in much confusion; and I was forced to ransack both the Rhode Island
Historical Society and Shepley Library before I could find a local door
which the name of Etienne Roulet would unlock. In the end I did find
something; something of such vague but monstrous import that I set about
at once to examine the cellar of the shunned house itself with a new and
excited minuteness.

The Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down the
west shore of Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude, and had
encountered much opposition before the Providence selectmen allowed them
to settle in the town. Unpopularity had dogged them in East Greenwich,
whither they had come in 1686, after the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, and rumor said that the cause of dislike extended beyond mere
racial and national prejudice, or the land disputes which involved other
French settlers with the English in rivalries which not even Governor
Andros could quell. But their ardent Protestantism--too ardent, some
whispered--and their evident distress when virtually driven from the
village down the bay, had moved the sympathy of the town fathers. Here
the strangers had been granted a haven; and the swarthy Etienne Roulet,
less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing queer
diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon
Tillinghast's wharf, far south in Town Street. There had, however, been
a riot of some sort later on--perhaps forty years later, after old
Roulet's death--and no one seemed to hear of the family after that.

For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well
remembered and frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet
life of a New England seaport. Etienne's son Paul, a surly fellow whose
erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out the
family, was particularly a source of speculation; and though Providence
never shared the witchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbors, it was
freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at
the proper time nor directed toward the proper object. All this had
undoubtedly formed the basis of the legend known by old Maria Robbins.
What relation it had to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris and other
inhabitants of the shunned house, imagination or future discovery alone
could determine. I wondered how many of those who had known the legends
realized that additional link with the terrible which my wide