Maitre Cornelius | Page 9

persons
attributed to Cornelius that fatal influence which Italian, Spanish, and
Asiatic superstition has called the "evil eye." Without the terrible power
of Louis XI., which was stretched like a mantle over that house, the
populace, on the slightest opportunity, would have demolished La
Malemaison, that "evil house" in the rue du Murier. And yet Cornelius
had been the first to plant mulberries in Tours, and the Touraineans at
that time regarded him as their good genius. Who shall reckon on
popular favor!
A few seigneurs having met Maitre Cornelius on his journeys out of
France were surprised at his friendliness and good-humor. At Tours he
was gloomy and absorbed, yet always he returned there. Some
inexplicable power brought him back to his dismal house in the rue du
Murier. Like a snail, whose life is so firmly attached to its shell, he
admitted to the king that he was never at ease except under the bolts
and behind the vermiculated stones of his little bastille; yet he knew
very well that whenever Louis XI. died, the place would be the most
dangerous spot on earth for him.

"The devil is amusing himself at the expense of our crony, the
torconnier," said Louis XI. to his barber, a few days before the festival
of All-Saints. "He says he has been robbed again, but he can't hang
anybody this time unless he hangs himself. The old vagabond came and
asked me if, by chance, I had carried off a string of rubies he wanted to
sell me. 'Pasques-Dieu! I don't steal what I can take,' I said to him."
"Was he frightened?" asked the barber.
"Misers are afraid of only one thing," replied the king. "My crony the
torconnier knows very well that I shall not plunder him unless for good
reason; otherwise I should be unjust, and I have never done anything
but what is just and necessary."
"And yet that old brigand overcharges you," said the barber.
"You wish he did, don't you?" replied the king, with the malicious look
at his barber.
"Ventre-Mahom, sire, the inheritance would be a fine one between you
and the devil!"
"There, there!" said the king, "don't put bad ideas into my head. My
crony is a more faithful man than those whose fortunes I have made
--perhaps because he owes me nothing."
For the last two years Maitre Cornelius had lived entirely alone with his
aged sister, who was thought a witch. A tailor in the neighborhood
declared that he had often seen her at night, on the roof of the house,
waiting for the hour of the witches' sabbath. This fact seemed the more
extraordinary because it was known to be the miser's custom to lock up
his sister at night in a bedroom with iron-barred windows.
As he grew older, Cornelius, constantly robbed, and always fearful of
being duped by men, came to hate mankind, with the one exception of
the king, whom he greatly respected. He fell into extreme misanthropy,
but, like most misers, his passion for gold, the assimilation, as it were,
of that metal with his own substance, became closer and closer, and age

intensified it. His sister herself excited his suspicions, though she was
perhaps more miserly, more rapacious than her brother whom she
actually surpassed in penurious inventions. Their daily existence had
something mysterious and problematical about it. The old woman
rarely took bread from the baker; she appeared so seldom in the market,
that the least credulous of the townspeople ended by attributing to these
strange beings the knowledge of some secret for the maintenance of life.
Those who dabbled in alchemy declared that Maitre Cornelius had the
power of making gold. Men of science averred that he had found the
Universal Panacea. According to many of the country-people to whom
the townsfolk talked of him, Cornelius was a chimerical being, and
many of them came into the town to look at his house out of mere
curiosity.
The young seigneur whom we left in front of that house looked about
him, first at the hotel de Poitiers, the home of his mistress, and then at
the evil house. The moonbeams were creeping round their angles, and
tinting with a mixture of light and shade the hollows and reliefs of the
carvings. The caprices of this white light gave a sinister expression to
both edifices; it seemed as if Nature herself encouraged the
superstitions that hung about the miser's dwelling. The young man
called to mind the many traditions which made Cornelius a personage
both curious and formidable. Though quite decided through the
violence of his love to enter that house, and stay there long enough to
accomplish his design, he hesitated to take the final step, all the while
aware that he should certainly take