Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/273

 thrown back her plaits undone, was Ursule, sobbing from time to time. Her eyes were dim, her lids swollen, in short, she was a prey to a moral and physical prostration which would have touched the most ferocious beings, except heirs.

“Ah! Monsieur Bongrand, after my birthday comes death and mourning!” she said, with the natural poetry of a beautiful mind. “You know what he was: for twenty years he never spoke a single impatient word to me! I thought he would live a hundred years! He has been a mother to me,” she cried, “and a good mother!”

These few uttered thoughts brought on floods of tears, broken by sobs; then she subsided into a heap.

“My child,” rejoined the justice of the peace, hearing the heirs on the staircase, “you have all your life before you for crying, and you have only a moment for your affairs; collect in your room all that belongs to you in this house. The heirs are forcing me to put seals—”

“Ah! the heirs can take everything,” cried Ursule standing up in a fit of savage indignation. “All that is most precious I have here,” she said, striking her bosom.

“And what is that?” asked the postmaster, who, with Massin, showed his dreadful face.

“The memory of his virtues, his life, of all his words, an image of his heavenly soul,” she said, her eyes and face flashing, while she raised her hand with a magnificent gesture.