第83章

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 he derived an income of seventeen thousand francs.Lupin the notary had cognizance of at least one hundred thousand francs which Rigou had lent on small mortgages upon good estates.Ostensibly, Rigou derived about fourteen thousand francs a year from landed property actually owned by him.But as to his amassed hoard, it was represented by an "x" which no rule of equations could evolve, just as the devil alone knew the secret schemes he plotted with Langlume.

This dangerous usurer, who proposed to live a score of years longer, had established fixed rules to work upon.He lent nothing to a peasant who bought less than seven acres, and who could not pay one-half of the purchase-money down.Rigou well understood the defects of the law of dispossession when applied to small holdings, and the danger both to the Public Treasury and to land-owners of the minute parcelling out of the soil.How can you sue a peasant for the value of one row of vines when he owns only five? The bird's-eye view of self-interest is always twenty-five years ahead of the perceptions of a legislative body.What a lesson for a nation! Law will ever emanate from one brain, that of a man of genius, and not from the nine hundred legislative heads, which, great as they may be in themselves, are belittled and lost in a crowd.Rigou's law contains the essential element which has yet to be found and introduced into public law to put an end to the absurd spectacle of landed property reduced to halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths,--as in the district of Argenteuil, where there are thirty thousand plots of land.

Such operations as those Rigou was concerned in require extensive collusion, like those we have seen existing in this arrondissement.

Lupin, the notary, whom Rigou employed to draw at least one third of the deeds annually entrusted to his notarial office, was devoted to him.This shark could thus include in the mortgage note (signed always in presence of the wife, when the borrower was married) the amount of the illegal interest.The peasant, delighted to feel he had to pay only his five per cent interest annually, always imagined he should be able to meet the payment by working doubly hard or by improving the land and getting double returns upon it.

Hence the deceitful hopes excited by what imbecile economists call "small farming,"--a political blunder to which we owe such mistakes as sending French money to Germany to buy horses which our own land had ceased to breed; a blunder which before long will reduce the raising of cattle until meat will be unattainable not only by the people, but by the lower middle classes (see "Le Cure de Village.")

So, not a little sweat bedewed men's brows between Conches and Ville-

aux-Fayes to Rigou's profit, all being willing to give it; whereas the labor dearly paid for by the general, the only man who did spend money in the district, brought him curses and hatred, which were showered upon him simply because he was rich.How could such facts be understood unless we had previously taken that rapid glance at the Mediocracy.Fourchon was right; the middle classes now held the position of the former lords.The small land-owners, of whom Courtecuisse is a type, were tenants in mortmain of a Tiberius in the valley of the Avonne, just as, in Paris, traders without money are the peasantry of the banking system.

Soudry followed Rigou's example from Soulanges to a distance of fifteen miles beyond Ville-aux-Fayes.These two usurers shared the district between them.

Gaubertin, whose rapacity was in a higher sphere, not only did not compete against that of his associates, but he prevented all other capital in Ville-aux-Fayes from being employed in the same fruitful manner.It is easy to imagine what immense influence this triumvirate --Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin--wielded in election periods over electors whose fortunes depended on their good-will.

Hate, intelligence, and means at command, such were the three sides of the terrible triangle which describes the general's closest enemy, the spy ever watching Les Aigues,--a shark having constant dealings with sixty to eighty small land-owners, relations or connections of the peasantry, who feared him as such men always fear their creditor.