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13 1 Webs: Genealogies, Roads, Streets (Balzac) In Balzac’s Ursule Mirouët, everyone is on the move. In the first scene, the maître de poste (postmaster) in Nemours, MinoretLevrault , awaits the arrival of a coach carrying his son, Désiré, who is returning home to Nemours from Paris after completing his law studies. Another Minoret, Doctor Minoret, who comes to Nemours to retire after a very long absence from the town and whose return will provoke the struggle for his inheritance that is the main narrative line of the novel, thinks nothing of jumping into a coach and traveling substantial distances to treat sick patients in provincial towns well outside Paris during the period when his medical practice is based in the capital. Moreover, in the last part of the novel, as the struggle is finally engaged to right the injustice that occurs after Doctor Minoret’s death when his estate is stolen from its rightful heir, a system of “shuttle diplomacy” between key characters in Nemours and the procureur du roi (prosecutor) in Fontainebleau begins. It ends only with a catastrophic accident on the very road that permits almost frenetic commuting between the two towns. What is the significance of all this traveling? What is its relation to the other themes that are developed in the novel? Answers to these questions will lead us first toward the issue of collateral relations and then toward a discussion of how such relations are connected to questions of transportation and speed of movement on roads. In a way that will become clear shortly, the issue of family relations and the networks they create is superimposed on the pattern of exchange networks created by the road system that is 01.13-39_Bell 9/11/03, 1:29 PM 13 14 Real Time such an integral part of the novel. Family relations in Balzac’s novel cannot be understood without reference to road networks. The notion of transport is perhaps the best way to try to understand what provincial families have become during the Restoration Balzac so constantly attempts to portray. Ursule Mirouët is a novel about collateral relations. The term “collateral ” exists in both English and French, although its usage is not quite the same in the two languages. In particular, les collatéraux in its substantive form in French refers to all those members of a family who descend from a common ancestor without descending directly from each other, in particular, various degrees of cousins. Balzac uses the term in the novel in order to explore what he considers to be a veritable genealogical and social problem and thus to create one of those characteristic moments of sociological reflection that are dispersed so strategically throughout the series of novels that make up La Comédie humaine. If one wanted to be slightly ironic in characterizing the novel, it could be said that the story deals with “collateral damage,” a play on an expression in English using the term. In this case, however, at stake is not damage caused to people or things near a military target but the damage, both moral and material, caused by the collaterals themselves, that is, the cousins in the Minoret-Levrault family clustered about the provincial town of Nemours. It would be useful first to set the stage for Balzac’s remarks on genealogy in this novel of family relations. Placed at the beginning of “Scènes de la vie de province,” Ursule Mirouët opens with a scene whose main character is Minoret-Levrault, mentioned above. This imposing personage is sitting at the end of the bridge leading into Nemours and fretting about the fact that the coach carrying his son home from Paris is late. He is certainly well placed as maître de poste to know that this delay could mean the coach has had an accident in which his son has been injured: “The stagecoach bringing his only son usually arrived in Nemours at around five o’clock in the morning, and the clock had just struck nine! What was the cause of such a delay? Had the coach tipped over? Was Désiré still alive? Perhaps only his leg was broken?”1 The reader later learns that the delay was caused when one of the coach’s wheels lost its steel rim—an incident that could well have resulted in a broken wheel and a serious accident: “The rim of one of the rear wheels came off between Essonne...

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