her lover to come to the back door and towards midnight she would open everything to him.  Now note, this was on a winter’s night; the Rue St. Montfumier is close to the Loire, and in this corner there continually blow in winter, winds sharp as a hundred needle-points.  The good hunchback, well muffled up in his mantle, failed not to come, and trotted up and down to keep himself warm while waiting for the appointed hour.  Towards midnight he was half frozen, as fidgety as thirty-two devils caught in a stole, and was about to give up his happiness, when a feeble light passed by the cracks of the window and came down towards the little door.

“Ah, it is she!” said he.

And this hope warned him once more.  Then he got close to the door, and heard a little voice—­

“Are you there?” said the dyer’s wife to him.

“Yes.”

“Cough, that I may see.”

The hunchback began to cough.

“It is not you.”

Then the hunchback said aloud—­

“How do you mean, it is not I?  Do you not recognise my voice?  Open the door!”

“Who’s there?” said the dyer, opening the window.

“There, you have awakened my husband, who returned from Amboise unexpectedly this evening.”

Thereupon the dyer, seeing by the light of the moon a man at the door, threw a big pot of cold water over him, and cried out, “Thieves! thieves!” in such a manner that the hunchback was forced to run away; but in his fear he failed to clear the chain stretched across the bottom of the road and fell into the common sewer, which the sheriff had not then replaced by a sluice to discharge the mud into the Loire.  In this bath the mechanician expected every moment to breathe his last, and cursed the fair Tascherette, for her husband’s name being Taschereau, she was so called by way of a little joke by the people of Tours.

Carandas—­for so was named the manufacturer of machines to weave, to spin, to spool, and to wind the silk—­was not sufficiently smitten to believe in the innocence of the dyer’s wife, and swore a devilish hate against her.  But some days afterwards, when he had recovered from his wetting in the dyer’s drain he came up to sup with his old comrade.  Then the dyer’s wife reasoned with him so well, flavoured her words with so much honey, and wheedled him with so many fair promises, that he dismissed his suspicions.

He asked for a fresh assignation, and the fair Tascherette with the face of a woman whose mind is dwelling on a subject, said to him, “Come tomorrow evening; my husband will be staying some days at Chinonceaux.  The queen wishes to have some of her old dresses dyed and would settle the colours with him.  It will take some time.”