Notre-Dame de Paris
by Victor Hugo · English · Gutenberg #2610 · 1,189,471 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Notre-Dame de Paris
Author: Victor Hugo
Translator: Isabel Florence Hapgood
Release date: April 1, 2001 [eBook #2610]
Most recently updated: April 15, 2023
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2610
Credits: Peter Snow Cao and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS ***
cover
NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS
Also known as:
_THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME_
By Victor Hugo
Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood
PREFACE.
A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about
Notre-Dame, the author of this book found, in an obscure nook of
one of the towers, the following word, engraved by hand upon the
wall:—
ἈΝÁΓΚΗ.
These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in
the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic
caligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes,
as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand
of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially
the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the
author deeply.
He questioned himself; he sought to divine who could have been
that soul in torment which had not been willing to quit this
world without leaving this stigma of crime or unhappiness upon
the brow of the ancient church.
Afterwards, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down, I know not
which, and the inscription disappeared. For it is thus that
people have been in the habit of proceeding with the marvellous
churches of the Middle Ages for the last two hundred years.
Mutilations come to them from every quarter, from within as well
as from without. The priest whitewashes them, the archdeacon
scrapes them down; then the populace arrives and demolishes them.
Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory which the author
of this book here consecrates to it, there remains to-day nothing
whatever of the mysterious word engraved within the gloomy tower
of Notre-Dame,—nothing of the destiny which it so sadly summed
up. The man who wrote that word upon the wall disappeared from
the midst of the generations of man many centuries ago; the word,
in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the church; the
church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the
earth.
It is upon this word that this book is founded.
March, 1831.
CONTENTS
PREFACE.
VOLUME I.
BOOK FIRST.
CHAPTER I. THE GRAND HALL.
CHAPTER II. PIERRE GRINGOIRE.
CHAPTER III. MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL.
CHAPTER IV. MASTER JACQUES COPPENOLE.
CHAPTER V. QUASIMODO.
CHAPTER VI. ESMERALDA.
BOOK SECOND.
CHAPTER I. FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA.
CHAPTER II. THE PLACE DE GRÈVE.
CHAPTER III. KISSES FOR BLOWS.
CHAPTER IV. THE INCONVENIENCES OF FOLLOWING A PRETTY WOMAN
THROUGH THE STREETS IN THE EVENING.
CHAPTER V. RESULT OF THE DANGERS.
CHAPTER VI. THE BROKEN JUG.
CHAPTER VII. A BRIDAL NIGHT.
BOOK THIRD.
CHAPTER I. NOTRE-DAME.
CHAPTER II. A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS.
BOOK FOURTH.
CHAPTER I. GOOD SOULS.
CHAPTER II. CLAUDE FROLLO.
CHAPTER III. _IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE_.
CHAPTER IV. THE DOG AND HIS MASTER.
CHAPTER V. MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO.
CHAPTER VI. UNPOPULARITY.
BOOK FIFTH.
CHAPTER I. _ABBAS BEATI MARTINI_.
CHAPTER II. THIS WILL KILL THAT.
BOOK SIXTH.
CHAPTER I. AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRACY.
CHAPTER II. THE RAT-HOLE.
CHAPTER III. HISTORY OF A LEAVENED CAKE OF MAIZE.
CHAPTER IV. A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER.
CHAPTER V. END OF THE STORY OF THE CAKE.
VOLUME II.
BOOK SEVENTH.
CHAPTER I. THE DANGER OF CONFIDING ONE’S SECRET TO A GOAT.
CHAPTER II. A PRIEST AND A PHILOSOPHER ARE TWO DIFFERENT
THINGS.
CHAPTER III. THE BELLS.
CHAPTER IV. ἈΝÁΓΚΗ.
CHAPTER V. THE TWO MEN CLOTHED IN BLACK.
CHAPTER VI. THE EFFECT WHICH SEVEN OATHS IN THE OPEN AIR CAN
PRODUCE.
CHAPTER VII. THE MYSTERIOUS MONK.
CHAPTER VIII. THE UTILITY OF WINDOWS WHICH OPEN ON THE RIVER.
BOOK EIGHTH.
CHAPTER I. THE CROWN CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF.
CHAPTER II. CONTINUATION OF THE CROWN WHICH WAS CHANGED INTO A
DRY LEAF.
CHAPTER III. END OF THE CROWN WHICH WAS TURNED INTO A DRY
LEAF.
CHAPTER IV. _LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA_—LEAVE ALL HOPE BEHIND, YE
WHO ENTER HERE.
CHAPTER V. THE MOTHER.
CHAPTER VI. THREE HUMAN HEARTS DIFFERENTLY CONSTRUCTED.
BOOK NINTH.
CHAPTER I. DELIRIUM.
CHAPTER II. HUNCHBACKED, ONE EYED, LAME.
CHAPTER III. DEAF.
CHAPTER IV. EARTHENWARE AND CRYSTAL.
CHAPTER V. THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR.
CHAPTER VI. CONTINUATION OF THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR.
BOOK TENTH.
CHAPTER I. GRINGOIRE HAS MANY GOOD IDEAS IN SUCCESSION.—RUE
DES BERNARDINS.
CHAPTER II. TURN VAGABOND.
CHAPTER III. LONG LIVE MIRTH.
CHAPTER IV. AN AWKWARD FRIEND.
CHAPTER V. THE RETREAT IN WHICH MONSIEUR LOUIS OF FRANCE SAYS
HIS PRAYERS.
CHAPTER VI. LITTLE SWORD IN POCKET.
CHAPTER VII. CHATEAUPERS TO THE RESCUE.
BOOK ELEVENTH.
CHAPTER I. THE LITTLE SHOE.
CHAPTER II. THE BEAUTIFUL CREATURE CLAD IN WHITE. (Dante.)
CHAPTER III. THE MARRIAGE OF PHOEBUS.
CHAPTER IV. THE MARRIAGE OF QUASIMODO.
NOTE.
FOOTNOTES.
VOLUME I.
BOOK FIRST.
CHAPTER I. THE GRAND HALL.
Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen
days ago to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the
bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the
town ringing a full peal.
The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which
history has preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in
the event which thus set the bells and the _bourgeois_ of Paris
in a ferment from early morning. It was neither an assault by the
Picards nor the Burgundians, nor a hunt led along in procession,
nor a revolt of scholars in the town of Laas, nor an entry of
“our much dread lord, monsieur the king,” nor even a pretty
hanging of male and female thieves by the courts of Paris.
Neither was it the arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth century,
of some plumed and bedizened embassy. It was barely two days
since the last cavalcade of that nature, that of the Flemish
ambassadors charged with concluding the marriage between the
dauphin and Marguerite of Flanders, had made its entry into
Paris, to the great annoyance of M. le Cardinal de Bourbon, who,
for the sake of pleasing the king, had been obliged to assume an
amiable mien towards this whole rustic rabble of Flemish
burgomasters, and to regale them at his Hôtel de Bourbon, with a
very “pretty morality, allegorical satire, and farce,” while a
driving rain drenched the magnificent tapestries at his door.
What put the “whole population of Paris in commotion,” as Jehan
de Troyes expresses it, on the sixth of January, was the double
solemnity, united from time immemorial, of the Epiphany and the
Feast of Fools.
On that day, there was to be a bonfire on the Place de Grève, a
maypole at the Chapelle de Braque, and a mystery at the Palais de
Justice. It had been cried, to the sound of the trumpet, the
preceding evening at all the cross roads, by the provost’s men,
clad in handsome, short, sleeveless coats of violet camelot, with
large white crosses upon their breasts.
So the crowd of citizens, male and female, having closed their
houses and shops, thronged from every direction, at early morn,
towards some one of the three spots designated.
Each had made his choice; one, the bonfire; another, the maypole;
another, the mystery play. It must be stated, in honor of the
good sense of the loungers of Paris, that the greater part of
this crowd directed their steps towards the bonfire, which was
quite in season, or towards the mystery play, which was to be
presented in the grand hall of the Palais de Justice (the courts
of law), which was well roofed and walled; and that the curious
left the poor, scantily flowered maypole to shiver all alone
beneath the sky of January, in the cemetery of the Chapel of
Braque.
The populace thronged the avenues of the law courts in
particular, because they knew that the Flemish ambassadors, who
had arrived two days previously, intended to be present at the
representation of the mystery, and at the election of the Pope of
the Fools, which was also to take place in the grand hall.
It was no easy matter on that day, to force one’s way into that
grand hall, although it was then reputed to be the largest
covered enclosure in the world (it is true that Sauval had not
yet measured the grand hall of the Château of Montargis). The
palace place, encumbered with people, offered to the curious
gazers at the windows the aspect of a sea; into which five or six
streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged every moment
fresh floods of heads. The waves of this crowd, augmented
incessantly, dashed against the angles of the houses which
projected here and there, like so many promontories, into the
irregular basin of the place. In the centre of the lofty
Gothic[1] façade of the palace, the grand staircase, incessantly
ascended and descended by a double current, which, after parting
on the intermediate landing-place, flowed in broad waves along
its lateral slopes,—the grand staircase, I say, trickled
incessantly into the place, like a cascade into a lake. The
cries, the laughter, the trampling of those thousands of feet,
produced a great noise and a great clamor. From time to time,
this noise and clamor redoubled; the current which drove the
crowd towards the grand staircase flowed backwards, became
troubled, formed whirlpools. This was produced by the buffet of
an archer, or the horse of one of the provost’s sergeants, which
kicked to restore order; an admirable tradition which the
provostship has bequeathed to the constablery, the constablery to
the _maréchaussée_, the _maréchaussée_ to our _gendarmeri_ of
Paris.
Thousands of good, calm, _bourgeois_ faces thronged the windows,
the doors, the dormer windows, the roofs, gazing at the palace,
gazing at the populace, and asking nothing more; for many
Parisians content themselves with the spectacle of the
spectators, and a wall behind which something is going on becomes
at once, for us, a very curious thing indeed.
If it could be granted to us, the men of 1830, to mingle in
thought with those Parisians of the fifteenth century, and to
enter with them, jostled, elbowed, pulled about, into that
immense hall of the palace, which was so cramped on that sixth of
January, 1482, the spectacle would not be devoid of either
interest or charm, and we should have about us only things that
were so old that they would seem new.
With the reader’s consent, we will endeavor to retrace in
thought, the impression which he would have experienced in
company with us on crossing the threshold of that grand hall, in
the midst of that tumultuous crowd in surcoats, short, sleeveless
jackets, and doublets.
And, first of all, there is a buzzing in the ears, a dazzlement
in the eyes. Above our heads is a double ogive vault, panelled
with wood carving, painted azure, and sown with golden
fleurs-de-lis; beneath our feet a pavement of black and white
marble, alternating. A few paces distant, an enormous pillar,
then another, then another; seven pillars in all, down the length
of the hall, sustaining the spring of the arches of the double
vault, in the centre of its width. Around four of the pillars,
stalls of merchants, all sparkling with glass and tinsel; around
the last three, benches of oak, worn and polished by the trunk
hose of the litigants, and the robes of the attorneys. Around the
hall, along the lofty wall, between the doors, between the
windows, between the pillars, the interminable row of all the
kings of France, from Pharamond down: the lazy kings, with
pendent arms and downcast eyes; the valiant and combative kings,
with heads and arms raised boldly heavenward. Then in the long,
pointed windows, glass of a thousand hues; at the wide entrances
to the hall, rich doors, finely sculptured; and all, the vaults,
pillars, walls, jambs, panelling, doors, statues, covered from
top to bottom with a splendid blue and gold illumination, which,
a trifle tarnished at the epoch when we behold it, had almost
entirely disappeared beneath dust and spiders in the year of
grace, 1549, when du Breul still admired it from tradition.
Let the reader picture to himself now, this immense, oblong hall,
illuminated by the pallid light of a January day, invaded by a
motley and noisy throng which drifts along the walls, and eddies
round the seven pillars, and he will have a confused idea of the
whole effect of the picture, whose curious details we shall make
an effort to indicate with more precision.
It is certain, that if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henri IV.,
there would have been no documents in the trial of Ravaillac
deposited in the clerk’s office of the Palais de Justice, no
accomplices interested in causing the said documents to
disappear; hence, no incendiaries obliged, for lack of better
means, to burn the clerk’s office in order to burn the documents,
and to burn the Palais de Justice in order to burn the clerk’s
office; consequently, in short, no conflagration in 1618. The old
Palais would be standing still, with its ancient grand hall; I
should be able to say to the reader, “Go and look at it,” and we
should thus both escape the necessity,—I of making, and he of
reading, a description of it, such as it is. Which demonstrates a
new truth: that great events have incalculable results.
It is true that it may be quite possible, in the first place,
that Ravaillac had no accomplices; and in the second, that if he
had any, they were in no way connected with the fire of 1618. Two
other very plausible explanations exist: First, the great flaming
star, a foot broad, and a cubit high, which fell from heaven, as
every one knows, upon the law courts, after midnight on the
seventh of March; second, Théophile’s quatrain,—
“Sure, ’twas but a sorry game
When at Paris, Dame Justice,
Through having eaten too much spice,
Set the palace all aflame.”
Whatever may be thought of this triple explanation, political,
physical, and poetical, of the burning of the law courts in 1618,
the unfortunate fact of the fire is certain. Very little to-day
remains, thanks to this catastrophe,—thanks, above all, to the
successive restorations which have completed what it spared,—very
little remains of that first dwelling of the kings of France,—of
that elder palace of the Louvre, already so old in the time of
Philip the Handsome, that they sought there for the traces of the
magnificent buildings erected by King Robert and described by
Helgaldus. Nearly everything has disappeared. What has become of
the chamber of the chancellery, where Saint Louis consummated his
marriage? the garden where he administered justice, “clad in a
coat of camelot, a surcoat of linsey-woolsey, without sleeves,
and a sur-mantle of black sandal, as he lay upon the carpet with
Joinville?” Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismond? and
that of Charles IV.? that of Jean the Landless? Where is the
staircase, from which Charles VI. promulgated his edict of
pardon? the slab where Marcel cut the throats of Robert de
Clermont and the Marshal of Champagne, in the presence of the
dauphin? the wicket where the bulls of Pope Benedict were torn,
and whence those who had brought them departed decked out, in
derision, in copes and mitres, and making an apology through all
Paris? and the grand hall, with its gilding, its azure, its
statues, its pointed arches, its pillars, its immense vault, all
fretted with carvings? and the gilded chamber? and the stone
lion, which stood at the door, with lowered head and tail between
his legs, like the lions on the throne of Solomon, in the
humiliated attitude which befits force in the presence of
justice? and the beautiful doors? and the stained glass? and the
chased ironwork, which drove Biscornette to despair? and the
delicate woodwork of Hancy? What has time, what have men done
with these marvels? What have they given us in return for all
this Gallic history, for all this Gothic art? The heavy flattened
arches of M. de Brosse, that awkward architect of the
Saint-Gervais portal. So much for art; and, as for history, we
have the gossiping reminiscences of the great pillar, still
ringing with the tattle of the Patru.
It is not much. Let us return to the veritable grand hall of the
veritable old palace. The two extremities of this gigantic
parallelogram were occupied, the one by the famous marble table,
so long, so broad, and so thick that, as the ancient land
rolls—in a style that would have given Gargantua an appetite—say,
“such a slice of marble as was never beheld in the world”; the
other by the chapel where Louis XI. had himself sculptured on his
knees before the Virgin, and whither he caused to be brought,
without heeding the two gaps thus made in the row of royal
statues, the statues of Charlemagne and of Saint Louis, two
saints whom he supposed to be great in favor in heaven, as kings
of France. This chapel, quite new, having been built only six
years, was entirely in that charming taste of delicate
architecture, of marvellous sculpture, of fine and deep chasing,
which marks with us the end of the Gothic era, and which is
perpetuated to about the middle of the sixteenth century in the
fairylike fancies of the Renaissance. The little open-work rose
window, pierced above the portal, was, in particular, a
masterpiece of lightness and grace; one would have pronounced it
a star of lace.
In the middle of the hall, opposite the great door, a platform of
gold brocade, placed against the wall, a special entrance to
which had been effected through a window in the corridor of the
gold chamber, had been erected for the Flemish emissaries and the
other great personages invited to the presentation of the mystery
play.
It was upon the marble table that the mystery was to be enacted,
as usual. It had been arranged for the purpose, early in the
morning; its rich slabs of marble, all scratched by the heels of
law clerks, supported a cage of carpenter’s work of considerable
height, the upper surface of which, within view of the whole
hall, was to serve as the theatre, and whose interior, masked by
tapestries, was to take the place of dressing-rooms for the
personages of the piece. A ladder, naively placed on the outside,
was to serve as means of communication between the dressing-room
and the stage, and lend its rude rungs to entrances as well as to
exits. There was no personage, however unexpected, no sudden
change, no theatrical effect, which was not obliged to mount that
ladder. Innocent and venerable infancy of art and contrivances!
Four of the bailiff of the palace’s sergeants, perfunctory
guardians of all the pleasures of the people, on days of festival
as well as on days of execution, stood at the four corners of the
marble table.
The piece was only to begin with the twelfth stroke of the great
palace clock sounding midday. It was very late, no doubt, for a
theatrical representation, but they had been obliged to fix the
hour to suit the convenience of the ambassadors.
Now, this whole multitude had been waiting since morning. A
goodly number of curious, good people had been shivering since
daybreak before the grand staircase of the palace; some even
affirmed that they had passed the night across the threshold of
the great door, in order to make sure that they should be the
first to pass in. The crowd grew more dense every moment, and,
like water, which rises above its normal level, began to mount
along the walls, to swell around the pillars, to spread out on
the entablatures, on the cornices, on the window-sills, on all
the salient points of the architecture, on all the reliefs of the
sculpture. Hence, discomfort, impatience, weariness, the liberty
of a day of cynicism and folly, the quarrels which break forth
for all sorts of causes—a pointed elbow, an iron-shod shoe, the
fatigue of long waiting—had already, long before the hour
appointed for the arrival of the ambassadors, imparted a harsh
and bitter accent to the clamor of these people who were shut in,
fitted into each other, pressed, trampled upon, stifled. Nothing
was to be heard but imprecations on the Flemish, the provost of
the merchants, the Cardinal de Bourbon, the bailiff of the
courts, Madame Marguerite of Austria, the sergeants with their
rods, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Bishop of Paris,
the Pope of the Fools, the pillars, the statues, that closed
door, that open window; all to the vast amusement of a band of
scholars and lackeys scattered through the mass, who mingled with
all this discontent their teasing remarks, and their malicious
suggestions, and pricked the general bad temper with a pin, so to
speak.
Among the rest there was a group of those merry imps, who, after
smashing the glass in a window, had seated themselves hardily on
the entablature, and from that point despatched their gaze and
their railleries both within and without, upon the throng in the
hall, and the throng upon the Place. It was easy to see, from
their parodied gestures, their ringing laughter, the bantering
appeals which they exchanged with their comrades, from one end of
the hall to the other, that these young clerks did not share the
weariness and fatigue of the rest of the spectators, and that
they understood very well the art of extracting, for their own
private diversion from that which they had under their eyes, a
spectacle which made them await the other with patience.
“Upon my soul, so it’s you, ‘Joannes Frollo de Molendino!’” cried
one of them, to a sort of little, light-haired imp, with a
well-favored and malign countenance, clinging to the acanthus
leaves of a capital; “you are well named John of the Mill, for
your two arms and your two legs have the air of four wings
fluttering on the breeze. How long have you been here?”
“By the mercy of the devil,” retorted Joannes Frollo, “these four
hours and more; and I hope that they will be reckoned to my
credit in purgatory. I heard the eight singers of the King of
Sicily intone the first verse of seven o’clock mass in the
Sainte-Chapelle.”
“Fine singers!” replied the other, “with voices even more pointed
than their caps! Before founding a mass for Monsieur Saint John,
the king should have inquired whether Monsieur Saint John likes
Latin droned out in a Provençal accent.”
“He did it for the sake of employing those accursed singers of
the King of Sicily!” cried an old woman sharply from among the
crowd beneath the window. “I just put it to you! A thousand
_livres parisi_ for a mass! and out of the tax on sea fish in the
markets of Paris, to boot!”
“Peace, old crone,” said a tall, grave person, stopping up his
nose on the side towards the fishwife; “a mass had to be founded.
Would you wish the king to fall ill again?”
“Bravely spoken, Sire Gilles Lecornu, master furrier of king’s
robes!” cried the little student, clinging to the capital.
A shout of laughter from all the students greeted the unlucky
name of the poor furrier of the king’s robes.
“Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!” said some.
“_Cornutus et hirsutus_, horned and hairy,” another went on.
“He! of course,” continued the small imp on the capital, “What
are they laughing at? An honorable man is Gilles Lecornu, brother
of Master Jehan Lecornu, provost of the king’s house, son of
Master Mahiet Lecornu, first porter of the Bois de Vincennes,—all
_bourgeois_ of Paris, all married, from father to son.”
The gayety redoubled. The big furrier, without uttering a word in
reply, tried to escape all the eyes riveted upon him from all
sides; but he perspired and panted in vain; like a wedge entering
the wood, his efforts served only to bury still more deeply in
the shoulders of his neighbors, his large, apoplectic face,
purple with spite and rage.
At length one of these, as fat, short, and venerable as himself,
came to his rescue.
“Abomination! scholars addressing a _bourgeois_ in that fashion
in my day would have been flogged with a fagot, which would have
afterwards been used to burn them.”
The whole band burst into laughter.
“Holà hé! who is scolding so? Who is that screech owl of evil
fortune?”
“Hold, I know him” said one of them; “’tis Master Andry Musnier.”
“Because he is one of the four sworn booksellers of the
university!” said the other.
“Everything goes by fours in that shop,” cried a third; “the four
nations, the four faculties, the four feasts, the four
procurators, the four electors, the four booksellers.”
“Well,” began Jean Frollo once more, “we must play the devil with
them.”[2]
“Musnier, we’ll burn your books.”
“Musnier, we’ll beat your lackeys.”
“Musnier, we’ll kiss your wife.”
“That fine, big Mademoiselle Oudarde.”
“Who is as fresh and as gay as though she were a widow.”
“Devil take you!” growled Master Andry Musnier.
“Master Andry,” pursued Jean Jehan, still clinging to his
capital, “hold your tongue, or I’ll drop on your head!”
Master Andry raised his eyes, seemed to measure in an instant the
height of the pillar, the weight of the scamp, mentally
multiplied that weight by the square of the velocity and remained
silent.
Jehan, master of the field of battle, pursued triumphantly:
“That’s what I’ll do, even if I am the brother of an archdeacon!”
“Fine gentry are our people of the university, not to have caused
our privileges to be respected on such a day as this! However,
there is a maypole and a bonfire in the town; a mystery, Pope of
the Fools, and Flemish ambassadors in the city; and, at the
university, nothing!”
“Nevertheless, the Place Maubert is sufficiently large!”
interposed one of the clerks established on the window-sill.
“Down with the rector, the electors, and the procurators!” cried
Joannes.
“We must have a bonfire this evening in the Champ-Gaillard,” went
on the other, “made of Master Andry’s books.”
“And the desks of the scribes!” added his neighbor.
“And the beadles’ wands!”
“And the spittoons of the deans!”
“And the cupboards of the procurators!”
“And the hutches of the electors!”
“And the stools of the rector!”
“Down with them!” put in little Jehan, as counterpoint; “down
with Master Andry, the beadles and the scribes; the theologians,
the doctors and the decretists; the procurators, the electors and
the rector!”
“The end of the world has come!” muttered Master Andry, stopping
up his ears.
“By the way, there’s the rector! see, he is passing through the
Place,” cried one of those in the window.
Each rivalled his neighbor in his haste to turn towards the
Place.
“Is it really our venerable rector, Master Thibaut?” demanded
Jehan Frollo du Moulin, who, as he was clinging to one of the
inner pillars, could not see what was going on outside.
“Yes, yes,” replied all the others, “it is really he, Master
Thibaut, the rector.”
It was, in fact, the rector and all the dignitaries of the
university, who were marching in procession in front of the
embassy, and at that moment traversing the Place. The students
crowded into the window, saluted them as they passed with
sarcasms and ironical applause. The rector, who was walking at
the head of his company, had to support the first broadside; it
was severe.
“Good day, monsieur le recteur! Holà hé! good day there!”
“How does he manage to be here, the old gambler? Has he abandoned
his dice?”
“How he trots along on his mule! her ears are not so long as
his!”
“Holà hé! good day, monsieur le recteur Thibaut! _Tybalde
aleator_! Old fool! old gambler!”
“God preserve you! Did you throw double six often last night?”
“Oh! what a decrepit face, livid and haggard and drawn with the
love of gambling and of dice!”
“Where are you bound for in that fashion, Thibaut, _Tybalde ad
dados_, with your back turned to the university, and trotting
towards the town?”
“He is on his way, no doubt, to seek a lodging in the Rue
Thibautodé?”[3] cried Jehan du M. Moulin.
The entire band repeated this quip in a voice of thunder,
clapping their hands furiously.
“You are going to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodé, are you
not, monsieur le recteur, gamester on the side of the devil?”
Then came the turns of the other dignitaries.
“Down with the beadles! down with the mace-bearers!”
“Tell me, Robin Pouissepain, who is that yonder?”
“He is Gilbert de Suilly, _Gilbertus de Soliaco_, the chancellor
of the College of Autun.”
“Hold on, here’s my shoe; you are better placed than I, fling it
in his face.”
“_Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces_.”
“Down with the six theologians, with their white surplices!”
“Are those the theologians? I thought they were the white geese
given by Sainte-Geneviève to the city, for the fief of Roogny.”
“Down with the doctors!”
“Down with the cardinal disputations, and quibblers!”
“My cap to you, Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève! You have done me
a wrong. ’Tis true; he gave my place in the nation of Normandy to
little Ascanio Falzapada, who comes from the province of Bourges,
since he is an Italian.”
“That is an injustice,” said all the scholars. “Down with the
Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève!”
“Ho hé! Master Joachim de Ladehors! Ho hé! Louis Dahuille! Ho hé
Lambert Hoctement!”
“May the devil stifle the procurator of the German nation!”
“And the chaplains of the Sainte-Chapelle, with their gray
_amices; cum tunices grisis_!”
“_Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis_!”
“Holà hé! Masters of Arts! All the beautiful black copes! all the
fine red copes!”
“They make a fine tail for the rector.”
“One would say that he was a Doge of Venice on his way to his
bridal with the sea.”
“Say, Jehan! here are the canons of Sainte-Geneviève!”
“To the deuce with the whole set of canons!”
“Abbé Claude Choart! Doctor Claude Choart! Are you in search of
Marie la Giffarde?”
“She is in the Rue de Glatigny.”
“She is making the bed of the king of the debauchees.”
“She is paying her four deniers[4] _quatuor denarios_.”
“_Aut unum bombum_.”
“Would you like to have her pay you in the face?”
“Comrades! Master Simon Sanguin, the Elector of Picardy, with his
wife on the crupper!”
“_Post equitem sedet atra cura_—behind the horseman sits black
care.”
“Courage, Master Simon!”
“Good day, Mister Elector!”
“Good night, Madame Electress!”
“How happy they are to see all that!” sighed Joannes de
Molendino, still perched in the foliage of his capital.
Meanwhile, the sworn bookseller of the university, Master Andry
Musnier, was inclining his ear to the furrier of the king’s
robes, Master Gilles Lecornu.
“I tell you, sir, that the end of the world has come. No one has
ever beheld such outbreaks among the students! It is the accursed
inventions of this century that are ruining
everything,—artilleries, bombards, and, above all, printing, that
other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books! printing
will kill bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing
nigh.”
“I see that plainly, from the progress of velvet stuffs,” said
the fur-merchant.
At this moment, midday sounded.
“Ha!” exclaimed the entire crowd, in one voice.
The scholars held their peace. Then a great hurly-burly ensued; a
vast movement of feet, hands, and heads; a general outbreak of
coughs and handkerchiefs; each one arranged himself, assumed his
post, raised himself up, and grouped himself. Then came a great
silence; all necks remained outstretched, all mouths remained
open, all glances were directed towards the marble table. Nothing
made its appearance there. The bailiff’s four sergeants were
still there, stiff, motionless, as painted statues. All eyes
turned to the estrade reserved for the Flemish envoys. The door
remained closed, the platform empty. This crowd had been waiting
since daybreak for three things: noonday, the embassy from
Flanders, the mystery play. Noonday alone had arrived on time.
On this occasion, it was too much.
They waited one, two, three, five minutes, a quarter of an hour;
nothing came. The dais remained empty, the theatre dumb. In the
meantime, wrath had succeeded to impatience. Irritated words
circulated in a low tone, still, it is true. “The mystery! the
mystery!” they murmured, in hollow voices. Heads began to
ferment. A tempest, which was only rumbling in the distance as
yet, was floating on the surface of this crowd. It was Jehan du
Moulin who struck the first spark from it.
“The mystery, and to the devil with the Flemings!” he exclaimed
at the full force of his lungs, twining like a serpent around his
pillar.
The crowd clapped their hands.
“The mystery!” it repeated, “and may all the devils take
Flanders!”
“We must have the mystery instantly,” resumed the student; “or
else, my advice is that we should hang the bailiff of the courts,
by way of a morality and a comedy.”
“Well said,” cried the people, “and let us begin the hanging with
his sergeants.”
A grand acclamation followed. The four poor fellows began to turn
pale, and to exchange glances. The crowd hurled itself towards
them, and they already beheld the frail wooden railing, which
separated them from it, giving way and bending before the
pressure of the throng.
It was a critical moment.
“To the sack, to the sack!” rose the cry on all sides.
At that moment, the tapestry of the dressing-room, which we have
described above, was raised, and afforded passage to a personage,
the mere sight of whom suddenly stopped the crowd, and changed
its wrath into curiosity as by enchantment.
“Silence! silence!”
The personage, but little reassured, and trembling in every limb,
advanced to the edge of the marble table with a vast amount of
bows, which, in proportion as he drew nearer, more and more
resembled genuflections.
In the meanwhile, tranquillity had gradually been restored. All
that remained was that slight murmur which always rises above the
silence of a crowd.
“Messieurs the _bourgeois_,” said he, “and mesdemoiselles the
_bourgeoises_, we shall have the honor of declaiming and
representing, before his eminence, monsieur the cardinal, a very
beautiful morality which has for its title, ‘The Good Judgment of
Madame the Virgin Mary.’ I am to play Jupiter. His eminence is,
at this moment, escorting the very honorable embassy of the Duke
of Austria; which is detained, at present, listening to the
harangue of monsieur the rector of the university, at the gate
Baudets. As soon as his illustrious eminence, the cardinal,
arrives, we will begin.”
It is certain, that nothing less than the intervention of Jupiter
was required to save the four unfortunate sergeants of the
bailiff of the courts. If we had the happiness of having invented
this very veracious tale, and of being, in consequence,
responsible for it before our Lady Criticism, it is not against
us that the classic precept, _Nec deus intersit_, could be
invoked. Moreover, the costume of Seigneur Jupiter, was very
handsome, and contributed not a little towards calming the crowd,
by attracting all its attention. Jupiter was clad in a coat of
mail, covered with black velvet, with gilt nails; and had it not
been for the rouge, and the huge red beard, each of which covered
one-half of his face,—had it not been for the roll of gilded
cardboard, spangled, and all bristling with strips of tinsel,
which he held in his hand, and in which the eyes of the initiated
easily recognized thunderbolts,—had not his feet been
flesh-colored, and banded with ribbons in Greek fashion, he might
have borne comparison, so far as the severity of his mien was
concerned, with a Breton archer from the guard of Monsieur de
Berry.
CHAPTER II. PIERRE GRINGOIRE.
Nevertheless, as he harangued them, the satisfaction and
admiration unanimously excited by his costume were dissipated by
his words; and when he reached that untoward conclusion: “As soon
as his illustrious eminence, the cardinal, arrives, we will
begin,” his voice was drowned in a thunder of hooting.
“Begin instantly! The mystery! the mystery immediately!” shrieked
the people. And above all the voices, that of Johannes de
Molendino was audible, piercing the uproar like the fife’s
derisive serenade: “Commence instantly!” yelped the scholar.
“Down with Jupiter and the Cardinal de Bourbon!” vociferated
Robin Poussepain and the other clerks perched in the window.
“The morality this very instant!” repeated the crowd; “this very
instant! the sack and the rope for the comedians, and the
cardinal!”
Poor Jupiter, haggard, frightened, pale beneath his rouge,
dropped his thunderbolt, took his cap in his hand; then he bowed
and trembled and stammered: “His eminence—the ambassadors—Madame
Marguerite of Flanders—.” He did not know what to say. In truth,
he was afraid of being hung.
Hung by the populace for waiting, hung by the cardinal for not
having waited, he saw between the two dilemmas only an abyss;
that is to say, a gallows.
Luckily, some one came to rescue him from his embarrassment, and
assume the responsibility.
An individual who was standing beyond the railing, in the free
space around the marble table, and whom no one had yet caught
sight of, since his long, thin body was completely sheltered from
every visual ray by the diameter of the pillar against which he
was leaning; this individual, we say, tall, gaunt, pallid, blond,
still young, although already wrinkled about the brow and cheeks,
with brilliant eyes and a smiling mouth, clad in garments of
black serge, worn and shining with age, approached the marble
table, and made a sign to the poor sufferer. But the other was so
confused that he did not see him. The new comer advanced another
step.
“Jupiter,” said he, “my dear Jupiter!”
The other did not hear.
At last, the tall blond, driven out of patience, shrieked almost
in his face,—
“Michel Giborne!”
“Who calls me?” said Jupiter, as though awakened with a start.
“I,” replied the person clad in black.
“Ah!” said Jupiter.
“Begin at once,” went on the other. “Satisfy the populace; I
undertake to appease the bailiff, who will appease monsieur the
cardinal.”
Jupiter breathed once more.
“Messeigneurs the _bourgeois_,” he cried, at the top of his lungs
to the crowd, which continued to hoot him, “we are going to begin
at once.”
“_Evoe Jupiter! Plaudite cives_! All hail, Jupiter! Applaud,
citizens!” shouted the scholars.
“Noël! Noël! good, good,” shouted the people.
The hand clapping was deafening, and Jupiter had already
withdrawn under his tapestry, while the hall still trembled with
acclamations.
In the meanwhile, the personage who had so magically turned the
tempest into dead calm, as our old and dear Corneille puts it,
had modestly retreated to the half-shadow of his pillar, and
would, no doubt, have remained invisible there, motionless, and
mute as before, had he not been plucked by the sleeve by two
young women, who, standing in the front row of the spectators,
had noticed his colloquy with Michel Giborne-Jupiter.
“Master,” said one of them, making him a sign to approach.
“Hold your tongue, my dear Liénarde,” said her neighbor, pretty,
fresh, and very brave, in consequence of being dressed up in her
best attire. “He is not a clerk, he is a layman; you must not say
master to him, but messire.”
“Messire,” said Liénarde.
The stranger approached the railing.
“What would you have of me, damsels?” he asked, with alacrity.
“Oh! nothing,” replied Liénarde, in great confusion; “it is my
neighbor, Gisquette la Gencienne, who wishes to speak with you.”
“Not so,” replied Gisquette, blushing; “it was Liénarde who
called you master; I only told her to say messire.”
The two young girls dropped their eyes. The man, who asked
nothing better than to enter into conversation, looked at them
with a smile.
“So you have nothing to say to me, damsels?”
“Oh! nothing at all,” replied Gisquette.
“Nothing,” said Liénarde.
The tall, light-haired young man retreated a step; but the two
curious maidens had no mind to let slip their prize.
“Messire,” said Gisquette, with the impetuosity of an open
sluice, or of a woman who has made up her mind, “do you know that
soldier who is to play the part of Madame the Virgin in the
mystery?”
“You mean the part of Jupiter?” replied the stranger.
“Hé! yes,” said Liénarde, “isn’t she stupid? So you know
Jupiter?”
“Michel Giborne?” replied the unknown; “yes, madam.”
“He has a fine beard!” said Liénarde.
“Will what they are about to say here be fine?” inquired
Gisquette, timidly.
“Very fine, mademoiselle,” replied the unknown, without the
slightest hesitation.
“What is it to be?” said Liénarde.
“‘The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin,’—a morality, if you
please, damsel.”
“Ah! that makes a difference,” responded Liénarde.
A brief silence ensued—broken by the stranger.
“It is a perfectly new morality, and one which has never yet been
played.”
“Then it is not the same one,” said Gisquette, “that was given
two years ago, on the day of the entrance of monsieur the legate,
and where three handsome maids played the parts—”
“Of sirens,” said Liénarde.
“And all naked,” added the young man.
Liénarde lowered her eyes modestly. Gisquette glanced at her and
did the same. He continued, with a smile,—
“It was a very pleasant thing to see. To-day it is a morality
made expressly for Madame the Demoiselle of Flanders.”
“Will they sing shepherd songs?” inquired Gisquette.
“Fie!” said the stranger, “in a morality? you must not confound
styles. If it were a farce, well and good.”
“That is a pity,” resumed Gisquette. “That day, at the Ponceau
Fountain, there were wild men and women, who fought and assumed
many aspects, as they sang little motets and bergerettes.”
“That which is suitable for a legate,” returned the stranger,
with a good deal of dryness, “is not suitable for a princess.”
“And beside them,” resumed Liénarde, “played many brass
instruments, making great melodies.”
“And for the refreshment of the passers-by,” continued Gisquette,
“the fountain spouted through three mouths, wine, milk, and
hippocrass, of which every one drank who wished.”
“And a little below the Ponceau, at the Trinity,” pursued
Liénarde, “there was a passion performed, and without any
speaking.”
“How well I remember that!” exclaimed Gisquette; “God on the
cross, and the two thieves on the right and the left.” Here the
young gossips, growing warm at the memory of the entrance of
monsieur the legate, both began to talk at once.
“And, further on, at the Painters’ Gate, there were other
personages, very richly clad.”
“And at the fountain of Saint-Innocent, that huntsman, who was
chasing a hind with great clamor of dogs and hunting-horns.”
“And, at the Paris slaughter-houses, stages, representing the
fortress of Dieppe!”
“And when the legate passed, you remember, Gisquette? they made
the assault, and the English all had their throats cut.”
“And against the gate of the Châtelet, there were very fine
personages!”
“And on the Port au Change, which was all draped above!”
“And when the legate passed, they let fly on the bridge more than
two hundred sorts of birds; wasn’t it beautiful, Liénarde?”
“It will be better to-day,” finally resumed their interlocutor,
who seemed to listen to them with impatience.
“Do you promise us that this mystery will be fine?” said
Gisquette.
“Without doubt,” he replied; then he added, with a certain
emphasis,—“I am the author of it, damsels.”
“Truly?” said the young girls, quite taken aback.
“Truly!” replied the poet, bridling a little; “that is, to say,
there are two of us; Jehan Marchand, who has sawed the planks and
erected the framework of the theatre and the woodwork; and I, who
have made the piece. My name is Pierre Gringoire.”
The author of the “Cid” could not have said “Pierre Corneille”
with more pride.
Our readers have been able to observe, that a certain amount of
time must have already elapsed from the moment when Jupiter had
retired beneath the tapestry to the instant when the author of
the new morality had thus abruptly revealed himself to the
innocent admiration of Gisquette and Liénarde. Remarkable fact:
that whole crowd, so tumultuous but a few moments before, now
waited amiably on the word of the comedian; which proves the
eternal truth, still experienced every day in our theatres, that
the best means of making the public wait patiently is to assure
them that one is about to begin instantly.
However, scholar Johannes had not fallen asleep.
“Holà hé!” he shouted suddenly, in the midst of the peaceable
waiting which had followed the tumult. “Jupiter, Madame the
Virgin, buffoons of the devil! are you jeering at us? The piece!
the piece! commence or we will commence again!”
This was all that was needed.
The music of high and low instruments immediately became audible
from the interior of the stage; the tapestry was raised; four
personages, in motley attire and painted faces, emerged from it,
climbed the steep ladder of the theatre, and, arrived upon the
upper platform, arranged themselves in a line before the public,
whom they saluted with profound reverences; then the symphony
ceased.
The mystery was about to begin.
The four personages, after having reaped a rich reward of
applause for their reverences, began, in the midst of profound
silence, a prologue, which we gladly spare the reader. Moreover,
as happens in our own day, the public was more occupied with the
costumes that the actors wore than with the roles that they were
enacting; and, in truth, they were right. All four were dressed
in parti-colored robes of yellow and white, which were
distinguished from each other only by the nature of the stuff;
the first was of gold and silver brocade; the second, of silk;
the third, of wool; the fourth, of linen. The first of these
personages carried in his right hand a sword; the second, two
golden keys; the third, a pair of scales; the fourth, a spade:
and, in order to aid sluggish minds which would not have seen
clearly through the transparency of these attributes, there was
to be read, in large, black letters, on the hem of the robe of
brocade, MY NAME IS NOBILITY; on the hem of the silken robe, MY
NAME IS CLERGY; on the hem of the woolen robe, MY NAME IS
MERCHANDISE; on the hem of the linen robe, MY NAME IS LABOR. The
sex of the two male characters was briefly indicated to every
judicious spectator, by their shorter robes, and by the cap which
they wore on their heads; while the two female characters, less
briefly clad, were covered with hoods.
Much ill-will would also have been required, not to comprehend,
through the medium of the poetry of the prologue, that Labor was
wedded to Merchandise, and Clergy to Nobility, and that the two
happy couples possessed in common a magnificent golden dolphin,
which they desired to adjudge to the fairest only. So they were
roaming about the world seeking and searching for this beauty,
and, after having successively rejected the Queen of Golconda,
the Princess of Trebizonde, the daughter of the Grand Khan of
Tartary, etc., Labor and Clergy, Nobility and Merchandise, had
come to rest upon the marble table of the Palais de Justice, and
to utter, in the presence of the honest audience, as many
sentences and maxims as could then be dispensed at the Faculty of
Arts, at examinations, sophisms, determinances, figures, and
acts, where the masters took their degrees.
All this was, in fact, very fine.
Nevertheless, in that throng, upon which the four allegories vied
with each other in pouring out floods of metaphors, there was no
ear more attentive, no heart that palpitated more, not an eye was
more haggard, no neck more outstretched, than the eye, the ear,
the neck, and the heart of the author, of the poet, of that brave
Pierre Gringoire, who had not been able to resist, a moment
before, the joy of telling his name to two pretty girls. He had
retreated a few paces from them, behind his pillar, and there he
listened, looked, enjoyed. The amiable applause which had greeted
the beginning of his prologue was still echoing in his bosom, and
he was completely absorbed in that species of ecstatic
contemplation with which an author beholds his ideas fall, one by
one, from the mouth of the actor into the vast silence of the
audience. Worthy Pierre Gringoire!
It pains us to say it, but this first ecstasy was speedily
disturbed. Hardly had Gringoire raised this intoxicating cup of
joy and triumph to his lips, when a drop of bitterness was
mingled with it.
A tattered mendicant, who could not collect any coins, lost as he
was in the midst of the crowd, and who had not probably found
sufficient indemnity in the pockets of his neighbors, had hit
upon the idea of perching himself upon some conspicuous point, in
order to attract looks and alms. He had, accordingly, hoisted
himself, during the first verses of the prologue, with the aid of
the pillars of the reserve gallery, to the cornice which ran
round the balustrade at its lower edge; and there he had seated
himself, soliciting the attention and the pity of the multitude,
with his rags and a hideous sore which covered his right arm.
However, he uttered not a word.
The silence which he preserved allowed the prologue to proceed
without hindrance, and no perceptible disorder would have ensued,
if ill-luck had not willed that the scholar Joannes should catch
sight, from the heights of his pillar, of the mendicant and his
grimaces. A wild fit of laughter took possession of the young
scamp, who, without caring that he was interrupting the
spectacle, and disturbing the universal composure, shouted
boldly,—
“Look! see that sickly creature asking alms!”
Any one who has thrown a stone into a frog pond, or fired a shot
into a covey of birds, can form an idea of the effect produced by
these incongruous words, in the midst of the general attention.
It made Gringoire shudder as though it had been an electric
shock. The prologue stopped short, and all heads turned
tumultuously towards the beggar, who, far from being disconcerted
by this, saw, in this incident, a good opportunity for reaping
his harvest, and who began to whine in a doleful way, half
closing his eyes the while,—“Charity, please!”
“Well—upon my soul,” resumed Joannes, “it’s Clopin Trouillefou!
Holà hé, my friend, did your sore bother you on the leg, that you
have transferred it to your arm?” So saying, with the dexterity
of a monkey, he flung a bit of silver into the gray felt hat
which the beggar held in his ailing arm. The mendicant received
both the alms and the sarcasm without wincing, and continued, in
lamentable tones,—
“Charity, please!”
This episode considerably distracted the attention of the
audience; and a goodly number of spectators, among them Robin
Poussepain, and all the clerks at their head, gayly applauded
this eccentric duet, which the scholar, with his shrill voice,
and the mendicant had just improvised in the middle of the
prologue.
Gringoire was highly displeased. On recovering from his first
stupefaction, he bestirred himself to shout, to the four
personages on the stage, “Go on! What the devil!—go on!”—without
even deigning to cast a glance of disdain upon the two
interrupters.
At that moment, he felt some one pluck at the hem of his surtout;
he turned round, and not without ill-humor, and found
considerable difficulty in smiling; but he was obliged to do so,
nevertheless. It was the pretty arm of Gisquette la Gencienne,
which, passed through the railing, was soliciting his attention
in this manner.
“Monsieur,” said the young girl, “are they going to continue?”
“Of course,” replied Gringoire, a good deal shocked by the
question.
“In that case, messire,” she resumed, “would you have the
courtesy to explain to me—”
“What they are about to say?” interrupted Gringoire. “Well,
listen.”
“No,” said Gisquette, “but what they have said so far.”
Gringoire started, like a man whose wound has been probed to the
quick.
“A plague on the stupid and dull-witted little girl!” he
muttered, between his teeth.
From that moment forth, Gisquette was nothing to him.
In the meantime, the actors had obeyed his injunction, and the
public, seeing that they were beginning to speak again, began
once more to listen, not without having lost many beauties in the
sort of soldered joint which was formed between the two portions
of the piece thus abruptly cut short. Gringoire commented on it
bitterly to himself. Nevertheless, tranquillity was gradually
restored, the scholar held his peace, the mendicant counted over
some coins in his hat, and the piece resumed the upper hand.
It was, in fact, a very fine work, and one which, as it seems to
us, might be put to use to-day, by the aid of a little
rearrangement. The exposition, rather long and rather empty, that
is to say, according to the rules, was simple; and Gringoire, in
the candid sanctuary of his own conscience, admired its
clearness. As the reader may surmise, the four allegorical
personages were somewhat weary with having traversed the three
sections of the world, without having found suitable opportunity
for getting rid of their golden dolphin. Thereupon a eulogy of
the marvellous fish, with a thousand delicate allusions to the
young betrothed of Marguerite of Flanders, then sadly cloistered
in at Amboise, and without a suspicion that Labor and Clergy,
Nobility and Merchandise had just made the circuit of the world
in his behalf. The said dauphin was then young, was handsome, was
stout, and, above all (magnificent origin of all royal virtues),
he was the son of the Lion of France. I declare that this bold
metaphor is admirable, and that the natural history of the
theatre, on a day of allegory and royal marriage songs, is not in
the least startled by a dolphin who is the son of a lion. It is
precisely these rare and Pindaric mixtures which prove the poet’s
enthusiasm. Nevertheless, in order to play the part of critic
also, the poet might have developed this beautiful idea in
something less than two hundred lines. It is true that the
mystery was to last from noon until four o’clock, in accordance
with the orders of monsieur the provost, and that it was
necessary to say something. Besides, the people listened
patiently.
All at once, in the very middle of a quarrel between Mademoiselle
Merchandise and Madame Nobility, at the moment when Monsieur
Labor was giving utterance to this wonderful line,—
In forest ne’er was seen a more triumphant beast;
the door of the reserved gallery which had hitherto remained so
inopportunely closed, opened still more inopportunely; and the
ringing voice of the usher announced abruptly, “His eminence,
Monseigneur the Cardinal de Bourbon.”
CHAPTER III. MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL.
Poor Gringoire! the din of all the great double petards of the
Saint-Jean, the discharge of twenty arquebuses on supports, the
detonation of that famous serpentine of the Tower of Billy,
which, during the siege of Paris, on Sunday, the twenty-sixth of
September, 1465, killed seven Burgundians at one blow, the
explosion of all the powder stored at the gate of the Temple,
would have rent his ears less rudely at that solemn and dramatic
moment, than these few words, which fell from the lips of the
usher, “His eminence, Monseigneur the Cardinal de Bourbon.”
It is not that Pierre Gringoire either feared or disdained
monsieur the cardinal. He had neither the weakness nor the
audacity for that. A true eclectic, as it would be expressed
nowadays, Gringoire was one of those firm and lofty, moderate and
calm spirits, which always know how to bear themselves amid all
circumstances (_stare in dimidio rerum_), and who are full of
reason and of liberal philosophy, while still setting store by
cardinals. A rare, precious, and never interrupted race of
philosophers to whom wisdom, like another Ariadne, seems to have
given a clew of thread which they have been walking along
unwinding since the beginning of the world, through the labyrinth
of human affairs. One finds them in all ages, ever the same; that
is to say, always according to all times. And, without reckoning
our Pierre Gringoire, who may represent them in the fifteenth
century if we succeed in bestowing upon him the distinction which
he deserves, it certainly was their spirit which animated Father
du Breul, when he wrote, in the sixteenth, these naively sublime
words, worthy of all centuries: “I am a Parisian by nation, and a
Parrhisian in language, for _parrhisia_ in Greek signifies
liberty of speech; of which I have made use even towards
messeigneurs the cardinals, uncle and brother to Monsieur the
Prince de Conty, always with respect to their greatness, and
without offending any one of their suite, which is much to say.”
There was then neither hatred for the cardinal, nor disdain for
his presence, in the disagreeable impression produced upon Pierre
Gringoire. Quite the contrary; our poet had too much good sense
and too threadbare a coat, not to attach particular importance to
having the numerous allusions in his prologue, and, in
particular, the glorification of the dauphin, son of the Lion of
France, fall upon the most eminent ear. But it is not interest
which predominates in the noble nature of poets. I suppose that
the entity of the poet may be represented by the number ten; it
is certain that a chemist on analyzing and pharmacopolizing it,
as Rabelais says, would find it composed of one part interest to
nine parts of self-esteem.
Now, at the moment when the door had opened to admit the
cardinal, the nine parts of self-esteem in Gringoire, swollen and
expanded by the breath of popular admiration, were in a state of
prodigious augmentation, beneath which disappeared, as though
stifled, that imperceptible molecule of which we have just
remarked upon in the constitution of poets; a precious
ingredient, by the way, a ballast of reality and humanity,
without which they would not touch the earth. Gringoire enjoyed
seeing, feeling, fingering, so to speak an entire assembly (of
knaves, it is true, but what matters that?) stupefied, petrified,
and as though asphyxiated in the presence of the incommensurable
tirades which welled up every instant from all parts of his
bridal song. I affirm that he shared the general beatitude, and
that, quite the reverse of La Fontaine, who, at the presentation
of his comedy of the “Florentine,” asked, “Who is the ill-bred
lout who made that rhapsody?” Gringoire would gladly have
inquired of his neighbor, “Whose masterpiece is this?”
The reader can now judge of the effect produced upon him by the
abrupt and unseasonable arrival of the cardinal.
That which he had to fear was only too fully realized. The
entrance of his eminence upset the audience. All heads turned
towards the gallery. It was no longer possible to hear one’s
self. “The cardinal! The cardinal!” repeated all mouths. The
unhappy prologue stopped short for the second time.
The cardinal halted for a moment on the threshold of the estrade.
While he was sending a rather indifferent glance around the
audience, the tumult redoubled. Each person wished to get a
better view of him. Each man vied with the other in thrusting his
head over his neighbor’s shoulder.
He was, in fact, an exalted personage, the sight of whom was well
worth any other comedy. Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon, Archbishop
and Comte of Lyon, Primate of the Gauls, was allied both to Louis
XI., through his brother, Pierre, Seigneur de Beaujeu, who had
married the king’s eldest daughter, and to Charles the Bold
through his mother, Agnes of Burgundy. Now, the dominating trait,
the peculiar and distinctive trait of the character of the
Primate of the Gauls, was the spirit of the courtier, and
devotion to the powers that be. The reader can form an idea of
the numberless embarrassments which this double relationship had
caused him, and of all the temporal reefs among which his
spiritual bark had been forced to tack, in order not to suffer
shipwreck on either Louis or Charles, that Scylla and that
Charybdis which had devoured the Duc de Nemours and the Constable
de Saint-Pol. Thanks to Heaven’s mercy, he had made the voyage
successfully, and had reached home without hindrance. But
although he was in port, and precisely because he was in port, he
never recalled without disquiet the varied haps of his political
career, so long uneasy and laborious. Thus, he was in the habit
of saying that the year 1476 had been “white and black” for
him—meaning thereby, that in the course of that year he had lost
his mother, the Duchesse de la Bourbonnais, and his cousin, the
Duke of Burgundy, and that one grief had consoled him for the
other.
Nevertheless, he was a fine man; he led a joyous cardinal’s life,
liked to enliven himself with the royal vintage of Challuau, did
not hate Richarde la Garmoise and Thomasse la Saillarde, bestowed
alms on pretty girls rather than on old women,—and for all these
reasons was very agreeable to the _populace_ of Paris. He never
went about otherwise than surrounded by a small court of bishops
and abbés of high lineage, gallant, jovial, and given to
carousing on occasion; and more than once the good and devout
women of Saint Germain d’ Auxerre, when passing at night beneath
the brightly illuminated windows of Bourbon, had been scandalized
to hear the same voices which had intoned vespers for them during
the day carolling, to the clinking of glasses, the bacchic
proverb of Benedict XII., that pope who had added a third crown
to the Tiara—_Bibamus papaliter_.
It was this justly acquired popularity, no doubt, which preserved
him on his entrance from any bad reception at the hands of the
mob, which had been so displeased but a moment before, and very
little disposed to respect a cardinal on the very day when it was
to elect a pope. But the Parisians cherish little rancor; and
then, having forced the beginning of the play by their authority,
the good _bourgeois_ had got the upper hand of the cardinal, and
this triumph was sufficient for them. Moreover, the Cardinal de
Bourbon was a handsome man,—he wore a fine scarlet robe, which he
carried off very well,—that is to say, he had all the women on
his side, and, consequently, the best half of the audience.
Assuredly, it would be injustice and bad taste to hoot a cardinal
for having come late to the spectacle, when he is a handsome man,
and when he wears his scarlet robe well.
He entered, then, bowed to those present with the hereditary
smile of the great for the people, and directed his course slowly
towards his scarlet velvet arm-chair, with the air of thinking of
something quite different. His cortege—what we should nowadays
call his staff—of bishops and abbés invaded the estrade in his
train, not without causing redoubled tumult and curiosity among
the audience. Each man vied with his neighbor in pointing them
out and naming them, in seeing who should recognize at least one
of them: this one, the Bishop of Marseilles (Alaudet, if my
memory serves me right);—this one, the primicier of
Saint-Denis;—this one, Robert de Lespinasse, Abbé of
Saint-Germain des Prés, that libertine brother of a mistress of
Louis XI.; all with many errors and absurdities. As for the
scholars, they swore. This was their day, their feast of fools,
their saturnalia, the annual orgy of the corporation of law
clerks and of the school. There was no turpitude which was not
sacred on that day. And then there were gay gossips in the
crowd—Simone Quatrelivres, Agnès la Gadine, and Rabine Piédebou.
Was it not the least that one could do to swear at one’s ease and
revile the name of God a little, on so fine a day, in such good
company as dignitaries of the church and loose women? So they did
not abstain; and, in the midst of the uproar, there was a
frightful concert of blasphemies and enormities of all the
unbridled tongues, the tongues of clerks and students restrained
during the rest of the year, by the fear of the hot iron of Saint
Louis. Poor Saint Louis! how they set him at defiance in his own
court of law! Each one of them selected from the new-comers on
the platform, a black, gray, white, or violet cassock as his
target. Joannes Frollo de Molendin, in his quality of brother to
an archdeacon, boldly attacked the scarlet; he sang in deafening
tones, with his impudent eyes fastened on the cardinal, “_Cappa
repleta mero_!”
All these details which we here lay bare for the edification of
the reader, were so covered by the general uproar, that they were
lost in it before reaching the reserved platforms; moreover, they
would have moved the cardinal but little, so much a part of the
customs were the liberties of that day. Moreover, he had another
cause for solicitude, and his mien as wholly preoccupied with it,
which entered the estrade the same time as himself; this was the
embassy from Flanders.
Not that he was a profound politician, nor was he borrowing
trouble about the possible consequences of the marriage of his
cousin Marguerite de Bourgoyne to his cousin Charles, Dauphin de
Vienne; nor as to how long the good understanding which had been
patched up between the Duke of Austria and the King of France
would last; nor how the King of England would take this disdain
of his daughter. All that troubled him but little; and he gave a
warm reception every evening to the wine of the royal vintage of
Chaillot, without a suspicion that several flasks of that same
wine (somewhat revised and corrected, it is true, by Doctor
Coictier), cordially offered to Edward IV. by Louis XI., would,
some fine morning, rid Louis XI. of Edward IV. “The much honored
embassy of Monsieur the Duke of Austria,” brought the cardinal
none of these cares, but it troubled him in another direction. It
was, in fact, somewhat hard, and we have already hinted at it on
the second page of this book,—for him, Charles de Bourbon, to be
obliged to feast and receive cordially no one knows what
_bourgeois_;—for him, a cardinal, to receive aldermen;—for him, a
Frenchman, and a jolly companion, to receive Flemish
beer-drinkers,—and that in public! This was, certainly, one of
the most irksome grimaces that he had ever executed for the good
pleasure of the king.
So he turned toward the door, and with the best grace in the
world (so well had he trained himself to it), when the usher
announced, in a sonorous voice, “Messieurs the Envoys of Monsieur
the Duke of Austria.” It is useless to add that the whole hall
did the same.
Then arrived, two by two, with a gravity which made a contrast in
the midst of the frisky ecclesiastical escort of Charles de
Bourbon, the eight and forty ambassadors of Maximilian of
Austria, having at their head the reverend Father in God, Jehan,
Abbot of Saint-Bertin, Chancellor of the Golden Fleece, and
Jacques de Goy, Sieur Dauby, Grand Bailiff of Ghent. A deep
silence settled over the assembly, accompanied by stifled
laughter at the preposterous names and all the _bourgeois_
designations which each of these personages transmitted with
imperturbable gravity to the usher, who then tossed names and
titles pell-mell and mutilated to the crowd below. There were
Master Loys Roelof, alderman of the city of Louvain; Messire
Clays d’Etuelde, alderman of Brussels; Messire Paul de Baeust,
Sieur de Voirmizelle, President of Flanders; Master Jehan
Coleghens, burgomaster of the city of Antwerp; Master George de
la Moere, first alderman of the kuere of the city of Ghent;
Master Gheldolf van der Hage, first alderman of the _parchons_ of
the said town; and the Sieur de Bierbecque, and Jehan Pinnock,
and Jehan Dymaerzelle, etc., etc., etc.; bailiffs, aldermen,
burgomasters; burgomasters, aldermen, bailiffs—all stiff,
affectedly grave, formal, dressed out in velvet and damask,
hooded with caps of black velvet, with great tufts of Cyprus gold
thread; good Flemish heads, after all, severe and worthy faces,
of the family which Rembrandt makes to stand out so strong and
grave from the black background of his “Night Patrol”; personages
all of whom bore, written on their brows, that Maximilian of
Austria had done well in “trusting implicitly,” as the manifest
ran, “in their sense, valor, experience, loyalty, and good
wisdom.”
There was one exception, however. It was a subtle, intelligent,
crafty-looking face, a sort of combined monkey and diplomat phiz,
before whom the cardinal made three steps and a profound bow, and
whose name, nevertheless, was only, “Guillaume Rym, counsellor
and pensioner of the City of Ghent.”
Few persons were then aware who Guillaume Rym was. A rare genius
who in a time of revolution would have made a brilliant
appearance on the surface of events, but who in the fifteenth
century was reduced to cavernous intrigues, and to “living in
mines,” as the Duc de Saint-Simon expresses it. Nevertheless, he
was appreciated by the “miner” of Europe; he plotted familiarly
with Louis XI., and often lent a hand to the king’s secret jobs.
All which things were quite unknown to that throng, who were
amazed at the cardinal’s politeness to that frail figure of a
Flemish bailiff.
CHAPTER IV. MASTER JACQUES COPPENOLE.
While the pensioner of Ghent and his eminence were exchanging
very low bows and a few words in voices still lower, a man of
lofty stature, with a large face and broad shoulders, presented
himself, in order to enter abreast with Guillaume Rym; one would
have pronounced him a bull-dog by the side of a fox. His felt
doublet and leather jerkin made a spot on the velvet and silk
which surrounded him. Presuming that he was some groom who had
stolen in, the usher stopped him.
“Hold, my friend, you cannot pass!”
The man in the leather jerkin shouldered him aside.
“What does this knave want with me?” said he, in stentorian
tones, which rendered the entire hall attentive to this strange
colloquy. “Don’t you see that I am one of them?”
“Your name?” demanded the usher.
“Jacques Coppenole.”
“Your titles?”
“Hosier at the sign of the ‘Three Little Chains,’ of Ghent.”
The usher recoiled. One might bring one’s self to announce
aldermen and burgomasters, but a hosier was too much. The
cardinal was on thorns. All the people were staring and
listening. For two days his eminence had been exerting his utmost
efforts to lick these Flemish bears into shape, and to render
them a little more presentable to the public, and this freak was
startling. But Guillaume Rym, with his polished smile, approached
the usher.
“Announce Master Jacques Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen of the
city of Ghent,” he whispered, very low.
“Usher,” interposed the cardinal, aloud, “announce Master Jacques
Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen of the illustrious city of
Ghent.”
This was a mistake. Guillaume Rym alone might have conjured away
the difficulty, but Coppenole had heard the cardinal.
“No, cross of God?” he exclaimed, in his voice of thunder,
“Jacques Coppenole, hosier. Do you hear, usher? Nothing more,
nothing less. Cross of God! hosier; that’s fine enough. Monsieur
the Archduke has more than once sought his _gant_[5] in my hose.”
Laughter and applause burst forth. A jest is always understood in
Paris, and, consequently, always applauded.
Let us add that Coppenole was of the people, and that the
auditors which surrounded him were also of the people. Thus the
communication between him and them had been prompt, electric,
and, so to speak, on a level. The haughty air of the Flemish
hosier, by humiliating the courtiers, had touched in all these
plebeian souls that latent sentiment of dignity still vague and
indistinct in the fifteenth century.
This hosier was an equal, who had just held his own before
monsieur the cardinal. A very sweet reflection to poor fellows
habituated to respect and obedience towards the underlings of the
sergeants of the bailiff of Sainte-Geneviève, the cardinal’s
train-bearer.
Coppenole proudly saluted his eminence, who returned the salute
of the all-powerful _bourgeois_ feared by Louis XI. Then, while
Guillaume Rym, a “sage and malicious man,” as Philippe de Comines
puts it, watched them both with a smile of raillery and
superiority, each sought his place, the cardinal quite abashed
and troubled, Coppenole tranquil and haughty, and thinking, no
doubt, that his title of hosier was as good as any other, after
all, and that Marie of Burgundy, mother to that Marguerite whom
Coppenole was to-day bestowing in marriage, would have been less
afraid of the cardinal than of the hosier; for it is not a
cardinal who would have stirred up a revolt among the men of
Ghent against the favorites of the daughter of Charles the Bold;
it is not a cardinal who could have fortified the populace with a
word against her tears and prayers, when the Maid of Flanders
came to supplicate her people in their behalf, even at the very
foot of the scaffold; while the hosier had only to raise his
leather elbow, in order to cause to fall your two heads, most
illustrious seigneurs, Guy d’Hymbercourt and Chancellor Guillaume
Hugonet.
Nevertheless, all was over for the poor cardinal, and he was
obliged to quaff to the dregs the bitter cup of being in such bad
company.
The reader has, probably, not forgotten the impudent beggar who
had been clinging fast to the fringes of the cardinal’s gallery
ever since the beginning of the prologue. The arrival of the
illustrious guests had by no means caused him to relax his hold,
and, while the prelates and ambassadors were packing themselves
into the stalls—like genuine Flemish herrings—he settled himself
at his ease, and boldly crossed his legs on the architrave. The
insolence of this proceeding was extraordinary, yet no one
noticed it at first, the attention of all being directed
elsewhere. He, on his side, perceived nothing that was going on
in the hall; he wagged his head with the unconcern of a
Neapolitan, repeating from time to time, amid the clamor, as from
a mechanical habit, “Charity, please!” And, assuredly, he was,
out of all those present, the only one who had not deigned to
turn his head at the altercation between Coppenole and the usher.
Now, chance ordained that the master hosier of Ghent, with whom
the people were already in lively sympathy, and upon whom all
eyes were riveted—should come and seat himself in the front row
of the gallery, directly above the mendicant; and people were not
a little amazed to see the Flemish ambassador, on concluding his
inspection of the knave thus placed beneath his eyes, bestow a
friendly tap on that ragged shoulder. The beggar turned round;
there was surprise, recognition, a lighting up of the two
countenances, and so forth; then, without paying the slightest
heed in the world to the spectators, the hosier and the wretched
being began to converse in a low tone, holding each other’s
hands, in the meantime, while the rags of Clopin Trouillefou,
spread out upon the cloth of gold of the dais, produced the
effect of a caterpillar on an orange.
The novelty of this singular scene excited such a murmur of mirth
and gayety in the hall, that the cardinal was not slow to
perceive it; he half bent forward, and, as from the point where
he was placed he could catch only an imperfect view of
Trouillerfou’s ignominious doublet, he very naturally imagined
that the mendicant was asking alms, and, disgusted with his
audacity, he exclaimed: “Bailiff of the Courts, toss me that
knave into the river!”
“Cross of God! monseigneur the cardinal,” said Coppenole, without
quitting Clopin’s hand, “he’s a friend of mine.”
“Good! good!” shouted the populace. From that moment, Master
Coppenole enjoyed in Paris as in Ghent, “great favor with the
people; for men of that sort do enjoy it,” says Philippe de
Comines, “when they are thus disorderly.” The cardinal bit his
lips. He bent towards his neighbor, the Abbé of Sainte-Geneviève,
and said to him in a low tone,—“Fine ambassadors monsieur the
archduke sends here, to announce to us Madame Marguerite!”
“Your eminence,” replied the abbé, “wastes your politeness on
these Flemish swine. _Margaritas ante porcos_, pearls before
swine.”
“Say rather,” retorted the cardinal, with a smile, “_Porcos ante
Margaritam_, swine before the pearl.”
The whole little court in cassocks went into ecstacies over this
play upon words. The cardinal felt a little relieved; he was
quits with Coppenole, he also had had his jest applauded.
Now, will those of our readers who possess the power of
generalizing an image or an idea, as the expression runs in the
style of to-day, permit us to ask them if they have formed a very
clear conception of the spectacle presented at this moment, upon
which we have arrested their attention, by the vast parallelogram
of the grand hall of the palace.
In the middle of the hall, backed against the western wall, a
large and magnificent gallery draped with cloth of gold, into
which enter in procession, through a small, arched door, grave
personages, announced successively by the shrill voice of an
usher. On the front benches were already a number of venerable
figures, muffled in ermine, velvet, and scarlet. Around the
dais—which remains silent and dignified—below, opposite,
everywhere, a great crowd and a great murmur. Thousands of
glances directed by the people on each face upon the dais, a
thousand whispers over each name. Certainly, the spectacle is
curious, and well deserves the attention of the spectators. But
yonder, quite at the end, what is that sort of trestle work with
four motley puppets upon it, and more below? Who is that man
beside the trestle, with a black doublet and a pale face? Alas!
my dear reader, it is Pierre Gringoire and his prologue.
We have all forgotten him completely.
This is precisely what he feared.
From the moment of the cardinal’s entrance, Gringoire had never
ceased to tremble for the safety of his prologue. At first he had
enjoined the actors, who had stopped in suspense, to continue,
and to raise their voices; then, perceiving that no one was
listening, he had stopped them; and, during the entire quarter of
an hour that the interruption lasted, he had not ceased to stamp,
to flounce about, to appeal to Gisquette and Liénarde, and to
urge his neighbors to the continuance of the prologue; all in
vain. No one quitted the cardinal, the embassy, and the
gallery—sole centre of this vast circle of visual rays. We must
also believe, and we say it with regret, that the prologue had
begun slightly to weary the audience at the moment when his
eminence had arrived, and created a diversion in so terrible a
fashion. After all, on the gallery as well as on the marble
table, the spectacle was the same: the conflict of Labor and
Clergy, of Nobility and Merchandise. And many people preferred to
see them alive, breathing, moving, elbowing each other in flesh
and blood, in this Flemish embassy, in this Episcopal court,
under the cardinal’s robe, under Coppenole’s jerkin, than
painted, decked out, talking in verse, and, so to speak, stuffed
beneath the yellow amid white tunics in which Gringoire had so
ridiculously clothed them.
Nevertheless, when our poet beheld quiet reestablished to some
extent, he devised a stratagem which might have redeemed all.
“Monsieur,” he said, turning towards one of his neighbors, a
fine, big man, with a patient face, “suppose we begin again.”
“What?” said his neighbor.
“Hé! the Mystery,” said Gringoire.
“As you like,” returned his neighbor.
This semi-approbation sufficed for Gringoire, and, conducting his
own affairs, he began to shout, confounding himself with the
crowd as much as possible: “Begin the mystery again! begin
again!”
“The devil!” said Joannes de Molendino, “what are they jabbering
down yonder, at the end of the hall?” (for Gringoire was making
noise enough for four.) “Say, comrades, isn’t that mystery
finished? They want to begin it all over again. That’s not fair!”
“No, no!” shouted all the scholars. “Down with the mystery! Down
with it!”
But Gringoire had multiplied himself, and only shouted the more
vigorously: “Begin again! begin again!”
These clamors attracted the attention of the cardinal.
“Monsieur Bailiff of the Courts,” said he to a tall, black man,
placed a few paces from him, “are those knaves in a holy-water
vessel, that they make such a hellish noise?”
The bailiff of the courts was a sort of amphibious magistrate, a
sort of bat of the judicial order, related to both the rat and
the bird, the judge and the soldier.
He approached his eminence, and not without a good deal of fear
of the latter’s displeasure, he awkwardly explained to him the
seeming disrespect of the audience: that noonday had arrived
before his eminence, and that the comedians had been forced to
begin without waiting for his eminence.
The cardinal burst into a laugh.
“On my faith, the rector of the university ought to have done the
same. What say you, Master Guillaume Rym?”
“Monseigneur,” replied Guillaume Rym, “let us be content with
having escaped half of the comedy. There is at least that much
gained.”
“Can these rascals continue their farce?” asked the bailiff.
“Continue, continue,” said the cardinal, “it’s all the same to
me. I’ll read my breviary in the meantime.”
The bailiff advanced to the edge of the estrade, and cried, after
having invoked silence by a wave of the hand,—
“_Bourgeois_, rustics, and citizens, in order to satisfy those
who wish the play to begin again, and those who wish it to end,
his eminence orders that it be continued.”
Both parties were forced to resign themselves. But the public and
the author long cherished a grudge against the cardinal.
So the personages on the stage took up their parts, and Gringoire
hoped that the rest of his work, at least, would be listened to.
This hope was speedily dispelled like his other illusions;
silence had indeed, been restored in the audience, after a
fashion; but Gringoire had not observed that at the moment when
the cardinal gave the order to continue, the gallery was far from
full, and that after the Flemish envoys there had arrived new
personages forming part of the _cortège_, whose names and ranks,
shouted out in the midst of his dialogue by the intermittent cry
of the usher, produced considerable ravages in it. Let the reader
imagine the effect in the midst of a theatrical piece, of the
yelping of an usher, flinging in between two rhymes, and often in
the middle of a line, parentheses like the following,—
“Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator to the king in the
Ecclesiastical Courts!”
“Jehan de Harlay, equerry guardian of the office of chevalier of
the night watch of the city of Paris!”
“Messire Galiot de Genoilhac, chevalier, seigneur de Brussac,
master of the king’s artillery!”
“Master Dreux-Raguier, surveyor of the woods and forests of the
king our sovereign, in the land of France, Champagne and Brie!”
“Messire Louis de Graville, chevalier, councillor, and
chamberlain of the king, admiral of France, keeper of the Forest
of Vincennes!”
“Master Denis le Mercier, guardian of the house of the blind at
Paris!” etc., etc., etc.
This was becoming unbearable.
This strange accompaniment, which rendered it difficult to follow
the piece, made Gringoire all the more indignant because he could
not conceal from himself the fact that the interest was
continually increasing, and that all his work required was a
chance of being heard.
It was, in fact, difficult to imagine a more ingenious and more
dramatic composition. The four personages of the prologue were
bewailing themselves in their mortal embarrassment, when Venus in
person, (_vera incessa patuit dea_) presented herself to them,
clad in a fine robe bearing the heraldic device of the ship of
the city of Paris. She had come herself to claim the dolphin
promised to the most beautiful. Jupiter, whose thunder could be
heard rumbling in the dressing-room, supported her claim, and
Venus was on the point of carrying it off,—that is to say,
without allegory, of marrying monsieur the dauphin, when a young
child clad in white damask, and holding in her hand a daisy (a
transparent personification of Mademoiselle Marguerite of
Flanders) came to contest it with Venus.
Theatrical effect and change.
After a dispute, Venus, Marguerite, and the assistants agreed to
submit to the good judgment of time holy Virgin. There was
another good part, that of the king of Mesopotamia; but through
so many interruptions, it was difficult to make out what end he
served. All these persons had ascended by the ladder to the
stage.
But all was over; none of these beauties had been felt nor
understood. On the entrance of the cardinal, one would have said
that an invisible magic thread had suddenly drawn all glances
from the marble table to the gallery, from the southern to the
western extremity of the hall. Nothing could disenchant the
audience; all eyes remained fixed there, and the new-comers and
their accursed names, and their faces, and their costumes,
afforded a continual diversion. This was very distressing. With
the exception of Gisquette and Liénarde, who turned round from
time to time when Gringoire plucked them by the sleeve; with the
exception of the big, patient neighbor, no one listened, no one
looked at the poor, deserted morality full face. Gringoire saw
only profiles.
With what bitterness did he behold his whole erection of glory
and of poetry crumble away bit by bit! And to think that these
people had been upon the point of instituting a revolt against
the bailiff through impatience to hear his work! now that they
had it they did not care for it. This same representation which
had been begun amid so unanimous an acclamation! Eternal flood
and ebb of popular favor! To think that they had been on the
point of hanging the bailiff’s sergeant! What would he not have
given to be still at that hour of honey!
But the usher’s brutal monologue came to an end; every one had
arrived, and Gringoire breathed freely once more; the actors
continued bravely. But Master Coppenole, the hosier, must needs
rise of a sudden, and Gringoire was forced to listen to him
deliver, amid universal attention, the following abominable
harangue.
“Messieurs the _bourgeois_ and squires of Paris, I don’t know,
cross of God! what we are doing here. I certainly do see yonder
in the corner on that stage, some people who appear to be
fighting. I don’t know whether that is what you call a “mystery,”
but it is not amusing; they quarrel with their tongues and
nothing more. I have been waiting for the first blow this quarter
of an hour; nothing comes; they are cowards who only scratch each
other with insults. You ought to send for the fighters of London
or Rotterdam; and, I can tell you! you would have had blows of
the fist that could be heard in the Place; but these men excite
our pity. They ought at least, to give us a moorish dance, or
some other mummer! That is not what was told me; I was promised a
feast of fools, with the election of a pope. We have our pope of
fools at Ghent also; we’re not behindhand in that, cross of God!
But this is the way we manage it; we collect a crowd like this
one here, then each person in turn passes his head through a
hole, and makes a grimace at the rest; time one who makes the
ugliest, is elected pope by general acclamation; that’s the way
it is. It is very diverting. Would you like to make your pope
after the fashion of my country? At all events, it will be less
wearisome than to listen to chatterers. If they wish to come and
make their grimaces through the hole, they can join the game.
What say you, Messieurs les _bourgeois_? You have here enough
grotesque specimens of both sexes, to allow of laughing in
Flemish fashion, and there are enough of us ugly in countenance
to hope for a fine grinning match.”
Gringoire would have liked to retort; stupefaction, rage,
indignation, deprived him of words. Moreover, the suggestion of
the popular hosier was received with such enthusiasm by these
_bourgeois_ who were flattered at being called “squires,” that
all resistance was useless. There was nothing to be done but to
allow one’s self to drift with the torrent. Gringoire hid his
face between his two hands, not being so fortunate as to have a
mantle with which to veil his head, like Agamemnon of Timantis.
CHAPTER V. QUASIMODO.
In the twinkling of an eye, all was ready to execute Coppenole’s
idea. _Bourgeois_, scholars and law clerks all set to work. The
little chapel situated opposite the marble table was selected for
the scene of the grinning match. A pane broken in the pretty rose
window above the door, left free a circle of stone through which
it was agreed that the competitors should thrust their heads. In
order to reach it, it was only necessary to mount upon a couple
of hogsheads, which had been produced from I know not where, and
perched one upon the other, after a fashion. It was settled that
each candidate, man or woman (for it was possible to choose a
female pope), should, for the sake of leaving the impression of
his grimace fresh and complete, cover his face and remain
concealed in the chapel until the moment of his appearance. In
less than an instant, the chapel was crowded with competitors,
upon whom the door was then closed.
Coppenole, from his post, ordered all, directed all, arranged
all. During the uproar, the cardinal, no less abashed than
Gringoire, had retired with all his suite, under the pretext of
business and vespers, without the crowd which his arrival had so
deeply stirred being in the least moved by his departure.
Guillaume Rym was the only one who noticed his eminence’s
discomfiture. The attention of the populace, like the sun,
pursued its revolution; having set out from one end of the hall,
and halted for a space in the middle, it had now reached the
other end. The marble table, the brocaded gallery had each had
their day; it was now the turn of the chapel of Louis XI.
Henceforth, the field was open to all folly. There was no one
there now, but the Flemings and the rabble.
The grimaces began. The first face which appeared at the
aperture, with eyelids turned up to the reds, a mouth open like a
maw, and a brow wrinkled like our hussar boots of the Empire,
evoked such an inextinguishable peal of laughter that Homer would
have taken all these louts for gods. Nevertheless, the grand hall
was anything but Olympus, and Gringoire’s poor Jupiter knew it
better than any one else. A second and third grimace followed,
then another and another; and the laughter and transports of
delight went on increasing. There was in this spectacle, a
peculiar power of intoxication and fascination, of which it would
be difficult to convey to the reader of our day and our salons
any idea.
Let the reader picture to himself a series of visages presenting
successively all geometrical forms, from the triangle to the
trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; all human
expressions, from wrath to lewdness; all ages, from the wrinkles
of the new-born babe to the wrinkles of the aged and dying; all
religious phantasmagories, from Faun to Beelzebub; all animal
profiles, from the maw to the beak, from the jowl to the muzzle.
Let the reader imagine all these grotesque figures of the Pont
Neuf, those nightmares petrified beneath the hand of Germain
Pilon, assuming life and breath, and coming in turn to stare you
in the face with burning eyes; all the masks of the Carnival of
Venice passing in succession before your glass,—in a word, a
human kaleidoscope.
The orgy grew more and more Flemish. Teniers could have given but
a very imperfect idea of it. Let the reader picture to himself in
bacchanal form, Salvator Rosa’s battle. There were no longer
either scholars or ambassadors or _bourgeois_ or men or women;
there was no longer any Clopin Trouillefou, nor Gilles Lecornu,
nor Marie Quatrelivres, nor Robin Poussepain. All was universal
license. The grand hall was no longer anything but a vast furnace
of effrontry and joviality, where every mouth was a cry, every
individual a posture; everything shouted and howled. The strange
visages which came, in turn, to gnash their teeth in the rose
window, were like so many brands cast into the brazier; and from
the whole of this effervescing crowd, there escaped, as from a
furnace, a sharp, piercing, stinging noise, hissing like the
wings of a gnat.
“Ho hé! curse it!”
“Just look at that face!”
“It’s not good for anything.”
“Guillemette Maugerepuis, just look at that bull’s muzzle; it
only lacks the horns. It can’t be your husband.”
“Another!”
“Belly of the pope! what sort of a grimace is that?”
“Holà hé! that’s cheating. One must show only one’s face.”
“That damned Perrette Callebotte! she’s capable of that!”
“Good! Good!”
“I’m stifling!”
“There’s a fellow whose ears won’t go through!” Etc., etc.
But we must do justice to our friend Jehan. In the midst of this
witches’ sabbath, he was still to be seen on the top of his
pillar, like the cabin-boy on the topmast. He floundered about
with incredible fury. His mouth was wide open, and from it there
escaped a cry which no one heard, not that it was covered by the
general clamor, great as that was but because it attained, no
doubt, the limit of perceptible sharp sounds, the thousand
vibrations of Sauveur, or the eight thousand of Biot.
As for Gringoire, the first moment of depression having passed,
he had regained his composure. He had hardened himself against
adversity.—“Continue!” he had said for the third time, to his
comedians, speaking machines; then as he was marching with great
strides in front of the marble table, a fancy seized him to go
and appear in his turn at the aperture of the chapel, were it
only for the pleasure of making a grimace at that ungrateful
populace.—“But no, that would not be worthy of us; no, vengeance!
let us combat until the end,” he repeated to himself; “the power
of poetry over people is great; I will bring them back. We shall
see which will carry the day, grimaces or polite literature.”
Alas! he had been left the sole spectator of his piece. It was
far worse than it had been a little while before. He no longer
beheld anything but backs.
I am mistaken. The big, patient man, whom he had already
consulted in a critical moment, had remained with his face turned
towards the stage. As for Gisquette and Liénarde, they had
deserted him long ago.
Gringoire was touched to the heart by the fidelity of his only
spectator. He approached him and addressed him, shaking his arm
slightly; for the good man was leaning on the balustrade and
dozing a little.
“Monsieur,” said Gringoire, “I thank you!”
“Monsieur,” replied the big man with a yawn, “for what?”
“I see what wearies you,” resumed the poet; “’tis all this noise
which prevents your hearing comfortably. But be at ease! your
name shall descend to posterity! Your name, if you please?”
“Renauld Chateau, guardian of the seals of the Châtelet of Paris,
at your service.”
“Monsieur, you are the only representative of the muses here,”
said Gringoire.
“You are too kind, sir,” said the guardian of the seals at the
Châtelet.
“You are the only one,” resumed Gringoire, “who has listened to
the piece decorously. What do you think of it?”
“He! he!” replied the fat magistrate, half aroused, “it’s
tolerably jolly, that’s a fact.”
Gringoire was forced to content himself with this eulogy; for a
thunder of applause, mingled with a prodigious acclamation, cut
their conversation short. The Pope of the Fools had been elected.
“Noël! Noël! Noël!”[6] shouted the people on all sides. That was,
in fact, a marvellous grimace which was beaming at that moment
through the aperture in the rose window. After all the
pentagonal, hexagonal, and whimsical faces, which had succeeded
each other at that hole without realizing the ideal of the
grotesque which their imaginations, excited by the orgy, had
constructed, nothing less was needed to win their suffrages than
the sublime grimace which had just dazzled the assembly. Master
Coppenole himself applauded, and Clopin Trouillefou, who had been
among the competitors (and God knows what intensity of ugliness
his visage could attain), confessed himself conquered: We will do
the same. We shall not try to give the reader an idea of that
tetrahedral nose, that horseshoe mouth; that little left eye
obstructed with a red, bushy, bristling eyebrow, while the right
eye disappeared entirely beneath an enormous wart; of those teeth
in disarray, broken here and there, like the embattled parapet of
a fortress; of that callous lip, upon which one of these teeth
encroached, like the tusk of an elephant; of that forked chin;
and above all, of the expression spread over the whole; of that
mixture of malice, amazement, and sadness. Let the reader dream
of this whole, if he can.
The acclamation was unanimous; people rushed towards the chapel.
They made the lucky Pope of the Fools come forth in triumph. But
it was then that surprise and admiration attained their highest
pitch; the grimace was his face.
Or rather, his whole person was a grimace. A huge head, bristling
with red hair; between his shoulders an enormous hump, a
counterpart perceptible in front; a system of thighs and legs so
strangely astray that they could touch each other only at the
knees, and, viewed from the front, resembled the crescents of two
scythes joined by the handles; large feet, monstrous hands; and,
with all this deformity, an indescribable and redoubtable air of
vigor, agility, and courage,—strange exception to the eternal
rule which wills that force as well as beauty shall be the result
of harmony. Such was the pope whom the fools had just chosen for
themselves.
One would have pronounced him a giant who had been broken and
badly put together again.
When this species of cyclops appeared on the threshold of the
chapel, motionless, squat, and almost as broad as he was tall;
_squared_ on the _base_, as a great man says; with his doublet
half red, half violet, sown with silver bells, and, above all, in
the perfection of his ugliness, the populace recognized him on
the instant, and shouted with one voice,—
“’Tis Quasimodo, the bellringer! ’tis Quasimodo, the hunchback of
Notre-Dame! Quasimodo, the one-eyed! Quasimodo, the bandy-legged!
Noël! Noël!”
It will be seen that the poor fellow had a choice of surnames.
“Let the women with child beware!” shouted the scholars.
“Or those who wish to be,” resumed Joannes.
The women did, in fact, hide their faces.
“Oh! the horrible monkey!” said one of them.
“As wicked as he is ugly,” retorted another.
“He’s the devil,” added a third.
“I have the misfortune to live near Notre-Dame; I hear him
prowling round the eaves by night.”
“With the cats.”
“He’s always on our roofs.”
“He throws spells down our chimneys.”
“The other evening, he came and made a grimace at me through my
attic window. I thought that it was a man. Such a fright as I
had!”
“I’m sure that he goes to the witches’ sabbath. Once he left a
broom on my leads.”
“Oh! what a displeasing hunchback’s face!”
“Oh! what an ill-favored soul!”
“Whew!”
The men, on the contrary, were delighted and applauded.
Quasimodo, the object of the tumult, still stood on the threshold
of the chapel, sombre and grave, and allowed them to admire him.
One scholar (Robin Poussepain, I think), came and laughed in his
face, and too close. Quasimodo contented himself with taking him
by the girdle, and hurling him ten paces off amid the crowd; all
without uttering a word.
Master Coppenole, in amazement, approached him.
“Cross of God! Holy Father! you possess the handsomest ugliness
that I have ever beheld in my life. You would deserve to be pope
at Rome, as well as at Paris.”
So saying, he placed his hand gayly on his shoulder. Quasimodo
did not stir. Coppenole went on,—
“You are a rogue with whom I have a fancy for carousing, were it
to cost me a new dozen of twelve livres of Tours. How does it
strike you?”
Quasimodo made no reply.
“Cross of God!” said the hosier, “are you deaf?”
He was, in truth, deaf.
Nevertheless, he began to grow impatient with Coppenole’s
behavior, and suddenly turned towards him with so formidable a
gnashing of teeth, that the Flemish giant recoiled, like a
bull-dog before a cat.
Then there was created around that strange personage, a circle of
terror and respect, whose radius was at least fifteen geometrical
feet. An old woman explained to Coppenole that Quasimodo was
deaf.
“Deaf!” said the hosier, with his great Flemish laugh. “Cross of
God! He’s a perfect pope!”
“Hé! I recognize him,” exclaimed Jehan, who had, at last,
descended from his capital, in order to see Quasimodo at closer
quarters, “he’s the bellringer of my brother, the archdeacon.
Good-day, Quasimodo!”
“What a devil of a man!” said Robin Poussepain still all bruised
with his fall. “He shows himself; he’s a hunchback. He walks;
he’s bandy-legged. He looks at you; he’s one-eyed. You speak to
him; he’s deaf. And what does this Polyphemus do with his
tongue?”
“He speaks when he chooses,” said the old woman; “he became deaf
through ringing the bells. He is not dumb.”
“That he lacks,” remarks Jehan.
“And he has one eye too many,” added Robin Poussepain.
“Not at all,” said Jehan wisely. “A one-eyed man is far less
complete than a blind man. He knows what he lacks.”
In the meantime, all the beggars, all the lackeys, all the
cutpurses, joined with the scholars, had gone in procession to
seek, in the cupboard of the law clerks’ company, the cardboard
tiara, and the derisive robe of the Pope of the Fools. Quasimodo
allowed them to array him in them without wincing, and with a
sort of proud docility. Then they made him seat himself on a
motley litter. Twelve officers of the fraternity of fools raised
him on their shoulders; and a sort of bitter and disdainful joy
lighted up the morose face of the cyclops, when he beheld beneath
his deformed feet all those heads of handsome, straight,
well-made men. Then the ragged and howling procession set out on
its march, according to custom, around the inner galleries of the
Courts, before making the circuit of the streets and squares.
CHAPTER VI. ESMERALDA.
We are delighted to be able to inform the reader, that during the
whole of this scene, Gringoire and his piece had stood firm. His
actors, spurred on by him, had not ceased to spout his comedy,
and he had not ceased to listen to it. He had made up his mind
about the tumult, and was determined to proceed to the end, not
giving up the hope of a return of attention on the part of the
public. This gleam of hope acquired fresh life, when he saw
Quasimodo, Coppenole, and the deafening escort of the pope of the
procession of fools quit the hall amid great uproar. The throng
rushed eagerly after them. “Good,” he said to himself, “there go
all the mischief-makers.” Unfortunately, all the mischief-makers
constituted the entire audience. In the twinkling of an eye, the
grand hall was empty.
To tell the truth, a few spectators still remained, some
scattered, others in groups around the pillars, women, old men,
or children, who had had enough of the uproar and tumult. Some
scholars were still perched astride of the window-sills, engaged
in gazing into the Place.
“Well,” thought Gringoire, “here are still as many as are
required to hear the end of my mystery. They are few in number,
but it is a choice audience, a lettered audience.”
An instant later, a symphony which had been intended to produce
the greatest effect on the arrival of the Virgin, was lacking.
Gringoire perceived that his music had been carried off by the
procession of the Pope of the Fools. “Skip it,” said he,
stoically.
He approached a group of _bourgeois_, who seemed to him to be
discussing his piece. This is the fragment of conversation which
he caught,—
“You know, Master Cheneteau, the Hôtel de Navarre, which belonged
to Monsieur de Nemours?”
“Yes, opposite the Chapelle de Braque.”
“Well, the treasury has just let it to Guillaume Alixandre,
historian, for six livres, eight sols, parisian, a year.”
“How rents are going up!”
“Come,” said Gringoire to himself, with a sigh, “the others are
listening.”
“Comrades,” suddenly shouted one of the young scamps from the
window, “La Esmeralda! La Esmeralda in the Place!”
This word produced a magical effect. Every one who was left in
the hall flew to the windows, climbing the walls in order to see,
and repeating, “La Esmeralda! La Esmeralda?” At the same time, a
great sound of applause was heard from without.
“What’s the meaning of this, of the Esmeralda?” said Gringoire,
wringing his hands in despair. “Ah, good heavens! it seems to be
the turn of the windows now.”
He returned towards the marble table, and saw that the
representation had been interrupted. It was precisely at the
instant when Jupiter should have appeared with his thunder. But
Jupiter was standing motionless at the foot of the stage.
“Michel Giborne!” cried the irritated poet, “what are you doing
there? Is that your part? Come up!”
“Alas!” said Jupiter, “a scholar has just seized the ladder.”
Gringoire looked. It was but too true. All communication between
his plot and its solution was intercepted.
“The rascal,” he murmured. “And why did he take that ladder?”
“In order to go and see the Esmeralda,” replied Jupiter
piteously. “He said, ‘Come, here’s a ladder that’s of no use!’
and he took it.”
This was the last blow. Gringoire received it with resignation.
“May the devil fly away with you!” he said to the comedian, “and
if I get my pay, you shall receive yours.”
Then he beat a retreat, with drooping head, but the last in the
field, like a general who has fought well.
And as he descended the winding stairs of the courts: “A fine
rabble of asses and dolts these Parisians!” he muttered between
his teeth; “they come to hear a mystery and don’t listen to it at
all! They are engrossed by every one, by Clopin Trouillefou, by
the cardinal, by Coppenole, by Quasimodo, by the devil! but by
Madame the Virgin Mary, not at all. If I had known, I’d have
given you Virgin Mary; you ninnies! And I! to come to see faces
and behold only backs! to be a poet, and to reap the success of
an apothecary! It is true that Homerus begged through the Greek
towns, and that Naso died in exile among the Muscovites. But may
the devil flay me if I understand what they mean with their
Esmeralda! What is that word, in the first place?—’tis Egyptian!”
BOOK SECOND.
CHAPTER I. FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA.
Night comes on early in January. The streets were already dark
when Gringoire issued forth from the Courts. This gloom pleased
him; he was in haste to reach some obscure and deserted alley, in
order there to meditate at his ease, and in order that the
philosopher might place the first dressing upon the wound of the
poet. Philosophy, moreover, was his sole refuge, for he did not
know where he was to lodge for the night. After the brilliant
failure of his first theatrical venture, he dared not return to
the lodging which he occupied in the Rue Grenier-sur-l’Eau,
opposite to the Port-au-Foin, having depended upon receiving from
monsieur the provost for his epithalamium, the wherewithal to pay
Master Guillaume Doulx-Sire, farmer of the taxes on cloven-footed
animals in Paris, the rent which he owed him, that is to say,
twelve sols parisian; twelve times the value of all that he
possessed in the world, including his trunk-hose, his shirt, and
his cap. After reflecting a moment, temporarily sheltered beneath
the little wicket of the prison of the treasurer of the
Sainte-Chappelle, as to the shelter which he would select for the
night, having all the pavements of Paris to choose from, he
remembered to have noticed the week previously in the Rue de la
Savaterie, at the door of a councillor of the parliament, a
stepping stone for mounting a mule, and to have said to himself
that that stone would furnish, on occasion, a very excellent
pillow for a mendicant or a poet. He thanked Providence for
having sent this happy idea to him; but, as he was preparing to
cross the Place, in order to reach the tortuous labyrinth of the
city, where meander all those old sister streets, the Rues de la
Barillerie, de la Vieille-Draperie, de la Savaterie, de la
Juiverie, etc., still extant to-day, with their nine-story
houses, he saw the procession of the Pope of the Fools, which was
also emerging from the court house, and rushing across the
courtyard, with great cries, a great flashing of torches, and the
music which belonged to him, Gringoire. This sight revived the
pain of his self-love; he fled. In the bitterness of his dramatic
misadventure, everything which reminded him of the festival of
that day irritated his wound and made it bleed.
He was on the point of turning to the Pont Saint-Michel; children
were running about here and there with fire lances and rockets.
“Pest on firework candles!” said Gringoire; and he fell back on
the Pont au Change. To the house at the head of the bridge there
had been affixed three small banners, representing the king, the
dauphin, and Marguerite of Flanders, and six little pennons on
which were portrayed the Duke of Austria, the Cardinal de
Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, and Madame Jeanne de France, and Monsieur
the Bastard of Bourbon, and I know not whom else; all being
illuminated with torches. The rabble were admiring.
“Happy painter, Jehan Fourbault!” said Gringoire with a deep
sigh; and he turned his back upon the bannerets and pennons. A
street opened before him; he thought it so dark and deserted that
he hoped to there escape from all the rumors as well as from all
the gleams of the festival. At the end of a few moments his foot
came in contact with an obstacle; he stumbled and fell. It was
the May truss, which the clerks of the clerks’ law court had
deposited that morning at the door of a president of the
parliament, in honor of the solemnity of the day. Gringoire bore
this new disaster heroically; he picked himself up, and reached
the water’s edge. After leaving behind him the civic Tournelle[7]
and the criminal tower, and skirted the great walls of the king’s
garden, on that unpaved strand where the mud reached to his
ankles, he reached the western point of the city, and considered
for some time the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches, which has
disappeared beneath the bronze horse of the Pont Neuf. The islet
appeared to him in the shadow like a black mass, beyond the
narrow strip of whitish water which separated him from it. One
could divine by the ray of a tiny light the sort of hut in the
form of a beehive where the ferryman of cows took refuge at
night.
“Happy ferryman!” thought Gringoire; “you do not dream of glory,
and you do not make marriage songs! What matters it to you, if
kings and Duchesses of Burgundy marry? You know no other daisies
(_marguerites_) than those which your April greensward gives your
cows to browse upon; while I, a poet, am hooted, and shiver, and
owe twelve sous, and the soles of my shoes are so transparent,
that they might serve as glasses for your lantern! Thanks,
ferryman, your cabin rests my eyes, and makes me forget Paris!”
He was roused from his almost lyric ecstacy, by a big double
Saint-Jean cracker, which suddenly went off from the happy cabin.
It was the cow ferryman, who was taking his part in the
rejoicings of the day, and letting off fireworks.
This cracker made Gringoire’s skin bristle up all over.
“Accursed festival!” he exclaimed, “wilt thou pursue me
everywhere? Oh! good God! even to the ferryman’s!”
Then he looked at the Seine at his feet, and a horrible
temptation took possession of him:
“Oh!” said he, “I would gladly drown myself, were the water not
so cold!”
Then a desperate resolution occurred to him. It was, since he
could not escape from the Pope of the Fools, from Jehan
Fourbault’s bannerets, from May trusses, from squibs and
crackers, to go to the Place de Grève.
“At least,” he said to himself, “I shall there have a firebrand
of joy wherewith to warm myself, and I can sup on some crumbs of
the three great armorial bearings of royal sugar which have been
erected on the public refreshment-stall of the city.”
CHAPTER II. THE PLACE DE GRÈVE.
There remains to-day but a very imperceptible vestige of the
Place de Grève, such as it existed then; it consists in the
charming little turret, which occupies the angle north of the
Place, and which, already enshrouded in the ignoble plaster which
fills with paste the delicate lines of its sculpture, would soon
have disappeared, perhaps submerged by that flood of new houses
which so rapidly devours all the ancient façades of Paris.
The persons who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de Grève
without casting a glance of pity and sympathy on that poor turret
strangled between two hovels of the time of Louis XV., can easily
reconstruct in their minds the aggregate of edifices to which it
belonged, and find again entire in it the ancient Gothic place of
the fifteenth century.
It was then, as it is to-day, an irregular trapezoid, bordered on
one side by the quay, and on the other three by a series of
lofty, narrow, and gloomy houses. By day, one could admire the
variety of its edifices, all sculptured in stone or wood, and
already presenting complete specimens of the different domestic
architectures of the Middle Ages, running back from the fifteenth
to the eleventh century, from the casement which had begun to
dethrone the arch, to the Roman semicircle, which had been
supplanted by the ogive, and which still occupies, below it, the
first story of that ancient house de la Tour Roland, at the
corner of the Place upon the Seine, on the side of the street
with the Tannerie. At night, one could distinguish nothing of all
that mass of buildings, except the black indentation of the
roofs, unrolling their chain of acute angles round the place; for
one of the radical differences between the cities of that time,
and the cities of the present day, lay in the façades which
looked upon the places and streets, and which were then gables.
For the last two centuries the houses have been turned round.
In the centre of the eastern side of the Place, rose a heavy and
hybrid construction, formed of three buildings placed in
juxtaposition. It was called by three names which explain its
history, its destination, and its architecture: “The House of the
Dauphin,” because Charles V., when Dauphin, had inhabited it;
“The Marchandise,” because it had served as town hall; and “The
Pillared House” (_domus ad piloria_), because of a series of
large pillars which sustained the three stories. The city found
there all that is required for a city like Paris; a chapel in
which to pray to God; a _plaidoyer_, or pleading room, in which
to hold hearings, and to repel, at need, the King’s people; and
under the roof, an _arsenac_ full of artillery. For the
_bourgeois_ of Paris were aware that it is not sufficient to pray
in every conjuncture, and to plead for the franchises of the
city, and they had always in reserve, in the garret of the town
hall, a few good rusty arquebuses. The Grève had then that
sinister aspect which it preserves to-day from the execrable
ideas which it awakens, and from the sombre town hall of
Dominique Bocador, which has replaced the Pillared House. It must
be admitted that a permanent gibbet and a pillory, “a justice and
a ladder,” as they were called in that day, erected side by side
in the centre of the pavement, contributed not a little to cause
eyes to be turned away from that fatal place, where so many
beings full of life and health have agonized; where, fifty years
later, that fever of Saint Vallier was destined to have its
birth, that terror of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all
maladies because it comes not from God, but from man.
It is a consoling idea (let us remark in passing), to think that
the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still encumbered
with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its
paraphernalia of torture, permanent and riveted to the pavement,
the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross du Trahoir,
the Marché aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfaucon, the barrier
des Sergents, the Place aux Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis,
Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint Jacques, without
reckoning the innumerable ladders of the provosts, the bishop of
the chapters, of the abbots, of the priors, who had the decree of
life and death,—without reckoning the judicial drownings in the
river Seine; it is consoling to-day, after having lost
successively all the pieces of its armor, its luxury of torment,
its penalty of imagination and fancy, its torture for which it
reconstructed every five years a leather bed at the Grand
Châtelet, that ancient suzerain of feudal society almost expunged
from our laws and our cities, hunted from code to code, chased
from place to place, has no longer, in our immense Paris, any
more than a dishonored corner of the Grève,—than a miserable
guillotine, furtive, uneasy, shameful, which seems always afraid
of being caught in the act, so quickly does it disappear after
having dealt its blow.
CHAPTER III. KISSES FOR BLOWS.
When Pierre Gringoire arrived on the Place de Grève, he was
paralyzed. He had directed his course across the Pont aux
Meuniers, in order to avoid the rabble on the Pont au Change, and
the pennons of Jehan Fourbault; but the wheels of all the
bishop’s mills had splashed him as he passed, and his doublet was
drenched; it seemed to him besides, that the failure of his piece
had rendered him still more sensible to cold than usual. Hence he
made haste to draw near the bonfire, which was burning
magnificently in the middle of the Place. But a considerable
crowd formed a circle around it.
“Accursed Parisians!” he said to himself (for Gringoire, like a
true dramatic poet, was subject to monologues) “there they are
obstructing my fire! Nevertheless, I am greatly in need of a
chimney corner; my shoes drink in the water, and all those cursed
mills wept upon me! That devil of a Bishop of Paris, with his
mills! I’d just like to know what use a bishop can make of a
mill! Does he expect to become a miller instead of a bishop? If
only my malediction is needed for that, I bestow it upon him! and
his cathedral, and his mills! Just see if those boobies will put
themselves out! Move aside! I’d like to know what they are doing
there! They are warming themselves, much pleasure may it give
them! They are watching a hundred fagots burn; a fine spectacle!”
On looking more closely, he perceived that the circle was much
larger than was required simply for the purpose of getting warm
at the king’s fire, and that this concourse of people had not
been attracted solely by the beauty of the hundred fagots which
were burning.
In a vast space left free between the crowd and the fire, a young
girl was dancing.
Whether this young girl was a human being, a fairy, or an angel,
is what Gringoire, sceptical philosopher and ironical poet that
he was, could not decide at the first moment, so fascinated was
he by this dazzling vision.
She was not tall, though she seemed so, so boldly did her slender
form dart about. She was swarthy of complexion, but one divined
that, by day, her skin must possess that beautiful golden tone of
the Andalusians and the Roman women. Her little foot, too, was
Andalusian, for it was both pinched and at ease in its graceful
shoe. She danced, she turned, she whirled rapidly about on an old
Persian rug, spread negligently under her feet; and each time
that her radiant face passed before you, as she whirled, her
great black eyes darted a flash of lightning at you.
All around her, all glances were riveted, all mouths open; and,
in fact, when she danced thus, to the humming of the Basque
tambourine, which her two pure, rounded arms raised above her
head, slender, frail and vivacious as a wasp, with her corsage of
gold without a fold, her variegated gown puffing out, her bare
shoulders, her delicate limbs, which her petticoat revealed at
times, her black hair, her eyes of flame, she was a supernatural
creature.
“In truth,” said Gringoire to himself, “she is a salamander, she
is a nymph, she is a goddess, she is a bacchante of the Menelean
Mount!”
At that moment, one of the salamander’s braids of hair became
unfastened, and a piece of yellow copper which was attached to
it, rolled to the ground.
“Hé, no!” said he, “she is a gypsy!”
All illusions had disappeared.
She began her dance once more; she took from the ground two
swords, whose points she rested against her brow, and which she
made to turn in one direction, while she turned in the other; it
was a purely gypsy effect. But, disenchanted though Gringoire
was, the whole effect of this picture was not without its charm
and its magic; the bonfire illuminated, with a red flaring light,
which trembled, all alive, over the circle of faces in the crowd,
on the brow of the young girl, and at the background of the Place
cast a pallid reflection, on one side upon the ancient, black,
and wrinkled façade of the House of Pillars, on the other, upon
the old stone gibbet.
Among the thousands of visages which that light tinged with
scarlet, there was one which seemed, even more than all the
others, absorbed in contemplation of the dancer. It was the face
of a man, austere, calm, and sombre. This man, whose costume was
concealed by the crowd which surrounded him, did not appear to be
more than five and thirty years of age; nevertheless, he was
bald; he had merely a few tufts of thin, gray hair on his
temples; his broad, high forehead had begun to be furrowed with
wrinkles, but his deep-set eyes sparkled with extraordinary
youthfulness, an ardent life, a profound passion. He kept them
fixed incessantly on the gypsy, and, while the giddy young girl
of sixteen danced and whirled, for the pleasure of all, his
revery seemed to become more and more sombre. From time to time,
a smile and a sigh met upon his lips, but the smile was more
melancholy than the sigh.
The young girl, stopped at length, breathless, and the people
applauded her lovingly.
“Djali!” said the gypsy.
Then Gringoire saw come up to her, a pretty little white goat,
alert, wide-awake, glossy, with gilded horns, gilded hoofs, and
gilded collar, which he had not hitherto perceived, and which had
remained lying curled up on one corner of the carpet watching his
mistress dance.
“Djali!” said the dancer, “it is your turn.”
And, seating herself, she gracefully presented her tambourine to
the goat.
“Djali,” she continued, “what month is this?”
The goat lifted its fore foot, and struck one blow upon the
tambourine. It was the first month in the year, in fact.
“Djali,” pursued the young girl, turning her tambourine round,
“what day of the month is this?”
Djali raised his little gilt hoof, and struck six blows on the
tambourine.
“Djali,” pursued the Egyptian, with still another movement of the
tambourine, “what hour of the day is it?”
Djali struck seven blows. At that moment, the clock of the Pillar
House rang out seven.
The people were amazed.
“There’s sorcery at the bottom of it,” said a sinister voice in
the crowd. It was that of the bald man, who never removed his
eyes from the gypsy.
She shuddered and turned round; but applause broke forth and
drowned the morose exclamation.
It even effaced it so completely from her mind, that she
continued to question her goat.
“Djali, what does Master Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of the
pistoliers of the town do, at the procession of Candlemas?”
Djali reared himself on his hind legs, and began to bleat,
marching along with so much dainty gravity, that the entire
circle of spectators burst into a laugh at this parody of the
interested devoutness of the captain of pistoliers.
“Djali,” resumed the young girl, emboldened by her growing
success, “how preaches Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator to
the king in the ecclesiastical court?”
The goat seated himself on his hind quarters, and began to bleat,
waving his fore feet in so strange a manner, that, with the
exception of the bad French, and worse Latin, Jacques Charmolue
was there complete,—gesture, accent, and attitude.
And the crowd applauded louder than ever.
“Sacrilege! profanation!” resumed the voice of the bald man.
The gypsy turned round once more.
“Ah!” said she, “’tis that villanous man!” Then, thrusting her
under lip out beyond the upper, she made a little pout, which
appeared to be familiar to her, executed a pirouette on her heel,
and set about collecting in her tambourine the gifts of the
multitude.
Big blanks, little blanks, targes[8] and eagle liards showered
into it.
All at once, she passed in front of Gringoire. Gringoire put his
hand so recklessly into his pocket that she halted. “The devil!”
said the poet, finding at the bottom of his pocket the reality,
that is, to say, a void. In the meantime, the pretty girl stood
there, gazing at him with her big eyes, and holding out her
tambourine to him and waiting. Gringoire broke into a violent
perspiration.
If he had all Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have given
it to the dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru, and, moreover,
America had not yet been discovered.
Happily, an unexpected incident came to his rescue.
“Will you take yourself off, you Egyptian grasshopper?” cried a
sharp voice, which proceeded from the darkest corner of the
Place.
The young girl turned round in affright. It was no longer the
voice of the bald man; it was the voice of a woman, bigoted and
malicious.
However, this cry, which alarmed the gypsy, delighted a troop of
children who were prowling about there.
“It is the recluse of the Tour-Roland,” they exclaimed, with wild
laughter, “it is the sacked nun who is scolding! Hasn’t she
supped? Let’s carry her the remains of the city refreshments!”
All rushed towards the Pillar House.
In the meanwhile, Gringoire had taken advantage of the dancer’s
embarrassment, to disappear. The children’s shouts had reminded
him that he, also, had not supped, so he ran to the public
buffet. But the little rascals had better legs than he; when he
arrived, they had stripped the table. There remained not so much
as a miserable _camichon_ at five sous the pound. Nothing
remained upon the wall but slender fleurs-de-lis, mingled with
rose bushes, painted in 1434 by Mathieu Biterne. It was a meagre
supper.
It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper, it is a
still less pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where one is
to sleep. That was Gringoire’s condition. No supper, no shelter;
he saw himself pressed on all sides by necessity, and he found
necessity very crabbed. He had long ago discovered the truth,
that Jupiter created men during a fit of misanthropy, and that
during a wise man’s whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy
in a state of siege. As for himself, he had never seen the
blockade so complete; he heard his stomach sounding a parley, and
he considered it very much out of place that evil destiny should
capture his philosophy by famine.
This melancholy revery was absorbing him more and more, when a
song, quaint but full of sweetness, suddenly tore him from it. It
was the young gypsy who was singing.
Her voice was like her dancing, like her beauty. It was
indefinable and charming; something pure and sonorous, aerial,
winged, so to speak. There were continual outbursts, melodies,
unexpected cadences, then simple phrases strewn with aerial and
hissing notes; then floods of scales which would have put a
nightingale to rout, but in which harmony was always present;
then soft modulations of octaves which rose and fell, like the
bosom of the young singer. Her beautiful face followed, with
singular mobility, all the caprices of her song, from the wildest
inspiration to the chastest dignity. One would have pronounced
her now a mad creature, now a queen.
The words which she sang were in a tongue unknown to Gringoire,
and which seemed to him to be unknown to herself, so little
relation did the expression which she imparted to her song bear
to the sense of the words. Thus, these four lines, in her mouth,
were madly gay,—
Un cofre de gran riqueza
Hallaron dentro un pilar,
Dentro del, nuevas banderas
Con figuras de espantar.[9]
And an instant afterwards, at the accents which she imparted to
this stanza,—
Alarabes de cavallo
Sin poderse menear,
Con espadas, y los cuellos,
Ballestas de buen echar,
Gringoire felt the tears start to his eyes. Nevertheless, her
song breathed joy, most of all, and she seemed to sing like a
bird, from serenity and heedlessness.
The gypsy’s song had disturbed Gringoire’s revery as the swan
disturbs the water. He listened in a sort of rapture, and
forgetfulness of everything. It was the first moment in the
course of many hours when he did not feel that he suffered.
The moment was brief.
The same woman’s voice, which had interrupted the gypsy’s dance,
interrupted her song.
“Will you hold your tongue, you cricket of hell?” it cried, still
from the same obscure corner of the place.
The poor “cricket” stopped short. Gringoire covered up his ears.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, “accursed saw with missing teeth, which comes
to break the lyre!”
Meanwhile, the other spectators murmured like himself; “To the
devil with the sacked nun!” said some of them. And the old
invisible kill-joy might have had occasion to repent of her
aggressions against the gypsy had their attention not been
diverted at this moment by the procession of the Pope of the
Fools, which, after having traversed many streets and squares,
debouched on the Place de Grève, with all its torches and all its
uproar.
This procession, which our readers have seen set out from the
Palais de Justice, had organized on the way, and had been
recruited by all the knaves, idle thieves, and unemployed
vagabonds in Paris; so that it presented a very respectable
aspect when it arrived at the Grève.
First came Egypt. The Duke of Egypt headed it, on horseback, with
his counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrups for him;
behind them, the male and female Egyptians, pell-mell, with their
little children crying on their shoulders; all—duke, counts, and
populace—in rags and tatters. Then came the Kingdom of Argot;
that is to say, all the thieves of France, arranged according to
the order of their dignity; the minor people walking first. Thus
defiled by fours, with the divers insignia of their grades, in
that strange faculty, most of them lame, some cripples, others
one-armed, shop clerks, pilgrims, _hubins_, bootblacks,
thimble-riggers, street arabs, beggars, the blear-eyed beggars,
thieves, the weakly, vagabonds, merchants, sham soldiers,
goldsmiths, passed masters of pickpockets, isolated thieves. A
catalogue that would weary Homer. In the centre of the conclave
of the passed masters of pickpockets, one had some difficulty in
distinguishing the King of Argot, the grand coësre, so called,
crouching in a little cart drawn by two big dogs. After the
kingdom of the Argotiers, came the Empire of Galilee. Guillaume
Rousseau, Emperor of the Empire of Galilee, marched majestically
in his robe of purple, spotted with wine, preceded by buffoons
wrestling and executing military dances; surrounded by his
macebearers, his pickpockets and clerks of the chamber of
accounts. Last of all came the corporation of law clerks, with
its maypoles crowned with flowers, its black robes, its music
worthy of the orgy, and its large candles of yellow wax. In the
centre of this crowd, the grand officers of the Brotherhood of
Fools bore on their shoulders a litter more loaded down with
candles than the reliquary of Sainte-Geneviève in time of pest;
and on this litter shone resplendent, with crosier, cope, and
mitre, the new Pope of the Fools, the bellringer of Notre-Dame,
Quasimodo the hunchback.
Each section of this grotesque procession had its own music. The
Egyptians made their drums and African tambourines resound. The
slang men, not a very musical race, still clung to the goat’s
horn trumpet and the Gothic rubebbe of the twelfth century. The
Empire of Galilee was not much more advanced; among its music one
could hardly distinguish some miserable rebec, from the infancy
of the art, still imprisoned in the _ré-la-mi_. But it was around
the Pope of the Fools that all the musical riches of the epoch
were displayed in a magnificent discord. It was nothing but
soprano rebecs, counter-tenor rebecs, and tenor rebecs, not to
reckon the flutes and brass instruments. Alas! our readers will
remember that this was Gringoire’s orchestra.
It is difficult to convey an idea of the degree of proud and
blissful expansion to which the sad and hideous visage of
Quasimodo had attained during the transit from the Palais de
Justice, to the Place de Grève. It was the first enjoyment of
self-love that he had ever experienced. Down to that day, he had
known only humiliation, disdain for his condition, disgust for
his person. Hence, deaf though he was, he enjoyed, like a
veritable pope, the acclamations of that throng, which he hated
because he felt that he was hated by it. What mattered it that
his people consisted of a pack of fools, cripples, thieves, and
beggars? it was still a people and he was its sovereign. And he
accepted seriously all this ironical applause, all this derisive
respect, with which the crowd mingled, it must be admitted, a
good deal of very real fear. For the hunchback was robust; for
the bandy-legged fellow was agile; for the deaf man was
malicious: three qualities which temper ridicule.
We are far from believing, however, that the new Pope of the
Fools understood both the sentiments which he felt and the
sentiments which he inspired. The spirit which was lodged in this
failure of a body had, necessarily, something incomplete and deaf
about it. Thus, what he felt at the moment was to him, absolutely
vague, indistinct, and confused. Only joy made itself felt, only
pride dominated. Around that sombre and unhappy face, there hung
a radiance.
It was, then, not without surprise and alarm, that at the very
moment when Quasimodo was passing the Pillar House, in that
semi-intoxicated state, a man was seen to dart from the crowd,
and to tear from his hands, with a gesture of anger, his crosier
of gilded wood, the emblem of his mock popeship.
This man, this rash individual, was the man with the bald brow,
who, a moment earlier, standing with the gypsy’s group had
chilled the poor girl with his words of menace and of hatred. He
was dressed in an ecclesiastical costume. At the moment when he
stood forth from the crowd, Gringoire, who had not noticed him up
to that time, recognized him: “Hold!” he said, with an
exclamation of astonishment. “Eh! ’tis my master in Hermes, Dom
Claude Frollo, the archdeacon! What the devil does he want of
that old one-eyed fellow? He’ll get himself devoured!”
A cry of terror arose, in fact. The formidable Quasimodo had
hurled himself from the litter, and the women turned aside their
eyes in order not to see him tear the archdeacon asunder.
He made one bound as far as the priest, looked at him, and fell
upon his knees.
The priest tore off his tiara, broke his crozier, and rent his
tinsel cope.
Quasimodo remained on his knees, with head bent and hands
clasped. Then there was established between them a strange
dialogue of signs and gestures, for neither of them spoke. The
priest, erect on his feet, irritated, threatening, imperious;
Quasimodo, prostrate, humble, suppliant. And, nevertheless, it is
certain that Quasimodo could have crushed the priest with his
thumb.
At length the archdeacon, giving Quasimodo’s powerful shoulder a
rough shake, made him a sign to rise and follow him.
Quasimodo rose.
Then the Brotherhood of Fools, their first stupor having passed
off, wished to defend their pope, so abruptly dethroned. The
Egyptians, the men of slang, and all the fraternity of law
clerks, gathered howling round the priest.
Quasimodo placed himself in front of the priest, set in play the
muscles of his athletic fists, and glared upon the assailants
with the snarl of an angry tiger.
The priest resumed his sombre gravity, made a sign to Quasimodo,
and retired in silence.
Quasimodo walked in front of him, scattering the crowd as he
passed.
When they had traversed the populace and the Place, the cloud of
curious and idle were minded to follow them. Quasimodo then
constituted himself the rearguard, and followed the archdeacon,
walking backwards, squat, surly, monstrous, bristling, gathering
up his limbs, licking his boar’s tusks, growling like a wild
beast, and imparting to the crowd immense vibrations, with a look
or a gesture.
Both were allowed to plunge into a dark and narrow street, where
no one dared to venture after them; so thoroughly did the mere
chimera of Quasimodo gnashing his teeth bar the entrance.
“Here’s a marvellous thing,” said Gringoire; “but where the deuce
shall I find some supper?”
CHAPTER IV. THE INCONVENIENCES OF FOLLOWING A PRETTY WOMAN
THROUGH THE STREETS IN THE EVENING.
Gringoire set out to follow the gypsy at all hazards. He had seen
her, accompanied by her goat, take to the Rue de la Coutellerie;
he took the Rue de la Coutellerie.
“Why not?” he said to himself.
Gringoire, a practical philosopher of the streets of Paris, had
noticed that nothing is more propitious to revery than following
a pretty woman without knowing whither she is going. There was in
this voluntary abdication of his freewill, in this fancy
submitting itself to another fancy, which suspects it not, a
mixture of fantastic independence and blind obedience, something
indescribable, intermediate between slavery and liberty, which
pleased Gringoire,—a spirit essentially compound, undecided, and
complex, holding the extremities of all extremes, incessantly
suspended between all human propensities, and neutralizing one by
the other. He was fond of comparing himself to Mahomet’s coffin,
attracted in two different directions by two loadstones, and
hesitating eternally between the heights and the depths, between
the vault and the pavement, between fall and ascent, between
zenith and nadir.
If Gringoire had lived in our day, what a fine middle course he
would hold between classicism and romanticism!
But he was not sufficiently primitive to live three hundred
years, and ’tis a pity. His absence is a void which is but too
sensibly felt to-day.
Moreover, for the purpose of thus following passers-by (and
especially female passers-by) in the streets, which Gringoire was
fond of doing, there is no better disposition than ignorance of
where one is going to sleep.
So he walked along, very thoughtfully, behind the young girl, who
hastened her pace and made her goat trot as she saw the
_bourgeois_ returning home and the taverns—the only shops which
had been open that day—closing.
“After all,” he half thought to himself, “she must lodge
somewhere; gypsies have kindly hearts. Who knows?—”
And in the points of suspense which he placed after this
reticence in his mind, there lay I know not what flattering
ideas.
Meanwhile, from time to time, as he passed the last groups of
_bourgeois_ closing their doors, he caught some scraps of their
conversation, which broke the thread of his pleasant hypotheses.
Now it was two old men accosting each other.
“Do you know that it is cold, Master Thibaut Fernicle?”
(Gringoire had been aware of this since the beginning of the
winter.)
“Yes, indeed, Master Boniface Disome! Are we going to have a
winter such as we had three years ago, in ’80, when wood cost
eight sous the measure?”
“Bah! that’s nothing, Master Thibaut, compared with the winter of
1407, when it froze from St. Martin’s Day until Candlemas! and so
cold that the pen of the registrar of the parliament froze every
three words, in the Grand Chamber! which interrupted the
registration of justice.”
Further on there were two female neighbors at their windows,
holding candles, which the fog caused to sputter.
“Has your husband told you about the mishap, Mademoiselle la
Boudraque?”
“No. What is it, Mademoiselle Turquant?”
“The horse of M. Gilles Godin, the notary at the Châtelet, took
fright at the Flemings and their procession, and overturned
Master Philippe Avrillot, lay monk of the Célestins.”
“Really?”
“Actually.”
“A _bourgeois_ horse! ’tis rather too much! If it had been a
cavalry horse, well and good!”
And the windows were closed. But Gringoire had lost the thread of
his ideas, nevertheless.
Fortunately, he speedily found it again, and he knotted it
together without difficulty, thanks to the gypsy, thanks to
Djali, who still walked in front of him; two fine, delicate, and
charming creatures, whose tiny feet, beautiful forms, and
graceful manners he was engaged in admiring, almost confusing
them in his contemplation; believing them to be both young girls,
from their intelligence and good friendship; regarding them both
as goats,—so far as the lightness, agility, and dexterity of
their walk were concerned.
But the streets were becoming blacker and more deserted every
moment. The curfew had sounded long ago, and it was only at rare
intervals now that they encountered a passer-by in the street, or
a light in the windows. Gringoire had become involved, in his
pursuit of the gypsy, in that inextricable labyrinth of alleys,
squares, and closed courts which surround the ancient sepulchre
of the Saints-Innocents, and which resembles a ball of thread
tangled by a cat. “Here are streets which possess but little
logic!” said Gringoire, lost in the thousands of circuits which
returned upon themselves incessantly, but where the young girl
pursued a road which seemed familiar to her, without hesitation
and with a step which became ever more rapid. As for him, he
would have been utterly ignorant of his situation had he not
espied, in passing, at the turn of a street, the octagonal mass
of the pillory of the fish markets, the open-work summit of which
threw its black, fretted outlines clearly upon a window which was
still lighted in the Rue Verdelet.
The young girl’s attention had been attracted to him for the last
few moments; she had repeatedly turned her head towards him with
uneasiness; she had even once come to a standstill, and taking
advantage of a ray of light which escaped from a half-open bakery
to survey him intently, from head to foot, then, having cast this
glance, Gringoire had seen her make that little pout which he had
already noticed, after which she passed on.
This little pout had furnished Gringoire with food for thought.
There was certainly both disdain and mockery in that graceful
grimace. So he dropped his head, began to count the
paving-stones, and to follow the young girl at a little greater
distance, when, at the turn of a street, which had caused him to
lose sight of her, he heard her utter a piercing cry.
He hastened his steps.
The street was full of shadows. Nevertheless, a twist of tow
soaked in oil, which burned in a cage at the feet of the Holy
Virgin at the street corner, permitted Gringoire to make out the
gypsy struggling in the arms of two men, who were endeavoring to
stifle her cries. The poor little goat, in great alarm, lowered
his horns and bleated.
“Help! gentlemen of the watch!” shouted Gringoire, and advanced
bravely. One of the men who held the young girl turned towards
him. It was the formidable visage of Quasimodo.
Gringoire did not take to flight, but neither did he advance
another step.
Quasimodo came up to him, tossed him four paces away on the
pavement with a backward turn of the hand, and plunged rapidly
into the gloom, bearing the young girl folded across one arm like
a silken scarf. His companion followed him, and the poor goat ran
after them all, bleating plaintively.
“Murder! murder!” shrieked the unhappy gypsy.
“Halt, rascals, and yield me that wench!” suddenly shouted in a
voice of thunder, a cavalier who appeared suddenly from a
neighboring square.
It was a captain of the king’s archers, armed from head to foot,
with his sword in his hand.
He tore the gypsy from the arms of the dazed Quasimodo, threw her
across his saddle, and at the moment when the terrible hunchback,
recovering from his surprise, rushed upon him to regain his prey,
fifteen or sixteen archers, who followed their captain closely,
made their appearance, with their two-edged swords in their
fists. It was a squad of the king’s police, which was making the
rounds, by order of Messire Robert d’Estouteville, guard of the
provostship of Paris.
Quasimodo was surrounded, seized, garroted; he roared, he foamed
at the mouth, he bit; and had it been broad daylight, there is no
doubt that his face alone, rendered more hideous by wrath, would
have put the entire squad to flight. But by night he was deprived
of his most formidable weapon, his ugliness.
His companion had disappeared during the struggle.
The gypsy gracefully raised herself upright upon the officer’s
saddle, placed both hands upon the young man’s shoulders, and
gazed fixedly at him for several seconds, as though enchanted
with his good looks and with the aid which he had just rendered
her. Then breaking silence first, she said to him, making her
sweet voice still sweeter than usual,—
“What is your name, monsieur le gendarme?”
“Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers, at your service, my beauty!”
replied the officer, drawing himself up.
“Thanks,” said she.
And while Captain Phœbus was turning up his moustache in
Burgundian fashion, she slipped from the horse, like an arrow
falling to earth, and fled.
A flash of lightning would have vanished less quickly.
“Nombrill of the Pope!” said the captain, causing Quasimodo’s
straps to be drawn tighter, “I should have preferred to keep the
wench.”
“What would you have, captain?” said one gendarme. “The warbler
has fled, and the bat remains.”
CHAPTER V. RESULT OF THE DANGERS.
Gringoire, thoroughly stunned by his fall, remained on the
pavement in front of the Holy Virgin at the street corner. Little
by little, he regained his senses; at first, for several minutes,
he was floating in a sort of half-somnolent revery, which was not
without its charm, in which æriel figures of the gypsy and her
goat were coupled with Quasimodo’s heavy fist. This state lasted
but a short time. A decidedly vivid sensation of cold in the part
of his body which was in contact with the pavement, suddenly
aroused him and caused his spirit to return to the surface.
“Whence comes this chill?” he said abruptly, to himself. He then
perceived that he was lying half in the middle of the gutter.
“That devil of a hunchbacked cyclops!” he muttered between his
teeth; and he tried to rise. But he was too much dazed and
bruised; he was forced to remain where he was. Moreover, his hand
was tolerably free; he stopped up his nose and resigned himself.
“The mud of Paris,” he said to himself—for decidedly he thought
that he was sure that the gutter would prove his refuge for the
night; and what can one do in a refuge, except dream?—“the mud of
Paris is particularly stinking; it must contain a great deal of
volatile and nitric salts. That, moreover, is the opinion of
Master Nicholas Flamel, and of the alchemists—”
The word _alchemists_ suddenly suggested to his mind the idea of
Archdeacon Claude Frollo. He recalled the violent scene which he
had just witnessed in part; that the gypsy was struggling with
two men, that Quasimodo had a companion; and the morose and
haughty face of the archdeacon passed confusedly through his
memory. “That would be strange!” he said to himself. And on that
fact and that basis he began to construct a fantastic edifice of
hypothesis, that card-castle of philosophers; then, suddenly
returning once more to reality, “Come! I’m freezing!” he
ejaculated.
The place was, in fact, becoming less and less tenable. Each
molecule of the gutter bore away a molecule of heat radiating
from Gringoire’s loins, and the equilibrium between the
temperature of his body and the temperature of the brook, began
to be established in rough fashion.
Quite a different annoyance suddenly assailed him. A group of
children, those little bare-footed savages who have always roamed
the pavements of Paris under the eternal name of _gamins_, and
who, when we were also children ourselves, threw stones at all of
us in the afternoon, when we came out of school, because our
trousers were not torn—a swarm of these young scamps rushed
towards the square where Gringoire lay, with shouts and laughter
which seemed to pay but little heed to the sleep of the
neighbors. They were dragging after them some sort of hideous
sack; and the noise of their wooden shoes alone would have roused
the dead. Gringoire who was not quite dead yet, half raised
himself.
“Ohé, Hennequin Dandèche! Ohé, Jehan Pincebourde!” they shouted
in deafening tones, “old Eustache Moubon, the merchant at the
corner, has just died. We’ve got his straw pallet, we’re going to
have a bonfire out of it. It’s the turn of the Flemish to-day!”
And behold, they flung the pallet directly upon Gringoire, beside
whom they had arrived, without espying him. At the same time, one
of them took a handful of straw and set off to light it at the
wick of the good Virgin.
“S’death!” growled Gringoire, “am I going to be too warm now?”
It was a critical moment. He was caught between fire and water;
he made a superhuman effort, the effort of a counterfeiter of
money who is on the point of being boiled, and who seeks to
escape. He rose to his feet, flung aside the straw pallet upon
the street urchins, and fled.
“Holy Virgin!” shrieked the children; “’tis the merchant’s
ghost!”
And they fled in their turn.
The straw mattress remained master of the field. Belleforêt,
Father Le Juge, and Corrozet affirm that it was picked up on the
morrow, with great pomp, by the clergy of the quarter, and borne
to the treasury of the church of Saint Opportune, where the
sacristan, even as late as 1789, earned a tolerably handsome
revenue out of the great miracle of the Statue of the Virgin at
the corner of the Rue Mauconseil, which had, by its mere
presence, on the memorable night between the sixth and seventh of
January, 1482, exorcised the defunct Eustache Moubon, who, in
order to play a trick on the devil, had at his death maliciously
concealed his soul in his straw pallet.
CHAPTER VI. THE BROKEN JUG.
After having run for some time at the top of his speed, without
knowing whither, knocking his head against many a street corner,
leaping many a gutter, traversing many an alley, many a court,
many a square, seeking flight and passage through all the
meanderings of the ancient passages of the Halles, exploring in
his panic terror what the fine Latin of the maps calls _tota via,
cheminum et viaria_, our poet suddenly halted for lack of breath
in the first place, and in the second, because he had been
collared, after a fashion, by a dilemma which had just occurred
to his mind. “It strikes me, Master Pierre Gringoire,” he said to
himself, placing his finger to his brow, “that you are running
like a madman. The little scamps are no less afraid of you than
you are of them. It strikes me, I say, that you heard the clatter
of their wooden shoes fleeing southward, while you were fleeing
northward. Now, one of two things, either they have taken flight,
and the pallet, which they must have forgotten in their terror,
is precisely that hospitable bed in search of which you have been
running ever since morning, and which madame the Virgin
miraculously sends you, in order to recompense you for having
made a morality in her honor, accompanied by triumphs and
mummeries; or the children have not taken flight, and in that
case they have put the brand to the pallet, and that is precisely
the good fire which you need to cheer, dry, and warm you. In
either case, good fire or good bed, that straw pallet is a gift
from heaven. The blessed Virgin Marie who stands at the corner of
the Rue Mauconseil, could only have made Eustache Moubon die for
that express purpose; and it is folly on your part to flee thus
zigzag, like a Picard before a Frenchman, leaving behind you what
you seek before you; and you are a fool!”
Then he retraced his steps, and feeling his way and searching,
with his nose to the wind and his ears on the alert, he tried to
find the blessed pallet again, but in vain. There was nothing to
be found but intersections of houses, closed courts, and
crossings of streets, in the midst of which he hesitated and
doubted incessantly, being more perplexed and entangled in this
medley of streets than he would have been even in the labyrinth
of the Hôtel des Tournelles. At length he lost patience, and
exclaimed solemnly: “Cursed be cross roads! ’tis the devil who
has made them in the shape of his pitchfork!”
This exclamation afforded him a little solace, and a sort of
reddish reflection which he caught sight of at that moment, at
the extremity of a long and narrow lane, completed the elevation
of his moral tone. “God be praised!” said he, “There it is
yonder! There is my pallet burning.” And comparing himself to the
pilot who suffers shipwreck by night, “_Salve_,” he added
piously, “_salve, maris stella_!”
Did he address this fragment of litany to the Holy Virgin, or to
the pallet? We are utterly unable to say.
He had taken but a few steps in the long street, which sloped
downwards, was unpaved, and more and more muddy and steep, when
he noticed a very singular thing. It was not deserted; here and
there along its extent crawled certain vague and formless masses,
all directing their course towards the light which flickered at
the end of the street, like those heavy insects which drag along
by night, from blade to blade of grass, towards the shepherd’s
fire.
Nothing renders one so adventurous as not being able to feel the
place where one’s pocket is situated. Gringoire continued to
advance, and had soon joined that one of the forms which dragged
along most indolently, behind the others. On drawing near, he
perceived that it was nothing else than a wretched legless
cripple in a bowl, who was hopping along on his two hands like a
wounded field-spider which has but two legs left. At the moment
when he passed close to this species of spider with a human
countenance, it raised towards him a lamentable voice: “_La buona
mancia, signor! la buona mancia_!”[10]
“Deuce take you,” said Gringoire, “and me with you, if I know
what you mean!”
And he passed on.
He overtook another of these itinerant masses, and examined it.
It was an impotent man, both halt and crippled, and halt and
crippled to such a degree that the complicated system of crutches
and wooden legs which sustained him, gave him the air of a
mason’s scaffolding on the march. Gringoire, who liked noble and
classical comparisons, compared him in thought to the living
tripod of Vulcan.
This living tripod saluted him as he passed, but stopping his hat
on a level with Gringoire’s chin, like a shaving dish, while he
shouted in the latter’s ears: “_Señor cabellero, para comprar un
pedaso de pan_!”[11]
“It appears,” said Gringoire, “that this one can also talk; but
’tis a rude language, and he is more fortunate than I if he
understands it.” Then, smiting his brow, in a sudden transition
of ideas: “By the way, what the deuce did they mean this morning
with their _Esmeralda?_”
He was minded to augment his pace, but for the third time
something barred his way. This something or, rather, some one was
a blind man, a little blind fellow with a bearded, Jewish face,
who, rowing away in the space about him with a stick, and towed
by a large dog, droned through his nose with a Hungarian accent:
“_Facitote caritatem_!”
“Well, now,” said Gringoire, “here’s one at last who speaks a
Christian tongue. I must have a very charitable aspect, since
they ask alms of me in the present lean condition of my purse. My
friend,” and he turned towards the blind man, “I sold my last
shirt last week; that is to say, since you understand only the
language of Cicero: _Vendidi hebdomade nuper transita meam
ultimam chemisam_.”
That said, he turned his back upon the blind man, and pursued his
way. But the blind man began to increase his stride at the same
time; and, behold! the cripple and the legless man, in his bowl,
came up on their side in great haste, and with great clamor of
bowl and crutches, upon the pavement. Then all three, jostling
each other at poor Gringoire’s heels, began to sing their song to
him,—
“_Caritatem_!” chanted the blind man.
“_La buona mancia_!” chanted the cripple in the bowl.
And the lame man took up the musical phrase by repeating: “_Un
pedaso de pan_!”
Gringoire stopped up his ears. “Oh, tower of Babel!” he
exclaimed.
He set out to run. The blind man ran! The lame man ran! The
cripple in the bowl ran!
And then, in proportion as he plunged deeper into the street,
cripples in bowls, blind men and lame men, swarmed about him, and
men with one arm, and with one eye, and the leprous with their
sores, some emerging from little streets adjacent, some from the
air-holes of cellars, howling, bellowing, yelping, all limping
and halting, all flinging themselves towards the light, and
humped up in the mire, like snails after a shower.
Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not
knowing very well what was to become of him, marched along in
terror among them, turning out for the lame, stepping over the
cripples in bowls, with his feet imbedded in that ant-hill of
lame men, like the English captain who got caught in the
quicksand of a swarm of crabs.
The idea occurred to him of making an effort to retrace his
steps. But it was too late. This whole legion had closed in
behind him, and his three beggars held him fast. So he proceeded,
impelled both by this irresistible flood, by fear, and by a
vertigo which converted all this into a sort of horrible dream.
At last he reached the end of the street. It opened upon an
immense place, where a thousand scattered lights flickered in the
confused mists of night. Gringoire flew thither, hoping to
escape, by the swiftness of his legs, from the three infirm
spectres who had clutched him.
“_Onde vas, hombre_?” (Where are you going, my man?) cried the
cripple, flinging away his crutches, and running after him with
the best legs that ever traced a geometrical step upon the
pavements of Paris.
In the meantime the legless man, erect upon his feet, crowned
Gringoire with his heavy iron bowl, and the blind man glared in
his face with flaming eyes!
“Where am I?” said the terrified poet.
“In the Court of Miracles,” replied a fourth spectre, who had
accosted them.
“Upon my soul,” resumed Gringoire, “I certainly do behold the
blind who see, and the lame who walk, but where is the Saviour?”
They replied by a burst of sinister laughter.
The poor poet cast his eyes about him. It was, in truth, that
redoubtable Cour des Miracles, whither an honest man had never
penetrated at such an hour; the magic circle where the officers
of the Châtelet and the sergeants of the provostship, who
ventured thither, disappeared in morsels; a city of thieves, a
hideous wart on the face of Paris; a sewer, from which escaped
every morning, and whither returned every night to crouch, that
stream of vices, of mendicancy and vagabondage which always
overflows in the streets of capitals; a monstrous hive, to which
returned at nightfall, with their booty, all the drones of the
social order; a lying hospital where the bohemian, the disfrocked
monk, the ruined scholar, the ne’er-do-wells of all nations,
Spaniards, Italians, Germans,—of all religions, Jews, Christians,
Mahometans, idolaters, covered with painted sores, beggars by
day, were transformed by night into brigands; an immense
dressing-room, in a word, where, at that epoch, the actors of
that eternal comedy, which theft, prostitution, and murder play
upon the pavements of Paris, dressed and undressed.
It was a vast place, irregular and badly paved, like all the
squares of Paris at that date. Fires, around which swarmed
strange groups, blazed here and there. Every one was going,
coming, and shouting. Shrill laughter was to be heard, the
wailing of children, the voices of women. The hands and heads of
this throng, black against the luminous background, outlined
against it a thousand eccentric gestures. At times, upon the
ground, where trembled the light of the fires, mingled with
large, indefinite shadows, one could behold a dog passing, which
resembled a man, a man who resembled a dog. The limits of races
and species seemed effaced in this city, as in a pandemonium.
Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health, maladies, all seemed to be
in common among these people; all went together, they mingled,
confounded, superposed; each one there participated in all.
The poor and flickering flames of the fire permitted Gringoire to
distinguish, amid his trouble, all around the immense place, a
hideous frame of ancient houses, whose wormeaten, shrivelled,
stunted façades, each pierced with one or two lighted attic
windows, seemed to him, in the darkness, like enormous heads of
old women, ranged in a circle, monstrous and crabbed, winking as
they looked on at the Witches’ Sabbath.
It was like a new world, unknown, unheard of, misshapen,
creeping, swarming, fantastic.
Gringoire, more and more terrified, clutched by the three beggars
as by three pairs of tongs, dazed by a throng of other faces
which frothed and yelped around him, unhappy Gringoire endeavored
to summon his presence of mind, in order to recall whether it was
a Saturday. But his efforts were vain; the thread of his memory
and of his thought was broken; and, doubting everything, wavering
between what he saw and what he felt, he put to himself this
unanswerable question,—
“If I exist, does this exist? if this exists, do I exist?”
At that moment, a distinct cry arose in the buzzing throng which
surrounded him, “Let’s take him to the king! let’s take him to
the king!”
“Holy Virgin!” murmured Gringoire, “the king here must be a ram.”
“To the king! to the king!” repeated all voices.
They dragged him off. Each vied with the other in laying his
claws upon him. But the three beggars did not loose their hold
and tore him from the rest, howling, “He belongs to us!”
The poet’s already sickly doublet yielded its last sigh in this
struggle.
While traversing the horrible place, his vertigo vanished. After
taking a few steps, the sentiment of reality returned to him. He
began to become accustomed to the atmosphere of the place. At the
first moment there had arisen from his poet’s head, or, simply
and prosaically, from his empty stomach, a mist, a vapor, so to
speak, which, spreading between objects and himself, permitted
him to catch a glimpse of them only in the incoherent fog of
nightmare,—in those shadows of dreams which distort every
outline, agglomerating objects into unwieldy groups, dilating
things into chimeras, and men into phantoms. Little by little,
this hallucination was succeeded by a less bewildered and
exaggerating view. Reality made its way to the light around him,
struck his eyes, struck his feet, and demolished, bit by bit, all
that frightful poetry with which he had, at first, believed
himself to be surrounded. He was forced to perceive that he was
not walking in the Styx, but in mud, that he was elbowed not by
demons, but by thieves; that it was not his soul which was in
question, but his life (since he lacked that precious
conciliator, which places itself so effectually between the
bandit and the honest man—a purse). In short, on examining the
orgy more closely, and with more coolness, he fell from the
witches’ sabbath to the dram-shop.
The Cour des Miracles was, in fact, merely a dram-shop; but a
brigand’s dram-shop, reddened quite as much with blood as with
wine.
The spectacle which presented itself to his eyes, when his ragged
escort finally deposited him at the end of his trip, was not
fitted to bear him back to poetry, even to the poetry of hell. It
was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the tavern.
Were we not in the fifteenth century, we would say that Gringoire
had descended from Michael Angelo to Callot.
Around a great fire which burned on a large, circular flagstone,
the flames of which had heated red-hot the legs of a tripod,
which was empty for the moment, some wormeaten tables were
placed, here and there, haphazard, no lackey of a geometrical
turn having deigned to adjust their parallelism, or to see to it
that they did not make too unusual angles. Upon these tables
gleamed several dripping pots of wine and beer, and round these
pots were grouped many bacchic visages, purple with the fire and
the wine. There was a man with a huge belly and a jovial face,
noisily kissing a woman of the town, thickset and brawny. There
was a sort of sham soldier, a “naquois,” as the slang expression
runs, who was whistling as he undid the bandages from his
fictitious wound, and removing the numbness from his sound and
vigorous knee, which had been swathed since morning in a thousand
ligatures. On the other hand, there was a wretched fellow,
preparing with celandine and beef’s blood, his “leg of God,” for
the next day. Two tables further on, a palmer, with his pilgrim’s
costume complete, was practising the lament of the Holy Queen,
not forgetting the drone and the nasal drawl. Further on, a young
scamp was taking a lesson in epilepsy from an old pretender, who
was instructing him in the art of foaming at the mouth, by
chewing a morsel of soap. Beside him, a man with the dropsy was
getting rid of his swelling, and making four or five female
thieves, who were disputing at the same table, over a child who
had been stolen that evening, hold their noses. All circumstances
which, two centuries later, “seemed so ridiculous to the court,”
as Sauval says, “that they served as a pastime to the king, and
as an introduction to the royal ballet of Night, divided into
four parts and danced on the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon.”
“Never,” adds an eye witness of 1653, “have the sudden
metamorphoses of the Court of Miracles been more happily
presented. Benserade prepared us for it by some very gallant
verses.”
Loud laughter everywhere, and obscene songs. Each one held his
own course, carping and swearing, without listening to his
neighbor. Pots clinked, and quarrels sprang up at the shock of
the pots, and the broken pots made rents in the rags.
A big dog, seated on his tail, gazed at the fire. Some children
were mingled in this orgy. The stolen child wept and cried.
Another, a big boy four years of age, seated with legs dangling,
upon a bench that was too high for him, before a table that
reached to his chin, and uttering not a word. A third, gravely
spreading out upon the table with his finger, the melted tallow
which dripped from a candle. Last of all, a little fellow
crouching in the mud, almost lost in a cauldron, which he was
scraping with a tile, and from which he was evoking a sound that
would have made Stradivarius swoon.
Near the fire was a hogshead, and on the hogshead a beggar. This
was the king on his throne.
The three who had Gringoire in their clutches led him in front of
this hogshead, and the entire bacchanal rout fell silent for a
moment, with the exception of the cauldron inhabited by the
child.
Gringoire dared neither breathe nor raise his eyes.
“_Hombre, quita tu sombrero_!” said one of the three knaves, in
whose grasp he was, and, before he had comprehended the meaning,
the other had snatched his hat—a wretched headgear, it is true,
but still good on a sunny day or when there was but little rain.
Gringoire sighed.
Meanwhile the king addressed him, from the summit of his cask,—
“Who is this rogue?”
Gringoire shuddered. That voice, although accentuated by menace,
recalled to him another voice, which, that very morning, had
dealt the deathblow to his mystery, by drawling, nasally, in the
midst of the audience, “Charity, please!” He raised his head. It
was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.
Clopin Trouillefou, arrayed in his royal insignia, wore neither
one rag more nor one rag less. The sore upon his arm had already
disappeared. He held in his hand one of those whips made of
thongs of white leather, which police sergeants then used to
repress the crowd, and which were called _boullayes_. On his head
he wore a sort of headgear, bound round and closed at the top.
But it was difficult to make out whether it was a child’s cap or
a king’s crown, the two things bore so strong a resemblance to
each other.
Meanwhile Gringoire, without knowing why, had regained some hope,
on recognizing in the King of the Cour des Miracles his accursed
mendicant of the Grand Hall.
“Master,” stammered he; “monseigneur—sire—how ought I to address
you?” he said at length, having reached the culminating point of
his crescendo, and knowing neither how to mount higher, nor to
descend again.
“Monseigneur, his majesty, or comrade, call me what you please.
But make haste. What have you to say in your own defence?”
“_In your own defence?_” thought Gringoire, “that displeases me.”
He resumed, stuttering, “I am he, who this morning—”
“By the devil’s claws!” interrupted Clopin, “your name, knave,
and nothing more. Listen. You are in the presence of three
powerful sovereigns: myself, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Thunes,
successor to the Grand Coësre, supreme suzerain of the Realm of
Argot; Mathias Hunyadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and of Bohemia, the
old yellow fellow whom you see yonder, with a dish clout round
his head; Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat fellow
who is not listening to us but caressing a wench. We are your
judges. You have entered the Kingdom of Argot, without being an
_argotier_; you have violated the privileges of our city. You
must be punished unless you are a _capon_, a _franc-mitou_ or a
_rifodé_; that is to say, in the slang of honest folks,—a thief,
a beggar, or a vagabond. Are you anything of that sort? Justify
yourself; announce your titles.”
“Alas!” said Gringoire, “I have not that honor. I am the author—”
“That is sufficient,” resumed Trouillefou, without permitting him
to finish. “You are going to be hanged. ’Tis a very simple
matter, gentlemen and honest _bourgeois_! as you treat our people
in your abode, so we treat you in ours! The law which you apply
to vagabonds, vagabonds apply to you. ’Tis your fault if it is
harsh. One really must behold the grimace of an honest man above
the hempen collar now and then; that renders the thing honorable.
Come, friend, divide your rags gayly among these damsels. I am
going to have you hanged to amuse the vagabonds, and you are to
give them your purse to drink your health. If you have any
mummery to go through with, there’s a very good God the Father in
that mortar yonder, in stone, which we stole from Saint-Pierre
aux Bœufs. You have four minutes in which to fling your soul at
his head.”
The harangue was formidable.
“Well said, upon my soul! Clopin Trouillefou preaches like the
Holy Father the Pope!” exclaimed the Emperor of Galilee, smashing
his pot in order to prop up his table.
“Messeigneurs, emperors, and kings,” said Gringoire coolly (for I
know not how, firmness had returned to him, and he spoke with
resolution), “don’t think of such a thing; my name is Pierre
Gringoire. I am the poet whose morality was presented this
morning in the grand hall of the Courts.”
“Ah! so it was you, master!” said Clopin. “I was there, _par la
tête Dieu_! Well! comrade, is that any reason, because you bored
us to death this morning, that you should not be hung this
evening?”
“I shall find difficulty in getting out of it,” said Gringoire to
himself. Nevertheless, he made one more effort: “I don’t see why
poets are not classed with vagabonds,” said he. “Vagabond, Æsopus
certainly was; Homerus was a beggar; Mercurius was a thief—”
Clopin interrupted him: “I believe that you are trying to blarney
us with your jargon. Zounds! let yourself be hung, and don’t kick
up such a row over it!”
“Pardon me, monseigneur, the King of Thunes,” replied Gringoire,
disputing the ground foot by foot. “It is worth trouble—One
moment!—Listen to me—You are not going to condemn me without
having heard me”—
His unlucky voice was, in fact, drowned in the uproar which rose
around him. The little boy scraped away at his cauldron with more
spirit than ever; and, to crown all, an old woman had just placed
on the tripod a frying-pan of grease, which hissed away on the
fire with a noise similar to the cry of a troop of children in
pursuit of a masker.
In the meantime, Clopin Trouillefou appeared to hold a momentary
conference with the Duke of Egypt, and the Emperor of Galilee,
who was completely drunk. Then he shouted shrilly: “Silence!”
and, as the cauldron and the frying-pan did not heed him, and
continued their duet, he jumped down from his hogshead, gave a
kick to the boiler, which rolled ten paces away bearing the child
with it, a kick to the frying-pan, which upset in the fire with
all its grease, and gravely remounted his throne, without
troubling himself about the stifled tears of the child, or the
grumbling of the old woman, whose supper was wasting away in a
fine white flame.
Trouillefou made a sign, and the duke, the emperor, and the
passed masters of pickpockets, and the isolated robbers, came and
ranged themselves around him in a horseshoe, of which Gringoire,
still roughly held by the body, formed the centre. It was a
semicircle of rags, tatters, tinsel, pitchforks, axes, legs
staggering with intoxication, huge, bare arms, faces sordid,
dull, and stupid. In the midst of this Round Table of beggary,
Clopin Trouillefou,—as the doge of this senate, as the king of
this peerage, as the pope of this conclave,—dominated; first by
virtue of the height of his hogshead, and next by virtue of an
indescribable, haughty, fierce, and formidable air, which caused
his eyes to flash, and corrected in his savage profile the
bestial type of the race of vagabonds. One would have pronounced
him a boar amid a herd of swine.
“Listen,” said he to Gringoire, fondling his misshapen chin with
his horny hand; “I don’t see why you should not be hung. It is
true that it appears to be repugnant to you; and it is very
natural, for you _bourgeois_ are not accustomed to it. You form
for yourselves a great idea of the thing. After all, we don’t
wish you any harm. Here is a means of extricating yourself from
your predicament for the moment. Will you become one of us?”
The reader can judge of the effect which this proposition
produced upon Gringoire, who beheld life slipping away from him,
and who was beginning to lose his hold upon it. He clutched at it
again with energy.
“Certainly I will, and right heartily,” said he.
“Do you consent,” resumed Clopin, “to enroll yourself among the
people of the knife?”
“Of the knife, precisely,” responded Gringoire.
“You recognize yourself as a member of the free
_bourgeoisie?_”[12] added the King of Thunes.
“Of the free _bourgeoisie_.”
“Subject of the Kingdom of Argot?”
“Of the Kingdom of Argot[13].”
“A vagabond?”
“A vagabond.”
“In your soul?”
“In my soul.”
“I must call your attention to the fact,” continued the king,
“that you will be hung all the same.”
“The devil!” said the poet.
“Only,” continued Clopin imperturbably, “you will be hung later
on, with more ceremony, at the expense of the good city of Paris,
on a handsome stone gibbet, and by honest men. That is a
consolation.”
“Just so,” responded Gringoire.
“There are other advantages. In your quality of a high-toned
sharper, you will not have to pay the taxes on mud, or the poor,
or lanterns, to which the _bourgeois_ of Paris are subject.”
“So be it,” said the poet. “I agree. I am a vagabond, a thief, a
sharper, a man of the knife, anything you please; and I am all
that already, monsieur, King of Thunes, for I am a philosopher;
_et omnia in philosophia, omnes in philosopho continentur_,—all
things are contained in philosophy, all men in the philosopher,
as you know.”
The King of Thunes scowled.
“What do you take me for, my friend? What Hungarian Jew patter
are you jabbering at us? I don’t know Hebrew. One isn’t a Jew
because one is a bandit. I don’t even steal any longer. I’m above
that; I kill. Cut-throat, yes; cutpurse, no.”
Gringoire tried to slip in some excuse between these curt words,
which wrath rendered more and more jerky.
“I ask your pardon, monseigneur. It is not Hebrew; ’tis Latin.”
“I tell you,” resumed Clopin angrily, “that I’m not a Jew, and
that I’ll have you hung, belly of the synagogue, like that little
shopkeeper of Judea, who is by your side, and whom I entertain
strong hopes of seeing nailed to a counter one of these days,
like the counterfeit coin that he is!”
So saying, he pointed his finger at the little, bearded Hungarian
Jew who had accosted Gringoire with his _facitote caritatem_, and
who, understanding no other language beheld with surprise the
King of Thunes’s ill-humor overflow upon him.
At length Monsieur Clopin calmed down.
“So you will be a vagabond, you knave?” he said to our poet.
“Of course,” replied the poet.
“Willing is not all,” said the surly Clopin; “good will doesn’t
put one onion the more into the soup, and ’tis good for nothing
except to go to Paradise with; now, Paradise and the thieves’
band are two different things. In order to be received among the
thieves,[14] you must prove that you are good for something, and
for that purpose, you must search the manikin.”
“I’ll search anything you like,” said Gringoire.
Clopin made a sign. Several thieves detached themselves from the
circle, and returned a moment later. They brought two thick
posts, terminated at their lower extremities in spreading timber
supports, which made them stand readily upon the ground; to the
upper extremity of the two posts they fitted a cross-beam, and
the whole constituted a very pretty portable gibbet, which
Gringoire had the satisfaction of beholding rise before him, in a
twinkling. Nothing was lacking, not even the rope, which swung
gracefully over the cross-beam.
“What are they going to do?” Gringoire asked himself with some
uneasiness. A sound of bells, which he heard at that moment, put
an end to his anxiety; it was a stuffed manikin, which the
vagabonds were suspending by the neck from the rope, a sort of
scarecrow dressed in red, and so hung with mule-bells and larger
bells, that one might have tricked out thirty Castilian mules
with them. These thousand tiny bells quivered for some time with
the vibration of the rope, then gradually died away, and finally
became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of
immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the
water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to
Gringoire a rickety old stool placed beneath the manikin,—“Climb
up there.”
“Death of the devil!” objected Gringoire; “I shall break my neck.
Your stool limps like one of Martial’s distiches; it has one
hexameter leg and one pentameter leg.”
“Climb!” repeated Clopin.
Gringoire mounted the stool, and succeeded, not without some
oscillations of head and arms, in regaining his centre of
gravity.
“Now,” went on the King of Thunes, “twist your right foot round
your left leg, and rise on the tip of your left foot.”
“Monseigneur,” said Gringoire, “so you absolutely insist on my
breaking some one of my limbs?”
Clopin tossed his head.
“Hark ye, my friend, you talk too much. Here’s the gist of the
matter in two words: you are to rise on tiptoe, as I tell you; in
that way you will be able to reach the pocket of the manikin, you
will rummage it, you will pull out the purse that is there,—and
if you do all this without our hearing the sound of a bell, all
is well: you shall be a vagabond. All we shall then have to do,
will be to thrash you soundly for the space of a week.”
“_Ventre-Dieu_! I will be careful,” said Gringoire. “And suppose
I do make the bells sound?”
“Then you will be hanged. Do you understand?”
“I don’t understand at all,” replied Gringoire.
“Listen, once more. You are to search the manikin, and take away
it
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