Honoré de Balzac
Ursula
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664630407
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I. THE FRIGHTENED HEIRS
CHAPTER III. THE DOCTOR’S FRIENDS
CHAPTER VI. A TREATISE ON MESMERISM
CHAPTER VII. A TWO-FOLD CONVERSION
CHAPTER IX. A FIRST CONFIDENCE
CHAPTER X. THE FAMILY OF PORTENDUERE
CHAPTER XII. OBSTACLES TO YOUNG LOVE
CHAPTER XIII. BETROTHAL OF HEARTS
CHAPTER XIV. URSULA AGAIN ORPHANED
CHAPTER XVI. THE TWO ADVERSARIES
CHAPTER XVII. THE MALIGNITY OF PROVINCIAL MINDS
CHAPTER XVIII. A TWO-FOLD VENGEANCE
CHAPTER XXI. SHOWING HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO STEAL THAT WHICH SEEMS VERY EASILY STOLEN
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
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