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rie's, that he was fain to seize, in 1806, the opportunity of reclaiming his French citizenship. He then established himself at Hamburg, where he married the daughter of a staunch citizen, enraptured with music, smitten with the artist whose glory was still in perspective and who wished to consecrate himself to it. But after fifteen years of misfortune, Joseph Mirouet found the wine of opulence too strong for him; his natural extravagance overcame him, and while making his wife happy, he spent her fortune in a few years. Misery returned. The household must have come to the most painful straits, for Joseph Mirouet to have engaged as musician in a French regiment. In 1813, by one of the greatest chances, the surgeon-major of this regiment, struck by this name of Mirouet, wrote to Dr. Minoret towards whom he had obligations. The answer was prompt. In 1814, before the capitulation of Paris, Joseph Mirouet had there an asylum, where his wife died in giving birth to a little girl, whom the doctor wished to call Ursula, the name of his wife. The musician did not survive the mother, exhausted like her with fatigues and miseries. In dying, the unfortunate musician bequeathed his daughter to the doctor, who served as her godfather, notwithstanding his repugnance for what he called the mummeries of the Church. After having seen his children successively perish by miscarriages, or during their first year, the doctor had awaited the effect of a last experience.

The last, conceived after two years of repose, had died during the year 1792, a victim to the nervous state of the mother, if those physiologists are in the right who think that in the inexplicable phenomenon of generation, the child holds to the father by the blood and to the mother by the nervous system.

Obliged to renounce the enjoyments of the most powerful sentiment of his nature, beneficence was, doubtless, for the doctor, a consolation for his disappointed paternity. During his conjugal life, so cruelly agitated, the doctor had above all desired a little blonde girl, one of those flowers that make the joy of a household; he accepted then thankfully the legacy that Joseph Mirouet made him, and revived upon this orphan the hopes of his vanished dreams. During two years, he assisted as Cato formerly for Pompey, at the most minute details of Ursula's life; he would not have the nurse give her to suck, raise her or put her to bed, without him. His experience, his science, all was at the service of this child. After having felt the pains, the alternatives of fear and

hope, the labors and joys of a mother, he had the happiness of seeing in this daughter of blonde Germany and of the French artist, a vigorous life, a profound sensibility. The pleased old man followed with a mother's sentiments the growth of her blonde tresses, first down, then silk, then hair, light and fine, so caressing to the fingers that caress them. He often kissed her little naked feet, whose toes covered with a pellicle beneath which the blood is seen, resembling rose-buds. He' was beside himself about this little one. When she tried to speak, or when she bent her fine blue eyes, so mild, on objects, with that dreamy look that seems to be the dawn of thought, and which she ended with a smile, he often remained before her during whole hours, seeking with Jordy the reasons, which so many others call caprices, hidden under the least phenomena of that delicious phase of life in which the child is at once a flower and a fruit; a confused intelligence, a perpetual movement, a violent desire. The beauty of Ursula, her gentleness, rendered her so dear to the doctor, that he would have wished to change for her the laws of Nature, and he sometimes confessed to old Jordy that his teeth ached when Ursula was cutting hers. When old men do love children, they set no bounds to their passion - they adore them. For those little beings they suppress their manias, and for them they remember all their past. Their experience, their indulgence, their patience, all the acquisitions of life, that treasure so painfully amassed, they deliver it to that young life by which they grow young again, and then supply maternity by intelligence. Their wisdom, always awakened, is worth the mother's intuition; they recall those delicacies of behavior which in her are divination, and carry them into the exercise of a compassion, the force of which is developed doubtless in proportion to the immense weakness of its object. The slowness of their movements replaces the maternal gentleness. Finally, with them, as with the children, life is reduced to simplicity, and if sentiment renders the mother a slave, the detachment from all passion and the absence of all interest permit the old man to devote himself entirely. Thus it is not rare to see children come to an understanding with old persons.

The old soldier, the old curate, the old doctor, happy in the caresses and coquettings of Ursula, never wearied of answering or of playing with her. Far from making them impatient, the petulance of this child charmed them, and they satisfied all her desires by making every thing a subject of instruction. Thus this little

one grew up, surrounded with old persons who smiled on her and behaved like several mothers around her, equally attentive and provident. Thanks to this education, Ursula's soul developed itself into the sphere that suited it. This rare plant met with its special soil, aspired the elements of its true life, and assimilated the floods of its sunshine.

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'In what religion will you raise this little one?" asked the Abbé Chaperon of Minoret, when Ursula was six years old.

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Atheist, after the fashion of M. de Wolmar in the Nouvelle Heloise, he did not recognize in himself the right to deprive Ursula of the benefits offered by the Catholic Religion.

The doctor, seated on a bank below the window of the Chinese Cabinet, then felt his hand pressed by the hand of the curate. "Yes, curate, whenever she speaks to me of God, I will send her to her friend Sapron," said he, imitating the infantine speech of Ursula. "I wish to know whether the Religious Sentiment is innate. Thus I have done nothing for or against the tendencies of this young soul, but I have already named you in my heart as her spiritual father."

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This will be counted to you by God, I hope," replied the Abbé Chaperon, striking his hands gently together and raising them towards Heaven, as if he were making a short mental prayer.

Thus from the age of six, the little orphan fell under the religious power of the curate, as she had already fallen under that of his old friend Jordy.

The captain, formerly a professor in one of the old military schools, occupied, by predilection, with grammar and the differences among the European tongues, had studied the problem of a universal language. This learned man, patient like all the old masters, found delight then in teaching Ursula to read and write, in teaching her the French language, and what she ought to know of calculation. The doctor's well-stocked library permitted him to select such books as might be read by a child, and such as might amuse while instructing her. The soldier and the curate left. this intellect to enrich itself with the same ease and liberty that the doctor left to the body. Ursula learned at her plays. Religion contained reflection. Abandoned to the Divine culture of a nature led into pure regions by those three prudent instructors, Ursula с aned more towards sentiment than towards duty, and took as the

rule of her conduct the voice of her conscience, rather than the social law. With her, the beautiful in sentiment and in action must be spontaneous: the judgment would confirm the impulse of the heart. She was destined to do good as a pleasure, before doing it as an obligation. This shade is peculiar to Christian education. These principles, quite other than those to be impressed on men, suited a woman, the genius and conscience of the family, the secret elegance of domestic life, indeed, the almost queen in the bosom of the household. All three proceeded in the same manner with this child. Far from withdrawing before the audacities of innocence, they explained to Ursula the end of things and the known means, never formulizing to her other than just ideas. When, about an herb, a flower, a star, she went straight to God, the professor and the doctor told her that the priest alone could answer her: not one of them encroached on the other's ground. The godfather took care for all the material well-being and things of this life; the intellectual culture belonged to Jordy; morals, metaphysics, and all high questions belonged to the curate.

This fine education was not, as often happens in the richest houses, contradicted by imprudent servants. La Bougival, admonished on this subject, and besides, too simple of mind and character to interfere, did not derange the work of these great minds. Ursula, a privileged creature, had then around her three good genii to whom her lovely nature rendered every task easy and light.

This virile tenderness, this gravity tempered by smiles, this liberty without danger, this perpetual care for the soul and the body; made of her at the age of nine a charming and accomplished child.

Unfortunately, this paternal trinity was broken. In the following year, the old captain died, leaving the doctor and the curate to continue his work, after having accomplished the most difficult part. Flowers ought to spring up of themselves in a soil so well prepared. The gentleman had, during nine years, economized one thousand francs each year, in order to bequeath ten thousand francs to his little Ursula, that she might preserve a remembrance of him all her life. In his will he invited his legatee to employ exclusively for her toilet the four or five hundred francs income which this little capital brought her. When the magistrate set the seals in the house of his old friend, there was found in a closet which he had never let any body enter, a great quantity of playthings, many

of which were broken, and all of which had been used; playthings of the past time, piously preserved, and which M. Bougrand was to burn, himself, at the request of the good captain. Towards this epoch, she was to make her first communion. The Abbé Chaperon employed a whole year in the instruction of this pupil, for whom the heart and the intelligence, so developed, but so prudently sustained by each other, required a peculiar spiritual aliment. Such was this initiation into the knowledge of divine things, that since the epoch when the soul takes its religious form Ursula had become the pious and mystical young girl whose character was always above events, and whose heart dominated all adversity. Then it was, also, that there secretly began, between this incredulous old age, and this childhood full of faith, a struggle long unknown to her that provoked it, but the result of which occupied the whole town, and was to have a serious influence over Ursula's future, by setting against her the collateral heirs of the doctor.

During the first six months of the year 1824, Ursula passed nearly all her mornings at the presbytery. The old doctor divined the intentions of the curate. The priest wished to make of Ursula an invincible argument. The incredulous man, loved by his goddaughter as by an only daughter, would believe in the candor, would be seduced by the touching effects of religion in the soul of a child whose love resembled those trees of Indian climes always loaded with flowers and fruits, always green and always balmy. A beautiful life is more powerful than the most vigorous reasoning. We can not resist the charms of certain images. Thus the doctor's eyes were moist with tears without his knowing why, when he saw the daughter of his heart setting out for church, dressed in a robe of white crape, with white satin shoes, decked with white ribands, her head girt with a bandelitte royale attached upon the side with a large knot, the thousand ringlets of her hair flowing over the swell of her shoulders, like flowers on snow, her corsage bordered with a pointed frill, adorned with comets, her eyes starry with a first hope, flying grand and happy to a first union, loving her godfather better since she had raised herself up to God. When he perceived the thought of eternity giving sustenance to this soul, up to that time in the lymbo of childhood, as after the night the Sun gives light to the Earth, always, without knowing why, he was troubled in remaining alone at home. Seated on the steps

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