who appeared in their shirts and cotton night-caps, with lights in
their hands, asking questions of one another, holding the strangest

colloquies, and exhibiting the queerest faces.
A certain poor bookbinder, who was very old, believed in hobgoblins.

Like most provincial artisans, he worked in a small basement shop. The
Knights, disguised as devils, invaded the place in the middle of the

night, put him into his own cutting-press, and left him shrieking to
himself like the souls in hell. The poor man roused the neighbors, to

whom he related the apparitions of Lucifer; and as they had no means
of undeceiving him, he was driven nearly insane.

In the middle of a severe winter, the Knights took down the chimney of
the collector of taxes, and built it up again in one night apparently

as it was before, without making the slightest noise, or leaving the
least trace of their work. But they so arranged the inside of the

chimney as to send all the smoke into the house. The collector
suffered for two months before he found out why his chimney, which had

always drawn so well, and of which he had often boasted, played him
such tricks; he was then obliged to build a new one.

At another time, they put three trusses of hay dusted with brimstone,
and a quantity of oiled paper down the chimney of a pious old woman

who was a friend of Madame Hochon. In the morning, when she came to
light her fire, the poor creature, who was very gentle and kindly,

imagined she had started a volcano. The fire-engines came, the whole
population rushed to her assistance. Several Knights were among the

firemen, and they deluged the old woman's house, till they had
frightened her with a flood, as much as they had terrified her with

the fire. She was made ill with fear.
When they wished to make some one spend the night under arms and in

mortal terror, they wrote an anonymous letter telling him that he was
about to be robbed; then they stole softly, one by one, round the

walls of his house, or under his windows, whistling as if to call each
other.

One of their famous performances, which long amused the town, where in
fact it is still related, was to write a letter to all the heirs of a

miserly old lady who was likely to leave a large property, announcing
her death, and requesting them to be promptly on hand when the seals

were affixed. Eighty persons arrived from Vatan, Saint-Florent,
Vierzon and the neighboring country, all in deep mourning,--widows

with sons, children with their fathers, some in carrioles, some in
wicker gigs, others in dilapidated carts. Imagine the scene between

the old woman's servants and the first arrivals! and the consultations
among the notaries! It created a sort of riot in Issoudun.

At last, one day the sub-prefect woke up to a sense that this state of
things was all the more intolerable because it seemed impossible to

find out who was at the bottom of it. Suspicion fell on several young
men; but as the National Guard was a mere name in Issoudun, and there

was no garrison, and the lieutenant of police had only eight gendarmes
under him, so that there were no patrols, it was impossible to get any

proof against them. The sub-prefect was immediately posted in the
"order of the night," and considered thenceforth fair game. This

functionary made a practice of breakfasting on two fresh eggs. He kept
chickens in his yard, and added to his mania for eating fresh eggs

that of boiling them himself. Neither his wife nor his servant, in
fact no one, according to him, knew how to boil an egg properly; he

did it watch in hand, and boasted that he carried off the palm of egg-
boiling from all the world. For two years he had boiled his eggs with

a success which earned him many witticisms. But now, every night for a
whole month, the eggs were taken from his hen-house, and hard-boiled

eggs substituted. The sub-prefect was at his wits' end, and lost his
reputation as the "sous-prefet a l'oeuf." Finally he was forced to

breakfast on other things. Yet he never suspected the Knights of
Idleness, whose trick had been cautiously played. After this, Max

managed to grease the sub-prefect's stoves every night with an oil
which sent forth so fetid a smell that it was impossible for any one

to stay in the house. Even that was not enough; his wife, going to
mass one morning, found her shawl glued together on the inside with

some tenacious substance, so that she was obliged to go without it.
The sub-prefect finally asked for another appointment. The cowardly

submissiveness of this officer had much to do with firmly establishing
the weird and comic authority of the Knights of Idleness.

Beyond the rue des Minimes and the place Misere, a section of a
quarter was at that time enclosed between an arm of the "Riviere

forcee" on the lower side and the ramparts on the other, beginning at
the place d'Armes and going as far as the pottery market. This

irregular square is filled with poor-looking houses crowded one
against the other, and divided here and there by streets so narrow

that two persons cannot walk abreast. This section of the town, a sort
of cour des Miracles, was occupied by poor people or persons working

at trades that were little remunerative,--a population living in
hovels, and buildings called picturesquely by the familiar term of

"blind houses." From the earliest ages this has no doubt been an
accursed quarter, the haunt of evil-doers; in fact one thoroughfare is

named "the street of the Executioner." For more than five centuries it
has been customary for the executioner to have a red door at the

entrance of his house. The assistant 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, a cook in a good family. The suburb of Rome

still continues, like Italy and Poland, to follow the Latin custom of
putting a femininetermination to the husband's name and giving it to

the wife.
By uniting their savings Pere Cognet and his spouse had managed to buy

their present house. La Cognette, a woman of forty, tall and plump,
with the nose of a Roxelane, a swarthy skin, jet-black hair, brown

eyes that were round and lively, and a general air of mirth and
intelligence, was selected by Maxence Gilet, on account of her

character and her talent for cookery, as the Leonarde of the Order.
Pere Cognet might be about fifty-six years old; he was thick-set, very