njoy the
fun of the fair as frankly as any sober burgess or loose-tongued clerk.
This year, however, a greater honor still was in store for the fair and
its fellowships of vagrant playmakers. It was known to a few, who were
privileged to share the secret, and also privileged to share the
enjoyment with which that secret was concerned, that his Sovereign
Majesty Louis of Bourbon, thirteenth of his name of the kings of France,
intended to visit incognito the fair at Neuilly. He was to go thither
accompanied by a few of the choicest spirits of his court, the most
excellent of the rakes and libertines who had been received into the
intimacy of the king's newly found liberty, and those same rakes and
libertines felt highly flattered at being chosen by his highness for his
companions in an enterprise which at least was something out of the
beaten track of the rather humdrum amusements of the Louvre. Why the king
particularly wanted to visit the fair of Neuilly on that particular day
of that particular spring-time, none of those that were in the secret of
the adventure professed to know or even were curious to inquire. It was
enough for them that the king, in spite of his ill-health, looked now
with a favorable eye upon frivolity, and that a sport was toward with
which their palates for pleasure were not already jaded, and they were as
gleeful as children at the prospect of the coming fun.

Neuilly knew nothing of the honor that was awaiting it. Neuilly was busy
with its booths and its trestles and its platforms and its roped-in,
canvas-walled circuses, and its gathering of wanderers from every corner
of Europe, speaking every European tongue. Neuilly was as busy as it well
might be about its yearly business, and could scarcely have made more
fuss and noise and pother if it had known that not only the King of
France, but every crowned head in Christendom, proposed to pay it a
visit.

A little way from Neuilly, to the Paris side of the fair, there stood a
small wayside inn, which was perched comfortably enough on a bank of the
river. It was called, no one knew why, the Inn of the Three Graces, and
had, like many another wayside inn in France, its pleasant benches before
the doors for open-air drinkers, and its not unpleasant darkened rooms
inside for wassail in stormy weather; also it had quite a large orchard
and garden behind it running down to the river's edge, where the people
of the Inn raised good fruit and good vegetabl