Notre-Dame de Paris

Also known as:

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

by 

Victor Hugo

 
 
PREFACE.
 
A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about
Notre-Dame, the author of this book found, in an obscure
nook of one of the towers, the following word, engraved by
hand upon the wall:--
 
       ~ANArKH~.
 
 
These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply
graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar
to Gothic caligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon
their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that
it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed
them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning
contained in them, struck the author deeply.
 
He questioned himself; he sought to divine who could have
been that soul in torment which had not been willing to quit
this world without leaving this stigma of crime or unhappiness
upon the brow of the ancient church.
 
Afterwards, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down, I
know not which, and the inscription disappeared.  For it is
thus that people have been in the habit of proceeding with
the marvellous churches of the Middle Ages for the last two
hundred years.  Mutilations come to them from every quarter,
from within as well as from without.  The priest whitewashes
them, the archdeacon scrapes them down; then the
populace arrives and demolishes them.
 
Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory which the
author of this book here consecrates to it, there remains
to-day nothing whatever of the mysterious word engraved
within the gloomy tower of Notre-Dame,--nothing of the
destiny which it so sadly summed up.   The man who wrote
that word upon the wall disappeared from the midst of the
generations of man many centuries ago; the word, in its turn,
has been effaced from the wall of the church; the church
will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the
earth.
 
It is upon this word that this book is founded.
 
March, 1831.
 
 
 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
 
VOLUME I.
BOOK FIRST.
I.    The Grand Hall
II.   Pierre Gringoire
III.  Monsieur the Cardinal
IV.   Master Jacques Coppenole
V.    Quasimodo
VI.   Esmeralda
BOOK SECOND.
I.    From Charybdis to Scylla
II.   The Place de Gr?e
III.  Kisses for Blows
IV.   The Inconveniences of Following a Pretty Woman through
        the Streets in the Evening
V.    Result of the Dangers
VI.   The Broken Jug
VII.  A Bridal Night
BOOK THIRD.
I.    Notre-Dame
II.   A Bird's-eye View of Paris
BOOK FOURTH.
I.    Good Souls
II.   Claude Frollo
III.  Immanis Pecoris Custos, Immanior Ipse
IV.   The Dog and his Master
V.    More about Claude Frollo
VI.   Unpopularity
BOOK FIFTH.
I.    Abbas Beati Martini
II.   This will Kill That
BOOK SIXTH.
I.    An Impartial Glance at the Ancient Magistracy
II.   The Rat-hole
III.  History of a Leavened Cake of Maize
IV.   A Tear for a Drop of Water
V.    End of the Story of the Cake
 
VOLUME II.
BOOK SEVENTH.
I.    The Danger of Confiding One's Secret to a Goat
II.   A Priest and a Philosopher are two Different Things
III.  The Bells
IV.   ~ANArKH~
V.    The Two Men Clothed in Black
VI.   The Effect which Seven Oaths in the Open Air can Produce
VII.  The Mysterious Monk
VIII. The Utility of Windows which Open on the River
BOOK EIGHTH.
I.    The Crown Changed into a Dry Leaf
II.   Continuation of the Crown which was Changed into a Dry Leaf
III.  End of the Crown which was Changed into a Dry Leaf
IV.   ~Lasciate Ogni Speranza~--Leave all hope behind, ye who Enter here
V.    The Mother
VI.   Three Human Hearts differently Constructed
BOOK NINTH.
I.    Delirium
II.   Hunchbacked, One Eyed, Lame
III.  Deaf
IV.   Earthenware and Crystal
V.    The Key to the Red Door
VI.   Continuation of the Key to the Red Door
BOOK TENTH.
I.    Gringoire has Many Good Ideas in Succession.--Rue des Bernardins
II.   Turn Vagabond
III.  Long Live Mirth
IV.   An Awkward Friend
V.    The Retreat in which Monsieur Louis of France says his Prayers
VI.   Little Sword in Pocket
VII.  Chateaupers to the Rescue
BOOK ELEVENTH.
I.    The Little Shoe
II.   The Beautiful Creature Clad in White
III.  The Marriage of Pinnbus
IV.   The Marriage of Quasimodo
      Note added to Definitive Edition
 
 
 
VOLUME I.
 
 
BOOK FIRST.
 
 
CHAPTER 1. THE GRAND HALL.
 
Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen
days ago to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all
the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and
the town ringing a full peal.
 
The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which
history has preserved the memory.  There was nothing notable
in the event which thus set the bells and the bourgeois
of Paris in a ferment from early morning.  It was neither an
assault by the Picards nor the Burgundians, nor a hunt led
along in procession, nor a revolt of scholars in the town of
Laas, nor an entry of "our much dread lord, monsieur the
king," nor even a pretty hanging of male and female thieves
by the courts of Paris.  Neither was it the arrival, so frequent
in the fifteenth century, of some plumed and bedizened embassy.
It was barely two days since the last cavalcade of
that nature, that of the Flemish ambassadors charged with
concluding the marriage between the dauphin and Marguerite
of Flanders, had made its entry into Paris, to the great annoyance
of M. le Cardinal de Bourbon, who, for the sake of pleasing the
king, had been obliged to assume an amiable mien
towards this whole rustic rabble of Flemish burgomasters, and
to regale them at his H?el de Bourbon, with a very "pretty
morality, allegorical satire, and farce," while a driving rain
drenched the magnificent tapestries at his door.
 
What put the "whole population of Paris in commotion," as
Jehan de Troyes expresses it, on the sixth of January, was
the double solemnity, united from time immemorial, of the
Epiphany and the Feast of Fools.
 
On that day, there was to be a bonfire on the Place de
Gr?e, a maypole at the Chapelle de Braque, and a mystery at
the Palais de Justice.  It had been cried, to the sound of the
trumpet, the preceding evening at all the cross roads, by the
provost's men, clad in handsome, short, sleeveless coats of
violet camelot, with large white crosses upon their breasts.
 
So the crowd of citizens, male and female, having closed
their houses and shops, thronged from every direction, at
early morn, towards some one of the three spots designated.
 
Each had made his choice; one, the bonfire; another, the
maypole; another, the mystery play.  It must be stated, in
honor of the good sense of the loungers of Paris, that the
greater part of this crowd directed their steps towards the
bonfire, which was quite in season, or towards the mystery
play, which was to be presented in the grand hall of the
Palais de Justice (the courts of law), which was well roofed
and walled; and that the curious left the poor, scantily flowered
maypole to shiver all alone beneath the sky of January,
in the cemetery of the Chapel of Braque.
 
The populace thronged the avenues of the law courts in
particular, because they knew that the Flemish ambassadors,
who had arrived two days previously, intended to be present
at the representation of the mystery, and at the election of
the Pope of the Fools, which was also to take place in the
grand hall.
 
It was no easy matter on that day, to force one's way into
that grand hall, although it was then reputed to be the largest
covered enclosure in the world (it is true that Sauval had not
yet measured the grand hall of the Ch?eau of Montargis).
The palace place, encumbered with people, offered to the
curious gazers at the windows the aspect of a sea; into which
five or six streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged
every moment fresh floods of heads.  The waves of this
crowd, augmented incessantly, dashed against the angles of
the houses which projected here and there, like so many
promontories, into the irregular basin of the place.  In the
centre of the lofty Gothic* fa?de of the palace, the grand
staircase, incessantly ascended and descended by a double
current, which, after parting on the intermediate landing-place,
flowed in broad waves along its lateral slopes,--the grand
staircase, I say, trickled incessantly into the place, like a
cascade into a lake.  The cries, the laughter, the trampling
of those thousands of feet, produced a great noise and a great
clamor.  From time to time, this noise and clamor redoubled;
the current which drove the crowd towards the grand staircase
flowed backwards, became troubled, formed whirlpools.
This was produced by the buffet of an archer, or the horse of
one of the provost's sergeants, which kicked to restore order;
an admirable tradition which the provostship has bequeathed
to the constablery, the constablery to the ~mar?hauss?~, the
~mar?hauss?~ to our ~gendarmeri~ of Paris.
 
 
*  The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally employed,
is wholly unsuitable, but wholly consecrated.  Hence we accept it
and we adopt it, like all the rest of the world, to characterize
the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, where the
ogive is the principle which succeeds the architecture of the first
period, of which the semi-circle is the father.
 
 
Thousands of good, calm, bourgeois faces thronged the windows,
the doors, the dormer windows, the roofs, gazing at the
palace, gazing at the populace, and asking nothing more; for
many Parisians content themselves with the spectacle of the
spectators, and a wall behind which something is going on
becomes at once, for us, a very curious thing indeed.
 
If it could be granted to us, the men of 1830, to mingle in
thought with those Parisians of the fifteenth century, and to
enter with them, jostled, elbowed, pulled about, into that
immense hall of the palace, which was so cramped on that
sixth of January, 1482, the spectacle would not be devoid of
either interest or charm, and we should have about us only
things that were so old that they would seem new.
 
With the reader's consent, we will endeavor to retrace in
thought, the impression which he would have experienced in
company with us on crossing the threshold of that grand hall,
in the midst of that tumultuous crowd in surcoats, short,
sleeveless jackets, and doublets.
 
And, first of all, there is a buzzing in the ears, a dazzlement
in the eyes.  Above our heads is a double ogive vault, panelled
with wood carving, painted azure, and sown with golden
fleurs-de-lis; beneath our feet a pavement of black and white
marble, alternating.  A few paces distant, an enormous pillar,
then another, then another; seven pillars in all, down the
length of the hall, sustaining the spring of the arches of the
double vault, in the centre of its width.  Around four of
the pillars, stalls of merchants, all sparkling with glass and
tinsel; around the last three, benches of oak, worn and polished
by the trunk hose of the litigants, and the robes of the
attorneys.  Around the hall, along the lofty wall, between the
doors, between the windows, between the pillars, the interminable
row of all the kings of France, from Pharamond down:
the lazy kings, with pendent arms and downcast eyes; the
valiant and combative kings, with heads and arms raised
boldly heavenward.  Then in the long, pointed windows,
glass of a thousand hues; at the wide entrances to the hall,
rich doors, finely sculptured; and all, the vaults, pillars,
walls, jambs, panelling, doors, statues, covered from top to
bottom with a splendid blue and gold illumination, which, a
trifle tarnished at the epoch when we behold it, had almost
entirely disappeared beneath dust and spiders in the year of
grace, 1549, when du Breul still admired it from tradition.
 
Let the reader picture to himself now, this immense, oblong
hall, illuminated by the pallid light of a January day, invaded
by a motley and noisy throng which drifts along the walls,
and eddies round the seven pillars, and he will have a confused
idea of the whole effect of the picture, whose curious
details we shall make an effort to indicate with more precision.
 
It is certain, that if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henri
IV., there would have been no documents in the trial of
Ravaillac deposited in the clerk's office of the Palais de Justice,
no accomplices interested in causing the said documents
to disappear; hence, no incendiaries obliged, for lack of better
means, to burn the clerk's office in order to burn the documents,
and to burn the Palais de Justice in order to burn the
clerk's office; consequently, in short, no conflagration in 1618.
The old Palais would be standing still, with its ancient grand
hall; I should be able to say to the reader, "Go and look at
it," and we should thus both escape the necessity,--I of
making, and he of reading, a description of it, such as it is.
Which demonstrates a new truth: that great events have
incalculable results.
 
It is true that it may be quite possible, in the first place,
that Ravaillac had no accomplices; and in the second, that if
he had any, they were in no way connected with the fire of
1618.  Two other very plausible explanations exist: First,
the great flaming star, a foot broad, and a cubit high, which
fell from heaven, as every one knows, upon the law courts,
after midnight on the seventh of March; second, Th?phile's
quatrain,--
 
 
    "Sure, 'twas but a sorry game
    When at Paris, Dame Justice,
    Through having eaten too much spice,
    Set the palace all aflame."
 
 
Whatever may be thought of this triple explanation, political,
physical, and poetical, of the burning of the law courts in
1618, the unfortunate fact of the fire is certain.  Very little
to-day remains, thanks to this catastrophe,--thanks, above
all, to the successive restorations which have completed what
it spared,--very little remains of that first dwelling of the
kings of France,--of that elder palace of the Louvre, already
so old in the time of Philip the Handsome, that they sought
there for the traces of the magnificent buildings erected by
King Robert and described by Helgaldus.  Nearly everything
has disappeared.  What has become of the chamber of the
chancellery, where Saint Louis consummated his marriage?
the garden where he administered justice, "clad in a coat of
camelot, a surcoat of linsey-woolsey, without sleeves, and a
sur-mantle of black sandal, as he lay upon the carpet with
Joinville?"  Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismond?
and that of Charles IV.? that of Jean the Landless?
Where is the staircase, from which Charles VI. promulgated
his edict of pardon? the slab where Marcel cut the throats of
Robert de Clermont and the Marshal of Champagne, in the
presence of the dauphin? the wicket where the bulls of
Pope Benedict were torn, and whence those who had brought
them departed decked out, in derision, in copes and mitres,
and making an apology through all Paris? and the grand
hall, with its gilding, its azure, its statues, its pointed arches,
its pillars, its immense vault, all fretted with carvings? and
the gilded chamber? and the stone lion, which stood at the
door, with lowered head and tail between his legs, like the
lions on the throne of Solomon, in the humiliated attitude
which befits force in the presence of justice? and the beautiful
doors? and the stained glass? and the chased ironwork,
which drove Biscornette to despair? and the delicate woodwork
of Hancy?  What has time, what have men done with
these marvels?  What have they given us in return for all
this Gallic history, for all this Gothic art?  The heavy flattened
arches of M. de Brosse, that awkward architect of the
Saint-Gervais portal.  So much for art; and, as for history,
we have the gossiping reminiscences of the great pillar, still
ringing with the tattle of the Patru.
 
It is not much.  Let us return to the veritable grand hall
of the veritable old palace.  The two extremities of this
gigantic parallelogram were occupied, the one by the famous
marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick that, as the
ancient land rolls--in a style that would have given Gargantua
an appetite--say, "such a slice of marble as was never
beheld in the world"; the other by the chapel where Louis XI.
had himself sculptured on his knees before the Virgin, and
whither he caused to be brought, without heeding the two
gaps thus made in the row of royal statues, the statues of
Charlemagne and of Saint Louis, two saints whom he supposed
to be great in favor in heaven, as kings of France.
This chapel, quite new, having been built only six years, was
entirely in that charming taste of delicate architecture, of
marvellous sculpture, of fine and deep chasing, which marks
with us the end of the Gothic era, and which is perpetuated
to about the middle of the sixteenth century in the fairylike
fancies of the Renaissance.  The little open-work rose window,
pierced above the portal, was, in particular, a masterpiece
of lightness and grace; one would have pronounced it a
star of lace.
 
In the middle of the hall, opposite the great door, a platform
of gold brocade, placed against the wall, a special
entrance to which had been effected through a window in
the corridor of the gold chamber, had been erected for the
Flemish emissaries and the other great personages invited to
the presentation of the mystery play.
 
It was upon the marble table that the mystery was to be
enacted, as usual.  It had been arranged for the purpose,
early in the morning; its rich slabs of marble, all scratched
by the heels of law clerks, supported a cage of carpenter's
work of considerable height, the upper surface of which,
within view of the whole hall, was to serve as the theatre,
and whose interior, masked by tapestries, was to take the
place of dressing-rooms for the personages of the piece.  A
ladder, naively placed on the outside, was to serve as means
of communication between the dressing-room and the stage,
and lend its rude rungs to entrances as well as to exits.
There was no personage, however unexpected, no sudden
change, no theatrical effect, which was not obliged to mount
that ladder.  Innocent and venerable infancy of art and
contrivances!
 
Four of the bailiff of the palace's sergeants, perfunctory
guardians of all the pleasures of the people, on days of festival
as well as on days of execution, stood at the four corners
of the marble table.
 
The piece was only to begin with the twelfth stroke of the
great palace clock sounding midday.  It was very late, no
doubt, for a theatrical representation, but they had been
obliged to fix the hour to suit the convenience of the ambassadors.
 
Now, this whole multitude had been waiting since morning.
A goodly number of curious, good people had been shivering
since daybreak before the grand staircase of the palace;
some even affirmed that they had passed the night across
the threshold of the great door, in order to make sure that
they should be the first to pass in.  The crowd grew more
dense every moment, and, like water, which rises above its
normal level, began to mount along the walls, to swell around
the pillars, to spread out on the entablatures, on the cornices,
on the window-sills, on all the salient points of the architecture,
on all the reliefs of the sculpture.  Hence, discomfort,
impatience, weariness, the liberty of a day of cynicism and
folly, the quarrels which break forth for all sorts of causes--a
pointed elbow, an iron-shod shoe, the fatigue of long waiting--had
already, long before the hour appointed for the
arrival of the ambassadors, imparted a harsh and bitter
accent to the clamor of these people who were shut in, fitted
into each other, pressed, trampled upon, stifled.  Nothing
was to be heard but imprecations on the Flemish, the provost
of the merchants, the Cardinal de Bourbon, the bailiff of the
courts, Madame Marguerite of Austria, the sergeants with
their rods, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Bishop
of Paris, the Pope of the Fools, the pillars, the statues, that
closed door, that open window; all to the vast amusement of
a band of scholars and lackeys scattered through the mass,
who mingled with all this discontent their teasing remarks,
and their malicious suggestions, and pricked the general bad
temper with a pin, so to speak.
 
Among the rest there was a group of those merry imps, who,
after smashing the glass in a window, had seated themselves
hardily on the entablature, and from that point despatched
their gaze and their railleries both within and without,
upon the throng in the hall, and the throng upon the Place.
It was easy to see, from their parodied gestures, their
ringing laughter, the bantering appeals which they exchanged
with their comrades, from one end of the hall to the other,
that these young clerks did not share the weariness and
fatigue of the rest of the spectators, and that they understood
very well the art of extracting, for their own private diversion
from that which they had under their eyes, a spectacle
which made them await the other with patience.
 
"Upon my soul, so it's you, 'Joannes Frollo de Molendino!'"
cried one of them, to a sort of little, light-haired
imp, with a well-favored and malign countenance, clinging to
the acanthus leaves of a capital; "you are well named John
of the Mill, for your two arms and your two legs have the air
of four wings fluttering on the breeze.  How long have you
been here?"
 
"By the mercy of the devil," retorted Joannes Frollo,
"these four hours and more; and I hope that they will be
reckoned to my credit in purgatory.  I heard the eight singers
of the King of Sicily intone the first verse of seven o'clock
mass in the Sainte-Chapelle."
 
"Fine singers!" replied the other, "with voices even more
pointed than their caps!  Before founding a mass for Monsieur
Saint John, the king should have inquired whether
Monsieur Saint John likes Latin droned out in a Proven?l
accent."
 
"He did it for the sake of employing those accursed singers
of the King of Sicily!" cried an old woman sharply from
among the crowd beneath the window.  "I just put it to
you!  A thousand ~livres parisi~ for a mass! and out of the tax
on sea fish in the markets of Paris, to boot!"
 
"Peace, old crone," said a tall, grave person, stopping up
his nose on the side towards the fishwife; "a mass had to be
founded.  Would you wish the king to fall ill again?"
 
"Bravely spoken, Sire Gilles Lecornu, master furrier of
king's robes!" cried the little student, clinging to the
capital.
 
A shout of laughter from all the students greeted the
unlucky name of the poor furrier of the king's robes.
 
"Lecornu!  Gilles Lecornu!" said some.
 
"~Cornutus et hirsutus~, horned and hairy," another went on.
 
"He! of course," continued the small imp on the capital,
"What are they laughing at?  An honorable man is Gilles
Lecornu, brother of Master Jehan Lecornu, provost of the
king's house, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, first porter of
the Bois de Vincennes,--all bourgeois of Paris, all married,
from father to son."
 
The gayety redoubled.  The big furrier, without uttering a
word in reply, tried to escape all the eyes riveted upon him
from all sides; but he perspired and panted in vain; like a
wedge entering the wood, his efforts served only to bury still
more deeply in the shoulders of his neighbors, his large,
apoplectic face, purple with spite and rage.
 
At length one of these, as fat, short, and venerable as
himself, came to his rescue.
 
"Abomination! scholars addressing a bourgeois in that
fashion in my day would have been flogged with a fagot,
which would have afterwards been used to burn them."
 
The whole band burst into laughter.
 
"Hol?h? who is scolding so?  Who is that screech owl of
evil fortune?"
 
"Hold, I know him" said one of them; "'tis Master
Andry Musnier."
 
"Because he is one of the four sworn booksellers of the
university!" said the other.
 
"Everything goes by fours in that shop," cried a third;
"the four nations, the four faculties, the four feasts, the four
procurators, the four electors, the four booksellers."
 
"Well," began Jean Frollo once more," we must play the
devil with them."*
 
 
*  ~Faire le diable a quatre~.
 
 
"Musnier, we'll burn your books."
 
"Musnier, we'll beat your lackeys."
 
"Musnier, we'll kiss your wife."
 
"That fine, big Mademoiselle Oudarde."
 
"Who is as fresh and as gay as though she were a widow."
 
"Devil take you!" growled Master Andry Musnier.
 
"Master Andry," pursued Jean Jehan, still clinging to his
capital, "hold your tongue, or I'll drop on your head!"
 
Master Andry raised his eyes, seemed to measure in an
instant the height of the pillar, the weight of the scamp,
mentally multiplied that weight by the square of the velocity
and remained silent.
 
Jehan, master of the field of battle, pursued triumphantly:
 
"That's what I'll do, even if I am the brother of an archdeacon!"
 
"Fine gentry are our people of the university, not to have
caused our privileges to be respected on such a day as this!
However, there is a maypole and a bonfire in the town; a
mystery, Pope of the Fools, and Flemish ambassadors in the
city; and, at the university, nothing!"
 
"Nevertheless, the Place Maubert is sufficiently large!"
interposed one of the clerks established on the window-sill.
 
"Down with the rector, the electors, and the procurators!"
cried Joannes.
 
"We must have a bonfire this evening in the Champ-Gaillard,"
went on the other, "made of Master Andry's books."
 
"And the desks of the scribes!" added his neighbor.
 
"And the beadles' wands!"
 
"And the spittoons of the deans!"
 
"And the cupboards of the procurators!"
 
"And the hutches of the electors!"
 
"And the stools of the rector!"
 
"Down with them!" put in little Jehan, as counterpoint;
"down with Master Andry, the beadles and the scribes; the
theologians, the doctors and the decretists; the procurators,
the electors and the rector!"
 
"The end of the world has come!,' muttered Master Andry,
stopping up his ears.
 
"By the way, there's the rector! see, he is passing through
the Place," cried one of those in the window.
 
Each rivalled his neighbor in his haste to turn towards the
Place.
 
"Is it really our venerable rector, Master Thibaut?" demanded
Jehan Frollo du Moulin, who, as he was clinging to
one of the inner pillars, could not see what was going on outside.
 
"Yes, yes," replied all the others, "it is really he, Master
Thibaut, the rector."
 
It was, in fact, the rector and all the dignitaries of the
university, who were marching in procession in front of the
embassy, and at that moment traversing the Place.  The students
crowded into the window, saluted them as they passed
with sarcasms and ironical applause.  The rector, who was
walking at the head of his company, had to support the first
broadside; it was severe.
 
"Good day, monsieur le recteur!  Hol?h? good day there!"
 
"How does he manage to be here, the old gambler?  Has
he abandoned his dice?"
 
"How he trots along on his mule! her ears are not so long
as his!"
 
"Hol?h? good day, monsieur le recteur Thibaut!  ~Tybalde
aleator~!  Old fool! old gambler!"
 
"God preserve you!  Did you throw double six often last
night?"
 
"Oh! what a decrepit face, livid and haggard and drawn
with the love of gambling and of dice!"
 
"Where are you bound for in that fashion, Thibaut, ~Tybalde
ad dados~, with your back turned to the university, and trotting
towards the town?"
 
"He is on his way, no doubt, to seek a lodging in the Rue
Thibautod?"* cried Jehan du M. Moulin.
 
 
*  ~Thibaut au des~,--Thibaut of the dice.
 
 
The entire band repeated this quip in a voice of thunder,
clapping their hands furiously.
 
"You are going to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautod?
are you not, monsieur le recteur, gamester on the side of the
devil?"
 
Then came the turns of the other dignitaries.
 
"Down with the beadles! down with the mace-bearers!"
 
"Tell me, Robin Pouissepain, who is that yonder?"
 
"He is Gilbert de Suilly, ~Gilbertus de Soliaco~, the chancellor
of the College of Autun."
 
"Hold on, here's my shoe; you are better placed than I,
fling it in his face."
 
"~Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces~."
 
"Down with the six theologians, with their white surplices!"
 
"Are those the theologians?  I thought they were the
white geese given by Sainte-Genevi?e to the city, for the
fief of Roogny."
 
"Down with the doctors!"
 
"Down with the cardinal disputations, and quibblers!"
 
"My cap to you, Chancellor of Sainte-Genevi?e!  You
have done me a wrong.  'Tis true; he gave my place in the
nation of Normandy to little Ascanio Falzapada, who comes
from the province of Bourges, since he is an Italian."
 
"That is an injustice," said all the scholars.  "Down with
the Chancellor of Sainte-Genevi?e!"
 
"Ho h?  Master Joachim de Ladehors!  Ho h?  Louis
Dahuille!  Ho he Lambert Hoctement!"
 
"May the devil stifle the procurator of the German nation!"
 
"And the chaplains of the Sainte-Chapelle, with their gray
~amices; cum tunices grisis~!"
 
"~Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis~!"
 
"Hol?h?  Masters of Arts!  All the beautiful black copes!
all the fine red copes!"
 
"They make a fine tail for the rector."
 
"One would say that he was a Doge of Venice on his way
to his bridal with the sea."
 
"Say, Jehan! here are the canons of Sainte-Genevi?e!"
 
"To the deuce with the whole set of canons!"
 
"Abb?Claude Choart!  Doctor Claude Choart!  Are you in
search of Marie la Giffarde?"
 
"She is in the Rue de Glatigny."
 
"She is making the bed of the king of the debauchees."
She is paying her four deniers* ~quatuor denarios~."
 
 
*  An old French coin, equal to the two hundred and
fortieth part of a pound.
 
 
"~Aut unum bombum~."
 
"Would you like to have her pay you in the face?"
 
"Comrades!  Master Simon Sanguin, the Elector of Picardy,
with his wife on the crupper!"
 
"~Post equitem seclet atra eura~--behind the horseman sits
black care."
 
"Courage, Master Simon!"
 
"Good day, Mister Elector!"
 
"Good night, Madame Electress!"
 
"How happy they are to see all that!" sighed Joannes de
Molendino, still perched in the foliage of his capital.
 
Meanwhile, the sworn bookseller of the university, Master
Andry Musnier, was inclining his ear to the furrier of the
king's robes, Master Gilles Lecornu.
 
"I tell you, sir, that the end of the world has come.  No
one has ever beheld such outbreaks among the students!  It is
the accursed inventions of this century that are ruining
everything,--artilleries, bombards, and, above all, printing,
that other German pest.  No more manuscripts, no more
books! printing will kill bookselling.  It is the end of the
world that is drawing nigh."
 
"I see that plainly, from the progress of velvet stuffs,"
said the fur-merchant.
 
At this moment, midday sounded.
 
"Ha!" exclaimed the entire crowd, in one voice.
 
The scholars held their peace.  Then a great hurly-burly
ensued; a vast movement of feet, hands, and heads; a general
outbreak of coughs and handkerchiefs; each one arranged
himself, assumed his post, raised himself up, and grouped
himself.  Then came a great silence; all necks remained
outstretched, all mouths remained open, all glances were
directed towards the marble table.  Nothing made its appearance
there.  The bailiff's four sergeants were still there, stiff,
motionless, as painted statues.  All eyes turned to the estrade
reserved for the Flemish envoys.  The door remained closed,
the platform empty.  This crowd had been waiting since daybreak
for three things: noonday, the embassy from Flanders, the
mystery play.  Noonday alone had arrived on time.
 
On this occasion, it was too much.
 
They waited one, two, three, five minutes, a quarter of an
hour; nothing came.  The dais remained empty, the theatre
dumb.  In the meantime, wrath had succeeded to impatience.
Irritated words circulated in a low tone, still, it is true.
"The mystery! the mystery!" they murmured, in hollow
voices.  Heads began to ferment.  A tempest, which was
only rumbling in the distance as yet, was floating on the
surface of this crowd.  It was Jehan du Moulin who struck
the first spark from it.
 
"The mystery, and to the devil with the Flemings!" he
exclaimed at the full force of his lungs, twining like a serpent
around his pillar.
 
The crowd clapped their hands.
 
"The mystery!" it repeated, "and may all the devils take
Flanders!"
 
"We must have the mystery instantly," resumed the student;
"or else, my advice is that we should hang the bailiff
of the courts, by way of a morality and a comedy."
 
"Well said," cried the people, "and let us begin the hanging
with his sergeants."
 
A grand acclamation followed.  The four poor fellows
began to turn pale, and to exchange glances.  The crowd
hurled itself towards them, and they already beheld the
frail wooden railing, which separated them from it, giving
way and bending before the pressure of the throng.
 
It was a critical moment.
 
"To the sack, to the sack!" rose the cry on all sides.
 
At that moment, the tapestry of the dressing-room, which
we have described above, was raised, and afforded passage to a
personage, the mere sight of whom suddenly stopped the crowd,
and changed its wrath into curiosity as by enchantment.
 
"Silence! silence!"
 
The personage, but little reassured, and trembling in every
limb, advanced to the edge of the marble table with a vast
amount of bows, which, in proportion as he drew nearer, more
and more resembled genuflections.
 
In the meanwhile, tranquillity had gradually been restored.
A1l that remained was that slight murmur which always rises
above the silence of a crowd.
 
"Messieurs the bourgeois," said he, "and mesdemoiselles
the ~bourgeoises~, we shall have the honor of declaiming and
representing, before his eminence, monsieur the cardinal, a
very beautiful morality which has for its title, 'The Good
Judgment of Madame the Virgin Mary.'  I am to play Jupiter.
His eminence is, at this moment, escorting the very
honorable embassy of the Duke of Austria; which is detained,
at present, listening to the harangue of monsieur the
rector of the university, at the gate Baudets.  As soon as his
illustrious eminence, the cardinal, arrives, we will begin."
 
It is certain, that nothing less than the intervention of
Jupiter was required to save the four unfortunate sergeants
of the bailiff of the courts.  If we had the happiness of having
invented this very veracious tale, and of being, in consequence,
responsible for it before our Lady Criticism, it is not against
us that the classic precept, ~Nec deus intersit~, could be invoked.
Moreover, the costume of Seigneur Jupiter, was very handsome,
and contributed not a little towards calming the crowd, by
attracting all its attention.  Jupiter was clad in a coat of
mail, covered with black velvet, with gilt nails; and had it
not been for the rouge, and the huge red beard, each of which
covered one-half of his face,--had it not been for the roll of
gilded cardboard, spangled, and all bristling with strips of
tinsel, which he held in his hand, and in which the eyes
of the initiated easily recognized thunderbolts,--had not his
feet been flesh-colored, and banded with ribbons in Greek
fashion, he might have borne comparison, so far as the severity
of his mien was concerned, with a Breton archer from
the guard of Monsieur de Berry.
 
 
 
CHAPTER II. PIERRE GRINGOIRE.
 
Nevertheless, as be harangued them, the satisfaction and
admiration unanimously excited by his costume were dissipated
by his words; and when he reached that untoward conclusion:
"As soon as his illustrious eminence, the cardinal,
arrives, we will begin," his voice was drowned in a thunder
of hooting.
 
"Begin instantly!  The mystery! the mystery immediately!"
shrieked the people.  And above all the voices, that
of Johannes de Molendino was audible, piercing the uproar
like the fife's derisive serenade: "Commence instantly!"
yelped the scholar.
 
"Down with Jupiter and the Cardinal de Bourbon!" vociferated
Robin Poussepain and the other clerks perched in the window.
 
"The morality this very instant!" repeated the crowd;
"this very instant! the sack and the rope for the comedians,
and the cardinal!"
 
Poor Jupiter, haggard, frightened, pale beneath his rouge,
dropped his thunderbolt, took his cap in his hand; then he
bowed and trembled and stammered: "His eminence--the
ambassadors--Madame Marguerite of Flanders--."  He did not
know what to say.  In truth, he was afraid of being hung.
 
Hung by the populace for waiting, hung by the cardinal for
not having waited, he saw between the two dilemmas only an
abyss; that is to say, a gallows.
 
Luckily, some one came to rescue him from his embarrassment,
and assume the responsibility.
 
An individual who was standing beyond the railing, in the
free space around the marble table, and whom no one had yet
caught sight of, since his long, thin body was completely sheltered
from every visual ray by the diameter of the pillar
against which he was leaning; this individual, we say, tall,
gaunt, pallid, blond, still young, although already wrinkled
about the brow and cheeks, with brilliant eyes and a smiling
mouth, clad in garments of black serge, worn and shining
with age, approached the marble table, and made a sign to the
poor sufferer.  But the other was so confused that he did not
see him.  The new comer advanced another step.
 
"Jupiter," said he, "my dear Jupiter!"
 
The other did not hear.
 
At last, the tall blond, driven out of patience, shrieked
almost in his face,--
 
"Michel Giborne!"
 
"Who calls me?" said Jupiter, as though awakened with a start.
 
"I," replied the person clad in black.
 
"Ah!" said Jupiter.
 
"Begin at once," went on the other.  "Satisfy the populace;
I undertake to appease the bailiff, who will appease monsieur
the cardinal."
 
Jupiter breathed once more.
 
"Messeigneurs the bourgeois," he cried, at the top of his
lungs to the crowd, which continued to hoot him, "we are
going to begin at once."
 
"~Evoe Jupiter!  Plaudite cives~!  All hail, Jupiter!  Applaud,
citizens!" shouted the scholars.
 
"Noel!  Noel! good, good," shouted the people.
 
The hand clapping was deafening, and Jupiter had already
withdrawn under his tapestry, while the hall still trembled
with acclamations.
 
In the meanwhile, the personage who had so magically
turned the tempest into dead calm, as our old and dear Corneille
puts it, had modestly retreated to the half-shadow of
his pillar, and would, no doubt, have remained invisible there,
motionless, and mute as before, had he not been plucked by
the sleeve by two young women, who, standing in the front
row of the spectators, had noticed his colloquy with Michel
Giborne-Jupiter.
 
"Master," said one of them, making him a sign to approach.
"Hold your tongue, my dear Li?arde," said her neighbor,
pretty, fresh, and very brave, in consequence of being dressed
up in her best attire.  "He is not a clerk, he is a layman;
you must not say master to him, but messire."
 
"Messire," said Li?arde.
 
The stranger approached the railing.
 
"What would you have of me, damsels?" he asked, with alacrity.
 
"Oh! nothing," replied Li?arde, in great confusion; "it
is my neighbor, Gisquette la Gencienne, who wishes to speak
with you."
 
"Not so," replied Gisquette, blushing; "it was Li?arde
who called you master; I only told her to say messire."
 
The two young girls dropped their eyes.  The man, who
asked nothing better than to enter into conversation, looked
at them with a smile.
 
"So you have nothing to say to me, damsels?"
 
"Oh! nothing at all," replied Gisquette.
 
"Nothing," said Li?arde.
 
The tall, light-haired young man retreated a step; but the
two curious maidens had no mind to let slip their prize.
 
"Messire," said Gisquette, with the impetuosity of an
open sluice, or of a woman who has made up her mind,
"do you know that soldier who is to play the part of Madame
the Virgin in the mystery?"
 
"You mean the part of Jupiter?" replied the stranger.
 
"H? yes," said Li?arde, "isn't she stupid?  So you know
Jupiter?"
 
"Michel Giborne?" replied the unknown; "yes, madam."
 
"He has a fine beard!" said Li?arde.
 
"Will what they are about to say here be fine?" inquired
Gisquette, timidly.
 
"Very fine, mademoiselle," replied the unknown, without
the slightest hesitation.
 
"What is it to be?" said Li?arde.
 
"'The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin,'--a morality,
if you please, damsel."
 
"Ah! that makes a difference," responded Li?arde.
 
A brief silence ensued--broken by the stranger.
 
"It is a perfectly new morality, and one which has never
yet been played."
 
"Then it is not the same one," said Gisquette, "that was
given two years ago, on the day of the entrance of monsieur
the legate, and where three handsome maids played the
parts--"
 
"Of sirens," said Li?arde.
 
"And all naked," added the young man.
 
Li?arde lowered her eyes modestly.  Gisquette glanced at
her and did the same.  He continued, with a smile,--
 
"It was a very pleasant thing to see.  To-day it is a morality
made expressly for Madame the Demoiselle of Flanders."
 
"Will they sing shepherd songs?" inquired Gisquette.
 
"Fie!" said the stranger, "in a morality? you must not
confound styles.  If it were a farce, well and good."
 
"That is a pity," resumed Gisquette.  "That day, at the
Ponceau Fountain, there were wild men and women, who
fought and assumed many aspects, as they sang little motets
and bergerettes."
 
"That which is suitable for a legate," returned the stranger,
with a good deal of dryness, "is not suitable for a princess."
 
"And beside them," resumed Li?arde, "played many brass
instruments, making great melodies."
 
"And for the refreshment of the passers-by," continued
Gisquette, "the fountain spouted through three mouths,
wine, milk, and hippocrass, of which every one drank who
wished."
 
"And a little below the Ponceau, at the Trinity," pursued
Li?arde, "there was a passion performed, and without
any speaking."
 
"How well I remember that!" exclaimed Gisquette; "God
on the cross, and the two thieves on the right and the left."
Here the young gossips, growing warm at the memory of
the entrance of monsieur the legate, both began to talk at
once.
 
"And, further on, at the Painters' Gate, there were other
personages, very richly clad."
 
"And at the fountain of Saint-Innocent, that huntsman,
who was chasing a hind with great clamor of dogs and hunting-horns."
 
"And, at the Paris slaughter-houses, stages, representing
the fortress of Dieppe!"
 
"And when the legate passed, you remember, Gisquette?
they made the assault, and the English all had their
throats cut."
 
"And against the gate of the Ch?elet, there were very fine
personages!"
 
"And on the Port au Change, which was all draped above!"
 
"And when the legate passed, they let fly on the bridge
more than two hundred sorts of birds; wasn't it beautiful,
Li?arde?"
 
"It will be better to-day," finally resumed their interlocutor,
who seemed to listen to them with impatience.
 
"Do you promise us that this mystery will be fine?" said
Gisquette.
 
"Without doubt," he replied; then he added, with a certain
emphasis,--"I am the author of it, damsels."
 
"Truly?" said the young girls, quite taken aback.
 
"Truly!" replied the poet, bridling a little; "that is, to
say, there are two of us; Jehan Marchand, who has sawed the
planks and erected the framework of the theatre and the
woodwork; and I, who have made the piece.  My name is
Pierre Gringoire."
 
The author of the "Cid" could not have said "Pierre Corneille"
with more pride.
 
Our readers have been able to observe, that a certain
amount of time must have already elapsed from the moment
when Jupiter had retired beneath the tapestry to the instant
when the author of the new morality had thus abruptly
revealed himself to the innocent admiration of Gisquette
and Li?arde.  Remarkable fact: that whole crowd, so
tumultuous but a few moments before, now waited amiably
on the word of the comedian; which proves the eternal truth,
still experienced every day in our theatres, that the best
means of making the public wait patiently is to assure them
that one is about to begin instantly.
 
However, scholar Johannes had not fallen asleep.
 
"Hol?h?" he shouted suddenly, in the midst of the peaceable
waiting which had followed the tumult.  "Jupiter, Madame the
Virgin, buffoons of the devil! are you jeering at us?
The piece! the piece! commence or we will commence again!"
 
This was all that was needed.
 
The music of high and low instruments immediately became
audible from the interior of the stage; the tapestry was
raised; four personages, in motley attire and painted faces,
emerged from it, climbed the steep ladder of the theatre, and,
arrived upon the upper platform, arranged themselves in a
line before the public, whom they saluted with profound reverences;
then the symphony ceased.
 
The mystery was about to begin.
 
The four personages, after having reaped a rich reward
of applause for their reverences, began, in the midst of
profound silence, a prologue, which we gladly spare the
reader.  Moreover, as happens in our own day, the public
was more occupied with the costumes that the actors wore
than with the roles that they were enacting; and, in truth,
they were right.  All four were dressed in parti-colored robes
of yellow and white, which were distinguished from each other
only by the nature of the stuff; the first was of gold and silver
brocade; the second, of silk; the third, of wool; the fourth,
of linen.  The first of these personages carried in his right
hand a sword; the second, two golden keys; the third, a pair
of scales; the fourth, a spade: and, in order to aid sluggish
minds which would not have seen clearly through the transparency
of these attributes, there was to be read, in large,
black letters, on the hem of the robe of brocade, MY NAME
IS NOBILITY; on the hem of the silken robe, MY NAME IS
CLERGY; on the hem of the woolen robe, MY NAME IS MERCHANDISE;
on the hem of the linen robe, MY NAME IS LABOR.
The sex of the two male characters was briefly indicated to
every judicious spectator, by their shorter robes, and by the
cap which they wore on their heads; while the two female
characters, less briefly clad, were covered with hoods.
 
Much ill-will would also have been required, not to
comprehend, through the medium of the poetry of the prologue, that
Labor was wedded to Merchandise, and Clergy to Nobility,
and that the two happy couples possessed in common a magnificent
golden dolphin, which they desired to adjudge to the
fairest only.  So they were roaming about the world seeking
and searching for this beauty, and, after having successively
rejected the Queen of Golconda, the Princess of Trebizonde,
the daughter of the Grand Khan of Tartary, etc., Labor and
Clergy, Nobility and Merchandise, had come to rest upon the
marble table of the Palais de Justice, and to utter, in the
presence of the honest audience, as many sentences and
maxims as could then be dispensed at the Faculty of Arts,
at examinations, sophisms, determinances, figures, and acts,
where the masters took their degrees.
 
All this was, in fact, very fine.
 
Nevertheless, in that throng, upon which the four allegories
vied with each other in pouring out floods of metaphors,
there was no ear more attentive, no heart that palpitated
more, not an eye was more haggard, no neck more outstretched,
than the eye, the ear, the neck, and the heart of
the author, of the poet, of that brave Pierre Gringoire, who
had not been able to resist, a moment before, the joy of telling
his name to two pretty girls.  He had retreated a few
paces from them, behind his pillar, and there he listened,
looked, enjoyed.  The amiable applause which had greeted the
beginning of his prologue was still echoing in his bosom,
and he was completely absorbed in that species of ecstatic
contemplation with which an author beholds his ideas fall,
one by one, from the mouth of the actor into the vast silence
of the audience.  Worthy Pierre Gringoire!
 
It pains us to say it, but this first ecstasy was speedily
disturbed.  Hardly had Gringoire raised this intoxicating cup of
joy and triumph to his lips, when a drop of bitterness was
mingled with it.
 
A tattered mendicant, who could not collect any coins, lost
as he was in the midst of the crowd, and who had not probably
found sufficient indemnity in the pockets of his neighbors,
had hit upon the idea of perching himself upon some conspicuous
point, in order to attract looks and alms.  He had,
accordingly, hoisted himself, during the first verses of the
prologue, with the aid of the pillars of the reserve gallery, to
the cornice which ran round the balustrade at its lower edge;
and there he had seated himself, soliciting the attention and
the pity of the multitude, with his rags and a hideous sore
which covered his right arm.  However, he uttered not a word.
 
The silence which he preserved allowed the prologue to
proceed without hindrance, and no perceptible disorder would
have ensued, if ill-luck had not willed that the scholar Joannes
should catch sight, from the heights of his pillar, of the
mendicant and his grimaces.  A wild fit of laughter took
possession of the young scamp, who, without caring that he
was interrupting the spectacle, and disturbing the universal
composure, shouted boldly,--
 
"Look! see that sickly creature asking alms!"
 
Any one who has thrown a stone into a frog pond, or fired a
shot into a covey of birds, can form an idea of the effect produced
by these incongruous words, in the midst of the general
attention.  It made Gringoire shudder as though it had been
an electric shock.  The prologue stopped short, and all heads
turned tumultuously towards the beggar, who, far from being
disconcerted by this, saw, in this incident, a good opportunity
for reaping his harvest, and who began to whine in
a doleful way, half closing his eyes the while,--"Charity,
please!"
 
"Well--upon my soul," resumed Joannes, "it's Clopin
Trouillefou!  Hol?he, my friend, did your sore bother you
on the leg, that you have transferred it to your arm?"
So saying, with the dexterity of a monkey, he flung a bit of
silver into the gray felt hat which the beggar held in his
ailing arm.  The mendicant received both the alms and the sarcasm
without wincing, and continued, in lamentable tones,--
 
"Charity, please!"
 
This episode considerably distracted the attention of the
audience; and a goodly number of spectators, among them
Robin Poussepain, and all the clerks at their head, gayly
applauded this eccentric duet, which the scholar, with his
shrill voice, and the mendicant had just improvised in the
middle of the prologue.
 
Gringoire was highly displeased.  On recovering from his
first stupefaction, he bestirred himself to shout, to the four
personages on the stage, "Go on!  What the devil!--go on!"
--without even deigning to cast a glance of disdain upon the
two interrupters.
 
At that moment, he felt some one pluck at the hem of his
surtout; he turned round, and not without ill-humor, and
found considerable difficulty in smiling; but he was obliged
to do so, nevertheless.  It was the pretty arm of Gisquette la
Gencienne, which, passed through the railing, was soliciting
his attention in this manner.
 
"Monsieur," said the young girl, "are they going to continue?"
 
"Of course," replied Gringoire, a good deal shocked by the
question.
 
"In that case, messire," she resumed, "would you have the
courtesy to explain to me--"
 
"What they are about to say?" interrupted Gringoire.
"Well, listen."
 
"No," said Gisquette, "but what they have said so far."
 
Gringoire started, like a man whose wound has been probed
to the quick.
 
"A plague on the stupid and dull-witted little girl!" he
muttered, between his teeth.
 
From that moment forth, Gisquette was nothing to him.
 
In the meantime, the actors had obeyed his injunction, and
the public, seeing that they were beginning to speak again,
began once more to listen, not without having lost many
beauties in the sort of soldered joint which was formed
between the two portions of the piece thus abruptly cut
short.  Gringoire commented on it bitterly to himself.
Nevertheless, tranquillity was gradually restored, the scholar held
his peace, the mendicant counted over some coins in his hat,
and the piece resumed the upper hand.
 
It was, in fact, a very fine work, and one which, as it seems
to us, might be put to use to-day, by the aid of a little
rearrangement.  The exposition, rather long and rather empty,
that is to say, according to the rules, was simple; and Gringoire,
in the candid sanctuary of his own conscience, admired
its clearness.  As the reader may surmise, the four allegorical
personages were somewhat weary with having traversed the
three sections of the world, without having found suitable
opportunity for getting rid of their golden dolphin.  Thereupon
a eulogy of the marvellous fish, with a thousand delicate
allusions to the young betrothed of Marguerite of Flanders,
then sadly cloistered in at Amboise, and without a suspicion
that Labor and Clergy, Nobility and Merchandise had just
made the circuit of the world in his behalf.  The said dauphin
was then young, was handsome, was stout, and, above
all (magnificent origin of all royal virtues), he was the son of
the Lion of France.  I declare that this bold metaphor is
admirable, and that the natural history of the theatre, on a
day of allegory and royal marriage songs, is not in the least
startled by a dolphin who is the son of a lion.  It is precisely
these rare and Pindaric mixtures which prove the poet's enthusiasm.  Nevertheless, in order to play the part of critic also,
the poet might have developed this beautiful idea in something
less than two hundred lines.  It is true that the mystery
was to last from noon until four o'clock, in accordance
with the orders of monsieur the provost, and that it was
necessary to say something.  Besides, the people listened
patiently.
 
All at once, in the very middle of a quarrel between Mademoiselle
Merchandise and Madame Nobility, at the moment when Monsieur Labor
was giving utterance to this wonderful line,--
 
    In forest ne'er was seen a more triumphant beast;
 
the door of the reserved gallery which had hitherto remained
so inopportunely closed, opened still more inopportunely; and
the ringing voice of the usher announced abruptly, "His
eminence, Monseigneur the Cardinal de Bourbon."
 
 
 
CHAPTER III. MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL.
 
Poor Gringoire! the din of all the great double petards of
the Saint-Jean, the discharge of twenty arquebuses on
supports, the detonation of that famous serpentine of the Tower
of Billy, which, during the siege of Paris, on Sunday, the
twenty-sixth of September, 1465, killed seven Burgundians at
one blow, the explosion of all the powder stored at the gate
of the Temple, would have rent his ears less rudely at that
solemn and dramatic moment, than these few words, which
fell from the lips of the usher, "His eminence, Monseigneur
the Cardinal de Bourbon."
 
It is not that Pierre Gringoire either feared or disdained
monsieur the cardinal.  He had neither the weakness nor the
audacity for that.  A true eclectic, as it would be expressed
nowadays, Gringoire was one of those firm and lofty, moderate
and calm spirits, which always know how to bear themselves
amid all circumstances (~stare in dimidio rerum~), and who
are full of reason and of liberal philosophy, while still setting
store by cardinals.  A rare, precious, and never interrupted
race of philosophers to whom wisdom, like another
Ariadne, seems to have given a clew of thread which they
have been walking along unwinding since the beginning of
the world, through the labyrinth of human affairs.  One finds
them in all ages, ever the same; that is to say, always according
to all times.  And, without reckoning our Pierre Gringoire,
who may represent them in the fifteenth century if we
succeed in bestowing upon him the distinction which he
deserves, it certainly was their spirit which animated Father
du Breul, when he wrote, in the sixteenth, these naively sublime
words, worthy of all centuries: "I am a Parisian by
nation, and a Parrhisian in language, for ~parrhisia~ in Greek
signifies liberty of speech; of which I have made use even
towards messeigneurs the cardinals, uncle and brother to
Monsieur the Prince de Conty, always with respect to their
greatness, and without offending any one of their suite, which
is much to say."
 
There was then neither hatred for the cardinal, nor disdain
for his presence, in the disagreeable impression produced
upon Pierre Gringoire.  Quite the contrary; our poet had
too much good sense and too threadbare a coat, not to
attach particular importance to having the numerous allusions
in his prologue, and, in particular, the glorification of the
dauphin, son of the Lion of France, fall upon the most eminent
ear.  But it is not interest which predominates in the noble
nature of poets.  I suppose that the entity of the poet may
be represented by the number ten; it is certain that a chemist
on analyzing and pharmacopolizing it, as Rabelais says, would
find it composed of one part interest to nine parts of
self-esteem.
 
Now, at the moment when the door had opened to admit
the cardinal, the nine parts of self-esteem in Gringoire,
swollen and expanded by the breath of popular admiration,
were in a state of prodigious augmentation, beneath which
disappeared, as though stifled, that imperceptible molecule of
which we have just remarked upon in the constitution of
poets; a precious ingredient, by the way, a ballast of
reality and humanity, without which they would not touch
the earth.  Gringoire enjoyed seeing, feeling, fingering, so to
speak an entire assembly (of knaves, it is true, but what matters
that ?) stupefied, petrified, and as though asphyxiated in
the presence of the incommensurable tirades which welled up
every instant from all parts of his bridal song.  I affirm that
he shared the general beatitude, and that, quite the reverse of
La Fontaine, who, at the presentation of his comedy of the
"Florentine," asked, "Who is the ill-bred lout who made
that rhapsody?" Gringoire would gladly have inquired of his
neighbor, "Whose masterpiece is this?"
 
The reader can now judge of the effect produced upon him
by the abrupt and unseasonable arrival of the cardinal.
 
That which he had to fear was only too fully realized.
The entrance of his eminence upset the audience.  All heads
turned towards the gallery.  It was no longer possible to
hear one's self.  "The cardinal!  The cardinal!" repeated
all mouths.  The unhappy prologue stopped short for the
second time.
 
The cardinal halted for a moment on the threshold of
the estrade.  While he was sending a rather indifferent
glance around the audience, the tumult redoubled.  Each
person wished to get a better view of him.  Each man vied
with the other in thrusting his head over his neighbor's
shoulder.
 
He was, in fact, an exalted personage, the sight of whom was
well worth any other comedy.  Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon,
Archbishop and Comte of Lyon, Primate of the Gauls, was
allied both to Louis XI., through his brother, Pierre, Seigneur
de Beaujeu, who had married the king's eldest daughter, and
to Charles the Bold through his mother, Agnes of Burgundy.
Now, the dominating trait, the peculiar and distinctive trait
of the character of the Primate of the Gauls, was the spirit
of the courtier, and devotion to the powers that be.  The
reader can form an idea of the numberless embarrassments
which this double relationship had caused him, and of all
the temporal reefs among which his spiritual bark had been
forced to tack, in order not to suffer shipwreck on either
Louis or Charles, that Scylla and that Charybdis which had
devoured the Duc de Nemours and the Constable de Saint-Pol.
Thanks to Heaven's mercy, he had made the voyage
successfully, and had reached home without hindrance.  But
although he was in port, and precisely because he was in
port, he never recalled without disquiet the varied haps of
his political career, so long uneasy and laborious.  Thus, he
was in the habit of saying that the year 1476 had been
"white and black" for him--meaning thereby, that in the
course of that year he had lost his mother, the Duchesse de
la Bourbonnais, and his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, and
that one grief had consoled him for the other.
 
Nevertheless, he was a fine man; he led a joyous cardinal's
life, liked to enliven himself with the royal vintage of Challuau,
did not hate Richarde la Garmoise and Thomasse la
Saillarde, bestowed alms on pretty girls rather than on old
women,--and for all these reasons was very agreeable to the
populace of Paris.  He never went about otherwise than surrounded
by a small court of bishops and abb? of high lineage,
gallant, jovial, and given to carousing on occasion; and more
than once the good and devout women of Saint Germain
d' Auxerre, when passing at night beneath the brightly illuminated
windows of Bourbon, had been scandalized to hear the
same voices which had intoned vespers for them during the
day carolling, to the clinking of glasses, the bacchic proverb of
Benedict XII., that pope who had added a third crown to the
Tiara--~Bibamus papaliter~.
 
It was this justly acquired popularity, no doubt, which preserved
him on his entrance from any bad reception at the
hands of the mob, which had been so displeased but a moment
before, and very little disposed to respect a cardinal on
the very day when it was to elect a pope.  But the Parisians
cherish little rancor; and then, having forced the beginning
of the play by their authority, the good bourgeois had got the
upper hand of the cardinal, and this triumph was sufficient
for them.  Moreover, the Cardinal de Bourbon was a handsome
man,--he wore a fine scarlet robe, which he carried off
very well,--that is to say, he had all the women on his side,
and, consequently, the best half of the audience.  Assuredly,
it would be injustice and bad taste to hoot a cardinal for having
come late to the spectacle, when he is a handsome man,
and when he wears his scarlet robe well.
 
He entered, then, bowed to those present with the hereditary
smile of the great for the people, and directed his course
slowly towards his scarlet velvet arm-chair, with the air of
thinking of something quite different.  His cortege--what
we should nowadays call his staff--of bishops and abb?
invaded the estrade in his train, not without causing redoubled
tumult and curiosity among the audience.  Each
man vied with his neighbor in pointing them out and naming
them, in seeing who should recognize at least one of them:
this one, the Bishop of Marseilles (Alaudet, if my memory
serves me right);--this one, the primicier of Saint-Denis;--this
one, Robert de Lespinasse, Abb?of Saint-Germain des
Pr?, that libertine brother of a mistress of Louis XI.; all
with many errors and absurdities.  As for the scholars, they
swore.  This was their day, their feast of fools, their saturnalia,
the annual orgy of the corporation of Law clerks and of
the school.  There was no turpitude which was not sacred on
that day.  And then there were gay gossips in the crowd--Simone
Quatrelivres, Agnes la Gadine, and Rabine Pi?ebou.
Was it not the least that one could do to swear at one's ease
and revile the name of God a little, on so fine a day, in such
good company as dignitaries of the church and loose women?
So they did not abstain; and, in the midst of the uproar, there
was a frightful concert of blasphemies and enormities of all
the unbridled tongues, the tongues of clerks and students
restrained during the rest of the year, by the fear of the hot
iron of Saint Louis.  Poor Saint Louis! how they set him at
defiance in his own court of law!  Each one of them selected
from the new-comers on the platform, a black, gray, white,
or violet cassock as his target.  Joannes Frollo de Molendin,
in his quality of brother to an archdeacon, boldly
attacked the scarlet; he sang in deafening tones, with his
impudent eyes fastened on the cardinal, "~Cappa repleta
mero~!"
 
All these details which we here lay bare for the edification
of the reader, were so covered by the general uproar, that
they were lost in it before reaching the reserved platforms;
moreover, they would have moved the cardinal but little, so
much a part of the customs were the liberties of that day.
Moreover, he had another cause for solicitude, and his mien
as wholly preoccupied with it, which entered the estrade
the same time as himself; this was the embassy from
Flanders.
 
Not that he was a profound politician, nor was he borrowing
trouble about the possible consequences of the marriage of
his cousin Marguerite de Bourgoyne to his cousin Charles,
Dauphin de Vienne; nor as to how long the good understanding
which had been patched up between the Duke of Austria
and the King of France would last; nor how the King of
England would take this disdain of his daughter.  All that
troubled him but little; and he gave a warm reception every
evening to the wine of the royal vintage of Chaillot, without
a suspicion that several flasks of that same wine (somewhat
revised and corrected, it is true, by Doctor Coictier), cordially
offered to Edward IV.  by Louis XI., would, some fine morning,
rid Louis XI. of Edward IV.  "The much honored embassy
of Monsieur the Duke of Austria," brought the cardinal
none of these cares, but it troubled him in another direction.
It was, in fact, somewhat hard, and we have already hinted
at it on the second page of this book,--for him, Charles de
Bourbon, to be obliged to feast and receive cordially no one
knows what bourgeois;--for him, a cardinal, to receive
aldermen;--for him, a Frenchman, and a jolly companion, to
receive Flemish beer-drinkers,--and that in public!  This
was, certainly, one of the most irksome grimaces that he had
ever executed for the good pleasure of the king.
 
So he turned toward the door, and with the best grace in
the world (so well had he trained himself to it), when the
usher announced, in a sonorous voice, "Messieurs the Envoys
of Monsieur the Duke of Austria."  It is useless to add that
the whole hall did the same.
 
Then arrived, two by two, with a gravity which made a
contrast in the midst of the frisky ecclesiastical escort of
Charles de Bourbon, the eight and forty ambassadors of Maximilian
of Austria, having at their head the reverend Father
in God, Jehan, Abbot of Saint-Bertin, Chancellor of the
Golden Fleece, and Jacques de Goy, Sieur Dauby, Grand Bailiff
of Ghent.  A deep silence settled over the assembly, accompanied
by stifled laughter at the preposterous names and all
the bourgeois designations which each of these personages
transmitted with imperturbable gravity to the usher, who then
tossed names and titles pell-mell and mutilated to the crowd
below.  There were Master Loys Roelof, alderman of the city
of Louvain; Messire Clays d'Etuelde, alderman of Brussels;
Messire Paul de Baeust, Sieur de Voirmizelle, President of
Flanders; Master Jehan Coleghens, burgomaster of the city
of Antwerp; Master George de la Moere, first alderman of the
kuere of the city of Ghent; Master Gheldolf van der Hage,
first alderman of the ~parchous~ of the said town; and the
Sieur de Bierbecque, and Jehan Pinnock, and Jehan Dymaerzelle,
etc., etc., etc.; bailiffs, aldermen, burgomasters; burgomasters,
aldermen, bailiffs--all stiff, affectedly grave, formal,
dressed out in velvet and damask, hooded with caps of black
velvet, with great tufts of Cyprus gold thread; good Flemish
heads, after all, severe and worthy faces, of the family which
Rembrandt makes to stand out so strong and grave from the
black background of his "Night Patrol "; personages all of
whom bore, written on their brows, that Maximilian of Austria
had done well in "trusting implicitly," as the manifest
ran, "in their sense, valor, experience, loyalty, and good
wisdom."
 
There was one exception, however.  It was a subtle, intelligent,
crafty-looking face, a sort of combined monkey and diplomat
phiz, before whom the cardinal made three steps and a
profound bow, and whose name, nevertheless, was only,
"Guillaume Rym, counsellor and pensioner of the City of
Ghent."
 
Few persons were then aware who Guillaume Rym was.  A
rare genius who in a time of revolution would have made a
brilliant appearance on the surface of events, but who in the
fifteenth century was reduced to cavernous intrigues, and to
"living in mines," as the Duc de Saint-Simon expresses it.
Nevertheless, he was appreciated by the "miner" of Europe;
he plotted familiarly with Louis XI., and often lent a hand to
the king's secret jobs.  All which things were quite unknown
to that throng, who were amazed at the cardinal's politeness
to that frail figure of a Flemish bailiff.
 
 
 
CHAPTER IV. MASTER JACQUES COPPENOLE.
 
While the pensioner of Ghent and his eminence were
exchanging very low bows and a few words in voices still
lower, a man of lofty stature, with a large face and broad
shoulders, presented himself, in order to enter abreast with
Guillaume Rym; one would have pronounced him a bull-dog
by the side of a fox.  His felt doublet and leather jerkin
made a spot on the velvet and silk which surrounded him.
Presuming that he was some groom who had stolen in, the
usher stopped him.
 
"Hold, my friend, you cannot pass!"
 
The man in the leather jerkin shouldered him aside.
 
"What does this knave want with me?" said he, in stentorian
tones, which rendered the entire hall attentive to this
strange colloquy.  "Don't you see that I am one of them?"
 
"Your name?" demanded the usher.
 
"Jacques Coppenole."
 
"Your titles?"
 
"Hosier at the sign of the 'Three Little Chains,' of Ghent."
 
The usher recoiled.  One might bring one's self to announce
aldermen and burgomasters, but a hosier was too much.  The
cardinal was on thorns.  All the people were staring and
listening.  For two days his eminence had been exerting his
utmost efforts to lick these Flemish bears into shape, and to
render them a little more presentable to the public, and this
freak was startling.  But Guillaume Rym, with his polished
smile, approached the usher.
 
"Announce Master Jacques Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen
of the city of Ghent," he whispered, very low.
 
"Usher," interposed the cardinal, aloud, "announce Master
Jacques Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen of the illustrious
city of Ghent."
 
This was a mistake.  Guillaume Rym alone might have
conjured away the difficulty, but Coppenole had heard the
cardinal.
 
"No, cross of God?" he exclaimed, in his voice of thunder,
"Jacques Coppenole, hosier.  Do you hear, usher?  Nothing
more, nothing less.  Cross of God! hosier; that's fine enough.
Monsieur the Archduke has more than once sought his ~gant~*
in my hose."
 
 
*  Got the first idea of a timing.
 
 
Laughter and applause burst forth.  A jest is always understood
in Paris, and, consequently, always applauded.
 
Let us add that Coppenole was of the people, and that the
auditors which surrounded him were also of the people.  Thus
the communication between him and them had been prompt,
electric, and, so to speak, on a level.  The haughty air of the
Flemish hosier, by humiliating the courtiers, had touched in
all these plebeian souls that latent sentiment of dignity still
vague and indistinct in the fifteenth century.
 
This hosier was an equal, who had just held his own before
monsieur the cardinal.  A very sweet reflection to poor fellows
habituated to respect and obedience towards the underlings
of the sergeants of the bailiff of Sainte-Genevi?e, the
cardinal's train-bearer.
 
Coppenole proudly saluted his eminence, who returned the
salute of the all-powerful bourgeois feared by Louis XI.
Then, while Guillaume Rym, a "sage and malicious man," as
Philippe de Comines puts it, watched them both with a smile
of raillery and superiority, each sought his place, the cardinal
quite abashed and troubled, Coppenole tranquil and haughty,
and thinking, no doubt, that his title of hosier was as good as
any other, after all, and that Marie of Burgundy, mother to
that Marguerite whom Coppenole was to-day bestowing in
marriage, would have been less afraid of the cardinal than of
the hosier; for it is not a cardinal who would have stirred up
a revolt among the men of Ghent against the favorites of the
daughter of Charles the Bold; it is not a cardinal who could
have fortified the populace with a word against her tears and
prayers, when the Maid of Flanders came to supplicate her
people in their behalf, even at the very foot of the scaffold;
while the hosier had only to raise his leather elbow, in order
to cause to fall your two heads, most illustrious seigneurs,
Guy d'Hymbercourt and Chancellor Guillaume Hugonet.
 
Nevertheless, all was over for the poor cardinal, and he was
obliged to quaff to the dregs the bitter cup of being in such
b ad company.
 
The reader has, probably, not forgotten the impudent beggar
who had been clinging fast to the fringes of the cardinal's
gallery ever since the beginning of the prologue.  The arrival
of the illustrious guests had by no means caused him to relax
his hold, and, while the prelates and ambassadors were packing
themselves into the stalls--like genuine Flemish herrings--he
settled himself at his ease, and boldly crossed his legs
on the architrave.  The insolence of this proceeding was
extraordinary, yet no one noticed it at first, the attention of
all being directed elsewhere.  He, on his side, perceived nothing
that was going on in the hall; he wagged his head with
the unconcern of a Neapolitan, repeating from time to time,
amid the clamor, as from a mechanical habit, "Charity,
please!"  And, assuredly, he was, out of all those present,
the only one who had not deigned to turn his head at the
altercation between Coppenole and the usher.  Now, chance
ordained that the master hosier of Ghent, with whom the
people were already in lively sympathy, and upon whom all
eyes were riveted--should come and seat himself in the front
row of the gallery, directly above the mendicant; and people
were not a little amazed to see the Flemish ambassador, on
concluding his inspection of the knave thus placed beneath
his eyes, bestow a friendly tap on that ragged shoulder.  The
beggar turned round; there was surprise, recognition, a lighting
up of the two countenances, and so forth; then, without
paying the slightest heed in the world to the spectators, the
hosier and the wretched being began to converse in a low
tone, holding each other's hands, in the meantime, while the
rags of Clopin Trouillefou, spread out upon the cloth of gold
of the dais, produced the effect of a caterpillar on an orange.
 
The novelty of this singular scene excited such a murmur
of mirth and gayety in the hall, that the cardinal was not
slow to perceive it; he half bent forward, and, as from the
point where he was placed he could catch only an imperfect
view of Trouillerfou's ignominious doublet, he very naturally
imagined that the mendicant was asking alms, and, disgusted
with his audacity, he exclaimed: "Bailiff of the Courts, toss
me that knave into the river!"
 
"Cross of God! monseigneur the cardinal," said Coppenole,
without quitting Clopin's hand, "he's a friend of mine."
 
"Good! good!" shouted the populace.  From that moment,
Master Coppenole enjoyed in Paris as in Ghent, "great favor
with the people; for men of that sort do enjoy it," says
Philippe de Comines, "when they are thus disorderly."
The cardinal bit his lips.  He bent towards his neighbor,
the Abb?of Saint Genevi?e, and said to him in a low
tone,--"Fine ambassadors monsieur the archduke sends here, to
announce to us Madame Marguerite!"
 
"Your eminence," replied the abb? "wastes your politeness
on these Flemish swine.  ~Margaritas ante porcos~, pearls
before swine."
 
"Say rather," retorted the cardinal, with a smile, "~Porcos
ante Margaritam~, swine before the pearl."
 
The whole little court in cassocks went into ecstacies over
this play upon words.  The cardinal felt a little relieved; he
was quits with Coppenole, he also had had his jest applauded.
 
Now, will those of our readers who possess the power of
generalizing an image or an idea, as the expression runs in
the style of to-day, permit us to ask them if they have formed
a very clear conception of the spectacle presented at this
moment, upon which we have arrested their attention, by the
vast parallelogram of the grand hall of the palace.
 
In the middle of the hall, backed against the western wall,
a large and magnificent gallery draped with cloth of gold, into
which enter in procession, through a small, arched door, grave
personages, announced successively by the shrill voice of an
usher.  On the front benches were already a number of venerable
figures, muffled in ermine, velvet, and scarlet.  Around
the dais--which remains silent and dignified--below, opposite,
everywhere, a great crowd and a great murmur.  Thousands
of glances directed by the people on each face upon the
dais, a thousand whispers over each name.  Certainly, the
spectacle is curious, and well deserves the attention of the
spectators.  But yonder, quite at the end, what is that sort
of trestle work with four motley puppets upon it, and more
below?  Who is that man beside the trestle, with a black
doublet and a pale face?  Alas! my dear reader, it is Pierre
Gringoire and his prologue.
 
We have all forgotten him completely.
 
This is precisely what he feared.
 
From the moment of the cardinal's entrance, Gringoire had
never ceased to tremble for the safety of his prologue.  At
first he had enjoined the actors, who had stopped in suspense,
to continue, and to raise their voices; then, perceiving that
no one was listening, he had stopped them; and, during the
entire quarter of an hour that the interruption lasted, he had
not ceased to stamp, to flounce about, to appeal to Gisquette
and Li?arde, and to urge his neighbors to the continuance
of the prologue; all in vain.  No one quitted the cardinal,
the embassy, and the gallery--sole centre of this vast circle
of visual rays.  We must also believe, and we say it with
regret, that the prologue had begun slightly to weary the
audience at the moment when his eminence had arrived,
and created a diversion in so terrible a fashion.  After all,
on the gallery as well as on the marble table, the spectacle
was the same: the conflict of Labor and Clergy, of Nobility
and Merchandise.  And many people preferred to see them
alive, breathing, moving, elbowing each other in flesh and
blood, in this Flemish embassy, in this Episcopal court,
under the cardinal's robe, under Coppenole's jerkin, than
painted, decked out, talking in verse, and, so to speak, stuffed
beneath the yellow amid white tunics in which Gringoire had
so ridiculously clothed them.
 
Nevertheless, when our poet beheld quiet reestablished
to some extent, he devised a stratagem which might have
redeemed all.
 
"Monsieur," he said, turning towards one of his neighbors,
a fine, big man, with a patient face, "suppose we begin
again."
 
"What?" said his neighbor.
 
"H? the Mystery," said Gringoire.
 
"As you like," returned his neighbor.
 
This semi-approbation sufficed for Gringoire, and, conducting
his own affairs, he began to shout, confounding himself
with the crowd as much as possible: "Begin the mystery
again! begin again!"
 
"The devil!" said Joannes de Molendino, "what are they
jabbering down yonder, at the end of the hall?" (for Gringoire
was making noise enough for four.)  "Say, comrades,
isn't that mystery finished?  They want to begin it all over
again.  That's not fair!"
 
"No, no!" shouted all the scholars.  "Down with the
mystery!  Down with it!"
 
But Gringoire had multiplied himself, and only shouted
the more vigorously: "Begin again! begin again!"
 
These clamors attracted the attention of the cardinal.
 
"Monsieur Bailiff of the Courts," said he to a tall, black
man, placed a few paces from him, "are those knaves in a
holy-water vessel, that they make such a hellish noise?"
 
The bailiff of the courts was a sort of amphibious magistrate,
a sort of bat of the judicial order, related to both the
rat and the bird, the judge and the soldier.
 
He approached his eminence, and not without a good deal
of fear of the latter's displeasure, he awkwardly explained to
him the seeming disrespect of the audience: that noonday
had arrived before his eminence, and that the comedians had
been forced to begin without waiting for his eminence.
 
The cardinal burst into a laugh.
 
"On my faith, the rector of the university ought to have
done the same.  What say you, Master Guillaume Rym?"
 
"Monseigneur," replied Guillaume Rym, "let us be content
with having escaped half of the comedy.  There is at least
that much gained."
 
"Can these rascals continue their farce?" asked the bailiff.
 
"Continue, continue," said the cardinal, "it's all the same
to me.  I'll read my breviary in the meantime."
 
The bailiff advanced to the edge of the estrade, and cried,
after having invoked silence by a wave of the hand,--
 
"Bourgeois, rustics, and citizens, in order to satisfy those
who wish the play to begin again, and those who wish it
to end, his eminence orders that it be continued."
 
Both parties were forced to resign themselves.  But the
public and the author long cherished a grudge against the
cardinal.
 
So the personages on the stage took up their parts, and
Gringoire hoped that the rest of his work, at least, would be
listened to.  This hope was speedily dispelled like his other
illusions; silence had indeed, been restored in the audience,
after a fashion; but Gringoire had not observed that at the
moment when the cardinal gave the order to continue, the
gallery was far from full, and that after the Flemish envoys
there had arrived new personages forming part of the cortege,
whose names and ranks, shouted out in the midst of his dialogue
by the intermittent cry of the usher, produced considerable
ravages in it.  Let the reader imagine the effect in the
midst of a theatrical piece, of the yelping of an usher, flinging
in between two rhymes, and often in the middle of a line,
parentheses like the following,--
 
"Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator to the king in the
Ecclesiastical Courts!"
 
"Jehan de Harlay, equerry guardian of the office of chevalier
of the night watch of the city of Paris!"
 
"Messire Galiot de Genoilhac, chevalier, seigneur de Brussac,
master of the king's artillery!"
 
"Master Dreux-Raguier, surveyor of the woods and forests
of the king our sovereign, in the land of France, Champagne
and Brie!"
 
"Messire Louis de Graville, chevalier, councillor, and
chamberlain of the king, admiral of France, keeper of the
Forest of Vincennes!"
 
"Master Denis le Mercier, guardian of the house of the
blind at Paris!" etc., etc., etc.
 
This was becoming unbearable.
 
This strange accompaniment, which rendered it difficult to
follow the piece, made Gringoire all the more indignant because
he could not conceal from himself the fact that the interest
was continually increasing, and that all his work required
was a chance of being heard.
 
It was, in fact, difficult to imagine a more ingenious and
more dramatic composition.  The four personages of the
prologue were bewailing themselves in their mortal embarrassment,
when Venus in person, (~vera incessa patuit dea~) presented
herself to them, clad in a fine robe bearing the heraldic
device of the ship of the city of Paris.  She had come herself
to claim the dolphin promised to the most beautiful.  Jupiter,
whose thunder could be heard rumbling in the dressing-room,
supported her claim, and Venus was on the point of carrying
it off,--that is to say, without allegory, of marrying monsieur
the dauphin, when a young child clad in white damask, and
holding in her hand a daisy (a transparent personification of
Mademoiselle Marguerite of Flanders) came to contest it with
Venus.
 
Theatrical effect and change.
 
After a dispute, Venus, Marguerite, and the assistants
agreed to submit to the good judgment of time holy Virgin.
There was another good part, that of the king of Mesopotamia;
but through so many interruptions, it was difficult to
make out what end he served.  All these persons had ascended
by the ladder to the stage.
 
But all was over; none of these beauties had been felt nor
understood.  On the entrance of the cardinal, one would have
said that an invisible magic thread had suddenly drawn all
glances from the marble table to the gallery, from the southern
to the western extremity of the hall.  Nothing could disenchant
the audience; all eyes remained fixed there, and the
new-comers and their accursed names, and their faces, and their
costumes, afforded a continual diversion.  This was very
distressing.  With the exception of Gisquette and Li?arde, who
turned round from time to time when Gringoire plucked them
by the sleeve; with the exception of the big, patient neighbor,
no one listened, no one looked at the poor, deserted morality
full face.  Gringoire saw only profiles.
 
With what bitterness did he behold his whole erection of
glory and of poetry crumble away bit by bit!  And to think
that these people had been upon the point of instituting a
revolt against the bailiff through impatience to hear his work!
now that they had it they did not care for it.  This same
representation which had been begun amid so unanimous an
acclamation!  Eternal flood and ebb of popular favor!  To
think that they had been on the point of hanging the bailiff's
sergeant!  What would he not have given to be still at that
hour of honey!
 
But the usher's brutal monologue came to an end; every
one had arrived, and Gringoire breathed freely once more;
the actors continued bravely.  But Master Coppenole, the
hosier, must needs rise of a sudden, and Gringoire was forced
to listen to him deliver, amid universal attention, the
following abominable harangue.
 
"Messieurs the bourgeois and squires of Paris, I don't
know, cross of God! what we are doing here.  I certainly do
see yonder in the corner on that stage, some people who appear
to be fighting.  I don't know whether that is what you
call a "mystery," but it is not amusing; they quarrel with their
tongues and nothing more.  I have been waiting for the first
blow this quarter of an hour; nothing comes; they are cowards
who only scratch each other with insults.  You ought to
send for the fighters of London or Rotterdam; and, I can tell
you! you would have had blows of the fist that could be
heard in the Place; but these men excite our pity.  They
ought at least, to give us a moorish dance, or some other
mummer!  That is not what was told me; I was promised a feast
of fools, with the election of a pope.  We have our pope of
fools at Ghent also; we're not behindhand in that, cross of
God!  But this is the way we manage it; we collect a crowd
like this one here, then each person in turn passes his head
through a hole, and makes a grimace at the rest; time one who
makes the ugliest, is elected pope by general acclamation;
that's the way it is.  It is very diverting.  Would you like to
make your pope after the fashion of my country?  At all
events, it will be less wearisome than to listen to chatterers.
If they wish to come and make their grimaces through the
hole, they can join the game.  What say you, Messieurs les
bourgeois?  You have here enough grotesque specimens of
both sexes, to allow of laughing in Flemish fashion, and there
are enough of us ugly in countenance to hope for a fine grinning
match."
 
Gringoire would have liked to retort; stupefaction, rage,
indignation, deprived him of words.  Moreover, the suggestion
of the popular hosier was received with such enthusiasm
by these bourgeois who were flattered at being called
"squires," that all resistance was useless.  There was nothing
to be done but to allow one's self to drift with the torrent.
Gringoire hid his face between his two hands, not being so
fortunate as to have a mantle with which to veil his head,
like Agamemnon of Timantis.
 
 
 
CHAPTER V. QUASIMODO.
 
In the twinkling of an eye, all was ready to execute Coppenole's
idea.  Bourgeois, scholars and law clerks all set to
work.  The little chapel situated opposite the marble table
was selected for the scene of the grinning match.  A pane
broken in the pretty rose window above the door, left free a
circle of stone through which it was agreed that the competitors
should thrust their heads.  In order to reach it, it was
only necessary to mount upon a couple of hogsheads, which
had been produced from I know not where, and perched one
upon the other, after a fashion.  It was settled that each
candidate, man or woman (for it was possible to choose a female
pope), should, for the sake of leaving the impression of his
grimace fresh and complete, cover his face and remain concealed
in the chapel until the moment of his appearance.  In less than
an instant, the chapel was crowded with competitors, upon whom
the door was then closed.
 
Coppenole, from his post, ordered all, directed all, arranged
all.  During the uproar, the cardinal, no less abashed than
Gringoire, had retired with all his suite, under the pretext of
business and vespers, without the crowd which his arrival had
so deeply stirred being in the least moved by his departure.
Guillaume Rym was the only one who noticed his eminence's
discomfiture.  The attention of the populace, like the sun,
pursued its revolution; having set out from one end of the
hall, and halted for a space in the middle, it had now reached
the other end.  The marble table, the brocaded gallery had each
had their day; it was now the turn of the chapel of Louis XI.
Henceforth, the field was open to all folly.  There was no one
there now, but the Flemings and the rabble.
 
The grimaces began.  The first face which appeared at the
aperture, with eyelids turned up to the reds, a mouth open
like a maw, and a brow wrinkled like our hussar boots of the
Empire, evoked such an inextinguishable peal of laughter
that Homer would have taken all these louts for gods.
Nevertheless, the grand hall was anything but Olympus, and
Gringoire's poor Jupiter knew it better than any one else.  A
second and third grimace followed, then another and another;
and the laughter and transports of delight went on increasing.
There was in this spectacle, a peculiar power of intoxication
and fascination, of which it would be difficult to convey to the
reader of our day and our salons any idea.
 
Let the reader picture to himself a series of visages presenting
successively all geometrical forms, from the triangle
to the trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; all human
expressions, from wrath to lewdness; all ages, from the
wrinkles of the new-born babe to the wrinkles of the aged
and dying; all religious phantasmagories, from Faun to Beelzebub;
all animal profiles, from the maw to the beak, from
the jowl to the muzzle.  Let the reader imagine all these
grotesque figures of the Pont Neuf, those nightmares petrified
beneath the hand of Germain Pilon, assuming life and breath,
and coming in turn to stare you in the face with burning
eyes; all the masks of the Carnival of Venice passing in succession
before your glass,--in a word, a human kaleidoscope.
 
The orgy grew more and more Flemish.  Teniers could have
given but a very imperfect idea of it.  Let the reader picture
to himself in bacchanal form, Salvator Rosa's battle.  There
were no longer either scholars or ambassadors or bourgeois or
men or women; there was no longer any Clopin Trouillefou,
nor Gilles Lecornu, nor Marie Quatrelivres, nor Robin Poussepain.
All was universal license.  The grand hall was no
longer anything but a vast furnace of effrontry and joviality,
where every mouth was a cry, every individual a posture;
everything shouted and howled.  The strange visages which
came, in turn, to gnash their teeth in the rose window, were
like so many brands cast into the brazier; and from the whole
of this effervescing crowd, there escaped, as from a furnace,
a sharp, piercing, stinging noise, hissing like the wings of a
gnat.
 
"Ho h? curse it!"
 
"Just look at that face!"
 
"It's not good for anything."
 
"Guillemette Maugerepuis, just look at that bull's muzzle;
it only lacks the horns.  It can't be your husband."
 
"Another!"
 
"Belly of the pope! what sort of a grimace is that?"
 
"Hola h? that's cheating.  One must show only one's face."
 
"That damned Perrette Callebotte! she's capable of that!"
 
"Good!  Good!"
 
"I'm stifling!"
 
"There's a fellow whose ears won't go through!" Etc., etc.
 
But we must do justice to our friend Jehan.  In the midst
of this witches' sabbath, he was still to be seen on the top of
his pillar, like the cabin-boy on the topmast.  He floundered
about with incredible fury.  His mouth was wide open, and
from it there escaped a cry which no one heard, not that it
was covered by the general clamor, great as that was but
because it attained, no doubt, the limit of perceptible sharp
sounds, the thousand vibrations of Sauveur, or the eight
thousand of Biot.
 
As for Gringoire, the first moment of depression having
passed, he had regained his composure.  He had hardened
himself against adversity.---"Continue!" he had said for the
third time, to his comedians, speaking machines; then as he
was marching with great strides in front of the marble table,
a fancy seized him to go and appear in his turn at the aperture
of the chapel, were it only for the pleasure of making a
grimace at that ungrateful populace.--"But no, that would
not be worthy of us; no, vengeance! let us combat until the
end," he repeated to himself; "the power of poetry over
people is great; I will bring them back.  We shall see which
will carry the day, grimaces or polite literature."
 
Alas! he had been left the sole spectator of his piece.
It was far worse than it had been a little while before.  He
no longer beheld anything but backs.
 
I am mistaken.  The big, patient man, whom he had already
consulted in a critical moment, had remained with his face
turned towards the stage.  As for Gisquette and Li?arde,
they had deserted him long ago.
 
Gringoire was touched to the heart by the fidelity of his
only spectator.  He approached him and addressed him, shaking
his arm slightly; for the good man was leaning on the
balustrade and dozing a little.
 
"Monsieur," said Gringoire, "I thank you!"
 
"Monsieur," replied the big man with a yawn, "for what?"
 
"I see what wearies you," resumed the poet; "'tis all this
noise which prevents your hearing comfortably.  But be at
ease! your name shall descend to posterity!  Your name,
if you please?"
 
"Renauld Chateau, guardian of the seals of the Ch?elet of
Paris, at your service."
 
"Monsieur, you are the only representive of the muses
here," said Gringoire.
 
"You are too kind, sir," said the guardian of the seals at
the Ch?elet.
 
"You are the only one," resumed Gringoire, "who has listened
to the piece decorously.  What do you think of it?"
 
"He! he!" replied the fat magistrate, half aroused, "it's
tolerably jolly, that's a fact."
 
Gringoire was forced to content himself with this eulogy;
for a thunder of applause, mingled with a prodigious acclamation,
cut their conversation short.  The Pope of the Fools had
been elected.
 
"Noel!  Noel!  Noel!"* shouted the people on all sides.
That was, in fact, a marvellous grimace which was beaming
at that moment through the aperture in the rose window.
After all the pentagonal, hexagonal, and whimsical faces, which
had succeeded each other at that hole without realizing the
ideal of the grotesque which their imaginations, excited by
the orgy, had constructed, nothing less was needed to win their
suffrages than the sublime grimace which had just dazzled the
assembly.  Master Coppenole himself applauded, and Clopin
Trouillefou, who had been among the competitors (and God
knows what intensity of ugliness his visage could attain),
confessed himself conquered: We will do the same.  We
shall not try to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedral
nose, that horseshoe mouth; that little left eye obstructed
with a red, bushy, bristling eyebrow, while the right eye disappeared
entirely beneath an enormous wart; of those teeth
in disarray, broken here and there, like the embattled parapet
of a fortress; of that callous lip, upon which one of these
teeth encroached, like the tusk of an elephant; of that forked
chin; and above all, of the expression spread over the whole;
of that mixture of malice, amazement, and sadness.  Let the
reader dream of this whole, if he can.
 
 
*  The ancient French hurrah.
 
 
The acclamation was unanimous; people rushed towards
the chapel.  They made the lucky Pope of the Fools come
forth in triumph.  But it was then that surprise and admiration
attained their highest pitch; the grimace was his face.
 
Or rather, his whole person was a grimace.  A huge head,
bristling with red hair; between his shoulders an enormous
hump, a counterpart perceptible in front; a system of thighs
and legs so strangely astray that they could touch each other
only at the knees, and, viewed from the front, resembled the
crescents of two scythes joined by the handles; large feet, monstrous
hands; and, with all this deformity, an indescribable
and redoubtable air of vigor, agility, and courage,--strange
exception to the eternal rule which wills that force as well as
beauty shall be the result of harmony.  Such was the pope
whom the fools had just chosen for themselves.
 
One would have pronounced him a giant who had been
broken and badly put together again.
 
When this species of cyclops appeared on the threshold of
the chapel, motionless, squat, and almost as broad as he was
tall; squared on the base, as a great man says; with his doublet
half red, half violet, sown with silver bells, and, above all,
in the perfection of his ugliness, the populace recognized him
on the instant, and shouted with one voice,--
 
"'Tis Quasimodo, the bellringer! 'tis Quasimodo, the hunchback
of Notre-Dame!  Quasimodo, the one-eyed!  Quasimodo, the
bandy-legged!  Noel!  Noel!"
 
It will be seen that the poor fellow had a choice of surnames.
 
"Let the women with child beware!" shouted the scholars.
 
"Or those who wish to be," resumed Joannes.
 
The women did, in fact, hide their faces.
 
"Oh! the horrible monkey!" said one of them.
 
"As wicked as he is ugly," retorted another.
 
"He's the devil," added a third.
 
"I have the misfortune to live near Notre-Dame; I hear
him prowling round the eaves by night."
 
"With the cats."
 
"He's always on our roofs."
 
"He throws spells down our chimneys."
 
"The other evening, he came and made a grimace at me
through my attic window.  I thought that it was a man.
Such a fright as I had!"
 
"I'm sure that he goes to the witches' sabbath.  Once he
left a broom on my leads."
 
"Oh! what a displeasing hunchback's face!"
 
"Oh! what an ill-favored soul!"
 
"Whew!"
 
The men, on the contrary, were delighted and applauded.
Quasimodo, the object of the tumult, still stood on the
threshold of the chapel, sombre and grave, and allowed them
to admire him.
 
One scholar (Robin Poussepain, I think), came and laughed
in his face, and too close.  Quasimodo contented himself with
taking him by the girdle, and hurling him ten paces off amid
the crowd; all without uttering a word.
 
Master Coppenole, in amazement, approached him.
 
"Cross of God!  Holy Father! you possess the handsomest
ugliness that I have ever beheld in my life.  You would
deserve to be pope at Rome, as well as at Paris."
 
So saying, he placed his hand gayly on his shoulder.  Quasimodo
did not stir.  Coppenole went on,--
 
"You are a rogue with whom I have a fancy for carousing,
were it to cost me a new dozen of twelve livres of Tours.
How does it strike you?"
 
Quasimodo made no reply.
 
"Cross of God!" said the hosier, "are you deaf?"
 
He was, in truth, deaf.
 
Nevertheless, he began to grow impatient with Coppenole's
behavior, and suddenly turned towards him with so formidable
a gnashing of teeth, that the Flemish giant recoiled, like
a bull-dog before a cat.
 
Then there was created around that strange personage, a
circle of terror and respect, whose radius was at least fifteen
geometrical feet.  An old woman explained to Coppenole that
Quasimodo was deaf.
 
"Deaf!" said the hosier, with his great Flemish laugh.
"Cross of God!  He's a perfect pope!"
 
"He!  I recognize him," exclaimed Jehan, who had, at
last, descended from his capital, in order to see Quasimodo at
closer quarters, "he's the bellringer of my brother, the archdeacon.
Good-day, Quasimodo!"
 
"What a devil of a man!" said Robin Poussepain still all
bruised with his fall.  "He shows himself; he's a hunchback.
He walks; he's bandy-legged.  He looks at you; he's one-eyed.
You speak to him; he's deaf.  And what does this Polyphemus do
with his tongue?"
 
"He speaks when he chooses," said the old woman; "he became
deaf through ringing the bells.  He is not dumb."
 
"That he lacks," remarks Jehan.
 
"And he has one eye too many," added Robin Poussepain.
 
"Not at all," said Jehan wisely.  "A one-eyed man is far
less complete than a blind man.  He knows what he lacks."
 
In the meantime, all the beggars, all the lackeys, all the cutpurses,
joined with the scholars, had gone in procession to
seek, in the cupboard of the law clerks' company, the cardboard
tiara, and the derisive robe of the Pope of the Fools.  Quasimodo
allowed them to array him in them without wincing, and
with a sort of proud docility.  Then they made him seat
himself on a motley litter.  Twelve officers of the fraternity
of fools raised him on their shoulders; and a sort of bitter
and disdainful joy lighted up the morose face of the cyclops,
when he beheld beneath his deformed feet all those heads of
handsome, straight, well-made men.  Then the ragged and
howling procession set out on its march, according to custom,
around the inner galleries of the Courts, before making the
circuit of the streets and squares.
 
 
 
CHAPTER VI. ESMERALDA.
 
We are delighted to be able to inform the reader, that during
the whole of this scene, Gringoire and his piece had stood
firm.  His actors, spurred on by him, had not ceased to spout
his comedy, and he had not ceased to listen to it.  He had
made up his mind about the tumult, and was determined to
proceed to the end, not giving up the hope of a return of
attention on the part of the public.  This gleam of hope acquired
fresh life, when he saw Quasimodo, Coppenole, and the
deafening escort of the pope of the procession of fools quit
the hall amid great uproar.  The throng rushed eagerly after
them.  "Good," he said to himself, "there go all the mischief-
makers."  Unfortunately, all the mischief-makers constituted
the entire audience.  In the twinkling of an eye, the grand
hall was empty.
 
To tell the truth, a few spectators still remained, some scattered,
others in groups around the pillars, women, old men, or
children, who had had enough of the uproar and tumult.  Some
scholars were still perched astride of the window-sills, engaged
in gazing into the Place.
 
"Well," thought Gringoire, "here are still as many as are
required to hear the end of my mystery.  They are few in
number, but it is a choice audience, a lettered audience."
 
An instant later, a symphony which had been intended to
produce the greatest effect on the arrival of the Virgin, was
lacking.  Gringoire perceived that his music had been carried
off by the procession of the Pope of the Fools.  "Skip it," said
he, stoically.
 
He approached a group of bourgeois, who seemed to him to
be discussing his piece.  This is the fragment of conversation
which he caught,--
 
"You know, Master Cheneteau, the H?el de Navarre, which
belonged to Monsieur de Nemours?"
 
"Yes, opposite the Chapelle de Braque."
 
"Well, the treasury has just let it to Guillaume Alixandre,
historian, for six hivres, eight sols, parisian, a year."
 
"How rents are going up!"
 
"Come," said Gringoire to himself, with a sigh, "the others
are listening."
 
"Comrades," suddenly shouted one of the young scamps
from the window, "La Esmeralda!  La Esmeralda in the
Place!"
 
This word produced a magical effect.  Every one who was
left in the hall flew to the windows, climbing the walls in
order to see, and repeating, "La Esmeralda!  La Esmeralda?"
At the same time, a great sound of applause was heard from
without.
 
"What's the meaning of this, of the Esmeralda?" said
Gringoire, wringing his hands in despair.  "Ah, good heavens!
it seems to be the turn of the windows now."
 
He returned towards the marble table, and saw that the
representation had been interrupted.  It was precisely at
the instant when Jupiter should have appeared with his
thunder.  But Jupiter was standing motionless at the foot of
the stage.
 
"Michel Giborne!" cried the irritated poet, "what are you
doing there?  Is that your part?  Come up!"
 
"Alas!" said Jupiter, "a scholar has just seized the ladder."
 
Gringoire looked.  It was but too true.  All communication
between his plot and its solution was intercepted.
 
"The rascal," he murmured.  "And why did he take that ladder?"
 
"In order to go and see the Esmeralda," replied Jupiter
piteously.  "He said, 'Come, here's a ladder that's of no
use!' and he took it."
 
This was the last blow.  Gringoire received it with resignation.
 
"May the devil fly away with you!" he said to the comedian,
"and if I get my pay, you shall receive yours."
 
Then he beat a retreat, with drooping head, but the last
in the field, like a general who has fought well.
 
And as he descended the winding stairs of the courts: "A
fine rabble of asses and dolts these Parisians!" he muttered
between his teeth; "they come to hear a mystery and don't
listen to it at all!  They are engrossed by every one, by
Chopin Trouillefou, by the cardinal, by Coppenole, by Quasimodo,
by the devil! but by Madame the Virgin Mary, not at
all.  If I had known, I'd have given you Virgin Mary; you
ninnies!  And I! to come to see faces and behold only backs!
to be a poet, and to reap the success of an apothecary!  It is
true that Homerus begged through the Greek towns, and that
Naso died in exile among the Muscovites.  But may the devil
flay me if I understand what they mean with their Esmeralda!
What is that word, in the first place?--'tis Egyptian!"
 
 
 
BOOK SECOND.
 
 
CHAPTER I. FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA.
 
Night comes on early in January.  The streets were already
dark when Gringoire issued forth from the Courts.  This
gloom pleased him; he was in haste to reach some obscure
and deserted alley, in order there to meditate at his ease, and
in order that the philosopher might place the first dressing
upon the wound of the poet.  Philosophy, moreover, was his
sole refuge, for he did not know where he was to lodge for the
night.  After the brilliant failure of his first theatrical
venture, he dared not return to the lodging which he occupied in
the Rue Grenier-sur-l'Eau, opposite to the Port-au-Foin, having
depended upon receiving from monsieur the provost for
his epithalamium, the wherewithal to pay Master Guillaume
Doulx-Sire, farmer of the taxes on cloven-footed animals in
Paris, the rent which he owed him, that is to say, twelve sols
parisian; twelve times the value of all that he possessed in
the world, including his trunk-hose, his shirt, and his cap.
After reflecting a moment, temporarily sheltered beneath the
little wicket of the prison of the treasurer of the Sainte-
Chappelle, as to the shelter which he would select for the
night, having all the pavements of Paris to choose from, he
remembered to have noticed the week previously in the Rue
de la Savaterie, at the door of a councillor of the parliament,
a stepping stone for mounting a mule, and to have said to
himself that that stone would furnish, on occasion, a very
excellent pillow for a mendicant or a poet.  He thanked
Providence for having sent this happy idea to him; but, as he
was preparing to cross the Place, in order to reach the tortuous
labyrinth of the city, where meander all those old sister
streets, the Rues de la Barillerie, de la Vielle-Draperie, de la
Savaterie, de la Juiverie, etc., still extant to-day, with their
nine-story houses, he saw the procession of the Pope of the
Fools, which was also emerging from the court house, and
rushing across the courtyard, with great cries, a great flashing
of torches, and the music which belonged to him, Gringoire.
This sight revived the pain of his self-love; he fled.  In the
bitterness of his dramatic misadventure, everything which
reminded him of the festival of that day irritated his wound
and made it bleed.
 
58
 
He was on the point of turning to the Pont Saint-Michel;
children were running about here and there with fire lances
and rockets.
 
"Pest on firework candles!" said Gringoire; and he fell
back on the Pont au Change.  To the house at the head of the
bridge there had been affixed three small banners, representing
the king, the dauphin, and Marguerite of Flanders, and
six little pennons on which were portrayed the Duke of Austria,
the Cardinal de Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, and Madame
Jeanne de France, and Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon, and
I know not whom else; all being illuminated with torches.
The rabble were admiring.
 
"Happy painter, Jehan Fourbault!" said Gringoire with a
deep sigh; and he turned his back upon the bannerets and
pennons.  A street opened before him; he thought it so dark
and deserted that he hoped to there escape from all the rumors
as well as from all the gleams of the festival.  At the end of
a few moments his foot came in contact with an obstacle; he
stumbled and fell.  It was the May truss, which the clerks of
the clerks' law court had deposited that morning at the door
of a president of the parliament, in honor of the solemnity of
the day.  Gringoire bore this new disaster heroically; he
picked himself up, and reached the water's edge.  After leaving
behind him the civic Tournelle* and the criminal tower,
and skirted the great walls of the king's garden, on that
unpaved strand where the mud reached to his ankles, he
reached the western point of the city, and considered for some
time the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches, which has disappeared
beneath the bronze horse of the Pont Neuf.  The islet
appeared to him in the shadow like a black mass, beyond the
narrow strip of whitish water which separated him from it.
One could divine by the ray of a tiny light the sort of hut in
the form of a beehive where the ferryman of cows took refuge
at night.
 
 
*  A chamber of the ancient parliament of Paris.
 
 
"Happy ferryman!" thought Gringoire; "you do not
dream of glory, and you do not make marriage songs!  What
matters it to you, if kings and Duchesses of Burgundy marry?
You know no other daisies (~marguerites~) than those which
your April greensward gives your cows to browse upon; while
I, a poet, am hooted, and shiver, and owe twelve sous, and
the soles of my shoes are so transparent, that they might
serve as glasses for your lantern!  Thanks, ferryman, your
cabin rests my eyes, and makes me forget Paris!"
 
He was roused from his almost lyric ecstacy, by a big
double Saint-Jean cracker, which suddenly went off from the
happy cabin.  It was the cow ferryman, who was taking his
part in the rejoicings of the day, and letting off fireworks.
 
This cracker made Gringoire's skin bristle up all over.
 
"Accursed festival!" he exclaimed, "wilt thou pursue me
everywhere?  Oh! good God! even to the ferryman's!"
 
Then he looked at the Seine at his feet, and a horrible
temptation took possession of him:
 
"Oh!" said he, "I would gladly drown myself, were the
water not so cold!"
 
Then a desperate resolution occurred to him.  It was, since
he could not escape from the Pope of the Fools, from Jehan
Fourbault's bannerets, from May trusses, from squibs and
crackers, to go to the Place de Gr?e.
 
"At least," he said to himself, "I shall there have a firebrand
of joy wherewith to warm myself, and I can sup on
some crumbs of the three great armorial bearings of royal
sugar which have been erected on the public refreshment-stall
of the city.
 
 
 
CHAPTER II. THE PLACE DE GREVE.
 
There remains to-day but a very imperceptible vestige of
the Place de Gr?e, such as it existed then; it consists in the
charming little turret, which occupies the angle north of the
Place, and which, already enshrouded in the ignoble plaster
which fills with paste the delicate lines of its sculpture, would
soon have disappeared, perhaps submerged by that flood of
new houses which so rapidly devours all the ancient fa?des
of Paris.
 
The persons who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de
Gr?e without casting a glance of pity and sympathy on that
poor turret strangled between two hovels of the time of Louis
XV., can easily reconstruct in their minds the aggregate of
edifices to which it belonged, and find again entire in it
the ancient Gothic place of the fifteenth century.
 
It was then, as it is to-day, an irregular trapezoid, bordered
on one side by the quay, and on the other three by a series of
lofty, narrow, and gloomy houses.  By day, one could admire
the variety of its edifices, all sculptured in stone or wood, and
already presenting complete specimens of the different domestic
architectures of the Middle Ages, running back from
the fifteenth to the eleventh century, from the casement
which had begun to dethrone the arch, to the Roman semicircle,
which had been supplanted by the ogive, and which
still occupies, below it, the first story of that ancient house de
la Tour Roland, at the corner of the Place upon the Seine, on
the side of the street with the Tannerie.  At night, one could
distinguish nothing of all that mass of buildings, except the
black indentation of the roofs, unrolling their chain of acute
angles round the place; for one of the radical differences
between the cities of that time, and the cities of the present
day, lay in the fa?des which looked upon the places and
streets, and which were then gables.  For the last two centuries
the houses have been turned round.
 
In the centre of the eastern side of the Place, rose a heavy
and hybrid construction, formed of three buildings placed in
juxtaposition.  It was called by three names which explain
its history, its destination, and its architecture: "The House
of the Dauphin," because Charles V., when Dauphin, had
inhabited it; "The Marchandise," because it had served as
town hall; and "The Pillared House" (~domus ad piloria~), because
of a series of large pillars which sustained the three
stories.  The city found there all that is required for a city
like Paris; a chapel in which to pray to God; a ~plaidoyer~, or
pleading room, in which to hold hearings, and to repel, at
need, the King's people; and under the roof, an ~arsenac~ full
of artillery.  For the bourgeois of Paris were aware that it is
not sufficient to pray in every conjuncture, and to plead for the
franchises of the city, and they had always in reserve, in the
garret of the town hall, a few good rusty arquebuses.  The
Gr?e had then that sinister aspect which it preserves to-day
from the execrable ideas which it awakens, and from the
sombre town hall of Dominique Bocador, which has replaced
the Pillared House.  It must be admitted that a permanent
gibbet and a pillory, "a justice and a ladder," as they were
called in that day, erected side by side in the centre of the
pavement, contributed not a little to cause eyes to be turned
away from that fatal place, where so many beings full of life
and health have agonized; where, fifty years later, that fever
of Saint Vallier was destined to have its birth, that terror of
the scaffold, the most monstrous of all maladies because it
comes not from God, but from man.
 
It is a consoling idea (let us remark in passing), to think
that the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still
encumbered with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its
paraphernalia of torture, permanent and riveted to the pavement,
the Gr?e, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross
du Trahoir, the March?aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfau?n,
the barrier des Sergents, the Place aux Chats, the
Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte
Saint Jacques, without reckoning the innumerable ladders of
the provosts, the bishop of the chapters, of the abbots, of the
priors, who had the decree of life and death,--without reckoning
the judicial drownings in the river Seine; it is consoling
to-day, after having lost successively all the pieces of its
armor, its luxury of torment, its penalty of imagination and
fancy, its torture for which it reconstructed every five years
a leather bed at the Grand Ch?elet, that ancient suzerain of
feudal society almost expunged from our laws and our cities,
hunted from code to code, chased from place to place, has no
longer, in our immense Paris, any more than a dishonored
corner of the Gr?e,--than a miserable guillotine, furtive,
uneasy, shameful, which seems always afraid of being caught
in the act, so quickly does it disappear after having dealt its
blow.
 
 
 
CHAPTER III. KISSES FOR BLOWS.
 
When Pierre Gringoire arrived on the Place de Gr?e, he
was paralyzed.  He had directed his course across the Pont
aux Meuniers, in order to avoid the rabble on the Pont au
Change, and the pennons of Jehan Fourbault; but the wheels
of all the bishop's mills had splashed him as he passed, and
his doublet was drenched; it seemed to him besides, that the
failure of his piece had rendered him still more sensible to
cold than usual.  Hence he made haste to draw near the bonfire,
which was burning magnificently in the middle of the
Place.  But a considerable crowd formed a circle around it.
 
"Accursed Parisians!" he said to himself (for Gringoire,
like a true dramatic poet, was subject to monologues) "there
they are obstructing my fire!  Nevertheless, I am greatly in
need of a chimney corner; my shoes drink in the water, and
all those cursed mills wept upon me!  That devil of a Bishop
of Paris, with his mills!  I'd just like to know what use a
bishop can make of a mill!  Does he expect to become a
miller instead of a bishop?  If only my malediction is needed
for that, I bestow it upon him! and his cathedral, and his
mills!  Just see if those boobies will put themselves out!
Move aside!  I'd like to know what they are doing there!
They are warming themselves, much pleasure may it give
them!  They are watching a hundred fagots burn; a fine
spectacle!"
 
On looking more closely, he perceived that the circle was
much larger than was required simply for the purpose of
getting warm at the king's fire, and that this concourse of
people had not been attracted solely by the beauty of the
hundred fagots which were burning.
 
In a vast space left free between the crowd and the fire, a
young girl was dancing.
 
Whether this young girl was a human being, a fairy, or an
angel, is what Gringoire, sceptical philosopher and ironical
poet that he was, could not decide at the first moment, so
fascinated was he by this dazzling vision.
 
She was not tall, though she seemed so, so boldly did her
slender form dart about.  She was swarthy of complexion,
but one divined that, by day, her skin must possess that
beautiful golden tone of the Andalusians and the Roman
women.  Her little foot, too, was Andalusian, for it was both
pinched and at ease in its graceful shoe.  She danced, she
turned, she whirled rapidly about on an old Persian rug,
spread negligently under her feet; and each time that her
radiant face passed before you, as she whirled, her great black
eyes darted a flash of lightning at you.
 
All around her, all glances were riveted, all mouths open;
and, in fact, when she danced thus, to the humming of the
Basque tambourine, which her two pure, rounded arms raised
above her head, slender, frail and vivacious as a wasp, with
her corsage of gold without a fold, her variegated gown puffing
out, her bare shoulders, her delicate limbs, which her
petticoat revealed at times, her black hair, her eyes of flame,
she was a supernatural creature.
 
"In truth," said Gringoire to himself, "she is a salamander,
she is a nymph, she is a goddess, she is a bacchante of the
Menelean Mount!"
 
At that moment, one of the salamander's braids of hair
became unfastened, and a piece of yellow copper which was
attached to it, rolled to the ground.
 
"H? no!" said he, "she is a gypsy!"
 
All illusions had disappeared.
 
She began her dance once more; she took from the ground
two swords, whose points she rested against her brow, and
which she made to turn in one direction, while she turned in
the other; it was a purely gypsy effect.  But, disenchanted
though Gringoire was, the whole effect of this picture was not
without its charm and its magic; the bonfire illuminated,
with a red flaring light, which trembled, all alive, over the
circle of faces in the crowd, on the brow of the young girl,
and at the background of the Place cast a pallid reflection,
on one side upon the ancient, black, and wrinkled fa?de of
the House of Pillars, on the other, upon the old stone
gibbet.
 
Among the thousands of visages which that light tinged
with scarlet, there was one which seemed, even more than all
the others, absorbed in contemplation of the dancer.  It was
the face of a man, austere, calm, and sombre.  This man,
whose costume was concealed by the crowd which surrounded
him, did not appear to be more than five and thirty years of
age; nevertheless, he was bald; he had merely a few tufts of
thin, gray hair on his temples; his broad, high forehead had
begun to be furrowed with wrinkles, but his deep-set eyes
sparkled with extraordinary youthfulness, an ardent life, a
profound passion.  He kept them fixed incessantly on the
gypsy, and, while the giddy young girl of sixteen danced and
whirled, for the pleasure of all, his revery seemed to become
more and more sombre.  From time to time, a smile and a
sigh met upon his lips, but the smile was more melancholy
than the sigh.
 
The young girl, stopped at length, breathless, and the people
applauded her lovingly.
 
"Djali!" said the gypsy.
 
Then Gringoire saw come up to her, a pretty little white
goat, alert, wide-awake, glossy, with gilded horns, gilded
hoofs, and gilded collar, which he had not hitherto perceived,
and which had remained lying curled up on one corner of the
carpet watching his mistress dance.
 
"Djali!" said the dancer, "it is your turn."
 
And, seating herself, she gracefully presented her tambourine
to the goat.
 
"Djali," she continued, "what month is this?"
 
The goat lifted its fore foot, and struck one blow upon
the tambourine.  It was the first month in the year, in
fact.
 
"Djali," pursued the young girl, turning her tambourine
round, "what day of the month is this?"
 
Djali raised his little gilt hoof, and struck six blows on the
tambourine.
 
"Djali," pursued the Egyptian, with still another movement
of the tambourine, "what hour of the day is it?"
 
Djali struck seven blows.  At that moment, the clock of
the Pillar House rang out seven.
 
The people were amazed.
 
"There's sorcery at the bottom of it," said a sinister voice
in the crowd.  It was that of the bald man, who never removed
his eyes from the gypsy.
 
She shuddered and turned round; but applause broke forth
and drowned the morose exclamation.
 
It even effaced it so completely from her mind, that she
continued to question her goat.
 
"Djali, what does Master Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of
the pistoliers of the town do, at the procession of Candlemas?"
 
Djali reared himself on his hind legs, and began to bleat,
marching along with so much dainty gravity, that the entire
circle of spectators burst into a laugh at this parody of the
interested devoutness of the captain of pistoliers.
 
"Djali," resumed the young girl, emboldened by her growing
success, "how preaches Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator
to the king in the ecclesiastical court?"
 
The goat seated himself on his hind quarters, and began
to bleat, waving his fore feet in so strange a manner, that,
with the exception of the bad French, and worse Latin,
Jacques Charmolue was there complete,--gesture, accent, and
attitude.
 
And the crowd applauded louder than ever.
 
"Sacrilege! profanation!" resumed the voice of the bald man.
 
The gypsy turned round once more.
 
"Ah!" said she, "'tis that villanous man!" Then, thrusting
her under lip out beyond the upper, she made a little
pout, which appeared to be familiar to her, executed a pirouette
on her heel, and set about collecting in her tambourine the
gifts of the multitude.
 
Big blanks, little blanks, targes* and eagle liards showered
into it.
 
 
*  A blank: an old French coin; six blanks were worth two sous
and a half; targe, an ancient coin of Burgundy, a farthing.
 
 
All at once, she passed in front of Gringoire.  Gringoire
put his hand so recklessly into his pocket that she halted.
"The devil!" said the poet, finding at the bottom of his
pocket the reality, that is, to say, a void.  In the meantime,
the pretty girl stood there, gazing at him with her big eyes,
and holding out her tambourine to him and waiting.  Gringoire
broke into a violent perspiration.
 
If he had all Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have
given it to the dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru, and,
moreover, America had not yet been discovered.
 
Happily, an unexpected incident came to his rescue.
 
"Will you take yourself off, you Egyptian grasshopper?"
cried a sharp voice, which proceeded from the darkest corner
of the Place.
 
The young girl turned round in affright.  It was no longer
the voice of the bald man; it was the voice of a woman,
bigoted and malicious.
 
However, this cry, which alarmed the gypsy, delighted a
troop of children who were prowling about there.
 
"It is the recluse of the Tour-Roland," they exclaimed,
with wild laughter, "it is the sacked nun who is scolding!
Hasn't she supped?  Let's carry her the remains of the city
refreshments!"
 
All rushed towards the Pillar House.
 
In the meanwhile, Gringoire had taken advantage of the
dancer's embarrassment, to disappear.  The children's shouts
had reminded him that he, also, had not supped, so he ran to
the public buffet.  But the little rascals had better legs than
he; when he arrived, they had stripped the table.  There
remained not so much as a miserable ~camichon~ at five sous
the pound.  Nothing remained upon the wall but slender
fleurs-de-lis, mingled with rose bushes, painted in 1434 by
Mathieu Biterne.  It was a meagre supper.
 
It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper, it is
a still less pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where
one is to sleep.  That was Gringoire's condition.  No supper,
no shelter; he saw himself pressed on all sides by necessity,
and he found necessity very crabbed.  He had long ago discovered
the truth, that Jupiter created men during a fit of
misanthropy, and that during a wise man's whole life, his
destiny holds his philosophy in a state of siege.  As for
himself, he had never seen the blockade so complete; he heard
his stomach sounding a parley, and he considered it very much
out of place that evil destiny should capture his philosophy
by famine.
 
This melancholy revery was absorbing him more and more,
when a song, quaint but full of sweetness, suddenly tore him
from it.  It was the young gypsy who was singing.
 
Her voice was like her dancing, like her beauty.  It was
indefinable and charming; something pure and sonorous,
aerial, winged, so to speak.  There were continual outbursts,
melodies, unexpected cadences, then simple phrases strewn
with aerial and hissing notes; then floods of scales which
would have put a nightingale to rout, but in which harmony
was always present; then soft modulations of octaves which
rose and fell, like the bosom of the young singer.  Her beautiful
face followed, with singular mobility, all the caprices of
her song, from the wildest inspiration to the chastest dignity.
One would have pronounced her now a mad creature, now a
queen.
 
The words which she sang were in a tongue unknown to
Gringoire, and which seemed to him to be unknown to herself,
so little relation did the expression which she imparted to her
song bear to the sense of the words.  Thus, these four lines,
in her mouth, were madly gay,--
 
 
  ~Un cofre de gran riqueza
    Hallaron dentro un pilar,
  Dentro del, nuevas banderas
   Con figuras de espantar~.*
 
 
*  A coffer of great richness
    In a pillar's heart they found,
   Within it lay new banners,
    With figures to astound.
 
 
And an instant afterwards, at the accents which she imparted
to this stanza,--
 
 
  ~Alarabes de cavallo
   Sin poderse menear,
  Con espadas, y los cuellos,
   Ballestas de buen echar~,
 
 
Gringoire felt the tears start to his eyes.  Nevertheless, her
song breathed joy, most of all, and she seemed to sing like a
bird, from serenity and heedlessness.
 
The gypsy's song had disturbed Gringoire's revery as the
swan disturbs the water.  He listened in a sort of rapture,
and forgetfulness of everything.  It was the first moment in
the course of many hours when he did not feel that he suffered.
 
The moment was brief.
 
The same woman's voice, which had interrupted the gypsy's
dance, interrupted her song.
 
"Will you hold your tongue, you cricket of hell?" it cried,
still from the same obscure corner of the place.
 
The poor "cricket" stopped short.  Gringoire covered up his ears.
 
"Oh!" he exclaimed, "accursed saw with missing teeth, which
comes to break the lyre!"
 
Meanwhile, the other spectators murmured like himself;
"To the devil with the sacked nun!" said some of them.
And the old invisible kill-joy might have had occasion to
repent of her aggressions against the gypsy had their attention
not been diverted at this moment by the procession of
the Pope of the Fools, which, after having traversed many
streets and squares, debouched on the Place de Gr?e, with
all its torches and all its uproar.
 
This procession, which our readers have seen set out from
the Palais de Justice, had organized on the way, and had been
recruited by all the knaves, idle thieves, and unemployed vagabonds
in Paris; so that it presented a very respectable aspect
when it arrived at the Gr?e.
 
First came Egypt.  The Duke of Egypt headed it, on horseback,
with his counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrups
for him; behind them, the male and female Egyptians,
pell-mell, with their little children crying on their shoulders;
all--duke, counts, and populace--in rags and tatters.  Then
came the Kingdom of Argot; that is to say, all the thieves of
France, arranged according to the order of their dignity; the
minor people walking first.  Thus defiled by fours, with the
divers insignia of their grades, in that strange faculty, most of
them lame, some cripples, others one-armed, shop clerks, pilgrim,
~hubins~, bootblacks, thimble-riggers, street arabs, beggars,
the blear-eyed beggars, thieves, the weakly, vagabonds,
merchants, sham soldiers, goldsmiths, passed masters of
pickpockets, isolated thieves.  A catalogue that would weary
Homer.  In the centre of the conclave of the passed masters
of pickpockets, one had some difficulty in distinguishing the
King of Argot, the grand co?re, so called, crouching in a
little cart drawn by two big dogs.  After the kingdom of the
Argotiers, came the Empire of Galilee.  Guillaume Rousseau,
Emperor of the Empire of Galilee, marched majestically in
his robe of purple, spotted with wine, preceded by buffoons
wrestling and executing military dances; surrounded by his
macebearers, his pickpockets and clerks of the chamber of
accounts.  Last of all came the corporation of law clerks,
with its maypoles crowned with flowers, its black robes, its
music worthy of the orgy, and its large candles of yellow
wax.  In the centre of this crowd, the grand officers of the
Brotherhood of Fools bore on their shoulders a litter more
loaded down with candles than the reliquary of Sainte-Genevi?e
in time of pest; and on this litter shone resplendent,
with crosier, cope, and mitre, the new Pope of the Fools, the
bellringer of Notre-Dame, Quasimodo the hunchback.
 
Each section of this grotesque procession had its own music.
The Egyptians made their drums and African tambourines
resound.  The slang men, not a very musical race, still clung
to the goat's horn trumpet and the Gothic rubebbe of the
twelfth century.  The Empire of Galilee was not much more
advanced; among its music one could hardly distinguish some
miserable rebec, from the infancy of the art, still imprisoned
in the ~re-la-mi~.  But it was around the Pope of the Fools that
all the musical riches of the epoch were displayed in a magnificent
discord.  It was nothing but soprano rebecs, counter-tenor
rebecs, and tenor rebecs, not to reckon the flutes and
brass instruments.  Alas! our readers will remember that this
was Gringoire's orchestra.
 
It is difficult to convey an idea of the degree of proud and
blissful expansion to which the sad and hideous visage of
Quasimodo had attained during the transit from the Palais de
Justice, to the Place de Gr?e.  It was the first enjoyment of
self-love that he had ever experienced.  Down to that day, he
had known only humiliation, disdain for his condition, disgust
for his person.  Hence, deaf though he was, he enjoyed, like
a veritable pope, the acclamations of that throng, which he
hated because he felt that he was hated by it.  What mattered
it that his people consisted of a pack of fools, cripples,
thieves, and beggars? it was still a people and he was its
sovereign.  And he accepted seriously all this ironical
applause, all this derisive respect, with which the crowd mingled,
it must be admitted, a good deal of very real fear.  For the
hunchback was robust; for the bandy-legged fellow was agile;
for the deaf man was malicious: three qualities which temper
ridicule.
 
We are far from believing, however, that the new Pope of
the Fools understood both the sentiments which he felt and
the sentiments which he inspired.  The spirit which was
lodged in this failure of a body had, necessarily, something
incomplete and deaf about it.  Thus, what he felt at the moment
was to him, absolutely vague, indistinct, and confused.
Only joy made itself felt, only pride dominated.  Around that
sombre and unhappy face, there hung a radiance.
 
It was, then, not without surprise and alarm, that at the
very moment when Quasimodo was passing the Pillar House,
in that semi-intoxicated state, a man was seen to dart from
the crowd, and to tear from his hands, with a gesture of anger,
his crosier of gilded wood, the emblem of his mock popeship.
 
This man, this rash individual, was the man with the bald
brow, who, a moment earlier, standing with the gypsy's
group had chilled the poor girl with his words of menace and
of hatred.  He was dressed in an eccleslastical costume.  At
the moment when he stood forth from the crowd, Gringoire,
who had not noticed him up to that time, recognized him:
"Hold!" he said, with an exclamation of astonishment.
"Eh! 'tis my master in Hermes, Dom Claude Frollo, the
archdeacon!  What the devil does he want of that old one-
eyed fellow?  He'll get himself devoured!"
 
A cry of terror arose, in fact.  The formidable Quasimodo
had hurled himself from the litter, and the women turned
aside their eyes in order not to see him tear the archdeacon
asunder.
 
He made one bound as far as the priest, looked at him, and
fell upon his knees.
 
The priest tore off his tiara, broke his crozier, and rent his
tinsel cope.
 
Quasimodo remained on his knees, with head bent and hands
clasped.  Then there was established between them a strange
dialogue of signs and gestures, for neither of them spoke.
The priest, erect on his feet, irritated, threatening, imperious;
Quasimodo, prostrate, humble, suppliant.  And, nevertheless,
it is certain that Quasimodo could have crushed the priest
with his thumb.
 
At length the archdeacon, giving Quasimodo's powerful
shoulder a rough shake, made him a sign to rise and follow him.
 
Quasimodo rose.
 
Then the Brotherhood of Fools, their first stupor having
passed off, wished to defend their pope, so abruptly dethroned.
The Egyptians, the men of slang, and all the fraternity of
law clerks, gathered howling round the priest.
 
Quasimodo placed himself in front of the priest, set in play
the muscles of his athletic fists, and glared upon the assailants
with the snarl of an angry tiger.
 
The priest resumed his sombre gravity, made a sign to Quasimodo,
and retired in silence.
 
Quasimodo walked in front of him, scattering the crowd as
he passed.
 
When they had traversed the populace and the Place, the
cloud of curious and idle were minded to follow them.  Quasimodo
then constituted himself the rearguard, and followed
the archdeacon, walking backwards, squat, surly, monstrous,
bristling, gathering up his limbs, licking his boar's tusks,
growling like a wild beast, and imparting to the crowd immense
vibrations, with a look or a gesture.
 
Both were allowed to plunge into a dark and narrow street,
where no one dared to venture after them; so thoroughly did
the mere chimera of Quasimodo gnashing his teeth bar the
entrance.
 
"Here's a marvellous thing," said Gringoire; "but where
the deuce shall I find some supper?"
 
 
 
CHAPTER IV. THE INCONVENIENCES OF FOLLOWING A PRETTY WOMAN
            THROUGH THE STREETS IN THE EVENING.
 
Gringoire set out to follow the gypsy at all hazards.  He
had seen her, accompanied by her goat, take to the Rue de la
Coutellerie; he took the Rue de la Coutellerie.
 
"Why not?" he said to himself.
 
Gringoire, a practical philosopher of the streets of Paris,
had noticed that nothing is more propitious to revery than
following a pretty woman without knowing whither she is
going.  There was in this voluntary abdication of his freewill,
in this fancy submitting itself to another fancy, which
suspects it not, a mixture of fantastic independence and blind
obedience, something indescribable, intermediate between slavery
and liberty, which pleased Gringoire,--a spirit essentially
compound, undecided, and complex, holding the extremities of
all extremes, incessantly suspended between all human propensities,
and neutralizing one by the other.  He was fond of comparing
himself to Mahomet's coffin, attracted in two different
directions by two loadstones, and hesitating eternally
between the heights and the depths, between the vault and the
pavement, between fall and ascent, between zenith and nadir.
 
If Gringoire had lived in our day, what a fine middle course
he would hold between classicism and romanticism!
 
But he was not sufficiently primitive to live three hundred
years, and 'tis a pity.  His absence is a void which is but too
sensibly felt to-day.
 
Moreover, for the purpose of thus following passers-by (and
especially female passers-by) in the streets, which Gringoire
was fond of doing, there is no better disposition than ignorance
of where one is going to sleep.
 
So he walked along, very thoughtfully, behind the young
girl, who hastened her pace and made her goat trot as she
saw the bourgeois returning home and the taverns--the only
shops which had been open that day--closing.
 
"After all," he half thought to himself, "she must lodge
somewhere; gypsies have kindly hearts.  Who knows?--"
 
And in the points of suspense which he placed after this reticence
in his mind, there lay I know not what flattering ideas.
 
Meanwhile, from time to time, as he passed the last groups
of bourgeois closing their doors, he caught some scraps of
their conversation, which broke the thread of his pleasant
hypotheses.
 
Now it was two old men accosting each other.
 
"Do you know that it is cold, Master Thibaut Fernicle?"
(Gringoire had been aware of this since the beginning of the
winter.)
 
"Yes, indeed, Master Boniface Disome!  Are we going to
have a winter such as we had three years ago, in '80, when
wood cost eight sous the measure?"
 
"Bah! that's nothing, Master Thibaut, compared with the
winter of 1407, when it froze from St. Martin's Day until
Candlemas! and so cold that the pen of the registrar of the
parliament froze every three words, in the Grand Chamber!
which interrupted the registration of justice."
 
Further on there were two female neighbors at their windows,
holding candles, which the fog caused to sputter.
 
"Has your husband told you about the mishap, Mademoiselle
la Boudraque?"
 
"No.  What is it, Mademoiselle Turquant?"
 
"The horse of M. Gilles Godin, the notary at the Ch?elet,
took fright at the Flemings and their procession, and overturned
Master Philippe Avrillot, lay monk of the C?estins."
 
"Really?"
 
"Actually."
 
"A bourgeois horse! 'tis rather too much!  If it had been
a cavalry horse, well and good!"
 
And the windows were closed.  But Gringoire had lost the
thread of his ideas, nevertheless.
 
Fortunately, he speedily found it again, and he knotted it
together without difficulty, thanks to the gypsy, thanks to
Djali, who still walked in front of him; two fine, delicate, and
charming creatures, whose tiny feet, beautiful forms, and
graceful manners he was engaged in admiring, almost confusing
them in his contemplation; believing them to be both
young girls, from their intelligence and good friendship; regarding
them both as goats,--so far as the lightness, agility, and
dexterity of their walk were concerned.
 
But the streets were becoming blacker and more deserted
every moment.  The curfew had sounded long ago, and it was
only at rare intervals now that they encountered a passer-by
in the street, or a light in the windows.  Gringoire had
become involved, in his pursuit of the gypsy, in that inextricable
labyrinth of alleys, squares, and closed courts which
surround the ancient sepulchre of the Saints-Innocents, and
which resembles a ball of thread tangled by a cat.  "Here
are streets which possess but little logic!" said Gringoire,
lost in the thousands of circuits which returned upon themselves
incessantly, but where the young girl pursued a road
which seemed familiar to her, without hesitation and with
a step which became ever more rapid.  As for him, he
would have been utterly ignorant of his situation had he not
espied, in passing, at the turn of a street, the octagonal mass
of the pillory of the fish markets, the open-work summit of
which threw its black, fretted outlines clearly upon a window
which was still lighted in the Rue Verdelet.
 
The young girl's attention had been attracted to him for the
last few moments; she had repeatedly turned her head towards
him with uneasiness; she had even once come to a standstill,
and taking advantage of a ray of light which escaped from a
half-open bakery to survey him intently, from head to foot, then,
having cast this glance, Gringoire had seen her make that little
pout which he had already noticed, after which she passed on.
 
This little pout had furnished Gringoire with food for
thought.  There was certainly both disdain and mockery in
that graceful grimace.  So he dropped his head, began to
count the paving-stones, and to follow the young girl at a little
greater distance, when, at the turn of a street, which had
caused him to lose sight of her, he heard her utter a piercing cry.
 
He hastened his steps.
 
The street was full of shadows.  Nevertheless, a twist of
tow soaked in oil, which burned in a cage at the feet of the
Holy Virgin at the street corner, permitted Gringoire to make
out the gypsy struggling in the arms of two men, who were
endeavoring to stifle her cries.  The poor little goat, in great
alarm, lowered his horns and bleated.
 
"Help! gentlemen of the watch!" shouted Gringoire, and
advanced bravely.  One of the men who held the young girl
turned towards him.  It was the formidable visage of Quasimodo.
 
Gringoire did not take to flight, but neither did he advance
another step.
 
Quasimodo came up to him, tossed him four paces away on
the pavement with a backward turn of the hand, and plunged
rapidly into the gloom, bearing the young girl folded across
one arm like a silken scarf.  His companion followed him, and
the poor goat ran after them all, bleating plaintively.
 
"Murder! murder!" shrieked the unhappy gypsy.
 
"Halt, rascals, and yield me that wench!" suddenly shouted
in a voice of thunder, a cavalier who appeared suddenly from
a neighboring square.
 
It was a captain of the king's archers, armed from head to
foot, with his sword in his hand.
 
He tore the gypsy from the arms of the dazed Quasimodo,
threw her across his saddle, and at the moment when the terrible
hunchback, recovering from his surprise, rushed upon
him to regain his prey, fifteen or sixteen archers, who followed
their captain closely, made their appearance, with their
two-edged swords in their fists.  It was a squad of the king's
police, which was making the rounds, by order of Messire
Robert d'Estouteville, guard of the provostship of Paris.
 
Quasimodo was surrounded, seized, garroted; he roared, he
foamed at the mouth, he bit; and had it been broad daylight,
there is no doubt that his face alone, rendered more hideous by
wrath, would have put the entire squad to flight.  But by night
he was deprived of his most formidable weapon, his ugliness.
 
His companion had disappeared during the struggle.
 
The gypsy gracefully raised herself upright upon the officer's
saddle, placed both hands upon the young man's shoulders,
and gazed fixedly at him for several seconds, as though
enchanted with his good looks and with the aid which he had
just rendered her.  Then breaking silence first, she said to
him, making her sweet voice still sweeter than usual,--
 
"What is your name, monsieur le gendarme?"
 
"Captain Phoebus de Ch?eaupers, at your service, my beauty!"
replied the officer, drawing himself up.
 
"Thanks," said she.
 
And while Captain Phoebus was turning up his moustache
in Burgundian fashion, she slipped from the horse, like an
arrow falling to earth, and fled.
 
A flash of lightning would have vanished less quickly.
 
"Nombrill of the Pope!" said the captain, causing Quasimodo's
straps to be drawn tighter, "I should have preferred to keep
the wench."
 
"What would you have, captain?" said one gendarme.  "The
warbler has fled, and the bat remains."
 
 
 
CHAPTER V. RESULT OF THE DANGERS.
 
Gringoire, thoroughly stunned by his fall, remained on
the pavement in front of the Holy Virgin at the street corner.
Little by little, he regained his senses; at first, for several
minutes, he was floating in a sort of half-somnolent revery,
which was not without its charm, in which aeriel figures of
the gypsy and her goat were coupled with Quasimodo's heavy
fist.  This state lasted but a short time.  A decidedly vivid
sensation of cold in the part of his body which was in contact
with the pavement, suddenly aroused him and caused his spirit
to return to the surface.
 
"Whence comes this chill?" he said abruptly, to himself.
He then perceived that he was lying half in the middle of the
gutter.
 
"That devil of a hunchbacked cyclops!" he muttered between
his teeth; and he tried to rise.  But he was too much
dazed and bruised; he was forced to remain where he was.
Moreover, his hand was tolerably free; he stopped up his nose
and resigned himself.
 
"The mud of Paris," he said to himself--for decidedly he
thought that he was sure that the gutter would prove his
refuge for the night; and what can one do in a refuge, except
dream?--"the mud of Paris is particularly stinking; it must
contain a great deal of volatile and nitric salts.  That,
moreover, is the opinion of Master Nicholas Flamel, and of the
alchemists--"
 
The word "alchemists" suddenly suggested to his mind the
idea of Archdeacon Claude Frollo.  He recalled the violent
scene which he had just witnessed in part; that the gypsy was
struggling with two men, that Quasimodo had a companion;
and the morose and haughty face of the archdeacon passed
confusedly through his memory.  "That would be strange!"
he said to himself.  And on that fact and that basis he began
to construct a fantastic edifice of hypothesis, that card-castle
of philosophers; then, suddenly returning once more to
reality, "Come!  I'm freezing!" he ejaculated.
 
The place was, in fact, becoming less and less tenable.
Each molecule of the gutter bore away a molecule of heat
radiating from Gringoire's loins, and the equilibrium between
the temperature of his body and the temperature of the brook,
began to be established in rough fashion.
 
Quite a different annoyance suddenly assailed him.  A group
of children, those little bare-footed savages who have always
roamed the pavements of Paris under the eternal name of
~gamins~, and who, when we were also children ourselves, threw
stones at all of us in the afternoon, when we came out of
school, because our trousers were not torn--a swarm of these
young scamps rushed towards the square where Gringoire lay,
with shouts and laughter which seemed to pay but little heed
to the sleep of the neighbors.  They were dragging after them
some sort of hideous sack; and the noise of their wooden
shoes alone would have roused the dead.  Gringoire who was
not quite dead yet, half raised himself.
 
"Oh? Hennequin Dand?he!  Oh? Jehan Pincebourde!"
they shouted in deafening tones, "old Eustache Moubon, the
merchant at the corner, has just died.  We've got his straw
pallet, we're going to have a bonfire out of it.  It's the turn
of the Flemish to-day!"
 
And behold, they flung the pallet directly upon Gringoire,
beside whom they had arrived, without espying him.  At the
same time, one of them took a handful of straw and set off
to light it at the wick of the good Virgin.
 
"S'death!" growled Gringoire, "am I going to be too warm now?"
 
It was a critical moment.  He was caught between fire and
water; he made a superhuman effort, the effort of a counterfeiter
of money who is on the point of being boiled, and who
seeks to escape.  He rose to his feet, flung aside the straw
pallet upon the street urchins, and fled.
 
"Holy Virgin!" shrieked the children; "'tis the merchant's ghost!"
 
And they fled in their turn.
 
The straw mattress remained master of the field.  Belleforet,
Father Le Juge, and Corrozet affirm that it was picked
up on the morrow, with great pomp, by the clergy of the
quarter, and borne to the treasury of the church of Saint
Opportune, where the sacristan, even as late as 1789, earned a
tolerably handsome revenue out of the great miracle of the
Statue of the Virgin at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil,
which had, by its mere presence, on the memorable night between
the sixth and seventh of January, 1482, exorcised the
defunct Eustache Moubon, who, in order to play a trick on
the devil, had at his death maliciously concealed his soul in
his straw pallet.
 
 
 
CHAPTER VI. THE BROKEN JUG.
 
After having run for some time at the top of his speed,
without knowing whither, knocking his head against many a
street corner, leaping many a gutter, traversing many an alley,
many a court, many a square, seeking flight and passage through
all the meanderings of the ancient passages of the Halles, exploring
in his panic terror what the fine Latin of the maps calls ~tota
via, cheminum et viaria~, our poet suddenly halted for lack
of breath in the first place, and in the second, because
he had been collared, after a fashion, by a dilemma which
had just occurred to his mind.  "It strikes me, Master Pierre
Gringoire," he said to himself, placing his finger to his brow,
"that you are running like a madman.  The little scamps are
no less afraid of you than you are of them.  It strikes me,
I say, that you heard the clatter of their wooden shoes
fleeing southward, while you were fleeing northward.  Now,
one of two things, either they have taken flight, and the
pallet, which they must have forgotten in their terror, is
precisely that hospitable bed in search of which you have been
running ever since morning, and which madame the Virgin
miraculously sends you, in order to recompense you for having
made a morality in her honor, accompanied by triumphs and
mummeries; or the children have not taken flight, and in
that case they have put the brand to the pallet, and that is
precisely the good fire which you need to cheer, dry, and warm
you.  In either case, good fire or good bed, that straw pallet
is a gift from heaven.  The blessed Virgin Marie who stands
at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil, could only have made
Eustache Moubon die for that express purpose; and it is folly
on your part to flee thus zigzag, like a Picard before a
Frenchman, leaving behind you what you seek before you;
and you are a fool!"
 
Then he retraced his steps, and feeling his way and searching,
with his nose to the wind and his ears on the alert, he
tried to find the blessed pallet again, but in vain.  There was
nothing to be found but intersections of houses, closed courts,
and crossings of streets, in the midst of which he hesitated
and doubted incessantly, being more perplexed and entangled
in this medley of streets than he would have been even in the
labyrinth of the H?el des Tournelles.  At length he lost
patience, and exclaimed solemnly: "Cursed be cross roads!
'tis the devil who has made them in the shape of his pitchfork!"
 
This exclamation afforded him a little solace, and a sort of
reddish reflection which he caught sight of at that moment, at
the extremity of a long and narrow lane, completed the elevation
of his moral tone.  "God be praised!" said he, "There
it is yonder!  There is my pallet burning."  And comparing
himself to the pilot who suffers shipwreck by night, "~Salve~,"
he added piously, "~salve, maris stella~!"
 
Did he address this fragment of litany to the Holy Virgin,
or to the pallet?  We are utterly unable to say.
 
He had taken but a few steps in the long street, which
sloped downwards, was unpaved, and more and more muddy
and steep, when he noticed a very singular thing.  It was
not deserted; here and there along its extent crawled certain
vague and formless masses, all directing their course towards
the light which flickered at the end of the street, like those
heavy insects which drag along by night, from blade to blade
of grass, towards the shepherd's fire.
 
Nothing renders one so adventurous as not being able to
feel the place where one's pocket is situated.  Gringoire
continued to advance, and had soon joined that one of the forms
which dragged along most indolently, behind the others.  On
drawing near, he perceived that it was nothing else than a
wretched legless cripple in a bowl, who was hopping along on
his two hands like a wounded field-spider which has but two
legs left.  At the moment when he passed close to this species
of spider with a human countenance, it raised towards
him a lamentable voice: "~La buona mancia, signor! la buona
mancia~!"*
 
 
*  Alms.
 
 
"Deuce take you," said Gringoire, "and me with you, if I
know what you mean!"
 
And he passed on.
 
He overtook another of these itinerant masses, and examined
it.  It was an impotent man, both halt and crippled,
and halt and crippled to such a degree that the complicated
system of crutches and wooden legs which sustained him, gave
him the air of a mason's scaffolding on the march.  Gringoire,
who liked noble and classical comparisons, compared him in
thought to the living tripod of Vulcan.
 
This living tripod saluted him as he passed, but stopping
his hat on a level with Gringoire's chin, like a shaving dish,
while he shouted in the latter's ears: "~Senor cabellero, para
comprar un pedaso de pan~!"*
 
 
*  Give me the means to buy a bit of bread, sir.
 
 
"It appears," said Gringoire, "that this one can also talk;
but 'tis a rude language, and he is more fortunate than I if
he understands it." Then, smiting his brow, in a sudden
transition of ideas: "By the way, what the deuce did they
mean this morning with their Esmeralda?"
 
He was minded to augment his pace, but for the third time
something barred his way.  This something or, rather, some
one was a blind man, a little blind fellow with a bearded,
Jewish face, who, rowing away in the space about him with a
stick, and towed by a large dog, droned through his nose with
a Hungarian accent: "~Facitote caritatem~!"
 
"Well, now," said Gringoire, "here's one at last who speaks
a Christian tongue.  I must have a very charitable aspect,
since they ask alms of me in the present lean condition of my
purse.  My friend," and he turned towards the blind man,
"I sold my last shirt last week; that is to say, since you
understand only the language of Cicero: ~Vendidi hebdomade
nuper transita meam ultimam chemisan~."
 
That said, he turned his back upon the blind man, and pursued
his way.  But the blind man began to increase his stride
at the same time; and, behold! the cripple and the legless
man, in his bowl, came up on their side in great haste, and
with great clamor of bowl and crutches, upon the pavement.
Then all three, jostling each other at poor Gringoire's heels,
began to sing their song to him,--
 
"~Caritatem~!" chanted the blind man.
 
"~La buona mancia~!" chanted the cripple in the bowl.
 
And the lame man took up the musical phrase by repeating:
"~Un pedaso de pan~!"
 
Gringoire stopped up his ears.  "Oh, tower of Babel!" he
exclaimed.
 
He set out to run.  The blind man ran!  The lame man
ran!  The cripple in the bowl ran!
 
And then, in proportion as he plunged deeper into the
street, cripples in bowls, blind men and lame men, swarmed
about him, and men with one arm, and with one eye, and the
leprous with their sores, some emerging from little streets
adjacent, some from the air-holes of cellars, howling, bellowing,
yelping, all limping and halting, all flinging themselves
towards the light, and humped up in the mire, like snails after
a shower.
 
Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not
knowing very well what was to become of him, marched along
in terror among them, turning out for the lame, stepping over
the cripples in bowls, with his feet imbedded in that ant-hill
of lame men, like the English captain who got caught in the
quicksand of a swarm of crabs.
 
The idea occurred to him of making an effort to retrace his
steps.  But it was too late.  This whole legion had closed in
behind him, and his three beggars held him fast.  So he
proceeded, impelled both by this irresistible flood, by fear,
and by a vertigo which converted all this into a sort of
horrible dream.
 
At last he reached the end of the street.  It opened upon
an immense place, where a thousand scattered lights flickered
in the confused mists of night.  Gringoire flew thither,
hoping to escape, by the swiftness of his legs, from the three
infirm spectres who had clutched him.
 
"~Onde vas, hombre~?" (Where are you going, my man?)
cried the cripple, flinging away his crutches, and running after
him with the best legs that ever traced a geometrical step upon
the pavements of Paris.
 
In the meantime the legless man, erect upon his feet,
crowned Gringoire with his heavy iron bowl, and the blind
man glared in his face with flaming eyes!
 
"Where am I?" said the terrified poet.
 
"In the Court of Miracles," replied a fourth spectre, who
had accosted them.
 
"Upon my soul," resumed Gringoire, "I certainly do behold the
blind who see, and the lame who walk, but where is the Saviour?"
 
They replied by a burst of sinister laughter.
 
The poor poet cast his eyes about him.  It was, in truth,
that redoubtable Cour des Miracles, whither an honest man
had never penetrated at such an hour; the magic circle where
the officers of the Ch?elet and the sergeants of the provostship,
who ventured thither, disappeared in morsels; a city of
thieves, a hideous wart on the face of Paris; a sewer, from
which escaped every morning, and whither returned every
night to crouch, that stream of vices, of mendicancy and
vagabondage which always overflows in the streets of capitals;
a monstrous hive, to which returned at nightfall, with
their booty, all the drones of the social order; a lying hospital
where the bohemian, the disfrocked monk, the ruined
scholar, the ne'er-do-wells of all nations, Spaniards, Italians,
Germans,--of all religions, Jews, Christians, Mahometans,
idolaters, covered with painted sores, beggars by day, were
transformed by night into brigands; an immense dressing-room,
in a word, where, at that epoch, the actors of that
eternal comedy, which theft, prostitution, and murder play
upon the pavements of Paris, dressed and undressed.
 
It was a vast place, irregular and badly paved, like all the
squares of Paris at that date.  Fires, around which swarmed
strange groups, blazed here and there.  Every one was going,
coming, and shouting.  Shrill laughter was to be heard, the
wailing of children, the voices of women.  The hands and
heads of this throng, black against the luminous background,
outlined against it a thousand eccentric gestures.  At times,
upon the ground, where trembled the light of the fires,
mingled with large, indefinite shadows, one could behold a dog
passing, which resembled a man, a man who resembled a dog.
The limits of races and species seemed effaced in this city, as
in a pandemonium.  Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health,
maladies, all seemed to be in common among these people;
all went together, they mingled, confounded, superposed;
each one there participated in all.
 
The poor and flickering flames of the fire permitted Gringoire
to distinguish, amid his trouble, all around the immense
place, a hideous frame of ancient houses, whose wormeaten,
shrivelled, stunted fa?des, each pierced with one or two
lighted attic windows, seemed to him, in the darkness, like
enormous heads of old women, ranged in a circle, monstrous
and crabbed, winking as they looked on at the Witches' Sabbath.
 
It was like a new world, unknown, unheard of, misshapen,
creeping, swarming, fantastic.
 
Gringoire, more and more terrified, clutched by the three
beggars as by three pairs of tongs, dazed by a throng of other
faces which frothed and yelped around him, unhappy Gringoire
endeavored to summon his presence of mind, in order
to recall whether it was a Saturday.  But his efforts were
vain; the thread of his memory and of his thought was
broken; and, doubting everything, wavering between what he
saw and what he felt, he put to himself this unanswerable
question,--
 
"If I exist, does this exist? if this exists, do I exist?"
 
At that moment, a distinct cry arose in the buzzing throng
which surrounded him, "Let's take him to the king! let's
take him to the king!"
 
"Holy Virgin!" murmured Gringoire, "the king here must be
a ram."
 
"To the king! to the king!" repeated all voices.
 
They dragged him off.  Each vied with the other in laying
his claws upon him.  But the three beggars did not loose their
hold and tore him from the rest, howling, "He belongs to us!"
 
The poet's already sickly doublet yielded its last sigh in
this struggle.
 
While traversing the horrible place, his vertigo vanished.
After taking a few steps, the sentiment of reality returned to
him.  He began to become accustomed to the atmosphere of
the place.  At the first moment there had arisen from his
poet's head, or, simply and prosaically, from his empty
stomach, a mist, a vapor, so to speak, which, spreading
between objects and himself, permitted him to catch a glimpse
of them only in the incoherent fog of nightmare,--in those
shadows of dreams which distort every outline, agglomerating
objects into unwieldy groups, dilating things into chimeras,
and men into phantoms.  Little by little, this hallucination
was succeeded by a less bewildered and exaggerating view.
Reality made its way to the light around him, struck his eyes,
struck his feet, and demolished, bit by bit, all that frightful
poetry with which he had, at first, believed himself to be
surrounded.  He was forced to perceive that he was not
walking in the Styx, but in mud, that he was elbowed not by
demons, but by thieves; that it was not his soul which was
in question, but his life (since he lacked that precious
conciliator, which places itself so effectually between the
bandit and the honest man--a purse).  In short, on examining the
orgy more closely, and with more coolness, he fell from the
witches' sabbath to the dram-shop.
 
The Cour des Miracles was, in fact, merely a dram-shop;
but a brigand's dram-shop, reddened quite as much with blood
as with wine.
 
The spectacle which presented itself to his eyes, when his
ragged escort finally deposited him at the end of his trip, was
not fitted to bear him back to poetry, even to the poetry of
hell.  It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of
the tavern.  Were we not in the fifteenth century, we would
say that Gringoire had descended from Michael Angelo to
Callot.
 
Around a great fire which burned on a large, circular flagstone,
the flames of which had heated red-hot the legs of a
tripod, which was empty for the moment, some wormeaten
tables were placed, here and there, haphazard, no lackey of a
geometrical turn having deigned to adjust their parallelism,
or to see to it that they did not make too unusual angles.
Upon these tables gleamed several dripping pots of wine and
beer, and round these pots were grouped many bacchic visages,
purple with the fire and the wine.  There was a man
with a huge belly and a jovial face, noisily kissing a woman
of the town, thickset and brawny.  There was a sort of sham
soldier, a "naquois," as the slang expression runs, who was
whistling as he undid the bandages from his fictitious wound,
and removing the numbness from his sound and vigorous
knee, which had been swathed since morning in a thousand
ligatures.  On the other hand, there was a wretched fellow,
preparing with celandine and beef's blood, his "leg of God,"
for the next day.  Two tables further on, a palmer, with his
pilgrim's costume complete, was practising the lament of the
Holy Queen, not forgetting the drone and the nasal drawl.
Further on, a young scamp was taking a lesson in epilepsy
from an old pretender, who was instructing him in the art of
foaming at the mouth, by chewing a morsel of soap.  Beside
him, a man with the dropsy was getting rid of his swelling,
and making four or five female thieves, who were disputing
at the same table, over a child who had been stolen that evening,
hold their noses.  All circumstances which, two centuries
later, "seemed so ridiculous to the court," as Sauval says,
"that they served as a pastime to the king, and as an introduction
to the royal ballet of Night, divided into four parts
and danced on the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon."  "Never,"
adds an eye witness of 1653, "have the sudden metamorphoses
of the Court of Miracles been more happily presented.
Benserade prepared us for it by some very gallant verses."
 
Loud laughter everywhere, and obscene songs.  Each one
held his own course, carping and swearing, without listening
to his neighbor.  Pots clinked, and quarrels sprang up at
the shock of the pots, and the broken pots made rents in
the rags.
 
A big dog, seated on his tail, gazed at the fire.  Some
children were mingled in this orgy.  The stolen child wept and
cried.  Another, a big boy four years of age, seated with
legs dangling, upon a bench that was too high for him, before
a table that reached to his chin, and uttering not a word.  A
third, gravely spreading out upon the table with his finger,
the melted tallow which dripped from a candle.  Last of all,
a little fellow crouching in the mud, almost lost in a cauldron,
which he was scraping with a tile, and from which he was
evoking a sound that would have made Stradivarius swoon.
 
Near the fire was a hogshead, and on the hogshead a beggar.
This was the king on his throne.
 
The three who had Gringoire in their clutches led him in
front of this hogshead, and the entire bacchanal rout fell
silent for a moment, with the exception of the cauldron
inhabited by the child.
 
Gringoire dared neither breathe nor raise his eyes.
 
"~Hombre, quita tu sombrero~!" said one of the three
knaves, in whose grasp he was, and, before he had
comprehended the meaning, the other had snatched his hat--a
wretched headgear, it is true, but still good on a sunny day or
when there was but little rain.  Gringoire sighed.
 
Meanwhile the king addressed him, from the summit of his
cask,--
 
"Who is this rogue?"
 
Gringoire shuddered.  That voice, although accentuated by
menace, recalled to him another voice, which, that very morning,
had dealt the deathblow to his mystery, by drawling,
nasally, in the midst of the audience, "Charity, please!"
He raised his head.  It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.
 
Clopin Trouillefou, arrayed in his royal insignia, wore
neither one rag more nor one rag less.  The sore upon his
arm had already disappeared.  He held in his hand one of
those whips made of thongs of white leather, which police
sergeants then used to repress the crowd, and which were
called ~boullayes~.  On his head he wore a sort of headgear,
bound round and closed at the top.  But it was difficult to
make out whether it was a child's cap or a king's crown, the
two things bore so strong a resemblance to each other.
 
Meanwhile Gringoire, without knowing why, had regained
some hope, on recognizing in the King of the Cour des Miracles
his accursed mendicant of the Grand Hall.
 
"Master," stammered he; "monseigneur--sire--how
ought I to address you?" he said at length, having reached
the culminating point of his crescendo, and knowing neither
how to mount higher, nor to descend again.
 
"Monseigneur, his majesty, or comrade, call me what you
please.  But make haste.  What have you to say in your
own defence?"
 
"In your own defence?" thought Gringoire, "that displeases
me."  He resumed, stuttering, "I am he, who this morning--"
 
"By the devil's claws!" interrupted Clopin, "your name,
knave, and nothing more.  Listen.  You are in the presence
of three powerful sovereigns: myself, Clopin Trouillefou,
King of Thunes, successor to the Grand Co?re, supreme
suzerain of the Realm of Argot; Mathias Hunyadi Spicali,
Duke of Egypt and of Bohemia, the old yellow fellow whom
you see yonder, with a dish clout round his head; Guillaume
Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat fellow who is not
listening to us but caressing a wench.  We are your judges.
You have entered the Kingdom of Argot, without being an
~argotier~; you have violated the privileges of our city.  You
must be punished unless you are a ~capon~, a ~franc-mitou~ or a
~rifod?; that is to say, in the slang of honest folks,--a thief,
a beggar, or a vagabond.  Are you anything of that sort?
Justify yourself; announce your titles."
 
"Alas!" said Gringoire, "I have not that honor.  I am
the author--"
 
"That is sufficient," resumed Trouillefou, without permitting
him to finish.  "You are going to be hanged.  'Tis a
very simple matter, gentlemen and honest bourgeois! as you
treat our people in your abode, so we treat you in ours!  The
law which you apply to vagabonds, vagabonds apply to you.
'Tis your fault if it is harsh.  One really must behold the
grimace of an honest man above the hempen collar now and
then; that renders the thing honorable.  Come, friend, divide
your rags gayly among these damsels.  I am going to have
you hanged to amuse the vagabonds, and you are to give them
your purse to drink your health.  If you have any mummery
to go through with, there's a very good God the Father in that
mortar yonder, in stone, which we stole from Saint-Pierre aux
Boeufs.  You have four minutes in which to fling your soul at
his head."
 
The harangue was formidable.
 
"Well said, upon my soul!  Clopin Trouillefou preaches
like the Holy Father the Pope!" exclaimed the Emperor of
Galilee, smashing his pot in order to prop up his table.
 
"Messeigneurs, emperors, and kings," said Gringoire coolly
(for I know not how, firmness had returned to him, and he
spoke with resolution), "don't think of such a thing; my
name is Pierre Gringoire.  I am the poet whose morality was
presented this morning in the grand hall of the Courts."
 
"Ah! so it was you, master!" said Clopin.  "I was there,
~x?e Dieu~!  Well! comrade, is that any reason, because
you bored us to death this morning, that you should not
be hung this evening?"
 
"I shall find difficulty in getting out of it," said Gringoire
to himself.  Nevertheless, he made one more effort: "I don't
see why poets are not classed with vagabonds," said he.
"Vagabond, Aesopus certainly was; Homerus was a beggar;
Mercurius was a thief--"
 
Clopin interrupted him: "I believe that you are trying to
blarney us with your jargon.  Zounds! let yourself be hung,
and don't kick up such a row over it!"
 
"Pardon me, monseigneur, the King of Thunes," replied
Gringoire, disputing the ground foot by foot.  "It is worth
trouble--One moment!--Listen to me--You are not going
to condemn me without having heard me"--
 
His unlucky voice was, in fact, drowned in the uproar which
rose around him.  The little boy scraped away at his cauldron
with more spirit than ever; and, to crown all, an old woman
had just placed on the tripod a frying-pan of grease, which
hissed away on the fire with a noise similar to the cry of a
troop of children in pursuit of a masker.
 
In the meantime, Clopin Trouillefou appeared to hold a
momentary conference with the Duke of Egypt, and the
Emperor of Galilee, who was completely drunk.  Then he
shouted shrilly: "Silence!" and, as the cauldron and the
frying-pan did not heed him, and continued their duet, he
jumped down from his hogshead, gave a kick to the boiler,
which rolled ten paces away bearing the child with it, a kick
to the frying-pan, which upset in the fire with all its grease,
and gravely remounted his throne, without troubling himself
about the stifled tears of the child, or the grumbling of the
old woman, whose supper was wasting away in a fine white flame.
 
Trouillefou made a sign, and the duke, the emperor, and
the passed masters of pickpockets, and the isolated robbers,
came and ranged themselves around him in a horseshoe, of
which Gringoire, still roughly held by the body, formed the
centre.  It was a semicircle of rags, tatters, tinsel, pitchforks,
axes, legs staggering with intoxication, huge, bare arms, faces
sordid, dull, and stupid.  In the midst of this Round Table of
beggary, Clopin Trouillefou,--as the doge of this senate, as
the king of this peerage, as the pope of this conclave,--
dominated; first by virtue of the height of his hogshead, and
next by virtue of an indescribable, haughty, fierce, and formidable
air, which caused his eyes to flash, and corrected in his
savage profile the bestial type of the race of vagabonds.  One
would have pronounced him a boar amid a herd of swine.
 
"Listen," said he to Gringoire, fondling his misshapen chin
with his horny hand; "I don't see why you should not be
hung.  It is true that it appears to be repugnant to you; and
it is very natural, for you bourgeois are not accustomed to it.
You form for yourselves a great idea of the thing.  After all,
we don't wish you any harm.  Here is a means of extricating
yourself from your predicament for the moment.  Will you
become one of us?"
 
The reader can judge of the effect which this proposition
produced upon Gringoire, who beheld life slipping away from
him, and who was beginning to lose his hold upon it.  He
clutched at it again with energy.
 
"Certainly I will, and right heartily," said he.
 
"Do you consent," resumed Clopin, "to enroll yourself among the
people of the knife?"
 
"Of the knife, precisely," responded Gringoire.
 
"You recognize yourself as a member of the free bourgeoisie?"*
added the King of Thunes.
 
 
*  A high-toned sharper.
 
 
"Of the free bourgeoisie."
 
"Subject of the Kingdom of Argot?"
 
"Of the Kingdom of Argot*."
 
 
*  Thieves.
 
 
"A vagabond?"
 
"A vagabond."
 
"In your soul?"
 
"In my soul."
 
"I must call your attention to the fact," continued the
king, "that you will be hung all the same."
 
"The devil!" said the poet.
 
"Only," continued Clopin imperturbably, "you will be hung
later on, with more ceremony, at the expense of the good city
of Paris, on a handsome stone gibbet, and by honest men.
That is a consolation."
 
"Just so," responded Gringoire.
 
"There are other advantages.  In your quality of a high-toned
sharper, you will not have to pay the taxes on mud, or
the poor, or lanterns, to which the bourgeois of Paris are
subject."
 
"So be it," said the poet.  "I agree.  I am a vagabond, a
thief, a sharper, a man of the knife, anything you please; and
I am all that already, monsieur, King of Thunes, for I am a
philosopher; ~et omnia in philosophia, omnes in philosopho
continentur~,--all things are contained in philosophy, all men in
the philosopher, as you know."
 
The King of Thunes scowled.
 
"What do you take me for, my friend?  What Hungarian
Jew patter are you jabbering at us?  I don't know Hebrew.
One isn't a Jew because one is a bandit.  I don't even steal
any longer.  I'm above that; I kill.  Cut-throat, yes;
cutpurse, no."
 
Gringoire tried to slip in some excuse between these curt
words, which wrath rendered more and more jerky.
 
"I ask your pardon, monseigneur.  It is not Hebrew; 'tis Latin."
 
"I tell you," resumed Clopin angrily, "that I'm not a Jew,
and that I'll have you hung, belly of the synagogue, like that
little shopkeeper of Judea, who is by your side, and whom I
entertain strong hopes of seeing nailed to a counter one of
these days, like the counterfeit coin that he is!"
 
So saying, he pointed his finger at the little, bearded Hungarian
Jew who had accosted Gringoire with his ~facitote caritatem~,
and who, understanding no other language beheld with
surprise the King of Thunes's ill-humor overflow upon him.
 
At length Monsieur Clopin calmed down.
 
"So you will be a vagabond, you knave?" he said to our poet.
 
"Of course," replied the poet.
 
"Willing is not all," said the surly Clopin; "good will
doesn't put one onion the more into the soup, and 'tis good
for nothing except to go to Paradise with; now, Paradise and
the thieves' band are two different things.  In order to be
received among the thieves,* you must prove that you are
good for something, and for that purpose, you must search the
manikin."
 
 
* L'argot.
 
 
"I'll search anything you like," said Gringoire.
 
Clopin made a sign.  Several thieves detached themselves
from the circle, and returned a moment later.  They brought
two thick posts, terminated at their lower extremities in
spreading timber supports, which made them stand readily
upon the ground; to the upper extremity of the two posts
they fitted a cross-beam, and the whole constituted a very
pretty portable gibbet, which Gringoire had the satisfaction of
beholding rise before him, in a twinkling.  Nothing was lacking,
not even the rope, which swung gracefully over the cross-beam.
 
"What are they going to do?" Gringoire asked himself
with some uneasiness.  A sound of bells, which he heard at
that moment, put an end to his anxiety; it was a stuffed
manikin, which the vagabonds were suspending by the neck
from the rope, a sort of scarecrow dressed in red, and so
hung with mule-bells and larger bells, that one might have
tricked out thirty Castilian mules with them.  These thousand
tiny bells quivered for some time with the vibration of the
rope, then gradually died away, and finally became silent
when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility
by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water
clock and the hour-glass.
Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool
placed beneath the manikin,--
"Climb up there."
 
"Death of the devil!" objected Gringoire; "I shall break
my neck.  Your stool limps like one of Martial's distiches;
it has one hexameter leg and one pentameter leg."
 
"Climb!" repeated Clopin.
 
Gringoire mounted the stool, and succeeded, not without
some oscillations of head and arms, in regaining his centre of
gravity.
 
"Now," went on the King of Thunes, "twist your right
foot round your left leg, and rise on the tip of your left foot."
 
"Monseigneur," said Gringoire, "so you absolutely insist
on my breaking some one of my limbs?"
 
Clopin tossed his head.
 
"Hark ye, my friend, you talk too much.  Here's the gist
of the matter in two words: you are to rise on tiptoe, as I
tell you; in that way you will be able to reach the pocket of
the manikin, you will rummage it, you will pull out the purse
that is there,--and if you do all this without our hearing
the sound of a bell, all is well: you shall be a vagabond.
All we shall then have to do, will be to thrash you soundly
for the space of a week."
 
"~Ventre-Dieu~!  I will be careful," said Gringoire.  "And
suppose I do make the bells sound?"
 
"Then you will be hanged.  Do you understand?"
 
"I don't understand at all," replied Gringoire.
 
"Listen, once more.  You are to search the manikin, and
take away its purse; if a single bell stirs during the operation,
you will be hung.  Do you understand that?"
 
"Good," said Gringoire; "I understand that.  And then?"
 
"If you succeed in removing the purse without our hearing
the bells, you are a vagabond, and you will be thrashed for
eight consecutive days.  You understand now, no doubt?"
 
"No, monseigneur; I no longer understand.  Where is the
advantage to me? hanged in one case, cudgelled in the other?"
 
"And a vagabond," resumed Clopin, "and a vagabond; is
that nothing?  It is for your interest that we should beat
you, in order to harden you to blows."
 
"Many thanks," replied the poet.
 
"Come, make haste," said the king, stamping upon his
cask, which resounded like a huge drum!  Search the manikin,
and let there be an end to this!  I warn you for the last
time, that if I hear a single bell, you will take the place of
the manikin."
 
The band of thieves applauded Clopin's words, and arranged
themselves in a circle round the gibbet, with a laugh so pitiless
that Gringoire perceived that he amused them too much
not to have everything to fear from them.  No hope was
left for him, accordingly, unless it were the slight chance
of succeeding in the formidable operation which was imposed
upon him; he decided to risk it, but it was not without first
having addressed a fervent prayer to the manikin he was
about to plunder, and who would have been easier to move
to pity than the vagabonds.  These myriad bells, with their
little copper tongues, seemed to him like the mouths of so
many asps, open and ready to sting and to hiss.
 
"Oh!" he said, in a very low voice, "is it possible that my
life depends on the slightest vibration of the least of these
bells?  Oh!" he added, with clasped hands, "bells, do not
ring, hand-bells do not clang, mule-bells do not quiver!"
 
He made one more attempt upon Trouillefou.
 
"And if there should come a gust of wind?"
 
"You will be hanged," replied the other, without hesitation.
 
Perceiving that no respite, nor reprieve, nor subterfuge was
possible, he bravely decided upon his course of action; he
wound his right foot round his left leg, raised himself on his
left foot, and stretched out his arm: but at the moment
when his hand touched the manikin, his body, which was now
supported upon one leg only, wavered on the stool which had
but three; he made an involuntary effort to support himself
by the manikin, lost his balance, and fell heavily to the
ground, deafened by the fatal vibration of the thousand bells
of the manikin, which, yielding to the impulse imparted by
his hand, described first a rotary motion, and then swayed
majestically between the two posts.
 
"Malediction!" he cried as he fell, and remained as though
dead, with his face to the earth.
 
Meanwhile, he heard the dreadful peal above his head, the
diabolical laughter of the vagabonds, and the voice of
Trouillefou saying,--
 
"Pick me up that knave, and hang him without ceremony."
He rose.  They had already detached the manikin to make
room for him.
 
The thieves made him mount the stool, Clopin came to him,
passed the rope about his neck, and, tapping him on the
shoulder,--
 
"Adieu, my friend.  You can't escape now, even if you
digested with the pope's guts."
 
The word "Mercy!" died away upon Gringoire's lips.  He
cast his eyes about him; but there was no hope: all were
laughing.
 
"Bellevigne de l'Etoile," said the King of Thunes to an
enormous vagabond, who stepped out from the ranks, "climb
upon the cross beam."
 
Bellevigne de l'Etoile nimbly mounted the transverse beam,
and in another minute, Gringoire, on raising his eyes, beheld
him, with terror, seated upon the beam above his head.
 
"Now," resumed Clopin Trouillefou, "as soon as I clap my
hands, you, Andry the Red, will fling the stool to the ground
with a blow of your knee; you, Fran?is Chante-Prune, will
cling to the feet of the rascal; and you, Bellevigne, will fling
yourself on his shoulders; and all three at once, do you
hear?"
 
Gringoire shuddered.
 
"Are you ready?" said Clopin Trouillefou to the three
thieves, who held themselves in readiness to fall upon
Gringoire.  A moment of horrible suspense ensued for the poor
victim, during which Clopin tranquilly thrust into the fire
with the tip of his foot, some bits of vine shoots which the
flame had not caught.  "Are you ready?" he repeated, and
opened his hands to clap.  One second more and all would
have been over.
 
But he paused, as though struck by a sudden thought.
 
"One moment!" said he; "I forgot!  It is our custom not
to hang a man without inquiring whether there is any woman
who wants him.  Comrade, this is your last resource.  You
must wed either a female vagabond or the noose."
 
This law of the vagabonds, singular as it may strike the
reader, remains to-day written out at length, in ancient English
legislation.  (See _Burington's Observations_.)
 
Gringoire breathed again.  This was the second time that
he had returned to life within an hour.  So he did not dare
to trust to it too implicitly.
 
"Hol?" cried Clopin, mounted once more upon his cask,
"hol? women, females, is there among you, from the sorceress
to her cat, a wench who wants this rascal?  Hol? Colette
la Charonne!  Elisabeth Trouvain!  Simone Jodouyne!
Marie Pi?ebou!  Thonne la Longue!  B?arde Fanouel!  Michelle
Genaille!  Claude Ronge-oreille!  Mathurine Girorou!--Hol?
Isabeau-la-Thierrye!  Come and see!  A man for nothing!
Who wants him?"
 
Gringoire, no doubt, was not very appetizing in this miserable
condition.  The female vagabonds did not seem to be
much affected by the proposition.  The unhappy wretch
heard them answer: "No! no! hang him; there'll be the more
fun for us all!"
 
Nevertheless, three emerged from the throng and came to
smell of him.  The first was a big wench, with a square face.
She examined the philosopher's deplorable doublet attentively.
His garment was worn, and more full of holes than a stove for
roasting chestnuts.  The girl made a wry face.  "Old rag!" she
muttered, and addressing Gringoire, "Let's see your cloak!"
"I have lost it," replied Gringoire.  "Your hat?"  "They took
it away from me."  "Your shoes?"  "They have hardly any
soles left."  "Your purse?"  "Alas!" stammered Gringoire, "I
have not even a sou."  "Let them hang you, then, and say 'Thank
you!'" retorted the vagabond wench, turning her back on him.
 
The second,--old, black, wrinkled, hideous, with an ugliness
conspicuous even in the Cour des Miracles, trotted round Gringoire.
He almost trembled lest she should want him.  But she
mumbled between her teeth, "He's too thin," and went off.
 
The third was a young girl, quite fresh, and not too ugly.
"Save me!" said the poor fellow to her, in a low tone.  She
gazed at him for a moment with an air of pity, then dropped
her eyes, made a plait in her petticoat, and remained in indecision.
He followed all these movements with his eyes; it
was the last gleam of hope.  "No," said the young girl, at
length, "no!  Guillaume Longuejoue would beat me."  She
retreated into the crowd.
 
"You are unlucky, comrade," said Clopin.
 
Then rising to his feet, upon his hogshead.  "No one wants
him," he exclaimed, imitating the accent of an auctioneer, to
the great delight of all; "no one wants him? once, twice,
three times!" and, turning towards the gibbet with a sign of
his hand, "Gone!"
 
Bellevigne de l'Etoile, Andry the Red, Fran?is Chante-Prune,
stepped up to Gringoire.
 
At that moment a cry arose among the thieves: "La Esmeralda!
La Esmeralda!"
 
Gringoire shuddered, and turned towards the side whence the
clamor proceeded.
 
The crowd opened, and gave passage to a pure and dazzling
form.
 
It was the gypsy.
 
"La Esmeralda!" said Gringoire, stupefied in the midst of
his emotions, by the abrupt manner in which that magic word
knotted together all his reminiscences of the day.
 
This rare creature seemed, even in the Cour des Miracles,
to exercise her sway of charm and beauty.  The vagabonds,
male and female, ranged themselves gently along her path, and
their brutal faces beamed beneath her glance.
 
She approached the victim with her light step.  Her pretty
Djali followed her.  Gringoire was more dead than alive.  She
examined him for a moment in silence.
 
"You are going to hang this man?" she said gravely, to Clopin.
 
"Yes, sister," replied the King of Thunes, "unless you will
take him for your husband."
 
She made her pretty little pout with her under lip.  "I'll take
him," said she.
 
Gringoire firmly believed that he had been in a dream ever
since morning, and that this was the continuation of it.
 
The change was, in fact, violent, though a gratifying one.
They undid the noose, and made the poet step down from the
stool.  His emotion was so lively that he was obliged to sit down.
 
The Duke of Egypt brought an earthenware crock, without
uttering a word.  The gypsy offered it to Gringoire: "Fling
it on the ground," said she.
 
The crock broke into four pieces.
 
"Brother," then said the Duke of Egypt, laying his hands
upon their foreheads, "she is your wife; sister, he is your
husband for four years.  Go."
 
 
 
CHAPTER VII. A BRIDAL NIGHT.
 
A few moments later our poet found himself in a tiny
arched chamber, very cosy, very warm, seated at a table
which appeared to ask nothing better than to make some loans
from a larder hanging near by, having a good bed in prospect,
and alone with a pretty girl.  The adventure smacked of
enchantment.  He began seriously to take himself for a personage
in a fairy tale; he cast his eyes about him from time
to time to time, as though to see if the chariot of fire, harnessed
to two-winged chimeras, which alone could have so
rapidly transported him from Tartarus to Paradise, were still
there.  At times, also, he fixed his eyes obstinately upon the
holes in his doublet, in order to cling to reality, and not lose
the ground from under his feet completely.  His reason,
tossed about in imaginary space, now hung only by this
thread.
 
The young girl did not appear to pay any attention to him;
she went and came, displaced a stool, talked to her goat, and
indulged in a pout now and then.  At last she came and
seated herself near the table, and Gringoire was able to
scrutinize her at his ease.
 
You have been a child, reader, and you would, perhaps, be
very happy to be one still.  It is quite certain that you have
not, more than once (and for my part, I have passed whole
days, the best employed of my life, at it) followed from
thicket to thicket, by the side of running water, on a sunny
day, a beautiful green or blue dragon-fly, breaking its flight
in abrupt angles, and kissing the tips of all the branches.
You recollect with what amorous curiosity your thought and
your gaze were riveted upon this little whirlwind, hissing
and humming with wings of purple and azure, in the midst
of which floated an imperceptible body, veiled by the very
rapidity of its movement.  The aerial being which was dimly
outlined amid this quivering of wings, appeared to you chimerical,
imaginary, impossible to touch, impossible to see.
But when, at length, the dragon-fly alighted on the tip of a
reed, and, holding your breath the while, you were able to examine
the long, gauze wings, the long enamel robe, the two
globes of crystal, what astonishment you felt, and what fear
lest you should again behold the form disappear into a shade,
and the creature into a chimera!  Recall these impressions,
and you will readily appreciate what Gringoire felt on
contemplating, beneath her visible and palpable form, that
Esmeralda of whom, up to that time, he had only caught a
glimpse, amidst a whirlwind of dance, song, and tumult.
 
Sinking deeper and deeper into his revery: "So this,"
he said to himself, following her vaguely with his eyes, "is
la Esmeralda! a celestial creature! a street dancer! so much,
and so little!  'Twas she who dealt the death-blow to my
mystery this morning, 'tis she who saves my life this
evening!  My evil genius!  My good angel!  A pretty woman,
on my word! and who must needs love me madly to have
taken me in that fashion.  By the way," said he, rising
suddenly, with that sentiment of the true which formed the
foundation of his character and his philosophy, "I don't
know very well how it happens, but I am her husband!"
 
With this idea in his head and in his eyes, he stepped up
to the young girl in a manner so military and so gallant
that she drew back.
 
"What do you want of me?" said she.
 
"Can you ask me, adorable Esmeralda?" replied Gringoire,
with so passionate an accent that he was himself astonished
at it on hearing himself speak.
 
The gypsy opened her great eyes.  "I don't know what
you mean."
 
"What!" resumed Gringoire, growing warmer and warmer,
and supposing that, after all, he had to deal merely with a
virtue of the Cour des Miracles; "am I not thine, sweet friend,
art thou not mine?"
 
And, quite ingenuously, he clasped her waist.
 
The gypsy's corsage slipped through his hands like the skin
of an eel.  She bounded from one end of the tiny room to the
other, stooped down, and raised herself again, with a little
poniard in her hand, before Gringoire had even had time to
see whence the poniard came; proud and angry, with swelling
lips and inflated nostrils, her cheeks as red as an api
apple,* and her eyes darting lightnings.  At the same time,
the white goat placed itself in front of her, and presented to
Gringoire a hostile front, bristling with two pretty horns,
gilded and very sharp.  All this took place in the twinkling
of an eye.
 
 
*  A small dessert apple, bright red on one side and greenish-
white on the other.
 
 
The dragon-fly had turned into a wasp, and asked nothing
better than to sting.
 
Our philosopher was speechless, and turned his astonished
eyes from the goat to the young girl.  "Holy Virgin!" he
said at last, when surprise permitted him to speak, "here are
two hearty dames!"
 
The gypsy broke the silence on her side.
 
"You must be a very bold knave!"
 
"Pardon, mademoiselle," said Gringoire, with a smile.  "But
why did you take me for your husband?"
 
"Should I have allowed you to be hanged?"
 
"So," said the poet, somewhat disappointed in his amorous
hopes.  "You had no other idea in marrying me than to save
me from the gibbet?"
 
"And what other idea did you suppose that I had?"
 
Gringoire bit his lips.  "Come," said he, "I am not yet so
triumphant in Cupido, as I thought.  But then, what was the
good of breaking that poor jug?"
 
Meanwhile Esmeralda's dagger and the goat's horns were
still upon the defensive.
 
"Mademoiselle Esmeralda," said the poet, "let us come to
terms.  I am not a clerk of the court, and I shall not go to
law with you for thus carrying a dagger in Paris, in the teeth
of the ordinances and prohibitions of M. the Provost.
Nevertheless, you are not ignorant of the fact that Noel
Lescrivain was condemned, a week ago, to pay ten Parisian sous,
for having carried a cutlass.  But this is no affair of mine, and
I will come to the point.  I swear to you, upon my share of
Paradise, not to approach you without your leave and permission,
but do give me some supper."
 
The truth is, Gringoire was, like M. Despreaux, "not very
voluptuous."  He did not belong to that chevalier and musketeer
species, who take young girls by assault.  In the matter
of love, as in all other affairs, he willingly assented to
temporizing and adjusting terms; and a good supper, and an amiable
t?e-a-t?e appeared to him, especially when he was hungry,
an excellent interlude between the prologue and the catastrophe
of a love adventure.
 
The gypsy did not reply.  She made her disdainful little
grimace, drew up her head like a bird, then burst out laughing,
and the tiny poniard disappeared as it had come, without
Gringoire being able to see where the wasp concealed its sting.
 
A moment later, there stood upon the table a loaf of rye
bread, a slice of bacon, some wrinkled apples and a jug of
beer.  Gringoire began to eat eagerly.  One would have said,
to hear the furious clashing of his iron fork and his
earthenware plate, that all his love had turned to appetite.
 
The young girl seated opposite him, watched him in silence,
visibly preoccupied with another thought, at which she smiled
from time to time, while her soft hand caressed the intelligent
head of the goat, gently pressed between her knees.
 
A candle of yellow wax illuminated this scene of voracity
and revery.
 
Meanwhile, the first cravings of his stomach having been
stilled, Gringoire felt some false shame at perceiving that
nothing remained but one apple.
 
"You do not eat, Mademoiselle Esmeralda?"
 
She replied by a negative sign of the head, and her pensive
glance fixed itself upon the vault of the ceiling.
 
"What the deuce is she thinking of?" thought Gringoire,
staring at what she was gazing at; "'tis impossible that it can
be that stone dwarf carved in the keystone of that arch, which
thus absorbs her attention.  What the deuce!  I can bear the
comparison!"
 
He raised his voice, "Mademoiselle!"
 
She seemed not to hear him.
 
He repeated, still more loudly, "Mademoiselle Esmeralda!"
 
Trouble wasted.  The young girl's mind was elsewhere, and
Gringoire's voice had not the power to recall it.  Fortunately,
the goat interfered.  She began to pull her mistress gently
by the sleeve.
 
"What dost thou want, Djali?" said the gypsy, hastily, as though
suddenly awakened.
 
"She is hungry," said Gringoire, charmed to enter into conversation.
Esmeralda began to crumble some bread, which Djali ate gracefully
from the hollow of her hand.
 
Moreover, Gringoire did not give her time to resume her
revery.  He hazarded a delicate question.
 
"So you don't want me for your husband?"
 
The young girl looked at him intently, and said, "No."
 
"For your lover?" went on Gringoire.
 
She pouted, and replied, "No."
 
"For your friend?" pursued Gringoire.
 
She gazed fixedly at him again, and said, after a momentary
reflection, "Perhaps."
 
This "perhaps," so dear to philosophers, emboldened Gringoire.
 
"Do you know what friendship is?" he asked.
 
"Yes," replied the gypsy; "it is to be brother and sister; two
souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand."
 
"And love?" pursued Gringoire.
 
"Oh! love!" said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye
beamed.  "That is to be two and to be but one.  A man and a
woman mingled into one angel.  It is heaven."
 
The street dancer had a beauty as she spoke thus, that
struck Gringoire singularly, and seemed to him in perfect
keeping with the almost oriental exaltation of her words.
Her pure, red lips half smiled; her serene and candid brow
became troubled, at intervals, under her thoughts, like a mirror
under the breath; and from beneath her long, drooping, black
eyelashes, there escaped a sort of ineffable light, which gave
to her profile that ideal serenity which Raphael found at
the mystic point of intersection of virginity, maternity,
and divinity.
 
Nevertheless, Gringoire continued,--
 
"What must one be then, in order to please you?"
 
"A man."
 
"And I--" said he, "what, then, am I?"
 
"A man has a hemlet on his head, a sword in his hand, and
golden spurs on his heels."
 
"Good," said Gringoire, "without a horse, no man.  Do
you love any one?"
 
"As a lover?--"
 
"Yes."
 
She remained thoughtful for a moment, then said with a
peculiar expression: "That I shall know soon."
 
"Why not this evening?" resumed the poet tenderly.  "Why
not me?"
 
She cast a grave glance upon him and said,--
 
"I can never love a man who cannot protect me."
 
Gringoire colored, and took the hint.  It was evident that
the young girl was alluding to the slight assistance which he
had rendered her in the critical situation in which she had
found herself two hours previously.  This memory, effaced by
his own adventures of the evening, now recurred to him.  He
smote his brow.
 
"By the way, mademoiselle, I ought to have begun there.
Pardon my foolish absence of mind.  How did you contrive
to escape from the claws of Quasimodo?"
 
This question made the gypsy shudder.
 
"Oh! the horrible hunchback," said she, hiding her face in
her hands.  And she shuddered as though with violent cold.
 
"Horrible, in truth," said Gringoire, who clung to his idea;
"but how did you manage to escape him?"
 
La Esmeralda smiled, sighed, and remained silent.
 
"Do you know why he followed you?" began Gringoire again,
seeking to return to his question by a circuitous route.
 
"I don't know," said the young girl, and she added hastily,
"but you were following me also, why were you following me?"
 
"In good faith," responded Gringoire, "I don't know either."
 
Silence ensued.  Gringoire slashed the table with his knife.
The young girl smiled and seemed to be gazing through the
wall at something.  All at once she began to sing in a barely
articulate voice,--
 
 
   ~Quando las pintadas aves,
   Mudas estan, y la tierra~--*
 
 
*  When the gay-plumaged birds grow weary, and the earth--
 
 
She broke off abruptly, and began to caress Djali.
 
"That's a pretty animal of yours," said Gringoire.
 
"She is my sister," she answered.
 
"Why are you called 'la Esmeralda?'" asked the poet.
 
"I do not know."
 
"But why?"
 
She drew from her bosom a sort of little oblong bag, suspended
from her neck by a string of adr?arach beads.  This
bag exhaled a strong odor of camphor.  It was covered with
green silk, and bore in its centre a large piece of green glass,
in imitation of an emerald.
 
"Perhaps it is because of this," said she.
 
Gringoire was on the point of taking the bag in his hand.
She drew back.
 
"Don't touch it!  It is an amulet.  You would injure the
charm or the charm would injure you."
 
The poet's curiosity was more and more aroused.
 
"Who gave it to you?"
 
She laid one finger on her mouth and concealed the amulet
in her bosom.  He tried a few more questions, but she
hardly replied.
 
"What is the meaning of the words, 'la Esmeralda?'"
 
"I don't know," said she.
 
"To what language do they belong?"
 
"They are Egyptian, I think."
 
"I suspected as much," said Gringoire, "you are not a
native of France?"
 
"I don't know."
 
"Are your parents alive?"
 
She began to sing, to an ancient air,--
  ~Mon p?e est oiseau,
  Ma m?e est oiselle.
B
  Je passe l'eau sans nacelle,
  Je passe l'eau sans bateau,
  Ma m?e est oiselle,
 Mon p?e est oiseau~.*
 
 
*  My father is a bird, my mother is a bird.  I cross the
water without a barque, I cross the water without a boat.
My mother is a bird, my father is a bird.
 
 
"Good," said Gringoire.  "At what age did you come to France?"
 
"When I was very young."
 
"And when to Paris?"
 
"Last year.  At the moment when we were entering the
papal gate I saw a reed warbler flit through the air, that was
at the end of August; I said, it will be a hard winter."
 
"So it was," said Gringoire, delighted at this beginning of
a conversation.  "I passed it in blowing my fingers.  So
you have the gift of prophecy?"
 
She retired into her laconics again.
 
"Is that man whom you call the Duke of Egypt, the chief
of your tribe?"
 
"Yes."
 
"But it was he who married us," remarked the poet timidly.
 
She made her customary pretty grimace.
 
"I don't even know your name."
 
"My name?  If you want it, here it is,--Pierre Gringoire."
 
"I know a prettier one," said she.
 
"Naughty girl!" retorted the poet.  "Never mind, you shall
not provoke me.  Wait, perhaps you will love me more when
you know me better; and then, you have told me your story
with so much confidence, that I owe you a little of mine.  You
must know, then, that my name is Pierre Gringoire, and that
I am a son of the farmer of the notary's office of Gonesse.
My father was hung by the Burgundians, and my mother
disembowelled by the Picards, at the siege of Paris, twenty years
ago.  At six years of age, therefore, I was an orphan, without
a sole to my foot except the pavements of Paris.  I do not
know how I passed the interval from six to sixteen.  A fruit
dealer gave me a plum here, a baker flung me a crust there;
in the evening I got myself taken up by the watch, who threw
me into prison, and there I found a bundle of straw.  All this
did not prevent my growing up and growing thin, as you see.
In the winter I warmed myself in the sun, under the porch of
the H?el de Sens, and I thought it very ridiculous that the
fire on Saint John's Day was reserved for the dog days.  At
sixteen, I wished to choose a calling.  I tried all in succession.
I became a soldier; but I was not brave enough.  I became a
monk; but I was not sufficiently devout; and then I'm a bad
hand at drinking.  In despair, I became an apprentice of the
woodcutters, but I was not strong enough; I had more of
an inclination to become a schoolmaster; 'tis true that I did
not know how to read, but that's no reason.  I perceived at
the end of a certain time, that I lacked something in every
direction; and seeing that I was good for nothing, of my own
free will I became a poet and rhymester.  That is a trade
which one can always adopt when one is a vagabond, and it's
better than stealing, as some young brigands of my acquaintance
advised me to do.  One day I met by luck, Dom Claude
Frollo, the reverend archdeacon of Notre-Dame.  He took an
interest in me, and it is to him that I to-day owe it that I am a
veritable man of letters, who knows Latin from the ~de Officiis~
of Cicero to the mortuology of the Celestine Fathers, and a
barbarian neither in scholastics, nor in politics, nor in rhythmics,
that sophism of sophisms.  I am the author of the Mystery
which was presented to-day with great triumph and a great
concourse of populace, in the grand hall of the Palais de Justice.
I have also made a book which will contain six hundred
pages, on the wonderful comet of 1465, which sent one man
mad.  I have enjoyed still other successes.  Being somewhat
of an artillery carpenter, I lent a hand to Jean Mangue's great
bombard, which burst, as you know, on the day when it was
tested, on the Pont de Charenton, and killed four and twenty
curious spectators.  You see that I am not a bad match in
marriage.  I know a great many sorts of very engaging tricks,
which I will teach your goat; for example, to mimic the
Bishop of Paris, that cursed Pharisee whose mill wheels
splash passers-by the whole length of the Pont aux Meuniers.
And then my mystery will bring me in a great deal of coined
money, if they will only pay me.  And finally, I am at your
orders, I and my wits, and my science and my letters, ready
to live with you, damsel, as it shall please you, chastely or
joyously; husband and wife, if you see fit; brother and sister,
if you think that better."
 
Gringoire ceased, awaiting the effect of his harangue on the
young girl.  Her eyes were fixed on the ground.
 
"'Phoebus,'" she said in a low voice.  Then, turning towards
the poet, "'Phoebus',--what does that mean?"
 
Gringoire, without exactly understanding what the connection
could be between his address and this question, was not
sorry to display his erudition.  Assuming an air of importance,
he replied,--
 
"It is a Latin word which means 'sun.'"
 
"Sun!" she repeated.
 
"It is the name of a handsome archer, who was a god,"
added Gringoire.
 
"A god!" repeated the gypsy, and there was something pensive and
passionate in her tone.
 
At that moment, one of her bracelets became unfastened
and fell.  Gringoire stooped quickly to pick it up; when he
straightened up, the young girl and the goat had disappeared.
He heard the sound of a bolt.  It was a little door, communicating,
no doubt, with a neighboring cell, which was being
fastened on the outside.
 
"Has she left me a bed, at least?" said our philosopher.
 
He made the tour of his cell.  There was no piece of furniture
adapted to sleeping purposes, except a tolerably long
wooden coffer; and its cover was carved, to boot; which
afforded Gringoire, when he stretched himself out upon it, a
sensation somewhat similar to that which Microm?as would
feel if he were to lie down on the Alps.
 
"Come!" said he, adjusting himself as well as possible, "I
must resign myself.  But here's a strange nuptial night.  'Tis
a pity.  There was something innocent and antediluvian about
that broken crock, which quite pleased me."
 
 
 
BOOK THIRD.
 
 
CHAPTER I. NOTRE-DAME.
 
The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a
majestic and sublime edifice.  But, beautiful as it has been
preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to
wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations
which time and men have both caused the venerable monument
to suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its
first stone, or for Philip Augustus, who laid the last.
 
On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the
side of a wrinkle, one always finds a scar.  ~Tempus edax,
homo edacior*~; which I should be glad to translate thus:
time is blind, man is stupid.
 
 
*  Time is a devourer; man, more so.
 
 
If we had leisure to examine with the reader, one by one,
the diverse traces of destruction imprinted upon the old
church, time's share would be the least, the share of men the
most, especially the men of art, since there have been individuals
who assumed the title of architects during the last two
centuries.
 
And, in the first place, to cite only a few leading examples,
there certainly are few finer architectural pages than this
fa?de, where, successively and at once, the three portals
hollowed out in an arch; the broidered and dentated cordon
of the eight and twenty royal niches; the immense central
rose window, flanked by its two lateral windows, like a
priest by his deacon and subdeacon; the frail and lofty gallery
of trefoil arcades, which supports a heavy platform above its
fine, slender columns; and lastly, the two black and massive
towers with their slate penthouses, harmonious parts of a
magnificent whole, superposed in five gigantic stories;--develop
themselves before the eye, in a mass and without confusion,
with their innumerable details of statuary, carving, and
sculpture, joined powerfully to the tranquil grandeur of the
whole; a vast symphony in stone, so to speak; the colossal work
of one man and one people, all together one and complex, like
the Iliads and the Romanceros, whose sister it is; prodigious
product of the grouping together of all the forces of an epoch,
where, upon each stone, one sees the fancy of the workman
disciplined by the genius of the artist start forth in a
hundred fashions; a sort of human creation, in a word,
powerful and fecund as the divine creation of which it seems
to have stolen the double character,--variety, eternity.
 
And what we here say of the fa?de must be said of the
entire church; and what we say of the cathedral church of
Paris, must be said of all the churches of Christendom in the
Middle Ages.  All things are in place in that art, self-created,
logical, and well proportioned.  To measure the great toe of
the foot is to measure the giant.
 
Let us return to the fa?de of Notre-Dame, as it still
appears to us, when we go piously to admire the grave and
puissant cathedral, which inspires terror, so its chronicles
assert: ~quoe mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus~.
 
Three important things are to-day lacking in that fa?de:
in the first place, the staircase of eleven steps which formerly
raised it above the soil; next, the lower series of statues
which occupied the niches of the three portals; and lastly the
upper series, of the twenty-eight most ancient kings of France,
which garnished the gallery of the first story, beginning with
Childebert, and ending with Phillip Augustus, holding in his
hand "the imperial apple."
 
Time has caused the staircase to disappear, by raising the
soil of the city with a slow and irresistible progress; but,
while thus causing the eleven steps which added to the majestic
height of the edifice, to be devoured, one by one, by the
rising tide of the pavements of Paris,--time has bestowed
upon the church perhaps more than it has taken away, for it
is time which has spread over the fa?de that sombre hue of
the centuries which makes the old age of monuments the
period of their beauty.
 
But who has thrown down the two rows of statues? who
has left the niches empty? who has cut, in the very middle of
the central portal, that new and bastard arch? who has dared
to frame therein that commonplace and heavy door of carved
wood, ?la Louis XV., beside the arabesques of Biscornette?
The men, the architects, the artists of our day.
 
And if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown
that colossus of Saint Christopher, proverbial for magnitude
among statues, as the grand hall of the Palais de Justice
was among halls, as the spire of Strasbourg among spires?
And those myriads of statues, which peopled all the spaces
between the columns of the nave and the choir, kneeling,
standing, equestrian, men, women, children, kings, bishops,
gendarmes, in stone, in marble, in gold, in silver, in
copper, in wax even,--who has brutally swept them away?
It is not time.
 
And who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly
encumbered with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble
sarcophagus, with angels' heads and clouds, which seems a
specimen pillaged from the Val-de-Gr?e or the Invalides?
Who stupidly sealed that heavy anachronism of stone in the
Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus?  Was it not Louis
XIV., fulfilling the request of Louis XIII.?
 
And who put the cold, white panes in the place of those
windows," high in color, "which caused the astonished eyes
of our fathers to hesitate between the rose of the grand portal
and the arches of the apse?  And what would a sub-chanter
of the sixteenth century say, on beholding the beautiful
yellow wash, with which our archiepiscopal vandals have
desmeared their cathedral?  He would remember that it
was the color with which the hangman smeared "accursed"
edifices; he would recall the H?el du Petit-Bourbon, all
smeared thus, on account of the constable's treason.  "Yellow,
after all, of so good a quality," said Sauval, "and so well
recommended, that more than a century has not yet caused
it to lose its color." He would think that the sacred place
had become infamous, and would flee.
 
And if we ascend the cathedral, without mentioning a thousand
barbarisms of every sort,--what has become of that
charming little bell tower, which rested upon the point of
intersection of the cross-roofs, and which, no less frail and no
less bold than its neighbor (also destroyed), the spire of the
Sainte-Chapelle, buried itself in the sky, farther forward than
the towers, slender, pointed, sonorous, carved in open work.
An architect of good taste amputated it (1787), and considered
it sufficient to mask the wound with that large, leaden
plaster, which resembles a pot cover.
 
'Tis thus that the marvellous art of the Middle Ages has
been treated in nearly every country, especially in France.
One can distinguish on its ruins three sorts of lesions, all
three of which cut into it at different depths; first, time,
which has insensibly notched its surface here and there, and
gnawed it everywhere; next, political and religious revolution,
which, blind and wrathful by nature, have flung themselves
tumultuously upon it, torn its rich garment of carving
and sculpture, burst its rose windows, broken its necklace of
arabesques and tiny figures, torn out its statues, sometimes
because of their mitres, sometimes because of their crowns;
lastly, fashions, even more grotesque and foolish, which, since
the anarchical and splendid deviations of the Renaissance,
have followed each other in the necessary decadence of
architecture.  Fashions have wrought more harm than revolutions.
They have cut to the quick; they have attacked the very
bone and framework of art; they have cut, slashed, disorganized,
killed the edifice, in form as in the symbol, in its
consistency as well as in its beauty.  And then they have
made it over; a presumption of which neither time nor
revolutions at least have been guilty.  They have audaciously
adjusted, in the name of "good taste," upon the wounds of
gothic architecture, their miserable gewgaws of a day, their
ribbons of marble, their pompons of metal, a veritable leprosy
of egg-shaped ornaments, volutes, whorls, draperies, garlands,
fringes, stone flames, bronze clouds, pudgy cupids, chubby-
cheeked cherubim, which begin to devour the face of art in
the oratory of Catherine de Medicis, and cause it to expire,
two centuries later, tortured and grimacing, in the boudoir of
the Dubarry.
 
Thus, to sum up the points which we have just indicated,
three sorts of ravages to-day disfigure Gothic architecture.
Wrinkles and warts on the epidermis; this is the work of
time.  Deeds of violence, brutalities, contusions, fractures;
this is the work of the revolutions from Luther to Mirabeau.
Mutilations, amputations, dislocation of the joints,
"restorations"; this is the Greek, Roman, and barbarian
work of professors according to Vitruvius and Vignole.  This
magnificent art produced by the Vandals has been slain by the
academies.  The centuries, the revolutions, which at least
devastate with impartiality and grandeur, have been joined by a
cloud of school architects, licensed, sworn, and bound by oath;
defacing with the discernment and choice of bad taste, substituting
the ~chicor?s~ of Louis XV. for the Gothic lace, for the greater
glory of the Parthenon.  It is the kick of the ass at the dying
lion.  It is the old oak crowning itself, and which, to heap the
measure full, is stung, bitten, and gnawed by caterpillars.
 
How far it is from the epoch when Robert Cenalis, comparing
Notre-Dame de Paris to the famous temple of Diana at
Ephesus, *so much lauded by the ancient pagans*, which Erostatus
*has* immortalized, found the Gallic temple "more excellent
in length, breadth, height, and structure."*
 
 
*  _Histoire Gallicane_, liv. II. Periode III. fo. 130, p. 1.
 
 
Notre-Dame is not, moreover, what can be called a complete,
definite, classified monument.  It is no longer a Romanesque
church; nor is it a Gothic church.  This edifice is
not a type.  Notre-Dame de Paris has not, like the Abbey of
Tournus, the grave and massive frame, the large and round
vault, the glacial bareness, the majestic simplicity of the
edifices which have the rounded arch for their progenitor.  It
is not, like the Cathedral of Bourges, the magnificent, light,
multiform, tufted, bristling efflorescent product of the pointed
arch.  Impossible to class it in that ancient family of sombre,
mysterious churches, low and crushed as it were by the round
arch, almost Egyptian, with the exception of the ceiling; all
hieroglyphics, all sacerdotal, all symbolical, more loaded in
their ornaments, with lozenges and zigzags, than with flowers,
with flowers than with animals, with animals than with men;
the work of the architect less than of the bishop; first
transformation of art, all impressed with theocratic and military
discipline, taking root in the Lower Empire, and stopping
with the time of William the Conqueror.  Impossible to place
our Cathedral in that other family of lofty, aerial churches,
rich in painted windows and sculpture; pointed in form,
bold in attitude; communal and bourgeois as political
symbols; free, capricious, lawless, as a work of art; second
transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic,
immovable and sacerdotal, but artistic, progressive, and popular,
which begins at the return from the crusades, and ends with
Louis IX.  Notre-Dame de Paris is not of pure Romanesque,
like the first; nor of pure Arabian race, like the second.
 
It is an edifice of the transition period.  The Saxon architect
completed the erection of the first pillars of the nave,
when the pointed arch, which dates from the Crusade, arrived
and placed itself as a conqueror upon the large Romanesque
capitals which should support only round arches.  The pointed
arch, mistress since that time, constructed the rest of the
church.  Nevertheless, timid and inexperienced at the start,
it sweeps out, grows larger, restrains itself, and dares no
longer dart upwards in spires and lancet windows, as it did
later on, in so many marvellous cathedrals.  One would say
that it were conscious of the vicinity of the heavy
Romanesque pillars.
 
However, these edifices of the transition from the Romanesque
to the Gothic, are no less precious for study than the
pure types.  They express a shade of the art which would be
lost without them.  It is the graft of the pointed upon the
round arch.
 
Notre-Dame de Paris is, in particular, a curious specimen
of this variety.  Each face, each stone of the venerable
monument, is a page not only of the history of the country, but
of the history of science and art as well.  Thus, in order to
indicate here only the principal details, while the little Red
Door almost attains to the limits of the Gothic delicacy
of the fifteenth century, the pillars of the nave, by their
size and weight, go back to the Carlovingian Abbey of
Saint-Germain des Pr?.  One would suppose that six centuries
separated these pillars from that door.  There is no one,
not even the hermetics, who does not find in the symbols of
the grand portal a satisfactory compendium of their science,
of which the Church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was
so complete a hieroglyph.  Thus, the Roman abbey, the
philosophers' church, the Gothic art, Saxon art, the heavy,
round pillar, which recalls Gregory VII., the hermetic symbolism,
with which Nicolas Flamel played the prelude to Luther,
papal unity, schism, Saint-Germain des Pr?, Saint-Jacques
de la Boucherie,--all are mingled, combined, amalgamated in
Notre-Dame.  This central mother church is, among the
ancient churches of Paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head
of one, the limbs of another, the haunches of another, something
of all.
 
We repeat it, these hybrid constructions are not the least
interesting for the artist, for the antiquarian, for the historian.
They make one feel to what a degree architecture is a primitive
thing, by demonstrating (what is also demonstrated by
the cyclopean vestiges, the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic
Hindoo pagodas) that the greatest products of architecture
are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the
offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man
of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the heaps
accumulated by centuries; the residue of successive evaporations
of human society,--in a word, species of formations.
Each wave of time contributes its alluvium, each race
deposits its layer on the monument, each individual brings
his stone.  Thus do the beavers, thus do the bees, thus do
men.  The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a hive.
 
Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.
Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending,
~pendent opera interrupta~; they proceed quietly in accordance
with the transformed art.  The new art takes the monument where
it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself,
develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can.
The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort,
without reaction,--following a natural and tranquil law.  It
is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation
which starts forth anew.  Certainly there is matter here for many
large volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the
successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same
monument.  The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these
great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence
is there summed up and totalized.  Time is the architect, the nation
is the builder.
 
Not to consider here anything except the Christian architecture
of Europe, that younger sister of the great masonries
of the Orient, it appears to the eyes as an immense formation
divided into three well-defined zones, which are superposed,
the one upon the other: the Romanesque zone*, the
Gothic zone, the zone of the Renaissance, which we would
gladly call the Greco-Roman zone.  The Roman layer, which
is the most ancient and deepest, is occupied by the round
arch, which reappears, supported by the Greek column, in
the modern and upper layer of the Renaissance.  The pointed
arch is found between the two.  The edifices which belong
exclusively to any one of these three layers are perfectly
distinct, uniform, and complete.  There is the Abbey of
Jumi?es, there is the Cathedral of Reims, there is the
Sainte-Croix of Orleans.  But the three zones mingle and
amalgamate along the edges, like the colors in the solar
spectrum.  Hence, complex monuments, edifices of gradation and
transition.  One is Roman at the base, Gothic in the middle,
Greco-Roman at the top.  It is because it was six hundred
years in building.  This variety is rare.  The donjon keep
of d'Etampes is a specimen of it.  But monuments of two
formations are more frequent.  There is Notre-Dame de Paris, a
pointed-arch edifice, which is imbedded by its pillars in that
Roman zone, in which are plunged the portal of Saint-Denis,
and the nave of Saint-Germain des Pr?.  There is the charming,
half-Gothic chapter-house of Bocherville, where the
Roman layer extends half way up.  There is the cathedral of
Rouen, which would be entirely Gothic if it did not bathe
the tip of its central spire in the zone of the Renaissance.**
 
 
*  This is the same which is called, according to locality,
climate, and races, Lombard, Saxon, or Byzantine.  There are
four sister and parallel architectures, each having its special
character, but derived from the same origin, the round arch.
 
  ~Facies non omnibus una,
  No diversa tamen, qualem~, etc.
 
Their faces not all alike, nor yet different, but such as the
faces of sisters ought to be.
 
**  This portion of the spire, which was of woodwork, is precisely
that which was consumed by lightning, in 1823.
 
 
However, all these shades, all these differences, do not
affect the surfaces of edifices only.  It is art which has
changed its skin.  The very constitution of the Christian
church is not attacked by it.  There is always the same
internal woodwork, the same logical arrangement of parts.
Whatever may be the carved and embroidered envelope of a
cathedral, one always finds beneath it--in the state of a
germ, and of a rudiment at the least--the Roman basilica.
It is eternally developed upon the soil according to the same
law.  There are, invariably, two naves, which intersect in a
cross, and whose upper portion, rounded into an apse, forms
the choir; there are always the side aisles, for interior
processions, for chapels,--a sort of lateral walks or promenades
where the principal nave discharges itself through the spaces
between the pillars.  That settled, the number of chapels,
doors, bell towers, and pinnacles are modified to infinity,
according to the fancy of the century, the people, and art.
The service of religion once assured and provided for,
architecture does what she pleases.  Statues, stained glass, rose
windows, arabesques, denticulations, capitals, bas-reliefs,--she
combines all these imaginings according to the arrangement
which best suits her.  Hence, the prodigious exterior
variety of these edifices, at whose foundation dwells so much
order and unity.  The trunk of a tree is immovable; the
foliage is capricious.
 
 
 
CHAPTER II. A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS.
 
We have just attempted to restore, for the reader's benefit,
that admirable church of Notre-Dame de Paris.  We have
briefly pointed out the greater part of the beauties which it
possessed in the fifteenth century, and which it lacks to-day;
but we have omitted the principal thing,--the view of Paris
which was then to be obtained from the summits of its towers.
 
That was, in fact,--when, after having long groped one's
way up the dark spiral which perpendicularly pierces the
thick wall of the belfries, one emerged, at last abruptly, upon
one of the lofty platforms inundated with light and air,--that
was, in fact, a fine picture which spread out, on all sides at
once, before the eye; a spectacle ~sui generis~, of which those
of our readers who have had the good fortune to see a Gothic
city entire, complete, homogeneous,--a few of which still
remain, Nuremberg in Bavaria and Vittoria in Spain,--can
readily form an idea; or even smaller specimens, provided
that they are well preserved,--Vitr?in Brittany, Nordhausen
in Prussia.
 
The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago--the Paris
of the fifteenth century--was already a gigantic city.  We
Parisians generally make a mistake as to the ground which
we think that we have gained, since Paris has not increased
much over one-third since the time of Louis XI.  It has
certainly lost more in beauty than it has gained in size.
 
Paris had its birth, as the reader knows, in that old island
of the City which has the form of a cradle.  The strand of
that island was its first boundary wall, the Seine its first
moat.  Paris remained for many centuries in its island state,
with two bridges, one on the north, the other on the south;
and two bridge heads, which were at the same time its
gates and its fortresses,--the Grand-Ch?elet on the right
bank, the Petit-Ch?elet on the left.  Then, from the date of
the kings of the first race, Paris, being too cribbed and
confined in its island, and unable to return thither, crossed
the water.  Then, beyond the Grand, beyond the Petit-Ch?elet,
a first circle of walls and towers began to infringe upon the
country on the two sides of the Seine.  Some vestiges of this
ancient enclosure still remained in the last century; to-day,
only the memory of it is left, and here and there a tradition,
the Baudets or Baudoyer gate, "Porte Bagauda".
 
Little by little, the tide of houses, always thrust from the
heart of the city outwards, overflows, devours, wears away,
and effaces this wall.  Philip Augustus makes a new dike for
it.  He imprisons Paris in a circular chain of great towers,
both lofty and solid.  For the period of more than a century,
the houses press upon each other, accumulate, and raise their
level in this basin, like water in a reservoir.  They begin to
deepen; they pile story upon story; they mount upon each
other; they gush forth at the top, like all laterally compressed
growth, and there is a rivalry as to which shall thrust
its head above its neighbors, for the sake of getting a little
air.  The street glows narrower and deeper, every space is
overwhelmed and disappears.  The houses finally leap the
wall of Philip Augustus, and scatter joyfully over the plain,
without order, and all askew, like runaways.  There they
plant themselves squarely, cut themselves gardens from the
fields, and take their ease.  Beginning with 1367, the city
spreads to such an extent into the suburbs, that a new wall
becomes necessary, particularly on the right bank; Charles V.
builds it.  But a city like Paris is perpetually growing.  It is
only such cities that become capitals.  They are funnels, into
which all the geographical, political, moral, and intellectual
water-sheds of a country, all the natural slopes of a people,
pour; wells of civilization, so to speak, and also sewers, where
commerce, industry, intelligence, population,--all that is sap,
all that is life, all that is the soul of a nation, filters and
amasses unceasingly, drop by drop, century by century.
 
 
So Charles V.'s wall suffered the fate of that of Philip
Augustus.  At the end of the fifteenth century, the Faubourg
strides across it, passes beyond it, and runs farther.  In the
sixteenth, it seems to retreat visibly, and to bury itself deeper
and deeper in the old city, so thick had the new city already
become outside of it.  Thus, beginning with the fifteenth
century, where our story finds us, Paris had already outgrown
the three concentric circles of walls which, from the time of
Julian the Apostate, existed, so to speak, in germ in the
Grand-Ch?elet and the Petit-Ch?elet.  The mighty city had
cracked, in succession, its four enclosures of walls, like a
child grown too large for his garments of last year.  Under
Louis XI., this sea of houses was seen to be pierced at
intervals by several groups of ruined towers, from the ancient
wall, like the summits of hills in an inundation,--like
archipelagos of the old Paris submerged beneath the new.
Since that time Paris has undergone yet another transformation,
unfortunately for our eyes; but it has passed only one
more wall, that of Louis XV., that miserable wall of mud and
spittle, worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet
who sung it,--
 
  ~Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant~.*
 
 
*  The wall walling Paris makes Paris murmur.
 
 
In the fifteenth century, Paris was still divided into three
wholly distinct and separate towns, each having its own
physiognomy, its own specialty, its manners, customs, privileges,
and history: the City, the University, the Town.  The City,
which occupied the island, was the most ancient, the smallest,
and the mother of the other two, crowded in between them
like (may we be pardoned the comparison) a little old woman
between two large and handsome maidens.  The University
covered the left bank of the Seine, from the Tournelle to the
Tour de Nesle, points which correspond in the Paris of to-day,
the one to the wine market, the other to the mint.  Its wall
included a large part of that plain where Julian had built his
hot baths.  The hill of Sainte-Genevi?e was enclosed in it.
The culminating point of this sweep of walls was the Papal
gate, that is to say, near the present site of the Pantheon.
The Town, which was the largest of the three fragments of
Paris, held the right bank.  Its quay, broken or interrupted
in many places, ran along the Seine, from the Tour de Billy
to the Tour du Bois; that is to say, from the place where the
granary stands to-day, to the present site of the Tuileries.
These four points, where the Seine intersected the wall of the
capital, the Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the right, the
Tour de Billy and the Tour du Bois on the left, were called
pre-eminently, "the four towers of Paris."  The Town encroached
still more extensively upon the fields than the University.
The culminating point of the Town wall (that of Charles V.)
was at the gates of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, whose situation
has not been changed.
 
As we have just said, each of these three great divisions of
Paris was a town, but too special a town to be complete, a city
which could not get along without the other two.  Hence three
entirely distinct aspects: churches abounded in the City; palaces,
in the Town; and colleges, in the University.  Neglecting
here the originalities, of secondary importance in old
Paris, and the capricious regulations regarding the public
highways, we will say, from a general point of view, taking
only masses and the whole group, in this chaos of communal
jurisdictions, that the island belonged to the bishop, the right
bank to the provost of the merchants, the left bank to the
Rector; over all ruled the provost of Paris, a royal not
a municipal official.  The City had Notre-Dame; the Town, the
Louvre and the H?el de Ville; the University, the Sorbonne.
The Town had the markets (Halles); the city, the Hospital;
the University, the Pr?aux-Clercs.  Offences committed by
the scholars on the left bank were tried in the law courts on
the island, and were punished on the right bank at Montfau?n;
unless the rector, feeling the university to be strong and
the king weak, intervened; for it was the students' privilege
to be hanged on their own grounds.
 
The greater part of these privileges, it may be noted in
passing, and there were some even better than the above, had
been extorted from the kings by revolts and mutinies.  It is
the course of things from time immemorial; the king only
lets go when the people tear away.  There is an old charter
which puts the matter naively: apropos of fidelity: ~Civibus
fidelitas in reges, quoe tamen aliquoties seditionibus
interrypta, multa peperit privileyia~.
 
In the fifteenth century, the Seine bathed five islands within
the walls of Paris: Louviers island, where there were then
trees, and where there is no longer anything but wood; l'ile
aux Vaches, and l'ile Notre-Dame, both deserted, with the
exception of one house, both fiefs of the bishop--in the
seventeenth century, a single island was formed out of these
two, which was built upon and named l'ile Saint-Louis--,
lastly the City, and at its point, the little islet of the cow
tender, which was afterwards engulfed beneath the platform
of the Pont-Neuf.  The City then had five bridges: three on
the right, the Pont Notre-Dame, and the Pont au Change, of
stone, the Pont aux Meuniers, of wood; two on the left, the
Petit Pont, of stone, the Pont Saint-Michel, of wood; all
loaded with houses.
 
The University had six gates, built by Philip Augustus;
there were, beginning with la Tournelle, the Porte Saint-
Victor, the Porte Bordelle, the Porte Papale, the Porte Saint-
Jacques, the Porte Saint-Michel, the Porte Saint-Germain.
The Town had six gates, built by Charles V.; beginning with
the Tour de Billy they were: the Porte Saint-Antoine, the Porte
du Temple, the Porte Saint-Martin, the Porte Saint-Denis, the
Porte Montmartre, the Porte Saint-Honor?  All these gates
were strong, and also handsome, which does not detract from
strength.  A large, deep moat, with a brisk current during
the high water of winter, bathed the base of the wall round
Paris; the Seine furnished the water.  At night, the gates
were shut, the river was barred at both ends of the city with
huge iron chains, and Paris slept tranquilly.
 
From a bird's-eye view, these three burgs, the City, the
Town, and the University, each presented to the eye an
inextricable skein of eccentrically tangled streets.  Nevertheless,
at first sight, one recognized the fact that these three
fragments formed but one body.  One immediately perceived three
long parallel streets, unbroken, undisturbed, traversing, almost
in a straight line, all three cities, from one end to the other;
from North to South, perpendicularly, to the Seine, which
bound them together, mingled them, infused them in each
other, poured and transfused the people incessantly, from one
to the other, and made one out of the three.  The first of
these streets ran from the Porte Saint-Martin: it was called
the Rue Saint-Jacques in the University, Rue de la Juiverie in
the City, Rue Saint-Martin in the Town; it crossed the water
twice, under the name of the Petit Pont and the Pont Notre-
Dame.  The second, which was called the Rue de la Harpe on
the left bank, Rue de la Barilleri?in the island, Rue Saint-
Denis on the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel on one arm of
the Seine, Pont au Change on the other, ran from the Porte
Saint-Michel in the University, to the Porte Saint-Denis in
the Town.  However, under all these names, there were but
two streets, parent streets, generating streets,--the two
arteries of Paris.  All the other veins of the triple city
either derived their supply from them or emptied into them.
 
Independently of these two principal streets, piercing Paris
diametrically in its whole breadth, from side to side, common
to the entire capital, the City and the University had also
each its own great special street, which ran lengthwise by
them, parallel to the Seine, cutting, as it passed, at right
angles, the two arterial thoroughfares.  Thus, in the Town,
one descended in a straight line from the Porte Saint-Antoine
to the Porte Saint-Honor? in the University from the Porte
Saint-Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain.  These two great
thoroughfares intersected by the two first, formed the canvas
upon which reposed, knotted and crowded together on every
hand, the labyrinthine network of the streets of Paris.  In
the incomprehensible plan of these streets, one distinguished
likewise, on looking attentively, two clusters of great streets,
like magnified sheaves of grain, one in the University, the
other in the Town, which spread out gradually from the
bridges to the gates.
 
Some traces of this geometrical plan still exist to-day.
 
Now, what aspect did this whole present, when, as viewed
from the summit of the towers of Notre-Dame, in 1482?
That we shall try to describe.
 
For the spectator who arrived, panting, upon that pinnacle,
it was first a dazzling confusing view of roofs, chimneys,
streets, bridges, places, spires, bell towers.  Everything
struck your eye at once: the carved gable, the pointed roof, the
turrets suspended at the angles of the walls; the stone pyramids
of the eleventh century, the slate obelisks of the fifteenth; the
round, bare tower of the donjon keep; the square and fretted
tower of the church; the great and the little, the massive and
the aerial.  The eye was, for a long time, wholly lost in this
labyrinth, where there was nothing which did not possess its
originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty,--nothing which
did not proceed from art; beginning with the smallest house,
with its painted and carved front, with external beams, elliptical
door, with projecting stories, to the royal Louvre, which
then had a colonnade of towers.  But these are the principal
masses which were then to be distinguished when the eye
began to accustom itself to this tumult of edifices.
 
In the first place, the City.--"The island of the City," as
Sauval says, who, in spite of his confused medley, sometimes
has such happy turns of expression,--"the island of the city
is made like a great ship, stuck in the mud and run aground
in the current, near the centre of the Seine."
 
We have just explained that, in the fifteenth century, this
ship was anchored to the two banks of the river by five
bridges.  This form of a ship had also struck the heraldic
scribes; for it is from that, and not from the siege by the
Normans, that the ship which blazons the old shield of Paris,
comes, according to Favyn and Pasquier.  For him who understands
how to decipher them, armorial bearings are algebra,
armorial bearings have a tongue.  The whole history of the
second half of the Middle Ages is written in armorial
bearings,--the first half is in the symbolism of the Roman
churches.  They are the hieroglyphics of feudalism, succeeding
those of theocracy.
 
Thus the City first presented itself to the eye, with its stern
to the east, and its prow to the west.  Turning towards the
prow, one had before one an innumerable flock of ancient
roofs, over which arched broadly the lead-covered apse of the
Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant's haunches loaded with its
tower.  Only here, this tower was the most audacious, the
most open, the most ornamented spire of cabinet-maker's work
that ever let the sky peep through its cone of lace.  In front
of Notre-Dame, and very near at hand, three streets opened
into the cathedral square,--a fine square, lined with ancient
houses.  Over the south side of this place bent the wrinkled
and sullen fa?de of the H?el Dieu, and its roof, which seemed
covered with warts and pustules.  Then, on the right and the
left, to east and west, within that wall of the City, which was
yet so contracted, rose the bell towers of its one and twenty
churches, of every date, of every form, of every size, from the
low and wormeaten belfry of Saint-Denis du Pas (~Carcer
Glaueini~) to the slender needles of Saint-Pierre aux Boeufs
and Saint-Landry.
 
Behind Notre-Dame, the cloister and its Gothic galleries
spread out towards the north; on the south, the half-Roman
palace of the bishop; on the east, the desert point of the
Terrain.  In this throng of houses the eye also distinguished,
by the lofty open-work mitres of stone which then crowned
the roof itself, even the most elevated windows of the palace,
the H?el given by the city, under Charles VI., to Juv?al des
Ursins; a little farther on, the pitch-covered sheds of the
Palus Market; in still another quarter the new apse of Saint-
Germain le Vieux, lengthened in 1458, with a bit of the Rue
aux Febves; and then, in places, a square crowded with
people; a pillory, erected at the corner of a street; a fine
fragment of the pavement of Philip Augustus, a magnificent
flagging, grooved for the horses' feet, in the middle of the
road, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the
miserable cobblestones, called the "pavement of the League;" a
deserted back courtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase
turrets, such as were erected in the fifteenth century, one
of which is still to be seen in the Rue des Bourdonnais.
Lastly, at the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, towards the west,
the Palais de Justice rested its group of towers at the edge
of the water.  The thickets of the king's gardens, which
covered the western point of the City, masked the Island du
Passeur.  As for the water, from the summit of the towers of
Notre-Dame one hardly saw it, on either side of the City; the
Seine was hidden by bridges, the bridges by houses.
 
And when the glance passed these bridges, whose roofs were
visibly green, rendered mouldy before their time by the vapors
from the water, if it was directed to the left, towards the
University, the first edifice which struck it was a large,
low sheaf of towers, the Petit-Ch?elet, whose yawning gate
devoured the end of the Petit-Pont.  Then, if your view ran
along the bank, from east to west, from the Tournelle to the
Tour de Nesle, there was a long cordon of houses, with carved
beams, stained-glass windows, each story projecting over
that beneath it, an interminable zigzag of bourgeois gables,
frequently interrupted by the mouth of a street, and from time
to time also by the front or angle of a huge stone mansion,
planted at its ease, with courts and gardens, wings and
detached buildings, amid this populace of crowded and narrow
houses, like a grand gentleman among a throng of rustics.
There were five or six of these mansions on the quay, from the
house of Lorraine, which shared with the Bernardins the
grand enclosure adjoining the Tournelle, to the H?el de Nesle,
whose principal tower ended Paris, and whose pointed roofs
were in a position, during three months of the year, to
encroach, with their black triangles, upon the scarlet disk of
the setting sun.
 
This side of the Seine was, however, the least mercantile of
the two.  Students furnished more of a crowd and more noise
there than artisans, and there was not, properly speaking,
any quay, except from the Pont Saint-Michel to the Tour de
Nesle.  The rest of the bank of the Seine was now a naked
strand, the same as beyond the Bernardins; again, a throng
of houses, standing with their feet in the water, as between
the two bridges.
 
There was a great uproar of laundresses; they screamed, and
talked, and sang from morning till night along the beach,
and beat a great deal of linen there, just as in our day.
This is not the least of the gayeties of Paris.
 
The University presented a dense mass to the eye.  From
one end to the other, it was homogeneous and compact.  The
thousand roofs, dense, angular, clinging to each other,
composed, nearly all, of the same geometrical element, offered,
when viewed from above, the aspect of a crystallization of the
same substance.
 
The capricious ravine of streets did not cut this block of
houses into too disproportionate slices.  The forty-two colleges
were scattered about in a fairly equal manner, and there were
some everywhere.  The amusingly varied crests of these
beautiful edifices were the product of the same art as the
simple roofs which they overshot, and were, actually, only
a multiplication of the square or the cube of the same
geometrical figure.  Hence they complicated the whole effect,
without disturbing it; completed, without overloading it.
Geometry is harmony.  Some fine mansions here and there
made magnificent outlines against the picturesque attics of
the left bank.  The house of Nevers, the house of Rome, the
house of Reims, which have disappeared; the H?el de Cluny,
which still exists, for the consolation of the artist, and whose
tower was so stupidly deprived of its crown a few years ago.
Close to Cluny, that Roman palace, with fine round arches,
were once the hot baths of Julian.  There were a great many
abbeys, of a beauty more devout, of a grandeur more solemn
than the mansions, but not less beautiful, not less grand.
Those which first caught the eye were the Bernardins, with
their three bell towers; Sainte-Genevi?e, whose square
tower, which still exists, makes us regret the rest; the
Sorbonne, half college, half monastery, of which so admirable
a nave survives; the fine quadrilateral cloister of the Mathurins;
its neighbor, the cloister of Saint-Benoit, within whose
walls they have had time to cobble up a theatre, between the
seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Cordeliers, with
their three enormous adjacent gables; the Augustins, whose
graceful spire formed, after the Tour de Nesle, the second
denticulation on this side of Paris, starting from the west.
The colleges, which are, in fact, the intermediate ring between
the cloister and the world, hold the middle position in the
monumental series between the H?els and the abbeys, with a
severity full of elegance, sculpture less giddy than the palaces,
an architecture less severe than the convents.  Unfortunately,
hardly anything remains of these monuments, where Gothic
art combined with so just a balance, richness and economy.
The churches (and they were numerous and splendid in the
University, and they were graded there also in all the ages of
architecture, from the round arches of Saint-Julian to the
pointed arches of Saint-S?erin), the churches dominated the
whole; and, like one harmony more in this mass of harmonies,
they pierced in quick succession the multiple open work of
the gables with slashed spires, with open-work bell towers,
with slender pinnacles, whose line was also only a magnificent
exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs.
 
The ground of the University was hilly; Mount Sainte-
Genevi?e formed an enormous mound to the south; and it
was a sight to see from the summit of Notre-Dame how that
throng of narrow and tortuous streets (to-day the Latin Quarter),
those bunches of houses which, spread out in every direction
from the top of this eminence, precipitated themselves in
disorder, and almost perpendicularly down its flanks, nearly to
the water's edge, having the air, some of falling, others of
clambering up again, and all of holding to one another.  A
continual flux of a thousand black points which passed each
other on the pavements made everything move before the
eyes; it was the populace seen thus from aloft and afar.
 
Lastly, in the intervals of these roofs, of these spires, of
these accidents of numberless edifices, which bent and writhed,
and jagged in so eccentric a manner the extreme line of the
University, one caught a glimpse, here and there, of a great
expanse of moss-grown wall, a thick, round tower, a crenellated
city gate, shadowing forth the fortress; it was the wall of
Philip Augustus.  Beyond, the fields gleamed green; beyond,
fled the roads, along which were scattered a few more suburban
houses, which became more infrequent as they became more
distant.  Some of these faubourgs were important: there were,
first, starting from la Tournelle, the Bourg Saint-Victor, with
its one arch bridge over the Bi?re, its abbey where one could
read the epitaph of Louis le Gros, ~epitaphium Ludovici Grossi~,
and its church with an octagonal spire, flanked with four little
bell towers of the eleventh century (a similar one can be seen
at Etampes; it is not yet destroyed); next, the Bourg Saint-
Marceau, which already had three churches and one convent;
then, leaving the mill of the Gobelins and its four white walls
on the left, there was the Faubourg Saint-Jacques with the
beautiful carved cross in its square; the church of Saint-
Jacques du Haut-Pas, which was then Gothic, pointed, charming;
Saint-Magloire, a fine nave of the fourteenth century,
which Napoleon turned into a hayloft; Notre-Dame des
Champs, where there were Byzantine mosaics; lastly, after
having left behind, full in the country, the Monastery des
Chartreux, a rich edifice contemporary with the Palais de Justice,
with its little garden divided into compartments, and the
haunted ruins of Vauvert, the eye fell, to the west, upon the
three Roman spires of Saint-Germain des Pr?.  The Bourg
Saint-Germain, already a large community, formed fifteen or
twenty streets in the rear; the pointed bell tower of Saint-
Sulpice marked one corner of the town.  Close beside it one
descried the quadrilateral enclosure of the fair of Saint-
Germain, where the market is situated to-day; then the
abbot's pillory, a pretty little round tower, well capped with
a leaden cone; the brickyard was further on, and the Rue du
Four, which led to the common bakehouse, and the mill on its
hillock, and the lazar house, a tiny house, isolated and half
seen.
 
But that which attracted the eye most of all, and fixed it for
a long time on that point, was the abbey itself.  It is certain
that this monastery, which had a grand air, both as a church and
as a seignory; that abbatial palace, where the bishops of Paris
counted themselves happy if they could pass the night; that
refectory, upon which the architect had bestowed the air, the
beauty, and the rose window of a cathedral; that elegant
chapel of the Virgin; that monumental dormitory; those vast
gardens; that portcullis; that drawbridge; that envelope of
battlements which notched to the eye the verdure of the
surrounding meadows; those courtyards, where gleamed men at
arms, intermingled with golden copes;--the whole grouped
and clustered about three lofty spires, with round arches,
well planted upon a Gothic apse, made a magnificent figure
against the horizon.
 
When, at length, after having contemplated the University
for a long time, you turned towards the right bank, towards
the Town, the character of the spectacle was abruptly altered.
The Town, in fact much larger than the University, was also
less of a unit.  At the first glance, one saw that it was divided
into many masses, singularly distinct.  First, to the eastward,
in that part of the town which still takes its name from the
marsh where Camulog?es entangled Caesar, was a pile of
palaces.  The block extended to the very water's edge.  Four
almost contiguous H?els, Jouy, Sens, Barbeau, the house of
the Queen, mirrored their slate peaks, broken with slender
turrets, in the Seine.
 
These four edifices filled the space from the Rue des
Nonaindi?es, to the abbey of the Celestins, whose spire gracefully
relieved their line of gables and battlements.  A few miserable,
greenish hovels, hanging over the water in front of these
sumptuous H?els, did not prevent one from seeing the fine
angles of their fa?des, their large, square windows with
stone mullions, their pointed porches overloaded with statues,
the vivid outlines of their walls, always clear cut, and all
those charming accidents of architecture, which cause Gothic
art to have the air of beginning its combinations afresh with
every monument.
 
Behind these palaces, extended in all directions, now broken,
fenced in, battlemented like a citadel, now veiled by great
trees like a Carthusian convent, the immense and multiform
enclosure of that miraculous H?el de Saint-Pol, where the
King of France possessed the means of lodging superbly two
and twenty princes of the rank of the dauphin and the Duke
of Burgundy, with their domestics and their suites, without
counting the great lords, and the emperor when he came to
view Paris, and the lions, who had their separate H?el at the
royal H?el.  Let us say here that a prince's apartment was
then composed of never less than eleven large rooms, from
the chamber of state to the oratory, not to mention the galleries,
baths, vapor-baths, and other "superfluous places," with
which each apartment was provided; not to mention the private
gardens for each of the king's guests; not to mention
the kitchens, the cellars, the domestic offices, the general
refectories of the house, the poultry-yards, where there were
twenty-two general laboratories, from the bakehouses to the
wine-cellars; games of a thousand sorts, malls, tennis, and riding
at the ring; aviaries, fishponds, menageries, stables, barns,
libraries, arsenals and foundries.  This was what a king's
palace, a Louvre, a H?el de Saint-Pol was then.  A city
within a city.
 
From the tower where we are placed, the H?el Saint-Pol,
almost half hidden by the four great houses of which we have
just spoken, was still very considerable and very marvellous
to see.  One could there distinguish, very well, though cleverly
united with the principal building by long galleries, decked
with painted glass and slender columns, the three H?els which
Charles V. had amalgamated with his palace: the H?el du
Petit-Muce, with the airy balustrade, which formed a graceful
border to its roof; the H?el of the Abbe de Saint-Maur,
having the vanity of a stronghold, a great tower, machicolations,
loopholes, iron gratings, and over the large Saxon door,
the armorial bearings of the abb? between the two mortises
of the drawbridge; the H?el of the Comte d' Etampes, whose
donjon keep, ruined at its summit, was rounded and notched
like a cock's comb; here and there, three or four ancient oaks,
forming a tuft together like enormous cauliflowers; gambols
of swans, in the clear water of the fishponds, all in folds
of light and shade; many courtyards of which one beheld
picturesque bits; the H?el of the Lions, with its low, pointed
arches on short, Saxon pillars, its iron gratings and its
perpetual roar; shooting up above the whole, the scale-
ornamented spire of the Ave-Maria; on the left, the house of
the Provost of Paris, flanked by four small towers, delicately
grooved, in the middle; at the extremity, the H?el Saint-Pol,
properly speaking, with its multiplied fa?des, its successive
enrichments from the time of Charles V., the hybrid excrescences,
with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it
during the last two centuries, with all the apses of its chapels,
all the gables of its galleries, a thousand weathercocks for the
four winds, and its two lofty contiguous towers, whose conical
roof, surrounded by battlements at its base, looked like those
pointed caps which have their edges turned up.
 
Continuing to mount the stories of this amphitheatre of
palaces spread out afar upon the ground, after crossing a deep
ravine hollowed out of the roofs in the Town, which marked
the passage of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the eye reached the
house of Angoul?e, a vast construction of many epochs,
where there were perfectly new and very white parts, which
melted no better into the whole than a red patch on a blue
doublet.  Nevertheless, the remarkably pointed and lofty
roof of the modern palace, bristling with carved eaves,
covered with sheets of lead, where coiled a thousand fantastic
arabesques of sparkling incrustations of gilded bronze, that
roof, so curiously damascened, darted upwards gracefully from
the midst of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice; whose
huge and ancient towers, rounded by age like casks, sinking
together with old age, and rending themselves from top to
bottom, resembled great bellies unbuttoned.  Behind rose the
forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles.  Not a view in
the world, either at Chambord or at the Alhambra, is more
magic, more aerial, more enchanting, than that thicket of
spires, tiny bell towers, chimneys, weather-vanes, winding
staircases, lanterns through which the daylight makes its way,
which seem cut out at a blow, pavilions, spindle-shaped turrets,
or, as they were then called, "tournelles," all differing in
form, in height, and attitude.  One would have pronounced
it a gigantic stone chess-board.
 
To the right of the Tournelles, that truss of enormous
towers, black as ink, running into each other and tied, as it
were, by a circular moat; that donjon keep, much more pierced
with loopholes than with windows; that drawbridge, always
raised; that portcullis, always lowered,--is the Bastille.
Those sorts of black beaks which project from between the
battlements, and which you take from a distance to be cave
spouts, are cannons.
 
Beneath them, at the foot of the formidable edifice, behold
the Porte Sainte-Antoine, buried between its two towers.
 
Beyond the Tournelles, as far as the wall of Charles V.,
spread out, with rich compartments of verdure and of flowers,
a velvet carpet of cultivated land and royal parks, in the
midst of which one recognized, by its labyrinth of trees and
alleys, the famous Daedalus garden which Louis XI. had given
to Coictier.  The doctor's observatory rose above the labyrinth
like a great isolated column, with a tiny house for a
capital.  Terrible astrologies took place in that laboratory.
 
There to-day is the Place Royale.
 
As we have just said, the quarter of the palace, of which
we have just endeavored to give the reader some idea by
indicating only the chief points, filled the angle which Charles
V.'s wall made with the Seine on the east.  The centre of
the Town was occupied by a pile of houses for the populace.
It was there, in fact, that the three bridges disgorged upon
the right bank, and bridges lead to the building of houses
rather than palaces.  That congregation of bourgeois habitations,
pressed together like the cells in a hive, had a beauty of
its own.  It is with the roofs of a capital as with the waves
of the sea,--they are grand.  First the streets, crossed and
entangled, forming a hundred amusing figures in the block;
around the market-place, it was like a star with a thousand
rays.
 
The Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable
ramifications, rose one after the other, like trees
intertwining their branches; and then the tortuous lines,
the Rues de la Pl?rerie, de la Verrerie, de la Tixeranderie,
etc., meandered over all.  There were also fine edifices which
pierced the petrified undulations of that sea of gables.  At
the head of the Pont aux Changeurs, behind which one beheld
the Seine foaming beneath the wheels of the Pont aux
Meuniers, there was the Chalelet, no longer a Roman tower, as
under Julian the Apostate, but a feudal tower of the thirteenth
century, and of a stone so hard that the pickaxe could
not break away so much as the thickness of the fist in a space
of three hours; there was the rich square bell tower of Saint-
Jacques de la Boucherie, with its angles all frothing with
carvings, already admirable, although it was not finished in
the fifteenth century.  (It lacked, in particular, the four
monsters, which, still perched to-day on the corners of its
roof, have the air of so many sphinxes who are propounding to
new Paris the riddle of the ancient Paris.  Rault, the sculptor,
only placed them in position in 1526, and received twenty
francs for his pains.) There was the Maison-aux-Piliers, the
Pillar House, opening upon that Place de Gr?e of which we
have given the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais,
which a front "in good taste" has since spoiled; Saint-M?y,
whose ancient pointed arches were still almost round arches;
Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial; there
were twenty other monuments, which did not disdain to bury
their wonders in that chaos of black, deep, narrow streets.
Add the crosses of carved stone, more lavishly scattered
through the squares than even the gibbets; the cemetery of
the Innocents, whose architectural wall could be seen in the
distance above the roofs; the pillory of the Markets, whose
top was visible between two chimneys of the Rue de la
Cossonnerie; the ladder of the Croix-du-Trahoir, in its square
always black with people; the circular buildings of the wheat
mart; the fragments of Philip Augustus's ancient wall,
which could be made out here and there, drowned among the
houses, its towers gnawed by ivy, its gates in ruins, with
crumbling and deformed stretches of wall; the quay with its
thousand shops, and its bloody knacker's yards; the Seine
encumbered with boats, from the Port au Foin to Port-l'Ev?ue,
and you will have a confused picture of what the central
trapezium of the Town was like in 1482.
 
With these two quarters, one of H?els, the other of houses,
the third feature of aspect presented by the city was a long
zone of abbeys, which bordered it in nearly the whole of its
circumference, from the rising to the setting sun, and, behind
the circle of fortifications which hemmed in Paris, formed a
second interior enclosure of convents and chapels.  Thus,
immediately adjoining the park des Tournelles, between the
Rue Saint-Antoine and the Vielle Rue du Temple, there stood
Sainte-Catherine, with its immense cultivated lands, which
were terminated only by the wall of Paris.  Between the old
and the new Rue du Temple, there was the Temple, a sinister
group of towers, lofty, erect, and isolated in the middle of a
vast, battlemented enclosure.  Between the Rue Neuve-du-
Temple and the Rue Saint-Martin, there was the Abbey of
Saint-Martin, in the midst of its gardens, a superb fortified
church, whose girdle of towers, whose diadem of bell towers,
yielded in force and splendor only to Saint-Germain des
Pr?.  Between the Rue Saint-Martin and the Rue Saint-
Denis, spread the enclosure of the Trinit?
 
Lastly, between the Rue Saint-Denis, and the Rue Montorgueil,
stood the Filles-Dieu.  On one side, the rotting roofs
and unpaved enclosure of the Cour des Miracles could be
descried.  It was the sole profane ring which was linked to
that devout chain of convents.
 
Finally, the fourth compartment, which stretched itself out
in the agglomeration of the roofs on the right bank, and
which occupied the western angle of the enclosure, and the
banks of the river down stream, was a fresh cluster of palaces
and H?els pressed close about the base of the Louvre.  The
old Louvre of Philip Augustus, that immense edifice whose
great tower rallied about it three and twenty chief towers, not
to reckon the lesser towers, seemed from a distance to be
enshrined in the Gothic roofs of the H?el d'Alen?n, and the
Petit-Bourbon.  This hydra of towers, giant guardian of
Paris, with its four and twenty heads, always erect, with its
monstrous haunches, loaded or scaled with slates, and all
streaming with metallic reflections, terminated with wonderful
effect the configuration of the Town towards the west.
 
Thus an immense block, which the Romans called ~iusula~, or
island, of bourgeois houses, flanked on the right and the left
by two blocks of palaces, crowned, the one by the Louvre, the
other by the Tournelles, bordered on the north by a long
girdle of abbeys and cultivated enclosures, all amalgamated
and melted together in one view; upon these thousands of
edifices, whose tiled and slated roofs outlined upon each other
so many fantastic chains, the bell towers, tattooed, fluted, and
ornamented with twisted bands, of the four and forty churches
on the right bank; myriads of cross streets; for boundary on
one side, an enclosure of lofty walls with square towers (that
of the University had round towers); on the other, the Seine,
cut by bridges, and bearing on its bosom a multitude of boats;
behold the Town of Paris in the fifteenth century.
 
Beyond the walls, several suburban villages pressed close
about the gates, but less numerous and more scattered than
those of the University.  Behind the Bastille there were
twenty hovels clustered round the curious sculptures of the
Croix-Faubin and the flying buttresses of the Abbey of Saint-
Antoine des Champs; then Popincourt, lost amid wheat fields;
then la Courtille, a merry village of wine-shops; the hamlet
of Saint-Laurent with its church whose bell tower, from afar,
seemed to add itself to the pointed towers of the Porte Saint-
Martin; the Faubourg Saint-Denis, with the vast enclosure
of Saint-Ladre; beyond the Montmartre Gate, the Grange-
Bateli?e, encircled with white walls; behind it, with its
chalky slopes, Montmartre, which had then almost as many
churches as windmills, and which has kept only the windmills,
for society no longer demands anything but bread for the
body.  Lastly, beyond the Louvre, the Faubourg Saint-
Honor? already considerable at that time, could be seen
stretching away into the fields, and Petit-Bretagne gleaming
green, and the March?aux Pourceaux spreading abroad, in
whose centre swelled the horrible apparatus used for boiling
counterfeiters.  Between la Courtille and Saint-Laurent, your
eye had already noticed, on the summit of an eminence
crouching amid desert plains, a sort of edifice which
resembled from a distance a ruined colonnade, mounted upon
a basement with its foundation laid bare.  This was neither
a Parthenon, nor a temple of the Olympian Jupiter.  It was
Montfau?n.
 
Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, summary as
we have endeavored to make it, has not shattered in the
reader's mind the general image of old Paris, as we have
constructed it, we will recapitulate it in a few words.  In
the centre, the island of the City, resembling as to form an
enormous tortoise, and throwing out its bridges with tiles for
scales; like legs from beneath its gray shell of roofs.  On the
left, the monolithic trapezium, firm, dense, bristling, of the
University; on the right, the vast semicircle of the Town,
much more intermixed with gardens and monuments.  The
three blocks, city, university, and town, marbled with innumerable
streets.  Across all, the Seine, "foster-mother Seine,"
as says Father Du Breul, blocked with islands, bridges, and
boats.  All about an immense plain, patched with a thousand
sorts of cultivated plots, sown with fine villages.  On the
left, Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirarde, Montrouge, Gentilly, with
its round tower and its square tower, etc.; on the right,
twenty others, from Conflans to Ville-l'Ev?ue.  On the horizon,
a border of hills arranged in a circle like the rim of the
basin.  Finally, far away to the east, Vincennes, and its
seven quadrangular towers to the south, Bic?re and its
pointed turrets; to the north, Saint-Denis and its spire; to
the west, Saint Cloud and its donjon keep.  Such was the
Paris which the ravens, who lived in 1482, beheld from the
summits of the towers of Notre-Dame.
 
Nevertheless, Voltaire said of this city, that "before Louis
XIV., it possessed but four fine monuments": the dome of
the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Gr?e, the modern Louvre, and I
know not what the fourth was--the Luxembourg, perhaps.
Fortunately, Voltaire was the author of "Candide" in spite of
this, and in spite of this, he is, among all the men who have
followed each other in the long series of humanity, the one
who has best possessed the diabolical laugh.  Moreover, this
proves that one can be a fine genius, and yet understand nothing
of an art to which one does not belong.  Did not Moliere
imagine that he was doing Raphael and Michael-Angelo a very
great honor, by calling them "those Mignards of their age?"
 
Let us return to Paris and to the fifteenth century.
 
It was not then merely a handsome city; it was a homogeneous
city, an architectural and historical product of the
Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone.  It was a city formed of
two layers only; the Romanesque layer and the Gothic layer;
for the Roman layer had disappeared long before, with the
exception of the Hot Baths of Julian, where it still pierced
through the thick crust of the Middle Ages.  As for the
Celtic layer, no specimens were any longer to be found, even
when sinking wells.
 
Fifty years later, when the Renaissance began to mingle
with this unity which was so severe and yet so varied, the
dazzling luxury of its fantasies and systems, its debasements
of Roman round arches, Greek columns, and Gothic bases, its
sculpture which was so tender and so ideal, its peculiar taste
for arabesques and acanthus leaves, its architectural paganism,
contemporary with Luther, Paris, was perhaps, still more beautiful,
although less harmonious to the eye, and to the thought.
 
But this splendid moment lasted only for a short time; the
Renaissance was not impartial; it did not content itself with
building, it wished to destroy; it is true that it required the
room.  Thus Gothic Paris was complete only for a moment. Saint-
Jacques de la Boucherie had barely been completed when the
demolition of the old Louvre was begun.
 
After that, the great city became more disfigured every day.
Gothic Paris, beneath which Roman Paris was effaced, was effaced in
its turn; but can any one say what Paris has replaced it?
 
There is the Paris of Catherine de Medicis at the Tuileries;*--the
Paris of Henri II., at the H?el de Ville, two edifices
still in fine taste;--the Paris of Henri IV., at the Place
Royale: fa?des of brick with stone corners, and slated roofs,
tri-colored houses;--the Paris of Louis XIII., at the Val-de-
Grace: a crushed and squat architecture, with vaults like
basket-handles, and something indescribably pot-bellied in the
column, and thickset in the dome;--the Paris of Louis XIV.,
in the Invalides: grand, rich, gilded, cold;--the Paris of Louis
XV., in Saint-Sulpice: volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds,
vermicelli and chiccory leaves, all in stone;--the Paris of Louis
XVI., in the Pantheon: Saint Peter of Rome, badly copied (the
edifice is awkwardly heaped together, which has not amended
its lines);--the Paris of the Republic, in the School of
Medicine: a poor Greek and Roman taste, which resembles the
Coliseum or the Parthenon as the constitution of the year III.,
resembles the laws of Minos,--it is called in architecture,
"the Messidor"** taste;--the Paris of Napoleon in the Place
Vendome: this one is sublime, a column of bronze made of
cannons;--the Paris of the Restoration, at the Bourse: a
very white colonnade supporting a very smooth frieze; the
whole is square and cost twenty millions.
 
 
*  We have seen with sorrow mingled with indignation, that it
is the intention to increase, to recast, to make over, that is
to say, to destroy this admirable palace.  The architects of our
day have too heavy a hand to touch these delicate works of the
Renaissance.  We still cherish a hope that they will not dare.
Moreover, this demolition of the Tuileries now, would be not
only a brutal deed of violence, which would make a drunken vandal
blush--it would be an act of treason.  The Tuileries is not simply
a masterpiece of the art of the sixteenth century, it is a page
of the history of the nineteenth.  This palace no longer belongs
to the king, but to the people.  Let us leave it as it is.  Our
revolution has twice set its seal upon its front.  On one of its
two fa?des, there are the cannon-balls of the 10th of August;
on the other, the balls of the 29th of July.  It is sacred.
Paris, April 1, 1831.  (Note to the fifth edition.)
 
**  The tenth month of the French republican calendar, from the
19th of June to the 18th of July.
 
 
To each of these characteristic monuments there is attached
by a similarity of taste, fashion, and attitude, a certain
number of houses scattered about in different quarters and which
the eyes of the connoisseur easily distinguishes and furnishes
with a date.  When one knows how to look, one finds the
spirit of a century, and the physiognomy of a king, even in
the knocker on a door.
 
The Paris of the present day has then, no general physiognomy.  It
is a collection of specimens of many centuries, and the finest have
disappeared.  The capital grows only in houses, and what houses!
At the rate at which Paris is now proceeding, it will renew itself
every fifty years.
 
Thus the historical significance of its architecture is being
effaced every day.  Monuments are becoming rarer and rarer,
and one seems to see them gradually engulfed, by the flood
of houses.  Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will
have one of plaster.
 
So far as the modern monuments of new Paris are concerned,
we would gladly be excused from mentioning them.  It is
not that we do not admire them as they deserve.  The
Sainte-Genevi?e of M. Soufflot is certainly the finest Savoy
cake that has ever been made in stone.  The Palace of the
Legion of Honor is also a very distinguished bit of pastry.
The dome of the wheat market is an English jockey cap, on a
grand scale.  The towers of Saint-Sulpice are two huge clarinets,
and the form is as good as any other; the telegraph, contorted
and grimacing, forms an admirable accident upon their roofs.
Saint-Roch has a door which, for magnificence, is comparable only
to that of Saint-Thomas d'Aquin.  It has, also, a crucifixion in
high relief, in a cellar, with a sun of gilded wood.  These things
are fairly marvellous.  The lantern of the labyrinth of the Jardin
des Plantes is also very ingenious.
 
As for the Palace of the Bourse, which is Greek as to its
colonnade, Roman in the round arches of its doors and windows,
of the Renaissance by virtue of its flattened vault, it is
indubitably a very correct and very pure monument; the proof
is that it is crowned with an attic, such as was never seen in
Athens, a beautiful, straight line, gracefully broken here and
there by stovepipes.  Let us add that if it is according to
rule that the architecture of a building should be adapted to
its purpose in such a manner that this purpose shall be
immediately apparent from the mere aspect of the building, one
cannot be too much amazed at a structure which might be
indifferently--the palace of a king, a chamber of communes,
a town-hall, a college, a riding-school, an academy, a
warehouse, a court-house, a museum, a barracks, a sepulchre, a
temple, or a theatre.  However, it is an Exchange.  An edifice
ought to be, moreover, suitable to the climate.  This one
is evidently constructed expressly for our cold and rainy skies.
It has a roof almost as flat as roofs in the East, which involves
sweeping the roof in winter, when it snows; and of course
roofs are made to be swept.  As for its purpose, of which we
just spoke, it fulfils it to a marvel; it is a bourse in France
as it would have been a temple in Greece.  It is true that the
architect was at a good deal of trouble to conceal the clock
face, which would have destroyed the purity of the fine lines
of the fa?de; but, on the other hand, we have that colonnade
which circles round the edifice and under which, on days of
high religious ceremony, the theories of the stock-brokers and
the courtiers of commerce can be developed so majestically.
 
These are very superb structures.  Let us add a quantity
of fine, amusing, and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli,
and I do not despair of Paris presenting to the eye, when
viewed from a balloon, that richness of line, that opulence
of detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiose something
in the simple, and unexpected in the beautiful, which
characterizes a checker-board.
 
However, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to
you, reconstruct the Paris of the fifteenth century, call it up
before you in thought; look at the sky athwart that surprising
forest of spires, towers, and belfries; spread out in the
centre of the city, tear away at the point of the islands, fold
at the arches of the bridges, the Seine, with its broad green
and yellow expanses, more variable than the skin of a serpent;
project clearly against an azure horizon the Gothic profile of
this ancient Paris.  Make its contour float in a winter's mist
which clings to its numerous chimneys; drown it in profound
night and watch the odd play of lights and shadows in that
sombre labyrinth of edifices; cast upon it a ray of light which
shall vaguely outline it and cause to emerge from the fog the
great heads of the towers; or take that black silhouette
again, enliven with shadow the thousand acute angles of the
spires and gables, and make it start out more toothed than a
shark's jaw against a copper-colored western sky,--and
then compare.
 
And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression
with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on
the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of
Easter or of Pentecost--climb upon some elevated point, whence
you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening
of the chimes.  Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it
is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver
simultaneously.  First come scattered strokes, running from
one church to another, as when musicians give warning that
they are about to begin.  Then, all at once, behold!--for it
seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its
own,--behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a
column of sound, a cloud of harmony.  First, the vibration of
each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak,
isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then,
little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle,
are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert.
It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations
incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats,
undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond
the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.
 
Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and
profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold
the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the
belfries.  You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and
shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves
leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth,
winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall,
broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their
midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends
the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid
notes running across it, executing three or four luminous
zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning.  Yonder is
the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the
gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end,
the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass.  The royal
chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without
relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular
intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame,
which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer.  At
intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which
come from the triple peal of Saint-Germaine des Pr?.  Then,
again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens
and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts
forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars.  Below, in the
very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the
interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the
vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs.
 
Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of
listening to.  Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris
by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing;
in this case, it is the city singing.  Lend an ear, then,
to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur
of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the
infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette
of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon,
like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half
shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central
chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more
rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult
of bells and chimes;--than this furnace of music,--than
these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in
the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,--than this city
which is no longer anything but an orchestra,--than this
symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.
 
 
 
BOOK FOURTH.
 
 
CHAPTER I. GOOD SOULS.
 
Sixteen years previous to the epoch when this story takes
place, one fine morning, on Quasimodo Sunday, a living creature
had been deposited, after mass, in the church of Notre-
Dame, on the wooden bed securely fixed in the vestibule on
the left, opposite that great image of Saint Christopher,
which the figure of Messire Antoine des Essarts, chevalier,
carved in stone, had been gazing at on his knees since 1413,
when they took it into their heads to overthrow the saint and
the faithful follower.  Upon this bed of wood it was customary
to expose foundlings for public charity.  Whoever cared
to take them did so.  In front of the wooden bed was a copper
basin for alms.
 
The sort of living being which lay upon that plank on the
morning of Quasimodo, in the year of the Lord, 1467, appeared
to excite to a high degree, the curiosity of the numerous
group which had congregated about the wooden bed.  The
group was formed for the most part of the fair sex.  Hardly
any one was there except old women.
 
In the first row, and among those who were most bent over
the bed, four were noticeable, who, from their gray ~cagoule~,
a sort of cassock, were recognizable as attached to some devout
sisterhood.  I do not see why history has not transmitted to
posterity the names of these four discreet and venerable
damsels.  They were Agnes la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme,
Henriette la Gaulti?e, Gauch?e la Violette, all four widows,
all four dames of the Chapel Etienne Haudry, who had quitted
their house with the permission of their mistress, and in
conformity with the statutes of Pierre d'Ailly, in order to
come and hear the sermon.
 
However, if these good Haudriettes were, for the moment,
complying with the statutes of Pierre d'Ailly, they certainly
violated with joy those of Michel de Brache, and the Cardinal
of Pisa, which so inhumanly enjoined silence upon them.
 
"What is this, sister?" said Agnes to Gauch?e, gazing at
the little creature exposed, which was screaming and writhing
on the wooden bed, terrified by so many glances.
 
"What is to become of us," said Jehanne, "if that is the
way children are made now?"
 
"I'm not learned in the matter of children," resumed Agnes,
"but it must be a sin to look at this one."
 
"'Tis not a child, Agnes."
 
"'Tis an abortion of a monkey," remarked Gauch?e.
 
"'Tis a miracle," interposed Henriette la Gaulti?e.
 
"Then," remarked Agnes, "it is the third since the Sunday
of the ~Loetare~: for, in less than a week, we had the miracle
of the mocker of pilgrims divinely punished by Notre-Dame
d'Aubervilliers, and that was the second miracle within
a month."
 
"This pretended foundling is a real monster of abomination,"
resumed Jehanne.
 
"He yells loud enough to deafen a chanter," continued Gauch?e.
"Hold your tongue, you little howler!"
 
"To think that Monsieur of Reims sent this enormity
to Monsieur of Paris," added la Gaulti?e, clasping
her hands.
 
"I imagine," said Agnes la Herme, "that it is a beast, an
animal,--the fruit of--a Jew and a sow; something not Christian,
in short, which ought to be thrown into the fire or into
the water."
 
"I really hope," resumed la Gaulti?e, "that nobody will
apply for it."
 
"Ah, good heavens!" exclaimed Agnes; "those poor nurses
yonder in the foundling asylum, which forms the lower end of
the lane as you go to the river, just beside Monseigneur the
bishop! what if this little monster were to be carried to them
to suckle?  I'd rather give suck to a vampire."
 
"How innocent that poor la Herme is!" resumed Jehanne; "don't
you see, sister, that this little monster is at least four years
old, and that he would have less appetite for your breast than
for a turnspit."
 
The "little monster" we should find it difficult
ourselves to describe him otherwise, was, in fact, not a new-born
child.  It was a very angular and very lively little mass,
imprisoned in its linen sack, stamped with the cipher of Messire
Guillaume Chartier, then bishop of Paris, with a head
projecting.  That head was deformed enough; one beheld only a
forest of red hair, one eye, a mouth, and teeth.  The eye
wept, the mouth cried, and the teeth seemed to ask only to
be allowed to bite.  The whole struggled in the sack, to the
great consternation of the crowd, which increased and was
renewed incessantly around it.
 
Dame Aloise de Gondelaurier, a rich and noble woman, who
held by the hand a pretty girl about five or six years of
age, and dragged a long veil about, suspended to the golden horn
of her headdress, halted as she passed the wooden bed, and gazed
for a moment at the wretched creature, while her charming little
daughter, Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, spelled out with her
tiny, pretty finger, the permanent inscription attached to the
wooden bed: "Foundlings."
 
"Really," said the dame, turning away in disgust, "I thought that
they only exposed children here."
 
She turned her back, throwing into the basin a silver florin,
which rang among the liards, and made the poor goodwives of
the chapel of Etienne Haudry open their eyes.
 
A moment later, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle,
the king's protonotary, passed, with an enormous missal under
one arm and his wife on the other (Damoiselle Guillemette la
Mairesse), having thus by his side his two regulators,--spiritual
and temporal.
 
"Foundling!" he said, after examining the object; "found,
apparently, on the banks of the river Phlegethon."
 
"One can only see one eye," observed Damoiselle Guillemette;
"there is a wart on the other."
 
"It's not a wart," returned Master Robert Mistricolle, "it
is an egg which contains another demon exactly similar, who
bears another little egg which contains another devil, and
so on."
 
"How do you know that?" asked Guillemette la Mairesse.
 
"I know it pertinently," replied the protonotary.
 
"Monsieur le protonotare," asked Gauch?e, "what do you
prognosticate of this pretended foundling?"
 
"The greatest misfortunes," replied Mistricolle.
 
"Ah! good heavens!" said an old woman among the spectators,
"and that besides our having had a considerable pestilence
last year, and that they say that the English are going
to disembark in a company at Harfleur."
 
"Perhaps that will prevent the queen from coming to Paris
in the month of September," interposed another; "trade is so
bad already."
 
"My opinion is," exclaimed Jehanne de la Tarme, "that it
would be better for the louts of Paris, if this little magician
were put to bed on a fagot than on a plank."
 
"A fine, flaming fagot," added the old woman.
 
"It would be more prudent," said Mistricolle.
 
For several minutes, a young priest had been listening to
the reasoning of the Haudriettes and the sentences of the
notary.  He had a severe face, with a large brow, a profound
glance.  He thrust the crowd silently aside, scrutinized the
"little magician," and stretched out his hand upon him.  It was
high time, for all the devotees were already licking their chops
over the "fine, flaming fagot."
 
"I adopt this child," said the priest.
 
He took it in his cassock and carried it off.  The spectators
followed him with frightened glances.  A moment later, he had
disappeared through the "Red Door," which then led from the
church to the cloister.
 
When the first surprise was over, Jehanne de la Tarme
bent down to the ear of la Gaulti?e,--
 
"I told you so, sister,--that young clerk, Monsieur Claude
Frollo, is a sorcerer."
 
 
 
CHAPTER II. CLAUDE FROLLO.
 
In fact, Claude Frollo was no common person.
 
He belonged to one of those middle-class families which
were called indifferently, in the impertinent language of the
last century, the high ~bourgeoise~ or the petty nobility.  This
family had inherited from the brothers Paclet the fief of
Tirechappe, which was dependent upon the Bishop of Paris, and
whose twenty-one houses had been in the thirteenth century
the object of so many suits before the official.  As possessor
of this fief, Claude Frollo was one of the twenty-seven
seigneurs keeping claim to a manor in fee in Paris and its
suburbs; and for a long time, his name was to be seen inscribed
in this quality, between the H?el de Tancarville, belonging
to Master Fran?is Le Rez, and the college of Tours, in the
records deposited at Saint Martin des Champs.
 
Claude Frollo had been destined from infancy, by his parents,
to the ecclesiastical profession.  He had been taught to
read in Latin; he had been trained to keep his eyes on the
ground and to speak low.  While still a child, his father had
cloistered him in the college of Torchi in the University.
There it was that he had grown up, on the missal and the
lexicon.
 
Moreover, he was a sad, grave, serious child, who studied
ardently, and learned quickly; he never uttered a loud cry in
recreation hour, mixed but little in the bacchanals of the Rue
du Fouarre, did not know what it was to ~dare alapas et capillos
laniare~, and had cut no figure in that revolt of 1463, which
the annalists register gravely, under the title of "The sixth
trouble of the University."  He seldom rallied the poor
students of Montaigu on the ~cappettes~ from which they derived
their name, or the bursars of the college of Dormans on their
shaved tonsure, and their surtout parti-colored of bluish-green,
blue, and violet cloth, ~azurini coloris et bruni~, as says the
charter of the Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes.
 
On the other hand, he was assiduous at the great and the
small schools of the Rue Saint Jean de Beauvais.  The first
pupil whom the Abb?de Saint Pierre de Val, at the moment
of beginning his reading on canon law, always perceived, glued
to a pillar of the school Saint-Vendregesile, opposite his
rostrum, was Claude Frollo, armed with his horn ink-bottle, biting
his pen, scribbling on his threadbare knee, and, in winter,
blowing on his fingers.  The first auditor whom Messire Miles
d'Isliers, doctor in decretals, saw arrive every Monday morning,
all breathless, at the opening of the gates of the school
of the Chef-Saint-Denis, was Claude Frollo.  Thus, at sixteen
years of age, the young clerk might have held his own, in
mystical theology, against a father of the church; in canonical
theology, against a father of the councils; in scholastic
theology, against a doctor of Sorbonne.
 
Theology conquered, he had plunged into decretals.  From
the "Master of Sentences," he had passed to the "Capitularies
of Charlemagne;" and he had devoured in succession, in his
appetite for science, decretals upon decretals, those of
Theodore, Bishop of Hispalus; those of Bouchard, Bishop of
Worms; those of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; next the decretal
of Gratian, which succeeded the capitularies of Charlemagne;
then the collection of Gregory IX.; then the Epistle of
~Superspecula~, of Honorius III.  He rendered clear and
familiar to himself that vast and tumultuous period of civil law
and canon law in conflict and at strife with each other, in the
chaos of the Middle Ages,--a period which Bishop Theodore
opens in 618, and which Pope Gregory closes in 1227.
 
Decretals digested, he flung himself upon medicine, on the
liberal arts.  He studied the science of herbs, the science of
unguents; he became an expert in fevers and in contusions,
in sprains and abcesses.  Jacques d' Espars would have
received him as a physician; Richard Hellain, as a surgeon.
He also passed through all the degrees of licentiate, master,
and doctor of arts.  He studied the languages, Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, a triple sanctuary then very little frequented.  His
was a veritable fever for acquiring and hoarding, in the matter
of science.  At the age of eighteen, he had made his way
through the four faculties; it seemed to the young man that
life had but one sole object: learning.
 
It was towards this epoch, that the excessive heat of the
summer of 1466 caused that grand outburst of the plague
which carried off more than forty thousand souls in the
vicomty of Paris, and among others, as Jean de Troyes states,
"Master Arnoul, astrologer to the king, who was a very
fine man, both wise and pleasant." The rumor spread in the
University that the Rue Tirechappe was especially devastated by
the malady.  It was there that Claude's parents resided, in
the midst of their fief.  The young scholar rushed in great
alarm to the paternal mansion.  When he entered it, he found
that both father and mother had died on the preceding day.
A very young brother of his, who was in swaddling clothes,
was still alive and crying abandoned in his cradle.  This was
all that remained to Claude of his family; the young man
took the child under his arm and went off in a pensive mood.
Up to that moment, he had lived only in science; he now
began to live in life.
 
This catastrophe was a crisis in Claude's existence.
Orphaned, the eldest, head of the family at the age of nineteen,
he felt himself rudely recalled from the reveries of school to
the realities of this world.  Then, moved with pity, he was
seized with passion and devotion towards that child, his
brother; a sweet and strange thing was a human affection
to him, who had hitherto loved his books alone.
 
This affection developed to a singular point; in a soul so
new, it was like a first love.  Separated since infancy from
his parents, whom he had hardly known; cloistered and immured,
as it were, in his books; eager above all things to study
and to learn; exclusively attentive up to that time, to his
intelligence which broadened in science, to his imagination,
which expanded in letters,--the poor scholar had not yet had
time to feel the place of his heart.
 
This young brother, without mother or father, this little
child which had fallen abruptly from heaven into his arms,
made a new man of him.  He perceived that there was something
else in the world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne,
and the verses of Homer; that man needed affections; that
life without tenderness and without love was only a set
of dry, shrieking, and rending wheels.  Only, he imagined, for
he was at the age when illusions are as yet replaced only by
illusions, that the affections of blood and family were the sole
ones necessary, and that a little brother to love sufficed to fill
an entire existence.
 
He threw himself, therefore, into the love for his little
Jehan with the passion of a character already profound,
ardent, concentrated; that poor frail creature, pretty, fair-
haired, rosy, and curly,--that orphan with another orphan
for his only support, touched him to the bottom of his heart;
and grave thinker as he was, he set to meditating upon Jehan
with an infinite compassion.  He kept watch and ward over
him as over something very fragile, and very worthy of care.
He was more than a brother to the child; he became a mother
to him.
 
Little Jehan had lost his mother while he was still at the
breast; Claude gave him to a nurse.  Besides the fief of
Tirechappe, he had inherited from his father the fief of
Moulin, which was a dependency of the square tower of Gentilly;
it was a mill on a hill, near the ch?eau of Winchestre
(Bic?re).  There was a miller's wife there who was nursing a
fine child; it was not far from the university, and Claude
carried the little Jehan to her in his own arms.
 
From that time forth, feeling that he had a burden to bear,
he took life very seriously.  The thought of his little brother
became not only his recreation, but the object of his studies.
He resolved to consecrate himself entirely to a future for
which he was responsible in the sight of God, and never to
have any other wife, any other child than the happiness and
fortune of his brother.  Therefore, he attached himself more
closely than ever to the clerical profession.  His merits, his
learning, his quality of immediate vassal of the Bishop of
Paris, threw the doors of the church wide open to him.  At
the age of twenty, by special dispensation of the Holy See,
he was a priest, and served as the youngest of the chaplains
of Notre-Dame the altar which is called, because of the late
mass which is said there, ~altare pigrorum~.
 
There, plunged more deeply than ever in his dear books,
which he quitted only to run for an hour to the fief of Moulin,
this mixture of learning and austerity, so rare at his age, had
promptly acquired for him the respect and admiration of the
monastery.  From the cloister, his reputation as a learned man
had passed to the people, among whom it had changed a little,
a frequent occurrence at that time, into reputation as a sorcerer.
 
It was at the moment when he was returning, on Quasimodo
day, from saying his mass at the Altar of the Lazy, which was
by the side of the door leading to the nave on the right, near
the image of the Virgin, that his attention had been attracted
by the group of old women chattering around the bed for
foundlings.
 
Then it was that he approached the unhappy little creature,
which was so hated and so menaced.  That distress, that
deformity, that abandonment, the thought of his young brother,
the idea which suddenly occurred to him, that if he were to
die, his dear little Jehan might also be flung miserably on the
plank for foundlings,--all this had gone to his heart
simultaneously; a great pity had moved in him, and he had
carried off the child.
 
When he removed the child from the sack, he found it greatly
deformed, in very sooth.  The poor little wretch had a wart on
his left eye, his head placed directly on his shoulders, his
spinal column was crooked, his breast bone prominent, and his
legs bowed; but he appeared to be lively; and although it was
impossible to say in what language he lisped, his cry indicated
considerable force and health.  Claude's compassion increased
at the sight of this ugliness; and he made a vow in his heart
to rear the child for the love of his brother, in order that,
whatever might be the future faults of the little Jehan, he
should have beside him that charity done for his sake.  It
was a sort of investment of good works, which he was effecting
in the name of his young brother; it was a stock of good works
which he wished to amass in advance for him, in case the little
rogue should some day find himself short of that coin, the only
sort which is received at the toll-bar of paradise.
 
He baptized his adopted child, and gave him the name of
Quasimodo, either because he desired thereby to mark the day,
when he had found him, or because he wished to designate by
that name to what a degree the poor little creature was
incomplete, and hardly sketched out.  In fact, Quasimodo,
blind, hunchbacked, knock-kneed, was only an "almost."
 
 
 
CHAPTER III. ~IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE~.
 
Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up.  He had become a
few years previously the bellringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to
his father by adoption, Claude Frollo,--who had become archdeacon
of Josas, thanks to his suzerain, Messire Louis de Beaumont,--who
had become Bishop of Paris, at the death of Guillaume Chartier in
1472, thanks to his patron, Olivier Le Daim, barber to Louis XI.,
king by the grace of God.
 
So Quasimodo was the ringer of the chimes of Notre-Dame.
 
In the course of time there had been formed a certain
peculiarly intimate bond which united the ringer to the church.
Separated forever from the world, by the double fatality of
his unknown birth and his natural deformity, imprisoned from
his infancy in that impassable double circle, the poor wretch
had grown used to seeing nothing in this world beyond the
religious walls which had received him under their shadow.
Notre-Dame had been to him successively, as he grew up and
developed, the egg, the nest, the house, the country, the
universe.
 
There was certainly a sort of mysterious and pre-existing
harmony between this creature and this church.  When, still
a little fellow, he had dragged himself tortuously and by jerks
beneath the shadows of its vaults, he seemed, with his human
face and his bestial limbs, the natural reptile of that humid
and sombre pavement, upon which the shadow of the Romanesque
capitals cast so many strange forms.
 
Later on, the first time that he caught hold, mechanically,
of the ropes to the towers, and hung suspended from them,
and set the bell to clanging, it produced upon his adopted
father, Claude, the effect of a child whose tongue is unloosed
and who begins to speak.
 
It is thus that, little by little, developing always in
sympathy with the cathedral, living there, sleeping there, hardly
ever leaving it, subject every hour to the mysterious impress,
he came to resemble it, he incrusted himself in it, so to speak,
and became an integral part of it.  His salient angles fitted
into the retreating angles of the cathedral (if we may be
allowed this figure of speech), and he seemed not only its
inhabitant but more than that, its natural tenant.  One might
almost say that he had assumed its form, as the snail takes on
the form of its shell.  It was his dwelling, his hole, his envelope.
There existed between him and the old church so profound an
instinctive sympathy, so many magnetic affinities, so many
material affinities, that he adhered to it somewhat as a
tortoise adheres to its shell.  The rough and wrinkled cathedral
was his shell.
 
It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally all the
similes which we are obliged to employ here to express the
singular, symmetrical, direct, almost consubstantial union of a
man and an edifice.  It is equally unnecessary to state to what
a degree that whole cathedral was familiar to him, after so
long and so intimate a cohabitation.  That dwelling was
peculiar to him.  It had no depths to which Quasimodo had not
penetrated, no height which he had not scaled.  He often
climbed many stones up the front, aided solely by the uneven
points of the carving.  The towers, on whose exterior
surface he was frequently seen clambering, like a lizard gliding
along a perpendicular wall, those two gigantic twins, so
lofty, so menacing, so formidable, possessed for him neither
vertigo, nor terror, nor shocks of amazement.
 
To see them so gentle under his hand, so easy to scale, one
would have said that he had tamed them.  By dint of leaping,
climbing, gambolling amid the abysses of the gigantic cathedral
he had become, in some sort, a monkey and a goat, like
the Calabrian child who swims before he walks, and plays with
the sea while still a babe.
 
Moreover, it was not his body alone which seemed fashioned
after the Cathedral, but his mind also.  In what condition
was that mind?  What bent had it contracted, what form
had it assumed beneath that knotted envelope, in that savage
life?  This it would be hard to determine.  Quasimodo had
been born one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame.  It was with great
difficulty, and by dint of great patience that Claude Frollo had
succeeded in teaching him to talk.  But a fatality was
attached to the poor foundling.  Bellringer of Notre-Dame at
the age of fourteen, a new infirmity had come to complete
his misfortunes: the bells had broken the drums of his ears;
he had become deaf.  The only gate which nature had left
wide open for him had been abruptly closed, and forever.
 
In closing, it had cut off the only ray of joy and of light
which still made its way into the soul of Quasimodo.  His
soul fell into profound night.  The wretched being's misery
became as incurable and as complete as his deformity.  Let us
add that his deafness rendered him to some extent dumb.
For, in order not to make others laugh, the very moment that
he found himself to be deaf, he resolved upon a silence which
he only broke when he was alone.  He voluntarily tied that
tongue which Claude Frollo had taken so much pains to unloose.
Hence, it came about, that when necessity constrained
him to speak, his tongue was torpid, awkward, and like a door
whose hinges have grown rusty.
 
If now we were to try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo
through that thick, hard rind; if we could sound the depths
of that badly constructed organism; if it were granted to us
to look with a torch behind those non-transparent organs
to explore the shadowy interior of that opaque creature, to
elucidate his obscure corners, his absurd no-thoroughfares, and
suddenly to cast a vivid light upon the soul enchained at the
extremity of that cave, we should, no doubt, find the unhappy
Psyche in some poor, cramped, and ricketty attitude, like
those prisoners beneath the Leads of Venice, who grew old
bent double in a stone box which was both too low and too
short for them.
 
It is certain that the mind becomes atrophied in a defective
body.  Quasimodo was barely conscious of a soul cast in his
own image, moving blindly within him.  The impressions of
objects underwent a considerable refraction before reaching
his mind.  His brain was a peculiar medium; the ideas which
passed through it issued forth completely distorted.  The
reflection which resulted from this refraction was, necessarily,
divergent and perverted.
 
Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations
of judgment, a thousand deviations, in which his thought
strayed, now mad, now idiotic.
 
The first effect of this fatal organization was to trouble the
glance which he cast upon things.  He received hardly any
immediate perception of them.  The external world seemed
much farther away to him than it does to us.
 
The second effect of his misfortune was to render him malicious.
 
He was malicious, in fact, because he was savage; he was
savage because he was ugly.  There was logic in his nature, as
there is in ours.
 
His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of
still greater malevolence: "~Malus puer robustus~," says
Hobbes.
 
This justice must, however be rendered to him.  Malevolence
was not, perhaps, innate in him.  From his very first
steps among men, he had felt himself, later on he had seen
himself, spewed out, blasted, rejected.  Human words were,
for him, always a raillery or a malediction.  As he grew up,
he had found nothing but hatred around him.  He had caught
the general malevolence.  He had picked up the weapon with
which he had been wounded.
 
After all, he turned his face towards men only with
reluctance; his cathedral was sufficient for him.  It was peopled
with marble figures,--kings, saints, bishops,--who at least
did not burst out laughing in his face, and who gazed upon
him only with tranquillity and kindliness.  The other statues,
those of the monsters and demons, cherished no hatred for
him, Quasimodo.  He resembled them too much for that.
They seemed rather, to be scoffing at other men.  The saints
were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his
friends and guarded him.  So he held long communion with
them.  He sometimes passed whole hours crouching before
one of these statues, in solitary conversation with it.  If any
one came, he fled like a lover surprised in his serenade.
 
And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the
universe, and all nature beside.  He dreamed of no other
hedgerows than the painted windows, always in flower; no
other shade than that of the foliage of stone which spread
out, loaded with birds, in the tufts of the Saxon capitals; of
no other mountains than the colossal towers of the church; of
no other ocean than Paris, roaring at their bases.
 
What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that
which aroused his soul, and made it open its poor wings,
which it kept so miserably folded in its cavern, that which
sometimes rendered him even happy, was the bells.  He
loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them.
From the chime in the spire, over the intersection of the aisles
and nave, to the great bell of the front, he cherished a
tenderness for them all.  The central spire and the two towers
were to him as three great cages, whose birds, reared by
himself, sang for him alone.  Yet it was these very bells which
had made him deaf; but mothers often love best that child
which has caused them the most suffering.
 
It is true that their voice was the only one which he could
still hear.  On this score, the big bell was his beloved.  It
was she whom he preferred out of all that family of noisy
girls which bustled above him, on festival days.  This bell
was named Marie.  She was alone in the southern tower, with
her sister Jacqueline, a bell of lesser size, shut up in a smaller
cage beside hers.  This Jacqueline was so called from the
name of the wife of Jean Montagu, who had given it to the
church, which had not prevented his going and figuring without
his head at Montfau?n.  In the second tower there were
six other bells, and, finally, six smaller ones inhabited the
belfry over the crossing, with the wooden bell, which rang
only between after dinner on Good Friday and the morning of
the day before Easter.  So Quasimodo had fifteen bells in his
seraglio; but big Marie was his favorite.
 
No idea can be formed of his delight on days when the
grand peal was sounded.  At the moment when the archdeacon
dismissed him, and said, "Go!" he mounted the spiral
staircase of the clock tower faster than any one else could
have descended it.  He entered perfectly breathless into the
aerial chamber of the great bell; he gazed at her a moment,
devoutly and lovingly; then he gently addressed her and
patted her with his hand, like a good horse, which is about
to set out on a long journey.  He pitied her for the trouble
that she was about to suffer.  After these first caresses, he
shouted to his assistants, placed in the lower story of the
tower, to begin.  They grasped the ropes, the wheel creaked,
the enormous capsule of metal started slowly into motion.
Quasimodo followed it with his glance and trembled.  The
first shock of the clapper and the brazen wall made the
framework upon which it was mounted quiver.  Quasimodo
vibrated with the bell.
 
"Vah!" he cried, with a senseless burst of laughter.  However,
the movement of the bass was accelerated, and, in proportion
as it described a wider angle, Quasimodo's eye opened
also more and more widely, phosphoric and flaming.  At
length the grand peal began; the whole tower trembled;
woodwork, leads, cut stones, all groaned at once, from the
piles of the foundation to the trefoils of its summit.  Then
Quasimodo boiled and frothed; he went and came; he trembled
from head to foot with the tower.  The bell, furious,
running riot, presented to the two walls of the tower
alternately its brazen throat, whence escaped that tempestuous
breath, which is audible leagues away.  Quasimodo stationed
himself in front of this open throat; he crouched and rose
with the oscillations of the bell, breathed in this overwhelming
breath, gazed by turns at the deep place, which swarmed
with people, two hundred feet below him, and at that enormous,
brazen tongue which came, second after second, to howl
in his ear.
 
It was the only speech which he understood, the only sound
which broke for him the universal silence.  He swelled out
in it as a bird does in the sun.  All of a sudden, the frenzy
of the bell seized upon him; his look became extraordinary;
he lay in wait for the great bell as it passed, as a spider lies
in wait for a fly, and flung himself abruptly upon it, with
might and main.  Then, suspended above the abyss, borne to
and fro by the formidable swinging of the bell, he seized the
brazen monster by the ear-laps, pressed it between both knees,
spurred it on with his heels, and redoubled the fury of the
peal with the whole shock and weight of his body.  Meanwhile,
the tower trembled; he shrieked and gnashed his teeth,
his red hair rose erect, his breast heaving like a bellows, his
eye flashed flames, the monstrous bell neighed, panting, beneath
him; and then it was no longer the great bell of Notre-
Dame nor Quasimodo: it was a dream, a whirlwind, a tempest,
dizziness mounted astride of noise; a spirit clinging to a flying
crupper, a strange centaur, half man, half bell; a sort of
horrible Astolphus, borne away upon a prodigious hippogriff
of living bronze.
 
The presence of this extraordinary being caused, as it were,
a breath of life to circulate throughout the entire cathedral.
It seemed as though there escaped from him, at least according
to the growing superstitions of the crowd, a mysterious
emanation which animated all the stones of Notre-Dame, and
made the deep bowels of the ancient church to palpitate.  It
sufficed for people to know that he was there, to make them
believe that they beheld the thousand statues of the galleries
and the fronts in motion.  And the cathedral did indeed seem
a docile and obedient creature beneath his hand; it waited on
his will to raise its great voice; it was possessed and filled
with Quasimodo, as with a familiar spirit.  One would have
said that he made the immense edifice breathe.  He was
everywhere about it; in fact, he multiplied himself on all
points of the structure.  Now one perceived with affright at
the very top of one of the towers, a fantastic dwarf climbing,
writhing, crawling on all fours, descending outside above the
abyss, leaping from projection to projection, and going to
ransack the belly of some sculptured gorgon; it was Quasimodo
dislodging the crows.  Again, in some obscure corner of
the church one came in contact with a sort of living chimera,
crouching and scowling; it was Quasimodo engaged in thought.
Sometimes one caught sight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous
head and a bundle of disordered limbs swinging furiously
at the end of a rope; it was Quasimodo ringing vespers
or the Angelus.  Often at night a hideous form was seen
wandering along the frail balustrade of carved lacework,
which crowns the towers and borders the circumference of
the apse; again it was the hunchback of Notre-Dame.  Then,
said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took
on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and
mouths were opened, here and there; one heard the dogs, the
monsters, and the gargoyles of stone, which keep watch night
and day, with outstretched neck and open jaws, around the
monstrous cathedral, barking.  And, if it was a Christmas
Eve, while the great bell, which seemed to emit the death
rattle, summoned the faithful to the midnight mass, such an
air was spread over the sombre fa?de that one would have
declared that the grand portal was devouring the throng, and
that the rose window was watching it.  And all this came
from Quasimodo.  Egypt would have taken him for the god
of this temple; the Middle Ages believed him to be its
demon: he was in fact its soul.
 
To such an extent was this disease that for those who know
that Quasimodo has existed, Notre-Dame is to-day deserted,
inanimate, dead.  One feels that something has disappeared
from it.  That immense body is empty; it is a skeleton; the
spirit has quitted it, one sees its place and that is all.  It is
like a skull which still has holes for the eyes, but no
longer sight.
 
 
 
CHAPTER IV. THE DOG AND HIS MASTER.
 
Nevertheless, there was one human creature whom Quasimodo
excepted from his malice and from his hatred for others,
and whom he loved even more, perhaps, than his cathedral:
this was Claude Frollo.
 
The matter was simple; Claude Frollo had taken him in,
had adopted him, had nourished him, had reared him.  When
a little lad, it was between Claude Frollo's legs that he was
accustomed to seek refuge, when the dogs and the children
barked after him.  Claude Frollo had taught him to talk, to
read, to write.  Claude Frollo had finally made him the
bellringer.  Now, to give the big bell in marriage to Quasimodo
was to give Juliet to Romeo.
 
Hence Quasimodo's gratitude was profound, passionate,
boundless; and although the visage of his adopted father
was often clouded or severe, although his speech was habitually
curt, harsh, imperious, that gratitude never wavered
for a single moment.  The archdeacon had in Quasimodo
the most submissive slave, the most docile lackey, the most
vigilant of dogs.  When the poor bellringer became deaf,
there had been established between him and Claude Frollo, a
language of signs, mysterious and understood by themselves
alone.  In this manner the archdeacon was the sole human
being with whom Quasimodo had preserved communication.
He was in sympathy with but two things in this world: Notre-
Dame and Claude Frollo.
 
There is nothing which can be compared with the empire of
the archdeacon over the bellringer; with the attachment of
the bellringer for the archdeacon.  A sign from Claude and
the idea of giving him pleasure would have sufficed to make
Quasimodo hurl himself headlong from the summit of Notre-
Dame.  It was a remarkable thing--all that physical strength
which had reached in Quasimodo such an extraordinary
development, and which was placed by him blindly at the disposition
of another.  There was in it, no doubt, filial devotion,
domestic attachment; there was also the fascination of one
spirit by another spirit.  It was a poor, awkward, and clumsy
organization, which stood with lowered head and supplicating
eyes before a lofty and profound, a powerful and superior
intellect.  Lastly, and above all, it was gratitude.  Gratitude
so pushed to its extremest limit, that we do not know to what
to compare it.  This virtue is not one of those of which the
finest examples are to be met with among men.  We will say
then, that Quasimodo loved the archdeacon as never a dog,
never a horse, never an elephant loved his master.
 
 
 
CHAPTER V. MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO.
 
In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years of age; Claude
Frollo, about thirty-six.  One had grown up, the other had
grown old.
 
Claude Frollo was no longer the simple scholar of the college
of Torch, the tender protector of a little child, the
young and dreamy philosopher who knew many things and
was ignorant of many.  He was a priest, austere, grave,
morose; one charged with souls; monsieur the archdeacon of
Josas, the bishop's second acolyte, having charge of the
two deaneries of Montlh?y, and Ch?eaufort, and one hundred
and seventy-four country curacies.  He was an imposing and
sombre personage, before whom the choir boys in alb and
in jacket trembled, as well as the machicots*, and the brothers
of Saint-Augustine and the matutinal clerks of Notre-Dame,
when he passed slowly beneath the lofty arches of the choir,
majestic, thoughtful, with arms folded and his head so bent
upon his breast that all one saw of his face was his large,
bald brow.
 
 
*  An official of Notre-Dame, lower than a beneficed clergyman,
higher than simple paid chanters.
 
 
Dom Claude Frollo had, however, abandoned neither science
nor the education of his young brother, those two occupations
of his life.  But as time went on, some bitterness had
been mingled with these things which were so sweet.  In the
long run, says Paul Diacre, the best lard turns rancid.  Little
Jehan Frollo, surnamed (~du Moulin~) "of the Mill" because of
the place where he had been reared, had not grown up in the
direction which Claude would have liked to impose upon him.
The big brother counted upon a pious, docile, learned, and
honorable pupil.  But the little brother, like those young trees
which deceive the gardener's hopes and turn obstinately to the
quarter whence they receive sun and air, the little brother did
not grow and did not multiply, but only put forth fine bushy
and luxuriant branches on the side of laziness, ignorance, and
debauchery.  He was a regular devil, and a very disorderly
one, who made Dom Claude scowl; but very droll and very
subtle, which made the big brother smile.
 
Claude had confided him to that same college of Torchi
where he had passed his early years in study and meditation;
and it was a grief to him that this sanctuary, formerly edified
by the name of Frollo, should to-day be scandalized by it.
He sometimes preached Jehan very long and severe sermons,
which the latter intrepidly endured.  After all, the young
scapegrace had a good heart, as can be seen in all comedies.
But the sermon over, he none the less tranquilly resumed his
course of seditions and enormities.  Now it was a ~bejaune~ or
yellow beak (as they called the new arrivals at the university),
whom he had been mauling by way of welcome; a precious
tradition which has been carefully preserved to our own day.
Again, he had set in movement a band of scholars, who had
flung themselves upon a wine-shop in classic fashion, quasi
~classico excitati~, had then beaten the tavern-keeper "with
offensive cudgels," and joyously pillaged the tavern, even to
smashing in the hogsheads of wine in the cellar.  And then
it was a fine report in Latin, which the sub-monitor of Torchi
carried piteously to Dom Claude with this dolorous marginal
comment,--~Rixa; prima causa vinum optimum potatum~.  Finally,
it was said, a thing quite horrible in a boy of sixteen, that
his debauchery often extended as far as the Rue de Glatigny.
 
Claude, saddened and discouraged in his human affections,
by all this, had flung himself eagerly into the arms of learning,
that sister which, at least does not laugh in your face, and
which always pays you, though in money that is sometimes a
little hollow, for the attention which you have paid to her.
Hence, he became more and more learned, and, at the same
time, as a natural consequence, more and more rigid as a
priest, more and more sad as a man.  There are for each of
us several parallelisms between our intelligence, our habits,
and our character, which develop without a break, and break
only in the great disturbances of life.
 
As Claude Frollo had passed through nearly the entire
circle of human learning--positive, exterior, and
permissible--since his youth, he was obliged, unless he came
to a halt, ~ubi defuit orbis~, to proceed further and seek other
aliments for the insatiable activity of his intelligence.  The
antique symbol of the serpent biting its tail is, above all,
applicable to science.  It would appear that Claude Frollo had
experienced this.  Many grave persons affirm that, after having
exhausted the ~fas~ of human learning, he had dared to penetrate
into the ~nefas~.  He had, they said, tasted in succession all
the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or
disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.  He had taken
his place by turns, as the reader has seen, in the conferences of
the theologians in Sorbonne,--in the assemblies of the doctors of
art, after the manner of Saint-Hilaire,--in the disputes of the
decretalists, after the manner of Saint-Martin,--in the
congregations of physicians at the holy water font of Notre-
Dame, ~ad cupam Nostroe-Dominoe~.  All the dishes permitted
and approved, which those four great kitchens called
the four faculties could elaborate and serve to the understanding,
he had devoured, and had been satiated with them before
his hunger was appeased.  Then he had penetrated further,
lower, beneath all that finished, material, limited knowledge;
he had, perhaps, risked his soul, and had seated himself in the
cavern at that mysterious table of the alchemists, of the
astrologers, of the hermetics, of which Averro?, Gillaume de
Paris, and Nicolas Flamel hold the end in the Middle Ages;
and which extends in the East, by the light of the seven-
branched candlestick, to Solomon, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster.
 
That is, at least, what was supposed, whether rightly or not.
It is certain that the archdeacon often visited the cemetery
of the Saints-Innocents, where, it is true, his father and
mother had been buried, with other victims of the plague of
1466; but that he appeared far less devout before the cross
of their grave than before the strange figures with which the
tomb of Nicolas Flamel and Claude Pernelle, erected just beside
it, was loaded.
 
It is certain that he had frequently been seen to pass along
the Rue des Lombards, and furtively enter a little house
which formed the corner of the Rue des Ecrivans and the Rue
Marivault.  It was the house which Nicolas Flamel had
built, where he had died about 1417, and which, constantly
deserted since that time, had already begun to fall in
ruins,--so greatly had the hermetics and the alchemists of all
countries wasted away the walls, merely by carving their names
upon them.  Some neighbors even affirm that they had once seen,
through an air-hole, Archdeacon Claude excavating, turning over,
digging up the earth in the two cellars, whose supports had been
daubed with numberless couplets and hieroglyphics by Nicolas
Flamel himself.  It was supposed that Flamel had buried the
philosopher's stone in the cellar; and the alchemists, for the
space of two centuries, from Magistri to Father Pacifique, never
ceased to worry the soil until the house, so cruelly ransacked
and turned over, ended by falling into dust beneath their feet.
 
Again, it is certain that the archdeacon had been seized
with a singular passion for the symbolical door of Notre-
Dame, that page of a conjuring book written in stone, by
Bishop Guillaume de Paris, who has, no doubt, been damned
for having affixed so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred poem
chanted by the rest of the edifice.  Archdeacon Claude had
the credit also of having fathomed the mystery of the colossus
of Saint Christopher, and of that lofty, enigmatical statue
which then stood at the entrance of the vestibule, and which
the people, in derision, called "Monsieur Legris."  But, what
every one might have noticed was the interminable hours
which he often employed, seated upon the parapet of the area
in front of the church, in contemplating the sculptures of the
front; examining now the foolish virgins with their lamps
reversed, now the wise virgins with their lamps upright; again,
calculating the angle of vision of that raven which belongs to
the left front, and which is looking at a mysterious point inside
the church, where is concealed the philosopher's stone, if it be
not in the cellar of Nicolas Flamel.
 
It was, let us remark in passing, a singular fate for the
Church of Notre-Dame at that epoch to be so beloved, in two
different degrees, and with so much devotion, by two beings so
dissimilar as Claude and Quasimodo.  Beloved by one, a sort
of instinctive and savage half-man, for its beauty, for its
stature, for the harmonies which emanated from its magnificent
ensemble; beloved by the other, a learned and passionate
imagination, for its myth, for the sense which it contains,
for the symbolism scattered beneath the sculptures of its
front,--like the first text underneath the second in a
palimpsest,--in a word, for the enigma which it is eternally
propounding to the understanding.
 
Furthermore, it is certain that the archdeacon had
established himself in that one of the two towers which looks
upon the Gr?e, just beside the frame for the bells, a very
secret little cell, into which no one, not even the bishop,
entered without his leave, it was said.  This tiny cell had
formerly been made almost at the summit of the tower,
among the ravens' nests, by Bishop Hugo de Besan?n* who
had wrought sorcery there in his day.  What that cell
contained, no one knew; but from the strand of the Terrain,
at night, there was often seen to appear, disappear, and
reappear at brief and regular intervals, at a little dormer
window opening upon the back of the tower, a certain red,
intermittent, singular light which seemed to follow the panting
breaths of a bellows, and to proceed from a flame, rather than
from a light.  In the darkness, at that height, it produced a
singular effect; and the goodwives said: "There's the
archdeacon blowing! hell is sparkling up yonder!"
 
 
*  Hugo II. de Bisuncio, 1326-1332.
 
 
There were no great proofs of sorcery in that, after all, but
there was still enough smoke to warrant a surmise of fire, and
the archdeacon bore a tolerably formidable reputation.  We
ought to mention however, that the sciences of Egypt, that
necromancy and magic, even the whitest, even the most innocent,
had no more envenomed enemy, no more pitiless denunciator
before the gentlemen of the officialty of Notre-Dame.
Whether this was sincere horror, or the game played by the
thief who shouts, "stop thief!" at all events, it did not prevent
the archdeacon from being considered by the learned heads of
the chapter, as a soul who had ventured into the vestibule of
hell, who was lost in the caves of the cabal, groping amid the
shadows of the occult sciences.  Neither were the people
deceived thereby; with any one who possessed any sagacity,
Quasimodo passed for the demon; Claude Frollo, for the
sorcerer.  It was evident that the bellringer was to serve the
archdeacon for a given time, at the end of which he would
carry away the latter's soul, by way of payment.  Thus the
archdeacon, in spite of the excessive austerity of his life, was
in bad odor among all pious souls; and there was no devout
nose so inexperienced that it could not smell him out to
be a magician.
 
And if, as he grew older, abysses had formed in his science,
they had also formed in his heart.  That at least, is what one
had grounds for believing on scrutinizing that face upon
which the soul was only seen to shine through a sombre cloud.
Whence that large, bald brow? that head forever bent? that
breast always heaving with sighs?  What secret thought
caused his mouth to smile with so much bitterness, at the
same moment that his scowling brows approached each other
like two bulls on the point of fighting?  Why was what hair
he had left already gray?  What was that internal fire which
sometimes broke forth in his glance, to such a degree that his
eye resembled a hole pierced in the wall of a furnace?
 
These symptoms of a violent moral preoccupation, had
acquired an especially high degree of intensity at the epoch
when this story takes place.  More than once a choir-boy had
fled in terror at finding him alone in the church, so strange
and dazzling was his look.  More than once, in the choir, at
the hour of the offices, his neighbor in the stalls had heard
him mingle with the plain song, ~ad omnem tonum~, unintelligible
parentheses.  More than once the laundress of the Terrain
charged "with washing the chapter" had observed, not
without affright, the marks of nails and clenched fingers
on the surplice of monsieur the archdeacon of Josas.
 
However, he redoubled his severity, and had never been
more exemplary.  By profession as well as by character, he
had always held himself aloof from women; he seemed to hate
them more than ever.  The mere rustling of a silken petticoat
caused his hood to fall over his eyes.  Upon this score he was
so jealous of austerity and reserve, that when the Dame de
Beaujeu, the king's daughter, came to visit the cloister of
Notre-Dame, in the month of December, 1481, he gravely
opposed her entrance, reminding the bishop of the statute of
the Black Book, dating from the vigil of Saint-Barth?emy,
1334, which interdicts access to the cloister to "any woman
whatever, old or young, mistress or maid." Upon which the
bishop had been constrained to recite to him the ordinance of
Legate Odo, which excepts certain great dames, ~aliquoe
magnates mulieres, quoe sine scandalo vitari non possunt~.
And again the archdeacon had protested, objecting that the
ordinance of the legate, which dated back to 1207, was anterior
by a hundred and twenty-seven years to the Black Book, and
consequently was abrogated in fact by it.  And he had refused
to appear before the princess.
 
It was also noticed that his horror for Bohemian women and
gypsies had seemed to redouble for some time past.  He had
petitioned the bishop for an edict which expressly forbade
the Bohemian women to come and dance and beat their tambourines
on the place of the Parvis; and for about the same length of
time, he had been ransacking the mouldy placards of the
officialty, in order to collect the cases of sorcerers and
witches condemned to fire or the rope, for complicity in crimes
with rams, sows, or goats.
 
 
 
CHAPTER VI. UNPOPULARITY.
 
The archdeacon and the bellringer, as we have already
said, were but little loved by the populace great and small, in
the vicinity of the cathedral.  When Claude and Quasimodo
went out together, which frequently happened, and when
they were seen traversing in company, the valet behind the
master, the cold, narrow, and gloomy streets of the block of
Notre-Dame, more than one evil word, more than one ironical
quaver, more than one insulting jest greeted them on their
way, unless Claude Frollo, which was rarely the case, walked
with head upright and raised, showing his severe and almost
august brow to the dumbfounded jeerers.
 
Both were in their quarter like "the poets" of whom
R?nier speaks,--
 
 
   "All sorts of persons run after poets,
   As warblers fly shrieking after owls."
 
 
Sometimes a mischievous child risked his skin and bones for
the ineffable pleasure of driving a pin into Quasimodo's hump.
Again, a young girl, more bold and saucy than was fitting,
brushed the priest's black robe, singing in his face the sardonic
ditty, "niche, niche, the devil is caught." Sometimes a group
of squalid old crones, squatting in a file under the shadow of
the steps to a porch, scolded noisily as the archdeacon and the
bellringer passed, and tossed them this encouraging welcome,
with a curse: "Hum! there's a fellow whose soul is made like
the other one's body!"  Or a band of schoolboys and street
urchins, playing hop-scotch, rose in a body and saluted him
classically, with some cry in Latin: "~Eia! eia! Claudius
cum claudo~!"
 
But the insult generally passed unnoticed both by the priest
and the bellringer.  Quasimodo was too deaf to hear all these
gracious things, and Claude was too dreamy.
 
 
 
BOOK FIFTH.
 
 
CHAPTER I. ~ABBAS BEATI MARTINI~.
 
Dom Claude's fame had spread far and wide.  It procured
for him, at about the epoch when he refused to see Madame de
Beaujeu, a visit which he long remembered.
 
It was in the evening.  He had just retired, after the office,
to his canon's cell in the cloister of Notre-Dame.  This cell,
with the exception, possibly, of some glass phials, relegated
to a corner, and filled with a decidedly equivocal powder,
which strongly resembled the alchemist's "powder of projection,"
presented nothing strange or mysterious.  There were,
indeed, here and there, some inscriptions on the walls, but they
were pure sentences of learning and piety, extracted from
good authors.  The archdeacon had just seated himself, by the
light of a three-jetted copper lamp, before a vast coffer
crammed with manuscripts.  He had rested his elbow upon the
open volume of _Honorius d'Autun_, ~De predestinatione et libero
arbitrio~, and he was turning over, in deep meditation, the
leaves of a printed folio which he had just brought, the
sole product of the press which his cell contained.  In the
midst of his revery there came a knock at his door.  "Who's
there?" cried the learned man, in the gracious tone of a
famished dog, disturbed over his bone.
 
A voice without replied, "Your friend, Jacques Coictier."
He went to open the door.
 
It was, in fact, the king's physician; a person about fifty
years of age, whose harsh physiognomy was modified only by a
crafty eye.  Another man accompanied him.  Both wore long
slate-colored robes, furred with minever, girded and closed,
with caps of the same stuff and hue.  Their hands were
concealed by their sleeves, their feet by their robes, their eyes
by their caps.
 
"God help me, messieurs!" said the archdeacon, showing
them in; "I was not expecting distinguished visitors at such
an hour." And while speaking in this courteous fashion he
cast an uneasy and scrutinizing glance from the physician to
his companion.
 
"'Tis never too late to come and pay a visit to so considerable
a learned man as Dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe," replied
Doctor Coictier, whose Franche-Comt?accent made all his
phrases drag along with the majesty of a train-robe.
 
There then ensued between the physician and the archdeacon
one of those congratulatory prologues which, in accordance
with custom, at that epoch preceded all conversations
between learned men, and which did not prevent them from
detesting each other in the most cordial manner in the world.
However, it is the same nowadays; every wise man's mouth
complimenting another wise man is a vase of honeyed gall.
 
Claude Frollo's felicitations to Jacques Coictier bore reference
principally to the temporal advantages which the worthy
physician had found means to extract, in the course of his
much envied career, from each malady of the king, an operation
of alchemy much better and more certain than the pursuit
of the philosopher's stone.
 
"In truth, Monsieur le Docteur Coictier, I felt great joy
on learning of the bishopric given your nephew, my reverend
seigneur Pierre Verse.  Is he not Bishop of Amiens?"
 
"Yes, monsieur Archdeacon; it is a grace and mercy of God."
 
"Do you know that you made a great figure on Christmas
Day at the bead of your company of the chamber of accounts,
Monsieur President?"
 
"Vice-President, Dom Claude.  Alas! nothing more."
 
"How is your superb house in the Rue Saint-Andr?des
Arcs coming on?  'Tis a Louvre.  I love greatly the apricot
tree which is carved on the door, with this play of words:
'A L'ABRI-COTIER--Sheltered from reefs.'"
 
"Alas! Master Claude, all that masonry costeth me dear.
In proportion as the house is erected, I am ruined."
 
"Ho! have you not your revenues from the jail, and the
bailiwick of the Palais, and the rents of all the houses,
sheds, stalls, and booths of the enclosure?  'Tis a fine breast
to suck."
 
"My castellany of Poissy has brought me in nothing this year."
 
"But your tolls of Triel, of Saint-James, of Saint-Germainen-Laye
are always good."
 
"Six score livres, and not even Parisian livres at that."
 
"You have your office of counsellor to the king.  That is fixed."
 
"Yes, brother Claude; but that accursed seigneury of Poligny,
which people make so much noise about, is worth not sixty gold
crowns, year out and year in."
 
In the compliments which Dom Claude addressed to Jacques
Coictier, there was that sardonical, biting, and covertly
mocking accent, and the sad cruel smile of a superior and
unhappy man who toys for a moment, by way of distraction, with
the dense prosperity of a vulgar man.  The other did not
perceive it.
 
"Upon my soul," said Claude at length, pressing his hand,
"I am glad to see you and in such good health."
 
"Thanks, Master Claude."
 
"By the way," exclaimed Dom Claude, "how is your royal patient?"
 
"He payeth not sufficiently his physician," replied the
doctor, casting a side glance at his companion.
 
"Think you so, Gossip Coictier," said the latter.
 
These words, uttered in a tone of surprise and reproach,
drew upon this unknown personage the attention of the
archdeacon which, to tell the truth, had not been diverted from
him a single moment since the stranger had set foot across
the threshold of his cell.  It had even required all the
thousand reasons which he had for handling tenderly Doctor
Jacques Coictier, the all-powerful physician of King Louis XI.,
to induce him to receive the latter thus accompanied.  Hence,
there was nothing very cordial in his manner when Jacques
Coictier said to him,--
 
"By the way, Dom Claude, I bring you a colleague who has
desired to see you on account of your reputation."
 
"Monsieur belongs to science?" asked the archdeacon, fixing
his piercing eye upon Coictier's companion.  He found
beneath the brows of the stranger a glance no less piercing
or less distrustful than his own.
 
He was, so far as the feeble light of the lamp permitted
one to judge, an old man about sixty years of age and of
medium stature, who appeared somewhat sickly and broken in
health.  His profile, although of a very ordinary outline, had
something powerful and severe about it; his eyes sparkled
beneath a very deep superciliary arch, like a light in the
depths of a cave; and beneath his cap which was well drawn
down and fell upon his nose, one recognized the broad expanse
of a brow of genius.
 
He took it upon himself to reply to the archdeacon's question,--
 
"Reverend master," he said in a grave tone, "your renown
has reached my ears, and I wish to consult you.  I am but a
poor provincial gentleman, who removeth his shoes before
entering the dwellings of the learned.  You must know my
name.  I am called Gossip Tourangeau."
 
"Strange name for a gentleman," said the archdeacon to himself.
 
Nevertheless, he had a feeling that he was in the presence
of a strong and earnest character.  The instinct of his own
lofty intellect made him recognize an intellect no less lofty
under Gossip Tourangeau's furred cap, and as he gazed at
the solemn face, the ironical smile which Jacques Coictier's
presence called forth on his gloomy face, gradually
disappeared as twilight fades on the horizon of night.
Stern and silent, he had resumed his seat in his great
armchair; his elbow rested as usual, on the table, and his brow
on his hand.  After a few moments of reflection, he motioned
his visitors to be seated, and, turning to Gossip Tourangeau
he said,--
 
"You come to consult me, master, and upon what science?"
 
"Your reverence," replied Tourangeau, "I am ill, very ill.
You are said to be great AEsculapius, and I am come to ask
your advice in medicine."
 
"Medicine!" said the archdeacon, tossing his head.  He
seemed to meditate for a moment, and then resumed: "Gossip
Tourangeau, since that is your name, turn your head, you will
find my reply already written on the wall."
 
Gossip Tourangeau obeyed, and read this inscription engraved
above his head: "Medicine is the daughter of dreams.--JAMBLIQUE."
 
Meanwhile, Doctor Jacques Coictier had heard his
companion's question with a displeasure which Dom Claude's
response had but redoubled.  He bent down to the ear of
Gossip Tourangeau, and said to him, softly enough not to be
heard by the archdeacon: "I warned you that he was mad.
You insisted on seeing him."
 
"'Tis very possible that he is right, madman as he is, Doctor
Jacques," replied his comrade in the same low tone, and with
a bitter smile.
 
"As you please," replied Coictier dryly.  Then, addressing
the archdeacon: "You are clever at your trade, Dom Claude,
and you are no more at a loss over Hippocrates than a
monkey is over a nut.  Medicine a dream!  I suspect that the
pharmacopolists and the master physicians would insist upon
stoning you if they were here.  So you deny the influence of
philtres upon the blood, and unguents on the skin!  You deny
that eternal pharmacy of flowers and metals, which is called
the world, made expressly for that eternal invalid called man!"
 
"I deny," said Dom Claude coldly, "neither pharmacy nor the
invalid.  I reject the physician."
 
"Then it is not true," resumed Coictier hotly, "that gout
is an internal eruption; that a wound caused by artillery is to
be cured by the application of a young mouse roasted; that
young blood, properly injected, restores youth to aged veins;
it is not true that two and two make four, and that
emprostathonos follows opistathonos."
 
The archdeacon replied without perturbation: "There are
certain things of which I think in a certain fashion."
 
Coictier became crimson with anger.
 
"There, there, my good Coictier, let us not get angry," said
Gossip Tourangeau.  "Monsieur the archdeacon is our friend."
 
Coictier calmed down, muttering in a low tone,--
 
"After all, he's mad."
 
"~Pasque-dieu~, Master Claude," resumed Gossip Tourangeau,
after a silence, "You embarrass me greatly.  I had two things
to consult you upon, one touching my health and the other
touching my star."
 
"Monsieur," returned the archdeacon, "if that be your
motive, you would have done as well not to put yourself out
of breath climbing my staircase.  I do not believe in Medicine.
I do not believe in Astrology."
 
"Indeed!" said the man, with surprise.
 
Coictier gave a forced laugh.
 
"You see that he is mad," he said, in a low tone, to Gossip
Tourangeau.  "He does not believe in astrology."
 
"The idea of imagining," pursued Dom Claude, "that every
ray of a star is a thread which is fastened to the head of
a man!"
 
"And what then, do you believe in?" exclaimed Gossip Tourangeau.
 
The archdeacon hesitated for a moment, then he allowed a
gloomy smile to escape, which seemed to give the lie to his
response: "~Credo in Deum~."
 
"~Dominum nostrum~," added Gossip Tourangeau, making the
sign of the cross.
 
"Amen," said Coictier.
 
"Reverend master," resumed Tourangeau, "I am charmed
in soul to see you in such a religious frame of mind.  But
have you reached the point, great savant as you are, of no
longer believing in science?"
 
"No," said the archdeacon, grasping the arm of Gossip
Tourangeau, and a ray of enthusiasm lighted up his gloomy
eyes, "no, I do not reject science.  I have not crawled so
long, flat on my belly, with my nails in the earth, through the
innumerable ramifications of its caverns, without perceiving
far in front of me, at the end of the obscure gallery, a light,
a flame, a something, the reflection, no doubt, of the dazzling
central laboratory where the patient and the wise have found
out God."
 
"And in short," interrupted Tourangeau, "what do you
hold to be true and certain?"
 
"Alchemy."
 
Coictier exclaimed, "Pardieu, Dom Claude, alchemy has its
use, no doubt, but why blaspheme medicine and astrology?"
 
"Naught is your science of man, naught is your science of
the stars," said the archdeacon, commandingly.
 
"That's driving Epidaurus and Chaldea very fast," replied
the physician with a grin.
 
"Listen, Messire Jacques.  This is said in good faith.  I
am not the king's physician, and his majesty has not
given me the Garden of Daedalus in which to observe the
constellations.  Don't get angry, but listen to me.  What
truth have you deduced, I will not say from medicine, which
is too foolish a thing, but from astrology?  Cite to me the
virtues of the vertical boustrophedon, the treasures of the
number ziruph and those of the number zephirod!"
 
"Will you deny," said Coictier, "the sympathetic force of
the collar bone, and the cabalistics which are derived from it?"
 
"An error, Messire Jacques!  None of your formulas end in
reality.  Alchemy on the other hand has its discoveries.  Will
you contest results like this?  Ice confined beneath the earth
for a thousand years is transformed into rock crystals.  Lead
is the ancestor of all metals.  For gold is not a metal, gold is
light.  Lead requires only four periods of two hundred years
each, to pass in succession from the state of lead, to the state
of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to silver.  Are
not these facts?  But to believe in the collar bone, in the full
line and in the stars, is as ridiculous as to believe with the
inhabitants of Grand-Cathay that the golden oriole turns into
a mole, and that grains of wheat turn into fish of the carp
species."
 
"I have studied hermetic science!" exclaimed Coictier,
"and I affirm--"
 
The fiery archdeacon did not allow him to finish: "And I
have studied medicine, astrology, and hermetics.  Here alone
is the truth." (As he spoke thus, he took from the top of the
coffer a phial filled with the powder which we have mentioned
above), "here alone is light!  Hippocrates is a dream; Urania
is a dream; Hermes, a thought.  Gold is the sun; to make
gold is to be God.  Herein lies the one and only science.
I have sounded the depths of medicine and astrology, I tell
you!  Naught, nothingness!  The human body, shadows! the
planets, shadows!"
 
And he fell back in his armchair in a commanding and
inspired attitude.  Gossip Touraugeau watched him in silence.
Coictier tried to grin, shrugged his shoulders imperceptibly,
and repeated in a low voice,--
 
"A madman!"
 
"And," said Tourangeau suddenly, "the wondrous result,--
have you attained it, have you made gold?"
 
"If I had made it," replied the archdeacon, articulating his
words slowly, like a man who is reflecting, "the king of
France would be named Claude and not Louis."
 
The stranger frowned.
 
"What am I saying?" resumed Dom Claude, with a smile
of disdain.  "What would the throne of France be to me when
I could rebuild the empire of the Orient?"
 
"Very good!" said the stranger.
 
"Oh, the poor fool!" murmured Coictier.
 
The archdeacon went on, appearing to reply now only to
his thoughts,--
 
"But no, I am still crawling; I am scratching my face and
knees against the pebbles of the subterranean pathway.  I
catch a glimpse, I do not contemplate!  I do not read, I
spell out!"
 
"And when you know how to read!" demanded the stranger,
"will you make gold?"
 
"Who doubts it?" said the archdeacon.
 
"In that case Our Lady knows that I am greatly in need of
money, and I should much desire to read in your books.  Tell
me, reverend master, is your science inimical or displeasing to
Our Lady?"
 
"Whose archdeacon I am?" Dom Claude contented himself with
replying, with tranquil hauteur.
 
"That is true, my master.  Well! will it please you to initiate
me?  Let me spell with you."
 
Claude assumed the majestic and pontifical attitude of a Samuel.
 
"Old man, it requires longer years than remain to you, to
undertake this voyage across mysterious things.  Your head
is very gray!  One comes forth from the cavern only with
white hair, but only those with dark hair enter it.  Science
alone knows well how to hollow, wither, and dry up human
faces; she needs not to have old age bring her faces already
furrowed.  Nevertheless, if the desire possesses you of putting
yourself under discipline at your age, and of deciphering
the formidable alphabet of the sages, come to me; 'tis well,
I will make the effort.  I will not tell you, poor old man, to
go and visit the sepulchral chambers of the pyramids, of
which ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower of
Babylon, nor the immense white marble sanctuary of the Indian
temple of Eklinga.  I, no more than yourself, have seen the
Chaldean masonry works constructed according to the sacred
form of the Sikra, nor the temple of Solomon, which is
destroyed, nor the stone doors of the sepulchre of the kings
of Israel, which are broken.  We will content ourselves with
the fragments of the book of Hermes which we have here.
I will explain to you the statue of Saint Christopher, the
symbol of the sower, and that of the two angels which are
on the front of the Sainte-Chapelle, and one of which holds
in his hands a vase, the other, a cloud--"
 
Here Jacques Coictier, who had been unhorsed by the
archdeacon's impetuous replies, regained his saddle, and
interrupted him with the triumphant tone of one learned man
correcting another,--"~Erras amice Claudi~.  The symbol is
not the number.  You take Orpheus for Hermes."
 
"'Tis you who are in error," replied the archdeacon, gravely.
"Daedalus is the base; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the
edifice,--that is all.  You shall come when you will," he
continued, turning to Tourangeau, "I will show you the little
parcels of gold which remained at the bottom of Nicholas
Flamel's alembic, and you shall compare them with the gold
of Guillaume de Paris.  I will teach you the secret virtues
of the Greek word, ~peristera~.  But, first of all, I will make
you read, one after the other, the marble letters of the alphabet,
the granite pages of the book.  We shall go to the portal
of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond at the Sainte-
Chapelle, then to the house of Nicholas Flamel, Rue Manvault,
to his tomb, which is at the Saints-Innocents, to his two
hospitals, Rue de Montmorency.  I will make you read the
hieroglyphics which cover the four great iron cramps on the
portal of the hospital Saint-Gervais, and of the Rue de la
Ferronnerie.  We will spell out in company, also, the fa?de
of Saint-Come, of Sainte-Genevi?e-des-Ardents, of Saint Martin,
of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie--."
 
For a long time, Gossip Tourangeau, intelligent as was his glance,
had appeared not to understand Dom Claude.  He interrupted.
 
"~Pasque-dieu~! what are your books, then?"
 
"Here is one of them," said the archdeacon.
 
And opening the window of his cell he pointed out with
his finger the immense church of Notre-Dame, which, outlining
against the starry sky the black silhouette of its two towers,
its stone flanks, its monstrous haunches, seemed an enormous
two-headed sphinx, seated in the middle of the city.
 
The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time
in silence, then extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards
the printed book which lay open on the table, and his left
towards Notre-Dame, and turning a sad glance from the book
to the church,--"Alas," he said, "this will kill that."
 
Coictier, who had eagerly approached the book, could not
repress an exclamation.  "H? but now, what is there so
formidable in this: 'GLOSSA IN EPISTOLAS D. PAULI, ~Norimbergoe,
Antonius Koburger~, 1474.'  This is not new.  'Tis a book of
Pierre Lombard, the Master of Sentences.  Is it because it is
printed?"
 
"You have said it," replied Claude, who seemed absorbed
in a profound meditation, and stood resting, his forefinger
bent backward on the folio which had come from the famous
press of Nuremberg.  Then he added these mysterious words:
"Alas! alas! small things come at the end of great things; a
tooth triumphs over a mass.  The Nile rat kills the crocodile,
the swordfish kills the whale, the book will kill the edifice."
 
The curfew of the cloister sounded at the moment when
Master Jacques was repeating to his companion in low tones,
his eternal refrain, "He is mad!" To which his companion
this time replied, "I believe that he is."
 
It was the hour when no stranger could remain in the
cloister.  The two visitors withdrew.  "Master," said Gossip
Tourangeau, as he took leave of the archdeacon, "I love wise
men and great minds, and I hold you in singular esteem.
Come to-morrow to the Palace des Tournelles, and inquire for
the Abb?de Sainte-Martin, of Tours."
 
The archdeacon returned to his chamber dumbfounded,
comprehending at last who Gossip Tourangeau was, and recalling
that passage of the register of Sainte-Martin, of Tours:--
~Abbas beati Martini, SCILICET REX FRANCIAE, est canonicus de
consuetudine et habet parvam proebendam quam habet sanctus
Venantius, et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii~.
 
It is asserted that after that epoch the archdeacon had
frequent conferences with Louis XI., when his majesty came
to Paris, and that Dom Claude's influence quite overshadowed
that of Olivier le Daim and Jacques Coictier, who, as was his
habit, rudely took the king to task on that account.
 
 
 
CHAPTER II. THIS WILL KILL THAT.
 
Our lady readers will pardon us if we pause for a moment
to seek what could have been the thought concealed beneath
those enigmatic words of the archdeacon: "This will kill
that.  The book will kill the edifice."
 
To our mind, this thought had two faces.  In the first place,
it was a priestly thought.  It was the affright of the priest in
the presence of a new agent, the printing press.  It was the
terror and dazzled amazement of the men of the sanctuary, in
the presence of the luminous press of Gutenberg.  It was
the pulpit and the manuscript taking the alarm at the printed
word: something similar to the stupor of a sparrow which
should behold the angel Legion unfold his six million wings.
It was the cry of the prophet who already hears emancipated
humanity roaring and swarming; who beholds in the future,
intelligence sapping faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world
shaking off Rome.  It was the prognostication of the philosopher
who sees human thought, volatilized by the press, evaporating
from the theocratic recipient.  It was the terror of
the soldier who examines the brazen battering ram, and says:--"The
tower will crumble." It signified that one power was about to
succeed another power.  It meant, "The press will kill the church."
 
But underlying this thought, the first and most simple one,
no doubt, there was in our opinion another, newer one, a corollary
of the first, less easy to perceive and more easy to contest,
a view as philosophical and belonging no longer to the
priest alone but to the savant and the artist.  It was a
presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was
about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant
idea of each generation would no longer be written with the
same matter, and in the same manner; that the book of stone,
so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book
of paper, more solid and still more durable.  In this
connection the archdeacon's vague formula had a second sense.
It meant, "Printing will kill architecture."
 
In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century
of the Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great
book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his
different stages of development, either as a force or as
an intelligence.
 
When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded,
when the mass of reminiscences of the human race became
so heavy and so confused that speech naked and flying, ran
the risk of losing them on the way, men transcribed them on
the soil in a manner which was at once the most visible, most
durable, and most natural.  They sealed each tradition beneath
a monument.
 
The first monuments were simple masses of rock, "which the
iron had not touched," as Moses says.  Architecture began like
all writing.  It was first an alphabet.  Men planted a stone
upright, it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and
upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital
on the column.  This is what the earliest races did everywhere,
at the same moment, on the surface of the entire world.  We
find the "standing stones" of the Celts in Asian Siberia; in
the pampas of America.
 
Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone,
they coupled those syllables of granite, and attempted some
combinations.  The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan
tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words.  Some, especially the
tumulus, are proper names.  Sometimes even, when men had
a great deal of stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase.
The immense pile of Karnac is a complete sentence.
 
At last they made books.  Traditions had brought forth
symbols, beneath which they disappeared like the trunk of a
tree beneath its foliage; all these symbols in which humanity
placed faith continued to grow, to multiply, to intersect, to
become more and more complicated; the first monuments
no longer sufficed to contain them, they were overflowing in
every part; these monuments hardly expressed now the primitive
tradition, simple like themselves, naked and prone upon
the earth.  The symbol felt the need of expansion in the edifice.
Then architecture was developed in proportion with human
thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads and
a thousand arms, and fixed all this floating symbolism in an
eternal, visible, palpable form.  While Daedalus, who is force,
measured; while Orpheus, who is intelligence, sang;--the pillar,
which is a letter; the arcade, which is a syllable; the pyramid,
which is a word,--all set in movement at once by a law of
geometry and by a law of poetry, grouped themselves, combined,
amalgamated, descended, ascended, placed themselves
side by side on the soil, ranged themselves in stories in the
sky, until they had written under the dictation of the general
idea of an epoch, those marvellous books which were also
marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Rhamseion of
Egypt, the Temple of Solomon.
 
The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation
of all these edifices, but also in the form.  The temple
of Solomon, for example, was not alone the binding of the
holy book; it was the holy book itself.  On each one of its
concentric walls, the priests could read the word translated and
manifested to the eye, and thus they followed its transformations
from sanctuary to sanctuary, until they seized it in its last
tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which still belonged to
architecture: the arch.  Thus the word was enclosed in an
edifice, but its image was upon its envelope, like the human
form on the coffin of a mummy.
 
And not only the form of edifices, but the sites selected for
them, revealed the thought which they represented, according
as the symbol to be expressed was graceful or grave.
Greece crowned her mountains with a temple harmonious to
the eye; India disembowelled hers, to chisel therein those
monstrous subterranean pagodas, borne up by gigantic rows of
granite elephants.
 
Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world, from
the most immemorial pagoda of Hindustan, to the cathedral
of Cologne, architecture was the great handwriting of the
human race.  And this is so true, that not only every religious
symbol, but every human thought, has its page and its monument
in that immense book.
 
All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy.
This law of liberty following unity is written in architecture.
For, let us insist upon this point, masonry must not be thought
to be powerful only in erecting the temple and in expressing
the myth and sacerdotal symbolism; in inscribing in hieroglyphs
upon its pages of stone the mysterious tables of the
law.  If it were thus,--as there comes in all human society a
moment when the sacred symbol is worn out and becomes
obliterated under freedom of thought, when man escapes from
the priest, when the excrescence of philosophies and systems
devour the face of religion,--architecture could not reproduce
this new state of human thought; its leaves, so crowded on the
face, would be empty on the back; its work would be mutilated;
its book would he incomplete.  But no.
 
Let us take as an example the Middle Ages, where we see
more clearly because it is nearer to us.  During its first
period, while theocracy is organizing Europe, while the Vatican
is rallying and reclassing about itself the elements of a
Rome made from the Rome which lies in ruins around the
Capitol, while Christianity is seeking all the stages of society
amid the rubbish of anterior civilization, and rebuilding with
its ruins a new hierarchic universe, the keystone to whose
vault is the priest--one first hears a dull echo from that
chaos, and then, little by little, one sees, arising from beneath
the breath of Christianity, from beneath the hand of the
barbarians, from the fragments of the dead Greek and Roman
architectures, that mysterious Romanesque architecture, sister
of the theocratic masonry of Egypt and of India, inalterable
emblem of pure catholicism, unchangeable hieroglyph of the
papal unity.  All the thought of that day is written, in fact,
in this sombre, Romanesque style.  One feels everywhere in
it authority, unity, the impenetrable, the absolute, Gregory
VII.; always the priest, never the man; everywhere caste,
never the people.
 
But the Crusades arrive.  They are a great popular
movement, and every great popular movement, whatever may be
its cause and object, always sets free the spirit of liberty
from its final precipitate.  New things spring into life every
day.  Here opens the stormy period of the Jacqueries, Pragueries,
and Leagues.  Authority wavers, unity is divided.
Feudalism demands to share with theocracy, while awaiting
the inevitable arrival of the people, who will assume the part
of the lion: ~Quia nominor leo~.  Seignory pierces through
sacerdotalism; the commonality, through seignory.  The face
of Europe is changed.  Well! the face of architecture is
changed also.  Like civilization, it has turned a page, and the
new spirit of the time finds her ready to write at its dictation.
It returns from the crusades with the pointed arch, like the
nations with liberty.
 
Then, while Rome is undergoing gradual dismemberment,
Romanesque architecture dies.  The hieroglyph deserts the
cathedral, and betakes itself to blazoning the donjon keep,
in order to lend prestige to feudalism.  The cathedral itself,
that edifice formerly so dogmatic, invaded henceforth by the
bourgeoisie, by the community, by liberty, escapes the priest and
falls into the power of the artist.  The artist builds it after
his own fashion.  Farewell to mystery, myth, law.  Fancy
and caprice, welcome.  Provided the priest has his basilica
and his altar, he has nothing to say.  The four walls belong
to the artist.  The architectural book belongs no longer to the
priest, to religion, to Rome; it is the property of poetry, of
imagination, of the people.  Hence the rapid and innumerable
transformations of that architecture which owns but three
centuries, so striking after the stagnant immobility
of the Romanesque architecture, which owns six or seven.
Nevertheless, art marches on with giant strides.  Popular genius
amid originality accomplish the task which the bishops formerly
fulfilled.  Each race writes its line upon the book, as it
passes; it erases the ancient Romanesque hieroglyphs on the
frontispieces of cathedrals, and at the most one only sees
dogma cropping out here and there, beneath the new symbol
which it has deposited.  The popular drapery hardly permits
the religious skeleton to be suspected.  One cannot even form
an idea of the liberties which the architects then take, even
toward the Church.  There are capitals knitted of nuns and
monks, shamelessly coupled, as on the hall of chimney pieces
in the Palais de Justice, in Paris.  There is Noah's adventure
carved to the last detail, as under the great portal of Bourges.
There is a bacchanalian monk, with ass's ears and glass in
hand, laughing in the face of a whole community, as on the
lavatory of the Abbey of Bocherville.  There exists at that
epoch, for thought written in stone, a privilege exactly
comparable to our present liberty of the press.  It is
the liberty of architecture.
 
This liberty goes very far.  Sometimes a portal, a fa?de,
an entire church, presents a symbolical sense absolutely foreign
to worship, or even hostile to the Church.  In the thirteenth
century, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicholas Flamel, in the
fifteenth, wrote such seditious pages.  Saint-Jacques de la
Boucherie was a whole church of the opposition.
 
Thought was then free only in this manner; hence it never
wrote itself out completely except on the books called edifices.
Thought, under the form of edifice, could have beheld itself
burned in the public square by the hands of the executioner,
in its manuscript form, if it had been sufficiently imprudent
to risk itself thus; thought, as the door of a church, would
have been a spectator of the punishment of thought as
a book.  Having thus only this resource, masonry, in order to
make its way to the light, flung itself upon it from all quarters.
Hence the immense quantity of cathedrals which have
covered Europe--a number so prodigious that one can hardly
believe it even after having verified it.  All the material
forces, all the intellectual forces of society converged towards
the same point: architecture.  In this manner, under the pretext
of building churches to God, art was developed in its
magnificent proportions.
 
Then whoever was born a poet became an architect.
Genius, scattered in the masses, repressed in every quarter
 
under feudalism as under a ~testudo~ of brazen bucklers, finding
no issue except in the direction of architecture,--gushed
forth through that art, and its Iliads assumed the form of
cathedrals.  All other arts obeyed, and placed themselves under
the discipline of architecture.  They were the workmen of the
great work.  The architect, the poet, the master, summed up
in his person the sculpture which carved his fa?des, painting
which illuminated his windows, music which set his bells to
pealing, and breathed into his organs.  There was nothing
down to poor poetry,--properly speaking, that which
persisted in vegetating in manuscripts,--which was not forced,
in order to make something of itself, to come and frame itself
in the edifice in the shape of a hymn or of prose; the same
part, after all, which the tragedies of AEschylus had played
in the sacerdotal festivals of Greece; Genesis, in the temple
of Solomon.
 
Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the
principal writing, the universal writing.  In that granite
book, begun by the Orient, continued by Greek and Roman
antiquity, the Middle Ages wrote the last page.  Moreover,
this phenomenon of an architecture of the people following
an architecture of caste, which we have just been observing
in the Middle Ages, is reproduced with every analogous
movement in the human intelligence at the other great
epochs of history.  Thus, in order to enunciate here only
summarily, a law which it would require volumes to develop:
in the high Orient, the cradle of primitive times, after
Hindoo architecture came Phoenician architecture, that opulent
mother of Arabian architecture; in antiquity, after Egyptian
architecture, of which Etruscan style and cyclopean monuments
are but one variety, came Greek architecture (of which the
Roman style is only a continuation), surcharged with the
Carthaginian dome; in modern times, after Romanesque
architecture came Gothic architecture.  And by separating there
three series into their component parts, we shall find in the
three eldest sisters, Hindoo architecture, Egyptian architecture,
Romanesque architecture, the same symbol; that is to
say, theocracy, caste, unity, dogma, myth, God: and for
the three younger sisters, Phoenician architecture, Greek
architecture, Gothic architecture, whatever, nevertheless,
may be the diversity of form inherent in their nature, the same
signification also; that is to say, liberty, the people, man.
 
In the Hindu, Egyptian, or Romanesque architecture, one
feels the priest, nothing but the priest, whether he calls
himself Brahmin, Magian, or Pope.  It is not the same in the
architectures of the people.  They are richer and less sacred.
In the Phoenician, one feels the merchant; in the Greek, the
republican; in the Gothic, the citizen.
 
The general characteristics of all theocratic architecture are
immutability, horror of progress, the preservation of traditional
lines, the consecration of the primitive types, the constant
bending of all the forms of men and of nature to the
incomprehensible caprices of the symbol.  These are dark
books, which the initiated alone understand how to decipher.
Moreover, every form, every deformity even, has there a
sense which renders it inviolable.  Do not ask of Hindoo,
Egyptian, Romanesque masonry to reform their design, or
to improve their statuary.  Every attempt at perfecting is
an impiety to them.  In these architectures it seems as
though the rigidity of the dogma had spread over the
stone like a sort of second petrifaction.  The general
characteristics of popular masonry, on the contrary, are progress,
originality, opulence, perpetual movement.  They are already
sufficiently detached from religion to think of their beauty,
to take care of it, to correct without relaxation their parure
of statues or arabesques.  They are of the age.  They have
something human, which they mingle incessantly with the
divine symbol under which they still produce.  Hence, edifices
comprehensible to every soul, to every intelligence, to
every imagination, symbolical still, but as easy to understand
as nature.  Between theocratic architecture and this there is
the difference that lies between a sacred language and a
vulgar language, between hieroglyphics and art, between
Solomon and Phidias.
 
If the reader will sum up what we have hitherto briefly,
very briefly, indicated, neglecting a thousand proofs and also
a thousand objections of detail, be will be led to this: that
architecture was, down to the fifteenth century, the chief
register of humanity; that in that interval not a thought which
is in any degree complicated made its appearance in the
world, which has not been worked into an edifice; that every
popular idea, and every religious law, has had its monumental
records; that the human race has, in short, had no important
thought which it has not written in stone.  And why?
Because every thought, either philosophical or religious, is
interested in perpetuating itself; because the idea which has
moved one generation wishes to move others also, and leave
a trace.  Now, what a precarious immortality is that of the
manuscript!  How much more solid, durable, unyielding, is a
book of stone!  In order to destroy the written word, a torch
and a Turk are sufficient.  To demolish the constructed word,
a social revolution, a terrestrial revolution are required.
The barbarians passed over the Coliseum; the deluge, perhaps,
passed over the Pyramids.
 
In the fifteenth century everything changes.
 
Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself,
not only more durable and more resisting than architecture,
but still more simple and easy.  Architecture is dethroned.
Gutenberg's letters of lead are about to supersede Orpheus's
letters of stone.
 
   *The book is about to kill the edifice*.
 
The invention of printing is the greatest event in history.
It is the mother of revolution.  It is the mode of expression
of humanity which is totally renewed; it is human thought
stripping off one form and donning another; it is the complete
and definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent which
since the days of Adam has represented intelligence.
 
In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than
ever; it is volatile, irresistible, indestructible.  It is mingled
with the air.  In the days of architecture it made a mountain
of itself, and took powerful possession of a century and
a place.  Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters
itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and
space at once.
 
We repeat, who does not perceive that in this form it is
far more indelible?  It was solid, it has become alive.
It passes from duration in time to immortality.  One can
demolish a mass; bow can one extirpate ubiquity?  If a flood
comes, the mountains will have long disappeared beneath the
waves, while the birds will still be flying about; and if a
single ark floats on the surface of the cataclysm, they will
alight upon it, will float with it, will be present with it at
the ebbing of the waters; and the new world which emerges
from this chaos will behold, on its awakening, the thought of
the world which has been submerged soaring above it, winged
and living.
 
And when one observes that this mode of expression is not
only the most conservative, but also the most simple, the
most convenient, the most practicable for all; when one
reflects that it does not drag after it bulky baggage, and
does not set in motion a heavy apparatus; when one compares
thought forced, in order to transform itself into an edifice,
to put in motion four or five other arts and tons of gold, a
whole mountain of stones, a whole forest of timber-work, a
whole nation of workmen; when one compares it to the thought
which becomes a book, and for which a little paper, a little
ink, and a pen suffice,--how can one be surprised that human
intelligence should have quitted architecture for printing?
Cut the primitive bed of a river abruptly with a canal
hollowed out below its level, and the river will desert
its bed.
 
Behold how, beginning with the discovery of printing,
architecture withers away little by little, becomes lifeless
and bare.  How one feels the water sinking, the sap departing,
the thought of the times and of the people withdrawing from
it!  The chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth
century; the press is, as yet, too weak, and, at the most,
draws from powerful architecture a superabundance of life.  But
practically beginning with the sixteenth century, the malady of
architecture is visible; it is no longer the expression of society;
it becomes classic art in a miserable manner; from being
Gallic, European, indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman;
from being true and modern, it becomes pseudo-classic.  It is
this decadence which is called the Renaissance.  A magnificent
decadence, however, for the ancient Gothic genius, that
sun which sets behind the gigantic press of Mayence, still
penetrates for a while longer with its rays that whole hybrid
pile of Latin arcades and Corinthian columns.
 
It is that setting sun which we mistake for the dawn.
 
Nevertheless, from the moment when architecture is no
longer anything but an art like any other; as soon as it is no
longer the total art, the sovereign art, the tyrant art,--it
has no longer the power to retain the other arts.  So they
emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take
themselves off, each one in its own direction.  Each one of
them gains by this divorce.  Isolation aggrandizes everything.
Sculpture becomes statuary, the image trade becomes painting,
the canon becomes music.  One would pronounce it an empire
dismembered at the death of its Alexander, and whose provinces
become kingdoms.
 
Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina,
those splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century.
 
Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time
as the arts.  The arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already
made large incisions into Catholicism.  The sixteenth century
breaks religious unity.  Before the invention of printing,
reform would have been merely a schism; printing converted
it into a revolution.  Take away the press; heresy is enervated.
Whether it be Providence or Fate, Gutenburg is the precursor
of Luther.
 
Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely
set, when the Gothic genius is forever extinct upon
the horizon, architecture grows dim, loses its color, becomes
more and more effaced.  The printed book, the gnawing worm
of the edifice, sucks and devours it.  It becomes bare, denuded
of its foliage, and grows visibly emaciated.  It is petty, it
is poor, it is nothing.  It no longer expresses anything, not
even the memory of the art of another time.  Reduced to itself,
abandoned by the other arts, because human thought is abandoning
it, it summons bunglers in place of artists.  Glass replaces
the painted windows.  The stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor.
Farewell all sap, all originality, all life, all intelligence.
It drags along, a lamentable workshop mendicant, from copy to
copy.  Michael Angelo, who, no doubt, felt even in the sixteenth
century that it was dying, had a last idea, an idea of
despair.  That Titan of art piled the Pantheon on the
Parthenon, and made Saint-Peter's at Rome.  A great work,
which deserved to remain unique, the last originality of
architecture, the signature of a giant artist at the bottom of
the colossal register of stone which was closed forever.  With
Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable architecture,
which survived itself in the state of a spectre, do?  It takes
Saint-Peter in Rome, copies it and parodies it.  It is a mania.
It is a pity.  Each century has its Saint-Peter's of Rome; in
the seventeenth century, the Val-de-Gr?e; in the eighteenth,
Sainte-Genevi?e.  Each country has its Saint-Peter's of
Rome.  London has one; Petersburg has another; Paris has
two or three.  The insignificant testament, the last dotage of
a decrepit grand art falling back into infancy before it dies.
 
If, in place of the characteristic monuments which we have
just described, we examine the general aspect of art from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we notice the same
phenomena of decay and phthisis.  Beginning with Fran?is II.,
the architectural form of the edifice effaces itself more and
more, and allows the geometrical form, like the bony structure
of an emaciated invalid, to become prominent.  The fine
lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of
geometry.  An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a
polyhedron.  Meanwhile, architecture is tormented in her
struggles to conceal this nudity.  Look at the Greek pediment
inscribed upon the Roman pediment, and vice versa.  It is still
the Pantheon on the Parthenon: Saint-Peter's of Rome.  Here
are the brick houses of Henri IV., with their stone corners;
the Place Royale, the Place Dauphine.  Here are the churches
of Louis XIII., heavy, squat, thickset, crowded together,
loaded with a dome like a hump.  Here is the Mazarin
architecture, the wretched Italian pasticcio of the Four Nations.
Here are the palaces of Louis XIV., long barracks for courtiers,
stiff, cold, tiresome.  Here, finally, is Louis XV., with
chiccory leaves and vermicelli, and all the warts, and all the
fungi, which disfigure that decrepit, toothless, and coquettish
old architecture.  From Fran?is II. to Louis XV., the evil
has increased in geometrical progression.  Art has no longer
anything but skin upon its bones.  It is miserably perishing.
 
Meanwhile what becomes of printing?  All the life which
is leaving architecture comes to it.  In proportion as
architecture ebbs, printing swells and grows.  That capital
of forces which human thought had been expending in edifices,
it henceforth expends in books.  Thus, from the sixteenth
century onward, the press, raised to the level of decaying
architecture, contends with it and kills it.  In the seventeenth
century it is already sufficiently the sovereign, sufficiently
triumphant, sufficiently established in its victory, to
give to the world the feast of a great literary century.  In
the eighteenth, having reposed for a long time at the Court
of Louis XIV., it seizes again the old sword of Luther, puts it
into the hand of Voltaire, and rushes impetuously to the
attack of that ancient Europe, whose architectural expression
it has already killed.  At the moment when the eighteenth
century comes to an end, it has destroyed everything.
In the nineteenth, it begins to reconstruct.
 
Now, we ask, which of the three arts has really represented
human thought for the last three centuries? which translates
it? which expresses not only its literary and scholastic
vagaries, but its vast, profound, universal movement? which
constantly superposes itself, without a break, without a gap,
upon the human race, which walks a monster with a thousand
legs?--Architecture or printing?
 
It is printing.  Let the reader make no mistake; architecture
is dead; irretrievably slain by the printed book,--slain
because it endures for a shorter time,--slain because it costs
more.  Every cathedral represents millions.  Let the reader
now imagine what an investment of funds it would require to
rewrite the architectural book; to cause thousands of edifices
to swarm once more upon the soil; to return to those epochs
when the throng of monuments was such, according to the
statement of an eye witness, "that one would have said that
the world in shaking itself, had cast off its old garments in
order to cover itself with a white vesture of churches." ~Erat
enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate,
candida ecclesiarum vestem indueret~.  (GLABER RADOLPHUS.)
 
A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far!
How can it surprise us that all human thought flows in this
channel?  This does not mean that architecture will not
still have a fine monument, an isolated masterpiece, here and
there.  We may still have from time to time, under the reign
of printing, a column made I suppose, by a whole army from
melted cannon, as we had under the reign of architecture,
Iliads and Romanceros, Mahab?rata, and Nibelungen Lieds,
made by a whole people, with rhapsodies piled up and melted
together.  The great accident of an architect of genius may
happen in the twentieth century, like that of Dante in the
thirteenth.  But architecture will no longer be the social art,
the collective art, the dominating art.  The grand poem, the
grand edifice, the grand work of humanity will no longer be
built: it will be printed.
 
And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally,
it will no longer be mistress.  It will be subservient
to the law of literature, which formerly received the
law from it.  The respective positions of the two arts will be
inverted.  It is certain that in architectural epochs, the poems,
rare it is true, resemble the monuments.  In India, Vyasa is
branching, strange, impenetrable as a pagoda.  In Egyptian
Orient, poetry has like the edifices, grandeur and tranquillity
of line; in antique Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in
Christian Europe, the Catholic majesty, the popular naivete,
the rich and luxuriant vegetation of an epoch of renewal.
The Bible resembles the Pyramids; the Iliad, the Parthenon;
Homer, Phidias.  Dante in the thirteenth century is the last
Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last
Gothic cathedral.
 
Thus, to sum up what we have hitherto said, in a fashion
which is necessarily incomplete and mutilated, the human
race has two books, two registers, two testaments: masonry
and printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper.  No
doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles, laid so broadly
open in the centuries, it is permissible to regret the visible
majesty of the writing of granite, those gigantic alphabets
formulated in colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those sorts
of human mountains which cover the world and the past, from
the pyramid to the bell tower, from Cheops to Strasburg.
The past must be reread upon these pages of marble.  This
book, written by architecture, must be admired and perused
incessantly; but the grandeur of the edifice which printing
erects in its turn must not be denied.
 
That edifice is colossal.  Some compiler of statistics has
calculated, that if all the volumes which have issued from the
press since Gutenberg's day were to be piled one upon another,
they would fill the space between the earth and the moon;
but it is not that sort of grandeur of which we wished to
speak.  Nevertheless, when one tries to collect in one's mind
a comprehensive image of the total products of printing down
to our own days, does not that total appear to us like an
immense construction, resting upon the entire world, at which
humanity toils without relaxation, and whose monstrous crest
is lost in the profound mists of the future?  It is the anthill
of intelligence.  It is the hive whither come all imaginations,
those golden bees, with their honey.
 
The edifice has a thousand stories.  Here and there one
beholds on its staircases the gloomy caverns of science which
pierce its interior.  Everywhere upon its surface, art causes
its arabesques, rosettes, and laces to thrive luxuriantly before
the eyes.  There, every individual work, however capricious
and isolated it may seem, has its place and its projection.
Harmony results from the whole.  From the cathedral of
Shakespeare to the mosque of Byron, a thousand tiny bell
towers are piled pell-mell above this metropolis of universal
thought.  At its base are written some ancient titles of
humanity which architecture had not registered.  To the left
of the entrance has been fixed the ancient bas-relief, in white
marble, of Homer; to the right, the polyglot Bible rears its
seven heads.  The hydra of the Romancero and some other
hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Nibelungen bristle further on.
 
Nevertheless, the prodigious edifice still remains incomplete.
The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all
the intellectual sap of society, belches forth without pause
fresh materials for its work.  The whole human race is on the
scaffoldings.  Each mind is a mason.  The humblest fills his
hole, or places his stone.  Retif d?le Bretonne brings his hod
of plaster.  Every day a new course rises.  Independently of
the original and individual contribution of each writer, there
are collective contingents.  The eighteenth century gives the
_Encyclopedia_, the revolution gives the _Moniteur_.  Assuredly,
it is a construction which increases and piles up in endless
spirals; there also are confusion of tongues, incessant
activity, indefatigable labor, eager competition of all
humanity, refuge promised to intelligence, a new Flood against
an overflow of barbarians.  It is the second tower of Babel
of the human race.
 
 
 
BOOK SIXTH.
 
 
CHAPTER I. AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRACY.
 
A very happy personage in the year of grace 1482, was the
noble gentleman Robert d'Estouteville, chevalier, Sieur de
Beyne, Baron d'Ivry and Saint Andry en la Marche, counsellor
and chamberlain to the king, and guard of the provostship of
Paris.  It was already nearly seventeen years since he had
received from the king, on November 7, 1465, the comet
year,* that fine charge of the provostship of Paris, which was
reputed rather a seigneury than an office.  ~Dignitas~, says
Joannes Loemnoeus, ~quoe cum non exigua potestate politiam
concernente, atque proerogativis multis et juribus conjuncta
est~.  A marvellous thing in '82 was a gentleman bearing the
king's commission, and whose letters of institution ran back
to the epoch of the marriage of the natural daughter of Louis
XI. with Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon.
 
 
*  This comet against which Pope Calixtus, uncle of Borgia,
ordered public prayers, is the same which reappeared in 1835.
 
 
The same day on which Robert d'Estouteville took the place
of Jacques de Villiers in the provostship of Paris, Master
Jehan Dauvet replaced Messire Helye de Thorrettes in the
first presidency of the Court of Parliament, Jehan Jouvenel
des Ursins supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of
chancellor of France, Regnault des Dormans ousted Pierre
Puy from the charge of master of requests in ordinary of the
king's household.  Now, upon how many heads had the presidency,
the chancellorship, the mastership passed since Robert
d'Estouteville had held the provostship of Paris.  It had been
"granted to him for safekeeping," as the letters patent said;
and certainly he kept it well.  He had clung to it, he had
incorporated himself with it, he had so identified himself
with it that he had escaped that fury for change which
possessed Louis XI., a tormenting and industrious king, whose
policy it was to maintain the elasticity of his power by
frequent appointments and revocations.  More than this; the
brave chevalier had obtained the reversion of the office for his
son, and for two years already, the name of the noble man
Jacques d'Estouteville, equerry, had figured beside his at the
head of the register of the salary list of the provostship of
Paris.  A rare and notable favor indeed!  It is true that
Robert d'Estouteville was a good soldier, that he had loyally
raised his pennon against "the league of public good," and
that he had presented to the queen a very marvellous stag in
confectionery on the day of her entrance to Paris in 14...
Moreover, he possessed the good friendship of Messire Tristan
l'Hermite, provost of the marshals of the king's household.
Hence a very sweet and pleasant existence was that of Messire
Robert.  In the first place, very good wages, to which
were attached, and from which hung, like extra bunches of
grapes on his vine, the revenues of the civil and criminal
registries of the provostship, plus the civil and criminal
revenues of the tribunals of Embas of the Ch?elet, without
reckoning some little toll from the bridges of Mantes and of
Corbeil, and the profits on the craft of Shagreen-makers of
Paris, on the corders of firewood and the measurers of salt.
Add to this the pleasure of displaying himself in rides about
the city, and of making his fine military costume, which
you may still admire sculptured on his tomb in the abbey
of Valmont in Normandy, and his morion, all embossed at
Montlh?y, stand out a contrast against the parti-colored
red and tawny robes of the aldermen and police.  And then,
was it nothing to wield absolute supremacy over the sergeants
of the police, the porter and watch of the Ch?elet, the two
auditors of the Ch?elet, ~auditores castelleti~, the sixteen
commissioners of the sixteen quarters, the jailer of the Ch?elet,
the four enfeoffed sergeants, the hundred and twenty mounted
sergeants, with maces, the chevalier of the watch with his
watch, his sub-watch, his counter-watch and his rear-watch?
Was it nothing to exercise high and low justice, the right
to interrogate, to hang and to draw, without reckoning petty
jurisdiction in the first resort (~in prima instantia~, as the
charters say), on that viscomty of Paris, so nobly appanaged
with seven noble bailiwicks?  Can anything sweeter be imagined
than rendering judgments and decisions, as Messire Robert
d'Estouteville daily did in the Grand Ch?elet, under the large
and flattened arches of Philip Augustus? and going, as he
was wont to do every evening, to that charming house situated
in the Rue Galilee, in the enclosure of the royal palace, which
he held in right of his wife, Madame Ambroise de Lore, to
repose after the fatigue of having sent some poor wretch to
pass the night in "that little cell of the Rue de Escorcherie,
which the provosts and aldermen of Paris used to make their
prison; the same being eleven feet long, seven feet and four
inches wide, and eleven feet high?"*
 
 
*  Comptes du domaine, 1383.
 
 
And not only had Messire Robert d'Estouteville his special
court as provost and vicomte of Paris; but in addition he
had a share, both for eye and tooth, in the grand court of the
king.  There was no head in the least elevated which had not
passed through his hands before it came to the headsman.  It
was he who went to seek M. de Nemours at the Bastille Saint
Antoine, in order to conduct him to the Halles; and to conduct
to the Gr?e M. de Saint-Pol, who clamored and resisted,
to the great joy of the provost, who did not love monsieur the
constable.
 
Here, assuredly, is more than sufficient to render a life
happy and illustrious, and to deserve some day a notable page
in that interesting history of the provosts of Paris, where
one learns that Oudard de Villeneuve had a house in the Rue
des Boucheries, that Guillaume de Hangest purchased the
great and the little Savoy, that Guillaume Thiboust gave the
nuns of Sainte-Genevi?e his houses in the Rue Clopin, that
Hugues Aubriot lived in the H?el du Pore-Epic, and other
domestic facts.
 
Nevertheless, with so many reasons for taking life patiently
and joyously, Messire Robert d'Estouteville woke up on the
morning of the seventh of January, 1482, in a very surly and
peevish mood.  Whence came this ill temper?  He could not
have told himself.  Was it because the sky was gray? or was
the buckle of his old belt of Montlh?y badly fastened, so
that it confined his provostal portliness too closely? had he
beheld ribald fellows, marching in bands of four, beneath his
window, and setting him at defiance, in doublets but no shirts,
hats without crowns, with wallet and bottle at their side?
Was it a vague presentiment of the three hundred and seventy
livres, sixteen sous, eight farthings, which the future King
Charles VII. was to cut off from the provostship in the
following year?  The reader can take his choice; we, for
our part, are much inclined to believe that he was in a bad
humor, simply because he was in a bad humor.
 
Moreover, it was the day after a festival, a tiresome day
for every one, and above all for the magistrate who is charged
with sweeping away all the filth, properly and figuratively
speaking, which a festival day produces in Paris.  And then
he had to hold a sitting at the Grand Ch?elet.  Now, we
have noticed that judges in general so arrange matters that
their day of audience shall also be their day of bad humor,
so that they may always have some one upon whom to vent
it conveniently, in the name of the king, law, and justice.
 
However, the audience had begun without him.  His lieutenants,
civil, criminal, and private, were doing his work,
according to usage; and from eight o'clock in the morning,
some scores of bourgeois and ~bourgeoises~, heaped and crowded
into an obscure corner of the audience chamber of Embas du
Ch?elet, between a stout oaken barrier and the wall, had been
gazing blissfully at the varied and cheerful spectacle of civil
and criminal justice dispensed by Master Florian Barbedienne,
 
auditor of the Ch?elet, lieutenant of monsieur the provost, in
a somewhat confused and utterly haphazard manner.
 
The hall was small, low, vaulted.  A table studded with
fleurs-de-lis stood at one end, with a large arm-chair of carved
oak, which belonged to the provost and was empty, and a stool
on the left for the auditor, Master Florian.  Below sat the
clerk of the court, scribbling; opposite was the populace; and
in front of the door, and in front of the table were many
sergeants of the provostship in sleeveless jackets of violet
camlet, with white crosses.  Two sergeants of the Parloir-
aux-Bourgeois, clothed in their jackets of Toussaint, half red,
half blue, were posted as sentinels before a low, closed door,
which was visible at the extremity of the hall, behind the
table.  A single pointed window, narrowly encased in the
thick wall, illuminated with a pale ray of January sun two
grotesque figures,--the capricious demon of stone carved as
a tail-piece in the keystone of the vaulted ceiling, and the
judge seated at the end of the hall on the fleurs-de-lis.
 
Imagine, in fact, at the provost's table, leaning upon his
elbows between two bundles of documents of cases, with his
foot on the train of his robe of plain brown cloth, his face
buried in his hood of white lamb's skin, of which his brows
seemed to be of a piece, red, crabbed, winking, bearing
majestically the load of fat on his cheeks which met under his
chin, Master Florian Barbedienne, auditor of the Ch?elet.
 
Now, the auditor was deaf.  A slight defect in an auditor.
Master Florian delivered judgment, none the less, without
appeal and very suitably.  It is certainly quite sufficient
for a judge to have the .air of listening; and the venerable
auditor fulfilled this condition, the sole one in justice, all
the better because his attention could not be distracted by
any noise.
 
Moreover, he had in the audience, a pitiless censor of his
deeds and gestures, in the person of our friend Jehan Frollo
du Moulin, that little student of yesterday, that "stroller,"
whom one was sure of encountering all over Paris, anywhere
except before the rostrums of the professors.
 
"Stay," he said in a low tone to his companion, Robin
Poussepain, who was grinning at his side, while he was
making his comments on the scenes which were being unfolded
before his eyes, "yonder is Jehanneton du Buisson.  The
beautiful daughter of the lazy dog at the March?Neuf!--Upon
my soul, he is condemning her, the old rascal! he has no more
eyes than ears.  Fifteen sous, four farthings, parisian,
for having worn two rosaries!  'Tis somewhat dear.  ~Lex
duri carminis~.  Who's that?  Robin Chief-de-Ville,
hauberkmaker.  For having been passed and received master of
the said trade!  That's his entrance money.  He! two gentlemen
among these knaves!  Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly
Two equerries, ~Corpus Christi~!  Ah! they have been playing
at dice.  When shall I see our rector here?  A hundred livres
parisian, fine to the king!  That Barbedienne strikes like a
deaf man,--as he is!  I'll be my brother the archdeacon, if
that keeps me from gaming; gaming by day, gaming by night,
living at play, dying at play, and gaming away my soul after
my shirt.  Holy Virgin, what damsels!  One after the other
my lambs.  Ambroise L?uyere, Isabeau la Paynette, B?arde
Gironin!  I know them all, by Heavens!  A fine! a fine!
That's what will teach you to wear gilded girdles! ten sous
parisis! you coquettes!  Oh! the old snout of a judge! deaf
and imbecile!  Oh!  Florian the dolt!  Oh!  Barbedienne the
blockhead!  There he is at the table!  He's eating the
plaintiff, he's eating the suits, he eats, he chews, he crams,
he fills himself.  Fines, lost goods, taxes, expenses, loyal
charges, salaries, damages, and interests, gehenna, prison, and
jail, and fetters with expenses are Christmas spice cake and
marchpanes of Saint-John to him!  Look at him, the pig!--Come!
Good!  Another amorous woman!  Thibaud-la-Thibaude,
neither more nor less!  For having come from the Rue
Glatigny!  What fellow is this?  Gieffroy Mabonne, gendarme
bearing the crossbow.  He has cursed the name of the
Father.  A fine for la Thibaude!  A fine for Gieffroy!  A
fine for them both!  The deaf old fool! he must have mixed
up the two cases!  Ten to one that he makes the wench pay
for the oath and the gendarme for the amour!  Attention,
Robin Poussepain!  What are they going to bring in?  Here
are many sergeants!  By Jupiter! all the bloodhounds of the
pack are there.  It must be the great beast of the hunt--a
wild boar.  And 'tis one, Robin, 'tis one.  And a fine one too!
~Hercle~! 'tis our prince of yesterday, our Pope of the Fools,
our bellringer, our one-eyed man, our hunchback, our grimace!
'Tis Quasimodo!"
 
It was he indeed.
 
It was Quasimodo, bound, encircled, roped, pinioned, and
under good guard.  The squad of policemen who surrounded
him was assisted by the chevalier of the watch in person,
wearing the arms of France embroidered on his breast,
and the arms of the city on his back.  There was nothing,
however, about Quasimodo, except his deformity, which could
justify the display of halberds and arquebuses; he was
gloomy, silent, and tranquil.  Only now and then did his
single eye cast a sly and wrathful glance upon the bonds
with which he was loaded.
 
He cast the same glance about him, but it was so dull and
sleepy that the women only pointed him out to each other
in derision.
 
Meanwhile Master Florian, the auditor, turned over
attentively the document in the complaint entered against
Quasimodo, which the clerk handed him, and, having thus
glanced at it, appeared to reflect for a moment.  Thanks to
this precaution, which he always was careful to take at the
moment when on the point of beginning an examination, he knew
beforehand the names, titles, and misdeeds of the accused,
made cut and dried responses to questions foreseen, and
succeeded in extricating himself from all the windings of
the interrogation without allowing his deafness to be too
apparent.  The written charges were to him what the dog is to
the blind man.  If his deafness did happen to betray him here
and there, by some incoherent apostrophe or some unintelligible
question, it passed for profundity with some, and for
imbecility with others.  In neither case did the honor of the
magistracy sustain any injury; for it is far better that a judge
should be reputed imbecile or profound than deaf.  Hence he
took great care to conceal his deafness from the eyes of all,
and he generally succeeded so well that he had reached the
point of deluding himself, which is, by the way, easier than
is supposed.  All hunchbacks walk with their heads held
high, all stutterers harangue, all deaf people speak low.  As
for him, he believed, at the most, that his ear was a little
refractory.  It was the sole concession which he made on this
point to public opinion, in his moments of frankness and
examination of his conscience.
 
Having, then, thoroughly ruminated Quasimodo's affair, he
threw back his head and half closed his eyes, for the sake of
more majesty and impartiality, so that, at that moment, he was
both deaf and blind.  A double condition, without which no
judge is perfect.  It was in this magisterial attitude that he
began the examination.
 
"Your name?"
 
Now this was a case which had not been "provided for by
law," where a deaf man should be obliged to question a
deaf man.
 
Quasimodo, whom nothing warned that a question had been
addressed to him, continued to stare intently at the judge,
and made no reply.  The judge, being deaf, and being in no way
warned of the deafness of the accused, thought that the latter
had answered, as all accused do in general, and therefore he
pursued, with his mechanical and stupid self-possession,--
 
"Very well.  And your age?"
 
Again Quasimodo made no reply to this question.  The judge
supposed that it had been replied to, and continued,--
 
"Now, your profession?"
 
Still the same silence.  The spectators had begun, meanwhile,
to whisper together, and to exchange glances.
 
"That will do," went on the imperturbable auditor, when he
supposed that the accused had finished his third reply.  "You
are accused before us, ~primo~, of nocturnal disturbance;
~secundo~, of a dishonorable act of violence upon the person of
a foolish woman, ~in proejudicium meretricis; tertio~, of rebellion
and disloyalty towards the archers of the police of our lord,
the king.  Explain yourself upon all these points.---Clerk,
have you written down what the prisoner has said thus far?"
 
At this unlucky question, a burst of laughter rose from the
clerk's table caught by the audience, so violent, so wild, so
contagious, so universal, that the two deaf men were forced
to perceive it.  Quasimodo turned round, shrugging his hump
with disdain, while Master Florian, equally astonished, and
supposing that the laughter of the spectators had been
provoked by some irreverent reply from the accused, rendered
visible to him by that shrug of the shoulders, apostrophized
him indignantly,--
 
"You have uttered a reply, knave, which deserves the halter.
Do you know to whom you are speaking?"
 
This sally was not fitted to arrest the explosion of general
merriment.  It struck all as so whimsical, and so ridiculous,
that the wild laughter even attacked the sergeants of the Parloi-
aux-Bourgeois, a sort of pikemen, whose stupidity was part
of their uniform.  Quasimodo alone preserved his seriousness,
for the good reason that he understood nothing of what was
going on around him.  The judge, more and more irritated,
thought it his duty to continue in the same tone, hoping
thereby to strike the accused with a terror which should react
upon the audience, and bring it back to respect.
 
"So this is as much as to say, perverse and thieving knave
that you are, that you permit yourself to be lacking in
respect towards the Auditor of the Ch?elet, to the magistrate
committed to the popular police of Paris, charged with searching
out crimes, delinquencies, and evil conduct; with controlling
all trades, and interdicting monopoly; with maintaining the
pavements; with debarring the hucksters of chickens, poultry,
and water-fowl; of superintending the measuring of fagots and
other sorts of wood; of purging the city of mud, and the air
of contagious maladies; in a word, with attending continually
to public affairs, without wages or hope of salary!  Do you
know that I am called Florian Barbedienne, actual lieutenant
to monsieur the provost, and, moreover, commissioner, inquisitor,
controller, and examiner, with equal power in provostship,
bailiwick, preservation, and inferior court of judicature?--"
 
There is no reason why a deaf man talking to a deaf man
should stop.  God knows where and when Master Florian
would have landed, when thus launched at full speed in lofty
eloquence, if the low door at the extreme end of the room had
not suddenly opened, and given entrance to the provost in
person.  At his entrance Master Florian did not stop short,
but, making a half-turn on his heels, and aiming at the provost
the harangue with which he had been withering Quasimodo a
moment before,--
 
"Monseigneur," said he, "I demand such penalty as you
shall deem fitting against the prisoner here present, for
grave and aggravated offence against the court."
 
And he seated himself, utterly breathless, wiping away the
great drops of sweat which fell from his brow and drenched,
like tears, the parchments spread out before him.  Messire
Robert d'Estouteville frowned and made a gesture so imperious
and significant to Quasimodo, that the deaf man in some
measure understood it.
 
The provost addressed him with severity, "What have you
done that you have been brought hither, knave?"
 
The poor fellow, supposing that the provost was asking his
name, broke the silence which he habitually preserved, and
replied, in a harsh and guttural voice, "Quasimodo."
 
The reply matched the question so little that the wild
laugh began to circulate once more, and Messire Robert
exclaimed, red with wrath,--
 
"Are you mocking me also, you arrant knave?"
 
"Bellringer of Notre-Dame," replied Quasimodo, supposing
that what was required of him was to explain to the judge
who he was.
 
"Bellringer!" interpolated the provost, who had waked up
early enough to be in a sufficiently bad temper, as we have
said, not to require to have his fury inflamed by such strange
responses.  "Bellringer!  I'll play you a chime of rods on
your back through the squares of Paris!  Do you hear, knave?"
 
"If it is my age that you wish to know," said Quasimodo,
"I think that I shall be twenty at Saint Martin's day."
 
This was too much; the provost could no longer restrain
himself.
 
"Ah! you are scoffing at the provostship, wretch!  Messieurs
the sergeants of the mace, you will take me this knave
to the pillory of the Gr?e, you will flog him, and turn
him for an hour.  He shall pay me for it, ~t?e Dieu~!  And I
order that the present judgment shall be cried, with the
assistance of four sworn trumpeters, in the seven castellanies
of the viscomty of Paris."
 
The clerk set to work incontinently to draw up the account
of the sentence.
 
"~Ventre Dieu~! 'tis well adjudged!" cried the little scholar,
Jehan Frollo du Moulin, from his corner.
 
The provost turned and fixed his flashing eyes once more on
Quasimodo.  "I believe the knave said '~Ventre Dieu~' Clerk,
add twelve deniers Parisian for the oath, and let the vestry
of Saint Eustache have the half of it; I have a particular
devotion for Saint Eustache."
 
In a few minutes the sentence was drawn up.  Its tenor
was simple and brief.  The customs of the provostship and
the viscomty had not yet been worked over by President
Thibaut Baillet, and by Roger Barmne, the king's advocate;
they had not been obstructed, at that time, by that lofty
hedge of quibbles and procedures, which the two jurisconsults
planted there at the beginning of the sixteenth century.  All
was clear, expeditious, explicit.  One went straight to the
point then, and at the end of every path there was immediately
visible, without thickets and without turnings; the wheel, the
gibbet, or the pillory.  One at least knew whither one was
going.
 
The clerk presented the sentence to the provost, who
affixed his seal to it, and departed to pursue his round of
the audience hall, in a frame of mind which seemed destined
to fill all the jails in Paris that day.  Jehan Frollo and
Robin Poussepain laughed in their sleeves.  Quasimodo gazed
on the whole with an indifferent and astonished air.
 
However, at the moment when Master Florian Barbedienne
was reading the sentence in his turn, before signing it, the
clerk felt himself moved with pity for the poor wretch of a
prisoner, and, in the hope of obtaining some mitigation of the
penalty, he approached as near the auditor's ear as possible,
and said, pointing to Quasimodo, "That man is deaf."
 
He hoped that this community of infirmity would awaken
Master Florian's interest in behalf of the condemned man.
But, in the first place, we have already observed that Master
Florian did not care to have his deafness noticed.  In the
next place, he was so hard of hearing That he did not catch a
single word of what the clerk said to him; nevertheless, he
wished to have the appearance of hearing, and replied, "Ah!
ah! that is different; I did not know that.  An hour more of
the pillory, in that case."
 
And he signed the sentence thus modified.
 
"'Tis well done," said Robin Poussepain, who cherished a
grudge against Quasimodo.  "That will teach him to handle
people roughly."
 
 
 
THE RAT-HOLE.
 
The reader must permit us to take him back to the Place
de Gr?e, which we quitted yesterday with Gringoire, in
order to follow la Esmeralda.
 
It is ten o'clock in the morning; everything is indicative of
the day after a festival.  The pavement is covered with rubbish;
ribbons, rags, feathers from tufts of plumes, drops of wax
from the torches, crumbs of the public feast.  A goodly
number of bourgeois are "sauntering," as we say, here and
there, turning over with their feet the extinct brands of
the bonfire, going into raptures in front of the Pillar House,
over the memory of the fine hangings of the day before, and
to-day staring at the nails that secured them a last pleasure.
The venders of cider and beer are rolling their barrels among
the groups.  Some busy passers-by come and go.  The merchants
converse and call to each other from the thresholds of
their shops.  The festival, the ambassadors, Coppenole, the
Pope of the Fools, are in all mouths; they vie with each
other, each trying to criticise it best and laugh the most.
And, meanwhile, four mounted sergeants, who have just
posted themselves at the four sides of the pillory, have
already concentrated around themselves a goodly proportion
of the populace scattered on the Place, who condemn themselves
to immobility and fatigue in the hope of a small execution.
 
If the reader, after having contemplated this lively and
noisy scene which is being enacted in all parts of the Place,
will now transfer his gaze towards that ancient demi-Gothic,
demi-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland, which forms the
corner on the quay to the west, he will observe, at the angle
of the fa?de, a large public breviary, with rich illuminations,
protected from the rain by a little penthouse, and from thieves
by a small grating, which, however, permits of the leaves being
turned.  Beside this breviary is a narrow, arched window,
closed by two iron bars in the form of a cross, and looking on
the square; the only opening which admits a small quantity
of light and air to a little cell without a door, constructed on
the ground-floor, in the thickness of the walls of the old house,
and filled with a peace all the more profound, with a silence
all the more gloomy, because a public place, the most populous
and most noisy in Paris swarms and shrieks around it.
 
This little cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly three
centuries, ever since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in
mourning for her father who died in the Crusades, had caused
it to be hollowed out in the wall of her own house, in order
to immure herself there forever, keeping of all her palace
only this lodging whose door was walled up, and whose window
stood open, winter and summer, giving all the rest to the
poor and to God.  The afflicted damsel had, in fact, waited
twenty years for death in this premature tomb, praying night
and day for the soul of her father, sleeping in ashes, without
even a stone for a pillow, clothed in a black sack, and
subsisting on the bread and water which the compassion of the
passers-by led them to deposit on the ledge of her window,
thus receiving charity after having bestowed it.  At her death,
at the moment when she was passing to the other sepulchre,
she had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to afflicted women,
mothers, widows, or maidens, who should wish to pray much
for others or for themselves, and who should desire to inter
themselves alive in a great grief or a great penance.  The
poor of her day had made her a fine funeral, with tears and
benedictions; but, to their great regret, the pious maid had
not been canonized, for lack of influence.  Those among them
who were a little inclined to impiety, had hoped that the matter
might be accomplished in Paradise more easily than at Rome,
and had frankly besought God, instead of the pope, in behalf
of the deceased.  The majority had contented themselves with
holding the memory of Rolande sacred, and converting her
rags into relics.  The city, on its side, had founded in honor
of the damoiselle, a public breviary, which had been fastened
near the window of the cell, in order that passers-by might
halt there from time to time, were it only to pray; that prayer
might remind them of alms, and that the poor recluses, heiresses
of Madame Rolande's vault, might not die outright of
hunger and forgetfulness.
 
Moreover, this sort of tomb was not so very rare a thing in
the cities of the Middle Ages.  One often encountered in
the most frequented street, in the most crowded and noisy
market, in the very middle, under the feet of the horses,
under the wheels of the carts, as it were, a cellar, a well, a
tiny walled and grated cabin, at the bottom of which a human
being prayed night and day, voluntarily devoted to some eternal
lamentation, to some great expiation.  And all the reflections
which that strange spectacle would awaken in us to-day;
that horrible cell, a sort of intermediary link between a house
and the tomb, the cemetery and the city; that living being
cut off from the human community, and thenceforth reckoned
among the dead; that lamp consuming its last drop of oil in
the darkness; that remnant of life flickering in the grave;
that breath, that voice, that eternal prayer in a box of stone;
that face forever turned towards the other world; that eye
already illuminated with another sun; that ear pressed to the
walls of a tomb; that soul a prisoner in that body; that body
a prisoner in that dungeon cell, and beneath that double
envelope of flesh and granite, the murmur of that soul in
pain;--nothing of all this was perceived by the crowd.
The piety of that age, not very subtle nor much given to
reasoning, did not see so many facets in an act of religion.
It took the thing in the block, honored, venerated, hallowed
the sacrifice at need, but did not analyze the sufferings, and
felt but moderate pity for them.  It brought some pittance to
the miserable penitent from time to time, looked through the
hole to see whether he were still living, forgot his name,
hardly knew how many years ago he had begun to die, and to
the stranger, who questioned them about the living skeleton
who was perishing in that cellar, the neighbors replied simply,
"It is the recluse."
 
Everything was then viewed without metaphysics, without
exaggeration, without magnifying glass, with the naked eye.
The microscope had not yet been invented, either for things of
matter or for things of the mind.
 
Moreover, although people were but little surprised by it,
the examples of this sort of cloistration in the hearts of cities
were in truth frequent, as we have just said.  There were in
Paris a considerable number of these cells, for praying to God
and doing penance; they were nearly all occupied.  It is true
that the clergy did not like to have them empty, since that
implied lukewarmness in believers, and that lepers were put
into them when there were no penitents on hand.  Besides the
cell on the Gr?e, there was one at Montfau?n, one at the
Charnier des Innocents, another I hardly know where,--at
the Clichon House, I think; others still at many spots where
traces of them are found in traditions, in default of memorials.
The University had also its own.  On Mount Sainte-Genevi?e
a sort of Job of the Middle Ages, for the space of thirty
years, chanted the seven penitential psalms on a dunghill
at the bottom of a cistern, beginning anew when he had
finished, singing loudest at night, ~magna voce per umbras~,
and to-day, the antiquary fancies that he hears his voice
as he enters the Rue du Puits-qui-parle--the street of the
"Speaking Well."
 
To confine ourselves to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we must
say that it had never lacked recluses.  After the death of
Madame Roland, it had stood vacant for a year or two,
though rarely.  Many women had come thither to mourn,
until their death, for relatives, lovers, faults.  Parisian
malice, which thrusts its finger into everything, even into
things which concern it the least, affirmed that it had beheld
but few widows there.
 
In accordance with the fashion of the epoch, a Latin
inscription on the wall indicated to the learned passer-by the
pious purpose of this cell.  The custom was retained until
the middle of the sixteenth century of explaining an edifice
by a brief device inscribed above the door.  Thus, one still
reads in France, above the wicket of the prison in the seignorial
mansion of Tourville, ~Sileto et spera~; in Ireland, beneath
the armorial bearings which surmount the grand door to
Fortescue Castle, ~Forte scutum, salus ducum~; in England,
over the principal entrance to the hospitable mansion of the
Earls Cowper: ~Tuum est~.  At that time every edifice was
a thought.
 
As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland,
these two words had been carved in large Roman capitals
over the window,--
 
 
   TU, ORA.
 
 
And this caused the people, whose good sense does not
perceive so much refinement in things, and likes to translate
_Ludovico Magno_ by "Porte Saint-Denis," to give to this dark,
gloomy, damp cavity, the name of "The Rat-Hole."  An explanation
less sublime, perhaps, than the other; but, on the other hand,
more picturesque.
 
 
 
CHAPTER III. HISTORY OF A LEAVENED CAKE OF MAIZE.
 
At the epoch of this history, the cell in the Tour-Roland
was occupied.  If the reader desires to know by whom, he
has only to lend an ear to the conversation of three worthy
gossips, who, at the moment when we have directed his
attention to the Rat-Hole, were directing their steps
towards the same spot, coming up along the water's edge
from the Ch?elet, towards the Gr?e.
 
Two of these women were dressed like good ~bourgeoises~ of
Paris.  Their fine white ruffs; their petticoats of linsey-
woolsey, striped red and blue; their white knitted stockings,
with clocks embroidered in colors, well drawn upon their
legs; the square-toed shoes of tawny leather with black soles,
and, above all, their headgear, that sort of tinsel horn,
loaded down with ribbons and laces, which the women of Champagne
still wear, in company with the grenadiers of the imperial
guard of Russia, announced that they belonged to that class
wives which holds the middle ground
between what the lackeys call a woman and what they term a
lady.  They wore neither rings nor gold crosses, and it was
easy to see that, in their ease, this did not proceed from
poverty, but simply from fear of being fined.  Their companion
was attired in very much the same manner; but there was
that indescribable something about her dress and bearing
which suggested the wife of a provincial notary.  One could
see, by the way in which her girdle rose above her hips, that
she had not been long in Paris.--Add to this a plaited tucker,
knots of ribbon on her shoes--and that the stripes of her
petticoat ran horizontally instead of vertically, and a
thousand other enormities which shocked good taste.
 
The two first walked with that step peculiar to Parisian
ladies, showing Paris to women from the country.  The
provincial held by the hand a big boy, who held in his a
large, flat cake.
 
We regret to be obliged to add, that, owing to the rigor of
the season, he was using his tongue as a handkerchief.
 
The child was making them drag him along, ~non passibus
Cequis~, as Virgil says, and stumbling at every moment, to the
great indignation of his mother.  It is true that he was
looking at his cake more than at the pavement.  Some serious
motive, no doubt, prevented his biting it (the cake), for he
contented himself with gazing tenderly at it.  But the mother
should have rather taken charge of the cake.  It was cruel to
make a Tantalus of the chubby-checked boy.
 
Meanwhile, the three demoiselles (for the name of dames
was then reserved for noble women) were all talking at once.
 
"Let us make haste, Demoiselle Mahiette," said the youngest
of the three, who was also the largest, to the provincial,
"I greatly fear that we shall arrive too late; they told us at
the Ch?elet that they were going to take him directly to
the pillory."
 
"Ah, bah! what are you saying, Demoiselle Oudarde
Musnier?" interposed the other Parisienne.  "There are two
hours yet to the pillory.  We have time enough.  Have you
ever seen any one pilloried, my dear Mahiette?"
 
"Yes," said the provincial, "at Reims."
 
"Ah, bah!  What is your pillory at Reims?  A miserable
cage into which only peasants are turned.  A great affair,
truly!"
 
"Only peasants!" said Mahiette, "at the cloth market in
Reims!  We have seen very fine criminals there, who have
killed their father and mother!  Peasants!  For what do you
take us, Gervaise?"
 
It is certain that the provincial was on the point of taking
offence, for the honor of her pillory.  Fortunately, that
discreet damoiselle, Oudarde Musnier, turned the conversation
in time.
 
"By the way, Damoiselle Mahiette, what say you to our
Flemish Ambassadors?  Have you as fine ones at Reims?"
 
"I admit," replied Mahiette, "that it is only in Paris that
such Flemings can be seen."
 
"Did you see among the embassy, that big ambassador who
is a hosier?" asked Oudarde.
 
"Yes," said Mahiette.  "He has the eye of a Saturn."
 
"And the big fellow whose face resembles a bare belly?"
resumed Gervaise.  "And the little one, with small eyes
framed in red eyelids, pared down and slashed up like a
thistle head?"
 
"'Tis their horses that are worth seeing," said Oudarde,
"caparisoned as they are after the fashion of their country!"
 
"Ah my dear," interrupted provincial Mahiette, assuming
in her turn an air of superiority, "what would you say then,
if you had seen in '61, at the consecration at Reims, eighteen
years ago, the horses of the princes and of the king's
company?  Housings and caparisons of all sorts; some of
damask cloth, of fine cloth of gold, furred with sables; others
of velvet, furred with ermine; others all embellished with
goldsmith's work and large bells of gold and silver!  And what
money that had cost!  And what handsome boy pages rode upon them!"
 
"That," replied Oudarde dryly, "does not prevent the Flemings
having very fine horses, and having had a superb supper
yesterday with monsieur, the provost of the merchants, at the
H?el-de-Ville, where they were served with comfits and
hippocras, and spices, and other singularities."
 
"What are you saying, neighbor!" exclaimed Gervaise.
"It was with monsieur the cardinal, at the Petit Bourbon
that they supped."
 
"Not at all.  At the H?el-de-Ville.
 
"Yes, indeed.  At the Petit Bourbon!"
 
"It was at the H?el-de-Ville," retorted Oudarde sharply,
"and Dr. Scourable addressed them a harangue in Latin,
which pleased them greatly.  My husband, who is sworn
bookseller told me."
 
"It was at the Petit Bourbon," replied Gervaise, with no
less spirit, "and this is what monsieur the cardinal's
procurator presented to them: twelve double quarts of hippocras,
white, claret, and red; twenty-four boxes of double Lyons
marchpane, gilded; as many torches, worth two livres a piece;
and six demi-queues* of Beaune wine, white and claret, the
best that could be found.  I have it from my husband, who is
a cinquantenier**, at the Parloir-aux Bourgeois, and who was
this morning comparing the Flemish ambassadors with those
of Prester John and the Emperor of Trebizond, who came
from Mesopotamia to Paris, under the last king, and who wore
rings in their ears."
 
 
*  A Queue was a cask which held a hogshead and a half.
 
**  A captain of fifty men.
 
 
"So true is it that they supped at the H?el-de-Ville,"
replied Oudarde but little affected by this catalogue, "that
such a triumph of viands and comfits has never been seen."
 
"I tell you that they were served by Le Sec, sergeant of the
city, at the H?el du Petit-Bourbon, and that that is where
you are mistaken."
 
"At the H?el-de-Ville, I tell you!"
 
"At the Petit-Bourbon, my dear! and they had illuminated
with magic glasses the word hope, which is written on the
grand portal."
 
"At the H?el-de-Ville!  At the H?el-de-Ville!  And
Husson-le-Voir played the flute!"
 
"I tell you, no!"
 
"I tell you, yes!"
 
"I say, no!"
 
Plump and worthy Oudarde was preparing to retort, and
the quarrel might, perhaps, have proceeded to a pulling of
caps, had not Mahiette suddenly exclaimed,--"Look at those
people assembled yonder at the end of the bridge!  There is
something in their midst that they are looking at!"
 
"In sooth," said Gervaise, "I hear the sounds of a
tambourine.  I believe 'tis the little Esmeralda, who plays
her mummeries with her goat.  Eh, be quick, Mahiette! redouble
your pace and drag along your boy.  You are come hither to
visit the curiosities of Paris.  You saw the Flemings
yesterday; you must see the gypsy to-day."
 
"The gypsy!" said Mahiette, suddenly retracing her steps,
and clasping her son's arm forcibly.  "God preserve me from
it!  She would steal my child from me!  Come, Eustache!"
 
And she set out on a run along the quay towards the Gr?e,
until she had left the bridge far behind her.  In the
meanwhile, the child whom she was dragging after her fell
upon his knees; she halted breathless.  Oudarde and Gervaise
rejoined her.
 
"That gypsy steal your child from you!" said Gervaise.
"That's a singular freak of yours!"
 
Mahiette shook her head with a pensive air.
 
"The singular point is," observed Oudarde, "that ~la sachette~
has the same idea about the Egyptian woman."
 
"What is ~la sachette~?" asked Mahiette.
 
"H?" said Oudarde, "Sister Gudule."
 
"And who is Sister Gudule?" persisted Mahiette.
 
"You are certainly ignorant of all but your Reims, not
to know that!" replied Oudarde.  "'Tis the recluse of
the Rat-Hole."
 
"What!" demanded Mahiette, "that poor woman to whom
we are carrying this cake?"
 
Oudarde nodded affirmatively.
 
"Precisely.  You will see her presently at her window on
the Gr?e.  She has the same opinion as yourself of these
vagabonds of Egypt, who play the tambourine and tell
fortunes to the public.  No one knows whence comes her
horror of the gypsies and Egyptians.  But you, Mahiette--why
do you run so at the mere sight of them?"
 
"Oh!" said Mahiette, seizing her child's round head in both
hands, "I don't want that to happen to me which happened to
Paquette la Chantefleurie."
 
"Oh! you must tell us that story, my good Mahiette," said
Gervaise, taking her arm.
 
"Gladly," replied Mahiette, "but you must be ignorant of
all but your Paris not to know that!  I will tell you then (but
'tis not necessary for us to halt that I may tell you the tale),
that Paquette la Chantefleurie was a pretty maid of eighteen
when I was one myself, that is to say, eighteen years ago, and
'tis her own fault if she is not to-day, like me, a good, plump,
fresh mother of six and thirty, with a husband and a son.
However, after the age of fourteen, it was too late!  Well, she
was the daughter of Guybertant, minstrel of the barges at
Reims, the same who had played before King Charles VII., at
his coronation, when he descended our river Vesle from Sillery
to Muison, when Madame the Maid of Orleans was also in the
boat.  The old father died when Paquette was still a mere
child; she had then no one but her mother, the sister of M.
Pradon, master-brazier and coppersmith in Paris, Rue Farm-
Garlin, who died last year.  You see she was of good family.
The mother was a good simple woman, unfortunately, and
she taught Paquette nothing but a bit of embroidery and
toy-making which did not prevent the little one from growing
very large and remaining very poor.  They both dwelt at
Reims, on the river front, Rue de Folle-Peine.  Mark this:
For I believe it was this which brought misfortune to Paquette.
In '61, the year of the coronation of our King Louis XI.
whom God preserve! Paquette was so gay and so pretty that
she was called everywhere by no other name than "la
Chantefleurie"--blossoming song.  Poor girl!  She had handsome
teeth, she was fond of laughing and displaying them.  Now, a
maid who loves to laugh is on the road to weeping; handsome teeth
ruin handsome eyes.  So she was la Chantefleurie.  She and
her mother earned a precarious living; they had been very
destitute since the death of the minstrel; their embroidery
did not bring them in more than six farthings a week, which
does not amount to quite two eagle liards.  Where were the
days when Father Guybertant had earned twelve sous parisian,
in a single coronation, with a song?  One winter (it was
in that same year of '61), when the two women had neither
fagots nor firewood, it was very cold, which gave la
Chantefleurie such a fine color that the men called
her Paquette!* and many called her P?uerette!** and she was
ruined.--Eustache, just let me see you bite that cake if you
dare!--We immediately perceived that she was ruined, one Sunday
when she came to church with a gold cross about her neck.
At fourteen years of age! do you see?  First it was the
young Vicomte de Cormontreuil, who has his bell tower three
leagues distant from Reims; then Messire Henri de Triancourt,
equerry to the King; then less than that, Chiart de
Beaulion, sergeant-at-arms; then, still descending, Guery
Aubergeon, carver to the King; then, Mace de Fr?us, barber
to monsieur the dauphin; then, Th?enin le Moine, King's
cook; then, the men growing continually younger and less
noble, she fell to Guillaume Racine, minstrel of the hurdy
gurdy and to Thierry de Mer, lamplighter.  Then, poor
Chantefleurie, she belonged to every one: she had reached
the last sou of her gold piece.  What shall I say to you, my
damoiselles?  At the coronation, in the same year, '61, 'twas
she who made the bed of the king of the debauchees!  In the
same year!"
 
 
*  Ox-eye daisy.
 
**  Easter daisy.
 
 
Mahiette sighed, and wiped away a tear which trickled from
her eyes.
 
"This is no very extraordinary history," said Gervaise, "and
in the whole of it I see nothing of any Egyptian women or
children."
 
"Patience!" resumed Mahiette, "you will see one child.--In
'66, 'twill be sixteen years ago this month, at Sainte-
Paule's day, Paquette was brought to bed of a little girl.
The unhappy creature! it was a great joy to her; she had long
wished for a child.  Her mother, good woman, who had never
known what to do except to shut her eyes, her mother was
dead.  Paquette had no longer any one to love in the world
or any one to love her.  La Chantefleurie had been a poor
creature during the five years since her fall.  She was alone,
alone in this life, fingers were pointed at her, she was hooted
at in the streets, beaten by the sergeants, jeered at by the
little boys in rags.  And then, twenty had arrived: and twenty
is an old age for amorous women.  Folly began to bring her
in no more than her trade of embroidery in former days; for
every wrinkle that came, a crown fled; winter became hard to
her once more, wood became rare again in her brazier, and
bread in her cupboard.  She could no longer work because,
in becoming voluptuous, she had grown lazy; and she suffered
much more because, in growing lazy, she had become voluptuous.
At least, that is the way in which monsieur the cure of
Saint-Remy explains why these women are colder and hungrier
than other poor women, when they are old."
 
"Yes," remarked Gervaise, "but the gypsies?"
 
"One moment, Gervaise!" said Oudarde, whose attention
was less impatient.  "What would be left for the end if all
were in the beginning?  Continue, Mahiette, I entreat you.
That poor Chantefleurie!"
 
Mahiette went on.
 
"So she was very sad, very miserable, and furrowed her
cheeks with tears.  But in the midst of her shame, her folly,
her debauchery, it seemed to her that she should be less wild,
less shameful, less dissipated, if there were something or
some one in the world whom she could love, and who could love
her.  It was necessary that it should be a child, because only
a child could be sufficiently innocent for that.  She had
recognized this fact after having tried to love a thief, the
only man who wanted her; but after a short time, she perceived
that the thief despised her.  Those women of love require either
a lover or a child to fill their hearts.  Otherwise, they are
very unhappy.  As she could not have a lover, she turned
wholly towards a desire for a child, and as she had not ceased
to be pious, she made her constant prayer to the good God
for it.  So the good God took pity on her, and gave her a
little daughter.  I will not speak to you of her joy; it was a
fury of tears, and caresses, and kisses.  She nursed her child
herself, made swaddling-bands for it out of her coverlet, the
only one which she had on her bed, and no longer felt either
cold or hunger.  She became beautiful once more, in consequence
of it.  An old maid makes a young mother.  Gallantry claimed
her once more; men came to see la Chantefleurie; she found
customers again for her merchandise, and out of all
these horrors she made baby clothes, caps and bibs, bodices
with shoulder-straps of lace, and tiny bonnets of satin, without
even thinking of buying herself another coverlet.--Master
Eustache, I have already told you not to eat that cake.--It
is certain that little Agnes, that was the child's name, a
baptismal name, for it was a long time since la Chantefleurie
had had any surname--it is certain that that little one
was more swathed in ribbons and embroideries than a
dauphiness of Dauphiny!  Among other things, she had a pair
of little shoes, the like of which King Louis XI. certainly
never had!  Her mother had stitched and embroidered them
herself; she had lavished on them all the delicacies of her
art of embroideress, and all the embellishments of a robe for
the good Virgin.  They certainly were the two prettiest little
pink shoes that could be seen.  They were no longer than my
thumb, and one had to see the child's little feet come out of
them, in order to believe that they had been able to get into
them.  'Tis true that those little feet were so small, so pretty,
so rosy! rosier than the satin of the shoes!  When you have
children, Oudarde, you will find that there is nothing prettier
than those little hands and feet."
 
"I ask no better," said Oudarde with a sigh, "but I am
waiting until it shall suit the good pleasure of M. Andry Musnier."
 
"However, Paquette's child had more that was pretty about
it besides its feet.  I saw her when she was only four months
old; she was a love!  She had eyes larger than her mouth,
and the most charming black hair, which already curled.  She
would have been a magnificent brunette at the age of sixteen!
Her mother became more crazy over her every day.  She
kissed her, caressed her, tickled her, washed her, decked her
out, devoured her!  She lost her head over her, she thanked
God for her.  Her pretty, little rosy feet above all were an
endless source of wonderment, they were a delirium of joy!
She was always pressing her lips to them, and she could never
recover from her amazement at their smallness.  She put
them into the tiny shoes, took them out, admired them, marvelled
at them, looked at the light through them, was curious
to see them try to walk on her bed, and would gladly have
passed her life on her knees, putting on and taking off the
shoes from those feet, as though they had been those of an
Infant Jesus."
 
"The tale is fair and good," said Gervaise in a low tone;
"but where do gypsies come into all that?"
 
"Here," replied Mahiette.  "One day there arrived in
Reims a very queer sort of people.  They were beggars and
vagabonds who were roaming over the country, led by their
duke and their counts.  They were browned by exposure to
the sun, they had closely curling hair, and silver rings in
their ears.  The women were still uglier than the men.  They
had blacker faces, which were always uncovered, a miserable
frock on their bodies, an old cloth woven of cords bound
upon their shoulder, and their hair hanging like the tail of a
horse.  The children who scrambled between their legs would
have frightened as many monkeys.  A band of excommunicates.
All these persons came direct from lower Egypt to
Reims through Poland.  The Pope had confessed them, it was
said, and had prescribed to them as penance to roam through
the world for seven years, without sleeping in a bed; and so
they were called penancers, and smelt horribly.  It appears
that they had formerly been Saracens, which was why they
believed in Jupiter, and claimed ten livres of Tournay from
all archbishops, bishops, and mitred abbots with croziers.
A bull from the Pope empowered them to do that.  They came
to Reims to tell fortunes in the name of the King of Algiers,
and the Emperor of Germany.  You can readily imagine that
no more was needed to cause the entrance to the town to be
forbidden them.  Then the whole band camped with good
grace outside the gate of Braine, on that hill where stands
a mill, beside the cavities of the ancient chalk pits.  And
everybody in Reims vied with his neighbor in going to see them.
They looked at your hand, and told you marvellous prophecies;
they were equal to predicting to Judas that he would become
Pope.  Nevertheless, ugly rumors were in circulation in
regard to them; about children stolen, purses cut, and human
flesh devoured.  The wise people said to the foolish: "Don't
go there!" and then went themselves on the sly.  It was an
infatuation.  The fact is, that they said things fit to astonish
a cardinal.  Mothers triumphed greatly over their little ones
after the Egyptians had read in their hands all sorts of
marvels written in pagan and in Turkish.  One had an emperor;
another, a pope; another, a captain.  Poor Chantefleurie was
seized with curiosity; she wished to know about herself, and
whether her pretty little Agnes would not become some day
Empress of Armenia, or something else.  So she carried her to
the Egyptians; and the Egyptian women fell to admiring the
child, and to caressing it, and to kissing it with their black
mouths, and to marvelling over its little band, alas! to the
great joy of the mother.  They were especially enthusiastic
over her pretty feet and shoes.  The child was not yet a year
old.  She already lisped a little, laughed at her mother like a
little mad thing, was plump and quite round, and possessed a
thousand charming little gestures of the angels of paradise.
 
She was very much frightened by the Egyptians, and wept.
But her mother kissed her more warmly and went away enchanted
with the good fortune which the soothsayers had foretold
for her Agnes.  She was to be a beauty, virtuous, a queen.
So she returned to her attic in the Rue Folle-Peine, very
proud of bearing with her a queen.  The next day she took
advantage of a moment when the child was asleep on her bed,
(for they always slept together), gently left the door a
little way open, and ran to tell a neighbor in the Rue de la
S?hesserie, that the day would come when her daughter Agnes
would be served at table by the King of England and the
Archduke of Ethiopia, and a hundred other marvels.  On
her return, hearing no cries on the staircase, she said to
herself: 'Good! the child is still asleep!'  She found her door
wider open than she had left it, but she entered, poor mother,
and ran to the bed.---The child was no longer there, the
place was empty.  Nothing remained of the child, but one of
her pretty little shoes.  She flew out of the room, dashed
down the stairs, and began to beat her head against the wall,
crying: 'My child! who has my child?  Who has taken my
child?'  The street was deserted, the house isolated; no
one could tell her anything about it.  She went about the
town, searched all the streets, ran hither and thither the
whole day long, wild, beside herself, terrible, snuffing at doors
and windows like a wild beast which has lost its young.  She
was breathless, dishevelled, frightful to see, and there was a
fire in her eyes which dried her tears.  She stopped the
passers-by and cried: 'My daughter! my daughter! my
pretty little daughter! If any one will give me back my
daughter, I will he his servant, the servant of his dog, and he
shall eat my heart if he will.'  She met M. le Cur?of Saint-
Remy, and said to him: 'Monsieur, I will till the earth
with my finger-nails, but give me back my child!'  It was
heartrending, Oudarde; and IL saw a very hard man, Master
Ponce Lacabre, the procurator, weep.  Ah! poor mother!  In
the evening she returned home.  During her absence, a neighbor
had seen two gypsies ascend up to it with a bundle in their
arms, then descend again, after closing the door.  After their
departure, something like the cries of a child were heard in
Paquette's room.  The mother, burst into shrieks of laughter,
ascended the stairs as though on wings, and entered.--A
frightful thing to tell, Oudarde!  Instead of her pretty little
Agnes, so rosy and so fresh, who was a gift of the good God, a
sort of hideous little monster, lame, one-eyed, deformed, was
crawling and squalling over the floor.  She hid her eyes in
horror.  'Oh!' said she, 'have the witches transformed my
daughter into this horrible animal?'  They hastened to carry
away the little club-foot; he would have driven her mad.  It
was the monstrous child of some gypsy woman, who had given
herself to the devil.  He appeared to be about four years old,
and talked a language which was no human tongue; there
were words in it which were impossible.  La Chantefleurie
flung herself upon the little shoe, all that remained to her of
all that she loved.  She remained so long motionless over it,
mute, and without breath, that they thought she was dead.
Suddenly she trembled all over, covered her relic with furious
kisses, and burst out sobbing as though her heart were broken.
I assure you that we were all weeping also.  She said: 'Oh,
my little daughter! my pretty little daughter! where art
thou?'--and it wrung your very heart.  I weep still when I
think of it.  Our children are the marrow of our bones, you
see.---My poor Eustache! thou art so fair!--If you only
knew how nice he is! yesterday he said to me: 'I want to be
a gendarme, that I do.'  Oh! my Eustache! if I were to lose
thee!--All at once la Chantefleurie rose, and set out to run
through Reims, screaming: 'To the gypsies' camp! to the
gypsies' camp!  Police, to burn the witches!'  The gypsies
were gone.  It was pitch dark.  They could not be followed.
On the morrow, two leagues from Reims, on a heath between
Gueux and Tilloy, the remains of a large fire were found,
some ribbons which had belonged to Paquette's child, drops of
blood, and the dung of a ram.  The night just past had been
a Saturday.  There was no longer any doubt that the Egyptians
had held their Sabbath on that heath, and that they had
devoured the child in company with Beelzebub, as the practice
is among the Mahometans.  When La Chantefleurie learned
these horrible things, she did not weep, she moved her lips as
though to speak, but could not.  On the morrow, her hair was
gray.  On the second day, she had disappeared.
 
"'Tis in truth, a frightful tale," said Oudarde, "and one
which would make even a Burgundian weep."
 
"I am no longer surprised," added Gervaise, "that fear of
the gypsies should spur you on so sharply."
 
"And you did all the better," resumed Oudarde, "to flee
with your Eustache just now, since these also are gypsies
from Poland."
 
"No," said Gervais, "'tis said that they come from Spain
and Catalonia."
 
"Catalonia? 'tis possible," replied Oudarde.  "Pologne,
Catalogue, Valogne, I always confound those three provinces,
One thing is certain, that they are gypsies."
 
"Who certainly," added Gervaise, "have teeth long enough
to eat little children.  I should not be surprised if la Sm?alda
ate a little of them also, though she pretends to be dainty.
Her white goat knows tricks that are too malicious for there
not to be some impiety underneath it all."
 
Mahiette walked on in silence.  She was absorbed in that
revery which is, in some sort, the continuation of a mournful
tale, and which ends only after having communicated the
emotion, from vibration to vibration, even to the very last
fibres of the heart.  Nevertheless, Gervaise addressed her,
"And did they ever learn what became of la Chantefleurie?"
Mahiette made no reply.  Gervaise repeated her question, and
shook her arm, calling her by name.  Mahiette appeared to
awaken from her thoughts.
 
"What became of la Chantefleurie?" she said, repeating
mechanically the words whose impression was still fresh in
her ear; then, ma king an effort to recall her attention to
the meaning of her words, "Ah!" she continued briskly, "no
one ever found out."
 
She added, after a pause,--
 
"Some said that she had been seen to quit Reims at nightfall
by the Fl?hembault gate; others, at daybreak, by the old
Bas? gate.  A poor man found her gold cross hanging on the
stone cross in the field where the fair is held.  It was that
ornament which had wrought her ruin, in '61.  It was a gift
from the handsome Vicomte de Cormontreuil, her first lover.
Paquette had never been willing to part with it, wretched as
she had been.  She had clung to it as to life itself.  So, when
we saw that cross abandoned, we all thought that she was
dead.  Nevertheless, there were people of the Cabaret les
Vantes, who said that they had seen her pass along the road
to Paris, walking on the pebbles with her bare feet.  But,
in that case, she must have gone out through the Porte de
Vesle, and all this does not agree.  Or, to speak more truly,
I believe that she actually did depart by the Porte de Vesle,
but departed from this world."
 
"I do not understand you," said Gervaise.
 
"La Vesle," replied Mahiette, with a melancholy smile, "is
the river."
 
"Poor Chantefleurie!" said Oudarde, with a shiver,--"drowned!"
 
"Drowned!" resumed Mahiette, "who could have told
good Father Guybertant, when he passed under the bridge of
Tingueux with the current, singing in his barge, that one day
his dear little Paquette would also pass beneath that bridge,
but without song or boat.
 
"And the little shoe?" asked Gervaise.
 
"Disappeared with the mother," replied Mahiette.
 
"Poor little shoe!" said Oudarde.
 
Oudarde, a big and tender woman, would have been well
pleased to sigh in company with Mahiette.  But Gervaise,
more curious, had not finished her questions.
 
"And the monster?" she said suddenly, to Mahiette.
 
"What monster?" inquired the latter.
 
"The little gypsy monster left by the sorceresses in
Chantefleurie's chamber, in exchange for her daughter.  What
did you do with it?  I hope you drowned it also."
 
"No." replied Mahiette.
 
"What?  You burned it then?  In sooth, that is more just.
A witch child!"
 
"Neither the one nor the other, Gervaise.  Monseigneur the
archbishop interested himself in the child of Egypt, exorcised
it, blessed it, removed the devil carefully from its body, and
sent it to Paris, to be exposed on the wooden bed at Notre-
Dame, as a foundling."
 
"Those bishops!" grumbled Gervaise, "because they are
learned, they do nothing like anybody else.  I just put
it to you, Oudarde, the idea of placing the devil among the
foundlings!  For that little monster was assuredly the devil.
Well, Mahiette, what did they do with it in Paris?  I am
quite sure that no charitable person wanted it."
 
"I do not know," replied the R?oise, "'twas just at that
time that my husband bought the office of notary, at Bern,
two leagues from the town, and we were no longer occupied
with that story; besides, in front of Bern, stand the two
hills of Cernay, which hide the towers of the cathedral in
Reims from view."
 
While chatting thus, the three worthy ~bourgeoises~ had
arrived at the Place de Gr?e.  In their absorption, they
had passed the public breviary of the Tour-Roland without
stopping, and took their way mechanically towards the pillory
around which the throng was growing more dense with every
moment.  It is probable that the spectacle which at that
moment attracted all looks in that direction, would have made
them forget completely the Rat-Hole, and the halt which
they intended to make there, if big Eustache, six years of
age, whom Mahiette was dragging along by the hand, had not
abruptly recalled the object to them: "Mother," said he, as
though some instinct warned him that the Rat-Hole was
behind him, "can I eat the cake now?"
 
If Eustache had been more adroit, that is to say, less
greedy, he would have continued to wait, and would only have
hazarded that simple question, "Mother, can I eat the cake,
now?" on their return to the University, to Master Andry
Musnier's, Rue Madame la Valence, when he had the two
arms of the Seine and the five bridges of the city between
the Rat-Hole and the cake.
 
This question, highly imprudent at the moment when
Eustache put it, aroused Mahiette's attention.
 
"By the way," she exclaimed, "we are forgetting the
recluse!  Show me the Rat-Hole, that I may carry her
her cake."
 
"Immediately," said Oudarde, "'tis a charity."
 
But this did not suit Eustache.
 
"Stop! my cake!" said he, rubbing both ears alternatively
with his shoulders, which, in such cases, is the supreme sign
of discontent.
 
The three women retraced their steps, and, on arriving in
the vicinity of the Tour-Roland, Oudarde said to the other two,--
 
"We must not all three gaze into the hole at once, for fear
of alarming the recluse.  Do you two pretend to read the
_Dominus_ in the breviary, while I thrust my nose into the
aperture; the recluse knows me a little.  I will give you
warning when you can approach."
 
She proceeded alone to the window.  At the moment when
she looked in, a profound pity was depicted on all her
features, and her frank, gay visage altered its expression
and color as abruptly as though it had passed from a ray of
sunlight to a ray of moonlight; her eye became humid; her
mouth contracted, like that of a person on the point of
weeping.  A moment later, she laid her finger on her lips,
and made a sign to Mahiette to draw near and look.
 
Mahiette, much touched, stepped up in silence, on tiptoe, as
though approaching the bedside of a dying person.
 
It was, in fact, a melancholy spectacle which presented
itself to the eyes of the two women, as they gazed through
the grating of the Rat-Hole, neither stirring nor breathing.
 
The cell was small, broader than it was long, with an arched
ceiling, and viewed from within, it bore a considerable
resemblance to the interior of a huge bishop's mitre.  On the bare
flagstones which formed the floor, in one corner, a woman
was sitting, or rather, crouching.  Her chin rested on her
knees, which her crossed arms pressed forcibly to her breast.
Thus doubled up, clad in a brown sack, which enveloped her
entirely in large folds, her long, gray hair pulled over in
front, falling over her face and along her legs nearly to her
feet, she presented, at the first glance, only a strange form
outlined against the dark background of the cell, a sort of
dusky triangle, which the ray of daylight falling through
the opening, cut roughly into two shades, the one sombre, the
other illuminated.  It was one of those spectres, half
light, half shadow, such as one beholds in dreams and in the
extraordinary work of Goya, pale, motionless, sinister,
crouching over a tomb, or leaning against the grating of
a prison cell.
 
It was neither a woman, nor a man, nor a living being, nor
a definite form; it was a figure, a sort of vision, in which
the real and the fantastic intersected each other, like
darkness and day.  It was with difficulty that one distinguished,
beneath her hair which spread to the ground, a gaunt and
severe profile; her dress barely allowed the extremity of a
bare foot to escape, which contracted on the hard, cold pavement.
The little of human form of which one caught a sight
beneath this envelope of mourning, caused a shudder.
 
That figure, which one might have supposed to be riveted
to the flagstones, appeared to possess neither movement, nor
thought, nor breath.  Lying, in January, in that thin, linen
sack, lying on a granite floor, without fire, in the gloom of a
cell whose oblique air-hole allowed only the cold breeze, but
never the sun, to enter from without, she did not appear to
suffer or even to think.  One would have said that she had
turned to stone with the cell, ice with the season.  Her hands
were clasped, her eyes fixed.  At first sight one took her for
a spectre; at the second, for a statue.
 
Nevertheless, at intervals, her blue lips half opened to
admit a breath, and trembled, but as dead and as mechanical
as the leaves which the wind sweeps aside.
 
Nevertheless, from her dull eyes there escaped a look, an
ineffable look, a profound, lugubrious, imperturbable look,
incessantly fixed upon a corner of the cell which could
not be seen from without; a gaze which seemed to fix all
the sombre thoughts of that soul in distress upon some
mysterious object.
 
Such was the creature who had received, from her habitation,
the name of the "recluse"; and, from her garment, the
name of "the sacked nun."
 
The three women, for Gervaise had rejoined Mahiette and
Oudarde, gazed through the window.  Their heads intercepted
the feeble light in the cell, without the wretched being whom
they thus deprived of it seeming to pay any attention to
them.  "Do not let us trouble her," said Oudarde, in a low
voice, "she is in her ecstasy; she is praying."
 
Meanwhile, Mahiette was gazing with ever-increasing
anxiety at that wan, withered, dishevelled head, and her eyes
filled with tears.  "This is very singular," she murmured.
 
She thrust her head through the bars, and succeeded in
casting a glance at the corner where the gaze of the unhappy
woman was immovably riveted.
 
When she withdrew her head from the window, her countenance
was inundated with tears.
 
"What do you call that woman?" she asked Oudarde.
 
Oudarde replied,--
 
"We call her Sister Gudule."
 
"And I," returned Mahiette, "call her Paquette la Chantefleurie."
 
Then, laying her finger on her lips, she motioned to the
astounded Oudarde to thrust her head through the window
and look.
 
Oudarde looked and beheld, in the corner where the eyes of
the recluse were fixed in that sombre ecstasy, a tiny shoe of
pink satin, embroidered with a thousand fanciful designs in
gold and silver.
 
Gervaise looked after Oudarde, and then the three women,
gazing upon the unhappy mother, began to weep.
 
But neither their looks nor their tears disturbed the recluse.
Her hands remained clasped; her lips mute; her eyes fixed;
and that little shoe, thus gazed at, broke the heart of any one
who knew her history.
 
The three women had not yet uttered a single word; they
dared not speak, even in a low voice.  This deep silence, this
deep grief, this profound oblivion in which everything had
disappeared except one thing, produced upon them the effect of
the grand altar at Christmas or Easter.  They remained silent,
they meditated, they were ready to kneel.  It seemed to them
that they were ready to enter a church on the day of Tenebrae.
 
At length Gervaise, the most curious of the three, and consequently
the least sensitive, tried to make the recluse speak:
 
"Sister!  Sister Gudule!"
 
She repeated this call three times, raising her voice each
time.  The recluse did not move; not a word, not a glance,
not a sigh, not a sign of life.
 
Oudarde, in her turn, in a sweeter, more caressing voice,--"Sister!"
said she, "Sister Sainte-Gudule!"
 
The same silence; the same immobility.
 
"A singular woman!" exclaimed Gervaise, "and one not to be moved
by a catapult!"
 
"Perchance she is deaf," said Oudarde.
 
"Perhaps she is blind," added Gervaise.
 
"Dead, perchance," returned Mahiette.
 
It is certain that if the soul had not already quitted this
inert, sluggish, lethargic body, it had at least retreated and
concealed itself in depths whither the perceptions of the
exterior organs no longer penetrated.
 
"Then we must leave the cake on the window," said Oudarde;
"some scamp will take it.  What shall we do to rouse her?"
 
Eustache, who, up to that moment had been diverted by a
little carriage drawn by a large dog, which had just passed,
suddenly perceived that his three conductresses were gazing
at something through the window, and, curiosity taking
possession of him in his turn, he climbed upon a stone post,
elevated himself on tiptoe, and applied his fat, red face to the
opening, shouting, "Mother, let me see too!"
 
At the sound of this clear, fresh, ringing child's voice, the
recluse trembled; she turned her head with the sharp, abrupt
movement of a steel spring, her long, fleshless hands cast
aside the hair from her brow, and she fixed upon the child,
bitter, astonished, desperate eyes.  This glance was but a
lightning flash.
 
"Oh my God!" she suddenly exclaimed, hiding her head on
her knees, and it seemed as though her hoarse voice tore her
chest as it passed from it, "do not show me those of others!"
 
"Good day, madam," said the child, gravely.
 
Nevertheless, this shock had, so to speak, awakened the
recluse.  A long shiver traversed her frame from head to
foot; her teeth chattered; she half raised her head and said,
pressing her elbows against her hips, and clasping her feet
in her hands as though to warm them,--
 
"Oh, how cold it is!"
 
"Poor woman!" said Oudarde, with great compassion, "would you
like a little fire?"
 
She shook her head in token of refusal.
 
"Well," resumed Oudarde, presenting her with a flagon;
"here is some hippocras which will warm you; drink it."
 
Again she shook her head, looked at Oudarde fixedly and
replied, "Water."
 
Oudarde persisted,--"No, sister, that is no beverage for
January.  You must drink a little hippocras and eat this
leavened cake of maize, which we have baked for you."
 
She refused the cake which Mahiette offered to her, and
said, "Black bread."
 
"Come," said Gervaise, seized in her turn with an impulse
of charity, and unfastening her woolen cloak, "here is a cloak
which is a little warmer than yours."
 
She refused the cloak as she had refused the flagon and
the cake, and replied, "A sack."
 
"But," resumed the good Oudarde, "you must have perceived
to some extent, that yesterday was a festival."
 
"I do perceive it," said the recluse; "'tis two days now
since I have had any water in my crock."
 
She added, after a silence, "'Tis a festival, I am forgotten.
People do well.  Why should the world think of me, when I
do not think of it?  Cold charcoal makes cold ashes."
 
And as though fatigued with having said so much, she
dropped her head on her knees again.  The simple and charitable
Oudarde, who fancied that she understood from her last
words that she was complaining of the cold, replied innocently,
"Then you would like a little fire?"
 
"Fire!" said the sacked nun, with a strange accent; "and
will you also make a little for the poor little one who has
been beneath the sod for these fifteen years?"
 
Every limb was trembling, her voice quivered, her eyes
flashed, she had raised herself upon her knees; suddenly she
extended her thin, white hand towards the child, who was
regarding her with a look of astonishment.  "Take away
that child!" she cried.  "The Egyptian woman is about to
pass by."
 
Then she fell face downward on the earth, and her forehead
struck the stone, with the sound of one stone against another
stone.  The three women thought her dead.  A moment later,
however, she moved, and they beheld her drag herself, on her
knees and elbows, to the corner where the little shoe was.
Then they dared not look; they no longer saw her; but they
heard a thousand kisses and a thousand sighs, mingled with
heartrending cries, and dull blows like those of a head in
contact with a wall.  Then, after one of these blows, so violent
that all three of them staggered, they heard no more.
 
"Can she have killed herself?" said Gervaise, venturing to
pass her head through the air-hole.  "Sister!  Sister Gudule!"
 
"Sister Gudule!" repeated Oudarde.
 
"Ah! good heavens! she no longer moves!" resumed Gervaise;
"is she dead?  Gudule!  Gudule!"
 
Mahiette, choked to such a point that she could not speak,
made an effort.  "Wait," said she.  Then bending towards
the window, "Paquette!" she said, "Paquette le Chantefleurie!"
 
A child who innocently blows upon the badly ignited fuse
of a bomb, and makes it explode in his face, is no more
terrified than was Mahiette at the effect of that name,
abruptly launched into the cell of Sister Gudule.
 
The recluse trembled all over, rose erect on her bare feet,
and leaped at the window with eyes so glaring that Mahiette
and Oudarde, and the other woman and the child recoiled even
to the parapet of the quay.
 
Meanwhile, the sinister face of the recluse appeared pressed
to the grating of the air-hole.  "Oh! oh!" she cried, with
an appalling laugh; "'tis the Egyptian who is calling me!"
 
At that moment, a scene which was passing at the pillory
caught her wild eye.  Her brow contracted with horror, she
stretched her two skeleton arms from her cell, and shrieked in
a voice which resembled a death-rattle, "So 'tis thou once
more, daughter of Egypt!  'Tis thou who callest me, stealer
of children!  Well!  Be thou accursed! accursed! accursed!
accursed!"
 
 
 
CHAPTER IV. A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER.
 
These words were, so to speak, the point of union of two
scenes, which had, up to that time, been developed in parallel
lines at the same moment, each on its particular theatre; one,
that which the reader has just perused, in the Rat-Hole;
the other, which he is about to read, on the ladder of the
pillory.  The first had for witnesses only the three women
with whom the reader has just made acquaintance; the second
had for spectators all the public which we have seen above,
collecting on the Place de Gr?e, around the pillory and the
gibbet.
 
That crowd which the four sergeants posted at nine o'clock
in the morning at the four corners of the pillory had inspired
with the hope of some sort of an execution, no doubt, not a
hanging, but a whipping, a cropping of ears, something, in
short,--that crowd had increased so rapidly that the four
policemen, too closely besieged, had had occasion to "press"
it, as the expression then ran, more than once, by sound blows
of their whips, and the haunches of their horses.
 
This populace, disciplined to waiting for public executions,
did not manifest very much impatience.  It amused itself
with watching the pillory, a very simple sort of monument,
composed of a cube of masonry about six feet high and hollow
in the interior.  A very steep staircase, of unhewn stone,
which was called by distinction "the ladder," led to the upper
platform, upon which was visible a horizontal wheel of solid
oak.  The victim was bound upon this wheel, on his knees,
with his hands behind his back.  A wooden shaft, which set
in motion a capstan concealed in the interior of the little
edifice, imparted a rotatory motion to the wheel, which always
maintained its horizontal position, and in this manner
presented the face of the condemned man to all quarters of
the square in succession.  This was what was called "turning"
a criminal.
 
As the reader perceives, the pillory of the Gr?e was far
from presenting all the recreations of the pillory of the Halles.
Nothing architectural, nothing monumental.  No roof to the
iron cross, no octagonal lantern, no frail, slender columns
spreading out on the edge of the roof into capitals of acanthus
leaves and flowers, no waterspouts of chimeras and monsters,
on carved woodwork, no fine sculpture, deeply sunk in the stone.
 
They were forced to content themselves with those four
stretches of rubble work, backed with sandstone, and a
wretched stone gibbet, meagre and bare, on one side.
 
The entertainment would have been but a poor one for
lovers of Gothic architecture.  It is true that nothing was
ever less curious on the score of architecture than the worthy
gapers of the Middle Ages, and that they cared very little for
the beauty of a pillory.
 
The victim finally arrived, bound to the tail of a cart, and
when he had been hoisted upon the platform, where he could
be seen from all points of the Place, bound with cords and
straps upon the wheel of the pillory, a prodigious hoot,
mingled with laughter and acclamations, burst forth upon the
Place.  They had recognized Quasimodo.
 
It was he, in fact.  The change was singular.  Pilloried on
the very place where, on the day before, he had been saluted,
acclaimed, and proclaimed Pope and Prince of Fools, in the
cortege of the Duke of Egypt, the King of Thunes, and the
Emperor of Galilee!  One thing is certain, and that is, that
there was not a soul in the crowd, not even himself, though
in turn triumphant and the sufferer, who set forth this
combination clearly in his thought.  Gringoire and his
philosophy were missing at this spectacle.
 
Soon Michel Noiret, sworn trumpeter to the king, our lord,
imposed silence on the louts, and proclaimed the sentence, in
accordance with the order and command of monsieur the provost.
Then he withdrew behind the cart, with his men in livery surcoats.
 
Quasimodo, impassible, did not wince.  All resistance had
been rendered impossible to him by what was then called, in
the style of the criminal chancellery, "the vehemence and
firmness of the bonds" which means that the thongs and chains
probably cut into his flesh; moreover, it is a tradition of jail
and wardens, which has not been lost, and which the handcuffs
still preciously preserve among us, a civilized, gentle, humane
people (the galleys and the guillotine in parentheses).
 
He had allowed himself to be led, pushed, carried, lifted,
bound, and bound again.  Nothing was to be seen upon his
countenance but the astonishment of a savage or an idiot.
He was known to be deaf; one might have pronounced him
to be blind.
 
They placed him on his knees on the circular plank; he
made no resistance.  They removed his shirt and doublet as
far as his girdle; he allowed them to have their way.  They
entangled him under a fresh system of thongs and buckles;
he allowed them to bind and buckle him.  Only from time to
time he snorted noisily, like a calf whose head is hanging and
bumping over the edge of a butcher's cart.
 
"The dolt," said Jehan Frollo of the Mill, to his friend
Robin Poussepain (for the two students had followed the
culprit, as was to have been expected), "he understands no
more than a cockchafer shut up in a box!"
 
There was wild laughter among the crowd when they beheld
Quasimodo's hump, his camel's breast, his callous and hairy
shoulders laid bare.  During this gayety, a man in the livery
of the city, short of stature and robust of mien, mounted the
platform and placed himself near the victim.  His name
speedily circulated among the spectators.  It was Master
Pierrat Torterue, official torturer to the Ch?elet.
 
He began by depositing on an angle of the pillory a black
hour-glass, the upper lobe of which was filled with red sand,
which it allowed to glide into the lower receptacle; then he
removed his parti-colored surtout, and there became visible,
suspended from his right hand, a thin and tapering whip of
long, white, shining, knotted, plaited thongs, armed with
metal nails.  With his left hand, he negligently folded back
his shirt around his right arm, to the very armpit.
 
In the meantime, Jehan Frollo, elevating his curly blonde
head above the crowd (he had mounted upon the shoulders of
Robin Poussepain for the purpose), shouted: "Come and
look, gentle ladies and men! they are going to peremptorily
flagellate Master Quasimodo, the bellringer of my brother,
monsieur the archdeacon of Josas, a knave of oriental
architecture, who has a back like a dome, and legs like
twisted columns!"
 
And the crowd burst into a laugh, especially the boys and
young girls.
 
At length the torturer stamped his foot.  The wheel began
to turn.  Quasimodo wavered beneath his bonds.  The amazement
which was suddenly depicted upon his deformed face
caused the bursts of laughter to redouble around him.
 
All at once, at the moment when the wheel in its revolution
presented to Master Pierrat, the humped back of Quasimodo,
Master Pierrat raised his arm; the fine thongs whistled
sharply through the air, like a handful of adders, and fell
with fury upon the wretch's shoulders.
 
Quasimodo leaped as though awakened with a start.  He
began to understand.  He writhed in his bonds; a violent
contraction of surprise and pain distorted the muscles of his
face, but he uttered not a single sigh.  He merely turned his
head backward, to the right, then to the left, balancing it as a
bull does who has been stung in the flanks by a gadfly.
 
A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another
and another, and still others.  The wheel did not cease to
turn, nor the blows to rain down.
 
Soon the blood burst forth, and could be seen trickling in a
thousand threads down the hunchback's black shoulders; and
the slender thongs, in their rotatory motion which rent the
air, sprinkled drops of it upon the crowd.
 
Quasimodo had resumed, to all appearance, his first
imperturbability.  He had at first tried, in a quiet way and
without much outward movement, to break his bonds.  His eye had
been seen to light up, his muscles to stiffen, his members to
concentrate their force, and the straps to stretch.  The effort
was powerful, prodigious, desperate; but the provost's seasoned
bonds resisted.  They cracked, and that was all.  Quasimodo
fell back exhausted.  Amazement gave way, on his features,
to a sentiment of profound and bitter discouragement.  He
closed his single eye, allowed his head to droop upon his
breast, and feigned death.
 
From that moment forth, he stirred no more.  Nothing
could force a movement from him.  Neither his blood, which
did not cease to flow, nor the blows which redoubled in fury,
nor the wrath of the torturer, who grew excited himself and
intoxicated with the execution, nor the sound of the horrible
thongs, more sharp and whistling than the claws of scorpions.
 
At length a bailiff from the Ch?elet clad in black, mounted
on a black horse, who had been stationed beside the ladder
since the beginning of the execution, extended his ebony wand
towards the hour-glass.  The torturer stopped.  The wheel
stopped.  Quasimodo's eye opened slowly.
 
The scourging was finished.  Two lackeys of the official
torturer bathed the bleeding shoulders of the patient, anointed
them with some unguent which immediately closed all the
wounds, and threw upon his back a sort of yellow vestment,
in cut like a chasuble.  In the meanwhile, Pierrat Torterue
allowed the thongs, red and gorged with blood, to drip upon
the pavement.
 
All was not over for Quasimodo.  He had still to undergo
that hour of pillory which Master Florian Barbedienne had so
judiciously added to the sentence of Messire Robert d'Estouteville;
all to the greater glory of the old physiological and psychological
play upon words of Jean de Cum?e, ~Surdus absurdus~: a deaf man
is absurd.
 
So the hour-glass was turned over once more, and they left
the hunchback fastened to the plank, in order that justice
might be accomplished to the very end.
 
The populace, especially in the Middle Ages, is in society
what the child is in the family.  As long as it remains in its
state of primitive ignorance, of moral and intellectual minority,
it can be said of it as of the child,--
 
 
   'Tis the pitiless age.
 
 
We have already shown that Quasimodo was generally
hated, for more than one good reason, it is true.  There was
hardly a spectator in that crowd who had not or who did not
believe that he had reason to complain of the malevolent
hunchback of Notre-Dame.  The joy at seeing him appear
thus in the pillory had been universal; and the harsh punishment
which he had just suffered, and the pitiful condition in
which it had left him, far from softening the populace had
rendered its hatred more malicious by arming it with a touch
of mirth.
 
Hence, the "public prosecution" satisfied, as the bigwigs
of the law still express it in their jargon, the turn came of a
thousand private vengeances.  Here, as in the Grand Hall, the
women rendered themselves particularly prominent.  All
cherished some rancor against him, some for his malice, others
for his ugliness.  The latter were the most furious.
 
"Oh! mask of Antichrist!" said one.
 
"Rider on a broom handle!" cried another.
 
"What a fine tragic grimace," howled a third, "and who
would make him Pope of the Fools if to-day were yesterday?"
 
"'Tis well," struck in an old woman.  "This is the grimace
of the pillory.  When shall we have that of the gibbet?"
 
"When will you be coiffed with your big bell a hundred feet
under ground, cursed bellringer?"
 
"But 'tis the devil who rings the Angelus!"
 
"Oh! the deaf man! the one-eyed creature! the hunch-
back! the monster!"
 
"A face to make a woman miscarry better than all the
drugs and medicines!"
 
And the two scholars, Jehan du Moulin, and Robin Poussepain,
sang at the top of their lungs, the ancient refrain,--
 
 
   "~Une hart
   Pour le pendard!
   Un fagot
   Pour le magot~!"*
 
 
*  A rope for the gallows bird!  A fagot for the ape.
 
 
A thousand other insults rained down upon him, and hoots
and imprecations, and laughter, and now and then, stones.
 
Quasimodo was deaf but his sight was clear, and the public
fury was no less energetically depicted on their visages than
in their words.  Moreover, the blows from the stones explained
the bursts of laughter.
 
At first he held his ground.  But little by little that
patience which had borne up under the lash of the torturer,
yielded and gave way before all these stings of insects.  The
bull of the Asturias who has been but little moved by the
attacks of the picador grows irritated with the dogs and
banderilleras.
 
He first cast around a slow glance of hatred upon the crowd.
But bound as he was, his glance was powerless to drive away
those flies which were stinging his wound.  Then he moved in
his bonds, and his furious exertions made the ancient wheel of
the pillory shriek on its axle.  All this only increased the
derision and hooting.
 
Then the wretched man, unable to break his collar, like that
of a chained wild beast, became tranquil once more; only at
intervals a sigh of rage heaved the hollows of his chest.
There was neither shame nor redness on his face.  He was
too far from the state of society, and too near the state of
nature to know what shame was.  Moreover, with such a degree
of deformity, is infamy a thing that can be felt?  But
wrath, hatred, despair, slowly lowered over that hideous visage
a cloud which grew ever more and more sombre, ever more and
more charged with electricity, which burst forth in a thousand
lightning flashes from the eye of the cyclops.
 
Nevertheless, that cloud cleared away for a moment, at the
passage of a mule which traversed the crowd, bearing a priest.
As far away as he could see that mule and that priest, the poor
victim's visage grew gentler.  The fury which had contracted
it was followed by a strange smile full of ineffable sweetness,
gentleness, and tenderness.  In proportion as the priest
approached, that smile became more clear, more distinct, more
radiant.  It was like the arrival of a Saviour, which the
unhappy man was greeting.  But as soon as the mule was near
enough to the pillory to allow of its rider recognizing the
victim, the priest dropped his eyes, beat a hasty retreat, spurred
on rigorously, as though in haste to rid himself of humiliating
appeals, and not at all desirous of being saluted and recognized
by a poor fellow in such a predicament.
 
This priest was Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo.
 
The cloud descended more blackly than ever upon Quasimodo's brow.
The smile was still mingled with it for a time, but was bitter,
discouraged, profoundly sad.
 
Time passed on.  He had been there at least an hour and a
half, lacerated, maltreated, mocked incessantly, and almost stoned.
 
All at once he moved again in his chains with redoubled
despair, which made the whole framework that bore him tremble,
and, breaking the silence which he had obstinately preserved
hitherto, he cried in a hoarse and furious voice, which
resembled a bark rather than a human cry, and which was
drowned in the noise of the hoots--"Drink!"
 
This exclamation of distress, far from exciting compassion,
only added amusement to the good Parisian populace who
surrounded the ladder, and who, it must be confessed, taken in
the mass and as a multitude, was then no less cruel and brutal
than that horrible tribe of robbers among whom we have
already conducted the reader, and which was simply the lower
stratum of the populace.  Not a voice was raised around the
unhappy victim, except to jeer at his thirst.  It is certain
that at that moment he was more grotesque and repulsive
than pitiable, with his face purple and dripping, his eye wild,
his mouth foaming with rage and pain, and his tongue lolling
half out.  It must also be stated that if a charitable soul of a
bourgeois or ~bourgeoise~, in the rabble, had attempted to carry
a glass of water to that wretched creature in torment, there
reigned around the infamous steps of the pillory such a prejudice
of shame and ignominy, that it would have sufficed to repulse
the good Samaritan.
 
At the expiration of a few moments, Quasimodo cast a desperate
glance upon the crowd, and repeated in a voice still
more heartrending: "Drink!"
 
And all began to laugh.
 
"Drink this!" cried Robin Poussepain, throwing in his
face a sponge which had been soaked in the gutter.  "There,
you deaf villain, I'm your debtor."
 
A woman hurled a stone at his head,--
 
"That will teach you to wake us up at night with your peal
of a dammed soul."
 
"He, good, my son!" howled a cripple, making an effort to
reach him with his crutch, "will you cast any more spells on
us from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame?"
 
"Here's a drinking cup!" chimed in a man, flinging a
broken jug at his breast.  "'Twas you that made my wife,
simply because she passed near you, give birth to a child with
two heads!"
 
"And my cat bring forth a kitten with six paws!" yelped
an old crone, launching a brick at him.
 
"Drink!" repeated Quasimodo panting, and for the third
time.
 
At that moment he beheld the crowd give way.  A young
girl, fantastically dressed, emerged from the throng.  She
was accompanied by a little white goat with gilded horns, and
carried a tambourine in her hand.
 
Quasimodo's eyes sparkled.  It was the gypsy whom he had
attempted to carry off on the preceding night, a misdeed for
which he was dimly conscious that he was being punished at
that very moment; which was not in the least the case, since
he was being chastised only for the misfortune of being deaf,
and of having been judged by a deaf man.  He doubted not
that she had come to wreak her vengeance also, and to deal
her blow like the rest.
 
He beheld her, in fact, mount the ladder rapidly.  Wrath
and spite suffocate him.  He would have liked to make the
pillory crumble into ruins, and if the lightning of his eye
could have dealt death, the gypsy would have been reduced
to powder before she reached the platform.
 
She approached, without uttering a syllable, the victim
who writhed in a vain effort to escape her, and detaching a
gourd from her girdle, she raised it gently to the parched lips
of the miserable man.
 
Then, from that eye which had been, up to that moment, so
dry and burning, a big tear was seen to fall, and roll slowly
down that deformed visage so long contracted with despair.
It was the first, in all probability, that the unfortunate man
had ever shed.
 
Meanwhile, be had forgotten to drink.  The gypsy made
her little pout, from impatience, and pressed the spout to the
tusked month of Quasimodo, with a smile.
 
He drank with deep draughts.  His thirst was burning.
 
When he had finished, the wretch protruded his black lips,
no doubt, with the object of kissing the beautiful hand which
had just succoured him.  But the young girl, who was, perhaps,
somewhat distrustful, and who remembered the violent attempt
of the night, withdrew her hand with the frightened gesture
of a child who is afraid of being bitten by a beast.
 
Then the poor deaf man fixed on her a look full of reproach
and inexpressible sadness.
 
It would have been a touching spectacle anywhere,--this
beautiful, fresh, pure, and charming girl, who was at the
same time so weak, thus hastening to the relief of so much
misery, deformity, and malevolence.  On the pillory, the
spectacle was sublime.
 
The very populace were captivated by it, and began to clap
their hands, crying,--
 
"Noel!  Noel!"
 
It was at that moment that the recluse caught sight, from
the window of her bole, of the gypsy on the pillory, and
hurled at her her sinister imprecation,--
 
"Accursed be thou, daughter of Egypt!  Accursed! accursed!"
 
 
 
CHAPTER V. END OF THE STORY OF THE CAKE.
 
La Esmeralda turned pale and descended from the pillory,
staggering as she went.  The voice of the recluse still
pursued her,--
 
"Descend! descend!  Thief of Egypt! thou shalt ascend it
once more!"
 
"The sacked nun is in one of her tantrums," muttered the
populace; and that was the end of it.  For that sort of woman
was feared; which rendered them sacred.  People did not then
willingly attack one who prayed day and night.
 
The hour had arrived for removing Quasimodo.  He was
unbound, the crowd dispersed.
 
Near the Grand Pont, Mahiette, who was returning with her
two companions, suddenly halted,--
 
"By the way, Eustache! what did you do with that cake?"
 
"Mother," said the child, "while you were talking with
that lady in the bole, a big dog took a bite of my cake, and
then I bit it also."
 
"What, sir, did you eat the whole of it?" she went on.
 
"Mother, it was the dog.  I told him, but he would not
listen to me.  Then I bit into it, also."
 
"'Tis a terrible child!" said the mother, smiling and
scolding at one and the same time.  "Do you see, Oudarde?  He
already eats all the fruit from the cherry-tree in our orchard
of Charlerange.  So his grandfather says that be will be a
captain.  Just let me catch you at it again, Master Eustache.
Come along, you greedy fellow!"
 
 
 
End of Volume 1.
 
 
 
VOLUME II.
 
 
BOOK SEVENTH.
 
 
CHAPTER I. THE DANGER OF CONFIDING ONE'S SECRET TO A GOAT.
 
Many weeks had elapsed.
 
The first of March had arrived.  The sun, which Dubartas,
that classic ancestor of periphrase, had not yet dubbed
the "Grand-duke of Candles," was none the less radiant and
joyous on that account.  It was one of those spring days
which possesses so much sweetness and beauty, that all Paris
turns out into the squares and promenades and celebrates
them as though they were Sundays.  In those days of brilliancy,
warmth, and serenity, there is a certain hour above all
others, when the fa?de of Notre-Dame should be admired.
It is the moment when the sun, already declining towards the
west, looks the cathedral almost full in the face.  Its rays,
growing more and more horizontal, withdraw slowly from the
pavement of the square, and mount up the perpendicular
fa?de, whose thousand bosses in high relief they cause to
start out from the shadows, while the great central rose
window flames like the eye of a cyclops, inflamed with the
reflections of the forge.
 
This was the hour.
 
Opposite the lofty cathedral, reddened by the setting sun,
on the stone balcony built above the porch of a rich Gothic
house, which formed the angle of the square and the Rue du
Parvis, several young girls were laughing and chatting with
every sort of grace and mirth.  From the length of the veil
which fell from their pointed coif, twined with pearls, to
their heels, from the fineness of the embroidered chemisette
which covered their shoulders and allowed a glimpse, according
to the pleasing custom of the time, of the swell of their fair
virgin bosoms, from the opulence of their under-petticoats
still more precious than their overdress (marvellous
refinement), from the gauze, the silk, the velvet, with which
all this was composed, and, above all, from the whiteness of
their hands, which certified to their leisure and idleness, it
was easy to divine they were noble and wealthy heiresses.  They
were, in fact, Damoiselle Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and
her companions, Diane de Christeuil, Amelotte de Montmichel,
Colombe de Gaillefontaine, and the little de Champchevrier
maiden; all damsels of good birth, assembled at that moment
at the house of the dame widow de Gondelaurier, on account
of Monseigneur de Beaujeu and Madame his wife, who were
to come to Paris in the month of April, there to choose maids
of honor for the Dauphiness Marguerite, who was to be
received in Picardy from the hands of the Flemings.  Now,
all the squires for twenty leagues around were intriguing for
this favor for their daughters, and a goodly number of the
latter had been already brought or sent to Paris.  These four
maidens had been confided to the discreet and venerable
charge of Madame Aloise de Gondelaurier, widow of a former
commander of the king's cross-bowmen, who had retired with
her only daughter to her house in the Place du Parvis, Notre-
Dame, in Paris.
 
The balcony on which these young girls stood opened from
a chamber richly tapestried in fawn-colored Flanders leather,
stamped with golden foliage.  The beams, which cut the ceiling
in parallel lines, diverted the eye with a thousand eccentric
painted and gilded carvings.  Splendid enamels gleamed
here and there on carved chests; a boar's head in faience
crowned a magnificent dresser, whose two shelves announced
that the mistress of the house was the wife or widow of a
knight banneret.  At the end of the room, by the side of a
lofty chimney blazoned with arms from top to bottom, in
a rich red velvet arm-chair, sat Dame de Gondelaurier, whose
five and fifty years were written upon her garments no less
distinctly than upon her face.
 
Beside her stood a young man of imposing mien, although
partaking somewhat of vanity and bravado--one of those
handsome fellows whom all women agree to admire, although
grave men learned in physiognomy shrug their shoulders at
them.  This young man wore the garb of a captain of the king's
unattached archers, which bears far too much resemblance to
the costume of Jupiter, which the reader has already been
enabled to admire in the first book of this history, for us to
inflict upon him a second description.
 
The damoiselles were seated, a part in the chamber, a part
in the balcony, some on square cushions of Utrecht velvet
with golden corners, others on stools of oak carved in flowers
and figures.  Each of them held on her knee a section of a
great needlework tapestry, on which they were working in
company, while one end of it lay upon the rush mat which
covered the floor.
 
They were chatting together in that whispering tone and
with the half-stifled laughs peculiar to an assembly of young
girls in whose midst there is a young man.  The young man
whose presence served to set in play all these feminine self-
conceits, appeared to pay very little heed to the matter, and,
while these pretty damsels were vying with one another to
attract his attention, he seemed to be chiefly absorbed in
polishing the buckle of his sword belt with his doeskin glove.
From time to time, the old lady addressed him in a very
low tone, and he replied as well as he was able, with a sort of
awkward and constrained politeness.
 
From the smiles and significant gestures of Dame Aloise,
from the glances which she threw towards her daughter,
Fleur-de-Lys, as she spoke low to the captain, it was easy
to see that there was here a question of some betrothal
concluded, some marriage near at hand no doubt, between the
young man and Fleur-de-Lys.  From the embarrassed coldness
of the officer, it was easy to see that on his side, at least,
love had no longer any part in the matter.  His whole air was
expressive of constraint and weariness, which our lieutenants
of the garrison would to-day translate admirably as, "What a
beastly bore!"
 
The poor dame, very much infatuated with her daughter,
like any other silly mother, did not perceive the officer's lack
of enthusiasm, and strove in low tones to call his attention
to the infinite grace with which Fleur-de-Lys used her needle
or wound her skein.
 
"Come, little cousin," she said to him, plucking him by the
sleeve, in order to speak in his ear, "Look at her, do! see her
stoop."
 
"Yes, truly," replied the young man, and fell back into his
glacial and absent-minded silence.
 
A moment later, he was obliged to bend down again, and
Dame Aloise said to him,--
 
"Have you ever beheld a more gay and charming face than
that of your betrothed?  Can one be more white and blonde?
are not her hands perfect? and that neck--does it not
assume all the curves of the swan in ravishing fashion?  How
I envy you at times! and how happy you are to be a man,
naughty libertine that you are!  Is not my Fleur-de-Lys
adorably beautiful, and are you not desperately in love with
her?"
 
"Of course," he replied, still thinking of something else.
 
"But do say something," said Madame Aloise, suddenly
giving his shoulder a push; "you have grown very timid."
 
We can assure our readers that timidity was neither the
captain's virtue nor his defect.  But he made an effort to do
what was demanded of him.
 
"Fair cousin," he said, approaching Fleur-de-Lys, "what is
the subject of this tapestry work which you are fashioning?'
"Fair cousin," responded Fleur-de-Lys, in an offended tone,
"I have already told you three times.  'Tis the grotto of Neptune."
 
It was evident that Fleur-de-Lys saw much more clearly
than her mother through the captain's cold and absent-minded
manner.  He felt the necessity of making some conversation.
 
"And for whom is this Neptunerie destined?"
 
"For the Abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs," answered
Fleur-de-Lys, without raising her eyes.
 
The captain took up a corner of the tapestry.
 
"Who, my fair cousin, is this big gendarme, who is puffing
out his cheeks to their full extent and blowing a trumpet?"
 
"'Tis Triton," she replied.
 
There was a rather pettish intonation in Fleur-de-Lys's--
laconic words.  The young man understood that it was
indispensable that he should whisper something in her ear, a
commonplace, a gallant compliment, no matter what.  Accordingly
he bent down, but he could find nothing in his imagination
more tender and personal than this,--
 
"Why does your mother always wear that surcoat with
armorial designs, like our grandmothers of the time of Charles
VII.?  Tell her, fair cousin, that 'tis no longer the fashion,
and that the hinge (gond) and the laurel (laurier) embroidered
on her robe give her the air of a walking mantlepiece.
In truth, people no longer sit thus on their banners, I
assure you."
 
Fleur-de-Lys raised her beautiful eyes, full of reproach,
"Is that all of which you can assure me?" she said, in a low voice.
 
In the meantime, Dame Aloise, delighted to see them thus
bending towards each other and whispering, said as she toyed
with the clasps of her prayer-book,--
 
"Touching picture of love!"
 
The captain, more and more embarrassed, fell back upon the
subject of the tapestry,--"'Tis, in sooth, a charming work!"
he exclaimed.
 
Whereupon Colombe de Gaillefontaine, another beautiful
blonde, with a white skin, dressed to the neck in blue damask,
ventured a timid remark which she addressed to Fleur-de-Lys,
in the hope that the handsome captain would reply to it, "My
dear Gondelaurier, have you seen the tapestries of the H?el
de la Roche-Guyon?"
 
"Is not that the hotel in which is enclosed the garden of
the Ling?e du Louvre?" asked Diane de Christeuil with a
laugh; for she had handsome teeth, and consequently laughed
on every occasion.
 
"And where there is that big, old tower of the ancient
wall of Paris," added Amelotte de Montmichel, a pretty fresh
and curly-headed brunette, who had a habit of sighing just as
the other laughed, without knowing why.
 
"My dear Colombe," interpolated Dame Aloise, "do you
not mean the hotel which belonged to Monsieur de Bacqueville,
in the reign of King Charles VI.? there are indeed
many superb high warp tapestries there."
 
"Charles VI.!  Charles VI.!" muttered the young captain,
twirling his moustache.  "Good heavens! what old things
the good dame does remember!"
 
Madame de Gondelaurier continued, "Fine tapestries, in
truth.  A work so esteemed that it passes as unrivalled."
 
At that moment B?ang?e de Champchevrier, a slender
little maid of seven years, who was peering into the square
through the trefoils of the balcony, exclaimed, "Oh! look,
fair Godmother Fleur-de-Lys, at that pretty dancer who is
dancing on the pavement and playing the tambourine in the
midst of the loutish bourgeois!"
 
The sonorous vibration of a tambourine was, in fact, audible.
"Some gypsy from Bohemia," said Fleur-de-Lys, turning
carelessly toward the square.
 
"Look! look!" exclaimed her lively companions; and they
all ran to the edge of the balcony, while Fleur-de-Lys,
rendered thoughtful by the coldness of her betrothed, followed
them slowly, and the latter, relieved by this incident, which
put an end to an embarrassing conversation, retreated to the
farther end of the room, with the satisfied air of a soldier
released from duty.  Nevertheless, the fair Fleur-de-Lys's was
a charming and noble service, and such it had formerly
appeared to him; but the captain had gradually become
blase'; the prospect of a speedy marriage cooled him more
every day.  Moreover, he was of a fickle disposition, and,
must we say it, rather vulgar in taste.  Although of very
noble birth, he had contracted in his official harness more
than one habit of the common trooper.  The tavern and its
accompaniments pleased him.  He was only at his ease amid
gross language, military gallantries, facile beauties, and
successes yet more easy.  He had, nevertheless, received from
his family some education and some politeness of manner;
but he had been thrown on the world too young, he had been
in garrison at too early an age, and every day the polish of a
gentleman became more and more effaced by the rough friction
of his gendarme's cross-belt.  While still continuing to
visit her from time to time, from a remnant of common
respect, he felt doubly embarrassed with Fleur-de-Lys; in the
first place, because, in consequence of having scattered his
love in all sorts of places, he had reserved very little for her;
in the next place, because, amid so many stiff, formal, and
decent ladies, he was in constant fear lest his mouth, habituated
to oaths, should suddenly take the bit in its teeth, and
break out into the language of the tavern.  The effect can
be imagined!
 
Moreover, all this was mingled in him, with great pretentions
to elegance, toilet, and a fine appearance.  Let the
reader reconcile these things as best he can.  I am simply the
historian.
 
He had remained, therefore, for several minutes, leaning in
silence against the carved jamb of the chimney, and thinking
or not thinking, when Fleur-de-Lys suddenly turned and addressed
him.  After all, the poor young girl was pouting
against the dictates of her heart.
 
"Fair cousin, did you not speak to us of a little Bohemian
whom you saved a couple of months ago, while making the
patrol with the watch at night, from the hands of a dozen
robbers?"
 
"I believe so, fair cousin,." said the captain.
 
"Well," she resumed, "perchance 'tis that same gypsy girl
who is dancing yonder, on the church square.  Come and see
if you recognize her, fair Cousin Phoebus."
 
A secret desire for reconciliation was apparent in this gentle
invitation which she gave him to approach her, and in the
care which she took to call him by name.  Captain Phoebus
de Ch?eaupers (for it is he whom the reader has had before
his eyes since the beginning of this chapter) slowly approached
the balcony.  "Stay," said Fleur-de-Lys, laying her hand tenderly
on Phoebus's arm; "look at that little girl yonder, dancing
in that circle.  Is she your Bohemian?"
 
Phoebus looked, and said,--
 
"Yes, I recognize her by her goat."
 
"Oh! in fact, what a pretty little goat!" said Amelotte,
clasping her hands in admiration.
 
"Are his horns of real gold?" inquired B?ang?e.
 
Without moving from her arm-chair, Dame Aloise interposed,
"Is she not one of those gypsy girls who arrived last
year by the Gibard gate?"
 
"Madame my mother," said Fleur-de-Lys gently, "that gate
is now called the Porte d'Enfer."
 
Mademoiselle de Gondelaurier knew how her mother's
antiquated mode of speech shocked the captain.  In fact, he
began to sneer, and muttered between his teeth: "Porte
Gibard!  Porte Gibard!  'Tis enough to make King Charles VI.
pass by."
 
"Godmother!" exclaimed B?ang?e, whose eyes, incessantly
in motion, had suddenly been raised to the summit of
the towers of Notre-Dame, "who is that black man up
yonder?"
 
All the young girls raised their eyes.  A man was, in truth,
leaning on the balustrade which surmounted the northern
tower, looking on the Gr?e.  He was a priest.  His costume
could be plainly discerned, and his face resting on both his
hands.  But he stirred no more than if he had been a statue.
His eyes, intently fixed, gazed into the Place.
 
It was something like the immobility of a bird of prey, who
has just discovered a nest of sparrows, and is gazing at it.
 
"'Tis monsieur the archdeacon of Josas," said Fleur-de-Lys.
 
"You have good eyes if you can recognize him from here,"
said the Gaillefontaine.
 
"How he is staring at the little dancer!" went on Diane
de Christeuil.
 
"Let the gypsy beware!" said Fleur-de-Lys, "for he loves
not Egypt."
 
"'Tis a great shame for that man to look upon her thus,"
added Amelotte de Montmichel, "for she dances delightfully."
 
"Fair cousin Phoebus," said Fleur-de-Lys suddenly, "Since
you know this little gypsy, make her a sign to come up here.
It will amuse us."
 
"Oh, yes!" exclaimed all the young girls, clapping their hands.
 
"Why! 'tis not worth while," replied Phoebus.  "She has
forgotten me, no doubt, and I know not so much as her
name.  Nevertheless, as you wish it, young ladies, I will
make the trial."  And leaning over the balustrade of the
balcony, he began to shout, "Little one!"
 
The dancer was not beating her tambourine at the moment.
She turned her head towards the point whence this call
proceeded, her brilliant eyes rested on Phoebus, and she
stopped short.
 
"Little one!" repeated the captain; and he beckoned her
to approach.
 
The young girl looked at him again, then she blushed as
though a flame had mounted into her cheeks, and, taking her
tambourine under her arm, she made her way through the
astonished spectators towards the door of the house where
Phoebus was calling her, with slow, tottering steps, and with
the troubled look of a bird which is yielding to the
fascination of a serpent.
 
A moment later, the tapestry porti?e was raised, and the
gypsy appeared on the threshold of the chamber, blushing,
confused, breathless, her large eyes drooping, and not daring
to advance another step.
 
B?ang?e clapped her hands.
 
Meanwhile, the dancer remained motionless upon the
threshold.  Her appearance had produced a singular effect upon
these young girls.  It is certain that a vague and indistinct
desire to please the handsome officer animated them all, that
his splendid uniform was the target of all their coquetries,
and that from the moment he presented himself, there existed
among them a secret, suppressed rivalry, which they hardly
acknowledged even to themselves, but which broke forth,
none the less, every instant, in their gestures and remarks.
Nevertheless, as they were all very nearly equal in beauty,
they contended with equal arms, and each could hope for the
victory.--The arrival of the gypsy suddenly destroyed this
equilibrium.  Her beauty was so rare, that, at the moment
when she appeared at the entrance of the apartment, it
seemed as though she diffused a sort of light which was
peculiar to herself.  In that narrow chamber, surrounded
by that sombre frame of hangings and woodwork, she was
incomparably more beautiful and more radiant than on the
public square.  She was like a torch which has suddenly
been brought from broad daylight into the dark.  The noble
damsels were dazzled by her in spite of themselves.  Each
one felt herself, in some sort, wounded in her beauty.  Hence,
their battle front (may we be allowed the expression,) was
immediately altered, although they exchanged not a single
word.  But they understood each other perfectly.  Women's
instincts comprehend and respond to each other more quickly
than the intelligences of men.  An enemy had just arrived;
all felt it--all rallied together.  One drop of wine is
sufficient to tinge a glass of water red; to diffuse a certain
degree of ill temper throughout a whole assembly of pretty women,
the arrival of a prettier woman suffices, especially when there
is but one man present.
 
Hence the welcome accorded to the gypsy was marvellously
glacial.  They surveyed her from head to foot, then
exchanged glances, and all was said; they understood each
other.  Meanwhile, the young girl was waiting to be spoken
to, in such emotion that she dared not raise her eyelids.
 
The captain was the first to break the silence.  "Upon my
word," said he, in his tone of intrepid fatuity, "here is a
charming creature!  What think you of her, fair cousin?"
 
This remark, which a more delicate admirer would have
uttered in a lower tone, at least was not of a nature to
dissipate the feminine jealousies which were on the alert
before the gypsy.
 
Fleur-de-Lys replied to the captain with a bland affectation
of disdain;--"Not bad."
 
The others whispered.
 
At length, Madame Aloise, who was not the less jealous
because she was so for her daughter, addressed the
dancer,--"Approach, little one."
 
"Approach, little one!" repeated, with comical dignity,
little B?ang?e, who would have reached about as high as
her hips.
 
The gypsy advanced towards the noble dame.
 
"Fair child," said Phoebus, with emphasis, taking several
steps towards her, "I do not know whether I have the
supreme honor of being recognized by you."
 
She interrupted him, with a smile and a look full of
infinite sweetness,--
 
"Oh! yes," said she.
 
"She has a good memory," remarked Fleur-de-Lys.
 
"Come, now," resumed Phoebus, "you escaped nimbly the
other evening.  Did I frighten you!"
 
"Oh! no," said the gypsy.
 
There was in the intonation of that "Oh! no," uttered
after that "Oh! yes," an ineffable something which wounded
Fleur-de-Lys.
 
"You left me in your stead, my beauty," pursued the
captain, whose tongue was unloosed when speaking to a girl
out of the street, "a crabbed knave, one-eyed and hunchbacked,
the bishop's bellringer, I believe.  I have been told
that by birth he is the bastard of an archdeacon and a devil.
He has a pleasant name: he is called ~Quatre-Temps~ (Ember
Days), ~Paques-Fleuries~ (Palm Sunday), Mardi-Gras (Shrove
Tuesday), I know not what!  The name of some festival when
the bells are pealed!  So he took the liberty of carrying you
off, as though you were made for beadles!  'Tis too much.
What the devil did that screech-owl want with you? Hey,
tell me!"
 
"I do not know," she replied.
 
"The inconceivable impudence!  A bellringer carrying off
a wench, like a vicomte! a lout poaching on the game of
gentlemen! that is a rare piece of assurance.  However, he paid
dearly for it.  Master Pierrat Torterue is the harshest groom
that ever curried a knave; and I can tell you, if it will be
agreeable to you, that your bellringer's hide got a thorough
dressing at his hands."
 
"Poor man!" said the gypsy, in whom these words revived the
memory of the pillory.
 
The captain burst out laughing.
 
"Corne-de-boeuf! here's pity as well placed as a feather in
a pig's tail!  May I have as big a belly as a pope, if--"
 
He stopped short.  "Pardon me, ladies; I believe that I
was on the point of saying something foolish."
 
"Fie, sir" said la Gaillefontaine.
 
"He talks to that creature in her own tongue!" added
Fleur-de-Lys, in a low tone, her irritation increasing every
moment.  This irritation was not diminished when she beheld
the captain, enchanted with the gypsy, and, most of all, with
himself, execute a pirouette on his heel, repeating with coarse,
na?e, and soldierly gallantry,--
 
"A handsome wench, upon my soul!"
 
"Rather savagely dressed," said Diane de Christeuil, laughing
to show her fine teeth.
 
This remark was a flash of light to the others.  Not being
able to impugn her beauty, they attacked her costume.
 
"That is true," said la Montmichel; "what makes you run
about the streets thus, without guimpe or ruff?"
 
"That petticoat is so short that it makes one tremble,"
added la Gaillefontaine.
 
"My dear," continued Fleur-de-Lys, with decided sharpness,
"You will get yourself taken up by the sumptuary police for
your gilded girdle."
 
"Little one, little one;" resumed la Christeuil, with an
implacable smile, "if you were to put respectable sleeves
upon your arms they would get less sunburned."
 
It was, in truth, a spectacle worthy of a more intelligent
spectator than Phoebus, to see how these beautiful maidens,
with their envenomed and angry tongues, wound, serpent-like,
and glided and writhed around the street dancer.  They were
cruel and graceful; they searched and rummaged maliciously
in her poor and silly toilet of spangles and tinsel.  There
was no end to their laughter, irony, and humiliation.  Sarcasms
rained down upon the gypsy, and haughty condescension and
malevolent looks.  One would have thought they were young
Roman dames thrusting golden pins into the breast of a
beautiful slave.  One would have pronounced them elegant
grayhounds, circling, with inflated nostrils, round a poor
woodland fawn, whom the glance of their master forbade them
to devour.
 
After all, what was a miserable dancer on the public squares
in the presence of these high-born maidens?  They seemed
to take no heed of her presence, and talked of her aloud, to
her face, as of something unclean, abject, and yet, at the
same time, passably pretty.
 
The gypsy was not insensible to these pin-pricks.  From
time to time a flush of shame, a flash of anger inflamed her
eyes or her cheeks; with disdain she made that little grimace
with which the reader is already familiar, but she remained
motionless; she fixed on Phoebus a sad, sweet, resigned look.
There was also happiness and tenderness in that gaze.  One
would have said that she endured for fear of being expelled.
 
Phoebus laughed, and took the gypsy's part with a mixture
of impertinence and pity.
 
"Let them talk, little one!" he repeated, jingling his golden
spurs.  "No doubt your toilet is a little extravagant and wild,
but what difference does that make with such a charming
damsel as yourself?"
 
"Good gracious!" exclaimed the blonde Gaillefontaine,
drawing up her swan-like throat, with a bitter smile.  "I see
that messieurs the archers of the king's police easily take fire
at the handsome eyes of gypsies!"
 
"Why not?" said Phoebus.
 
At this reply uttered carelessly by the captain, like a stray
stone, whose fall one does not even watch, Colombe began to
laugh, as well as Diane, Amelotte, and Fleur-de-Lys, into
whose eyes at the same time a tear started.
 
The gypsy, who had dropped her eyes on the floor at the
words of Colombe de Gaillefontaine, raised them beaming with
joy and pride and fixed them once more on Phoebus.  She was
very beautiful at that moment.
 
The old dame, who was watching this scene, felt offended,
without understanding why.
 
"Holy Virgin!" she suddenly exclaimed, "what is it moving
about my legs?  Ah! the villanous beast!"
 
It was the goat, who had just arrived, in search of his
mistress, and who, in dashing towards the latter, had begun
by entangling his horns in the pile of stuffs which the noble
dame's garments heaped up on her feet when she was seated.
 
This created a diversion.  The gypsy disentangled his
horns without uttering a word.
 
"Oh! here's the little goat with golden hoofs!" exclaimed
B?ang?e, dancing with joy.
 
The gypsy crouched down on her knees and leaned her
cheek against the fondling head of the goat.  One would have
said that she was asking pardon for having quitted it thus.
 
Meanwhile, Diane had bent down to Colombe's ear.
 
"Ah! good heavens! why did not I think of that sooner?
'Tis the gypsy with the goat.  They say she is a sorceress,
and that her goat executes very miraculous tricks."
 
"Well!" said Colombe, "the goat must now amuse us in
its turn, and perform a miracle for us."
 
Diane and Colombe eagerly addressed the gypsy.
 
"Little one, make your goat perform a miracle."
 
"I do not know what you mean," replied the dancer.
 
"A miracle, a piece of magic, a bit of sorcery, in short."
 
"I do not understand."  And she fell to caressing the
pretty animal, repeating, "Djali!  Djali!"
 
At that moment Fleur-de-Lys noticed a little bag of
embroidered leather suspended from the neck of the goat,--
"What is that?" she asked of the gypsy.
 
The gypsy raised her large eyes upon her and replied gravely,--
"That is my secret."
 
"I should really like to know what your secret is," thought
Fleur-de-Lys.
 
Meanwhile, the good dame had risen angrily,--" Come
now, gypsy, if neither you nor your goat can dance for us,
what are you doing here?"
 
The gypsy walked slowly towards the door, without making
any reply.  But the nearer she approached it, the more
her pace slackened.  An irresistible magnet seemed to hold
her.  Suddenly she turned her eyes, wet with tears, towards
Phoebus, and halted.
 
"True God!" exclaimed the captain, "that's not the way
to depart.  Come back and dance something for us.  By the
way, my sweet love, what is your name?"
 
"La Esmeralda," said the dancer, never taking her eyes
from him.
 
At this strange name, a burst of wild laughter broke from
the young girls.
 
"Here's a terrible name for a young lady," said Diane.
 
"You see well enough," retorted Amelotte, "that she is
an enchantress."
 
"My dear," exclaimed Dame Aloise solemnly, "your parents
did not commit the sin of giving you that name at the
baptismal font."
 
In the meantime, several minutes previously, B?ang?e had
coaxed the goat into a corner of the room with a marchpane
cake, without any one having noticed her.  In an instant they
had become good friends.  The curious child had detached
the bag from the goat's neck, had opened it, and had emptied
out its contents on the rush matting; it was an alphabet, each
letter of which was separately inscribed on a tiny block of
boxwood.  Hardly had these playthings been spread out on
the matting, when the child, with surprise, beheld the
goat (one of whose "miracles" this was no doubt), draw out
certain letters with its golden hoof, and arrange them, with
gentle pushes, in a certain order.  In a moment they
constituted a word, which the goat seemed to have been trained
to write, so little hesitation did it show in forming it, and
B?ang?e suddenly exclaimed, clasping her hands in admiration,--
 
"Godmother Fleur-de-Lys, see what the goat has just done!"
 
Fleur-de-Lys ran up and trembled.  The letters arranged
upon the floor formed this word,--
 
 
         PHOEBUS.
 
 
"Was it the goat who wrote that?" she inquired in a
changed voice.
 
"Yes, godmother," replied B?ang?e.
 
It was impossible to doubt it; the child did not know how
to write.
 
"This is the secret!" thought Fleur-de-Lys.
 
Meanwhile, at the child's exclamation, all had hastened up,
the mother, the young girls, the gypsy, and the officer.
 
The gypsy beheld the piece of folly which the goat had
committed.  She turned red, then pale, and began to tremble like
a culprit before the captain, who gazed at her with a smile of
satisfaction and amazement.
 
"Phoebus!" whispered the young girls, stupefied: "'tis
the captain's name!"
 
"You have a marvellous memory!" said Fleur-de-Lys, to
the petrified gypsy.  Then, bursting into sobs: "Oh!" she
stammered mournfully, hiding her face in both her beautiful
hands, "she is a magician!"  And she heard another and a
still more bitter voice at the bottom of her heart, saying,--
"She is a rival!"
 
She fell fainting.
 
"My daughter! my daughter!" cried the terrified mother.
"Begone, you gypsy of hell!"
 
In a twinkling, La Esmeralda gathered up the unlucky
letters, made a sign to Djali, and went out through one door,
while Fleur-de-Lys was being carried out through the other.
 
Captain Phoebus, on being left alone, hesitated for a moment
between the two doors, then he followed the gypsy.
 
 
 
CHAPTER II. A PRIEST AND A PHILOSOPHER ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.
 
The priest whom the young girls had observed at the top of
the North tower, leaning over the Place and so attentive to the
dance of the gypsy, was, in fact, Archdeacon Claude Frollo.
 
Our readers have not forgotten the mysterious cell which
the archdeacon had reserved for himself in that tower.  (I do
not know, by the way be it said, whether it be not the same,
the interior of which can be seen to-day through a little square
window, opening to the east at the height of a man above the
platform from which the towers spring; a bare and dilapidated
den, whose badly plastered walls are ornamented here
and there, at the present day, with some wretched yellow
engravings representing the fa?des of cathedrals.  I presume
that this hole is jointly inhabited by bats and spiders, and
that, consequently, it wages a double war of extermination
on the flies).
 
Every day, an hour before sunset, the archdeacon ascended
the staircase to the tower, and shut himself up in this cell,
where he sometimes passed whole nights.  That day, at the
moment when, standing before the low door of his retreat, he
was fitting into the lock the complicated little key which he
always carried about him in the purse suspended to his side,
a sound of tambourine and castanets had reached his ear.
These sounds came from the Place du Parvis.  The cell, as we
have already said, had only one window opening upon the rear
of the church.  Claude Frollo had hastily withdrawn the key,
and an instant later, he was on the top of the tower, in the
gloomy and pensive attitude in which the maidens had seen
him.
 
There he stood, grave, motionless, absorbed in one look and
one thought.  All Paris lay at his feet, with the thousand spires
of its edifices and its circular horizon of gentle hills--with
its river winding under its bridges, and its people moving to
and fro through its streets,--with the clouds of its smoke,--with
the mountainous chain of its roofs which presses Notre-Dame in
its doubled folds; but out .of all the city, the archdeacon
gazed at one corner only of the pavement, the Place du
Parvis; in all that throng at but one figure,--the gypsy.
 
It would have been difficult to say what was the nature of this
look, and whence proceeded the flame that flashed from it.  It
was a fixed gaze, which was, nevertheless, full of trouble and
tumult.  And, from the profound immobility of his whole
body, barely agitated at intervals by an involuntary shiver, as
a tree is moved by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows,
more marble than the balustrade on which they leaned; or
the sight of the petrified smile which contracted his face,--
one would have said that nothing living was left about Claude
Frollo except his eyes.
 
The gypsy was dancing; she was twirling her tambourine
on the tip of her finger, and tossing it into the air as she
danced Proven?l sarabands; agile, light, joyous, and
unconscious of the formidable gaze which descended
perpendicularly upon her head.
 
The crowd was swarming around her; from time to time, a
man accoutred in red and yellow made them form into a circle,
and then returned, seated himself on a chair a few paces from
the dancer, and took the goat's head on his knees.  This man
seemed to be the gypsy's companion.  Claude Frollo could not
distinguish his features from his elevated post.
 
From the moment when the archdeacon caught sight of this
stranger, his attention seemed divided between him and the
dancer, and his face became more and more gloomy.  All at
once he rose upright, and a quiver ran through his whole
body: "Who is that man?" he muttered between his teeth:
"I have always seen her alone before!"
 
Then he plunged down beneath the tortuous vault of the
spiral staircase, and once more descended.  As he passed the
door of the bell chamber, which was ajar, be saw something
which struck him; he beheld Quasimodo, who, leaning through
an opening of one of those slate penthouses which resemble
enormous blinds, appeared also to be gazing at the Place.  He
was engaged in so profound a contemplation, that he did not
notice the passage of his adopted father.  His savage eye had
a singular expression; it was a charmed, tender look.  "This
is strange!" murmured Claude.  "Is it the gypsy at whom
he is thus gazing?"  He continued his descent.  At the end
of a few minutes, the anxious archdeacon entered upon the
Place from the door at the base of the tower.
 
"What has become of the gypsy girl?" he said, mingling
with the group of spectators which the sound of the tambourine
had collected.
 
"I know not," replied one of his neighbors, "I think that
she has gone to make some of her fandangoes in the house
opposite, whither they have called her."
 
In the place of the gypsy, on the carpet, whose arabesques
had seemed to vanish but a moment previously by the capricious
figures of her dance, the archdeacon no longer beheld
any one but the red and yellow man, who, in order to earn a
few testers in his turn, was walking round the circle, with his
elbows on his hips, his head thrown back, his face red, his
neck outstretched, with a chair between his teeth.  To the
chair he had fastened a cat, which a neighbor had lent, and
which was spitting in great affright.
 
"Notre-Dame!" exclaimed the archdeacon, at the moment
when the juggler, perspiring heavily, passed in front of him
with his pyramid of chair and his cat, "What is Master
Pierre Gringoire doing here?"
 
The harsh voice of the archdeacon threw the poor fellow
into such a commotion that he lost his equilibrium, together
with his whole edifice, and the chair and the cat tumbled
pell-mell upon the heads of the spectators, in the midst of
inextinguishable hootings.
 
It is probable that Master Pierre Gringoire (for it was
indeed he) would have had a sorry account to settle with the
neighbor who owned the cat, and all the bruised and scratched
faces which surrounded him, if he had not hastened to profit
by the tumult to take refuge in the church, whither Claude
Frollo had made him a sign to follow him.
 
The cathedral was already dark and deserted; the side-aisles
were full of shadows, and the lamps of the chapels began to
shine out like stars, so black had the vaulted ceiling become.
Only the great rose window of the fa?de, whose thousand
colors were steeped in a ray of horizontal sunlight, glittered
in the gloom like a mass of diamonds, and threw its dazzling
reflection to the other end of the nave.
 
When they had advanced a few paces, Dom Claude placed
his back against a pillar, and gazed intently at Gringoire.
The gaze was not the one which Gringoire feared, ashamed as
he was of having been caught by a grave and learned person
in the costume of a buffoon.  There was nothing mocking or
ironical in the priest's glance, it was serious, tranquil,
piercing.  The archdeacon was the first to break the silence.
 
"Come now, Master Pierre.  You are to explain many
things to me.  And first of all, how comes it that you have
not been seen for two months, and that now one finds you in
the public squares, in a fine equipment in truth!  Motley red
and yellow, like a Caudebec apple?"
 
"Messire," said Gringoire, piteously, "it is, in fact, an
amazing accoutrement.  You see me no more comfortable in it
than a cat coiffed with a calabash.  'Tis very ill done, I am
conscious, to expose messieurs the sergeants of the watch to
the liability of cudgelling beneath this cassock the humerus
of a Pythagorean philosopher.  But what would you have,
my reverend master? 'tis the fault of my ancient jerkin,
which abandoned me in cowardly wise, at the beginning of
the winter, under the pretext that it was falling into tatters,
and that it required repose in the basket of a rag-picker.
What is one to do?  Civilization has not yet arrived at the
point where one can go stark naked, as ancient Diogenes
wished.  Add that a very cold wind was blowing, and 'tis not
in the month of January that one can successfully attempt to
make humanity take this new step.  This garment presented
itself, I took it, and I left my ancient black smock, which,
for a hermetic like myself, was far from being hermetically
closed.  Behold me then, in the garments of a stage-player,
like Saint Genest.  What would you have? 'tis an eclipse.
Apollo himself tended the flocks of Admetus."
 
"'Tis a fine profession that you are engaged in!" replied
the archdeacon.
 
"I agree, my master, that 'tis better to philosophize and
poetize, to blow the flame in the furnace, or to receive it
from carry cats on a shield.  So, when you addressed
me, I was as foolish as an ass before a turnspit.  But
what would you have, messire?  One must eat every day, and
the finest Alexandrine verses are not worth a bit of Brie
cheese.  Now, I made for Madame Marguerite of Flanders,
that famous epithalamium, as you know, and the city will not
pay me, under the pretext that it was not excellent; as
though one could give a tragedy of Sophocles for four crowns!
Hence, I was on the point of dying with hunger.  Happily,
I found that I was rather strong in the jaw; so I said to this
jaw,--perform some feats of strength and of equilibrium:
nourish thyself.  ~Ale te ipsam~.  A pack of beggars who have
become my good friends, have taught me twenty sorts of
herculean feats, and now I give to my teeth every evening the
bread which they have earned during the day by the sweat
of my brow.  After all, concede, I grant that it is a sad
employment for my intellectual faculties, and that man is not
made to pass his life in beating the tambourine and biting
chairs.  But, reverend master, it is not sufficient to pass
one's life, one must earn the means for life.''
 
Dom Claude listened in silence.  All at once his deep-set
eye assumed so sagacious and penetrating an expression, that
Gringoire felt himself, so to speak, searched to the bottom of
the soul by that glance.
 
"Very good, Master Pierre; but how comes it that you are
now in company with that gypsy dancer?"
 
"In faith!" said Gringoire, "'tis because she is my wife
and I am her husband."
 
The priest's gloomy eyes flashed into flame.
 
"Have you done that, you wretch!" he cried, seizing
Gringoire's arm with fury; "have you been so abandoned by
God as to raise your hand against that girl?"
 
"On my chance of paradise, monseigneur," replied Gringoire,
trembling in every limb, "I swear to you that I have
never touched her, if that is what disturbs you."
 
"Then why do you talk of husband and wife?" said the priest.
Gringoire made haste to relate to him as succinctly as possible,
all that the reader already knows, his adventure in the
Court of Miracles and the broken-crock marriage.  It
appeared, moreover, that this marriage had led to no results
whatever, and that each evening the gypsy girl cheated him
of his nuptial right as on the first day.  "'Tis a mortification,"
he said in conclusion, "but that is because I have had the
misfortune to wed a virgin."
 
"What do you mean?" demanded the archdeacon, who had been
gradually appeased by this recital.
 
"'Tis very difficult to explain," replied the poet.  "It is
a superstition.  My wife is, according to what an old thief,
who is called among us the Duke of Egypt, has told me, a
foundling or a lost child, which is the same thing.  She wears
on her neck an amulet which, it is affirmed, will cause her to
meet her parents some day, but which will lose its virtue if
the young girl loses hers.  Hence it follows that both of us
remain very virtuous."
 
"So," resumed Claude, whose brow cleared more and more,
"you believe, Master Pierre, that this creature has not been
approached by any man?"
 
"What would you have a man do, Dom Claude, as against
a superstition?  She has got that in her head.  I assuredly
esteem as a rarity this nunlike prudery which is preserved
untamed amid those Bohemian girls who are so easily brought
into subjection.  But she has three things to protect her:
the Duke of Egypt, who has taken her under his safeguard,
reckoning, perchance, on selling her to some gay abb? all his
tribe, who hold her in singular veneration, like a Notre-Dame;
and a certain tiny poignard, which the buxom dame always
wears about her, in some nook, in spite of the ordinances of
the provost, and which one causes to fly out into her hands
by squeezing her waist.  'Tis a proud wasp, I can tell you!"
 
The archdeacon pressed Gringoire with questions.
 
La Esmeralda, in the judgment of Gringoire, was an inoffensive
and charming creature, pretty, with the exception of a
pout which was peculiar to her; a na?e and passionate damsel,
ignorant of everything and enthusiastic about everything;
not yet aware of the difference between a man and a woman,
even in her dreams; made like that; wild especially over
dancing, noise, the open air; a sort of woman bee, with
invisible wings on her feet, and living in a whirlwind.  She
owed this nature to the wandering life which she had always
led.  Gringoire had succeeded in learning that, while a mere
child, she had traversed Spain and Catalonia, even to Sicily;
he believed that she had even been taken by the caravan of
Zingari, of which she formed a part, to the kingdom of Algiers,
a country situated in Achaia, which country adjoins, on one
side Albania and Greece; on the other, the Sicilian Sea, which
is the road to Constantinople.  The Bohemians, said Gringoire,
were vassals of the King of Algiers, in his quality of chief of
the White Moors.  One thing is certain, that la Esmeralda
had come to France while still very young, by way of
Hungary.  From all these countries the young girl had brought
back fragments of queer jargons, songs, and strange ideas,
which made her language as motley as her costume, half
Parisian, half African.  However, the people of the quarters
which she frequented loved her for her gayety, her daintiness,
her lively manners, her dances, and her songs.  She believed
herself to be hated, in all the city, by but two persons, of
whom she often spoke in terror: the sacked nun of the
Tour-Roland, a villanous recluse who cherished some secret
grudge against these gypsies, and who cursed the poor dancer
every time that the latter passed before her window; and a
priest, who never met her without casting at her looks and
words which frightened her.
 
The mention of this last circumstance disturbed the
archdeacon greatly, though Gringoire paid no attention to
his perturbation; to such an extent had two months sufficed
to cause the heedless poet to forget the singular details of
the evening on which he had met the gypsy, and the presence
of the archdeacon in it all.  Otherwise, the little dancer
feared nothing; she did not tell fortunes, which protected
her against those trials for magic which were so frequently
instituted against gypsy women.  And then, Gringoire held the
position of her brother, if not of her husband.  After all,
the philosopher endured this sort of platonic marriage very
patiently.  It meant a shelter and bread at least.  Every
morning, he set out from the lair of the thieves, generally
with the gypsy; he helped her make her collections of
targes* and little blanks** in the squares; each evening he
returned to the same roof with her, allowed her to bolt herself
into her little chamber, and slept the sleep of the just.  A
very sweet existence, taking it all in all, he said, and well
adapted to revery.  And then, on his soul and conscience, the
philosopher was not very sure that he was madly in love with
the gypsy.  He loved her goat almost as dearly.  It was a
charming animal, gentle, intelligent, clever; a learned
goat.  Nothing was more common in the Middle Ages than these
learned animals, which amazed people greatly, and often led
their instructors to the stake.  But the witchcraft of the
goat with the golden hoofs was a very innocent species of
magic.  Gringoire explained them to the archdeacon, whom these
details seemed to interest deeply.  In the majority of cases,
it was sufficient to present the tambourine to the goat in
such or such a manner, in order to obtain from him the trick
desired.  He had been trained to this by the gypsy, who
possessed, in these delicate arts, so rare a talent that two
months had sufficed to teach the goat to write, with movable
letters, the word "Phoebus."
 
 
*  An ancient Burgundian coin.
 
** An ancient French coin.
 
 
"'Phoebus!'" said the priest; "why 'Phoebus'?"
 
"I know not," replied Gringoire.  "Perhaps it is a word
which she believes to be endowed with some magic and secret
virtue.  She often repeats it in a low tone when she thinks
that she is alone."
 
"Are you sure," persisted Claude, with his penetrating
glance, "that it is only a word and not a name?"
 
"The name of whom?" said the poet.
 
"How should I know?" said the priest.
 
"This is what I imagine, messire.  These Bohemians are
something like Guebrs, and adore the sun.  Hence, Phoebus."
 
"That does not seem so clear to me as to you, Master Pierre."
 
"After all, that does not concern me.  Let her mumble her
Phoebus at her pleasure.  One thing is certain, that Djali loves
me almost as much as he does her."
 
"Who is Djali?"
 
"The goat."
 
The archdeacon dropped his chin into his hand, and appeared
to reflect for a moment.  All at once he turned abruptly
to Gringoire once more.
 
"And do you swear to me that you have not touched her?"
 
"Whom?" said Gringoire; "the goat?"
 
"No, that woman."
 
"My wife?  I swear to you that I have not."
 
"You are often alone with her?"
 
"A good hour every evening."
 
Porn Claude frowned.
 
"Oh! oh! ~Solus cum sola non cogitabuntur orare Pater Noster~."
 
"Upon my soul, I could say the ~Pater~, and the ~Ave Maria~,
and the ~Credo in Deum patrem omnipotentem~ without her
paying any more attention to me than a chicken to a church."
 
"Swear to me, by the body of your mother," repeated the
archdeacon violently, "that you have not touched that creature
with even the tip of your finger."
 
"I will also swear it by the head of my father, for the two
things have more affinity between them.  But, my reverend
master, permit me a question in my turn."
 
"Speak, sir."
 
"What concern is it of yours?"
 
The archdeacon's pale face became as crimson as the cheek
of a young girl.  He remained for a moment without answering;
then, with visible embarrassment,--
 
"Listen, Master Pierre Gringoire.  You are not yet damned,
so far as I know.  I take an interest in you, and wish you
well.  Now the least contact with that Egyptian of the demon
would make you the vassal of Satan.  You know that 'tis
always the body which ruins the soul.  Woe to you if you
approach that woman!  That is all."
 
"I tried once," said Gringoire, scratching his ear; "it was
the first day: but I got stung."
 
"You were so audacious, Master Pierre?" and the priest's
brow clouded over again.
 
"On another occasion," continued the poet, with a smile, "I
peeped through the keyhole, before going to bed, and I beheld
the most delicious dame in her shift that ever made a bed
creak under her bare foot."
 
"Go to the devil!" cried the priest, with a terrible look;
and, giving the amazed Gringoire a push on the shoulders, he
plunged, with long strides, under the gloomiest arcades of the
cathedral.
 
 
 
CHAPTER III. THE BELLS.
 
After the morning in the pillory, the neighbors of Notre-
Dame thought they noticed that Quasimodo's ardor for
ringing had grown cool.  Formerly, there had been peals for
every occasion, long morning serenades, which lasted from
prime to compline; peals from the belfry for a high mass,
rich scales drawn over the smaller bells for a wedding, for a
christening, and mingling in the air like a rich embroidery of
all sorts of charming sounds.  The old church, all vibrating
and sonorous, was in a perpetual joy of bells.  One was
constantly conscious of the presence of a spirit of noise and
caprice, who sang through all those mouths of brass.  Now
that spirit seemed to have departed; the cathedral seemed
gloomy, and gladly remained silent; festivals and funerals
had the simple peal, dry and bare, demanded by the ritual,
nothing more.  Of the double noise which constitutes a
church, the organ within, the bell without, the organ alone
remained.  One would have said that there was no longer
a musician in the belfry.  Quasimodo was always there,
nevertheless; what, then, had happened to him?  Was it that
the shame and despair of the pillory still lingered in the
bottom of his heart, that the lashes of his tormentor's whip
reverberated unendingly in his soul, and that the sadness of
such treatment had wholly extinguished in him even his passion
for the bells? or was it that Marie had a rival in the heart
of the bellringer of Notre-Dame, and that the great bell and
her fourteen sisters were neglected for something more amiable
and more beautiful?
 
It chanced that, in the year of grace 1482, Annunciation
Day fell on Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of March.  That day
the air was so pure and light that Quasimodo felt some
returning affection for his bells.  He therefore ascended
the northern tower while the beadle below was opening wide
the doors of the church, which were then enormous panels of
stout wood, covered with leather, bordered with nails of gilded
iron, and framed in carvings "very artistically elaborated."
 
On arriving in the lofty bell chamber, Quasimodo gazed for
some time at the six bells and shook his head sadly, as though
groaning over some foreign element which had interposed
itself in his heart between them and him.  But when he had
set them to swinging, when he felt that cluster of bells
moving under his hand, when he saw, for he did not hear it,
the palpitating octave ascend and descend that sonorous scale,
like a bird hopping from branch to branch; when the demon
Music, that demon who shakes a sparkling bundle of strette,
trills and arpeggios, had taken possession of the poor deaf
man, he became happy once more, he forgot everything, and
his heart expanding, made his face beam.
 
He went and came, he beat his hands together, he ran from
rope to rope, he animated the six singers with voice and
gesture, like the leader of an orchestra who is urging on
intelligent musicians.
 
"Go on," said he, "go on, go on, Gabrielle, pour out all thy
noise into the Place, 'tis a festival to-day.  No laziness,
Thibauld; thou art relaxing; go on, go on, then, art thou rusted,
thou sluggard?  That is well! quick! quick! let not thy
clapper be seen!  Make them all deaf like me.  That's it,
Thibauld, bravely done!  Guillaume!  Guillaume! thou art
the largest, and Pasquier is the smallest, and Pasquier does
best.  Let us wager that those who hear him will understand
him better than they understand thee.  Good! good! my
Gabrielle, stoutly, more stoutly!  Eli!  what are you doing up
aloft there, you two Moineaux (sparrows)?  I do not see you
making the least little shred of noise.  What is the meaning
of those beaks of copper which seem to be gaping when they
should sing?  Come, work now, 'tis the Feast of the
Annunciation.  The sun is fine, the chime must be fine
also.  Poor Guillaume! thou art all out of breath, my
big fellow!"
 
He was wholly absorbed in spurring on his bells, all six of
which vied with each other in leaping and shaking their
shining haunches, like a noisy team of Spanish mules, pricked
on here and there by the apostrophes of the muleteer.
 
All at once, on letting his glance fall between the large
slate scales which cover the perpendicular wall of the bell
tower at a certain height, he beheld on the square a young
girl, fantastically dressed, stop, spread out on the ground a
carpet, on which a small goat took up its post, and a group of
spectators collect around her.  This sight suddenly changed
the course of his ideas, and congealed his enthusiasm as a
breath of air congeals melted rosin.  He halted, turned his
back to the bells, and crouched down behind the projecting
roof of slate, fixing upon the dancer that dreamy, sweet, and
tender look which had already astonished the archdeacon on
one occasion.  Meanwhile, the forgotten bells died away
abruptly and all together, to the great disappointment of the
lovers of bell ringing, who were listening in good faith to the
peal from above the Pont du Change, and who went away
dumbfounded, like a dog who has been offered a bone and
given a stone.
 
 
 
CHAPTER IV. ~ANArKH~.
 
It chanced that upon a fine morning in this same month of
March, I think it was on Saturday the 29th, Saint Eustache's
day, our young friend the student, Jehan Frollo du Moulin,
perceived, as he was dressing himself, that his breeches, which
contained his purse, gave out no metallic ring.  "Poor purse,"
he said, drawing it from his fob, "what! not the smallest
parisis! how cruelly the dice, beer-pots, and Venus have
depleted thee!  How empty, wrinkled, limp, thou art!  Thou
resemblest the throat of a fury!  I ask you, Messer Cicero,
and Messer Seneca, copies of whom, all dog's-eared, I behold
scattered on the floor, what profits it me to know, better
than any governor of the mint, or any Jew on the Pont aux
Changeurs, that a golden crown stamped with a crown is worth
thirty-five unzains of twenty-five sous, and eight deniers
parisis apiece, and that a crown stamped with a crescent is
worth thirty-six unzains of twenty-six sous, six deniers
tournois apiece, if I have not a single wretched black liard
to risk on the double-six!  Oh!  Consul Cicero! this is no
calamity from which one extricates one's self with periphrases,
~quemadmodum~, and ~verum enim vero~!"
 
He dressed himself sadly.  An idea had occurred to him as
he laced his boots, but he rejected it at first; nevertheless,
it returned, and he put on his waistcoat wrong side out, an
evident sign of violent internal combat.  At last he dashed his
cap roughly on the floor, and exclaimed: "So much the worse!
Let come of it what may.  I am going to my brother!  I
shall catch a sermon, but I shall catch a crown."
 
Then be hastily donned his long jacket with furred half-
sleeves, picked up his cap, and went out like a man driven
to desperation.
 
He descended the Rue de la Harpe toward the City.  As he
passed the Rue de la Huchette, the odor of those admirable
spits, which were incessantly turning, tickled his olfactory
apparatus, and he bestowed a loving glance toward the
Cyclopean roast, which one day drew from the Franciscan friar,
Calatagirone, this pathetic exclamation: ~Veramente, queste
rotisserie sono cosa stupenda~!*  But Jehan had not the
wherewithal to buy a breakfast, and he plunged, with a
profound sigh, under the gateway of the Petit-Ch?elet, that
enormous double trefoil of massive towers which guarded the
entrance to the City.
 
 
*  Truly, these roastings are a stupendous thing!
 
 
He did not even take the trouble to cast a stone in passing,
as was the usage, at the miserable statue of that P?inet
Leclerc who had delivered up the Paris of Charles VI. to the
English, a crime which his effigy, its face battered with
stones and soiled with mud, expiated for three centuries at
the corner of the Rue de la Harpe and the Rue de Buci, as in
an eternal pillory.
 
The Petit-Pont traversed, the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevi?e
crossed, Jehan de Molendino found himself in front of Notre-
Dame.  Then indecision seized upon him once more, and he
paced for several minutes round the statue of M. Legris,
repeating to himself with anguish: "The sermon is sure, the
crown is doubtful."
 
He stopped a beadle who emerged from the cloister,--"Where
is monsieur the archdeacon of Josas?"
 
"I believe that he is in his secret cell in the tower," said
the beadle; "I should advise you not to disturb him there,
unless you come from some one like the pope or monsieur the king."
 
Jehan clapped his hands.
 
"~B?liable~! here's a magnificent chance to see the famous
sorcery cell!"
 
This reflection having brought him to a decision, he plunged
resolutely into the small black doorway, and began the
ascent of the spiral of Saint-Gilles, which leads to the upper
stories of the tower.  "I am going to see," he said to himself
on the way.  "By the ravens of the Holy Virgin! it must
needs be a curious thing, that cell which my reverend brother
hides so secretly!  'Tis said that he lights up the kitchens
of hell there, and that he cooks the philosopher's stone there
over a hot fire.  ~B?ieu~!  I care no more for the philosopher's
stone than for a pebble, and I would rather find over his furnace
an omelette of Easter eggs and bacon, than the biggest
philosopher's stone in the world."'
 
On arriving at the gallery of slender columns, he took
breath for a moment, and swore against the interminable
staircase by I know not how many million cartloads of devils;
then he resumed his ascent through the narrow door of the
north tower, now closed to the public.  Several moments
after passing the bell chamber, he came upon a little
landing-place, built in a lateral niche, and under the vault
of a low, pointed door, whose enormous lock and strong iron
bars he was enabled to see through a loophole pierced in the
opposite circular wall of the staircase.  Persons desirous of
visiting this door at the present day will recognize it by this
inscription engraved in white letters on the black wall: "J'ADORE
CORALIE, 1823.  SIGNE UGENE."  "Sign? stands in the text.
 
"Ugh!" said the scholar; "'tis here, no doubt."
 
The key was in the lock, the door was very close to him;
he gave it a gentle push and thrust his head through the opening.
 
The reader cannot have failed to turn over the admirable
works of Rembrandt, that Shakespeare of painting.  Amid so
many marvellous engravings, there is one etching in particular,
which is supposed to represent Doctor Faust, and which
it is impossible to contemplate without being dazzled.  It
represents a gloomy cell; in the centre is a table loaded
with hideous objects; skulls, spheres, alembics, compasses,
hieroglyphic parchments.  The doctor is before this table clad
in his large coat and covered to the very eyebrows with his
furred cap.  He is visible only to his waist.  He has half
risen from his immense arm-chair, his clenched fists rest on
the table, and he is gazing with curiosity and terror at a large
luminous circle, formed of magic letters, which gleams from
the wall beyond, like the solar spectrum in a dark chamber.
This cabalistic sun seems to tremble before the eye, and fills
the wan cell with its mysterious radiance.  It is horrible and
it is beautiful.
 
Something very similar to Faust's cell presented itself to
Jehan's view, when he ventured his head through the half-
open door.  It also was a gloomy and sparsely lighted retreat.
There also stood a large arm-chair and a large table, compasses,
alembics, skeletons of animals suspended from the ceiling,
a globe rolling on the floor, hippocephali mingled
promiscuously with drinking cups, in which quivered leaves
of gold, skulls placed upon vellum checkered with figures and
characters, huge manuscripts piled up wide open, without
mercy on the cracking corners of the parchment; in short, all
the rubbish of science, and everywhere on this confusion dust
and spiders' webs; but there was no circle of luminous letters,
no doctor in an ecstasy contemplating the flaming vision,
as the eagle gazes upon the sun.
 
Nevertheless, the cell was not deserted.  A man was seated
in the arm-chair, and bending over the table.  Jehan, to whom
his back was turned, could see only his shoulders and the
back of his skull; but he had no difficulty in recognizing that
bald head, which nature had provided with an eternal tonsure,
as though desirous of marking, by this external symbol, the
archdeacon's irresistible clerical vocation.
 
Jehan accordingly recognized his brother; but the door
had been opened so softly, that nothing warned Dom Claude of
his presence.  The inquisitive scholar took advantage of this
circumstance to examine the cell for a few moments at his
leisure.  A large furnace, which he had not at first observed,
stood to the left of the arm-chair, beneath the window.  The
ray of light which penetrated through this aperture made its
way through a spider's circular web, which tastefully inscribed
its delicate rose in the arch of the window, and in the centre
of which the insect architect hung motionless, like the hub
of this wheel of lace.  Upon the furnace were accumulated
in disorder, all sorts of vases, earthenware bottles, glass
retorts, and mattresses of charcoal.  Jehan observed, with a
sigh, that there was no frying-pan.  "How cold the kitchen
utensils are!" he said to himself.
 
In fact, there was no fire in the furnace, and it seemed as
though none had been lighted for a long time.  A glass mask,
which Jehan noticed among the utensils of alchemy, and
which served no doubt, to protect the archdeacon's face when
he was working over some substance to be dreaded, lay in one
corner covered with dust and apparently forgotten.  Beside it
lay a pair of bellows no less dusty, the upper side of which
bore this inscription incrusted in copper letters: SPIRA SPERA.
 
Other inscriptions were written, in accordance with the
fashion of the hermetics, in great numbers on the walls; some
traced with ink, others engraved with a metal point.  There
were, moreover, Gothic letters, Hebrew letters, Greek letters,
and Roman letters, pell-mell; the inscriptions overflowed at
haphazard, on top of each other, the more recent effacing the
more ancient, and all entangled with each other, like the
branches in a thicket, like pikes in an affray.  It was, in
fact, a strangely confused mingling of all human philosophies,
all reveries, all human wisdom.  Here and there one shone
out from among the rest like a banner among lance heads.
Generally, it was a brief Greek or Roman device, such as the
Middle Ages knew so well how to formulate.--~Unde?  Inde?--Homo
homini monstrurn-Ast'ra, castra, nomen, numen.--Meya Bibklov,
ueya xaxov.--Sapere aude.  Fiat ubi vult~--etc.; sometimes
a word devoid of all apparent sense, ~Avayxoqpayia~, which
possibly contained a bitter allusion to the regime of the
cloister; sometimes a simple maxim of clerical discipline
formulated in a regular hexameter ~Coelestem dominum terrestrem
dicite dominum~.  There was also Hebrew jargon, of which
Jehan, who as yet knew but little Greek, understood nothing;
and all were traversed in every direction by stars, by
figures of men or animals, and by intersecting triangles; and
this contributed not a little to make the scrawled wall of the
cell resemble a sheet of paper over which a monkey had
drawn back and forth a pen filled with ink.
 
The whole chamber, moreover, presented a general aspect
of abandonment and dilapidation; and the bad state of the
utensils induced the supposition that their owner had long
been distracted from his labors by other preoccupations.
Meanwhile, this master, bent over a vast manuscript,
ornamented with fantastical illustrations, appeared to be
tormented by an idea which incessantly mingled with his
meditations.  That at least was Jehan's idea, when he heard him
exclaim, with the thoughtful breaks of a dreamer thinking
aloud,--
 
"Yes, Manou said it, and Zoroaster taught it! the sun is
born from fire, the moon from the sun; fire is the soul
of the universe; its elementary atoms pour forth and flow
incessantly upon the world through infinite channels!  At
the point where these currents intersect each other in the
heavens, they produce light; at their points of intersection
on earth, they produce gold.  Light, gold; the same thing!
From fire to the concrete state.  The difference between the
visible and the palpable, between the fluid and the solid in
the same substance, between water and ice, nothing more.
These are no dreams; it is the general law of nature.  But
what is one to do in order to extract from science the secret
of this general law?  What! this light which inundates my
hand is gold!  These same atoms dilated in accordance with
a certain law need only be condensed in accordance with
another law.  How is it to be done?  Some have fancied by
burying a ray of sunlight, Averro?,--yes, 'tis Averro?,--
Averro? buried one under the first pillar on the left of the
sanctuary of the Koran, in the great Mahometan mosque of
Cordova; but the vault cannot he opened for the purpose of
ascertaining whether the operation has succeeded, until after
the lapse of eight thousand years.
 
"The devil!" said Jehan, to himself, "'tis a long while to
wait for a crown!"
 
"Others have thought," continued the dreamy archdeacon,
"that it would be better worth while to operate upon a
ray of Sirius.  But 'tis exceeding hard to obtain this
ray pure, because of the simultaneous presence of other
stars whose rays mingle with it.  Flamel esteemed it more
simple to operate upon terrestrial fire.  Flamel! there's
predestination in the name!  ~Flamma~! yes, fire.  All lies
there.  The diamond is contained in the carbon, gold is in the
fire.  But how to extract it?  Magistri affirms that there are
certain feminine names, which possess a charm so sweet and
mysterious, that it suffices to pronounce them during the
operation.  Let us read what Manon says on the matter: 'Where
women are honored, the divinities are rejoiced; where they are
despised, it is useless to pray to God.  The mouth of a woman
is constantly pure; it is a running water, it is a ray of
sunlight.  The name of a woman should be agreeable, sweet,
fanciful; it should end in long vowels, and resemble words
of benediction.'  Yes, the sage is right; in truth, Maria,
Sophia, la Esmeral--Damnation! always that thought!"
 
And he closed the book violently.
 
He passed his hand over his brow, as though to brush away
the idea which assailed him; then he took from the table a
nail and a small hammer, whose handle was curiously painted
with cabalistic letters.
 
"For some time," he said with a bitter smile, "I have failed
in all my experiments! one fixed idea possesses me, and sears
my brain like fire.  I have not even been able to discover the
secret of Cassiodorus, whose lamp burned without wick and
without oil.  A simple matter, nevertheless--"
 
"The deuce!" muttered Jehan in his beard.
 
"Hence," continued the priest, "one wretched thought is
sufficient to render a man weak and beside himself!  Oh!
how Claude Pernelle would laugh at me.  She who could not
turn Nicholas Flamel aside, for one moment, from his pursuit
of the great work!  What!  I hold in my hand the magic
hammer of Z?hi?? at every blow dealt by the formidable
rabbi, from the depths of his cell, upon this nail, that
one of his enemies whom he had condemned, were he a thousand
leagues away, was buried a cubit deep in the earth which
swallowed him.  The King of France himself, in consequence
of once having inconsiderately knocked at the door of the
thermaturgist, sank to the knees through the pavement of
his own Paris.  This took place three centuries ago.  Well!
I possess the hammer and the nail, and in my hands they are
utensils no more formidable than a club in the hands of a
maker of edge tools.  And yet all that is required is to find
the magic word which Z?hi??pronounced when he struck
his nail."
 
"What nonsense!" thought Jehan.
 
"Let us see, let us try!" resumed the archdeacon briskly.
"Were I to succeed, I should behold the blue spark flash
from the head of the nail.  Emen-H?an!  Emen-H?an!
That's not it.  Sig?ni!  Sig?ni!  May this nail open the
tomb to any one who bears the name of Phoebus!  A curse
upon it!  Always and eternally the same idea!"
 
And he flung away the hammer in a rage.  Then he sank
down so deeply on the arm-chair and the table, that Jehan
lost him from view behind the great pile of manuscripts.  For
the space of several minutes, all that he saw was his fist
convulsively clenched on a book.  Suddenly, Dom Claude sprang
up, seized a compass and engraved in silence upon the wall in
capital letters, this Greek word
 
         ~ANArKH~.
 
"My brother is mad," said Jehan to himself; "it would
have been far more simple to write ~Fatum~, every one is not
obliged to know Greek."
 
The archdeacon returned and seated himself in his armchair,
and placed his head on both his hands, as a sick man does,
whose head is heavy and burning.
 
The student watched his brother with surprise.  He did not
know, he who wore his heart on his sleeve, he who observed
only the good old law of Nature in the world, he who allowed
his passions to follow their inclinations, and in whom the lake
of great emotions was always dry, so freely did he let it off
each day by fresh drains,--he did not know with what fury
the sea of human passions ferments and boils when all egress
is denied to it, how it accumulates, how it swells, how it
overflows, how it hollows out the heart; how it breaks in inward
sobs, and dull convulsions, until it has rent its dikes and
burst its bed.  The austere and glacial envelope of Claude
Frollo, that cold surface of steep and inaccessible virtue,
had always deceived Jehan.  The merry scholar had never
dreamed that there was boiling lava, furious and profound,
beneath the snowy brow of AEtna.
 
We do not know whether he suddenly became conscious of
these things; but, giddy as he was, he understood that he had
seen what he ought not to have seen, that he had just surprised
the soul of his elder brother in one of its most secret
altitudes, and that Claude must not be allowed to know it.
Seeing that the archdeacon had fallen back into his former
immobility, he withdrew his head very softly, and made some
noise with his feet outside the door, like a person who has
just arrived and is giving warning of his approach.
 
"Enter!" cried the archdeacon, from the interior of his
cell; "I was expecting you.  I left the door unlocked
expressly; enter Master Jacques!"
 
The scholar entered boldly.  The archdeacon, who was very
much embarrassed by such a visit in such a place, trembled
in his arm-chair.  "What! 'tis you, Jehan?"
 
"'Tis a J, all the same," said the scholar, with his ruddy,
merry, and audacious face.
 
Dom Claude's visage had resumed its severe expression.
 
"What are you come for?"
 
"Brother," replied the scholar, making an effort to assume
a decent, pitiful, and modest mien, and twirling his cap in his
hands with an innocent air; "I am come to ask of you--"
 
"What?"
 
"A little lecture on morality, of which I stand greatly in
need," Jehan did not dare to add aloud,--"and a little money
of which I am in still greater need."  This last member of
his phrase remained unuttered.
 
"Monsieur," said the archdeacon, in a cold tone, "I am greatly
displeased with you."
 
"Alas!" sighed the scholar.
 
Dom Claude made his arm-chair describe a quarter circle,
and gazed intently at Jehan.
 
"I am very glad to see you."
 
This was a formidable exordium.  Jehan braced himself
for a rough encounter.
 
"Jehan, complaints are brought me about you every day.
What affray was that in which you bruised with a cudgel a
little vicomte, Albert de Ramonchamp?"
 
"Oh!" said Jehan, "a vast thing that!  A malicious page
amused himself by splashing the scholars, by making his
horse gallop through the mire!"
 
"Who," pursued the archdeacon, "is that Mahiet Fargel,
whose gown you have torn?  ~Tunicam dechiraverunt~, saith
the complaint."
 
"Ah bah! a wretched cap of a Montaigu!  Isn't that it?"
 
"The compl