A proverb which became popular at this period and survived at Tours for a long time was the saying: "You have crossed the usurer's path; woe will befall you." "You have crossed the usurer's path" accounted for sudden ailments, involuntary depression, and the evil turns of fortune. Even at Court Cornélius was credited with the fatal influence which, in Italy, Spain, and the East, superstition has named the Evil Eye.
But for the terrible power of Louis XI., which was extended like a shield over his house, the populace would, on the slenderest pretext, have demolished the Malemaison of the Rue du Mûrier. And yet it was by Cornélius that the first mulberry trees in Tours had been planted, and at that time the inhabitants had regarded him as a good genius. Who then may trust to popular favor?
Certain gentlemen who had met Maître Cornélius in foreign lands had been amazed by his good humor. At Tours he was constantly gloomy and absent-minded; but he always came back there. Some inexplicable attraction always brought him home to his dismal house in the Rue du Mûrier. Like the snail whose life is inseparable from that of his shell, he confessed to the King that he never felt so happy as behind the time-eaten stones, the bolts of his little bastille, albeit he knew that in the event of Louis' death it would be the most dangerous spot on earth to him.
"The devil is amusing himself at the expense of our friend the torçonnier," said Louis XI. to his barber, a few days before the festival of All Saints. "He complains of having been robbed again! But there is nobody this time for him to hang—unless he hangs himself. If the old vagabond did not come to ask me whether I had carried off by mistake a chain of rubies he had been meaning to sell me? By the Mass! I do not steal what I have only to take, said I."
"And was he frightened?" asked the barber.
"Misers are afraid but of one thing," replied the King. "My gossip the usurer knows full well that I should not flay him for nothing; otherwise I should be unjust, and I have never done anything that was not just and necessary."
"And yet the old hulk cheats you," replied the barber.
"You only wish that were true, heh?" said the King, with a cunning leer at the barber.
"Nay, Sire," replied the man, with an oath; "but there would be a snug fortune to divide between you and the devil."
"That will do," said the King. "Do not put mischief into my head. My gossip is a more faithful friend than all the men whose fortunes I have made—possibly because he owes me nothing."