Ursule Mirouët (Tomlinson translation)/Part II/3
*
The elections of 1830 brought some credit to the heirs, who, through the pains of Désiré Minoret and Goupil, formed a committee in Nemours whose efforts caused the liberal candidate to be returned at Fontainebleau. Massin exercised a tremendous influence over the country constituents. Five of the postmaster’s tenants were electors. Dionis represented more than eleven votes. Through assembling at the notary’s house, Crémière, Massin, the postmaster and their adherents ended by falling into the habit of meeting there. Upon the doctor’s return, Dionis’ salon had then become the camp of the heirs. The justice of the peace and the mayor, who then formed a league to resist the liberals of Nemours, and who were beaten by the opposition in spite of the efforts of the aristocracy situated in the neighborhood, were closely linked together by their defeat. When Bongrand and the Abbé Chaperon told the doctor the result of this antagonism which, for the first time, formed two parties in Nemours, Charles X. was leaving Rambouillet for Cherbourg. Désiré Minoret, who shared the opinions of the Paris bar, had sent to Nemours for fifteen friends commanded by Goupil, and whom the postmaster supplied with horses to hasten to Paris, where they arrived at Désiré’s during the night of the twenty-eighth. Goupil and Désiré, with this band, co-operated in the capture of the town-hall. Désiré Minoret was decorated with the Legion of Honor, and appointed substitute of the attorney for the crown at Fontainebleau. Goupil was given the Cross of July. Dionis was elected Mayor of Nemours in place of the Sieur Levrault, and the municipal council was composed of MinoretLevrault, deputy; of Massin, Crémière and all the followers of Dionis’ salon. Bongrand kept his place only through the influence of his son, appointed attorney for the Crown at Melun, and whose marriage with Mademoiselle Levrault then appeared likely. Seeing that the three per cents were at fortyfive, the doctor set out by post for Paris; and invested five hundred and forty thousand francs in certificates to bearer. The remainder of his fortune, which amounted to about two hundred and seventy thousand francs, invested in his name in the same stock, gave him an ostensible income of fifteen thousand francs. He laid out the capital bequeathed by the old professor to Ursule in the same way, as well as the eight thousand francs yielded by the interest of nine years, which gave his ward an income of fourteen hundred francs, with the help of a small sum he added to it so as to enlarge this slight revenue. Following her master’s advice, old La Bougival had an income of three hundred and fifty francs by investing five thousand and a few hundred francs’ savings in the same way. These prudent speculations, planned between the doctor and the justice of the peace, were accomplished in the most profound secrecy under cover of the political disturbances. When peace was almost re-established, the doctor bought a little house adjoining his own, and tore it down, as well as the wall of his courtyard, so as to have a coach house and stable built on the ground. To use the capital of a thousand francs’ income to set up outhouses seemed madness to the Minoret heirs. The so-called madness began a new era in the doctor’s life, for, at a time when horses and carriages were to be procured for almost nothing, he brought back from Paris three superb horses and a barouche.
When, in the beginning of November, 1830, the old man, for the first time, drove to mass on a rainy day, and got down to give his hand to Ursule, all the inhabitants rushed into the market-place, as much to see the doctor’s carriage and question his coachman, as to find fault with his ward, to whose excessive ambition Massin, Crémière, the postmaster and their wives attributed their uncle’s follies.
“The barouche! eh! Massin!” cried Goupil, “your succession is going capitally, hein?”
“You must have good wages, Cabirolle?” said the postmaster to the son of one of his drivers, who was standing by the horses, “for it is to be hoped that you will not wear out many horseshoes with a man eighty-four years old. How much did the horses cost?”
“Four thousand francs. The carriage, although second-hand, cost two thousand francs; but it is a handsome one, the wheels are a patent.”
“What do you say, Cabirolle?” asked Madame Crémière.
“He says à ma tante,” replied Goupil, “it is an English idea, and they invented these wheels. Here! you see, nothing can be seen, it all fits in, that’s nice, it does not get locked, and there is no longer that horrid end of square iron which used to go beyond the axle.”
“What rhymes with ma tante?” then said Madame Crémière, innocently.
“What!” said Goupil, “that does not ‘tente’ you then?”
“Ah! I understand,” she said.
“Well, no, you are an honest woman,” said Goupil, “I must not deceive you, the real word is à patte entre, because the pin is hidden.”
“Yes, madame,” said Cabirolle, who was taken in by Goupil’s explanation, so seriously had the clerk given it.
“It is a fine carriage all the same,” cried Crémière, “and one must be rich to buy a kind like that.”
“She is doing well, the little one,” said Goupil. “But she is right, she is teaching you how to enjoy life. Why have you not got beautiful horses and carriages, you, Papa Minoret? Will you let yourself be humiliated? Were I in your place I would have a prince’s carriage!”
“See, Cabirolle,” said Massin, “is it the little one that launches our uncle into these luxuries?”
“I don’t know,” replied Cabirolle, “but she is almost mistress at home. Master upon master now comes from Paris. They say she is going to study painting.”
“I shall seize this opportunity to have my portrait drawn,” said Madame Crémière.
In the provinces, in speaking of a portrait they still say drawn, instead of to have a portrait taken.
“And yet the old German is not dismissed,” said Madame Massin.
“He is there again to-day,” replied Cabirolle.
“You can’t have too much of a good thing,” said Madame Crémière, making everybody laugh.
“Now,” cried Goupil, “you need not reckon on the inheritance. Ursule will soon be seventeen, she is prettier than ever; travel improves youth, and the little humbug has got on the right side of your uncle. Every week the stage brings her five or six packages, and dressmakers and milliners come here to try on her dresses and things. And so my mistress is furious. Wait until Ursule comes out and then look at her little shoulder shawl, a real cashmere at six hundred francs.”
Had a thunderbolt fallen in the middle of the group of heirs it would not have produced more effect than these last words of Goupil, who rubbed his hands.
The doctor’s old green salon was renovated by an upholsterer from Paris. Judged by the luxury he was displaying, the old man was at one time accused of having concealed his fortune and of possessing an income of sixty thousand francs, at another of spending his capital to please Ursule. He was alternately called a rich man and a libertine. This remark: “He is an old fool!” summed up the opinion of the country. This false direction of the judgment of the little town had this advantage, that it deceived the heirs, who did not at all suspect Savinien’s love for Ursule, which was the real cause of the doctor’s expenditure, as he delighted to accustom his ward to her rôle of viscountess, and who, with more than fifty thousand francs a year, gave himself the pleasure of adorning his idol.
In February, 1832, on Ursule’s seventeenth birthday, that same morning as she was getting up, she saw Savinien, at his window, in midshipman’s uniform.
“How is it that I knew nothing of it?” she said to herself.
Since the capture of Algiers in which Savinien distinguished himself by an act of courage which had gained him the cross, the corvette upon which he served having remained several months at sea, he had found it absolutely impossible to write to the doctor, and he would not leave the service without having consulted him. Anxious to keep such an illustrious name in the navy, the new government had profited by the July disturbances to confer the rank of midshipman upon Savinien. After having obtained leave for a fortnight, the new midshipman arrived from Toulon by the mail-coach for Ursule’s birthday and at the same time to seek the doctor’s advice.
“He has come!” cried the goddaughter rushing into her godfather’s room.
“All right,” he replied, “I can guess the motive which has made him leave the service, and he can now remain in Nemours.”
“Ah! it is my birthday; it is all in that word,” she said, kissing the doctor.
At a sign she went to make to him, Savinien came at once; she wanted to admire him, for she thought he seemed improved. In fact, military service stamps the gestures, the bearing and appearance of men with decision mingled with gravity, an indefinable uprightness which enables the most superficial observer to recognize a military man under the bourgeois coat; there is no better proof that a man is made to command. Ursule loved Savinien still better for it, and felt a childish delight in walking up and down the little garden on his arm, making him relate the share he had had, in his character of naval cadet, in the capture of Algiers. Obviously, Savinien had taken Algiers. She saw everything red, she said, when she was looking at Savinien’s decoration. The doctor, who was watching them from his room whilst dressing, came to join them. Without entirely unbosoming himself to the viscount, he then told him that in case Madame de Portenduère should consent to his marriage with Ursule, his goddaughter’s fortune would make the salary from any rank he might attain, superfluous.
“Alas!” said Savinien, “it will take a long time to overcome my mother’s opposition. Before my departure, with the alternative of seeing me stay with her if she consented to my marriage with Ursule, or of only seeing me from time to time with the knowledge that I was exposed to the dangers of my profession, she let me go—”
“But, Savinien, we shall be together,” said Ursule, taking his hand and shaking it half impatiently.
To see each other, and never to part, was to her the whole of love; she did not look beyond that; and her pretty gesture, and her rebellious accent were expressive of so much innocence that Savinien and the doctor relented. The resignation was sent in, and the presence of her fiancé gave the greatest radiance to Ursule’s birthday. Several months after, toward May, domestic life at Doctor Minoret’s resumed its tranquillity, but with one more regular visitor. The young viscount’s attentions were all the more promptly construed as those of an intended husband, as, whether at mass, or out walking, his and Ursule’s manners, although reserved, betrayed the understanding of their hearts. Dionis called the attention of the heirs to the fact that the old man never demanded his interest from Madame de Portenduère, and that the old lady already owed it for three years.
“She will be forced to yield, and consent to her son’s misalliance,” said the notary. “If this misfortune happens, it is probable that a large part of your uncle’s fortune will serve, according to Basile, as an irresistible argument.”
The irritation of the heirs at finding that their uncle preferred Ursule too much not to secure her happiness at their expense, then became as secret as it was deep. Meeting every night since the July revolution at the house of Dionis, they would there curse the two lovers, and the evening seldom drew to a close without their having searched, but vainly, for means of thwarting the old man. Zélie, who, like the doctor, had doubtless profited by the fall in stock to advantageously invest her enormous capital, was the hardest upon the orphan girl and the Portenduères. One night when Goupil, who, however, took care not to be bored at these receptions, had come to inquire the affairs of the town which were there being discussed, Zélie had a revival of hatred; in the morning she had seen the doctor, Ursule and Savinien returning in the barouche from a drive in the neighborhood, in an intimacy which betrayed all.
“I would willingly give thirty thousand francs for God to summon our uncle to Himself before the marriage of this Portenduère and that conceited little creature could take place,” she said.
Goupil accompanied Monsieur and Madame Minoret as far as the middle of their big courtyard, and said, looking all around to see that they were quite alone:
“Will you give me the means of buying up Dionis’s practice, and I will break off Monsieur de Portenduère’s marriage with Ursule?”
“How?” asked the giant.
“Do you think I am fool enough to tell you my plan?” replied the head clerk.
“Well, my boy, set them by the ears and we will see,” said Zélie.
“I am not going to enter at all upon such worries for a ‘we shall see!’ The young man is a swaggerer who might kill me, and I should have to be roughshod, and be his match with sword and pistol. Set me up, and I will keep my word.”
“Prevent this marriage and then I will set you up,” replied the postmaster.
“You have been nine months considering whether you should lend me fifteen thousand wretched francs to buy the practice of Lecœur, the attorney, and do you expect me to trust to this promise? Go, you will lose your uncle’s inheritance, and it will be a good job.”
“Were it only a question of fifteen thousand francs and Lecœur’s practice, it might be managed,” replied Zélie, “but to be your security for fifty thousand crowns!”
“But I will pay,” said Goupil, darting a bewitching glance at Zélie which encountered the postmistress’s haughty look.
It was like poison on steel.
“We will wait,” said Zélie.
“The evil genius be with you!” thought Goupil. “If ever I get them in my power,” he said to himself as he went out, “I will squeeze them like lemons.”
By cultivating the society of the doctor, the justice of the peace, and the curé, Savinien proved the excellence of his character to them. The young man’s love for Ursule, so devoid of all selfishness, and so persistent, so keenly interested the three friends, that they no longer separated these two children in their thoughts. Before long the monotony of this patriarchal life and the certainty of the lover’s future ended by giving their affection an appearance of fraternity. The doctor often left Ursule and Savinien alone. He had well judged this charming young man, who would kiss Ursule’s hand upon arriving and would not have asked her for it when they were alone, so much was he filled with respect for the innocence and simplicity of this child, whose excessive sensitiveness, often tested, had taught him that a harsh expression, a cold look, or the alternations of gentleness and roughness might kill her. Their greatest liberties the two lovers would be guilty of in the presence of the old men, in the evening. Two years, full of secret joys, passed in this way, with no other incident than the young man’s futile attempts to obtain his mother’s consent to his marriage with Ursule. He would sometimes talk for whole mornings together, his mother listening without answering his arguments and entreaties, except by the silence of a Bretonne or by refusals. At nineteen, Ursule, graceful, an excellent musician and well-educated, had nothing more to acquire; she was perfect. She was also renowned far and wide for her beauty, grace and education. One day, the doctor had to refuse the Marquise d’Aiglemont, who thought of Ursule for her eldest son. Six months later, in spite of the profound secrecy observed by Ursule, the doctor, and Madame d’Aiglemont, Savinien accidentally heard of this circumstance. Touched by so much delicacy, he pleaded this proceeding in order to overcome his mother’s obstinacy, her reply being:
“If the D’Aiglemonts wish to make a bad match, is that any reason why we should?”
In December, 1834, the pious, good old man visibly failed. When he was seen coming out of church, with his yellow, shriveled face and faded eyes, the whole town spoke of the old man’s approaching death, he being then eighty-eight years old.
“You will know how matters stand,” they said to the heirs.
In fact, the old man’s demise possessed the attraction of a problem. But the doctor did not know he was ill, he labored under a delusion, and neither poor Ursule, nor Savinien, nor the justice of the peace, nor the curé, would through delicacy, enlighten him as to his situation; the Nemours doctor, who came to see him every night, was afraid to prescribe any further. Old Minoret felt no pain, he was gently dying. With him, the mind remained strong, clear and powerful. With old men thus constituted, the mind governs the body and gives it strength to die standing. The curé, for fear of hastening the fatal end, excused his parishioner from coming to hear mass in church, and allowed him to read the services at home; for the doctor carefully fulfilled all his religious duties; the further he went toward the grave, the more he loved God. The eternal light more and more explained to him difficulties of all kinds. At the beginning of the new year, Ursule persuaded him to sell his carriage and horses, and to dismiss Cabirolle. The justice of the peace, whose anxiety about Ursule’s future was far from being quieted by the old man’s half-confidences, broached the delicate question of inheritance, by explaining one evening to his old friend the necessity of emancipating Ursule. The ward would then be able to receive a tutelary account and come into possession; which would operate to her advantage. In spite of this overture, the old man, who however had already consulted the justice of the peace, did not at all entrust him with the secret of his arrangements about Ursule; but he adopted the course of emancipation. The more the justice of the peace persisted in wishing to know the means his old friend had taken to enrich Ursule, the more suspicious grew the doctor. At last Minoret positively dreaded confiding to the justice of the peace his thirty-six thousand francs of stock to bearer.
“Why,” said Bongrand, “do you risk any chance?”
“Between two chances,” replied the doctor, “one avoids the most uncertain.”
Bongrand conducted the matter of emancipation so quickly that it was finished on the day Mademoiselle Mirouët attained her twentieth year. This anniversary was to be the old doctor’s last fête, and, seized no doubt with a presentiment of his coming end, he celebrated this day sumptuously by giving a small dance to which he invited all the boys and girls of the four families, Dionis, Crémière, Minoret and Massin. Savinien, Bongrand, the curé, his two curates, the Nemours doctor and Mesdames Zélie Minoret, Massin and Crémière, as well as Schmucke, were the guests at the big dinner which preceded the ball.
“I feel that I am going,” said the old man to the notary at the close of the evening. “So I must beg you to come to-morrow to draw up the guardian’s account that I must give Ursule, so as to avoid complicating my inheritance. Thank God! I have not wronged my heirs of a farthing, and have only disposed of my income. Messieurs Crémière, Massin, and Minoret, my nephew, are members of the family council appointed for Ursule, they will assist at this examination of accounts.”
These words, overheard by Massin and hawked about the ballroom, spread joy amongst the three families, who for four years had been living in continual alternations, at one time believing themselves rich, at another disinherited.
“It is a tongue dying out,” said Madame Crémière.
When, toward two in the morning, nobody was left in the drawing-room but Savinien, Bongrand and the Abbé Chaperon, the old doctor pointed to Ursule, charming in her ball dress, who was just saying good-bye to the young Mesdemoiselles Crémière and Massin, and said:
“It is to you, my friends, that I entrust her! In a few days I shall no longer be here to protect her; stand, all of you, between her and the world, until she is married.—I am afraid for her!”
These words made a painful impression. The account, which was made up several days afterward in a family council, showed that Doctor Minoret was short ten thousand six hundred francs, partly as arrears of the stock receipt of fourteen hundred francs a year, the acquisition of which was accounted for by the employment of Captain de Jordy’s legacy, and partly by the little capital of five thousand francs coming from gifts that, for fifteen years, the doctor had made to his ward on their respective fête-days or birthdays.