In the depths of a severe winter the confederates demolished the chimney-pot of the tax-collector, and replaced it in the course of the night; it was exactly the same; they made no noise and left not the slightest trace of their work. The chimney was, however, so arranged inside as to fill the room with smoke. The tax-collector endured this for two months before discovering why his chimney, which had always worked properly and given him perfect satisfaction, should play such tricks; and he had to reconstruct it.
One day they stuffed trusses of straw sprinkled with sulphur, and greasy paper into the chimney of an old bigot, a friend of Madame Hochon’s. Next morning, on lighting her fire, the poor old lady, a quiet, gentle creature, thought she had lighted a volcano. The firemen came, the whole town rushed in; and as there were among the firemen some of the Knights of Idlesse, they deluged the poor soul’s house, and put her in fear of drowning after the fear of fire. She fell ill of the shock.
When they wished to keep anyone up all night, under arms and in mortal terror, they sent anonymous letters warning him of a plan to rob him; then they crept one by one under his wall or past his windows whistling signals to each other.
One of their most successful hoaxes, which amused the town hugely, and is talked of to this day, was sending to all the possible heirs of a very miserly old woman, who was expected to leave a large fortune, a few lines announcing her death, and inviting them to come punctually at a certain hour, when seals would be affixed. About eighty persons arrived from Vatan, Saint-Florent, Vierzon, and the neighborhood, all in deep mourning, but in very good spirits—men with their wives, widows with their sons, children with their parents, some in gigs, some in basket-carriages, some in old tax-carts. Imagine the scenes between the old lady’s servant and the first-comers! Then the consultations at the lawyer’s!—It was like a riot in the town.
At last one day the Sous-préfet began to think this state of things intolerable, all the more so because it was impossible to ascertain who ventured to perpetrate these pleasantries. Suspicion, indeed, rested on the guilty youths; but as the National Guard was at that time a mere name at Issoudun, as there was no garrison, and as the lieutenant of police had not more than eight gendarmes at his command, and kept no patrol, it was impossible to obtain proofs. The Sous-préfet was at once placed on “the order of the night,” to be treated as obnoxious. This functionary was in the habit of eating two new-laid eggs for breakfast. He kept fowls in his yard, and he crowned his mania for eating new-laid eggs by insisting on cooking them himself. Neither his wife, nor the maid, nor anyone, according to him, could cook an egg as it ought to be done; he watched the clock, and boasted that in this particular he could beat all the world. For two years he had boiled his own eggs with a success that was the subject of much jesting. Then, every night for a month the eggs were taken from his hens and hard-boiled eggs put in their place. The poor man was at his wit’s end, and lost his reputation as the egg-boiling Sous-préfet. Finally, he had something else for breakfast.
Still, he never suspected the Knights of Idlesse; the trick was too neatly done. Max hit on a plan for greasing his stovepipes every night with oil saturated with such vile odors that it was impossible to live in the house. Nor was this all; one morning his wife, wishing to attend mass, found her shawl stuck together inside by some glue so tenacious that she was obliged to go without it. The official begged to be transferred. His cowardice and submission established beyond question the occult and farcial sway of the Knights of Idlesse.
Between the Rue des Minimes and the Place Misère there existed at that time a part of the town enclosed between the Borrowed Stream at the bottom and the rampart above—the part extending from the Parade to the crockery market. This sort of misshapen square was occupied by wretched-looking houses, closely packed and divided by alleys so narrow that two persons could not walk abreast. This part of the town, a sort of Court of Miracles, was inhabited by poor people, or such as carried on the least profitable trades, lodging in the hovels and wretched tenements expressively designated as maison borgnes—purblind houses. It was, no doubt, at all times a spot accursed, the den of evil livers, for one of these lanes is called Rue du Bourreau, or Hangman’s Alley. It is certain that the town executioner had here his house, with its red door, for more than five centuries. The executioner’s man lives there still, if public report may be believed, for the townspeople never see him. None but the vinedressers keep up any communication with this mysterious personage, who inherits from his predecessors the gift of healing fractures and wounds. The women of the town held high festival here of old, when the place gave itself the airs of a capital. Here dwelt the dealers in secondhand articles which never seem to find a buyer, old-clothes vendors, with their malodorous display; in short, all the mongrel population that herds in some such corner of almost every town, under the dominion of one or two Jews.
At the corner of one of these dark passages, in the least dead-alive part of the suburb, there was, from 1815 till 1823, and perhaps even later, a beer-shop
