“What! you complain of the Shopman when he proposes to make your fortune?” said Gaubertin.  “Doesn’t the fool offer to give you three francs for every arrest you make, and the fines to boot?  Have an understanding with your friends and you can bring as many indictments as you please,—­hundreds if you like!  With one thousand francs you can buy La Bachelerie from Rigou, become a property owner, live in your own house, and work for yourself, or rather, make others work for you, and take your ease.  Only—­now listen to me—­you must manage to arrest only such as haven’t a penny in the world.  You can’t shear sheep unless the wool is on their backs.  Take the Shopman’s offer and leave him to collect the costs,—­if he wants them; tastes differ.  Didn’t old Mariotte prefer losses to profits, in spite of my advice?”

Courtecuisse, filled with admiration for these words of wisdom, returned home burning with the desire to be a land-owner and a bourgeois like the rest.

When the general reached Les Aigues he related his expedition to Sibilet.

“Monsieur le comte did very right,” said the steward, rubbing his hands; “but he must not stop short half-way.  The field-keeper of the district who allows the country-people to prey upon the meadows and rob the harvests ought to be changed.  Monsieur le comte should have himself chosen mayor, and appoint one of his old soldiers, who would have the courage to carry out his orders, in place of Vaudoyer.  A great land-owner should be master in his own district.  Just see what difficulties we have with the present mayor!”

The mayor of the district of Blangy, formerly a Benedictine, named Rigou, had married, in the first year of the Republic, the servant-woman of the late priest of Blangy.  In spite of the repugnance which a married monk excited at the Prefecture, he had continued to be mayor after 1815, for the reason that there was no-one else at Blangy who was capable of filling the post.  But in 1817, when the bishop sent the Abbe Brossette to the parish of Blangy (which had then been vacant over twenty-five years), a violent opposition not unnaturally broke out between the old apostate and the young ecclesiastic, whose character is already known to us.  The war which was then and there declared between the mayor’s office and the parsonage increased the popularity of the magistrate, who had hitherto been more or less despised.  Rigou, whom the peasants had disliked for usurious dealings, now suddenly represented their political and financial interests, supposed to be threatened by the Restoration, and more especially by the clergy.

A copy of the “Constitutionnel,” that great organ of liberalism, after making the rounds of the Cafe de la Paix, came back to Rigou on the seventh day,—­the subscription, standing in the name of old Socquard the keeper of the coffee-house, being shared by twenty persons.  Rigou passed the paper on to Langlume the miller, who, in turn, gave it in shreds to any one who knew how to read.  The “Paris items,” and the anti-religion jokes of the liberal sheet formed the public opinion of the valley des Aigues.  Rigou, like the venerable Abbe Gregoire, became a hero.  For him, as for certain Parisian bankers, politics spread a mantle of popularity over his shameful dishonesty.