As Rigou crossed the Thune, fordable at all seasons, Tonsard came out of the tavern and met him on the high-road.

“Well, Pere Rigou,” he said, “so the Shopman means to make dogs of us?”

“We’ll see about that,” said the usurer, whipping up his horse.

“He’ll protect us,” said Tonsard, turning to a group of women and children who were near him.

“Rigou is thinking as much about you as a cook thinks of the gudgeons he is frying in his pan,” called out Fourchon.

“Take the clapper out of your throat when you are drunk,” said Mouche, pulling his grandfather by the blouse, and tumbling him down on a bank under a poplar tree.  “If that hound of a mayor heard you say that, he’d never buy any more of your tales.”

The truth was that Rigou was hurrying to Soulanges in consequence of the warning given him by the steward of Les Aigues, which, in his heart, he regarded as threatening the secret coalition of the valley.

PART II

CHAPTER I

THE LEADING SOCIETY OF SOULANGES

About six kilometres (speaking legally) from Blangy, and at the same distance from Ville-aux-Fayes, on an elevation radiating from the long hillside at the foot of which flows the Avonne, stands the little town of Soulanges, surnamed La Jolie, with, perhaps, more right to that title than Mantes.

At the foot of the hill, the Thune broadens over a clay bottom to a space of some seventy acres, at the end of which the Soulanges mills, placed on numerous little islets, present as graceful a group of buildings as any landscape architect could devise.  After watering the park of Soulanges, where it feeds various other streams and artificial lakes, the Thune falls into the Avonne through a fine broad channel.

The chateau of Soulanges, rebuilt under Louis XIV. from designs of Jules Mansart, and one of the finest in Burgundy, stands facing the town; so that Soulanges and its chateau mutually present to each other a charming and even elegant vista.  The main road winds between the town and the pond, called by the country people, rather pompously, the lake of Soulanges.

The little town is one of those natural compositions which are extremely rare in France, where prettiness of its own kind is absolutely wanting.  Here you would indeed find, as Blondet said in his letter, the charm of Switzerland, the prettiness of the environs of Neuf-chatel; while the bright vineyards which encircle Soulanges complete the resemblance,—­leaving out, be it said, the Alps and the Jura.  The streets, placed one above another on the slope of the hill, have but few houses; for each house stands in its own garden, which produces a mass of greenery rarely seen in a town.  The roofs, red or blue, rising among flower-gardens, trees, and trellised terraces, present an harmonious variety of aspects.