Ursule Mirouët (Tomlinson translation)/Part I/1
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In entering Nemours, on the Paris side, one crosses the canal of the Loing, the banks of which make both rustic ramparts and picturesque walks for this pretty little town. Since 1830, several houses have, unfortunately, been built on this side of the bridge. If this species of suburb increases, the appearance of the town will lose its charming originality. But, in 1829, the sides of the way being clear, the postmaster, a big, stout man about sixty years of age, seated at the highest point of this bridge, could perfectly well, on a fine morning, embrace that which, in the terms of his profession, is called a highroad. The month of September was putting forth its treasures, the atmosphere burning above the grass and stones, no cloud disturbing the blue of the ether whose purity, everywhere intense, even on the horizon, told of the exceeding rarefaction of the air. So that Minoret-Levrault, as the postmaster was called, was obliged to make a screen of one hand to avoid being dazzled. Like a man provoked at waiting, he looked now at the delightful fields that spread to the right of the road, and where the aftermath was growing, now at the wood-covered hill which, on the left, stretches from Nemours to Bouron. In the valley of the Loing, where echoed the noises of the road, thrown back by the hill, he could hear the gallop of his own horses and the crack of his postilions’ whips. Could any but a postmaster grow impatient before a field full of Paul Potter cattle, under a Raphael sky, over a canal shaded by trees in Hobbema’s style? Anyone acquainted with Nemours knows that there nature is as beautiful as art, whose mission is to spiritualize her; there, the scenery holds ideas and rouses thought. But, at sight of Minoret-Levrault, an artist would have forsaken the view to sketch this bourgeois, so original did his very coarseness render him. Combine all the conditions of the brute, and you get Caliban, which certainly is a great thing. Where form predominates, sentiment disappears. The postmaster, living proof of this axiom, presented one of those countenances in which a thinker can with difficulty trace the mind beneath the violent complexion produced by a rude development of the flesh. His blue cloth cap, small peaked and ribbed like a melon, outlined a head whose large dimensions proved that Gall’s science has not yet attacked the subject of exceptions. The gray and almost glossy hair projecting beyond the cap would have told you that other causes than intellectual fatigue or sorrow whiten the hair. On each side of the head, one saw large ears, almost scarred along the edges by the erosions of an over-abundant blood which seemed ready to gush out at the slightest exertion. The complexion was violet-hued under a brown coating, due to the habit of facing the sun. The eyes, gray, alert, sunken and hidden beneath two black bushes, resembled the eyes of the Kalmucks, who arrived in 1815; if at moments they sparkled, it could only be under the strain of some covetous thought. The nose, depressed at the root, suddenly turned up like the leg of a copper pot. Thick lips harmonizing with an almost repulsive double chin, the beard of which, shaved hardly twice a week, kept a wretched silk handkerchief in a threadbare condition; a neck creased with fat, though very short; and huge cheeks, completing the characteristics of stupid power that sculptors impart to their caryatids. Minoret-Levrault resembled these statues with this difference merely, that they support a building, and he had enough to do to support himself. One may meet many such an Atlas without a world. This man’s head and shoulders were like a block; one might have said, those of a bull raised on his hind legs. The stalwart arms terminated in thick, hard hands, big and powerful, that could and did handle a whip, the reins, or the pitchfork, and with which no postilion ever trifled. This giant’s enormous stomach was supported by thighs as thick as an adult’s body, and by the feet of an elephant. Anger must have been rare with this man, but terrible and apoplectic when he gave vent to it. Although violent and incapable of reflection, this man had done nothing to justify the sinister prophecies of his physiognomy. His postilions would say to those who quaked before the giant:
“Oh! he is not bad!”
The master of Nemours, to use an abbreviation employed in many countries, wore a bottle-green velvet shooting-jacket, green drill trousers with green stripes, an ample yellow mohair waistcoat, in the pocket of which could be seen a monstrous snuffbox outlined by a black circle. A big snuff-box for a snub nose, is a law almost without exception.
Minoret-Levrault, offspring of the Revolution and spectator of the Empire, had never mixed himself up with politics; as for his religious opinions, he had never set foot inside a church except to be married; as for his principles in private life, they existed in the Civil Code; all that was not forbidden or unattainable by the law he believed to be feasible. He had never read anything but the newspaper of the department of Seine-et-Oise, or a few instructions referring to his profession. He was considered to be a skilful farmer; but his knowledge was purely practical. Thus, with Minoret-Levrault, the mind did not belie the body. It was seldom, too, that he talked; and, before beginning to speak, he always took a pinch of snuff to give himself time to seek, not ideas, but words. As a talker, he would have struck one as a failure. Considering that this species of trunkless and unintelligent elephant was named Minoret-Levrault, must one not admit with Sterne the occult power of names that sometimes mock and sometimes foretell character? In spite of his obvious incapacity, in thirty-six years he had with the help of the Revolution, acquired an income of thirty thousand francs, in fields, arable land, and forest. If Minoret, with an interest in the Nemours stage, and those running between Gâtinais and Paris, still worked, he was in this acting less through habit than for the sake of an only son for whom he wished to prepare a fine future. This son, who had become a gentleman—as the peasants termed it—had just finished reading for the bar, and when the courts re-opened, was to take the oath as lawyer’s licentiate. Monsieur and Madame Minoret-Levrault,—for, through this giant everyone discovered a wife without whom such a handsome fortune was impossible,—left their son free to choose a profession for himself: notary in Paris, attorney for the crown somewhere, receiver-general no matter where, exchange agent or postmaster. What whim could be denied, what calling above the aspirations of the son of a man of whom it was said from Montargis to Essonne that “Father Minoret cannot count his income.” This saying, four years before, had acquired further authority when, after having sold his inn, Minoret had built himself a magnificent house and stables by transferring the stage from the Grand’Rue to the harbor. This new establishment had cost two hundred thousand francs, that the gossips for thirty miles round doubled. The Nemours stage requires a large number of horses, it goes toward Paris as far as Fontainebleau and runs beyond the Montargis and Montereau roads; on both sides the stage is slow, and the sands of the Montargis road warrant that chimerical third horse which is always paid for and never seen. So a man built like Minoret, as rich as Minoret, and at the head of such an establishment could call himself without antiphrasis, the master of Nemours. Although he had never given a thought to God or the devil, and was as practical a materialist as he was a practical farmer, practical egotist, and practical miser, Minoret had, up till then, enjoyed unmixed happiness, if one may consider a purely material life as happiness. A physiologist, beholding the cushion of bare flesh enveloping the last vertebra and compressing this man’s hind brain, and, above all, hearing the clear, shrill voice which contrasted so ludicrously with his chest and shoulders, would have perfectly understood why this big, stout, thickset farmer adored his only son, and why, perhaps, he had waited so long for him, as the child’s name of Désiré sufficiently explained. In short, if love, by betraying a rich organization, is, in man, a promise of the grandest things, then philosophers will understand the causes of Minoret’s incapacity. The mother, whom the son fortunately resembled, vied with the father in spoiling him. No natural child could have resisted this idolatry. So Désiré, knowing the extent of his power, knew how to drain his mother’s money-box and take from his father’s purse whilst pretending to both authors of his being that he was only applying to the one. Desire, who, at Nemours bore a part infinitely superior to that of a royal prince in his father’s capital, had wished to gratify all his caprices in Paris as he had gratified them in his own small town, and, every year, he had there spent more than twelve thousand francs. But, for this sum, he had also acquired ideas that would never have come to him in Nemours; he had sloughed off the provincial skin, he had understood the power of money and foresaw a means of preferment in the bench. During this last year, he had spent an additional ten thousand francs, by forming connections with artists, with journalists and their mistresses. A somewhat disquieting confidential letter to the postmaster, whose help his son had asked in a marriage, would, at a pinch, have explained his mounting guard; but Mother Minoret-Levrault, busy preparing a sumptuous luncheon to celebrate the triumph and the return of the licentiate in law, had sent her husband on the road, bidding him ride on if he did not see the diligence. The coach which was to bring this only son, usually arrives at Nemours about five o’clock in the morning, and nine o’clock was striking!
What could cause such delay? Had there been an upset? Was Désiré alive? Had he merely a broken leg?
Three thundering cracks of a whip explode and rend the air like musket-shots, the red waistcoats of the postilions appear, the horses neigh! the master takes off his cap and waves it, he is seen. The best mounted postilion, the one who was bringing back two dapple-gray road horses, sets spurs to his near-horse, outstrips five great coach horses, the Minorets of the stable, three carriage horses, and arrives in front of the master.
“Have you seen la Dueler?”
On the highroads, coaches are given rather fanciful names; they say la Caillard, la Dueler—the coach from Nemours to Paris—le Grand-Bureau. Every fresh undertaking is called la Concurrence. At the time of the Lecomtes’ enterprise, their carriages were called la Comtesse. “Caillard has not overtaken la Comtesse, but the Grand-Bureau has fairly taken the shine out of her all the same! La Caillard and the Grand-Bureau have sunk les Françaises—the French stage coaches.” If you see the postilion going at a breakneck speed and refusing a glass of wine, question the guard; he will answer, sniffing the wind and looking into space: “La Concurrence is ahead!”—“And we do not see it!” says the postilion.—“The villain, he can’t have allowed the passengers to eat!” “Has he any?” replies the guard. “Then whip up Polignac!” All bad horses are called Polignac. Such are the jokes and the stock of conversation between the postilions and guards on top of the coaches. Every profession has its slang in France.
“Did you look inside la Dueler?”
“Monsieur Désiré?” replied the postilion, interrupting his master. “Eh! you must have heard us, our whips must have told you enough, we quite thought you were on the road.”
“Then why is the coach four hours late?”
“The tire of one of the back wheels fell off between Essonne and Ponthierry. But there was no accident; at the hill, Cabirolle happily noticed the matter.”
At this moment, a woman dressed in her Sunday clothes, for the pealing of the Nemours bell was summoning the inhabitants to the Sunday mass—a woman about thirty-six years old approached the postmaster.
“Well, cousin,” she said, “you never would believe me! Our uncle is in the Grand’Rue with Ursule and they are going to High Mass.”
In spite of the rules of modern poetry about local color, it is impossible to carry truth so far as to repeat the frightful abuse mingled with oaths that this news, apparently so little dramatic, called forth from Minoret-Levrault’s great mouth; his shrill voice hissed and his face presented the effect so ingeniously termed by the people, a Sunstroke.
“Are you sure?” he said after the first explosion of anger.
The postilions passed with their horses, saluting their master, who seemed neither to see nor to hear them. Instead of waiting for his son, Minoret-Levrault turned back up the Grand’Rue with his cousin.
“Have I not always told you so?” she resumed, “when Doctor Minoret has lost his mind, this demure little chit will make him take to religion; and as whoever holds the mind holds the purse-strings, she will have our inheritance.”
“But, Madame Massin—!” said the postmaster, stupefied.
“Ah! you too,” replied Madame Massin, interrupting her cousin, “you are going to tell me like Massin: ‘Can a little girl of fifteen invent such plans and execute them? shake the opinions of a man of eighty-three years of age, who has never set foot in a church but to be married, who holds the priests in such horror that he did not even accompany this child to the parish church the day of her first Communion?’ Well then, why, if Doctor Minoret detests the priests, has he for fifteen years spent nearly every evening in the week with the Abbé Chaperon? The old hypocrite has never failed to give Ursule twenty francs for candles when she gives back the consecrated bread. Then you have forgotten the gift Ursule gave the church as thanks to the curé for having prepared her for her first Communion? She spent all her money on it, and her godfather gave it back to her, but doubled. You men notice nothing! When I heard these particulars, I said, ‘Good-bye our hopes! all is over!’ An uncle with an inheritance does not act like this purposelessly, toward a little sniveller picked out of the street.”
“Bah! cousin,” replied the postmaster, “perhaps the old man is taking Ursule accidentally to church. It is fine, and our uncle is going for a walk.”
“Cousin, our uncle holds a prayer-book; and he has a hypocritical look! In short, you will see him.”
“They were hiding their game very well,” answered the big postmaster, “for La Bougival told me that there was never any question of religion between the doctor and the Abbé Chaperon. Besides, the curé of Nemours is the most honest man in the world, he would give his last shirt to a beggar; he is incapable of a mean action; and dissipating an inheritance is—”
“But it is robbery,” said Madame Massin.
“It’s worse!” cried Minoret-Levrault, exasperated by his garrulous cousin’s remark.
“I know,” replied Madame Massin, “that the Abbé Chaperon, although a priest, is an honest man; but he is capable of anything for the poor! He will have bored, and bored, and bored beneath my uncle, and the doctor will have sunk into bigotry. We were quite easy, and here he is perverted. A man who has never believed in anything and who had principles! Oh! we are all done for. My husband is all upset about it”
Madame Massin, whose words were like so many arrows stinging her big cousin, made him walk along, in spite of his embonpoint, as rapidly as herself to the great astonishment of the people who were going to mass. She wanted to overtake this uncle Minoret and point him out to the postmaster.
On the Gâtinais side, Nemours is overlooked by a hill, along which extends the road of Montargis and the Loing. The church, over whose stones time has spread its rich black cloak—for it was undoubtedly rebuilt in the fourteenth century by the Guises for whom Nemours was erected into a duchy-peerage, stands up at the end of the little town, enframed at the base of a great arch. For public buildings as for men, position is everything. Shaded by several trees, and thrown up by a neat square, this solitary church produced an imposing effect. In emerging on the square, the master of Nemours could see his uncle giving his arm to the young girl called Ursule, each holding a prayerbook and going into the church. The old man removed his hat in the porch, and his head, entirely white, like a snow-capped pinnacle, shone in the soft shadows of the façade.
“Well, Minoret, what do you say to your uncle’s conversion?” cried the tax-collector of Nemours, named Crémière.
“What would you have me say?” replied the postmaster, offering him a pinch of snuff.
“Well answered, père Levrault! you cannot say what you think, if a famous author was right in writing that man is obliged to think his words before speaking his thought,” maliciously cried a young man who had come up, and who, in Nemours, played the rôle of Mephistopheles in Faust.
This horrid fellow, called Goupil, was the head clerk of Monsieur Crémière-Dionis, the notary of Nemours. In spite of past behavior of an almost debauched lowness, Dionis had taken Goupil into his office, when further sojourn in Paris, where the clerk had dissipated the inheritance of his father, a well-to-do farmer who had destined him for a notary, was forbidden him by absolute poverty. Upon seeing Goupil, you would at once have understood that he had lost no time in enjoying life; for, to obtain enjoyment, he must have paid dearly. In spite of his small stature, at twenty-seven years old the clerk’s chest and shoulders were as developed as those of a man of forty. Slender, short legs, a large face the color of a sky before a storm and crowned by a bald forehead, still further brought out this strange conformation. His face also seemed to belong to a humpback whose hump must have been inside. One peculiarity of this sharp, pale face confirmed the existence of this invisible hunchback. Curved and twisted like that of so many hunchbacks, the nose bent from right to left instead of accurately dividing the face. The mouth, contracted at both corners like those of the Sardinians, was always on the lookout for irony. Thin reddish hair fell in straight locks, and in places disclosed the skull. The hands, coarse and badly set at the end of over-long arms, were crooked and rarely clean. Goupil was wearing shoes only fit to throw into a rubbish heap, and thread stockings of a reddish black; his trousers and black coat, worn threadbare and almost thick with dirt; his pitiful waistcoats, several buttons of which were short of covering; the old silk handkerchief which did duty for a tie, his whole dress told of the cynical wretchedness to which his passions condemned him.
Two eyes like goats’, with the eyeballs encircled with yellow, both lascivious and cowardly, rose about this ensemble of forbidding things. Nobody was more feared or respected in Nemours than Goupil. Armed with pretensions allowed by his ugliness, he had that detestable intelligence peculiar to those who give themselves free license, and he used it to avenge the disappointments of a ceaseless jealousy. He rhymed satirical couplets that are sung at carnivals, he organized mock serenades, he alone wrote the little newspaper of the town. Dionis, a cunning, insincere man, but timid for all that, kept Goupil as much from fear as on account of his exceeding intelligence and his sound knowledge of the concerns of the country. But the master so much distrusted the clerk, that he kept the accounts himself, did not lodge him in his own house, kept him at a distance, and never entrusted him with any secret or delicate affair. Therefore the clerk flattered his employer by hiding the resentment that this behavior caused him, and he watched Madame Dionis with an idea of vengeance. Being gifted with keen apprehension, work was no labor to him.
“Oh! you, you are already mocking our misfortune,” replied the postmaster to the clerk, who was rubbing his hands.
As Goupil meanly humored all the passions of Désiré, who for five years had made a companion of him, the postmaster treated him rather roughly, without suspecting what terrible hoard of ill-will was accumulating at the bottom of Goupil’s heart at every fresh injury. After having reckoned that money was more necessary to himself than to anyone else, the clerk, who knew himself to be superior to all the bourgeoisie of Nemours, wanted to make a fortune, and counted on Désiré’s friendship to be able to buy one of the three offices of the town, that of clerk to the justice of the peace, one of the sheriff’s offices or that occupied by Dionis. And so he patiently bore the postmaster’s tirades and Madame Minoret-Levrault’s contempt, and he played an infamous part with Désiré, who for two years had left him to console the Ariadnes, victims of the close of the holidays. In this way, Goupil devoured the crumbs of the feasts he had prepared.
“Had I been the old man’s nephew, he would not have made God my joint-heir,” replied the clerk, displaying scant, black, menacing teeth in a hideous sneer.
At this moment, Massin-Levrault junior, clerk of the justice of the peace, joined his wife, bringing with him Madame Crémière, wife of the tax-gatherer of Nemours. This person, one of the sharpest citizens in the little town, had the physiognomy of a Tartar; little round eyes like sloes, under a low forehead, woolly hair, an oily skin, big ears without edges, a mouth with hardly any lip, and a scanty beard. His manner had the merciless humility of a usurer, whose line of conduct rests upon fixed principles. He spoke like a man who suffers from loss of voice. In short, in order to portray him, it suffices to say that he employed his eldest daughter and his wife to make copies of the trials.
Madame Crémière was a stout woman with doubtful yellow hair, a complexion covered with freckles, a little too tightly squeezed into her dresses, was connected with Madame Dionis, and passed as well-informed because she read novels. This financier of the lowest order, full of pretensions to wit and beauty, was waiting for her uncle’s inheritance to take up a certain style, to decorate her salon and there receive the bourgeoisie; for her husband refused to give her the Carcel lamps, the lithographs and the useless knickknacks she saw at the house of the notary’s wife. She had an excessive dread of Goupil, who used to watch for and hawk about her capsulinguettes—her rendering of the word lapsus linguæ.—One day, Madame Dionis was saying she did not know what water to use for her teeth.
“Take an opiate,” she replied.
Nearly all the collateral heirs of old Doctor Minoret now found themselves assembled in the square, and the importance of the event which was stirring them up was so generally felt, that the groups of peasants, armed with their red umbrellas, all clothed in the dazzling colors which make them so picturesque on fête days on the roads, had their eyes upon the Minoret heirs. In the little towns which are something between the big boroughs and the cities, those who do not go to mass remain in the square. They talk business. At Nemours, the hour for divine service was also that of a weekly exchange, often attended by the masters of dwellings scattered within a circuit of half a mile. This explains the understanding between the peasants against the bourgeois in relation to the prices of provisions and of manual labor.
“And what would you have done?” said the master of Nemours to Goupil.
“I should have made myself as necessary to his life as the air he breathes. But, in the first place, you have not known how to take him! An inheritance requires as much care as a beautiful woman, and, for want of attention, they both escape. If my mistress were here,” he resumed, “she would tell you how true the simile is.”
“But Monsieur Bongrand has just told me not to make ourselves uneasy,” replied the justice’s clerk.
“Oh! there are many ways of saying that,” answered Goupil, laughing. “I should like to have heard your sly justice of the peace! If there was nothing more to be done; if, like him who lives with your uncle, I knew all was lost, I should tell you ‘not to worry about anything!’
Whilst pronouncing these last words, Goupil wore so comical a smile and gave it so clear a meaning, that the heirs suspected the clerk of having been taken in by the cunning of the justice of the peace. The tax-collector, a fat little man, as insignificant as a tax-collector ought to be, and as unimportant as a sensible woman could wish, crushed his co-heir Massin by: “I told you so!”
As double-dealing people always ascribe their own duplicity to others, Massin scowled at the justice of the peace, who was talking just then close to the church with the Marquis du Rouvre, one of his former clients.
“If I were only sure of it!” he said.
“You would paralyze the protection he grants to the Marquis du Rouvre, who has been arrested, and whom he is at this moment soaking with advice,” said Goupil, insinuating an idea of revenge into the clerk, “but go gently with your chief; the old man is artful, he must have some influence over your uncle, and may still prevent him from leaving all to the Church.”
“Bah! we shan’t die of it,” said Minoret-Levrault, opening his enormous snuff-box.
“You will not live by it either,” replied Goupil, causing shivers to the two women, who were quicker than their husbands to construe into privation the loss of this inheritance so often laid out in comforts. “But we will drown this little trouble in floods of champagne in celebrating Désiré’s return, eh, gros père?” he added, tapping the giant’s stomach and thus inviting himself for fear of being forgotten.
Before proceeding any further, perhaps exact people will like to find here beforehand some kind of a titular inventory, rather necessary moreover, to learn the degrees of relationship which bound the old man, so suddenly converted, to these three fathers of families and their wives. These crossings of race in the depths of the provinces may give grounds for more than ordinary instructive reflection.
THE CHURCH AT NEMOURS.
The master of Nemours could see his uncle giving his arm to the young girl called Ursule, each holding a prayer-book and going into the church. The old man removed his hat in the porch, and his head, entirely white, like a snow-capped pinnacle, shone in the soft shadows of the façade.
"Well, Minoret, what do you say to your uncle's conversion?" cried the tax-collector of Nemours.
Copyrighted 1897 by G. B. & Son
