Ursule Mirouët (Tomlinson translation)/Part II/10
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The Abbé Chaperon observed a priestly silence. As often happens in such circumstances, he thought far oftener than he wanted to of the robbery half-confessed by Minoret, and of Savinien’s happiness so obviously delayed by Ursule’s want of fortune; for the old lady secretly admitted to her confessor how wrong she had been to have refused consent to her son’s marriage during the doctor’s lifetime. The next day, on leaving the altar, after mass, he was seized with an idea which inwardly assumed all the force of a spoken declaration; he signed to Ursule to wait for him, and went with her before breakfasting.
“My child,” said the curé, “I want to see the two volumes in which the godfather in your dreams declares he put his bonds and bills.”
Ursule and the curé went up to the library and there took out the third volume of the Pandects. Upon opening it, the old man, not without astonishment, noticed the mark made by the papers upon the leaves, which, offering less resistance than the cover, still preserved the imprint of the bonds. Then, in another volume, he recognized the species of gap produced by the continued presence of some packet and the outline of it in the middle of the two pages in folio.
“Come up, do, Monsieur Bongrand!” cried La Bougival to the justice of the peace, who was passing.
Bongrand arrived just as the curé was putting on his spectacles to read three numbers written in the hand of the late Minoret on the fly-leaf of colored vellum, gummed inside the cover by the binder, and which Ursule had just discovered.
“What is the meaning of this? Our dear doctor was too great a lover of books to spoil the fly-leaf of a cover,” said the Abbé Chaperon, “here are three numbers entered between a first number preceded by an M, and another number preceded by a U.”
“What do you say?” replied Bongrand, “let me see.” “Mon Dieu!” cried the justice of the peace, “is not this enough to open the eyes of an atheist by proving the existence of a Providence? I think that human justice is the development of a divine idea that hovers over communities!”
He seized Ursule and kissed her on the forehead.
“Oh! my child, you will be happy and rich, and through me!”
“What is the matter?” said the curé.
“My dear monsieur,” cried La Bougival, catching hold of the justice’s blue frock-coat, “oh! do let me embrace you for what you have just said.”
“Explain yourself, so as to spare any false joy,” said the curé.
“If, to become rich, I have to cause pain to anyone,” said Ursule, anticipating criminal proceedings, “I—”
“Eh!” said the justice of the peace, interrupting Ursule, “just think of the delight you will be giving our dear Savinien.”
“But you are mad!” said the curé.
“No, my dear curé,” said the justice, “listen. The certificates of the national debt have as many series as there are letters in the alphabet; and each number bears the letter of its series; but the bonds of stock to bearer cannot have any letter at all, as they are in nobody’s name; and so what you see proves that, the day upon which the old man invested his money in the Funds, he made a note of his bond of fifteen thousand francs a year bearing the letter M—Minoret,—the numbers without letters of the three bonds to bearer, and those belonging to Ursule Mirouët, the number of which is 23,534, and which as you see, immediately follows that of the fifteen thousand franc bond. This coincidence proves that these numbers are those of five bonds obtained on the same day, and noted down by the old man in case of loss. I had advised him to put Ursule’s fortune in bonds to bearer, and he must have invested his own capital, that which he intended for Ursule and that which belonged to his ward, on the same day. I am going to Dionis’s to consult the inventory; and, if the number of the inscription he left in his own name is 23,533, letter M, then we may be sure that on that same day, through the office of the same exchange agent, he invested: primo, his capital in one bond; secundo, his savings in three bonds to bearer, numbered without any series letter; tertio, his ward’s capital; the book of transfers will give undeniable proofs. Ah! Minoret, you sly dog, I’ve got you—Motus, my boys!”
The justice of the peace left the curé, La Bougival and Ursule lost in profound admiration of the ways in which God leads innocence to its triumph.
“The finger of God is in this,” cried the Abbé Chaperon.
“Will they do him any harm?” said Ursule.
“Ah! mademoiselle!” cried La Bougival, “I would give a rope to hang him with.”
The justice of the peace had already arrived at Goupil’s, the appointed successor to Dionis, and was walking into the office with a sufficiently indifferent air.
“I want,” said he to Goupil, “some slight information about the Minoret inheritance.”
“What is it?” replied Goupil.
“Did the old man leave one or more three per cent bonds?”
“He left fifteen thousand francs a year in three per cents,” said Goupil “in one bond, I described it myself.”
“Then consult the inventory,” said the justice.
Goupil took a portfolio, searched it, drew out the memorandum, examined it, found what he wanted and read: “‘Item, one bond—’ Here, read it!—under number 23,533, letter M.”
“Be so kind as to give me a copy of this item of the inventory between this and one o’clock; I will wait for it.”
“Of what use can it be to you?” asked Goupil.
“Do you want to be notary?” replied the justice of the peace, looking severely at Dionis’s appointed successor.
“I should think so!” cried Goupil, “I have swallowed enough humiliation to arrive at being called master. I entreat you to believe, Monsieur le Juge de Paix, that the wretched head clerk called Goupil has nothing in common with master Jean-Sébastien-Marie Goupil, notary of Nemours, husband of Mademoiselle Massin. These two beings are strangers, they are not even alike! Do you not notice anything about me?”
Monsieur Bongrand then looked at Goupil’s costume and saw that he wore a white tie, a dazzling white shirt ornamented with ruby buttons, a red velvet waistcoat, trousers and coat of handsome black cloth made in Paris. He had smart boots. His hair, carefully smoothed and combed, smelt agreeable. In fact, he seemed transformed.
“The fact is, you are another man,” said Bongrand.
“In morals as well as physique, monsieur! Wisdom comes with practice; and, moreover, fortune is the source of cleanliness—”
“In morals as well as physique,” said the justice, settling his spectacles.
“Eh! monsieur, is a man with a hundred thousand crowns ever a democrat? So you may take me for an honest man that knows what delicacy is, and is disposed to love his wife,” he added as he saw Madame Goupil coming in. “So changed am I,” he said, “that I find a great deal of intelligence in my Cousin Crémière, I am training her; and so her daughter never talks any more about pistons. In fact, yesterday you see, she said that Monsieur Savinien’s dog was splendid aux arrêts—in confinement—: well then, I did not repeat this joke, however good it might be, and I immediately explained to her the difference between etre à l’arrêt—setting, of a dog—; en arrêt—couched as a lance—, and aux arrêts—in confinement—. And so, as you see, I am quite another man, and I would prevent any client from doing a dirty trick.”
“Then make haste,” said Bongrand. “See that I have that in an hour’s time, and the notary Goupil will have made up for some of the misdeeds of the head clerk.”
After having asked the Nemours doctor to lend him his horse and gig, the justice of the peace went to fetch the two accusing volumes, Ursule’s bond, and, armed with the extract from the inventory, he hastened to Fontainebleau to see the public prosecutor. Bongrand readily proved the purloining of the three bonds by some one of the heirs, and, subsequently, the guilt of Minoret.
“His behavior is explained,” said the public prosecutor.
As a measure of precaution, the magistrate forthwith wrote a stay for the treasury to the transfer of the three bonds, and instructed the justice of the peace to go and inquire into the proportion of the income from the three bonds and to find out whether they had been sold. While the justice of the peace was at work in Paris, the public prosecutor wrote politely to Madame Minoret, asking her to call at his office. Zélie, full of anxiety about her son’s duel, dressed, ordered the horses to be put to the carriage and came in fiocchi to Fontainebleau. The prosecutor’s plan was simple and formidable. By separating the wife from the husband, he intended, through the terror inspired by justice, to learn the truth. Zélie found the magistrate in his study, and was completely crushed by these unceremonious words.
“Madame, I do not believe you to be an accomplice in a theft that has been made in the Minoret inheritance, and which justice is tracking at this present moment; but you can save your husband from the Assize Court by the entire confession of what you know about it. Moreover, the punishment your husband will incur is not the only thing to be feared; your son’s removal and ruin have to be avoided. In a few minutes, it will be too late, the police are in the saddle and the commitment will start for Nemours.”
Zélie nearly fainted. When she had regained her senses, she confessed all. After having easily shown this woman that she was an accomplice, the magistrate told her, that in order to save her husband and her son, he would proceed with caution.
“You have had to do with the man and not with the magistrate,” he said. “There has been no complaint made by the victim, or publicity given to the robbery; but your husband has committed horrible crimes, madame, that come under the jurisdiction of a far stricter tribunal than I am. In the present state of affairs, you must be made a prisoner—Oh! at my house, and on parole,” he said, seeing Zélie about to relapse into a fainting fit “You must remember that my strict duty would be to order a commitment and to commence proceedings; but I am now acting as Mademoiselle Ursule Mirouët’s guardian and of course her interests demand some compromise.”
“Ah!” said Zélie.
“Write these words to your husband:”
And he dictated the following letter to Zélie, whom he placed at his desk:
“Mi frend,
“i am arested, and i hav told al. Giv up thee hinskripshuns that owr unkel lefft to Monsieur de Portenduère in persewanse ov the wil that yu bernt, for Monsieur le praucureure du roa has just put inn an hopozishun too thee Trezhury.”
“In this way you will spare him the denials that would be his ruin,” said the magistrate, smiling at the orthography, “we shall have the restitution managed decently. My wife will make your stay at my house as little unpleasant as possible, and I advise you not to say a word about it and not to appear at all agitated.”
His deputy’s mother once confessed and shut up, the magistrate sent for Désiré, related to him in detail the theft secretly committed by his father to Ursule’s harm, and obviously to the injury of his co-heirs, and showed him the letter written by Zélie. Désiré was the first to ask permission to go to Nemours to see that his father made restitution.
“It is all very serious,” said the magistrate. “The will having been destroyed, if the matter is spread about, the Massin and Crémière heirs, your relations, may interfere. I now have enough proofs against your father. I restore you your mother, who has been sufficiently enlightened as to her duties by this little ceremony. Before her, I shall appear to have yielded to your entreaties in setting her free. Go to Nemours with her, and bring all these difficulties to a good end. Do not be afraid of anybody. Monsieur Bongrand is too fond of Mademoiselle Mirouët ever to be guilty of any indiscretion.”
Zélie and Désiré started immediately afterward for Nemours. Three hours after the departure of his deputy, an express messenger brought the public prosecutor the following letter, the orthography of which has been corrected, so as to spare any derision of a man overtaken by misfortune:
TO MONSIEUR LE PROCUREUR DU ROI, AT THE COURT OF FONTAINEBLEAU.
“Monsiuer,
“God has not been so lenient with us as you were, and we are afflicted by an irreparable misfortune. Upon arriving at the Nemours bridge, one of the traces became unhooked. My wife had no servant behind the carriage; the horses could smell their stable; my son, fearing their impatience, would not allow the coachman to get down, and jumped out to fasten the trace. Just as he was turning round to get up beside his mother, the horses started off, Désiré was not in time to squeeze himself against the parapet, the steps cut his legs, he fell and the back wheel went over his body. The express which is hastening to Paris to fetch the leading surgeons will take you this letter, which my son, in the midst of his agony, has told me to write to you, in order to inform you of our entire submission to your decision in the business that was bringing him home. Until my last breath, I shall be grateful to you for the way in which you have proceeded, and I will justify your confidence.”
The town of Nemours was distracted at this terrible event. The sympathetic crowd, at the gate of the Minorets’ house, told Savinien that his revenge had been taken in hand by one more powerful than himself. The nobleman went at once to Ursule’s, where the curé, as well as the young girl, were in greater terror than surprise. The next day, after the first dressing, when the doctors and surgeons from Paris had given their unanimous opinion upon the necessity of amputating both legs, Minoret came, dejected, pale, undone, accompanied by the curé, to Ursule’s house, where were Bongrand and Savinien.
“Mademoiselle,” he said to her, “I have done you great wrong; but, if all the injury I have done cannot be completely amended, I can atone for some of it. My wife and I, we have made a vow to give you our entire estate of Le Rouvre in the event of our son’s recovery, even as we shall if we have the fearful misfortune of losing him.”
And the man burst into tears at the end of this sentence.
“I can assure you, my dear Ursule,” said the curé, “that you can and ought to accept part of this gift.”
“Will you forgive us?” said the colossus humbly, going down upon his knee before the astonished girl. “In a few hours, the operation is to be performed by the head surgeon of the Hôtel-Dieu; but I do not trust human science at all, I believe in God’s omnipotence! If you forgive me, if you will go and ask God to spare us our son, he will have the strength to bear this torture, and I am certain that we shall have the happiness of saving him.”
“Let us go to church!” said Ursule, rising.
Once risen, she gave a piercing shriek, fell back upon the sofa and fainted. When she regained consciousness she saw her friends, save Minoret who had rushed out to fetch a doctor, all anxiously watching her, waiting for her to speak. Her words struck a chill in every heart.
“I saw my godfather at the door,” she said, “and he signed to me that there was no hope.”
In fact, the day after the operation, Désiré died, carried off by fever and the revulsion of the humors which follows upon these operations. Madame Minoret, who had no other feeling in her heart than that of maternity, went mad after her son’s burial and was put by her husband under the care of Doctor Blanche, where she died in 1841.
Three months after these events, in January, 1837, Ursule was married to Savinien, with the consent of Madame de Portenduère. Minoret became a party to the marriage settlements so as to give Mademoiselle Mirouët his estate of Le Rouvre and twenty-four thousand francs a year in the Funds, keeping nothing of his fortune except his uncle’s house and six thousand francs a year. He has become the most charitable, the most pious man in Nemours; he is churchwarden of the parish and has constituted himself the providence of all unfortunates.
“The poor have taken my son’s place,” he said.
If you have ever remarked beside the way, in countries where oaks are lopped off, some old tree, blanched and almost withered, still pushing forth shoots, with gaping sides, calling for the axe, you will have some idea of the thin, white-haired, broken down old postmaster, in whom the veterans of the country do not recognize the happy imbecile whom we saw waiting for his son at the beginning of this story; he no longer takes his snuff in the same manner, he carries something besides his body. In short, one feels in every way that God’s hand has been laid heavily upon this figure to make a terrible example of him. After having so hated his uncle’s ward, this old man, like Doctor Minoret, has so thoroughly centred his affections in Ursule, that he has constituted himself manager of her estates in Nemours.
Monsieur and Madame de Portenduère spend five months of the year in Paris, where they have bought a magnificent mansion in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. After giving her house in Nemours to the Sisters of Mercy to keep a free school, the dowager Madame de Portenduère went to live at Le Rouvre, where La Bougival is head concierge. Cabirolle’s father, the old conductor of La Dueler, a man of sixty, has married La Bougival, who possesses twelve hundred francs a year, besides the ample salary from her situation. Cabirolle’s son is Monsieur de Portenduère’s coachman.
If you should see passing through the Champs-Elysees one of those charming little low carriages called escargots, lined with silk gridelin, ornamented with blue trimmings, and should admire a pretty, fair woman therein, her face wreathed in myriads of curls, with eyes like shining periwinkles and brimful of love, leaning lightly against a handsome young man; if you should be bitten with envious longing, just think that this handsome Heaven-blest couple have early had their share in the miseries of life. These two married lovers will probably be the Vicomte de Portenduère and his wife. There are not two such couples in Paris.
“Theirs is the greatest happiness I have ever seen,” was said of them lately by the Comtesse de l’Estorade.
So bless these happy children instead of envying them, and look for another Ursule Mirouët, a young girl brought up by three old men, and the best of mothers—adversity.
Goupil, who is useful to everybody and is justly regarded as the wittiest man in Nemours, enjoys the esteem of all in the little town; but he is punished through his children, who are ugly, stunted and inclined to hydrocephalus. Dionis, his predecessor, flourishes in the Chamber of Deputies, of which he is one of the brightest ornaments, to the great satisfaction of the king, who sees Madame Dionis at all his balls. Madame Dionis gives the whole town of Nemours the details of her receptions at the Tuileries and of the grandeur of the French King’s court; she reigns in Nemours, by means of the throne, which certainly became popular at that time.
Bongrand is president of the Court at Melun: his son is in a fair way to become a very creditable attorney-general.
Madame Crémière always says the funniest things in the world. She adds a g to tambourg, apparently because her pen sputters. On the eve of her daughter’s marriage, she told her at the conclusion of her instructions that a wife should be the busy caterpillar in her house, and should keep a sphinx’s eye upon everything. Goupil is also making a collection of his cousin’s nonsense, a Crémièrana.
“We have had the sorrow of losing our good Abbé Chaperon,” said Madame la Vicomtesse de Portenduère this winter, she having tended him during his illness. “The whole district came to his funeral. Nemours is fortunate, for this holy man’s successor is the venerable Curé de Saint-Lange.”
Paris, June-July, 1841.
RESTITUTION.
"Mademoiselle" he said to her, "I have done you great wrong; but, if all the injury I have done cannot be completely amended, I can atone for some of it. My wife and I, we have made a vow to give yon our entire estate of Le Rouvre in the event of our son's recovery, even as we shall if we have the fearful misfortune of losing him."
Copyrighted 1897 by G. B. & Son
