abbe by a pious female parishioner) and protected from draughts by
thick curtains. All the rest of Rigou's belongings were made
comfortable for his use, as we shall see.

In the first place, he had reduced his wife, who could neither read,
write, nor cipher, to absolute obedience. After having ruled her
deceased master, the poor creature was now the servant of her husband;
she cooked and did the washing, with very little help from a pretty
girl named Annette, who was nineteen years old and as much a slave to
Rigou as her mistress, and whose wages were thirty francs a year.

Tall, thin, and withered, Madame Rigou, a woman with a yellow face red
about the cheek-bones, her head always wrapped in a colored
handkerchief, and wearing the same dress all the year round, did not
leave the house for two hours in a month's time, but kept herself in
exercise by doing the hard work of a devoted servant. The keenest
observer could not have found a trace of the fine figure, the Rubens
coloring, the splendid lines, the superb teeth, the virginal eyes
which first drew the attention of the Abbe Niseron to the young girl.
The birth of her only daughter, Madame Soudry, Jr., had blighted her
complexion, decayed her teeth, dimmed her eyes, and even caused the
dropping of their lashes. It almost seemed as if the finger of God had
fallen upon the wife of the priest. Like all well-to-do country
house-wives, she liked to see her closets full of silk gowns, made and
unmade, and jewels and laces which did her no good and only excited
the sin of envy and a desire for her death in the minds of all the
young women who served Rigou. She was one of those beings, half-woman,
half-animal, who are born to live by instinct. This ex-beautiful
Arsene was disinterested; and the bequest left to her by the late Abbe
Niseron would be inexplicable were it not for the curious circumstance