prefet a l'oeuf." Finally he was forced to breakfast on other
things. Yet he never suspected the Knights of Idleness, whose trick
had been cautiously played. After this, Max managed to grease the
sub-prefect's stoves every night with an oil which sent forth so fetid a
smell that it was impossible for any one to stay in the house. Even that
was not enough; his wife, going to mass one morning, found her shawl
glued together on the inside with some tenacious substance, so that she
was obliged to go without it. The sub-prefect finally asked for another
appointment. The cowardly submissiveness of this officer had much to do
with firmly establishing the weird and comic authority of the Knights of
Idleness.

Beyond the rue des Minimes and the place Misere, a section of a quarter
was at that time enclosed between an arm of the "Riviere forcee" on the
lower side and the ramparts on the other, beginning at the place d'Armes
and going as far as the pottery market. This irregular square is filled
with poor-looking houses crowded one against the other, and divided here
and there by streets so narrow that two persons cannot walk abreast.
This section of the town, a sort of cour des Miracles, was occupied
by poor people or persons working at trades that were little
remunerative,--a population living in hovels, and buildings called
picturesquely by the familiar term of "blind houses." From the
earliest ages this has no doubt been an accursed quarter, the haunt
of evil-doers; in fact one thoroughfare is named "the street of the
Executioner." For more than five centuries it has been customary for
the executioner to have a red door at the entrance of his house. The
assistant of the executioner of Chateauroux still lives there,--if we
are to believe public rumor, for the townspeople never see him: the
vine-dressers alone maintain an intercourse with this mysterious
being, who inherits from his predecessors the gift of curing wounds and
fractures. In the days when Issoudun assumed the airs of a capital
city the women of the town made this section of it the scene of their
wanderings. Here came the second-hand sellers of things that look as
if they never could find a purchaser, old-clothes dealers whose wares
infected the air; in short, it was the rendezvous of that apocryphal
population which is to be found in nearly all such portions of a city,
where two or three Jews have gained an ascendency.

At the corner of one of these gloomy streets