Ursule Mirouët

Part I

The Heirs in Alarm

As you enter Nemours coming from Paris, you cross the canal of the Loing, whose banks form a rural rampart to the pretty little town, and afford many picturesque walks. Since 1830, unfortunately, many houses have been built beyond the bridge. If this suburb increases, the aspect of the town will lose much of its attractive originality.

But in 1829 the country on each side of the road lay open, and the postmaster, a tall, burly man of about sixty, as he sat on the highest point of the bridge one fine morning, could command a view of what he would have called a ribbon-road.

The month of September was lavishing its wealth. The atmosphere quivered with heat above the grass and stones, not a cloud flecked the ethereal blue, of which the vivid transparency was uniform to the very horizon, showing the extreme rarity of the air. Indeed, Minoret-Levrault, the postmaster in question, was obliged to shade his eyes with his hand not to be quite dazzled. Out of patience with waiting, he looked now at the lovely meadows spreading away to the right, where his after-crop was growing apace, and now at the densely wooded hills to the left, stretching from Nemours to Bouron. And in the valley of the Loing, where the noises on the road came back echoed from the hill, he could hear the gallop of his own horses, and the cracking of his postilions’ whips.

Could anyone but a postmaster get out of patience with gazing at a field full of cattle, such as Paul Potter painted, under a sky worthy of Raphael, by a canal overhung with trees, like a picture by Hobbema? Anyone who knows Nemours, knows that nature there is as beautiful as art, whose mission it is to spiritualize nature; the landscape there has ideas, and suggests thoughts.