Mademoiselle Turquet, in summer the 
 understudy of the principal rider at the cirque, and in winter 
 " a super" in a Boulevard theatre.
 
 364 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 " Malaga ! " shouted the doorkeeper, rushing into the attic, 
 " here is a fine gentleman for you ! He is asking Chapuzot 
 all about you ; and Chapuzot is cramming him to give me 
 time to let you know." 
 
 "Thank you, Madame Chapuzot; but what will he say to 
 find me ironing my gown ? " 
 
 " Pooh, stuff! When a man is in love, he loves everything 
 about you." 
 
 " Is he an Englishman ? They are fond of horses." 
 
 " No. He looks to me like a Spaniard." 
 
 "So much the worse. The Spaniards are down in the 
 market they say. Stay here, Madame Chapuzot, I shall not 
 look so left to myself." 
 
 "Who were you wanting, monsieur?" said the woman, 
 opening the door to Thaddeus. 
 
 "Mademoiselle Turquet." 
 
 "My child," said the porter's wife, wrapping her shawl 
 round her, " here is somebody asking for you." 
 
 A rope on which some linen was airing knocked off the 
 captain's hat. 
 
 "What is your business, monsieur?" asked Malaga, pick- 
 ing it up. 
 
 "I saw you at the circus; you remind me, mademoiselle, 
 of a daughter I lost ; and out of affection for my Heloise, 
 whom you are so wonderfully like, I should wish to be of use 
 to you, if you will allow me." 
 
 "Well, to be sure ! But sit down, Monsieur le General," 
 said Madame Chapuzot. "You cannot say fairer nor 
 handsomer." 
 
 "I am not by way of love-making, my good lady," said 
 Paz. " I am a father in deep distress, eager to be cheated by 
 a likeness." 
 
 "And so I am to pass as your daughter?" said Malaga, 
 very roguishly, and without suspecting the absolute truth of 
 the statement.
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 365 
 
 "Yes," said Paz. "I will come sometimes to see you; 
 and that the illusion may be perfect, I will place you in hand- 
 some lodgings, nicely furnished " 
 
 " I shall have furniture of my own ? " said Malaga, looking 
 at Madame Chapuzot. 
 
 "And servants," Paz went on; "and live quite at your 
 ease." 
 
 Malaga looked at the stranger from under her brow. 
 
 " From what country are you, monsieur? " 
 
 " I am a Pole." 
 
 " Then I accept," said she. 
 
 Paz went away, promising to call again. 
 
 " That is a tough one ! " said Marguerite Turquet, looking 
 at Madame Chapuzot. " But I am afraid this man is wheed- 
 ling me to humor some fancy. Well, I will risk it." 
 
 A month after this whimsical scene, the fair circus-rider 
 was established in rooms charmingly furnished by Count 
 Adam's upholsterer, for Paz wished that his folly should txi 
 talked about in the Laginski household. Malaga, to whom 
 the adventure was like an Arabian Night's dream, was waited 
 on by the Chapuzot couple at once her servants and her 
 confidants. The Chapuzots and Marguerite Turquet expected 
 some startling climax ; but at the end of three months, neither 
 Malaga nor the Chapuzots could account for the Polish 
 Count's fancy. Paz would spend about an hour there once a 
 week, during which he sat in the drawing-room, never choos- 
 ing to go either into Malaga's boudoir nor into her bedroom, 
 which, in fact, he never entered in spite of the cleverest 
 manoeuvring on her part and on that of the Chapuzots. The 
 Count inquired about the little incidents that varied the 
 horsewoman's life, and on going away he always left two 
 forty-franc pieces on the chimney-shelf. 
 
 " He looks dreadfully bored," said Madame Chapuzot. 
 
 "Yes," replied Malaga, " that man is as cold as frost after 
 a thaw."
 
 366 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 " He is a jolly good fellow, all the same," cried Chapuzot, 
 delighted to see himself dressed in blue Elbeuf cloth, and as 
 smart as a minister's office-messenger. 
 
 Paz, by his periodical tribute, made Marguerite Turquet an 
 allowance of three hundred and twenty francs a month. 
 This sum, added to her small earnings at the circus, secured 
 her a splendid existence as compared with her past squalor. 
 Strange tales were current among the performers at the circus 
 as to Malaga's good fortune. The girl's vanity allowed her 
 rent to be stated at sixty thousand francs, instead of the 
 modest six thousand which her rooms cost the prudent 
 captain. According to the clowns and supers, Malaga ate 
 off silver plate ; and she certainly came to the circus in pretty 
 burnouses, in shawls, and elegant scarfs. And, to crown all, 
 the Pole was the best fellow a circus-rider could come across ; 
 never tiresome, never jealous, leaving Malaga perfect freedom. 
 
 "Some women are so lucky!" said Malaga's rival. 
 " Such a thing would never happen to me, though I bring in 
 a third of the receipts." 
 
 Malaga wore smart "coal-scuttles," and sometimes gave 
 herself airs in a carriage in the Bois de Boulogne, where the 
 youth of fashion began to observe her. In short, Malaga 
 was talked about in the flash world of equivocal women, and 
 her good fortune was attacked by calumny. She was reported 
 to be a somnambulist, and the Pole was said to be a magnet- 
 izer in search of the philosopher's stone. Other comments 
 of a far more venomous taint made Malaga more inquisitive 
 than Psyche ; she reported them, with tears, to Paz. 
 
 " When I owe a woman a grudge," said she to conclude, 
 " I do not calumniate her, I do not say that a man magnet- 
 izes her to find stones. I say that she is a bad lot, and I 
 prove it. Why do you get me into trouble ? " 
 
 Paz was cruelly speechless. 
 
 Madame Chapuzot succeeded at last in discovering his 
 name and title. Then, at the Hotel Laginski, she ascertained
 
 THE IMAGINARY A1ISTRESS. 37 
 
 some positive facts : Thaddeus was unmarried ; he was not 
 known to have a dead daughter either in Poland or France. 
 Malaga could not help feeling a thrill of terror. 
 
 "My dear child," exclaimed Madame Chapuzot, "that 
 monster ' ' 
 
 A man who was satisfied with gazing at a beautiful creature 
 like Malaga gazing at her by stealth from under his brows 
 not daring to come to any decision without any confi- 
 dence ; such a man, in Madame Chapuzot's mind, must be a 
 monster. " That monster is breaking you in, to lead you on 
 to something illegal or criminal. God above us ! if you were 
 to be brought up at the assizes and it makes me shudder 
 from head to foot to think of it, I quake only to speak of it 
 or in the criminal court, and your name was in the news- 
 papers ! Do you know what I should do in your place ? 
 
 Well, in your place, to make all safe, I should warn the 
 police." 
 
 One day, when mad notions were fermenting in Malaga's 
 brain, Paz having laid his gold-pieces on the velvet chimney- 
 shelf, she snatched up the money and flung it in his face, say- 
 ing, " I will not take stolen money ! " 
 
 The captain gave the gold to the Chapuzots, and came no 
 more. 
 
 Clementine was spending the summer on the estate of her 
 uncle, the Marquis de Ronquerolles, in Burgundy. 
 
 When the troupe at the circus no longer saw Thaddeus in 
 his seat, there was a great talk among the artists. Malaga's 
 magnanimity was regarded as folly by some, as cunning by 
 others. The Pole's behavior, as explained to the most ex- 
 perienced of the women, seemed inexplicable. In the course 
 of a single week, Thaddeus received thirty-seven letters from 
 women of the town. Happily for him, his singular reserve 
 gave rise to no curiosity in fashionable circles, and remained 
 the subject of discussion in the flash set only. 
 
 Two months later, the handsome rider, swamped in debt,
 
 368 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 wrote to Count Paz the following letter, which the dandies of 
 the day regarded as a masterpiece : 
 
 " You, whom I still venture to call my friend, will you not 
 take pity on me after what passed between us, which you took 
 so ill ? My heart disowns everything that could hurt your 
 feelings. If I was so happy as to make you feel some charm 
 
 when you sat near me, as you used to do, come again 
 
 otherwise, I shall sink into despair. Poverty has come upon 
 me already, and you do not know what stupid things it brings 
 with it. Yesterday I lived on a herring for two sous and one 
 sou's worth of bread. Is that a breakfast for the woman you 
 love ? The Chapuzots have left me after seeming so devoted 
 to me. Your absence has shown me the shallowness of human 
 attachment. A bailiff, who turned a deaf ear to me, has 
 seized everything on behalf of the landlord, who has no pity, 
 and of the jeweler, who will not wait even ten days ; for with 
 you men, credit vanishes with confidence. What a position 
 for a woman who has nothing to reproach herself for but a 
 little amusement ! My dear friend, I have taken everything 
 of any value to my uncle's ; I have nothing left but my 
 memory of you, and the hard weather is coming on. All 
 through the winter I shall have no fire, since nothing but 
 melodrama is played at the Boulevard, in which I have noth- 
 ing to do but tiny parts, which do not show a woman off. 
 How could you misunderstand my noble feelings towards you, 
 for, after all, we have not two ways of expressing our grati- 
 tude ? How is it that you, who seemed so pleased to see me 
 comfortable, could leave me in misery ? Oh, my only friend 
 on earth, before I go back to travel from fair to fair with the 
 Bouthors for so, at any rate, I can make my living forgive 
 me for wanting to know if I have really lost you for ever. If 
 I should happen to think of you just as I was jumping through 
 the hoop, I might break my legs by missing time. Come 
 what may, I am yours for life. MARGUERITE TURQUET."
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 369 
 
 "This letter," exclaimed Thaddeus, shouting with laugh- 
 ter, "is well worth my ten thousand francs." 
 
 Clementine came home on the following day, and Paz saw 
 her once more, lovelier and more gracious than ever. During 
 dinner the Countess preserved an air of perfect indifference 
 towards Thaddeus, but a scene took place between the Count 
 and his wife after their friend had left. Thaddeus, with an 
 affectation of asking Adam's advice, had left Malaga's letter 
 in his hands, as if by accident. 
 
 "Poor Thaddeus!" said Adam to his wife, after seeing 
 Paz make his escape. " What a misfortune for a man of his 
 superior stamp to be the plaything of a ballet-girl of the lowest 
 class ! He will love anything ; he will degrade himself; he 
 will be unrecognizable before long. Here, my dear, read 
 that," and he handed her Malaga's letter. 
 
 Clementine read the note, which smelt of tobacco, and 
 tossed it away with disgust. 
 
 " However thick the bandage over his eyes may be, he must 
 have found something out. Malaga must have played him 
 some faithless trick." 
 
 " And he is going back to her ! " cried Clementine. " He 
 will forgive her ! You men can have no pity for any but those 
 horrible women ! " 
 
 " They need it so badly ! " said Adam. 
 
 "Thaddeus did himself justice by keeping to himself! " 
 said she. 
 
 "Oh, my dearest, you go too far," said the Count, who, 
 '.hough he was at first delighted to lower his friend in his 
 wife's eyes, would not be the death of the sinner. 
 
 Thaddeus, who knew Adam well, had begged for absolute 
 secrecy ; he had only spoken, he said, as an excuse for his 
 dissipations, and to beg his friend to allow him to have a 
 thousand crowns for Malaga. 
 
 " He is a man of great pride," Adam went on. 
 
 " What do you mean ? " 
 24
 
 370 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 " Well, to have spent no more than ten thousand francs on 
 her, and to wait for such a letter as that to rouse him before 
 taking her the money to pay her debts ! For a Pole, on my 
 honor!" 
 
 " But he may ruin you ! " said Clementine in the acrid tone 
 of a Parisian woman when she expresses her cat-like distrust- 
 fulness. 
 
 " Oh ! I understand him," said Adam. "He would sac- 
 rifice Malaga to us." 
 
 " We shall see," replied the Countess. 
 
 "If it were needful for his happiness, I should not hesitate 
 to ask him to give her up. Constantine tells me that during 
 the time when he was seeing her, Paz, usually so sober, some- 
 times came in quite fuddled. If he allowed himself to take 
 to drink, I should be as much grieved as if he were my son." 
 
 " Do not tell me any more ! " cried the Countess with an- 
 other gesture of disgust. 
 
 Two days later the captain could see in her manner, in the 
 tone of her voice, in her eyes, the terrible results of Adam's 
 betrayal. Scorn had opened gulfs between him and this 
 charming woman. And he fell forthwith into deep melan- 
 choly, devoured by this thought, "You have made yourself 
 unworthy of her." Life became a burden to him ; the bright 
 sunshine was gloomy in his eyes. Nevertheless, under these 
 floods of bitter thought, he had some happy moments : he 
 could now give himself up without danger to his admiration 
 for the Countess, who never paid him the slightest attention 
 when, at a party, hidden in a corner, mute, all eyes and all 
 heart, he did not lose one of her movements, not a note of 
 her song when she sang. He lived in this enchanting life : 
 he might himself groom the horse that she was to ride, and 
 devote himself to the management of her splendid house with 
 redoubled care for its interests. 
 
 These unspoken joys were buried in his heart like those of 
 a mother, whose child never knows anything of his mother's
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 371 
 
 heart : for is it knowledge so long as even one thing remains 
 unknown ? Was not this finer than Petrarch's chaste passion 
 for Laura, which, after all, was well repaid by a wealth of 
 glory, and by the triumph of the poetry she had inspired ? 
 Was not the emotion which Assas felt in dying, in truth a 
 whole life? This emotion Paz felt every day without dying, 
 but also without the guerdon of immortality. 
 
 What is there in love that Paz, notwithstanding these 
 secret delights, was consumed by sorrow? The Catholic 
 religion has so elevated love that she has married it insep- 
 arably, so to speak, to esteem and generosity. Love does 
 not exist apart from the fine qualities of which man is proud, 
 and so rarely are we loved if we are contemned, that Thad- 
 deus was perishing of his self-inflicted wounds. Only to 
 hear her say that she could have loved him, and then to die ! 
 The hapless lover would have thought his life well paid for. 
 The torments of his previous position seemed to him prefer- 
 able to living close to her, loading her with his generosity 
 without being appreciated or understood. In short, he wanted 
 the price of his virtue. 
 
 He grew thin and yellow, and fell so thoroughly ill, con- 
 sumed by low fever, that during the month of January he 
 kept his bed, though refusing to see a physician. Count 
 Adam grew extremely uneasy about his poor Thaddeus. The 
 Countess then was so cruel as to say, when they were together 
 one day, "Let him alone; do you not see that he has some 
 Olympian remorse?" 
 
 This speech stung Thaddeus to the verge of despair; he 
 got up, went out, tried some amusement, and recovered his 
 health. 
 
 In the month of February, Adam lost a rather considerable 
 sum at the Jockey Club, and, being afraid of his wife, he 
 begged Thaddeus to place this sum to the account of his 
 extravagance for Malaga. 
 
 "What is there strange in the notion thai the ballet-girl
 
 372 Tff IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 should have cost you twenty thousand francs ? It concerns 
 no one but me. Whereas, if the Countess should know that 
 I had lost it at play, I should fall in her esteem, and she 
 would be in alarm for the future." 
 
 " This to crown all ! " cried Thaddeus, with a deep sigh. 
 
 "Ah! Thaddeus, this service would make us quits if I 
 were not already the debtor." 
 
 "Adam, you may have children. Give up gambling," 
 said his friend. 
 
 "And twenty thousand francs more that Malaga has cost 
 us!" exclaimed the Countess some days after, on discover- 
 ing Adam's generosity to Paz. " And ten thousand before 
 that is thirty thousand in all ! Fifteen hundred francs a 
 year, the price of my box at the Italian opera, a whole for- 
 tune to many people. Oh ! you Poles are incomprehen- 
 sible ! " cried she, as she picked some flowers in her beautiful 
 conservatory. " You care no more than that 1 " 
 
 "Poor Paz " 
 
 " Poor Paz, poor Paz ! " she echoed, interrupting him. 
 " What good does he do us ? I will manage the house my- 
 self! Give him the hundred louis a year that he refused, 
 and let him make his own arrangements with the Olympic 
 Circus." 
 
 " He is of the greatest use to us ; he has saved us at least 
 forty thousand francs this year. In short, my dearest, he has 
 placed a hundred thousand francs for us in Nucingen's bank, 
 and a steward would have netted them." 
 
 Clementine was softened, but she was not the less hard on 
 Thaddeus. 
 
 Some days after she desired Paz to come to her in her 
 boudoir, where, a year since, she had been startled by com- 
 paring him with the Count. This time she received him 
 alone, without any suspicion of danger. 
 
 "My dear Paz," said she, with the careless familiarity of 
 fine folks to their inferiors, "if you love Adam as you say
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 373 
 
 you do, you will do one thing which he will never ask, but 
 which I, as his wife, do not hesitate to require of you " 
 
 "It is about Malaga," said Thaddeus with deep irony. 
 
 "Well, yes, it is," she said. "If you want to end your 
 days with us, if you wish that we should remain friends, give 
 her up. How can an old soldier " 
 
 " I am but five-and-thirty, and have not a gray hair ! " 
 
 " You look as if you had," said she, " and that is the same 
 thing. How can a man so capable of putting two and two 
 together, so superior " 
 
 What was horrible was that she spoke the word with such an 
 evident intention of rousing in him the nobleness of soul 
 which she believed to be dead. 
 
 "So superior as you are," she went on, after a little pause, 
 which a gesture from Paz forced upon her, "allow yourself 
 to be entrapped like a boy. Your affair with her has made 
 Malaga famous. Well ! My uncle wanted to see her, and 
 he saw her. My uncle is ( not the only one ; Malaga is very 
 ready to receive all these gentlemen. I believed you to be 
 high-minded. Take shame to yourself! Come, would she 
 be an irreparable loss to you?" 
 
 " Madame, if I knew of any sacrifice by which I might 
 recover your esteem, it would soon be made ; but to give up 
 Malaga is not a sacrifice " 
 
 " In your place that is what I should say if I were a man," 
 replied Clementine. " Well, but if I take it as a great sacri- 
 fice, there is nothing to be angry at." 
 
 Paz went away, fearing he might do some mad act ; he felt 
 his brain invaded by crazy notions. He went out for a walk, 
 lightly dressed in spite of the cold, but failed to cool the 
 burning of his face and brow. " I believed you to be high- 
 minded !" He heard the words again and again. "And 
 scarcely a year ago," said he to himself, "to hear Clemen- 
 tine, I had beaten the Russians single-handed ! " He thought 
 of quitting the Laginski household, of asking to be sent on
 
 374 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 service in the Spahi Regiment, and getting himself killed in 
 Africa; but a dreadful fear checked him: "What would 
 become of them without me ? They would soon be ruined. 
 Poor Countess, what a horrible life it would be for her to be 
 reduced even to thirty thousand francs a year ! Come," said 
 he to himself, "since she can never be yours, courage, finish 
 your work ! " 
 
 As all the world knows, since 1830 the Carnival in Paris 
 has grown to prodigious proportions, making it European, 
 and burlesque, and animated to a far greater degree than the 
 departed carnivals of Venice. Is this because, since fortunes 
 have so enormously diminished, Parisians have thought of 
 amusing themselves collectively, just as in their clubs they 
 have a drawing-room without any mistress of the house, with- 
 out politeness, and quite cheap ? Be this as it may, the month 
 of March was prodigal of those balls, where dancing, farce, 
 coarse fun, delirium, grotesque figures, and banter made keen 
 by Paris wit, achieved gigantic results. This madness had its 
 pandemonium at that time in the Rue Saint-Honore, and its 
 Napoleon in Musard, a little man born to rule an orchestra as 
 tremendous as the rampant mob, and to conduct a galop 
 that whirl of witches at their Sabbath, and one of Auber's 
 triumphs, for the galop derived its form and its poetry from 
 the famous galop in Gustavus. May not this vehement finale 
 serve as a symbol of an age when, for fifty years, everything 
 has rushed on with the swiftness of a dream ? 
 
 Now, our grave Thaddeus, bearing an immaculate image 
 in his heart, went to Malaga to invite her, the queen of car- 
 nival dancing, to spend an evening at Musard's as soon as he 
 learned that the Countess, disguised to the teeth, was intend- 
 ing to come with two other young ladies, escorted by their 
 husbands, to see the curious spectacle of one of these monster 
 balls. On Shrove Tuesday night, in the year of grace 1838, 
 at four o'clock in the morning, the Countess, wrapped in a 
 black domino, and seated on a bench of one of the amphi-
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 375 
 
 theatres of the Babylonian hall where Valentino has since 
 given his concerts, saw Thaddeus, dressed as Robert Macaire, 
 leading the circus-rider in the costume of a savage, her head 
 dressed with nodding plumes like a horse at a coronation, 
 and leaping among the groups like a perfect Jack-o'-lantern. 
 
 "Oh ! " exclaimed Clementine to her husband, " you 
 Poles are not men of character. Who would not have felt 
 sure of Thaddeus ? He gave me his word, not knowing 
 that I should be here and see all without being seen." 
 
 Some days after this she invited Paz to dinner. After 
 dinner, Adam left them together, and Clementine scolded 
 Thaddeus in such a way as to make him feel that she would 
 no longer have him about the house. 
 
 "Indeed, madame," said Thaddeus, humbly, "you are 
 quite right. I am a wretch ; I had pledged my word. But 
 what can I do ? I put off the parting with Malaga till after 
 the Carnival. And I will be honest with you ; the woman 
 has so much power over me." 
 
 "A woman who gets herself turned out of Musard's by the 
 police, and for such dancing? " 
 
 " I admit it ; I sit condemned ; I will quit your house. 
 But you know Adam. If I hand over to you the conduct of 
 your affairs, you will have to exert great energy. Though I 
 have the vice of Malaga, I know how to keep an eye on your 
 concerns, how to manage your household, and superintend 
 the smallest details. Allow me then to remain until I have 
 seen you qualified to continue my system of management. 
 You have now been married three years, and are safe from the 
 first follies consequent on the honeymoon. The ladies of 
 Paris society, even with the highest titles, understand very 
 well in these days how to control a fortune and a household. 
 Well, as soon as I am assured, not of your capacity, but of 
 your firmness, I will leave Paris." 
 
 "It is Thaddeus of Warsaw that speaks, not Thaddeus of 
 the circus. Come back to us cured."
 
 376 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 " Cured? Never ! " said Paz, his eye fixed on Clementine's 
 pretty feet. " You cannot know, Countess, all the spice, the 
 unexpectedness there is in that woman's wit." And feeling 
 his courage fail him, he added : " There is not a single woman 
 of fashion, with her prim airs, who is worth that frank young 
 animal nature." 
 
 " In fact, I should not choose to have anything in me of 
 the animal 1 " said the Countess, with a flashing look like an 
 adder in a rage. 
 
 After that day Count Paz explained to Clementine all her 
 affairs, made himself her tutor, taught her the difficulties of 
 managing her property, the real cost of things, and the way 
 to avoid being too extensively robbed by her people. She 
 might trust Constantine, and make him her major-domo. 
 Thaddeus had trained Constantine. By the month of May 
 he thought the Countess perfectly capable of administering 
 her fortune ; for Clementine was one of those clear-sighted 
 women whose instincts are alert, with an inborn genius for 
 household rule. 
 
 The situation thus naturally brought about by Thaddeus 
 took a sudden turn most distressing for him, for his sufferings 
 were not so light as he made them seem. The hapless lover 
 had not reckoned with accident. Adam fell very seriously ill. 
 Thaddeus, instead of leaving, installed himself as his friend's 
 sick-nurse. His devotedness was indefatigable. A woman who 
 had had an interest in looking through the telescope of fore- 
 sight would have seen in the captain's heroism the sort of 
 punishment which noble souls inflict on themselves to subdue 
 their involuntary thoughts of sin ; but women see everything 
 or nothing, according to their frame of mind ; love is their 
 sole luminary. 
 
 For forty-five days Paz watched and nursed Mitgislas with- 
 out seeming to have a thought of Malaga, for the excellent 
 reason that he never did think of her. Clementine, seeing
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 377 
 
 Adam at death's door, and yet not dead, had a consultation 
 of the most famous doctors. 
 
 "If he gets through this," said the most learned of the 
 physicians, " it can only be by an effort of nature. It lies 
 witli those who nurse him to watch for the moment and aid 
 nature. The Count's life is in the hands of his attendants." 
 
 Thaddeus went to communicate this verdict to Clementine, 
 who was sitting in the Chinese pavilion, as much to rest after 
 her fatigues as to leave the field free for the doctors, and not 
 to be in their way. As he trod the graveled paths leading 
 from the boudoir to the rockery on which the Chinese sum- 
 mer-house was built, Clementine's lover felt as though he 
 were in one of the gulfs described by Alighieri. The un- 
 happy man had never foreseen the chance of becoming Cle- 
 mentine's husband, and he had bogged himself in a swamp of 
 mud. When he reached her his face was set, sublime in its 
 despair. Like Medusa's head, it communicated terror. 
 
 " He is dead ? " said Clementine. 
 
 " They have given no hope ; at least, they leave it to nature. 
 Do not go in just yet. They are still there, and Bianchon 
 himself is examining him." 
 
 " Poor fellow ! I wonder whether I have ever worried 
 him," she said. 
 
 "You have made him very happy; be quite easy on that 
 point," said Thaddeus; "and you have been indulgent to 
 him " 
 
 " The loss will be irreparable." 
 
 " But, dear lady, supposing the Count should die, had you 
 not formed your opinion of him?" 
 
 " I do not love him blindly," she said ; " but I loved as a 
 wife ought to love her husband." 
 
 "Then," said Thaddeus, in a voice new to Clementine's 
 experience of him, " you ought to feel less regret than if you 
 were losing one of those men who are a woman's pride, her 
 love, her whole life ! You maybe frank with such a friend as
 
 378 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 I am I shall regret him I ! Long before your marriage 
 
 I had made him my child, and I have devoted my life to him. 
 I shall have no interest left on earth. But life still has charms 
 for a widow of four-and-twenty." 
 
 " Why, you know very well that I love no one," said she, 
 with the roughness of sorrow. 
 
 " You do not know yet what it is to love," said Thaddeus. 
 
 " Oh ! husband for husband, I have sense enough to prefer 
 a child like my poor Adam to a superior man. For nearly a 
 month now we have been asking ourselves, ' Will he live ? ' 
 These fluctuations have prepared me, as they have you, for 
 this end. I may be frank with you ? Well, then, I would 
 give part of my life to save Adam. Does not independence 
 for a woman, here in Paris, mean liberty to be gulled by the 
 pretense of love in men who are ruined or profligate ? I have 
 prayed God to spare me my husband so gentle, such a good 
 fellow, so little fractious, and who was beginning to be a little 
 afraid of me." 
 
 "You are honest, and I like you the better for it," said 
 Thaddeus, taking Clementine's hands, which she allowed him 
 to kiss. " In such a solemn moment there is indescribable 
 satisfaction in finding a woman devoid of hypocrisy. It is 
 possible to talk to you. Consider the future ; supposing God 
 should not listen to you and I am one of those who are most 
 ready to cry to Him : Spare my friend ! for these fifty nights 
 past have not made my eyes heavy, and if thirty days and 
 thirty nights more care are needed, you, madame, may sleep 
 while I watch. I will snatch him from death, if, as they say, 
 he can be saved by care. But if, in spite of you, in spite of 
 me, the Count is dead. Well, then, if you were loved, or 
 worshiped, by a man whose heart and character were worthy 
 of yours " 
 
 " I have perhaps madly wished to be loved, but I have 
 never met " 
 
 " Supposing you were mistaken."
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 379 
 
 Clementine looked steadily at Thaddeus, suspecting him 
 less of loving her than of a covetous dream ; she poured con- 
 tempt on him by a glance, measuring him from head to foot, 
 and crushed him with two words, " Poor Malaga ! " pro- 
 nounced in those tones such as fine ladies alone can find in 
 the gamut of their contempt. 
 
 She rose and left Thaddeus fainting, for she did not turn 
 round, but walked with great dignity back to her boudoir, 
 and thence up to her husband's room. 
 
 An hour later Paz returned to the sick man's bedside, and 
 gave all his care to the Count, as though he had not received 
 his own death-blow. 
 
 From that dreadful moment he became silent ; he had a 
 duel to fight with disease, and he carried it through in a way 
 that excited the admiration of the doctors. At any hour his 
 eyes were always beaming like two lamps. Without showing 
 the slightest resentment towards Clementine, he listened to 
 her thanks without accepting them ; he seemed deaf. He 
 had said to himself, " She shall owe Adam's life to me ! " and 
 these words he had, as it were, written in letters of fire in the 
 sick man's room. 
 
 At the end of a fortnight Clementine was obliged to give 
 up some of the nursing, or risk falling ill from so much 
 fatigue. Paz was inexhaustible. At last, about the end of 
 August, Bianchon, the family doctor, answered for the Count's 
 life 
 
 "Ah, madame," said he to Clementine, "you are under 
 not the slightest obligation to me. But for his friend we 
 could not have saved him ! " 
 
 On the day after the terrible scene in the Chinese pavilion, 
 the Marquis de Ronquerolles had come to see his nephew, for 
 he was setting out for Russia with a secret mission ; and Paz, 
 overwhelmed by the previous evening, had spoken a few words 
 to the diplomat.
 
 380 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 On the very day when Count Adam and his wife went out 
 for the first time for a drive, at the moment when the carriage 
 was turning from the steps, an orderly came into the court- 
 yard and asked for Count Paz. Thaddeus, who was sitting 
 with his back to the horses, turned round to take a letter 
 bearing the stamp of the minister for foreign affairs, and put 
 it into the side-pocket of his coat, with a decision which 
 precluded any questions on the part of Clementine or Adam. 
 It cannot be denied that persons of good breeding are masters 
 of the language that uses no speech. Nevertheless, as they 
 reached the Porte Maillot, Adam, assuming the privilege of a 
 convalescent whose every whim must be indulged, said to 
 Thaddeus 
 
 " There can be no indiscretions between two brothers 
 who love each other as you and I do ; you know what is in 
 that letter ; tell me, I am in a fever of curiosity to know it 
 also." 
 
 Clementine looked at Thaddeus as an angry woman can, 
 and said to her husband, " He has been so sulky with me 
 these two months that I shall take good care not to press 
 him." 
 
 "Oh dear me!" replied Thaddeus, "as I cannot hinder 
 the newspapers from publishing it, I may very well reveal the 
 secret. The Emperor Nicholas does me the favor of appoint- 
 ing me captain on service in a regiment starting with the 
 Khiva Expedition." 
 
 " And you are going? " cried Adam. 
 
 "I shall go, my dear fellow. I came as captain, and as 
 captain I return. Malaga might lead me to make a fool of 
 myself. We shall dine together to-morrow for the last time. 
 If I did not set out in September for St. Petersburg, I should 
 have to travel overland, and I am not rich. I must leave 
 Malaga her little independence. How can I fail to provide 
 for the future of the only woman who has understood me ? 
 Malaga thinks me a great man ? Malaga thinks me hand*
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 381 
 
 some ! Malaga may perhaps be faithless, but she would go 
 through " 
 
 " Through a hoop for you, and fall on her feet on horse- 
 back ! " said Clementine, sharply. 
 
 " Oh, you do not know Malaga," said the captain, with 
 deep bitterness, and an ironical look which made Clementine 
 uneasy and silent. 
 
 " Farewell to the young trees of this lovely Bois de Bou- 
 logne, where Parisian ladies drive, and the exiles wander who 
 have found a home here. I know that my eyes will never 
 again see the green trees of the Alle"e de Mademoiselle, or of 
 the Route des Dames, nor the acacias, nor the cedar at the 
 Ronds-points. 
 
 " On the Asiatic frontier, obedient to the schemes of the 
 great Emperor I have chosen to be my master, promoted 
 perhaps to command an army, for sheer courage, for con- 
 stantly risking my life, I may indeed regret the Champs- 
 ElysSes where you, once, made me take a place in the car- 
 riage, by your side. Finally, I shall never cease to regret 
 the severity of Malaga of the Malaga I am at this moment 
 thinking of." 
 
 This was said in a tone that made Clementine shiver. 
 
 " Then you love Malaga very truly ? " she said. 
 
 " I have sacrificed for her the honor we never sacrifice " 
 
 "Which?" 
 
 " That which we would fain preserve at any cost in the eyes 
 of the idol we worship." 
 
 After this speech Thaddeus kept an impenetrable silence; he 
 broke it only when, as they drove down the Champs-Elysees, 
 he pointed to a wooden structure and said, " There is the 
 circus ! " 
 
 Before their last dinner he went to the Russian embassy for 
 a few minutes, and thence to the minister for foreign affairs, 
 and he started for Havre next morning before the Countess 
 and Adam were up.
 
 382 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 "I have lost a friend," said Adam, with tears in his eyes, 
 when he learned that Count Paz was gone, " a friend in the 
 truest sense of the word, and I cannot think what has made 
 him flee from my house as if it were the plague. We are not 
 the sort of friends to quarrel over a woman," he went on, 
 looking full at Clementine, "and yet all he said yesterday 
 was about Malaga. But he never laid the tip of his finger on 
 the girl." 
 
 " How do you know?" asked Clementine. 
 
 " Well, I was naturally curious to see Mademoiselle Tur- 
 quet, and the poor girl cannot account for Thaddeus' extra- 
 ordinary reserve " 
 
 " That is enough," said the Countess, going off to her own 
 room, and saying to herself, " I have surely been the victim 
 of some sublime hoax." 
 
 She had scarcely made the reflection, when Constantine 
 placed in her hands the following letter, which Thaddeus had 
 scrawled in the night : 
 
 " COUNTESS: To go to be killed in the Caucasus, and to 
 bear the burden of your scorn, is too much ; a man should 
 die unmutilated. I loved you from the first time I saw you, 
 as a man loves the woman he will love for ever, even when 
 she is faithless I, under obligations to Adam, whom you 
 chose and married I, so poor, the volunteer steward, de- 
 voted to your household. In this dreadful catastrophe I 
 found a delightful existence. To be an indispensable wheel 
 in the machine, to know myself useful to your luxury and 
 comfort, was a source of joy to me ; and if that joy had 
 been keen when Adam alone was my care, think what it 
 must have been when the woman I worshiped was at once 
 the cause and the effect ! I have known all the joys of 
 motherhood in my love ; and I accepted life on those terms. 
 Like the beggars on the high-roads, I built myself a hut of 
 stones on the skirts of your beautiful home, but without hold-
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 383 
 
 ing out my hand for alms. I, poor and unhappy, but blinded 
 by Adam's happiness, I was the donor. Yes, you were hedged 
 in by a love as pure as that of a guardian angel ; it watched 
 while you slept ; it caressed you with a look as you passed by ; 
 it was glad merely to exist ; in short, you were the sunshine 
 of home to the hapless exile who is now writing to you, with 
 tears in his eyes, as he recalls the happiness of those early 
 days. 
 
 "At the age of eighteen, with no one to love me, I had 
 chosen as an ideal mistress a charming woman at Warsaw, to 
 whom I referred all my thoughts and my wishes, the queen 
 of my days and nights. This woman knew nothing of it, but 
 why inform her ? For my part, what I loved was love. 
 
 "You may fancy, from this adventure of my boyhood, how 
 happy I was, living within the sphere of your influence, 
 grooming your horse, picking out new gold-pieces for your 
 purse, superintending the splendor of your table and your en- 
 tertainments, seeing you eclipse fortunes greater than your 
 own by my good management. With what zeal did I not 
 rush round Paris when Adam said to me, ' Thaddeus, she 
 wants this or that ! ' It was one of those joys for which there 
 are no words. You have now and again wished for some trifle 
 within a certain time which has compelled me to feats of 
 expedition, driving for six or seven hours in a cab; and what 
 happiness it has been to walk in your service. When I have 
 watched you smiling in the midst of your flowers without 
 being seen by you, I have forgotten that no one loved me 
 in short, at such moments I was but eighteen again. 
 
 " Sometimes, when my happiness turned my brain, I would 
 go at night and kiss the spot where your feet had left, for me, 
 a luminous trace, just as of old I had stolen, with a thief's 
 miraculous skill, to kiss a key which Countess Ladislas had 
 touched on opening a door. The air you breathed was em- 
 balmed ; to me it was fresh life to breathe it ; and I felt, as 
 they say is the case in the tropics, overwhelmed by an atmo-
 
 384 TtiE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 sphere surcharged with creative elements. I must tell you all 
 these things to account for the strange fatuity of my involun- 
 tary thoughts. I would have died sooner than divulge my 
 secret. 
 
 " You may remember those few days when you were curi- 
 ous, when you wanted to see the worker of the wonders which 
 had at last struck you with surprise. I believed forgive me, 
 madame I believed that you would love me. Your kindli- 
 ness, your looks interpreted by a lover seamed fraught with 
 so much danger to me that I took up Malaga, knowing that 
 there are liaisons which no woman can forgive ; I took the 
 girl up at the moment when I saw that my love was inevi- 
 tably infectious. Overwhelm me now with the scorn which 
 you poured upon me so freely when I did not deserve it ; but 
 I think I may be quite sure that if, on the evening when your 
 aunt took the Count out, I had said what I have here written, 
 having once said it I should have been like the tame tiger 
 who has at last set his teeth in living flesh, and who scents 
 warm blood 
 
 "Midnight. 
 
 " I could write no more, the memory of that evening was 
 too vivid ! Yes, I was then in a delirium ! I saw expectancy 
 in your eyes ; victory and its crimson banners may have 
 burned in mine and fascinated yours. My crime was to think 
 such things and perhaps wrongly. You alone can be judge 
 of that fearful scene when I succeeded in crushing love, desire, 
 the most stupendous forces of manhood under the icy hand 
 of gratitude which must be eternal. Your terrible scorn pun- 
 ished me. You have showed me that neither disgust nor con- 
 tempt can ever be gotten over. I love you like a madman. I 
 must have gone away if Adam had died. There is all the 
 more reason since Adam is saved. I did not snatch my friend 
 from the grave to betray him. And, indeed, my departure is 
 the due punishment for the thought that came to me that I
 
 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 385 
 
 would let him die when the physicians said his life depended 
 on his attendants. 
 
 "Farewell, madame; in leaving Paris I lose everything, 
 but you lose nothing in parting with yours most faithfully, 
 
 "THADDEUS PAZ." 
 
 " If my poor Adam says he has lost a friend, what have I 
 lost?" thought Clementine, sitting dejected, with her eyes 
 fixed on a flower in the carpet. 
 
 This is the note which Constantine delivered privately to 
 his master 
 
 " MY DEAR MITGISLAS: Malaga has told me all. For the 
 sake of your happiness, never let a word escape you in Clem- 
 entine's presence as to your visits to the circus-rider; let her 
 still believe that Malaga costs me a hundred thousand francs. 
 With the Countess' character she will not forgive you either 
 your losses at play or your visits to Malaga. I am not going 
 to Khiva, but to the Caucasus. I have a fit of spleen, and at 
 the pace I mean to go, in three months I shall be Prince Paz, 
 or dead. Farewell ; though I have drawn sixty thousand francs 
 out of Nucingen's, we are quits. 
 
 "THADDEUS." 
 
 "Idiot that I am ! I very nearly betrayed myself just now 
 by speaking of the circus-rider ! " said Adam to himself. 
 
 Thaddeus has been gone three years, and the papers do not 
 as yet mention any Prince Paz. Countess Laginski takes a 
 keen interest in the Emperor Nicholas' expeditions; she is a 
 Russian at heart, and reads with avidity all the news from that 
 country. Once or twice a year she says to the ambassador, 
 with an affectation of indifference, " Do you know what has 
 become of our poor friend Paz?" 
 
 Alas! most Parisian women, keen-eyed and subtle as they 
 25
 
 386 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 
 
 are supposed to be, pass by and always will pass by such an 
 one as Paz without observing him. Yes, more than one Paz 
 remains misunderstood ; but, fearful thought ! some are mis- 
 understood even when they are loved. The simplest woman 
 in the world requires some little coxcombry in the greatest 
 man ; and the most heroic love counts for nothing if it is un- 
 cut ; it needs the arts of the polisher and the jeweler. 
 
 In the month of January, 1842, Countess Laginski, beauti- 
 fied by gentle melancholy, inspired a mad passion in the 
 Comte de la Palfrine, one of the most audacious bucks of 
 Paris at this day. La Palfe"rine understood the difficulty of 
 conquering a woman guarded by a chimera ; to triumph over 
 this bewitching woman, he trusted to a surprise, and to the 
 assistance of a woman who, being a little jealous of Cl6men- 
 tine, would lend herself to plot the chances of the adventure. 
 
 Clementine, incapable with all her wit of suspecting such 
 treachery, was so imprudent as to go with this false friend to 
 the masked ball at the opera. At about three in the morning, 
 carried away by the excitement of the ball, Clementine, for 
 whom La Palferine had exhausted himself in attentions, con- 
 sented to sup with him, and was getting into the lady's car- 
 riage. At this critical moment she was seized by a strong 
 arm, and in spite of her cries placed in her own carriage, 
 which was standing with the door open, though she did not 
 know that it was waiting. 
 
 " He has not left Paris ! " she exclaimed, recognizing Thad- 
 deus, who ran off when he saw the carriage drive away with 
 the Countess. 
 
 Had ever another woman such a romance in her life ? 
 
 Clementine is always hoping to see Paz again. 
 
 PARIS, January, 1842.
 
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