Chapter 1718 minute read

Part 17

And henceforth, if architecture should accidentally rise again, it will no longer be mistress. It will be subject to the law of literature, which once received that law 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—resembled monuments. In India, Vyasa is dense, strange, impenetrable like a pagoda. In the Egyptian Orient, poetry has, like its buildings, the grandeur and tranquillity of line; in ancient Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, Catholic majesty, popular naïveté, 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 sum up what we have said thus far in a necessarily incomplete and truncated way, the human race has two books, two registers, two testaments: masonry and printing, the bible of stone and the bible of paper. No doubt, when one contemplates these two bibles so widely opened across the centuries, one may be permitted to regret the visible majesty of the writing in granite, those gigantic alphabets formulated in colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those species of human mountains which cover the world and the past from the pyramid to the bell tower, from Cheops to Strasbourg. The past must be reread upon these pages of marble. The book written by architecture must be admired and leafed through again and again; but the grandeur of the edifice which printing in turn erects must not be denied.

This edifice is colossal. I know not what maker of statistics has calculated that by superimposing upon one another all the volumes issued from the press since Gutenberg, the distance from the earth to the moon would be filled; but it is not of this sort of grandeur that we wish to speak. However, when one seeks to gather in one's thought a total image of the whole of printing's products down to our own days, does not this whole appear to us as an immense construction, leaning upon the entire world, which humanity builds without rest, and whose monstrous head is lost in the deep mists of the future? It is the ant heap of intelligences. It is the hive where all imaginations, those golden bees, arrive with their honey. The edifice has a thousand stories. Here and there, one sees open upon its slopes the shadowy caverns of science which intersect in its bowels. Everywhere upon its surface art causes its arabesques, its rosettes and its laces to luxuriate to the eye. There, each individual work, however capricious and isolated it may seem, has its place and its projection. Harmony results from the whole. From the cathedral of Shakespeare to the mosque of Byron, a thousand bell turrets jostle in confusion upon this metropolis of universal thought. At its base, some ancient titles of humanity which architecture had not registered have been rewritten. To the left of the entrance, the old white marble bas-relief of Homer has been set; to the right, the polyglot Bible rears its seven heads. The hydra of the Romancero bristles farther on, and some other hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Niebelungen. For the rest, the prodigious edifice remains forever unfinished. The press, that gigantic machine, which ceaselessly pumps all the intellectual sap of society, incessantly vomits new materials for its work. The whole human race is upon the scaffolding. Each mind is a mason. The humblest stops up his hole or sets his stone. Rétif de la Bretonne brings his load of rubble. Every day a new course rises. Independently of the original and individual contribution of each writer, there are collective contingents. The eighteenth century gives the _Encyclopédie_, the Revolution gives the _Moniteur_. Assuredly, this too is a construction which grows and piles up in endless spirals; here too there is confusion of tongues, incessant activity, untiring labor, the fierce concurrence of all humanity, a 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 SIXTH

AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRACY

He was a most fortunate personage, in the year of grace 1482, that noble man Robert d'Estouteville, knight, lord of Beyne, baron of Yvri and Saint-Andry in the Marche, counselor and chamberlain of the king, and keeper of the provostship of Paris. It was nearly seventeen years since he had received from the king, on 7 November 1465, the year of the comet[62], that fine office of provost of Paris, which was reputed rather a lordship than a post, _dignitas_, says Joannes Loemnoeus, _quæ cum non exigua potestate politiam concernente, atque prærogativis multis et juribus conjuncta est_[63]. The thing was marvelous in '82 that a gentleman holding commission from the king, and whose letters of institution dated from the marriage of the natural daughter of Louis XI with the bastard of Bourbon, should still hold it. On the same day that Robert d'Estouteville had replaced Jacques de Villiers in the provostship of Paris, master Jean Dauvet replaced messire Hélye de Thorrettes in the first presidency of the parliament court, Jean Jouvenel des Ursins supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of chancellor of France, Regnault des Dormans displaced Pierre Puy from the post of master of ordinary requests of the king's household. Now, over how many heads had the presidency, the chancellorship and the mastership passed since Robert d'Estouteville had held the provostship of Paris! It had been given him _in guard_, said the letters patent; and certainly, he guarded it well. He had clung to it, incorporated himself with it, identified himself with it. So well that he had escaped that fury of change which possessed Louis XI, a distrustful, teasing and hard-working king who liked to maintain, by frequent institutions and revocations, the elasticity of his power. More than that, the brave knight had obtained for his son the survivorship of his office, and already for two years the name of noble man Jacques d'Estouteville, esquire, had appeared beside his own at the head of the register of the ordinary of the provostship of Paris. Rare, certes, and signal favor! True, Robert d'Estouteville was a good soldier, had loyally raised the pennant against _the league of the public weal_, and had offered the queen a very marvelous stag in preserves on the day of her entry into Paris in 14... He had moreover 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 further clusters on his vine, the revenues of the civil and criminal registries of the provostship, plus the civil and criminal revenues of the lower auditories of the Châtelet, not to mention some small toll at the bridge of Mantes and of Corbeil, and the profits of the truce on the fencing schools of Paris, on the log-makers and the salt-measurers. Add to that the pleasure of displaying in the ridings through the city, and of causing to stand out upon the half-red and tawny robes of the aldermen and quarter-masters, his fine war-habit which you may still admire today sculpted upon his tomb in the abbey of Valmont in Normandy, and his helmet all dented at Montlhéry. And then, was it nothing to have all supremacy over the serjeants of the dozen, the concierge and watch of the Châtelet, the two auditors of the Châtelet, _auditores Castelleti_, the sixteen commissioners of the sixteen quarters, the jailer of the Châtelet, the four fief-holding serjeants, the hundred and twenty mounted serjeants, the hundred and twenty verge-serjeants, 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, right to turn, to hang and to drag, not to mention the petty jurisdiction in first instance, _in prima instantia_, as the charters say, over that viscounty of Paris, so gloriously endowed with seven noble bailiwicks? Can anything be imagined more suave than to render decrees and judgments, as messire Robert d'Estouteville did daily, in the Grand-Châtelet, beneath the broad and crushed arches of Philippe-Auguste? and to go, as he was wont each evening, to that charming house situated in the rue Galilée within the precinct of the Palais-Royal, which he held by right of his wife, madame Ambroise de Loré, to rest from the fatigue of having sent some poor devil to pass the night on his side in "that little lodge in the rue de l'Escorcherie, wherein the provosts and aldermen of Paris would make their prison; the said containing eleven feet in length, seven feet and four inches in width and eleven feet in height[64]"?

And not only did messire Robert d'Estouteville have his particular justice as provost and viscount of Paris, but he also had part, glance and bite, in the great justice of the king. There was no head somewhat high which had not passed through his hands before falling to the executioner. It was he who had fetched from the Bastille Saint-Antoine to lead him to the Halles, M. de Nemours; to lead to the Grève, M. de Saint-Pol, who scowled and protested, to the great joy of M. the provost, who did not like M. the constable.

Here is certainly more than enough to make a happy and illustrious life, and to deserve one day a notable page in that interesting history of the provosts of Paris, wherein one learns that Oudard de Villeneuve had a house in the rue des Boucheries, that Guillaume de Hangest bought the great and little Savoy, that Guillaume Thiboust gave to the nuns of Sainte-Geneviève his houses in the rue Clopin, that Hugues Aubriot dwelt at the hôtel du Porc-épic, and other domestic facts.

Yet, with so many reasons to take life in patience and in joy, messire Robert d'Estouteville had awakened on the morning of 7 January 1482 in a very surly and murderous humor. Whence came this humor? it was what he could not have said himself. Was it that the sky was gray? that the buckle of his old belt of Montlhéry was ill-fastened, and girt too militarily his provost's embonpoint? that he had seen pass in the street beneath his window some ribalds making mouths at him, going four in a band, doublet without shirt, hat without crown, sack and bottle at side? Was it vague presentiment of the three hundred seventy livres sixteen sols eight deniers which the future king Charles VIII was to deduct the following year from the revenues of the provostship? The reader may choose; as for us, we should incline to believe quite simply that he was in a bad humor because he was in a bad humor.

Besides, it was the morrow of a feast, a day of tedium for everyone, and above all for the magistrate charged with sweeping away all the filth, literal and figurative, that a feast makes in Paris. And then, he was to hold session at the Grand-Châtelet. Now, we have observed that judges generally arrange matters so that their audience day is also their ill-humor day, in order always to have someone upon whom to discharge it conveniently, by the king, the law and justice.

However, the audience 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, some dozens of burghers and bourgeoises heaped and crushed in an obscure corner of the lower auditory of the Châtelet, between a strong oak barrier and the wall, were beholding with beatitude the varied and rejoicing spectacle of civil and criminal justice rendered by master Florian Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet, lieutenant of M. the provost, a little pell-mell, and quite at random.

The room was small, low, vaulted. A fleur-de-lys table was at the back, with a great carved oak armchair, which was the provost's and empty, and a stool to the left for the auditor, master Florian. Below sat the clerk, scribbling. Opposite was the people; and before the door and before the table, many serjeants of the provostship, in camelot hooded coats violet with white crosses. Two serjeants of the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, clad in their All-Saints jackets, half red and blue, kept sentinel before a low door closed which one perceived at the back behind the table. A single ogive window, narrowly set in the thick wall, lit with a pale January ray two grotesque figures: the capricious stone demon sculpted as a corbel in the key of the vault, and the judge seated at the back of the room upon the fleurs-de-lys.

Indeed, picture to yourself at the provost's table, between two bundles of suits, crouched upon his elbows, his foot upon the train of his plain brown cloth robe, his face in his white lamb fur, from which his eyebrows seemed detached, red, surly, blinking, bearing with majesty the fat of his cheeks, which met beneath his chin, master Florian Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet.

Now the auditor was deaf. A slight defect for an auditor. Master Florian nonetheless judged without appeal and very congruously. It is certain that it suffices that a judge seem to listen; and the venerable auditor fulfilled that condition the better, the only essential one in good justice, that his attention could be distracted by no noise.

Besides, he had in the auditory an implacable controller of his doings in the person of our friend Jehan Frollo du Moulin, that schoolboy of yesterday, that _pedestrian_ one was always sure to meet everywhere in Paris, except before the professors' chair.

"Look," said he softly to his companion Robin Poussepain who sniggered beside him, while he commented upon the scenes unfolding before their eyes, "here is Jehanneton du Buisson. The pretty girl of the Cagnard at the Marché-Neuf! Upon my soul, he is condemning her, the old man! he has then no more eyes than ears. Fifteen sols four deniers parisis, for having carried two paternosters! That is a bit dear. _Lex duri carminis_[65].—Who is that one? Robin Chief-de-Ville, habergeon-maker!—For having been passed and received master in said trade?—It is his entrance fee.—Ho! two gentlemen among these knaves! Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly. Two squires, _corpus Christi_[66]! Ah! they have played at dice. When shall I see here our rector? A hundred livres parisis fine to the king! Barbedienne strikes like a deaf man,—what a deaf man!—I would be my brother the archdeacon if that kept me from playing, from playing by day, from playing by night, from living at play, from dying at play and from playing my soul after my shirt!—Holy Virgin, what a lot of girls! one after another, my sheep! Ambroise Lécuyère! Isabeau la Paynette! Bérarde Gironin! I know them all, by God! To the fine! to the fine! That will teach you to wear gilded belts! ten sols parisis! jades! Oh! the old mug of a judge, deaf and imbecile! Oh! Florian the lout! Oh! Barbedienne the boor! there he is at table! he eats the litigant, he eats the suit, he eats, he chews, he gorges, he fills himself. Fines, escheats, taxes, costs, lawful charges, wages, damages and interest, gehenna, prison and jail and stocks with expenses, are to him Christmas sweetmeats and St. John's marzipan! Look at him, the pig!—Come now! good! another love-sick woman! Thibaud la Thibaude, neither more nor less!—For having come out of the rue Glatigny!—Who is this son? Gieffroy Mabonne, crossbowman gendarme. He has blasphemed the name of the Father. To the fine, the Thibaude! to the fine, the Gieffroy! to the fine both! The old deaf man! he must have mixed up the two cases! Ten to one he makes the girl pay for the oath and the gendarme for the love!—Attention, Robin Poussepain! What are they bringing in? Here are many serjeants! By Jupiter! all the hounds of the pack are there. It must be the big piece of the hunt. A boar—It is one, Robin! it is one.—And a fine one too!—_Hercle_[67]! it is our prince of yesterday, our pope of fools, our bell-ringer, our one-eyed, our hunchback, our grimacer! It is Quasimodo!..."

It was nothing less.

It was Quasimodo, belted, hooped, tied, bound and under good guard. The squad of serjeants which surrounded him was assisted by the knight of the watch in person, bearing embroidered the arms of France upon the chest and the arms of the city upon the back. There was nothing else in Quasimodo, apart from his deformity, which could justify this apparatus of halberds and arquebuses. He was somber, silent and tranquil. Scarcely did his single eye cast from time to time upon the bonds that loaded him a sly and angry look.

He cast that same look around him, but so extinguished and so asleep that the women only pointed him out with the finger to laugh at him.

Meanwhile master Florian the auditor leafed through with attention the dossier of the complaint drawn up against Quasimodo, which the clerk presented to him, and, that glance cast, seemed to collect himself an instant. Thanks to this precaution which he always took care to use at the moment of proceeding to an interrogation, he knew in advance the names, qualities, offenses of the defendant, made foreseen replies to foreseen answers, and managed to extricate himself from all the sinuosities of the interrogation, without too much betraying his deafness. The dossier of the suit was for him the dog of the blind man. If it happened by chance that his infirmity betrayed itself here and there by some incoherent apostrophe or some unintelligible question, that passed for profundity among some, and for imbecility among others. In both cases, the honor of the magistracy received no blow; for it is still better that a judge be reputed imbecile or profound, than deaf. He therefore took great care to dissimulate his deafness from all eyes, and he succeeded ordinarily so well that he had come to deceive himself. Which is besides easier than one thinks. All hunchbacks hold the head high, all stammerers harangue, all deaf speak low. As for him, he believed himself at most a little rebellious of ear. That was the only concession he made on this point to public opinion, in his moments of frankness and self-examination.

Having therefore well ruminated Quasimodo's affair, he threw his head back and half-closed his eyes, for more majesty and impartiality, so well that he was at that moment both deaf and blind. Double condition without which there is no perfect judge. It is in this magisterial attitude that he began the interrogation.

"Your name?"

Now, here is a case which had not been "foreseen by the law", that where a deaf man should have to interrogate a deaf man.

Quasimodo, whom nothing warned of the question addressed to him, continued to look at the judge fixedly and answered not. The judge, deaf and whom nothing warned of the defendant's deafness, believed that he had answered, as generally all defendants did, and pursued with his mechanical and stupid aplomb.

"That is well. Your age?"

Quasimodo answered no more to this question. The judge believed it satisfied, and continued.

"Now, your estate?"

Still same silence. The auditory however began to whisper and look at one another.

"That suffices," resumed the imperturbable auditor when he supposed the defendant had consummated his third response. "You are accused, before us: _primo_, of nocturnal disturbance; _secundo_, of dishonest assault upon the person of a mad woman, _in præjudicium meretricis_[68]; _tertio_, of rebellion and disloyalty toward the archers of the ordinance of the king our sire. Explain yourself upon all these points.—Clerk, have you written what the defendant has said thus far?"

At this unfortunate question, a burst of laughter arose, from the registry to the auditory, so violent, so mad, so contagious, so universal that the two deaf men were perforce obliged to notice it. Quasimodo turned around, raising his hump, with disdain, while master Florian, astonished like him and supposing that the spectators' laughter had been provoked by some irreverent reply of the defendant, made visible to him by this shrug of the shoulders, apostrophized him with indignation.

"You have made there, knave, a reply which would deserve the halter! Know you to whom you speak?"

This sally was not apt to stop the explosion of general gaiety. It appeared to all so heteroclite and so horned that the mad laughter gained even to the serjeants of the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, a species of halberdiers in whom stupidity was of uniform. Quasimodo alone kept his seriousness, by the good reason that he understood nothing of what passed around him. The judge, more and more irritated, believed he ought to continue in the same tone, hoping thereby to strike the defendant with a terror which would react upon the auditory and bring it back to respect.

"Is it then to say, master perverse and rapinier that you are, that you permit yourself to fail the auditor of the Châtelet, the magistrate commissioned with the popular police of Paris, charged with making search for crimes, delicts and evil courses, with controlling all trades and forbidding monopoly, with maintaining the pavements, with preventing the regrators of poultry, fowls and game, with causing the measure of billets and other sorts of wood to be taken, with purging the city of mud and the air of contagious diseases, with attending continually to the public weal, in a word, without wages or hope of salary! Know you that I am called Florian Barbedienne, proper lieutenant of M. the provost, and moreover commissioner, inquisitor, controller and examiner with equal power in provostship, bailiwick, conservation and presidial!..."

There is no reason that a deaf man who speaks to a deaf man should stop. God knows where and when master Florian, thus launched at all oars into high eloquence, would have touched ground, if the low door at the back had not suddenly opened and given passage to M. the provost in person.

At his entry, master Florian did not remain short, but making a half-turn upon his heels, and abruptly pointing at the provost the harangue with which he was thundering Quasimodo the moment before: "My lord," said he, "I require such penalty as shall please you against the accused here present, for grave and mirific failing toward justice."

And he reseated himself quite out of breath, wiping great drops of sweat which fell from his brow and soaked like tears the parchments spread before him. Messire Robert d'Estouteville frowned and made upon Quasimodo a gesture of attention so imperious and significant that the deaf man understood something of it.

The provost addressed him with severity: "What is it that you have done, then, to be here, knave?"

The poor devil, supposing that the provost asked him his name, broke the silence he habitually kept, and answered with a raucous and guttural voice: "Quasimodo."

The response coincided so little with the question, that the mad laughter began again to circulate, and that messire Robert cried, red with anger: "Do you also mock me, arrant knave?"

"Bell-ringer at Notre-Dame," answered Quasimodo, believing that it was a matter of explaining to the judge who he was.

"Bell-ringer!" resumed the provost, who had awakened in the morning in rather bad humor, as we have said, so that his fury needed not to be fed by such strange replies. "Bell-ringer! I will have you make upon your back a carillon of switches through the crossroads of Paris. Do you hear, knave?"

"If it is my age that you wish to know," said Quasimodo, "I believe I shall be twenty years at Saint-Martin's."

This was too much; the provost could not hold. "Ah! you flout the provostship, miserable! Masters the verge-serjeants, you shall lead this knave to the pillory of the Grève, you shall beat him and you shall turn him for an hour. He shall pay me for it, by God's head! and I will that there be made a cry of the present judgment, with assistance of four sworn trumpets, in the seven castellanies of the viscounty of Paris."

The clerk began to draw up the judgment forthwith.

"Gut of God! how well that is judged!" cried from his corner the little schoolboy Jehan Frollo du Moulin.

The provost turned around and fixed again upon Quasimodo his flashing eyes.—"I believe the knave said _gut of God_! Clerk, add twelve deniers parisis fine for swearing, and let the fabric of Saint-Eustache have the half. I have a particular devotion to Saint-Eustache."} // Removed the JSON wrapper as instructed: output only translated chapter text.</think:6124c78e>Chapter 17: Part 17

BOOK SIXTH

AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRACY

“Stories of the world, in your language.”