Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/55

 married Monsieur Crémière-Levrault-Dionis, a fodder contractor, who perished on the scaffold. His wife died of despair and ruined, leaving a daughter married to a Levrault-Minoret, a farmer at Montereau, who does very well; and their daughter has just married a Massin-Levrault,—notary’s clerk at Montargis, where the father is a locksmith.”

“So I am not lacking in heirs,” said the doctor gaily, who desired to take a stroll round Nemours in company with his nephew.

The Loing undulates through the town, bordered by terraced gardens and tidy houses whose aspect gives rise to the belief that prosperity must dwell there rather than elsewhere. When the doctor turned out of the Grand’Rue into the Ruedes Bourgeois, Minoret-Levrault pointed out the property of Monsieur Levrault, a rich ironmonger in Paris, who, he said, had just let himself die.

“There, uncle, is a pretty house for sale, it has a delightful garden looking on the river.”

“Let us go in,” said the doctor, spying at the bottom of a little paved court, a house squeezed between the walls of two neighboring houses hidden by massive trees and climbing plants.

“It is built over cellars,” said the doctor, going in by a very steep flight of steps decorated with vases of white and blue faïence where geraniums were then in bloom.

Cut up, like most provincial houses, by a corridor leading from the court to the garden, there was nothing to the right but a drawing-room lighted by four