The first effect of these rumors was to isolate Maitre Cornelius.  The Touraineans treated him like a leper, called him the “tortionnaire,” and named his house Malemaison.  If the Fleming had found strangers to the town bold enough to enter it, the inhabitants would have warned them against doing so.  The most favorable opinion of Maitre Cornelius was that of persons who thought him merely baneful.  Some he inspired with instinctive terror; others he impressed with the deep respect that most men feel for limitless power and money, while to a few he certainly possessed the attraction of mystery.  His way of life, his countenance, and the favor of the king, justified all the tales of which he had now become the subject.

Cornelius travelled much in foreign lands after the death of his persecutor, the Duke of Burgundy; and during his absence the king caused his premises to be guarded by a detachment of his own Scottish guard.  Such royal solicitude made the courtiers believe that the old miser had bequeathed his property to Louis XI.  When at home, the torconnier went out but little; but the lords of the court paid him frequent visits.  He lent them money rather liberally, though capricious in his manner of doing so.  On certain days he refused to give them a penny; the next day he would offer them large sums,—­always at high interest and on good security.  A good Catholic, he went regularly to the services, always attending the earliest mass at Saint-Martin; and as he had purchased there, as elsewhere, a chapel in perpetuity, he was separated even in church from other Christians.  A popular proverb of that day, long remembered in Tours, was the saying:  “You passed in front of the Fleming; ill-luck will happen to you.”  Passing in front of the Fleming explained all sudden pains and evils, involuntary sadness, ill-turns of fortune among the Touraineans.  Even at court most 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.