Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/96

 such terrible poverty, that in 1806, he snatched at the chance of becoming a Frenchman once more. He then settled at Hamburg, where he married the daughter of a worthy bourgeois, mad about music, who fell in love with the artist, whose success was always in perspective and to which she wished to devote herself. But, after fifteen years of destitution, Joseph Mirouët could not withstand the intoxication of wealth; his natural extravagance reappeared; and, though he made his wife happy, he spent her fortune in a very few years. Poverty returned. The household must have led the most horrible existence for Joseph Mirouët to have come to engaging himself as a musician in a French regiment. In 1813, by the merest chance, the surgeon-major of this regiment, struck by the name of Mirouët, wrote to Doctor Minoret, to whom he owed obligations. The answer was not long in coming. In 1814, before the capitulation of Paris, Joseph Mirouët had a refuge in Paris, where his wife died in giving birth to a little girl whom the doctor wished to call Ursule, after his wife. The band captain did not survive the mother, exhausted as she too had been by fatigue and misery. When dying, the unfortunate musician left his daughter to the doctor, who stood as her godfather, in spite of his repugnance for what he called the mummeries of the church.

After having seen all his children perish successively through miscarriages, in painful confinements or during their first year, the doctor had awaited the