Ursule Mirouët
By Honoré de Balzac.
Translated by Clara Bell.
Imprint
This ebook is the product of many hours of hard work by volunteers for Standard Ebooks, and builds on the hard work of other literature lovers made possible by the public domain.
This particular ebook is based on digital scans from the Internet Archive.
The source text and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. They may still be copyrighted in other countries, so users located outside of the United States must check their local laws before using this ebook. The creators of, and contributors to, this ebook dedicate their contributions to the worldwide public domain via the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. For full license information, see the Uncopyright at the end of this ebook.
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces ebook editions of public domain literature using modern typography, technology, and editorial standards, and distributes them free of cost. You can download this and other ebooks carefully produced for true book lovers at standardebooks.org.
To Mademoiselle Sophie Surville
It is a real pleasure, my dear niece, to dedicate to you a book of which the subject and the details have gained the approbation—so difficult to secure—of a young girl to whom the world is as yet unknown, and who will make no compromise with the high principles derived from a pious education. You young girls are a public to be dreaded; you ought never to be suffered to read any book less pure than your own pure souls, and you are forbidden certain books, just as you are not allowed to see society as it really is. Is it not enough, then, to make a writer proud, to know that he has satisfied you? Heaven grant that affection may not have misled you! Who can say? The future only, which you, I hope, will see, though he may not, who is your uncle
Ursule Mirouët
Part I
The Heirs in Alarm
As you enter Nemours coming from Paris, you cross the canal of the Loing, whose banks form a rural rampart to the pretty little town, and afford many picturesque walks. Since 1830, unfortunately, many houses have been built beyond the bridge. If this suburb increases, the aspect of the town will lose much of its attractive originality.
But in 1829 the country on each side of the road lay open, and the postmaster, a tall, burly man of about sixty, as he sat on the highest point of the bridge one fine morning, could command a view of what he would have called a ribbon-road.
The month of September was lavishing its wealth. The atmosphere quivered with heat above the grass and stones, not a cloud flecked the ethereal blue, of which the vivid transparency was uniform to the very horizon, showing the extreme rarity of the air. Indeed, Minoret-Levrault, the postmaster in question, was obliged to shade his eyes with his hand not to be quite dazzled. Out of patience with waiting, he looked now at the lovely meadows spreading away to the right, where his after-crop was growing apace, and now at the densely wooded hills to the left, stretching from Nemours to Bouron. And in the valley of the Loing, where the noises on the road came back echoed from the hill, he could hear the gallop of his own horses, and the cracking of his postilions’ whips.
Could anyone but a postmaster get out of patience with gazing at a field full of cattle, such as Paul Potter painted, under a sky worthy of Raphael, by a canal overhung with trees, like a picture by Hobbema? Anyone who knows Nemours, knows that nature there is as beautiful as art, whose mission it is to spiritualize nature; the landscape there has ideas, and suggests thoughts.
Still, on seeing Minoret-Levrault, an artist would have left his place to sketch this country townsman; he was so original by sheer force of being common. Combine all the characteristics of the brute and you get Caliban, who certainly is a great creation. Where matter predominates, sentiment ends. The postmaster, a living proof of this axiom, had one of those countenances in which the student finds it hard to discern the soul through the violent purple hues of the coarsely developed flesh. His little bored blue cap with a peak, fitted closely to a head so huge as to prove that Gall’s science of phrenology has not yet dealt with the exceptions to his rules. The shining gray hair, which formed a fringe to the cap, showed that white hairs may be the result of other causes than overworked brains or severe grief.
His large ears were almost bursting round the edges from the fullness of too abundant blood, which seemed ready to spurt out after the smallest exertion. His complexion showed purple blotches under a brown pigment, the result of constant exposure to the sun. His gray eyes, restless and deep set, hidden under two black bushes of eyebrow, were like the eyes of the Kalmucks seen in Paris in 1815; if they glistened now and then, it could only be under the influence of a covetous idea. His nose, squat at the base, took a sudden turn up like the foot of a kettle. Thick lips harmonized with an almost disgusting double chin, rough with the stubble of a beard shaved scarcely twice a week, which rubbed a dirty necktie into a state of worn string; a very short neck, in rolls of fat, and puffy cheeks,
