Ursule Mirouët (Tomlinson translation)/Part I/2
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[edit]At Nemours, there are only three or four households of unknown gentry, prominent amongst these being that of the Portenduère. These exclusive families frequent only the nobles who own the land or the châteaux in the neighborhood, amongst whom may be singled out the d’Aiglemonts, owners of the fine estate of Saint-Lange, and the Marquis du Rouvre, for whose property, overwhelmed with mortgages, the bourgeois were on the lookout. The nobles of the town were poor. For all estate, Madame de Portenduère possessed a farm yielding four thousand seven hundred francs income, and her town house. Against this little Faubourg Saint-Germain were grouped half a score of rich men, former millers, retired merchants, in a word, a miniature bourgeoisie under whom revolved small retail dealers, working men and peasants. This bourgeoisie, like that of the Swiss cantons and several other small countries, presents the curious spectacle of the irradiation of a few aboriginal families, probably Gallic, reigning over one territory, overrunning it and making the inhabitants all cousins. Under Louis XI., epoch in which the third Estate ended by turning its nicknames into real names, several of which became mingled with those of feudalism, the bourgeoisie of Nemours consisted of Minoret, de Massin, de Levrault and de Crémière. Under Louis XIII., these four families already produced the Massin-Crémière, the Levrault-Massin, the Massin-Minoret, the Minoret-Minoret, the Crémière-Levrault, the Levrault-Minoret-Massin, the Massin-Levrault, the Minoret-Massin, the Massin-Massin, the Crémière-Massin, all this varied with junior, senior, Crémière-François, Levrault-Jacques, Jean-Minoret, enough to distract the father Anselm of the people, if the people had ever wanted a genealogist. The variations in the four elements of this domestic kaleidoscope became so complicated by births and marriages, that the genealogical tree of the citizens of Nemours would have puzzled even the benedictines of the Gotha almanac, in spite of the atomical science with which they arrange the zigzags of the German alliances. For a long time, the Minorets occupied the tanneries, the Crémières held the mills, the Massins applied themselves to trade, and the Levraults remained farmers. Happily for the country, these four stems spread instead of pivoting, or had thrust out fresh shoots by exiling children who sought their fortunes abroad; there are Minoret cutlers in Melun, some Levraults in Montargis, Massins in Orléans and Crémières of importance in Paris. The destinies of these bees from the mother hive are very varied. Rich Massins necessarily employ Massin workmen, in the same way as there are German princes in the service of Austria or Prussia. The same province sees a Minoret millionaire guarded by a Minoret soldier. Filled with the same blood and called by the same name to all similarity, these four shuttles had unceasingly woven a human canvas, every shred of which happened to be gown or towel, superb cambric or coarse lining. The same blood ran in the head, in the feet or the heart, in the industrious hands, in diseased lungs or in a brow, big with genius. The heads of the clan dwelt faithfully in the little town, where the ties of kindred slackened or contracted at the will of events enacted by this strange cognomenism. In whatever country you go, change the names and you will recognize the fact, but without the poetry that feudalism imparted to it and that Walter Scott has reproduced with so much talent Let us look higher and examine human nature in history. All the noble families of the eleventh century, now almost all extinct, except the royal race of the Capets, have necessarily all co-operated in the birth of a Rohan, a Montmorency, a Bauffremont, and a Mortemart of to-day; in fact they must all necessarily be in the blood of the last gentleman who is truly a gentleman. In other words, every bourgeois is cousin to a bourgeois, and every nobleman, cousin to a nobleman. As it says in the sublime pages of the biblical genealogies, in a thousand years, three families, Shem, Ham and Japheth, can cover the globe with their children. A family can become a nation, and, unfortunately, a nation can once more become a single, simple family. To prove this, it suffices to apply to the investigation of ancestors and their accumulation that time increases in a retrograde geometrical progression multiplied by itself, the calculation of that sage, who, when asking a Persian king, as a reward for having invented the game of chess, to give him one ear of corn for the first square of the chess-board whilst always doubling it, demonstrated that the kingdom itself would not suffice to pay it. The network of nobility encircled by the network of the bourgeoisie, this antagonism of two races, the one protected by immovable institutions, the other by the active patience of work and the wiles of trade, produced the revolution of 1789. The two races, almost reunited, stand today face to face with collateral heirs without any inheritance. What are they going to do? Our political future is pregnant with the reply.
The family of him who under Louis XV. called himself simply Minoret, was so numerous, that one of the five children, the Minoret whose entrance into the church created a sensation, went to seek his fortune in Paris, and only appeared at long intervals in his native town, where, upon the death of his grandparents, he doubtless came to fetch his share of the inheritance. After having suffered a great deal, like all young people gifted with a strong will and who wish to hold a place in the brilliant society of Paris, the child of the Minorets created for himself a finer destiny than he had perhaps ever dreamt of at the outset; for he had at once devoted himself to medicine, one of the professions which require talent and luck, but even more luck than talent. Supported by Dupont—of Nemours,—connected by a lucky chance with the Abbé Morellet that Voltaire used to call Mords-les, and protected by the encyclopedists, Doctor Minoret attached himself like a satellite to the great doctor Bordeu, Diderot’s friend. D’Alembert, Helvétius, Baron d’Holbach, and Grimm, before whom he was a mere lad, doubtless ended, like Bordeu, by interesting themselves in Minoret, who, about 1777, had a fairly large practice of deists, encyclopedists, sensualists, and materialists, whatever you like to call the rich philosophers of those times. Although he was in no way a quack, he invented the famous balsam of Lelièvre, so much praised by the Mercure de France, the advertisement of which was always at the end of this newspaper, the weekly organ of the encyclopedists. The apothecary Lelièvre, a clever man, saw a speculation in what Minoret had only looked upon as a preparation to be placed in the pharmacopoeia, and loyally he had shared his profits with the doctor, who was a pupil of Rouelle’s in chemistry, as he had been Bordeu’s in medicine. One might have been a materialist for less. In 1778, period when la Nouvelle Héloïse reigned and people sometimes married for love, the doctor made a love match with the daughter of a famous harpsichord player, Valentin Mirouët, a celebrated musician, weak and delicate, who was killed by the Revolution. Minoret was intimately acquainted with Robespierre, to whom he had formerly given a gold medal for an essay upon the following subject: What is the origin of the opinion which spreads over the whole family part of the shame attached to the ignominious penalties endured by a culprit? Is this opinion more harmful than effective? And, if it should be decided for the affirmative, what means should be employed to guard against the disadvantages resulting from this? The Royal Academy of Science and Art at Metz, to which Minoret belonged, must have the original of this essay. Although, thanks to this friendship, the doctor’s wife had nothing to apprehend, she was so afraid of going to the scaffold, that this unconquerable terror aggravated the aneurism which she owed to an exaggerated sensitiveness. In spite of all the precautions that an adoring man could take for his wife, Ursule met the cart full of the condemned, in which was Madame Roland, and this sight caused her death. Minoret, full of tenderness for his Ursule, to whom he had refused nothing and who had led a life of studied elegance, found himself almost poor after he had lost her. Robespierre had him appointed head physician to a hospital.
Although, during the animated altercations to which mesmerism gave rise, Minoret’s name acquired a celebrity which recalled him from time to time to his parents, the Revolution was so great a dissolvent and so broke up family connections that, in 1813, Nemours was entirely unaware of the existence of Doctor Minoret, who was led by an unforeseen chance to conceive the idea of returning, like a hare, to die at home.
Whilst traveling through France, where the eye so quickly wearies of the monotony of the plains, who is there that has not felt the delicious sensation from the top of a hill, from its slope or at the turn, just when the promise is of a barren landscape, of discovering a fresh valley watered by a river, and a little town sheltered under the rock like a hive in the hollow of an old willow? At the sound of the Hue! of the postilion who is walking beside his horses, one shakes off sleep, one admires as a dream within a dream some beautiful landscape which is to the traveler what a remarkable passage in a book is to a reader, one of Nature’s brilliant thoughts. Such is the sensation caused by the sudden view of Nemours when one arrives there from Bourgogne. From there it is seen, encircled by bare, gray, white and black rocks, weirdly shaped, like those that are so often found in the forest of Fontainebleau, and from which the scattered trees shoot up, standing clearly out against the sky and giving a wild appearance to this species of crumbled wall. There the long forest hill ends which slopes from Nemours to Bouron while skirting the road. At the bottom of this crude amphitheatre stretches a field where the Loing flows, forming sheeted waterfalls. This delicious landscape, which follows the Montargis road, resembles an opera scene, so studied are the effects. One morning, the doctor, whom a rich invalid in Bourgogne had summoned, and who was returning post haste to Paris, not having said at the preceding stage which road he wished to take, was driven unconsciously through Nemours and, between two naps, once more beheld the country in the midst of which his childhood had been passed. The doctor had then lost several of his old friends. The sectary of the Encyclopedia had witnessed the conversion of La Harpe, he had buried Lebrun-Pindare, and Marie-Joseph de Chénier, and Morellet, and Madame Helvétius. He assisted at the semi-downfall of Voltaire, attacked by Geoffroy, the continuer of Fréron. He was then thinking of retiring. And so, when his post chaise stopped at the top of the Grand’Rue of Nemours, he was prompted to inquire for his family. Minoret-Levrault came himself to see the doctor, who recognized his eldest brother’s son in the postmaster. This nephew presented his wife as the only daughter of father Levrault-Crémière, who, twelve years ago, had left him the post-house and the finest inn in Nemours.
“Well, nephew,” said the doctor, “have I any other heirs?”
“My aunt Minoret, your sister, married a Massin-Massin.”
“Yes, the surveyor of Saint-Lange.”
“She died a widow, leaving one daughter, who has just married a Crémière, a charming fellow, who has no employment as yet.”
“Well! she is my direct niece. Now, as my sailor brother died a bachelor, as Captain Minoret was killed at Monte-Legino, and as I am here, the paternal line is exhausted. Have I any relations on the maternal side? My mother was a Jean Massin-Levrault.”
“Of the Jean Massin-Levraults,” replied Minoret-Levrault, “there only remains one Jean Massin, who married Monsieur Crémière-Levrault-Dionis, a fodder contractor, who perished on the scaffold. His wife died of despair and ruined, leaving a daughter married to a Levrault-Minoret, a farmer at Montereau, who does very well; and their daughter has just married a Massin-Levrault,—notary’s clerk at Montargis, where the father is a locksmith.”
“So I am not lacking in heirs,” said the doctor gaily, who desired to take a stroll round Nemours in company with his nephew.
The Loing undulates through the town, bordered by terraced gardens and tidy houses whose aspect gives rise to the belief that prosperity must dwell there rather than elsewhere. When the doctor turned out of the Grand’Rue into the Ruedes Bourgeois, Minoret-Levrault pointed out the property of Monsieur Levrault, a rich ironmonger in Paris, who, he said, had just let himself die.
“There, uncle, is a pretty house for sale, it has a delightful garden looking on the river.”
“Let us go in,” said the doctor, spying at the bottom of a little paved court, a house squeezed between the walls of two neighboring houses hidden by massive trees and climbing plants.
“It is built over cellars,” said the doctor, going in by a very steep flight of steps decorated with vases of white and blue faïence where geraniums were then in bloom.
Cut up, like most provincial houses, by a corridor leading from the court to the garden, there was nothing to the right but a drawing-room lighted by four windows, two facing the court and two overlooking the garden; but Levrault-Levrault had sacrificed one of these windows as an entrance to a long brick greenhouse which reached from the drawing-room to the river, where it ended in a horrible Chinese pavilion.
“Good! by roofing this greenhouse and flooring it,” said old Minoret, “I could stow away my library and make a fine study of this extraordinary piece of architecture.”
On the opposite side of the corridor, overlooking the garden, was a dining-room, in imitation black lacquer with green and gold flowers, and separated from the kitchen by the frame of the staircase. A little office contrived behind this staircase, communicated with the kitchen, the iron-grated windows of which opened upon the courtyard. There were two rooms on the first floor; and above, roofed attics which were still inhabitable. After a rapid examination of this house covered from top to bottom with green trellis work, on the side of the courtyard as well as the garden side, and which terminated on the river in a terrace filled with faience vases, the doctor said:
“Levrault-Levrault must have spent a lot of money here!”
“Oh! sums as big as himself,” replied Minoret-Levrault. “He loved flowers, such nonsense! ‘What do they bring in?’ says my wife. You see, an artist came from Paris to paint his corridor with flowers in fresco. He put plate glass everywhere. The ceilings were done up with cornices that cost six francs a foot. The dining-room floor is all inlaid, such follies! The house is not worth a penny the more.”
“Well, nephew, make this purchase for me, and let me know about it, here is my address; the rest my solicitor will see to.—Who lives opposite?” he asked, on leaving.
“Some refugees!” replied the postmaster, “a Chevalier de Portenduère.”
Once the house was bought, the famous doctor, instead of going there, wrote to his nephew to let it. The Folie-Levrault was inhabited by the notary of Nemours, who then sold his practice to Dionis, his head clerk, and who died two years after, saddling the doctor with a house to let just when Napoléon’s fate was being decided in the vicinity. The doctor’s heirs, pretty well deceived, had taken his desire to return as a rich man’s caprice, and were frantic at supposing him to have ties in Paris which would keep him there and rob them of their inheritance. Nevertheless, Minoret-Levrault’s wife seized this opportunity of writing to the doctor. The old man replied that as soon as peace was signed, once the roads were free of soldiers and communication re-established, he should come to live at Nemours. He paid a flying visit with two of his patients, a hospital architect and an upholsterer, who undertook repairs, interior arrangements and the transport of the furniture. Madame Minoret-Levrault offered, as caretaker, the cook of the deceased old notary, who was accepted. When the heirs knew that their uncle or great-uncle Minoret was positively going to live at Nemours, their families were seized, in spite of the political events which at that time weighed upon Le Gâtinais and La Brie, with a devouring but almost legitimate curiosity. Was their uncle rich? Was he economical or extravagant? Would he leave a handsome fortune, or none at all? Had he any life annuities? This is what they finally learnt, but with infinite difficulty and by means of underhand espionage. After the death of Ursule Minoret, his wife, from 1789 to 1813, the doctor, appointed consulting physician to the Emperor in 1805, must have earned a great deal of money, but nobody knew his income; he lived simply, with no other expenses than those of a carriage by the year, and a sumptuous apartment; he never received company and nearly always dined out. His housekeeper, furious at not accompanying him to Nemours, told Zélie Levrault, the postmaster’s wife, that she knew the doctor to have fourteen thousand francs income from the Funds. Now, after twenty years’ practice in a profession which the titles of head physician of a hospital, physician to the Emperor, and member of the Institute rendered so lucrative, these fourteen thousand francs income, profit of successive investments, implied at the most one hundred and sixty thousand francs savings! To have saved only eight thousand francs a year, the doctor must have had a great many vices or a great many virtues to gratify; but neither the housekeeper, nor Zélie, nor anybody could fathom the reason for this moderate expenditure; Minoret, who was much regretted in his neighborhood, was one of the most benevolent men in Paris, and, like Larrey, kept his charitable acts a profound secret. It was therefore with keen satisfaction that the heirs saw the arrival of the rich upholstery and the large library of their uncle, already an officer of the Legion of Honor, and appointed by the King chevalier of the order of Saint-Michel, perhaps on account of his retirement which made way for some favorite. But, when the architect, the painters, and the upholsterers had arranged all in the most comfortable manner, the doctor did not come. Madame Minoret-Levrault, who was superintending the upholsterer and the architect as if it were a question of her own fortune, learnt, through the indiscretion of a young man sent down to arrange the library, that the doctor took care of an orphan called Ursule. This news made wild havoc in the town of Nemours. The old man at last came home toward the middle of the month of January, 1815, and secretly installed himself with a little girl of ten months, accompanied by a wet-nurse.
“Ursule cannot be his daughter, he is seventy-one years old!” said the alarmed heirs.
“Whatever she may be,” said Madame Massin, “she will give us plenty of worry!”
The doctor gave a somewhat cold reception to his great-niece on the maternal side, whose husband had just bought the clerkship of the justice of the peace, and who had been the first to venture to tell him of their hard situation. Massin and his wife were not rich. Massin’s father, a locksmith at Montargis, obliged to compound with his creditors, at sixty-seven years of age was working like a young man, and would leave nothing. Madame Massin’s father, Levrault-Minoret, had just died at Montereau, from the effects of war, having seen his farm burnt, his fields ruined and his cattle consumed.
“We shall get nothing from your great-uncle,” said Massin to his wife, who was already pregnant with her second child.
The doctor secretly gave them ten thousand francs, with which the clerk of the justice of the peace, a friend of the notary and sheriff of Nemours, started usury and went to work so thoroughly with the peasants of the vicinity, that just now Goupil knew him to be worth eighty thousand francs in unacknowledged capital.
As for his other niece, the doctor, through his connections in Paris, obtained the collectorship of Nemours for Crémière and guaranteed the security. Although Minoret-Levrault was in need of nothing, Zélie, jealous of the uncle’s liberality to his two nieces, introduced her son to him, who was then ten years old, and whom she was going to send to a college in Paris, where, she said, education was very expensive. As he was physician at Fontanes, the doctor obtained a half-scholarship at the college of Louis-le-Grand for his great-nephew, who was placed in the fourth class.
Crémière, Massin and Minoret-Levrault, exceedingly vulgar people, were mercilessly summed up by the doctor from the first two months during which they tried to encompass, not so much the uncle, as the inheritance. People who are guided by instinct have this disadvantage compared to people of ideas, that they are at once found out; instinct’s inspirations are too natural, and appeal too much to the eye not to be immediately perceived; whilst, to be fathomed, the conceptions of intellect demand an equal intelligence on both sides. After having bought the gratitude of his heirs, and having in some degree closed their mouths, the wily doctor alleged his occupations, habits, and the attentions required by the little Ursule as an excuse to avoid receiving them, without, however, forbidding them the house. He liked to dine alone, he went to bed and rose late, he had come to his native country in search of rest and solitude. These caprices of an old man appeared sufficiently natural, and his heirs contented themselves with calling upon him every Sunday between one and four o’clock, weekly visits which he tried to stop by saying to them:
“Do not come to see me unless you want me.”
The doctor, without refusing to grant consultations in serious cases, especially for the poor, would not become physician to the little hospital at Nemours, and declared that he would no longer practise his profession.
“I have killed people enough,” he said laughingly to the Curé Chaperon, who, knowing him to be charitable, was pleading for the poor.
“He is notoriously eccentric!”
This remark, said about Doctor Minoret, was the harmless revenge of offended vanity, for the doctor formed for himself a society of persons who deserved to be classed opposite the heirs. Now, those of the bourgeois who thought themselves worthy of swelling the court of a man with a black ribbon, treasured up a ferment of jealousy against the doctor and his privileged friends, which, unfortunately, had its results.
Through some odd freak explained by the proverb: “Extremes meet,” the materialist doctor and the Curé of Nemours quickly became friends. The old man was very fond of backgammon, a favorite game with churchmen, and the Abbé Chaperon and the doctor were evenly matched. So the game was the first link between them. Then Minoret was charitable, and the Curé of Nemours was the Fénelon of Gâtinais. Both were broadly educated; the man of God was the only one in all Nemours who could understand atheism. To be able to argue, two men must in the first place understand each other. What pleasure is there in addressing pungent words to some one who does not feel them? The doctor and the priest both had too much good taste, and had seen too much of good society not to practise its precepts; they could in that case, wage that mimic warfare which is so necessary to all conversation. Each disliked the other’s opinions, but they respected each other’s character. If such contrasts and such sympathies are not the elements of private life, must one not despair of society, which, especially in France, requires some kind of antagonism? It is from collision of character, not from conflict of ideas, that antipathies arise. The Abbé Chaperon was then the doctor’s first friend in Nemours. This ecclesiastic, then sixty years old, had been curé of Nemours since the revival of Catholic worship. Out of love for his flock, he had refused the vicariate of the diocese. If those who were indifferent to religious matters were pleased with him, the faithful loved him even more. Thus respected by his flock and valued by the population, the curé did good without inquiring into the religious opinions of unfortunate people. His vicarage had hardly furniture sufficient for his needs and was as cold and bare as a miser’s house. Avarice and charity betray themselves in similar effects; does not charity lay up for itself the treasure in Heaven that the miser lays up on earth? The Abbé Chaperon disputed his expenditure with his servant with as much severity as Gobseck did with his, if however, this famous Jew ever had a servant. The good priest often sold the silver buckles from his shoes and breeches to give the value of them to the poor who caught him without a penny. When they saw him coming out of his church, with the ends of his breeches tied into the buttonholes, the devotees of the town then went to find the curé’s buckles at the watchmaker and jeweler’s of Nemours, and scolded their pastor when they brought them back to him. He never bought himself linen or clothes, and wore his garments until they were unwearable. His linen, thick with darns, marked his skin like a haircloth. Madame de Portenduère or other simple souls then agreed with the housekeeper to replace his linen or old clothes by new ones during his sleep, and the curé did not always remark the change at once. At home he ate off pewter and with knives and forks of wrought iron. When he received his officiating priests and curates on days of solemnity, which is a tax upon the curés of the district, he used to borrow silver and table linen from his friend the atheist.
“My silver is his salvation!” the doctor would then say.
These good actions, which were sooner or later discovered and always accompanied by spiritual encouragement, were accomplished with sublime naivete. This life was all the more meritorious, in that the Abbé Chaperon possessed erudition as extensive as it was varied, and rare attainments. With him, shrewdness and grace, simplicity’s inseparable companions, enhanced a delivery worthy of a prelate. His manners, his character and his habits imparted that exquisite savor to his conversation, which, with intelligence, is both witty and sincere. Disposed to humor, he never acted the priest in a drawing-room. Until Doctor Minoret’s arrival, the simple soul left his light under a bushel without any regret; but maybe he was very pleased to turn them to account. Though when he came to Nemours he was rich in the possession of a fairly fine library and an income of two thousand francs, in 1829 the curé owned nothing more than the revenue from his cure, almost entirely distributed every year. An excellent counselor in delicate affairs or in troubles, many a person, who never went to church for consolation used to go to the presbytery to seek advice. One small anecdote will suffice to complete this moral picture. Some of the peasants, rarely, it is true, and after all dishonest people, said they were being sued, in order to rouse the benevolence of the Abbé Chaperon. They deceived their wives, who, seeing their home threatened with dispossession and their cows seized, deceived the poor curé with their innocent tears, so that he could then find them the necessary seven or eight hundred francs, with which the peasant would buy a plot of ground. When religious persons, churchwardens, explained the fraud to the Abbé Chaperon whilst begging him to consult them to avoid being made the victim of cupidity, he said:
“Perhaps these people would have committed some crime to get their acre of earth, is it not at least doing good to prevent evil?”
Readers may be pleased to here find the sketch of this figure, remarkable in that science and literature had passed through this heart and vigorous mind while leaving them uncorrupted.
At sixty, the Abbé Chaperon had entirely white hair, so keenly did he feel the misfortune of others, so much also had the incidents of the Revolution told upon him. Twice he had been imprisoned for twice refusing to take an oath, and twice, as he expressed it, had he said his In Manus. He was middle-sized, neither fat nor thin. His face, deeply wrinkled, hollow and colorless, at once attracted attention by the profound tranquillity of the lines and the purity of the contour, which appeared to be bordered with light. The face of a chaste man with an indescribable radiance. Brown eyes with glowing pupils, animated this irregular face which was surmounted by an immense forehead. His glance exercised inexplicable influence by a gentleness which did not exclude strength. The arches over his eyes were like two vaults shaded by great grizzly eyebrows which were not at all alarming. As he had lost many of his teeth, his mouth was out of shape and his cheeks fallen in; but these ravages were not without charm, and the friendly wrinkles seemed to smile upon one. Without being the least gouty, he had such sensitive feet and walked with so much difficulty that he wore Orleans calfskin shoes in all weathers. He considered the fashion of wearing trousers ill suited to a priest and always appeared clothed in coarse black woolen stockings knitted by his housekeeper, and cloth breeches. He never went out in a cassock, but in a brown frock coat, and he adhered to the three-cornered hat, bravely worn through the worst times. This noble, handsome old man, whose face was always beautiful by the serenity of a blameless soul, was to have so great an influence over the events and the men in this history that it is necessary first to trace the source of his authority.
Minoret took in three newspapers; one liberal, one ministerial, one ultra, several periodicals and some scientific journals, collections of which swelled his library. The newspapers, the encyclopedist and the books were an attraction to a former captain of the Royal-Swedish regiment, named Monsieur de Jordy, a Voltairean gentleman and an old bachelor who lived upon a pension of sixteen hundred francs and a life annuity. After having, through the medium of the curé, read the gazettes for several days, Monsieur de Jordy thought proper to go and thank the doctor. From the first visit, the old captain, formerly a professor in the military colleges, won the good graces of the old doctor, who hastened to return his call. Monsieur de Jordy, a dry, thin little man, always troubled with full bloodedness, although he had a very pale face, struck one at first by his fine forehead à la Charles XII., above which he kept his hair cut as close as that of that soldier-king. His blue eyes, profoundly sad, that seemed to say: “Love has passed by here,” interested one at first sight, and where one might catch glimpses of the memories which he otherwise guarded with such profound secrecy, that his old friends never surprised either any allusion to his past life or any one of those exclamations wrung through a similarity of calamities. He concealed the mournful mystery of his past under a philosophic gaiety; but, when he thought himself alone, his movements, benumbed by a slowness that was less senile than calculated, attested some painful and uninterrupted thought; so the Abbé Chaperon had nicknamed him the Christian before knowing him. Always dressed in blue cloth, his rather stiff carriage and his clothes betrayed the former habits of military discipline. His gentle, harmonious voice stirred the soul. His beautiful hands, and the cut of his figure, which recalled that of the Comte d’Artois, whilst showing how charming he must have been in his youth, rendered the mystery of his life even more impenetrable. One asked one’s self involuntarily what misfortune could have overtaken the beauty, courage, grace, learning and all the most valuable qualities of heart which were formerly united in his person. Monsieur de Jordy always winced at the name of Robespierre. He took a great deal of snuff, and, strange to say, he left it off on account of the little Ursule, who, because of this habit, showed repugnance for him. From the time he was allowed to see this little one, the captain riveted long, almost passionate looks upon her. So madly did he love her games, and so much did he interest himself in her, that this affection tightened still closer the links between him and the doctor, who never dared ask this old bachelor:
“And you too have lost some children?”
There are beings, good and patient like him, who pass through life with a bitter thought in the heart and a smile both tender and mournful on the lips, bearing with them the solution to the riddle without allowing it to be fathomed, through pride, disdain or vengeance perhaps, having none but God for confidant and comforter. Monsieur de Jordy saw no one at Nemours—where, like the doctor, he had come to die in peace—but the curé, always at the disposal of his parishioners, and Madame de Portenduère, who used to go to bed at nine o’clock. And so, tired out, he ended by going to bed early, in spite of the thorns with which his pillow was stuffed. So it was a piece of good luck for the doctor as well as for the captain, to meet a man who had seen the same society, and who spoke the same language, with whom to exchange ideas, and who went to bed late. Once Monsieur de Jordy, the Abbé Chaperon and Minoret had spent the first evening together, they experienced such pleasure from it, that the priest and the soldier returned every evening at nine o’clock, when, little Ursule having gone to bed, the old man found himself at liberty. And all three stayed up until twelve or one o’clock.