When Doctor Minoret moves to Nemours with a baby girl in tow, his relatives and heirs are alarmed. The seventy-one-year-old doctor is wealthy, and his heirs were already mentally dividing up the spoils amongst themselves. They didn't want a new candidate for the doctor's affection interfering with their inheritance. The doctor soon makes friends of the local curé, a retired military man, and the local justice of the peace. Together the men dote on Ursule, the illegitimate daughter of the doctor's nephew, and bring her up in an unconventional yet loving environment. The heirs, to whom the doctor has made plain he does not care to socialize, continue to fume and fret and scheme. When Ursule becomes a teenager and begins to notice young men, and one in particular, the doctor at last begins to decline. He makes arrangements to provide for Ursule after he's gone, but the heirs are on heightened alert, and the drama of whether Ursule will be provided for or completely disinherited begins. Perfect for readers who love richly detailed French literature and compelling family dramas about inheritance, loyalty, and social class. Balzac's masterful storytelling brings 19th-century provincial France to vivid life in this touching tale of an unlikely father-daughter bond that threatens to upend an entire family's expectations. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)