courier. During the first year of his settlement in Tours, a robbery
of considerable amount took place in his house, and judicial inquiry
showed that the crime must have been committed by one of its inmates.
The old miser had his two valets and the secretary put in prison. The
young man was feeble and he died under the sufferings of the
"question" protesting his innocence. The valets confessed the crime to
escape torture; but when the judge required them to say where the
stolen property could be found, they kept silence, were again put to
the torture, judged, condemned, and hanged. On their way to the
scaffold they declared themselves innocent, according to the custom
of all persons about to be executed.

The city of Tours talked much of this singular affair; but the
criminals were Flemish, and the interest felt in their unhappy fate
soon evaporated. In those days wars and seditions furnished endless
excitements, and the drama of each day eclipsed that of the night
before. More grieved by the loss he had met with than by the death of
his three servants, Maitre Cornelius lived alone in his house with the
old Flemish woman, his sister. He obtained permission from the king to
use state couriers for his private affairs, sold his mules to a
muleteer of the neighborhood, and lived from that moment in the
deepest solitude, seeing no one but the king, doing his business by
means of Jews, who, shrewd calculators, served him well in order to
gain his all-powerful protection.

Some time after this affair, the king himself procured for his old
"torconnier" a young orphan in whom he took an interest. Louis XI.
called Maitre Cornelius familiarly by that obsolete term, which, under
the reign of Saint-Louis, meant a usurer, a collector of imposts, a
man who pressed others by violent means. The epithet, "tortionnaire,"