s. Rigou passed
the paper on to Langlume the miller, who, in turn, gave it in shreds to
any one who knew how to read. The "Paris items," and the anti-religion
jokes of the liberal sheet formed the public opinion of the valley des
Aigues. Rigou, like the _venerable_ Abbe Gregoire, became a hero.
For him, as for certain Parisian bankers, politics spread a mantle of
popularity over his shameful dishonesty.

At this particular time the perjured monk, like Francois Keller the
great orator, was looked upon as a defender of the rights of the
people,--he who, not so very long before, dared not walk in the fields
after dark, lest he should stumble into pitfalls where he would seem to
have been killed by accident! Persecute a man politically and you not
only magnify him, but you redeem his past and make it innocent. The
liberal party was a great worker of miracles in this respect. Its
dangerous journal, which had the wit to make itself as commonplace, as
calumniating, as credulous, and as sillily perfidious as every audience
made up the general masses, did in all probability as much injury to
private interests as it did to those of the Church.

Rigou flattered himself that he should find in a Bonapartist general
now laid on the shelf, in a son of the people raised from nothing by
the Revolution, a sound enemy to the Bourbons and the priests. But the
general, bearing in mind his private ambitions, so arranged matters as
to evade the visit of Monsieur and Madame Rigou when he first came to
Les Aigues.

When you have become better acquainted with the terrible character of
Rigou, the lynx of the valley, you will understand the full extent of
the second capital blunder which the general's aristocratic ambitions
led him to commit, and which the countess made all the greater by an
offence which will be described in the further history of Rigou.

If Montcornet had courted the mayor's good-will, if he had sought his
friendship, perhaps the influence of the renegade might have neutralized
that of Gaubertin. Far from that, three suits were now pending in the
courts of Ville-aux-Fayes between the general and the ex-monk. Until the
present time the general had been so absorbed in his personal interests
and in his marriage that he had never remembered Rigou, but when
Sibilet advised him to get himself made mayor in Rigou's place, he took
post-horses and went to see the prefect.

The prefect, Comte Martial de la Roche-Hugon, had been a fri