ld her lover to come to the back
door and towards midnight she would open everything to him. Now note,
this was on a winter's night; the Rue St. Montfumier is close to the
Loire, and in this corner there continually blow in winter, winds
sharp as a hundred needle-points. The good hunchback, well muffled up
in his mantle, failed not to come, and trotted up and down to keep
himself warm while waiting for the appointed hour. Towards midnight he
was half frozen, as fidgety as thirty-two devils caught in a stole,
and was about to give up his happiness, when a feeble light passed by
the cracks of the window and came down towards the little door.

"Ah, it is she!" said he.

And this hope warned him once more. Then he got close to the door, and
heard a little voice--

"Are you there?" said the dyer's wife to him.

"Yes."

"Cough, that I may see."

The hunchback began to cough.

"It is not you."

Then the hunchback said aloud--

"How do you mean, it is not I? Do you not recognise my voice? Open the
door!"

"Who's there?" said the dyer, opening the window.

"There, you have awakened my husband, who returned from Amboise
unexpectedly this evening."

Thereupon the dyer, seeing by the light of the moon a man at the door,
threw a big pot of cold water over him, and cried out, "Thieves!
thieves!" in such a manner that the hunchback was forced to run away;
but in his fear he failed to clear the chain stretched across the
bottom of the road and fell into the common sewer, which the sheriff
had not then replaced by a sluice to discharge the mud into the Loire.
In this bath the mechanician expected every moment to breathe his
last, and cursed the fair Tascherette, for her husband's name being
Taschereau, she was so called by way of a little joke by the people of
Tours.

Carandas--for so was named the manufacturer of machines to weave, to
spin, to spool, and to wind the silk--was not sufficiently smitten to
believe in the innocence of the dyer's wife, and swore a devilish hate
against her. But some days afterwards, when he had recovered from his
wetting in the dyer's drain he came up to sup with his old comrade.
Then the dyer's wife reasoned with him so well, flavoured her words
with so much honey, and wheedled him with so many fair promises, that
he dismissed his suspicions.

He asked for a fresh assignation, and the fair Tascherette with the
face of a woman whose mind is dwelling on a subject, said to him,
"Come tomo