haps not before the next morning. Yet 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 but large
dimensions, ornamented with three windows looking into the street on the
first floor, with two in the second and with a little oeil de boeuf in
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 building 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. Towards 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 macaroni 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 macaroni was left upon the table, only just tasted by the royal
mouth.

This double favor, of a strangulation and a macaroni, conferred upon the
triangular house, gave poor Cropoli a fancy to grace his hostelry with
a pompous title. But his quality of an Italian was no recommendation in
these times, and his small, well-concealed fortune forbade attracting
too much attention.

When he found himself about to die, which happened in 1643, just after
the death of Louis XIII., he called to him his son, a young cook
of