ions, and ten horsemen
were dispatched to the preserves of Chambord to seek for game, to the
fisheries of Beuvron for fish, and to the gardens of Cheverny for fruits
and flowers.

Precious tapestries, and lusters with great gilt chains, were drawn from
the cupboards; an army of the poor were engaged in sweeping the courts
and washing the stone fronts, whilst their wives went in droves to the
meadows beyond the Loire, to gather green boughs and field-flowers. The
whole city, not to be behind in this luxury of cleanliness, assumed its
best toilette with the help of brushes, brooms, and water. The gutters
of the upper town, swollen by these continued ablutions, became rivers
at the bottom of the city, and the pavement, generally very muddy, it
must be allowed, took a clean face, and absolutely shone in the friendly
rays of the sun.

Next the music was to be provided; drawers were emptied; the
shop-keepers did a glorious trade in wax, ribbons, and sword-knots;
housekeepers laid in stores of bread, meat, and spices. Already numbers
of the citizens whose houses were furnished as if for a siege, having
nothing more to do, donned their festive clothes, and directed their
course towards the city gate, in order to be the first to signal or see
the _cortege_. They knew very well that the king would not arrive before
night, perhaps not before the next morning. Yet what is expectation but
a kind of folly, and what is that folly but an excess of hope?

In the lower city, at scarcely a hundred paces from the Castle of the
States, between the mall and the castle, in a sufficiently handsome
street, then called the Rue Vieille, and which must, in fact, have been
very old, stood a venerable edifice, with pointed gables, of squat but
large dimensions, ornamented with three windows looking into the street
on the first floor, with two in the second, and with a little _oeil de
boeuf_ in the third.

On the sides of this triangle had recently been constructed a
parallelogram of considerable size, which encroached upon the street
remorselessly, according to the familiar uses of the building of that
period. The street was narrowed by a quarter by it, but then the house
was enlarged by a half; and was not that a sufficient compensation?

Tradition said that this house with the pointed gables was inhabited,
in the time of Henry III., by a councilor of state whom Queen Catherine
came, some say to visit, and others to strangle. However that may