Before proceeding further, persons of an exact turn of mind may like to
read a species of family inventory, so as to understand the degrees
of relationship which connected the old man thus suddenly converted
to religion with these three heads of families or their wives. This
cross-breeding of families in the remote provinces might be made the
subject of many instructive reflections.
There are but three or four houses of the lesser nobility in Nemours;
among them, at the period of which we write, that of the family of
Portenduere was the most important. These exclusives visited none but
nobles who possessed lands or chateaus in the neighbourhood; of the
latter we may mention the d’Aiglemonts, owners of the beautiful estate
of Saint-Lange, and the Marquis du Rouvre, whose property, crippled by
mortgages, was closely watched by the bourgeoisie. The nobles of the
town had no money. Madame de Portenduere’s sole possessions were a
farm which brought a rental of forty-seven hundred francs, and her town
house.
In opposition to this very insignificant Faubourg St. Germain was a
group of a dozen rich families, those of retired millers, or former
merchants; in short a miniature bourgeoisie; below which, again, lived
and moved the retail shopkeepers, the proletaries and the peasantry. The
bourgeoisie presented (like that of the Swiss cantons and of other
small countries) the curious spectacle of the ramifications of certain
autochthonous families, old-fashioned and unpolished perhaps, but who
rule a whole region and pervade it, until nearly all its inhabitants are
cousins. Under Louis XI., an epoch at which the commons first made
real names of their surnames (some of which are united with those of
feudalism) the bourgeoisie of Nemours was made up of Minorets, Massins,
Levraults and Cremieres. Under Louis XIII. these four families had
already produced the Massin-Cremieres, the Levrault-Massins, the
Massin-Minorets, the Minoret-Minorets, the Cremiere-Levraults,
the Levrault-Minoret-Massins, Massin-Levraults, Minoret-Massins,
Massin-Massins, and Cremiere-Massins,--all these varied with juniors
and diversified with the names of eldest sons, as for instance,
Cremiere-Francois, Levrault-Jacques, Jean-Minoret--enough to drive a
Pere Anselme of the People frantic,--if the people should ever want a
genealogist.
The variations of this family kaleidoscope of four branches was now so
complicated by births and marriages that the genealogical tree of
the bourgeoisie of Nemours would have puzzled the Benedictines of
the Almanach of Gotha, in spite of the atomic science with which they
arrange those zigzags of German alliances. For a long time the Minorets
occupied the tanneries, the Cremieres kept the mills, the Massins were
in trade, and the Levraults continued farmers. Fortunately for the
neighbourhood these four stocks threw out suckers instead of depending
only on their tap-roots; they scattered cuttings by the expatriation
of sons who sought their fortune elsewhere; for instance, there are
Minorets who are cutlers at Melun; Levraults at Montargis; Massins
at Orleans; and Cremieres of some importance in Paris. Divers are the
destinies of these bees from the parent hive. Rich Massins employ, of
course, the poor working Massins--just as Austria and Prussia take the
German princes into their service. It may happen that a public office is
managed by a Minoret millionaire and guarded by a Minoret sentinel. Full
of the same blood and called by the same name (for sole likeness), these
four roots had ceaselessly woven a human network of which each thread
was delicate or strong, fine or coarse, as the case might be. The same
blood was in the head and in the feet and in the heart, in the working
hands, in the weakly lungs, in the forehead big with genius.
The chiefs of the clan were faithful to the little town, where the
ties of family were relaxed or tightened according to the events which
happened under this curious cognomenism. In whatever part of France you
may be, you will find the same thing under changed names, but without
the poetic charm which feudalism gave to it, and which Walter Scott’s
genius reproduced so faithfully. Let us look a little higher and
examine humanity as it appears in history. All the noble families of the
eleventh century, most of them (except the royal race of Capet) extinct
to-day, will be found to have contributed to the birth of the Rohans,
Montmorencys, Beauffremonts, and Mortemarts of our time,--in fact they
will all be found in the blood of the last gentleman who is indeed a
gentleman. In other words, every bourgeois is cousin to a bourgeois, and
every noble is cousin to a noble. A splendid page of biblical genealogy
shows that in one thousand years three families, Shem, Ham, and Japhet,
peopled the globe. One family may become a nation; unfortunately, a
nation may become one family. To prove this we need only search back
through our ancestors and see their accumulation, which time increases
into a retrograde geometric progression, which multiplies of itself;
reminding us of the calculation of the wise man who, being told to
choose a reward from the king of Persia for inventing chess, asked
for one ear of wheat for the first move on the board, the reward to be
doubled for each succeeding move; when it was found that the kingdom was
not large enough to pay it. The net-work of the nobility, hemmed in by
the net-work of the bourgeoisie,--the antagonism of two protected races,
one protected by fixed institutions, the other by the active patience of
labor and the shrewdness of commerce,--produced the revolution of 1789.
The two races almost reunited are to-day face to face with collaterals
without a heritage. What are they to do? Our political future is big
with the answer.
The family of the man who under Louis XV. was simply called Minoret was
so numerous that one of the five children (the Minoret whose entrance
into the parish church caused such interest) went to Paris to seek
his fortune, and seldom returned to his native town, until he came to
receive his share of the inheritance of his grandfather. After suffering
many things, like all young men of firm will who struggle for a place in
the brilliant world of Paris, this son of the Minorets reached a nobler
destiny than he had, perhaps, dreamed of at the start. He devoted
himself, in the first instance, to medicine, a profession which demands
both talent and a cheerful nature, but the latter qualification even
more than talent. Backed by Dupont de Nemours, connected by a lucky
chance with the Abbe Morellet (whom Voltaire nicknamed Mords-les), and
protected by the Encyclopedists, Doctor Minoret attached himself as
liegeman to the famous Doctor Bordeu, the friend of Diderot, D’Alembert,
Helvetius, the Baron d’Holbach and Grimm, in whose presence he felt
himself a mere boy. These men, influenced by Bordeu’s example, became
interested in Minoret, who, about the year 1777, found himself with
a very good practice among deists, encyclopedists, sensualists,
materialists, or whatever you are pleased to call the rich philosophers
of that period.
Though Minoret was very little of a humbug, he invented the famous balm
of Lelievre, so much extolled by the “Mercure de France,” the weekly
organ of the Encyclopedists, in whose columns it was permanently
advertised. The apothecary Lelievre, a clever man, saw a stroke
of business where Minoret had only seen a new preparation for the
dispensary, and he loyally shared his profits with the doctor, who was
a pupil of Rouelle in chemistry as well as of Bordeu in medicine. Less
than that would make a man a materialist.
The doctor married for love in 1778, during the reign of the “Nouvelle
Heloise,” when persons did occasionally marry for that reason. His
wife was a daughter of the famous harpsichordist Valentin Mirouet,
a celebrated musician, frail and delicate, whom the Revolution slew.
Minoret knew Robespierre intimately, for he had once been instrumental
in awarding him a gold medal for a dissertation on the following
subject: “What is the origin of the opinion that covers a whole family
with the shame attaching to the public punishment of a guilty member of
it? Is that opinion more harmful than useful? If yes, in what way can
the harm be warded off.” The Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences at
Metz, to which Minoret belonged, must possess this dissertation in the
original. Though, thanks to this friendship, the Doctor’s wife need
have had no fear, she was so in dread of going to the scaffold that
her terror increased a disposition to heart disease caused by the
over-sensitiveness of her nature. In spite of all the precautions taken
by the man who idolized her, Ursula unfortunately met the tumbril of
victims among whom was Madame Roland, and the shock caused her death.
Minoret, who in tenderness to his wife had refused her nothing, and had
given her a life of luxury, found himself after her death almost a
poor man. Robespierre gave him an appointment as surgeon-in-charge of a
hospital.
Though the name of Minoret obtained during the lively debates to which
mesmerism gave rise a certain celebrity which occasionally recalled
him to the minds of his relatives, still the Revolution was so great a
destroyer of family relations that in 1813 Nemours knew little of Doctor
Minoret, who was induced to think of returning there to die, like the
hare to its form, by a circumstance that was wholly accidental.
Who has not felt in traveling through France, where the eye is often
wearied by the monotony of plains, the charming sensation of coming
suddenly, when the eye is prepared for a barren landscape, upon a fresh
cool valley, watered by a river, with a little town sheltering beneath
a cliff like a swarm of bees in the hollow of an old willow? Wakened by
the “hu! hu!” of the postilion as he walks beside his horses, we shake
off sleep and admire, like a dream within a dream, the beautiful
scene which is to the traveler what a noble passage in a book is to a
reader,--a brilliant thought of Nature. Such is the sensation caused
by a first sight of Nemours as we approach it from Burgundy. We see it
encircled with bare rocks, gray, black, white, fantastic in shape like
those we find in the forest of Fontainebleau; from them spring scattered
trees, clearly defined against the sky, which give to this particular
rock formation the dilapidated look of a crumbling wall. Here ends the
long wooded hill which creeps from Nemours to Bouron, skirting the road.
At the bottom of this irregular amphitheater lie meadow-lands through
which flows the Loing, forming sheets of water with many falls. This
delightful landscape, which continues the whole way to Montargis, is
like an opera scene, for its effects really seem to have been studied.
One morning Doctor Minoret, who had been summoned into Burgundy by a
rich patient, was returning in all haste to Paris. Not having mentioned
at the last relay the route he intended to take, he was brought without
his knowledge through Nemours, and beheld once more, on waking from a
nap, the scenery in which his childhood had been passed. He had lately
lost many of his old friends. The votary of the Encyclopedists had
witnessed the conversion of La Harpe; he had buried Lebrun-Pindare and
Marie-Joseph de Chenier, and Morellet, and Madame Helvetius. He assisted
at the quasi-fall of Voltaire when assailed by Geoffroy, the continuator
of Freton. For some time past he had thought of retiring, and so, when
his post chaise stopped at the head of the Grand’Rue of Nemours, his
heart prompted him to inquire for his family. Minoret-Levrault, the post
master, came forward himself to see the doctor, who discovered him to
be the son of his eldest brother. The nephew presented the doctor to
his wife, the only daughter of the late Levrault-Cremiere, who had died
twelve years earlier, leaving him the post business and the finest inn
in Nemours.
“Well, nephew,” said the doctor, “have I any other relatives?”
“My aunt Minoret, your sister, married a Massin-Massin--”
“Yes, I know, the bailiff of Saint-Lange.”
“She died a widow leaving an only daughter, who has lately married a
Cremiere-Cremiere, a fine young fellow, still without a place.”
“Ah! she is my own niece. Now, as my brother, the sailor, died a
bachelor, and Captain Minoret was killed at Monte-Legino, and here I am,
that ends the paternal line. Have I any relations on the maternal side?
My mother was a Jean-Massin-Levrault.”
“Of the Jean-Massin-Levrault’s there’s only one left,” answered
Minoret-Levrault, “namely, Jean-Massin, who married Monsieur
Cremiere-Levrault-Dionis, a purveyor of forage, who perished on the
scaffold. His wife died of despair and without a penny, leaving one
daughter, married to a Levrault-Minoret, a farmer at Montereau, who is
doing well; their daughter has just married a Massin-Levrault, notary’s
clerk at Montargis, where his father is a locksmith.”
“So I’ve plenty of heirs,” said the doctor gayly, immediately proposing
to take a walk through Nemours accompanied by his nephew.
The Loing runs through the town in a waving line, banked by terraced
gardens and neat houses, the aspect of which makes one fancy that
happiness must abide there sooner than elsewhere. When the doctor turned
into the Rue des Bourgeois, Minoret-Levrault pointed out the property of
Levrault-Levrault, a rich iron merchant in Paris who, he said, had just
died.
“The place is for sale, uncle, and a very pretty house it is; there’s a
charming garden running down to the river.”
“Let us go in,” said the doctor, seeing, at the farther end of a
small paved courtyard, a house standing between the walls of the
two neighbouring houses which were masked by clumps of trees and
climbing-plants.
“It is built over a cellar,” said the doctor, going up the steps of
a high portico adorned with vases of blue and white pottery in which
geraniums were growing.
Cut in two, like the majority of provincial houses, by a long passage
which led from the courtyard to the garden, the house had only one room
to the right, a salon lighted by four windows, two on the courtyard and
two on the garden; but Levrault-Levrault had used one of these windows
to make an entrance to a long greenhouse built of brick which extended
from the salon towards the river, ending in a horrible Chinese pagoda.
“Good! by building a roof to that greenhouse and laying a floor,” said
old Minoret, “I could put my book there and make a very comfortable
study of that extraordinary bit of architecture at the end.”
On the other side of the passage, toward the garden, was the
dining-room, decorated in imitation of black lacquer with green and
gold flowers; this was separated from the kitchen by the well of the
staircase. Communication with the kitchen was had through a little
pantry built behind the staircase, the kitchen itself looking into the
courtyard through windows with iron railings. There were two chambers on
the next floor, and above them, attic rooms sheathed in wood, which were
fairly habitable. After examining the house rapidly, and observing that
it was covered with trellises from top to bottom, on the side of the
courtyard as well as on that to the garden,--which ended in a terrace
overlooking the river and adorned with pottery vases,--the doctor
remarked:--
“Levrault-Levrault must have spend a good deal of money here.”
“Ho! I should think so,” answered Minoret-Levrault. “He liked
flowers--nonsense! ‘What do they bring in?’ says my wife. You saw inside
there how an artist came from Paris to paint flowers in fresco in the
corridor. He put those enormous mirrors everywhere. The ceilings were
all re-made with cornices which cost six francs a foot. The dining-room
floor is in marquetry--perfect folly! The house won’t sell for a penny
the more.”
“Well, nephew, buy it for me: let me know what you do about it; here’s
my address. The rest I leave to my notary. Who lives opposite?” he
asked, as they left the house.
“Emigres,” answered the post master, “named Portenduere.”
The house once bought, the illustrious doctor, instead of living
there, wrote to his nephew to let it. The Folie-Levraught was therefore
occupied by the notary of Nemours, who about that time sold his practice
to Dionis, his head-clerk, and died two years later, leaving the house
on the doctor’s hands, just at the time when the fate of Napoleon was
being decided in the neighbourhood. The doctor’s heirs, at first misled,
had by this time decided that his thought of returning to his native
place was merely a rich man’s fancy, and that probably he had some tie
in Paris which would keep him there and cheat them of their hoped-for
inheritance. However, Minoret-Levrault’s wife seized the occasion
to write him a letter. The old man replied that as soon as peace
was signed, the roads cleared of soldiers, and safe communications
established, he meant to go and live at Nemours. He did, in fact, put in
an appearance with two of his clients, the architect of his hospital and
an upholsterer, who took charge of the repairs, the indoor arrangements,
and the transportation of the furniture. Madame Minoret-Levrault
proposed the cook of the late notary as caretaker, and the woman was
accepted.
When the heirs heard that their uncle and great-uncle Minoret was really
coming to live in Nemours, they were seized (in spite of the political
events which were just then weighing so heavily on Brie and on the
Gatinais) with a devouring curiosity, which was not surprising. Was
he rich? Economical or spendthrift? Would he leave a fine fortune or
nothing? Was his property in annuities? In the end they found out
what follows, but only by taking infinite pains and employing much
subterraneous spying.
After the death of his wife, Ursula Mirouet, and between the years 1789
and 1813, the doctor (who had been appointed consulting physician to the
Emperor in 1805) must have made a good deal of money; but no one knew
how much. He lived simply, without other extravagancies than a carriage
by the year and a sumptuous apartment. He received no guests, and dined
out almost every day. His housekeeper, furious at not being allowed to
go with him to Nemours, told Zelie Levrault, the post master’s wife,
that she knew the doctor had fourteen thousand francs a year on the
“grand-livre.” Now, after twenty years’ exercise of a profession which
his position as head of a hospital, physician to the Emperor, and member
of the Institute, rendered lucrative, these fourteen thousand francs a
year showed only one hundred and sixty thousand francs laid by. To have
saved only eight thousand francs a year the doctor must have had either
many vices or many virtues to gratify. But neither his housekeeper
nor Zelie nor any one else could discover the reason for such moderate
means. Minoret, who when he left it was much regretted in the quarter
of Paris where he had lived, was one of the most benevolent of men, and,
like Larrey, kept his kind deeds a profound secret.
The heirs watched the arrival of their uncle’s fine furniture and large
library with complacency, and looked forward to his own coming, he being
now an officer of the Legion of honor, and lately appointed by the king
a chevalier of the order of Saint-Michel--perhaps on account of his
retirement, which left a vacancy for some favorite. But when the
architect and painter and upholsterer had arranged everything in
the most comfortable manner, the doctor did not come. Madame
Minoret-Levrault, who kept an eye on the upholsterer and architect as if
her own property was concerned, found out, through the indiscretion of a
young man sent to arrange the books, that the doctor was taking care of
a little orphan named Ursula. The news flew like wild-fire through the
town. At last, however, towards the middle of the month of January,
1815, the old man actually arrived, installing himself quietly, almost
slyly, with a little girl about ten months old, and a nurse.
“The child can’t be his daughter,” said the terrified heirs; “he is
seventy-one years old.”
“Whoever she is,” remarked Madame Massin, “she’ll give us plenty of
tintouin” (a word peculiar to Nemours, meaning uneasiness, anxiety, or
more literally, tingling in the ears).
The doctor received his great-niece on the mother’s side somewhat
coldly; her husband had just bought the place of clerk of the court, and
the pair began at once to tell him of their difficulties. Neither Massin
nor his wife were rich. Massin’s father, a locksmith at Montargis,
had been obliged to compromise with his creditors, and was now, at
sixty-seven years of age, working like a young man, and had nothing to
leave behind him. Madame Massin’s father, Levrault-Minoret, had just
died at Montereau after the battle, in despair at seeing his farm
burned, his fields ruined, his cattle slaughtered.
“We’ll get nothing out of your great-uncle,” said Massin to his wife,
now pregnant with her second child, after the interview.
The doctor, however, gave them privately ten thousand francs, with which
Massin, who was a great friend of the notary and of the sheriff, began
the business of money-lending, and carried matters so briskly with the
peasantry that by the time of which we are now writing Goupil knew him
to hold at least eighty thousand francs on their property.
As to his other niece, the doctor obtained for her husband, through
his influence in Paris, the collectorship of Nemours, and became his
bondsman. Though Minoret-Levrault needed no assistance, Zelie, his wife,
being jealous of the uncle’s liberality to his two nieces, took her
ten-year old son to see him, and talked of the expense he would be to
them at a school in Paris, where, she said, education costs so much. The
doctor obtained a half-scholarship for his great-nephew at the school of
Louis-le-Grand, where Desire was put into the fourth class.
Cremiere, Massin, and Minoret-Levrault, extremely common persons, were
“rated without appeal” by the doctor within two months of his arrival
in Nemours, during which time they courted, less their uncle than his
property. Persons who are led by instinct have one great disadvantage
against others with ideas. They are quickly found out; the suggestions
of instinct are too natural, too open to the eye not to be seen at a
glance; whereas, the conceptions of the mind require an equal amount of
intellect to discover them. After buying the gratitude of his heirs, and
thus, as it were, shutting their mouths, the wily doctor made a pretext
of his occupations, his habits, and the care of the little Ursula to
avoid receiving his relatives without exactly closing his doors to them.
He liked to dine alone; he went to bed late and he got up late; he had
returned to his native place for the very purpose of finding rest
in solitude. These whims of an old man seemed to be natural, and his
relatives contented themselves with paying him weekly visits on Sundays
from one to four o’clock, to which, however, he tried to put a stop by
saying: “Don’t come and see me unless you want something.”
The doctor, while not refusing to be called in consultation over serious
cases, especially if the patients were indigent, would not serve as a
physician in the little hospital of Nemours, and declared that he no
longer practiced his profession.
“I’ve killed enough people,” he said, laughing, to the Abbe Chaperon,
who, knowing his benevolence, would often get him to attend the poor.
“He’s an original!” These words, said of Doctor Minoret, were the
harmless revenge of various wounded vanities; for a doctor collects
about him a society of persons who have many of the characteristics of
a set of heirs. Those of the bourgeoisie who thought themselves entitled
to visit this distinguished physician kept up a ferment of jealousy
against the few privileged friends whom he did admit to his intimacy,
which had in the long run some unfortunate results.