Cropole

Also known as: Cropole the younger / M. Cropole / Master Cropole / young Cropole · Family: Les Medici · Role: innkeeper · First appears: Chapter 5

Life events

• Cropoli revealed a hidden fortune to his son and died.(Chapter5 · 📍 Blois)
  • With: Cropoli
  • “The worthy Cropoli, after these recommendations, had only sufficient time to point out to his young successor a chimney, under the slab of which he had hidden a thousand ten-franc pieces, and then expired.”
• Cropoli the younger Frenchified his name and became known as M. Cropole.(Chapter5 · 📍 Blois)
  • “He began by accustoming the public to sound the final i of his name so little, that by the aid of general complaisance, he was soon called nothing but M. Cropole, which is quite a French name.”
• Cropole married a French girl after securing her parents’ reasonable dowry.(Chapter5 · 📍 Blois)
  • “He then married, having had in his eye a little French girl, from whose parents he extorted a reasonable dowry by showing them what there was beneath the slab of the chimney.”
• Cropole sheltered Pittrino, who became an overseer of the hostelry.(Chapter5 · 📍 Blois)
  • With: Pittrino
  • “As he grew old he attached himself to the son as he had done to the father, and by degrees became a kind of over-looker of a house in which his remarkable integrity, his acknowledged sobriety, and a thousand other virtues useless to enumerate, gave him an eternal place by the fireside, with a right of inspection over the domestics.”
• The city authorized Pittrino’s revised sign, which made the hostelry extravagantly successful.(Chapter5 · 📍 Blois)
  • With: Pittrino
  • “The sign produced an extravagant success in the city, which proves that poetry has always been in the wrong, before citizens, as Pittrino said.”
• Cropole raises the lodging charge to six louis for three apartments.(Chapter6 · 📍 Blois)
  • “if the court comes to sleep here, the charge of the day is reckoned. From that it results that three chambers, at two louis each, make six louis.”
• The unknown pays Cropole seven louis for his lodging and remaining expenses.(Chapter6 · 📍 Blois)
  • With: the unknown
  • “With this change, he made up a louis.”
• 1643 · Cropoli died after entrusting his son with the macaroni secret and hidden fortune.(Chapter5 · 📍 Blois)
  • With: Cropoli
  • “When he found himself about to die, which happened in 1643, just after the death of Louis XIII., he called to him his son, a young cook of great promise, and with tears in his eyes, he recommended him to preserve carefully the secret of the macaroni, to Frenchify his name, and at length, when the political horizon should be cleared from the clouds which obscured it—this was practiced then as in our day, to order of the nearest smith a handsome sign, upon which a famous painter, whom he named, should design two queens’ portraits, with these words as a legend: ‘TO THE MEDICI.’”