Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/97

 result of the last experience. When a sickly, nervous, delicate woman begins with a miscarriage, it is no uncommon thing to see her behaving during pregnancy and in her confinements as Ursule Minoret did, in spite of her husband’s care, attentions and science. The poor man often reproached himself for their mutual persistence in wishing for children. The last one, conceived after an interval of two years, died during the year 1792, the victim of the mother’s nervous condition, if those physiologists are to be believed who think that, in the unaccountable phenomena of generation, the child takes after the father in blood, and after the mother in its nervous system. Forced to renounce the enjoyment of his strongest feeling, the doctor’s benevolence was doubtless in revenge of his disappointed paternity. During his conjugal life, so cruelly disturbed, the doctor had, above all, longed for a little fair-haired girl, one of those flowers which gladden a whole house; so he joyfully accepted the legacy left him by Joseph Mirouët, and over the orphan revived the expectations of his vanished dreams. For two years, he superintended, as Cato once did for Pompey, the minutest details of Ursule’s life; he would not let the wet-nurse suckle her, dress her, or put her to bed without him. His experience and his science were all at this child’s disposal. After having felt all the sorrows, the alternations of fear and hope, the labors and joys of a mother, he had the happiness of seeing this daughter of the blonde German woman and the French artist develop a