Part
II
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 Kergarouët and an émigrée. 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. Moreover, the feeling which governs grandparents when matrimonial 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 Zélie 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 nobility. 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 Kergarouëts and the Portenduères.
“The Family has ceased to exist, my dear mother,” replied Savinien. “Nothing is left but the Individual. The nobility no longer form a compact body. Nowadays no one asks if you are a Portenduère, or if you are brave, or a statesman; all that anyone requires 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 peasant’s daughter if she has a million of francs, and if she is 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 Portenduères and the Kergarouëts.”
“Then you would leave me to die of hunger and despair for the sake of a chimera which, in these days, can only become 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.”
“Louis XIV was very near marrying Mazarin’s niece—a parvenu.”
“Mazarin himself opposed it.”
“And the widow Scarron?”
“She was a d’Aubigne! 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 Kergarouëts, an obstinacy equal to her own, and determined 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.
When, after vespers, Doctor Minoret, with Ursule, dressed in pink and white, entered the chill 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 doctor, 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 hopelessly the distance which divided a Vicomte de Portenduère 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 Portenduère in her most vinegar 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 suddenly struck Madame de Portenduère, and led her to suspect 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 uncomfortable, when a knock was heard.
“Here is our good curé,” 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 offence at Madame de Portenduère’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 entrusting 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 at Savinien, who bowed in reply. “Well, then, they can be handed to Dionis,” and she pushed away the papers, treating the affair with the contempt due in her eyes to money matters.
To look down on wealth was, in Madame de Porienduere’s opinion, to enhance nobility, and leave the middle class without 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 insolently 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 had shut the door.
“What can it matter whether people of that class are ugly or handsome?” said Madame de Portenduère.
“I have no objection to his ugliness,” said the curé, “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 Abbé Chaperon, whose gentle 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, madame,” said the doctor severely, “her soul feels chilled, accustomed as she is to see nothing but smiles.”
“A bad education, monsieur,” said Madame de Portenduère. “Do not you think so, Monsieur le Curé?”
“Yes, madame,” Minoret put in, with a glance at the curé, who could not say a word. “I have, I see, made life impossible 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 coldness, indifference, and hatred—”
“Godfather! I beg of you—that is enough. I feel nothing unpleasant here,” she said, ready to meet Madame de Portenduère’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 Portenduère 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 perceived that Savinien looked at you with pleasure; she is afraid lest he should fall in love with you.”
“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 Portenduère’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 Portenduère pledged all her property until the hundred thousand francs lent by the doctor to the Vicomte should be repaid, with the interest, calculated at five percent. When reading this clause, the curé looked at Minoret, who answered the Abbé 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 curé, “to pay the law costs.”
“Monsieur,” said Minoret to Dionis, “as Monsieur and Madame de Portenduère 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 withdrew at the same time as the notary and the witnesses.
“Madame,” said the Abbé, 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?”
“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 Portenduère and the son of a Kergarouët 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 Crémière and Massin whispered together, and stared at Ursule, who blushed. The mothers murmured to Désiré that Goupil was very likely in the right as regarded the marriage. The eyes of all were then centered 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 Portenduères.
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 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 compositions, 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 supported 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 curé 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 Désiré, who remained to investigate the intentions of his uncle, of the Vicomte, and of Ursule.
“You have as much talent as feeling, mademoiselle,” said 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 Dauphiné, 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 Désiré.
The players exchanged ironical glances. When the game was ended, the doctor, who had been thoughtful all the evening, turned to Savinien with the expression of a man grieved to fulfil 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 expression of regret rather than of disappointment. Désiré left the room at the same moment, but he could not speak a word with him, for Savinien rushed home.
For two days the coolness between the Portenduères and the doctor was the sole object of conversation among the heritors, who did justice to the acumen of Dionis, and believed that the inheritance was safe. And thus, in an age when ranks are leveled, when the mania for equality puts all individuals on the same footing, and threatens every institution, 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:
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 guardian rescued me. I henceforth must offer better guarantees than another man; hence, mademoiselle, it is with the greatest 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 Kergarouët 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 position. 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 recluse 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 lay at your feet, as we lay all at the throne of God. Tell me, then, that I may call myself
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 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 Comte, am but a poor girl, whose future fortune depends entirely not only on my godfather’s goodwill, 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 Mirouët, bandmaster to the 40th 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 defenceless. You see, monsieur, that my slender prospects are not the worst of my misfortunes. I have many reasons for humility. It is for 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 kindness 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 happiness, 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.
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 reflex 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 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:
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 Kergarouët, 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 sublieutenant; 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 Portenduère 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, and to your uncle I will give such guarantees as may assure him of your happiness. He does 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 advantages by dressing as carefully, as elegantly, as though it were to charm the handsome and haughty Comtesse de Kergarouët. 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.
“Yes, mademoiselle, to deserve you. So, the more haste I put into it, the more affection I shall show for you.”
“Today is the 3rd of October,” said she, looking at him with infinite tenderness. “Start after the 19th.”
“Yes,” said the old man; “we will keep the feast of Saint-Savinien.”
“Then, goodbye,” 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 instruments 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 may be 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 25th. As the doctor invited him to dinner on the 18th, 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 curé, the Justice, the town doctor, and La Bougival.
“Children,” said the old man, “you are risking your happiness by not keeping the secret to yourselves.”
At last, on the fête 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, interrupting 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, before 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 love anyone but you, and will never marry anyone else.”
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 Savinien 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 moderate 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 what 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 curé, and the Justice, that Savinien was warring with a hurricane. The Justice made her happy for a few days with a print representing a naval cadet in his uniform. She read the newspapers, 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. Those 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 when this had happened without the doctor and the curé being at all surprised; “now, I am easy; however far away Savinien 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 curé 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 curé 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 Portenduère, 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 curé kept the secret of the doctor’s intentions with regard to this journey, which seemed to be undertaken 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 the minister had especially recommended young Portenduère, 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 Désiré 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 postmaster’s farmers also had votes. Dionis represented more than eleven votes. By meeting at the notary’s, Crémière, Massin, the postmaster, and their adherents got into a habit of assembling 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 Bongrand and the Abbé 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. Désiré Minoret, whose opinions were those of the Paris bar, had invited fifteen of his friends, with Goupil at their head, to come from Nemours; the postmaster gave them horses to hurry to Paris, where they joined Désiré on the night of the 28th of July. Désiré and Groupil led this little troop to assist in the seizure of the Hôtel de Ville.
Désiré Minoret received the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, and was appointed Deputy to the Public Prosecutor at Fontainebleau. 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, Crémière, and all the followers of Dionis.
Bongrand only kept his appointment as Justice by the influence of his son, who was made Public Prosecutor at Melun, his marriage with Mademoiselle Levrault seeming at that time probable.
When three percents were down to forty-five, the doctor set out to 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 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, Crémière, and the postmaster ascribed their uncle’s follies.
“A chariot! heh, Massin?” cried Goupil. “Your inheritance 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 secondhand, 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 Crémière.
“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 Crémière 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.”
“That’s it, madame,” said Cabirolle, who was himself taken in by Goupil’s explanation, the clerk spoke with such gravity.
“It is a handsome carriage, at any rate,” said Crémière, “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 not you 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 Crémière. 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 today,” replied Cabirolle.
“There is safety in numbers,” observed Madame Crémière, 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 Indian 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.
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 neighbors. The misguided verdict of the little town had this advantage: it deceived the next-of-kin, who never suspected Savinien’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 sublieutenant’s uniform.
“How is it that I knew nothing about it?” she asked herself.
After the taking of Algiers, where Savinien had distinguished 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 advantage 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.”
“This is my birthday treat! It is all in those words!” she exclaimed, embracing the doctor.
In reply to a signal she made him, Savinien 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 decision, a certain rectitude, which enables the most superficial observer to recognize a soldier under a civilian’s coat; nothing 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 Portenduère’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 overcome 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 risks 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.
Savinien 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 bridegroom; all the more so since, whether at mass or out walking, 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 Portenduère, who already owed it for three years.
“She will be forced to give in, to consent to her son’s marrying 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 argument.”
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 having tried in vain to hit on some way of thwarting the old man. Zélie, who had, no doubt, like the doctor, taken advantage of the fall in the funds to invest her enormous savings, was the most furious against the orphan and the Portenduères. 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, Zélie had a recrudescence of hatred. She had that morning seen the doctor, with Ursule and Savinien, returning from a drive in the neighborhood, with an appearance of intimacy that told all.
“I would give thirty thousand francs, gladly, if only God would take our uncle to Himself before that Portenduère 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 about him to make sure that they were alone:
“Will you give me money enough to buy Dionis out of his business, and I will see that the marriage of Monsieur de Portenduère 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 Zélie.
“I am not going to plunge into such a job on the strength of ‘we will see.’ The young gentleman is hotheaded, and might kill me; and I must be well roughshod, 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 Lecoeurs 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 Lecoeurs business, I don’t say no,” replied Zélie; “but to be security for fifty thousand crowns—”
“But I will repay you,” said Goupil, with a fascinating leer at Zélie, which the postmistress met with an imperious stare.
It was like vitriol on steel.
“We will wait,” said Zélie.
“Possessed by the genius of evil!” thought Goupil. “If 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 curé, showed them the excellence of his character. The young man’s love for Ursule, so absolutely disinterested, 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 hard 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, unbroken 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 excellent 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 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 that 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 problem. 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 curé, 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 curé 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 uneasiness 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 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.
“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 “emancipation” so briskly that Mademoiselle Mirouët was legally independent on the day when she was twenty. This anniversary 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, Crémière, Minoret, and Massin. Savinien, Bongrand, the curé and his two assistant priests, the town doctor, Mesdames Zélie Minoret, Massin, and Crémière, with old Schmucke, were his guests at a grand dinner before the dance.
“I feel that I have not so long to stay,” said the old man to the notary towards the end of the evening. “I beg you to come tomorrow to draw up the report and accounts I have to hand over to Ursule as her guardian, so as to avoid all complications after my death. Thank God, I have not robbed my heirs of a sou, and have spent nothing but my income. Messieurs Crémière, 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 spent three years in constant alterations of feelings, believing themselves sometimes rich, and sometimes disinherited.
“It is a lamp flying out,” said Madame Crémière. (She meant dying out.)
When, at about two in the morning, no one remained in the room but Savinien, Bongrand, and the Abbé Chaperon, the old doctor said, as he pointed to Ursule, lovely in her ball-dress, having just said good night to the young Crémière and Massin girls:
“I place her in your hands, my friends. In a few days I shall be no longer 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 name-days.
This authenticated schedule of the account had been advised 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.
In 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 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 curé should carry to the old man the last sacraments with all the ceremony usual in provincial towns. Hence, when two days later the Abbé 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 anything 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 curé looked round, saw them, and read the prayers very slowly. The postmaster was the first to rise from his uncomfortable attitude, his wife followed his example; Massin, fearful lest Zélie 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 Crémière; “so we may be easy.”
“Yes; we shall each have about twenty thousand francs a year,” replied Madame Massin.
“I have got it into my head,” said Zélie, “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 Crémière.
“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 Crémière, “how shall we proceed? Shall we divide? Or put it into the lawyer’s 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 Zélie’s shrill tones, rang across the courtyard out into the street.
“He must be dead,” said the curious crowd that had collected 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 Crémière.
“Very well, we will pay for it as much as it is worth,” retorted Zélie sharply.
“Monsieur le Curé,” said the old man to the Abbé, 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 curé 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 Abbé 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 Crémière. “I will keep guard. It is quite possible that he may plot something against our interests.”
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 carpets in the passages and on the stairs. He thus came close to his uncle’s door without being heard. The curé 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 Curé 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 tonight.—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 Portenduère, 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 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 summerhouse.
Minoret, his eyes dim with greed, and his blood singing in his ears, unscrewed the lock with a pocketknife as dexterously 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, waiting 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.
The postmaster, meanwhile, had gone home to master the contents of the mysterious packet. This was what he read:
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 likeness to Ursule Mirouët, 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 Portenduère. Having regard to these 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 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 certificates to bearer of three percent 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. Remember, 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 disobey 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 Portenduère; so, whether you own them, or they are the gift of your lover, they will be legitimately yours.—Your godfather,
Subjoined to this letter, on a sheet of stamped paper, was the following document:
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 Portenduère a sincere affection for me, I bequeath to him thirty-six thousand francs in perpetual consols at three percent, to be paid out of my estate as a first charge.
Made and written all by my own hand at Nemours, January 11, 1831.
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 tinderbox; 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 there?” he said to Massin and Crémière. “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, Crémière, 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 Crémière, “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 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 sledgehammer.
“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?” he observed to Crémière. “Come here, and go there! How well he knows the game!”
“Yes, for a fathead 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 wild cat.
“I wish it were done, and that we could all go quietly home,” said Minoret.
“And we will put someone 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 tomorrow at noon. The inventory cannot be made till after a week.”
“But,” said the colossus smiling, “we can turn out that 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; we must witness the affixing of the seals for our common interest.”
He then took Zélie 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 Zélie and Madame Massin, to desire Ursule to leave the house.
“Go yourselves and turn her out 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 there everything 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 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.
“Ah, Monsieur Bongrand, after my happy fête, 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, starting 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 lightnings 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 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 prayerbook, and remained all night with the Curé 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 bid 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 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; 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. Désiré 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 Désiré’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 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 everyone 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 everyone 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 instalment 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 bookshelves. 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 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 curé both dreaded for her the sudden transition 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 bitterness of her changed fortunes, which, nevertheless, raised a fresh obstacle in the way of her marriage. Savinien’s dejection 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 Zélie’s thriftiness, foreclosed on Madame and Monsieur de Portenduère, 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 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 a bad set to deal with who will make no compromise; their point is to drive you to extremities and take possession of the farm at Bordières,” 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 husband. 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 delicate 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. Happily, 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 complete. Monsieur Bongrand still hopes to find something for you. He is as much surprised as I am to find you left penniless. The doctor so often spoke to him and to me of the 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 godfather’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 hundred and twenty-nine thousand francs of the Portenduère mortgage, the fifteen thousand francs a year in three percents, then quoted at sixty-five, and yielding a capital of three hundred 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 fortune for the provinces, it never occurred to anyone 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 Portenduère mortgage. Bongrand, Savinien, and the curé 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 Monsieur do Portenduère,” 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 bedsteads 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 curé. “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 Crémières. 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 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 secondhand 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 till it had been carefully examined by a cabinetmaker, noted for his experience of secret drawers and panels, who was sent for expressly from Paris. When the Justice gave orders that the bookcase and books should be conveyed to Mademoiselle Mirouët’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 fifty thousand francs, imagining that the postmaster 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 Goupil, 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 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 Zélie 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 poignant because he had so much more wealth that 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 perhaps, again, crime has its own counsel of perfection. An ill deed begun may demand its climax, a first blow may require a second—a deathblow. Robbery, perhaps, inevitably leads to murder. Minoret had committed the theft without a moment’s pause for reflection, events had crowded on so swiftly; reflection came afterwards. Now, if the reader has fully pictured the appearance and build of this man, he will understand 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 lighthearted.
“I cannot think what has come over Minoret,” said his wife, to whom he had never revealed his bold stroke. “He is all 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 Bougival never let a day pass without making to her foster-child some allusion to the fortune she ought to have had, or comparing 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.
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 imagination the sight of this sketch was sufficient to bring her godfather 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 Abbé 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 practised 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 weather, would find the window half open, and sit on the outer sill to chat with her for half-an-hour. In the evening the curé or the Justice would call, but she would never allow Savinien to accompany them. Nor would she accept a proposal from Madame de Portenduère, 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 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 penurious life, after having enjoyed a luxurious existence, when her lightest whims were worshiped, gained her the regard of certain persons. She was respected, and never talked about. The heirs, once satisfied, did her full justice. Savinien admired such strength of character in so young a girl. Now and again, on coming out of church, Madame de Portenduère 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 persecution of Ursule, which had hitherto smouldered, 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 Portenduères, and undertook to get them out of their difficulties; but, in calling on the old lady, whose opposition 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 Mirouët. He selected one of his former clerks to plead for the Portenduères at Fontainebleau, and himself conducted the appeal, for a decree against the foreclosure. He intended to take advantage of the interval of time which must elapse between the granting of this decree and Massins 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 Portenduère’s, consisting of himself and the curé, Savinien and Ursule, for whom the Justice and the Abbé called every evening, and they saw her home again.
In June, Bongrand got his decree annulling the proceedings taken by Massin against the Portenduères. 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 Zélie, who, as he knew, was puzzled for an investment for her savings, and suggested to her that she should buy Bordières for two hundred and twenty thousand francs.
“I would clinch the bargain on the spot,” said Minoret, “if only I were sure that the Portenduères were going to live anywhere than at Nemours.”
“Why?” asked the Justice.
“We want to be quit of nobles at Nemours.”
“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 Zélie. “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 Bordières off my hands with their eyes shut. Then you will have lost the opportunity of an investment at three percent in the district of le Rouvre.”
“And why then did you come to us?” said Zélie.
“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 Portenduères in any way,” replied Bongrand, “but I feel sure that they will not remain at Nemours.”
On this assurance Minoret, to whom Zélie gave a nudge, undertook to pay off the Portenduères’ 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 terras of the renewed lease, though he perceived rather late, as well as Zélie, 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 Portenduère 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 percent, 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 Zélie 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 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 Désiré with formality, and drop the familiar tu; and Désiré, 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 Mirouët?” 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 marriage to young Portenduère. 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 highroad to fortune. I wish you well; for, after all, you were my son’s companion. Listen to me: If you can persuade that little Mirouët 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 Orléans.”
“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.”
“It must be quite understood that I only give the hundred thousand francs in consideration of my young relative’s marriage. I wish to provide for her out of regard for my deceased uncle.”
“And why not out of regard for me?” said Goupil mischievously, 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 Château 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, gardens, preserves, timber, and all.”
“You had better!” exclaimed Zélie, interrupting them.
“Well,” said Goupil, with a viperine glance at her, “if I choose, Massin will have it all tomorrow for two hundred thousand francs.”
“Leave us, wife,” said the colossus, taking Zélie 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 would 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 snuffbox, and offering it to Goupil.
“Well, then, all is square and above board?” asked Goupil, shaking his fingers.
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 Zélie’s hand; she has taught him his part. Bah! Let Massin slide! Within three years I shall be returned as député 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 Mirouët, 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 député in three years, will settle a hundred thousand francs on her.”
“She can do better,” said Bongrand stiffly. “Since Madame de Portenduère’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 got hold of us, farewell prudence,’ ” says la Fontaine. “But who is your 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.
“Would you like to be the wife of a notary who will settle a hundred thousand francs on you?” cried Bongrand, entering the little sitting-room, and speaking to Ursule, who was sitting by Madame de Portenduère. 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 Portenduère. “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 Portenduère, and one to Ursule. This is the letter received 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 bandmaster; 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 marriage, so as not to leave their fortune to her foolish old father, M. du Rouvre, who wastes his substance. Madame de Sérizy—Aunt Clémentine du Rouvre—who has just lost her only son in Algiers, will no doubt also adopt her niece. Someone 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 without such emotions as prove to him that his love is for life. This young man is gifted with a will of iron and a perseverance 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 Portenduère, who will see you no more at her house, is going this morning to le Rouvre, on foot, in spite of the weak state she is in, to ask Mademoiselle 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 moment when she received this fatal missive, she sat motionless 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 between 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 were 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 curé came in the evening, the poor old nurse stopped him on the threshold.
“Oh, Monsieur le Curé, I do not know what ails Mademoiselle; she—”
“I know,” said the priest sadly, silencing the frightened attendant.
The Abbé then told Ursule what she had not dared to ask: “Madame de Portenduère had gone to dine at le Rouvre.”
“And Savinien?”
“He too.”
Ursule shuddered nervously—a shudder which thrilled the Abbé Chaperon as though he had received a shock from a Leyden jar, and he felt a painful turmoil at his heart.
“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 extremities 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 curé.
“I do not wish to show any unjust suspicion of M. de Portenduère’s character—”
“Why do you no longer call him Savinien?” asked the Abbé, 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, indeed, 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 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 curé 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 orphaned 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! it is an anonymous letter that has prompted Madame de Portenduère’s expedition to le Rouvre!” exclaimed the curé. “You are, no doubt, the object of some malignant persecution.”
“But why? Neither Savinien nor I have injured anyone, and we are doing no harm to anyone 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 remember, 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 frightened. She ran in without replying.
“She is a wild bird,” said Minoret to the curé.
“Mademoiselle Mirouët 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 curé 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.”
“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 you?” asked the clerk in some surprise.
“I am sick of her,” said Minoret roughly.
“Only wait till Monday, and you shall see how I will make her squirm,” replied Goupil, studying the postmaster’s countenance.
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 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; and perhaps she is right. You see yourself between a life almost of poverty and a position 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 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 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 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 thousand francs a year, in a pretty cottage on the banks of the Loing, quite a fortune? We calculated that, with La Bougival, 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.
“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 differences. 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. “Besides, 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. Everyone knows the intolerable torment 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 sound; she distrusted the silence; she suspected the walls of conspiracies. Her peaceful sleep was broken. Goupil, without 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 reassured, and overpowered by sleep. At about midnight she was roused by a band, consisting of a clarinet, a hautbois, a flute, a cornet-à-piston, 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 Mirouët, 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 everyone was lost in conjecture. Ursule got home more dead than alive, and went out no more, the curé 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 of this conspiracy was drooping like a plucked flower, Mesdemoiselles Massin, Dionis, and Crémière 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-à-piston!”
“What is a cornet-à-piston?”
“A new sort of musical instrument—there—as long as that!” said Angélique Crémière to Pamela Massin.
Early 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 instrument, it was impossible to ascertain which had gone to Nemours, since the Colonel prohibited them from playing for private persons without his leave. Monsieur de Portenduère 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 hautbois. 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 Mirouët.”
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 containing 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 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 Abbé, 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 curé, Bongrand, and Savinien puzzled themselves with conjectures and suppositions. Savinien, Tiennette, La Bougival, and two devoted adherents of the curé’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 consumptive 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 was recovering her spirit, one morning, about the middle of July, a ladder of ropes was found attached to her window. The postilion 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 Château of le Rouvre from his creditors. Madame de Portenduère 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 Curé 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 curé, which was not refused, as his writing was familiar.
“My child, leave Nemours, and so discomfit 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 reread 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 apply to the public prosecutor, showing him the forged letter from the Abbé.
“It is murder,” said the young man to the lawyer. “Murder 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 Mirouët 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 defence. 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 château. Mademoiselle du Rouvre is to marry a rich Polish Count. Monsieur du Rouvre himself was about to leave the neighborhood on the day of my visit, to escape being seized for debt.”
Désiré, 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, increased 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 Crémière, and the protection 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 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 prosecutor 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. Minoret had achieved his great end; he was now the immovable owner of the Château 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 percent—twenty thousand francs, with which you can buy a bailiff’s practice at Nemours. And I guarantee your marriage with one of the Crémière girls—the elder.”
“The one who talked of the cornet-à-piston?” cried Goupil.
“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 anyone but a parvenu simpleton tremble as he looked down from a high terrace on the gardens, and the handsome roof of a château 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 unancountable 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 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 Portenduère, 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 Portenduère, indeed, found it quite becoming to her dignity to carry encouragement 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 Abbé Chaperon, had produced a revulsion in Ursule which revived the hopes of the physician, 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 Gatinais, and regard you as worthy to make a gentleman of family happy.”
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 forever 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 Portenduère,” 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.
“Swear to me by the life of Ursule whom you love, and by your honor as a gentleman which you prize, so to behave 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 Mirouët.”
“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 Mirouët,” 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 hunchback 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 Mirouët 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 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 got 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 the gentleman.
“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 the gentleman’s hand.
“Who is it, then, that is persecuting Ursule?” said Savinien.
“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 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! Tomorrow, on the walls of Nemours, of Fontainebleau, of le Rouvre, the words shall be seen in red chalk—Minoret 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 Mirouët, 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 curé 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.”
“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 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 curé, the Justice, and the doctor in a breath.
“Keep his secret,” said Ursule, putting a finger on her lips.
Goupil heard her words, 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 deserving 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 Portenduère here.”
“That is right, Goupil,” said the curé; “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 Lecoeur for his place as summonsing officer, I hope this confession 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 curé.
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 Désiré’s future prospects. Désiré had quite settled down since he had held an appointment; he worked steadily, and had a good chance, it was said, of succeeding 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 député for Fontainebleau, where Zélie thought they would do 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.
“Monsieur de Portenduère would like to speak to you,” said Cabirolle, coming in.
“Bring him here,” said Zélie.
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 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 Nemours, 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 Zélie, “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 château 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 Désiré had taken a 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. Zélie had detected a nervous movement in the broad face of her colossus.
“Though you are but vermin, I intend to be publicly revenged 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 Mirouët; but from your son. The first time Monsieur Minoret, junior, sets foot in Nemours, we meet. He has got 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 defenceless 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 Zélie. “What! Do you suppose that I shall allow Désiré 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 will 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 castle. I do not know what you are at with all your rhodomontade, but just turn on your heel; and if you lay a finger on Désiré, 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 Zélie’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 Zélie 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’s; I had promised to help him to be made notary if he would get le Rouvre on reasonable terms. I gave him ten percent, twenty thousand francs, in bills of exchange, and I suppose he is not satisfied.”
“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 son. There is something behind it all, and you have got to 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 Désiré; if anything happens to him—there, I tell you, I should do something that would take me to the block. Désiré!—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 with 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 thief! Everyone he met pitied him, and asked him who was at the bottom of this anonymous placarding, and everyone overlooked the evasiveness of his replies by ascribing it to his stupidity. Simpletons gain more advantages 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. Zélie 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 summonsing officer his word, he most audaciously refused now to sign the agreement.
“My dear Lecoeur, you see I am in a position to buy Dionis’ practice, and I can help you to sell yours to someone else. Put your agreement in your pocket again. It is the loss only of a couple of stamps. Here are seventy centimes.”
Lecoeur was too much afraid of Goupil to make any complaints. All Nemours was forthwith informed that Minoret had offered his guarantee to Dionis to enable Goupil to purchase his place. The budding notary wrote to Savinien retracting 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 fighting a duel. At the same time, he warned him to take care henceforth how he behaved, as he—Goupil—was practised 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 thousand francs and her ugly face; Goupil, his misshapen body and his appointment; so the union seemed suitable and probable.
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 Portenduère’s visit, Ursule had a dream which presented the characteristics 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, through the darkness, as far as the house in the Rue des Bourgeois, 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 curé, “shone as though they had been traced withi 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 Zélie’s room, where the spectre made her see the spoiler unsealing the letters, reading and burning them.
“He could only make the third match bum,” 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 you should 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 promised 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 offence at the thought of revealing a dream of which the cause and object were her own pecuniary interests; she naturally attributed 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 Abbé Chaperon.
“Monsieur le Curé,” 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 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, in 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 Nemours, 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 apparitions 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 Zélie 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 produced?” 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 our interior senses under certain conditions. Thus your godfather’s ideas may enwrap you, and you perhaps have lent them his aspect. Then, if Minoret has committed these actions, 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 Abbé, “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 Duc 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 curé went up to the first 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 curé, 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 Fortes, by a gunshot in the head. He was to have been made Marshal of France the very day he was killed. Just about the moment when the Marquis died, the Duc de Montmorency, who was sleeping in his tent, was roused by a voice like that of the Marquis, bidding him farewell. The love he had for one who was so near 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 distinctly 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, unable 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 marvelousness and its truth.”
“But, then,” asked Ursule, “what ought I to do?”
“My child,” said the curé, “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, tomorrow 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 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 curé.
Without losing a minute the Abbé Chaperon went to Minoret’s house and begged him to grant him a minute’s conversation 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 Abbé, 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 curé went on to tell Minoret the whole story of Minoret’s conduct, without omitting the smallest detail. The retired postmaster, when he heard of the circumstance of the two matches which went out before burning up, felt his hair creep on his thickset 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 Curé,” 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.
“I have not come to frighten you, my dear sir, for I shall never speak of this to any living creature,” said the curé. “You alone know the truth. It is a matter between you and God.”
“Come, now, Monsieur le Curé, do you believe me capable 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 apostolic 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 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 Curé, do you give me your word of honor that you have heard all this story from no one but my uncle?”
“Your uncle has 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 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-organized communities 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. Consequently, 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 curé 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 she done to you?” asked his wife, who had come in on tiptoe after seeing the curé depart.
For the first and only time in his life, Minoret, drunk with fury and driven to extremities by his wife’s persistent questioning, 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, everyone, 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 absentminded 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 to take her to Madame de Portenduère’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 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 purchasing an estate in Brittany, in Madame de Portenduère’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 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, everyone will answer in his own way. It will be interpreted as compensation 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 affection 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 anybody’s 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 Désiré’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 Désiré, and was informed that he was at an evening party at the sous-préfet’s. The Justice, quite delighted, went on thither. Désiré was playing a rubber with the public prosecutor’s wife, the wife of the sous-préfet, and the general of the regiment stationed there.
“I have come the bearer of good news,” said Monsieur Bongrand to Désiré, “You are in love with Ursule Mirouët, and your father no longer objects to the marriage.”
“Ursule Mirouët! I am in love with her?” cried Désiré, laughing. “What put Ursule Mirouët into your head? I remember seeing her occasionally at old Doctor Minoret’s, my great-granduncle, 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 Bongrand? All the world knows that my father is sovereign lord over lands worth forty-eight thousand francs a year, lying round his Château 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 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 sous-préfet’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 Mirouët. 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 admissible 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 Portenduère 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 Portenduère 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.
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 warrants.
“Goodbye, 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 Nemours, 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 saw first 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 subsequently described it, there seemed to be another self moving within it.
“Mercy!” she cried, “godfather!”
“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 Abbé 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 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 of horses, and men 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 Abbé 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 Curé,” said Zélie, “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 got 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 gravestone 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 Curé, I cannot be left in peace anywhere, not even in this wilderness. I want to know nothing of what goes on in the next world.”
“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. Restitution, 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.”
“Goodbye. 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 beware! There is a man who has his eye on you. God have mercy on you!”
The curé 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 business, 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. Zélie, who had steered her own ship so well, would know how to get him out of this scrape.
Three percents 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 Zélie; the sword of Damocles swayed over their heads. Towards the middle of October Monsieur and Madame Minoret received the following letter from their son Désiré:—
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 Portenduère only awaited my going to Nemours to pick a quarrel with me. Tired, perhaps, of the long postponement of the revenge he is anxious to take on our family, the Vicomte has been to Fontainebleau, where he appointed 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 Mirouët, 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 avenging 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. Moreover, 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 Ursule’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 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 Portenduère, Monsieur de Soulanges, and Monsieur de Trailles will go there 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 goodbye.
When they had read this letter, there was a scene between Zélie 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 Zélie as it had for Minoret.
“Do you stay quietly here,” said Zélie, without the smallest reproach to her husband for his blundering; “I will take the matter in hand. We will keep the money, and Désiré 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, Zélie Minoret was abashed by the girl’s cold looks, but she scolded herself for her cowardice, and took an airy tone.
“Here, Mademoiselle Mirouët, have the kindness to read 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 château; besides that we can give Désiré 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 Zélie, noting Ursule’s eager gesture of denial. “I have come to ask your hand for Désiré; you will take your godfather’s name—that will do it honor. Désiré, 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 Désiré 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 moustache 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 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 Désiré 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 Portenduère’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 Portenduère, 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 Portenduère, I could never make up my mind to go through the sorrows and joys of life as your son’s companion. If Monsieur Savinien has been in debt, you have often paid Monsieur Désiré’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 advantages, you will not fail to find plenty of girls handsomer than I am, of higher rank, and much richer.”
“Swear to me, child,” said Zélie, “that you will prevent these two young men from taking their journey and fighting.”
“It will, I know, be the greatest sacrifice Monsieur de Portenduère can make for my sake. But my bridal wreath must not be claimed by bloodstained 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 Zélie.
“I suffer from them too much not to believe in them.”
“But then—” Zélie began.
“Good morning, madame,” said Ursule, with a bow to Madame Minoret, as she heard the curé’s step.
The Abbé Chaperon was surprised to find Madame Minoret with Ursule. The anxiety depicted on the retired postmistress’ pinched and wrinkled face naturally led the priest to study the two women by turns.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Zélie asked the curé.
“Do you believe in dividends?” replied the curé, smiling.
“Sharpers—all of them!” thought Zélie; “they want to get round us. The old priest, the old Justice, and that rascally little Savinien have arranged it all. There are no more dreams in it than there are hairs in the palm of my hand.” She courtesied twice with curt abruptness, and went away.
“I know why Savinien went to Fontainebleau,” said Ursule to the Abbé Chaperon, and she informed him of the duel, begging him to use his influence to prevent it.
“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 curé.
The Justice, who came in at this moment, heard of the proceedings and the offer made by Zélie, whose hatred of Ursule was known to him, and he glanced at the curé 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 Abbé 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 curé 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 Abbé Chaperon.
“I do not think, I am sure—there, only look.” The Justice 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 as tight as a drum, bursting with the coarse, rude health of a man without a care? What has set dark rings 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 curé, 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 Mirouët has just refused your son’s hand?”
“But,” added the curé, “you may be easy; she will prevent his duel with Monsieur de Portenduère.”
“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 curé had betrayed him, but the Abbé preserved a fixity of countenance, a calm melancholy, that 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 les Bordières, 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 something at the bottom of all this!”
Minoret wanted to answer; he tried to find words, he could only bring out:
“You are funny. Monsieur le Juge de Paix.—Good day, gentlemen.”
And 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 curé.
“God has endowed us with a feeling which is now speaking in that man,” replied the Justice, “But we call that presumptive evidence, and human justice requires something more.”
The Abbé Chaperon kept silence, 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 during 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 curé went upstairs to the library and took down the third volume of the Pandects. On opening it, the curé 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.
“Come in, come up!” cried the Abbé 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 booklover to spoil the guard of a binding,” said the Abbé 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 development 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 curé.
“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 curé, “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 curé.
“No, my dear curé,” said Bongrand. “Listen. Certificates 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, 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 Mirouët 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 acquired on the same day, and noted by the old man in case of loss. I had advised him to put Ursule’s money into certificates 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 got you! Mum’s the word, my friends!”
The Justice left the curé, 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 Abbé 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 Groupil was already the successor designate of Dionis, and went into the office with a careless air.
“I want a little information,” said he to Groupil, “as to the estate of Doctor Minoret.”
“What is it?” asked Goupil.
“Did the old man leave one or more certificates of investment in three percents?”
“He left fifteen thousand francs of income in three percents,” said Goupil, “in one certificate. I entered it myself.”
“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 23,533, letter M.”
“Be so kind as to hand over to me an extract of the particulars 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 Maître. I beg you to understand, monsieur, that the wretched office clerk known as Goupil has no connection with Maître Jean-Sebastien-Marie Goupil, notary at Nemours, and husband to Mademoiselle 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.
“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 Crémière quite witty. I have taken her in hand; and even her daughter 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 between 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 certificate, 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 certificates 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. Zélie, anxious about her son’s duel, dressed, had her own carriage out, and drove posthaste 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. Zélie 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; justice 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.”
Zélie 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 committed dreadful crimes, madame, which, are usually tried before a tribunal less accommodating than I am. In the present circumstances of the case you will be obliged to remain prisoner.—Oh, in my house, and on parole,” he added, seeing Zélie 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 Mirouët, and in her interests, wisely understood, a compromise will be advisable.”
“Ah!” said Zélie.
“Write as follows to your husband.” And he dictated this letter to Zélie, who wrote it at his desk, with preposterously bad spelling.
My Dear—I am arrested, and I have told all. Give up the certificates left by our uncle to Monsieur de Portenduère 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 anyone, and not to show your distress.”
As soon as his deputy’s mother had confessed, and been placed in safety, the magistrate sent for Désiré, 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. Désiré 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 Crémière, 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 Mirouët too well to commit any indiscretion.”
Zélie and Désiré 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:
God has not been so merciful to us as you have been, and an irreparable misfortune has fallen on us. On arriving at the bridge of Nemours, a strap came unfastened. My wife was at the back of the chaise without a servant; 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; Désiré did not make way quickly enough by squeezing back against the parapet, the iron steps 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 decisions 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.
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 curé 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 heartbroken, came, accompanied by the curé, 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 of losing him.” As he ceased speaking, the man melted into tears.
“I may assure you, my dear Ursule,” said the curé, “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 Hôtel-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 no sooner was 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. Désiré 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, where she died in January 1841.
Three months after these events, in January 1837, Ursule married Savinien, with Madame de Portenduère’s consent. Minoret intervened at the signing of the contract to settle on Mademoiselle Mirouët, 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 is become the most charitable 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 everything 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 Portenduère 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 Portenduère the elder went to live at le Rouvre, where La Bougival is the head gatekeeper. Cabirolle’s father, formerly the guard of the “Ducler,” 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 Portenduère’s coachman.
When, in the Champs-Élysées, 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 married lovers will probably be the Vicomte de Portenduère and his wife. There are not two such couples in Paris.
“It is the prettiest happiness I ever saw,” said the Comtesse d’Estorade, not long since.
So give those happy children your blessing instead of envying them, and try to find an Ursule Mirouët—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, his son on the high road to becoming a very respectable public prosecutor.
Madame Crémière 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 Crémièriana.
“We have had the grief of losing our good Abbé Chaperon this winter,” says the Vicomtesse de Portenduère, who nursed him during his illness. All the district attended his funeral. Nemours is fortunate, for this saintly man’s successor is the venerable Curé de Saint-Lange.