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 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 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