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 cause for remorse or repentance, Minoret enjoyed a perfect serenity. In carrying out his kindnesses without any hope of a heavenly harvest, he considered himself loftier than the catholic, whom he always accused of usury with God.

“But,” the Abbé Chaperon would say, “if all men would devote themselves to this trade, you must confess that society would be perfect. There would be no more poor. To be charitable in your way, one must be a great philosopher; you raise yourself to your doctrine by reasoning, you are a social exception; whilst it suffices to be a Christian to be charitable according to ours. With you, it is an effort; with us, it is natural.”

“That means, curé, that I think and you feel, that’s all.”

And yet, at twelve years of age, Ursule, whose naturally feminine penetration and cleverness had been trained by a superior education, and whose reason, in all its bloom, was enlightened by a religious spirit, of all kinds of spirits the most delicate, ended by understanding that her godfather believed neither in a future, nor in the immortality of the soul, neither in providence nor in God. Plied with questions by the innocent creature, it was impossible for the doctor to hide this fatal secret any longer. Ursule’s artless consternation made him smile at first; but, seeing her sometimes sad, he understood the depth of affection that this sadness betokened. Despotic love has a horror of any kind of disagreement even in ideas that are alien to it Sometimes,


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 the doctor yielded to his adopted daughter’s softly, tenderly spoken arguments as if they were caresses, breathed by the warmest and purest affection. Believers and unbelievers speak two different languages and can never agree. The godchild, in pleading God’s cause, would ill-treat her godfather just as a spoilt child sometimes ill-treats its mother. The curé gently reproved Ursule, and told her that God reserved the right to humble these haughty spirits. The young girl answered that David had discomfited Goliath. This religious difference and the regrets of the child who wanted to win her guardian to God were the only sorrows of this home life, so sweet and satisfied, hidden away from the eyes of the inquisitive little town. Ursule was growing and developing, and becoming the modest and religiously educated young girl that Désiré had admired coming out of church. The culture of flowers in the garden, music, her guardian’s pleasures and all the little attentions that Ursule paid him—for she had relieved La Bougival by attending to him—filled the hours, days and months of this quiet existence. Nevertheless, for a year the doctor had been anxious about some trouble with Ursule; but the cause had been so much expected, that he did not worry himself further than to watch over her health. And yet, this sagacious observer and profound practitioner thought that these troubles had had some sort of echo in the mind. He watched his ward as a mother would, but could not see anyone around her who was

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 Rh

{{Hoyt quote | num = 7 | text = Audentem Forsque Venusque juvant. Fortune and love favour the brave. | author = Ovid | work = Ars Amatoria. | place = Bk. I. 608. | seealso = (See also {{sc|Dryden, Schiller, Terence, Vergil) | note = | topic = | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = 8 | text = Omne solum forti patria est. | trans = The brave find a home in every land. | author = Ovid | work = Fasti. | place = I. 493. | note = | topic = | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = 9 | text = Audentes deus ipse juvat. | trans = God himself favors the brave. | author = Ovid | work = Metamorphoses. | place = X. 586. | note = | topic = | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = 10 | text = Who combats bravely is not therefore brave: He dreads a death-bed like the meanest slave. | author = Pope | work = Moral Essays. | place = Epistle I. L. 115. | topic = Bravery | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = 11 | text = Dem Muthigen hilft Gott. | trans = God helps the brave. | author = Schiller | work = Wilhelm Tell. | place = I. 2. 132. | seealso = (See also {{sc|Ovid}}) | topic = Bravery | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = 12 | text = Come one, come all! this rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I. Scott—Lady of the Lake Canto V. St. 10. He did look far Into the service of the time, and was Discipled of the bravest; he lasted long; But on us both did haggish age steal on And wore us out of act. All's Well That Ends Well. Act I. Sc2. L. 26. | author = | work = | place = | note = | topic = | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = | text = What's brave, what's noble, Let's do it after the high Roman fashion, And make death proud to take us. Antony and Cleopatra. Act IV. Sc. 15. L.86. | author = | work = | place = | note = | topic = | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = 15 | text = Fortes et strenuos etiam contra fortunam insistere, timidos et ignores ad desperationem formidine properare. The brave and bold persist even against fortune ; the timid and cowardly rush to despair through fear alone. Tacitus—Annates. II. 46. | author = | work = | place = | note = | topic = | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = | text = Fortes fortuna adjuvat. Fortune favors the brave. Terence—Phormio. I. 4. 26. Quoted as a | seealso = (See also {{sc|Ovid}}) | topic = | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = | text = Bravery never goes out of fashion. Thackeray—Four Georges. George Second. | author = | work = | place = | note = | topic = | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = | text = Audentes fortuna juvat. Fortune favours the daring. Vergil—Æneid. X. 284 and 458. Same phrase or idea found in Cicero—De Finibus. III. 4. and Tusc. II. 4. Claudianus—Ad Probin. XLIH. 9. Ennius—Annates. V. 262. Livy—Bk. IV. 37; Bk. VII. 29; Bk. XXXIV. 37. Menander—In Stob^jus Flor. VII. P. 206. Ed. 1709. Ovid—Metamorphoses. X. 11. 27. Pliny the Younger —Epistles. VI. 16. Tacitus—Annales. IV. 17. | seealso = (See also {{sc|Ovro)

BRIBERY

{{Hoyt quote | num = | text = And ye sail walk in silk attire, And siller hae to spare, Gin ye'll consent to be his bride, Nor think o' Donald mair. Susanna Blamhie—The Siller Crown. | author = | work = | place = | note = | topic = | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = | text = 'Tis pleasant purchasing our fellow-creatures; And all are to be sold, if you consider Their passions, and are dext'rous; some by features Are brought up, others by a warlike leader; Some by a place—as tend their years or natures; The most by ready cash—but all have prices, From crowns to kicks, according to their vices. Byron—Don Juan. Canto V. St. 27. | seealso = (See also {{sc|Walpole}}) | topic = | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = | text = Flowery oratory he [Walpole] despised. He ascribed to the interested views of themselves or their relatives the declarations of pretended patriots, of whom he said, "All those men have their price." Coxe—Memoirs of Walpole. Vol. IV. P. 369. | seealso = (See also {{sc|Byron, Walpole}}) | topic = | page = 83 }}

{{Hoyt quote | num = | text = A hoarseness caused by swallowing gold and silver. Demosthenes, bribed not to speak against Harpalus, he pretended to have lost his voice. Plutarch quotes the accusation as above. Also elsewhere refers to it as the "silver quinsey."


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 worthy of inspiring her with love, and so his anxiety passed.

At this juncture, one month before the day upon which this drama commences, one of those events took place in the doctor’s intellectual life which ploughs up the field of conviction to the chalk and overturns it; but this event requires a brief account of several incidents of his medical career, which will moreover give fresh interest to this story.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, science was as entirely divided about Mesmer’s appearance, as art had been about that of Gluck. After having discovered magnetism, Mesmer came to France, where from time immemorial inventors have flocked to obtain recognition of their discoveries. France, thanks to her intelligible language, is in some sort the trumpet of the world.

“If homeopathy reaches Paris, it is safe,” said Hahnemann lately.

“Go to France,” said Monsieur de Metternich to Gall, “and, if they jeer at your bumps, you will be famous.”

Mesmer had, then, followers and antagonists as keen as were the Piccinists against the Gluckists. Learned France was roused and a solemn discussion opened. Before pronouncing any decision the Faculty of Medicine in a body proscribed Mesmer’s socalled charlatanism, his tub, his divining rod and his theories. But, it must be said, this German unfortunately compromised his magnificent discovery by preposterous pecuniary claims. Mesmer


text:
The New International Encyclopædia/Retzsch, Moritz

RETZSCH,, (1779-1857). A German painter and engraver. He was born in Dresden, December 9, 1779, and studied at the academy of his native city, where he became a professor in 1824, and died July 11, 1857. Although treating romantic subjects, he belongs to the followers of Mengs. His chief celebrity rests upon his illustrations in outline of the great German poets, Schiller, Goethe, etc., whom he interpreted with great vigor and sympathy. His etchings of Goethe's Faust (26 plates, 1884)

are particularly well known, not only in his own country, but also in France and England. Among other important works are the outline illustrations of Schiller's Lied von der Glocke (43 plates, 1884); his Shakespeare Gallery (80 plates, 1860); and his outline drawings of Bürger's Ballads (15 plates, 1872). His oil paintings, treating classical subjects, are of little interest, but he succeeded better with portraits.


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 failed through uncertainty about facts, through ignorance of the rôle played by hitherto unobserved imponderables in Nature, through his inaptitude for investigating the different sides of a triple-faced science. Magnetism has more applications; in Mesmer’s hands it was, as regards its prospects, what principle is to effect. But, if the inventor was lacking in genius, it is sad for human reason and for France to have to state that a contemporary science of the societies, cultivated equally by Egypt and Chaldea, by Greece and India, experienced in Paris in the middle of the eighteenth century the fate that truth had met with in the person of Galileo in the sixteenth century, and that magnetism was scouted by the united attacks of religious people and materialistic philosophers, alike alarmed. Magnetism, Christ’s favorite science and one of the divine powers remitted to the apostles, seemed to have been no more foreseen by the Church than by the disciples of Jean-Jacques, Voltaire, Locke and Condillac. The Encyclopedia and the clergy could not reconcile themselves to this old human power which seemed so new. The miracles of the Convulsionaries, hushed up by the Church and the indifference of scholars, in spite of the valuable pamphlets of the Councillor Carré de Montgeron, were the first summons to make experiments with the human fluids which give the power to oppose interior forces sufficiently to annul the suffering caused by exterior agents. But it was necessary to recognize the existence of intangible, invisible and imponderable


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 fluids, three negations which the science of that time insisted upon considering as a definition of space. In modern philosophy, space does not exist. Ten feet of space and the world would crumble to pieces! According to materialists particularly, the world is full, everything is connected, everything is linked together and everything is contrived. “The world,” said Diderot, “as the result of chance, is more explicable than God. The multiplicity of causes and the measureless number of rays that chance implies explains the creation. Given the Eneid and all the characters necessary to its composition, and given the time and the space, by means of tossing up the letters, I should arrive at the combination of the Eneid.” Those wretched men, who deified anything rather than acknowledge God, also shrank before the infinite divisibility of matter that the nature of imponderable forces admits of. Locke and Condillac then delayed for fifty years the immense progress that the natural sciences now make under the idea of unity due to the great Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Several upright men, without any system, convinced by facts conscientiously considered, persisted in Mesmer’s doctrine, which recognized in man the existence of a penetrating influence, leading from man to man, worked by the will, healing by the abundance of fluid, the exercise of which constituted a duel between two wills, between an evil to be cured and the will to cure it. The phenomena of somnambulism, barely surmised by Mesmer, were due to Messieurs de Puységur and Deleuze;


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 but the Revolution put a stop to these discoveries which gave success to the cause of the scholars and mockers. A few doctors were amongst the believers. Until their death these dissenters were persecuted by their fellow-physicians. The respectable body of Paris doctors displayed all the harshness of the religious wars towards the Mesmerists, and were as cruel in their hatred for them as it was possible to be in that time of Voltairean tolerance. The orthodox doctors refused to consult with those doctors who favored the Mesmeric heresy. In 1820, these so-called arch-heretics were still the object of this secret proscription. The miseries and storms of the Revolution did not extinguish this scientific hatred. Only priests, magistrates and doctors can hate like that. The gown is always terrible. But are not ideas also much more implacable than things? Doctor Bouvard, one of Minoret’s friends, believed in the new faith, and persisted until his death in the science to which he had sacrificed his peace in life, for he was one of the bêtes-noires of the Faculty of Paris. Minoret, one of the stoutest upholders of the Encyclopedists, the most formidable enemy of Deslon, Mesmer’s provost, and whose pen carried enormous weight in this dispute, quarreled irrevocably with his fellow-physician; he went even further, and persecuted him. His treatment of Bouvard was to cause him the only regret that troubled the serenity of his declining age. Since Doctor Minoret’s retirement to Nemours, the science of imponderables, the only name that tallies with


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 magnetism, which is so closely allied by the nature of its phenomena to light and electricity, was making immense progress, in spite of the ceaseless jeers of Parisian science. Phrenology and physiognomy, twin sciences of Gall and Lavater, of which one is to the other what cause is to effect, proved to the eyes of more than one physiologist the traces of an imperceptible fluid, the base of the phenomena of the human will, the source of the passions and habits, the forms of face and those of the skull. In short, magnetic facts, and somnambulistic miracles, those of divination and entrancement which permitted penetration into the spiritual world, were accumulating. The strange and well-established story of the apparitions of farmer Martin, and this peasant’s interview with Louis XVIII.; the knowledge of Swedenborg’s relations with the dead, so seriously established in Germany; Walter Scott’s accounts of the effects of second sight; the exercise of the prodigious faculties of several fortune-tellers who jumble up chiromancy, cartomancy and horoscopy into one science; the feats of catalepsy and those of the working of the properties of the diaphragm by certain morbid affections; these phenomena, all emanating from the same source and at least curious, were undermining many doubts and leading the most indifferent to the ground of experiment. Minoret knew nothing of this march of intelligence, so great in the north of Europe, still so feeble in France, where those facts were nevertheless taking place, which were styled marvelous by superficial


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 observers, and which fall, like stones to the bottom of the sea, into the turmoil of Parisian events.

At the beginning of this year, the anti-mesmerist’s peace was disturbed by the following letter:

“Every friendship, even if lost, has its rights which are with difficulty prescribed. I know that you are alive, and I retain less recollection of our enmity than of our happy days in the wretched lodging of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Just as I am about to leave this world I am anxious to prove to you that magnetism will constitute one of the most important sciences, if, however, all science is not one. I can overwhelm your incredulity with positive proofs. Perhaps I may be indebted to your curiosity for the pleasure of shaking your hand once more, as we used to do before Mesmer.

“Always yours,

“BOUVARD.”

Stung as a lion is stung by a gad-fly, the anti-mesmerist flew to Paris and left his card at old Bouvard’s house, in Rue Férou, near Saint-Sulpice. Bouvard left a card at his hotel, writing on it: “Tomorrow, at nine o’clock, Rue Saint-Honoré, opposite the Assumption.” Minoret, grown young once more, did not sleep. He went to see the old doctors of his acquaintance, and asked them if the world was upside down, if there was a College of Medicine, if the four Faculties still survived. The doctors reassured him by saying that the old spirit of resistance still existed; only, instead of persecuting, the Academy of Medicine and the Academy of Science grossly ridiculed whilst ranking the magnetic feats


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 with the surprises of Comus, Comte, and De Bosco, and as jugglery, conjuring and what is known as entertaining physics. This talk in no way deterred old Minoret from keeping the appointment made by old Bouvard. After forty-four years of enmity, the two opponents met again under a gateway in the Rue Saint-Honoré. Frenchmen are too continually distracted to hate each other long. In Paris particularly, events enlarge space too much and by politics, literature and science make life too vast for men not to be able to find countries to conquer where their pretensions may reign at ease. Hatred requires so many forces ready armed, that one has to keep in touch with them when one tries to hate very long. Moreover the body only can have any recollection of it. After forty-four years, Robespierre and Danton would embrace each other. And yet, neither of the doctors offered his hand. Bouvard was the first to say to Minoret:

“You look wonderfully well.”

“Yes, not bad, and you?” replied Minoret once the ice was broken.

“I? Just as you see.”

“Has magnetism prevented you from dying?” asked Minoret in a pleasant tone, but without bitterness.

“No, but it nearly prevented my living.”

“Then you are not rich?” said Minoret.

“Bah!” said Bouvard.

“Well, I am rich,” cried Minoret.


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 “It is not your fortune, but your conviction that I want. Come along,” answered Bouvard.

“Oh! you obstinate man!” cried Minoret.

The Mesmerist dragged the unbeliever into a rather dark stairway and made him go up carefully to the fourth story.

Just then an extraordinary man was making himself known in Paris, gifted by faith with an incalculable power, and making use of the magnetic powers in all their applications. Not only did this great unknown, who is yet living, himself suddenly and radically cure the most cruel and most inveterate illnesses from a distance, like the Saviour of mankind did formerly; but he would also produce the most curious instantaneous phenomena of somnambulism by mastering the most rebellious wills. The physiognomy of this stranger, who is said to depend only upon God and to communicate with the angels, like Swedenborg, resembles a lion; a concentrated, irresistible strength flashes from it. His singularly distorted features have a terrible and startling appearance; his voice, which comes from the depths of his being, is as if charged with magnetic fluid, it penetrates the hearer through every pore. Disgusted by the public ingratitude after thousands of cures, he has fallen back into impenetrable solitude, into voluntary nothingness. His all-powerful hand, which has restored dying daughters to their mothers, fathers to their weeping children, idolizing mistresses to their frenzied lovers; which has cured sick people given up by the doctors,


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 which caused hymns to be sung in synagogues, temples and churches by priests of different creeds all brought to the same God by the same miracle; which softened the agonies of the dying, to whom life was impossible; this sovereign hand, the sun of life which dazzled the closed eyes of somnambulists, will not raise itself to restore an heir presumptive to a queen. Wrapt in the memory of his good deeds as if in a shining shroud, he refuses to see anybody and lives in the skies. But, at the dawn of his reign, almost astonished at his own power, this man, whose disinterestedness has equaled his power, permitted a few inquisitive people to be witnesses of his miracles. The fame of this celebrated man, which was unbounded and which might revive again to-morrow, roused Doctor Bouvard at the brink of the grave. The persecuted mesmerist could at last see the most radiant phenomena of this science, guarded in his heart like a treasure. The misfortunes of this old man had touched the great stranger, who allowed him several privileges. And so Bouvard, going up the stairs, suffered his old antagonist’s jests with malicious joy. His only answer was, “You will see! You will see!” and those little tosses of the head indulged in by people who are sure of their facts.

The two doctors entered a more than modest apartment. Bouvard went to talk for a moment in a bedroom adjoining the drawing-room where Minoret, whose mistrust was awakening, was waiting;


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 but Bouvard came to fetch him directly and ushered him into this room occupied by the mysterious Swedenborgian and a woman seated in an armchair. This woman did not get up at all, and did not seem to notice the entrance of the two old men.

“What! no more tub?” said Minoret, smiling.

“Nothing but the power of God,” gravely replied the Swedenborgian, who appeared to Minoret to be about fifty years old.

The three men sat down, and the stranger began to talk. They talked about the weather, to the great surprise of old Minoret, who thought he was being humbugged. The Swedenborgian questioned the visitor upon his scientific opinions, and evidently seemed to be taking time to examine him.

“You come here out of mere curiosity, monsieur,” he finally said. “I am not in the habit of prostituting a power, which, in my conviction, emanates from God; if I were to make a bad or frivolous use of it, it might be withdrawn from me. Nevertheless, it is a question, so Monsieur Bouvard tells me, of changing a contrary opinion to our own, and of enlightening an honest scholar; so I will gratify you. This woman whom you see,” he said, pointing to the strange woman, “is in a somnambulistic sleep. According to the confessions and manifestations of all somnambulists, this condition constitutes a delicious life during which the inmost being, freed from all the fetters which are brought into the exercise of its faculties by visible nature, wanders through the world which we wrongfully call


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 invisible. Sight and hearing then exercise themselves more perfectly than in the condition called waking, and possibly without the aid of those organs which are the sheaths for those luminous swords called sight and hearing! For a man put into this condition, distances and material objects do not exist, or are traversed by a life that is within us, and for which our body is a reservoir, a necessary prop, an envelope. Terms are wanting for such freshly recovered effects; for nowadays the words imponderable, intangible, invisible, have no meaning relative to the fluid whose action is demonstrated by magnetism. Light is weighable by its heat, which, by penetrating bodies, increases their volume, and electricity is certainly only too tangible. We have condemned things instead of accusing the imperfection of our agents.”

“Is she asleep?” said Minoret, examining the woman, who seemed to him to belong to the inferior class.

“Her body is in some degree annihilated,” replied the Swedenborgian. “Ignorant people take this condition for sleep. But she will prove to you that there exists a spiritual universe and that the soul does not recognize the laws of the material universe. I will send her to any region that you wish, twenty leagues away or to China; she will tell you what is happening there.”

“Send her to my home only, at Nemours,” Minoret requested.

“I will have nothing to do with it,” replied the


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 mysterious man. “Give me your hand; you shall be both actor and spectator, cause and effect.”

He took Minoret’s passive hand; he held it for a moment whilst appearing to be collecting himself, and with his other hand seized the hand of the woman sitting in the armchair; then he placed the doctor’s in that of the woman, whilst signing to the old unbeliever to seat himself beside this priestess without a tripod. Minoret noticed a slight quivering in this woman’s exceedingly calm features when they were united by the Swedenborgian; but this movement, although marvelous in its effect, was wonderfully simple.

“Obey this gentleman,” said this person, extending his hand over the woman’s head, who seemed to inhale both light and life from him, “and remember that all you do for him will please me.”

“Now you can speak to her,” said he to Minoret.

“Go to Nemours, Rue des Bourgeois, to my house,” said the doctor.

“Give her time, leave your hand in hers until she proves to you by what she tells you that she has got there,” said Bouvard to his old friend.

“I see a river,” replied the woman in a feeble voice whilst seeming to be looking within herself with profound attention, in spite of her lowered lids, “I see a pretty garden—”

“Why do you go in by the river and the garden?” said Minoret.

“Because they are there.”

“Who?”


text: Portal talk:Greece

title: Portal talk:Greece


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 “The young girl and the nurse of whom you are thinking.”

“What is the garden like?” asked Minoret.

“On the right as you go in by the little stairway leading down to the river, there is a long brick gallery in which I see books, and ending in a rambling barracks decorated with little wooden bells and red eggs. On the left, the wall is covered with a clump of climbing plants, Virginia creeper, and Virginia jasmine. In the centre is a little sundial. There are many pots of flowers. Your ward examines her flowers, shows them to her nurse, makes holes with a dibble and puts in some seeds—The nurse is raking the paths—Although this young girl is as pure as an angel, there is a dawning of love within her, faint as the morning twilight.”

“For whom?” asked the doctor, who till now, was persuaded that no one could tell him anything without being somnambulistic. He always believed there was some jugglery.

“You know nothing about it, although you were lately somewhat anxious when she grew into a woman,” she said smiling. “The working of her heart has followed that of Nature—”

“And it is a common working-woman who speaks like this?” cried the old doctor.

“In this state people express themselves with peculiar clearness,” replied Bouvard.

“But whom does Ursule love?”

“Ursule does not know that she is in love,” replied the woman, with a little movement of the head,


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 “she is much too angelic to know desire or anything whatever about love; but she is engrossed by him, she thinks of him, she even resists it, but returns to it in spite of her determination to refrain.—She is at the piano—”

“But who is it?”

“The son of a lady who lives opposite—”

“Madame de Portenduère?”

“Portenduère, do you say?” rejoined the somnambulist, “I daresay. But there is no danger, he is not in the country.”

“Have they spoken to each other?” asked the doctor.

“Never. They have looked at each other. She thinks him charming. In fact, he is a handsome man and has a good heart. She has seen him from her window, they have also seen each other in church; but the young man thinks no more about it.”

“His name?”

“Ah! to tell you that, I must read it or hear it—He is called Savinien, she has just uttered his name; she finds it sweet to pronounce; she has already looked out his birthday in her almanac, she has put a little red dot against it—Such childishness! Oh! she will love well, but with as much purity as strength; she is not a girl to love twice, and love will tinge her soul and penetrate it so thoroughly that it will drive out every other feeling.”

“Where do you see that?”

“Within her. She will know how to suffer; she


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 has this from someone, for her father and mother have suffered much!”

This last remark upset the doctor, who was less staggered than surprised. It may be as well to note here that ten or fifteen minutes elapsed between each of the woman’s sentences, during which her attention became more and more concentrated. They could see her looking! Her forehead presented an extraordinary appearance; the inward efforts were depicted there, it cleared or contracted through some power the effects of which Minoret had only remarked in dying persons at those moments in which they are gifted with the power of prophecy. Several times she made gestures which were like Ursule’s.

“Oh! question her,” resumed the mysterious person addressing Minoret, “she will tell you secrets that you alone can know.”

“Does Ursule love me?” continued Minoret.

“Almost as much as she does God,” she said with a smile, “she is also very unhappy about your unbelief. You do not believe in God, as if you could prevent Him from being! His word fills the world! In this you are the only cause of anxiety to this poor child—Ah! she is playing scales; she wishes she were an even better musician than she is, she frets about it. This is what she is thinking: ‘If I could sing well, if I had a beautiful voice, when he comes to his mother’s my voice would reach his ears.’”

Doctor Minoret took out his pocket-book and noted down the exact time.


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 “Can you tell me what sort of seeds she has sown?”

“Mignonette, sweet peas, balsam—”

“And the last?”

“Larkspur.”

“Where is my money?”

“At your notary’s; but you invest it cautiously without losing a single day’s interest.”

“Yes; but where is the money I keep at Nemours for my half-yearly expenditure?”

“You put it in a big book bound in red, entitled Pandects of Justinian, volume II., between the last two leaves; the book is above the glass-paneled sideboard in the folio division. You have a whole row of it. Your funds are in the last volume, on the salon side. Stay! volume III. is before volume II. But you have no money, it is—”

“Bills of one thousand francs?” asked the doctor.

“I cannot see clearly, they are folded up. No, there are two bills of five hundred francs each.”

“Can you see them?”

“Yes.”

“What are they like?”

“One is very yellow and old, the other white and almost new.—”

This last part of the examination startled Doctor Minoret. He looked at Bouvard stupefied; but Bouvard and the Swedenborgian, accustomed to the astonishment of unbelievers, were talking in a low voice without appearing either surprised or astounded. Minoret begged them to let him return


text: Portal talk:Grenada

title: Portal talk:Grenada


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 after dinner. The anti-Mesmerist wanted to collect himself, to recover his profound terror, to test afresh this immense power, to submit it to decisive experiments, to put it questions whose solution should remove every kind of doubt.

“Be here at nine o’clock to-night,” said the stranger; “I will come back for you.”

Doctor Minoret was in such a violent state, that he left without bowing, followed by Bouvard, who cried out to him at intervals:

“Well? Well?”

“I think I am mad, Bouvard,” replied Minoret on the step of the gateway. “If the woman has told the truth about Ursule, and as Ursule is the only person in the world who knows what this sorceress has revealed to me, you will be right. I wish I had wings to go to Nemours to verify her assertions. But I shall hire a carriage and leave to-night at ten o’clock. Ah! I am losing my head.”

“What would happen to you if, having known an invalid incurable for many years, you saw him cured in five seconds; if you saw this great magnetizer make perspiration pour profusely from a person who had ringworm; if you saw him make a crippled woman walk?”

“Let us dine together, Bouvard, and do not leave me until nine o’clock. I want to try a decisive unimpeachable experiment.”

“Very well, my old friend,” replied the mesmerist doctor.

The two enemies, reconciled, went to dine at the


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 Palais-Royal. After an animated conversation which helped Minoret to divert the fever of ideas that was ravaging his brain, Bouvard said to him:

“If you acknowledge that this woman has the faculty of reducing or of traversing space, if you admit the certainty that, from the Assumption, she hears and sees all that is being said and done at Nemours, then you must admit all the other magnetic effects, which to an unbeliever are as incredible as these are. So ask her for one proof only that shall satisfy you, for you may think that we procured all this information; but we could not know, for instance, what will take place at nine o’clock, in your house, in your ward’s room; remember or write down what the somnambulist will see or hear, and then hurry home. This little Ursule, whom I do not know at all, is not our accomplice; and, if she has said or done what you have written, then bow your head, proud Sicambrus!”

The two friends returned to the room, and there found the somnambulist, who did not recognize Doctor Minoret. This woman’s eyes gently closed under the hand which the Swedenborgian stretched over her at intervals, and she resumed the attitude in which Minoret had seen her before dinner. When the woman’s hand and the doctor’s had been placed in communication, he begged her to tell him all that was passing at his house in Nemours at that moment.

“What is Ursule doing?” he said.

“She is undressed, she has finished putting on


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 her curl-papers, she is kneeling on her prie-Dieu, in front of an ivory crucifix fastened on a red velvet panel.”

“What is she saying?”

“She is saying her evening prayers, she commends herself to God, beseeches Him to keep her mind from evil thoughts; she examines her conscience and goes over all she has done during the day, in order to know if she has failed in any of His commandments or those of the church. In fact, she sifts her soul, poor dear little creature!”—The somnambulist’s eyes were wet—“She has not committed any sin, but she reproaches herself with having thought too much about Monsieur Savinien,” she continued, “she breaks off to wonder what he is doing in Paris, and prays God to make him happy. She finishes with you and says a prayer aloud.”

“Can you repeat it?”

“Yes.”

Minoret took his pencil and wrote, at the somnambulist’s dictation, the following prayer, evidently composed by the Abbé Chaperon:

“‘O God! if Thou art pleased with Thy servant, who adores Thee, and prays to Thee with as much love as fervor, who tries in every way to keep Thy Holy Commandments, who would gladly die as did Thy Son to glorify Thy name, and who would dwell within Thy shadow, Thou who readest all hearts, graciously deign to open my godfather’s eyes, set him in the way of salvation, and impart to him Thy grace so that he may live his last days in Thee;


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The New International Encyclopædia/Reuchlin, Johann

REUCHLIN,, , known also by the Greek form of his name, (1455-1522). The first humanist of Germany and one of the earliest promoters of Hebrew studies in that country. He was born at Pforzheim, in Baden, February 22, 1455. He began his studies at his native place, continued them at Freiburg, and in 1473 accompanied Prince Frederick of Baden to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Johann Wessel (q.v.) and began to study Greek. The next year he went to Basel, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1475 and his master's in 1477. He then revisited France, studied law at Orleans and Poitiers, and gave lectures in Greek and Latin. In 1481 he established himself at Tübingen as teacher of jurisprudence and literature. He entered the service of Eberhard, first Duke of Württemberg, accompanied him to Italy in 1482, and was employed in a number of public services. He visited Italy again in 1490. In 1492 the Emperor made him a count of the German Empire, and about the same time he began the study of Hebrew under a learned Jew who was Imperial physician. In 1496, after Eberhard's death, he went to Heidelberg, and made a third visit to Italy in the service of the Elector Palatine in 1498. At Rome he applied himself with renewed vigor to the study of Hebrew and Greek. He returned to Württemberg in 1499, and in 1502 was made a member of the Swabian confederate tribunal, retaining the office till 1513. In consequence of a quarrel between Ulrich, Duke of Württemberg, and the Swabian League, he went to Ingolstadt in 1519 and taught Greek and Hebrew at the university. When the plague broke out at Ingolstadt two years later he returned to Tübingen, intending to devote himself exclusively to study, but soon fell sick, and died at Liebenzell, June 30, 1522. Reuchlin is justly regarded as the father of Greek and Hebrew studies in Germany. He had great ability as a teacher, and, although for most of his life he held no professorial chair and was not always free to lecture openly, nevertheless he directed and encouraged the study of both languages in his generation. His devotion to Hebrew was the cause of the most interesting and important incident of his life. In 1510 one Johann Pfefferkorn, a baptized Jew, called upon princes and subjects to prosecute the religion of his fathers, and especially urged the Emperor to burn or confiscate all Jewish books except the Bible. Reuchlin remonstrated, maintaining that only books directly written against Christianity should be destroyed. This attitude drew upon him the enmity of the Dominicans, and particularly of the Inquisitor Jakob van Hoogstraten (q.v.). Reuchlin's opponents controlled the universities of Paris, Louvain, Erfurt, and Mainz; but many of the distinguished and independent thinkers of Germany were on the side of the scholar. Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen in particular gave him support and protection, the latter threatening Hoogstraten and the monks with terrible vengeance if they did not cease to persecute “his teacher, Doctor Reuchlin, that wise, experienced, pious, and ingenious man.” The Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum (q.v.) was an outcome of the contest. While there was much in Reuchlin's character and experience to draw him toward the Reformation, he never openly joined the movement, and late in life declared against Luther. Melanchthon was his great-nephew. Heuchlin's works include editions and Latin translations of Greek texts: a Vocabularius Latinus Breviloquus (1475); a manuscript Greek grammar (not published ) ; the Rudimenta Linguæ Hebraicæ (1506), which, with pardonable pride, he declares to be “the first attempt to execute a grammar of the Hebrew tongue.” and made “without any foreign help;” De Accentibus et Orthographi Hebræorum Libri III. (1518); an edition of the seven Penitential Psalms (1512), the first Hebrew book printed in Germany; De Verbo Mirifico (1494); and De Arte Cabbalistica (1517), works on the Cabbala; Scenica Progymnasmata (1497), and Sergius (1507), Latin satirical comedies, not without humor and literary merit; the Augenspiegel (1511; ed. by Mayerhoff, Berlin, 1836), a reply to a book by Pfefferkorn (the Handspiegel). Two of Reuchlin's Greek treatises, the De Quatuor Idiomatibus and Colloquia græca, have been published by Horawitz under the title Griechische Studien (Berlin, 1884). The best biography of Reuchlin is Geiger, Johann Reuchlin; sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig, 1871); consult also: id., Johann Reuchlins Briefwechsel (Tübingen, 1875); Horawitz, Zur Biographie und Korrespondenz J. Reuchlins (Vienna, 1877); Holstein, J. Reuchlins Komödien (Halle, 1888); Strauss, Ulrich von Hutten (6th ed., Leipzig, 1895), for the controversy about the Jewish books.


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 keep him from all harm and let me suffer in his stead! Good Saint-Ursule, my beloved patroness, and Thou, Divine Mother of God, queen of Heaven, archangels and saints of Paradise, hear me, and join Thy intercessions to mine, and have pity upon us!’”

The somnambulist imitated the child’s innocent gestures of holy inspirations so perfectly, that Doctor Minoret’s eyes were full of tears.

“Does she say anything else?” asked Minoret.

“Yes.”

“Repeat it.”

“‘Dear godfather! who will play backgammon with him in Paris?’ She blows out the candle, lays her head down, and goes to sleep. Now she is off! She looks very pretty in her little nightcap.”

Minoret bowed to the great stranger, shook hands with Bouvard, rapidly descended the stairs, and ran to a coach-stand which then existed under the gateway of a hôtel that has since been demolished to make way for the Rue d’Alger; there he found a driver and asked him if he would agree to start at once for Fontainebleau. Once the fare was settled and accepted, the old man, once more revived, set out immediately. According to his agreement, he rested the horse at Essonne, caught the diligence for Nemours, found a place in it, and dismissed his cabman. Reaching home about five in the morning, he went to bed amidst the ruins of all his previous ideas about physiology, nature, and metaphysics, and slept until nine o’clock, so greatly had his journey tired him.


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 *

Upon waking, quite sure that, since his return, no one had crossed the threshold of his door, the doctor proceeded, not without an unconquerable dread, to the verification of facts. He himself was ignorant of the difference between the two bank bills and the change of the volumes of the Pandects. The somnambule had seen well. He rang for La Bougival.

“Tell Ursule to come to speak to me,” he said, sitting down in the middle of his library.

The child came, ran to him and kissed him; the doctor took her on his knee, where she sat mingling her beautiful fair locks with her old friend’s white hairs.

“Is anything the matter, godfather?”

“Yes, but promise me, by your salvation, to answer my questions frankly, without evasion.”

Ursule blushed right up to her forehead.

“Oh! I shall not ask you anything that you cannot tell me,” he continued, seeing the shame of first love troubling the hitherto childish purity of those beautiful eyes.

“Speak, godfather.”

“With what thought did you finish your evening prayers yesterday, and at what time did you say them?”

“It was a quarter-past nine, half-past nine.” (107)


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 “Well then, repeat me your last prayer.”

The young girl hoped that her voice might communicate her faith to the unbeliever; she left her place, knelt down, joined her hands fervently, a radiant light illumined her face, she looked at the old man and said:

“What I asked of God yesterday, I asked this morning, and I will ask for it until it is granted me.”

Then she repeated her prayer with renewed and more powerful expression; but, to her great astonishment, her godfather interrupted her by finishing the prayer.

“All right, Ursule,” said the doctor, taking his godchild on his knee again. “When you went to sleep with your head on the pillow, did you not say to yourself, ‘That dear godfather! who will play backgammon with him in Paris?’”

Ursule sprang up as if the trump of the Judgment Day had sounded in her ears; she gave a cry of terror; her dilated eyes gazed at the old man with horrible fixity.

“Who are you, godfather? From whom do you get such a power?” she asked, supposing that, not to believe in God, he must have made a compact with the angel of darkness.

“What did you sow in your garden yesterday?”

“Mignonette, sweet peas and balsam.”

“And lastly some larkspur?”

She fell on her knees.

“Do not frighten me, godfather; but you were here, were you not?”


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 “Am I not always with you?” replied the doctor, jesting in order to respect this innocent creature’s reason, “let us go to your room.”

He gave her his arm and went up the stairs.

“Your legs are trembling, my dear friend,” she said.

“Yes, I am as if thunderstruck.”

“Are you at last going to believe in God?’ she cried with artless joy, showing the tears in her eyes.

The old man looked at the simple, pretty room he had arranged for Ursule. On the floor, a plain, cheap, green carpet that she kept in exquisite cleanliness; on the walls, a pale gray paper strewn with roses and their green foliage; the windows, which looked on the courtyard, were hung with calico curtains trimmed with a band of some pink stuff; between the two windows, under a long, high glass, was a gilded wooden bracket covered with marble upon which stood a blue Sèvres vase that she used to fill with flowers; and, opposite the fireplace, a little chest of drawers in charming marquetry with a top of the marble known as breccia of Aleppo. The bed, hung with old chintz and with curtains of pinklined chintz, was one of those duchess beds so common in the eighteenth century, and which was ornamented with a tuft of feathers carved above the four fluted posts at each angle. An old clock, encased in a sort of tortoise-shell monument encrusted with ivory arabesques, adorned the mantelpiece, of which the marble top and candlesticks,


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 and the glass with its gray painted frame presented a remarkable harmony of tone, color and style. A big wardrobe, the doors of which were covered with landscapes made in different woods, some of which were of a green tint, and which are no longer to be found in the trade, doubtless contained her linen and dresses. In this room he breathed the fragrance of Heaven. The exact arrangement of things showed a spirit of order and a sense of harmony which would certainly have struck everybody, even a Minoret-Levrault. One could especially see how much Ursule loved the things that surrounded her, and how she delighted in a room which was bound up, so to speak, in her childhood and girlhood life. Reviewing everything according to its bearings, the guardian ascertained that it was possible to see over into Madame Portenduère’s from Ursule’s room. During the night, he had reflected on the line of conduct he ought to take with Ursule concerning the secret surprise of this growing passion. An examination would compromise him with his ward. Either he must approve or disapprove of this love; in either case, his position would be false. So he had determined to examine the respective situations of young Portenduère and Ursule to find out whether he ought to fight against this partiality before it became irresistible. An old man only could display so much wisdom. Still quivering under the blows of the truth of the magnetic facts, he kept turning round and looking at the smallest objects in the


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 room, and he wanted to cast his eye over the almanac hung at the corner of the fireplace.

“These horrid candlesticks are too heavy for your pretty little hands,” he said, taking up the candlesticks of marble decorated with copper.

He weighed them in his hand, looked at the almanac, took it and said:

“This seems to me very ugly also. Why do you keep this postman’s almanac in such a pretty room?”

“Oh! do let me have it, godfather.”

“No, you shall have another one to-morrow.”

He went down with this convincing proof, shut himself up in his study, looked for Saint Savinien, and found, as the somnambulist had said, a tiny, red dot in front of the nineteenth of October; he also saw one opposite the day of Saint Denis, his own patron saint and before Saint Jean, the curé’s patron. This point, the size of a pin’s head, the sleeping woman had seen in spite of distance and obstacles. Until night time the old man meditated upon these events, which were even more immense to him than to anyone else. He was bound to yield to evidence. A strong wall crumbled away, so to speak, within him, for he lived supported by two foundations; his indifference to religious matters and his disbelief in magnetism. By proving that the senses, a purely physical construction, organs whose powers were accounted for, were bounded by some of the attributes of the infinite, magnetism overthrew, or at least seemed to him to overthrow, Spinosa’s powerful argumentation; the infinite and


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 the finite, two elements that according to this great man were incompatible, proved to be one within the other. Whatever power he might have accorded to divisibility, to the mobility of matter, he could not admit that it had half-divine qualities. After all, he had grown too old to connect these phenomena with a system, to compare them with those of sleep, sight, and light. All his science, based upon the assertions of the school of Locke and Condillac, was in ruins. Seeing his hollow idols in pieces, his incredulity necessarily faltered. And so all the advantage in this struggle beween Catholic childhood and Voltairean old age, was to be with Ursule. A light was streaming on this dismantled fort, and on these ruins. The voice of prayer was bursting from the bosom of the fragments! Nevertheless, the stubborn old man picked a quarrel with his doubts. Although he was struck to the heart, he would not make up his mind, and constantly struggled against God. And yet, his spirit seemed wavering, he was no longer the same. Dreamy beyond measure, he would read Pascal’s Pensées. Bossuet’s sublime Histoire des Variations, he read Bonald and Saint-Augustin; he also insisted upon running through the works of Swedenborg and the late Saint-Martin, of which the mysterious man had spoken. The edifice built up in this man by materialism was cracking in every part, it only needed one more shake; and, when his heart was ripe for God, he fell into the heavenly vineyard as the fruits fall. Several times already whilst playing with the


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 curé, his godchild beside them, he had asked questions, which, considering his opinions, appeared strange to the Abbé Chaperon, yet ignorant of the inward labor with which God was redressing this beautiful conscience.

“Do you believe in apparitions?” asked the unbeliever of his pastor whilst interrupting the game.

“Cardan, a great philosopher of the sixteenth century, has said that he has seen some,” replied the curé.

“I know all those that have engrossed scholars, I have just read Plotin over again. At this moment, I am questioning you as a Catholic, and ask you if you think that a dead man can revisit the living.”

“But Jesus appeared to His Apostles after His death,” rejoined the curé. “The church must have faith in our Saviour’s apparitions. As to miracles, they are not wanting,” said the Abbé Chaperon, smiling, “would you care to hear the most recent? It happened during the eighteenth century.”

“Bah!”

“Yes, the blessed Marie-Alphonse de Liguori knew of the Pope’s death far away from Rome, the very moment when the Holy Father was expiring, and there are numerous witnesses of this miracle. The sainted bishop, being in a trance, heard the sovereign pontiff’s last words and repeated them before several persons. The courier entrusted to announce it to the Bishop, only arrived thirty hours after—”

“Jesuit!” replied old Minoret, jokingly, “I do


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 not ask you for proofs, I ask you if you believe in it.”

“I believe that the apparition depends very much on the person who sees it,” said the curé, still teasing the unbeliever.

“My friend, I am not laying a trap for you; what do you believe in all this?”

“I believe the power of God to be infinite,” said the abbé.

“When I am dead, if I become reconciled with God, I will pray Him to let me appear to you,” said the doctor, laughing.

“That is precisely the agreement made between Cardan and his friend,” replied the curé.

“Ursule,” said Minoret, “if ever any danger threatens you, call me and I will come.”

“You have just said in one word the touching elegy entitled Néère, by André Chénier,” replied the curé. “But poets are only great because they know how to clothe facts or the sentiments of eternally living pictures.”

“Why do you speak of your death, dear godfather?” said the young girl in a mournful tone. “We Christians do not die, our tomb is the cradle of our soul.”

“Well,” said the doctor, smiling, “we must some day leave this world, and when I am no longer here, you will be very much astonished at your good fortune.”

“When you are no more, my beloved friend, my only consolation will be to devote my life to you.”


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 “To me, dead?”

“Yes. All the good works that I might be able to do should be done in your name to redeem your mistakes. I should pray to God every day, so that in His infinite mercy He might not eternally punish the errors of a day, and that He might place a soul as beautiful and pure as yours close to Himself, among the souls of the blessed.”

This answer, said with angelic candor and pronounced in an accent full of conviction, overwhelmed fallacy and converted Denis Minoret as Saint-Paul was converted. A ray of inward light dazzled him, whilst this tenderness, reaching all through his life to come, made his eyes fill with tears. There was something electric in this sudden effect of grace. The curé clasped his hands and rose, disturbed. The child, astonished at her success, burst into tears. The old man stood up as if someone had called him, gazed into space as if he could see some aurora, then he bent his knee upon his armchair, folded his hands and cast his eyes upon the ground like a profoundly humiliated man.

“O God!” he said in a voice of emotion, and raising his forehead, “if anyone can obtain my forgiveness and lead me to Thee, is it not this spotless creature? Forgive the repentant old age that this glorious child offers Thee!”

He mentally lifted up his soul to God, praying Him to complete his enlightenment by His science after having overwhelmed him with His mercy; he turned to the curé and stretching out his hand, said:


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 “My dear pastor, I am a little child again, I belong to you and give you up my soul.”

Ursule covered her godfather’s hand with joyful tears and kisses. The old man took the child upon his knees and called her gaily his godmother. The curé, completely moved, recited the Veni, Creator, in a sort of religious effusion. These three kneeling Christians used this hymn as their evening prayer.

“What is the matter?” asked La Bougival, astonished.

“At last my godfather believes in God,” replied Ursule.

“Ah! upon my faith! he only needed that to be quite perfect,” cried the old Bressane, crossing herself with grave naïveté.

“Dear doctor,” said the good priest, “you will soon understand the greatness of religion and the necessity of its observances; you will find its philosophy, as regards its humanity, much loftier than that of the most daring intelligence.”

The curé, who displayed an almost childish delight, then agreed to catechise the old man whilst conferring with him twice a week. Thus, the conversion attributed to Ursule and to a spirit of sordid calculation was spontaneous. The curé, who had refrained for fourteen years from touching the wounds of this heart, even whilst deploring them, had been applied to as one sends for the surgeon when one knows one’s self to be hurt. Since this scene, every night the prayers pronounced by Ursule had been said together. From time to time the old man had


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 felt peace succeeding to agitation within him. Having, as he said, God for a responsible editor for unaccountable things, his mind was at rest. His beloved child answered that by this he could well see that he was advancing in the kingdom of God. During mass, he had just been reading the prayers whilst applying his senses to them, for he had risen after a first conference to the divine idea of communion among all believers. This old neophyte had understood the eternal symbol attaching to this food, which faith renders necessary when it has been fathomed in its inmost, deep, and joyful meaning. If he had seemed in haste to return home, it was to thank his dear little godchild for having made him take the cowl, according to the beautiful expression of times gone by. And so he was holding her on his knee in the salon and giving her a holy kiss on the forehead at the very moment when, soiling so sacred an influence with their ignoble fears, his collateral heirs were lavishing the coarsest abuse upon Ursule. The old man’s eagerness to get home, his asserted scorn of his relations, and his biting answers upon leaving the church were naturally attributed by each of the heirs to the hatred for them with which Ursule was inspiring him.

Whilst the godchild was playing to her godfather variations of Weber’s Last Thought, a fine plot was hatching in the dining-room of the Minoret-Levrault household which was to result in bringing on the scene one of the chief persons in this


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20 The moan of an expiring northwester was faintly heard from the tops of the magnificent forest pines. Three sportsmen, while it was yet early, met at their trysting place, to perpetrate a raid against the deer! They were no novices, those huntsmen; they had won trophies in many a sylvan war, and they now took the field "of malice prepense" with all the appliances of destruction at their beck—practiced drivers of the pack, often proved, and now refreshed by three days rest. Brief was their interchange of compliment; they felt that such a day was not to be trifled away in talk; and they hallooed their hounds impatiently into the drive—yet not as greenhorns would have done. "Keep clear of the swamps" was the order of the drivers—"leave the close covers—ride not where the ice crackles under the horse's hoof, but look closely into the sheltered knolls, where you will find the deer sunning themselves after the last night's frost." The effect of this order was soon evident, for in the second knoll entered by the hounds a herd of deer were found thawing themselves in the first beams of the ascending sun. Ho! what a burst! with what fury the hounds dash in among them! Now they sweep along the thickets that skirt the drive and climb the summit of that elevated piny ridge—destined one day to become a summer settlement and to bear the name of———. But not unforeseen or unprovided for was the run which the deer had taken. Frisky Geordy was in their path, and crack went the sound of his gun, and loud and vaunting was the twang of his horn that followed the explosion! And now the frozen earth reechoed to the tramp of horses hoofs, as the huntsmen hurried to the call that proclaims that a deer has fallen. There was Geordy, his gun against a pine, his knee upon the still heaving flank of a pricket buck, his right hand clenched upon his dripping knife, his left flourishing a horn, which ever and anon was given to his mouth and filled the air with its boastful notes.


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 drama. The breakfast, noisy like all provincial breakfasts and enlivened by some excellent wines which reach Nemours by the canal, either from Burgundy or La Touraine, lasted more than two hours. Zélie had sent for some shell-fish, salt water fish and various gastronomic dainties, in order to celebrate Désiré’s return.

The dining-room, in the middle of which the round table presented a gladdening sight, looked like an inn-room. Satisfied with her quantity of stock, Zélie had built a pavilion between her immense yard and her garden planted with vegetables and full of fruit trees. Everything, with her, was only for cleanliness and solidity. Levrault-Levrault’s example had seemed terrible to the country. And so she forbade her architect to lead her into any similar nonsense. This room was consequently hung with a glazed paper, furnished with walnut chairs, walnut sideboards, and adorned with a faience stove, a timepiece and a barometer. If the plates and dishes were of common white china, the table was conspicuous through the linen and abundant silver. Once the coffee had been served by Zélie, who was on the move like a leaden shot in a bottle of champagne, for she contented herself with a cook; when Désiré, the future barrister, had been told all about the great event of the morning and its consequences, Zélie shut the door, and the notary Dionis was requested to speak. From the silence that ensued, and from the look that each heir fixed upon this authentic face, it was easy to


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 recognize the dominion that such men exercise over families.

“My dear children,” said he, “your uncle, having been born in 1746, is eighty-three years old today; now, old men are subject to follies, and this little—”

“Viper!” cried Madame Massin.

“Wretch!” said Zélie.

“Let us call her only by name,” rejoined Dionis.

“Well then, she is a thief,” said Madame Crémière.

“A pretty thief,” replied Désiré Minoret.

“This little Ursule,” resumed Dionis, “he is very fond of. In the interest of you all, my clients, I did not wait until this morning to seek information, and this is what I know about this young—”

“Despoiler!” cried the tax-gatherer.

“Legacy-hunter!” said the clerk.

“Chut! my friends,” said the notary, “or I take my hat, leave you and say good-night.”

“Come, papa,” cried Minoret pouring out for him a small glass of rum, “take it! it came from Rome itself. Indeed, it is worth a franc’s stage-fees.”

“It is true that Ursule is the legitimate daughter of Joseph Mirouët; but her father is the natural son of Valentin Mirouët, your uncle’s father-in-law. So Ursule is Doctor Denis Minoret’s natural niece. As a natural niece, the will the doctor may make in her favor would be hardly assailable; and, if he left her his fortune in this way, you would bring a sufficiently serious action for yourselves against


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 Ursule, as one cannot maintain that there is no bond of parentage between Ursule and the doctor; but this suit would certainly frighten a defenceless young girl and might lead to some compromise.”

“The severity of the law upon the claims of natural children is so great,” said the newly-made licentiate, anxious to show off his knowledge, “that, according to the terms of a decision of the supreme Court of Appeal of the seventh of July, 1817, a natural child can lay claim to nothing from his natural grandfather, not even maintenance. So you see how they have widened the parentage of the natural child. The law pursues the natural child even to its legitimate descent, for it alleges that the liberality shown to the grandchildren applies to the natural son by interposition of person. This results from comparing Articles 757, 908 and 911 of the Civil Code. The Royal Court of Paris on the twenty-sixth of December of last year also reduced the legacy left to the legitimate child of the natural son by the grandfather, who, most assuredly, as a grandfather, was as much of a stranger to the natural grandson as the doctor, as an uncle, could be to Ursule.”

“All that,” said Goupil, “seems to me only to concern the question of gifts made by the grandparents to the natural descendants; it is no question at all of the uncles, who do not appear to me to have any tie of kindred with the legitimate children of their natural brothers-in-law. Ursule is a stranger to Doctor Minoret. I recollect a decision


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 of the Royal Court of Colmar, made in 1825, whilst I was finishing reading for the law, by which it was declared that once a natural child was deceased, his descendants could no longer be the object of interposition. Now, Ursule’s father is dead.”

Goupil’s argument produced what, in accounts of legislative sittings, journalists describe by this parenthesis: (Profound Sensation).

“And what does that signify?” cried Dionis, “that the case of gifts made by the uncle of a natural child has never yet come before the court; but, let it come, and the severity of the French law toward natural children would be all the more enforced as we live in an age in which religion is respected. And I can also answer for it that over this lawsuit there would be a compromise, particularly when you can have been persuaded to drive Ursule to the Court of Appeal.”

The delight of heirs finding heaps of gold broke out into smiles, starts, and gestures all round the table, which prevented them from noticing a denial from Goupil. Then, after this outburst, profound silence and anxiety followed the notary’s first word, a most terrible word:

“But—”

Dionis then saw all eyes staring at him, and all faces set in the same expression just as if he had pulled the string on one of those little stages where all the characters walk in jerks by means of machinery.

“But no law can prevent your uncle from adopting


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 or marrying Ursule,” he resumed. “As for adoption it could be contested and I think you would gain your cause; the royal courts do not trifle on the subject of adoption, and you would be heard at the inquiry. It is all very well the doctor wearing the ribbon of Saint-Michel, being an officer of the Legion of Honor and former physician to the Ex-Emperor, he will die. But, if you are forewarned in case of adoption, how would you know of the marriage? The old man is sly enough to go and marry in Paris after a year’s residence, and requite his intended, in the marriage settlements, by a dowry of a million. Therefore the only act that can endanger your inheritance is the marriage of the little one and your uncle.”

Here the notary paused.

“There is yet another danger,” said Goupil again, with a knowing look, “that of a will made to a third, old Bongrand, for instance, who might hold a legacy trust for Mademoiselle Ursule Mirouët.”

“If you worry your uncle,” resumed Dionis, cutting short his head clerk, “and if you are not kind to Ursule, you will drive him either into marriage, or into the legacy trust of which Goupil has spoken; but I do not believe him capable of resorting to a legacy trust, a dangerous means. As to marriage, it is easy to prevent that. Désiré only has to pay her the least attention and she would always prefer a charming young man, the cock of Nemours, to an old man.”

“Mother,” whispered the postmaster’s son to


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 Zélie, as much allured by the sum as by Ursule’s beauty, “if I were to marry her, we should have all.”

“Are you mad? You who will one day have an income of fifty thousand francs and who are to become a deputy! As long as I am alive you shall not be ruined by an idiotic marriage. Seven hundred thousand francs?—a fine thing! The mayor’s only daughter will have fifty thousand francs income, and has already been proposed to me—”

This answer, the first time his mother had ever spoken harshly to him, extinguished any hope that Désiré might have had of marrying the lovely Ursule, for his father and he would never be able to prevail against the determination written in Zélie’s terrible blue eyes.

“Eh! but see here, Monsieur Dionis,” cried Crémière, nudged by his wife, “if the old man took the thing seriously and married his ward to Désiré whilst giving her the reversion to all his fortune, good-bye to the inheritance! And if he only lives another five years our uncle will have pretty well a million.”

“Never,” cried Zélie, “in my lifetime shall Désiré marry the daughter of a bastard, a charitygirl, picked up in a market-place! Bless me! my son is to represent the Minorets at his uncle’s death, and the Minorets can boast of five hundred years of good citizens. It is quite as good as the nobility. Make yourselves easy about that; Désiré will marry when we know what he can become in the Chamber of Deputies.”


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 This haughty declaration was seconded by Goupil, who said:

“Désiré, endowed with an income of twenty-four thousand francs, will become either president of the royal Courts or attorney-general, which leads to the peerage; and a foolish marriage would do for him.”

The heirs then all talked to one another; but held their peace at Minoret’s thump on the table to enable the notary to continue speaking.

“Your uncle is an honest, worthy man,” resumed Dionis. “He believes himself to be immortal; and like all intelligent people, he will allow death to overtake him without having made a will. My opinion is therefore, that at present he should be urged to invest his capital in such a way as to render your dispossession difficult, and the chance has occurred. Young Portenduère is imprisoned at Sainte-Pélagie for debts of a hundred and odd thousand francs. His aged mother knows he is in prison, she cries like a Magdalen and is expecting the Abbé Chaperon to dinner, doubtless in order to discuss this disaster with him. Well, to-night I will go and persuade your uncle to sell his stock of five per cent consols, which are at one hundred and eighteen, and lend Madame de Portenduère, on her Bordières farm and on her house, the sum necessary to clear the prodigal child. I shall be in my character as notary in speaking for this little fool of a Portenduère, and it is very natural that I should wish to make him re-invest his stock; I gain the deeds, the sale and commission on it. If I can become his


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 adviser, I will propose other investments in land for the surplus of the capital, and I have some excellent ones in my office. Once his fortune is placed in landed estates or in trust mortgages in the country, it will not easily fly away. One can always cause difficulties to arise between the wish to realize and the realization.”

The heirs, struck by the truth of this argument, much more skilful than that of Monsieur Josse, murmured approvingly.

“You must all act together,” said the notary in conclusion, “so as to keep your uncle in Nemours, to which he is accustomed, and where you can watch him. By providing a lover for the little one, you prevent the marriage—”

“But suppose the marriage took place?” said Goupil, seized with an ambitious idea.

“Even that would not be so bad, for the loss would be enumerated, and one would know what the old man wishes to give her,” replied the notary. “But if you let Désiré loose upon her, he can dawdle on with the little one until the old man’s death. Marriages are made and unmade.”

“The shortest way,” said Goupil, “if the doctor is still going to live any length of time, would be to marry her to some good fellow, who would free you of her by settling with her at Sens, Montargis or Orléans, with a hundred thousand francs.”

Dionis, Massin, Zélie and Goupil, the only clever heads in this assembly, exchanged four glances full of ideas.


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 “That would be the worm within the pear,” whispered Zélie to Massin.

“Why did they let him come?” replied the clerk.

“That would suit you very nicely,” cried Désiré to Goupil, “but could you ever keep yourself clean enough to please the old man and his ward?”

“You are not rubbing your stomach with a basket,” said the postmaster who finally grasped Goupil’s idea.

This coarse joke was a prodigious success. The head clerk scrutinized the laughers with such a terrible look, that silence was immediately restored.

“Nowadays,” whispered Zélie to Massin, “notaries think only of their own interests; and suppose Dionis, in order to profit, went over to Ursule’s side?”

“I am sure of him,” replied the clerk, giving his cousin a look out of his malicious little eyes.

He was going to add, “I know enough to ruin him!” but checked himself.

“I am entirely of Dionis’s opinion,” said he, aloud.

“And I also,” cried Zélie, who nevertheless suspected a collusion of interest between the notary and the clerk.

“My wife has voted,” said the postmaster, sucking down a glass of brandy, although his face was already violet-colored from digesting the breakfast and from a remarkable absorption of liquor.

“That’s all right,” said the tax-gatherer.

“Then shall I go after dinner?” rejoined Dionis.


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 “If Monsieur Dionis is right,” said Madame Crémière to Madame Massin, “we must visit our uncle in the evening as before, every Sunday, and do all that Monsieur Dionis has just told us.”

“Yes, to be received as we used to be!” cried Zélie. “After all, we have a good income of more than forty thousand francs, and he has refused all our invitations; we are quite as good as he is. Even though I do not know how to make laws, I can steer my own bark.”

“As I am far from having forty thousand francs a year,” said Madame Massin, rather piqued, “I do not care to lose ten thousand!”

“We are his nieces, we will take care of him; we will keep our eyes open,” said Madame Crémière, “and some day, cousin, you will be grateful to us.”

“Treat Ursule well, the old man De Jordy left her his savings,” said the notary, lifting his forefinger to his lips.

“I will be on my P’s and Q’s,” cried Désiré.

“You were as clever as Desroches, the cleverest of all the Paris solicitors,” said Goupil to his master as they left the post-house.

“And they discuss our fees!” replied the notary, smiling bitterly.

The heirs, who were seeing Dionis and his head clerk home, all met, their faces rather flushed by the breakfast, at the end of vespers. According to the notary’s anticipations, the Abbé Chaperon was giving his arm to old Madame de Portenduère.


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 “She has dragged him to vespers,” cried Madame Massin, drawing Madame Crémière’s attention to Ursule and her godfather as they were leaving the church.

“Let us go and speak to him,” said Madame Crémière, advancing toward the old man.

The change that the conference had wrought in all these faces surprised Doctor Minoret. He wondered what was the cause of this feigned friendliness, and, out of curiosity, favored the meeting of Ursule and the two women, eager to greet her with exaggerated affection and forced smiles.

“Uncle, will you allow us to come and see you tonight?” said Madame Crémière. “We have sometimes thought that we worried you; but it is such a long time since our children paid you their respects, and now our daughters are of an age to make acquaintance with our dear Ursule.”

“Ursule is worthy of her name,” replied the doctor, “she is very wild.”

“Let us tame her,” said Madame Massin. “And then, see here, uncle,” added this good housewife, trying to hide her projects under a calculation of economy, “we were told that your dear godchild shows such wonderful talent on the piano-forte, that we should be delighted to hear her. Madame Crémière and I are rather inclined to have her master for our little ones; for, if he had seven or eight pupils, he might fix his charges within reach of our fortunes—”

“Willingly,” said the old man, “and that would


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 be all the better as I also wish to give Ursule a singing-master.”

“Well then, till to-night, uncle; we will come with your great-nephew Désiré, who is now a lawyer.”

“Till to-night,” replied Minoret, who wanted to fathom these shallow minds.

The two nieces squeezed Ursule’s hand, saying to her with pretended graciousness:

“Au revoir.”

“Oh! godfather, then you see into my heart?” cried Ursule, giving the old man a look full of gratitude.

“You have a voice,” he said. “And I also want you to have drawing and Italian masters. A woman,” resumed the doctor, looking at Ursule as he was opening the gate of his house, “ought to be brought up in such a way as to feel herself equal to any position in which her marriage may place her.”

Ursule grew as red as a cherry; her guardian seemed to be thinking of the same person as she was. Feeling herself on the point of confessing the involuntary partiality which drove her to thinking of Savinien and connecting all her longing for perfection with him, she went and sat down under the clump of climbing plants, where, from afar, she stood out like a blue and white flower.

“You can quite see, godfather, how kind your nieces are to me; they were nice,” she said, seeing him coming, and to throw him off the scent of the thoughts which had made her pensive.


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BRONX RIVER

BROOKS


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 “Poor little thing!” cried the old man.

He patted Ursule’s hand as she laid it on his arm, and led her along the terrace beside the river, where no one could overhear them.

“Why do you say, ‘Poor little thing?’”

“Do you not see that they are afraid of you?”

“But why?”

“All my heirs are just now very uneasy about my conversion; they have doubtless attributed it to the influence you exercise over me, and imagine that I shall disappoint them of my inheritance in order to enrich you.”

“But that would not be?” said Ursule naïvely, looking at her godfather.

“Oh! heavenly consolation of my declining days!” said the old man, lifting up his ward and kissing her on both cheeks. “It is indeed for her and not for myself! O God! that I prayed Thee a moment ago to let me live until the day upon which I shall have entrusted her to some good being who is worthy of her! You will see, my little angel, the farce that the Minorets, Crémières and Massins will come and play here. You want to beautify and prolong my life, you do! Whereas they only think of my death—”

“God preserve us from hating; but, if that is so, —oh! I do indeed despise them!” said Ursule.

“Dinner!” cried La Bougival from the top of the steps, which, on the garden side, were at the end of the passage.


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At dessert, Ursule and her guardian were in the pretty dining-room decorated with Chinese paintings in lacquer, the ruin of Levrault-Levrault, when the justice of the peace called. The doctor offered him, as a great mark of intimacy, a cup of his Mocha coffee mixed with Bourbon and Martinique coffee, burnt, ground and made by himself in a silver coffee-pot à la Chaptal.

“Well!” said Bongrand, lifting his spectacles and looking slyly at the old man, “the whole town is astir! your appearance in church has upset your relations! You are leaving your fortune to the priests and the poor! You have stirred them up, and they are fidgeting, ah! I saw their first outbreak in the square, they were as busy as ants who had been robbed of their eggs.”

“What did I tell you, Ursule?” cried the old man. “At the risk of paining you, my child, ought I not to teach you to know the world, and to be on your guard against undeserved ill-will?”

“I should like to say a word to you on this subject,” rejoined Bongrand, seizing this opportunity of speaking to his old friend about Ursule’s future.

The doctor put a black velvet cap over his white head, the justice of the peace kept on his hat to protect himself from the cold, and both walked up


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 and down the terrace discussing the means of securing for Ursule what her godfather wanted to give her. The justice of the peace knew Dionis’s opinion upon the invalidity of any will made by the doctor in Ursule’s favor, for Nemours was too much occupied about the Minoret inheritance for this question not to have been discussed between the lawyers of the town. Bongrand had decided that Ursule Mirouët was a stranger with regard to Doctor Minoret, but he felt that the spirit of the law repulsed any illegitimate offshoots from the family. The authors of the Code had only foreseen the weakness of fathers and mothers for the natural children, without imagining that the uncles or the aunts might espouse the tenderness of the natural child in favor of its descendants. There was evidently something wanting in the law.

“In any other country,” he said to the doctor at the conclusion of his explanation of the state of the law that Goupil, Dionis, and Désiré had just explained to the heirs, “Ursule would have nothing to fear; she is a legitimate daughter, and her father’s incapacity ought only to operate in regard to the inheritance of Valentin-Mirouet, your father-in-law; but, in France, the magistracy is unfortunately very ingenious and consistent, it seeks the spirit of the law. The lawyers would talk morality and prove that the void in the Code arose from the simplicity of the legislators who had not foreseen the case, but who had none the less established a principle. The suit would be long and expensive. With Zélie,


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 they would go as far as the Court of Appeal, and I would not be sure of being still alive when this suit came on.”

“The best of lawsuits is no longer good for anything,” cried the doctor, “I also see the memorandum on this question: To what extent should the incapacity be carried which, in the matter of inheritance, strikes natural children? and a good lawyer’s pride consists in winning desperate cases.”

“Faith!” said Bongrand, “I would not dare undertake to affirm that the magistrates would not extend the interpretation of the law so as to extend the protection granted to marriage, the eternal foundation of all society.”

Without declaring his intentions, the old man rejected the legacy trust. But, as to the question of a marriage that Bongrand suggested to him as a means of securing his fortune for Ursule:

“Poor little girl!” cried the doctor, “I am capable of living another fifteen years, what would become of her?”

“Well then, what do you think of doing?” said Bongrand.

“We will think it over—I will see,” replied the old doctor, evidently at a loss for an answer.

At that moment, Ursule came to inform the two friends that Dionis wished to speak to the doctor.

“Dionis already!” cried Minoret, looking at the justice of the peace. “Yes,” he replied to Ursule, “let him come in.”

“I’ll wager my spectacles against a match, that


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 he is the screen of your heirs; they have all been breakfasting at the post-house with Dionis, they must have planned something.”

The notary, conducted by Ursule, came to the bottom of the garden. After the greetings and several trifling sentences, Dionis was granted a moment’s private hearing. Ursule and Bongrand retired to the salon.

“We will think it over! I will see!” said Bongrand to himself, repeating the doctor’s last words, “that is what clever people always say; death overtakes them and they leave the beings who are dear to them, in distress.”

The mistrust that highly gifted men inspire in business men is extraordinary; they will not trust them in the least while recognizing them in the greatest affairs. But perhaps this mistrust is an encomium. Seeing them dwelling at the summit of human affairs, business people do not believe superior men capable of descending to the infinite littlenesses of the details which, like the interests in finance and the microscopies in natural science, end by equalizing capital and forming worlds. Mistaken fallacy! A man of good feeling and a man of genius see everything. Bongrand, nettled at the doctor’s silence, but moved doubtless through interest in Ursule and believing her to be imperiled, resolved to defend her against the heirs. He was frantic at the thought of knowing nothing of the old man’s conversation with Dionis.

“However pure Ursule may be,” he thought,


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 whilst examining her, “there is a point at which young girls usually take the law and morality upon themselves. Let us try!—The Minoret-Levraults,” he said to Ursule, securing his spectacles, “are likely to ask your hand in marriage for their son.”

The poor little thing turned pale; she was too well brought up, and had too saintly a delicacy to go and listen to what was being said by Dionis and her uncle; but, after some brief inward deliberation, she thought she might show herself, reflecting that if she were not wanted her godfather would let her feel it. The outer blinds of the French window of the doctor’s study in the Chinese pavilion were open. Ursule contrived an excuse for going to shut them up herself. She apologized for leaving the justice of the peace alone in the salon, and he said to her, smiling:

“Do it, do it.”

Ursule gained the flight of steps leading down from the Chinese pavilion to the garden, and stood there several minutes, slowly arranging the blinds and looking at the setting sun. She then heard the following reply made by the doctor, who was coming towards the Chinese pavilion:

“My heirs would be delighted to see me investing in landed property and mortgages; they fancy that my fortune would be much more secure; I can guess all they say to each other, and perhaps you come from them—Know, my dear sir, that my arrangements are irrevocable. My heirs will have the capital of the fortune that I brought here, let them take


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 this as a warning and leave me in peace. If any one of them were to meddle in any way with what I consider I ought to do for this child”—he pointed to his godchild—“I would return from the next world to torment him! And so Monsieur Savinien de Portenduère may indeed remain in prison if anyone reckons upon me to get him out,” added the doctor. “I will never sell my stock.”

Upon hearing this last fragment of the sentence, Ursule experienced the first and only sorrow which had ever overtaken her; she leant her forehead against the blind and clung to it for support.

“Mon Dieu! what is the matter with her?” cried the old doctor, “she is quite white! Such a disturbance after dinner might kill her!”

He stretched out his arm to catch Ursule, who fell almost fainting.

“Good-bye, sir, leave me,” he said to the notary.

He carried his goddaughter to an immense armchair of the time of Louis XV., which was in his study, seized a bottle of ether from his dispensary and made her inhale it.

“Take my place, my friend,” he said to the terrified Bongrand, “I want to be alone with her.”

The justice of the peace escorted the notary as far as the gate, asking him without any show of eagerness:

“What happened to Ursule?”

“I do not know,” replied Monsieur Dionis, “she was on the steps listening to us; and, when her uncle refused to lend the sum necessary to young


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 Portenduère, who is in prison for debt, for he did not have, like Monsieur du Rouvre, a Monsieur Bongrand to defend him, she grew pale, staggered—Could she be in love with him? Might there be between them—?”

“At fifteen?” rejoined Bongrand, interrupting Dionis.

“She was born in February, 1814, she will be sixteen years old in four months.”

“She has never seen her neighbor,” replied the justice of the peace. “No, it was an attack.”

“A heart attack,” answered the notary.

The notary was delighted enough at this discovery, which might prevent the dreaded marriage in extremis with which the doctor could balk his heirs, whilst Bongrand saw his castles in the air overthrown; for a long time, he had been thinking of marrying his son to Ursule.

“If the poor child were in love with this fellow, it would be a misfortune for her; Madame de Portenduère is a Breton and biased as to her nobility,” returned the justice of the peace after a pause.

“Happily—for the honor of the Portenduères,” replied the notary, who was near betraying himself.

Let us do the good honest justice of the peace the justice of saying that whilst coming from the gate to the salon he abandoned, not without pity for his son, the hope he had fostered of one day calling Ursule his daughter. He reckoned on giving his son six thousand francs income upon the day when he should be appointed deputy; and, if


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 the doctor would have given Ursule a dowry of one hundred thousand francs, these two young people ought to have made the best of households; his Eugene was a loyal and charming fellow. Perhaps he had boasted too much about this Eugene, and perhaps old Minoret’s distrust came from that.

“I shall fall back upon the mayor’s daughter,” thought Bongrand, “but Ursule without a dowry is worth more than Mademoiselle Levrault-Crémière with her million. Now, we must manoeuvre so as to bring about Ursule’s marriage with this young Portenduère, if however, she loves him.”

After having shut the door on the side of the library and the garden door, the doctor led his ward to the window looking out upon the water’s edge.

“What is the matter with you, cruel child?” he said to her, “your life is my life. What would become of me without your smile?”

“Savinien in prison!” she replied.

After these words, a torrent of tears fell from her eyes and the sobs came.

“She is saved!” thought the old man, who was feeling her pulse with a father’s anxiety. “Alas! she has all my poor wife’s sensitiveness,” he said to himself whilst going to fetch a stethoscope which he placed on Ursule’s heart while applying his ear to it.

“Come, all goes well,” he said to himself.—“I did not know, my dearest, that you already loved him so much,” he resumed, looking at her. “But think of me as if it were yourself, and tell me all that has passed between you.”


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 “I do not love him, godfather, we have never spoken to each other,” she replied, sobbing. “But to hear that this poor young man is in prison, and to know that you harshly refuse to get him out, you who are so good!”

“Ursule, my good little angel, if you do not love him, why do you put a red dot before the day of Saint-Savinien as well as before the day of Saint-Denis? Come now, tell me the minutest incidents of this love affair.”

Ursule reddened, restrained her tears, and there was a moment’s silence between her and her uncle.

“Are you afraid of your father, your friend, your mother, your physician, your godfather, whose heart has for several days been made more tender than it was before—?”

“Well then, dear godfather,” she rejoined, “I will open my soul to you. In the month of May, Monsieur Savinien came to see his mother. Up till that journey, I had never paid him the least attention. When he left to live in Paris, I was a child, and I swear to you, I could see no difference between a young man and such as you, unless it were that I loved you, without dreaming that I could possibly love anybody better. Monsieur Savinien arrived by the mail-coach on the eve of his mother’s birthday, without our knowledge. At seven in the morning, after having said my prayers, whilst opening the window to air my room, I saw the windows of Monsieur Savinien’s room open, and Monsieur Savinien in his dressing-gown, busy shaving, and putting a


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 grace into his movements—well, I thought him handsome. He combed his black moustache, the point under his chin, and I saw his white, round neck—Must I tell you everything?—I noticed that this fresh neck, this face and this beautiful black hair were very different from yours, when I used to see you shaving. A surging vapor, from where I do not know, rose in my heart, in my throat, in my head, and so violently that I sat down. I could not stand upright, I trembled. But I so much wanted to see him, that I stood on tiptoe; he then saw me, and, in fun, sent me a kiss with the tips of his fingers, and—”

“And—?”

“And,” she resumed, “I hid myself, as much ashamed as I was happy, without being able to account for my shame in this happiness. This movement, which intoxicated my soul whilst causing I know not what power, is renewed every time that I see this young face again in my mind’s eye. At last I used to delight in recognizing this emotion, however violent it might be. Whilst going to mass, an unconquerable force urged me to look at Monsieur Savinien giving his arm to his mother; his bearing, his clothes, everything, even to the sound of his boots on the pavement, seemed to me desirable. The least thing about him, his hand, so delicately gloved, influenced me like a spell. Nevertheless, I had the strength not to think of him during mass. At the end of the service, I remained in the church in such a way as to allow Madame de Portenduère


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 to leave first, and thus to walk after him. I could not convey to you how much these little arrangements interested me. Upon coming in, when I turned round to shut the gate—”

“And La Bougival?” said the doctor.

“Oh! I let her go to her kitchen,” said Ursule naïvely. “So I could then of course see Monsieur Savinien standing firmly looking at me. Oh! godfather, I felt so proud at fancying I could see a sort of surprise and admiration in his eyes, that I do not know what I would not have done to afford him the opportunity of looking at me. It seemed to me that I ought not in future to do anything but please him. His glance is now the sweetest reward for my good actions. From that moment, I think of him ceaselessly and in spite of myself. Monsieur Savinien left again that evening, I have not seen him since, the Rue des Bourgeois has seemed empty to me, and he has, as it were, carried away my heart with him, without knowing it.”

“Is that all?” said the doctor.

“All, godfather,” she said, with a sigh in which the regret at not having more to tell was stifled under the sorrow of the moment.

“My dear little one,” said the doctor, seating Ursule on his knees, “you will soon be sixteen, and your life as a woman will begin. You are between your blessed childhood, which ceases, and the agitations of love, which will make your existence a stormy one, for you have the nervous system belonging to an exquisite sensitiveness. What has


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 come to you, is love, my child,” said the old man, with an expression of profound sadness, “it is love in its sacred simplicity, love as it should be; involuntary, swift, come as a thief who takes all—yes, all! And I expected it. I have studied women well, and know that, if love only masters most of them after many proofs and miracles of affection, if those women never break their silence and only yield when conquered, there are others who, under the influence of a sympathy which is accounted for nowadays by magnetic fluids, are overcome in an instant. I can tell you this to-day; as soon as I saw the charming woman who bore your name, I felt that I should love her solely and faithfully, without knowing if our characters or our persons would agree. Has love got second sight? What answer can one give, after having seen so many unions celebrated under the auspices of so heavenly a contract, broken later on, engendering almost eternal hatred, and positive repulsion? The senses can, so to speak, mutually correspond and the ideas be at variance: and perhaps some people live more through ideas than through the feelings. On the other hand, characters often agree and the persons dislike each other. These two utterly different phenomena, which would account for many misfortunes, prove the wisdom of the laws which allow the parents the upper hand in the marriages of their children; for a young girl is often the dupe of one of these two hallucinations. Therefore I do not blame you. The sensations that you experience,


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 this movement of your sensibility which rushes from its yet unknown centre over your heart and mind, this happiness with which you think of Savinien, all is natural. But, my adored child, as our good Abbé Chaperon has told you, society demands the sacrifice of many natural inclinations. The destinies of men are different from those of women. I was able to choose Ursule Mirouët for my wife and go to her telling her how much I loved her; whilst a young girl belies her virtues by soliciting the love of the man she loves: the woman has not, like us, the means of pursuing in broad daylight the accomplishment of her desires. Besides, with her, with you all, and particularly with you, modesty is the insuperable barrier which guards the secrets of your heart. Your hesitation in confiding your first emotions to me is enough to tell me that you would endure the most cruel tortures rather than confess to Savinien—”

“Oh! yes!” she said.

“But, my child, you ought to do more; you ought to repress the impulses of your heart, and forget them.”

“Why?”

“Because, my little angel, you ought to love none but the man who is to be your husband; and, even if Monsieur Savinien de Portenduère loved you—”

“I have not yet thought of that.”

“Listen to me—even if he love you, and his mother were to ask me for your hand, I would not consent to this marriage until I had submitted