shed to patronize the new land-owner. In fact
his intentions were so patent that Gaubertin thought best to let him
into the secrets of the coalition against Les Aigues. Before accepting
any part in the affair, Rigou determined, as he said, to put the general
between two stools.

One day, after the countess was fairly installed, a little wicker
carriage painted green entered the grand courtyard of the chateau. The
mayor, who was flanked by his mayoress, got out and came round to the
portico on the garden side. As he did so Rigou saw Madame le comtesse at
a window. She, however, devoted to the bishop and to religion and to the
Abbe Brossette, sent word by Francois that "Madame was out."

This act of incivility, worthy of a woman born in Russia, turned the
face of the ex-Benedictine yellow. If the countess had seen the man whom
the abbe told her was "a soul in hell who plunged into iniquity as into
a bath in his efforts to cool himself," if she had seen his face then
she might have refrained from exciting the cold, deliberate hatred
felt by the liberals against the royalists, increased as it was
in country-places by the jealousies of neighborhood, where the
recollections of wounded vanity are kept constantly alive.

A few details about this man and his morals will not only throw light on
his share of the plot, called "the great affair" by his two associates,
but it will have the merit of picturing an extremely curious type of
man,--one of those rural existences which are peculiar to France, and
which no writer has hitherto sought to depict. Nothing about this man is
without significance,--neither his house, nor his manner of blowing
the fire, nor his ways of eating; his habits, morals, and opinions will
vividly illustrate the history of the valley. This renegade serves
to show the utility of democracy; he is at once its theory and its
practice, its alpha and its omega, in short, its "summum."

Perhaps you will remember certain masters of avarice pictured in former
scenes of this comedy of human life: in the first place the provincial
minister, Pere Grandet of Saumur, miserly as a tiger is cruel; next
Gobseck, the usurer, that Jesuit of gold, delighting only in its power,
and relishing the tears of the unfortunate because gold produced them;
then Baron Nucingen, lifting base and fraudulent money transactions to
the level of State policy. Then, too, you may remember that portrait
of domestic parsimony, old Hochon of Issou