Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/215

 “You would serve France and trust in God!”

“You would postpone my happiness until after your death?”

“It would be horrible of you, that’s all.”

“Louis XIV. nearly married the niece of Mazarin, a parvenu.”

“Mazarin himself opposed it.”

“And Scarron’s widow?”

“She was a d’Aubigne! Besides, the marriage was secret. But I am very old, my son,” she said, tossing her head. “When I am no more, you will marry as you please.”

Savinien both loved and respected his mother; he immediately, but silently, opposed the old Kergarouët’s obstinacy with an equal stubbornness, and resolved never to have any other wife than Ursule, who, by this opposition, as always happens in similar occurrences, acquired the merit of a forbidden thing.

When, after vespers, Doctor Minoret and Ursule, dressed in white and pink, entered this chilly parlor, the child was seized with nervous trembling as if she were in the presence of the Queen of France, and had some favor to ask of her. Since her explanation with the doctor, this little house had assumed the proportions of a palace, and the old lady all the social weight that a duchess must have had in the middle ages, in the eyes of a bondsman’s daughter. Never had Ursule so desperately compared as at this moment the distance that divided a Vicomte de Portenduère from the daughter of a