NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS

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

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 its purse; if
a single bell stirs during the operation, you will be hung. Do you understand
that?”

“Good,” said Gringoire; “I understand that. And then?”

“If you succeed in removing the purse without our hearing the bells, you are a
vagabond, and you will be thrashed for eight consecutive days. You understand
now, no doubt?”

“No, monseigneur; I no longer understand. Where is the advantage to me? hanged
in one case, cudgelled in the other?”

“And a vagabond,” resumed Clopin, “and a vagabond; is that nothing? It is for
your interest that we should beat you, in order to harden you to blows.”

“Many thanks,” replied the poet.

“Come, make haste,” said the king, stamping upon his cask, which resounded like
a huge drum! “Search the manikin, and let there be an end to this! I warn you
for the last time, that if I hear a single bell, you will take the place of the
manikin.”

The band of thieves applauded Clopin’s words, and arranged themselves in a
circle round the gibbet, with a laugh so pitiless that Gringoire perceived that
he amused them too much not to have everything to fear from them. No hope was
left for him, accordingly, unless it were the slight chance of succeeding in
the formidable operation which was imposed upon him; he decided to risk it, but
it was not without first having addressed a fervent prayer to the manikin he
was about to plunder, and who would have been easier to move to pity than the
vagabonds. These myriad bells, with their little copper tongues, seemed to him
like the mouths of so many asps, open and ready to sting and to hiss.

“Oh!” he said, in a very low voice, “is it possible that my life depends on the
slightest vibration of the least of these bells? Oh!” he added, with clasped
hands, “bells, do not ring, hand-bells do not clang, mule-bells do not quiver!”

He made one more attempt upon Trouillefou.

“And if there should come a gust of wind?”

“You will be hanged,” replied the other, without hesitation.

Perceiving that no respite, nor reprieve, nor subterfuge was possible, he
bravely decided upon his course of action; he wound his right foot round his
left leg, raised himself on his left foot, and stretched out his arm: but at
the moment when his hand touched the manikin, his body, which was now supported
upon one leg only, wavered on the stool which had but three; he made an
involuntary effort to support himself by the manikin, lost his balance, and
fell heavily to the ground, deafened by the fatal vibration of the thousand
bells of the manikin, which, yielding to the impulse imparted by his hand,
described first a rotary motion, and then swayed majestically between the two
posts.

“Malediction!” he cried as he fell, and remained as though dead, with his face
to the earth.

Meanwhile, he heard the dreadful peal above his head, the diabolical laughter
of the vagabonds, and the voice of Trouillefou saying,—

“Pick me up that knave, and hang him without ceremony.” He rose. They had
already detached the manikin to make room for him.

The thieves made him mount the stool, Clopin came to him, passed the rope about
his neck, and, tapping him on the shoulder,—

“Adieu, my friend. You can’t escape now, even if you digested with the pope’s
guts.”

The word “Mercy!” died away upon Gringoire’s lips. He cast his eyes about him;
but there was no hope: all were laughing.

“Bellevigne de l’Étoile,” said the King of Thunes to an enormous vagabond, who
stepped out from the ranks, “climb upon the cross beam.”

Bellevigne de l’Étoile nimbly mounted the transverse beam, and in another
minute, Gringoire, on raising his eyes, beheld him, with terror, seated upon
the beam above his head.

“Now,” resumed Clopin Trouillefou, “as soon as I clap my hands, you, Andry the
Red, will fling the stool to the ground with a blow of your knee; you, François
Chanteprune, will cling to the feet of the rascal; and you, Bellevigne, will
fling yourself on his shoulders; and all three at once, do you hear?”

Gringoire shuddered.

“Are you ready?” said Clopin Trouillefou to the three thieves, who held
themselves in readiness to fall upon Gringoire. A moment of horrible suspense
ensued for the poor victim, during which Clopin tranquilly thrust into the fire
with the tip of his foot, some bits of vine shoots which the flame had not
caught. “Are you ready?” he repeated, and opened his hands to clap. One second
more and all would have been over.

But he paused, as though struck by a sudden thought.

“One moment!” said he; “I forgot! It is our custom not to hang a man without
inquiring whether there is any woman who wants him. Comrade, this is your last
resource. You must wed either a female vagabond or the noose.”

This law of the vagabonds, singular as it may strike the reader, remains to-day
written out at length, in ancient English legislation. (See Burington’s
Observations.)

Gringoire breathed again. This was the second time that he had returned to life
within an hour. So he did not dare to trust to it too implicitly.

“Holà!” cried Clopin, mounted once more upon his cask, “holà! women, females,
is there among you, from the sorceress to her cat, a wench who wants this
rascal? Holà, Colette la Charonne! Elisabeth Trouvain! Simone Jodouyne! Marie
Piédebou! Thonne la Longue! Bérarde Fanouel! Michelle Genaille! Claude
Ronge-oreille! Mathurine Girorou!—Holà! Isabeau-la-Thierrye! Come and see! A
man for nothing! Who wants him?”

Gringoire, no doubt, was not very appetizing in this miserable condition. The
female vagabonds did not seem to be much affected by the proposition. The
unhappy wretch heard them answer: “No! no! hang him; there’ll be the more fun
for us all!”

Nevertheless, three emerged from the throng and came to smell of him. The first
was a big wench, with a square face. She examined the philosopher’s deplorable
doublet attentively. His garment was worn, and more full of holes than a stove
for roasting chestnuts. The girl made a wry face. “Old rag!” she muttered, and
addressing Gringoire, “Let’s see your cloak!” “I have lost it,” replied
Gringoire. “Your hat?” “They took it away from me.” “Your shoes?” “They have
hardly any soles left.” “Your purse?” “Alas!” stammered Gringoire, “I have not
even a sou.” “Let them hang you, then, and say ‘Thank you!’” retorted the
vagabond wench, turning her back on him.

The second,—old, black, wrinkled, hideous, with an ugliness conspicuous even in
the Cour des Miracles, trotted round Gringoire. He almost trembled lest she
should want him. But she mumbled between her teeth, “He’s too thin,” and went
off.

The third was a young girl, quite fresh, and not too ugly. “Save me!” said the
poor fellow to her, in a low tone. She gazed at him for a moment with an air of
pity, then dropped her eyes, made a plait in her petticoat, and remained in
indecision. He followed all these movements with his eyes; it was the last
gleam of hope. “No,” said the young girl, at length, “no! Guillaume Longuejoue
would beat me.” She retreated into the crowd.

“You are unlucky, comrade,” said Clopin.

Then rising to his feet, upon his hogshead. “No one wants him,” he exclaimed,
imitating the accent of an auctioneer, to the great delight of all; “no one
wants him? once, twice, three times!” and, turning towards the gibbet with a
sign of his hand, “Gone!”

Bellevigne de l’Étoile, Andry the Red, François Chanteprune, stepped up to
Gringoire.

At that moment a cry arose among the thieves: “La Esmeralda! La
Esmeralda!”

Gringoire shuddered, and turned towards the side whence the clamor proceeded.

The crowd opened, and gave passage to a pure and dazzling form.

It was the gypsy.

“La Esmeralda!” said Gringoire, stupefied in the midst of his emotions, by the
abrupt manner in which that magic word knotted together all his reminiscences
of the day.

This rare creature seemed, even in the Cour des Miracles, to exercise her sway
of charm and beauty. The vagabonds, male and female, ranged themselves gently
along her path, and their brutal faces beamed beneath her glance.

She approached the victim with her light step. Her pretty Djali followed her.
Gringoire was more dead than alive. She examined him for a moment in silence.

“You are going to hang this man?” she said gravely, to Clopin.

“Yes, sister,” replied the King of Thunes, “unless you will take him for your
husband.”

She made her pretty little pout with her under lip. “I’ll take him,” said she.

Gringoire firmly believed that he had been in a dream ever since morning, and
that this was the continuation of it.

The change was, in fact, violent, though a gratifying one. They undid the
noose, and made the poet step down from the stool. His emotion was so lively
that he was obliged to sit down.

The Duke of Egypt brought an earthenware crock, without uttering a word. The
gypsy offered it to Gringoire: “Fling it on the ground,” said she.

The crock broke into four pieces.

“Brother,” then said the Duke of Egypt, laying his hands upon their foreheads,
“she is your wife; sister, he is your husband for four years. Go.”

CHAPTER VII.
A BRIDAL NIGHT.

A few moments later our poet found himself in a tiny arched chamber, very cosy,
very warm, seated at a table which appeared to ask nothing better than to make
some loans from a larder hanging near by, having a good bed in prospect, and
alone with a pretty girl. The adventure smacked of enchantment. He began
seriously to take himself for a personage in a fairy tale; he cast his eyes
about him from time to time to time, as though to see if the chariot of fire,
harnessed to two-winged chimeras, which alone could have so rapidly transported
him from Tartarus to Paradise, were still there. At times, also, he fixed his
eyes obstinately upon the holes in his doublet, in order to cling to reality,
and not lose the ground from under his feet completely. His reason, tossed
about in imaginary space, now hung only by this thread.

The young girl did not appear to pay any attention to him; she went and came,
displaced a stool, talked to her goat, and indulged in a pout now and then. At
last she came and seated herself near the table, and Gringoire was able to
scrutinize her at his ease.

You have been a child, reader, and you would, perhaps, be very happy to be one
still. It is quite certain that you have not, more than once (and for my part,
I have passed whole days, the best employed of my life, at it) followed from
thicket to thicket, by the side of running water, on a sunny day, a beautiful
green or blue dragon-fly, breaking its flight in abrupt angles, and kissing the
tips of all the branches. You recollect with what amorous curiosity your
thought and your gaze were riveted upon this little whirlwind, hissing and
humming with wings of purple and azure, in the midst of which floated an
imperceptible body, veiled by the very rapidity of its movement. The aerial
being which was dimly outlined amid this quivering of wings, appeared to you
chimerical, imaginary, impossible to touch, impossible to see. But when, at
length, the dragon-fly alighted on the tip of a reed, and, holding your breath
the while, you were able to examine the long, gauze wings, the long enamel
robe, the two globes of crystal, what astonishment you felt, and what fear lest
you should again behold the form disappear into a shade, and the creature into
a chimera! Recall these impressions, and you will readily appreciate what
Gringoire felt on contemplating, beneath her visible and palpable form, that
Esmeralda of whom, up to that time, he had only caught a glimpse, amidst a
whirlwind of dance, song, and tumult.

Sinking deeper and deeper into his revery: “So this,” he said to himself,
following her vaguely with his eyes, “is la Esmeralda! a celestial
creature! a street dancer! so much, and so little! ’Twas she who dealt the
death-blow to my mystery this morning, ’tis she who saves my life this evening!
My evil genius! My good angel! A pretty woman, on my word! and who must needs
love me madly to have taken me in that fashion. By the way,” said he, rising
suddenly, with that sentiment of the true which formed the foundation of his
character and his philosophy, “I don’t know very well how it happens, but I am
her husband!”

With this idea in his head and in his eyes, he stepped up to the young girl in
a manner so military and so gallant that she drew back.

“What do you want of me?” said she.

“Can you ask me, adorable Esmeralda?” replied Gringoire, with so passionate an
accent that he was himself astonished at it on hearing himself speak.

The gypsy opened her great eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“What!” resumed Gringoire, growing warmer and warmer, and supposing that, after
all, he had to deal merely with a virtue of the Cour des Miracles; “am I not
thine, sweet friend, art thou not mine?”

And, quite ingenuously, he clasped her waist.

The gypsy’s corsage slipped through his hands like the skin of an eel. She
bounded from one end of the tiny room to the other, stooped down, and raised
herself again, with a little poniard in her hand, before Gringoire had even had
time to see whence the poniard came; proud and angry, with swelling lips and
inflated nostrils, her cheeks as red as an api apple,[15] and her eyes darting lightnings. At the same
time, the white goat placed itself in front of her, and presented to Gringoire
a hostile front, bristling with two pretty horns, gilded and very sharp. All
this took place in the twinkling of an eye.

The dragon-fly had turned into a wasp, and asked nothing better than to sting.

Our philosopher was speechless, and turned his astonished eyes from the goat to
the young girl. “Holy Virgin!” he said at last, when surprise permitted him to
speak, “here are two hearty dames!”

The gypsy broke the silence on her side.

“You must be a very bold knave!”

“Pardon, mademoiselle,” said Gringoire, with a smile. “But why did you take me
for your husband?”

“Should I have allowed you to be hanged?”

“So,” said the poet, somewhat disappointed in his amorous hopes. “You had no
other idea in marrying me than to save me from the gibbet?”

“And what other idea did you suppose that I had?”

Gringoire bit his lips. “Come,” said he, “I am not yet so triumphant in Cupido,
as I thought. But then, what was the good of breaking that poor jug?”

Meanwhile Esmeralda’s dagger and the goat’s horns were still upon the
defensive.

“Mademoiselle Esmeralda,” said the poet, “let us come to terms. I am not a
clerk of the court, and I shall not go to law with you for thus carrying a
dagger in Paris, in the teeth of the ordinances and prohibitions of M. the
Provost. Nevertheless, you are not ignorant of the fact that Noël Lescrivain
was condemned, a week ago, to pay ten Parisian sous, for having carried a
cutlass. But this is no affair of mine, and I will come to the point. I swear
to you, upon my share of Paradise, not to approach you without your leave and
permission, but do give me some supper.”

The truth is, Gringoire was, like M. Despreaux, “not very voluptuous.” He did
not belong to that chevalier and musketeer species, who take young girls by
assault. In the matter of love, as in all other affairs, he willingly assented
to temporizing and adjusting terms; and a good supper, and an amiable
tête-à-tête appeared to him, especially when he was hungry, an excellent
interlude between the prologue and the catastrophe of a love adventure.

The gypsy did not reply. She made her disdainful little grimace, drew up her
head like a bird, then burst out laughing, and the tiny poniard disappeared as
it had come, without Gringoire being able to see where the wasp concealed its
sting.

A moment later, there stood upon the table a loaf of rye bread, a slice of
bacon, some wrinkled apples and a jug of beer. Gringoire began to eat eagerly.
One would have said, to hear the furious clashing of his iron fork and his
earthenware plate, that all his love had turned to appetite.

The young girl seated opposite him, watched him in silence, visibly preoccupied
with another thought, at which she smiled from time to time, while her soft
hand caressed the intelligent head of the goat, gently pressed between her
knees.

A candle of yellow wax illuminated this scene of voracity and revery.

Meanwhile, the first cravings of his stomach having been stilled, Gringoire
felt some false shame at perceiving that nothing remained but one apple.

“You do not eat, Mademoiselle Esmeralda?”

She replied by a negative sign of the head, and her pensive glance fixed itself
upon the vault of the ceiling.

“What the deuce is she thinking of?” thought Gringoire, staring at what she was
gazing at; “’tis impossible that it can be that stone dwarf carved in the
keystone of that arch, which thus absorbs her attention. What the deuce! I can
bear the comparison!”

He raised his voice, “Mademoiselle!”

She seemed not to hear him.

He repeated, still more loudly, “Mademoiselle Esmeralda!”

Trouble wasted. The young girl’s mind was elsewhere, and Gringoire’s voice had
not the power to recall it. Fortunately, the goat interfered. She began to pull
her mistress gently by the sleeve.

“What dost thou want, Djali?” said the gypsy, hastily, as though suddenly
awakened.

“She is hungry,” said Gringoire, charmed to enter into conversation. Esmeralda
began to crumble some bread, which Djali ate gracefully from the hollow of her
hand.

Moreover, Gringoire did not give her time to resume her revery. He hazarded a
delicate question.

“So you don’t want me for your husband?”

The young girl looked at him intently, and said, “No.”

“For your lover?” went on Gringoire.

She pouted, and replied, “No.”

“For your friend?” pursued Gringoire.

She gazed fixedly at him again, and said, after a momentary reflection,
“Perhaps.”

This “perhaps,” so dear to philosophers, emboldened Gringoire.

“Do you know what friendship is?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied the gypsy; “it is to be brother and sister; two souls which
touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.”

“And love?” pursued Gringoire.

“Oh! love!” said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye beamed. “That is to
be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is
heaven.”

The street dancer had a beauty as she spoke thus, that struck Gringoire
singularly, and seemed to him in perfect keeping with the almost oriental
exaltation of her words. Her pure, red lips half smiled; her serene and candid
brow became troubled, at intervals, under her thoughts, like a mirror under the
breath; and from beneath her long, drooping, black eyelashes, there escaped a
sort of ineffable light, which gave to her profile that ideal serenity which
Raphael found at the mystic point of intersection of virginity, maternity, and
divinity.

Nevertheless, Gringoire continued,—

“What must one be then, in order to please you?”

“A man.”

“And I—” said he, “what, then, am I?”

“A man has a helmet on his head, a sword in his hand, and golden spurs on his
heels.”

“Good,” said Gringoire, “without a horse, no man. Do you love any one?”

“As a lover?—”

“Yes.”

She remained thoughtful for a moment, then said with a peculiar expression:
“That I shall know soon.”

“Why not this evening?” resumed the poet tenderly. “Why not me?”

She cast a grave glance upon him and said,—

“I can never love a man who cannot protect me.”

Gringoire colored, and took the hint. It was evident that the young girl was
alluding to the slight assistance which he had rendered her in the critical
situation in which she had found herself two hours previously. This memory,
effaced by his own adventures of the evening, now recurred to him. He smote his
brow.

“By the way, mademoiselle, I ought to have begun there. Pardon my foolish
absence of mind. How did you contrive to escape from the claws of Quasimodo?”

This question made the gypsy shudder.

“Oh! the horrible hunchback,” said she, hiding her face in her hands. And she
shuddered as though with violent cold.

“Horrible, in truth,” said Gringoire, who clung to his idea; “but how did you
manage to escape him?”

La Esmeralda smiled, sighed, and remained silent.

“Do you know why he followed you?” began Gringoire again, seeking to return to
his question by a circuitous route.

“I don’t know,” said the young girl, and she added hastily, “but you were
following me also, why were you following me?”

“In good faith,” responded Gringoire, “I don’t know either.”

Silence ensued. Gringoire slashed the table with his knife. The young girl
smiled and seemed to be gazing through the wall at something. All at once she
began to sing in a barely articulate voice,—

Quando las pintadas aves,
Mudas estan, y la tierra—[16]

She broke off abruptly, and began to caress Djali.

“That’s a pretty animal of yours,” said Gringoire.

“She is my sister,” she answered.

“Why are you called la Esmeralda?” asked the poet.

“I do not know.”

“But why?”

She drew from her bosom a sort of little oblong bag, suspended from her neck by
a string of adrézarach beads. This bag exhaled a strong odor of camphor. It was
covered with green silk, and bore in its centre a large piece of green glass,
in imitation of an emerald.

“Perhaps it is because of this,” said she.

Gringoire was on the point of taking the bag in his hand. She drew back.

“Don’t touch it! It is an amulet. You would injure the charm or the charm would
injure you.”

The poet’s curiosity was more and more aroused.

“Who gave it to you?”

She laid one finger on her mouth and concealed the amulet in her bosom. He
tried a few more questions, but she hardly replied.

“What is the meaning of the words, la Esmeralda?”

“I don’t know,” said she.

“To what language do they belong?”

“They are Egyptian, I think.”

“I suspected as much,” said Gringoire, “you are not a native of France?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are your parents alive?”

She began to sing, to an ancient air,—

Mon père est oiseau,
Ma mère est oiselle.
Je passe l’eau sans nacelle,
Je passe l’eau sans bateau,
Ma mère est oiselle,
Mon père est oiseau.[17]

“Good,” said Gringoire. “At what age did you come to France?”

“When I was very young.”

“And when to Paris?”

“Last year. At the moment when we were entering the papal gate I saw a reed
warbler flit through the air, that was at the end of August; I said, it will be
a hard winter.”

“So it was,” said Gringoire, delighted at this beginning of a conversation. “I
passed it in blowing my fingers. So you have the gift of prophecy?”

She retired into her laconics again.

“Is that man whom you call the Duke of Egypt, the chief of your tribe?”

“Yes.”

“But it was he who married us,” remarked the poet timidly.

She made her customary pretty grimace.

“I don’t even know your name.”

“My name? If you want it, here it is,—Pierre Gringoire.”

“I know a prettier one,” said she.

“Naughty girl!” retorted the poet. “Never mind, you shall not provoke me. Wait,
perhaps you will love me more when you know me better; and then, you have told
me your story with so much confidence, that I owe you a little of mine. You
must know, then, that my name is Pierre Gringoire, and that I am a son of the
farmer of the notary’s office of Gonesse. My father was hung by the
Burgundians, and my mother disembowelled by the Picards, at the siege of Paris,
twenty years ago. At six years of age, therefore, I was an orphan, without a
sole to my foot except the pavements of Paris. I do not know how I passed the
interval from six to sixteen. A fruit dealer gave me a plum here, a baker flung
me a crust there; in the evening I got myself taken up by the watch, who threw
me into prison, and there I found a bundle of straw. All this did not prevent
my growing up and growing thin, as you see. In the winter I warmed myself in
the sun, under the porch of the Hôtel de Sens, and I thought it very ridiculous
that the fire on Saint John’s Day was reserved for the dog days. At sixteen, I
wished to choose a calling. I tried all in succession. I became a soldier; but
I was not brave enough. I became a monk; but I was not sufficiently devout; and
then I’m a bad hand at drinking. In despair, I became an apprentice of the
woodcutters, but I was not strong enough; I had more of an inclination to
become a schoolmaster; ’tis true that I did not know how to read, but that’s no
reason. I perceived at the end of a certain time, that I lacked something in
every direction; and seeing that I was good for nothing, of my own free will I
became a poet and rhymester. That is a trade which one can always adopt when
one is a vagabond, and it’s better than stealing, as some young brigands of my
acquaintance advised me to do. One day I met by luck, Dom Claude Frollo, the
reverend archdeacon of Notre-Dame. He took an interest in me, and it is to him
that I to-day owe it that I am a veritable man of letters, who knows Latin from
the de Officiis of Cicero to the mortuology of the Celestine Fathers,
and a barbarian neither in scholastics, nor in politics, nor in rhythmics, that
sophism of sophisms. I am the author of the Mystery which was presented to-day
with great triumph and a great concourse of populace, in the grand hall of the
Palais de Justice. I have also made a book which will contain six hundred
pages, on the wonderful comet of 1465, which sent one man mad. I have enjoyed
still other successes. Being somewhat of an artillery carpenter, I lent a hand
to Jean Mangue’s great bombard, which burst, as you know, on the day when it
was tested, on the Pont de Charenton, and killed four and twenty curious
spectators. You see that I am not a bad match in marriage. I know a great many
sorts of very engaging tricks, which I will teach your goat; for example, to
mimic the Bishop of Paris, that cursed Pharisee whose mill wheels splash
passers-by the whole length of the Pont aux Meuniers. And then my mystery will
bring me in a great deal of coined money, if they will only pay me. And
finally, I am at your orders, I and my wits, and my science and my letters,
ready to live with you, damsel, as it shall please you, chastely or joyously;
husband and wife, if you see fit; brother and sister, if you think that
better.”

Gringoire ceased, awaiting the effect of his harangue on the young girl. Her
eyes were fixed on the ground.

“Phœbus,” she said in a low voice. Then, turning towards the poet,
“Phœbus,—what does that mean?”

Gringoire, without exactly understanding what the connection could be between
his address and this question, was not sorry to display his erudition. Assuming
an air of importance, he replied,—

“It is a Latin word which means sun.”

“Sun!” she repeated.

“It is the name of a handsome archer, who was a god,” added Gringoire.

“A god!” repeated the gypsy, and there was something pensive and passionate in
her tone.

At that moment, one of her bracelets became unfastened and fell. Gringoire
stooped quickly to pick it up; when he straightened up, the young girl and the
goat had disappeared. He heard the sound of a bolt. It was a little door,
communicating, no doubt, with a neighboring cell, which was being fastened on
the outside.

“Has she left me a bed, at least?” said our philosopher.

He made the tour of his cell. There was no piece of furniture adapted to
sleeping purposes, except a tolerably long wooden coffer; and its cover was
carved, to boot; which afforded Gringoire, when he stretched himself out upon
it, a sensation somewhat similar to that which Micromégas would feel if he were
to lie down on the Alps.

“Come!” said he, adjusting himself as well as possible, “I must resign myself.
But here’s a strange nuptial night. ’Tis a pity. There was something innocent
and antediluvian about that broken crock, which quite pleased me.”

BOOK THIRD.

CHAPTER I.
NOTRE-DAME.

The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and sublime
edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is
difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations
and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to
suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for
Philip Augustus, who laid the last.

On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of a wrinkle, one
always finds a scar. Tempus edax, homo edacior[18]; which I should be glad to translate thus:
time is blind, man is stupid.

If we had leisure to examine with the reader, one by one, the diverse traces of
destruction imprinted upon the old church, time’s share would be the least, the
share of men the most, especially the men of art, since there have been
individuals who assumed the title of architects during the last two centuries.

And, in the first place, to cite only a few leading examples, there certainly
are few finer architectural pages than this façade, where, successively and at
once, the three portals hollowed out in an arch; the broidered and dentated
cordon of the eight and twenty royal niches; the immense central rose window,
flanked by its two lateral windows, like a priest by his deacon and subdeacon;
the frail and lofty gallery of trefoil arcades, which supports a heavy platform
above its fine, slender columns; and lastly, the two black and massive towers
with their slate penthouses, harmonious parts of a magnificent whole,
superposed in five gigantic stories;—develop themselves before the eye, in a
mass and without confusion, with their innumerable details of statuary,
carving, and sculpture, joined powerfully to the tranquil grandeur of the
whole; a vast symphony in stone, so to speak; the colossal work of one man and
one people, all together one and complex, like the Iliads and the Romanceros,
whose sister it is; prodigious product of the grouping together of all the
forces of an epoch, where, upon each stone, one sees the fancy of the workman
disciplined by the genius of the artist start forth in a hundred fashions; a
sort of human creation, in a word, powerful and fecund as the divine creation
of which it seems to have stolen the double character,—variety, eternity.

And what we here say of the façade must be said of the entire church; and what
we say of the cathedral church of Paris, must be said of all the churches of
Christendom in the Middle Ages. All things are in place in that art,
self-created, logical, and well proportioned. To measure the great toe of the
foot is to measure the giant.

Let us return to the façade of Notre-Dame, as it still appears to us, when we
go piously to admire the grave and puissant cathedral, which inspires terror,
so its chronicles assert: quæ mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus.

Three important things are to-day lacking in that façade: in the first place,
the staircase of eleven steps which formerly raised it above the soil; next,
the lower series of statues which occupied the niches of the three portals; and
lastly the upper series, of the twenty-eight most ancient kings of France,
which garnished the gallery of the first story, beginning with Childebert, and
ending with Phillip Augustus, holding in his hand “the imperial apple.”

Time has caused the staircase to disappear, by raising the soil of the city
with a slow and irresistible progress; but, while thus causing the eleven steps
which added to the majestic height of the edifice, to be devoured, one by one,
by the rising tide of the pavements of Paris,—time has bestowed upon the church
perhaps more than it has taken away, for it is time which has spread over the
façade that sombre hue of the centuries which makes the old age of monuments
the period of their beauty.

But who has thrown down the two rows of statues? who has left the niches empty?
who has cut, in the very middle of the central portal, that new and bastard
arch? who has dared to frame therein that commonplace and heavy door of carved
wood, à la Louis XV., beside the arabesques of Biscornette? The men, the
architects, the artists of our day.

And if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown that colossus
of Saint Christopher, proverbial for magnitude among statues, as the grand hall
of the Palais de Justice was among halls, as the spire of Strasbourg among
spires? And those myriads of statues, which peopled all the spaces between the
columns of the nave and the choir, kneeling, standing, equestrian, men, women,
children, kings, bishops, gendarmes, in stone, in marble, in gold, in silver,
in copper, in wax even,—who has brutally swept them away? It is not time.

And who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly encumbered with
shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus, with angels’ heads and
clouds, which seems a specimen pillaged from the Val-de-Grâce or the Invalides?
Who stupidly sealed that heavy anachronism of stone in the Carlovingian
pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV., fulfilling the request of Louis
XIII.?

And who put the cold, white panes in the place of those windows, “high in
color,” which caused the astonished eyes of our fathers to hesitate between the
rose of the grand portal and the arches of the apse? And what would a
sub-chanter of the sixteenth century say, on beholding the beautiful yellow
wash, with which our archiepiscopal vandals have desmeared their cathedral? He
would remember that it was the color with which the hangman smeared “accursed”
edifices; he would recall the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, all smeared thus, on
account of the constable’s treason. “Yellow, after all, of so good a quality,”
said Sauval, “and so well recommended, that more than a century has not yet
caused it to lose its color.” He would think that the sacred place had become
infamous, and would flee.

And if we ascend the cathedral, without mentioning a thousand barbarisms of
every sort,—what has become of that charming little bell tower, which rested
upon the point of intersection of the cross-roofs, and which, no less frail and
no less bold than its neighbor (also destroyed), the spire of the
Sainte-Chapelle, buried itself in the sky, farther forward than the towers,
slender, pointed, sonorous, carved in open work. An architect of good taste
amputated it (1787), and considered it sufficient to mask the wound with that
large, leaden plaster, which resembles a pot cover.

’Tis thus that the marvellous art of the Middle Ages has been treated in nearly
every country, especially in France. One can distinguish on its ruins three
sorts of lesions, all three of which cut into it at different depths; first,
time, which has insensibly notched its surface here and there, and gnawed it
everywhere; next, political and religious revolution, which, blind and wrathful
by nature, have flung themselves tumultuously upon it, torn its rich garment of
carving and sculpture, burst its rose windows, broken its necklace of
arabesques and tiny figures, torn out its statues, sometimes because of their
mitres, sometimes because of their crowns; lastly, fashions, even more
grotesque and foolish, which, since the anarchical and splendid deviations of
the Renaissance, have followed each other in the necessary decadence of
architecture. Fashions have wrought more harm than revolutions. They have cut
to the quick; they have attacked the very bone and framework of art; they have
cut, slashed, disorganized, killed the edifice, in form as in the symbol, in
its consistency as well as in its beauty. And then they have made it over; a
presumption of which neither time nor revolutions at least have been guilty.
They have audaciously adjusted, in the name of “good taste,” upon the wounds of
gothic architecture, their miserable gewgaws of a day, their ribbons of marble,
their pompons of metal, a veritable leprosy of egg-shaped ornaments, volutes,
whorls, draperies, garlands, fringes, stone flames, bronze clouds, pudgy
cupids, chubby-cheeked cherubim, which begin to devour the face of art in the
oratory of Catherine de Medicis, and cause it to expire, two centuries later,
tortured and grimacing, in the boudoir of the Dubarry.

Thus, to sum up the points which we have just indicated, three sorts of ravages
to-day disfigure Gothic architecture. Wrinkles and warts on the epidermis; this
is the work of time. Deeds of violence, brutalities, contusions, fractures;
this is the work of the revolutions from Luther to Mirabeau. Mutilations,
amputations, dislocation of the joints, restorations; this is the Greek,
Roman, and barbarian work of professors according to Vitruvius and Vignole.
This magnificent art produced by the Vandals has been slain by the academies.
The centuries, the revolutions, which at least devastate with impartiality and
grandeur, have been joined by a cloud of school architects, licensed, sworn,
and bound by oath; defacing with the discernment and choice of bad taste,
substituting the chicorées of Louis XV. for the Gothic lace, for the
greater glory of the Parthenon. It is the kick of the ass at the dying lion. It
is the old oak crowning itself, and which, to heap the measure full, is stung,
bitten, and gnawed by caterpillars.

How far it is from the epoch when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre-Dame de Paris
to the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus, so much lauded by the ancient
pagans, which Erostatus has immortalized, found the Gallic temple
“more excellent in length, breadth, height, and structure.”[19]

Notre-Dame is not, moreover, what can be called a complete, definite,
classified monument. It is no longer a Romanesque church; nor is it a Gothic
church. This edifice is not a type. Notre-Dame de Paris has not, like the Abbey
of Tournus, the grave and massive frame, the large and round vault, the glacial
bareness, the majestic simplicity of the edifices which have the rounded arch
for their progenitor. It is not, like the Cathedral of Bourges, the
magnificent, light, multiform, tufted, bristling efflorescent product of the
pointed arch. Impossible to class it in that ancient family of sombre,
mysterious churches, low and crushed as it were by the round arch, almost
Egyptian, with the exception of the ceiling; all hieroglyphics, all sacerdotal,
all symbolical, more loaded in their ornaments, with lozenges and zigzags, than
with flowers, with flowers than with animals, with animals than with men; the
work of the architect less than of the bishop; first transformation of art, all
impressed with theocratic and military discipline, taking root in the Lower
Empire, and stopping with the time of William the Conqueror. Impossible to
place our Cathedral in that other family of lofty, aerial churches, rich in
painted windows and sculpture; pointed in form, bold in attitude; communal and
bourgeois as political symbols; free, capricious, lawless, as a work of
art; second transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, immovable
and sacerdotal, but artistic, progressive, and popular, which begins at the
return from the crusades, and ends with Louis IX. Notre-Dame de Paris is not of
pure Romanesque, like the first; nor of pure Arabian race, like the second.

It is an edifice of the transition period. The Saxon architect completed the
erection of the first pillars of the nave, when the pointed arch, which dates
from the Crusade, arrived and placed itself as a conqueror upon the large
Romanesque capitals which should support only round arches. The pointed arch,
mistress since that time, constructed the rest of the church. Nevertheless,
timid and inexperienced at the start, it sweeps out, grows larger, restrains
itself, and dares no longer dart upwards in spires and lancet windows, as it
did later on, in so many marvellous cathedrals. One would say that it were
conscious of the vicinity of the heavy Romanesque pillars.

However, these edifices of the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic,
are no less precious for study than the pure types. They express a shade of the
art which would be lost without them. It is the graft of the pointed upon the
round arch.

Notre-Dame de Paris is, in particular, a curious specimen of this variety. Each
face, each stone of the venerable monument, is a page not only of the history
of the country, but of the history of science and art as well. Thus, in order
to indicate here only the principal details, while the little Red Door almost
attains to the limits of the Gothic delicacy of the fifteenth century, the
pillars of the nave, by their size and weight, go back to the Carlovingian
Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. One would suppose that six centuries separated
these pillars from that door. There is no one, not even the hermetics, who does
not find in the symbols of the grand portal a satisfactory compendium of their
science, of which the Church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was so complete a
hieroglyph. Thus, the Roman abbey, the philosophers’ church, the Gothic art,
Saxon art, the heavy, round pillar, which recalls Gregory VII., the hermetic
symbolism, with which Nicolas Flamel played the prelude to Luther, papal unity,
schism, Saint-Germain des Prés, Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie,—all are mingled,
combined, amalgamated in Notre-Dame. This central mother church is, among the
ancient churches of Paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head of one, the limbs
of another, the haunches of another, something of all.

We repeat it, these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting for the
artist, for the antiquarian, for the historian. They make one feel to what a
degree architecture is a primitive thing, by demonstrating (what is also
demonstrated by the cyclopean vestiges, the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic
Hindoo pagodas) that the greatest products of architecture are less the works
of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation’s effort, than
the inspired flash of a man of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the
heaps accumulated by centuries; the residue of successive evaporations of human
society,—in a word, species of formations. Each wave of time contributes its
alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monument, each individual brings
his stone. Thus do the beavers, thus do the bees, thus do men. The great symbol
of architecture, Babel, is a hive.

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often
undergoes a transformation while they are pending, pendent opera
interrupta; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art.
The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there,
assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it
if it can. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without
reaction,—following a natural and tranquil law. It is a graft which shoots up,
a sap which circulates, a vegetation which starts forth anew. Certainly there
is matter here for many large volumes, and often the universal history of
humanity in the successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the
same monument. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great
masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed
up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.

Not to consider here anything except the Christian architecture of Europe, that
younger sister of the great masonries of the Orient, it appears to the eyes as
an immense formation divided into three well-defined zones, which are
superposed, the one upon the other: the Romanesque zone[20], the Gothic zone, the zone of the
Renaissance, which we would gladly call the Greco-Roman zone. The Roman layer,
which is the most ancient and deepest, is occupied by the round arch, which
reappears, supported by the Greek column, in the modern and upper layer of the
Renaissance. The pointed arch is found between the two. The edifices which
belong exclusively to any one of these three layers are perfectly distinct,
uniform, and complete. There is the Abbey of Jumiéges, there is the Cathedral
of Reims, there is the Sainte-Croix of Orléans. But the three zones mingle and
amalgamate along the edges, like the colors in the solar spectrum. Hence,
complex monuments, edifices of gradation and transition. One is Roman at the
base, Gothic in the middle, Greco-Roman at the top. It is because it was six
hundred years in building. This variety is rare. The donjon keep of d’Étampes
is a specimen of it. But monuments of two formations are more frequent. There
is Notre-Dame de Paris, a pointed-arch edifice, which is imbedded by its
pillars in that Roman zone, in which are plunged the portal of Saint-Denis, and
the nave of Saint-Germain des Prés. There is the charming, half-Gothic
chapter-house of Bocherville, where the Roman layer extends half way up. There
is the cathedral of Rouen, which would be entirely Gothic if it did not bathe
the tip of its central spire in the zone of the Renaissance.[21]

However, all these shades, all these differences, do not affect the surfaces of
edifices only. It is art which has changed its skin. The very constitution of
the Christian church is not attacked by it. There is always the same internal
woodwork, the same logical arrangement of parts. Whatever may be the carved and
embroidered envelope of a cathedral, one always finds beneath it—in the state
of a germ, and of a rudiment at the least—the Roman basilica. It is eternally
developed upon the soil according to the same law. There are, invariably, two
naves, which intersect in a cross, and whose upper portion, rounded into an
apse, forms the choir; there are always the side aisles, for interior
processions, for chapels,—a sort of lateral walks or promenades where the
principal nave discharges itself through the spaces between the pillars. That
settled, the number of chapels, doors, bell towers, and pinnacles are modified
to infinity, according to the fancy of the century, the people, and art. The
service of religion once assured and provided for, architecture does what she
pleases. Statues, stained glass, rose windows, arabesques, denticulations,
capitals, bas-reliefs,—she combines all these imaginings according to the
arrangement which best suits her. Hence, the prodigious exterior variety of
these edifices, at whose foundation dwells so much order and unity. The trunk
of a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.

CHAPTER II.
A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS.

We have just attempted to restore, for the reader’s benefit, that admirable
church of Notre-Dame de Paris. We have briefly pointed out the greater part of
the beauties which it possessed in the fifteenth century, and which it lacks
to-day; but we have omitted the principal thing,—the view of Paris which was
then to be obtained from the summits of its towers.

That was, in fact,—when, after having long groped one’s way up the dark spiral
which perpendicularly pierces the thick wall of the belfries, one emerged, at
last abruptly, upon one of the lofty platforms inundated with light and
air,—that was, in fact, a fine picture which spread out, on all sides at once,
before the eye; a spectacle sui generis, of which those of our readers
who have had the good fortune to see a Gothic city entire, complete,
homogeneous,—a few of which still remain, Nuremberg in Bavaria and Vittoria in
Spain,—can readily form an idea; or even smaller specimens, provided that they
are well preserved,—Vitré in Brittany, Nordhausen in Prussia.

The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago—the Paris of the fifteenth
century—was already a gigantic city. We Parisians generally make a mistake as
to the ground which we think that we have gained, since Paris has not increased
much over one-third since the time of Louis XI. It has certainly lost more in
beauty than it has gained in size.

Paris had its birth, as the reader knows, in that old island of the City which
has the form of a cradle. The strand of that island was its first boundary
wall, the Seine its first moat. Paris remained for many centuries in its island
state, with two bridges, one on the north, the other on the south; and two
bridge heads, which were at the same time its gates and its fortresses,—the
Grand-Châtelet on the right bank, the Petit-Châtelet on the left. Then, from
the date of the kings of the first race, Paris, being too cribbed and confined
in its island, and unable to return thither, crossed the water. Then, beyond
the Grand, beyond the Petit-Châtelet, a first circle of walls and towers began
to infringe upon the country on the two sides of the Seine. Some vestiges of
this ancient enclosure still remained in the last century; to-day, only the
memory of it is left, and here and there a tradition, the Baudets or Baudoyer
gate, Porta Bagauda.

Little by little, the tide of houses, always thrust from the heart of the city
outwards, overflows, devours, wears away, and effaces this wall. Philip
Augustus makes a new dike for it. He imprisons Paris in a circular chain of
great towers, both lofty and solid. For the period of more than a century, the
houses press upon each other, accumulate, and raise their level in this basin,
like water in a reservoir. They begin to deepen; they pile story upon story;
they mount upon each other; they gush forth at the top, like all laterally
compressed growth, and there is a rivalry as to which shall thrust its head
above its neighbors, for the sake of getting a little air. The street glows
narrower and deeper, every space is overwhelmed and disappears. The houses
finally leap the wall of Philip Augustus, and scatter joyfully over the plain,
without order, and all askew, like runaways. There they plant themselves
squarely, cut themselves gardens from the fields, and take their ease.
Beginning with 1367, the city spreads to such an extent into the suburbs, that
a new wall becomes necessary, particularly on the right bank; Charles V. builds
it. But a city like Paris is perpetually growing. It is only such cities that
become capitals. They are funnels, into which all the geographical, political,
moral, and intellectual water-sheds of a country, all the natural slopes of a
people, pour; wells of civilization, so to speak, and also sewers, where
commerce, industry, intelligence, population,—all that is sap, all that is
life, all that is the soul of a nation, filters and amasses unceasingly, drop
by drop, century by century.

So Charles V.’s wall suffered the fate of that of Philip Augustus. At the end
of the fifteenth century, the Faubourg strides across it, passes beyond it, and
runs farther. In the sixteenth, it seems to retreat visibly, and to bury itself
deeper and deeper in the old city, so thick had the new city already become
outside of it. Thus, beginning with the fifteenth century, where our story
finds us, Paris had already outgrown the three concentric circles of walls
which, from the time of Julian the Apostate, existed, so to speak, in germ in
the Grand-Châtelet and the Petit-Châtelet. The mighty city had cracked, in
succession, its four enclosures of walls, like a child grown too large for his
garments of last year. Under Louis XI., this sea of houses was seen to be
pierced at intervals by several groups of ruined towers, from the ancient wall,
like the summits of hills in an inundation,—like archipelagos of the old Paris
submerged beneath the new. Since that time Paris has undergone yet another
transformation, unfortunately for our eyes; but it has passed only one more
wall, that of Louis XV., that miserable wall of mud and spittle, worthy of the
king who built it, worthy of the poet who sung it,—

Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.[22]

In the fifteenth century, Paris was still divided into three wholly distinct
and separate towns, each having its own physiognomy, its own specialty, its
manners, customs, privileges, and history: the City, the University, the Town.
The City, which occupied the island, was the most ancient, the smallest, and
the mother of the other two, crowded in between them like (may we be pardoned
the comparison) a little old woman between two large and handsome maidens. The
University covered the left bank of the Seine, from the Tournelle to the Tour
de Nesle, points which correspond in the Paris of to-day, the one to the wine
market, the other to the mint. Its wall included a large part of that plain
where Julian had built his hot baths. The hill of Sainte-Geneviève was enclosed
in it. The culminating point of this sweep of walls was the Papal gate, that is
to say, near the present site of the Pantheon. The Town, which was the largest
of the three fragments of Paris, held the right bank. Its quay, broken or
interrupted in many places, ran along the Seine, from the Tour de Billy to the
Tour du Bois; that is to say, from the place where the granary stands to-day,
to the present site of the Tuileries. These four points, where the Seine
intersected the wall of the capital, the Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the
right, the Tour de Billy and the Tour du Bois on the left, were called
pre-eminently, the four towers of Paris. The Town encroached still more
extensively upon the fields than the University. The culminating point of the
Town wall (that of Charles V.) was at the gates of Saint-Denis and
Saint-Martin, whose situation has not been changed.

As we have just said, each of these three great divisions of Paris was a town,
but too special a town to be complete, a city which could not get along without
the other two. Hence three entirely distinct aspects: churches abounded in the
City; palaces, in the Town; and colleges, in the University. Neglecting here
the originalities, of secondary importance in old Paris, and the capricious
regulations regarding the public highways, we will say, from a general point of
view, taking only masses and the whole group, in this chaos of communal
jurisdictions, that the island belonged to the bishop, the right bank to the
provost of the merchants, the left bank to the Rector; over all ruled the
provost of Paris, a royal not a municipal official. The City had Notre-Dame;
the Town, the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville; the University, the Sorbonne. The
Town had the markets (Halles); the city, the Hospital; the University, the
Pré-aux-Clercs. Offences committed by the scholars on the left bank were tried
in the law courts on the island, and were punished on the right bank at
Montfaucon; unless the rector, feeling the university to be strong and the king
weak, intervened; for it was the students’ privilege to be hanged on their own
grounds.

The greater part of these privileges, it may be noted in passing, and there
were some even better than the above, had been extorted from the kings by
revolts and mutinies. It is the course of things from time immemorial; the king
only lets go when the people tear away. There is an old charter which puts the
matter naively: àpropos of fidelity: Civibus fidelitas in reges, quæ
tamen aliquoties seditionibus interrupta, multa peperit privilegia.

In the fifteenth century, the Seine bathed five islands within the walls of
Paris: Louviers island, where there were then trees, and where there is no
longer anything but wood; l’île aux Vaches, and l’île Notre-Dame, both
deserted, with the exception of one house, both fiefs of the bishop—in the
seventeenth century, a single island was formed out of these two, which was
built upon and named l’île Saint-Louis—, lastly the City, and at its point, the
little islet of the cow tender, which was afterwards engulfed beneath the
platform of the Pont-Neuf. The City then had five bridges: three on the right,
the Pont Notre-Dame, and the Pont au Change, of stone, the Pont aux Meuniers,
of wood; two on the left, the Petit Pont, of stone, the Pont Saint-Michel, of
wood; all loaded with houses.

The University had six gates, built by Philip Augustus; there were, beginning
with la Tournelle, the Porte Saint-Victor, the Porte Bordelle, the Porte
Papale, the Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Saint-Michel, the Porte
Saint-Germain. The Town had six gates, built by Charles V.; beginning with the
Tour de Billy they were: the Porte Saint-Antoine, the Porte du Temple, the
Porte Saint-Martin, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Porte Montmartre, the Porte
Saint-Honoré. All these gates were strong, and also handsome, which does not
detract from strength. A large, deep moat, with a brisk current during the high
water of winter, bathed the base of the wall round Paris; the Seine furnished
the water. At night, the gates were shut, the river was barred at both ends of
the city with huge iron chains, and Paris slept tranquilly.

From a bird’s-eye view, these three burgs, the City, the Town, and the
University, each presented to the eye an inextricable skein of eccentrically
tangled streets. Nevertheless, at first sight, one recognized the fact that
these three fragments formed but one body. One immediately perceived three long
parallel streets, unbroken, undisturbed, traversing, almost in a straight line,
all three cities, from one end to the other; from North to South,
perpendicularly, to the Seine, which bound them together, mingled them, infused
them in each other, poured and transfused the people incessantly, from one to
the other, and made one out of the three. The first of these streets ran from
the Porte Saint-Martin: it was called the Rue Saint-Jacques in the University,
Rue de la Juiverie in the City, Rue Saint-Martin in the Town; it crossed the
water twice, under the name of the Petit Pont and the Pont Notre-Dame. The
second, which was called the Rue de la Harpe on the left bank, Rue de la
Barillerié in the island, Rue Saint-Denis on the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel
on one arm of the Seine, Pont au Change on the other, ran from the Porte
Saint-Michel in the University, to the Porte Saint-Denis in the Town. However,
under all these names, there were but two streets, parent streets, generating
streets,—the two arteries of Paris. All the other veins of the triple city
either derived their supply from them or emptied into them.

Independently of these two principal streets, piercing Paris diametrically in
its whole breadth, from side to side, common to the entire capital, the City
and the University had also each its own great special street, which ran
lengthwise by them, parallel to the Seine, cutting, as it passed, at right
angles, the two arterial thoroughfares. Thus, in the Town, one descended in a
straight line from the Porte Saint-Antoine to the Porte Saint-Honoré; in the
University from the Porte Saint-Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain. These two
great thoroughfares intersected by the two first, formed the canvas upon which
reposed, knotted and crowded together on every hand, the labyrinthine network
of the streets of Paris. In the incomprehensible plan of these streets, one
distinguished likewise, on looking attentively, two clusters of great streets,
like magnified sheaves of grain, one in the University, the other in the Town,
which spread out gradually from the bridges to the gates.

Some traces of this geometrical plan still exist to-day.

Now, what aspect did this whole present, when, as viewed from the summit of the
towers of Notre-Dame, in 1482? That we shall try to describe.

For the spectator who arrived, panting, upon that pinnacle, it was first a
dazzling confusing view of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, places, spires,
bell towers. Everything struck your eye at once: the carved gable, the pointed
roof, the turrets suspended at the angles of the walls; the stone pyramids of
the eleventh century, the slate obelisks of the fifteenth; the round, bare
tower of the donjon keep; the square and fretted tower of the church; the great
and the little, the massive and the aerial. The eye was, for a long time,
wholly lost in this labyrinth, where there was nothing which did not possess
its originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty,—nothing which did not
proceed from art; beginning with the smallest house, with its painted and
carved front, with external beams, elliptical door, with projecting stories, to
the royal Louvre, which then had a colonnade of towers. But these are the
principal masses which were then to be distinguished when the eye began to
accustom itself to this tumult of edifices.

In the first place, the City.—“The island of the City,” as Sauval says, who, in
spite of his confused medley, sometimes has such happy turns of
expression,—“the island of the city is made like a great ship, stuck in the mud
and run aground in the current, near the centre of the Seine.”

We have just explained that, in the fifteenth century, this ship was anchored
to the two banks of the river by five bridges. This form of a ship had also
struck the heraldic scribes; for it is from that, and not from the siege by the
Normans, that the ship which blazons the old shield of Paris, comes, according
to Favyn and Pasquier. For him who understands how to decipher them, armorial
bearings are algebra, armorial bearings have a tongue. The whole history of the
second half of the Middle Ages is written in armorial bearings,—the first half
is in the symbolism of the Roman churches. They are the hieroglyphics of
feudalism, succeeding those of theocracy.

Thus the City first presented itself to the eye, with its stern to the east,
and its prow to the west. Turning towards the prow, one had before one an
innumerable flock of ancient roofs, over which arched broadly the lead-covered
apse of the Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant’s haunches loaded with its tower.
Only here, this tower was the most audacious, the most open, the most
ornamented spire of cabinet-maker’s work that ever let the sky peep through its
cone of lace. In front of Notre-Dame, and very near at hand, three streets
opened into the cathedral square,—a fine square, lined with ancient houses.
Over the south side of this place bent the wrinkled and sullen façade of the
Hôtel Dieu, and its roof, which seemed covered with warts and pustules. Then,
on the right and the left, to east and west, within that wall of the City,
which was yet so contracted, rose the bell towers of its one and twenty
churches, of every date, of every form, of every size, from the low and
wormeaten belfry of Saint-Denis du Pas (Carcer Glaucini) to the slender
needles of Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs and Saint-Landry.

Behind Notre-Dame, the cloister and its Gothic galleries spread out towards the
north; on the south, the half-Roman palace of the bishop; on the east, the
desert point of the Terrain. In this throng of houses the eye also
distinguished, by the lofty open-work mitres of stone which then crowned the
roof itself, even the most elevated windows of the palace, the hotel given by
the city, under Charles VI., to Juvénal des Ursins; a little farther on, the
pitch-covered sheds of the Palus Market; in still another quarter the new apse
of Saint-Germain le Vieux, lengthened in 1458, with a bit of the Rue aux
Febves; and then, in places, a square crowded with people; a pillory, erected
at the corner of a street; a fine fragment of the pavement of Philip Augustus,
a magnificent flagging, grooved for the horses’ feet, in the middle of the
road, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the miserable
cobblestones, called the pavement of the League; a deserted back
courtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase turrets, such as were erected
in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seen in the Rue des
Bourdonnais. Lastly, at the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, towards the west, the
Palais de Justice rested its group of towers at the edge of the water. The
thickets of the king’s gardens, which covered the western point of the City,
masked the Island du Passeur. As for the water, from the summit of the towers
of Notre-Dame one hardly saw it, on either side of the City; the Seine was
hidden by bridges, the bridges by houses.

And when the glance passed these bridges, whose roofs were visibly green,
rendered mouldy before their time by the vapors from the water, if it was
directed to the left, towards the University, the first edifice which struck it
was a large, low sheaf of towers, the Petit-Châtelet, whose yawning gate
devoured the end of the Petit-Pont. Then, if your view ran along the bank, from
east to west, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, there was a long cordon
of houses, with carved beams, stained-glass windows, each story projecting over
that beneath it, an interminable zigzag of bourgeois gables, frequently
interrupted by the mouth of a street, and from time to time also by the front
or angle of a huge stone mansion, planted at its ease, with courts and gardens,
wings and detached buildings, amid this populace of crowded and narrow houses,
like a grand gentleman among a throng of rustics. There were five or six of
these mansions on the quay, from the house of Lorraine, which shared with the
Bernardins the grand enclosure adjoining the Tournelle, to the Hôtel de Nesle,
whose principal tower ended Paris, and whose pointed roofs were in a position,
during three months of the year, to encroach, with their black triangles, upon
the scarlet disk of the setting sun.

This side of the Seine was, however, the least mercantile of the two. Students
furnished more of a crowd and more noise there than artisans, and there was
not, properly speaking, any quay, except from the Pont Saint-Michel to the Tour
de Nesle. The rest of the bank of the Seine was now a naked strand, the same as
beyond the Bernardins; again, a throng of houses, standing with their feet in
the water, as between the two bridges.

There was a great uproar of laundresses; they screamed, and talked, and sang
from morning till night along the beach, and beat a great deal of linen there,
just as in our day. This is not the least of the gayeties of Paris.

The University presented a dense mass to the eye. From one end to the other, it
was homogeneous and compact. The thousand roofs, dense, angular, clinging to
each other, composed, nearly all, of the same geometrical element, offered,
when viewed from above, the aspect of a crystallization of the same substance.

The capricious ravine of streets did not cut this block of houses into too
disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were scattered about in a
fairly equal manner, and there were some everywhere. The amusingly varied
crests of these beautiful edifices were the product of the same art as the
simple roofs which they overshot, and were, actually, only a multiplication of
the square or the cube of the same geometrical figure. Hence they complicated
the whole effect, without disturbing it; completed, without overloading it.
Geometry is harmony. Some fine mansions here and there made magnificent
outlines against the picturesque attics of the left bank. The house of Nevers,
the house of Rome, the house of Reims, which have disappeared; the Hôtel de
Cluny, which still exists, for the consolation of the artist, and whose tower
was so stupidly deprived of its crown a few years ago. Close to Cluny, that
Roman palace, with fine round arches, were once the hot baths of Julian. There
were a great many abbeys, of a beauty more devout, of a grandeur more solemn
than the mansions, but not less beautiful, not less grand. Those which first
caught the eye were the Bernardins, with their three bell towers;
Sainte-Geneviève, whose square tower, which still exists, makes us regret the
rest; the Sorbonne, half college, half monastery, of which so admirable a nave
survives; the fine quadrilateral cloister of the Mathurins; its neighbor, the
cloister of Saint-Benoît, within whose walls they have had time to cobble up a
theatre, between the seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Cordeliers,
with their three enormous adjacent gables; the Augustins, whose graceful spire
formed, after the Tour de Nesle, the second denticulation on this side of
Paris, starting from the west. The colleges, which are, in fact, the
intermediate ring between the cloister and the world, hold the middle position
in the monumental series between the hotels and the abbeys, with a severity
full of elegance, sculpture less giddy than the palaces, an architecture less
severe than the convents. Unfortunately, hardly anything remains of these
monuments, where Gothic art combined with so just a balance, richness and
economy. The churches (and they were numerous and splendid in the University,
and they were graded there also in all the ages of architecture, from the round
arches of Saint-Julian to the pointed arches of Saint-Séverin), the churches
dominated the whole; and, like one harmony more in this mass of harmonies, they
pierced in quick succession the multiple open work of the gables with slashed
spires, with open-work bell towers, with slender pinnacles, whose line was also
only a magnificent exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs.

The ground of the University was hilly; Mount Sainte-Geneviève formed an
enormous mound to the south; and it was a sight to see from the summit of
Notre-Dame how that throng of narrow and tortuous streets (to-day the Latin
Quarter), those bunches of houses which, spread out in every direction from the
top of this eminence, precipitated themselves in disorder, and almost
perpendicularly down its flanks, nearly to the water’s edge, having the air,
some of falling, others of clambering up again, and all of holding to one
another. A continual flux of a thousand black points which passed each other on
the pavements made everything move before the eyes; it was the populace seen
thus from aloft and afar.

Lastly, in the intervals of these roofs, of these spires, of these accidents of
numberless edifices, which bent and writhed, and jagged in so eccentric a
manner the extreme line of the University, one caught a glimpse, here and
there, of a great expanse of moss-grown wall, a thick, round tower, a
crenellated city gate, shadowing forth the fortress; it was the wall of Philip
Augustus. Beyond, the fields gleamed green; beyond, fled the roads, along which
were scattered a few more suburban houses, which became more infrequent as they
became more distant. Some of these faubourgs were important: there were, first,
starting from la Tournelle, the Bourg Saint-Victor, with its one arch bridge
over the Bièvre, its abbey where one could read the epitaph of Louis le Gros,
epitaphium Ludovici Grossi, and its church with an octagonal spire,
flanked with four little bell towers of the eleventh century (a similar one can
be seen at Étampes; it is not yet destroyed); next, the Bourg Saint-Marceau,
which already had three churches and one convent; then, leaving the mill of the
Gobelins and its four white walls on the left, there was the Faubourg
Saint-Jacques with the beautiful carved cross in its square; the church of
Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, which was then Gothic, pointed, charming;
Saint-Magloire, a fine nave of the fourteenth century, which Napoleon turned
into a hayloft; Notre-Dame des Champs, where there were Byzantine mosaics;
lastly, after having left behind, full in the country, the Monastery des
Chartreux, a rich edifice contemporary with the Palais de Justice, with its
little garden divided into compartments, and the haunted ruins of Vauvert, the
eye fell, to the west, upon the three Roman spires of Saint-Germain des Prés.
The Bourg Saint-Germain, already a large community, formed fifteen or twenty
streets in the rear; the pointed bell tower of Saint-Sulpice marked one corner
of the town. Close beside it one descried the quadrilateral enclosure of the
fair of Saint-Germain, where the market is situated to-day; then the abbot’s
pillory, a pretty little round tower, well capped with a leaden cone; the
brickyard was further on, and the Rue du Four, which led to the common
bakehouse, and the mill on its hillock, and the lazar house, a tiny house,
isolated and half seen.

But that which attracted the eye most of all, and fixed it for a long time on
that point, was the abbey itself. It is certain that this monastery, which had
a grand air, both as a church and as a seignory; that abbatial palace, where
the bishops of Paris counted themselves happy if they could pass the night;
that refectory, upon which the architect had bestowed the air, the beauty, and
the rose window of a cathedral; that elegant chapel of the Virgin; that
monumental dormitory; those vast gardens; that portcullis; that drawbridge;
that envelope of battlements which notched to the eye the verdure of the
surrounding meadows; those courtyards, where gleamed men at arms, intermingled
with golden copes;—the whole grouped and clustered about three lofty spires,
with round arches, well planted upon a Gothic apse, made a magnificent figure
against the horizon.

When, at length, after having contemplated the University for a long time, you
turned towards the right bank, towards the Town, the character of the spectacle
was abruptly altered. The Town, in fact much larger than the University, was
also less of a unit. At the first glance, one saw that it was divided into many
masses, singularly distinct. First, to the eastward, in that part of the town
which still takes its name from the marsh where Camulogènes entangled Cæsar,
was a pile of palaces. The block extended to the very water’s edge. Four almost
contiguous hotels, Jouy, Sens, Barbeau, the house of the Queen, mirrored their
slate peaks, broken with slender turrets, in the Seine.

These four edifices filled the space from the Rue des Nonaindières, to the
abbey of the Celestins, whose spire gracefully relieved their line of gables
and battlements. A few miserable, greenish hovels, hanging over the water in
front of these sumptuous hotels, did not prevent one from seeing the fine
angles of their façades, their large, square windows with stone mullions, their
pointed porches overloaded with statues, the vivid outlines of their walls,
always clear cut, and all those charming accidents of architecture, which cause
Gothic art to have the air of beginning its combinations afresh with every
monument.

Behind these palaces, extended in all directions, now broken, fenced in,
battlemented like a citadel, now veiled by great trees like a Carthusian
convent, the immense and multiform enclosure of that miraculous Hôtel de
Saint-Pol, where the King of France possessed the means of lodging superbly two
and twenty princes of the rank of the dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy, with
their domestics and their suites, without counting the great lords, and the
emperor when he came to view Paris, and the lions, who had their separate hotel
at the royal hotel. Let us say here that a prince’s apartment was then composed
of never less than eleven large rooms, from the chamber of state to the
oratory, not to mention the galleries, baths, vapor-baths, and other
“superfluous places,” with which each apartment was provided; not to mention
the private gardens for each of the king’s guests; not to mention the kitchens,
the cellars, the domestic offices, the general refectories of the house, the
poultry-yards, where there were twenty-two general laboratories, from the
bakehouses to the wine-cellars; games of a thousand sorts, malls, tennis, and
riding at the ring; aviaries, fishponds, menageries, stables, barns, libraries,
arsenals and foundries. This was what a king’s palace, a Louvre, a Hôtel de
Saint-Pol was then. A city within a city.

From the tower where we are placed, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, almost half hidden by
the four great houses of which we have just spoken, was still very considerable
and very marvellous to see. One could there distinguish, very well, though
cleverly united with the principal building by long galleries, decked with
painted glass and slender columns, the three hotels which Charles V. had
amalgamated with his palace: the Hôtel du Petit-Muce, with the airy balustrade,
which formed a graceful border to its roof; the Hôtel of the Abbé de
Saint-Maur, having the vanity of a stronghold, a great tower, machicolations,
loopholes, iron gratings, and over the large Saxon door, the armorial bearings
of the abbé, between the two mortises of the drawbridge; the Hôtel of the Comte
d’Étampes, whose donjon keep, ruined at its summit, was rounded and notched
like a cock’s comb; here and there, three or four ancient oaks, forming a tuft
together like enormous cauliflowers; gambols of swans, in the clear water of
the fishponds, all in folds of light and shade; many courtyards of which one
beheld picturesque bits; the Hôtel of the Lions, with its low, pointed arches
on short, Saxon pillars, its iron gratings and its perpetual roar; shooting up
above the whole, the scale-ornamented spire of the Ave-Maria; on the left, the
house of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four small towers, delicately
grooved, in the middle; at the extremity, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, properly
speaking, with its multiplied façades, its successive enrichments from the time
of Charles V., the hybrid excrescences, with which the fancy of the architects
had loaded it during the last two centuries, with all the apses of its chapels,
all the gables of its galleries, a thousand weathercocks for the four winds,
and its two lofty contiguous towers, whose conical roof, surrounded by
battlements at its base, looked like those pointed caps which have their edges
turned up.

Continuing to mount the stories of this amphitheatre of palaces spread out afar
upon the ground, after crossing a deep ravine hollowed out of the roofs in the
Town, which marked the passage of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the eye reached the
house of Angoulême, a vast construction of many epochs, where there were
perfectly new and very white parts, which melted no better into the whole than
a red patch on a blue doublet. Nevertheless, the remarkably pointed and lofty
roof of the modern palace, bristling with carved eaves, covered with sheets of
lead, where coiled a thousand fantastic arabesques of sparkling incrustations
of gilded bronze, that roof, so curiously damascened, darted upwards gracefully
from the midst of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice; whose huge and
ancient towers, rounded by age like casks, sinking together with old age, and
rending themselves from top to bottom, resembled great bellies unbuttoned.
Behind rose the forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles. Not a view in
the world, either at Chambord or at the Alhambra, is more magic, more aerial,
more enchanting, than that thicket of spires, tiny bell towers, chimneys,
weather-vanes, winding staircases, lanterns through which the daylight makes
its way, which seem cut out at a blow, pavilions, spindle-shaped turrets, or,
as they were then called, tournelles, all differing in form, in height,
and attitude. One would have pronounced it a gigantic stone chess-board.

To the right of the Tournelles, that truss of enormous towers, black as ink,
running into each other and tied, as it were, by a circular moat; that donjon
keep, much more pierced with loopholes than with windows; that drawbridge,
always raised; that portcullis, always lowered,—is the Bastille. Those sorts of
black beaks which project from between the battlements, and which you take from
a distance to be cave spouts, are cannons.

Beneath them, at the foot of the formidable edifice, behold the Porte
Sainte-Antoine, buried between its two towers.

Beyond the Tournelles, as far as the wall of Charles V., spread out, with rich
compartments of verdure and of flowers, a velvet carpet of cultivated land and
royal parks, in the midst of which one recognized, by its labyrinth of trees
and alleys, the famous Dædalus garden which Louis XI. had given to Coictier.
The doctor’s observatory rose above the labyrinth like a great isolated column,
with a tiny house for a capital. Terrible astrologies took place in that
laboratory.

There to-day is the Place Royale.

As we have just said, the quarter of the palace, of which we have just
endeavored to give the reader some idea by indicating only the chief points,
filled the angle which Charles V.’s wall made with the Seine on the east. The
centre of the Town was occupied by a pile of houses for the populace. It was
there, in fact, that the three bridges disgorged upon the right bank, and
bridges lead to the building of houses rather than palaces. That congregation
of bourgeois habitations, pressed together like the cells in a hive, had
a beauty of its own. It is with the roofs of a capital as with the waves of the
sea,—they are grand. First the streets, crossed and entangled, forming a
hundred amusing figures in the block; around the market-place, it was like a
star with a thousand rays.

The Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable ramifications,
rose one after the other, like trees intertwining their branches; and then the
tortuous lines, the Rues de la Plâtrerie, de la Verrerie, de la Tixeranderie,
etc., meandered over all. There were also fine edifices which pierced the
petrified undulations of that sea of gables. At the head of the Pont aux
Changeurs, behind which one beheld the Seine foaming beneath the wheels of the
Pont aux Meuniers, there was the Châlelet, no longer a Roman tower, as under
Julian the Apostate, but a feudal tower of the thirteenth century, and of a
stone so hard that the pickaxe could not break away so much as the thickness of
the fist in a space of three hours; there was the rich square bell tower of
Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, with its angles all frothing with carvings,
already admirable, although it was not finished in the fifteenth century. (It
lacked, in particular, the four monsters, which, still perched to-day on the
corners of its roof, have the air of so many sphinxes who are propounding to
new Paris the riddle of the ancient Paris. Rault, the sculptor, only placed
them in position in 1526, and received twenty francs for his pains.) There was
the Maison-aux-Piliers, the Pillar House, opening upon that Place de Grève of
which we have given the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais, which a
front “in good taste” has since spoiled; Saint-Méry, whose ancient pointed
arches were still almost round arches; Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was
proverbial; there were twenty other monuments, which did not disdain to bury
their wonders in that chaos of black, deep, narrow streets. Add the crosses of
carved stone, more lavishly scattered through the squares than even the
gibbets; the cemetery of the Innocents, whose architectural wall could be seen
in the distance above the roofs; the pillory of the Markets, whose top was
visible between two chimneys of the Rue de la Cossonnerie; the ladder of the
Croix-du-Trahoir, in its square always black with people; the circular
buildings of the wheat mart; the fragments of Philip Augustus’s ancient wall,
which could be made out here and there, drowned among the houses, its towers
gnawed by ivy, its gates in ruins, with crumbling and deformed stretches of
wall; the quay with its thousand shops, and its bloody knacker’s yards; the
Seine encumbered with boats, from the Port au Foin to For-l’Évêque, and you
will have a confused picture of what the central trapezium of the Town was like
in 1482.

With these two quarters, one of hotels, the other of houses, the third feature
of aspect presented by the city was a long zone of abbeys, which bordered it in
nearly the whole of its circumference, from the rising to the setting sun, and,
behind the circle of fortifications which hemmed in Paris, formed a second
interior enclosure of convents and chapels. Thus, immediately adjoining the
park des Tournelles, between the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Vieille Rue du
Temple, there stood Sainte-Catherine, with its immense cultivated lands, which
were terminated only by the wall of Paris. Between the old and the new Rue du
Temple, there was the Temple, a sinister group of towers, lofty, erect, and
isolated in the middle of a vast, battlemented enclosure. Between the Rue
Neuve-du-Temple and the Rue Saint-Martin, there was the Abbey of Saint-Martin,
in the midst of its gardens, a superb fortified church, whose girdle of towers,
whose diadem of bell towers, yielded in force and splendor only to
Saint-Germain des Prés. Between the Rue Saint-Martin and the Rue Saint-Denis,
spread the enclosure of the Trinité.

Lastly, between the Rue Saint-Denis, and the Rue Montorgueil, stood the
Filles-Dieu. On one side, the rotting roofs and unpaved enclosure of the Cour
des Miracles could be descried. It was the sole profane ring which was linked
to that devout chain of convents.

Finally, the fourth compartment, which stretched itself out in the
agglomeration of the roofs on the right bank, and which occupied the western
angle of the enclosure, and the banks of the river down stream, was a fresh
cluster of palaces and hôtels pressed close about the base of the Louvre. The
old Louvre of Philip Augustus, that immense edifice whose great tower rallied
about it three and twenty chief towers, not to reckon the lesser towers, seemed
from a distance to be enshrined in the Gothic roofs of the Hôtel d’Alençon, and
the Petit-Bourbon. This hydra of towers, giant guardian of Paris, with its four
and twenty heads, always erect, with its monstrous haunches, loaded or scaled
with slates, and all streaming with metallic reflections, terminated with
wonderful effect the configuration of the Town towards the west.

Thus an immense block, which the Romans called insula, or island, of
bourgeois houses, flanked on the right and the left by two blocks of
palaces, crowned, the one by the Louvre, the other by the Tournelles, bordered
on the north by a long girdle of abbeys and cultivated enclosures, all
amalgamated and melted together in one view; upon these thousands of edifices,
whose tiled and slated roofs outlined upon each other so many fantastic chains,
the bell towers, tattooed, fluted, and ornamented with twisted bands, of the
four and forty churches on the right bank; myriads of cross streets; for
boundary on one side, an enclosure of lofty walls with square towers (that of
the University had round towers); on the other, the Seine, cut by bridges, and
bearing on its bosom a multitude of boats; behold the Town of Paris in the
fifteenth century.

Beyond the walls, several suburban villages pressed close about the gates, but
less numerous and more scattered than those of the University. Behind the
Bastille there were twenty hovels clustered round the curious sculptures of the
Croix-Faubin and the flying buttresses of the Abbey of Saint-Antoine des
Champs; then Popincourt, lost amid wheat fields; then la Courtille, a merry
village of wine-shops; the hamlet of Saint-Laurent with its church whose bell
tower, from afar, seemed to add itself to the pointed towers of the Porte
Saint-Martin; the Faubourg Saint-Denis, with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre;
beyond the Montmartre Gate, the Grange-Batelière, encircled with white walls;
behind it, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which had then almost as many
churches as windmills, and which has kept only the windmills, for society no
longer demands anything but bread for the body. Lastly, beyond the Louvre, the
Faubourg Saint-Honoré, already considerable at that time, could be seen
stretching away into the fields, and Petit-Bretagne gleaming green, and the
Marché aux Pourceaux spreading abroad, in whose centre swelled the horrible
apparatus used for boiling counterfeiters. Between la Courtille and
Saint-Laurent, your eye had already noticed, on the summit of an eminence
crouching amid desert plains, a sort of edifice which resembled from a distance
a ruined colonnade, mounted upon a basement with its foundation laid bare. This
was neither a Parthenon, nor a temple of the Olympian Jupiter. It was
Montfaucon.

Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, summary as we have endeavored to
make it, has not shattered in the reader’s mind the general image of old Paris,
as we have constructed it, we will recapitulate it in a few words. In the
centre, the island of the City, resembling as to form an enormous tortoise, and
throwing out its bridges with tiles for scales; like legs from beneath its gray
shell of roofs. On the left, the monolithic trapezium, firm, dense, bristling,
of the University; on the right, the vast semicircle of the Town, much more
intermixed with gardens and monuments. The three blocks, city, university, and
town, marbled with innumerable streets. Across all, the Seine, “foster-mother
Seine,” as says Father Du Breul, blocked with islands, bridges, and boats. All
about an immense plain, patched with a thousand sorts of cultivated plots, sown
with fine villages. On the left, Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirarde, Montrouge,
Gentilly, with its round tower and its square tower, etc.; on the right, twenty
others, from Conflans to Ville-l’Évêque. On the horizon, a border of hills
arranged in a circle like the rim of the basin. Finally, far away to the east,
Vincennes, and its seven quadrangular towers to the south, Bicêtre and its
pointed turrets; to the north, Saint-Denis and its spire; to the west, Saint
Cloud and its donjon keep. Such was the Paris which the ravens, who lived in
1482, beheld from the summits of the towers of Notre-Dame.

Nevertheless, Voltaire said of this city, that “before Louis XIV., it possessed
but four fine monuments”: the dome of the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, the
modern Louvre, and I know not what the fourth was—the Luxembourg, perhaps.
Fortunately, Voltaire was the author of “Candide” in spite of this, and in
spite of this, he is, among all the men who have followed each other in the
long series of humanity, the one who has best possessed the diabolical laugh.
Moreover, this proves that one can be a fine genius, and yet understand nothing
of an art to which one does not belong. Did not Molière imagine that he was
doing Raphael and Michael-Angelo a very great honor, by calling them “those
Mignards of their age?”

Let us return to Paris and to the fifteenth century.

It was not then merely a handsome city; it was a homogeneous city, an
architectural and historical product of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone.
It was a city formed of two layers only; the Romanesque layer and the Gothic
layer; for the Roman layer had disappeared long before, with the exception of
the Hot Baths of Julian, where it still pierced through the thick crust of the
Middle Ages. As for the Celtic layer, no specimens were any longer to be found,
even when sinking wells.

Fifty years later, when the Renaissance began to mingle with this unity which
was so severe and yet so varied, the dazzling luxury of its fantasies and
systems, its debasements of Roman round arches, Greek columns, and Gothic
bases, its sculpture which was so tender and so ideal, its peculiar taste for
arabesques and acanthus leaves, its architectural paganism, contemporary with
Luther, Paris, was perhaps, still more beautiful, although less harmonious to
the eye, and to the thought.

But this splendid moment lasted only for a short time; the Renaissance was not
impartial; it did not content itself with building, it wished to destroy; it is
true that it required the room. Thus Gothic Paris was complete only for a
moment. Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie had barely been completed when the
demolition of the old Louvre was begun.

After that, the great city became more disfigured every day. Gothic Paris,
beneath which Roman Paris was effaced, was effaced in its turn; but can any one
say what Paris has replaced it?

There is the Paris of Catherine de Medicis at the Tuileries;[23]—the Paris of Henri II., at the
Hôtel de Ville, two edifices still in fine taste;—the Paris of Henri IV., at
the Place Royale: façades of brick with stone corners, and slated roofs,
tri-colored houses;—the Paris of Louis XIII., at the Val-de-Grâce: a crushed
and squat architecture, with vaults like basket-handles, and something
indescribably pot-bellied in the column, and thickset in the dome;—the Paris of
Louis XIV., in the Invalides: grand, rich, gilded, cold;—the Paris of Louis
XV., in Saint-Sulpice: volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli and
chiccory leaves, all in stone;—the Paris of Louis XVI., in the Pantheon: Saint
Peter of Rome, badly copied (the edifice is awkwardly heaped together, which
has not amended its lines);—the Paris of the Republic, in the School of
Medicine: a poor Greek and Roman taste, which resembles the Coliseum or the
Parthenon as the constitution of the year III., resembles the laws of Minos,—it
is called in architecture, “the Messidor”[24] taste;—the Paris of Napoleon in
the Place Vendôme: this one is sublime, a column of bronze made of cannons;—the
Paris of the Restoration, at the Bourse: a very white colonnade supporting a
very smooth frieze; the whole is square and cost twenty millions.

To each of these characteristic monuments there is attached by a similarity of
taste, fashion, and attitude, a certain number of houses scattered about in
different quarters and which the eyes of the connoisseur easily distinguishes
and furnishes with a date. When one knows how to look, one finds the spirit of
a century, and the physiognomy of a king, even in the knocker on a door.

The Paris of the present day has then, no general physiognomy. It is a
collection of specimens of many centuries, and the finest have disappeared. The
capital grows only in houses, and what houses! At the rate at which Paris is
now proceeding, it will renew itself every fifty years.

Thus the historical significance of its architecture is being effaced every
day. Monuments are becoming rarer and rarer, and one seems to see them
gradually engulfed, by the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone;
our sons will have one of plaster.

So far as the modern monuments of new Paris are concerned, we would gladly be
excused from mentioning them. It is not that we do not admire them as they
deserve. The Sainte-Geneviève of M. Soufflot is certainly the finest Savoy cake
that has ever been made in stone. The Palace of the Legion of Honor is also a
very distinguished bit of pastry. The dome of the wheat market is an English
jockey cap, on a grand scale. The towers of Saint-Sulpice are two huge
clarinets, and the form is as good as any other; the telegraph, contorted and
grimacing, forms an admirable accident upon their roofs. Saint-Roch has a door
which, for magnificence, is comparable only to that of Saint-Thomas d’Aquin. It
has, also, a crucifixion in high relief, in a cellar, with a sun of gilded
wood. These things are fairly marvellous. The lantern of the labyrinth of the
Jardin des Plantes is also very ingenious.

As for the Palace of the Bourse, which is Greek as to its colonnade, Roman in
the round arches of its doors and windows, of the Renaissance by virtue of its
flattened vault, it is indubitably a very correct and very pure monument; the
proof is that it is crowned with an attic, such as was never seen in Athens, a
beautiful, straight line, gracefully broken here and there by stovepipes. Let
us add that if it is according to rule that the architecture of a building
should be adapted to its purpose in such a manner that this purpose shall be
immediately apparent from the mere aspect of the building, one cannot be too
much amazed at a structure which might be indifferently—the palace of a king, a
chamber of communes, a town-hall, a college, a riding-school, an academy, a
warehouse, a court-house, a museum, a barracks, a sepulchre, a temple, or a
theatre. However, it is an Exchange. An edifice ought to be, moreover, suitable
to the climate. This one is evidently constructed expressly for our cold and
rainy skies. It has a roof almost as flat as roofs in the East, which involves
sweeping the roof in winter, when it snows; and of course roofs are made to be
swept. As for its purpose, of which we just spoke, it fulfils it to a marvel;
it is a bourse in France as it would have been a temple in Greece. It is true
that the architect was at a good deal of trouble to conceal the clock face,
which would have destroyed the purity of the fine lines of the façade; but, on
the other hand, we have that colonnade which circles round the edifice and
under which, on days of high religious ceremony, the theories of the
stock-brokers and the courtiers of commerce can be developed so majestically.

These are very superb structures. Let us add a quantity of fine, amusing, and
varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris
presenting to the eye, when viewed from a balloon, that richness of line, that
opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiose something in the
simple, and unexpected in the beautiful, which characterizes a checker-board.

However, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to you, reconstruct the
Paris of the fifteenth century, call it up before you in thought; look at the
sky athwart that surprising forest of spires, towers, and belfries; spread out
in the centre of the city, tear away at the point of the islands, fold at the
arches of the bridges, the Seine, with its broad green and yellow expanses,
more variable than the skin of a serpent; project clearly against an azure
horizon the Gothic profile of this ancient Paris. Make its contour float in a
winter’s mist which clings to its numerous chimneys; drown it in profound night
and watch the odd play of lights and shadows in that sombre labyrinth of
edifices; cast upon it a ray of light which shall vaguely outline it and cause
to emerge from the fog the great heads of the towers; or take that black
silhouette again, enliven with shadow the thousand acute angles of the spires
and gables, and make it start out more toothed than a shark’s jaw against a
copper-colored western sky,—and then compare.

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the
modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the morning of some grand
festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost—climb upon some
elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the
wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the
sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come
scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give
warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!—for it seems
at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising
from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony.
First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to
speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by
little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and
amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of
sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats,
undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon
the deafening circle of its oscillations.

Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is,
it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of
notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns
grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from
one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and
whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of
wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and
re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes
running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like
flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked
singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the
great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace
scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which
fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame,
which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you
behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime
noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts
forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the
concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches,
which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs.

Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to.
Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by
night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an
ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a
million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the
wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the
hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a
half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and
say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden,
more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this furnace of
music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the
flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer
anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the noise of a
tempest.

BOOK FOURTH.

CHAPTER I.
GOOD SOULS.

Sixteen years previous to the epoch when this story takes place, one fine
morning, on Quasimodo Sunday, a living creature had been deposited, after mass,
in the church of Notre-Dame, on the wooden bed securely fixed in the vestibule
on the left, opposite that great image of Saint Christopher, which the figure
of Messire Antoine des Essarts, chevalier, carved in stone, had been gazing at
on his knees since 1413, when they took it into their heads to overthrow the
saint and the faithful follower. Upon this bed of wood it was customary to
expose foundlings for public charity. Whoever cared to take them did so. In
front of the wooden bed was a copper basin for alms.

The sort of living being which lay upon that plank on the morning of Quasimodo,
in the year of the Lord, 1467, appeared to excite to a high degree, the
curiosity of the numerous group which had congregated about the wooden bed. The
group was formed for the most part of the fair sex. Hardly any one was there
except old women.

In the first row, and among those who were most bent over the bed, four were
noticeable, who, from their gray cagoule, a sort of cassock, were
recognizable as attached to some devout sisterhood. I do not see why history
has not transmitted to posterity the names of these four discreet and venerable
damsels. They were Agnès la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la Gaultière,
Gauchère la Violette, all four widows, all four dames of the Chapel Étienne
Haudry, who had quitted their house with the permission of their mistress, and
in conformity with the statutes of Pierre d’Ailly, in order to come and hear
the sermon.

However, if these good Haudriettes were, for the moment, complying with the
statutes of Pierre d’Ailly, they certainly violated with joy those of Michel de
Brache, and the Cardinal of Pisa, which so inhumanly enjoined silence upon
them.

“What is this, sister?” said Agnès to Gauchère, gazing at the little creature
exposed, which was screaming and writhing on the wooden bed, terrified by so
many glances.

“What is to become of us,” said Jehanne, “if that is the way children are made
now?”

“I’m not learned in the matter of children,” resumed Agnès, “but it must be a
sin to look at this one.”

“’Tis not a child, Agnès.”

“’Tis an abortion of a monkey,” remarked Gauchère.

“’Tis a miracle,” interposed Henriette la Gaultière.

“Then,” remarked Agnès, “it is the third since the Sunday of the Lætare:
for, in less than a week, we had the miracle of the mocker of pilgrims divinely
punished by Notre-Dame d’Aubervilliers, and that was the second miracle within
a month.”

“This pretended foundling is a real monster of abomination,” resumed Jehanne.

“He yells loud enough to deafen a chanter,” continued Gauchère. “Hold your
tongue, you little howler!”

“To think that Monsieur of Reims sent this enormity to Monsieur of Paris,”
added la Gaultière, clasping her hands.

“I imagine,” said Agnès la Herme, “that it is a beast, an animal,—the fruit of
a Jew and a sow; something not Christian, in short, which ought to be thrown
into the fire or into the water.”

“I really hope,” resumed la Gaultière, “that nobody will apply for it.”

“Ah, good heavens!” exclaimed Agnès; “those poor nurses yonder in the foundling
asylum, which forms the lower end of the lane as you go to the river, just
beside Monseigneur the bishop! what if this little monster were to be carried
to them to suckle? I’d rather give suck to a vampire.”

“How innocent that poor la Herme is!” resumed Jehanne; “don’t you see, sister,
that this little monster is at least four years old, and that he would have
less appetite for your breast than for a turnspit.”

The “little monster” we should find it difficult ourselves to describe him
otherwise, was, in fact, not a new-born child. It was a very angular and very
lively little mass, imprisoned in its linen sack, stamped with the cipher of
Messire Guillaume Chartier, then bishop of Paris, with a head projecting. That
head was deformed enough; one beheld only a forest of red hair, one eye, a
mouth, and teeth. The eye wept, the mouth cried, and the teeth seemed to ask
only to be allowed to bite. The whole struggled in the sack, to the great
consternation of the crowd, which increased and was renewed incessantly around
it.

Dame Aloïse de Gondelaurier, a rich and noble woman, who held by the hand a
pretty girl about five or six years of age, and dragged a long veil about,
suspended to the golden horn of her headdress, halted as she passed the wooden
bed, and gazed for a moment at the wretched creature, while her charming little
daughter, Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, spelled out with her tiny, pretty
finger, the permanent inscription attached to the wooden bed: “Foundlings.”

“Really,” said the dame, turning away in disgust, “I thought that they only
exposed children here.”

She turned her back, throwing into the basin a silver florin, which rang among
the liards, and made the poor goodwives of the chapel of Étienne Haudry open
their eyes.

A moment later, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, the king’s
protonotary, passed, with an enormous missal under one arm and his wife on the
other (Damoiselle Guillemette la Mairesse), having thus by his side his two
regulators,—spiritual and temporal.

“Foundling!” he said, after examining the object; “found, apparently, on the
banks of the river Phlegethon.”

“One can only see one eye,” observed Damoiselle Guillemette; “there is a wart
on the other.”

“It’s not a wart,” returned Master Robert Mistricolle, “it is an egg which
contains another demon exactly similar, who bears another little egg which
contains another devil, and so on.”

“How do you know that?” asked Guillemette la Mairesse.

“I know it pertinently,” replied the protonotary.

“Monsieur le protonotare,” asked Gauchère, “what do you prognosticate of this
pretended foundling?”

“The greatest misfortunes,” replied Mistricolle.

“Ah! good heavens!” said an old woman among the spectators, “and that besides
our having had a considerable pestilence last year, and that they say that the
English are going to disembark in a company at Harfleur.”

“Perhaps that will prevent the queen from coming to Paris in the month of
September,” interposed another; “trade is so bad already.”

“My opinion is,” exclaimed Jehanne de la Tarme, “that it would be better for
the louts of Paris, if this little magician were put to bed on a fagot than on
a plank.”

“A fine, flaming fagot,” added the old woman.

“It would be more prudent,” said Mistricolle.

For several minutes, a young priest had been listening to the reasoning of the
Haudriettes and the sentences of the notary. He had a severe face, with a large
brow, a profound glance. He thrust the crowd silently aside, scrutinized the
“little magician,” and stretched out his hand upon him. It was high time, for
all the devotees were already licking their chops over the “fine, flaming
fagot.”

“I adopt this child,” said the priest.

He took it in his cassock and carried it off. The spectators followed him with
frightened glances. A moment later, he had disappeared through the “Red Door,”
which then led from the church to the cloister.

When the first surprise was over, Jehanne de la Tarme bent down to the ear of
la Gaultière,—

“I told you so, sister,—that young clerk, Monsieur Claude Frollo, is a
sorcerer.”

CHAPTER II.
CLAUDE FROLLO.

In fact, Claude Frollo was no common person.

He belonged to one of those middle-class families which were called
indifferently, in the impertinent language of the last century, the high
bourgeoise or the petty nobility. This family had inherited from the
brothers Paclet the fief of Tirechappe, which was dependent upon the Bishop of
Paris, and whose twenty-one houses had been in the thirteenth century the
object of so many suits before the official. As possessor of this fief, Claude
Frollo was one of the twenty-seven seigneurs keeping claim to a manor in fee in
Paris and its suburbs; and for a long time, his name was to be seen inscribed
in this quality, between the Hôtel de Tancarville, belonging to Master François
Le Rez, and the college of Tours, in the records deposited at Saint Martin des
Champs.

Claude Frollo had been destined from infancy, by his parents, to the
ecclesiastical profession. He had been taught to read in Latin; he had been
trained to keep his eyes on the ground and to speak low. While still a child,
his father had cloistered him in the college of Torchi in the University. There
it was that he had grown up, on the missal and the lexicon.

Moreover, he was a sad, grave, serious child, who studied ardently, and learned
quickly; he never uttered a loud cry in recreation hour, mixed but little in
the bacchanals of the Rue du Fouarre, did not know what it was to dare
alapas et capillos laniare, and had cut no figure in that revolt of 1463,
which the annalists register gravely, under the title of “The sixth trouble of
the University.” He seldom rallied the poor students of Montaigu on the
cappettes from which they derived their name, or the bursars of the
college of Dormans on their shaved tonsure, and their surtout parti-colored of
bluish-green, blue, and violet cloth, azurini coloris et bruni, as says
the charter of the Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes.

On the other hand, he was assiduous at the great and the small schools of the
Rue Saint Jean de Beauvais. The first pupil whom the Abbé de Saint Pierre de
Val, at the moment of beginning his reading on canon law, always perceived,
glued to a pillar of the school Saint-Vendregesile, opposite his rostrum, was
Claude Frollo, armed with his horn ink-bottle, biting his pen, scribbling on
his threadbare knee, and, in winter, blowing on his fingers. The first auditor
whom Messire Miles d’Isliers, doctor in decretals, saw arrive every Monday
morning, all breathless, at the opening of the gates of the school of the
Chef-Saint-Denis, was Claude Frollo. Thus, at sixteen years of age, the young
clerk might have held his own, in mystical theology, against a father of the
church; in canonical theology, against a father of the councils; in scholastic
theology, against a doctor of Sorbonne.

Theology conquered, he had plunged into decretals. From the “Master of
Sentences,” he had passed to the “Capitularies of Charlemagne;” and he had
devoured in succession, in his appetite for science, decretals upon decretals,
those of Theodore, Bishop of Hispalus; those of Bouchard, Bishop of Worms;
those of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; next the decretal of Gratian, which
succeeded the capitularies of Charlemagne; then the collection of Gregory IX.;
then the Epistle of Superspecula, of Honorius III. He rendered clear and
familiar to himself that vast and tumultuous period of civil law and canon law
in conflict and at strife with each other, in the chaos of the Middle Ages,—a
period which Bishop Theodore opens in 618, and which Pope Gregory closes in
1227.

Decretals digested, he flung himself upon medicine, on the liberal arts. He
studied the science of herbs, the science of unguents; he became an expert in
fevers and in contusions, in sprains and abcesses. Jacques d’ Espars would have
received him as a physician; Richard Hellain, as a surgeon. He also passed
through all the degrees of licentiate, master, and doctor of arts. He studied
the languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, a triple sanctuary then very little
frequented. His was a veritable fever for acquiring and hoarding, in the matter
of science. At the age of eighteen, he had made his way through the four
faculties; it seemed to the young man that life had but one sole object:
learning.

It was towards this epoch, that the excessive heat of the summer of 1466 caused
that grand outburst of the plague which carried off more than forty thousand
souls in the vicomty of Paris, and among others, as Jean de Troyes states,
“Master Arnoul, astrologer to the king, who was a very fine man, both wise and
pleasant.” The rumor spread in the University that the Rue Tirechappe was
especially devastated by the malady. It was there that Claude’s parents
resided, in the midst of their fief. The young scholar rushed in great alarm to
the paternal mansion. When he entered it, he found that both father and mother
had died on the preceding day. A very young brother of his, who was in
swaddling clothes, was still alive and crying abandoned in his cradle. This was
all that remained to Claude of his family; the young man took the child under
his arm and went off in a pensive mood. Up to that moment, he had lived only in
science; he now began to live in life.

This catastrophe was a crisis in Claude’s existence. Orphaned, the eldest, head
of the family at the age of nineteen, he felt himself rudely recalled from the
reveries of school to the realities of this world. Then, moved with pity, he
was seized with passion and devotion towards that child, his brother; a sweet
and strange thing was a human affection to him, who had hitherto loved his
books alone.

This affection developed to a singular point; in a soul so new, it was like a
first love. Separated since infancy from his parents, whom he had hardly known;
cloistered and immured, as it were, in his books; eager above all things to
study and to learn; exclusively attentive up to that time, to his intelligence
which broadened in science, to his imagination, which expanded in letters,—the
poor scholar had not yet had time to feel the place of his heart.

This young brother, without mother or father, this little child which had
fallen abruptly from heaven into his arms, made a new man of him. He perceived
that there was something else in the world besides the speculations of the
Sorbonne, and the verses of Homer; that man needed affections; that life
without tenderness and without love was only a set of dry, shrieking, and
rending wheels. Only, he imagined, for he was at the age when illusions are as
yet replaced only by illusions, that the affections of blood and family were
the sole ones necessary, and that a little brother to love sufficed to fill an
entire existence.

He threw himself, therefore, into the love for his little Jehan with the
passion of a character already profound, ardent, concentrated; that poor frail
creature, pretty, fair-haired, rosy, and curly,—that orphan with another orphan
for his only support, touched him to the bottom of his heart; and grave thinker
as he was, he set to meditating upon Jehan with an infinite compassion. He kept
watch and ward over him as over something very fragile, and very worthy of
care. He was more than a brother to the child; he became a mother to him.

Little Jehan had lost his mother while he was still at the breast; Claude gave
him to a nurse. Besides the fief of Tirechappe, he had inherited from his
father the fief of Moulin, which was a dependency of the square tower of
Gentilly; it was a mill on a hill, near the château of Winchestre (Bicêtre).
There was a miller’s wife there who was nursing a fine child; it was not far
from the university, and Claude carried the little Jehan to her in his own
arms.

From that time forth, feeling that he had a burden to bear, he took life very
seriously. The thought of his little brother became not only his recreation,
but the object of his studies. He resolved to consecrate himself entirely to a
future for which he was responsible in the sight of God, and never to have any
other wife, any other child than the happiness and fortune of his brother.
Therefore, he attached himself more closely than ever to the clerical
profession. His merits, his learning, his quality of immediate vassal of the
Bishop of Paris, threw the doors of the church wide open to him. At the age of
twenty, by special dispensation of the Holy See, he was a priest, and served as
the youngest of the chaplains of Notre-Dame the altar which is called, because
of the late mass which is said there, altare pigrorum.

There, plunged more deeply than ever in his dear books, which he quitted only
to run for an hour to the fief of Moulin, this mixture of learning and
austerity, so rare at his age, had promptly acquired for him the respect and
admiration of the monastery. From the cloister, his reputation as a learned man
had passed to the people, among whom it had changed a little, a frequent
occurrence at that time, into reputation as a sorcerer.

It was at the moment when he was returning, on Quasimodo day, from saying his
mass at the Altar of the Lazy, which was by the side of the door leading to the
nave on the right, near the image of the Virgin, that his attention had been
attracted by the group of old women chattering around the bed for foundlings.

Then it was that he approached the unhappy little creature, which was so hated
and so menaced. That distress, that deformity, that abandonment, the thought of
his young brother, the idea which suddenly occurred to him, that if he were to
die, his dear little Jehan might also be flung miserably on the plank for
foundlings,—all this had gone to his heart simultaneously; a great pity had
moved in him, and he had carried off the child.

When he removed the child from the sack, he found it greatly deformed, in very
sooth. The poor little wretch had a wart on his left eye, his head placed
directly on his shoulders, his spinal column was crooked, his breast bone
prominent, and his legs bowed; but he appeared to be lively; and although it
was impossible to say in what language he lisped, his cry indicated
considerable force and health. Claude’s compassion increased at the sight of
this ugliness; and he made a vow in his heart to rear the child for the love of
his brother, in order that, whatever might be the future faults of the little
Jehan, he should have beside him that charity done for his sake. It was a sort
of investment of good works, which he was effecting in the name of his young
brother; it was a stock of good works which he wished to amass in advance for
him, in case the little rogue should some day find himself short of that coin,
the only sort which is received at the toll-bar of paradise.

He baptized his adopted child, and gave him the name of Quasimodo, either
because he desired thereby to mark the day, when he had found him, or because
he wished to designate by that name to what a degree the poor little creature
was incomplete, and hardly sketched out. In fact, Quasimodo, blind,
hunchbacked, knock-kneed, was only an “almost.”

CHAPTER III.
IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE.

Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up. He had become a few years previously the
bellringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to his father by adoption, Claude Frollo,—who
had become archdeacon of Josas, thanks to his suzerain, Messire Louis de
Beaumont,—who had become Bishop of Paris, at the death of Guillaume Chartier in
1472, thanks to his patron, Olivier Le Daim, barber to Louis XI., king by the
grace of God.

So Quasimodo was the ringer of the chimes of Notre-Dame.

In the course of time there had been formed a certain peculiarly intimate bond
which united the ringer to the church. Separated forever from the world, by the
double fatality of his unknown birth and his natural deformity, imprisoned from
his infancy in that impassable double circle, the poor wretch had grown used to
seeing nothing in this world beyond the religious walls which had received him
under their shadow. Notre-Dame had been to him successively, as he grew up and
developed, the egg, the nest, the house, the country, the universe.

There was certainly a sort of mysterious and pre-existing harmony between this
creature and this church. When, still a little fellow, he had dragged himself
tortuously and by jerks beneath the shadows of its vaults, he seemed, with his
human face and his bestial limbs, the natural reptile of that humid and sombre
pavement, upon which the shadow of the Romanesque capitals cast so many strange
forms.

Later on, the first time that he caught hold, mechanically, of the ropes to the
towers, and hung suspended from them, and set the bell to clanging, it produced
upon his adopted father, Claude, the effect of a child whose tongue is unloosed
and who begins to speak.

It is thus that, little by little, developing always in sympathy with the
cathedral, living there, sleeping there, hardly ever leaving it, subject every
hour to the mysterious impress, he came to resemble it, he incrusted himself in
it, so to speak, and became an integral part of it. His salient angles fitted
into the retreating angles of the cathedral (if we may be allowed this figure
of speech), and he seemed not only its inhabitant but more than that, its
natural tenant. One might almost say that he had assumed its form, as the snail
takes on the form of its shell. It was his dwelling, his hole, his envelope.
There existed between him and the old church so profound an instinctive
sympathy, so many magnetic affinities, so many material affinities, that he
adhered to it somewhat as a tortoise adheres to its shell. The rough and
wrinkled cathedral was his shell.

It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally all the similes which we
are obliged to employ here to express the singular, symmetrical, direct, almost
consubstantial union of a man and an edifice. It is equally unnecessary to
state to what a degree that whole cathedral was familiar to him, after so long
and so intimate a cohabitation. That dwelling was peculiar to him. It had no
depths to which Quasimodo had not penetrated, no height which he had not
scaled. He often climbed many stones up the front, aided solely by the uneven
points of the carving. The towers, on whose exterior surface he was frequently
seen clambering, like a lizard gliding along a perpendicular wall, those two
gigantic twins, so lofty, so menacing, so formidable, possessed for him neither
vertigo, nor terror, nor shocks of amazement.

To see them so gentle under his hand, so easy to scale, one would have said
that he had tamed them. By dint of leaping, climbing, gambolling amid the
abysses of the gigantic cathedral he had become, in some sort, a monkey and a
goat, like the Calabrian child who swims before he walks, and plays with the
sea while still a babe.

Moreover, it was not his body alone which seemed fashioned after the Cathedral,
but his mind also. In what condition was that mind? What bent had it
contracted, what form had it assumed beneath that knotted envelope, in that
savage life? This it would be hard to determine. Quasimodo had been born
one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame. It was with great difficulty, and by dint of great
patience that Claude Frollo had succeeded in teaching him to talk. But a
fatality was attached to the poor foundling. Bellringer of Notre-Dame at the
age of fourteen, a new infirmity had come to complete his misfortunes: the
bells had broken the drums of his ears; he had become deaf. The only gate which
nature had left wide open for him had been abruptly closed, and forever.

In closing, it had cut off the only ray of joy and of light which still made
its way into the soul of Quasimodo. His soul fell into profound night. The
wretched being’s misery became as incurable and as complete as his deformity.
Let us add that his deafness rendered him to some extent dumb. For, in order
not to make others laugh, the very moment that he found himself to be deaf, he
resolved upon a silence which he only broke when he was alone. He voluntarily
tied that tongue which Claude Frollo had taken so much pains to unloose. Hence,
it came about, that when necessity constrained him to speak, his tongue was
torpid, awkward, and like a door whose hinges have grown rusty.

If now we were to try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo through that thick,
hard rind; if we could sound the depths of that badly constructed organism; if
it were granted to us to look with a torch behind those non-transparent organs
to explore the shadowy interior of that opaque creature, to elucidate his
obscure corners, his absurd no-thoroughfares, and suddenly to cast a vivid
light upon the soul enchained at the extremity of that cave, we should, no
doubt, find the unhappy Psyche in some poor, cramped, and ricketty attitude,
like those prisoners beneath the Leads of Venice, who grew old bent double in a
stone box which was both too low and too short for them.

It is certain that the mind becomes atrophied in a defective body. Quasimodo
was barely conscious of a soul cast in his own image, moving blindly within
him. The impressions of objects underwent a considerable refraction before
reaching his mind. His brain was a peculiar medium; the ideas which passed
through it issued forth completely distorted. The reflection which resulted
from this refraction was, necessarily, divergent and perverted.

Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations of judgment, a
thousand deviations, in which his thought strayed, now mad, now idiotic.

The first effect of this fatal organization was to trouble the glance which he
cast upon things. He received hardly any immediate perception of them. The
external world seemed much farther away to him than it does to us.

The second effect of his misfortune was to render him malicious.

He was malicious, in fact, because he was savage; he was savage because he was
ugly. There was logic in his nature, as there is in ours.

His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of still greater
malevolence: “Malus puer robustus,” says Hobbes.

This justice must, however be rendered to him. Malevolence was not, perhaps,
innate in him. From his very first steps among men, he had felt himself, later
on he had seen himself, spewed out, blasted, rejected. Human words were, for
him, always a raillery or a malediction. As he grew up, he had found nothing
but hatred around him. He had caught the general malevolence. He had picked up
the weapon with which he had been wounded.

After all, he turned his face towards men only with reluctance; his cathedral
was sufficient for him. It was peopled with marble figures,—kings, saints,
bishops,—who at least did not burst out laughing in his face, and who gazed
upon him only with tranquillity and kindliness. The other statues, those of the
monsters and demons, cherished no hatred for him, Quasimodo. He resembled them
too much for that. They seemed rather, to be scoffing at other men. The saints
were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and guarded
him. So he held long communion with them. He sometimes passed whole hours
crouching before one of these statues, in solitary conversation with it. If any
one came, he fled like a lover surprised in his serenade.

And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the universe, and all
nature beside. He dreamed of no other hedgerows than the painted windows,
always in flower; no other shade than that of the foliage of stone which spread
out, loaded with birds, in the tufts of the Saxon capitals; of no other
mountains than the colossal towers of the church; of no other ocean than Paris,
roaring at their bases.

What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that which aroused his
soul, and made it open its poor wings, which it kept so miserably folded in its
cavern, that which sometimes rendered him even happy, was the bells. He loved
them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them. From the chime in the
spire, over the intersection of the aisles and nave, to the great bell of the
front, he cherished a tenderness for them all. The central spire and the two
towers were to him as three great cages, whose birds, reared by himself, sang
for him alone. Yet it was these very bells which had made him deaf; but mothers
often love best that child which has caused them the most suffering.

It is true that their voice was the only one which he could still hear. On this
score, the big bell was his beloved. It was she whom he preferred out of all
that family of noisy girls which bustled above him, on festival days. This bell
was named Marie. She was alone in the southern tower, with her sister
Jacqueline, a bell of lesser size, shut up in a smaller cage beside hers. This
Jacqueline was so called from the name of the wife of Jean Montagu, who had
given it to the church, which had not prevented his going and figuring without
his head at Montfaucon. In the second tower there were six other bells, and,
finally, six smaller ones inhabited the belfry over the crossing, with the
wooden bell, which rang only between after dinner on Good Friday and the
morning of the day before Easter. So Quasimodo had fifteen bells in his
seraglio; but big Marie was his favorite.

No idea can be formed of his delight on days when the grand peal was sounded.
At the moment when the archdeacon dismissed him, and said, “Go!” he mounted the
spiral staircase of the clock tower faster than any one else could have
descended it. He entered perfectly breathless into the aerial chamber of the
great bell; he gazed at her a moment, devoutly and lovingly; then he gently
addressed her and patted her with his hand, like a good horse, which is about
to set out on a long journey. He pitied her for the trouble that she was about
to suffer. After these first caresses, he shouted to his assistants, placed in
the lower story of the tower, to begin. They grasped the ropes, the wheel
creaked, the enormous capsule of metal started slowly into motion. Quasimodo
followed it with his glance and trembled. The first shock of the clapper and
the brazen wall made the framework upon which it was mounted quiver. Quasimodo
vibrated with the bell.

“Vah!” he cried, with a senseless burst of laughter. However, the movement of
the bass was accelerated, and, in proportion as it described a wider angle,
Quasimodo’s eye opened also more and more widely, phosphoric and flaming. At
length the grand peal began; the whole tower trembled; woodwork, leads, cut
stones, all groaned at once, from the piles of the foundation to the trefoils
of its summit. Then Quasimodo boiled and frothed; he went and came; he trembled
from head to foot with the tower. The bell, furious, running riot, presented to
the two walls of the tower alternately its brazen throat, whence escaped that
tempestuous breath, which is audible leagues away. Quasimodo stationed himself
in front of this open throat; he crouched and rose with the oscillations of the
bell, breathed in this overwhelming breath, gazed by turns at the deep place,
which swarmed with people, two hundred feet below him, and at that enormous,
brazen tongue which came, second after second, to howl in his ear.

It was the only speech which he understood, the only sound which broke for him
the universal silence. He swelled out in it as a bird does in the sun. All of a
sudden, the frenzy of the bell seized upon him; his look became extraordinary;
he lay in wait for the great bell as it passed, as a spider lies in wait for a
fly, and flung himself abruptly upon it, with might and main. Then, suspended
above the abyss, borne to and fro by the formidable swinging of the bell, he
seized the brazen monster by the ear-laps, pressed it between both knees,
spurred it on with his heels, and redoubled the fury of the peal with the whole
shock and weight of his body. Meanwhile, the tower trembled; he shrieked and
gnashed his teeth, his red hair rose erect, his breast heaving like a bellows,
his eye flashed flames, the monstrous bell neighed, panting, beneath him; and
then it was no longer the great bell of Notre-Dame nor Quasimodo: it was a
dream, a whirlwind, a tempest, dizziness mounted astride of noise; a spirit
clinging to a flying crupper, a strange centaur, half man, half bell; a sort of
horrible Astolphus, borne away upon a prodigious hippogriff of living bronze.

The presence of this extraordinary being caused, as it were, a breath of life
to circulate throughout the entire cathedral. It seemed as though there escaped
from him, at least according to the growing superstitions of the crowd, a
mysterious emanation which animated all the stones of Notre-Dame, and made the
deep bowels of the ancient church to palpitate. It sufficed for people to know
that he was there, to make them believe that they beheld the thousand statues
of the galleries and the fronts in motion. And the cathedral did indeed seem a
docile and obedient creature beneath his hand; it waited on his will to raise
its great voice; it was possessed and filled with Quasimodo, as with a familiar
spirit. One would have said that he made the immense edifice breathe. He was
everywhere about it; in fact, he multiplied himself on all points of the
structure. Now one perceived with affright at the very top of one of the
towers, a fantastic dwarf climbing, writhing, crawling on all fours, descending
outside above the abyss, leaping from projection to projection, and going to
ransack the belly of some sculptured gorgon; it was Quasimodo dislodging the
crows. Again, in some obscure corner of the church one came in contact with a
sort of living chimera, crouching and scowling; it was Quasimodo engaged in
thought. Sometimes one caught sight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous head and
a bundle of disordered limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope; it was
Quasimodo ringing vespers or the Angelus. Often at night a hideous form was
seen wandering along the frail balustrade of carved lacework, which crowns the
towers and borders the circumference of the apse; again it was the hunchback of
Notre-Dame. Then, said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took on
something fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and mouths were opened, here
and there; one heard the dogs, the monsters, and the gargoyles of stone, which
keep watch night and day, with outstretched neck and open jaws, around the
monstrous cathedral, barking. And, if it was a Christmas Eve, while the great
bell, which seemed to emit the death rattle, summoned the faithful to the
midnight mass, such an air was spread over the sombre façade that one would
have declared that the grand portal was devouring the throng, and that the rose
window was watching it. And all this came from Quasimodo. Egypt would have
taken him for the god of this temple; the Middle Ages believed him to be its
demon: he was in fact its soul.

To such an extent was this disease that for those who know that Quasimodo has
existed, Notre-Dame is to-day deserted, inanimate, dead. One feels that
something has disappeared from it. That immense body is empty; it is a
skeleton; the spirit has quitted it, one sees its place and that is all. It is
like a skull which still has holes for the eyes, but no longer sight.

CHAPTER IV.
THE DOG AND HIS MASTER.

Nevertheless, there was one human creature whom Quasimodo excepted from his
malice and from his hatred for others, and whom he loved even more, perhaps,
than his cathedral: this was Claude Frollo.

The matter was simple; Claude Frollo had taken him in, had adopted him, had
nourished him, had reared him. When a little lad, it was between Claude
Frollo’s legs that he was accustomed to seek refuge, when the dogs and the
children barked after him. Claude Frollo had taught him to talk, to read, to
write. Claude Frollo had finally made him the bellringer. Now, to give the big
bell in marriage to Quasimodo was to give Juliet to Romeo.

Hence Quasimodo’s gratitude was profound, passionate, boundless; and although
the visage of his adopted father was often clouded or severe, although his
speech was habitually curt, harsh, imperious, that gratitude never wavered for
a single moment. The archdeacon had in Quasimodo the most submissive slave, the
most docile lackey, the most vigilant of dogs. When the poor bellringer became
deaf, there had been established between him and Claude Frollo, a language of
signs, mysterious and understood by themselves alone. In this manner the
archdeacon was the sole human being with whom Quasimodo had preserved
communication. He was in sympathy with but two things in this world: Notre-Dame
and Claude Frollo.

There is nothing which can be compared with the empire of the archdeacon over
the bellringer; with the attachment of the bellringer for the archdeacon. A
sign from Claude and the idea of giving him pleasure would have sufficed to
make Quasimodo hurl himself headlong from the summit of Notre-Dame. It was a
remarkable thing—all that physical strength which had reached in Quasimodo such
an extraordinary development, and which was placed by him blindly at the
disposition of another. There was in it, no doubt, filial devotion, domestic
attachment; there was also the fascination of one spirit by another spirit. It
was a poor, awkward, and clumsy organization, which stood with lowered head and
supplicating eyes before a lofty and profound, a powerful and superior
intellect. Lastly, and above all, it was gratitude. Gratitude so pushed to its
extremest limit, that we do not know to what to compare it. This virtue is not
one of those of which the finest examples are to be met with among men. We will
say then, that Quasimodo loved the archdeacon as never a dog, never a horse,
never an elephant loved his master.

CHAPTER V.
MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO.

In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years of age; Claude Frollo, about
thirty-six. One had grown up, the other had grown old.

Claude Frollo was no longer the simple scholar of the college of Torchi, the
tender protector of a little child, the young and dreamy philosopher who knew
many things and was ignorant of many. He was a priest, austere, grave, morose;
one charged with souls; monsieur the archdeacon of Josas, the bishop’s second
acolyte, having charge of the two deaneries of Montlhéry, and Châteaufort, and
one hundred and seventy-four country curacies. He was an imposing and sombre
personage, before whom the choir boys in alb and in jacket trembled, as well as
the machicots[25], and the
brothers of Saint-Augustine and the matutinal clerks of Notre-Dame, when he
passed slowly beneath the lofty arches of the choir, majestic, thoughtful, with
arms folded and his head so bent upon his breast that all one saw of his face
was his large, bald brow.

Dom Claude Frollo had, however, abandoned neither science nor the education of
his young brother, those two occupations of his life. But as time went on, some
bitterness had been mingled with these things which were so sweet. In the long
run, says Paul Diacre, the best lard turns rancid. Little Jehan Frollo,
surnamed (du Moulin) “of the Mill” because of the place where he had
been reared, had not grown up in the direction which Claude would have liked to
impose upon him. The big brother counted upon a pious, docile, learned, and
honorable pupil. But the little brother, like those young trees which deceive
the gardener’s hopes and turn obstinately to the quarter whence they receive
sun and air, the little brother did not grow and did not multiply, but only put
forth fine bushy and luxuriant branches on the side of laziness, ignorance, and
debauchery. He was a regular devil, and a very disorderly one, who made Dom
Claude scowl; but very droll and very subtle, which made the big brother smile.

Claude had confided him to that same college of Torchi where he had passed his
early years in study and meditation; and it was a grief to him that this
sanctuary, formerly edified by the name of Frollo, should to-day be scandalized
by it. He sometimes preached Jehan very long and severe sermons, which the
latter intrepidly endured. After all, the young scapegrace had a good heart, as
can be seen in all comedies. But the sermon over, he none the less tranquilly
resumed his course of seditions and enormities. Now it was a béjaune or
yellow beak (as they called the new arrivals at the university), whom he had
been mauling by way of welcome; a precious tradition which has been carefully
preserved to our own day. Again, he had set in movement a band of scholars, who
had flung themselves upon a wine-shop in classic fashion, quasi classico
excitati, had then beaten the tavern-keeper “with offensive cudgels,” and
joyously pillaged the tavern, even to smashing in the hogsheads of wine in the
cellar. And then it was a fine report in Latin, which the sub-monitor of Torchi
carried piteously to Dom Claude with this dolorous marginal comment,—Rixa;
prima causa vinum optimum potatum. Finally, it was said, a thing quite
horrible in a boy of sixteen, that his debauchery often extended as far as the
Rue de Glatigny.

Claude, saddened and discouraged in his human affections, by all this, had
flung himself eagerly into the arms of learning, that sister which, at least
does not laugh in your face, and which always pays you, though in money that is
sometimes a little hollow, for the attention which you have paid to her. Hence,
he became more and more learned, and, at the same time, as a natural
consequence, more and more rigid as a priest, more and more sad as a man. There
are for each of us several parallelisms between our intelligence, our habits,
and our character, which develop without a break, and break only in the great
disturbances of life.

As Claude Frollo had passed through nearly the entire circle of human
learning—positive, exterior, and permissible—since his youth, he was obliged,
unless he came to a halt, ubi defuit orbis, to proceed further and seek
other aliments for the insatiable activity of his intelligence. The antique
symbol of the serpent biting its tail is, above all, applicable to science. It
would appear that Claude Frollo had experienced this. Many grave persons affirm
that, after having exhausted the fas of human learning, he had dared to
penetrate into the nefas. He had, they said, tasted in succession all
the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had
ended by tasting the forbidden fruit. He had taken his place by turns, as the
reader has seen, in the conferences of the theologians in Sorbonne,—in the
assemblies of the doctors of art, after the manner of Saint-Hilaire,—in the
disputes of the decretalists, after the manner of Saint-Martin,—in the
congregations of physicians at the holy water font of Notre-Dame, ad cupam
Nostræ-Dominæ. All the dishes permitted and approved, which those four
great kitchens called the four faculties could elaborate and serve to the
understanding, he had devoured, and had been satiated with them before his
hunger was appeased. Then he had penetrated further, lower, beneath all that
finished, material, limited knowledge; he had, perhaps, risked his soul, and
had seated himself in the cavern at that mysterious table of the alchemists, of
the astrologers, of the hermetics, of which Averroès, Guillaume de Paris, and
Nicolas Flamel hold the end in the Middle Ages; and which extends in the East,
by the light of the seven-branched candlestick, to Solomon, Pythagoras, and
Zoroaster.

That is, at least, what was supposed, whether rightly or not. It is certain
that the archdeacon often visited the cemetery of the Saints-Innocents, where,
it is true, his father and mother had been buried, with other victims of the
plague of 1466; but that he appeared far less devout before the cross of their
grave than before the strange figures with which the tomb of Nicolas Flamel and
Claude Pernelle, erected just beside it, was loaded.

It is certain that he had frequently been seen to pass along the Rue des
Lombards, and furtively enter a little house which formed the corner of the Rue
des Ecrivans and the Rue Marivault. It was the house which Nicolas Flamel had
built, where he had died about 1417, and which, constantly deserted since that
time, had already begun to fall in ruins,—so greatly had the hermetics and the
alchemists of all countries wasted away the walls, merely by carving their
names upon them. Some neighbors even affirm that they had once seen, through an
air-hole, Archdeacon Claude excavating, turning over, digging up the earth in
the two cellars, whose supports had been daubed with numberless couplets and
hieroglyphics by Nicolas Flamel himself. It was supposed that Flamel had buried
the philosopher’s stone in the cellar; and the alchemists, for the space of two
centuries, from Magistri to Father Pacifique, never ceased to worry the soil
until the house, so cruelly ransacked and turned over, ended by falling into
dust beneath their feet.

Again, it is certain that the archdeacon had been seized with a singular
passion for the symbolical door of Notre-Dame, that page of a conjuring book
written in stone, by Bishop Guillaume de Paris, who has, no doubt, been damned
for having affixed so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred poem chanted by the
rest of the edifice. Archdeacon Claude had the credit also of having fathomed
the mystery of the colossus of Saint Christopher, and of that lofty,
enigmatical statue which then stood at the entrance of the vestibule, and which
the people, in derision, called “Monsieur Legris.” But, what every one might
have noticed was the interminable hours which he often employed, seated upon
the parapet of the area in front of the church, in contemplating the sculptures
of the front; examining now the foolish virgins with their lamps reversed, now
the wise virgins with their lamps upright; again, calculating the angle of
vision of that raven which belongs to the left front, and which is looking at a
mysterious point inside the church, where is concealed the philosopher’s stone,
if it be not in the cellar of Nicolas Flamel.

It was, let us remark in passing, a singular fate for the Church of Notre-Dame
at that epoch to be so beloved, in two different degrees, and with so much
devotion, by two beings so dissimilar as Claude and Quasimodo. Beloved by one,
a sort of instinctive and savage half-man, for its beauty, for its stature, for
the harmonies which emanated from its magnificent ensemble; beloved by the
other, a learned and passionate imagination, for its myth, for the sense which
it contains, for the symbolism scattered beneath the sculptures of its
front,—like the first text underneath the second in a palimpsest,—in a word,
for the enigma which it is eternally propounding to the understanding.

Furthermore, it is certain that the archdeacon had established himself in that
one of the two towers which looks upon the Grève, just beside the frame for the
bells, a very secret little cell, into which no one, not even the bishop,
entered without his leave, it was said. This tiny cell had formerly been made
almost at the summit of the tower, among the ravens’ nests, by Bishop Hugo de
Besançon[26] who had wrought sorcery there in his
day. What that cell contained, no one knew; but from the strand of the Terrain,
at night, there was often seen to appear, disappear, and reappear at brief and
regular intervals, at a little dormer window opening upon the back of the
tower, a certain red, intermittent, singular light which seemed to follow the
panting breaths of a bellows, and to proceed from a flame, rather than from a
light. In the darkness, at that height, it produced a singular effect; and the
goodwives said: “There’s the archdeacon blowing! hell is sparkling up yonder!”

There were no great proofs of sorcery in that, after all, but there was still
enough smoke to warrant a surmise of fire, and the archdeacon bore a tolerably
formidable reputation. We ought to mention however, that the sciences of Egypt,
that necromancy and magic, even the whitest, even the most innocent, had no
more envenomed enemy, no more pitiless denunciator before the gentlemen of the
officialty of Notre-Dame. Whether this was sincere horror, or the game played
by the thief who shouts, “stop thief!” at all events, it did not prevent the
archdeacon from being considered by the learned heads of the chapter, as a soul
who had ventured into the vestibule of hell, who was lost in the caves of the
cabal, groping amid the shadows of the occult sciences. Neither were the people
deceived thereby; with any one who possessed any sagacity, Quasimodo passed for
the demon; Claude Frollo, for the sorcerer. It was evident that the bellringer
was to serve the archdeacon for a given time, at the end of which he would
carry away the latter’s soul, by way of payment. Thus the archdeacon, in spite
of the excessive austerity of his life, was in bad odor among all pious souls;
and there was no devout nose so inexperienced that it could not smell him out
to be a magician.

And if, as he grew older, abysses had formed in his science, they had also
formed in his heart. That at least, is what one had grounds for believing on
scrutinizing that face upon which the soul was only seen to shine through a
sombre cloud. Whence that large, bald brow? that head forever bent? that breast
always heaving with sighs? What secret thought caused his mouth to smile with
so much bitterness, at the same moment that his scowling brows approached each
other like two bulls on the point of fighting? Why was what hair he had left
already gray? What was that internal fire which sometimes broke forth in his
glance, to such a degree that his eye resembled a hole pierced in the wall of a
furnace?

These symptoms of a violent moral preoccupation, had acquired an especially
high degree of intensity at the epoch when this story takes place. More than
once a choir-boy had fled in terror at finding him alone in the church, so
strange and dazzling was his look. More than once, in the choir, at the hour of
the offices, his neighbor in the stalls had heard him mingle with the plain
song, ad omnem tonum, unintelligible parentheses. More than once the
laundress of the Terrain charged “with washing the chapter” had observed, not
without affright, the marks of nails and clenched fingers on the surplice of
monsieur the archdeacon of Josas.

However, he redoubled his severity, and had never been more exemplary. By
profession as well as by character, he had always held himself aloof from
women; he seemed to hate them more than ever. The mere rustling of a silken
petticoat caused his hood to fall over his eyes. Upon this score he was so
jealous of austerity and reserve, that when the Dame de Beaujeu, the king’s
daughter, came to visit the cloister of Notre-Dame, in the month of December,
1481, he gravely opposed her entrance, reminding the bishop of the statute of
the Black Book, dating from the vigil of Saint-Barthélemy, 1334, which
interdicts access to the cloister to “any woman whatever, old or young,
mistress or maid.” Upon which the bishop had been constrained to recite to him
the ordinance of Legate Odo, which excepts certain great dames, aliquæ
magnates mulieres, quæ sine scandalo vitari non possunt. And again the
archdeacon had protested, objecting that the ordinance of the legate, which
dated back to 1207, was anterior by a hundred and twenty-seven years to the
Black Book, and consequently was abrogated in fact by it. And he had refused to
appear before the princess.

It was also noticed that his horror for Bohemian women and gypsies had seemed
to redouble for some time past. He had petitioned the bishop for an edict which
expressly forbade the Bohemian women to come and dance and beat their
tambourines on the place of the Parvis; and for about the same length of time,
he had been ransacking the mouldy placards of the officialty, in order to
collect the cases of sorcerers and witches condemned to fire or the rope, for
complicity in crimes with rams, sows, or goats.

CHAPTER VI.
UNPOPULARITY.

The archdeacon and the bellringer, as we have already said, were but little
loved by the populace great and small, in the vicinity of the cathedral. When
Claude and Quasimodo went out together, which frequently happened, and when
they were seen traversing in company, the valet behind the master, the cold,
narrow, and gloomy streets of the block of Notre-Dame, more than one evil word,
more than one ironical quaver, more than one insulting jest greeted them on
their way, unless Claude Frollo, which was rarely the case, walked with head
upright and raised, showing his severe and almost august brow to the
dumbfounded jeerers.

Both were in their quarter like “the poets” of whom Régnier speaks,—

“All sorts of persons run after poets,
As warblers fly shrieking after owls.”

Sometimes a mischievous child risked his skin and bones for the ineffable
pleasure of driving a pin into Quasimodo’s hump. Again, a young girl, more bold
and saucy than was fitting, brushed the priest’s black robe, singing in his
face the sardonic ditty, “niche, niche, the devil is caught.” Sometimes
a group of squalid old crones, squatting in a file under the shadow of the
steps to a porch, scolded noisily as the archdeacon and the bellringer passed,
and tossed them this encouraging welcome, with a curse: “Hum! there’s a fellow
whose soul is made like the other one’s body!” Or a band of schoolboys and
street urchins, playing hop-scotch, rose in a body and saluted him classically,
with some cry in Latin: “Eia! eia! Claudius cum claudo!”

But the insult generally passed unnoticed both by the priest and the
bellringer. Quasimodo was too deaf to hear all these gracious things, and
Claude was too dreamy.

BOOK FIFTH.

CHAPTER I.
ABBAS BEATI MARTINI.

Dom Claude’s fame had spread far and wide. It procured for him, at about the
epoch when he refused to see Madame de Beaujeu, a visit which he long
remembered.

It was in the evening. He had just retired, after the office, to his canon’s
cell in the cloister of Notre-Dame. This cell, with the exception, possibly, of
some glass phials, relegated to a corner, and filled with a decidedly equivocal
powder, which strongly resembled the alchemist’s “powder of projection,”
presented nothing strange or mysterious. There were, indeed, here and there,
some inscriptions on the walls, but they were pure sentences of learning and
piety, extracted from good authors. The archdeacon had just seated himself, by
the light of a three-jetted copper lamp, before a vast coffer crammed with
manuscripts. He had rested his elbow upon the open volume of Honorius d’Autun,
De predestinatione et libero arbitrio, and he was turning over, in deep
meditation, the leaves of a printed folio which he had just brought, the sole
product of the press which his cell contained. In the midst of his revery there
came a knock at his door. “Who’s there?” cried the learned man, in the gracious
tone of a famished dog, disturbed over his bone.

A voice without replied, “Your friend, Jacques Coictier.” He went to open the
door.

It was, in fact, the king’s physician; a person about fifty years of age, whose
harsh physiognomy was modified only by a crafty eye. Another man accompanied
him. Both wore long slate-colored robes, furred with minever, girded and
closed, with caps of the same stuff and hue. Their hands were concealed by
their sleeves, their feet by their robes, their eyes by their caps.

“God help me, messieurs!” said the archdeacon, showing them in; “I was not
expecting distinguished visitors at such an hour.” And while speaking in this
courteous fashion he cast an uneasy and scrutinizing glance from the physician
to his companion.

“’Tis never too late to come and pay a visit to so considerable a learned man
as Dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe,” replied Doctor Coictier, whose
Franche-Comté accent made all his phrases drag along with the majesty of a
train-robe.

There then ensued between the physician and the archdeacon one of those
congratulatory prologues which, in accordance with custom, at that epoch
preceded all conversations between learned men, and which did not prevent them
from detesting each other in the most cordial manner in the world. However, it
is the same nowadays; every wise man’s mouth complimenting another wise man is
a vase of honeyed gall.

Claude Frollo’s felicitations to Jacques Coictier bore reference principally to
the temporal advantages which the worthy physician had found means to extract,
in the course of his much envied career, from each malady of the king, an
operation of alchemy much better and more certain than the pursuit of the
philosopher’s stone.

“In truth, Monsieur le Docteur Coictier, I felt great joy on learning of the
bishopric given your nephew, my reverend seigneur Pierre Versé. Is he not
Bishop of Amiens?”

“Yes, monsieur Archdeacon; it is a grace and mercy of God.”

“Do you know that you made a great figure on Christmas Day at the head of your
company of the chamber of accounts, Monsieur President?”

“Vice-President, Dom Claude. Alas! nothing more.”

“How is your superb house in the Rue Saint-André des Arcs coming on? ’Tis a
Louvre. I love greatly the apricot tree which is carved on the door, with this
play of words: ‘A L’ABRI-COTIER—Sheltered from reefs.’”

“Alas! Master Claude, all that masonry costeth me dear. In proportion as the
house is erected, I am ruined.”

“Ho! have you not your revenues from the jail, and the bailiwick of the Palais,
and the rents of all the houses, sheds, stalls, and booths of the enclosure?
’Tis a fine breast to suck.”

“My castellany of Poissy has brought me in nothing this year.”

“But your tolls of Triel, of Saint-James, of Saint-Germain-en-Laye are always
good.”

“Six score livres, and not even Parisian livres at that.”

“You have your office of counsellor to the king. That is fixed.”

“Yes, brother Claude; but that accursed seigneury of Poligny, which people make
so much noise about, is worth not sixty gold crowns, year out and year in.”

In the compliments which Dom Claude addressed to Jacques Coictier, there was
that sardonical, biting, and covertly mocking accent, and the sad cruel smile
of a superior and unhappy man who toys for a moment, by way of distraction,
with the dense prosperity of a vulgar man. The other did not perceive it.

“Upon my soul,” said Claude at length, pressing his hand, “I am glad to see you
and in such good health.”

“Thanks, Master Claude.”

“By the way,” exclaimed Dom Claude, “how is your royal patient?”

“He payeth not sufficiently his physician,” replied the doctor, casting a side
glance at his companion.

“Think you so, Gossip Coictier,” said the latter.

These words, uttered in a tone of surprise and reproach, drew upon this unknown
personage the attention of the archdeacon which, to tell the truth, had not
been diverted from him a single moment since the stranger had set foot across
the threshold of his cell. It had even required all the thousand reasons which
he had for handling tenderly Doctor Jacques Coictier, the all-powerful
physician of King Louis XI., to induce him to receive the latter thus
accompanied. Hence, there was nothing very cordial in his manner when Jacques
Coictier said to him,—

“By the way, Dom Claude, I bring you a colleague who has desired to see you on
account of your reputation.”

“Monsieur belongs to science?” asked the archdeacon, fixing his piercing eye
upon Coictier’s companion. He found beneath the brows of the stranger a glance
no less piercing or less distrustful than his own.

He was, so far as the feeble light of the lamp permitted one to judge, an old
man about sixty years of age and of medium stature, who appeared somewhat
sickly and broken in health. His profile, although of a very ordinary outline,
had something powerful and severe about it; his eyes sparkled beneath a very
deep superciliary arch, like a light in the depths of a cave; and beneath his
cap which was well drawn down and fell upon his nose, one recognized the broad
expanse of a brow of genius.

He took it upon himself to reply to the archdeacon’s question,—

“Reverend master,” he said in a grave tone, “your renown has reached my ears,
and I wish to consult you. I am but a poor provincial gentleman, who removeth
his shoes before entering the dwellings of the learned. You must know my name.
I am called Gossip Tourangeau.”

“Strange name for a gentleman,” said the archdeacon to himself.

Nevertheless, he had a feeling that he was in the presence of a strong and
earnest character. The instinct of his own lofty intellect made him recognize
an intellect no less lofty under Gossip Tourangeau’s furred cap, and as he
gazed at the solemn face, the ironical smile which Jacques Coictier’s presence
called forth on his gloomy face, gradually disappeared as twilight fades on the
horizon of night. Stern and silent, he had resumed his seat in his great
armchair; his elbow rested as usual, on the table, and his brow on his hand.
After a few moments of reflection, he motioned his visitors to be seated, and,
turning to Gossip Tourangeau he said,—

“You come to consult me, master, and upon what science?”

“Your reverence,” replied Tourangeau, “I am ill, very ill. You are said to be
great Æsculapius, and I am come to ask your advice in medicine.”

“Medicine!” said the archdeacon, tossing his head. He seemed to meditate for a
moment, and then resumed: “Gossip Tourangeau, since that is your name, turn
your head, you will find my reply already written on the wall.”

Gossip Tourangeau obeyed, and read this inscription engraved above his head:
“Medicine is the daughter of dreams.—JAMBLIQUE.”

Meanwhile, Doctor Jacques Coictier had heard his companion’s question with a
displeasure which Dom Claude’s response had but redoubled. He bent down to the
ear of Gossip Tourangeau, and said to him, softly enough not to be heard by the
archdeacon: “I warned you that he was mad. You insisted on seeing him.”

“’Tis very possible that he is right, madman as he is, Doctor Jacques,” replied
his comrade in the same low tone, and with a bitter smile.

“As you please,” replied Coictier dryly. Then, addressing the archdeacon: “You
are clever at your trade, Dom Claude, and you are no more at a loss over
Hippocrates than a monkey is over a nut. Medicine a dream! I suspect that the
pharmacopolists and the master physicians would insist upon stoning you if they
were here. So you deny the influence of philtres upon the blood, and unguents
on the skin! You deny that eternal pharmacy of flowers and metals, which is
called the world, made expressly for that eternal invalid called man!”

“I deny,” said Dom Claude coldly, “neither pharmacy nor the invalid. I reject
the physician.”

“Then it is not true,” resumed Coictier hotly, “that gout is an internal
eruption; that a wound caused by artillery is to be cured by the application of
a young mouse roasted; that young blood, properly injected, restores youth to
aged veins; it is not true that two and two make four, and that emprostathonos
follows opistathonos.”

The archdeacon replied without perturbation: “There are certain things of which
I think in a certain fashion.”

Coictier became crimson with anger.

“There, there, my good Coictier, let us not get angry,” said Gossip Tourangeau.
“Monsieur the archdeacon is our friend.”

Coictier calmed down, muttering in a low tone,—

“After all, he’s mad.”

“Pasque-dieu, Master Claude,” resumed Gossip Tourangeau, after a
silence, “You embarrass me greatly. I had two things to consult you upon, one
touching my health and the other touching my star.”

“Monsieur,” returned the archdeacon, “if that be your motive, you would have
done as well not to put yourself out of breath climbing my staircase. I do not
believe in Medicine. I do not believe in Astrology.”

“Indeed!” said the man, with surprise.

Coictier gave a forced laugh.

“You see that he is mad,” he said, in a low tone, to Gossip Tourangeau. “He
does not believe in astrology.”

“The idea of imagining,” pursued Dom Claude, “that every ray of a star is a
thread which is fastened to the head of a man!”

“And what then, do you believe in?” exclaimed Gossip Tourangeau.

The archdeacon hesitated for a moment, then he allowed a gloomy smile to
escape, which seemed to give the lie to his response: “Credo in Deum.”

“Dominum nostrum,” added Gossip Tourangeau, making the sign of the
cross.

“Amen,” said Coictier.

“Reverend master,” resumed Tourangeau, “I am charmed in soul to see you in such
a religious frame of mind. But have you reached the point, great savant as you
are, of no longer believing in science?”

“No,” said the archdeacon, grasping the arm of Gossip Tourangeau, and a ray of
enthusiasm lighted up his gloomy eyes, “no, I do not reject science. I have not
crawled so long, flat on my belly, with my nails in the earth, through the
innumerable ramifications of its caverns, without perceiving far in front of
me, at the end of the obscure gallery, a light, a flame, a something, the
reflection, no doubt, of the dazzling central laboratory where the patient and
the wise have found out God.”

“And in short,” interrupted Tourangeau, “what do you hold to be true and
certain?”

“Alchemy.”

Coictier exclaimed, “Pardieu, Dom Claude, alchemy has its use, no doubt, but
why blaspheme medicine and astrology?”

“Naught is your science of man, naught is your science of the stars,” said the
archdeacon, commandingly.

“That’s driving Epidaurus and Chaldea very fast,” replied the physician with a
grin.

“Listen, Messire Jacques. This is said in good faith. I am not the king’s
physician, and his majesty has not given me the Garden of Dædalus in which to
observe the constellations. Don’t get angry, but listen to me. What truth have
you deduced, I will not say from medicine, which is too foolish a thing, but
from astrology? Cite to me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon, the
treasures of the number ziruph and those of the number zephirod!”

“Will you deny,” said Coictier, “the sympathetic force of the collar bone, and
the cabalistics which are derived from it?”

“An error, Messire Jacques! None of your formulas end in reality. Alchemy on
the other hand has its discoveries. Will you contest results like this? Ice
confined beneath the earth for a thousand years is transformed into rock
crystals. Lead is the ancestor of all metals. For gold is not a metal, gold is
light. Lead requires only four periods of two hundred years each, to pass in
succession from the state of lead, to the state of red arsenic, from red
arsenic to tin, from tin to silver. Are not these facts? But to believe in the
collar bone, in the full line and in the stars, is as ridiculous as to believe
with the inhabitants of Grand-Cathay that the golden oriole turns into a mole,
and that grains of wheat turn into fish of the carp species.”

“I have studied hermetic science!” exclaimed Coictier, “and I affirm—”

The fiery archdeacon did not allow him to finish: “And I have studied medicine,
astrology, and hermetics. Here alone is the truth.” (As he spoke thus, he took
from the top of the coffer a phial filled with the powder which we have
mentioned above), “here alone is light! Hippocrates is a dream; Urania is a
dream; Hermes, a thought. Gold is the sun; to make gold is to be God. Herein
lies the one and only science. I have sounded the depths of medicine and
astrology, I tell you! Naught, nothingness! The human body, shadows! the
planets, shadows!”

And he fell back in his armchair in a commanding and inspired attitude. Gossip
Touraugeau watched him in silence. Coictier tried to grin, shrugged his
shoulders imperceptibly, and repeated in a low voice,—

“A madman!”

“And,” said Tourangeau suddenly, “the wondrous result,—have you attained it,
have you made gold?”

“If I had made it,” replied the archdeacon, articulating his words slowly, like
a man who is reflecting, “the king of France would be named Claude and not
Louis.”

The stranger frowned.

“What am I saying?” resumed Dom Claude, with a smile of disdain. “What would
the throne of France be to me when I could rebuild the empire of the Orient?”

“Very good!” said the stranger.

“Oh, the poor fool!” murmured Coictier.

The archdeacon went on, appearing to reply now only to his thoughts,—

“But no, I am still crawling; I am scratching my face and knees against the
pebbles of the subterranean pathway. I catch a glimpse, I do not contemplate! I
do not read, I spell out!”

“And when you know how to read!” demanded the stranger, “will you make gold?”

“Who doubts it?” said the archdeacon.

“In that case Our Lady knows that I am greatly in need of money, and I should
much desire to read in your books. Tell me, reverend master, is your science
inimical or displeasing to Our Lady?”

“Whose archdeacon I am?” Dom Claude contented himself with replying, with
tranquil hauteur.

“That is true, my master. Well! will it please you to initiate me? Let me spell
with you.”

Claude assumed the majestic and pontifical attitude of a Samuel.

“Old man, it requires longer years than remain to you, to undertake this voyage
across mysterious things. Your head is very gray! One comes forth from the
cavern only with white hair, but only those with dark hair enter it. Science
alone knows well how to hollow, wither, and dry up human faces; she needs not
to have old age bring her faces already furrowed. Nevertheless, if the desire
possesses you of putting yourself under discipline at your age, and of
deciphering the formidable alphabet of the sages, come to me; ’tis well, I will
make the effort. I will not tell you, poor old man, to go and visit the
sepulchral chambers of the pyramids, of which ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the
brick tower of Babylon, nor the immense white marble sanctuary of the Indian
temple of Eklinga. I, no more than yourself, have seen the Chaldean masonry
works constructed according to the sacred form of the Sikra, nor the temple of
Solomon, which is destroyed, nor the stone doors of the sepulchre of the kings
of Israel, which are broken. We will content ourselves with the fragments of
the book of Hermes which we have here. I will explain to you the statue of
Saint Christopher, the symbol of the sower, and that of the two angels which
are on the front of the Sainte-Chapelle, and one of which holds in his hands a
vase, the other, a cloud—”

Here Jacques Coictier, who had been unhorsed by the archdeacon’s impetuous
replies, regained his saddle, and interrupted him with the triumphant tone of
one learned man correcting another,—“Erras amice Claudi. The symbol is
not the number. You take Orpheus for Hermes.”

“’Tis you who are in error,” replied the archdeacon, gravely. “Dædalus is the
base; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the edifice,—that is all. You shall come
when you will,” he continued, turning to Tourangeau, “I will show you the
little parcels of gold which remained at the bottom of Nicholas Flamel’s
alembic, and you shall compare them with the gold of Guillaume de Paris. I will
teach you the secret virtues of the Greek word, peristera. But, first of
all, I will make you read, one after the other, the marble letters of the
alphabet, the granite pages of the book. We shall go to the portal of Bishop
Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond at the Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house
of Nicholas Flamel, Rue Manvault, to his tomb, which is at the
Saints-Innocents, to his two hospitals, Rue de Montmorency. I will make you
read the hieroglyphics which cover the four great iron cramps on the portal of
the hospital Saint-Gervais, and of the Rue de la Ferronnerie. We will spell out
in company, also, the façade of Saint-Côme, of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents, of
Saint Martin, of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie—.”

For a long time, Gossip Tourangeau, intelligent as was his glance, had appeared
not to understand Dom Claude. He interrupted.

“Pasque-dieu! what are your books, then?”

“Here is one of them,” said the archdeacon.

And opening the window of his cell he pointed out with his finger the immense
church of Notre-Dame, which, outlining against the starry sky the black
silhouette of its two towers, its stone flanks, its monstrous haunches, seemed
an enormous two-headed sphinx, seated in the middle of the city.

The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time in silence, then
extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards the printed book which lay open
on the table, and his left towards Notre-Dame, and turning a sad glance from
the book to the church,—“Alas,” he said, “this will kill that.”

Coictier, who had eagerly approached the book, could not repress an
exclamation. “Hé, but now, what is there so formidable in this: ‘GLOSSA IN
EPISTOLAS D. PAULI, Norimbergæ, Antonius Koburger, 1474.’ This is not
new. ’Tis a book of Pierre Lombard, the Master of Sentences. Is it because it
is printed?”

“You have said it,” replied Claude, who seemed absorbed in a profound
meditation, and stood resting, his forefinger bent backward on the folio which
had come from the famous press of Nuremberg. Then he added these mysterious
words: “Alas! alas! small things come at the end of great things; a tooth
triumphs over a mass. The Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills the
whale, the book will kill the edifice.”

The curfew of the cloister sounded at the moment when Master Jacques was
repeating to his companion in low tones, his eternal refrain, “He is
mad!” To which his companion this time replied, “I believe that he is.”

It was the hour when no stranger could remain in the cloister. The two visitors
withdrew. “Master,” said Gossip Tourangeau, as he took leave of the archdeacon,
“I love wise men and great minds, and I hold you in singular esteem. Come
to-morrow to the Palace des Tournelles, and inquire for the Abbé de
Sainte-Martin, of Tours.”

The archdeacon returned to his chamber dumbfounded, comprehending at last who
Gossip Tourangeau was, and recalling that passage of the register of
Sainte-Martin, of Tours:—Abbas beati Martini, SCILICET REX FRANCIÆ, est
canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam præbendam quam habet sanctus
Venantius, et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii.

It is asserted that after that epoch the archdeacon had frequent conferences
with Louis XI., when his majesty came to Paris, and that Dom Claude’s influence
quite overshadowed that of Olivier le Daim and Jacques Coictier, who, as was
his habit, rudely took the king to task on that account.

CHAPTER II.
THIS WILL KILL THAT.

Our lady readers will pardon us if we pause for a moment to seek what could
have been the thought concealed beneath those enigmatic words of the
archdeacon: “This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice.”

To our mind, this thought had two faces. In the first place, it was a priestly
thought. It was the affright of the priest in the presence of a new agent, the
printing press. It was the terror and dazzled amazement of the men of the
sanctuary, in the presence of the luminous press of Gutenberg. It was the
pulpit and the manuscript taking the alarm at the printed word: something
similar to the stupor of a sparrow which should behold the angel Legion unfold
his six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears
emancipated humanity roaring and swarming; who beholds in the future,
intelligence sapping faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off
Rome. It was the prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought,
volatilized by the press, evaporating from the theocratic recipient. It was the
terror of the soldier who examines the brazen battering ram, and says:—“The
tower will crumble.” It signified that one power was about to succeed another
power. It meant, “The press will kill the church.”

But underlying this thought, the first and most simple one, no doubt, there was
in our opinion another, newer one, a corollary of the first, less easy to
perceive and more easy to contest, a view as philosophical and belonging no
longer to the priest alone but to the savant and the artist. It was a
presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its
mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer
be written with the same matter, and in the same manner; that the book of
stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper,
more solid and still more durable. In this connection the archdeacon’s vague
formula had a second sense. It meant, “Printing will kill architecture.”

In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the
Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book of humanity, the
principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a
force or as an intelligence.

When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when the mass of
reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that speech
naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, men transcribed them
on the soil in a manner which was at once the most visible, most durable, and
most natural. They sealed each tradition beneath a monument.

The first monuments were simple masses of rock, “which the iron had not
touched,” as Moses says. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an
alphabet. Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and each letter was a
hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital
on the column. This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the same
moment, on the surface of the entire world. We find the “standing stones” of
the Celts in Asian Siberia; in the pampas of America.

Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone, they coupled those
syllables of granite, and attempted some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and
cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words. Some, especially
the tumulus, are proper names. Sometimes even, when men had a great deal of
stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase. The immense pile of Karnac is a
complete sentence.

At last they made books. Traditions had brought forth symbols, beneath which
they disappeared like the trunk of a tree beneath its foliage; all these
symbols in which humanity placed faith continued to grow, to multiply, to
intersect, to become more and more complicated; the first monuments no longer
sufficed to contain them, they were overflowing in every part; these monuments
hardly expressed now the primitive tradition, simple like themselves, naked and
prone upon the earth. The symbol felt the need of expansion in the edifice.
Then architecture was developed in proportion with human thought; it became a
giant with a thousand heads and a thousand arms, and fixed all this floating
symbolism in an eternal, visible, palpable form. While Dædalus, who is force,
measured; while Orpheus, who is intelligence, sang;—the pillar, which is a
letter; the arcade, which is a syllable; the pyramid, which is a word,—all set
in movement at once by a law of geometry and by a law of poetry, grouped
themselves, combined, amalgamated, descended, ascended, placed themselves side
by side on the soil, ranged themselves in stories in the sky, until they had
written under the dictation of the general idea of an epoch, those marvellous
books which were also marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Rhamseion
of Egypt, the Temple of Solomon.

The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of all these
edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon, for example, was not
alone the binding of the holy book; it was the holy book itself. On each one of
its concentric walls, the priests could read the word translated and manifested
to the eye, and thus they followed its transformations from sanctuary to
sanctuary, until they seized it in its last tabernacle, under its most concrete
form, which still belonged to architecture: the arch. Thus the word was
enclosed in an edifice, but its image was upon its envelope, like the human
form on the coffin of a mummy.

And not only the form of edifices, but the sites selected for them, revealed
the thought which they represented, according as the symbol to be expressed was
graceful or grave. Greece crowned her mountains with a temple harmonious to the
eye; India disembowelled hers, to chisel therein those monstrous subterranean
pagodas, borne up by gigantic rows of granite elephants.

Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world, from the most
immemorial pagoda of Hindustan, to the cathedral of Cologne, architecture was
the great handwriting of the human race. And this is so true, that not only
every religious symbol, but every human thought, has its page and its monument
in that immense book.

All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy. This law of liberty
following unity is written in architecture. For, let us insist upon this point,
masonry must not be thought to be powerful only in erecting the temple and in
expressing the myth and sacerdotal symbolism; in inscribing in hieroglyphs upon
its pages of stone the mysterious tables of the law. If it were thus,—as there
comes in all human society a moment when the sacred symbol is worn out and
becomes obliterated under freedom of thought, when man escapes from the priest,
when the excrescence of philosophies and systems devour the face of
religion,—architecture could not reproduce this new state of human thought; its
leaves, so crowded on the face, would be empty on the back; its work would be
mutilated; its book would be incomplete. But no.

Let us take as an example the Middle Ages, where we see more clearly because it
is nearer to us. During its first period, while theocracy is organizing Europe,
while the Vatican is rallying and reclassing about itself the elements of a
Rome made from the Rome which lies in ruins around the Capitol, while
Christianity is seeking all the stages of society amid the rubbish of anterior
civilization, and rebuilding with its ruins a new hierarchic universe, the
keystone to whose vault is the priest—one first hears a dull echo from that
chaos, and then, little by little, one sees, arising from beneath the breath of
Christianity, from beneath the hand of the barbarians, from the fragments of
the dead Greek and Roman architectures, that mysterious Romanesque
architecture, sister of the theocratic masonry of Egypt and of India,
inalterable emblem of pure catholicism, unchangeable hieroglyph of the papal
unity. All the thought of that day is written, in fact, in this sombre,
Romanesque style. One feels everywhere in it authority, unity, the
impenetrable, the absolute, Gregory VII.; always the priest, never the man;
everywhere caste, never the people.

But the Crusades arrive. They are a great popular movement, and every great
popular movement, whatever may be its cause and object, always sets free the
spirit of liberty from its final precipitate. New things spring into life every
day. Here opens the stormy period of the Jacqueries, Pragueries, and Leagues.
Authority wavers, unity is divided. Feudalism demands to share with theocracy,
while awaiting the inevitable arrival of the people, who will assume the part
of the lion: Quia nominor leo. Seignory pierces through sacerdotalism;
the commonality, through seignory. The face of Europe is changed. Well! the
face of architecture is changed also. Like civilization, it has turned a page,
and the new spirit of the time finds her ready to write at its dictation. It
returns from the crusades with the pointed arch, like the nations with liberty.

Then, while Rome is undergoing gradual dismemberment, Romanesque architecture
dies. The hieroglyph deserts the cathedral, and betakes itself to blazoning the
donjon keep, in order to lend prestige to feudalism. The cathedral itself, that
edifice formerly so dogmatic, invaded henceforth by the bourgeoisie, by
the community, by liberty, escapes the priest and falls into the power of the
artist. The artist builds it after his own fashion. Farewell to mystery, myth,
law. Fancy and caprice, welcome. Provided the priest has his basilica and his
altar, he has nothing to say. The four walls belong to the artist. The
architectural book belongs no longer to the priest, to religion, to Rome; it is
the property of poetry, of imagination, of the people. Hence the rapid and
innumerable transformations of that architecture which owns but three
centuries, so striking after the stagnant immobility of the Romanesque
architecture, which owns six or seven. Nevertheless, art marches on with giant
strides. Popular genius amid originality accomplish the task which the bishops
formerly fulfilled. Each race writes its line upon the book, as it passes; it
erases the ancient Romanesque hieroglyphs on the frontispieces of cathedrals,
and at the most one only sees dogma cropping out here and there, beneath the
new symbol which it has deposited. The popular drapery hardly permits the
religious skeleton to be suspected. One cannot even form an idea of the
liberties which the architects then take, even toward the Church. There are
capitals knitted of nuns and monks, shamelessly coupled, as on the hall of
chimney pieces in the Palais de Justice, in Paris. There is Noah’s adventure
carved to the last detail, as under the great portal of Bourges. There is a
bacchanalian monk, with ass’s ears and glass in hand, laughing in the face of a
whole community, as on the lavatory of the Abbey of Bocherville. There exists
at that epoch, for thought written in stone, a privilege exactly comparable to
our present liberty of the press. It is the liberty of architecture.

This liberty goes very far. Sometimes a portal, a façade, an entire church,
presents a symbolical sense absolutely foreign to worship, or even hostile to
the Church. In the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicholas Flamel,
in the fifteenth, wrote such seditious pages. Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was
a whole church of the opposition.

Thought was then free only in this manner; hence it never wrote itself out
completely except on the books called edifices. Thought, under the form of
edifice, could have beheld itself burned in the public square by the hands of
the executioner, in its manuscript form, if it had been sufficiently imprudent
to risk itself thus; thought, as the door of a church, would have been a
spectator of the punishment of thought as a book. Having thus only this
resource, masonry, in order to make its way to the light, flung itself upon it
from all quarters. Hence the immense quantity of cathedrals which have covered
Europe—a number so prodigious that one can hardly believe it even after having
verified it. All the material forces, all the intellectual forces of society
converged towards the same point: architecture. In this manner, under the
pretext of building churches to God, art was developed in its magnificent
proportions.

Then whoever was born a poet became an architect. Genius, scattered in the
masses, repressed in every quarter under feudalism as under a testudo of
brazen bucklers, finding no issue except in the direction of
architecture,—gushed forth through that art, and its Iliads assumed the form of
cathedrals. All other arts obeyed, and placed themselves under the discipline
of architecture. They were the workmen of the great work. The architect, the
poet, the master, summed up in his person the sculpture which carved his
façades, painting which illuminated his windows, music which set his bells to
pealing, and breathed into his organs. There was nothing down to poor
poetry,—properly speaking, that which persisted in vegetating in
manuscripts,—which was not forced, in order to make something of itself, to
come and frame itself in the edifice in the shape of a hymn or of prose; the
same part, after all, which the tragedies of Æschylus had played in the
sacerdotal festivals of Greece; Genesis, in the temple of Solomon.

Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the principal writing, the
universal writing. In that granite book, begun by the Orient, continued by
Greek and Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages wrote the last page. Moreover, this
phenomenon of an architecture of the people following an architecture of caste,
which we have just been observing in the Middle Ages, is reproduced with every
analogous movement in the human intelligence at the other great epochs of
history. Thus, in order to enunciate here only summarily, a law which it would
require volumes to develop: in the high Orient, the cradle of primitive times,
after Hindoo architecture came Phœnician architecture, that opulent mother of
Arabian architecture; in antiquity, after Egyptian architecture, of which
Etruscan style and cyclopean monuments are but one variety, came Greek
architecture (of which the Roman style is only a continuation), surcharged with
the Carthaginian dome; in modern times, after Romanesque architecture came
Gothic architecture. And by separating there three series into their component
parts, we shall find in the three eldest sisters, Hindoo architecture, Egyptian
architecture, Romanesque architecture, the same symbol; that is to say,
theocracy, caste, unity, dogma, myth, God: and for the three younger sisters,
Phœnician architecture, Greek architecture, Gothic architecture, whatever,
nevertheless, may be the diversity of form inherent in their nature, the same
signification also; that is to say, liberty, the people, man.

In the Hindu, Egyptian, or Romanesque architecture, one feels the priest,
nothing but the priest, whether he calls himself Brahmin, Magian, or Pope. It
is not the same in the architectures of the people. They are richer and less
sacred. In the Phœnician, one feels the merchant; in the Greek, the republican;
in the Gothic, the citizen.

The general characteristics of all theocratic architecture are immutability,
horror of progress, the preservation of traditional lines, the consecration of
the primitive types, the constant bending of all the forms of men and of nature
to the incomprehensible caprices of the symbol. These are dark books, which the
initiated alone understand how to decipher. Moreover, every form, every
deformity even, has there a sense which renders it inviolable. Do not ask of
Hindoo, Egyptian, Romanesque masonry to reform their design, or to improve
their statuary. Every attempt at perfecting is an impiety to them. In these
architectures it seems as though the rigidity of the dogma had spread over the
stone like a sort of second petrifaction. The general characteristics of
popular masonry, on the contrary, are progress, originality, opulence,
perpetual movement. They are already sufficiently detached from religion to
think of their beauty, to take care of it, to correct without relaxation their
parure of statues or arabesques. They are of the age. They have something
human, which they mingle incessantly with the divine symbol under which they
still produce. Hence, edifices comprehensible to every soul, to every
intelligence, to every imagination, symbolical still, but as easy to understand
as nature. Between theocratic architecture and this there is the difference
that lies between a sacred language and a vulgar language, between
hieroglyphics and art, between Solomon and Phidias.

If the reader will sum up what we have hitherto briefly, very briefly,
indicated, neglecting a thousand proofs and also a thousand objections of
detail, he will be led to this: that architecture was, down to the fifteenth
century, the chief register of humanity; that in that interval not a thought
which is in any degree complicated made its appearance in the world, which has
not been worked into an edifice; that every popular idea, and every religious
law, has had its monumental records; that the human race has, in short, had no
important thought which it has not written in stone. And why? Because every
thought, either philosophical or religious, is interested in perpetuating
itself; because the idea which has moved one generation wishes to move others
also, and leave a trace. Now, what a precarious immortality is that of the
manuscript! How much more solid, durable, unyielding, is a book of stone! In
order to destroy the written word, a torch and a Turk are sufficient. To
demolish the constructed word, a social revolution, a terrestrial revolution
are required. The barbarians passed over the Coliseum; the deluge, perhaps,
passed over the Pyramids.

In the fifteenth century everything changes.

Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more durable
and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy.
Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg’s letters of lead are about to supersede
Orpheus’s letters of stone.

The book is about to kill the edifice.

The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of
revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which is totally renewed;
it is human thought stripping off one form and donning another; it is the
complete and definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent which since
the days of Adam has represented intelligence.

In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile,
irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of
architecture it made a mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a
century and a place. Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters
itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once.

We repeat, who does not perceive that in this form it is far more indelible? It
was solid, it has become alive. It passes from duration in time to immortality.
One can demolish a mass; how can one extirpate ubiquity? If a flood comes, the
mountains will have long disappeared beneath the waves, while the birds will
still be flying about; and if a single ark floats on the surface of the
cataclysm, they will alight upon it, will float with it, will be present with
it at the ebbing of the waters; and the new world which emerges from this chaos
will behold, on its awakening, the thought of the world which has been
submerged soaring above it, winged and living.

And when one observes that this mode of expression is not only the most
conservative, but also the most simple, the most convenient, the most
practicable for all; when one reflects that it does not drag after it bulky
baggage, and does not set in motion a heavy apparatus; when one compares
thought forced, in order to transform itself into an edifice, to put in motion
four or five other arts and tons of gold, a whole mountain of stones, a whole
forest of timber-work, a whole nation of workmen; when one compares it to the
thought which becomes a book, and for which a little paper, a little ink, and a
pen suffice,—how can one be surprised that human intelligence should have
quitted architecture for printing? Cut the primitive bed of a river abruptly
with a canal hollowed out below its level, and the river will desert its bed.

Behold how, beginning with the discovery of printing, architecture withers away
little by little, becomes lifeless and bare. How one feels the water sinking,
the sap departing, the thought of the times and of the people withdrawing from
it! The chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century; the press is,
as yet, too weak, and, at the most, draws from powerful architecture a
superabundance of life. But practically beginning with the sixteenth century,
the malady of architecture is visible; it is no longer the expression of
society; it becomes classic art in a miserable manner; from being Gallic,
European, indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman; from being true and modern,
it becomes pseudo-classic. It is this decadence which is called the
Renaissance. A magnificent decadence, however, for the ancient Gothic genius,
that sun which sets behind the gigantic press of Mayence, still penetrates for
a while longer with its rays that whole hybrid pile of Latin arcades and
Corinthian columns.

It is that setting sun which we mistake for the dawn.

Nevertheless, from the moment when architecture is no longer anything but an
art like any other; as soon as it is no longer the total art, the sovereign
art, the tyrant art,—it has no longer the power to retain the other arts. So
they emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take
themselves off, each one in its own direction. Each one of them gains by this
divorce. Isolation aggrandizes everything. Sculpture becomes statuary, the
image trade becomes painting, the canon becomes music. One would pronounce it
an empire dismembered at the death of its Alexander, and whose provinces become
kingdoms.

Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those splendors of the
dazzling sixteenth century.

Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time as the arts. The
arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already made large incisions into
Catholicism. The sixteenth century breaks religious unity. Before the invention
of printing, reform would have been merely a schism; printing converted it into
a revolution. Take away the press; heresy is enervated. Whether it be
Providence or Fate, Gutenburg is the precursor of Luther.

Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set, when the
Gothic genius is forever extinct upon the horizon, architecture grows dim,
loses its color, becomes more and more effaced. The printed book, the gnawing
worm of the edifice, sucks and devours it. It becomes bare, denuded of its
foliage, and grows visibly emaciated. It is petty, it is poor, it is nothing.
It no longer expresses anything, not even the memory of the art of another
time. Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts, because human thought is
abandoning it, it summons bunglers in place of artists. Glass replaces the
painted windows. The stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all
originality, all life, all intelligence. It drags along, a lamentable workshop
mendicant, from copy to copy. Michael Angelo, who, no doubt, felt even in the
sixteenth century that it was dying, had a last idea, an idea of despair. That
Titan of art piled the Pantheon on the Parthenon, and made Saint-Peter’s at
Rome. A great work, which deserved to remain unique, the last originality of
architecture, the signature of a giant artist at the bottom of the colossal
register of stone which was closed forever. With Michael Angelo dead, what does
this miserable architecture, which survived itself in the state of a spectre,
do? It takes Saint-Peter in Rome, copies it and parodies it. It is a mania. It
is a pity. Each century has its Saint-Peter’s of Rome; in the seventeenth
century, the Val-de-Grâce; in the eighteenth, Sainte-Geneviève. Each country
has its Saint-Peter’s of Rome. London has one; Petersburg has another; Paris
has two or three. The insignificant testament, the last dotage of a decrepit
grand art falling back into infancy before it dies.

If, in place of the characteristic monuments which we have just described, we
examine the general aspect of art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century,
we notice the same phenomena of decay and phthisis. Beginning with François
II., the architectural form of the edifice effaces itself more and more, and
allows the geometrical form, like the bony structure of an emaciated invalid,
to become prominent. The fine lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable
lines of geometry. An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron.
Meanwhile, architecture is tormented in her struggles to conceal this nudity.
Look at the Greek pediment inscribed upon the Roman pediment, and vice versâ.
It is still the Pantheon on the Parthenon: Saint-Peter’s of Rome. Here are the
brick houses of Henri IV., with their stone corners; the Place Royale, the
Place Dauphine. Here are the churches of Louis XIII., heavy, squat, thickset,
crowded together, loaded with a dome like a hump. Here is the Mazarin
architecture, the wretched Italian pasticcio of the Four Nations. Here are the
palaces of Louis XIV., long barracks for courtiers, stiff, cold, tiresome.
Here, finally, is Louis XV., with chiccory leaves and vermicelli, and all the
warts, and all the fungi, which disfigure that decrepit, toothless, and
coquettish old architecture. From François II. to Louis XV., the evil has
increased in geometrical progression. Art has no longer anything but skin upon
its bones. It is miserably perishing.

Meanwhile what becomes of printing? All the life which is leaving architecture
comes to it. In proportion as architecture ebbs, printing swells and grows.
That capital of forces which human thought had been expending in edifices, it
henceforth expends in books. Thus, from the sixteenth century onward, the
press, raised to the level of decaying architecture, contends with it and kills
it. In the seventeenth century it is already sufficiently the sovereign,
sufficiently triumphant, sufficiently established in its victory, to give to
the world the feast of a great literary century. In the eighteenth, having
reposed for a long time at the Court of Louis XIV., it seizes again the old
sword of Luther, puts it into the hand of Voltaire, and rushes impetuously to
the attack of that ancient Europe, whose architectural expression it has
already killed. At the moment when the eighteenth century comes to an end, it
has destroyed everything. In the nineteenth, it begins to reconstruct.

Now, we ask, which of the three arts has really represented human thought for
the last three centuries? which translates it? which expresses not only its
literary and scholastic vagaries, but its vast, profound, universal movement?
which constantly superposes itself, without a break, without a gap, upon the
human race, which walks a monster with a thousand legs?—Architecture or
printing?

It is printing. Let the reader make no mistake; architecture is dead;
irretrievably slain by the printed book,—slain because it endures for a shorter
time,—slain because it costs more. Every cathedral represents millions. Let the
reader now imagine what an investment of funds it would require to rewrite the
architectural book; to cause thousands of edifices to swarm once more upon the
soil; to return to those epochs when the throng of monuments was such,
according to the statement of an eye witness, “that one would have said that
the world in shaking itself, had cast off its old garments in order to cover
itself with a white vesture of churches.” Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse
excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, candidam ecclesiarum vestem indueret.
(GLABER RADOLPHUS.)

A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How can it surprise
us that all human thought flows in this channel? This does not mean that
architecture will not still have a fine monument, an isolated masterpiece, here
and there. We may still have from time to time, under the reign of printing, a
column made I suppose, by a whole army from melted cannon, as we had under the
reign of architecture, Iliads and Romanceros, Mahabâhrata, and Nibelungen
Lieds, made by a whole people, with rhapsodies piled up and melted together.
The great accident of an architect of genius may happen in the twentieth
century, like that of Dante in the thirteenth. But architecture will no longer
be the social art, the collective art, the dominating art. The grand poem, the
grand edifice, the grand work of humanity will no longer be built: it will be
printed.

And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally, it will no
longer be mistress. It will be subservient to the law of literature, which
formerly received the law from it. The respective positions of the two arts
will be inverted. It is certain that in architectural epochs, the poems, rare
it is true, resemble the monuments. In India, Vyasa is branching, strange,
impenetrable as a pagoda. In Egyptian Orient, poetry has like the edifices,
grandeur and tranquillity of line; in antique Greece, beauty, serenity, calm;
in Christian Europe, the Catholic majesty, the popular naïvete, the rich and
luxuriant vegetation of an epoch of renewal. The Bible resembles the Pyramids;
the Iliad, the Parthenon; Homer, Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is
the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothic
cathedral.

Thus, to sum up what we have hitherto said, in a fashion which is necessarily
incomplete and mutilated, the human race has two books, two registers, two
testaments: masonry and printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper. No
doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles, laid so broadly open in the
centuries, it is permissible to regret the visible majesty of the writing of
granite, those gigantic alphabets formulated in colonnades, in pylons, in
obelisks, those sorts of human mountains which cover the world and the past,
from the pyramid to the bell tower, from Cheops to Strasbourg. The past must be
reread upon these pages of marble. This book, written by architecture, must be
admired and perused incessantly; but the grandeur of the edifice which printing
erects in its turn must not be denied.

That edifice is colossal. Some compiler of statistics has calculated, that if
all the volumes which have issued from the press since Gutenberg’s day were to
be piled one upon another, they would fill the space between the earth and the
moon; but it is not that sort of grandeur of which we wished to speak.
Nevertheless, when one tries to collect in one’s mind a comprehensive image of
the total products of printing down to our own days, does not that total appear
to us like an immense construction, resting upon the entire world, at which
humanity toils without relaxation, and whose monstrous crest is lost in the
profound mists of the future? It is the anthill of intelligence. It is the hive
whither come all imaginations, those golden bees, with their honey.

The edifice has a thousand stories. Here and there one beholds on its
staircases the gloomy caverns of science which pierce its interior. Everywhere
upon its surface, art causes its arabesques, rosettes, and laces to thrive
luxuriantly before the eyes. There, every individual work, however capricious
and isolated it may seem, has its place and its projection. Harmony results
from the whole. From the cathedral of Shakespeare to the mosque of Byron, a
thousand tiny bell towers are piled pell-mell above this metropolis of
universal thought. At its base are written some ancient titles of humanity
which architecture had not registered. To the left of the entrance has been
fixed the ancient bas-relief, in white marble, of Homer; to the right, the
polyglot Bible rears its seven heads. The hydra of the Romancero and some other
hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Nibelungen bristle further on.

Nevertheless, the prodigious edifice still remains incomplete. The press, that
giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap of society,
belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work. The whole human race
is on the scaffoldings. Each mind is a mason. The humblest fills his hole, or
places his stone. Rétif de La Bretonne brings his hod of plaster. Every day a
new course rises. Independently of the original and individual contribution of
each writer, there are collective contingents. The eighteenth century gives the
Encyclopedia, the revolution gives the Moniteur. Assuredly, it is
a construction which increases and piles up in endless spirals; there also are
confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labor, eager
competition of all humanity, refuge promised to intelligence, a new Flood
against an overflow of barbarians. It is the second tower of Babel of the human
race.

BOOK SIXTH.

CHAPTER I.
AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRACY.

A very happy personage in the year of grace 1482, was the noble gentleman
Robert d’Estouteville, chevalier, Sieur de Beyne, Baron d’Ivry and Saint Andry
en la Marche, counsellor and chamberlain to the king, and guard of the
provostship of Paris. It was already nearly seventeen years since he had
received from the king, on November 7, 1465, the comet year,[27] that fine charge of the
provostship of Paris, which was reputed rather a seigneury than an office.
Dignitas, says Joannes Lœmnœus, quæ cum non exigua potestate politiam
concernente, atque prærogativis multis et juribus conjuncta est. A
marvellous thing in ’82 was a gentleman bearing the king’s commission, and
whose letters of institution ran back to the epoch of the marriage of the
natural daughter of Louis XI. with Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon.

The same day on which Robert d’Estouteville took the place of Jacques de
Villiers in the provostship of Paris, Master Jehan Dauvet replaced Messire
Helye de Thorrettes in the first presidency of the Court of Parliament, Jehan
Jouvenel des Ursins supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of
chancellor of France, Regnault des Dormans ousted Pierre Puy from the charge of
master of requests in ordinary of the king’s household. Now, upon how many
heads had the presidency, the chancellorship, the mastership passed since
Robert d’Estouteville had held the provostship of Paris. It had been “granted
to him for safekeeping,” as the letters patent said; and certainly he kept it
well. He had clung to it, he had incorporated himself with it, he had so
identified himself with it that he had escaped that fury for change which
possessed Louis XI., a tormenting and industrious king, whose policy it was to
maintain the elasticity of his power by frequent appointments and revocations.
More than this; the brave chevalier had obtained the reversion of the office
for his son, and for two years already, the name of the noble man Jacques
d’Estouteville, equerry, had figured beside his at the head of the register of
the salary list of the provostship of Paris. A rare and notable favor indeed!
It is true that Robert d’Estouteville was a good soldier, that he had loyally
raised his pennon against “the league of public good,” and that he had
presented to the queen a very marvellous stag in confectionery on the day of
her entrance to Paris in 14…. Moreover, he possessed the good friendship of
Messire Tristan l’Hermite, provost of the marshals of the king’s household.
Hence a very sweet and pleasant existence was that of Messire Robert. In the
first place, very good wages, to which were attached, and from which hung, like
extra bunches of grapes on his vine, the revenues of the civil and criminal
registries of the provostship, plus the civil and criminal revenues of the
tribunals of Embas of the Châtelet, without reckoning some little toll from the
bridges of Mantes and of Corbeil, and the profits on the craft of
Shagreen-makers of Paris, on the corders of firewood and the measurers of salt.
Add to this the pleasure of displaying himself in rides about the city, and of
making his fine military costume, which you may still admire sculptured on his
tomb in the abbey of Valmont in Normandy, and his morion, all embossed at
Montlhéry, stand out a contrast against the parti-colored red and tawny robes
of the aldermen and police. And then, was it nothing to wield absolute
supremacy over the sergeants of the police, the porter and watch of the
Châtelet, the two auditors of the Châtelet, auditores castelleti, the
sixteen commissioners of the sixteen quarters, the jailer of the Châtelet, the
four enfeoffed sergeants, the hundred and twenty mounted sergeants, with maces,
the chevalier of the watch with his watch, his sub-watch, his counter-watch and
his rear-watch? Was it nothing to exercise high and low justice, the right to
interrogate, to hang and to draw, without reckoning petty jurisdiction in the
first resort (in prima instantia, as the charters say), on that viscomty
of Paris, so nobly appanaged with seven noble bailiwicks? Can anything sweeter
be imagined than rendering judgments and decisions, as Messire Robert
d’Estouteville daily did in the Grand Châtelet, under the large and flattened
arches of Philip Augustus? and going, as he was wont to do every evening, to
that charming house situated in the Rue Galilée, in the enclosure of the royal
palace, which he held in right of his wife, Madame Ambroise de Loré, to repose
after the fatigue of having sent some poor wretch to pass the night in “that
little cell of the Rue de Escorcherie, which the provosts and aldermen of Paris
used to make their prison; the same being eleven feet long, seven feet and four
inches wide, and eleven feet high?”[28]

And not only had Messire Robert d’Estouteville his special court as provost and
vicomte of Paris; but in addition he had a share, both for eye and tooth, in
the grand court of the king. There was no head in the least elevated which had
not passed through his hands before it came to the headsman. It was he who went
to seek M. de Nemours at the Bastille Saint Antoine, in order to conduct him to
the Halles; and to conduct to the Grève M. de Saint-Pol, who clamored and
resisted, to the great joy of the provost, who did not love monsieur the
constable.

Here, assuredly, is more than sufficient to render a life happy and
illustrious, and to deserve some day a notable page in that interesting history
of the provosts of Paris, where one learns that Oudard de Villeneuve had a
house in the Rue des Boucheries, that Guillaume de Hangest purchased the great
and the little Savoy, that Guillaume Thiboust gave the nuns of Sainte-Geneviève
his houses in the Rue Clopin, that Hugues Aubriot lived in the Hôtel du
Porc-Épic, and other domestic facts.

Nevertheless, with so many reasons for taking life patiently and joyously,
Messire Robert d’Estouteville woke up on the morning of the seventh of January,
1482, in a very surly and peevish mood. Whence came this ill temper? He could
not have told himself. Was it because the sky was gray? or was the buckle of
his old belt of Montlhéry badly fastened, so that it confined his provostal
portliness too closely? had he beheld ribald fellows, marching in bands of
four, beneath his window, and setting him at defiance, in doublets but no
shirts, hats without crowns, with wallet and bottle at their side? Was it a
vague presentiment of the three hundred and seventy livres, sixteen sous, eight
farthings, which the future King Charles VII. was to cut off from the
provostship in the following year? The reader can take his choice; we, for our
part, are much inclined to believe that he was in a bad humor, simply because
he was in a bad humor.

Moreover, it was the day after a festival, a tiresome day for every one, and
above all for the magistrate who is charged with sweeping away all the filth,
properly and figuratively speaking, which a festival day produces in Paris. And
then he had to hold a sitting at the Grand Châtelet. Now, we have noticed that
judges in general so arrange matters that their day of audience shall also be
their day of bad humor, so that they may always have some one upon whom to vent
it conveniently, in the name of the king, law, and justice.

However, the audience had begun without him. His lieutenants, civil, criminal,
and private, were doing his work, according to usage; and from eight o’clock in
the morning, some scores of bourgeois and bourgeoises, heaped and
crowded into an obscure corner of the audience chamber of Embas du Châtelet,
between a stout oaken barrier and the wall, had been gazing blissfully at the
varied and cheerful spectacle of civil and criminal justice dispensed by Master
Florian Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet, lieutenant of monsieur the
provost, in a somewhat confused and utterly haphazard manner.

The hall was small, low, vaulted. A table studded with fleurs-de-lis stood at
one end, with a large arm-chair of carved oak, which belonged to the provost
and was empty, and a stool on the left for the auditor, Master Florian. Below
sat the clerk of the court, scribbling; opposite was the populace; and in front
of the door, and in front of the table were many sergeants of the provostship
in sleeveless jackets of violet camlet, with white crosses. Two sergeants of
the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, clothed in their jackets of Toussaint, half red,
half blue, were posted as sentinels before a low, closed door, which was
visible at the extremity of the hall, behind the table. A single pointed
window, narrowly encased in the thick wall, illuminated with a pale ray of
January sun two grotesque figures,—the capricious demon of stone carved as a
tail-piece in the keystone of the vaulted ceiling, and the judge seated at the
end of the hall on the fleurs-de-lis.

Imagine, in fact, at the provost’s table, leaning upon his elbows between two
bundles of documents of cases, with his foot on the train of his robe of plain
brown cloth, his face buried in his hood of white lamb’s skin, of which his
brows seemed to be of a piece, red, crabbed, winking, bearing majestically the
load of fat on his cheeks which met under his chin, Master Florian Barbedienne,
auditor of the Châtelet.

Now, the auditor was deaf. A slight defect in an auditor. Master Florian
delivered judgment, none the less, without appeal and very suitably. It is
certainly quite sufficient for a judge to have the air of listening; and the
venerable auditor fulfilled this condition, the sole one in justice, all the
better because his attention could not be distracted by any noise.

Moreover, he had in the audience, a pitiless censor of his deeds and gestures,
in the person of our friend Jehan Frollo du Moulin, that little student of
yesterday, that “stroller,” whom one was sure of encountering all over Paris,
anywhere except before the rostrums of the professors.

“Stay,” he said in a low tone to his companion, Robin Poussepain, who was
grinning at his side, while he was making his comments on the scenes which were
being unfolded before his eyes, “yonder is Jehanneton du Buisson. The beautiful
daughter of the lazy dog at the Marché-Neuf!—Upon my soul, he is condemning
her, the old rascal! he has no more eyes than ears. Fifteen sous, four
farthings, parisian, for having worn two rosaries! ’Tis somewhat dear. Lex
duri carminis. Who’s that? Robin Chief-de-Ville, hauberkmaker. For having
been passed and received master of the said trade! That’s his entrance money.
He! two gentlemen among these knaves! Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly Two
equerries, Corpus Christi! Ah! they have been playing at dice. When
shall I see our rector here? A hundred livres parisian, fine to the king! That
Barbedienne strikes like a deaf man,—as he is! I’ll be my brother the
archdeacon, if that keeps me from gaming; gaming by day, gaming by night,
living at play, dying at play, and gaming away my soul after my shirt. Holy
Virgin, what damsels! One after the other my lambs. Ambroise Lécuyère, Isabeau
la Paynette, Bérarde Gironin! I know them all, by Heavens! A fine! a fine!
That’s what will teach you to wear gilded girdles! ten sous parisis! you
coquettes! Oh! the old snout of a judge! deaf and imbecile! Oh! Florian the
dolt! Oh! Barbedienne the blockhead! There he is at the table! He’s eating the
plaintiff, he’s eating the suits, he eats, he chews, he crams, he fills
himself. Fines, lost goods, taxes, expenses, loyal charges, salaries, damages,
and interests, gehenna, prison, and jail, and fetters with expenses are
Christmas spice cake and marchpanes of Saint-John to him! Look at him, the
pig!—Come! Good! Another amorous woman! Thibaud-la-Thibaude, neither more nor
less! For having come from the Rue Glatigny! What fellow is this? Gieffroy
Mabonne, gendarme bearing the crossbow. He has cursed the name of the Father. A
fine for la Thibaude! A fine for Gieffroy! A fine for them both! The deaf old
fool! he must have mixed up the two cases! Ten to one that he makes the wench
pay for the oath and the gendarme for the amour! Attention, Robin Poussepain!
What are they going to bring in? Here are many sergeants! By Jupiter! all the
bloodhounds of the pack are there. It must be the great beast of the hunt—a
wild boar. And ’tis one, Robin, ’tis one. And a fine one too! Hercle!
’tis our prince of yesterday, our Pope of the Fools, our bellringer, our
one-eyed man, our hunchback, our grimace! ’Tis Quasimodo!”

It was he indeed.

It was Quasimodo, bound, encircled, roped, pinioned, and under good guard. The
squad of policemen who surrounded him was assisted by the chevalier of the
watch in person, wearing the arms of France embroidered on his breast, and the
arms of the city on his back. There was nothing, however, about Quasimodo,
except his deformity, which could justify the display of halberds and
arquebuses; he was gloomy, silent, and tranquil. Only now and then did his
single eye cast a sly and wrathful glance upon the bonds with which he was
loaded.

He cast the same glance about him, but it was so dull and sleepy that the women
only pointed him out to each other in derision.

Meanwhile Master Florian, the auditor, turned over attentively the document in
the complaint entered against Quasimodo, which the clerk handed him, and,
having thus glanced at it, appeared to reflect for a moment. Thanks to this
precaution, which he always was careful to take at the moment when on the point
of beginning an examination, he knew beforehand the names, titles, and misdeeds
of the accused, made cut and dried responses to questions foreseen, and
succeeded in extricating himself from all the windings of the interrogation
without allowing his deafness to be too apparent. The written charges were to
him what the dog is to the blind man. If his deafness did happen to betray him
here and there, by some incoherent apostrophe or some unintelligible question,
it passed for profundity with some, and for imbecility with others. In neither
case did the honor of the magistracy sustain any injury; for it is far better
that a judge should be reputed imbecile or profound than deaf. Hence he took
great care to conceal his deafness from the eyes of all, and he generally
succeeded so well that he had reached the point of deluding himself, which is,
by the way, easier than is supposed. All hunchbacks walk with their heads held
high, all stutterers harangue, all deaf people speak low. As for him, he
believed, at the most, that his ear was a little refractory. It was the sole
concession which he made on this point to public opinion, in his moments of
frankness and examination of his conscience.

Having, then, thoroughly ruminated Quasimodo’s affair, he threw back his head
and half closed his eyes, for the sake of more majesty and impartiality, so
that, at that moment, he was both deaf and blind. A double condition, without
which no judge is perfect. It was in this magisterial attitude that he began
the examination.

“Your name?”

Now this was a case which had not been “provided for by law,” where a deaf man
should be obliged to question a deaf man.

Quasimodo, whom nothing warned that a question had been addressed to him,
continued to stare intently at the judge, and made no reply. The judge, being
deaf, and being in no way warned of the deafness of the accused, thought that
the latter had answered, as all accused do in general, and therefore he
pursued, with his mechanical and stupid self-possession,—

“Very well. And your age?”

Again Quasimodo made no reply to this question. The judge supposed that it had
been replied to, and continued,—

“Now, your profession?”

Still the same silence. The spectators had begun, meanwhile, to whisper
together, and to exchange glances.

“That will do,” went on the imperturbable auditor, when he supposed that the
accused had finished his third reply. “You are accused before us, primo,
of nocturnal disturbance; secundo, of a dishonorable act of violence
upon the person of a foolish woman, in præjudicium meretricis; tertio,
of rebellion and disloyalty towards the archers of the police of our lord, the
king. Explain yourself upon all these points.—Clerk, have you written down what
the prisoner has said thus far?”

At this unlucky question, a burst of laughter rose from the clerk’s table
caught by the audience, so violent, so wild, so contagious, so universal, that
the two deaf men were forced to perceive it. Quasimodo turned round, shrugging
his hump with disdain, while Master Florian, equally astonished, and supposing
that the laughter of the spectators had been provoked by some irreverent reply
from the accused, rendered visible to him by that shrug of the shoulders,
apostrophized him indignantly,—

“You have uttered a reply, knave, which deserves the halter. Do you know to
whom you are speaking?”

This sally was not fitted to arrest the explosion of general merriment. It
struck all as so whimsical, and so ridiculous, that the wild laughter even
attacked the sergeants of the Parloi-aux-Bourgeois, a sort of pikemen, whose
stupidity was part of their uniform. Quasimodo alone preserved his seriousness,
for the good reason that he understood nothing of what was going on around him.
The judge, more and more irritated, thought it his duty to continue in the same
tone, hoping thereby to strike the accused with a terror which should react
upon the audience, and bring it back to respect.

“So this is as much as to say, perverse and thieving knave that you are, that
you permit yourself to be lacking in respect towards the Auditor of the
Châtelet, to the magistrate committed to the popular police of Paris, charged
with searching out crimes, delinquencies, and evil conduct; with controlling
all trades, and interdicting monopoly; with maintaining the pavements; with
debarring the hucksters of chickens, poultry, and water-fowl; of superintending
the measuring of fagots and other sorts of wood; of purging the city of mud,
and the air of contagious maladies; in a word, with attending continually to
public affairs, without wages or hope of salary! Do you know that I am called
Florian Barbedienne, actual lieutenant to monsieur the provost, and, moreover,
commissioner, inquisitor, controller, and examiner, with equal power in
provostship, bailiwick, preservation, and inferior court of judicature?—”

There is no reason why a deaf man talking to a deaf man should stop. God knows
where and when Master Florian would have landed, when thus launched at full
speed in lofty eloquence, if the low door at the extreme end of the room had
not suddenly opened, and given entrance to the provost in person. At his
entrance Master Florian did not stop short, but, making a half-turn on his
heels, and aiming at the provost the harangue with which he had been withering
Quasimodo a moment before,—

“Monseigneur,” said he, “I demand such penalty as you shall deem fitting
against the prisoner here present, for grave and aggravated offence against the
court.”

And he seated himself, utterly breathless, wiping away the great drops of sweat
which fell from his brow and drenched, like tears, the parchments spread out
before him. Messire Robert d’Estouteville frowned and made a gesture so
imperious and significant to Quasimodo, that the deaf man in some measure
understood it.

The provost addressed him with severity, “What have you done that you have been
brought hither, knave?”

The poor fellow, supposing that the provost was asking his name, broke the
silence which he habitually preserved, and replied, in a harsh and guttural
voice, “Quasimodo.”

The reply matched the question so little that the wild laugh began to circulate
once more, and Messire Robert exclaimed, red with wrath,—

“Are you mocking me also, you arrant knave?”

“Bellringer of Notre-Dame,” replied Quasimodo, supposing that what was required
of him was to explain to the judge who he was.

“Bellringer!” interpolated the provost, who had waked up early enough to be in
a sufficiently bad temper, as we have said, not to require to have his fury
inflamed by such strange responses. “Bellringer! I’ll play you a chime of rods
on your back through the squares of Paris! Do you hear, knave?”

“If it is my age that you wish to know,” said Quasimodo, “I think that I shall
be twenty at Saint Martin’s day.”

This was too much; the provost could no longer restrain himself.

“Ah! you are scoffing at the provostship, wretch! Messieurs the sergeants of
the mace, you will take me this knave to the pillory of the Grève, you will
flog him, and turn him for an hour. He shall pay me for it, tête Dieu!
And I order that the present judgment shall be cried, with the assistance of
four sworn trumpeters, in the seven castellanies of the viscomty of Paris.”

The clerk set to work incontinently to draw up the account of the sentence.

“Ventre Dieu! ’tis well adjudged!” cried the little scholar, Jehan
Frollo du Moulin, from his corner.

The provost turned and fixed his flashing eyes once more on Quasimodo. “I
believe the knave said ‘Ventre Dieu!’ Clerk, add twelve deniers Parisian
for the oath, and let the vestry of Saint Eustache have the half of it; I have
a particular devotion for Saint Eustache.”

In a few minutes the sentence was drawn up. Its tenor was simple and brief. The
customs of the provostship and the viscomty had not yet been worked over by
President Thibaut Baillet, and by Roger Barmne, the king’s advocate; they had
not been obstructed, at that time, by that lofty hedge of quibbles and
procedures, which the two jurisconsults planted there at the beginning of the
sixteenth century. All was clear, expeditious, explicit. One went straight to
the point then, and at the end of every path there was immediately visible,
without thickets and without turnings; the wheel, the gibbet, or the pillory.
One at least knew whither one was going.

The clerk presented the sentence to the provost, who affixed his seal to it,
and departed to pursue his round of the audience hall, in a frame of mind which
seemed destined to fill all the jails in Paris that day. Jehan Frollo and Robin
Poussepain laughed in their sleeves. Quasimodo gazed on the whole with an
indifferent and astonished air.

However, at the moment when Master Florian Barbedienne was reading the sentence
in his turn, before signing it, the clerk felt himself moved with pity for the
poor wretch of a prisoner, and, in the hope of obtaining some mitigation of the
penalty, he approached as near the auditor’s ear as possible, and said,
pointing to Quasimodo, “That man is deaf.”

He hoped that this community of infirmity would awaken Master Florian’s
interest in behalf of the condemned man. But, in the first place, we have
already observed that Master Florian did not care to have his deafness noticed.
In the next place, he was so hard of hearing that he did not catch a single
word of what the clerk said to him; nevertheless, he wished to have the
appearance of hearing, and replied, “Ah! ah! that is different; I did not know
that. An hour more of the pillory, in that case.”

And he signed the sentence thus modified.

“’Tis well done,” said Robin Poussepain, who cherished a grudge against
Quasimodo. “That will teach him to handle people roughly.”

CHAPTER II.
THE RAT-HOLE.

The reader must permit us to take him back to the Place de Grève, which we
quitted yesterday with Gringoire, in order to follow la Esmeralda.

It is ten o’clock in the morning; everything is indicative of the day after a
festival. The pavement is covered with rubbish; ribbons, rags, feathers from
tufts of plumes, drops of wax from the torches, crumbs of the public feast. A
goodly number of bourgeois are “sauntering,” as we say, here and there,
turning over with their feet the extinct brands of the bonfire, going into
raptures in front of the Pillar House, over the memory of the fine hangings of
the day before, and to-day staring at the nails that secured them a last
pleasure. The venders of cider and beer are rolling their barrels among the
groups. Some busy passers-by come and go. The merchants converse and call to
each other from the thresholds of their shops. The festival, the ambassadors,
Coppenole, the Pope of the Fools, are in all mouths; they vie with each other,
each trying to criticise it best and laugh the most. And, meanwhile, four
mounted sergeants, who have just posted themselves at the four sides of the
pillory, have already concentrated around themselves a goodly proportion of the
populace scattered on the Place, who condemn themselves to immobility and
fatigue in the hope of a small execution.

If the reader, after having contemplated this lively and noisy scene which is
being enacted in all parts of the Place, will now transfer his gaze towards
that ancient demi-Gothic, demi-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland, which forms
the corner on the quay to the west, he will observe, at the angle of the
façade, a large public breviary, with rich illuminations, protected from the
rain by a little penthouse, and from thieves by a small grating, which,
however, permits of the leaves being turned. Beside this breviary is a narrow,
arched window, closed by two iron bars in the form of a cross, and looking on
the square; the only opening which admits a small quantity of light and air to
a little cell without a door, constructed on the ground-floor, in the thickness
of the walls of the old house, and filled with a peace all the more profound,
with a silence all the more gloomy, because a public place, the most populous
and most noisy in Paris swarms and shrieks around it.

This little cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly three centuries, ever
since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in mourning for her father who died in
the Crusades, had caused it to be hollowed out in the wall of her own house, in
order to immure herself there forever, keeping of all her palace only this
lodging whose door was walled up, and whose window stood open, winter and
summer, giving all the rest to the poor and to God. The afflicted damsel had,
in fact, waited twenty years for death in this premature tomb, praying night
and day for the soul of her father, sleeping in ashes, without even a stone for
a pillow, clothed in a black sack, and subsisting on the bread and water which
the compassion of the passers-by led them to deposit on the ledge of her
window, thus receiving charity after having bestowed it. At her death, at the
moment when she was passing to the other sepulchre, she had bequeathed this one
in perpetuity to afflicted women, mothers, widows, or maidens, who should wish
to pray much for others or for themselves, and who should desire to inter
themselves alive in a great grief or a great penance. The poor of her day had
made her a fine funeral, with tears and benedictions; but, to their great
regret, the pious maid had not been canonized, for lack of influence. Those
among them who were a little inclined to impiety, had hoped that the matter
might be accomplished in Paradise more easily than at Rome, and had frankly
besought God, instead of the pope, in behalf of the deceased. The majority had
contented themselves with holding the memory of Rolande sacred, and converting
her rags into relics. The city, on its side, had founded in honor of the
damoiselle, a public breviary, which had been fastened near the window of the
cell, in order that passers-by might halt there from time to time, were it only
to pray; that prayer might remind them of alms, and that the poor recluses,
heiresses of Madame Rolande’s vault, might not die outright of hunger and
forgetfulness.

Moreover, this sort of tomb was not so very rare a thing in the cities of the
Middle Ages. One often encountered in the most frequented street, in the most
crowded and noisy market, in the very middle, under the feet of the horses,
under the wheels of the carts, as it were, a cellar, a well, a tiny walled and
grated cabin, at the bottom of which a human being prayed night and day,
voluntarily devoted to some eternal lamentation, to some great expiation. And
all the reflections which that strange spectacle would awaken in us to-day;
that horrible cell, a sort of intermediary link between a house and the tomb,
the cemetery and the city; that living being cut off from the human community,
and thenceforth reckoned among the dead; that lamp consuming its last drop of
oil in the darkness; that remnant of life flickering in the grave; that breath,
that voice, that eternal prayer in a box of stone; that face forever turned
towards the other world; that eye already illuminated with another sun; that
ear pressed to the walls of a tomb; that soul a prisoner in that body; that
body a prisoner in that dungeon cell, and beneath that double envelope of flesh
and granite, the murmur of that soul in pain;—nothing of all this was perceived
by the crowd. The piety of that age, not very subtle nor much given to
reasoning, did not see so many facets in an act of religion. It took the thing
in the block, honored, venerated, hallowed the sacrifice at need, but did not
analyze the sufferings, and felt but moderate pity for them. It brought some
pittance to the miserable penitent from time to time, looked through the hole
to see whether he were still living, forgot his name, hardly knew how many
years ago he had begun to die, and to the stranger, who questioned them about
the living skeleton who was perishing in that cellar, the neighbors replied
simply, “It is the recluse.”

Everything was then viewed without metaphysics, without exaggeration, without
magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet been invented,
either for things of matter or for things of the mind.

Moreover, although people were but little surprised by it, the examples of this
sort of cloistration in the hearts of cities were in truth frequent, as we have
just said. There were in Paris a considerable number of these cells, for
praying to God and doing penance; they were nearly all occupied. It is true
that the clergy did not like to have them empty, since that implied
lukewarmness in believers, and that lepers were put into them when there were
no penitents on hand. Besides the cell on the Grève, there was one at
Montfaucon, one at the Charnier des Innocents, another I hardly know where,—at
the Clichon House, I think; others still at many spots where traces of them are
found in traditions, in default of memorials. The University had also its own.
On Mount Sainte-Geneviève a sort of Job of the Middle Ages, for the space of
thirty years, chanted the seven penitential psalms on a dunghill at the bottom
of a cistern, beginning anew when he had finished, singing loudest at night,
magna voce per umbras, and to-day, the antiquary fancies that he hears
his voice as he enters the Rue du Puits-qui-parle—the street of the “Speaking
Well.”

To confine ourselves to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we must say that it had
never lacked recluses. After the death of Madame Roland, it had stood vacant
for a year or two, though rarely. Many women had come thither to mourn, until
their death, for relatives, lovers, faults. Parisian malice, which thrusts its
finger into everything, even into things which concern it the least, affirmed
that it had beheld but few widows there.

In accordance with the fashion of the epoch, a Latin inscription on the wall
indicated to the learned passer-by the pious purpose of this cell. The custom
was retained until the middle of the sixteenth century of explaining an edifice
by a brief device inscribed above the door. Thus, one still reads in France,
above the wicket of the prison in the seignorial mansion of Tourville,
Sileto et spera; in Ireland, beneath the armorial bearings which
surmount the grand door to Fortescue Castle, Forte scutum, salus ducum;
in England, over the principal entrance to the hospitable mansion of the Earls
Cowper: Tuum est. At that time every edifice was a thought.

As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland, these two words had
been carved in large Roman capitals over the window,—

TU, ORA.

And this caused the people, whose good sense does not perceive so much
refinement in things, and likes to translate Ludovico Magno by Porte
Saint-Denis, to give to this dark, gloomy, damp cavity, the name of “The
Rat-Hole.” An explanation less sublime, perhaps, than the other; but, on the
other hand, more picturesque.

CHAPTER III.
HISTORY OF A LEAVENED CAKE OF MAIZE.

At the epoch of this history, the cell in the Tour-Roland was occupied. If the
reader desires to know by whom, he has only to lend an ear to the conversation
of three worthy gossips, who, at the moment when we have directed his attention
to the Rat-Hole, were directing their steps towards the same spot, coming up
along the water’s edge from the Châtelet, towards the Grève.

Two of these women were dressed like good bourgeoises of Paris. Their
fine white ruffs; their petticoats of linsey-woolsey, striped red and blue;
their white knitted stockings, with clocks embroidered in colors, well drawn
upon their legs; the square-toed shoes of tawny leather with black soles, and,
above all, their headgear, that sort of tinsel horn, loaded down with ribbons
and laces, which the women of Champagne still wear, in company with the
grenadiers of the imperial guard of Russia, announced that they belonged to
that class wives which holds the middle ground between what the lackeys call a
woman and what they term a lady. They wore neither rings nor gold crosses, and
it was easy to see that, in their ease, this did not proceed from poverty, but
simply from fear of being fined. Their companion was attired in very much the
same manner; but there was that indescribable something about her dress and
bearing which suggested the wife of a provincial notary. One could see, by the
way in which her girdle rose above her hips, that she had not been long in
Paris. Add to this a plaited tucker, knots of ribbon on her shoes—and that the
stripes of her petticoat ran horizontally instead of vertically, and a thousand
other enormities which shocked good taste.

The two first walked with that step peculiar to Parisian ladies, showing Paris
to women from the country. The provincial held by the hand a big boy, who held
in his a large, flat cake.

We regret to be obliged to add, that, owing to the rigor of the season, he was
using his tongue as a handkerchief.

The child was making them drag him along, non passibus æquis, as Virgil
says, and stumbling at every moment, to the great indignation of his mother. It
is true that he was looking at his cake more than at the pavement. Some serious
motive, no doubt, prevented his biting it (the cake), for he contented himself
with gazing tenderly at it. But the mother should have rather taken charge of
the cake. It was cruel to make a Tantalus of the chubby-cheeked boy.

Meanwhile, the three demoiselles (for the name of dames was then
reserved for noble women) were all talking at once.

“Let us make haste, Demoiselle Mahiette,” said the youngest of the three, who
was also the largest, to the provincial, “I greatly fear that we shall arrive
too late; they told us at the Châtelet that they were going to take him
directly to the pillory.”

“Ah, bah! what are you saying, Demoiselle Oudarde Musnier?” interposed the
other Parisienne. “There are two hours yet to the pillory. We have time enough.
Have you ever seen any one pilloried, my dear Mahiette?”

“Yes,” said the provincial, “at Reims.”

“Ah, bah! What is your pillory at Reims? A miserable cage into which only
peasants are turned. A great affair, truly!”

“Only peasants!” said Mahiette, “at the cloth market in Reims! We have seen
very fine criminals there, who have killed their father and mother! Peasants!
For what do you take us, Gervaise?”

It is certain that the provincial was on the point of taking offence, for the
honor of her pillory. Fortunately, that discreet damoiselle, Oudarde Musnier,
turned the conversation in time.

“By the way, Damoiselle Mahiette, what say you to our Flemish Ambassadors? Have
you as fine ones at Reims?”

“I admit,” replied Mahiette, “that it is only in Paris that such Flemings can
be seen.”

“Did you see among the embassy, that big ambassador who is a hosier?” asked
Oudarde.

“Yes,” said Mahiette. “He has the eye of a Saturn.”

“And the big fellow whose face resembles a bare belly?” resumed Gervaise. “And
the little one, with small eyes framed in red eyelids, pared down and slashed
up like a thistle head?”

“’Tis their horses that are worth seeing,” said Oudarde, “caparisoned as they
are after the fashion of their country!”

“Ah my dear,” interrupted provincial Mahiette, assuming in her turn an air of
superiority, “what would you say then, if you had seen in ’61, at the
consecration at Reims, eighteen years ago, the horses of the princes and of the
king’s company? Housings and caparisons of all sorts; some of damask cloth, of
fine cloth of gold, furred with sables; others of velvet, furred with ermine;
others all embellished with goldsmith’s work and large bells of gold and
silver! And what money that had cost! And what handsome boy pages rode upon
them!”

“That,” replied Oudarde dryly, “does not prevent the Flemings having very fine
horses, and having had a superb supper yesterday with monsieur, the provost of
the merchants, at the Hôtel-de-Ville, where they were served with comfits and
hippocras, and spices, and other singularities.”

“What are you saying, neighbor!” exclaimed Gervaise. “It was with monsieur the
cardinal, at the Petit Bourbon that they supped.”

“Not at all. At the Hôtel-de-Ville.

“Yes, indeed. At the Petit Bourbon!”

“It was at the Hôtel-de-Ville,” retorted Oudarde sharply, “and Dr. Scourable
addressed them a harangue in Latin, which pleased them greatly. My husband, who
is sworn bookseller told me so.”

“It was at the Petit Bourbon,” replied Gervaise, with no less spirit, “and this
is what monsieur the cardinal’s procurator presented to them: twelve double
quarts of hippocras, white, claret, and red; twenty-four boxes of double Lyons
marchpane, gilded; as many torches, worth two livres a piece; and six
demi-queues[29] of Beaune wine, white and claret, the
best that could be found. I have it from my husband, who is a cinquantenier[30], at the Parloir-aux Bourgeois, and who
was this morning comparing the Flemish ambassadors with those of Prester John
and the Emperor of Trebizond, who came from Mesopotamia to Paris, under the
last king, and who wore rings in their ears.”

“So true is it that they supped at the Hôtel-de-Ville,” replied Oudarde but
little affected by this catalogue, “that such a triumph of viands and comfits
has never been seen.”

“I tell you that they were served by Le Sec, sergeant of the city, at the Hôtel
du Petit-Bourbon, and that that is where you are mistaken.”

“At the Hôtel-de-Ville, I tell you!”

“At the Petit-Bourbon, my dear! and they had illuminated with magic glasses the
word Hope, which is written on the grand portal.”

“At the Hôtel-de-Ville! At the Hôtel-de-Ville! And Husson-le-Voir played the
flute!”

“I tell you, no!”

“I tell you, yes!”

“I say, no!”

Plump and worthy Oudarde was preparing to retort, and the quarrel might,
perhaps, have proceeded to a pulling of caps, had not Mahiette suddenly
exclaimed,—“Look at those people assembled yonder at the end of the bridge!
There is something in their midst that they are looking at!”

“In sooth,” said Gervaise, “I hear the sounds of a tambourine. I believe ’tis
the little Esmeralda, who plays her mummeries with her goat. Eh, be quick,
Mahiette! redouble your pace and drag along your boy. You are come hither to
visit the curiosities of Paris. You saw the Flemings yesterday; you must see
the gypsy to-day.”

“The gypsy!” said Mahiette, suddenly retracing her steps, and clasping her
son’s arm forcibly. “God preserve me from it! She would steal my child from me!
Come, Eustache!”

And she set out on a run along the quay towards the Grève, until she had left
the bridge far behind her. In the meanwhile, the child whom she was dragging
after her fell upon his knees; she halted breathless. Oudarde and Gervaise
rejoined her.

“That gypsy steal your child from you!” said Gervaise. “That’s a singular freak
of yours!”

Mahiette shook her head with a pensive air.

“The singular point is,” observed Oudarde, “that la sachette has the
same idea about the Egyptian woman.”

“What is la sachette?” asked Mahiette.

“Hé!” said Oudarde, “Sister Gudule.”

“And who is Sister Gudule?” persisted Mahiette.

“You are certainly ignorant of all but your Reims, not to know that!” replied
Oudarde. “’Tis the recluse of the Rat-Hole.”

“What!” demanded Mahiette, “that poor woman to whom we are carrying this cake?”

Oudarde nodded affirmatively.

“Precisely. You will see her presently at her window on the Grève. She has the
same opinion as yourself of these vagabonds of Egypt, who play the tambourine
and tell fortunes to the public. No one knows whence comes her horror of the
gypsies and Egyptians. But you, Mahiette—why do you run so at the mere sight of
them?”

“Oh!” said Mahiette, seizing her child’s round head in both hands, “I don’t
want that to happen to me which happened to Paquette la Chantefleurie.”

“Oh! you must tell us that story, my good Mahiette,” said Gervaise, taking her
arm.

“Gladly,” replied Mahiette, “but you must be ignorant of all but your Paris not
to know that! I will tell you then (but ’tis not necessary for us to halt that
I may tell you the tale), that Paquette la Chantefleurie was a pretty maid of
eighteen when I was one myself, that is to say, eighteen years ago, and ’tis
her own fault if she is not to-day, like me, a good, plump, fresh mother of six
and thirty, with a husband and a son. However, after the age of fourteen, it
was too late! Well, she was the daughter of Guybertant, minstrel of the barges
at Reims, the same who had played before King Charles VII., at his coronation,
when he descended our river Vesle from Sillery to Muison, when Madame the Maid
of Orleans was also in the boat. The old father died when Paquette was still a
mere child; she had then no one but her mother, the sister of M. Pradon,
master-brazier and coppersmith in Paris, Rue Parin-Garlin, who died last year.
You see she was of good family. The mother was a good simple woman,
unfortunately, and she taught Paquette nothing but a bit of embroidery and
toy-making which did not prevent the little one from growing very large and
remaining very poor. They both dwelt at Reims, on the river front, Rue de
Folle-Peine. Mark this: For I believe it was this which brought misfortune to
Paquette. In ’61, the year of the coronation of our King Louis XI. whom God
preserve! Paquette was so gay and so pretty that she was called everywhere by
no other name than la Chantefleurie—blossoming song. Poor girl! She had
handsome teeth, she was fond of laughing and displaying them. Now, a maid who
loves to laugh is on the road to weeping; handsome teeth ruin handsome eyes. So
she was la Chantefleurie. She and her mother earned a precarious living; they
had been very destitute since the death of the minstrel; their embroidery did
not bring them in more than six farthings a week, which does not amount to
quite two eagle liards. Where were the days when Father Guybertant had earned
twelve sous parisian, in a single coronation, with a song? One winter (it was
in that same year of ’61), when the two women had neither fagots nor firewood,
it was very cold, which gave la Chantefleurie such a fine color that the men
called her Paquette![31] and many called her Pâquerette![32] and she was ruined.—Eustache,
just let me see you bite that cake if you dare!—We immediately perceived that
she was ruined, one Sunday when she came to church with a gold cross about her
neck. At fourteen years of age! do you see? First it was the young Vicomte de
Cormontreuil, who has his bell tower three leagues distant from Reims; then
Messire Henri de Triancourt, equerry to the King; then less than that, Chiart
de Beaulion, sergeant-at-arms; then, still descending, Guery Aubergeon, carver
to the King; then, Macé de Frépus, barber to monsieur the dauphin; then,
Thévenin le Moine, King’s cook; then, the men growing continually younger and
less noble, she fell to Guillaume Racine, minstrel of the hurdy-gurdy and to
Thierry de Mer, lamplighter. Then, poor Chantefleurie, she belonged to every
one: she had reached the last sou of her gold piece. What shall I say to you,
my damoiselles? At the coronation, in the same year, ’61, ’twas she who made
the bed of the king of the debauchees! In the same year!”

Mahiette sighed, and wiped away a tear which trickled from her eyes.

“This is no very extraordinary history,” said Gervaise, “and in the whole of it
I see nothing of any Egyptian women or children.”

“Patience!” resumed Mahiette, “you will see one child.—In ’66, ’twill be
sixteen years ago this month, at Sainte-Paule’s day, Paquette was brought to
bed of a little girl. The unhappy creature! it was a great joy to her; she had
long wished for a child. Her mother, good woman, who had never known what to do
except to shut her eyes, her mother was dead. Paquette had no longer any one to
love in the world or any one to love her. La Chantefleurie had been a poor
creature during the five years since her fall. She was alone, alone in this
life, fingers were pointed at her, she was hooted at in the streets, beaten by
the sergeants, jeered at by the little boys in rags. And then, twenty had
arrived: and twenty is an old age for amorous women. Folly began to bring her
in no more than her trade of embroidery in former days; for every wrinkle that
came, a crown fled; winter became hard to her once more, wood became rare again
in her brazier, and bread in her cupboard. She could no longer work because, in
becoming voluptuous, she had grown lazy; and she suffered much more because, in
growing lazy, she had become voluptuous. At least, that is the way in which
monsieur the curé of Saint-Remy explains why these women are colder and
hungrier than other poor women, when they are old.”

“Yes,” remarked Gervaise, “but the gypsies?”

“One moment, Gervaise!” said Oudarde, whose attention was less impatient. “What
would be left for the end if all were in the beginning? Continue, Mahiette, I
entreat you. That poor Chantefleurie!”

Mahiette went on.

“So she was very sad, very miserable, and furrowed her cheeks with tears. But
in the midst of her shame, her folly, her debauchery, it seemed to her that she
should be less wild, less shameful, less dissipated, if there were something or
some one in the world whom she could love, and who could love her. It was
necessary that it should be a child, because only a child could be sufficiently
innocent for that. She had recognized this fact after having tried to love a
thief, the only man who wanted her; but after a short time, she perceived that
the thief despised her. Those women of love require either a lover or a child
to fill their hearts. Otherwise, they are very unhappy. As she could not have a
lover, she turned wholly towards a desire for a child, and as she had not
ceased to be pious, she made her constant prayer to the good God for it. So the
good God took pity on her, and gave her a little daughter. I will not speak to
you of her joy; it was a fury of tears, and caresses, and kisses. She nursed
her child herself, made swaddling-bands for it out of her coverlet, the only
one which she had on her bed, and no longer felt either cold or hunger. She
became beautiful once more, in consequence of it. An old maid makes a young
mother. Gallantry claimed her once more; men came to see la Chantefleurie; she
found customers again for her merchandise, and out of all these horrors she
made baby clothes, caps and bibs, bodices with shoulder-straps of lace, and
tiny bonnets of satin, without even thinking of buying herself another
coverlet.—Master Eustache, I have already told you not to eat that cake.—It is
certain that little Agnès, that was the child’s name, a baptismal name, for it
was a long time since la Chantefleurie had had any surname—it is certain that
that little one was more swathed in ribbons and embroideries than a dauphiness
of Dauphiny! Among other things, she had a pair of little shoes, the like of
which King Louis XI. certainly never had! Her mother had stitched and
embroidered them herself; she had lavished on them all the delicacies of her
art of embroideress, and all the embellishments of a robe for the good Virgin.
They certainly were the two prettiest little pink shoes that could be seen.
They were no longer than my thumb, and one had to see the child’s little feet
come out of them, in order to believe that they had been able to get into them.
’Tis true that those little feet were so small, so pretty, so rosy! rosier than
the satin of the shoes! When you have children, Oudarde, you will find that
there is nothing prettier than those little hands and feet.”

“I ask no better,” said Oudarde with a sigh, “but I am waiting until it shall
suit the good pleasure of M. Andry Musnier.”

“However, Paquette’s child had more that was pretty about it besides its feet.
I saw her when she was only four months old; she was a love! She had eyes
larger than her mouth, and the most charming black hair, which already curled.
She would have been a magnificent brunette at the age of sixteen! Her mother
became more crazy over her every day. She kissed her, caressed her, tickled
her, washed her, decked her out, devoured her! She lost her head over her, she
thanked God for her. Her pretty, little rosy feet above all were an endless
source of wonderment, they were a delirium of joy! She was always pressing her
lips to them, and she could never recover from her amazement at their
smallness. She put them into the tiny shoes, took them out, admired them,
marvelled at them, looked at the light through them, was curious to see them
try to walk on her bed, and would gladly have passed her life on her knees,
putting on and taking off the shoes from those feet, as though they had been
those of an Infant Jesus.”

“The tale is fair and good,” said Gervaise in a low tone; “but where do gypsies
come into all that?”

“Here,” replied Mahiette. “One day there arrived in Reims a very queer sort of
people. They were beggars and vagabonds who were roaming over the country, led
by their duke and their counts. They were browned by exposure to the sun, they
had closely curling hair, and silver rings in their ears. The women were still
uglier than the men. They had blacker faces, which were always uncovered, a
miserable frock on their bodies, an old cloth woven of cords bound upon their
shoulder, and their hair hanging like the tail of a horse. The children who
scrambled between their legs would have frightened as many monkeys. A band of
excommunicates. All these persons came direct from lower Egypt to Reims through
Poland. The Pope had confessed them, it was said, and had prescribed to them as
penance to roam through the world for seven years, without sleeping in a bed;
and so they were called penancers, and smelt horribly. It appears that they had
formerly been Saracens, which was why they believed in Jupiter, and claimed ten
livres of Tournay from all archbishops, bishops, and mitred abbots with
croziers. A bull from the Pope empowered them to do that. They came to Reims to
tell fortunes in the name of the King of Algiers, and the Emperor of Germany.
You can readily imagine that no more was needed to cause the entrance to the
town to be forbidden them. Then the whole band camped with good grace outside
the gate of Braine, on that hill where stands a mill, beside the cavities of
the ancient chalk pits. And everybody in Reims vied with his neighbor in going
to see them. They looked at your hand, and told you marvellous prophecies; they
were equal to predicting to Judas that he would become Pope. Nevertheless, ugly
rumors were in circulation in regard to them; about children stolen, purses
cut, and human flesh devoured. The wise people said to the foolish: “Don’t go
there!” and then went themselves on the sly. It was an infatuation. The fact
is, that they said things fit to astonish a cardinal. Mothers triumphed greatly
over their little ones after the Egyptians had read in their hands all sorts of
marvels written in pagan and in Turkish. One had an emperor; another, a pope;
another, a captain. Poor Chantefleurie was seized with curiosity; she wished to
know about herself, and whether her pretty little Agnès would not become some
day Empress of Armenia, or something else. So she carried her to the Egyptians;
and the Egyptian women fell to admiring the child, and to caressing it, and to
kissing it with their black mouths, and to marvelling over its little band,
alas! to the great joy of the mother. They were especially enthusiastic over
her pretty feet and shoes. The child was not yet a year old. She already lisped
a little, laughed at her mother like a little mad thing, was plump and quite
round, and possessed a thousand charming little gestures of the angels of
paradise.

“She was very much frightened by the Egyptians, and wept. But her mother kissed
her more warmly and went away enchanted with the good fortune which the
soothsayers had foretold for her Agnès. She was to be a beauty, virtuous, a
queen. So she returned to her attic in the Rue Folle-Peine, very proud of
bearing with her a queen. The next day she took advantage of a moment when the
child was asleep on her bed, (for they always slept together), gently left the
door a little way open, and ran to tell a neighbor in the Rue de la
Séchesserie, that the day would come when her daughter Agnès would be served at
table by the King of England and the Archduke of Ethiopia, and a hundred other
marvels. On her return, hearing no cries on the staircase, she said to herself:
‘Good! the child is still asleep!’ She found her door wider open than she had
left it, but she entered, poor mother, and ran to the bed.—The child was no
longer there, the place was empty. Nothing remained of the child, but one of
her pretty little shoes. She flew out of the room, dashed down the stairs, and
began to beat her head against the wall, crying: ‘My child! who has my child?
Who has taken my child?’ The street was deserted, the house isolated; no one
could tell her anything about it. She went about the town, searched all the
streets, ran hither and thither the whole day long, wild, beside herself,
terrible, snuffing at doors and windows like a wild beast which has lost its
young. She was breathless, dishevelled, frightful to see, and there was a fire
in her eyes which dried her tears. She stopped the passers-by and cried: ‘My
daughter! my daughter! my pretty little daughter! If any one will give me back
my daughter, I will be his servant, the servant of his dog, and he shall eat my
heart if he will.’ She met M. le Curé of Saint-Remy, and said to him:
‘Monsieur, I will till the earth with my finger-nails, but give me back my
child!’ It was heartrending, Oudarde; and I saw a very hard man, Master Ponce
Lacabre, the procurator, weep. Ah! poor mother! In the evening she returned
home. During her absence, a neighbor had seen two gypsies ascend up to it with
a bundle in their arms, then descend again, after closing the door. After their
departure, something like the cries of a child were heard in Paquette’s room.
The mother, burst into shrieks of laughter, ascended the stairs as though on
wings, and entered.—A frightful thing to tell, Oudarde! Instead of her pretty
little Agnès, so rosy and so fresh, who was a gift of the good God, a sort of
hideous little monster, lame, one-eyed, deformed, was crawling and squalling
over the floor. She hid her eyes in horror. ‘Oh!’ said she, ‘have the witches
transformed my daughter into this horrible animal?’ They hastened to carry away
the little club-foot; he would have driven her mad. It was the monstrous child
of some gypsy woman, who had given herself to the devil. He appeared to be
about four years old, and talked a language which was no human tongue; there
were words in it which were impossible. La Chantefleurie flung herself upon the
little shoe, all that remained to her of all that she loved. She remained so
long motionless over it, mute, and without breath, that they thought she was
dead. Suddenly she trembled all over, covered her relic with furious kisses,
and burst out sobbing as though her heart were broken. I assure you that we
were all weeping also. She said: ‘Oh, my little daughter! my pretty little
daughter! where art thou?’—and it wrung your very heart. I weep still when I
think of it. Our children are the marrow of our bones, you see.—My poor
Eustache! thou art so fair!—If you only knew how nice he is! yesterday he said
to me: ‘I want to be a gendarme, that I do.’ Oh! my Eustache! if I were to lose
thee!—All at once la Chantefleurie rose, and set out to run through Reims,
screaming: ‘To the gypsies’ camp! to the gypsies’ camp! Police, to burn the
witches!’ The gypsies were gone. It was pitch dark. They could not be followed.
On the morrow, two leagues from Reims, on a heath between Gueux and Tilloy, the
remains of a large fire were found, some ribbons which had belonged to
Paquette’s child, drops of blood, and the dung of a ram. The night just past
had been a Saturday. There was no longer any doubt that the Egyptians had held
their Sabbath on that heath, and that they had devoured the child in company
with Beelzebub, as the practice is among the Mahometans. When La Chantefleurie
learned these horrible things, she did not weep, she moved her lips as though
to speak, but could not. On the morrow, her hair was gray. On the second day,
she had disappeared.

“’Tis in truth, a frightful tale,” said Oudarde, “and one which would make even
a Burgundian weep.”

“I am no longer surprised,” added Gervaise, “that fear of the gypsies should
spur you on so sharply.”

“And you did all the better,” resumed Oudarde, “to flee with your Eustache just
now, since these also are gypsies from Poland.”

“No,” said Gervais, “’tis said that they come from Spain and Catalonia.”

“Catalonia? ’tis possible,” replied Oudarde. “Pologne, Catalogne, Valogne, I
always confound those three provinces, One thing is certain, that they are
gypsies.”

“Who certainly,” added Gervaise, “have teeth long enough to eat little
children. I should not be surprised if la Smeralda ate a little of them also,
though she pretends to be dainty. Her white goat knows tricks that are too
malicious for there not to be some impiety underneath it all.”

Mahiette walked on in silence. She was absorbed in that revery which is, in
some sort, the continuation of a mournful tale, and which ends only after
having communicated the emotion, from vibration to vibration, even to the very
last fibres of the heart. Nevertheless, Gervaise addressed her, “And did they
ever learn what became of la Chantefleurie?” Mahiette made no reply. Gervaise
repeated her question, and shook her arm, calling her by name. Mahiette
appeared to awaken from her thoughts.

“What became of la Chantefleurie?” she said, repeating mechanically the words
whose impression was still fresh in her ear; then, making an effort to recall
her attention to the meaning of her words, “Ah!” she continued briskly, “no one
ever found out.”

She added, after a pause,—

“Some said that she had been seen to quit Reims at nightfall by the
Fléchembault gate; others, at daybreak, by the old Basée gate. A poor man found
her gold cross hanging on the stone cross in the field where the fair is held.
It was that ornament which had wrought her ruin, in ’61. It was a gift from the
handsome Vicomte de Cormontreuil, her first lover. Paquette had never been
willing to part with it, wretched as she had been. She had clung to it as to
life itself. So, when we saw that cross abandoned, we all thought that she was
dead. Nevertheless, there were people of the Cabaret les Vantes, who said that
they had seen her pass along the road to Paris, walking on the pebbles with her
bare feet. But, in that case, she must have gone out through the Porte de
Vesle, and all this does not agree. Or, to speak more truly, I believe that she
actually did depart by the Porte de Vesle, but departed from this world.”

“I do not understand you,” said Gervaise.

“La Vesle,” replied Mahiette, with a melancholy smile, “is the river.”

“Poor Chantefleurie!” said Oudarde, with a shiver,—“drowned!”

“Drowned!” resumed Mahiette, “who could have told good Father Guybertant, when
he passed under the bridge of Tingueux with the current, singing in his barge,
that one day his dear little Paquette would also pass beneath that bridge, but
without song or boat.

“And the little shoe?” asked Gervaise.

“Disappeared with the mother,” replied Mahiette.

“Poor little shoe!” said Oudarde.

Oudarde, a big and tender woman, would have been well pleased to sigh in
company with Mahiette. But Gervaise, more curious, had not finished her
questions.

“And the monster?” she said suddenly, to Mahiette.

“What monster?” inquired the latter.

“The little gypsy monster left by the sorceresses in Chantefleurie’s chamber,
in exchange for her daughter. What did you do with it? I hope you drowned it
also.”

“No.” replied Mahiette.

“What? You burned it then? In sooth, that is more just. A witch child!”

“Neither the one nor the other, Gervaise. Monseigneur the archbishop interested
himself in the child of Egypt, exorcised it, blessed it, removed the devil
carefully from its body, and sent it to Paris, to be exposed on the wooden bed
at Notre-Dame, as a foundling.”

“Those bishops!” grumbled Gervaise, “because they are learned, they do nothing
like anybody else. I just put it to you, Oudarde, the idea of placing the devil
among the foundlings! For that little monster was assuredly the devil. Well,
Mahiette, what did they do with it in Paris? I am quite sure that no charitable
person wanted it.”

“I do not know,” replied the Rémoise, “’twas just at that time that my husband
bought the office of notary, at Beru, two leagues from the town, and we were no
longer occupied with that story; besides, in front of Beru, stand the two hills
of Cernay, which hide the towers of the cathedral in Reims from view.”

While chatting thus, the three worthy bourgeoises had arrived at the
Place de Grève. In their absorption, they had passed the public breviary of the
Tour-Roland without stopping, and took their way mechanically towards the
pillory around which the throng was growing more dense with every moment. It is
probable that the spectacle which at that moment attracted all looks in that
direction, would have made them forget completely the Rat-Hole, and the halt
which they intended to make there, if big Eustache, six years of age, whom
Mahiette was dragging along by the hand, had not abruptly recalled the object
to them: “Mother,” said he, as though some instinct warned him that the
Rat-Hole was behind him, “can I eat the cake now?”

If Eustache had been more adroit, that is to say, less greedy, he would have
continued to wait, and would only have hazarded that simple question, “Mother,
can I eat the cake, now?” on their return to the University, to Master Andry
Musnier’s, Rue Madame la Valence, when he had the two arms of the Seine and the
five bridges of the city between the Rat-Hole and the cake.

This question, highly imprudent at the moment when Eustache put it, aroused
Mahiette’s attention.

“By the way,” she exclaimed, “we are forgetting the recluse! Show me the
Rat-Hole, that I may carry her her cake.”

“Immediately,” said Oudarde, “’tis a charity.”

But this did not suit Eustache.

“Stop! my cake!” said he, rubbing both ears alternatively with his shoulders,
which, in such cases, is the supreme sign of discontent.

The three women retraced their steps, and, on arriving in the vicinity of the
Tour-Roland, Oudarde said to the other two,—

“We must not all three gaze into the hole at once, for fear of alarming the
recluse. Do you two pretend to read the Dominus in the breviary, while I
thrust my nose into the aperture; the recluse knows me a little. I will give
you warning when you can approach.”

She proceeded alone to the window. At the moment when she looked in, a profound
pity was depicted on all her features, and her frank, gay visage altered its
expression and color as abruptly as though it had passed from a ray of sunlight
to a ray of moonlight; her eye became humid; her mouth contracted, like that of
a person on the point of weeping. A moment later, she laid her finger on her
lips, and made a sign to Mahiette to draw near and look.

Mahiette, much touched, stepped up in silence, on tiptoe, as though approaching
the bedside of a dying person.

It was, in fact, a melancholy spectacle which presented itself to the eyes of
the two women, as they gazed through the grating of the Rat-Hole, neither
stirring nor breathing.

The cell was small, broader than it was long, with an arched ceiling, and
viewed from within, it bore a considerable resemblance to the interior of a
huge bishop’s mitre. On the bare flagstones which formed the floor, in one
corner, a woman was sitting, or rather, crouching. Her chin rested on her
knees, which her crossed arms pressed forcibly to her breast. Thus doubled up,
clad in a brown sack, which enveloped her entirely in large folds, her long,
gray hair pulled over in front, falling over her face and along her legs nearly
to her feet, she presented, at the first glance, only a strange form outlined
against the dark background of the cell, a sort of dusky triangle, which the
ray of daylight falling through the opening, cut roughly into two shades, the
one sombre, the other illuminated. It was one of those spectres, half light,
half shadow, such as one beholds in dreams and in the extraordinary work of
Goya, pale, motionless, sinister, crouching over a tomb, or leaning against the
grating of a prison cell.

It was neither a woman, nor a man, nor a living being, nor a definite form; it
was a figure, a sort of vision, in which the real and the fantastic intersected
each other, like darkness and day. It was with difficulty that one
distinguished, beneath her hair which spread to the ground, a gaunt and severe
profile; her dress barely allowed the extremity of a bare foot to escape, which
contracted on the hard, cold pavement. The little of human form of which one
caught a sight beneath this envelope of mourning, caused a shudder.

That figure, which one might have supposed to be riveted to the flagstones,
appeared to possess neither movement, nor thought, nor breath. Lying, in
January, in that thin, linen sack, lying on a granite floor, without fire, in
the gloom of a cell whose oblique air-hole allowed only the cold breeze, but
never the sun, to enter from without, she did not appear to suffer or even to
think. One would have said that she had turned to stone with the cell, ice with
the season. Her hands were clasped, her eyes fixed. At first sight one took her
for a spectre; at the second, for a statue.

Nevertheless, at intervals, her blue lips half opened to admit a breath, and
trembled, but as dead and as mechanical as the leaves which the wind sweeps
aside.

Nevertheless, from her dull eyes there escaped a look, an ineffable look, a
profound, lugubrious, imperturbable look, incessantly fixed upon a corner of
the cell which could not be seen from without; a gaze which seemed to fix all
the sombre thoughts of that soul in distress upon some mysterious object.

Such was the creature who had received, from her habitation, the name of the
“recluse”; and, from her garment, the name of “the sacked nun.”

The three women, for Gervaise had rejoined Mahiette and Oudarde, gazed through
the window. Their heads intercepted the feeble light in the cell, without the
wretched being whom they thus deprived of it seeming to pay any attention to
them. “Do not let us trouble her,” said Oudarde, in a low voice, “she is in her
ecstasy; she is praying.”

Meanwhile, Mahiette was gazing with ever-increasing anxiety at that wan,
withered, dishevelled head, and her eyes filled with tears. “This is very
singular,” she murmured.

She thrust her head through the bars, and succeeded in casting a glance at the
corner where the gaze of the unhappy woman was immovably riveted.

When she withdrew her head from the window, her countenance was inundated with
tears.

“What do you call that woman?” she asked Oudarde.

Oudarde replied,—

“We call her Sister Gudule.”

“And I,” returned Mahiette, “call her Paquette la Chantefleurie.”

Then, laying her finger on her lips, she motioned to the astounded Oudarde to
thrust her head through the window and look.

Oudarde looked and beheld, in the corner where the eyes of the recluse were
fixed in that sombre ecstasy, a tiny shoe of pink satin, embroidered with a
thousand fanciful designs in gold and silver.

Gervaise looked after Oudarde, and then the three women, gazing upon the
unhappy mother, began to weep.

But neither their looks nor their tears disturbed the recluse. Her hands
remained clasped; her lips mute; her eyes fixed; and that little shoe, thus
gazed at, broke the heart of any one who knew her history.

The three women had not yet uttered a single word; they dared not speak, even
in a low voice. This deep silence, this deep grief, this profound oblivion in
which everything had disappeared except one thing, produced upon them the
effect of the grand altar at Christmas or Easter. They remained silent, they
meditated, they were ready to kneel. It seemed to them that they were ready to
enter a church on the day of Tenebræ.

At length Gervaise, the most curious of the three, and consequently the least
sensitive, tried to make the recluse speak:

“Sister! Sister Gudule!”

She repeated this call three times, raising her voice each time. The recluse
did not move; not a word, not a glance, not a sigh, not a sign of life.

Oudarde, in her turn, in a sweeter, more caressing voice,—“Sister!” said she,
“Sister Sainte-Gudule!”

The same silence; the same immobility.

“A singular woman!” exclaimed Gervaise, “and one not to be moved by a
catapult!”

“Perchance she is deaf,” said Oudarde.

“Perhaps she is blind,” added Gervaise.

“Dead, perchance,” returned Mahiette.

It is certain that if the soul had not already quitted this inert, sluggish,
lethargic body, it had at least retreated and concealed itself in depths
whither the perceptions of the exterior organs no longer penetrated.

“Then we must leave the cake on the window,” said Oudarde; “some scamp will
take it. What shall we do to rouse her?”

Eustache, who, up to that moment had been diverted by a little carriage drawn
by a large dog, which had just passed, suddenly perceived that his three
conductresses were gazing at something through the window, and, curiosity
taking possession of him in his turn, he climbed upon a stone post, elevated
himself on tiptoe, and applied his fat, red face to the opening, shouting,
“Mother, let me see too!”

At the sound of this clear, fresh, ringing child’s voice, the recluse trembled;
she turned her head with the sharp, abrupt movement of a steel spring, her
long, fleshless hands cast aside the hair from her brow, and she fixed upon the
child, bitter, astonished, desperate eyes. This glance was but a lightning
flash.

“Oh my God!” she suddenly exclaimed, hiding her head on her knees, and it
seemed as though her hoarse voice tore her chest as it passed from it, “do not
show me those of others!”

“Good day, madam,” said the child, gravely.

Nevertheless, this shock had, so to speak, awakened the recluse. A long shiver
traversed her frame from head to foot; her teeth chattered; she half raised her
head and said, pressing her elbows against her hips, and clasping her feet in
her hands as though to warm them,—

“Oh, how cold it is!”

“Poor woman!” said Oudarde, with great compassion, “would you like a little
fire?”

She shook her head in token of refusal.

“Well,” resumed Oudarde, presenting her with a flagon; “here is some hippocras
which will warm you; drink it.”

Again she shook her head, looked at Oudarde fixedly and replied, “Water.”

Oudarde persisted,—“No, sister, that is no beverage for January. You must drink
a little hippocras and eat this leavened cake of maize, which we have baked for
you.”

She refused the cake which Mahiette offered to her, and said, “Black bread.”

“Come,” said Gervaise, seized in her turn with an impulse of charity, and
unfastening her woolen cloak, “here is a cloak which is a little warmer than
yours.”

She refused the cloak as she had refused the flagon and the cake, and replied,
“A sack.”

“But,” resumed the good Oudarde, “you must have perceived to some extent, that
yesterday was a festival.”

“I do perceive it,” said the recluse; “’tis two days now since I have had any
water in my crock.”

She added, after a silence, “’Tis a festival, I am forgotten. People do well.
Why should the world think of me, when I do not think of it? Cold charcoal
makes cold ashes.”

And as though fatigued with having said so much, she dropped her head on her
knees again. The simple and charitable Oudarde, who fancied that she understood
from her last words that she was complaining of the cold, replied innocently,
“Then you would like a little fire?”

“Fire!” said the sacked nun, with a strange accent; “and will you also make a
little for the poor little one who has been beneath the sod for these fifteen
years?”

Every limb was trembling, her voice quivered, her eyes flashed, she had raised
herself upon her knees; suddenly she extended her thin, white hand towards the
child, who was regarding her with a look of astonishment. “Take away that
child!” she cried. “The Egyptian woman is about to pass by.”

Then she fell face downward on the earth, and her forehead struck the stone,
with the sound of one stone against another stone. The three women thought her
dead. A moment later, however, she moved, and they beheld her drag herself, on
her knees and elbows, to the corner where the little shoe was. Then they dared
not look; they no longer saw her; but they heard a thousand kisses and a
thousand sighs, mingled with heartrending cries, and dull blows like those of a
head in contact with a wall. Then, after one of these blows, so violent that
all three of them staggered, they heard no more.

“Can she have killed herself?” said Gervaise, venturing to pass her head
through the air-hole. “Sister! Sister Gudule!”

“Sister Gudule!” repeated Oudarde.

“Ah! good heavens! she no longer moves!” resumed Gervaise; “is she dead?
Gudule! Gudule!”

Mahiette, choked to such a point that she could not speak, made an effort.
“Wait,” said she. Then bending towards the window, “Paquette!” she said,
“Paquette le Chantefleurie!”

A child who innocently blows upon the badly ignited fuse of a bomb, and makes
it explode in his face, is no more terrified than was Mahiette at the effect of
that name, abruptly launched into the cell of Sister Gudule.

The recluse trembled all over, rose erect on her bare feet, and leaped at the
window with eyes so glaring that Mahiette and Oudarde, and the other woman and
the child recoiled even to the parapet of the quay.

Meanwhile, the sinister face of the recluse appeared pressed to the grating of
the air-hole. “Oh! oh!” she cried, with an appalling laugh; “’tis the Egyptian
who is calling me!”

At that moment, a scene which was passing at the pillory caught her wild eye.
Her brow contracted with horror, she stretched her two skeleton arms from her
cell, and shrieked in a voice which resembled a death-rattle, “So ’tis thou
once more, daughter of Egypt! ’Tis thou who callest me, stealer of children!
Well! Be thou accursed! accursed! accursed! accursed!”

CHAPTER IV.
A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER.

These words were, so to speak, the point of union of two scenes, which had, up
to that time, been developed in parallel lines at the same moment, each on its
particular theatre; one, that which the reader has just perused, in the
Rat-Hole; the other, which he is about to read, on the ladder of the pillory.
The first had for witnesses only the three women with whom the reader has just
made acquaintance; the second had for spectators all the public which we have
seen above, collecting on the Place de Grève, around the pillory and the
gibbet.

That crowd which the four sergeants posted at nine o’clock in the morning at
the four corners of the pillory had inspired with the hope of some sort of an
execution, no doubt, not a hanging, but a whipping, a cropping of ears,
something, in short,—that crowd had increased so rapidly that the four
policemen, too closely besieged, had had occasion to “press” it, as the
expression then ran, more than once, by sound blows of their whips, and the
haunches of their horses.

This populace, disciplined to waiting for public executions, did not manifest
very much impatience. It amused itself with watching the pillory, a very simple
sort of monument, composed of a cube of masonry about six feet high and hollow
in the interior. A very steep staircase, of unhewn stone, which was called by
distinction “the ladder,” led to the upper platform, upon which was visible a
horizontal wheel of solid oak. The victim was bound upon this wheel, on his
knees, with his hands behind his back. A wooden shaft, which set in motion a
capstan concealed in the interior of the little edifice, imparted a rotatory
motion to the wheel, which always maintained its horizontal position, and in
this manner presented the face of the condemned man to all quarters of the
square in succession. This was what was called “turning” a criminal.

As the reader perceives, the pillory of the Grève was far from presenting all
the recreations of the pillory of the Halles. Nothing architectural, nothing
monumental. No roof to the iron cross, no octagonal lantern, no frail, slender
columns spreading out on the edge of the roof into capitals of acanthus leaves
and flowers, no waterspouts of chimeras and monsters, on carved woodwork, no
fine sculpture, deeply sunk in the stone.

They were forced to content themselves with those four stretches of rubble
work, backed with sandstone, and a wretched stone gibbet, meagre and bare, on
one side.

The entertainment would have been but a poor one for lovers of Gothic
architecture. It is true that nothing was ever less curious on the score of
architecture than the worthy gapers of the Middle Ages, and that they cared
very little for the beauty of a pillory.

The victim finally arrived, bound to the tail of a cart, and when he had been
hoisted upon the platform, where he could be seen from all points of the Place,
bound with cords and straps upon the wheel of the pillory, a prodigious hoot,
mingled with laughter and acclamations, burst forth upon the Place. They had
recognized Quasimodo.

It was he, in fact. The change was singular. Pilloried on the very place where,
on the day before, he had been saluted, acclaimed, and proclaimed Pope and
Prince of Fools, in the cortège of the Duke of Egypt, the King of Thunes, and
the Emperor of Galilee! One thing is certain, and that is, that there was not a
soul in the crowd, not even himself, though in turn triumphant and the
sufferer, who set forth this combination clearly in his thought. Gringoire and
his philosophy were missing at this spectacle.

Soon Michel Noiret, sworn trumpeter to the king, our lord, imposed silence on
the louts, and proclaimed the sentence, in accordance with the order and
command of monsieur the provost. Then he withdrew behind the cart, with his men
in livery surcoats.

Quasimodo, impassible, did not wince. All resistance had been rendered
impossible to him by what was then called, in the style of the criminal
chancellery, “the vehemence and firmness of the bonds” which means that the
thongs and chains probably cut into his flesh; moreover, it is a tradition of
jail and wardens, which has not been lost, and which the handcuffs still
preciously preserve among us, a civilized, gentle, humane people (the galleys
and the guillotine in parentheses).

He had allowed himself to be led, pushed, carried, lifted, bound, and bound
again. Nothing was to be seen upon his countenance but the astonishment of a
savage or an idiot. He was known to be deaf; one might have pronounced him to
be blind.

They placed him on his knees on the circular plank; he made no resistance. They
removed his shirt and doublet as far as his girdle; he allowed them to have
their way. They entangled him under a fresh system of thongs and buckles; he
allowed them to bind and buckle him. Only from time to time he snorted noisily,
like a calf whose head is hanging and bumping over the edge of a butcher’s
cart.

“The dolt,” said Jehan Frollo of the Mill, to his friend Robin Poussepain (for
the two students had followed the culprit, as was to have been expected), “he
understands no more than a cockchafer shut up in a box!”

There was wild laughter among the crowd when they beheld Quasimodo’s hump, his
camel’s breast, his callous and hairy shoulders laid bare. During this gayety,
a man in the livery of the city, short of stature and robust of mien, mounted
the platform and placed himself near the victim. His name speedily circulated
among the spectators. It was Master Pierrat Torterue, official torturer to the
Châtelet.

He began by depositing on an angle of the pillory a black hour-glass, the upper
lobe of which was filled with red sand, which it allowed to glide into the
lower receptacle; then he removed his parti-colored surtout, and there became
visible, suspended from his right hand, a thin and tapering whip of long,
white, shining, knotted, plaited thongs, armed with metal nails. With his left
hand, he negligently folded back his shirt around his right arm, to the very
armpit.

In the meantime, Jehan Frollo, elevating his curly blonde head above the crowd
(he had mounted upon the shoulders of Robin Poussepain for the purpose),
shouted: “Come and look, gentle ladies and men! they are going to peremptorily
flagellate Master Quasimodo, the bellringer of my brother, monsieur the
archdeacon of Josas, a knave of oriental architecture, who has a back like a
dome, and legs like twisted columns!”

And the crowd burst into a laugh, especially the boys and young girls.

At length the torturer stamped his foot. The wheel began to turn. Quasimodo
wavered beneath his bonds. The amazement which was suddenly depicted upon his
deformed face caused the bursts of laughter to redouble around him.

All at once, at the moment when the wheel in its revolution presented to Master
Pierrat, the humped back of Quasimodo, Master Pierrat raised his arm; the fine
thongs whistled sharply through the air, like a handful of adders, and fell
with fury upon the wretch’s shoulders.

Quasimodo leaped as though awakened with a start. He began to understand. He
writhed in his bonds; a violent contraction of surprise and pain distorted the
muscles of his face, but he uttered not a single sigh. He merely turned his
head backward, to the right, then to the left, balancing it as a bull does who
has been stung in the flanks by a gadfly.

A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another and another, and
still others. The wheel did not cease to turn, nor the blows to rain down.

Soon the blood burst forth, and could be seen trickling in a thousand threads
down the hunchback’s black shoulders; and the slender thongs, in their rotatory
motion which rent the air, sprinkled drops of it upon the crowd.

Quasimodo had resumed, to all appearance, his first imperturbability. He had at
first tried, in a quiet way and without much outward movement, to break his
bonds. His eye had been seen to light up, his muscles to stiffen, his members
to concentrate their force, and the straps to stretch. The effort was powerful,
prodigious, desperate; but the provost’s seasoned bonds resisted. They cracked,
and that was all. Quasimodo fell back exhausted. Amazement gave way, on his
features, to a sentiment of profound and bitter discouragement. He closed his
single eye, allowed his head to droop upon his breast, and feigned death.

From that moment forth, he stirred no more. Nothing could force a movement from
him. Neither his blood, which did not cease to flow, nor the blows which
redoubled in fury, nor the wrath of the torturer, who grew excited himself and
intoxicated with the execution, nor the sound of the horrible thongs, more
sharp and whistling than the claws of scorpions.

At length a bailiff from the Châtelet clad in black, mounted on a black horse,
who had been stationed beside the ladder since the beginning of the execution,
extended his ebony wand towards the hour-glass. The torturer stopped. The wheel
stopped. Quasimodo’s eye opened slowly.

The scourging was finished. Two lackeys of the official torturer bathed the
bleeding shoulders of the patient, anointed them with some unguent which
immediately closed all the wounds, and threw upon his back a sort of yellow
vestment, in cut like a chasuble. In the meanwhile, Pierrat Torterue allowed
the thongs, red and gorged with blood, to drip upon the pavement.

All was not over for Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour of pillory
which Master Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to the sentence of
Messire Robert d’Estouteville; all to the greater glory of the old
physiological and psychological play upon words of Jean de Cumène, Surdus
absurdus: a deaf man is absurd.

So the hour-glass was turned over once more, and they left the hunchback
fastened to the plank, in order that justice might be accomplished to the very
end.

The populace, especially in the Middle Ages, is in society what the child is in
the family. As long as it remains in its state of primitive ignorance, of moral
and intellectual minority, it can be said of it as of the child,—

’Tis the pitiless age.

We have already shown that Quasimodo was generally hated, for more than one
good reason, it is true. There was hardly a spectator in that crowd who had not
or who did not believe that he had reason to complain of the malevolent
hunchback of Notre-Dame. The joy at seeing him appear thus in the pillory had
been universal; and the harsh punishment which he had just suffered, and the
pitiful condition in which it had left him, far from softening the populace had
rendered its hatred more malicious by arming it with a touch of mirth.

Hence, the “public prosecution” satisfied, as the bigwigs of the law still
express it in their jargon, the turn came of a thousand private vengeances.
Here, as in the Grand Hall, the women rendered themselves particularly
prominent. All cherished some rancor against him, some for his malice, others
for his ugliness. The latter were the most furious.

“Oh! mask of Antichrist!” said one.

“Rider on a broom handle!” cried another.

“What a fine tragic grimace,” howled a third, “and who would make him Pope of
the Fools if to-day were yesterday?”

“’Tis well,” struck in an old woman. “This is the grimace of the pillory. When
shall we have that of the gibbet?”

“When will you be coiffed with your big bell a hundred feet under ground,
cursed bellringer?”

“But ’tis the devil who rings the Angelus!”

“Oh! the deaf man! the one-eyed creature! the hunch-back! the monster!”

“A face to make a woman miscarry better than all the drugs and medicines!”

And the two scholars, Jehan du Moulin, and Robin Poussepain, sang at the top of
their lungs, the ancient refrain,—

“Une hart
Pour le pendard!
Un fagot
Pour le magot!”[33]

A thousand other insults rained down upon him, and hoots and imprecations, and
laughter, and now and then, stones.

Quasimodo was deaf but his sight was clear, and the public fury was no less
energetically depicted on their visages than in their words. Moreover, the
blows from the stones explained the bursts of laughter.

At first he held his ground. But little by little that patience which had borne
up under the lash of the torturer, yielded and gave way before all these stings
of insects. The bull of the Asturias who has been but little moved by the
attacks of the picador grows irritated with the dogs and banderilleras.

He first cast around a slow glance of hatred upon the crowd. But bound as he
was, his glance was powerless to drive away those flies which were stinging his
wound. Then he moved in his bonds, and his furious exertions made the ancient
wheel of the pillory shriek on its axle. All this only increased the derision
and hooting.

Then the wretched man, unable to break his collar, like that of a chained wild
beast, became tranquil once more; only at intervals a sigh of rage heaved the
hollows of his chest. There was neither shame nor redness on his face. He was
too far from the state of society, and too near the state of nature to know
what shame was. Moreover, with such a degree of deformity, is infamy a thing
that can be felt? But wrath, hatred, despair, slowly lowered over that hideous
visage a cloud which grew ever more and more sombre, ever more and more charged
with electricity, which burst forth in a thousand lightning flashes from the
eye of the cyclops.

Nevertheless, that cloud cleared away for a moment, at the passage of a mule
which traversed the crowd, bearing a priest. As far away as he could see that
mule and that priest, the poor victim’s visage grew gentler. The fury which had
contracted it was followed by a strange smile full of ineffable sweetness,
gentleness, and tenderness. In proportion as the priest approached, that smile
became more clear, more distinct, more radiant. It was like the arrival of a
Saviour, which the unhappy man was greeting. But as soon as the mule was near
enough to the pillory to allow of its rider recognizing the victim, the priest
dropped his eyes, beat a hasty retreat, spurred on rigorously, as though in
haste to rid himself of humiliating appeals, and not at all desirous of being
saluted and recognized by a poor fellow in such a predicament.

This priest was Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo.

The cloud descended more blackly than ever upon Quasimodo’s brow. The smile was
still mingled with it for a time, but was bitter, discouraged, profoundly sad.

Time passed on. He had been there at least an hour and a half, lacerated,
maltreated, mocked incessantly, and almost stoned.

All at once he moved again in his chains with redoubled despair, which made the
whole framework that bore him tremble, and, breaking the silence which he had
obstinately preserved hitherto, he cried in a hoarse and furious voice, which
resembled a bark rather than a human cry, and which was drowned in the noise of
the hoots—“Drink!”

This exclamation of distress, far from exciting compassion, only added
amusement to the good Parisian populace who surrounded the ladder, and who, it
must be confessed, taken in the mass and as a multitude, was then no less cruel
and brutal than that horrible tribe of robbers among whom we have already
conducted the reader, and which was simply the lower stratum of the populace.
Not a voice was raised around the unhappy victim, except to jeer at his thirst.
It is certain that at that moment he was more grotesque and repulsive than
pitiable, with his face purple and dripping, his eye wild, his mouth foaming
with rage and pain, and his tongue lolling half out. It must also be stated
that if a charitable soul of a bourgeois or bourgeoise, in the
rabble, had attempted to carry a glass of water to that wretched creature in
torment, there reigned around the infamous steps of the pillory such a
prejudice of shame and ignominy, that it would have sufficed to repulse the
good Samaritan.

At the expiration of a few moments, Quasimodo cast a desperate glance upon the
crowd, and repeated in a voice still more heartrending: “Drink!”

And all began to laugh.

“Drink this!” cried Robin Poussepain, throwing in his face a sponge which had
been soaked in the gutter. “There, you deaf villain, I’m your debtor.”

A woman hurled a stone at his head,—

“That will teach you to wake us up at night with your peal of a dammed soul.”

“He, good, my son!” howled a cripple, making an effort to reach him with his
crutch, “will you cast any more spells on us from the top of the towers of
Notre-Dame?”

“Here’s a drinking cup!” chimed in a man, flinging a broken jug at his breast.
“’Twas you that made my wife, simply because she passed near you, give birth to
a child with two heads!”

“And my cat bring forth a kitten with six paws!” yelped an old crone, launching
a brick at him.

“Drink!” repeated Quasimodo panting, and for the third time.

At that moment he beheld the crowd give way. A young girl, fantastically
dressed, emerged from the throng. She was accompanied by a little white goat
with gilded horns, and carried a tambourine in her hand.

Quasimodo’s eyes sparkled. It was the gypsy whom he had attempted to carry off
on the preceding night, a misdeed for which he was dimly conscious that he was
being punished at that very moment; which was not in the least the case, since
he was being chastised only for the misfortune of being deaf, and of having
been judged by a deaf man. He doubted not that she had come to wreak her
vengeance also, and to deal her blow like the rest.

He beheld her, in fact, mount the ladder rapidly. Wrath and spite suffocate
him. He would have liked to make the pillory crumble into ruins, and if the
lightning of his eye could have dealt death, the gypsy would have been reduced
to powder before she reached the platform.

She approached, without uttering a syllable, the victim who writhed in a vain
effort to escape her, and detaching a gourd from her girdle, she raised it
gently to the parched lips of the miserable man.

Then, from that eye which had been, up to that moment, so dry and burning, a
big tear was seen to fall, and roll slowly down that deformed visage so long
contracted with despair. It was the first, in all probability, that the
unfortunate man had ever shed.

Meanwhile, he had forgotten to drink. The gypsy made her little pout, from
impatience, and pressed the spout to the tusked month of Quasimodo, with a
smile.

He drank with deep draughts. His thirst was burning.

When he had finished, the wretch protruded his black lips, no doubt, with the
object of kissing the beautiful hand which had just succoured him. But the
young girl, who was, perhaps, somewhat distrustful, and who remembered the
violent attempt of the night, withdrew her hand with the frightened gesture of
a child who is afraid of being bitten by a beast.

Then the poor deaf man fixed on her a look full of reproach and inexpressible
sadness.

It would have been a touching spectacle anywhere,—this beautiful, fresh, pure,
and charming girl, who was at the same time so weak, thus hastening to the
relief of so much misery, deformity, and malevolence. On the pillory, the
spectacle was sublime.

The very populace were captivated by it, and began to clap their hands,
crying,—

“Noël! Noël!”

It was at that moment that the recluse caught sight, from the window of her
bole, of the gypsy on the pillory, and hurled at her her sinister imprecation,—

“Accursed be thou, daughter of Egypt! Accursed! accursed!”

CHAPTER V.
END OF THE STORY OF THE CAKE.

La Esmeralda turned pale and descended from the pillory, staggering as she
went. The voice of the recluse still pursued her,—

“Descend! descend! Thief of Egypt! thou shalt ascend it once more!”

“The sacked nun is in one of her tantrums,” muttered the populace; and that was
the end of it. For that sort of woman was feared; which rendered them sacred.
People did not then willingly attack one who prayed day and night.

The hour had arrived for removing Quasimodo. He was unbound, the crowd
dispersed.

Near the Grand Pont, Mahiette, who was returning with her two companions,
suddenly halted,—

“By the way, Eustache! what did you do with that cake?”

“Mother,” said the child, “while you were talking with that lady in the bole, a
big dog took a bite of my cake, and then I bit it also.”

“What, sir, did you eat the whole of it?” she went on.

“Mother, it was the dog. I told him, but he would not listen to me. Then I bit
into it, also.”

“’Tis a terrible child!” said the mother, smiling and scolding at one and the
same time. “Do you see, Oudarde? He already eats all the fruit from the
cherry-tree in our orchard of Charlerange. So his grandfather says that he will
be a captain. Just let me catch you at it again, Master Eustache. Come along,
you greedy fellow!”

VOLUME II.

BOOK SEVENTH.

CHAPTER I.
THE DANGER OF CONFIDING ONE’S SECRET TO A GOAT.

Many weeks had elapsed.

The first of March had arrived. The sun, which Dubartas, that classic ancestor
of periphrase, had not yet dubbed the “Grand-duke of Candles,” was none the
less radiant and joyous on that account. It was one of those spring days which
possesses so much sweetness and beauty, that all Paris turns out into the
squares and promenades and celebrates them as though they were Sundays. In
those days of brilliancy, warmth, and serenity, there is a certain hour above
all others, when the façade of Notre-Dame should be admired. It is the moment
when the sun, already declining towards the west, looks the cathedral almost
full in the face. Its rays, growing more and more horizontal, withdraw slowly
from the pavement of the square, and mount up the perpendicular façade, whose
thousand bosses in high relief they cause to start out from the shadows, while
the great central rose window flames like the eye of a cyclops, inflamed with
the reflections of the forge.

This was the hour.

Opposite the lofty cathedral, reddened by the setting sun, on the stone balcony
built above the porch of a rich Gothic house, which formed the angle of the
square and the Rue du Parvis, several young girls were laughing and chatting
with every sort of grace and mirth. From the length of the veil which fell from
their pointed coif, twined with pearls, to their heels, from the fineness of
the embroidered chemisette which covered their shoulders and allowed a glimpse,
according to the pleasing custom of the time, of the swell of their fair virgin
bosoms, from the opulence of their under-petticoats still more precious than
their overdress (marvellous refinement), from the gauze, the silk, the velvet,
with which all this was composed, and, above all, from the whiteness of their
hands, which certified to their leisure and idleness, it was easy to divine
they were noble and wealthy heiresses. They were, in fact, Damoiselle
Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her companions, Diane de Christeuil, Amelotte
de Montmichel, Colombe de Gaillefontaine, and the little de Champchevrier
maiden; all damsels of good birth, assembled at that moment at the house of the
dame widow de Gondelaurier, on account of Monseigneur de Beaujeu and Madame his
wife, who were to come to Paris in the month of April, there to choose maids of
honor for the Dauphiness Marguerite, who was to be received in Picardy from the
hands of the Flemings. Now, all the squires for twenty leagues around were
intriguing for this favor for their daughters, and a goodly number of the
latter had been already brought or sent to Paris. These four maidens had been
confided to the discreet and venerable charge of Madame Aloïse de Gondelaurier,
widow of a former commander of the king’s cross-bowmen, who had retired with
her only daughter to her house in the Place du Parvis, Notre-Dame, in Paris.

The balcony on which these young girls stood opened from a chamber richly
tapestried in fawn-colored Flanders leather, stamped with golden foliage. The
beams, which cut the ceiling in parallel lines, diverted the eye with a
thousand eccentric painted and gilded carvings. Splendid enamels gleamed here
and there on carved chests; a boar’s head in faïence crowned a magnificent
dresser, whose two shelves announced that the mistress of the house was the
wife or widow of a knight banneret. At the end of the room, by the side of a
lofty chimney blazoned with arms from top to bottom, in a rich red velvet
arm-chair, sat Dame de Gondelaurier, whose five and fifty years were written
upon her garments no less distinctly than upon her face.

Beside her stood a young man of imposing mien, although partaking somewhat of
vanity and bravado—one of those handsome fellows whom all women agree to
admire, although grave men learned in physiognomy shrug their shoulders at
them. This young man wore the garb of a captain of the king’s unattached
archers, which bears far too much resemblance to the costume of Jupiter, which
the reader has already been enabled to admire in the first book of this
history, for us to inflict upon him a second description.

The damoiselles were seated, a part in the chamber, a part in the balcony, some
on square cushions of Utrecht velvet with golden corners, others on stools of
oak carved in flowers and figures. Each of them held on her knee a section of a
great needlework tapestry, on which they were working in company, while one end
of it lay upon the rush mat which covered the floor.

They were chatting together in that whispering tone and with the half-stifled
laughs peculiar to an assembly of young girls in whose midst there is a young
man. The young man whose presence served to set in play all these feminine
self-conceits, appeared to pay very little heed to the matter, and, while these
pretty damsels were vying with one another to attract his attention, he seemed
to be chiefly absorbed in polishing the buckle of his sword belt with his
doeskin glove. From time to time, the old lady addressed him in a very low
tone, and he replied as well as he was able, with a sort of awkward and
constrained politeness.

From the smiles and significant gestures of Dame Aloïse, from the glances which
she threw towards her daughter, Fleur-de-Lys, as she spoke low to the captain,
it was easy to see that there was here a question of some betrothal concluded,
some marriage near at hand no doubt, between the young man and Fleur-de-Lys.
From the embarrassed coldness of the officer, it was easy to see that on his
side, at least, love had no longer any part in the matter. His whole air was
expressive of constraint and weariness, which our lieutenants of the garrison
would to-day translate admirably as, “What a beastly bore!”

The poor dame, very much infatuated with her daughter, like any other silly
mother, did not perceive the officer’s lack of enthusiasm, and strove in low
tones to call his attention to the infinite grace with which Fleur-de-Lys used
her needle or wound her skein.

“Come, little cousin,” she said to him, plucking him by the sleeve, in order to
speak in his ear, “Look at her, do! see her stoop.”

“Yes, truly,” replied the young man, and fell back into his glacial and
absent-minded silence.

A moment later, he was obliged to bend down again, and Dame Aloïse said to
him,—

“Have you ever beheld a more gay and charming face than that of your betrothed?
Can one be more white and blonde? are not her hands perfect? and that neck—does
it not assume all the curves of the swan in ravishing fashion? How I envy you
at times! and how happy you are to be a man, naughty libertine that you are! Is
not my Fleur-de-Lys adorably beautiful, and are you not desperately in love
with her?”

“Of course,” he replied, still thinking of something else.

“But do say something,” said Madame Aloïse, suddenly giving his shoulder a
push; “you have grown very timid.”

We can assure our readers that timidity was neither the captain’s virtue nor
his defect. But he made an effort to do what was demanded of him.

“Fair cousin,” he said, approaching Fleur-de-Lys, “what is the subject of this
tapestry work which you are fashioning?”

“Fair cousin,” responded Fleur-de-Lys, in an offended tone, “I have already
told you three times. ’Tis the grotto of Neptune.”

It was evident that Fleur-de-Lys saw much more clearly than her mother through
the captain’s cold and absent-minded manner. He felt the necessity of making
some conversation.

“And for whom is this Neptunerie destined?”

“For the Abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs,” answered Fleur-de-Lys, without
raising her eyes.

The captain took up a corner of the tapestry.

“Who, my fair cousin, is this big gendarme, who is puffing out his cheeks to
their full extent and blowing a trumpet?”

“’Tis Triton,” she replied.

There was a rather pettish intonation in Fleur-de-Lys’s laconic words. The
young man understood that it was indispensable that he should whisper something
in her ear, a commonplace, a gallant compliment, no matter what. Accordingly he
bent down, but he could find nothing in his imagination more tender and
personal than this,—

“Why does your mother always wear that surcoat with armorial designs, like our
grandmothers of the time of Charles VII.? Tell her, fair cousin, that ’tis no
longer the fashion, and that the hinge (gond) and the laurel
(laurier) embroidered on her robe give her the air of a walking
mantlepiece. In truth, people no longer sit thus on their banners, I assure
you.”

Fleur-de-Lys raised her beautiful eyes, full of reproach, “Is that all of which
you can assure me?” she said, in a low voice.

In the meantime, Dame Aloïse, delighted to see them thus bending towards each
other and whispering, said as she toyed with the clasps of her prayer-book,—

“Touching picture of love!”

The captain, more and more embarrassed, fell back upon the subject of the
tapestry,—“’Tis, in sooth, a charming work!” he exclaimed.

Whereupon Colombe de Gaillefontaine, another beautiful blonde, with a white
skin, dressed to the neck in blue damask, ventured a timid remark which she
addressed to Fleur-de-Lys, in the hope that the handsome captain would reply to
it, “My dear Gondelaurier, have you seen the tapestries of the Hôtel de la
Roche-Guyon?”

“Is not that the hôtel in which is enclosed the garden of the Lingère du
Louvre?” asked Diane de Christeuil with a laugh; for she had handsome teeth,
and consequently laughed on every occasion.

“And where there is that big, old tower of the ancient wall of Paris,” added
Amelotte de Montmichel, a pretty fresh and curly-headed brunette, who had a
habit of sighing just as the other laughed, without knowing why.

“My dear Colombe,” interpolated Dame Aloïse, “do you not mean the hôtel which
belonged to Monsieur de Bacqueville, in the reign of King Charles VI.? there
are indeed many superb high warp tapestries there.”

“Charles VI.! Charles VI.!” muttered the young captain, twirling his moustache.
“Good heavens! what old things the good dame does remember!”

Madame de Gondelaurier continued, “Fine tapestries, in truth. A work so
esteemed that it passes as unrivalled.”

At that moment Bérangère de Champchevrier, a slender little maid of seven
years, who was peering into the square through the trefoils of the balcony,
exclaimed, “Oh! look, fair Godmother Fleur-de-Lys, at that pretty dancer who is
dancing on the pavement and playing the tambourine in the midst of the loutish
bourgeois!”

The sonorous vibration of a tambourine was, in fact, audible. “Some gypsy from
Bohemia,” said Fleur-de-Lys, turning carelessly toward the square.

“Look! look!” exclaimed her lively companions; and they all ran to the edge of
the balcony, while Fleur-de-Lys, rendered thoughtful by the coldness of her
betrothed, followed them slowly, and the latter, relieved by this incident,
which put an end to an embarrassing conversation, retreated to the farther end
of the room, with the satisfied air of a soldier released from duty.
Nevertheless, the fair Fleur-de-Lys’s was a charming and noble service, and
such it had formerly appeared to him; but the captain had gradually become
blasé; the prospect of a speedy marriage cooled him more every day.
Moreover, he was of a fickle disposition, and, must we say it, rather vulgar in
taste. Although of very noble birth, he had contracted in his official harness
more than one habit of the common trooper. The tavern and its accompaniments
pleased him. He was only at his ease amid gross language, military gallantries,
facile beauties, and successes yet more easy. He had, nevertheless, received
from his family some education and some politeness of manner; but he had been
thrown on the world too young, he had been in garrison at too early an age, and
every day the polish of a gentleman became more and more effaced by the rough
friction of his gendarme’s cross-belt. While still continuing to visit her from
time to time, from a remnant of common respect, he felt doubly embarrassed with
Fleur-de-Lys; in the first place, because, in consequence of having scattered
his love in all sorts of places, he had reserved very little for her; in the
next place, because, amid so many stiff, formal, and decent ladies, he was in
constant fear lest his mouth, habituated to oaths, should suddenly take the bit
in its teeth, and break out into the language of the tavern. The effect can be
imagined!

Moreover, all this was mingled in him, with great pretentions to elegance,
toilet, and a fine appearance. Let the reader reconcile these things as best he
can. I am simply the historian.

He had remained, therefore, for several minutes, leaning in silence against the
carved jamb of the chimney, and thinking or not thinking, when Fleur-de-Lys
suddenly turned and addressed him. After all, the poor young girl was pouting
against the dictates of her heart.

“Fair cousin, did you not speak to us of a little Bohemian whom you saved a
couple of months ago, while making the patrol with the watch at night, from the
hands of a dozen robbers?”

“I believe so, fair cousin,” said the captain.

“Well,” she resumed, “perchance ’tis that same gypsy girl who is dancing
yonder, on the church square. Come and see if you recognize her, fair Cousin
Phœbus.”

A secret desire for reconciliation was apparent in this gentle invitation which
she gave him to approach her, and in the care which she took to call him by
name. Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers (for it is he whom the reader has had
before his eyes since the beginning of this chapter) slowly approached the
balcony. “Stay,” said Fleur-de-Lys, laying her hand tenderly on Phœbus’s arm;
“look at that little girl yonder, dancing in that circle. Is she your
Bohemian?”

Phœbus looked, and said,—

“Yes, I recognize her by her goat.”

“Oh! in fact, what a pretty little goat!” said Amelotte, clasping her hands in
admiration.

“Are his horns of real gold?” inquired Bérangère.

Without moving from her arm-chair, Dame Aloïse interposed, “Is she not one of
those gypsy girls who arrived last year by the Gibard gate?”

“Madame my mother,” said Fleur-de-Lys gently, “that gate is now called the
Porte d’Enfer.”

Mademoiselle de Gondelaurier knew how her mother’s antiquated mode of speech
shocked the captain. In fact, he began to sneer, and muttered between his
teeth: “Porte Gibard! Porte Gibard! ’Tis enough to make King Charles VI. pass
by.”

“Godmother!” exclaimed Bérangère, whose eyes, incessantly in motion, had
suddenly been raised to the summit of the towers of Notre-Dame, “who is that
black man up yonder?”

All the young girls raised their eyes. A man was, in truth, leaning on the
balustrade which surmounted the northern tower, looking on the Grève. He was a
priest. His costume could be plainly discerned, and his face resting on both
his hands. But he stirred no more than if he had been a statue. His eyes,
intently fixed, gazed into the Place.

It was something like the immobility of a bird of prey, who has just discovered
a nest of sparrows, and is gazing at it.

“’Tis monsieur the archdeacon of Josas,” said Fleur-de-Lys.

“You have good eyes if you can recognize him from here,” said the
Gaillefontaine.

“How he is staring at the little dancer!” went on Diane de Christeuil.

“Let the gypsy beware!” said Fleur-de-Lys, “for he loves not Egypt.”

“’Tis a great shame for that man to look upon her thus,” added Amelotte de
Montmichel, “for she dances delightfully.”

“Fair cousin Phœbus,” said Fleur-de-Lys suddenly, “Since you know this little
gypsy, make her a sign to come up here. It will amuse us.”

“Oh, yes!” exclaimed all the young girls, clapping their hands.

“Why! ’tis not worth while,” replied Phœbus. “She has forgotten me, no doubt,
and I know not so much as her name. Nevertheless, as you wish it, young ladies,
I will make the trial.” And leaning over the balustrade of the balcony, he
began to shout, “Little one!”

The dancer was not beating her tambourine at the moment. She turned her head
towards the point whence this call proceeded, her brilliant eyes rested on
Phœbus, and she stopped short.

“Little one!” repeated the captain; and he beckoned her to approach.

The young girl looked at him again, then she blushed as though a flame had
mounted into her cheeks, and, taking her tambourine under her arm, she made her
way through the astonished spectators towards the door of the house where
Phœbus was calling her, with slow, tottering steps, and with the troubled look
of a bird which is yielding to the fascination of a serpent.

A moment later, the tapestry portière was raised, and the gypsy appeared on the
threshold of the chamber, blushing, confused, breathless, her large eyes
drooping, and not daring to advance another step.

Bérangère clapped her hands.

Meanwhile, the dancer remained motionless upon the threshold. Her appearance
had produced a singular effect upon these young girls. It is certain that a
vague and indistinct desire to please the handsome officer animated them all,
that his splendid uniform was the target of all their coquetries, and that from
the moment he presented himself, there existed among them a secret, suppressed
rivalry, which they hardly acknowledged even to themselves, but which broke
forth, none the less, every instant, in their gestures and remarks.
Nevertheless, as they were all very nearly equal in beauty, they contended with
equal arms, and each could hope for the victory. The arrival of the gypsy
suddenly destroyed this equilibrium. Her beauty was so rare, that, at the
moment when she appeared at the entrance of the apartment, it seemed as though
she diffused a sort of light which was peculiar to herself. In that narrow
chamber, surrounded by that sombre frame of hangings and woodwork, she was
incomparably more beautiful and more radiant than on the public square. She was
like a torch which has suddenly been brought from broad daylight into the dark.
The noble damsels were dazzled by her in spite of themselves. Each one felt
herself, in some sort, wounded in her beauty. Hence, their battle front (may we
be allowed the expression,) was immediately altered, although they exchanged
not a single word. But they understood each other perfectly. Women’s instincts
comprehend and respond to each other more quickly than the intelligences of
men. An enemy had just arrived; all felt it—all rallied together. One drop of
wine is sufficient to tinge a glass of water red; to diffuse a certain degree
of ill temper throughout a whole assembly of pretty women, the arrival of a
prettier woman suffices, especially when there is but one man present.

Hence the welcome accorded to the gypsy was marvellously glacial. They surveyed
her from head to foot, then exchanged glances, and all was said; they
understood each other. Meanwhile, the young girl was waiting to be spoken to,
in such emotion that she dared not raise her eyelids.

The captain was the first to break the silence. “Upon my word,” said he, in his
tone of intrepid fatuity, “here is a charming creature! What think you of her,
fair cousin?”

This remark, which a more delicate admirer would have uttered in a lower tone,
at least was not of a nature to dissipate the feminine jealousies which were on
the alert before the gypsy.

Fleur-de-Lys replied to the captain with a bland affectation of disdain;—“Not
bad.”

The others whispered.

At length, Madame Aloïse, who was not the less jealous because she was so for
her daughter, addressed the dancer,—“Approach, little one.”

“Approach, little one!” repeated, with comical dignity, little Bérangère, who
would have reached about as high as her hips.

The gypsy advanced towards the noble dame.

“Fair child,” said Phœbus, with emphasis, taking several steps towards her, “I
do not know whether I have the supreme honor of being recognized by you.”

She interrupted him, with a smile and a look full of infinite sweetness,—

“Oh! yes,” said she.

“She has a good memory,” remarked Fleur-de-Lys.

“Come, now,” resumed Phœbus, “you escaped nimbly the other evening. Did I
frighten you!”

“Oh! no,” said the gypsy.