“To be sure; she is my own niece. Now, as my brother at sea died unmarried, and Captain Minoret was killed at Monte-Legino, and I am here, that is an end of my father’s family. Have I any relations on my mother’s side? She was a Jean-Massin-Levrault.”
“Of the Jean-Massin-Levraults,” replied Minoret-Levrault, “only one daughter survived, who married Monsieur Crémière-Levrault-Dionis, a dealer in corn and forage, who died on the scaffold. His wife died of a broken heart, and quite ruined, leaving one girl, married to a Levrault-Minoret, a farmer at Montereau, who is doing well; and their daughter has just married a Massin-Levrault, a notary’s clerk at Montargis, where his father is a locksmith.”
“So I have no lack of inheritors,” said the doctor cheerfully, and he determined to walk round Nemours in his nephew’s company.
The Loing meanders through the town, fringed with terraced gardens and neat houses that look as if happiness should inhabit there rather than elsewhere. When the doctor turned out of the High Street into the Rue des Bourgeois, Minoret-Levrault pointed out the property of Monsieur Levrault, a rich iron-master at Paris, who, he said, was lately dead.
“There, uncle,” said he, “is a pretty house to be sold, with a beautiful garden down to the river.”
“Let us go in,” said the doctor, seeing a house at the further side of a paved courtyard, shut in by the walls of houses on either side, hidden by clumps of trees and climbing plants.
“It is built on cellars,” said the doctor as he went in, up a high outside stairway, decorated with blue and white earthenware pots in which the geraniums were still in bloom. The house, like most provincial residences, was pierced by a passage down the middle, leading from the courtyard to the garden; to the right was a single sitting-room with four windows, two to the yard, and two to the garden; but Levrault-Levrault had turned one of these into an entrance to a long conservatory built of brick, leading from the room to the river, where it ended in a hideous Chinese summerhouse.
“Very good!” said the doctor. “By roofing and flooring this conservatory I could make a place for my books, and turn that amazing piece of architecture into a pretty little study.”
On the other side of the passage, looking on to the garden, was a dining-room, decorated in imitation of lacquer, with a black ground and green and gold flowers; this was divided from the kitchen by the staircase. A little pantry behind the lower flight led from the dining-room to the kitchen, which had barred windows looking out on the courtyard. On the first floor were two sets of rooms, and above that wainscoted attics, quite habitable. After a brief inspection of this house, which was covered with green vine-trellis from top to bottom, on the courtyard front as well as on the garden side, with a terrace to the river edged with earthenware flower-vases, the doctor remarked:
“Levrault-Levrault must have spent a good deal here!”
“Oh, his weight in gold!” replied Minoret-Levrault. “He had a passion for flowers—such folly! ‘What profit do they bring?’ as my wife says. As you see, a painter came from Paris to paint his corridor with flowers in fresco. He put in whole plate mirrors everywhere. The ceilings were done up with cornices that cost six francs a foot. In the dining-room, the floor is of the finest inlay—such folly! The house is not worth a penny the more for it.”
“Well, nephew, buy it for me. Let me know when it is settled; here is my address. The rest my lawyer will attend to.—Who lives opposite?” he asked as they went out.
“Some émigrés,” said the postmaster; “a Chevalier de Portenduère.”
When the house was bought, the distinguished physician, instead of coming to live in it, wrote orders to his nephew to let it. Levrault’s Folly was taken by the notary of Nemours, who sold his business to Dionis his head clerk, and who died two years after, leaving the doctor burdened with a house to let just at the time when Napoleon’s fate was being sealed in the neighborhood. The doctor’s heirs, somewhat taken in, had at first supposed his wish to return to be a rich man’s whim, and were in despair when, as they imagined, he had ties in Paris which kept him there, and would rob them of his leavings. However, Minoret-Levrault’s wife seized this opportunity of writing to the doctor. The old man replied that as soon as peace should be signed, the roads cleared of soldiers, and communications free once more, he meant to live at Nemours. He made his appearance there with two of his clients, the architect to the hospital, and an upholsterer who undertook the repairs, the rearrangement of the rooms, and the removal of the furniture. Madame Minoret-Levrault proposed to him as caretaker the cook of the departed notary, and this he agreed to.
When the heirs learned that their uncle, or great-uncle Minoret, was really going to live at Nemours, their families were seized by an absorbing but almost legitimate curiosity, in spite of the political events which just then more especially agitated the district of the Gatinais and Brie. Was their uncle rich? Was he economical or extravagant? Would he leave a fine fortune or nothing at all? Had he invested in annuities? All this they at last came to know, but with infinite difficulty, and by means of much backstairs spying.
After the death of his wife Ursule Mirouët, from 1789 to 1813, the doctor, who in 1805 had been appointed consulting physician to the Emperor, must have made a great deal of money, but no one knew how much; he lived very simply, with no expenses beyond a carriage by the year, and a splendid apartment; he never entertained, and almost always dined out. His housekeeper, furious at not being asked to go with him to Nemours, told Zélie Levrault, the postmaster’s wife, that to her knowledge
