Rigou in his own home. A mere motion of his black eyelashes could
plunge his wife, Annette, and Jean into the deepest anxiety. He held
his three slaves by the multiplicity of their many duties, which were
like a chain in his hands. These poor creatures were under the
perpetual yoke of some ordered duty, with an eye always on them; but
they had come to take a sort of pleasure in accomplishing these tasks,
and did not suffer under them. All three had the comfort and
well-being of that one man before their minds as the sole end and
object of all their thoughts.

Annette was (since 1795) the tenth pretty girl in Rigou's service, and
he expected to go down to his grave with relays of such servants.
Brought to him at sixteen, she would be sent away at nineteen. All
these girls, carefully chosen at Auxerre, Clamecy, or in the Morvan,
were enticed by the promise of future prosperity; but Madame Rigou
persisted in living. So at the end of every three years some quarrel,
usually brought about by the insolence of the servant to the poor
mistress, caused their dismissal.

Annette, who was a picture of delicate beauty, ingenuous and
sparkling, deserved to be a duchess. Rigou knew nothing of the love
affair between her and Jean-Louis Tonsard, which proves that he had
let himself be fooled by the girl,--the only one of his many servants
whose ambition had taught her to flatter the lynx as the only way to
blind him.

This uncrowned Louis XV. did not keep himself wholly to his pretty
Annette. Being the mortgagee of lands bought by peasants who were
unable to pay for them, he kept a harem in the valley, from Soulanges
to five miles beyond Conches on the road to La Brie, without making