He harassed the Comte de
Montcornet. He worked the peasants like puppets by hidden wires, the
handling of which amused him as though it were a game of chess where
the pawns were alive, the knights caracoled, the bishops, like Fourchon,
gabbled, the feudal castles shone in the sun, and the queen maliciously
checkmated the king. Every day, when he got out of bed and saw from his
window the proud towers of Les Aigues, the chimneys of the pavilions,
and the noble gates, he said to himself: "They shall fall! I'll dry up
the brooks, I'll chop down the woods." But he had two victims in mind, a
chief one and a lesser one. Though he meditated the dismemberment of the
chateau, the apostate also intended to make an end of the Abbe Brossette
by pin-pricks.

To complete the portrait of the ex-priest it will suffice to add that
he went to mass regretting that his wife still lived, and expressed the
desire to be reconciled with the Church as soon as he became a widower.
He bowed deferentially to the Abbe Brossette whenever he met him, and
spoke to him courteously and without heat. As a general thing all men
who belong to the Church, or who have come out of it, have the patience
of insects; they owe this to the obligation they have been under,
ecclesiastically, to preserve decorum,--a training which has been
lacking for the last twenty years to the vast majority of the French
nation, even those who think themselves well-bred. All the monks
which the Revolution brought out of their monasteries and forced into
business, public or private, showed in their coldness and reserve the
great advantage which ecclesiastical discipline gives to the sons of the
Church, even those who desert her.

Gaubertin had understood Rigou from the days when the Abbe Niseron made
his will and the ex-monk married the heiress; he fathomed the craft
hidden behind the jaundiced face of that accomplished hypocrite; and he
made himself the man's fellow-worshipper before the altar of the Golden
Calf. When the banking-house of Leclercq was first started he advised
Rigou to put fifty thousand francs into it, guaranteeing their security
himself. Rigou was all the more desirable as an investor, or sleeping
partner, because he drew no interest but allowed his capital to
accumulate. At the period of which we write it amounted to over a
hundred thousand francs, although in 1816 he had taken out one hundred
and eighty thousand for investment in the Public Funds, from which