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My happiness is my only fortune, I do not blush to say so; I shall not risk it. Monsieur de Portenduere is only waiting for my majority to marry me." "Then the old saw that 'Money does all' is a lie," said Minoret, looking at the justice of peace, whose observing eyes annoyed him so much. He rose and left the house, but, once outside, he found the air as oppressive as in the little salon.
"Do you know what Madame Minoret came about?" said the justice as soon as they were in the street. "What?" asked the priest, looking at Bongrand with an air that seemed merely curious. "She had some plan for restitution." "Then you think " began the abbe. "I don't think, I know; I have the certainty and see there!"
Monsieur Minoret and I have acquired property about Rouvre, a really regal castle, which gives us forty-eight thousand francs a year; we shall give Desire twenty-four thousand a year which we have in the Funds; in all, seventy thousand francs a year. You will admit that there are not many better matches than he.
"Well, yes, the idea of getting her out of Nemours, so that my son will leave me in peace; he is in love with her and wants to marry her." "Well, we'll see about it," said Bongrand, settling his spectacles. "Give us time to think it over." He walked home with Minoret, applauding the solicitude shown by the father for his son's interests, and slightly blaming Ursula for her hasty decision.
The evening of the day on which this was finally settled he went to see Zelie, whom he knew to be puzzled as to how to invest her money, and proposed to sell her the farm at Bordieres for two hundred and twenty thousand francs. "I'd buy it at once," said Minoret, "if I were sure the Portendueres would go and live somewhere else." "Why?" said the justice of peace.
Nearly all the collateral heirs of old Doctor Minoret were now assembled in the square; the importance of the event which brought them was so generally felt that even groups of peasants, armed with their scarlet umbrellas and dressed in those brilliant colors which make them so picturesque on Sundays and fete-days, stood by, with their eyes fixed on the frightened heirs.
For the last six months not a day passed that friends and neighbours did not speak to the heirs, with secret envy, of the day the good man's eyes would shut and the coffers open. "Doctor Minoret may be an able physician, on good terms with death, but none but God is eternal," said one. "Pooh, he'll bury us all; his health is better than ours," replied an heir, hypocritically.
Minoret called a hackney-coach and took her to the Rue de la Clef, where the carriage drew up before the shabby front of an old convent then transformed into a prison. "Oh!" she said, "to imprison young men in this dreadful place for money! How can a debt to a money-lender have a power the king has not? He there!" she cried. "Where, godfather?" she added, looking from window to window.
"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."
"I believe only in crimes which are confessed to me, and of which the sinner repents," said the priest, in an apostolic tone. "Crime?" cried Minoret. "A crime frightful in its consequences." "What consequences?" "In the fact that it escapes human justice. The crimes which are not expiated here below will be punished in another world. God himself avenges innocence."
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