In 1822 this notion still derived some certainty from the existence of the beautiful Church of Saint-Paterne, only recently pulled down by the son of the man who purchased it from the nation. This building, one of the prettiest examples of Romanesque Church architecture in France, was destroyed without anyone having drawn the porch front, which was in perfect preservation. The only voice that was raised to save the building found no echo, neither in the town nor in the department.
Though the castle-precincts of Issoudun have all the character of an old place, with its narrow streets and ancient houses, the town, properly so called, which was taken and burnt again and again at different periods, and especially during the Fronde, when it was burnt to the ground, has now a modern aspect. Broad streets, as compared with the other quarters, and well-built houses form a contrast with the ancient castle striking enough to have earned Issoudun, in some geographies, the epithet of pretty.
In a town thus constituted, devoid even of commercial activity, of taste for the arts, of scientific interest, where everyone sits at home, it could not but happen—and it did in fact happen—that at the time of the Restoration, in 1816, when the war was over, many of the young men of the place had no career before them, and did not know what to do with themselves pending their marriage, or their coming into their parents’ money. Bored to death at home, these young people found no means of diversion in the town; and since, as the proverb has it, young men must sow their wild oats, they performed the operation at the expense of the town itself. It was difficult to do much by broad daylight; they would have been recognized, and, the cup of their misdemeanors once full, they would at their first serious offence have found themselves in the hands of the police; so they very judiciously, preferred to play their mischievous pranks at night. And thus, among these old ruins left by so many departed phases of civilization, a vestige of the farcical spirit that characterized the manners of the past flashed like a dying flame. These young men took their pleasure as Charles IX and his courtiers, or Henry V and his companions, were wont to take theirs, in a form of amusement common of old in many provincial towns.
Having become confederates by their need of mutual help and defence and the desire to invent practical jokes, the friction of wits developed among them a pitch of mischievousness which is natural to the young, and may be noticed even in animals. Their confederacy gave them also the little enjoyment that comes of the mystery of a standing conspiracy. They called themselves “The Knights of Idlesse.” All through the day these young monkeys were little saints; they affected excessive quietude; besides, they slept late in the mornings after nights when they had carried out some cruel trick. The Knights of Idlesse began by common practical jokes, such as unhooking and changing shop-signs, ringing at doors, hurling a cask left outside a door into a neighbors cellar with a prodigious clatter, and waking the folks by a noise like the explosion of a mine. At Issoudun, as in many places, the way into the cellars is through a trapdoor close to the entrance from the street, closed by a huge lid with hinges, and fastened with a heavy padlock. These Bad Boys, at the end of 1816, had not got beyond the practical jokes played everywhere by young men and lads. But in January 1817 the Order of Idlesse had a Grand Master, and distinguished itself by certain pranks which until 1823 were the terror of Issoudun, or, at any rate, kept the citizens and craftsmen in perpetual alarms.
This leader was one Maxence Gilet, called Max for short; and his antecedents, no less than his strength and youth, destined him for the part. Maxence Gilet was supposed to be the natural son of Lousteau, Madame Hochon’s brother, the sub-delegate whose gallantries had left many memorials, and who had incurred, as we know, Doctor Rouget’s hatred apropos to Agathe’s birth. But before this quarrel the friendship between the two men had been so close that, to use a phrase of the country and period, where one went the other would go. So it was always said that Max might just as well be the doctor’s son as Lousteau’s; but he belonged to neither of them, for his father was a handsome young dragoon officer in garrison at Bourges. However, as a consequence of their intimacy, happily for the boy, the two men were always disputing for the paternity.
Max’s mother, the wife of a clog-maker in the Roman suburb, was for her soul’s destruction amazingly beautiful, with the beauty of a true Trasteverina, the only thing she had to bequeath to her boy. Madame Gilet, before Max’s birth in 1788, had long pined for this boon from heaven, which was maliciously ascribed to the gallantries of the two men—no doubt to set them at loggerheads. Gilet, a hardened old sot, winked at his wife’s misconduct by such collusion and
