Long ago, in the days of St. Louis, there lived in the city of Paris a rich pastrycook. He had not always been rich ; in fact, he began in a very small way indeed as one of those itinerant rissole-sellers who go about at night with a large basket covered with a white napkin, selling rissoles and wafer-cakes to the poor scholars of the University. The scholars used to lead most of the pastrycooks no end of a dance, stealing their baskets and eating the rissoles and hanging the empty baskets up as trophies under their windows. But this pastrycook, whose name was Master Otelinus, did not lose his basket twice, but kept his eyes open and stuck to business and rose very high indeed in what was only too appropriately termed in those days (as, indeed, it should be in our own) the mystery of a pastrycook.

In due time he built a handsome shop in The Great Street not far from the Sorbonne, and here he stood at his open window—whose bottom shutters let down into the street made a fine counter, while the top ones were hooked back for an awning—and sold pies of all sorts and sizes from morning till night. Pies stuffed with pork and eels and wild-fowl and eggs—sometimes good eggs and sometimes bad, sanis et quandoque itn-mundis—and very peppery cheese custard. And his servants paraded the city—for he no longer went out himself—cheating his old enemies, the students, over black and white prunes and cherries and unripe apples and such-like small gear.