“Now, you see, godfather, your nieces were kind to me; they were very nice just now,” said she, as he followed her, to mislead him as to the thoughts which had made her pensive.
“Poor little thing!” said the old man. He laid Ursule’s hand on his arm, patting it gently, and led her along the terrace by the river, where no one could overhear them.
“Why do you say, ‘poor little thing’?”
“Can you not see that they are afraid of you?”
“But why?”
“My heirs are at this moment very uneasy about my conversion; they ascribe it, no doubt, to your influence, and fancy that I shall deprive them of their inheritance to make you the richer.”
“But you will not?” said Ursule with simplicity, and looking in his face.
“Ah, divine comfort of my old age,” said the old man, lifting her up, and kissing her on both cheeks. “It was for her sake and not for my own, O God, that I besought Thee just now to suffer me to live till I shall have given her into the keeping of some good man worthy of her!—You will see, my angel, the farce that the Minorets and the Crémières and the Massins are going to play here. You want to prolong and beautify my life. They! they think of nothing but my death!”
“God forbids us to hate; but if that is true—oh, I scorn them!” cried Ursule.
“Dinner!” cried La Bougival, from the top of the steps, which, on the garden side, were at the end of the gallery.
Ursule and the doctor were eating their dessert in the pretty dining-room painted to imitate Chinese lacquer, which had ruined Levrault-Levrault, when the Justice walked in. The doctor, as his most signal mark of intimacy, offered him a cup of his own coffee, a mixture of Mocha with Bourbon and Martinique berries, roasted, ground, and made by his own hands in a silver coffeepot of the kind patented by Chaptal.
“Well, well,” said Bongrand, putting up his spectacles, and looking at the old man with a sly twinkle, “the town is by the ears! Your appearance at church has revolutionized your relations. You are going to leave everything to the priests and to the poor! You have stirred them up, and they are astir! Oh! I saw their first commotion on the Church Square; they were as fussy as a nest of ants robbed of their eggs.”
“What did I tell you, Ursule?” exclaimed the old man. “Even at the risk of grieving you, my child, am I not bound to teach you to know the world, and to put you on your guard against undeserved enmity?”
“I wanted to say a few words to you on that subject,” said Bongrand, seizing the opportunity of speaking to his old friend about Ursule’s future prospects.
The doctor put a black velvet cap on his white head, and the Justice kept on his hat as a protection against the dew, and they walked together up and down the terrace, talking over the means of securing to Ursule the little fortune the doctor proposed to leave her. Bongrand knew the opinion of Dionis as to the invalidity of any will made by the doctor in Ursule’s favor, for Nemours was too inquisitive as to the Minoret inheritance for this question not to have been discussed by the wise-heads of the town. He himself had decided that Ursule was an alien in blood as regarded Doctor Minoret; but he was fully aware that the spirit of the law was adverse to the recognition of illegitimate offspring as members of the family. The framers of the Code had only anticipated the weakness of fathers and mothers for their natural children; it had not been supposed that uncles or aunts might have such tender feelings for an illegitimate relation as to favor his descendants. There was evidently an omission in the law.
“In any other country,” said he to the doctor, after setting forth the state of the law which Goupil, Dionis, and Désiré had just explained to the heirs, “Ursule would have nothing to fear. She is a legitimate child, and her father’s disabilities ought only to affect the money left by Valentin Mirouët, your father-in-law. But in France the bench is unluckily very clever and very logical; it insists on the spirit of the law. Pleaders will talk of morality, and prove that the omission in the Code arises from the single-mindedness of the framers, who never foresaw such a case, but who nevertheless established a principle. A lawsuit would be lengthy and costly. With Zélie on the other side it would be carried to the Court of Appeal; and I cannot be sure that I should be still living when the case was tried.”
“The strongest case is not certain to stand,” cried the doctor. “I can see the documents on the subject already. ‘To what degree of relationship ought the disabilities of natural children in the matter of inheritance to extend?’ and the glory of a clever lawyer is to gain a rotten suit.”
“On my honor,” said Bongrand, “I would not take it upon myself to assert that the judges would not widen the interpretation of the law so as to extend its protection of marriage, which is the everlasting foundation of society.”
Without explaining his intentions, the doctor rejected the idea of a trust. But as to the notion of marrying her, which Bongrand suggested as a means of securing her his fortune—
“Poor little thing!” cried the doctor. “I may live fifteen years yet. What would become of her?”
“Well, then, what do you propose?” said Bongrand.
“We must think about it.—I shall see,” replied the old
