Page:The Vicomte de Bragelonne 2.djvu/41

 and spices. Already numbers of the citizens, whose houses were furnished as if for a siege, having nothing more to do, donned their festive clothes, and directed their course toward the city gate, in order to be the first to signal or see the cortege. They knew very well that the king would not arrive before night, perhaps not before the next morning. But what is expectation but a kind of folly, and what is that folly but an excess of hope?

In the lower city, at scarcely a hundred paces from the Castle of the States, between the mall and the castle, in a sufficiently handsome street, then called Rue Vieille, and which must, in fact, have been very old, stood a venerable edifice, with pointed gables, of squat and large dimensions, ornamented with three windows looking into the street on the first floor, with two in the second, and with a little œil de bœuf the third.

On the sides of this triangle had recently been constructed a parallelogram of considerable size, which encroached upon the street remorselessly, according to the familiar uses of the edility of that period. The street was narrowed by a quarter by it, but then the house was enlarged by a half; and was not that a sufficient compensation?

Tradition said that this house with the pointed gables was inhabited, in the time of Henry III, by a councilor of state whom Queen Catherine came, some say to visit, and others to strangle. However that may be, the good lady must have stepped with a circumspect foot over the threshold of this building.

After the councilor had died—whether by strangulation or naturally is of no consequence—the house had been sold, then abandoned, and lastly isolated from the other houses of the street. Toward the middle of the reign of Louis XIII. only, an Italian, named Cropoli, escaped from the kitchens of the Marquis d'Ancre, came and took possession of this house. There he established a little hostelry, in which was fabricated a maccaroni so delicious that people came from miles round to fetch it or eat it.

So famous had the house become for it that when Mary de Medici was a prisoner, as we know, in the castle of Blois, she once sent for some.

It was precisely on the day she had escaped by the famous window. The dish of maccaroni was left upon the table, only just tasted by the royal mouth.

This double favor, of a strangulation and a maccaroni, conferred upon the triangular house, gave poor Cropoli a