nd other domestic
facts.

Nevertheless, with so many reasons for taking life patiently and
joyously, Messire Robert d'Estouteville woke up on the morning of the
seventh of January, 1482, in a very surly and peevish mood. Whence came
this ill temper? He could not have told himself. Was it because the sky
was gray? or was the buckle of his old belt of Montlhery badly fastened,
so that it confined his provostal portliness too closely? had he beheld
ribald fellows, marching in bands of four, beneath his window, and
setting him at defiance, in doublets but no shirts, hats without crowns,
with wallet and bottle at their side? Was it a vague presentiment of the
three hundred and seventy livres, sixteen sous, eight farthings, which
the future King Charles VII. was to cut off from the provostship in the
following year? The reader can take his choice; we, for our part, are
much inclined to believe that he was in a bad humor, simply because he
was in a bad humor.

Moreover, it was the day after a festival, a tiresome day for every one,
and above all for the magistrate who is charged with sweeping away all
the filth, properly and figuratively speaking, which a festival day
produces in Paris. And then he had to hold a sitting at the Grand
Chatelet. Now, we have noticed that judges in general so arrange matters
that their day of audience shall also be their day of bad humor, so that
they may always have some one upon whom to vent it conveniently, in the
name of the king, law, and justice.

However, the audience had begun without him. His lieutenants, civil,
criminal, and private, were doing his work, according to usage; and
from eight o'clock in the morning, some scores of bourgeois and
_bourgeoises_, heaped and crowded into an obscure corner of the audience
chamber of Embas du Chatelet, between a stout oaken barrier and the
wall, had been gazing blissfully at the varied and cheerful spectacle of
civil and criminal justice dispensed by Master Florian Barbedienne,
auditor of the Chatelet, lieutenant of monsieur the provost, in a
somewhat confused and utterly haphazard manner.

The hall was small, low, vaulted. A table studded with fleurs-de-lis
stood at one end, with a large arm-chair of carved oak, which belonged
to the provost and was empty, and a stool on the left for the auditor,
Master Florian. Below sat the clerk of the court, scribbling; opposite
was the populace; and in front of the door, and in front of the table
were ma