Sons of the Soil Part 26

In 1791, just about the time that the Abbe Niseron offered his house as an asylum to Rigou and his brother Jean, the little girl played one of her mischievous but innocent tricks. She was playing with a.r.s.ene and some other children at a game which consists in hiding an object which the rest seek, and crying out, "You burn!" or "You freeze!" according as the searchers approach or leave the hidden article. Little Genevieve took it into her head to hide the bellows in a.r.s.ene'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.

a.r.s.ene 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 a.r.s.ene'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 a.r.s.ene 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 a.r.s.ene Pichard.

In 1823 Rigou, perhaps out of a sense of grat.i.tude, 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 a.r.s.ene'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.

a.r.s.ene 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 exposed the wrinkled, red, and granulated skin of his neck, would have compared him to a condor,--all the more because his long nose, sharp at the tip, increased the likeness by its sanguineous color. His head, partly bald, would have frightened phrenologists by the shape of its skull, which was like an a.s.s's backbone, an indication of despotic will. His grayish eyes, half-covered by filmy, red-veined lids, were predestined to aid hypocrisy. Two scanty locks of hair of an undecided color overhung the large ears, which were long and without rim, a sure sign of cruelty, but cruelty of the moral nature only, unless where it means actual insanity. The mouth, very broad, with thin lips, indicated a st.u.r.dy eater and a determined drinker by the drop of its corners, which turned downward like two commas, from which drooled gravy when he ate and saliva when he talked. Heliogabalus must have been like this.

His dress, which never varied, consisted of a long blue surtout with a military collar, a black cravat, with waistcoat and trousers of black cloth. His shoes, very thick soled, had iron nails outside, and inside woollen linings knit by his wife in the winter evenings. Annette and her mistress also knit the master's stockings. Rigou's name was Gregoire.

Though this sketch gives some idea of the man's character, no one can imagine the point to which, in his private and unthwarted life, the ex-Benedictine had pushed the science of selfishness, good living, and sensuality. In the first place, he dined alone, waited upon by his wife and Annette, who themselves dined with Jean in the kitchen, while the master digested his meal and disposed of his wine as he read "the news."

In the country the special names of journals are never mentioned; they are all called by the general name of "the news."

Rigou's dinner, like his breakfast and supper, was always of choice delicacies, cooked with the art which distinguishes a priest's housekeeper from all other cooks. Madame Rigou made the b.u.t.ter herself twice a week. Cream was a concomitant of many sauces. The vegetables came at a jump, as it were, from their frames to the saucepan.

Parisians, who are accustomed to eat the fruits of the earth after they have had a second ripening in the sun of a city, infected by the air of the streets, fermenting in close shops, and watered from time to time by the market-women to give them a deceitful freshness, have little idea of the exquisite flavors of really fresh produce, to which nature has lent fugitive but powerful charms when eaten as it were alive.

The butcher of Soulanges brought his best meat under fear of losing Rigou's custom. The poultry, raised on the premises, was of the finest quality.

This system of secret pampering embraced everything in which Rigou was personally concerned. Though the slippers of the knowing Thelemist were of stout leather they were lined with lamb's wool. Though his coat was of rough cloth it did not touch his skin, for his shirt, washed and ironed at home, was of the finest Frisian linen. His wife, Annette, and Jean drank the common wine of the country, the wine he reserved from his own vineyards; but in his private cellar, as well stocked as the cellars of Belgium, the finest vintages of Burgundy rubbed sides with those of Bordeaux, Champagne, Roussillon, not to speak of Spanish and Rhine wines, all bought ten years in advance of use and bottled by Brother Jean. The liqueurs in that cellar were those of the Isles, and came originally from Madame Amphoux. Rigou had laid in a supply to last him the rest of his days, at the national sale of a chateau in Burgundy.

The ex-monk ate and drank like Louis XIV. (one of the greatest consumers of food and drink ever known), which reveals the costs of a life that was more than voluptuous. Careful and very shrewd in managing his secret prodigalities, he disputed all purchases as only churchmen can dispute.

Instead of taking infinite precautions against being cheated, the sly monk kept patterns and samples, had the agreements reduced to writing, and warned those who forwarded his wines or his provisions that if they fell short of the mark in any way he should refuse to accept their consignments.

Jean, who had charge of the fruit-room, was trained to keep fresh the finest fruits grown in the department; so that Rigou ate pears and apples and sometimes grapes, at Easter.

No prophet regarded as a G.o.d was ever more blindly obeyed than was Rigou in his own home. A mere motion of his black eyelashes could plunge his wife, Annette, and Jean into the deepest anxiety. He held his three slaves by the multiplicity of their many duties, which were like a chain in his hands. These poor creatures were under the perpetual yoke of some ordered duty, with an eye always on them; but they had come to take a sort of pleasure in accomplishing these tasks, and did not suffer under them. All three had the comfort 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 d.u.c.h.ess. 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 princ.i.p.al 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. He hara.s.sed 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 p.a.w.ns 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 n.o.ble 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-p.r.i.c.ks.

To complete the portrait of the ex-priest it will suffice to add that he went to ma.s.s 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 acc.u.mulate. 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 ama.s.sed h.o.a.rd, 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 arrondiss.e.m.e.nt.

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 cla.s.ses (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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.sociates, 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.

Rigou was in his way another Tonsard. The one throve on thefts from nature, the other waxed fat on legal plunder. Both liked to live well.

It was the same nature in two species,--the one natural, the other whetted by his training in a cloister.

It was about four o'clock when Vaudoyer left the tavern of the Grand-I-Vert to consult the former mayor. Rigou was at dinner. Finding the front door locked, Vaudoyer looked above the window blinds and called out:--

"Monsieur Rigou, it is I,--Vaudoyer."

Jean came round from the porte-cochere and said to Vaudoyer:--

"Come into the garden; Monsieur has company."

The company was Sibilet, who, under pretext of discussing the verdict Brunet had just handed in, was talking to Rigou of quite other matters.

He had found the usurer finishing his dessert. On a square dinner-table covered with a dazzling white cloth--for, regardless of his wife and Annette who did the washing, Rigou exacted clean table-linen every day--the steward noted strawberries, apricots, peaches, figs, and almonds, all the fruits of the season in profusion, served in white porcelain dishes on vine-leaves as daintily as at Les Aigues.

Seeing Sibilet, Rigou told him to run the bolts of the inside double-doors, which were added to the other doors as much to stifle sounds as to keep out the cold air, and asked him what pressing business brought him there in broad daylight when it was so much safer to confer together at night.

"The Shopman talks of going to Paris to see the Keeper of the Seals; he is capable of doing you a great deal of harm; he may ask for the dismissal of your son-in-law, and the removal of the judges at Ville-aux-Fayes, especially after reading the verdict just rendered in your favor. He has turned at bay; he is shrewd, and he has an adviser in that abbe, who is quite able to tilt with you and Gaubertin. Priests are powerful. Monseigneur the bishop thinks a great deal of the Abbe Brossette. Madame la comtesse talks of going herself to her cousin the prefect, the Comte de Casteran, about Nicolas. Michaud begins to see into our game."

"You are frightened," said Rigou, softly, casting a look on Sibilet which suspicion made less impa.s.sive than usual, and which was therefore terrific. "You are debating whether it would not be better on the whole to side with the Comte de Montcornet."

"I don't see where I am to get the four thousand francs I save honestly and invest every year, after you have cut up and sold Les Aigues," said Sibilet, shortly. "Monsieur Gaubertin has made me many fine promises; but the crisis is coming on; there will be fighting, surely. Promising before victory and keeping a promise after it are two very different things."

"I will talk to him about it," replied Rigou, imperturbably. "Meantime this is what I should say to you if I were in his place: 'For the last five years you have taken Monsieur Rigou four thousand francs a year, and that worthy man gives you seven and a half per cent; which makes your property in his hands at this moment over twenty-seven thousand francs, as you have not drawn the interest. But there exists a private signed agreement between you and Rigou, and the Shopman will dismiss his steward whenever the Abbe Brossette lays that doc.u.ment before his eyes; the abbe will be able to do so after receiving an anonymous letter which will inform him of your double-dealing. You would therefore do better for yourself by keeping well with us instead of clamoring for your pay in advance,--all the more because Monsieur Rigou, who is not legally bound to give you seven and a half per cent and the interest on your interest, will make you in court a legal tender of your twenty thousand francs, and you will not be able to touch that money until your suit, prolonged by legal trickery, shall be decided by the court at Ville-aux-Fayes. But if you act wisely you will find that when Monsieur Rigou gets possession of your pavilion at Les Aigues, you will have very nearly thirty thousand francs in his hands and thirty thousand more which the said Rigou may entrust to you,--which will be all the more advantageous to you then because the peasantry will have flung them themselves upon the estate of Les Aigues, divided into small lots like the poverty of the world.' That's what Monsieur Gaubertin might say to you. As for me, I have nothing to say, for it is none of my business.

Gaubertin and I have our own quarrel with that son of the people who is ashamed of his own father, and we follow our own course. If my friend Gaubertin feels the need of using you, I don't; I need no one, for everybody is at my command. As to the Keeper of the Seals, that functionary is often changed; whereas we--WE are always here, and can bide our time."

"Well, I've warned you," returned Sibilet, feeling like a donkey under a pack-saddle.

"Warned me of what?" said Rigou, artfully.