ssistant of the executioner of Chateauroux
still lives there,--if we are to believe public rumor, for the
townspeople never see him: the vine-dressers alone maintain an
intercourse with this mysterious being, who inherits from his
predecessors the gift of curing wounds and fractures. In the days when
Issoudun assumed the airs of a capital city the women of the town made
this section of it the scene of their wanderings. Here came the
second-hand sellers of things that look as if they never could find a
purchaser, old-clothes dealers whose wares infected the air; in short,
it was the rendezvous of that apocryphal population which is to be
found in nearly all such portions of a city, where two or three Jews
have gained an ascendency.

At the corner of one of these gloomy streets in the livelier half of
the quarter, there existed from 1815 to 1823, and perhaps later, a
public-house kept by a woman commonly called Mere Cognette. The house
itself was tolerably well built, in courses of white stone, with the
intermediary spaces filled in with ashlar and cement, one storey high
with an attic above. Over the door was an enormous branch of pine,
looking as though it were cast in Florentine bronze. As if this symbol
were not explanatory enough, the eye was arrested by the blue of a
poster which was pasted over the doorway, and on which appeared, above
the words "Good Beer of Mars," the picture of a soldier pouring out,
in the direction of a very decolletee woman, a jet of foam which
spurted in an arched line from the pitcher to the glass which she was
holding towards him; the whole of a color to make Delacroix swoon.

The ground-floor was occupied by an immense hall serving both as
kitchen and dining-room, from the beams of which hung, suspended by
huge nails, the provisions needed for the custom of such a house.
Behind this hall a winding staircase led to the upper storey; at the
foot of the staircase a door led into a low, long room lighted from
one of those little provincial courts, so narrow, dark, and sunken
between tall houses, as to seem like the flue of a chimney. Hidden by
a shed, and concealed from all eyes by walls, this low room was the
place where the Bad Boys of Issoudun held their plenary court.
Ostensibly, Pere Cognet boarded and lodged the country-people on
market-days; secretly, he was landlord to the Knights of Idleness.
This man, who was formerly a groom in a rich household, had ended by
marrying La Cognette,