Rigou passed the paper on to Langlume the miller, who, in turn, gave it in shreds to any one who knew how to read.

The "Paris items," and the anti-religion jokes of the liberal sheet formed the public opinion of the valley des Aigues.

Rigou, like the _venerable_ Abbe Gregoire, became a hero.
For him, as for certain Parisian bankers, politics spread a mantle of popularity over his shameful dishonesty.
At this particular time the perjured monk, like Francois Keller the great orator, was looked upon as a defender of the rights of the people,--he who, not so very long before, dared not walk in the fields after dark, lest he should stumble into pitfalls where he would seem to have been killed by accident! Persecute a man politically and you not only magnify him, but you redeem his past and make it innocent.

The liberal party was a great worker of miracles in this respect.

Its dangerous journal, which had the wit to make itself as commonplace, as calumniating, as credulous, and as sillily perfidious as every audience made up the general masses, did in all probability as much injury to private interests as it did to those of the Church.
Rigou flattered himself that he should find in a Bonapartist general now laid on the shelf, in a son of the people raised from nothing by the Revolution, a sound enemy to the Bourbons and the priests.