Part 35

--Yes, they would have hanged her. They did hang a sow last month. The executioner enjoys that. He eats the beast afterward. To hang my pretty Djali! Poor little lamb!

--Curse it! cried dom Claude. The executioner is you. What means of salvation then have you found, knave? Must we deliver your idea with forceps?

--Softly, master! here it is.

Gringoire bent to the archdeacon's ear and spoke very low, casting an uneasy glance from one end of the street to the other, though no one was passing. When he had finished, dom Claude took his hand and said coldly: That is well. Until tomorrow.

--Until tomorrow, repeated Gringoire. And while the archdeacon went off one way, he went off the other, saying half aloud: Here is a fine business, master Pierre Gringoire. Never mind. Because one is small, it is not said that one should be frightened at a great undertaking. Biton carried a great bull on his shoulders; the wagtails, the flycatchers and the wheatears cross the ocean.

II

MAKE YOURSELF A TRUAND

The archdeacon, on returning to the cloister, found at the door of his cell his brother Jehan du Moulin, who was waiting for him and had beguiled the tedium of waiting by drawing with a coal on the wall a profile of his elder brother enriched with an outsized nose.

Dom Claude scarcely looked at his brother. He had other musings. That merry face of a good-for-nothing, whose radiance had so often brightened the gloomy countenance of the priest, was now powerless to melt the mist which daily thickened over that corrupted, mephitic and stagnant soul.

--My brother, said Jehan timidly, I come to see you.

The archdeacon did not so much as lift his eyes to him.

--Well?

--My brother, resumed the hypocrite, you are so good to me, and give me such good counsel, that I always return to you.

--And then?

--Alas! my brother, it is that you were quite right when you said to me: Jehan! Jehan! cessat doctorum doctrina, discipulorum disciplina[120]. Jehan, be wise; Jehan, be learned; Jehan, do not pass the night outside the college without the leave and permission of the master. Do not beat the Picards, noli, Joannes, verberare picardos. Do not rot like an illiterate ass, quasi asinus illitteratus, upon the straw of the school. Jehan, let yourself be punished at the master's discretion. Jehan, go every evening to the chapel and sing there an antiphon with verse and orison to my lady the glorious Virgin Mary. Alas! what excellent advice that was!

--And after?

--Alas! my brother, you see a guilty one, a criminal, a wretch, a libertine, an enormous man! My dear brother, Jehan has made of your gracious counsels straw and dung to be trampled underfoot. I am well punished for it, and God is extraordinarily just. As long as I had money, I feasted, raved and lived merrily. Oh! how debauchery, so charming of face, is ugly and sour of rear! Now I have not a penny, I have sold my cloth, my shirt and my towel; no more merry life! the fair candle is extinguished, and I have only the foul tallow wick that smokes in my nose. The girls mock me. I drink water. I am racked with remorse and creditors.

--The rest? said the archdeacon.

--Alas! dearest brother, I would fain turn to a better life. I come to you, full of contrition. I am penitent. I confess. I beat my breast with great blows of the fist. You were quite right to wish that I should become one day a licentiate and sub-monitor of the college of Torchi. See, I feel at present a magnificent vocation for that estate. But I have no more ink, I must buy some; I have no more pens, I must buy some; I have no more paper, I have no more books, I must buy some. I have great need for this of a little money. And I come to you, my brother, my heart full of contrition.

--Is that all?

--Yes, said the scholar. A little money.

--I have none.

The scholar then said, with an air at once grave and resolved: Well, my brother, I am sorry to have to tell you that very fine offers and proposals are made me elsewhere. You will not give me money? No?--In that case, I shall make myself a truand.

In pronouncing this monstrous word, he put on an Ajax-like look, expecting to see the thunderbolt fall upon his head.

The archdeacon said to him coldly:

--Make yourself a truand.

Jehan bowed to him profoundly and went down the cloister stair, whistling.

At the moment when he passed in the cloister court under the window of his brother's cell, he heard that window open, lifted his nose and saw the severe head of the archdeacon pass through the opening. Get thee to the devil! said dom Claude; here is the last money you will have from me.

At the same time the priest threw a purse at Jehan which made a great bump on the scholar's forehead, and with which Jehan went off at once angry and content, like a dog that one would stone with marrow-bones.

III

LONG LIVE MIRTH!

The reader has perhaps not forgotten that a part of the Court of Miracles was enclosed by the old city wall, many of whose towers were even then beginning to fall into ruin. One of these towers had been converted into a place of pleasure by the truands. There was a tavern on the lower floor, and the rest in the upper stories. This tower was the most lively point and consequently the most hideous of the vagabondage. It was a sort of monstrous hive which hummed there night and day. At night, when all the rest of the beggary slept, when there was no longer a lighted window on the muddy facades of the square, when no cry was heard to issue from those innumerable households, those ant-hills of thieves, girls and stolen or bastard children, one always recognized the merry tower by the noise it made, by the scarlet light which, shining at once from the air-holes, the windows, the fissures of the cracked walls, escaped, so to speak, from all its pores.

The cellar was therefore the tavern. One descended into it by a low door and by a stair as steep as a classical alexandrine. On the door there was, by way of sign, a marvellous daub representing new coins and killed fowls, with this pun beneath: To the bell-ringers for the dead.

One evening, at the moment when the curfew sounded from all the belfries of Paris, the sergeants of the watch, had it been granted them to enter the redoubtable Court of Miracles, might have remarked that there was in the truands' tavern more tumult even than usual, that they drank more and swore better there. Outside, there were in the square many groups conversing in low voices, as when some great design is afoot, and here and there a knave squatting who sharpened a wicked iron blade upon a paving-stone.

Meanwhile in the tavern itself, wine and gaming were so powerful a diversion from the ideas which that evening occupied the vagabondage, that it would have been difficult to guess from the talk of the drinkers what was afoot. Only they looked merrier than usual, and one saw gleam in all of them some weapon between the legs, a billhook, an axe, a great two-handed sword, or the crook of an old harquebus.

The room, of round shape, was very vast, but the tables were so crowded and the drinkers so numerous, that all the tavern contained, men, women, benches, beer-jugs, those who drank, those who slept, those who played, the hale, the lame, seemed heaped pell-mell with as much order and harmony as a heap of oyster-shells. There were some tallow dips lit on the tables; but the true lighting of the tavern, that which filled in the cabaret the role of the chandelier in an opera hall, was the fire. This cellar was so damp that the chimney was never left unextinguished, even in the height of summer; an immense chimney with a carved mantel, all bristling with heavy iron firedogs and kitchen gear, with one of those great fires mingled of wood and peat which, at night, in village streets, make so redly start from the opposite walls the spectre of the forge windows. A large dog, gravely seated in the ashes, turned before the embers a spit laden with meats.

However great the confusion, after the first glance one could distinguish in this multitude three principal groups, which pressed around three personages the reader already knows. One of these personages, bizarrely accoutred in many an oriental rag, was Mathias Hungadi Spicali, duke of Egypt and of Bohemia. The knave was seated on a table, legs crossed, finger in air, and was loudly dispensing his knowledge of white and black magic to many a gaping face that surrounded him.

Another crowd thickened around our former friend, the valiant king of Thunes, armed to the teeth. Clopin Trouillefou, with a very serious air and in a low voice, was regulating the pillage of an enormous cask full of arms, widely staved in before him, from which poured in throngs axes, swords, sallets, coats of mail, plates, lance and javelin heads, arrows and darts, like apples and grapes from a horn of plenty. Each took from the heap, one the morion, another the tuck, another the cross-hilted misericorde. The children even armed themselves, and there were even some legless cripples who, barded and cuirassed, passed between the drinkers' legs like great beetles.

Finally a third audience, the noisiest, the most jovial and the most numerous, encumbered the benches and tables amid which harangued and swore a flute-like voice issuing from beneath a heavy complete armor from helmet to spurs. The individual who had thus screwed a panoply upon his body disappeared so wholly under the war-habit that one saw no longer of his person save an impudent red turned-up nose, a lock of blond hair, a pink mouth and bold eyes. He had his girdle full of daggers and poignards, a great sword at his flank, a rusty arbalest at his left, and a vast jug of wine before him, not to mention at his right a buxom dishevelled girl. All the mouths around him laughed, swore and drank.

Add twenty secondary groups, the girls and boys of the service running with jugs on their heads, the players squatting over ninepins, merels, dice, the game of fox-and-geese, the passionate game of tringlet, the quarrels in one corner, the kisses in another, and one will have some idea of this whole, over which wavered the light of a great blazing fire which made dance upon the cabaret walls a thousand monstrous and grotesque shadows.

As for the noise, it was the inside of a bell in full peal.

The dripping-pan, where a rain of grease crackled, filled with its continual yelping the intervals of those thousand dialogues which crossed from one end of the room to the other.

There was among this uproar, at the back of the tavern, on the inner bench of the chimney, a philosopher who meditated, his feet in the ashes and his eye on the embers. It was Pierre Gringoire.

--Come, quick! make haste, arm yourselves! we set out in an hour! said Clopin Trouillefou to his argotiers.

A girl hummed:

Good night, my father and my mother! The last cover the fire.

Two card-players quarrelled. Knave! cried the more purple of the two, shaking his fist at the other, I'll mark you with the club. You can replace Mistigri in my lord the king's pack of cards.

--Oof! howled a Norman, recognizable by his nasal accent, we are here packed like the saints of Caillouville!

--Son, said the duke of Egypt, speaking in falsetto to his audience, the witches of France go to the sabbath without broom, or grease, or mount, only with a few magic words. The witches of Italy always have a goat who awaits them at their door. All are bound to leave by the chimney.

The voice of the young knave armed cap-a-pie dominated the hubbub.

--Christmas! Christmas! he cried. My first arms today! Truand! I am a truand, by the belly of Christ! pour me to drink!--My friends, I am called Jehan Frollo du Moulin, and I am a gentleman. I am of the opinion that, if God were a man-at-arms, he would turn robber. Brothers, we are going to make a fine expedition. We are brave ones. Besiege the church, break down the doors, draw the fair girl thence, save her from the judges, save her from the priests, dismantle the cloister, burn the bishop in the bishop's palace, we shall do that in less time than a burgomaster needs to eat a spoonful of soup. Our cause is just, we shall pillage Notre-Dame, and all is said. We will hang Quasimodo. Do you know Quasimodo, my ladies? Have you seen him puffing on the great bell on a day of Whitsuntide? Horn of the Father! it is very fine! one would say a devil astride a maw.--My friends, listen to me, I am a truand to the bottom of my heart, I am an argotier in my soul, I was born a cagou. I was very rich, and have eaten my estate. My mother would have made me an officer, my father a subdeacon, my aunt a councillor of inquiries, my grandmother a protonotary of the king, my great-aunt a treasurer of the short robe. I have made myself a truand. I said that to my father who spat his curse in my face, to my mother who, the old lady, fell to weeping and drooling like this log on this firedog. Long live mirth! I am a true Bicêtre! Hostess my dear, more wine! I still have wherewith to pay. I want no more wine of Suresnes. It grieves my gullet. I would as soon, corboeuf! gargle with a basket!

Meanwhile the crowd applauded with bursts of laughter, and, seeing the tumult redouble around him, the scholar cried out: Oh! the fine noise! Populi debacchantis populosa debacchatio[121]! Then he began to sing, his eye as if drowned in ecstasy, in the tone of a canon intoning vespers: --Quæ cantica! quæ organa! quæ cantilenæ! quæ melodiæ hic sine fine decantantur! sonant melliflua hymnorum organa, suavissima angelorum melodia, cantica canticorum mira[122]! He broke off: Devil's tapster, give me my supper.

There was a moment of near-silence during which rose in turn the shrill voice of the duke of Egypt, instructing his bohemians... The weasel is called Aduine, the fox Blue-Foot or Wood-Runner, the wolf Grey-Foot or Gold-Foot, the bear the Old One or the Grandfather.--The cap of a gnome renders invisible, and makes visible the invisible things.--Every toad that is baptized must be clad in red or black velvet, a bell at the neck, a bell at the feet. The godfather holds the head, the godmother the rear.--It is the demon Sidragasum who has the power to make the girls dance naked.

--By the mass! interrupted Jehan, I would be the demon Sidragasum.

Meanwhile the truands continued to arm themselves, whispering at the other end of the cabaret.

--That poor Esmeralda! said a bohemian. She is our sister.--We must draw her out of there.

--Is she then still at Notre-Dame? resumed a chapman with a Jewish look.

--Yes, by God!

--Well! comrades, cried the chapman, to Notre-Dame! The more so that in the chapel of the saints Féréol and Ferrution there are two statues, one of saint John the Baptist, the other of saint Anthony, both of gold, weighing together seventeen marks of gold and fifteen estellins, and the gilt-silver footstools seventeen marks five ounces. I know that. I am a goldsmith.

Here they served Jehan his supper. He cried, sprawling on the bosom of the girl at his side:

--By saint Voult-de-Lucques, whom the people call saint Goguelu, I am perfectly happy. I have before me an imbecile who looks at me with the beardless mien of an archduke. Here is one at my left who has teeth so long they hide his chin. And then I am like the marshal of Gié at the siege of Pontoise, I have my right leaning on a nipple.--Belly-Mahom! comrade, you look like a dealer in truncheons, and you come sit by me! I am noble, friend. Merchandise is incompatible with nobility! Get you gone from there.--Holàhée! you others! do not fight! How now, Baptiste Croque-Oison, you who have so fair a nose, you would risk it against the big fists of that boor! Imbecile! Non cuiquam datum est habere nasum[123].--You are truly divine, Jacqueline Ronge-Oreille! it is a pity you have no hair.--Holà! I am called Jehan Frollo, and my brother is archdeacon. The devil take him! All I tell you is the truth. In making myself a truand, I have of free heart renounced the half of a house situated in paradise which my brother had promised me. Dimidiam domum in paradiso. I cite the text. I have a fief in the rue Tirechappe, and all the women are in love with me, as true as it is true that saint Eloi was an excellent goldsmith, and that the five trades of the good city of Paris are the tanners, the white-leatherers, the curriers, the purse-makers and the sweepers, and that saint Laurent was burned with egg-shells. I swear to you, comrades,

That I shall not drink of spice-wine Within a year, if I lie herein!

My charming one, the moon shines clear, look you yonder through the air-hole how the wind ruffles the clouds! Thus I do your gorget.--Girls! snuff the children and the candles.--Christ and Mahom! what is it I eat there, Jupiter! Ohé! the old crone! the hair one does not find on the heads of your trulls, one finds it in your omelettes. Old woman! I love bald omelettes. The devil make you flat-nosed!--Fair hostelry of Beelzebub where the trulls comb themselves with forks!

This said, he broke his plate on the pavement and fell to singing at the top of his lungs:

And I have, myself, By the blood of God! Nor faith, nor law, Nor fire, nor place, Nor king, Nor God!

Meanwhile, Clopin Trouillefou had finished his distribution of arms. He approached Gringoire, who seemed plunged in a deep reverie, his feet on a firedog.

--Friend Pierre, said the king of Thunes, what the devil are you thinking of?

Gringoire turned toward him with a melancholy smile:

--I love fire, my dear lord. Not for the trivial reason that fire warms our feet or cooks our soup, but because it has sparks. Sometimes I spend hours looking at the sparks. I discover a thousand things in those stars which powder the black bottom of the hearth. Those stars too are worlds.

--Thunder if I understand you! said the truand. Do you know what time it is?

--I know not, answered Gringoire.

Clopin then approached the duke of Egypt.

--Comrade Mathias, the quarter-hour is not good. They say king Louis XI is in Paris.

--All the more reason to draw our sister from his claws, answered the old bohemian.

--You speak as a man, Mathias, said the king of Thunes. Besides we shall do it smartly. No resistance to fear in the church. The canons are hares, and we are in force. The men of the parliament will be finely caught tomorrow when they come for her! Bowels of the pope! I will not have the fair girl hanged!

Clopin left the cabaret.

Meanwhile Jehan cried with a husky voice: I drink, I eat, I am drunk, I am Jupiter!--Eh! Pierre the Slayer, if you look at me still like that, I'll dust your nose with flickings.

For his part Gringoire, torn from his meditations, had set himself to consider the fiery and clamorous scene about him, murmuring between his teeth: Luxuriosa res vinum et tumultuosa ebrietas[124]. Alas! how right I am not to drink, and how excellently saint Benedict says: Vinum apostatare facit etiam sapientes[125].

At this moment Clopin re-entered and cried with a voice of thunder: Midnight!

At this word, which had the effect of the boot-and-saddle on a halted regiment, all the truands, men, women, children, precipitated in throng out of the tavern with a great noise of arms and ironware.

The moon had veiled herself. The Court of Miracles was quite dark. There was not a light. It was nevertheless far from deserted. One distinguished there a crowd of men and women who spoke low together. One heard them hum, and one saw gleam all sorts of arms in the darkness. Clopin mounted on a great stone.

--To your ranks, the Argot! he cried. To your ranks, the Egypt! To your ranks, Galilee!

A movement was made in the shadow. The immense multitude seemed to form in column. After some minutes, the king of Thunes raised his voice again: Now, silence to cross Paris! The password is: Little flame in the rattle! We shall light the torches only at Notre-Dame! March!

Ten minutes after, the watch's horsemen were fleeing in terror before a long procession of black and silent men which descended toward the Pont-au-Change, through the tortuous streets which pierce in all directions the massy quarter of the Halles.

IV

AN AWKWARD FRIEND

This same night, Quasimodo did not sleep. He had just made his last round in the church. He had not remarked, at the moment when he closed the doors, that the archdeacon had passed near him and had shown some ill-humor in seeing him bolt and padlock with care the enormous iron framework which gave to their wide leaves the solidity of a wall. Dom Claude looked even more preoccupied than usual. Besides, since the nocturnal adventure of the cell, he constantly ill-treated Quasimodo; but, though he might bully him, and even strike him sometimes, nothing shook the submission, the patience, the devoted resignation of the faithful bell-ringer. From the archdeacon he suffered all, insults, threats, blows, without murmuring a reproach, without uttering a complaint. Only he followed him at times with uneasy eyes when dom Claude mounted the tower stair, but the archdeacon had of his own accord abstained from reappearing before the eyes of the Egyptian.

This night therefore, Quasimodo, after having given a glance to his poor bells so neglected, to Jacqueline, to Marie, to Thibauld, had mounted even to the top of the northern tower, and there, setting upon the lead his well-closed deaf lantern, had fallen to looking at Paris. The night, we have already said, was very dark. Paris, which was, so to speak, not lit at that epoch, presented to the eye a confused heap of black masses, cut here and there by the whitish curve of the Seine. Quasimodo saw no more light in it than at a window of a distant edifice whose vague and sombre profile stood out well above the roofs, on the side of the Saint-Antoine gate. There too there was someone watching.

While letting his single gaze float in that horizon of mist and night, the bell-ringer felt within himself an inexpressible uneasiness. For several days he had been on his guard. He saw constantly prowling around the church men of sinister mien who did not quit their eyes from the asylum of the young girl. He bethought him that some plot was afoot against the unhappy refugee. He fancied that there was a popular hatred upon her as there was one upon him, and that it might well happen that something would soon befall. So he held himself upon his belfry, on the watch, dreaming in his dreamer, as Rabelais says, his eye by turns upon the cell and upon Paris, keeping sure guard, like a good dog, with a thousand suspicions in his mind.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”