It was a custom of old standing in the little village of Neuilly to hold
a fair every year in the full flush of the spring. The custom of this
fair went back for ages; antiquarians declared that they could find
traces of it so far off as the reign of the good King Dagobert of the
yellow hair, who had, as immortal song has consecrated, a trifling
difficulty with his smallclothes; at least, it was certain that it dated
from a very long time, and that year by year it had grown in importance
with the people who go to fairs for the purposes of business, and in
popularity with the people who go to fairs for the purposes of pleasure.
Hither came half the tumblers, rope-walkers, contortionists, balancers,
bear-leaders, puppet-players, wrestlers, strong men, fat women, bearded
ladies, living skeletons, horrible deformities, lion-tamers, quack
doctors, mountebanks, and jugglers who patrolled Europe in those days,
and earned a precarious living and enjoyed the sweets of a vagabond
freedom in the plying of their varied trades.
At one time the fair of Neuilly had attracted only the humbler folk from
Paris to taste of its wares, but as it had gradually grown in importance,
so, accordingly, it had increased the number of its clients. First, the
humbler burgesses came with their wives to gape and stare at the marvels
it displayed; then their example was followed by the wealthier of their
kind, and fur and velvet moved freely among the rabble of the fair. Now,
in the year with which we deal, it had been for some little time the
fashion for gentlefolk to drift in merry parties to Neuilly and enjoy the
fun of the fair as frankly as any sober burgess or loose-tongued clerk.
This year, however, a greater honor still was in store for the fair and
its fellowships of vagrant playmakers. It was known to a few, who were
privileged to share the secret, and also privileged to share the
enjoyment with which that secret was concerned, that his Sovereign
Majesty Louis of Bourbon, thirteenth of his name of the kings of France,
intended to visit incognito the fair at Neuilly. He was to go thither
accompanied by a few of the choicest spirits of his court, the most
excellent of the rakes and libertines who had been received into the
intimacy of the king's newly found liberty, and those same rakes and
libertines felt highly flattered at being chosen by his highness for his
companions in an enterprise which at least was something out of the
beaten track of the rather humdrum amusements of the Louvre. Why the king
particularly wanted to visit the fair of Neuilly on that particular day
of that particular spring-time, none of those that were in the secret of
the adventure professed to know or even were curious to inquire. It was
enough for them that the king, in spite of his ill-health, looked now
with a favorable eye upon frivolity, and that a sport was toward with
which their palates for pleasure were not already jaded, and they were as
gleeful as children at the prospect of the coming fun.
Neuilly knew nothing of the honor that was awaiting it. Neuilly was busy
with its booths and its trestles and its platforms and its roped-in,
canvas-walled circuses, and its gathering of wanderers from every corner
of Europe, speaking every European tongue. Neuilly was as busy as it well
might be about its yearly business, and could scarcely have made more
fuss and noise and pother if it had known that not only the King of
France, but every crowned head in Christendom, proposed to pay it a
visit.
A little way from Neuilly, to the Paris side of the fair, there stood a
small wayside inn, which was perched comfortably enough on a bank of the
river. It was called, no one knew why, the Inn of the Three Graces, and
had, like many another wayside inn in France, its pleasant benches before
the doors for open-air drinkers, and its not unpleasant darkened rooms
inside for wassail in stormy weather; also it had quite a large orchard
and garden behind it running down to the river's edge, where the people
of the Inn raised good fruit and good vegetables, which added materially
to the excellence of their homely table. The high-road that skirted the
Inn encountered, a little way above it, a bridge that spanned the river
and continued its way to Neuilly and the fair and the world beyond. At
one side of the Inn was a little space of common land, on which, at this
time of fair-making, a company of gypsies were encamped, with their
caravans and their ragged tents and their camp-fires. On the other side
of the Inn were some agreeably arranged arbors, in whose shadow tables
and chairs were disposed for the benefit of those who desired to taste
the air with their wine and viands. Taking it in an amiable spirit, the
Inn of the Three Graces seemed a very commendable place.
All day long on the day of which we speak, and all day long for many days
preceding it, there had been a steady flow of folk from the direction of
Paris making in the direction of Neuilly, and not a few of these, taken
by the appearance of the little wayside Inn, found it agreeable to
refresh themselves by slaking their thirst and staying their stomachs
inside or outside of its hospitable walls. The most of those that so
passed were sight-seers, and these the Inn saw again as they passed
homeward in the dusk or sometimes even in the darkness with the aid of
flambeaux and lanterns. But a certain number were, as might be said,
professional pedestrians, peddlers with their packs upon their shoulders,
anxious to dispose of ribbons and trinkets to gaping rustics, easily
bubbled burgesses, and to the more wary histrions and mountebanks, for
whom a different scale of charges ranged.
A little after noon on the day in question the wayside Inn of the Three
Graces was quiet enough. The last chance visitor had emptied his can and
crossed the bridge to Neuilly and its delights; the last peddler had
slung his pack and tramped in the same direction; the gypsies, who since
early morning had sprawled upon the common land, had shaken themselves
free from their idleness into an assumption of activity, and had marched
off almost in a body to take their share in the profits of the occasion
by a little judicious horse-coping and fortune-telling. One of their
number, indeed, they left behind in the great, gaudy, green-and-red
caravan that stood in front of all the other caravans in the middle of
the grassy space--one of their number who would much have preferred the
merriment and the sunlight of the fair to the confinement of the caravan,
but who remained in the caravan, nevertheless, because she had to do what
she was told.
The neighborhood of the Inn, therefore, seemed strangely deserted when a
man appeared upon the bridge in the direction contrary to that of the
general stream of passers-by, for this man was coming from the direction
of Neuilly and was going in the direction of Paris. He was a twisted man
with a hunched back, who was clad in black and carried a long sword, and
he came slowly down the slope of the bridge and along the road to the
Inn, looking about him quickly and cautiously the while as he did so. He
had the air of one resolved to be alert against possible surprises even
where surprises were improbable if not impossible; but his sinister face
wore a malign smile of self-confidence which proclaimed that its wearer
felt himself to be proof against all dangers.