the dismemberment of the chateau, the apostate also intended to make
an end of the Abbe Brossette by pin-pricks.

To complete the portrait of the ex-priest it will suffice to add that
he went to mass regretting that his wife still lived, and expressed
the desire to be reconciled with the Church as soon as he became a
widower. He bowed deferentially to the Abbe Brossette whenever he met
him, and spoke to him courteously and without heat. As a general thing
all men who belong to the Church, or who have come out of it, have the
patience of insects; they owe this to the obligation they have been
under, ecclesiastically, to preserve decorum,--a training which has
been lacking for the last twenty years to the vast majority of the
French nation, even those who think themselves well-bred. All the
monks which the Revolution brought out of their monasteries and forced
into business, public or private, showed in their coldness and reserve
the great advantage which ecclesiastical discipline gives to the sons
of the Church, even those who desert her.

Gaubertin had understood Rigou from the days when the Abbe Niseron
made his will and the ex-monk married the heiress; he fathomed the
craft hidden behind the jaundiced face of that accomplished hypocrite;
and he made himself the man's fellow-worshipper before the altar of
the Golden Calf. When the banking-house of Leclercq was first started
he advised Rigou to put fifty thousand francs into it, guaranteeing
their security himself. Rigou was all the more desirable as an
investor, or sleeping partner, because he drew no interest but allowed
his capital to accumulate. At the period of which we write it amounted
to over a hundred thousand francs, although in 1816 he had taken out
one hundred and eighty thousand for investment in the Public Funds,
from which he derived an income of seventeen thousand francs. Lupin