the notary had cognizance of at least one hundred thousand francs
which Rigou had lent on small mortgages upon good estates. Ostensibly,
Rigou derived about fourteen thousand francs a year from landed
property actually owned by him. But as to his amassed hoard, it was
represented by an "x" which no rule of equations could evolve, just as
the devil alone knew the secret schemes he plotted with Langlume.

This dangerous usurer, who proposed to live a score of years longer,
had established fixed rules to work upon. He lent nothing to a peasant
who bought less than seven acres, and who could not pay one-half of
the purchase-money down. Rigou well understood the defects of the law
of dispossession when applied to small holdings, and the danger both
to the Public Treasury and to land-owners of the minute parcelling out
of the soil. How can you sue a peasant for the value of one row of
vines when he owns only five? The bird's-eye view of self-interest is
always twenty-five years ahead of the perceptions of a legislative
body. What a lesson for a nation! Law will ever emanate from one
brain, that of a man of genius, and not from the nine hundred
legislative heads, which, great as they may be in themselves, are
belittled and lost in a crowd. Rigou's law contains the essential
element which has yet to be found and introduced into public law to
put an end to the absurd spectacle of landed property reduced to
halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths,--as in the district of
Argenteuil, where there are thirty thousand plots of land.

Such operations as those Rigou was concerned in require extensive
collusion, like those we have seen existing in this arrondissement.
Lupin, the notary, whom Rigou employed to draw at least one third of
the deeds annually entrusted to his notarial office, was devoted to
him. This shark could thus include in the mortgage note (signed always