enlarged the circle of its report, like the increasing
circumference produced by a stone thrown into a placid lake?
Blois, as peaceful in the morning, as we have seen, as the
calmest lake in the world, at the announcement of the royal
arrival, was suddenly filled with the tumult and buzzing of
a swarm of bees.
All the servants of the castle, under the inspection of the
officers, were sent into the city in quest of provisions,
and ten horsemen were dispatched to the preserves of
Chambord to seek for game, to the fisheries of Beuvion for
fish, and to the gardens of Chaverny 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 kennels of the upper town, swollen by these continued
lotions, 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
Page 29
Dumas, Alexandre – Ten Years Later
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 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 be, the good lady must
have stepped with a circumspect foot over the threshold of
this building.
After the councilor had died — whether by strangulation or
naturally is of no consequence — the house had been sold,
then abandoned, and lastly isolated from the other houses of
the street. Towards the middle of the reign of Louis XIII.
only, an Italian, named Cropoli, escaped from the kitchens
of the Marquis d’Ancre, came and took possession of this
house. There he established a little hostelry, in which was
fabricated a macaroni so delicious that people came from
miles round to fetch it or eat it.
So famous had the house become for it, that when Mary de
Medici was a prisoner, as we know, in the castle of Blois,
she once sent for some.
It was precisely on the day she had escaped by the famous
window. The dish of macaroni was left upon the table, only
just tasted by the royal mouth.
This double favor, of a strangulation and a macaroni,
conferred upon the triangular house, gave poor Cropoli a
fancy to grace his hostelry with a pompous title. But his