Perhaps you will remember certain masters of avarice pictured in
former scenes of this comedy of human life: in the first place the
provincial minister, Pere Grandet of Saumur, miserly as a tiger is
cruel; next Gobseck, the usurer, that Jesuit of gold, delighting only
in its power, and relishing the tears of the unfortunate because gold
produced them; then Baron Nucingen, lifting base and fraudulent money
transactions to the level of State policy. Then, too, you may remember
that portrait of domestic parsimony, old Hochon of Issoudun, and that
other miser in behalf of family interests, little la Baudraye of
Sancerre. Well, human emotions--above all, those of avarice--take on
so many and diverse shades in the diverse centres of social existence
that there still remains upon the stage of our comedy another miser to
be studied, namely, Rigou,--Rigou, the miser-egoist; full of
tenderness for his own gratifications, cold and hard to others; the
ecclesiastical miser; the monk still a monk so far as he can squeeze
the juice of the fruit called good-living, and becoming secular only
to put a paw upon the public money. In the first place, let us explain
the continual pleasure that he took in sleeping under his own roof.

Blangy--by that we mean the sixty houses described by Blondet in his
letter to Nathan--stands on a rise of land to the left of the Thune.
As all the houses are surrounded by gardens, the village is a very
pretty one. Some houses are built on the banks of the stream. At the
upper end of the long rise stands the church, formerly flanked by a
parsonage, its apse surrounded, as in many other villages, by a
graveyard. The sacrilegious old Rigou had bought the parsonage, which
was originally built by an excellent Catholic, Mademoiselle Choin, on
land which she had bought for the purpose. A terraced garden, from
which the eye looked down upon Blangy, Cerneux, and Soulanges standing