in the livelier half of
the quarter, there existed from 1815 to 1823, and perhaps later, a
public-house kept by a woman commonly called Mere Cognette. The house
itself was tolerably well built, in courses of white stone, with the
intermediary spaces filled in with ashlar and cement, one storey high
with an attic above. Over the door was an enormous branch of pine,
looking as though it were cast in Florentine bronze. As if this symbol
were not explanatory enough, the eye was arrested by the blue of a
poster which was pasted over the doorway, and on which appeared, above
the words "Good Beer of Mars," the picture of a soldier pouring out, in
the direction of a very decolletee woman, a jet of foam which spurted
in an arched line from the pitcher to the glass which she was holding
towards him; the whole of a color to make Delacroix swoon.

The ground-floor was occupied by an immense hall serving both as kitchen
and dining-room, from the beams of which hung, suspended by huge nails,
the provisions needed for the custom of such a house. Behind this hall a
winding staircase led to the upper storey; at the foot of the staircase
a door led into a low, long room lighted from one of those little
provincial courts, so narrow, dark, and sunken between tall houses, as
to seem like the flue of a chimney. Hidden by a shed, and concealed from
all eyes by walls, this low room was the place where the Bad Boys of
Issoudun held their plenary court. Ostensibly, Pere Cognet boarded and
lodged the country-people on market-days; secretly, he was landlord to
the Knights of Idleness. This man, who was formerly a groom in a rich
household, had ended by marrying La Cognette, a cook in a good family.
The suburb of Rome still continues, like Italy and Poland, to follow the
Latin custom of putting a feminine termination to the husband's name and
giving it to the wife.

By uniting their savings Pere Cognet and his spouse had managed to buy
their present house. La Cognette, a woman of forty, tall and plump, with
the nose of a Roxelane, a swarthy skin, jet-black hair, brown eyes that
were round and lively, and a general air of mirth and intelligence, was
selected by Maxence Gilet, on account of her character and her talent
for cookery, as the Leonarde of the Order. Pere Cognet might be about
fifty-six years old; he was thick-set, very much under his wife's rule,
and, according to a witticism which she was fond of repeating, he only
saw things with a go