“Yet they and I have rummaged everywhere,” said Bongrand,—­“they to find money, and I to find a will in favor of Monsieur de Portenduere.  They have sifted the ashes, lifted the marbles, felt of the slippers, bored into the wood-work of the beds, emptied the mattresses, ripped up the quilts, turned his eider-down inside-out, examined every inch of paper piece by piece, searched the drawers, dug up the cellar floor —­and I have urged on their devastations.”

“What do you think about it?” said the abbe.

“The will has been suppressed by one of the heirs.”

“But where’s the property?”

“We may whistle for it!”

“Perhaps the will is hidden in the library,” said Savinien.

“Yes, and for that reason I don’t dissuade Ursula from buying it.  If it were not for that, it would be absurd to let her put every penny of her ready money into books she will never open.”

At first the whole town believed the doctor’s niece had got possession of the unfound capital; but when it was known positively that fourteen hundred francs a year and her gifts constituted her whole fortune the search of the doctor’s house and furniture excited a more wide-spread curiosity than before.  Some said the money would be found in bank bills hidden away in the furniture, others that the old man had slipped them into his books.  The sale of the effects exhibited a spectacle of the most extraordinary precautions on the part of the heirs.  Dionis, who was doing duty as auctioneeer, declared, as each lot was cried out, that the heirs only sold the article (whatever it was) and not what it might contain; then, before allowing it to be taken away it was subjected to a final investigation, being thumped and sounded; and when at last it left the house the sellers followed with the looks a father might cast upon a son who was starting for India.

“Ah, mademoiselle,” cried La Bougival, returning from the first session in despair, “I shall not go again.  Monsieur Bongrand is right, you could never bear the sight.  Everything is ticketed.  All the town is coming and going just as in the street; the handsome furniture is being ruined, they even stand upon it; the whole place is such a muddle that a hen couldn’t find her chicks.  You’d think there had been a fire.  Lots of things are in the courtyard; the closets are all open, and nothing in them.  Oh! the poor dear man, it’s well he died, the sight would have killed him.”

Bongrand, who bought for Ursula certain articles which her uncle cherished, and which were suitable for her little house, did not appear at the sale of the library.  Shrewder than the heirs, whose cupidity might have run up the price of the books had they known he was buying them for Ursula, he commissioned a dealer in old books living in Melun to buy them for him.  As a result of the heir’s anxiety the whole library was sold book by book.  Three thousand volumes were examined, one by one, held by the two