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 in presence of the wife, when the borrower was married) the amount of the illegal interest.

The peasant, delighted to feel he had to pay only his five per cent interest annually, always imagined he should be able to meet the payment by working doubly hard or by improving the land and getting double returns upon it.
Hence the deceitful hopes excited by what imbecile economists call "small farming,"-- a political blunder to which we owe such mistakes as sending French money to Germany to buy horses which our own land had ceased to breed; a blunder which before long will reduce the raising of cattle until meat will be unattainable not only by the people, but by the lower middle classes (see "Le Cure de Village.") So, not a little sweat bedewed men's brows between Conches and Ville-aux-Fayes to Rigou's profit, all being willing to give it; whereas the labor dearly paid for by the general, the only man who did spend money in the district, brought him curses and hatred, which were showered upon him simply because he was rich.

How could such facts be understood unless we had previously taken that rapid glance at the Mediocracy.

Fourchon was right; the middle classes now held the position of the former lords.

The small land-owners, of whom Courtecuisse is a type, were tenants in mortmain of a Tiberius in the valley of the Avonne, just as, in Paris, traders without money are the peasantry of the banking system.
Soudry followed Rigou's example from Soulanges to a distance of fifteen miles beyond Ville-aux-Fayes.