he
derived an income of seventeen thousand francs. Lupin the notary had
cognizance of at least one hundred thousand francs which Rigou had lent
on small mortgages upon good estates. Ostensibly, Rigou derived about
fourteen thousand francs a year from landed property actually owned by
him. But as to his amassed hoard, it was represented by an "x" which no
rule of equations could evolve, just as the devil alone knew the secret
schemes he plotted with Langlume.

This dangerous usurer, who proposed to live a score of years longer, had
established fixed rules to work upon. He lent nothing to a peasant who
bought less than seven acres, and who could not pay one-half of the
purchase-money down. Rigou well understood the defects of the law of
dispossession when applied to small holdings, and the danger both to the
Public Treasury and to land-owners of the minute parcelling out of the
soil. How can you sue a peasant for the value of one row of vines
when he owns only five? The bird's-eye view of self-interest is always
twenty-five years ahead of the perceptions of a legislative body. 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 lan