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 Grève

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

BOOR 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

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 Hôtel de Bourbon, with a very "pretty

morality, allegorical satire, and farce," while a driving rain

drenched the magnificent tapestries at his door.

What put the "whole population of Paris in commotion," as

Jehan de Troyes expresses it, on the sixth of January, was

the double solemnity, united from time immemorial, of the

Epiphany and the Feast of Fools.

On that day, there was to be a bonfire on the Place de

Grève, a maypole at the Chapelle de Braque, and a mystery at

the Palais de Justice. It had been cried, to the sound of the

trumpet, the preceding evening at all the cross roads, by the

provost's men, clad in handsome, short, sleeveless coats of

violet camelot, with large white crosses upon their breasts.

So the crowd of citizens, male and female, having closed

their houses and shops, thronged from every direction, at

early morn, towards some one of the three spots designated.

Each had made his choice; one, the bonfire; another, the

maypole; another, the mystery play. It must be stated, in

honor of the good sense of the loungers of Paris, that the

greater part of this crowd directed their steps towards the

bonfire, which was quite in season, or towards the mystery

play, which was to be presented in the grand hall of the

Palais de Justice (the courts of law), which was well roofed

and walled; and that the curious left the poor, scantily flowered

maypole to shiver all alone beneath the sky of January,

in the cemetery of the Chapel of Braque.

The populace thronged the avenues of the law courts in

particular, because they knew that the Flemish ambassadors,

who had arrived two days previously, intended to be present

at the representation of the mystery, and at the election of

the Pope of the Fools, which was also to take place in the

grand hall.

It was no easy matter on that day, to force one's way into

that grand hall, although it was then reputed to be the largest

covered enclosure in the world (it is true that Sauval had not

yet measured the grand hall of the Château of Montargis).

The palace place, encumbered with people, offered to the

curious gazers at the windows the aspect of a sea; into which

five or six streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged

every moment fresh floods of heads. The waves of this

crowd, augmented incessantly, dashed against the angles of

the houses which projected here and there, like so many

promontories, into the irregular basin of the place. In the

centre of the lofty Gothic* façade of the palace, the grand

staircase, incessantly ascended and descended by a double

current, which, after parting on the intermediate landing-place,

flowed in broad waves along its lateral slopes,--the grand

staircase, I say, trickled incessantly into the place, like a

cascade into a lake. The cries, the laughter, the trampling

of those thousands of feet, produced a great noise and a great

clamor. From time to time, this noise and clamor redoubled;

the current which drove the crowd towards the grand staircase

flowed backwards, became troubled, formed whirlpools.

This was produced by the buffet of an archer, or the horse of

one of the provost's sergeants, which kicked to restore order;

an admirable tradition which the provostship has bequeathed

to the constablery, the constablery to the ~maréchaussée~, the

~maréchaussée~ to our ~gendarmeri~ of Paris.

* 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, Théophile's

quatrain,--

"Sure, 'twas but a sorry game

When at Paris, Dame Justice,

Through having eaten too much spice,

Set the palace all aflame."

Whatever may be thought of this triple explanation, political,

physical, and poetical, of the burning of the law courts in

1618, the unfortunate fact of the fire is certain. Very little

to-day remains, thanks to this catastrophe,--thanks, above

all, to the successive restorations which have completed what

it spared,--very little remains of that first dwelling of the

kings of France,--of that elder palace of the Louvre, already

so old in the time of Philip the Handsome, that they sought

there for the traces of the magnificent buildings erected by

King Robert and described by Helgaldus. Nearly everything

has disappeared. What has become of the chamber of the

chancellery, where Saint Louis consummated his marriage?

the garden where he administered justice, "clad in a coat of

camelot, a surcoat of linsey-woolsey, without sleeves, and a

sur-mantle of black sandal, as he lay upon the carpet with

Joinville?" Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismond?

and that of Charles IV.? that of Jean the Landless?

Where is the staircase, from which Charles VI. promulgated

his edict of pardon? the slab where Marcel cut the throats of

Robert de Clermont and the Marshal of Champagne, in the

presence of the dauphin? the wicket where the bulls of

Pope Benedict were torn, and whence those who had brought

them departed decked out, in derision, in copes and mitres,

and making an apology through all Paris? and the grand

hall, with its gilding, its azure, its statues, its pointed arches,

its pillars, its immense vault, all fretted with carvings? and

the gilded chamber? and the stone lion, which stood at the

door, with lowered head and tail between his legs, like the

lions on the throne of Solomon, in the humiliated attitude

which befits force in the presence of justice? and the beautiful

doors? and the stained glass? and the chased ironwork,

which drove Biscornette to despair? and the delicate woodwork

of Hancy? What has time, what have men done with

these marvels? What have they given us in return for all

this Gallic history, for all this Gothic art? The heavy flattened

arches of M. de Brosse, that awkward architect of the

Saint-Gervais portal. So much for art; and, as for history,

we have the gossiping reminiscences of the great pillar, still

ringing with the tattle of the Patru.

It is not much. Let us return to the veritable grand hall

of the veritable old palace. The two extremities of this

gigantic parallelogram were occupied, the one by the famous

marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick that, as the

ancient land rolls--in a style that would have given Gargantua

an appetite--say, "such a slice of marble as was never

beheld in the world"; the other by the chapel where Louis XI.

had himself sculptured on his knees before the Virgin, and

whither he caused to be brought, without heeding the two

gaps thus made in the row of royal statues, the statues of

Charlemagne and of Saint Louis, two saints whom he supposed

to be great in favor in heaven, as kings of France.

This chapel, quite new, having been built only six years, was

entirely in that charming taste of delicate architecture, of

marvellous sculpture, of fine and deep chasing, which marks

with us the end of the Gothic era, and which is perpetuated

to about the middle of the sixteenth century in the fairylike

fancies of the Renaissance. The little open-work rose window,

pierced above the portal, was, in particular, a masterpiece

of lightness and grace; one would have pronounced it a

star of lace.

In the middle of the hall, opposite the great door, a platform

of gold brocade, placed against the wall, a special

entrance to which had been effected through a window in

the corridor of the gold chamber, had been erected for the

Flemish emissaries and the other great personages invited to

the presentation of the mystery play.

It was upon the marble table that the mystery was to be

enacted, as usual. It had been arranged for the purpose,

early in the morning; its rich slabs of marble, all scratched

by the heels of law clerks, supported a cage of carpenter's

work of considerable height, the upper surface of which,

within view of the whole hall, was to serve as the theatre,

and whose interior, masked by tapestries, was to take the

place of dressing-rooms for the personages of the piece. A

ladder, naively placed on the outside, was to serve as means

of communication between the dressing-room and the stage,

and lend its rude rungs to entrances as well as to exits.

There was no personage, however unexpected, no sudden

change, no theatrical effect, which was not obliged to mount

that ladder. Innocent and venerable infancy of art and

contrivances!

Four of the bailiff of the palace's sergeants, perfunctory

guardians of all the pleasures of the people, on days of festival

as well as on days of execution, stood at the four corners

of the marble table.

The piece was only to begin with the twelfth stroke of the

great palace clock sounding midday. It was very late, no

doubt, for a theatrical representation, but they had been

obliged to fix the hour to suit the convenience of the ambassadors.

Now, this whole multitude had been waiting since morning.

A goodly number of curious, good people had been shivering

since daybreak before the grand staircase of the palace;

some even affirmed that they had passed the night across

the threshold of the great door, in order to make sure that

they should be the first to pass in. The crowd grew more

dense every moment, and, like water, which rises above its

normal level, began to mount along the walls, to swell around

the pillars, to spread out on the entablatures, on the cornices,

on the window-sills, on all the salient points of the architecture,

on all the reliefs of the sculpture. Hence, discomfort,

impatience, weariness, the liberty of a day of cynicism and

folly, the quarrels which break forth for all sorts of causes--a

pointed elbow, an iron-shod shoe, the fatigue of long waiting--had

already, long before the hour appointed for the

arrival of the ambassadors, imparted a harsh and bitter

accent to the clamor of these people who were shut in, fitted

into each other, pressed, trampled upon, stifled. Nothing

was to be heard but imprecations on the Flemish, the provost

of the merchants, the Cardinal de Bourbon, the bailiff of the

courts, Madame Marguerite of Austria, the sergeants with

their rods, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Bishop

of Paris, the Pope of the Fools, the pillars, the statues, that

closed door, that open window; all to the vast amusement of

a band of scholars and lackeys scattered through the mass,

who mingled with all this discontent their teasing remarks,

and their malicious suggestions, and pricked the general bad

temper with a pin, so to speak.

Among the rest there was a group of those merry imps, who,

after smashing the glass in a window, had seated themselves

hardily on the entablature, and from that point despatched

their gaze and their railleries both within and without,

upon the throng in the hall, and the throng upon the Place.

It was easy to see, from their parodied gestures, their

ringing laughter, the bantering appeals which they exchanged

with their comrades, from one end of the hall to the other,

that these young clerks did not share the weariness and

fatigue of the rest of the spectators, and that they understood

very well the art of extracting, for their own private diversion

from that which they had under their eyes, a spectacle

which made them await the other with patience.

"Upon my soul, so it's you, 'Joannes Frollo de Molendino!'"

cried one of them, to a sort of little, light-haired

imp, with a well-favored and malign countenance, clinging to

the acanthus leaves of a capital; "you are well named John

of the Mill, for your two arms and your two legs have the air

of four wings fluttering on the breeze. How long have you

been here?"

"By the mercy of the devil," retorted Joannes Frollo,

"these four hours and more; and I hope that they will be

reckoned to my credit in purgatory. I heard the eight singers

of the King of Sicily intone the first verse of seven o'clock

mass in the Sainte-Chapelle."

"Fine singers!" replied the other, "with voices even more

pointed than their caps! Before founding a mass for Monsieur

Saint John, the king should have inquired whether

Monsieur Saint John likes Latin droned out in a Provençal

accent."

"He did it for the sake of employing those accursed singers

of the King of Sicily!" cried an old woman sharply from

among the crowd beneath the window. "I just put it to

you! A thousand ~livres parisi~ for a mass! and out of the tax

on sea fish in the markets of Paris, to boot!"

"Peace, old crone," said a tall, grave person, stopping up

his nose on the side towards the fishwife; "a mass had to be

founded. Would you wish the king to fall ill again?"

"Bravely spoken, Sire Gilles Lecornu, master furrier of

king's robes!" cried the little student, clinging to the

capital.

A shout of laughter from all the students greeted the

unlucky name of the poor furrier of the king's robes.

"Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!" said some.

"~Cornutus et hirsutus~, horned and hairy," another went on.

"He! of course," continued the small imp on the capital,

"What are they laughing at? An honorable man is Gilles

Lecornu, brother of Master Jehan Lecornu, provost of the

king's house, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, first porter of

the Bois de Vincennes,--all bourgeois of Paris, all married,

from father to son."

The gayety redoubled. The big furrier, without uttering a

word in reply, tried to escape all the eyes riveted upon him

from all sides; but he perspired and panted in vain; like a

wedge entering the wood, his efforts served only to bury still

more deeply in the shoulders of his neighbors, his large,

apoplectic face, purple with spite and rage.

At length one of these, as fat, short, and venerable as

himself, came to his rescue.

"Abomination! scholars addressing a bourgeois in that

fashion in my day would have been flogged with a fagot,

which would have afterwards been used to burn them."

The whole band burst into laughter.

"Holà hé! who is scolding so? Who is that screech owl of

evil fortune?"

"Hold, I know him" said one of them; "'tis Master

Andry Musnier."

"Because he is one of the four sworn booksellers of the

university!" said the other.

"Everything goes by fours in that shop," cried a third;

"the four nations, the four faculties, the four feasts, the four

procurators, the four electors, the four booksellers."

"Well," began Jean Frollo once more," we must play the

devil with them."*

* ~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! Holà hé! good day there!"

"How does he manage to be here, the old gambler? Has

he abandoned his dice?"

"How he trots along on his mule! her ears are not so long

as his!"

"Holà hé! good day, monsieur le recteur Thibaut! ~Tybalde

aleator~! Old fool! old gambler!"

"God preserve you! Did you throw double six often last

night?"

"Oh! what a decrepit face, livid and haggard and drawn

with the love of gambling and of dice!"

"Where are you bound for in that fashion, Thibaut, ~Tybalde

ad dados~, with your back turned to the university, and trotting

towards the town?"

"He is on his way, no doubt, to seek a lodging in the Rue

Thibautodé?"* 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 Thibautodé,

are you not, monsieur le recteur, gamester on the side of the

devil?"

Then came the turns of the other dignitaries.

"Down with the beadles! down with the mace-bearers!"

"Tell me, Robin Pouissepain, who is that yonder?"

"He is Gilbert de Suilly, ~Gilbertus de Soliaco~, the chancellor

of the College of Autun."

"Hold on, here's my shoe; you are better placed than I,

fling it in his face."

"~Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces~."

"Down with the six theologians, with their white surplices!"

"Are those the theologians? I thought they were the

white geese given by Sainte-Geneviève to the city, for the

fief of Roogny."

"Down with the doctors!"

"Down with the cardinal disputations, and quibblers!"

"My cap to you, Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève! You

have done me a wrong. 'Tis true; he gave my place in the

nation of Normandy to little Ascanio Falzapada, who comes

from the province of Bourges, since he is an Italian."

"That is an injustice," said all the scholars. "Down with

the Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève!"

"Ho hé! Master Joachim de Ladehors! Ho hé! Louis

Dahuille! Ho 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~!"

"Holà hé! Masters of Arts! All the beautiful black copes!

all the fine red copes!"

"They make a fine tail for the rector."

"One would say that he was a Doge of Venice on his way

to his bridal with the sea."

"Say, Jehan! here are the canons of Sainte-Geneviève!"

"To the deuce with the whole set of canons!"

"Abbé Claude Choart! Doctor Claude Choart! Are you in

search of Marie la Giffarde?"

"She is in the Rue de Glatigny."

"She is making the bed of the king of the debauchees."

She is paying her four deniers* ~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 Liénarde," said her neighbor,

pretty, fresh, and very brave, in consequence of being dressed

up in her best attire. "He is not a clerk, he is a layman;

you must not say master to him, but messire."

"Messire," said Liénarde.

The stranger approached the railing.

"What would you have of me, damsels?" he asked, with alacrity.

"Oh! nothing," replied Liénarde, in great confusion; "it

is my neighbor, Gisquette la Gencienne, who wishes to speak

with you."

"Not so," replied Gisquette, blushing; "it was Liénarde

who called you master; I only told her to say messire."

The two young girls dropped their eyes. The man, who

asked nothing better than to enter into conversation, looked

at them with a smile.

"So you have nothing to say to me, damsels?"

"Oh! nothing at all," replied Gisquette.

"Nothing," said Liénarde.

The tall, light-haired young man retreated a step; but the

two curious maidens had no mind to let slip their prize.

"Messire," said Gisquette, with the impetuosity of an

open sluice, or of a woman who has made up her mind,

"do you know that soldier who is to play the part of Madame

the Virgin in the mystery?"

"You mean the part of Jupiter?" replied the stranger.

"Hé! yes," said Liénarde, "isn't she stupid? So you know

Jupiter?"

"Michel Giborne?" replied the unknown; "yes, madam."

"He has a fine beard!" said Liénarde.

"Will what they are about to say here be fine?" inquired

Gisquette, timidly.

"Very fine, mademoiselle," replied the unknown, without

the slightest hesitation.

"What is it to be?" said Liénarde.

"'The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin,'--a morality,

if you please, damsel."

"Ah! that makes a difference," responded Liénarde.

A brief silence ensued--broken by the stranger.

"It is a perfectly new morality, and one which has never

yet been played."

"Then it is not the same one," said Gisquette, "that was

given two years ago, on the day of the entrance of monsieur

the legate, and where three handsome maids played the

parts--"

"Of sirens," said Liénarde.

"And all naked," added the young man.

Liénarde lowered her eyes modestly. Gisquette glanced at

her and did the same. He continued, with a smile,--

"It was a very pleasant thing to see. To-day it is a morality

made expressly for Madame the Demoiselle of Flanders."

"Will they sing shepherd songs?" inquired Gisquette.

"Fie!" said the stranger, "in a morality? you must not

confound styles. If it were a farce, well and good."

"That is a pity," resumed Gisquette. "That day, at the

Ponceau Fountain, there were wild men and women, who

fought and assumed many aspects, as they sang little motets

and bergerettes."

"That which is suitable for a legate," returned the stranger,

with a good deal of dryness, "is not suitable for a princess."

"And beside them," resumed Liénarde, "played many brass

instruments, making great melodies."

"And for the refreshment of the passers-by," continued

Gisquette, "the fountain spouted through three mouths,

wine, milk, and hippocrass, of which every one drank who

wished."

"And a little below the Ponceau, at the Trinity," pursued

Liénarde, "there was a passion performed, and without

any speaking."

"How well I remember that!" exclaimed Gisquette; "God

on the cross, and the two thieves on the right and the left."

Here the young gossips, growing warm at the memory of

the entrance of monsieur the legate, both began to talk at

once.

"And, further on, at the Painters' Gate, there were other

personages, very richly clad."

"And at the fountain of Saint-Innocent, that huntsman,

who was chasing a hind with great clamor of dogs and hunting-horns."

"And, at the Paris slaughter-houses, stages, representing

the fortress of Dieppe!"

"And when the legate passed, you remember, Gisquette?

they made the assault, and the English all had their

throats cut."

"And against the gate of the Châtelet, there were very fine

personages!"

"And on the Port au Change, which was all draped above!"

"And when the legate passed, they let fly on the bridge

more than two hundred sorts of birds; wasn't it beautiful,

Liénarde?"

"It will be better to-day," finally resumed their interlocutor,

who seemed to listen to them with impatience.

"Do you promise us that this mystery will be fine?" said

Gisquette.

"Without doubt," he replied; then he added, with a certain

emphasis,--"I am the author of it, damsels."

"Truly?" said the young girls, quite taken aback.

"Truly!" replied the poet, bridling a little; "that is, to

say, there are two of us; Jehan Marchand, who has sawed the

planks and erected the framework of the theatre and the

woodwork; and I, who have made the piece. My name is

Pierre Gringoire."

The author of the "Cid" could not have said "Pierre Corneille"

with more pride.

Our readers have been able to observe, that a certain

amount of time must have already elapsed from the moment

when Jupiter had retired beneath the tapestry to the instant

when the author of the new morality had thus abruptly

revealed himself to the innocent admiration of Gisquette

and Liénarde. Remarkable fact: that whole crowd, so

tumultuous but a few moments before, now waited amiably

on the word of the comedian; which proves the eternal truth,

still experienced every day in our theatres, that the best

means of making the public wait patiently is to assure them

that one is about to begin instantly.

However, scholar Johannes had not fallen asleep.

"Holà hé!" he shouted suddenly, in the midst of the peaceable

waiting which had followed the tumult. "Jupiter, Madame the

Virgin, buffoons of the devil! are you jeering at us?

The piece! the piece! commence or we will commence again!"

This was all that was needed.

The music of high and low instruments immediately became

audible from the interior of the stage; the tapestry was

raised; four personages, in motley attire and painted faces,

emerged from it, climbed the steep ladder of the theatre, and,

arrived upon the upper platform, arranged themselves in a

line before the public, whom they saluted with profound reverences;

then the symphony ceased.

The mystery was about to begin.

The four personages, after having reaped a rich reward

of applause for their reverences, began, in the midst of

profound silence, a prologue, which we gladly spare the

reader. Moreover, as happens in our own day, the public

was more occupied with the costumes that the actors wore

than with the roles that they were enacting; and, in truth,

they were right. All four were dressed in parti-colored robes

of yellow and white, which were distinguished from each other

only by the nature of the stuff; the first was of gold and silver

brocade; the second, of silk; the third, of wool; the fourth,

of linen. The first of these personages carried in his right

hand a sword; the second, two golden keys; the third, a pair

of scales; the fourth, a spade: and, in order to aid sluggish

minds which would not have seen clearly through the transparency

of these attributes, there was to be read, in large,

black letters, on the hem of the robe of brocade, MY NAME

IS NOBILITY; on the hem of the silken robe, MY NAME IS

CLERGY; on the hem of the woolen robe, MY NAME IS MERCHANDISE;

on the hem of the linen robe, MY NAME IS LABOR.

The sex of the two male characters was briefly indicated to

every judicious spectator, by their shorter robes, and by the

cap which they wore on their heads; while the two female

characters, less briefly clad, were covered with hoods.

Much ill-will would also have been required, not to

comprehend, through the medium of the poetry of the prologue, that

Labor was wedded to Merchandise, and Clergy to Nobility,

and that the two happy couples possessed in common a magnificent

golden dolphin, which they desired to adjudge to the

fairest only. So they were roaming about the world seeking

and searching for this beauty, and, after having successively

rejected the Queen of Golconda, the Princess of Trebizonde,

the daughter of the Grand Khan of Tartary, etc., Labor and

Clergy, Nobility and Merchandise, had come to rest upon the

marble table of the Palais de Justice, and to utter, in the

presence of the honest audience, as many sentences and

maxims as could then be dispensed at the Faculty of Arts,

at examinations, sophisms, determinances, figures, and acts,

where the masters took their degrees.

All this was, in fact, very fine.

Nevertheless, in that throng, upon which the four allegories

vied with each other in pouring out floods of metaphors,

there was no ear more attentive, no heart that palpitated

more, not an eye was more haggard, no neck more outstretched,

than the eye, the ear, the neck, and the heart of

the author, of the poet, of that brave Pierre Gringoire, who

had not been able to resist, a moment before, the joy of telling

his name to two pretty girls. He had retreated a few

paces from them, behind his pillar, and there he listened,

looked, enjoyed. The amiable applause which had greeted the

beginning of his prologue was still echoing in his bosom,

and he was completely absorbed in that species of ecstatic

contemplation with which an author beholds his ideas fall,

one by one, from the mouth of the actor into the vast silence

of the audience. Worthy Pierre Gringoire!

It pains us to say it, but this first ecstasy was speedily

disturbed. Hardly had Gringoire raised this intoxicating cup of

joy and triumph to his lips, when a drop of bitterness was

mingled with it.

A tattered mendicant, who could not collect any coins, lost

as he was in the midst of the crowd, and who had not probably

found sufficient indemnity in the pockets of his neighbors,

had hit upon the idea of perching himself upon some conspicuous

point, in order to attract looks and alms. He had,

accordingly, hoisted himself, during the first verses of the

prologue, with the aid of the pillars of the reserve gallery, to

the cornice which ran round the balustrade at its lower edge;

and there he had seated himself, soliciting the attention and

the pity of the multitude, with his rags and a hideous sore

which covered his right arm. However, he uttered not a word.

The silence which he preserved allowed the prologue to

proceed without hindrance, and no perceptible disorder would

have ensued, if ill-luck had not willed that the scholar Joannes

should catch sight, from the heights of his pillar, of the

mendicant and his grimaces. A wild fit of laughter took

possession of the young scamp, who, without caring that he

was interrupting the spectacle, and disturbing the universal

composure, shouted boldly,--

"Look! see that sickly creature asking alms!"

Any one who has thrown a stone into a frog pond, or fired a

shot into a covey of birds, can form an idea of the effect produced

by these incongruous words, in the midst of the general

attention. It made Gringoire shudder as though it had been

an electric shock. The prologue stopped short, and all heads

turned tumultuously towards the beggar, who, far from being

disconcerted by this, saw, in this incident, a good opportunity

for reaping his harvest, and who began to whine in

a doleful way, half closing his eyes the while,--"Charity,

please!"

"Well--upon my soul," resumed Joannes, "it's Clopin

Trouillefou! Holà 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 abbés of high lineage,

gallant, jovial, and given to carousing on occasion; and more

than once the good and devout women of Saint Germain

d' Auxerre, when passing at night beneath the brightly illuminated

windows of Bourbon, had been scandalized to hear the

same voices which had intoned vespers for them during the

day carolling, to the clinking of glasses, the bacchic proverb of

Benedict XII., that pope who had added a third crown to the

Tiara--~Bibamus papaliter~.

It was this justly acquired popularity, no doubt, which preserved

him on his entrance from any bad reception at the

hands of the mob, which had been so displeased but a moment

before, and very little disposed to respect a cardinal on

the very day when it was to elect a pope. But the Parisians

cherish little rancor; and then, having forced the beginning

of the play by their authority, the good bourgeois had got the

upper hand of the cardinal, and this triumph was sufficient

for them. Moreover, the Cardinal de Bourbon was a handsome

man,--he wore a fine scarlet robe, which he carried off

very well,--that is to say, he had all the women on his side,

and, consequently, the best half of the audience. Assuredly,

it would be injustice and bad taste to hoot a cardinal for having

come late to the spectacle, when he is a handsome man,

and when he wears his scarlet robe well.

He entered, then, bowed to those present with the hereditary

smile of the great for the people, and directed his course

slowly towards his scarlet velvet arm-chair, with the air of

thinking of something quite different. His cortege--what

we should nowadays call his staff--of bishops and abbés

invaded the estrade in his train, not without causing redoubled

tumult and curiosity among the audience. Each

man vied with his neighbor in pointing them out and naming

them, in seeing who should recognize at least one of them:

this one, the Bishop of Marseilles (Alaudet, if my memory

serves me right);--this one, the primicier of Saint-Denis;--this

one, Robert de Lespinasse, Abbé of Saint-Germain des

Prés, that libertine brother of a mistress of Louis XI.; all

with many errors and absurdities. As for the scholars, they

swore. This was their day, their feast of fools, their saturnalia,

the annual orgy of the corporation of Law clerks and of

the school. There was no turpitude which was not sacred on

that day. And then there were gay gossips in the crowd--Simone

Quatrelivres, Agnes la Gadine, and Rabine Piédebou.

Was it not the least that one could do to swear at one's ease

and revile the name of God a little, on so fine a day, in such

good company as dignitaries of the church and loose women?

So they did not abstain; and, in the midst of the uproar, there

was a frightful concert of blasphemies and enormities of all

the unbridled tongues, the tongues of clerks and students

restrained during the rest of the year, by the fear of the hot

iron of Saint Louis. Poor Saint Louis! how they set him at

defiance in his own court of law! Each one of them selected

from the new-comers on the platform, a black, gray, white,

or violet cassock as his target. Joannes Frollo de Molendin,

in his quality of brother to an archdeacon, boldly

attacked the scarlet; he sang in deafening tones, with his

impudent eyes fastened on the cardinal, "~Cappa repleta

mero~!"

All these details which we here lay bare for the edification

of the reader, were so covered by the general uproar, that

they were lost in it before reaching the reserved platforms;

moreover, they would have moved the cardinal but little, so

much a part of the customs were the liberties of that day.

Moreover, he had another cause for solicitude, and his mien

as wholly preoccupied with it, which entered the estrade

the same time as himself; this was the embassy from

Flanders.

Not that he was a profound politician, nor was he borrowing

trouble about the possible consequences of the marriage of

his cousin Marguerite de Bourgoyne to his cousin Charles,

Dauphin de Vienne; nor as to how long the good understanding

which had been patched up between the Duke of Austria

and the King of France would last; nor how the King of

England would take this disdain of his daughter. All that

troubled him but little; and he gave a warm reception every

evening to the wine of the royal vintage of Chaillot, without

a suspicion that several flasks of that same wine (somewhat

revised and corrected, it is true, by Doctor Coictier), cordially

offered to Edward IV. by Louis XI., would, some fine morning,

rid Louis XI. of Edward IV. "The much honored embassy

of Monsieur the Duke of Austria," brought the cardinal

none of these cares, but it troubled him in another direction.

It was, in fact, somewhat hard, and we have already hinted

at it on the second page of this book,--for him, Charles de

Bourbon, to be obliged to feast and receive cordially no one

knows what bourgeois;--for him, a cardinal, to receive

aldermen;--for him, a Frenchman, and a jolly companion, to

receive Flemish beer-drinkers,--and that in public! This

was, certainly, one of the most irksome grimaces that he had

ever executed for the good pleasure of the king.

So he turned toward the door, and with the best grace in

the world (so well had he trained himself to it), when the

usher announced, in a sonorous voice, "Messieurs the Envoys

of Monsieur the Duke of Austria." It is useless to add that

the whole hall did the same.

Then arrived, two by two, with a gravity which made a

contrast in the midst of the frisky ecclesiastical escort of

Charles de Bourbon, the eight and forty ambassadors of Maximilian

of Austria, having at their head the reverend Father

in God, Jehan, Abbot of Saint-Bertin, Chancellor of the

Golden Fleece, and Jacques de Goy, Sieur Dauby, Grand Bailiff

of Ghent. A deep silence settled over the assembly, accompanied

by stifled laughter at the preposterous names and all

the bourgeois designations which each of these personages

transmitted with imperturbable gravity to the usher, who then

tossed names and titles pell-mell and mutilated to the crowd

below. There were Master Loys Roelof, alderman of the city

of Louvain; Messire Clays d'Etuelde, alderman of Brussels;

Messire Paul de Baeust, Sieur de Voirmizelle, President of

Flanders; Master Jehan Coleghens, burgomaster of the city

of Antwerp; Master George de la Moere, first alderman of the

kuere of the city of Ghent; Master Gheldolf van der Hage,

first alderman of the ~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-Geneviève, the

cardinal's train-bearer.

Coppenole proudly saluted his eminence, who returned the

salute of the all-powerful bourgeois feared by Louis XI.

Then, while Guillaume Rym, a "sage and malicious man," as

Philippe de Comines puts it, watched them both with a smile

of raillery and superiority, each sought his place, the cardinal

quite abashed and troubled, Coppenole tranquil and haughty,

and thinking, no doubt, that his title of hosier was as good as

any other, after all, and that Marie of Burgundy, mother to

that Marguerite whom Coppenole was to-day bestowing in

marriage, would have been less afraid of the cardinal than of

the hosier; for it is not a cardinal who would have stirred up

a revolt among the men of Ghent against the favorites of the

daughter of Charles the Bold; it is not a cardinal who could

have fortified the populace with a word against her tears and

prayers, when the Maid of Flanders came to supplicate her

people in their behalf, even at the very foot of the scaffold;

while the hosier had only to raise his leather elbow, in order

to cause to fall your two heads, most illustrious seigneurs,

Guy d'Hymbercourt and Chancellor Guillaume Hugonet.

Nevertheless, all was over for the poor cardinal, and he was

obliged to quaff to the dregs the bitter cup of being in such

bad company.

The reader has, probably, not forgotten the impudent beggar

who had been clinging fast to the fringes of the cardinal's

gallery ever since the beginning of the prologue. The arrival

of the illustrious guests had by no means caused him to relax

his hold, and, while the prelates and ambassadors were packing

themselves into the stalls--like genuine Flemish herrings--he

settled himself at his ease, and boldly crossed his legs

on the architrave. The insolence of this proceeding was

extraordinary, yet no one noticed it at first, the attention of

all being directed elsewhere. He, on his side, perceived nothing

that was going on in the hall; he wagged his head with

the unconcern of a Neapolitan, repeating from time to time,

amid the clamor, as from a mechanical habit, "Charity,

please!" And, assuredly, he was, out of all those present,

the only one who had not deigned to turn his head at the

altercation between Coppenole and the usher. Now, chance

ordained that the master hosier of Ghent, with whom the

people were already in lively sympathy, and upon whom all

eyes were riveted--should come and seat himself in the front

row of the gallery, directly above the mendicant; and people

were not a little amazed to see the Flemish ambassador, on

concluding his inspection of the knave thus placed beneath

his eyes, bestow a friendly tap on that ragged shoulder. The

beggar turned round; there was surprise, recognition, a lighting

up of the two countenances, and so forth; then, without

paying the slightest heed in the world to the spectators, the

hosier and the wretched being began to converse in a low

tone, holding each other's hands, in the meantime, while the

rags of Clopin Trouillefou, spread out upon the cloth of gold

of the dais, produced the effect of a caterpillar on an orange.

The novelty of this singular scene excited such a murmur

of mirth and gayety in the hall, that the cardinal was not

slow to perceive it; he half bent forward, and, as from the

point where he was placed he could catch only an imperfect

view of Trouillerfou's ignominious doublet, he very naturally

imagined that the mendicant was asking alms, and, disgusted

with his audacity, he exclaimed: "Bailiff of the Courts, toss

me that knave into the river!"

"Cross of God! monseigneur the cardinal," said Coppenole,

without quitting Clopin's hand, "he's a friend of mine."

"Good! good!" shouted the populace. From that moment,

Master Coppenole enjoyed in Paris as in Ghent, "great favor

with the people; for men of that sort do enjoy it," says

Philippe de Comines, "when they are thus disorderly."

The cardinal bit his lips. He bent towards his neighbor,

the Abbé of Saint Geneviéve, and said to him in a low

tone,--"Fine ambassadors monsieur the archduke sends here, to

announce to us Madame Marguerite!"

"Your eminence," replied the abbé, "wastes your politeness

on these Flemish swine. ~Margaritas ante porcos~, pearls

before swine."

"Say rather," retorted the cardinal, with a smile, "~Porcos

ante Margaritam~, swine before the pearl."

The whole little court in cassocks went into ecstacies over

this play upon words. The cardinal felt a little relieved; he

was quits with Coppenole, he also had had his jest applauded.

Now, will those of our readers who possess the power of

generalizing an image or an idea, as the expression runs in

the style of to-day, permit us to ask them if they have formed

a very clear conception of the spectacle presented at this

moment, upon which we have arrested their attention, by the

vast parallelogram of the grand hall of the palace.

In the middle of the hall, backed against the western wall,

a large and magnificent gallery draped with cloth of gold, into

which enter in procession, through a small, arched door, grave

personages, announced successively by the shrill voice of an

usher. On the front benches were already a number of venerable

figures, muffled in ermine, velvet, and scarlet. Around

the dais--which remains silent and dignified--below, opposite,

everywhere, a great crowd and a great murmur. Thousands

of glances directed by the people on each face upon the

dais, a thousand whispers over each name. Certainly, the

spectacle is curious, and well deserves the attention of the

spectators. But yonder, quite at the end, what is that sort

of trestle work with four motley puppets upon it, and more

below? Who is that man beside the trestle, with a black

doublet and a pale face? Alas! my dear reader, it is Pierre

Gringoire and his prologue.

We have all forgotten him completely.

This is precisely what he feared.

From the moment of the cardinal's entrance, Gringoire had

never ceased to tremble for the safety of his prologue. At

first he had enjoined the actors, who had stopped in suspense,

to continue, and to raise their voices; then, perceiving that

no one was listening, he had stopped them; and, during the

entire quarter of an hour that the interruption lasted, he had

not ceased to stamp, to flounce about, to appeal to Gisquette

and Liénarde, and to urge his neighbors to the continuance

of the prologue; all in vain. No one quitted the cardinal,

the embassy, and the gallery--sole centre of this vast circle

of visual rays. We must also believe, and we say it with

regret, that the prologue had begun slightly to weary the

audience at the moment when his eminence had arrived,

and created a diversion in so terrible a fashion. After all,

on the gallery as well as on the marble table, the spectacle

was the same: the conflict of Labor and Clergy, of Nobility

and Merchandise. And many people preferred to see them

alive, breathing, moving, elbowing each other in flesh and

blood, in this Flemish embassy, in this Episcopal court,

under the cardinal's robe, under Coppenole's jerkin, than

painted, decked out, talking in verse, and, so to speak, stuffed

beneath the yellow amid white tunics in which Gringoire had

so ridiculously clothed them.

Nevertheless, when our poet beheld quiet reestablished

to some extent, he devised a stratagem which might have

redeemed all.

"Monsieur," he said, turning towards one of his neighbors,

a fine, big man, with a patient face, "suppose we begin

again."

"What?" said his neighbor.

"Hé! the Mystery," said Gringoire.

"As you like," returned his neighbor.

This semi-approbation sufficed for Gringoire, and, conducting

his own affairs, he began to shout, confounding himself

with the crowd as much as possible: "Begin the mystery

again! begin again!"

"The devil!" said Joannes de Molendino, "what are they

jabbering down yonder, at the end of the hall?" (for Gringoire

was making noise enough for four.) "Say, comrades,

isn't that mystery finished? They want to begin it all over

again. That's not fair!"

"No, no!" shouted all the scholars. "Down with the

mystery! Down with it!"

But Gringoire had multiplied himself, and only shouted

the more vigorously: "Begin again! begin again!"

These clamors attracted the attention of the cardinal.

"Monsieur Bailiff of the Courts," said he to a tall, black

man, placed a few paces from him, "are those knaves in a

holy-water vessel, that they make such a hellish noise?"

The bailiff of the courts was a sort of amphibious magistrate,

a sort of bat of the judicial order, related to both the

rat and the bird, the judge and the soldier.

He approached his eminence, and not without a good deal

of fear of the latter's displeasure, he awkwardly explained to

him the seeming disrespect of the audience: that noonday

had arrived before his eminence, and that the comedians had

been forced to begin without waiting for his eminence.

The cardinal burst into a laugh.

"On my faith, the rector of the university ought to have

done the same. What say you, Master Guillaume Rym?"

"Monseigneur," replied Guillaume Rym, "let us be content

with having escaped half of the comedy. There is at least

that much gained."

"Can these rascals continue their farce?" asked the bailiff.

"Continue, continue," said the cardinal, "it's all the same

to me. I'll read my breviary in the meantime."

The bailiff advanced to the edge of the estrade, and cried,

after having invoked silence by a wave of the hand,--

"Bourgeois, rustics, and citizens, in order to satisfy those

who wish the play to begin again, and those who wish it

to end, his eminence orders that it be continued."

Both parties were forced to resign themselves. But the

public and the author long cherished a grudge against the

cardinal.

So the personages on the stage took up their parts, and

Gringoire hoped that the rest of his work, at least, would be

listened to. This hope was speedily dispelled like his other

illusions; silence had indeed, been restored in the audience,

after a fashion; but Gringoire had not observed that at the

moment when the cardinal gave the order to continue, the

gallery was far from full, and that after the Flemish envoys

there had arrived new personages forming part of the 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 Liénarde, who

turned round from time to time when Gringoire plucked them

by the sleeve; with the exception of the big, patient neighbor,

no one listened, no one looked at the poor, deserted morality

full face. Gringoire saw only profiles.

With what bitterness did he behold his whole erection of

glory and of poetry crumble away bit by bit! And to think

that these people had been upon the point of instituting a

revolt against the bailiff through impatience to hear his work!

now that they had it they did not care for it. This same

representation which had been begun amid so unanimous an

acclamation! Eternal flood and ebb of popular favor! To

think that they had been on the point of hanging the bailiff's

sergeant! What would he not have given to be still at that

hour of honey!

But the usher's brutal monologue came to an end; every

one had arrived, and Gringoire breathed freely once more;

the actors continued bravely. But Master Coppenole, the

hosier, must needs rise of a sudden, and Gringoire was forced

to listen to him deliver, amid universal attention, the

following abominable harangue.

"Messieurs the bourgeois and squires of Paris, I don't

know, cross of God! what we are doing here. I certainly do

see yonder in the corner on that stage, some people who appear

to be fighting. I don't know whether that is what you

call a "mystery," but it is not amusing; they quarrel with their

tongues and nothing more. I have been waiting for the first

blow this quarter of an hour; nothing comes; they are cowards

who only scratch each other with insults. You ought to

send for the fighters of London or Rotterdam; and, I can tell

you! you would have had blows of the fist that could be

heard in the Place; but these men excite our pity. They

ought at least, to give us a moorish dance, or some other

mummer! That is not what was told me; I was promised a feast

of fools, with the election of a pope. We have our pope of

fools at Ghent also; we're not behindhand in that, cross of

God! But this is the way we manage it; we collect a crowd

like this one here, then each person in turn passes his head

through a hole, and makes a grimace at the rest; time one who

makes the ugliest, is elected pope by general acclamation;

that's the way it is. It is very diverting. Would you like to

make your pope after the fashion of my country? At all

events, it will be less wearisome than to listen to chatterers.

If they wish to come and make their grimaces through the

hole, they can join the game. What say you, Messieurs les

bourgeois? You have here enough grotesque specimens of

both sexes, to allow of laughing in Flemish fashion, and there

are enough of us ugly in countenance to hope for a fine grinning

match."

Gringoire would have liked to retort; stupefaction, rage,

indignation, deprived him of words. Moreover, the suggestion

of the popular hosier was received with such enthusiasm

by these bourgeois who were flattered at being called

"squires," that all resistance was useless. There was nothing

to be done but to allow one's self to drift with the torrent.

Gringoire hid his face between his two hands, not being so

fortunate as to have a mantle with which to veil his head,

like Agamemnon of Timantis.

CHAPTER V.

QUASIMODO.

In the twinkling of an eye, all was ready to execute Coppenole's

idea. Bourgeois, scholars and law clerks all set to

work. The little chapel situated opposite the marble table

was selected for the scene of the grinning match. A pane

broken in the pretty rose window above the door, left free a

circle of stone through which it was agreed that the competitors

should thrust their heads. In order to reach it, it was

only necessary to mount upon a couple of hogsheads, which

had been produced from I know not where, and perched one

upon the other, after a fashion. It was settled that each

candidate, man or woman (for it was possible to choose a female

pope), should, for the sake of leaving the impression of his

grimace fresh and complete, cover his face and remain concealed

in the chapel until the moment of his appearance. In less than

an instant, the chapel was crowded with competitors, upon whom

the door was then closed.

Coppenole, from his post, ordered all, directed all, arranged

all. During the uproar, the cardinal, no less abashed than

Gringoire, had retired with all his suite, under the pretext of

business and vespers, without the crowd which his arrival had

so deeply stirred being in the least moved by his departure.

Guillaume Rym was the only one who noticed his eminence's

discomfiture. The attention of the populace, like the sun,

pursued its revolution; having set out from one end of the

hall, and halted for a space in the middle, it had now reached

the other end. The marble table, the brocaded gallery had each

had their day; it was now the turn of the chapel of Louis XI.

Henceforth, the field was open to all folly. There was no one

there now, but the Flemings and the rabble.

The grimaces began. The first face which appeared at the

aperture, with eyelids turned up to the reds, a mouth open

like a maw, and a brow wrinkled like our hussar boots of the

Empire, evoked such an inextinguishable peal of laughter

that Homer would have taken all these louts for gods.

Nevertheless, the grand hall was anything but Olympus, and

Gringoire's poor Jupiter knew it better than any one else. A

second and third grimace followed, then another and another;

and the laughter and transports of delight went on increasing.

There was in this spectacle, a peculiar power of intoxication

and fascination, of which it would be difficult to convey to the

reader of our day and our salons any idea.

Let the reader picture to himself a series of visages presenting

successively all geometrical forms, from the triangle

to the trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; all human

expressions, from wrath to lewdness; all ages, from the

wrinkles of the new-born babe to the wrinkles of the aged

and dying; all religious phantasmagories, from Faun to Beelzebub;

all animal profiles, from the maw to the beak, from

the jowl to the muzzle. Let the reader imagine all these

grotesque figures of the Pont Neuf, those nightmares petrified

beneath the hand of Germain Pilon, assuming life and breath,

and coming in turn to stare you in the face with burning

eyes; all the masks of the Carnival of Venice passing in succession

before your glass,--in a word, a human kaleidoscope.

The orgy grew more and more Flemish. Teniers could have

given but a very imperfect idea of it. Let the reader picture

to himself in bacchanal form, Salvator Rosa's battle. There

were no longer either scholars or ambassadors or bourgeois or

men or women; there was no longer any Clopin Trouillefou,

nor Gilles Lecornu, nor Marie Quatrelivres, nor Robin Poussepain.

All was universal license. The grand hall was no

longer anything but a vast furnace of effrontry and joviality,

where every mouth was a cry, every individual a posture;

everything shouted and howled. The strange visages which

came, in turn, to gnash their teeth in the rose window, were

like so many brands cast into the brazier; and from the whole

of this effervescing crowd, there escaped, as from a furnace,

a sharp, piercing, stinging noise, hissing like the wings of a

gnat.

"Ho hé! curse it!"

"Just look at that face!"

"It's not good for anything."

"Guillemette Maugerepuis, just look at that bull's muzzle;

it only lacks the horns. It can't be your husband."

"Another!"

"Belly of the pope! what sort of a grimace is that?"

"Hola hé! that's cheating. One must show only one's face."

"That damned Perrette Callebotte! she's capable of that!"

"Good! Good!"

"I'm stifling!"

"There's a fellow whose ears won't go through!" Etc., etc.

But we must do justice to our friend Jehan. In the midst

of this witches' sabbath, he was still to be seen on the top of

his pillar, like the cabin-boy on the topmast. He floundered

about with incredible fury. His mouth was wide open, and

from it there escaped a cry which no one heard, not that it

was covered by the general clamor, great as that was but

because it attained, no doubt, the limit of perceptible sharp

sounds, the thousand vibrations of Sauveur, or the eight

thousand of Biot.

As for Gringoire, the first moment of depression having

passed, he had regained his composure. He had hardened

himself against adversity.---"Continue!" he had said for the

third time, to his comedians, speaking machines; then as he

was marching with great strides in front of the marble table,

a fancy seized him to go and appear in his turn at the aperture

of the chapel, were it only for the pleasure of making a

grimace at that ungrateful populace.--"But no, that would

not be worthy of us; no, vengeance! let us combat until the

end," he repeated to himself; "the power of poetry over

people is great; I will bring them back. We shall see which

will carry the day, grimaces or polite literature."

Alas! he had been left the sole spectator of his piece.

It was far worse than it had been a little while before. He

no longer beheld anything but backs.

I am mistaken. The big, patient man, whom he had already

consulted in a critical moment, had remained with his face

turned towards the stage. As for Gisquette and Liénarde,

they had deserted him long ago.

Gringoire was touched to the heart by the fidelity of his

only spectator. He approached him and addressed him, shaking

his arm slightly; for the good man was leaning on the

balustrade and dozing a little.

"Monsieur," said Gringoire, "I thank you!"

"Monsieur," replied the big man with a yawn, "for what?"

"I see what wearies you," resumed the poet; "'tis all this

noise which prevents your hearing comfortably. But be at

ease! your name shall descend to posterity! Your name,

if you please?"

"Renauld Chateau, guardian of the seals of the Châtelet of

Paris, at your service."

"Monsieur, you are the only representive of the muses

here," said Gringoire.

"You are too kind, sir," said the guardian of the seals at

the Châtelet.

"You are the only one," resumed Gringoire, "who has listened

to the piece decorously. What do you think of it?"

"He! he!" replied the fat magistrate, half aroused, "it's

tolerably jolly, that's a fact."

Gringoire was forced to content himself with this eulogy;

for a thunder of applause, mingled with a prodigious acclamation,

cut their conversation short. The Pope of the Fools had

been elected.

"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 Hôtel de Navarre, which

belonged to Monsieur de Nemours?"

"Yes, opposite the Chapelle de Braque."

"Well, the treasury has just let it to Guillaume Alixandre,

historian, for six 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 Grève.

"At least," he said to himself, "I shall there have a firebrand

of joy wherewith to warm myself, and I can sup on

some crumbs of the three great armorial bearings of royal

sugar which have been erected on the public refreshment-stall

of the city.

CHAPTER II.

THE PLACE DE GREVE.

There remains to-day but a very imperceptible vestige of

the Place de Grève, such as it existed then; it consists in the

charming little turret, which occupies the angle north of the

Place, and which, already enshrouded in the ignoble plaster

which fills with paste the delicate lines of its sculpture, would

soon have disappeared, perhaps submerged by that flood of

new houses which so rapidly devours all the ancient façades

of Paris.

The persons who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de

Grève without casting a glance of pity and sympathy on that

poor turret strangled between two hovels of the time of Louis

XV., can easily reconstruct in their minds the aggregate of

edifices to which it belonged, and find again entire in it

the ancient Gothic place of the fifteenth century.

It was then, as it is to-day, an irregular trapezoid, bordered

on one side by the quay, and on the other three by a series of

lofty, narrow, and gloomy houses. By day, one could admire

the variety of its edifices, all sculptured in stone or wood, and

already presenting complete specimens of the different domestic

architectures of the Middle Ages, running back from

the fifteenth to the eleventh century, from the casement

which had begun to dethrone the arch, to the Roman semicircle,

which had been supplanted by the ogive, and which

still occupies, below it, the first story of that ancient house de

la Tour Roland, at the corner of the Place upon the Seine, on

the side of the street with the Tannerie. At night, one could

distinguish nothing of all that mass of buildings, except the

black indentation of the roofs, unrolling their chain of acute

angles round the place; for one of the radical differences

between the cities of that time, and the cities of the present

day, lay in the façades which looked upon the places and

streets, and which were then gables. For the last two centuries

the houses have been turned round.

In the centre of the eastern side of the Place, rose a heavy

and hybrid construction, formed of three buildings placed in

juxtaposition. It was called by three names which explain

its history, its destination, and its architecture: "The House

of the Dauphin," because Charles V., when Dauphin, had

inhabited it; "The Marchandise," because it had served as

town hall; and "The Pillared House" (~domus ad piloria~), because

of a series of large pillars which sustained the three

stories. The city found there all that is required for a city

like Paris; a chapel in which to pray to God; a ~plaidoyer~, or

pleading room, in which to hold hearings, and to repel, at

need, the King's people; and under the roof, an ~arsenac~ full

of artillery. For the bourgeois of Paris were aware that it is

not sufficient to pray in every conjuncture, and to plead for the

franchises of the city, and they had always in reserve, in the

garret of the town hall, a few good rusty arquebuses. The

Grève had then that sinister aspect which it preserves to-day

from the execrable ideas which it awakens, and from the

sombre town hall of Dominique Bocador, which has replaced

the Pillared House. It must be admitted that a permanent

gibbet and a pillory, "a justice and a ladder," as they were

called in that day, erected side by side in the centre of the

pavement, contributed not a little to cause eyes to be turned

away from that fatal place, where so many beings full of life

and health have agonized; where, fifty years later, that fever

of Saint Vallier was destined to have its birth, that terror of

the scaffold, the most monstrous of all maladies because it

comes not from God, but from man.

It is a consoling idea (let us remark in passing), to think

that the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still

encumbered with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its

paraphernalia of torture, permanent and riveted to the pavement,

the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross

du Trahoir, the Marché aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfauçon,

the barrier des Sergents, the Place aux Chats, the

Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte

Saint Jacques, without reckoning the innumerable ladders of

the provosts, the bishop of the chapters, of the abbots, of the

priors, who had the decree of life and death,--without reckoning

the judicial drownings in the river Seine; it is consoling

to-day, after having lost successively all the pieces of its

armor, its luxury of torment, its penalty of imagination and

fancy, its torture for which it reconstructed every five years

a leather bed at the Grand Châtelet, that ancient suzerain of

feudal society almost expunged from our laws and our cities,

hunted from code to code, chased from place to place, has no

longer, in our immense Paris, any more than a dishonored

corner of the Grève,--than a miserable guillotine, furtive,

uneasy, shameful, which seems always afraid of being caught

in the act, so quickly does it disappear after having dealt its

blow.

CHAPTER III.

KISSES FOR BLOWS.

When Pierre Gringoire arrived on the Place de Grève, he

was paralyzed. He had directed his course across the Pont

aux Meuniers, in order to avoid the rabble on the Pont au

Change, and the pennons of Jehan Fourbault; but the wheels

of all the bishop's mills had splashed him as he passed, and

his doublet was drenched; it seemed to him besides, that the

failure of his piece had rendered him still more sensible to

cold than usual. Hence he made haste to draw near the bonfire,

which was burning magnificently in the middle of the

Place. But a considerable crowd formed a circle around it.

"Accursed Parisians!" he said to himself (for Gringoire,

like a true dramatic poet, was subject to monologues) "there

they are obstructing my fire! Nevertheless, I am greatly in

need of a chimney corner; my shoes drink in the water, and

all those cursed mills wept upon me! That devil of a Bishop

of Paris, with his mills! I'd just like to know what use a

bishop can make of a mill! Does he expect to become a

miller instead of a bishop? If only my malediction is needed

for that, I bestow it upon him! and his cathedral, and his

mills! Just see if those boobies will put themselves out!

Move aside! I'd like to know what they are doing there!

They are warming themselves, much pleasure may it give

them! They are watching a hundred fagots burn; a fine

spectacle!"

On looking more closely, he perceived that the circle was

much larger than was required simply for the purpose of

getting warm at the king's fire, and that this concourse of

people had not been attracted solely by the beauty of the

hundred fagots which were burning.

In a vast space left free between the crowd and the fire, a

young girl was dancing.

Whether this young girl was a human being, a fairy, or an

angel, is what Gringoire, sceptical philosopher and ironical

poet that he was, could not decide at the first moment, so

fascinated was he by this dazzling vision.

She was not tall, though she seemed so, so boldly did her

slender form dart about. She was swarthy of complexion,

but one divined that, by day, her skin must possess that

beautiful golden tone of the Andalusians and the Roman

women. Her little foot, too, was Andalusian, for it was both

pinched and at ease in its graceful shoe. She danced, she

turned, she whirled rapidly about on an old Persian rug,

spread negligently under her feet; and each time that her

radiant face passed before you, as she whirled, her great black

eyes darted a flash of lightning at you.

All around her, all glances were riveted, all mouths open;

and, in fact, when she danced thus, to the humming of the

Basque tambourine, which her two pure, rounded arms raised

above her head, slender, frail and vivacious as a wasp, with

her corsage of gold without a fold, her variegated gown puffing

out, her bare shoulders, her delicate limbs, which her

petticoat revealed at times, her black hair, her eyes of flame,

she was a supernatural creature.

"In truth," said Gringoire to himself, "she is a salamander,

she is a nymph, she is a goddess, she is a bacchante of the

Menelean Mount!"

At that moment, one of the salamander's braids of hair

became unfastened, and a piece of yellow copper which was

attached to it, rolled to the ground.

"Hé, no!" said he, "she is a gypsy!"

All illusions had disappeared.

She began her dance once more; she took from the ground

two swords, whose points she rested against her brow, and

which she made to turn in one direction, while she turned in

the other; it was a purely gypsy effect. But, disenchanted

though Gringoire was, the whole effect of this picture was not

without its charm and its magic; the bonfire illuminated,

with a red flaring light, which trembled, all alive, over the

circle of faces in the crowd, on the brow of the young girl,

and at the background of the Place cast a pallid reflection,

on one side upon the ancient, black, and wrinkled façade of

the House of Pillars, on the other, upon the old stone

gibbet.

Among the thousands of visages which that light tinged

with scarlet, there was one which seemed, even more than all

the others, absorbed in contemplation of the dancer. It was

the face of a man, austere, calm, and sombre. This man,

whose costume was concealed by the crowd which surrounded

him, did not appear to be more than five and thirty years of

age; nevertheless, he was bald; he had merely a few tufts of

thin, gray hair on his temples; his broad, high forehead had

begun to be furrowed with wrinkles, but his deep-set eyes

sparkled with extraordinary youthfulness, an ardent life, a

profound passion. He kept them fixed incessantly on the

gypsy, and, while the giddy young girl of sixteen danced and

whirled, for the pleasure of all, his revery seemed to become

more and more sombre. From time to time, a smile and a

sigh met upon his lips, but the smile was more melancholy

than the sigh.

The young girl, stopped at length, breathless, and the people

applauded her lovingly.

"Djali!" said the gypsy.

Then Gringoire saw come up to her, a pretty little white

goat, alert, wide-awake, glossy, with gilded horns, gilded

hoofs, and gilded collar, which he had not hitherto perceived,

and which had remained lying curled up on one corner of the

carpet watching his mistress dance.

"Djali!" said the dancer, "it is your turn."

And, seating herself, she gracefully presented her tambourine

to the goat.

"Djali," she continued, "what month is this?"

The goat lifted its fore foot, and struck one blow upon

the tambourine. It was the first month in the year, in

fact.

"Djali," pursued the young girl, turning her tambourine

round, "what day of the month is this?"

Djali raised his little gilt hoof, and struck six blows on the

tambourine.

"Djali," pursued the Egyptian, with still another movement

of the tambourine, "what hour of the day is it?"

Djali struck seven blows. At that moment, the clock of

the Pillar House rang out seven.

The people were amazed.

"There's sorcery at the bottom of it," said a sinister voice

in the crowd. It was that of the bald man, who never removed

his eyes from the gypsy.

She shuddered and turned round; but applause broke forth

and drowned the morose exclamation.

It even effaced it so completely from her mind, that she

continued to question her goat.

"Djali, what does Master Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of

the pistoliers of the town do, at the procession of Candlemas?"

Djali reared himself on his hind legs, and began to bleat,

marching along with so much dainty gravity, that the entire

circle of spectators burst into a laugh at this parody of the

interested devoutness of the captain of pistoliers.

"Djali," resumed the young girl, emboldened by her growing

success, "how preaches Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator

to the king in the ecclesiastical court?"

The goat seated himself on his hind quarters, and began

to bleat, waving his fore feet in so strange a manner, that,

with the exception of the bad French, and worse Latin,

Jacques Charmolue was there complete,--gesture, accent, and

attitude.

And the crowd applauded louder than ever.

"Sacrilege! profanation!" resumed the voice of the bald man.

The gypsy turned round once more.

"Ah!" said she, "'tis that villanous man!" Then, thrusting

her under lip out beyond the upper, she made a little

pout, which appeared to be familiar to her, executed a pirouette

on her heel, and set about collecting in her tambourine the

gifts of the multitude.

Big blanks, little blanks, targes* 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 Grève, with

all its torches and all its uproar.

This procession, which our readers have seen set out from

the Palais de Justice, had organized on the way, and had been

recruited by all the knaves, idle thieves, and unemployed vagabonds

in Paris; so that it presented a very respectable aspect

when it arrived at the Grève.

First came Egypt. The Duke of Egypt headed it, on horseback,

with his counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrups

for him; behind them, the male and female Egyptians,

pell-mell, with their little children crying on their shoulders;

all--duke, counts, and populace--in rags and tatters. Then

came the Kingdom of Argot; that is to say, all the thieves of

France, arranged according to the order of their dignity; the

minor people walking first. Thus defiled by fours, with the

divers insignia of their grades, in that strange faculty, most of

them lame, some cripples, others one-armed, shop clerks, 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 coësre, so called, crouching in a

little cart drawn by two big dogs. After the kingdom of the

Argotiers, came the Empire of Galilee. Guillaume Rousseau,

Emperor of the Empire of Galilee, marched majestically in

his robe of purple, spotted with wine, preceded by buffoons

wrestling and executing military dances; surrounded by his

macebearers, his pickpockets and clerks of the chamber of

accounts. Last of all came the corporation of law clerks,

with its maypoles crowned with flowers, its black robes, its

music worthy of the orgy, and its large candles of yellow

wax. In the centre of this crowd, the grand officers of the

Brotherhood of Fools bore on their shoulders a litter more

loaded down with candles than the reliquary of Sainte-Geneviève

in time of pest; and on this litter shone resplendent,

with crosier, cope, and mitre, the new Pope of the Fools, the

bellringer of Notre-Dame, Quasimodo the hunchback.

Each section of this grotesque procession had its own music.

The Egyptians made their drums and African tambourines

resound. The slang men, not a very musical race, still clung

to the goat's horn trumpet and the Gothic rubebbe of the

twelfth century. The Empire of Galilee was not much more

advanced; among its music one could hardly distinguish some

miserable rebec, from the infancy of the art, still imprisoned

in the ~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 Grève. It was the first enjoyment of

self-love that he had ever experienced. Down to that day, he

had known only humiliation, disdain for his condition, disgust

for his person. Hence, deaf though he was, he enjoyed, like

a veritable pope, the acclamations of that throng, which he

hated because he felt that he was hated by it. What mattered

it that his people consisted of a pack of fools, cripples,

thieves, and beggars? it was still a people and he was its

sovereign. And he accepted seriously all this ironical

applause, all this derisive respect, with which the crowd mingled,

it must be admitted, a good deal of very real fear. For the

hunchback was robust; for the bandy-legged fellow was agile;

for the deaf man was malicious: three qualities which temper

ridicule.

We are far from believing, however, that the new Pope of

the Fools understood both the sentiments which he felt and

the sentiments which he inspired. The spirit which was

lodged in this failure of a body had, necessarily, something

incomplete and deaf about it. Thus, what he felt at the moment

was to him, absolutely vague, indistinct, and confused.

Only joy made itself felt, only pride dominated. Around that

sombre and unhappy face, there hung a radiance.

It was, then, not without surprise and alarm, that at the

very moment when Quasimodo was passing the Pillar House,

in that semi-intoxicated state, a man was seen to dart from

the crowd, and to tear from his hands, with a gesture of anger,

his crosier of gilded wood, the emblem of his mock popeship.

This man, this rash individual, was the man with the bald

brow, who, a moment earlier, standing with the gypsy's

group had chilled the poor girl with his words of menace and

of hatred. He was dressed in an 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 Châtelet,

took fright at the Flemings and their procession, and overturned

Master Philippe Avrillot, lay monk of the Célestins."

"Really?"

"Actually."

"A bourgeois horse! 'tis rather too much! If it had been

a cavalry horse, well and good!"

And the windows were closed. But Gringoire had lost the

thread of his ideas, nevertheless.

Fortunately, he speedily found it again, and he knotted it

together without difficulty, thanks to the gypsy, thanks to

Djali, who still walked in front of him; two fine, delicate, and

charming creatures, whose tiny feet, beautiful forms, and

graceful manners he was engaged in admiring, almost confusing

them in his contemplation; believing them to be both

young girls, from their intelligence and good friendship; regarding

them both as goats,--so far as the lightness, agility, and

dexterity of their walk were concerned.

But the streets were becoming blacker and more deserted

every moment. The curfew had sounded long ago, and it was

only at rare intervals now that they encountered a passer-by

in the street, or a light in the windows. Gringoire had

become involved, in his pursuit of the gypsy, in that inextricable

labyrinth of alleys, squares, and closed courts which

surround the ancient sepulchre of the Saints-Innocents, and

which resembles a ball of thread tangled by a cat. "Here

are streets which possess but little logic!" said Gringoire,

lost in the thousands of circuits which returned upon themselves

incessantly, but where the young girl pursued a road

which seemed familiar to her, without hesitation and with

a step which became ever more rapid. As for him, he

would have been utterly ignorant of his situation had he not

espied, in passing, at the turn of a street, the octagonal mass

of the pillory of the fish markets, the open-work summit of

which threw its black, fretted outlines clearly upon a window

which was still lighted in the Rue Verdelet.

The young girl's attention had been attracted to him for the

last few moments; she had repeatedly turned her head towards

him with uneasiness; she had even once come to a standstill,

and taking advantage of a ray of light which escaped from a

half-open bakery to survey him intently, from head to foot, then,

having cast this glance, Gringoire had seen her make that little

pout which he had already noticed, after which she passed on.

This little pout had furnished Gringoire with food for

thought. There was certainly both disdain and mockery in

that graceful grimace. So he dropped his head, began to

count the paving-stones, and to follow the young girl at a little

greater distance, when, at the turn of a street, which had

caused him to lose sight of her, he heard her utter a piercing cry.

He hastened his steps.

The street was full of shadows. Nevertheless, a twist of

tow soaked in oil, which burned in a cage at the feet of the

Holy Virgin at the street corner, permitted Gringoire to make

out the gypsy struggling in the arms of two men, who were

endeavoring to stifle her cries. The poor little goat, in great

alarm, lowered his horns and bleated.

"Help! gentlemen of the watch!" shouted Gringoire, and

advanced bravely. One of the men who held the young girl

turned towards him. It was the formidable visage of Quasimodo.

Gringoire did not take to flight, but neither did he advance

another step.

Quasimodo came up to him, tossed him four paces away on

the pavement with a backward turn of the hand, and plunged

rapidly into the gloom, bearing the young girl folded across

one arm like a silken scarf. His companion followed him, and

the poor goat ran after them all, bleating plaintively.

"Murder! murder!" shrieked the unhappy gypsy.

"Halt, rascals, and yield me that wench!" suddenly shouted

in a voice of thunder, a cavalier who appeared suddenly from

a neighboring square.

It was a captain of the king's archers, armed from head to

foot, with his sword in his hand.

He tore the gypsy from the arms of the dazed Quasimodo,

threw her across his saddle, and at the moment when the terrible

hunchback, recovering from his surprise, rushed upon

him to regain his prey, fifteen or sixteen archers, who followed

their captain closely, made their appearance, with their

two-edged swords in their fists. It was a squad of the king's

police, which was making the rounds, by order of Messire

Robert d'Estouteville, guard of the provostship of Paris.

Quasimodo was surrounded, seized, garroted; he roared, he

foamed at the mouth, he bit; and had it been broad daylight,

there is no doubt that his face alone, rendered more hideous by

wrath, would have put the entire squad to flight. But by night

he was deprived of his most formidable weapon, his ugliness.

His companion had disappeared during the struggle.

The gypsy gracefully raised herself upright upon the officer's

saddle, placed both hands upon the young man's shoulders,

and gazed fixedly at him for several seconds, as though

enchanted with his good looks and with the aid which he had

just rendered her. Then breaking silence first, she said to

him, making her sweet voice still sweeter than usual,--

"What is your name, monsieur le gendarme?"

"Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers, 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.

"Ohé, Hennequin Dandéche! Ohè, 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 Hôtel des Tournelles. At length he lost

patience, and exclaimed solemnly: "Cursed be cross roads!

'tis the devil who has made them in the shape of his pitchfork!"

This exclamation afforded him a little solace, and a sort of

reddish reflection which he caught sight of at that moment, at

the extremity of a long and narrow lane, completed the elevation

of his moral tone. "God be praised!" said he, "There

it is yonder! There is my pallet burning." And comparing

himself to the pilot who suffers shipwreck by night, "~Salve~,"

he added piously, "~salve, maris stella~!"

Did he address this fragment of litany to the Holy Virgin,

or to the pallet? We are utterly unable to say.

He had taken but a few steps in the long street, which

sloped downwards, was unpaved, and more and more muddy

and steep, when he noticed a very singular thing. It was

not deserted; here and there along its extent crawled certain

vague and formless masses, all directing their course towards

the light which flickered at the end of the street, like those

heavy insects which drag along by night, from blade to blade

of grass, towards the shepherd's fire.

Nothing renders one so adventurous as not being able to

feel the place where one's pocket is situated. Gringoire

continued to advance, and had soon joined that one of the forms

which dragged along most indolently, behind the others. On

drawing near, he perceived that it was nothing else than a

wretched legless cripple in a bowl, who was hopping along on

his two hands like a wounded field-spider which has but two

legs left. At the moment when he passed close to this species

of spider with a human countenance, it raised towards

him a lamentable voice: "~La buona mancia, signor! la buona

mancia~!"*

* 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 Châtelet and the sergeants of the provostship,

who ventured thither, disappeared in morsels; a city of

thieves, a hideous wart on the face of Paris; a sewer, from

which escaped every morning, and whither returned every

night to crouch, that stream of vices, of mendicancy and

vagabondage which always overflows in the streets of capitals;

a monstrous hive, to which returned at nightfall, with

their booty, all the drones of the social order; a lying hospital

where the bohemian, the disfrocked monk, the ruined

scholar, the ne'er-do-wells of all nations, Spaniards, Italians,

Germans,--of all religions, Jews, Christians, Mahometans,

idolaters, covered with painted sores, beggars by day, were

transformed by night into brigands; an immense dressing-room,

in a word, where, at that epoch, the actors of that

eternal comedy, which theft, prostitution, and murder play

upon the pavements of Paris, dressed and undressed.

It was a vast place, irregular and badly paved, like all the

squares of Paris at that date. Fires, around which swarmed

strange groups, blazed here and there. Every one was going,

coming, and shouting. Shrill laughter was to be heard, the

wailing of children, the voices of women. The hands and

heads of this throng, black against the luminous background,

outlined against it a thousand eccentric gestures. At times,

upon the ground, where trembled the light of the fires,

mingled with large, indefinite shadows, one could behold a dog

passing, which resembled a man, a man who resembled a dog.

The limits of races and species seemed effaced in this city, as

in a pandemonium. Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health,

maladies, all seemed to be in common among these people;

all went together, they mingled, confounded, superposed;

each one there participated in all.

The poor and flickering flames of the fire permitted Gringoire

to distinguish, amid his trouble, all around the immense

place, a hideous frame of ancient houses, whose wormeaten,

shrivelled, stunted façades, each pierced with one or two

lighted attic windows, seemed to him, in the darkness, like

enormous heads of old women, ranged in a circle, monstrous

and crabbed, winking as they looked on at the Witches' Sabbath.

It was like a new world, unknown, unheard of, misshapen,

creeping, swarming, fantastic.

Gringoire, more and more terrified, clutched by the three

beggars as by three pairs of tongs, dazed by a throng of other

faces which frothed and yelped around him, unhappy Gringoire

endeavored to summon his presence of mind, in order

to recall whether it was a Saturday. But his efforts were

vain; the thread of his memory and of his thought was

broken; and, doubting everything, wavering between what he

saw and what he felt, he put to himself this unanswerable

question,--

"If I exist, does this exist? if this exists, do I exist?"

At that moment, a distinct cry arose in the buzzing throng

which surrounded him, "Let's take him to the king! let's

take him to the king!"

"Holy Virgin!" murmured Gringoire, "the king here must be

a ram."

"To the king! to the king!" repeated all voices.

They dragged him off. Each vied with the other in laying

his claws upon him. But the three beggars did not loose their

hold and tore him from the rest, howling, "He belongs to us!"

The poet's already sickly doublet yielded its last sigh in

this struggle.

While traversing the horrible place, his vertigo vanished.

After taking a few steps, the sentiment of reality returned to

him. He began to become accustomed to the atmosphere of

the place. At the first moment there had arisen from his

poet's head, or, simply and prosaically, from his empty

stomach, a mist, a vapor, so to speak, which, spreading

between objects and himself, permitted him to catch a glimpse

of them only in the incoherent fog of nightmare,--in those

shadows of dreams which distort every outline, agglomerating

objects into unwieldy groups, dilating things into chimeras,

and men into phantoms. Little by little, this hallucination

was succeeded by a less bewildered and exaggerating view.

Reality made its way to the light around him, struck his eyes,

struck his feet, and demolished, bit by bit, all that frightful

poetry with which he had, at first, believed himself to be

surrounded. He was forced to perceive that he was not

walking in the Styx, but in mud, that he was elbowed not by

demons, but by thieves; that it was not his soul which was

in question, but his life (since he lacked that precious

conciliator, which places itself so effectually between the

bandit and the honest man--a purse). In short, on examining the

orgy more closely, and with more coolness, he fell from the

witches' sabbath to the dram-shop.

The Cour des Miracles was, in fact, merely a dram-shop;

but a brigand's dram-shop, reddened quite as much with blood

as with wine.

The spectacle which presented itself to his eyes, when his

ragged escort finally deposited him at the end of his trip, was

not fitted to bear him back to poetry, even to the poetry of

hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of

the tavern. Were we not in the fifteenth century, we would

say that Gringoire had descended from Michael Angelo to

Callot.

Around a great fire which burned on a large, circular flagstone,

the flames of which had heated red-hot the legs of a

tripod, which was empty for the moment, some wormeaten

tables were placed, here and there, haphazard, no lackey of a

geometrical turn having deigned to adjust their parallelism,

or to see to it that they did not make too unusual angles.

Upon these tables gleamed several dripping pots of wine and

beer, and round these pots were grouped many bacchic visages,

purple with the fire and the wine. There was a man

with a huge belly and a jovial face, noisily kissing a woman

of the town, thickset and brawny. There was a sort of sham

soldier, a "naquois," as the slang expression runs, who was

whistling as he undid the bandages from his fictitious wound,

and removing the numbness from his sound and vigorous

knee, which had been swathed since morning in a thousand

ligatures. On the other hand, there was a wretched fellow,

preparing with celandine and beef's blood, his "leg of God,"

for the next day. Two tables further on, a palmer, with his

pilgrim's costume complete, was practising the lament of the

Holy Queen, not forgetting the drone and the nasal drawl.

Further on, a young scamp was taking a lesson in epilepsy

from an old pretender, who was instructing him in the art of

foaming at the mouth, by chewing a morsel of soap. Beside

him, a man with the dropsy was getting rid of his swelling,

and making four or five female thieves, who were disputing

at the same table, over a child who had been stolen that evening,

hold their noses. All circumstances which, two centuries

later, "seemed so ridiculous to the court," as Sauval says,

"that they served as a pastime to the king, and as an introduction

to the royal ballet of Night, divided into four parts

and danced on the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon." "Never,"

adds an eye witness of 1653, "have the sudden metamorphoses

of the Court of Miracles been more happily presented.

Benserade prepared us for it by some very gallant verses."

Loud laughter everywhere, and obscene songs. Each one

held his own course, carping and swearing, without listening

to his neighbor. Pots clinked, and quarrels sprang up at

the shock of the pots, and the broken pots made rents in

the rags.

A big dog, seated on his tail, gazed at the fire. Some

children were mingled in this orgy. The stolen child wept and

cried. Another, a big boy four years of age, seated with

legs dangling, upon a bench that was too high for him, before

a table that reached to his chin, and uttering not a word. A

third, gravely spreading out upon the table with his finger,

the melted tallow which dripped from a candle. Last of all,

a little fellow crouching in the mud, almost lost in a cauldron,

which he was scraping with a tile, and from which he was

evoking a sound that would have made Stradivarius swoon.

Near the fire was a hogshead, and on the hogshead a beggar.

This was the king on his throne.

The three who had Gringoire in their clutches led him in

front of this hogshead, and the entire bacchanal rout fell

silent for a moment, with the exception of the cauldron

inhabited by the child.

Gringoire dared neither breathe nor raise his eyes.

"~Hombre, quita tu sombrero~!" said one of the three

knaves, in whose grasp he was, and, before he had

comprehended the meaning, the other had snatched his hat--a

wretched headgear, it is true, but still good on a sunny day or

when there was but little rain. Gringoire sighed.

Meanwhile the king addressed him, from the summit of his

cask,--

"Who is this rogue?"

Gringoire shuddered. That voice, although accentuated by

menace, recalled to him another voice, which, that very morning,

had dealt the deathblow to his mystery, by drawling,

nasally, in the midst of the audience, "Charity, please!"

He raised his head. It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.

Clopin Trouillefou, arrayed in his royal insignia, wore

neither one rag more nor one rag less. The sore upon his

arm had already disappeared. He held in his hand one of

those whips made of thongs of white leather, which police

sergeants then used to repress the crowd, and which were

called ~boullayes~. On his head he wore a sort of headgear,

bound round and closed at the top. But it was difficult to

make out whether it was a child's cap or a king's crown, the

two things bore so strong a resemblance to each other.

Meanwhile Gringoire, without knowing why, had regained

some hope, on recognizing in the King of the Cour des Miracles

his accursed mendicant of the Grand Hall.

"Master," stammered he; "monseigneur--sire--how

ought I to address you?" he said at length, having reached

the culminating point of his crescendo, and knowing neither

how to mount higher, nor to descend again.

"Monseigneur, his majesty, or comrade, call me what you

please. But make haste. What have you to say in your

own defence?"

"In your own defence?" thought Gringoire, "that displeases

me." He resumed, stuttering, "I am he, who this morning--"

"By the devil's claws!" interrupted Clopin, "your name,

knave, and nothing more. Listen. You are in the presence

of three powerful sovereigns: myself, Clopin Trouillefou,

King of Thunes, successor to the Grand Coësre, supreme

suzerain of the Realm of Argot; Mathias Hunyadi Spicali,

Duke of Egypt and of Bohemia, the old yellow fellow whom

you see yonder, with a dish clout round his head; Guillaume

Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat fellow who is not

listening to us but caressing a wench. We are your judges.

You have entered the Kingdom of Argot, without being an

~argotier~; you have violated the privileges of our city. You

must be punished unless you are a ~capon~, a ~franc-mitou~ or a

~rifodé~; that is to say, in the slang of honest folks,--a thief,

a beggar, or a vagabond. Are you anything of that sort?

Justify yourself; announce your titles."

"Alas!" said Gringoire, "I have not that honor. I am

the author--"

"That is sufficient," resumed Trouillefou, without permitting

him to finish. "You are going to be hanged. 'Tis a

very simple matter, gentlemen and honest bourgeois! as you

treat our people in your abode, so we treat you in ours! The

law which you apply to vagabonds, vagabonds apply to you.

'Tis your fault if it is harsh. One really must behold the

grimace of an honest man above the hempen collar now and

then; that renders the thing honorable. Come, friend, divide

your rags gayly among these damsels. I am going to have

you hanged to amuse the vagabonds, and you are to give them

your purse to drink your health. If you have any mummery

to go through with, there's a very good God the Father in that

mortar yonder, in stone, which we stole from Saint-Pierre aux

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,

~xête 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, François 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.

"Holà!" cried Clopin, mounted once more upon his cask,

"holà! women, females, is there among you, from the sorceress

to her cat, a wench who wants this rascal? Holà, Colette

la Charonne! Elisabeth Trouvain! Simone Jodouyne!

Marie Piédebou! Thonne la Longue! Bérarde Fanouel! Michelle

Genaille! Claude Ronge-oreille! Mathurine Girorou!--Holà!

Isabeau-la-Thierrye! Come and see! A man for nothing!

Who wants him?"

Gringoire, no doubt, was not very appetizing in this miserable

condition. The female vagabonds did not seem to be

much affected by the proposition. The unhappy wretch

heard them answer: "No! no! hang him; there'll be the more

fun for us all!"

Nevertheless, three emerged from the throng and came to

smell of him. The first was a big wench, with a square face.

She examined the philosopher's deplorable doublet attentively.

His garment was worn, and more full of holes than a stove for

roasting chestnuts. The girl made a wry face. "Old rag!" she

muttered, and addressing Gringoire, "Let's see your cloak!"

"I have lost it," replied Gringoire. "Your hat?" "They took

it away from me." "Your shoes?" "They have hardly any

soles left." "Your purse?" "Alas!" stammered Gringoire, "I

have not even a sou." "Let them hang you, then, and say 'Thank

you!'" retorted the vagabond wench, turning her back on him.

The second,--old, black, wrinkled, hideous, with an ugliness

conspicuous even in the Cour des Miracles, trotted round Gringoire.

He almost trembled lest she should want him. But she

mumbled between her teeth, "He's too thin," and went off.

The third was a young girl, quite fresh, and not too ugly.

"Save me!" said the poor fellow to her, in a low tone. She

gazed at him for a moment with an air of pity, then dropped

her eyes, made a plait in her petticoat, and remained in indecision.

He followed all these movements with his eyes; it

was the last gleam of hope. "No," said the young girl, at

length, "no! Guillaume Longuejoue would beat me." She

retreated into the crowd.

"You are unlucky, comrade," said Clopin.

Then rising to his feet, upon his hogshead. "No one wants

him," he exclaimed, imitating the accent of an auctioneer, to

the great delight of all; "no one wants him? once, twice,

three times!" and, turning towards the gibbet with a sign of

his hand, "Gone!"

Bellevigne de l'Etoile, Andry the Red, François 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

tête-a-tête appeared to him, especially when he was hungry,

an excellent interlude between the prologue and the catastrophe

of a love adventure.

The gypsy did not reply. She made her disdainful little

grimace, drew up her head like a bird, then burst out laughing,

and the tiny poniard disappeared as it had come, without

Gringoire being able to see where the wasp concealed its sting.

A moment later, there stood upon the table a loaf of rye

bread, a slice of bacon, some wrinkled apples and a jug of

beer. Gringoire began to eat eagerly. One would have said,

to hear the furious clashing of his iron fork and his

earthenware plate, that all his love had turned to appetite.

The young girl seated opposite him, watched him in silence,

visibly preoccupied with another thought, at which she smiled

from time to time, while her soft hand caressed the intelligent

head of the goat, gently pressed between her knees.

A candle of yellow wax illuminated this scene of voracity

and revery.

Meanwhile, the first cravings of his stomach having been

stilled, Gringoire felt some false shame at perceiving that

nothing remained but one apple.

"You do not eat, Mademoiselle Esmeralda?"

She replied by a negative sign of the head, and her pensive

glance fixed itself upon the vault of the ceiling.

"What the deuce is she thinking of?" thought Gringoire,

staring at what she was gazing at; "'tis impossible that it can

be that stone dwarf carved in the keystone of that arch, which

thus absorbs her attention. What the deuce! I can bear the

comparison!"

He raised his voice, "Mademoiselle!"

She seemed not to hear him.

He repeated, still more loudly, "Mademoiselle Esmeralda!"

Trouble wasted. The young girl's mind was elsewhere, and

Gringoire's voice had not the power to recall it. Fortunately,

the goat interfered. She began to pull her mistress gently

by the sleeve.

"What dost thou want, Djali?" said the gypsy, hastily, as though

suddenly awakened.

"She is hungry," said Gringoire, charmed to enter into conversation.

Esmeralda began to crumble some bread, which Djali ate gracefully

from the hollow of her hand.

Moreover, Gringoire did not give her time to resume her

revery. He hazarded a delicate question.

"So you don't want me for your husband?"

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

"For your lover?" went on Gringoire.

She pouted, and replied, "No."

"For your friend?" pursued Gringoire.

She gazed fixedly at him again, and said, after a momentary

reflection, "Perhaps."

This "perhaps," so dear to philosophers, emboldened Gringoire.

"Do you know what friendship is?" he asked.

"Yes," replied the gypsy; "it is to be brother and sister; two

souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand."

"And love?" pursued Gringoire.

"Oh! love!" said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye

beamed. "That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a

woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven."

The street dancer had a beauty as she spoke thus, that

struck Gringoire singularly, and seemed to him in perfect

keeping with the almost oriental exaltation of her words.

Her pure, red lips half smiled; her serene and candid brow

became troubled, at intervals, under her thoughts, like a mirror

under the breath; and from beneath her long, drooping, black

eyelashes, there escaped a sort of ineffable light, which gave

to her profile that ideal serenity which Raphael found at

the mystic point of intersection of virginity, maternity,

and divinity.

Nevertheless, Gringoire continued,--

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

"A man."

"And I--" said he, "what, then, am I?"

"A man has a 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 adrézarach beads. This

bag exhaled a strong odor of camphor. It was covered with

green silk, and bore in its centre a large piece of green glass,

in imitation of an emerald.

"Perhaps it is because of this," said she.

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

She drew back.

"Don't touch it! It is an amulet. You would injure the

charm or the charm would injure you."

The poet's curiosity was more and more aroused.

"Who gave it to you?"

She laid one finger on her mouth and concealed the amulet

in her bosom. He tried a few more questions, but she

hardly replied.

"What is the meaning of the words, 'la Esmeralda?'"

"I don't know," said she.

"To what language do they belong?"

"They are Egyptian, I think."

"I suspected as much," said Gringoire, "you are not a

native of France?"

"I don't know."

"Are your parents alive?"

She began to sing, to an ancient air,--

~Mon père est oiseau,

Ma mère est oiselle.

B

Je passe l'eau sans nacelle,

Je passe l'eau sans bateau,

Ma mère est oiselle,

Mon père 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 Hôtel de Sens, and I thought it very ridiculous that the

fire on Saint John's Day was reserved for the dog days. At

sixteen, I wished to choose a calling. I tried all in succession.

I became a soldier; but I was not brave enough. I became a

monk; but I was not sufficiently devout; and then I'm a bad

hand at drinking. In despair, I became an apprentice of the

woodcutters, but I was not strong enough; I had more of

an inclination to become a schoolmaster; 'tis true that I did

not know how to read, but that's no reason. I perceived at

the end of a certain time, that I lacked something in every

direction; and seeing that I was good for nothing, of my own

free will I became a poet and rhymester. That is a trade

which one can always adopt when one is a vagabond, and it's

better than stealing, as some young brigands of my acquaintance

advised me to do. One day I met by luck, Dom Claude

Frollo, the reverend archdeacon of Notre-Dame. He took an

interest in me, and it is to him that I to-day owe it that I am a

veritable man of letters, who knows Latin from the ~de Officiis~

of Cicero to the mortuology of the Celestine Fathers, and a

barbarian neither in scholastics, nor in politics, nor in rhythmics,

that sophism of sophisms. I am the author of the Mystery

which was presented to-day with great triumph and a great

concourse of populace, in the grand hall of the Palais de Justice.

I have also made a book which will contain six hundred

pages, on the wonderful comet of 1465, which sent one man

mad. I have enjoyed still other successes. Being somewhat

of an artillery carpenter, I lent a hand to Jean Mangue's great

bombard, which burst, as you know, on the day when it was

tested, on the Pont de Charenton, and killed four and twenty

curious spectators. You see that I am not a bad match in

marriage. I know a great many sorts of very engaging tricks,

which I will teach your goat; for example, to mimic the

Bishop of Paris, that cursed Pharisee whose mill wheels

splash passers-by the whole length of the Pont aux Meuniers.

And then my mystery will bring me in a great deal of coined

money, if they will only pay me. And finally, I am at your

orders, I and my wits, and my science and my letters, ready

to live with you, damsel, as it shall please you, chastely or

joyously; husband and wife, if you see fit; brother and sister,

if you think that better."

Gringoire ceased, awaiting the effect of his harangue on the

young girl. Her eyes were fixed on the ground.

"'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 Micromégas would

feel if he were to lie down on the Alps.

"Come!" said he, adjusting himself as well as possible, "I

must resign myself. But here's a strange nuptial night. 'Tis

a pity. There was something innocent and antediluvian about

that broken crock, which quite pleased me."

BOOK THIRD.

CHAPTER I.

NOTRE-DAME.

The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a

majestic and sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been

preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to

wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations

which time and men have both caused the venerable monument

to suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its

first stone, or for Philip Augustus, who laid the last.

On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the

side of a wrinkle, one always finds a scar. ~Tempus edax,

homo edacior*~; 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

façade, where, successively and at once, the three portals

hollowed out in an arch; the broidered and dentated cordon

of the eight and twenty royal niches; the immense central

rose window, flanked by its two lateral windows, like a

priest by his deacon and subdeacon; the frail and lofty gallery

of trefoil arcades, which supports a heavy platform above its

fine, slender columns; and lastly, the two black and massive

towers with their slate penthouses, harmonious parts of a

magnificent whole, superposed in five gigantic stories;--develop

themselves before the eye, in a mass and without confusion,

with their innumerable details of statuary, carving, and

sculpture, joined powerfully to the tranquil grandeur of the

whole; a vast symphony in stone, so to speak; the colossal work

of one man and one people, all together one and complex, like

the Iliads and the Romanceros, whose sister it is; prodigious

product of the grouping together of all the forces of an epoch,

where, upon each stone, one sees the fancy of the workman

disciplined by the genius of the artist start forth in a

hundred fashions; a sort of human creation, in a word,

powerful and fecund as the divine creation of which it seems

to have stolen the double character,--variety, eternity.

And what we here say of the façade must be said of the

entire church; and what we say of the cathedral church of

Paris, must be said of all the churches of Christendom in the

Middle Ages. All things are in place in that art, self-created,

logical, and well proportioned. To measure the great toe of

the foot is to measure the giant.

Let us return to the façade of Notre-Dame, as it still

appears to us, when we go piously to admire the grave and

puissant cathedral, which inspires terror, so its chronicles

assert: ~quoe mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus~.

Three important things are to-day lacking in that façade:

in the first place, the staircase of eleven steps which formerly

raised it above the soil; next, the lower series of statues

which occupied the niches of the three portals; and lastly the

upper series, of the twenty-eight most ancient kings of France,

which garnished the gallery of the first story, beginning with

Childebert, and ending with Phillip Augustus, holding in his

hand "the imperial apple."

Time has caused the staircase to disappear, by raising the

soil of the city with a slow and irresistible progress; but,

while thus causing the eleven steps which added to the majestic

height of the edifice, to be devoured, one by one, by the

rising tide of the pavements of Paris,--time has bestowed

upon the church perhaps more than it has taken away, for it

is time which has spread over the façade that sombre hue of

the centuries which makes the old age of monuments the

period of their beauty.

But who has thrown down the two rows of statues? who

has left the niches empty? who has cut, in the very middle of

the central portal, that new and bastard arch? who has dared

to frame therein that commonplace and heavy door of carved

wood, à la Louis XV., beside the arabesques of Biscornette?

The men, the architects, the artists of our day.

And if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown

that colossus of Saint Christopher, proverbial for magnitude

among statues, as the grand hall of the Palais de Justice

was among halls, as the spire of Strasbourg among spires?

And those myriads of statues, which peopled all the spaces

between the columns of the nave and the choir, kneeling,

standing, equestrian, men, women, children, kings, bishops,

gendarmes, in stone, in marble, in gold, in silver, in

copper, in wax even,--who has brutally swept them away?

It is not time.

And who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly

encumbered with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble

sarcophagus, with angels' heads and clouds, which seems a

specimen pillaged from the Val-de-Grâce or the Invalides?

Who stupidly sealed that heavy anachronism of stone in the

Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis

XIV., fulfilling the request of Louis XIII.?

And who put the cold, white panes in the place of those

windows," high in color, "which caused the astonished eyes

of our fathers to hesitate between the rose of the grand portal

and the arches of the apse? And what would a sub-chanter

of the sixteenth century say, on beholding the beautiful

yellow wash, with which our archiepiscopal vandals have

desmeared their cathedral? He would remember that it

was the color with which the hangman smeared "accursed"

edifices; he would recall the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, all

smeared thus, on account of the constable's treason. "Yellow,

after all, of so good a quality," said Sauval, "and so well

recommended, that more than a century has not yet caused

it to lose its color." He would think that the sacred place

had become infamous, and would flee.

And if we ascend the cathedral, without mentioning a thousand

barbarisms of every sort,--what has become of that

charming little bell tower, which rested upon the point of

intersection of the cross-roofs, and which, no less frail and no

less bold than its neighbor (also destroyed), the spire of the

Sainte-Chapelle, buried itself in the sky, farther forward than

the towers, slender, pointed, sonorous, carved in open work.

An architect of good taste amputated it (1787), and considered

it sufficient to mask the wound with that large, leaden

plaster, which resembles a pot cover.

'Tis thus that the marvellous art of the Middle Ages has

been treated in nearly every country, especially in France.

One can distinguish on its ruins three sorts of lesions, all

three of which cut into it at different depths; first, time,

which has insensibly notched its surface here and there, and

gnawed it everywhere; next, political and religious revolution,

which, blind and wrathful by nature, have flung themselves

tumultuously upon it, torn its rich garment of carving

and sculpture, burst its rose windows, broken its necklace of

arabesques and tiny figures, torn out its statues, sometimes

because of their mitres, sometimes because of their crowns;

lastly, fashions, even more grotesque and foolish, which, since

the anarchical and splendid deviations of the Renaissance,

have followed each other in the necessary decadence of

architecture. Fashions have wrought more harm than revolutions.

They have cut to the quick; they have attacked the very

bone and framework of art; they have cut, slashed, disorganized,

killed the edifice, in form as in the symbol, in its

consistency as well as in its beauty. And then they have

made it over; a presumption of which neither time nor

revolutions at least have been guilty. They have audaciously

adjusted, in the name of "good taste," upon the wounds of

gothic architecture, their miserable gewgaws of a day, their

ribbons of marble, their pompons of metal, a veritable leprosy

of egg-shaped ornaments, volutes, whorls, draperies, garlands,

fringes, stone flames, bronze clouds, pudgy cupids, chubby-

cheeked cherubim, which begin to devour the face of art in

the oratory of Catherine de Medicis, and cause it to expire,

two centuries later, tortured and grimacing, in the boudoir of

the Dubarry.

Thus, to sum up the points which we have just indicated,

three sorts of ravages to-day disfigure Gothic architecture.

Wrinkles and warts on the epidermis; this is the work of

time. Deeds of violence, brutalities, contusions, fractures;

this is the work of the revolutions from Luther to Mirabeau.

Mutilations, amputations, dislocation of the joints,

"restorations"; this is the Greek, Roman, and barbarian

work of professors according to Vitruvius and Vignole. This

magnificent art produced by the Vandals has been slain by the

academies. The centuries, the revolutions, which at least

devastate with impartiality and grandeur, have been joined by a

cloud of school architects, licensed, sworn, and bound by oath;

defacing with the discernment and choice of bad taste, substituting

the ~chicorées~ of Louis XV. for the Gothic lace, for the greater

glory of the Parthenon. It is the kick of the ass at the dying

lion. It is the old oak crowning itself, and which, to heap the

measure full, is stung, bitten, and gnawed by caterpillars.

How far it is from the epoch when Robert Cenalis, comparing

Notre-Dame de Paris to the famous temple of Diana at

Ephesus, *so much lauded by the ancient pagans*, which Erostatus

*has* immortalized, found the Gallic temple "more excellent

in length, breadth, height, and structure."*

* _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 Prés. One would suppose that six centuries

separated these pillars from that door. There is no one,

not even the hermetics, who does not find in the symbols of

the grand portal a satisfactory compendium of their science,

of which the Church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was

so complete a hieroglyph. Thus, the Roman abbey, the

philosophers' church, the Gothic art, Saxon art, the heavy,

round pillar, which recalls Gregory VII., the hermetic symbolism,

with which Nicolas Flamel played the prelude to Luther,

papal unity, schism, Saint-Germain des Prés, Saint-Jacques

de la Boucherie,--all are mingled, combined, amalgamated in

Notre-Dame. This central mother church is, among the

ancient churches of Paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head

of one, the limbs of another, the haunches of another, something

of all.

We repeat it, these hybrid constructions are not the least

interesting for the artist, for the antiquarian, for the historian.

They make one feel to what a degree architecture is a primitive

thing, by demonstrating (what is also demonstrated by

the cyclopean vestiges, the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic

Hindoo pagodas) that the greatest products of architecture

are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the

offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man

of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the heaps

accumulated by centuries; the residue of successive evaporations

of human society,--in a word, species of formations.

Each wave of time contributes its alluvium, each race

deposits its layer on the monument, each individual brings

his stone. Thus do the beavers, thus do the bees, thus do

men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a hive.

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.

Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending,

~pendent opera interrupta~; they proceed quietly in accordance

with the transformed art. The new art takes the monument where

it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself,

develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can.

The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort,

without reaction,--following a natural and tranquil law. It

is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation

which starts forth anew. Certainly there is matter here for many

large volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the

successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same

monument. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these

great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence

is there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation

is the builder.

Not to consider here anything except the Christian architecture

of Europe, that younger sister of the great masonries

of the Orient, it appears to the eyes as an immense formation

divided into three well-defined zones, which are superposed,

the one upon the other: the Romanesque zone*, the

Gothic zone, the zone of the Renaissance, which we would

gladly call the Greco-Roman zone. The Roman layer, which

is the most ancient and deepest, is occupied by the round

arch, which reappears, supported by the Greek column, in

the modern and upper layer of the Renaissance. The pointed

arch is found between the two. The edifices which belong

exclusively to any one of these three layers are perfectly

distinct, uniform, and complete. There is the Abbey of

Jumiéges, there is the Cathedral of Reims, there is the

Sainte-Croix of 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 Prés. There is the charming,

half-Gothic chapter-house of Bocherville, where the

Roman layer extends half way up. There is the cathedral of

Rouen, which would be entirely Gothic if it did not bathe

the tip of its central spire in the zone of the Renaissance.**

* 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,--Vitré in Brittany, Nordhausen

in Prussia.

The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago--the Paris

of the fifteenth century--was already a gigantic city. We

Parisians generally make a mistake as to the ground which

we think that we have gained, since Paris has not increased

much over one-third since the time of Louis XI. It has

certainly lost more in beauty than it has gained in size.

Paris had its birth, as the reader knows, in that old island

of the City which has the form of a cradle. The strand of

that island was its first boundary wall, the Seine its first

moat. Paris remained for many centuries in its island state,

with two bridges, one on the north, the other on the south;

and two bridge heads, which were at the same time its

gates and its fortresses,--the Grand-Châtelet on the right

bank, the Petit-Châtelet on the left. Then, from the date of

the kings of the first race, Paris, being too cribbed and

confined in its island, and unable to return thither, crossed

the water. Then, beyond the Grand, beyond the Petit-Châtelet,

a first circle of walls and towers began to infringe upon the

country on the two sides of the Seine. Some vestiges of this

ancient enclosure still remained in the last century; to-day,

only the memory of it is left, and here and there a tradition,

the Baudets or Baudoyer gate, "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-Châtelet and the Petit-Châtelet. The mighty city had

cracked, in succession, its four enclosures of walls, like a

child grown too large for his garments of last year. Under

Louis XI., this sea of houses was seen to be pierced at

intervals by several groups of ruined towers, from the ancient

wall, like the summits of hills in an inundation,--like

archipelagos of the old Paris submerged beneath the new.

Since that time Paris has undergone yet another transformation,

unfortunately for our eyes; but it has passed only one

more wall, that of Louis XV., that miserable wall of mud and

spittle, worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet

who sung it,--

~Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant~.*

* 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-Geneviève was enclosed in it.

The culminating point of this sweep of walls was the Papal

gate, that is to say, near the present site of the Pantheon.

The Town, which was the largest of the three fragments of

Paris, held the right bank. Its quay, broken or interrupted

in many places, ran along the Seine, from the Tour de Billy

to the Tour du Bois; that is to say, from the place where the

granary stands to-day, to the present site of the Tuileries.

These four points, where the Seine intersected the wall of the

capital, the Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the right, the

Tour de Billy and the Tour du Bois on the left, were called

pre-eminently, "the four towers of Paris." The Town encroached

still more extensively upon the fields than the University.

The culminating point of the Town wall (that of Charles V.)

was at the gates of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, whose situation

has not been changed.

As we have just said, each of these three great divisions of

Paris was a town, but too special a town to be complete, a city

which could not get along without the other two. Hence three

entirely distinct aspects: churches abounded in the City; palaces,

in the Town; and colleges, in the University. Neglecting

here the originalities, of secondary importance in old

Paris, and the capricious regulations regarding the public

highways, we will say, from a general point of view, taking

only masses and the whole group, in this chaos of communal

jurisdictions, that the island belonged to the bishop, the right

bank to the provost of the merchants, the left bank to the

Rector; over all ruled the provost of Paris, a royal not

a municipal official. The City had Notre-Dame; the Town, the

Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville; the University, the Sorbonne.

The Town had the markets (Halles); the city, the Hospital;

the University, the Pré-aux-Clercs. Offences committed by

the scholars on the left bank were tried in the law courts on

the island, and were punished on the right bank at Montfauçon;

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-Honoré. All these gates

were strong, and also handsome, which does not detract from

strength. A large, deep moat, with a brisk current during

the high water of winter, bathed the base of the wall round

Paris; the Seine furnished the water. At night, the gates

were shut, the river was barred at both ends of the city with

huge iron chains, and Paris slept tranquilly.

From a bird's-eye view, these three burgs, the City, the

Town, and the University, each presented to the eye an

inextricable skein of eccentrically tangled streets. Nevertheless,

at first sight, one recognized the fact that these three

fragments formed but one body. One immediately perceived three

long parallel streets, unbroken, undisturbed, traversing, almost

in a straight line, all three cities, from one end to the other;

from North to South, perpendicularly, to the Seine, which

bound them together, mingled them, infused them in each

other, poured and transfused the people incessantly, from one

to the other, and made one out of the three. The first of

these streets ran from the Porte Saint-Martin: it was called

the Rue Saint-Jacques in the University, Rue de la Juiverie in

the City, Rue Saint-Martin in the Town; it crossed the water

twice, under the name of the Petit Pont and the Pont Notre-

Dame. The second, which was called the Rue de la Harpe on

the left bank, Rue de la Barillerié in the island, Rue Saint-

Denis on the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel on one arm of

the Seine, Pont au Change on the other, ran from the Porte

Saint-Michel in the University, to the Porte Saint-Denis in

the Town. However, under all these names, there were but

two streets, parent streets, generating streets,--the two

arteries of Paris. All the other veins of the triple city

either derived their supply from them or emptied into them.

Independently of these two principal streets, piercing Paris

diametrically in its whole breadth, from side to side, common

to the entire capital, the City and the University had also

each its own great special street, which ran lengthwise by

them, parallel to the Seine, cutting, as it passed, at right

angles, the two arterial thoroughfares. Thus, in the Town,

one descended in a straight line from the Porte Saint-Antoine

to the Porte Saint-Honoré; in the University from the Porte

Saint-Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain. These two great

thoroughfares intersected by the two first, formed the canvas

upon which reposed, knotted and crowded together on every

hand, the labyrinthine network of the streets of Paris. In

the incomprehensible plan of these streets, one distinguished

likewise, on looking attentively, two clusters of great streets,

like magnified sheaves of grain, one in the University, the

other in the Town, which spread out gradually from the

bridges to the gates.

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

Now, what aspect did this whole present, when, as viewed

from the summit of the towers of Notre-Dame, in 1482?

That we shall try to describe.

For the spectator who arrived, panting, upon that pinnacle,

it was first a dazzling confusing view of roofs, chimneys,

streets, bridges, places, spires, bell towers. Everything

struck your eye at once: the carved gable, the pointed roof, the

turrets suspended at the angles of the walls; the stone pyramids

of the eleventh century, the slate obelisks of the fifteenth; the

round, bare tower of the donjon keep; the square and fretted

tower of the church; the great and the little, the massive and

the aerial. The eye was, for a long time, wholly lost in this

labyrinth, where there was nothing which did not possess its

originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty,--nothing which

did not proceed from art; beginning with the smallest house,

with its painted and carved front, with external beams, elliptical

door, with projecting stories, to the royal Louvre, which

then had a colonnade of towers. But these are the principal

masses which were then to be distinguished when the eye

began to accustom itself to this tumult of edifices.

In the first place, the City.--"The island of the City," as

Sauval says, who, in spite of his confused medley, sometimes

has such happy turns of expression,--"the island of the city

is made like a great ship, stuck in the mud and run aground

in the current, near the centre of the Seine."

We have just explained that, in the fifteenth century, this

ship was anchored to the two banks of the river by five

bridges. This form of a ship had also struck the heraldic

scribes; for it is from that, and not from the siege by the

Normans, that the ship which blazons the old shield of Paris,

comes, according to Favyn and Pasquier. For him who understands

how to decipher them, armorial bearings are algebra,

armorial bearings have a tongue. The whole history of the

second half of the Middle Ages is written in armorial

bearings,--the first half is in the symbolism of the Roman

churches. They are the hieroglyphics of feudalism, succeeding

those of theocracy.

Thus the City first presented itself to the eye, with its stern

to the east, and its prow to the west. Turning towards the

prow, one had before one an innumerable flock of ancient

roofs, over which arched broadly the lead-covered apse of the

Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant's haunches loaded with its

tower. Only here, this tower was the most audacious, the

most open, the most ornamented spire of cabinet-maker's work

that ever let the sky peep through its cone of lace. In front

of Notre-Dame, and very near at hand, three streets opened

into the cathedral square,--a fine square, lined with ancient

houses. Over the south side of this place bent the wrinkled

and sullen façade of the Hôtel Dieu, and its roof, which seemed

covered with warts and pustules. Then, on the right and the

left, to east and west, within that wall of the City, which was

yet so contracted, rose the bell towers of its one and twenty

churches, of every date, of every form, of every size, from the

low and wormeaten belfry of Saint-Denis du Pas (~Carcer

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 Hôtel given by the city, under Charles VI., to Juvénal des

Ursins; a little farther on, the pitch-covered sheds of the

Palus Market; in still another quarter the new apse of Saint-

Germain le Vieux, lengthened in 1458, with a bit of the Rue

aux Febves; and then, in places, a square crowded with

people; a pillory, erected at the corner of a street; a fine

fragment of the pavement of Philip Augustus, a magnificent

flagging, grooved for the horses' feet, in the middle of the

road, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the

miserable cobblestones, called the "pavement of the League;" a

deserted back courtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase

turrets, such as were erected in the fifteenth century, one

of which is still to be seen in the Rue des Bourdonnais.

Lastly, at the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, towards the west,

the Palais de Justice rested its group of towers at the edge

of the water. The thickets of the king's gardens, which

covered the western point of the City, masked the Island du

Passeur. As for the water, from the summit of the towers of

Notre-Dame one hardly saw it, on either side of the City; the

Seine was hidden by bridges, the bridges by houses.

And when the glance passed these bridges, whose roofs were

visibly green, rendered mouldy before their time by the vapors

from the water, if it was directed to the left, towards the

University, the first edifice which struck it was a large,

low sheaf of towers, the Petit-Chàtelet, whose yawning gate

devoured the end of the Petit-Pont. Then, if your view ran

along the bank, from east to west, from the Tournelle to the

Tour de Nesle, there was a long cordon of houses, with carved

beams, stained-glass windows, each story projecting over

that beneath it, an interminable zigzag of bourgeois gables,

frequently interrupted by the mouth of a street, and from time

to time also by the front or angle of a huge stone mansion,

planted at its ease, with courts and gardens, wings and

detached buildings, amid this populace of crowded and narrow

houses, like a grand gentleman among a throng of rustics.

There were five or six of these mansions on the quay, from the

house of Lorraine, which shared with the Bernardins the

grand enclosure adjoining the Tournelle, to the Hôtel de Nesle,

whose principal tower ended Paris, and whose pointed roofs

were in a position, during three months of the year, to

encroach, with their black triangles, upon the scarlet disk of

the setting sun.

This side of the Seine was, however, the least mercantile of

the two. Students furnished more of a crowd and more noise

there than artisans, and there was not, properly speaking,

any quay, except from the Pont Saint-Michel to the Tour de

Nesle. The rest of the bank of the Seine was now a naked

strand, the same as beyond the Bernardins; again, a throng

of houses, standing with their feet in the water, as between

the two bridges.

There was a great uproar of laundresses; they screamed, and

talked, and sang from morning till night along the beach,

and beat a great deal of linen there, just as in our day.

This is not the least of the gayeties of Paris.

The University presented a dense mass to the eye. From

one end to the other, it was homogeneous and compact. The

thousand roofs, dense, angular, clinging to each other,

composed, nearly all, of the same geometrical element, offered,

when viewed from above, the aspect of a crystallization of the

same substance.

The capricious ravine of streets did not cut this block of

houses into too disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges

were scattered about in a fairly equal manner, and there were

some everywhere. The amusingly varied crests of these

beautiful edifices were the product of the same art as the

simple roofs which they overshot, and were, actually, only

a multiplication of the square or the cube of the same

geometrical figure. Hence they complicated the whole effect,

without disturbing it; completed, without overloading it.

Geometry is harmony. Some fine mansions here and there

made magnificent outlines against the picturesque attics of

the left bank. The house of Nevers, the house of Rome, the

house of Reims, which have disappeared; the Hôtel de Cluny,

which still exists, for the consolation of the artist, and whose

tower was so stupidly deprived of its crown a few years ago.

Close to Cluny, that Roman palace, with fine round arches,

were once the hot baths of Julian. There were a great many

abbeys, of a beauty more devout, of a grandeur more solemn

than the mansions, but not less beautiful, not less grand.

Those which first caught the eye were the Bernardins, with

their three bell towers; Sainte-Geneviève, whose square

tower, which still exists, makes us regret the rest; the

Sorbonne, half college, half monastery, of which so admirable

a nave survives; the fine quadrilateral cloister of the Mathurins;

its neighbor, the cloister of Saint-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 Hôtels and the abbeys, with a

severity full of elegance, sculpture less giddy than the palaces,

an architecture less severe than the convents. Unfortunately,

hardly anything remains of these monuments, where Gothic

art combined with so just a balance, richness and economy.

The churches (and they were numerous and splendid in the

University, and they were graded there also in all the ages of

architecture, from the round arches of Saint-Julian to the

pointed arches of Saint-Séverin), the churches dominated the

whole; and, like one harmony more in this mass of harmonies,

they pierced in quick succession the multiple open work of

the gables with slashed spires, with open-work bell towers,

with slender pinnacles, whose line was also only a magnificent

exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs.

The ground of the University was hilly; Mount Sainte-

Geneviève formed an enormous mound to the south; and it

was a sight to see from the summit of Notre-Dame how that

throng of narrow and tortuous streets (to-day the Latin Quarter),

those bunches of houses which, spread out in every direction

from the top of this eminence, precipitated themselves in

disorder, and almost perpendicularly down its flanks, nearly to

the water's edge, having the air, some of falling, others of

clambering up again, and all of holding to one another. A

continual flux of a thousand black points which passed each

other on the pavements made everything move before the

eyes; it was the populace seen thus from aloft and afar.

Lastly, in the intervals of these roofs, of these spires, of

these accidents of numberless edifices, which bent and writhed,

and jagged in so eccentric a manner the extreme line of the

University, one caught a glimpse, here and there, of a great

expanse of moss-grown wall, a thick, round tower, a crenellated

city gate, shadowing forth the fortress; it was the wall of

Philip Augustus. Beyond, the fields gleamed green; beyond,

fled the roads, along which were scattered a few more suburban

houses, which became more infrequent as they became more

distant. Some of these faubourgs were important: there were,

first, starting from la Tournelle, the Bourg Saint-Victor, with

its one arch bridge over the Bièvre, its abbey where one could

read the epitaph of Louis le Gros, ~epitaphium Ludovici Grossi~,

and its church with an octagonal spire, flanked with four little

bell towers of the eleventh century (a similar one can be seen

at 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 Prés. The Bourg

Saint-Germain, already a large community, formed fifteen or

twenty streets in the rear; the pointed bell tower of Saint-

Sulpice marked one corner of the town. Close beside it one

descried the quadrilateral enclosure of the fair of Saint-

Germain, where the market is situated to-day; then the

abbot's pillory, a pretty little round tower, well capped with

a leaden cone; the brickyard was further on, and the Rue du

Four, which led to the common bakehouse, and the mill on its

hillock, and the lazar house, a tiny house, isolated and half

seen.

But that which attracted the eye most of all, and fixed it for

a long time on that point, was the abbey itself. It is certain

that this monastery, which had a grand air, both as a church and

as a seignory; that abbatial palace, where the bishops of Paris

counted themselves happy if they could pass the night; that

refectory, upon which the architect had bestowed the air, the

beauty, and the rose window of a cathedral; that elegant

chapel of the Virgin; that monumental dormitory; those vast

gardens; that portcullis; that drawbridge; that envelope of

battlements which notched to the eye the verdure of the

surrounding meadows; those courtyards, where gleamed men at

arms, intermingled with golden copes;--the whole grouped

and clustered about three lofty spires, with round arches,

well planted upon a Gothic apse, made a magnificent figure

against the horizon.

When, at length, after having contemplated the University

for a long time, you turned towards the right bank, towards

the Town, the character of the spectacle was abruptly altered.

The Town, in fact much larger than the University, was also

less of a unit. At the first glance, one saw that it was divided

into many masses, singularly distinct. First, to the eastward,

in that part of the town which still takes its name from the

marsh where Camulogènes entangled Caesar, was a pile of

palaces. The block extended to the very water's edge. Four

almost contiguous Hôtels, Jouy, Sens, Barbeau, the house of

the Queen, mirrored their slate peaks, broken with slender

turrets, in the Seine.

These four edifices filled the space from the Rue des

Nonaindières, to the abbey of the Celestins, whose spire gracefully

relieved their line of gables and battlements. A few miserable,

greenish hovels, hanging over the water in front of these

sumptuous Hôtels, did not prevent one from seeing the fine

angles of their façades, their large, square windows with

stone mullions, their pointed porches overloaded with statues,

the vivid outlines of their walls, always clear cut, and all

those charming accidents of architecture, which cause Gothic

art to have the air of beginning its combinations afresh with

every monument.

Behind these palaces, extended in all directions, now broken,

fenced in, battlemented like a citadel, now veiled by great

trees like a Carthusian convent, the immense and multiform

enclosure of that miraculous Hôtel de Saint-Pol, where the

King of France possessed the means of lodging superbly two

and twenty princes of the rank of the dauphin and the Duke

of Burgundy, with their domestics and their suites, without

counting the great lords, and the emperor when he came to

view Paris, and the lions, who had their separate Hôtel at the

royal Hôtel. Let us say here that a prince's apartment was

then composed of never less than eleven large rooms, from

the chamber of state to the oratory, not to mention the galleries,

baths, vapor-baths, and other "superfluous places," with

which each apartment was provided; not to mention the private

gardens for each of the king's guests; not to mention

the kitchens, the cellars, the domestic offices, the general

refectories of the house, the poultry-yards, where there were

twenty-two general laboratories, from the bakehouses to the

wine-cellars; games of a thousand sorts, malls, tennis, and riding

at the ring; aviaries, fishponds, menageries, stables, barns,

libraries, arsenals and foundries. This was what a king's

palace, a Louvre, a Hôtel de Saint-Pol was then. A city

within a city.

From the tower where we are placed, the Hôtel Saint-Pol,

almost half hidden by the four great houses of which we have

just spoken, was still very considerable and very marvellous

to see. One could there distinguish, very well, though cleverly

united with the principal building by long galleries, decked

with painted glass and slender columns, the three Hôtels which

Charles V. had amalgamated with his palace: the Hôtel du

Petit-Muce, with the airy balustrade, which formed a graceful

border to its roof; the Hôtel of the 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 abbé, between the two mortises

of the drawbridge; the Hôtel 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 Hôtel of the Lions, with its low, pointed

arches on short, Saxon pillars, its iron gratings and its

perpetual roar; shooting up above the whole, the scale-

ornamented spire of the Ave-Maria; on the left, the house of

the Provost of Paris, flanked by four small towers, delicately

grooved, in the middle; at the extremity, the Hôtel Saint-Pol,

properly speaking, with its multiplied façades, its successive

enrichments from the time of Charles V., the hybrid excrescences,

with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it

during the last two centuries, with all the apses of its chapels,

all the gables of its galleries, a thousand weathercocks for the

four winds, and its two lofty contiguous towers, whose conical

roof, surrounded by battlements at its base, looked like those

pointed caps which have their edges turned up.

Continuing to mount the stories of this amphitheatre of

palaces spread out afar upon the ground, after crossing a deep

ravine hollowed out of the roofs in the Town, which marked

the passage of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the eye reached the

house of Angoulême, a vast construction of many epochs,

where there were perfectly new and very white parts, which

melted no better into the whole than a red patch on a blue

doublet. Nevertheless, the remarkably pointed and lofty

roof of the modern palace, bristling with carved eaves,

covered with sheets of lead, where coiled a thousand fantastic

arabesques of sparkling incrustations of gilded bronze, that

roof, so curiously damascened, darted upwards gracefully from

the midst of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice; whose

huge and ancient towers, rounded by age like casks, sinking

together with old age, and rending themselves from top to

bottom, resembled great bellies unbuttoned. Behind rose the

forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles. Not a view in

the world, either at Chambord or at the Alhambra, is more

magic, more aerial, more enchanting, than that thicket of

spires, tiny bell towers, chimneys, weather-vanes, winding

staircases, lanterns through which the daylight makes its way,

which seem cut out at a blow, pavilions, spindle-shaped turrets,

or, as they were then called, "tournelles," all differing in

form, in height, and attitude. One would have pronounced

it a gigantic stone chess-board.

To the right of the Tournelles, that truss of enormous

towers, black as ink, running into each other and tied, as it

were, by a circular moat; that donjon keep, much more pierced

with loopholes than with windows; that drawbridge, always

raised; that portcullis, always lowered,--is the Bastille.

Those sorts of black beaks which project from between the

battlements, and which you take from a distance to be cave

spouts, are cannons.

Beneath them, at the foot of the formidable edifice, behold

the Porte Sainte-Antoine, buried between its two towers.

Beyond the Tournelles, as far as the wall of Charles V.,

spread out, with rich compartments of verdure and of flowers,

a velvet carpet of cultivated land and royal parks, in the

midst of which one recognized, by its labyrinth of trees and

alleys, the famous 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 Plâtrerie, de la Verrerie, de la Tixeranderie,

etc., meandered over all. There were also fine edifices which

pierced the petrified undulations of that sea of gables. At

the head of the Pont aux Changeurs, behind which one beheld

the Seine foaming beneath the wheels of the Pont aux

Meuniers, there was the 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 Grève of which we

have given the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais,

which a front "in good taste" has since spoiled; Saint-Méry,

whose ancient pointed arches were still almost round arches;

Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial; there

were twenty other monuments, which did not disdain to bury

their wonders in that chaos of black, deep, narrow streets.

Add the crosses of carved stone, more lavishly scattered

through the squares than even the gibbets; the cemetery of

the Innocents, whose architectural wall could be seen in the

distance above the roofs; the pillory of the Markets, whose

top was visible between two chimneys of the Rue de la

Cossonnerie; the ladder of the Croix-du-Trahoir, in its square

always black with people; the circular buildings of the wheat

mart; the fragments of Philip Augustus's ancient wall,

which could be made out here and there, drowned among the

houses, its towers gnawed by ivy, its gates in ruins, with

crumbling and deformed stretches of wall; the quay with its

thousand shops, and its bloody knacker's yards; the Seine

encumbered with boats, from the Port au Foin to Port-l'Evêque,

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 Hôtels, 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

Prés. Between the Rue Saint-Martin and the Rue Saint-

Denis, spread the enclosure of the Trinité.

Lastly, between the Rue Saint-Denis, and the Rue Montorgueil,

stood the Filles-Dieu. On one side, the rotting roofs

and unpaved enclosure of the Cour des Miracles could be

descried. It was the sole profane ring which was linked to

that devout chain of convents.

Finally, the fourth compartment, which stretched itself out

in the agglomeration of the roofs on the right bank, and

which occupied the western angle of the enclosure, and the

banks of the river down stream, was a fresh cluster of palaces

and Hôtels pressed close about the base of the Louvre. The

old Louvre of Philip Augustus, that immense edifice whose

great tower rallied about it three and twenty chief towers, not

to reckon the lesser towers, seemed from a distance to be

enshrined in the Gothic roofs of the Hôtel d'Alençon, and the

Petit-Bourbon. This hydra of towers, giant guardian of

Paris, with its four and twenty heads, always erect, with its

monstrous haunches, loaded or scaled with slates, and all

streaming with metallic reflections, terminated with wonderful

effect the configuration of the Town towards the west.

Thus an immense block, which the Romans called ~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-

Batelière, encircled with white walls; behind it, with its

chalky slopes, Montmartre, which had then almost as many

churches as windmills, and which has kept only the windmills,

for society no longer demands anything but bread for the

body. Lastly, beyond the Louvre, the Faubourg Saint-

Honoré, already considerable at that time, could be seen

stretching away into the fields, and Petit-Bretagne gleaming

green, and the Marché aux Pourceaux spreading abroad, in

whose centre swelled the horrible apparatus used for boiling

counterfeiters. Between la Courtille and Saint-Laurent, your

eye had already noticed, on the summit of an eminence

crouching amid desert plains, a sort of edifice which

resembled from a distance a ruined colonnade, mounted upon

a basement with its foundation laid bare. This was neither

a Parthenon, nor a temple of the Olympian Jupiter. It was

Montfauçon.

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'Evêque. On the horizon,

a border of hills arranged in a circle like the rim of the

basin. Finally, far away to the east, Vincennes, and its

seven quadrangular towers to the south, Bicêtre and its

pointed turrets; to the north, Saint-Denis and its spire; to

the west, Saint Cloud and its donjon keep. Such was the

Paris which the ravens, who lived in 1482, beheld from the

summits of the towers of Notre-Dame.

Nevertheless, Voltaire said of this city, that "before Louis

XIV., it possessed but four fine monuments": the dome of

the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, the modern Louvre, and I

know not what the fourth was--the Luxembourg, perhaps.

Fortunately, Voltaire was the author of "Candide" in spite of

this, and in spite of this, he is, among all the men who have

followed each other in the long series of humanity, the one

who has best possessed the diabolical laugh. Moreover, this

proves that one can be a fine genius, and yet understand nothing

of an art to which one does not belong. Did not 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 Hôtel de Ville, two edifices

still in fine taste;--the Paris of Henri IV., at the Place

Royale: façades of brick with stone corners, and slated roofs,

tri-colored houses;--the Paris of Louis XIII., at the Val-de-

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 façades, 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-Geneviève of M. Soufflot is certainly the finest Savoy

cake that has ever been made in stone. The Palace of the

Legion of Honor is also a very distinguished bit of pastry.

The dome of the wheat market is an English jockey cap, on a

grand scale. The towers of Saint-Sulpice are two huge clarinets,

and the form is as good as any other; the telegraph, contorted

and grimacing, forms an admirable accident upon their roofs.

Saint-Roch has a door which, for magnificence, is comparable only

to that of Saint-Thomas d'Aquin. It has, also, a crucifixion in

high relief, in a cellar, with a sun of gilded wood. These things

are fairly marvellous. The lantern of the labyrinth of the Jardin

des Plantes is also very ingenious.

As for the Palace of the Bourse, which is Greek as to its

colonnade, Roman in the round arches of its doors and windows,

of the Renaissance by virtue of its flattened vault, it is

indubitably a very correct and very pure monument; the proof

is that it is crowned with an attic, such as was never seen in

Athens, a beautiful, straight line, gracefully broken here and

there by stovepipes. Let us add that if it is according to

rule that the architecture of a building should be adapted to

its purpose in such a manner that this purpose shall be

immediately apparent from the mere aspect of the building, one

cannot be too much amazed at a structure which might be

indifferently--the palace of a king, a chamber of communes,

a town-hall, a college, a riding-school, an academy, a

warehouse, a court-house, a museum, a barracks, a sepulchre, a

temple, or a theatre. However, it is an Exchange. An edifice

ought to be, moreover, suitable to the climate. This one

is evidently constructed expressly for our cold and rainy skies.

It has a roof almost as flat as roofs in the East, which involves

sweeping the roof in winter, when it snows; and of course

roofs are made to be swept. As for its purpose, of which we

just spoke, it fulfils it to a marvel; it is a bourse in France

as it would have been a temple in Greece. It is true that the

architect was at a good deal of trouble to conceal the clock

face, which would have destroyed the purity of the fine lines

of the façade; but, on the other hand, we have that colonnade

which circles round the edifice and under which, on days of

high religious ceremony, the theories of the stock-brokers and

the courtiers of commerce can be developed so majestically.

These are very superb structures. Let us add a quantity

of fine, amusing, and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli,

and I do not despair of Paris presenting to the eye, when

viewed from a balloon, that richness of line, that opulence

of detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiose something

in the simple, and unexpected in the beautiful, which

characterizes a checker-board.

However, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to

you, reconstruct the Paris of the fifteenth century, call it up

before you in thought; look at the sky athwart that surprising

forest of spires, towers, and belfries; spread out in the

centre of the city, tear away at the point of the islands, fold

at the arches of the bridges, the Seine, with its broad green

and yellow expanses, more variable than the skin of a serpent;

project clearly against an azure horizon the Gothic profile of

this ancient Paris. Make its contour float in a winter's mist

which clings to its numerous chimneys; drown it in profound

night and watch the odd play of lights and shadows in that

sombre labyrinth of edifices; cast upon it a ray of light which

shall vaguely outline it and cause to emerge from the fog the

great heads of the towers; or take that black silhouette

again, enliven with shadow the thousand acute angles of the

spires and gables, and make it start out more toothed than a

shark's jaw against a copper-colored western sky,--and

then compare.

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression

with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on

the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of

Easter or of Pentecost--climb upon some elevated point, whence

you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening

of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it

is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver

simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from

one church to another, as when musicians give warning that

they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!--for it

seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its

own,--behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a

column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of

each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak,

isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then,

little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle,

are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert.

It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations

incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats,

undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond

the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.

Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and

profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold

the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the

belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and

shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves

leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth,

winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall,

broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their

midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends

the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid

notes running across it, executing three or four luminous

zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is

the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the

gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end,

the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal

chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without

relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular

intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame,

which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At

intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which

come from the triple peal of Saint-Germaine des Prés. Then,

again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens

and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts

forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the

very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the

interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the

vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs.

Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of

listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris

by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing;

in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then,

to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur

of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the

infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette

of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon,

like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half

shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central

chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more

rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult

of bells and chimes;--than this furnace of music,--than

these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in

the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,--than this city

which is no longer anything but an orchestra,--than this

symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.

BOOK FOURTH.

CHAPTER I.

GOOD SOULS.

Sixteen years previous to the epoch when this story takes

place, one fine morning, on Quasimodo Sunday, a living creature

had been deposited, after mass, in the church of Notre-

Dame, on the wooden bed securely fixed in the vestibule on

the left, opposite that great image of Saint Christopher,

which the figure of Messire Antoine des Essarts, chevalier,

carved in stone, had been gazing at on his knees since 1413,

when they took it into their heads to overthrow the saint and

the faithful follower. Upon this bed of wood it was customary

to expose foundlings for public charity. Whoever cared

to take them did so. In front of the wooden bed was a copper

basin for alms.

The sort of living being which lay upon that plank on the

morning of Quasimodo, in the year of the Lord, 1467, appeared

to excite to a high degree, the curiosity of the numerous

group which had congregated about the wooden bed. The

group was formed for the most part of the fair sex. Hardly

any one was there except old women.

In the first row, and among those who were most bent over

the bed, four were noticeable, who, from their gray ~cagoule~,

a sort of cassock, were recognizable as attached to some devout

sisterhood. I do not see why history has not transmitted to

posterity the names of these four discreet and venerable

damsels. They were Agnes la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme,

Henriette la Gaultière, Gauchère 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 Gauchère, gazing at

the little creature exposed, which was screaming and writhing

on the wooden bed, terrified by so many glances.

"What is to become of us," said Jehanne, "if that is the

way children are made now?"

"I'm not learned in the matter of children," resumed Agnes,

"but it must be a sin to look at this one."

"'Tis not a child, Agnes."

"'Tis an abortion of a monkey," remarked Gauchère.

"'Tis a miracle," interposed Henriette la Gaultière.

"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 Gauchère.

"Hold your tongue, you little howler!"

"To think that Monsieur of Reims sent this enormity

to Monsieur of Paris," added la Gaultière, clasping

her hands.

"I imagine," said 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 Gaultière, "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 Gauchère, "what do you

prognosticate of this pretended foundling?"

"The greatest misfortunes," replied Mistricolle.

"Ah! good heavens!" said an old woman among the spectators,

"and that besides our having had a considerable pestilence

last year, and that they say that the English are going

to disembark in a company at Harfleur."

"Perhaps that will prevent the queen from coming to Paris

in the month of September," interposed another; "trade is so

bad already."

"My opinion is," exclaimed Jehanne de la Tarme, "that it

would be better for the louts of Paris, if this little magician

were put to bed on a fagot than on a plank."

"A fine, flaming fagot," added the old woman.

"It would be more prudent," said Mistricolle.

For several minutes, a young priest had been listening to

the reasoning of the Haudriettes and the sentences of the

notary. He had a severe face, with a large brow, a profound

glance. He thrust the crowd silently aside, scrutinized the

"little magician," and stretched out his hand upon him. It was

high time, for all the devotees were already licking their chops

over the "fine, flaming fagot."

"I adopt this child," said the priest.

He took it in his cassock and carried it off. The spectators

followed him with frightened glances. A moment later, he had

disappeared through the "Red Door," which then led from the

church to the cloister.

When the first surprise was over, Jehanne de la Tarme

bent down to the ear of la Gaultière,--

"I told you so, sister,--that young clerk, Monsieur Claude

Frollo, is a sorcerer."

CHAPTER II.

CLAUDE FROLLO.

In fact, Claude Frollo was no common person.

He belonged to one of those middle-class families which

were called indifferently, in the impertinent language of the

last century, the high ~bourgeoise~ or the petty nobility. This

family had inherited from the brothers Paclet the fief of

Tirechappe, which was dependent upon the Bishop of Paris, and

whose twenty-one houses had been in the thirteenth century

the object of so many suits before the official. As possessor

of this fief, Claude Frollo was one of the twenty-seven

seigneurs keeping claim to a manor in fee in Paris and its

suburbs; and for a long time, his name was to be seen inscribed

in this quality, between the Hôtel de Tancarville, belonging

to Master François Le Rez, and the college of Tours, in the

records deposited at Saint Martin des Champs.

Claude Frollo had been destined from infancy, by his parents,

to the ecclesiastical profession. He had been taught to

read in Latin; he had been trained to keep his eyes on the

ground and to speak low. While still a child, his father had

cloistered him in the college of Torchi in the University.

There it was that he had grown up, on the missal and the

lexicon.

Moreover, he was a sad, grave, serious child, who studied

ardently, and learned quickly; he never uttered a loud cry in

recreation hour, mixed but little in the bacchanals of the Rue

du Fouarre, did not know what it was to ~dare alapas et capillos

laniare~, and had cut no figure in that revolt of 1463, which

the annalists register gravely, under the title of "The sixth

trouble of the University." He seldom rallied the poor

students of Montaigu on the ~cappettes~ from which they derived

their name, or the bursars of the college of Dormans on their

shaved tonsure, and their surtout parti-colored of bluish-green,

blue, and violet cloth, ~azurini coloris et bruni~, as says the

charter of the Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes.

On the other hand, he was assiduous at the great and the

small schools of the Rue Saint Jean de Beauvais. The first

pupil whom the Abbé de Saint Pierre de Val, at the moment

of beginning his reading on canon law, always perceived, glued

to a pillar of the school Saint-Vendregesile, opposite his

rostrum, was Claude Frollo, armed with his horn ink-bottle, biting

his pen, scribbling on his threadbare knee, and, in winter,

blowing on his fingers. The first auditor whom Messire Miles

d'Isliers, doctor in decretals, saw arrive every Monday morning,

all breathless, at the opening of the gates of the school

of the Chef-Saint-Denis, was Claude Frollo. Thus, at sixteen

years of age, the young clerk might have held his own, in

mystical theology, against a father of the church; in canonical

theology, against a father of the councils; in scholastic

theology, against a doctor of Sorbonne.

Theology conquered, he had plunged into decretals. From

the "Master of Sentences," he had passed to the "Capitularies

of Charlemagne;" and he had devoured in succession, in his

appetite for science, decretals upon decretals, those of

Theodore, Bishop of Hispalus; those of Bouchard, Bishop of

Worms; those of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; next the decretal

of Gratian, which succeeded the capitularies of Charlemagne;

then the collection of Gregory IX.; then the Epistle of

~Superspecula~, of Honorius III. He rendered clear and

familiar to himself that vast and tumultuous period of civil law

and canon law in conflict and at strife with each other, in the

chaos of the Middle Ages,--a period which Bishop Theodore

opens in 618, and which Pope Gregory closes in 1227.

Decretals digested, he flung himself upon medicine, on the

liberal arts. He studied the science of herbs, the science of

unguents; he became an expert in fevers and in contusions,

in sprains and abcesses. Jacques d' Espars would have

received him as a physician; Richard Hellain, as a surgeon.

He also passed through all the degrees of licentiate, master,

and doctor of arts. He studied the languages, Latin, Greek,

Hebrew, a triple sanctuary then very little frequented. His

was a veritable fever for acquiring and hoarding, in the matter

of science. At the age of eighteen, he had made his way

through the four faculties; it seemed to the young man that

life had but one sole object: learning.

It was towards this epoch, that the excessive heat of the

summer of 1466 caused that grand outburst of the plague

which carried off more than forty thousand souls in the

vicomty of Paris, and among others, as Jean de Troyes states,

"Master Arnoul, astrologer to the king, who was a very

fine man, both wise and pleasant." The rumor spread in the

University that the Rue Tirechappe was especially devastated by

the malady. It was there that Claude's parents resided, in

the midst of their fief. The young scholar rushed in great

alarm to the paternal mansion. When he entered it, he found

that both father and mother had died on the preceding day.

A very young brother of his, who was in swaddling clothes,

was still alive and crying abandoned in his cradle. This was

all that remained to Claude of his family; the young man

took the child under his arm and went off in a pensive mood.

Up to that moment, he had lived only in science; he now

began to live in life.

This catastrophe was a crisis in Claude's existence.

Orphaned, the eldest, head of the family at the age of nineteen,

he felt himself rudely recalled from the reveries of school to

the realities of this world. Then, moved with pity, he was

seized with passion and devotion towards that child, his

brother; a sweet and strange thing was a human affection

to him, who had hitherto loved his books alone.

This affection developed to a singular point; in a soul so

new, it was like a first love. Separated since infancy from

his parents, whom he had hardly known; cloistered and immured,

as it were, in his books; eager above all things to study

and to learn; exclusively attentive up to that time, to his

intelligence which broadened in science, to his imagination,

which expanded in letters,--the poor scholar had not yet had

time to feel the place of his heart.

This young brother, without mother or father, this little

child which had fallen abruptly from heaven into his arms,

made a new man of him. He perceived that there was something

else in the world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne,

and the verses of Homer; that man needed affections; that

life without tenderness and without love was only a set

of dry, shrieking, and rending wheels. Only, he imagined, for

he was at the age when illusions are as yet replaced only by

illusions, that the affections of blood and family were the sole

ones necessary, and that a little brother to love sufficed to fill

an entire existence.

He threw himself, therefore, into the love for his little

Jehan with the passion of a character already profound,

ardent, concentrated; that poor frail creature, pretty, fair-

haired, rosy, and curly,--that orphan with another orphan

for his only support, touched him to the bottom of his heart;

and grave thinker as he was, he set to meditating upon Jehan

with an infinite compassion. He kept watch and ward over

him as over something very fragile, and very worthy of care.

He was more than a brother to the child; he became a mother

to him.

Little Jehan had lost his mother while he was still at the

breast; Claude gave him to a nurse. Besides the fief of

Tirechappe, he had inherited from his father the fief of

Moulin, which was a dependency of the square tower of Gentilly;

it was a mill on a hill, near the château of Winchestre

(Bicêtre). There was a miller's wife there who was nursing a

fine child; it was not far from the university, and Claude

carried the little Jehan to her in his own arms.

From that time forth, feeling that he had a burden to bear,

he took life very seriously. The thought of his little brother

became not only his recreation, but the object of his studies.

He resolved to consecrate himself entirely to a future for

which he was responsible in the sight of God, and never to

have any other wife, any other child than the happiness and

fortune of his brother. Therefore, he attached himself more

closely than ever to the clerical profession. His merits, his

learning, his quality of immediate vassal of the Bishop of

Paris, threw the doors of the church wide open to him. At

the age of twenty, by special dispensation of the Holy See,

he was a priest, and served as the youngest of the chaplains

of Notre-Dame the altar which is called, because of the late

mass which is said there, ~altare pigrorum~.

There, plunged more deeply than ever in his dear books,

which he quitted only to run for an hour to the fief of Moulin,

this mixture of learning and austerity, so rare at his age, had

promptly acquired for him the respect and admiration of the

monastery. From the cloister, his reputation as a learned man

had passed to the people, among whom it had changed a little,

a frequent occurrence at that time, into reputation as a sorcerer.

It was at the moment when he was returning, on Quasimodo

day, from saying his mass at the Altar of the Lazy, which was

by the side of the door leading to the nave on the right, near

the image of the Virgin, that his attention had been attracted

by the group of old women chattering around the bed for

foundlings.

Then it was that he approached the unhappy little creature,

which was so hated and so menaced. That distress, that

deformity, that abandonment, the thought of his young brother,

the idea which suddenly occurred to him, that if he were to

die, his dear little Jehan might also be flung miserably on the

plank for foundlings,--all this had gone to his heart

simultaneously; a great pity had moved in him, and he had

carried off the child.

When he removed the child from the sack, he found it greatly

deformed, in very sooth. The poor little wretch had a wart on

his left eye, his head placed directly on his shoulders, his

spinal column was crooked, his breast bone prominent, and his

legs bowed; but he appeared to be lively; and although it was

impossible to say in what language he lisped, his cry indicated

considerable force and health. Claude's compassion increased

at the sight of this ugliness; and he made a vow in his heart

to rear the child for the love of his brother, in order that,

whatever might be the future faults of the little Jehan, he

should have beside him that charity done for his sake. It

was a sort of investment of good works, which he was effecting

in the name of his young brother; it was a stock of good works

which he wished to amass in advance for him, in case the little

rogue should some day find himself short of that coin, the only

sort which is received at the toll-bar of paradise.

He baptized his adopted child, and gave him the name of

Quasimodo, either because he desired thereby to mark the day,

when he had found him, or because he wished to designate by

that name to what a degree the poor little creature was

incomplete, and hardly sketched out. In fact, Quasimodo,

blind, hunchbacked, knock-kneed, was only an "almost."

CHAPTER III.

~IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE~.

Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up. He had become a

few years previously the bellringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to

his father by adoption, Claude Frollo,--who had become archdeacon

of Josas, thanks to his suzerain, Messire Louis de Beaumont,--who

had become Bishop of Paris, at the death of Guillaume Chartier in

1472, thanks to his patron, Olivier Le Daim, barber to Louis XI.,

king by the grace of God.

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

In the course of time there had been formed a certain

peculiarly intimate bond which united the ringer to the church.

Separated forever from the world, by the double fatality of

his unknown birth and his natural deformity, imprisoned from

his infancy in that impassable double circle, the poor wretch

had grown used to seeing nothing in this world beyond the

religious walls which had received him under their shadow.

Notre-Dame had been to him successively, as he grew up and

developed, the egg, the nest, the house, the country, the

universe.

There was certainly a sort of mysterious and pre-existing

harmony between this creature and this church. When, still

a little fellow, he had dragged himself tortuously and by jerks

beneath the shadows of its vaults, he seemed, with his human

face and his bestial limbs, the natural reptile of that humid

and sombre pavement, upon which the shadow of the Romanesque

capitals cast so many strange forms.

Later on, the first time that he caught hold, mechanically,

of the ropes to the towers, and hung suspended from them,

and set the bell to clanging, it produced upon his adopted

father, Claude, the effect of a child whose tongue is unloosed

and who begins to speak.

It is thus that, little by little, developing always in

sympathy with the cathedral, living there, sleeping there, hardly

ever leaving it, subject every hour to the mysterious impress,

he came to resemble it, he incrusted himself in it, so to speak,

and became an integral part of it. His salient angles fitted

into the retreating angles of the cathedral (if we may be

allowed this figure of speech), and he seemed not only its

inhabitant but more than that, its natural tenant. One might

almost say that he had assumed its form, as the snail takes on

the form of its shell. It was his dwelling, his hole, his envelope.

There existed between him and the old church so profound an

instinctive sympathy, so many magnetic affinities, so many

material affinities, that he adhered to it somewhat as a

tortoise adheres to its shell. The rough and wrinkled cathedral

was his shell.

It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally all the

similes which we are obliged to employ here to express the

singular, symmetrical, direct, almost consubstantial union of a

man and an edifice. It is equally unnecessary to state to what

a degree that whole cathedral was familiar to him, after so

long and so intimate a cohabitation. That dwelling was

peculiar to him. It had no depths to which Quasimodo had not

penetrated, no height which he had not scaled. He often

climbed many stones up the front, aided solely by the uneven

points of the carving. The towers, on whose exterior

surface he was frequently seen clambering, like a lizard gliding

along a perpendicular wall, those two gigantic twins, so

lofty, so menacing, so formidable, possessed for him neither

vertigo, nor terror, nor shocks of amazement.

To see them so gentle under his hand, so easy to scale, one

would have said that he had tamed them. By dint of leaping,

climbing, gambolling amid the abysses of the gigantic cathedral

he had become, in some sort, a monkey and a goat, like

the Calabrian child who swims before he walks, and plays with

the sea while still a babe.

Moreover, it was not his body alone which seemed fashioned

after the Cathedral, but his mind also. In what condition

was that mind? What bent had it contracted, what form

had it assumed beneath that knotted envelope, in that savage

life? This it would be hard to determine. Quasimodo had

been born one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame. It was with great

difficulty, and by dint of great patience that Claude Frollo had

succeeded in teaching him to talk. But a fatality was

attached to the poor foundling. Bellringer of Notre-Dame at

the age of fourteen, a new infirmity had come to complete

his misfortunes: the bells had broken the drums of his ears;

he had become deaf. The only gate which nature had left

wide open for him had been abruptly closed, and forever.

In closing, it had cut off the only ray of joy and of light

which still made its way into the soul of Quasimodo. His

soul fell into profound night. The wretched being's misery

became as incurable and as complete as his deformity. Let us

add that his deafness rendered him to some extent dumb.

For, in order not to make others laugh, the very moment that

he found himself to be deaf, he resolved upon a silence which

he only broke when he was alone. He voluntarily tied that

tongue which Claude Frollo had taken so much pains to unloose.

Hence, it came about, that when necessity constrained

him to speak, his tongue was torpid, awkward, and like a door

whose hinges have grown rusty.

If now we were to try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo

through that thick, hard rind; if we could sound the depths

of that badly constructed organism; if it were granted to us

to look with a torch behind those non-transparent organs

to explore the shadowy interior of that opaque creature, to

elucidate his obscure corners, his absurd no-thoroughfares, and

suddenly to cast a vivid light upon the soul enchained at the

extremity of that cave, we should, no doubt, find the unhappy

Psyche in some poor, cramped, and ricketty attitude, like

those prisoners beneath the Leads of Venice, who grew old

bent double in a stone box which was both too low and too

short for them.

It is certain that the mind becomes atrophied in a defective

body. Quasimodo was barely conscious of a soul cast in his

own image, moving blindly within him. The impressions of

objects underwent a considerable refraction before reaching

his mind. His brain was a peculiar medium; the ideas which

passed through it issued forth completely distorted. The

reflection which resulted from this refraction was, necessarily,

divergent and perverted.

Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations

of judgment, a thousand deviations, in which his thought

strayed, now mad, now idiotic.

The first effect of this fatal organization was to trouble the

glance which he cast upon things. He received hardly any

immediate perception of them. The external world seemed

much farther away to him than it does to us.

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

He was malicious, in fact, because he was savage; he was

savage because he was ugly. There was logic in his nature, as

there is in ours.

His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of

still greater malevolence: "~Malus puer robustus~," says

Hobbes.

This justice must, however be rendered to him. Malevolence

was not, perhaps, innate in him. From his very first

steps among men, he had felt himself, later on he had seen

himself, spewed out, blasted, rejected. Human words were,

for him, always a raillery or a malediction. As he grew up,

he had found nothing but hatred around him. He had caught

the general malevolence. He had picked up the weapon with

which he had been wounded.

After all, he turned his face towards men only with

reluctance; his cathedral was sufficient for him. It was peopled

with marble figures,--kings, saints, bishops,--who at least

did not burst out laughing in his face, and who gazed upon

him only with tranquillity and kindliness. The other statues,

those of the monsters and demons, cherished no hatred for

him, Quasimodo. He resembled them too much for that.

They seemed rather, to be scoffing at other men. The saints

were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his

friends and guarded him. So he held long communion with

them. He sometimes passed whole hours crouching before

one of these statues, in solitary conversation with it. If any

one came, he fled like a lover surprised in his serenade.

And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the

universe, and all nature beside. He dreamed of no other

hedgerows than the painted windows, always in flower; no

other shade than that of the foliage of stone which spread

out, loaded with birds, in the tufts of the Saxon capitals; of

no other mountains than the colossal towers of the church; of

no other ocean than Paris, roaring at their bases.

What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that

which aroused his soul, and made it open its poor wings,

which it kept so miserably folded in its cavern, that which

sometimes rendered him even happy, was the bells. He

loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them.

From the chime in the spire, over the intersection of the aisles

and nave, to the great bell of the front, he cherished a

tenderness for them all. The central spire and the two towers

were to him as three great cages, whose birds, reared by

himself, sang for him alone. Yet it was these very bells which

had made him deaf; but mothers often love best that child

which has caused them the most suffering.

It is true that their voice was the only one which he could

still hear. On this score, the big bell was his beloved. It

was she whom he preferred out of all that family of noisy

girls which bustled above him, on festival days. This bell

was named Marie. She was alone in the southern tower, with

her sister Jacqueline, a bell of lesser size, shut up in a smaller

cage beside hers. This Jacqueline was so called from the

name of the wife of Jean Montagu, who had given it to the

church, which had not prevented his going and figuring without

his head at Montfauçon. In the second tower there were

six other bells, and, finally, six smaller ones inhabited the

belfry over the crossing, with the wooden bell, which rang

only between after dinner on Good Friday and the morning of

the day before Easter. So Quasimodo had fifteen bells in his

seraglio; but big Marie was his favorite.

No idea can be formed of his delight on days when the

grand peal was sounded. At the moment when the archdeacon

dismissed him, and said, "Go!" he mounted the spiral

staircase of the clock tower faster than any one else could

have descended it. He entered perfectly breathless into the

aerial chamber of the great bell; he gazed at her a moment,

devoutly and lovingly; then he gently addressed her and

patted her with his hand, like a good horse, which is about

to set out on a long journey. He pitied her for the trouble

that she was about to suffer. After these first caresses, he

shouted to his assistants, placed in the lower story of the

tower, to begin. They grasped the ropes, the wheel creaked,

the enormous capsule of metal started slowly into motion.

Quasimodo followed it with his glance and trembled. The

first shock of the clapper and the brazen wall made the

framework upon which it was mounted quiver. Quasimodo

vibrated with the bell.

"Vah!" he cried, with a senseless burst of laughter. However,

the movement of the bass was accelerated, and, in proportion

as it described a wider angle, Quasimodo's eye opened

also more and more widely, phosphoric and flaming. At

length the grand peal began; the whole tower trembled;

woodwork, leads, cut stones, all groaned at once, from the

piles of the foundation to the trefoils of its summit. Then

Quasimodo boiled and frothed; he went and came; he trembled

from head to foot with the tower. The bell, furious,

running riot, presented to the two walls of the tower

alternately its brazen throat, whence escaped that tempestuous

breath, which is audible leagues away. Quasimodo stationed

himself in front of this open throat; he crouched and rose

with the oscillations of the bell, breathed in this overwhelming

breath, gazed by turns at the deep place, which swarmed

with people, two hundred feet below him, and at that enormous,

brazen tongue which came, second after second, to howl

in his ear.

It was the only speech which he understood, the only sound

which broke for him the universal silence. He swelled out

in it as a bird does in the sun. All of a sudden, the frenzy

of the bell seized upon him; his look became extraordinary;

he lay in wait for the great bell as it passed, as a spider lies

in wait for a fly, and flung himself abruptly upon it, with

might and main. Then, suspended above the abyss, borne to

and fro by the formidable swinging of the bell, he seized the

brazen monster by the ear-laps, pressed it between both knees,

spurred it on with his heels, and redoubled the fury of the

peal with the whole shock and weight of his body. Meanwhile,

the tower trembled; he shrieked and gnashed his teeth,

his red hair rose erect, his breast heaving like a bellows, his

eye flashed flames, the monstrous bell neighed, panting, beneath

him; and then it was no longer the great bell of Notre-

Dame nor Quasimodo: it was a dream, a whirlwind, a tempest,

dizziness mounted astride of noise; a spirit clinging to a flying

crupper, a strange centaur, half man, half bell; a sort of

horrible Astolphus, borne away upon a prodigious hippogriff

of living bronze.

The presence of this extraordinary being caused, as it were,

a breath of life to circulate throughout the entire cathedral.

It seemed as though there escaped from him, at least according

to the growing superstitions of the crowd, a mysterious

emanation which animated all the stones of Notre-Dame, and

made the deep bowels of the ancient church to palpitate. It

sufficed for people to know that he was there, to make them

believe that they beheld the thousand statues of the galleries

and the fronts in motion. And the cathedral did indeed seem

a docile and obedient creature beneath his hand; it waited on

his will to raise its great voice; it was possessed and filled

with Quasimodo, as with a familiar spirit. One would have

said that he made the immense edifice breathe. He was

everywhere about it; in fact, he multiplied himself on all

points of the structure. Now one perceived with affright at

the very top of one of the towers, a fantastic dwarf climbing,

writhing, crawling on all fours, descending outside above the

abyss, leaping from projection to projection, and going to

ransack the belly of some sculptured gorgon; it was Quasimodo

dislodging the crows. Again, in some obscure corner of

the church one came in contact with a sort of living chimera,

crouching and scowling; it was Quasimodo engaged in thought.

Sometimes one caught sight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous

head and a bundle of disordered limbs swinging furiously

at the end of a rope; it was Quasimodo ringing vespers

or the Angelus. Often at night a hideous form was seen

wandering along the frail balustrade of carved lacework,

which crowns the towers and borders the circumference of

the apse; again it was the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then,

said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took

on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and

mouths were opened, here and there; one heard the dogs, the

monsters, and the gargoyles of stone, which keep watch night

and day, with outstretched neck and open jaws, around the

monstrous cathedral, barking. And, if it was a Christmas

Eve, while the great bell, which seemed to emit the death

rattle, summoned the faithful to the midnight mass, such an

air was spread over the sombre façade that one would have

declared that the grand portal was devouring the throng, and

that the rose window was watching it. And all this came

from Quasimodo. Egypt would have taken him for the god

of this temple; the Middle Ages believed him to be its

demon: he was in fact its soul.

To such an extent was this disease that for those who know

that Quasimodo has existed, Notre-Dame is to-day deserted,

inanimate, dead. One feels that something has disappeared

from it. That immense body is empty; it is a skeleton; the

spirit has quitted it, one sees its place and that is all. It is

like a skull which still has holes for the eyes, but no

longer sight.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DOG AND HIS MASTER.

Nevertheless, there was one human creature whom Quasimodo

excepted from his malice and from his hatred for others,

and whom he loved even more, perhaps, than his cathedral:

this was Claude Frollo.

The matter was simple; Claude Frollo had taken him in,

had adopted him, had nourished him, had reared him. When

a little lad, it was between Claude Frollo's legs that he was

accustomed to seek refuge, when the dogs and the children

barked after him. Claude Frollo had taught him to talk, to

read, to write. Claude Frollo had finally made him the

bellringer. Now, to give the big bell in marriage to Quasimodo

was to give Juliet to Romeo.

Hence Quasimodo's gratitude was profound, passionate,

boundless; and although the visage of his adopted father

was often clouded or severe, although his speech was habitually

curt, harsh, imperious, that gratitude never wavered

for a single moment. The archdeacon had in Quasimodo

the most submissive slave, the most docile lackey, the most

vigilant of dogs. When the poor bellringer became deaf,

there had been established between him and Claude Frollo, a

language of signs, mysterious and understood by themselves

alone. In this manner the archdeacon was the sole human

being with whom Quasimodo had preserved communication.

He was in sympathy with but two things in this world: Notre-

Dame and Claude Frollo.

There is nothing which can be compared with the empire of

the archdeacon over the bellringer; with the attachment of

the bellringer for the archdeacon. A sign from Claude and

the idea of giving him pleasure would have sufficed to make

Quasimodo hurl himself headlong from the summit of Notre-

Dame. It was a remarkable thing--all that physical strength

which had reached in Quasimodo such an extraordinary

development, and which was placed by him blindly at the disposition

of another. There was in it, no doubt, filial devotion,

domestic attachment; there was also the fascination of one

spirit by another spirit. It was a poor, awkward, and clumsy

organization, which stood with lowered head and supplicating

eyes before a lofty and profound, a powerful and superior

intellect. Lastly, and above all, it was gratitude. Gratitude

so pushed to its extremest limit, that we do not know to what

to compare it. This virtue is not one of those of which the

finest examples are to be met with among men. We will say

then, that Quasimodo loved the archdeacon as never a dog,

never a horse, never an elephant loved his master.

CHAPTER V.

MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO.

In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years of age; Claude

Frollo, about thirty-six. One had grown up, the other had

grown old.

Claude Frollo was no longer the simple scholar of the college

of 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 Montlhéry, and Châteaufort, and one hundred

and seventy-four country curacies. He was an imposing and

sombre personage, before whom the choir boys in alb and

in jacket trembled, as well as the machicots*, 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 Averroès, 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 Grève, just beside the frame for the bells, a very

secret little cell, into which no one, not even the bishop,

entered without his leave, it was said. This tiny cell had

formerly been made almost at the summit of the tower,

among the ravens' nests, by Bishop Hugo de Besançon* 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-Barthélemy,

1334, which interdicts access to the cloister to "any woman

whatever, old or young, mistress or maid." Upon which the

bishop had been constrained to recite to him the ordinance of

Legate Odo, which excepts certain great dames, ~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

Régnier speaks,--

"All sorts of persons run after poets,

As warblers fly shrieking after owls."

Sometimes a mischievous child risked his skin and bones for

the ineffable pleasure of driving a pin into Quasimodo's hump.

Again, a young girl, more bold and saucy than was fitting,

brushed the priest's black robe, singing in his face the sardonic

ditty, "niche, niche, the devil is caught." Sometimes a group

of squalid old crones, squatting in a file under the shadow of

the steps to a porch, scolded noisily as the archdeacon and the

bellringer passed, and tossed them this encouraging welcome,

with a curse: "Hum! there's a fellow whose soul is made like

the other one's body!" Or a band of schoolboys and street

urchins, playing hop-scotch, rose in a body and saluted him

classically, with some cry in Latin: "~Eia! eia! Claudius

cum claudo~!"

But the insult generally passed unnoticed both by the priest

and the bellringer. Quasimodo was too deaf to hear all these

gracious things, and Claude was too dreamy.

BOOK FIFTH.

CHAPTER I.

~ABBAS BEATI MARTINI~.

Dom Claude's fame had spread far and wide. It procured

for him, at about the epoch when he refused to see Madame de

Beaujeu, a visit which he long remembered.

It was in the evening. He had just retired, after the office,

to his canon's cell in the cloister of Notre-Dame. This cell,

with the exception, possibly, of some glass phials, relegated

to a corner, and filled with a decidedly equivocal powder,

which strongly resembled the alchemist's "powder of projection,"

presented nothing strange or mysterious. There were,

indeed, here and there, some inscriptions on the walls, but they

were pure sentences of learning and piety, extracted from

good authors. The archdeacon had just seated himself, by the

light of a three-jetted copper lamp, before a vast coffer

crammed with manuscripts. He had rested his elbow upon the

open volume of _Honorius d'Autun_, ~De predestinatione et libero

arbitrio~, and he was turning over, in deep meditation, the

leaves of a printed folio which he had just brought, the

sole product of the press which his cell contained. In the

midst of his revery there came a knock at his door. "Who's

there?" cried the learned man, in the gracious tone of a

famished dog, disturbed over his bone.

A voice without replied, "Your friend, Jacques Coictier."

He went to open the door.

It was, in fact, the king's physician; a person about fifty

years of age, whose harsh physiognomy was modified only by a

crafty eye. Another man accompanied him. Both wore long

slate-colored robes, furred with minever, girded and closed,

with caps of the same stuff and hue. Their hands were

concealed by their sleeves, their feet by their robes, their eyes

by their caps.

"God help me, messieurs!" said the archdeacon, showing

them in; "I was not expecting distinguished visitors at such

an hour." And while speaking in this courteous fashion he

cast an uneasy and scrutinizing glance from the physician to

his companion.

"'Tis never too late to come and pay a visit to so considerable

a learned man as Dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe," replied

Doctor Coictier, whose Franche-Comté accent made all his

phrases drag along with the majesty of a train-robe.

There then ensued between the physician and the archdeacon

one of those congratulatory prologues which, in accordance

with custom, at that epoch preceded all conversations

between learned men, and which did not prevent them from

detesting each other in the most cordial manner in the world.

However, it is the same nowadays; every wise man's mouth

complimenting another wise man is a vase of honeyed gall.

Claude Frollo's felicitations to Jacques Coictier bore reference

principally to the temporal advantages which the worthy

physician had found means to extract, in the course of his

much envied career, from each malady of the king, an operation

of alchemy much better and more certain than the pursuit

of the philosopher's stone.

"In truth, Monsieur le Docteur Coictier, I felt great joy

on learning of the bishopric given your nephew, my reverend

seigneur Pierre 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-André des

Arcs coming on? 'Tis a Louvre. I love greatly the apricot

tree which is carved on the door, with this play of words:

'A L'ABRI-COTIER--Sheltered from reefs.'"

"Alas! Master Claude, all that masonry costeth me dear.

In proportion as the house is erected, I am ruined."

"Ho! have you not your revenues from the jail, and the

bailiwick of the Palais, and the rents of all the houses,

sheds, stalls, and booths of the enclosure? 'Tis a fine breast

to suck."

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

"But your tolls of Triel, of Saint-James, of Saint-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 façade

of Saint-Come, of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents, of Saint Martin,

of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie--."

For a long time, Gossip Tourangeau, intelligent as was his glance,

had appeared not to understand Dom Claude. He interrupted.

"~Pasque-dieu~! what are your books, then?"

"Here is one of them," said the archdeacon.

And opening the window of his cell he pointed out with

his finger the immense church of Notre-Dame, which, outlining

against the starry sky the black silhouette of its two towers,

its stone flanks, its monstrous haunches, seemed an enormous

two-headed sphinx, seated in the middle of the city.

The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time

in silence, then extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards

the printed book which lay open on the table, and his left

towards Notre-Dame, and turning a sad glance from the book

to the church,--"Alas," he said, "this will kill that."

Coictier, who had eagerly approached the book, could not

repress an exclamation. "Hé, but now, what is there so

formidable in this: 'GLOSSA IN EPISTOLAS D. PAULI, ~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 Abbé de Sainte-Martin, of Tours."

The archdeacon returned to his chamber dumbfounded,

comprehending at last who Gossip Tourangeau was, and recalling

that passage of the register of Sainte-Martin, of Tours:--

~Abbas beati Martini, SCILICET REX 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 façade,

an entire church, presents a symbolical sense absolutely foreign

to worship, or even hostile to the Church. In the thirteenth

century, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicholas Flamel, in the

fifteenth, wrote such seditious pages. Saint-Jacques de la

Boucherie was a whole church of the opposition.

Thought was then free only in this manner; hence it never

wrote itself out completely except on the books called edifices.

Thought, under the form of edifice, could have beheld itself

burned in the public square by the hands of the executioner,

in its manuscript form, if it had been sufficiently imprudent

to risk itself thus; thought, as the door of a church, would

have been a spectator of the punishment of thought as

a book. Having thus only this resource, masonry, in order to

make its way to the light, flung itself upon it from all quarters.

Hence the immense quantity of cathedrals which have

covered Europe--a number so prodigious that one can hardly

believe it even after having verified it. All the material

forces, all the intellectual forces of society converged towards

the same point: architecture. In this manner, under the pretext

of building churches to God, art was developed in its

magnificent proportions.

Then whoever was born a poet became an architect.

Genius, scattered in the masses, repressed in every quarter

under feudalism as under a ~testudo~ of brazen bucklers, finding

no issue except in the direction of architecture,--gushed

forth through that art, and its Iliads assumed the form of

cathedrals. All other arts obeyed, and placed themselves under

the discipline of architecture. They were the workmen of the

great work. The architect, the poet, the master, summed up

in his person the sculpture which carved his façades, painting

which illuminated his windows, music which set his bells to

pealing, and breathed into his organs. There was nothing

down to poor poetry,--properly speaking, that which

persisted in vegetating in manuscripts,--which was not forced,

in order to make something of itself, to come and frame itself

in the edifice in the shape of a hymn or of prose; the same

part, after all, which the tragedies of 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-Grâce; in the eighteenth,

Sainte-Geneviève. Each country has its Saint-Peter's of

Rome. London has one; Petersburg has another; Paris has

two or three. The insignificant testament, the last dotage of

a decrepit grand art falling back into infancy before it dies.

If, in place of the characteristic monuments which we have

just described, we examine the general aspect of art from the

sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we notice the same

phenomena of decay and phthisis. Beginning with François II.,

the architectural form of the edifice effaces itself more and

more, and allows the geometrical form, like the bony structure

of an emaciated invalid, to become prominent. The fine

lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of

geometry. An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a

polyhedron. Meanwhile, architecture is tormented in her

struggles to conceal this nudity. Look at the Greek pediment

inscribed upon the Roman pediment, and vice 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 François II. to Louis XV., the evil

has increased in geometrical progression. Art has no longer

anything but skin upon its bones. It is miserably perishing.

Meanwhile what becomes of printing? All the life which

is leaving architecture comes to it. In proportion as

architecture ebbs, printing swells and grows. That capital

of forces which human thought had been expending in edifices,

it henceforth expends in books. Thus, from the sixteenth

century onward, the press, raised to the level of decaying

architecture, contends with it and kills it. In the seventeenth

century it is already sufficiently the sovereign, sufficiently

triumphant, sufficiently established in its victory, to

give to the world the feast of a great literary century. In

the eighteenth, having reposed for a long time at the Court

of Louis XIV., it seizes again the old sword of Luther, puts it

into the hand of Voltaire, and rushes impetuously to the

attack of that ancient Europe, whose architectural expression

it has already killed. At the moment when the eighteenth

century comes to an end, it has destroyed everything.

In the nineteenth, it begins to reconstruct.

Now, we ask, which of the three arts has really represented

human thought for the last three centuries? which translates

it? which expresses not only its literary and scholastic

vagaries, but its vast, profound, universal movement? which

constantly superposes itself, without a break, without a gap,

upon the human race, which walks a monster with a thousand

legs?--Architecture or printing?

It is printing. Let the reader make no mistake; architecture

is dead; irretrievably slain by the printed book,--slain

because it endures for a shorter time,--slain because it costs

more. Every cathedral represents millions. Let the reader

now imagine what an investment of funds it would require to

rewrite the architectural book; to cause thousands of edifices

to swarm once more upon the soil; to return to those epochs

when the throng of monuments was such, according to the

statement of an eye witness, "that one would have said that

the world in shaking itself, had cast off its old garments in

order to cover itself with a white vesture of churches." ~Erat

enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate,

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, Mahabâhrata, and Nibelungen Lieds,

made by a whole people, with rhapsodies piled up and melted

together. The great accident of an architect of genius may

happen in the twentieth century, like that of Dante in the

thirteenth. But architecture will no longer be the social art,

the collective art, the dominating art. The grand poem, the

grand edifice, the grand work of humanity will no longer be

built: it will be printed.

And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally,

it will no longer be mistress. It will be subservient

to the law of literature, which formerly received the

law from it. The respective positions of the two arts will be

inverted. It is certain that in architectural epochs, the poems,

rare it is true, resemble the monuments. In India, Vyasa is

branching, strange, impenetrable as a pagoda. In Egyptian

Orient, poetry has like the edifices, grandeur and tranquillity

of line; in antique Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in

Christian Europe, the Catholic majesty, the popular 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 dè 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 Châtelet, without

reckoning some little toll from the bridges of Mantes and of

Corbeil, and the profits on the craft of Shagreen-makers of

Paris, on the corders of firewood and the measurers of salt.

Add to this the pleasure of displaying himself in rides about

the city, and of making his fine military costume, which

you may still admire sculptured on his tomb in the abbey

of Valmont in Normandy, and his morion, all embossed at

Montlhéry, stand out a contrast against the parti-colored

red and tawny robes of the aldermen and police. And then,

was it nothing to wield absolute supremacy over the sergeants

of the police, the porter and watch of the Châtelet, the two

auditors of the Châtelet, ~auditores castelleti~, the sixteen

commissioners of the sixteen quarters, the jailer of the Châtelet,

the four enfeoffed sergeants, the hundred and twenty mounted

sergeants, with maces, the chevalier of the watch with his

watch, his sub-watch, his counter-watch and his rear-watch?

Was it nothing to exercise high and low justice, the right

to interrogate, to hang and to draw, without reckoning petty

jurisdiction in the first resort (~in prima instantia~, as the

charters say), on that viscomty of Paris, so nobly appanaged

with seven noble bailiwicks? Can anything sweeter be imagined

than rendering judgments and decisions, as Messire Robert

d'Estouteville daily did in the Grand Châtelet, under the large

and flattened arches of Philip Augustus? and going, as he

was wont to do every evening, to that charming house situated

in the Rue 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 Grève M. de Saint-Pol, who clamored and resisted,

to the great joy of the provost, who did not love monsieur the

constable.

Here, assuredly, is more than sufficient to render a life

happy and illustrious, and to deserve some day a notable page

in that interesting history of the provosts of Paris, where

one learns that Oudard de Villeneuve had a house in the Rue

des Boucheries, that Guillaume de Hangest purchased the

great and the little Savoy, that Guillaume Thiboust gave the

nuns of Sainte-Geneviève his houses in the Rue Clopin, that

Hugues Aubriot lived in the Hôtel du 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 Montlhéry badly fastened, so

that it confined his provostal portliness too closely? had he

beheld ribald fellows, marching in bands of four, beneath his

window, and setting him at defiance, in doublets but no shirts,

hats without crowns, with wallet and bottle at their side?

Was it a vague presentiment of the three hundred and seventy

livres, sixteen sous, eight farthings, which the future King

Charles VII. was to cut off from the provostship in the

following year? The reader can take his choice; we, for

our part, are much inclined to believe that he was in a bad

humor, simply because he was in a bad humor.

Moreover, it was the day after a festival, a tiresome day

for every one, and above all for the magistrate who is charged

with sweeping away all the filth, properly and figuratively

speaking, which a festival day produces in Paris. And then

he had to hold a sitting at the Grand Châtelet. Now, we

have noticed that judges in general so arrange matters that

their day of audience shall also be their day of bad humor,

so that they may always have some one upon whom to vent

it conveniently, in the name of the king, law, and justice.

However, the audience had begun without him. His lieutenants,

civil, criminal, and private, were doing his work,

according to usage; and from eight o'clock in the morning,

some scores of bourgeois and ~bourgeoises~, heaped and crowded

into an obscure corner of the audience chamber of Embas du

Châtelet, between a stout oaken barrier and the wall, had been

gazing blissfully at the varied and cheerful spectacle of civil

and criminal justice dispensed by Master Florian Barbedienne,

auditor of the Châtelet, lieutenant of monsieur the provost, in

a somewhat confused and utterly haphazard manner.

The hall was small, low, vaulted. A table studded with

fleurs-de-lis stood at one end, with a large arm-chair of carved

oak, which belonged to the provost and was empty, and a stool

on the left for the auditor, Master Florian. Below sat the

clerk of the court, scribbling; opposite was the populace; and

in front of the door, and in front of the table were many

sergeants of the provostship in sleeveless jackets of violet

camlet, with white crosses. Two sergeants of the Parloir-

aux-Bourgeois, clothed in their jackets of Toussaint, half red,

half blue, were posted as sentinels before a low, closed door,

which was visible at the extremity of the hall, behind the

table. A single pointed window, narrowly encased in the

thick wall, illuminated with a pale ray of January sun two

grotesque figures,--the capricious demon of stone carved as

a tail-piece in the keystone of the vaulted ceiling, and the

judge seated at the end of the hall on the fleurs-de-lis.

Imagine, in fact, at the provost's table, leaning upon his

elbows between two bundles of documents of cases, with his

foot on the train of his robe of plain brown cloth, his face

buried in his hood of white lamb's skin, of which his brows

seemed to be of a piece, red, crabbed, winking, bearing

majestically the load of fat on his cheeks which met under his

chin, Master Florian Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet.

Now, the auditor was deaf. A slight defect in an auditor.

Master Florian delivered judgment, none the less, without

appeal and very suitably. It is certainly quite sufficient

for a judge to have the .air of listening; and the venerable

auditor fulfilled this condition, the sole one in justice, all

the better because his attention could not be distracted by

any noise.

Moreover, he had in the audience, a pitiless censor of his

deeds and gestures, in the person of our friend Jehan Frollo

du Moulin, that little student of yesterday, that "stroller,"

whom one was sure of encountering all over Paris, anywhere

except before the rostrums of the professors.

"Stay," he said in a low tone to his companion, Robin

Poussepain, who was grinning at his side, while he was

making his comments on the scenes which were being unfolded

before his eyes, "yonder is Jehanneton du Buisson. The

beautiful daughter of the lazy dog at the Marché-Neuf!--Upon

my soul, he is condemning her, the old rascal! he has no more

eyes than ears. Fifteen sous, four farthings, parisian,

for having worn two rosaries! 'Tis somewhat dear. ~Lex

duri carminis~. Who's that? Robin Chief-de-Ville,

hauberkmaker. For having been passed and received master of

the said trade! That's his entrance money. He! two gentlemen

among these knaves! Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly

Two equerries, ~Corpus Christi~! Ah! they have been playing

at dice. When shall I see our rector here? A hundred livres

parisian, fine to the king! That Barbedienne strikes like a

deaf man,--as he is! I'll be my brother the archdeacon, if

that keeps me from gaming; gaming by day, gaming by night,

living at play, dying at play, and gaming away my soul after

my shirt. Holy Virgin, what damsels! One after the other

my lambs. Ambroise Lécuyere, Isabeau la Paynette, Bérarde

Gironin! I know them all, by Heavens! A fine! a fine!

That's what will teach you to wear gilded girdles! ten sous

parisis! you coquettes! Oh! the old snout of a judge! deaf

and imbecile! Oh! Florian the dolt! Oh! Barbedienne the

blockhead! There he is at the table! He's eating the

plaintiff, he's eating the suits, he eats, he chews, he crams,

he fills himself. Fines, lost goods, taxes, expenses, loyal

charges, salaries, damages, and interests, gehenna, prison, and

jail, and fetters with expenses are Christmas spice cake and

marchpanes of Saint-John to him! Look at him, the pig!--Come!

Good! Another amorous woman! Thibaud-la-Thibaude,

neither more nor less! For having come from the Rue

Glatigny! What fellow is this? Gieffroy Mabonne, gendarme

bearing the crossbow. He has cursed the name of the

Father. A fine for la Thibaude! A fine for Gieffroy! A

fine for them both! The deaf old fool! he must have mixed

up the two cases! Ten to one that he makes the wench pay

for the oath and the gendarme for the amour! Attention,

Robin Poussepain! What are they going to bring in? Here

are many sergeants! By Jupiter! all the bloodhounds of the

pack are there. It must be the great beast of the hunt--a

wild boar. And 'tis one, Robin, 'tis one. And a fine one too!

~Hercle~! 'tis our prince of yesterday, our Pope of the Fools,

our bellringer, our one-eyed man, our hunchback, our grimace!

'Tis Quasimodo!"

It was he indeed.

It was Quasimodo, bound, encircled, roped, pinioned, and

under good guard. The squad of policemen who surrounded

him was assisted by the chevalier of the watch in person,

wearing the arms of France embroidered on his breast,

and the arms of the city on his back. There was nothing,

however, about Quasimodo, except his deformity, which could

justify the display of halberds and arquebuses; he was

gloomy, silent, and tranquil. Only now and then did his

single eye cast a sly and wrathful glance upon the bonds

with which he was loaded.

He cast the same glance about him, but it was so dull and

sleepy that the women only pointed him out to each other

in derision.

Meanwhile Master Florian, the auditor, turned over

attentively the document in the complaint entered against

Quasimodo, which the clerk handed him, and, having thus

glanced at it, appeared to reflect for a moment. Thanks to

this precaution, which he always was careful to take at the

moment when on the point of beginning an examination, he knew

beforehand the names, titles, and misdeeds of the accused,

made cut and dried responses to questions foreseen, and

succeeded in extricating himself from all the windings of

the interrogation without allowing his deafness to be too

apparent. The written charges were to him what the dog is to

the blind man. If his deafness did happen to betray him here

and there, by some incoherent apostrophe or some unintelligible

question, it passed for profundity with some, and for

imbecility with others. In neither case did the honor of the

magistracy sustain any injury; for it is far better that a judge

should be reputed imbecile or profound than deaf. Hence he

took great care to conceal his deafness from the eyes of all,

and he generally succeeded so well that he had reached the

point of deluding himself, which is, by the way, easier than

is supposed. All hunchbacks walk with their heads held

high, all stutterers harangue, all deaf people speak low. As

for him, he believed, at the most, that his ear was a little

refractory. It was the sole concession which he made on this

point to public opinion, in his moments of frankness and

examination of his conscience.

Having, then, thoroughly ruminated Quasimodo's affair, he

threw back his head and half closed his eyes, for the sake of

more majesty and impartiality, so that, at that moment, he was

both deaf and blind. A double condition, without which no

judge is perfect. It was in this magisterial attitude that he

began the examination.

"Your name?"

Now this was a case which had not been "provided for by

law," where a deaf man should be obliged to question a

deaf man.

Quasimodo, whom nothing warned that a question had been

addressed to him, continued to stare intently at the judge,

and made no reply. The judge, being deaf, and being in no way

warned of the deafness of the accused, thought that the latter

had answered, as all accused do in general, and therefore he

pursued, with his mechanical and stupid self-possession,--

"Very well. And your age?"

Again Quasimodo made no reply to this question. The judge

supposed that it had been replied to, and continued,--

"Now, your profession?"

Still the same silence. The spectators had begun, meanwhile,

to whisper together, and to exchange glances.

"That will do," went on the imperturbable auditor, when he

supposed that the accused had finished his third reply. "You

are accused before us, ~primo~, of nocturnal disturbance;

~secundo~, of a dishonorable act of violence upon the person of

a foolish woman, ~in 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 Châtelet, to the magistrate

committed to the popular police of Paris, charged with searching

out crimes, delinquencies, and evil conduct; with controlling

all trades, and interdicting monopoly; with maintaining the

pavements; with debarring the hucksters of chickens, poultry,

and water-fowl; of superintending the measuring of fagots and

other sorts of wood; of purging the city of mud, and the air

of contagious maladies; in a word, with attending continually

to public affairs, without wages or hope of salary! Do you

know that I am called Florian Barbedienne, actual lieutenant

to monsieur the provost, and, moreover, commissioner, inquisitor,

controller, and examiner, with equal power in provostship,

bailiwick, preservation, and inferior court of judicature?--"

There is no reason why a deaf man talking to a deaf man

should stop. God knows where and when Master Florian

would have landed, when thus launched at full speed in lofty

eloquence, if the low door at the extreme end of the room had

not suddenly opened, and given entrance to the provost in

person. At his entrance Master Florian did not stop short,

but, making a half-turn on his heels, and aiming at the provost

the harangue with which he had been withering Quasimodo a

moment before,--

"Monseigneur," said he, "I demand such penalty as you

shall deem fitting against the prisoner here present, for

grave and aggravated offence against the court."

And he seated himself, utterly breathless, wiping away the

great drops of sweat which fell from his brow and drenched,

like tears, the parchments spread out before him. Messire

Robert d'Estouteville frowned and made a gesture so imperious

and significant to Quasimodo, that the deaf man in some

measure understood it.

The provost addressed him with severity, "What have you

done that you have been brought hither, knave?"

The poor fellow, supposing that the provost was asking his

name, broke the silence which he habitually preserved, and

replied, in a harsh and guttural voice, "Quasimodo."

The reply matched the question so little that the wild

laugh began to circulate once more, and Messire Robert

exclaimed, red with wrath,--

"Are you mocking me also, you arrant knave?"

"Bellringer of Notre-Dame," replied Quasimodo, supposing

that what was required of him was to explain to the judge

who he was.

"Bellringer!" interpolated the provost, who had waked up

early enough to be in a sufficiently bad temper, as we have

said, not to require to have his fury inflamed by such strange

responses. "Bellringer! I'll play you a chime of rods on

your back through the squares of Paris! Do you hear, knave?"

"If it is my age that you wish to know," said Quasimodo,

"I think that I shall be twenty at Saint Martin's day."

This was too much; the provost could no longer restrain

himself.

"Ah! you are scoffing at the provostship, wretch! Messieurs

the sergeants of the mace, you will take me this knave

to the pillory of the Grève, you will flog him, and turn

him for an hour. He shall pay me for it, ~tête Dieu~! And I

order that the present judgment shall be cried, with the

assistance of four sworn trumpeters, in the seven castellanies

of the viscomty of Paris."

The clerk set to work incontinently to draw up the account

of the sentence.

"~Ventre Dieu~! 'tis well adjudged!" cried the little scholar,

Jehan Frollo du Moulin, from his corner.

The provost turned and fixed his flashing eyes once more on

Quasimodo. "I believe the knave said '~Ventre Dieu~' Clerk,

add twelve deniers Parisian for the oath, and let the vestry

of Saint Eustache have the half of it; I have a particular

devotion for Saint Eustache."

In a few minutes the sentence was drawn up. Its tenor

was simple and brief. The customs of the provostship and

the viscomty had not yet been worked over by President

Thibaut Baillet, and by Roger Barmne, the king's advocate;

they had not been obstructed, at that time, by that lofty

hedge of quibbles and procedures, which the two jurisconsults

planted there at the beginning of the sixteenth century. All

was clear, expeditious, explicit. One went straight to the

point then, and at the end of every path there was immediately

visible, without thickets and without turnings; the wheel, the

gibbet, or the pillory. One at least knew whither one was

going.

The clerk presented the sentence to the provost, who

affixed his seal to it, and departed to pursue his round of

the audience hall, in a frame of mind which seemed destined

to fill all the jails in Paris that day. Jehan Frollo and

Robin Poussepain laughed in their sleeves. Quasimodo gazed

on the whole with an indifferent and astonished air.

However, at the moment when Master Florian Barbedienne

was reading the sentence in his turn, before signing it, the

clerk felt himself moved with pity for the poor wretch of a

prisoner, and, in the hope of obtaining some mitigation of the

penalty, he approached as near the auditor's ear as possible,

and said, pointing to Quasimodo, "That man is deaf."

He hoped that this community of infirmity would awaken

Master Florian's interest in behalf of the condemned man.

But, in the first place, we have already observed that Master

Florian did not care to have his deafness noticed. In the

next place, he was so hard of hearing That he did not catch a

single word of what the clerk said to him; nevertheless, he

wished to have the appearance of hearing, and replied, "Ah!

ah! that is different; I did not know that. An hour more of

the pillory, in that case."

And he signed the sentence thus modified.

"'Tis well done," said Robin Poussepain, who cherished a

grudge against Quasimodo. "That will teach him to handle

people roughly."

THE RAT-HOLE.

The reader must permit us to take him back to the Place

de Grève, which we quitted yesterday with Gringoire, in

order to follow la Esmeralda.

It is ten o'clock in the morning; everything is indicative of

the day after a festival. The pavement is covered with rubbish;

ribbons, rags, feathers from tufts of plumes, drops of wax

from the torches, crumbs of the public feast. A goodly

number of bourgeois are "sauntering," as we say, here and

there, turning over with their feet the extinct brands of

the bonfire, going into raptures in front of the Pillar House,

over the memory of the fine hangings of the day before, and

to-day staring at the nails that secured them a last pleasure.

The venders of cider and beer are rolling their barrels among

the groups. Some busy passers-by come and go. The merchants

converse and call to each other from the thresholds of

their shops. The festival, the ambassadors, Coppenole, the

Pope of the Fools, are in all mouths; they vie with each

other, each trying to criticise it best and laugh the most.

And, meanwhile, four mounted sergeants, who have just

posted themselves at the four sides of the pillory, have

already concentrated around themselves a goodly proportion

of the populace scattered on the Place, who condemn themselves

to immobility and fatigue in the hope of a small execution.

If the reader, after having contemplated this lively and

noisy scene which is being enacted in all parts of the Place,

will now transfer his gaze towards that ancient demi-Gothic,

demi-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland, which forms the

corner on the quay to the west, he will observe, at the angle

of the façade, a large public breviary, with rich illuminations,

protected from the rain by a little penthouse, and from thieves

by a small grating, which, however, permits of the leaves being

turned. Beside this breviary is a narrow, arched window,

closed by two iron bars in the form of a cross, and looking on

the square; the only opening which admits a small quantity

of light and air to a little cell without a door, constructed on

the ground-floor, in the thickness of the walls of the old house,

and filled with a peace all the more profound, with a silence

all the more gloomy, because a public place, the most populous

and most noisy in Paris swarms and shrieks around it.

This little cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly three

centuries, ever since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in

mourning for her father who died in the Crusades, had caused

it to be hollowed out in the wall of her own house, in order

to immure herself there forever, keeping of all her palace

only this lodging whose door was walled up, and whose window

stood open, winter and summer, giving all the rest to the

poor and to God. The afflicted damsel had, in fact, waited

twenty years for death in this premature tomb, praying night

and day for the soul of her father, sleeping in ashes, without

even a stone for a pillow, clothed in a black sack, and

subsisting on the bread and water which the compassion of the

passers-by led them to deposit on the ledge of her window,

thus receiving charity after having bestowed it. At her death,

at the moment when she was passing to the other sepulchre,

she had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to afflicted women,

mothers, widows, or maidens, who should wish to pray much

for others or for themselves, and who should desire to inter

themselves alive in a great grief or a great penance. The

poor of her day had made her a fine funeral, with tears and

benedictions; but, to their great regret, the pious maid had

not been canonized, for lack of influence. Those among them

who were a little inclined to impiety, had hoped that the matter

might be accomplished in Paradise more easily than at Rome,

and had frankly besought God, instead of the pope, in behalf

of the deceased. The majority had contented themselves with

holding the memory of Rolande sacred, and converting her

rags into relics. The city, on its side, had founded in honor

of the damoiselle, a public breviary, which had been fastened

near the window of the cell, in order that passers-by might

halt there from time to time, were it only to pray; that prayer

might remind them of alms, and that the poor recluses, heiresses

of Madame Rolande's vault, might not die outright of

hunger and forgetfulness.

Moreover, this sort of tomb was not so very rare a thing in

the cities of the Middle Ages. One often encountered in

the most frequented street, in the most crowded and noisy

market, in the very middle, under the feet of the horses,

under the wheels of the carts, as it were, a cellar, a well, a

tiny walled and grated cabin, at the bottom of which a human

being prayed night and day, voluntarily devoted to some eternal

lamentation, to some great expiation. And all the reflections

which that strange spectacle would awaken in us to-day;

that horrible cell, a sort of intermediary link between a house

and the tomb, the cemetery and the city; that living being

cut off from the human community, and thenceforth reckoned

among the dead; that lamp consuming its last drop of oil in

the darkness; that remnant of life flickering in the grave;

that breath, that voice, that eternal prayer in a box of stone;

that face forever turned towards the other world; that eye

already illuminated with another sun; that ear pressed to the

walls of a tomb; that soul a prisoner in that body; that body

a prisoner in that dungeon cell, and beneath that double

envelope of flesh and granite, the murmur of that soul in

pain;--nothing of all this was perceived by the crowd.

The piety of that age, not very subtle nor much given to

reasoning, did not see so many facets in an act of religion.

It took the thing in the block, honored, venerated, hallowed

the sacrifice at need, but did not analyze the sufferings, and

felt but moderate pity for them. It brought some pittance to

the miserable penitent from time to time, looked through the

hole to see whether he were still living, forgot his name,

hardly knew how many years ago he had begun to die, and to

the stranger, who questioned them about the living skeleton

who was perishing in that cellar, the neighbors replied simply,

"It is the recluse."

Everything was then viewed without metaphysics, without

exaggeration, without magnifying glass, with the naked eye.

The microscope had not yet been invented, either for things of

matter or for things of the mind.

Moreover, although people were but little surprised by it,

the examples of this sort of cloistration in the hearts of cities

were in truth frequent, as we have just said. There were in

Paris a considerable number of these cells, for praying to God

and doing penance; they were nearly all occupied. It is true

that the clergy did not like to have them empty, since that

implied lukewarmness in believers, and that lepers were put

into them when there were no penitents on hand. Besides the

cell on the Grève, there was one at Montfauçon, one at the

Charnier des Innocents, another I hardly know where,--at

the Clichon House, I think; others still at many spots where

traces of them are found in traditions, in default of memorials.

The University had also its own. On Mount Sainte-Geneviève

a sort of Job of the Middle Ages, for the space of thirty

years, chanted the seven penitential psalms on a dunghill

at the bottom of a cistern, beginning anew when he had

finished, singing loudest at night, ~magna voce per umbras~,

and to-day, the antiquary fancies that he hears his voice

as he enters the Rue du Puits-qui-parle--the street of the

"Speaking Well."

To confine ourselves to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we must

say that it had never lacked recluses. After the death of

Madame Roland, it had stood vacant for a year or two,

though rarely. Many women had come thither to mourn,

until their death, for relatives, lovers, faults. Parisian

malice, which thrusts its finger into everything, even into

things which concern it the least, affirmed that it had beheld

but few widows there.

In accordance with the fashion of the epoch, a Latin

inscription on the wall indicated to the learned passer-by the

pious purpose of this cell. The custom was retained until

the middle of the sixteenth century of explaining an edifice

by a brief device inscribed above the door. Thus, one still

reads in France, above the wicket of the prison in the seignorial

mansion of Tourville, ~Sileto et spera~; in Ireland, beneath

the armorial bearings which surmount the grand door to

Fortescue Castle, ~Forte scutum, salus ducum~; in England,

over the principal entrance to the hospitable mansion of the

Earls Cowper: ~Tuum est~. At that time every edifice was

a thought.

As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland,

these two words had been carved in large Roman capitals

over the window,--

TU, ORA.

And this caused the people, whose good sense does not

perceive so much refinement in things, and likes to translate

_Ludovico Magno_ by "Porte Saint-Denis," to give to this dark,

gloomy, damp cavity, the name of "The Rat-Hole." An explanation

less sublime, perhaps, than the other; but, on the other hand,

more picturesque.

CHAPTER III.

HISTORY OF A LEAVENED CAKE OF MAIZE.

At the epoch of this history, the cell in the Tour-Roland

was occupied. If the reader desires to know by whom, he

has only to lend an ear to the conversation of three worthy

gossips, who, at the moment when we have directed his

attention to the Rat-Hole, were directing their steps

towards the same spot, coming up along the water's edge

from the Châtelet, towards the Grève.

Two of these women were dressed like good ~bourgeoises~ of

Paris. Their fine white ruffs; their petticoats of linsey-

woolsey, striped red and blue; their white knitted stockings,

with clocks embroidered in colors, well drawn upon their

legs; the square-toed shoes of tawny leather with black soles,

and, above all, their headgear, that sort of tinsel horn,

loaded down with ribbons and laces, which the women of Champagne

still wear, in company with the grenadiers of the imperial

guard of Russia, announced that they belonged to that class

wives which holds the middle ground

between what the lackeys call a woman and what they term a

lady. They wore neither rings nor gold crosses, and it was

easy to see that, in their ease, this did not proceed from

poverty, but simply from fear of being fined. Their companion

was attired in very much the same manner; but there was

that indescribable something about her dress and bearing

which suggested the wife of a provincial notary. One could

see, by the way in which her girdle rose above her hips, that

she had not been long in Paris.--Add to this a plaited tucker,

knots of ribbon on her shoes--and that the stripes of her

petticoat ran horizontally instead of vertically, and a

thousand other enormities which shocked good taste.

The two first walked with that step peculiar to Parisian

ladies, showing Paris to women from the country. The

provincial held by the hand a big boy, who held in his a

large, flat cake.

We regret to be obliged to add, that, owing to the rigor of

the season, he was using his tongue as a handkerchief.

The child was making them drag him along, ~non passibus

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 Châtelet that they were going to take him directly to

the pillory."

"Ah, bah! what are you saying, Demoiselle Oudarde

Musnier?" interposed the other Parisienne. "There are two

hours yet to the pillory. We have time enough. Have you

ever seen any one pilloried, my dear Mahiette?"

"Yes," said the provincial, "at Reims."

"Ah, bah! What is your pillory at Reims? A miserable

cage into which only peasants are turned. A great affair,

truly!"

"Only peasants!" said Mahiette, "at the cloth market in

Reims! We have seen very fine criminals there, who have

killed their father and mother! Peasants! For what do you

take us, Gervaise?"

It is certain that the provincial was on the point of taking

offence, for the honor of her pillory. Fortunately, that

discreet damoiselle, Oudarde Musnier, turned the conversation

in time.

"By the way, Damoiselle Mahiette, what say you to our

Flemish Ambassadors? Have you as fine ones at Reims?"

"I admit," replied Mahiette, "that it is only in Paris that

such Flemings can be seen."

"Did you see among the embassy, that big ambassador who

is a hosier?" asked Oudarde.

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

"And the big fellow whose face resembles a bare belly?"

resumed Gervaise. "And the little one, with small eyes

framed in red eyelids, pared down and slashed up like a

thistle head?"

"'Tis their horses that are worth seeing," said Oudarde,

"caparisoned as they are after the fashion of their country!"

"Ah my dear," interrupted provincial Mahiette, assuming

in her turn an air of superiority, "what would you say then,

if you had seen in '61, at the consecration at Reims, eighteen

years ago, the horses of the princes and of the king's

company? Housings and caparisons of all sorts; some of

damask cloth, of fine cloth of gold, furred with sables; others

of velvet, furred with ermine; others all embellished with

goldsmith's work and large bells of gold and silver! And what

money that had cost! And what handsome boy pages rode upon them!"

"That," replied Oudarde dryly, "does not prevent the Flemings

having very fine horses, and having had a superb supper

yesterday with monsieur, the provost of the merchants, at the

Hôtel-de-Ville, where they were served with comfits and

hippocras, and spices, and other singularities."

"What are you saying, neighbor!" exclaimed Gervaise.

"It was with monsieur the cardinal, at the Petit Bourbon

that they supped."

"Not at all. At the Hôtel-de-Ville.

"Yes, indeed. At the Petit Bourbon!"

"It was at the Hôtel-de-Ville," retorted Oudarde sharply,

"and Dr. Scourable addressed them a harangue in Latin,

which pleased them greatly. My husband, who is sworn

bookseller told me."

"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 Hôtel-de-Ville,"

replied Oudarde but little affected by this catalogue, "that

such a triumph of viands and comfits has never been seen."

"I tell you that they were served by Le Sec, sergeant of the

city, at the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, and that that is where

you are mistaken."

"At the Hôtel-de-Ville, I tell you!"

"At the Petit-Bourbon, my dear! and they had illuminated

with magic glasses the word hope, which is written on the

grand portal."

"At the Hôtel-de-Ville! At the Hôtel-de-Ville! And

Husson-le-Voir played the flute!"

"I tell you, no!"

"I tell you, yes!"

"I say, no!"

Plump and worthy Oudarde was preparing to retort, and

the quarrel might, perhaps, have proceeded to a pulling of

caps, had not Mahiette suddenly exclaimed,--"Look at those

people assembled yonder at the end of the bridge! There is

something in their midst that they are looking at!"

"In sooth," said Gervaise, "I hear the sounds of a

tambourine. I believe 'tis the little Esmeralda, who plays

her mummeries with her goat. Eh, be quick, Mahiette! redouble

your pace and drag along your boy. You are come hither to

visit the curiosities of Paris. You saw the Flemings

yesterday; you must see the gypsy to-day."

"The gypsy!" said Mahiette, suddenly retracing her steps,

and clasping her son's arm forcibly. "God preserve me from

it! She would steal my child from me! Come, Eustache!"

And she set out on a run along the quay towards the Grève,

until she had left the bridge far behind her. In the

meanwhile, the child whom she was dragging after her fell

upon his knees; she halted breathless. Oudarde and Gervaise

rejoined her.

"That gypsy steal your child from you!" said Gervaise.

"That's a singular freak of yours!"

Mahiette shook her head with a pensive air.

"The singular point is," observed Oudarde, "that ~la sachette~

has the same idea about the Egyptian woman."

"What is ~la sachette~?" asked Mahiette.

"Hé!" said Oudarde, "Sister Gudule."

"And who is Sister Gudule?" persisted Mahiette.

"You are certainly ignorant of all but your Reims, not

to know that!" replied Oudarde. "'Tis the recluse of

the Rat-Hole."

"What!" demanded Mahiette, "that poor woman to whom

we are carrying this cake?"

Oudarde nodded affirmatively.

"Precisely. You will see her presently at her window on

the Grève. She has the same opinion as yourself of these

vagabonds of Egypt, who play the tambourine and tell

fortunes to the public. No one knows whence comes her

horror of the gypsies and Egyptians. But you, Mahiette--why

do you run so at the mere sight of them?"

"Oh!" said Mahiette, seizing her child's round head in both

hands, "I don't want that to happen to me which happened to

Paquette la Chantefleurie."

"Oh! you must tell us that story, my good Mahiette," said

Gervaise, taking her arm.

"Gladly," replied Mahiette, "but you must be ignorant of

all but your Paris not to know that! I will tell you then (but

'tis not necessary for us to halt that I may tell you the tale),

that Paquette la Chantefleurie was a pretty maid of eighteen

when I was one myself, that is to say, eighteen years ago, and

'tis her own fault if she is not to-day, like me, a good, plump,

fresh mother of six and thirty, with a husband and a son.

However, after the age of fourteen, it was too late! Well, she

was the daughter of Guybertant, minstrel of the barges at

Reims, the same who had played before King Charles VII., at

his coronation, when he descended our river Vesle from Sillery

to Muison, when Madame the Maid of Orleans was also in the

boat. The old father died when Paquette was still a mere

child; she had then no one but her mother, the sister of M.

Pradon, master-brazier and coppersmith in Paris, Rue 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 Pàquerette!** and she was