Ursule Mirouët (Tomlinson translation)/Part I/7
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At dessert, Ursule and her guardian were in the pretty dining-room decorated with Chinese paintings in lacquer, the ruin of Levrault-Levrault, when the justice of the peace called. The doctor offered him, as a great mark of intimacy, a cup of his Mocha coffee mixed with Bourbon and Martinique coffee, burnt, ground and made by himself in a silver coffee-pot à la Chaptal.
“Well!” said Bongrand, lifting his spectacles and looking slyly at the old man, “the whole town is astir! your appearance in church has upset your relations! You are leaving your fortune to the priests and the poor! You have stirred them up, and they are fidgeting, ah! I saw their first outbreak in the square, they were as busy as ants who had been robbed of their eggs.”
“What did I tell you, Ursule?” cried the old man. “At the risk of paining you, my child, ought I not to teach you to know the world, and to be on your guard against undeserved ill-will?”
“I should like to say a word to you on this subject,” rejoined Bongrand, seizing this opportunity of speaking to his old friend about Ursule’s future.
The doctor put a black velvet cap over his white head, the justice of the peace kept on his hat to protect himself from the cold, and both walked up and down the terrace discussing the means of securing for Ursule what her godfather wanted to give her. The justice of the peace knew Dionis’s opinion upon the invalidity of any will made by the doctor in Ursule’s favor, for Nemours was too much occupied about the Minoret inheritance for this question not to have been discussed between the lawyers of the town. Bongrand had decided that Ursule Mirouët was a stranger with regard to Doctor Minoret, but he felt that the spirit of the law repulsed any illegitimate offshoots from the family. The authors of the Code had only foreseen the weakness of fathers and mothers for the natural children, without imagining that the uncles or the aunts might espouse the tenderness of the natural child in favor of its descendants. There was evidently something wanting in the law.
“In any other country,” he said to the doctor at the conclusion of his explanation of the state of the law that Goupil, Dionis, and Désiré had just explained to the heirs, “Ursule would have nothing to fear; she is a legitimate daughter, and her father’s incapacity ought only to operate in regard to the inheritance of Valentin-Mirouet, your father-in-law; but, in France, the magistracy is unfortunately very ingenious and consistent, it seeks the spirit of the law. The lawyers would talk morality and prove that the void in the Code arose from the simplicity of the legislators who had not foreseen the case, but who had none the less established a principle. The suit would be long and expensive. With Zélie, they would go as far as the Court of Appeal, and I would not be sure of being still alive when this suit came on.”
“The best of lawsuits is no longer good for anything,” cried the doctor, “I also see the memorandum on this question: To what extent should the incapacity be carried which, in the matter of inheritance, strikes natural children? and a good lawyer’s pride consists in winning desperate cases.”
“Faith!” said Bongrand, “I would not dare undertake to affirm that the magistrates would not extend the interpretation of the law so as to extend the protection granted to marriage, the eternal foundation of all society.”
Without declaring his intentions, the old man rejected the legacy trust. But, as to the question of a marriage that Bongrand suggested to him as a means of securing his fortune for Ursule:
“Poor little girl!” cried the doctor, “I am capable of living another fifteen years, what would become of her?”
“Well then, what do you think of doing?” said Bongrand.
“We will think it over—I will see,” replied the old doctor, evidently at a loss for an answer.
At that moment, Ursule came to inform the two friends that Dionis wished to speak to the doctor.
“Dionis already!” cried Minoret, looking at the justice of the peace. “Yes,” he replied to Ursule, “let him come in.”
“I’ll wager my spectacles against a match, that he is the screen of your heirs; they have all been breakfasting at the post-house with Dionis, they must have planned something.”
The notary, conducted by Ursule, came to the bottom of the garden. After the greetings and several trifling sentences, Dionis was granted a moment’s private hearing. Ursule and Bongrand retired to the salon.
“We will think it over! I will see!” said Bongrand to himself, repeating the doctor’s last words, “that is what clever people always say; death overtakes them and they leave the beings who are dear to them, in distress.”
The mistrust that highly gifted men inspire in business men is extraordinary; they will not trust them in the least while recognizing them in the greatest affairs. But perhaps this mistrust is an encomium. Seeing them dwelling at the summit of human affairs, business people do not believe superior men capable of descending to the infinite littlenesses of the details which, like the interests in finance and the microscopies in natural science, end by equalizing capital and forming worlds. Mistaken fallacy! A man of good feeling and a man of genius see everything. Bongrand, nettled at the doctor’s silence, but moved doubtless through interest in Ursule and believing her to be imperiled, resolved to defend her against the heirs. He was frantic at the thought of knowing nothing of the old man’s conversation with Dionis.
“However pure Ursule may be,” he thought, whilst examining her, “there is a point at which young girls usually take the law and morality upon themselves. Let us try!—The Minoret-Levraults,” he said to Ursule, securing his spectacles, “are likely to ask your hand in marriage for their son.”
The poor little thing turned pale; she was too well brought up, and had too saintly a delicacy to go and listen to what was being said by Dionis and her uncle; but, after some brief inward deliberation, she thought she might show herself, reflecting that if she were not wanted her godfather would let her feel it. The outer blinds of the French window of the doctor’s study in the Chinese pavilion were open. Ursule contrived an excuse for going to shut them up herself. She apologized for leaving the justice of the peace alone in the salon, and he said to her, smiling:
“Do it, do it.”
Ursule gained the flight of steps leading down from the Chinese pavilion to the garden, and stood there several minutes, slowly arranging the blinds and looking at the setting sun. She then heard the following reply made by the doctor, who was coming towards the Chinese pavilion:
“My heirs would be delighted to see me investing in landed property and mortgages; they fancy that my fortune would be much more secure; I can guess all they say to each other, and perhaps you come from them—Know, my dear sir, that my arrangements are irrevocable. My heirs will have the capital of the fortune that I brought here, let them take this as a warning and leave me in peace. If any one of them were to meddle in any way with what I consider I ought to do for this child”—he pointed to his godchild—“I would return from the next world to torment him! And so Monsieur Savinien de Portenduère may indeed remain in prison if anyone reckons upon me to get him out,” added the doctor. “I will never sell my stock.”
Upon hearing this last fragment of the sentence, Ursule experienced the first and only sorrow which had ever overtaken her; she leant her forehead against the blind and clung to it for support.
“Mon Dieu! what is the matter with her?” cried the old doctor, “she is quite white! Such a disturbance after dinner might kill her!”
He stretched out his arm to catch Ursule, who fell almost fainting.
“Good-bye, sir, leave me,” he said to the notary.
He carried his goddaughter to an immense armchair of the time of Louis XV., which was in his study, seized a bottle of ether from his dispensary and made her inhale it.
“Take my place, my friend,” he said to the terrified Bongrand, “I want to be alone with her.”
The justice of the peace escorted the notary as far as the gate, asking him without any show of eagerness:
“What happened to Ursule?”
“I do not know,” replied Monsieur Dionis, “she was on the steps listening to us; and, when her uncle refused to lend the sum necessary to young Portenduère, who is in prison for debt, for he did not have, like Monsieur du Rouvre, a Monsieur Bongrand to defend him, she grew pale, staggered—Could she be in love with him? Might there be between them—?”
“At fifteen?” rejoined Bongrand, interrupting Dionis.
“She was born in February, 1814, she will be sixteen years old in four months.”
“She has never seen her neighbor,” replied the justice of the peace. “No, it was an attack.”
“A heart attack,” answered the notary.
The notary was delighted enough at this discovery, which might prevent the dreaded marriage in extremis with which the doctor could balk his heirs, whilst Bongrand saw his castles in the air overthrown; for a long time, he had been thinking of marrying his son to Ursule.
“If the poor child were in love with this fellow, it would be a misfortune for her; Madame de Portenduère is a Breton and biased as to her nobility,” returned the justice of the peace after a pause.
“Happily—for the honor of the Portenduères,” replied the notary, who was near betraying himself.
Let us do the good honest justice of the peace the justice of saying that whilst coming from the gate to the salon he abandoned, not without pity for his son, the hope he had fostered of one day calling Ursule his daughter. He reckoned on giving his son six thousand francs income upon the day when he should be appointed deputy; and, if the doctor would have given Ursule a dowry of one hundred thousand francs, these two young people ought to have made the best of households; his Eugene was a loyal and charming fellow. Perhaps he had boasted too much about this Eugene, and perhaps old Minoret’s distrust came from that.
“I shall fall back upon the mayor’s daughter,” thought Bongrand, “but Ursule without a dowry is worth more than Mademoiselle Levrault-Crémière with her million. Now, we must manoeuvre so as to bring about Ursule’s marriage with this young Portenduère, if however, she loves him.”
After having shut the door on the side of the library and the garden door, the doctor led his ward to the window looking out upon the water’s edge.
“What is the matter with you, cruel child?” he said to her, “your life is my life. What would become of me without your smile?”
“Savinien in prison!” she replied.
After these words, a torrent of tears fell from her eyes and the sobs came.
“She is saved!” thought the old man, who was feeling her pulse with a father’s anxiety. “Alas! she has all my poor wife’s sensitiveness,” he said to himself whilst going to fetch a stethoscope which he placed on Ursule’s heart while applying his ear to it.
“Come, all goes well,” he said to himself.—“I did not know, my dearest, that you already loved him so much,” he resumed, looking at her. “But think of me as if it were yourself, and tell me all that has passed between you.”
“I do not love him, godfather, we have never spoken to each other,” she replied, sobbing. “But to hear that this poor young man is in prison, and to know that you harshly refuse to get him out, you who are so good!”
“Ursule, my good little angel, if you do not love him, why do you put a red dot before the day of Saint-Savinien as well as before the day of Saint-Denis? Come now, tell me the minutest incidents of this love affair.”
Ursule reddened, restrained her tears, and there was a moment’s silence between her and her uncle.
“Are you afraid of your father, your friend, your mother, your physician, your godfather, whose heart has for several days been made more tender than it was before—?”
“Well then, dear godfather,” she rejoined, “I will open my soul to you. In the month of May, Monsieur Savinien came to see his mother. Up till that journey, I had never paid him the least attention. When he left to live in Paris, I was a child, and I swear to you, I could see no difference between a young man and such as you, unless it were that I loved you, without dreaming that I could possibly love anybody better. Monsieur Savinien arrived by the mail-coach on the eve of his mother’s birthday, without our knowledge. At seven in the morning, after having said my prayers, whilst opening the window to air my room, I saw the windows of Monsieur Savinien’s room open, and Monsieur Savinien in his dressing-gown, busy shaving, and putting a grace into his movements—well, I thought him handsome. He combed his black moustache, the point under his chin, and I saw his white, round neck—Must I tell you everything?—I noticed that this fresh neck, this face and this beautiful black hair were very different from yours, when I used to see you shaving. A surging vapor, from where I do not know, rose in my heart, in my throat, in my head, and so violently that I sat down. I could not stand upright, I trembled. But I so much wanted to see him, that I stood on tiptoe; he then saw me, and, in fun, sent me a kiss with the tips of his fingers, and—”
“And—?”
“And,” she resumed, “I hid myself, as much ashamed as I was happy, without being able to account for my shame in this happiness. This movement, which intoxicated my soul whilst causing I know not what power, is renewed every time that I see this young face again in my mind’s eye. At last I used to delight in recognizing this emotion, however violent it might be. Whilst going to mass, an unconquerable force urged me to look at Monsieur Savinien giving his arm to his mother; his bearing, his clothes, everything, even to the sound of his boots on the pavement, seemed to me desirable. The least thing about him, his hand, so delicately gloved, influenced me like a spell. Nevertheless, I had the strength not to think of him during mass. At the end of the service, I remained in the church in such a way as to allow Madame de Portenduère to leave first, and thus to walk after him. I could not convey to you how much these little arrangements interested me. Upon coming in, when I turned round to shut the gate—”
“And La Bougival?” said the doctor.
“Oh! I let her go to her kitchen,” said Ursule naïvely. “So I could then of course see Monsieur Savinien standing firmly looking at me. Oh! godfather, I felt so proud at fancying I could see a sort of surprise and admiration in his eyes, that I do not know what I would not have done to afford him the opportunity of looking at me. It seemed to me that I ought not in future to do anything but please him. His glance is now the sweetest reward for my good actions. From that moment, I think of him ceaselessly and in spite of myself. Monsieur Savinien left again that evening, I have not seen him since, the Rue des Bourgeois has seemed empty to me, and he has, as it were, carried away my heart with him, without knowing it.”
“Is that all?” said the doctor.
“All, godfather,” she said, with a sigh in which the regret at not having more to tell was stifled under the sorrow of the moment.
“My dear little one,” said the doctor, seating Ursule on his knees, “you will soon be sixteen, and your life as a woman will begin. You are between your blessed childhood, which ceases, and the agitations of love, which will make your existence a stormy one, for you have the nervous system belonging to an exquisite sensitiveness. What has come to you, is love, my child,” said the old man, with an expression of profound sadness, “it is love in its sacred simplicity, love as it should be; involuntary, swift, come as a thief who takes all—yes, all! And I expected it. I have studied women well, and know that, if love only masters most of them after many proofs and miracles of affection, if those women never break their silence and only yield when conquered, there are others who, under the influence of a sympathy which is accounted for nowadays by magnetic fluids, are overcome in an instant. I can tell you this to-day; as soon as I saw the charming woman who bore your name, I felt that I should love her solely and faithfully, without knowing if our characters or our persons would agree. Has love got second sight? What answer can one give, after having seen so many unions celebrated under the auspices of so heavenly a contract, broken later on, engendering almost eternal hatred, and positive repulsion? The senses can, so to speak, mutually correspond and the ideas be at variance: and perhaps some people live more through ideas than through the feelings. On the other hand, characters often agree and the persons dislike each other. These two utterly different phenomena, which would account for many misfortunes, prove the wisdom of the laws which allow the parents the upper hand in the marriages of their children; for a young girl is often the dupe of one of these two hallucinations. Therefore I do not blame you. The sensations that you experience, this movement of your sensibility which rushes from its yet unknown centre over your heart and mind, this happiness with which you think of Savinien, all is natural. But, my adored child, as our good Abbé Chaperon has told you, society demands the sacrifice of many natural inclinations. The destinies of men are different from those of women. I was able to choose Ursule Mirouët for my wife and go to her telling her how much I loved her; whilst a young girl belies her virtues by soliciting the love of the man she loves: the woman has not, like us, the means of pursuing in broad daylight the accomplishment of her desires. Besides, with her, with you all, and particularly with you, modesty is the insuperable barrier which guards the secrets of your heart. Your hesitation in confiding your first emotions to me is enough to tell me that you would endure the most cruel tortures rather than confess to Savinien—”
“Oh! yes!” she said.
“But, my child, you ought to do more; you ought to repress the impulses of your heart, and forget them.”
“Why?”
“Because, my little angel, you ought to love none but the man who is to be your husband; and, even if Monsieur Savinien de Portenduère loved you—”
“I have not yet thought of that.”
“Listen to me—even if he love you, and his mother were to ask me for your hand, I would not consent to this marriage until I had submitted Savinien to a long and mature examination. His conduct has just made him suspected by all families, and placed between him and any heiress barriers which will be overcome with difficulty.”
A divine smile dried Ursule’s tears and she said:
“In some circumstances misfortune is a good thing!”
The doctor could not answer this simplicity.
“What has he done, godfather?” she resumed.
“In two years, my little angel, he has contracted one hundred and twenty thousand francs’ worth of debts in Paris! He was foolish enough to allow himself to be put in Sainte-Pélagie, a blunder which, as times go, brings a young man into disrepute forever. A spendthrift who is capable of plunging a poor mother into sorrow and want, would kill his wife from despair as your poor father did.”
“Do you think he could reform?” she asked.
“If his mother pays for him, he would be reduced to beggary, and I know no worse correction for a nobleman than to be without money.”
This answer made Ursule thoughtful; she dried her tears and said to her godfather:
“If you can, do save him, godfather; this service would give you the right to advise him; you would remonstrate with him—”
“And,” said the doctor, imitating Ursule’s way of speaking, “he could come here, the old lady would come here, we should see them, and—”
“I was only thinking of him just then,” replied Ursule, blushing.
“Do not think of him any more, my poor child; it is folly!” said the doctor, gravely. “Madame de Portenduère, a Kergarouët, had she only three hundred francs a year to live on, would never consent to the marriage of the Vicomte Savinien de Portenduère, grand-nephew of the late Comte de Portenduère, lieutenant-general of the King’s navy and son of the Vicomte de Portenduère, post-captain, with whom? with Ursule Mirouët, daughter of a bandmaster in a regiment, without fortune, and whose father, alas! now is the moment to tell you, was the bastard of an organist, my father-in-law.”
“Oh! godfather, you are right; we are only equal before God. I will never think of him again but in my prayers!” she said between the sobs excited by this disclosure. “Give him all that you destine for me. What can a poor girl like myself want?—In prison, he!”
“Present all your sorrows to God, and perhaps He will come to our aid.”
Silence reigned for several moments. When Ursule, who had not dared look at her godfather, raised her eyes to his, her heart was deeply touched at seeing the tears rolling down his withered cheeks. Old men’s tears are as alarming as children’s are natural.
“Mon Dieu! What is the matter?” she said, throwing herself at his feet and kissing his hands. “Are you not sure about me?”
“I, who long to satisfy all your wishes, am obliged to cause you the first great sorrow of your life! I suffer as much as you do. I never wept except at my children’s and Ursule’s death—Here, I will do anything you wish!” he cried.
Through her tears, Ursule gave her godfather a look that was like a flash; she smiled.
“Let us go to the salon, and contrive to keep all this to yourself, my little one,” said the doctor, leaving his goddaughter in his study.
This father felt himself so weak before this divine smile, that he was almost on the point of saying a word of hope and so misleading his goddaughter.