Book IX   
VI. Sequel to the Key of the Porte Rouge   
     
THAT night Esmeralda had fallen asleep in her little chamber full of hope and sweet thoughts, the horrors of the past forgotten. She had been sleeping for some time, dreaming, as ever, of Phœbus, when she seemed to hear some sound. Her slumbers were light and broken—the sleep of a bird; the slightest thing awoke her. She opened her eyes.      1   
  The night was very dark. Nevertheless, she saw a face peering in at her through the window—a lamp shed its light on this apparition. The moment it found itself observed by Esmeralda the apparition extinguished the lamp. However, the girl had had time to recognise the features. She closed her eyes in terror.      2   
  “Oh,” she murmured weakly, “the priest!”      3   
  All her past misfortunes flashed like lightning through her mind. She fell back upon her bed frozen with horror.      4   
  The next moment she felt something in contact with the whole length of her body which sent such a shudder through her that she started up in bed, wide awake and furious. The priest had glided up beside her and clasped his arms about her.      5   
  She tried to scream but could not.      6   
  “Begone, monster! begone, assassin!” she said, in a voice hoarse with passion and dread.      7   
  “Have pity! have pity!” murmured the priest, pressing his lips to her shoulder.      8   
  She clutched his tonsured head by its scant remaining locks and strove to repel his kisses as if he had been biting her.      9   
  “Have pity!” repeated the unhappy wretch. “Didst thou but know what my love for thee is! ’Tis fire! ’tis molten lead—a thousand daggers in my heart!”     10   
  He held her arm fast with a superhuman grip. “Let me go!” she cried wildly, “or I spit in thy face!”     11   
  He released her. “Vilify me—strike me—be angry—do what thou wilt; but in mercy, love me!”     12   
  She struck him with the fury of a child. She raised her pretty hands to tear his face. “Away, demon!”     13   
  “Love me! love me!” pleaded the unhappy priest, coming close to her again and answering her blows by caresses.     14   
  Suddenly she felt that he was overpowering her. “There must be an end to this,” said he, grinding his teeth.     15   
  She was vanquished, panting, broken, in his arms, at his mercy. She felt a lascivious hand groping over her, and making one supreme effort she screamed, “Help! help! a vampire! a vampire!”     16   
  But no one came. Only Djali was awakened and bleating in terror.     17   
  “Keep quiet,” panted the priest. Suddenly in her struggles the gipsy’s hand came against something cold and metallic. It was Quasimodo’s whistle. She seized it with a spasm of relief, put it to her lips, and blew with all her remaining strength. The whistle came clear, shrill, piercing.     18   
  “What is that?” said the priest. Almost as he spoke he felt himself dragged away by vigorous arms; the cell was dark, he could not distinguish clearly who it was that held him, but he heard teeth gnashing with rage, and there was just sufficient light in the gloom to show him the glitter of a great knife-blade just above his head.     19   
  The priest thought he could distinguish the outline of Quasimodo. He supposed it could be no one else. He recollected having stumbled, in entering, over a bundle lying across the outside of the door. Yet, as the new-comer uttered no word, he knew not what to think. He seized the arm that held the knife. “Quasimodo!” he cried, forgetting in this moment of danger that Quasimodo was deaf.     20   
  In a trice the priest was thrown upon the floor and felt a knee of iron planted on his chest. By the pressure of that knee he recognised the hunchback. But what could he do—how make himself known to the other? Night made the deaf man blind.     21   
  He was lost. The girl, pitiless as an enraged tigress, would not interfere to save him. The knife was nearing his head—it was a critical moment. Suddenly his adversary seemed to hesitate. “No blood near her!” he said under his breath.     22   
  There was no mistaking—it was Quasimodo’s voice.     23   
  On this the priest felt the huge hand dragging him out of the cell by the foot; he was to die outside.     24   
  Fortunately for him the moon had just risen. As they crossed the threshold a pale ray fell across the priest’s face. Quasimodo stared at him, a tremor seized him, he relinquished his hold and shrank back.     25   
  The gipsy girl, who had stolen to the door, was surprised to see them suddenly change parts; for now it was the priest who threatened and Quasimodo who entreated.     26   
  The priest, overwhelming the deaf man with gestures of anger and reproof, motioned vehemently to him to withdraw.     27   
  The hunchback hung his head, then went and knelt before the gipsy’s door. “Monseigneur,” he said in firm but resigned tones, “you will do as you think fit afterward, but you will have to kill me first.” So saying, he offered his knife to the priest.     28   
  Claude, beside himself with passion, put out his hand to seize it, but the girl was too quick for him. She snatched the knife from Quasimodo and burst into a frantic laugh. “Now come!” she cried to the priest.     29   
  She held the blade aloft. The priest faltered—she would most certainly have struck. “You dare not approach me, coward!” she cried. Then she added in a pitiless tone, and knowing well that she was plunging a thousand red-hot irons into the priest’s heart: “Ha! I know that Phœbus is not dead!”     30   
  The priest threw Quasimodo to the ground with a furious kick; then, trembling with passion, hurled himself into the darkness of the stair-case.     31   
  When he was gone, Quasimodo picked up the whistle which had just been the means of saving the gipsy. “It was getting rusty,” was all he said as he handed it back to her; then he left her to herself.     32   
  Overpowered by the violent scene, the girl sank exhausted upon her couch and broke into bitter sobs. Her outlook was becoming sinister once more.     33   
  Meanwhile the priest had groped his way back to his cell.     34   
  It had come to this—Dom Claude was jealous of Quasimodo. Lost in thought, he repeated his baleful words, “No one shall have her.”

   
Book X   
I. Gringoire Has Several Bright Ideas in Succession in the Rue des Bernardins   
     
DIRECTLY Gringoire had seen the turn affairs were taking, and that there was every prospect of the rope, the gallows, and various other disagreeables for the chief actors in this drama, he felt in nowise drawn to take part in it. The truands, with whom he had remained, considering them the best company in Paris—the truands continued to be interested in the gipsy girl. This he judged very natural in people who, like her, had nothing but Charmolue and Torterue to look forward to, and did not caracol in the regions of the imagination as he did astride of Pegasus. He had learned from them that his bride of the broken pitcher had taken refuge in Notre Dame, and he rejoiced at it. But he was not even tempted to go and visit her there. He sometimes thought of the little goat, but that was the utmost. For the rest, he performed feats of strength during the daytime to earn a living, and at night he was engaged in elaborating a memorial against the Bishop of Paris, for he had not forgotten how the wheels of his mills had drenched him, and owed the bishop a grudge in consequence. He was also busy writing a commentary on the great work of Baudry le Rouge, Bishop of Noyon and Tournay, De Cupa Petrarum, which had inspired him with a violent taste for architecture, a love which had supplanted his passion for hermetics, of which, too, it was but a natural consequence, seeing that there is an intimate connection between hermetics and freemasonry. Gringoire had passed from the love of an idea to the love for its outward form.      1   
  He happened one day to stop near the Church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, at a corner of a building called the Forl’Èvêque, which was opposite another called the For-le-Roi. To the former was attached a charming fourteenth century chapel, the chancel of which was towards the street. Gringoire was absorbed in studying its external sculpture. It was one of those moments of selfish, exclusive, and supreme enjoyment in which the artist sees nothing in all the world but art, and sees the whole world in art. Suddenly a hand was laid heavily on his shoulder. He turned round—it was his former friend and master, the Archdeacon.      2   
  He stood gaping stupidly. It was long since he had seen the Archdeacon, and Dom Claude was one of those grave and intense men who invariably upset a sceptical philosopher’s equilibrium.      3   
  The Archdeacon kept silence for some moments, during which Gringoire found leisure to observe him more closely. He thought Dom Claude greatly altered, pallid as a winter’s morning, hollow-eyed, his hair nearly white. The priest was the first to break this silence:      4   
  “How fares it with you, Maître Pierre?” he asked in a cold and even tone.      5   
  “My health?” returned Gringoire. “Well, as to that, it has its ups and downs: but on the whole, I may say it is good. I am moderate in all things. You know, master, the secret, according to Hippocrates; ‘id est: cibi, potus, somni, venus, omnia moderata sunt.”’ 1      6   
  “You have no care then, Maître Gringoire?” resumed the priest, fixing Gringoire with a penetrating eye.      7   
  “Faith, not I.”      8   
  “And what are you doing now?”      9   
  “You see for yourself, master; I am examining the cutting of these stones, and the style of this bas-relief.”     10   
  The priest smiled faintly, but with that scornful smile which only curls one corner of the mouth. “And that amuses you?”     11   
  “It is paradise!” exclaimed Gringoire. And bending over the stone carvings with the fascinated air of a demonstrator of living phenomena—“For example,” he said, “look at this bas-relief: do you not consider its execution a marvel of skill, delicacy, and patience? Look at this small column: where would you find a capital whose leaves were more daintily entwined or more tenderly treated by the chisel? Here are three round alto-relievos by Jean Maillevin. They are not the finest examples of that great genius; nevertheless, the childlike simplicity, the sweetness of the faces, the sportive grace of the attitudes and the draperies, and the indefinable charm which is mingled with all the imperfections, makes the little figures wonderfully airy and delicate—perhaps almost too much so. You do not find that diverting?”     12   
  “Oh, yes,” said the priest.     13   
  “And if you were to see the interior of the chapel!” continued the poet with his loquacious enthusiasm. “Carvings everywhere—leafy as the heart of a cabbage! The chancel is most devout in style and quite unique. Nowhere have I seen anything similar!”     14   
  Dom Claude interrupted him: “You are happy, then?”     15   
  “Upon my honour, yes!” returned Gringoire rapturously. “I began by loving women, and went on to animals; now I am in love with stones. It is quite as diverting as beasts or women, and less fickle.”     16   
  The priest passed his hand across his brow. The gesture was habitual with him.     17   
  “Say you so?”     18   
  “Look you,” said Gringoire, “what joys are to be extracted from it!” He took the priest by the arm, who yielded passively, and led him into the stair turret of the For-l’ Èvôque. “Look at that stair! Every time I see it it makes me happy. The style of that flight of steps is the simplest and most rare in Paris. Each step is sloped underneath. Its beauty and its simplicity consists in the fact of the steps, which are about a foot broad, being interlaced, mortised, jointed, linked, interwoven, and fitting into one another in a manner truly both firm and elegant.”     19   
  “And you long for nothing?”     20   
  “No.”     21   
  “And you have no regrets?”     22   
  “Neither regrets nor desires. I have arranged my life to my satisfaction.”     23   
  “What man arranges,” said Claude, “circumstances may disarrange.”     24   
  “I am a Pyrrhonian philosopher,” returned Gringoire, “and I hold the equilibrium in every thing.”     25   
  “And how do you get your living?”     26   
  “I still write an epopee or a tragedy now and then; but what brings me in the most is that industry in which you have already seen me engaged, master—carrying a pyramid of chairs in my teeth.”     27   
  “A gross occupation for a philosopher.”     28   
  “’Tis always a form of equilibrium,” returned Gringoire. “When one takes up an idea, one finds something of it everywhere.”     29   
  “I know it,” answered the Archdeacon. Then after a pause he went on: “Nevertheless, you are very poor?”     30   
  “Poor, yes, unhappy, no.”     31   
  There was a clatter of horses’ hoofs, and the two friends saw a company of the King’s archers file past the end of the street, their lances high and an officer at their head. The cavalcade was brilliant, and the street echoed to their tread.     32   
  “How you look at that officer!” said Gringoire to the Archdeacon.     33   
  “It is because I seem to know him.”     34   
  “What is his name?”     35   
  “I think,” answered Claude, “it is Phœbus de Châteaupers.”     36   
  “Phœbus! a curious name that! There is a Count of Foix called Phœbus. I remember that a girl I once knew never swore by any other name.”     37   
  “Come away,” said the priest, “I have something to say to you.”     38   
  A certain degree of agitation was perceptible under the Archdeacon’s glacial manner since the passing of the troop of soldiers. He started off walking, Gringoire following, accustomed to obey like all who once came under the influence of that dominating personality. They proceeded in silence till they reached the Rue des Bernardins, which was well-night deserted. Here Dom Claude came to a standstill.     39   
  “What have you to say to me, master?” asked Gringoire.     40   
  “Do you not consider,” answered the Archdeacon with an air of profound reflection, “that the attire of those cavaliers is handsomer than yours or mine?”     41   
  Gringoire shook his head. “Faith, I prefer my red and yellow cloak to those iron and steel scales. Where’s the pleasure of making a noise when you walk like the Iron Wharf in an earthquake?”     42   
  “Then, Gringoire, you have never envied those fine fellows in their coats of mail?”     43   
  “Envied them for what, Monsieur the Archdeacon? Their strength, their arms, their discipline? Nay, give me philosophy and independence in rags. I’d rather be the head of a fly than the tail of a lion.”     44   
  “How singular!” mused the priest. “A fine uniform is, nevertheless, a fine thing in its way.”     45   
  Gringoire seeing him immersed in thought, strolled away to admire the porch of a neighbouring house. He returned clapping his hands.     46   
  “If you were less occupied with the fine habiliments of these warriors, Monsieur the Archdeacon, I would beg you to come and see this door. I have always declared that the house of the Sieur Aubry boasts the most superb entrance in the world!”     47   
  “Pierre Gringoire,” said the Archdeacon, “what have you done with the little gipsy dancing girl?”     48   
  “Esmeralda, you mean? You have very abrupt changes of conversation.”     49   
  “Was she not your wife?”     50   
  “Yes, by grace of a broken pitcher. It was a four years’ agreement. By-the-by,” Gringoire went on in a half bantering tone, “you still think of her, then?”     51   
  “And you—you think of her no longer?”     52   
  “Not much—I have so many other things. Lord, how pretty the little goat was!”     53   
  “Did not that Bohemian girl save your life?”     54   
  “Pardieu—that’s true!”     55   
  “Well, then, what has become of her? what have you done with her?”     56   
  “I cannot tell you. I believe they hanged her.”     57   
  “You believe?”     58   
  “I am not sure. As soon as I saw there was any question of hanging I kept out of the game.”     59   
  “And that is all you know about her?”     60   
  “Stay; I was told that she had taken refuge in Notre Dame, and that she was in safety, and I’m sure I’m delighted; but I was not able to discover whether the goat had escaped with her—and that is all I know about it.”     61   
  “Then I am going to tell you more,” cried Dom Claude; and his voice, till then low, deliberate, and hollow, rose to thunder. “She did find sanctuary in Notre Dame, but in three days hence the law will drag her out again, and she will be hanged at the Grève. There is a decree of Parliament.”     62   
  “How very disappointing,” said Gringoire. In an instant the priest had resumed his cold, grave demeanour.     63   
  “And who the devil,” continued the poet, “has taken the trouble to solicit a decree of reintegration? Why couldn’t they leave the Parliament alone? What harm can it do to any one for a poor girl to take shelter under the buttresses of Notre Dame among the swallows’ nests?”     64   
  “There are Satans in the world,” replied the Archdeacon gloomily.     65   
  “Well, ’tis a devlish bad piece of work,” observed Gringoire.     66   
  “So she saved your life?” the priest went on after a pause.     67   
  “Yes, among my good friends the vagabonds. A touch more, a shade less, and I should have been hanged. They would have been sorry for it now.”     68   
  “Will you then do nothing for her?”     69   
  “I ask nothing better, Don Claude; but what if I bring an ugly bit of business about my ears?”     70   
  “What does it matter?”     71   
  “Matter indeed? You are very good, my dear master! I have two great works just begun.”     72   
  The priest smote his forehead. Despite the calm he affected, a violent gesture from time to time betrayed his inward struggles. “How is she to be saved?”     73   
  “Master,” said Gringoire, “I can give you an answer; It padelt,’ which is the Turkish for ‘God is our hope.’”     74   
  “How is she to be saved?” repeated Dom Claude, deep in thought.     75   
  It was Gringoire’s turn to smite his forehead. “Hark you, master, I have imagination. I will find you a choice of expedients. What if we entreated the King’s mercy?”     76   
  “Mercy? from Louis XI?”     77   
  “Why not?”     78   
  “Go ask the tiger for his bone!”     79   
  Gringoire racked his brain for fresh solutions.     80   
  “Well, then—stay; how would it be to draw up a memorial from the midwives of the city declaring the girl to be pregnant?”     81   
  The priest’s sunken eyes glared savagely. “Pregnant? Rascal, knowest thou anything of such a matter?”     82   
  Gringoire recoiled in alarm at his manner. He hastened to say, “Oh, not I indeed! Our marriage was a regular foris maritagium. I am altogether outside of it. But at any rate, that would secure a respite.”     83   
  “Folly! Infamy! Hold thy peace!”     84   
  “You are wrong to be angry,” said Gringoire reproachfully. “We get a respite which does harm to nobody, and puts forty deniers parisis into the pockets of the midwives, who are poor women.”     85   
  The priest was not listening. “But she must be got out of there,” he murmured. “The decree has to be carried out within three days—That Quasimodo! Women have very depraved tastes!” He raised his voice. “Maitre Pierre, I have thought it well over; there is but one means of saving her.”     86   
  “And what is that? For my part I can suggest nothing.”     87   
  “Hark you, Maitre Pierre; remember that you owe your life to her. I will impart my idea frankly to you. The church is watched night and day; no one is allowed to come out who has not been seen to go in. Thus you can enter. You shall come; I will take you to her. You will change clothes with her. She will take your doublet, you will take her petticoats.”     88   
  “So far so good,” observed the philosopher. “And after?”     89   
  “After? Why, she will go out in your clothes, and you will stay there in hers. They will hang you, perhaps, but she will be saved.”     90   
  Gringoire scratched his ear with a very serious air. “Now that,” said he, “is an idea that would never have occurred to me.”     91   
  At Dom Claude’s unexpected proposal, the open and benign countenance of the poet became suddenly overcast, like a smiling landscape of Italy when a nasty squall of wind drives a cloud against the sun.     92   
  “Well, Gringoire, what say you to this plan?”     93   
  “I say that they will not hang me perhaps, but that they will hang me indubitably.”     94   
  “The does not concern us.”     95   
  “The plague it doesn’t!”     96   
  “She saved your life. It is a debt you ought to pay.”     97   
  “There is many another I don’t pay.”     98   
  “Maitre Pierre, this must be done.” The Archdeacon spoke imperiously.     99   
  “Hark you, Dom Claude,” returned the poet in consternation. “You cling to that idea, but you are wrong. I see no reason why I should hang instead of another.”    100   
  “What is there to attract you so firmly to life?”    101   
  “Ah, a thousand things!”    102   
  “What, pray?”    103   
  “What?—why, the air, the sky, the morning, the evening, moonlight, my good friends the vagabonds, our pranks with the women, the fine architecture of Paris to study, three important books to write—one of them against the bishop and his mills; oh, more than I can say. Anaxagoras said that he was in the world merely to admire the sun. And besides, I enjoy the felicity of passing the whole of my days, from morning till night, in the company of a man of genius—myself, to wit—and that is very agreeable.”    104   
  “Oh, empty rattle-pate!” growled the Archdeacon. “And who, prithee, preserved to thee that life thou deemest so pleasant? Whose gift is it that thou art breathing the air, looking at the sky, hast still the power to divert thy feather-brained spirit with folly and nonsense? But for her, where wouldst thou be? Thou wouldst let her die, then—her through whom thou lives? Let her die—that being so lovely, so sweet, so adorable—a creature necessary to the light of the world, more divine than God himself! whilst thou, half philosopher, half fool—mere outline of something, a species of vegetable that imagines it walks and thinks—thou wilt go on living with the life thou hats stolen from her, useless as a torch at noon day? Come, Grainier, a little pity! be generous in thy turn; ’taws she that showed thee the way.”    105   
  The priest spoke vehemently. Grainier listened at first with an air of indecision; presently he was touched, and ended by making a tragic grimace which made his wan visage like that of a new-born infant with the colic.    106   
  “You are in truth most pathetic,” said he, wiping away a tear. “Well, I’ll think on it—’tis an odd idea of yours, that. After all,” he pursued, after a moment’s silence, “who knows; may-be they would not hang me—’tis not every betrothal that ends in marriage. When they find me in my hiding-place thus grotesquely disguised in coif and kirtle, it is very possible they will burst out laughing. On the other hand, even if they do hang me—well, the rope is a death like any other—nay, rather it is not death like any other—it is a death worthy of a sage who has swung gently all his life between the extremes—a death which, like the mind of the true sceptic, is neither flesh nor fish; a death thoroughly expressive of Pyrrhonism and hesitation, which holds the mean between heaven and earth, which holds you in suspension. ’Tis the death of a philosopher and to which mayhap I was predestined. It is magnificent to die as one has lived!”    107   
  The priest interrupted him. “So it is a bargain, then?”    108   
  “When all’s said and done,” pursued Grainier with exaltation, “what is death? An uncomfortable moment—a tollgate—the transit from little to nothing. Some one having asked Cercidas of Megalopolis whether he could die willingly, he replied, ‘Wherefore not? for after my death I should see those great men: Pythagoras among the philosophers, Hecatæus among the historians, Homer among the poets, Olympus among the musicians.’”    109   
  The Archdeacon held out his hand. “It is settled, then? You will come to-morrow?”    110   
  This action brought Grainier down to the realities. “Faith no!” said he in the tone of a man who awakens. “Let myself be hanged?—’tis too absurd! I will not.”    111   
  “God be with you, then!” and the Archdeacon muttered between his teeth, “We shall meet again!”    112   
  “I have no desire to meet that devil of man again,” thought Grainier. He ran after Dom Claude. “Hark you, Monsieur the Archdeacon, no offence between old friends! You are interested in this girl—my wife I mean—that’s very well. You have devised a stratagem for getting her sagely out of Notre Dame, but your plan is highly unpleasant for me, Grainier. If I only had another to suggest!—Let me tell you that a most luminous inspiration has this instant come to me. How if I had a practicable scheme for extricating her from this tight place without exposing my own neck to the slightest danger of a slip-knot, what would you say? Would not that suffice you? Is it absolutely necessary that I should be hanged to satisfy you?”    113   
  The priest was tearing at the buttons of his soutance with impatience. “Oh, babbling stream of words! Out with thy plan!”    114   
  “Yes,” said Grainier, speaking to himself and rubbing his nose with his forefinger in sign of deep cogitation; “that’s it! The vagabonds are good-hearted fellows! The tribe of Egypt loves her. They will rise at a word. Nothing easier. A surprise—and under cover of the disorder, carry her off—perfectly easily! This very next night. Nothing would please them better.”    115   
  “The plan—speak!” said the priest, shaking him.    116   
  Grainier turned to him majestically.    117   
  “Let me be! see you not that I am composing?” He ruminated again for a few moments, then began to clap his hands at his thought. “Admirable! he cried, “an assured success!”    118   
  “The plan!” repeated Claude, enraged.    119   
  Grainier was radiant. “Hist!” said he, “let me tell it you in a whisper. ’Tis a counterplot that’s really brilliant, and will get us all clear out of the affair. Pardieu! you must admit that I’m no fool.”    120   
  He stopped short. “Ah, but the little goat—is she with the girl?”    121   
  “Yes—yes—devil take thee! go on!”    122   
  “They would hang her too, would they not?”    123   
  “What’s that to me?”    124   
  “Yes, they would hang her. They hanged a sow last month, sure enough. The hangman likes that—he east the beast afterward. Hang my pretty Djali! Poor sweet lamb!”    125   
  “A murrain on thee!” cried Dom Claude. “’Tis thou art the hangman. What plan for saving her hats thou found, rascal? Must thou be delivered of thy scheme with the forceps?”    126   
  “Gently, master. This is it.” Grainier bent to the Archdeacon’s ear and spoke very low, casting an anxious glance up and down the street, in which, however, there was not a soul to be seen. When he had finished, Dom Claude touched his hand and said coldly: “’Tis well. Till to-morrow, then.”    127   
  “Till to-morrow,” repeated Grainier, and while the Archdeacon retreated in one direction, he went off in the other, murmuring to himself: “This is a nice business, M. Pierre Grainier! Never mind, it’s not to say because one’s of small account one need be frightened at a great undertaking. Biton carried a great bull on his shoulders; wagtails and linnets cross the ocean.”    128   


Note 1.  Food, drink, sleep, love—all in moderation. [back]

   
Book X   
II. Turn Vagabond   
     
THE ARCHDEACON, on returning to the cloister, found his brother, Jehan of the Mill, watching for him at the door of his cell, having whiled away the tediousness of waiting by drawing on the wall with a piece of charcoal a profile portrait of his elder brother enriched by a nose of preposterous dimensions.      1   
  Dom Claude scarcely glanced at his brother. He had other things to think of. That laughing, scampish face, whose beams had so often lifted the gloom from the sombre countenance of the priest, had now no power to dissipate the mists that gathered ever more thickly over that festering mephitic, stagnant soul.      2   
  “Brother,” Jehan began timidly, “I have come to see you.”      3   
  The Archdeacon did not even glance at him. “Well?”      4   
  “Brother,” continued the little hypocrite, “you are so good to me, and you bestow upon me such excellent advice, that I always come back to you.”      5   
  “What further?”      6   
  “Alas, brother you were very right when you said to me: ‘Jehan! Jehan! cessat doctorum doctrina, discipulorum disciplina. Jehan, be staid; Jehan, be studious; Jehan, spend not thy nights outside the college without lawful occasion and leave of the masters. Come not to blows with the Picards—noli, Joannes, verbe rare Picardos. Lie not rotting like an unlettered ass—quasi asinus illiteratus—among the straw of the schools. Jehan, let thyself be chastised at the discretion of the master. Jehan, go every evening to chapel and sing an anthem with verse and prayer in praise of Our Lady the Virgin Mary.’ Alas! how excellent was that advice!”      7   
  “And then?”      8   
  “Brother, you see before you a guilty wretch, a miscreant, a profligate, a monster! My dear brother, Jehan has used your counsel as mere straw and dung to be trodden under foot. Well am I chastised for it, and the heavenly Father is extraordinarily just. So long as I had money I spent it in feasting, folly and profligacy. Ah, how hideous and vile is the back view of debauchery compared with the smiling countenance she faces us with! Now I have not a single sou left; I’ve sold my coverlet, my shirt, and my towel—no merry life for me any longer! The fair taper is extinguished, and nothing remains to me but its villainous snuff that stinks in my nostrils. The girls make mock of me. I drink water. I am harassed by remorse and creditors.”      9   
  “The end?” said the Archdeacon.     10   
  “Ah, best of brothers, I would fain lead a better life. I come to you full of contrition. I am penitent. I acknowledge my sins. I beat my breast with heavy blows. You are very right to desire that I should one day become a licentiate and sub-monitor of the Collége de Torchi. I now feel a remarkable vocation for that office. But I have no more ink left—I shall be obliged to buy some; I have no pens left—I must buy some; no more paper, no books—I must buy them. For that purpose I am sorely in need of the financial wherewithal. And I come to you, my brother, with a heart full of contrition.”     11   
  “Is that all?”     12   
  “Yes,” said the scholar. “A little money.”     13   
  “I have none.”     14   
  The scholar assumed an air of gravity and resolution: “Very good, brother, then I am sorry to have to inform you that I have received from other quarters very advantageous offers and proposals. You will not give me any money? No? In that case I shall turn Vagabond.” And with this portentous word he adopted the mien of an Ajax awaiting the lightning.     15   
  The Archdeacon answered, unmoved:     16   
  “Then turn Vagabond.”     17   
  Jehan made him a profound bow, and descended the cloister stair-case whistling.     18   
  As he passed through the courtyard of the cloister under his brother’s window, he heard that window open, looked up, and saw the Archdeacon’s stern countenance leaning out of it. “Get thee to the devil!” called Dome Claude; “here is the last money thou shalt have of me.”     19   
  So saying, the priest tossed down a purse to Jean, which raised a large bump on his forehead, and with which he set off, at once angry and delighted, like a dog that has been pelted with marrowbones.

Book X   
III. Vive la Joie!   
     
THE READER may perhaps remember that a portion of the Court of Miracles was enclosed by the ancient wall of the city, a good many towers of which were beginning at that time to fall into decay. One of these towers had been converted by the truands into a place of entertainment, with a tavern in the basement, and the rest in the upper stores. This tower was the most animated, and consequently the most hideous, spot in the whole Vagabond quarter—a monstrous hive, buzzing day and night. At night, when the rest of the rabble were asleep—when not a lighted window was to be seen in the squalid fronts of the houses round the Place, when all sound had ceased in the innumerable tenements with their swarms of thieves, loose women, stolen or bastard children—the joyous tower could always be distinguished by the uproar that issued from it, and by the crimson glow of light streaming out from the loopholes, the windows, the fissures in the gaping walls, escaping, as it were, from every pore.      1   
  The tavern, as we have said, was in the basement. The descent to it was through a low door and down a steep, narrow stair. Over the door, by way of sign, hung an extraordinary daub representing new-coined sols and dead fowls, with the punning legend underneath, Aux sonneurs 1 pour les trépassés!—The ringers for the dead.      2   
  One evening, when the curfew was ringing from all the steeples of Paris, the sergeants of the watch, could they have entered the redoubtable Court of Miracles, might have remarked that a greater hubbub than usual was going on in the tavern of the Vagabonds; that they were drinking deeper and swearing harder. Without, in the Place, were a number of groups conversing in low tones, as when some great plot is brewing, and here and there some fellow crouched down and sharpened a villainous iron blade on a flagstone.      3   
  Meanwhile, in the tavern itself, wine and gambling formed so strong a diversion to the ideas that occupied the Vagabonds, that it would have been difficult to gather from the conversation of the drinkers what the matter was which so engaged them. Only they wore a gayer air than usual, and every one of them had some weapon or other gleaming between his knees—a pruning hook, an axed, a broadsword, or the crook of some ancient blunderbuss.      4   
  The hall, which was circular in form, was very spacious; but the tables were so crowded together and the drinkers so numerous, that the whole contents of the tavern—men, women, benches, tankards, drinkers, sleepers, gamblers, the able-bodied and the crippled—seemed thrown pell-mell together, with about as much order and harmony as a heap of oysters hells. A few tallow candles guttered on the table; but the real source of light to the tavern, that which sustained in the cabaret the character of the chandelier in an opera house, was the fire. This cellar was so damp that the fire was never allowed to go out, even in the height of summer; an immense fireplace with a carved chimney piece, and crowded with heavy andirons and cooking utensils, contained one of those huge fires of wood and turf which in a village street at night cast the deep red glow of the forge windows on the opposite wall. A great dog, gravely seated in the ashes, was turning a spit hung with meat.      5   
  In spite of the prevailing confusion, after the first glance three principal groups might be singled out, pressing round the several personages already known to the reader. One of these personages, fantastically benzene with many an Oriental gaudy, was Manias Hungary Spica, Duke of Egypt and Bohemia. The old rogue was seated cross legged on a table, his finger upraised, exhibiting in a loud voice his skill in white and black magic to many an open-mouthed face that surrounded him.      6   
  Another crowd was gathered thick round our old friend the King of Tunis, armed to the teeth. Clop in Trouillefou, with a very serious mien and in a low voice, was superintending the ransacking of an enormous cask full of arms staved open before him and disgorging a profusion of axes, swords, firelocks, coats of mail, lance and pike heads, crossbows and arrows, like apples and grapes from a cornucopia. Each one took something from the heap—one a morion, another a rapier, a third a cross-hilted dagger. The very children were arming, and even the worst cripples, mere torsos of men, all barbed and cuirassed, were crawling about among the legs of the drinkers like so many great beetles.      7   
  And lastly, a third audience—much the noisiest, most jovial, and numerous of the lot—crowded the benches and tables, listening to the haranguing and swearing of a flutelike voice which proceeded from a figure dressed in a complete suit of heavy armour from casque to spurs. The individual thus trussed up in full panoply was so buried under his warlike accoutrements that nothing of his person was visible but an impudent tip-tilted nose, a lock of golden hair, a rosy mouth, and a pair of bold blue eyes. His belt bristled with daggers and poniards, a large sword hung at one side, a rusty cross-bow at the other, a vast jug of wine stood before him, and in his right arm he held a strapping wench with uncovered bosom. Every mouth in his neighbourhood was laughing, drinking, swearing.      8   
  Add to these twenty minor groups; the serving men and women running to and fro with wine and beer-cans on their heads, the players absorbed in the various games of hazard—billes (a primitive form of billiards), dice, cards, backgammon, the intensely exciting “tringlet” (a form of spilikins), quarrels in one corner, kisses in another—and some idea may be formed of the scene, over which flickered the light of the great blazing fire, setting a thousand grotesque and enormous shadows dancing on the tavern walls.      9   
  As to the noise—the place might have been the inside of a bell in full peal, while any intervals that might occur in the hubbub were filled by the spluttering of the dripping-pan in front of the fire.     10   
  In the midst of all this uproar, on a bench inside the fireplace, a philosopher sat and meditated, with his feet in the ashes and his eyes fixed on the blaze. It was Pierre Grainier.     11   
  “Now, then, look alive, arm yourselves—we march in an hour!” said Clop in Trouillefou to his rascals.     12   
  A girl sang a snatch of song:
           “Father and mother dear, good-night;   
The last to go put out the light.”   
  13   
  Two card-players were disputing. “Knave!” cried the reddest-faced of the two, shaking his fist at the other, “I’ll so mark thee thou mightest take the place of knave of clubs in our lord the King’s own pack of cards!”     14   
  “Ouf!”roared one, whose nasal drawl betrayed him as a Norman; “we are packed together here like the saints of Caillouville!”     15   
  “Children,” said the Duke of Egypt to his audience in a falsetto voice, “the witches of France go to the Sabbaths without ointment, or broomsticks, or any other mount, by a few magic words only. The witches of Italy have always a goat in readiness at the door. All are bound to go up the chimney.”     16   
  The voice of the young scamp armed cap-à-pie dominated the hubbub.     17   
  “Noël! Noël!” he cried. “My first day in armour! A Vagabond! I’m a Vagabond, body of Christ! pour me some wine! My friends, my name is Jean Frollo of the Mill, and I’m a gentleman. It’s my opinion that if the Almighty were a man-at-arms he’d turn robber. Brothers, we are bound on a great expedition. We are doughty men. Lay siege to the church, break in the doors, bring out the maid, save her from the judges, save her from the priests, dismantle the cloister, burn the bishop in his house—we’ll do all this in less time than it takes a burgomaster to eat a mouthful of soup. Our cause is a righteous one—we loot Notre Dame, and there you are! We’ll hang Quasimodo. Are you acquainted with Quasimodo, fair ladies? Have you seen him snorting on the back of the big bell on a day of high festival? Corne du Père! ’tis a grand sight—you’d say it was a devil astride a gaping maw. Hark ye, my friends; I am a truand to the bottom of my heart, I am Argotier to the soul, I’m a born Cagou. I was very rich, but I’ve spent all I had. My mother wanted to make me an officer, my father a subdeacon, my aunt a criminal councillor, my grandmother a protonotary, but I made myself a Vagabond. I told my father so, and he spat his curse in my face; my mother, the good old lady, fell to weeping and spluttering like the log in that fireplace. So hey for a merry life! I’m a whole madhouse in myself. Landlady, my duck, some more wine—I’ve got some money left yet, but no more of that Suresnes, it rasps my throat. Why, corbœuf, it’s like gargling with a basket!”     18   
  The crowd received his every utterance with yells of laughter, and seeing that the uproar was increasing round him, the scholar cried: “O glorious uproar! Populi debacchantis populosa debacchatio!” and set off singing, his eyes swinging in apparent ecstasy, in the tone of a canon chanting vespers: “Qua cantica! quæ organa! quæ cantilenæ! quæ melodiæ hic sine fine decantantur; sonant melliflua hymnorum organa, suavissima angelorum melodia, cantica canticorum mira.” 2     19   
  He broke off. “Hey there—devil’s own landlady—give me some supper!”     20   
  There was a moment almost of silence, during which the strident voice of the Duke of Egypt was heard instructing his Bohemians:     21   
  “—The weasel goes by the name of Adnine, the fox is Bluefoot or Woodranger, the wolf. Grayfoot of Giltfoot, the bear, Old Man, or Grandfather. The cap of a gnome renders one invisible and makes one see invisible things. When a toad is baptized it should be clad in velvet—red or black—a bell at its neck, a bell on its foot. The godfather holds the head, the godmother the hinder parts. It is the demon Sidragasum that has the power of making girls dance naked.”     22   
  “By the mass!” broke in Jean, “I would I were a demon Sidragasum.”     23   
  All this time the truands had been steadily arming themselves at the other side of the tavern, whispering to one another.     24   
  “Poor Esmeralda!” said a gipsy. “She is our sister. We must get her out of that!”     25   
  “Is she there still in Notre Dame?” asked a Jewish looking huckster.     26   
  “Yes, by God!”     27   
  “Well, comrades,” exclaimed the huckster, “to Notre Dame, then! All the more because in the chapel of Saints Féréol and Ferrution there are two statues, one of Saint-John the Baptist and the other of Saint-Anthony, both of pure gold, weighing together seven gold marks and fifteen esterlins, 3 and the pedestals of silver-gilt weigh seventeen marks five ounces. I know it—I am a goldsmith.”     28   
  Here they served Jehan’s supper. He lolled on the bosom of the girl beside him. “By Saint-Voult-de-Lucques, called familiarly Saint-Goguelu, now I’m perfectly happy!” he cried. “Here in front of me I see a blockhead with the beardless face of an archduke. On my left is another with teeth so long they hide his chin. Body of Mahomet! Comrade! thou hats all the appearance of a draper, and hats the effrontery to come and sit by me! I am noble, my friend, and trade is incompatible with nobility. Get thee farther off. Holà, you there! no fighting! How now! Baptiste Croque-Oison, wouldst risk that splendid nose of thine under the gross fists of yonder bumpkin! Imbecile! Non cuiquam datum est habere nasum. 4 Truly thou art divine, Jacqueline Rouge-Oreille! pity ’tis thou hats no hair. Holà! My name’s Jean Frollo, and my brother’s an archdeacon—may the devil fly away with him! Every word I tell you is the truth. By turning Vagabond, I have cheerfully renounced the half of a house situate in paradise promised me by my brother—dimidem donum in paradiso—I quote the very words. I’ve a property in the Rue Tirechappe, and all the women run after me—as true as it’s true that Saint-Eligius was an excellent goldsmith, and that the five trades of the good city of Paris are the tanners, the leather-dressers, the baldrick-makers, the purse-makers, and the leather-scourers, and that Saint-Laurence was burned with hot egg-shells. I swear to you, comrades,
           ‘For a full year I’ll taste no wine   
If this be any lie of mine!’   
  29   
  “My charmer, ’tis moonlight; look through that loophole how the wind rumples the clouds—just as I do with thy kerchief. Girls, snuff the children and the candles. Christ and Mahomet! what am I eating now? Hey there, old jade! the hairs that are missing from the heads of thy trulls we find in the omelets! Hark ye, old lady, I prefer my omelets bald. May the devil flatten thy nose! A fine tavern of Beelzebub, in sooth, where the wenches comb themselves with the forks!”     30   
  With which he smashed his plate on the floor and began singing in an ear-splitting voice:
           “By the blood of Christ,   
I lay no store   
By faith or law,   
Neither hearth nor home   
Do I call my own,   
    Nor God,   
    Nor King!”   
  31   
  By this time Clop in Trouillefou had finished distributing his arms. Approaching Grainier, who seemed plunged in profound reverie, his feet on a log:     32   
  “Friend Pierre,” said the King of Tunis, “what the devil art thinking about?”     33   
  Grainier turned to him with a melancholy smile. “I love the fire, my dear sir. Not for the trivial reason that it warms our feet and cooks our soup, but because it throws out sparks. Sometimes I pass whole hours watching the sparks. I discover a host of things in those stars that sprinkle the dark background of the fireplace. Those stars are worlds.”     34   
  “The fiend take me if I understand thee,” said the Vagabond. “Dost thou know what’s o’clock?”     35   
  “I do not,” answered Grainier. Clop in went to the Duke of Egypt.     36   
  “Comrade Manias, the moment is ill-chosen. They say King Louis is in Paris.”     37   
  “All the more need for getting our sister out of his clutches,” answered the old Bohemian.     38   
  “You speak like a man, Manias,” returned the King of Tunis. “Besides, it will be an easy matter. There’s no resistance to fear in the church. The priests are so many hares, and we are in full force. The men of the Parliament will be finely balked to-morrow when they come to fetch her! By the bowels of the Pope, they shall not hang the pretty creature!”     39   
  Clop in then left the tavern.     40   
  In the meantime Jean was shouting hoarsely: “I drink—I eat—I’m drunk—I am Jupiter! Ah, Pierre l’Assommeur, if thou glarest at me again in that manner, I’ll dust thy nose with my fist!”     41   
  Grainier, on his part, aroused from his meditations, was contemplating the wild scene of license and uproar around him, while he murmured to himself: “Luxuriosa res vinum et tumultuosa ebrietas. 5 Ah, how wise am I to eschew drinking, and how excellent is the saying of Saint-Benedict: Vinum apostatare facit etiam sapientes!” 6     42   
  At this moment Clop in returned and shouted in a voice of thunder, “Midnight!”     43   
  The word acted on the truands like the order to mount on a regiment, and the entire band—men, women, and children—poured out of the tavern with a great clatter of arms and iron. The moon was obscured. The Court of Miracles lay in utter darkness—not a single light was to be seen, but it was far from being deserted. A great crowd of men and women stood in the Place talking to one another in low voices. There was a continuous deep hum, and many a weapon flashed in the gloom.     44   
  Clop in mounted on a great stone. “To your ranks, Argot!” cried he. “To your ranks, Egypt! To your ranks, Galilee!”     45   
  A movement ran through the darkness. The vast multitude seemed to be forming in columns. After a few minutes the King of Tunis once more lifted up his voice:     46   
  “Now, then, silence on the march through Paris! The password is ‘Dagger in pouch.’ Torches not to be lighted till we reach Notre Dame! March!”     47   
  Ten minutes later the horsemen of the night-watch were fleeing in terror before a long procession, black and silent, pouring down towards the Pont-au-Change through the tortuous streets that run in every direction through the dense quarter of the Halles.     48   


Note 1.  Slang term for ready money, hard cash. [back]   
Note 2.  What chants! what instruments! what songs and melodies without end are sung here! Hymns from mellifluous pipes are sounding, sweetest of angels’ melodies, the most wonderful song of all songs. [back]   
Note 3.  Obsolete goldsmith weight of 28 4–5 grains. [back]   
Note 4.  It is not given to every one to have a nose. [back]   
Note 5.  A dissolute thing is wine and leads to noisy intoxication. [back]   
Note 6.  The avoiding of wine also makes a man wise. [back]

Book X   
IV. An Awkward Friend   
     
QUASIMODO on that night was not asleep. He had just gone his last round through the church. He had failed to remark that at the moment when he was closing the doors the Archdeacon had passed near him and evinced some annoyance at seeing him bolt and padlock with care the enormous iron bars which gave the wide doors the solidity of a wall. Dome Claude seemed even more preoccupied than usual. Moreover, since the nocturnal adventure in the cell, he treated Quasimodo with constant unkindness; but in vain he used him harshly, sometimes even striking him—nothing could shake the submissive patience, the devoted resignation of the faithful bell-ringer. From the Archdeacon he would endure anything—abuse, threats, blows—without a murmur of reproach, without even a sigh of complaint. The utmost that he did was to follow Dome Claude with an anxious eye if he mounted the stair of the tower; but the Archdeacon had of himself abstained from appearing again before the gipsy girl.      1   
  That night, then, Quasimodo, after a glance at his poor forsaken bells, Jacqueline, Marie, Thibauld, had ascended to the top of the northern tower, and there, after setting down his dark-lantern on the leads, he fell to contemplating Paris. The night, as we have said, was very dark. Paris, which, speaking broadly, was not lighted at all at that period, presented to the eye a confused mass of black blots, cut here and there by the pale windings of the river. Quasimodo saw not a light except in the window of a distant edifice, whose vague and sombre outline was distinguishable high above the roofs in the direction of the Porte Saint-Antoine. Here, too, some one kept vigil.      2   
  While his eye thus lingered over the dark and misty scene, the bell-ringer felt an indescribable sense of anxiety rising within him. For several days he had been on the watch. He had constantly noticed men of sinister aspect loitering round the church and never taking their eyes off the gipsy girl’s hiding-place. He feared lest some plot should be hatching against the unfortunate refugee. He conceived her to be an object of popular hatred, as he was himself, and that something might very well be going to happen in the immediate future. Thus he remained on his tower on the lookout—“Revant dans son revoir”—Musing in his musery—as Rabelais says, his eye by turns on the cell and on Paris, keeping safe watch, like a trusty dog, with a thousand suspicions in his mind.      3   
  All at once, while he was reconnoitring the great city with that solitary eye which nature, as if by way of compensation, had made so piercing that it almost supplied the deficiency of other organs in Quasimodo, it struck him that there was something unusual in the appearance of the outline of the quay of the Veille Pelleterie, that there was some movement at this point, that the line of the parapet which stood out black against the whiteness of the water was not straight and still like that of the other quays, but that it appeared to undulate like the waves of a river or the heads of a crowd in motion.      4   
  He thought this very peculiar. He redoubled his attention. The movement appeared to be coming towards the city—not a light, however. It lasted some time on the quay, and then flowed away by degrees, as if whatever was passing along was entering the interior of the island; then it ceased altogether, and the line of the quay returned to its wonted straightness and immobility.      5   
  Just as Quasimodo was exhausting himself in conjectures, it seemed to him that the movement was reappearing in the Rue du Parvis, which runs into the city in a straight line with the front of Notre Dame. At last, despite the great darkness, he could descry the head of a column issuing from that street, and the next instant a crowd spreading out into the square, of which he could distinguish nothing further than that it was a crowd.      6   
  It was a fear-compelling spectacle. No doubt this strange procession, which seemed so anxious to cloak itself under the profound darkness, preserved a silence no less profound. Still, some sound must have escaped from it, were it only the tramp of feet. But even this sound did not reach the deaf hunchback, and the great multitude, which he could only dimly see, but which he heard not at all, moving so near him, seemed to him like an assemblage of the dead—mute, ghostly shapes, hovering in a mist—shadows in a shade.      7   
  Then his former fears returned; the idea of an attempt against the gipsy girl presented itself once more to his mind. He had a vague premonition of some violent situation approaching. At this critical moment he held counsel with himself, reasoning with greater acumen and promptness than would have been expected from so ill-organized a brain. Should he awaken the gipsy girl?—help her to escape? Which way? The streets were blocked, the church was backed by the river—no boat—no egress. There remained but one thing therefore—to face death on threshold of Notre Dame; to hold them off at least until assistance came, supposing there were any to come, and not to disturb the slumbers of Esmeralda. The unhappy girl would always be awakened early enough to die. This resolution once taken, he proceeded to observe “the enemy” with greater calmness.      8   
  The crowd in the Parvis appeared to be increasing momentarily; though, seeing that the windows of the streets and the Place remained closed, he concluded that they could not be making much noise. Suddenly a light shone out, and in an instant seven or eight torches were waving above the heads, tossing their plumes of flame through the darkness. By their light Quasimodo had a clear vision of an appalling band of tatterdemalions—men and women—flocking into the Parvis, armed with scythes, pikes, pruning-forks, partisans—their thousand blades glittering as they caught the fitful light—and here and there black pitchforks furnishing horns to these hideous visages. He had a confused remembrance of that populace, and thought to recognise in them the crowd which but a few months before had acclaimed him Pope of Fools. A man holding a torch in one hand and a birch rod in the other was mounted on a corner post and apparently haranguing the multitude, and at the same time the ghostly army performed some evolutions as if taking up a position round the church. Quasimodo picked up his lantern and descended to the platform between the towers to observe more closely and deliberate on the means of defence.      9   
  Arrived in front of the great door of Notre Dame, Clop in Trouillefou had in fact drawn up his troops in battle array. Though anticipating no resistance, yet, like a prudent general, he determined to preserve so much order as would, in case of need, enable him to face a sudden attack of the watch or the city guard. Accordingly, he had so disposed his brigade that, seen from above and at distance, it might have been taken for the Roman triangle at the battle of Ecnoma, the boar’s head of Alexander, or the famous wedge of Gustavus Adolphus. The base of this triangle ran along the back of the Place in such a manner as to bar the Rue du Parvis, one side looked towards the Hotel Dieu, the other towards the Rue Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs; Clop in Trouillenfou had posted himself at the point with the Duke of Egypt, our friend Jean, and the boldest of the beggar tribe.     10   
  An enterprise such as the truandswere now attempting against Notre Dame was no means an uncommon occurrence in the Middle Ages. What we now call “police” did not then exist. In the populous cities, particularly in the capitals, there was no united central power regulating the whole. Feudalism had shaped these great municipalities after an absurd fashion. A city was a collection of innumerable seigneuries, cutting it up into divisions of all shapes and sizes; hence its crowd of contradictory police establishments, or rather no police at all. In Paris, for instance, independently of the hundred and forty-one feudal lords claiming manorial dues, there were twenty-five claiming justiciary and manorial rights, from the Bishop of Paris, who possessed a hundred and five streets, to the Prior of Notre Dame des Chaps, who had only four. All these feudal justiciaries recognised only nominally the paramount authority of the king. All exercised right of highway, all were their own masters. Louis XI—that in defatigable workman, who commenced on so large a scale the demolition of the feudal edifice, continued by Richelieu and Louis XIV to the advantage of royalty, and completed by Mirabeau to the advantage of the people—Louis XI had done his utmost to break up this network of seigneuries which covered Paris, by casting violently athwart it two or three ordinances of general police. Thus, in 1465, we find the inhabitants ordered to put lighted candles in their windows at nightfall, and to shut up their dogs on pain of the halter; in the same year, the order to bar the streets at night with iron chains, and the prohibition against their carrying daggers or any other offensive weapon in the streets at night. But in a short time all these attempts at municipal legislation fell into disuse; the citizens let the candles at their windows be extinguished by the wind and their dogs roam at large; the iron chains were only stretched across the street in case of siege, and the prohibition against carrying weapons brought about no other changes than converting the Rue Coupe-Gueule into Coupe-Gorge; which, to be sure, is a clear evidence of progress. The old framework of the feudal jurisdictions remained standing—an immense accumulation of bailiwicks and seigneuries, crossing one another in all directions through the length and breadth of the city, embarrassing, entangling, overlapping one another—a useless thicket of watches, counter-watches, and out-watches, through the very midst of which stalked brigandage, rapine, and sedition, sword in hand. Under such condition of disorder, therefore, it excited no very great remark if a part of the populace laid violent hands on a palace, a mansion, or any ordinary dwelling-house in the most populated quarters of the city. In most cases the neighbours did interfere in the matter unless the plundering extended to themselves. They stopped their ears to the report of the musketry, closed their shutters, barricaded their doors, and let the struggle exhaust itself with or without the assistance of the watch, and the next day it would be quietly said in Paris: “Last night Etienne Barbette’s house was broken into.” or “The Marshal de Clermont was attacked,” etc. Hence, not only royal residences, the Louvre, the Palais, the Bastille, the Tournelles, but the mansions of the nobility, such as the Petit-Bourbon, the Hotel de Sens, the Hotel d’Angoulême, and so on, had their battlemented walls and their fortified turrets over the entrances. The churches were protected turrets over the entrances. The churches were protected by their sanctity. Some of them, nevertheless—among which was not Notre Dame—were fortified. The Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was castellated like a baronial mansion, and more copper had been used there for bombards than for bells. These fortifications were still to be seen in 1610; now scarcely the church remains.     11   
  But to return to Notre Dame.     12   
  The first arrangements completed—and it must be said, to the honour of the truand discipline, that Clopin’s orders were carried out in silence and with admirable precision—the worthy leader mounted the parapet of the Parvis, turned his face to Notre Dame, and raising his harsh and churlish voice while he shook his torch—the light of which flaring in the wind and veiled at intervals by its own smoke, made the dark front of the Cathedral vanish and reappear by turns—     13   
  “Unto thee,” he cried, “Louis de Beaumont, Bishop of Paris, Councillor in the Court of Parliament, thus say I, Clop in Trouillefou, King of Tunis, Grand Coësre, Prince of Argot, Bishop of the Fools: Our sister, falsely condemned for witchcraft, has taken refuge in thy church. Thou art bound to accord her shelter and safeguard; but now the Parliament designs to take her thence, and thou consentest thereunto, so that she would be hanged to-morrow at the Grève if God and the truands were no at hand. We come to thee, then, Bishop. If thy church is sacred, our sister is so too; if our sister is not sacred, neither is thy church. Wherefore we summon thee to give up the maid if thou wouldst save thy church, or we will take the maid ourselves sand plunder the church: which will most certainly happen. In token where of I here set up my banner. And so God help thee, Bishop of Paris!”     14   
  Unfortunately Quasimodo could no hear these words, which were delivered with a sort of savage and morose dignity. A Vagabond handed Clop in his banner, which he gravely planted between two paving-stones. It was a pitchfork on which hung gory piece of carrion.     15   
  This done, the King of Tunis turned about and cast his eye over his army, a ferocious multitude whose eyes gleamed almost as savagely as their pikes. After a moment’s pause—“Forward, lads!” he cried. “To your work, house breakers!”     16   
  Thirty thick-set, strong-limbed men with hammers, pincers, and iron crowbars on their shoulders, stepped from the ranks They advanced towards the main entrance of the church, ascended the steps, and immediately set to work on the door with pincers and levers. A large party of truands followed them to assist or look on, so that the whole flight of eleven steps was crowded with them.     17   
  The door, however, held firm. “The devil! but she’s hard and headstrong!” said one. “She’s old, and her gristle’s tough!” said another. “Courage, comrades!” said Clop in. “I wager my head against a slipper that you’ll have burst the door, got the maid, and stripped the high altar before ever there’s a beadle of them all awake. There—I believe the lock’s going.”     18   
  Clop in was interrupted by a frightful noise which at that moment resounded behind him. He turned round. An enormous beam had just fallen from on high, crushing a dozen truands on the steps of the church and rebounding on to the pavement with the noise of a piece of artillery, breaking here and there the legs of others among the Vagabond crowd, which fled in all directions with cries of terror. In a trice the enclosure of the Parvis was empty. The doorbreakers, though protected by the deep arches of the doorway, abandoned it, and Clop in himself fell back to a respectful distance from the church.     19   
  “Tête-bœuf! I had a narrow escape!” cried Jean. “I felt the wind of it; but Pierre the Feller is felled at last.”     20   
  It would be impossible to describe the mingled astonishment and alarm that fell with this beam upon the bandit crew. They remained for a few minutes gazing openmouthed into the air in greater consternation at this piece of wood than at twenty thousand King’s archers.     21   
  “Satan!” growled the Duke of Egypt, “but this smells of magic!”     22   
  “It’s the moon that’s thrown this log at us,” said Andry le Rouge.     23   
  “That’s it,” returned François Chanteprune, “for they say the moon’s the friend of the Virgin.”     24   
  “A thousand popes!” cried Clop in, “you’re a parcel of dunderheads, the whole lot of you!” But he knew no better than they how to account for the beam, for nothing was perceptible on the front of the building, to the top of which the light of the torches could not reach. The ponderous beam lay in the middle of the Parvis, and the groans of the poor wretches could be heard who had received its first shock and had been almost cut in two on the sharp edges of the stone steps.     25   
  At last the King of Tunis, his first surprise past, discovered an explanation which seemed plausible to his fellows.     26   
  “Gueule-Dieu! Can the clergy be making a defence? If that be so, then—to the sack! to the sack!”     27   
  “To the sack!” yelled the band with a furious hurrah, and discharged a volley of cross-bows and arquebuses against the façade of the Cathedral.     28   
  Roused by the detonation, the peaceable inhabitants of the surrounding houses awoke, several windows opened, and night-capped heads appeared at the casements.     29   
  “Fire at the windows!” shouted Clop in. The shutters closed on the instant, and the poor citizens, who had only had time to catch a bewildered glimpse of the scene of glare and tumult, returned in a cold perspiration of fright to their wives, wondering whether the witches now held their Sabbaths in the Parvis of Notre Dame, or whether it was another assault by the Burgundians, as in ’64. The men thought of robbery; the wives, of rape; and all trembled.     30   
  “To the sack!” repeated the Argotiers; but they did not venture closer. They looked from the Cathedral to the mysterious beam. The beam lay perfectly still, the church preserved its peaceful, solitary aspect; but something froze the courage of the Vagabonds.     31   
  “To your work, lads!” cried Trouillefou. “Come—force the door!”     32   
  Nobody stirred a step.     33   
  “Beard and belly!” exclaimed Clop in; “why, here are men afraid of a rafter!”     34   
  An old Vagabond now addressed him:     35   
  “Captain, it’s not the rafter we mind, ’tis the door. That’s all covered with bars of iron. The picks are no good against it.”     36   
  “What do you want, then, to burst it open?” inquired Clop in.     37   
  “Why, we want a battering-ram.”     38   
  The King of Tunis ran boldly to the formidable piece of timber and set his foot on it. “Here’s one!” cried he, “and the reverend canons themselves have sent it you.” Then, making a mock salute to the Cathedral, “My thanks to you, canons!” he added.     39   
  This piece of bravado had excellent effect—the spell of the miraculous rafter was broken. The truands plucked up their courage, and soon the heavy beam, lifted like a feather by two hundred vigorous arms, was driven furiously against the great door which they had already endeavoured in vain to loosen. Seen thus in the dim light cast over the Place by the scattered torches of the truands, the vast beam borne along by that crowd of men and pointed against the church looked like some miraculous animal with innumerable legs charging head foremost at the stone giantess.     40   
  As the beam struck the half-metal door it droned like an enormous drum. The door did not give, but the Cathedral shook from top to bottom, and rumbling echoes woke in its deepest depths. At the same moment a shower of great stones began to fall from the upper part of the façade on to the assailants.     41   
  “Diable!” cried Jean, “are the towers shaking down their balustrades upon us?”     42   
  But the impulse had been given. The King of Tunis stuck to his assertion that it was the Bishop acting on the defensive, and they only battered the door the more furiously for the stones that fractured the skulls right and left.     43   
  It was certainly curious that these stones fell one by one, but they followed quickly on one another. The Argotiers always felt two of them at once—one against their legs, the other on their heads. There were few that missed their mark, and already a heap of dead and wounded, bleeding and panting, lay thick under the feet of the assailants, who, now grown furious, renewed their numbers every moment. The long beam continued to batter the door at regular intervals like the strokes of a bell, the stones to rain down, and the door to groan.     44   
  The reader will doubtless have guessed ere this that the unexpected resistance which so exasperated the Vagabonds proceeded from Quasimodo.     45   
  Accident had unfortunately favoured the devoted hunchback. When he had descended to the platform between the towers, his ideas were in a state of chaos. He had run to and fro along the gallery for some minutes like one demented, looking down upon the compact mass of the beggars ready to rush the church, and calling upon God or the devil to save the gipsy girl. He thought of ascending the southern steeple and sounding the tocsin, but before he could have got the bell in motion, before the loud voice of Marie could have sent forth a single stroke, there would have been time to burst in the door ten times over. This was the instant at which the Vagabonds advanced with their lock-breaking instruments. What was to be done?     46   
  Suddenly he recollected that masons had been at work all day repairing the wall, the wood-work, and the roofing of the southern tower. This was a flash of light to him. The wall was of stone, the roofing of lead, the rafters of wood, and so enormous and close-packed that it was called the forest.     47   
  Quasimodo flew to this tower. The lower chambers in effect were full of building materials—piles of stone blocks, sheets of lead in rolls, bundles of laths, strong beams already shaped by the saw, several rubbish heaps—a complete arsenal.     48   
  Time pressed—the levers and hammers were at work below. With a strength multiplied ten fold by the consciousness of danger, he lifted an end of one of the beams—the longest and heaviest of all. He managed to push it through one of the loopholes; then, laying hold of it again outside the tower, he pushed it over the outer corner of the balustrade surrounding the platform and let it drop into the abyss below. In this fall of a hundred and sixty feet the enormous beam—grazing the wall and breaking the sculptured figures—turned several times on its own axis, like the sail of a windmill going round of itself through space. Finally it reached the ground, a horrid cry went up, and the black piece of timber rebounded on the pavement, like a serpent rearing.     49   
  Quasimodo saw the enemy scattered by the fall of the beam like ashes by the breath of a child; and while they fixed their superstitious gaze on this immense log fallen from the skies, and were peppering the stone saints of the doorway with a volley of bolts and bullets, Quasimodo was silently piling up stones and rubbish, and even the masons’ bags of tools, upon the edge of the balustrade from which he had already hurled the beam.     50   
  Accordingly, no sooner did they begin to batter the door, than the showers of stone blocks began to fall, till they thought the church must be shaking itself to pieces on the top of them.     51   
  Any one who could have seen Quasimodo at that moment would have been appalled. Besides the missiles which he had piled up on the balustrade, he had collected a heap of stones on the platform itself. As soon as the blocks of stones on the parapet were spent, he turned to this latter heap. He stooped, rose, stooped and rose again with incredible agility. He would thrust his great gnome’s head over the balustrade; then there dropped an enormous stone—then another and another. Now and then he followed a specially promising one with his eye, and when he saw that it killed its man, he grunted a “h’m!” of satisfaction.     52   
  Nevertheless the beggars did not lose courage. Twenty times already had the massive door which they were so furiously storming shaken under the weight of their oaken battering-ram, multiplied by the strength of a hundred men. The panels cracked, the carvings flew in splinters, the hinges at each shock danced upon their hooks, the planks were displaced, the wood smashed to atoms ground between the sheathings of iron. Fortunately for Quasimodo there was more iron than wood.     53   
  He felt, however, that the great door was giving way. Although he could not hear it, every crash of the batteringram shook him to his foundation, as it did the church. As he looked down upon the Vagabonds, full of exaltation and rage, shaking their fists at the gloomy and impassive façade, he coveted for himself and the gipsy girl the wings of the owls flitting away in terror over his head.     54   
  His shower of stones was not sufficient to repulse the assailants.     55   
  At this desperate moment his eye fell on two long stone rain-gutters which discharged themselves immediately over the great doorway, a little below the balustrade from whence he had been crushing the Angotiers. The internal orifice of these gutters was in the floor of the platform. An idea occurred to him. He ran and fetched a fagot from the little chamber he occupied, laid over the fagot several bundles of laths and rolls of lead—ammunition he had not yet made use of—and after placing this pile in position in front of the orifice of the gutters, he set fire to it with his lantern.     56   
  During this time, as the stones no longer fell, the truands had ceased looking upward. The bandits, panting like a pack of hounds baying the wild boar in his lair, pressed tumultuously round the great door, disfigured now and injured by the great battering-ram, but still erect. They waited, eager and trembling, for the grand stroke—the blow that should bring it crashing down. Each strove to get nearest to be the first, when it should open, to rush into that opulent Cathedral, that vast repository in which the riches of three centuries were heaped up. They reminded one another with roars of exultation and rapacity of the splendid silver crosses, the fine brocade copes, the silver-gilt tombs, of all the magnificence of the choir, the dazzling display on high festivals, the Christmas illuminations, the Easter monstrances glittering like the sun, and all the splendid solemnities in which shrines, candlesticks, pixes, tabernacles, and reliquaries crusted the altars with gold and diamonds. It is very certain that at this exciting moment every one of the truands was thinking much less about the deliverance of the gipsy girl than the plundering of Notre Dame. Indeed, we can very well believe that to the majority of them Esmeralda was merely a pretext—if plunderers have any call for pretexts.     57   
  Suddenly, at the moment when they were crowding round the battering-ram for a final effort, each one holding his breath and gathering up his muscles to give full force to the decisive blow, a howl more agonizing than that which succeeded the fall of the great beam arose from the midst of them.     58   
  Those who were not screaming, those who were still alive, looked and saw two streams of molten lead pouring from the top of the edifice into the thickest of the crowd. The waves of that human sea had sunk under the boiling metal which, at the two points where it fell, had made two black and reeking hollows, like hot water poured on snow. There lay dying, wretches burned almost to a cinder and moaning in agony; and besides the two principal streams, drops of this hideous rain fell from scattered points on to the assailants, penetrating their skulls like fiery gimlets, pattering on them like red-hot hailstones.     59   
  The screams were heart-rending. Throwing down the battering-ram on the dead bodies, they fled in complete panic—the boldest with the most timid—and for a second time the Parvis was emptied.     60   
  Every eye was now directed upward to the top of the church. They beheld an extraordinary sight. On the top-most gallery, higher up than the great rose-window, a huge flame ascended between the two steeples, throwing out whirlwinds of sparks and shooting tongues of fire into the smoke as it was caught by the wind. Below this flame, under the balustrade whose carved trefoils showed black against the glare, two gargoyles vomited incessantly that burning shower, the silvery stream of which shone out upon the darkness of the lower part of the façade. As they neared the ground the two streams of liquid lead spread out into a spray, like water from the rose of a monster watering-can. Above the flame, the huge towers, of each of which two sides sharply outlined—one black, the other glowing red—were visible, seemed more enormous still by the immensity of the shadow they cast upon the sky. Their myriad sculptured devils and dragons assumed a sinister aspect. In the flickering radiance of the fire they appeared to move—vampires grinned, gargoyles barked, salamanders blew the fire, griffins sneezed in the smoke. And among these monsters, thus awakened from their stony slumber by all this flame and uproar, there was one that walked about and passed from time to time before the blazing front of the pile, like a bat before a torch.     61   
  Assuredly this strange beacon-light must have awakened the lonely wood-cutter on the far Bicêtre hills, startled to see the gigantic shadows of the towers of Notre Dame wavering on his coppices.     62   
  The silence of terror now fell upon the truands; and through it they heard the cries of alarm of the clergy shut up in their cloister like frightened horses in a burning stable, the stealthy sound of windows opened quickly and still more quickly shut again, the stir inside the surrounding houses and the Hôtel-Dieu, the roar and crackle of the fire, the groans of the dying, and the continuous patter of the shower of boiling lead upon the pavement.     63   
  Meanwhile the chief Vagabonds had retired under the porch of the Gondelaurier mansion and were holding a council of war. The Duke of Egypt, seated on a post, was contemplating with religious awe the phantasmagoric pile blazing two hundred feet aloft in the air. Clopin Trouillefou gnawed his great fists with rage.     64   
  “Impossible to make an entrance,” he muttered between his teeth.     65   
  “An enchanted church!” growled the old Bohemian, Mathias Hungadi Spicali.     66   
  “By the Pope’s whiskers!” said a grizzled truand who had seen active service, “but these two rain-pipes spit molten lead at you better than the loopholes of Lectoure.”     67   
  “Do you see that demon going to and from in front of the fire?” cried the Duke of Egypt.     68   
  “By God!” exclaimed Clopin, “ ’tis that damned ringer; ’tis Quasimodo!”     69   
  The Bohemian shook his head. “I tell you ’tis the spirit Sabnac, the great marquis, the demon of fortifications. He has the form of an armed soldier and a lion’s head. Sometimes he is mounted on a grewsome horse. He turns men into stones and builds towers of them. He has command over near on fifty legions. ’Tis he, sure enough. I should know him anywhere. Sometimes he has on a fine robe wrought with gold, after the fashion of the Turks.”     70   
  “Where is Bellevigne de l’Etoile?” asked Clopin.     71   
  “Dead,” answered a truand woman.     72   
  “Notre Dame is keeping the Hôtel-Dieu busy,” said Andry le Rouge with a vacant laugh.     73   
  “Is there no way to force that door?” cried the King of Tunis, stamping his foot.     74   
  The Duke of Egypt pointed with a mournful gesture to the two rivulets of boiling lead which continued to streak the dark front of the building.     75   
  “Churches have been known to defend themselves thus,” he observed with a sigh. “Saint-Sophia in Constantinople, forty years ago, threw down the crescent of Mahomet three times running just by shaking her domes, which are her heads. William of Paris, who built this one, was a magician.”     76   
  “Are we then to slink away pitifully with our tails between our legs?” cried Clopin. “Leave our sister here for these cowled wolves to hang to-morrow?”     77   
  “And the sacristy where there are cart-loads of treasure!” added a Vagabond, of whose name, to our great regret, we are ignorant.     78   
  “By the beard of Mahomet!” exclaimed Trouillefou.     79   
  “Let’s have another try,” suggested the truand.     80   
  But Mathias Hungadi shook his head. “We shall never get in by that door. We must find some joint in the enchanted armour. A hole, a postern door, a chink of some kind.”     81   
  “Who’s with me?” said Clopin. “I am going back. By-the-bye, where’s the little scholar Jehan?”     82   
  “He’s dead, no doubt,” answered some one, “for one does not hear his laugh.”     83   
  The King of Tunis frowned gloomily.     84   
  “ ’Tis a pity. There was a stout heart under that rattling armour. And Master Pierre Gringoire?”     85   
  “Captain Clopin,” said Andry le Rouge, “he made off before we got as far as the Pont-aux-Change.”     86   
  Clopin stamped his foot. “Gueule-Dieu! ’tis he that thrust us into this business, and now he leaves us in the very thick of it. A prating poltroon!”     87   
  “Captain Clopin,” announced Andry le Rouge, who had been looking down the Rue du Parvis, “here comes the little scholar.”     88   
  “Praised be Pluto!” said Clopin. “But what the devil is he dragging after him?”     89   
  It was, in truth, Jehan, coming along as quickly as his cumbrous paladin accoutrements would permit of with a long ladder, which he tugged stoutly over the pavement, more breathless than an ant harnessed to a blade of grass twenty times her own length.     90   
  “Victory! Te Deum!” shouted the scholar. “Here’s the ladder from the Saint-Landry wharf.”     91   
  Clopin went up to him. “Little one,” said he, “what art thou going to do with that ladder, corne-Dieu?”     92   
  “I’ve secured it,” answered Jehan panting. “I knew where it was—under the shed of the lieutenant’s house. There’s a girl there whom I know—she thinks me a very Cupido for beauty. It was through her I managed to get the ladder, and here I am, Pasque-Mahom! The poor soul came out in her smock to let me in.”     93   
  “Yes, yes,” said Clopin, “but what wilt thou do with this ladder?”     94   
  Jehan gave him a sly, knowing look and snapped his fingers like castanets. He was sublime at this moment. He had on his head one of those overloaded helmets of the fifteenth century which struck terror to the heart of the foe by their monstrous-looking crests. Jehan’s bristled with ten iron beaks, so that he might have contended with the Homeric ship of Nestor for the epithet of [Greek].     95   
  “What do I mean to do with it, august King of Tunis? Do you see that row of statues with the faces of imbeciles over there above the three arches of the doorway?”     96   
  “Yes; what of them?”     97   
  “That is the gallery of the King of France.”     98   
  “Well, what’s that to us?” said Clopin.     99   
  “You shall see. At the end of that gallery there is a door that is closed with a latch; with this ladder I reach that door, and then I’m in the church.”    100   
  “Let me go up first, child.”    101   
  “No, comrade, the ladder’s mine. Come on—you shall be second.”    102   
  “Beelzebub strangle thee!” said Clopin sulkily. “I will be second to nobody.”    103   
  “Then, Clopin, go fetch thyself a ladder.” And Jehan set off running across the Place, dragging his ladder after him and shouting, “Follow, boys!”    104   
  In an instant the ladder was set up and placed against the balustrade of the lower gallery over one of the side doors. The crowd of beggars, shouting and hustling, pressed round the foot of it wanting to ascend; but Jehan maintained his right, and was the first to set foot on the steps of the ladder. The ascent was pretty long. The gallery of the kings is, at this day, about sixty feet from the ground; but at that period it was raised still higher by the eleven steps of the entrance. Jehan ascended slowly, much encumbered by his heavy armour, one hand on the ladder, the other grasping his crossbow. When he was half-way up he cast a mournful glance over the poor dead Argotiers heaped on the steps. “Alas!” said he, “here are corpses enough for the fifth canto of the Iliad!” He continued his ascent, the Vagabonds following him, one on every step of the ladder. To see that line of mailed backs rising and undulating in the dark, one might have taken it for a serpent with steely scales rearing itself on end to attack the church, and the whistling of Jehan, who represented its head, completed the illusion.    105   
  The scholar at last reached the parapet of the gallery, and strode lightly over it amid the applause of the whole truandry. Finding himself thus master of the citadel, he uttered a joyful shout—and then stopped short, petrified. He had just caught sight, behind one of the royal statues, of Quasimodo crouching in the gloom, his eye glittering ominously.    106   
  Before another of the besiegers had time to gain a footing on the gallery, the redoubtable hunchback sprang to the head of the ladder, seized without a word the ends of the two uprights in his powerful hands, heaved them away from the wall, let the long and pliant ladder, packed with truands from top to bottom, sway for a moment amid a sudden outcry of fear, then suddenly, with superhuman force, flung back this living cluster into the Place. For an instant the stoutest heart quailed. The ladder thrust backward stood upright for a moment, swayed, then suddenly, describing a frightful arc of eighty feet in radius, crashed down upon the pavement with its living load more rapidly than a drawbridge when its chain gives way. There was one universal imprecation, then silence, and a few mutilated wretches were seen crawling out from among the heap of dead.    107   
  A murmur of mingled agony and resentment succeeded the besiegers’ first shouts of triumph. Quasimodo, leaning on his elbows on the balustrade, regarded them impassively. He might have been one of the old long-haired kings at his window.    108   
  Jehan Frollo found himself in a critical position. He was alone on the gallery with the redoubtable bell-ringer, separated from his companions by eighty feet of sheer wall. While Quasimodo was engaged with the ladder, the scholar had run to the postern which he expected to find on the latch. Foiled! The bell-ringer, as he entered the gallery, had locked it behind him. Thereupon Jehan had hidden himself behind one of the stone kings, not daring to breathe, but fixing upon the terrible hunchback a wide-eyed and bewildered gaze, like the man who courted the wife of a menagerie keeper, and going one evening to a rendezvous, scaled the wrong wall and found himself suddenly face to face with the polar bear.    109   
  For the first few moments the hunchback did not notice him; but presently he turned his head and straightened himself with a jerk—he had caught sight of the scholar.    110   
  Jehan prepared himself for a savage encounter, but his deaf antagonist did not move; only he kept his face turned towards him and regarded him steadily.    111   
  “Ho! ho!” said Jehan, “why dost thou glare at me so with that single surly eye?” And so saying, the young scamp began stealthily raising his cross-bow. “Quasimodo!” he cried, “I’m going to change thy nickname. Henceforth they shall call thee the blind bell-ringer.”    112   
  He let fly the winged shaft; it whistled and drove into the hunchback’s left arm. Quasimodo was no more disturbed by it than the effigy of King Pharamond by the scratch of a penknife. He took hold of the arrow, drew it out of his arm, and calmly broke it across his powerful knee. Then he dropped rather than threw the two pieces to the ground. But he did not give Jehan time to discharge another shaft. The arrow broken, Quasimodo with a snort leapt like a locust upon the boy, whose armour was flattened by the shock against the wall.    113   
  And now, in the half darkness, by the flickering light of the torches, a horrible scene was enacted.    114   
  In his left hand Quasimodo grasped both Jehan’s arms, who made no struggle, so utterly did he give himself up for lost; then, with his right, the hunchback proceeded to take off one by one, and with sinister deliberation, the several pieces of the scholar’s iron shell—sword, dagger, helmet, breastplate, armpieces—like a monkey peeling a walnut, and dropped them at his feet.    115   
  When Jehan found himself thus disarmed, divested of all shield and covering, naked and helpless in those formidable arms, he did not attempt to parley with his deaf enemy. Instead, he fell to laughing impudently in his face, and with all the careless assurance of a boy of sixteen, burst into a song at that time popular in the streets:
           “The town of Cambrai is finely clad,   
But Marafin has stripped her.”   
 116   
  He had not time to finish. Quasimodo was seen to mount the parapet of the gallery, holding the scholar by the feet in one hand only and swinging him over the abyss like a sling. Then came a sound like a box of bones dashing against a wall, and something came hurtling down that stopped halfway in its descent, caught by one of the projections of the building. It was a dead body bent double, the loins broken, the skull empty.    117   
  A cry of horror went up from the truands.    118   
  “Revenge!” yelled Clopin. “Sack! sack!” replied the multitude. “To the assault!”    119   
  An appalling uproar followed, in which every language, every patois, every conceivable accent was mingled. The death of the poor little scholar inspired the crowd with furious energy. They were torn with anger and shame at having been so long held in check by a miserable hunchback. Their rage found them ladders, multiplied their torches, and in a few minutes Quasimodo, to his consternation and despair, beheld the hideous swarm mounting from all sides to the assault of Notre Dame. They who had no ladders had knotted ropes; they who had no ropes clambered up by the carvings, helping themselves up by one another’s rags. There was no means of forcing back this rising tide of frightful forms. Fury reddened the ferocious faces, sweat poured from the grimy foreheads, eyes glared viciously. It was as if some other church had sent out her gorgons, her dragons, her goblins, her demons, all her most fantastic sculptures to the assault of Notre Dame—a coating of living monsters covering the stone monsters of the façade.    120   
  Meanwhile a thousand torches had kindled in the Place. The wild scene, wrapped until now in dense obscurity, suddenly leapt out in a blaze of light. The Parvis was brilliantly illumined and cast a radiance on the sky, while the blazing pile on the high platform of the church still burned and lit up the city far around. The vast outline of the two towers, thrown far across the roofs of Paris, broke this brightness with a wide mass of shadow. The city appeared to be rousing itself from its slumbers. Distant tocsins uttered their warning plaints. The truands howled, panted, blasphemed, and climbed steadily higher, while Quasimodo, impotent against so many enemies, trembling for the gipsy girl as he saw those savage faces approaching nearer and nearer to his gallery, implored a miracle from heaven, and wrung his hands in despair.

Book X   
V. The Closet Where Monsieur Louis of France Recites His Orisons   
     
THE READER perhaps remembers that Quasimodo, a moment before catching sight of the nocturnal band of truands and scrutinizing Paris from the height of his steeple, saw but a single remaining light twinkling at a window in the topmost storey of a grim and lofty building beside the Porte Saint-Antoine. The building was the Bastille, the twinkling light was the taper of Louis XI.      1   
  The King had, in fact, been in Paris these two days past, and was to set out again the next day but one for his citadel of Montilz-les-Tours. He made but rare and short visits to his good city of Paris, not feeling himself sufficiently surrounded there by pitfalls, gibbets, and Scottish archers.      2   
  That day he had come to sleep at the Bastille. The great chamber, five toises square, which he had at the Louvre, with its splendid chimney-pieces bearing the effigies of twelve great beasts and thirteen great prophets, and his bed, eleven feet by twelve, were little to his taste. He felt lost amid all these grandeurs. The good homely King preferred the Bastille, with a chamber and bed of more modest proportions; besides, the Bastille was stronger than the Louvre.      3   
  This chambrette which the King reserved for his own use in the famous prison was spacious enough, nevertheless, and occupied the uppermost storey of a turret forming part of the donjon-keep. It was a circular apartment hung with matting of shining straw, the rafters of the ceiling being decorated with raised fleurs de lis in gilt metal interspaced with colour, and wainscotted with rich carvings sprinkled with metal rosettes and painted a beautiful vivid green made of a mixture of orpiment and fine indigo.      4   
  There was but one window, a long pointed one, latticed by iron bars and iron wire, and still further darkened with fine glass painted with the arms of the King and Queen, each pane of which had cost twenty-two sols.      5   
  There was also but one entrance, a door of the contemporary style under a flattened arch, furnished inside with a tapestry hanging, and outside with one of those porches of Irish wood—delicate structures of elaborately wrought cabinet-work which still abounded in old mansions a hundred and fifty years ago. “Although they disfigure and encumber the places,” says Sauval in desperation, “our old people will not have them removed, but keep them in spite of everybody.”      6   
  Not a single article of the ordinary furniture of a room was to be seen here—neither benches, nor trestles, nor forms; neither common box-stools, nor handsome ones supported by pillars and carved feet at four sols apiece. There was one folding arm-chair only, a very magnificent one, its frame painted with roses on a crimson ground, and the seat of crimson Cordova leather with a quantity of gold-headed nails. The solitary state of this chair testified to the fact that one person alone was entitled to be seated in the room. Beside the chair and close under the window was a table covered by a cloth wrought with figures of birds. On the table was a much-used inkstand, a few sheets of parchment, some pens, and a goblet of chased silver; farther off, a charcoal brasier and a prie-dieu covered with crimson velvet and ornamented with gold bosses. Finally, at the other end of the room, an unpretentious bed of red and yellow damask with no decoration of any sort but a plain fringe. This bed, famous as having borne the sleep or sleeplessness of Louis XI, was still in existence two hundred years ago in the house of a councillor of state, where it was seen by the aged Mme. Pilou, celebrated in Le Grand Cyrus under the name of Arricidie and of La Morale Vivante.      7   
  Such was the room known as “the closet where Monsieur Louis of France recites his orisons.”      8   
  At the moment at which we have introduced the reader into it, this closet was very dark. Curfew had rung an hour back, night had fallen, and there was but one flickering wax candle on the table to light five persons variously grouped about the room.      9   
  The first upon whom the light fell was a gentleman superbly attired in doublet and hose of scarlet slashed with silver and a cloak with puffed shoulder-pieces of cloth of gold figured with black, the whole gorgeous costume appearing to be shot with flames wherever the light played on it. The man who wore it had his heraldic device embroidered in vivid colours on his breast—a chevron and a stag passant, the scutcheon supported by a branch of olive dexter and a stag’s horn sinister. In his girdle he wore a rich dagger, the silver-gilt hilt being wrought in the form of a helmet and surmounted by a count’s coronet. He had a venomous eye, and his manner was haughty and overbearing. At the first glance you were struck by the arrogance of his face, at the second by its craftiness. He stood bareheaded, a long written scroll in his hand, behind the arm-chair in which sat a very shabbily dressed personage in an uncouth attitude, his shoulders stooping, his knees crossed, his elbow on the table. Picture to yourself in that rich Cordovan chair a pair of bent knees, two spindle shanks poorly clad in close-fitting black worsted breeches, the body wrapped in a loose coat of fustian the fur lining of which showed more leather than hair, and to crown the whole, a greasy old hat of mean black felt garnished all round by a string of little leaden figures. This, with the addition of a dirty skull-cap, beneath which hardly a hair was visible, was all that could be seen of the seated personage. His head was bowed so low on his breast that nothing was visible of his deeply shadowed face but the end of his nose, on which a ray of light fell, and which was evidently very long. By his emaciated and wrinkled hands one divined him to be an old man. It was Louis XI.     10   
  At some distance behind them, two men habited after the Flemish fashion were conversing in low tones. They were not so completely lost in the gloom but that any one who had attended the performance of Gringoire’s Mystery could recognise them as the two chief Flemish envoys: Guillaume Rym, the sagacious pensionary of Ghent, and Jacques Coppenole, the popular hosier. It will be remembered that these two men were concerned with the secret politics of Louis XI.     11   
  And finally, quite in the dim background near the door, there stood, motionless as a statue, a brawny, thick-set man in military accoutrements and an emblazoned coat, whose square, low-browed face with its prominent eyes, immense slit of a mouth, ears concealed beneath two wide flaps of smooth hair, seemed a cross between the bulldog and the tiger.     12   
  All were uncovered except the King.     13   
  The knightly personage standing behind the King was reading out items from a sort of long memorandum, to which his Majesty appeared to listen attentively. The two Flemings whispered together.     14   
  “By the rood!” grumbled Coppenole, “I’m tired of standing. Is there never a chair here?”     15   
  Rym replied with a negative gesture, accompanied by a discreet smile.     16   
  “Croix-Dieu!” resumed Coppenole, sorely exercised at having to lower his voice, “I am devoured by the desire to plump myself down cross legged on the floor as I do in my own shop.”     17   
  “You had best beware of doing so, Maître Jacques,” was the reply.     18   
  “Heyday! Maître Guillaume, may a man then be only on his feet here?”     19   
  “Or on his knees,” said Rym. At that moment the King raised his voice and they ceased their talking.     20   
  “Fifty sols for the gowns of our valets, and twelve livres for the mantles of the crown clerks! That’s the way! Pour out the gold by tons! Are you crazed, Olivier?”     21   
  As he spoke the old man raised his head, and you could see the golden shells of the collar of Saint-Michael glittering round his neck. The candle shone full on his fleshless and morose countenance. He snatched the paper from the hands of the other.     22   
  “You are ruining us!” he cried, casting his hollow eyes over the schedule. “What’s all this? What need have we of so prodigious a household? Two chaplains at ten livres a month each, and a chapel clerk at a hundred sols! A valet-de-chambre at ninety livres a year! Four kitchen masters at a hundred and sixty livres a year each! A roaster, a soup-dresser, a sauce-dresser, a head cook, an armourer, two sumpter men at the rate of ten livres a month each! Two turn-spits at eight livres! A groom and his two helpers at four and twenty livres a month! A porter, a pastry-cook, a baker, two carters, each at sixty livres a year! And the marshal of forges a hundred and twenty livres! And the master of our exchequer chamber twelve hundred livres! And a comptroller five hundred livres! And God knows what besides! It’s raving madness! The wages of our domestics are simply stripping France bare. All the treasure of the Louvre would melt away before such a blaze of expense! We shall have to sell our plate! And next year, if God and Our Lady (here he raised his hat) grant us life, we shall have to drink our tisanes from a pewter pot!”     23   
  At which he glanced at the silver goblet sparkling on the table, coughed, and went on:     24   
  “Master Olivier, princes who reign over great realms as kings and superiors should not allow sumptuousness to be engendered in their households, inasmuch as that is a fire which will spread from thence to the provinces. And so, Master Olivier, make no mistake about this. Our expenses increase with every year, and the thing displeases us. Why, pasque-Dieu! up till ’79 it never exceeded thirty-six thousand livres. In ’80 it rose to forty-three thousand six hundred and nineteen livres. I have the figures in my head. In ’8I it was sixty-six thousand six hundred and eighty livres, and this year, faith of my body! it will come to eighty thousand livres. Doubled in four years! Monstrous!”     25   
  He stopped to take breath, then resumed with vehemence: “I see none about me but people fattening on my leanness. Ye suck my money from me at every pore!”     26   
  All kept silence. It was one of those fits of anger that must be allowed to run their course. He continued his complaints.     27   
  “It is the same thing with that Latin memorial from the great lords of France requesting us to re-establish what they call the great offices of the Crown. Offices! call them rather burdens—burdens that crush us to the ground. Ah, messieurs! you tell us we are no King to reign dapifero nullo buticulario nullo! 1 But we will let you see, pasque-Dieu! whether we are a King or no!”     28   
  He smiled in the consciousness of his power, his ill-humour was allayed, and he turned to the Flemings:     29   
  “Look you, Gossip Guillaume, the grand baker, the grand butler, the grand chamberlain, the seneschal are not worth the meanest valet. Bear this in mind, Gossip Coppenole, they are of no use whatever. Standing thus useless about the King, they put me in mind of the four evangelists that surround the face of the great clock of the palace, and that Philippe Brille has just renovated. They are gilded, but they do not mark the hour, and the clock hand could do excellently well without them.”     30   
  He mused for a moment and added, shaking his old head: “He! ho! by Our Lady, I am not Philippe Brille, and I will not regild the great vassals of the crown. Proceed, Olivier.”     31   
  The person thus addressed received the schedule-book from his hands and went on reading aloud:     32   
  “To Adam Tenon, assistant keeper of the seals of the provostry of Paris, for the silver, workmanship, and engraving of the said seals which have had to be renewed, inasmuch as the former ones, being old and worn out, could no longer be used, twelve livres parisis.     33   
  “To Guillaume Frère, the sum of four livres four sols parisis for his wages and trouble in having fed and maintained the pigeons of the two pigeon-houses at the Hôtel des Tournelles during the months of January, February, and March of this year, for the which he has furnished seven setiers of barley.     34   
  “To a Franciscan for shriving a criminal, four sols parisis.”     35   
  The King listened in silence. From time to time he coughed, and then raised the goblet to his lips and drank a mouthful with a wry face.     36   
  “In this year have been made,” continued the reader, “by order of the law, by sound of trumpet, through the streets of Paris, fifty-six public proclamations. Account not yet rendered.     37   
  “For search made in divers places in Paris and elsewhere after treasure said to be concealed in the said places, but nothing has been found, forty-five livres parisis.”     38   
  “Burying a florin to dig up a sou,” commented the King.     39   
  “—For putting in, at the Hôtel des Tournelles, six panes of white glass, at the place where the iron cage stands, thirteen sols. For making and delivering on the day of the mustering of the troops, four escutcheons bearing the arms of our said lord, wreathed round with chaplets of roses, six livres. A pair of new sleeves to the King’s old doublet, twenty sols. A pot of grease to grease the King’s boots, fifteen deniers. A new sty for lodging the King’s black swine, thirty livres parisis. Several partitions, planks, and trap-doors, for the safe-keeping of the lions at the Hôtel Saint-Paul, twenty-two livres.”     40   
  “Costly beasts, these,” said Louis XI. “But no matter, it is a magnificence befitting a King. There is a great tawny lion that I love for his engaging ways. Have you seen him, Maître Guillaume? It is fitting that princes should keep these marvellous animals. For dogs, we kings should have lions; and for cats, tigers. The great beseems a crown. In the days of the pagan worshippers of Jupiter, when the people offered a hundred bullocks and a hundred sheep in the churches, the emperors gave a hundred lions and a hundred eagles. That was very fierce and noble. The kings of France have always had these roarings around their throne. Nevertheless, to do me justice, it must be admitted that I spend less in that way than my predecessors, and that I am less ostentatious in the matter of lions, bears, elephants, and leopards,—Continue, Maître Olivier. This was for the benefit of our friends, the Flemings.”     41   
  Guillaume Rym bowed low, while Coppenole, with his surly face, looked much like one of the bears of whom his Majesty had spoken. The King paid on attention: he had just taken a sip from the goblet, and was spitting out the beverage again with a “Faugh! the nasty stuff!”     42   
  The reader went on: “For the food of a rogue and vagabond kept locked up for the last six months in the cell at the Skinners’ yard until it should be known what was to be done with him, six livres four sols.”     43   
  “What’s that?” interrupted the King. “Feeding what ought to be hanged! Pasque-Dicu! I’ll not give another sol for that food. Olivier, arrange this matter with M. d’Estouteville, and see to it that this very night preparations are made to unite this gallant with the gallows. Go on.”     44   
  Olivier made a mark with his thumb-nail against the item rogue and vagabond, and proceeded:     45   
  “To Henriet Cousin, chief executioner at the Justice of Paris, the sum of sixty sols parisis, to him adjudged and accorded by the Lord Provost of Paris for having purchased, by order of the said Lord Provost, a great broad-bladed sword, to be used for executing and decapitating the persons condemned by law for their delinquencies, and having it furnished with a scabbard and all necessary appurtenances; and similarly for the repair and putting in order of the old sword, which had been splintered and notched in executing justice on Messire Louis of Luxembourg, as can be plainly shown.”     46   
  The King broke in: “Enough! I give order for that sum with all my heart. These are expenses I do not look at twice. I have never regretted that money. Proceed.”     47   
  “For constructing a new cage——”     48   
  “Ah!” said the King, grasping the arms of his chair, “I knew I had come to the Bastille for something special. Stop, Master Olivier, I will see that cage myself. You shall read over the cost of it to me while I examine it. Messieurs the Flemings, you must come and see this; it is curious.”     49   
  He rose to his feet, leaned on the arm of his interlocutor, signed to the sort of mute standing beside the door to precede them, to the two Flemings to follow, and left the chamber.     50   
  The King’s cortège was recruited at the door by a party of men-at-arms ponderous with steel, and slim pages carrying torches. It proceeded for some time through the interior of the grim donjon-keep, perforated by flights of stairs and corridors even to the thickness of the walls. The captain of the Bastille walked at its head, and directed the opening of the successive narrow doors before the bent and decrepit King, who coughed as he walked along.     51   
  At each door every head was obliged to stoop, except that of the old man already bent with age. “Hum!” said he between his gums, for he had no teeth; “we are in excellent trim for the gate of the sepulchre. A low door needs a stooping passenger.”     52   
  At length, after passing through the last door of all, so encumbered with complicated locks that it took a quarter of an hour to get them all open, they entered a lofty and spacious Gothic hall, in the centre of which they could discern by the light of the torches a great square mass of masonry, iron, and wood-work. The interior was hollow. It was one of those famous cages for state prisoners familiarly known as “Fillettes du roi”—little daughters of the King. There were two or three small windows in its walls, but so closely grated with massive iron bars that no glass was visible. The door consisted of a huge single slab of stone, like that of a tomb—one of those doors that serve for entrance alone. Only here, the dead was alive.     53   
  The King began pacing slowly round this small edifice, examining it with care, while Maître Olivier, who followed him, read aloud the items of the account:     54   
  “For making a great wooden cage of heavy beams, joists, and rafters, measuring nine feet in length and eight in breadth, and seven feet high between roof and floor, mortised and bolted with great iron bolts; which has been placed in a certain chamber situated in one of the towers of the Bastille Saint-Antoine; in the which said cage is put and kept by command of our lord the King a prisoner, who before inhabited an old, decayed, and unserviceable cage. Used in the building of the said new cage, ninety-six horizontal beams and fifty-two perpendicular, ten joists, each three toises long. Employed in squaring, planing, and fitting the same woodwork in the yard of the Bastille, nineteen carpenters for twenty days——”     55   
  “Fine solid timber, that!” remarked the King, rapping his knuckles on the wood.     56   
  “Used in this cage,” continued the other, “two hundred and twenty great iron bolts nine feet and eight feet long, the rest of medium length, together with the plates and nuts for fastening the said bolts; the said iron weighing in all three thousand seven hundred and thirty-five pounds; besides eight heavy iron clamps for fixing the said cage in its place, altogether two hundred and eighteen pounds; without reckoning the iron of the grating to the windows of the chamber and other items——”     57   
  “Here’s a deal of iron to restrain the levity of a spirit!”     58   
  “—The whole amounts to three hundred and seventeen livres, five sols, seven deniers.”     59   
  “Pasque-Dieu!” exclaimed the King. This oath, which was the favourite one of Louis XI, apparently aroused some one inside the cage; there was sound of clanking chains being dragged across its floor, and a feeble voice that seemed to issue from the tomb, wailed: “Sire! Sire, mercy!” The speaker was not visible.     60   
  “Three hundred and seventeen livres, five sols, seven deniers!” repeated Louis XI.     61   
  The voice of lamentation which had issued from the cage chilled the blood of all present, even Maître Olivier. The King alone gave no evidence of having heard it. At this command Olivier resumed his reading, and his Majesty coolly continued his inspection of the cage.     62   
  “Besides the above, there has been paid to a mason, for making the holes to fix the window-grating and the flooring of the chamber containing the cage, forasmuch as the floor would not otherwise have supported the said cage by reason of its weight—twenty-seven livres, fourteen sols parisis——”     63   
  The voice began its wailing again. “Mercy, Sire! I swear to you it was Monsieur the Cardinal of Angers who committed the treason—not I!”     64   
  “The mason’s charge is exorbitant!” said the King. “Go on, Olivier.”     65   
  Olivier went on: “To a joiner for window-frames, bedstead, closet-stool, and other things—twenty livres, two sols parisis——”     66   
  The voice also went on: “Woe is me, Sire! will you not hear me? I protest it was not I who wrote that to the Duke of Guyenne, but Monsieur the Cardinal Balue!”     67   
  “The joiner is dear,” observed the King. “Is that all?”     68   
  “No, Sire. To a glazier for the windows of the said chamber, forty-six sols, eight deniers parisis.”     69   
  “Have mercy, Sire!” cried the voice again. “It is not enough that all my possessions have been given to my judges—my table service to M. de Torcy, my library to Maître Pierre Doriolle, my tapestries to the Governor of Roussillon? I am innocent. Lo, these fourteen years have I shivered in an iron cage. Have mercy, Sire! and you shall find it in heaven!”     70   
  “Maître Olivier,” said the King, “the total?”     71   
  “Three hundred and sixty-seven livres, eight sols, three deniers parisis——”     72   
  “Notre Dame!” cried the King. “’Tis an outrageous cage!”     73   
  He snatched the paper from Olivier’s hand, and began to reckon it up himself on his fingers, examining the schedule and the cage by turns—while the prisoner was heard sobbing within it. It was a dismal scene in the darkness, and the bystanders paled as they looked at one another.     74   
  “Fourteen years, Sire! It is fourteen years—since April, 1469. I conjure you in the name of the Holy Mother of God, listen to me, Sire! During all those years you have enjoyed the warmth of the sun; shall I, feeble wretch that I am, never see the light of day again? Mercy, Sire! Show mercy! Clemency is a noble virtue in a King, and turns aside the current of the wrath to come. Think you, your Majesty, that at the hour of death it will be a great satisfaction to a King to know that he has never let an offence go unpunished? Moreover, I never betrayed your Majesty—it was Monsieur of Angers. And I have a very heavy chain on my foot with a huge iron ball attached to it—far heavier than there is any need for. Oh, Sire, have pity on me!”     75   
  “Olivier,” said the King, shaking his head, “I observe that they charge me the bushel of plaster at twenty sols, though it is only worth twelve. You will draw up this memorandum afresh.”     76   
  He turned his back on the cage, and began to move towards the door of the chamber. The wretched prisoner judged by the withdrawal of the torchlight and by the sounds that the King was preparing to depart.     77   
  “Sire! Sire!” he cried in anguish.     78   
  The door closed. He saw nothing more, and heard nothing but the raucous voice of the turnkey singing close by:
           “Maître Jean Balue   
Has lost from view   
  His bishoprics all.   
Monsieur de Verdun   
Has now not got one;   
  They’re gone, one and all.”   
  79   
  The King returned in silence to his closet, followed by his train, all horror-struck at the last bitter cry of the prisoner. Suddenly his Majesty turned to the Governor of the Bastille.     80   
  “By-the-bye,” said he, “was there not some one in that cage?”     81   
  “Pardieu! yes, Sire!” answered the governor, dumfounded by the question.     82   
  “And who?”     83   
  “Monsieur the Bishop of Verdun.”     84   
  The King knew that better than any one, but it was a way he had.     85   
  “Ah,” said he blandly, with the air of remembering it for the first time, “Guillaume de Harancourt, the friend of Monsieur the Cardinal Balue. A good fellow of a bishop!”     86   
  A few minutes later, the door of the closet had opened and closed again on the five persons whom the reader found there at the beginning of this chapter, and who had severally resumed their places, their attitudes, and their whispered conversation.     87   
  During the King’s absence some despatches had been laid upon the table, of which he himself broke the seal. He then began reading them attentively one after another, motioned to Maître Olivier, who seemed to fill the post of minister to him, to take a pen, and without imparting to him the contents of the despatches, began in a low voice to dictate to him the answers, which the latter wrote kneeling uncomfortably at the table.     88   
  Guillaume Rym watched them.     89   
  The King spoke so low that the Flemings could hear nothing of what he was dictating, except here and there a few isolated and scarcely intelligible fragments, such as: “Maintain the fertile tracts by commerce and the sterile ones by manufactures.—Show my lords the English our four bombards: the Londres, the Brabant, the Bourg-en-Bresse, the Saint-Omer.—It is owing to artillery that war is now more reasonably carried on.—To Monsieur de Bressuire, our friend.—Armies cannot be maintained without contributions,” etc.     90   
  Once he raised his voice. “Pasque-Dieu! Monsieur the King of Sicily seals his letters with yellow wax like a King of France! Perhaps we do wrong to permit this. My good cousin of Burgundy accorded no arms of a field gules. The greatness of house is secured by upholding the integrity of its prerogatives. Note that down, friend Olivier.”     91   
  Another time: “Oh, oh!” said he, “a big missive! What does our friend the Emperor demand of us now?” Then, running his eye over the despatch and interrupting the perusal now and again with brief interjections: “Certes, Germany is getting so grand and mighty it is scarcely credible. But we do not forget the old proverb: ‘The finest country is Flanders; the finest duchy, Milan; the finest kingdom, France.’ Is that not so, Messieurs the Flemings?”     92   
  This time Coppenole bowed as well as Guillaume Rym. The hosier’s patriotism was tickled.     93   
  The last of the batch made Louis XI knit his brows. “What have we here?” he exclaimed. “Complaints and petitions against our garrisons in Picardy! Olivier, write with all speed to Monsieur the Marshal de Rouault: That discipline is relaxed; that the men-at-arms, the nobles, the free archers, and the Swiss are doing infinite mischief to the inhabitants; that the military, not content with the good things they find in the dwellings of the husbandmen, must needs compel them with heavy blows of staves or bills to fetch them from the town wine, fish, spices, and other superfluous articles; that the King knows all this; that we mean to protect our people from annoyance, theft, and pillage; that such is our will, by Our Lady! That, furthermore, it does not please us that any musician, barber, or man-at-arms whatsoever, should go clad like a prince in velvet, silk, and gold rings; that such vanities are hateful to God; that we, who are a gentleman, content ourselves with a doublet of cloth at sixteen sols parisis the ell; that messieurs the varlets may very well come down to that price likewise. Convey and command this—To M. de Rouault, our friend.—Good.”     94   
  He dictated this letter in a loud voice with a firm tone, and in short, abrupt sentences. As he spoke the last word, the door flew open and admitted a fresh person, who rushed into the chamber in breathless agitation, crying:     95   
  “Sire! Sire! there is a rising of the populace of Paris!”     96   
  The King’s grave face contracted, but such emotion as he displayed passed like a flash. He controlled himself. “Compere Jacques,” he said in a tone and with a look of quiet severity, “you enter very abruptly.”     97   
  “Sire! Sire! there is a revolt!” gasped Maître Jacques.     98   
  Louis, who had risen from his seat, seized him roughly by the arm, and in a tone of concentrated anger and a sidelong glance at the Flemings, said in his ear so as to be heard by him alone: “Hold thy peace, or speak low!”     99   
  The newcomer grasped the situation and proceeded to tell his news in a terrified whisper, the King listening unmoved, while Guillaume Rym directed Coppenole’s attention to the messenger’s face and dress, his furred hood (caputia forrata), his short cloak (epitogia curta), his gown of black velvet, which proclaimed him a president of the Court of Accompts.    100   
  Scarcely had this person given the King a few details, when Louis exclaimed in a burst of laughter: “Nay, in good sooth, speak up, Compere Coictier. What need to whisper thus? Our Lady knows we no secrets from our good Flemish friends.”    101   
  “But, Sire——”    102   
  “Speak up!” said the King.    103   
  Compêre Coictier stood in mute surprise.    104   
  “So,” resumed the King—“speak out, monsieur. So there is a rising of the populace in our good city of Paris?”    105   
  “Yes, Sire.”    106   
  “Which is directed, you tell me, against Monsieur the Provost of the Palais de Justice?”    107   
  “It would seem so,” replied the man, who still found his words with difficulty, so confounded was he by the sudden and inexplicable change in the King’s manner.    108   
  “Where did the watch encounter the mob?” asked Louis.     109   
  “Advancing from the Great Truanderie towards the Pont-aux-Changeurs. I met it myself on my way here in obedience to your Majesty’s orders. I heard some of them cry, ‘Down with the Provost of the Palais!”’    110   
  “And what is their grievance against the provost?”    111   
  “Oh,” said Jacques, “that he is their liege lord.”    112   
  “In truth?”    113   
  “Yes, Sire. They are rascals from the Court of Miracles. They have long been complaining of the provost whose vassals they are. They will not acknowledge him either as justiciary or as lord of the highway.”    114   
  “So, so!” retorted the King, with a smile of satisfaction which he strove in vain to conceal.    115   
  “In all their petitions to the Parliament,” continued Compere Jacques, “they claim to have only two masters—your Majesty and their God; who is, I believe, the devil.”    116   
  “He, he!” chuckled the King, rubbing his hands with that internal laugh which irradiates the countenance. He could not disguise his delight, though he made a momentary effort to compose himself. No one had the least idea what it meant, not even Olivier. He remained silent for a moment, but with a thoughtful and satisfied air.    117   
  “Are they in force?” he asked suddenly.    118   
  “They are indeed, Sire,” replied Coictier.    119   
  “How many?”    120   
  “Six thousand at the very least.”    121   
  The King could not repress a pleased “Good!—Are they armed?” he went on.    122   
  “With scythes, pikes, hackbuts, pickaxes—every description of violent weapon.”    123   
  The King seemed in nowise disturbed by this alarming list. Compere Jacques thought it advisable to add: “If your Majesty sends not speedy succour to the provost, he is lost!”    124   
  “We will send,” said the King with simulated earnestness. “Good! we will certainly send. Monsieur the Provost is our friend. Six thousand! These are determined rogues! Their boldness is extraordinary, and we are highly incensed thereat. But we have few men about us to-night. It will be time enough to-morrow morning.”    125   
  Coictier gave a cry. “This moment, Sire! They would have time to sack the court-house twenty times over, storm the manor, and hang the provost himself. For God’s sake, Sire, send before to-morrow morning!”    126   
  The King looked him full in the face. “I said to-morrow morning.” It was one of those looks to which there is no reply.    127   
  After a pause, Louis again raised his voice. “My good Jacques, you should know that— What did—” he corrected himself—“what does the feudal jurisdiction of the provost comprise?”    128   
  “Sire, the Rue de la Calandre as far as the Rue de l’Herberie, the Place Saint-Michel and places commonly called Les Mureaux situated near the Church of Notre Dame des Champs,”—here the King lifted the brim of his hat—“which mansions are thirteen in number; further the Court of Miracles, further the Lazaretto called the Banlieue, further the whole of the high-road beginning at the Lazaretto and ending at the Porte Saint-Jacques. Of these several places he is reeve of the ways, chief, mean, and inferior justiciary, full and absolute lord.”    129   
  “So, ho!” said the King, scratching his left ear with his right hand, “that comprises a good slice of my town! Ah, Monsieur the Provost was king of all this!”    130   
  This time he did not correct himself. He continued cogitating and as if talking to himself: “Softly, Monsieur the Provost, you had a very pretty piece of our Paris!”    131   
  Suddenly he burst out: “Pasque-Dieu! what are all these people that claim to be highway-reeves, justiciaries, lords and masters along with us! that have their toll-gates at the corner of every field, their gibbet and their executioner at every crossway among our people, so that, as the Greek thought he had as many gods as he had springs of water, the Persian as many as the stars he saw, the Frenchman reckons as many kings as he sees gibbets. Pardieu! this thing is evil, and the confusion of it incenses me! I would know if it be God’s pleasure that there should be in Paris any keepers of the highways but the King, any justiciary but our Parliament, any emperor but ourself in this empire? By my soul, but the day must come when there shall be in France but one king, one lord, one judge, one headsman, just as in paradise there is but one God!”    132   
  He lifted his cap again and went on, still deep in his own thoughts, with the look and tone of a huntsman uncoupling and cheering on his pack:    133   
  “Good, my people! Well done! Pull down these false lords! Do your work! At them! At them! Pillage, hang, sack them! Ah, you would be kings, my lords! At them! my people, at them!”    134   
  He stopped himself abruptly, bit his lips as if to regain possession of his escaping thoughts, bent his piercing eye in turn on each of the five persons around him, and suddenly taking his hat in both hands and regarding it steadfastly, he exclaimed: “Oh, I would burn thee, didst thou know what I have in my head!”    135   
  Then casting around him the alert and suspicious glance of a fox stealing back to his hole—“No matter,” he said, “we will send help to Monsieur the Provost. Most unfortunately we have very few troops here at this moment to send against such a mob. We must wait till to-morrow. Order shall then be restored in the city, and all who are taken shall be promptly hanged.”    136   
  “That reminds me, Sire,” said Coictier, “I forgot in my first perturbation, the watch have seized two stragglers of the band. If your Majesty pleases to see these men, they are here.”    137   
  “If it be my pleasure!” cried the King. “What Pasque-Dieu! canst thou forget such a thing? Run quick. Olivier, do thou go and bring them here.”    138   
  Maître Olivier went out and returned immediately with the two prisoners, surrounded by archers of the body-guard. The first of the two had a wild, imbecile face, drunken and wonder-struck. He was clad in rags and walked with one knee bent and dragging his foot. The other presented a pale and smiling countenance, with which the reader is already acquainted.    139   
  The King scrutinized them a moment without speaking, then abruptly addressed the first prisoner:

  “What is thy name?”    141   
  “Gieffroy Pincebourde.”    142   
  “Thy trade?”    143   
  “Truand.”    144   
  “What wast thou doing in that damnable riot?”    145   
  The truand gazed at the King, swinging his arms the while with an air of sottish stupidity. His was one of those uncouth heads in which the intellect is about as much at its ease as a light under an extinguisher.    146   
  “Were you not going to outrageously attack and plunder your lord the Provost of the Palais?”    147   
  “I know they were going to take something from somebody, but that’s all.”    148   
  A soldier showed the King a pruning-hook which had been found on the truand.    149   
  “Dost thou recognise this weapon?” demanded the King.    150   
  “Yes, ’tis my pruning-hook. I am a vine-dresser.”    151   
  “And dost thou know this man for thy companion?” added Louis, pointing to the other prisoner.    152   
  “No, I do not know him.”    153   
  “That will do,” said the King; and motioning to the silent figure standing impassively at the door, whom we have already pointed out to the reader: “Compere Tristan,” he said, “here’s a man for you.”    154   
  Tristan l’Hermite bowed, then whispered an order to a couple of archers. who carried off the unlucky truand.    155   
  Meanwhile the King had addressed himself to the other prisoner, who was perspiring profusely: “Thy name?”    156   
  “Pierre Gringoire, Sire.”    157   
  “Thy trade?”    158   
  “Philosopher, Sire.”    159   
  “How comes it, rascal, that thou hast the presumption to go and beset our friend Monsieur the Provost of the Palais, and what hast thou to say with regard to this rising of the populace?”    160   
  “Sire, I was not in it.”    161   
  “Go to, ribald; wast thou not taken by the watch in that bad company?”    162   
  “No, Sire, there is a misapprehension; ’tis an unlucky mischance. I am a maker of tragedies, Sire. I beseech your Majesty to hear me. I am a poet. It is the craze of men of my profession to go about the streets at night. I was passing by, this evening; ’twas a mere chance. They took me without reason. I am innocent of this civil disturbance. Your Majesty sees that the truand did not know me. I conjure your Majesty——”    163   
  “Hold thy tongue!” said the King, between two sips of his tisane; “thou wilt split our head.”    164   
  Tristan l’Hermite approached, and pointing to Gringoire: “Sire, shall we hang this one at the same time?”    165   
  It was the first word he had spoken. “Bah!” returned the King carelessly, “I see no objection.”    166   
  “But I do—a great many,” said Gringoire.    167   
  Our philosopher’s countenance at this moment rivalled the hue of the olive. He saw by the cold and indifferent air of the King that he had no resource but in something excessively pathetic. He therefore threw himself at the feet of Louis XI, and, with gestures of despair, cried:    168   
  “Sire, will your Majesty deign to listen to me? Sire, break not forth in thunders against so poor a thing as I—the bolts of God strike not the lowly lettuce. Sire, you are an august and mighty monarch; have pity on a poor honest man who would be more incapable of inflaming a revolt than an icicle of producing a spark. Most gracious Sire, magnanimity is the virtue of the lion and of the King. Alas! severity does but exasperate the spirit; the fierce blast of the north wind will not make the traveller lay aside his mantle, but the sun’s gentle rays, warming him little by little, cause him at last to strip himself gladly to his shirt. Sire, you are the sun. I protest to you, my sovereign lord and master, that I am no disorderly companion of truands and thieves. Revolt and brigandage go not in the train of Apollo. I am no man to throw myself headlong into those clouds that burst in thunders of sedition. I am a faithful vassal of your Majesty. The same jealousy which the husband has for his wife’s honour, the affection with which the son should requite his father’s love, a good vassal should feel for the glory of his King, should wear himself out for the upholding of his house, for the furtherance of his service. All other passions that might possess him were mere frenzy. These, Sire, are my maxims of state. Therefore judge me not as sedition-monger and pillager because my coat is out at elbows. Show me mercy, Sire, and I will wear out my knees in praying God for you day and night. Alas! I am not extremely rich, it is true—rather, I am somewhat poor; but for all that, I am not vicious. It is not my fault. Every one knows that great wealth is not to be acquired from belles-letters, and that the most accomplished writers have not always a great fire to warm them in winter. The advocates alone take all the grain, and leave nothing but the chaff for the other learned professions. There are forty very excellent proverbs upon the philosopher’s threadbare coat. Oh, Sire, clemency is the only light that can illumine the interior of a great soul. Clemency bears the torch before all the other virtues. Without her they are blind, groping for God in the darkness. Mercy, which is the same as clemency, produces loving subjects—the most powerful body-guard that can surround a prince. What can it signify to your Majesty, by whom all faces are dazzled, that there should be one more poor man upon earth—a poor, innocent philosopher crawling about in the slough of calamity, his empty purse flapping upon his empty stomach? Besides, Sire, I am a man of letters. Great kings add a jewel to their crown by patronizing learning. Hercules did not disdain the title of Musagetes—leader of the Muses. Mathias Corvinus showed favour to Jean de Monroyal, the ornament of mathematics. Now ’tis an ill way of patronizing letters to hang the lettered. What a stain on Alexander had he hanged Aristotle! The act would not have been a beauty-spot upon the cheek of his reputation to embellish it, but a virulent ulcer disfiguring it. Sire, I wrote a very appropriate epithalamium for Made moiselle of Flanders and Monsieur the most august Dauphin. That was not like a fire-brand of rebellion. Your Majesty can see that I am no dunce; that I have studied excellently, and that I have much natural eloquence. Grant me mercy, Sire! By so doing, you will perform an action agreeable to Our Lady, and I do assure you, Sire, that I am greatly frightened at the thought of being hanged!”    169   
  So saying, the desperate Gringoire kissed the King’s shoe, whereat Guillaume Rym murmured low to Coppenole: “He does well to crawl upon the floor. Kings are like the Cretan Jupiter—they have ears on their feet only.” And Coppenole, unmoved by the peculiar attributes of the Cretan Jupiter, answered with a slow smile and his eye fixed on Gringoire: “Ah, that’s good! I could fancy I hear the Chancellor Hugonet begging mercy of me?”    170   
  When Gringoire stopped at length, out of breath, he raised his head tremulously to the King, who was engaged in scratching off a spot on his breeches’ knee with his fingernail, after which his Majesty took another mouthful from the goblet. But he said never a word, and his silence kept Gringoire on the rack. At last the King looked at him.    171   
  “Here’s a terrible babbler!” said he. Then turning to Tristan l’Hermite: “Bah! let him go!”    172   
  Gringoire, giddy with joy, suddenly sat flat on the floor.    173   
  “Free?” growled Tristan. “Your Majesty will not even have him caged for a while?”    174   
  “Compère,” returned Louis XI, “dost thou think it is for birds like this we have cages made at three hundred and seventy-seven livres, eight sols, three deniers apiece? Set him at liberty, the rascal, and send him off with a drubbing.”    175   
  “Ouf!” cried Gringoire; “here indeed is a great King!”    176   
  And, fearing a counter-order, he hurried to the door, which Tristan opened for him with a very bad grace. The soldiers went out with him, driving him before them with great blows of their fists, which Gringoire bore like a true Stoic.    177   
  The good humour of the King, since the revolt against the provost had been announced to him, manifested itself at every point, and this unusual clemency was no insignificant sign of it. Tristan l’Hermite in his corner looked as surly as a dog that has seen much but got nothing.    178   
  Meanwhile the King was gaily drumming the Pont Audemer march on the arms of his chair. He was a dissembling prince, but he was much better able to conceal his sorrow than his joys. These outward and visible signs of rejoicing at good news sometimes carried him great lengths—thus at the death of Charles the Bold, to vowing balustrades of silver to Saint-Martin of Tours; on his accession to the throne, of forgetting to give orders for his father’s obsequies.    179   
  “Hah, Sire!” suddenly exclaimed Jacques Coictier, “what of the sharp attack of illness for which your Majesty sent for me?”    180   
  “Oh,” said the King, “truly I suffer greatly, Gossip Jacques. I have singings in the ear, and teeth of fire that rake my chest.”    181   
  Coictier took the King’s hand and felt his pulse with a professional air.    182   
  “Look at him now, Coppenole,” said Rym in a low voice. “There he is between Coictier and Tristan. That is his whole court—a physician for himself, a hangman for the others.”    183   
  As he felt the King’s pulse, Coictier assumed a look of great alarm. Louis regarded him with some anxiety, while the physician’s countenance waxed gloomier every instant. The good man had no other means of subsistence but the King’s bad health; he accordingly made the most of it.    184   
  “Oh, oh!” he muttered at last, “this is indeed serious.”    185   
  “Yes, is it not?” said the King, anxiously.    186   
  “Pulsus creber, anhelans, crepitans, irregularis,” 2 continued the physician.    187   
  “Pasque-Dieu!” exclaimed his Majesty.    188   
  “This might carry off a man in less than three days.”    189   
  “Notre Dame!” cried the King. “And the remedy, Gossip?”    190   
  “I am thinking of one, Sire.”    191   
  He made Louis put out his tongue; then shook his head, pulled a long face, and in the midst of these antics—“Pardieu! Sire,” he remarked suddenly, “I must inform you that there is a receivership of episcopal revenues vacant, and that I have a nephew.”    192   
  “I give the receivership to thy nephew, Gossip Jacques; but take this fire from my breast.”    193   
  “Since your Majesty is so gracious,” the physician went on, “you will not refuse to assist me a little towards the building of my house in the Rue Saint-Andry des Arcs?”    194   
  “H’m!” said the King.    195   
  “I am at the end of my money,” continued the doctor, “and it would indeed be a pity that the house should be left without a roof—not for the sake of the house itself, which is plain and homely, but for the paintings of Jehan Fourbault which adorn the wainscoting. There is a Diana among them, flying in the air; but so excellently limned, so tender, so delicate, the attitude so artless, the hair so admirably arranged and crowned by a crescent, the flesh so white, that she leads those into temptation who regard her too closely. Then there is also another, a Ceres—another most admirable divinity—seated on sheaves of corn, and crowned with a garland of wheat-ears intertwined with salsify and other flowers. Never were more amorous eyes, or shapelier limbs, or a nobler mien, or more graceful folds of drapery. It is one of the most innocent and perfect beauties that ever brush produced.”    196   
  “Tormentor!” growled Louis, “to what does all this tend?”    197   
  “I require a roof over these paintings, Sire, and, although it be but a trifle, I have no money left.”    198   
  “What will it cost, this roof of thine?”    199   
  “Oh, well; a roof of copper-gilt and with mythological figures, two thousand livres at most.”    200   
  “Ha! the assassin!” screamed the King. “He never draws me a tooth but he makes a diamond out of it!”    201   
  “Am I to have my roof?” said Coictier.    202   
  “Yes!—and go to the devil; but cure me first.”    203   
  Jacques Coictier made a profound obeisance and said: “Sire, it is a repellant that will save you. We shall apply to your loins the great deterrent composed of cerade, clay of Armenia, white of egg, oil, and vinegar. You will continue the tisane, and we will answer for your Majesty’s safety.”    204   
  A lighted candle never attracts one gnat only. Master Olivier, seeing the King in so liberal a mood, and judging the moment propitious, approached in his turn.    205   
  “Sire——”    206   
  “What do you want now?” asked Louis.    207   
  “Sire, your Majesty is aware that Simon Radin is dead.”    208   
  “Well?”    209   
  “He was King’s Councillor to the Court of Treasury.”    210   
  “Well?”    211   
  “Sire, his post is vacant.”    212   
  As he spoke, Maître Olivier’s overbearing countenance changed its arrogance for cringing—the only alternation on the face of a courtier. The King looked him very straight in the face and answered dryly, “I understand.”    213   
  “Maître Olivier,” he went on, “the Marshal de Boucicaut says: ‘There is no good gift but from the King; there is no good fishing but in the sea.’ I see you share Monsieur de Boucicaut’s opinion. Now harken to this—we have a good memory. In ’68 we made you a groom of the chamber; in ’69, warder of the fort on the bridge of Saint-Cloud, with a salary of a hundred livres tournois (you wanted it parisis). In November, ’73, by letters patent given at Gergeole, we appointed you ranger of the forest of Vincennes in place of Gilbert Acle, squire; in ’75, warden of the forest of Rouvraylez-Saint-Cloud, in place of Jacques le Maire; in ’78, we graciously settled upon you, by letters patent sealed with a double seal of green wax, an annuity of ten livres parisis, for yourself and your spouse, chargeable on the place aux Marchands, near the School of Saint-Germain; in ’79, we made you warden of the forest of Senard, in the place of poor Jehan Diaz; then captain of the Castle of Loches; then Governor of Saint-Quentin; then captain of the Bridge of Meulan, of which you had yourself called count. Of the five sols fine paid by every barber who shaves on a holiday, you get three—and we get what you leave. We were pleased to change your surname of Le Mauvais as being too expressive of your mien. In ’74, we granted you, to the great umbrage of our nobility, armorial bearings of many colours, which enables you to display a peacock breast. Pasque-Dieu! are you not surfeited? Is not the draught of fishes abundant and miraculous enough? Are you not afraid that one salmon more will sink your boat? Pride will be your ruin, my Gossip. Ruin and shame tread ever close upon the heels of pride. Remember that, and keep still.”    214   
  These words, pronounced with severity, brought back the insolence to Olivier’s face.    215   
  “Good!” he muttered almost aloud; “’tis evident the King is sick to-day, for he gives all to the physician.”    216   
  Far from taking offence at this piece of effrontery, Louis resumed in a milder tone: “Stay, I had forgotten too that I made you my ambassador at Ghent to Mme. Marie. Yes, gentlemen,” he added, addressing himself to the Flemings, “this man has been an ambassador. There, there, Gossip,” turning to Olivier, “let us not fall out—we are old friends. It is getting late. We have finished our business—shave me.”    217   
  The reader has doubtless already recognised in Maître Olivier the terrible Figaro whose part Providence—that master playwright—wove so skilfully into the long and sanguinary drama of Louis XI. We shall not attempt here to describe that baleful character. This barber to the King had three names. At Court they addressed him politely as Olivier le Daim; among the people he was Olivier le Diable. His real name was Olivier le Mauvais—the Miscreant.    218   
  Olivier le Mauvais stood unmoved, sulking at the King, scowling at Jacques Coictier.    219   
  “Yes, yes! the physician!” he muttered between his teeth.    220   
  “Quite so; the physician!” repeated Louis with unwonted affability; “the physician has yet more influence than thy self. The reason is not far to seek—he has hold over our entire body; thou only of our chin. Come, come, my poor barber, all will be well. Now, Gossip, perform thy office, and shave me; go fetch what is needful.”    221   
  Olivier, seeing that the King was determined to take the matter as a jest, and that it was useless even to try to provoke him, went out grumbling to execute his orders.    222   
  The King rose and went to the window. Suddenly he threw it open with extraordinary excitement:    223   
  “Oh, yes!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands, “there’s a glare in the sky over the city. It is the Provost of the Palais burning; it can be nothing else. Ha! my good people, so ye aid me at last in the overthrow of the feudal lords! Gentlemen,” and he turned to the Flemings, “come and look at this. Is that not the red glare of a conflagration?”    224   
  The two Flemings approached.    225   
  “A great fire,” said Guillaume Rym.    226   
  “Oh!” added Coppenole, his face lighting up suddenly, “that reminds me of the burning of the Seigneur d’Hymbercourt’s house. There must be a big revolt over there.”    227   
  “Think you so, Maître Coppenole?” and Louis’s face beamed even brighter than the hosier’s. “Do you not think it will be difficult to check?”    228   
  “Croix-Dieu! Sire, it may cost your Majesty many a company of soldiers!”    229   
  “Ah—cost me—that’s different,” rejoined the King. “If I choose——”    230   
  “If this revolt be what I suppose,” continued the hosier boldly, “you will have no choice in the matter, Sire.”    231   
  “My friend,” said Louis XI, “two companies of my bodyguard, and the discharge of a serpentine, are amply sufficient to put a mob of common people to the rout.”    232   
  Regardless of the signs Guillaume Rym was making to him, the hosier seemed bent upon contesting the matter with the King. “Sire,” said he, “the Swiss were common people too. Monsieur the Duke of Burgundy was a great seigneur, and held the canaille of no account. At the battle of Granson, Sire, he shouted: ‘Cannoneers, fire upon these churls!’ and he swore by Saint-George. But the syndic Scharnachtal rushed upon the fine duke with his clubs and his men, and at the shock of the peasants with their bull-hides, the glittering Burgundian army was shattered like a pane of glass by a stone. There was many a knight killed there by the base-born churls, and Monsieur de Château-Guyon, the greatest lord in Burgundy, was found dead, with his great gray charger, in a little boggy field.”    233   
  “Friend,” returned the King, “you are speaking of a battle. This is but a riot, and I can put an end to it the moment I choose to lift a finger.”    234   
  To which the other replied unconcernedly, “That may be, Sire; but in that case, the hour of the people has not yet come.”    235   
  Guillaume Rym thought it time to interfere. “Maître Coppenole, you are talking to a great King.”    236   
  “I know it,” answered the hosier gravely.    237   
  “Let him speak his mind, friend Rym,” said the King. “I like this plain speaking. My father, Charles VII, used to say that truth was sick For my part, I thought she was dead and had found no confessor. Maître Coppenole shows me I am mistaken.” Then, laying his hand on Maître Coppenole’s shoulder: “You were saying, Maître Jacques——”    238   
  “I said, Sire, that may-be you were right; that the people’s hour is not yet come with you.”    239   
  Louis XI looked at him with his penetrating gaze. “And when will that hour come, Maître?”    240   
  “You will hear it strike.”    241   
  “By what clock, prithee?”    242   
  Coppenole, with his quiet and homely self-possession, signed to the King to approach the window. “Listen, Sire! There is here a donjon-keep, a bell-tower, cannon, townsfolk, soldiers. When the tocsin sounds, when the cannons roar, when, with great clamour, the fortress walls are shattered, when citizens and soldiers shout and kill each other—then the hour will strike.”    243   
  Louis’s face clouded and he seemed to muse. He was silent for a moment, then, clapping his hand gently against the thick wall of the keep, as one pats the flank of a charger:    244   
  “Ah, surely not,” said he; “thou wilt not be so easily shattered, eh, my good Bastille?”    245   
  And turning abruptly to the undaunted Fleming: “Have you ever seen a revolt, Maître Jacques?”    246   
  “Sire, I have made one,” answered the hosier.    247   
  “How do you set about it,” said the King, “to make a revolt?”    248   
  “Oh,” answered Coppenole, “it is no very difficult matter. There are a hundred ways. First of all, there must be dissatisfaction in the town—that’s nothing uncommon. And next, there is the character of the inhabitants. Those of Ghent are prone to revolt. They ever love the son of the prince, but never the prince himself. Well, one fine morning, we will suppose, some one enters my shop and says to me: ‘Father Coppenole, it is thus and thus—the Lady of Flanders wants to save her favourites, the chief provost has doubled the toll on green food, or something of the kind—what you will. I throw down my work, run out of my shop into the street, and cry, ‘A sac!’ There is sure to be some empty cask about. I get upon it, and say in a loud voice the first thing that comes into my head—what’s uppermost in my heart—and when one is of the people, Sire, one has always something in one’s heart. Then a crowd gets together; they shout, they ring the tocsin, the people arm themselves by disarming the soldiers, the market people join the rest, and off they march. And so it will always be, so long as there are lords in the manors, citizens in the cities, and peasants in the country.”    249   
  “And against whom do you rise thus?” asked the King; “against your provosts? against your lords?”    250   
  “Sometimes; it all depends. Against the duke, too, on occasion.”    251   
  Louis returned to his chair. “Ah! here,” he said with a smile, “they have not got further than the provosts!”    252   
  At the same instant Olivier le Daim entered the apartment. He was followed by two pages bearing the toilet necessaries of the King; but what struck Louis was to see him also accompanied by the Provost of Paris and the commander of the watch, who both appeared full of consternation. There was consternation, too, in the manner of the rancorous barber, but with an underlying satisfaction.    253   
  He was the first to speak. “Sire, I crave pardon of your Majesty for the calamitous news I bring.”    254   
  The King turned sharply round, tearing the mat under the feet of his chair. “What’s that?”    255   
  “Sire,” replied Olivier, with the malevolent look of one who rejoices that he has to deal a violent blow, “it is not against the Provost of the Palais that this rising is directed.”    256   
  “Against whom, then?”    257   
  “Against you, Sire.”    258   
  The aged King sprang to his feet, erect as a young man.    259   
  “Explain thyself, Olivier! explain thyself! And look well to thy head, my Gossip; for I swear to thee by the cross of Saint-Lô, that if thou speakest false in this matter, the sword that cut the throat of M. de Luxembourg is not so notched but it will manage to saw thine too.”    260   
  It was a formidable oath. Never but twice in his life had Louis sworn by the cross of Saint-Lô.    261   
  Olivier opened his mouth to answer. “Sire——”    262   
  “Down on thy knees!” interrupted the King vehemently. “Tristan, stand guard over this man!”    263   
  Olivier went down on his knees. “Sire,” he said composedly, “a witch was condemned to death by your Court of Parliament. She took sanctuary in Notre Dame. The people want to take her thence by main force. Monsieur the Provost and Monsieur the Commander of the Watch are here to contradict me if I speak not the truth. It is Notre Dame the people are besieging.”    264   
  “Ah! ah!” murmured the King, pale and shaking with passion. “Notre Dame they besiege! Our Lady, my good mistress, in her own Cathedral! Rise, Olivier. Thou art right. I give thee Simon Radin’s office. Thou art right; it is me they attack. The witch is under the safeguard of the Church, the Church is under my safeguard. And I—who thought all the while that it was only the provost—and ’tis against myself!”    265   
  Rejuvenated by passion, he began to pace the room with great strides. He laughed no more; he was terrible to look upon as he went to and fro—the fox was become a hyena. He seemed choking with rage, his lips moved, but no word came, his fleshless hands were clenched. Suddenly he raised his head, his sunken eyes blazed full of light, his voice rang like a clarion: “Seize them, Tristan! Cut down the knaves! Away, Tristan, my friend! Kill! Kill!”    266   
  This outburst over, he returned to his seat, and went on in a voice of cold and concentrated rage: “Hither, Tristan. We have with us in this Bastille fifty lances of the Vicomte de Gif, which makes three hundred horses; you will take them. There is also a company of the archers of our bodyguard, under Monsieur de Châteaupers; you will take them. You are provost-marshal, and have the men of your provostry; you will take them. At the Hôtel Saint-Pol you will find forty archers of the new guard of Monsieur the Dauphin; take them, and with all these you will speed to Notre Dame. Ah, messieurs, the commons of Paris, do you fly thus in the face of the crown of France, of the sanctity of Notre Dame, and the peace of this commonwealth! Exterminate, Tristan! exterminate! and let not one escape for Montfaucon!”    267   
  Tristan bowed. “Very good, Sire! And what am I to do with the witch?” he added after a moment’s pause.    268   
  This question gave the King food for reflection. “Ah, to be sure,” said he, “the witch? M. d’Estouteville, what did the people want to do with her?”    269   
  “Sire,” answered the Provost of Paris, “I imagine, that as the people were come to drag her out of sanctuary in Notre Dame, it is her impunity that offends them, and that they desire to hang her.”    270   
  The King appeared to reflect profoundly; then, addressing himself to Tristan l’Hermite:    271   
  “Very well, Compère; exterminate the people and hang the witch.”    272   
  “In other words,” whispered Rym to Coppenole, “punish the people for wanting to do a thing, and then do it yourself!”    273   
  “Very good, Sire,” returned Tristan. “And if the witch is still inside the Cathedral, are we to disregard the sanctuary and take her away?”    274   
  “Pasque-Dieu! the sanctuary,” said the King, scratching his ear; “and yet the woman must be hanged.”    275   
  Then, as if an idea had suddenly occurred to him, he fell on his knees before his chair, took off his hat, laid it on the seat, and gazing devoutly at one of the little lead images with which it was encircled: “Oh!” he cried, clasping his hands, “Our Lady of Paris, my gracious patroness, give me pardon, I will do it only this once. This criminal must be punished. I do assure you, Madame the Virgin, my good mistress, that it is a sorceress, unworthy of your kind protection. You know, Madame, that many very devout princes have trespassed on the privileges of the Church for the glory of God and the necessity of the state. Saint-Hugh, Bishop of England, permitted King Edward to seize a magician in his church. My master, Saint-Louis of France, transgressed for the like purpose in the Church of Saint-Paul, and Monsieur Alphonse, son of the King of Jerusalem, in the Church of the Holy Sephulchre itself. Pardon me, then, for this once, Our Lady of Paris! I will never again transgress in this manner, and I will give you a fair statue of silver, like that I gave last year to Our Lady of Ecouys. So be it!”    276   
  He made the sign of the cross, rose to his feet, replaced his hat, and turned to Tristan. “Make all speed, Compère. Take M. de Châteaupers with you. You will sound the tocsin, crush the people, hang the witch—that is all. You will defray all the charges of the execution and bring me the account. Come, Olivier, I shall not go to bed to-night. Shave me.”    277   
  Tristan l’Hermite bowed and left. The king then dismissed Rym and Coppenole with a wave of the hand. “God keep you, my good Flemish friends. Go and take a little rest. The night is far advanced, and we are nearer the morning than the evening.”    278   
  They both withdrew. On reaching their apartments under the escort of the captain of the Bastille, Coppenole remarked to Rym, “Hum! I’ve had enough of this coughing King. I have seen Charles of Burgundy drunk, but he was not near so wicked as Louis XI sick.”    279   
  “Maître Jacques,” returned Rym, “that is because kings are not half so bloodthirsty in their wine as in their medicinecups.”    280   


Note 1.  Without steward or cup-bearer. [back]   
Note 2.  Pulse rapid full, jerking, irregular. [back]

Book X   
VI. The Pass-Word   
     
ON quitting the Bastille, Gringoire fled down the Rue Saint-Antoine with the speed of a runaway horse. Arrived at the Baudoyer Gate, he made straight for the stone cross in the middle of the square as if he discerned in the dark the figure of a man, clothed and hooded in black, sitting upon its steps.      1   
  “Is that you, master?” said Gringoire.      2   
  The figure rose. “Death and hell! you drive me mad, Gringoire. The watch on the tower of Saint-Gervais has just called the half after one.”      3   
  “It is no fault of mine,” returned Gringoire, “but of the watch and the King. I’ve had a narrow escape. I always miss being hanged within an ace. It is my predestination.”      4   
  “You miss everything,” retorted the other. “But come quickly now. Hast thou the pass-word?”      5   
  “Only think, master, I have seen the King. I’ve just left him. He wears worsted breeches. It was an adventure, I can tell you!”      6   
  “Oh, clappering mill-wheel of words! what’s thy adventure to me? Hast thou the truands’ pass-word?”      7   
  “I have it. Make yourself easy. ‘Dagger in pouch.’”      8   
  “Good! Without it we could not get through to the church; the truands block the streets. Luckily, they seem to have met with some opposition. We may yet arrive in time.”      9   
  “Yes, master; but how are we to gain entrance into Notre Dame?”     10   
  “I have the key of the tower.”     11   
  “And how shall we get out again?”     12   
  “There is a small door at the back of the cloister opening on to the Terrain and the waterside. I have got the key, and I moored a boat there this morning.”     13   
  “I had a near shave of being hanged,” repeated Gringoire.     14   
  “Quick, then, let us be going!” said the other; and both started off at full speed towards the city.

   
Book X   
VII. Châteaupers to the Rescue   
     
THE READER probably remembers the critical situation in which we left Quasimodo. The doughty hunchback, assailed on all sides, had lost, if not his courage, at least all hope of saving, not himself—for of that he took no thought—but the Egyptian. He ran distractedly along the gallery. Notre Dame was on the point of being carried by the truands. Suddenly the thunder of galloping hoofs filled the adjacent streets, and with a long file of torches and a dense column of horsemen, lances down and bridles hanging loose, the furious sound swept into the Place like a hurricane.      1   
  “France! France! Cut down the rabble! Châteaupers to the rescue! Provostry! Provostry!”      2   
  These were, of course, the troops despatched by the King.      3   
  The startled truands faced about.      4   
  Quasimodo, though he heard nothing, saw the naked swords, the torches, the lances, the mass of cavalry, at the head of which he recognized Captain Phœbus. He saw the confusion of the truands, the terror of some, the consternation of the stoutest-hearted among them, and the unexpected succour so revived his energy that he hurled back the foremost of the assailants who had already gained a footing on the gallery.      5   
  The truands bore themselves bravely, defending themselves with the energy of despair. Attacked on the flank from the Rue Saint-Pierre-aux-Bœufs, and in the rear from the Rue du Parvis, jammed against Notre Dame, which they were attacking and Quasimodo still defending—at once besiegers and besieged—they were in the peculiar position in which Count Henry d’Harcourt found himself at the famous siege of Turin in 1640, between Prince Thomas of Savoy, whom he was besieging, and the Marquis de Langane, who, in turn, was blockading him—Taurinum obsessor idem et obsessus 1 —as his epitaph expresses it.      6   
  The mêlée was terrific. “To wolves’ flesh dogs’ teeth,” says Father Mathieu. The King’s horsemen, among whom Phœbus de Châteaupers displayed great valour, gave no quarter, and they that escaped the lance fell by the sword. The truands, ill-armed, foamed and bit in rage and despair. Men, women, and children fastened themselves on the flanks and chests of the horses, clinging to them tooth and nail, like cats; others battered the faces of the archers with their torches; others, again, caught the horsemen by the neck in their iron bill-hooks, striving to pull them down. Those who fell, they tore to pieces.      7   
  One among them had a long and glittering scythe, with which, for a long time, he mowed the legs of the horses. It was an appalling sight. On he came, singing a droning song and taking long sweeping strokes with his deadly scythe.      8   
  At every stroke he laid around him a circle of severed limbs. He advanced in this manner into the thickest of the cavalry, calm and unhasting, with the even swing of the head and regular breathing of a reaper cutting a field of corn. It was Clopin Trouillefou. A volley of musketry laid him low.      9   
  In the meantime the windows had opened again. The burghers, hearing the war-cry of the King’s men, had taken part in the affray, and from every storey bullets rained upon the truands. The Parvis was thick with smoke streaked with the flashing fire of the musketry. Through it the façade of Notre Dame was dimly discernible, and the tumble-down Hôtel-Dieu, with a wan face or two peering frightened from its many windowed roofs.     10   
  At last the truands gave way. Exhaustion, want of proper arms, the alarming effect of this surprise, the volleys from the windows, the spirited charge of the King’s men—all combined to overpower them. Breaking through the line of their assailants, they fled in all directions, leaving the Parvis heaped with their dead.     11   
  When Quasimodo, who had not for a moment ceased fighting, beheld this rout, he fell upon his knees and lifted his hands to heaven. Then, frenzied with joy, he ran to the stairs, and ascended with the swiftness of a bird to that cell, the approaches to which he had so intrepidly defended. He had but one thought now—to go and fall on his knees at the feet of her whom he had saved for the second time.     12   
  He entered the cell—it was empty.     13   


Note 1.  Besieger of Turin and himself besieged. [back]

Book XI   
I. The Little Shoe   
     
AT the moment the truands attacked the Cathedral, Esmeralda was asleep.      1   
  But soon the ever-increasing uproar round the church, and the bleating of her goat—awakened before herself—broke these slumbers. She sat up, listened, looked around; then, frightened at the glare and the noise, hurried out of her cell to see what was the matter. The aspect of the Place, the strange visions moving in it, the disorder of this nocturnal assault, the hideous crowd dimly visible through the darkness, hopping about like a cloud of frogs, the hoarse croaking of the multitude, the scattered red torches flitting to and fro in the storm like will-o’-the-wisps flitting over the misty face of a swamp—all seemed to her like some mysterious battle between the phantoms of the witches’ Sabbath and the stone monsters of the Cathedral. Imbued from her childhood with the superstitions of the gipsy tribe, her first idea was that she had happened unawares on the Satanic rites of the weird beings proper to the night. Whereupon she hastened back to cower in her cell, asking of her humble couch some less horrible nightmare.      2   
  But, by degrees, the first fumes of her terror cleared away from her brain, and by the constantly increasing noise, and other signs of reality, she discovered that she was beset, not by spectres, but by human beings. At this her fear changed; not in degree, but in kind. The thought of the possibility of a popular rising to drag her from her place of refuge flashed into her mind. The prospect of once more losing life, hope, Phœbus, who still was ever-present in her dreams of the future, her utter helplessness, all flight barred, her abandonment, her friendless state—these and a thousand other cruel thoughts overwhelmed her. She fell upon her knees, her head upon her couch her hands clasped upon her head, overcome by anxiety and terror; and gipsy, idolatress, and pagan as she was, began with sobs and tremblings to ask mercy of the God of the Christians, and pray to Our Lady, her hostess. For, even though one believe in nothing, there come moments in life in which one instinctively turns to the religion of the temple nearest at hand.      3   
  She remained thus prostrated for a considerable time, trembling, in truth, more than she prayed, frozen with terror at the breath of that furious multitude coming ever nearer; ignorant of the nature of the storm, of what was in progress, what they were doing, what they wanted; but having the presentiment of some dreadful issue.      4   
  In the midst of this agonizing uncertainty, she heard footsteps near her. She raised her head. Two men, one of whom was carrying a lantern, entered her cell. She uttered a feeble cry.      5   
  “Fear nothing,” said a voice which sounded familiar to her, “it is I.”      6   
  “Who?” she asked.      7   
  “Pierre Gringoire.”      8   
  The name reassured her. She raised her eyes and saw it was indeed the poet. But at his side stood a dark figure shrouded from head to foot which struck her dumb with fear.      9   
  “Ah,” said Gringoire in reproachful tones, “Djali recognised me before you did.”     10   
  In truth, the little goat had not waited for Gringoire to name himself. He had scarcely crossed the threshold before she began rubbing herself fondly against his knee, covering the poet with caresses and with white hairs, for she was casting her coat, Gringoire returning her endearments.     11   
  “Who is that with you?” asked the Egyptian in a low voice.     12   
  “Make yourself easy,” answered Gringoire, “it is a friend of mine.”     13   
  Then, setting down his lantern, the philosopher seated himself on the floor, clasping Djali enthusiastically in his arms. “Oh, ’tis an engaging beast! More remarkable, no doubt, for its beauty and cleanliness than for its size; but ingenious, subtle, and lettered as a grammarian! Come, my Djali, let us see if thou hast not forgotten any of thy pretty tricks! How does Maître Jacques Charmolue when——”     14   
  The man in black did not let him finish. He went up to him and pushed him roughly by the shoulder. Gringoire got up again. “You are right,” said he, “I had forgotten that we were in haste. However, that is no reason, master, for hustling people so roughly. My dear pretty one, your life is in danger, and Djali’s too. They want to hang you again. We are your friends, and have come to save you. Follow us.”     15   
  “Is that true?” she cried.     16   
  “Yes, quite true. Come without delay!”     17   
  “I will,” she faltered; “but why does not your friend speak?”     18   
  “Ah,” said Gringoire, “that is because his father and mother were somewhat fantastical people, and endowed him with a taciturn disposition.”     19   
  She had perforce to content herself with this explanation. Gringoire took her by the hand, his companion picked up the lantern and walked ahead of them. The poor girl was bewildered with fear and let herself be led, the goat came skipping after them, so overjoyed at seeing Gringoire once more that she made him stumble at every other step by thrusting her horns between his legs.     20   
  “Such is life,” said the philosopher as he just missed falling flat; “it is often our best friends that occasion our fall!”     21   
  They rapidly descended the stairs of the towers, crossed the church, which was dark and totally deserted but echoing with the frightful uproar without, and issued by the Porte Rouge into the court-yard of the cloister. The cloister was deserted, the clergy having taken refuge in the bishop’s house, there to offer up their prayers together. The courtyard was empty save for a few terrified lackeys crouching in the darkest corners. They made their way to the small door leading out of the court-yard to the Terrain. The man in black opened it with a key he carried with him. Our readers are aware that the Terrain was a tongue of land enclosed by walls on the side next the city, belonging to the chapter of Notre Dame, and forming the end of the island on the east, behind the church. They found this enclosure perfectly solitary. Here, even the noise in the air was sensibly less, the clamour of the assault reaching their ears confusedly and deadened. They could now hear the rustling of the leaves of the solitary tree planted at the point of the Terrain as the fresh breeze swept up from the river. Nevertheless, they were still very close to danger. The buildings nearest them were the bishop’s residence and the church. There were visible signs of great confusion within the bishop’s residence. Its dark mass was streaked with lights flitting from window to window, just as after burning a piece of paper, bright sparks run in a thousand fantastic lines across the dark mound of ashes. Beside it, the huge black towers of Notre Dame rearing themselves over the long nave, sharply outlined against the vast red glow which filled the Parvis, looked like the gigantic andirons of some Cyclopean fire-place.     22   
  What was visible of Paris on all sides seemed to float in a mingled atmosphere of light and shadow, such as Rembrandt has in some of his backgrounds.     23   
  The man with the lantern walked straight to the point of the Terrain where, at the extreme edge of the water, were the decaying remains of a fence of stakes interlaced with laths, on which a low vine had spread its few starveling branches like the fingers of an open hand. Behind it, in the shadow of the fence, a little boat lay moored. The man motioned Gringoire and his companion to enter, and the goat jumped in after them. The man himself got in last. He cut the rope of the boat, pushed off from the shore with a long boat-hook, and seizing a pair of oars, seated himself in the bow and rowed with all his might out into mid-stream. The Seine runs very strong at this part, and he had considerable difficulty in clearing the point of the island.     24   
  Gringoire’s first care, on entering the boat, was to take the goat upon his knees. He settled himself in the stern, and the girl, whom the unknown man inspired with indefinable uneasiness, seated herself as close as possible to the poet.     25   
  As soon as our philosopher felt the boat in motion, he clapped his hands and kissed Djali between her horns.     26   
  “Oh!” he cried, “now we are safe, all four of us!” and added with the air of a profound thinker: “We are indebted sometimes to fortune, sometimes to strategy, for the happy issue of a great undertaking.”     27   
  The boat was making its way slowly across to the right bank. The gipsy girl regarded their unknown companion with secret terror. He had carefully shut off the light of his dark-lantern, and was now only dimly perceptible in the bow of the boat, like a shadowy phantom. His hood, which was still pulled down, formed a kind of mask to his face, and each time that in rowing he opened his arms, his long hanging black sleeves gave them the appearance of enormous bat’s wings. As yet he had breathed not a word. There was no sound in the boat but the regular splash of the oars and the rippling of the water against the sides of the skiff.     28   
  “Upon my soul!” suddenly exclaimed Gringoire, “we are as lively as a company of horned-owls! We observe a silence of Pythagoreans or of fishes! Pasque-Dieu! my friends, I wish that some one would converse with me. The human voice is music in the human ear. That is not my own saying, but of Didymus of Alexandria, and an illustrious saying it is! Certes, Didymus of Alexandria was no mediocre philosopher. One word, my pretty one—only one word, I entreat you. By the way, you used to make a droll little grimace, peculiar to yourself; do you make it still? You must know, my dear, that the Parliament has full jurisdiction over all places of sanctuary, and that you were in great peril in that little cell of yours in Notre Dame? The little trochilus builds its nest in the crocodile’s jaws. Master, here’s the moon appearing again. If they only do not catch sight of us! We are performing a laudable act in saving mademoiselle, and yet they would string us up in the King’s name if they were to catch us. Alas, that every human action should have two handles! They blame in me what they crown in thee. One man admires Cæsar, and abuses Catiline. Is that not so, master? What say you to this philosophy? I possess the philosophy of instinct, of nature, ut apes geometriam. What, no answer from anybody? You are both, it seems, in a very churlish mood!     29   
  “You oblige me to do the talking alone. That is what we call in tragedy a monologue. Pasque-Dieu!—I would have you know that I am just come from King Louis XI, and that I have caught that oath from him—Pasque-Dieu! they are keeping up a glorious howling in the city! ’Tis a bad, wicked old king. He is all wrapped in furs. He still owes me the money for my epithalamium, and he all but hanged me to-night, which would have greatly hindered my career. He is niggardly towards men of merit. He would do well to read the four books of Salvian of Cologne—Adversus Avaritiam. In good sooth, he is a king very narrow in his dealings with men of letters, and who commits most barbarous cruelties—a sponge laid upon the people, and sucking up their money. His thrift is as the spleen that grows big upon the wasting of the other members. And so the complaints against the hardness of the times turn to murmurs against the prince. Under this mild and pious lord of ours the gibbets are weighed down with corpses, the blocks rot with gore, the prisons burst like overfilled sacks. This king robs with one hand, and hangs with the other. He is the purveyor for Mme. Gabelle 1 and M. Gibbet. The high are stripped of their dignities, and the low are increasingly loaded with fresh burdens. ’Tis an exorbitant prince. I like not this monarch. What say you, my master?”     30   
  The man in black let the garrulous poet babble on. He was still struggling against the strong full current that separates the prow of the city from the poop of the Ile Notre Dame, now called the Ile Saint Louis.     31   
  “By-the-bye, master,” Gringoire began again suddenly; “just as we reached the Parvis through the raging crowd of truands, did your reverence remark the poor little devil whose brains that deaf ringer of yours was in the act of dashing out against the parapet of the gallery of kings? I am near-sighted, and could not recognise him. Who can it have been, think you?”     32   
  The unknown answered not a word, but he ceased rowing abruptly; his arms fell slack as if broken, his head dropped upon his breast, and Esmeralda heard him sigh convulsively. She started violently; she had heard sighs like that before.     33   
  The boat, left to itself, drifted for a few moments with the stream; but the man in black roused himself at last, grasped the oars again, and set the boat once more upstream. He doubled the point of the Ile Notre Dame, and made for the landing-place at the hay wharf.     34   
  “Ah!” said Gringoire, “we are passing the Logis Barbeau. Look, master, at that group of black roofs that form such quaint angles over there, just underneath that mass of low-hanging gray cloud, through which the moon looks all crushed and spread abroad like the yolk of an egg when the shell is broken. ’Tis a very fine mansion. It has a chapel crowned by a small dome which is wholly lined with admirably carved enrichments. Just above it, you can see the bell-tower, very delicately perforated. It also possesses a pleasant garden comprising a pond, an aviary, an echo, a mall, a labyrinth, and wild beast house, and many bosky paths very agreeable to Venus. Besides, there’s a very naughty tree which they call the ‘pander,’ because it cloaked the pleasures of a notorious princess and a certain Constable of France—a man of wit and gallantry. Alas! we poor philosophers are to a Constable of France as the cabbage or radish-bed to the garden of the Louvre. Well, what matters it after all? Life is a mixture of good and evil for the great even as for us. Sorrow is ever by the side of joy, the spondee beside the dactyl. Master, I must tell you that story of the Logis Barbeau some day; it had a tragical ending. It happened in 1319, in the reign of Philippe V, the longest reign of all the kings of France. The moral of the story is that the temptations of the flesh are pernicious and malign. Let our eyes not linger too long upon our neighbour’s wife, however much our senses may be excited by her beauty. Fornication is a very libertine thought. Adultery, a prying into the pleasant delights of another. Ohé! the noise grows louder over there!”     35   
  In truth, the uproar was increasing round Notre Dame. They listened. They were plainly shouts of victory. Suddenly a hundred torches, their light flashing upon the helmets of men-at-arms, spread themselves rapidly over the church at every height, over the towers, the galleries, under the buttresses, appearing to be searching for something; and soon the distant shouts reached the ears of the fugitives: “The gipsy! the witch! Death to the Egyptian!”     36   
  The unhappy girl dropped her face in her hands, and the unknown began rowing furiously towards the bank. Meanwhile our philosopher cogitated rapidly. He clasped the goat in his arms, and edged gently away from the gipsy, who pressed closer and closer to his side as her only remaining protection.     37   
  Certainly Gringoire was on the horns of a cruel dilemma. He reflected that the goat too, by the existing legislation, was bound to be hanged if retaken, which would be a sad pity, poor little Djali! that two condemned females thus clinging on to him were more than he could manage, and that finally his companion asked for nothing better than to take charge of the gipsy girl. Nevertheless, a violent struggle went on in his mind, during which, like the Jupiter of the Iliad, he weighed the gipsy and the goat by turns in the balance, looking first at one and then at the other, his eyes moist with tears, while he muttered between his teeth, “And yet I cannot save both of you!”     38   
  The bumping of the boat against the landing-place shook him out of his musings. The sinister hubbub still resounded through the city. The unknown rose, advanced to the girl, and made as if to help her ashore; but she evaded him, and laid hold of Gringoire’s sleeve; whereat he, in turn, being fully occupied with the goat, almost repulsed her. She accordingly sprang ashore by herself, but in such a state of fear and bewilderment that she knew not what she did or whither she was going. She stood thus a moment, stupefied, gazing down at the swift flowing water. When she somewhat recovered her senses, she found herself alone on the landing-stage with the unknown man. Gringoire had apparently availed himself of the moment of their going ashore to vanish with the goat among the labyrinth of houses of the Rue Grenier sur l’Eau.     39   
  The poor little gipsy shuddered to find herself alone with this man. She strove to speak, to cry out, to call to Gringoire, but her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth, and no sound issued from her lips. Suddenly she felt the hand of the unknown grasp hers—a cold, strong hand. Her teeth chattered, she turned paler than the moonbeams that shone upon her. The man said not a word, but strode away in the direction of the Place de Grève, still holding her firmly by the hand.     40   
  At that moment she had a dim sense of the irresistible force of destiny. All power of will forsook her; she let him drag her along, running to keep pace with him: the ground at this part of the quay rose somewhat, but to her they seemed to be rushing down an incline.     41   
  She looked on all sides—not a single passenger to be seen; the quay was absolutely deserted. She heard no sound, she perceived no sign of life save in the glaring and tumultuous city, from which she was only separated by an arm of the river, and from which her own name reached her coupled with shouts of death. All the rest of Paris lay around her shadowy and silent as the grave.     42   
  Meanwhile the stranger was dragging her along in the same silence and at the same rapid pace. She had no recollection of any of the streets they traversed. Passing a lighted window she made a last effort, and stopping suddenly, screamed, “Help!”     43   
  The citizen at the window opened it, and showing himself in his night-shirt and a lamp in his hand, looked out stupidly on to the quay, muttered a few words which she could not catch, and closed his shutter once more. Her last ray of hope was extinguished.     44   
  The man in black proffered no remark; he held her fast and quickened his pace. She offered no further resistance, but followed him limp and hopeless.     45   
  From time to time she gathered sufficient strength to ask in a voice broken by the roughness of the pavement and the breathless haste of their motion: “Who are you? Who are you?” But there was no reply.     46   
  In this manner they presently reached an open square of considerable size. The moon shone faintly out; a sort of black cross was dimly visible standing in the middle. It was a gibbet. She saw this, and in a flash knew where she was. It was the Place de Grève.     47   
  The man stood still, turned towards her and lifted his hood. “Oh,” she stammered, petrified with horror, “I knew it must be he!”     48   
  It was the priest. He looked like a wraith in the spectral moonlight.     49   
  “Listen,” said he; and she shivered at the sound of the ill-omened voice that she had not heard for so long. “Listen,” he went on, speaking with that broken and gasping utterance which bespeaks the profoundest inward upheaval. “We have arrived at our destination. I would speak with thee. This is the Grève; we have reached the extreme limit. Fate has delivered each of us into the hand of the other. Thou shalt have the disposing of my soul; I, of thy life. Here is a place and an hour beyond which there is no seeing. Listen to me, then. I will tell thee—but first, name not thy Phœbus to me. (And while he spoke thus he paced to and fro, like a man incapable of standing still, dragging her with him.) Speak not of him! Mark me, if thou utterest his name, I know not what I shall do, but it will be something terrible.”     50   
  Having relieved his mind of this, he stood motionless, like a body finding its centre of gravity. But his agitation was in nowise diminished; his voice sank deeper and deeper.     51   
  “Turn not away from me thus. Hear me; ’tis a matter of the utmost import. First, this is what has happened—’tis no laughing matter, I warrant! What was I saying? Remind me! Ah—there is a decree of Parliament delivering thee over to execution again. I have but now succeeded in rescuing thee out of their hands. But they are on thy track. Behold!”     52   
  He stretched his arm towards the city, where, in truth, the search seemed to be eagerly prosecuted. The noise of it drew nearer. The tower of the lieutenant’s house opposite the Grève was full of lights and bustle, and they could see soldiers running about the opposite quay with torches in their hands, shouting, “The gipsy! Where is the gipsy? Death to her! death!”     53   
  “Thou seest plainly,” resumed the priest, “that they are in pursuit of thee and that I lie not. Oh, I love thee. Nay, speak not, open not thy lips, if it be to tell me that thou hatest me. I am resolved not to hear that again. I have just saved thee. Let me finish what I have to say. I can save thee altogether; I have prepared everything. It remains for thee to desire it. As thou wilt, so I can do.”     54   
  He interrupted himself vehemently. “No, that is not what I should have said!”     55   
  With a hurried step, and making her hasten too, for he had retained his grasp of her arm, he walked straight to the gibbet, and pointing to it:     56   
  “Choose between us,” he said coldly.     57   
  She wrenched herself from his grasp and fell at the foot of the gibbet, clasping her arms round that grim pillar; and, half turning her beautiful head, gazed at the priest over her shoulder. It might have been a Madonna at the foot of the Cross. The priest had remained transfixed, his finger pointing to the gibbet, motionless as a statue.     58   
  At last the gipsy spoke: “This is less abhorrent to me than you are.”     59   
  He let his arm drop slowly, and bent his eyes upon the ground in deepest dejection. “If these stones could speak,” he murmured, “they would say, ‘Here is, indeed, a most unhappy man!”’     60   
  “I love you,” he resumed, and the girl still kneeling at the gibbet, her long hair falling around her, let him speak without interrupting him. His tones were plaintive now and gentle, contrasting sadly with the harsh disdain stamped upon his features. “Yes, in spite of all, ’tis perfectly true. Is there then nothing to show for this fire that consumes my heart! Alas! night and day—yes, girl, night and day—does that deserve no pity? ’Tis a love of the night and the day, I tell you—’tis torture! Oh! my torment is too great, my poor child. ’Tis a thing worthy of compassion, I do protest to you. You see, I speak in all gentleness. I would fain have you cease to abhor me. Look you, when a man loves a woman, it is not his fault! Oh, my God! What! will you then never forgive me? will you hate me ever thus? And is this the end? That is what makes me wicked, look you, and horrible to myself. You will not even look at me. You are, may-be, thinking of something else while I stand here talking to you, and we both are trembling on the brink of eternity! But above all things, speak not to me of that soldier! What! I might fling myself at your knees, I might kiss, not your feet—for that you will not have, but the ground under your feet! I might sob like a child, might tear from my breast, not words, but my very heart, to tell you that I love you—and all would be in vain—all! And yet, there is nothing in your soul but what is tender and merciful. Loving kindness beams from you; you are all goodness and sweetness, full of pity and grace. Alas! your harshness is for me alone. Oh, bitter fate!”     61   
  He buried his face in his hands. The girl could hear him weeping; it was the first time. Standing thus, and shaken by sobs, he made a more wretched and suppliant figure even than on his knees. He wept on for a while.     62   
  “Enough,” he said presently, the first violence of his emotion spent. “I find no words. And yet I had well pondered what I would say to you. And now I tremble and shiver, I grow faint-hearted at the decisive moment. I feel that something transcendent wraps us round, and my tongue falters. Oh, I shall fall to the ground if you will not take pity on me, pity on yourself! Condemn us not both to perdition. Didst thou but know how much I love thee!—what a heart is mine! the desertion of all virtue, the abandonment of myself! A doctor, I mock at science; a gentleman, I tarnish my name; a priest, I make of my missal a pillow of wantonness—I spit in the face of my Redeemer! And all for thee, enchantress; to be more worthy of thy hell! And yet thou rejectest the damned! Oh, let me tell thee all—more than this, something still more horrible, more horrible——!”     63   
  With these last words his manner became utterly distraught. He was silent a moment, then, in a stern voice and as if addressing himself:     64   
  “Cain!” he cried, “what has thou done with thy brother?”     65   
  There was a pause, and then he began again. “What have I done with him, Lord? I took him, I reared him, I nourished him, loved him, idolized him, and—I killed him! Yes, Lord, before my very eyes they dashed his head against the stones of thy house; and it was because of me, because of this woman, because of her——”     66   
  Madness gleamed from his sunken eyes; his voice dropped away; two or three times he repeated mechanically, and with long pauses between, like the last prolonged vibrations of the strokes of a bell, “Because of her—because of her——” At last, though his lips still moved, no articulate sound came from them, then suddenly he felt in a heap like a house crumbling to pieces, and remained motionless on the ground, his head on his knees.     67   
  A faint movement of the girl, drawing away her foot from under him, brought him to himself. He slowly swept his hand over his haggard cheeks, and gazed for some moments at his fingers, surprised to find them wet. “What,” he murmured, “have I been weeping?”     68   
  He turned suddenly upon the gipsy with nameless anguish.     69   
  “Woe is me! thou canst see me weep unmoved! Child, knowest thou that such tears are molten lava? Is it then indeed true, that in the man we hate nothing can melt us? Thou wouldst see me die and wouldst laugh. Oh, I cannot see thee die! One word, one single word of kindness! I ask not that thou shouldst say thou lovest me; tell me only that thou art willing I should save thee. That will suffice: I will save thee in return for that. If not—oh, time flies! I entreat thee, by all that is sacred, wait not till I turn to stone again like this gibbet, that yearns for thee also! Remember that I hold both our destinies in my hand; that I am frenzied—it is terrible—that I may let everything go, and that there lies beneath us, unhappy girl, a bottomless pit wherein my fall will follow thine to all eternity! One word of kindness! Say one word! but one word!”     70   
  Her lips parted to answer him. He flung himself on his knees before her to receive with adoration the words, perchance of relenting, that should fall from them.     71   
  “You are an assassin!” she said.     72   
  The priest clasped her furiously in his arms and burst into a hideous laugh.     73   
  “Good, then; yes, an assassin!” he cried, “and I will have thee. Thou wilt not have me for a slave; thou shalt have me for thy master. I will take my prey; I have a den whither I will drag thee. Thou shalt follow me; thou must follow me, or I will deliver thee up! Thou must die, my fair one, or be mine! belong to me, the priest, the apostate, the murderer! and this very night, hearest thou? Come! kiss me, little fool! The grave or my bed!”     74   
  His eyes flashed with rage and lust. Froth stood on the lascivious lips that covered the girl’s neck with frenzied kisses. She struggled fiercely in his arms.     75   
  “Bite me not, monster!” she shrieked. “Oh, the hateful, venomous monk! Let me go, or I tear out thy vile gray hairs and fling them in handfuls in thy face!”     76   
  He turned red, then white, then loosed his hold on her with a darkling look. Thinking herself victorious, she went on: “I tell thee I belong to my Phœbus; that it is Phœbus I love; Phœbus, who is fair to look upon. Thou, priest, art old, thou art frightful. Get thee gone!”     77   
  He uttered a sudden scream, like some poor wretch under the branding-iron. “Die, then!” said he, grinding his teeth. She caught his terrible look and turned to fly; but he seized her, shook her, threw her on the ground, and walked rapidly towards the corner of the Tour-Roland, dragging her after him along the pavement by her little hands.     78   
  Arrived at the corner of the Place, he turned round to her. “For the last time, wilt thou be mine?”     79   
  “No!”     80   
  The next moment, “Gudule! Gudule!” he cried in a loud voice, “here is the gipsy! take thy revenge!”     81   
  The girl felt herself suddenly seized by the arm. She looked up, a skeleton arm was stretched through the window in the wall and was holding her in a grip of iron.     82   
  “Hold her fast!” said the priest. “It is the Egyptian woman escaped. Do not let her go; I go to fetch the sergeants. Thou shalt see her hang.”     83   
  A guttural laugh from the other side of the wall made answer to these bloodthirsty words. The gipsy saw the priest hurry away towards the Pont Notre Dame, from which direction came the clatter of horses’ hoofs.     84   
  The girl had recognised the evil-minded recluse. Panting with terror, she strove to free herself. In vain she writhed and turned in agony and despair, the other held her with incredible strength. The lean bony fingers that clutched her were clenched and met round her flesh—that hand seemed rivetted to her arm. It was more than a chain, more than an iron ring: it was a pair of pincers endowed with life and understanding, issuing from a wall.     85   
  Exhausted at last, she fell against the wall, and the fear of death came upon her. She thought of all that made life desirable—of youth, the sight of the sky, all the varying aspects of nature, of love and Phœbus, of all that was going from her and all that was approaching, of the priest who was even now betraying her, of the executioner he would bring, of the gibbet standing ready. Terror mounted even to the roots of her hair, and she heard the sinister laugh of the recluse as she hissed at her: “Ha! ha! thou art going to be hanged!”     86   
  She turned her fading eyes towards the window and saw the wolfish face of the sachette glaring at her through the bars.     87   
  “What have I done to you?” she gasped, almost past speaking.     88   
  The recluse made no answer, but fell to muttering in a sing-song, rasping, mocking tone: “Daughter of Egypt! daughter of Egypt! daughter of Egypt!”     89   
  The unfortunate Esmeralda let her head droop on her breast, understanding that this was no human being.     90   
  Suddenly, as if the gipsy’s question had taken all this time to reach her apprehension, the recluse exclaimed:     91   
  “What hast thou done to me, sayest thou? Ah, what hast thou done to me, gipsy! Well, listen. I had a child—I—hearest thou?—I had a child—a child, I tell thee! The fairest little daughter! My Agnes—” and she paused and kissed something distractedly in the gloom. “Well, seest thou, daughter of Egypt, they took my child from me; they stole my child! That is what thou hast done to me!”     92   
  To which the poor girl answered, like the lamb in the fable: “Alas! perhaps I was not born then!”     93   
  “Oh, yes,” rejoined the recluse, “thou must have been born then. Thou wert one of them. She would be about thy age—thou seest therefore! For fifteen years have I been here; fifteen years have I suffered; fifteen years have I been smiting my head against these four walls. I tell thee that they were gipsy women that stole her from me—dost thou hear?—and that devoured her with their teeth. Hast thou a heart? Picture to thyself a child playing, sucking, sleeping—so sweet, so innocent! Well, that—all that—was what they stole from me, what they killed! The God in heaven knows it! To-day it is my turn; I shall eat of the Egyptian! Oh, that these bars were not so close, that I might bite thee! But my head is too big. The poor, pretty thing! while she slept! And if they did wake her as they took her away, she might scream as she would; I was not there! Ah, you gipsy mothers that ate my child, come hither now and look at yours!” And she laughed again and ground her teeth—the two actions were alike in that frenzied countenance.     94   
  Day was beginning to dawn. As the wan gray light spread gradually over the scene, the gibbet was growing more and more distinct in the centre of the Place. On the other side, in the direction of the Pont Notre Dame, the poor girl thought she heard the sound of cavalry approaching.     95   
  “Madame!” she cried, clasping her hands and falling on her knees, dishevelled, wild, frantic with terror; “Madame! have pity! They are coming. I never harmed you: will you see me die in this horrible manner before your very eyes? You have pity for me, I am sure. It is too dreadful. Let me fly; leave go of me, for pity’s sake! I cannot die like that!”     96   
  “Give me back my child!” said the recluse.     97   
  “Mercy! mercy!”     98   
  “Give me back my child!”     99   
  “Let me go, in Heaven’s name!”    100   
  “Give me back my child!”