URSULA
By Honore De Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Mademoiselle Sophie Surville,
It is a true pleasure, my dear niece, to dedicate to you this
book, the subject and details of which have won the
approbation, so difficult to win, of a young girl to whom the
world is still unknown, and who has compromised with none of
the lofty principles of a saintly education. Young girls are
indeed a formidable public, for they ought not to be allowed
to read books less pure than the purity of their souls; they
are forbidden certain reading, just as they are carefully
prevented from seeing social life as it is. Must it not
therefore be a source of pride to a writer to find that he has
pleased you?
God grant that your affection for me has not misled you. Who can tell?
--the future; which you, I hope, will see, though not, perhaps.
Your uncle,
De Balzac.
URSULA
CHAPTER I. THE FRIGHTENED HEIRS
Entering Nemours by the road to Paris, we cross the canal du Loing, the
steep banks of which serve the double purpose of ramparts to the fields
and of picturesque promenades for the inhabitants of that pretty little
town. Since 1830 several houses had unfortunately been built on the
farther side of the bridge. If this sort of suburb increases, the place
will lose its present aspect of graceful originality.
In 1829, however, both sides of the road were clear, and the master of
the post route, a tall, stout man about sixty years of age, sitting one
fine autumn morning at the highest part of the bridge, could take in at
a glance the whole of what is called in his business a “ruban de queue.”
The month of September was displaying its treasures; the atmosphere
glowed above the grass and the pebbles; no cloud dimmed the blue of the
sky, the purity of which in all parts, even close to the horizon, showed
the extreme rarefaction of the air. So Minoret-Levrault (for that was
the post master’s name) was obliged to shade his eyes with one hand to
keep them from being dazzled. With the air of a man who was tired of
waiting, he looked first to the charming meadows which lay to the
right of the road where the aftermath was springing up, then to the
hill-slopes covered with copses which extend, on the left, from Nemours
to Bouron. He could hear in the valley of the Loing, where the sounds on
the road were echoed back from the hills, the trot of his own horses and
the crack of his postilion’s whip.
None but a post master could feel impatient within sight of such
meadows, filled with cattle worthy of Paul Potter and glowing beneath
a Raffaelle sky, and beside a canal shaded with trees after Hobbema.
Whoever knows Nemours knows that nature is there as beautiful as art,
whose mission is to spiritualize it; there, the landscape has ideas and
creates thought. But, on catching sight of Minoret-Levrault an artist
would very likely have left the view to sketch the man, so original was
he in his native commonness. Unite in a human being all the conditions
of the brute and you have a Caliban, who is certainly a great thing.
Wherever form rules, sentiment disappears. The post master, a living
proof of that axiom, presented a physiognomy in which an observer could
with difficulty trace, beneath the vivid carnation of its coarsely
developed flesh, the semblance of a soul. His cap of blue cloth, with
a small peak, and sides fluted like a melon, outlined a head of vast
dimensions, showing that Gall’s science has not yet produced its chapter
of exceptions. The gray and rather shiny hair which appeared below the
cap showed that other causes than mental toil or grief had whitened
it. Large ears stood out from the head, their edges scarred with the
eruptions of his over-abundant blood, which seemed ready to gush at the
least exertion. His skin was crimson under an outside layer of
brown, due to the habit of standing in the sun. The roving gray eyes,
deep-sunken, and hidden by bushy black brows, were like those of the
Kalmucks who entered France in 1815; if they ever sparkled it was
only under the influence of a covetous thought. His broad pug nose was
flattened at the base. Thick lips, in keeping with a repulsive double
chin, the beard of which, rarely cleaned more than once a week, was
encircled with a dirty silk handkerchief twisted to a cord; a short
neck, rolling in fat, and heavy cheeks completed the characteristics of
brute force which sculptors give to their caryatids. Minoret-Levrault
was like those statues, with this difference, that whereas they
supported an edifice, he had more than he could well do to support
himself. You will meet many such Atlases in the world. The man’s torso
was a block; it was like that of a bull standing on his hind-legs. His
vigorous arms ended in a pair of thick, hard hands, broad and strong
and well able to handle whip, reins, and pitchfork; hands which his
postilions never attempted to trifle with. The enormous stomach of this
giant rested on thighs which were as large as the body of an ordinary
adult, and feet like those of an elephant. Anger was a rare thing with
him, but it was terrible, apoplectic, when it did burst forth. Though
violent and quite incapable of reflection, the man had never done
anything that justified the sinister suggestions of his bodily presence.
To all those who felt afraid of him his postilions would reply, “Oh!
he’s not bad.”
The master of Nemours, to use the common abbreviation of the country,
wore a velveteen shooting-jacket of bottle-green, trousers of green
linen with great stripes, and an ample yellow waistcoat of goat’s
skin, in the pocket of which might be discerned the round outline of
a monstrous snuff-box. A snuff-box to a pug nose is a law without
exception.
A son of the Revolution and a spectator of the Empire, Minoret-Levrault
did not meddle with politics; as to his religious opinions, he had never
set foot in a church except to be married; as to his private principles,
he kept them within the civil code; all that the law did not forbid or
could not prevent he considered right. He never read anything but
the journal of the department of the Seine-et-Oise, and a few printed
instructions relating to his business. He was considered a clever
agriculturist; but his knowledge was only practical. In him the moral
being did not belie the physical. He seldom spoke, and before speaking
he always took a pinch of snuff to give himself time, not to find ideas,
but words. If he had been a talker you would have felt that he was out
of keeping with himself. Reflecting that this elephant minus a trumpet
and without a mind was called Minoret-Levrault, we are compelled to
agree with Sterne as to the occult power of names, which sometimes
ridicule and sometimes foretell characters.
In spite of his visible incapacity he had acquired during the last
thirty-six years (the Revolution helping him) an income of thirty
thousand francs, derived from farm lands, woods and meadows. If Minoret,
being master of the coach-lines of Nemours and those of the Gatinais to
Paris, still worked at his business, it was less from habit than for the
sake of an only son, to whom he was anxious to give a fine career. This
son, who was now (to use an expression of the peasantry) a “monsieur,”
had just completed his legal studies and was about to take his degree as
licentiate, preparatory to being called to the Bar. Monsieur and Madame
Minoret-Levrault--for behind our colossus every one will perceive
a woman without whom this signal good-fortune would have been
impossible--left their son free to choose his own career; he might be a
notary in Paris, king’s-attorney in some district, collector of customs
no matter where, broker, or post master, as he pleased. What fancy of
his could they ever refuse him? to what position of life might he
not aspire as the son of a man about whom the whole countryside, from
Montargis to Essonne, was in the habit of saying, “Pere Minoret doesn’t
even know how rich he is”?
This saying had obtained fresh force about four years before this
history begins, when Minoret, after selling his inn, built stables and a
splendid dwelling, and removed the post-house from the Grand’Rue to the
wharf. The new establishment cost two hundred thousand francs, which the
gossip of thirty miles in circumference more than doubled. The Nemours
mail-coach service requires a large number of horses. It goes to
Fontainebleau on the road to Paris, and from there diverges to Montargis
and also to Montereau. The relays are long, and the sandy soil of the
Montargis road calls for the mythical third horse, always paid for but
never seen. A man of Minoret’s build, and Minoret’s wealth, at the head
of such an establishment might well be called, without contradiction,
the master of Nemours. Though he never thought of God or devil, being
a practical materialist, just as he was a practical agriculturist, a
practical egoist, and a practical miser, Minoret had enjoyed up to
this time a life of unmixed happiness,--if we can call pure materialism
happiness. A physiologist, observing the rolls of flesh which covered
the last vertebrae and pressed upon the giant’s cerebellum, and, above
all, hearing the shrill, sharp voice which contrasted so absurdly with
his huge body, would have understood why this ponderous, coarse being
adored his only son, and why he had so long expected him,--a fact proved
by the name, Desire, which was given to the child.
The mother, whom the boy fortunately resembled, rivaled the father in
spoiling him. No child could long have resisted the effects of such
idolatry. As soon as Desire knew the extent of his power he milked his
mother’s coffer and dipped into his father’s purse, making each author
of his being believe that he, or she, alone was petitioned. Desire,
who played a part in Nemours far beyond that of a prince royal in his
father’s capital, chose to gratify his fancies in Paris just as he had
gratified them in his native town; he had therefore spent a yearly sum
of not less than twelve thousand francs during the time of his legal
studies. But for that money he had certainly acquired ideas that would
never had come to him in Nemours; he had stripped off the provincial
skin, learned the power of money and seen in the magistracy a means of
advancement which he fancied. During the last year he had spent an extra
sum of ten thousand francs in the company of artists, journalists, and
their mistresses. A confidential and rather disquieting letter from his
son, asking for his consent to a marriage, explains the watch which the
post master was now keeping on the bridge; for Madame Minoret-Levrault,
busy in preparing a sumptuous breakfast to celebrate the triumphal
return of the licentiate, had sent her husband to the mail road,
advising him to take a horse and ride out if he saw nothing of the
diligence. The coach which was conveying the precious son usually
arrived at five in the morning and it was now nine! What could be the
meaning of such delay? Was the coach overturned? Could Desire be dead?
Or was it nothing worse than a broken leg?
Three distinct volleys of cracking whips rent the air like a discharge
of musketry; the red waistcoats of the postilions dawned in sight, ten
horses neighed. The master pulled off his cap and waved it; he was
seen. The best mounted postilion, who was returning with two gray
carriage-horses, set spurs to his beast and came on in advance of the
five diligence horses and the three other carriage-horses, and soon
reached his master.
“Have you seen the ‘Ducler’?”
On the great mail routes names, often fantastic, are given to the
different coaches; such, for instance, as the “Caillard,” the “Ducler”
(the coach between Nemours and Paris), the “Grand Bureau.” Every new
enterprise is called the “Competition.” In the days of the Lecompte
company their coaches were called the “Countess.”--“‘Caillard’ could not
overtake the ‘Countess’; but ‘Grand Bureau’ caught up with her finely,”
you will hear the men say. If you see a postilion pressing his horses
and refusing a glass of wine, question the conductor and he will
tell you, snuffing the air while his eye gazes far into space, “The
‘Competition’ is ahead.”--“We can’t get in sight of her,” cries
the postilion; “the vixen! she wouldn’t stop to let her passengers
dine.”--“The question is, has she got any?” responds the conductor.
“Give it to Polignac!” All lazy and bad horses are called Polignac.
Such are the jokes and the basis of conversation between postilions and
conductors on the roofs of the coaches. Each profession, each calling in
France has its slang.
“Have you seen the ‘Ducler’?” asked Minoret.
“Monsieur Desire?” said the postilion, interrupting his master. “Hey!
you must have heard us, didn’t our whips tell you? we felt you were
somewhere along the road.”
Just then a woman dressed in her Sunday clothes,--for the bells were
pealing from the clock tower and calling the inhabitants to mass,--a
woman about thirty-six years of age came up to the post master.
“Well, cousin,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe me--Uncle is with Ursula
in the Grand’Rue, and they are going to mass.”
In spite of the modern poetic canons as to local color, it is quite
impossible to push realism so far as to repeat the horrible blasphemy
mingled with oaths which this news, apparently so unexciting, brought
from the huge mouth of Minoret-Levrault; his shrill voice grew sibilant,
and his face took on the appearance of what people oddly enough call a
sunstroke.
“Is that true?” he asked, after the first explosion of his wrath was
over.
The postilions bowed to their master as they and their horses passed
him, but he seemed to neither see nor hear them. Instead of waiting for
his son, Minoret-Levrault hurried up to the Grand’Rue with his cousin.
“Didn’t I always tell you so?” she resumed. “When Doctor Minoret
goes out of his head that demure little hypocrite will drag him into
religion; whoever lays hold of the mind gets hold of the purse, and
she’ll have our inheritance.”
“But, Madame Massin--” said the post master, dumbfounded.
“There now!” exclaimed Madame Massin, interrupting her cousin. “You are
going to say, just as Massin does, that a little girl of fifteen
can’t invent such plans and carry them out, or make an old man of
eighty-three, who has never set foot in a church except to be married,
change his opinions,--now don’t tell me he has such a horror of priests
that he wouldn’t even go with the girl to the parish church when she
made her first communion. I’d like to know why, if Doctor Minoret hates
priests, he has spent nearly every evening for the last fifteen years of
his life with the Abbe Chaperon. The old hypocrite never fails to give
Ursula twenty francs for wax tapers every time she takes the sacrament.
Have you forgotten the gift Ursula made to the church in gratitude to
the cure for preparing her for her first communion? She spent all her
money on it, and her godfather returned it to her doubled. You men!
you don’t pay attention to things. When I heard that, I said to myself,
‘Farewell baskets, the vintage is done!’ A rich uncle doesn’t behave
that way to a little brat picked up in the streets without some good
reason.”
“Pooh, cousin; I dare say the good man is only taking her to the door of
the church,” replied the post master. “It is a fine day, and he is out
for a walk.”
“I tell you he is holding a prayer-book, and looks sanctimonious--you’ll
see him.”
“They hide their game pretty well,” said Minoret, “La Bougival told me
there was never any talk of religion between the doctor and the abbe.
Besides, the abbe is one of the most honest men on the face of the
globe; he’d give the shirt off his back to a poor man; he is incapable
of a base action, and to cheat a family out of their inheritance is--”
“Theft,” said Madame Massin.
“Worse!” cried Minoret-Levrault, exasperated by the tongue of his
gossiping neighbour.
“Of course I know,” said Madame Massin, “that the Abbe Chaperon is an
honest man; but he is capable of anything for the sake of his poor. He
must have mined and undermined uncle, and the old man has just tumbled
into piety. We did nothing, and here he is perverted! A man who never
believed in anything, and had principles of his own! Well! we’re done
for. My husband is absolutely beside himself.”
Madame Massin, whose sentences were so many arrows stinging her fat
cousin, made him walk as fast as herself, in spite of his obesity and
to the great astonishment of the church-goers, who were on their way to
mass. She was determined to overtake this uncle and show him to the post
master.
Nemours is commanded on the Gatinais side by a hill, at the foot of
which runs the road to Montargis and the Loing. The church, on the
stones of which time has cast a rich discolored mantle (it was rebuilt
in the fourteenth century by the Guises, for whom Nemours was raised to
a peerage-duchy), stands at the end of the little town close to a
great arch which frames it. For buildings, as for men, position does
everything. Shaded by a few trees, and thrown into relief by a neatly
kept square, this solitary church produces a really grandiose effect. As
the post master of Nemours entered the open space, he beheld his uncle
with the young girl called Ursula on his arm, both carrying prayer-books
and just entering the church. The old man took off his hat in the porch,
and his head, which was white as a hill-top covered with snow, shone
among the shadows of the portal.
“Well, Minoret, what do you say to the conversion of your uncle?” cried
the tax-collector of Nemours, named Cremiere.
“What do you expect me to say?” replied the post master, offering him a
pinch of snuff.
“Well answered, Pere Levrault. You can’t say what you think, if it is
true, as an illustrious author says it is, that a man must think his
words before he speaks his thoughts,” cried a young man, standing near,
who played the part of Mephistopheles in the little town.
This ill-conditioned youth, named Goupil, was head clerk to Monsieur
Cremiere-Dionis, the Nemours notary. Notwithstanding a past conduct that
was almost debauched, Dionis had taken Goupil into his office when a
career in Paris--where the clerk had wasted all the money he inherited
from his father, a well-to-do farmer, who educated him for a notary--was
brought to a close by his absolute pauperism. The mere sight of Goupil
told an observer that he had made haste to enjoy life, and had paid
dear for his enjoyments. Though very short, his chest and shoulders were
developed at twenty-seven years of age like those of a man of forty.
Legs small and weak, and a broad face, with a cloudy complexion like
the sky before a storm, surmounted by a bald forehead, brought out still
further the oddity of his conformation. His face seemed as though it
belonged to a hunchback whose hunch was inside of him. One singularity
of that pale and sour visage confirmed the impression of an invisible
gobbosity; the nose, crooked and out of shape like those of many
deformed persons, turned from right to left of the face instead of
dividing it down the middle. The mouth, contracted at the corners, like
that of a Sardinian, was always on the qui vive of irony. His hair, thin
and reddish, fell straight, and showed the skull in many places. His
hands, coarse and ill-joined at the wrists to arms that were far too
long, were quick-fingered and seldom clean. Goupil wore boots only fit
for the dust-heap, and raw silk stockings now of a russet black; his
coat and trousers, all black, and threadbare and greasy with dirt,
his pitiful waistcoat with half the button-moulds gone, an old silk
handkerchief which served as a cravat--in short, all his clothing
revealed the cynical poverty to which his passions had reduced him. This
combination of disreputable signs was guarded by a pair of eyes with
yellow circles round the pupils, like those of a goat, both lascivious
and cowardly. No one in Nemours was more feared nor, in a way, more
deferred to than Goupil. Strong in the claims made for him by his very
ugliness, he had the odious style of wit peculiar to men who allow
themselves all license, and he used it to gratify the bitterness of
his life-long envy. He wrote the satirical couplets sung during the
carnival, organized charivaris, and was himself a “little journal” of
the gossip of the town. Dionis, who was clever and insincere, and for
that reason timid, kept Goupil as much through fear as for his keen mind
and thorough knowledge of all the interests of the town. But the master
so distrusted his clerk that he himself kept the accounts, refused to
let him live in his house, held him at arm’s length, and never confided
any secret or delicate affair to his keeping. In return the clerk fawned
upon the notary, hiding his resentment at this conduct, and watching
Madame Dionis in the hope that he might get his revenge there. Gifted
with a ready mind and quick comprehension he found work easy.
“You!” exclaimed the post master to the clerk, who stood rubbing his
hands, “making game of our misfortunes already?”
As Goupil was known to have pandered to Dionis’ passions for the last
five years, the post master treated him cavalierly, without suspecting
the hoard of ill-feeling he was piling up in Goupil’s heart with every
fresh insult. The clerk, convinced that money was more necessary to him
than it was to others, and knowing himself superior in mind to the whole
bourgeoisie of Nemours, was now counting on his intimacy with Minoret’s
son Desire to obtain the means of buying one or the other of three town
offices,--that of clerk of the court, or the legal practice of one of
the sheriffs, or that of Dionis himself. For this reason he put up
with the affronts of the post master and the contempt of Madame
Minoret-Levrault, and played a contemptible part towards Desire,
consoling the fair victims whom that youth left behind him after each
vacation,--devouring the crumbs of the loaves he had kneaded.
“If I were the nephew of a rich old fellow, he never would have given
God to ME for a co-heir,” retorted Goupil, with a hideous grin which
exhibited his teeth--few, black, and menacing.
Just then Massin-Levrault, junior, the clerk of the court, joined his
wife, bringing with him Madame Cremiere, the wife of the tax-collector
of Nemours. This man, one of the hardest natures of the little town, had
the physical characteristics of a Tartar: eyes small and round as sloes
beneath a retreating brow, crimped hair, an oily skin, huge ears without
any rim, a mouth almost without lips, and a scanty beard. He spoke like
a man who was losing his voice. To exhibit him thoroughly it is enough
to say that he employed his wife and eldest daughter to serve his legal
notices.
Madame Cremiere was a stout woman, with a fair complexion injured by
red blotches, always too tightly laced, intimate with Madame Dionis, and
supposed to be educated because she read novels. Full of pretensions to
wit and elegance, she was awaiting her uncle’s money to “take a certain
stand,” decorate her salon, and receive the bourgeoisie. At present her
husband denied her Carcel lamps, lithographs, and all the other trifles
the notary’s wife possessed. She was excessively afraid of Goupil, who
caught up and retailed her “slapsus-linquies” as she called them. One
day Madame Dionis chanced to ask what “Eau” she thought best for the
teeth.
“Try opium,” she replied.
Nearly all the collateral heirs of old Doctor Minoret were now assembled
in the square; the importance of the event which brought them was so
generally felt that even groups of peasants, armed with their scarlet
umbrellas and dressed in those brilliant colors which make them so
picturesque on Sundays and fete-days, stood by, with their eyes fixed on
the frightened heirs. In all little towns which are midway between
large villages and cities those who do not go to mass stand about in the
square or market-place. Business is talked over. In Nemours the hour of
church service was a weekly exchange, to which the owners of property
scattered over a radius of some miles resorted.
“Well, how would you have prevented it?” said the post master to Goupil
in reply to his remark.
“I should have made myself as important to him as the air he breathes.
But from the very first you failed to get hold of him. The inheritance
of a rich uncle should be watched as carefully as a pretty woman--for
want of proper care they’ll both escape you. If Madame Dionis were here
she could tell you how true that comparison is.”
“But Monsieur Bongrand has just told me there is nothing to worry
about,” said Massin.
“Oh! there are plenty of ways of saying that!” cried Goupil, laughing.
“I would like to have heard your sly justice of the peace say it. If
there is nothing to be done, if he, being intimate with your uncle,
knows that all is lost, the proper thing for him to say to you is,
‘Don’t be worried.’”
As Goupil spoke, a satirical smile overspread his face, and gave such
meaning to his words that the other heirs began to feel that Massin
had let Bongrand deceive him. The tax-collector, a fat little man, as
insignificant as a tax-collector should be, and as much of a cipher as a
clever woman could wish, hereupon annihilated his co-heir, Massin, with
the words:--“Didn’t I tell you so?”
Tricky people always attribute trickiness to others. Massin therefore
looked askance at Monsieur Bongrand, the justice of the peace, who was
at that moment talking near the door of the church with the Marquis du
Rouvre, a former client.
“If I were sure of it!” he said.
“You could neutralize the protection he is now giving to the Marquis
du Rouvre, who is threatened with arrest. Don’t you see how Bongrand
is sprinkling him with advice?” said Goupil, slipping an idea of
retaliation into Massin’s mind. “But you had better go easy with your
chief; he’s a clever old fellow; he might use his influence with your
uncle and persuade him not to leave everything to the church.”
“Pooh! we sha’n’t die of it,” said Minoret-Levrault, opening his
enormous snuff-box.
“You won’t live of it, either,” said Goupil, making the two women
tremble. More quick-witted than their husbands, they saw the privations
this loss of inheritance (so long counted on for many comforts) would
be to them. “However,” added Goupil, “we’ll drown this little grief in
floods of champagne in honor of Desire!--sha’n’t we, old fellow?” he
cried, tapping the stomach of the giant, and inviting himself to the
feast for fear he should be left out.