In that day there was situate in the Rue du Palais, south of the harbor, an inn which was the delight of all those mariners whose palates were still unimpaired by the brine of the seven seas, and whose purses spoke well of the hazards of chance.  Erected at the time when Henri II and Diane de Poitiers turned the sober city into one of licentious dalliance, it had cheered the wayfarer during four generations.  It was three stories high, constructed of stone, gabled and balconied, with a roof which resembled an assortment of fanciful noses.  Here and there the brown walls were lightened by patches of plaster and sea-cobble; for though the buildings in the Rue du Palais had stood in the shelter of the walls and fortifications, few had been exempt from Monseigneur the Cardinal’s iron compliments to the Huguenots.

Swinging on an iron bar which projected from the porticoed entrance, and supported by two grimacing cherubs, once daintily pink, but now verging on rubicundity, a change due either to the vicissitudes of the weather or to the close proximity to the wine-cellars,—­was a horn of plenty, the pristine glory of which had also departed.  This invitation often excited the stranger’s laughter; but the Rochellais themselves never laughed at it, for to them it represented a familiar object, which, however incongruous or ridiculous, is always dear to the human heart.  At night a green lantern was attached to the horn.  At the left of the building was a walled court pierced by a gate which gave entrance to the stables.  For not only the jolly mariners found pleasure at the Corne d’Abondance.  The wild bloods of the town came thither to riot and play, to junket and carouse.  The inn had seen many a mad night, and on the stone flooring lay written many an invisible epitaph.

The host himself was a man of note, one Jean le Borgne, whose cousin was the agent of D’Aunay in the Tour-D’Aunay quarrel over Acadia in New France.  He had purchased the inn during the year ’29, and since that time it had become the most popular in the city; and as a result of his enterprise, the Pomme de Pin, in the shadow of the one remaining city gate, Porte de la Grosse-Horloge, had lost the patronage of the nobility.  Maitre le Borgne recognized the importance of catering more to the jaded palate than to the palate in normal condition; hence, his popularity.  In truth, he had the most delectable vintages outside the governor’s cellars; they came from Bordeaux, Anjou, Burgundy, Champagne, and Sicily.  His cook was an excommunicated monk from Touraine, a province, according to the merry Vicar of Meudon, in which cooks, like poets, were born, not bred.  His spits for turning a fat goose or capon were unrivaled even in Paris, whither his fame had gone through a speech of the Duc de Rohan, who said, shortly after the siege, that if ever he gained the good graces of Louis, he would come back for that monk.