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.