Part 3

--If I remember it! cried Gisquette: God upon the cross, and the two thieves to the right and to the left!"

Here the young gossips, warming to the memory of the legate's entry, began to speak all at once.

--And further on, at the Painters' Gate, there were other persons very richly dressed.

--And at the fountain of Saint-Innocent, that huntsman pursuing a doe with great noise of dogs and hunting horns!

--And at the butchery of Paris, those scaffolds representing the bastille of Dieppe!

--And when the legate passed, you know, Gisquette, they gave the assault, and the English had all their throats cut.

--And against the gate of the Châtelet, there were very fine personages!

--And on the Change Bridge, which was all hung with drapery above!

--And when the legate passed, they let fly upon the bridge more than two hundred dozen of all sorts of birds; it was very beautiful, Liénarde.

--It will be finer today, at last replied their interlocutor, who seemed to listen to them with impatience.

--You promise us that this mystery will be fine? said Gisquette.

--Assuredly, he answered; then he added with a certain emphasis:--Mesdames, it is I who am its author.

--Truly? said the young girls, all amazed.

--Truly! answered the poet, drawing himself up slightly; that is to say we are two: Jehan Marchand, who sawed the planks, and raised the framework of the theatre and all the woodwork, and I who made the piece.--My name is Pierre Gringoire."

The author of *Le Cid* would not have said with more pride: *Pierre Corneille*.

Our readers may have observed that a certain time must already have elapsed from the moment when Jupiter withdrew under the tapestry until the instant when the author of the new morality thus abruptly revealed himself to the naive admiration of Gisquette and Liénarde. A remarkable thing: all this crowd, so tumultuous a few minutes before, was now waiting with meekness, on the word of the actor; which proves that eternal truth, still verified every day in our theatres, that the best means of making the public wait patiently is to assure them that one is about to begin at once.

Nevertheless the scholar Joannes was not asleep.

--Holloa! he suddenly cried in the midst of the peaceful expectancy that had succeeded the disturbance, Jupiter, madame the Virgin, jugglers of the devil! are you mocking us? The piece! the piece! Begin, or we begin again."

No more was needed.

A music of high and low instruments made itself heard from inside the scaffolding; the tapestry lifted; four motley and painted personages came out, climbed the steep ladder of the theatre, and, having reached the upper platform, ranged themselves in line before the public, whom they saluted profoundly; then the symphony ceased. It was the mystery beginning.

The four personages, after having amply collected the payment of their reverences in applause, struck up, amid a religious silence, a prologue of which we willingly spare the reader. Moreover, as still happens in our own days, the public occupied itself even more with the costumes they wore than with the role they declaimed; and in truth it was just. They were all four clad in robes party-colored yellow and white, which were distinguished from one another only by the nature of the stole; the first was of brocade, gold and silver, the second of silk, the third of wool, the fourth of linen. The first of the personages held in his right hand a sword, the second two golden keys, the third a balance, the fourth a spade; and to aid lazy intelligences that might not have seen clearly through the transparency of these attributes, one could read in large black letters embroidered: at the hem of the brocade robe, I AM CALLED NOBILITY; at the hem of the silk robe, I AM CALLED CLERGY; at the hem of the woolen robe, I AM CALLED TRADE; at the hem of the linen robe, I AM CALLED LABOR. The sex of the two male allegories was clearly indicated to every judicious spectator by their shorter robes and the cramignole they wore on their heads, while the two female allegories, more longly clad, were coiffed with a hood.

There would also have been much ill-will needed not to understand, through the poetry of the prologue, that Labor was married to Trade and Clergy to Nobility, and that the two happy couples possessed in common a magnificent golden dolphin, which they pretended to adjudge only to the fairest. They were therefore going through the world seeking and questing for this beauty, and after having successively rejected the queen of Golconda, the princess of Trebizond, the daughter of the Great Khan of Tartary, etc., etc., Labor and Clergy, Nobility and Trade had come to rest upon the marble table of the Palais de Justice, uttering before the honest audience as many sentences and maxims as one could then expend at the Faculty of Arts in the examinations, sophisms, determinations, figures and acts wherein the masters took their licentiate caps.

All this was indeed very fine.

However, in this crowd upon which the four allegories were pouring out, each vying with the other, floods of metaphors, there was not an ear more attentive, not a heart more palpitating, not an eye more haggard, not a neck more stretched, than the eye, the ear, the neck and the heart of the author, the poet, of this worthy Pierre Gringoire, who had not been able to resist, a moment before, the joy of telling his name to two pretty girls. He had gone back a few paces from them, behind his pillar, and there he listened, he looked, he savored. The kindly applause which had greeted the beginning of his prologue was still resounding in his bowels, and he was completely absorbed in that sort of ecstatic contemplation with which an author sees his ideas fall one by one from the actor's mouth into the silence of a vast audience. Worthy Pierre Gringoire!

It costs us to say it, but this first ecstasy was very soon troubled. Scarcely had Gringoire applied his lips to that intoxicating cup of joy and triumph, when a drop of bitterness mingled therein.

A ragged beggar, who could not make a collection, lost as he was in the midst of the crowd, and who had doubtless not found sufficient indemnity in the pockets of his neighbors, had imagined to perch himself upon some conspicuous point, to attract looks and alms. He had therefore hoisted himself during the first verses of the prologue, by aid of the pillars of the reserved platform, up to the cornice which bordered its balustrade on the lower part, and there he had seated himself, soliciting the attention and pity of the multitude with his rags and a hideous sore that covered his right arm. For the rest he uttered not a word.

The silence he kept let the prologue go on without hindrance, and no sensible disorder would have arisen, had not misfortune willed that the scholar Joannes should espy, from the top of his pillar, the beggar and his antics. A fit of mad laughter seized the young rogue, who, without caring to interrupt the spectacle and trouble the universal collectedness, cried out gaily: "Look! this mangy fellow asking alms!"

Whosoever has thrown a stone into a frog-pond or fired a shot into a flight of birds, may form an idea of the effect produced by these incongruous words, amid the general attention. Gringoire started as from an electric shock. The prologue stopped short, and all heads turned in tumult toward the beggar, who, far from being disconcerted, saw in this incident a good occasion for harvest, and began to say with a doleful air, half-closing his eyes: "Charity, if you please!"

--Why, upon my soul, resumed Joannes, it is Clopin Trouillefou. Holloa! friend, did your sore trouble you in the leg, that you have put it on your arm?"

As he spoke thus, he flung with a monkey's dexterity a small white coin into the greasy felt hat which the beggar held out with his sick arm. The beggar received without flinching both the alms and the sarcasm, and continued in a lamentable accent: "Charity, if you please!"

This episode had considerably distracted the audience, and a good number of spectators, Robin Poussepain and all the clerks at their head, gaily applauded this bizarre duet which the scholar and the beggar had just improvised, in the midst of the prologue, with his shrill voice and the beggar's imperturbable chant.

Gringoire was much displeased. Recovered from his first stupor, he exerted himself to cry to the four personages on stage: "Go on! the devil, go on!" without even deigning to cast a glance of disdain upon the two interrupters.

At this moment he felt himself pulled by the edge of his surtout; he turned round, not without some ill-humor, and had enough trouble to smile. He must, however. It was the pretty arm of Gisquette la Gencienne, which, passed through the balustrade, thus solicited his attention.

--Sir, said the young girl, are they going to continue?

--Assuredly, answered Gringoire, quite shocked at the question.

--In that case, sire, resumed she, 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 is touched.

"Plague on the silly, thick-headed little girl!" said he between his teeth.

From that moment Gisquette was lost in his mind.

Meanwhile, the actors had obeyed his injunction, and the public, seeing them begin to speak again, had begun to listen again, not without having lost much beauty, in the kind of solder that was made between the two parts of the piece thus abruptly cut. Gringoire was making the bitter reflection on this in a low voice. Yet tranquillity had little by little re-established itself, the scholar held his tongue, the beggar counted some coin in his hat, and the piece had regained the upper hand.

It was in reality a very fine work, and one from which it seems to us one could still very well profit today, with some arrangements. The exposition, a little long and a little empty, that is to say according to rule, was simple, and Gringoire, in the candid sanctuary of his inner self, admired its clarity. As may well be guessed, the four allegorical personages were a little wearied at having traversed the three parts of the world without finding to dispose conveniently of their golden dolphin. Thereupon, praise of the marvelous fish, with a thousand delicate allusions to the young betrothed of Marguerite of Flanders, then very sorrowfully shut up at Amboise, and little suspecting that Labor and Clergy, Nobility and Trade had just made the tour of the world for him. The said dolphin therefore was young, was beautiful, was strong, and above all (magnificent origin of all royal virtues!) he was son of the lion of France. I declare that this bold metaphor is admirable, and that natural history of the theatre, on a day of allegory and royal epithalamium, is in no way alarmed at a dolphin son of a lion. It is precisely these rare and pindaric mixtures which prove enthusiasm. Nevertheless, to do also the part of criticism, the poet might have developed this fine 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 ordinance of monsieur the provost, and that one must needs say something. Besides, they listened patiently.

Suddenly, in the very middle of a quarrel between mademoiselle Trade and madame Nobility, at the moment when master Labor pronounced this mirific verse:

*Never was seen in the woods a beast more triumphant!*

the door of the reserved platform, which had till then remained so ill-timedly shut, opened yet more ill-timedly; and the resounding voice of the usher abruptly announced: *His Eminence monseigneur the cardinal de Bourbon*.

III

MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL

Poor Gringoire! the crash of all the great double petards of Saint-Jean, the discharge of twenty hackbuts, the detonation of that famous serpentine of the Tower of Billy, which, at the siege of Paris, Sunday 29 September 1465, killed seven Burgundians at a stroke, the explosion of all the cannon powder stored at the Temple gate, would have torn his ears less rudely, in this solemn and dramatic moment, than those few words fallen from the mouth of an usher: *His Eminence monseigneur the cardinal de Bourbon*.

It is not that Pierre Gringoire feared monsieur the cardinal or disdained him. He had neither that weakness nor that presumption. A true eclectic, as one would say today, Gringoire was of those lofty and firm spirits, moderate and calm, who always know how to keep themselves in the middle of all (*stare in dimidio rerum*), and who are full of reason and liberal philosophy, while making account of cardinals. A precious race, never interrupted, of philosophers to whom wisdom, like another Ariadne, seems to have given a clew of thread which they go unwinding from the beginning of the world through the labyrinth of human things. One finds 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 succeeded in rendering him the illustration he deserves, certainly it is their spirit which animated father Du Breul when he wrote in the sixteenth these naively sublime words, worthy of all ages: "I am Parisian by nation and parrhisian by speech, since *parrhisia* in Greek signifies liberty of speech: of which I have used myself even toward my lords the cardinals, uncle and brother of monseigneur the prince of Conty: nevertheless with respect to their greatness, and without offending anyone of their suite, which is much[13]."

There was therefore neither hatred of the cardinal nor disdain of his presence, in the unpleasant impression he made upon Pierre Gringoire. Quite the contrary: our poet had too much good sense and too threadbare a jacket not to attach a particular price to the fact that many an allusion of his prologue, and in particular the glorification of the dolphin son of the lion of France, should be gathered by an eminently ear. But it is not interest which dominates in the noble nature of poets. I suppose the entity of the poet be represented by the number ten, it is certain that a chemist, in analyzing and pharmacopolizing him, as says Rabelais, would find him composed of one part of interest against nine parts of self-love. Now, at the moment when the door had opened for the cardinal, the nine parts of self-love of Gringoire, swollen and tumefied at the breath of popular admiration, were in a state of prodigious growth, beneath which disappeared as stifled that imperceptible molecule of interest which we distinguished just now in the constitution of poets; a precious ingredient, nevertheless, a ballast of reality and humanity without which they would not touch the earth. Gringoire enjoyed feeling, seeing, palpating, so to speak, an entire assembly, of blackguards it is true, but what matter, stupefied, petrified, and as asphyxiated before the immeasurable tirades which sprang up at every instant from all parts of his epithalamium. I affirm that he shared himself the general beatitude, and that, unlike La Fontaine, who, at the performance of his comedy *The Florentine*, asked: *What is the knave who made this rhapsody?* Gringoire would willingly have asked his neighbor: *Whose is this masterpiece?* One may judge now what effect was produced upon him by the abrupt and untimely arrival of the cardinal.

What he could fear was but too well realized. The entry of his eminence overturned the audience. All heads turned toward the platform. It was a case of hearing no more. "The cardinal! The cardinal!" repeated every mouth. The unhappy prologue stopped short a second time.

The cardinal paused a moment upon the threshold of the platform. While he cast a rather indifferent glance over the audience, the tumult redoubled. Each one wished to see him better. It was a contest who should put his head upon his neighbor's shoulders.

It was indeed a high personage, and whose spectacle was worth any other comedy. Charles, cardinal de Bourbon, archbishop and count of Lyon, primate of the Gauls, was at once allied to Louis XI by his brother, Pierre, lord of Beaujeu, who had married the king's eldest daughter, and allied to Charles the Bold by 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 courtier's spirit and devotion to the powers. One may judge of the countless embarrassments this double kinship had cost him, and of all the temporal reefs between which his spiritual bark had had to tack, not to be wrecked either upon Louis or upon Charles, that Charybdis and that Scylla which had devoured the duke of Nemours and the constable of Saint-Pol. Thanks to heaven, he had got through the passage pretty well, and had arrived at Rome without hindrance. But, though he was in port, and precisely because he was in port, he never recalled without uneasiness the diverse chances of his political life, so long alarmed and laborious. He therefore had the custom of saying that the year 1476 had been for him *black and white*; meaning thereby that in that same year he had lost his mother the duchess of Bourbonnais and his cousin the duke of Burgundy, and that one mourning had consoled him for the other.

For the rest, he was a good fellow. He led a merry cardinal's life, willingly made merry with the royal vintage of Challuau, hated not 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 *populace* of Paris. He walked only surrounded by a little court of bishops and abbots of high lineage, gallant, loose, and carousing when needful; and more than once the good devout women of Saint-Germain d'Auxerre, passing in the evening under the illuminated windows of the house of Bourbon, had been scandalized to hear the same voices which had sung them vespers in the daytime, chant by the noise of glasses the bacchic proverb of Benedict XII, that pope who had added a third crown to the tiara: *"Bibamus papaliter[14]."*

It was doubtless this popularity, so justly acquired, which preserved him, at his entry, from all ill reception on the part of the mob, so discontented a moment before, and very little disposed to respect a cardinal on the very day when they were to elect a pope. But the Parisians bear little grudge; and besides, by making the representation begin by authority, the good burghers had got the better of the cardinal, and this triumph sufficed them. Moreover monsieur the cardinal de Bourbon was a handsome man, he had a very fine red robe which he wore very well; which is to say that he had for him all the women, and consequently the better half of the audience. Certainly there would be injustice and bad taste in hooting a cardinal for having made himself awaited at the spectacle, when he is handsome and wears his red robe well.

He therefore entered, saluted the assembly with that hereditary smile of the great for the people, and directed himself by slow steps toward his chair of scarlet velvet, having the air of thinking of something quite else. His cortege, what we should call today his staff of bishops and abbots, made irruption after him into the platform, not without redoubling of tumult and curiosity in the pit. It was a contest who should point them out, name them, who should know at least one of them; who, monsieur the bishop of Marseilles, Alaudet, if my memory serves; 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 with much scorn and cacophony. As for the scholars, they swore. It was their day, their feast of fools, their saturnalia, the annual orgy of the basoche and of the school. No turpitude but was of right that day and a sacred thing. And then there were mad wenches in the crowd, Simone Quatrelivres, Agnès la Gadine, Robine Piédebou. Was it not the least one could do to swear at ease and grumble a little the name of God, such a fine day, in such good company of churchmen and girls of joy? They therefore did not spare themselves; and, amid the hubbub, it was a frightful charivari of blasphemies and enormities that of all those loosed tongues, tongues of clerks and scholars restrained the rest of the year by the fear of the hot iron of Saint Louis. Poor Saint Louis, what a flout they made him in his own palace of justice! Each of them, among the new-comers of the platform, had taken to task a black, or gray, or white, or violet gown. As for Joannes Frollo de Molendino, in his quality of brother to an archdeacon, it was to the red that he had boldly attacked, and he sang at top of voice, fixing his shameless eyes upon the cardinal: *Cappa repleta mero[15]*.

All these details, which we here lay bare for the edification of the reader, were so covered by the general rumor that they were effaced therein before reaching the reserved platform. Besides, the cardinal would have been little moved thereby, so much were the liberties of that day in the customs. He had moreover, and his countenance was all preoccupied with it, another care which followed him closely and which entered almost at the same time as he into the platform. It was the embassy of Flanders.

Not that he was a deep politician, and made a matter of his own the possible consequences of the marriage of madame his cousin Marguerite of Burgundy with monsieur his cousin Charles, dauphin of Vienne; how long would last the plastered good understanding of the duke of Austria and the king of France, how the king of England would take this disdain of his daughter, little did it trouble him, and he feasted each evening on the wine of the royal vintage of Chaillot, without suspecting that some flasks of this same wine (a little revised and corrected, it is true, by the physician Coictier), cordially offered to Edward IV by Louis XI, would rid Louis XI one fine morning of Edward IV. *The much honored embassy of monsieur the duke of Austria* brought the cardinal none of these cares, but it importuned him on another side. It was indeed a little hard, and we have already said a word of it on the second page of this book, to be obliged to make feast and good welcome, he Charles de Bourbon, to I know not what burghers; he a cardinal, to aldermen; he a Frenchman, merry guest, to Flamands drinkers of beer; and that in public. That was certainly one of the most tedious grimaces he had ever made for the good pleasure of the king.

He therefore turned toward the door, and with the best grace in the world (so much did he study it), when the usher announced in a sonorous voice: *Messieurs the envoys of monsieur the duke of Austria*. It is useless to say that the whole hall did the same.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”