As we have said, in the midst of this activity, of which he was the cause and the pivot, Father Madeleine made his fortune, but, singularly enough in a plain man of business, this did not appear to be his chief care; he seemed to think a great deal of others and but little of himself. In 1820, he was known to have a sum of 630,000 francs in Lafitte's bank; but before he put that amount on one side he had spent more than a million for the town and the poor. The hospital was badly endowed, and he added ten beds. M. sur M. is divided into an upper and a lower town; the latter, in which he lived, had only one school, a poor tenement falling in ruins, and he built two, one for boys and one for girls. He paid the two teachers double the amount of their poor official salary, and to some one who expressed surprise, he said, "The first two functionaries of the State are the nurse and the schoolmaster." He had established at his own charges an infant-school, a thing at that time almost unknown in France, and a charitable fund for old and infirm workmen. As his factory was a centre, a new district, in which there was a large number of indigent families, rapidly sprang up around it, and he opened there a free dispensary. At the beginning, kind souls said, "He is a man who wants to grow rich:" when it was seen that he enriched the town before enriching himself, the same charitable souls said, "He is ambitious." This seemed the more likely because he was religious, and even practised to a certain extent a course which was admired in those days. He went regularly to hear Low Mass on Sundays, and the local deputy, who scented rivalry everywhere, soon became alarmed about this religion. This deputy, who had been a member of the legislative council of the Empire, shared the religious ideas of a Father of the Oratory, known by the name of Fouché, Duc d'Otranto, whose creature and friend he had been. But when he saw the rich manufacturer Madeleine go to seven o'clock Low Mass, he scented a possible candidate, and resolved to go beyond him; he chose a Jesuit confessor, and went to High Mass and vespers. Ambition at that time was, in the true sense of the term, a steeple-chase. The poor profited by the alarm, for the honorable deputy founded two beds at the hospital, which made twelve.