Meantime, the County of Chartres was raised to a Duchy in favour of Rénée, daughter of the late King Louis XII. and Anne de Bretaigne, on the occasion of her marriage with Hercules d’Éste, son of the Duke of Ferrara. A more profitable honour befell the town a few years later, when a judicial tribunal was set up here, a step which tended in some degree to lessen the excessive expenses and delays of the law. This was done in 1552, and in 1566 Charles IX. authorised the merchants and various trades, who were groaning under the exactions of the _procureurs_ and the ruinous procedure of the _gens du baillage_, to choose a merchant judge and four colleagues (consuls) in the town of Chartres. This tribunal was intended to deal with business affairs. The bailiffs and attorneys, seeing in the creation of a Tribunal of Commerce a severe blow to their interests, did their utmost to frustrate it. But the Tribunal got itself established none the less in the House and Meeting-place of the Merchants, as they then called it; the Maison des Vieux-Consuls, as it came to be known later, after the consuls had transferred the scene of their labours elsewhere. The ‘House of the Old Consuls’ in the Rue des Écuyers, facing the entrance of the Rue de la Petite-Boucherie de Bourg, is not in itself remarkable, save as the seat and cradle of municipal justice in Chartres. For that purpose it was well placed, being in the centre of the steep old streets of the lower town and near the river, round which, as we have seen, clustered numerous industries. The site was originally just within the old walls of the ninth century, and it is possible that the house was part of the old Tour du Roy. But it was completely rebuilt in the seventeenth century, and were it not for the fifteenth-century entrance, and the extremely picturesque circular staircase with its elegant and curious carving (early sixteenth century), it would be of no account. This staircase is known as the _Escalier de la Reine Berthe_--Queen Bertha’s Staircase. The name apparently is quite modern, and there is no explanation of it which can claim to be certainly correct. The Queen Bertha indicated may be either the wife of Eudes I., Count of Chartres, who afterwards married King Robert, and who, when he was forced to repudiate her, came to live in the old castle at Chartres, where she ended her days striving to forget her ephemeral greatness and succouring the poor; or, and this seems more likely, it may be Bertha, sister of Count Thibault III., widow of the Duke of Aquitaine, who spent her widowhood at Chartres in this quarter of the town, a fact which has survived in tradition and is confirmed by a document of 1069. For there is mention of the house of the Countess between the Tour du and the Porte Cendreuse (_camera comitissa inter Turrim et portam Cinerosam_). [Illustration: Old Dormer Window from Maison du Saumon]