e searchers approach or leave the hidden article. Little Genevieve
took it into her head to hide the bellows in Arsene's bed. The bellows
could not be found, and the game came to an end; Genevieve was taken
home by her mother and forgot to put the bellows back on the nail.
Arsene and her aunt searched more than a week for them; then they
stopped searching and managed to do without them, the old abbe blowing
his fire with an air-cane made in the days when air-canes were the
fashion,--a fashion which was no doubt introduced by some courtier of
the reign of Henri III. At last, about a month before her death, the
housekeeper, after a dinner at which the Abbe Mouchon, the Niseron
family, and the curate of Soulanges were present, returned to her
jeremiades about the loss of the bellows.

"Why! they've been these two weeks in Arsene's bed!" cried the little
one, with a peal of laughter. "Great lazy thing! if she had taken the
trouble to make her bed she would have found them."

As it was 1791 everybody laughed; but a dead silence succeeded the
laugh.

"There is nothing laughable in that," said the housekeeper; "since I
have been ill Arsene sleeps in my room."

In spite of this explanation the Abbe Niseron looked thunderbolts at
Madame Niseron and his nephew, thinking they were plotting mischief
against him. The housekeeper died. Rigou contrived to work up the
abbe's resentment to such a pitch that he made a will disinheriting
Jean-Francois Niseron in favor of Arsene Pichard.

In 1823 Rigou, perhaps out of a sense of gratitude, still blew the fire
with an air-cane, and left the bellows hanging to the screw.

Madame Niseron, idolizing her daughter, did not long survive her. Mother
and child died in 1794. The old abbe, too, was dead, and citizen Rigou
took charge of Arsene's affairs by marrying her. A former convert in
the monastery, attached to Rigou as a dog is to his master, became the
groom, gardener, herdsman, valet, and steward of the sensual Harpagon.
Arsene Rigou, the daughter, married in 1821 without dowry to the
prosecuting-attorney, inheriting something of her mother's rather vulgar
beauty, together with the crafty mind of her father.

Now about sixty-seven years of age, Rigou had never been ill in his
life, and nothing seemed able to lessen his aggressively good health.
Tall, lean, with brown circles round his eyes, the lids of which were
nearly black, any one who saw him of a morning, when as he dressed he
ex