omfort and well-being of that one man before
their minds as the sole end and object of all their thoughts.

Annette was (since 1795) the tenth pretty girl in Rigou's service,
and he expected to go down to his grave with relays of such servants.
Brought to him at sixteen, she would be sent away at nineteen. All these
girls, carefully chosen at Auxerre, Clamecy, or in the Morvan, were
enticed by the promise of future prosperity; but Madame Rigou persisted
in living. So at the end of every three years some quarrel, usually
brought about by the insolence of the servant to the poor mistress,
caused their dismissal.

Annette, who was a picture of delicate beauty, ingenuous and sparkling,
deserved to be a duchess. Rigou knew nothing of the love affair between
her and Jean-Louis Tonsard, which proves that he had let himself be
fooled by the girl,--the only one of his many servants whose ambition
had taught her to flatter the lynx as the only way to blind him.

This uncrowned Louis XV. did not keep himself wholly to his pretty
Annette. Being the mortgagee of lands bought by peasants who were unable
to pay for them, he kept a harem in the valley, from Soulanges to
five miles beyond Conches on the road to La Brie, without making other
payments than "extension of time," for those fugitive pleasures which
eat into the fortunes of so many old men.

This luxurious life, a life like that of Bouret, cost Rigou almost
nothing. Thanks to his white slaves, he could cut and mow down and
gather in his wood, hay, and grain. To the peasant manual labor is
a small matter, especially if it serves to postpone the payment of
interest due. And so Rigou, while requiring little premiums on each
month's delay, squeezed a great deal of manual labor out of his
debtors,--positive drudgery, to which they submitted thinking they gave
little because nothing left their pockets. Rigou sometimes obtained in
this way more than the principal of a debt.

Deep as a monk, silent as a Benedictine in the throes of writing
history, sly as a priest, deceitful as all misers, carefully keeping
within the limits of the law, the man might have been Tiberius in Rome,
Richelieu under Louis XIII., or Fouche, had the ambition seized him to
go to the Convention; but, instead of all that, Rigou had the common
sense to remain a Lucullus without ostentation, in other words, a
parsimonious voluptuary. To occupy his mind he indulged a hatred
manufactured out of the whole cloth.