Thence he drove on to the Three Crowns,
where he designed to lie. The streets were still crowded with
holiday-makers and decked out with festal hangings. Tapestries and
silken draperies adorned the balconies of the houses, innumerable tiny
lamps framed the doors and windows, and the street-shrines were dressed
with a profusion of flowers; while every square and open space in the
city was crowded with booths, with the tents of ambulant comedians and
dentists, and with the outspread carpets of snake-charmers,
posture-makers and jugglers. Among this mob of quacks and pedlars
circulated other fantastic figures, the camp-followers of the army of
hucksters: dwarfs and cripples, mendicant friars, gypsy fortune-tellers,
and the itinerant reciters of Ariosto and Tasso. With these mingled the
towns-people in holiday dress, the well-to-do farmers and their wives,
and a throng of nondescript idlers, ranging from the servants of the
nobility pushing their way insolently through the crowd, to those
sinister vagabonds who lurk, as it were, in the interstices of every
concourse of people.
It was not long before the noise and animation about him had dispelled
Odo's ill-humour. The world was too fair to be darkened by a girl's
disdain, and a reaction of feeling putting him in tune with the humours
of the market-place, he at once set forth on foot to view the city. It
was now near sunset and the day's decline irradiated the stately front
of the Cathedral, the walls of the ancient Hospital that faced it, and
the groups gathered about the stalls and platforms obstructing the
square.
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