Ursule Mirouët quotes

“I would have made myself as indispensable to him as the air he breathes. But you did not know how to manage him to begin with.

An inheritance needs as much looking after as a pretty woman, and for lack of care both may slip through your fingers.

If my master’s wife were here, she would tell you how accurate the comparison is,” he added.

Crémière, Massin, and Minoret-Levrault, all three very common men, were condemned beyond appeal by the doctor during the first two or three months, while they were trying to circumvent their future prospects rather than himself.

Persons who act by instinct have this disadvantage as compared with those who have ideas⁠—they are more easily seen through.

The inspirations of instinct are too elementary, and appeal too directly to the eye, not to be detected at once; while to penetrate ideas, the device of the mind, equal intelligence is needed on both sides.

His own dwelling, scarcely supplied with furniture enough for the strictest necessities of life, was as cold and bare as a miser’s hovel.

Avarice and charity betray themselves by similar results; does not charity lay up in heaven the treasure that the miser hoards on earth?

The Abbé Chaperon took his servant to task for every expense, more severely than Gobseck ever scolded his—if, indeed, that notorious Jew ever had a servant.

He dined off pewter, with iron forks and spoons; when, on great occasions, he had to receive his subordinate clergy and other curés, a duty that falls on the head of a district, he borrowed silver and table-linen from his friend the atheist.

“My plate is working out its salvation,” the doctor would say.

His good deeds, which were sooner or later found out, and which he always reinforced with spiritual comfort, were carried out with sublime simplicity.

When some pious persons, churchwardens, pointed out the fraud, begging the curé to consult them for the future, that he might not be the victim of greed, he replied:

“Perhaps those men would have committed some crime to get their acre of land, and is it not a form of good to hinder evil?”

The reader may perhaps find pleasure in this sketch of a figure, remarkable because science and literature had entered that heart and that capable brain without corrupting them in any way.

He was of middle height, neither stout nor thin. His face, deeply furrowed, hollow-cheeked, and colorless, attracted the eye at once by the perfect calm of the lines and the purity of its outline, which looked as if fringed with light.

There is a mysterious kind of radiance from the face of a perfectly chaste man.

Brown eyes, with bright pupils, gave life to irregular features, under a powerful forehead. His gaze exercised a dominion that may be explained by its sweetness, which did not exclude strength.

The postboys knew by the rowings they got from Minoret when his wife had scolded him, for her rage glanced off on to them. But, indeed, Madame Minoret was as shrewd as she was avaricious.

“Where would Minoret be without his wife?” was a byword in more than one household in the town.

“When you hear what is happening to us you will be beside yourself too,” replied the Master of Nemours.

… leading characteristics of the head, and the look of the face, in the portraits of the encyclopedists, of the orators of the Girondins, and of the men of that time whose religious belief was almost a blank, and who, though calling themselves deists, were atheists.

A deist is an atheist with an eye to the off-chance of some advantage.

Old Minoret had a forehead of this type, but furrowed with wrinkles, and it derived a sort of childlike ingenuousness from the way in which his silver hair, combed back like a woman’s at her toilet, curled in thin locks on his black coat;

“This is your doing, mademoiselle,” said Madame Crémière, interposing with a low courtesy. “It is no trouble to you to work miracles.”

“The miracle is God’s, madame,” replied Ursule.

“Oh, indeed! God’s,” exclaimed Minoret-Levrault. “My father-in-law used to say that God was a name for many a dark horse.”

“You would be wise, uncle,” said Madame Massin, “not to go to church without a little black velvet cap; the parish church is very damp.”

“Pah! niece,” said the old man, looking round at his followers. “The sooner I am laid to rest, the sooner you will dance.”

He walked on, dragging Ursule with him, and seeming in such haste that they were left to themselves.

“Florine is adored by the famous Nathan, and my folly is of no use, for she positively refuses to marry me.”

“Girls who are rash with their bodies are sometimes prudent with their brains,” said Goupil.

“If you could but see her, only once, you would not make use of such expressions,” said Désiré languishingly.

… were his own child, would believe in her simplicity, and be attracted by the touching effects of religion in the soul of a girl whose love, like the trees of the tropical forest, was always loaded with flowers and fruit, always fresh, and always fragrant.

A beautiful life is more powerful than the most cogent arguments.

It is impossible to resist the charm of certain images, and the doctor’s eyes filled with tears, he knew not why, when he saw the child of his heart set out for church dressed in a frock of white gauze, with white satin shoes, graced …

You raise yourself to your principles by reason—you are a social exception; now you need only be a Christian to be benevolent on ours. With you it is an effort; with us it is natural.”

“Which is as much as to say, Curé, that I think and you feel. That is all.”

Meanwhile, having reached the age of twelve, Ursule, whose womanly tact and shrewdness were brought into play by a superior education, and whose sense, now in its blossom, was enlightened by a religious spirit, fully understood that her godfather believed not in a future life, …

The old man would sometimes lend himself, as to a caress, to the arguments of his adopted child, spoken in a gentle and tender voice, and the outcome of the most pure and ardent feeling.

But believers and unbelievers speak two different languages, and cannot understand each other.

The young girl in pleading the cause of God was hard upon her godfather, as a spoilt child is sometimes hard upon its mother. The curé gently reproved her, telling her that God reserved to Himself the power of humbling such proud spirits.

“Has magnetism kept you from dying?” asked Minoret in a bantering tone, but not bitterly.

“No; but it has almost kept me from living.”

“You are not rich then?” said Minoret.

It is a mistake.

The man of feeling and the man of genius see everything.

Bongrand, nettled by the doctor’s persistent silence, but urged, no doubt, by Ursule’s interests; which he feared were compromised, determined to protect her against her rivals. He was in despair at not knowing what was going on between the old man and Dionis.

For some minutes silence reigned. When Ursule, who dared not look at her godfather, presently raised her eyes to his face, she was deeply moved by seeing tears flowing down his withered cheeks.

The tears of an old man are as terrible as those of a child are natural.

“What, oh, what is the matter with you?” she cried, falling at his feet and kissing his hands. “Do you not trust me?”

her cap was tumbled and askew; her hair had come unpinned, and the plaits fell about her face, which was rosy with the heat; but in this disorder, which is horrible in a woman to whom dress is indispensable, youth and beauty are triumphant.

The sleep of innocence is always lovely.

Her parted lips showed pretty teeth; her shawl, thrown back, allowed him to observe, without offence to Ursule, the grace of her figure under the folds of a full bodice of flowered muslin.

“

The king stands between the two Chambers, like a man between his lawful wife and his mistress.

So I must contrive to marry some rich girl whatever her family may be—a peasant’s daughter if she has a million of francs, and if she is fairly well brought up, that is to say, if she comes from a convent-school.”

To an impassioned man a woman is worth just what she costs him; now, Savinien, foreseeing a struggle, efforts, and suspense, which already made the young girl precious to him, was determined to win her.

Perhaps our feelings obey the law of nature as to the duration of all her creations⁠—a long life has a long childhood.

Next morning, on waking, Ursule and Savinien had the same idea. This community of feeling would give birth to love if it were not the most delightful proof of its existence.

When the young girl opened her curtains a little way, so as to give her eyes exactly space enough to look across to Savinien’s room, she saw her lover’s face above the window-fastening opposite.

When we remember the immense service done to lovers by windows, it seems quite natural that they should be taxed.

After thus protesting against her godfather’s hard-heartedness, Ursule let the curtains fall to again, and opened the window to close the Venetians, through which she could see without being seen.

“No, he is here today,” replied Cabirolle.

“There is safety in numbers,” observed Madame Crémière, making everybody laugh.

“You need no longer count on the inheritance,” cried Goupil. “Ursule is nearly seventeen; she is prettier than ever; traveling forms the youthful mind, and she knows the length of your uncle’s foot.

Ursule, hardly recovered from her fever and the blow dealt her by the doctor’s next-of-kin, was bewildered with dismay when she heard of this fresh disaster.

To love, and be unable to help the person beloved, is one of the most terrible pangs that the soul of a high-minded and delicate woman can suffer.

“I meant to buy my uncle’s house,” she said. “I will buy your mother’s instead.”

Minoret is a thief! Everyone he met pitied him, and asked him who was at the bottom of this anonymous placarding, and everyone overlooked the evasiveness of his replies by ascribing it to his stupidity.

Simpletons gain more advantages from their weakness than clever men get from their strength.

We look on at a great man struggling against fate, but we raise a fund for a bankrupt grocer. Do you know why? We feel superior when we protect an idiot, and are aggrieved at being no more than equal to the man of genius.

Everyone he met pitied him, and asked him who was at the bottom of this anonymous placarding, and everyone overlooked the evasiveness of his replies by ascribing it to his stupidity. Simpletons gain more advantages from their weakness than clever men get from their strength.

We look on at a great man struggling against fate, but we raise a fund for a bankrupt grocer.

Do you know why? We feel superior when we protect an idiot, and are aggrieved at being no more than equal to the man of genius.

“God is most good to work miracles for me, Monsieur le Curé,” said Minoret, inspired by his peril to utter the only jest he ever perpetrated in his life.

“All that God does is natural,” replied the priest.

“Your phantasmagoria does not frighten me,” said the colossus, recovering his presence of mind a little.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Zélie asked the curé.

“Do you believe in dividends?” replied the curé, smiling.

“Sharpers—all of them!” thought Zélie; “they want to get round us. The old priest, the old Justice, and that rascally little Savinien have arranged it all. There are no more dreams in it than there are hairs in the palm of my hand.”