Book II   
II. The Place de Grève   
     
THERE remains but one slight vestige of the Place de Grève as it was in those days; namely, the charming little turret at the northern angle of the square, and that, buried as it is already under the unsightly coating of whitewash which obliterates the spirited outlines of its carvings, will doubtless soon have disappeared altogether, submerged under that flood of raw, new buildings which is rapidly swallowing up all the old façades of Paris.      1   
  Those who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de Grève without a glance of pity and sympathy for the poor little turret squeezed between two squalid houses of the time of Louis XV, can easily conjure up in fancy the ensemble of edifices of which it formed a part, and so regain a complete picture of the old Gothic square of the fifteenth century.      2   
  Then, as now, it was an irregular square bounded on one side by the quay, and at the others by rows of tall, narrow, and gloomy houses. By daylight, there was much to admire in the diversity of these edifices, all sculptured in wood or stone, and offering, even then, perfect examples of the various styles of architecture in the Middle Ages, ranging from the fifteenth back to the eleventh century, from the perpendicular, which was beginning to oust the Gothic, to the Roman which the Gothic had supplanted, and which still occupied beneath it the first story of the ancient Tour de Roland, at the corner of the square adjoining the Seine on the side of the Rue de la Tannerie. At night, nothing was distinguishable of this mass of buildings but the black and jagged outline of the roofs encircling the Place with their chain of sharp-pointed gables. For herein consists one of the radical differences between the cities of that day and the present, that whereas now the fronts of the houses look on the squares and streets, then it was their backs. During the last two centuries the houses have completely turned about.      3   
  In the centre of the eastern side of the square rose a clumsy and hybrid pile formed of three separate buildings joined together. It was known by three names, which explain its history, its purpose, and its style of architecture: the Maison au Dauphin, because Charles V had inhabited it as Dauphin; the Marchandise, because it was used as the Town Hall; the Maison-aux-Piliers (domus ad pilorum), because of the row of great pillars that supported its three storeys. Here the city found all that was necessary to a good city like Paris: a chapel for its prayers, a plaidoyer or court-room wherein to hear causes and, at need, to give a sharp set-down to the King’s men-at-arms, and in the garrets an arsenal stocked with ammunition. For the good citizens of Paris knew full well that it is not sufficient at all junctures to depend either on prayer or the law for maintaining the franchises of the city, and have always some good old rusty blunderbuss or other in reserve in the attic of the Hôtel de Ville.      4   
  La Grève already had that sinister aspect which it still retains owing to the execrable associations it calls up, and the frowning Hôtel de Ville of Dominique Bocador which has replaced the Maison-aux-Piliers. It must be admitted that a gibbet and a pillory—a justice and a ladder, as they were then called—set up side by side in the middle of the Place, went far to make the passer-by turn in aversion from this fatal spot, where so many human beings throbbing with life and health have been done to death, and which fifty years later was to engender the Saint-Vallier fever, that morbid terror of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all maladies, because it comes not from the hand of God but of man.      5   
  It is a consoling thought, let it be said in passing, to remember that the death penalty, which three centuries ago encumbered with its spiked wheels, its stone gibbets, all its dread apparatus of death permanently fixed into the ground, the Place de Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cours du Trahoir, the Marché-aux-Pourceaux or pig-market, awful Montfaucon, the Barrière-des-Sergents, the Place-au-Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint-Jacques, not to mention the pillories under the jurisdiction of the Bishop, of the Chapters, of the Abbots, of the Priors; nor the judicial drownings in the Seine—it is consoling, we repeat, to reflect that after losing, one by one, all the pieces of its dread panoply: its multiplicity of executions, its fantastically cruel sentences, its rack at the Grand Châtelet—the leather stretcher of which had to be renewed every five years—that ancient suzerain of feudal society is to-day well-nigh banished from our laws and our cities, tracked from code to code, hunted from place to place, till in all great Paris it has but one dishonoured corner it can call its own—in the Place de Grève; but one wretched guillotine, furtive, craven, shameful, that always seems to fear being caught red-handed, so quickly does it vanish after dealing its fatal blow.

Book II   
III. Besos Para Golpes   
     
BY 1 the time Pierre Grainier reached the Place de Grève he was chilled to the bone. He had made his way across the Pont-aux-Meuniers—the Millers’ bridge—to avoid the crowd on the Pont-au-Change and the sight of Jehan Fourbault’s banners; but the wheel of the episcopal mills had splashed him as he passed, and his coat was wet through. In addition, it seemed to him that the failure of his play made him feel the cold more keenly. He hastened, therefore, to get near the splendid bonfire burning in the middle of the Place, but found it surrounded by a considerable crowd.      1   
  “Perdition take these Parisians!” said he to himself—for as a true dramatic poet, Grainier was greatly addicted to monologue—“now they prevent me getting near the fire—and Heaven knows I have need of a warm corner! My shoes are veritable sponges, and those cursed mill-wheels have been raining upon me. Devil take the Bishop of Paris and his mills! I’d like to know what a bishop wants with a mill. Does he expect he may some day have to turn miller instead of bishop? If he is only waiting for my curse to effect this transformation, he is welcome to it, and may it include his cathedral and his mills as well. Now, let us see if these varlets will make room for me. What are they doing there, I’d like to know. Warming themselves—a fine pleasure indeed! Watching a pile of fagots burn—a grand spectacle, i’ faith!”      2   
  On looking closer, however, he perceived that the circle was much wider than necessary for merely warming one’s self at the King’s bonfire, and that such a crowd of spectators was not attracted solely by the beauty of a hundred blazing fagots. In the immense space left free between the crowd and the fire a girl was dancing, but whether she was a human being, a sprite, or an angel, was what Grainier—sceptical philosopher, ironical poet though he might be—was unable for the moment to determine, so dazzled was he by the fascinating vision.      3   
  She was not tall, but her slender and elastic figure made her appear so. Her skin was brown, but one guessed that by day it would have the warm golden tint of the Andalusian and Roman women. Her small foot too, so perfectly at ease in its narrow, graceful shoe, was quite Andalusian. She was dancing, pirouetting, whirling on an old Persian carpet spread carelessly on the ground, and each time her radiant face passed before you, you caught the flash of her great dark eyes.      4   
  The crowd stood round her open-mouthed, every eye fixed upon her, and in truth, as she danced thus to the drumming of a tambourine held high above her head by her round and delicate arms, slender, fragile, airy as a wasp, with her gold-laced bodice closely moulded to her form, her bare shoulders, her gaily striped skirt swelling out round her, affording glimpses of her exquisitely shaped limbs, the dusky masses of her hair, her gleaming eyes, she seemed a creature of some other world.      5   
  “In very truth,” thought Grainier, “it is a salamander—a nymph—’tis a goddess—a bacchante of Mount Mæ nalus!”      6   
  At this moment a tress of the “salamander’s” hair became uncoiled, and a piece of brass attached to it fell to the ground.      7   
  “Why, no,” said he, “ ’tis a gipsy!” and all illusion vanished.      8   
  She resumed her performance. Taking up two swords from the ground, she leaned the points against her forehead, and twisted them in one direction while she herself turned in another.      9   
  True, she was simply a gipsy; but however disenchanted Grainier might feel, the scene was not without its charm, nor a certain weird magic under the glaring red light of the bonfire which flared over the ring of faces and the figure of the dancing girl and cast a pale glimmer among the wavering shadows at the far end of the Place, flickering over the black and corrugated front of the old Maison-aux-Piliers, or the stone arms of the gibbet opposite.     10   
  Among the many faces dyed crimson by this glow was one which, more than all the others, seemed absorbed in contemplation of the dancer. It was the face of a man, austere, calm, and sombre. His costume was hidden by the crowd pressing round him; but though he did not appear to be more than thirty-five, he was bald, showing only a few sparse locks at the temples and they already gray. The broad, high forehead was furrowed, but in the deep-set eyes there glowed an extraordinary youthfulness, a fervid vitality, a consuming passion. Those eyes never moved from the gipsy, and the longer the girl danced and bounded in all the unrestrained grace of her sixteen years, delighting the populace, the gloomier did his thoughts seem to become. Ever and anon a smile and a sigh would meet upon his lips, but the smile was the more grievous of the two.     11   
  At last, out of breath with her exertion, the girl stopped, and the people applauded with all their heart.     12   
  “Djali!” cried the gipsy.     13   
  At this there appeared a pretty little white goat, lively, intelligent, and glossy, with gilded horns and hoofs and a gilt collar, which Grainier had not observed before, as it had been lying on a corner of the carpet, watching its mistress dance.     14   
  “Djali,” said the dancing girl, “it is your turn now,” and seating herself, she gracefully held out her tambourine to the goat.     15   
  “Now, Djali,” she continued, “which month of the year is it?”     16   
  The goat lifted its fore-foot and tapped once on the tambourine. It was in fact the first month. The crowd applauded.     17   
  “Djali,” resumed the girl, reversing the tambourine, “what day of the month is it?”     18   
  Djali lifted her little golden hoof and gave six strokes on the tambourine.     19   
  “Djali,” continued the gipsy girl, again changing the position of the tambourine, “what hour of the day is it?”     20   
  Djali gave seven strokes. At the same instant the clock of the Maison-aux-Piliers struck seven.     21   
  The people were lost in admiration and astonishment.     22   
  “There is witchcraft in this,” said a sinister voice in the crowd. It came from the bald man, who had never taken his eyes off the gipsy.     23   
  The girl shuddered and turned round, but the applause burst out afresh and drowned the morose exclamation—effaced it, indeed, so completely from her mind that she continued to interrogate her goat.     24   
  “Djali, show us how Maître Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of the town sharp-shooters, walks in the procession at Candlemas.”     25   
  Djali stood up on her hind legs and began to bleat, while she strutted along with such a delightful air of gravity that the whole circle of spectators, irresistibly carried away by this parody on the devotional manner of the captain of the sharp-shooters, burst into a roar of laughter.     26   
  “Djali,” resumed the girl, emboldened by her increasing success, “show us Maître Jacques Charmolue, the King’s Procurator in the Ecclesiastical Court, when he preaches.”     27   
  The goat sat up on its hind quarters and proceeded to bleat and wave its fore-feet in so comical a fashion that—excepting the bad French and worse Latin—it was Jacques Charmolue, gesture, accent, attitude, to the life.     28   
  The crowd applauded ecstatically.     29   
  “Sacrilege! profanation!” exclaimed the voice of the bald man once more.     30   
  The gipsy girl turned round again. “Ah,” said she, “it is that hateful man!” then, with a disdainful pout of her under lip, which seemed a familiar little grimace with her, she turned lightly on her heels and began collecting the contributions of the bystanders in her tambourine.     31   
  Grands blancs, petits blancs, targes, liards à l’aigle, every description of small coin, were now showered upon her. Suddenly, just as she was passing Grainier, he, in sheer absence of mind, thrust his hand into his pocket, so that the girl stopped in front of him.     32   
  “Diable!” exclaimed the poet, finding at the bottom of his pocket reality—in other words, nothing. And yet, here was this pretty girl, her great eyes fixed on him, holding out her tambourine expectantly. Grainier broke out in a cold perspiration. If he had had all Peru in his pocket, he would most certainly have handed it to the dancing girl, but Grainier did not possess Peru—and in any case America had not yet been discovered.     33   
  Fortunately an unexpected occurrence came to his relief.     34   
  “Get thee gone from here, locust of Egypt!” cried a harsh voice from the darkest corner of the Place.     35   
  The girl turned in alarm. This was not the voice of the bald man; it was the voice of a woman, one full of fanaticism and malice. However, the exclamation which startled the gipsy girl highly delighted a noisy band of children prowling about the Place.     36   
  “ ’Tis the recluse of the Tour-Roland!” they cried with discordant shouts of laughter; “ ’tis the sachette 2 scolding again. Has she not had any supper? Let’s take her something from the public buffet!” and they rushed in a mass towards the Maison-aux-Piliers.     37   
  Meanwhile Grainier had taken advantage of the dancing girl’s perturbation to eclipse himself, and the children’s mocking shouts reminded him that he too had had no supper. He hastened to the buffet, but the little rascals had been too quick for him, and by the time he arrived they had swept the board. There was not even a miserable piece of honeybread at five sous the pound. Nothing was left against the wall but the slender fleur de lis and roses painted there in 1434 by Mathieu Biterne—in sooth, a poor kind of supper.     38   
  It is not exactly gay to have to go to bed supperless, but it is still less entertaining neither to have supped nor to know where you are going to get a bed. Yet this was Gringoire’s plight—without a prospect of food or lodging. He found himself pressed on all sides by necessity, and he considered necessity extremely hard on him. He had long ago discovered this truth—that Jupiter created man during a fit of misanthropy, and throughout life the destiny of the wise man holds his philosophy in a state of siege. For his own part, Grainier had never seen the blockade so complete. He heard his stomach sound a parley, and he thought it too bad that his evil fate should be enabled to take his philosophy by famine.     39   
  He was sinking deeper and deeper into this melancholy mood, when his attention was suddenly aroused by the sound of singing, most sweet but full of strange and fantastic modulations. It was the gipsy girl.     40   
  Her voice, like her dancing and her beauty, had some indefinable and charming quality—something pure and sonorous; something, so to speak, soaring, winged. Her singing was a ceaseless flow of melody, of unexpected cadences, of simple phrases dotted over with shrill and staccato notes, of liquid runs that would have taxed a nightingale, but in which the harmony was never lost, of soft octave undulations that rose and fell like the bosom of the fair singer. And all the while her beautiful face expressed with singular mobility all the varying emotions of her song, from the wildest inspiration to the most virginal dignity—one moment a maniac, the next a queen.     41   
  The words she sang were in a tongue unknown to Grainier and apparently to herself, so little did the expression she put into her song fit the sense of the words. Thus, on her lips these four lines were full of sparkling gaiety:
           “Un cofre de gran riqueza   
  Halloran dentro un pilar;   
Dentro del, nuevas banderas   
  Con figuras de espantar.” 3   
  42   
  And the next moment Gringoire’s eyes filled with tears at the expression she put into this verse:
           “Alarabes de cavallo   
  Sin poderse menear,   
Con espadas, y a los cuellos   
  Ballestas de buen echar.” 4   
  43   
  However, the prevailing note in her singing was joyousness, and, like the birds, she seemed to sing from pure serenity and lightness of heart.     44   
  The gipsy’s song disturbed Gringoire’s reverie, but only as a swan ruffles the water. He listened in a sort of trance, unconscious of all around him. It was the first moment for many hours that he forgot his woes.     45   
  The respite was short. The female voice which had interrupted the gipsy’s dance now broke in upon her song:     46   
  “Silence, grasshooper of hell!” she cried out of the same dark corner of the Place.     47   
  The poor “cigale” stopped short. Grainier clapped his hands to his ears.     48   
  “Oh!” he cried, “accursed, broken-toothed saw that comes to break the lyre!”     49   
  The rest of the audience agreed with him. “The foul fiend take the old sachette!” growled more than one of them, and the invisible spoil-sport might have had reason to repent of her attacks on the gipsy, if the attention of crowd had not been distracted by the procession of the Pope of Fools, now pouring into the Place de Grève, after making the tour of the streets with its blaze of torches and its deafening hubbub.     50   
  This procession which our readers saw issuing from the Palais de Justice had organized itself en route, and had been recruited by all the ruffians, all the idle pickpockets and unemployed vagabonds of Paris, so that by this time it had reached most respectable proportions.     51   
  First came Egypt, the Duke of the Gipsies at the head, on horseback, with his counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrups and followed by the whole gipsy tribe, men and women, pell-mell, their children screeching on their shoulders, and all of them, duke, counts, and rabble, in rags and tinsel. Then came the Kingdom of Argot, otherwise all the vagabonds in France, marshalled in order of their various ranks, the lowest being first. Thus they marched, four abreast, bearing the divers insignia of their degrees in that strange faculty, most of them maimed in one way or another, some halt, some minus a hand—the courtauds de boutanche (shoplifters), the coquillarts (pilgrims), the hubins (housebreakers), the sabouleux (sham epileptics), the calots (dotards), the francs-mitoux (“schnorrers”), the polissons (street rowdies), the piètres (sham cripples), the capons (card-sharpers), the malingreux (infirm), the marcandiers (hawkers), the narquois (thimble-riggers), the orphelines (pickpockets), the archisuppôts (arch-thieves), and the cagoux (master-thieves)—a list long enough to have wearied Homer himself. It was not without difficulty that in the middle of a conclave of cagoux and archisuppôts one discovered the King of Argot, the Grand Coësre, huddled up in a little cart drawn by two great dogs. The Kingdom of Argot was followed by the Empire of Galilee, led by Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, walking majestically in a purple, wine-stained robe, preceded by mummers performing sham-fights and war-dances, and surrounded by his macebearers, his satellites, and his clerks of the exchequer. Last of all came the members of the Basoche with their garlanded maypoles, their black robes, their music worthy of a witches’ Sabbath, and their great yellow wax candles. In the center of this crowd the great officers of the Con fraternity of Fools bore on their shoulders a sort of litter more loaded with candles than the shrine of Sainte-Genevieve at the time of the plague. And on it, resplendent in cope, choosier, and miter, sat enthroned the new Pope of the Fools, Quasimodo, the hunchback, the bell ringer of Notre Dame.     52   
  Each section of this grotesque procession had its special music. The gipsies scraped their balafos 5 and banged their tambourines. The Arguers—not a very musical race—had got no further than the viola, the cow horn, and the Gothic rebel of the twelfth century. The Empire of Galilee was not much better—scarcely that you distinguished in its music the squeak of some primitive fiddle dating from the infancy of the art, and still confined to the relax. But it was round the Fools’ Pope that all the musical treasures of the age were gathered in one glorious discordance—treble rebels, tenor rebels, not to mention flutes and brasses. Alas, our readers will remember that this was Gringoire’s orchestra.     53   
  It would be difficult to convey an idea of the degree of beatitude and proud satisfaction which had gradually spread over the sad and hideous countenance of Quasimodo during his progress from the Palais to the Place de Grève. It was the first gleam of self-approbation he had ever experienced. Hitherto, humiliation, disdain, disgust alone had been his portion. Deaf as he was, he relished like any true Pope the acclamations of the multitude, whom he hated because he felt they hated him. What matter that his people were a rabble of Fools, of halt and maimed, of thieves, of beggars? They were a people and he was a sovereign. And he accepted seriously all this ironical applause, all this mock reverence, with which, however, we are bound to say, there was mingled a certain amount of perfectly genuine fear. For the hunchback was very strong, and though bow-legged was active, and though deaf, was resentful—three qualities which have a way of tempering ridicule.     54   
  For the rest, it is highly improbable that the new Pope of Fools was conscious either of the sentiments he experienced or of those which he inspired. The mind lodged in that misshapen body must inevitably be itself defective and dim, so that whatever he felt at that moment, he was aware of it but in a vague, uncertain, confused way. But joy pierced the gloom and pride predominated. Around that sombre and unhappy countenance there was a halo of light.     55   
  It was therefore not without surprise and terror that suddenly, just as Quasimodo in this semi-ecstatic state was passing the Maison-aux-Piliers in his triumphant progress, they saw a man dart from the crowd, and with a gesture of hate, snatch from his hand the choosier of gilt wood, the emblem of his mock papacy.     56   
  This bold person was the same man who, a moment before, had scared the poor gipsy girl with his words of menace and hatred. He wore the habit of an ecclesiastic, and the moment he disengaged himself from the crowd, Grainier, who had not observed him before, recognised him. “Tiens!” said he with a cry of astonishment, “it is my master in Hermetics, Dom Claude Frollo the Archdeacon. What the devil can he want with that one-eyed brute? He will assuredly be devoured!”     57   
  Indeed, a cry of terror rose from the crowd, for the formidable hunchback had leapt from his seat, and the women turned their heads that they might not see the Archdeacon torn limb from limb.     58   
  He made one bound towards the priest, looked in his face, and fell on his knees before him.     59   
  The priest then snatched off his tiara, broke his choosier in two, and rent his cope of tinsel, Quasimodo remaining on his knees with bent head and clasped hands.     60   
  On this there began a strange dialogue between the two of signs and gestures, for neither of them uttered a word: the priest standing angry, menacing, masterful; Quasimodo prostrate before him, humbled and suppliant; and yet Quasimodo could certainly have crushed the priest with his finger and thumb.     61   
  At last, with a rough shake of the dwarf’s powerful shoulder, the Archdeacon made him a sign to rise and follow him.     62   
  Quasimodo rose to his feet.     63   
  At this the Fraternity of Fools, the first stupor of surprise passed, prepared to defend their Pope thus rudely dethroned, while the Egyptians, the Arguers, and the Basoche in a body closed yelping round the priest.     64   
  But Quasimodo, placing himself in front of the Archdeacon, brought the muscles of his brawny fists into play and faced the assailants with the snarl of an angry tiger.     65   
  The priest, returned to his gloomy gravity, signed to Quasimodo and withdrew in silence, the hunchback walking before him and scattering the crowd in his passage.     66   
  When they had made their way across the Place the curious and idle rabble made as if to follow, whereupon Quasimodo took up his position in the rear and followed the Archdeacon, facing the crowd, thick-set, snarling, hideous, shaggy, ready for a spring, gnashing his tusks, growling like a wild beast, and causing wild oscillations in the crowd by a mere gesture or a look.     67   
  So they were allowed to turn unhindered into a dark and narrow street, where no one ventured to follow them, so effectually was the entrance barred by the mere image of Quasimodo and his gnashing fangs.     68   
  “A most amazing incident!” said Grainier; “but where the devil am I to find a supper?”     69   


Note 1.  A kiss brings pain. [back]   
Note 2.  Nun of the Order of the Sack, or of the Penitence of Christ. [back]   
Note 3. 
           A chest richly decorated   
They found in a well,   
And in it new banners   
With figures most terrifying.   
 [back]   
Note 4. 
           Arab horsemen they are,   
Looking like statues,   
With swords, and over their shoulders   
Cross-bows that shoot well.   
 [back]   
Note 5.  A primitive stringed instrument of negro origin. [back]

Book II   
IV. The Mishaps Consequent on Following a Pretty Woman through the Streets at Night   
     
AT a venture, Grainier set off to follow the gipsy girl. He had seen her and her goat turn into the Rue de la Coutellerie, so he too turned down the Rue de la Coutellerie.      1   
  “Why not?” said he to himself.      2   
  Now, Grainier, being a practical philosopher of the streets of Paris, had observed that nothing is more conducive to pleasant reverie than to follow a pretty woman without knowing where she is going. There is in this voluntary abdication of one’s free-will, in this subordination of one’s whim to that of another person who is totally unconscious of one’s proceedings, a mixture of fanciful independence and blind obedience, an indefinable something between slavery and freedom which appealed to Grainier, whose mind was essentially mixed, vacillating, and complex, touching in turn all extremes, hanging continually suspended between all human propensities, and letting one neutralize the other. He was fond of comparing himself to Mahomet’s coffin, attracted equally by two loadstones, and hesitating eternally between heaven and earth, between the roof and the pavement, between the fall and the ascension, between the zenith and the nadir.      3   
  Had Grainier lived in our day, how admirably he would have preserved the golden mean between the classical and the romantic. But he was not primitive enough to live three hundred years, a fact much to be deplored; his absence creates a void only too keenly felt in these days.      4   
  For the rest, nothing disposes one more readily to follow passengers through the streets—especially female ones, as Grainier had a weakness for doing—than not to know where to find a bed.      5   
  He therefore walked all pensively after the girl, who quickened her pace, making her pretty little goat trot beside her, as she saw the townsfolk going home, and the taverns—the only shops that had been open that day—preparing to close.      6   
  “After all,” he thought, “she must lodge somewhere—gipsy women are kind-hearted—who knows…?”      7   
  And he filled in the asterisks which followed this discreet break with I know not what engaging fancies.      8   
  Meanwhile, from time to time, as he passed the last groups of burghers closing their doors, he caught scraps of their conversation which broke the charmed spell of his happy imaginings.      9   
  Now it was two old men accosting each other:     10   
  “Maître Thibaut Fernicle, do you know that it is very cold?” (Grainier had known it ever since the winter set in.)     11   
  “You are right there, Maître Boniface Disome. Are we going to have another winter like three years ago, in ’80, when wood cost eight sols a load?”     12   
  “Bah, Maître Thibaut! it is nothing to the winter of 1407—when there was frost from Martinmas to Candlemas, and so sharp that at every third word the ink froze in the pen of the registrar of the parliament, which interrupted the recording of the judgments——”     13   
  Farther on were two gossips at their windows with candles that spluttered in the foggy air.     14   
  “Has your husband told you of the accident, Mlle. La Boudraque?”     15   
  “No; what is it, Mlle. Turquant?”     16   
  “Why, the horse of M. Gilles Godin, notary at the Châtelet, was startled by the Flemings and their procession and knocked down Maître Phillipot Avrillot, a Celestine lay-brother.”     17   
  “Is that so?”     18   
  “Yes, truly.”     19   
  “Just an ordinary horse too! That’s rather too bad. If it had been a cavalry horse, now!”     20   
  And the windows were shut again; but not before Grainier had lost the thread of his ideas.     21   
  Fortunately he soon picked it up again, and had no difficulty in resuming it, thanks to the gipsy and to Djali, who continued to walk before him—two graceful, delicate creatures, whose small feet, pretty forms, and engaging ways he admired exceedingly, almost confounding them in his contemplation: regarding them for their intelligence and good fellowship both as girls, while for their sure-footed, light and graceful gait, they might both have been goats.     22   
  Meanwhile the streets were momentarily becoming darker and more deserted. Curfew had rung long ago, and it was only at rare intervals that one encountered a foot-passenger in the street or a light in a window. In following the gipsy, Grainier had become involved in that inextricable maze of alleys, lanes, and culs-de-sac which surrounds the ancient burial-ground of the Holy Innocents, and which resembles nothing so much as a skein of cotton ravelled by a kitten.     23   
  “Very illogical streets, i’ faith!” said Grainier, quite lost in the thousand windings which seemed forever to return upon themselves, but through which the girl followed a path apparently quite familiar to her, and at an increasingly rapid pace. For his part, he would have been perfectly ignorant of his whereabouts, had he not caught sight at a turning of the octagonal mass of the pillory of the Halles, the perforated top of which was outlined sharply against a solitary lighted window in the Rue Verdelet.     24   
  For some moments the girl had been aware of his presence, turning round two or three times uneasily; once, even, she had stopped short, and taking advantage of a ray of light from a half-open bakehouse door, had scanned him steadily from head to foot; then, with the little pouting grimace which Grainier had already noticed, she had proceeded on her way.     25   
  That little moue gave Grainier food for reflection. There certainly was somewhat of disdain and mockery in that captivating grimace. In consequence he hung his head and began to count the paving-stones, and to follow the girl at a more respectful distance. Suddenly, at a street corner which for the moment had caused him to lose sight of her, he heard her utter a piercing shriek. He hastened forward. The street was very dark, but a twist of cotton steeped in oil that burned behind an iron grating at the feet of an image of the Virgin, enabled Grainier to descry the gipsy struggling in the arms of two men who were endeavouring to stifle her cries. The poor, frightened little goat lowered its horns and bleated piteously.     26   
  “Help! help! gentlemen of the watch!” cried Grainier, advancing bravely. One of the men holding the girl turned towards him—it was the formidable countenance of Quasimodo.     27   
  Grainier did not take to his heels, but neither did he advance one step.     28   
  Quasimodo came at him, dealt him a blow that hurled him four paces off on the pavement, and disappeared rapidly into the darkness, carrying off the girl hanging limply over one of his arms like a silken scarf. His companion followed him, and the poor little goat ran after them bleating piteously.     29   
  “Murder! murder!” screamed the hapless gipsy.     30   
  “Hold, villains, and drop that wench!” thundered a voice suddenly, and a horseman sprang out from a neighbouring cross-road.     31   
  It was a captain of the Royal Archers, armed cap-à-pie, and sabre in hand.     32   
  He snatched the gipsy from the grasp of the stupefied Quasimodo and laid her across his saddle; and as the redoubtable hunchback, recovered from his surprise, was about to throw himself upon him and recover his prey, fifteen or sixteen archers who had followed close upon their captain appeared, broadsword in hand. It was a detachment going the night rounds by order of M. d’Estouteville, commandant of the Provostry of Paris.     33   
  Quasimodo was instantly surrounded, seized, and bound. He roared, he foamed, he bit, and had it been daylight, no doubt his face alone, rendered still more hideous by rage, would have put the whole detachment to flight. But darkness deprived him of his most formidable weapon—his ugliness.     34   
  His companion had vanished during the struggle.     35   
  The gipsy girl sat up lightly on the officer’s saddle, put her two hands on the young man’s shoulders, and regarded him fixedly for several seconds, obviously charmed by his good looks and grateful for the service he had just rendered her.     36   
  She was the first to break the silence. Infusing a still sweeter tone into her sweet voice, she said: “Monsieur the Gendarme, how are you called?”     37   
  “Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers, at your service, ma belle.”     38   
  “Thank you,” she replied; and while Monsieur the Captain was occupied in twirling his mustache à la Burguignonne, she slid from the saddle like a falling arrow and was gone—no lightning could have vanished more rapidly.     39   
  “Nombril du Pape!” swore the captain while he made them tighten Quasimodo’s bonds. “I would rather have kept the girl.”     40   
  “Well, captain,” returned one of the men, “though the bird has flown, we’ve got the bat safe.”     41

   
Book II   
V. Sequel of the Mishap   
     
GRINGOIRE, stunned by his fall, lay prone upon the pavement in front of the image of Our Lady at the corner of the street. By slow degrees his senses returned, but for some moments he lay in a kind of half-somnolent state—not without its charms—in which the airy figures of the gipsy and her goat mingled strangely with the weight of Quasimodo’s fist. This condition, however, was of short duration. A very lively sense of cold in that portion of his frame which was in contact with the ground woke him rudely from his dreams, and brought his mind back to the realities.      1   
  “Whence comes this coolness?” he hastily said to himself, and then he discovered that he was lying in the middle of the gutter.      2   
  “Devil take that hunchback Cyclops!” he growled as he attempted to rise. But he was still too giddy and too bruised from his fall. There was nothing for it but to lie where he was. He still had the free use of his hands, however, so he held his nose and resigned himself to his fate.      3   
  “The mud of Paris,” thought he drowsily—for he now felt pretty well convinced that he would have to put up with the kennel as a bed—“has a most potent stink. It must contain a large amount of volatile and nitric acids, which is also the opinion of Maitre Nicolas Flamel and of the alchemists.”      4   
  The word alchemist suddenly recalled the Archdeacon Claude Frollo to his mind. He remembered the scene of violence of which he had just caught a glimpse—that the gipsy was struggling between two men, that Quasimodo had had a companion, and then the morose and haughty features of the Archdeacon passed vaguely through his memory. “That would be strange,” thought he, and immediately with this datum and from this basis began raising a fantastic edifice of hypothesis, that house of cards of the philosophers. Then, returning suddenly to the practical, “Why, I am freezing!” he cried.      5   
  His position was indeed becoming less and less tenable. Each molecule of water in the gutter carried away a molecule of heat from Gringoire’s loins, and the equilibrium between the temperature of the body and the temperature of the water was being established in a rapid and painful manner.      6   
  Presently he was assailed by an annoyance of quite another character.      7   
  A troop of children, of those little barefooted savages who in all times have run about the streets of Paris under the immemorial name of “gamins,” and who, when we too were young, would throw stones at us when we came out of school because our breeches were not in rags—a swarm of these young gutter-snipes came running towards the spot where Grainier lay, laughing and shouting in a manner that showed little regard for the slumbers of their neighbours. After them they dragged some shapeless bundle, and the clatter of their wooden shoes alone was enough to wake the dead. Grainier, who had not quite reached that pass, raised himself up on his elbow.      8   
  “Ohé! Hennequin Dandéche! Ohé! Jehan Pincebourde!” they bawled at the pitch of their voices, “old Eustache Moubon, the ironmonger at the corner, is just dead. We’ve got his straw mattress, and we’re going to make a bonfire of it. Come on!”      9   
  And with that they flung the mattress right on top of Grainier, whom they had come up to without perceiving, while at the same time one of them took a handful of straw and lit it at the Blessed Virgin’s lamp.     10   
  “Mort-Christ!” gasped Grainier, “am I going to be too hot now?”     11   
  The moment was critical. He was on the point of being caught between fire and water. He made a superhuman effort—such as a coiner would make to escape being boiled alive—staggered to his feet, heaved the mattress back upon the boys, and fled precipitately.     12   
  “Holy Virgin!” yelled the gamins, “it is the ironmonger’s ghost!”     13   
  And they too ran away.     14   
  The mattress remained master of the field. Belleforêt, Father Le Juge, and Corrozet assert that next day it was picked up by the clergy of that district and conveyed with great pomp and ceremony to the treasury of the Church of Saint Opportune, where, down to 1789 the sacristan drew a handsome income from the great miracle worked by the image of the Virgin at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil, the which, by its mere presence, had on the memorable night between the sixth and seventh of January, 1482, exorcised the defunct Eustache Moubon, who, to balk the devil, had, when dying, cunningly hidden his soul in his mattress.

   
Book II   
VI. The Broken Pitcher   
     
AFTER running for some time as fast as his legs could carry him without knowing whither, rushing head foremost into many a street corner, leaping gutters, traversing numberless alleys, courts, and streets, seeking flight and passage among the endless meanderings of the old street round the Halles, exploring in his blind panic what the elegant Latin of the Charters describes as “tota via, cheminum et viaria,” our poet suddenly drew up short, first because he was out of breath, and secondly because an unexpected idea gripped his mind.      1   
  “It appears to me, Maitre Pierre Grainier,” he apostrophized himself, tapping his forehead, “that you must be demented to run thus. Those little ragamuffins were just as frightened of you as you of them. If I mistake not, you heard the clatter of their sabots making off southward, while you were fleeing to the north. Now of two things one: either they ran away, and the mattress, forgotten in their flight, is precisely the hospitable bed you have been searching for since the morning, and which Our Lady conveys to you miraculously as a reward for having composed in her honour a Morality accompanied by triumphs and mummeries; or, on the other hand, the boys have not run away, and, in that case, they have set fire to the mattress, which will be exactly the fire you are in need of to cheer, warm, and dry you. In either case—good fire or good bed—the mattress is a gift from Heaven. The thrice-blessed Virgin Mary at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil has maybe caused Eustache Moubon to die for that identical purpose, and it is pure folly on your part to rush off headlong, like a Picard running from a Frenchman, leaving behind what you are seeking in front—decidedly you are an idiot!”      2   
  Accordingly, he began to retrace his steps, and with much seeking, ferreting about, nose on the scent, and ears pricked, he endeavoured to find his way back to that blessed mattress—but in vain. It was one maze of intersecting houses, blind alleys, and winding streets, among which he hesitated and wavered continually, more bewildered and entangled in this network of dark alleys than he would have been in the real labyrinth of the Hôtel des Tournelles. Finally he lost patience and swore aloud: “A malediction upon these alleys! The devil himself must have made them after the pattern of his pitchfork!”      3   
  Somewhat relieved by this outburst, next moment his nerve was completely restored by catching sight of a red glow at the end of a long, narrow street.      4   
  “Heaven be praised!” said he, “there it is—that must be the blaze of my mattress,” and likening himself to a pilot in danger of foundering in the night, “Salve,” he added piously, “Salve maris stella!” but whether this fragment of litany was addressed to the Virgin or to the mattress, we really are unable to say.      5   
  He had advanced but a few steps down the narrow street, which was on an incline, unpaved, and more and more miry as it neared the bottom, when he became aware of a curious fact. The street was not deserted. Here and there he caught sight of vague and indeterminate shapes, all crawling in the direction of the light that flickered at the end of the street, like those lumbering insects which creep at night from one blade of grass to another towards a shepherd’s fire.      6   
  Nothing makes one more boldly venturesome than the consciousness of an empty pocket. Grainier, therefore, continued his way and soon came up with the last of these weird objects dragging itself clumsily after the rest. On closer inspection he perceived that it was nothing but a miserable fragment, a stump of a man hobbling along painfully on his two hands like a mutilated grasshopper with only its front legs left. As he passed this kind of human spider it addressed him in a lamentable whine: “La buona mancia, signor! la buona mancia!” 1      7   
  “The devil fly away with thee!” said Grainier, “and me too, if I know what that means.” And he passed on.      8   
  He reached another of those ambulatory bundles and examined it. It was a cripple with only one leg and one arm, but so legless and so armless that the complicated system of crutches and wooden legs on which he was supported gave him all the appearance of a scaffolding in motion. Grainier, who dearly loved noble and classical similes, compared him in his own mind to the living tripod of Vulcan.      9   
  The living tripod greeted him as he passed by, lifting his hat to the height of Gringoire’s chin and holding it there like a barber’s basin while he shouted in his ear: “Senor caballero, para comprar un pedaso de pan!” 2     10   
  “It appears,” said Grainier, “that this one talks also; but it’s a barbarous lingo, and he is luckier than I if he understands it.” Then striking his forehead with a sudden change of thought—“That reminds me—what the devil did they mean this morning with their Esmeralda?”     11   
  He started to quicken his pace, but for the third time something barred the way. This something, or rather some one, was blind, a little blind man with a bearded, Jewish face, who, lunging in the space round him with a stick, and towed along by a great dog, snuffled out to him in a strong, Hungarian accent: “Facitote caritatem!” 3     12   
  “Thank goodness!” exclaimed Pierre Grainier, “at last here’s one who can speak a Christian language. I must indeed have a benevolent air for them to ask alms of me, considering the present exhausted condition of my purse. My friend,” and he turned to the blind man, “last week I sold my last shirt, or rather, as you are acquainted only with the language of Cicero, ‘Vendid hebdomade super transita meum ultimuman chemisam.’”     13   
  So saying, he turned his back on the blind man and pursued his way. But the blind man proceeded to quicken his pace at the same time, and behold the cripple and the stump also came hurrying forward with great clatter and rattle of crutches and supports, and all three tumbling over one another at poor Gringoire’s heels, favoured him with their several songs. “Caritatem!” whined the blind man. “La buona mancia!” piped the stump, and the cripple took up the strain of “Un pedaso de pan!”     14   
  Gringoire stopped his ears. “Oh, tower of Babel!” he cried, and set off running. The blind man ran, the cripple ran, the stump ran.     15   
  And as he penetrated farther down the street, the maimed, the halt, and the blind began to swarm round him, while one-armed or one-eyed men, and lepers covered with sores, issued from the houses, some from little streets adjacent, some from the bowels of the earth, howling, bellowing, yelping, hobbling, and clattering along, all pressing forward towards the glow and wallowing in the mud like slugs after the rain.     16   
  Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not at all sure of what would come of all this, walked on bewildered in the midst of this swarm, upsetting the halt, striding over the stumps, his feet entangled in that ant-hill of cripples, like the English captain who was beset by a legion of crabs.     17   
  It occurred to him to attempt to retrace his steps, but it was too late. The herd had closed up behind him and his three beggars held him fast. He went on, therefore, compelled at once by that irresistible flood, by fear, and by a sensation of giddiness which made the whole thing seem like some horrible nightmare.     18   
  At last he reached the end of the street. It opened into an immense square in which a multitude of scattered lights were flickering through the misty gloom. Gringoire precipitated himself into it, hoping by the speed of his legs to escape the three maimed spectres who had fastened themselves on to him.     19   
  “Onde vas hombre?” 4 cried the cripple, tossing aside his complicated supports and running after him with as good a pair of legs as ever measured a geometrical pace upon the pavements of Paris; while the stump, standing erect upon his feet, bonneted Gringoire with the heavy iron-rimmed platter which served him as a support, and the blind man stared him in the face with great flaming eyes.     20   
  “Where am I?” asked the terrified poet.     21   
  “In the Court of Miracles,” replied a fourth spectre who had joined them.     22   
  “Truly,” said Gringoire, “I see that here the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, but where is the Saviour?”     23   
  Their only answer was a sinister laugh.     24   
  The poor poet looked about him. He was, in fact, in that Cour des Miracles where never honest man penetrated at such an hour—a magic circle wherein any officer of the Châtelet or sergeant of the Provostry intrepid enough to risk entering vanished in morsels—a city of thieves, a hideous sore on the face of Paris; a drain whence flowed forth each morning, to return at night, that stream of iniquity, of mendacity, and vagabondage which flows forever through the streets of a capital; a monstrous hive to which all the hornets that prey on the social order return at night, laden with their booty; a fraudulent hospital where the Bohemian, the unfrocked monk, the ruined scholar, the good-for-nothing of every nation—Spaniards, Italians, Germans—and of every creed—Jews, Turks, and infidels—beggars covered with painted sores during the day were transformed at night into robbers; in a word, a vast green-room, serving at that period for all the actors in that eternal drama of robbery, prostitution, and murder enacted on the streets of Paris.     25   
  It was a vast open space, irregular and ill-paved, as were all the squares of Paris at that time. Fires, around which swarmed strange groups, gleamed here and there. It was one ceaseless movement and clamour, shrieks of laughter, the wailing of babies, the voices of women. The hands and heads of this crowd threw a thousand grotesque outlines on the luminous background. The light of the fires flickered over the ground mingled with huge indefinite shadows, and across it from time to time passed some animal-like man or man-like animal. The boundary lines between race and species seemed here effaced as in a pandemonium. Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health and sickness, all seemed to be in common with this people; all was shared, mingled, confounded, superimposed, each one participated in all.     26   
  The faint and unsteady gleam of the fires enabled Gringoire through all his perturbation to distinguish that the great square was enclosed in a hideous framework of ancient houses, which, with their mouldering, shrunken, stooping fronts, each pierced by one or two round lighted windows, looked to him in the dark like so many old women’s heads, monstrous and cross-grained, ranged in a circle, and blinking down upon these witches’ revels.     27   
  It was like another and an unknown world, undreamt of, shapeless, crawling, swarming, fantastic.     28   
  Gringoire, growing momentarily more affrighted, held by the three beggars as by so many vices, bewildered by a crowd of other faces that bleated and barked round him—the luckless Gringoire strove to collect his mind sufficiently to remember whether this was really Saturday—the witches’ Sabbath. But all his efforts were useless—the link between his memory and his brain was broken; and doubtful of everything, vacillating between what he saw and what he felt, he asked himself this insoluble question: “If I am I, then what is this? If this is real, then what am I?”     29   
  At this moment an intelligible cry detached itself from the buzzing of the crowd surrounding him: “Take him to the King! Take him to the King!”     30   
  “Holy Virgin!” muttered Gringoire, “the King of this place? He must be a goat!”     31   
  “To the King! To the King!” they shouted in chorus.     32   
  They dragged him away, each striving to fasten his claws on him; but the three beggars would not loose their hold, and tore him from the others, yelling: “He belongs to us!”     33   
  The poet’s doublet, already sadly ailing, gave up the ghost in this struggle.     34   
  In traversing the horrible place his giddiness passed off, and after proceeding a few paces he had entirely recovered his sense of reality. He began to adapt himself to the atmosphere of the place. In the first moments there had arisen from his poet’s head, or perhaps quite simply and prosaically from his empty stomach, a fume, a vapour, so to speak, which, spreading itself between him and the surrounding objects, had permitted him to view them only through the incoherent mist of a nightmare, that distorting twilight of our dreams which exaggerates and misplaces every outline, crowding objects together in disproportionate groups, transforming ordinary things into chimeras and men into monstrous phantoms. By degrees, this hallucination gave place to a less bewildered, less exaggerated state of mind. The real forced itself upon him—struck upon his eyes—struck against his feet—and demolished, piece by piece, the terrifying vision by which at first he had imagined himself surrounded. He now perforce was aware that he was walking not through the Styx, but through the mud; that he was being hustled not by demons, but by thieves; that not his soul, but in simple sooth his life, was in danger (since he was without that invaluable conciliator which interposes so efficaciously between the robber and the honest man—the purse); in short, on examining the orgy more closely and in colder blood, he was obliged to climb down from the witches’ Sabbath to the pot-house.     35   
  And, in truth, the Court of Miracles was nothing more nor less than a huge tavern; but a tavern for brigands, as red with blood as ever it was with wine.     36   
  The spectacle which presented itself to him when his ragged escort at last brought him to the goal of his march, was not calculated to incline his mind to poetry, even though it were the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the pot-house. Were we not writing of the fifteenth century, we would say that Gringoire had come down from Michael Angelo to Callot.     37   
  Round a great fire which burned on a large round flagstone, and glowed on the red-hot legs of a trivet, unoccupied for the moment, some worm-eaten tables were ranged haphazard, without the smallest regard to symmetry or order. On these tables stood a few overflowing tankards of wine or beer, and grouped round them many bacchanalian faces reddened both by the fire and wine. Here was a man, round of belly and jovial of face, noisily embracing a thick-set, brawny trollop of the streets. Here a sham soldier, whistling cheerfully while he unwound the bandages of his false wound, and unstiffened his sound and vigorous knee, strapped up since the morning in yards of ligature. Anon it was a malingreux—a malingerer—preparing with celandine and oxblood his “jambe de Dieu” or sore leg for the morrow. Two tables farther on a coquillart with his complete pilgrim’s suit, cockle-shell on hat, was spelling out and practising the Plaint of Sainte-Reine in its proper sing-song tone and nasal whine. Elsewhere a young hubin was taking a lesson in epilepsy from an old sabouleux, who was teaching him how to foam at the mouth by chewing a piece of soap. Close by, a dropsical man was removing his swelling, while four or five hags at the same table were quarrelling over a child they had stolen that evening. All of which circumstances two centuries later “appeared so diverting to the Court,” says Sauval, “that they furnished pastime to the King, and the opening scene of the royal ballet, entitled ‘Night,’ which was divided into four parts and was danced on the stage of the Petit-Bourbon.” “And never,” adds an eye-witness in 1653, “were the sudden metamorphoses of the Cour des Miracles more happily represented. Benserade prepared us for it with some very pleasing verses.”     38   
  Loud guffaws of laughter resounded everywhere, and obscene songs. Each one said his say, passed his criticisms, and swore freely without listening to his neighbours’. Wine cups clinked and quarrels arose as the cups met, the smash of broken crockery leading further to the tearing of rags.     39   
  A great dog sat on his tail and stared into the fire. A few children mingled in this orgy. The stolen child wept and wailed; another, a bouncing boy of four, was seated with dangling legs on too high a bench, the table reaching just to his chin, and said not a word; a third was engaged in spreading over the table with his fingers the tallow from a guttering candle. Lastly, a very little one was squatting in the mud, and almost lost in a great iron pot, which he scraped out with a tile, drawing sounds from it which would have made Stradivarius swoon.     40   
  There was a barrel near the fire, and seated on the barrel a beggar. It was the King upon his throne.     41   
  The three who had hold of Gringoire led him up to the barrel, and the pandemonium was silent for a moment, save for the caldron tenanted by the child.     42   
  Gringoire dared not breathe or lift his eyes.     43   
  “Hombre, quita tu sombrero,” 5 said one of the three rogues in possession of him; and before he could understand what this meant, another had snatched off his hat—a poor thing, it is true, but available still on a day of sunshine or of rain.     44   
  Gringoire heaved a sigh.     45   
  Meanwhile the King, from his elevated seat, demanded: “What sort of a rascal is this?”     46   
  Gringoire started. This voice, though speaking in menacing tones, reminded him of the one which that very morning had struck the first blow at his Mystery, as it whined in the middle of the audience, “Charity, I pray!” He looked up—it was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.     47   
  Clopin Trouillefou, invested with the regal insignia, had not one rag the more or the less upon him. The sore on his arm had disappeared certainly, while in his hand he held one of those leather-thonged whips called boullayes, and used in those days by the sergeants of the guard to keep back the crowd. On his head he had a sort of bonnet twisted into a circle and closed at the top; but whether it was a child’s cap or a king’s crown it would be hard to say, so much did the two resemble one another.     48   
  However, Gringoire, without any apparent reason, felt his hopes revive a little on recognising in the King of the Court of Miracles his accursed beggar of the great Hall.     49   
  “Maître,” he stammered, “Monseigneur—Sire—How must I call you?” he said at last, having reached the highest point of his scale, and not knowing how to mount higher nor how to descend.     50   
  “Monseigneur, Your Majesty, or Comrade—call me what thou wilt, only make haste. What hast thou to say in thy defence?”     51   
  “In my defence?” thought Gringoire; “I don’t quite like the sound of that. I am the one,” he stammered, “who this morning——”     52   
  “By the claws of the devil,” broke in Clopin, “thy name, rascal, and nothing more! Hark ye! thou standest before three puissant sovereigns—myself, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Tunis, successor of the Grand Coësre, Supreme Ruler of the Kingdom of Argot; Mathias Hungadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and Bohemia, the yellow-vised old fellow over there with a clout round his head; Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat fellow who’s hugging a wench instead of attending to us. We are thy judges. Thou hast entered into the Kingdom of Argot without being an Argotier, and so violated the privileges of our city. Thou must pay the penalty unless thou art either a capon, a franc mitou, or a rifodé—that is to say, in the argot of honest men, either a thief, a beggar, or a vagabond. Art thou any one of these? Come, justify thyself—describe thy qualifications.”     53   
  “Alas!” said Gringoire, “I have not that honour. I am the author——”     54   
  “That’s enough,” resumed Trouillefou without letting him finish; “thou shalt go hang. A very simple matter, messieurs the honest burghers. We do unto you as we are done by. The same law that you mete out to the Truands, the Truands mete out to you again. You are to blame if that law is a bad one. No harm if now and then an honest man grin through the hempen collar—that makes the thing honourable. Come, my friend, divide thy rags cheerfully among these ladies. I am going to string thee up for the diversion of the Vagabonds, and thou shalt give them thy purse for a pour-boire. If thou hast any last mummeries to go through, thou wilt find down in that wooden mortar a very passable stone God the Father that we stole from Saint-Pierre-aux-Bœufs. Thou hast four minutes to throw thy soul at his head.”     55   
  This was a formidable harangue.     56   
  “Well said, by my soul!” cried the Emperor of Galilee, smashing his wine pot to prop up his table. “Clopin Trouillefou preaches like a Holy Pope!”     57   
  “Messeigneurs the Emperors and the Kings,” said Gringoire coolly (for somehow or other his courage had returned to him and he spoke resolutely), “you fail to understand. My name is Pierre Gringoire. I am a poet, the author of a Morality which was performed this morning in the great Hall of the Palais.”     58   
  “Ah, ’tis thou, Maître, is it?” answered Clopin. “I was there myself, par la tête de Dieu! Well, comrade, is it any reason because thou weariedst us to death this morning that thou shouldst not be hanged to-night?”     59   
  “I shall not get out of this so easily,” thought Gringoire. However, he had a try for it. “I see no reason why the poets should not come under the head of vagabonds,” he said. “As to thieves, Mercurius was one——”     60   
  Here Clopin interrupted him: “Thou wastest time with thy patter. Pardieu, man, be hanged quietly and without more ado!”     61   
  “Pardon me, Monsieur the King of Tunis,” returned Gringoire, disputing the ground inch by inch; “it is well worth your trouble—one moment—hear me—you will not condemn me without a hearing——”     62   
  In truth, his luckless voice was drowned by the hubbub around him. The child was scraping his kettle with greater vigour than ever, and as a climax, an old woman had just placed on the hot trivet a pan of fat, which made as much noise, spitting and fizzling over the fire, as a yelling troop of children running after a mask at Carnival time.     63   
  Meanwhile, Clopin Trouillefou, after conferring a moment with his brothers of Egypt and of Galilee, the latter of whom was quite drunk, cried sharply, “Silence!” As neither the frying-pan nor the kettle paid any attention, but continued their duet, he jumped down from his barrel, gave one kick to the kettle, which set it rolling ten paces from the child, and another to the frying-pan, upsetting all the fat into the fire; then he solemnly remounted his throne, heedless of the smothered cries of the child or the grumbling of the old woman, whose supper was vanishing in beautiful white flames.     64   
  At a sign from Trouillefou, the duke, the emperor, the archisuppôts, and the cagoux came and ranged themselves round him in a horse-shoe, of which Gringoire, upon whom they still kept a tight hold, occupied the centre. It was a semicircle of rags and tatters, of pitchforks and hatchets, of reeling legs and great bare arms, of sordid, haggard, and sottish faces. In the midst of this Round Table of the riffraff, Clopin Trouillefou, as Doge of this Senate, as head of this peerage, as Pope of this Conclave, dominated the heterogeneous mass; in the first place by the whole height of his barrel, and then by virtue of a lofty, fierce, and formidable air which made his eye flash and rectified in his savage countenance the bestial type of the vagabond race. He was like a wild boar among swine.     65   
  “Look you,” said he to Gringoire, stroking his unsightly chin with his horny hand. “I see no reason why you should not be hanged. To be sure, the prospect does not seem to please you; but that is simply because you townsfolk are not used to it—you make such a tremendous business of it. After all, we mean you no harm. But here’s one way of getting out of it for the moment. Will you be one of us?”     66   
  One may imagine the effect of this suggestion on Gringoire, who saw life slipping from his grasp and had already begun to loosen his hold on it. He clutched it again with all his might.     67   
  “That will I most readily,” he replied.     68   
  “You consent,” resumed Clopin, “to enrol yourself among the members of the ‘petite flambe’ (the little dagger)?”     69   
  “Of the Little Dagger—certainly,” answered Gringoire.     70   
  “You acknowledge yourself a member of the Free Company?” went on the King of Tunis.     71   
  “Of the Free Company.”     72   
  “A subject of the Kingdom of Argot?”     73   
  “Of the Kingdom of Argot.”     74   
  “A Vagabond?”     75   
  “A Vagabond.”     76   
  “With heart and soul?”     77   
  “Heart and soul.”     78   
  “I would have you observe,” added the King, “that you will be none the less hanged for all that.”     79   
  “Diable!” exclaimed the poet.     80   
  “Only,” continued Clopin imperturbably, “it will take place somewhat later, with more ceremony, and at the expense of the city of Paris, on a fine stone gibbet, and by honest men. That’s some consolation.”     81   
  “I am glad you think so,” responded Gringoire.     82   
  “Then, there are other advantages. As a member of the Free Company you will have to contribute neither towards the paving, the lighting, nor the poor—taxes to which the burghers of Paris are subject.”     83   
  “So be it,” said the poet. “I agree. I am a Vagabond, an Argotier, a Little Dagger—whatever you please. And, indeed, I was all that already, Monsieur the King of Tunis, for I am a philosopher and ‘Omnia in philosophia, omnes in philosopho continentur’—as you are aware.”     84   
  The King of Tunis knit his brows. “What do you take me for, my friend? What Jew of Hungary’s patter are you treating us to now? I know no Hebrew. It’s not to say that because a man’s a robber he must be a Jew. Nay, indeed. I do not even thieve now—I am above that—I kill. Cutthroat, yes; cutpurse, no!”     85   
  Gringoire endeavoured to squeeze some extenuating plea between these brief ejaculations jerked at him by the offended monarch. “I ask your pardon, monsieur, but it is not Hebrew; it is Latin.”     86   
  “I tell thee,” retorted the enraged Clopin, “that I’m not a Jew, and I’ll have thee hanged, ventre de synagogue! as well as that little usurer of Judea standing beside thee, and whom I hope to see some day nailed to a counter like the bad penny that he is.”     87   
  As he spoke, he pointed to the little bearded Hungarian Jew who had accosted Gringoire with “Facitote caritatem,” and who, understanding no other language, was much astonished that the King of Tunis should thus vent his wrath on him.     88   
  At length Monseigneur Clopin’s wrath abated.     89   
  “So, rascal,” said he to out poet, “you are willing to become a Vagabond?”     90   
  “Willingly,” replied the poet.     91   
  “Willing is not all,” said Clopin gruffly. “Good-will never put an extra onion into the soup, and is of no value but for getting you into Paradise. Now, Paradise and Argot are two very different places. To be received into Argot you must first prove that you are good for something, and to that end you must search the manikin.”     92   
  “I will search,” said Gringoire, “anything you please.”     93   
  At a sign from Clopin, several Argotiers detached themselves from the group and returned a moment afterward, bearing two posts ending in two broad wooden feet, which insured them standing firmly on the ground. To the upper end of these posts they attached a cross-beam, the whole constituting a very pretty portable gallows, which Gringoire had the satisfaction of seeing erected before him in the twinkling of an eye. It was quite complete, even to the rope swinging gracefully from the transverse beam.     94   
  “What are they after now?” Gringoire asked himself with some uneasiness. The jingling of little bells, which at that moment sounded on his ear, banished his anxiety, for it proceeded from a stuffed figure which the Vagabonds were hanging by the neck to the rope, a sort of scarecrow, dressed in red and covered with little tinkling bells sufficient to equip thirty Castilian mules. The jingling of these thousand bells continued for some time under the vibration of the rope, then died slowly away and sank into complete silence as the figure hung motionless.     95   
  Then Clopin, pointing to a rickety old stool placed beneath the figure, said to Gringoire, “Mount that.”     96   
  “Death of the devil!” objected Gringoire, “I shall break my neck. Your stool halts like a distich of Martial: one leg is hexameter and one pentameter.”     97   
  “Get up,” repeated Clopin.     98   
  Gringoire mounted upon the stool and succeeded, though not without some oscillations of head and arms, in finding his centre of gravity.     99   
  “Now,” continued the King of Tunis, “twist your right foot round your left leg, and stand on tip-toe on your left foot.”    100   
  “Monseigneur,” remonstrated Gringoire, “you are determined, then, that I should break some of my limbs?”    101   
  Clopin shook his head. “Hark ye, friend—you talk too much. In two words, this is what you are to do: stand on tip-toe, as I told you; you will then be able to reach the manikin’s pocket; you will put your hand into it and pull out a purse that is there. If you do all this without a sound from one of the bells, well and good; you shall be a Vagabond. We shall then have nothing further to do but belabour you well for a week.”    102   
  “Ventre Dieu! I will be careful,” said Gringoire. “And what if I make the bells ring?”    103   
  “Then you will be hanged. Do you understand?”    104   
  “No, not at all,” declared Gringoire.    105   
  “Listen once more. You are to pick the manikin’s pocket, and if a single bell stirs during the operation you will be hanged. You understand that?”    106   
  “Yes,” said Gringoire, “I understand that. What next?”    107   
  “If you succeed in drawing out the purse without sounding a single bell, you are a Vagabound, and you will be soundly beaten for eight days running. You understand now, no doubt.”    108   
  “No monseigneur, I do not understand. Hanged in one case, beaten in the other; where does my advantage come in?”    109   
  “And what about becoming a rogue?” rejoined Clopin. “Is that nothing? It’s in your own interest that we beat you, so that you may be hardened against stripes.”    110   
  “I am greatly obliged to you,” replied the poet.    111   
  “Come, make haste!” said the King with a resounding kick against his barrel. “Pick the manikin’s pocket and be done with it. I warn you for the last time that if I hear the faintest tinkle you shall take the manikin’s place.”    112   
  The whole crew of Argotiers applauded Clopin’s words, and ranged themselves in a circle round the gallows with such pitiless laughter, that Gringoire saw plainly that he was affording them too much amusement not to have cause to fear the worst. He had therefore no hope left, save perhaps in the faint chance of succeeding in the desperate task imposed upon him. He resolved to risk it, but he first addressed a fervent prayer to the man of straw whom he was preparing to rob, and whose heart he was more likely to soften than those of the rogues. These myriad bells with their little brazen tongues seemed to him like so many asps with mouths open ready to hiss and bite.    113   
  “Oh,” he breathed, “can it be that my life depends on the faintest vibration of the smallest of these bells? Oh,” he added, clasping his hands, “oh, clashing, jingling, tinkling bells, be silent, I implore!”    114   
  He made one more attempt with Trouillefou.    115   
  “And if there should come a puff of wind?”    116   
  “You will be hanged,” replied the other without hesitation.    117   
  Realizing that there was no respite, no delay or subterfuge possible, he bravely set about his task. He twisted his right foot round his left ankle, rose on his left foot, and stretched out his hand; but as he touched the manikin, his body, being now supported but on one foot, swayed on the stool which had but three; he clutched mechanically at the figure, lost his balance, and fell heavily to the ground, deafened by the fatal clashing of the manikin’s thousand bells, while the figure, yielding to the thrust of his hand, first revolved on its own axis, and then swung majestically between the two posts.    118   
  “Malediction!” exclaimed the poet as he fell, and he lay face downward on the earth as if dead.    119   
  Nevertheless, he heard the terrible carillon going on above his head, and the diabolical laughter of the thieves, and the voice of Trouillefou saying: “Lift the fellow up and hang him double-quick!”    120   
  Gringoire rose to his feet. They had already unhooked the manikin to make room for him.    121   
  The Argotiers forced him to mount the stool. Clopin then came up, passed the rope round his neck, and clapping him on the shoulders, “Adieu, l’ami,” he said. “You don’t escape this time, not even if you were as cunning as the Pope himself.”    122   
  The word “mercy” died on Gringoire’s lips. He looked around him—not a sign of hope—all were laughing.    123   
  “Bellevigne de l’Etoile,” said the King of Tunis to a gigantic rogue, who at once stood forth from the rest, “climb up to the top beam.”    124   
  Bellevigne de l’Etoile clambered nimbly up, and the next instant Gringoire, on raising his eyes, saw with terror that he was astride the cross-beam above his head.    125   
  “Now,” resumed Clopin Trouillefou, “when I clap my hands, do you, Andry le Rouge, knock over the stool with your knee; François Chante-Prune will hang on to the rascal’s legs, and you, Bellevigne, jump on to his shoulders—but all three at the same time, do you hear?”    126   
  Gringoire shuddered.    127   
  “Ready?” cried Clopin Trouillefou to the three Argotiers waiting to fall on Gringoire like spiders on a fly. The poor victim had a moment of horrible suspense, during which Clopin calmly pushed into the fire with the point of his shoe some twigs of vine which the flame had not yet reached.    128   
  “Ready?” he repeated, and raised his hands to clap. A second more and it would have been all over.    129   
  But he stopped short, struck by a sudden idea. “One moment,” he said; “I had forgotten. It is the custom with us not to hang a man without first asking if there’s any woman who will have him. Comrade, that’s your last chance. You must marry either an Argotière or the rope.”    130   
  Absurd as this gipsy law may appear to the reader, he will find it set forth at full length in old English law. (See Burington’s Observations.)    131   
  Gringoire breathed again. It was the second reprieve he had had within the last half hour. Yet he could not place much confidence in it.    132   
  “Holà!” shouted Clopin, who had reascended his throne. “Holà there! women—wenches—is there any one of you, from the witch to her cat, any jade among you who’ll have this rogue? Holà Colette la Charonne! Elizabeth Trouvain! Simone Jodouyne! Marie Piédebou! Thonne-la-Longue! Bérarde Fanouel! Michelle Genaille! Claude Rongeoreille! Mathurine Girorou! Hullah! Isabeau la Thierrye! Come and look! A husband for nothing! Who’ll have him?”    133   
  Gringoire, in this miserable plight, was doubtless not exactly tempting. The ladies seemed but little moved at the proposal, for the unfortunate man heard them answer: “No, no—hang him! Then we shall all get some enjoyment out of him!”    134   
  Three of them, however, did come forward and inspect him. The first a big, square-faced young woman, carefully examined the philosopher’s deplorable doublet. His coat was threadbare and with more holes in it than a chestnut roaster. The woman made a wry face. “An old rag,” she muttered, and turning to Gringoire, “Let’s see thy cloak.”    135   
  “I have lost it,” answered Gringoire.    136   
  “Thy hat?”    137   
  “They took it from me.”    138   
  “Thy shoes?”    139   
  “The soles are coming off.”    140   
  “Thy purse?”    141   
  “Alas!” stammered Gringoire, “I haven’t a single denier parisis.”    142   
  “Then be hanged and welcome!” retorted the woman, turning her back on him.    143   
  The second, a hideous old beldame, black and wrinkled, and so ugly as to be conspicuous even in the Court of Miracles, came and viewed him from all sides. He almost trembled lest she should take a fancy to him. But she muttered between her teeth, “He’s too lean,” and went away.    144   
  The third was a young girl, rosy-cheeked and not too ill-favoured. “Save me!” whispered the poor devil. She considered him for a moment with an air of pity, then cast down her eyes, played with a fold in her petticoat, and stood irresolute. Gringoire followed her every movement with his eyes—it was the last gleam of hope.    145   
  “No,” she said at length, “no; Guillaume Longjoue would beat me.” So she rejoined the others.    146   
  “Comrade,” said Clopin, “you’ve no luck.”    147   
  Then standing up on his barrel: “Nobody bids?” he cried, mimicking the voice of an auctioneer to the huge delight of the crowd. “Nobody bids? Going—going—” and, with a sign of the head to the gallows—“gone!”    148   
  Bellevigne de l’Etoile, Andry le Rouge, François Chante-Prune again approached Gringoire.    149   
  At that moment a cry arose among the Argotiers: “La Esmeralda! la Esmeralda!”    150   
  Gringoire started, and turned in the direction whence the shouts proceeded. The crowd opened and made way for a fair and radiant figure. It was the gipsy girl.    151   
  “La Esmeralda?” said Gringoire, amazed even in the midst of his emotions how instantaneously this magic word linked together all the recollections of his day.    152   
  This engaging creature seemed to hold sway even over the Court of Miracles by the power of her exceeding charm and beauty. The Argotiers, male and female, drew aside gently to let her pass, and their brutal faces softened at her look.    153   
  She approached the victim with her firm, light step, followed closely by her pretty Djali. Gringoire was more dead than alive. She regarded him a moment in silence.    154   
  “You are going to hang this man?” she asked gravely of Clopin.    155   
  “Yes, sister,” replied the King of Tunis; “that is, unless thou wilt take him for thy husband.”    156   
  She thrust out her pretty under lip.    157   
  “I will take him,” said she.    158   
  This confirmed Gringoire more than ever in his opinion that he had been in a dream since the morning, and that this was merely a continuation of it. The transformation, though pleasing, was violent.    159   
  They instantly unfastened the noose and let the poet descend from the stool, after which he was obliged to sit down, so overcome was he by emotion.    160   
  The Duke of Egypt proceeded without a word to bring an earthenware pitcher, which the gipsy girl handed to Gringoire, saying, “Throw it on the ground.”    161   
  The pitcher broke in pieces.    162   
  “Brother,” said the Duke of Egypt, laying hands on the two heads, “she is your wife; sister, he is your husband—for four years. Go your ways.”    163   


Note 1.  Charity, kind sir [back]   
Note 2.  Kind sir, something to buy a piece of bread! [back]   
Note 3.  Charity! [back]   
Note 4.  Whither away, man? [back]   
Note 5.  Fellow, take off thy hat. [back]

   
Book II   
VII. A Wedding Night   
     
A FEW minutes afterward our poet found himself in a warm and cosy little chamber with a vaulted roof, seated in front of a table which seemed impatient to share some of the contents of a small larder hanging on the wall close by, having a good bed in prospect, and a tête-à-tête with a pretty girl. The adventure smacked decidedly of witchcraft. He began to take himself seriously for the hero of a fairy-tale, and looked about him from time to time to see whether the fiery chariot drawn by winged gryphons, which alone could have transported him so rapidly from Tartarus to Paradise, were still there. At intervals, too, he steadily eyed the holes in his doublet, in order to keep a firm hold on reality—not to let the earth slip away from him altogether. His reason, tossing on delusive waves, had only this frail spar to cling to.      1   
  The girl paid apparently not the slightest heed to him, but came and went, shifting one thing and another, talking to her goat, making her little pouting grimace now and then just as if he had not been there.      2   
  At last she came and seated herself near the table, so that Gringoire could contemplate her at his leisure.      3   
  You have been young, reader—maybe, indeed, you are fortunate enough to be so still. It is impossible but that more than once (and for my part I have spent whole days—the best employed of my life—in this pursuit) you have followed from bush to bush, beside some running brook, on a sunny day, some lovely dragon-fly, all iridescent, blue and green, darting hither and thither, kissing the tip of every spray. Can you forget the adoring curiosity with which your thoughts and your eyes were fixed upon this little darting, humming whirlwind of purple and azure wings, in the midst of which floated an intangible form, veiled, as it were, by the very rapidity of its motion? The aerial creature, dimly discerned through all this flutter of wings, seemed to you chimerical, illusory, intangible. But when at last the dragon-fly settled on the end of a reed, and you could examine, with bated breath, the gauzy wings, the long enamel robe, the two crystal globes of eyes, what amazement seized you, and what fear lest the exquisite creature should again vanish into shadow, the vision into air. Recall these impressions, and you will readily understand Gringoire’s feelings as he contemplated, in her visible and palpable form, that Esmeralda, of whom, up till then, he had only caught a glimpse through a whirl of dance and song and fluttering skirts.      4   
  Sinking deeper and deeper into his reverie: “So this,” he said to himself, as he followed her vaguely with his eyes, “this is what they meant by Esmeralda—a divine creature—a dancer of the streets. So high, and yet so low. It was she who dealt the death-blow to my Mystery this morning—she it is who saves my life to-night. My evil genius—my good angel! And a pretty woman, on my soul!—who must have loved me to distraction to have taken me like this. Which reminds me,” said he, suddenly rising from his seat, impelled by that sense of the practical which formed the basis of his character and his philosophy—“I’m not very clear how it came about, but the fact remains that I am her husband.”      5   
  With this idea in his mind and in his eyes, he approached the girl with so enterprising and gallant an air that she drew back.      6   
  “What do you want with me?” said she.      7   
  “Can you ask, adorable Esmeralda?” responded Gringoire in such impassioned accents that he was astonished at himself.      8   
  The gipsy stared at him wide-eyed. “I don’t know what you mean.”      9   
  “What?” rejoined Gringoire, growing warmer and warmer, and reflecting that after all it was only a virtue of the Court of Miracles he had to deal with, “am I not thine, sweetheart; art thou not mine?” and without more ado he clasped his arms about her.     10   
  The gipsy slipped through his hands like an eel; with one bound she was at the farther end of the little chamber, stooped, and rose with a little dagger in her hand before Gringoire had even time to see where she drew it from. There she stood, angry and erect, breathing fast with parted lips and fluttering nostrils, her cheeks red as peonies, her eyes darting lightning, while at the same moment the little white goat planted itself in front of her, ready to do battle with the offender, as it lowered its gilded but extremely sharp horns at him. In a twinkling the dragon-fly had turned wasp with every disposition to sting.     11   
  Our philosopher stood abashed, glancing foolishly from the goat to its mistress.     12   
  “Blessed Virgin!” he exclaimed as soon as his astonishment would permit him, “what a pair of spitfires!”     13   
  The gipsy now broke silence.     14   
  “You are an impudent fellow,” she said.     15   
  “Pardon me, mademoiselle,” retorted Gringoire with a smile, “then why did you take me for your husband?”     16   
  “Was I to let you be hanged?”     17   
  “So that,” returned the poet, somewhat disabused of his amorous expectations, “was all you thought of in saving me from the gallows?”     18   
  “And what more should I have thought of, do you suppose?”     19   
  Gringoire bit his lip. “It seems,” said he, “that I am not quite so triumphant in Cupido as I imagined. But in that case, why have broken the poor pitcher?”     20   
  All this time Esmeralda’s dagger and the goat’s horns continued on the defensive.     21   
  “Mademoiselle Esmeralda,” said the poet, “let us come to terms. As I am not the recorder at the Châtelet I shall not make difficulties about your carrying a dagger thus in Paris, in the teeth of the ordinances and prohibitions of Monsieur the Provost, though you must be aware that Noël Lescrivain was condemned only last week to pay ten sols parisis for carrying a cutlass. However, that is no affair of mine, and I will come to the point. I swear to you by my hope of salvation that I will not approach you without your consent and permission; but, I implore you, give me some supper.”     22   
  Truth to tell, Gringoire, like M. Depréaux, was “but little inclined to sensuality.” He had none of those swashbuckler and conquering ways that take girls by storm. In love, as in all other matters, he willingly resigned himself to temporizing and a middle course, and a good supper in charming tête-à-tête, especially when he was hungry, appeared to him an admirable interlude between the prologue and the dénouement of an amatory adventure.     23   
  The gipsy made no reply. She pouted her lips disdainfully, tossed her little head like a bird, then burst into a peal of laughter, and the dainty little weapon vanished as it had appeared, without Gringoire being able to observe where the wasp concealed its sting.     24   
  A minute afterward there appeared upon the table a loaf of bread, a slice of bacon, some wrinkled apples, and a mug of beer. Gringoire fell to ravenously. To hear the furious clatter of his fork on the earthenware platter you would have concluded that all his love had turned to hunger.     25   
  Seated opposite to him, the girl let him proceed in silence, being visibly preoccupied with some other thought, at which she smiled from time to time, while her gentle hand absently caressed the intelligent head of the goat pressed gently against her knee. A candle of yellow wax lit up this scene of voracity and musing. Presently, the first gnawings of his stomach being satisfied, Gringoire had a pang of remorse at seeing that nothing remained of the feast but one apple. “You are not eating, Mademoiselle Esmeralda?”     26   
  She replied with a shake of the head, and fixed her pensive gaze on the arched roof of the chamber.     27   
  “Now, what in the world is she absorbed in?” thought Gringoire as he followed her gaze: “it can’t possibly be that grinning dwarf’s face carved in the keystone of the vaulting. Que diable! I can well stand the comparison!”     28   
  He raised his voice: “Mademoiselle!”     29   
  She seemed not to hear him.     30   
  He tried again still louder: “Mademoiselle Esmeralda!”     31   
  Labour lost. The girl’s mind was elsewhere and Gringoire’s voice had not the power to call it back. Fortunately, the goat struck in and began pulling its mistress gently by the sleeve.     32   
  “What is it, Djali?” said the gipsy quickly, as if starting out of a dream.     33   
  “It is hungry,” said Gringoire, delighted at any opening for a conversation.     34   
  Esmeralda began crumbling some bread, which Djali ate daintily out of the hollow of her hand.     35   
  Gringoire gave her no time to resume her musings. He hazarded a delicate question.     36   
  “So you will not have me for your husband?”     37   
  The girl looked at him steadily. “No,” she said.     38   
  “Nor for your lover?”     39   
  She thrust out her under lip and answered “No.”     40   
  “For a friend, then?” continued Gringoire.     41   
  She regarded him fixedly, then after a moment’s reflection, “Perhaps,” she replied.     42   
  This perhaps, so dear to the philosopher, encouraged Gringoire. “Do you know what friendship is?” he asked.     43   
  “Yes,” returned the gipsy. “It is to be like brother and sister; two souls that touch without mingling; two fingers of the same hand.”     44   
  “And love?” proceeded Gringoire.     45   
  “Oh, love,” she said, and her voice vibrated and her eyes shone, “that is to be two and yet only one—a man and a woman blending into an angel—it is heaven!”     46   
  As she spoke, the dancing girl of the streets glowed with a beauty which affected Gringoire strangely, and which seemed to him in perfect harmony with the almost Oriental exaltation of her words.     47   
  Her chaste and rosy lips were parted in a half smile, her pure and open brow was ruffled for a moment by her thoughts, as a mirror is dimmed by a passing breath, and from under her long, dark, drooping lashes there beamed a sort of ineffable light, imparting to her face that ideal suavity which later on Raphael found at the mystic point of intersection of the virginal, the human, and the divine.     48   
  Nevertheless, Gringoire continued “What must a man be, then, to win your favour?”     49   
  “He must be a man!”     50   
  “And I,” said he; “what am I, then?”     51   
  “A man goes helmet on head, sword in hand, and gilt spurs on heel.”     52   
  “Good,” said Gringoire, “the horse makes the man. Do you love any one?”     53   
  “As a lover?”     54   
  “As a lover.”     55   
  She paused thoughtfully for a moment, then she said with a peculiar expression, “I shall know that soon.”     56   
  “And why not to-night?” rejoined the poet in tender accents; “why not me?”     57   
  She gave him a cold, grave look. “I could never love a man unless he could protect me.”     58   
  Gringoire reddened and accepted the rebuke. The girl evidently alluded to the feeble assistance he had rendered her in the critical situation of a couple of hours before. This recollection, effaced by the subsequent adventures of the evening, now returned to him. He smote his forehead.     59   
  “That reminds me, mademoiselle, I ought to have begun by that. Pardon my foolish distraction. How did you manage to escape out of the clutches of Quasimodo?”     60   
  The gipsy shuddered. “Oh, the horrible hunchback!” she exclaimed, hiding her face in her hands, and shivering as if overcome by violent cold.     61   
  “Horrible indeed,” agreed Gringoire; “but how,” he persisted, “did you get away from him?”     62   
  Esmeralda smiled, heaved a little sigh, and held her peace.     63   
  “Do you know why he followed you?” asked Gringoire, trying to come at the information he sought by another way.     64   
  “No, I do not,” answered the gipsy. “But,” she added sharply, “you were following me too. Why did you follow me?”     65   
  “To tell you the honest truth,” replied Gringoire, “I don’t know that either.”     66   
  There was a pause. Gringoire was scratching the table with his knife; the girl smiled to herself and seemed to be looking at something through the wall. Suddenly she began to sing, hardly above her breath:
           “Quando las pintades aves   
Mudas está, y la tierra …” 1    
  67   
  She stopped abruptly, and fell to stroking Djali.     68   
  “That is a pretty little animal you have there.”     69   
  “It is my sister,” she replied.     70   
  “Why do they call you Esmeralda?” inquired the poet.     71   
  “I don’t know.”     72   
  “Oh, do tell me.”     73   
  She drew from her bosom a little oblong bag hanging round her neck by a chain of berries. The bag, which exhaled a strong smell of camphor, was made of green silk, and had in the middle a large green glass bead like an emerald. “It is perhaps because of that,” said she.     74   
  Gringoire put out his hand for the little bag, but she drew back. “Do not touch it! It is an amulet, and either you will do mischief to the charm, or it will hurt you.”     75   
  The poet’s curiosity became more and more lively. “Who gave it you?”     76   
  She laid a finger on her lips and hid the amulet again in her bosom. He tried her with further questions, but she scarcely answered.     77   
  “What does the word Esmeralda mean?”     78   
  “I don’t know.”     79   
  “What language is it?”     80   
  “Egyptian, I think.”     81   
  “I thought as much,” said Gringoire. “You are not a native of this country?”     82   
  “I don’t know.”     83   
  “Have you father or mother?”     84   
  She began singing to an old air:
           “Mon père est oiseau,   
Ma mère est oiselle.   
Je passe l’eau sans nacelle,   
Je passe l’eau sans bateau.   
Ma mère est oiselle,   
Mon père est oiseau.” 2   
  85   
  “Very good,” said Gringoire. “How old were you when you came to France?”     86   
  “Quite little.”     87   
  “And to Paris?”     88   
  “Last year. As we came through the Porte Papale I saw the reed linnet fly overhead. It was the end of August; I said, It will be a hard winter.”     89   
  “And so it was,” said Gringoire, delighted at this turn in the conversation. “I spent it in blowing on my fingers. So you have the gift of prophecy?”     90   
  She lapsed again into her laconic answers—“No.”     91   
  “That man whom you call the Duke of Egypt, is he the head of your tribe?”     92   
  “Yes.”     93   
  “Well, but it was he who united us in marriage,” observed the poet timidly.     94   
  She made her favourite little grimace. “Why, I don’t even know your name!”     95   
  “My name? If you wish to know it, here it is—Pierre Gringoire.”     96   
  “I know a finer one than that,” said she.     97   
  “Ah, cruel one!” responded the poet. “Never mind, you cannot provoke me. See, perhaps you will like me when you know me better; besides, you have told me your story with so much confidence that it is only fair that I should tell you something of mine. You must know, then, that my name is Pierre Gringoire, and that my father farmed the office of notary in Gonesse. He was hanged by the Burgundians, and my mother was murdered by the Picards at the time of the siege of Paris, twenty years ago. So, at six years of age I was an orphan, with no sole to my foot but the pavement of Paris. How I got through the interval from six to sixteen I should be at a loss to tell. A fruit-seller would throw me a plum here, a baker a crust of bread there. At night I would get picked up by the watch, who put me in prison, where at least I found a truss of straw to lie upon. All this did not prevent me from growing tall and thin, as you perceive. In winter I warmed myself in the sun in the porch of the Hôtel de Sens, and I thought it very absurd that the bonfires for the Feast of Saint-John should be reserved for the dog-days. At sixteen I wished to adopt a trade. I tried everything in turn. I became a soldier, but I was lacking in courage; friar, but I was not sufficiently pious—besides, I am a poor hand at drinking. In desperation I apprenticed myself to a Guild of Carpenters, but I was not strong enough. I had more inclination towards being a schoolmaster: to be sure, I could not read, but that need not have prevented me. At last I was obliged to acknowledge that something was lacking in me for every profession; so, finding that I was good for nothing, I, of my own free will, turned poet and composer of rhythms. That is a calling a man can adopt when he is a vagabond, and is always better than robbing, as some young friends of mine, who are themselves footpads, urged me to do. One fine day I was fortunate enough to encounter Dom Claude Frollo, the reverend Archdeacon of Notre Dame. He interested himself in me, and I owe it to him that I am to-day a finished man of letters, being well versed in Latin, from Cicero’s ‘Offices’ to the ‘Mortuology’ of the Celestine Fathers, nor ignorant of scholastics, of poetics, of music, nor even of hermetics nor alchemy—that subtlety of subtleties. Then, I am the author of the Mystery represented with great triumph and concourse of the people, filling the great Hall of the Palais de Justice. Moreover, I have written a book running to six hundred pages on the prodigious comet of 1465, over which a man lost his reason. Other successes, too, I have had. Being somewhat of an artillery carpenter, I helped in the construction of that great bombard of Jean Maugue, which, as you know, burst on the Charenton bridge the first time it was tried and killed four-and-twenty of the spectators. So, you see, I am not such a bad match. I know many very pleasing tricks which I would teach your goat; for instance, to imitate the Bishop of Paris, that accursed Pharisee whose mill-wheels splash the passengers the whole length of the Pont-aux-Meuniers. And then my Mystery play will bring me in a great deal of money, if only they pay me. In short, I am wholly at your service—myself, my wit, my science, and my learning; ready, damoselle, to live with you as it shall please you—in chastity or pleasure—as man and wife, if so you think good—as brother and sister, if it please you better.”     98   
  Gringoire stopped, waiting for the effect of his long speech on the girl. Her eyes were fixed on the ground.     99   
  “Phœbus,” she murmured. Then, turning to the poet, “Phœbus, what does that mean?”    100   
  Gringoire, though not exactly seeing the connection between his harangue and this question, was nothing loath to exhibit his erudition. Bridling with conscious pride, he answered: “It is a Latin word meaning ‘the sun.’”    101   
  “The sun!” she exclaimed.    102   
  “And the name of a certain handsome archer, who was a god,” added Gringoire.    103   
  “A god!” repeated the gipsy with something pensive and passionate in her tone.    104   
  At that moment one of her bracelets became unfastened and slipped to the ground. Gringoire bent quickly to pick it up; when he rose the girl and her goat had disappeared. He only heard the sound of a bolt being shot which came from a little door leading, doubtless, into an inner room.    105   
  “Has she, at least, left me a bed?” inquired our philosopher.    106   
  He made the tour of the chamber. He found no piece of furniture suitable for slumber but a long wooden chest, and its lid was profusely carved, so that when Gringoire lay down upon it he felt very much as Micromegas must have done when he stretched himself at full length to slumber on the Alps.    107   
  “Well,” he said, accommodating himself as best he might to the inequalities of his couch, “one must make the best of it. But this is indeed a strange wedding-night. ’Tis a pity, too; there was something guileless and antediluvian about that marriage by broken pitcher that took my fancy.”    108   


Note 1. 
           When the bright-hued birds are silent,   
And the earth …   
 [back]   
Note 2. 
           My father’s a bird,   
My mother’s another.   
I pass over the water   
Without boat or wherry.   
My mother’s a bird,   
And so is my father,   
 [back]

   
Book III   
I. Notre Dame   
     
ASSUREDLY the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris is, to this day, a majestic and sublime edifice. But noble as it has remained while growing old, one cannot but regret, cannot but feel indignant at the innumerable degradations and mutilations inflicted on the venerable pile, both by the action of time and the hand of man, regardless alike of Charlemagne, who laid the first stone, and Philip Augustus, who laid the last.      1   
  On the face of this ancient queen of our cathedrals, beside each wrinkle one invariably finds a scar. “Tempus edax, homo edacior,” which I would be inclined to translate: “Time is blind, but man is senseless.”      2   
  Had we, with the reader, the leisure to examine, one by one, the traces of the destruction wrought on this ancient church, we should have to impute the smallest share to Time, the largest to men, and more especially to those whom we must perforce call artists, since, during the last two centuries, there have been individuals among them who assumed the title of architect.      3   
  And first of all, to cite only a few prominent examples, there are surely few such wonderful pages in the book of Architecture as the façades of the Cathedral. Here unfold themselves to the eye, successively and at one glance, the three deep Gothic doorways; the richly traced and sculptured band of twenty-eight royal niches; the immense central rose-window, flanked by its two lateral windows, like a priest by the deacon and subdeacon; the lofty and fragile gallery of trifoliated arches supporting a heavy platform on its slender columns; finally, the two dark and massive towers with their projecting slate roofs—harmonious parts of one magnificent whole, rising one above another in five gigantic storeys, massed yet unconfused, their innumerable details of statuary, sculpture, and carving boldly allied to the impassive grandeur of the whole. A vast symphony in stone, as it were; the colossal achievement of a man and a nation—one and yet complex—like the Iliades and the Romances to which it is sister—prodigious result of the union of all the resources of an epoch, where on every stone is displayed in a hundred variations the fancy of the craftsman controlled by the genius of the artist; in a word, a sort of human Creation, mighty and prolific, like the divine Creation, of which it seems to have caught the double characteristics—variety and eternity.      4   
  And what we say here of the façade applies to the entire church; and what we say of the Cathedral of Paris may be said of all the ministers of Christendom in the Middle Ages.      5   
  Everything stands in its proper relation in that self-evolved art, is logical, well-proportioned. By measuring one toe you can estimate the height of the giant.      6   
  To return to the façade of Notre Dame, as we see it to-day, when we stand lost in pious admiration of the mighty and awe-inspiring Cathedral, which, according to the chroniclers, strikes the beholder with terror—quæ mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus.      7   
  Three important things are now missing in that façade: the flight of eleven steps which raised it above the level of the ground; the lower row of statues occupying the niches of the three doorways; and the upper series of twenty-eight, which filled the gallery of the first story and represented the earliest Kings of France, from Childebert to Philip Augustus, each holding in his hand the “imperial orb.”      8   
  The disappearance of the steps is due to Time, which by slow and irresistible degrees has raised the level of the soil of the city. But Time, though permitting these eleven steps, which added to the stately elevation of the pile, to be swallowed by the rising tide of the Paris pavement, has given to the Cathedral more perhaps than he took away; for it was the hand of Time that steeped its façade in those rich and sombre tints by which the old age of monuments becomes their period of beauty.      9   
  But who has overthrown the two rows of statues? Who has left the niches empty? Who has scooped out, in the very middle of the central door, that new and bastard-pointed arch? Who has dared to hang in it, cheek by jowl with Biscornette’s arabesques, that tasteless and clumsy wooden door with Louis XV carvings? Man—the architects—the artists of our own day!     10   
  And, if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown the colossal St. Christopher, proverbial among statues as the Grande Salle of the Palais among Halls, as the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral among steeples? And the countless figures—kneeling, standing, equestrian, men, women, children, kings, bishops, knights, of stone, marble, gold, silver, brass, even wax—which peopled all the spaces between the columns of the nave and the choir—what brutal hand has swept them away? Not that of Time.     11   
  And who replaced the ancient Gothic altar, splendidly charged with shrines and reliquaries, by that ponderous marble sarcophagus with its stone clouds and cherubs’ heads, which looks like an odd piece out of the Val de Grâce or of the Invalides?     12   
  And who was so besotted as to fix this lumbering stone anachronism into the Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV, in fulfillment of the vow of Louis XIII?     13   
  And who put cold white glass in the place of those “richly coloured” panes which caused the dazzled eyes of our fore-fathers to wander undecided from the rose-window over the great doorway to the pointed ones of the chancel and back again? And what would a priest of the sixteenth century say to the fine yellow wash with which the vandal Arch-bishops have smeared the walls of their Cathedral? He would recollect that this was the colour the hangman painted over houses of evil-fame; he would recall the Hôtel de Petit-Bourbon plastered all over with yellow because of the treason of its owner, the Connétable—“a yellow of so permanent a dye,” says Sauval, “and so well laid on, that the passage of more than a century has not succeeded in dimming its colour.” He would think that the Holy Place had become infamous and would flee from it.     14   
  And if we ascend the Cathedral, passing over a thousand barbarisms of every description—what has become of the charming little belfry, fretted, slender, pointed, sonorous, which rose from the point of intersection of the transept, and every whit as delicate and as bold as its neighbour the spire (likewise destroyed) of the Sainte-Chapelle, soared into the blue, farther even than the towers? An architect “of taste” (1787) had it amputated, and deemed it sufficient reparation to hide the wound under the great lead plaster which looks like the lid of a sauce-pen.     15   
  Thus has the marvellous art of the Middle Ages been treated in almost every country, but especially in France. In its ruin three distinct factors can be traced, causing wounds of varying depths.     16   
  First of all, Time, which has gradually made breaches here and there and gnawed its whole surface; next, religious and political revolutions, which, in the blind fury natural to them, wreaked their tempestuous passions upon it, rent its rich garment of sculpture and carving, burst in its rose-windows, broke its necklets of arabesques and figurines, tore down its statues, one time for their mitres, another time for their crowns; and finally, the various fashions, growing ever more grotesque and senseless, which, from the anarchical yet splendid deviations of the Renaissance onwards, have succeeded one another in the inevitable decadence of Architecture. Fashion has committed more crimes than revolution. It has cut to the quick, it has attacked the very bone and framework of the art; has mangled, pared, dislocated, destroyed the edifice—in its form as in its symbolism, in its coherence as in its beauty. This achieved, it set about renewing—a thing which Time and Revolution, at least, never had the presumption to do. With unblushing effrontery, “in the interests of good taste,” it has plastered over the wounds of Gothic architecture with its trumpery knick-knacks, its marble ribbons and knots, its metal rosettes—a perfect eruption of ovolos, scrolls, and scallops; of draperies, garlands, fringes; of marble flames and brazen clouds; of blowzy cupids and inflated cherubs, which began by devouring the face of art in the oratory of Catherine de Medicis, and ended by causing it to expire, tortured and grimacing, two centuries later, in the boudoir of Mme. Dubarry.     17   
  Thus, to sum up the points we have just discussed, the ravages that now disfigure Gothic architecture are of three distinct kinds: furrows and blotches wrought by the hand of Time; practical violence—brutalities, bruises, fractures—the outcome of revolution, from Luther down to Mirabeau; mutilations, amputations, dislocation of members, restorations, the result of the labours—Greek, Roman, and barbarian—of the professors following out the rules of Vitruvius and Vignola. That magnificent art which the Goths created has been murdered by the Academies.     18   
  To the devastations of Time and of Revolutions—carried out at least with impartiality and grandeur—have been added those of a swarm of school-trained architects, duly licensed and incorporated, degrading their art deliberately and, with all the discernment of bad taste, substituting the Louis XV fussiness for Gothic simplicity, and all to the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is the kick of the ass to the dying lion; it is the ancient oak, dead already above, gnawed at the roots by worms and vermin.     19   
  How remote is this from the time when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre Dame at Paris with the far-famed Temple of Diana at Ephesus, “so much vaunted by the ancient pagans,” which immortalized Erostratus, considered the Gallican Cathedral “more excellent in length, breadth, height, and structure.” 1     20   
  For the rest, Notre Dame cannot, from the architectural point of view, be called complete, definite, classified. It is not a Roman church, neither is it a Gothic church. It is not typical of any style of architecture. Notre Dame has not, like the Abbey of Tournus, the grave and massive squareness, the round, wide, vaulted roof, the frigid nudity, the majestic simplicity of the edifices which have their origin in the Roman arch. Nor is it like the Cathedral of Bourges, the splendid, airy, multiform, foliated, pinnacled, efflorescent product of the Gothic arch. Impossible, either, to rank it among that antique family of churches—sombre, mysterious, low-pitched, cowering, as it were, under the weight of the round arch; half Egyptian, wholly hieroglyphical, wholly sacerdotal, wholly symbolical; as regards ornament, rather overloaded with lozenges and zigzags than with flowers, with flowers than animals, with animals than human figures; less the work of the architect than the Bishop, the first transformation of the art still deeply imbued with theocratic and military discipline, having its root in the Byzantine Empire, and stopping short at William the Conqueror. Nor, again, can the Cathedral be ranked with that other order of lofty, aerial churches, with their wealth of painted windows and sculptured work, with their sharp pinnacles and bold outlines; communal and citizen—regarded as political symbols; free, capricious, untrammelled—regarded as works of art. This is the second transformation of architecture—no longer cryptic, sacerdotal, inevitable, but artistic, progressive, popular—beginning with the return from the Crusades and ending with Louis XI.     21   
  Notre Dame is neither pure Roman, like the first, nor pure Gothic, like the second; it is an edifice of the transition period. The Saxon architect had just finished erecting the first pillars of the nave when the pointed arch, brought back by the Crusaders, arrived and planted itself victorious on the broad Roman capitals which were intended only to support round arches. Master, henceforth, of the situation, the pointed arch determined the construction of the rest of the building. Inexperienced and timid at its commencement, it remains wide and low, restraining itself, as it were, not daring to soar up into the arrows and lancets of the marvellous cathedrals of the later period. It would almost seem that it was affected by the proximity of the heavy Roman pillars.     22   
  Not that these edifices showing the transition from Roman to Gothic are less worthy of study than the pure models. They express a gradation of the art which would else be lost. It is the grafting of the pointed arch on to the circular arch.     23   
  Notre Dame de Paris, in particular, is a curious specimen of this variety. Every surface, every stone of this venerable pile, is a page of the history not only of the country, but of science and of art. Thus—to mention here only a few of the chief details—whereas the small Porte Rouge almost touches the limits of fifteenth century Gothic delicacy, the pillars of the nave, by their massiveness and great girth, reach back to the Carlovingian Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. One would imagine that six centuries lay between that door and those pillars. Not even the Hermetics fail to find in the symbols of the grand doorway a satisfactory compendium of their science, of which the Church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was so complete a hieroglyph. Thus the Roman Abbey—the Church of the Mystics—Gothic art—Saxon art—the ponderous round pillar reminiscent of Gregory VII, the alchemistic symbolism by which Nicolas Flamel paved the way for Luther—papal unity—schism—Saint-Germain-des-Prés—Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie—all are blended, combined, amalgamated in Notre Dame. This generative Mother-Church is, among the other ancient churches of Paris, a sort of Chimera: she has the head of one, the limbs of another, the body of a third—something of all.     24   
  These hybrid edifices are, we repeat, by no means the least interesting to the artist, the antiquary, and the historian. They let us realize to how great a degree architecture is a primitive matter, in that they demonstrate, as do the Cyclopean remains, the Pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic Hindu pagodas, that the greatest productions of architecture are not so much the work of individuals as of a community; are rather the offspring of a nation’s labour than the out-come of individual genius; the deposit of a whole people; the heaped-up treasure of centuries; the residuum left by the successive evaporations of human society; in a word, a species of formations. Each wave of time leaves its coating of alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monuments, each individual contributes his stone to it. Thus do the beavers work, thus the bees, thus man. Babel, that great symbol of architecture, is a bee-hive.     25   
  Great edifices, like the great mountains, are the work of ages. Often art undergoes a transformation while they are waiting pending completion—pendent opera interrupta—they then proceed imperturbably in conformity with the new order of things. The new art takes possession of the monument at the point at which it finds it, absorbs itself into it, develops it after its own idea, and completes it if it can. The matter is accomplished without disturbance, without effort, without reaction, in obedience to an undeviating, peaceful law of nature—a shoot is grafted on, the sap circulates, a fresh vegetation is in progress. Truly, there is matter for mighty volumes; often, indeed, for a universal history of mankind, in these successive layers of different periods of art, on different levels of the same edifice. The man, the artist, the individual, are lost sight of in these massive piles that have no record of authorship; they are an epitome, a totalization of human intelligence. Time is the architect—a nation is the builder.     26   
  Reviewing here only Christo-European architecture, that younger sister of the great Masonic movements of the East, it presents the aspect of a huge formation divided into three sharply defined superincumbent zones: the Roman, 2 the Greek, and that of the Renaissance, which we would prefer to call the Greco-Romanesque. The Roman stratum, the oldest and the lowest of the three, is occupied by the circular arch, which reappears, supported by the Greek column, in the modern and upper stratum of the Renaissance. Between the two comes the pointed arch. The edifices which belong exclusively to one or other of these three strata are perfectly distinct, uniform, and complete in themselves. The Abbey of Jumièges is one, the Cathedral of Reims another, the Sainte-Croix of Orleans is a third. But the three zones mingle and overlap one another at the edges, like the colours of the solar spectrum; hence these complex buildings, these edifices of the gradational, transitional period. One of them will be Roman as to its feet, Greek as to its body, and Greco-Romanesque as to its head. That happens when it has taken six hundred years in the building. But that variety is rare: the castle-keep of Etampes is a specimen. Edifices of two styles are more frequent. Such is Notre Dame of Paris, a Gothic structure, rooted by its earliest pillars in that Roman zone in which the portal of Saint-Denis and the nave of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are entirely sunk. Such again is the semi-Gothic Chapter Hall of Bocherville, in which the Roman layer reaches half-way up. Such is the Cathedral at Rouen, which would be wholly Gothic had not the point of its central spire reached up into the Renaissance. 3     27   
  For the rest, all these gradations, these differences, do but affect the surface of the building. Art has changed its skin, but the actual conformation of the Christian Church has remained untouched. It has ever the same internal structure, the same logical disposition of the parts. Be the sculptured and decorated envelope of a cathedral as it will, underneath, at least, as germ or rudiment, we invariably find the Roman basilica. It develops itself unswervingly on this foundation and following the same rules. There are invariably two naves crossing each other at right angles, the upper end of which, rounded off in a half circle, forms the choir; there are always two lower-pitched side-aisles for the processions—the chapels—sort of lateral passages communicating with the nave by its intercolumnar spaces. These conditions once fulfilled, the number of chapels, doorways, steeples, spires, may be varied to infinity, according to the fancy of the age, the nation, or the art. The proper observances of worship once provided for and insured, architecture is free to do as she pleases. Statues, stained glass, rose-windows, arabesques, flutings, capitals, bas-reliefs—all these flowers of fancy she distributes as best suits her particular scheme of the moment. Hence the prodigious variety in the exterior of these edifices, in the underlying structure of which there rules so much order and uniformity. The trunk of the tree is unchanging; its vegetation only is variable.     28   


Note 1.  Histoire Gallicane, Book ii, period ii, fol. 130, p. 4.—AUTHOR’SOTE. [back]   
Note 2.  vThis is also known, according to situation, race, or style, as Lombard, Saxon, or Byzantine: four sister and parallel architectures, each having its own peculiar characteristics, but all deriving from the same principle—the circular arch. Facies non omnibus una, non diversa tamen, qualem, etc.—AUTHOR’S NOTE. [back]   
Note 3.  This part of the spire, which was of timber, was destroyed by lightning in 1823.—AUTHOR’S NOTE. [back]

Book III   
II. A Bird’s-Eye View of Paris   
     
WE have endeavoured to restore for the reader this admirable Cathedral of Notre Dame. We have briefly enumerated most of the beauties it possessed in the fifteenth century, though lost to it now; but we have omitted the chief one—the view of Paris as it then appeared from the summits of the towers.      1   
  When, after long gropings up the dark perpendicular stair-case which pierces the thick walls of the steeple towers, one emerged at last unexpectedly on to one of the two high platforms inundated with light and air, it was in truth a marvellous picture spread out before you on every side; a spectacle sui generis of which those of our readers can best form an idea who have had the good fortune to see a purely Gothic city, complete and homogeneous, of which there are still a few remaining, such as Nuremberg in Bavaria, Vittoria in Spain, or even smaller specimens, provided they are well-preserved, like Vitré in Brittany and Nordhausen in Prussia.      2   
  The Paris of that day, the Paris of the fifteenth century, was already a giant city. We Parisians in general are mistaken as to the amount of ground we imagine we have gained since then. Paris, since the time of Louis XI, has not increased by much more than a third; and, truth to tell, has lost far more in beauty than ever it has gained in size.      3   
  Paris first saw the light on that ancient island in the Seine, the Cité, which has, in fact, the form of a cradle. The strand of this island was its first enclosure, the Seine its first moat.      4   
  For several centuries Paris remained an island, with two bridges, one north, the other south, and two bridge heads, which were at once its gates and its fortresses: the Grand-Châtelet on the right bank, the Petit-Châtelet on the left. Then, after the kings of the first generation, Paris, finding itself too cramped on its island home, where it no longer had room to turn round, crossed the river; whereupon, beyond each of the bridge-fortresses, a first circle of walls and towers began to enclose pieces of the land on either side of the Seine. Of this ancient wall some vestiges were still standing in the last century; to-day, nothing is left but the memory, and here and there a tradition, such as the Baudets or Baudoyer Gate—porta bagauda.      5   
  By degrees the flood of dwellings, constantly pressing forward from the heart of the city, overflows, saps, eats away, and finally swallows up this enclosure. Philip Augustus makes a fresh line of circumvallation, and immures Paris within a chain of massive and lofty towers. For upward of a century the houses press upon one another, accumulate, and rise in this basin like water in a reservoir. They begin to burrow deeper in the ground, they pile storey upon storey, they climb one upon another, they shoot up in height like all compressed growth, and each strives to raise its head above its neighbour for a breath of air. The streets grow ever deeper and narrower, every open space fills up and disappears, till, finally, the houses overleap the wall of Philip Augustus, and spread themselves joyfully over the country like escaped prisoners, without plan or system, gathering themselves together in knots, cutting slices out of the surrounding fields for gardens, taking plenty of elbowroom.      6   
  By 1367, the town has made such inroads on the suburb that a new enclosure has become necessary, especially on the right bank, and is accordingly built by Charles V. But a town like Paris is in a state of perpetual growth—it is only such cities that become capitals. They are the reservoirs into which are directed all the streams—geographical, political, moral, intellectual—of a country, all the natural tendencies of the people; wells of civilization, so to speak—but also outlets—where commerce, manufacture, intelligence, population, all that there is of vital fluid, of life, of soul, in a people, filters through and collects incessantly, drop by drop, century by century. The wall of Charles V, however, endures the same fate as that of Philip Augustus. By the beginning of the fifteenth century it, too, is over-stepped, left behind, the new suburb hurries on, and in the sixteenth century it seems visibly to recede farther and farther into the depths of the old city, so dense has the new town become outside it.      7   
  Thus, by the fifteenth century—to go no farther—Paris had already consumed the three concentric circles of wall, which, in the time of Julian the Apostate, were in embryo, so to speak, in the Grand-Châtelet and the Petit-Châtelet. The mighty city had successively burst its four girdles of wall like a child grown out of last year’s garments. Under Louis XI, clusters of ruined towers belonging to the old fortified walls were still visible, rising out of the sea of houses like hilltops out of an inundation—the archipelagoes of the old Paris, submerged beneath the new.      8   
  Since then, unfortunately for us, Paris has changed again; but it has broken through one more enclosure, that of Louis XV, a wretched wall of mud and rubbish, well worthy of the King who built it and of the poet who sang of it:
           “Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.” 1   
   9   
  In the fifteenth century Paris was still divided into three towns, perfectly distinct and separate, having each its peculiar features, specialty, manners, customs, privileges, and history: the City, the University, the Town. The City, which occupied the island, was the oldest and the smallest of the trio—the mother of the other two—looking, if we may be allowed the comparison, like a little old woman between two tall and blooming daughters. The University covered the left bank of the Seine from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle—points corresponding in the Paris of to-day to the Halles-aux-Vins and the Mint, its circular wall taking in a pretty large portion of that ground on which Julian had built his baths. 2 It also included the Hill of Sainte-Geneviève. The outermost point of the curving wall was the Papal Gate; that is to say, just about the site of the Panthéon. The Town, the largest of the three divisions of Paris, occupied the right bank. Its quay, interrupted at several points, stretched along the Seine from the Tour de Billy to the Tour du Bois; that is, from the spot where the Grenier d’Abondance now stands to that occupied by the Tuileries. These four points at which the Seine cut through the circumference of the Capital—la Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the left, the Tour de Billy and the Tour de Bois on the right bank—were called par excellence “the four towers of Paris.” The Town encroached more deeply into the surrounding country than did the University. The farthest point of its enclosing wall (the one built by Charles V) was at the gates of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, the situation of which has not changed.     10   
  As we have already stated, each of these three great divisions of Paris was a town—but a town too specialized to be complete, a town which could not dispense with the other two. So, too, each had its peculiarly characteristic aspect. In the City, churches were the prevailing feature; in the Town, palaces; in the University, colleges. Setting aside the less important originalities of Paris and the capricious legal intricacies of the right of way, and taking note only of the collective and important masses in the chaos of communal jurisdictions, we may say that, broadly speaking, the island belonged to the Bishop, the right bank to the Provost of the Merchants’ Guild, and the left bank to the Rector of the University. The Provost of Paris—a royal, not a municipal office—had authority over all. The City boasted Notre Dame; the Town, the Louvre and the Hôtel-de-Ville; the University, the Sorbonne. Again, the Town had the Halles, the City the Hôtel-Dieu, the University the Pré-aux-Clercs. 3 Crimes committed by the students on the right bank, were tried on the island in the Palais de Justice, and punished on the right bank at Montfaucon, unless the Rector, feeling the University to be strong and the King weak, thought fit to intervene; for the scholars enjoyed the privilege of being hanged on their own premises.     11   
  Most of these privileges (we may remark in passing), and there were some of even greater value than this, had been extorted from the kings by mutiny and revolts. It is the immemorial course: Le roi ne lâche que quand le peuple arrache—the King only gives up what the people wrest from him. There is an old French charter which defines this popular loyalty with great simplicity: Civibus fidelitas in reges, quæ tamen aliquoties seditionibus interrupta, multa peperit privilegia. 4     12   
  In the fifteenth century the Seine embraced five islands within the purlieus of Paris: the Louvre, on which trees then grew; the Ile-aux-Vaches and the Ile Notre Dame, both uninhabited except for one poor hovel, both fiefs of the Bishop (in the seventeenth century these two islands were made into one and built upon, now known as the Ile Saint-Louis); finally the City, having at its western extremity the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches—the cattle ferry—now buried under the foundations of the Pont Neuf. The City had, in those days, five bridges—three on the right: the Pont Notre Dame and the Pont-aux-Change being of stone, and the Pont-aux-Meuniers of wood; and two on the left: the Petit-Pont of stone, and the Pont Saint-Michel of wood—all lined with houses. The University had six gates built by Philip Augustus, namely—starting from the Tournelle—the Porte Saint-Victor, the Porte Bordelle, the Porte Papale, the Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Saint-Michel and the Porte Saint-Germain. The Town also had six gates, built by Charles V, namely—starting from the Tour de Billy—the Porte Saint-Antoine, the Porte du Temple, the Porte Saint-Martin, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Porte Montmartre and the Porte Saint-Honoré. All these gates were strong, and at the same time handsome—which is no detriment to strength. A wide and deep fosse, filled during the winter months with a swift stream supplied by the Seine, washed the foot of the walls all round Paris. At night the gates were shut, the river was barred at the two extremities of the town by the massive iron chains, and Paris slept in peace.     13   
  From a bird’s-eye view, these three great divisions—the City, the University, and the Town—presented each an inextricably tangled network of streets to the eye. Nevertheless, one recognised at a glance that the three fragments formed together a single body. You at once distinguished two long, parallel streets running, without a break or deviation, almost in a straight line through all these towns from end to end, from south to north, at right angles with the Seine; connecting, mingling, transfusing them, incessantly pouring the inhabitants of one into the walls of the other, blending the three into one. One of these two streets ran from the Porte Saint-Jacques to the Porte Saint-Martin, and was called Rue Saint-Jacques in the University, Rue de la Juiverie (Jewry) in the City, and Rue Saint-Martin in the Town, crossing the river twice, as the Petit-Pont and the Pont Notre Dame. The second—which was called Rue de la Harpe on the left bank, Rue de la Barillerie on the island, Rue Saint-Denis on the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel on one arm of the Seine, Pont-aux-Change on the other—ran from the Porte Saint-Michel in the University to the Porte Saint-Denis in the Town. For the rest, under however many names, they were still only the two streets, the two thoroughfares, the two mother-streets, the main arteries of Paris, from which all the other ducts of the triple city started, or into which they flowed.     14   
  Independently of these two principal streets, cutting diametrically through the breadth of Paris and common to the entire capital, the Town and the University had each its own main street running in the direction of their length, parallel to the Seine, and intersecting the two “arterial” streets at right angles. Thus, in the Town you descended in a straight line from the Porte Saint-Antoine to the Porte Saint-Honoré; in the University, from the Porte Saint Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain. These two great thoroughfares, crossing the two first mentioned, formed the frame on to which was woven the knotted, tortuous network of the streets of Paris. In the inextricable tangle of this network, however, on closer inspection, two sheaf-like clusters of streets could be distinguished, one in the University, one in the Town, spreading out from the bridges to the gates. Something of the same geometrical plan still exists.     15   
  Now, what aspect did this present when viewed from the top of the towers of Notre Dame in 1482?     16   
  That is what we will endeavour to describe.     17   
  To the spectator, arrived breathless on this summit, the first glance revealed only a bewildering jumble of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, squares, spires, and steeples. Everything burst upon the eye at once—the carved gable, the high, pointed roof, the turret clinging to the corner wall, the stone pyramid of the eleventh century, the slate obelisk of the fifteenth, the round, stark tower of the donjon-keep, the square and elaborately decorated tower of the church, the large, the small, the massive, the airy. The gaze was lost for long and completely in this maze, where there was nothing that had not its own originality, its reason, its touch of genius, its beauty; where everything breathed of art, from the humblest house with its painted and carved front, its visible timber framework, its low-browed doorway and projecting storeys, to the kingly Louvre itself, which, in those days, boasted a colonnade of towers. But here are the most important points which struck the eye when it became some-what accustomed to this throng of edifices.     18   
  To begin with, the City. “The island of the City,” as Sauval observes—who, with all his pompous verbosity, sometimes hits upon these happy turns of phrase—“the island of the City is shaped like a great ship sunk into the mud and run aground lengthwise, about mid-stream of the Seine.” As we have already shown, in the fifteenth century this ship was moored to the two banks of the Seine by five bridges. This likeness to a ship had also struck the fancy of the heraldic scribes; for, according to Favyn and Pasquier, it was from this circumstance, and not from the siege by the Normans, that is derived the ship emblazoned in the arms of Paris. To him who can decipher it, heraldry is an algebra, a complete language. The whole history of the later half of the Middle Ages is written in heraldry, as is that of the first half in the symbolism of the Roman churches—the hieroglyphics of feudalism succeeding those of theocracy.     19   
  The City, then, first presented itself to the view, with its stern to the east and its prow to the west. Facing towards the prow there stretched an endless line of old roofs, above which rose, broad and domed, the lead-roofed transept of the Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant with its tower, except that here the tower was the boldest, airiest, most elaborate and serrated spire that ever showed the sky through its fretted cone.     20   
  Just in front of Notre Dame three streets opened into the Cathedral close—a fine square of old houses. On the south side of this glowered the furrowed, beetling front of the Hôtel-Dieu, with its roof as if covered with boils and warts. Then, on every side, right, left, east, and west, all within the narrow circuit of the City, rose the steeples of its twenty-one churches, of all dates, shapes, and sizes, from the low, worm-eaten Roman belfry of Saint-Denis du Pas (carcer Glaucini) to the slender, tapering spires of Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs and Saint-Landry. Behind Notre Dame northward, stretched the cloister with its Gothic galleries; southward, the semi-Roman palace of the Bishop, and eastward, an uncultivated piece of ground, the terrain, at the point of the island. Furthermore, in this sea of houses, the eye could distinguish, by the high, perforated mitres of stone which at that period capped even its topmost attic windows, the palace presented by the town, in the reign of Charles VI, to Juvénal des Ursins; a little farther on, the black-barred roofs of the market-shed in the Marché Palus; farther off still, the new chancel of Saint-Germain le Vieux, lengthened in 1458 by taking in a piece of the Rue aux Febves with here and there a glimpse of causeway, crowded with people, some pillory at a corner of the street, some fine piece of the pavement of Philip Augustus—magnificent flagging, furrowed in the middle for the benefit of the horses, and so badly replaced in the middle of the sixteenth century by the wretched cobblestones called “pavé de la Ligue”; some solitary court-yard with one of those diaphanous wrought-iron stair-case turrets they were so fond of in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seen in the Rue des Bourdonnais. Lastly, to the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, westward, the Palais de Justice displayed its group of towers by the water’s edge. The trees of the royal gardens, which occupied the western point of the island, hid the ferry-man’s islet from view. As for the water, it was hardly visible on either side of the City from the towers of Notre Dame: the Seine disappeared under the bridges, and the bridges under the houses.     21   
  And when one looked beyond these bridges, on which the house-roofs glimmered green—moss-grown before their time from the mists of the river—and turned one’s gaze to the left towards the University, the first building which caught the eye was a low, extensive cluster of towers, the Petit-Châtelet, whose yawning gateway swallowed up the end of the Petit-Pont. Then, if you ran your eye along the river bank from east to west, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, it was one long line of houses with sculptured beams, coloured windows, overhanging storeys jutting out over the roadway—an interminable zigzag of gabled houses broken frequently by the opening of some street, now and then by the frontage or corner of some grand mansion with its gardens and its court-yards, its wings and outbuildings; standing proudly there in the midst of this crowding, hustling throng of houses, like a grand seigneur among a mob of rustics. There were five or six of these palaces along the quay, from the Logis de Lorraine, which shared with the Bernardines the great neighbouring enclosure of the Tournelle, to the Tour de Nesle, the chief tower of which formed the boundary of Paris, and whose pointed gables were accustomed, for three months of the year, to cut with their black triangles the scarlet disk of the setting sun.     22   
  Altogether, this side of the Seine was the least mercantile of the two: there was more noise and crowding of scholars than artisans, and there was no quay, properly speaking, except between the Pont Saint-Michel and the Tour de Nesle. The rest of the river bank was either a bare strand, like that beyond the Bernardine Monastery, or a row of houses with their feet in the water, as between the two bridges. This was the domain of the washerwomen; here they called to one another, chattered, laughed, and sang, from morning till night along the river side, while they beat the linen vigorously—as they do to this day, contributing not a little to the gaiety of Paris.     23   
  The University itself appeared as one block forming from end to end a compact and homogeneous whole. Seen from above, this multitude of closely packed, angular, clinging roofs, built, for the most part, on one geometrical principle, gave the impression of the crystallization of one substance. Here the capricious cleavage of the streets did not cut up the mass into such disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were distributed pretty equally over the whole, and were in evidence on all sides. The varied and charming rooflines of these beautiful buildings originated in the same art which produced the simple roofs they overtopped, being practically nothing more than a repetition, in the square or cube, of the same geometrical figure. Consequently, they lent variety to the whole without confusing it, completed without overloading it—for geometry is another form of harmony. Several palatial residences lifted their heads sumptuously here and there above the picturesque roofs of the left bank: the Logis de Nevers, the Logis de Rome, the Logis de Reims, which have disappeared; also the Hôtel de Cluny, which for the consolation of the artist still exists, but the tower of which was so stupidly shortened a few years ago. Near the Hôtel Cluny stood the Baths of Julian, a fine Roman palace with circular arches. There was, besides, a number of abbeys, more religious in style, of graver aspect than the secular residences, but not inferior either in beauty or in extent. The most striking of these were the Bernardines’ Abbey with its three steeples; Sainte-Geneviéve, the square tower of which still exists to make us more deeply regret the rest; the Sorbonne, part college, part monastery, of which so admirable a nave still survives; the beautiful quadrilateral Monastery of the Mathurins; 5 adjacent to it the Benedictine Monastery, within the wall of which they managed to knock up a theatre between the issue of the seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Abbey of the Cordeliers, with its three enormous gables in a row; that of the Augustines, the tapering spire of which was, after the Tour de Nesle, the second pinnacle at this side of Paris, counting from the west. The colleges, the connecting link between the cloister and the world, held architecturally the mean between the great mansions and the abbeys, more severe in their elegance, more massive in their sculpture than the palaces, less serious in their style of architecture than the religious houses. Unfortunately, scarcely anything remains of these buildings, in which Gothic art held so admirable a balance between the sumptuous and the simple. The churches (and they were numerous and splendid in the University quarter, illustrating every architectural era, from the Roman arches of Saint-Julien to the Gothic arches of Saint-Séverin)—the churches dominated the whole, and as one harmony more in that sea of harmonies they pierced in quick succession the waving, fretted outline of the gabled roofs with their boldly cut spires, their steeples, their tapering pinnacles, themselves but a magnificent exaggeration of the sharp angles of the roofs.     24   
  The ground of the University quarter was hilly, swelling in the southeast to the vast mound of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviéve. It was curious to note, from the heights of Notre Dame, the multitude of narrow and tortuous streets (now the Quartier Latin), the clusters of houses, spreading helter-skelter in every direction down the steep sides of this hill to the water-edge, some apparently rushing down, others climbing up, and all clinging one to the other.     25   
  The inhabitants thronging the streets looked, from that height and at that distance, like a swarm of ants perpetually passing and repassing each other, and added greatly to the animation of the scene.     26   
  And here and there, in the spaces between the roofs, the steeples, the innumerable projections which so fantastically bent and twisted and notched the outermost line of the quarter, you caught a glimpse of a moss-grown wall, a thickset round tower, an embattled, fortress-like gateway—the wall of Philip Augustus. Beyond this stretched the verdant meadows, ran the great high-roads with a few houses straggling along their sides, growing fewer the farther they were removed from the protecting barrier. Some of these suburbs were considerable. There was first—taking the Tournelle as the point of departure—the market-town of Saint-Victor, with its one-arched bridge spanning the Bièvre; its Abbey, where the epitaph of King Louis the Fat—epitaphium Ludovici Grossi—was to be seen; and its church with an octagonal spire, flanked by four belfry towers of the eleventh century (there is a similar one still to be seen at Etampes). Then there was Saint-Marceau, which already boasted three churches and a convent; then, leaving on the left the mill of the Gobelins with its white wall of enclosure, you came to the Faubourg Saint-Jacques with its beautifully carved stone cross at the cross-roads; the Church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, then a charming Gothic structure; Saint-Magloire, with a beautiful nave of the fourteenth century, which Napoleon turned into a hayloft; and Notre Dame-des-Champs, which contained some Byzantine mosaics. Finally, after leaving in the open fields the Chartreux Monastery, a sumptuous edifice contemporary to the Palais de Justice with its garden divided off into compartments, and the deserted ruins of Vauvert, the eye turned westward and fell upon the three Roman spires of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the rear of which the market-town of Saint-Germain, already quite a large parish, formed fifteen or twenty streets, the sharp steeple of Saint-Sulpice marking one of the corners of the town boundary. Close by was the square enclosure of the Foire Saint-Germain, where the fairs were held—the present market-place. Then came the abbot’s pillory, a charming little round tower, capped by a cone of lead; farther on were the tile-fields and the Rue du Four, leading to the manorial bakehouse; then the mill on its raised mound; finally, the Lazarette, a small, isolated building scarcely discernible in the distance.     27   
  But what especially attracted the eye and held it long was the Abbey itself. Undoubtedly this monastery, in high repute both as a religious house and as a manor, this abbey-palace, wherein the Bishop of Paris esteemed it a privilege to pass one night; with a refectory which the architect had endowed with the aspect, the beauty, and the splendid rose-window of a cathedral; its elegant Lady Chapel; its monumental dormitories, its spacious gardens, its portcullis, its drawbridge, its belt of crenated wall, which seemed to stamp its crested outline on the meadow beyond, its court-yards where the glint of armour mingled with the shimmer of gold-embroidered vestments—the whole grouped and marshalled round the three high Roman towers firmly planted on a Gothic transept—all this, I say, produced a magnificent effect against the horizon.     28   
  When at length, after long contemplating the University, you turned towards the right bank—the Town—the scene changed its character abruptly. Much larger than the University quarter, the Town was much less of a united whole. The first glance showed it to be divided into several singularly distinct areas. First, on the east, in that part of the Town which still takes its name from the “marais”—the morass into which Camulogènes led Cæsar—there was a great group of palaces extending to the water’s edge. Four huge mansions, almost contiguous—the Hôtels Jouy, Sens, Barbeau, and the Logis de la Reine mirrored in the Seine their slated roofs and slender turrets. These four edifices filled the space between the Rue des Nonaindières to the Celestine Abbey, the spire of which formed a graceful relief to their line of gables and battlements. Some squalid, moss-grown hovels overhanging the water in front of these splendid buildings were not sufficient to conceal from view the beautifully ornamented corners of their façades, their great square stone casements, their Gothic porticoes surmounted by statues, the bold, clear-cut parapets of their walls, and all those charming architectural surprises which give Gothic art the appearance of forming her combinations afresh for each new structure. Behind these palaces ran in every direction, now cleft, palisaded, and embattled like a citadel, now veiled by great trees like a Carthusian monastery, the vast and multiform encircling wall of that marvellous Hôtel Saint-Pol, where the King of France had room to lodge superbly twenty-two princes of the rank of the Dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy with their retinues and their servants, not to mention the great barons, and the Emperor when he came to visit Paris, and the lions, who had a palace for themselves within the royal palace. And we must observe here that a prince’s lodging comprised in those days not less than eleven apartments, from the state chamber to the oratory, besides all the galleries, the baths, the “sweating-rooms,” and other “superfluous places” with which each suite of apartments was provided—not to mention the gardens specially allotted to each guest of the King, nor the kitchens, store-rooms, pantries, and general refectories of the household; the inner court-yards in which were situated twenty-two general offices, from the bakehouse to the royal cellarage; the grounds for every sort and description of game—mall, tennis, tilting at the ring, etc.; aviaries, fish-ponds, menageries, stables, cattle-sheds, libraries, armouries, and foundries. Such was, at that day, a King’s palace—a Louvre, an Hôtel Saint-Pol—a city within a city.     29   
  From the tower on which we have taken up our stand, one obtained of the Hôtel Saint-Pol, though half-hidden by the four great mansions we spoke of, a very considerable and wonderful view. You could clearly distinguish in it, though skilfully welded to the main building by windowed and pillared galleries, the three mansions which Charles V had absorbed into his palace: the Hôtel du Petit-Muce with the fretted parapet that gracefully bordered its roof; the Hôtel of the Abbot of Saint-Maur, having all the appearance of a fortress, with its massive tower, its machicolations, loopholes, iron bulwarks, and over the great Saxon gate, between the two grooves for the drawbridge, the escutcheon of the Abbot; the Hôtel of the Comte d’Etampes, of which the keep, ruined at its summit, was arched and notched like a cock’s-comb; here and there, three or four ancient oaks grouped together in one great bushy clump; a glimpse of swans floating on clear pools, all flecked with light and shadow; picturesque corners of innumerable court-yards; the Lion house, with its low Gothic arches on short Roman pillars, its iron bars and continuous roaring; cutting right through this picture the scaly spire of the Ave-Maria Chapel; on the left, the Mansion of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four delicately perforated turrets; and, in the centre of it all, the Hôtel Saint-Pol itself, with its multiplicity of façades, its successive enrichments since the time of Charles V, the heterogeneous excrescences with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it during two centuries, with all the roofs of its chapels, all its gables, its galleries, a thousand weather-cocks turning to the four winds of heaven, and its two lofty, contiguous towers with conical roofs surrounded by battlements at the base, looking like peaked hats with the brim turned up.     30   
  Continuing to mount the steps of this amphitheatre of palaces, rising tier upon tier in the distance, having crossed the deep fissure in the roofs of the Town which marked the course of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the eye travelled on to the Logis d’Angoulême, a vast structure of several periods, parts of which were glaringly new and white, blending with the rest about as well as a crimson patch on a blue doublet. Nevertheless, the peculiarly sharp and high-pitched roof of the modern palace—bristling with sculptured gargoyles, and covered with sheets of lead, over which ran sparkling incrustations of gilded copper in a thousand fantastic arabesques—this curiously damascened roof rose gracefully out of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice, whose massive old towers, bulging cask-like with age, sinking into themselves with decrepitude, and rent from top to bottom, looked like great unbuttoned waistcoats. Behind rose the forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles. No show-place in the world—not even Chambord or the Alhambra—could afford a more magical, more ethereal, more enchanting spectacle than this grove of spires, bell-towers, chimneys, weather-cocks, spiral stair-cases; of airy lantern towers that seemed to have been worked with a chisel; of pavilions; of spindle-shaped turrets, all diverse in shape, height, and position. It might have been a gigantic chess-board in stone.     31   
  That sheaf of enormous black towers to the right of the inky Tournelles, pressing one against the other, and bound together, as it were, by a circular moat; that donjon-keep, pierced far more numerously with shot-holes than with windows, its drawbridge always raised, its portcullis always lowered—that is the Bastile. Those objects like black beaks projecting from the embrasures of the battlements, and which, from a distance, you might take for rain-spouts, are cannon. Within their range, at the foot of the formidable pile, is the Porte Saint-Antoine, crouching between its two towers.     32   
  Beyond the Tournelles, reaching to the wall of Charles V, stretched in rich diversity of lawns and flower-beds a velvet carpet of gardens and royal parks, in the heart of which, conspicuous by its maze of trees and winding paths, one recognised the famous labyrinthine garden presented by Louis XI to Coictier. The great physician’s observatory rose out of the maze like a massive, isolated column with a tiny house for its capital. Many a terrible astrological crime was perpetrated in that laboratory. This is now the Place Royale.     33   
  As we have said, the Palace quarter, of which we have endeavoured to convey some idea to the reader, though merely pointing out the chief features, filled the angle formed by the Seine and the wall of Charles V on the east. The centre of the Town was occupied by a congeries of dwelling-houses. For it was here that the three bridges of the City on the right bank discharged their streams of passengers; and bridges lead to the building of houses before palaces. This collection of middle-class dwellings, closely packed together like the cells of a honeycomb, was, however, by no means devoid of beauty. The sea of roofs of a great city has much of the grandeur of the ocean about it. To begin with, the streets in their crossings and windings cut up the mass into a hundred charming figures, streaming out from the Halles like the rays of a star. The streets of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable ramifications, went up side by side like two great trees intertwining their branches; while such streets as the Rue de la Plâterie, Rue de la Verrerie, Rue de la Tixeranderie, etc., wound in tortuous lines through the whole. Some handsome edifices, too, thrust up their heads through the petrified waves of this sea of gables. For instance, at the head of the Pont-aux-Changeurs, behind which you could see the Seine foaming under the mill-wheels of the Pont-aux-Meuniers, there was the Châtelet, no longer a Roman keep, as under Julian the Apostate, but a feudal tower of the thirteenth century, and built of stone so hard that three hours’ work with the pick did not remove more than the size of a man’s fist. Then there was the square steeple of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, with its richly sculptured corners, most worthy of admiration even then, though it was not completed in the fifteenth century; it lacked in particular the four monsters which, still perched on the four corners of its roof, look like sphinxes offering to modern Paris the enigma of the old to unriddle. Rault, the sculptor, did not put them up till 1526, and received twenty francs for his trouble. There was the Maison-aux-Piliers, facing the Place de Grève, of which we have already given the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais, since spoilt by a doorway “in good taste”; Saint-Méry, of which the primitive pointed arches were scarcely more than circular; Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial; and twenty other edifices which disdained not to hide their wonders in that chaos of deep, dark, narrow streets. Add to these the carved stone crosses, more numerous at the crossways than even the gibbets; the cemetery of the Innocents, of whose enclosing wall you caught a glimpse in the distance; the pillory of the Halles, just visible between two chimneys of the Rue de la Cossonnerie; the gibbet of the Croix du Trahoir at the corner of the ever-busy thoroughfare; the round stalls of the Corn Market; fragments of the old wall of Philip Augustus, distinguishable here and there, buried among the houses; mouldering, ivy-clad towers, ruined gateways, bits of crumbling walls; the quay with its myriad booths and gory skinning yards; the Seine, swarming with boats from the Port au Foin or hay wharf to the For l’Evêque, and you will be able to form some adequate idea of what the great irregular quadrangle of the Town looked like in 1482.     34   
  Besides these two quarters—the one of palaces, the other of houses—the Town contributed a third element to the view: that of a long belt of abbeys which bordered almost its entire circumference from east to west; and, lying just inside the fortified wall which encircled Paris, furnished a second internal rampart of cloisters and chapels. Thus, immediately adjoining the park of the Tournelles, between the Rue Saint-Antoine and the old Rue du Temple, stood the old convent of Sainte-Catherine, with its immense grounds, bounded only by the city wall. Between the old and the new Rue du Temple was the Temple itself, a grim sheaf of lofty towers, standing haughty and alone, surrounded by a vast, embattled wall. Between the Rue Neuve du Temple and the Rue Saint-Martin, in the midst of gardens, stood the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a superb fortified church, whose girdle of towers and crown of steeples were second only to Saint-Germain-des-Prés in strength and splendour.     35   
  Between the two streets of Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis stretched the convent enclosure of the Trinité, and between the Rue Saint-Denis and the Rue Montorgueil that of Filles-Dieu. Close by, one caught a glimpse of the mouldering roofs and broken wall of the Cour des Miracles, the only profane link in that pious chain.     36   
  Lastly, the fourth area, standing out distinctly in the conglomeration of roofs on the right bank, and occupying the eastern angle formed by the city wall and the river wall, was a fresh knot of palaces and mansions clustered round the foot of the Louvre. The old Louvre of Philip Augustus, that stupendous pile whose enormous middle tower mustered round it twenty-three major towers, irrespective of the smaller ones, appeared from the distance as if encased within the Gothic roof-lines of the Hôtel d’Alencon and the Petit-Bourbon. This hydra of towers, this guardian monster of Paris, with its twenty-four heads ever erect, the tremendous ridge of its roof sheathed in lead or scales of slate and glistening in metallic lustre, furnished an unexpected close to the western configuration of the Town.     37   
  This then, was the town of Paris in the fifteenth century—an immense mass—what the Romans called insula—of burgher dwelling-houses, flanked on either side by two blocks of palaces, terminated the one by the Louvre, the other by the Tournelles, bordered on the north by a long chain of abbeys and walled gardens all blended and mingling in one harmonious whole; above these thousand buildings with their fantastic outline of tiled and slated roofs, the steeples—fretted, fluted honeycombed—of the forty-four churches on the right bank; myriads of streets cutting through it; as boundary: on one side a circuit of lofty walls with square towers (those of the University wall were round); on the other, the Seine, intersected by bridges and carrying numberless boats.     38   
  Beyond the walls a few suburbs hugged the protection of the gates, but they were less numerous and more scattered than on the side of the University. In the rear of the Bastille about twenty squalid cottages huddled round the curious stonework of the Croix-Faubin, and the abutments of the Abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs; then came Popincourt, buried in cornfields; then La Courtille, a blithe village of taverns; the market-town of Saint-Laurent with its church steeple appearing in the distance as if one of the pointed towers of the Porte Saint-Martin; the suburb of Saint-Denis with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre; outside the Porte-Montmartre, the Grange-Bâteliére encircled by white walls; behind that again, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which then had almost as many churches as wind-mills, but has only retained the wind-mills, for the world is now merely concerned for bread for the body. Finally, beyond the Louvre, among the meadows, stretched the Faubourg Saint-Honorè, already a considerable suburb, and the verdant pastures of Petite-Bretagne and the Marché-aux-Porceaux or pig-market, in the middle of which stood the horrible furnace where they seethed the false coiners.     39   
  On the top of a hill, rising out of the solitary plain between La Courtille and Saint-Laurent, you will have remarked a sort of building, presenting the appearance, in the distance, of a ruined colonnade with its foundation laid bare. But this was neither a Panthèon nor a Temple of Jupiter; it was Montfaucon. 6     40   
  Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, brief as we have done our best to make it, has not shattered in the reader’s mind the image of old Paris as fast as we have built it up, we will recapitulate in a few words. In the centre, the island of the City like an immense tortoise, stretching out its tiled bridges like scaly paws from under its gray shell of roofs. On the left, the dense, bristling, square block of the University; on the right, the high semicircle of the Town, showing many more gardens and isolated edifices than the other two. The three areas, City, University, and Town, are veined with streets innumerable. Athwart the whole runs the Seine—“the fostering Seine,” as Peter du Breul calls it—encumbered with islands, bridges, and boats. All around, a vast plain checkered with a thousand forms of cultivation and dotted with fair villages; to the left, Issy, Vanves, Vaugirarde, Montrouge, Gentilly, with its round and its square tower, etc.; to the right, a score of others from Conflans to Ville-l’Evêque; on the horizon, a border of hills ranged in a circle, the rim of the basin, as it were. Finally, far to the east, Vincennes with its seven square towers; southward, Bicêtre and its sharp-pointed turrets; northward, Saint-Denis with its spire; and in the west, Saint-Cloud and its castle-keep. Such was the Paris which the ravens of 1482 looked down upon from the heights of Notre Dame.     41   
  And yet this was the city of which Voltaire said that “before the time of Louis XIV it only possessed four handsome examples of architecture”—the dome of the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, the modern Louvre, and I forget the fourth—the Luxembourg, perhaps. Fortunately, Voltaire was none the less the author of Candide; and none the less the man of all others in the long line of humanity who possessed in highest perfection the rire diabolique—the sardonic smile. It proves, besides, that one may be a brilliant genius, and yet know nothing of an art one has not studied. Did not Molière think to greatly honour Raphael and Michael Angelo by calling them “the Mignards 7 of their age”?     42   
  But to return to Paris and the fifteenth century.     43   
  It was in those days not only a beautiful city; it was a homogeneous city, a direct product—architectural and historical—of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone. It was a city composed of two architectural strata only—the Romanesque and the Gothic—for the primitive Roman layer had long since disappeared excepting in the Baths of Julian, where it still pierced through the thick overlying crust of the Middle Ages. As for the Celtic stratum, no trace of it was discoverable even when sinking wells.     44   
  Fifty years later, when the Renaissance came, and with that unity of style, so severe and yet so varied, associated its dazzling wealth of fantasy and design, its riot of Roman arches, Doric columns and Gothic vaults, its delicate and ideal sculpture, its own peculiar tastes in arabesques and capitals, its architectural paganism contemporary with Luther, Paris was perhaps more beautiful still though less harmonious to the eye and the strictly artistic sense. But that splendid period was of short duration. The Renaissance was not impartial; it was not content only to erect, it must also pull down; to be sure, it required space. Gothic Paris was complete but for a moment. Scarcely was Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie finished when the demolition of the old Louvre began.     45   
  Since then the great city has gone on losing her beauty day by day. The Gothic Paris, which was effacing the Romanesque, has been effaced in its turn. But what name shall be given to the Paris which has replaced it?     46   
  We have the Paris of Catherine de Mèin the Tuileries; the Paris of Henri II in the Hôtel-de-Ville, both edifices in the grand style; the Place Royale shows us the Paris of Henri IV—brick fronts, stone copings, and slate roofs—tricolour houses; the Val-de-Grâce is the Paris of Louis XIII—low and broad in style, with basket-handle arches and something indefinably pot-bellied about its pillars and humpbacked about its domes. We see the Paris of Louis XIV in the Invalides—stately, rich, gilded, cold; the Paris of Louis XV at Saint-Sulpice—scrolls and love-knots and clouds, vermicelli and chicory leaves—all in stone; the Paris of Louis XVI in the Panthèon, a bad copy of Saint Peter’s at Rome (the building has settled rather crookedly, which has not tended to improve its lines); the Paris of the Republic at the School of Medicine—a spurious hash of Greek and Roman, with about as much relation to the Coliseum or the Panthèon as the constitution of the year III has to the laws of Minos—a style known in architecture as “the Messidor”; 8 the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme—a sublime idea, a bronze column made of cannons; the Paris of the Restoration at the Bourse—an abnormally white colonnade supporting an abnormally smooth frieze—it is perfectly square and cost twenty million francs.     47   
  To each of these characteristic buildings there belongs, in virtue of a similarity of style, of form, and of disposition a certain number of houses scattered about the various districts easily recognised and assigned to their respective dates by the eye of the connoisseur. To the seeing eye, the spirit of a period and the features of a King are traceable even in the knocker of a door.     48   
  The Paris of to-day has, therefore, no typical characteristic physiognomy. It is a collection of samples of several periods, of which the finest have disappeared. The capital is increasing in houses only, and what houses! At this rate, there will be a new Paris every fifty years. The historic significance, too, of its architecture is lessened day by day. The great edifices are becoming fewer and fewer, are being swallowed up before our eyes by the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will have a Paris of stucco.     49   
  As for the modern structures of this new Paris, we would much prefer not to dilate upon them. Not that we fail to give them their due. The Sainte-Geneviève of M. Soufflot is certainly the finest tea-cake that ever was made of stone. The palace of the Lègion d’Honneur is also a most distinguished piece of confectionery. The dome of the Corn Market is a jockey-cap set on the top of a high ladder. The towers of Saint-Sulpice are two great clarinets—a shape which is as good as any other—and the grinning zigzag of the telegraph agreeably breaks the monotony of their roofs. Saint-Roch possesses a door that can only be matched in magnificence by that of Saint Thomas Aquinas; also it owns a Calvary in alto-relievo down in a cellar, and a monstrance of gilded wood—real marvels these, one must admit. The lantern tower in the maze at the Botanical Gardens is also vastly ingenious. As regards the Bourse, which is Greek as to its colonnade, Roman as to the round arches of its windows and doors, and Renaissance as to its broad, low, vaulted roof, it is indubitably in purest and most correct style; in proof of which we need only state that it is crowned by an attic storey such as was never seen in Athens—a beautiful straight line, gracefully intersected at intervals by chimney pots. And, admitting that it be a rule in architecture that a building should be so adapted to its purpose that that purpose should at once be discernible in the aspect of the edifice, no praise is too high for a structure which might, from its appearance, be indifferently a royal palace, a chamber of deputies, a town hall, a college, a riding-school, an academy, a warehouse, a court of justice, a museum, a barracks, a mausoleum, a temple, or a theatre—and all the time it is an Exchange. Again, a building should be appropriate to the climate. This one is obviously constructed for our cold and rainy skies. It has an almost flat roof, as they obtain in the East, so that in winter, when it snows, that roof has to be swept, and, of course, we all know that roofs are intended to be swept. And as regards the purpose of which we spoke just now, the building fulfils it to admiration; it is a Bourse in France as it would have been a Temple in Greece. It is true that the architect has been at great pains to conceal the face of the clock, which would have spoilt the pure lines of the façade; but in return, we have the colonnade running round the entire building, under which, on high-days and holidays, the imposing procession of stock-brokers and exchange-agents can display itself in all its glory.     50   
  These now are undoubtedly very superior buildings. Add to them a number of such handsome, interesting, and varied streets as the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris offering one day to the view, if seen from a balloon, that wealth of outline, that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that indescribable air of grandeur in its simplicity, of the unexpected in its beauty, which characterizes—a draught-board.     51   
  Nevertheless, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to you, conjure up the Paris of the fifteenth century; rebuild it in imagination; look through that amazing forest of spires, towers, and steeples; pour through the middle of the immense city the Seine, with its broad green and yellow pools that make it iridescent as a serpent’s skin; divide it at the island points, send it swirling round the piers of the bridges; project sharply against an azure horizon the Gothic profile of old Paris; let its outline float in a wintry mist clinging round its numerous chimneys; plunge it in deepest night, and watch the fantastic play of light and shadow in that sombre labyrinth of edifices; cast into it a ray of moonlight, showing it vague and uncertain, with its towers rearing their massive heads above the mists; or go back to the night scene, touch up the thousand points of the spires and gables with shadow, let it stand out more ridged and jagged than a shark’s jaw against a coppery sunset sky—and then compare.     52   
  And if you would receive from the old city an impression the modern one is incapable of giving, go at dawn on some great festival—Easter or Whitsuntide—and mount to some elevated point, whence the eye commands the entire capital, and be present at the awakening of the bells. Watch, at a signal from heaven—for it is the sun that gives it—those thousand churches starting from their sleep. First come scattered notes passing from church to church, as when musicians signal to one another that the concert is to begin. Then, suddenly behold—for there are moments when the ear, too, seems to have sight—behold, how, at the same moment, from every steeple there rises a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. At first the vibration of each bell mounts up straight, pure, isolated from the rest, into the resplendent sky of morn; then, by degrees, as the waves spread out, they mingle, blend, unite one with the other, and melt into one magnificent concert. Now it is one unbroken stream of sonorous sound poured incessantly from the innumerable steeples—floating, undulating, leaping, eddying over the city, the deafening circle of its vibration extending far beyond the horizon. Yet this scene of harmony is no chaos. Wide and deep though it be, it never loses its limpid clearness; you can follow the windings of each separate group of notes that detaches itself from the peal; you can catch the dialogue, deep and shrill by turns, between the bourdon and the crecelle; you hear the octaves leap from steeple to steeple, darting winged, airy, strident from the bell of silver, dropping halt and broken from the bell of wood. You listen delightedly to the rich gamut, incessantly ascending and descending, of the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; clear and rapid notes flash across the whole in luminous zigzags, and then vanish like lightning. That shrill, cracked voice over there comes from the Abbey of Saint-Martin; here the hoarse and sinister growl of the Bastile; at the other end the boom of the great tower of the Louvre. The royal carillon of the Palais scatters its glittering trills on every side, and on them, at regular intervals, falls the heavy clang of the great bell of Notre Dame, striking flashes from them as the hammer from the anvil. At intervals, sounds of every shape pass by, coming from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, ever and anon, the mass of sublime sound opens and gives passage to the stretto of the Ave-Maria chapel, flashing through like a shower of meteors. Down below, in the very depths of the chorus, you can just catch the chanting inside the churches, exhaled faintly through the pores of their vibrating domes. Here, in truth, is an opera worth listening to. In general, the murmur that rises up from Paris during the daytime is the city talking; at night it is the city breathing; but this is the city singing. Lend your ear, then, to this tutti of the bells; diffuse over the ensemble the murmur of half a million of human beings, the eternal plaint of the river, the ceaseless rushing of the wind, the solemn and distant quartet of the four forests set upon the hills, round the horizon, like so many enormous organ-cases; muffle in this, as in a sort of twilight, all of the great central peal that might otherwise be too hoarse or too shrill, and then say whether you know of anything in the world more rich, more blithe, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes—this furnace of music, these ten thousand brazen voices singing at once in flutes of stone, three hundred feet high—this city which is now but one vast orchestra—this symphony with the mighty uproar of a tempest.     53   


Note 1.  This might be freely translated: The dam damming Paris, sets Paris damning. [back]   
Note 2. &nbspPortions of these Roman baths still exist in the Hôtel de Cluny. [back]   
Note 3. &nbspThe recreation and fighting ground of the students, the present Fau bourg Saint-Germain. [back]   
Note 4. &nbspFidelity to the kings, though broken at times by revolts, procured the burghers many privileges. [back]   
Note 5. &nbspAn order formed in the twelfth century, specially vowed to the rescuing of Christians out of slavery. [back]   
Note 6. &nbspThe place of execution, furnished with immense gibbets, the site of an ancient Druidical temple. [back]   
Note 7. &nbspPierre Mignard (1610–1695), the well-known French painter, a contemporary of Molière. [back]   
Note 8. &nbspFrom that period of the French Revolution when this bad imitation of the antique was much in vogue. [back]

   
Book IV   
I. Charitable Souls   
     
SIXTEEN years before the events here recorded took place early on Quasimodo or Low-Sunday morning, a human creature had been deposited after Mass on the plank bed fastened to the pavement on the left of the entrance to Notre Dame, opposite the “great image” of Saint Christopher, which the kneeling stone figure of Messire Antoine des Essarts, knight, had contemplated since 1413. Upon this bed it was customary to expose foundling children to the charity of the public; any one could take them away who chose. In front of the bed was a copper basin for the reception of alms.      1   
  The specimen of humanity lying on this plank on the morning of Quasimodo-Sunday, in the year of our Lord 1467, seemed to invite, in a high degree, the curiosity of the very considerable crowd which had collected round it. This crowd was largely composed of members of the fair sex; in fact, there were hardly any but old women.      2   
  In front of the row of spectators, stooping low over the bed, were four of them whom by their gray cagoules—a kind of hooded cassock—one recognised as belonging to some religious order. I see no reason why history should not hand down to posterity the names of these discreet and venerable dames. They were: Agnès la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la Gaultière, and Gauchére la Violette—all four widows, all four bedes-women of the Chapelle Etienne-Haudry, who, with their superior’s permission, and conformably to the rules of Pierre d’Ailly, had come to hear the sermon.      3   
  However, if these good sisters were observing for the moment the rules of Pierre d’Ailly, they were certainly violating to their heart’s content those of Michel de Brache and the Cardinal of Pisa, which so inhumanly imposed silence upon them.      4   
  “What can that be, sister?” said Agnès la Herme as she gazed at the little foundling, screaming and wriggling on its wooden pallet, terrified by all these staring eyes.      5   
  “What are we coming to,” said Jehanne, “if this is the kind of children they bring into the world now?”      6   
  “I am no great judge of children,” resumed Agnès, “but it must surely be a sin to look at such a one as this.”      7   
  “It’s not a child, Agnès.”      8   
  “It’s a monkey spoiled,” observed Gauchére.      9   
  “It’s a miracle,” said Henriette la Gaultière.     10   
  “If so,” remarked Agnès, “it is the third since Lætare Sunday, for it is not a week since we had the miracle of the mocker of pilgrims suffering divine punishment at the hands of Our Lady of Aubervilliers, and that was already the second within the month.”     11   
  “But this so-called foundling is a perfect monster of abomination,” said Jehanne.     12   
  “He bawls loud enough to deafen a precentor,” continued Gauchére. “Hold your tongue, you little bellower!”     13   
  “And to say that the Bishop of Reims sent this monstrosity to the Bishop of Paris!” exclaimed Gaultière, clasping her hands.     14   
  “I expect,” said Agnès la Herme, “that it is really a beast of some sort, an animal—the offspring of a Jew and a sow, something, at any rate, that is not Christian, and that ought to be committed to the water or the fire.”     15   
  “Surely,” went on La Gaultière, “nobody will have any thing to do with it.”     16   
  “Oh, mercy!” cried Agnès, “what if those poor nurses at the foundling-house at the bottom of the lane by the river, close beside the Lord Bishop’s—what if they take this little brute to them to be suckled. I would rather give suck to a vampire.”     17   
  “What a simpleton she is, that poor La Herme!” returned Jehanne; “don’t you see, ma sæur, that this little monster is at least four years old, and that a piece of meat would be more to his taste than your breast?”     18   
  And in truth “the little monster” (for we ourselves would be at a loss to describe it by any other name) was not a newborn babe. It was a little angular, wriggling lump, tied up in a canvas sack marked with the monogram of Messier Guillaume Charier, the then Bishop of Paris, with only its head sticking out at one end. But what a head! All that was visible was a thatch of red hair, an eye, a mouth, and some teeth. The eye wept, the mouth roared, and the teeth seemed only too ready to bite. The whole creature struggled violently in the sack, to the great wonderment of the crowd, constantly increasing and collecting afresh.     19   
  The Lady Aloïse de Gondelaurier, a wealthy and noble dame, with a long veil trailing from the peak of her head-dress, and holding by the hand a pretty little girl of about six years of age, stopped in passing and looked for a moment at the hapless creature, while her charming little daughter, Fleur-de-lis de Gondelaurier, all clad in silks and velvets, traced with her pretty finger on the permanent tablet attached to the bed the words: “Enchants trouvés.”     20   
  “Good lack!” said the lady, turning away in disgust. “I thought they exposed here nothing but babes.”     21   
  And she went on her way, first, however, tossing a silver Florin into the basin among the coppers, causing the eyes of the poor sisters of the Chapels Etienne-Haudry to open wide with astonishment.     22   
  A moment afterward the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, promontory to the King, came along, with an enormous missal under one arm, and on the other his wife (Dame Guillemette la Maitres), having thus at his side his two monitors—the spiritual and the temporal.     23   
  “Foundling!” said he, after examining the object. “Found evidently on the brink of the river Phlegethon.”     24   
  “You can see but one eye,” observed Dame Guillemette. “There is a wart over the other.”     25   
  “That is no wart,” returned Maître Robert Mistricolle. “That is an egg containing just such another demon, which has a similar little egg with another little devil inside it, and so on.”     26   
  “How do you know that?” asked Dame Guillemette.     27   
  “I know it for a fact,” replied the promontory.     28   
  “Monsieur the promontory,” asked Gauchére, “what do you predict from this pretended foundling?”     29   
  “The greatest calamities,” returned Mistricolle.     30   
  “Ah, mon Dieu!” cried an old woman among the by-standers, “and there was already a considerable pestilence last year, and they say that the English are prepared to land in great companies at Harfleur.”     31   
  “Maybe that will prevent the Queen coming to Paris in September,” remarked another, “and trade is bad enough as it is.”     32   
  “It’s my opinion,” cried Jehanne de la Tarme, “that it would be better for the people of Paris if this little wizard were lying on a bundle of fagots instead of a bed.”     33   
  “And nice blazing fagots too,” added the old woman.     34   
  “It would be wiser,” said Mistricolle.     35   
  For some moments past a young priest, stern of face, with a broad forehead and penetrating eye, had stood listening to the argument of the Haudriette sisters, and the pronouncements of the promontory. He now silently parted the crowd, examined the “little wizard,” and stretched a hand over him. It was high time, for these pious old women were already licking their lips in anticipation of the “fine blazing fagots.”     36   
  “I adopt this child,” said the priest.     37   
  He wrapped it in his Spokane and carried it off, the bystanders looking after him in speechless amazement. The next moment he had disappeared through the Porte Rouge, which led at that time from the church into the cloister.     38   
  The first shock of surprise over, Jeannine de la Tame bent down and whispered in the ear of La Gaultière: “Did I not say to you, ma sœur, that that young cleric, M. Claude Follow was a sorcerer?”

Book IV   
II. Claude Frollo   
     
IN truth, Claude Follow was no ordinary person.      1   
  He belonged to one of those families which it was the foolish fashion of the last century to describe indifferently as the upper middle class or lower aristocracy.      2   
  The family had inherited from the brothers Packet the fief of Tirechappe, which was held of the Bishop of Paris, and the twenty-one houses of which had, since the thirteenth century, been the object of countless litigations in the Ecclesiastical Court. As owner of this fief, Claude Follow was one of the “seven times twenty-one” seigneurs claiming manorial dues in Paris and its suburbs; and in that capacity his name was long to be seen inscribed between the Hôtel de Tancarville, belonging to Maître François le Rez, and the College of Tours, in the cartulary deposited at Saint-Martin des Champs.      3   
  From his childhood Claude Follow had been destined by his parents for the priesthood. He had been taught to read in Latin; he had early been trained to keep his eyes down-cast, and to speak in subdued tones. While still quite a child his father had bound him to the monastic seclusion of the Collége de Torchi in the University, and there he had grown up over the missal and the lexicon.      4   
  He was, however, by nature a melancholy, reserved, serious boy, studying with ardour and learning easily. He never shouted in the recreation hour; he mixed but little in the bacchanalia of the Rue du Fouarre; did not know what it was to dare alapas et capillos laniare, 1 and had taken no part in that Students’ riot of 1463, which the chroniclers gravely record as “The Sixth Disturbance in the University.” It rarely happened that he jibed at the poor scholars of Montaigu for their “cappettes,” from which they derived their nickname, or the exhibitioners of the Collége de Dormans for their smooth tonsure and their tricoloured surcoats of dark blue, light blue and violet cloth—azurini coloris et bruni, as the charter of the Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes puts it.      5   
  On the other hand, he was assiduous in his attendance at the higher and lower schools of the Rue Saint-Jean de Beauvais. The first scholar whom the Abbé de Saint-Pierre de Val caught sight of, established against a pillar in the Ecole Saint-Vendregesile, exactly opposite to his desk when he began his lecture on Canon Law, was invariably Claude Follow, armed with his inkhorn, chewing his pen, scribbling on his threadbare knees, or, in winter, blowing on his fingers. The first pupil Messier Miles d’Isliers, doctor of ecclesiastical law, saw arrive breathless every Monday morning as the door of the Chef-Saint-Denis schools opened, was Claude Follow. Consequently, by the time he was sixteen, the young cleric was a match in mystical theology for a Father of the Church, and in scholastic theology for a Doctor of the Sorbonne.      6   
  Having finished with theology, he threw himself into canonical law and the study of the decretals.      7   
  From the Magister Sententiarum he had fallen upon the Capitularies of Charlemagne, and in his insatiable hunger for knowledge had devoured decretal after decretal: those of Theodore, Bishop of Hispalis, those of Bouchard, Bishop of Worms, those of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; then the decretal of Gratian, which came after Charlemagne’s Capitularies; then the collection of Gregory IX; then the epistle Super specula of Honorius III. He thoroughly investigated and made himself familiar with that vast and stormy period of bitter and protracted struggle between Civil and Ecclesiastical Law during the chaos of the Middle Ages, a period which Bishop Theodore began in 618, and Pope Gregory closed in 1227.      8   
  The decretals assimilated, he turned his attention to medicine and the liberal arts; studied the science of herbs and of slaves; became an expert in the treatment of fevers and contusions, of wounds and of abscesses. Jacques d’Espars would have passed him as physician; Richard Hellain, as surgeon. He ran through the degrees of Licentiate, Master, and Doctor of Arts; he studied languages: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—a thrice inner sanctuary of learning seldom penetrated at that time. He was possessed by a veritable rage for acquiring and storing up knowledge. At eighteen, he had made his way through the four faculties. Life for this young man seemed to have but one aim and object—knowledge.      9   
  It was just about this time that the excessive heat of the summer of 1466 caused the outbreak of that great pestilence which carried off more than forty thousand people in the jurisdiction of Paris, among others, says Jean de Troyes, “Maître Arnoul, the King’s astrologer, a right honest man, both wise and merry withal.” The rumour spread through the University that the Rue Tirechappe had been specially devastated by the malady. It was here, in the middle of their fief, that Claude’s parents dwelt. Much alarmed, the young student hastened forthwith to his father’s house, only to find that both father and mother had died the previous day. An infant brother, in swaddling-clothes, was still alive and lay wailing and abandoned in the cradle. This was all that remained to Claude of his family. The young man took the child in his arms and went thoughtfully away. Hitherto he had lived only in the world of Learning; now he was to begin living in the world of Life.     10   
  This catastrophe was a turning point in Claude Frollo’s existence. An orphan, an elder brother, and the head of his house at nineteen, he felt himself rudely recalled from the reveries of the school to the realities of the world. It was then that, moved with pity, he was seized with a passionate devotion for this infant brother. How strange and sweet a thing this human affection to him, who had never yet loved aught but books!     11   
  This affection waxed strong to a singular degree; in a soul so new to passion, it was like a first love. Separated since his childhood from his parents whom he had scarcely known; cloistered and immured, as it were, in his books, eager before all things to study, to learn; attentive hitherto only to his intellect which expanded in science, to his imagination which grew with his literary studies, the poor scholar had not yet had time to feel that he had a heart. This young brother, without mother or father, this helpless babe, suddenly fallen from the skies into his arms, made a new man of him. He perceived for the first time that there were other things in the world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne and the verses of Homer; that Man has need of the affections; that life without tenderness and without love is a piece of heartless mechanism, insensate, noisy, wearisome. Only, he imagined, being as yet at the age when one illusion is replaced merely by another illusion, that the affections of blood and kindred were the only ones necessary, and the love for a little brother was sufficient to fill his whole existence.     12   
  He threw himself, therefore, into the love of his little Jehan with all the passion of a character already profound, ardent, and concentrated. The thought of this poor, pretty, rosy, golden-haired creature, this orphan with another orphan for its sole support, moved him to the heart’s core, and like the earnest thinker that he was, he began to reflect upon Jehan with a sense of infinite compassion. He lavished all his solicitude upon him as upon something very fragile, very specially recommended to his care. He became more than a brother to the babe: he became a mother.     13   
  Little Jehan having still been at the breast when he lost his mother, Claude put him out at nurse. Besides the fief of Tirechappe, he inherited from his father that of Moulin, which was held of the square tower of Gentilly. It was a mill standing upon rising ground, near the Castle of Winchestre, the present Bicêtre. The miller’s wife was suckling a fine boy at the time; the mill was not far from the University, and Claude carried his little Jehan to her himself.     14   
  Thenceforward, feeling he had a heavy responsibility on his shoulders, he took life very seriously. The thought of his little brother not only became his recreation from study, but the chief object of those studies. He resolved to devote himself wholly to the future of that being for whom he was answerable before God, and never to have any other spouse, any other child than the happiness and welfare of his little brother.     15   
  He bound himself, therefore, still more closely to his clerical vocation. His personal merits, his learning, his position as an immediate vassal of the Bishop of Paris, opened wide to him the doors of the Church. At twenty, by special dispensation from the Holy See, he was ordained priest, and as the youngest of the chaplains of Notre Dame, performed the service at the altar called, from the late hour at which the mass was celebrated there, altare pigrorum—the sluggards’ altar.     16   
  After this, and because he was more than ever immersed in his beloved books, which he only left to hasten for an hour to the mill, this union of wisdom and austerity, so rare at his age, had speedily gained him the respect and admiration of the cloister. From the cloister his fame for erudition had spread to the people, by whom, as frequently happened in those days, it had been converted in some sort into a reputation for necromancy.     17   
  It was just as he was returning on Quasimodo-Sunday from celebrating mass for the sluggards at their altar—which was beside the door in the choir leading into the nave, on the right, near the image of the Virgin—that his attention had been arrested by the group of old women chattering round the foundling.     18   
  He accordingly drew nearer to the poor little creature, the object of so much abhorrence and ill-will. The sight of its distress, its deformity, its abandonment, the remembrance of his young brother, the horror that suddenly assailed him at the thought that if he were to die his beloved little Jehan might thus be miserably exposed upon the self-same bed—all this rushed into his mind at once, and, moved by an impulse of profound compassion, he had carried away the child.     19   
  When he took the child out of the sack, he found it was indeed ill-favoured. The poor little wretch had a great wart over the left eye, its head was sunk between its shoulders, the spine arched, the breastbone protruding, the legs bowed. Yet he seemed lively enough; and although it was impossible to make out the language of his uncouth stammerings, his voice evidenced a fair degree of health and strength. Claude’s compassion was increased by this ugliness, and he vowed in his heart to bring up this child for love of his brother; so that, whatever in the future might be the faults of little Jehan, this good deed, performed in his stead, might be accounted to him for righteousness. It was a sort of investment in charity effected in his brother’s name, a stock of good work laid up for him in advance, on which the little rogue might fall back if some day he found himself short of that peculiar form of small change—the only kind accepted at the Gate of Heaven.     20   
  He christened his adopted child by the name of Quasimodo, either to commemorate thereby the day on which he found him, or to indicate by that name how incomplete and indefinite of shape the unfortunate little creature was. And, in truth, one-eyed, humpbacked, bow-legged, poor Quasimodo could hardly be accounted more than “quasi” human.     21   


Note 1.  Deal out cuffs on the head and fight. [back]