Part 7

Fortunately he soon found it again and re-tied it with ease, thanks to the gypsy, thanks to Djali, who kept walking ahead of him; two fine, delicate, and charming creatures, whose little feet, pretty shapes, and graceful ways he admired, almost confounding them in his contemplation; for intelligence and good friendship, believing both to be young girls; for lightness, agility, and skill of step, finding them both goats.

The streets, however, grew darker and more deserted at every moment. The curfew had long since rung, and one began to meet only at rare intervals a passerby on the pavement, a light at a window. Gringoire had ventured, following the Egyptian girl, into that inextricable maze of alleys, crossroads, and blind courts which surrounds the old burial ground of the Holy Innocents, and which resembles a skein of thread tangled by a cat. "Here are streets that have very little logic!" said Gringoire, lost in those thousand circuits which ever returned upon themselves, but where the young girl followed a path that seemed well known to her, without hesitation and with ever quicker step. As for him, he would have been perfectly ignorant of where he was, had he not caught sight, as he passed, at the turning of a street, of the octagonal mass of the pillory of the markets, whose openwork top sharply detached its black fretwork against a window still lit in the rue Verdelet.

For some moments he had attracted the young girl's attention; she had several times turned her head toward him with unease; she had even once stopped short, had taken advantage of a ray of light escaping from a half-open bakery to look him fixedly up and down; then, that glance cast, Gringoire had seen her make the little pout he had already noticed, and she had passed on.

That little pout gave Gringoire food for thought. There was certainly disdain and mockery in that graceful grimace. So he began to lower his head, to count the paving stones, and to follow the young girl from a little farther off, when, at the turning of a street which had just made him lose sight of her, he heard her utter a piercing cry.

He quickened his step.

The street was full of darkness. Yet a wick soaked in oil, burning in an iron cage at the feet of the Holy Virgin at the corner of the street, allowed Gringoire to make out the gypsy struggling in the arms of two men who were striving to stifle her cries. The poor little goat, quite terrified, lowered its horns and bleated.

"To us, gentlemen of the watch!" cried Gringoire, and he advanced bravely. One of the men holding the young girl turned toward him. It was the formidable face of Quasimodo.

Gringoire did not take flight, but he did not take another step either.

Quasimodo came at him, flung him four paces onto the pavement with a backhand blow, and plunged rapidly into the shadow, carrying off the young girl bent over one of his arms like a silken scarf. His companion followed him, and the poor goat ran after them all, with its plaintive bleating.

"Murder! murder!" cried the unhappy gypsy. "Halt there, wretches, and let go that strumpet!" said suddenly, in a voice of thunder, a horseman who burst abruptly from the neighboring crossroads.

It was a captain of the archers of the king's ordinance, armed from head to foot, sword in hand.

He tore the gypsy from the arms of the stupefied Quasimodo, laid her across his saddle, and, at the moment when the dreadful hunchback, recovered from his surprise, hurled himself upon him to recover his prey, fifteen or sixteen archers, who closely followed their captain, appeared with their short swords in hand. It was a detachment of the king's ordinance doing counter-watch, by order of messire Robert d'Estouteville, warden of the provostry of Paris.

Quasimodo was surrounded, seized, bound. He roared, he foamed, he bit; and, had it been broad daylight, no doubt his face alone, made yet more hideous by anger, would have put the whole detachment to flight. But at night he was disarmed of his most dreadful weapon, his ugliness.

His companion had disappeared in the struggle.

The gypsy rose gracefully on the officer's saddle; she rested her two hands on the young man's two shoulders, and looked at him fixedly for some seconds, as if enraptured by his good looks and the good help he had just brought her. Then, breaking silence first, she said to him, making her sweet voice yet sweeter:

"What is your name, monsieur the man-at-arms?"

"Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers, at your service, my beauty!" answered the officer, drawing himself up.

"Thank you," she said.

And, while Captain Phoebus twirled his Burgundian mustache, she let herself slide down from the horse, like an arrow falling to earth, and fled.

A flash of lightning would have vanished less quickly.

"Pope's navel!" said the captain, having the straps of Quasimodo tightened; "I had rather have kept the strumpet."

"What would you have, captain?" said a man-at-arms; "the finch has flown, the bat has stayed."

V

CONTINUATION OF THE INCONVENIENCES

Gringoire, quite stunned by his fall, had remained on the pavement before the good Virgin at the corner of the street. Little by little he recovered his senses; he was at first for some minutes floating in a kind of half-somnolent reverie which was not without sweetness, wherein the aerial figures of the gypsy and the goat wedded themselves to the heaviness of Quasimodo's fist. This state lasted but briefly. A rather keen impression of cold upon the part of his body in contact with the pavement suddenly woke him, and brought his mind back to the surface. "Whence comes this coolness to me?" said he abruptly. He then perceived that he was rather in the middle of the gutter.

"Devil of a hunchbacked Cyclops!" he grumbled between his teeth, and tried to rise. But he was too stunned and too bruised. He was forced to remain where he was. He had, moreover, his hand sufficiently free; he stopped his nose, and resigned himself.

"The mud of Paris," he thought (for he believed himself surely certain that the gutter would decidedly be his lodging,

_And what to do in a lodging unless one dream_[19]?),

"the mud of Paris is particularly foul-smelling. It must contain much volatile salt and nitre. This, moreover, is the opinion of master Nicolas Flamel and the hermetics..."

The word _hermetics_ suddenly brought the idea of the archdeacon Claude Frollo into his mind. He recalled the violent scene he had just glimpsed, that the gypsy was struggling between two men, that Quasimodo had a companion, and the morose and haughty face of the archdeacon passed confusedly through his memory. "That would be strange!" he thought. And he began to build, upon that datum and that base, the fanciful edifice of hypotheses, that house of cards of philosophers. Then suddenly, returning once more to reality: "Holloa! I am freezing!" he cried.

The place, in effect, became less and less tenable. Each molecule of the gutter water carried off a molecule of radiant heat from Gringoire's loins, and the equilibrium between the temperature of his body and the temperature of the gutter began to establish itself in a rough fashion.

An annoyance of a quite different nature suddenly assailed him.

A group of children, those little barefoot savages who have at all times beaten the pavement of Paris under the eternal name of _gamins_, and who, when we too were children, threw stones at us all every evening on leaving school, because our breeches were not torn, a swarm of these young rogues came running toward the crossroads where Gringoire lay, with laughs and cries which seemed to care very little for the sleep of the neighbors. They dragged after them I know not what shapeless sack; and the noise alone of their wooden shoes would have woken a dead man. Gringoire, who was not quite one yet, raised himself half up.

"Holloa, Hennequin Dandèche! holloa, Jehan Pincebourde!" they cried at the top of their lungs; "old Eustache Moubon, the ironmonger of the corner, is just dead. We have his straw pallet, we are going to make a bonfire of it. Today is the Flemings' day!"

And behold, they threw the pallet precisely upon Gringoire, near whom they had arrived without seeing him. At the same time, one of them took a handful of straw which he went to light at the wick of the good Virgin.

"Christ's death!" grumbled Gringoire; "am I now going to be too hot?"

The moment was critical. He was about to be caught between fire and water; he made a superhuman effort, the effort of a false coiner about to be boiled who tries to escape. He stood up, threw the pallet back upon the urchins, and fled.

"Holy Virgin!" cried the children; "the ironmonger come back!"

And they fled on their side.

The pallet remained mistress of the field of battle. Belle-forest, father Le Juge, and Corrozet assert that on the morrow it was gathered up with great pomp by the clergy of the quarter and carried to the treasury of the church of Saint-Opportune, where the sacristan made until 1789 a fairly handsome revenue from the great miracle of the statue of the Virgin at the corner of the rue Mauconseil, which had, by its mere presence, in the memorable night of January 6 to 7, 1482, exorcised the late Eustache Moubon, who, to play a trick on the devil, had, in dying, maliciously hidden his soul in his pallet.

VI

THE BROKEN JUG

After having run at full speed for some time, without knowing where, knocking his head against many a street corner, straddling many a gutter, crossing many an alley, blind court, and crossroads, seeking flight and passage through all the meanderings of the old pavement of the Markets, exploring in his panic fear what the fine Latin of the charters calls _tota via, cheminum et viaria_[20], our poet suddenly stopped, from breathlessness first, then seized in some sort by the collar by a dilemma which had just arisen in his mind. "It seems to me, master Pierre Gringoire," said he to himself, pressing his finger to his forehead, "that you are running there like a scatterbrain. The little rogues were no less afraid of you than you of them. It seems to me, I say, that you heard the noise of their wooden shoes fleeing southward, while you fled northward. Now, one of two things: either they took flight; and then the pallet which they must have forgotten in their terror is precisely that hospitable bed after which you have been running since this morning, and which my lady the Virgin miraculously sends you to reward you for having performed in her honor a morality accompanied by triumphs and mummeries; or the children did not take flight, and in that case they have put the torch to the pallet, and that is precisely the excellent fire of which you have need to rejoice, dry yourself, and warm yourself. In both cases, good fire or good bed, the pallet is a gift from heaven. The blessed Virgin Mary, who is at the corner of the rue Mauconseil, perhaps caused Eustache Moubon to die only for that; and it is folly in you to flee thus on your trailing-gut, like a Picard before a Frenchman, leaving behind you what you seek before you; and you are a fool!"

Then he turned back his steps, and, orienting himself and sniffing about, nose to the wind and ear on the alert, he strove to find again the blessed pallet. But in vain. It was only intersections of houses, blind courts, forks, amid which he hesitated and doubted unceasingly, more hindered and more ensnared in that tangle of dark alleys than he would have been in the very labyrinth of the hôtel des Tournelles. At last he lost patience, and cried solemnly: "Cursed be the crossroads! it is the devil who made them in the image of his fork."

This exclamation relieved him somewhat, and a sort of reddish reflection which he perceived at that moment at the end of a long and narrow alley, finished raising his spirits. "God be praised!" said he; "there it is! Yonder is my pallet burning." And comparing himself to the boatman sinking in the night: "_Salve_," he added piously, "_salve, maris stella_[21]!"

Did he address this fragment of litany to the Holy Virgin or to the pallet? that is what we are perfectly ignorant of.

Scarcely had he taken a few steps into the long alley, which was sloping, unpaved, and ever more muddy and inclined, when he noticed something rather singular. It was not deserted. Here and there, in its length, crawled I know not what vague and shapeless masses, all making toward the light which flickered at the end of the street, like those heavy insects which drag themselves at night from blade of grass to blade of grass toward a shepherd's fire.

Nothing makes one adventurous like not feeling the place of one's purse. Gringoire continued to advance, and soon overtook that one of these larvae which dragged itself most lazily in the wake of the others. On approaching it, he saw that it was nothing other than a miserable cripple who hopped on his two hands, like a wounded harvestman that has no more than two legs. At the moment he passed near this sort of human-faced spider, it raised toward him a lamentable voice: "_La buona mancia, signor! la buona mancia_[22]!"

"The devil take you," said Gringoire, "and me with you, if I know what you mean!"

And he passed on.

He overtook another of those ambulant masses, and examined it. It was a cripple, at once lame and armless, and so armless and so lame that the complicated system of crutches and wooden legs which sustained him gave him the air of a mason's scaffolding on the march. Gringoire, who had noble and classical comparisons, compared him in his thought to the living tripod of Vulcan.

This living tripod saluted him in passing, but stopping his hat at the height of Gringoire's chin, like a barber's basin, and crying in his ears: "_Señor caballero, para comprar un pedaso de pan_[23]!"

"It appears," said Gringoire, "that that one speaks too; but it is a harsh tongue, and he is happier than I if he understands it."

Then striking his forehead by a sudden transition of idea: "By the way, what the devil did they mean this morning with their _Esmeralda_?"

He wished to double his pace; but for the third time something barred his way. That something, or rather that someone, was a blind man, a little blind man with a Jewish and bearded face, who, rowing in the space about him with a stick, and towed by a big dog, piped to him in a Hungarian accent: "_Facitote caritatem_[24]!"

"That's well!" said Pierre Gringoire; "here is one at last who speaks a Christian tongue. I must look like a very charitable gentleman for them to ask alms of me in the lean state of my purse. My friend" (and he turned toward the blind man), "I sold last week my last shirt; that is to say, since you understand only the language of Cicero: _Vendidi hebdomade nuper transita meam ultimam chemisam_."

That said, he turned his back on the blind man, and pursued his way; but the blind man began to lengthen his step at the same time as he, and behold the cripple, behold the hopper came up on their side with great haste and great noise of wooden bowl and crutches on the pavement. Then, all three, tumbling one over the other at the heels of poor Gringoire, began to sing him their song:

"Caritatem!" sang the blind.

"_La buona mancia!_" sang the hopper.

And the lame one took up the musical phrase, repeating: "_Un pedaso de pan!_"

Gringoire stopped his ears. "O Tower of Babel!" he cried.

He set to running. The blind ran. The lame ran. The hopper ran.

And then, as he sank deeper into the street, hoppers, blind men, lame ones, swarmed about him, and armless men, and one-eyed men, and lepers with their sores, some issuing from the houses, some from the adjacent alleys, some from the cellar gratings, howling, bellowing, yelping, all hobbling along, jolting, hurling themselves toward the light, and wallowing in the mire like slugs after rain.

Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not quite knowing what would come of all this, walked aghast amid the others, turning around the lame, straddling the hoppers, his feet entangled in that ant-heap of cripples, like that English captain who sank into a herd of crabs.

The idea came to him to try to turn back. But it was too late. All that legion had closed behind him, and his three beggars held him fast. He continued therefore, pushed at once by that irresistible flood, by fear, and by a vertigo which made of all this a sort of horrible dream.

At last he reached the end of the street. It opened onto a vast square, where a thousand scattered lights flickered in the confused fog of night. Gringoire threw himself into it, hoping to escape by the speed of his legs from the three infirm specters who had clung to him.

"_Ondè vas, hombre_[25]!" cried the lame one, throwing down his crutches, and running after him with the two best legs that ever traced a geometrical step on the pavement of Paris.

Meanwhile the hopper, standing on his feet, capped Gringoire with his heavy iron-bound bowl, and the blind man looked him in the face with flaming eyes.

"Where am I?" said the terrified poet.

"In the Court of Miracles," answered a fourth specter who had accosted them.

"Upon my soul," replied Gringoire, "I see well the blind who see and the lame who run; but where is the Savior?"

They answered with a sinister burst of laughter.

The poor poet cast his eyes about him. He was indeed in that dreadful Court of Miracles, where never had an honest man penetrated at such an hour; magic circle where the officers of the Châtelet and the sergeants of the provostry who ventured there disappeared in crumbs; city of thieves, hideous wart on the face of Paris; sewer whence escaped each morning, and where returned each night to stagnate, that stream of vices, of mendicancy, and of vagabondage ever overflowing in the streets of capitals; monstrous hive where there came home in the evening with their booty all the drones of the social order; lying hospital where the gypsy, the unfrocked monk, the lost scholar, the good-for-nothings of all nations, Spaniards, Italians, Germans, of all religions, Jews, Christians, Mahometans, idolaters, covered with farded sores, beggars by day, transfigured themselves by night into brigands; immense wardrobe, in a word, where at that epoch all the actors of that eternal comedy which theft, prostitution, and murder play upon the pavement of Paris dressed and undressed.

It was a vast square, irregular and ill-paved, like all the squares of Paris then. Fires, around which strange groups swarmed, shone here and there. All that went, came, cried. One heard shrill laughs, infant wailings, women's voices. The hands, the heads of that crowd, black upon the luminous ground, cut out a thousand bizarre gestures there. At moments, upon the ground, where the light of the fires trembled, mingled with great indefinite shadows, one could see pass a dog that resembled a man, a man that resembled a dog. The limits of races and of species seemed to fade in that city as in a pandemonium. Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health, sickness, all seemed to be in common among that people; all went together, mixed, confounded, superimposed; each participated in all.

The wavering and poor radiance of the fires allowed Gringoire, through his trouble, to distinguish all about the immense square a hideous framing of old houses whose worm-eaten, shriveled, stunted facades, pierced each with one or two dormer windows lit up, seemed to him in the shadow enormous heads of old women, ranged in a circle, monstrous and surly, who looked on at the sabbath with blinking eyes.

It was like a new world, unknown, unheard-of, deformed, reptile, teeming, fantastic.

Gringoire, more and more aghast, taken by the three beggars like by three pincers, deafened by a crowd of other faces which flocked and barked around him, the ill-starred Gringoire strove to rally his presence of mind to recall whether it was a Saturday. But his efforts were vain; the thread of his memory and of his thought was broken; and doubting all, floating from what he saw to what he felt, he posed himself this insoluble question: "If I am, is that? if that is, am I?"

At that moment a distinct cry rose in the humming throng which enveloped him: "Let us take him to the king! let us take him to the king!"

"Holy Virgin!" murmured Gringoire; "the king of here, that must be a he-goat."

"To the king! to the king!" repeated all the voices.

They dragged him off. It was who should lay claw on him. But the three beggars did not let go, and tore him from the others, howling: "He is ours!"

The doublet already ailing of the poet breathed its last sigh in that struggle.

In crossing the horrible square, his vertigo dissipated. At the end of some steps, the sense of reality had returned to him. He began to accustom himself to the atmosphere of the place. In the first moment, from his poet's head, or perhaps, quite simply and prosaically, from his empty stomach, there had risen a smoke, a vapor so to speak, which, spreading between objects and him, had let him see them only in the incoherent mist of nightmare, in those shadows of dreams which make all outlines tremble, all forms grimace, agglomerate objects into disproportionate groups, dilating things into chimeras and men into phantoms. Little by little this hallucination was succeeded by a less wandering and less magnifying gaze. The real made its way around him, struck his eyes, struck his feet, and demolished piece by piece all the frightful poetry wherewith he had at first believed himself surrounded. He was forced to perceive that he was not walking in the Styx, but in the mud; that he was not jostled by demons, but by thieves; that it was not his soul at stake, but quite simply his life (since there lacked to him that precious conciliator which places itself so efficaciously between the bandit and the honest man: the purse). Finally, in examining the orgy more closely and with more coolness, he fell from sabbath to tavern.

The Court of Miracles was in effect but a tavern, but a tavern of brigands, as red with blood as with wine.

The spectacle which offered itself to his eyes, when his escort in rags at last deposited him at the term of his course, was not fitted to bring him back to poetry, were it even the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the taproom. If we were not in the fifteenth century, we should say that Gringoire had descended from Michelangelo to Callot.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”