So it was with the liveliest satisfaction that his heirs watched the arrival of their uncle’s handsome furniture and extensive library, and knew him to be an officer of the Legion of Honor, and made Chevalier of the Order of Saint-Michael by the king, in consequence, perhaps, of his retirement, which made way for some favorite. But the architect, the painters, and the upholsterers had finished everything in the most comfortable fashion, and still the doctor came not. Madame Minoret-Levrault, who watched the upholsterer and the architect as though her own property were at stake, discovered, through the inadvertence of a young man sent to put the books in order, that the doctor had in his care an orphan named Ursule. This news caused strange dismay in the town of Nemours. At last the old man came home in about the middle of January 1815, and settled down without any fuss, bringing with him a little girl of ten months and her nurse.
“Ursule cannot be his daughter; he is seventy-one years old!” cried the alarmed expectants.
“Whoever she may be, she will give us plenty of bother,” said Madame Massin.
The doctor’s reception of his grandniece on the mother’s side was cold enough; her husband had just bought the place of registrar to the Justice of the peace, and they were the first to venture on any allusion to the difficulties of their position. Massin and his wife were not rich. Massin’s father, an ironworker at Montargis, had been obliged to compound with his creditors, and worked now, at the age of sixty-seven, as hard as a young man; he would have nothing to leave. Madame Massin’s father, Levrault-Minoret, had lately died at Montereau of grief at the results of the fighting—his farm burned down, his fields destroyed, and his cattle killed and eaten.
“We shall get nothing out of our great-uncle,” said Massin to his wife, who was expecting her second baby.
But the doctor secretly gave them ten thousand francs, with which the registrar, as the friend of the notary and of the usher of Nemours, had begun money-lending; and he made the peasants pay such usurious interest that, at this later day, Goupil knew him to possess about eighty thousand francs of unconfessed capital.
As to his other niece, the doctor, by his influence in Paris, procured the post of receiver of public moneys at Nemours for Crémière, and advanced the necessary security. Though Minoret-Levrault wanted nothing, Zélie, very jealous of her uncle’s liberality to his two nieces, came to see him with her son, then ten years old, whom she was about to send to school in Paris, where, as she said, education was very costly. As physician to Monsieur de Fontanes, the Doctor obtained a half-scholarship at the College of Louis le Grand for his grandnephew, who was placed in the fourth class.
Crémière, Massin, and Minoret-Levrault, all three very common men, were condemned beyond appeal by the doctor during the first two or three months, while they were trying to circumvent their future prospects rather than himself. Persons who act by instinct have this disadvantage as compared with those who have ideas—they are more easily seen through. The inspirations of instinct are too elementary, and appeal too directly to the eye, not to be detected at once; while to penetrate ideas, the device of the mind, equal intelligence is needed on both sides.
Having thus purchased the gratitude of his heirs, and to some extent stopped their mouths, the wily doctor alleged his occupations, his habits, and the care he gave to little Ursule, so as not to receive their visits, without however shutting his door to them: “He liked to dine alone; he went to bed and rose late; he had come back to his native place to enjoy repose and solitude.” These whims in an old man seemed natural enough, and his expectant heirs were satisfied to pay him a weekly visit on Sundays between one and four, to which he vainly tried to put a stop by saying:
“Only come to see me when you want me.”
The doctor, though he did not refuse his advice in serious cases, especially among the poor, would not become physician to the little asylum at Nemours, and declared that he would no longer practise.
“I have killed enough people!” said he, laughing, to the Curé Chaperon, who, knowing his benevolence, pleaded for the poor.
“He is quite an oddity.”
This verdict on Doctor Minoret was the harmless revenge of wounded vanity, for the physician formed a little society for himself of persons who deserve to be contrasted with the heirs. Now, those of the town magnates who thought themselves worthy to swell the Court circle of a man wearing the black ribbon of Saint Michael, nourished a ferment of jealousy against the doctor and his privileged friends which, unhappily, was not impotent.
By a singularity which can only be explained by the saying that “Extremes meet,” the materialist doctor and the priest of Nemours very soon were friends. The old man was very fond of backgammon, the favorite game of the clergy, and the Abbé was a match for the physician. This game thus became the first bond between
