This dreadful news broke down the old lady.  Her son very gently pointed out to her that had she consented to his marriage in Minoret’s life-time, the doctor would have left his property to Ursula’s husband and they would to-day have been opulent instead of being, as they now were, in the depths of poverty.  Though said without reproach, this argument annihilated the poor woman even more than the thought of her coming ejectment.  When Ursula heard of this catastrophe she was stupefied with grief, having scarcely recovered from her fever, and the blow which the heirs had already dealt her.  To love and be unable to succor the man she loves,—­that is one of the most dreadful of all sufferings to the soul of a noble and sensitive woman.

“I wished to buy my uncle’s house,” she said, “now I will buy your mother’s.”

“Can you?” said Savinien.  “You are a minor, and you cannot sell out your Funds without formalities to which the procureur du roi, now your legal guardian, would not agree.  We shall not resist.  The whole town will be glad to see the discomfiture of a noble family.  These bourgeois are like hounds after a quarry.  Fortunately, I still have ten thousand francs left, on which I can support my mother till this deplorable matter is settled.  Besides, the inventory of your godfather’s property is not yet finished; Monsieur Bongrand still thinks he shall find something for you.  He is as much astonished as I am that you seem to be left without fortune.  The doctor so often spoke both to him and to me of the future he had prepared for you that neither of us can understand this conclusion.”

“Pooh!” she said; “so long as I can buy my godfather’s books and furniture and prevent their being dispersed, I am content.”

“But who knows the price these infamous creatures will set on anything you want?”

Nothing was talked of from Montargis to Fontainebleau but the million for which the Minoret heirs were searching.  But the most minute search made in every corner of the house after the seals were removed, brought no discovery.  The one hundred and twenty-nine thousand francs of the Portenduere debt, the capital of the fifteen thousand a year in the three per cents (then quoted at 76), the house, valued at forty thousand francs, and its handsome furniture, produced a total of about six hundred thousand francs, which to most persons seemed a comforting sum.  But what had become of the money the doctor must have saved?

Minoret began to have gnawing anxieties.  La Bougival and Savinien, who persisted in believing, as did the justice of peace, in the existence of a will, came every day at the close of each session to find out from Bongrand the results of the day’s search.  The latter would sometimes exclaim, before the agents and the heirs were fairly out of hearing, “I can’t understand the thing!” Bongrand, Savinien, and the abbe often declared to each other that the doctor, who received no interest from the Portenduere loan, could not have kept his house as he did on fifteen thousand francs a year.  This opinion, openly expressed, made the post master turn livid more than once.