et was unable to bear prosperity; he was naturally a spendthrift,
and though kind to his wife, he wasted her fortune in a very few years.
The household must have dragged on a wretched existence before Joseph
Mirouet reached the point of enlisting as a musician in a French
regiment. In 1813 the surgeon-major of the regiment, by the merest
chance, heard the name of Mirouet, was struck by it, and wrote to Doctor
Minoret, to whom he was under obligations.

The answer was not long in coming. As a result, in 1814, before the
allied occupation, Joseph Mirouet had a home in Paris, where his wife
died giving birth to a little girl, whom the doctor desired should
be called Ursula after his wife. The father did not long survive the
mother, worn out, as she was, by hardship and poverty. When dying the
unfortunate musician bequeathed his daughter to the doctor, who was
already her godfather, in spite of his repugnance for what he called the
mummeries of the Church. Having seen his own children die in succession
either in dangerous confinements or during the first year of their
lives, the doctor had awaited with anxiety the result of a last hope.
When a nervous, delicate, and sickly woman begins with a miscarriage
it is not unusual to see her go through a series of such pregnancies as
Ursula Minoret did, in spite of the care and watchfulness and science
of her husband. The poor man often blamed himself for their mutual
persistence in desiring children. The last child, born after a rest
of nearly two years, died in 1792, a victim of its mother's nervous
condition--if we listen to physiologists, who tell us that in the
inexplicable phenomenon of generation the child derives from the father
by blood and from the mother in its nervous system.

Compelled to renounce the joys of a feeling all powerful within him, the
doctor turned to benevolence as a substitute for his denied paternity.
During his married life, thus cruelly disappointed, he had longed more
especially for a fair little daughter, a flower to bring joy to the
house; he therefore gladly accepted Joseph Mirouet's legacy, and gave to
the orphan all the hopes of his vanished dreams. For two years he took
part, as Cato for Pompey, in the most minute particulars of Ursula's
life; he would not allow the nurse to suckle her or to take her up or
put her to bed without him. His medical science and his experience
were all put to use in her service. After going through many trials,
alte