This renegade serves to show the utility of democracy; he is at once its theory and its practice, its alpha and its omega, in short, its "summum." Perhaps you will remember certain masters of avarice pictured in former scenes of this comedy of human life: in the first place the provincial minister, Pere Grandet of Saumur, miserly as a tiger is cruel; next Gobseck, the usurer, that Jesuit of gold, delighting only in its power, and relishing the tears of the unfortunate because gold produced them; then Baron Nucingen, lifting base and fraudulent money transactions to the level of State policy.

Then, too, you may remember that portrait of domestic parsimony, old Hochon of Issoudun, and that other miser in behalf of family interests, little la Baudraye of Sancerre.

Well, human emotions--above all, those of avarice--take on so many and diverse shades in the diverse centres of social existence that there still remains upon the stage of our comedy another miser to be studied, namely, Rigou,--Rigou, the miser-egoist; full of tenderness for his own gratifications, cold and hard to others; the ecclesiastical miser; the monk still a monk so far as he can squeeze the juice of the fruit called good-living, and becoming secular only to put a paw upon the public money.

In the first place, let us explain the continual pleasure that he took in sleeping under his own roof.
Blangy--by that we mean the sixty houses described by Blondet in his letter to Nathan--stands on a rise of land to the left of the Thune.

As all the houses are surrounded by gardens, the village is a very pretty one.