In 1791, just about the time that the Abbe Niseron offered his house as an asylum to Rigou and his brother Jean, the little girl played one of her mischievous but innocent tricks. She was playing with Arsene and some other children at a game which consists in hiding an object which the rest seek, and crying out, “You burn!” or “You freeze!” according as the searchers approach or leave the hidden article. Little Genevieve took it into her head to hide the bellows in Arsene’s bed. The bellows could not be found, and the game came to an end; Genevieve was taken home by her mother and forgot to put the bellows back on the nail. Arsene and her aunt searched more than a week for them; then they stopped searching and managed to do without them, the old abbe blowing his fire with an air-cane made in the days when air-canes were the fashion,--a fashion which was no doubt introduced by some courtier of the reign of Henri III. At last, about a month before her death, the housekeeper, after a dinner at which the Abbe Mouchon, the Niseron family, and the curate of Soulanges were present, returned to her jeremiades about the loss of the bellows.
“Why! they’ve been these two weeks in Arsene’s bed!” cried the little one, with a peal of laughter. “Great lazy thing! if she had taken the trouble to make her bed she would have found them.”
As it was 1791 everybody laughed; but a dead silence succeeded the laugh.
“There is nothing laughable in that,” said the housekeeper; “since I have been ill Arsene sleeps in my room.”
In spite of this explanation the Abbe Niseron looked thunderbolts at Madame Niseron and his nephew, thinking they were plotting mischief against him. The housekeeper died. Rigou contrived to work up the abbe’s resentment to such a pitch that he made a will disinheriting Jean-Francois Niseron in favor of Arsene Pichard.
In 1823 Rigou, perhaps out of a sense of gratitude, still blew the fire with an air-cane, and left the bellows hanging to the screw.
Madame Niseron, idolizing her daughter, did not long survive her. Mother and child died in 1794. The old abbe, too, was dead, and citizen Rigou took charge of Arsene’s affairs by marrying her. A former convert in the monastery, attached to Rigou as a dog is to his master, became the groom, gardener, herdsman, valet, and steward of the sensual Harpagon. Arsene Rigou, the daughter, married in 1821 without dowry to the prosecuting-attorney, inheriting something of her mother’s rather vulgar beauty, together with the crafty mind of her father.