“Another folly!” said Jean-Louis, in a low voice, “Rigou betrays everybody; Annette tells me so; she says he’s more dangerous when he listens to you than other folks are when they bluster.”

“I advise you to be cautious,” said Langlume.  “The general has gone to the prefecture about your misdeeds, and Sibilet tells me he has sworn an oath to go to Paris and see the Chancellor of France and the King himself, and the whole pack of them if necessary, to get the better of his peasantry.”

“His peasantry!” shouted every one.

“Ha, ha! so we don’t belong to ourselves any longer?”

As Tonsard asked the question, Vaudoyer left the house to see Rigou.

Langlume, who had already gone out, turned on the door-step, and answered:—­

“Crowd of do-nothings! are you so rich that you think you are your own masters?”

Though said with a laugh, the meaning contained in those words was understood by all present, as horses understand the cut of a whip.

“Ran tan plan! masters indeed!” shouted old Fourchon.  “I say, my lad,” he added to Nicolas, “after your performance this morning it’s not my clarionet that you’ll get between your thumb and four fingers!”

“Don’t plague him, or he’ll make you throw up your wine by a punch in the stomach,” said Catherine, roughly.

CHAPTER XIII

A TYPE OF THE COUNTRY USURER

Strategically, Rigou’s position at Blangy was that of a picket sentinel.  He watched Les Aigues, and watched it well.  The police have no spies comparable to those that serve hatred.

When the general first came to Les Aigues Rigou apparently formed some plans about him which Montcornet’s marriage with a Troisville put an end to; he seemed to have wished to patronize the new land-owner.  In fact his intentions were so patent that Gaubertin thought best to let him into the secrets of the coalition against Les Aigues.  Before accepting any part in the affair, Rigou determined, as he said, to put the general between two stools.

One day, after the countess was fairly installed, a little wicker carriage painted green entered the grand courtyard of the chateau.  The mayor, who was flanked by his mayoress, got out and came round to the portico on the garden side.  As he did so Rigou saw Madame le comtesse at a window.  She, however, devoted to the bishop and to religion and to the Abbe Brossette, sent word by Francois that “Madame was out.”

This act of incivility, worthy of a woman born in Russia, turned the face of the ex-Benedictine yellow.  If the countess had seen the man whom the abbe told her was “a soul in hell who plunged into iniquity as into a bath in his efforts to cool himself,” if she had seen his face then she might have refrained from exciting the cold, deliberate hatred felt by the liberals against the royalists, increased as it was in country-places by the jealousies of neighborhood, where the recollections of wounded vanity are kept constantly alive.