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."We can well imagine the alacrity with which the heirs followed the notary to the post house.Goupil, who accompanied his friend Desire, locked arm in arm with him, whispered something in the youth's ear with an odious smile."What do I care?" answered the son of the house, shrugging his shoulders."I am madly in love with Florine, the most celestial creature in the world.""Florine! and who may she be?" demanded Goupil."I'm too fond of you to let you make a goose of yourself wish such creatures.""Florine is the idol of the famous Nathan; my passion is wasted, I know that.She has positively refused to marry me.""Sometimes those girls who are fools with their bodies are wise with their heads," responded Goupil."If you could but see her—only once," said Desire, lackadaisically, "you wouldn't say such things.""If I saw you throwing away your whole future for nothing better than a fancy," said Goupil, with a warmth which might even have deceived his master, "I would break your doll as Varney served Amy Robsart in 'Kenilworth.' Your wife must be a d'Aiglement or a Mademoiselle du Rouvre, and get you made a deputy.My future depends on yours, and I sha'n't let you commit any follies.""I am rich enough to care only for happiness," replied Desire."What are you two plotting together?" cried Zelie, beckoning to the two friends, who were standing in the middle of the courtyard, to come into the house.The doctor disappeared into the Rue des Bourgeois with the activity of a young man, and soon reached his own house, where strange events had lately taken place, the visible results of which now filled the minds of the whole community of Nemours.A few explanations are needed to make this history and the notary's remark to the heirs perfectly intelligible to the reader.CHAPTER V.URSULAThe father-in-law of Doctor Minoret, the famous harpsichordist and maker of instruments, Valentin Mirouet, also one of our most celebrated organists, died in 1785 leaving a natural son, the child of his old age, whom he acknowledged and called by his own name, but who turned out a worthless fellow.He was deprived on his death bed of the comfort of seeing this petted son.Joseph Mirouet, a singer and composer, having made his debut at the Italian opera under a feigned name, ran away with a young lady in Germany.The dying father commended the young man, who was really full of talent, to his son-in-law, proving to him, at the same time, that he had refused to marry the mother that he might not injure Madame Minoret.The doctor promised to give the unfortunate Joseph half of whatever his wife inherited from her father, whose business was purchased by the Erards.He made due search for his illegitimate brother-in-law; but Grimm informed him one day that after enlisting in a Prussian regiment Joseph had deserted and taken a false name and that all efforts to find him would be frustrated.Joseph Mirouet, gifted by nature with a delightful voice, a fine figure, a handsome face, and being moreover a composer of great taste and much brilliancy, led for over fifteen years the Bohemian life which Hoffman has so well described.So, by the time he was forty, he was reduced to such depths of poverty that he took advantage of the events of 1806 to make himself once more a Frenchman.He settled in Hamburg, where he married the daughter of a bourgeois, a girl devoted to music, who fell in love with the singer (whose fame was ever prospective) and chose to devote her life to him.But after fifteen years of Bohemia, Joseph Mirouet was unable to bear prosperity; he was naturally a spendthrift, and though kind to his wife, he wasted her fortune in a very few years.The household must have dragged on a wretched existence before Joseph Mirouet reached the point of enlisting as a musician in a French regiment.In 1813 the surgeon-major of the regiment, by the merest chance, heard the name of Mirouet, was struck by it, and wrote to Doctor Minoret, to whom he was under obligations.The answer was not long in coming.As a result, in 1814, before the allied occupation, Joseph Mirouet had a home in Paris, where his wife died giving birth to a little girl, whom the doctor desired should be called Ursula after his wife.The father did not long survive the mother, worn out, as she was, by hardship and poverty
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