Part 4

Then arrived, two by two, with a gravity that made contrast amid the sprightly ecclesiastical train of Charles de Bourbon, the forty-eight ambassadors of Maximilian of Austria, headed by the reverend father in God, Jehan, abbot of Saint-Bertin, chancellor of the Golden Fleece, and Jacques de Goy, lord of Dauby, high bailiff of Ghent. There arose in the assembly a great silence accompanied by stifled laughter, as they listened to all the outlandish names and all the bourgeois titles which each of these personages imperturbably transmitted to the usher, who thereafter flung names and qualities pell-mell and all mangled through the crowd. There was master Loys Roelof, alderman of the city of Louvain; messire Clays d'Etuelde, alderman of Brussels; messire Paul de Baeust, lord of Voirmizelle, president of Flanders; master Jehan Coleghens, burgomaster of the city of Antwerp; master George de la Moere, first alderman of the keure of the city of Ghent; master Gheldolf van der Hage, first alderman of the parchons of said city; and the lord of Bierbecque, and Jehan Pinnock, and Jehan Dymaerzelle, etc., etc., etc., bailiffs, aldermen, burgomasters; burgomasters, aldermen, bailiffs; all stiff, prim, starched, decked out in velvet and damask, hooded with cramignoles of black velvet with heavy tassels of Cyprus gold thread; good Flemish heads after all, worthy and severe faces, of the family of those which Rembrandt makes stand out so strong and so grave against the black ground of his _Night Watch_; personages who all bore written on their foreheads that Maximilian of Austria had been right to _trust fully_, as his manifesto said, _in their sense, valor, experience, loyalties and good worth_.

One excepted, however. It was a fine, intelligent, cunning face, a kind of monkey's and diplomat's snout, before whom the cardinal took three steps and a deep reverence, and who nevertheless was called only _Guillaume Rym, counselor and pensionary of the city of Ghent_.

Few persons then knew what Guillaume Rym was. A rare genius who in a time of revolution would have shone brilliantly on the surface of events, but who in the fifteenth century was reduced to cavernous intrigues and to living _in the trenches_, as the duke of Saint-Simon says. For the rest, he was appreciated by the first _trench-digger_ of Europe; he plotted familiarly with Louis XI, and often lent a hand to the king's secret labors. All things quite unknown to this crowd, which was amazed by the cardinal's courtesies to that feeble figure of a Flemish bailiff.

IV

MASTER JACQUES COPPENOLE

While the pensionary of Ghent and the eminence exchanged a very low reverence and a few words in an even lower voice, a man of tall stature, broad face, and powerful shoulders presented himself to enter abreast with Guillaume Rym: one would have said a mastiff beside a fox. His felt bicorne and leather jerkin made a blot amid the velvet and silk that surrounded him. Presuming he was some stray groom, the usher stopped him.

"Ho, friend! none passes."

The man in the leather jerkin thrust him back with his shoulder.

"What does this knave want of me?" said he, with a voice so loud that the whole hall turned attentive to this strange colloquy. "Do you not see I am one of them?"

"Your name?" asked the usher.

"Jacques Coppenole."

"Your qualities?"

"Hosier, at the sign of the _Three Little Chains_, in Ghent."

The usher recoiled. To announce aldermen and burgomasters, well and good; but a hosier, that was hard. The cardinal was on thorns. All the people listened and looked. For two days his Eminence had been exerting himself to lick these Flemish bears into somewhat more presentable shape in public, and the prank was a rude one. Yet Guillaume Rym, with his sly smile, drew near the usher:

"Announce master Jacques Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen of the city of Ghent," he whispered very low.

"Usher," resumed the cardinal in a loud voice, "announce master Jacques Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen of the illustrious city of Ghent."

It was a mistake. Guillaume Rym alone would have smuggled the difficulty through; but Coppenole had heard the cardinal.

"No, by the Cross of God!" he cried in his thundering voice, "Jacques Coppenole, hosier. Do you hear, usher? Nothing more, nothing less. By the Cross of God! hosier is fine enough. Monsieur the archduke has more than once sought his glove in my hose."

Laughter and applause broke out. A jest is instantly understood at Paris, and consequently always applauded.

Let us add that Coppenole was of the people, and that this public surrounding him was of the people. Hence the communication between him and them had been prompt, electric, and, so to speak, on equal footing. The proud insolence of the Flemish hosier, in humbling the court folk, had stirred in all plebeian souls a certain sentiment of dignity still vague and indistinct in the fifteenth century. It was an equal, this hosier, who had just held his own against monsieur the cardinal! a reflection very sweet to poor devils who were accustomed to respect and obedience toward the sergeants' valets of the bailiff of the abbot of Sainte-Geneviève, train-bearer to the cardinal.

Coppenole saluted his Eminence proudly, who returned the salute to the all-powerful bourgeois dreaded by Louis XI. Then, while Guillaume Rym, a wise and malicious man, as Philippe de Comines says, followed both with a smile of raillery and superiority, they each gained their place, the cardinal quite disconcerted and anxious, Coppenole tranquil and haughty, and thinking no doubt that after all his title of hosier was worth as much as another, and that Mary of Burgundy, mother of this Marguerite whom Coppenole was marrying today, would have feared him less as cardinal than as hosier: for it is not a cardinal who would have roused the men of Ghent against the favorites of the daughter of Charles the Bold; it is not a cardinal who would have stiffened the crowd with a word against her tears and prayers, when the lady of Flanders came to supplicate her people for them even to the foot of their scaffold; whereas the hosier had but to lift his leather elbow to make fall your two heads, most illustrious lords, Guy d'Hymbercourt, chancellor Guillaume Hugonet!

Yet all was not over for this poor cardinal, and he was to drink to the dregs the cup of being in such bad company.

The reader has perhaps not forgotten the brazen beggar who, from the beginning of the prologue, had come to cling to the fringes of the cardinal's platform. The arrival of the illustrious guests had in no way made him let go; and while prelates and ambassadors packed themselves, true Flemish herrings, into the stalls of the gallery, he had made himself at ease, and had boldly crossed his legs on the architrave. The insolence was rare, and no one had noticed it at first, attention being turned elsewhere. He, for his part, noticed nothing in the hall; he balanced his head with a Neapolitan carelessness, repeating from time to time amid the murmur, as by a mechanical habit: "Charity, if you please!" And certainly he was, in all the assembly, the only one probably who had not deigned to turn his head at the altercation of Coppenole and the usher. Now, chance willed it that the master hosier of Ghent, with whom the people already so warmly sympathized and on whom all eyes were fixed, came precisely to seat himself in the front row of the platform above the beggar; and there was no small astonishment at seeing the Flemish ambassador, having inspected the rogue placed beneath his eyes, strike familiarly upon that shoulder covered with rags. The beggar turned; there was surprise, recognition, the brightening of both faces, etc.; then, caring not the least in the world for the spectators, the hosier and the cripple fell to talking in low voices, holding each other's hands, while the rags of Clopin Trouillefou spread upon the gold cloth of the platform made the effect of a caterpillar on an orange.

The novelty of this singular scene excited such a murmur of madness and gaiety in the hall that the cardinal soon perceived it; he leaned halfway over, and, being able, from where he was placed, only to catch a very imperfect glimpse of the ignominious jacket of Trouillefou, naturally supposed that the beggar was asking alms, and, revolted at the boldness, cried: "Monsieur the bailiff of the Palace, throw me that knave into the river!"

"By the Cross of God! my lord cardinal," said Coppenole without releasing Clopin's hand, "he is a friend of mine."

"Noel! Noel!" shouted the mob. From that moment, master Coppenole had in Paris, as in Ghent, _great credit with the people; for men of such stature have it there_, says Philippe de Comines, _when they are thus unbridled_.

The cardinal bit his lips. He leaned toward his neighbor the abbot of Sainte-Geneviève, and said to him in a half-voice:

"Pleasant ambassadors that monsieur the archduke sends us to announce madame Marguerite!"

"Your Eminence," answered the abbot, "wastes his courtesies on these Flemish snouts. _Margaritas ante porcos_[16]."

"Say rather," answered the cardinal with a smile, "_Porcos ante Margaritam_."

All the little court in cassock extolled the pun. The cardinal felt somewhat relieved; he was now quit with Coppenole, he too had had his applauded jest.

Now, let those of our readers who have the power to generalize an image and an idea, as one says in the style of today, permit us to ask them if they clearly picture the spectacle offered, at the moment we arrest their attention, by the vast parallelogram of the grand hall of the Palace. In the middle of the hall, backed against the western wall, a wide and magnificent platform of cloth of gold, into which enter processionally, by a small ogive door, grave personages successively announced by the shrill voice of an usher. On the front benches, already many venerable figures, hooded in ermine, velvet and scarlet. Around the platform, which remains silent and dignified, below, opposite, everywhere, a great crowd and a great murmur. A thousand glances of the people upon each face of the platform, a thousand whisperings upon each name. Certainly the spectacle is curious and well deserves the attention of the spectators. But yonder, at the far end, what is that sort of trestle with four motley puppets atop and four others below? What, beside the trestle, is that man in a black gown and pale of face? Alas! my dear reader, it is Pierre Gringoire and his prologue.

We had all profoundly forgotten him.

That is precisely what he feared.

From the moment the cardinal had entered, Gringoire had not ceased to stir for the salvation of his prologue. He had first enjoined the actors, left in suspense, to continue and raise their voices; then, seeing that no one listened, he had stopped them, and for nearly a quarter of an hour that the interruption had lasted, he had not ceased to stamp his foot, to bustle about, to hail Gisquette and Liénarde, to encourage his neighbors to pursue the prologue; all in vain. None stirred from the cardinal, the embassy and the platform, the sole center of this vast circle of visual rays. It must be believed also, and we say it with regret, that the prologue began to embarrass the audience slightly, at the moment when his Eminence had come to make diversion from it in so terrible a fashion. After all, on the platform as on the marble table, it was still the same spectacle: the conflict of Labor and Clergy, of Nobility and Trade. And many people preferred to see them simply, living, breathing, acting, jostling, in flesh and bone, in this Flemish embassy, in this episcopal court, under the cardinal's robe, under Coppenole's jerkin, than painted, bedizened, speaking in verse, and so to speak stuffed under the yellow and white tunics with which Gringoire had rigged them out.

Yet when our poet saw calm somewhat restored, he devised a stratagem that might have saved all.

"Monsieur," said he, turning to one of his neighbors, a brave stout man with a patient face, "if they were to begin again?"

"What?" said the neighbor.

"Why, the mystery," said Gringoire.

"As you please," replied the neighbor.

This half-approval sufficed for Gringoire, and doing his own business, he began to shout, blending as much as possible with the crowd: "Begin the mystery again! begin again!"

"The devil!" said Joannes de Molendino, "what are they singing down there, at the end? (For Gringoire made noise enough for four.) Tell me, comrades! is the mystery not finished? They want to begin it again. It is not fair."

"No! no!" cried all the scholars. "Down with the mystery! down with it!"

But Gringoire multiplied himself and only cried the louder: "Begin again! begin again!"

These clamors attracted the cardinal's attention.

"Monsieur the bailiff of the Palace," said he to a great black man placed a few paces from him, "are those knaves in a holy-water stoup, that they make this infernal noise?"

The bailiff of the Palace was a kind of amphibious magistrate, a sort of bat of the judicial order, partaking at once of the rat and the bird, of the judge and the soldier. He approached his Eminence, and, not without greatly fearing his displeasure, explained to him in stammering the popular incongruity: that noon had arrived before his Eminence, and that the players had been forced to begin without waiting for his Eminence.

The cardinal burst out laughing.

"On my faith, monsieur the rector of the University might well have done as much. What say you, master Guillaume Rym?"

"My lord," answered Guillaume Rym, "let us be content with having escaped half the comedy. That is always so much gained."

"Can these rogues continue their farce?" asked the bailiff.

"Continue, continue," said the cardinal; "it is all one to me. Meanwhile I shall read my breviary."

The bailiff advanced to the edge of the platform, and cried, after imposing silence with a gesture of the hand:

"Burgesses, commoners and inhabitants, to satisfy those who wish it begun again and those who wish it ended, his Eminence orders that it be continued."

Both sides had to resign themselves. Yet the author and the public long bore the cardinal a grudge.

The persons on stage therefore resumed their gloss, and Gringoire hoped that at least the rest of his work would be heard. This hope was not long deceived like his other illusions; silence had indeed been re-established more or less in the audience; but Gringoire had not noticed that, at the moment when the cardinal had given the order to continue, the platform was far from full, and that after the Flemish envoys had come new personages forming part of the train, whose names and qualities, hurled right across his dialogue by the intermittent cry of the usher, wrought considerable havoc therein. Let one imagine, in the middle of a play, the yelping of an usher throwing, between two rhymes and often between two hemistichs, parentheses like these:

Master Jacques Charmolue, king's prosecutor in ecclesiastical court!

Jehan de Harlay, esquire, keeper of the office of knight of the night watch of the city of Paris!

Messire Galiot de Genoilhac, knight, lord of Brussac, master of the king's artillery!

Master Dreux-Raguier, inquisitor of waters and forests of the king our sire, in the lands of France, Champagne and Brie!

Messire Louis de Graville, knight, counselor and chamberlain of the king, admiral of France, keeper of the wood of Vincennes!

Master Denis Le Mercier, keeper of the house of the blind of Paris!—Etc., etc., etc.

This became insupportable.

This strange accompaniment, which made the piece difficult to follow, indignant Gringoire all the more in that he could not disguise from himself that interest kept ever growing and that his work lacked only to be listened to. It was in fact difficult to imagine a more ingenious and more dramatic construction. The four personages of the prologue were lamenting in their mortal embarrassment, when Venus in person, _vera incessu patuit dea_[17], had presented herself to them, clad in a fair cotte-hardie emblazoned with the ship of the city of Paris. She came herself to claim the dauphin promised to the fairest. Jupiter, whose thunder was heard rumbling in the wardrobe, backed her, and the goddess was about to carry it—that is, without figure, to marry monsieur the dauphin—when a young maid, clad in white damask and holding a marguerite in her hand (diaphanous personification of mademoiselle of Flanders), had come to contend with Venus. A coup de théâtre and peripeteia. After debate, Venus, Marguerite and the offstage had agreed to refer themselves to the good judgment of the Holy Virgin. There was yet a fine role, that of dom Pèdre, king of Mesopotamia. But, amid so many interruptions, it was difficult to make out what he served for. All that was mounted by the ladder.

But it was over. None of these beauties was felt or understood. At the cardinal's entrance it seemed a sudden and magic thread had drawn all glances from the marble table to the platform, from the southern extremity of the hall to the western side. Nothing could disenchant the audience. All eyes remained fixed there, and the new arrivals, and their accursed names, and their faces, and their costumes were a continual diversion. It was desolate. Except Gisquette and Liénarde, who turned aside from time to time when Gringoire pulled them by the sleeve, except the patient stout neighbor, no one listened, no one looked full at the poor abandoned morality. Gringoire saw only profiles.

With what bitterness he saw crumble piece by piece all his scaffolding of glory and poetry! And to think that this people had been on the point of rebelling against monsieur the bailiff, out of impatience to hear his work! now that they had it, they cared nothing for it. That same representation which had begun in such unanimous acclamation! Eternal flux and reflux of popular favor! To think they had nearly hanged the bailiff's sergeants! What would he not have given to be still at that hour of honey.

The brutal monologue of the usher ceased however. Every one had arrived, and Gringoire breathed. The actors continued bravely. But lo and behold master Coppenole, the hosier, rises suddenly, and Gringoire hears him pronounce, amid universal attention, this abominable harangue:

"Gentlemen burgesses and hobereaux of Paris, I know not, by the Cross of God! what we are doing here. I see well yonder in that corner, on that trestle, some folk who look as if they would fight. I know not if that is what you call a mystery; but it is not amusing. They quarrel with the tongue, and nothing more. There is a quarter of an hour I have been waiting for the first blow. Nothing comes. They are cowards, who only scratch each other with insults. You should have brought wrestlers from London or Rotterdam; and, well and good! you would have had fist-blows audible from the square. But these make one pity them. They should at least give us a morris dance, or some other mumming! This is not what I was promised. I was promised a Feast of Fools, with election of the pope. We too have our pope of fools at Ghent, and in that we are not behindhand, by the Cross of God! But here is how we do. A mob gathers, as here. Then each in turn goes to pass his head through a hole and makes a grimace at the others. He who makes the ugliest, to the acclamation of all, is elected pope. That is vastly diverting. Will you that we make your pope in the fashion of my country? It will at least be less tedious than listening to these babblers. If they will come make their grimace at the skylight, they shall be of the game. What say you, gentlemen burgesses? There is here a sufficiently grotesque sample of both sexes for one to laugh in Flemish fashion, and we are enough ugly faces to hope for a fine grimace."

Gringoire would have answered. Stupefaction, anger, indignation took his speech away. Besides, the motion of the popular hosier was received with such enthusiasm by these burgesses flattered to be called _hobereaux_, that all resistance was useless. There was nothing left but to let oneself go with the torrent. Gringoire hid his face in his two hands, not having the happiness of a mantle wherewith to veil his head like the Agamemnon of Timanthes.

V

QUASIMODO

In the twinkling of an eye all was ready to execute Coppenole's idea. Burgesses, scholars and basocheurs had set to work. The little chapel situated opposite the marble table was chosen for the theater of grimaces. A broken pane in the pretty rose-window above the door left free a circle of stone through which it was agreed the competitors should pass their heads. It sufficed, to reach it, to climb on two barrels, which had been taken no one knows where and jammed one atop the other as best they could. It was ruled that each candidate, man or woman (for one might make a popess), in order to leave virgin and entire the impression of his grimace, should cover his face and remain hidden in the chapel until the moment of appearing. In less than an instant the chapel was filled with competitors, upon whom the door was shut.

Coppenole from his place ordered all, directed all, arranged all. During the hubbub, the cardinal, no less disconcerted than Gringoire, had, under a pretext of business and vespers, withdrawn with all his suite, without this crowd, which his arrival had so vividly stirred, being in the least moved at his departure. Guillaume Rym was the only one who noticed his Eminence's rout. Popular attention, like the sun, pursued its revolution; having started from one end of the hall, after halting some time in the middle, it was now at the other end. The marble table, the cloth-of-gold platform had had their moment; it was the turn of the chapel of Louis XI. The field was henceforth free to all folly. There were none left but Flemings and rabble.

The grimaces began. The first face that appeared at the skylight, with eyelids turned back to red, mouth open like a maw and brow wrinkled like our hussar boots of the empire, burst forth such unquenchable laughter that Homer would have taken all these churls for gods. Yet the grand hall was nothing less than an Olympus, and the poor Jupiter of Gringoire knew it better than any one. A second, a third grimace succeeded, then another, then another, and ever the laughter and the stamping of joy redoubled. There was in this spectacle a certain peculiar vertigo, a certain power of intoxication and fascination of which it would be difficult to give an idea to the reader of our days and our salons. Let one imagine a series of faces successively presenting all geometrical forms, from the triangle to the trapezoid, from the cone to the polyhedron; all human expressions, from anger to lust; all ages, from the wrinkles of the newborn to the wrinkles of the dying old woman; all religious phantasmagoria, from Faun to Beelzebub; all animal profiles, from the jaw to the beak, from the snout to the muzzle. Let one picture all the mascarons of the Pont-Neuf, those nightmares petrified under the hand of Germain Pilon, taking life and breath, and coming in turn to look you full in the face with ardent eyes; all the masks of the carnival of Venice succeeding each other at your lorgnette; in a word, a human kaleidoscope.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”