Notre Dame de Paris   
Volume XII   
   
Victor Marie Hugo   
   
List of Characters
Author’s Preface to the Edition of 1831

Book I.
The Great Hall
Pierre Gringoire
The Cardinal
Master Jacques Coppenole
Quasimodo
Esmeralda

Book II.
From Scylla to Charybdis
The Place de Grève
Besos Para Golpes
The Mishaps Consequent on Following a Pretty Woman through the Streets at Night
Sequel of the Mishap
The Broken Pitcher
A Wedding Night

Book III.
Notre Dame
A Bird’s-Eye View of Paris

Book IV.
Charitable Souls
Claude Frollo
Immanis Pecoris Custos, Immanior Ipse
The Dog and His Master
Further Particulars of Claude Frollo
Unpopularity

Book V.
The Abbot of St.-Martin’s
This Will Destroy That

Book VI.
An Impartial Glance at the Ancient Magistracy
The Rat-Hole
The Story of a Wheaten Cake
A Tear for a Drop of Water
End of the Wheaten Cake

Book VII.
Showing the Danger of Confiding One’s Secret to a Goat
Showing That a Priest and a Philosopher Are Not the Same
The Bells
Fate
The Two Men in Black
Of the Result of Launching a String of Seven Oaths in a Public Square
The Spectre-Monk
The Convenience of Windows Overlooking the River

Book VIII.
The Crown Piece Changed into a Withered Leaf
Sequel to the Crown Piece Changed into a Withered Leaf
End of the Crown Piece Changed into a Withered Leaf
Lasciate Ogni Speranza
The Mother
Three Various Hearts of Men

Book IX.
Delirium
Humpbacked, One-Eyed, Lame
Deaf
Earthenware and Crystal
The Key of the Porte Rouge
Sequel to the Key of the Porte Rouge

Book X.
Gringoire Has Several Bright Ideas in Succession in the Rue des Bernardins
Turn Vagabond
Vive la Joie!
An Awkward Friend
The Closet Where Monsieur Louis of France Recites His Orisons
The Pass-Word
Châteaupers to the Rescue

Book XI.
The Little Shoe
La Creatura Bella Bianco Vestita—Dante
The Marriage of Phœbus
The Marriage of Quasimodo

Appendix

List of Characters   
     
PIERRE GRINGOIRE, a poet.
CHARLES, Cardinal Bourbon, Archbishop of Lyons.
GUILLAUME RYM, councillor and pensionary of Ghent.
JACQUES COPPENOLE, hosier, of Ghent.
ROBIN POUSSEPAIN, a student.
QUASIMODO, bell-ringer of Notre Dame, a hunchback.
ESMERALDA, a gipsy.
DJALI, her goat.
DOM CLAUDE FROLLO, archdeacon of Josas.
PH�BUS DE CHÂTEAUPERS, captain of archers.
CLOPIN TROUILLEFOU, king of Tunis.
MATHIAS HUNGADI SPICALI, duke of Egypt and Bohemia, & GUILLAUME ROUSSEAU, emperor of Galilee, vagabonds, vagabonds.
AGNÈS LA HERME, JEHANNE DE LA TARME, HENRIETTE LA GAULTIÈRE & GAUCHÈRE LA VIOLETTE, widows of the Etienne-Haudry chapel.
ROBERT MISTRICOLLE, prothonotary to Louis XI.
DAMOISELLE GUILLEMETTE LA MAIRESSE, his wife.
JEHAN FROLLO DU MOULIN, brother of Don Claude Follow; a student.
JACQUES COICTIER, physician to Louis XI.
LOUIS XI, king of France.
FATHER TOURANGEAU & The Abbot of Saint-Martin de Tours, disguises of Louis XI.
ROBERT D’ESTOUTEVILLE, provost of Paris.
FLORIAN BARBEDIENNE, auditor of the Châtelet.
DAMOISELLE MANNETTE, citizen of Rheims.
EUSTASCHE, son of Damoiselle Mahiette.
DAMOISELLE OUDARDE MUSNIER & DAMOISELLE GERVAISE, citizens of Paris.
PAQUETTE LA CHANTEFLEURIE, recluse of the Tour-Roland, called also Sister Gudule.
MADAME ALOÏSE DE GONDELAURIER, a noble lady.
FLEUR-DE-LYS DE GONDELAURIER, her daughter.
DIANE DE CHRISTEUIL,
AMELOTTE DE MONTMICHEL, COLOMBE DE GAILLEFONTAINE & BERANGÈRE DE CHAMPCHEVRIER, her friends.
JACQUES CHARMOLUE, king’s proxy to the Ecclesiastical Court.
MOTHER LA FALOURDEL, a hag.
PHILIPPE LHEULIER, advocate extraordinary to the king.
PIERRAT TORTERUE, sworn torturer of the châtelet.
OLIVIER LE DAIM, barber and favourite of Louis XI.
GIEFFROY PINCEBOURDE, a vagabond.
TRISTAN L’HERMITE, the king’s provost marshal.
HENRIET COUSIN, his hangman.
Students, citizens, gipsies, etc., etc.

Author’s Preface to the Edition of 1831   
     
SOME years ago, when visiting, or, more properly speaking, thoroughly exploring the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the writer came upon the word
           
[Greek] 1
graven on the wall in a dim corner of one of the towers.      1   
  In the outline and slope of these Greek capitals, black with age and deeply scored into the stone, there were certain peculiarities characteristic of Gothic calligraphy which at once betrayed the hand of the mediæval scribe.      2   
  But most of all, the writer was struck by the dark and fateful significance of the word; and he pondered long and deeply over the identity of that anguished soul that would not quit the world without imprinting this stigma of crime or misfortune on the brow of the ancient edifice.      3   
  Since then the wall has been plastered over or scraped—I forget which—and the inscription has disappeared. For thus, during the past two hundred years, have the marvellous churches of the Middle Ages been treated. Defacement and mutilation have been their portion—both from within and from without. The priest plasters them over, the architect scrapes them; finally the people come and demolish them altogether.      4   
  Hence, save only the perishable memento dedicated to it here by the author of this book, nothing remains of the mysterious word graven on the sombre tower of Notre Dame, nothing of the unknown destiny it so mournfully recorded. The man who inscribed that word passed centuries ago from among men; the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the Cathedral; soon, perhaps, the Cathedral itself will have vanished from the face of the earth.      5   
  This word, then, the writer has taken for the text of his book.
  February, 1831.      6   


Note 1.  >Fate, destiny.

   
Book I   
I. The Great Hall   
     
PRECISELY three hundred and forty-eight years, six months and nineteen days ago 1 Paris was awakened by the sound of the pealing of all the bells within the triple enclosing walls of the city, the University, and the town.      1   
  Yet the 6th of January, 1482, was not a day of which history has preserved the record. There was nothing of peculiar note in the event which set all the bells and the good people of Paris thus in motion from early dawn. It was neither an assault by Picards or Burgundians, nor a holy image carried in procession, nor a riot of the students in the vineyard of Laas, nor the entry into the city of “our most dread Lord the King,” nor even a fine stringing up of thieves, male and female, at the Justice of Paris. Neither was it the unexpected arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth century, of some foreign ambassador with his beplumed and gold-laced retinue. Scarce two days had elapsed since the last cavalcade of this description, that of the Flemish envoys charged with the mission to conclude the marriage between the Dauphin and Margaret of Flanders, had made its entry into Paris, to the great annoyance of Monsieur the Cardinal of Bourbon, who, to please the King, had been obliged to extend a gracious reception to this boorish company of Flemish burgomasters, and entertain them in his Hôtel de Bourbon with a “most pleasant morality play, drollery, and farce,” while a torrent of rain drenched the splendid tapestries at his door.      2   
  The 6th of January, which “set the whole population of Paris in a stir,” as Jehan de Troyes relates, was the date of the double festival—united since time immemorial—of the Three Kings, and the Feast of Fools.      3   
  On this day there was invariably a bonfire on the Place de Grève, a may-pole in front of the Chapels de Braque, and a mystery-play at the Palais de Justice, as had been proclaimed with blare of trumpets on the preceding day in all the streets by Monsieur de Provost’s men, arrayed in tabards of violet camlet with great white crosses on the breast.      4   
  The stream of people accordingly made their way in the morning from all parts of the town, their shops and houses being closed, to one or other of these points named. Each one had chosen his share of the entertainments—some the bonfire, some the may-pole, others the Mystery. To the credit of the traditional good sense of the Paris “cit” be it said that the majority of the spectators directed their steps towards the bonfire, which was entirely seasonable, or the Mystery, which was to be performed under roof and cover in the great Hall of the Palais de Justice, and were unanimous in leaving the poor scantily decked may-pole to shiver alone under the January sky in the cemetery of the Chapels de Braque.      5   
  The crowd flocked thickest in the approaches to the Palais, as it was known that the Flemish envoys intended to be present at the performance of the Mystery, and the election of the Pope of Fools, which was likewise to take place in the great Hall.      6   
  It was no easy matter that day to penetrate into the great Hall, then reputed the largest roofed-in space in the world. (It is true that, at that time, Sauval had not yet measured the great hall of the Castle of Montargis.) To the gazers from the windows, the square in front of the Palais, packed as it was with people, presented the aspect of a lake into which five or six streets, like so many river mouths, were each moment pouring fresh floods of heads. The ever-swelling waves of this multitude broke against the angles of the houses, which projected here and there, like promontories, into the irregular basin of the Place.      7   
  In the center of the high Gothic 2 façade of the Paladins was the great flight of steps, incessantly occupied by a double stream ascending and descending, which, after being broken by the intermediate landing, spread in broad waves over the two lateral flights.      8   
  Down this great staircase the crowd poured continuously into the Place like a cascade into a lake, the shouts, the laughter, the trampling of thousands of feet making a mighty clamor and tumult. From time to time the uproar redoubled, the current which bore the crowd towards the grand stairs was choked, thrown back, and formed into eddies, when some archer thrust back the crowd, or the horse of one of the provost’s men kicked out to restore order; an admirable tradition which has been faithfully handed down through the centuries to our present gendarmes of Paris.      9   
  Every door and window and roof swarmed with good, placid, honest burgher faces gazing at the Paladins and at the crowd, and asking no better amusement. For there are many people in Paris quite content to be the spectators of spectators; and to us a wall, behind which something is going on, is a sufficiently exciting spectacle.     10   
  If we of the nineteenth century could mingle in imagination with these Parisians of the fifteenth century, could push our way with that hustling, elbowing, stamping crowd into the immense Hall of the Paladins, so cramped on the 6th of January, 1482, the scene would not be without interest or charm for us, and we would find ourselves surrounded by things so old that to us they would appear quite new.     11   
  With the reader’s permission we will attempt to evoke in thought the impression he would have experienced in crossing with us the threshold of that great Hall and amid that throng in surcoat, doublet, and kirtle.     12   
  At first there is nothing but a dull roar in our ears and a dazzle in our eyes. Overhead, a roof of double Gothic arches, paneled with carved wood, painted azure blue, and diapered with golden fleer de lies; underfoot, a pavement in alternate squares of black and white. A few paces off is an enormous pillar, and another—seven in all down the length of the hall, supporting in the center line the springing arches of the double groaning. Around the first four pillars are stalls all glittering with glassware and trinkets, and around the last three are oaken benches, worn smooth and shining by the breeches of the litigants and the gowns of the attorneys. Ranged along the lofty walls, between the doors, between the windows, between the pillars, is the interminable series of statues of the rulers of France from Pharaoh downward; the “‘Roils fainéants,” with drooping eyes and indolent hanging arms; the valiant warrior kings, with head and hands boldly uplifted in the sight of heaven. The tall, pointed windows glow in a thousand colors; at the wide entrances to the Hall are richly carved doors; and the whole—roof, pillars, walls, cornices, doors, statues—is resplendent from top to bottom in a coating of blue and gold, already somewhat tarnished at the period of which we write, but which had almost entirely disappeared under dust and cob-webs in the year of grace 1549, when Du Broil alluded to it in terms of admiration, but from hearsay only.     13   
  Now let the reader picture to himself that immense, oblong Hall under the wan light of a January morning and invaded by a motley, noisy crowd, pouring along the walls and eddying round the pillars, and he will have some idea of the scene as a whole, the peculiarities of which we will presently endeavor to describe more in detail.     14   
  Assuredly if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henry IV there would have been no documents relating to his trial to be deposited in the Record office of the Paladins de Justice; no accomplices interested in causing those documents to disappear, and consequently no incendiaries compelled, in default of a better expedient, to set fire to the Record office in order to destroy the documents, and to burn down the Paladins de Justice in order to burn the Record office—in short, no conflagration of 1618.     15   
  The old Paladins would still be standing with its great Hall, and I could say to the reader “Go and see for yourself,” and we should both be exempt of the necessity, I of writing, he of reading this description, such as it is. All of which goes to prove the novel truth, that great events have incalculable consequences.     16   
  To be sure, it is quite possible that Ravaillac had no accomplices, also that, even if he had, they were in no way accessory to the fire of 1618. There exist two other highly plausible explanations. In the first place, the great fiery star a foot wide and an ell high, which, as every mother’s son knows, fell from heaven on to the Paladins on the 7th of March just after midnight; and secondly, Théophile’s quatrain, which runs:
           “Certes, ce fut un triste jeu   
  Quand à Paris dame Justice,   
  Pour avoir mangé trop d’épice   
Se mit tout le palais en feu.” 3    
  17   
  Whatever one may think of this triple explanation—political, physical, and poetical—of the burning of the Paladins de Justice in 1618, about one fact there is unfortunately no doubt, and that is the fire itself.     18   
  Thanks to this disaster, and more still to the successive restorations which destroyed what the fire had spared, very little remains of this first residence of the Kings of France, of this original palace of the Louvre, so old even in the time of Philip the Fair, that in it they sought for traces of the magnificent buildings erected by King Robert and described by Helgaldus.     19   
  Nearly all has gone. What has become of the Chancery Chamber in which St. Louis “consummated his marriage”? what of the garden where he administered justice, “clad in a jerkin of camlet, a surcoat of coarse woollen stuff without sleeves, and over all a mantle of black ‘sandal,’ and reclining on a carpet with Joinville”? Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismund? where that of Charles IV? that of John Lackland? Where is the flight of steps from which Charles VI proclaimed his “Edict of Pardon”? the flag-stone whereon, in the presence of the Dauphin, Marcel strangled Robert de Clermont and the Marshal de Champagne? the wicket where the bulls of the anti-Pope Benedict were torn up, and through which the bearers of them marched out, mitred and coped in mock state, to publicly make the amende honorable through the streets of Paris? and the great Hall with its blue and gold, its Gothic windows, its statues, its pillars, its immense vaulted roof so profusely carved—and the gilded chamber—and the stone lion kneeling at the door with head abased and tail between its legs, like the lions of Solomon’s throne, in that attitude of humility which beseems Strength in the presence of Justice? and the beautiful doors, and the gorgeous-hued windows, and the wrought iron-work which discouraged Biscornette—and the delicate cabinet-work of Du Hancy? How has time, how has man, served these marvels? What have they given us in exchange for all this, for this great page of Gallic history, for all this Gothic art? The uncouth, surbased arches of M. de Brosse, the clumsy architect of the great door of Saint-Gervais—so much for art; and as regards history, we have the gossipy memoirs of the Great Pillar, which still resounds with the old wives’ tales of such men as Patru.     20   
  Well, that is not much to boast of. Let us return to the real great Hall of the real old Paladins.     21   
  The two extremities of this huge parallelogram were occupied, the one by the famous marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick that, say the old territorial records in a style that would whet the appetite of a Gargantua, “Never was such a slab of marble seen in the world”; the other by the chapel in which Louis XI caused his statue to be sculptured kneeling in front of the Virgin, and to which he had transferred—indifferent to the fact that thereby two niches were empty in the line of royal statues—those of Charlemagne and Saint-Louis: two saints who, as Kings of France, he supposed to be high in favour in heaven. This chapel, which was still quite new, having been built scarcely six years, was carried out entirely in that charming style of delicate architecture, with its marvellous stone-work, its bold and exquisite tracery, which marks in France the end of the Gothic period, and lasts on into the middle of the sixteenth century in the ethereal fantasies of the Renaissance. The little fretted stone rose-window above the door was in particular a masterpiece of grace and lightness—a star of lace.     22   
  In the center of the Hall, opposite the great entrance, they had erected for the convenience of the Flemish envoys and other great personages invited to witness the performance of the Mystery, a raised platform covered with gold brocade and fixed against the wall, to which a special entrance had been contrived by utilizing a window into the passage from the Gilded Chamber.     23   
  According to custom, the performance was to take place upon the marble table, which had been prepared for that purpose since the morning. On the magnificent slab, all scored by the heels of the law-clerks, stood a high wooden erection, the upper floor of which, visible from every part of the Hall, was to serve as the stage, while its interior, hung round with draperies, furnished a dressing-room for the actors. A ladder, frankly placed in full view of the audience, formed the connecting link between stage and dressing-room, and served the double office of entrance and exit. There was no character however unexpected, no change of scene, no stage effect, but was obliged to clamber up this ladder. Dear and guileless infancy of art and of stage machinery!     24   
  Four sergeants of the provost of the Paladins—the appointed superintendents of all popular holidays, whether festivals or executions—stood on duty at the four corners of the marble table.     25   
  The piece was not to commence till the last stroke of noon of the great clock of the Paladins. To be sure, this was very late for a theatrical performance; but they had been obliged to suit the convenience of the ambassadors.     26   
  Now, all this multitude had been waiting since the early morning; indeed, a considerable number of these worthy spectators had stood shivering and chattering their teeth with cold since break of day before the grand staircase of the Paladins; some even declared that they had spent the night in front of the great entrance to make sure of being the first to get in. The crowd became denser every moment, and like water that overflows its boundaries, began to mount the walls, to surge round the pillars, to rise up and cover the cornices, the window-sills, every projection and every coign of vantage in architecture or sculpture. The all-prevailing impatience, discomfort, and weariness, the license of a holiday approvedly dedicated to folly, the quarrels incessantly arising out of a sharp elbow or an iron-shod heel, the fatigue of long waiting—all conduced to give a tone of bitterness and acerbity to the clamor of this closely packed, squeezed, hustled, stifled throng long before the hour at which the ambassadors were expected. Nothing was to be heard but grumbling and imprecations against the Flemings, the Cardinal de Bourbon, the Chief Magistrate, Madame Marguerite of Austria, the beadles, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Bishop of Paris, the Fools’ Pope, the pillars, the statues, this closed door, yonder open window—to the huge diversion of the bands of scholars and lackeys distributed through the crowd, who mingled their gibes and pranks with this seething mass of dissatisfaction, aggravating the general ill-humour by perpetual pin-pricks.     27   
  There was one group in particular of these joyous young demons who, after knocking out the glass of a window, had boldly seated themselves in the frame, from whence they could cast their gaze and their banter by turns at the crowd inside the Hall and that outside in the Place. By their aping gestures, their yells of laughter, by their loud interchange of opprobrious epithets with comrades at the other side of the Hall, it was very evident that these budding literati by no means shared the boredom and fatigue of the rest of the gathering, and that they knew very well how to extract out of the scene actually before them sufficient entertainment of their own to enable them to wait patiently for the other.     28   
  “Why, by my soul, ’tis Joannes Follow de Molendino!” cried one of them to a little fair-haired imp with a handsome mischievous face, who had swarmed up the pillar and was clinging to the foliage of its capital; “well are you named Jehan of the Mill, for your two arms and legs are just like the sails of a wind-mill. How long have you been here?”     29   
  “By the grace of the devil,” returned Joannes Follow, “over four hours, and I sincerely trust they may be deducted from my time in purgatory. I heard the eight chanters of the King of Sicily start High Mass at seven in the Sainte-Chapelle.”     30   
  “Fine chanters forsooth!” exclaimed the other, “their voices are sharper than the peaks of their caps! The King had done better, before founding a Mass in honour of M. Saint-John, to inquire if M. Saint-John was fond of hearing Latin droned with a Provençal accent.”     31   
  “And was it just for the sake of employing these rascally chanters of the King of Sicily that he did that?” cried an old woman bitterly in the crowd beneath the window. “I ask you—a thousand livres parisis 4 for a Mass, and that too to be charged on the license for selling salt-water fish in the fish-market of Paris.”     32   
  “Peace! old woman,” replied a portly and solemn personage, who was holding his nose as he stood beside the fish-wife; “a Mass had to be founded. Would you have the King fall sick again?”     33   
  “Bravely said, Sir Gilles Lecornu, 5 master furrier to the royal wardrobe!” cried the little scholar clinging to the capital.     34   
  A burst of laughter from the whole band of scholars greeted the unfortunate name of the hapless Court furrier.     35   
  “Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!” shouted some.     36   
  “Cornitus et hirsutus!” 6 responded another.     37   
  “Why, of course,” continued the little wretch on the capital. “But what is there to laugh about? A worthy man is Gilles Lecornu, brother to Master Jehan Lecornu, provost of the Royal Palais, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, head keeper of the Forest of Vincennes, all good citizens of Paris, married every one of them from father to son!”     38   
  The mirth redoubled. The portly furrier answered never a word, but did his best to escape the attention directed to him from all sides; but he puffed and panted in vain. Like a wedge being driven into wood, his struggles only served to fix his broad apoplectic face, purple with anger and vexation, more firmly between the shoulders of his neighbours.     39   
  At last one of these neighbours, fat, pursy, and worthy as himself, came to his aid.     40   
  “Out upon these graceless scholars who dare to address a burgher in such a manner! In my day they would have first been beaten with sticks, and then burnt on them.”     41   
  This set the whole band agog.     42   
  “Holà! hé! what tune’s this? Who’s that old bird of ill omen?”     43   
  “Oh, I know him!” exclaimed one; “it’s Maître Andry Musnier.”     44   
  “Yes, he’s one of the four booksellers by appointment to the University,” said another.     45   
  “Everything goes by fours in that shop!” cried a third. “Four nations, four faculties, four holidays, four procurators, four electors, four booksellers.”     46   
  “Very good,” returned Jehan Frollo, “we’ll quadruple the devil for them.”     47   
  “Musnier, we’ll burn thy books.”     48   
  “Musnier, we’ll beat thy servants.”     49   
  “Musnier, we’ll tickle thy wife.”     50   
  “The good, plump Mlle. Oudarde.”     51   
  “Who is as buxom and merry as if she were already a widow.”     52   
  “The devil fly away with you all,” growled Maître Andry Musnier.     53   
  “Maître Andry,” said Jehan, still hanging fast to his capital, “hold thy tongue, or I fall plump on thy head.”     54   
  Maître Andry looked up, appeared to calculate for a moment the height of the pillar and the weight of the little rascal, mentally multiplied that weight by the square of the velocity—and held his peace. Whereupon Jehan, left master of the field, added triumphantly, “And I’d do it too, though I am the brother of an archdeacon.”     55   
  “A fine set of gentlemen those of ours at the University, not even on a day like this do they see that we get our rights. There’s a may-pole and a bonfire in the town, a Fool’s Pope and Flemish ambassadors in the city, but at the University, nothing!”     56   
  “And yet the Place Maubert is large enough,” observed one of the youngsters, ensconced in a corner of the window-ledge.     57   
  “Down with the Rector, the electors, and the procurators!” yelled Jehan.     58   
  “We’ll make a bonfire to-night in the Champs-Gaillard with Maître Andry’s books!” added another.     59   
  “And the desks of the scribes!” cried his neighbour.     60   
  “And the wands of the beadles!”     61   
  “And the spittoons of the deans!”     62   
  “And the muniment chests of the procurators!”     63   
  “And the tubs of the doctors!”     64   
  “And the stools of the Rector!”     65   
  “Down!” bellowed little Jehan in a roaring bass; “down with Maître Andry, the beadles and the scribes; down with the theologians, the physicians, and the priests; down with the procurators, the electors, and the Rector!!”     66   
  “’Tis the end of the world!” muttered Maître Andry, stopping his ears.     67   
  “Talk of the Rector—there he goes down the square!” cried one of those in the window. And they all strained to catch a glimpse.     68   
  “Is it in truth our venerable Rector, Maître Thibaut?” inquired Jehan Frollo du Moulin, who from his pillar in the interior of the Hall could see nothing of what went on outside.     69   
  “Yes, yes,” responded the others in chorus, “it is Maître Thibaut, the Rector himself.”     70   
  It was in fact the Rector, accompanied by all the dignitaries of the University going in procession to receive the ambassadors, and in the act of crossing the Place du Palais.     71   
  The scholars crowding at the window greeted them as they passed with gibes and ironical plaudits. The Rector marching at the head of his band received the first volley—it was a heavy one.     72   
  “Good-day, Monsieur the Rector—Holà there! Good-day to you!”     73   
  “How comes it that the old gambler has managed to be here? Has he then actually left his dice?”     74   
  “Look at him jogging alone on his mule—its ears are not as long as his own!”     75   
  “Holà, good-day to you Monsieur the Rector Thibaut! Tybalde aleator! 7 old numskull! old gamester!”     76   
  “God save you! How often did you throw double six last night?”     77   
  “Oh, just look at the lantern-jawed old face of him—all livid and drawn and battered from his love of dice and gaming!”     78   
  “Where are you off to like that, Thibaut, Tybalde addados, 8 turning your back on the University and trotting towards the town?”     79   
  “Doubtless he is going to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodé!” 9 cried Jehan Frollo.     80   
  The whole ribald crew repeated the pun in a voice of thunder and with furious clapping of hands.     81   
  “You are off to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodé, aren’t you, Monsieur the Rector, own partner to the devil!”     82   
  Now came the turn of the other dignitaries.     83   
  “Down with the beadles! Down with the mace-bearers!”     84   
  “Tell me, Robin Poussepain, who is that one over there?”     85   
  “It is Gilbert de Suilly, Gilbertus de Soliaco, the Chancellor of the College of Autun.”     86   
  “Here, take my shoe—you have a better place than I have—throw it in his face!”     87   
  “Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces!” 10     88   
  “Down with the six theologians in their white surplices!”     89   
  “Are those the theologians? I took them for the six white geese Sainte-Geneviève pays to the Town as tribute for the fief of Roogny.”     90   
  “Down with the physicians!”     91   
  “Down with all the pompous and squabbling disputations!”     92   
  “Here goes my cap at thy head, Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève; I owe thee a grudge. He gave my place in the Nation of Normandy to little Ascaino Falzaspada, who as an Italian, belongs of right to the Province of Bourges.”     93   
  “’Tis an injustice!” cried the scholars in chorus. “Down with the Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève!”     94   
  “Ho, there, Maître Joachim de Ladehors! Ho, Louis Dahuille! Ho, Lambert Hoctement!”     95   
  “The devil choke the Procurator of the Nation of Germany!”     96   
  “And the chaplains of the Sainte-Chapelle in their gray amices; cum tunicis grisis!”     97   
  “Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis!”     98   
  “There go the Masters of Art! Oh, the fine red copes! and oh, the fine black ones!”     99   
  “That makes a fine tail for the Rector!”    100   
  “He might be the Doge of Venice going to espouse the sea.”    101   
  “Look, Jehan, the canons of Sainte-Geneviéve!”    102   
  “The foul fiend take the whole lot of them!”    103   
  “Abbé Claude Choart! Doctor Claude Choart, do you seek Marie la Giffarde?”    104   
  “You’ll find her in the Rue Glatigny.”    105   
  “Bed-making for the King of the Bawdies!”    106   
  “She pays her fourpence—quatuor denarios.”    107   
  “Aut unnum bombum.”    108   
  “Would you have her pay you with one on the nose?”    109   
  “Comrades! Maître Simon Sanguin, the elector of the Nation of Picardy, with his wife on the saddle behind him.”    110   
  “Post equitem sedet atra cura.” 11    111   
  “Good-day to you, Monsieur the Elector!”    112   
  “Good-night to you, Madame the Electress!”    113   
  “Lucky dogs to be able to see all that!” sighed Joannes de Molendino, still perched among the acanthus leaves of his capital.    114   
  Meanwhile the bookseller of the University, Maître Andry Musnier, leaned over and whispered to the Court furrier, Maître Gilles Lecornu:    115   
  “I tell you, monsieur, ’tis the end of the world. Never has there been such unbridled license among the scholars. It all comes of these accursed inventions—they ruin everything—the artillery, the culverine, the blunderbuss, and above all, printing, that second pestilence brought us from Germany. No more manuscripts—no more books! Printing gives the death-blow to bookselling. It is the beginning of the end.”    116   
  “I, too, am well aware of it by the increasing preference for velvet stuffs,” said the furrier.    117   
  At that moment it struck twelve.    118   
  A long-drawn “Ah!” went up from the crowd.    119   
  The scholars held their peace. There ensued a general stir and upheaval, a great shuffling of feet and movement of heads, much coughing and blowing of noses; everyone resettled himself, rose on tip-toe, placed himself in the most favourable position obtainable. Then deep silence, every neck outstretched, every mouth agape, every eye fixed on the marble table. Nothing appeared; only the four sergeants were still at their posts, stiff and motionless as four painted statues. Next, all eyes turned towards the platform reserved for the Flemish envoys. The door remained closed and the platform empty. Since daybreak the multitude had been waiting for three things—the hour of noon, the Flemish ambassadors, and the Mystery-Play. Noon alone had kept the appointment. It was too bad. They waited one, two, three, five minutes—a quarter of an hour—nothing happened. Then anger followed on the heels of impatience; indignant words flew hither and thither, though in suppressed tones as yet. “The Mystery, the Mystery!” they murmured sullenly. The temper of the crowd began to rise rapidly. The warning growls of the gathering storm rumbled overhead. It was Jehan Du Moulin who struck out the first flash.    120   
  “Let’s have the Mystery, and the devil take the Flemings!” he cried at the pitch of his voice, coiling himself about his pillar like a serpent.    121   
  The multitude clapped its approval.    122   
  “The Mystery, the Mystery!” they repeated, “and to the devil with all Flanders!”    123   
  “Give us the Mystery at once,” continued the scholar, “or it’s my advice we hang the provost of the Palais by way of both Comedy and Morality.”    124   
  “Well said!” shouted the crowd, “and let’s begin the hanging by stringing up his sergeants.”    125   
  A great roar of applause followed. The four poor devils grew pale and glanced apprehensively at one another. The multitude surged towards them, and they already saw the frail wooden balustrade that formed the only barrier between them and the crowd bulge and give way under the pressure from without.    126   
  The moment was critical.    127   
  “At them! At them!” came from all sides.    128   
  At that instant the curtain of the dressing-room we have described was raised to give passage to a personage, the mere sight of whom suddenly arrested the crowd, and, as if by magic, transformed its anger into curiosity.    129   
  “Silence! Silence!”    130   
  But slightly reassured and trembling in every limb, the person in question advanced to the edge of the marble table with a profusion of bows, which, the nearer he approached, assumed more and more the character of genuflections.    131   
  By this time quiet had been gradually restored, and there only remained that faint hum which always rises out of the silence of a great crowd.    132   
  “Messieurs the bourgeois,” he began, “and Mesdemoiselles the bourgeoises, we shall have the honour of declaiming and performing before his Eminence Monsieur the Cardinal a very fine Morality entitled ‘The Good Judgment of Our Lady the Virgin Mary.’ I play Jupiter. His Eminence accompanies at this moment the most honourable Embassy of the Duke of Austria, just now engaged in listening to the harangue of Monsieur the Rector of the University at the Porte Baudets. As soon as the Most Reverend the Cardinal arrives we will commence.”    133   
  Certainly nothing less than the direct intervention of Jupiter could have saved the four unhappy sergeants of the provost of the Palais from destruction. Were we so fortunate as to have invented this most veracious history and were therefore liable to be called to task for it by Our Lady of Criticism, not against us could the classical rule be cited, Nec deus intersit.    134   
  For the rest, the costume of Seigneur Jupiter was very fine, and had contributed not a little towards soothing the crowd by occupying its whole attention. Jupiter was arrayed in a “brigandine” or shirt of mail of black velvet thickly studded with gilt nails, on his head was a helmet embellished with silver-gilt buttons, and but for the rouge and the great beard which covered respectively the upper and lower half of his face, but for the roll of gilded pasteboard in his hand studded with iron spikes and bristling with jagged strips of tinsel, which experienced eyes at once recognised as the dread thunder-bolt, and were it not for his flesh-coloured feet, sandalled and beribboned à la Grecque, you would have been very apt to mistake him for one of M. de Berry’s company of Breton archers.    135   


Note 1.  Notre Dame de Paris was begun July 30, 1830. [back]   
Note 2.  The term Gothic used in its customary sense is quite incorrect, but is hallowed by tradition. We accept it, therefore, and use it like the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the latter half of the Middle Ages, of which the pointed arch forms the central idea, and which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the round arch is the Derailing feature.—AUTHOR’S NOTE. [back]   
Note 3. 
           In truth it was a sorry game   
  When in Paris Dame Justice,   
  Having gorged herself with spice,   
Set all her palace in a flame.   
The application of these lines depends, unfortunately, on an untranslatable play on the word ´pice, which means both spice and lawyers’ fees. [back]   
Note 4.  Old French money was reckoned according to two standards, that of Paris (parisis) and Tours (tournois); the livre parisis, the old franc, having twenty-five sols or sous, and the livre tournois twenty sols.—TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. [back]   
Note 5.  Cuckold. [back]   
Note 6.  Horned and hairy. [back]   
Note 7.  Thibaut, thou gamester. [back]   
Note 8.  Thibaut towards losses. [back]   
Note 9.  A pun. Thibaut aux dès; i. e., Thibaut with the dice. [back]   
Note 10.  Freely translated: There’ll be rotten apples thrown at heads to-day. [back]   
Note 11.  Behind the rider sits black care. [back]

Book I   
II. Pierre Gringoire   
     
UNFORTUNATELY, the admiration and satisfaction so universally excited by his costume died out during his harangue, and when he reached the unlucky concluding words, “As soon as his Reverence the Cardinal arrives, we will begin,” his voice was drowned in a tempest of hooting.      1   
  “Begin on the spot! The Mystery, the Mystery at once!” shouted the audience, the shrill voice of Joannes de Molendino sounding above all the rest, and piercing the general uproar like the fife in a charivari at Nimes.      2   
  “Begin!” piped the boy.      3   
  “Down with Jupiter and the Cardinal de Bourbon!” yelled Robin Poussepain and the other scholars perched on the window-sill.      4   
  “The Morality!” roared the crowd. “At once—on the spot. The sack and the rope for the players and the Cardinal!”      5   
  Poor Jupiter, quaking, bewildered, pale beneath his rogue, dropped his thunder-blot and took his helmet in his hand; then bowing and trembling: “His Eminence,” he stammered, “the Ambassadors—Madame Marguerite of Flanders—” he could get no farther. Truth to tell, he was afraid of being hanged by the populance for beginning too late, hanged by the Cardinal for being too soon; on either side he beheld an abyss—that is to say, a gibbet.      6   
  Mercifully some one arrived upon the scene to extricate him from the dilemma and assume the responsibility.      7   
  An individual standing inside the balustrade in the space left clear round the marble table, and whom up till now no one had noticed, so effectually was his tall and spare figure concealed from view by the thickness of the pillar against which he leaned—this person, thin, sallow, light-haired, young still, though furrowed of brow and cheek, with gleaming eye and smiling mouth, clad in black serge threadbare and shiny with age, now approached the marble table and signed to the wretched victim. But the other was too perturbed to notice.      8   
  The newcomer advanced a step nearer. “Jupiter,” said he, “my dear Jupiter.”      9   
  The other heard nothing.     10   
  At last the tall young man losing patience, shouted almost in his face: “Michel Giborne!”     11   
  “Who calls?” said Jupiter, starting as if from a trance.     12   
  “It is I,” answered the stranger in black.     13   
  “Ah!” said Jupiter.     14   
  “Begin at once,” went on the other. “Do you content the people—I will undertake to appease Monsieur the provost, who, in his turn, will appease Monsieur the Cardinal.”     15   
  Jupiter breathed again.     16   
  “Messeigneurs the bourgeois,” he shouted with all the force of his lungs to the audience, which had not ceased to hoot him, “we are going to begin.”     17   
  “Evoe Jupiter! Plaudite cives!” 1 yelled the scholars.     18   
  “Noël! Noël!” shouted the people.     19   
  There was a deafening clapping of hands, and the Hall still rocked with plaudits after Jupiter had retired behind his curtain.     20   
  Meanwhile the unknown personage who had so magically transformed the storm into a calm, had modestly re-entered the penumbra of his pillar, where doubtless he would have remained, unseen, unheard, and motionless as before, had he not been lured out of it by two young women who, seated in the first row of spectators, had witnessed his colloquy with Michel Giborne—Jupiter.     21   
  “Maître,” said one of them, beckoning to him to come nearer.     22   
  “Hush, my dear Liénarde,” said her companion, a pretty, rosy-cheeked girl, courageous in the consciousness of her holiday finery, “he doesn’t belong to the University—he’s a layman. You mustn’t say ‘Maître’ to him, you must say ‘Messire.’”     23   
  “Messire,” resumed Liénarde.     24   
  The stranger approached the balustrade.     25   
  “What can I do for you, mesdemoiselles?” he asked eagerly.     26   
  “Oh, nothing!” said Liénarde, all confused; “it is my neighbour, Gisquette la Gencienne, who wants to speak to you.”     27   
  “Not at all,” said Gisquette, blushing, “it was Liénarde who called you ‘Maitre,’ and I told her she ought to say ‘Messire.”’     28   
  The two girls cast down their eyes. The stranger, nothing loath to start a conversation with them, looked at them smilingly.     29   
  “So you have nothing to say to me, ladies?”     30   
  “Oh, nothing at all,” Gisquette declared.     31   
  “No, nothing,” added Liénarde.     32   
  The tall young man made as if to retire, but the two inquiring damsels were not inclined to let him go so soon.     33   
  “Messire,” began Gisquette with the impetuous haste of a woman taking a resolve, “it appears you are acquainted with the soldier who is going to play the part of Madame the Virgin in the Mystery.”     34   
  “You mean the part of Jupiter,” returned the unknown.     35   
  “Yes, of course!” said Liénarde. “Isn’t she stupid? So you know Jupiter?”     36   
  “Michel Giborne? Yes, madame.”     37   
  “He has a splendid beard,” said Liénarde.     38   
  “Will it be very fine what they are going to say?” asked Gisquette shyly.     39   
  “Extremely fine, mademoiselle,” responded the unknown without the slightest hesitation.     40   
  “What is it to be?” asked Liénarde.     41   
  “‘The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin,’ a Morality, an it please you, mademoiselle.”     42   
  “Ah! that’s different,” rejoined Liénarde.     43   
  A short silence ensued. It was broken by the young man.     44   
  “It is an entirely new Morality,” said he, “and has never been used before.”     45   
  “Then it is not the same as they gave two years ago on the day of the entry of Monsieur the Legate, in which there were three beautiful girls to represent certain personages——”     46   
  “Sirens,” said Liénarde.     47   
  “And quite naked,” added the young man.     48   
  Liénarde modestly cast down her eyes. Gisquette glanced at her and then followed her example.     49   
  “It was a very pleasant sight,” continued the young man, unabashed. “But the Morality to-day was composed expressly for Madame the Lady of Flanders.”     50   
  “Will they sing any bergerettes?” asked Gisquette.     51   
  “Fie!” exclaimed the unknown; “love-songs in a Morality? The different sorts of plays must not be confounded. Now, if it were sotie, 2 well and good——”     52   
  “What a pity!” returned Gisquette. “That day at the Ponceau fountain there were wild men and women who fought with one another and formed themselves into different groups, singing little airs and love-songs.”     53   
  “What is suitable for a legate,” remarked the unknown dryly, “would not be seemly for a princess.”     54   
  “And close by,” Liénarde went on, “a number of deep-toned instruments played some wonderful melodies.”     55   
  “And for the refreshment of the passer-by,” added Gisquette, “the fountains spouted wine and milk and hypocras from three mouths, and every one drank that would.”     56   
  “And a little below the Ponceau fountain at the Trinité,” continued Liénarde, “there was a Passion Play acted without words.”     57   
  “Yes, so there was!” cried Gisquette. “Our Lord on the cross and the two thieves to right and left of him.”     58   
  Here the two friends, warming to the recollection of the legate’s entry, both began talking at once. “And farther on, at the Porte-aux-Peintres were other persons very richly dressed”     59   
  “And at the Fountain of the Holy Innocents, that huntsman pursuing a hind with great barking of dogs and blowing of horns.”     60   
  “And near the slaughter-house of Paris, that wooden erection representing the fortress of Dieppe.”     61   
  “And you remember, Gisquette, just as the legate passed they sounded the assault, and all the English had their throats cut.”     62   
  “And near the Châtelet Gate were some very fine figures.”     63   
  “And on the Pont-au-Change, too, which was all hung with draperies.”     64   
  “And when the legate passed over it they let fly more than two hundred dozen birds of all kinds. That was beautiful, Liénarde!”     65   
  “It will be far finer to-day,” broke in their interlocutor at last, who had listened to them with evident impatience.     66   
  “You can promise us that this Mystery will be a fine one?” said Gisquette.     67   
  “Most assuredly I can,” he replied; then added with a certain solemnity, “Mesdemoiselles, I am myself the author of it.”     68   
  “Truly?” exclaimed the girls in amazement.     69   
  “Yes, truly,” asserted the poet with conscious pride. “That is to say, there are two of us—Jehan Marchand, who sawed the planks and put up the wooden structure of the theatre, and I, who wrote the piece. My name is Pierre Gringoire.”     70   
  Not with greater pride could the author of the Cid have said, “I am Pierre Corneille.”     71   
  Our readers cannot have failed to note that some time had elapsed between the moment at which Jupiter withdrew behind the curtain, and that at which the author thus abruptly revealed himself to the unsophisticated admiration of Gisquette and Liénarde. Strange to say, all this crowd, so tumultuous but a few minutes ago, were now waiting patiently with implicit faith in the player’s word. A proof of the everlasting truth still demonstrated in our theatres, that the best means of making the public wait patiently is to assure them that the performance is about to begin.     72   
  However, the scholar Joannes was not so easily lulled. “Holà!” he shouted suddenly into the midst of the peaceful expectation which had succeeded the uproar, “Jupiter! Madame the Virgin! Ye devil’s mountebanks! would you mock us? The piece! the piece. Do you begin this moment, or we will——”     73   
  This was enough. Immediately a sound of music from high-and low-pitched instruments was heard underneath the structure, the curtain was raised, four party-coloured and painted figures issued from it, and clambering up the steep ladder on to the upper platform, ranged themselves in a row fronting the audience, whom they greeted with a profound obeisance. The symphony then ceased. The Mystery began.     74   
  After receiving ample meed of applause in return for their bows, the four characters proceeded, amid profound silence, to deliver a prologue which we willingly spare the reader. Besides, just as in our own day, the public was far more interested in the costumes the actors wore than the parts they enacted—and therein they chose the better part.     75   
  All four were attired in party-coloured robes, half yellow, half white, differing from one another only in material; the first being of gold and silver brocade, the second of silk, the third of woollen stuff, the fourth of linen. The first of these figures carried a sword in his right hand, the second two golden keys, the third a pair of scales, the fourth a spade; and for the benefit of such sluggish capacities as might have failed to penetrate the transparency of these attributes, on the hem of the brocade robe was embroidered in enormous black letters, “I am Nobility,” on the silk one “I am Clergy,” on the woollen one “I am Commerce,” on the linen one “I am Labour.” The sex of the two male allegories was plainly indicated by the comparative shortness of their tunics and their Phrygian caps, whereas the female characters wore robes of ample length and hoods on their heads.     76   
  It would also have required real perverseness not to have understood from the poetic imagery of the prologue that Labour was espoused to Commerce, and Clergy to Nobility, and that the two happy couples possessed between them a magnificent golden dolphin (dauphin) which they proposed to adjudge only to the most beautiful damsel. Accordingly, they were roaming the world in search of this Fair One, and, after rejecting successively the Queen of Golconda, the Princess of Trebizonde, the daughter of the Grand Khan of Tartary, etc., etc., Labour and Commerce, Clergy and Nobility, had come to rest themselves awhile on the marble table of the Palais de Justice, and to deliver themselves before an honoured audience of a multitude of sententious phrases, moral maxims, sophisms, flowers of speech, as were freely dispensed in those days by the Faculty of Arts or at the examinations at which the Masters took their degree.     77   
  All this was, in effect, very fine.     78   
  Meanwhile, in all that crowd over which the four allegorical figures were pouring out floods of metaphor, no ear was more attentive, no heart more palpitating, no eye more eager, no neck more outstretched than the eye, the ear, the heart, the neck of the poet-author, our good Pierre Gringoire, who but a little while before had been unable to resist the joy of revealing his name to a couple of pretty girls. He had retired again behind his pillar, a few paces from them, where he stood gazing, listening, relishing. The favourable applause which had greeted the opening of his prologue was still thrilling through his vitals; and he was completely carried away by that kind of contemplative ecstasy with which the dramatic author follows his ideas as they drop one by one from the lips of the actor amid the silence of a vast audience. Happy Pierre Gringoire!     79   
  Sad to say, however, this first ecstasy was but of short duration. Scarcely had Gringoire raised this intoxicating cup of triumph and delight to his lips than a drop of bitterness came to mingle with it.     80   
  A beggar, a shocking tatterdemalion, too tightly squeezed in among the crowd to be able to collect his usual harvest, or, in all probability, had not found sufficient to indemnify himself in the pockets of his immediate neighbours, had conceived the bright idea of perching himself in some conspicuous spot from whence he might attract the gaze and the alms of the benevolent.     81   
  To this end, during the opening lines of the prologue, he had managed to hoist himself up by the pillars of the reserved platform on to the cornice which projected around the foot of its balustrade, where he seated himself, soliciting the attention and the pity of the throng by his rags and a hideous sore covering his right arm. He did not, however, utter a word.     82   
  The silence he preserved allowed of the prologue proceeding without let or hindrance, nor would any noticeable disturbance have occurred if, as luck would have it, the scholar Jehan had not, from his own high perch, espied the beggar and his antics. A wild fit of laughter seized the graceless young rascal, and, unconcerned at interrupting the performance and distracting the attention of the audience, he cried delightedly:     83   
  “Oh, look at that old fraud over there begging!”     84   
  Any one who has ever thrown a stone into a frog-pond, or fired into a covey of birds, will have some idea of the effect of these incongruous words breaking in upon the all-pervading quiet. Gringoire started as if he had received an electric shock. The prologue broke off short, and all heads turned suddenly towards the beggar, who, far from being disconcerted, only saw in this incident an excellent opportunity for gathering a harvest, and at once began whining in a piteous voice with half-closed eyes: “Charity, I pray you!”     85   
  “Why, upon my soul!” cried Jehan, “if it isn’t Clopin Trouillefou! Holà! friend, so thy sore was troublesome on thy leg that thou hast removed it to thine arm?” and so saying, with the dexterity of a monkey he tossed a small silver piece into the greasy old beaver which the beggar held out with his diseased arm. The man received both alms and sarcasm without wincing, and resumed his doleful petition: “Charity, I pray you!”     86   
  This episode had distracted the audience not a little, and a good many of the spectators, Robin Poussepain and the rest of the students at the head, delightedly applauded this absurd duet improvised in the middle of the prologue between the scholar with his shrill, piping voice, and the beggar with his imperturbable whine.     87   
  Gringoire was seriously put out. Recovering from his first stupefaction, he pulled himself together hurriedly and shouted to the four actors on the stage: “Go on! que diable! go on!” without deigning even a glance of reprobation at the two brawlers.     88   
  At that moment he felt a pluck at the edge of his surcoat, and turning round, not in the best of humours, he forced an unwilling smile to his lips, for it was the pretty hand of Gisquette la Gencienne thrust through the balustrade and thus soliciting his attention.     89   
  “Monsieur,” said the girl, “are they going on?”     90   
  “To be sure,” Gringoire replied, half offended by the question.     91   
  “In that case, messire,” she continued, “will you of your courtesy explain to me——”     92   
  “What they are going to say?” broke in Gringoire. “Well, listen.”     93   
  “No,” said Gisquette; “but what they have already said.”     94   
  Gringoire started violently like a man touched in an open wound. “A pestilence on the witless little dunce!” he muttered between his teeth; and from that moment Gisquette was utterly lost in his estimation.     95   
  Meanwhile the actors had obeyed his injunction, and the public, seeing that they were beginning to speak, resettled itself to listen; not, however, without having lost many a beautiful phrase in the soldering of the two parts of the piece which had so abruptly been cut asunder. Gringoire reflected bitterly on this fact. However, tranquillity had gradually been restored, Jehan was silent, the beggar was counting the small change in his hat, and the play had once more got the upper hand.     96   
  Sooth to say, it was a very fine work which, it seems to us, might well be turned to account even now with a few modifications. The exposition, perhaps somewhat lengthy and dry, but strictly according to prescribed rules, was simple, and Gringoire, in the inner sanctuary of his judgment, frankly admired its perspicuity.     97   
  As one might very well suppose, the four allegorical personages were somewhat fatigued after having travelled over three parts of the globe without finding an opportunity of disposing suitably of their golden dolphin. Thereupon, a long eulogy on the marvellous fish, with a thousand delicate allusions to the young betrothed of Marguerite of Flanders—who at that moment was languishing in dismal seclusion at Amboise, entirely unaware that Labour and Clergy, Nobility and Commerce, had just made the tour of the world on his behalf. The said dolphin, then, was handsome, was young, was brave; above all (splendid origin of all the royal virtues) he was the son of the Lion of France. Now I maintain that this bold metaphor is admirable, and the natural history of the stage has no occasion on a day of allegory and royal epithalamium to take exception at a dolphin who is son to a lion. These rare and Pindaric combinations merely prove the poet’s enthusiasm. Nevertheless, in justice to fair criticism be it said, the poet might have developed this beautiful idea in less than two hundred lines. On the other hand, by the arrangements of Monsieur the Provost, the Mystery was to last from noon till four o’clock, and they were obliged to say something. Besides, the people listened very patiently.     98   
  Suddenly, in the very middle of a quarrel between Dame Commerce and my Lady Nobility, and just as Labour was pronouncing this wonderful line:
           “Beast more triumphant ne’er in woods I’ve seen,”   
the door of the reserved platform which up till then had remained inopportunely closed, now opened still more inopportunely, and the stentorian voice of the usher announced “His Eminence Monseigneur the Cardinal de Bourbon!”     99   


Note 1.  Hail, Jupiter! Citizens, applaud! [back]   
Note 2.  A satirical play very much in vogue during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. [back]

Book I   
III. The Cardinal   
     
ALAS, poor Gringoire! The noise of the double petards let off on Saint-John’s Day, a salvo of twenty arque-buses, the thunder of the famous culverin of the Tour de Billy, which on September 29, 1465, during the siege of Paris, killed seven Burgundians at a blow, the explosion of the whole stock of gunpowder stored at the Temple Gate would have assailed his ears less rudely at this solemn and dramatic moment than those few words from the lips of the usher: “His Eminence the Cardinal de Bourbon!”      1   
  Not that Pierre Gringoire either feared the Cardinal or despised him; he was neither so weak nor so presumptuous. A true eclectic, as nowadays he would be called, Gringoire was of those firm and elevated spirits, moderate and calm, who ever maintain an even balance—stare in dimidio rerum—and who are full of sense and liberal philosophy, to whom Wisdom, like another Ariadne, seems to have given a ball of thread which they have gone on unwinding since the beginning of all things through the labyrinthine paths of human affairs. One comes upon them in all ages and ever the same; that is to say, ever conforming to the times. And without counting our Pierre Gringoire, who would represent them in the fifteenth century if we could succeed in conferring on him the distinction he merits, it was certainly their spirit which inspired Father de Bruel in the sixteenth century, when he wrote the following sublimely naïve words, worthy of all ages: “I am Parisian by nation, and parrhisian by speech, since parrhisia in Greek signifies freedom of speech, which freedom I have used even towards Messeigneurs the Cardinals, uncle and brother to Monseigneur the Prince de Conty: albeit with due respect for their high degree and without offending any one of their train, which is saying much.”      2   
  There was therefore neither dislike of the Cardinal nor contemptuous indifference to his presence in the unpleasing impression made on Gringoire. Quite the contrary; for our poet had too much common sense and too threadbare a doublet not to attach particular value to the fact that many an allusion in his prologue, and more especially the glorification of the dolphin, son of the Lion of France, would fall upon the ear of an Eminentissime. But self-interest is not the predominating quality in the noble nature of the poet. Supposing the entity of the poet to be expressed by the number ten, it is certain that a chemist in analyzing and “pharmacopœizing” it, as Rabelais terms it, would find it to be composed of one part self-interest to nine parts of self-esteem. Now, at the moment when the door opened for the Cardinal’s entry, Gringoire’s nine parts of self-esteem, swollen and inflated by the breath of popular admiration, were in a state of prodigious enlargement, obliterating that almost imperceptible molecule of self-interest which we just now pointed out as a component part of the poet’s constitution—a priceless ingredient, be it said, the ballast of common sense and humanity, without which they would forever wander in the clouds. Gringoire was revelling in the delights of seeing, of, so to speak, touching, an entire assemblage (common folk, it is true, but what of that?) stunned, petrified, suffocated almost by the inexhaustible flow of words which poured down upon them from every point of his epithalamium.      3   
  I affirm that he shared in the general beatitude, and that, unlike La Fontaine, who, at the performance of his comedy Florentin, inquired, “What bungler wrote this balderdash?” Gringoire would gladly have asked his neighbours, “Who is the author of this master-piece?” Judge, therefore, of the effect produced on him by the abrupt and ill-timed arrival of the Cardinal.      4   
  And his worst fears were but too fully realized. The entry of his Eminence set the whole audience in commotion. Every head was turned towards the gallery. You could not hear yourself speak. “The Cardinal! The Cardinal!” resounded from every mouth. For the second time the unfortunate prologue came to an abrupt stop.      5   
  The Cardinal halted for a moment on the threshold of the platform, and while he cast a glance of indifference over the crowd the uproar increased. Each one wanted a good view, and strained to raise his head above his neighbour’s.      6   
  And in truth he was a very exalted personage, the sight of whom was worth any amount of Mysteries. Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon, Archbishop and Count of Lyons, Primate of all Gaul was related to Louis XI through his brother, Pierre, Lord of Beaujeu, who had married the King’s eldest daughter, and to Charles the Bold through his mother, Agnes of Burgundy. The dominant trait, the prevailing and most striking feature in the character of the Primate of Gaul, was his courtier spirit and unswerving devotion to the powers that be. One may imagine the innumerable perplexities in which these two relationships involved him, and through what temporal shoals he had to steer his spiritual bark in order to avoid being wrecked either on Louis or on Charles, that Scylla and Charybdis which had swallowed up both the Duke of Nemours and the Constable of Saint-Pol. Heaven be praised, however, he had managed the voyage well, and had come safely to anchor in Rome without mishap. Yet, although he was in port, and precisely because he was in port, he never recalled without a qualm of uneasiness the many changes and chances of his long and stormy political voyage, and he often said that the year 1476 had been for him both black and white; meaning that in that year he had lost his mother, the Duchess of Bourbonnais, and his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, and that the one death had consoled him for the other.      7   
  For the rest, he was a proper gentleman; led the pleasant life befitting a cardinal, was ever willing to make merry on the royal vintage of Chaillot, had no objection to Richarde de la Garmoise and Thomasse la Saillarde, would rather give alms to a pretty girl than an old woman, for all of which reasons he was high in favour with the populace of Paris. He was always surrounded by a little court of bishops and abbots of high degree, gay and sociable gentlemen, never averse to a thorough good dinner; and many a time had the pious gossips of Saint-Germain d’Auxerre been scandalized in passing at night under the lighted windows of the Hôtel de Bourbon, to hear the selfsame voices which erstwhile had chanted vespers for them now trolling out, to the jingle of glasses, the bacchanalian verses of Benedict XII (the Pope who added the third crown to the tiara) beginning “Bibamus papaliter” (Let us drink like Popes).      8   
  Without doubt it was this well-earned popularity which saved him from any demonstration of ill-will on the part of the crowd, so dissatisfied but a moment before, and but little disposed to evince respect towards a Cardinal on the very day they were going to elect a Pope of their own. But the Parisians bear very little malice; besides, having forced the performance to commence of their own authority, they had worsted the Cardinal, and their victory sufficed them. Moreover, Monseigneur was a handsome man, and he wore his handsome red robe excellently well; which is equivalent to saying that he had all the women, and consequently the greater part of the audience, on his side. Decidedly it would have shown great want both of justice and of good taste to hoot a Cardinal for coming late to the play, when he is a handsome man and wears his red robe with so handsome an air.      9   
  He entered then, greeted the audience with that smile which the great instinctively bestow upon the people, and slowly directed his steps towards his chair of scarlet velvet, his mind obviously preoccupied by some very different matter. His train, or what we should now call his staff, of bishops and abbots, streamed after him on to the platform, greatly increasing the disturbance and the curiosity down among the spectators. Each one was anxious to point them out or name them, to show that he knew at least one of them; some pointing to the Bishop of Marseilles—Alaudet, if I remember right—some to the Dean of Saint-Denis, other again to Robert de Lespinasse, Abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the dissolute brother of a mistress of Louis XI, all with much ribald laughter and scurrilous jesting.     10   
  As for the scholars, they swore like troopers. This was their own especial day, their Feast of Fools, their Saturnalia, the annual orgy of the Basoche 1 and the University—no turpitude, no foulness of language but was right and proper to that day. Besides, there was many a madcap light o’ love down in the crowd to spur them on—Simone Quatrelivres, Agnès la Gadine, Robine Piédebou. It was the least that could be expected, that they should be allowed to curse at their ease and blaspheme a little on so joyful an occasion and in such good company—churchmen and courtesans. Nor did they hesitate to take full advantage thereof, and into the midst of the all-prevailing hubbub there poured an appalling torrent of blasphemies and enormities of every description from these clerks and scholars, tongue-tied all the rest of the year through fear of the branding-iron of Saint-Louis. Poor Saint-Louis, they were snapping their fingers at him in his own Palais de Justice. Each one of them had singled out among the new arrivals some cassock—black or gray, white or violet—Joannes Frollo de Molendino, as brother to an archdeacon, having audaciously assailed the red robe, fixing his bold eyes on the Cardinal and yelling at the pitch of his voice, “Cappa repleta mero!” Oh, cassock full of wine.     11   
  But all these details which we thus lay bare for the edification of the reader were so overborne by the general clamour that they failed altogether to reach the reserved platform. In any case the Cardinal would have taken but little heed of them, such license being entirely in keeping with the manners of the day. Besides, his mind was full of something else, as was evident by his preoccupied air; a cause of concern which followed close upon his heels and entered almost at the time with him on to the platform. This was the Flemish Embassy.     12   
  Not that he was a profound politician and thus concerned for the possible consequences of the marriage between his one cousin, Madame Marguerite of Burgundy, and his other cousin, the Dauphin Charles; little he cared how long the patched-up friendship between the Duke of Austria and the King of France would last, nor how the King of England would regard this slight offered to his daughter, and he drank freely each evening of the royal vintage of Chaillot, never dreaming that a few flagons of this same wine (somewhat revised and corrected, it is true), cordially presented to Edward IV by Louis XI, would serve one fine day to rid Louis XI of Edward IV. No, “the most honourable Embassy of Monsieur the Duke of Austria” brought none of these anxieties to the Cardinal’s mind; the annoyance came from another quarter. In truth, it was no small hardship, as we have already hinted at the beginning of this book, that he, Charles of Bourbon, should be forced to offer a courteous welcome and entertainment to a squad of unknown burghers; he, the Cardinal, receive mere sheriffs; he, the Frenchman, a polished bon-viveur, and these beer-drinking Flemish boors—and all this in public too! Faith, it was one of the most irksome parts he had ever had to play at the good pleasure of the King.     13   
  However, he had studied that part so well, that when the usher announced in sonorous tones, “Messieurs, the Envoys of Monsieur the Duke of Austria,” he turned towards the door with the most courteous grace in the world. Needless to say, every head in the Hall turned in the same direction.     14   
  Thereupon there entered, walking two and two, and with a gravity of demeanour which contrasted strongly with the flippant manner of the Cardinal’s ecclesiastical following, the forty-eight ambassadors of Maximilian of Austria, led by the Reverend Father in God, Jehan, Abbot of Saint-Bertin, Chancellor of the Golden Fleece, and Jacques de Goy, Sieur Dauby, baillie of Ghent. Deep silence fell upon the assemblage, only broken by suppressed titters at the uncouth names and bourgeois qualifications which each of these persons transmitted with imperturbable gravity to the usher who proceeded to hurl name and title unrecognisably mixed and mutilated, at the crowd below. There was Master Loys Roelof, Sheriff of the City of Louvain; Messire Clays d’Etuelde, Sheriff of Brussels; Messire Paul de Baeust, Sieur of Voirmizelle, President of Flanders; Master Jehan Coleghens, Burgomaster of the City of Antwerp; Master George de la Moere, High Sheriff of the Court of Law of the City of Ghent; Master Gheldolf van der Hage, High Sheriff to the Parchons, or Succession Offices of the same city; and the Sieur de Bierbecque, and Jehan Pinnock, and Jehan Dymaerzelle, and so on and so on; baillies, sheriffs, burgomasters; burgomasters, sheriffs, baillies; wooden, formal figures, stiff with velvet and damask, their heads covered by birettas of black velvet with great tassels of gold thread of Cyprus—good Flemish heads, nevertheless, dignified and sober faces, akin to those which stand out so strong and earnest from the dark background of Rembrandt’s “Night Round”; faces which all bore witness to the perspicacity of Maximilian of Austria in confiding “to the full,” as his manifesto ran, “in their good sense, valour, experience, loyalty, and high principles.”     15   
  There was one exception, however, a subtle, intelligent, crafty face, a curious mixture of the ape and the diplomatist, towards whom the Cardinal advanced three paces and bowed profoundly, but who, nevertheless, was simply named Guillaume Rym, Councillor and Pensionary 2 of the City of Ghent. Few people at that time recognised the true significance of Guillaume Rym. A rare genius who, in revolutionary times, would have appeared upon the surface of events, the fifteenth century compelled him to expend his fine capacities on underground intrigue—to live in the saps, as Saint-Simon expresses it. For the rest, he found full appreciation with the first “sapper” of Europe, being intimately associated with Louis XI in his plots, and often had a hand in the secret machinations of the King. All of which things were entirely beyond the ken of the multitude, who were much astonished at the deferential politeness of the Cardinal towards this insignificant-looking little Flemish functionary.     16   


Note 1.  The company and jurisdiction of the Paris lawyers, founded 1303. [back]   
Note 2.  Title, in those days, of the first Minister of State in Holland. [back]

Book I   
IV. Master Jacques Coppenole   
     
WHILE the Pensionary of Ghent and his Eminence were exchanging very low bows and a few words in a tone still lower, a tall man, large-featured and of powerful build, prepared to enter abreast with Guillaume Rym—the mastiff with the fox—his felt hat and leathern jerkin contrasting oddly with all the surrounding velvet and silk. Presuming that it was some groom gone astray, the usher stopped him:      1   
  “Hold, friend, this is not your way!”      2   
  The man in the leathern jerkin shouldered him aside.      3   
  “What does the fellow want of me?” said he in a voice which drew the attention of the entire Hall to the strange colloquy; “seest not that I am one of them?”      4   
  “Your name?” demanded the usher.      5   
  “Jacques Coppenole.”      6   
  “Your degree?”      7   
  “Hosier, at the sign of the ‘Three Chains’ in Ghent.”      8   
  The usher recoiled. To announce sheriff and burgomaster was bad enough; but a hosier—no, that passed all bounds!      9   
  The Cardinal was on thorns. Everybody was staring and listening. For two whole days had his Eminence been doing his utmost to lick these Flemish bears into shape in order to make them somewhat presentable in public—this contretemps was a rude shock.     10   
  Meanwhile Guillaume Rym turned to the usher and with his diplomatic smile, “Announce Maître Jacques Coppenole, Clerk to the Sheriffs of the City of Ghent,” he whispered to him very softly.     11   
  “Usher,” added the Cardinal loudly, “announce Maître Jacques Coppenole, Clerk to the Sheriffs of the illustrious City of Ghent.”     12   
  This was a mistake. Left to himself, Guillaume Rym would have dexterously settled the difficulty; but Coppenole had heard the Cardinal.     13   
  “No, Croix-Dieu!” he said in a voice of thunder, “Jacques Coppenole, hosier. Hearest thou, usher? Nothing more, nothing less! God’s cross! Hosier is as fine a title as any other! Many a time Monsieur the Archduke has looked for his glove 1 among my hose!”     14   
  There was a roar of laughter and applause. A pun is instantly taken up in Paris, and never fails of applause.     15   
  Add to this that Coppenole was one of the people, and that the throng beneath him was also composed of the people, wherefore, the understanding between them and him had been instantaneous, electric, and, so to speak, from the same point of view. The Flemish hosier’s high and mighty way of putting down the courtiers stirred in these plebeian breasts a certain indefinable sense of self-respect, vague and embryonic as yet in the fifteenth century. And this hosier, who just now had held his own so stoutly before the Cardinal, was one of themselves—a most comfortable reflection to poor devils accustomed to pay respect and obedience to the servants of the servants of the Abbot of Sainte-Geneviéve, the Cardinal’s train-bearer.     16   
  Coppenole saluted his Eminence haughtily, who courteously returned the greeting of the all-powerful burgher, whom even Louis XI feared. Then, while Guillaume Rym, “that shrewd and malicious man,” as Philippe de Comines says, followed them both with a mocking and supercilious smile, each sought their appointed place, the Cardinal discomfited and anxious, Coppenole calm and dignified, and thinking no doubt that after all his little of hosier was as good as any other, and that Mary of Burgundy, the mother of that Margaret whose marriage Coppenole was helping to arrange, would have feared him less as cardinal than as hosier. For it was not a cardinal who would have stirred up the people of Ghent against the favourites of the daughter of Charles the Bold, and no cardinal could have hardened the crowd with a word against her tears and entreaties when the Lady of Flanders came to supplicate her people for them, even at the foot of their scaffold; whereas the hosier had but to lift his leather-clad arm, and off went your heads my fine gentlemen, Seigneur Guy d’Hymbercourt and Chancellor Guillaume Hugonet!     17   
  Yet this was not all that was in store for the poor Cardinal; he was to drink to the dregs the cup of humiliation—the penalty of being in such low company.     18   
  The reader may perhaps remember the impudent mendicant who, at the beginning of the Prologue, had established himself upon the projection just below the Cardinal’s platform. The arrival of the illustrious guests had in nowise made him quit his position, and while prelates and ambassadors were packed on the narrow platform like Dutch herrings in a barrel, the beggar sat quite at his ease with his legs crossed comfortably on the architrave. It was a unique piece of insolence, but nobody had noticed it as yet, the attention of the public being directed elsewhere. For his part, he took no notice of what was going on, but kept wagging his head from side to side with the unconcern of a Neapolitan lazzarone, and mechanically repeating his droning appeal, “Charity, I pray you!” Certain it was, he was the only person in the whole vast audience who never even deigned to turn his head at the altercation between Coppenole and the usher. Now, it so chanced that the master hosier of Ghent, with whom the people were already so much in sympathy and on whom all eyes were fixed, came and seated himself in the first row on the platform, just above the beggar. What was the amazement of the company to see the Flemish ambassador, after examining the strange figure beneath him, lean over and clap the ragged shoulder amicably. The beggar turned—surprise, recognition, and pleasure beamed from the two faces—then, absolutely regardless of their surroundings, the hosier and the sham leper fell to conversing in low tones and hand clasped in hand, Clopin Trouillefou’s ragged arm against the cloth of gold draperies of the balustrade, looking like a caterpillar on an orange.     19   
  The novelty of this extraordinary scene excited such a stir of merriment in the Hall that the Cardinal’s attention was attracted. He bent forward, but being unable from where he sat to do more than catch a very imperfect glimpse of Trouillefou’s unsightly coat, he naturally imagined that it was merely a beggar asking alms, and, incensed at his presumption—     20   
  “Monsieur the Provost of the Palais, fling me this rascal into the river!” he cried.     21   
  “Croix-Dieu! Monsiegneur the Cardinal,” said Coppenole without leaving hold of Trouillefou’s hand, “it’s a friend of mine.”     22   
  “Noë! Noë!” shouted the crowd; and from that moment Master Coppenole enjoyed in Paris as in Ghent “great favour with the people, as men of his stamp always do,” says Philippe de Comines, “when they are thus indifferent to authority.”     23   
  The Cardinal bit his lip, then he leaned over to his neighbour, the Abbot of Sainte-Geneviève:     24   
  “Droll ambassadors these, whom Monsieur the Archduke sends to announce Madame Marguerite to us,” he said in a half whisper.     25   
  “Your Eminence wastes his courtesy on these Flemish hogs,” returned the Abbot. “Margaritas ante porcos.”     26   
  “Say rather,” retorted the Cardinal with a smile, “Porcos ante Margaritam.”     27   
  This little jeu de mots sent the whole cassocked court into ecstasies. The Cardinal’s spirits rose somewhat; he was quits now with Coppenole—he, too, had had a pun applauded.     28   
  And now, with such of our readers as have the power to generalize an image and an idea, as it is the fashion to say nowadays, permit us to ask if they are able to form a clear picture of the scene presented by the vast parallelogram of the great Hall at the moment to which we draw their attention. In the middle of the western wall is the magnificent and spacious platform draped with cloth of gold, entered by a small Gothic doorway, through which files a procession of grave and reverend personages whose names are announced in succession by the strident voice of the usher. The first benches are already occupied by a crowd of venerable figures muffled in robes of ermine, velvet, and scarlet cloth. Around this platform—on which reigns decorous silence—below, opposite, everywhere, the seething multitude, the continuous hum of voices, all eyes fixed on every face on the platform, a thousand muttered repetitions of each name. In truth, a curious spectacle and worthy of the attention of the spectators. But stay, what is that kind of erection at the opposite end of the Hall, having four party-coloured puppets on it and four others underneath; and who is that pale figure standing beside it clad in sombre black? Alas! dear reader, it is none other than Pierre Gringoire and his Prologue, both of which we had utterly forgotten.     29   
  And that is exactly what he had feared.     30   
  From the moment when the Cardinal entered, Gringoire had never ceased to exert himself to keep his Prologue above water. First he had vehemently urged the actors, who had faltered, and stopped short, to proceed and raise their voices; then, perceiving that nobody was listening to them, he stopped them again, and during the quarter of an hour the interruption had lasted had never ceased tapping his foot impatiently, fuming, calling upon Gisquette and Liénarde, urging those near him to insist on the continuation of the Prologue—in vain. Not one of them would transfer his attention from the Cardinal, the Embassy, the platform—the one centre of this vast radius of vision. It must also be admitted, and we say it with regret, that by the time his Eminence appeared on the scene and caused so marked a diversion, the audience was beginning to find the Prologue just a little tedious. After all, whether you looked at the platform or the marble table, the play was the same—the conflict between Labour and Clergy, Aristocracy and Commerce. And most of them preferred to watch these personages as they lived and breathed, elbowing each other in actual flesh and blood on the platform, in the Flemish Embassy, under the Cardinal’s robe or Coppenole’s leathern jerkin, than painted, tricked out, speaking in stilted verse, mere dummies stuffed into yellow and white tunics, as Gringoire represented them.     31   
  Nevertheless, seeing tranquillity somewhat restored, our poet bethought him of a stratagem which might have been the saving of the whole thing.     32   
  “Monsieur,” said he, addressing a man near him, a stout, worthy person with a long-suffering countenance, “now, how would it be if they were to begin it again?”     33   
  “What?” asked the man.     34   
  “Why, the Mystery,” said Gringoire.     35   
  “Just as you please,” returned the other.     36   
  This half consent was enough for Gringoire, and taking the business into his own hands, he began calling out, making himself as much one of the crowd as possible: “Begin the Mystery again! Begin again!”     37   
  “What the devil’s all the hubbub about down there?” said Joannes de Molendino (for Gringoire was making noise enough for half a dozen). “What, comrades, is the Mystery not finished and done with? They are going to begin again; that’s not fair!”     38   
  “No! no!” shouted the scholars in chorus. “Down with the Mystery—down with it!”     39   
  But Gringoire only multiplied himself and shouted the louder, “Begin again! begin again!”     40   
  These conflicting shouts at last attracted the attention of the Cardinal.     41   
  “Monsieur the Provost of the Palais,” said he to a tall man in black standing a few paces from him, “have these folk gone demented that they are making such an infernal noise?”     42   
  The Provost of the Palais was a sort of amphibious magistrate; the bat, as it were, of the judicial order, partaking at once of the nature of the rat and the bird, the judge and the soldier.     43   
  He approached his Eminence, and with no slight fear of his displeasure, explained in faltering accents the unseemly behaviour of the populace: how, the hour of noon having arrived before his Eminence, the players had been forced into commencing without waiting for his Eminence.     44   
  The Cardinal burst out laughing.     45   
  “By my faith, Monsieur the Rector of the University might well have done likewise. What say you Maître Guillaume Rym?”     46   
  “Monseigneur,” replied Rym, “let us be content with having missed half the play. That is so much gained at any rate.”     47   
  “Have the fellows permission to proceed with their mummeries?” inquired the Provost.     48   
  “Oh, proceed, proceed,” returned the Cardinal; “’tis all one to me. Meanwhile I can be reading my breviary.”     49   
  The Provost advanced to the front of the platform, and after obtaining silence by a motion of the hand, called out:     50   
  “Burghers, country and townsfolk, to satisfy those who desire the play should begin again and those who desire it should finish, his Eminence orders that it should continue.”     51   
  Thus both parties had to be content. Nevertheless, both author and audience long bore the Cardinal a grudge in consequence.     52   
  The persons on the stage accordingly resumed the thread of their discourse, and Gringoire hoped that at least the remainder of his great work would get a hearing. But this hope was doomed to speedy destruction like his other illusions. Silence had indeed been established to a certain extent, but Gringoire had not observed that when the Cardinal gave the order for the Mystery to proceed, the platform was far from being filled, and that the Flemish ambassadors were followed by other persons belonging to the rest of the cortège, whose names and titles, hurled intermittently by the usher into the midst of his dialogue, caused considerable havoc therein. Imagine the effect in a drama of to-day of the doorkeeper bawling between the lines, or even between the first two halves of an alexandrine, such parentheses as these:     53   
  “Maître Jacques Charmolue, Procurator of the King in the Ecclesiastical Court!”     54   
  “Jehan de Harlay, Esquire, Officer of the Mounted Night Watch of the City of Paris!”     55   
  “Messire Galiot de Genoilhac, Knight, Lord of Brussac, Chief of the King’s Artillery!”     56   
  “Maître Dreux-Raguier, Inspector of Waters and Forests of our Lord the King, throughout the lands of France, Champagne, and Brie!”     57   
  “Messire Louis de Graville, Knight, Councillor and Chamberlain to the King, Admiral of France, Ranger of the Forest of Vincennes!”     58   
  “Maître Denis le Mercier, Custodian to the House for the Blind in Paris!” etc., etc., etc.     59   
  It was insufferable.     60   
  This peculiar accompaniment, which made it so difficult to follow the piece, was the more exasperating to Gringoire as he was well aware that the interest increased rapidly as the work advanced, and that it only wanted hearing to be a complete success. It would indeed be difficult to imagine a plot more ingeniously and dramatically constructed. The four characters of the Prologue were still engaged in bewailing their hopeless dilemma when Venus herself, vera incessu patuit dea, appeared before them, wearing a splendid robe emblazoned with the ship of the city of Paris. 2 She had come to claim for herself the dolphin promised to the Most Fair. She had the support of Jupiter, whose thunder was heard rumbling in the dressing-room, and the goddess was about to bear away her prize-in other words, to espouse Monsieur the Dauphin—when a little girl, clad in white damask, and holding a daisy in her hand (transparent personification of Marguerite of Flanders), arrived on the scene to contest it with Venus. Coup de théâtre and quick change. After a brisk dispute, Marguerite, Venus, and the side characters agreed to refer the matter to the good judgment of the Blessed Virgin. There was another fine part, that of Don Pedro, King of Mesopotamia; but it was difficult amid so many interruptions to make out exactly what was his share in the transaction. And all this had scrambled up the ladder.     61   
  But the play was done for; not one of these many beauties was heard or understood. It seemed as if, with the entrance of the Cardinal, an invisible and magic thread had suddenly drawn all eyes from the marble table to the platform, from the southern to the western side of the Hall. Nothing could break the spell, all eyes were tenaciously fixed in that direction, and each fresh arrival, his detestable name, his appearance, his dress, made a new diversion. Excepting Gisquette and Liénarde, who turned from time to time if Gringoire plucked them by the sleeve, and the big, patient man, not a soul was listening, not one face was turned towards the poor, deserted Morality. Gringoire looked upon an unbroken vista of profiles.     62   
  With what bitterness did he watch his fair palace of fame and poetry crumble away bit by bit! And to think that these same people had been on the point of rioting from impatience to hear his piece! And now that they had got it, they cared not a jot for it—the very same performance which had commenced amid such unanimous applause. Eternal flow and ebb of popular favour! And to think they had nearly hanged the sergeants of the Provost! What would he not have given to go back to that honey-sweet moment!     63   
  However, at last all the guests had arrived and the usher’s brutal monologue perforce came to an end. Gringoire heaved a sigh of relief. The actors spouted away bravely. Then, what must Master Coppenole the hosier do but start up suddenly, and in the midst of undivided attention deliver himself of the following abominable harangue:     64   
  “Messires the burghers and squires of Paris, hang me if I know what we’re all doing here. To be sure, I do perceive over in that corner on a sort of stage some people who look as if they were going to fight. I do not know if this is what you call a Mystery, but I am quite certain it is not very amusing. They wrestle only with their tongues. For the last quarter of an hour I have been waiting to see the first blow struck, but nothing happens. They are poltroons and maul one another only with foul words. You should have had some fighters over from London or Rotterdam, then there would have been some pretty fisticuffing if you like—blows that could have been heard out on the Place. But these are sorry folk. They should at least give us a Morrisdance or some such mummery. This is not what I had been given to expect. I had been promised a Feast of Fools and the election of a Pope. We too have our pope of fools at Ghent, in that we are behind nobody. Croix-Dieu! This is how we manage it. We get a crowd together as here; then everybody in turn thrusts his head through a hole and pulls a face at the others. The one who by universal consent makes the ugliest face is chosen Pope. That’s our way. It’s most diverting. Shall we choose your Pope after the same fashion? It would at any rate be less tedious than listening to these babblers. If they like to take their turn at grimacing they’re welcome. What say you, my masters? We have here sufficiently queer samples of both sexes to give us a good Flemish laugh, and enough ugly faces to justify our hopes of a beautiful grimace.”     65   
  Gringoire would fain have replied, but stupefaction, wrath, and indignation rendered him speechless. Besides, the proposal of the popular hosier was received with such enthusiasm by these townsfolk, so flattered by being addressed as Squires, that further resistance was useless. There was nothing for it but to go with the stream. Gringoire buried his face in his hands, not being fortunate enough to possess a mantle wherewith to veil his countenance like the Agamemnon of Timanthes.     66   


Note 1.  A pun on the word gant (glove) and Gand, the French name for the city of Ghent. [back]   
Note 2.  The arms of the city of Paris show a ship on heaving billows and the motto “Fluctuat nec mergitur.” [back]

Book I   
V. Quasimodo   
     
IN a twinkling burghers, students, and Basochians had set to work, and all was ready to carry out Coppenole’s suggestion. The little chapel facing the marble table was chosen as the mise en scène of the grimaces. A pane of glass was broken out of the charming rose-window above the door, leaving an empty ring of stone, through which the competitors were to thrust their heads, while two barrels, procured from goodness knows where, and balanced precariously on the top of one another, enabled them to mount up to it. It was then agreed that, in order that the impression of the grimace might reach the beholder in full unbroken purity, each candidate, whether male or female (for there could be a female pope), was to cover his face and remain concealed in the chapel till the moment of his appearance.      1   
  In an instant the chapel was filled with competitors, and the doors closed upon them.      2   
  From his place on the platform Coppenole ordered everything, directed everything, arranged everything. During the hubbub, and pretexting vespers and other affairs of importance, the Cardinal, no less disconcerted than Gringoire, retired with his whole suite, and the crowd, which had evinced so lively an interest in his arrival, was wholly unmoved by his departure. Guillaume Rym alone noticed the rout of his Eminence.      3   
  Popular attention, like the sun, pursued its even course. Starting at one end of the Hall, it remained stationary for a time in the middle, and was now at the other end. The marble table, the brocade-covered platform, had had their day; now it was the turn of the Chapel of Louis XI. The field was clear for every sort of folly; the Flemings and the rabble were masters of the situation.      4   
  The pulling of faces began. The first to appear in the opening—eye-lids turned inside out, the gaping mouth of a ravening beast, the brow creased and wrinkled like the hussar boots of the Empire period—was greeted with such a roar of inextinguishable laughter that Homer would have taken all these ragamuffins for gods.      5   
  Nevertheless, the great Hall was anything rather than Olympus, as Gringoire’s poor Jupiter knew to his cost. A second, a third distortion followed, to be succeeded by another and another; and with each one the laughter redoubled, and the crowd stamped and roared its delight. There was in the whole scene a peculiar frenzy, a certain indescribable sense of intoxication and fascination almost impossible to convey to the reader of our times and social habits.      6   
  Picture to yourself a series of faces representing successively every geometrical form, from the triangle to the trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; every human expression, from rage to lewdness; every stage of life, from the creases of the newly born to the wrinkles of hoary age; every phantasm of mythology and religion, from Faunus to Beelzebub; every animal head, from the buffalo to the eagle. from the shark to the bulldog. Conceive all the grotesques of the Pont-Neuf, those nightmares turned to stone under the hand of Germain Pilon, inspired with the breath of life, and rising up one by one to stare you in the face with gleaming eyes; all the masks of the Carnival of Venice passing in procession before you—in a word, a human kaleidoscope.      7   
  The orgy became more and more Flemish. Tenniers himself could have given but a feeble idea of it; a Salvator Rosa battle-piece treated as a bacchic feast would be nearer the mark. There were no longer scholars, ambassadors, burghers, men or women; neither Clopin Trouillefou nor Gilles Lecornu nor Marie Quatrelivres nor Robin Poussepain. The individual was swallowed up in the universal license. The great Hall was simply one vast furnace of effrontery and unbridled mirth, in which every mouth was a yell, every countenance a grimace, every individual a posture. The whole mass shrieked and bellowed. Every new visage that came grinning and gnashing to the window was fresh fuel to the furnace. And from this seething multitude, like steam from a caldron, there rose a hum—shrill, piercing, sibilant, as from a vast swarm of gnats.      8   
  “Oh! oh! malediction!”      9   
  “Oh, look at that face!”     10   
  “That’s no good.”     11   
  “Show us another.”     12   
  “Guillemette Maugrepuis, look at that ox-muzzle. It only wants horns. It can’t be thy husband.”     13   
  “The next!”     14   
  “Ventre du pape! What sort of a face do you call that?”     15   
  “Holà there—that’s cheating! no more than the face is to be shown!”     16   
  “Is that Perette Callebotte?—devil take her—it’s just what she would do!”     17   
  “Noël! Noël!”     18   
  “I shall choke!”     19   
  “Here’s one whose ears won’t come through.”     20   
  And so on, and so on.     21   
  To do our friend Jehan justice, however, he was still visible in the midst of the pandemonium, high up on his pillar like a ship’s boy in the mizzen, gesticulating like a maniac, his mouth wide open and emitting sounds that nobody heard; not because they were drowned by the all-pervading clamour, terrific as it was, but because doubtless they had reached the limit at which shrill sounds are audible—the twelve thousand vibrations of Sauveur, or the eight thousand of Biot.     22   
  As to Gringoire, the first moment of depression over, he had regained his self-possession, had stiffened his back against adversity.     23   
  “Go on,” said he for the third time to his players. “Go on, you speaking machines,” and proceeded to pace with long strides in front of the marble table. At one moment he was seized with the desire to go and present himself at the round window, if only for the gratification of pulling a face at this thankless crowd. “But no,” he said to himself, “that would be beneath our dignity—no vengeance. We will fight on to the end. The power of poetry over the people is great. I shall yet regain my hold. We shall see which will win the day, belles-lettres or grimaces.”     24   
  Alas! he was the sole spectator of his piece.     25   
  No, I am wrong. The big, patient man, whom he had already consulted at a critical moment, still faced the stage. As to Gisquette and Liénarde, they had long since deserted him.     26   
  Touched to the heart by the stanchness of this audience of one, Gringoire went up to him and accosted him, shaking him gently by the arm, for the good man was leaning against the balustrade dozing comfortably.     27   
  “Sir,” said Gringoire, “I thank you.”     28   
  “Sir,” returned the big man with a yawn, “for what?”     29   
  “I see the cause of your annoyance,” resumed the poet. “This infernal din prevents your listening in comfort. But never fear, your name shall go down to posterity. Your name, if I may ask?”     30   
  “Renault Château, Keeper of the Seal of the Châtelet of Paris, at your service.”     31   
  “Sir, you are the sole representative of the Muses,” said Gringoire.     32   
  “You are too good, sir,” replied the Keeper of the Seal of Châtelet.     33   
  “The one person who has paid suitable attention to the piece. What do you think of it?”     34   
  “H’m, h’m,” replied the big official drowsily. “Really quite entertaining.”     35   
  Gringoire had to be content with this faint praise, for the conversation was abruptly cut short by a thunder of applause mingled with shouts of acclamation. The Fools had elected their Pope.     36   
  “Noël! Noël! Noël!” roared the crowd from all sides.     37   
  In truth, the grimace that beamed through the broken rose-window at this moment was nothing short of miraculous. After all the faces—pentagonal, hexagonal, and heteroclite—which had succeeded each other in the stone frame, without realizing the grotesque ideal set up by the inflamed popular imagination, nothing inferior to the supreme effort now dazzling the spectators would have sufficed to carry every vote. Master Coppenole himself applauded, and Clopin Trouillefou, who had competed—and Lord knows to what heights his ugliness could attain—had to own himself defeated. We will do likewise, nor attempt to convey to the reader a conception of that tetrahedral nose, that horse-shoe mouth, of that small left eye obscured by a red and bristling brow, while the right disappeared entirely under a monstrous wart, of those uneven teeth, with breaches here and there like the crenated walls of a fortress, of that horny lip over which one of the teeth projected like an elephant’s tusk, of that cloven chin, nor, above all, of the expression overlying the whole—an indefinable mixture of malice, bewilderment, and sadness. Picture such an ensemble to yourself if you can.     38   
  There was not a single dissentient voice. They rushed to the Chapel and in triumph dragged forth the thrice lucky Pope of Fools. Then surprise and admiration reached the culminating point—he had but shown his natural countenance.     39   
  Rather, let us say, his whole person was a grimace. An enormous head covered with red bristles; between the shoulders a great hump balanced by one in front; a system of thighs and legs so curiously misplaced that they only touched at the knees, and, viewed from the front, appeared like two sickles joined at the handles; huge splay feet, monstrous hands, and, with all this deformity, a nameless impression of formidable strength, agility, and courage—strange exception to the eternal rule, which decrees that strength, like beauty, shall be the outcome of harmony.     40   
  Such was he whom the Fools had chosen for their Pope. He looked like a giant broken and badly repaired.     41   
  The moment this species of Cyclops appeared in the doorway of the Chapel, standing motionless, squat, almost as broad as he was long, squared by the base, as a great man has described it, he was instantly recognised by his party-coloured coat, half red, half violet, sprinkled with little silver bells, and above all, by the perfection of his ugliness.     42   
  “’Tis Quasimodo the bell-ringer!” shouted the people with one voice; “Quasimodo the Hunchback of Notre Dame! Quasimodo the one-eyed! Quasimodo the bandy-legged! Noël! Noël!”     43   
  The poor devil had evidently a large stock of nicknames to choose from.     44   
  “Let all pregnant women beware!” cried the scholars.     45   
  “Or those that wish to be!” added Joannes.     46   
  And in effect the women hastily covered their faces.     47   
  “Oh, the hideous ape!” exclaimed one.     48   
  “And as wicked as he is ugly,” returned another.     49   
  “’Tis the devil himself,” added a third.     50   
  “I am unlucky enough to live near Notre Dame. I hear him scrambling about the leads all night.”     51   
  “With the cats.”     52   
  “He’s forever on our roofs.”     53   
  “He casts spells at us down our chimneys.”     54   
  “The other night he came and made faces at me through my sky-light window. I though it was a man. What a fright I got.”     55   
  “I am certain he goes to the witches’ Sabbath. He once left a broom on my leads.”     56   
  “Oh, his horrid hunchback’s face!”     57   
  “Oh, the wicked creature!”     58   
  “Fie upon him!”     59   
  On the other hand, the men were enchanted and applauded vociferously.     60   
  Meanwhile Quasimodo, the object of all this uproar, stood grave and unmoved in the doorway of the Chapel, and suffered himself to be admired. One of the scholars, Robin Poussepain I think it was, came up and laughed in his face—somewhat too close. Without a word Quasimodo seized him by the belt and tossed him into the crowd full ten paces off.     61   
  “God’s cross! Holy Father!” exclaimed Master Coppenole in amazement. “Yours is the rarest ugliness I have over beheld in all my born days. You deserve to be Pope of Rome, as well as of Paris.” And so saying, he clapped a jovial hand on the hunchback’s shoulder.     62   
  Quasimodo did not stir. “Now here’s a fellow,” continued Coppenole, “I have a mind to dine with, even if it cost me a new douzain of twelve livres tournois. What say you?”     63   
  Quasimodo made no reply.     64   
  “Croix-Dieu!” cried the hosier, “art deaf?”     65   
  As a matter of fact he was deaf.     66   
  However, he began to be annoyed by Coppenole’s manner, and suddenly turned upon him with such a snarl that the Flemish giant recoiled like a bulldog before a cat.     67   
  The result of this was that a circle of terror and respect, with a radius of at least fifteen geometric paces, was formed around the alarming personage.     68   
  An old woman explained to Master Coppenole that Quasimodo was deaf.     69   
  “Deaf?” cried the hosier with his great Flemish guffaw; “Croix-Dieu! then he’s every inch a Pope!”     70   
  “Why, I know him!” exclaimed Jehan, who by this time had clambered down from his pillar to examine the hunchback more closely. “It’s my brother the Archdeacon’s bellringer. Good-day, Quasimodo.”     71   
  “The man’s a devil,” growled Robin Poussepain, still giddy from his fall. “He shows himself, and you discover he is a hunchback; he walks, and he is bow-legged; he looks at you, and he has only one eye; you speak to him, and he is deaf. Why, what does this Polyphemus do with his tongue?”     72   
  “He can speak when he likes,” said the old woman. “He is deaf from the bell-ringing; he is not dumb.”     73   
  “That’s all that’s wanting to make him perfect,” remarked Jehan.     74   
  “And he has an eye too many.”     75   
  “Not at all,” said Jehan judicially; “a one-eyed man is more incomplete than a blind one, for he is conscious of what he lacks.”     76   
  Meanwhile all the beggars, all the lackeys, all the cutpurses, had tacked themselves on to the scholars, and gone in procession to the wardrobe of the Basoche to fetch the pasteboard tiara and the mock robe reserved for the Fools’ Pope, with which Quasimodo permitted himself to be invested without turning a hair, and with a sort of proud docility. They then seated him on a chair, twelve officers of the Fraternity of Fools lifted him on their shoulders, and a gleam of bitter and disdainful satisfaction lit up the morose face of the Cyclops as he saw the heads of all these fine, strong, straight-limbed men beneath his misshapen feet.     77   
  Then the whole bellowing, tattered crew set itself in motion to make the customary round of the interior galleries of the Palais, before marching through the streets and byways of the city.

   
Book I   
VI. Esmeralda   
     
WE are charmed to be able to inform our readers that during this whole scene Grainier and his piece held their own. Spurred on by him, the actors had not ceased to declaim, nor he to listen. He had contributed his share to the clamor and was determined to stand fast to the end; nor did he despair of finally regaining the attention of the public. This spark of hope revived when he beheld Quasimodo, Coppenole, and the yelling cortège of the Pope of Fools troop out of the Hall with deafening up-roar, the crowd eagerly at their heels.      1   
  “Good,” said he, “there goes the disturbing element.”      2   
  But unfortunately the disturbing element comprised the entire public. In a twinkling the Hall was empty.      3   
  To be exact, a sprinkling of spectators still remained, scattered about singly or grouped round the pillars—women, old men, and children who had had enough of the noise and the tumult. A few scholars sat astride the windows looking down into the Place.      4   
  “Well,” thought Grainier, “here we have at least enough to listen to the end of my Mystery. They are few, but select—a lettered audience.”      5   
  A moment afterward it was discovered that a band of music, which should have been immensely effective at the entry of the Blessed Virgin, was missing. Grainier found that his musicians had been pressed into the service of the Pope of Fools. “Go on without it,” he said stoically.      6   
  Approaching a group of townsfolk who appeared to be discussing his play, he caught the following scraps of conversation:      7   
  “Maitre Cheneteau, you know the Hôtel de Navarre, which used to belong to M. de Nemours?”      8   
  “Opposite the Chapelle de Braque—yes.”      9   
  “Well, the fiscal authorities have just let it to Guillaume Alisandre, the historical painter, for six livres eight sols parisis a year.”     10   
  “How rents are rising!”     11   
  “Come,” thought Grainier with a sigh, “at least the others are listening.”     12   
  “Comrades!” suddenly cried one of the young rascals at the window, “Esmeralda—Esmeralda down in the Place!”     13   
  The name acted like a charm. Every soul in the Hall rushed to the window, clambering up the walls to see, and repeating “Esmeralda! Esmeralda!” while from the outside came a great burst of applause.     14   
  “Now what do they mean with their ‘Esmeralda’?” Grainier inquired, clasping his hands in despair. “Ah, mon Dieu! it appears that the windows are the attraction now.”     15   
  He turned towards the marble table and discovered that the play had suffered an interruption. It was the moment at which Jupiter was to appear on the scene with his thunder. But Jupiter was standing stock-still below the stage.     16   
  “Michel Giborne, what are you doing there?” cried the exasperated poet. “Is that playing your part? Get up on the stage at once.”     17   
  “Alas!” said Jupiter, “one of the scholars has just taken away the ladder.”     18   
  Grainier looked. It was but too true; the connection between the knot of his play and the untying had been cut.     19   
  “Rascal,” he muttered, “what did he want with the ladder?”     20   
  “To help him to see Esmeralda,” answered Jupiter, in an injured tone. “He said, ‘Hallo, here’s a ladder that nobody’s using,’ and away he went with it.”     21   
  This was the last straw. Grainier accepted it with resignation.     22   
  “May the devil fly away with you!” said he to the actors, “and if I am paid you shall be.” Whereupon he beat a retreat, hanging his head, but the last in the field, like a general who has made a good fight.     23   
  “A precious set of boobies and asses, these Parisians!” he growled between his teeth, as he descended the tortuous stairs of the Palais. “They come to hear a Mystery, and don’t listen to a word. They’ve been taken up with all the world—with Clopin Trouillefou, with the Cardinal, with Coppenole, with Quasimodo, with the devil; but with Madame the Virgin Mary not a bit. Dolts! if I had only known! I’d have given you some Virgin Marys with a vengeance. To think that I should have come here to see faces and found nothing but backs! I, a poet, to have the success of an apothecary! True, Homerus had to beg his bread through the Greek villages, and Ovidius Naso died in exile among the Muscovites. But the devil flay me if I know what they mean with their Esmeralda. To begin with, where can the word come from?—ah, it’s Egyptian.”

   
Book II   
I. From Scylla to Charybdis   
     
NIGHT falls early in January. It was already dark in the streets when Grainier quitted the Palais, which quite suited his taste, for he was impatient to reach some obscure and deserted alley where he might meditate in peace, and where the philosopher might apply the first salve to the wounds of the poet. Philosophy was his last refuge, seeing that he did not know where to turn for a night’s lodging. After the signal miscarriage of his first effort, he had not the courage to return to his lodging in the Rue Grenier-sur-l’Eau, opposite the hay-wharf, having counted on receiving from Monsieur the Provost for his epithalamium the wherewithal to pay Maître Guillaume Doulx-Sire, farmer of the cattle taxes in Paris, the six months’ rent he owed him; that is to say, twelve sols parisis, or twelve times the value of all he possessed in the world, including his breeches, his shirt, and his beaver.      1   
  Resting for a moment under the shelter of the little gateway of the prison belonging to the treasurer of the Sainte-Chapelle he considered what lodging he should choose for the night, having all the pavements of Paris at his disposal. Suddenly he remembered having noticed in the preceding week, at the door of one of the parliamentary counsellors in the Rue de la Savaterie, a stone step, used for mounting on mule-back, and having remarked to himself that that stone might serve excellently well as a pillow to a beggar or a poet. He thanked Providence for having sent him this happy thought, and was just preparing to cross the Place du Palais and enter the tortuous labyrinth of the city, where those ancient sisters, the streets of la Baillerie, la Vielle-Draperie, la Savaterie, la Juiverie, etc., pursue their mazy windings, and are still standing to this day with their nine-storied houses, when he caught sight of the procession of the Pope of Fools, as it issued from the Palais and poured across his path with a great uproar, accompanied by shouts and glare of torches and Gringoire’s own band of music.      2   
  The sight touched his smarting vanity, and he fled. In the bitterness of his dramatic failure everything that reminded him of the unlucky festival exasperated him and made his wounds bleed afresh.      3   
  He would have crossed the Pont Saint-Michel, but children were running up and down with squibs and rockets.      4   
  “A murrain on the fire-works!” exclaimed Grainier, turning back to the Pont-au-Change. In front of the houses at the entrance to the bridge they had attached three banners of cloth, representing the King, the Dauphin, and Marguerite of Flanders, and also six smaller banners or draplets on which were “pourtraicts” of the Duke of Austria, the Cardinal de Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, Mme. Jeanne de France, and Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon, and some one else, the whole lighted up by flaming cressets. The crowd was lost in admiration.      5   
  “Lucky painter, Jehan Fourbault,” said Grainier with a heavy sigh, and turned his back upon the banners and the bannerets. A street opened before him so dark and deserted that it offered him every prospect of escape from all the sounds and the illuminations of the festival. He plunged into it. A few moments afterward his foot struck against an obstacle, he tripped and fell. It was the great bunch of may which the clerks of the Basoche had laid that morning at the door of one of the presidents of the parliament, in honour of the day.      6   
  Gringoire bore this fresh mishap with heroism, he picked himself up and made for the water-side. Leaving behind him the Tournelle Civile and the Tour Criminelle, and skirting the high walls of the royal gardens, ankle-deep in mud, he reached the western end of the city, and stopped for some time in contemplation of the islet of the Passeur-aux-vaches or ferry-man of the cattle, since buried under the bronze horse of the Pont-Neuf. In the gloom the islet looked to him like a black blot across the narrow, gray-white stream that separated him from it. One could just make out by a faint glimmer of light proceeding from it, the hive-shaped hut in which the ferry-man sheltered for the night.      7   
  “Happy ferry-man,” thought Grainier, “thou aspirest not to fame; thou composest no epithalamiums. What carest thou for royal marriages or for Duchesses of Burgundy? Thou reckest of no Marguerites but those with which April pies the meadows for thy cows to crop. And I, a poet, am hooted at, and I am shivering, and I owe twelve sous, and my shoe-soles are worn so thin they would do to glaze thy lantern. I thank thee, ferry-man; thy cabin is soothing to my sight, and makes me forget Paris.”      8   
  Here he was startled out of his well-nigh lyric ecstasy by the explosion of a great double rocket which suddenly went up from the thrice happy cabin. It was the ferry-man adding his contribution to the festivities of the day by letting off some fire-works.      9   
  At this Grainier fairly bristled with rage.     10   
  “Accursed festival!” cried he; “is there no escape from it?—not even on the cattle ferry-man’s islet?”     11   
  He gazed on the Seine at his feet, and a horrible temptation assailed him.     12   
  “Oh, how gladly would I drown myself,” said he, “if only the water were not so cold!”     13   
  It was then he formed the desperate resolve that, as there was no escape from the Pope of Fools, from Jehan Four-bault’s painted banners, from the bunches of may, from the squibs and rockets, he would boldly cast himself into the very heart of the merry-making and go to the Place de Grève.     14   
  “There at least,” he reflected, “I may manage to get a brand from the bonfire whereat to warm myself, and to sup off some remnant of the three great armorial devices in sugar which have been set out on the public buffets of the city.”