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 other payments than "extension of time," for those fugitive pleasures which eat into the fortunes of so many old men.
This luxurious life, a life like that of Bouret, cost Rigou almost nothing.