dun, and that other miser in
behalf of family interests, little la Baudraye of Sancerre. Well, human
emotions--above all, those of avarice--take on so many and diverse
shades in the diverse centres of social existence that there still
remains upon the stage of our comedy another miser to be studied,
namely, Rigou,--Rigou, the miser-egoist; full of tenderness for his own
gratifications, cold and hard to others; the ecclesiastical miser; the
monk still a monk so far as he can squeeze the juice of the fruit called
good-living, and becoming secular only to put a paw upon the public
money. In the first place, let us explain the continual pleasure that he
took in sleeping under his own roof.

Blangy--by that we mean the sixty houses described by Blondet in his
letter to Nathan--stands on a rise of land to the left of the Thune. As
all the houses are surrounded by gardens, the village is a very pretty
one. Some houses are built on the banks of the stream. At the upper end
of the long rise stands the church, formerly flanked by a parsonage,
its apse surrounded, as in many other villages, by a graveyard. The
sacrilegious old Rigou had bought the parsonage, which was originally
built by an excellent Catholic, Mademoiselle Choin, on land which she
had bought for the purpose. A terraced garden, from which the eye looked
down upon Blangy, Cerneux, and Soulanges standing between the two great
seignorial parks, separated the late parsonage from the church. On its
opposite side lay a meadow, bought by the last curate of the parish not
long before his death, which the distrustful Rigou had since surrounded
with a wall.

The ex-monk and mayor having refused to sell back the parsonage for its
original purpose, the parish was obliged to buy a house belonging to
a peasant, which adjoined the church. It was necessary to spend five
thousand francs to repair and enlarge it and to enclose it in a
little garden, one wall of which was that of the sacristy, so that
communication between the parsonage and the church was still as close as
it ever was.

These two houses, built on a line with the church, and seeming to belong
to it by their gardens, faced a piece of open ground planted by trees,
which might be called the square of Blangy,--all the more because
the count had lately built, directly opposite to the new parsonage,
a communal building intended for the mayor's office, the home of the
field-keeper, and the quarters of that school of the B