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 duchess.  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 principal 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 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.