Part 2

The two extremities of this gigantic parallelogram were occupied, the one by the famous marble table, so long, so wide and so thick that never, say the old terrier papers, in a style that would have given Gargantua an appetite, was there seen "such a slice of marble in the world"; the other, by the chapel where Louis XI had caused himself to be sculpted kneeling before the Virgin, and where he had had transported, without caring to leave two empty niches in the row of royal statues, the statues of Charlemagne and of Saint Louis, two saints whom he supposed to be in high credit in heaven as kings of France. This chapel, still new, built scarcely six years before, was entirely in that charming taste of delicate architecture, of marvellous sculpture, of fine and profound chasing which marks among us the end of the Gothic era and perpetuates itself until about the middle of the sixteenth century in the fairy-like fancies of the Renaissance. The little openwork rose window pierced above the portal was in particular a masterpiece of slenderness and grace; one would have said a star of lace.

In the middle of the hall, opposite the great door, a dais of cloth of gold, backed against the wall, and in which a private entrance had been made by means of a window of the corridor of the gilded chamber, had been raised for the Flemish envoys and the other great personages invited to the representation of the mystery.

It was upon the marble table that the mystery was to be performed, according to custom. It had been arranged for this purpose since the morning; its rich marble slab, all scratched by the heels of the law students, supported a fairly tall timber cage, whose upper surface, visible to the gaze of the whole hall, was to serve as stage, and whose interior, masked by tapestries, was to stand in place of the dressing-room for the characters of the play. A ladder, naively placed on the outside, was to establish communication between the stage and the dressing-room, and to lend its stiff rungs to the entrances as to the exits. There was no character so unexpected, no complication, no theatrical coup that was not obliged to mount by this ladder. Innocent and venerable infancy of art and of machinery!

Four sergeants of the bailiff of the Palace, obligatory guardians of all the pleasures of the people on feast days as on days of execution, stood at the four corners of the marble table.

It was only at the twelfth stroke of noon sounding from the great clock of the Palace that the play was to begin. It was surely late enough for a theatrical representation; but the hour of the ambassadors had had to be taken into account.

Now this whole multitude had been waiting since the morning. A good number of these honest curious ones were shivering at daybreak before the great staircase of the Palace; some even affirmed having spent the night stretched across the great door to be sure of entering first. The crowd thickened every moment, and, like water that rises above its level, began to climb along the walls, to swell around the pillars, to overflow upon the entablatures, upon the cornices, upon the window sills, upon all the projections of the architecture, upon all the reliefs of the sculpture. Hence the constraint, the impatience, the boredom, the license of a day of cynicism and madness, the quarrels that broke out on every pretext for a sharp elbow or a shod foot, the fatigue of a long wait, already gave, long before the hour when the ambassadors were to arrive, a sour and bitter accent to the clamor of this people shut in, packed, pressed, trampled, stifled. Nothing was heard but 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 verge-bearers, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the bishop of Paris, the pope of fools, the pillars, the statues, that closed door, that open window; all to the great amusement of the bands of schoolboys and lackeys scattered through the mass, who mingled with all this discontent their teasing and their mischief, and pricked, so to speak with pins, the general ill-humor.

Among others there was 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 by turns their looks and their raillery within and without, into the crowd of the hall and into the crowd of the square. By their mimic gestures, by their loud laughter, by the mocking calls they exchanged from one end of the hall to the other with their comrades, it was easy to judge that these young clerks did not share the boredom and fatigue of the rest of the spectators, and that they knew right well, for their particular pleasure, how to extract from what they had before their eyes a spectacle which made them await the other patiently.

"Upon my soul, it is you, Joannes Frollo de Molendino!" cried one of them to a sort of little blond devil, with a pretty and malicious face, hooked upon the acanthus of a capital; "you are well named Jehan of the Mill, for your two arms and your two legs look like four wings going on the wind. How long have you been here?"

"By the mercy of the devil," answered Joannes Frollo, "it is more than four hours, and I hope well that they will be counted to me upon my time in purgatory. I heard the eight singers of the king of Sicily intone the first verse of the high mass of seven o'clock in the Sainte-Chapelle."

"Fine singers," resumed the other, "and who have voices still more pointed than their cap! Before founding a mass for Monsieur Saint John, the king would have done well to inquire whether Monsieur Saint John likes Latin psalmody with a Provençal accent."

"It is to employ those accursed singers of the king of Sicily that he did that!" cried bitterly an old woman in the crowd at the foot of the window. "I ask you a little! a thousand Parisian livres for a mass! and upon the farm of sea fish of the Paris markets, too!"

"Peace! old woman," replied a fat and grave personage who was holding his nose next to the fishwife; "there had to be a mass founded. Would you have wished the king to fall ill again?"

"Bravely spoken, Sire Gilles Lecornu, master furrier of the king's robes!" cried the little scholar clinging to the capital.

A burst of laughter from all the schoolboys greeted the ill-fated name of the poor furrier of the king's robes.

"Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!" said some.

"Cornutus et hirsutus," resumed another.

"Why, of course," continued the little demon of the capital. "What have they to laugh at? Honorable man Gilles Lecornu, brother of Master Jehan Lecornu, provost of the king's household, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, first doorkeeper of the wood of Vincennes, all bourgeois of Paris, all married from father to son!"

The merriment redoubled. The fat furrier, without answering a word, strove to withdraw from the looks fixed upon him from all sides; but he sweated and puffed in vain: like a wedge that drives into wood, the efforts he made served only to embed more solidly within the shoulders of his neighbors his broad apoplectic face, purple with spite and anger.

At last one of them, fat, short and venerable like himself, came to his aid.

"Abomination! schoolboys who speak thus to a bourgeois! In my time they would have been flogged with a fagot wherewith they would afterwards have been burned."

The whole band burst out laughing.

"Holàhee! who sings that tune? what ill-omened screech-owl is that?"

"Why, I recognize him," said one; "it is Master Andry Musnier."

"Because he is one of the four sworn booksellers of the University!" said another.

"Everything goes by four in this shop," cried a third; "the four nations, the four faculties, the four feasts, the four procurators, the four electors, the four booksellers."

"Well," resumed Jehan Frollo, "let us give them the very devil by fours."

"Musnier, we will burn your books."

"Musnier, we will beat your lackey."

"Musnier, we will rumple your wife."

"The good fat demoiselle Oudarde."

"Who is as fresh and as gay as if she were a widow."

"The devil take you!" grumbled Master Andry Musnier.

"Master Andry," resumed Jehan, still hanging from his capital, "hold your tongue, or I will fall upon your head!"

Master Andry raised his eyes, seemed for an instant to measure the height of the pillar, the heaviness of the rogue, mentally multiplied that heaviness by the square of the velocity, and held his peace.

Jehan, master of the field of battle, pursued with triumph:

"For I would do it, though I am brother to an archdeacon!

"Fine sirs, these folk of ours at the University! not even to have had our privileges respected on a day like this! Why, there is a May and a bonfire at the City; mystery, pope of fools and Flemish ambassadors at the Cité; and at the University, nothing!

"Yet the Place Maubert is large enough!" resumed one of the clerks stationed on the window ledge.

"Down with the rector, the electors and the procurators!" cried Joannes.

"We must have a bonfire this evening in the Champ-Gaillard," pursued the other, "with the books of Master Andry."

"And the desks of the scribes!" said his neighbor.

"And the rods of the beadles!"

"And the spittoons of the deans!"

"And the buffets of the procurators!"

"And the hutches of the electors!"

"And the stools of the rector!"

"Down with them!" resumed little Jehan in a falsetto; "down with Master Andry, the beadles and the scribes; the theologians, the physicians and the decretalists; the procurators, the electors and the rector!"

"Then this is the end of the world!" murmured Master Andry, stopping his ears.

"By the way, the rector! here he comes in the square," cried one of those at the window.

It was a race who should turn round toward the square.

"Is it really our venerable rector Master Thibaut?" asked Jehan Frollo du Moulin, who, having hooked himself to a pillar on the inside, could not see what was passing without.

"Yes, yes," answered all the others, "it is he, it is indeed he, Master Thibaut the rector."

It was in fact the rector and all the dignitaries of the University who were proceeding in procession to meet the embassy and at that moment crossing the Place du Palais. The schoolboys, pressed at the window, received them as they passed with sarcasms and ironical applause. The rector, who marched at the head of his company, caught the first volley; it was rough.

"Good day, Mr. Rector! Holàhee! good day then!

"How does he come to be here, the old gamester? He has quit his dice then?

"How he trots on his mule! hers has shorter ears than he.

"Holàhee! good day, Mr. Rector Thibaut! Tybalde aleator! old imbecile! old gambler!

"God keep you! have you thrown double six often this night?

"Oh, the decrepit face, leaden, drawn and battered for love of play and of dice!

"Where are you going thus, Tybalde ad dados, turning your back on the University and trotting toward the City?

"He is doubtless going to seek lodgings in the Rue Thibautodé," cried Jehan du Moulin.

The whole band repeated the jest with a voice of thunder and furious clappings of hands.

"You are going to seek lodgings in the Rue Thibautodé, are you not, Mr. Rector, player in the devil's game?"

Then it was the turn of the other dignitaries.

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

"Say then, Robin Poussepain, who is that yonder?"

"It is Gilbert de Suilly, Gilbertus de Soliaco, chancellor of the college of Autun."

"Why, here is my shoe; you are better placed than I; throw it in his face.

"Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces.

"Down with the six theologians in their white surplices!

"Are those the theologians? I thought they were the six white geese given by Saint Genevieve to the city, for the fief of Roogny.

"Down with the physicians!

"Down with the cardinal disputations and quodlibetal!

"Here, take my hood, chancellor of Sainte-Genevieve! you did me a wrong. It is true he gave my place in the nation of Normandy to little Ascanio Falzaspada, who is of the province of Berry, since he is an Italian.

"That is an injustice," said all the schoolboys. "Down with the chancellor of Sainte-Genevieve!

"Ho hey! Master Joachim de Ladehors! Ho hey! Louis Dahuille! Ho hey! Lambert Hoctement!

"The devil choke the procurator of the German nation!

"And the chaplains of the Sainte-Chapelle, with their gray amices; cum tunicis grisis!

"Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis!

"Holàhee! the masters of arts! All the fine black copes! all the fine red copes!

"That makes a fine tail to the rector.

"One would say a doge of Venice going to the espousal of the sea.

"Say then, Jehan! the canons of Sainte-Genevieve!

"The devil take the canonry!

"Abbé Claude Choart! doctor Claude Choart! Are you seeking Marie la Giffarde?

"She is in the Rue de Glatigny.

"She makes the bed of the king of ribalds.

"She pays her four deniers; quatuor denarios.

"Aut unum bombum.

"Will you have her pay you on the nose?

"Comrades! Master Simon Sanguin, the elector of Picardy, with his wife behind him!

"Post equitem sedet atra cura.

"Courage, Master Simon!

"Good day, Mr. Elector!

"Good night, Madam Electress!"

"Are they happy to see all that," said, sighing, Joannes de Molendino, still perched in the foliage of his capital.

Meanwhile the sworn bookseller of the University, Master Andry Musnier, was whispering in the ear of the furrier of the king's robes, Master Gilles Lecornu.

"I tell you, sir, this is the end of the world. Never were such outrages of the schools seen. These are the accursed inventions of the age that ruin everything. Artilleries, serpentines, bombards, and above all printing, that other plague of Germany. No more manuscripts, no more books! Printing kills the book trade. It is the end of the world that comes.

"I perceive it well by the progress of velvet stoles," said the fur merchant.

At this moment noon sounded.

"Ha!..." said the whole crowd with one voice. The schoolboys held their peace. Then there was a great bustle, a great movement of feet and heads, a great general detonation of coughs and handkerchiefs; every one arranged himself, posted himself, raised himself, grouped himself; then a great silence; all necks remained stretched, all mouths open, all looks turned toward the marble table. Nothing appeared there. The four sergeants of the bailiff were still there, stiff and motionless like four painted statues. All eyes turned toward the dais reserved for the Flemish envoys. The door remained shut, and the dais empty. This crowd had awaited since morning 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 dais remained deserted, the stage mute. Meanwhile anger succeeded impatience. Irritated words circulated, still in a low voice, it is true. "The mystery! the mystery!" was muttered sullenly. Heads were fermenting. A tempest, which as yet only growled, hovered on the surface of this crowd. It was Jehan du Moulin who drew the first spark from it.

"The mystery, and the devil take the Flemings!" he cried with all the force of his lungs, twisting like a serpent around his capital.

The crowd clapped its hands.

"The mystery," it repeated, "and Flanders to all the devils!"

"We must have the mystery, at once," resumed the clerk; "or it is my advice that we hang the bailiff of the Palace, by way of comedy and morality."

"Well said," cried the people, "and let us begin the hanging with his sergeants."

A great acclamation followed. The four poor devils began to grow pale and look at one another. The multitude was moving toward them, and they already saw the frail wooden balustrade that separated them bend and bulge under the pressure of the crowd.

The moment was critical.

"To the sack! to the sack!" was cried from all sides.

At this instant, the tapestry of the dressing-room which we have described above was lifted, and gave passage to a personage whose single appearance suddenly arrested the crowd, and changed, as if by enchantment, its anger into curiosity.

"Silence! silence!"

The personage, very far from reassured and trembling in all his limbs, advanced to the edge of the marble table, with many reverences which, as he drew near, resembled more and more genuflections.

Meanwhile calm had little by little been restored. There remained only that slight murmur which always escapes the silence of a crowd.

"Gentlemen bourgeois," said he, "and damsels bourgeois, we are to have the honor of declaiming and representing before his Eminence the Cardinal a very fine morality, which is named: The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin Mary. It is I who play Jupiter. His Eminence is at this moment accompanying the most honorable embassy of the Duke of Austria; the which is detained, at this hour, at hearing the harangue of the Rector of the University, at the Baudets gate. As soon as the most eminent cardinal shall have arrived, we will begin."

It is certain that nothing less than the intervention of Jupiter was needed to save the four unhappy sergeants of the bailiff of the Palace. If we had the good fortune to have invented this very truthful story, and consequently to be responsible for it before Our Lady the Critic, it is not against us that one could in this moment invoke the classical precept: Nec deus intersit. Besides, the costume of the lord Jupiter was very fine, and had not a little contributed to calm the crowd by attracting all its attention. Jupiter was clad in a brigandine covered with black velvet, studded with gilt nails; he was capped with a bicoquet furnished with gilt silver buttons; and, but for the red and the great beard which covered each one half of his face, but for the roll of gilt cardboard, sown with spangles and all bristling with strips of tinsel that he held in his hand and in which practiced eyes easily recognized the thunderbolt, but for his feet of flesh color and banded in the Greek fashion, he might have borne comparison, for the severity of his bearing, with a Breton archer of the body of Monsieur de Berry.

II

PIERRE GRINGOIRE

Meanwhile, while he was haranguing, the satisfaction and unanimous admiration excited by his costume were dissipating at his words; and when he came to that unfortunate conclusion: "As soon as the most eminent cardinal shall have arrived, we will begin," his voice was lost in a thunder of hoots.

"Begin at once! The mystery! the mystery at once!" cried the people. And above all the voices was heard that of Johannes de Molendino, piercing the rumor like the fife in a charivari of Nîmes: "Begin at once!" glapped the clerk.

"Down with Jupiter and the Cardinal of Bourbon!" vociferated Robin Poussepain and the other clerks perched in the window.

"The morality at once!" repeated the crowd. "Immediately! at once! The sack and the rope for the players and the cardinal!"

The poor Jupiter, haggard, terrified, pale beneath his red, let fall his thunderbolt, took his bicoquet in hand; then he bowed and trembled, stammering: His Eminence... the ambassadors... Madame Marguerite of Flanders... He knew not what to say. At bottom, 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 nothing but an abyss, that is to say, a gallows.

Happily some one came to draw him out of his embarrassment and assume the responsibility.

An individual who stood within the balustrade in the space left free around the marble table, and whom no one had yet perceived, so completely was his long and slender person sheltered from every visual ray by the diameter of the pillar against which he was leaning, this individual, we say, tall, thin, pale, blond, still young, though already wrinkled on brow and cheek, with brilliant eyes and a smiling mouth, clad in black serge, threadbare and glossy with age, approached the marble table and made a sign to the poor patient. But the other, bewildered, did not see.

The new-comer took one step more: "Jupiter!" said he, "my dear Jupiter!"

The other heard not.

At last the tall blond, impatient, cried to him almost under his nose:

"Michel Giborne!"

"Who calls me?" said Jupiter, as if awakened with a start.

"I," answered the personage in black.

"Ah!" said Jupiter.

"Begin at once," resumed the other. "Satisfy the populace. I will undertake to appease Monsieur the bailiff, who will appease Monsieur the cardinal."

Jupiter breathed again.

"Gentlemen bourgeois," he cried with all the force of his lungs to the crowd which continued to hoot him, "we are going to begin at once."

"Evoe, Jupiter! Plaudite, cives!" cried the schoolboys.

"Noël! Noël!" cried the people.

It was a deafening clapping of hands, and Jupiter had already re-entered under his tapestry when the hall was still trembling with acclamations.

Meanwhile the unknown personage who had so magically changed "the storm into a calm," as says our old and dear Corneille, had modestly re-entered the half-light of his pillar, and would doubtless have remained there invisible, motionless and mute as before, had he not been drawn thence by two young women who, placed in the front rank of the spectators, had remarked his colloquy with Michel Giborne-Jupiter.

"Master," said one of them, making him a sign to approach...

"Hold your tongue, dear Liénarde," said her neighbor, pretty, fresh, and all brave for being Sunday-fine. "It is not a clerk, it is a layman; one must not say master, but rather sir."

"Sir," said Liénarde.

The unknown approached the balustrade.

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

"Oh! nothing," said Liénarde, all confused; "it is my neighbor Gisquette la Gencienne who would speak with you."

"Not so," replied Gisquette, reddening; "it is Liénarde who said to you: Master; I told her one said: Sir."

The two young girls lowered their eyes. The other, who asked nothing better than to enter into conversation, looked at them smiling:

"You have then nothing to say to me, damsels?"

"Oh! nothing at all," answered Gisquette.

"Nothing," said Liénarde.

The tall young blond took a step to withdraw. But the two curious ones had no mind to let go.

"Sir," said Gisquette quickly, with the impetuosity of a sluice that opens or of a woman who makes up her mind, "you know then that soldier who is to play the part of Madame the Virgin in the mystery?"

"You mean the part of Jupiter?" resumed the anonymous.

"Why, yes," said Liénarde; "is she silly! You know Jupiter then?"

"Michel Giborne?" answered the anonymous; "yes, madam."

"He has a fine beard!" said Liénarde.

"Will it be fine, what they are going to say there?" asked Gisquette timidly.

"Very fine, mademoiselle," answered the anonymous without the least hesitation.

"What will it be?" said Liénarde.

"The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin, a morality, if you please, mademoiselle."

"Ah! that is different," resumed Liénarde.

A short silence followed. The unknown broke it:

"It is a morality quite new, and which has never yet served."

"It is not then the same," said Gisquette, "as that which was given two years ago, on the day of the entry of the lord legate, and where there were three fair maidens playing characters..."

"Of sirens," said Liénarde.

"And all naked," added the young man.

Liénarde lowered her eyes modestly. Gisquette looked at her, and did likewise. He pursued, smiling:

"It was a thing right pleasant to see. Today it is a morality made expressly for mademoiselle of Flanders."

"Will they sing bergerettes?" asked Gisquette.

"Fie!" said the unknown; "in a morality! One must not confound the genres. If it were a sotie, well and good."

"That is a pity," resumed Gisquette. "That day there were at the Ponceau fountain men and savage women who fought and made several postures singing little motets and bergerettes."

"What suits a legate," said the unknown rather dryly, "suits not a princess."

"And near them," resumed Liénarde, "several bass instruments played that rendered great melodies."

"And to refresh the passers-by," continued Gisquette, "the fountain threw by three mouths, wine, milk and hippocras, of which whoso would might drink."

"And a little below the Ponceau," pursued Liénarde, "at the Trinity, there was a passion by characters, and without speaking."}

“Stories of the world, in your language.”