Plongez au cœur du chef-d’œuvre intemporel de Victor Hugo, *Notre-Dame de Paris – Tome 1*, et découvrez les destins entrecroisés de personnages inoubliables dans le Paris médiéval 🏰✨. Ce premier tome nous entraîne dans l’univers fascinant de Quasimodo, le sonneur bossu, de la belle et mystérieuse Esmeralda 💃, et de l’archidiacre Frollo, partagé entre foi et passion interdite.
À travers la grandeur et la décadence de la cathédrale Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo dresse un tableau vibrant de la société du XVe siècle, où l’amour, le drame, la tragédie et l’injustice s’entremêlent. Chaque chapitre est une fresque vivante de la capitale, oscillant entre lumière et ombre, entre rêve et désespoir 🌙🔥.
🎧 Idéal pour les amateurs de littérature classique, ce récit captivant vous transportera dans une époque riche en émotions et en rebondissements.
✅ **Dans ce tome, vous trouverez :**
– Des personnages iconiques et profondément humains 👥
– Des descriptions magistrales de Paris et de sa cathédrale 🏛️
– Une intrigue pleine de tensions et de drames 💔
– Une réflexion profonde sur l’amour, la beauté et le destin ✨
🔔 **Abonnez-vous pour plus de grands classiques en audio :** https://bit.ly/LivresAudioLaMagieDesMots
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00:00:38 Chapter 1.
00:26:47 Chapter 2.
00:43:12 Chapter 3.
00:55:28 Chapter 4.
01:12:03 Chapter 5.
01:24:24 Chapter 7.
01:28:14 Chapter 8.
01:33:12 Chapter 9.
01:37:18 Chapter 10.
01:54:47 Chapter 11.
02:02:29 Chapter 12.
02:06:22 Chapter 13.
02:40:18 Chapter 14.
02:57:00 Chapter 15.
03:13:56 Chapter 16.
04:01:50 Chapter 17.
04:08:19 Chapter 18.
04:11:11 Chapter 19.
04:17:48 Chapter 20.
04:32:11 Chapter 21.
04:34:20 Chapter 22.
04:46:51 Chapter 23.
04:48:33 Chapter 24.
05:06:49 Chapter 25.
05:36:33 Chapter 26.
05:56:51 Chapter 27.
06:04:28 Chapter 28.
06:42:46 Chapter 29.
06:59:33 Chapter 30.
Let’s dive into the heart of medieval Paris with Victor Hugo’s ‘Notre-Dame de Paris – Volume 1′, a timeless masterpiece that blends passion, drama, and tragic destiny. In the imposing shadow of the cathedral, unforgettable characters come to life: Esmeralda, the beautiful and mysterious gypsy; Quasimodo, the deformed bell-ringer with a sensitive heart; and Claude Frollo, the tormented priest. Hugo draws us into a tale where love collides with obsession, where beauty confronts the cruelty of the world; and where the history of stone merges with that of men. A vibrant fresco, where every page breathes the soul of Paris. Chapter 1. THE GREAT HALL. Today, three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago, the people of Paris awoke to the sound of all the bells ringing loudly within the triple enclosure of the City, the University, and the City. However, it is not a day that history has remembered as January 6, 1482. There was nothing notable in the event that set the bells and the bourgeoisie of Paris in motion in the morning. It was neither an assault by Picards or Burgundians, nor a shrine led in procession, nor a revolt of schoolchildren in the town of Laas, nor an entry of our said very dreaded lord, monsieur the king, nor even a fine hanging of thieves and thieves at the Justice of Paris. Nor was it the arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth century, of some bedecked and plumed embassy. It was barely two days since the last cavalcade of this kind, that of the Flemish ambassadors charged with concluding the marriage between the Dauphin and Margaret of Flanders, had made its entrance into Paris, to the great annoyance of Cardinal de Bourbon, who, to please the king, had had to put on a brave face for all this rustic rabble of Flemish burgomasters, and regale them, in his Hôtel de Bourbon, with a host of fine morality, farce and farce, while a pouring rain flooded his magnificent tapestries at his door. On January 6, what stirred the whole populace of Paris, as Jehan de Troyes says, was the double solemnity, united since time immemorial, of the day of the kings and the festival of fools. On that day, there was to be a bonfire at La Grève, a planting of May at the chapel of Braque and a mystery at the Palais de Justice. The cry had been made the day before by trumpet at the crossroads by the people of the Provost, in fine purple chaps, with large white crosses on their chests. The crowd of bourgeois men and women was therefore making their way from all directions from early morning, houses and shops closed, towards one of the three designated places. Each had taken sides, some for the bonfire, some for the May, some for the mystery. It must be said, in praise of the ancient good sense of the Parisian onlookers, that the greater part of this crowd was heading towards the bonfire, which was quite in season, or towards the mystery, which was to be performed in the great hall of the Palace, well covered and well closed, and that the curious agreed to leave the poor, poorly flowered May to shiver all alone under the January sky in the cemetery of the Braque chapel. The people flocked especially to the avenues of the Palais de Justice, because it was known that the Flemish ambassadors, who had arrived from the watch, intended to attend the performance of the mystery play and the election of the Pope of Fools, which was also to take place in the great hall. It was not easy to enter this great hall that day , although it was then reputed to be the largest covered enclosure in the world. (It is true that Sauval had not yet measured the great hall of the Château de Montargis.) The Place du Palais, crowded with people, offered to the curious at the windows the appearance of a sea, into which five or six streets, like so many river mouths, were disgorging new waves of heads at every moment. The waves of this crowd, constantly swelling, crashed against the corners of the houses . which advanced here and there, like so many promontories, into the irregular basin of the square. In the center of the high Gothic facade[1] of the Palace, the grand staircase, ceaselessly ascended and descended by a double current which, after breaking under the intermediate steps, spread out in broad waves on its two lateral slopes, the grand staircase, I say, flowed incessantly into the square like a waterfall into a lake. The cries, the laughter, the stamping of these thousand feet made a great noise and a great clamour. From time to time, this clamour and this noise redoubled, the current which pushed all this crowd towards the grand staircase turned back, became troubled, swirled. It was a shove from an archer, or the horse of a sergeant of the provost who kicked to restore order; admirable tradition that the provostship bequeathed to the constable, the constableship to the constabulary, and the constabulary to our Paris gendarmerie. [1] The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally used, is completely improper, but perfectly consecrated. We therefore accept it, and we adopt it, like everyone else, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, that of which the ogive is the principle, which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the semicircular arch is the generator. At the doors, at the windows, at the skylights, on the roofs, swarmed thousands of good bourgeois figures, calm and honest, looking at the palace, looking at the crowd, and asking for nothing more; for many people in Paris are content with the spectacle of the spectators, and it is already for us a very curious thing to have a wall behind which something is happening. If it were possible for us, men of 1830, to mingle in thought with these Parisians of the fifteenth century and to enter with them, torn, jostled, toppled, into this immense hall of the Palace, so narrow on January 6, 1482, the spectacle would be neither without interest nor without charm, and we would have around us only things so old that they would seem brand new to us. If the reader consents, we will try to recapture in thought the impression he would have experienced with us on crossing the threshold of this great hall in the midst of this throng in surcoats, hiccups, and coats of mail. And at first, a ringing in the ears, a dazzling in the eyes. Above our heads a double ogival vault, paneled with wooden sculptures, painted azure, fleur-de-lis in gold; beneath our feet, an alternating pavement of white and black marble. A few steps from us, an enormous pillar, then another, then another; in all seven pillars along the length of the hall, supporting in the middle of its width the projections of the double vault. Around the first four pillars, merchants’ shops, all glittering with glass and tinsel; around the last three, oak benches, worn and polished by the breeches of the litigators and the robes of the attorneys. Around the hall, along the high wall, between the doors, between the windows, between the pillars, the interminable row of statues of all the kings of France since Pharamond; the idle kings, their arms hanging down and their eyes lowered; the valiant and combative kings, their heads and hands boldly raised to the sky. If it were possible for us, men of 1830, to mingle in thought with these Parisians of the fifteenth century and to enter with them, pulled, elbowed, toppled, into this immense hall of the Palace, so narrow on January 6, 1482, the spectacle would be neither without interest nor without charm, and we would have around us only things so old that they would seem brand new to us. If the reader consents, we will try to recapture in thought the impression that he would have experienced with us on crossing the threshold of
this great hall in the midst of this crowd in surcoats, hiccups and coats of mail. And first, buzzing in the ears, dazzling in the eyes. Above our heads a double ribbed vault, paneled with wooden sculptures, painted azure, fleur-de-lis in gold; beneath our feet, an alternating pavement of white and black marble. A few steps from us, an enormous pillar, then another, then another; in all seven pillars in the length of the room, supporting in the middle of its width the projections of the double vault. Around the first four pillars, merchants’ shops, all glittering with glass and tinsel; around the last three, oak benches, worn and polished by the breeches of the litigants and the robes of the attorneys. Around the room, along the high wall, between the doors, between the windows, between the pillars, the interminable row of statues of all the kings of France since Pharamond; the idle kings, their arms hanging down and their eyes lowered; the valiant and combative kings, their heads and hands boldly raised to the sky. Then, in the long ogival windows, stained-glass windows of a thousand colors; in the wide exits of the room, rich, finely carved doors; and the whole, vaults, pillars, walls, doorframes, paneling, doors, statues, covered from top to bottom with a splendid blue and gold illumination, which, already a little tarnished at the time when we see it, had almost entirely disappeared under dust and cobwebs in the year of grace 1549, when du Breul still admired it by tradition. Let us now imagine this immense oblong room, lit by the pale brightness of a January day, invaded by a motley and noisy crowd drifting along the walls and swirling around the seven pillars, and we will already have a confused idea of the whole picture, of which we will try to indicate more precisely the curious details. It is certain that, if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henri IV, there would have been no documents from Ravaillac’s trial filed in the registry of the Palais de Justice; no accomplices interested in making the said documents disappear; therefore, no arsonists obliged, for lack of a better means, to burn the registry in order to burn the documents, and to burn the Palais de Justice in order to burn the registry; consequently, finally, no fire of 1618. The old Palais would still be standing with its old great hall; I could say to the reader: Go see it; and we would both be exempt, I from making a description of it, he from reading it as it is.–Which proves this new truth: that great events have incalculable consequences. It is true that it would be very possible firstly that Ravaillac had no accomplices, and secondly that his accomplices, if by chance he had any, had nothing to do with the fire of 1618. There are two other very plausible explanations. Firstly, the large flaming star, a foot wide and a cubit high, which fell, as everyone knows, from the sky onto the Palace, on March 7 after midnight. Secondly, Théophile’s quatrain : Certainly, it was a sad game When in Paris Lady Justice, For having eaten too much spice, Set the whole palace on fire. Whatever one thinks of this triple political, physical, poetic explanation of the fire at the Palais de Justice in 1618, the unfortunately certain fact is the fire. There is very little left today, thanks to this catastrophe, thanks above all to the various successive restorations which have completed what it had spared, there is very little left of this first residence of the kings of France, of this elder palace of the Louvre, already so old in the time of Philip the Fair that one looked there for traces of the magnificent buildings erected by King Robert and described by Helgaldus. Almost everything has disappeared. What has become of the chamber of the chancellery where Saint Louis consummated his marriage? the garden where he dispensed justice, dressed in a camelot’s coat, a sleeveless surcoat of tiretaine, and a cloak over black sandals, lying on carpets, with Joinville? Where Is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismund? That of Charles IV? That of John Lackland? Where is the staircase from which Charles VI promulgated his edict of pardon? The slab where Marcel slaughtered, in the presence of the Dauphin, Robert of Clermont and the Marshal of Champagne? The wicket where the bulls of the antipope Benedict were torn, and from where those who had brought them departed, hooded and mitred in derision, and making amends throughout Paris? And the great hall, with its gilding, its azure, its ogives, its statues, its pillars, its immense vault all jagged with sculptures? And the gilded chamber? And the stone lion that stood at the door, kneeling with its head bowed, its tail between its legs, like the lions on the throne of Solomon, in the humiliated attitude that befits strength before justice? And the beautiful doors? And the beautiful stained-glass windows? and the chiseled ironwork that discouraged Biscornette? and the delicate woodwork of du Hancy?… What has time done, what have men done with these marvels? What have we been given for all that, for all this Gallic history, for all this Gothic art? The heavy, lowered arches of M. de Brosse, that awkward architect of the Saint-Gervais portal, that’s for art; and as for history, we have the chattering memories of the large pillar, still resounding with the gossip of the Patrus. It’s not much.–Let us return to the true great hall of the true old Palace. The two ends of this gigantic parallelogram were occupied, one by the famous marble table, so long, so wide and so thick that never, say the old papers, in a style that would have given an appetite to Gargantua, was seen such a slice of marble in the world; the other, by the chapel where Louis XI had himself sculpted kneeling before the Virgin, and where he had transported, without worrying about leaving two empty niches in the row of royal statues, the statues of Charlemagne and Saint Louis, two saints whom he supposed to be highly regarded in heaven as kings of France. This chapel, still new, built barely six years earlier, was entirely in that charming taste of delicate architecture, marvelous sculpture, fine and deep chiseling, which marks among us the end of the Gothic era and is perpetuated until around the middle of the sixteenth century in the fairy-tale fantasies of the Renaissance. The small openwork rose window, pierced above the portal, was in particular a masterpiece of tenuity and grace; it looked like a lace star. In the middle of the room, opposite the great door, a platform of gold brocade, leaning against the wall, and in which a private entrance was made by means of a window in the corridor of the golden chamber, had been erected for the Flemish envoys and the other important persons invited to the representation of the mystery. It was on the marble table that, according to custom, the mystery was to be represented. It had been arranged for this purpose since the morning. Its rich marble board, all scratched by the heels of the basoche, supported a fairly high wooden cage, the upper surface of which, accessible to the eyes of the whole room, was to serve as a theater, and the interior of which, masked by tapestries, was to serve as a dressing room for the characters of the play. A ladder, naively placed outside, was to establish communication between the stage and the dressing room, and lend its steep rungs to the entrances as well as the exits. There was no character so unexpected, no twist, no twist that was not bound to ascend this ladder. Innocent and venerable childhood of art and machines! Four sergeants of the bailiff of the Palace, obligatory guardians of all the pleasures of the people, on feast days as well as on days of execution, stood at the four corners of the marble table. It was only at the twelfth stroke of noon striking the great clock of the Palace that the play was to begin. It was doubtless very late for a theatrical performance; but it had been necessary to take the time of the ambassadors. Now this whole multitude had been waiting since morning. A good number of these honest onlookers were shivering from daybreak in front of the great steps of the Palace; some even claimed to have spent the night across the great door to be sure of entering first. The crowd grew thicker every moment, and, like water that exceeds its level, began to rise along the walls, to swell around the pillars, to overflow onto the entablatures, onto the cornices, onto the window sills, onto all the projections of the architecture, onto all the reliefs of the sculpture. So the discomfort, the impatience, the boredom, the freedom of a day of cynicism and madness, the quarrels that broke out at every opportunity over a pointed elbow or a hobnailed shoe, the fatigue of a long wait, already gave, well before the hour when the ambassadors were to arrive, a sour and bitter accent to the clamor of this people, shut in, huddled, pressed, trampled, stifled. One heard only complaints and imprecations against the Flemings, the provost of the merchants, the Cardinal of Bourbon, the bailiff of the Palace, Madame Marguerite of Austria, the sergeants with rods, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Bishop of Paris, the Pope of fools, the pillars, the statues, this closed door, this open window; all to the great amusement of the bands of schoolboys and lackeys scattered among the crowd, who mingled with all this discontent their teasing and mischief, and pricked, so to speak, the general bad humor with pins . There was among others a group of these merry demons who, after breaking the glass of a window, had boldly seated themselves on the entablature, and from there plunged their glances and their mockery alternately in and out, into the crowd in the hall and into the crowd in the square. From their parodic gestures, their loud laughter, the mocking calls they exchanged from one end of the room to the other with their comrades, it was easy to judge that these young clerics did not share the boredom and fatigue of the rest of the audience, and that they knew very well, for their own particular pleasure , how to extract from what was before their eyes a spectacle that made them patiently wait for the other. “Upon my soul, it’s you, Joannes Frollo de Molendino!” one of them shouted to a sort of little blond devil, with a pretty and malignant face, clinging to the acanthus leaves of a capital; “you are well named Jehan du Moulin, for your two arms and your two legs look like four wings going in the wind.” “How long have you been here? ” “By the mercy of the devil!” replied Joannes Frollo, it has been more than four hours, and I hope they will be counted towards my time in purgatory. I heard the eight singers of the King of Sicily intoning the first verse of the seven o’clock high mass in the Sainte-Chapelle. “Fine singers!” replied the other, “and whose voices are even sharper than their caps! Before founding a mass for Monsieur Saint John, the king should have inquired whether Monsieur Saint John likes Latin chanted with a Provençal accent. ” “It’s to employ these cursed singers of the King of Sicily that he did this!” cried an old woman sourly in the crowd at the bottom of the window. “I’m asking you for a little! A thousand livres Parisis for a mass! And on the farm of the sea fish of the Paris markets, too! ” “Peace! old woman,” replied a large and grave personage who was holding his nose beside the fishmonger; It was necessary to found a mass. Didn’t you want the king to fall ill again? “Bravely spoken, Sir Gilles Lecornu, master furrier of the king’s robes!” cried the little schoolboy clinging to the capital. A burst of laughter from all the schoolboys greeted the unfortunate name of the poor furrier of the king’s robes. “Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!” said some. “Cornutus et hirsutus,” resumed another. “Hey! no doubt,” continued the little demon of the capital. What are they laughing at? Honorable man Gilles Lecornu, brother of Master Jehan Lecornu, provost of the king’s hotel, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, first porter of the Bois de Vincennes, all bourgeois of Paris, all married from father to son! The gaiety redoubled. The fat furrier, without answering a word, tried to evade the stares fixed on him from all sides; but he sweated and puffed in vain. Like a wedge digging into the wood, the efforts he made only served to embed more firmly in the shoulders of his neighbors his broad, apoplectic face, purple with spite and anger. Finally, one of them, fat, short, and venerable like himself, came to his aid. “Abomination! Schoolboys who speak like that to a bourgeois!” In my time they would have been flogged with a person and then burned . The whole gang burst out. “Hello! Who sings this scale? Who is the owl of misfortune?” “Well, I recognize him,” said one; “it’s Master Andry Musnier. ” “Because he is one of the four sworn booksellers of the University!” said another. “Everything is in fours in this shop,” shouted a third, “the four nations, the four faculties, the four festivals, the four prosecutors, the four electors, the four booksellers. ” “Well,” resumed Jean Frollo, “we must play the devil with them all. ” “Musnier, we will burn your books. ” “Musnier, we will beat your lackey. ” “Musnier, we will rump up your wife. ” “Good old Mademoiselle Oudarde. ” “Who is as fresh and as cheerful as if she were a widow. ” “May the devil take you!” grumbled Master Andry Musnier. “Master Andry,” resumed Jehan, still hanging from his capital, “shut up, or I’ll fall on your head! ” Master Andry raised his eyes, seemed to measure for a moment the height of the pillar, the weight of the rascal, mentally multiplied this weight by the square of the speed, and fell silent. Jehan, master of the battlefield, continued triumphantly: “I would, even though I am the brother of an archdeacon! ” “Fair sirs, our people at the University! Not to have even enforced our privileges on a day like this! After all, there is May and a bonfire in the City; mystery, a pope of fools and Flemish ambassadors in the City; and at the University, nothing! ” “However, the Place Maubert is large enough!” resumed one of the clerks quartered on the table by the window. “Down with the rector, the electors and the procurators!” shouted Joannes. “We’ll have to make a bonfire this evening in the Champ-Gaillard,” continued the other, “with Master Andry’s books. ” “And the scribes’ desks!” said his neighbor. “And the vergers’ rods! And the deans’ spittoons! And the prosecutors’ sideboards! And the electors’ hutches! And the rector’s stools! ” “Down with them!” resumed little Jehan, in a false drone. “Down with Master Andry, the vergers and the scribes; the theologians, the doctors and the decretists; the prosecutors, the electors and the rector! ” “So it’s the end of the world!” murmured Master Andry, covering his ears. “By the way, the rector! Here he is, passing through the square,” shouted one of those at the window. It was a question of who would turn towards the square. “Is that really our venerable rector, Master Thibaut?” asked Jehan Frollo du Moulin, who, having clung to a pillar from the inside, could not see what was happening outside. “Yes, yes,” replied all the others, “it is indeed him, Master Thibaut the Rector. ” It was indeed the Rector and all the dignitaries of the University, who were going in procession to meet the embassy and were at that moment crossing the Place du Palais. The schoolchildren, crowded at the window, greeted them as they passed with sarcasm and ironic applause. The Rector, who was walking at the head of his company, received the first volley. It was harsh. “Good morning, Mr. Rector! Whoa! Good morning then!” “How does the old gambler manage to be here? Has he left his dice? ” “How he trots on his mule! Its ears are shorter than his.
” “Hello, hey! Good morning, Mr. Rector Thibaut! Tybalde aleator! Old fool! Old gambler! ” “God save you! Have you often rolled double-sixes last night? ” “Oh! What a decrepit face, leaden, drawn, and beaten for the love of gambling and dice! ” “Where are you going like this, Thibaut, Tybalde ad dados,” turning your back on the University and trotting toward the City? ” He’s probably going to look for a place to stay in Rue Thibautodé,” cried Jehan du Moulin.
The whole group repeated the quip with thunderous voices and furious hand clapping. “You’re going to look for a place to stay in Rue Thibautodé, aren’t you, Mr. Rector, player in the devil’s game?” Then it was the turn of the other dignitaries. –Down with the vergers! Down with the mace-makers! –Say, Robin Poussepain, who is this guy? –He’s Gilbert de Suilly, Gilbertus de Soliaco, the chancellor of the college of Autun. –Here, here’s my shoe; you’re in a better position than I am, throw it in his face. –Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces. –Down with the six theologians with their white surplices! –Are these the theologians? I thought they were six white geese given by Sainte-Geneviève to the town, for the fief of Roogny. –Down with the doctors! –Down with the cardinal and quodlibetary disputes! –My headdress is yours, chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève! You’ve given me a free pass. –That’s true! He gave my place in the nation of Normandy to little Ascanio Falzaspada, who is from the province of Bourges, since he is Italian. “It’s an injustice,” said all the schoolchildren. “Down with the chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève! ” “Ho hey! Master Joachim de Ladehors! Ho hey! Louis Dahuille! Ho hey! Lambert Hoctement! “May the devil stifle the procurator of the nation of Germany! ” “And the chaplains of the Sainte-Chapelle, with their gray almusses; cum tunicis grisis! — Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis! — Hola hey! the masters of arts! All the beautiful black copes! All the beautiful red copes! — That makes a fine queue for the rector. ” “He’d think he was a Duke of Venice going to the wedding of the sea. ” “Hey, Jehan! The canons of Sainte-Geneviève!” “To hell with the canonry! ” “Abbé Claude Choart!” Doctor Claude Choart! Are you looking for Marie la Giffarde? –She is on the Rue de Glatigny. –She makes the bed of the king of ribalds. –She pays her four pennies; quatuor denarios. — Aut unum bombum. –Do you want her to pay you through the nose? –Comrades! Master Simon Sanguin, the Elector of Picardy, who has his wife on his back. — Post equitem sedet atra cura. –Bold, Master Simon! –Good morning, Mr. Elector! –Good night, Madam Electress! –Are they happy to see all this! said Joannes de Molendino with a sigh, still perched in the foliage of his capital. Meanwhile, the sworn bookseller of the University, Master Andry Musnier, was leaning towards the ear of the furrier of the king’s robes, Master Gilles Lecornu. “I tell you, sir, it’s the end of the world. We’ve never seen such excesses in the school system. It’s the cursed inventions of the century that are ruining everything. Artillery, serpentines, bombards, and above all printing, that other plague of Germany. No more manuscripts, no more books. Printing is killing the book trade. The end of the world is coming. ” “I can see it clearly from the progress made in velvet fabrics,” said the furrier. At that moment, noon struck. “Ha!” said the whole crowd with one voice. The schoolchildren fell silent. Then there was a great commotion, a great shuffling of feet and heads, a great general explosion of coughs and handkerchiefs; everyone arranged themselves, took up their positions, raised themselves, grouped together; then a great silence; all necks remained stretched, all mouths open, all eyes turned towards the marble table. Nothing appeared. The bailiff’s four sergeants were still there, stiff and motionless like four painted statues. All eyes turned towards the platform reserved for the Flemish envoys. The door remained closed, and the platform empty. This crowd had been waiting since morning for three things: noon, the Flemish embassy, the mystery. Noon alone had arrived on time. This time, it was too much. They waited one, two, three, five minutes, a quarter of an hour; nothing came. The platform remained deserted, the theater silent. However, impatience had given way to anger. Irritated words circulated, still in low voices, it is true. “The mystery! The mystery!” they murmured dully. Heads were fermenting. A storm, which was still only rumbling, floated on the surface of this crowd. It was Jehan du Moulin who drew the first spark from it. “Mystery, and to hell with the Flemings!” he cried with all the strength of his lungs, writhing like a serpent around his big top. The crowd clapped their hands. “Mystery,” they repeated, “and Flanders to the devil! ” “We must have mystery, at once,” the schoolboy continued; “or I think we shall hang the bailiff of the Palace, as a play and a moral. ” “Well said,” cried the people, “and let us begin the hanging with his sergeants.” A great cheer followed. The four poor devils began to turn pale and look at each other. The multitude was moving towards them, and they could already see the flimsy wooden balustrade that separated them bending and buckling under the pressure of the crowd. The moment was critical. “Sack! Sack!” they cried from all sides. At that moment, the tapestry of the cloakroom that we have described above rose, and gave way to a personage whose very sight suddenly stopped the crowd, and as if by magic changed its anger into curiosity. “Silence! silence!” they cried from all sides. The personage, very uneasy and trembling in every limb, advanced to the edge of the marble table, with many bows which, as he approached, resembled more and more genuflections . Meanwhile, calm was gradually restored. There remained only that faint murmur which always arises from the silence of the crowd. “Gentlemen of the bourgeoisie,” he said, “and young ladies of the bourgeoisie, we must have the honor of declaiming and presenting before his eminence, the cardinal, a very beautiful morality, which is called: The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin Mary. It is I who play Jupiter. His eminence is at this moment accompanying the very honorable embassy of Monsieur the Duke of Austria; which is detained, at this very moment , to listen to the speech of the rector of the University, at the Porte Baudets. As soon as the most eminent cardinal arrives, we will begin. It is certain that nothing less than the intervention of Jupiter was needed to save the four unfortunate sergeants of the bailiff of the Palace.” If we had the good fortune to have invented this very true story, and consequently to be responsible for it before Our Lady of Criticism, it is not against us that one could invoke at this moment the classical precept: Nec deus intersit. Moreover, the costume of Lord Jupiter was very beautiful, and had contributed not a little to calming the crowd, by attracting all its attention. Jupiter was dressed in a brigandine covered with black velvet, with gilt studs; he wore a hat decorated with gilt silver buttons; and, were it not for the rouge and the big beard which each covered half of his face, were it not for the roll of gilt cardboard, strewn with passequilles and bristling with strips of tinsel, which he carried in his hand and in which practiced eyes easily recognized the lightning, were it not for his flesh-colored feet and ribboned in the Greek style, he could have borne the comparison, for the severity of his bearing, with a Breton archer of the corps of Monsieur de Berry. Chapter 2. PIERRE GRINGOIRE. However, while he harangued, the satisfaction, the admiration unanimously excited by his costume dissipated at his words; and when he arrived at this unfortunate conclusion: As soon as the most eminent cardinal has arrived, we will begin, his voice was lost in a thunder of boos. “Begin at once! The mystery! The mystery at once!” shouted the people. And above all the voices could be heard that of Johannes de Molendino, who pierced the din like the fife in a charivari of Nîmes. “Begin at once!” yelled the schoolboy. “Down with Jupiter and the Cardinal of Bourbon!” vociferated Robin Poussepain and the other clerics perched in the window. “Morality at once!” repeated the crowd. Immediately! Immediately ! The bag and rope for the actors and the cardinal! Poor Jupiter, haggard, frightened, pale under his rouge, dropped his thunderbolt, took his shack in his hand; then he bowed and trembled, stammering: “His Eminence…. the ambassadors…. Madame Marguerite de Flandre…” He didn’t know what to say. Deep down, he was afraid of being hanged. Hanged by the populace for waiting, hanged by the cardinal for not having waited, he saw on both sides only an abyss, that is to say, a gallows. Fortunately, someone came to save him from his embarrassment and assume responsibility. An individual who was standing on this side of the balustrade in the space left free around the marble table, and whom no one had yet seen, so completely was his long, thin person sheltered from any visual ray by the diameter of the pillar against which he was leaning, this individual, we say, tall, thin, pale, blond, still young, although already wrinkled on the forehead and cheeks, with bright eyes and a smiling mouth, dressed in black serge, threadbare and shiny with age, approached the marble table and made a sign to the poor patient. But the other, dumbfounded, did not see. The newcomer took a step closer. “Jupiter!” he said, “my dear Jupiter!” The other did not hear. Finally the tall blond man, growing impatient, shouted almost under his nose: “Michel Giborne! ” “Who is calling me?” said Jupiter, as if awakened with a start. “Me,” replied the personage dressed in black. “Ah!” said Jupiter. “Begin at once,” the other continued. “Satisfy the people. I will undertake to appease the bailiff, who will appease the cardinal. ” Jupiter breathed. “My lords of the bourgeoisie,” he shouted with all the strength of his lungs to the crowd that continued to boo him, “we will begin at once. ” “Evoe, Jupiter! Plaudite, cives!” shouted the schoolchildren. “Christmas! Christmas!” shouted the people. There was a deafening clap of hands, and Jupiter had already withdrawn under his tapestry when the hall was still trembling with acclamations. Meanwhile, the unknown personage who had so magically changed the storm into calm, as our old and dear Corneille says, had modestly returned to the shadows of his pillar, and would doubtless have remained invisible there, motionless and mute as before, if he had not been drawn out by two young women who, seated in the front row of the spectators, had noticed his conversation with Michel Giborne-Jupiter. “Master,” said one of them, beckoning him to approach. “Be quiet, my dear Liénarde,” said her neighbor, pretty, fresh, and very brave from being in her Sunday best. “He is not a cleric, he is a layman; one should not say master, but rather messire. ” “Sir,” said Liénarde. The stranger approached the balustrade. “What do you want from me, ladies?” he asked eagerly . “Oh! “Nothing,” said Liénarde, quite confused; “it’s my neighbor Gisquette la Gencienne who wants to speak to you. ” “No, not,” replied Gisquette, blushing; “it’s Liénarde who asked you.” said Master; I told him that we said Messire. The two young girls lowered their eyes. The other, who was only too happy to strike up a conversation, looked at them, smiling. “So you have nothing to say to me, young ladies?” “Oh! nothing at all,” replied Gisquette. “Nothing,” said Liénarde. The tall, blond young man took a step to withdraw. But the two curious women did not want to let go. “Sir,” said Gisquette quickly, with the impetuosity of a floodgate opening or a woman making up her mind, “so you know this soldier who is going to play the role of Madame la Vierge in the mystery? ” “You mean the role of Jupiter?” continued the anonymous person. “Hey! Yes,” said Liénarde, “she’s so stupid! So you know Jupiter?” “Michel Giborne?” replied the anonymous person; “yes, madame. ” “He has a proud beard!” said Liénarde. “Will it be beautiful, what they’re going to say about it?” asked Gisquette timidly. “Very beautiful, madame,” replied the anonymous person without the slightest hesitation. “What will it be?” said Liénarde. “The good judgment of Madame la Vierge, morality, if you please, madame. ” “Ah! that’s different,” continued Liénarde. A short silence followed. The stranger broke it. “It’s a brand new morality, and one that hasn’t been used yet. ” “So it’s not the same,” said Gisquette, “as the one given two years ago, on the day of Monsieur the Legate’s entry, and in which there were three beautiful girls playing the parts of… ” “Sirens,” said Liénarde. “And completely naked,” added the young man. Liénarde lowered her eyes modestly. Gisquette looked at her, and did the same. He continued, smiling: “It was a very pleasant thing to see. Today, it’s a morality play made expressly for Madame la demoiselle de Flandre. ” “Shall we sing bergerettes?” asked Gisquette. “Fie!” said the stranger, “in a morality play! We mustn’t confuse genres. If it was a farce, fine. ” “It’s a pity,” continued Gisquette. ” That day at the Ponceau fountain there were savage men and women fighting and putting on various performances while singing little motets and bergerettes. “What is appropriate for a legate,” said the stranger rather dryly, “is not appropriate for a princess. ” “And near them,” continued Liénarde, “were playing several bass instruments that made grand melodies. ” “And to refresh the passers-by,” continued Gisquette, “the fountain threw out from three mouths wine, milk, and hypocras, from which anyone who wanted drank.” “And a little below the Ponceau,” Liénarde continued, “at the Trinity, there was a passion play by figures, and without speaking. ” “If I remember!” cried Gisquette. “God on the cross, and the two thieves to the right and left.” Here the young gossips, growing heated at the memory of the entry of Monsieur the Legate, began to speak at once. “And further on, at the Porte aux Peintres, there were other very richly dressed people. “And at the Saint-Innocent fountain, that hunter who was chasing a doe with a great noise from dogs and hunting horns! “And at the butcher’s shop in Paris, those scaffolds which represented the Bastille of Dieppe! “And when the Legate passed, you know, Gisquette, the assault was launched, and the English all had their throats cut.” “And against the gate of the Châtelet, there were very beautiful figures! ” “And on the Pont au Change, which was all stretched over it! ” “And when the legate passed, more than two hundred dozen of all kinds of birds were allowed to fly over the bridge ; it was very beautiful, Liénarde. ” “It will be more beautiful today,” their interlocutor finally continued, who seemed to be listening to them impatiently. “You promise us that this mystery will be beautiful?” said Gisquette. “No doubt,” he replied; then he added with a certain emphasis: “Ladies, I am the author of it. ” “Really?” said the young girls, quite astonished. “Really!” replied the poet, puffing himself up slightly; “that is to say, there are two of us: Jehan Marchand, who sawed the boards and erected the framework of the theater and all the woodwork, and I, who wrote the play.” “My name is Pierre Gringoire.” The author of Le Cid could not have said with more pride: “Pierre Corneille.” Our readers may have observed that some time must have already passed from the moment when Jupiter had reentered the tapestry to the moment when the author of the new morality had thus suddenly revealed himself to the naive admiration of Gisquette and Liénarde. Remarkably, all this crowd, a few minutes before so tumultuous, now waited with gentleness, on the faith of the actor; which proves this eternal truth, still tested every day in our theaters, that the best way to make the public wait patiently is to assure them that it will begin immediately . However, the schoolboy Joannes did not fall asleep. “Hey there!” he suddenly shouted in the midst of the peaceful waiting that had succeeded the disturbance, “Jupiter, Madame la Vierge, you devil’s entertainers! Are you jeering? The play! The play! Begin, or we begin again! ” That was all it took. Music from high and low instruments was heard from inside the scaffolding; the tapestry rose; four colorful and painted figures came out, climbed the steep ladder of the theater, and, having reached the upper platform, lined up in front of the audience, whom they bowed profoundly; then the symphony fell silent. It was the mystery that was beginning. The four characters, after having amply received the payment of their reverence in applause, began, in the midst of a religious silence, a prologue for which we willingly spare the reader. Moreover, as still happens today, the public was even more interested in the costumes they wore than in the role they played; and in truth it was just. They were all four dressed in robes half yellow and half white, which were distinguished from each other only by the nature of the material; the first was in gold and silver brocade, the second in silk, the third in wool, the fourth in canvas. The first of the characters carried in his right hand a sword, the second two gold keys, the third a pair of scales, the fourth a spade ; and to help lazy minds who would not have seen clearly through the transparency of these attributes, one could read in large black letters embroidered at the bottom of the brocade robe, MY NAME IS NOBILITY; at the bottom of the silk robe, I am called Clergy; at the bottom of the wool robe, I am called Merchandise; at the bottom of the linen robe, I am called Labor. The sex of the two male allegories was clearly indicated to any judicious spectator by their shorter robes and by the cramignole they wore on their heads, while the two female allegories, less scantily clad, wore a hood. It would also have taken a great deal of ill will not to understand, through the poetry of the prologue, that Labor was married to Merchandise and Clergy to Nobility, and that the two happy couples owned in common a magnificent golden dolphin, which they claimed to award only to the most beautiful. So they went through the world seeking and searching for this beauty, and after having successively rejected the Queen of Golconda, the Princess of Trebizond, the daughter of the Grand Khan of Tartary, etc., etc., Labor and Clergy, Nobility and Merchandise had come to rest on the marble table of the Palace of Justice, reeling off before the honest audience as many sentences and maxims as could then be spent in the Faculty of Arts on examinations, sophisms, determinations, figures and acts where the masters took their bachelor caps. All this was indeed very beautiful. However, in this crowd on which the four allegories poured out streams of metaphors, there was no ear more attentive, no heart more palpitating, no eye more haggard, no neck more tense, than the eye, the ear, the neck and the heart of the author, the poet, of that brave Pierre Gringoire, who had not been able to resist, a moment before, the joy of saying his name to two pretty girls. He had returned a few steps from them, behind his pillar, and there he listened, he watched, he savored. The benevolent applause which had greeted the beginning of his prologue still resounded in his entrails, and he was completely absorbed in that kind of ecstatic contemplation with which an author sees his ideas fall one by one from the mouth of the actor into the silence of a vast audience. Worthy Pierre Gringoire! It pains us to say it, but this first ecstasy was very quickly disturbed. Hardly had Gringoire brought his lips to this intoxicating cup of joy and triumph, when a drop of bitterness came to mingle with it. A ragged beggar, who could not make money, lost as he was in the middle of the crowd, and who had doubtless not found sufficient compensation in the pockets of his neighbors, had thought of perching himself on some conspicuous point, to attract attention and alms . He had therefore hoisted himself during the first verses of the prologue, with the help of the pillars of the reserved platform, up to the cornice which bordered the balustrade at its lower part, and there he had sat, soliciting the attention and pity of the multitude with his rags and a hideous wound which covered his right arm. Besides, he did not utter a word. The silence he maintained allowed the prologue to proceed without hindrance, and no noticeable disorder would have arisen, if misfortune had not willed that the schoolboy Joannes should have noticed, from the top of his pillar, the beggar and his antics. A fit of laughter seized the young rascal, who, without caring to interrupt the spectacle and disturb the universal reverence, cried out cheerfully: “Look! this sickly fellow begging for alms! Anyone who has thrown a stone into a frog pond or fired a shot into a flock of birds can form an idea of the effect produced by these incongruous words, in the midst of general attention . Gringoire shuddered as if from an electric shock. The prologue was short, and all heads turned tumultuously towards the beggar, who, far from being disconcerted, saw in this incident a good opportunity for harvest, and began to say with a doleful air, half-closing his eyes: “Charity, if you please!” “Hey, but on my soul,” Joannes continued, “it’s Clopin Trouillefou. Hey , friend, so your wound was bothering you on your leg, that you put it on your arm? ” As he spoke, he threw, with the skill of a monkey, a small white cloth into the greasy felt that the beggar held out with his sick arm. The beggar received the alms and the sarcasm without flinching, and continued in a lamentable tone: “Charity, if you please!” This episode had considerably distracted the audience, and a good number of spectators, Robin Poussepain and all the clerks at the head, applauded gaily this bizarre duet which had just been improvised, in the middle of the prologue, by the schoolboy with his shrill voice and the beggar with his imperturbable psalmody. Gringoire was very displeased. Having recovered from his initial stupefaction, he was striving to shout to the four characters on stage: “Go on! What the devil! Go on!” without even deigning to cast a disdainful glance at the two interrupters. At this moment, he felt himself being pulled by the edge of his manteau; he turned around, not without some irritation, and had some difficulty in smiling. Yet he had to. It was the pretty arm of Gisquette la Gencienne, which, passed through the balustrade, was thus soliciting his attention. “Sir,” said the young girl, “are they going to go on?” “No doubt,” replied Gringoire, rather shocked by the question. “In that case, sir,” she continued, “would you have the courtesy to explain to me… ” “What they are going to say?” interrupted Gringoire. “Well! Listen. ” “No,” said Gisquette, “but what they have said up to now.” Gringoire gave a start, like a man whose raw wound has been touched . “Plague of the stupid and stuffy little girl!” he said between his teeth. From that moment on, Gisquette was lost in her own mind. However, the actors had obeyed her injunction, and the audience, seeing that they were beginning to speak again, had resumed listening, not without having lost many beauties, in the sort of bond that was created between the two parts of the play thus abruptly cut off. Gringoire reflected bitterly on this in a low voice. Yet peace had gradually been restored, the schoolboy fell silent, the beggar counted some change in his hat, and the coin had regained the upper hand. It was in reality a very fine work, and it seems to us that one could still make very good use of it today, with a few adjustments. The exposition, a little long and a little empty, that is to say, within the rules, was simple, and Gringoire, in the candid sanctuary of his inner self, admired its clarity. As one might well imagine, the four allegorical characters were a little tired of having traveled the three parts of the world without finding a suitable way to part with their golden dolphin. Thereupon, praise of the marvelous fish, with a thousand delicate allusions to the young fiancé of Margaret of Flanders, then very sadly secluded in Amboise, and hardly suspecting that Labor and Clergy, Nobility and Merchandise had just traveled the world for him. The aforementioned dauphin was young, was handsome, was strong, 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 theater, on a day of allegory and royal epithalamium, is not at all frightened by a dauphin son of a lion. It is precisely these rare and Pindaric mixtures which prove the enthusiasm. Nevertheless, to also make room for criticism, the poet could have developed this beautiful idea in less than two hundred verses. It is true that the mystery was to last from noon until four o’clock, according to the provost’s order , and that something must be said. Besides, people listened patiently. Suddenly, in the middle of a quarrel between Mademoiselle Marchandise and Madame Noblesse, at the moment when Maître Labour was pronouncing this wonderful verse: Onc ne vis dans les bois un bête plus triomphente! The door of the reserved platform, which had until then remained so inappropriately closed, opened even more inappropriately; and the resounding voice of the usher abruptly announced: His Eminence, Monseigneur Cardinal de Bourbon. Chapter 3. CARDINAL. Poor Gringoire! The crash of all the large double petards of Saint-Jean, the discharge of twenty hooked arquebuses, the detonation of that famous serpentine of the Tour de Billy, which, during the siege of Paris, on Sunday, September 29, 1465, killed seven Burgundians at one shot, the explosion of all the gunpowder stored at the gate of the Temple, would have torn his ears less harshly, at that solemn and dramatic moment, than these few words falling from the mouth of an usher: His Eminence, Monseigneur Cardinal de Bourbon. It was not that Pierre Gringoire feared Monsieur the Cardinal or disdained him. He had neither this weakness nor this presumption. A true eclectic, as we would say today, Gringoire was one of those high and firm minds, moderate and calm, who always know how to stand in the middle of everything, stare in dimidio rerum, and who are full of reason and liberal philosophy, while still taking the cardinals into account. A precious and uninterrupted race of philosophers to whom wisdom, like another Ariadne, seems to have given a ball of thread that they have been unwinding since the beginning of the world through the labyrinth of human affairs. We find them in all times, always the same, that is to say, always according to all times. And without counting our Pierre Gringoire, who would represent them in the fifteenth century if we managed to give him the illustration he deserves, certainly it is their spirit that animated Father du Breul when he wrote in the sixteenth these naively sublime words, worthy of all centuries: I am Parisian by nation and parrhisian of speech, since parrhisia in Greek means freedom of speech: of which I have even mentioned several my lords the cardinals, uncle and brother of my lord the Prince of Conty: all the same with respect for their greatness, and without offending anyone of their retinue, which is many. There was therefore neither hatred of the cardinal, nor disdain for his presence, in the unpleasant impression it made on Pierre Gringoire. Quite the contrary; our poet had too much common sense and too threadbare a coat not to attach particular value to the fact that many an allusion in his prologue, and in particular the glorification of the dauphin, son of the lion of France, was picked up by a most eminent ear. But it is not interest that dominates in the noble nature of poets. I suppose that the entity of the poet is represented by the number ten, it is certain that a chemist, in analyzing and pharmacopolising it, as Rabelais says, would find it composed of one part interest against nine parts self-esteem. Now, at the moment when the door opened for the cardinal, Gringoire’s nine parts of self-esteem, swollen and swollen by the breath of popular admiration, were in a state of prodigious growth, beneath which disappeared as if stifled that imperceptible molecule of interest which we distinguished just now in the constitution of poets; a precious ingredient, moreover, ballast of reality and humanity without which they would not touch the earth. Gringoire enjoyed feeling, seeing, feeling, so to speak, an entire assembly, of marauders it is true, but what does it matter! stupefied, petrified, and as if asphyxiated before the immeasurable tirades which arose at every moment from all the parts of his epithalamium. I affirm that he himself shared the general beatitude, and that contrary to La Fontaine, who, at the performance of his comedy The Florentine, asked: Who is the lout who wrote this rhapsody? Gringoire would have willingly asked his neighbor: Whose masterpiece is this? We can now judge what effect the sudden and untimely arrival of the cardinal had on him. What he might have feared only too well came true. The entrance of his eminence upset the audience. All heads turned towards the platform. It was no longer possible to hear each other. “The cardinal! the cardinal!” repeated all mouths. The unfortunate prologue was cut short a second time. The cardinal stopped for a moment on the threshold of the platform. While he cast a rather indifferent glance over the audience, the tumult redoubled. Everyone wanted to see him better. It was a question of who would put his head on his neighbor’s shoulders. He was indeed a high-ranking personage, and the spectacle of which was worth any other comedy. Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, Archbishop and Count of Lyon, Primate of the Gauls, was at the same time allied to Louis XI through his brother, Pierre, Lord of Beaujeu, who had married the king’s eldest daughter, and allied to Charles the Bold through his mother, Agnes of Burgundy. Now the dominant trait, the characteristic and distinctive trait of the character of the Primate of the Gauls, was the spirit of a courtier and devotion to the powers. One can judge the countless embarrassments that this double kinship had brought upon him, and all the temporal pitfalls between which his spiritual bark had to tack, in order not to break either at Louis or at Charles, this Charybdis and this Scylla which had devoured the Duke of Nemours and the Constable of Saint-Pol. Thank heaven, he had come through the crossing quite well, and had arrived in Rome without mishap. But although he was in port, and precisely because he was in port, he never remembered without anxiety the various chances of his political life, so long alarmed and laborious. Also he was in the habit of saying that the year 1476 had been black and white for him; meaning by this that he had lost in that same year his mother, the Duchess of Bourbonnais, and his cousin the Duke of Burgundy, and that one bereavement had consoled him for the other. Besides, he was a good man. He led the joyous life of a cardinal, gladly amused himself with the royal wine of Challuau, did not hate Richarde la Garmoise and Thomasse la Saillarde, gave alms to pretty girls rather than to old women, and for all these reasons was very agreeable to the people of Paris. He walked only surrounded by a small court of bishops and abbots of high lineage, gallant, bawdy and carousing when necessary; and more than once the brave devout women of Saint-Germain d’Auxerre, passing in the evening under the illuminated windows of the Bourbon lodge, had been scandalized to hear the same voices that had sung vespers for them during the day, chanting to the clink of glasses the Bacchic proverb of Benedict XII, the pope who had added a third crown to the tiara:– Bibamus papaliter. It was doubtless this popularity, so justly acquired, which preserved him, upon his entrance, from any bad reception on the part of the crowd, so discontented the moment before, and very little disposed to respect a cardinal on the very day when they were about to elect a pope. But the Parisians have few resentments; and besides, by starting the performance with authority, the good bourgeois had prevailed over the cardinal, and this triumph was enough for them. Besides, Monsieur the Cardinal of Bourbon was a handsome man, he had a very beautiful red robe which he wore very well; that is to say that he had all the women on his side , and consequently the better half of the audience. Certainly it would be injustice and bad taste to boo a cardinal for having kept people waiting for the performance, when he is a handsome man and wears his red robe well. So he entered, greeted the audience with that hereditary smile of the great for the people, and walked slowly towards his scarlet velvet armchair, seeming to be thinking of something else entirely. His retinue, what we would call today his staff, of bishops and abbots, burst into the platform after him, not without a redoubling of tumult and curiosity in the pit. It was a question of who would show them, who would name them, who would know at least one of them, who, Monsieur the Bishop of Marseilles, Alaudet, if I remember correctly; who, the Primicier of Saint-Denis; who, Robert de Lespinasse, Abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, that libertine brother of a mistress of Louis XI; all this with much confusion and cacophony. As for the schoolchildren, they swore. It was their day, their Feast of Fools, their Saturnalia, the annual orgy of the school and the school. No turpitude that was not a matter of right and sacred on that day. And then there were mad gossips in the crowd, Simone Quatrelivres, Agnès la Gadine, Robine Piédebou. Wasn’t it the least one could do to swear at one’s leisure and curse the name of God a little, on such a fine day, in such good company of churchmen and girls of joy? So they did not fail to do so; and, in the midst of the hubbub, it was a frightening din of blasphemies and enormities that of all these escaped tongues, tongues of clerics and schoolchildren contained the rest of the year by the fear of the hot iron of Saint Louis. Poor Saint Louis, what a mockery they gave him in his own courthouse! Each of them, among the newcomers to the platform, had taken to task a black, or gray, or white, or purple cassock. As for Joannes Frollo de Molendino, in his capacity as brother of an archdeacon, it was the red one that he had boldly attacked, and he sang at the top of his voice, fixing his brazen eyes on the cardinal: Cappa repleta mero! All these details, which we lay bare here for the edification of the reader, were so covered by the general rumor that they were effaced before reaching the reserved platform. Besides, the cardinal would have been little moved by it, so much were the liberties of that day in the customs. He had, moreover, and his expression was completely preoccupied by it, another concern which followed him closely and which entered the platform almost at the same time as him. It was the embassy of Flanders. Not that he was a deep politician, and that he made a matter of the possible consequences of the marriage of his cousin Margaret of Burgundy to his cousin Charles, Dauphin of Vienna; how long the plastered good understanding of the Duke of Austria and the King of France would last, how the King of England would take this disdain of his daughter, that worried him little; and he celebrated every evening the wine of the royal vintage of Chaillot, without suspecting that a few bottles of this same wine (a little revised and corrected, it is true, by the doctor Coictier), cordially offered to Edward IV by Louis XI, would one fine morning rid Louis XI of Edward IV. The much-honored embassy of the Duke of Austria brought the cardinal none of these worries, but it bothered him in another way. It was indeed a little hard, and we have already said a word about it on the second page of this book, to be obliged to give a party and a good welcome, he, Charles of Bourbon, to I know not what bourgeois; he, a cardinal, to some aldermen; he, a Frenchman, a merry guest, to some beer-drinking Flemings; and all this in public. It was , certainly, one of the most tiresome grimaces he had ever made for the good pleasure of the king. He therefore turned towards the door, and with the best grace in the world (so much did he study it), when the usher announced in a sonorous voice: Gentlemen, the envoys of the Duke of Austria. It is needless to say that the whole room did the same. Then arrived, two by two, with a gravity that contrasted with the lively ecclesiastical retinue of Charles of Bourbon, the forty-eight ambassadors of Maximilian of Austria, headed by the reverend father in God, Jehan, abbot of Saint-Bertin, chancellor of the Golden Fleece, and Jacques de Goy, lord Dauby, high bailiff of Ghent. A great silence fell in the assembly, accompanied by stifled laughter, to listen to all the ludicrous names and bourgeois qualifications that each of these people imperturbably transmitted to the usher, who then threw names and qualities pell-mell and all crippled through the crowd. They were Master Loys Roelof, alderman of the city of Louvain; Sir Clays d’Etuelde, alderman of Brussels; Sir Paul de Baeust, lord of 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 parchons of the said city; and the lord of Bierbecque, and Jehan Pinnock, and Jehan Dymaerzelle, etc., etc., etc.; bailiffs, aldermen, burgomasters; burgomasters, aldermen, bailiffs; all stiff, stiff, starched, dressed in velvet and damask, hooded with black velvet cramignoles with large tufts of gold thread from Cyprus; good Flemish heads after all, dignified and severe figures, of the family of those that Rembrandt makes stand out so strong and so serious against the black background of his Night Watch; characters who all had written on their foreheads that Maximilian of Austria had been right to fully confide, as his manifesto said, in their sense, bravery, experience, loyalty and good preudomies. One exception, however. It was a fine, intelligent, cunning face, a sort of monkey’s and diplomat’s muzzle, before whom the cardinal took three steps and a deep bow, and whose name was none other than Guillaume Rym, councilor and pensionary of the city of Ghent. Few people knew then what Guillaume Rym was. A rare genius who, in a time of revolution, would have appeared brilliantly on the surface of events, but who, in the fifteenth century, was reduced to cavernous intrigues and to living in the saps, as the Duke of Saint-Simon says. Moreover, he was appreciated by the first sapper of Europe; he schemed familiarly with Louis XI, and often put his hand in the secret tasks of the king. All things quite unknown to this crowd who marveled at the politeness of the cardinal to this puny face of a Flemish bailiff. Chapter 4. MASTER JACQUES COPPENOLE. While the pensionary of Ghent and the eminence exchanged a very low bow and a few words in even lower voices, a tall man with a broad face and powerful shoulders presented himself to enter side by side with Guillaume Rym; he would have been a mastiff beside a fox. His felt hat and leather jacket stood out against the velvet and silk surrounding him. Presuming it was some misguided groom, the usher stopped him. “Hey, friend! We’re not going through.” The man in the leather jacket pushed him back with his shoulder. “What does this fellow want from me?” he said with a burst of voice that made the entire room pay attention to this strange conversation. “Can’t you see that I ‘m one of them?” “Your name?” asked the usher. “Jacques Coppenole. ” “Your qualifications?” –Sock maker, at the sign of the Three Chains, in Ghent. The bailiff stepped back. Announcing aldermen and mayors is fine; but a hosier was hard. The cardinal was on thorns. All the people listened and watched. For two days his eminence had been striving to lick these Flemish bears to make them a little more presentable in public, and the escapade was harsh. Meanwhile Guillaume Rym, with his sly smile, approached the bailiff. –Announce Master Jacques Coppenole, clerk to the aldermen of the city of Ghent, he whispered to him very quietly. –Bailiff, the cardinal continued aloud, announce Master Jacques Coppenole, clerk to the aldermen of the illustrious city of Ghent. This was a mistake. Guillaume Rym alone would have avoided the difficulty; but Coppenole had heard the cardinal. “No, by Jove!” he cried in his thunderous voice. “Jacques Coppenole, hosier. Do you hear, usher? Nothing more, nothing less. By Jove! Hosier, that’s quite fine. Monsieur the Archduke has more than once looked for his glove in my breeches. ” Laughter and applause broke out. A joke is immediately understood in Paris, and consequently always applauded. Let us add that Coppenole was of the people, and that this public which surrounded him was of the people. Also, the communication between them and him had been prompt, electric, and so to speak on the same level. The haughty display of the Flemish hosier, in humiliating the courtiers , had stirred in all plebeian souls some sense of dignity still vague and indistinct in the fifteenth century. This hosier was an equal, who had just stood up to Monsieur the Cardinal! A very sweet reflection to poor devils who were accustomed to respect and obedience towards the servants of the sergeants of the bailiff of the Abbot of Sainte-Geneviève, the cardinal’s tail. Coppenole proudly saluted his eminence, who returned his salute to the all-powerful bourgeois feared by Louis XI. Then, while Guillaume Rym, a wise and malicious man, as Philippe de Comines says, followed them both with a smile of mockery and superiority, they each took their place, the cardinal all disconcerted and worried, Coppenole calm and haughty, and thinking no doubt that after all his title of hosier was worth as much as any other, and that Marie de Bourgogne, mother of this Marguerite whom Coppenole was marrying today, would have feared him less as a cardinal than as a hosier; for it was not a cardinal who would have stirred up the people of Ghent against the favorites of the daughter of Charles the Bold; it was not a cardinal who would have strengthened the crowd with a word against its tears and its prayers, when the young lady of Flanders came to beg her people for them right up to the foot of their scaffold; while the hosier had only to raise his leather elbow to bring down your two heads, most illustrious lords, Guy d’Hymbercourt, chancellor Guillaume Hugonet! However, all was not over for this poor cardinal, and he had to drink to the dregs the chalice of being in such bad company. The reader has perhaps not forgotten the impudent beggar who had come to cling, from the beginning of the prologue, to the fringes of the cardinal’s platform. The arrival of the illustrious guests had not made him loosen his grip, and while prelates and ambassadors were cramming themselves, like true Flemish herrings, into the stalls of the tribune, he had made himself comfortable, and had bravely crossed his legs on the architrave. Insolence was rare, and no one had noticed it at first, attention being turned elsewhere. He, for his part, noticed nothing in the room; he swung his head with the carelessness of a Neapolitan, repeating from time to time in the din, like a mechanical habit: Charity, please! And certainly he was, in all the audience, probably the only one who had not deigned to turn his head at the altercation between Coppenole and the usher. Now, chance would have it that the master hosier of Ghent, with whom the people already sympathized so strongly and on whom all eyes were fixed, happened to sit in the front row of the platform above the beggar; and they were not a little astonished to see the Flemish ambassador, having inspected the rascal placed before his eyes, tap friendly on this shoulder covered in rags. The beggar turned around; there was surprise, recognition, a blossoming of the two faces, etc.; Then, without the least concern for the spectators, the hosier and the sickly man began to talk in low voices, holding hands, while the rags of Clopin Trouillefou, spread out on the cloth of gold of the platform, looked like a caterpillar on an orange. The novelty of this singular scene excited such a commotion of madness and gaiety in the hall that the cardinal was not long in noticing it; he half leaned forward, and being able, from the point where he was placed, to only glimpse very imperfectly the ignominious jacket of Trouillefou, he imagined quite naturally that the beggar was asking for alms, and, revolted by the audacity, he cried out: “Monsieur le bailiff of the Palace, throw this rascal into the river!” “Croix-Dieu!” My Lord Cardinal, said Coppenole, without taking his hand from Clopin, he is a friend of mine. “Christmas! Christmas!” cried the crowd. From that moment on, Master Coppenole had in Paris, as in Ghent, great credit with the people; for people of such stature have it, said Philippe de Comines, when they are thus disorderly. The cardinal bit his lip. He leaned towards his neighbor, the Abbot of Sainte-Geneviève, and said to him in a low voice: “Pleasant ambassadors that the Archduke sends us here to announce Madame Marguerite! ” “Your Eminence,” replied the Abbot, “is losing his politeness with these Flemish snouts. Margaritas ante porcos. ” “Say rather,” replied the cardinal with a smile: “Porcos ante Margaritam. ” The whole little court in cassocks went into ecstasies over the play on words. The cardinal felt a little relieved; he was even with Coppenole, he had also had his jibe applauded. Now, let those of our readers who have the power to generalize an image and an idea, as we say in today’s style , allow us to ask them if they can clearly imagine the spectacle offered, at the moment we arrest their attention, by the vast parallelogram of the great hall of the Palace. In the middle of the hall, backed by the western wall, a wide and magnificent platform of gold brocade, into which enter in procession, through a small arched door, grave personages successively announced by the shrill voice of an usher. On the first benches, already many venerable figures, wrapped in ermine, velvet and scarlet. Around the platform, which remains silent and dignified, below, opposite, everywhere, a large crowd and a great uproar. A thousand glances from the people on every face on the platform, a thousand whispers about every name. Certainly, the spectacle is curious and well deserves the attention of the spectators. But over there, at the very end, what is this sort of trestle with four multi-colored puppets on it and four others below? What is this man in a black coat and a pale face beside the trestle ? Alas! my dear reader, it is Pierre Gringoire and his prologue. We had all profoundly forgotten him. This is precisely what he feared. From the moment the cardinal entered, Gringoire had not ceased to agitate for the salvation of his prologue. He had first ordered the actors, who had remained in suspense, to continue and to raise their voices; then, seeing that no one was listening, he had stopped them, and, for nearly a quarter of an hour that the interruption had lasted, he had not ceased to stamp his foot, to struggle, to call out to Gisquette and Liénarde, to encourage his neighbors to continue the prologue; all in vain. No one moved from the cardinal, from the embassy and from the platform, the sole center of this vast circle of visual rays. It must also be believed, and we say it with regret, that the prologue was beginning to slightly annoy the audience, at the moment when his eminence had come to divert it in such a terrible way. After all, on the platform as at the marble table, it was always the same spectacle, the conflict of Labor and Clergy, of Nobility and Merchandise. And many people preferred to see them simply, living, breathing, acting, rubbing shoulders, in the flesh and blood, in this Flemish embassy, in this episcopal court, in the cardinal’s robe, in the jacket of Coppenole, than painted, dressed up, speaking in verse, and so to speak stuffed under the yellow and white tunics with which Gringoire had adorned them. However, when our poet saw that calm had been somewhat restored, he devised a stratagem which would have saved everything. “Sir,” he said, turning to one of his neighbors, a brave, fat man with a patient face, “shall we begin again? ” “What?” said the neighbor. “Hey! the mystery,” said Gringoire. “As you please,” replied the neighbor. This half-approval was enough for Gringoire, and, minding his own business, he began to shout, blending in as much as possible with the crowd: “Begin the mystery again! begin again!” “The devil!” said Joannes de Molendino, “what are they singing over there at the end?” (For Gringoire was making a noise like four.) “Say , comrades! Isn’t the mystery over? They want to start it again, it’s not fair. ” “No, no,” cried all the schoolboys. “Down with the mystery! Down!” But Gringoire multiplied and shouted all the louder : “Start again! Start again! ” These clamors attracted the attention of the cardinal. “Monsieur Bailiff of the Palace,” he said to a tall black man standing a few paces away from him, “are these rascals in a holy water font, making such a hellish noise? ” The Bailiff of the Palace was a sort of amphibious magistrate, a sort of a bat of the judicial order, part rat, part bird, part judge, part soldier. He approached his eminence, and, not without greatly fearing his displeasure, he explained to him in a stammering tone the popular incongruity; that noon had arrived before his eminence, and that the actors had been forced to begin without waiting for his eminence. The cardinal burst out laughing. “Upon my word, the rector of the University should have done the same. What do you say, Master Guillaume Rym? ” “My lord,” replied Guillaume Rym, “let us be content to have escaped half the comedy. That’s something gained. ” “Can these scoundrels continue their farce?” asked the bailiff. “Continue, continue,” said the cardinal; “that’s all the same to me. In the meantime , I’ll read my breviary.” The bailiff advanced to the edge of the platform and, after having silenced himself with a gesture of his hand, shouted: “Bourgeois, peasants, and inhabitants, to satisfy those who want us to begin again and those who want us to finish, his eminence orders that we continue.” Both parties had to resign themselves. However, the author and the public long held a grudge against the cardinal. The characters on stage therefore resumed their gloss, and Gringoire hoped that at least the rest of his work would be heard. This hope was soon disappointed, like his other illusions; silence had indeed been restored to such an extent in the audience; but Gringoire had not noticed that, at the moment when the cardinal had given the order to continue, the platform was far from being filled, and that after the Flemish envoys, new characters had appeared , forming part of the procession, whose names and qualities, thrown throughout his dialogue by the intermittent shout of the usher, produced considerable havoc. Imagine, in fact, in the middle of a play, the yelp of an usher, throwing, between two rhymes, and often between two hemistichs, parentheses like these: Master Jacques Charmolue, king’s attorney in the church court! Jehan de Harlay, squire, guard of the office of knight of the night watch of the city of Paris! Messire Galiot de Genoilhac, knight, lord of Brussac, master of the king’s artillery! Master Dreux-Raguier, investigator of the waters and forests of our lord the king, in the lands of France, Champagne and Brie! Messire Louis de Graville, knight, counselor and chamberlain to the king, admiral of France, caretaker of the Bois de Vincennes! Master Denis Le Mercier, guard of the house of the blind in Paris!–Etc., etc., etc. It was becoming unbearable. This strange accompaniment, which made the play difficult to follow, incensed Gringoire all the more because he could not hide from himself that the interest was constantly growing and that the only thing missing from his work was to be listened to. It was indeed difficult to imagine a more ingenious and dramatic structure. The four characters of the prologue were lamenting their mortal embarrassment, when Venus herself , vera incessu patuit dea, appeared before them, dressed in a beautiful coat of arms emblazoned with the ship of the city of Paris. She herself came to claim the dauphin promised to the most beautiful. Jupiter, whose thunder could be heard rumbling in the dressing room, supported her, and the goddess was about to win, that is to say, without a face, to marry the dauphin, when a young child, dressed in white damask and holding a daisy in her hand (a diaphanous personification of Mademoiselle de Flandre), came to wrestle with Venus. A dramatic turn of events and a twist. After the controversy, Venus, Marguerite and the crowd had agreed to defer to the good judgment of the Holy Virgin. There was still a fine role, that of Dom Pedro, King of Mesopotamia; but, through so many interruptions, it was It was difficult to unravel what it was for. All this had been brought up the ladder. But it was over, none of these beauties were felt or understood. At the entrance of the cardinal, it was as if an invisible and magic thread had suddenly drawn all eyes from the marble table to the platform, from the southern end of the hall to the western side. Nothing could disenchant the audience. All eyes remained fixed there, and the new arrivals, and their accursed names, and their faces, and their costumes were a continual diversion. It was desolate. Except for Gisquette and Liénarde, who turned away from time to time when Gringoire tugged at their sleeves, except the fat, patient neighbor, no one listened, no one looked at the poor abandoned morality in the face . Gringoire saw nothing but profiles. With what bitterness he saw his entire scaffolding of glory and poetry crumble piece by piece ! And to think that these people had been on the point of rebelling against the bailiff, out of impatience to hear his work! Now that they had it, they cared nothing for it. This same performance which had begun with such unanimous acclamation! Eternal ebb and flow of popular favor! To think that they had almost hanged the bailiff’s sergeants! What would he not have given to still be at this honeyed hour! The usher’s brutal monologue ceased, however. Everyone had arrived, and Gringoire breathed. The actors continued bravely. But
then Master Coppenole, the hosier, suddenly rises , and Gringoire hears him pronounce, amidst universal attention, this abominable harangue: “Gentlemen of Paris, bourgeois and squires, I don’t know, by God! what we are doing here. I can see over there in that corner, on that stage, people who look as if they want to fight. I don’t know if that’s what you call a mystery, but it’s not amusing. They quarrel over their tongues, and nothing more. I’ve been waiting for the first blow for a quarter of an hour. Nothing comes. They are cowards, who only scratch each other with insults. They should have brought wrestlers from London or Rotterdam; and, well ! you would have had punches that would have been heard from the square. But those are pitiful.” They should at least give us a Moorish dance, or some other mummery! That’s not what I was told. I was promised a Feast of Fools, with the election of the Pope. We also have our Pope of Fools in Ghent, and in that we are not behind, by Jove! But this is how we do it. We gather a crowd, like here. Then everyone in turn sticks their head through a hole and makes a face at the others. The one who makes the ugliest face, to the acclamation of all, is elected Pope. There. It’s very entertaining. Do you want us to make your Pope in the style of my country? It will always be less tedious than listening to these chatterers. If they want to come and make their faces at the skylight, they will be part of the game. What do you say, gentlemen of the bourgeoisie? There is here a sufficiently grotesque sample of both sexes to make us laugh in the Flemish way, and we have enough ugly faces to hope for a fine grimace. Gringoire would have liked to reply. Stupefaction, anger, indignation took away his speech. Besides, the motion of the popular hosier was received with such enthusiasm by these bourgeois flattered to be called squires, that all resistance was useless. There was nothing left but to let oneself go with the torrent. Gringoire hid his face with both hands, not having the good fortune to have a cloak to cover his head, like Timante’s Agamemnon. Chapter 5. QUASIMODO. In the twinkling of an eye everything was ready to carry out Coppenole’s idea. Bourgeois, schoolchildren and Basochians had set to work. The little The chapel opposite the marble table was chosen for the grimace theater. A broken window in the pretty rose window above the door left a stone circle free through which it was agreed that the competitors would put their heads. To reach it, it was enough to climb onto two barrels, which had been taken from I don’t know where and perched one on top of the other as best they could. It was arranged that each candidate, man or woman (for a female pope could be made), to leave the impression of their grimace untouched and untouched, would cover their face and remain hidden in the chapel until the moment of their appearance. In less than an instant the chapel was filled with competitors, upon whom the door closed. Coppenole from his place ordered everything, directed everything, arranged everything. During the hubbub, the cardinal, no less disconcerted than Gringoire, had, under the pretext of business and vespers, withdrawn with all his retinue, without this crowd, which his arrival had stirred so vigorously, being in the least moved by his departure. Guillaume Rym was the only one who noticed the rout of his eminence. Popular attention , like the sun, continued its revolution; starting from one end of the room, after stopping for a time in the middle, it was now at the other end. The marble table, the brocade platform had had their moment; it was the turn of the chapel of Louis XI. The field was henceforth open to all madness. There were only Flemings and rabble. The grimaces began. The first figure that appeared at the skylight, with red-rimmed eyelids, a mouth open like a maw , and a brow furrowed like our imperial hussar boots, gave rise to such inextinguishable laughter that Homer would have taken all these peasants for gods. However, the great hall was nothing less than an Olympus, and poor Jupiter Gringoire knew it better than anyone. A second, a third grimace followed, then another, then another, and always the laughter and stamping of joy redoubled. There was in this spectacle I know not what particular vertigo, I know not what power of intoxication and fascination of which it would be difficult to give an idea to the reader of our days and our salons. Let us imagine a series of faces presenting successively all the geometric forms, from the triangle to the trapezoid, from the cone to the polyhedron; all human expressions, from anger to lust; all ages, from the wrinkles of the newborn to the wrinkles of the dying old woman; all religious phantasmagoria, from Faun to Beelzebub; all animal profiles, from the mouth to the beak, from the head to the snout. Imagine all the mascarons of the Pont-Neuf, those nightmares petrified under the hand of Germain Pilon, taking life and breath, and coming one after the other to look you in the face with burning eyes; all the masks of the Venice carnival succeeding one another under your telescope; in a word, a human kaleidoscope. The orgy was becoming more and more Flemish. Teniers would give only a very imperfect idea of it. Imagine the battle of Salvator Rosa as a bacchanal. There were no longer any schoolchildren, ambassadors, bourgeois, men, or women; no more Clopin Trouillefou, no more Gilles Lecornu, no more Marie Quatrelivres, no more Robin Poussepain. Everything faded into the common license. The great hall was nothing more than a vast furnace of effrontery and joviality where each mouth was a cry, each face a grimace, each individual a posture. Everything shouted and screamed. The strange faces that came in turn to grind their teeth at the rose window were like so many brands thrown into the brazier. And from all this effervescent crowd escaped, like the steam from the furnace, a sour, sharp, piercing rumor, hissing like the wings of a gnat. –Oh hey! curse! –Look at that face! –It’s worthless. –To another! –Guillemette Maugerepuis, look at that bull’s muzzle, all he’s missing are horns. He’s not your husband. –Another! –Pope’s belly! What’s that grimace? –Hey hey! That’s cheating. We should only show our face. –That damned Perrette Callebotte! She’s capable of that. –Christmas! Christmas! –I’m suffocating! –There’s one whose ears can’t get through! Etc., etc. Yet we must give our friend Jehan due credit. In the middle of this sabbath, he could still be seen at the top of his pillar, like a cabin boy in the topsail. He was struggling with incredible fury. His mouth was wide open, and a cry escaped from it that could not be heard, not because it was drowned out by the general clamor, however intense it might be, but because it doubtless reached the limit of perceptible high-pitched sounds, the twelve thousand vibrations of Sauveur or the eight thousand of Biot. As for Gringoire, the first movement of dejection having passed, he had regained his composure. He had steeled himself against adversity. “Continue! ” he had said for the third time to his actors, talking machines. Then, pacing with great strides before the marble table, he fancied appearing in his turn at the chapel window, if only to have the pleasure of making a face at this ungrateful people. “But no, that would not be worthy of us; no vengeance! Let us fight to the end,” he repeated to himself. The power of poetry is great over the people; I will bring them back. We shall see which will prevail, grimaces or belles-lettres. Alas! he had remained the only spectator of his play. It was much worse than before. He saw nothing but backs. I am mistaken. The fat, patient man, whom he had already consulted in a critical moment, had remained turned towards the stage. As for Gisquette and Liénarde, they had deserted long ago. Gringoire was touched to the depths of his heart by the loyalty of his only spectator. He approached him and addressed him, shaking his arm lightly; for the good man was leaning against the balustrade and was sleeping a little. “Sir,” said Gringoire, “I thank you.” “Sir,” replied the fat man with a yawn, “for what? ” “I see what is bothering you,” resumed the poet, “it is all this noise which prevents you from hearing at your ease. But be calm!” Your name will go down in history. Your name, if you please? Renault Château, Keeper of the Seal of the Châtelet of Paris, at your service. Sir, you are the only representative of the muses here, said Gringoire. You are too honest, sir, replied the Keeper of the Seal of the Châtelet. You are the only one, resumed Gringoire, who has listened properly to the piece. How do you find it? Hey! hey! replied the fat magistrate, half awake, quite lively indeed. Gringoire had to be content with this praise; for a thunder of applause, mingled with a prodigious acclamation, came to cut short their conversation. The Pope of Fools was elected. Christmas! Christmas! Christmas! cried the people from all sides. It was a marvelous grimace, indeed, that which shone at that moment from the hole in the rose window. After all the pentagonal, hexagonal and heterogeneous figures that had succeeded one another at this skylight without realizing this ideal of the grotesque that had been constructed in the imaginations exalted by the orgy, nothing less was needed to win the votes than the sublime grimace that had just dazzled the assembly. Master Coppenole himself applauded; and Clopin Trouillefou, who had competed, and God knows what intensity of ugliness his face could attain, admitted defeat. We will do the same. We will not try to give the reader an idea of what tetrahedral nose, of that horseshoe mouth, of that small left eye obstructed by a bushy red eyebrow while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart, of those disordered teeth, chipped here and there, like the battlements of a fortress, of that calloused lip on which one of those teeth encroached like an elephant’s tusk, of that forked chin, and above all of the physiognomy spread over all that, of that mixture of malice, astonishment and sadness. Let one dream, if one can, of this ensemble. The acclamation was unanimous. They rushed towards the chapel. They brought out in triumph the blessed pope of fools. But it was then that surprise and admiration were at their height. The grimace was his face. Or rather his whole person was a grimace. A large head bristling with red hair; between the two shoulders an enormous hump whose counter-blow was felt in front; a system of thighs and legs so strangely distorted that they could only touch at the knees, and, seen from the front, resembled two crescents of sickles which joined at the handle; large feet, monstrous hands ; and, with all this deformity, I know not what formidable appearance of vigor, agility and courage; a strange exception to the eternal rule which says that strength, like beauty, results from harmony. Such was the pope that the madmen had just given themselves. One would have said a broken and badly mended giant. When this sort of cyclops appeared on the threshold of the chapel, motionless, squat, and almost as wide as he was tall, square at the base, as a great man says, by his half-red and half-purple surtout, strewn with silver bells, and above all by the perfection of his ugliness, the populace recognized him at once, and cried out with one voice: “It’s Quasimodo, the bell-ringer! It’s Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame! One-eyed Quasimodo! Quasimodo the lopsided! Noel! Noel! You see that the poor devil had nicknames to choose from. ” “Beware of fat women!” cried the schoolchildren. “Or who want to be,” resumed Joannes. The women, in fact, hid their faces. “Oh! the ugly monkey!” said one. “As wicked as he is ugly,” resumed another. “It’s the devil,” added a third. –I have the misfortune to live near Notre-Dame; all night long I hear him prowling in the gutter. –With the cats. –He is always on our roofs. –He casts spells on us through the chimneys. –The other evening, he came and made a face at me through my skylight. I thought he was a man. I was frightened! –I am sure he goes to the Sabbath. Once, he left a broom on my lead. –Oh! the unpleasant hunchback face! –Oh! the ugly soul! –Buah! The men, on the contrary, were delighted and applauded. Quasimodo, the object of the tumult, still stood at the door of the chapel, upright, somber and grave, allowing himself to be admired. A schoolboy, Robin Poussepain, I believe, came to laugh under his nose, and too close. Quasimodo contented himself with taking him by the belt and throwing him ten paces through the crowd. All this without saying a word. Master Coppenole, amazed, approached him. “Good heavens! Holy Father! You are truly the most beautiful ugliness I have ever seen in my life. You deserve the papacy in Rome as well as in Paris. ” As he spoke, he put his hand gaily on his shoulder. Quasimodo did not move. Coppenole continued. “You are a fellow with whom I am itching to feast, even if it should cost me a dozen nines of twelve tournois. What do you think? ” Quasimodo did not reply. “Good heavens!” said the hosier, “are you deaf?” He was deaf indeed. However, he was beginning to grow impatient with Coppenole’s manners, and suddenly turned towards him with such a tremendous grinding of his teeth that the Flemish giant recoiled, like a bulldog before a cat. Then a circle of terror and respect formed around the strange personage , at least fifteen geometric steps in radius. An old woman explained to Master Coppenole that Quasimodo was deaf. “Deaf!” said the hosier with his loud Flemish laugh. “Good heavens! He’s an accomplished pope. ” “Hey! I recognize him,” cried Jehan, who had finally come down from his capital to see Quasimodo more closely. “He’s the bell ringer of my brother the archdeacon.” “Hello, Quasimodo! ” “Devil of a man!” said Robin Poussepain, still bruised from his fall. ” He appears; he’s a hunchback. He walks; he’s wobbly. He looks at you; he’s one-eyed. You speak to him; he’s deaf.” “Oh, what does he do with his tongue, this Polyphemus? ” “He speaks when he wants to,” said the old woman. He has become deaf from ringing the bells. He is not mute. “He lacks that,” observed Jehan. “And he has one eye too many,” added Robin Poussepain. “Not so,” said Jehan judiciously. “A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man. He knows what he lacks.” Meanwhile, all the beggars, all the footmen, all the cut-purses, together with the schoolchildren, had gone in procession to fetch from the cupboard of the basoche the cardboard tiara and the paltry simar of the Pope of Fools. Quasimodo allowed himself to be dressed in them without flinching and with a sort of proud docility. Then he was made to sit on a motley stretcher. Twelve officers of the Brotherhood of Fools lifted him onto their shoulders; and a kind of bitter and disdainful joy came to bloom on the gloomy face of the Cyclops, when he saw beneath his deformed feet all these heads of handsome, upright, and well-made men. Then the howling and ragged procession set off to make, according to custom, the inner tour of the galleries of the Palace, before the promenade of the streets and crossroads. Chapter 7. LA ESMERALDA. We are delighted to have to inform our readers that during this whole scene Gringoire and his play had held firm. His actors, closely followed by him, had not stopped delivering his comedy, and he had not stopped listening to it. He had accepted the uproar and was determined to see it through to the end, not despairing of a return of attention from the public. This glimmer of hope was rekindled when he saw Quasimodo, Coppenole, and the deafening procession of the Pope of Fools noisily exit the hall. The crowd eagerly rushed after them. “Well,” he said to himself, “there are all the drafts leaving.” “Unfortunately, all the drafts were the public.” In the blink of an eye, the great hall was empty. In fact, there were still a few spectators, some scattered, others grouped around the pillars, women, old people, or children, fed up with the hubbub and the tumult. A few schoolchildren had remained astride the entablature of the windows and were looking into the square. “Well,” thought Gringoire, “here are as many as are needed to hear the end of my mystery. They are few, but it is an elite audience, a literate audience.” After a moment, a symphony, which was to produce the greatest effect on the arrival of the Blessed Virgin, failed. Gringoire noticed that his music had been carried away by the procession of the Pope of Fools. “Pass on,” he said stoically. He approached a group of bourgeois who gave him the impression of discussing his play. Here is the scrap of conversation he caught: “You know, Master Cheneteau, the Hôtel de Navarre, which belonged to M. de Nemours? ” “Yes, opposite the chapel of Braque. ” “Well, the taxman has just rented it to Guillaume Alixandre, historian, for six livres eight sols Parisian a year. ” “How the rents are rising! ” “Come on!” said Gringoire to himself with a sigh, “the others are listening.” “Comrades,” suddenly shouted one of those young rascals from the windows, “the Esmeralda! the Esmeralda in the square! This word produced a magical effect. All who remained in the hall rushed to the windows, climbing the walls to see, and repeating: La Esmeralda! la Esmeralda! At the same time a great noise of applause was heard outside. “What does this mean, la Esmeralda?” said Gringoire, clasping his hands in desolation. “Ah! my God! it seems that it is the turn of the windows now.” He turned towards the marble table, and saw that the performance was interrupted. It was precisely the moment when Jupiter was to appear with his thunderbolt. Now Jupiter stood motionless at the bottom of the stage. “Michel Giborne!” cried the irritated poet, “what are you doing here? Is this your part? Come up! ” “Alas!” said Jupiter, “a schoolboy has just taken the ladder.” Gringoire looked. The thing was only too true. All communication was intercepted between its knot and its unraveling. “The rascal!” he murmured. “And why did he take that ladder? ” “To go and see Esmeralda,” Jupiter replied piteously. “He said, ‘ Look, here’s a ladder that’s not in use!'” and he took it. It was the last blow. Gringoire received it with resignation. “The devil take you!” he said to the actors, “and if I am paid, you shall be.” Then he retreated, head bowed, but last, like a general who has fought well. And while descending the winding stairs of the Palace: “What a fine crowd of donkeys and oafs, these Parisians!” he grumbled between his teeth. ” They come to hear a mystery, and listen to nothing! They ‘ve taken care of everyone, of Clopin Trouillefou, the cardinal, Coppenole, Quasimodo, the devil! But not of Madame the Virgin Mary.” If I had known, I would have given you some Virgin Marys, you onlookers! And me! To come to see faces, and see only backs! To be a poet, and have the success of an apothecary! It is true that Homerus begged through the Greek villages, and that Nason died in exile among the Muscovites. But I want the devil to flay me if I understand what they mean by their Esmeralda! What is that word anyway? It’s Egyptian! BOOK TWO Chapter 8. FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA. Night comes early in January. The streets were already dark when Gringoire left the Palace. This nightfall pleased him; he longed to approach some dark and deserted alley to meditate at his ease, and for the philosopher to place the first apparatus on the poet’s wound. Philosophy was, moreover, his only refuge, for he did not know where to stay. After the resounding failure of his theatrical attempt, he did not dare return to the lodgings he occupied, rue Grenier-sur-l’eau, opposite Port-au-Foin, having counted on what the provost would give him from his epithalamium to pay Master Guillaume Doulx-Sire, farmer of the custom of the pied-fourché of Paris, the six months’ rent he owed him, that is to say twelve Parisian sols; twelve times the value of what he possessed in the world, including his breeches, his shirt and his hut. After having reflected for a moment , temporarily sheltered under the small wicket of the prison of the treasurer of the Sainte-Chapelle, at the lodging which he would choose for the night, having all the cobblestones of Paris at his choice, he remembered having noticed, the previous week, rue de la Savaterie, at the door of a councilor in parliament, a step to be mounted on a mule, and having said to himself that this stone would, in the event, be a very excellent pillow for a beggar or for a poet. He thanked providence for having sent him this good idea; but, as he was preparing to cross the Place du Palais to reach the tortuous labyrinth of the Cité, where all these old sisters wind, the streets of the Barillerie, of the Vieille-Draperie, of the Savaterie, of the Juiverie, etc., still standing Today, with their nine-story houses, he saw the procession of the Pope of Fools also leaving the Palace and rushing across his path, with loud shouts, great flashes of torches, and his own music, Gringoire. This sight revived the scratches in his self-esteem; he fled. In the bitterness of his dramatic misadventure, everything that reminded him of the day’s festival embittered him and made his wound bleed. He wanted to take the Pont Saint-Michel; children were running here and there with fire lances and rockets. “A plague on fireworks!” said Gringoire; and he fell back on the Pont au Change. Three flags had been attached to the houses at the head of the bridge, representing the King, the Dauphin, and Margaret of Flanders, and six small flags depicting the Duke of Austria, the Cardinal of Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, Madame Jeanne of France, M. le Bâtard de Bourbon, and I don’t know who else; all lit by torches. The crowd admired. “Happy painter Jehan Fourbault!” said Gringoire with a deep sigh; and he turned his back on the flags and flags. A street was before him; he found it so dark and so deserted that he hoped to escape all the reverberations and all the radiance of the festival. He plunged into it. After a few moments, his foot struck an obstacle; he stumbled and fell. It was the May bundle, which the clerks of the Basoche had left that morning at the door of a president in parliament, in honor of the solemnity of the day. Gringoire endured this new encounter heroically. He got up and reached the water’s edge. After leaving behind him the civil tower and the criminal tower, and skirting the great walls of the king’s gardens, on this unpaved beach where the mud came up to his ankles, he arrived at the western tip of the City, and considered for some time the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches, which has since disappeared under the bronze horse of the Pont Neuf. The islet appeared to him in the shadows as a black mass beyond the narrow whitish stream that separated it. One could make out there, by the radiance of a small light, the kind of hive-shaped hut where the cow ferryman took shelter at night. “Happy cow-ferryman!” thought Gringoire; “you don’t think of glory and you don’t make epithalamia! What do you care about kings who marry and duchesses of Burgundy! You know no other daisies than those which your April lawn gives to your cows to graze on! And I, poet, I am booed, and I shiver, and I owe twelve sous, and my sole is so transparent that it could serve as a windowpane for your lantern. Thank you! Cow-ferryman! Your cabin rests my sight, and makes me forget Paris!” He was awakened from his almost lyrical ecstasy by a large double Saint-Jean firecracker, which suddenly went off from the blessed cabin. It was the cow-ferryman who was taking his share of the day’s festivities and setting off a firework display. This firecracker made Gringoire’s skin bristle. “Cursed party!” he cried, will you pursue me everywhere? Oh! my God! even to the cow ferryman’s! Then he looked at the Seine at his feet, and a horrible temptation seized him: “Oh!” he said, “how willingly I would drown myself, if the water were not so cold!” Then a desperate resolution came to him. It was, since he could not escape the pope of fools, the flags of Jehan Fourbault, the May boots, the fire lances and the firecrackers, to plunge boldly into the very heart of the festival, and go to the Place de Grève. “At least,” he thought, “I may have a brand from the bonfire there to warm me, and I will be able to sup with a crumb of the three great royal sugar coats of arms that must have been placed on the public buffet of the town. ” Chapter 9. THE PLACE DE GRÈVE. Today, only a very imperceptible vestige of the Place de Grève as it existed then remains ; it is the charming turret which occupies the northern corner of the square, and which, already buried under the ignoble whitewashing which thickens the sharp edges of its sculptures, will soon perhaps have disappeared, submerged by this flood of new houses which so rapidly devours all the old facades of Paris. People who, like us, never pass through the Place de Grève without giving a look of pity and sympathy to this poor turret strangled between two hovels from the time of Louis XV, can easily reconstruct in their minds the group of buildings to which it belonged, and find there the old Gothic square of the fifteenth century intact . It was, as today, an irregular trapezoid bordered on one side by the quay, and on the other three by a series of tall, narrow and dark houses . By day, one could admire the variety of its buildings, all sculpted in stone or wood, and already presenting complete samples of the various domestic architectures of the Middle Ages, going back from the fifteenth to the eleventh century, from the crossing which was beginning to dethrone the ribbed vault, to the Romanesque semicircular arch, which had been supplanted by the ribbed vault, and which still occupied, below it, the first floor of this old house of the Tour-Roland, corner of the square on the Seine, on the side of the rue de la Tannerie. By night, one could distinguish of this mass of buildings only the black indentations of the roofs unrolling around the square their chain of acute angles. For it is one of the radical differences between the cities of that time and the cities of today , that today it is the facades which face the squares and the streets, and that then it was the gables. For two centuries, the houses have turned around. In the center of the eastern side of the square, stood a heavy and hybrid construction made up of three juxtaposed dwellings. It was called by three names which explain its history, its purpose and its architecture: the Maison-au-Dauphin, because Charles V, dauphin, had lived there; the Marchandise, because it served as a town hall; the Maison-aux-Piliers (domus ad piloria), because of a series of large pillars which supported its three floors. The city found there everything necessary for a good city like Paris: a chapel, to pray to God; a plea, to hold audiences and rebuff the king’s people if necessary; and, in the attic, an arsenal full of artillery. For the bourgeois of Paris know that it is not enough in every situation to pray and plead for the city’s liberties, and they always have some good rusty arquebus in reserve in an attic of the Town Hall . The Grève then had that sinister aspect which is still preserved today by the execrable idea it arouses and by the gloomy Town Hall of Dominique Bocador, which replaced the Maison-aux-Piliers. It must be said that a permanent gallows and pillory, a justice and a ladder, as they said then, erected side by side in the middle of the pavement, contributed not a little to turning one’s eyes away from this fatal place, where so many beings full of health and life have died; where fifty years later this Saint-Vallier fever was to be born, this disease of the terror of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all diseases, because it does not come from God, but from man. It is a consoling idea, let us say 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 sealed in the pavement, the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Trahoir cross, the pig market, this hideous Montfaucon, the Sergents’ Barrier, the Place aux Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint-Jacques, not to mention the innumerable ladders of the provosts, the bishop, the chapters, the abbots, the priors having justice; not to mention the legal drownings in the River Seine; it is consoling that today, after having successively lost all the pieces of her armor, her luxury of tortures, her penalty of imagination and fantasy, her torture to which she remade every five years a leather bed at the Grand-Châtelet, this old suzerain of feudal society, almost outlawed by our laws and our cities, hounded from code to code, chased from place to place, has nothing left in our immense Paris but a dishonored corner of the Grève, a miserable guillotine, furtive, restless, ashamed, which always seems to fear being caught in the act, so quickly does it disappear after having done its deed! Chapter 10. KISSES FOR GOLPES. When Pierre Gringoire arrived on the Place de Grève, he was frozen. He had taken the Pont aux Meuniers to avoid the crush of the Pont au Change and the flags of Jehan Fourbault; but the wheels of all the bishop’s mills had splashed him as he passed, and his coat was soaked. It seemed to him, moreover, that the fall of his coin made him even more chilly. So he hastened to approach the bonfire which was burning magnificently in the middle of the square. But a considerable crowd was forming a circle around it. “Damned Parisians!” he said to himself, “for Gringoire, like a true dramatic poet, was prone to monologues, here they are blocking my fire! Yet I have great need of a corner of the chimney. My shoes are leaking, and all these cursed mills that have wept over me! Devil of a Bishop of Paris with his mills! I should like to know what a bishop can do with a mill! Does he expect to become a miller from a bishop?” If all he needs is my curse for that, I ‘ll give it to him, and to his cathedral, and to his mills! Just see if they’ll bother, these onlookers! I ask you what they’re doing there! They’re warming themselves; a fine pleasure! They’re watching a hundred bourrées burn; a fine spectacle! On closer inspection, he noticed that the circle was much larger than was necessary to warm oneself at the king’s fire, and that this crowd of spectators was not solely attracted by the beauty of the hundred bourrées that 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, or a fairy, or an angel, that is what Gringoire, skeptical philosopher and ironic poet that he was, could not decide at first, so fascinated was he by this dazzling vision. She was not tall, but she seemed so, so boldly did her slender figure spring forth. She was dark, but one could guess that in the daytime her skin must have that beautiful golden sheen of Andalusian and Roman women. Her small foot was also Andalusian, for it was at once cramped and comfortable in its graceful shoe. She danced, she turned, she whirled on an old Persian carpet, carelessly thrown under her feet; and each time that, whirling, her radiant figure passed before you, her large black eyes flashed at you. Around her all the gazes were fixed, all the mouths open; and indeed, while she danced thus, to the buzzing of the tambourine which her two round and pure arms raised above her head, thin, frail and lively as a wasp, with her gold bodice without folds, her multi-colored dress which billowed out, with her bare shoulders, her slender legs which her skirt revealed at times, her black hair, her eyes of flame, she was a supernatural creature. “Truly,” thought Gringoire, “she is a salamander, she is a nymph, she is a goddess, she is a bacchante from Mount Menalea!” At that moment, one of the braids of the salamander’s hair came loose, and a piece of yellow copper which was attached to it rolled to the ground. “Oh no!” he said, “she is a gypsy.” All illusion had disappeared. She began to dance again. She took two swords from the ground, which she pressed against them. the point on her forehead, and which she made turn in one direction while she turned in the other. She was indeed quite simply a gypsy. But, however disenchanted Gringoire was, the whole of this scene was not without prestige and magic; the bonfire lit it up with a harsh, red light which trembled vividly on the circle of faces in the crowd, on the brown forehead of the young girl, and at the back of the square threw a pale reflection mingled with the vacillations of their shadows, on one side on the old black and wrinkled facade of the House of Pillars, on the other on the stone arms of the gallows. Among the thousand faces which this light tinged scarlet, there was one which seemed even more than all the others absorbed in the contemplation of the dancer. It was a man’s face, austere, calm and sombre. This man, whose costume was hidden by the crowd surrounding him, did not appear to be more than thirty-five years old; however, he was bald; he had barely a few tufts of thin, already gray hair at his temples; his broad, high forehead was beginning to be furrowed with wrinkles, but in his deep-set eyes shone an extraordinary youth, an ardent life, a profound passion. He kept them constantly fixed on the gypsy, and while the wild young girl of sixteen danced and fluttered to the delight of all, his own reverie seemed to become more and more gloomy. From time to time a smile and a sigh met on his lips, but the smile was more painful than the sigh. The young girl, out of breath, finally stopped, and the people applauded her lovingly. “Djali!” said the gypsy. Then Gringoire saw a pretty little white goat arrive, alert, awake, shiny, with golden horns, with golden feet, with a golden collar, which he had not yet seen, and which had remained until then crouching on a corner of the carpet and watching its mistress dance. “Djali,” said the dancer, “your turn.” And, sitting down, she graciously presented her tambourine to the goat . “Djali,” she continued, “what month of the year is it?” The goat raised its front foot and struck the drum once. It was indeed the first month. The crowd applauded. “Djali,” continued the young girl, turning her tambourine to the other side, “what day of the month is it?” Djali raised his little golden foot and struck the drum six times. “Djali,” continued the Egyptian woman, still beating the drum, “what time of day is it? ” Djali struck seven times. At the same time, the clock of the Maison-aux-Piliers struck seven. The people were amazed. “There’s witchcraft going on,” said a sinister voice in the crowd. It was that of the bald man who never took his eyes off the gypsy. She flinched and turned around; but the applause burst out and drowned out the gloomy exclamation. It even erased it so completely from her mind that she continued to call out to her goat. “Djali, how is Master Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of the town’s pistol-fighters, doing at the Candlemas procession?” Djali stood up on his hind legs and began to bleat, walking with such gentle gravity that the entire circle of spectators burst out laughing at this parody of the self-interested devotion of the captain of the pistoliers. “Djali,” continued the young girl, emboldened by this growing success, ” how does Master Jacques Charmolue, the king’s attorney in the church court, preach?” The goat sat on its backside and began to bleat, waving its front legs in such a strange way that, apart from the bad French and bad Latin, gesture, accent, attitude, all of Jacques Charmolue was there. And the crowd applauded even more. “Sacrilege! profanation!” resumed the voice of the bald man. The gypsy turned around once more. “Ah!” she said, “it’s that ugly man!” Then, stretching her lower lip beyond her upper lip, she made a little pout that seemed familiar to her, pirouetted on her heel, and began to collect in a tambourine the gifts of the multitude. The grand-blancs, the petit-blancs, the targes, the eagle liards rained down. Suddenly she passed in front of Gringoire. Gringoire put his hand so heedlessly in his pocket that she stopped. “The devil!” said the poet, finding at the bottom of his pocket reality, that is to say, emptiness . Meanwhile the pretty girl was there, looking at him with her large eyes, holding out her tambourine, and waiting. Gringoire was sweating profusely . If he had had the Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have given it to the dancer; but Gringoire did not have Peru, and besides, America was not yet discovered. Fortunately, an unexpected incident came to his aid. “Will you go away, grasshopper of Egypt?” cried a shrill voice from the darkest corner of the square. The young girl turned around in fear. It was no longer the voice of the bald man; it was a woman’s voice, a devout and wicked voice. Moreover, this cry, which frightened the gypsy, delighted a troop of children who were prowling by. “It’s the recluse from the Tour-Roland,” they cried with wild laughter , “it’s the sachette who’s grumbling! Hasn’t she had supper? Let’s take her some leftovers from the town buffet!” They all rushed towards the Maison-aux-Piliers. Meanwhile, Gringoire had taken advantage of the dancer’s confusion to slip away. The children’s clamor reminded him that he, too, hadn’t had supper. So he ran to the buffet. But the little rascals had better legs than he; when he arrived, they had made a clean sweep. There wasn’t even a miserable camichon left at five sous a pound. There was nothing left on the wall but the slender fleurs-de-lis, intermingled with rosebushes, painted in 1434 by Mathieu Biterne. It was a meager supper. It is an unwelcome thing to go to bed without supper; it is an even less cheerful thing to have no supper and not know where to sleep. Gringoire was at that point. No bread, no shelter; he saw himself pressed on all sides by necessity, and he found necessity very surly. He had long since discovered the truth that Jupiter created men in a fit of misanthropy, and that, throughout the life of the wise man, his destiny keeps his philosophy under siege. As for him, he had never seen the blockade so complete; he could hear his stomach pounding, and he found it very out of place that bad fate should take his philosophy by famine. This melancholy reverie absorbed him more and more, when a strange song, though full of sweetness, suddenly came to tear him away from it. It was the young Egyptian woman who was singing. It was with her voice as with her dance, as with her beauty. It was indefinable and charming; something pure and sonorous, aerial, winged, so to speak. There were continual blossomings, melodies, unexpected cadences, then simple phrases strewn with sharp, whistling notes, then leaps of scale that would have disconcerted a nightingale, but in which harmony was always found, then soft undulations of octaves that rose and fell like the breast of the young singer. Her beautiful face followed with singular mobility all the caprices of her song, from the most wild inspiration to the most chaste dignity. One would have said sometimes a madwoman, sometimes a queen. The words she sang were in a language unknown to Gringoire, and which seemed to be unknown to her herself, so little did the expression she gave to the song relate to the meaning of the words. Thus these four verses in her mouth were of a mad gaiety: Un cofre de gran riqueza Hallaron dentro un pilar, Dentro del, nuevas banderas Con figuras de espantar. And a moment later, at the accent she gave to this stanza: Alarabes de cavallo Sin poderse menear, Con espadas, y los cuellos, Ballestas de buen echar. Gringoire felt tears coming to his eyes. However, her song breathed above all joy, and she seemed to sing, like the bird, out of serenity and carelessness. The gypsy’s song had disturbed Gringoire’s reverie, but as the swan disturbs the water. He listened to it with a sort of rapture and forgetfulness of everything. It was, for several hours, the first moment when he did not feel himself suffering. This moment was short. The same woman’s voice that had interrupted the gypsy’s dance came to interrupt her song. “Will you be silent, you cicada of hell?” she cried, still from the same dark corner of the square. The poor cicada stopped short. Gringoire covered his ears. “Oh!” he cried, “cursed jagged saw, which comes to break the lyre!” Meanwhile the other spectators murmured like him: “To hell with the bag!” said more than one. And the old invisible troublemaker might have had cause to repent of her aggressions against the gypsy, if they had not been distracted at that very moment by the procession of the Pope of Fools, which, after having traversed many streets and crossroads, was emerging in the Place de Grève, with all its torches and all its noise. This procession, which our readers have seen leaving the Palace, had been organized along the way, and recruited from all the marauders, idle thieves, and available vagabonds in Paris ; so she presented a respectable appearance when she arrived at Grève. First marched Egypt. The Duke of Egypt, at the head, on horseback, with his counts on foot, holding his bridle and stirrup; behind them, the Egyptians, pell-mell, with their little children crying on their shoulders; all of them, duke, counts, common people, in rags and tinsel. Then came the kingdom of slang; that is to say, all the thieves of France, ranked in order of dignity; the least going first. Thus, four by four, with the various insignia of their ranks in this strange faculty, most of them crippled, some lame, some one-armed, the short-legged , the coquillarts, the hubins, the sabouleux, the calots, the francs-mitoux, the rascals, the poor, the capons, the puny, the rifodés, the marcandiers, the sneers, the orphans, the arch-suppôts, the cagoux; a census to tire Homer. At the center of the conclave of cagoux and arch-suppôts, one could hardly distinguish the king of slang, the grand coësre, crouching in a small cart drawn by two large dogs. After the kingdom of the slangers, came the empire of Galileo. William Rousseau, Emperor of the Empire of Galilee, marched majestically in his wine-stained purple robe, preceded by minstrels fighting and dancing Pyrrhic songs, surrounded by his maces, his henchmen, and the clerks of the Chamber of Accounts. Finally came the basoche, with its hands crowned with flowers, its black robes, its music worthy of the Sabbath, and its large yellow wax candles. In the center of this crowd, the grand officers of the Brotherhood of Fools carried on their shoulders a stretcher more overloaded with candles than the shrine of Sainte-Geneviève in times of plague. And on this stretcher shone resplendently, crozier, cope, and mitre, the new Pope of Fools, the bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, Quasimodo the Hunchback. Each section of this grotesque procession had its own particular music. The Egyptians were blasting their balafos and African tambourines. The slang-makers, a very unmusical race, were still playing the viol, the cornetto and the Gothic rubebbe of the twelfth century. The empire of Galilee was hardly more advanced; barely One could distinguish in his music some miserable rebec from the infancy of art, still imprisoned in the D-A-E. But it was around the Pope of Fools that all the musical riches of the time were deployed in a magnificent cacophony . There were only rebec trebles, rebec high-countertenors, rebec tailles, not to mention flutes and brass instruments. Alas! our readers will remember that this was Gringoire’s orchestra . It is difficult to give an idea of the degree of proud and beatific blossoming to which the sad and hideous face of Quasimodo had reached on the journey from the Palace to the Grève. It was the first joy of self-esteem that he had ever experienced. Until then, he had known only humiliation, disdain for his condition, disgust for his person. So, deaf as he was, he savored, like a true pope, the acclamations of this crowd that he hated for feeling himself hated by them. That his people were a collection of madmen, cripples, thieves, beggars, what did it matter! They were still a people, and he was still a sovereign. And he took seriously all this ironic applause, all this derisory respect, to which we must say that there was nevertheless mixed in the crowd a little very real fear. For the hunchback was robust, for the wobbly one was agile, for the deaf one was wicked; three qualities that temper the ridiculous. Besides, that the new pope of madmen realized to himself the feelings he experienced and the feelings he inspired, is what we are far from believing. The spirit that was lodged in this defective body necessarily had something incomplete and deaf about it. So, what he felt at that moment was for him absolutely vague, indistinct and confused. Only joy shone through, pride dominated. Around this dark and unhappy figure, there was radiance. It was therefore not without surprise and fear that suddenly , at the moment when Quasimodo, in this half-drunken state, was passing triumphantly before the House of Pillars, a man suddenly sprang from the crowd and snatched from his hands, with an angry gesture, his gilded wooden crozier, the insignia of his mad papacy. This man, this rash fellow, was the personage with the bald forehead who, a moment before, mingled with the gypsy’s group, had frozen the poor girl with his words of threat and hatred. He was dressed in ecclesiastical costume. At the moment when he left the crowd, Gringoire, who had not noticed him until then, recognized him: “Look! he said, with a cry of astonishment, it’s my master in Hermes, Dom Claude Frollo, the archdeacon! What the devil does he want with that ugly one-eyed man? He’s going to be devoured. A cry of terror arose indeed. The formidable Quasimodo had thrown himself from the stretcher, and the women looked away so as not to see him tear the archdeacon to pieces. He made a leap to the priest, looked at him, and fell to his knees. The priest tore off his tiara, broke his crozier, and lacerated his tinsel cope. Quasimodo remained on his knees, bowed his head, and clasped his hands. Then a strange dialogue of signs and gestures took place between them, for neither spoke. The priest, standing, irritated, threatening, imperious; Quasimodo, prostrate, humble, supplicating. And yet it is certain that Quasimodo could have crushed the priest with his thumb. Finally the archdeacon, roughly shaking Quasimodo’s powerful shoulder , signaled to him to get up and follow him. Quasimodo got up. Then the brotherhood of fools, the first stupor passed, wanted to defend their pope so abruptly dethroned. The Egyptians, the slangers and the whole basoche came barking around the priest. Quasimodo placed himself in front of the priest, flexed the muscles of his athletic fists, and looked at the assailants with the gnashing of teeth of an angry tiger. The priest resumed his somber gravity, made a sign to Quasimodo, and withdrew in silence. Quasimodo walked in front of him, scattering the crowd as he passed. When they had passed through the populace and the square, the swarm of curious onlookers and idlers wanted to follow them. Quasimodo then took the rearguard, and followed the archdeacon backwards, squat, snarling, monstrous, bristling, gathering his limbs, licking his boar’s tusks, snarling like a wild beast, and making the crowd sway immensely with a gesture or a glance. They were left both to plunge into a narrow and dark street, where no one dared to venture after them; so much did the mere chimera of Quasimodo gnashing his teeth bar the entrance. “That is marvelous,” said Gringoire; “but where the devil shall I find supper?” Chapter 11. THE DISADVANTAGES OF FOLLOWING A PRETTY WOMAN IN THE EVENING THROUGH THE STREETS. Gringoire, just in case, had begun to follow the gypsy. He had seen her take the Rue de la Coutellerie with her goat; he had taken the Rue de la Coutellerie. “Why not?” he had said to himself. Gringoire, a practical philosopher of the streets of Paris, had noticed that nothing is so conducive to reverie as following a pretty woman without knowing where she is going. There is in this voluntary abdication of one’s free will, in this fantasy which submits to another fantasy, which is unaware of it, a mixture of whimsical independence and blind obedience, something intermediate between slavery and liberty, which pleased Gringoire, an essentially mixed mind, indecisive and complex, holding the end of all extremes, incessantly suspended between all human propensities, and neutralizing one by the other. He liked to compare himself to the tomb of Mahomet, drawn in opposite directions by two lodestones, and eternally hesitating between the top and the bottom, between the vault and the pavement, between the fall and the ascent, between the zenith and the nadir. If Gringoire lived today, what a beautiful middle ground he would occupy between the classical and the romantic! But he was not primitive enough to live three hundred years, and that is a pity. His absence is a void that is only too keenly felt today. Besides, to follow the passers-by (and especially the women passers-by) in the streets, which Gringoire did willingly, there is no better disposition than not knowing where to sleep. So he walked thoughtfully behind the young girl who quickened her pace and made her pretty goat trot as she saw the bourgeois return and the taverns close, the only shops that would have been open that day. “After all,” he thought more or less, “she must have a place to live ; gypsies have good hearts. Who knows?… And there were in the suspensive points with which he traced this reticence in his mind I don’t know what rather graceful ideas. However, from time to time, as he passed the last groups of bourgeois closing their doors, he caught some scrap of their conversations which came to break the chain of his laughing hypotheses. Sometimes it was two old men who accosted each other. “Master Thibaut Fernicle, do you know that it’s cold? ” (Gringoire had known that since the beginning of winter.) “Yes, well, Master Boniface Disome! Are we going to have a winter like three years ago, in ’80, when wood cost eight sols a mold? ” “Bah!” It’s nothing, Master Thibaut, near the winter of 1407, that it froze from Saint-Martin until Candlemas! and with such fury that the pen of the clerk of the parliament froze, in the grand chamber, every three words! which interrupted the registration of justice. Further on, there were neighbors at their window with candles that the fog made crackle. –Did your husband tell you about the misfortune, Mademoiselle La Boudraque? –No. What is it, Mademoiselle Turquant? –The horse of M. Gilles Godin, the notary at the Châtelet, who was startled by the Flemings and their procession, and who knocked down Master Philippot Avrillot, oblate of the Celestines. –Truly? –Beautifully. –A bourgeois horse! That’s a bit much. If it were a cavalry horse , all right! And the windows closed. But Gringoire had nonetheless lost the thread of his thoughts. Fortunately, he quickly found it again and resumed it without difficulty, thanks to the gypsy, thanks to Djali, who always walked in front of him; two fine, delicate, and charming creatures, whose small feet, pretty forms, and graceful manners he admired, almost confounding them in his contemplation; for their intelligence and good friendship, believing them both to be young girls; for their lightness, agility, and dexterity of walking, finding them both goats. The streets, however, were becoming darker and more deserted every moment. The curfew had long since sounded, and one was beginning to encounter only at rare intervals a passer-by on the pavement, a light in the windows. Gringoire had entered, following the gypsy girl, into that inextricable maze of alleys, crossroads, and dead ends, which surrounds the ancient sepulchre of the Holy Innocents, and which resembles a skein of thread tangled by a cat. “These streets have very little logic!” said Gringoire, lost in those thousand circuits which constantly returned on themselves, but where the young girl followed a path which seemed well known to her, without hesitation and with an increasingly rapid step. As for himself, he would have been completely ignorant of where he was, if he had not noticed, as he passed, at the turn of a street, the octagonal mass of the pillory of the market hall, whose openwork top stood out sharply in black against a still-lit window of the Rue Verdelet. For some moments, he had attracted the young girl’s attention ; she had several times turned her head towards him with uneasiness; she had even once stopped short, had taken advantage of a ray of light which escaped from a half-open bakery to look him fixedly from top to bottom; then, having cast this glance, Gringoire had seen her make that little pout which he had already noticed, and she had passed on. This little pout gave Gringoire something to think about. There was certainly disdain and mockery in this graceful grimace. So he began to lower his head, to count the paving stones, and to follow the young girl a little further away, when, at the turn of a street which had just made him lose sight of her, he heard her utter a piercing cry. He quickened his pace. The street was full of darkness. However, a tow soaked in oil, which was burning in an iron cage at the feet of the Holy Virgin at the corner of the street, enabled Gringoire to distinguish the gypsy struggling in the arms of two men who were trying to stifle her cries. The poor little goat, quite frightened, lowered its horns and bleated. “Help us, gentlemen of the watch!” cried Gringoire, and he advanced bravely. One of the men who held the young girl turned towards him. It was the formidable figure of Quasimodo. Gringoire did not take flight, but he did not take another step. Quasimodo came up to him, threw him four paces onto the pavement with a backhand , and quickly disappeared into the shadows, carrying the young girl folded over one of his arms like a silk scarf. His companion followed him, and the poor goat ran after them all, with her plaintive bleating. “Murder! Murder!” cried the unfortunate gypsy. “Halt, you wretches, and let go of this hussy!” suddenly said in a voice of thunder a horseman who emerged abruptly from the neighboring crossroads. He was a captain of the archers of the king’s ordinance, armed from head to toe, and sword in hand. He snatched the gypsy from the arms of the astonished Quasimodo, placed her across his saddle, and, at the moment when the formidable hunchback, having recovered from his surprise, rushed upon him to recapture his prey, fifteen or sixteen archers, who were closely following their captain, appeared, swords in hand. It was a squad of the king’s orderly who were keeping watch, by order of Messire Robert d’Estouteville, guard of the provost court of Paris. Quasimodo was surrounded, seized, and bound. He roared, he foamed, he bit, and, if it had been broad daylight, there was no doubt that his face alone, made even more hideous by anger, would have put the whole squad to flight. But at night he was disarmed of his most formidable weapon, of his ugliness. His companion had disappeared in the struggle. The gypsy rose gracefully in the officer’s saddle, rested her two hands on the young man’s shoulders, and looked at him fixedly for a few seconds, as if delighted by his good looks and the kind assistance he had just given her. Then, breaking the silence first , she said to him, making her sweet voice even softer: “What is your name, Monsieur le Gendarme? ” “Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers, at your service, my dear!” replied the officer, straightening up. “Thank you,” she said. And while Captain Phoebus was twiddling his Burgundian moustache , she let herself slide off the horse, like an arrow falling to the ground, and fled. A flash of lightning would have vanished less quickly. “Pope’s navel!” said the captain, having Quasimodo’s straps tightened. “I would have preferred to keep the ribald. ” “What do you want, Captain?” said a gendarme, the warbler flew away, the bat remained. Chapter 12. CONTINUATION OF INCONVENIENCES. Gringoire, quite dazed by his fall, had remained on the pavement in front of the good Virgin at the corner of the street. Little by little, he regained his senses; he was at first floating for a few minutes in a sort of half -drowsy reverie which was not without sweetness, in which the aerial figures of the gypsy and the goat were combined with the weight of Quasimodo’s fist. This state did not last long. A rather sharp sensation of cold on the part of his body which was in contact with the pavement suddenly woke him up, and brought his mind back to the surface. “Where do I get this coolness from?” he said to himself abruptly. He then realized that he was more or less in the middle of the gutter. “Devil of a hunchbacked Cyclops!” he grumbled between his teeth; and he tried to get up. But he was too dizzy and too bruised; he was forced to stay where he was. He had a fairly free hand, however; he held his nose and resigned himself. “The mud of Paris,” he thought (for he believed he was sure that the stream would definitely be his refuge, ” And what can one do in a refuge, unless one dreams?”) “The mud of Paris is particularly stinking. It must contain a lot of volatile and nitrous salt. This, moreover, is the opinion of Master Nicolas Flamel and the hermetics… ” The word hermetics suddenly brought the idea of Archdeacon Claude Frollo to his mind. He remembered the violent scene he had just glimpsed, that the gypsy was struggling between two men, that Quasimodo had a companion, and the morose and haughty face of the archdeacon passed confusedly into his memory. “That would be strange!” he thought. And he began to construct, with this data and on this basis, the fantastic edifice of hypotheses, this house of cards of the philosophers. Then suddenly, returning once more to reality: “Ah! I’m freezing!” he cried. The place, in fact, was becoming less and less tenable. Each molecule of water in the stream removed a molecule of radiant heat from Gringoire’s loins, and the equilibrium between the temperature of his body and the temperature of the stream began to be established in a harsh way. A boredom of a completely different nature suddenly came to assail him. A group of children, those barefoot little savages who have always pounded the pavement of Paris under the eternal name of gamins, and who, when we were children too, threw stones at us all in the evening after school, because our trousers were not torn, a swarm of these young rascals was running towards the crossroads where Gringoire lay, with laughter and shouts that seemed to care very little for the sleep of the neighbors. They were dragging after them some shapeless sack; and the mere noise of their clogs would have woken the dead. Gringoire, who was not yet quite dead, half rose . “Ahoy, Hennequin Dandèche! Ahoy, Jehan Pincebourde!” they cried at the top of their voices; “old Eustache Moubon, the local ironmonger, has just died. We have his straw mattress, we are going to make a bonfire of it. Today is the Flemish!” And there they were, throwing the straw mattress right at Gringoire, near whom they had arrived without seeing him. At the same time, one of them took a handful of straw which he went to light with the wick of the good Virgin. “Mort-Christ!” grumbled Gringoire, “am I going to be too hot now? ” The moment was critical. He was going to be caught between fire and water; he made a supernatural effort, the effort of a counterfeiter who is about to be boiled and who is trying to escape. He stood up, threw the straw mattress at the children, and fled. “Holy Virgin!” cried the children; “the iron merchant is coming back!” And they fled on their side. The straw mattress remained master of the battlefield. Belleforêt, Father Le Juge and Corrozet assure that the next day it was collected with great pomp by the clergy of the district and taken to the treasury of the church of Sainte-Opportune, where the sacristan made a rather handsome income until 1789 with the great miracle of the statue of the Virgin on the corner of rue Mauconseil, which had, by its mere presence, on the memorable night of January 6 to 7, 1482, exorcised the deceased Eustache Moubon, who, to make a nest for the devil, had, while dying, maliciously hidden his soul in his straw mattress. Chapter 13. THE BROKEN JUG. After running at full speed for some time, without knowing where, turning his head at many a street corner, stepping over many a stream, crossing many an alley, many a dead end, many a crossroads, seeking escape and passage through all the twists and turns of the old cobblestones of Les Halles, exploring in his panic fear what the beautiful Latin of the charters calls tota via, cheminum et viaria, our poet suddenly stopped , out of breath at first, then seized as it were by the collar by a dilemma that had just arisen in his mind. “It seems to me, Master Pierre Gringoire,” he said to himself, pressing his finger to his forehead, “that you are running around like a madman. The little rascals were no less afraid of you than you were of them.” It seems to me, I tell you, that you heard the sound of their hooves fleeing to the south, while you fled to the north. Now, one of two things: either they fled, and then the straw mattress they must have forgotten in their terror is precisely this hospitable bed after which you have been running since this morning, and which the Virgin Mary miraculously sends you to reward you for having made in her honor a morality accompanied by triumphs and mummeries; or the children did not flee, and in this case they put the brand to the straw mattress, and that is precisely the excellent fire which you need to rejoice, dry and warm yourselves. In both cases, good fire or good bed, the straw mattress is a gift from heaven. The blessed Virgin Mary who is at the corner of the rue Mauconseil perhaps only had Eustache Moubon killed for that; and it is madness of you to run away like this on a train of guts, like a Picard before a Frenchman, leaving behind you what you are looking for in front of you; and you are a fool! Then he retraced his steps, and, orienting himself and ferreting around, his nose in the wind and with his ear on the alert, he tried to find the blessed straw mattress. But in vain. It was nothing but intersections of houses, dead ends, crow’s feet, in the midst of which he hesitated and doubted constantly, more hindered and more stuck in this tangle of black alleys than he would have been in the very maze of the Hôtel des Tournelles. Finally he lost patience, and cried out solemnly: “Cursed be the crossroads! It was the devil who made them in the image of his pitchfork.” This exclamation relieved him a little, and a sort of reddish reflection that he saw at that moment at the end of a long and narrow alley finished raising his spirits. “God be praised!” he said, “it’s over there! There’s my straw mattress burning.” And comparing himself to the ferryman who sinks into the night: “Salve,” he added piously, “salve, maris stella!” Did he address this fragment of the litany to the Blessed Virgin or to the straw mattress? That is something we do not know at all. He had hardly taken a few steps along the long alley, which was sloping, unpaved, and increasingly muddy and inclined, when he noticed something rather singular. It was not deserted. Here and there, along its length, crawled I know not what vague and shapeless masses, all heading towards the flickering light at the end of the street, like those heavy insects which drag themselves at night from blade of grass to blade of grass towards a shepherd’s fire. Nothing makes one adventurous like not feeling where one’s pocket was. Gringoire continued to advance, and soon joined the one of these larvae which dragged itself most lazily behind the others. As he approached it, he saw that it was nothing other than a miserable cripple hopping on its two hands, like a wounded reaper who has only two legs left. At the moment when he passed close to this species of spider with a human face, it raised a lamentable voice towards him: “La buona mancia, signor! la buona mancia! ” “The devil take you,” said Gringoire, “and me with you, if I know what you mean!” And he passed on. He joined another of these ambulatory masses, and examined it. He was a cripple, both lame and one-armed, and so one-armed and so lame that the complicated system of crutches and wooden legs which supported him gave him the appearance of a masons’ scaffolding in motion. Gringoire, who loved noble and classical comparisons, compared him in his thoughts to Vulcan’s living tripod. This living tripod saluted him as he passed, but by stopping his hat at the level of Gringoire’s chin, like a shaving dish, and shouting in his ears: “Señor caballero, para comprar un pedaso de pan!” “It seems,” said Gringoire, “that this one speaks too; but it is a rough language, and he is happier than I if he understands it.” Then, striking his forehead by a sudden transition of thought: “By the way, what the devil did they want to say this morning with their Esmeralda?” He wanted to quicken his pace; but for the third time something blocked his path. This something, or rather this someone, was a blind man, a little blind man with a Jewish face and a beard, who, rowing in the space around him with a stick, and towed by a large dog, nasally called to him with a Hungarian accent: Facitote caritatem! –Good! said Pierre Gringoire, here is one at last who speaks a Christian language. I must have a very charitable air for someone to ask me for charity in such a meager state in which my purse is. My friend (and he turned to the blind man), I sold my last shirt last week; that is to say, since you only understand the language of Cicero: Vendidi hebdomade nuper transita meam ultimam chemisam. Having said this, he turned his back on the blind man and continued on his way. But the blind man began to lengthen his stride at the same time as him; and suddenly the cripple, suddenly the legless man, appeared on their side with great haste and a great noise of bowls and crutches on the pavement. Then, all three, tumbling over each other at the heels of poor Gringoire, began to sing their song to him: “Caritatem!” sang the blind man. “La buona mancia!” sang the cripple. And the lame man picked up the musical phrase, repeating: “Un pedaso de pan!” Gringoire stopped his ears. “O Tower of Babel!” he cried. He began to run. The blind man ran. The lame man ran. The cripple ran. And then, as he went deeper into the street, legless, blind, and lame people swarmed around him, and one-armed, one-eyed , and lepers with their sores, some coming out of the houses, some from the little side streets, some from the cellar vents, howling, bellowing, yelping, all hobbling, lurching, rushing towards the light, and wallowing in the mud like slugs after the rain. Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not knowing quite what would become of him, walked in terror among the others, turning around the lame, stepping over the legless, his feet entangled in this anthill of cripples, like the English captain who got stuck in a flock of crabs. The idea came to him to try to retrace his steps. But it was too late. This whole legion had closed behind him, and his three beggars held him. He continued, therefore, driven at once by this irresistible flood, by fear, and by a dizziness which made it all seem like a sort of horrible dream. At last, he reached the end of the street. It opened onto an immense square, where a thousand scattered lights flickered in the confused fog of the night. Gringoire threw himself into it, hoping to escape by the speed of his legs from the three infirm spectres who had clung to him. “Onde vas, hombre!” cried the cripple, throwing down his crutches and running after him with the two best legs that had ever traced a geometrical step on the pavement of Paris. Meanwhile, the legless man, standing on his feet, crowned Gringoire with his heavy iron-plated bowl, and the blind man looked him in the face with blazing 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 see the blind watching and the lame running; but where is the Savior?” They answered with a burst of sinister laughter. The poor poet looked around him. He was indeed in that formidable Court of Miracles, where no honest man had ever penetrated at such an hour; a magic circle where the officers of the Châtelet and the sergeants of the provost who ventured there disappeared in pieces; a city of thieves, a hideous wart on the face of Paris; a sewer from which escaped every morning, and where returned to stagnate every night, that stream of vice, begging and vagrancy, always overflowing in the streets of capitals; monstrous hive where all the hornets of the social order returned in the evening with their booty; a lying hospital where the Bohemian, the defrocked monk, the lost schoolboy, the scoundrels of all nations, Spaniards, Italians, Germans, of all religions, Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, idolaters, covered in painted wounds, beggars by day, were transfigured by night into brigands; an immense changing room, in a word, where at that time all the actors dressed and undressed in that eternal comedy that theft, prostitution and murder played on the pavement of Paris. It was a vast square, irregular and badly paved, like all the squares of Paris at that time. Fires, around which strange groups swarmed, shone here and there. All this came and went, shouted. One could hear shrill laughter, the wailing of children, women’s voices. The hands and heads of this crowd, black against the luminous background, cut out a thousand bizarre gestures. At times, on the ground, where the brightness of the fires trembled, mingled with great indefinite shadows, one could see passing a dog that looked like a man, a man that looked like a dog. The boundaries of races and species seemed to disappear in this city as in a pandemonium. Men, women, animals, age, sex, health, illnesses, everything seemed to be in common among this people; everything went together, mixed, confounded, superimposed; each one participated in everything. The wavering and poor radiance of the fires allowed Gringoire to distinguish, through his confusion, all around the immense square, a hideous frame of old houses whose worm-eaten, shriveled, stunted facades , each pierced by one or two lighted skylights, seemed to him in the shadows to be enormous heads of old women, arranged in a circle, monstrous and sullen, who were watching the Sabbath with blinking eyes. It was like a new world, unknown, unheard of, deformed, reptilian, teeming, fantastic. Gringoire, more and more frightened, caught by the three beggars as if by three pincers, deafened by a crowd of other faces that fleeced and barked around him, the unfortunate Gringoire tried to rally his presence of mind to remember whether it was a Saturday. But his efforts were in vain; the thread of his memory and his thought was broken; and doubting everything, floating from what he saw to what he felt, he asked himself this insoluble question: “If I am, is that? If that is, am I?” At that moment, a distinct cry arose in the buzzing throng that surrounded him: “Let us take him to the king! let us take him to the king!” “Holy Virgin!” murmured Gringoire, “the king here must be a goat.” “To the king! To the king!” repeated all the voices. They dragged him away. It was a question of who would lay their hands on him. But the three beggars did not let go, and tore him away from the others , shouting: “He is ours!” The poet’s already sick doublet breathed its last in this struggle. As he crossed the horrible square, his dizziness dissipated. After a few steps, the sense of reality had returned to him. He was beginning to get used to the atmosphere of the place. In the first moment, from his poet’s head, or perhaps, quite simply and prosaically, from his empty stomach, a smoke had risen, a vapor so to speak, which, spreading between the objects and him, had allowed him to glimpse them only in the incoherent mist of the nightmare, in those darknesses of dreams which make all contours tremble, all forms grimace, objects agglomerate into disproportionate groups, dilating things into chimeras and men into phantoms. Little by little this hallucination was succeeded by a less bewildered and less magnifying gaze. Reality dawned around him, struck his eyes, struck his feet, and demolished piece by piece all the frightful poetry with which he had at first believed himself surrounded. It was clear that he was not walking in the Styx, but in the mud, that he was not being elbowed by demons, but by thieves, that it was not his soul that was at stake, but quite simply his life (since he lacked that precious conciliator who so effectively places himself between the bandit and the honest man, the purse). Finally, examining the orgy more closely and with more composure, he fell from the sabbath to the tavern. The Court of Miracles was in fact only a tavern, but a tavern of brigands, as red with blood as with wine. The spectacle that met his eyes, when his ragged escort finally set him down at the end of his journey, was not likely to bring him back to poetry, even to the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the tavern. If we were not in the fifteenth century, we would say that Gringoire had descended from Michelangelo to Callot. Around a large fire which burned on a large round slab, and which penetrated with its flames the reddened stems of a tripod empty for the moment, a few worm-eaten tables were set up here and there, at random, without the least lackey geometer having deigned to adjust their parallelism or to ensure that at least they did not intersect at too unusual angles. On these tables gleamed a few pots dripping with wine and ale, and around these pots were grouped many bacchic faces, flushed with fire and wine. It was a man with a big belly and a jovial face who was noisily kissing a girl of joy, thick and fleshy. It was a kind of false soldier, a mocker, as they said in slang, who was undoing with a whistle the bandages of his false wound, and who was stretching his healthy and vigorous knee, swaddled since the morning in a thousand ligatures. On the other hand, it was a sickly man who was preparing his God’s leg for the next day with lightning and ox blood. Two tables further on, a coquillart, in his complete pilgrim’s costume, was spelling out the lament of Sainte-Reine, without forgetting the psalmody and the nasal sound. Elsewhere, a young hubin was taking lessons in epilepsy from an old saboulous man who was teaching him the art of foaming while chewing a piece of soap. Nearby, a dropsical man was deflating, and making four or five thieves stop their noses, who were fighting at the same table over a child stolen in the evening. All these circumstances which, two centuries later, seemed so ridiculous at court, as Sauval says, that they served as a pastime for the king and as an entry into the royal ballet of La Nuit, divided into four parts and danced on the Petit-Bourbon stage. Never, adds an eyewitness from 1653, have the sudden metamorphoses of the Cour des Miracles been more happily represented. Benserade prepared us for it with some rather gallant verses. Loud laughter erupted everywhere, and the song obscene. Everyone pulled to themselves, glossing and swearing without listening to their neighbors. The pots clinked, and quarrels arose from the clash of pots, and the chipped pots tore rags. A large dog, sitting on its tail, watched the fire. Some children were mixed up in this orgy. The stolen child, who wept and screamed. Another, a fat boy of four, sitting with his legs dangling on a bench that was too high, with the table up to his chin, and saying nothing. A third gravely spread with his finger on the table the molten tallow that dripped from a candle. A last one, small, crouched in the mud, almost lost in a cauldron which he was scraping with a tile, and from which he drew a sound that would have made Stradivarius faint. A barrel was near the fire, and a beggar on the barrel. It was the king on his throne. The three who had Gringoire brought him before this barrel, and the whole bacchanalia fell silent for a moment, except for the cauldron inhabited by the child. Gringoire did not dare to breathe or raise his eyes. “Hombre, quita tu sombrero,” said one of the three rascals to whom he belonged; and before he had understood what that meant, the other had taken his hat. Miserable little hut, it is true, but still good on a sunny day or a rainy day. Gringoire sighed. Meanwhile the king, from the height of his cask, addressed him. “What is this scoundrel?” Gringoire shuddered. This voice, although accentuated by the threat, reminded him of another voice which that very morning had dealt the first blow to his mystery, nasally in the middle of the audience: Charity, please ! He raised his head. It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou. Clopin Trouillefou, dressed in his royal insignia, was not a rag more nor less. The wound on his arm had already disappeared. He carried in his hand one of those whips with white leather thongs which the sergeants with rods used at that time to keep the crowd in line, and which were called boullayes. He had on his head a sort of headdress, circled and closed at the top; but it was difficult to distinguish whether it were a child’s roll or a king’s crown, so much do the two things resemble each other. Meanwhile Gringoire, without knowing why, had regained some hope when he recognized in the king of the Court of Miracles his cursed beggar from the great hall. “Master,” he stammered….. Monseigneur….. Sire….. What should I call you? he said at last, having reached the climax of his crescendo, and no longer knowing how to ascend or descend. “Monseigneur, his majesty, or comrade, call me what you will. But hurry. What have you to say in your defense? In your defense!” thought Gringoire, “this displeases me.” He continued, stammering: “I am the one who this morning…” “By the devil’s nails!” interrupted Clopin, “your name, scoundrel, and nothing more. Listen.” You are before three powerful sovereigns: me, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Thunes, successor to the Grand Coësre, supreme overlord of the kingdom of slang; Mathias Hungadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and Bohemia, that old sallow you see there with a rag around his head; William Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat man who doesn’t listen to us and who caresses a ribald. We are your judges. You have entered the kingdom of slang without being an slang-speaker, 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 people, a thief, a beggar, or a vagabond. Are you anything like that? Justify yourself. State your qualities. “Alas!” said Gringoire, “I have not that honor.” I am the author… “That’s enough,” Trouillefou continued without letting him finish. “You’re going to be hanged. It’s quite simple, gentlemen honest bourgeois! As you treat our people at home, we treat yours at home. The law you lay down for the crooks, the crooks lay down for you. It’s your fault if it’s nasty. From time to time, one has to see an honest man’s grimace above the hemp collar; that makes it honorable. Come on, friend, share your rags cheerfully with these young ladies. I’m going to have you hanged to amuse the crooks, and you can give them your purse to drink from. If you have any mummery to do, there’s over there in the snuffbox a very good God-the-Father in stone that we stole from Saint-Pierre-aux-bœufs. You have four minutes to throw your soul at his head. ” The speech was formidable. “Well said, upon my soul! Clopin Trouillefou preaches like a holy father the pope!” cried the Emperor of Galilee, breaking his pot to prop up his table. “My lords emperors and kings,” said Gringoire coolly (for I don’t know how his firmness had returned to him, and he spoke resolutely), “you don’t think so. My name is Pierre Gringoire, I am the poet whose morality was performed this morning in the great hall of the Palace. ” “Ah! it’s you, master!” said Clopin. “I was there, by God’s name! Well ! Comrade, is that a reason, because you bored us this morning, for not being hanged this evening? ” “I shall have difficulty getting out of it,” thought Gringoire. He made one more effort, however. “I don’t see why,” he said, “poets are not classed among the thugs.” Aesopus was a vagabond; Homerus was a beggar; Mercurius was a thief… Clopin interrupted him: “I think you want to matagrabolize us with your tome. By Jove, let yourself be hanged, and not in such a fuss! ” “Pardon, my lord the king of Thunes,” replied Gringoire, disputing the ground foot to foot. “It’s worth the trouble… Just a moment!… Listen to me… You won’t condemn me without hearing me…” His unfortunate voice, in fact, was drowned out by the uproar around him. The little boy was scraping his cauldron with more verve than ever; and, to cap it all, an old woman had just placed a pan full of grease on the tripod, which was squealing in the fire with a noise like the cries of a troop of children chasing a mask. Meanwhile, Clopin Trouillefou appeared to confer for a moment with the Duke of Egypt and the Emperor of Galilee, who was completely drunk. Then he shouted sourly: “Silence!” and, as the cauldron and the frying pan did not listen to him and continued their duet, he jumped down from his barrel, kicked the cauldron, which rolled ten paces with the child, kicked the frying pan, all the fat of which spilled into the fire, and he gravely climbed back onto his throne, without heeding the stifled cries of the child, nor the grumbling of the old woman, whose supper was going up in a beautiful white flame. Trouillefou made a sign, and the Duke, and the Emperor, and the arch-supporters and the cagoux came and formed themselves around him in a horseshoe, of which Gringoire, still roughly apprehended, occupied the center. It was a semicircle of rags, tatters, tinsel, pitchforks, axes, drunken legs, large bare arms, sordid, dull, and dazed faces. In the middle of this round table of beggarly business, Clopin Trouillefou, like the doge of this senate, like the king of this peerage, like the pope of this conclave, dominated, first from the full height of his barrel, then with I know not what haughty, fierce, and formidable air which made his pupils sparkle and corrected in his savage profile the bestial type of the rogue race. One would have said a face among snouts. “Listen,” he said to Gringoire, stroking his deformed chin with his calloused hand; “I do not see why you should not be hanged. It is true that it seems to disgust you; And it’s quite simple, you bourgeois, you’re not used to it. You’ve got a big idea about it. After all, we don’t want to harm you. Here’s a way to get you out of this mess for the moment. Do you want to be one of us? One can imagine the effect this proposal had on Gringoire, who saw life slipping away from him and was beginning to let go. He clung to it energetically. “I want it, certainly, beautifully,” he said. “You consent,” continued Clopin, “to enlist among the people of the little flame? ” “Of the little flame. Precisely,” replied Gringoire. “You recognize yourself as a member of the free bourgeoisie?” continued the King of Thunes. “Of the free bourgeoisie. “Subject of the kingdom of slang? -Of the kingdom of slang. -Thug? -Thug. -In the soul? -In the soul.” “I point out to you,” the king continued, “that you will be hanged no less for that. ” “The devil!” said the poet. “Only,” continued Clopin imperturbably, “you will be hanged later, with more ceremony, at the expense of the good city of Paris, on a fine stone gallows, and by honest people. That is a consolation. ” “As you say,” replied Gringoire. “There are other advantages. As a free bourgeois, you will have to pay neither mud, nor paupers, nor lanterns, to which the bourgeois of Paris are subject. ” “So be it,” said the poet. “I consent. I am a crook, a slang-book, a free bourgeois, a little flambe, whatever you wish. And I was all that in advance, Monsieur the King of Thunes, for I am a philosopher; and omnia in philosophia, omnes in philosopho continentur, as you know.” The King of Thunes frowned. “What do you take me for, friend? What Hungarian Jewish slang are you singing to us? I don’t know Hebrew. To be a bandit, one is not Jewish. I don’t even steal anymore, I’m above that, I kill. Cut-throat, yes; cut-purse, no.” Gringoire tried to slip some excuse into these brief words , which were becoming more and more jerky with anger. “I beg your pardon, my lord. It’s not Hebrew, it’s Latin. ” “I tell you,” Clopin continued angrily, “that I am not Jewish, and that I will have you hanged, you synagogue belly! As well as that little Judean merchant who is near you, and whom I hope to see nail one day to a counter, like a piece of counterfeit money that he is! In speaking thus, he pointed with his finger at the little bearded Hungarian Jew, who had accosted Gringoire with his facitote caritatem, and who, not understanding any other language, watched in surprise as the King of Thunes’s bad humor spilled over onto him. Finally, Monseigneur Clopin calmed down. “Scoundrel,” he said to our poet, “so you want to be a crook? ” “No doubt,” replied the poet. “It’s not all about wanting,” said the gruff Clopin. “Goodwill doesn’t put an extra onion in the soup, and is only good for going to paradise; now, paradise and slang are two. To be received in slang, you must prove that you are good for something, and for that you must search the mannequin. ” “I will search,” said Gringoire, “whatever you please. ” Clopin made a sign. Some slangers left the circle and returned a moment later. They brought two posts ending at their lower end in two wooden spatulas, which gave them an easy footing on the ground. To the upper end of the two posts they fitted a transverse beam, and the whole thing constituted a very pretty portable gallows, which Gringoire had the satisfaction of seeing erected before him in the twinkling of an eye. Nothing was missing, not even the rope that swung gracefully below the crosspiece. “What are they getting at?” asked Gringoire with some uneasiness. A sound of bells that he heard at the same moment put an end to his anxiety. It was a dummy that the thugs were hanging by the neck from the rope, a sort of bird scarecrow, dressed in red, and so laden with bells and small bells that one could have harnessed thirty Castilian mules with it. These thousand bells trembled for a time with the oscillations of the rope, then died away little by little, and finally fell silent, when the mannequin had been brought back to immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the hourglass. Then Clopin, indicating to Gringoire an old, shaky stool, placed beneath the mannequin: “Get on it. ” “Devil!” objected Gringoire, “I’m going to break my neck. Your stool limps like a Martial couplet; it has a hexameter foot and a pentameter foot. ” “Get on,” resumed Clopin. Gringoire mounted the stool, and managed, not without some oscillation of his head and arms, to find his center of gravity there. “Now,” continued the King of Thunes, “turn your right foot around your left leg and stand on tiptoe.” “My lord,” said Gringoire, “so you absolutely insist that I break some limb?” Clopin nodded. “Listen, friend, you talk too much. That’s what it is in a nutshell. You will stand on tiptoe, as I told you; in this way you will be able to reach the dummy’s pocket; you will search it; you will take out a purse that is there; and if you do all this without the sound of a bell being heard, that’s fine; you will be a crook. We will only have to beat you for eight days. ” “Ventre-Dieu! I would not take care,” said Gringoire. “And if I make the bells ring? ” “Then you will be hanged. Do you understand? ” “I don’t understand at all,” replied Gringoire. “Listen once more. You will search the dummy and take its purse; If a single bell moves during the operation, you will be hanged. Do you understand that? “Good,” said Gringoire; “I understand that. After? ” “If you manage to remove the purse without the bells being heard, you are a crook, and you will be beaten for eight consecutive days. You understand, no doubt, now? ” “No, my lord; I no longer understand. What is my advantage? Hanged in one case, beaten in the other? ” “And crook,” resumed Clopin, “and crook, is that nothing? It is in your interest that we will beat you, in order to harden you to blows. “Many thanks,” replied the poet. “Come, let’s hurry,” said the king, stamping his foot on his barrel, which resounded like a bass drum. “Search the dummy, and let this be over. I warn you one last time that if I hear a single bell, you will take the dummy’s place.” The band of slangers applauded Clopin’s words, and formed a circle around the gallows, with such pitiless laughter that Gringoire saw that he amused them too much not to have everything to fear from them. So there was no hope left for him, except the frail chance of succeeding in the formidable operation imposed on him. He decided to risk it, but not without first addressing a fervent prayer to the dummy he was going to rob, and who would have been easier to soften up than the crooks. This myriad of bells with their little copper tongues seemed to him like so many open asp mouths, ready to bite and whistle. “Oh!” he said in a 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, don’t ring! bells, don’t ring! bells, don’t shiver! ” He made one more effort on Trouillefou. “And if a gust of wind comes?” he asked him. “You will be hanged,” replied the other without hesitation. Seeing that there was no respite, no reprieve, no evasion possible, he bravely made up his mind. He turned his right foot around his left, stood up on his left foot, and stretched out his arm; but, at the moment he touched the dummy, his body, which had only one foot, tottered on the stool, which had only three; he mechanically tried to lean on the dummy, lost his balance, and fell heavily to the ground, completely deafened by the fatal vibration of the thousand bells of the dummy, which, yielding to the impulse of his hand, described first a rotation on itself, then swung majestically between the two posts. “Curse!” he cried as he fell, and he remained as if dead, face down on the ground. Meanwhile he heard the formidable chime above his head, and the diabolical laughter of the thugs, and the voice of Trouillefou, who said: “Raise the rascal up for me, and hang him roughly.” He stood up. They had already taken down the dummy to make room for him. The slangers made him climb onto the stool. Clopin came to him, put the rope around his neck, and, striking him on the shoulder: “Farewell, friend! You can’t escape now, even if you were to digest with the Pope’s intestines. ” The word “pardon” expired on Gringoire’s lips. He looked around him. But there was no hope; everyone was laughing. “Bellevigne de l’Étoile,” said the King of Thunes to an enormous rogue, who had come out of the ranks, “climb up onto the crossbar. ” Bellevigne de l’Étoile climbed nimbly onto the transverse beam, and after a moment Gringoire, raising his eyes, saw him with terror crouching on the crossbar above his head. “Now,” resumed Clopin Trouillefou, “as soon as I clap my hands, Andry-le-Rouge, you will throw the stool to the ground with a blow of your knee; François Chante-Prune, you will hang yourself at the feet of the scoundrel; and you, Bellevigne, you will throw yourself on his shoulders; and all three at once, do you hear? Gringoire shuddered. “Are you there?” said Clopin Trouillefou to the three slangers ready to throw themselves upon Gringoire like three spiders upon a fly. The poor patient had a moment of horrible waiting, while Clopin calmly pushed back into the fire with the tip of his foot a few sprigs of vine that the flame had not reached. “Are you there?” he repeated, and he opened his hands to strike. One second more, it would have been over. But he stopped, as if warned by a sudden idea. “One moment!” he said; “I forgot!… It is customary for us not to hang a man without asking if there is a woman who wants him. Comrade, it is your last resort. You must marry a thug or the rope. This Bohemian law, however bizarre it may seem to the reader, is still written at length in old English legislation. See Burington’s Observations. Gringoire breathed. It was the second time he had come back to life in the last half hour. So he did not dare to trust it too much. “Hello!” shouted Clopin, climbing back onto his cask, “holo! women, females, is there among you, from the witch to her cat, a ribald who wants this ribald? Holo, Colette la Charonne! Élisabeth Trouvain! Simone Jodouyne! Marie Piédebou! Thonne-la-Longue! Bérarde Fanouel! Michelle Genaille! Claude Ronge-oreille! Mathurine Girorou! Holo! Isabeau-la-Thierrye! Come and see! A man for nothing! Who wants one?
Gringoire, in his miserable state, was doubtless not very appetizing. The thugs showed themselves only slightly moved by the proposal. The unfortunate man heard them reply: “No! No! Hang him, there will be pleasure for all. ” Three, however, came out of the crowd and came to sniff him out. The first was a fat girl with a square face. She examined attentively the philosopher’s deplorable doublet. The smock was worn and more torn than a chestnut-roasting pan. The girl grimaced. “Old flag!” she grumbled; and, addressing Gringoire: “Let’s see your cape?” “I’ve lost it,” said Gringoire. “Your hat ?” “It’s been taken from me.” “Your shoes?” “They’re beginning to have no soles.” “Your purse?” “Alas!” stammered Gringoire, “I haven’t a penny.” “Let yourself hang, and say thank you!” replied the thug , turning her back on him. The second, old, black, wrinkled, hideous, of an ugliness that would make a blot on the Court of Miracles, circled around Gringoire. He was almost trembling lest she should want him. But she said between her teeth: “He ‘s too thin!” and went away. The third was a young girl, quite fresh, and not too ugly. “Save me!” said the poor devil in a low voice. She looked at him for a moment with a look of pity, then lowered her eyes, tucked her skirt, and remained undecided. He followed her every movement with his eyes; it was the last glimmer of hope. “No,” said the young girl at last, “no! Guillaume Longuejoue would beat me.” She returned to the crowd. “Comrade,” said Clopin, “you are in trouble.” Then, standing up on his barrel: “No one wants it?” he cried, imitating the accent of an auctioneer, to the great gaiety of all; “no one wants it? Once, twice, three times?” And turning towards the gallows with a nod of his head: “Sold! Bellevigne de l’Étoile, Andry-le-Rouge, François Chante-Prune approached Gringoire. At that moment a cry arose among the slangers: “La Esmeralda!” Esmeralda ! Gringoire shuddered and turned in the direction from which the clamor came. The crowd parted, and gave way to a pure and dazzling figure. It was the gypsy. “Esmeralda!” said Gringoire, stupefied, in the midst of his emotions, at the sudden manner in which this magic word united all the memories of his day. This rare creature seemed to exercise even in the Court of Miracles her empire of charm and beauty. Argotiers and argotières ranged themselves gently as she passed, and their brutal faces blossomed before her gaze. She approached the patient with her light step. Her pretty Djali followed her. Gringoire was more dead than alive. She considered him for a moment in silence. “Are you going to hang this man?” she said gravely to Clopin. “Yes, sister,” replied the King of Thunes, “unless you take him for a husband.” She made her pretty little pout with her lower lip. “I’ll take it,” she said. Gringoire firmly believed that he had only had one dream since morning, and that this was the continuation of it. The incident, in fact, although graceful, was violent. The noose was untied, and the poet was made to descend from the stool. He was forced to sit down, so great was the commotion. The Duke of Egypt, without uttering a word, brought an earthenware jug. The gypsy presented it to Gringoire. “Throw it to the ground,” she said. The jug broke into four pieces. “Brother,” said the Duke of Egypt, laying his hands on their foreheads, “she is your wife; sister, he is your husband. For four years. Go.
” Chapter 14. A WEDDING NIGHT. After a few moments, our poet found himself in a small vaulted room, well closed, very warm, seated at a table which seemed to ask nothing better than to borrow a few things from a pantry suspended nearby, with a good bed in sight , and face to face with a pretty girl. The adventure was enchanting. He began to take himself seriously for a character in a fairy tale; from time to time, he cast his eyes around him as if to see if the fiery chariot drawn by two winged chimeras, which alone had been able to transport him so quickly from Tartarus to paradise, was still there. At times, too, he stubbornly fixed his gaze on the holes in his doublet, in order to cling to reality and not lose his ground completely. His reason, tossed about in imaginary spaces, hung by this thread. The young girl did not seem to pay any attention to him; she came and went, moved some stool, chatted with her goat, pouted here and there. Finally she came and sat down near the table, and Gringoire was able to look at her at ease. You were a child, reader, and you are perhaps happy enough to be so still. It is not that you have not more than once (and for my part I have spent whole days there, the best spent of my life) followed from thicket to thicket, at the edge of a running stream, on a sunny day, some beautiful green or blue damsel, breaking her flight at abrupt angles and kissing the tips of all the branches. You remember with what amorous curiosity your thoughts and your gaze were attached to this little whirlwind, whirling and buzzing, of wings, purple and azure, in the middle of which floated an elusive form, veiled by the very rapidity of its movement. The aerial being that was vaguely outlined through this quivering of wings seemed to you chimerical, imaginary, impossible to touch, impossible to see. But when at last the young lady rested at the tip of a reed, and you could examine, with bated breath, the long gauze wings, the long enamel dress, the two crystal globes, what astonishment you felt, and what fear to see once again the form disappear into shadow and the being into a chimera! Recall these impressions, and you will easily realize what Gringoire felt as he contemplated in her visible and palpable form this Esmeralda whom he had only glimpsed until then through a whirlwind of dance, song, and tumult. Deeper and deeper in his reverie,–So this, he said to himself, following her vaguely with his eyes, is what Esmeralda is! A celestial creature! A street dancer! So much and so little! It was she who gave the final blow to my mystery this morning, it is she who is saving my life this evening. My evil genius! My good angel!–A pretty woman, upon my word!–and who must love me madly to have taken me in this way.–By the way, he said, rising suddenly with that feeling of truth which formed the basis of his character and his philosophy, I don’t know how it is, but I am her husband! With this idea in his head and in his eyes, he approached the young girl in such a military and gallant manner that she recoiled. “What do you want from me then?” she said. “Can you ask me, adorable Esmeralda?” replied Gringoire , with such a passionate accent that he himself was astonished when he heard himself speak. The gypsy opened her eyes wide. “I don’t know what you mean . ” “Well?” resumed Gringoire, growing more and more heated, and thinking that he was after all only dealing with a virtue of the Court of Miracles, “am I not yours, sweet friend? Are you not mine?” And, quite ingenuously, he took her waist. The bodice of the gypsy slipped into his hands like the dress of an eel. She sprang at a bound to the other end of the cell, stooped, and stood up again, with a small dagger in her hand, before Gringoire had even time to see where it came from; irritated and proud, her lips swollen, her nostrils open, her cheeks red as an api apple, her eyes radiant with lightning. At the same time, the white goat placed herself in front of her, and presented Gringoire with a battle front, bristling with two pretty horns, golden and very pointed. All this was done in the blink of an eye. The young lady was making herself a wasp, and asked nothing better than to sting. Our philosopher remained speechless, casting stupefied glances from the goat to the young girl in turn . “Holy Virgin!” he said at last when surprise allowed him to speak, “here are two rogues!” The gypsy broke the silence for her part. “You must be a very bold fellow!” “Pardon, madame,” said Gringoire, smiling. “But why did you take me for a husband? ” “Was it necessary to let you be hanged?” “So,” continued the poet, a little disappointed in his amorous hopes, “you had no other thought in marrying me than to save me from the gallows? ” “And what other thought do you expect me to have had?” Gringoire bit his lip. “Come,” he said, “I am not yet as triumphant as Cupido as I thought. But, then, what was the point of breaking that poor jug? Meanwhile, Esmeralda’s dagger and the goat’s horns were still on the defensive. ” “Mademoiselle Esmeralda,” said the poet, “let us capitulate. I am not a clerk at the Châtelet, and I will not scold you for carrying a dagger in Paris in the face of the ordinances and prohibitions of the Provost. You are not unaware, however, that Noël Lescripvain was sentenced eight days ago to ten sous Parisis for carrying a braquemard.” But that is not my business, and I come to the point. I swear on my share of paradise not to approach you without your leave and permission; but give me some supper. At heart, Gringoire, like M. Despréaux, was very little voluptuous. He was not of that knight and musketeer type who takes young girls by assault. In matters of love, as in all other affairs, he was willingly for temporizations and middle ways; and a good supper, in an amiable tête-à-tête, seemed to him, especially when he was hungry, an excellent interlude between the prologue and the denouement of a love affair. The gypsy girl did not reply. She made her little disdainful pout, raised her head like a bird, then burst out laughing, and the cute dagger disappeared as it had come, without Gringoire being able to see where the bee hid its sting. A moment later, there was on the table a loaf of rye bread, a slice of bacon, some wrinkled apples, and a jug of beer. Gringoire began to eat with gusto. To hear the furious clatter of his iron fork and his earthenware plate, one would have said that all his love had turned to appetite. The young girl seated before him watched him do so 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 yellow wax candle lit up this scene of voracity and reverie. However, the first bleats of his stomach having been appeased, Gringoire felt a touch of false shame at seeing that there was only one apple left. “Aren’t you eating, Mademoiselle Esmeralda?” She replied with a negative nod, and her thoughtful gaze went to rest on the vault of the cell. “What the devil is she doing?” thought Gringoire; and, looking at what she was looking at: “It is impossible that it is the grimace of that stone dwarf carved in the keystone that is thus absorbing her attention. What the devil! I can bear the comparison! ” He raised his voice: “Madame!” She did not seem to hear him. He continued even louder: “Madame Esmeralda! It was all in vain. The young girl’s mind was elsewhere, and Gringoire’s voice lacked the power to recall it. Fortunately, the goat interfered. She began to gently pull her mistress by the sleeve. “What do you want, Djali?” said the gypsy quickly, as if suddenly awakened . “She is hungry,” said Gringoire, delighted to begin the conversation. La Esmeralda began to crumble some bread, which Djali ate gracefully from the palm of his hand. However, Gringoire did not give her time to resume her reverie. He ventured a delicate question. “You do not want me for your husband then?” The young girl looked at him fixedly and said: “No. ” “For your lover?” resumed Gringoire. She pursed her lips and replied: “No. ” “For your friend?” continued Gringoire. She looked at him again fixedly and said after a moment’s 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 touching without merging, the two fingers of the hand. ” “And love?” continued Gringoire. “Oh! love!” she said, and her voice trembled, and her eye shone. ” It is to be two and yet to be one. A man and a woman who melt into an angel. It is heaven.” The street dancer, as she spoke thus, had a beauty that singularly struck Gringoire, and seemed to him in perfect harmony with the almost oriental exaltation of her words. Her pure, rosy lips half smiled; her candid, serene brow became troubled at times under her thoughts, like a mirror under a breath; and from her long, lowered black eyelashes escaped a sort of ineffable light , which gave to her profile that ideal suavity which Raphael later rediscovered at the mystical intersection of virginity, maternity , and divinity. Gringoire continued nonetheless. “What must one be like to please you?” “One must be a man. ” “And I,” he said, “what am I then? ” “A man has a helmet on his head, a sword in his hand, and golden spurs on his heels. ” “Good,” said Gringoire, “without the horse, no man.” “Do you love someone? ” “Love? ” “Love.” She remained pensive for a moment, then she said with a peculiar expression: “I shall know that soon. ” “Why not this evening?” the poet then continued tenderly. “Why not me?” She gave him a grave glance. “I can only love a man who can protect me.” Gringoire blushed, and took it for granted. It was evident that the young girl was alluding to the little support he had given her in the critical circumstance in which she had found herself two hours before. This memory, effaced by his other adventures of the evening, came back to him. He struck his forehead. “By the way, madame, I should have begun there. Forgive me my mad distractions. How did you manage to escape the clutches of Quasimodo? ” This question made the gypsy shudder. “Oh! the horrible hunchback!” she said, hiding her face in her hands. And she shivered as if in great cold. “Horrible, indeed!” said Gringoire, who was still thinking about his idea; “but how could you have escaped him?” La Esmeralda smiled, sighed, and remained silent. “Do you know why he followed you?” Gringoire continued, trying to return to his question by a roundabout way. “I don’t know,” said the young girl. And she added quickly: “But you who were following me too, why were you following me? ” “In good faith,” replied Gringoire, “I don’t know either.” There was a silence. Gringoire was cutting the table with his knife. The young girl smiled and seemed to be looking at something through the wall. Suddenly she began to sing in a barely articulate voice: Quando las pintadas aves Mudas están, y la tierra… ” She stopped abruptly and began to caress Djali. “You have a pretty creature there,” said Gringoire. “It’s my sister,” she replied. “Why are you called Esmeralda?” asked the poet. “I don’t know. ” “But what else?” She took from her bosom a sort of small oblong sachet suspended from her neck by a string of adrezarach grains. This sachet exhaled a strong odor of camphor. It was covered with green silk, and bore in its center a large green glass, imitating emerald. “Perhaps it’s because of that,” she said. Gringoire wanted to take the sachet. She stepped back. “Don’t touch it! It’s an amulet. You would harm the charm, or the charm yourself. ” The poet’s curiosity was more and more aroused. “Who gave it to you?” She put a finger to her mouth and hid the amulet in her bosom. He tried other questions, but she barely answered. “What does this word, la Esmeralda, mean? ” “I don’t know,” she said. “What language does it belong to? ” “It’s Egyptian, I think. ” “I suspected as much,” said Gringoire. “You’re not from France? ” “I don’t know. ” “Do you have your parents?” She began to sing to an old tune: My father is a bird, My mother is a bird, I cross the water without a boat, I cross the water without a boat, My mother is a bird. My father is a bird. ” “That’s good,” said Gringoire. “At what age did you come to France? ” “When you were very little.” “To Paris? ” “Last year.” Just as we were entering through the papal gate, I saw the reed warbler flying through the air; it was at the end of August; I said: The winter will be harsh. ” “It has been,” said Gringoire, delighted at this beginning of the conversation. I spent it blowing through my fingers. So you have the gift of prophecy? She relapsed into her laconicism. “No.” “This man you call the Duke of Egypt, is he the chief of your tribe? ” “Yes.
” “And yet it was he who married us,” the poet observed timidly. She made her usual pretty grimace. “I don’t even know your name. ” “My name? If you want it, here it is. Pierre Gringoire. ” “I know a better one,” she said. “Bad!” the poet continued. “Never mind, you won’t irritate me. Here, perhaps you’ll love me when you know me better; and besides, you ‘ve told me your story with such confidence that I owe you a little of my own. You will know, then, that my name is Pierre Gringoire, and that I am the son of the farmer of the notary’s office of Gonesse.” My father was hanged by the Burgundians and my mother disemboweled by the Picards, during the siege of Paris, twenty years ago. At six years old, I was an orphan, having nothing on my feet but the pavement of Paris. I don’t know how I crossed the gap from six to sixteen. A fruit seller gave me a plum here, a talmellier threw me a crust there; in the evening I would be picked up by the eleven-twenty who put me in prison, and there I would find a bale of straw. All this did not prevent me to grow and lose weight, as you see. In winter, I warmed myself in the sun, under the porch of the Hôtel de Sens, and I found it very ridiculous that the Saint-Jean fire was reserved for the dog days. At sixteen, I wanted to take up a profession. Successively, I tried everything. I became a soldier; but I was not brave enough. I became a monk; but I was not devout enough. And then, I drink badly. In despair, I became an apprentice among the carpenters of the great axe; but I was not strong enough. I was more inclined to be a schoolmaster; it is true that I did not know how to read; but that is no reason. I realized, after a certain time, that I lacked something for everything; and, seeing that I was good for nothing, I willingly became a poet and composer of rhythms. It is a profession that one can always take when one is a vagabond, and it is better than stealing, as some young brigandier sons of my friends advised me. I happened to meet Dom Claude Frollo one fine day, the reverend archdeacon of Notre-Dame. He took an interest in me, and it is to him that I owe that I am today a true scholar, knowing Latin from the Offices of Cicero to the Mortuology of the Celestine Fathers, and being barbaric neither in scholasticism, nor in poetics, nor in rhythmics, nor even in hermeticism, this sophia of sophies. It is I who am the author of the mystery that was performed today, with great triumph and a large crowd, in the full great hall of the Palace. I have also written a book that will have six hundred pages on the prodigious comet of 1465, from which a man went mad. I have had other successes as well. Being a bit of an artillery carpenter, I worked on that big bombard of Jean Maugue’s, which you know burst at the Charenton bridge, the day it was tested , and killed twenty-four curious onlookers. You see that I am not a bad match for marriage. I know many ways of very attractive tricks that I will teach your goat; for example, how to imitate the Bishop of Paris, that cursed Pharisee whose mills splash passers-by all along the Pont-aux-Meuniers. And then my mystery will bring me a lot of coined money, if I am paid for it. Finally, I am at your command, I, and my mind, and my science, and my letters, ready to live with you, damsel, as you please; chastely or joyfully; husband and wife, if you find it good; brother and sister, if you find it better. Gringoire fell silent, waiting for the effect of his speech on the young girl. She had her eyes fixed on the ground. “Phoebus,” she said in a low voice. Then, turning to the poet: “Phoebus, what does that mean?” Gringoire, without quite understanding what connection there could be between his speech and this question, was not sorry to show off his erudition. He replied, puffing himself up: “It is a Latin word which means sun. ” “Sun!” she continued. “It is the name of a fine archer, who was a god,” added Gringoire. “God!” repeated the gypsy. And there was something pensive and passionate in her accent. At that moment, one of her bracelets came loose and fell. Gringoire stooped quickly to pick it up. When he got up, the young girl and the goat had disappeared. He heard the sound of a bolt. It was a small door, no doubt communicating with a neighboring cell, which closed on the outside. “Did she at least leave me a bed?” said our philosopher. He walked around the cell. There was no furniture suitable for sleeping except a rather long wooden chest, and even then the lid was carved, which gave Gringoire, when he stretched out on it, a sensation almost similar to that which Micromégas would experience if he were lying down at full length on the Alps. “Come!” he said, making the best of it, “we must resign ourselves.” But this is a strange wedding night. It’s a shame. There was something naive and antediluvian in this marriage with the broken jug that pleased me. BOOK THREE Chapter 15. NOTRE-DAME. Without doubt, the church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still today a majestic and sublime edifice . But, however beautiful it has remained as it ages, it is difficult not to sigh, not to be indignant at the degradations, the countless mutilations that time and men have simultaneously inflicted on the venerable monument, without respect for Charlemagne who laid the first stone, or for Philip Augustus who laid the last. On the face of this old queen of our cathedrals, beside a wrinkle, there is always a scar. Tempus edax, homo edacior. Which I would willingly translate as: time is blind, man is stupid. If we had the leisure to examine one by one with the reader the various traces of destruction imprinted on the ancient church, the part of time would be the least, the worst that of men, especially men of art. I must say men of art, since there have been individuals who have taken the quality of architects in the last two centuries. And first of all, to cite only a few capital examples, there are, without doubt, few more beautiful architectural pages than this façade where, successively and at the same time, the three portals hollowed out in an ogive, the embroidered and indented cord of the twenty-eight royal niches, the immense central rose window flanked by its two lateral windows like the priest of the deacon and the sub-deacon, the high and frail gallery of trefoil arcades which supports a heavy platform on its fine columns, finally the two black and massive towers with their slate canopies, harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, superimposed in five gigantic floors, develop before the eye, in crowd and without disturbance, with their innumerable details of statuary, sculpture and chiseling, powerfully united with the tranquil grandeur of the whole; vast symphony in stone, so to speak; colossal work of a man and a people, all together one and complex like the Iliads and the romanceros of which it is sister; prodigious product of the contribution of all the forces of an era, where on each stone one sees protruding in a hundred ways the fantasy of the worker disciplined by the genius of the artist; a sort of human creation, in a word, powerful and fertile like the divine creation from which it seems to have stolen the double character: variety, eternity. And what we say here of the facade, we must say of the entire church; and what we say of the cathedral church of Paris, we must say of all the churches of Christianity in the Middle Ages. Everything is held together in this art which came of itself, logical and well-proportioned. To measure the toe of the foot is to measure the giant. Let us return to the façade of Notre-Dame, as it still appears to us today, when we piously go to admire the grave and powerful cathedral, which terrifies, according to its chroniclers; quæ mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus. Three important things are missing today from this façade. First, the step of eleven steps which formerly raised it above the ground; then the lower series of statues which occupied the niches of the three portals, and the upper series of the twenty-eight most ancient kings of France, which adorned the gallery of the first floor, from Childebert to Philip Augustus, holding the imperial apple in his hand. Time has made the step disappear by raising the level of the ground of the City with an irresistible and slow progress. But, while causing the rising tide of Parisian pavement to devour one by one the eleven steps which added to the majestic height of the building, time has perhaps given back to the church more than it has taken from it, for It is time that has spread over the façade this dark color of the centuries which makes the old age of monuments the age of their beauty. But who threw down the two rows of statues? Who left the niches empty? Who carved, in the very middle of the central portal, this new and bastard ogive? Who dared to frame there this insipid and heavy door of carved wood in the style of Louis XV next to the arabesques of Biscornette? Men; the architects, the artists of our days. And, if we enter the interior of the building, who overthrew this colossus of Saint Christopher, proverbial among the statues as the great hall of the Palace among the rooms, as the spire of Strasbourg among the bell towers? And those myriad statues, which populated all the inter-columnations of the nave and the choir, kneeling, standing, equestrian, men, women, children, kings, bishops, gendarmes, in stone, marble, gold, silver, copper, even wax, who brutally swept them away? It was not time. And who substituted for the old Gothic altar, splendidly cluttered with reliquaries, this heavy marble sarcophagus with angel heads and clouds, which seems a mismatched sample of the Val-de-Grâce or the Invalides? Who stupidly sealed this heavy anachronism of stone in the Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Is it not Louis XIV fulfilling the wish of Louis XIII? And who put cold white panes in place of those colorful stained-glass windows that made the astonished eye of our fathers hesitate between the rose window of the great portal and the ribs of the apse? And what would a sub-cantor of the sixteenth century say, seeing the beautiful yellow whitewash with which our vandal archbishops have daubed their cathedral? He would remember that it was the color with which the executioner brushed the corrupted buildings; he would remember the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, also all stuck with yellow for the treason of the constable; yellow after all of such good quality, says Sauval, and so well recommended, that more than a century has not yet been able to make it lose its color. He would believe that the holy place had become infamous, and would flee. And if we go up to the cathedral, without stopping at a thousand barbarities of every kind, what has been done with this charming little bell tower which rested on the point of intersection of the crossing, and which, no less frail and no less bold than its neighbor the spire ( also destroyed) of the Sainte-Chapelle, plunged into the sky further than the towers, slender, sharp, sonorous, cut out in the open? An architect of good taste (1787) amputated it, and believed that it was enough to mask the wound with this large lead plaster which resembles the lid of a pot. This is how the marvelous art of the Middle Ages has been treated almost in every country, especially in France. We can distinguish on its ruin three kinds of lesions, all three of which cut into it at different depths: first time, which has imperceptibly chipped here and there and rusted its surface everywhere; then, the political and religious revolutions , which, blind and angry by nature, rushed in tumult upon it, tore its rich clothing of sculptures and carvings, punctured its rosettes, broke its collars of arabesques and figurines, tore off its statues, sometimes for their miters, sometimes for their crowns; finally, the fashions, more and more grotesque and foolish, which, since the anarchic and splendid deviations of the Renaissance, have succeeded one another in the necessary decadence of architecture. Fashions have done more harm than revolutions. They have cut to the quick, they have attacked the bony framework of art, they have cut, carved, disorganized, killed the edifice, in form as in symbol, in its logic as in its beauty. And then, they have remade; a pretension that at least neither time nor revolutions had . They have brazenly adjusted, in good taste, the wounds of Gothic architecture, their miserable one-day trinkets, their marble ribbons, their metal pompoms, a veritable leprosy of oves, volutes, swirls, draperies, garlands, fringes, stone flames, bronze clouds, plump cupids, bloated cherubs, which begins to devour the face of art in the oratory of Catherine de Medici, and makes it expire, two centuries later, tormented and grimacing, in the boudoir of Dubarry. Thus, to summarize the points we have just indicated, three kinds of ravages disfigure Gothic architecture today. Wrinkles and warts on the skin; this is the work of time. Assaults, brutalities, bruises, fractures; this is the work of revolutions, from Luther to Mirabeau. Mutilations, amputations, dislocation of the limb, restorations; this is the Greek, Roman, and barbaric work of professors according to Vitruvius and Vignola. This magnificent art that the Vandals had produced, the academies killed it. To the centuries, to the revolutions, which devastate at least with impartiality and grandeur, has been added the swarm of school architects, licensed, sworn and sworn, degrading with the discernment and choice of bad taste, substituting the chicories of Louis XV for Gothic lace, for the greater glory of the Parthenon. It is the kick of the donkey to the dying lion. It is the old oak that crowns itself, and which, to cap it all, is pricked, bitten, shredded by the caterpillars. How far from that time Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre-Dame de Paris to that famous temple of Diana at Ephesus, so much sought after by the ancient pagans, who immortalized Erostratus, found the Gallic cathedral more excellent in length, width, height and structure[2]. [2] Gallican History. Book II, period III, fol. 130, p. 1. Notre-Dame de Paris is not, moreover, what one can call a complete, defined, classified monument. It is no longer a Romanesque church, it is not yet a Gothic church. This building is not a type. Notre-Dame de Paris does not have, like the abbey of Tournus, the grave and massive build, the round and wide vault, the glacial nudity, the majestic simplicity of buildings which have the semicircular arch as their generator. It is not, like Bourges Cathedral, the magnificent, light, multiform, bushy, bristling, efflorescent product of the ogive. It is impossible to place it in that ancient family of dark, mysterious, low churches, as if crushed by the round arch; almost Egyptian, except for the ceiling; all hieroglyphic, all sacerdotal, all symbolic; more laden, 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; the first transformation of art, all imbued with theocratic and military discipline, which takes root in the late empire and stops with William the Conqueror. It is impossible to place our cathedral in that other family of tall, airy churches, rich in stained glass and sculptures; sharp in form, bold in attitude; communal and bourgeois as political symbols; free, capricious, unbridled, as a work of art; second transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, immutable and priestly, but artistic, progressive and popular, which begins with the return of the Crusades and ends with Louis XI. Notre-Dame de Paris is not of pure Roman race like the first, nor of pure Arab race like the second. It is a building of transition. The Saxon architect was finishing erecting the first pillars of the nave, when the ribbed arch, which arrived from the Crusade, came to rest as a conqueror on these large Romanesque capitals which were to carry only round arches. The ribbed arch, mistress from then on, built the rest of the church. However, inexperienced and timid at the beginning, it flares out, widens, contains itself, and does not dare to soar again in spires and lancets, as it did later in so many marvelous cathedrals. One would say that it is affected by the proximity of the heavy Romanesque pillars. Moreover, these buildings of the transition from Romanesque to Gothic are no less valuable to study than the pure types. They express a nuance of art which would be lost without them. It is the grafting of the ribbed vault onto the round arch. Notre-Dame de Paris is, in particular, a curious sample of this variety. Each face, each stone of the venerable monument is a page not only in the history of the country, but also in the history of science and art. Thus, to indicate here only the principal details, while the small Red Gate reaches almost to the limits of the Gothic delicacies of the fifteenth century, the pillars of the nave, by their volume and their gravity, recede as far as the Carlovingian abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. One would think that there are six centuries between this gate and these pillars. Even the hermeticists find in the symbols of the great portal a satisfactory summary of their science, of which the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was such a complete hieroglyph. Thus the Romanesque abbey, the philosopher’s church, Gothic art, Saxon art, the heavy round pillar that recalls Gregory VII, the hermetic symbolism with which Nicolas Flamel preluded Luther, papal unity, schism, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, all are melted, combined, amalgamated in Notre-Dame. This central and generative church is among the old churches of Paris a sort of chimera; it has the head of one, the members of that one, the rump of the other; something of all of them. We repeat, these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting for the artist, for the antiquarian, for the historian. They make us feel to what extent architecture is a primitive thing, in that they demonstrate, as also demonstrated by the Cyclopean remains, the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic Hindu pagodas, that the greatest products of architecture are less individual works than social works; rather the birth of peoples in labor than the jet of men of genius; the deposit that a nation leaves; the heaps that the centuries make; the residue of the successive evaporations of human society; in a word, kinds of formations. Each flood of time superimposes its alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monument, each individual brings his stone. Thus do beavers, thus do bees, thus do men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a hive. Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Often art is transformed while they still hang; pendent opera interrupta; they continue peacefully according to transformed art. New art takes the monument where it finds it, embeds itself in it, assimilates it, develops it according to its whim, and completes it if it can.
The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction, following a natural and tranquil law. It is a graft that occurs, a sap that circulates, a vegetation that takes root. Certainly, there is material for very large books, and often a universal history of humanity, in these successive weldings of several arts at several heights on the same monument. Man, the artist, the individual, fade into the background on these great masses without the name of the author; human intelligence is summarized and totalized there. Time is the architect, the people are the mason. Considering here only European Christian architecture, this younger sister of the great masonries of the Orient, it appears to the eye as an immense formation divided into three clearly defined zones which overlap: the Romanesque zone[3], the Gothic zone, the zone of the Renaissance, which we would willingly call Greco-Roman. The Romanesque layer, which is the oldest and deepest, is occupied by the semicircular arch, which reappears, carried by the Greek column, in the modern and upper layer of the Renaissance. The ribbed vault is between the two. The buildings that belong exclusively to one of these three layers are perfectly distinct, united, and complete. It is the abbey of Jumiéges, it is the cathedral of Reims, it is Sainte-Croix d’Orléans. But the three zones mix and amalgamate at the edges, like colors in the solar spectrum. Hence the complex monuments, the buildings of nuance and transition. One is Romanesque at the feet, Gothic in the middle, Greco-Roman at the head. This is because it took six hundred years to build. This variety is rare. The keep of Étampes is a sample. But monuments of two formations are more frequent. It is Notre-Dame de Paris, an ogival building, which sinks by its first pillars into this Romanesque zone where the portal of Saint-Denis and the nave of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are immersed. It is the charming half-Gothic chapter house of Bocherville, to which the Romanesque layer reaches halfway. It is the cathedral of Rouen, which would be entirely Gothic, if it did not bathe the end of its central spire in the Renaissance zone[4]. [3] It is the same which is also called, according to the places, the climates and the species, Lombard, Saxon and Byzantine. These are four sister and parallel architectures, each having their particular character, but deriving from the same principle, the semicircular arch. Facies non omnibus una, Non diversa tamen, qualem, etc. [4] This part of the spire, which was in timber frame, is precisely the one that was consumed by the fire from heaven in 1823. Besides, all these nuances, all these differences only affect the surface of the buildings. It is the art that has changed its skin. The very constitution of the Christian church is not attacked. It is always the same interior framework, the same logical arrangement of the parts. Whatever the sculpted and embroidered envelope of a cathedral, one always finds underneath, at least in the state of germ and rudiment, the Roman basilica. It develops eternally on the ground according to the same law. There are imperturbably two naves which intersect in a cross, and whose upper end, rounded into an apse, forms the choir; there are always side aisles, for the interior processions, for the chapels, a sort of lateral promenades where the main nave disgorges through the inter-columns. This being said, the number of chapels, portals, bell towers, and spires is infinitely modified, according to the whim of the century, the people, and art. Once the service of worship is provided and assured, architecture does what it sees fit. Statues, stained-glass windows, rosettes, arabesques, dentures, capitals, bas-reliefs, it combines all these imaginations according to the logarithm that suits it. Hence the prodigious exterior variety of these buildings, at the bottom of which resides so much order and unity. The trunk of the tree is immutable, the vegetation is capricious. Chapter 16. PARIS FROM A BIRD’S VIEW. We have just tried to repair for the reader this admirable church of Notre-Dame de Paris. We have briefly indicated most of the beauties that it had in the fifteenth century and which it lacks today; but we have omitted the main one, which is the view of Paris that one discovered from the top of its towers. It was indeed, when, after having groped for a long time in the dark spiral which pierces perpendicularly the thick wall of the bell towers, one finally emerged abruptly onto one of the two high platforms flooded with day and air, it was a beautiful picture that unfolded at once from all sides before your eyes; a spectacle sui generis, of which those of our readers who have had the good fortune to see an entire, complete, homogeneous Gothic city, such as still remain some, Nuremberg in Bavaria, Vittoria in Spain; or even smaller samples, provided they are well preserved, Vitré in Brittany, Nordhausen in Prussia, can easily form an idea. The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago, the Paris of the fifteenth century was already a giant city. We Parisians are generally mistaken about the ground we believe we have gained since then. Paris, since Louis XI, has not grown by much more than a third. It has, certainly, lost much more in beauty than it has gained in grandeur. Paris was born, as we know, on this old island of the City which has the shape of a cradle. The shore of this island was its first enclosure, the Seine its first moat. Paris remained for several centuries in the state of an island, with two bridges, one to the north, the other to the south, and two bridgeheads , which were both its gates and its fortresses, the Grand-Châtelet on the right bank, the Petit-Châtelet on the left bank. Then, from the time of the kings of the first race, too cramped in its island, and no longer able to return there, Paris crossed the water. Then, beyond the Grand, beyond the Petit-Châtelet, a first enclosure of walls and towers began to encroach on the countryside on both sides of the Seine. Of this ancient enclosure there still remained in the last century some vestiges; today, only the memory remains, and here and there a tradition, the Baudets or Baudoyer gate, porta Bagauda. Little by little, the flood of houses, always pushed from the heart of the city to the outside, overflows, gnaws away, wears away and erases this enclosure. Philip Augustus built a new dike for it. He imprisoned Paris in a circular chain of large towers, tall and solid. For more than a century, the houses crowded together, accumulated, and raised their level in this basin, like water in a reservoir. They began to become deep, they built stories upon stories, they rose one upon the other, they gushed upwards like any compressed sap, and it was a question of who would stick their head over their neighbors to get a little air. The street became more and more hollow and narrow; every space was filled and disappeared. The houses finally leaped over Philip Augustus’s wall and scattered joyfully across the plain, without order and all crooked, like escapes . There, they squared themselves, carved out gardens in the fields, and took their ease. By 1367, the city had spread so far into the suburbs that a new fence was needed, especially on the right bank. Charles V built it. But a city like Paris is in a perpetual flood. Only such cities become capitals. They are funnels into which all the geographical, political, moral, and intellectual slopes of a country, all the natural inclinations of a people, converge; 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 soul in a nation, filters and accumulates ceaselessly, drop by drop, century by century. The wall of Charles V thus has the fate of the wall of Philip Augustus. From the end of the fifteenth century, it is crossed, surpassed, and the suburb runs further. In the sixteenth, it seems to be visibly receding and sinking deeper and deeper into the old city, so much so that a new city is already thickening outside. Thus, from the fifteenth century, to stop there, Paris had already worn out the three concentric circles of walls which, in the time of Julian the Apostate, were, so to speak, in embryo in the Grand-Châtelet and the Petit-Châtelet. The powerful city had successively cracked its four belts of walls, like a child who grows up and bursts last year’s clothes. Under Louis XI, one saw, in places, pierce, in this sea of houses, a few groups of ruined towers of the old walls, like the peaks of the hills in a flood, like archipelagos of old Paris submerged under the new. Since then, Paris has been transformed again, unfortunately for our eyes; but it has only crossed one more wall, that of Louis XV, this miserable wall of mud and spit, worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet who sang of it. The wall walling Paris makes Paris murmuring. In the fifteenth century, Paris was still divided into three completely distinct and separate cities, each with its own physiognomy, its specialty, its morals, its customs, its privileges, its history: the City, the University, the City. The City, which occupied the island, was the oldest, the smallest, and the mother of the other two, squeezed together, if you will allow us the comparison, like a little old woman between two tall, beautiful girls. The University covered the left bank of the Seine, from the Tournelle to the Nesle tower , points which correspond, in today’s Paris, one to the Wine Hall, the other to the Mint. Its enclosure cut quite widely into this countryside where Julian had built his baths. The mountain of Sainte-Geneviève was enclosed there. The highest point of this curve of walls was the Papal Gate, that is to say, roughly the current location of the Pantheon. The City, which was the largest of the three parts of Paris, had the right bank. Its quay, however broken or interrupted in several places, ran along the Seine, from the Billy tower to the Bois tower, that is to say, from the place where the Grenier d’abondance is today to the place where the Tuileries are today. These four points, where the Seine cut through the capital’s walls, the Tournelle and the Nesle tower on the left, the Billy tower and the Bois tower on the right, were called par excellence the four towers of Paris. The City entered the land even deeper than the University. The highest point of the City’s enclosure (that of Charles V) was at the Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin gates, the location of which has not changed. As we have just said, each of these three great divisions of Paris was a city, but a city too special to be complete, a city that could not do without the other two. Thus, three perfectly separate aspects. In the City abounded churches, in the City palaces, in the University colleges. To neglect here the secondary originalities of old Paris and the whims of the right of way, we will say, from a general point of view, taking only the groups and the masses in the chaos of the municipal jurisdictions, that the island belonged to the bishop, the right bank to the provost of the merchants, the left bank to the rector. The provost of Paris, a royal and not municipal officer, over the whole. The City had Notre-Dame, the City the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville, the University the Sorbonne. The City had the Halles; the City the Hôtel-Dieu; the University, the Pré-aux-Clercs. The offense that the schoolchildren committed on the left bank was judged on the island, at the Palais-de-Justice, and punished on the right bank, at Montfaucon. Unless the rector, feeling the University strong and the king weak, intervened; for it was a privilege of schoolchildren to be hanged in their own homes.
(Most of these privileges, to note in passing, and there were better ones than this one, had been extorted from kings by revolts and mutinies. This is the immemorial march. The king only gives up when the people tear him away. There is an old charter which says it naively, about fidelity: Civibus fidelitas in reges, quæ tamen aliquoties seditionibus interrupta, multa peperit privilegia.) In the fifteenth century, the Seine bathed five islands within the walls of Paris: the island of Louviers, where there were then trees and where there has more than wood; the Isle of Cows and the Isle of Notre-Dame, both deserted, except for one hovel, both fiefs of the bishop (in the seventeenth century, from these two islands one was made, which was built, and which we call the Isle of Saint-Louis); finally the City, and at its tip the islet of the ferryman of cows which has since sunk under the earthwork of the Pont-Neuf. The City then had five bridges: three on the right, the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change, in stone, the Pont aux Meuniers, in wood; two on the left, the Petit-Pont, in stone, the Pont Saint-Michel, in wood; all loaded with houses. The University had six gates, built by Philippe-Auguste; These were, from the Tournelle, the Porte Saint-Victor, the Porte Bordelle, the Porte Papale, the Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Saint-Michel, the Porte Saint-Germain. The City had six gates, built by Charles V; these were, from the Tour de Billy, 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 beautiful too, which does not spoil the strength. A wide, deep ditch, with a strong current in the winter floods, washed the foot of the walls all around Paris; the Seine provided the water. At night, the gates were closed, the river was blocked at both ends of the city with large iron chains, and Paris slept peacefully. Seen from a bird’s eye, these three towns, the City, the University, the Town, each presented to the eye an inextricable knit of strangely jumbled streets. However, at first glance, one recognized that these three fragments of the city formed a single body. One immediately saw two long parallel streets, without break, without disturbance, almost in a straight line, which crossed the three towns from one end to the other, from south to north, perpendicular to the Seine, linked them, mixed them, infused, poured, transferred without respite the people of one into the walls of the other, and of the three made only one. The first of these two streets went from the Porte Saint-Jacques to the Porte Saint-Martin; it was called 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 Petit-Pont and Pont Notre-Dame. The second, which was called Rue de la Harpe on the left bank, Rue de la Barillerie on the island, Rue Saint-Denis on the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel on one arm of the Seine, Pont au Change on the other, went from the Porte Saint-Michel in the University to the Porte Saint-Denis in the City. Moreover, under so many different names, they were always only two streets, but the two mother streets, the two generating streets, the two arteries of Paris. All the other veins of the triple city came to draw from them or to discharge themselves there. Independently of these two principal streets, diametrical, piercing Paris from one side to the other in its width, common to the entire capital, the City and the University each had their own large street, which ran in the direction of their length, parallel to the Seine, and in passing cut at right angles the two arterial streets. Thus,
in the City, 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 roads, crossed with the first two, formed the canvas on which rested, knotted and tightened in all directions, the labyrinthine network of the streets of Paris. In the unintelligible design of this network one could also distinguish, on careful examination, like two enlarged sheaves, one in the University, the other in the City, two clusters of large streets which spread out from the bridges to the gates. Something of this geometric plan still survives today. Now, what aspect did this whole thing appear, seen from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame, in 1482? This is what we will try to to say.
For the spectator who arrived breathless on this peak, it was first of all a dazzling display of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, squares, spires, bell towers. Everything caught your eye at once, the carved gable, the pointed roof, the turret suspended from the corners of the walls, the stone pyramid of the eleventh century, the slate obelisk of the fifteenth, the round and bare tower of the keep, the square and embroidered tower of the church, the large, the small, the massive, the aerial. The gaze was lost for a long time at all depths in this labyrinth, where there was nothing that did not have its originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty, nothing that did not come from art, from the smallest house with a painted and sculpted front, with an exterior framework, a lowered door, with overhanging floors, to the royal Louvre, which then had a colonnade of towers. But here are the principal masses that could be distinguished when the eye began to adjust to this tumult of buildings. First the City. The island of the City, as Sauval says, who, through his jumble, sometimes has these good fortunes of style, the island of the City is made like a large ship sunk in the mud and stranded on the water towards the middle of the Seine. We have just explained that in the fifteenth century this ship was moored to the two banks of the river by five bridges. This shape of vessel had also struck the heraldic scribes; for it is from there, and not from the seat of the Normans, that comes, according to Favyn and Pasquier, the ship which emblazons the old coat of arms of Paris. For those who know how to decipher it, the coat of arms is an algebra, the coat of arms is a language. The entire history of the second half of the Middle Ages is written in the coat of arms, as the history of the first half is in the symbolism of the Romanesque churches. These are the hieroglyphs of feudalism after those of theocracy. The City, then, 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 oneself an innumerable flock of old roofs, on which the leaded chevet of the Sainte-Chapelle rounded out broadly, like an elephant’s rump laden with its tower. Only here this tower was the boldest, most wrought, most carpentered, most jagged spire that had ever allowed the sky to be seen through its lace cone. In front of Notre-Dame, at its closest, three streets poured into the forecourt, a beautiful square with old houses. On the south side of this square leaned the wrinkled and scowling facade of the Hôtel-Dieu, and its roof which seemed covered with pustules and warts. Then, to the right, to the left, to the east, to the west, within this nevertheless narrow enclosure of the City, rose the bell towers of its twenty -one churches of all dates, of all shapes, of all sizes, from the low and worm-eaten Romanesque bell tower of Saint-Denis du Pas, carcer Glaucini, to the slender spires of Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs and Saint-Landry. Behind Notre-Dame unfolded, to the north, the cloister with its Gothic galleries; to the south, the half-Romanesque palace of the bishop; to the east, the deserted point of Terrain. In this heap of houses, the eye could still distinguish, by these high stone miters pierced through which then crowned on the roof even the highest windows of the palaces, the hotel given by the city, under Charles VI, to Juvénal des Ursins; a little further, the tarred huts of the Palus market; elsewhere still, the new apse of Saint-Germain le Vieux, extended in 1458 with a piece of the rue aux Febves; and then, in places, a crossroads crowded with people, a pillory erected at a street corner, a beautiful piece of the pavement of Philippe-Auguste, magnificent striped paving for the horses’ feet in the middle of the road and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the miserable cobblestone called the pavé de la Ligue, a deserted backyard with one of those diaphanous turrets of the staircase as they were made in the fifteenth century, as we see another rue des Bourdonnais. Finally, to the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, towards the west, the Palais-de-Justice sat at the water’s edge with its group of towers. The high forests of the King’s gardens, which covered the western tip of the City, masked the ferryman’s island. As for the water, from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame, it was hardly visible on either side of the City; the Seine disappeared under the bridges, the bridges under the houses. And when the gaze passed these bridges, whose roofs, turning green before the eye, moldered before their time by the vapors of the water, if it turned to the left towards the University, the first building that struck it was a large and low cluster of towers, the Petit-Châtelet, whose gaping porch devoured the end of the Petit-Pont; then, if your view ran along the bank from east to west, from the Tournelle to the tower of Nesle, it was a long line of houses with sculpted joists, with colored windows, overhanging from floor to floor on the pavement, an interminable zigzag of bourgeois gables, frequently cut by the mouth of a street, and from time to time also by the face or the bend of a large stone hotel, squeezing itself at its ease, courtyards and gardens, wings and main buildings , among this populace of tightly packed and cramped houses, like a great lord in a heap of peasants. There were five or six of these hotels on the quay, from the Logis de Lorraine, which shared with the Bernardins the large enclosure near the Tournelle, to the Hôtel de Nesle, whose principal tower marked the boundary of Paris, and whose pointed roofs were in possession for three months of the year of indenting with their black triangles the scarlet disc of the setting sun. This side of the Seine, moreover, was the less commercial of the two; the schoolchildren made more noise and crowd there than the artisans, and there was, strictly speaking, no quay except from the Pont Saint-Michel to the Tour de Nesle. The rest of the bank of the Seine was sometimes a bare beach, as beyond the Bernardins, sometimes a heap of houses with their feet in the water, as between the two bridges. There was a great uproar of laundresses; they shouted, spoke, sang from morning to night along the edge, and beat the linen loudly, as in our days. This is not the least gaiety of Paris. The University made a block to the eye. From one end to the other it was a homogeneous and compact whole. These thousand roofs, dense, angular, adherent, composed almost all of the same geometric element, offered, seen from above, the appearance of a crystallization of the same substance. The capricious ravine of the streets did not cut this block of houses into too disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were scattered there in a fairly equal manner, and there were some everywhere. The varied and amusing ridges of these beautiful buildings were the product of the same art as the simple roofs which they exceeded, and were ultimately only a multiplication to the square or cube of the same geometric figure. They therefore complicated the whole without disturbing it, completed it without overloading it. Geometry is harmony. A few fine hotels also made magnificent projections here and there over the picturesque attics of the left bank; the Logis de Nevers, the Logis de Rome, the Logis de Reims, which have disappeared; the Hôtel de Cluny, which still exists for the consolation of the artist, and whose tower was so stupidly decapitated a few years ago. Near Cluny, this Roman palace, with its beautiful curved arches, was the Baths of Julien. There were also many abbeys of a more devout beauty, of a more solemn grandeur than the hotels, but no less beautiful, no 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 one so regret the rest; the Sorbonne, half college, half monastery, of which such an admirable nave survives; the beautiful quadrilateral cloister of the Mathurins; its neighbor the cloister of Saint-Benoit, within whose walls they had time to botch a theater between the seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Cordeliers, with their three enormous juxtaposed gables; the Augustins, whose graceful spire made, after the tower of Nesle, the second dentil on this side of Paris, from the west. The colleges, which are in fact the intermediate ring of the cloister in the world, held the middle in the monumental series between the hotels and the abbeys, with a severity full of elegance, a sculpture less evaporated than the palaces, an architecture less serious than the convents. Unfortunately, almost nothing remains of these monuments where Gothic art intersected with such precision wealth and economy. The churches (and they were numerous and splendid in the University; and they were spread out there also in all the ages of architecture, from the round arches of Saint-Julien to the ribbed vaults of Saint-Séverin), the churches dominated the whole, and, like one more harmony in this mass of harmonies, they pierced at every moment the multiple cutout of the gables with slashed spires, openwork bell towers, slender needles whose line was also only a magnificent exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs. The ground of the University was hilly. The Sainte-Geneviève mountain made an enormous bulb there to the south-east; and it was a thing to see from the top of Notre-Dame this crowd of narrow and tortuous streets (today the Latin country), these clusters of houses which, spread in all directions from the summit of this eminence, rushed in disorder and almost perpendicularly down its sides to the edge of the water, having the air, some of falling, others of climbing again, all of holding on to each other. A continual flow of a thousand black dots which crossed each other on the pavement made everything move to the eyes; it was the people seen thus from above and from afar. Finally, in the intervals of these roofs, these spires, these accidents of innumerable buildings which bent, twisted and jagged in such a bizarre way the extreme line of the University, one glimpsed, from space to space, a large section of mossy wall, a thick round tower, a crenellated city gate, representing the fortress; it was the enclosure of Philippe-Auguste. Beyond them were the green meadows, beyond them the roads ran away, along which still trailed a few suburban houses, all the rarer the further away they were. Some of these suburbs were important. First, from the Tournelle, there was the village of Saint-Victor, with its one-arched bridge over the Bièvre, its abbey, where one could read the epitaph of Louis the Fat, epitaphium Ludovici Grossi, and its church with an octagonal spire flanked by four eleventh- century bell towers (one can see a similar one at Étampes, it has not yet been demolished); then the village of Saint-Marceau, which already had three churches and a convent; then, leaving the Gobelins mill and its four white walls on the left, there was the suburb of Saint-Jacques with the beautiful sculpted cross at its crossroads; the church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, which was then Gothic, pointed and charming; Saint-Magloire, a beautiful fourteenth-century nave, which Napoleon made into a hayloft; Notre-Dame des Champs, where there were Byzantine mosaics. Finally, after leaving the Carthusian monastery in the open field, a rich building contemporary with the Palais de Justice, with its small compartmented gardens , and the poorly haunted ruins of Vauvert, the eye fell, to the west, on the three Romanesque spires of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The village of Saint-Germain, already a large commune, was fifteen or twenty streets behind. The pointed bell tower of Saint-Sulpice marked one of the corners of the village. Right next to it one could distinguish the quadrilateral enclosure of the Saint-Germain fair, where the market is today; then the pillory of the abbot, a pretty little round tower, well topped with a lead cone. The tile factory was further away, and the rue du Four, which led to the communal oven, and the mill on its mound, and the leper house, an isolated and poorly seen little house . But what especially attracted the eye and fixed it for a long time on this point was the abbey itself. It is certain that this monastery, which had a grand appearance both as a church and as a lordship, this abbey palace, where the bishops of Paris considered themselves happy to sleep for a night, this refectory, to which the architect had given the air, the beauty and the splendid rose window of a cathedral, this elegant chapel of the Virgin, this monumental dormitory, these vast gardens, this portcullis, this drawbridge, this envelope of battlements which cut into the greenery of the surrounding meadows, these courtyards where men-at-arms mingled with golden copes shone, all grouped and rallied around the three tall, semi-circular spires, well seated on a Gothic apse, made a magnificent figure on the horizon. When finally, after having long considered the University, you turned towards the right bank, towards the City, the spectacle abruptly changed character. The City, in fact, much larger than the University, was also less one. At first glance, it was seen to divide into several singularly distinct masses. First, to the east, in that part of the City which still receives its name today from the marsh where Camulogenes got Caesar stuck, it was a heap of palaces. The block reached right to the water’s edge. Four almost contiguous hotels, Jouy, Sens, Barbeau, the Queen’s lodgings, reflected in the Seine their slate roofs cut with slender turrets. These four buildings filled the space from the Rue des Nonaindières to the Célestins Abbey, whose needle gracefully raised their line of gables and battlements. A few greenish hovels, leaning over the water in front of these sumptuous hotels, did not prevent one from seeing the beautiful angles of their facades, their large square windows with stone crosspieces, their ogival porches overloaded with statues, the sharp edges of their walls, always clearly cut, and all those charming architectural accidents which make Gothic art seem to begin its combinations anew with each monument. Behind these palaces, ran in all directions, sometimes split, palisaded and crenellated like a citadel, sometimes veiled with large trees like a charterhouse, the immense and multiform enclosure of this miraculous hotel of Saint-Pol, where the king of France had enough to superbly lodge twenty-two princes of the quality of the dauphin and the duke of Burgundy, with their servants and their suites, without counting the great lords, and the emperor when he came to see Paris, and the lions, who had their own hotel in the royal hotel. Let us say here that a prince’s apartment was then composed of no less than eleven rooms, from the state chamber to the priez-Dieu, without speaking of the galleries, the baths, the stews and other superfluous places with which each apartment was provided; without speaking of the private gardens of each guest of the king; not to mention the kitchens, the cellars, the offices, the general refectories of the house, the farmyards, where there were twenty-two general laboratories, from the oven to the cup-bearer’s room; games of a thousand kinds, mail, tennis , ring; aviaries, fishmongers, menageries, stables, cowsheds, libraries, arsenals and foundries. This is what a king’s palace, a Louvre, a Hôtel Saint-Pol was then. A city within the city. From the tower where we stood, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, almost half hidden by the four large dwellings we have just spoken of, was still very considerable and very marvelous to see. One could clearly distinguish there, although skillfully welded to the main building by long galleries with stained glass windows and small columns, the three hotels that Charles V had amalgamated with his palace, the Hôtel du Petit-Muce, with the lace balustrade that gracefully hemmed its roof; the Hôtel of the Abbot of Saint-Maur, having the relief of a fortified castle, a large tower, machicolations, loopholes, iron sparrows, and on the wide Saxon door the escutcheon of the Abbot between the two notches of the drawbridge; the Hôtel of the Count of Étampes, whose keep, ruined at its summit, rounded off the eyes, chipped like a cock’s comb; here and there, three or four old oaks forming a clump together like enormous cauliflowers, swans frolicking in the clear waters of the fishponds, all pleated with shadow and light; many courtyards of which one could see picturesque bits; the Hôtel des Lions with its low ribs on short Saxon pillars, its iron portcullises and its perpetual roar; across this whole ensemble the scaly spire of the Ave-Maria; to the left, the lodgings of the provost of Paris, flanked by four finely hollowed turrets; in the middle, at the back, the Hôtel Saint-Pol itself, with its multiple facades, its successive enrichments since Charles V, the hybrid excrescences with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it for two centuries, with all the apses of its chapels, all the gables of its galleries, a thousand weather vanes to the four winds, and its two tall adjoining towers whose conical roof, surrounded by battlements at its base, had the appearance of those pointed hats with raised brims. Continuing to climb the floors of this amphitheater of palaces developed far on the ground, after having crossed a deep ravine dug in the roofs of the City, which marked the passage of the rue Saint-Antoine, the eye arrived at the house of Angoulême, a vast construction of several periods, where there were completely new and very white parts, which blended into the whole no better than a red patch with a blue doublet. However, the singularly sharp and high roof of the modern palace, bristling with chiseled gutters, covered with blades of lead where glittering incrustations of gilded copper rolled in a thousand fantastic arabesques, this roof so curiously damascened rose gracefully from the middle of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice, whose old large towers, bulging with age like casks, sagging in on themselves with dilapidation and tearing from top to bottom, resembled large unbuttoned bellies. Behind it rose the forest of needles of the Palais des Tournelles. No glance at the world, nor at Chambord, nor at the Alhambra, more magical, more ethereal, more prestigious than this forest of spires, pinnacles, chimneys, weather vanes, spirals, screws, lanterns pierced by the daylight which seemed punched out, pavilions, spindle turrets, or, as they were called then, tournelles, all diverse in shape, height and attitude. It looked like a gigantic stone chessboard. To the right of the Tournelles, this bunch of enormous towers of inky black, one inside the other, and tied together, so to speak, by a circular moat, this keep pierced with many more loopholes than windows, this drawbridge always erect, this portcullis always fallen, this is the Bastille. These kinds of black beaks which emerge from between the battlements, and which from a distance you take for gutters, are cannons. Beneath their cannonballs, at the foot of the formidable building, here is the Saint-Antoine gate, buried between its two towers. Beyond the Tournelles, up to the wall of Charles V, unfolded, with rich compartments of greenery and flowers, a velvety carpet of crops and royal parks, in the middle of which one could recognize, by its labyrinth of trees and paths, the famous Dédalus garden that Louis XI had given to Coictier. The doctor’s observatory rose above the maze like a large isolated column with a small house for a capital. It was made in this workshop of terrible astrologies. There today stands the Place Royale. As we have just said, the palace district of which we have tried to give the reader some idea, while nevertheless indicating only the summits, filled the angle that the wall of Charles V made with the Seine to the east. The center of the City was occupied by a heap of houses for the people. It was there, in fact, that the three bridges of the City flowed onto the right bank, and bridges make houses before palaces. This mass of bourgeois dwellings, pressed together like the cells in a beehive, had its beauty. It is with the roofs of a capital like the waves of a sea, that is great. First the streets, crossed and jumbled, made a hundred amusing figures in the block. Around the market halls, it was like a star with a thousand lines. The streets of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable ramifications, rose up alongside each other like two large trees mingling their branches. And then, in tortuous lines, the streets of Plâtrerie, Verrerie, Tixeranderie, etc., wound over the whole. There were also fine buildings that pierced the petrified undulation of this sea of gables. It was, at the head of the Pont aux Changeurs, behind which one could see the Seine foaming under the wheels of the Pont aux Meuniers, it was the Châtelet, 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 a pickaxe in three hours could not lift the thickness of its fist. It was the rich square bell tower of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, with its angles all blunted with sculptures, already admirable, although it was not finished in the fifteenth century. It lacked in particular those four monsters which, even today, perched at the corners of its roof, have the appearance of four sphinxes which give to the new Paris the enigma of the old; Rault, the sculptor, did not place them until 1526, and he received twenty francs for his trouble. It was the Maison-aux-Piliers, opening onto this Place de Grève of which we have given the reader some idea. It was Saint-Gervais, which a portal of good taste has since spoiled; Saint-Méry, whose old ribbed vaults were almost still semicircular arches ; Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial; There were twenty other monuments which did not disdain to bury their marvels in this chaos of black, narrow and deep streets. Add the sculpted stone crosses, even more lavish in the crossroads than the gallows; the cemetery of the Innocents, whose architectural enclosure could be seen in the distance, above the roofs; the pillory of the Halles, whose summit could be seen between two chimneys in the rue de la Cossonnerie; the ladder of the Croix-du-Trahoir in its crossroads always black with people; the circular hovels of the wheat exchange; the sections of the old enclosure of Philippe-Auguste, which could be distinguished here and there, drowned in the houses, towers eaten away by ivy, ruined doors, sections of crumbling and deformed walls; the quay with its thousand shops and its bleeding flayings; the Seine laden with boats, from the port au Foin to For-l’Évêque; and you will have a confused image of what the central trapezium of the City was like in 1482. With these two districts, one of hotels, the other of houses, the third element of the appearance offered by the City was a long zone of abbeys which bordered it almost all around, from east to west, and, behind the wall of fortifications which closed Paris, made a second inner wall of convents and chapels. Thus, immediately next to the Parc des Tournelles, between the rue Saint-Antoine and the old rue du Temple, there was Sainte-Catherine with its immense culture, which was only bounded by the wall of Paris. Between the old and the new rue du Temple, there was the Temple, a sinister bundle of towers, high, standing and isolated in the middle of a vast crenellated enclosure. Between the rue Neuve-du-Temple and the rue Saint-Martin, there was the abbey of Saint-Martin, in the middle of its gardens, a superb fortified church, whose belt of towers, including the tiara of bell towers, yielded in strength and splendor only to Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Between the two rue Saint-Martin and rue Saint-Denis, the enclosure of the Trinity developed. Finally, between the rue Saint-Denis and the rue Montorgueil, the Filles-Dieu. Beside it, one could distinguish the rotten roofs and the unpaved enclosure of the Cour des Miracles. It was the only profane ring that mingled with this devout chain of convents. Finally, the fourth compartment, which stood out of itself in the agglomeration of roofs on the right bank, and which occupied the western angle of the enclosure and the water’s edge downstream, was a new knot of palaces and hotels huddled at the foot of the Louvre. The old Louvre of Philippe-Auguste, that immense edifice whose great tower united twenty-three master towers around it, not counting the turrets, seemed from a distance to be embedded in the Gothic attics of the Hôtel d’Alençon and the Petit-Bourbon. This hydra of towers, giant guardian of Paris, with its twenty-four heads always erect, with its monstrous rumps, leaded or flakes of slate, and all dripping with metallic reflections, completed in a surprising manner the configuration of the City at sunset. Thus, an immense block, what the Romans called insula, of bourgeois houses, flanked on the right and left by two blocks of palaces, crowned, one by the Louvre, the other by the Tournelles, bordered to the north by a long belt of abbeys and cultivated enclosures, the whole amalgamated and melted into view; on these thousand buildings whose tiled and slate roofs cut out so many bizarre chains one upon the other, the tattooed, embossed and guilloché bell towers of the forty-four churches on the right bank; myriads of streets across; for a boundary, on one side, a fence of high walls with square towers (that of the University had round towers); on the other, the Seine cut by bridges and carrying many boats; this is the City in the fifteenth century. Beyond the walls, a few suburbs crowded the gates, but fewer and more scattered than those of the University. Behind the Bastille, there were twenty hovels huddled around the curious sculptures of the Croix-Faubin and the flying buttresses of the abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs; then Popincourt, lost in the wheat; then La Courtille, a cheerful village of cabarets; the borough of Saint-Laurent with its church whose steeple, from a distance, seemed to join the pointed towers of the Porte Saint-Martin; the Faubourg Saint-Denis, with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre; outside the Porte Montmartre, the Grange-Batelière, surrounded by white walls; behind it, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which then had almost as many churches as mills, and which has kept only the mills, for society now demands only the bread of the body. Finally, beyond the Louvre, one could see the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, already quite considerable then, stretching out into the meadows , and Little Britain turning green, and the Pig Market unfolding, in the center of which rounded the horrible furnace for boiling counterfeiters. Between the Courtille and Saint-Laurent, your eye had already noticed, at the crown of a height crouching on deserted plains, a kind of building which resembled from a distance a ruined colonnade standing on a disused base. It was neither a Parthenon nor a temple of Olympian Jupiter. It was Montfaucon. Now, if the enumeration of so many buildings, however summary we have wanted to make it, has not pulverized, as we have built it, in the mind of the reader, the general image of old Paris, we will summarize it in a few words. In the center, the island of the City, resembling in shape an enormous tortoise and making its bridges, scaly with tiles, emerge like paws, from under its gray carapace of roofs. To the left, the monolithic trapezoid, firm, dense, tight, bristling, of the University; to the right, the vast semicircle of the City, much more mixed with gardens and monuments. The three blocks, City, University, City, marbled with countless streets. All across, the Seine, the nourishing Seine, as Father Du Breul says, obstructed with islands, bridges and boats. All around an immense plain, patched with a thousand kinds of crops, strewn with beautiful villages; to the left Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirard, Montrouge, Gentilly with its round tower and its square tower, etc.; to the right, twenty others, from Conflans to Ville-l’Évêque. On the horizon, a hem of hills arranged in a circle like the edge of the basin. Finally, in the distance, to the east, Vincennes and its seven quadrangular towers; to the south, Bicêtre and its pointed turrets; to the north, Saint-Denis and its needle; to the west, Saint-Cloud and its keep. This is the Paris that the crows who lived in 1482 saw from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame . Yet it is of this city that Voltaire said that before Louis XIV it possessed only four beautiful monuments: the dome of the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, the modern Louvre, and I no longer know the fourth, perhaps the Luxembourg. Fortunately, Voltaire nonetheless made Candide, and is nonetheless, of all the men who have succeeded one another in the long series of humanity, the one who best had a diabolical laugh. This proves, moreover, that one can be a beautiful genius and understand nothing about an art of which one is not a part. Did not Molière believe he was doing great honor to Raphael and Michelangelo by calling them these Mignards of their age? Let us return to Paris and the fifteenth century. It was not then only a beautiful 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 only two layers, the Romanesque layer and the Gothic layer, for the Roman layer had disappeared long ago, except at the Baths of Julian, where it still pierced the thick crust of the Middle Ages. As for the Celtic layer, samples of it were no longer even found by digging wells.
Fifty years later, when the Renaissance came to blend with this unity so severe and yet so varied the dazzling luxury of its fantasies and its systems, its debauchery of Roman round arches, Greek columns and Gothic lowerings, its sculpture so tender and so ideal, its particular taste for arabesques and acanthus, its architectural paganism contemporary with Luther, Paris was perhaps even more beautiful, although less harmonious to the eye and to the mind. But this splendid moment lasted a short time. The Renaissance was not impartial; it was not content to build, it wanted to throw down. It is true that it needed space. Thus Gothic Paris was only complete for a minute. Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was barely finished when the demolition of the old Louvre began.
Since then, the great city has been deforming day by day. Gothic Paris , under which Romanesque Paris was fading, has faded in turn. But can we say what Paris replaced it? There is the Paris of Catherine de Medici, at the Tuileries[5], the Paris of Henri II, at the Hôtel de Ville, two buildings still in great taste; the Paris of Henri IV, at the Place Royale: brick facades with stone corners and slate roofs, tricolored houses; the Paris of Louis XIII, at the Val-de-Grâce: a crushed and squat architecture, basket-handle vaults , something pot-bellied in the column and hunchbacked in the dome; the Paris of Louis XIV, at the Invalides: grand, rich, gilded and cold; the Paris of Louis XV, at Saint-Sulpice: volutes, ribbon knots, clouds, vermicelli and chicory, all in stone; the Paris of Louis XVI, at the Pantheon: Saint-Pierre in Rome poorly copied (the building settled awkwardly, which did not mend its lines); the Paris of the Republic, at the School of Medicine: a poor Greek and Roman taste, which resembles the Coliseum or the Parthenon as the constitution of the year III to the laws of Minos, it is called in architecture the Messidor taste; the Paris of Napoleon, at the Place Vendôme: that one is sublime, a bronze column made with 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 million. [5] We saw with pain mixed with indignation that people were thinking of enlarging, recasting, reworking, that is to say, destroying this admirable palace. The architects of our days are too heavy-handed to touch these delicate works of the Renaissance. We still hope they won’t dare. Besides, this demolition of the Tuileries now would not only be a brutal act that would make a drunken Vandal blush, it would be an act of treason. The Tuileries are not simply a masterpiece of sixteenth-century art; they are a page in nineteenth-century history . This palace no longer belongs to the king, but to the people. Let us leave it as it is. Our revolution has marked it twice on the forehead. On one of its two facades, it has the cannonballs of August 10; on the other, the cannonballs of July 29. It is holy. Paris, April 7, 1831. (Note from the fifth edition.) To each of these characteristic monuments is connected, by a similarity of taste, style, and attitude, a certain number of houses scattered in various neighborhoods, and which the eye of the connoisseur easily distinguishes and dates. When one knows how to see, one finds the spirit of a century and the physiognomy of a king even in a doorknob. Present-day Paris therefore has no general physiognomy. It is a collection of samples from several centuries, and the most beautiful have disappeared. The capital is growing only in houses, and what houses! At the rate Paris is going, it will be renewed every fifty years. Also, the historical significance of its architecture is fading every day. Monuments are becoming rarer and rarer, and it seems that we see them being swallowed up little by little, drowned in the houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will have a Paris of plaster. As for the modern monuments of the new Paris, we will gladly refrain from speaking of them. It is not that we do not admire them as we should. Mr. Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève is certainly the most beautiful Savoy cake ever made in stone. The Palace of the Legion of Honor is also a very distinguished piece of pastry. The dome of the corn exchange is an English jockey’s cap on a grand scale. The Saint-Sulpice towers are two large clarinets, and it is a form like any other; the telegraph, twisted and grimacing, makes a pleasant accident on their roof. Saint-Roch has a portal that is comparable, for magnificence, only to Saint-Thomas d’Aquin. It also has a Calvary in the round in a cellar and a sun of gilded wood. These are quite marvelous things. The lantern of the labyrinth of the Jardin des Plantes is also very ingenious. As for the Palais de la Bourse, which is Greek in its colonnade, Roman in the round arch of its doors and windows, Renaissance in its great lowered vault, it is undoubtedly a very correct and very pure monument; the proof is that it is crowned with an attic such as was not seen in Athens, a beautiful straight line, gracefully cut here and there by stove pipes. Let us add that if it is the rule that the architecture of a building is adapted to its purpose in such a way that this purpose reveals itself from the mere appearance of the building, one does not could not marvel too much at a monument which could be indifferently a king’s palace, a chamber of commons, a town hall, a college, a riding school, an academy, a warehouse, a court, a museum, a barracks, a sepulchre, a temple, a theatre. Meanwhile, it is a Stock Exchange. A monument must also be appropriate to the climate. This one is obviously built expressly for our cold and rainy sky. It has an almost flat roof like in the Orient, which means that in winter, when it snows, the roof is swept; and it is certain that a roof is made to be swept. As for this destination of which we spoke just now, it fulfills it marvelously; it is a Stock Exchange in France, as it would have been a temple in Greece. It is true that the architect had enough trouble hiding the clock face, which would have destroyed the purity of the beautiful lines of the facade; but, on the other hand, we have this colonnade which runs around the monument, and under which, on the great days of religious solemnity, the theory of stockbrokers and commercial brokers can be majestically developed. These are undoubtedly very superb monuments. Let us add to them many beautiful streets, amusing and varied, like the rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair that Paris, seen from a balloon, will one day present to the eyes this richness of lines, this opulence of details, this diversity of aspects, this I know not what of grandiose in the simple and unexpected in the beautiful, which characterizes a checkerboard. However, however admirable the Paris of today may seem to you, remake the Paris of the fifteenth century, reconstruct it in your mind; look at the day through this surprising hedge of needles, towers and bell towers; spread in the middle of the immense city, tear at the tips of the islands, fold at the arches of the bridges the Seine with its wide green and yellow pools, more changeable than a serpent’s dress; clearly detach on an azure horizon the Gothic profile of this old Paris; make its outline float in a winter mist which clings to its numerous chimneys; drown it in a deep night, and observe the bizarre play of darkness and light in this somber labyrinth of buildings; throw there a ray of moonlight which outlines it vaguely and brings out of the fog the great heads of the towers; or take up again this black silhouette, revive with shadow the thousand sharp angles of the spires and gables, and make it protrude, more jagged than a shark’s jaw, against the copper sky of the sunset.–And then, compare. And if you wish to receive from the old city an impression that the modern one could no longer give you, go up, on a great festive morning, at the rising sun of Easter or Pentecost, climb to some high point from which you overlook the entire capital, and witness the awakening of the chimes. See, at a signal from the sky, for it is the sun that gives it, these thousand churches quiver at once. At first there are scattered chimes, going from one church to another, as when musicians warn each other that they are about to begin. Then, suddenly, see, for it seems that at certain moments the ear also has its sight, see rising at the same moment from each bell tower like a column of noise, like a smoke of harmony. At first the vibration of each bell rises straight, pure, and so to speak isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky. Then, little by little, as they grow , they blend, they fade into one another, they amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is nothing more than a mass of sonorous vibrations which ceaselessly emerges from the innumerable bell towers, which floats, undulates, leaps, swirls over the city, and extends well beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. However, this sea of harmony is not chaos. However large and however deep it may be, it has not lost its transparency; you there you see each group of notes escaping from the bells meandering separately ; you can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the rattle and the drone; you see the octaves leaping from one bell tower to another; you watch them spring winged, light and whistling from the silver bell, fall broken and lame from the wooden bell; you admire in the middle of them the rich scale which descends and rises ceaselessly the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see running, all through, clear and rapid notes which make three or four luminous zigzags and vanish like lightning. Over there, it is the abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill and cracked singer; here, the sinister and gruff voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass-taille. The royal carillon of the Palace relentlessly throws forth resplendent trills from all sides, upon which fall in equal time the heavy blows of the belfry of Notre-Dame, making them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you see sounds of all forms passing by, coming from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then again, from time to time this mass of sublime noises opens and gives way to the stretto of the Ave-Maria which bursts and sparkles like a plume of stars. Below, in the depths of the concert, you distinguish dimly the interior chant of the churches which transpires through the vibrating pores of their vaults.–Certainly, this is an opera which is worth listening to. Ordinarily, the rumor which escapes from Paris by day is the city which speaks; by night, it is the city which breathes; Here, it is the city that sings. Lend your ears to this tutti of bell towers; spread over the whole the murmur of half a million men, the eternal complaint of the river, the infinite breaths of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests arranged on the hills of the horizon like immense organ cases; extinguish there, as if in a half-tone, all that the central carillon would have of too hoarse and too high, and say if you know in the world anything richer, more joyful, more golden, more dazzling than this tumult of bells and ringing; than this furnace of music; than these ten thousand voices of brass singing at once in stone flutes three hundred feet high; than this city which is no more than an orchestra; than this symphony which makes the noise of a storm. BOOK FOUR Chapter 17. THE GOOD SOULS. Sixteen years ago, at the time this story takes place, on a beautiful Quasimodo Sunday morning, a living creature had been placed, after Mass, in the church of Notre-Dame, on the bedstead sealed in the forecourt, on the left-hand side, opposite that large image of Saint Christopher, which the stone-carved figure of Messire Antoine des Essarts, knight, had been kneeling and looking at since 1413, when it was decided to throw down both the saint and the faithful. It was on this bedstead that it was customary to expose foundlings to public charity. Anyone who wanted to could take them there. In front of the bedstead was a copper basin for alms. The kind of living being that lay on this board on the morning of Quasimodo, in the year of our Lord 1467, seemed to excite to a high degree the curiosity of the rather considerable group that had gathered around the bedstead. The group was formed largely of the fair sex. They were almost entirely old women. In the front row and the most inclined on the bed, one noticed four that from their gray hoods, a sort of cassock, one could guess were attached to some devout brotherhood. I do not see why history should not transmit to posterity the names of these four discreet and venerable young ladies. They were Agnès la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la Gaultière, Gauchère la Violette, all four widows, all four good women from the Étienne-Haudry chapel, having left their house, with the permission of their mistress and in accordance with the statutes of Pierre d’Ailly, to come and hear the sermon. Besides, if these brave Haudriettes were observing for the moment the statutes of Pierre d’Ailly, they were certainly violating with joy those of Michel de Brache and the Cardinal of Pisa, who so inhumanly prescribed silence for them. “What is this, my sister?” said Agnès to Gauchère, looking at the little creature exposed who was yelping and writhing on the wooden bed, completely frightened by so many looks. “What will become of us,” said Jehanne, “if this is how they make children now? ” “I don’t know anything about children,” continued Agnès, “but it must be a sin to look at this one. ” “He’s not a child, Agnès.” “He’s a failed monkey,” observed Gauchère. “It’s a miracle,” resumed Henriette la Gaultière. “Well,” remarked Agnès, “it’s the third since Laetare Sunday. For it’s not eight days since we had the miracle of the mocker of pilgrims divinely punished by Our Lady of Aubervilliers, and it was the second miracle of the month. ” “He’s a real monster of abomination, this so-called foundling,” resumed Jehanne. “He’s bawling enough to deafen a cantor,” continued Gauchère. “Be quiet , you little howler! ” “To think that it’s M. de Reims who sends this enormity to M. de Paris!” added la Gaultière, clasping her hands. “I imagine,” said Agnès la Herme, “that he’s a beast, an animal, the product of a Jew with a sow; something finally that is not Christian, and that must be thrown into the water or the fire. “I hope,” resumed La Gaultière, “that it will not be postulated by anyone. ” “Oh my God!” cried Agnès, “those poor nurses who are there in the foundling’s lodgings which make up the bottom of the alley going down to the river, right next to Monseigneur the Bishop, if only we were to bring them this little monster to suckle! I would rather give it to a vampire. ” “Is she innocent, this poor Herme!” resumed Jehanne; ” don’t you see, my sister, that this little monster is at least four years old, and that he would have less appetite for your teat than for a turnspit. Indeed, this little monster was not a newborn. (We ourselves would be very prevented from describing it otherwise.) It was a small, very angular and very restless mass, imprisoned in a canvas bag printed with the moniker of Messire Guillaume Chartier, at that time Bishop of Paris, with a head sticking out. This head was a rather deformed thing. All that could be seen was a forest of red hair, an eye, a mouth, and teeth. The eye wept, the mouth screamed, and the teeth seemed only to be begging to bite. The whole thing was struggling in the bag, to the great astonishment of the crowd that was constantly growing and renewing itself around it. Dame Aloïse de Gondelaurier, a rich and noble woman, who was holding a pretty girl of about six years old in her hand, and who was trailing a long veil on the golden horn of her headdress, stopped as she passed in front of the bed, and gazed for a moment at the unfortunate creature, while her charming little daughter Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, all dressed in silk and velvet, spelled out with her pretty little finger the permanent sign hanging on the bedstead: FOUNDLINGS. “Truly,” said the lady, turning away with disgust, “I thought that only children were exhibited here.” She turned her back, throwing a silver florin into the basin, which clanged among the farthings, and made the poor women of the Étienne-Haudry chapel open their eyes wide. A moment later, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, protonotary of the king, passed by with an enormous missal under one arm and his wife under the other (Damsel Guillemette la Mairesse), thus having at his side his two regulators, spiritual and temporal. “Foundling!” he said after examining the object. “Apparently found on the parapet of the Phlegethus River! ” “Only one eye is visible,” observed Miss Guillemette. “He has a wart on the other. ” “It’s not a wart,” continued Master Robert Mistricolle. “It’s an egg containing another demon just like it, which carries another small egg containing another devil, and so on. ” “How do you know that?” asked Guillemette the Mayoress. “I know it perfectly well,” replied the Protonotary. “Monsieur Protonotary,” asked Gauchère, “what do you predict for this supposed foundling? ” “The greatest misfortunes,” replied Mistricolle. “Ah! my God!” said an old woman in the audience, besides the fact that there was a considerable pestilence last year, and that it is said that the English are going to land in company at Harefleu. “Perhaps that will prevent the queen from coming to Paris in September ,” replied another; “the merchandise is already doing so badly! ” “I am of the opinion,” cried Jehanne de la Tarme, “that it would be better, for the commoners of Paris, if that little magician were lying on a person rather than on a board. ” “A fine, flamboyant person!” added the old woman. “That would be more prudent,” said Mistricolle. For some moments a young priest had been listening to the reasoning of the haudriettes and the sentences of the protonotary. He had a stern face, a broad forehead, a deep gaze. He silently parted the crowd, examined the little magician, and stretched out his hand over him. It was time, for all the devout women were already licking the beards of the fine, flamboyant person. “I adopt this child,” said the priest. He took him in his cassock and carried him away. The audience followed him with startled eyes. A moment later, he had disappeared through the Red Gate, which then led from the church to the cloister. When the initial surprise had passed, Jehanne de la Tarme leaned into La Gaultière’s ear. “I told you, my sister, that this young clerk, Monsieur Claude Frollo, is a sorcerer.” Chapter 18. CLAUDE FROLLO. Indeed, Claude Frollo was not a common character. He belonged to one of those middle-class families that were indifferently called, in the impertinent language of the last century, upper middle class or lower nobility. This family had inherited from the Paclet brothers the fief of Tirechappe, which was under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Paris, and whose twenty-one houses had been the subject of so many pleas before the official in the thirteenth century. As the possessor of this fief, Claude Frollo was one of the seven twenty-one lords claiming censive in Paris and its suburbs; and his name could long be seen inscribed in this capacity, between the Hôtel de Tancarville, belonging to Master François Le Rez, and the college of Tours, in the cartulary deposited at Saint-Martin-des-Champs. Claude Frollo had been destined from childhood by his parents for the ecclesiastical state. He had been taught to read in Latin. He had been raised to lower his eyes and speak quietly. As a child, his father had cloistered him in the college of Torchi in the University. It was there that he had grown up, on the missal and the lexicon. He was, moreover, a sad, grave, serious child, who studied ardently and learned quickly. He did not raise much of a cry during recreations, did not mix much with the bacchanalia of the rue du Fouarre, did not know what dare alapas et capillos laniare were, and had not made any figure in this mutiny of 1463 which the annalists gravely record under the title: Sixth trouble of the University. He rarely happened to mock the poor schoolchildren of Montaigu for the cappettes from which they took their name, or the scholarship holders of the college of Dormans for their shaved tonsure and their above all three-part cloth of pers, blue and violet, azurini coloris and bruni, as the charter of the Cardinal of the Four Crowns says. On the other hand, he was a regular at the large and small schools of the rue Saint-Jean de Beauvais. The first student that the Abbot of Saint-Pierre de Val, at the moment of beginning his reading of canon law, always saw glued opposite his pulpit to a pillar of the Saint-Vendregesile school, was Claude Frollo, armed with his horn writing desk , chewing his quill, scribbling on his worn knee, and, in winter, blowing into his fingers. The first listener that Messire Miles d’Isliers, doctor of decrees, saw arrive every Monday morning, all out of breath, at the opening of the doors of the school of Chef-Saint-Denis, was Claude Frollo. Also, at sixteen, the young cleric could have held his own, in mystical theology, with a father of the church; in canonical theology, with a father of the councils; in scholastic theology, to a doctor of the Sorbonne. Theology surpassed, he had rushed into the decree. From the Master of Sentences, he had fallen to the Capitularies of Charlemagne. And successively he had devoured, in his appetite for science, decretal upon decretal, those of Theodore, bishop of Hispale, those of Bouchard, bishop of Worms, those of Yves, bishop of Chartres; then the decree of Gratian which succeeded the capitularies of Charlemagne; then the collection of Gregory IX; then the epistle Super specula of Honorius Chapter 19. He became clear, he became familiar with this vast and tumultuous period of civil law and canon law in struggle and in work in the chaos of the Middle Ages, a period which Bishop Theodore opened in 618 and which Pope Gregory closed in 1227. Once the decree was digested, he threw himself into medicine and the liberal arts. He studied the science of herbs, the science of ointments. He became an expert in fevers and bruises, in wounds and apostasy. Jacques d’Espars would have received him as a physician; Richard Hellain, a surgeon. He also completed all the degrees of license, mastery , and doctorate in the arts. He studied languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, a triple sanctuary then very little frequented. It was a real fever to acquire and hoard in matters of science. At eighteen, all four faculties had been passed through it. It seemed to the young man that life had a single goal: knowledge. It was around this time that the excessive summer of 1466 caused the outbreak of the great plague, which carried off more than forty thousand creatures in the viscounty of Paris, and among others, says Jean de Troyes, Master Arnoul, the king’s astrologer, who was a very good, wise, and pleasant man. The rumor spread through the University that Rue Tirechappe was particularly devastated by the disease. It was there that Claude’s parents resided, in the middle of their fiefdom. The young scholar ran, greatly alarmed, to his father’s house. When he entered, his father and mother had died the day before. A very young brother, whom he had in his jersey, 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 out pensive. Until then, he had lived only in science; he was beginning to live in life. This catastrophe was a crisis in Claude’s existence. Orphaned, the eldest, head of the family at nineteen, he felt himself rudely recalled from the reveries of school to the realities of this world. Then, moved with pity, he became filled with passion and devotion for this child, his brother; a strange and sweet thing, a human affection, for him who had only loved books. This affection developed to a singular point. In such a new soul, it was like a first love. Separated since childhood from his parents, whom he had barely known, cloistered and as if walled up in his books, eager above all to study and learn, exclusively attentive until then to his intelligence which was expanding in science, to his imagination which was growing in letters, the The poor schoolboy had not yet had time to feel the place of his heart. This young brother, without mother or father, this little child, who suddenly fell from the sky into his arms, made him a new man. He realized that there was something else in the world than the speculations of the Sorbonne and the verses of Homerus; that man needed affections; that life without tenderness and without love was only a dry, screeching, and heart-rending cog. Only he imagined, for he was at the age when illusions are still only replaced by illusions, that the affections of blood and family were the only necessary ones, and that a little brother to love was enough to fill an entire existence. He therefore threw himself into the love of his little Jehan with the passion of a character already deep, ardent, concentrated. This poor, frail creature, pretty, blond, pink, and curly, this orphan with no other support than an orphan, stirred him to the depths of his being; and, grave thinker that he was, he began to reflect on Jehan with infinite mercy. He took care of him and cared for him as if he were something very fragile and highly recommended. He was more than a brother to the child; he became a mother to him. Little Jehan had lost his mother, whom he was still suckling. Claude put him in a wet nurse. Besides the fief of Tirechappe, he had inherited from his father the fief of Moulin, which depended on the square tower of Gentilly. It was a mill on a hill, near the castle of Winchestre (Bicêtre). There was the miller’s wife who was nursing a beautiful child; it was not far from the University. Claude himself carried his little Jehan to him. From then on, feeling that he had a burden to drag around, he took life very seriously. The thought of his little brother became not only recreation, but also the goal of his studies. He resolved to devote himself entirely to a future for which he was answerable before God, and to never have another wife, another child than the happiness and fortune of his brother. He therefore attached himself more than ever to his clerical vocation. His merit, his knowledge, his status as immediate vassal of the Bishop of Paris, opened wide the doors of the church to him. At twenty, by special dispensation from 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, more than ever immersed in his beloved books, which he left only to run for an hour to the fief of the Moulin, this mixture of knowledge and austerity, so rare at his age, had quickly restored him to the respect and admiration of the cloister. From the cloister, his reputation as a scholar had spread to the people, where it had somewhat turned, a common thing at that time, into the reputation of a sorcerer. It was at the moment when he was returning, on the day of Quasimodo, from saying his Mass for the Lazy at their altar, which was next to the choir door leading to the nave, on the right, near the image of the Virgin, that his attention had been aroused by the group of old women squealing around the bed of the foundlings. It was then that he had approached the unfortunate little creature so hated and so threatened. This distress, this deformity, this abandonment, the thought of his young brother, the chimera which suddenly struck his mind that, if he died, his dear little Jehan might also be miserably thrown onto the foundlings’ plank, all this had come to his heart at once, a great pity had stirred within him, and he had taken the child away. When he took this child out of the bag, he found him very deformed indeed. The poor little devil had a wart over his left eye, his head on his shoulders, his spine arched, his sternum prominent, his legs twisted; but he seemed lively; and, although it was impossible to know what language he stammered, his cry announced some strength and some health. Claude’s compassion increased by this ugliness; and he made a vow in his heart to raise this child for the love of his brother, so that, whatever the faults of little Jehan might be in the future, he would have this charity made for him. It was a sort of investment of good works that he made on the head of his young brother; it was a pile of good deeds that he wanted to amass for him in advance, in case the little rascal one day found himself short of this currency, the only one that is received at the tollbooth of paradise. He baptized his adopted child, and named him Quasimodo, either because he wanted to mark by this the day on which he had found him, or because he wanted to characterize by this name to what extent the poor little creature was incomplete and barely sketched. Indeed, Quasimodo, one-eyed, hunchbacked, knock-kneed, was hardly more than a rough approximation. Chapter 20. IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE. Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up. He had become, for several years, bell ringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to his adoptive father Claude Frollo, who had become archdeacon of Josas, thanks to his liege lord Lord Louis de Beaumont, who had become Bishop of Paris in 1472, upon the death of Guillaume Chartier, thanks to his patron Olivier le Daim, barber to King Louis XI by the grace of God. Quasimodo was therefore carillonneur of Notre-Dame. Over time, he had formed some intimate bond that united the bell ringer to the church. Separated forever from the world by the double fatality of his unknown birth and his deformed nature, imprisoned from childhood in this impassable double circle, the poor unfortunate had become accustomed to seeing nothing in this world beyond the religious walls which had taken him into their shadow. Notre Dame had been successively for him, as he grew and developed, the egg, the nest, the house, the fatherland, the universe. And it is certain that there was a sort of mysterious and pre-existing harmony between this creature and this edifice. When, still very small, he dragged himself tortuously and with jolts under the darkness of its vaults, he seemed, with his human face and his bestial frame, the natural reptile of this damp and dark slab on which the shadow of the Romanesque capitals projected so many bizarre forms . Later, the first time he mechanically clung to the rope of the towers, and hung there, and set the bell in motion, it had on Claude, his adoptive father, the effect of a child whose tongue is loosened and who begins to speak. Thus, little by little, always developing in the direction of the cathedral, living there, sleeping there, almost never leaving it, undergoing at all hours the mysterious pressure, he came to resemble it, to become embedded in it, so to speak, to become an integral part of it. Its salient angles fitted together, if we may spare this figure, with the re-entrant angles of the building, and he seemed not only its inhabitant, but also its natural contents. One could almost say that he had taken its form, as the snail takes the form of its shell. It was his dwelling, his hole, his envelope. There
was between the old church and him such a profound instinctive sympathy , such magnetic affinities, such material affinities, that he clung to it in a way like a tortoise to its shell. The rugged cathedral was his shell. It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally the figures that we are obliged to employ here to express this singular, symmetrical, immediate, almost consubstantial coupling of a man and a building. It is also useless to say to what extent he had become familiar with the whole cathedral in such a long and intimate cohabitation. This dwelling was his own. It had no depth that Quasimodo had not penetrated, no height that he had not climbed. It happened to him many times to climb the façade at several elevations, using only the roughness of the sculpture. The towers, on the exterior surface of which he was often seen crawling like a lizard gliding down a sheer wall, these two twin giants, so high, so threatening, so formidable, caused him neither vertigo, nor terror, nor jolts of dizziness; seeing them so soft under his hand, so easy to climb, one would have said that he had tamed them. By dint of jumping, climbing, and frolicking in the midst of the abysses of the gigantic cathedral, he had become in some way ape and chamois, like the Calabrian child who swims before walking, and plays, very small, with the sea. Moreover, not only his body seemed to have been shaped according to the cathedral, but also his mind. In what state was this soul? What fold it had contracted, what form it had taken under this knotted envelope, in this wild life, is what would be difficult to determine. Quasimodo was born one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame. It was with great difficulty and great patience that Claude Frollo had succeeded in teaching him to speak. But a fatality was attached to the poor foundling. A bell ringer at Notre-Dame at fourteen, a new infirmity had come to complete him; the bells had broken his eardrum, he had become deaf. The only door that nature had left wide open to the world had suddenly closed forever. In closing, it intercepted the only ray of joy and light that still penetrated Quasimodo’s soul. This soul fell into a profound night. The melancholy of the wretch became incurable and complete like his deformity. Let us add that his deafness rendered him in some way mute. For, in order not to make others laugh, from the moment he saw himself deaf, he resolutely decided on a silence which he rarely broke except when he was alone. He voluntarily tied the tongue which Claude Frollo had had so much trouble untying. From this it happened that, when necessity forced him to speak, his tongue was numb, clumsy, and like a door with rusty hinges. If now we were to try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo through this thick and hard bark; if we could sound the depths of this badly constructed organization; If we were given the chance to look with a torch behind these organs without transparency, to explore the dark interior of this opaque creature, to elucidate its obscure recesses, its absurd dead ends, and to suddenly throw a bright light on the psyche chained to the bottom of this cave, we would doubtless find the unfortunate woman in some poor, stunted, and rachitic attitude, like those prisoners of lead in Venice who grew old bent double in a stone box that was too low and too short. It is certain that the mind atrophies in a failed body. Quasimodo barely felt a soul made in his image moving blindly within him. The impressions of objects underwent considerable refraction before reaching his thoughts. His brain was a particular medium; the ideas that crossed it emerged all twisted. The reflection that came from this refraction was necessarily divergent and deviated. Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations of judgment, a thousand deviations in which his thoughts wandered, sometimes mad, sometimes idiotic. The first effect of this fatal organization was to disturb the way he looked at things. He received almost no immediate perception of them. The outside world seemed much further away to him than it does to us. The second effect of his misfortune was to make him wicked. He was wicked indeed, because he was savage, he was savage because he was ugly. There was a logic in his nature as in ours. His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of more wickedness. Malus puer robustus, says Hobbes. Besides, we must give him this credit: wickedness was perhaps not innate in him. From his first steps among men, he had felt, then he had seen himself booed, branded, rejected. Human speech for him was always a mockery or a curse. As he grew up, he had found only hatred around him. He had taken it. He had gained the general wickedness. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded. After all, he only reluctantly turned his face towards men. His cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures, kings, saints, bishops, who at least did not burst out laughing in his face and had for him only a calm and benevolent look. The
other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him, Quasimodo. He resembled them too much for that. They mocked other men instead. The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him. So he had long outpourings with them. So he sometimes spent whole hours, crouching before one of these statues, talking alone with it. If someone came along, he fled like a lover surprised in his serenade. And the cathedral was not only his society, but also the universe, but all of nature. He dreamed of no other espaliers than the stained-glass windows always in flower, of no other shade than that of these stone foliages which blossom laden with birds in the tuft of the Saxon capitals, of no other mountains than the colossal towers of the church, of no other ocean than Paris which rustled at their feet. What he loved above all in his mother’s house, what awakened his soul and made it open its poor wings that it kept so miserably folded in its cavern, what sometimes made him happy, were the bells. He loved them, caressed them, spoke to them, understood them. From the chime of the needle of the crossing to the great bell of the gate, he held them all in affection. The steeple of the crossing, the two towers, were for him like three large cages whose birds, raised by him, sang only for him. Yet it was these same bells that had made him deaf, but mothers often love best the child who has made them suffer the most. It is true that their voice was the only one he could still hear. As such, the great bell was his beloved. It was she whom he preferred in this family of noisy girls who wriggled around him on feast days. This great bell was called Marie. She was alone in the southern tower with her sister Jacqueline, a smaller bell, locked in a smaller cage next to hers. This Jacqueline was so named after the wife of John Montagu, who had given her to the church, which had not prevented him from appearing headless at Montfaucon. In the second tower there were six other bells, and finally the six smallest inhabited the bell tower on the crossing with the wooden bell, which was rung only from the afternoon of Thursday Absolut until the morning of Easter Eve. Quasimodo therefore had fifteen bells in his seraglio, but the fat Marie was the favorite. One cannot imagine his joy on days of great peals. At the moment when the archdeacon had let him go and said to him: Go, he was raising the screw of the bell tower faster than anyone else could have lowered it. He entered, all out of breath, into the airy chamber of the great bell; he considered it for a moment with reverence and love; then he spoke to it gently, he stroked it with his hand, like a good horse about to run a long race. He pitied it for the trouble it was going to have. After these first caresses, he called to his assistants, placed on the lower floor of the tower, to begin. They hung from the cables, the capstan creaked, and the enormous metal capsule slowly shook. Quasimodo, palpitating, followed it with his eyes. The first shock of the clapper and the brazen wall made the framework on which he was mounted shudder. Quasimodo vibrated with the bell. Vah! he cried with a burst of mad laughter. Meanwhile the movement of the bell accelerated, and, as it traversed a more open angle, Quasimodo’s eye also opened more and more phosphoric and blazing. Finally the great peal began, the whole tower trembled, framework, lead, cut stone, everything rumbled at once, from the piles of the foundation to the trefoils of the crown. Quasimodo then boiled with great foam; he went to and fro; he trembled with the tower from head to foot. The bell, unchained and furious, presented alternately to the two walls of the tower its bronze mouth from which escaped that stormy breath which one hears four leagues away. Quasimodo placed himself before this open mouth; he crouched down, rose up with the returns of the bell, inhaled this astounding breath, looked alternately at the deep place which swarmed two hundred feet below him and at the enormous copper tongue which came from second to second to howl in his ear. It was the only word he heard, the only sound which disturbed the universal silence for him. He dilated there like a bird in the sun. Suddenly the frenzy of the bell overtook him; his gaze became extraordinary; he awaited the passing drone, as the spider awaits the fly, and suddenly threw himself upon it body and soul. Then, suspended over the abyss, launched into the formidable swing of the bell, he seized the brazen monster with the earpieces, clasped it with both knees, spurred it with both heels, and redoubled with all the shock and all the weight of his body the fury of the volley. Meanwhile the tower tottered; he cried out and ground his teeth, his red hair stood on end, his chest made the noise of a forge bellows, his eye threw out flames, the monstrous bell whinnied, panting beneath him, and then it was no longer the bell of Notre-Dame or Quasimodo, it was a dream, a whirlwind, a storm; vertigo astride the noise; a spirit clinging to a flying rump; a strange centaur, half man, half bell; a kind of horrible Astolph carried away on a prodigious hippogriff of living bronze. The presence of this extraordinary being caused some breath of life to circulate throughout the cathedral. It seemed that 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 entrails of the old church palpitate . It was enough to know that he was there for one to believe that one saw the thousand statues of the galleries and portals living and moving. And in fact, the cathedral seemed a docile and obedient creature under his hand; it awaited his will to raise its deep voice; it was possessed and filled with Quasimodo as with a familiar genius. One would have said that he made the immense edifice breathe. He was everywhere indeed, he multiplied at every point of the monument. Sometimes one would see with terror at the highest point of one of the towers a strange dwarf who climbed, wound his way, crawled on all fours, descended outside onto the abyss, jumped from projection to projection, and went to rummage in the belly of some sculpted gorgon; it was Quasimodo unearthing crows. Sometimes one would come across in a dark corner of the church a sort of living chimera, crouching and scowling; it was Quasimodo thinking. Sometimes one would see under a bell tower an enormous head and a bundle of disordered limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope; it was Quasimodo ringing for vespers or the Angelus. Often At night, a hideous form could be seen wandering on the frail lace-cut balustrade that crowns the towers and borders the perimeter of the apse; it was still the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then, the neighbors said, the whole church took on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and mouths opened here and there; one could hear the barking of the dogs, the guivres, the stone tarasques that watch day and night, necks stretched and mouths open, around the monstrous cathedral; and if it were Christmas night, while the great bell, which seemed to be rattling, called the faithful to the fiery midnight mass, there was such an air spread over the somber facade that one would have said that the great portal was devouring the crowd and that the rose window was looking down on 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 the demon; he was its soul. So much so that, for those who know that Quasimodo existed, Notre-Dame is today deserted, inanimate, dead. One feels that something has disappeared. This immense body is empty; it is a skeleton; the spirit has left it, one sees its place, and that is all. It is like a skull where there are still holes for the eyes, but no more vision. Chapter 21. THE DOG AND HIS MASTER. There was, however, one human creature that Quasimodo excepted from his malice and his hatred for others, and whom he loved as much, perhaps more than his cathedral; it was Claude Frollo. The thing was simple. Claude Frollo had taken him in, adopted him, fed him, raised him. As a child, he used to take refuge in Claude Frollo’s lap when the dogs and children barked at him. Claude Frollo had taught him to speak, to read, to write. Finally, Claude Frollo had made him a bell ringer. Now, to give the great bell in marriage to Quasimodo was to give Juliet to Romeo. Thus, Quasimodo’s gratitude was deep, passionate, and boundless; and although his adoptive father’s face was often misty and severe, although his speech was habitually brief, harsh, and imperious, this gratitude had never wavered for a single instant. In Quasimodo, the archdeacon had the most submissive slave, the most docile servant, the most vigilant mastiff. When the poor bell ringer had become deaf, a sign language had been established between him and Claude Frollo, mysterious and understood only by them. In this way, the archdeacon was the only human being with whom Quasimodo had maintained communication. He was in contact in this world with only two things: Notre-Dame and Claude Frollo. Nothing comparable to the archdeacon’s influence over the bell-ringer, to the bell-ringer’s attachment to the archdeacon. A sign from Claude and the idea of pleasing him would have been enough for Quasimodo to throw himself from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame. It was a remarkable thing that all this physical strength had reached such an extraordinary development in Quasimodo and been blindly placed by him at the disposal of another. There was undoubtedly filial devotion, domestic attachment; there was also the fascination of one mind by another. It was a poor, awkward, and clumsy organization that stood with its head bowed and its eyes supplicating before a high and profound, powerful and superior intelligence. Finally, and above all, it was gratitude. Gratitude so pushed to its extreme limit that we would not know what to compare it to. This virtue is not one of those whose finest examples are among men. We will therefore say that Quasimodo loved the archdeacon as no dog, no horse, no elephant has ever loved its master. Chapter 22. CONTINUED BY CLAUDE FROLLO. In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years old, Claude Frollo about thirty-six. One had grown up, the other had aged. Claude Frollo was no longer the simple schoolboy of the Torchi college, the tender protector of a small child, the young and dreamy philosopher who knew many things and ignored many. He was an austere, grave, morose priest; a man in charge of souls; Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas, the second acolyte of the bishop, having on his hands the two deaneries of Montlhéry and Châteaufort, and one hundred and seventy-four rural curates. He was an imposing and somber figure, before whom the choirboys in albs and jackets, the machicots, the confreres of Saint-Augustin, the morning clerics of Notre-Dame trembled, when he passed slowly under the high ogives of the choir, majestic, pensive, arms crossed and head so bent on his chest that only his large bald forehead could be seen of his face. Dom Claude Frollo had not abandoned, moreover, either science or the education of his young brother, these two occupations of his life. But with time there had been a certain bitterness mixed with these sweet things. In the long run, says Paul Diacre, the best bacon turns rancid. Little Jehan Frollo, nicknamed du Moulin because of the place where he had been raised, had not grown in the direction that Claude had wanted to give him. The big brother counted on a pious, docile, learned, honorable pupil . Now the little brother, like those young trees that deceive the gardener’s efforts, and stubbornly turn to the side from which the air and the sun come to them, the little brother grew and multiplied, and sprouted beautiful, bushy and luxuriant branches only from the side of laziness, ignorance and debauchery. He was a real devil, very disorderly, which made Dom Claude frown , but very funny and very subtle, which made the big brother smile. Claude had entrusted him to the same college of Torchi where he had spent his early years in study and meditation; and it was a pain for him that this sanctuary once built with the name of Frollo should be scandalized today. He sometimes gave Jehan very severe and very long sermons, which the latter endured intrepidly. After all, the young scoundrel had a good heart, as is evident in all comedies. But, after the sermon, he nonetheless calmly resumed the course of his seditions and his enormities. Sometimes it was a béjaune (the name was given to new arrivals at the University) whom he had scolded for his welcome; a precious tradition which has been carefully perpetuated to the present day. Sometimes he had given the go-ahead to a band of schoolboys, who had classically thrown themselves on a tavern, quasi classico excitati, then had beaten the tavern owner with offensive sticks, and joyfully plundered the tavern until the barrels of wine had collapsed in the cellar. And then, it was a fine report in Latin that the sub-monitor of Torchi pitifully brought to Dom Claude with this painful emargination: Rixa; prima causa vinum optimum potatum. Finally, it was said, to the horror of a sixteen-year-old child, that his excesses often went as far as the rue de Glatigny. From all this, Claude, saddened and discouraged in his human affections, had thrown himself with more enthusiasm into the arms of science, that sister who at least does not laugh in your face, and always repays you, although sometimes in rather hollow money, for the care given to him. He thus became more and more learned, and at the same time, by a natural consequence, more and more rigid as a priest, more and more sad as a man. There are for each of us certain parallels between our intelligence, our morals and our character, which develop without discontinuity, and are broken only by the great disturbances of life. As Claude Frollo had from his youth traversed almost the entire circle of positive, external and licit human knowledge, He was forced, unless he stopped ubi defuit orbis, he was forced to go further and seek other nourishment for the insatiable activity of his intelligence. The ancient symbol of the serpent biting its tail is especially suited to science. It seems that Claude Frollo had experienced this. Several serious people affirmed that after having exhausted the fas of human knowledge, he had dared to penetrate the nefas. He had, it was said, tasted successively all the apples of the tree of intelligence, and, hunger or disgust, he had ended by biting the forbidden fruit. He had taken his place in turn, as our readers have seen, at the conferences of theologians at the Sorbonne, at the assemblies of the artists at the image of Saint Hilaire, at the disputes of the decretists at the image of Saint Martin, at the congregations of doctors at the holy water font of Notre Dame, ad cupam Nostræ-Dominæ; all the permitted and approved dishes that these four great kitchens called the four faculties could elaborate and serve to an intelligence, he had devoured them, and satiety had come to him before his hunger was appeased; then he had dug deeper, deeper, beneath all this finite, material, limited science; he had perhaps risked his soul, and had sat down in the cave at this mysterious table of the alchemists, the astrologers, the hermetics, of which Averroes, William of Paris and Nicolas Flamel held the end in the Middle Ages, and which extends in the East, in the light of the seven-branched candlestick, to Solomon, Pythagoras and Zoroaster. At least that was what was supposed, rightly or wrongly. It is certain that the archdeacon often visited the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, where his father and mother had been buried, it is true, with the other victims of the plague of 1466; but that he seemed much less devout at the cross of their grave than at the strange figures with which the tomb of Nicolas Flamel and Claude Pernelle, built nearby, was laden. It is certain that he had often been seen walking along the Rue des Lombards and furtively entering a small house which formed the corner of the Rue des Écrivains and the Rue Marivault. It was the house which Nicolas Flamel had built, where he had died around 1417, and which, always deserted since then, was already beginning to fall into ruin, so much had the hermeticists and the blowers of all countries worn down the walls simply by engraving their names there. Some neighbors even claimed to have once seen, through a basement window, Archdeacon Claude digging, stirring and spading the earth in these two cellars, whose crotch legs had been daubed with countless verses and hieroglyphs by Nicolas Flamel himself. It was supposed that Flamel had buried the philosopher’s stone in these cellars; and the alchemists, for two centuries, from Magistri to Father Pacifique, did not cease to torment the soil until the house, so cruelly searched and overturned, finally turned into dust beneath their feet. It is also certain that the archdeacon had fallen in love with a singular passion for the symbolic portal of Notre-Dame, this page of grimoire written in stone by Bishop Guillaume de Paris, who was doubtless damned for having attached such an infernal frontispiece to the holy poem that the rest of the building eternally sings. Archdeacon Claude was also said to have delved into the colossus of Saint Christopher and this long enigmatic statue which then stood at the entrance to the square and which the people called in their derision Monsieur Legris. But what everyone could notice was the endless hours he often spent, sitting on the parapet of the forecourt, contemplating the sculptures of the portal, examining sometimes the foolish virgins with their lamps upside down, sometimes the wise virgins with their lamps upright; other times, calculating the angle of the gaze of the crow which hangs on the left portal and which look in the church at a mysterious point where the philosopher’s stone is certainly hidden, if it is not in Nicolas Flamel’s cellar. It was, let us say in passing, a singular destiny for the church of Notre-Dame at that time to be thus loved to two different degrees, and with such devotion, by two beings as dissimilar as Claude and Quasimodo; loved by one, a sort of instinctive and wild half-man, for its beauty, for its stature, for the harmonies which emerge from its magnificent ensemble; loved by the other, a learned and passionate imagination, for its significance, for its myth, for the meaning it contains, for the symbol scattered beneath the sculptures of its façade, like the first text beneath the second in a palimpsest, in a word, for the enigma which it eternally proposes to the intelligence. It is certain, finally, that the archdeacon had arranged for himself, in the one of the two towers which looks out over the Grève, right next to the bell cage, a small, very secret cell which no one entered, not even the bishop, it was said, without his permission. This cell had once been made almost at the top of the tower, among the crows’ nests, by Bishop Hugo of Besançon[6], who had cast a spell there in his time. What this cell contained, no one knew; but one had often seen, from the Grèves du Terrain, at night, through a small skylight which he had on the back of the tower, a red, intermittent, bizarre light appearing, disappearing and reappearing at short and equal intervals, which seemed to follow the panting aspirations of a bellows, and to come rather from a flame than from a light. In the shadows, at this height, it made a singular effect; and the good women said: There is the archdeacon blowing! Hell is sparkling up there. [6] Hugo II de Bisuncio, 1326-1332. There was not, after all, great evidence of witchcraft in all this; but it was still as much smoke as was needed to suppose fire, and the archdeacon had a rather formidable reputation. We must say, however, that the sciences of Egypt, that necromancy, that magic, even the whitest and most innocent, had no more bitter enemy, no more pitiless denunciator before the gentlemen of the officialdom of Notre-Dame. Whether it was sincere horror or the game played by the thief who cries ‘thief’! this did not prevent the archdeacon from being considered by the learned heads of the chapter as a soul ventured into the vestibule of hell, lost in the dens of the cabal, groping in the darkness of the occult sciences. The people were not mistaken either; to anyone who had a little sagacity, Quasimodo passed for the demon, Claude Frollo for the sorcerer. It was obvious that the bell-ringer had to serve the archdeacon for a given time, at the end of which he would take his soul as payment. Thus the archdeacon was, despite the excessive austerity of his life, in bad odor among good souls; and there was no nose of a devout woman so inexperienced that he did not smell a magician. And if, as he grew older, abysses had formed in his science, they had also formed in his heart. At least, this is what one was justified in believing when examining this face on which one could see his soul shining only through a dark cloud. Where did this broad bald forehead come from , this head always bent, this chest always heaving with sighs? What secret thought made his mouth smile with such bitterness at the same moment when his furrowed brows drew together like two bulls about to fight? Why was his remaining hair already gray? What was this inner fire that sometimes burst forth in his gaze, to the point that his eye resembled a hole pierced in the wall of a furnace? These symptoms of a violent moral preoccupation had especially acquired a high degree of intensity at the time when this story takes place. More than once a choirboy had run away in fear to find him alone in the church, so strange and dazzling was his gaze. More than once, in the choir, at the hour of services, his neighbor in the stall had heard him mixing unintelligible parentheses with the plainchant ad omnem tonum . More than once the laundrywoman of the Terrain, charged with washing the chapter, had observed, not without fear, marks of nails and clenched fingers in the surplice of Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas. Moreover, he redoubled his severity and had never been more exemplary. By status as by character, he had always kept himself away from women; he seemed to hate them more than ever. The mere quivering of a silk coat made his hood fall over his eyes. He was so jealous of austerity and reserve on this point that when the lady of Beaujeu, the king’s daughter, came in December 1481 to visit the cloister of Notre-Dame, he gravely opposed her entry, reminding the bishop of the statute of the Black Book, dated the vigil of Saint-Barthélemy 1334, which forbade access to the cloister to any woman, old or young, mistress or chambermaid. Whereupon the bishop had been forced to cite to him the ordinance of the legate Odo, which excepts certain great ladies, aliquæ magnates mulieres, quæ sine scandalo vitari non possunt. And again the archdeacon protested, objecting that the legate’s ordinance, which dated back to 1207, was one hundred and twenty-seven years prior to the Black Book, and consequently repealed in fact by it. And he had refused to appear before the princess. It was also noted that his horror for Egyptian women and zingari seemed to have redoubled recently. He had requested from the bishop an edict expressly forbidding gypsies from coming to dance and drum in the square of the parvis, and since that time he had been poring over the moldy posters of the official, in order to gather the cases of sorcerers and witches condemned to the fire or to the rope for complicity in curses with billy-goats, sows or goats. Chapter 23. UNPOPULARITY. The archdeacon and the bell-ringer, as we have already said, were not very popular with the common people and the common people of the vicinity of the cathedral. When Claude and Quasimodo went out together, which happened many times, and they were seen crossing together, the servant following the master, the cool, narrow, and dark streets of the Notre-Dame block, more than one bad word, more than one ironic hum, more than one insulting jibe harassed them as they passed, unless Claude Frollo, which rarely happened, walked with his head erect and raised, showing his severe and almost august brow to the stunned mockers. Both were in their neighborhood like the poets of whom Régnier speaks. All sorts of people go after poets, as warblers go screeching after owls. Sometimes it was a sly brat who risked his skin and bones to have the ineffable pleasure of driving a pin into Quasimodo’s hump . Sometimes a beautiful young girl, lively and more brazen than necessary, would brush against the priest’s black robe, singing the sardonic song under his nose: Niche, niche, the devil is taken. Sometimes a squalid group of old women, staggered and crouching in the shadows on the steps of a porch, would grumble loudly as the archdeacon and the bell-ringer passed by, and would grumble to them with this encouraging welcome: Hum! Here’s one whose soul is made like the other’s body! Or else it would be a group of schoolboys and stone -pushers playing at blackbirds who would rise en masse and greet them classically with some hoot in Latin: Eia! eia! Claudius cum claudo! But most often the insult passed unnoticed by the priest and the bell-ringer. To hear all these graceful things, Quasimodo was too deaf and Claude too dreamy. BOOK FIVE Chapter 24. ABBAS BEATI MARTINI. Dom Claude’s fame had spread far and wide. It earned him, around the time he refused to see Madame de Beaujeu, a visit he remembered for a long time. It was one evening. He had just retired after the service to his canonical cell in the cloister of Notre-Dame. This, apart perhaps from a few glass vials relegated to a corner, and full of a rather dubious powder that strongly resembled projection powder, offered nothing strange or mysterious. There were indeed a few inscriptions here and there on the wall, but they were pure sentences of science or piety taken from good authors. The archdeacon had just sat down, in the light of a three-beak copper lamp, before a vast chest laden with manuscripts. He had rested his elbow on the wide- open book by Honorius of Autun, De prædestinatione et libero arbitrio, and was leafing through with deep thought a printed folio he had just brought, the only product of the press contained in his cell. In the midst of his reverie, there was a knock at his door. “Who’s there?” the scholar called out in the graceful tone of a starving mastiff being disturbed from its bone. A voice answered from outside: “Your friend, Jacques Coictier.” He went to open the door. It was indeed the king’s physician; a man of about fifty , whose hard countenance was only corrected by a sly glance. Another man accompanied him. Both wore long, slate-colored robes lined with squirrel fur, belted and fastened, with caps of the same material and color. Their hands disappeared under their sleeves, their feet under their robes, their eyes under their caps. “God help me, gentlemen!” said the archdeacon , introducing them. “I did not expect such an honorable visit at such an hour. ” And while speaking in this courteous manner, he cast a worried and scrutinizing glance from the doctor to his companion. “It is never too late to come and visit a scholar as important as Dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe,” replied Doctor Coictier, whose Franche-Comté accent made all his sentences drag with the majesty of a tailed robe. Then began between the doctor and the archdeacon one of those congratulatory prologues which preceded, at that time, according to custom, any conversation between scholars, and which did not prevent them from hating each other most cordially. Besides, it is still the same today; Every scholar’s mouth that compliments another scholar is a vase of honeyed gall. Claude Frollo’s congratulations to Jacques Coictier related above all to the numerous temporal advantages that the worthy physician had been able to extract, in the course of his much envied career, from each of the king’s illnesses, an operation of a better and more certain alchemy than the pursuit of the philosopher’s stone. –In truth, Doctor Coictier, I had great joy to learn of the bishopric of your nephew, my reverend lord Pierre Versé. Is he not Bishop of Amiens? –Yes, Archdeacon; it is a grace and mercy of God. –Do you know that you looked very good on Christmas Day, at the head of your company in the Chamber of Accounts, Mr. President? –Vice-President, Dom Claude. Alas! nothing more. –What is the state of your superb house on Rue Saint-André des Arcs? It’s a Louvre. I really like the apricot tree carved on the door with this play on words that is pleasant: A L’ABRI-COTIER. –Alas! Master Claude, all this masonry is costing me a lot. As the house is built, I am ruining myself. –Ho! don’t you have your income from the jail and the bailiwick of the Palace, and the rent from all the houses, stalls, lodges, and shops in the enclosure? It’s milking a fine udder. –My chatellany of Poissy has brought me nothing this year. “But your tolls at Triel, Saint-James, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, are still good. ” “Sixty livres, not even Parisis.” “You have your office as advisor to the king. That’s settled. ” “Yes, brother Claude, but this cursed lordship of Poligny, which is being talked about, is not worth sixty gold crowns to me, good year, bad year.” There was in the compliments that Dom Claude addressed to Jacques Coictier that sardonic, sour, and secretly mocking accent, that sad and cruel smile of a superior and unhappy man who plays for a moment by distraction with the substantial prosperity of a vulgar man. The other did not notice it. “Upon my soul,” said Claude at last, shaking his hand, “I am glad to see you in such good health. ” “Thank you, Master Claude.” “By the way,” cried Dom Claude, “how is your royal patient? ” “He doesn’t pay his doctor enough,” replied the doctor, casting a sideways glance at his companion. “Do you think so, Compère Coictier?” said the companion. This word, spoken in a tone of surprise and reproach, brought the archdeacon’s attention back to this unknown personage, which, to tell the truth, had not completely turned away from him for a single moment since this stranger had crossed the threshold of the cell. It had even taken the thousand reasons he had for sparing Doctor Jacques Coictier, the all-powerful physician of King Louis XI, for him to receive him thus accompanied. So his expression was not very cordial when Jacques Coictier said to him: “By the way, Dom Claude, I bring you a colleague who wanted to see you on your reputation. ” “Is the gentleman of science?” asked the archdeacon, fixing his penetrating eye on Coictier’s companion. He did not find under the stranger’s eyebrows a look less piercing and less distrustful than his own.
He was, as far as the dim light of the lamp allowed him to judge, an old man of about sixty years of age and of medium height, who appeared rather sick and broken. His profile, although of a very bourgeois line, had something powerful and severe about it; his pupil sparkled under a very deep brow, like a light at the bottom of a cave; and, under the low cap which fell over his nose, one could feel the broad planes of a genius’s brow turning. He undertook to answer the archdeacon’s question himself. “Reverend Master,” he said in a grave tone, “your fame has reached me, and I wanted to consult you. I am only a poor provincial gentleman who takes off his shoes before entering the scholars’ house. You must know my name.” My name is Compère Tourangeau. “A strange name for a gentleman!” thought the archdeacon. However, he felt himself before something strong and serious. The instinct of his high intelligence made him guess at something no less high beneath Compère Tourangeau’s fur-lined cap; and as he considered this grave figure, the ironic grin that the presence of Jacques Coictier had brought to light on his morose face gradually vanished, like twilight on a night horizon. He had sat down again, gloomy and silent, in his large armchair, his elbow had resumed its accustomed place on the table, and his forehead on his hand. After a few moments of meditation, he signaled to the two visitors to sit down, and addressed Compère Tourangeau. “You have come to consult me, master, and on what science? ” “Reverend,” replied Compère Tourangeau, “I am ill, very ill. They say you are a great Aesculapius, and I have come to ask you for medical advice.” “Medicine!” said the archdeacon, nodding his head. He seemed to collect himself for a moment and then continued: “Compère Tourangeau, since that is your name, turn your head. You will find my answer written all over the wall.” Compère Tourangeau obeyed, and read above his head this inscription engraved on the wall: Medicine is the daughter of dreams. –JAMBLIQUE. Meanwhile, Doctor Jacques Coictier had heard his companion’s question with a vexation that Dom Claude’s response had redoubled. He leaned over to Compère Tourangeau’s ear and said to him, quietly enough not to be heard by the archdeacon: –I warned you that he was a madman. You wanted to see him! –It is that it could very well be that he was right, that madman, Doctor Jacques! replied the compère in the same tone, and with a bitter smile. –As you please, replied Coictier dryly. Then, addressing the archdeacon: –You are quick at work, Dom Claude, and you are hardly more hindered by Hippocrates than a monkey by a hazelnut. Medicine is a dream! I doubt that the pharmacopoles and the masters would refrain from stoning you if they were here. So you deny the influence of philters on the blood, of ointments on the flesh! You deny this eternal pharmacy of flowers and metals that we call the world, made expressly for this eternal invalid that we call man! “I deny,” said Dom Claude coldly, “neither the pharmacy nor the sick person. I deny the doctor. ” “So it is not true,” Coictier continued heatedly, “that gout is an internal scab, that an artillery wound is cured by the application of a roasted mouse, that young blood properly infused restores youth to old veins; it is not true that two and two make four, and that emprostathonos succeeds opistathonos. ” The archdeacon replied without moving: “There are certain things about which I think in a certain way.” Coictier became red with anger. “There, there, my good Coictier, let’s not get angry,” said Compère Tourangeau. “The Archdeacon is our friend. ” Coictier calmed down, grumbling in a low voice: “After all, he’s mad!” “Pasquedieu, Master Claude,” resumed Compère Tourangeau after a silence, “you’re bothering me greatly. I had two consultations to request from you, one concerning my health, the other concerning my star. ” “Sir,” replied the archdeacon, “if that’s what you think, you would have done just as well not to get out of breath on the steps of my staircase. I don’t believe in medicine. I don’t believe in astrology. ” “Truly!” said the Compère in surprise. Coictier laughed a forced laugh. “You see he’s mad,” he said in a low voice to Compère Tourangeau. ” He doesn’t believe in astrology!” “The means of imagining,” continued Dom Claude, “that each starbeam is a thread that holds to the head of a man! ” “And what do you believe then?” cried Compère Tourangeau. The archdeacon remained undecided for a moment, then he let slip a dark smile that seemed to contradict his answer: “Credo in Deum. ” “Dominum nostrum,” added Compère Tourangeau with the sign of the cross. “Amen,” said Coictier. “Reverend Master,” resumed the compère, “I am charmed in my soul to see you in such good religion. But, great scholar that you are, are you then so much so that you no longer believe in science? ” “No,” said the archdeacon, seizing Compère Tourangeau’s arm, and a flash of enthusiasm was rekindled in his dull eye, “no, I do not deny science.” I have not crawled for so long on my stomach and with my nails in the earth through the innumerable branches of the cavern without seeing, far ahead of me, at the end of the dark gallery, a light, a flame, something, the reflection no doubt of the dazzling central laboratory where the patients and the wise surprised God. “And finally,” interrupted the man from Tours, “what thing do you hold true and certain? ” “Alchemy.” Coictier exclaimed. “Pardieu, Dom Claude, alchemy has its reasons no doubt, but why blaspheme medicine and astrology? ” “Nothing, your science of man! Nothing, your science of the heavens!” said the archdeacon with empire. “That’s leading Epidaurus and Chaldea in style,” replied the doctor, sneering. “Listen, Sir Jacques. This is said in good faith. I am not the king’s physician, and his majesty did not give me the garden of Daedalus to observe the constellations there…” “Don’t get angry and listen to me.” “What truth have you drawn, I don’t say from medicine, which is too crazy a thing, but from astrology? Quote to me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon, the discoveries of the number ziruph and those of the number zephirod. ” “Will you deny,” said Coictier, “the sympathetic force of the clavicle and that cabalistics derives from it? ” “Error, Sir Jacques! None of your formulas lead to reality. While alchemy has its discoveries.” Will you dispute results like these?–Ice locked underground for a thousand years transforms into rock crystal.–Lead is the ancestor of all metals. (For gold is not a metal, gold is light.)–It takes lead only four periods of two hundred years each to pass successively from the state of lead to the state of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to silver.–Are these facts? But to believe in the clavicle, the solid line, and the stars is as ridiculous as believing, with the inhabitants of Greater Cathay, that the oriole changes into a mole and grains of wheat into fish of the cyprinus type! “I have studied hermetics,” cried Coictier, “and I affirm… ” The fiery archdeacon did not let him finish. “And I have studied medicine, astrology, and hermetics. Here alone is the truth ” (while speaking thus, he had taken from the chest a phial full of that powder we spoke of above), “here alone is the light! Hippocrates is a dream; Urania is a dream; Hermes is a thought. Gold is the sun; to make gold is to be God. That is the only science. I have plumbed medicine and astrology, I tell you! Nothingness, nothingness. The human body, darkness; the stars, darkness!” And he fell back into his armchair in a powerful and inspired attitude. Compère Tourangeau observed him in silence. Coictier forced himself to sneer, shrugged his shoulders imperceptibly, and repeated in a low voice: “A madman! ” “And,” said the man from Tours suddenly, “did you hit the magnificent goal? Did you make gold? ” “If I had,” replied the archdeacon, articulating his words slowly like a man who reflects, “the King of France would be called Claude and not Louis. ” The friend frowned. “What am I saying?” continued Dom Claude with a smile of disdain. ” What would the throne of France do me when I could rebuild the Eastern Empire! ” “Good!” said the friend. “Oh! the poor madman!” murmured Coictier. The archdeacon continued, seeming to respond only to his thoughts. “But no, I’m still crawling; I’m scraping my face and knees on the pebbles of the underground road.” I glimpse, I do not contemplate! I do not read, I spell! “And when you know how to read,” asked the friend, “will you make gold? ” “Who doubts it?” said the archdeacon. “In that case, Our Lady knows that I have great need of money, and I would like to learn to read from your books. Tell me, reverend master, is your knowledge not hostile or displeasing to Our Lady?” To this question from the friend, Dom Claude contented himself with replying with quiet haughtiness: “Whose archdeacon am I? ” “That is true, my master. Well! Would you like to initiate me? Have me spell with you. ” Claude assumed the majestic and pontifical attitude of a Samuel. “Old man, it takes longer years than you have left to undertake this journey through mysterious things. Your head is very gray!” We only come out of the cave with white hair, but one can only enter with black hair. Science knows all too well on its own how to hollow out, wither, and dry out human faces; it has no need for old age to bring it wrinkled faces. If, however, you are possessed by the desire to discipline yourself at your age and decipher the formidable alphabet of the wise, come to me, it is good, I will try. I will not tell you, poor old man, to go and visit the sepulchral chambers of the pyramids of which the ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower of Babylon, nor the immense white marble sanctuary of the Indian temple of Eklinga. I have not seen any more than you the Chaldean masonry built 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 be content 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 who are at the portal of the Sainte-Chapelle, one of whom has his hand in a vase and the other in a cloud… Here, Jacques Coictier, whom the fiery replies of the archdeacon had unseated, got back in the saddle, and interrupted him in the triumphant tone of a scholar who straightens another:– Erras, amice Claudi. The symbol is not the number. You take Orpheus for Hermes. –It is you who err, replied the archdeacon gravely. Daedalus is the foundation; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the building, it is the whole.–You will come when you wish, he continued, turning towards the man from Tours, I will show you the particles of gold remaining at the bottom of Nicolas Flamel’s crucible, and you will compare them to the gold of William of Paris. I will teach you the secret virtues of the Greek word peristera. But, before all, I will have you read one after the other the marble letters of the alphabet, the granite pages of the book. We will go from the portal of Bishop William and Saint-Jean le Rond to the Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house of Nicolas Flamel, rue Marivault, to his tomb, which is at the Saints-Innocents, to his two hospitals rue de Montmorency. I will have you read the hieroglyphs which cover the four large iron andirons of the portal of the hospital Saint-Gervais and of the rue de la Ferronnerie. We will still spell out together the facades of Saint-Côme, Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents, Saint-Martin, Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie… For a long time now, the man from Tours, however intelligent his gaze, seemed to no longer understand Dom Claude. He interrupted him. “Pasquedieu! What are your books? ” “Here is one,” said the archdeacon. And, opening the cell window, he pointed to the immense church of Notre-Dame, which, standing out against a starry sky with the black silhouette of its two towers, its stone ribs, and its monstrous rump, seemed like an enormous two-headed sphinx sitting in the middle of the city. The archdeacon contemplated the gigantic edifice in silence for some time, then, extending with a sigh his right hand toward the printed book that lay open on his table and his left hand toward Notre-Dame, and casting a sad glance from the book to the church, he said, “Alas!” “This will kill that.” Coictier, who had eagerly approached the book, could not help exclaiming, “Well, what is so formidable about this: GLOSSA IN EPISTOLAS D. PAULI. Norimbergæ, Antonius Koburger. 1474. It is not new. It is a book by Peter Lombard, the Master of Sentences. Is it because it is printed? ” “You said so,” replied Claude, who seemed absorbed in deep meditation and stood, resting his bent index finger on the folio from the famous presses of Nuremberg. Then he added these mysterious words:–Alas! alas! little things come to end of the great ones; a tooth triumphs over a sledgehammer. The Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale, the book will kill the building! The curfew of the cloister sounded at the moment when Doctor Jacques was repeating in a low voice to his companion his eternal refrain: He is mad. To which the
companion replied this time: “I think so.” It was the hour when no stranger could remain in the cloister. The two visitors withdrew. “Master,” said Compère Tourangeau, taking leave of the archdeacon, “I love scholars and great minds, and I hold you in singular esteem. Come tomorrow to the Palais des Tournelles, and ask for the Abbot of Saint-Martin de Tours.” The archdeacon returned home amazed, finally understanding what a character this fellow Tourangeau was, and remembering this passage from the cartulary of Saint-Martin de Tours: Abbas beati Martini, SCILICET REX FRANCIÆ, est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam præbendam quam habet sanctus Venantius et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii. It was said that since that time the archdeacon had frequent conferences with Louis XI, when his majesty came to Paris, and that the influence of Dom Claude overshadowed Olivier le Daim and Jacques Coictier, who, in his own way, treated the king very roughly. Chapter 25. THIS WILL KILL THAT. Our readers will forgive us for pausing for a moment to consider what could be the thought that was hidden behind these enigmatic words of the archdeacon: This will kill that. The book will kill the building. In our view, this thought had two faces. It was first a priest’s thought. It was the terror of the priesthood before a new agent, the printing press. It was the terror and dazzlement of the man in the sanctuary before Gutenberg’s luminous press. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken word and the written word, alarmed by the printed word; something like the stupor of a sparrow who sees the angel Legion open his six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the rustling and swarming of emancipated humanity, who sees in the future intelligence undermining faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking Rome. The prognosis of the philosopher who sees human thought, volatilized by the press, evaporating from the theocratic container. Terror of the soldier who examines the brazen ram and says: The tower will crumble. This meant that one power would succeed another power. This meant: The press will kill the church. But beneath this thought, the first and the simplest without doubt, there was in our opinion another, newer one, a corollary of the first less easy to perceive and easier to contest, a view just as philosophical, no longer of the priest only, but of the scholar and the artist. It was a presentiment that human thought, by changing form, would change its mode of expression; that the capital idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same material and in the same way; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, would give way to the book of paper, even more solid and more durable. In this respect, the archdeacon’s vague formula had a second meaning; it signified that one art would dethrone another art. It meant: Printing will kill architecture. Indeed, from the origin of things up to and including the fifteenth century of the Christian era, architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his various states of development, whether as force or as intelligence. When the memory of the first races felt overloaded, when the baggage of memories of the human race became so heavy and so confused that speech, naked and flying, risked losing some along the way, they were transcribed on the ground in the most visible, most durable and most natural way at the same time. Each tradition was sealed under a monument. The first monuments were simple pieces of rock that iron had not touched, said Moses. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. A stone was planted upright, and it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and on each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column. This was what the first races did, everywhere, at the same time, on the surface of the entire world. We find the standing stone of the Celts in the Siberia of Asia, in the pampas of America. Later, words were made. Stone was superimposed on stone, these granite syllables were coupled, the verb tried some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words. Some, the tumulus especially, are proper nouns. Sometimes even, when one had a lot of stones and a vast beach, one wrote a sentence. The immense pile of stones at Karnak is already a whole formula. Finally, books were made. Traditions had given birth to symbols, beneath which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree beneath its foliage; all these symbols, in which humanity had faith, were growing, multiplying, crossing, becoming more and more complicated; the first monuments were no longer sufficient to contain them; they were overflowing with them on all sides; these monuments barely expressed the primitive tradition, like them simple, naked, and lying on the ground. The symbol needed to blossom in the building. Architecture then developed with human thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads and a thousand arms, and fixed in an eternal, visible, palpable form, all this floating symbol. While Daedalus, who is strength, measured, while Orpheus, who is intelligence, sang, the pillar which is a letter, the arch which is a syllable, the pyramid which is a word, set in motion at once by a law of geometry and by a law of poetry, grouped themselves, combined themselves, amalgamated themselves, descended, rose, juxtaposed themselves on the ground, and rose in tiers in the sky, until they had written, under the dictation of the general idea of an epoch, these marvelous books which were also marvelous buildings: the pagoda of Eklinga, the Rhamseion of Egypt, the temple of Solomon. The mother idea, the word, was not only at the bottom of all these buildings, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon, for example, was not simply the binding of the holy book, it was the holy book itself. On each of its concentric enclosures, the priests could read the word translated and manifested to the eyes, and they thus followed its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary until they grasped it in its last tabernacle, in its most concrete form, which was still architecture, the ark. Thus the word was enclosed in the building, but its image was on its envelope like the human figure on the coffin of a mummy. And not only the form of the buildings, but also the location they chose, revealed the thought they represented. According to whether the symbol to be expressed was graceful or somber, Greece crowned its mountains with a temple harmonious to the eye, India disemboweled its mountains to chisel these misshapen subterranean pagodas carried 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 writing of the human race. And this is so true that not only every religious symbol, but also every human thought, has its page in this immense book and its monument. Every civilization begins with theocracy and ends with democracy. This law of liberty succeeding unity is written in architecture. For, let us insist on this point, we must not believe that Masonry is only powerful in building the temple, in expressing the myth and the sacerdotal symbolism, in transcribing in hieroglyphs on its pages of stone the mysterious tablets of the law. If this were so, as happens in every human society a moment when the sacred symbol wears away and is obliterated by free thought, when man eludes the priest, when the excrescence of philosophies and systems eats away at the face of religion, architecture could not reproduce this new state of the human spirit, its pages, loaded on the front, would be empty on the back, its work would be truncated, its book would be incomplete. But no. Let us take the Middle Ages as an example, where we see more clearly because it is closer to us. During its first period, while theocracy was organizing Europe, while the Vatican was rallying and reclassifying around itself the elements of a Rome made with the Rome that lay collapsed around the Capitol, while Christianity was going off searching in the ruins of the previous civilization all the levels of society, and rebuilding with its ruins a new hierarchical universe of which the priesthood was the keystone, we hear first welling up in this chaos, then we see little by little under the breath of Christianity, under the hand of the barbarians, rising from the rubble of dead Greek and Roman architecture, this mysterious Romanesque architecture, sister of the theocratic masonry of Egypt and India, unalterable emblem of pure Catholicism, immutable hieroglyph of papal unity. All the thought of the time was written in fact in this dark Romanesque style. Everywhere one feels authority, unity, the impenetrable, the absolute, Gregory VII; everywhere the priest, never the man; everywhere the caste, never the people. But the Crusades arrive. It is a great popular movement, and every great popular movement, whatever its cause and goal, always releases from its last precipitate the spirit of liberty. New things will emerge. Here begins the stormy period of peasant revolts, pragueries, and leagues. Authority is shaken, unity bifurcates. Feudalism demands to share with the theocracy, while waiting for the people who will inevitably arrive and who will, as always, take the lion’s share. Quia nominor leo. The lordship thus breaks through under the priesthood, the commune under the lordship. The face of Europe is changed. Well! the face of architecture is changed too. Like civilization, it has turned the page, and the new spirit of the times finds it ready to write under its dictation. It returned from the Crusades with the ogive, like nations with liberty. So, while Rome gradually dismembers itself, Romanesque architecture dies. The hieroglyph deserts the cathedral and goes to emblazon the keep to give prestige to feudalism. The cathedral itself, this building once so dogmatic, now invaded by the bourgeoisie, by the commune, by liberty, escapes the priest and falls into the power of the artist. The artist builds it as he pleases. Goodbye to mystery, myth, the law. Here comes fantasy and caprice. Provided the priest has his basilica and his altar, he has nothing to say. The four walls belong to the artist. The architectural book no longer belongs to the priesthood, to religion, to Rome; it belongs to the imagination, to poetry, to the people. Hence the rapid and innumerable transformations of this architecture, which is only three centuries old, so striking after the stagnant immobility of Romanesque architecture, which is six or seven. Art, however, advances with giant steps. Popular genius and originality do the work that the bishops did. Each race writes its line in the book as it passes; it erases the old Romanesque hieroglyphs on the frontispieces of cathedrals, and it is at most if one still sees the dogma breaking through here and there under the new symbol that it places there. The drapery popular barely hints at the religious bones. We cannot get an idea of the licenses that architects took at that time, even towards the church. They are capitals knitted with monks and nuns shamefully coupled, as in the Hall of Chimneys of the Palais de Justice in Paris. It is the adventure of Noah sculpted in full , as under the great portal of Bourges. It is a bacchic monk with donkey ears and a glass in his hand laughing in the face of an entire community, as on the washbasin of the Abbey of Bocherville. There existed at that time, for thought written in stone, a privilege entirely comparable to our current freedom of the press. It is the freedom of architecture. This freedom goes very far. Sometimes a portal, a facade, an entire church presents a symbolic meaning absolutely foreign to worship, or even hostile to the church. From the thirteenth century, William of Paris, and Nicolas Flamel in the fifteenth, wrote these seditious pages. Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was a whole church of opposition. Thought then was free only in this way; thus it was written entirely only on these books that were called edifices. In this edifice form, it would have seen itself burned in the public square by the executioner’s hand in manuscript form, if it had been imprudent enough to risk it; the thought of the church portal would have witnessed the torture of the thought of the book. Also, having only this path, masonry, to make itself known, it rushed there from all sides. Hence the immense quantity of cathedrals that 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 at the same point, architecture. In this way, under the pretext of building churches to God, art developed in magnificent proportions. Then, whoever was born a poet became an architect. The genius scattered among the masses, compressed on all sides under feudalism as under a testudo of brazen shields, finding outlet only in architecture, emerged through this art, and its Iliads took the form of cathedrals. All the other arts obeyed and were disciplined under architecture. They were the workers of the great work. The architect, the poet, the master, totalized in his person the sculpture that chiseled his facades, the painting that illuminated his stained-glass windows, the music that set his bell in motion and blew into his organs. Even poor poetry, strictly speaking, that which persisted in vegetating in manuscripts, was obliged, in order to be something, to come and frame itself in the building in the form of a hymn or prose; the same role, after all, that the tragedies of Aeschylus had played in the priestly festivals of Greece, Genesis in the temple of Solomon. Thus, until Gutenberg, architecture was the principal writing, the universal writing. This 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 succeeding an architecture of caste that we have just observed in the Middle Ages, is reproduced with every analogous movement in human intelligence in the other great periods of history. Thus, to state here only summarily a law which would require to be developed in volumes, in the High East, cradle of primitive times, after Hindu architecture, Phoenician architecture, this opulent mother of Arab architecture; in antiquity, after Egyptian architecture, of which the Etruscan style and the Cyclopean monuments are only a variety, Greek architecture, of which the Roman style is only an overloaded extension of the Carthaginian dome; in modern times, after Romanesque architecture, Gothic architecture. And by doubling these three series, we will find in the three elder sisters, Hindu 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 the diversity of form inherent in their nature, the same meaning also, that is to say liberty, the people, man. Whether he is called Brahmin, Magus or Pope, in Hindu, Egyptian or Romanesque masonry , we always feel the priest, nothing but the priest. It is not the same in the architectures of the people. They are richer and less holy. In the Phoenician, we feel the merchant; in the Greek, the republican; in the Gothic, the bourgeois. The general characteristics of all theocratic architecture are immutability, horror of progress, the conservation of traditional lines, the consecration of primitive types, the constant bending of all forms of man and nature to the incomprehensible whims of the symbol. These are dark books that only the initiated know how to decipher. Moreover, every form, even every deformity, has a meaning that makes it inviolable. Do not ask Hindu, Egyptian, or Roman masonry to reform its design or improve its statuary. Any improvement is impiety to them. In these architectures, it seems that the rigidity of dogma has spread over the stone like a second petrification. The general characteristics of popular masonry, on the contrary , are variety, progress, originality, opulence, perpetual movement. They are already sufficiently detached from religion to think of their beauty, to care for it, to constantly correct their adornment of statues or arabesques. They are of the century. They have something human that they constantly mix with the divine symbol under which they are still produced. Hence buildings penetrable to every soul, to every intelligence, to every imagination, still symbolic, but easy to understand like nature. Between theocratic architecture and this, there is the difference between a sacred language and a vulgar language, from the hieroglyph to art, from Solomon to Phidias. If we summarize what we have indicated so far very summarily, neglecting a thousand proofs and also a thousand objections of detail, we are led to this: that architecture was until the fifteenth century the principal register of humanity; that in this interval there did not appear in the world a slightly complicated thought that did not become a building; that every popular idea like every religious law had its monuments; that the human race has finally thought nothing important that it has not written in stone. And why? It is because all thought, whether religious or philosophical, is interested in perpetuating itself, it is because the idea that has stirred one generation wants to stir others, and leave a trace. Now what precarious immortality that of the manuscript! What a book a building is, much more solid, durable and resistant! To destroy the written word, a torch and a Turk are enough. To demolish the constructed word, a social revolution is needed, an earthly revolution. The barbarians passed over the Colosseum, the flood perhaps over the Pyramids. In the fifteenth century everything changes. Human thought discovers a means of perpetuating itself not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but even simpler and easier. Architecture is dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus will be succeeded by the lead letters of Gutenberg. The book will kill the building. The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity. which is totally renewed, it is human thought which sheds one form and puts on another, it is the complete and definitive change of skin of this symbolic serpent which, since Adam, has represented intelligence. In the form of printing, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, elusive, indestructible. It mixes with the air. In the time of architecture, it became a mountain and powerfully seized a century and a place. Now it becomes a flock of birds, scatters to the four winds, and occupies at once all points of the air and space. We repeat, who does not see that in this way it is much more indelible? From being solid, it becomes perennial. It passes from duration to immortality. One can demolish a mass, how can one extirpate ubiquity? If a flood comes, the mountain will have long since disappeared beneath the waves, and the birds will still be flying; and if a single ark floats on the surface of the cataclysm, they will land there, float with it, witness with it the receding of the waters, and the new world which will emerge from this chaos will see, upon awakening, hovering above it, winged and alive, the thought of the submerged world. And when we observe that this mode of expression is not only the most conservative, but also the simplest, the most convenient, the most practicable for all, when we consider that it does not drag a heavy baggage and does not move a heavy apparatus, when we compare the thought obliged to translate itself into a building to put into motion four or five other arts and tons of gold, a whole mountain of stones, a whole forest of frames, a whole people of workers, when we compare it to the thought which becomes a book, and for which a little paper, a little ink and a pen are enough, how can we be surprised that human intelligence has left architecture for printing? Abruptly cut off the primitive bed of a river with a canal dug below its level, and the river will desert its bed. Also see how, from the discovery of printing, architecture gradually dries up, atrophies and becomes bare. How one feels that the water is falling, that the sap is leaving, that the thought of the times and of the peoples is withdrawing from it! The cooling is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century, the press is still too weak, and at most draws from the powerful architecture a superabundance of life. But from the sixteenth century, the sickness of architecture is visible; it no longer essentially expresses society; it miserably becomes classical art; from Gallic, European, indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman, from true and modern, pseudo-antique. It is this decadence that we call the Renaissance. Magnificent decadence, however, because the old Gothic genius, this sun setting behind the gigantic press of Mainz, still penetrates for a while with its last rays all this hybrid heap of Latin arcades and Corinthian colonnades. It is this setting sun that we take for a dawn. However, from the moment when architecture is no longer just an art like any other, from the moment it is no longer the total art, the sovereign art, the tyrannical art, it no longer has the strength to hold back the other arts. They therefore emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and go their separate ways. Each of them gains from this divorce. Isolation increases everything. Sculpture becomes statuary, imagery becomes painting, the canon becomes music. It is like an empire that dismembers itself at the death of its Alexander and whose provinces become kingdoms. Hence Raphael, Michelangelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, these splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century. At the same time as the arts, thought is emancipated on all sides. The heretics of the Middle Ages had already made large cuts in Catholicism. The sixteenth century breaks religious unity. Before printing, the reform would have been only a schism, printing makes it a revolution. Take away the press, heresy is enervated. Whether fatal or providential, Gutenberg is the precursor of Luther. However, when the sun of the Middle Ages has completely set, when the Gothic genius has forever faded from the horizon of art, architecture will tarnish, fade, fade more and more. The printed book, this gnawing worm of the building, sucks it and devours it. It strips itself, it sheds its leaves, it visibly loses weight. It is mean, it is poor, it is worthless. 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 abandons it, it calls for maneuvers in the absence of artists. Glass replaces stained-glass. The stonemason succeeds the sculptor. Farewell to all sap, all originality, all life, all intelligence. It drags itself along, a pitiful beggar from workshop to workshop, from copy to copy. Michelangelo, who no doubt felt it dying since the sixteenth century, had one last idea, an idea of despair. This titan of art had piled the Pantheon on top of the Parthenon, and built Saint Peter’s in Rome. A great work that deserved to remain unique, the last originality of architecture, the signature of a giant artist at the bottom of the colossal register of stone that was closing. With Michelangelo dead, what does this miserable architecture do that survived itself in the state of a specter and a shadow? It takes Saint Peter’s in Rome, and copies it, and parodies it. It is a mania. It is a pity. Every century has its Saint Peter’s in Rome; in the seventeenth century the Val-de-Grâce, in the eighteenth Sainte-Geneviève. Every country has its Saint-Pierre in Rome. London has its own. Petersburg has its own. Paris has two or three. An insignificant testament, the last drivel of a great, decrepit art that reverts to childhood before dying. If, instead of characteristic monuments like those we have just spoken of, we examine the general aspect of art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we notice the same phenomena of decline and ethiosis. From the time of Francis II, the architectural form of the building fades more and more and lets the geometric form stand out, like the bony framework of an emaciated patient. The beautiful lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of the geometer. A building is no longer a building, it is a polyhedron. Architecture, however, struggles to hide this nakedness. Here is the Greek pediment which is inscribed in the Roman pediment, and vice versa. It is always the Pantheon in the Parthenon, Saint Peter’s in Rome. Here are the brick houses of Henri IV with stone corners; the Place Royale, the Place Dauphine. Here are the churches of Louis XIII, heavy, squat, low, hunched over, laden with a dome like a hump. Here is the Mazarine architecture, the bad Italian pasticcio of the Four Nations. Here are the palaces of Louis XIV, long courtiers’ barracks, stiff, icy, boring. Here finally is Louis XV, with the chicory and the vermicelli, and all the warts and all the fungus which disfigure this old , decayed, toothless, and coquettish architecture. From François II to Louis XV, the evil grew in geometric progression. Art is now nothing but skin and bones. It is dying miserably. Meanwhile, what becomes of printing? All this life that is leaving architecture is coming to it. As architecture declines, printing swells and grows. This capital of strength that human thought spent on buildings, it now spends on books. So, from the sixteenth century onwards, the press, having grown to the level of declining architecture, struggles with it and kills it. In the seventeenth century, it is already sovereign enough, triumphant enough, sufficiently established in its victory to give the world the celebration of a great century. literary. In the eighteenth century, long rested at the court of Louis XIV, it seized Luther’s old sword, Voltaire as its weapon, and rushed tumultuously to attack that old Europe whose architectural expression it had already killed. By the time the eighteenth century was ending, it had destroyed everything. In the nineteenth, it was going to rebuild. Now, we ask now, which of the two arts has truly represented human thought for three centuries? Which translates it? Which expresses, not only its literary and scholastic manias, but its vast, profound, universal movement? Which is constantly superimposed, without break or gap, on the human race, which marches, a thousand-footed monster? Architecture or printing? Printing. Let there be no mistake, architecture is dead, dead beyond return, killed by the printed book, killed because it lasts less, killed because it costs more. Every cathedral is a billion. Let us now imagine what an outlay would be required to rewrite the architectural book; to make thousands of buildings swarm once again on the ground; to return to those times when the multitude of monuments was such that, according to an eyewitness, one would have said that the world, shaking itself, had thrown off its old clothes to cover itself with a white garment of churches. Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, candidam ecclesiarum vestem indueret. (GLABER RADULPHUS.) A book is so soon written, costs so little, and can go so far! How can we be surprised that all human thought flows down this slope? This is not to say that architecture will not still have here and there a beautiful monument, an isolated masterpiece. We may still have from time to time, under the reign of printing, a column made, I suppose, by an entire army, with amalgamated cannons, just as we had, under the reign of architecture, Iliads and Romanceros, Mahabâhratas and Niebelungen, made by an entire people with rhapsodies piled up and melted together. The great accident of a genius architect may occur in the twentieth century, like that of Dante in the thirteenth. But architecture will no longer be the social art, the collective art, the dominant art. The great poem, the great edifice, the great work of humanity will no longer be built, it will be printed. And henceforth, if architecture rises accidentally, it will no longer be mistress. It will submit to the law of literature, which formerly received it from it. The respective positions of the two arts will be reversed. It is certain that in the architectural age, poems, rare, it is true, resemble monuments. In India, Vyasa is dense, strange, impenetrable like a pagoda. In the Egyptian East, poetry has, like buildings, the grandeur and tranquility of lines; in ancient Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, Catholic majesty, popular naivety, the rich and luxuriant vegetation of an age 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 summarize what we have said so far in a necessarily incomplete and truncated way, the human race has two books, two registers, two testaments, masonry and printing, the stone Bible and the paper Bible. Without doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles, so widely opened in the centuries, one is permitted to regret the visible majesty of the granite writing, these gigantic alphabets formulated in colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, these kinds of human mountains which cover the world and the past, from the pyramid to the bell tower, from Cheops to Strasbourg. One must reread the past on these marble pages. One must admire and endlessly re-leaf through the book written by architecture; but we must not deny the grandeur of the edifice that printing in turn raises. This edifice is colossal. I don’t know which statistician has calculated that by superimposing one on top of the other all the volumes that have come off the press since Gutenberg we would fill the gap from the earth to the moon; but it is not of this sort of grandeur that we want to speak. However, when we seek to gather in our thoughts a total image of all the products of printing up to the present day, does this whole not appear to us as an immense construction, supported by the entire world, on which humanity works tirelessly, and whose monstrous head is lost in the deep mists of the future? It is the anthill of intelligences. It is the hive where all imaginations, these golden bees, arrive with their honey. The edifice has a thousand floors. Here and there, one sees opening onto its ramps the dark caverns of science, intersecting in its entrails. Everywhere on its surface, art makes its arabesques, its rosettes, and its lacework luxurious to the eye. There, each individual work, however capricious and isolated it may seem, has its place and its protrusion. Harmony results from the whole. From Shakespeare’s cathedral to Byron’s mosque, a thousand pinnacles are jumbled together on this metropolis of universal thought. At its base, some ancient titles of humanity have been rewritten, which architecture had not recorded. To the left of the entrance, the old white marble bas-relief of Homer has been sealed; to the right, the polyglot Bible raises its seven heads. The hydra of the Romancero bristles further on, and a few other hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Niebelungen. Moreover, the prodigious edifice remains unfinished. The press, this giant machine, which tirelessly pumps all the intellectual sap of society, incessantly vomits new materials for its work. The entire human race is on the scaffolding. Every mind is a mason. The humblest plugs his hole or adds his stone. The stubborn Breton woman brings his basket of plaster. Every day a new foundation 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. Certainly, this too is a construction which grows and piles up in endless spirals; here too there is confusion of languages, incessant activity, tireless labor, relentless competition of all humanity, refuge promised to intelligence against a new deluge, against a submersion of barbarians. It is the second Tower of Babel of the human race. BOOK SIX Chapter 26. AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRATURE. He was a very fortunate personage, in the year of grace 1482, that noble man Robert d’Estouteville, knight, lord of Beyne, baron of Yvri and Saint-Andry en la Marche, councilor and chamberlain of 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 year of the comet[7], this fine office of provost of Paris, which was considered more of a lordship than an office, dignitas, says Joannes Lœmnœus, quæ cum non exigua potestate politiam concernante, atque prærogativis multis et juribus conjuncta est. The thing was marvelous in 82 that a gentleman having commission from the king and whose letters of institution dated back to the time of the marriage of the natural daughter of Louis XI with Monsieur the bastard of Bourbon. On the same day that Robert d’Estouteville had replaced Jacques de Villiers in the provostship of Paris, Master Jehan Dauvet replaced Messire Hélye 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 disappointed Pierre Puy with the position of master of ordinary requests of the king’s household. Now, over how many heads had the presidency, the chancellery and the mastery passed since Robert d’Estouteville had the provostship of Paris! It had been given to him for safekeeping, the letters patent said; and certainly, he kept it well. He had clung to it, he had incorporated himself into it, he had identified with it so well, that he had escaped that fury of change which possessed Louis XI, a defiant, teasing and hard-working king, who was keen to maintain, by institutions and frequent revocations, the elasticity of his power. What is more, the brave knight had obtained for his son the survival of his office, and it was already two years since the name of the nobleman Jacques d’Estouteville, squire, appeared next to his own at the head of the register of the ordinary of the provostship of Paris. Rare, certainly, and a signal favor! It is true that Robert d’Estouteville was a good soldier, that he had loyally raised the pennant against the League of the Public Good, and that he had offered the queen a very marvelous stag in preserves on the day of his entry into Paris in 14… He also had the good friendship of Messire Tristan l’Hermite, provost of the marshals of the king’s household. It was therefore a very sweet and pleasant existence that of Messire Robert. First, very good wages, to which were attached and hung, like more grapes on his vine, the income from the civil and criminal registry of the provostship, plus the civil and criminal income from the audiences of Embas du Châtelet, not to mention some small toll at the bridge of Mantes and Corbeil, and the profits from the tru on the esgrin of Paris, on the molders of logs and the measurers of salt. Add to this the pleasure of displaying in the city’s cavalcades and of making stand out on the half-parted red and tanned robes of the aldermen and quartermasters his beautiful war habit that you can still admire today sculpted on his tomb, at the Abbey of Valmont in Normandy, and his dented morion at Montlhéry. And then, was it nothing to have complete supremacy over the sergeants of the dozen, the concierge and watch of the Châtelet, the two auditors of the Châtelet, auditores Castelleti, the sixteen commissioners of the sixteen districts, the jailer of the Châtelet, the four fiefed sergeants, the one hundred and twenty mounted sergeants, the one hundred and twenty rod sergeants, the knight of the watch with his watch, his under-watch, his counter-watch and his rear-watch? Was it nothing to exercise high and low justice, the right to turn, to hang and to drag, not to mention the minor jurisdiction in the first instance (in prima instantia, as the charters say) over this viscounty of Paris, so gloriously appanaged by seven noble bailiwicks? Can one imagine anything more suave than to render judgments and rulings, as Sir Robert d’Estouteville did daily, in the Grand-Châtelet, under the broad and crushed ogives of Philippe-Auguste? and to go, as was his custom every evening, to this charming house located on the rue Galilée, in the purple of the royal palace, which he held from his wife, Madame Ambroise de Loré, to rest from the fatigue of having sent some poor devil to spend the night on his side in this little lodge on the rue de l’Escorcherie, in which the provosts and aldermen of Paris wanted to make their prison; containing it eleven feet long, seven feet and four inches wide and eleven feet high[8]? [7] This comet, against which Pope Calixtus, uncle of Borgia, ordered public prayers, is the same one that will reappear in 1835. [8] Accounts of the domain, 1383. And not only did Sir Robert d’Estouteville have his own particular justice as provost and viscount of Paris, but he also had a share, a glance and a bite in the great justice of the king. There was not a head a little high that had not passed through his hands before to fall to the executioner. It was he who had been fetched from the Bastille Saint-Antoine, to take him to Les Halles, M. de Nemours; to take him to Grève, M. de Saint-Pol, who balked and protested, to the great joy of M. le Provost, who did not like M. le Constable. There, certainly, was more than enough to make a happy and illustrious life, and to deserve one day a notable page in this interesting history of the provosts of Paris, where we learn that Oudard de Villeneuve had a house on Rue des Boucheries, that Guillaume de Hangast bought the Grande and Petite Savoie, that Guillaume Thiboust gave to the nuns of Sainte-Geneviève his houses on Rue Clopin, that Hugues Aubriot lived at the Hôtel du Porc-épic, and other domestic facts. However, with so many reasons to take life with patience and joy, Sir Robert d’Estouteville had woken up on the morning of January 7, 1482, very gruff and in a foul mood. Where did this mood come from? He himself could not have said. Was it that the sky was gray? That the buckle of his old Montlhéry belt was loose and cinched his provost’s plumpness too military-like? That he had seen ribalds passing in the street under his window , taunting him, marching four in a band, doublet without shirt, bottomless hat , knapsack and bottle at his side? Was it a vague presentiment of the three hundred and seventy livres, sixteen sols, eight deniers that the future King Charles VIII would, the following year, deduct from the provost’s revenues? The reader can choose; As for us, we would be inclined to believe quite simply that he was in a bad mood, because he was in a bad mood. Besides, it was the day after a festival, a boring day for everyone , and especially for the magistrate responsible for sweeping away all the rubbish, literally and figuratively, that a festival makes in Paris. And then, he had to hold a session at the Grand-Châtelet. Now we have noticed that judges generally arrange things so that their day of hearing is also their day of mood, in order to always have someone on whom to conveniently unload it, by the king, the law and justice. However, the hearing had begun without him. His lieutenants in civil, criminal and private matters were doing his work, according to custom; and, from eight o’clock in the morning, a few dozen bourgeois men and women, crowded and crowded into a dark corner of the auditorium of Embas du Châtelet, between a strong oak barrier and the wall, watched with bliss the varied and joyful spectacle of civil and criminal justice, rendered by Maître Florian Barbedienne, auditor at the Châtelet, lieutenant of the provost, a little pell-mell and completely at random. The room was small, low, and vaulted. A fleur-de-lis table was at the back, with a large armchair of carved oak, which belonged to the provost and was empty, and a stool on the left for the auditor, Maître Florian. Below stood the clerk, scribbling. Opposite were the people; and in front of the door, and in front of the table, a number of sergeants of the provost court, in purple chaps with white crosses. Two sergeants of the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, dressed in their All Saints’ Day jackets, half red and half blue, stood sentry before a low , closed door, which could be seen at the back behind the table. A single pointed window, narrowly set in the thick wall, lit with a pale January ray two grotesque figures, the capricious stone demon sculpted in the corbel in the keystone, and the judge seated at the back of the room on the fleurs-de-lis. Indeed, imagine yourself at the provost’s table, between two bundles of lawsuits, crouching on his elbows, his foot on the tail of his plain brown cloth robe, his face in his white lambskin, from which his eyebrows seemed detached, red, surly, winking , bearing with majesty the fat of his cheeks, which joined under his chin, Maître Florian Barbedienne, auditor at the Châtelet. Now the auditor was deaf. A slight defect for an auditor. Maître Florian nonetheless judged without appeal and very congruously. It is certain that it is enough for a judge to appear to be listening; and the venerable auditor fulfilled this condition all the better, the only essential one in good justice, as his attention could not be distracted by any noise. Moreover, he had in the audience a pitiless controller of his actions in the person of our friend Jehan Frollo du Moulin, that little schoolboy of yesterday, that pedestrian whom one was always sure to meet everywhere in Paris, except in front of the professors’ pulpit. “Well,” he said in a low voice to his companion Robin Poussepain, who was sniggering beside him, while he commented on the scenes unfolding before their eyes, “there is Jehanneton du Buisson.” The beautiful daughter of the hothead at the Marché-Neuf!–Upon my soul, he condemns her, the old man! So he has no more eyes than ears. Fifteen sols, four Parisian deniers, for having carried two paternosters! That’s a bit much. Lex duri carminis.–Who is that? Robin Chief-de-Ville, innkeeper.– For having been passed and received master of said trade?–That’s his entry denier.–Hey! Two gentlemen among these scoundrels! Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly. Two squires, Corpus Christi! Ah! They played dice. When will I see our rector here? A hundred Parisian livres fine to the king! Barbedienne knocks like a deaf man,–that he is!–I want to be my brother the archdeacon, if that prevents me from playing; to play by day, to play by night, to live at gambling, to die at gambling, and to play my soul after my shirt!–Holy Virgin, how many girls! One after the other, my sheep! Ambroise Lécuyère! Isabeau la Paynette! Bérarde Gironin! I know them all, by God! Fine! Fine! That will teach you to wear golden belts! Ten sols Parisiens! Coquettes!–Oh! the old judge’s snout, deaf and imbecile! oh! Florian the oaf! oh! Barbedienne the oaf! There he is at the table! He eats the litigant, he eats the trial, he eats, he chews, he gorges himself, he fills himself. Fines, wrecks, taxes, expenses, loyal costs, salaries, damages, hell, prison and jail and stocks with costs, are Christmas camichons and Saint John’s marzipans to him! Look at him, the pig!–Come on! Good! Another woman in love! Thibaud-la-Thibaude, no more, no less!–For coming out of the Rue Glatigny!–Who is this son? Gieffroy Mabonne, gendarme, crane-handler. He grumbled the Father’s name.–Fine, Thibaude! Fine , Gieffroy! Fine them both! The deaf old man! He must have mixed up the two cases! Ten to one, let him make the girl pay for the oath and the gendarme for love!–Watch out, Robin Poussepain! What are they going to bring in? There are plenty of sergeants! By Jupiter! All the greyhounds in the pack are there. It must be the big piece of the hunt. A wild boar.–It’s one, Robin! It’s one.– And a fine one at that!–Hercle! This is our prince of yesterday, our pope of fools, our bell ringer, our one-eyed man, our hunchback, our grimace! This is Quasimodo! It was nothing less. It was Quasimodo, strapped, bound, tied, garroted, and under heavy guard. The squad of sergeants surrounding him was assisted by the knight of the watch himself, embroidered with the arms of France on his chest and the arms of the city on his back. There was nothing else in Quasimodo, apart from his deformity, that could justify this apparatus of halberds and arquebuses. He was somber, silent, and tranquil. His single eye barely cast a sly and angry glance from time to time at the bonds that burdened him. He cast this same look around him, but so dull and so sleepy that the women only pointed at him to laugh. However, Master Florian the auditor carefully leafed through the file. of the complaint filed against Quasimodo, which the clerk presented to him, and, having glanced at it, seemed to collect himself for a moment. Thanks to this precaution which he always took care to take when proceeding with an interrogation, he knew in advance the names, qualities, and offenses of the accused, made planned replies to planned answers, and managed to extricate himself from all the twists and turns of the interrogation without giving too much away his deafness. The trial file was for him the blind man’s dog. If it happened by chance that his infirmity betrayed itself here and there by some incoherent apostrophe or some unintelligible question, this was considered profound by some, and imbecility by others. In both cases, the honor of the judiciary received no attack; for it is still better for a judge to be reputed imbecile or profound than deaf. He therefore took great care to conceal his deafness from everyone, and he usually succeeded so well that he had managed to deceive himself. Which, moreover, is easier than one might think. All hunchbacks hold their heads high, all stutterers hold forth, all deaf people speak quietly. As for him, he believed at most that his ear was a little rebellious. It was the only concession he made on this point to public opinion , in his moments of frankness and self-examination. Having thus thoroughly ruminated on the Quasimodo affair, he threw back his head and half-closed his eyes, for greater majesty and impartiality, so that he was at that moment both deaf and blind. A double condition without which there is no perfect judge. It was in this masterly attitude that he began the interrogation. “Your name?” Now here is a case which had not been provided for by the law, that in which a deaf person would have to question a deaf person. Quasimodo, who had no warning of the question addressed to him, continued to look fixedly at the judge and did not answer. The judge, deaf and who had no warning of the accused’s deafness, thought that he had answered, as all accused persons generally did, and continued with his mechanical and stupid aplomb. “That is good. Your age?” Quasimodo did not answer this question further. The judge thought it satisfied, and continued. “Now, your condition? ” Still the same silence. The audience, however, began to whisper and look at each other. “That is enough,” resumed the imperturbable auditor, when he supposed that the accused had made his third answer. ” You are accused, before us: first, of nocturnal disturbance; secondly, of dishonest assault on the person of a mad woman, in præjudicium meretricis; thirdly, of rebellion and disloyalty to the archers of the ordinance of the king, our lord. Explain yourself on all these points.–Clerk, have you written down what the accused has said so far? At this unfortunate question, a burst of laughter rose from the registry to the audience, so violent, so mad, so contagious, so universal, that the two deaf men were forced to notice it. Quasimodo turned around, shrugging his hump with disdain, while Master Florian, astonished like him, and supposing that the laughter of the spectators had been provoked by some irreverent reply from the accused, made visible to him by this shrug of the shoulders, apostrophized him indignantly. – You have made there, you rascal, an answer that deserves the hart! Do you know who you’re talking to? This outburst was not likely to stop the explosion of general gaiety . It seemed to everyone so heterogeneous and so reticent that the laughter even reached the sergeants of the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, a sort of valets of spades for whom stupidity was a uniform. Quasimodo alone remained serious, for the good reason that he understood nothing of what was happening around him. The judge, more and more irritated, felt it his duty to continue in the same tone, hoping thereby to strike the accused with a terror that would react on the audience and bring them back to respect. –That is to say, perverse and rapine master that you are, that you allow yourself to fail the auditor of the Châtelet, the magistrate appointed to the popular police of Paris, responsible for investigating crimes, offenses and bad habits, for controlling all trades and prohibiting monopoly, for maintaining the paving stones, for preventing the re-scrapers of chickens, poultry and wildfowl, for measuring the log and other kinds of wood, for purging the city of mud and the air of contagious diseases, for continually attending to public affairs, in a word, without wages or hope of salary! Do you know that my name is Florian Barbedienne, the provost’s own lieutenant, and also commissioner, investigator, checker, and examiner with equal power in the provostship, bailiwick, conservation, and presidial court!… There is no reason for a deaf man speaking to a deaf man to stop. God knows where and when Master Florian would have landed, thus launched at full speed into high eloquence, if the low door at the back had not suddenly opened and given way to the provost himself . On his entry, Master Florian did not stop short, but turning around on his heels, and abruptly pointing at the provost the harangue with which he had been blasting Quasimodo the moment before: – My Lord, he said, I request whatever punishment you please against the accused here present, for a grave and magnificent breach of justice. And he sat down again, all out of breath, wiping away large drops of sweat that fell from his forehead and soaked like tears the parchments spread out before him. Messire Robert d’Estouteville frowned and made such an imperious and significant gesture of attention to Quasimodo that the deaf man understood something of it. The provost addressed him severely: “What have you done to be here, you scoundrel?” The poor devil, supposing that the provost was asking his name, broke the silence he usually maintained, and replied in a hoarse and guttural voice: “Quasimodo.” The answer coincided so little with the question that the mad laughter began to circulate again, and Messire Robert cried out, red with anger: “Are you also making fun of me, you dastardly rascal?” “Bell ringer at Notre-Dame,” replied Quasimodo, believing that he was to explain to the judge who he was. “Bell ringer!” resumed the provost, who had woken up that morning in a bad enough mood, as we have said, that his fury did not need to be stirred up by such strange replies. “Bell ringer ! I will have a peal of houssines rung on your back through the crossroads of Paris. Do you hear, rascal? ” “If it is my age you want to know,” said Quasimodo, “I believe I will be twenty on Saint-Martin’s Day. ” This time it was too much; the provost could not resist. “Ah! You are mocking the provostship, you wretch! Gentlemen of the sergeants, you will take this rascal to the pillory at La Grève, you will beat him and turn him for an hour.” He will pay me, tête-Dieu! and I want a shout of this judgment to be made, with the assistance of four trumpet-jurors, in the seven castellanies of the viscounty of Paris. The clerk immediately began to write the judgment. “Ventre-Dieu! That is well judged!” cried the little schoolboy Jehan Frollo du Moulin from his corner. The provost turned and fixed his sparkling eyes on Quasimodo again. “I think the rascal said ventre-Dieu! Clerk, add twelve deniers parisis as a fine for the oath, and the factory of Saint-Eustache will have half. I have a particular devotion to Saint-Eustache.” In a few minutes, the judgment was drawn up. Its content was simple and brief. The custom of the provostship and viscounty of Paris had not was still being worked on by President Thibaut Baillet and by Roger Barmne, the king’s lawyer. It was not then obstructed by that tall forest of chicanery and procedures that the two jurists planted there at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Everything was clear, expeditious, explicit. One walked straight to the goal, and one could immediately see at the end of each path, without undergrowth and without detour, the wheel, the gallows or the pillory. At least one knew where one was going. The clerk presented the sentence to the provost, who affixed his seal to it, and left to continue his tour of the courts, with a frame of mind that must have populated, that day, all the jails of Paris. Jehan Frollo and Robin Poussepain laughed under their breath. Quasimodo looked at everything with an indifferent and astonished air. Meanwhile, the clerk, at the moment when Maître Florian Barbedienne was reading the judgment in turn to sign it, felt moved with pity for the poor devil of a condemned man, and, in the hope of obtaining some reduction in the sentence, he approached as close as he could to the auditor’s ear and said to him, pointing to Quasimodo: “This man is deaf. ” He hoped that this commonality of infirmity would arouse Maître Florian’s interest in the condemned man’s favor. But first, we have already observed that Maître Florian did not care that his deafness should be noticed. Then, he was so hard of hearing that he did not hear a word of what the clerk said to him; yet, he wanted to appear to hear, and replied: “Ah! ah! that’s different. I didn’t know that. One more hour in the pillory, in that case.” And he signed the sentence thus modified. “That’s well done,” said Robin Poussepain, who was still holding a grudge against Quasimodo. “That will teach him to be rude.” Chapter 27. THE RAT HOLE. May the reader allow us to take him back to the Place de Grève, which we left yesterday with Gringoire to follow La Esmeralda. It is ten o’clock in the morning. Everything there smells of the day after a party. The pavement is covered with debris, ribbons, rags, plumes from the plumes, drops of wax from the torches, crumbs from the public feast. A good number of bourgeois are loitering, as we say, here and there, stirring with their feet the extinct embers of the bonfire, going into ecstasies before the House of Pillars, remembering the beautiful hangings of the day before, and today looking at the nails, their last pleasure. The cider and beer sellers roll their barrels through the groups. A few busy passers-by come and go. The merchants chat and call to each other from the thresholds of the shops. The festival, the ambassadors, Coppenole, the Pope of Fools, are on everyone’s lips. It’s a question of who can rant the best and laugh the most. And yet four mounted sergeants, who have just posted themselves on the four sides of the pillory, have already gathered around them a good portion of the people scattered across the square, who condemn themselves to immobility and boredom in the hope of a minor execution. If the reader now, after contemplating this lively and garish scene playing out at all points of the square, turns his gaze towards this ancient half-Gothic, half-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland, which forms the corner of the quay to the west, he will be able to notice at the corner of the facade a large public breviary, richly illuminated, protected from the rain by a small awning, and from thieves by a grating which nevertheless allows one to leaf through it. Beside this breviary is a narrow, pointed skylight, closed by two crossed iron bars, overlooking the square; the only opening that lets a little air and light into a small, doorless cell cut on the ground floor in the thickness of the wall of the old house, and filled with a peace all the more profound, a silence all the more gloomy because a public square, the most populous and the noisiest in Paris, teems and howls around it. This cell had been famous in Paris for nearly three centuries , and Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in mourning for her father who had died on the crusade, had had it dug into the wall of her own house to lock herself in forever, keeping of her palace only this dwelling whose door was walled up and whose skylight was open, winter and summer, giving all the rest to the poor and to God. The desolate young lady had indeed waited twenty years for death, in this anticipated tomb, praying night and day for the soul of her father, sleeping in ashes, without even a stone for a pillow, dressed in black sackcloth, and living only on what the pity of passers-by placed of bread and water on the edge of her skylight, thus receiving charity after having given it. At her death, as she was about to pass into the other sepulchre, she had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to afflicted women, mothers, widows, or daughters, who would have much to pray for others or for themselves, and who would like to bury themselves alive in great sorrow or in great penance. The poor of her time had given her a beautiful funeral of tears and blessings; but, to their great regret, the pious girl had not been able to be canonized a saint, for lack of protection. Those among them who were a little impious had hoped that the thing would be done in paradise more easily than in Rome, and had simply prayed to God for the deceased, in the absence of the Pope. Most had been content to hold Rolande’s memory sacred and to make relics of her rags. The city, for its part, had founded, for the young lady’s benefit, a public breviary which had been sealed near the skylight of the cell, so that passers-by would stop there from time to time, if only to pray, so that prayer would make them think of almsgiving, and so that the poor recluses, heirs to Madame Rolande’s vault, would not die there completely of hunger and oblivion. This kind of tomb was not, moreover, a very rare thing in the cities of the Middle Ages. One often came across, in the busiest street, in the most colorful and deafening market, right in the middle, under the hooves of horses, under the wheels of carts, so to speak, a cellar, a well, a walled and grilled shed, at the bottom of which a human being prayed day and night , voluntarily devoted to some eternal lamentation, to some great expiation. And all the reflections that this strange spectacle would awaken in us today, this horrible cell, a sort of intermediate ring between the house and the tomb, the cemetery and the city, this living being cut off from the human community and henceforth counted among the dead, this lamp consuming its last drop of oil in the shadows, this remnant of life flickering in a pit, this breath, this voice, this eternal prayer in a stone box, this face forever turned towards the other world, this eye already illuminated by another sun, this ear glued to the walls of the tomb, this soul imprisoned in this body, this body imprisoned in this dungeon, and under this double envelope of flesh and granite the buzzing of this tormented soul, none of this was perceived by the crowd. The unreasoning and unsubtle piety of that time did not see so many facets to an act of religion. She took the whole thing, and honored, venerated, sanctified the sacrifice if necessary, but did not analyze the sufferings and felt mediocre pity for them. From time to time she brought some food to the miserable penitent, looked through the hole to see if he was still alive, did not know his name, hardly knew how many years ago he had begun to die, and to the stranger who questioned them about the living skeleton rotting in this cellar, the neighbors simply replied, if it was a man: “It’s the recluse”; if it was a woman: “It’s the recluse.” Everything was seen like that then, without metaphysics, without exaggeration, without a magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet was invented, neither for matters of matter, nor for matters of the mind. Besides, although one wondered little about it, examples of this kind of cloistering within cities were, in truth, frequent, as we said just now. There were quite a few of these cells in Paris for praying to God and doing penance; they were almost all occupied. It is true that the clergy did not care to leave them empty, which implied lukewarmness among the believers, and that lepers were put there when there were no penitents. Besides the lodge at La Grève, there was one at Montfaucon, one at the charnel house of the Innocents, another I no longer know where, at the Clichon lodge, I believe. Others still in many places where one finds traces of them in traditions, in the absence of monuments. The University also had its own. On the Sainte-Geneviève mountain a kind of medieval Job sang for thirty years the seven Psalms of penitence on a dunghill, at the bottom of a cistern, beginning again when he had finished, chanting louder at night, magna voce per umbras, and today the antiquary believes he still hears his voice when entering the rue du Puits-qui-parle. To stick to the lodge of the Tour-Roland, we must say that it had never been without recluses. Since the death of Madame Rolande, it had rarely been vacant for a year or two. Many women had come there to mourn, until death, relatives, lovers, sins. Parisian malice, which meddles in everything, even in things that concern it the least, claimed that few widows had been seen there. According to the fashion of the time, a Latin legend, inscribed on the wall, indicated to the educated passer-by the pious destination of this cell. The custom was preserved until the middle of the sixteenth century of explaining a building by a short motto written above the door. Thus one still reads in France, above the wicket of the prison of the manor house of Tourville: Sileto et spera; in Ireland, under the coat of arms which surmounts the great door of Fortescue Castle: Forte scutum, salus ducum; in England, on the main entrance of the hospitable manor of the Cowper earls: Tuum est. This is because then every building was a thought. As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland, these two words were engraved in large Roman letters above the window : TU, ORA. Which is why the people, whose common sense does not see so much subtlety in things, and willingly translates Ludovico Magno as Porte Saint-Denis, had given to this black, dark and humid cavity the name of Trou aux Rats. An explanation less sublime perhaps than the other, but on the other hand more picturesque. Chapter 28. STORY OF A CORN SOURDOUGH CAKE. At the time when this story takes place, the cell of the Tour-Roland was occupied. If the reader wishes to know by whom, he has only to listen to the conversation of three good gossips who, at the moment when we stopped his attention on the Trou aux Rats, were heading precisely in the same direction, going up from the Châtelet towards the Grève, along the water. Two of these women were dressed as good bourgeois women of Paris. Their fine white gorget, their striped tiretaine skirt, red and blue, their white knitted breeches, with colored embroidered corners, well pulled on the leg, their square shoes of tawny leather with black soles, and above all their headdress, this kind of horn of tinsel overloaded with ribbons and lace that the women of Champagne still wear, in competition with the grenadiers of the Russian imperial guard, announced that they belonged to that class of rich merchants who hold the middle ground between what the footmen call a woman and what they call a lady. They wore neither rings nor gold crosses, and it was easy to see that this was not the case with them. poverty, but quite naively afraid of the fine. Their companion was dressed in almost the same way, but there was in her dress and in her bearing that something that smacks of the wife of a provincial notary. One could see, from the way her belt rode up above her hips, that she had not been in Paris for long. Add to that a pleated gorget, ribbon bows on her shoes, that the stripes of the skirt were in the width and not in the length, and a thousand other enormities that indignant good taste. The first two walked with that gait peculiar to Parisian women who show Paris to provincial women. The provincial woman held in her hand a fat boy who held in hers a large cake. We are sorry to have to add that, given the harshness of the season, he made his tongue his handkerchief. The child was being dragged along, non passibus æquis, as Virgil says, and was stumbling every moment, to the great cry of his mother. It is true that he looked more at the cake than at the paving stone. No doubt some serious reason prevented him from biting into it (the cake), for he was content to consider it tenderly. But the mother should have taken charge of the cake. It was cruel to make a Tantalus of the fat chubby fellow. Meanwhile the three damsels (for the name of ladies was then reserved for noblewomen) were talking at once. “Let’s hurry, Miss Mahiette,” said the youngest of the three, who was also the fattest, to the provincial woman. “I’m very afraid we’ll arrive too late. We were told at the Châtelet that they were going to take him immediately to the pillory. “Ah, well! What are you saying, Miss Oudarde Musnier?” resumed the other Parisian. He will remain two hours in the pillory. We have time. Have you ever seen a pillory, my dear Mahiette? “Yes,” said the provincial, “in Reims. ” “Ah, well! What is that, your pillory in Reims? A nasty cage where they only turn peasants. That’s a big deal! ” “Only peasants!” said Mahiette, “at the Cloth Market! In Reims! We saw some very handsome criminals there, and they had killed their father and mother! Peasants! Who do you take us for, Gervaise?” The provincial was certainly on the point of getting angry, for the honor of her pillory. Fortunately, the discreet young lady Oudarde Musnier changed the subject in time. “By the way, young lady Mahiette, what do you say about our Flemish ambassadors? Do you have any as handsome in Reims?” “I admit,” replied Mahiette, “that only in Paris can you see Flemings like those. ” “Did you see in the embassy that great ambassador who is a hosier?” asked Oudarde. “Yes,” said Mahiette. “He looks like a Saturn. ” “And that fat one whose face resembles a bare belly?” continued Gervaise. ” And that little one with small eyes bordered by a red eyelid, scuffed and jagged like a thistle’s head? ” “It’s their horses that are beautiful to see,” said Oudarde, “dressed as they are in the fashion of their country! ” “Ah! my dear,” interrupted the provincial Mahiette, taking on an air of superiority in her turn, “what would you say if you had seen, in ’61, at the coronation at Reims, eighteen years ago, the horses of the princes and the king’s company!” Covers and caparisons of all kinds; some of damask cloth, fine cloth of gold, lined with sable martens; others of velvet, lined with ermine feathers; others, all laden with goldwork and large bells of gold and silver! And the money that it had cost! And the beautiful page children who were on them! “That doesn’t prevent,” replied Damsel Oudarde dryly, “the Flemings from having very fine horses, and from having a superb supper yesterday at the house of the Provost of the Merchants, at the Town Hall, where they were served sugared almonds, hippocras, spices, and other oddities. ” “What are you saying, my neighbor?” cried Gervaise. “It’s at the house of the cardinal, at the Petit-Bourbon, that the Flemings had supper. –No, not. At the Hôtel de Ville! –Yes, indeed. At the Petit-Bourbon! –It was so good at the Hôtel de Ville, replied Oudarde sourly, that Doctor Scourable gave them a speech in Latin, with which they were very satisfied. It was my husband, who is a sworn bookseller, who told me. –It was so good at the Petit-Bourbon, replied Gervaise no less eagerly, that this is what the cardinal’s attorney presented to them: twelve double quarters of white, claret, and vermeil hypocras; twenty-four layettes of double gilded Lyon marzipan; as many torches of two livres each, and six half-tails of Beaune wine, white and claret, the best that could be found. I hope this is positive. I have it from my husband, who is a fiftieth-year-old at the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, and who this morning was 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 had rings in their ears. “It is so true that they supped at the Hôtel de Ville,” replied Oudarde, little moved by this display, “that one has never seen such a triumph of meats and sugared almonds. ” “I tell you, they were served by Le Sec, sergeant of the city, at the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, and that is what is deceiving you. ” “At the Hôtel de Ville, I tell you! ” “At the Petit-Bourbon, my dear!” so much so that the word “Hope” written on the great portal had been illuminated with magic glass . “At the Hôtel de Ville! At the Hôtel de Ville!” Even Husson-le-Voir played the flute! –I tell you no! –I tell you yes! –I tell you no! The good old Oudarde was preparing to reply, and the quarrel might have come to headdresses, if Mahiette had not suddenly cried out : –Look at those people who have gathered over there at the end of the bridge! There is something in their midst that they are looking at. –Truly, said Gervaise, I hear drumming. I think it is little Smeralda who is making her mummies with her goat. Oh, quick, Mahiette! quicken your pace and drag your boy along. You came here to visit the curiosities of Paris. You saw the Flemings yesterday; today you must see the Egyptian. –The Egyptian! said Mahiette, turning back abruptly and gripping her son’s arm tightly. God forbid! She would steal my child! Come on, Eustache! And she began to run along the quay towards the Grève, until she had left the bridge far behind her. Meanwhile, the child she was dragging fell to her knees; she stopped, out of breath. Oudarde and Gervaise joined her. This Egyptian woman is stealing your child! said Gervaise. You have a singular fantasy there. Mahiette nodded thoughtfully. What is singular, observed Oudarde, is that the sachette has the same idea about Egyptian women. What is the sachette? said Mahiette. Hey! said Oudarde, Sister Gudule. What is Sister Gudule, replied Mahiette? You are indeed from your Reims, not to know that! replied Oudarde. It’s the recluse from the Rat Hole. “What!” asked Mahiette, “this poor woman to whom we are taking this cake?” Oudarde nodded affirmatively. “Precisely. You’ll see her later at her window overlooking the Grève. She has the same view as you do of those Egyptian vagabonds who drum and tell fortunes to the public. We don’t know where this horror of zingari and Egyptians comes from. But you, Mahiette, why do you run away like that, just by seeing them? ” “Oh!” said Mahiette, grasping her child’s round head in both hands , “I don’t want what happened to Paquette la Chantefleurie to happen to me.” “Ah! Here’s a story you’re going to tell us, my dear Mahiette,” said Gervaise, taking her arm. “I’m happy to,” replied Mahiette, “but you must be a true native of your Paris not to know that! I’ll tell you then—but there ‘s no need to stop to tell the story—that Paquette la Chantefleurie was a pretty girl of eighteen when I was one too, that is to say, eighteen years ago, and that it’s her fault if she isn’t today, like me, a good, fat, fresh mother of thirty-six, with a man and a boy.” Besides, at the age of fourteen, it was too late!–So she was the daughter of Guybertaut, a minstrel of boats in Reims, the same one who had played before King Charles VII at his coronation, when he went down our river Vesle from Sillery to Muison, that even Madame la Pucelle was in the boat. The old father died, when Paquette was still a child; so she had only her mother left, sister of M. Pradon, master coppersmith and tinsmith in Paris, rue Parin-Garlin, who died last year. You see that she was of family. The mother was a good woman, unfortunately, and taught Paquette nothing but a little goldsmithing and trinket-making which did not prevent the little one from becoming very big and remaining very poor. They both lived in Reims, along the river, rue de Folle-Peine. Note this; I believe that this is what brought bad luck to Paquette. In 61, the year of the coronation of our King Louis the Eleventh, may God protect her! Paquette was so cheerful and so pretty that she was called everywhere only La Chantefleurie.–Poor girl!–She had pretty teeth, she loved to laugh to show them off. Now, a girl who loves to laugh is on the verge of crying; beautiful teeth lose beautiful eyes. So it was La Chantefleurie. She and her mother earned their living hard. They had fallen far short since the death of the minstrel. Their gold-plating brought them in hardly more than six deniers a week, which is not quite two liards at the eagle. Where was the time when Father Guybertaut earned twelve sols Parisis in a single coronation with a song? One winter—it was in that same year 61—when the two women had neither logs nor people, and it was very cold, it gave such beautiful colors to the Chantefleurie, that the men called her: Paquette! that several called her Pâquerette! and that she was lost.—Eustache! let me see you bite into the cake!—We saw at once that she was lost, one Sunday when she came to church with a golden cross around her neck.—At fourteen years old! Do you see that!—It was first the young Viscount of Cormontreuil, who has his bell tower three-quarters of a league from Reims; then, Sir Henri de Triancourt, knight of the king; then, less than that, Chiart de Beaulion, sergeant-at-arms; then, always descending, Guery Aubergeon, cutter valet of the king; then, Macé de Frépus, barber to M. le Dauphin; then, Thévenin-le-Moine, queux-le-roi; then, always thus from less young to less noble, she fell to Guillaume Racine, minstrel of the hurdy-gurdy, and to Thierry-de-Mer, lantern maker. Then, poor Chantefleurie, she was everything to everyone. She had reached the last sou of her gold piece. What shall I tell you, ladies? At the coronation, in the same year 61, it was she who made the bed of the king of the ribalds!–In the same year! Mahiette sighed, and wiped away a tear that rolled in her eyes. “That is not a very extraordinary story,” said Gervaise, ” and I do not see in all this, any Egyptians or children. ” “Patience!” continued Mahiette; of a child, you are going to see one.–In 66, sixteen years ago this month on Saint Paule’s Day, Paquette gave birth to a little girl. Poor thing! She had great joy. She had wanted a child for a long time. Her mother, a good woman who had never known how to do anything but close her eyes, her mother had died. Paquette had nothing left to love in the world, nothing left to love her. For the five years since she had failed, Chantefleurie was a poor creature. She was alone, alone in this life, pointed at, shouted at in the streets, beaten by sergeants, mocked by little boys in rags. And then, twenty had come; and twenty is old age for women in love. Folly was beginning to bring her no more than gilding used to; for a wrinkle that came, a crown went; winter was becoming hard on her again, wood was once again scarce in her ashtray and bread in her bin. She could no longer work, because in becoming voluptuous she had become lazy, and she suffered much more, because in becoming lazy she had become voluptuous. At least, that’s how the priest of Saint-Remy explains why these women are colder and hungrier than other poor women when they are old. “Yes,” observed Gervaise, “but the Egyptians? ” “Just a moment, Gervaise!” said Oudarde, whose attention was less impatient. “What would there be at the end if everything were at the beginning? Go on, Mahiette, I pray you. This poor Chantefleurie! ” Mahiette continued. “So she was very sad, very miserable, and hollowed her cheeks with her tears. But in her shame, in her madness, and in her abandonment, it seemed to her that she would be less ashamed, less mad , and less abandoned, if there were something in the world or someone she could love and who could love her. It had to be a child, because only a child could be innocent enough for that. –She
had recognized this after having tried to love a thief, the only man who could want her; but after a short time she had realized that the thief despised her. –These women of love need a lover or a child to fill their hearts. Otherwise they are very unhappy. Unable to have a lover, she turned entirely to the desire for a child, and, as she had not ceased to be pious, she made it her eternal prayer to God. God therefore took pity on her and gave her a little girl. Her joy, I will not tell you about it. It was a fury of tears, caresses, and kisses. She nursed her child herself , made swaddling clothes for him with her blanket, the only one she had on her bed, and no longer felt cold or hunger. She became beautiful again. An old maid becomes a young mother. Gallantry resumed, people came back to see Chantefleurie, she found customers for her merchandise, and from all these horrors she made layettes, bonnets and bibs, lace brassieres and little satin bonnets, without even thinking of buying herself a blanket.–Monsieur Eustache, I have already told you not to eat the cake.–It is certain that little Agnès–that was the child’s name, a baptismal name, because Chantefleurie had long since lost a family name–it is certain that this little girl was more swaddled in ribbons and embroidery than a dauphine of the Dauphiné! Among other things, she had a pair of little shoes, which King Louis XI certainly did not have the like of! Her mother had sewn and embroidered them for her herself, she had put into them all her finery as a gilder and all the trimmings of a good Virgin’s dress. They were truly the two prettiest pink shoes you could ever see. They were no longer than my thumb, and you had to see the child’s little feet sticking out of them to believe they could have fit into them. It is true that those little feet were so small, so pretty, so pink! Pinker than the satin of the shoes! –When you have children, Oudarde, you will know that nothing is prettier than those little feet and those little hands. –I ask for nothing better, said Oudarde with a sigh, but I am waiting for Monsieur Andry Musnier to please me. “Besides,” Mahiette continued, “Paquette’s child wasn’t just pretty with her feet. I saw her when she was only four months old. She was a darling! She had eyes bigger than her mouth. And the most charming fine black hair, which was already curling. It would have made a proud brunette at sixteen! Her mother was going crazier and crazier over her every day. She caressed her, kissed her, tickled her, washed her, dressed her up, ate her! She was losing her mind over it, she thanked God for it. Her pretty pink feet especially, they were an endless wonder, a delirium of joy! She always had her lips glued to them, and could not get over their smallness.” She put them in the little shoes, took them out, admired them, marveled at them, looked at the daylight through them, felt sorry for herself trying them on while walking on her bed, and would gladly have spent her life on her knees, putting on and taking off those feet like those of a child Jesus. “The story is fine and good,” said Gervaise in a low voice, “but where is Egypt in all this?” “Here,” replied Mahiette. “One day some very strange sorts of horsemen arrived in Reims . They were beggars and thugs who traveled through the country, led by their duke and their counts. They were swarthy, had curly hair, and silver rings in their ears. The women were even uglier than the men. Their faces were darker and always uncovered, they had a nasty mutt on their body, an old sheet of rope tied over their shoulders, and their hair in a ponytail. The children who wallowed in their legs would have scared monkeys. A band of excommunicated people. All of them came straight from Lower Egypt to Reims via Poland. The Pope had confessed them, it was said, and had given them the penance of traveling the world for seven years without sleeping in beds. Also, they were called Penanciers and stank. It seems that they had once been Saracens, which is why they believed in Jupiter, and they demanded ten livres tournois from all archbishops, bishops, and abbots with crosses and miters. It was a papal bull that earned them this. They came to Reims to tell fortunes in the name of the King of Algiers and the Emperor of Germany. You can imagine that this was all it took to forbid them entry into the city. Then the whole band camped willingly near the Braine gate, on that hill where there is a mill, next to the holes of the old chalk pits. And it was in Reims who would go and see them. They looked you in the hand and told you marvelous prophecies. They were strong enough to predict to Judas that he would be pope. However, there were nasty rumors about stolen children and purses cut and human flesh eaten. The wise people said to the fools: Don’t go there! – and went there on their own in secret. So it was a fit of anger. The fact is that they said things that would astonish a cardinal. The mothers made a great triumph of their children ever since the Egyptians had read into their hands all sorts of miracles written in pagan and Turkish. One had an emperor, another a pope, another a captain. Poor Chantefleurie was overcome with curiosity. She wanted to know what was wrong with her, and whether her pretty little Agnes would one day be Empress of Armenia or something else. So she took her to the Egyptians; and the Egyptian women admired the child, caressed her, kissed her with their black mouths, and marveled at her little hand. Alas! to the mother’s great joy. They especially celebrated the pretty feet and the pretty shoes. The child was not yet a year old. She already stammered, laughed at her mother like a little madwoman, was plump and plump, and had a thousand charming little gestures of the angels of paradise. She was very frightened by the Egyptian women, and wept. But the mother kissed her harder and went away delighted with the good adventure that the fortune-tellers had told her Agnes. She must have been a beauty, a virtue, a queen. So she returned to her garret on the Rue Folle-Peine, very proud to bring back a queen. The next day, she took advantage of a moment when the child was sleeping on her bed, for she always put her to bed with her, quietly left the door ajar, and ran to tell a neighbor on the Rue de la Séchesserie that the day would come when her daughter Agnes would be served at table by the King of England and the Archduke of Ethiopia, and a hundred other surprises. On her return, not hearing any cries as she climbed her stairs, she said to herself: “Good! The child is still asleep.” She found her door wider open than she had left it, yet she went in, poor mother, and ran to bed… The child was no longer there, the place was empty. There was nothing left of the child, except one of her pretty little shoes. She rushed out of the room, threw herself down the stairs, and began to beat the walls with her head, crying: “My child! Who has my child? Who has taken my child from me?” The street was deserted, the house isolated; no one could say anything to her. She went through the town, ferreted out all the streets, ran here and there all day , mad, lost, terrible, sniffing at the doors and windows like a wild beast that has lost its young. She was panting, disheveled, frightening to see, and there was a fire in her eyes that dried her tears. She stopped passers-by and cried: “My daughter! My daughter! My pretty little girl! Whoever gives me back my daughter, I will be his servant, the servant of his dog, and he will eat my heart if he wishes.” She met the priest of Saint-Remy and said to him: “Monsieur le curé, I will plow the earth with my nails, but give me back my child!” It was heartbreaking, Oudarde; and I saw a very hard man, Maître Ponce Lacabre, the prosecutor, who was crying. Ah! the poor mother! That evening, she returned home. During her absence, a neighbor had seen two Egyptian women sneak up with a package in their arms, then come back down after closing the door and flee in haste. Since their departure, people could hear a kind of childish cries at Paquette’s house. The mother laughed out loud, went up the stairs as if with wings, broke down her door as if with an artillery cannon, and entered… “A terrible thing, Oudarde!” Instead of her sweet little Agnes, so rosy and so fresh, who was a gift from God, a sort of hideous little monster, lame, one-eyed, deformed, dragged itself squealing on the floor. She hid her eyes in horror. “Oh! ” she said, “have the witches transformed my daughter into that frightful animal?” They hastened to carry away the little clubfoot. It would have driven her mad. It was a monstrous child of some Egyptian woman given to the devil. It looked about four years old, and spoke a language that was not a human language; it was words that were not possible. La Chantefleurie had thrown herself on the little shoe, all that remained to her of all that she had loved. She remained there so long motionless, mute, breathless, that they thought she had died there. Suddenly she trembled all over, covered her relic with furious kisses, and burst into tears as if her heart had burst. I assure you that we were all crying too. She said: “Oh! my little girl! my pretty little girl! Where are you?” And it twisted your insides. I still cry thinking about it. Our children, you see? They are the marrow of our bones.” “My poor Eustache! You are so handsome! If you only knew how kind he is! Yesterday he said to me: “I want to be a gendarme.” Oh my Eustache! If I were to lose you!” La Chantefleurie suddenly got up and began to run through Reims, shouting: “To the Egyptian camp! To the Egyptian camp! Sergeants to burn the witches!” The Egyptians had left. It was pitch black. They could not pursue them. The next day, at two Leagues from Reims, in a heath between Gueux and Tilloy, the remains of a large fire were found, some ribbons that had belonged to Paquette’s child , drops of blood, and goat droppings. The night that had just passed was precisely a Saturday. There was no longer any doubt that the Egyptians had celebrated the Sabbath in this heath, and that they had devoured the child in the company of Beelzebub, as is the practice among the Mohammedans. When Chantefleurie learned of these horrible things, she did not cry, she moved her lips as if to speak, but could not. The next day, her hair was gray. The day after, she had disappeared. “That, indeed, is a terrible story,” said Oudarde, “and one that would make a Burgundian weep!” “I’m no longer surprised,” added Gervaise, “that fear of the Egyptians is so close to your heels! ” “And you did all the better,” resumed Oudarde, “to run away just now with your Eustache, since these too are Egyptians from Poland. ” “No,” said Gervaise, “they say they come from Spain and Catalonia. ” “Catalonia? It’s possible,” replied Oudarde. “Poland, Catalonia, Valogne, I always confuse those three provinces. What is certain is that they are Egyptians. ” “And who certainly have,” added Gervaise, “teeth long enough to eat little children. And I wouldn’t be surprised if La Smeralda ate a few too, while turning up her nose. Her white goat has too many mischievous tricks for there not to be some debauchery underneath. ” Mahiette walked silently. She was absorbed in this reverie which is in some way the prolongation of a painful story, and which only stops after having propagated its shock, from vibration to vibration, to the last fibers of the heart. However, Gervaise addressed her: “And no one has been able to find out what became of the Chantefleurie?” Mahiette did not answer. Gervaise repeated her question, shaking her arm and calling her by name. Mahiette seemed to wake up from her thoughts. “What became of the Chantefleurie?” she said, mechanically repeating the words whose impression was still fresh in her ear; then making an effort to bring her attention back to the meaning of these words: “Ah!” she continued quickly, “no one has ever known.” She added after a pause: “Some said they saw her leave Reims at dusk by the Porte Fléchembault; others, at daybreak, by the old Porte Basée.” A poor man found her golden cross hanging from the stone cross in the field where the fair is held. It was this jewel that had lost her, in 61. It was a gift from the handsome Viscount of Cormontreuil, her first lover. Paquette had never wanted to part with it, miserable as she had been. She clung to it as if it were her life. So, when we saw the cross abandoned, we all thought she was dead. However, there are people from Cabaret-les-Vantes who said they saw her pass by on the road to Paris, walking barefoot on the pebbles. But then she would have to have left by the Porte de Vesle, and all that is not in agreement. Or, to put it better, I believe she did indeed leave by the Porte de Vesle, but left this world. “I don’t understand you,” said Gervaise. “The Vesle,” replied Mahiette with a melancholy smile, “that’s the river.”
“Poor Chantefleurie!” said Oudarde, shivering; “drowned! ” “Drowned!” continued Mahiette; “and who would have told good Father Guybertaut when he was passing under the bridge at Tinqueux along the water, singing in his boat, that one day his dear little Paquette would also pass under that bridge, but without a song and without a boat? ” “And the little shoe?” asked Gervaise. “Disappeared with the mother,” replied Mahiette. “Poor little shoe!” said Oudarde. Oudarde, a fat and sensitive woman, would have been very content with sighing in company with Mahiette. But Gervaise, more curious, had not yet finished her questions. “And the monster?” she suddenly asked Mahiette. “What monster?” she asked. “The little Egyptian monster left by the witches at La Chantefleurie’s in exchange for her daughter? What did you do with him? I hope you drowned him too. ” “No, not,” replied Mahiette. “What! Burned him then? Actually, that’s more accurate. A child witch! ” “Neither one nor the other, Gervaise. The Archbishop took an interest in the child from Egypt, exorcised him, blessed him, very carefully removed the devil from his body, and sent him to Paris to be exposed on the wooden bed at Notre-Dame, as a foundling. ” “Those bishops!” said Gervaise, grumbling, “because they are learned, they don’t do anything like the others.” I’m asking you, Oudarde, to put the devil in the foundlings! For it was certainly the devil , that little monster.–Well, Mahiette, what did they do with him in Paris? I reckon not a single charitable person wanted him.–I don’t know, replied the woman from Reims. It was precisely at that time that my husband bought the notary’s office of Beru, two leagues from the town, and we no longer concerned ourselves with this matter; besides , in front of Beru there are the two hills of Cernay, which make you lose sight of the steeples of the cathedral of Reims. While speaking thus, the three worthy bourgeois women had arrived at the Place de Grève. In their preoccupation, they had passed without stopping in front of the public breviary of the Tour-Roland, and were heading mechanically towards the pillory, around which the crowd was swelling every moment. It is probable that the spectacle which at that moment attracted all eyes would have made them completely forget the Rat Hole and the station they had intended to make there, if the big six-year-old Eustache whom Mahiette was dragging by her hand had not suddenly reminded them of its object: “Mother,” he said, as if some instinct warned him that the Rat Hole was behind him, “can I eat the cake now?” If Eustache had been more skillful, that is to say, less greedy, he would have waited a little longer, and it was only on their return, to the University, to the lodgings of Master Andry Musnier, rue Madame-la-Valence, when there would have been the two branches of the Seine and the five bridges of the City between the Rat Hole and the cake, that he would have ventured this timid question: “Mother, can I eat the cake now?” This same question, imprudent at the moment when Eustache asked it, aroused Mahiette’s attention. “By the way,” she cried, “we’re forgetting the recluse! Show me your Rat Hole, so I can take her cake. ” “Right away,” said Oudarde. “It’s charity. That wasn’t Eustache’s account. ” “Here, my cake!” he said, knocking his shoulders alternately with his ears, which in such cases is the supreme sign of discontent. The three women retraced their steps, and, arriving near the house of Tour-Roland, Oudarde said to the other two: “You mustn’t all three look into the hole at once, for fear of frightening the sachette. You two pretend to read dominus in the breviary, while I put my nose to the skylight. The sachette knows me a little. I’ll let you know when you can come.” She went alone to the skylight. The moment her sight penetrated it, a deep pity was painted on all her features, and her gay and frank physiognomy changed as suddenly in expression and color as if she had passed from a ray of sunshine to a ray of moonlight. Her eye became moist, her mouth contracted as when one is about to cry. A moment later, she put a finger to her lips and beckoned to Mahiette to come and see. Mahiette came, moved, in silence and on tiptoe, as when one approaches the bed of a dying man. It was indeed a sad spectacle that met the eyes of the two women, while they gazed without moving or breathing through the barred skylight of the Rat Hole. The cell was narrow, wider than it was deep, vaulted in an ogive, and seen from the inside looked rather like the socket of a large bishop’s miter. On the bare slab that formed the floor, in a corner, a woman was sitting, or rather squatting. Her chin was resting on her knees, which her two crossed arms pressed tightly against her chest. Thus huddled up, dressed in a brown sack that enveloped her entirely in large folds, her long gray hair swept back in front and falling over her face along her legs to her feet, she presented at first sight only a strange shape, cut out against the dark background of the cell, a sort of blackish triangle, which the ray of daylight coming from the skylight cut crudely into two shades, one dark, the other illuminated. She was one of those spectres half-parted of shadow and light, such as one sees in dreams and in the extraordinary work of Goya, pale, motionless, sinister, crouching on a tomb or leaning against the bars of a dungeon. She was neither a woman nor a man, nor a living being, nor a definite form; she was a figure; a sort of vision in which the real and the fantastic intersected, like shadow and day. Barely beneath her hair, spread to the ground, could one distinguish a gaunt and severe profile; barely did her dress reveal the tip of a bare foot, which clenched on the rigid and frozen pavement. The little human form that one glimpsed beneath this envelope of mourning made one shudder. This figure, which one would have thought sealed in the slab, seemed to have neither movement, nor thought, nor breath. Under this thin canvas sack, in January, lying naked on a granite pavement, without fire, in the shadow of a dungeon whose oblique air vent let in from outside only the north wind and never the sun, she did not seem to suffer, not even to feel. One would have said that she had become stone with the dungeon, ice with the season. Her hands were clasped, her eyes were fixed. At first glance one took her for a ghost, at the second for a statue. However, at intervals her blue lips parted to a breath, and trembled, but as dead and as mechanical as leaves parting in the wind. Meanwhile, from her dull eyes escaped a look, an ineffable look, a deep, lugubrious, imperturbable look, incessantly fixed on a corner of the cell which could not be seen from outside; a look which seemed to connect all the dark thoughts of this soul in distress to some mysterious object or other. Such was the creature who received from her dwelling the name of recluse, and from her clothing the name of sachette. The three women, for Gervaise had joined Mahiette and Oudarde, looked out of the skylight. Their heads intercepted the faint light of the dungeon, without the wretch they were thus depriving of it appearing to pay any attention to them. “Let’s not disturb her,” said Oudarde in a low voice, “she is in her ecstasy, she is praying. ” Meanwhile, Mahiette gazed with ever-increasing anxiety at that haggard, withered, disheveled head, and her eyes filled with tears. “That would be very strange,” she murmured. She put her head through the bars of the air vent, and managed to get her gaze right into the corner where the unfortunate woman’s gaze was invariably fixed. When she removed her head from the skylight, her face was bathed in tears. “What do you call this woman?” she asked Oudarde. Oudarde replied: “We call her Sister Gudule. ” “And I,” continued Mahiette, “I call her Paquette la Chantefleurie.” Then, putting a finger to her mouth, she signaled to Oudarde stupefied to put her head through the skylight and look. Oudarde looked, and saw, in the corner where the recluse’s eye was fixed with that dark ecstasy, a little pink satin slipper, embroidered with a thousand gold and silver passequilles. Gervaise looked after Oudarde, and then the three women, gazing at the unhappy mother, began to weep. Neither their glances, however, nor their tears had distracted the recluse. Her hands remained clasped, her lips silent, her eyes fixed, and, for anyone who knew her story, this little slipper looked at like this broke the heart. The three women had not yet uttered a word; they did not dare to speak, even in a low voice. This great silence, this great sorrow, this great oblivion where everything had disappeared except one thing, had on them the effect of a high altar at Easter or Christmas. They were silent, they were meditating, they were ready to kneel. It seemed to them that they had just entered a church on the day of Darkness. Finally, Gervaise, the most curious of the three, and consequently the least sensitive, tried to make the recluse speak: “Sister! Sister Gudule! ” She repeated this call up to three times, raising her voice each time. The recluse did not move. Not a word, not a glance, not a sigh, not a sign of life. Oudarde in turn, in a softer and more caressing voice: “Sister!” she said, “Sister Sainte-Gudule! ” The same silence, the same immobility. “A singular woman!” cried Gervaise, “and who would not be moved by a bombarde! ” “Perhaps she is deaf,” said Oudarde. “Perhaps blind,” added Gervaise. “Perhaps dead,” continued Mahiette. It is certain that if the soul had not yet left this inert, sleeping, lethargic body, at least it had withdrawn and hidden itself in depths where the perceptions of the external organs no longer reached. “It will be necessary then,” said Oudarde, “to leave the cake on the skylight. Some son will take it. How can we wake her up?” Eustace, who until that moment had been distracted by a small carriage drawn by a large dog, which had just passed, suddenly noticed that its three drivers were looking at something at the skylight, and, curiosity seizing him in turn, he climbed onto a boundary stone, stood on tiptoe, and pressed his large rosy face to the opening, crying: “Mother, let me see!” At this child’s voice, clear, fresh, sonorous, the recluse shuddered. She turned her head with the sharp, abrupt movement of a steel spring, her two long, gaunt hands came to brush her hair back from her forehead, and she fixed on the child with astonished, bitter, and desperate eyes . This look was only a flash. “Oh my God!” she cried suddenly, hiding her head in her knees, and it seemed that her hoarse voice tore at her chest as she passed, “at least don’t show me those of the others! ” “Good morning, madame,” said the child gravely. However, this shock had, so to speak, awakened the recluse. A long shudder ran through her whole body, from head to toe, her teeth chattered, she half raised her head, and said, pressing her elbows against her hips and taking her feet in her hands as if to warm them: “Oh! the bitter cold!” “Poor woman!” said Oudarde in great pity, “would you like a little fire?” She shook her head in refusal. “Well,” Oudarde continued, offering her a flask, “here is some hypocras that will warm you up. Drink.” She shook her head again, looked fixedly at Oudarde, and replied: “Water.” Oudarde insisted. “No, sister, this is not a January drink. You must drink a little hypocras and eat this corn sourdough cake that we baked for you. ” She pushed away the cake that Mahiette offered her and said: ” Black bread .” “Come on,” said Gervaise, seized with charity in her turn, and undoing her Woolen mutt, here is a coat a little warmer than yours. Put this on your shoulders. She refused the coat, as well as the flask and the cake, and replied: “A bag. ” “But you must,” replied the good Oudarde, “remember that yesterday was a holiday. ” “I notice,” said the recluse; “I haven’t had any water in my pitcher for two days. ” She added after a silence: “It’s a holiday, they forget me. They do well. Why should the world think of me, who doesn’t think of themselves? Cold ashes like extinguished coal. ” And as if tired of having said so much, she let her head fall back on her knees. The simple and charitable Oudarde, who thought she understood from her last words that she was still complaining of the cold, answered her naively: “Then, would you like a little fire? ” “Fire!” said the bag with a strange accent; and will you also do a little for the poor little one who has been underground for fifteen years? All her limbs trembled, her speech vibrated, her eyes shone, she had risen on her knees. She suddenly stretched out her thin, white hand towards the child who was looking at her with an astonished look: “Take this child away!” she cried. The gypsy woman is about to pass. Then she fell face down, and her forehead struck the flagstone with the sound of a stone on a stone. The three women thought she was dead. A moment later, however, she stirred, and they saw her drag herself on her knees and elbows to the corner where the little shoe was. Then they dared not look, they saw her no more, but they heard a thousand kisses and a thousand sighs, mingled with heart-rending cries and dull blows like those of a head striking a wall. Then, after one of these blows, so violent that all three of them staggered, they heard nothing more. “Has she killed herself?” said Gervaise, venturing to stick her head out of the air vent. “Sister! Sister Gudule!” repeated Oudarde. “Ah! my God! She’s not moving!” continued Gervaise, “is she dead?” “Gudule! Gudule! ” Mahiette, so suffocated that she could not speak, made an effort. “Wait,” she said. Then, leaning toward the skylight: “Paquette!” she said, “Paquette la Chantefleurie!” A child who naively blows on the badly lit fuse of a firecracker and blows it in his eyes is no more terrified than Mahiette was at the effect of this name suddenly thrown out in Sister Gudule’s cell . The recluse shuddered all over, stood up on her bare feet, and leaped to the skylight with such blazing eyes that Mahiette and Oudarde and the other woman and the child retreated to the parapet of the quay. Meanwhile the sinister figure of the recluse appeared glued to the grating of the air vent. “Oh! oh!” she cried with a frightening laugh, “it’s the Egyptian woman calling me!” At that moment, a scene taking place in the pillory arrested her haggard eye. Her brow wrinkled with horror, she stretched out her two skeletal arms from her box, and cried out in a voice that resembled a death rattle: “So it’s you again, daughter of Egypt! It’s you who’s calling me, child thief! Well! cursed be you! cursed! cursed! cursed!” Chapter 29. A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER. These words were, so to speak, the point of junction of two scenes which had until then developed parallel to each other at the same time, each on its own particular stage, one, the one we have just read about, in the Rat Hole, the other, which we are about to read about, on the ladder of the pillory. The first had as witnesses only the three women with whom the reader has just become acquainted; the second had as spectators the entire public which we saw above gathering on the Place de Grève, around the pillory and the gallows. This crowd, to which the four sergeants, who had posted themselves immediately nine o’clock in the morning at the four corners of the pillory, had raised hopes of an execution such as this, not doubtless a hanging, but a whipping, a wringing, something finally, this crowd had increased so rapidly that the four sergeants, too closely surrounded, had more than once needed to hold it, as they said then, with great blows of the boullaye and the rump of a horse. This populace, disciplined in the expectation of public executions, did not show too much impatience. It amused itself by looking at the pillory, a kind of very simple monument composed of a cube of masonry about ten feet high, hollow inside. A very steep step of rough stone, which was called par excellence the ladder, led to the upper platform, on which one could see a horizontal wheel of solid oak. The patient was tied to this wheel, on his knees and with his arms behind his back. A wooden rod, set in motion by a capstan hidden inside the small building, imparted a rotation to the wheel, always kept in the horizontal plane, and in this way presented the face of the condemned man successively to all points of the square. This is what was called turning a criminal. As we see, the pillory of the Grève was far from offering all the recreations of the pillory of the Halles. Nothing architectural. Nothing monumental. No roof with an iron cross, no octagonal lantern, no frail columns blossoming at the edge of the roof in capitals of acanthus and flowers, no chimerical and monstrous gutters, no chiseled framework, no fine sculpture deeply carved into the stone. It was necessary to be content with these four sections of rubble with two sandstone counter-hearts, and a mean stone gallows, thin and bare, beside them. The treat would have been petty for lovers of Gothic architecture. It is true that nothing was less curious about monuments than the brave onlookers of the Middle Ages, and that they cared little for the beauty of a pillory. The patient finally arrived tied to the back of a cart, and when he had been hoisted onto the platform, when he could be seen from all points of the square tied with ropes and straps to the wheel of the pillory, a prodigious hoot, mingled with laughter and acclamations, broke out in the square. Quasimodo had been recognized. It was indeed him. The return was strange. Pilloried on this same square where the day before he had been greeted, acclaimed and proclaimed pope and prince of fools, in procession of the Duke of Egypt, the King of Thunes and the Emperor of Galilee! What is certain is that there was not a single spirit in the crowd, not even he, by turns the triumphant and the patient, who clearly discerned this connection in his thoughts. Gringoire and his philosophy were missing from this spectacle. Soon Michel Noiret, trumpeter-sworn to the king our lord, silenced the peasants and called the arrest, following the order and command of the provost. Then he withdrew behind the cart with his men in livery smocks. Quasimodo, impassive, did not flinch. All resistance was rendered impossible for him by what was then called, in the style of criminal chancellery, the vehemence and firmness of the attachments, which means that the straps and chains were probably digging into his flesh. It is, moreover, a tradition of jail and galley prison that has not been lost, and that the handcuffs still preciously preserve among us, a civilized, gentle, humane people (the penal colony and the guillotine in parentheses). He had allowed himself to be led, pushed, carried, perched, bound and re-bound. Nothing could be guessed from his physiognomy except the astonishment of a savage or an idiot. He was known to be deaf, one would have said he was blind. He was made to kneel on the circular board, he let himself be put there. He was stripped of his shirt and doublet down to his waist, he let it happen. He was entangled under a new system of straps and barbs, he allowed himself to be buckled and tied up. Only from time to time he puffed noisily, like a calf whose head hangs and tosses on the edge of the butcher’s cart. “The oaf,” said Jehan Frollo du Moulin to his friend Robin Poussepain (for the two schoolboys had followed the patient, as is only right), “he understands no more than a cockchafer shut in a box!” There was a burst of laughter in the crowd when they saw Quasimodo’s hump, his camel’s chest, his calloused and hairy shoulders. During all this gaiety, a man in the livery of the city, short and robust-looking, climbed onto the platform and came to stand near the patient. His name quickly circulated among the audience. It was Master Pierrat Torterue, sworn torturer of the Châtelet. He began by placing on a corner of the pillory a black hourglass whose upper capsule was full of red sand which it allowed to leak into the lower receptacle; then he removed his half-parted surtout, and from his right hand was seen hanging a thin, tapered whip with long , shiny, knotted, braided white thongs, armed with metal nails. With his left hand he casually folded his shirt around his right arm, up to the armpit. Meanwhile, Jehan Frollo shouted, raising his blond, curly head above the crowd (he had mounted on Robin Poussepain’s shoulders for this purpose): “Come and see, ladies and gentlemen! Here we are going to peremptorily flog Master Quasimodo, the bell-ringer of my brother , the Archdeacon of Josas, a strange piece of oriental architecture, with a domed back and twisted columnar legs!” And the crowd laughed, especially the children and young girls. Finally the tormentor stamped his foot. The wheel began to turn. Quasimodo staggered beneath his bonds. The stupor that suddenly appeared on his deformed face caused the peals of laughter to redouble all around. Suddenly, at the moment when the wheel in its revolution presented Quasimodo’s mountainous back to Master Pierrat, Master Pierrat raised his arm; the fine thongs hissed shrilly in the air like a handful of snakes, and fell furiously upon the wretch’s shoulders. Quasimodo jumped up, as if awakened with a start. He was beginning to understand. He writhed in his bonds; a violent contraction of surprise and pain decomposed the muscles of his face; but he did not utter a sigh. Only he turned his head back, to the right, then to the left, swinging it like a bull stung in the flank by a horsefly. A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another, and another, and still more. The wheel did not stop turning nor the blows from raining down. Soon the blood gushed out, it was seen to stream in a thousand rivulets over the black shoulders of the hunchback, and the slender thongs, in their rotation which rent the air, scattered it in drops among the crowd. Quasimodo had regained, in appearance at least, his former impassivity. He had tried at first secretly and without much external shock to break his bonds. They had seen his eye light up, his muscles stiffen, his limbs bunch up, and the straps and chains tighten. The effort was powerful, prodigious, desperate; but the old constraints of the provostship resisted. They cracked, and that was all. Quasimodo fell back exhausted. The stupor gave way to a feeling of bitter and profound discouragement on his features. He closed his one eye, let his head fall on his chest, and played dead. From then on he did not move. Nothing could force him to move. Neither his blood, which continued to flow, nor the blows, which redoubled in fury, nor the anger of the tormentor, who was becoming excited and intoxicated by the execution, nor the noise of the horrible thongs, sharper and more hissing than the paws of a bigaille. Finally, an usher of the Châtelet, dressed in black, mounted on a black horse, stationed beside the ladder since the beginning of the execution, extended his ebony wand towards the hourglass. The tormentor stopped. The wheel stopped. Quasimodo’s eye slowly reopened. The flagellation was over. Two servants of the sworn torturer washed the patient’s bleeding shoulders, rubbed them with some unguent that immediately closed all the wounds, and threw over his back a sort of yellow loincloth cut into a chasuble. Meanwhile, Pierrat Torterue dripped the red, blood-soaked strips onto the pavement. All was not over for Quasimodo. He still had to endure that hour in the pillory that Master Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to the sentence of Messire Robert d’Estouteville; all to the great glory of the old physiological and psychological pun of John of Cumene: Surdus absurdus. So the hourglass was turned over, and the hunchback was left tied to the plank, so that justice might be done to the end. The people, especially in the Middle Ages, are to society what the child is to the family. As long as they remain in this state of primary ignorance, of moral and intellectual minority, one can say of them as of the child: This age is without pity. We have already shown that Quasimodo was generally hated, for more than one good reason, it is true. There was hardly a spectator in this crowd who did not have or believe he had cause to complain about the evil hunchback of Notre-Dame. The joy had been universal to see him appear in the pillory; and the harsh execution he had just undergone and the pitiful posture in which it had left him, far from softening the populace, had made their hatred more spiteful by arming it with a touch of gaiety. Also, once public vindictiveness was satisfied, as the square caps still jargon today, it was the turn of a thousand private revenges. Here as in the great hall, the women especially burst forth. They all held a grudge against him, some for his malice, others for his ugliness. The last were the most furious. “Oh! Mask of the Antichrist!” said one. “Broomstick rider!” shouted another. “The beautiful tragic grimace,” yelled a third, “and who would make him pope of fools, if today were yesterday! ” “That’s good,” resumed an old woman. “That’s the grimace of the pillory. When will that of the gallows be? When will you be wearing your big bell a hundred feet underground, cursed bell-ringer? ” “And yet it’s this devil who rings the Angelus!” “Oh! the deaf man! the one-eyed man! the hunchback! the monster! ” “A figure that would abort a pregnancy better than all medicines and pharmaceutics!” And the two schoolboys, Jehan du Moulin, Robin Poussepain, sang at the top of their voices the old popular refrain: A heart for the hangman! A person for the loot! A thousand other insults rained down, and boos, and imprecations, and laughter, and stones here and there. Quasimodo was deaf, but he saw clearly, and the public fury was no less energetically depicted on the faces than in the words. Besides, the blows of stones explained the bursts of laughter. He held firm at first. But little by little this patience, which had stiffened under the whip of the tormentor, faltered and gave way to all these insect bites. The Asturian ox, which had been little moved by the attacks of the picador, was irritated by the dogs and the banderillas. At first he slowly cast a threatening look over the crowd. But, tied up as he was, his gaze was powerless to chase away the flies that were biting his wound. Then he stirred in his fetters, and his furious jolts made the old pillory wheel squeal on its boards . From all this, the derision and jeers increased. Then the wretch, unable to break his collar of a chained wild beast, became calm again. Only at intervals a sigh of rage rose from all the cavities of his chest. There was neither shame nor blush on his face. He was too far from the state of society and too close to the state of nature to know what shame is. Besides, at this point of deformity, is infamy a sensible thing? But anger, hatred, despair, slowly lowered over this hideous face a cloud that was darker and darker, more and more charged with an electricity that burst into a thousand flashes in the eye of the cyclops. However, this cloud cleared for a moment, as a mule passed through the crowd, carrying a priest. From the distance that he saw this mule and this priest, the face of the poor patient softened. The fury that contracted him was succeeded by a strange smile, full of ineffable sweetness, gentleness, and tenderness. As the priest approached, this smile became clearer, more distinct, more radiant. It was like the arrival of a savior that the unfortunate man was greeting. However, the moment the mule was close enough to the pillory for its rider to recognize the patient, the priest lowered his eyes, turned back abruptly, and spurted forward, as if he had been eager to be rid of humiliating complaints and had little concern for being greeted and recognized by a poor devil in such a position. This priest was Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo. The cloud fell darker on Quasimodo’s brow. The smile remained there for a while longer, but bitter, discouraged, deeply sad. Time was passing. He had been there for at least an hour and a half, torn apart, mistreated, mocked relentlessly, and almost stoned. Suddenly he stirred again in his chains with a redoubling of despair that made the whole frame that supported him tremble, and, breaking the silence he had stubbornly maintained until then, he cried out in a hoarse and furious voice that sounded more like a bark than a human cry and that drowned the noise of the boos : “Drink! ” This exclamation of distress, far from moving compassion, was an additional amusement to the good Parisian populace who surrounded the ladder, and who, it must be said, taken as a whole and as a multitude, were then hardly less cruel and less brutal than that horrible tribe of thugs to whom we have already led the reader, and who were quite simply the lowest stratum of the people. Not a voice was raised around the unfortunate patient, except to mock him for his thirst. It is certain that at that moment he was grotesque and repulsive even more than pitiful, with his flushed and streaming face, his wild eye, his mouth foaming with anger and suffering, and his half-stuck tongue. It must also be said that, had there been in the crowd some good, charitable soul of a bourgeois man or woman who had been tempted to bring a glass of water to this miserable creature in pain, there reigned around the infamous steps of the pillory such a prejudice of shame and ignominy that it would have been enough to repel the Good Samaritan. At the end of a few minutes, Quasimodo cast a despairing look over the crowd, and repeated in an even more heart-rending voice: “To drink! ” And they all laughed. “Drink this!” cried Robin Poussepain, throwing a sponge dragged into the gutter in his face. “Here, you deaf villain! I am your debtor.” A woman threw a stone at his head: “That’ll teach you to wake us up at night with your damned chimes. ” “Well then! Son,” yelled a cripple, struggling to reach him with his crutch, “will you cast spells on us again from the towers of Notre-Dame? ” “Here’s a bowl to drink from!” a man retorted, blasting him in the chest with a broken jug. “It was you who, just by passing in front of her, made my wife give birth to a two-headed child! ” “And my cat to a six-legged cat!” yelped an old woman, throwing a tile at him. “To drink!” repeated Quasimodo, panting, for the third time. At that moment, he saw the crowd part. A young girl strangely dressed came out of the crowd. She was accompanied by a small white goat with golden horns and carried a tambourine in her hand. Quasimodo’s eye sparkled. It was the gypsy he had tried to abduct the previous night, an altercation for which he felt confusedly that he was being punished at that very moment; which, moreover, was not the least bit so, since he was only punished for the misfortune of being deaf and having been judged by a deaf man. He had no doubt that she would come to take revenge too and deal him her blow like all the others. He saw her quickly climb the ladder. Anger and spite were suffocating him. He would have liked to be able to bring down the pillory, and, if the flash of his eye could have struck down, the gypsy would have been powdered before reaching the platform. She approached, without saying a word, the patient who was writhing in vain to escape her, and, detaching a flask from her belt, she gently brought it to the wretch’s dry lips. Then, in that eye, hitherto so dry and so burned, a large tear was seen to roll, which fell slowly down that deformed face, long contracted by despair. It was perhaps the first that the unfortunate man had ever shed. However, he forgot to drink. The gypsy woman made her little pout impatiently , and smilingly pressed the neck to Quasimodo’s toothy mouth. He drank in long draughts. His thirst was burning. When he had finished, the wretch stretched out his black lips, no doubt to kiss the beautiful hand that had just assisted him. But the young girl, who was perhaps not without mistrust and remembered the violent attempt of the night, withdrew her hand with the frightened gesture of a child who fears being bitten by an animal. Then the poor deaf man fixed on her a look full of reproach and inexpressible sadness. It would have been a touching sight anywhere, this beautiful girl, fresh, pure, charming, and so weak at the same time, thus piously rushed to the aid of so much misery, deformity and wickedness. On a pillory, this spectacle was sublime. All these people themselves were seized by it and began to clap their hands, crying: Christmas! Christmas! It was at this moment that the recluse saw, from the skylight of her hole, the Egyptian woman on the pillory, and hurled her sinister imprecation at her : –Cursed be you, daughter of Egypt! Cursed! Cursed! Chapter 30. END OF THE STORY OF THE CAKE. Esmeralda turned pale and staggered down from the pillory. The recluse’s voice pursued her again: “Go down! Go down! Thief of Egypt, you’ll go back up there! ” “The bag is in her whims,” the people murmured; and nothing more came of it. For these sorts of women were feared, which made them sacred. People did not readily attack those who prayed day and night. The time had come to take Quasimodo back. He was untied, and the crowd dispersed. Near the Grand-Pont, Mahiette, who was returning with her two companions, stopped abruptly: “By the way, Eustache! What have you done with the cake?” “Mother,” said the child, “while you were talking with that lady who was in the hole, there was a big dog that bit into my cake. So I ate some too. ” “What, sir,” she continued, “you ate it all?” “Mother, it’s the dog. I told him, he didn’t listen to me. So I bit too, mind you! ” “He’s a terrible child,” said the mother, smiling and scolding at the same time. “You see, Oudarde, he’s already eaten the whole cherry tree in our Charlerange enclosure by himself. Also, his grandfather says he’ll be a captain.” “Let me correct you, Monsieur Eustache.” “Go, big lion!” Thus ends this first volume of ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’, in which Victor Hugo laid the foundations of a human and monumental tragedy. We have walked the streets of the old city, felt the breath bells and discovered the intertwined destinies of figures marked by love, jealousy and sacrifice. But this is only the beginning: the shadow of the cathedral still looms, and the threads of the drama are not all tied up. In the sequel, secrets, revelations and tragedies will seal the fate of the protagonists, in an epic where the soul of Paris vibrates at every moment.
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