Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 27, 2025
"I don't see where I am to get the four thousand francs I save honestly and invest every year, after you have cut up and sold Les Aigues," said Sibilet, shortly. "Monsieur Gaubertin has made me many fine promises; but the crisis is coming on; there will be fighting, surely. Promising before victory and keeping a promise after it are two very different things."
But if you act wisely you will find that when Monsieur Rigou gets possession of your pavilion at Les Aigues, you will have very nearly thirty thousand francs in his hands and thirty thousand more which the said Rigou may entrust to you, which will be all the more advantageous to you then because the peasantry will have flung them themselves upon the estate of Les Aigues, divided into small lots like the poverty of the world. That's what Monsieur Gaubertin might say to you.
Under a lymphatic appearance they have nerves which maintain their marvellous physique; they actually preserve their beauty for reasons which would make a virtuous woman haggard. No, upon my word, Nature is not moral! Mademoiselle Laguerre lived an irreproachable life at Les Aigues, one might even call it a saintly one, after her famous adventure, you remember it?
"Yes, that's so; you'll be Rigou's cats-paw!" cried Fourchon, who alone understood his grandson. Just then Langlume, the miller of Les Aigues, passed the tavern. Madame Tonsard hailed him. "Is it true," she said, "that gleaning is to be forbidden?" Langlume, a jovial white man, white with flour and dressed in grayish-white clothes, came up the steps and looked in.
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. But the general, bearing in mind his private ambitions, so arranged matters as to evade the visit of Monsieur and Madame Rigou when he first came to Les Aigues.
This event, insignificant as it seems, was destined, in the irritated state of feeling then existing between Les Aigues and the peasantry, to have a decisive influence on the fate of all, just as victory or defeat in battle sometimes depends upon a brook which shepherds jump while cannon are unable to pass it.
Accordingly, the pilfering thefts which thin the woods and tithe the ploughed lands and meadows and vineyards became habitual in this valley, and soon existed as a right throughout the districts of Blangy, Conches, and Cerneux, all adjacent to the domain of Les Aigues.
In 1790 Mademoiselle Laguerre, alarmed at the turn of public affairs, came to settle at Les Aigues, bought and given to her by Bouret, who passed several summers with her at the chateau. Terrified at the fate of Madame du Barry, she buried her diamonds.
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.
The stones of the dismantled buildings encumbered the ground till 1708, when they were all carried off for the construction of the new canal which runs along the coast through the chain of lagoons from Cette to Aigues Mortes. "A church and its archives," says the historian of Maguelonne, "that is all that the revolution of fate has respected of one of the principal monastic centres in the south.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking