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.