At this particular time the perjured monk, like Francois Keller the great orator, was looked upon as a defender of the rights of the people,—­he who, not so very long before, dared not walk in the fields after dark, lest he should stumble into pitfalls where he would seem to have been killed by accident!  Persecute a man politically and you not only magnify him, but you redeem his past and make it innocent.  The liberal party was a great worker of miracles in this respect.  Its dangerous journal, which had the wit to make itself as commonplace, as calumniating, as credulous, and as sillily perfidious as every audience made up the general masses, did in all probability as much injury to private interests as it did to those of the Church.

Rigou flattered himself that he should find in a Bonapartist general now laid on the shelf, in a son of the people raised from nothing by the Revolution, a sound enemy to the Bourbons and the priests.  But the general, bearing in mind his private ambitions, so arranged matters as to evade the visit of Monsieur and Madame Rigou when he first came to Les Aigues.

When you have become better acquainted with the terrible character of Rigou, the lynx of the valley, you will understand the full extent of the second capital blunder which the general’s aristocratic ambitions led him to commit, and which the countess made all the greater by an offence which will be described in the further history of Rigou.

If Montcornet had courted the mayor’s good-will, if he had sought his friendship, perhaps the influence of the renegade might have neutralized that of Gaubertin.  Far from that, three suits were now pending in the courts of Ville-aux-Fayes between the general and the ex-monk.  Until the present time the general had been so absorbed in his personal interests and in his marriage that he had never remembered Rigou, but when Sibilet advised him to get himself made mayor in Rigou’s place, he took post-horses and went to see the prefect.

The prefect, Comte Martial de la Roche-Hugon, had been a friend of the general since 1804; and it was a word from him said to Montcornet in a conversation in Paris, which brought about the purchase of Les Aigues.  Comte Martial, a prefect under Napoleon, remained a prefect under the Bourbons, and courted the bishop to retain his place.  Now it happened that Monseigneur had several times requested him to get rid of Rigou.  Martial, to whom the condition of the district was perfectly well known, was delighted with the general’s request; so that in less than a month the Comte de Montcornet was mayor of Blangy.

By one of those accidents which come about naturally, the general met, while at the prefecture where his friend put him up, a non-commissioned officer of the ex-Imperial guard, who had been cheated out of his retiring pension.  The general had already, under other circumstances, done a service to the brave cavalryman, whose name was Groison; the man, remembering it, now told him his troubles, admitting that he was penniless.  The general promised to get him his pension, and proposed that he should take the place of field-keeper to the district of Blangy, as a way of paying off his score of gratitude by devotion to the new mayor’s interests.  The appointments of master and man were made simultaneously, and the general gave, as may be supposed, very firm instructions to his subordinate.