ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a reading of Ursule Mirouët to show how Honoré de Balzac's writing offers a very idiosyncratic rendering of the sort of polemical positions that are attributed to him. It provides the provisions of the Civil Code concerning wills. The chapter expresses that Ursule Mirouët, offers a rather special example of a successful will, or rather, that it is itself a text which for various reasons believes in the possibility of successful wills; more often, however, the bachelor uncle's will is stifled by the superior status of the Civil Code itself. In a subversive twist, then, Minoret's use of his testamentary liberty promotes the very Malthusianism subsequent advocates of such liberty, and notably Frédéric Le Play, attributed precisely to the meddling of the Civil Code. There is, additionally, a significant point of fracture in Minoret's apparition as the paterfamilias — the fracturing of his posthumous language into two distinct texts.
