Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/286

 The things are in the yard, the cupboards open, and nothing in them! Oh! the poor dear man, it was well he died, this sale would have killed him.”

Bongrand, who bought for Ursule the pieces of furniture that the deceased had been fond of and that were calculated to adorn the little house, did not appear at all at the sale of the library. More cunning than the heirs, whose avidity might have made him pay too dear for the books, he had commissioned a dealer in second-hand books at Melun, who had purposely come to Nemours, and who had already had several lots knocked down to him. In consequence of the suspicion of the heirs, the library was sold in separate works. Three thousand volumes were examined, rummaged one by one, held up by both sides of the uplifted cover, and shaken in order to turn out any papers that might be hidden in them; finally their covers and fly-leaves were examined. The total of the auction, for Ursule, ran up to about six thousand five hundred francs, the half of her claim against the estate. The bookcase was not given up until after it had been carefully examined by a cabinetmaker sent for from Paris, who was celebrated for secret drawers. When the justice of the peace gave the order for the bookcase and the books to be conveyed to Mademoiselle Mirouët, the heirs felt vague misgivings, which vanished later on when she was seen to be as poor as before. Minoret bought his uncle’s house, which his co-inheritors worked up to fifty thousand francs, thinking that