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The Vicomte De Bragelonne
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The Vicomte De Bragelonne 14 at Prostate Health
royale, heslowly murmured:"How he has grown!"CHAPTER 5In which Something will be said of Cropoli--of Cropoli and of a Great Unknown Painter.Whilst the Comte de la Fere with Raoul visits the newbuildings he has had erected, and the new horses he hasbought, with the readers permission we will lead him backto the city of Blois, and make him a witness of theunaccustomed activity which pervades that city.It was in the hotels that the surprise of the news broughtby Raoul was most sensibly felt.In fact, the king and the court at Blois, that is to say, ahundred horsemen, ten carriages, two hundred horses, as manylackeys as masters -- where was this crowd to be housed?Where were to be lodged all the gentry of the neighborhood,who would gather in two or three hours after the news hadenlarged the circle of its report, like the increasingcircumference produced by a stone thrown into a placid lake?Blois, as peaceful in the morning, as we have seen, as thecalmest lake in the world, at the announcement of the royalarrival, was suddenly filled with the tumult and buzzing ofa swarm of bees.All the servants of the castle, under the inspection of theofficers, were sent into the city in quest of provisions,and ten horsemen were dispatched to the preserves ofChambord to seek for game, to the fisheries of Beuvion forfish, and to the gardens of Chaverny for fruits and flowers.Precious tapestries, and lusters with great gilt chains,were drawn from the cupboards; an army of the poor wereengaged in sweeping the courts and washing the stone fronts,whilst their wives went in droves to the meadows beyond theLoire, to gather green boughs and field-flowers. The wholecity, not to be behind in this luxury of cleanliness,assumed its best toilette with the help of brushes, brooms,and water.The kennels of the upper town, swollen by these continuedlotions, became rivers at the bottom of the city, and thepavement, generally very muddy, it must be allowed, took aclean face, and absolutely shone in the friendly rays of thesun.Next the music was to be provided; drawers were emptied; theshop-keepers did a glorious trade in wax, ribbons, andsword-knots; housekeepers laid in stores of bread, meat, andspices. Already numbers of the citizens whose houses werefurnished as if for a siege, having nothing more to do,donned their festive clothes and directed their coursetowards the city gate, in order to be the first to signal orsee the cortege. They knew very well that the king would notarrive before night, perhaps not before the next morning.Yet what is expectation but a kind of folly, and what isthat folly but an excess of hope?In the lower city, at scarcely a hundred paces from theCastle of the States, between the mall and the castle, in asufficiently handsome street, then called Rue Vieille, andwhich must, in fact, have been very old, stood a venerableedifice, with pointed gables, of squat but large dimensions,ornamented with three windows looking into the street on thefirst floor, with two in the second and with a little oeilde boeuf in the third.On the sides of this triangle had recently been constructeda parallelogram of considerable size, which encroached uponthe street remorselessly, according to the familiar uses ofthe building of that period. The street was narrowed by aquarter 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 wasinhabited, in the time of Henry III., by a councilor ofstate whom Queen Catherine came, some say to visit, andothers to strangle. However that may be, the good lady musthave stepped with a circumspect foot over the threshold ofthis building.After the councilor had died -- whether by strangulation ornaturally is of no consequence -- the house had been sold,then abandoned, and lastly isolated from the other houses ofthe street. Towards the middle of the reign of Louis XIII.only, an Italian, named Cropoli, escaped from the kitchensof the Marquis dAncre, came and took possession of thishouse. There he established a little hostelry, in which wasfabricated a macaroni so delicious that people came frommiles round to fetch it or eat it.So famous had the house become for it, that when Mary deMedici was a prisoner, as we know, in the castle of
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