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.

A few details about this man and his morals will not only throw light
on his share of the plot, called "the great affair" by his two
associates, but it will have the merit of picturing an extremely
curious type of man,--one of those rural existences which are peculiar
to France, and which no writer has hitherto sought to depict. Nothing
about this man is without significance,--neither his house, nor his
manner of blowing the fire, nor his ways of eating; his habits,
morals, and opinions will vividly illustrate the history of the
valley. This renegade serves to show the utility of democracy; he is
at once its theory and its practice, its alpha and its omega, in
short, its "summum."