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
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