be, the good lady must have stepped with a circumspect foot over the
threshold of this building.

After the councilor had died--whether by strangulation or naturally is
of no consequence--the house had been sold, then abandoned, and lastly
isolated from the other houses of the street. Towards the middle of the
reign of Louis XIII. only, an Italian named Cropoli, escaped from the
kitchens of the Marechal d'Ancre, came and took possession of this
house. There he established a little hostelry, in which was fabricated
a macaroni so delicious that people came from miles round to fetch it or
eat it.

So famous had the house become for it, that when Mary de Medici was a
prisoner, as we know, in the castle of Blois, she once sent for some.

It was precisely on the day she had escaped by the famous window. The
dish of macaroni was left upon the table, only just tasted by the royal
mouth.

This double favor, of a strangulation and a macaroni, conferred upon the
triangular house, gave poor Cropoli a fancy to grace his hostelry with
a pompous title. But his quality of an Italian was no recommendation in
these times, and his small, well-concealed fortune forbade attracting
too much attention.

When he found himself about to die, which happened in 1643, just after
the death of Louis XIII., he called to him his son, a young cook
of great promise, and with tears in his eyes, he recommended him to
preserve carefully the secret of the macaroni, to Frenchify his name,
and at length, when the political horizon should be cleared from the
clouds which obscured it--this was practiced then as in our day, to
order of the nearest smith a handsome sign, upon which a famous painter,
whom he named, should design two queens' portraits, with these words as
a legend: "TO THE MEDICI."

The worthy Cropoli, after these recommendations, had only sufficient
time to point out to his young successor a chimney, under the slab of
which he had hidden a thousand ten-franc pieces, and then expired.

Cropoli the younger, like a man of good heart, supported the loss with
resignation, and the gain without insolence. He began by accustoming the
public to sound the final i of his name so little, that by the aid of
general complaisance, he was soon called nothing but M. Cropole, which
is quite a French name. He then married, having had in his eye a little
French girl, from whose parents he extorted a reasonable dowry by
showing them what there was beneath the