Ursule Mirouët (Tomlinson translation)/Part I/4
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The doctor’s father-in-law, the famous harpsichord player and instrument maker, Valentine Mirouët, one of our most celebrated organists, died in 1785, leaving a natural son, the child of his old age, acknowledged and bearing his name, but an exceedingly worthless fellow. Upon his deathbed, he was denied the consolation of seeing this spoilt child. Joseph Mirouët, singer and composer, after having come out at the Italiens under an assumed name, had eloped to Germany with a young girl. The old manufacturer commended this really talented boy to his son-in-law, reminding him that he had refused to marry the mother so as not to wrong Madame Minoret. The doctor promised that he would give half the inheritance of the manufacturer, whose business had been bought by Erard, to this wretched man. He made diplomatic inquiries about his natural brother-in-law, Joseph Mirouët; but Grimm told him one night that after having enlisted in a Prussian regiment the artist had deserted, taking a false name, and had baffled all pursuit. For fifteen years Joseph Mirouët, gifted by nature with a seductive voice, a desirable figure, a handsome face, besides being a composer full of taste and spirit, led that bohemian life which has been so well described by the Berlinese Hoffmann. And so, when about forty years old, he was the victim of such terrible poverty, that in 1806, he snatched at the chance of becoming a Frenchman once more. He then settled at Hamburg, where he married the daughter of a worthy bourgeois, mad about music, who fell in love with the artist, whose success was always in perspective and to which she wished to devote herself. But, after fifteen years of destitution, Joseph Mirouët could not withstand the intoxication of wealth; his natural extravagance reappeared; and, though he made his wife happy, he spent her fortune in a very few years. Poverty returned. The household must have led the most horrible existence for Joseph Mirouët to have come to engaging himself as a musician in a French regiment. In 1813, by the merest chance, the surgeon-major of this regiment, struck by the name of Mirouët, wrote to Doctor Minoret, to whom he owed obligations. The answer was not long in coming. In 1814, before the capitulation of Paris, Joseph Mirouët had a refuge in Paris, where his wife died in giving birth to a little girl whom the doctor wished to call Ursule, after his wife. The band captain did not survive the mother, exhausted as she too had been by fatigue and misery. When dying, the unfortunate musician left his daughter to the doctor, who stood as her godfather, in spite of his repugnance for what he called the mummeries of the church.
After having seen all his children perish successively through miscarriages, in painful confinements or during their first year, the doctor had awaited the result of the last experience. When a sickly, nervous, delicate woman begins with a miscarriage, it is no uncommon thing to see her behaving during pregnancy and in her confinements as Ursule Minoret did, in spite of her husband’s care, attentions and science. The poor man often reproached himself for their mutual persistence in wishing for children. The last one, conceived after an interval of two years, died during the year 1792, the victim of the mother’s nervous condition, if those physiologists are to be believed who think that, in the unaccountable phenomena of generation, the child takes after the father in blood, and after the mother in its nervous system. Forced to renounce the enjoyment of his strongest feeling, the doctor’s benevolence was doubtless in revenge of his disappointed paternity. During his conjugal life, so cruelly disturbed, the doctor had, above all, longed for a little fair-haired girl, one of those flowers which gladden a whole house; so he joyfully accepted the legacy left him by Joseph Mirouët, and over the orphan revived the expectations of his vanished dreams. For two years, he superintended, as Cato once did for Pompey, the minutest details of Ursule’s life; he would not let the wet-nurse suckle her, dress her, or put her to bed without him. His experience and his science were all at this child’s disposal. After having felt all the sorrows, the alternations of fear and hope, the labors and joys of a mother, he had the happiness of seeing this daughter of the blonde German woman and the French artist develop a vigorous life, and a profound sensitiveness. The happy old man followed with a maternal solicitude the growth of this fair hair, first down, then silk, then light and fine hair, so endearing to the fingers that stroke it. He often kissed the naked little feet, the toes of which, covered with film, showing the blood beneath, were like rose buds. He was mad about this little girl. When she tried to speak, or when she fixed her beautiful soft blue eyes on all objects, with that reflective look which seems to be the dawning of thought and which she ended in a laugh, he would remain beside her for hours together, seeking, with Jordy, the reasons, which so many other people call caprices, hidden under the slightest phenomena of this delicious phase of life when the child is at once blossom and fruit, a confused intelligence, a perpetual movement, and a passionate longing. Ursule’s beauty and gentleness endeared her so much to the doctor, that he would have liked to change all the laws of Nature for her; he sometimes told old Jordy that his teeth ached when Ursule was cutting hers. When old men love children, they place no bounds upon their passion, but adore them. For the sake of these little beings, they suppress their hobbies, and for them call to mind their own past. Their experience, indulgence and patience, all the acquisitions of life, so painfully hoarded a treasure, they give up to the young life through which they grow young again, and so supply the place of maternity by intelligence. Their ever-watchful wisdom is as good as the mother’s intuition; they recollect the niceties which with her are divination, and they show them in the exercise of a compassion whose strength doubtless develops in proportion to this great tenderness. The slowness of their movements supplies the place of the maternal gentleness. In short, with them as with children, life is reduced to simplicity; and if sentiment makes a slave of the mother, the detachment of all passion and the absence of all self-interest permits an old man to give himself up entirely. It is also no uncommon thing to see children on good terms with old people. The old soldier, the old curé and the old doctor, happy in Ursule’s caresses and coquetries, never tired of answering her or playing with her. Far from fretting them, this child’s petulance delighted them, and they gratified all her wishes whilst making everything a subject for instruction. And so this little girl grew surrounded by old people who smiled upon her and were like so many mothers around her, equally attentive and prudent. Thanks to this learned education, Ursule’s mind developed in the sphere most congenial to it. This rare plant lit upon its particular soil, inhaled the elements of its true life and assimilated the floods of light from its sun.
“In what religion will you bring up this little one?” asked the Abbé Chaperon of Minoret when Ursule was six years old.
“In yours,” replied the physician.
An atheist like Monsieur de Wolmar in La Nouvelle Héloïse, he did not consider he had the right to deprive Ursule of the benefits offered by the Catholic religion. The doctor, seated on a bench below the window of the Chinese study, then felt the curé press his hand.
“Yes, curé, every time that she speaks to me of God, I shall send her to her friend Sapron,” he said, imitating Ursule’s childish way of speaking. “I want to see if religious feeling is innate. And so I have done nothing for or against the tendencies of this young mind; but I have already appointed you in my heart as her spiritual father.”
“God will count this to you, I hope,” replied the Abbé Chaperon, gently striking his hands together and lifting them towards the sky as if in brief mental prayer.
And so, from the age of six, the little orphan fell under the curé’s religious influence, as she had already fallen under that of her old friend Jordy.
The captain, formerly a professor in one of the old military colleges, and applying himself by choice to grammar and the differences between the European tongues, had studied the problem of a universal language. This learned man, patient like all old masters, made it his delight to teach Ursule to read and write, whilst teaching her the French language and all that she had to know of arithmetic. The doctor’s vast library permitted the choice of books suitable for a child, and which might amuse as well as instruct it. The soldier and the curé left this intelligence to thrive upon the ease and liberty that the doctor allowed the body. Ursule learnt whilst she was playing. Religion restrained reflection. Given up to the divine culture of a disposition led into pure regions by these three prudent instructors, Ursule was more inclined to sentiment than duty, and took the voice of Conscience rather than the social law as her rule of conduct. With her, whatever was beautiful in feelings or actions had to be spontaneous; her judgment would confirm the impulse of the heart. She was meant to do good as a pleasure before doing it as an obligation. This distinction is the characteristic of the Christian religion. These principles, more than any others made for mankind, become a woman, the genius and conscience of the family, the secret refinement of domestic life, in fact, almost a queen in the bosom of the household. All three proceeded in the same way with the child. Far from shrinking from the audacity of innocence, they would explain to Ursule the purpose of things and all known means whilst never formulating any but the most accurate ideas for her. When, in regard to a plant, a flower or a star she would make direct inquiries about God, the professor and the doctor would tell her that the priest alone could answer her. None of them ever encroached on the others’ territory. The godfather undertook all material well-being and things of this life; the education concerned Jordy; the morals, metaphysics and higher questions belonged to the curé. This splendid education was not thwarted by injudicious servants, as so often happens in the wealthiest households. La Bougival, who had been lectured on the subject, and who was besides much too simple in mind and character to interfere, never disturbed the work of these noble men. Ursule, who was a privileged being, was in this surrounded by three good genii, and by her beautiful disposition rendered their tasks both easy and light. This virile tenderness, this gravity tempered by smiles, this liberty without danger, and this perpetual care of soul and body, made her, at nine years of age, an accomplished and charming child. Unhappily, this paternal trinity dissolved. In the following year the old captain died, leaving his work to be continued by the doctor and the curé, after having accomplished the most difficult part. Flowers ought to grow of themselves in so well prepared a soil. For nine years the old gentleman had saved up a thousand francs a year, in order to leave ten thousand francs to his little Ursule so that she might keep some souvenir of him all through her life. In a will, the contents of which were touching, he begged his legatee to use the four or five hundred francs income returned by this little capital entirely for her dress. When the justice of the peace affixed the seals at his old friend’s house, they found in a cabinet which he had never allowed anybody to look into, a great quantity of toys, many of which were broken, and which all had used, toys of days gone by, religiously preserved, and that the poor captain requested Monsieur Bongrand himself should burn.