There is little doubt, at all events, that Time’s finger had scarcely dulled the delicacy of her complexion, or the brightness of her eyes. Were thanks due to the Man in Black for this? It was a question she put to St Evrémond very seriously, but the cheery Epicurean had only a smile and a witticism for answer. The devil, he assured her, did not exist, and he proposed to escort her to the fair of St Germain that fine February afternoon. This was scarcely the best way to make good his assertion; for if his Satanic Majesty was to be found in Paris, it was certainly in that quarter; for was not the rue d’Enfer, whence the Capucins had ejected him from his house, hard by? This, however, had by no means hindered the brethren of St Germain des Prés countenancing the proceedings, which had come to be near to an orgy, of the annual market, or fair of St Germain des Prés—by the letting their ground for it to be held upon. From the king, to the most villainous of the populace, everybody went to the fair. The booths were within hail of the ground known as the _Pré aux Clercs_, the haunt of the _basochiens_, the lawyers’ clerks of the Palais de Justice, away upon the Ile de la Cité, between St Sulpice and St Germain—the church of the three steeples. The roof of the modern flower-market now covers this ground. Everything conceivable could be purchased at the stalls, from the richest silks and velvets to a pancake or a glass eye, or a wooden leg or a wax arm, or essences and waters for turning old people young again; every game of chance, thimblerig, lottery, cards, held out its temptation; every kind of entertainment, dancing, tumbling, jugglery, music of fiddle and fife, and drum and tabor—a deafening _tintamarre_; all kinds of beverages—wine, cider, tea, coffee—“to drive away melancholy;” syrups were concocted for the dust-dried throats of the surging crowd of fine ladies, students, lackeys, soldiers, dainty-shod, short-cloaked, blond-bewigged abbés, pages, beggars, gipsies. Respectable bourgeois families rubbed shoulders with flaunting women, and the wretched crew of mendicant impostors from the old _cours de miracles_. Often it was the scene of fracas and fisticuffs and damaged countenances. On one occasion, a page of the Duc de Bouillon cut off the ears of a clerk of the _basoche_ and put them in his pocket. The students of the quarter fell to murderous assault upon the fellow, while the pages retaliated, and many a dead body of page and student was found afterwards in the ditches of the Abbaye. At once an earthly paradise and a pandemonium was the time-honoured annual market of St Germain des Prés, and in the midst of the madding riot and confusion a great deal of serious business was transacted among the merchants and foreign traders who came from afar to exhibit their wares, as for centuries had been the custom, ever since mediæval day, when church porches and convent gates were nearly the only rendezvous for buying and selling.