“Is the king well?”
“Perfectly.”
“And Monsieur le Prince also?”
“As usual, Monsieur.”
The comte forgot to inquire after Mazarin; that was an old habit.
“Well, Raoul, since you are entirely mine, I will give up my whole day to you. Embrace me—again, again! You are at home, vicomte! Ah, there is our old Grimaud! Come in, Grimaud; Monsieur le Vicomte is desirous of embracing you likewise.”
The good old man did not require to be twice told; he rushed in with open arms, Raoul meeting him halfway.
“Now, if you please, we will go into the garden, Raoul. I will show you the new lodging I have had prepared for you during your leave of absence; and whilst examining the last winter’s plantations, and two saddle-horses I have just acquired, you will give me all the news of our friends in Paris.”
The comte closed his manuscript, took the young man’s arm, and went out into the gardens with him.
Grimaud looked at Raoul with a melancholy air as the young man passed out; observing that his head nearly touched the traverse of the doorway, stroking his white royale, he slowly murmured:—“How he has grown!”
5
In Which Something Will Be Said of Cropoli—Of Cropoli and of a Great Unknown Painter
Whilst the Comte de la Fère with Raoul visits the new buildings he has erected, and the new horses he has bought, with the reader’s permission we will lead him back to the city of Blois, and make him a witness of the unaccustomed activity which pervades that city.
It was in the hotels that the surprise of the news brought by Raoul was most sensibly felt.
In fact, the king and the court at Blois, that is to say, a hundred horsemen, ten carriages, two hundred horses, as many lackeys as masters—where was this crowd to be housed? Where were to be lodged all the gentry of the neighborhood, who would gather in two or three hours after the news had enlarged the circle of its report, like the increasing circumferences 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 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 shopkeepers 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 cortège. 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 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 Maréchal 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 Marie 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
