Give us more saintly orphans: Ursule Mirouët and the hazards of good breeding

Ursule Mirouët

By Honoré Balzac

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Project Gutenberg

By Comrade Reviewer Marienka


Whenever you encounter a book with an orphan, particularly a saintly one, you can be fairly certain you are on to a good thing. Why? Orphans sell books.  We identify with orphans.  In our childhood, many of us cast ourselves in the leading role of saintly orphan.  Some of us even reach adulthood believing we are saintly orphans. And if we can't quite summon up the necessary assurance that we are saintly orphans, we can turn to excellent literature, not to mention Disney movies, to satisfy our deep inward need to be saintly orphans.


Consider the case of Little Nell of Old Curiosity Shop fame. So saintly and beleaguered was she that droves of demented American fans stormed the harbor when the ship carrying the last installment of The Old Curiosity Shop pulled in—all of them shouting to the sailors, “Is Little Nell dead?”[1]  And that was before the age of midnight media-staged releases of Harry Potter—another orphan of note. The only close competitor to the saintly orphan is the saintly and faithful dog.  Put the two together and you've got midnight madness at the rapidly vanishing bookstores. Even Oscar Wilde, who famously declared, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing,” would probably agree.[2]



Let's face it; almost everyone loves an orphan except the villainous characters in the book who connive with one another as to the best way to destroy the orphan and/or that orphan's saintliness. But whatever the advantages of being a dead saintly orphan are, live saintly orphans are more satisfying, particularly if the villainous characters gnash their teeth in the end and cry “Curses! Foiled again.”


Ursule Mirouët eponymous heroine of Balzac's novel is a saintly orphan of the first order.  A orphan with a complicated history-the legitimate daughter of her godfather's illegitimate brother-in-law, Ursule becomes the ward and goddaughter of her uncle, Dr. Mirouët, a wealthy widower who offers the infant Ursule a home, promptly names her after his saintly dead wife and retires to Nemours, a small provincial town outside Paris where a host of his relatives live-relatives who are neither saintly nor virtuous.  Ursule's arrival upsets their great expectations of inheriting beaucoup d'argent, a fact that makes them gnash what teeth they have and begin plotting.


In the meantime, the good Dr. Mirouët raises Ursule in virtuous and innocent isolation from the evils of the world.  In this task, he is aided by his good friend the Abbé Chaperon, so saintly that his breeches are mostly on the verge of falling down because he has sold the buckles keeping them in place to aid the poor.  “A beautiful naïveté,” the narrator informs us.  Monsieur Jordy, “a Voltairean nobleman and an old bachelor,” joins the good doctor and the abbé in bringing up baby.  All these benevolent gentlemen function as Ursule “three mothers.”


Virtue, piety, and the protection of a wealthy uncle would seem to guarantee an easy life for Ursule, but the vagaries of French law concerning inheritance and illegitimacy and the cursed relatives threaten Ursule's peace . . . or would if she were wicked. 


First published in 1842, Ursule Mirouët is an obscure novel but one that Balzac described as “the finest work [he] had written” thus far.[3] As the omniscient narrator remarks, “Bless them, therefore, and be not envious; seek an Ursule for yourselves a young girl brought up by three old men, and by the best of all mothers-adversity.” Read it and judge for yourself. Remember.  We saintly orphans must stick together.

Works Cited

Schlicke, Paul, ed. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. [1] [2]

Balzac, Honoré de. The Letters of Honoré de Balzac to Madame Hanska. Trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1900. [3]