Maison des Avocats

This guide to the Maison des Avocats in Lyon follows a rowdy fraternity of law clerks called the Basoche, who once staged mock trials in this courtyard, and their favorite script: a medieval farce about a swindling lawyer, a cloth merchant, and a shepherd hired to outwit his own defense. Look up at the three tiers of Tuscan-arched galleries added around fifteen sixteen, still ringing the courtyard where that joke once played out again and again.