Ursule Mirouët (Tomlinson translation)/Part I/3
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Very soon this trio became a quartette. Another man to whom life was known, and who to the habit of business owed that forbearance, that knowledge, that mass of observation, that shrewdness, and that talent for conversation which the soldier, the doctor and the curé owed to experience of souls, sick people and a profession—the justice of the peace sniffed the pleasures of these evenings and sought the doctor’s society. Before becoming justice of the peace at Nemours, Monsieur Bongrand had been solicitor for ten years at Melun, where he pleaded himself, according to the custom of towns where there is no bar. Becoming a widower at forty-five, he still felt too active to be idle; so he had applied for the justiceship of the peace of Nemours, which was vacant some months before the doctor’s instalment. The Keeper of the Seals is always glad to find practitioners, and especially people who are well off, to hold this important magistracy. Monsieur Bongrand lived modestly at Nemours upon the fifteen hundred francs from his post, and was thus able to devote his income to his son, who was reading for the bar at Paris, while studying jurisprudence under the famous solicitor Derville. Father Bongrand somewhat resembled an old retired head-clerk; he had a face that was not so much pale as turned pale, upon which business, disappointments and disgust have left their traces, wrinkled with thought and also with the continual contraction customary with people who are obliged not to repeat everything; but it was often illuminated by those smiles which are peculiar to those men who alternately believe everything or nothing, accustomed to hear and see everything without surprise, to pierce the mysteries that self-interest unfolds at the bottom of all hearts. Under his hair, less white than faded, waving back over his head, he had a shrewd forehead whose yellow color harmonized with the threads of his scanty hair. His puckered face gave him all the more resemblance to a fox as his nose was short and pointed. Out of his wide mouth, like that of great talkers, he spurted white sparks which made his conversation so showery, that Goupil wickedly said: “One wants an umbrella to listen to him,” or else: “Judgments à la justice de paix are raining.” Behind his spectacles his eyes looked sharp; but, if he took them off, his dulled glance seemed simple. Although he was gay, almost jovial even, he always gave himself by his bearing, a little too much the look of an important man. He nearly always held his hands in his breeches pockets, and only removed them to secure his spectacles with an almost mocking movement which seemed to announce a shrewd observation or some victorious argument. His gestures, loquacity and innocent affectations betrayed the former provincial solicitor; but these slight faults only existed on the surface; he redeemed them by an acquired good nature which a strict moralist would call the indulgence natural to superiority. If he were a little fox-like, he was also considered deeply cunning, without being dishonest. His artfulness was the game of perspicacity. But are not those people called cunning who foresee a result and protect themselves from the traps that are laid for them? The justice of the peace loved whist, a game that the captain and the doctor knew, and which the curé learnt in a very short time.
This little company became an oasis in Minoret’s salon. The Nemours doctor, who was not wanting in education or good breeding, and who honored Minoret as one of the celebrities in medicine, had free access; but his work and fatigue, which obliged him to retire early in order to rise early, prevented him from being as regular as were the doctor’s three friends. The reunion of these five superior persons, the only ones in Nemours who had sufficient general information to understand each other, explains old Minoret’s feeling of repulsion for his heirs; if he had to leave them his fortune, he could hardly admit them into his society. Whether the postmaster, the clerk and the collector understood these distinctions, or whether they were reassured by their uncle’s loyalty and benefaction, to his great satisfaction they ceased visiting him. And so the four old whist and backgammon-players, seven or eight months after the doctor’s installation at Nemours, formed a compact, exclusive society, which was for each like an unexpected, autumn fraternity, the delights were only the better enjoyed. In Ursule, this family of chosen spirits had a child adopted by each according to his tastes; the curé thought about the soul, the justice of the peace constituted himself the guardian, the soldier promised himself to become the tutor; and, as for Minoret, he was at once father, mother and physician.
After having become acclimatized, the old man resumed his habits and regulated his life as it is regulated in the depths of all the provinces. On account of Ursule, he never received anyone in the morning, and he never invited anyone to dine; his friends could arrive about six in the evening and stay until midnight. The first comers used to find the papers on the salon table and would read them whilst waiting for the others, or they would sometimes go to meet the doctor if he were out walking. These quiet habits were not only necessary to old age, but with the old gentleman were wisely and deeply calculated to prevent his happiness from being disturbed by the anxious curiosity of his heirs or by the tittle-tattle of the small towns. He would make no concessions to that fickle goddess, public opinion, whose tyranny, one of France’s misfortunes, was setting itself up and making a very province of our country. And so, from the time the child was weaned and could walk, he sent away the cook that his niece, Madame Minoret-Levrault, had given him, through discovering that she told the postmistress of all that went on in his house.
Little Ursule’s wet-nurse, the widow of a poor workman with no other than his Christian name and who came from Bougival, had lost her last child when it was six months old, just when the doctor, touched by her distress and knowing her to be an honest good creature, took her as wet-nurse. Penniless, from La Bresse, where her family lived in want, Antoinette Patris, widow of Pierre surnamed De Bougival, attached herself naturally to Ursule as foster mothers attach themselves to their nurslings when they keep them. This blind maternal affection increased with domestic devotion. Anticipating the doctor’s intentions, La Bougival secretly learned to cook, became clean and handy and fell into the old man’s ways. She took particular care of the furniture and the rooms, and, in short, was indefatigable. The doctor not only wanted to keep his private life sacred, but moreover he had reasons for concealing the knowledge of his business from his heirs. So, from the second year of his establishment, he had no one in the house but La Bougival, upon whose discretion he could absolutely depend, and he disguised his real motives under the all-powerful reason of economy. To the great content of his heirs, he became stingy. Without wheedling and by the sole influence of her solicitude and devotion, La Bougival, just forty-three at the time this drama commences, was housekeeper to the doctor and his protégée, the hinge upon which all in the house turned, in short, the trusted servant. They had called her La Bougival from the recognized impossibility of applying her Christian name of Antoinette to her person, for names and figures obey the laws of harmony.
The doctor’s avarice was no mere empty word, but there was an object in it. From 1817, he cut off two newspapers and stopped subscribing to his periodicals. His yearly expenditure, that all Nemours could reckon, never exceeded eighteen hundred francs a year. Like all old men, his needs in linen, booting and clothes were almost nothing. Every six months, he made a journey to Paris, doubtless to receive and himself invest his income. During fifteen years, he did not say one word that related to his affairs. His trust in Bongrand came very late; it was only after the Revolution of 1830, that he unfolded his schemes to him. Such were the only things in the doctor’s life then known to the bourgeoisie and his heirs. As to his political opinions, as his house tax was only one hundred francs, he mixed himself up in nothing, and scouted Royalist and Liberal subscriptions alike. His known horror for parsons and his deism were so averse to manifestations, that he turned out of doors a commercial traveler sent by his great-nephew Désiré Minoret-Levrault to sell him a Curé Meslier and the Discours by General Foy. Such mistaken tolerance seemed unaccountable to the Liberals of Nemours.
The doctor’s three collateral heirs, Minoret-Levrault and his wife, Monsieur and Madame Massin-Levrault junior, Monsieur and Madame Crémière-Crémière—whom we will call simply Crémière, Massin, and Minoret, since these distinctions between namesakes are only necessary in Gâtinais,—these three families, too busy to create a new centre, visited one another as they do in all small towns. The postmaster used to give a big dinner on his son’s birthday, a ball at the Carnival, and another on the anniversaries of his wedding, when he invited all the bourgeoisie of Nemours. The tax-gatherer also summoned his relations and friends twice a year. The clerk of the justice of the peace, “too poor” he said, “to rush into such extravagances,” lived in a very small way in a house in the middle of the Grand’Rue, part of which, the ground floor, was let to his sister, directress of the post-office, another of the doctor’s kindnesses. However, during the year, these three heirs or their wives met in the town, out walking, in the market in the morning, on their doorsteps, or, on Sundays, after mass, in the square, as just now; so that they used to see each other every day. Now, for the last three years particularly, the doctor’s age, his avarice and his fortune warranted allusions or direct remarks referring to the inheritance, which ended by spreading from place to place and making the doctor and his heirs equally far-famed. For six months past, not a week went by without the friends or neighbors of the Minoret heirs speaking to them, with secret envy, “of the day when the old man’s eyes being closed, his coffers would open.”
“It’s no use Doctor Minoret being a doctor and settling with death, God only is eternal,” said one.
“Bah! he will bury us all; he is in better health than we are,” replied the heir hypocritically.
“Well, if it is not you, your children will always inherit, unless that little Ursule—”
“He will not leave all to her.”
Ursule, according to Madame Massin’s anticipations, was the bête-noire of the heirs, their sword of Damocles, and this remark, “Bah! those that live will see!” Madame Crémière’s favorite conclusion, was enough to show that they wished her more harm than good.
The tax-gatherer and the clerk, both poor compared to the postmaster, had often, by way of conversation, estimated the doctor’s inheritance. Whilst walking along the canal or on the road, if they saw their uncle coming, they would look at each other piteously.
“No doubt he has kept some elixir of long life for himself,” one would say.
“He has made a compact with the devil,” the other would reply.
“He ought to favor both of us, because that fat Minoret does not want anything.”
“Ah! Minoret has a son who will squander lots of money!”
“What do you reckon the doctor’s fortune to be?” the clerk asked the financier.
“At the end of twelve years, twelve thousand francs saved every year gives one hundred and forty-four thousand francs, and the compound interest produces at least one hundred thousand francs; but, as he must have made several good speculations through the advice of his notary at Paris, and that, up to 1822, he must have invested at eight and at seven and a half in the State, the old man now turns over about four hundred thousand francs, besides his fourteen thousand francs income from the five per cents, now at one hundred and sixteen. If he were to die to-morrow without favoring Ursule, he would then leave us seven to eight hundred thousand francs, besides his house and furniture.”
“Well then, one hundred thousand to Minoret, one hundred thousand to the little one, and to each of us three hundred; that would be just.”
“Ah! that would fit us nicely.”
“If he did that,” cried Massin, “I would sell my clerkship, and I would buy a fine estate; I should try to become judge at Fontainebleau, and I should be deputy.”
“As for me, I should buy a stockbroker’s business,” said the tax-gatherer.
“Unfortunately, this little girl he has on his arm, and the curé have hemmed him in so well, that we can do nothing with him.”
“After all, we are always quite sure that he will leave nothing to the Church.”
Everyone can now understand what a fright the heirs were in at seeing their uncle going to mass. Everyone is intelligent enough to imagine any injury to self-interest. Interest constitutes the peasant’s mind as it does that of the diplomatist, and, on this footing, the simplest outwardly may perhaps be the strongest. And so this terrible argument: “If little Ursule has the power to thrust her protector into the lap of the Church, she would certainly be able to make him give her the inheritance,” flashed in letters of fire across the mind of the most obtuse of the heirs. The postmaster had forgotten the enigma contained in his son’s letter, to hurry to the market place; for, if the doctor was in the church to read the ordinary of the mass, it was a question of losing two hundred and fifty thousand francs. It must be confessed, the fears of the heirs appealed to the strongest and most legitimate of social sentiments, family interest.
“Well, Monsieur Minoret,” said the Mayor—once a miller who had become a Royalist, a Levrault-Crémière,—“when the devil was old, the devil a monk would be. They say your uncle is one of us.”
“Better late than never, cousin,” replied the postmaster, trying to conceal his vexation.
“How he would laugh,” he said, “if we were disappointed! He would be capable of marrying his son to that damned girl, whom may the devil enfold with his tail!” cried Crémière, shaking his fists, and pointing to the mayor under the porch.
“What is the matter with father Crémière?” said the butcher of Nemours, the eldest son of a Levrault-Levrault. “Is he not pleased to see his uncle going the way of Paradise?”
“Who would ever have believed it?” said the clerk.
“Ah! one must never say: ‘Fountain, I will not drink of your water,’” replied the notary, who, seeing the group from afar, left his wife and let her go alone to church.
“Now see, Monsieur Dionis,” said Crémière, taking the notary by the arm, “what would you advise us to do under these circumstances?”
“I would advise you,” said the notary, addressing the heirs, “to go to bed and get up at your usual hours, to eat your soup before it grows cold, to put your feet in your slippers, your hats upon your heads, in short, to continue your manner of life exactly as if nothing had happened.”
“You are not comforting,” said Massin, giving him the look of a crony.
In spite of his small stature and embonpoint, and in spite of his coarse, squat face, Crémière Dionis was as sharp as a bristle. To make money, he had secretly entered into partnership with Massin, whom he doubtless told of the straitened peasants and the patches of ground to be devoured. These two men thus picked out their business, letting no good thing escape them, and sharing the profits on this mortgage usury, which hinders, but does not stop the influence of the peasants over the soil. And so, it was not so much for Minoret the postmaster, or Crémière the tax-collector, as for the sake of his friend the clerk that Dionis took so keen an interest in the doctor’s inheritance. Massin’s share, sooner or later was to swell the capital with which the two partners operated in the district.
“We will try to find out through Monsieur Bongrand where this blow comes from,” replied the notary in a low voice whilst cautioning Massin to keep close.
“But what are you doing here, Minoret?” suddenly cried a little woman, bursting into the group in the middle of which the postmaster looked like a tower, “you do not know where Désiré is and there you stay planted on your legs gossiping when I thought you were on horseback!—Good-morning, mesdames and messieurs.”
This thin, pale, fair little woman, dressed in a white print gown with large chocolate-colored flowers, with an embroidered lace-trimmed cap, and wearing a little green shawl over her flat shoulders, was the postmistress who made the roughest postilions, servants and carters tremble; who kept the cash-box and the books, and managed the household with a finger and a glance, according to the popular expression of the neighbors. Like all true housewives, she wore no jewels. She did not believe, so she said, in tinsel and gewgaws; she pinned her faith to what was solid, and in spite of the fête, kept on her black apron, in the pockets of which jangled a bunch of keys. Her squeaking voice grated upon the drum of the ear. Notwithstanding the tender blue of her eyes, her severe glance was in obvious harmony with the thin lips of a pursed-up mouth, with a high, bulging and extremely imperious forehead. Sharp as was the glance of the eye, still sharper were the gestures and words. “Zélie, obliged to have a will for two, had always had enough for three,” Goupil used to say, and he called attention to the successive reigns of three tidy young postilions, each of whom had been set up by Zélie after seven years’ service. And so the malicious clerk called them Postilion I., Postilion II. and Postilion III. But the small amount of influence exercised by these young men in the house, and their perfect obedience proved that Zélie had been purely and simply interested in steady, good fellows.
“Well then, Zélie loves zeal,” replied the clerk to those who made such remarks to him.
This scandal was very improbable. Ever since the birth of her son, whom she had nursed herself without anyone being able to tell how, the postmistress had thought of nothing but increasing her fortune, and applied herself unceasingly to the management of her immense establishment. To steal a truss of straw or two or three bushels of oats, to deceive Zélie in the most complicated accounts was an impossibility although she wrote like a cat and knew no more arithmetic than addition and subtraction. She never went out except to measure her hay, her aftermaths and her oats; then she would send her husband to the harvest and her postilions to the binding, telling them, within a hundred pounds, the quantity that such and such a meadow should yield. Although she was the soul of that great fat body called Minoret-Levrault, and although she led him by the end of that absurdly turned-up nose, she used to experience frights, which more or less, always agitate tamers of wild beasts. And so she would constantly fly into rages before him, and the postilions knew, by the scoldings Minoret gave them, when he had been quarreling with his wife, for the fury rebounded on them. La Minoret was also as clever as she was mercenary. All over the town in more than one household this remark used to be made: “Where would Minoret be without his wife!”
“When you know what has happened,” replied the Master of Nemours, “you yourself will be exasperated.”
“Well, what is it?”
“Ursule has taken Doctor Minoret to mass.”
Zélie Levrault’s pupils dilated, she stood for a moment, yellow with anger, said, “I must see it to believe it!” and dashed into the church. The mass had got as far as the Elevation of the Host Befriended by the general meditation, La Minoret was then able to look into each row of chairs and benches, whilst proceeding along the chapels until she came to Ursule’s place, where she saw the old man, bareheaded, beside her.
By recalling the faces of Barbé-Marbois, Boissy d’Anglas, Morellet, Helvétius and Frederick the Great, you will at once have an exact picture of the head of Doctor Minoret, whose green old age resembled that of these famous persons. These heads, as if struck from the same coin, for they adapt themselves to medals, present a severe and almost puritanical profile, cold coloring, mathematical proportions, a certain narrowness in the almost concise face, keen eyes and serious mouths, something aristocratic, less in the sentiment than in the habits, more in the ideas than in the character. All have high foreheads, but with a sloping at the top, which betrays a materialistic tendency. You will find these chief characteristics of head and likeness of face in the portraits of all the encyclopedists, the orators of the Gironde, and the men of that time whose religious beliefs were almost nil, who called themselves deists and were atheists. The deist is an atheist without his obligations. Old Minoret had this sort of a forehead, but furrowed with wrinkles, and which acquired a kind of naïveté from the way in which his silvery hair, drawn back like that of a woman at her toilette, curled in light tufts over his black coat, for he was obstinately dressed, as in his youth, in black silk stockings, gold buckled shoes, paduasoy breeches, a white waistcoat crossed by the black ribbon, and a black coat decorated with the red rosette. This distinguished head, whose cold whiteness was softened by the yellow tones of old age, was in the full light of a window. Just when the postmistress arrived, the doctor’s blue eyes, with moistened lids and softened outlines, were fixed upon the altar; a new conviction gave them a new expression. His spectacles marked the place at which he had left off reading in his prayerbook. With his arms crossed on his chest, this tall, gaunt old man, standing in an attitude expressive of the omnipotence of his faculties and something immovable in his faith, never ceased contemplating the altar with a humble look, revived by hope, refusing to look at his nephew’s wife, planted almost in front of him as if to reproach him with this return to God.
Seeing all eyes turning upon her, Zélie hastened out, and returned to the market-place less precipitately than she had entered the church; she counted on this inheritance, and the inheritance was becoming problematical. She found the clerk, the tax-collector and their wives even more dismayed than before; Goupil had delighted in teasing them.
“We cannot talk over our affairs in the marketplace and before all the town,” said the postmistress; “come to my house. You will not be in the way, Monsieur Dionis,” she said to the notary.
In this way, the probable disinheriting of the Massins, the Crémières and the postmaster was to be the talk of the country.
Just as the heirs and the notary were about to cross the square on their way to the post-house, the sound of a diligence arriving full tilt at the office, which was a few steps from the church, at the top of the Grand’Rue, made a tremendous noise.
“Bless my soul! I am like you, Minoret, I am forgetting Désiré,” said Zélie. “Let us go and see him get down; he is almost a barrister, and it is a matter that concerns him.”
The arrival of a stage coach is always a distraction; but, when it is late, some incident is to be expected; and so the crowd moved in front of the Dueler.
“There is Désiré!” was the universal cry.
Désiré, at once the tyrant and boon companion of Nemours, always set the town in a flutter by his visits. His presence roused up the young people, by whom he was liked, and with whom he was open-handed; but his amusements were so much dreaded, that more than one family rejoiced to see him go off to study and read for the bar at Paris. Désiré Minoret—a thin young man, slender and fair like his mother, from whom he got his blue eyes and pale complexion—smiled out of the window at the crowd, and jumped out lightly to kiss his mother. A slight sketch of this boy will prove how pleased Zélie was at seeing him.
The student wore thin boots, white trousers of some English material with patent leather straps, a handsome fashionable tie even more beautifully tied, a stylish fancy waistcoat, and in this waistcoat pocket, a flat watch with a hanging chain, and lastly, a short frockcoat of blue cloth and a gray hat; but the gold buttons of the waistcoat and the ring worn outside the violet-colored kid gloves betrayed the parvenu. He carried a cane with a chased gold knob.
“You will lose your watch,” said his mother, kissing him.
“It is done on purpose,” he replied, submitting to his father’s embrace.
“Well, cousin, you will soon be a barrister?” said Massin.
“I shall take the oath at the re-opening,” he said, answering the friendly greetings from the crowd.
“Then we shall have some fun?” said Goupil shaking his hand.
“Ah! there you are, old monkey,” replied Désiré.
“You still take out a license for argument after your argument for a license,” retorted the clerk, mortified at being treated so familiarly before so many people.
“What! he tells him to hold his tongue?” Madame Crémière asked her husband.
“You know what I brought, Cabirolle!” cried Désiré to the old violet-hued, pimple-faced guard, “have it all taken to the house.”
“The perspiration is streaming off your horses,” said the harsh Zélie to Cabirolle; “have you no better sense than to drive them like that? You are more stupid than they are!”
“But Monsieur Désiré wanted to arrive as quickly as possible, in order to relieve your anxiety—”
“But, as there was no accident, why risk losing your horses?” she rejoined.
The recognition of friends, the good-mornings, the outbursts of the young people around Désiré, all the incidents of the arrival and the account of the accident which had caused the delay, took so much time that the band of heirs, with the addition of their friends, arrived in the market-place just as mass was ended. By chance, which indulges in everything, Désiré saw Ursule under the church porch as he was passing, and he stopped, stupefied by her beauty. The young lawyer’s movement necessarily stopped his parents’ progress.
Obliged, by giving her arm to her godfather, to hold her prayer-book in her right hand and her umbrella in the other, Ursule was then displaying the innate grace that graceful women show in performing all the fastidious details belonging to a woman’s charming calling. If thought is revealed as a whole, it must be admitted that this demeanor expressed a divine simplicity. Ursule was dressed in a white muslin gown cut like a dressing-gown trimmed at various points with blue bows. The tippet, edged with ribbon to match run through a wide hem, and tied with bows similar to those on the dress, gave glimpses of the beauty of her bust. The charming tone of her ivory-white neck was set off by all the blue, the disguise of all blondes. Her blue sash with long floating ends outlined a flat, apparently flexible waist, one of the most alluring charms of the sex. She wore a rice-straw hat, simply trimmed with ribbons to match her dress, with the strings tied under the chin, which, whilst it relieved the extreme whiteness of the hat, in no way destroyed that of her beautiful fair complexion. On each side of Ursule’s face, which seemed to lend itself naturally to a headdress à la Berthe, were big smooth plaits of fine fair hair with little tresses which caught the eye with their thousand glistening projections. Her gray eyes, at once gentle and proud, harmonized with a well-shaped forehead. A pink color diffusing her cheeks like a cloud, animated her regular but not insipid face, for Nature, by some rare privilege, had given her both purity of line and of physiognomy. The dignity of her life betrayed itself in the admirable harmony between her features, movements and the general expression of her person, which might have served as a model for Trust or Modesty. Her health, although brilliant, did not break out coarsely, so she had a distinguished appearance. Under her light-colored gloves, one might guess at her pretty hands. Her slender, arched feet were delicately shod in bronze kid shoes fringed with brown silk. Her blue sash, distended by a little flat watch and her blue purse with golden tassels, attracted the eyes of all the women.
“He has given her a new watch!” said Madame Crémière, squeezing her husband’s arm.
“What! is that Ursule?” cried Désiré, “I never should have recognized her.”
“Well, my dear uncle, you are causing a sensation,” said the postmaster, pointing to the whole town drawn up in two lines on each side of the old man’s path, “everyone wants to see you.”
“Is it the Abbé Chaperon or Mademoiselle Ursule who has converted you, uncle?” said Massin with jesuitical obsequiousness, bowing to the doctor and his protégée.
“It is Ursule,” said the old man dryly, walking all the time like a man beset.
Even if the evening before, whilst finishing his whist with Ursule, the doctor of Nemours and Bongrand, at these words said by the old man, “Tomorrow I shall go to mass!” the justice of the peace had not replied, “Your heirs will sleep no more!” it would have needed only a single glance from the shrewd, clear-sighted doctor to penetrate the frame of mind of his heirs at sight of their faces. Zélie’s irruption into the church, her look that the doctor caught, this assembly of all the parties concerned, in the market-place, and the expression of their eyes as they saw Ursule, all betrayed renewed hatred and sordid fears.
“This is your doing, mademoiselle!” resumed Madame Crémière, also interposing with a humble curtsey. “A miracle costs you nothing.”
“He belongs to God, madame,” replied Ursule.
“Oh! God!” cried Minoret-Levrault, “my father-in-law used to say that He served as a cloak for many a horse.”
“He had the opinions of a horse-dealer,” said the doctor severely.
“Well,” said Minoret to his wife and son, “are you not going to greet my uncle?”
“I could not control myself before this demure-looking chit,” cried Zélie, carrying off her son.
“You would do well, uncle,” said Madame Massin, “not to go to church without a little black velvet cap, the church is very damp.”
“Bah! my niece,” said the old man, looking at those who accompanied him, “the sooner I am laid to rest, the sooner you will dance.”
He continued walking the whole time, dragging Ursule with him, and seemed so hurried, that they were left alone.
“Why did you speak so harshly to them? It is not right,” said Ursule, shaking his arm rebelliously.
“Before, as after my entry into religion, my hatred will be the same for all hypocrites. I have done good to them all, I have asked no gratitude from them; but not one of those people sent you a flower on your birthday, the only day I celebrate.”
At a fairly long distance from the doctor and Ursule, Madame de Portenduère was dragging herself along apparently overcome with grief. She belonged to that class of old women whose dress revives the spirit of the last century, who wear violet gowns, with flat sleeves and cut in a fashion which is only seen in the portraits of Madame Lebrun; they wear black lace mantles, and old-fashioned hats in keeping with their slow, solemn step; one would think they were always walking with their hoops, and that they still felt them round them, like those who have had an arm cut off sometimes move the hand that is lost; their long, pale faces, with great bruised eyes, and withered foreheads are not without a certain melancholy grace, in spite of the towering hair and flattened curls; they wrap their faces up in old laces that refuse any longer to wave about the cheeks; but all these ruins are overruled by an incredible dignity of manner and looks. This old lady’s wrinkled, red eyes told plainly enough that she had been crying during mass. She was going along like a person in trouble, and seemed to be expecting someone, for she turned round. Now, Madame de Portenduère turning round was as serious an act as that of Doctor Minoret’s conversion.
“Whom does Madame de Portenduère want?” said Madame Massin, rejoining the heirs, who were petrified by the old man’s answers.
“She is looking for the curé,” said the notary Dionis, who struck his forehead like a man overcome by some recollection or a forgotten idea, “I have something to tell you all, and the inheritance is saved! Let us go and breakfast happily with Madame Minoret.”
It may be imagined with what eagerness the heirs followed the notary to the post-house. Goupil accompanied his friend, arm-in-arm, whispering to him with a hideous smile:
“There are some gay women.”
“What do I care?” replied the son of the family, shrugging his shoulders, “I am madly in love with Florine, the most heavenly creature in the world.”
“And who is Florine?” asked Goupil. “I care for you too much to let you be bamboozled by any creatures.”
“Florine is the famous Nathan’s passion, and my folly is useless, for she has positively refused to marry me.”
“Women who are foolish with their bodies are often wise in their heads,” said Goupil.
“If only you could see her, you would not make use of such expressions,” said Désiré languishingly.
“If I saw you blighting your future for what can be but a whim,” rejoined Goupil with an earnestness that would have deceived even Bongrand, “I would go and crush that doll as Varney crushes Amy Robsart in Kenilworth! Your wife ought to be a D’Aiglemont, or a Mademoiselle du Rouvre, and help you to become a deputy. My future is mortgaged to yours and I shall not let you commit blunders.”
“I am rich enough to be content with happiness,” replied Désiré.
“Well, what are you plotting there?” said Zélie to Goupil, hailing the two friends who were standing in the middle of her enormous yard.
The doctor disappeared into the Rue des Bourgeois, and reached, as nimbly as any young man, the house where, during the week, the strange event had come to pass which was then disturbing the whole town of Nemours, and which needs some explanation to elucidate this story and the notary’s communication to the heirs.