Ursule Mirouët blends a study of provincial manners, the drama of inheritance, and a reflection on belief. At Nemours, the old Doctor Minoret, a rationalist and unbeliever, raises with tenderness his orphaned goddaughter Ursule, a girl of exemplary purity and piety. The doctor's collateral heirs — the Minoret-Levrault, Massin, and Crémière families, greedy and vulgar — view with anxiety the affection he bears this penniless child, fearing she will deprive them of their inheritance. Now the doctor, at first a materialist, converts to belief after witnessing experiments in animal magnetism that shake his skepticism — a Swedenborgian theme dear to Balzac. At his death, he secretly leaves Ursule the means to secure her future, but the postmaster Minoret-Levrault steals the papers and money that should have come to her. Ursule, persecuted and impoverished, endures the heirs' maneuvers. It is then that the marvelous intervenes: the dead doctor appears to Ursule in a dream and reveals the theft and its author. Gnawed by remorse and by misfortunes that fall on him like a chastisement, the thief finally restores the stolen property. Ursule, reinstated in her rights, can marry the man she loves, the young noble Savinien de Portenduère. Balzac vigorously paints the rapacity of provincial families lying in wait for an inheritance, and sets against this baseness the grace of an angelic heroine. The novel is also notable for its avowed recourse to the supernatural and to magnetism, which makes it one of the works where Balzac's mysticism surfaces within a realist frame. It is a variation on persecuted virtue, then rewarded, doubled with a satire of provincial appetites.