Part 6

It is a consoling thought, let us remark in passing, to reflect that the death penalty, which, three hundred years ago, still encumbered the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Croix-du-Trahoir, the Marché-aux-Pourceaux, that hideous Montfaucon, the Barrière des Sergents, the Place-aux-Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint-Jacques, with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, all its permanent and pavement-set apparatus of torture—not to mention the countless scaffolds of the provosts, the bishop, the chapters, the abbots, the priors having jurisdiction; not to mention the legal drownings in the waters of the Seine—it is consoling that today, having successively lost every piece of its armor, its lavishness of torture, its penal imagination and caprice, its rack which it re-mattressed with leather every five years at the Grand-Châtelet, this old suzerain of feudal society, almost outlawed from our laws and our cities, hunted from code to code, driven from place to place, possesses no longer in our immense Paris but a dishonored corner of the Grève, but a miserable guillotine, furtive, uneasy, ashamed, which seems ever to fear being caught in the act, so quickly does it vanish after striking its blow!

III

“BESOS PARA GOLPES[18]”

When Pierre Gringoire arrived at the Place de Grève, he was half-frozen. He had come by the Pont-aux-Meuniers to avoid the crowd on the Pont-au-Change and the little banners of Jehan Fourbault; but the wheels of all the bishop’s mills had splashed him as he passed, and his smock was soaked. It seemed to him besides that the loss of his piece had made him still more chilly. He therefore hastened to approach the bonfire which was burning magnificently in the middle of the square. But a considerable crowd was circling around it.

“Accursed Parisians!” he said to himself, for Gringoire, being a true dramatic poet, was given to monologues; “there they are blocking my fire! Yet I have good need of a corner of a hearth. My shoes are drinking, and all those damned mills that wept over me! The devil take the Bishop of Paris and his mills! I should like to know what a bishop can do with a mill; does he expect to become a miller-bishop? If all he needs is my curse for that, I give it to him, and to his cathedral, and to his mills! Just look whether those idlers will stir! I ask you what they are doing there! They are warming themselves; fine pleasure! They are watching a faggot of brushwood burn; fine spectacle!”

On looking more closely, he perceived that the circle was much larger than was needed to warm oneself at the king’s fire, and that this throng of spectators was not drawn solely by the beauty of the burning faggot.

In a wide space left free between the crowd and the fire, a young girl was dancing.

Whether this young girl was a human being, or a fairy, or an angel, is what Gringoire, skeptical philosopher and ironic poet though he was, could not determine at first, so fascinated was he by this dazzling vision.

She was not tall, but she seemed so, such was the bold spring of her slender waist. She was brunette, but one guessed that by day her skin must have that beautiful golden glow of Andalusians and Romans. Her little foot was also Andalusian, for it was at once cramped and at ease in its graceful shoe. She danced, she turned, she whirled upon an old Persian carpet, thrown carelessly under her feet; and each time, as she spun, her radiant face passed before you, her great black eyes flashed a lightning glance.

Around her all gazes were fixed, all mouths open; and indeed, while she thus danced, to the hum of the tambourine which her two round and pure arms raised above her head, slender, frail and lively as a wasp, with her gold bodice without a fold, her parti-colored skirt which swelled out, with her bare shoulders, her slim legs which her petticoat now and then uncovered, her black hair, her eyes of flame—she was a supernatural creature.

“In truth,” thought Gringoire, “she is a salamander, she is a nymph, she is a goddess, she is a bacchante of Mount Menalus!”

At this moment one of the plaits of the “salamander’s” hair came loose, and a piece of yellow copper attached to it rolled to the ground.

“Ah no!” said he; “she is a gypsy.”

All illusion had vanished.

She began dancing again. She took up from the ground two swords, whose points she rested on her forehead and made them turn one way while she turned the other. She was indeed simply a gypsy. But however disenchanted Gringoire might be, the whole of this picture was not without prestige and without magic; the bonfire lit it with a crude red light which trembled vividly over the circle of the crowd’s faces, over the brown brow of the young girl, and, at the far end of the square, cast a pale reflection mingled with the wavering of their shadows, on one side upon the old black and wrinkled façade of the Maison-aux-Piliers, on the other upon the stone arms of the gibbet.

Among the thousand faces which this glow tinged with scarlet, there was one which seemed even more than all the others absorbed in contemplation of the dancer. It was a man’s face, austere, calm and dark. This man, whose dress was hidden by the crowd around him, did not appear to be more than thirty-five years old; yet he was bald; he had barely at his temples a few sparse tufts of hair already gray; his broad high forehead was beginning to be furrowed with wrinkles; but in his sunken eyes there blazed an extraordinary youth, an ardent life, a profound passion. He kept them ceaselessly fixed upon the gypsy, and while the mad sixteen-year-old girl danced and flitted for everyone’s pleasure, his reverie, his, seemed to grow ever more somber. From time to time a smile and a sigh met upon his lips, but the smile was more painful than the sigh.

The young girl, out of breath, finally stopped, and the people applauded her with fondness.

“Djali,” said the gypsy.

Then Gringoire saw arrive a pretty little white goat, alert, awake, glossy, with gilded horns, gilded feet, a gilded collar, which he had not yet noticed, and which had remained until then crouched in a corner of the carpet and watching its mistress dance.

“Djali,” said the dancer, “your turn.”

And sitting down, she gracefully presented her tambourine to the goat.

“Djali,” she continued, “what month of the year is it?”

The goat raised its forefoot and struck once upon the tambourine. It was indeed the first month. The crowd applauded.

“Djali,” resumed the young girl, turning her tambourine the other way, “what day of the month is it?”

Djali raised its little golden foot and struck six times upon the tambourine.

“Djali,” pursued the Egyptian, still with a new maneuver of the tambourine, “what hour of the day is it?”

Djali struck seven times. At the same moment the clock of the Maison-aux-Piliers struck seven.

The people were amazed.

“There is sorcery beneath this,” said a sinister voice in the crowd. It was the voice of the bald man who had not taken his eyes from the gypsy.

She shuddered, turned away; but the applause broke out and drowned the morose exclamation.

They even effaced it so completely from her mind that she continued to question her goat.

“Djali, how does Master Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of the city pistoliers, behave at the Candlemas procession?”

Djali reared upon her hind legs and began to bleat, walking with so pretty a gravity that the whole circle of spectators burst into laughter at this parody of the interested devotion of the captain of the pistoliers.

“Djali,” resumed the young girl, emboldened by her growing success, “how does Master Jacques Charmolue, king’s proctor in ecclesiastical court, preach?”

The goat seated herself upon her haunches, and began to bleat, moving her forelegs in so strange a fashion that, save for the bad French and the bad Latin, gesture, accent, attitude, all was Jacques Charmolue.

And the crowd applauded more heartily.

“Sacrilege! profanation!” again said the voice of the bald man.

The gypsy turned round once more.

“Ah!” said she, “it is that ugly man!” then, thrusting her lower lip beyond the upper, she made a little grimace which seemed familiar to her, pirouetted upon her heel, and began to collect in a tambourine the gifts of the multitude.

The grands-blancs, the petits-blancs, the targes, the liards-à-l’aigle rained down. Suddenly she passed before Gringoire. Gringoire so heedlessly put his hand to his pocket that she stopped. “The devil!” said the poet, finding at the bottom of his pocket the reality, that is to say, emptiness. Meanwhile the pretty girl was there, looking at him with her great eyes, holding out her tambourine, and waiting. Gringoire sweated great drops. Had he had Peru in his pocket, certainly he would have given it to the dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru, and besides America was not yet discovered.

Happily an unexpected incident came to his rescue.

“Will you be off, grasshopper of Egypt?” cried a shrill voice coming from the darkest corner of the square.

The young girl turned back frightened. It was no longer the voice of the bald man; it was a woman’s voice, a devout and malicious voice.

Moreover, this cry, which frightened the gypsy, delighted a band of children who were roaming there.

“It is the recluse of the Tour-Roland,” they cried with disorderly laughter; “it is the sachette who scolds! Has she not supped? let us carry her some remnant of the city banquet!”

All precipitated themselves toward the Maison-aux-Piliers.

Meanwhile Gringoire had profited by the dancer’s confusion to slip away. The clamor of the children reminded him that he too had not supped. He therefore ran to the banquet. But the little rogues had better legs than he; when he arrived, they had made a clean sweep. There remained not even a miserable camichon at five sous the pound. There was nothing left upon the wall but the slender fleurs-de-lis, intermingled with rosebushes, painted in 1434 by Mathieu Biterne. It was a meager supper.

It is an annoying thing to go to bed without supper; it is a less cheerful thing still not to sup and not to know where to sleep. Gringoire was at that pass. No bread, no lodging; he found himself pressed on all sides by necessity, and he thought necessity very churlish. He had long since discovered this truth, that Jupiter created men in a fit of misanthropy, and that, during the whole life of the sage, his destiny holds in a state of siege his philosophy. As for himself, he had never seen the blockade so complete; he heard his stomach beat the chamade, and found it very unseemly that evil fate should take his philosophy by famine.

This melancholy reverie absorbed him more and more, when a bizarre song, though full of sweetness, abruptly tore him from it. It was the young Egyptian who was singing.

It was with her voice as with her dance, as with her beauty. It was indefinable and charming; something pure, sonorous, aerial, winged, so to speak. They were continual unfoldings, melodies, unexpected cadences, then simple phrases strewn with sharp and hissing notes, then leaps of scales which would have baffled a nightingale, but where harmony was ever found again, then soft undulations of octaves which rose and fell like the bosom of the young singer. Her beautiful face followed with a singular mobility all the caprices of her song, from the most disheveled inspiration to the chastest dignity. One would have said now a madwoman, now a queen.

The words she sang were in a tongue unknown to Gringoire, and which seemed unknown to herself, so little did the expression she gave the song relate to the sense of the words. Thus these four verses in her mouth were of a mad gayety:

_Un cofre de gran riqueza_ _Hallaron dentro un pilar,_ _Dentro del, nuevas banderas_ _Con figuras de espantar._

And an instant after, with the accent she gave to this stanza:

_Alarabes de cavallo_ _Sin poderse menear,_ _Con espadas, y los cuellos,_ _Ballestas de buen echar._

Gringoire felt tears come to his eyes. Yet her song breathed above all joy, and she seemed to sing, like the bird, from serenity and carelessness.

The song of the gypsy had troubled Gringoire’s reverie, but as the swan troubles the water. He listened to it with a kind of ravishment and forgetfulness of all things. It was the first moment for several hours in which he had not felt himself suffer.

That moment was short.

The same woman’s voice which had interrupted the gypsy’s dance came to interrupt her song.

“Will you hold your tongue, cicada of hell?” she cried, still from the same dark corner of the square.

The poor _cicada_ stopped short. Gringoire stopped his ears.

“Oh!” cried he, “accursed notched saw, who comes to break the lyre!”

Meanwhile the other spectators murmured like him: “The devil take the sachette!” said more than one. And the invisible trouble-maker might have had cause to repent her aggressions against the gypsy, had they not been distracted at that very moment by the procession of the Pope of Fools, which, after traversing many streets and crossroads, debouched into the Place de Grève, with all its torches and all its uproar.

This procession, which our readers have seen set out from the Palais, had organized itself by the way, and recruited from all the knaves, idle thieves, and available vagabonds there were in Paris; thus it presented a respectable aspect when it arrived at the Grève.

First marched Egypt. The Duke of Egypt at the head, on horseback, his counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrup; behind them, the Egyptians and Egyptian women pell-mell with their little children crying upon their shoulders; all, duke, counts, common folk, in rags and tatters. Then came the kingdom of argot: that is to say, all the thieves of France, ranged by order of dignity; the least passing first. Thus defiled four by four, with the various insignia of their grades in that strange faculty, most of them maimed, some limping, others one-armed, the courtauds de boutanche, the coquillarts, the hubins, the sabouleux, the calots, the francs-mitoux, the polissons, the piètres, the capons, the malingreux, the rifodés, the marcandiers, the narquois, the orphelins, the archisuppôts, the cagoux; a reckoning to weary Homer. In the center of the conclave of cagoux and archisuppôts, one could hardly distinguish the King of Argot, the great Coësre, crouched in a little cart drawn by two large dogs. After the kingdom of the argotiers came the Empire of Galilee. Guillaume Rousseau, emperor of the Empire of Galilee, marched majestically in his robe of purple stained with wine, preceded by mountebanks fighting and dancing pyrrhics, surrounded by his mace-bearers, his suppôts, and the clerks of the chamber of accounts. Last came the Basoche, with its maypoles crowned with flowers, its black robes, its music worthy of the sabbath, and its great yellow wax candles. In the center of this crowd, the great officers of the confraternity of Fools bore upon their shoulders a bier more laden with candles than the shrine of Sainte-Geneviève in time of pestilence. And upon that bier resplendent, croziered, coped and mitred, was the new Pope of Fools, the ringer of Notre-Dame, Quasimodo the Hunchback.

Each section of this grotesque procession had its particular music. The Egyptians made their balafos and African tambourines detonate. The argotiers, a very unmusical race, were still at the viol, the cornet à bouquin and the gothic rubebbe of the twelfth century. The Empire of Galilee was scarcely further advanced; one could barely distinguish in its music some miserable rebec of the infancy of art, still imprisoned in the _ré-la-mi_. But it was around the Pope of Fools that there deployed, in a magnificent cacophony, all the musical riches of the epoch. There were nothing but trebles of rebec, haute-contres of rebec, tailles of rebec, not to mention flutes and brass. Alas! our readers remember that it was Gringoire’s orchestra.

It is difficult to give an idea of the degree of proud and beatific expansion to which the sad and hideous face of Quasimodo had attained in the passage from the Palais to the Grève. It was the first enjoyment of self-love he had ever experienced. He had known until then only humiliation, scorn for his condition, disgust for his person. Thus, deaf as he was, he savored as a true pope the acclamations of that crowd which he hated, to feel himself hated by it. That his people was a rabble of fools, of cripples, of thieves, of beggars, what mattered it! it was still a people, and he a sovereign. And he took seriously all those ironical applauses, all those derisory respects, to which we must say there was yet mingled in the crowd a little very real fear. For the hunchback was robust; for the bandy-legged was agile; for the deaf was malicious: three qualities which temper ridicule.

Moreover, that the new Pope of Fools rendered account to himself of the sentiments he felt and of the sentiments he inspired, is what we are far from believing. The spirit lodged in that misshapen body necessarily had itself something incomplete and deaf. Thus, what he felt at this moment was for him absolutely vague, indistinct and confused. Only joy pierced through, pride dominated. Around this dark and unhappy face, there was radiance.

It was not therefore without surprise and without dread that one saw suddenly, at the moment when Quasimodo, in this half-intoxication, passed triumphantly before the Maison-aux-Piliers, a man leap from the crowd and snatch from his hands, with an angry gesture, his crosier of gilded wood, insignia of his foolish papacy.

This man, this rash one, was the bald-headed personage who, a moment before, mingled with the gypsy’s group, had frozen the poor girl with his words of menace and hatred. He was clad in ecclesiastical costume. At the moment he issued from the crowd, Gringoire, who had not remarked him until then, recognized him: “Why,” said he, with a cry of astonishment, “it is my master in Hermes, Dom Claude Frollo, the archdeacon! What the devil does he want with this ugly blind-eye? He is going to get himself devoured.”

A cry of terror rose indeed. The formidable Quasimodo had precipitated himself down from the bier, and the women turned their eyes away so as not to see him tear the archdeacon. He made a bound to the priest, looked at him, and fell upon his knees.

The priest tore from him his tiara, broke his crosier, rent his tinsel cope.

Quasimodo remained on his knees, bowed his head and joined his hands.

Then there was established between them a strange dialogue of signs and gestures, for neither spoke. The priest, standing, irritated, threatening, imperious; Quasimodo, prostrate, humble, suppliant. And yet it is certain that Quasimodo could have crushed the priest with his thumb.

At last the archdeacon, roughly shaking the powerful shoulder of Quasimodo, made him a sign to rise and follow him.

Quasimodo rose.

Then the confraternity of Fools, the first stupor past, wished to defend its pope so abruptly dethroned. The Egyptians, the argotiers and all the Basoche came yelping around the priest.

Quasimodo placed himself before the priest, made the muscles of his athletic fists play, and looked upon the assailants with the teeth-grinding of an angered tiger.

The priest resumed his somber gravity, made a sign to Quasimodo, and retired in silence.

Quasimodo marched before him, scattering the crowd at his passage.

When they had crossed the populace and the square, the cloud of curious and idle folk wished to follow them. Quasimodo then took the rear-guard, and followed the archdeacon backwards, squat, surly, monstrous, bristling, gathering his limbs, licking his boar’s tusks, growling like a wild beast, and imprinting immense oscillations upon the crowd with a gesture or a look.

They were let sink both into a narrow and dark street, where none dared venture after them; so well did the mere chimera of Quasimodo gnashing his teeth bar the entrance.

“This is marvellous,” said Gringoire; “but where the devil shall I find supper?”

IV

THE INCONVENIENCES OF FOLLOWING A PRETTY WOMAN IN THE EVENING THROUGH THE STREETS

Gringoire, at all hazards, had begun to follow the gypsy. He had seen her take, with her goat, the Rue de la Coutellerie; he had taken the Rue de la Coutellerie.

“Why not?” he had said to himself.

Gringoire, practical philosopher of the streets of Paris, had remarked that nothing is so propitious to reverie as following a pretty woman without knowing where she goes. There is in this voluntary abdication of one’s free will, in this fancy which submits to another fancy which suspects it not, a mixture of fantastic independence and blind obedience, I know not what intermediate thing between slavery and liberty which pleased Gringoire, an essentially mixed, undecided and complex spirit, holding the end of all extremes, incessantly suspended between all human propensities, and neutralizing them one by the other. He compared himself willingly to the tomb of Mahomet, attracted in opposite directions by two loadstones, and which hesitates eternally between high and low, between vault and pavement, between fall and ascent, between zenith and nadir.

If Gringoire lived in our days, what a fine middle ground he would hold between classical and romantic!

But he was not primitive enough to live three hundred years, and that is a pity. His absence is a void only too keenly felt today.

Besides, to follow thus in the streets the passers-by (and especially the passers-by of the fair sex), which Gringoire did willingly, there is no better disposition than to know not where to lodge.

He therefore walked quite thoughtful behind the young girl who quickened her pace and made her pretty goat trot, seeing the burghers go in and the taverns—the only shops which had been open that day—close.

“After all,” he thought approximately, “she must lodge somewhere; gypsies have good hearts.—Who knows?...”

And there was in the suspension points with which he made this reticence in his mind follow, I know not what rather graceful ideas.

Meanwhile from time to time, in passing before the last groups of burghers closing their doors, he caught some fragment of their conversations which came to break the chain of his smiling hypotheses.

Now it was two old men accosting each other.

“Master Thibaut Fernicle, do you know it is cold?

(Gringoire had known that since the beginning of winter.)

—Yes, indeed, Master Boniface Disome! Are we to have a winter like that of three years ago, in ’80, when wood cost eight sous the bundle?

—Bah! that is nothing, Master Thibaut, compared with the winter of 1407, when it froze from Saint-Martin’s Day to Candlemas! and with such fury that the pen of the clerk of the parliament froze, in the grand-chamber, every three words; which interrupted the registering of justice.”

Further on, it was neighbors at their window with candles which the fog made sputter.

“Has your husband told you the misfortune, Mademoiselle La Boudraque?

—No. What is it then, Mademoiselle Turquant?

—The horse of Master Gilles Godin, the notary at the Châtelet, which took fright at the Flemings and their procession, and overturned Master Philippot Avrillot, oblate of the Celestines.

—In truth?

—Rightly so.

—A bourgeois horse! that is a bit much. If it had been a cavalry horse, well and good!”

And the windows closed again. But Gringoire had none the less lost the thread of his ideas.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”