Part 8

Around a great fire that burned upon a broad round slab, and whose flames pierced the reddened stems of an empty tripod for the moment, a few worm-eaten tables were set up here and there, at random, without any geometrical lackey having deigned to adjust their parallelism or see to it that at least they did not cross at too unusual angles. Upon these tables glistened a few pots dripping with wine and ale, and around these pots were grouped many bacchic faces, empurpled with fire and wine. There was a big-bellied man with a jovial countenance who was noisily kissing a buxom, fleshy harlot. There was a sort of false soldier, a knave, as they said in slang, who was unwinding, whistling, the bandages of his feigned wound, and loosening his sound and vigorous knee, swathed since morning in a thousand ligatures. On the contrary, there was a malingerer who was preparing with lard and ox-blood his 'God's leg' for the morrow. Two tables farther, a counterfeit cripple, in his complete pilgrim's costume, was spelling out the lament of Saint Reine, not forgetting the psalmody and the nasal drawl. Elsewhere a young rogue was taking a lesson in epilepsy from an old mumper who was teaching him the art of foaming at the mouth by chewing a bit of soap. Beside them, a dropsical man was letting out his water, and making four or five thieving wenches at the same table hold their noses, as they quarreled over a child stolen in the evening. All circumstances which, two centuries later, 'seemed so ridiculous at court,' says Sauval, 'that they served as pastime for the king and as opening to the royal ballet of The Night, divided into four parts and danced upon the stage of the Petit-Bourbon'[26]. 'Never,' adds an eyewitness of 1653, 'have the sudden metamorphoses of the Court of Miracles been more happily represented. Benserade prepared us for it with verses of a gallant enough sort.'

Loud laughter broke out everywhere, and obscene song. Each drew to himself, glossing and swearing without heeding his neighbor. The pots clinked, and quarrels arose at the clash of pots, and the chipped pots made the rags tear.

A big dog, seated on his tail, watched the fire. A few children were mixed up in this orgy. The stolen child, who wept and cried. Another, a stout boy of four, seated with dangling legs upon a bench too high, the table reaching to his chin, and saying not a word. A third gravely spreading with his finger upon the table the melting tallow that ran from a candle. A last, a little one, squatting in the mud, almost lost in a kettle which he was scraping with a tile and from which he drew a sound to make Stradivarius faint.

A cask stood near the fire, and a beggar upon the cask. It was the king upon his throne.

The three who had Gringoire brought him before this cask, and the whole bacchanal was silent for a moment, except for the kettle inhabited by the child.

Gringoire dared not breathe nor lift his eyes.

'Hombre, quita ta sombrero'[27], said one of the three knaves to him who he was; and before he had understood what that meant, the other had taken his hat from him. A sorry cap, it is true, but still good for a sunny day or a rainy day. Gringoire sighed.

Meanwhile the king, from the height of his cask, addressed him.

'What is this marauder?' said he.

Gringoire started. That voice, though accentuated by menace, recalled to him another voice which that morning had dealt the first blow to his mystery by nasalizing in the midst of the audience: 'Charity, if you please!' He lifted his head. It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.

Clopin Trouillefou, invested with his royal insignia, had not a rag more nor less. His wound on the arm had already disappeared. He held in his hand one of those whips with white leather thongs which the sergeants-at-mace then used to press back the crowd, and which were called 'boullayes.' He wore upon his head a sort of headgear hooped and closed at the top; but it was difficult to distinguish whether it was a child's circlet or a king's crown, so much do the two things resemble each other.

However, Gringoire, without knowing why, had recovered some hope in recognizing in the king of the Court of Miracles his accursed beggar of the great hall.

'Master,' he stammered, 'my Lord... Sire... How am I to call you?' said he at last, arrived at the culminating point of his crescendo, and knowing no longer how to rise or descend.

'My Lord, His Majesty, or comrade, call me what you will. But make haste. What have you to say for your defense?'

'For your defense!' thought Gringoire, this displeases me. He resumed, stuttering: 'I am he who this morning...'

'By the devil's nails!' interrupted Clopin, 'your name, marauder, and nothing more. Listen. You are before three mighty sovereigns: I, Clopin Trouillefou, king of Thunes, successor of the great coësre, supreme suzerain of the kingdom of slang; Mathias Hungadi Spicali, duke of Egypt and of Bohemia, that old yellow fellow you see there with a rag around his head; Guillaume Rousseau, emperor of Galilee, that fat man who is not listening to us and who is caressing a strumpet. We are your judges. You have entered the kingdom of slang without being a slangster, you have violated the privileges of our city. You must be punished, unless you are a capon, a franc-mitou or a rifodé, that is to say, in the slang of honest folk, thief, beggar or vagabond. Are you anything of that sort? Justify yourself. State your qualities.'

'Alas!' said Gringoire, 'I have not that honor. I am the author...'

'That suffices,' resumed Trouillefou without letting him finish. 'You are going to be hanged. A very simple thing, gentlemen honest burgesses! as you treat ours among you, we treat yours among us. The law you make for the truands, the truands make for you. It is your fault if it is harsh. One must needs see from time to time a grimace of an honest man above the hempen collar; that renders the thing honorable. Come, friend, share your rags gaily with these damsels. I am going to have you hanged to amuse the truands, and you shall give them your purse to drink. If you have some mumming to do, there is yonder in the mortar a very good God-the-Father in stone which we stole from Saint-Pierre-aux-Boeufs. You have four minutes to fling your soul at his head.'

The harangue was formidable.

'Well said, upon my soul! Clopin Trouillefou preaches like a holy father the pope,' cried the emperor of Galilee, breaking his pot to prop his table.

'My lords the emperors and kings,' said Gringoire with coolness (for I know not how firmness had returned to him, and he spoke resolutely), 'you do not think of it. I am called Pierre Gringoire, I am the poet whose morality was played this morning in the great hall of the Palace.'

'Ah! it is you, master!' said Clopin. 'I was there, by God's head! Well! comrade, is it a reason, because you bored us this morning, that you should not be hanged this evening?'

I shall have trouble getting out of this, thought Gringoire. He tried yet another effort. 'I do not see why,' said he, 'poets should not be ranked among the truands. Vagabond, Aesopus was; mendicant, Homerus was; thief, Mercurius was...'

Clopin interrupted him: 'I believe you want to bamboozle us with your grimoire. By God, let yourself be hanged, and no more ado!'

'Pardon, my lord the king of Thunes,' replied Gringoire, disputing the ground foot by foot. 'It is worth the trouble... A moment!... Listen to me... you will not condemn me without hearing me...'

His unhappy voice, in fact, was covered by the clamor that was making around him. The little boy scraped his kettle with more spirit than ever; and to crown all, an old woman had just set upon the burning tripod a frying-pan full of grease, which squeaked on the fire with a noise like the cries of a troop of children pursuing a mask.

Meanwhile Clopin Trouillefou seemed to confer a moment with the duke of Egypt and the emperor of Galilee, who was completely drunk. Then he cried shrilly: 'Silence, then!' and, as the kettle and the frying-pan did not heed him and continued their duet, he sprang down from his cask, gave a kick to the kettle, which rolled ten paces off with the child, a kick to the frying-pan, whose grease all spilled into the fire, and remounted gravely to his throne, without caring for the stifled sobs of the child, nor the grumblings of the old woman, whose supper was going up in fine white flame.

Trouillefou made a sign, and the duke, and the emperor, and the arch-knaves and the cagoux came to range themselves around him in a horseshoe, of which Gringoire, still roughly held in body, occupied the center. It was a half-circle of rags, of tatters, of tinsel, of forks, of axes, of drunken legs, of bare brawny arms, of sordid, dull and stupefied faces. In the midst of this round table of beggary, Clopin Trouillefou, like the doge of this senate, like the king of this peerage, like the pope of this conclave, towered, first by all the height of his cask, then by I know not what haughty, fierce and formidable air which made his pupil sparkle and corrected in his savage profile the bestial type of the truand race. One would have said a boar's head among snouts.

'Listen,' said he to Gringoire, caressing his deformed chin with his callous hand, 'I do not see why you should not be hanged. It is true that it seems to repel you; and that is natural, you burgesses are not used to it, you make a great matter of the thing. After all, we wish you no harm, here is a means to get you out of the scrape for the moment, will you be one of us?'

One may judge of the effect this proposition made upon Gringoire, who saw life escaping him, and began to let go. He clung to it energetically.

'I will, certainly, most beautifully,' said he.

'You consent,' resumed Clopin, 'to enroll among the men of the little flame?'

'Of the little flame. Precisely,' answered Gringoire.

'You acknowledge yourself member of the free bourgeoisie?' resumed the king of Thunes.

'Of the free bourgeoisie.'

'Subject of the kingdom of slang?'

'Of the kingdom of slang.'

'Truand?'

'Truand.'

'In your soul?'

'In my soul.'

'I remark to you,' resumed the king, 'that you will be no less hanged for that.'

'The devil!' said the poet.

'Only,' continued Clopin, imperturbable, 'you will be hanged later, with more ceremony, at the expense of the good city of Paris, upon a fine stone gibbet, and by honest folks. That is a consolation.'

'As you say,' answered Gringoire.

'There are other advantages. As a free-bourgeois, you will not have to pay mud-tax, nor poor-tax, nor lantern-tax, to which the burgesses of Paris are subject.'

'So be it,' said the poet. 'I consent. I am truand, slangster, free-bourgeois, little flame, whatever you will. And I was all that beforehand, Mr. king of Thunes, for I am a philosopher; 'et omnia in philosophia, omnes in philosopho continentur'[28], as you know.'

The king of Thunes knit his brow.

'For whom do you take me, friend? What Jewish-Hungarian slang are you singing us there? I know not Hebrew. To be a bandit is not to be a Jew. I do not even steal any more, I am above that, I kill. Cut-throat, yes; cut-purse, no.'

Gringoire tried to slip some excuse through these brief words which anger made more and more jerky. 'I beg your pardon, my lord. It is not Hebrew, it is Latin.'

'I tell you,' resumed Clopin with vehemence, 'that I am not a Jew, and that I will have you hanged, belly of synagogue! as well as that little Judas of a peddler who is beside you and whom I hope to see one day nailed upon a counter, like the false coin he is!'

In speaking thus, he pointed with his finger at the little bearded Hungarian Jew who had accosted Gringoire with his 'facitote caritatem,' and who, understanding no other tongue, looked with surprise at the ill-humor of the king of Thunes overflowing upon him.

At last my lord Clopin calmed himself.

'Marauder!' said he to our poet, 'you want then to be a truand?'

'Assuredly,' answered the poet.

'That is not all of wanting,' said the surly Clopin. 'Good will puts not an onion the more in the soup, and is good only for going to paradise; now paradise and slang are two. To be received into slang, you must prove you are good for something, and to that end you must rifle the mannikin.'

'I will rifle,' said Gringoire, 'whatever pleases you.'

Clopin made a sign. Some slangsters detached themselves from the circle and returned a moment after. They brought two posts terminated at their lower extremity by two carpenter's spades, which made them take easy footing on the ground. At the upper extremity of the two posts they fitted a cross-beam, and the whole constituted a very pretty portable gibbet, which Gringoire had the satisfaction of seeing raised before him in the twinkling of an eye. Nothing was lacking, not even the rope which swung gracefully beneath the traverse.

'Where do they mean to come out?' wondered Gringoire with some uneasiness. A sound of bells which he heard at the same moment put an end to his anxiety. It was a mannikin which the truands were suspending by the neck from the rope, a sort of scarecrow for birds, clad in red, and so laden with rattles and little bells that one might have harnessed thirty Castilian mules with them. These thousand bells trembled some time at the oscillations of the rope, then died away by little and little, and were silent at last, when the mannikin had been brought back to immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the clepsydra and the hourglass.

Then Clopin, indicating to Gringoire an old tottering stool placed beneath the mannikin: 'Mount there.'

'Death-devil!' objected Gringoire, 'I shall break my neck. Your stool limps like a distich of Martial; it has one hexameter foot and one pentameter foot.'

'Mount,' resumed Clopin.

Gringoire mounted the stool, and attained, not without some oscillations of head and arms, to find there his center of gravity.

'Now,' pursued the king of Thunes, 'turn your right foot around your left leg and rise upon the toe of your left foot.'

'My lord,' said Gringoire, 'do you then absolutely insist that I break some limb?'

Clopin shook his head.

'Listen, friend, you talk too much; in two words, here is the matter. You are going to rise upon the toe, as I tell you; in this way you will be able to reach up to the pocket of the mannikin; you will rifle it; you will draw from it a purse which is there; and if you do all that without one bell being heard to sound, it is well; you will be a truand. We shall have nothing more to do but to beat you for eight days.'

'God's belly! I would beware of it,' said Gringoire. 'And if I make the bells ring?'

'Then you will be hanged. Do you understand?'

'I do not understand at all,' answered Gringoire.

'Listen once more. You are going to rifle the mannikin and take his purse; if a single bell moves in the operation, you will be hanged. Do you understand that?'

'Well,' said Gringoire, 'I understand that. And then?'

'If you succeed in taking the purse without the rattles being heard, you are a truand, and you will be beaten for eight consecutive days. You understand, no doubt, now?'

'No, my lord, I no longer understand. Where is my advantage? hanged in one case, beaten in the other...'

'And truand?' resumed Clopin, 'and truand? is that nothing? It is in your interest that we beat you, to harden you to blows.'

'Great thanks,' answered the poet.

'Come, make haste,' said the king, striking his foot upon his cask which resounded like a great drum. 'Rifle the mannikin, and let this end. I warn you for the last time that if I hear a single bell, you take the mannikin's place.'

The band of slangsters applauded Clopin's words, and ranged themselves circularly around the gibbet, with a laugh so pitiless that Gringoire saw that he amused them too much not to have everything to fear from them. He had therefore no hope left, save the frail chance of succeeding in the dreadful operation imposed upon him. He decided to risk it, but not without having first addressed a fervent prayer to the mannikin he was about to rob, and which would have been easier to soften than the truands. This myriad of bells with their little tongues of copper seemed to him so many open asp mouths, ready to bite and hiss.

'Oh!' said he softly, 'is it possible that my life depends upon the least vibration of the least of these bells! Oh!' added he, hands joined, 'bells, ring not! little bells, bell not! rattles, rattle not!'

He made yet another effort upon Trouillefou.

'And if a gust of wind comes?' asked he of him.

'You will be hanged,' answered the other without hesitation.

Seeing there was neither respite, nor reprieve, nor possible subterfuge, he bravely made up his mind. He turned his right foot around his left foot, rose upon his left foot, and stretched out his arm; but, at the moment he touched the mannikin, his body which had only one foot left wavered upon the stool which had but three; he would mechanically lean on the mannikin, lost his balance, and fell heavily to the earth, quite stunned by the fatal vibration of the mannikin's thousand bells, which, yielding to the impulse of his hand, described first a rotation upon itself, then swung majestically between the two posts.

'Accursed!' cried he in falling, and he remained as dead, face to the ground.

Meanwhile he heard the dreadful peal above his head, and the diabolical laugh of the truands, and the voice of Trouillefou, which said: 'Lift up the knave, and hang him soundly.'

He rose. They had already unhooked the mannikin to make room for him.

The slangsters made him mount the stool. Clopin came to him, passed the rope around his neck, and striking him on the shoulder: 'Farewell, friend! You can no longer escape now, were you to digest with the pope's guts.'

The word 'grace' expired on Gringoire's lips. He cast his eyes around him. But no hope: all were laughing.

'Bellevigne de l'Étoile,' said the king of Thunes to an enormous truand who came out of the ranks, 'climb upon the traverse.'

Bellevigne de l'Étoile mounted nimbly upon the cross-beam, and at the end of an instant Gringoire, raising his eyes, saw him with terror crouched upon the traverse above his head.

'Now,' resumed Clopin Trouillefou, 'as soon as I clap my hands, Andry le Rouge, you shall throw the stool to earth with a blow of the knee; François Chante-Prune, you shall hang upon the fellow's feet; and you, Bellevigne, you shall throw yourself upon his shoulders; and all three at once, understand you?'

Gringoire shuddered.

'Are you ready?' said Clopin Trouillefou to the three slangsters ready to precipitate themselves upon Gringoire like three spiders upon a fly. The poor patient had a horrible moment of waiting, while Clopin tranquilly pushed back with the tip of his foot into the fire a few sprigs of vine-branch which the flame had not caught. 'Are you ready?' repeated he, and he opened his hands to clap. One second more, and it was done.

But he stopped, as warned by a sudden idea. 'One instant! said he; 'I was forgetting!... It is the custom that we hang not a man without asking if there is a woman who will have him. Comrade, that is your last resource. You must marry a truande or the rope.'

This Bohemian law, strange as it may seem to the reader, is even now written at length in old English legislation. See 'Burington's Observations.'

Gringoire breathed. It was the second time he had come back to life since half an hour. He therefore dared not too much trust in it.

'Holà!' cried Clopin remounted upon his cask, 'holà! women, females, is there among you, from the witch to her cat, a strumpet who will have this knave? Holà, Colette la Charonne! Élisabeth Trouvain! Simone Jodouyne! Marie Piédebou! Thonne la Longue! Bérarde Fanouel! Michelle Genaille! Claude Ronge-Oreille! Mathurine Girorou! Holà! Isabeau la Thierrye! Come and see! a man for nothing! who will have him?'

Gringoire, in this miserable state, was no doubt little appetizing. The truandes showed themselves moderately touched by the proposition. The unhappy man heard them answer: 'No! no! hang him, there will be sport for all.'

Three however came out of the crowd and came to sniff at him. The first was a stout girl with a square face. She examined attentively the deplorable doublet of the philosopher. The frock was worn and more holed than a chestnut-roasting pan. The girl made a grimace. 'Old rag!' grumbled she, and addressing Gringoire: 'Let us see your cloak?—I have lost it,' said Gringoire. 'Your hat?—They took it from me.' 'Your shoes?—They are beginning to have no more soles.' 'Your purse?—Alas!' stammered Gringoire, 'I have not a single parisis penny.' 'Let yourself be hanged, and say thank you!' replied the truande, turning her back on him.

The second, old, black, wrinkled, hideous, of an ugliness to make a blot in the Court of Miracles, turned around Gringoire. He trembled almost lest she should want him. But she said between her teeth: 'He is too lean!' and went away.

The third was a young girl, rather fresh, and not too ugly. 'Save me!' said to her in a low voice the poor devil. She considered him a moment with an air of pity, then lowered her eyes, made a fold in her skirt, and remained undecided. He followed with his eyes all her movements; it was the last gleam of hope. 'No,' said the young girl at last, 'no! Guillaume Longuejoue would beat me.' She re-entered the crowd.

'Comrade,' said Clopin, 'you have ill luck.'

Then, standing up on his cask: 'Does no one want him?' cried he, counterfeiting the accent of a selling-bailiff, to the great merriment of all; 'does no one want him? once, twice, three times!' And turning toward the gibbet with a nod: 'Sold!'

Bellevigne de l'Étoile, Andry le Rouge, François Chante-Prune drew near to Gringoire.

At this moment a cry arose among the slangsters: 'La Esmeralda! la Esmeralda!'

Gringoire started, and turned toward the side whence came the clamor. The crowd opened, and gave passage to a pure and dazzling figure.

It was the Bohemian.

'La Esmeralda!' said Gringoire, stupefied, in the midst of his emotions, by the abrupt manner in which this magic word knotted all the memories of his day.

This rare creature seemed to exercise even in the Court of Miracles her empire of charm and beauty. Slangsters and slang-women ranged themselves softly at her passage, and their brutal faces brightened at her look.

She approached the patient with her light step. Her pretty Djali followed her. Gringoire was more dead than alive. She considered him a moment in silence.

'You are going to hang this man?' said she gravely to Clopin.

'Yes, sister,' answered the king of Thunes, 'unless you take him for husband.'

She made her pretty little pout of the lower lip.

'I take him,' said she.

Gringoire here believed firmly that he had done nothing but dream since the morning, and that this was the sequel.

The turn of events, though graceful, was violent.

They untied the running knot, they made the poet descend from the stool. He was obliged to sit down, so lively was the shock.

The duke of Egypt, without uttering a word, brought an earthenware pitcher. The Bohemian presented it to Gringoire. 'Throw it to earth,' said she to him.

The pitcher broke in four pieces.

'Brother,' said then the duke of Egypt, imposing hands upon their foreheads, 'she is your wife; sister, he is your husband. For four years. Go.'

VII

A WEDDING NIGHT

“Stories of the world, in your language.”