Ursule Mirouët

and coming from La Bresse, where her family lived in poverty, Antoinette Patris, widow of Pierre dit de Bougival, naturally attached herself to Ursule, as foster-mothers do attach themselves to a sucking child as it grows up. This blind motherly affection was reinforced by domestic attachment. Warned beforehand of the doctor’s intentions, La Bougival learned to cook on the sly, made herself tidy, and fell into the old man’s ways. She took the greatest care of the furniture and the rooms; in short, she was indefatigable. Not only did the doctor insist that his private life should be screened from the world; he had reasons of his own for keeping all knowledge of his affairs from his heirs. Thus by the time he had been at Nemours a year, there was no one in his house but La Bougival on whose discretion he could absolutely rely, and he disguised his real reasons under the all-powerful plea of economy. To the great joy of his family, he became miserly. Without underhand wheedling, solely as a result of her solicitude and devotedness. La Bougival, who at the time when this drama opens was forty-three years old, was housekeeper to the doctor and his little protégée, the pivot on which the whole house turned, in fact, his confidential servant. She had been named La Bougival in consequence of the impossibility of calling her by her Christian name of Antoinette, for names and faces must follow a law of harmony.

The doctor’s avarice was not an empty word; but it was for a purpose. From 1817 he gave up two of his newspapers, and ceased to subscribe to periodical magazines. His annual outlay, which all Nemours could reckon, was not more than eighteen hundred francs. Like all old men, his requirements in linen, clothing, and shoes were a mere trifle. Every six months he made a journey to Paris, no doubt to draw and invest his dividends. In fifteen years he never said a word that had anything to do with his affairs. His confidence in Bongrand was of later date; he never spoke to him of his plans till after the Revolution of 1830. These were the only things in the doctor’s life known at that time to the townsfolk and his heirs. As to his political opinions, as his house was rated at no more than a hundred francs in taxes, he never interfered, and would have nothing to say to subscriptions on either the Royalist or the Liberal side. His well-known horror of priests and his deism so little loved demonstrations, that when his nephew, Minoret-Levrault, sent a traveling bookseller to his house to propose that he should buy the “Curé Meslier,” and General Foy’s addresses, he turned the man out of the house. Tolerance on such terms was quite inexplicable to the Liberals of Nemours.

The doctor’s three collateral heirs, Minoret-Levrault and his wife. Monsieur and Madame Massin-Levrault, junior, Monsieur and Madame Crémière-Crémière⁠—who shall be called simply Crémière, Massin, and Minoret, since such elaborate distinctions are only needed in the Gatinais⁠—these three families, too busy to create another centre, met constantly, as people only meet in small towns. The postmaster gave a grand dinner on his son’s birthday, a ball at the Carnival, and another on the anniversary of his wedding day, and to these he asked all the townsfolk of Nemours. The tax-receiver also gathered his relations and friends about him twice a year. The Justice’s registrar being, as he said, too poor to launch out in such extravagance, lived narrowly in a house halfway down the High Street, of which the ground floor was let to his sister, the mistress of the letter-post⁠—another benefaction of the doctor’s. But in the course of the year these three inheritors or their wives met in the town or out walking, at the market in the morning, on their door steps, or on Sunday, after Mass, on the Church Square, as at this moment, so that they saw each other every day.

Now for the last three years more especially, the doctor’s age, his miserliness, and his fortune justified allusions or direct remarks relating to their prospects, which, passing from one to another, at last made the doctor and his heirs equally famous. For these six months not a week had passed without the friends and neighbors of the Minoret family speaking to them with covert envy of the day when the old man’s eyes would be closed, and his money boxes opened.

“Doctor Minoret may be a physician, and have come to an understanding with Death,” said one; “but only God is eternal.”

“Bah! he will bury us all; he is in better health than we are,” one of the expectant heirs would reply hypocritically.

“Well, if you don’t get it, your children will⁠—unless that little Ursule⁠—”

“He will not leave her everything!”

Ursule, as Madame Massin had prognosticated, was the real bugbear of the family, the Damocles’ sword; and Madame Crémière’s favorite last word, “Those who live will know,” showed plainly enough that they wished her ill rather than well.

The tax-receiver and the registrar, who were poor by comparison with the postmaster, had often, by way of conversation, calculated the doctor’s property. As they walked along by the canal, or on the highroad, if they saw their uncle coming they looked at each other piteously.

“He has provided himself with some elixir of life, no doubt,” said one.

“He is in league with the devil,” said the other.

“He ought to leave us the lion’s share, for that fat Minoret wants for nothing.”

“Oh, Minoret has a son who will get rid of a great deal of his money for him!”

“How much, now, do you suppose the doctor’s fortune may run to?” said the registrar.

“Well, at the end of twelve years, twelve thousand francs saved every year come to a hundred and forty-four thousand, and compound interest will have produced at least a hundred thousand francs more; but as, under his Paris lawyer’s advice, he must have turned his money