Ursule is the legitimate daughter of the widower Dr Denis Minoret’s deceased illegitimate brother-in-law by marriage, Joseph Mirouët; not only is she the doctor’s niece, she is also his goddaughter and ward.

At the beginning of the novel he is, however, converted to Christianity – emotionally by the example of Ursule’s piety, and intellectually by his experience of animal magnetism, or the paranormal, and by his longstanding friendship with Abbé Chaperon.

He intends, on the other hand, to bequeath the remainder (approximately half) of his total fortune of about 1,500,000 francs to his “héritiers”, nephews and cousins of his own bloodline who are members of the Minoret, Crémière and Massin families.

Discontented with their inheritance prospects, the “heirs” seek to grab the whole of their wealthy relative's fortune, enlisting the help of the notary's clerk Goupil.

This, together with three bearer bonds, is stolen by one of the doctor's nephews, the postmaster François Minoret-Levrault, who, in the era before railways, owns and manages the carriage and postchaise services in and out of Nemours.

According to Balzac in his Avant-propos (Foreword) to La Comédie humaine, it is in capital cities that “the extremes of good and evil are to be found”.

Ursule Mirouët embodies important philosophical statements of Balzac's view of life, in particular his belief in Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism.

Through Dr Minoret's experience of the occult, his séance with the mysterious hypnotist and the elderly female medium, he becomes a Christian believer: here in La Comédie humaine the finite is seen as being embedded within the infinite; animal magnetism underpins a belief in God.

[7] Not only is Dr Minoret converted to Christianity by a séance, he also makes five dream-like appearances from the dead; and the supernatural also seems to intervene in the fatal accident that befalls Désiré Minoret-Levrault.

Opening with François Minoret-Levrault anxiously awaiting his son Désiré's return home, it then turns to the circumstances leading up to that moment.

(2) There is in fact a double employment of this flashback technique as shortly afterwards, to the town's amazement, Dr Minoret is shown walking to church with Ursule.

The skirmishings to obtain the inheritance are admirably represented, as in a tableau, by the scene at the auction of Dr Minoret's belongings, where the “heirs” tip upside down and shake every volume in his library in their efforts to find the missing fortune.

Yet the dominant tone of Ursule Mirouët is projected at the very outset of the work, when Balzac compares its Nemours setting to the beauty and simplicity of a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.