Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/103

 &#42;

About this time, Ursule was to take her first communion. The Abbé Chaperon spent a whole year preparing this young girl, whose heart and intelligence, both so developed, but so discreetly kept in check by each other, required a particular spiritual nurture. Such was this initiation into the knowledge of things divine, that, from the time the soul takes its religious shape, Ursule became the pious, mystic young girl whose character always rose above events, and whose heart dominated all adversity. It was then that a struggle secretly began between incredulous old age and believing childhood, for a long time unknown to her who provoked it, the issue of which was occupying the whole town, and was to have so great an influence over Ursule’s future by exciting the doctor’s collateral heirs against her.

During the first six months of the year 1824, Ursule spent nearly all her mornings at the presbytery. The old doctor guessed the curé’s intentions. The priest wanted to make Ursule an invincible argument. The unbeliever, loved by his godchild as if she had been his own daughter, would believe in this ingenuousness, would be won by the moving results of religion in the soul of a child whose love resembled those trees in Indian climates that are always laden with flowers and fruit, always green (81)