Ursule Mirouët
Encyclopedia
Ursule Mirouët, an often overlooked novel, belongs to Honoré de Balzac
’s great series of 94 novels and short stories La Comédie humaine
. Written in 1841 and published in 1842, it forms part of his Scènes de la vie de province.
The action of the novel takes place in Nemours
, though with flashbacks
to Paris. It is set in the years 1829-1837.
, has persisted in his rationalistic atheism for most of his eighty-three years. At the beginning of the novel he is, however, converted to Christianity – emotionally by the example of Ursule’s piety, and intellectually by his experience of animal magnetism
, or the paranormal
, and by his longstanding friendship with Abbé Chaperon.
Dr Minoret is determined that Ursule shall inherit all the savings he has accumulated during his lifetime. He intends, on the other hand, to bequeath the remainder (approximately half) of his total fortune of about 1,500,000 francs to his “héritiers”, nephews and cousins of his own bloodline who are members of the Minoret, Crémière and Massin families.
Discontented with their inheritance prospects, the “heirs” seek to grab the whole of their wealthy relative’s fortune, enlisting the help of the notary’s clerk Goupil. The doctor conceals a letter of testamentary intention in a legal volume in his library. This, together with three bearer bonds, is stolen by one of the doctor’s nephews, the postmaster François Minoret-Levrault, who, in the era before railways, owns and manages the carriage and postchaise services in and out of Nemours
.
The doctor dies, leaving Ursule much poorer than he had intended, for her inheritance would have become her dowry
. Despite their best efforts – ransacking all the books in his library – the “heirs” (or “family”) cannot find the clue to the money. But remorse strikes Minoret-Levrault, and the doctor, appearing to him in a vision, instructs him to make good his theft. By an act of poetic justice
the postmaster’s dandyish son Désiré Minoret-Levrault is killed in a stagecoach accident. Ursule marries the man of her dreams, the young Army officer Viscount Savinien de Portenduère.
, Ursule Mirouët, La Rabouilleuse
and Le Cousin Pons
). As in all of the first three of these novels, the struggle for the inheritance is played out in a provincial town.
(2) Ursule is conspicuously virtuous, and Balzac was acutely aware of the difficulty of presenting a virtuous heroine in a novel. “Goodness has just one form, evil has a thousand”, he believed: “to be able to portray many virgins, you need to be like Raphael
” He hoped that Ursule Mirouët would win the annual Prix Montyon for the book which had rendered the greatest service to mankind; but in this he was disappointed.
(3) According to Balzac in his Avant-propos (Foreword) to La Comédie humaine
, it is in capital cities that “the extremes of good and evil are to be found”. However, the extreme polarization of good and evil in this novel is to be found in the provinces.
(4) In no other inheritance novel of La Comédie humaine
are the complexities of French inheritance law so coolly and analytically explored, and never more so than when the notary’s clerk Goupil explains the inheritance situation to the “heirs”. Legally speaking, Ursule Mirouët is no relation whatever of Dr Minoret: this is in stark contrast to the emotional situation, where she is everything to him! There is therefore no possibility that Ursule could obtain the whole of Dr Minoret’s wealth – unless, at nineteen years of age, she were to marry the eighty-seven-year-old doctor, which, as he is neither a blood relation of hers nor any sort of relation in law, he could legally do: and this is what the “heirs” fear.
(5) Dr Minoret is moved by a profound sense of natural justice
. For this reason he rules out any thought of a marriage of convenience with Ursule. And it is implied by Balzac that this sense of natural justice was just as strong within him in the days when he was an atheist.
(6) Furthermore, though the law can be manipulated by calculating people for their own self-advancement, it does roughly approximate to justice. Désiré Minoret-Levrault, a lawyer himself, realizes this. Balzac, in Ursule Mirouët, seems to be of the opinion that justice “has a power of omniscience, a collective memory and a capacity for eventual action which far transcend the law’s imperfect machinery” – though allowance should be made for free indirect discourse. Nowhere else in La Comédie humaine
is this opinion so categorically stated.
(7) Ursule Mirouët embodies important philosophical statements of Balzac’s view of life, in particular his belief in Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism
. Through Dr Minoret’s experience of the occult
, his séance with the mysterious hypnotist and the elderly female medium, he becomes a Christian believer: here in La Comédie humaine
the finite is seen as being embedded within the infinite; animal magnetism
underpins a belief in God. Balzac views Dr Minoret’s rejection of religious indifference as the necessary accompaniment of his rejection of his earlier denial of animal magnetism
.
(8) Not only is Dr Minoret converted to Christianity by a séance, he also makes five dream-like appearances from the dead; and the supernatural also seems to intervene in the fatal accident that befalls Désiré Minoret-Levrault. It is because of this supernatural, cosmic dimension that – very unusually for Balzac’s novels – Ursule Mirouët has a happy ending. It is one of the most joyful of his novels.
technique. Opening with François Minoret-Levrault anxiously awaiting his son Désiré’s return home, it then turns to the circumstances leading up to that moment.
(2) There is in fact a double employment of this flashback
technique as shortly afterwards, to the town’s amazement, Dr Minoret is shown walking to church with Ursule. The novel then proceeds to outline Dr Minoret’s life up to that point.
(3) The influence of the roman-feuilleton (serial (literature)
) is very noticeable. Leading feuilletonistes were Eugène Sue
, Alexandre Dumas, père
, Paul Féval, père
, Frédéric Soulié and Eugène Scribe
. Balzac became increasingly preoccupied by their popularity in the 1840s and tried to emulate them. This involved incorporating many features of melodrama
; thus, for example, the séance is high melodrama. Serialization also encouraged the ending of each serialized extract on a note of high suspense.
(4) There is a strong ludic element in Ursule Mirouët. For Goupil the law is nothing but a game the aim of which is to outwit and defeat one’s opponents. Melodrama
also has a ludic dimension as Balzac conjures into and out of existence the visionary beings who assist the progress of the plot. He thus juggles with the different levels of reality – the normal and the paranormal
– as if he were playing with a kaleidoscope. At the level of language this juggling is mirrored in Goupil’s puns and Mme Crémière’s slips of the tongue.
(5) The narrative of Ursule Mirouët is essentially simple in conception. It is, according to Donald Adamson
, “a story in which no violent collision between the characters [arises]”. Flashbacks
apart, Ursule Mirouët has a straightforward storyline, with no sub-plots. Nevertheless, because of the flashbacks, it is a work of great narrative intricacy. Thus, with its stagecoach element, Désiré Minoret-Levrault’s death strikingly parallels the opening scene of the novel.
regarded Ursule Mirouët as a fairly minor work by Balzac’s standards, Balzac himself described it as the masterpiece of all the studies of human society he had written up to that date. There is an air of serenity about this novel which La Comédie humaine
seldom achieves; and this despite the elements of melodrama
and class conflict. The skirmishings to obtain the inheritance are admirably represented, as in a tableau, by the scene at the auction of Dr Minoret’s belongings, where the “heirs” tip upside down and shake every volume in his library in their efforts to find the missing fortune. This turmoil is in a sense the Romantic
dimension of the novel. Yet the dominant tone of Ursule Mirouët is projected at the very outset of the work, when Balzac compares its Nemours
setting to the beauty and simplicity of a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. Ursule Mirouët has that “noble simplicity, and … tranquil greatness” which, in Winckelmann’s words, were the defining characteristics of Classicism
.
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
’s great series of 94 novels and short stories La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
. Written in 1841 and published in 1842, it forms part of his Scènes de la vie de province.
The action of the novel takes place in Nemours
Nemours
Nemours is a commune in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France.-Geography:Nemours is located on the Loing and its canal, c...
, though with flashbacks
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
to Paris. It is set in the years 1829-1837.
Plot summary
Ursule is the legitimate daughter of the widower Dr Denis Minoret’s deceased illegitimate brother-in-law by marriage, Joseph Mirouët; not only is she the doctor’s niece, she is also his goddaughter and ward. Fifteen years old when the novel begins, she has been brought up by the doctor. Dr Minoret, an atheist rather than an agnostic, and a devoted student of the EncyclopédieEncyclopédie
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. It was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert...
, has persisted in his rationalistic atheism for most of his eighty-three years. At the beginning of the novel he is, however, converted to Christianity – emotionally by the example of Ursule’s piety, and intellectually by his experience of animal magnetism
Animal magnetism
Animal magnetism , in modern usage, refers to a person's sexual attractiveness or raw charisma. As postulated by Franz Mesmer in the 18th century, the term referred to a supposed magnetic fluid or ethereal medium believed to reside in the bodies of animate beings...
, or the paranormal
Paranormal
Paranormal is a general term that designates experiences that lie outside "the range of normal experience or scientific explanation" or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure...
, and by his longstanding friendship with Abbé Chaperon.
Dr Minoret is determined that Ursule shall inherit all the savings he has accumulated during his lifetime. He intends, on the other hand, to bequeath the remainder (approximately half) of his total fortune of about 1,500,000 francs to his “héritiers”, nephews and cousins of his own bloodline who are members of the Minoret, Crémière and Massin families.
Discontented with their inheritance prospects, the “heirs” seek to grab the whole of their wealthy relative’s fortune, enlisting the help of the notary’s clerk Goupil. The doctor conceals a letter of testamentary intention in a legal volume in his library. This, together with three bearer bonds, is stolen by one of the doctor’s nephews, the postmaster François Minoret-Levrault, who, in the era before railways, owns and manages the carriage and postchaise services in and out of Nemours
Nemours
Nemours is a commune in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France.-Geography:Nemours is located on the Loing and its canal, c...
.
The doctor dies, leaving Ursule much poorer than he had intended, for her inheritance would have become her dowry
Dowry
A dowry is the money, goods, or estate that a woman brings forth to the marriage. It contrasts with bride price, which is paid to the bride's parents, and dower, which is property settled on the bride herself by the groom at the time of marriage. The same culture may simultaneously practice both...
. Despite their best efforts – ransacking all the books in his library – the “heirs” (or “family”) cannot find the clue to the money. But remorse strikes Minoret-Levrault, and the doctor, appearing to him in a vision, instructs him to make good his theft. By an act of poetic justice
Poetic justice
Poetic justice is a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct.- Origin of the term :...
the postmaster’s dandyish son Désiré Minoret-Levrault is killed in a stagecoach accident. Ursule marries the man of her dreams, the young Army officer Viscount Savinien de Portenduère.
Fundamental themes of the work
(1) Ursule Mirouët is the second of Balzac’s four inheritance novels (i.e., Eugénie GrandetEugénie Grandet
Eugénie Grandet is an 1833 novel by Honoré de Balzac about miserliness, and how it is bequeathed from the father to the daughter, Eugénie, through her unsatisfying love attachment with her cousin. As is usual with Balzac, all the characters in the novel are fully realized...
, Ursule Mirouët, La Rabouilleuse
La Rabouilleuse
La Rabouilleuse , is a 1842 novel by Honoré de Balzac as part of his series La Comédie humaine. The Black Sheep is the title of the English translation by Donald Adamson published by Penguin Classics...
and Le Cousin Pons
Le Cousin Pons
Le Cousin Pons is virtually the last of the 94 works of Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie humaine, which are in both novel and short story form. Begun in 1846 as a novella, or long-short story, it was envisaged as one part of a diptych, Les Parents pauvres , the other part of which was La Cousine Bette...
). As in all of the first three of these novels, the struggle for the inheritance is played out in a provincial town.
(2) Ursule is conspicuously virtuous, and Balzac was acutely aware of the difficulty of presenting a virtuous heroine in a novel. “Goodness has just one form, evil has a thousand”, he believed: “to be able to portray many virgins, you need to be like Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...
” He hoped that Ursule Mirouët would win the annual Prix Montyon for the book which had rendered the greatest service to mankind; but in this he was disappointed.
(3) According to Balzac in his Avant-propos (Foreword) to La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
, it is in capital cities that “the extremes of good and evil are to be found”. However, the extreme polarization of good and evil in this novel is to be found in the provinces.
(4) In no other inheritance novel of La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
are the complexities of French inheritance law so coolly and analytically explored, and never more so than when the notary’s clerk Goupil explains the inheritance situation to the “heirs”. Legally speaking, Ursule Mirouët is no relation whatever of Dr Minoret: this is in stark contrast to the emotional situation, where she is everything to him! There is therefore no possibility that Ursule could obtain the whole of Dr Minoret’s wealth – unless, at nineteen years of age, she were to marry the eighty-seven-year-old doctor, which, as he is neither a blood relation of hers nor any sort of relation in law, he could legally do: and this is what the “heirs” fear.
(5) Dr Minoret is moved by a profound sense of natural justice
Natural justice
Natural justice is a term of art that denotes specific procedural rights in the English legal system and the systems of other nations based on it. Whilst the term natural justice is often retained as a general concept, it has largely been replaced and extended by the more general "duty to act fairly"...
. For this reason he rules out any thought of a marriage of convenience with Ursule. And it is implied by Balzac that this sense of natural justice was just as strong within him in the days when he was an atheist.
(6) Furthermore, though the law can be manipulated by calculating people for their own self-advancement, it does roughly approximate to justice. Désiré Minoret-Levrault, a lawyer himself, realizes this. Balzac, in Ursule Mirouët, seems to be of the opinion that justice “has a power of omniscience, a collective memory and a capacity for eventual action which far transcend the law’s imperfect machinery” – though allowance should be made for free indirect discourse. Nowhere else in La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
is this opinion so categorically stated.
(7) Ursule Mirouët embodies important philosophical statements of Balzac’s view of life, in particular his belief in Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism
Animal magnetism
Animal magnetism , in modern usage, refers to a person's sexual attractiveness or raw charisma. As postulated by Franz Mesmer in the 18th century, the term referred to a supposed magnetic fluid or ethereal medium believed to reside in the bodies of animate beings...
. Through Dr Minoret’s experience of the occult
Occult
The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus , referring to "knowledge of the hidden". In the medical sense it is used to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e.g...
, his séance with the mysterious hypnotist and the elderly female medium, he becomes a Christian believer: here in La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
the finite is seen as being embedded within the infinite; animal magnetism
Animal magnetism
Animal magnetism , in modern usage, refers to a person's sexual attractiveness or raw charisma. As postulated by Franz Mesmer in the 18th century, the term referred to a supposed magnetic fluid or ethereal medium believed to reside in the bodies of animate beings...
underpins a belief in God. Balzac views Dr Minoret’s rejection of religious indifference as the necessary accompaniment of his rejection of his earlier denial of animal magnetism
Animal magnetism
Animal magnetism , in modern usage, refers to a person's sexual attractiveness or raw charisma. As postulated by Franz Mesmer in the 18th century, the term referred to a supposed magnetic fluid or ethereal medium believed to reside in the bodies of animate beings...
.
(8) Not only is Dr Minoret converted to Christianity by a séance, he also makes five dream-like appearances from the dead; and the supernatural also seems to intervene in the fatal accident that befalls Désiré Minoret-Levrault. It is because of this supernatural, cosmic dimension that – very unusually for Balzac’s novels – Ursule Mirouët has a happy ending. It is one of the most joyful of his novels.
Narrative strategies
(1) The novel is notable for its use of the in medias resIn medias res
In medias res or medias in res is a Latin phrase denoting the literary and artistic narrative technique wherein the relation of a story begins either at the mid-point or at the conclusion, rather than at the beginning In medias res or medias in res (into the middle of things) is a Latin phrase...
technique. Opening with François Minoret-Levrault anxiously awaiting his son Désiré’s return home, it then turns to the circumstances leading up to that moment.
(2) There is in fact a double employment of this flashback
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
technique as shortly afterwards, to the town’s amazement, Dr Minoret is shown walking to church with Ursule. The novel then proceeds to outline Dr Minoret’s life up to that point.
(3) The influence of the roman-feuilleton (serial (literature)
Serial (literature)
In literature, a serial is a publishing format by which a single large work, most often a work of narrative fiction, is presented in contiguous installments—also known as numbers, parts, or fascicles—either issued as separate publications or appearing in sequential issues of a single periodical...
) is very noticeable. Leading feuilletonistes were Eugène Sue
Eugène Sue
Joseph Marie Eugène Sue was a French novelist.He was born in Paris, the son of a distinguished surgeon in Napoleon's army, and is said to have had the Empress Joséphine for godmother. Sue himself acted as surgeon both in the Spanish campaign undertaken by France in 1823 and at the Battle of Navarino...
, Alexandre Dumas, père
Alexandre Dumas, père
Alexandre Dumas, , born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world...
, Paul Féval, père
Paul Féval, père
Paul Henri Corentin Féval, père was a French novelist and dramatist.He was the author of popular swashbuckler novels such as Le Loup Blanc and the perennial best-seller Le Bossu...
, Frédéric Soulié and Eugène Scribe
Eugène Scribe
Augustin Eugène Scribe , was a French dramatist and librettist. He is best known for the perfection of the so-called "well-made play" . This dramatic formula was a mainstay of popular theater for over 100 years.-Biography:...
. Balzac became increasingly preoccupied by their popularity in the 1840s and tried to emulate them. This involved incorporating many features of melodrama
Melodrama
The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
; thus, for example, the séance is high melodrama. Serialization also encouraged the ending of each serialized extract on a note of high suspense.
(4) There is a strong ludic element in Ursule Mirouët. For Goupil the law is nothing but a game the aim of which is to outwit and defeat one’s opponents. Melodrama
Melodrama
The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
also has a ludic dimension as Balzac conjures into and out of existence the visionary beings who assist the progress of the plot. He thus juggles with the different levels of reality – the normal and the paranormal
Paranormal
Paranormal is a general term that designates experiences that lie outside "the range of normal experience or scientific explanation" or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure...
– as if he were playing with a kaleidoscope. At the level of language this juggling is mirrored in Goupil’s puns and Mme Crémière’s slips of the tongue.
(5) The narrative of Ursule Mirouët is essentially simple in conception. It is, according to Donald Adamson
Donald Adamson
Donald Adamson is a historian, biographer, philosophical writer, textual scholar, literary critic, and translator of French literature...
, “a story in which no violent collision between the characters [arises]”. Flashbacks
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
apart, Ursule Mirouët has a straightforward storyline, with no sub-plots. Nevertheless, because of the flashbacks, it is a work of great narrative intricacy. Thus, with its stagecoach element, Désiré Minoret-Levrault’s death strikingly parallels the opening scene of the novel.
Conclusion
Although André GideAndré Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
regarded Ursule Mirouët as a fairly minor work by Balzac’s standards, Balzac himself described it as the masterpiece of all the studies of human society he had written up to that date. There is an air of serenity about this novel which La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
seldom achieves; and this despite the elements of melodrama
Melodrama
The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
and class conflict. The skirmishings to obtain the inheritance are admirably represented, as in a tableau, by the scene at the auction of Dr Minoret’s belongings, where the “heirs” tip upside down and shake every volume in his library in their efforts to find the missing fortune. This turmoil is in a sense the Romantic
Romance (genre)
As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...
dimension of the novel. Yet the dominant tone of Ursule Mirouët is projected at the very outset of the work, when Balzac compares its Nemours
Nemours
Nemours is a commune in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France.-Geography:Nemours is located on the Loing and its canal, c...
setting to the beauty and simplicity of a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. Ursule Mirouët has that “noble simplicity, and … tranquil greatness” which, in Winckelmann’s words, were the defining characteristics of Classicism
Classicism
Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
.