He set to work diplomatically to find his natural half-brother, Joseph Mirouët; but one evening Grimm told him that, after enlisting in a Prussian regiment, the artist had deserted, and, taking a false name, had escaped all search.
Joseph Mirouët, gifted by nature with an enchanting voice, a fine figure, and a handsome face, being a composer of taste and spirit into the bargain, led for fifteen years the Bohemian existence which Hoffmann of Berlin has so well described. But at the age of forty he was reduced to such misery that, in 1806, he seized the opportunity of becoming a Frenchman again. He then settled at Hamburg, where he married the daughter of a respectable citizen, who, being music-mad, fell in love with the singer whose fame was still in the future, and who devoted herself to its attainment. But after fifteen years of penury, Joseph Mirouët’s head could not stand the wine of opulence; his extravagant nature reasserted itself; and though he made his wife happy, in a few years he had spent all her fortune. Misery again came upon them. The household must indeed have been living wretchedly for Joseph Mirouët to come down to enlisting as one of the band in a French regiment.
In 1813, by the merest chance, the surgeon-major of this regiment, struck by the name of Mirouët, wrote to Doctor Minoret, to whom he owed some obligation. The reply came at once. In 1814, before the capitulation of Paris, Joseph Mirouët had found a home there, and there his wife died in giving birth to a little girl, whom the doctor named Ursule, after his wife. The bandmaster did not long survive his wife; he, like her, was worn out by fatigue and privation. On his deathbed the hapless musician bequeathed his little girl to the doctor, who was her godfather, in spite of his repugnance for what he called Church mummeries.
After losing every child, either by miscarriage, at the time of its birth, or within the first year of its life, the doctor had anxiously looked forward to their last hope. But when a sickly, nervous, delicate woman begins with a miscarriage, it is common enough to see her successive failures, as in the case of Ursule Minoret, in spite of her husband’s care, watchfulness, and learning. The poor man had often blamed himself for their persistent desire to have children. The last of the little ones born to them, after an interval of more than two years, died in 1792, the victim of constitutional nervousness, inherited from its mother, if we may believe the physiologists, who say that, in the inscrutable phenomena of generation, a child takes its blood from the father and its nervous system from the mother. The doctor, compelled to forego the joys of his strongest feelings, no doubt found in benevolence some indemnity for disappointed fatherhood.
All through his married life, so cruelly agitated, he had wished above everything for a little fair girl, one of those flowers which are the delight of a household; so he gladly accepted his half-brother’s request, and transferred all his vanished hopes and dreams to the little orphan. For two years he watched over the minutest details of Ursule’s life, as Cato over Pompey; he would not have her fed, or taken up, or put to bed without his superintendence. His experience and his science were all devoted to this child. After enduring all the pangs, the alternations of fear and hope, the anxieties and joys of a mother, he was so happy as to find vigorous vitality and a deeply sensitive nature in this child of the flaxen-haired German mother and the artistic Frenchman. The happy old man watched the growth of that yellow hair with the feelings of a mother—first pale down, then silk, then light, fine hair, so caressing to the touch of caressing fingers. He would kiss the tiny feet, the toes through whose fine skin the blood shows pink, making them look like rosebuds. He was crazy over the child.
When she tried to speak, or when she fixed her lovely, soft blue eyes on the objects about her, with the wondering look which would seem to be the dawning of ideas, and which she ended with a laugh, he would sit in front of her for whole hours, and he and Jordy would try to find out the reasons—which to many have seemed mere caprices—concealed under the smallest manifestations of that delightful phase of life when the child is at once flower and fruit, a bewildered intelligence, perpetual motion, and vehement desire. Little Ursule’s beauty and sweetness made her so precious to the doctor that for her he would gladly have changed the laws of nature; he would sometimes tell his friend Jordy that he suffered from pain in his teeth when Ursule was cutting hers.
When old men love a child there is no limit to their passion; they adore it. For this tiny creature’s sake they silence their pet manias, and recall every detail of their past life. Their experience, their forbearance, their patience, all the acquisitions of life—a treasure so painfully amassed—are poured out for this young life by which they grow young again, and they make up for motherliness by intelligence. Their wisdom, always on the alert, is as good as a mother’s intuition; they remember the exquisite care which in a mother is divination, and infuse it into the exercise of a pitifulness whose strength is great, no doubt, in proportion to that excessive weakness. The slowness of their movements supplies the place of maternal gentleness. And
