The mayor, who was flanked by his mayoress, got out and came round to the portico on the garden side.

As he did so Rigou saw Madame le comtesse at a window.

She, however, devoted to the bishop and to religion and to the Abbe Brossette, sent word by Francois that "Madame was out." This act of incivility, worthy of a woman born in Russia, turned the face of the ex-Benedictine yellow.

If the countess had seen the man whom the abbe told her was "a soul in hell who plunged into iniquity as into a bath in his efforts to cool himself," if she had seen his face then she might have refrained from exciting the cold, deliberate hatred felt by the liberals against the royalists, increased as it was in country-places by the jealousies of neighborhood, where the recollections of wounded vanity are kept constantly alive.
A few details about this man and his morals will not only throw light on his share of the plot, called "the great affair" by his two associates, but it will have the merit of picturing an extremely curious type of man,--one of those rural existences which are peculiar to France, and which no writer has hitherto sought to depict.

Nothing about this man is without significance,--neither his house, nor his manner of blowing the fire, nor his ways of eating; his habits, morals, and opinions will vividly illustrate the history of the valley.