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Title: Notre-Dame de Paris

Author: Victor Hugo

Translator: Isabel Florence Hapgood

Release date: April 1, 2001 [eBook #2610]
Most recently updated: April 15, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2610

Credits: Peter Snow Cao and David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTRE-DAME
DE PARIS ***

N O T R E - D A M E D E PA R I S

Also known as:

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME

By Victor Hugo

Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood

PREFACE.

A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about Notre-Dame,
the author of this book found, in an obscure nook of one of the towers, the
following word, engraved by hand upon the wall:—

ἈΝÁΓΚΗ.

These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the
stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic caligraphy imprinted
upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of
revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed
them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in
them, struck the author deeply.
He questioned himself; he sought to divine who could have been that
soul in torment which had not been willing to quit this world without
leaving this stigma of crime or unhappiness upon the brow of the ancient
church.
Afterwards, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down, I know not
which, and the inscription disappeared. For it is thus that people have been
in the habit of proceeding with the marvellous churches of the Middle Ages
for the last two hundred years. Mutilations come to them from every
quarter, from within as well as from without. The priest whitewashes them,
the archdeacon scrapes them down; then the populace arrives and
demolishes them.
Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory which the author of this
book here consecrates to it, there remains to-day nothing whatever of the
mysterious word engraved within the gloomy tower of Notre-Dame,—
nothing of the destiny which it so sadly summed up. The man who wrote
that word upon the wall disappeared from the midst of the generations of
man many centuries ago; the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the

wall of the church; the church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the
face of the earth.
It is upon this word that this book is founded.
March, 1831.

CONTENTS

PREFACE.

VOLUME I.
BOOK FIRST.
CHAPTER I. THE GRAND HALL.
CHAPTER II. PIERRE GRINGOIRE.
CHAPTER III. MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL.
CHAPTER IV. MASTER JACQUES COPPENOLE.
CHAPTER V. QUASIMODO.
CHAPTER VI. ESMERALDA.

BOOK SECOND.
CHAPTER I. FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA.
CHAPTER II. THE PLACE DE GRÈVE.
CHAPTER III. KISSES FOR BLOWS.
CHAPTER IV. THE INCONVENIENCES OF FOLLOWING A PRETTY
WOMAN THROUGH THE STREETS IN THE EVENING.
CHAPTER V. RESULT OF THE DANGERS.
CHAPTER VI. THE BROKEN JUG.
CHAPTER VII. A BRIDAL NIGHT.

BOOK THIRD.
CHAPTER I. NOTRE-DAME.
CHAPTER II. A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS.

BOOK FOURTH.
CHAPTER I. GOOD SOULS.
CHAPTER II. CLAUDE FROLLO.
CHAPTER III. IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE.
CHAPTER IV. THE DOG AND HIS MASTER.
CHAPTER V. MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO.
CHAPTER VI. UNPOPULARITY.

BOOK FIFTH.
CHAPTER I. ABBAS BEATI MARTINI.
CHAPTER II. THIS WILL KILL THAT.

BOOK SIXTH.
CHAPTER I. AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT
MAGISTRACY.
CHAPTER II. THE RAT-HOLE.
CHAPTER III. HISTORY OF A LEAVENED CAKE OF MAIZE.
CHAPTER IV. A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER.
CHAPTER V. END OF THE STORY OF THE CAKE.

VOLUME II.
BOOK SEVENTH.
CHAPTER I. THE DANGER OF CONFIDING ONE’S SECRET TO A
GOAT.
CHAPTER II. A PRIEST AND A PHILOSOPHER ARE TWO
DIFFERENT THINGS.
CHAPTER III. THE BELLS.
CHAPTER IV. ἈΝÁΓΚΗ.
CHAPTER V. THE TWO MEN CLOTHED IN BLACK.
CHAPTER VI. THE EFFECT WHICH SEVEN OATHS IN THE OPEN
AIR CAN PRODUCE.
CHAPTER VII. THE MYSTERIOUS MONK.

CHAPTER VIII. THE UTILITY OF WINDOWS WHICH OPEN ON THE
RIVER.

BOOK EIGHTH.
CHAPTER I. THE CROWN CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF.
CHAPTER II. CONTINUATION OF THE CROWN WHICH WAS
CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF.
CHAPTER III. END OF THE CROWN WHICH WAS TURNED INTO A
DRY LEAF.
CHAPTER IV. LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA—LEAVE ALL HOPE
BEHIND, YE WHO ENTER HERE.
CHAPTER V. THE MOTHER.
CHAPTER VI. THREE HUMAN HEARTS DIFFERENTLY
CONSTRUCTED.

BOOK NINTH.
CHAPTER I. DELIRIUM.
CHAPTER II. HUNCHBACKED, ONE EYED, LAME.
CHAPTER III. DEAF.
CHAPTER IV. EARTHENWARE AND CRYSTAL.
CHAPTER V. THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR.
CHAPTER VI. CONTINUATION OF THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR.

BOOK TENTH.
CHAPTER I. GRINGOIRE HAS MANY GOOD IDEAS IN
SUCCESSION.—RUE DES BERNARDINS.
CHAPTER II. TURN VAGABOND.
CHAPTER III. LONG LIVE MIRTH.
CHAPTER IV. AN AWKWARD FRIEND.
CHAPTER V. THE RETREAT IN WHICH MONSIEUR LOUIS OF
FRANCE SAYS HIS PRAYERS.
CHAPTER VI. LITTLE SWORD IN POCKET.

CHAPTER VII. CHATEAUPERS TO THE RESCUE.

BOOK ELEVENTH.
CHAPTER I. THE LITTLE SHOE.
CHAPTER II. THE BEAUTIFUL CREATURE CLAD IN WHITE.
(Dante.)
CHAPTER III. THE MARRIAGE OF PHOEBUS.
CHAPTER IV. THE MARRIAGE OF QUASIMODO.

NOTE.
FOOTNOTES.

VOLUME I.

BOOK FIRST.

CHAPTER I.
THE GRAND HALL.

Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago
to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit
of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal.
The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has
preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in the event which thus
set the bells and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment from early morning. It
was neither an assault by the Picards nor the Burgundians, nor a hunt led
along in procession, nor a revolt of scholars in the town of Laas, nor an
entry of “our much dread lord, monsieur the king,” nor even a pretty
hanging of male and female thieves by the courts of Paris. Neither was it
the arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth century, of some plumed and
bedizened embassy. It was barely two days since the last cavalcade of that
nature, that of the Flemish ambassadors charged with concluding the
marriage between the dauphin and Marguerite of Flanders, had made its
entry into Paris, to the great annoyance of M. le Cardinal de Bourbon, who,
for the sake of pleasing the king, had been obliged to assume an amiable
mien towards this whole rustic rabble of Flemish burgomasters, and to
regale them at his Hôtel de Bourbon, with a very “pretty morality,
allegorical satire, and farce,” while a driving rain drenched the magnificent
tapestries at his door.
What put the “whole population of Paris in commotion,” as Jehan de
Troyes expresses it, on the sixth of January, was the double solemnity,
united from time immemorial, of the Epiphany and the Feast of Fools.
On that day, there was to be a bonfire on the Place de Grève, a maypole
at the Chapelle de Braque, and a mystery at the Palais de Justice. It had
been cried, to the sound of the trumpet, the preceding evening at all the
cross roads, by the provost’s men, clad in handsome, short, sleeveless coats
of violet camelot, with large white crosses upon their breasts.

So the crowd of citizens, male and female, having closed their houses
and shops, thronged from every direction, at early morn, towards some one
of the three spots designated.
Each had made his choice; one, the bonfire; another, the maypole;
another, the mystery play. It must be stated, in honor of the good sense of
the loungers of Paris, that the greater part of this crowd directed their steps
towards the bonfire, which was quite in season, or towards the mystery
play, which was to be presented in the grand hall of the Palais de Justice
(the courts of law), which was well roofed and walled; and that the curious
left the poor, scantily flowered maypole to shiver all alone beneath the sky
of January, in the cemetery of the Chapel of Braque.
The populace thronged the avenues of the law courts in particular,
because they knew that the Flemish ambassadors, who had arrived two days
previously, intended to be present at the representation of the mystery, and
at the election of the Pope of the Fools, which was also to take place in the
grand hall.
It was no easy matter on that day, to force one’s way into that grand hall,
although it was then reputed to be the largest covered enclosure in the world
(it is true that Sauval had not yet measured the grand hall of the Château of
Montargis). The palace place, encumbered with people, offered to the
curious gazers at the windows the aspect of a sea; into which five or six
streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged every moment fresh
floods of heads. The waves of this crowd, augmented incessantly, dashed
against the angles of the houses which projected here and there, like so
many promontories, into the irregular basin of the place. In the centre of the
lofty Gothic[1] façade of the palace, the grand staircase, incessantly
ascended and descended by a double current, which, after parting on the
intermediate landing-place, flowed in broad waves along its lateral slopes,
—the grand staircase, I say, trickled incessantly into the place, like a
cascade into a lake. The cries, the laughter, the trampling of those thousands
of feet, produced a great noise and a great clamor. From time to time, this
noise and clamor redoubled; the current which drove the crowd towards the
grand staircase flowed backwards, became troubled, formed whirlpools.
This was produced by the buffet of an archer, or the horse of one of the
provost’s sergeants, which kicked to restore order; an admirable tradition

which the provostship has bequeathed to the constablery, the constablery to
the maréchaussée, the maréchaussée to our gendarmeri of Paris.
Thousands of good, calm, bourgeois faces thronged the windows, the
doors, the dormer windows, the roofs, gazing at the palace, gazing at the
populace, and asking nothing more; for many Parisians content themselves
with the spectacle of the spectators, and a wall behind which something is
going on becomes at once, for us, a very curious thing indeed.
If it could be granted to us, the men of 1830, to mingle in thought with
those Parisians of the fifteenth century, and to enter with them, jostled,
elbowed, pulled about, into that immense hall of the palace, which was so
cramped on that sixth of January, 1482, the spectacle would not be devoid
of either interest or charm, and we should have about us only things that
were so old that they would seem new.
With the reader’s consent, we will endeavor to retrace in thought, the
impression which he would have experienced in company with us on
crossing the threshold of that grand hall, in the midst of that tumultuous
crowd in surcoats, short, sleeveless jackets, and doublets.
And, first of all, there is a buzzing in the ears, a dazzlement in the eyes.
Above our heads is a double ogive vault, panelled with wood carving,
painted azure, and sown with golden fleurs-de-lis; beneath our feet a
pavement of black and white marble, alternating. A few paces distant, an
enormous pillar, then another, then another; seven pillars in all, down the
length of the hall, sustaining the spring of the arches of the double vault, in
the centre of its width. Around four of the pillars, stalls of merchants, all
sparkling with glass and tinsel; around the last three, benches of oak, worn
and polished by the trunk hose of the litigants, and the robes of the
attorneys. Around the hall, along the lofty wall, between the doors, between
the windows, between the pillars, the interminable row of all the kings of
France, from Pharamond down: the lazy kings, with pendent arms and
downcast eyes; the valiant and combative kings, with heads and arms raised
boldly heavenward. Then in the long, pointed windows, glass of a thousand
hues; at the wide entrances to the hall, rich doors, finely sculptured; and all,
the vaults, pillars, walls, jambs, panelling, doors, statues, covered from top
to bottom with a splendid blue and gold illumination, which, a trifle
tarnished at the epoch when we behold it, had almost entirely disappeared

beneath dust and spiders in the year of grace, 1549, when du Breul still
admired it from tradition.
Let the reader picture to himself now, this immense, oblong hall,
illuminated by the pallid light of a January day, invaded by a motley and
noisy throng which drifts along the walls, and eddies round the seven
pillars, and he will have a confused idea of the whole effect of the picture,
whose curious details we shall make an effort to indicate with more
precision.
It is certain, that if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henri IV., there would
have been no documents in the trial of Ravaillac deposited in the clerk’s
office of the Palais de Justice, no accomplices interested in causing the said
documents to disappear; hence, no incendiaries obliged, for lack of better
means, to burn the clerk’s office in order to burn the documents, and to burn
the Palais de Justice in order to burn the clerk’s office; consequently, in
short, no conflagration in 1618. The old Palais would be standing still, with
its ancient grand hall; I should be able to say to the reader, “Go and look at
it,” and we should thus both escape the necessity,—I of making, and he of
reading, a description of it, such as it is. Which demonstrates a new truth:
that great events have incalculable results.
It is true that it may be quite possible, in the first place, that Ravaillac had
no accomplices; and in the second, that if he had any, they were in no way
connected with the fire of 1618. Two other very plausible explanations
exist: First, the great flaming star, a foot broad, and a cubit high, which fell
from heaven, as every one knows, upon the law courts, after midnight on
the seventh of March; second, Théophile’s quatrain,—
“Sure, ’twas but a sorry game
When at Paris, Dame Justice,
Through having eaten too much spice,
Set the palace all aflame.”

Whatever may be thought of this triple explanation, political, physical,
and poetical, of the burning of the law courts in 1618, the unfortunate fact
of the fire is certain. Very little to-day remains, thanks to this catastrophe,—
thanks, above all, to the successive restorations which have completed what
it spared,—very little remains of that first dwelling of the kings of France,
—of that elder palace of the Louvre, already so old in the time of Philip the
Handsome, that they sought there for the traces of the magnificent buildings

erected by King Robert and described by Helgaldus. Nearly everything has
disappeared. What has become of the chamber of the chancellery, where
Saint Louis consummated his marriage? the garden where he administered
justice, “clad in a coat of camelot, a surcoat of linsey-woolsey, without
sleeves, and a sur-mantle of black sandal, as he lay upon the carpet with
Joinville?” Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismond? and that of
Charles IV.? that of Jean the Landless? Where is the staircase, from which
Charles VI. promulgated his edict of pardon? the slab where Marcel cut the
throats of Robert de Clermont and the Marshal of Champagne, in the
presence of the dauphin? the wicket where the bulls of Pope Benedict were
torn, and whence those who had brought them departed decked out, in
derision, in copes and mitres, and making an apology through all Paris? and
the grand hall, with its gilding, its azure, its statues, its pointed arches, its
pillars, its immense vault, all fretted with carvings? and the gilded
chamber? and the stone lion, which stood at the door, with lowered head
and tail between his legs, like the lions on the throne of Solomon, in the
humiliated attitude which befits force in the presence of justice? and the
beautiful doors? and the stained glass? and the chased ironwork, which
drove Biscornette to despair? and the delicate woodwork of Hancy? What
has time, what have men done with these marvels? What have they given us
in return for all this Gallic history, for all this Gothic art? The heavy
flattened arches of M. de Brosse, that awkward architect of the Saint-
Gervais portal. So much for art; and, as for history, we have the gossiping
reminiscences of the great pillar, still ringing with the tattle of the Patru.
It is not much. Let us return to the veritable grand hall of the veritable old
palace. The two extremities of this gigantic parallelogram were occupied,
the one by the famous marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick that, as
the ancient land rolls—in a style that would have given Gargantua an
appetite—say, “such a slice of marble as was never beheld in the world”;
the other by the chapel where Louis XI. had himself sculptured on his knees
before the Virgin, and whither he caused to be brought, without heeding the
two gaps thus made in the row of royal statues, the statues of Charlemagne
and of Saint Louis, two saints whom he supposed to be great in favor in
heaven, as kings of France. This chapel, quite new, having been built only
six years, was entirely in that charming taste of delicate architecture, of
marvellous sculpture, of fine and deep chasing, which marks with us the
end of the Gothic era, and which is perpetuated to about the middle of the

sixteenth century in the fairylike fancies of the Renaissance. The little open-
work rose window, pierced above the portal, was, in particular, a
masterpiece of lightness and grace; one would have pronounced it a star of
lace.
In the middle of the hall, opposite the great door, a platform of gold
brocade, placed against the wall, a special entrance to which had been
effected through a window in the corridor of the gold chamber, had been
erected for the Flemish emissaries and the other great personages invited to
the presentation of the mystery play.
It was upon the marble table that the mystery was to be enacted, as usual.
It had been arranged for the purpose, early in the morning; its rich slabs of
marble, all scratched by the heels of law clerks, supported a cage of
carpenter’s work of considerable height, the upper surface of which, within
view of the whole hall, was to serve as the theatre, and whose interior,
masked by tapestries, was to take the place of dressing-rooms for the
personages of the piece. A ladder, naively placed on the outside, was to
serve as means of communication between the dressing-room and the stage,
and lend its rude rungs to entrances as well as to exits. There was no
personage, however unexpected, no sudden change, no theatrical effect,
which was not obliged to mount that ladder. Innocent and venerable infancy
of art and contrivances!
Four of the bailiff of the palace’s sergeants, perfunctory guardians of all
the pleasures of the people, on days of festival as well as on days of
execution, stood at the four corners of the marble table.
The piece was only to begin with the twelfth stroke of the great palace
clock sounding midday. It was very late, no doubt, for a theatrical
representation, but they had been obliged to fix the hour to suit the
convenience of the ambassadors.
Now, this whole multitude had been waiting since morning. A goodly
number of curious, good people had been shivering since daybreak before
the grand staircase of the palace; some even affirmed that they had passed
the night across the threshold of the great door, in order to make sure that
they should be the first to pass in. The crowd grew more dense every
moment, and, like water, which rises above its normal level, began to mount
along the walls, to swell around the pillars, to spread out on the
entablatures, on the cornices, on the window-sills, on all the salient points

of the architecture, on all the reliefs of the sculpture. Hence, discomfort,
impatience, weariness, the liberty of a day of cynicism and folly, the
quarrels which break forth for all sorts of causes—a pointed elbow, an iron-
shod shoe, the fatigue of long waiting—had already, long before the hour
appointed for the arrival of the ambassadors, imparted a harsh and bitter
accent to the clamor of these people who were shut in, fitted into each other,
pressed, trampled upon, stifled. Nothing was to be heard but imprecations
on the Flemish, the provost of the merchants, the Cardinal de Bourbon, the
bailiff of the courts, Madame Marguerite of Austria, the sergeants with their
rods, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Bishop of Paris, the Pope of the
Fools, the pillars, the statues, that closed door, that open window; all to the
vast amusement of a band of scholars and lackeys scattered through the
mass, who mingled with all this discontent their teasing remarks, and their
malicious suggestions, and pricked the general bad temper with a pin, so to
speak.
Among the rest there was a group of those merry imps, who, after
smashing the glass in a window, had seated themselves hardily on the
entablature, and from that point despatched their gaze and their railleries
both within and without, upon the throng in the hall, and the throng upon
the Place. It was easy to see, from their parodied gestures, their ringing
laughter, the bantering appeals which they exchanged with their comrades,
from one end of the hall to the other, that these young clerks did not share
the weariness and fatigue of the rest of the spectators, and that they
understood very well the art of extracting, for their own private diversion
from that which they had under their eyes, a spectacle which made them
await the other with patience.
“Upon my soul, so it’s you, ‘Joannes Frollo de Molendino!’” cried one of
them, to a sort of little, light-haired imp, with a well-favored and malign
countenance, clinging to the acanthus leaves of a capital; “you are well
named John of the Mill, for your two arms and your two legs have the air of
four wings fluttering on the breeze. How long have you been here?”
“By the mercy of the devil,” retorted Joannes Frollo, “these four hours
and more; and I hope that they will be reckoned to my credit in purgatory. I
heard the eight singers of the King of Sicily intone the first verse of seven
o’clock mass in the Sainte-Chapelle.”

“Fine singers!” replied the other, “with voices even more pointed than
their caps! Before founding a mass for Monsieur Saint John, the king
should have inquired whether Monsieur Saint John likes Latin droned out in
a Provençal accent.”
“He did it for the sake of employing those accursed singers of the King
of Sicily!” cried an old woman sharply from among the crowd beneath the
window. “I just put it to you! A thousand livres parisi for a mass! and out of
the tax on sea fish in the markets of Paris, to boot!”
“Peace, old crone,” said a tall, grave person, stopping up his nose on the
side towards the fishwife; “a mass had to be founded. Would you wish the
king to fall ill again?”
“Bravely spoken, Sire Gilles Lecornu, master furrier of king’s robes!”
cried the little student, clinging to the capital.
A shout of laughter from all the students greeted the unlucky name of the
poor furrier of the king’s robes.
“Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!” said some.
“Cornutus et hirsutus, horned and hairy,” another went on.
“He! of course,” continued the small imp on the capital, “What are they
laughing at? An honorable man is Gilles Lecornu, brother of Master Jehan
Lecornu, provost of the king’s house, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, first
porter of the Bois de Vincennes,—all bourgeois of Paris, all married, from
father to son.”
The gayety redoubled. The big furrier, without uttering a word in reply,
tried to escape all the eyes riveted upon him from all sides; but he perspired
and panted in vain; like a wedge entering the wood, his efforts served only
to bury still more deeply in the shoulders of his neighbors, his large,
apoplectic face, purple with spite and rage.
At length one of these, as fat, short, and venerable as himself, came to his
rescue.
“Abomination! scholars addressing a bourgeois in that fashion in my day
would have been flogged with a fagot, which would have afterwards been
used to burn them.”
The whole band burst into laughter.
“Holà hé! who is scolding so? Who is that screech owl of evil fortune?”

“Hold, I know him” said one of them; “’tis Master Andry Musnier.”
“Because he is one of the four sworn booksellers of the university!” said
the other.
“Everything goes by fours in that shop,” cried a third; “the four nations,
the four faculties, the four feasts, the four procurators, the four electors, the
four booksellers.”
“Well,” began Jean Frollo once more, “we must play the devil with
them.”[2]
“Musnier, we’ll burn your books.”
“Musnier, we’ll beat your lackeys.”
“Musnier, we’ll kiss your wife.”
“That fine, big Mademoiselle Oudarde.”
“Who is as fresh and as gay as though she were a widow.”
“Devil take you!” growled Master Andry Musnier.
“Master Andry,” pursued Jean Jehan, still clinging to his capital, “hold
your tongue, or I’ll drop on your head!”
Master Andry raised his eyes, seemed to measure in an instant the height
of the pillar, the weight of the scamp, mentally multiplied that weight by the
square of the velocity and remained silent.
Jehan, master of the field of battle, pursued triumphantly:
“That’s what I’ll do, even if I am the brother of an archdeacon!”
“Fine gentry are our people of the university, not to have caused our
privileges to be respected on such a day as this! However, there is a
maypole and a bonfire in the town; a mystery, Pope of the Fools, and
Flemish ambassadors in the city; and, at the university, nothing!”
“Nevertheless, the Place Maubert is sufficiently large!” interposed one of
the clerks established on the window-sill.
“Down with the rector, the electors, and the procurators!” cried Joannes.
“We must have a bonfire this evening in the Champ-Gaillard,” went on
the other, “made of Master Andry’s books.”
“And the desks of the scribes!” added his neighbor.
“And the beadles’ wands!”
“And the spittoons of the deans!”

“And the cupboards of the procurators!”
“And the hutches of the electors!”
“And the stools of the rector!”
“Down with them!” put in little Jehan, as counterpoint; “down with
Master Andry, the beadles and the scribes; the theologians, the doctors and
the decretists; the procurators, the electors and the rector!”
“The end of the world has come!” muttered Master Andry, stopping up
his ears.
“By the way, there’s the rector! see, he is passing through the Place,”
cried one of those in the window.
Each rivalled his neighbor in his haste to turn towards the Place.
“Is it really our venerable rector, Master Thibaut?” demanded Jehan
Frollo du Moulin, who, as he was clinging to one of the inner pillars, could
not see what was going on outside.
“Yes, yes,” replied all the others, “it is really he, Master Thibaut, the
rector.”
It was, in fact, the rector and all the dignitaries of the university, who
were marching in procession in front of the embassy, and at that moment
traversing the Place. The students crowded into the window, saluted them as
they passed with sarcasms and ironical applause. The rector, who was
walking at the head of his company, had to support the first broadside; it
was severe.
“Good day, monsieur le recteur! Holà hé! good day there!”
“How does he manage to be here, the old gambler? Has he abandoned his
dice?”
“How he trots along on his mule! her ears are not so long as his!”
“Holà hé! good day, monsieur le recteur Thibaut! Tybalde aleator! Old
fool! old gambler!”
“God preserve you! Did you throw double six often last night?”
“Oh! what a decrepit face, livid and haggard and drawn with the love of
gambling and of dice!”
“Where are you bound for in that fashion, Thibaut, Tybalde ad dados,
with your back turned to the university, and trotting towards the town?”

“He is on his way, no doubt, to seek a lodging in the Rue
Thibautodé?”[3] cried Jehan du M. Moulin.
The entire band repeated this quip in a voice of thunder, clapping their
hands furiously.
“You are going to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodé, are you not,
monsieur le recteur, gamester on the side of the devil?”
Then came the turns of the other dignitaries.
“Down with the beadles! down with the mace-bearers!”
“Tell me, Robin Pouissepain, who is that yonder?”
“He is Gilbert de Suilly, Gilbertus de Soliaco, the chancellor of the
College of Autun.”
“Hold on, here’s my shoe; you are better placed than I, fling it in his
face.”
“Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces.”
“Down with the six theologians, with their white surplices!”
“Are those the theologians? I thought they were the white geese given by
Sainte-Geneviève to the city, for the fief of Roogny.”
“Down with the doctors!”
“Down with the cardinal disputations, and quibblers!”
“My cap to you, Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève! You have done me a
wrong. ’Tis true; he gave my place in the nation of Normandy to little
Ascanio Falzapada, who comes from the province of Bourges, since he is an
Italian.”
“That is an injustice,” said all the scholars. “Down with the Chancellor of
Sainte-Geneviève!”
“Ho hé! Master Joachim de Ladehors! Ho hé! Louis Dahuille! Ho hé
Lambert Hoctement!”
“May the devil stifle the procurator of the German nation!”
“And the chaplains of the Sainte-Chapelle, with their gray amices; cum
tunices grisis!”
“Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis!”
“Holà hé! Masters of Arts! All the beautiful black copes! all the fine red
copes!”

“They make a fine tail for the rector.”
“One would say that he was a Doge of Venice on his way to his bridal
with the sea.”
“Say, Jehan! here are the canons of Sainte-Geneviève!”
“To the deuce with the whole set of canons!”
“Abbé Claude Choart! Doctor Claude Choart! Are you in search of Marie
la Giffarde?”
“She is in the Rue de Glatigny.”
“She is making the bed of the king of the debauchees.”
“She is paying her four deniers[4] quatuor denarios.”
“Aut unum bombum.”
“Would you like to have her pay you in the face?”
“Comrades! Master Simon Sanguin, the Elector of Picardy, with his wife
on the crupper!”
“Post equitem sedet atra cura—behind the horseman sits black care.”
“Courage, Master Simon!”
“Good day, Mister Elector!”
“Good night, Madame Electress!”
“How happy they are to see all that!” sighed Joannes de Molendino, still
perched in the foliage of his capital.
Meanwhile, the sworn bookseller of the university, Master Andry
Musnier, was inclining his ear to the furrier of the king’s robes, Master
Gilles Lecornu.
“I tell you, sir, that the end of the world has come. No one has ever
beheld such outbreaks among the students! It is the accursed inventions of
this century that are ruining everything,—artilleries, bombards, and, above
all, printing, that other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books!
printing will kill bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing
nigh.”
“I see that plainly, from the progress of velvet stuffs,” said the fur-
merchant.
At this moment, midday sounded.
“Ha!” exclaimed the entire crowd, in one voice.

The scholars held their peace. Then a great hurly-burly ensued; a vast
movement of feet, hands, and heads; a general outbreak of coughs and
handkerchiefs; each one arranged himself, assumed his post, raised himself
up, and grouped himself. Then came a great silence; all necks remained
outstretched, all mouths remained open, all glances were directed towards
the marble table. Nothing made its appearance there. The bailiff’s four
sergeants were still there, stiff, motionless, as painted statues. All eyes
turned to the estrade reserved for the Flemish envoys. The door remained
closed, the platform empty. This crowd had been waiting since daybreak for
three things: noonday, the embassy from Flanders, the mystery play.
Noonday alone had arrived on time.
On this occasion, it was too much.
They waited one, two, three, five minutes, a quarter of an hour; nothing
came. The dais remained empty, the theatre dumb. In the meantime, wrath
had succeeded to impatience. Irritated words circulated in a low tone, still,
it is true. “The mystery! the mystery!” they murmured, in hollow voices.
Heads began to ferment. A tempest, which was only rumbling in the
distance as yet, was floating on the surface of this crowd. It was Jehan du
Moulin who struck the first spark from it.
“The mystery, and to the devil with the Flemings!” he exclaimed at the
full force of his lungs, twining like a serpent around his pillar.
The crowd clapped their hands.
“The mystery!” it repeated, “and may all the devils take Flanders!”
“We must have the mystery instantly,” resumed the student; “or else, my
advice is that we should hang the bailiff of the courts, by way of a morality
and a comedy.”
“Well said,” cried the people, “and let us begin the hanging with his
sergeants.”
A grand acclamation followed. The four poor fellows began to turn pale,
and to exchange glances. The crowd hurled itself towards them, and they
already beheld the frail wooden railing, which separated them from it,
giving way and bending before the pressure of the throng.
It was a critical moment.
“To the sack, to the sack!” rose the cry on all sides.

At that moment, the tapestry of the dressing-room, which we have
described above, was raised, and afforded passage to a personage, the mere
sight of whom suddenly stopped the crowd, and changed its wrath into
curiosity as by enchantment.
“Silence! silence!”
The personage, but little reassured, and trembling in every limb,
advanced to the edge of the marble table with a vast amount of bows,
which, in proportion as he drew nearer, more and more resembled
genuflections.
In the meanwhile, tranquillity had gradually been restored. All that
remained was that slight murmur which always rises above the silence of a
crowd.
“Messieurs the bourgeois,” said he, “and mesdemoiselles the
bourgeoises, we shall have the honor of declaiming and representing, before
his eminence, monsieur the cardinal, a very beautiful morality which has for
its title, ‘The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin Mary.’ I am to play
Jupiter. His eminence is, at this moment, escorting the very honorable
embassy of the Duke of Austria; which is detained, at present, listening to
the harangue of monsieur the rector of the university, at the gate Baudets.
As soon as his illustrious eminence, the cardinal, arrives, we will begin.”
It is certain, that nothing less than the intervention of Jupiter was required
to save the four unfortunate sergeants of the bailiff of the courts. If we had
the happiness of having invented this very veracious tale, and of being, in
consequence, responsible for it before our Lady Criticism, it is not against
us that the classic precept, Nec deus intersit, could be invoked. Moreover,
the costume of Seigneur Jupiter, was very handsome, and contributed not a
little towards calming the crowd, by attracting all its attention. Jupiter was
clad in a coat of mail, covered with black velvet, with gilt nails; and had it
not been for the rouge, and the huge red beard, each of which covered one-
half of his face,—had it not been for the roll of gilded cardboard, spangled,
and all bristling with strips of tinsel, which he held in his hand, and in
which the eyes of the initiated easily recognized thunderbolts,—had not his
feet been flesh-colored, and banded with ribbons in Greek fashion, he might
have borne comparison, so far as the severity of his mien was concerned,
with a Breton archer from the guard of Monsieur de Berry.

CHAPTER II.
PIERRE GRINGOIRE.

Nevertheless, as he harangued them, the satisfaction and admiration
unanimously excited by his costume were dissipated by his words; and
when he reached that untoward conclusion: “As soon as his illustrious
eminence, the cardinal, arrives, we will begin,” his voice was drowned in a
thunder of hooting.
“Begin instantly! The mystery! the mystery immediately!” shrieked the
people. And above all the voices, that of Johannes de Molendino was
audible, piercing the uproar like the fife’s derisive serenade: “Commence
instantly!” yelped the scholar.
“Down with Jupiter and the Cardinal de Bourbon!” vociferated Robin
Poussepain and the other clerks perched in the window.
“The morality this very instant!” repeated the crowd; “this very instant!
the sack and the rope for the comedians, and the cardinal!”
Poor Jupiter, haggard, frightened, pale beneath his rouge, dropped his
thunderbolt, took his cap in his hand; then he bowed and trembled and
stammered: “His eminence—the ambassadors—Madame Marguerite of
Flanders—.” He did not know what to say. In truth, he was afraid of being
hung.
Hung by the populace for waiting, hung by the cardinal for not having
waited, he saw between the two dilemmas only an abyss; that is to say, a
gallows.
Luckily, some one came to rescue him from his embarrassment, and
assume the responsibility.
An individual who was standing beyond the railing, in the free space
around the marble table, and whom no one had yet caught sight of, since his
long, thin body was completely sheltered from every visual ray by the

diameter of the pillar against which he was leaning; this individual, we say,
tall, gaunt, pallid, blond, still young, although already wrinkled about the
brow and cheeks, with brilliant eyes and a smiling mouth, clad in garments
of black serge, worn and shining with age, approached the marble table, and
made a sign to the poor sufferer. But the other was so confused that he did
not see him. The new comer advanced another step.
“Jupiter,” said he, “my dear Jupiter!”
The other did not hear.
At last, the tall blond, driven out of patience, shrieked almost in his face,
—
“Michel Giborne!”
“Who calls me?” said Jupiter, as though awakened with a start.
“I,” replied the person clad in black.
“Ah!” said Jupiter.
“Begin at once,” went on the other. “Satisfy the populace; I undertake to
appease the bailiff, who will appease monsieur the cardinal.”
Jupiter breathed once more.
“Messeigneurs the bourgeois,” he cried, at the top of his lungs to the
crowd, which continued to hoot him, “we are going to begin at once.”
“Evoe Jupiter! Plaudite cives! All hail, Jupiter! Applaud, citizens!”
shouted the scholars.
“Noël! Noël! good, good,” shouted the people.
The hand clapping was deafening, and Jupiter had already withdrawn
under his tapestry, while the hall still trembled with acclamations.
In the meanwhile, the personage who had so magically turned the
tempest into dead calm, as our old and dear Corneille puts it, had modestly
retreated to the half-shadow of his pillar, and would, no doubt, have
remained invisible there, motionless, and mute as before, had he not been
plucked by the sleeve by two young women, who, standing in the front row
of the spectators, had noticed his colloquy with Michel Giborne-Jupiter.
“Master,” said one of them, making him a sign to approach.
“Hold your tongue, my dear Liénarde,” said her neighbor, pretty, fresh,
and very brave, in consequence of being dressed up in her best attire. “He is
not a clerk, he is a layman; you must not say master to him, but messire.”

“Messire,” said Liénarde.
The stranger approached the railing.
“What would you have of me, damsels?” he asked, with alacrity.
“Oh! nothing,” replied Liénarde, in great confusion; “it is my neighbor,
Gisquette la Gencienne, who wishes to speak with you.”
“Not so,” replied Gisquette, blushing; “it was Liénarde who called you
master; I only told her to say messire.”
The two young girls dropped their eyes. The man, who asked nothing
better than to enter into conversation, looked at them with a smile.
“So you have nothing to say to me, damsels?”
“Oh! nothing at all,” replied Gisquette.
“Nothing,” said Liénarde.
The tall, light-haired young man retreated a step; but the two curious
maidens had no mind to let slip their prize.
“Messire,” said Gisquette, with the impetuosity of an open sluice, or of a
woman who has made up her mind, “do you know that soldier who is to
play the part of Madame the Virgin in the mystery?”
“You mean the part of Jupiter?” replied the stranger.
“Hé! yes,” said Liénarde, “isn’t she stupid? So you know Jupiter?”
“Michel Giborne?” replied the unknown; “yes, madam.”
“He has a fine beard!” said Liénarde.
“Will what they are about to say here be fine?” inquired Gisquette,
timidly.
“Very fine, mademoiselle,” replied the unknown, without the slightest
hesitation.
“What is it to be?” said Liénarde.
“‘The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin,’—a morality, if you please,
damsel.”
“Ah! that makes a difference,” responded Liénarde.
A brief silence ensued—broken by the stranger.
“It is a perfectly new morality, and one which has never yet been
played.”

“Then it is not the same one,” said Gisquette, “that was given two years
ago, on the day of the entrance of monsieur the legate, and where three
handsome maids played the parts—”
“Of sirens,” said Liénarde.
“And all naked,” added the young man.
Liénarde lowered her eyes modestly. Gisquette glanced at her and did the
same. He continued, with a smile,—
“It was a very pleasant thing to see. To-day it is a morality made
expressly for Madame the Demoiselle of Flanders.”
“Will they sing shepherd songs?” inquired Gisquette.
“Fie!” said the stranger, “in a morality? you must not confound styles. If
it were a farce, well and good.”
“That is a pity,” resumed Gisquette. “That day, at the Ponceau Fountain,
there were wild men and women, who fought and assumed many aspects, as
they sang little motets and bergerettes.”
“That which is suitable for a legate,” returned the stranger, with a good
deal of dryness, “is not suitable for a princess.”
“And beside them,” resumed Liénarde, “played many brass instruments,
making great melodies.”
“And for the refreshment of the passers-by,” continued Gisquette, “the
fountain spouted through three mouths, wine, milk, and hippocrass, of
which every one drank who wished.”
“And a little below the Ponceau, at the Trinity,” pursued Liénarde, “there
was a passion performed, and without any speaking.”
“How well I remember that!” exclaimed Gisquette; “God on the cross,
and the two thieves on the right and the left.” Here the young gossips,
growing warm at the memory of the entrance of monsieur the legate, both
began to talk at once.
“And, further on, at the Painters’ Gate, there were other personages, very
richly clad.”
“And at the fountain of Saint-Innocent, that huntsman, who was chasing
a hind with great clamor of dogs and hunting-horns.”
“And, at the Paris slaughter-houses, stages, representing the fortress of
Dieppe!”

“And when the legate passed, you remember, Gisquette? they made the
assault, and the English all had their throats cut.”
“And against the gate of the Châtelet, there were very fine personages!”
“And on the Port au Change, which was all draped above!”
“And when the legate passed, they let fly on the bridge more than two
hundred sorts of birds; wasn’t it beautiful, Liénarde?”
“It will be better to-day,” finally resumed their interlocutor, who seemed
to listen to them with impatience.
“Do you promise us that this mystery will be fine?” said Gisquette.
“Without doubt,” he replied; then he added, with a certain emphasis,—“I
am the author of it, damsels.”
“Truly?” said the young girls, quite taken aback.
“Truly!” replied the poet, bridling a little; “that is, to say, there are two of
us; Jehan Marchand, who has sawed the planks and erected the framework
of the theatre and the woodwork; and I, who have made the piece. My name
is Pierre Gringoire.”
The author of the “Cid” could not have said “Pierre Corneille” with more
pride.
Our readers have been able to observe, that a certain amount of time must
have already elapsed from the moment when Jupiter had retired beneath the
tapestry to the instant when the author of the new morality had thus
abruptly revealed himself to the innocent admiration of Gisquette and
Liénarde. Remarkable fact: that whole crowd, so tumultuous but a few
moments before, now waited amiably on the word of the comedian; which
proves the eternal truth, still experienced every day in our theatres, that the
best means of making the public wait patiently is to assure them that one is
about to begin instantly.
However, scholar Johannes had not fallen asleep.
“Holà hé!” he shouted suddenly, in the midst of the peaceable waiting
which had followed the tumult. “Jupiter, Madame the Virgin, buffoons of
the devil! are you jeering at us? The piece! the piece! commence or we will
commence again!”
This was all that was needed.

The music of high and low instruments immediately became audible
from the interior of the stage; the tapestry was raised; four personages, in
motley attire and painted faces, emerged from it, climbed the steep ladder of
the theatre, and, arrived upon the upper platform, arranged themselves in a
line before the public, whom they saluted with profound reverences; then
the symphony ceased.
The mystery was about to begin.
The four personages, after having reaped a rich reward of applause for
their reverences, began, in the midst of profound silence, a prologue, which
we gladly spare the reader. Moreover, as happens in our own day, the public
was more occupied with the costumes that the actors wore than with the
roles that they were enacting; and, in truth, they were right. All four were
dressed in parti-colored robes of yellow and white, which were
distinguished from each other only by the nature of the stuff; the first was of
gold and silver brocade; the second, of silk; the third, of wool; the fourth, of
linen. The first of these personages carried in his right hand a sword; the
second, two golden keys; the third, a pair of scales; the fourth, a spade: and,
in order to aid sluggish minds which would not have seen clearly through
the transparency of these attributes, there was to be read, in large, black
letters, on the hem of the robe of brocade, MY NAME IS NOBILITY; on
the hem of the silken robe, MY NAME IS CLERGY; on the hem of the
woolen robe, MY NAME IS MERCHANDISE; on the hem of the linen
robe, MY NAME IS LABOR. The sex of the two male characters was
briefly indicated to every judicious spectator, by their shorter robes, and by
the cap which they wore on their heads; while the two female characters,
less briefly clad, were covered with hoods.
Much ill-will would also have been required, not to comprehend, through
the medium of the poetry of the prologue, that Labor was wedded to
Merchandise, and Clergy to Nobility, and that the two happy couples
possessed in common a magnificent golden dolphin, which they desired to
adjudge to the fairest only. So they were roaming about the world seeking
and searching for this beauty, and, after having successively rejected the
Queen of Golconda, the Princess of Trebizonde, the daughter of the Grand
Khan of Tartary, etc., Labor and Clergy, Nobility and Merchandise, had
come to rest upon the marble table of the Palais de Justice, and to utter, in
the presence of the honest audience, as many sentences and maxims as

could then be dispensed at the Faculty of Arts, at examinations, sophisms,
determinances, figures, and acts, where the masters took their degrees.
All this was, in fact, very fine.
Nevertheless, in that throng, upon which the four allegories vied with
each other in pouring out floods of metaphors, there was no ear more
attentive, no heart that palpitated more, not an eye was more haggard, no
neck more outstretched, than the eye, the ear, the neck, and the heart of the
author, of the poet, of that brave Pierre Gringoire, who had not been able to
resist, a moment before, the joy of telling his name to two pretty girls. He
had retreated a few paces from them, behind his pillar, and there he listened,
looked, enjoyed. The amiable applause which had greeted the beginning of
his prologue was still echoing in his bosom, and he was completely
absorbed in that species of ecstatic contemplation with which an author
beholds his ideas fall, one by one, from the mouth of the actor into the vast
silence of the audience. Worthy Pierre Gringoire!
It pains us to say it, but this first ecstasy was speedily disturbed. Hardly
had Gringoire raised this intoxicating cup of joy and triumph to his lips,
when a drop of bitterness was mingled with it.
A tattered mendicant, who could not collect any coins, lost as he was in
the midst of the crowd, and who had not probably found sufficient
indemnity in the pockets of his neighbors, had hit upon the idea of perching
himself upon some conspicuous point, in order to attract looks and alms. He
had, accordingly, hoisted himself, during the first verses of the prologue,
with the aid of the pillars of the reserve gallery, to the cornice which ran
round the balustrade at its lower edge; and there he had seated himself,
soliciting the attention and the pity of the multitude, with his rags and a
hideous sore which covered his right arm. However, he uttered not a word.
The silence which he preserved allowed the prologue to proceed without
hindrance, and no perceptible disorder would have ensued, if ill-luck had
not willed that the scholar Joannes should catch sight, from the heights of
his pillar, of the mendicant and his grimaces. A wild fit of laughter took
possession of the young scamp, who, without caring that he was
interrupting the spectacle, and disturbing the universal composure, shouted
boldly,—
“Look! see that sickly creature asking alms!”

Any one who has thrown a stone into a frog pond, or fired a shot into a
covey of birds, can form an idea of the effect produced by these
incongruous words, in the midst of the general attention. It made Gringoire
shudder as though it had been an electric shock. The prologue stopped
short, and all heads turned tumultuously towards the beggar, who, far from
being disconcerted by this, saw, in this incident, a good opportunity for
reaping his harvest, and who began to whine in a doleful way, half closing
his eyes the while,—“Charity, please!”
“Well—upon my soul,” resumed Joannes, “it’s Clopin Trouillefou! Holà
hé, my friend, did your sore bother you on the leg, that you have transferred
it to your arm?” So saying, with the dexterity of a monkey, he flung a bit of
silver into the gray felt hat which the beggar held in his ailing arm. The
mendicant received both the alms and the sarcasm without wincing, and
continued, in lamentable tones,—
“Charity, please!”
This episode considerably distracted the attention of the audience; and a
goodly number of spectators, among them Robin Poussepain, and all the
clerks at their head, gayly applauded this eccentric duet, which the scholar,
with his shrill voice, and the mendicant had just improvised in the middle of
the prologue.
Gringoire was highly displeased. On recovering from his first
stupefaction, he bestirred himself to shout, to the four personages on the
stage, “Go on! What the devil!—go on!”—without even deigning to cast a
glance of disdain upon the two interrupters.
At that moment, he felt some one pluck at the hem of his surtout; he
turned round, and not without ill-humor, and found considerable difficulty
in smiling; but he was obliged to do so, nevertheless. It was the pretty arm
of Gisquette la Gencienne, which, passed through the railing, was soliciting
his attention in this manner.
“Monsieur,” said the young girl, “are they going to continue?”
“Of course,” replied Gringoire, a good deal shocked by the question.
“In that case, messire,” she resumed, “would you have the courtesy to
explain to me—”
“What they are about to say?” interrupted Gringoire. “Well, listen.”
“No,” said Gisquette, “but what they have said so far.”

Gringoire started, like a man whose wound has been probed to the quick.
“A plague on the stupid and dull-witted little girl!” he muttered, between
his teeth.
From that moment forth, Gisquette was nothing to him.
In the meantime, the actors had obeyed his injunction, and the public,
seeing that they were beginning to speak again, began once more to listen,
not without having lost many beauties in the sort of soldered joint which
was formed between the two portions of the piece thus abruptly cut short.
Gringoire commented on it bitterly to himself. Nevertheless, tranquillity
was gradually restored, the scholar held his peace, the mendicant counted
over some coins in his hat, and the piece resumed the upper hand.
It was, in fact, a very fine work, and one which, as it seems to us, might
be put to use to-day, by the aid of a little rearrangement. The exposition,
rather long and rather empty, that is to say, according to the rules, was
simple; and Gringoire, in the candid sanctuary of his own conscience,
admired its clearness. As the reader may surmise, the four allegorical
personages were somewhat weary with having traversed the three sections
of the world, without having found suitable opportunity for getting rid of
their golden dolphin. Thereupon a eulogy of the marvellous fish, with a
thousand delicate allusions to the young betrothed of Marguerite of
Flanders, then sadly cloistered in at Amboise, and without a suspicion that
Labor and Clergy, Nobility and Merchandise had just made the circuit of
the world in his behalf. The said dauphin was then young, was handsome,
was stout, and, above all (magnificent origin of all royal virtues), he was the
son of the Lion of France. I declare that this bold metaphor is admirable,
and that the natural history of the theatre, on a day of allegory and royal
marriage songs, is not in the least startled by a dolphin who is the son of a
lion. It is precisely these rare and Pindaric mixtures which prove the poet’s
enthusiasm. Nevertheless, in order to play the part of critic also, the poet
might have developed this beautiful idea in something less than two
hundred lines. It is true that the mystery was to last from noon until four
o’clock, in accordance with the orders of monsieur the provost, and that it
was necessary to say something. Besides, the people listened patiently.
All at once, in the very middle of a quarrel between Mademoiselle
Merchandise and Madame Nobility, at the moment when Monsieur Labor
was giving utterance to this wonderful line,—

In forest ne’er was seen a more triumphant beast;

the door of the reserved gallery which had hitherto remained so
inopportunely closed, opened still more inopportunely; and the ringing
voice of the usher announced abruptly, “His eminence, Monseigneur the
Cardinal de Bourbon.”

CHAPTER III.
MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL.

Poor Gringoire! the din of all the great double petards of the Saint-Jean,
the discharge of twenty arquebuses on supports, the detonation of that
famous serpentine of the Tower of Billy, which, during the siege of Paris,
on Sunday, the twenty-sixth of September, 1465, killed seven Burgundians
at one blow, the explosion of all the powder stored at the gate of the
Temple, would have rent his ears less rudely at that solemn and dramatic
moment, than these few words, which fell from the lips of the usher, “His
eminence, Monseigneur the Cardinal de Bourbon.”
It is not that Pierre Gringoire either feared or disdained monsieur the
cardinal. He had neither the weakness nor the audacity for that. A true
eclectic, as it would be expressed nowadays, Gringoire was one of those
firm and lofty, moderate and calm spirits, which always know how to bear
themselves amid all circumstances (stare in dimidio rerum), and who are
full of reason and of liberal philosophy, while still setting store by cardinals.
A rare, precious, and never interrupted race of philosophers to whom
wisdom, like another Ariadne, seems to have given a clew of thread which
they have been walking along unwinding since the beginning of the world,
through the labyrinth of human affairs. One finds them in all ages, ever the
same; that is to say, always according to all times. And, without reckoning
our Pierre Gringoire, who may represent them in the fifteenth century if we
succeed in bestowing upon him the distinction which he deserves, it
certainly was their spirit which animated Father du Breul, when he wrote, in
the sixteenth, these naively sublime words, worthy of all centuries: “I am a
Parisian by nation, and a Parrhisian in language, for parrhisia in Greek
signifies liberty of speech; of which I have made use even towards
messeigneurs the cardinals, uncle and brother to Monsieur the Prince de

Conty, always with respect to their greatness, and without offending any
one of their suite, which is much to say.”
There was then neither hatred for the cardinal, nor disdain for his
presence, in the disagreeable impression produced upon Pierre Gringoire.
Quite the contrary; our poet had too much good sense and too threadbare a
coat, not to attach particular importance to having the numerous allusions in
his prologue, and, in particular, the glorification of the dauphin, son of the
Lion of France, fall upon the most eminent ear. But it is not interest which
predominates in the noble nature of poets. I suppose that the entity of the
poet may be represented by the number ten; it is certain that a chemist on
analyzing and pharmacopolizing it, as Rabelais says, would find it
composed of one part interest to nine parts of self-esteem.
Now, at the moment when the door had opened to admit the cardinal, the
nine parts of self-esteem in Gringoire, swollen and expanded by the breath
of popular admiration, were in a state of prodigious augmentation, beneath
which disappeared, as though stifled, that imperceptible molecule of which
we have just remarked upon in the constitution of poets; a precious
ingredient, by the way, a ballast of reality and humanity, without which they
would not touch the earth. Gringoire enjoyed seeing, feeling, fingering, so
to speak an entire assembly (of knaves, it is true, but what matters that?)
stupefied, petrified, and as though asphyxiated in the presence of the
incommensurable tirades which welled up every instant from all parts of his
bridal song. I affirm that he shared the general beatitude, and that, quite the
reverse of La Fontaine, who, at the presentation of his comedy of the
“Florentine,” asked, “Who is the ill-bred lout who made that rhapsody?”
Gringoire would gladly have inquired of his neighbor, “Whose masterpiece
is this?”
The reader can now judge of the effect produced upon him by the abrupt
and unseasonable arrival of the cardinal.
That which he had to fear was only too fully realized. The entrance of his
eminence upset the audience. All heads turned towards the gallery. It was
no longer possible to hear one’s self. “The cardinal! The cardinal!” repeated
all mouths. The unhappy prologue stopped short for the second time.
The cardinal halted for a moment on the threshold of the estrade. While
he was sending a rather indifferent glance around the audience, the tumult

redoubled. Each person wished to get a better view of him. Each man vied
with the other in thrusting his head over his neighbor’s shoulder.
He was, in fact, an exalted personage, the sight of whom was well worth
any other comedy. Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon, Archbishop and Comte of
Lyon, Primate of the Gauls, was allied both to Louis XI., through his
brother, Pierre, Seigneur de Beaujeu, who had married the king’s eldest
daughter, and to Charles the Bold through his mother, Agnes of Burgundy.
Now, the dominating trait, the peculiar and distinctive trait of the character
of the Primate of the Gauls, was the spirit of the courtier, and devotion to
the powers that be. The reader can form an idea of the numberless
embarrassments which this double relationship had caused him, and of all
the temporal reefs among which his spiritual bark had been forced to tack,
in order not to suffer shipwreck on either Louis or Charles, that Scylla and
that Charybdis which had devoured the Duc de Nemours and the Constable
de Saint-Pol. Thanks to Heaven’s mercy, he had made the voyage
successfully, and had reached home without hindrance. But although he was
in port, and precisely because he was in port, he never recalled without
disquiet the varied haps of his political career, so long uneasy and laborious.
Thus, he was in the habit of saying that the year 1476 had been “white and
black” for him—meaning thereby, that in the course of that year he had lost
his mother, the Duchesse de la Bourbonnais, and his cousin, the Duke of
Burgundy, and that one grief had consoled him for the other.
Nevertheless, he was a fine man; he led a joyous cardinal’s life, liked to
enliven himself with the royal vintage of Challuau, did not hate Richarde la
Garmoise and Thomasse la Saillarde, bestowed alms on pretty girls rather
than on old women,—and for all these reasons was very agreeable to the
populace of Paris. He never went about otherwise than surrounded by a
small court of bishops and abbés of high lineage, gallant, jovial, and given
to carousing on occasion; and more than once the good and devout women
of Saint Germain d’ Auxerre, when passing at night beneath the brightly
illuminated windows of Bourbon, had been scandalized to hear the same
voices which had intoned vespers for them during the day carolling, to the
clinking of glasses, the bacchic proverb of Benedict XII., that pope who had
added a third crown to the Tiara—Bibamus papaliter.
It was this justly acquired popularity, no doubt, which preserved him on
his entrance from any bad reception at the hands of the mob, which had

been so displeased but a moment before, and very little disposed to respect
a cardinal on the very day when it was to elect a pope. But the Parisians
cherish little rancor; and then, having forced the beginning of the play by
their authority, the good bourgeois had got the upper hand of the cardinal,
and this triumph was sufficient for them. Moreover, the Cardinal de
Bourbon was a handsome man,—he wore a fine scarlet robe, which he
carried off very well,—that is to say, he had all the women on his side, and,
consequently, the best half of the audience. Assuredly, it would be injustice
and bad taste to hoot a cardinal for having come late to the spectacle, when
he is a handsome man, and when he wears his scarlet robe well.
He entered, then, bowed to those present with the hereditary smile of the
great for the people, and directed his course slowly towards his scarlet
velvet arm-chair, with the air of thinking of something quite different. His
cortege—what we should nowadays call his staff—of bishops and abbés
invaded the estrade in his train, not without causing redoubled tumult and
curiosity among the audience. Each man vied with his neighbor in pointing
them out and naming them, in seeing who should recognize at least one of
them: this one, the Bishop of Marseilles (Alaudet, if my memory serves me
right);—this one, the primicier of Saint-Denis;—this one, Robert de
Lespinasse, Abbé of Saint-Germain des Prés, that libertine brother of a
mistress of Louis XI.; all with many errors and absurdities. As for the
scholars, they swore. This was their day, their feast of fools, their saturnalia,
the annual orgy of the corporation of law clerks and of the school. There
was no turpitude which was not sacred on that day. And then there were gay
gossips in the crowd—Simone Quatrelivres, Agnès la Gadine, and Rabine
Piédebou. Was it not the least that one could do to swear at one’s ease and
revile the name of God a little, on so fine a day, in such good company as
dignitaries of the church and loose women? So they did not abstain; and, in
the midst of the uproar, there was a frightful concert of blasphemies and
enormities of all the unbridled tongues, the tongues of clerks and students
restrained during the rest of the year, by the fear of the hot iron of Saint
Louis. Poor Saint Louis! how they set him at defiance in his own court of
law! Each one of them selected from the new-comers on the platform, a
black, gray, white, or violet cassock as his target. Joannes Frollo de
Molendin, in his quality of brother to an archdeacon, boldly attacked the
scarlet; he sang in deafening tones, with his impudent eyes fastened on the
cardinal, “Cappa repleta mero!”

All these details which we here lay bare for the edification of the reader,
were so covered by the general uproar, that they were lost in it before
reaching the reserved platforms; moreover, they would have moved the
cardinal but little, so much a part of the customs were the liberties of that
day. Moreover, he had another cause for solicitude, and his mien as wholly
preoccupied with it, which entered the estrade the same time as himself; this
was the embassy from Flanders.
Not that he was a profound politician, nor was he borrowing trouble
about the possible consequences of the marriage of his cousin Marguerite
de Bourgoyne to his cousin Charles, Dauphin de Vienne; nor as to how long
the good understanding which had been patched up between the Duke of
Austria and the King of France would last; nor how the King of England
would take this disdain of his daughter. All that troubled him but little; and
he gave a warm reception every evening to the wine of the royal vintage of
Chaillot, without a suspicion that several flasks of that same wine
(somewhat revised and corrected, it is true, by Doctor Coictier), cordially
offered to Edward IV. by Louis XI., would, some fine morning, rid Louis
XI. of Edward IV. “The much honored embassy of Monsieur the Duke of
Austria,” brought the cardinal none of these cares, but it troubled him in
another direction. It was, in fact, somewhat hard, and we have already
hinted at it on the second page of this book,—for him, Charles de Bourbon,
to be obliged to feast and receive cordially no one knows what bourgeois;—
for him, a cardinal, to receive aldermen;—for him, a Frenchman, and a jolly
companion, to receive Flemish beer-drinkers,—and that in public! This was,
certainly, one of the most irksome grimaces that he had ever executed for
the good pleasure of the king.
So he turned toward the door, and with the best grace in the world (so
well had he trained himself to it), when the usher announced, in a sonorous
voice, “Messieurs the Envoys of Monsieur the Duke of Austria.” It is
useless to add that the whole hall did the same.
Then arrived, two by two, with a gravity which made a contrast in the
midst of the frisky ecclesiastical escort of Charles de Bourbon, the eight and
forty ambassadors of Maximilian of Austria, having at their head the
reverend Father in God, Jehan, Abbot of Saint-Bertin, Chancellor of the
Golden Fleece, and Jacques de Goy, Sieur Dauby, Grand Bailiff of Ghent. A
deep silence settled over the assembly, accompanied by stifled laughter at

the preposterous names and all the bourgeois designations which each of
these personages transmitted with imperturbable gravity to the usher, who
then tossed names and titles pell-mell and mutilated to the crowd below.
There were Master Loys Roelof, alderman of the city of Louvain; Messire
Clays d’Etuelde, alderman of Brussels; Messire Paul de Baeust, Sieur de
Voirmizelle, President of Flanders; Master Jehan Coleghens, burgomaster of
the city of Antwerp; Master George de la Moere, first alderman of the kuere
of the city of Ghent; Master Gheldolf van der Hage, first alderman of the
parchons of the said town; and the Sieur de Bierbecque, and Jehan Pinnock,
and Jehan Dymaerzelle, etc., etc., etc.; bailiffs, aldermen, burgomasters;
burgomasters, aldermen, bailiffs—all stiff, affectedly grave, formal, dressed
out in velvet and damask, hooded with caps of black velvet, with great tufts
of Cyprus gold thread; good Flemish heads, after all, severe and worthy
faces, of the family which Rembrandt makes to stand out so strong and
grave from the black background of his “Night Patrol”; personages all of
whom bore, written on their brows, that Maximilian of Austria had done
well in “trusting implicitly,” as the manifest ran, “in their sense, valor,
experience, loyalty, and good wisdom.”
There was one exception, however. It was a subtle, intelligent, crafty-
looking face, a sort of combined monkey and diplomat phiz, before whom
the cardinal made three steps and a profound bow, and whose name,
nevertheless, was only, “Guillaume Rym, counsellor and pensioner of the
City of Ghent.”
Few persons were then aware who Guillaume Rym was. A rare genius
who in a time of revolution would have made a brilliant appearance on the
surface of events, but who in the fifteenth century was reduced to cavernous
intrigues, and to “living in mines,” as the Duc de Saint-Simon expresses it.
Nevertheless, he was appreciated by the “miner” of Europe; he plotted
familiarly with Louis XI., and often lent a hand to the king’s secret jobs. All
which things were quite unknown to that throng, who were amazed at the
cardinal’s politeness to that frail figure of a Flemish bailiff.

CHAPTER IV.
MASTER JACQUES COPPENOLE.

While the pensioner of Ghent and his eminence were exchanging very
low bows and a few words in voices still lower, a man of lofty stature, with
a large face and broad shoulders, presented himself, in order to enter abreast
with Guillaume Rym; one would have pronounced him a bull-dog by the
side of a fox. His felt doublet and leather jerkin made a spot on the velvet
and silk which surrounded him. Presuming that he was some groom who
had stolen in, the usher stopped him.
“Hold, my friend, you cannot pass!”
The man in the leather jerkin shouldered him aside.
“What does this knave want with me?” said he, in stentorian tones, which
rendered the entire hall attentive to this strange colloquy. “Don’t you see
that I am one of them?”
“Your name?” demanded the usher.
“Jacques Coppenole.”
“Your titles?”
“Hosier at the sign of the ‘Three Little Chains,’ of Ghent.”
The usher recoiled. One might bring one’s self to announce aldermen and
burgomasters, but a hosier was too much. The cardinal was on thorns. All
the people were staring and listening. For two days his eminence had been
exerting his utmost efforts to lick these Flemish bears into shape, and to
render them a little more presentable to the public, and this freak was
startling. But Guillaume Rym, with his polished smile, approached the
usher.
“Announce Master Jacques Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen of the city
of Ghent,” he whispered, very low.

“Usher,” interposed the cardinal, aloud, “announce Master Jacques
Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen of the illustrious city of Ghent.”
This was a mistake. Guillaume Rym alone might have conjured away the
difficulty, but Coppenole had heard the cardinal.
“No, cross of God?” he exclaimed, in his voice of thunder, “Jacques
Coppenole, hosier. Do you hear, usher? Nothing more, nothing less. Cross
of God! hosier; that’s fine enough. Monsieur the Archduke has more than
once sought his gant[5] in my hose.”
Laughter and applause burst forth. A jest is always understood in Paris,
and, consequently, always applauded.
Let us add that Coppenole was of the people, and that the auditors which
surrounded him were also of the people. Thus the communication between
him and them had been prompt, electric, and, so to speak, on a level. The
haughty air of the Flemish hosier, by humiliating the courtiers, had touched
in all these plebeian souls that latent sentiment of dignity still vague and
indistinct in the fifteenth century.
This hosier was an equal, who had just held his own before monsieur the
cardinal. A very sweet reflection to poor fellows habituated to respect and
obedience towards the underlings of the sergeants of the bailiff of Sainte-
Geneviève, the cardinal’s train-bearer.
Coppenole proudly saluted his eminence, who returned the salute of the
all-powerful bourgeois feared by Louis XI. Then, while Guillaume Rym, a
“sage and malicious man,” as Philippe de Comines puts it, watched them
both with a smile of raillery and superiority, each sought his place, the
cardinal quite abashed and troubled, Coppenole tranquil and haughty, and
thinking, no doubt, that his title of hosier was as good as any other, after all,
and that Marie of Burgundy, mother to that Marguerite whom Coppenole
was to-day bestowing in marriage, would have been less afraid of the
cardinal than of the hosier; for it is not a cardinal who would have stirred up
a revolt among the men of Ghent against the favorites of the daughter of
Charles the Bold; it is not a cardinal who could have fortified the populace
with a word against her tears and prayers, when the Maid of Flanders came
to supplicate her people in their behalf, even at the very foot of the scaffold;
while the hosier had only to raise his leather elbow, in order to cause to fall
your two heads, most illustrious seigneurs, Guy d’Hymbercourt and
Chancellor Guillaume Hugonet.

Nevertheless, all was over for the poor cardinal, and he was obliged to
quaff to the dregs the bitter cup of being in such bad company.
The reader has, probably, not forgotten the impudent beggar who had
been clinging fast to the fringes of the cardinal’s gallery ever since the
beginning of the prologue. The arrival of the illustrious guests had by no
means caused him to relax his hold, and, while the prelates and
ambassadors were packing themselves into the stalls—like genuine Flemish
herrings—he settled himself at his ease, and boldly crossed his legs on the
architrave. The insolence of this proceeding was extraordinary, yet no one
noticed it at first, the attention of all being directed elsewhere. He, on his
side, perceived nothing that was going on in the hall; he wagged his head
with the unconcern of a Neapolitan, repeating from time to time, amid the
clamor, as from a mechanical habit, “Charity, please!” And, assuredly, he
was, out of all those present, the only one who had not deigned to turn his
head at the altercation between Coppenole and the usher. Now, chance
ordained that the master hosier of Ghent, with whom the people were
already in lively sympathy, and upon whom all eyes were riveted—should
come and seat himself in the front row of the gallery, directly above the
mendicant; and people were not a little amazed to see the Flemish
ambassador, on concluding his inspection of the knave thus placed beneath
his eyes, bestow a friendly tap on that ragged shoulder. The beggar turned
round; there was surprise, recognition, a lighting up of the two
countenances, and so forth; then, without paying the slightest heed in the
world to the spectators, the hosier and the wretched being began to converse
in a low tone, holding each other’s hands, in the meantime, while the rags
of Clopin Trouillefou, spread out upon the cloth of gold of the dais,
produced the effect of a caterpillar on an orange.
The novelty of this singular scene excited such a murmur of mirth and
gayety in the hall, that the cardinal was not slow to perceive it; he half bent
forward, and, as from the point where he was placed he could catch only an
imperfect view of Trouillerfou’s ignominious doublet, he very naturally
imagined that the mendicant was asking alms, and, disgusted with his
audacity, he exclaimed: “Bailiff of the Courts, toss me that knave into the
river!”
“Cross of God! monseigneur the cardinal,” said Coppenole, without
quitting Clopin’s hand, “he’s a friend of mine.”

“Good! good!” shouted the populace. From that moment, Master
Coppenole enjoyed in Paris as in Ghent, “great favor with the people; for
men of that sort do enjoy it,” says Philippe de Comines, “when they are
thus disorderly.” The cardinal bit his lips. He bent towards his neighbor, the
Abbé of Sainte-Geneviève, and said to him in a low tone,—“Fine
ambassadors monsieur the archduke sends here, to announce to us Madame
Marguerite!”
“Your eminence,” replied the abbé, “wastes your politeness on these
Flemish swine. Margaritas ante porcos, pearls before swine.”
“Say rather,” retorted the cardinal, with a smile, “Porcos ante
Margaritam, swine before the pearl.”
The whole little court in cassocks went into ecstacies over this play upon
words. The cardinal felt a little relieved; he was quits with Coppenole, he
also had had his jest applauded.
Now, will those of our readers who possess the power of generalizing an
image or an idea, as the expression runs in the style of to-day, permit us to
ask them if they have formed a very clear conception of the spectacle
presented at this moment, upon which we have arrested 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 large and
magnificent gallery draped with cloth of gold, into which enter in
procession, through a small, arched door, grave personages, announced
successively by the shrill voice of an usher. On the front benches were
already a number of venerable figures, muffled in ermine, velvet, and
scarlet. Around the dais—which remains silent and dignified—below,
opposite, everywhere, a great crowd and a great murmur. Thousands of
glances directed by the people on each face upon the dais, a thousand
whispers over each name. Certainly, the spectacle is curious, and well
deserves the attention of the spectators. But yonder, quite at the end, what is
that sort of trestle work with four motley puppets upon it, and more below?
Who is that man beside the trestle, with a black doublet and a pale face?
Alas! my dear reader, it is Pierre Gringoire and his prologue.
We have all forgotten him completely.
This is precisely what he feared.

From the moment of the cardinal’s entrance, Gringoire had never ceased
to tremble for the safety of his prologue. At first he had enjoined the actors,
who had stopped in suspense, to continue, and to raise their voices; then,
perceiving that no one was listening, he had stopped them; and, during the
entire quarter of an hour that the interruption lasted, he had not ceased to
stamp, to flounce about, to appeal to Gisquette and Liénarde, and to urge his
neighbors to the continuance of the prologue; all in vain. No one quitted the
cardinal, the embassy, and the gallery—sole centre of this vast circle of
visual rays. We must also believe, and we say it with regret, that the
prologue had begun slightly to weary the audience at the moment when his
eminence had arrived, and created a diversion in so terrible a fashion. After
all, on the gallery as well as on the marble table, the spectacle was the
same: the conflict of Labor and Clergy, of Nobility and Merchandise. And
many people preferred to see them alive, breathing, moving, elbowing each
other in flesh and blood, in this Flemish embassy, in this Episcopal court,
under the cardinal’s robe, under Coppenole’s jerkin, than painted, decked
out, talking in verse, and, so to speak, stuffed beneath the yellow amid
white tunics in which Gringoire had so ridiculously clothed them.
Nevertheless, when our poet beheld quiet reestablished to some extent,
he devised a stratagem which might have redeemed all.
“Monsieur,” he said, turning towards one of his neighbors, a fine, big
man, with a patient face, “suppose we begin again.”
“What?” said his neighbor.
“Hé! the Mystery,” said Gringoire.
“As you like,” returned his neighbor.
This semi-approbation sufficed for Gringoire, and, conducting his own
affairs, he began to shout, confounding himself with the crowd as much as
possible: “Begin the mystery again! begin again!”
“The devil!” said Joannes de Molendino, “what are they jabbering down
yonder, at the end of the hall?” (for Gringoire was making noise enough for
four.) “Say, comrades, isn’t that mystery finished? They want to begin it all
over again. That’s not fair!”
“No, no!” shouted all the scholars. “Down with the mystery! Down with
it!”

But Gringoire had multiplied himself, and only shouted the more
vigorously: “Begin again! begin again!”
These clamors attracted the attention of the cardinal.
“Monsieur Bailiff of the Courts,” said he to a tall, black man, placed a
few paces from him, “are those knaves in a holy-water vessel, that they
make such a hellish noise?”
The bailiff of the courts was a sort of amphibious magistrate, a sort of bat
of the judicial order, related to both the rat and the bird, the judge and the
soldier.
He approached his eminence, and not without a good deal of fear of the
latter’s displeasure, he awkwardly explained to him the seeming disrespect
of the audience: that noonday had arrived before his eminence, and that the
comedians had been forced to begin without waiting for his eminence.
The cardinal burst into a laugh.
“On my faith, the rector of the university ought to have done the same.
What say you, Master Guillaume Rym?”
“Monseigneur,” replied Guillaume Rym, “let us be content with having
escaped half of the comedy. There is at least that much gained.”
“Can these rascals continue their farce?” asked the bailiff.
“Continue, continue,” said the cardinal, “it’s all the same to me. I’ll read
my breviary in the meantime.”
The bailiff advanced to the edge of the estrade, and cried, after having
invoked silence by a wave of the hand,—
“Bourgeois, rustics, and citizens, in order to satisfy those who wish the
play to begin again, and those who wish it to end, his eminence orders that
it be continued.”
Both parties were forced to resign themselves. But the public and the
author long cherished a grudge against the cardinal.
So the personages on the stage took up their parts, and Gringoire hoped
that the rest of his work, at least, would be listened to. This hope was
speedily dispelled like his other illusions; silence had indeed, been restored
in the audience, after a fashion; but Gringoire had not observed that at the
moment when the cardinal gave the order to continue, the gallery was far
from full, and that after the Flemish envoys there had arrived new

personages forming part of the cortège, whose names and ranks, shouted
out in the midst of his dialogue by the intermittent cry of the usher,
produced considerable ravages in it. Let the reader imagine the effect in the
midst of a theatrical piece, of the yelping of an usher, flinging in between
two rhymes, and often in the middle of a line, parentheses like the
following,—
“Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator to the king in the Ecclesiastical
Courts!”
“Jehan de Harlay, equerry guardian of the office of chevalier of the night
watch of the city of Paris!”
“Messire Galiot de Genoilhac, chevalier, seigneur de Brussac, master of
the king’s artillery!”
“Master Dreux-Raguier, surveyor of the woods and forests of the king
our sovereign, in the land of France, Champagne and Brie!”
“Messire Louis de Graville, chevalier, councillor, and chamberlain of the
king, admiral of France, keeper of the Forest of Vincennes!”
“Master Denis le Mercier, guardian of the house of the blind at Paris!”
etc., etc., etc.
This was becoming unbearable.
This strange accompaniment, which rendered it difficult to follow the
piece, made Gringoire all the more indignant because he could not conceal
from himself the fact that the interest was continually increasing, and that
all his work required was a chance of being heard.
It was, in fact, difficult to imagine a more ingenious and more dramatic
composition. The four personages of the prologue were bewailing
themselves in their mortal embarrassment, when Venus in person, (vera
incessa patuit dea) presented herself to them, clad in a fine robe bearing the
heraldic device of the ship of the city of Paris. She had come herself to
claim the dolphin promised to the most beautiful. Jupiter, whose thunder
could be heard rumbling in the dressing-room, supported her claim, and
Venus was on the point of carrying it off,—that is to say, without allegory,
of marrying monsieur the dauphin, when a young child clad in white
damask, and holding in her hand a daisy (a transparent personification of
Mademoiselle Marguerite of Flanders) came to contest it with Venus.
Theatrical effect and change.

After a dispute, Venus, Marguerite, and the assistants agreed to submit to
the good judgment of time holy Virgin. There was another good part, that of
the king of Mesopotamia; but through so many interruptions, it was difficult
to make out what end he served. All these persons had ascended by the
ladder to the stage.
But all was over; none of these beauties had been felt nor understood. On
the entrance of the cardinal, one would have said that an invisible magic
thread had suddenly drawn all glances from the marble table to the gallery,
from the southern to the western extremity of the hall. Nothing could
disenchant the audience; all eyes remained fixed there, and the new-comers
and their accursed names, and their faces, and their costumes, afforded a
continual diversion. This was very distressing. With the exception of
Gisquette and Liénarde, who turned round from time to time when
Gringoire plucked them by the sleeve; with the exception of the big, patient
neighbor, no one listened, no one looked at the poor, deserted morality full
face. Gringoire saw only profiles.
With what bitterness did he behold his whole erection of glory and of
poetry crumble away bit by bit! And to think that these people had been
upon the point of instituting a revolt against the bailiff through impatience
to hear his work! now that they had it they did not care for it. This same
representation which had been begun amid so unanimous an acclamation!
Eternal flood and ebb of popular favor! To think that they had been on the
point of hanging the bailiff’s sergeant! What would he not have given to be
still at that hour of honey!
But the usher’s brutal monologue came to an end; every one had arrived,
and Gringoire breathed freely once more; the actors continued bravely. But
Master Coppenole, the hosier, must needs rise of a sudden, and Gringoire
was forced to listen to him deliver, amid universal attention, the following
abominable harangue.
“Messieurs the bourgeois and squires of Paris, I don’t know, cross of
God! what we are doing here. I certainly do see yonder in the corner on that
stage, some people who appear to be fighting. I don’t know whether that is
what you call a “mystery,” but it is not amusing; they quarrel with their
tongues and nothing more. I have been waiting for the first blow this
quarter of an hour; nothing comes; they are cowards who only scratch each
other with insults. You ought to send for the fighters of London or

Rotterdam; and, I can tell you! you would have had blows of the fist that
could be heard in the Place; but these men excite our pity. They ought at
least, to give us a moorish dance, or some other mummer! That is not what
was told me; I was promised a feast of fools, with the election of a pope.
We have our pope of fools at Ghent also; we’re not behindhand in that,
cross of God! But this is the way we manage it; we collect a crowd like this
one here, then each person in turn passes his head through a hole, and
makes a grimace at the rest; time one who makes the ugliest, is elected pope
by general acclamation; that’s the way it is. It is very diverting. Would you
like to make your pope after the fashion of my country? At all events, it will
be less wearisome than to listen to chatterers. If they wish to come and
make their grimaces through the hole, they can join the game. What say
you, Messieurs les bourgeois? You have here enough grotesque specimens
of both sexes, to allow of laughing in Flemish fashion, and there are enough
of us ugly in countenance to hope for a fine grinning match.”
Gringoire would have liked to retort; stupefaction, rage, indignation,
deprived him of words. Moreover, the suggestion of the popular hosier was
received with such enthusiasm by these bourgeois who were flattered at
being called “squires,” that all resistance was useless. There was nothing to
be done but to allow one’s self to drift with the torrent. Gringoire hid his
face between his two hands, not being so fortunate as to have a mantle with
which to veil his head, like Agamemnon of Timantis.

CHAPTER V.
QUASIMODO.

In the twinkling of an eye, all was ready to execute Coppenole’s idea.
Bourgeois, scholars and law clerks all set to work. The little chapel situated
opposite the marble table was selected for the scene of the grinning match.
A pane broken in the pretty rose window above the door, left free a circle of
stone through which it was agreed that the competitors should thrust their
heads. In order to reach it, it was only necessary to mount upon a couple of
hogsheads, which had been produced from I know not where, and perched
one upon the other, after a fashion. It was settled that each candidate, man
or woman (for it was possible to choose a female pope), should, for the sake
of leaving the impression of his grimace fresh and complete, cover his face
and remain concealed in the chapel until the moment of his appearance. In
less than an instant, the chapel was crowded with competitors, upon whom
the door was then closed.
Coppenole, from his post, ordered all, directed all, arranged all. During
the uproar, the cardinal, no less abashed than Gringoire, had retired with all
his suite, under the pretext of business and vespers, without the crowd
which his arrival had so deeply stirred being in the least moved by his
departure. Guillaume Rym was the only one who noticed his eminence’s
discomfiture. The attention of the populace, like the sun, pursued its
revolution; having set out from one end of the hall, and halted for a space in
the middle, it had now reached the other end. The marble table, the
brocaded gallery had each had their day; it was now the turn of the chapel
of Louis XI. Henceforth, the field was open to all folly. There was no one
there now, but the Flemings and the rabble.
The grimaces began. The first face which appeared at the aperture, with
eyelids turned up to the reds, a mouth open like a maw, and a brow
wrinkled like our hussar boots of the Empire, evoked such an

inextinguishable peal of laughter that Homer would have taken all these
louts for gods. Nevertheless, the grand hall was anything but Olympus, and
Gringoire’s poor Jupiter knew it better than any one else. A second and third
grimace followed, then another and another; and the laughter and transports
of delight went on increasing. There was in this spectacle, a peculiar power
of intoxication and fascination, of which it would be difficult to convey to
the reader of our day and our salons any idea.
Let the reader picture to himself a series of visages presenting
successively all geometrical forms, from the triangle to the trapezium, from
the cone to the polyhedron; all human expressions, from wrath to lewdness;
all ages, from the wrinkles of the new-born babe to the wrinkles of the aged
and dying; all religious phantasmagories, from Faun to Beelzebub; all
animal profiles, from the maw to the beak, from the jowl to the muzzle. Let
the reader imagine all these grotesque figures of the Pont Neuf, those
nightmares petrified beneath the hand of Germain Pilon, assuming life and
breath, and coming in turn to stare you in the face with burning eyes; all the
masks of the Carnival of Venice passing in succession before your glass,—
in a word, a human kaleidoscope.
The orgy grew more and more Flemish. Teniers could have given but a
very imperfect idea of it. Let the reader picture to himself in bacchanal
form, Salvator Rosa’s battle. There were no longer either scholars or
ambassadors or bourgeois or men or women; there was no longer any
Clopin Trouillefou, nor Gilles Lecornu, nor Marie Quatrelivres, nor Robin
Poussepain. All was universal license. The grand hall was no longer
anything but a vast furnace of effrontry and joviality, where every mouth
was a cry, every individual a posture; everything shouted and howled. The
strange visages which came, in turn, to gnash their teeth in the rose window,
were like so many brands cast into the brazier; and from the whole of this
effervescing crowd, there escaped, as from a furnace, a sharp, piercing,
stinging noise, hissing like the wings of a gnat.
“Ho hé! curse it!”
“Just look at that face!”
“It’s not good for anything.”
“Guillemette Maugerepuis, just look at that bull’s muzzle; it only lacks
the horns. It can’t be your husband.”
“Another!”

“Belly of the pope! what sort of a grimace is that?”
“Holà hé! that’s cheating. One must show only one’s face.”
“That damned Perrette Callebotte! she’s capable of that!”
“Good! Good!”
“I’m stifling!”
“There’s a fellow whose ears won’t go through!” Etc., etc.
But we must do justice to our friend Jehan. In the midst of this witches’
sabbath, he was still to be seen on the top of his pillar, like the cabin-boy on
the topmast. He floundered about with incredible fury. His mouth was wide
open, and from it there escaped a cry which no one heard, not that it was
covered by the general clamor, great as that was but because it attained, no
doubt, the limit of perceptible sharp sounds, the thousand vibrations of
Sauveur, or the eight thousand of Biot.
As for Gringoire, the first moment of depression having passed, he had
regained his composure. He had hardened himself against adversity.
—“Continue!” he had said for the third time, to his comedians, speaking
machines; then as he was marching with great strides in front of the marble
table, a fancy seized him to go and appear in his turn at the aperture of the
chapel, were it only for the pleasure of making a grimace at that ungrateful
populace.—“But no, that would not be worthy of us; no, vengeance! let us
combat until the end,” he repeated to himself; “the power of poetry over
people is great; I will bring them back. We shall see which will carry the
day, grimaces or polite literature.”
Alas! he had been left the sole spectator of his piece. It was far worse
than it had been a little while before. He no longer beheld anything but
backs.
I am mistaken. The big, patient man, whom he had already consulted in a
critical moment, had remained with his face turned towards the stage. As
for Gisquette and Liénarde, they had deserted him long ago.
Gringoire was touched to the heart by the fidelity of his only spectator.
He approached him and addressed him, shaking his arm slightly; for the
good man was leaning on the balustrade and dozing a little.
“Monsieur,” said Gringoire, “I thank you!”
“Monsieur,” replied the big man with a yawn, “for what?”

“I see what wearies you,” resumed the poet; “’tis all this noise which
prevents your hearing comfortably. But be at ease! your name shall descend
to posterity! Your name, if you please?”
“Renauld Chateau, guardian of the seals of the Châtelet of Paris, at your
service.”
“Monsieur, you are the only representative of the muses here,” said
Gringoire.
“You are too kind, sir,” said the guardian of the seals at the Châtelet.
“You are the only one,” resumed Gringoire, “who has listened to the
piece decorously. What do you think of it?”
“He! he!” replied the fat magistrate, half aroused, “it’s tolerably jolly,
that’s a fact.”
Gringoire was forced to content himself with this eulogy; for a thunder of
applause, mingled with a prodigious acclamation, cut their conversation
short. The Pope of the Fools had been elected.
“Noël! Noël! Noël!”[6] shouted the people on all sides. That was, in fact,
a marvellous grimace which was beaming at that moment through the
aperture in the rose window. After all the pentagonal, hexagonal, and
whimsical faces, which had succeeded each other at that hole without
realizing the ideal of the grotesque which their imaginations, excited by the
orgy, had constructed, nothing less was needed to win their suffrages than
the sublime grimace which had just dazzled the assembly. Master
Coppenole himself applauded, and Clopin Trouillefou, who had been
among the competitors (and God knows what intensity of ugliness his
visage could attain), confessed himself conquered: We will do the same. We
shall not try to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedral nose, that
horseshoe mouth; that little left eye obstructed with a red, bushy, bristling
eyebrow, while the right eye disappeared entirely beneath an enormous
wart; of those teeth in disarray, broken here and there, like the embattled
parapet of a fortress; of that callous lip, upon which one of these teeth
encroached, like the tusk of an elephant; of that forked chin; and above all,
of the expression spread over the whole; of that mixture of malice,
amazement, and sadness. Let the reader dream of this whole, if he can.
The acclamation was unanimous; people rushed towards the chapel. They
made the lucky Pope of the Fools come forth in triumph. But it was then

that surprise and admiration attained their highest pitch; the grimace was his
face.
Or rather, his whole person was a grimace. A huge head, bristling with
red hair; between his shoulders an enormous hump, a counterpart
perceptible in front; a system of thighs and legs so strangely astray that they
could touch each other only at the knees, and, viewed from the front,
resembled the crescents of two scythes joined by the handles; large feet,
monstrous hands; and, with all this deformity, an indescribable and
redoubtable air of vigor, agility, and courage,—strange exception to the
eternal rule which wills that force as well as beauty shall be the result of
harmony. Such was the pope whom the fools had just chosen for
themselves.
One would have pronounced him a giant who had been broken and badly
put together again.
When this species of cyclops appeared on the threshold of the chapel,
motionless, squat, and almost as broad as he was tall; squared on the base,
as a great man says; with his doublet half red, half violet, sown with silver
bells, and, above all, in the perfection of his ugliness, the populace
recognized him on the instant, and shouted with one voice,—
“’Tis Quasimodo, the bellringer! ’tis Quasimodo, the hunchback of
Notre-Dame! Quasimodo, the one-eyed! Quasimodo, the bandy-legged!
Noël! Noël!”
It will be seen that the poor fellow had a choice of surnames.
“Let the women with child beware!” shouted the scholars.
“Or those who wish to be,” resumed Joannes.
The women did, in fact, hide their faces.
“Oh! the horrible monkey!” said one of them.
“As wicked as he is ugly,” retorted another.
“He’s the devil,” added a third.
“I have the misfortune to live near Notre-Dame; I hear him prowling
round the eaves by night.”
“With the cats.”
“He’s always on our roofs.”
“He throws spells down our chimneys.”

“The other evening, he came and made a grimace at me through my attic
window. I thought that it was a man. Such a fright as I had!”
“I’m sure that he goes to the witches’ sabbath. Once he left a broom on
my leads.”
“Oh! what a displeasing hunchback’s face!”
“Oh! what an ill-favored soul!”
“Whew!”
The men, on the contrary, were delighted and applauded. Quasimodo, the
object of the tumult, still stood on the threshold of the chapel, sombre and
grave, and allowed them to admire him.
One scholar (Robin Poussepain, I think), came and laughed in his face,
and too close. Quasimodo contented himself with taking him by the girdle,
and hurling him ten paces off amid the crowd; all without uttering a word.
Master Coppenole, in amazement, approached him.
“Cross of God! Holy Father! you possess the handsomest ugliness that I
have ever beheld in my life. You would deserve to be pope at Rome, as well
as at Paris.”
So saying, he placed his hand gayly on his shoulder. Quasimodo did not
stir. Coppenole went on,—
“You are a rogue with whom I have a fancy for carousing, were it to cost
me a new dozen of twelve livres of Tours. How does it strike you?”
Quasimodo made no reply.
“Cross of God!” said the hosier, “are you deaf?”
He was, in truth, deaf.
Nevertheless, he began to grow impatient with Coppenole’s behavior,
and suddenly turned towards him with so formidable a gnashing of teeth,
that the Flemish giant recoiled, like a bull-dog before a cat.
Then there was created around that strange personage, a circle of terror
and respect, whose radius was at least fifteen geometrical feet. An old
woman explained to Coppenole that Quasimodo was deaf.
“Deaf!” said the hosier, with his great Flemish laugh. “Cross of God!
He’s a perfect pope!”

“Hé! I recognize him,” exclaimed Jehan, who had, at last, descended
from his capital, in order to see Quasimodo at closer quarters, “he’s the
bellringer of my brother, the archdeacon. Good-day, Quasimodo!”
“What a devil of a man!” said Robin Poussepain still all bruised with his
fall. “He shows himself; he’s a hunchback. He walks; he’s bandy-legged.
He looks at you; he’s one-eyed. You speak to him; he’s deaf. And what does
this Polyphemus do with his tongue?”
“He speaks when he chooses,” said the old woman; “he became deaf
through ringing the bells. He is not dumb.”
“That he lacks,” remarks Jehan.
“And he has one eye too many,” added Robin Poussepain.
“Not at all,” said Jehan wisely. “A one-eyed man is far less complete than
a blind man. He knows what he lacks.”
In the meantime, all the beggars, all the lackeys, all the cutpurses, joined
with the scholars, had gone in procession to seek, in the cupboard of the law
clerks’ company, the cardboard tiara, and the derisive robe of the Pope of
the Fools. Quasimodo allowed them to array him in them without wincing,
and with a sort of proud docility. Then they made him seat himself on a
motley litter. Twelve officers of the fraternity of fools raised him on their
shoulders; and a sort of bitter and disdainful joy lighted up the morose face
of the cyclops, when he beheld beneath his deformed feet all those heads of
handsome, straight, well-made men. Then the ragged and howling
procession set out on its march, according to custom, around the inner
galleries of the Courts, before making the circuit of the streets and squares.

CHAPTER VI.
ESMERALDA.

We are delighted to be able to inform the reader, that during the whole of
this scene, Gringoire and his piece had stood firm. His actors, spurred on by
him, had not ceased to spout his comedy, and he had not ceased to listen to
it. He had made up his mind about the tumult, and was determined to
proceed to the end, not giving up the hope of a return of attention on the
part of the public. This gleam of hope acquired fresh life, when he saw
Quasimodo, Coppenole, and the deafening escort of the pope of the
procession of fools quit the hall amid great uproar. The throng rushed
eagerly after them. “Good,” he said to himself, “there go all the mischief-
makers.” Unfortunately, all the mischief-makers constituted the entire
audience. In the twinkling of an eye, the grand hall was empty.
To tell the truth, a few spectators still remained, some scattered, others in
groups around the pillars, women, old men, or children, who had had
enough of the uproar and tumult. Some scholars were still perched astride
of the window-sills, engaged in gazing into the Place.
“Well,” thought Gringoire, “here are still as many as are required to hear
the end of my mystery. They are few in number, but it is a choice audience,
a lettered audience.”
An instant later, a symphony which had been intended to produce the
greatest effect on the arrival of the Virgin, was lacking. Gringoire perceived
that his music had been carried off by the procession of the Pope of the
Fools. “Skip it,” said he, stoically.
He approached a group of bourgeois, who seemed to him to be
discussing his piece. This is the fragment of conversation which he caught,
—

“You know, Master Cheneteau, the Hôtel de Navarre, which belonged to
Monsieur de Nemours?”
“Yes, opposite the Chapelle de Braque.”
“Well, the treasury has just let it to Guillaume Alixandre, historian, for
six livres, eight sols, parisian, a year.”
“How rents are going up!”
“Come,” said Gringoire to himself, with a sigh, “the others are listening.”
“Comrades,” suddenly shouted one of the young scamps from the
window, “La Esmeralda! La Esmeralda in the Place!”
This word produced a magical effect. Every one who was left in the hall
flew to the windows, climbing the walls in order to see, and repeating, “La
Esmeralda! La Esmeralda?” At the same time, a great sound of applause
was heard from without.
“What’s the meaning of this, of the Esmeralda?” said Gringoire, wringing
his hands in despair. “Ah, good heavens! it seems to be the turn of the
windows now.”
He returned towards the marble table, and saw that the representation had
been interrupted. It was precisely at the instant when Jupiter should have
appeared with his thunder. But Jupiter was standing motionless at the foot
of the stage.
“Michel Giborne!” cried the irritated poet, “what are you doing there? Is
that your part? Come up!”
“Alas!” said Jupiter, “a scholar has just seized the ladder.”
Gringoire looked. It was but too true. All communication between his
plot and its solution was intercepted.
“The rascal,” he murmured. “And why did he take that ladder?”
“In order to go and see the Esmeralda,” replied Jupiter piteously. “He
said, ‘Come, here’s a ladder that’s of no use!’ and he took it.”
This was the last blow. Gringoire received it with resignation.
“May the devil fly away with you!” he said to the comedian, “and if I get
my pay, you shall receive yours.”
Then he beat a retreat, with drooping head, but the last in the field, like a
general who has fought well.

And as he descended the winding stairs of the courts: “A fine rabble of
asses and dolts these Parisians!” he muttered between his teeth; “they come
to hear a mystery and don’t listen to it at all! They are engrossed by every
one, by Clopin Trouillefou, by the cardinal, by Coppenole, by Quasimodo,
by the devil! but by Madame the Virgin Mary, not at all. If I had known, I’d
have given you Virgin Mary; you ninnies! And I! to come to see faces and
behold only backs! to be a poet, and to reap the success of an apothecary! It
is true that Homerus begged through the Greek towns, and that Naso died in
exile among the Muscovites. But may the devil flay me if I understand what
they mean with their Esmeralda! What is that word, in the first place?—’tis
Egyptian!”

BOOK SECOND.

CHAPTER I.
FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA.

Night comes on early in January. The streets were already dark when
Gringoire issued forth from the Courts. This gloom pleased him; he was in
haste to reach some obscure and deserted alley, in order there to meditate at
his ease, and in order that the philosopher might place the first dressing
upon the wound of the poet. Philosophy, moreover, was his sole refuge, for
he did not know where he was to lodge for the night. After the brilliant
failure of his first theatrical venture, he dared not return to the lodging
which he occupied in the Rue Grenier-sur-l’Eau, opposite to the Port-au-
Foin, having depended upon receiving from monsieur the provost for his
epithalamium, the wherewithal to pay Master Guillaume Doulx-Sire, farmer
of the taxes on cloven-footed animals in Paris, the rent which he owed him,
that is to say, twelve sols parisian; twelve times the value of all that he
possessed in the world, including his trunk-hose, his shirt, and his cap. After
reflecting a moment, temporarily sheltered beneath the little wicket of the
prison of the treasurer of the Sainte-Chappelle, as to the shelter which he
would select for the night, having all the pavements of Paris to choose from,
he remembered to have noticed the week previously in the Rue de la
Savaterie, at the door of a councillor of the parliament, a stepping stone for
mounting a mule, and to have said to himself that that stone would furnish,
on occasion, a very excellent pillow for a mendicant or a poet. He thanked
Providence for having sent this happy idea to him; but, as he was preparing
to cross the Place, in order to reach the tortuous labyrinth of the city, where
meander all those old sister streets, the Rues de la Barillerie, de la Vieille-
Draperie, de la Savaterie, de la Juiverie, etc., still extant to-day, with their
nine-story houses, he saw the procession of the Pope of the Fools, which
was also emerging from the court house, and rushing across the courtyard,
with great cries, a great flashing of torches, and the music which belonged
to him, Gringoire. This sight revived the pain of his self-love; he fled. In the

bitterness of his dramatic misadventure, everything which reminded him of
the festival of that day irritated his wound and made it bleed.
He was on the point of turning to the Pont Saint-Michel; children were
running about here and there with fire lances and rockets.
“Pest on firework candles!” said Gringoire; and he fell back on the Pont
au Change. To the house at the head of the bridge there had been affixed
three small banners, representing the king, the dauphin, and Marguerite of
Flanders, and six little pennons on which were portrayed the Duke of
Austria, the Cardinal de Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, and Madame Jeanne de
France, and Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon, and I know not whom else;
all being illuminated with torches. The rabble were admiring.
“Happy painter, Jehan Fourbault!” said Gringoire with a deep sigh; and
he turned his back upon the bannerets and pennons. A street opened before
him; he thought it so dark and deserted that he hoped to there escape from
all the rumors as well as from all the gleams of the festival. At the end of a
few moments his foot came in contact with an obstacle; he stumbled and
fell. It was the May truss, which the clerks of the clerks’ law court had
deposited that morning at the door of a president of the parliament, in honor
of the solemnity of the day. Gringoire bore this new disaster heroically; he
picked himself up, and reached the water’s edge. After leaving behind him
the civic Tournelle[7] and the criminal tower, and skirted the great walls of
the king’s garden, on that unpaved strand where the mud reached to his
ankles, he reached the western point of the city, and considered for some
time the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches, which has disappeared beneath the
bronze horse of the Pont Neuf. The islet appeared to him in the shadow like
a black mass, beyond the narrow strip of whitish water which separated him
from it. One could divine by the ray of a tiny light the sort of hut in the
form of a beehive where the ferryman of cows took refuge at night.
“Happy ferryman!” thought Gringoire; “you do not dream of glory, and
you do not make marriage songs! What matters it to you, if kings and
Duchesses of Burgundy marry? You know no other daisies (marguerites)
than those which your April greensward gives your cows to browse upon;
while I, a poet, am hooted, and shiver, and owe twelve sous, and the soles
of my shoes are so transparent, that they might serve as glasses for your
lantern! Thanks, ferryman, your cabin rests my eyes, and makes me forget
Paris!”

He was roused from his almost lyric ecstacy, by a big double Saint-Jean
cracker, which suddenly went off from the happy cabin. It was the cow
ferryman, who was taking his part in the rejoicings of the day, and letting
off fireworks.
This cracker made Gringoire’s skin bristle up all over.
“Accursed festival!” he exclaimed, “wilt thou pursue me everywhere?
Oh! good God! even to the ferryman’s!”
Then he looked at the Seine at his feet, and a horrible temptation took
possession of him:
“Oh!” said he, “I would gladly drown myself, were the water not so
cold!”
Then a desperate resolution occurred to him. It was, since he could not
escape from the Pope of the Fools, from Jehan Fourbault’s bannerets, from
May trusses, from squibs and crackers, to go to the Place de Grève.
“At least,” he said to himself, “I shall there have a firebrand of joy
wherewith to warm myself, and I can sup on some crumbs of the three great
armorial bearings of royal sugar which have been erected on the public
refreshment-stall of the city.”

CHAPTER II.
THE PLACE DE GRÈVE.

There remains to-day but a very imperceptible vestige of the Place de
Grève, such as it existed then; it consists in the charming little turret, which
occupies the angle north of the Place, and which, already enshrouded in the
ignoble plaster which fills with paste the delicate lines of its sculpture,
would soon have disappeared, perhaps submerged by that flood of new
houses which so rapidly devours all the ancient façades of Paris.
The persons who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de Grève without
casting a glance of pity and sympathy on that poor turret strangled between
two hovels of the time of Louis XV., can easily reconstruct in their minds
the aggregate of edifices to which it belonged, and find again entire in it the
ancient Gothic place of the fifteenth century.
It was then, as it is to-day, an irregular trapezoid, bordered on one side by
the quay, and on the other three by a series of lofty, narrow, and gloomy
houses. By day, one could admire the variety of its edifices, all sculptured
in stone or wood, and already presenting complete specimens of the
different domestic architectures of the Middle Ages, running back from the
fifteenth to the eleventh century, from the casement which had begun to
dethrone the arch, to the Roman semicircle, which had been supplanted by
the ogive, and which still occupies, below it, the first story of that ancient
house de la Tour Roland, at the corner of the Place upon the Seine, on the
side of the street with the Tannerie. At night, one could distinguish nothing
of all that mass of buildings, except the black indentation of the roofs,
unrolling their chain of acute angles round the place; for one of the radical
differences between the cities of that time, and the cities of the present day,
lay in the façades which looked upon the places and streets, and which were
then gables. For the last two centuries the houses have been turned round.

In the centre of the eastern side of the Place, rose a heavy and hybrid
construction, formed of three buildings placed in juxtaposition. It was
called by three names which explain its history, its destination, and its
architecture: “The House of the Dauphin,” because Charles V., when
Dauphin, had inhabited it; “The Marchandise,” because it had served as
town hall; and “The Pillared House” (domus ad piloria), because of a series
of large pillars which sustained the three stories. The city found there all
that is required for a city like Paris; a chapel in which to pray to God; a
plaidoyer, or pleading room, in which to hold hearings, and to repel, at
need, the King’s people; and under the roof, an arsenac full of artillery. For
the bourgeois of Paris were aware that it is not sufficient to pray in every
conjuncture, and to plead for the franchises of the city, and they had always
in reserve, in the garret of the town hall, a few good rusty arquebuses. The
Grève had then that sinister aspect which it preserves to-day from the
execrable ideas which it awakens, and from the sombre town hall of
Dominique Bocador, which has replaced the Pillared House. It must be
admitted that a permanent gibbet and a pillory, “a justice and a ladder,” as
they were called in that day, erected side by side in the centre of the
pavement, contributed not a little to cause eyes to be turned away from that
fatal place, where so many beings full of life and health have agonized;
where, fifty years later, that fever of Saint Vallier was destined to have its
birth, that terror of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all maladies because
it comes not from God, but from man.
It is a consoling idea (let us remark in passing), to think that the death
penalty, which three hundred years ago still encumbered with its iron
wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its paraphernalia of torture, permanent and
riveted to the pavement, the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the
Cross du Trahoir, the Marché aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfaucon, the
barrier des Sergents, the Place aux Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis,
Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint Jacques, without reckoning
the innumerable ladders of the provosts, the bishop of the chapters, of the
abbots, of the priors, who had the decree of life and death,—without
reckoning the judicial drownings in the river Seine; it is consoling to-day,
after having lost successively all the pieces of its armor, its luxury of
torment, its penalty of imagination and fancy, its torture for which it
reconstructed every five years a leather bed at the Grand Châtelet, that
ancient suzerain of feudal society almost expunged from our laws and our

cities, hunted from code to code, chased from place to place, has no longer,
in our immense Paris, any more than a dishonored corner of the Grève,—
than a miserable guillotine, furtive, uneasy, shameful, which seems always
afraid of being caught in the act, so quickly does it disappear after having
dealt its blow.

CHAPTER III.
KISSES FOR BLOWS.

When Pierre Gringoire arrived on the Place de Grève, he was paralyzed.
He had directed his course across the Pont aux Meuniers, in order to avoid
the rabble on the Pont au Change, and the pennons of Jehan Fourbault; but
the wheels of all the bishop’s mills had splashed him as he passed, and his
doublet was drenched; it seemed to him besides, that the failure of his piece
had rendered him still more sensible to cold than usual. Hence he made
haste to draw near the bonfire, which was burning magnificently in the
middle of the Place. But a considerable crowd formed a circle around it.
“Accursed Parisians!” he said to himself (for Gringoire, like a true
dramatic poet, was subject to monologues) “there they are obstructing my
fire! Nevertheless, I am greatly in need of a chimney corner; my shoes
drink in the water, and all those cursed mills wept upon me! That devil of a
Bishop of Paris, with his mills! I’d just like to know what use a bishop can
make of a mill! Does he expect to become a miller instead of a bishop? If
only my malediction is needed for that, I bestow it upon him! and his
cathedral, and his mills! Just see if those boobies will put themselves out!
Move aside! I’d like to know what they are doing there! They are warming
themselves, much pleasure may it give them! They are watching a hundred
fagots burn; a fine spectacle!”
On looking more closely, he perceived that the circle was much larger
than was required simply for the purpose of getting warm at the king’s fire,
and that this concourse of people had not been attracted solely by the beauty
of the hundred fagots which were burning.
In a vast space left free between the crowd and the fire, a young girl was
dancing.
Whether this young girl was a human being, a fairy, or an angel, is what
Gringoire, sceptical philosopher and ironical poet that he was, could not

decide at the first moment, so fascinated was he by this dazzling vision.
She was not tall, though she seemed so, so boldly did her slender form
dart about. She was swarthy of complexion, but one divined that, by day,
her skin must possess that beautiful golden tone of the Andalusians and the
Roman women. Her little foot, too, was Andalusian, for it was both pinched
and at ease in its graceful shoe. She danced, she turned, she whirled rapidly
about on an old Persian rug, spread negligently under her feet; and each
time that her radiant face passed before you, as she whirled, her great black
eyes darted a flash of lightning at you.
All around her, all glances were riveted, all mouths open; and, in fact,
when she danced thus, to the humming of the Basque tambourine, which
her two pure, rounded arms raised above her head, slender, frail and
vivacious as a wasp, with her corsage of gold without a fold, her variegated
gown puffing out, her bare shoulders, her delicate limbs, which her petticoat
revealed at times, her black hair, her eyes of flame, she was a supernatural
creature.
“In truth,” said Gringoire to himself, “she is a salamander, she is a
nymph, she is a goddess, she is a bacchante of the Menelean Mount!”
At that moment, one of the salamander’s braids of hair became
unfastened, and a piece of yellow copper which was attached to it, rolled to
the ground.
“Hé, no!” said he, “she is a gypsy!”
All illusions had disappeared.
She began her dance once more; she took from the ground two swords,
whose points she rested against her brow, and which she made to turn in
one direction, while she turned in the other; it was a purely gypsy effect.
But, disenchanted though Gringoire was, the whole effect of this picture
was not without its charm and its magic; the bonfire illuminated, with a red
flaring light, which trembled, all alive, over the circle of faces in the crowd,
on the brow of the young girl, and at the background of the Place cast a
pallid reflection, on one side upon the ancient, black, and wrinkled façade
of the House of Pillars, on the other, upon the old stone gibbet.
Among the thousands of visages which that light tinged with scarlet,
there was one which seemed, even more than all the others, absorbed in
contemplation of the dancer. It was the face of a man, austere, calm, and

sombre. This man, whose costume was concealed by the crowd which
surrounded him, did not appear to be more than five and thirty years of age;
nevertheless, he was bald; he had merely a few tufts of thin, gray hair on his
temples; his broad, high forehead had begun to be furrowed with wrinkles,
but his deep-set eyes sparkled with extraordinary youthfulness, an ardent
life, a profound passion. He kept them fixed incessantly on the gypsy, and,
while the giddy young girl of sixteen danced and whirled, for the pleasure
of all, his revery seemed to become more and more sombre. From time to
time, a smile and a sigh met upon his lips, but the smile was more
melancholy than the sigh.
The young girl, stopped at length, breathless, and the people applauded
her lovingly.
“Djali!” said the gypsy.
Then Gringoire saw come up to her, a pretty little white goat, alert, wide-
awake, glossy, with gilded horns, gilded hoofs, and gilded collar, which he
had not hitherto perceived, and which had remained lying curled up on one
corner of the carpet watching his mistress dance.
“Djali!” said the dancer, “it is your turn.”
And, seating herself, she gracefully presented her tambourine to the goat.
“Djali,” she continued, “what month is this?”
The goat lifted its fore foot, and struck one blow upon the tambourine. It
was the first month in the year, in fact.
“Djali,” pursued the young girl, turning her tambourine round, “what day
of the month is this?”
Djali raised his little gilt hoof, and struck six blows on the tambourine.
“Djali,” pursued the Egyptian, with still another movement of the
tambourine, “what hour of the day is it?”
Djali struck seven blows. At that moment, the clock of the Pillar House
rang out seven.
The people were amazed.
“There’s sorcery at the bottom of it,” said a sinister voice in the crowd. It
was that of the bald man, who never removed his eyes from the gypsy.
She shuddered and turned round; but applause broke forth and drowned
the morose exclamation.

It even effaced it so completely from her mind, that she continued to
question her goat.
“Djali, what does Master Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of the pistoliers
of the town do, at the procession of Candlemas?”
Djali reared himself on his hind legs, and began to bleat, marching along
with so much dainty gravity, that the entire circle of spectators burst into a
laugh at this parody of the interested devoutness of the captain of pistoliers.
“Djali,” resumed the young girl, emboldened by her growing success,
“how preaches Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator to the king in the
ecclesiastical court?”
The goat seated himself on his hind quarters, and began to bleat, waving
his fore feet in so strange a manner, that, with the exception of the bad
French, and worse Latin, Jacques Charmolue was there complete,—gesture,
accent, and attitude.
And the crowd applauded louder than ever.
“Sacrilege! profanation!” resumed the voice of the bald man.
The gypsy turned round once more.
“Ah!” said she, “’tis that villanous man!” Then, thrusting her under lip
out beyond the upper, she made a little pout, which appeared to be familiar
to her, executed a pirouette on her heel, and set about collecting in her
tambourine the gifts of the multitude.
Big blanks, little blanks, targes[8] and eagle liards showered into it.
All at once, she passed in front of Gringoire. Gringoire put his hand so
recklessly into his pocket that she halted. “The devil!” said the poet, finding
at the bottom of his pocket the reality, that is, to say, a void. In the
meantime, the pretty girl stood there, gazing at him with her big eyes, and
holding out her tambourine to him and waiting. Gringoire broke into a
violent perspiration.
If he had all Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have given it to the
dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru, and, moreover, America had not yet
been discovered.
Happily, an unexpected incident came to his rescue.
“Will you take yourself off, you Egyptian grasshopper?” cried a sharp
voice, which proceeded from the darkest corner of the Place.

The young girl turned round in affright. It was no longer the voice of the
bald man; it was the voice of a woman, bigoted and malicious.
However, this cry, which alarmed the gypsy, delighted a troop of children
who were prowling about there.
“It is the recluse of the Tour-Roland,” they exclaimed, with wild laughter,
“it is the sacked nun who is scolding! Hasn’t she supped? Let’s carry her the
remains of the city refreshments!”
All rushed towards the Pillar House.
In the meanwhile, Gringoire had taken advantage of the dancer’s
embarrassment, to disappear. The children’s shouts had reminded him that
he, also, had not supped, so he ran to the public buffet. But the little rascals
had better legs than he; when he arrived, they had stripped the table. There
remained not so much as a miserable camichon at five sous the pound.
Nothing remained upon the wall but slender fleurs-de-lis, mingled with rose
bushes, painted in 1434 by Mathieu Biterne. It was a meagre supper.
It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper, it is a still less
pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where one is to sleep. That was
Gringoire’s condition. No supper, no shelter; he saw himself pressed on all
sides by necessity, and he found necessity very crabbed. He had long ago
discovered the truth, that Jupiter created men during a fit of misanthropy,
and that during a wise man’s whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy in
a state of siege. As for himself, he had never seen the blockade so complete;
he heard his stomach sounding a parley, and he considered it very much out
of place that evil destiny should capture his philosophy by famine.
This melancholy revery was absorbing him more and more, when a song,
quaint but full of sweetness, suddenly tore him from it. It was the young
gypsy who was singing.
Her voice was like her dancing, like her beauty. It was indefinable and
charming; something pure and sonorous, aerial, winged, so to speak. There
were continual outbursts, melodies, unexpected cadences, then simple
phrases strewn with aerial and hissing notes; then floods of scales which
would have put a nightingale to rout, but in which harmony was always
present; then soft modulations of octaves which rose and fell, like the
bosom of the young singer. Her beautiful face followed, with singular
mobility, all the caprices of her song, from the wildest inspiration to the

chastest dignity. One would have pronounced her now a mad creature, now
a queen.
The words which she sang were in a tongue unknown to Gringoire, and
which seemed to him to be unknown to herself, so little relation did the
expression which she imparted to her song bear to the sense of the words.
Thus, these four lines, in her mouth, were madly gay,—
Un cofre de gran riqueza
Hallaron dentro un pilar,
Dentro del, nuevas banderas
Con figuras de espantar.[9]

And an instant afterwards, at the accents which she imparted to this stanza,
—
Alarabes de cavallo
Sin poderse menear,
Con espadas, y los cuellos,
Ballestas de buen echar,

Gringoire felt the tears start to his eyes. Nevertheless, her song breathed joy,
most of all, and she seemed to sing like a bird, from serenity and
heedlessness.
The gypsy’s song had disturbed Gringoire’s revery as the swan disturbs
the water. He listened in a sort of rapture, and forgetfulness of everything. It
was the first moment in the course of many hours when he did not feel that
he suffered.
The moment was brief.
The same woman’s voice, which had interrupted the gypsy’s dance,
interrupted her song.
“Will you hold your tongue, you cricket of hell?” it cried, still from the
same obscure corner of the place.
The poor “cricket” stopped short. Gringoire covered up his ears.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, “accursed saw with missing teeth, which comes to
break the lyre!”
Meanwhile, the other spectators murmured like himself; “To the devil
with the sacked nun!” said some of them. And the old invisible kill-joy
might have had occasion to repent of her aggressions against the gypsy had
their attention not been diverted at this moment by the procession of the

Pope of the Fools, which, after having traversed many streets and squares,
debouched on the Place de Grève, with all its torches and all its uproar.
This procession, which our readers have seen set out from the Palais de
Justice, had organized on the way, and had been recruited by all the knaves,
idle thieves, and unemployed vagabonds in Paris; so that it presented a very
respectable aspect when it arrived at the Grève.
First came Egypt. The Duke of Egypt headed it, on horseback, with his
counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrups for him; behind them, the
male and female Egyptians, pell-mell, with their little children crying on
their shoulders; all—duke, counts, and populace—in rags and tatters. Then
came the Kingdom of Argot; that is to say, all the thieves of France,
arranged according to the order of their dignity; the minor people walking
first. Thus defiled by fours, with the divers insignia of their grades, in that
strange faculty, most of them lame, some cripples, others one-armed, shop
clerks, pilgrims, hubins, bootblacks, thimble-riggers, street arabs, beggars,
the blear-eyed beggars, thieves, the weakly, vagabonds, merchants, sham
soldiers, goldsmiths, passed masters of pickpockets, isolated thieves. A
catalogue that would weary Homer. In the centre of the conclave of the
passed masters of pickpockets, one had some difficulty in distinguishing the
King of Argot, the grand coësre, so called, crouching in a little cart drawn
by two big 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, spotted with wine, preceded by buffoons
wrestling and executing military dances; surrounded by his macebearers,
his pickpockets and clerks of the chamber of accounts. Last of all came the
corporation of law clerks, with its maypoles crowned with flowers, its black
robes, its music worthy of the orgy, and its large candles of yellow wax. In
the centre of this crowd, the grand officers of the Brotherhood of Fools bore
on their shoulders a litter more loaded down with candles than the reliquary
of Sainte-Geneviève in time of pest; and on this litter shone resplendent,
with crosier, cope, and mitre, the new Pope of the Fools, the bellringer of
Notre-Dame, Quasimodo the hunchback.
Each section of this grotesque procession had its own music. The
Egyptians made their drums and African tambourines resound. The slang
men, not a very musical race, still clung to the goat’s horn trumpet and the
Gothic rubebbe of the twelfth century. The Empire of Galilee was not much

more advanced; among its music one could hardly distinguish some
miserable rebec, from the infancy of the art, still imprisoned in the ré-la-mi.
But it was around the Pope of the Fools that all the musical riches of the
epoch were displayed in a magnificent discord. It was nothing but soprano
rebecs, counter-tenor rebecs, and tenor rebecs, not to reckon the flutes and
brass instruments. Alas! our readers will remember that this was Gringoire’s
orchestra.
It is difficult to convey an idea of the degree of proud and blissful
expansion to which the sad and hideous visage of Quasimodo had attained
during the transit from the Palais de Justice, to the Place de Grève. It was
the first enjoyment of self-love that he had ever experienced. Down to that
day, he had known only humiliation, disdain for his condition, disgust for
his person. Hence, deaf though he was, he enjoyed, like a veritable pope,
the acclamations of that throng, which he hated because he felt that he was
hated by it. What mattered it that his people consisted of a pack of fools,
cripples, thieves, and beggars? it was still a people and he was its sovereign.
And he accepted seriously all this ironical applause, all this derisive respect,
with which the crowd mingled, it must be admitted, a good deal of very real
fear. For the hunchback was robust; for the bandy-legged fellow was agile;
for the deaf man was malicious: three qualities which temper ridicule.
We are far from believing, however, that the new Pope of the Fools
understood both the sentiments which he felt and the sentiments which he
inspired. The spirit which was lodged in this failure of a body had,
necessarily, something incomplete and deaf about it. Thus, what he felt at
the moment was to him, absolutely vague, indistinct, and confused. Only
joy made itself felt, only pride dominated. Around that sombre and unhappy
face, there hung a radiance.
It was, then, not without surprise and alarm, that at the very moment
when Quasimodo was passing the Pillar House, in that semi-intoxicated
state, a man was seen to dart from the crowd, and to tear from his hands,
with a gesture of anger, his crosier of gilded wood, the emblem of his mock
popeship.
This man, this rash individual, was the man with the bald brow, who, a
moment earlier, standing with the gypsy’s group had chilled the poor girl
with his words of menace and of hatred. He was dressed in an ecclesiastical
costume. At the moment when he stood forth from the crowd, Gringoire,

who had not noticed him up to that time, recognized him: “Hold!” he said,
with an exclamation of astonishment. “Eh! ’tis my master in Hermes, Dom
Claude Frollo, the archdeacon! What the devil does he want of that old one-
eyed fellow? He’ll get himself devoured!”
A cry of terror arose, in fact. The formidable Quasimodo had hurled
himself from the litter, and the women turned aside their eyes in order not to
see him tear the archdeacon asunder.
He made one bound as far as the priest, looked at him, and fell upon his
knees.
The priest tore off his tiara, broke his crozier, and rent his tinsel cope.
Quasimodo remained on his knees, with head bent and hands clasped.
Then there was established between them a strange dialogue of signs and
gestures, for neither of them spoke. The priest, erect on his feet, irritated,
threatening, imperious; Quasimodo, prostrate, humble, suppliant. And,
nevertheless, it is certain that Quasimodo could have crushed the priest with
his thumb.
At length the archdeacon, giving Quasimodo’s powerful shoulder a rough
shake, made him a sign to rise and follow him.
Quasimodo rose.
Then the Brotherhood of Fools, their first stupor having passed off,
wished to defend their pope, so abruptly dethroned. The Egyptians, the men
of slang, and all the fraternity of law clerks, gathered howling round the
priest.
Quasimodo placed himself in front of the priest, set in play the muscles
of his athletic fists, and glared upon the assailants with the snarl of an angry
tiger.
The priest resumed his sombre gravity, made a sign to Quasimodo, and
retired in silence.
Quasimodo walked in front of him, scattering the crowd as he passed.
When they had traversed the populace and the Place, the cloud of curious
and idle were minded to follow them. Quasimodo then constituted himself
the rearguard, and followed the archdeacon, walking backwards, squat,
surly, monstrous, bristling, gathering up his limbs, licking his boar’s tusks,
growling like a wild beast, and imparting to the crowd immense vibrations,
with a look or a gesture.

Both were allowed to plunge into a dark and narrow street, where no one
dared to venture after them; so thoroughly did the mere chimera of
Quasimodo gnashing his teeth bar the entrance.
“Here’s a marvellous thing,” said Gringoire; “but where the deuce shall I
find some supper?”

CHAPTER IV.
THE INCONVENIENCES OF FOLLOWING A
PRETTY WOMAN THROUGH THE STREETS IN
THE EVENING.

Gringoire set out to follow the gypsy at all hazards. He had seen her,
accompanied by her goat, take to the Rue de la Coutellerie; he took the Rue
de la Coutellerie.
“Why not?” he said to himself.
Gringoire, a practical philosopher of the streets of Paris, had noticed that
nothing is more propitious to revery than following a pretty woman without
knowing whither she is going. There was in this voluntary abdication of his
freewill, in this fancy submitting itself to another fancy, which suspects it
not, a mixture of fantastic independence and blind obedience, something
indescribable, intermediate between slavery and liberty, which pleased
Gringoire,—a spirit essentially compound, undecided, and complex,
holding the extremities of all extremes, incessantly suspended between all
human propensities, and neutralizing one by the other. He was fond of
comparing himself to Mahomet’s coffin, attracted in two different directions
by two loadstones, and hesitating eternally between the heights and the
depths, between the vault and the pavement, between fall and ascent,
between zenith and nadir.
If Gringoire had lived in our day, what a fine middle course he would
hold between classicism and romanticism!
But he was not sufficiently primitive to live three hundred years, and ’tis
a pity. His absence is a void which is but too sensibly felt to-day.
Moreover, for the purpose of thus following passers-by (and especially
female passers-by) in the streets, which Gringoire was fond of doing, there

is no better disposition than ignorance of where one is going to sleep.
So he walked along, very thoughtfully, behind the young girl, who
hastened her pace and made her goat trot as she saw the bourgeois returning
home and the taverns—the only shops which had been open that day—
closing.
“After all,” he half thought to himself, “she must lodge somewhere;
gypsies have kindly hearts. Who knows?—”
And in the points of suspense which he placed after this reticence in his
mind, there lay I know not what flattering ideas.
Meanwhile, from time to time, as he passed the last groups of bourgeois
closing their doors, he caught some scraps of their conversation, which
broke the thread of his pleasant hypotheses.
Now it was two old men accosting each other.
“Do you know that it is cold, Master Thibaut Fernicle?” (Gringoire had
been aware of this since the beginning of the winter.)
“Yes, indeed, Master Boniface Disome! Are we going to have a winter
such as we had three years ago, in ’80, when wood cost eight sous the
measure?”
“Bah! that’s nothing, Master Thibaut, compared with the winter of 1407,
when it froze from St. Martin’s Day until Candlemas! and so cold that the
pen of the registrar of the parliament froze every three words, in the Grand
Chamber! which interrupted the registration of justice.”
Further on there were two female neighbors at their windows, holding
candles, which the fog caused to sputter.
“Has your husband told you about the mishap, Mademoiselle la
Boudraque?”
“No. What is it, Mademoiselle Turquant?”
“The horse of M. Gilles Godin, the notary at the Châtelet, took fright at
the Flemings and their procession, and overturned Master Philippe Avrillot,
lay monk of the Célestins.”
“Really?”
“Actually.”
“A bourgeois horse! ’tis rather too much! If it had been a cavalry horse,
well and good!”

And the windows were closed. But Gringoire had lost the thread of his
ideas, nevertheless.
Fortunately, he speedily found it again, and he knotted it together without
difficulty, thanks to the gypsy, thanks to Djali, who still walked in front of
him; two fine, delicate, and charming creatures, whose tiny feet, beautiful
forms, and graceful manners he was engaged in admiring, almost confusing
them in his contemplation; believing them to be both young girls, from their
intelligence and good friendship; regarding them both as goats,—so far as
the lightness, agility, and dexterity of their walk were concerned.
But the streets were becoming blacker and more deserted every moment.
The curfew had sounded long ago, and it was only at rare intervals now that
they encountered a passer-by in the street, or a light in the windows.
Gringoire had become involved, in his pursuit of the gypsy, in that
inextricable labyrinth of alleys, squares, and closed courts which surround
the ancient sepulchre of the Saints-Innocents, and which resembles a ball of
thread tangled by a cat. “Here are streets which possess but little logic!”
said Gringoire, lost in the thousands of circuits which returned upon
themselves incessantly, but where the young girl pursued a road which
seemed familiar to her, without hesitation and with a step which became
ever more rapid. As for him, he would have been utterly ignorant of his
situation had he not espied, in passing, at the turn of a street, the octagonal
mass of the pillory of the fish markets, the open-work summit of which
threw its black, fretted outlines clearly upon a window which was still
lighted in the Rue Verdelet.
The young girl’s attention had been attracted to him for the last few
moments; she had repeatedly turned her head towards him with uneasiness;
she had even once come to a standstill, and taking advantage of a ray of
light which escaped from a half-open bakery to survey him intently, from
head to foot, then, having cast this glance, Gringoire had seen her make that
little pout which he had already noticed, after which she passed on.
This little pout had furnished Gringoire with food for thought. There was
certainly both disdain and mockery in that graceful grimace. So he dropped
his head, began to count the paving-stones, and to follow the young girl at a
little greater distance, when, at the turn of a street, which had caused him to
lose sight of her, he heard her utter a piercing cry.
He hastened his steps.

The street was full of shadows. Nevertheless, a twist of tow soaked in oil,
which burned in a cage at the feet of the Holy Virgin at the street corner,
permitted Gringoire to make out the gypsy struggling in the arms of two
men, who were endeavoring to stifle her cries. The poor little goat, in great
alarm, lowered his horns and bleated.
“Help! gentlemen of the watch!” shouted Gringoire, and advanced
bravely. One of the men who held the young girl turned towards him. It was
the formidable visage of Quasimodo.
Gringoire did not take to flight, but neither did he advance another step.
Quasimodo came up to him, tossed him four paces away on the pavement
with a backward turn of the hand, and plunged rapidly into the gloom,
bearing the young girl folded across one arm like a silken scarf. His
companion followed him, and the poor goat ran after them all, bleating
plaintively.
“Murder! murder!” shrieked the unhappy gypsy.
“Halt, rascals, and yield me that wench!” suddenly shouted in a voice of
thunder, a cavalier who appeared suddenly from a neighboring square.
It was a captain of the king’s archers, armed from head to foot, with his
sword in his hand.
He tore the gypsy from the arms of the dazed Quasimodo, threw her
across his saddle, and at the moment when the terrible hunchback,
recovering from his surprise, rushed upon him to regain his prey, fifteen or
sixteen archers, who followed their captain closely, made their appearance,
with their two-edged swords in their fists. It was a squad of the king’s
police, which was making the rounds, by order of Messire Robert
d’Estouteville, guard of the provostship of Paris.
Quasimodo was surrounded, seized, garroted; he roared, he foamed at the
mouth, he bit; and had it been broad daylight, there is no doubt that his face
alone, rendered more hideous by wrath, would have put the entire squad to
flight. But by night he was deprived of his most formidable weapon, his
ugliness.
His companion had disappeared during the struggle.
The gypsy gracefully raised herself upright upon the officer’s saddle,
placed both hands upon the young man’s shoulders, and gazed fixedly at
him for several seconds, as though enchanted with his good looks and with

the aid which he had just rendered her. Then breaking silence first, she said
to him, making her sweet voice still sweeter than usual,—
“What is your name, monsieur le gendarme?”
“Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers, at your service, my beauty!” replied
the officer, drawing himself up.
“Thanks,” said she.
And while Captain Phœbus was turning up his moustache in Burgundian
fashion, she slipped from the horse, like an arrow falling to earth, and fled.
A flash of lightning would have vanished less quickly.
“Nombrill of the Pope!” said the captain, causing Quasimodo’s straps to
be drawn tighter, “I should have preferred to keep the wench.”
“What would you have, captain?” said one gendarme. “The warbler has
fled, and the bat remains.”

CHAPTER V.
RESULT OF THE DANGERS.

Gringoire, thoroughly stunned by his fall, remained on the pavement in
front of the Holy Virgin at the street corner. Little by little, he regained his
senses; at first, for several minutes, he was floating in a sort of half-
somnolent revery, which was not without its charm, in which æriel figures
of the gypsy and her goat were coupled with Quasimodo’s heavy fist. This
state lasted but a short time. A decidedly vivid sensation of cold in the part
of his body which was in contact with the pavement, suddenly aroused him
and caused his spirit to return to the surface.
“Whence comes this chill?” he said abruptly, to himself. He then
perceived that he was lying half in the middle of the gutter.
“That devil of a hunchbacked cyclops!” he muttered between his teeth;
and he tried to rise. But he was too much dazed and bruised; he was forced
to remain where he was. Moreover, his hand was tolerably free; he stopped
up his nose and resigned himself.
“The mud of Paris,” he said to himself—for decidedly he thought that he
was sure that the gutter would prove his refuge for the night; and what can
one do in a refuge, except dream?—“the mud of Paris is particularly
stinking; it must contain a great deal of volatile and nitric salts. That,
moreover, is the opinion of Master Nicholas Flamel, and of the alchemists
—”
The word alchemists suddenly suggested to his mind the idea of
Archdeacon Claude Frollo. He recalled the violent scene which he had just
witnessed in part; that the gypsy was struggling with 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 said to himself. And on that fact and that basis he began to
construct a fantastic edifice of hypothesis, that card-castle of philosophers;

then, suddenly returning once more to reality, “Come! I’m freezing!” he
ejaculated.
The place was, in fact, becoming less and less tenable. Each molecule of
the gutter bore away a molecule of heat radiating from Gringoire’s loins,
and the equilibrium between the temperature of his body and the
temperature of the brook, began to be established in rough fashion.
Quite a different annoyance suddenly assailed him. A group of children,
those little bare-footed savages who have always roamed the pavements of
Paris under the eternal name of gamins, and who, when we were also
children ourselves, threw stones at all of us in the afternoon, when we came
out of school, because our trousers were not torn—a swarm of these young
scamps rushed towards the square where Gringoire lay, with shouts and
laughter which seemed to pay but little heed to the sleep of the neighbors.
They were dragging after them some sort of hideous sack; and the noise of
their wooden shoes alone would have roused the dead. Gringoire who was
not quite dead yet, half raised himself.
“Ohé, Hennequin Dandèche! Ohé, Jehan Pincebourde!” they shouted in
deafening tones, “old Eustache Moubon, the merchant at the corner, has just
died. We’ve got his straw pallet, we’re going to have a bonfire out of it. It’s
the turn of the Flemish to-day!”
And behold, they flung the pallet directly upon Gringoire, beside whom
they had arrived, without espying him. At the same time, one of them took a
handful of straw and set off to light it at the wick of the good Virgin.
“S’death!” growled Gringoire, “am I going to be too warm now?”
It was a critical moment. He was caught between fire and water; he made
a superhuman effort, the effort of a counterfeiter of money who is on the
point of being boiled, and who seeks to escape. He rose to his feet, flung
aside the straw pallet upon the street urchins, and fled.
“Holy Virgin!” shrieked the children; “’tis the merchant’s ghost!”
And they fled in their turn.
The straw mattress remained master of the field. Belleforêt, Father Le
Juge, and Corrozet affirm that it was picked up on the morrow, with great
pomp, by the clergy of the quarter, and borne to the treasury of the church
of Saint Opportune, where the sacristan, even as late as 1789, earned a
tolerably handsome revenue out of the great miracle of the Statue of the

Virgin at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil, which had, by its mere
presence, on the memorable night between the sixth and seventh of January,
1482, exorcised the defunct Eustache Moubon, who, in order to play a trick
on the devil, had at his death maliciously concealed his soul in his straw
pallet.

CHAPTER VI.
THE BROKEN JUG.

After having run for some time at the top of his speed, without knowing
whither, knocking his head against many a street corner, leaping many a
gutter, traversing many an alley, many a court, many a square, seeking
flight and passage through all the meanderings of the ancient passages of
the Halles, exploring in his panic terror what the fine Latin of the maps calls
tota via, cheminum et viaria, our poet suddenly halted for lack of breath in
the first place, and in the second, because he had been collared, after a
fashion, by a dilemma which had just occurred to his mind. “It strikes me,
Master Pierre Gringoire,” he said to himself, placing his finger to his brow,
“that you are running like a madman. The little scamps are no less afraid of
you than you are of them. It strikes me, I say, that you heard the clatter of
their wooden shoes fleeing southward, while you were fleeing northward.
Now, one of two things, either they have taken flight, and the pallet, which
they must have forgotten in their terror, is precisely that hospitable bed in
search of which you have been running ever since morning, and which
madame the Virgin miraculously sends you, in order to recompense you for
having made a morality in her honor, accompanied by triumphs and
mummeries; or the children have not taken flight, and in that case they have
put the brand to the pallet, and that is precisely the good fire which you
need to cheer, dry, and warm you. In either case, good fire or good bed, that
straw pallet is a gift from heaven. The blessed Virgin Marie who stands at
the corner of the Rue Mauconseil, could only have made Eustache Moubon
die for that express purpose; and it is folly on your part to flee thus zigzag,
like a Picard before a Frenchman, leaving behind you what you seek before
you; and you are a fool!”
Then he retraced his steps, and feeling his way and searching, with his
nose to the wind and his ears on the alert, he tried to find the blessed pallet

again, but in vain. There was nothing to be found but intersections of
houses, closed courts, and crossings of streets, in the midst of which he
hesitated and doubted incessantly, being more perplexed and entangled in
this medley of streets than he would have been even in the labyrinth of the
Hôtel des Tournelles. At length he lost patience, and exclaimed solemnly:
“Cursed be cross roads! ’tis the devil who has made them in the shape of his
pitchfork!”
This exclamation afforded him a little solace, and a sort of reddish
reflection which he caught sight of at that moment, at the extremity of a
long and narrow lane, completed the elevation of his moral tone. “God be
praised!” said he, “There it is yonder! There is my pallet burning.” And
comparing himself to the pilot who suffers shipwreck by night, “Salve,” he
added piously, “salve, maris stella!”
Did he address this fragment of litany to the Holy Virgin, or to the pallet?
We are utterly unable to say.
He had taken but a few steps in the long street, which sloped downwards,
was unpaved, and more and more muddy and steep, when he noticed a very
singular thing. It was not deserted; here and there along its extent crawled
certain vague and formless masses, all directing their course towards the
light which flickered at the end of the street, like those heavy insects which
drag along by night, from blade to blade of grass, towards the shepherd’s
fire.
Nothing renders one so adventurous as not being able to feel the place
where one’s pocket is situated. Gringoire continued to advance, and had
soon joined that one of the forms which dragged along most indolently,
behind the others. On drawing near, he perceived that it was nothing else
than a wretched legless cripple in a bowl, who was hopping along on his
two hands like a wounded field-spider which has but two legs left. At the
moment when he passed close to this species of spider with a human
countenance, it raised towards him a lamentable voice: “La buona mancia,
signor! la buona mancia!”[10]
“Deuce take you,” said Gringoire, “and me with you, if I know what you
mean!”
And he passed on.
He overtook another of these itinerant masses, and examined it. It was an
impotent man, both halt and crippled, and halt and crippled to such a degree

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 liked noble and classical comparisons, compared him in thought to the
living tripod of Vulcan.
This living tripod saluted him as he passed, but stopping his hat on a
level with Gringoire’s chin, like a shaving dish, while he shouted in the
latter’s ears: “Señor cabellero, para comprar un pedaso de pan!”[11]
“It appears,” said Gringoire, “that this one can also talk; but ’tis a rude
language, and he is more fortunate than I if he understands it.” Then,
smiting his brow, in a sudden transition of ideas: “By the way, what the
deuce did they mean this morning with their Esmeralda?”
He was minded to augment his pace, but for the third time something
barred his way. This something or, rather, some one was a blind man, a little
blind fellow with a bearded, Jewish face, who, rowing away in the space
about him with a stick, and towed by a large dog, droned through his nose
with a Hungarian accent: “Facitote caritatem!”
“Well, now,” said Gringoire, “here’s one at last who speaks a Christian
tongue. I must have a very charitable aspect, since they ask alms of me in
the present lean condition of my purse. My friend,” and he turned towards
the blind man, “I sold my last shirt last week; 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 upon the blind man, and pursued his way.
But the blind man began to increase his stride at the same time; and,
behold! the cripple and the legless man, in his bowl, came up on their side
in great haste, and with great clamor of bowl and crutches, upon the
pavement. Then all three, jostling each other at poor Gringoire’s heels,
began to sing their song to him,—
“Caritatem!” chanted the blind man.
“La buona mancia!” chanted the cripple in the bowl.
And the lame man took up the musical phrase by repeating: “Un pedaso
de pan!”
Gringoire stopped up his ears. “Oh, tower of Babel!” he exclaimed.
He set out to run. The blind man ran! The lame man ran! The cripple in
the bowl ran!

And then, in proportion as he plunged deeper into the street, cripples in
bowls, blind men and lame men, swarmed about him, and men with one
arm, and with one eye, and the leprous with their sores, some emerging
from little streets adjacent, some from the air-holes of cellars, howling,
bellowing, yelping, all limping and halting, all flinging themselves towards
the light, and humped up in the mire, like snails after a shower.
Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not knowing very
well what was to become of him, marched along in terror among them,
turning out for the lame, stepping over the cripples in bowls, with his feet
imbedded in that ant-hill of lame men, like the English captain who got
caught in the quicksand of a swarm of crabs.
The idea occurred to him of making an effort to retrace his steps. But it
was too late. This whole legion had closed in behind him, and his three
beggars held him fast. So he proceeded, impelled both by this irresistible
flood, by fear, and by a vertigo which converted all this into a sort of
horrible dream.
At last he reached the end of the street. It opened upon an immense place,
where a thousand scattered lights flickered in the confused mists of night.
Gringoire flew thither, hoping to escape, by the swiftness of his legs, from
the three infirm spectres who had clutched him.
“Onde vas, hombre?” (Where are you going, my man?) cried the cripple,
flinging away his crutches, and running after him with the best legs that
ever traced a geometrical step upon the pavements of Paris.
In the meantime the legless man, erect upon his feet, crowned Gringoire
with his heavy iron bowl, and the blind man glared in his face with flaming
eyes!
“Where am I?” said the terrified poet.
“In the Court of Miracles,” replied a fourth spectre, who had accosted
them.
“Upon my soul,” resumed Gringoire, “I certainly do behold the blind
who see, and the lame who walk, but where is the Saviour?”
They replied by a burst of sinister laughter.
The poor poet cast his eyes about him. It was, in truth, that redoubtable
Cour des Miracles, whither an honest man had never penetrated at such an
hour; the magic circle where the officers of the Châtelet and the sergeants of

the provostship, who ventured thither, disappeared in morsels; a city of
thieves, a hideous wart on the face of Paris; a sewer, from which escaped
every morning, and whither returned every night to crouch, that stream of
vices, of mendicancy and vagabondage which always overflows in the
streets of capitals; a monstrous hive, to which returned at nightfall, with
their booty, all the drones of the social order; a lying hospital where the
bohemian, the disfrocked monk, the ruined scholar, the ne’er-do-wells of all
nations, Spaniards, Italians, Germans,—of all religions, Jews, Christians,
Mahometans, idolaters, covered with painted sores, beggars by day, were
transformed by night into brigands; an immense dressing-room, in a word,
where, at that epoch, the actors of that eternal comedy, which theft,
prostitution, and murder play upon the pavements of Paris, dressed and
undressed.
It was a vast place, irregular and badly paved, like all the squares of Paris
at that date. Fires, around which swarmed strange groups, blazed here and
there. Every one was going, coming, and shouting. Shrill laughter was to be
heard, the wailing of children, the voices of women. The hands and heads of
this throng, black against the luminous background, outlined against it a
thousand eccentric gestures. At times, upon the ground, where trembled the
light of the fires, mingled with large, indefinite shadows, one could behold
a dog passing, which resembled a man, a man who resembled a dog. The
limits of races and species seemed effaced in this city, as in a
pandemonium. Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health, maladies, all seemed
to be in common among these people; all went together, they mingled,
confounded, superposed; each one there participated in all.
The poor and flickering flames of the fire permitted Gringoire to
distinguish, amid his trouble, all around the immense place, a hideous frame
of ancient houses, whose wormeaten, shrivelled, stunted façades, each
pierced with one or two lighted attic windows, seemed to him, in the
darkness, like enormous heads of old women, ranged in a circle, monstrous
and crabbed, winking as they looked on at the Witches’ Sabbath.
It was like a new world, unknown, unheard of, misshapen, creeping,
swarming, fantastic.
Gringoire, more and more terrified, clutched by the three beggars as by
three pairs of tongs, dazed by a throng of other faces which frothed and
yelped around him, unhappy Gringoire endeavored to summon his presence

of mind, in order 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 everything, wavering between what he saw and what he felt, he
put to himself this unanswerable question,—
“If I exist, does this exist? if this exists, do I exist?”
At that moment, a distinct cry arose in the buzzing throng which
surrounded him, “Let’s take him to the king! let’s take him to the king!”
“Holy Virgin!” murmured Gringoire, “the king here must be a ram.”
“To the king! to the king!” repeated all voices.
They dragged him off. Each vied with the other in laying his claws upon
him. But the three beggars did not loose their hold and tore him from the
rest, howling, “He belongs to us!”
The poet’s already sickly doublet yielded its last sigh in this struggle.
While traversing the horrible place, his vertigo vanished. After taking a
few steps, the sentiment of reality returned to him. He began to become
accustomed to the atmosphere of the place. At the first moment there had
arisen from his poet’s head, or, simply and prosaically, from his empty
stomach, a mist, a vapor, so to speak, which, spreading between objects and
himself, permitted him to catch a glimpse of them only in the incoherent
fog of nightmare,—in those shadows of dreams which distort every outline,
agglomerating objects into unwieldy groups, dilating things into chimeras,
and men into phantoms. Little by little, this hallucination was succeeded by
a less bewildered and exaggerating view. Reality made its way to the light
around him, struck his eyes, struck his feet, and demolished, bit by bit, all
that frightful poetry with which he had, at first, believed himself to be
surrounded. He was forced to perceive that he was not walking in the Styx,
but in mud, that he was elbowed not by demons, but by thieves; that it was
not his soul which was in question, but his life (since he lacked that
precious conciliator, which places itself so effectually between the bandit
and the honest man—a purse). In short, on examining the orgy more
closely, and with more coolness, he fell from the witches’ sabbath to the
dram-shop.
The Cour des Miracles was, in fact, merely a dram-shop; but a brigand’s
dram-shop, reddened quite as much with blood as with wine.

The spectacle which presented itself to his eyes, when his ragged escort
finally deposited him at the end of his trip, was not fitted to bear him back
to poetry, even to the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and
brutal reality of the tavern. Were we not in the fifteenth century, we would
say that Gringoire had descended from Michael Angelo to Callot.
Around a great fire which burned on a large, circular flagstone, the
flames of which had heated red-hot the legs of a tripod, which was empty
for the moment, some wormeaten tables were placed, here and there,
haphazard, no lackey of a geometrical turn having deigned to adjust their
parallelism, or to see to it that they did not make too unusual angles. Upon
these tables gleamed several dripping pots of wine and beer, and round
these pots were grouped many bacchic visages, purple with the fire and the
wine. There was a man with a huge belly and a jovial face, noisily kissing a
woman of the town, thickset and brawny. There was a sort of sham soldier,
a “naquois,” as the slang expression runs, who was whistling as he undid
the bandages from his fictitious wound, and removing the numbness from
his sound and vigorous knee, which had been swathed since morning in a
thousand ligatures. On the other hand, there was a wretched fellow,
preparing with celandine and beef’s blood, his “leg of God,” for the next
day. Two tables further on, a palmer, with his pilgrim’s costume complete,
was practising the lament of the Holy Queen, not forgetting the drone and
the nasal drawl. Further on, a young scamp was taking a lesson in epilepsy
from an old pretender, who was instructing him in the art of foaming at the
mouth, by chewing a morsel of soap. Beside him, a man with the dropsy
was getting rid of his swelling, and making four or five female thieves, who
were disputing at the same table, over a child who had been stolen that
evening, hold their noses. All circumstances which, two centuries later,
“seemed so ridiculous to the court,” as Sauval says, “that they served as a
pastime to the king, and as an introduction to the royal ballet of Night,
divided into four parts and danced on the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon.”
“Never,” adds an eye witness of 1653, “have the sudden metamorphoses of
the Court of Miracles been more happily presented. Benserade prepared us
for it by some very gallant verses.”
Loud laughter everywhere, and obscene songs. Each one held his own
course, carping and swearing, without listening to his neighbor. Pots
clinked, and quarrels sprang up at the shock of the pots, and the broken pots
made rents in the rags.

A big dog, seated on his tail, gazed at the fire. Some children were
mingled in this orgy. The stolen child wept and cried. Another, a big boy
four years of age, seated with legs dangling, upon a bench that was too high
for him, before a table that reached to his chin, and uttering not a word. A
third, gravely spreading out upon the table with his finger, the melted tallow
which dripped from a candle. Last of all, a little fellow crouching in the
mud, almost lost in a cauldron, which he was scraping with a tile, and from
which he was evoking a sound that would have made Stradivarius swoon.
Near the fire was a hogshead, and on the hogshead a beggar. This was the
king on his throne.
The three who had Gringoire in their clutches led him in front of this
hogshead, and the entire bacchanal rout fell silent for a moment, with the
exception of the cauldron inhabited by the child.
Gringoire dared neither breathe nor raise his eyes.
“Hombre, quita tu sombrero!” said one of the three knaves, in whose
grasp he was, and, before he had comprehended the meaning, the other had
snatched his hat—a wretched headgear, it is true, but still good on a sunny
day or when there was but little rain. Gringoire sighed.
Meanwhile the king addressed him, from the summit of his cask,—
“Who is this rogue?”
Gringoire shuddered. That voice, although accentuated by menace,
recalled to him another voice, which, that very morning, had dealt the
deathblow to his mystery, by drawling, nasally, in the midst of the audience,
“Charity, please!” He raised his head. It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.
Clopin Trouillefou, arrayed in his royal insignia, wore neither one rag
more nor one rag less. The sore upon his arm had already disappeared. He
held in his hand one of those whips made of thongs of white leather, which
police sergeants then used to repress the crowd, and which were called
boullayes. On his head he wore a sort of headgear, bound round and closed
at the top. But it was difficult to make out whether it was a child’s cap or a
king’s crown, the two things bore so strong a resemblance to each other.
Meanwhile Gringoire, without knowing why, had regained some hope,
on recognizing in the King of the Cour des Miracles his accursed mendicant
of the Grand Hall.

“Master,” stammered he; “monseigneur—sire—how ought I to address
you?” he said at length, having reached the culminating point of his
crescendo, and knowing neither how to mount higher, nor to descend again.
“Monseigneur, his majesty, or comrade, call me what you please. But
make haste. What have you to say in your own defence?”
“In your own defence?” thought Gringoire, “that displeases me.” He
resumed, stuttering, “I am he, who this morning—”
“By the devil’s claws!” interrupted Clopin, “your name, knave, and
nothing more. Listen. You are in the presence of three powerful sovereigns:
myself, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Thunes, successor to the Grand Coësre,
supreme suzerain of the Realm of Argot; Mathias Hunyadi Spicali, Duke of
Egypt and of Bohemia, the old yellow fellow whom you see yonder, with a
dish clout round his head; Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat
fellow who is not listening to us but caressing a wench. We are your judges.
You have entered the Kingdom of Argot, without being an argotier; 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
folks,—a thief, a beggar, or a vagabond. Are you anything of that sort?
Justify yourself; announce your titles.”
“Alas!” said Gringoire, “I have not that honor. I am the author—”
“That is sufficient,” resumed Trouillefou, without permitting him to
finish. “You are going to be hanged. ’Tis a very simple matter, gentlemen
and honest bourgeois! as you treat our people in your abode, so we treat
you in ours! The law which you apply to vagabonds, vagabonds apply to
you. ’Tis your fault if it is harsh. One really must behold the grimace of an
honest man above the hempen collar now and then; that renders the thing
honorable. Come, friend, divide your rags gayly among these damsels. I am
going to have you hanged to amuse the vagabonds, and you are to give
them your purse to drink your health. If you have any mummery to go
through with, there’s a very good God the Father in that mortar yonder, in
stone, which we stole from Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs. You have four minutes
in which to fling your soul at his head.”
The harangue was formidable.
“Well said, upon my soul! Clopin Trouillefou preaches like the Holy
Father the Pope!” exclaimed the Emperor of Galilee, smashing his pot in
order to prop up his table.

“Messeigneurs, emperors, and kings,” said Gringoire coolly (for I know
not how, firmness had returned to him, and he spoke with resolution),
“don’t think of such a thing; my name is Pierre Gringoire. I am the poet
whose morality was presented this morning in the grand hall of the Courts.”
“Ah! so it was you, master!” said Clopin. “I was there, par la tête Dieu!
Well! comrade, is that any reason, because you bored us to death this
morning, that you should not be hung this evening?”
“I shall find difficulty in getting out of it,” said Gringoire to himself.
Nevertheless, he made one more effort: “I don’t see why poets are not
classed with vagabonds,” said he. “Vagabond, Æsopus certainly was;
Homerus was a beggar; Mercurius was a thief—”
Clopin interrupted him: “I believe that you are trying to blarney us with
your jargon. Zounds! let yourself be hung, and don’t kick up such a row
over it!”
“Pardon me, monseigneur, the King of Thunes,” replied Gringoire,
disputing the ground foot by foot. “It is worth trouble—One moment!—
Listen to me—You are not going to condemn me without having heard
me”—
His unlucky voice was, in fact, drowned in the uproar which rose around
him. The little boy scraped away at his cauldron with more spirit than ever;
and, to crown all, an old woman had just placed on the tripod a frying-pan
of grease, which hissed away on the fire with a noise similar to the cry of a
troop of children in pursuit of a masker.
In the meantime, Clopin Trouillefou appeared to hold a momentary
conference with the Duke of Egypt, and the Emperor of Galilee, who was
completely drunk. Then he shouted shrilly: “Silence!” and, as the cauldron
and the frying-pan did not heed him, and continued their duet, he jumped
down from his hogshead, gave a kick to the boiler, which rolled ten paces
away bearing the child with it, a kick to the frying-pan, which upset in the
fire with all its grease, and gravely remounted his throne, without troubling
himself about the stifled tears of the child, or the grumbling of the old
woman, whose supper was wasting away in a fine white flame.
Trouillefou made a sign, and the duke, the emperor, and the passed
masters of pickpockets, and the isolated robbers, came and ranged
themselves around him in a horseshoe, of which Gringoire, still roughly
held by the body, formed the centre. It was a semicircle of rags, tatters,

tinsel, pitchforks, axes, legs staggering with intoxication, huge, bare arms,
faces sordid, dull, and stupid. In the midst of this Round Table of beggary,
Clopin Trouillefou,—as the doge of this senate, as the king of this peerage,
as the pope of this conclave,—dominated; first by virtue of the height of his
hogshead, and next by virtue of an indescribable, haughty, fierce, and
formidable air, which caused his eyes to flash, and corrected in his savage
profile the bestial type of the race of vagabonds. One would have
pronounced him a boar amid a herd of swine.
“Listen,” said he to Gringoire, fondling his misshapen chin with his
horny hand; “I don’t see why you should not be hung. It is true that it
appears to be repugnant to you; and it is very natural, for you bourgeois are
not accustomed to it. You form for yourselves a great idea of the thing.
After all, we don’t wish you any harm. Here is a means of extricating
yourself from your predicament for the moment. Will you become one of
us?”
The reader can judge of the effect which this proposition produced upon
Gringoire, who beheld life slipping away from him, and who was beginning
to lose his hold upon it. He clutched at it again with energy.
“Certainly I will, and right heartily,” said he.
“Do you consent,” resumed Clopin, “to enroll yourself among the people
of the knife?”
“Of the knife, precisely,” responded Gringoire.
“You recognize yourself as a member of the free bourgeoisie?”[12]
added the King of Thunes.
“Of the free bourgeoisie.”
“Subject of the Kingdom of Argot?”
“Of the Kingdom of Argot[13].”
“A vagabond?”
“A vagabond.”
“In your soul?”
“In my soul.”
“I must call your attention to the fact,” continued the king, “that you will
be hung all the same.”
“The devil!” said the poet.

“Only,” continued Clopin imperturbably, “you will be hung later on, with
more ceremony, at the expense of the good city of Paris, on a handsome
stone gibbet, and by honest men. That is a consolation.”
“Just so,” responded Gringoire.
“There are other advantages. In your quality of a high-toned sharper, you
will not have to pay the taxes on mud, or the poor, or lanterns, to which the
bourgeois of Paris are subject.”
“So be it,” said the poet. “I agree. I am a vagabond, a thief, a sharper, a
man of the knife, anything you please; and I am all that already, monsieur,
King of Thunes, for I am a philosopher; et omnia in philosophia, omnes in
philosopho continentur,—all things are contained in philosophy, all men in
the philosopher, as you know.”
The King of Thunes scowled.
“What do you take me for, my friend? What Hungarian Jew patter are
you jabbering at us? I don’t know Hebrew. One isn’t a Jew because one is a
bandit. I don’t even steal any longer. I’m above that; I kill. Cut-throat, yes;
cutpurse, no.”
Gringoire tried to slip in some excuse between these curt words, which
wrath rendered more and more jerky.
“I ask your pardon, monseigneur. It is not Hebrew; ’tis Latin.”
“I tell you,” resumed Clopin angrily, “that I’m not a Jew, and that I’ll
have you hung, belly of the synagogue, like that little shopkeeper of Judea,
who is by your side, and whom I entertain strong hopes of seeing nailed to a
counter one of these days, like the counterfeit coin that he is!”
So saying, he pointed his finger at the little, bearded Hungarian Jew who
had accosted Gringoire with his facitote caritatem, and who, understanding
no other language beheld with surprise the King of Thunes’s ill-humor
overflow upon him.
At length Monsieur Clopin calmed down.
“So you will be a vagabond, you knave?” he said to our poet.
“Of course,” replied the poet.
“Willing is not all,” said the surly Clopin; “good will doesn’t put one
onion the more into the soup, and ’tis good for nothing except to go to
Paradise with; now, Paradise and the thieves’ band are two different things.

In order to be received among the thieves,[14] you must prove that you are
good for something, and for that purpose, you must search the manikin.”
“I’ll search anything you like,” said Gringoire.
Clopin made a sign. Several thieves detached themselves from the circle,
and returned a moment later. They brought two thick posts, terminated at
their lower extremities in spreading timber supports, which made them
stand readily upon the ground; to 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 beholding rise before him, in a
twinkling. Nothing was lacking, not even the rope, which swung gracefully
over the cross-beam.
“What are they going to do?” Gringoire asked himself with some
uneasiness. A sound of bells, which he heard at that moment, put an end to
his anxiety; it was a stuffed manikin, which the vagabonds were suspending
by the neck from the rope, a sort of scarecrow dressed in red, and so hung
with mule-bells and larger bells, that one might have tricked out thirty
Castilian mules with them. These thousand tiny bells quivered for some
time with the vibration of the rope, then gradually died away, and finally
became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility
by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the
hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool placed
beneath the manikin,—“Climb up there.”
“Death of the devil!” objected Gringoire; “I shall break my neck. Your
stool limps like one of Martial’s distiches; it has one hexameter leg and one
pentameter leg.”
“Climb!” repeated Clopin.
Gringoire mounted the stool, and succeeded, not without some
oscillations of head and arms, in regaining his centre of gravity.
“Now,” went on the King of Thunes, “twist your right foot round your
left leg, and rise on the tip of your left foot.”
“Monseigneur,” said Gringoire, “so you absolutely insist on my breaking
some one of my limbs?”
Clopin tossed his head.
“Hark ye, my friend, you talk too much. Here’s the gist of the matter in
two words: you are to rise on tiptoe, as I tell you; in that way you will be

able to reach the pocket of the manikin, you will rummage it, you will pull
out the purse that is there,—and if you do all this without our hearing the
sound of a bell, all is well: you shall be a vagabond. All we shall then have
to do, will be to thrash you soundly for the space of a week.”
“Ventre-Dieu! I will be careful,” said Gringoire. “And suppose I do make
the bells sound?”
“Then you will be hanged. Do you understand?”
“I don’t understand at all,” replied Gringoire.
“Listen, once more. You are to search the manikin, and take away its
purse; if a single bell stirs during the operation, you will be hung. Do you
understand that?”
“Good,” said Gringoire; “I understand that. And then?”
“If you succeed in removing the purse without our hearing the bells, you
are a vagabond, and you will be thrashed for eight consecutive days. You
understand now, no doubt?”
“No, monseigneur; I no longer understand. Where is the advantage to
me? hanged in one case, cudgelled in the other?”
“And a vagabond,” resumed Clopin, “and a vagabond; is that nothing? It
is for your interest that we should beat you, in order to harden you to
blows.”
“Many thanks,” replied the poet.
“Come, make haste,” said the king, stamping upon his cask, which
resounded like a huge drum! “Search the manikin, and let there be an end to
this! I warn you for the last time, that if I hear a single bell, you will take
the place of the manikin.”
The band of thieves applauded Clopin’s words, and arranged themselves
in a circle round the gibbet, with a laugh so pitiless that Gringoire perceived
that he amused them too much not to have everything to fear from them. No
hope was left for him, accordingly, unless it were the slight chance of
succeeding in the formidable operation which was imposed upon him; he
decided to risk it, but it was not without first having addressed a fervent
prayer to the manikin he was about to plunder, and who would have been
easier to move to pity than the vagabonds. These myriad bells, with their
little copper tongues, seemed to him like the mouths of so many asps, open
and ready to sting and to hiss.

“Oh!” he said, in a very low voice, “is it possible that my life depends on
the slightest vibration of the least of these bells? Oh!” he added, with
clasped hands, “bells, do not ring, hand-bells do not clang, mule-bells do
not quiver!”
He made one more attempt upon Trouillefou.
“And if there should come a gust of wind?”
“You will be hanged,” replied the other, without hesitation.
Perceiving that no respite, nor reprieve, nor subterfuge was possible, he
bravely decided upon his course of action; he wound his right foot round his
left leg, raised himself on his left foot, and stretched out his arm: but at the
moment when his hand touched the manikin, his body, which was now
supported upon one leg only, wavered on the stool which had but three; he
made an involuntary effort to support himself by the manikin, lost his
balance, and fell heavily to the ground, deafened by the fatal vibration of
the thousand bells of the manikin, which, yielding to the impulse imparted
by his hand, described first a rotary motion, and then swayed majestically
between the two posts.
“Malediction!” he cried as he fell, and remained as though dead, with his
face to the earth.
Meanwhile, he heard the dreadful peal above his head, the diabolical
laughter of the vagabonds, and the voice of Trouillefou saying,—
“Pick me up that knave, and hang him without ceremony.” He rose. They
had already detached the manikin to make room for him.
The thieves made him mount the stool, Clopin came to him, passed the
rope about his neck, and, tapping him on the shoulder,—
“Adieu, my friend. You can’t escape now, even if you digested with the
pope’s guts.”
The word “Mercy!” died away upon Gringoire’s lips. He cast his eyes
about him; but there was no hope: all were laughing.
“Bellevigne de l’Étoile,” said the King of Thunes to an enormous
vagabond, who stepped out from the ranks, “climb upon the cross beam.”
Bellevigne de l’Étoile nimbly mounted the transverse beam, and in
another minute, Gringoire, on raising his eyes, beheld him, with terror,
seated upon the beam above his head.

“Now,” resumed Clopin Trouillefou, “as soon as I clap my hands, you,
Andry the Red, will fling the stool to the ground with a blow of your knee;
you, François Chanteprune, will cling to the feet of the rascal; and you,
Bellevigne, will fling yourself on his shoulders; and all three at once, do
you hear?”
Gringoire shuddered.
“Are you ready?” said Clopin Trouillefou to the three thieves, who held
themselves in readiness to fall upon Gringoire. A moment of horrible
suspense ensued for the poor victim, during which Clopin tranquilly thrust
into the fire with the tip of his foot, some bits of vine shoots which the
flame had not caught. “Are you ready?” he repeated, and opened his hands
to clap. One second more and all would have been over.
But he paused, as though struck by a sudden thought.
“One moment!” said he; “I forgot! It is our custom not to hang a man
without inquiring whether there is any woman who wants him. Comrade,
this is your last resource. You must wed either a female vagabond or the
noose.”
This law of the vagabonds, singular as it may strike the reader, remains
to-day written out at length, in ancient English legislation. (See Burington’s
Observations.)
Gringoire breathed again. This was the second time that he had returned
to life within an hour. So he did not dare to trust to it too implicitly.
“Holà!” cried Clopin, mounted once more upon his cask, “holà! women,
females, is there among you, from the sorceress to her cat, a wench who
wants this rascal? Holà, Colette la Charonne! Elisabeth 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 wants him?”
Gringoire, no doubt, was not very appetizing in this miserable condition.
The female vagabonds did not seem to be much affected by the proposition.
The unhappy wretch heard them answer: “No! no! hang him; there’ll be the
more fun for us all!”
Nevertheless, three emerged from the throng and came to smell of him.
The first was a big wench, with a square face. She examined the
philosopher’s deplorable doublet attentively. His garment was worn, and

more full of holes than a stove for roasting chestnuts. The girl made a wry
face. “Old rag!” she muttered, and addressing Gringoire, “Let’s see your
cloak!” “I have lost it,” replied Gringoire. “Your hat?” “They took it away
from me.” “Your shoes?” “They have hardly any soles left.” “Your purse?”
“Alas!” stammered Gringoire, “I have not even a sou.” “Let them hang you,
then, and say ‘Thank you!’” retorted the vagabond wench, turning her back
on him.
The second,—old, black, wrinkled, hideous, with an ugliness
conspicuous even in the Cour des Miracles, trotted round Gringoire. He
almost trembled lest she should want him. But she mumbled between her
teeth, “He’s too thin,” and went off.
The third was a young girl, quite fresh, and not too ugly. “Save me!” said
the poor fellow to her, in a low tone. She gazed at him for a moment with an
air of pity, then dropped her eyes, made a plait in her petticoat, and
remained in indecision. He followed all these movements with his eyes; it
was the last gleam of hope. “No,” said the young girl, at length, “no!
Guillaume Longuejoue would beat me.” She retreated into the crowd.
“You are unlucky, comrade,” said Clopin.
Then rising to his feet, upon his hogshead. “No one wants him,” he
exclaimed, imitating the accent of an auctioneer, to the great delight of all;
“no one wants him? once, twice, three times!” and, turning towards the
gibbet with a sign of his hand, “Gone!”
Bellevigne de l’Étoile, Andry the Red, François Chanteprune, stepped up
to Gringoire.
At that moment a cry arose among the thieves: “La Esmeralda! La
Esmeralda!”
Gringoire shuddered, and turned towards the side whence the clamor
proceeded.
The crowd opened, and gave passage to a pure and dazzling form.
It was the gypsy.
“La Esmeralda!” said Gringoire, stupefied in the midst of his emotions,
by the abrupt manner in which that magic word knotted together all his
reminiscences of the day.
This rare creature seemed, even in the Cour des Miracles, to exercise her
sway of charm and beauty. The vagabonds, male and female, ranged

themselves gently along her path, and their brutal faces beamed beneath her
glance.
She approached the victim with her light step. Her pretty Djali followed
her. Gringoire was more dead than alive. She examined him for a moment
in silence.
“You are going to hang this man?” she said gravely, to Clopin.
“Yes, sister,” replied the King of Thunes, “unless you will take him for
your husband.”
She made her pretty little pout with her under lip. “I’ll take him,” said
she.
Gringoire firmly believed that he had been in a dream ever since
morning, and that this was the continuation of it.
The change was, in fact, violent, though a gratifying one. They undid the
noose, and made the poet step down from the stool. His emotion was so
lively that he was obliged to sit down.
The Duke of Egypt brought an earthenware crock, without uttering a
word. The gypsy offered it to Gringoire: “Fling it on the ground,” said she.
The crock broke into four pieces.
“Brother,” then said the Duke of Egypt, laying his hands upon their
foreheads, “she is your wife; sister, he is your husband for four years. Go.”

CHAPTER VII.
A BRIDAL NIGHT.

A few moments later our poet found himself in a tiny arched chamber,
very cosy, very warm, seated at a table which appeared to ask nothing better
than to make some loans from a larder hanging near by, having a good bed
in prospect, and alone with a pretty girl. The adventure smacked of
enchantment. He began seriously to take himself for a personage in a fairy
tale; he cast his eyes about him from time to time to time, as though to see
if the chariot of fire, harnessed to two-winged chimeras, which alone could
have so rapidly transported him from Tartarus to Paradise, were still there.
At times, also, he fixed his eyes obstinately upon the holes in his doublet, in
order to cling to reality, and not lose the ground from under his feet
completely. His reason, tossed about in imaginary space, now hung only by
this thread.
The young girl did not appear to pay any attention to him; she went and
came, displaced a stool, talked to her goat, and indulged in a pout now and
then. At last she came and seated herself near the table, and Gringoire was
able to scrutinize her at his ease.
You have been a child, reader, and you would, perhaps, be very happy to
be one still. It is quite certain that you have not, more than once (and for my
part, I have passed whole days, the best employed of my life, at it) followed
from thicket to thicket, by the side of running water, on a sunny day, a
beautiful green or blue dragon-fly, breaking its flight in abrupt angles, and
kissing the tips of all the branches. You recollect with what amorous
curiosity your thought and your gaze were riveted upon this little
whirlwind, hissing and humming with wings of purple and azure, in the
midst of which floated an imperceptible body, veiled by the very rapidity of
its movement. The aerial being which was dimly outlined amid this
quivering of wings, appeared to you chimerical, imaginary, impossible to

touch, impossible to see. But when, at length, the dragon-fly alighted on the
tip of a reed, and, holding your breath the while, you were able to examine
the long, gauze wings, the long enamel robe, the two globes of crystal, what
astonishment you felt, and what fear lest you should again behold the form
disappear into a shade, and the creature into a chimera! Recall these
impressions, and you will readily appreciate what Gringoire felt on
contemplating, beneath her visible and palpable form, that Esmeralda of
whom, up to that time, he had only caught a glimpse, amidst a whirlwind of
dance, song, and tumult.
Sinking deeper and deeper into his revery: “So this,” he said to himself,
following her vaguely with his eyes, “is la Esmeralda! a celestial creature!
a street dancer! so much, and so little! ’Twas she who dealt the death-blow
to my mystery this morning, ’tis she who saves my life this evening! My
evil genius! My good angel! A pretty woman, on my word! and who must
needs love me madly to have taken me in that fashion. By the way,” said he,
rising suddenly, with that sentiment of the true which formed the foundation
of his character and his philosophy, “I don’t know very well how it
happens, but I am her husband!”
With this idea in his head and in his eyes, he stepped up to the young girl
in a manner so military and so gallant that she drew back.
“What do you want of me?” said she.
“Can you ask me, adorable Esmeralda?” replied Gringoire, with so
passionate an accent that he was himself astonished at it on hearing himself
speak.
The gypsy opened her great eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“What!” resumed Gringoire, growing warmer and warmer, and supposing
that, after all, he had to deal merely with a virtue of the Cour des Miracles;
“am I not thine, sweet friend, art thou not mine?”
And, quite ingenuously, he clasped her waist.
The gypsy’s corsage slipped through his hands like the skin of an eel. She
bounded from one end of the tiny room to the other, stooped down, and
raised herself again, with a little poniard in her hand, before Gringoire had
even had time to see whence the poniard came; proud and angry, with
swelling lips and inflated nostrils, her cheeks as red as an api apple,[15] and
her eyes darting lightnings. At the same time, the white goat placed itself in

front of her, and presented to Gringoire a hostile front, bristling with two
pretty horns, gilded and very sharp. All this took place in the twinkling of
an eye.
The dragon-fly had turned into a wasp, and asked nothing better than to
sting.
Our philosopher was speechless, and turned his astonished eyes from the
goat to the young girl. “Holy Virgin!” he said at last, when surprise
permitted him to speak, “here are two hearty dames!”
The gypsy broke the silence on her side.
“You must be a very bold knave!”
“Pardon, mademoiselle,” said Gringoire, with a smile. “But why did you
take me for your husband?”
“Should I have allowed you to be hanged?”
“So,” said the poet, somewhat disappointed in his amorous hopes. “You
had no other idea in marrying me than to save me from the gibbet?”
“And what other idea did you suppose that I had?”
Gringoire bit his lips. “Come,” said he, “I am not yet so triumphant in
Cupido, as I thought. But then, what was the good of breaking that poor
jug?”
Meanwhile Esmeralda’s dagger and the goat’s horns were still upon the
defensive.
“Mademoiselle Esmeralda,” said the poet, “let us come to terms. I am not
a clerk of the court, and I shall not go to law with you for thus carrying a
dagger in Paris, in the teeth of the ordinances and prohibitions of M. the
Provost. Nevertheless, you are not ignorant of the fact that Noël Lescrivain
was condemned, a week ago, to pay ten Parisian sous, for having carried a
cutlass. But this is no affair of mine, and I will come to the point. I swear to
you, upon my share of Paradise, not to approach you without your leave and
permission, but do give me some supper.”
The truth is, Gringoire was, like M. Despreaux, “not very voluptuous.”
He did not belong to that chevalier and musketeer species, who take young
girls by assault. In the matter of love, as in all other affairs, he willingly
assented to temporizing and adjusting terms; and a good supper, and an
amiable tête-à-tête appeared to him, especially when he was hungry, an

excellent interlude between the prologue and the catastrophe of a love
adventure.
The gypsy did not reply. She made her disdainful little grimace, drew up
her head like a bird, then burst out laughing, and the tiny poniard
disappeared as it had come, without Gringoire being able to see where the
wasp concealed its sting.
A moment later, there stood upon the table a loaf of rye bread, a slice of
bacon, some wrinkled apples and a jug of beer. Gringoire began to eat
eagerly. One would have said, to hear the furious clashing of his iron fork
and his earthenware plate, that all his love had turned to appetite.
The young girl seated opposite him, watched him in silence, visibly
preoccupied with another thought, at which she smiled from time to time,
while her soft hand caressed the intelligent head of the goat, gently pressed
between her knees.
A candle of yellow wax illuminated this scene of voracity and revery.
Meanwhile, the first cravings of his stomach having been stilled,
Gringoire felt some false shame at perceiving that nothing remained but one
apple.
“You do not eat, Mademoiselle Esmeralda?”
She replied by a negative sign of the head, and her pensive glance fixed
itself upon the vault of the ceiling.
“What the deuce is she thinking of?” thought Gringoire, staring at what
she was gazing at; “’tis impossible that it can be that stone dwarf carved in
the keystone of that arch, which thus absorbs her attention. What the deuce!
I can bear the comparison!”
He raised his voice, “Mademoiselle!”
She seemed not to hear him.
He repeated, still more loudly, “Mademoiselle Esmeralda!”
Trouble wasted. The young girl’s mind was elsewhere, and Gringoire’s
voice had not the power to recall it. Fortunately, the goat interfered. She
began to pull her mistress gently by the sleeve.
“What dost thou want, Djali?” said the gypsy, hastily, as though suddenly
awakened.

“She is hungry,” said Gringoire, charmed to enter into conversation.
Esmeralda began to crumble some bread, which Djali ate gracefully from
the hollow of her hand.
Moreover, Gringoire did not give her time to resume her revery. He
hazarded a delicate question.
“So you don’t want me for your husband?”
The young girl looked at him intently, and said, “No.”
“For your lover?” went on Gringoire.
She pouted, and replied, “No.”
“For your friend?” pursued Gringoire.
She gazed fixedly at him again, and said, after a momentary reflection,
“Perhaps.”
This “perhaps,” so dear to philosophers, emboldened Gringoire.
“Do you know what friendship is?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied the gypsy; “it is to be brother and sister; two souls which
touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.”
“And love?” pursued Gringoire.
“Oh! love!” said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye beamed. “That
is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel.
It is heaven.”
The street dancer had a beauty as she spoke thus, that struck Gringoire
singularly, and seemed to him in perfect keeping with the almost oriental
exaltation of her words. Her pure, red lips half smiled; her serene and
candid brow became troubled, at intervals, under her thoughts, like a mirror
under the breath; and from beneath her long, drooping, black eyelashes,
there escaped a sort of ineffable light, which gave to her profile that ideal
serenity which Raphael found at the mystic point of intersection of
virginity, maternity, and divinity.
Nevertheless, Gringoire continued,—
“What must one be then, in order to please you?”
“A man.”
“And I—” said he, “what, then, am I?”

“A man has a helmet on his head, a sword in his hand, and golden spurs
on his heels.”
“Good,” said Gringoire, “without a horse, no man. Do you love any
one?”
“As a lover?—”
“Yes.”
She remained thoughtful for a moment, then said with a peculiar
expression: “That I shall know soon.”
“Why not this evening?” resumed the poet tenderly. “Why not me?”
She cast a grave glance upon him and said,—
“I can never love a man who cannot protect me.”
Gringoire colored, and took the hint. It was evident that the young girl
was alluding to the slight assistance which he had rendered her in the
critical situation in which she had found herself two hours previously. This
memory, effaced by his own adventures of the evening, now recurred to
him. He smote his brow.
“By the way, mademoiselle, I ought to have begun there. Pardon my
foolish absence of mind. How did you contrive to escape from the claws of
Quasimodo?”
This question made the gypsy shudder.
“Oh! the horrible hunchback,” said she, hiding her face in her hands. And
she shuddered as though with violent cold.
“Horrible, in truth,” said Gringoire, who clung to his idea; “but how did
you manage to escape him?”
La Esmeralda smiled, sighed, and remained silent.
“Do you know why he followed you?” began Gringoire again, seeking to
return to his question by a circuitous route.
“I don’t know,” said the young girl, and she added hastily, “but you were
following me also, why were you following me?”
“In good faith,” responded Gringoire, “I don’t know either.”
Silence ensued. Gringoire slashed the table with his knife. The young girl
smiled and seemed to be gazing through the wall at something. All at once
she began to sing in a barely articulate voice,—

Quando las pintadas aves,
Mudas estan, y la tierra—[16]

She broke off abruptly, and began to caress Djali.
“That’s a pretty animal of yours,” said Gringoire.
“She is my sister,” she answered.
“Why are you called la Esmeralda?” asked the poet.
“I do not know.”
“But why?”
She drew from her bosom a sort of little oblong bag, suspended from her
neck by a string of adrézarach beads. This bag exhaled a strong odor of
camphor. It was covered with green silk, and bore in its centre a large piece
of green glass, in imitation of an emerald.
“Perhaps it is because of this,” said she.
Gringoire was on the point of taking the bag in his hand. She drew back.
“Don’t touch it! It is an amulet. You would injure the charm or the charm
would injure you.”
The poet’s curiosity was more and more aroused.
“Who gave it to you?”
She laid one finger on her mouth and concealed the amulet in her bosom.
He tried a few more questions, but she hardly replied.
“What is the meaning of the words, la Esmeralda?”
“I don’t know,” said she.
“To what language do they belong?”
“They are Egyptian, I think.”
“I suspected as much,” said Gringoire, “you are not a native of France?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are your parents alive?”
She began to sing, to an ancient air,—
Mon père est oiseau,
Ma mère est oiselle.
Je passe l’eau sans nacelle,
Je passe l’eau sans bateau,
Ma mère est oiselle,
Mon père est oiseau.[17]

“Good,” said Gringoire. “At what age did you come to France?”
“When I was very young.”
“And when to Paris?”
“Last year. At the moment when we were entering the papal gate I saw a
reed warbler flit through the air, that was at the end of August; I said, it will
be a hard winter.”
“So it was,” said Gringoire, delighted at this beginning of a conversation.
“I passed it in blowing my fingers. So you have the gift of prophecy?”
She retired into her laconics again.
“Is that man whom you call the Duke of Egypt, the chief of your tribe?”
“Yes.”
“But it was he who married us,” remarked the poet timidly.
She made her customary pretty grimace.
“I don’t even know your name.”
“My name? If you want it, here it is,—Pierre Gringoire.”
“I know a prettier one,” said she.
“Naughty girl!” retorted the poet. “Never mind, you shall not provoke
me. Wait, perhaps you will love me more when you know me better; and
then, you have told me your story with so much confidence, that I owe you
a little of mine. You must know, then, that my name is Pierre Gringoire, and
that I am a son of the farmer of the notary’s office of Gonesse. My father
was hung by the Burgundians, and my mother disembowelled by the
Picards, at the siege of Paris, twenty years ago. At six years of age,
therefore, I was an orphan, without a sole to my foot except the pavements
of Paris. I do not know how I passed the interval from six to sixteen. A fruit
dealer gave me a plum here, a baker flung me a crust there; in the evening I
got myself taken up by the watch, who threw me into prison, and there I
found a bundle of straw. All this did not prevent my growing up and
growing thin, as you see. In the winter I warmed myself in the sun, under
the porch of the Hôtel de Sens, and I thought it very ridiculous that the fire
on Saint John’s Day was reserved for the dog days. At sixteen, I wished to
choose a calling. I tried all in succession. I became a soldier; but I was not
brave enough. I became a monk; but I was not sufficiently devout; and then
I’m a bad hand at drinking. In despair, I became an apprentice of the

woodcutters, but I was not strong enough; I had more of an inclination to
become a schoolmaster; ’tis true that I did not know how to read, but that’s
no reason. I perceived at the end of a certain time, that I lacked something
in every direction; and seeing that I was good for nothing, of my own free
will I became a poet and rhymester. That is a trade which one can always
adopt when one is a vagabond, and it’s better than stealing, as some young
brigands of my acquaintance advised me to do. One day I met by luck, Dom
Claude Frollo, the reverend archdeacon of Notre-Dame. He took an interest
in me, and it is to him that I to-day owe it that I am a veritable man of
letters, who knows Latin from the de Officiis of Cicero to the mortuology of
the Celestine Fathers, and a barbarian neither in scholastics, nor in politics,
nor in rhythmics, that sophism of sophisms. I am the author of the Mystery
which was presented to-day with great triumph and a great concourse of
populace, in the grand hall of the Palais de Justice. I have also made a book
which will contain six hundred pages, on the wonderful comet of 1465,
which sent one man mad. I have enjoyed still other successes. Being
somewhat of an artillery carpenter, I lent a hand to Jean Mangue’s great
bombard, which burst, as you know, on the day when it was tested, on the
Pont de Charenton, and killed four and twenty curious spectators. You see
that I am not a bad match in marriage. I know a great many sorts of very
engaging tricks, which I will teach your goat; for example, to mimic the
Bishop of Paris, that cursed Pharisee whose mill wheels splash passers-by
the whole length of the Pont aux Meuniers. And then my mystery will bring
me in a great deal of coined money, if they will only pay me. And finally, I
am at your orders, I and my wits, and my science and my letters, ready to
live with you, damsel, as it shall please you, chastely or joyously; husband
and wife, if you see fit; brother and sister, if you think that better.”
Gringoire ceased, awaiting the effect of his harangue on the young girl.
Her eyes were fixed on the ground.
“Phœbus,” she said in a low voice. Then, turning towards the poet,
“Phœbus,—what does that mean?”
Gringoire, without exactly understanding what the connection could be
between his address and this question, was not sorry to display his
erudition. Assuming an air of importance, he replied,—
“It is a Latin word which means sun.”
“Sun!” she repeated.

“It is the name of a handsome archer, who was a god,” added Gringoire.
“A god!” repeated the gypsy, and there was something pensive and
passionate in her tone.
At that moment, one of her bracelets became unfastened and fell.
Gringoire stooped quickly to pick it up; when he straightened up, the young
girl and the goat had disappeared. He heard the sound of a bolt. It was a
little door, communicating, no doubt, with a neighboring cell, which was
being fastened on the outside.
“Has she left me a bed, at least?” said our philosopher.
He made the tour of his cell. There was no piece of furniture adapted to
sleeping purposes, except a tolerably long wooden coffer; and its cover was
carved, to boot; which afforded Gringoire, when he stretched himself out
upon it, a sensation somewhat similar to that which Micromégas would feel
if he were to lie down on the Alps.
“Come!” said he, adjusting himself as well as possible, “I must resign
myself. But here’s a strange nuptial night. ’Tis a pity. There was something
innocent and antediluvian about that broken crock, which quite pleased
me.”

BOOK THIRD.

CHAPTER I.
NOTRE-DAME.

The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and
sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is
difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless
degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the
venerable monument to suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid
its first stone, or for Philip Augustus, who laid the last.
On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of a wrinkle,
one always finds a scar. Tempus edax, homo edacior[18]; which I should be
glad to translate thus: time is blind, man is stupid.
If we had leisure to examine with the reader, one by one, the diverse
traces of destruction imprinted upon the old church, time’s share would be
the least, the share of men the most, especially the men of art, since there
have been individuals who assumed the title of architects during the last
two centuries.
And, in the first place, to cite only a few leading examples, there
certainly are few finer architectural pages than this façade, where,
successively and at once, the three portals hollowed out in an arch; the
broidered and dentated cordon of the eight and twenty royal niches; the
immense central rose window, flanked by its two lateral windows, like a
priest by his deacon and subdeacon; the frail and lofty gallery of trefoil
arcades, which supports a heavy platform above its fine, slender columns;
and lastly, the two black and massive towers with their slate penthouses,
harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, superposed in five gigantic
stories;—develop themselves before the eye, in a mass and without
confusion, with their innumerable details of statuary, carving, and sculpture,
joined powerfully to the tranquil grandeur of the whole; a vast symphony in
stone, so to speak; the colossal work of one man and one people, all
together one and complex, like the Iliads and the Romanceros, whose sister

it is; prodigious product of the grouping together of all the forces of an
epoch, where, upon each stone, one sees the fancy of the workman
disciplined by the genius of the artist start forth in a hundred fashions; a sort
of human creation, in a word, powerful and fecund as the divine creation of
which it seems to have stolen the double character,—variety, eternity.
And what we here say of the façade must be said of the entire church;
and what we say of the cathedral church of Paris, must be said of all the
churches of Christendom in the Middle Ages. All things are in place in that
art, self-created, logical, and well proportioned. To measure the great toe of
the foot is to measure the giant.
Let us return to the façade of Notre-Dame, as it still appears to us, when
we go piously to admire the grave and puissant cathedral, which inspires
terror, so its chronicles assert: quæ mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus.
Three important things are to-day lacking in that façade: in the first place,
the staircase of eleven steps which formerly raised it above the soil; next,
the lower series of statues which occupied the niches of the three portals;
and lastly the upper series, of the twenty-eight most ancient kings of
France, which garnished the gallery of the first story, beginning with
Childebert, and ending with Phillip Augustus, holding in his hand “the
imperial apple.”
Time has caused the staircase to disappear, by raising the soil of the city
with a slow and irresistible progress; but, while thus causing the eleven
steps which added to the majestic height of the edifice, to be devoured, one
by one, by the rising tide of the pavements of Paris,—time has bestowed
upon the church perhaps more than it has taken away, for it is time which
has spread over the façade that sombre hue of the centuries which makes
the old age of monuments the period of their beauty.
But who has thrown down the two rows of statues? who has left the
niches empty? who has cut, in the very middle of the central portal, that
new and bastard arch? who has dared to frame therein that commonplace
and heavy door of carved wood, à la Louis XV., beside the arabesques of
Biscornette? The men, the architects, the artists of our day.
And if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown that
colossus of Saint Christopher, proverbial for magnitude among statues, as
the grand hall of the Palais de Justice was among halls, as the spire of
Strasbourg among spires? And those myriads of statues, which peopled all

the spaces between the columns of the nave and the choir, kneeling,
standing, equestrian, men, women, children, kings, bishops, gendarmes, in
stone, in marble, in gold, in silver, in copper, in wax even,—who has
brutally swept them away? It is not time.
And who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly encumbered
with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus, with angels’
heads and clouds, which seems a specimen pillaged from the Val-de-Grâce
or the Invalides? Who stupidly sealed that heavy anachronism of stone in
the Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV., fulfilling
the request of Louis XIII.?
And who put the cold, white panes in the place of those windows, “high
in color,” which caused the astonished eyes of our fathers to hesitate
between the rose of the grand portal and the arches of the apse? And what
would a sub-chanter of the sixteenth century say, on beholding the beautiful
yellow wash, with which our archiepiscopal vandals have desmeared their
cathedral? He would remember that it was the color with which the
hangman smeared “accursed” edifices; he would recall the Hôtel du Petit-
Bourbon, all smeared thus, on account of the constable’s treason. “Yellow,
after all, of so good a quality,” said Sauval, “and so well recommended, that
more than a century has not yet caused it to lose its color.” He would think
that the sacred place had become infamous, and would flee.
And if we ascend the cathedral, without mentioning a thousand
barbarisms of every sort,—what has become of that charming little bell
tower, which rested upon the point of intersection of the cross-roofs, and
which, no less frail and no less bold than its neighbor (also destroyed), the
spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, buried itself in the sky, farther forward than
the towers, slender, pointed, sonorous, carved in open work. An architect of
good taste amputated it (1787), and considered it sufficient to mask the
wound with that large, leaden plaster, which resembles a pot cover.
’Tis thus that the marvellous art of the Middle Ages has been treated in
nearly every country, especially in France. One can distinguish on its ruins
three sorts of lesions, all three of which cut into it at different depths; first,
time, which has insensibly notched its surface here and there, and gnawed it
everywhere; next, political and religious revolution, which, blind and
wrathful by nature, have flung themselves tumultuously upon it, torn its rich
garment of carving and sculpture, burst its rose windows, broken its

necklace of arabesques and tiny figures, torn out its statues, sometimes
because of their mitres, sometimes because of their crowns; lastly, fashions,
even more grotesque and foolish, which, since the anarchical and splendid
deviations of the Renaissance, have followed each other in the necessary
decadence of architecture. Fashions have wrought more harm than
revolutions. They have cut to the quick; they have attacked the very bone
and framework of art; they have cut, slashed, disorganized, killed the
edifice, in form as in the symbol, in its consistency as well as in its beauty.
And then they have made it over; a presumption of which neither time nor
revolutions at least have been guilty. They have audaciously adjusted, in the
name of “good taste,” upon the wounds of gothic architecture, their
miserable gewgaws of a day, their ribbons of marble, their pompons of
metal, a veritable leprosy of egg-shaped ornaments, volutes, whorls,
draperies, garlands, fringes, stone flames, bronze clouds, pudgy cupids,
chubby-cheeked cherubim, which begin to devour the face of art in the
oratory of Catherine de Medicis, and cause it to expire, two centuries later,
tortured and grimacing, in the boudoir of the Dubarry.
Thus, to sum up the points which we have just indicated, three sorts of
ravages to-day disfigure Gothic architecture. Wrinkles and warts on the
epidermis; this is the work of time. Deeds of violence, brutalities,
contusions, fractures; this is the work of the revolutions from Luther to
Mirabeau. Mutilations, amputations, dislocation of the joints, restorations;
this is the Greek, Roman, and barbarian work of professors according to
Vitruvius and Vignole. This magnificent art produced by the Vandals has
been slain by the academies. The centuries, the revolutions, which at least
devastate with impartiality and grandeur, have been joined by a cloud of
school architects, licensed, sworn, and bound by oath; defacing with the
discernment and choice of bad taste, substituting the chicorées of Louis XV.
for the Gothic lace, for the greater glory of the Parthenon. It is the kick of
the ass at the dying lion. It is the old oak crowning itself, and which, to heap
the measure full, is stung, bitten, and gnawed by caterpillars.
How far it is from the epoch when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre-
Dame de Paris to the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus, so much lauded
by the ancient pagans, which Erostatus has immortalized, found the Gallic
temple “more excellent in length, breadth, height, and structure.”[19]

Notre-Dame is not, moreover, what can be called a complete, definite,
classified monument. It is no longer a Romanesque church; nor is it a
Gothic church. This edifice is not a type. Notre-Dame de Paris has not, like
the Abbey of Tournus, the grave and massive frame, the large and round
vault, the glacial bareness, the majestic simplicity of the edifices which
have the rounded arch for their progenitor. It is not, like the Cathedral of
Bourges, the magnificent, light, multiform, tufted, bristling efflorescent
product of the pointed arch. Impossible to class it in that ancient family of
sombre, mysterious churches, low and crushed as it were by the round arch,
almost Egyptian, with the exception of the ceiling; all hieroglyphics, all
sacerdotal, all symbolical, more loaded in their ornaments, with lozenges
and zigzags, than with flowers, with flowers than with animals, with
animals than with men; the work of the architect less than of the bishop;
first transformation of art, all impressed with theocratic and military
discipline, taking root in the Lower Empire, and stopping with the time of
William the Conqueror. Impossible to place our Cathedral in that other
family of lofty, aerial churches, rich in painted windows and sculpture;
pointed in form, bold in attitude; communal and bourgeois as political
symbols; free, capricious, lawless, as a work of art; second transformation
of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, immovable and sacerdotal, but
artistic, progressive, and popular, which begins at the return from the
crusades, and ends with Louis IX. Notre-Dame de Paris is not of pure
Romanesque, like the first; nor of pure Arabian race, like the second.
It is an edifice of the transition period. The Saxon architect completed the
erection of the first pillars of the nave, when the pointed arch, which dates
from the Crusade, arrived and placed itself as a conqueror upon the large
Romanesque capitals which should support only round arches. The pointed
arch, mistress since that time, constructed the rest of the church.
Nevertheless, timid and inexperienced at the start, it sweeps out, grows
larger, restrains itself, and dares no longer dart upwards in spires and lancet
windows, as it did later on, in so many marvellous cathedrals. One would
say that it were conscious of the vicinity of the heavy Romanesque pillars.
However, these edifices of the transition from the Romanesque to the
Gothic, are no less precious for study than the pure types. They express a
shade of the art which would be lost without them. It is the graft of the
pointed upon the round arch.

Notre-Dame de Paris is, in particular, a curious specimen of this variety.
Each face, each stone of the venerable monument, is a page not only of the
history of the country, but of the history of science and art as well. Thus, in
order to indicate here only the principal details, while the little Red Door
almost attains to the limits of the Gothic delicacy of the fifteenth century,
the pillars of the nave, by their size and weight, go back to the Carlovingian
Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. One would suppose that six centuries
separated these pillars from that door. There is no one, not even the
hermetics, who does not find in the symbols of the grand portal a
satisfactory compendium of their science, of which the Church of Saint-
Jacques de la Boucherie was so complete a hieroglyph. Thus, the Roman
abbey, the philosophers’ church, the Gothic art, Saxon art, the heavy, round
pillar, which recalls Gregory VII., the hermetic symbolism, with which
Nicolas Flamel played the prelude to Luther, papal unity, schism, Saint-
Germain des Prés, Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie,—all are mingled,
combined, amalgamated in Notre-Dame. This central mother church is,
among the ancient churches of Paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head of
one, the limbs of another, the haunches of another, something of all.
We repeat it, these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting for
the artist, for the antiquarian, for the historian. They make one feel to what
a degree architecture is a primitive thing, by demonstrating (what is also
demonstrated by the cyclopean vestiges, the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic
Hindoo pagodas) that the greatest products of architecture are less the
works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation’s effort,
than the inspired flash of a man of genius; the deposit left by a whole
people; the heaps accumulated by centuries; the residue of successive
evaporations of human society,—in a word, species of formations. Each
wave of time contributes its alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the
monument, each individual brings his stone. Thus do the beavers, thus do
the bees, thus do men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a hive.
Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often
undergoes a transformation while they are pending, pendent opera
interrupta; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art. The
new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there,
assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it
can. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without
reaction,—following a natural and tranquil law. It is a graft which shoots

up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which starts forth anew. Certainly
there is matter here for many large volumes, and often the universal history
of humanity in the successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon
the same monument. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these
great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence is
there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the
builder.
Not to consider here anything except the Christian architecture of
Europe, that younger sister of the great masonries of the Orient, it appears
to the eyes as an immense formation divided into three well-defined zones,
which are superposed, the one upon the other: the Romanesque zone[20],
the Gothic zone, the zone of the Renaissance, which we would gladly call
the Greco-Roman zone. The Roman layer, which is the most ancient and
deepest, is occupied by the round arch, which reappears, supported by the
Greek column, in the modern and upper layer of the Renaissance. The
pointed arch is found between the two. The edifices which belong
exclusively to any one of these three layers are perfectly distinct, uniform,
and complete. There is the Abbey of Jumiéges, there is the Cathedral of
Reims, there is the Sainte-Croix of Orléans. But the three zones mingle and
amalgamate along the edges, like the colors in the solar spectrum. Hence,
complex monuments, edifices of gradation and transition. One is Roman at
the base, Gothic in the middle, Greco-Roman at the top. It is because it was
six hundred years in building. This variety is rare. The donjon keep of
d’Étampes is a specimen of it. But monuments of two formations are more
frequent. There is Notre-Dame de Paris, a pointed-arch edifice, which is
imbedded by its pillars in that Roman zone, in which are plunged the portal
of Saint-Denis, and the nave of Saint-Germain des Prés. There is the
charming, half-Gothic chapter-house of Bocherville, where the Roman layer
extends half way up. There is the cathedral of Rouen, which would be
entirely Gothic if it did not bathe the tip of its central spire in the zone of
the Renaissance.[21]
However, all these shades, all these differences, do not affect the surfaces
of edifices only. It is art which has changed its skin. The very constitution
of the Christian church is not attacked by it. There is always the same
internal woodwork, the same logical arrangement of parts. Whatever may
be the carved and embroidered envelope of a cathedral, one always finds
beneath it—in the state of a germ, and of a rudiment at the least—the

Roman basilica. It is eternally developed upon the soil according to the
same law. There are, invariably, two naves, which intersect in a cross, and
whose upper portion, rounded into an apse, forms the choir; there are
always the side aisles, for interior processions, for chapels,—a sort of
lateral walks or promenades where the principal nave discharges itself
through the spaces between the pillars. That settled, the number of chapels,
doors, bell towers, and pinnacles are modified to infinity, according to the
fancy of the century, the people, and art. The service of religion once
assured and provided for, architecture does what she pleases. Statues,
stained glass, rose windows, arabesques, denticulations, capitals, bas-
reliefs,—she combines all these imaginings according to the arrangement
which best suits her. Hence, the prodigious exterior variety of these
edifices, at whose foundation dwells so much order and unity. The trunk of
a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.

CHAPTER II.
A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS.

We have just attempted to restore, for the reader’s benefit, that admirable
church of Notre-Dame de Paris. We have briefly pointed out the greater part
of the beauties which it possessed in the fifteenth century, and which it
lacks to-day; but we have omitted the principal thing,—the view of Paris
which was then to be obtained from the summits of its towers.
That was, in fact,—when, after having long groped one’s way up the dark
spiral which perpendicularly pierces the thick wall of the belfries, one
emerged, at last abruptly, upon one of the lofty platforms inundated with
light and air,—that was, in fact, a fine picture which spread out, on all sides
at once, before the eye; a spectacle sui generis, of which those of our
readers who have had the good fortune to see a Gothic city entire, complete,
homogeneous,—a few of which still remain, Nuremberg in Bavaria and
Vittoria in Spain,—can readily form an idea; or even smaller specimens,
provided that they are well preserved,—Vitré in Brittany, Nordhausen in
Prussia.
The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago—the Paris of the fifteenth
century—was already a gigantic city. We Parisians generally make a
mistake as to the ground which we think that we have gained, since Paris
has not increased much over one-third since the time of Louis XI. It has
certainly lost more in beauty than it has gained in size.
Paris had its birth, as the reader knows, in that old island of the City
which has the form of a cradle. The strand of that island was its first
boundary wall, the Seine its first moat. Paris remained for many centuries in
its island state, with two bridges, one on the north, the other on the south;
and two bridge heads, which were at the same time its gates and its
fortresses,—the Grand-Châtelet on the right bank, the Petit-Châtelet on the
left. Then, from the date of the kings of the first race, Paris, being too

cribbed and confined in its island, and unable to return thither, crossed the
water. Then, beyond the Grand, beyond the Petit-Châtelet, a first circle of
walls and towers began to infringe upon the country on the two sides of the
Seine. Some vestiges of this ancient enclosure still remained in the last
century; to-day, only the memory of it is left, and here and there a tradition,
the Baudets or Baudoyer gate, Porta Bagauda.
Little by little, the tide of houses, always thrust from the heart of the city
outwards, overflows, devours, wears away, and effaces this wall. Philip
Augustus makes a new dike for it. He imprisons Paris in a circular chain of
great towers, both lofty and solid. For the period of more than a century, the
houses press upon each other, accumulate, and raise their level in this basin,
like water in a reservoir. They begin to deepen; they pile story upon story;
they mount upon each other; they gush forth at the top, like all laterally
compressed growth, and there is a rivalry as to which shall thrust its head
above its neighbors, for the sake of getting a little air. The street glows
narrower and deeper, every space is overwhelmed and disappears. The
houses finally leap the wall of Philip Augustus, and scatter joyfully over the
plain, without order, and all askew, like runaways. There they plant
themselves squarely, cut themselves gardens from the fields, and take their
ease. Beginning with 1367, the city spreads to such an extent into the
suburbs, that a new wall becomes necessary, particularly on the right bank;
Charles V. builds it. But a city like Paris is perpetually growing. It is only
such cities that become capitals. They are funnels, into which all the
geographical, political, moral, and intellectual water-sheds of a country, all
the natural slopes of a people, pour; wells of civilization, so to speak, and
also sewers, where commerce, industry, intelligence, population,—all that is
sap, all that is life, all that is the soul of a nation, filters and amasses
unceasingly, drop by drop, century by century.
So Charles V.’s wall suffered the fate of that of Philip Augustus. At the
end of the fifteenth century, the Faubourg strides across it, passes beyond it,
and runs farther. In the sixteenth, it seems to retreat visibly, and to bury
itself deeper and deeper in the old city, so thick had the new city already
become outside of it. Thus, beginning with the fifteenth century, where our
story finds us, Paris had already outgrown the three concentric circles of
walls which, from the time of Julian the Apostate, existed, so to speak, in
germ in the Grand-Châtelet and the Petit-Châtelet. The mighty city had
cracked, in succession, its four enclosures of walls, like a child grown too

large for his garments of last year. Under Louis XI., this sea of houses was
seen to be pierced at intervals by several groups of ruined towers, from the
ancient wall, like the summits of hills in an inundation,—like archipelagos
of the old Paris submerged beneath the new. Since that time Paris has
undergone yet another transformation, unfortunately for our eyes; but it has
passed only one more wall, that of Louis XV., that miserable wall of mud
and spittle, worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet who sung it,
—
Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.[22]

In the fifteenth century, Paris was still divided into three wholly distinct
and separate towns, each having its own physiognomy, its own specialty, its
manners, customs, privileges, and history: the City, the University, the
Town. The City, which occupied the island, was the most ancient, the
smallest, and the mother of the other two, crowded in between them like
(may we be pardoned the comparison) a little old woman between two large
and handsome maidens. The University covered the left bank of the Seine,
from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, points which correspond in the
Paris of to-day, the one to the wine market, the other to the mint. Its wall
included a large part of that plain where Julian had built his hot baths. The
hill of Sainte-Geneviève was enclosed in it. The culminating point of this
sweep of walls was the Papal gate, that is to say, near the present site of the
Pantheon. The Town, which was the largest of the three fragments of Paris,
held the right bank. Its quay, broken or interrupted in many places, ran
along the Seine, from the Tour de Billy to the Tour du Bois; that is to say,
from the place where the granary stands to-day, to the present site of the
Tuileries. These four points, where the Seine intersected the wall of the
capital, the Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the right, the Tour de Billy
and the Tour du Bois on the left, were called pre-eminently, the four towers
of Paris. The Town encroached still more extensively upon the fields than
the University. The culminating point of the Town wall (that of Charles V.)
was at the gates of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, whose situation has not
been changed.
As we have just said, each of these three great divisions of Paris was a
town, but too special a town to be complete, a city which could not get
along without the other two. Hence three entirely distinct aspects: churches
abounded in the City; palaces, in the Town; and colleges, in the University.

Neglecting here the originalities, of secondary importance in old Paris, and
the capricious regulations regarding the public highways, we will say, from
a general point of view, taking only masses and the whole group, in this
chaos of communal jurisdictions, that the island belonged to the bishop, the
right bank to the provost of the merchants, the left bank to the Rector; over
all ruled the provost of Paris, a royal not a municipal official. The City had
Notre-Dame; the Town, the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville; the University,
the Sorbonne. The Town had the markets (Halles); the city, the Hospital; the
University, the Pré-aux-Clercs. Offences committed by the scholars on the
left bank were tried in the law courts on the island, and were punished on
the right bank at Montfaucon; unless the rector, feeling the university to be
strong and the king weak, intervened; for it was the students’ privilege to be
hanged on their own grounds.
The greater part of these privileges, it may be noted in passing, and there
were some even better than the above, had been extorted from the kings by
revolts and mutinies. It is the course of things from time immemorial; the
king only lets go when the people tear away. There is an old charter which
puts the matter naively: àpropos of fidelity: Civibus fidelitas in reges, quæ
tamen aliquoties seditionibus interrupta, multa peperit privilegia.
In the fifteenth century, the Seine bathed five islands within the walls of
Paris: Louviers island, where there were then trees, and where there is no
longer anything but wood; l’île aux Vaches, and l’île Notre-Dame, both
deserted, with the exception of one house, both fiefs of the bishop—in the
seventeenth century, a single island was formed out of these two, which was
built upon and named l’île Saint-Louis—, lastly the City, and at its point,
the little islet of the cow tender, which was afterwards engulfed beneath the
platform of the Pont-Neuf. The City then had five bridges: three on the
right, the Pont Notre-Dame, and the Pont au Change, of stone, the Pont aux
Meuniers, of wood; two on the left, the Petit Pont, of stone, the Pont Saint-
Michel, of wood; all loaded with houses.
The University had six gates, built by Philip Augustus; there were,
beginning with la Tournelle, the Porte Saint-Victor, the Porte Bordelle, the
Porte Papale, the Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Saint-Michel, the Porte
Saint-Germain. The Town had six gates, built by Charles V.; beginning with
the Tour de Billy they were: the Porte Saint-Antoine, the Porte du Temple,
the Porte Saint-Martin, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Porte Montmartre, the

Porte Saint-Honoré. All these gates were strong, and also handsome, which
does not detract from strength. A large, deep moat, with a brisk current
during the high water of winter, bathed the base of the wall round Paris; the
Seine furnished the water. At night, the gates were shut, the river was barred
at both ends of the city with huge iron chains, and Paris slept tranquilly.
From a bird’s-eye view, these three burgs, the City, the Town, and the
University, each presented to the eye an inextricable skein of eccentrically
tangled streets. Nevertheless, at first sight, one recognized the fact that
these three fragments formed but one body. One immediately perceived
three long parallel streets, unbroken, undisturbed, traversing, almost in a
straight line, all three cities, from one end to the other; from North to South,
perpendicularly, to the Seine, which bound them together, mingled them,
infused them in each other, poured and transfused the people incessantly,
from one to the other, and made one out of the three. The first of these
streets ran from the Porte Saint-Martin: it was called the Rue Saint-Jacques
in the University, Rue de la Juiverie in the City, Rue Saint-Martin in the
Town; it crossed the water twice, under the name of the Petit Pont and the
Pont Notre-Dame. The second, which was called the Rue de la Harpe on the
left bank, Rue de la Barillerié in the island, Rue Saint-Denis on the right
bank, Pont Saint-Michel on one arm of the Seine, Pont au Change on the
other, ran from the Porte Saint-Michel in the University, to the Porte Saint-
Denis in the Town. However, under all these names, there were but two
streets, parent streets, generating streets,—the two arteries of Paris. All the
other veins of the triple city either derived their supply from them or
emptied into them.
Independently of these two principal streets, piercing Paris diametrically
in its whole breadth, from side to side, common to the entire capital, the
City and the University had also each its own great special street, which ran
lengthwise by them, parallel to the Seine, cutting, as it passed, at right
angles, the two arterial thoroughfares. Thus, in the Town, one descended in
a straight line from the Porte Saint-Antoine to the Porte Saint-Honoré; in
the University from the Porte Saint-Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain.
These two great thoroughfares intersected by the two first, formed the
canvas upon which reposed, knotted and crowded together on every hand,
the labyrinthine network of the streets of Paris. In the incomprehensible
plan of these streets, one distinguished likewise, on looking attentively, two
clusters of great streets, like magnified sheaves of grain, one in the

University, the other in the Town, which spread out gradually from the
bridges to the gates.
Some traces of this geometrical plan still exist to-day.
Now, what aspect did this whole present, when, as viewed from the
summit of the towers of Notre-Dame, in 1482? That we shall try to
describe.
For the spectator who arrived, panting, upon that pinnacle, it was first a
dazzling confusing view of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, places, spires,
bell towers. Everything struck your eye at once: the carved gable, the
pointed roof, the turrets suspended at the angles of the walls; the stone
pyramids of the eleventh century, the slate obelisks of the fifteenth; the
round, bare tower of the donjon keep; the square and fretted tower of the
church; the great and the little, the massive and the aerial. The eye was, for
a long time, wholly lost in this labyrinth, where there was nothing which
did not possess its originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty,—nothing
which did not proceed from art; beginning with the smallest house, with its
painted and carved front, with external beams, elliptical door, with
projecting stories, to the royal Louvre, which then had a colonnade of
towers. But these are the principal masses which were then to be
distinguished when the eye began to accustom itself to this tumult of
edifices.
In the first place, the City.—“The island of the City,” as Sauval says,
who, in spite of his confused medley, sometimes has such happy turns of
expression,—“the island of the city is made like a great ship, stuck in the
mud and run aground in the current, near the centre of the Seine.”
We have just explained that, in the fifteenth century, this ship was
anchored to the two banks of the river by five bridges. This form of a ship
had also struck the heraldic scribes; for it is from that, and not from the
siege by the Normans, that the ship which blazons the old shield of Paris,
comes, according to Favyn and Pasquier. For him who understands how to
decipher them, armorial bearings are algebra, armorial bearings have a
tongue. The whole history of the second half of the Middle Ages is written
in armorial bearings,—the first half is in the symbolism of the Roman
churches. They are the hieroglyphics of feudalism, succeeding those of
theocracy.

Thus the City first presented itself to the eye, with its stern to the east,
and its prow to the west. Turning towards the prow, one had before one an
innumerable flock of ancient roofs, over which arched broadly the lead-
covered apse of the Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant’s haunches loaded
with its tower. Only here, this tower was the most audacious, the most open,
the most ornamented spire of cabinet-maker’s work that ever let the sky
peep through its cone of lace. In front of Notre-Dame, and very near at
hand, three streets opened into the cathedral square,—a fine square, lined
with ancient houses. Over the south side of this place bent the wrinkled and
sullen façade of the Hôtel Dieu, and its roof, which seemed covered with
warts and pustules. Then, on the right and the left, to east and west, within
that wall of the City, which was yet so contracted, rose the bell towers of its
one and twenty churches, of every date, of every form, of every size, from
the low and wormeaten belfry of Saint-Denis du Pas (Carcer Glaucini) to
the slender needles of Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs and Saint-Landry.
Behind Notre-Dame, the cloister and its Gothic galleries spread out
towards the north; on the south, the half-Roman palace of the bishop; on the
east, the desert point of the Terrain. In this throng of houses the eye also
distinguished, by the lofty open-work mitres of stone which then crowned
the roof itself, even the most elevated windows of the palace, the hotel
given by the city, under Charles VI., to Juvénal des Ursins; a little farther
on, the pitch-covered sheds of the Palus Market; in still another quarter the
new apse of Saint-Germain le Vieux, lengthened in 1458, with a bit of the
Rue aux Febves; and then, in places, a square crowded with people; a
pillory, erected at the corner of a street; a fine fragment of the pavement of
Philip Augustus, a magnificent flagging, grooved for the horses’ feet, in the
middle of the road, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the
miserable cobblestones, called the pavement of the League; a deserted back
courtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase turrets, such as were
erected in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seen in the Rue
des Bourdonnais. Lastly, at the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, towards the
west, the Palais de Justice rested its group of towers at the edge of the
water. The thickets of the king’s gardens, which covered the western point
of the City, masked the Island du Passeur. As for the water, from the summit
of the towers of Notre-Dame one hardly saw it, on either side of the City;
the Seine was hidden by bridges, the bridges by houses.

And when the glance passed these bridges, whose roofs were visibly
green, rendered mouldy before their time by the vapors from the water, if it
was directed to the left, towards the University, the first edifice which
struck it was a large, low sheaf of towers, the Petit-Châtelet, whose
yawning gate devoured the end of the Petit-Pont. Then, if your view ran
along the bank, from east to west, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle,
there was a long cordon of houses, with carved beams, stained-glass
windows, each story projecting over that beneath it, an interminable zigzag
of bourgeois gables, frequently interrupted by the mouth of a street, and
from time to time also by the front or angle of a huge stone mansion,
planted at its ease, with courts and gardens, wings and detached buildings,
amid this populace of crowded and narrow houses, like a grand gentleman
among a throng of rustics. There were five or six of these mansions on the
quay, from the house of Lorraine, which shared with the Bernardins the
grand enclosure adjoining the Tournelle, to the Hôtel de Nesle, whose
principal tower ended Paris, and whose pointed roofs were in a position,
during three months of the year, to encroach, with their black triangles,
upon the scarlet disk of the setting sun.
This side of the Seine was, however, the least mercantile of the two.
Students furnished more of a crowd and more noise there than artisans, and
there was not, properly speaking, any quay, except from the Pont Saint-
Michel to the Tour de Nesle. The rest of the bank of the Seine was now a
naked strand, the same as beyond the Bernardins; again, a throng of houses,
standing with their feet in the water, as between the two bridges.
There was a great uproar of laundresses; they screamed, and talked, and
sang from morning till night along the beach, and beat a great deal of linen
there, just as in our day. This is not the least of the gayeties of Paris.
The University presented a dense mass to the eye. From one end to the
other, it was homogeneous and compact. The thousand roofs, dense,
angular, clinging to each other, composed, nearly all, of the same
geometrical element, offered, when viewed from above, the aspect of a
crystallization of the same substance.
The capricious ravine of streets did not cut this block of houses into too
disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were scattered about in a
fairly equal manner, and there were some everywhere. The amusingly
varied crests of these beautiful edifices were the product of the same art as

the simple roofs which they overshot, and were, actually, only a
multiplication of the square or the cube of the same geometrical figure.
Hence they complicated the whole effect, without disturbing it; completed,
without overloading it. Geometry is harmony. Some fine mansions here and
there made magnificent outlines against the picturesque attics of the left
bank. The house of Nevers, the house of Rome, the house of Reims, which
have disappeared; the Hôtel de Cluny, which still exists, for the consolation
of the artist, and whose tower was so stupidly deprived of its crown a few
years ago. Close to Cluny, that Roman palace, with fine round arches, were
once the hot baths of Julian. There were a great many abbeys, of a beauty
more devout, of a grandeur more solemn than the mansions, but not less
beautiful, not less grand. Those which first caught the eye were the
Bernardins, with their three bell towers; Sainte-Geneviève, whose square
tower, which still exists, makes us regret the rest; the Sorbonne, half
college, half monastery, of which so admirable a nave survives; the fine
quadrilateral cloister of the Mathurins; its neighbor, the cloister of Saint-
Benoît, within whose walls they have had time to cobble up a theatre,
between the seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Cordeliers, with
their three enormous adjacent gables; the Augustins, whose graceful spire
formed, after the Tour de Nesle, the second denticulation on this side of
Paris, starting from the west. The colleges, which are, in fact, the
intermediate ring between the cloister and the world, hold the middle
position in the monumental series between the hotels and the abbeys, with a
severity full of elegance, sculpture less giddy than the palaces, an
architecture less severe than the convents. Unfortunately, hardly anything
remains of these monuments, where Gothic art combined with so just a
balance, richness and economy. The churches (and they were numerous and
splendid in the University, and they were graded there also in all the ages of
architecture, from the round arches of Saint-Julian to the pointed arches of
Saint-Séverin), the churches dominated the whole; and, like one harmony
more in this mass of harmonies, they pierced in quick succession the
multiple open work of the gables with slashed spires, with open-work bell
towers, with slender pinnacles, whose line was also only a magnificent
exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs.
The ground of the University was hilly; Mount Sainte-Geneviève formed
an enormous mound to the south; and it was a sight to see from the summit
of Notre-Dame how that throng of narrow and tortuous streets (to-day the

Latin Quarter), those bunches of houses which, spread out in every
direction from the top of this eminence, precipitated themselves in disorder,
and almost perpendicularly down its flanks, nearly to the water’s edge,
having the air, some of falling, others of clambering up again, and all of
holding to one another. A continual flux of a thousand black points which
passed each other on the pavements made everything move before the eyes;
it was the populace seen thus from aloft and afar.
Lastly, in the intervals of these roofs, of these spires, of these accidents of
numberless edifices, which bent and writhed, and jagged in so eccentric a
manner the extreme line of the University, one caught a glimpse, here and
there, of a great expanse of moss-grown wall, a thick, round tower, a
crenellated city gate, shadowing forth the fortress; it was the wall of Philip
Augustus. Beyond, the fields gleamed green; beyond, fled the roads, along
which were scattered a few more suburban houses, which became more
infrequent as they became more distant. Some of these faubourgs were
important: there were, first, starting from la Tournelle, the Bourg Saint-
Victor, with its one arch bridge over the Bièvre, its abbey where one could
read the epitaph of Louis le Gros, epitaphium Ludovici Grossi, and its
church with an octagonal spire, flanked with four little bell towers of the
eleventh century (a similar one can be seen at Étampes; it is not yet
destroyed); next, the Bourg Saint-Marceau, which already had three
churches and one convent; then, leaving the mill of the Gobelins and its
four white walls on the left, there was the Faubourg Saint-Jacques with the
beautiful carved cross in its square; the church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-
Pas, which was then Gothic, pointed, charming; Saint-Magloire, a fine nave
of the fourteenth century, which Napoleon turned into a hayloft; Notre-
Dame des Champs, where there were Byzantine mosaics; lastly, after
having left behind, full in the country, the Monastery des Chartreux, a rich
edifice contemporary with the Palais de Justice, with its little garden
divided into compartments, and the haunted ruins of Vauvert, the eye fell, to
the west, upon the three Roman spires of Saint-Germain des Prés. The
Bourg Saint-Germain, already a large community, formed fifteen or twenty
streets in the rear; the pointed bell tower of Saint-Sulpice marked one
corner of the town. Close beside it one descried the quadrilateral enclosure
of the fair of Saint-Germain, where the market is situated to-day; then the
abbot’s pillory, a pretty little round tower, well capped with a leaden cone;
the brickyard was further on, and the Rue du Four, which led to the

common bakehouse, and the mill on its hillock, and the lazar house, a tiny
house, isolated and half seen.
But that which attracted the eye most of all, and fixed it for a long time
on that point, was the abbey itself. It is certain that this monastery, which
had a grand air, both as a church and as a seignory; that abbatial palace,
where the bishops of Paris counted themselves happy if they could pass the
night; that refectory, upon which the architect had bestowed the air, the
beauty, and the rose window of a cathedral; that elegant chapel of the
Virgin; that monumental dormitory; those vast gardens; that portcullis; that
drawbridge; that envelope of battlements which notched to the eye the
verdure of the surrounding meadows; those courtyards, where gleamed men
at arms, intermingled with golden copes;—the whole grouped and clustered
about three lofty spires, with round arches, well planted upon a Gothic apse,
made a magnificent figure against the horizon.
When, at length, after having contemplated the University for a long
time, you turned towards the right bank, towards the Town, the character of
the spectacle was abruptly altered. The Town, in fact much larger than the
University, was also less of a unit. At the first glance, one saw that it was
divided into many masses, singularly distinct. First, to the eastward, in that
part of the town which still takes its name from the marsh where
Camulogènes entangled Cæsar, was a pile of palaces. The block extended to
the very water’s edge. Four almost contiguous hotels, Jouy, Sens, Barbeau,
the house of the Queen, mirrored their slate peaks, broken with slender
turrets, in the Seine.
These four edifices filled the space from the Rue des Nonaindières, to the
abbey of the Celestins, whose spire gracefully relieved their line of gables
and battlements. A few miserable, greenish hovels, hanging over the water
in front of these sumptuous hotels, did not prevent one from seeing the fine
angles of their façades, their large, square windows with stone mullions,
their pointed porches overloaded with statues, the vivid outlines of their
walls, always clear cut, and all those charming accidents of architecture,
which cause Gothic art to have the air of beginning its combinations afresh
with every monument.
Behind these palaces, extended in all directions, now broken, fenced in,
battlemented like a citadel, now veiled by great trees like a Carthusian
convent, the immense and multiform enclosure of that miraculous Hôtel de

Saint-Pol, where the King of France possessed the means of lodging
superbly two and twenty princes of the rank of the dauphin and the Duke of
Burgundy, with their domestics and their suites, without counting the great
lords, and the emperor when he came to view Paris, and the lions, who had
their separate hotel at the royal hotel. Let us say here that a prince’s
apartment was then composed of never less than eleven large rooms, from
the chamber of state to the oratory, not to mention the galleries, baths,
vapor-baths, and other “superfluous places,” with which each apartment
was provided; not to mention the private gardens for each of the king’s
guests; not to mention the kitchens, the cellars, the domestic offices, the
general refectories of the house, the poultry-yards, where there were
twenty-two general laboratories, from the bakehouses to the wine-cellars;
games of a thousand sorts, malls, tennis, and riding at the ring; aviaries,
fishponds, menageries, stables, barns, libraries, arsenals and foundries. This
was what a king’s palace, a Louvre, a Hôtel de Saint-Pol was then. A city
within a city.
From the tower where we are placed, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, almost half
hidden by the four great houses of which we have just spoken, was still very
considerable and very marvellous to see. One could there distinguish, very
well, though cleverly united with the principal building by long galleries,
decked with painted glass and slender columns, the three hotels which
Charles V. had amalgamated with his palace: the Hôtel du Petit-Muce, with
the airy balustrade, which formed a graceful border to its roof; the Hôtel of
the Abbé de Saint-Maur, having the vanity of a stronghold, a great tower,
machicolations, loopholes, iron gratings, and over the large Saxon door, the
armorial bearings of the abbé, between the two mortises of the drawbridge;
the Hôtel of the Comte d’Étampes, whose donjon keep, ruined at its
summit, was rounded and notched like a cock’s comb; here and there, three
or four ancient oaks, forming a tuft together like enormous cauliflowers;
gambols of swans, in the clear water of the fishponds, all in folds of light
and shade; many courtyards of which one beheld picturesque bits; the Hôtel
of the Lions, with its low, pointed arches on short, Saxon pillars, its iron
gratings and its perpetual roar; shooting up above the whole, the scale-
ornamented spire of the Ave-Maria; on the left, the house of the Provost of
Paris, flanked by four small towers, delicately grooved, in the middle; at the
extremity, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, properly speaking, with its multiplied
façades, its successive enrichments from the time of Charles V., the hybrid

excrescences, with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it during the
last two centuries, with all the apses of its chapels, all the gables of its
galleries, a thousand weathercocks for the four winds, and its two lofty
contiguous towers, whose conical roof, surrounded by battlements at its
base, looked like those pointed caps which have their edges turned up.
Continuing to mount the stories of this amphitheatre of palaces spread
out afar upon the ground, after crossing a deep ravine hollowed out of the
roofs in the Town, which marked the passage of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the
eye reached the house of Angoulême, a vast construction of many epochs,
where there were perfectly new and very white parts, which melted no
better into the whole than a red patch on a blue doublet. Nevertheless, the
remarkably pointed and lofty roof of the modern palace, bristling with
carved eaves, covered with sheets of lead, where coiled a thousand fantastic
arabesques of sparkling incrustations of gilded bronze, that roof, so
curiously damascened, darted upwards gracefully from the midst of the
brown ruins of the ancient edifice; whose huge and ancient towers, rounded
by age like casks, sinking together with old age, and rending themselves
from top to bottom, resembled great bellies unbuttoned. Behind rose the
forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles. Not a view in the world, either
at Chambord or at the Alhambra, is more magic, more aerial, more
enchanting, than that thicket of spires, tiny bell towers, chimneys, weather-
vanes, winding staircases, lanterns through which the daylight makes its
way, which seem cut out at a blow, pavilions, spindle-shaped turrets, or, as
they were then called, tournelles, all differing in form, in height, and
attitude. One would have pronounced it a gigantic stone chess-board.
To the right of the Tournelles, that truss of enormous towers, black as ink,
running into each other and tied, as it were, by a circular moat; that donjon
keep, much more pierced with loopholes than with windows; that
drawbridge, always raised; that portcullis, always lowered,—is the Bastille.
Those sorts of black beaks which project from between the battlements, and
which you take from a distance to be cave spouts, are cannons.
Beneath them, at the foot of the formidable edifice, behold the Porte
Sainte-Antoine, buried between its two towers.
Beyond the Tournelles, as far as the wall of Charles V., spread out, with
rich compartments of verdure and of flowers, a velvet carpet of cultivated
land and royal parks, in the midst of which one recognized, by its labyrinth

of trees and alleys, the famous Dædalus garden which Louis XI. had given
to Coictier. The doctor’s observatory rose above the labyrinth like a great
isolated column, with a tiny house for a capital. Terrible astrologies took
place in that laboratory.
There to-day is the Place Royale.
As we have just said, the quarter of the palace, of which we have just
endeavored to give the reader some idea by indicating only the chief points,
filled the angle which Charles V.’s wall made with the Seine on the east.
The centre of the Town was occupied by a pile of houses for the populace.
It was there, in fact, that the three bridges disgorged upon the right bank,
and bridges lead to the building of houses rather than palaces. That
congregation of bourgeois habitations, pressed together like the cells in a
hive, had a beauty of its own. It is with the roofs of a capital as with the
waves of the sea,—they are grand. First the streets, crossed and entangled,
forming a hundred amusing figures in the block; around the market-place, it
was like a star with a thousand rays.
The Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable
ramifications, rose one after the other, like trees intertwining their branches;
and then the tortuous lines, the Rues de la Plâtrerie, de la Verrerie, de la
Tixeranderie, etc., meandered over all. There were also fine edifices which
pierced the petrified undulations of that sea of gables. At the head of the
Pont aux Changeurs, behind which one beheld the Seine foaming beneath
the wheels of the Pont aux Meuniers, there was the Châlelet, no longer a
Roman tower, as under Julian the Apostate, but a feudal tower of the
thirteenth century, and of a stone so hard that the pickaxe could not break
away so much as the thickness of the fist in a space of three hours; there
was the rich square bell tower of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, with its
angles all frothing with carvings, already admirable, although it was not
finished in the fifteenth century. (It lacked, in particular, the four monsters,
which, still perched to-day on the corners of its roof, have the air of so
many sphinxes who are propounding to new Paris the riddle of the ancient
Paris. Rault, the sculptor, only placed them in position in 1526, and
received twenty francs for his pains.) There was the Maison-aux-Piliers, the
Pillar House, opening upon that Place de Grève of which we have given the
reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais, which a front “in good taste” has
since spoiled; Saint-Méry, whose ancient pointed arches were still almost

round arches; Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial; there
were twenty other monuments, which did not disdain to bury their wonders
in that chaos of black, deep, narrow streets. Add the crosses of carved stone,
more lavishly scattered through the squares than even the gibbets; the
cemetery of the Innocents, whose architectural wall could be seen in the
distance above the roofs; the pillory of the Markets, whose top was visible
between two chimneys of the Rue de la Cossonnerie; the ladder of the
Croix-du-Trahoir, in its square always black with people; the circular
buildings of the wheat mart; the fragments of Philip Augustus’s ancient
wall, which could be made out here and there, drowned among the houses,
its towers gnawed by ivy, its gates in ruins, with crumbling and deformed
stretches of wall; the quay with its thousand shops, and its bloody knacker’s
yards; the Seine encumbered with boats, from the Port au Foin to For-
l’Évêque, and you will have a confused picture of what the central
trapezium of the Town was like in 1482.
With these two quarters, one of hotels, the other of houses, the third
feature of aspect presented by the city was a long zone of abbeys, which
bordered it in nearly the whole of its circumference, from the rising to the
setting sun, and, behind the circle of fortifications which hemmed in Paris,
formed a second interior enclosure of convents and chapels. Thus,
immediately adjoining the park des Tournelles, between the Rue Saint-
Antoine and the Vieille Rue du Temple, there stood Sainte-Catherine, with
its immense cultivated lands, which were terminated only by the wall of
Paris. Between the old and the new Rue du Temple, there was the Temple, a
sinister group of towers, lofty, erect, and isolated in the middle of a vast,
battlemented enclosure. Between the Rue Neuve-du-Temple and the Rue
Saint-Martin, there was the Abbey of Saint-Martin, in the midst of its
gardens, a superb fortified church, whose girdle of towers, whose diadem of
bell towers, yielded in force and splendor only to Saint-Germain des Prés.
Between the Rue Saint-Martin and the Rue Saint-Denis, spread the
enclosure of the Trinité.
Lastly, between the Rue Saint-Denis, and the Rue Montorgueil, stood the
Filles-Dieu. On one side, the rotting roofs and unpaved enclosure of the
Cour des Miracles could be descried. It was the sole profane ring which was
linked to that devout chain of convents.

Finally, the fourth compartment, which stretched itself out in the
agglomeration of the roofs on the right bank, and which occupied the
western angle of the enclosure, and the banks of the river down stream, was
a fresh cluster of palaces and hôtels pressed close about the base of the
Louvre. The old Louvre of Philip Augustus, that immense edifice whose
great tower rallied about it three and twenty chief towers, not to reckon the
lesser towers, seemed from a distance to be enshrined in the Gothic roofs of
the Hôtel d’Alençon, and the Petit-Bourbon. This hydra of towers, giant
guardian of Paris, with its four and twenty heads, always erect, with its
monstrous haunches, loaded or scaled with slates, and all streaming with
metallic reflections, terminated with wonderful effect the configuration of
the Town towards the west.
Thus an immense block, which the Romans called insula, or island, of
bourgeois houses, flanked on the right and the left by two blocks of palaces,
crowned, the one by the Louvre, the other by the Tournelles, bordered on
the north by a long girdle of abbeys and cultivated enclosures, all
amalgamated and melted together in one view; upon these thousands of
edifices, whose tiled and slated roofs outlined upon each other so many
fantastic chains, the bell towers, tattooed, fluted, and ornamented with
twisted bands, of the four and forty churches on the right bank; myriads of
cross streets; for boundary on one side, an enclosure of lofty walls with
square towers (that of the University had round towers); on the other, the
Seine, cut by bridges, and bearing on its bosom a multitude of boats; behold
the Town of Paris in the fifteenth century.
Beyond the walls, several suburban villages pressed close about the
gates, but less numerous and more scattered than those of the University.
Behind the Bastille there were twenty hovels clustered round the curious
sculptures of the Croix-Faubin and the flying buttresses of the Abbey of
Saint-Antoine des Champs; then Popincourt, lost amid wheat fields; then la
Courtille, a merry village of wine-shops; the hamlet of Saint-Laurent with
its church whose bell tower, from afar, seemed to add itself to the pointed
towers of the Porte Saint-Martin; the Faubourg Saint-Denis, with the vast
enclosure of Saint-Ladre; beyond the Montmartre Gate, the Grange-
Batelière, encircled with white walls; behind it, with its chalky slopes,
Montmartre, which had then almost as many churches as windmills, and
which has kept only the windmills, for society no longer demands anything
but bread for the body. Lastly, beyond the Louvre, the Faubourg Saint-

Honoré, already considerable at that time, could be seen stretching away
into the fields, and Petit-Bretagne gleaming green, and the Marché aux
Pourceaux spreading abroad, in whose centre swelled the horrible apparatus
used for boiling counterfeiters. Between la Courtille and Saint-Laurent,
your eye had already noticed, on the summit of an eminence crouching
amid desert plains, a sort of edifice which resembled from a distance a
ruined colonnade, mounted upon a basement with its foundation laid bare.
This was neither a Parthenon, nor a temple of the Olympian Jupiter. It was
Montfaucon.
Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, summary as we have
endeavored to make it, has not shattered in the reader’s mind the general
image of old Paris, as we have constructed it, we will recapitulate it in a few
words. In the centre, the island of the City, resembling as to form an
enormous tortoise, and throwing out its bridges with tiles for scales; like
legs from beneath its gray shell of roofs. On the left, the monolithic
trapezium, firm, dense, bristling, of the University; on the right, the vast
semicircle of the Town, much more intermixed with gardens and
monuments. The three blocks, city, university, and town, marbled with
innumerable streets. Across all, the Seine, “foster-mother Seine,” as says
Father Du Breul, blocked with islands, bridges, and boats. All about an
immense plain, patched with a thousand sorts of cultivated plots, sown with
fine villages. On the left, Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirarde, Montrouge, Gentilly,
with its round tower and its square tower, etc.; on the right, twenty others,
from Conflans to Ville-l’Évêque. On the horizon, a border of hills arranged
in a circle like the rim of the basin. Finally, far away to the east, Vincennes,
and its seven quadrangular towers to the south, Bicêtre and its pointed
turrets; to the north, Saint-Denis and its spire; to the west, Saint Cloud and
its donjon keep. Such was the Paris which the ravens, who lived in 1482,
beheld from the summits of the towers of Notre-Dame.
Nevertheless, Voltaire said of this city, that “before Louis XIV., it
possessed but four fine monuments”: the dome of the Sorbonne, the Val-de-
Grâce, the modern Louvre, and I know not what the fourth was—the
Luxembourg, perhaps. Fortunately, Voltaire was the author of “Candide” in
spite of this, and in spite of this, he is, among all the men who have
followed each other in the long series of humanity, the one who has best
possessed the diabolical laugh. Moreover, this proves that one can be a fine
genius, and yet understand nothing of an art to which one does not belong.

Did not Molière imagine that he was doing Raphael and Michael-Angelo a
very great honor, by calling them “those Mignards of their age?”
Let us return to Paris and to the fifteenth century.
It was not then merely a handsome city; it was a homogeneous city, an
architectural and historical product of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone.
It was a city formed of two layers only; the Romanesque layer and the
Gothic layer; for the Roman layer had disappeared long before, with the
exception of the Hot Baths of Julian, where it still pierced through the thick
crust of the Middle Ages. As for the Celtic layer, no specimens were any
longer to be found, even when sinking wells.
Fifty years later, when the Renaissance began to mingle with this unity
which was so severe and yet so varied, the dazzling luxury of its fantasies
and systems, its debasements of Roman round arches, Greek columns, and
Gothic bases, its sculpture which was so tender and so ideal, its peculiar
taste for arabesques and acanthus leaves, its architectural paganism,
contemporary with Luther, Paris, was perhaps, still more beautiful, although
less harmonious to the eye, and to the thought.
But this splendid moment lasted only for a short time; the Renaissance
was not impartial; it did not content itself with building, it wished to
destroy; it is true that it required the room. Thus Gothic Paris was complete
only for a moment. Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie had barely been
completed when the demolition of the old Louvre was begun.
After that, the great city became more disfigured every day. Gothic Paris,
beneath which Roman Paris was effaced, was effaced in its turn; but can
any one say what Paris has replaced it?
There is the Paris of Catherine de Medicis at the Tuileries;[23]—the Paris
of Henri II., at the Hôtel de Ville, two edifices still in fine taste;—the Paris
of Henri IV., at the Place Royale: façades of brick with stone corners, and
slated roofs, tri-colored houses;—the Paris of Louis XIII., at the Val-de-
Grâce: a crushed and squat architecture, with vaults like basket-handles,
and something indescribably pot-bellied in the column, and thickset in the
dome;—the Paris of Louis XIV., in the Invalides: grand, rich, gilded, cold;
—the Paris of Louis XV., in Saint-Sulpice: volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds,
vermicelli and chiccory leaves, all in stone;—the Paris of Louis XVI., in the
Pantheon: Saint Peter of Rome, badly copied (the edifice is awkwardly
heaped together, which has not amended its lines);—the Paris of the

Republic, in the School of Medicine: a poor Greek and Roman taste, which
resembles the Coliseum or the Parthenon as the constitution of the year III.,
resembles the laws of Minos,—it is called in architecture, “the
Messidor”[24] taste;—the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme: this one
is sublime, a column of bronze made of cannons;—the Paris of the
Restoration, at the Bourse: a very white colonnade supporting a very
smooth frieze; the whole is square and cost twenty millions.
To each of these characteristic monuments there is attached by a
similarity of taste, fashion, and attitude, a certain number of houses
scattered about in different quarters and which the eyes of the connoisseur
easily distinguishes and furnishes with a date. When one knows how to
look, one finds the spirit of a century, and the physiognomy of a king, even
in the knocker on a door.
The Paris of the present day has then, no general physiognomy. It is a
collection of specimens of many centuries, and the finest have disappeared.
The capital grows only in houses, and what houses! At the rate at which
Paris is now proceeding, it will renew itself every fifty years.
Thus the historical significance of its architecture is being effaced every
day. Monuments are becoming rarer and rarer, and one seems to see them
gradually engulfed, by the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone;
our sons will have one of plaster.
So far as the modern monuments of new Paris are concerned, we would
gladly be excused from mentioning them. It is not that we do not admire
them as they deserve. The Sainte-Geneviève of M. Soufflot is certainly the
finest Savoy cake that has ever been made in stone. The Palace of the
Legion of Honor is also a very distinguished bit of pastry. The dome of the
wheat market is an English jockey cap, on a grand scale. The towers of
Saint-Sulpice are two huge clarinets, and the form is as good as any other;
the telegraph, contorted and grimacing, forms an admirable accident upon
their roofs. Saint-Roch has a door which, for magnificence, is comparable
only to that of Saint-Thomas d’Aquin. It has, also, a crucifixion in high
relief, in a cellar, with a sun of gilded wood. These things are fairly
marvellous. The lantern of the labyrinth of the Jardin des Plantes is also
very ingenious.
As for the Palace of the Bourse, which is Greek as to its colonnade,
Roman in the round arches of its doors and windows, of the Renaissance by

virtue of its flattened vault, it is indubitably a very correct and very pure
monument; the proof is that it is crowned with an attic, such as was never
seen in Athens, a beautiful, straight line, gracefully broken here and there
by stovepipes. Let us add that if it is according to rule that the architecture
of a building should be adapted to its purpose in such a manner that this
purpose shall be immediately apparent from the mere aspect of the building,
one cannot be too much amazed at a structure which might be indifferently
—the palace of a king, a chamber of communes, a town-hall, a college, a
riding-school, an academy, a warehouse, a court-house, a museum, a
barracks, a sepulchre, a temple, or a theatre. However, it is an Exchange. An
edifice ought to be, moreover, suitable to the climate. This one is evidently
constructed expressly for our cold and rainy skies. It has a roof almost as
flat as roofs in the East, which involves sweeping the roof in winter, when it
snows; and of course roofs are made to be swept. As for its purpose, of
which we just spoke, it fulfils it to a marvel; it is a bourse in France as it
would have been a temple in Greece. It is true that the architect was at a
good deal of trouble to conceal the clock face, which would have destroyed
the purity of the fine lines of the façade; but, on the other hand, we have
that colonnade which circles round the edifice and under which, on days of
high religious ceremony, the theories of the stock-brokers and the courtiers
of commerce can be developed so majestically.
These are very superb structures. Let us add a quantity of fine, amusing,
and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris
presenting to the eye, when viewed from a balloon, that richness of line,
that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiose something in
the simple, and unexpected in the beautiful, which characterizes a checker-
board.
However, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to you, reconstruct
the Paris of the fifteenth century, call it up before you in thought; look at the
sky athwart that surprising forest of spires, towers, and belfries; spread out
in the centre of the city, tear away at the point of the islands, fold at the
arches of the bridges, the Seine, with its broad green and yellow expanses,
more variable than the skin of a serpent; project clearly against an azure
horizon the Gothic profile of this ancient Paris. Make its contour float in a
winter’s mist which clings to its numerous chimneys; drown it in profound
night and watch the odd play of lights and shadows in that sombre labyrinth
of edifices; cast upon it a ray of light which shall vaguely outline it and

cause to emerge from the fog the great heads of the towers; or take that
black silhouette again, enliven with shadow the thousand acute angles of
the spires and gables, and make it start out more toothed than a shark’s jaw
against a copper-colored western sky,—and then compare.
And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which
the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the morning of some
grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost—climb upon
some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be
present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from
heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver
simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to
another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then,
all at once, behold!—for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed
a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a
column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell
mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others,
into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt
together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent
concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations
incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds,
whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening
circle of its oscillations.
Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it
is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of
notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns
grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap
from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and
whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of
wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends
and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid
notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and
vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a
shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the
other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of
the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills,
upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of
Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At

intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from
the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, again, from time to time,
this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave
Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in
the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior
chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their
vaulted roofs.
Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to.
Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking;
by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an
ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a
million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the
wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the
hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a
half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and
say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more
golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this
furnace of music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting
simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this
city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony
which produces the noise of a tempest.

BOOK FOURTH.

CHAPTER I.
GOOD SOULS.

Sixteen years previous to the epoch when this story takes place, one fine
morning, on Quasimodo Sunday, a living creature had been deposited, after
mass, in the church of Notre-Dame, on the wooden bed securely fixed in the
vestibule on the left, opposite that great image of Saint Christopher, which
the figure of Messire Antoine des Essarts, chevalier, carved in stone, had
been gazing at on his knees since 1413, when they took it into their heads to
overthrow the saint and the faithful follower. Upon this bed of wood it was
customary to expose foundlings for public charity. Whoever cared to take
them did so. In front of the wooden bed was a copper basin for alms.
The sort of living being which lay upon that plank on the morning of
Quasimodo, in the year of the Lord, 1467, appeared to excite to a high
degree, the curiosity of the numerous group which had congregated about
the wooden bed. The group was formed for the most part of the fair sex.
Hardly any one was there except old women.
In the first row, and among those who were most bent over the bed, four
were noticeable, who, from their gray cagoule, a sort of cassock, were
recognizable as attached to some devout sisterhood. I do not see why
history has not transmitted to posterity the names of these four discreet and
venerable damsels. They were Agnès la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme,
Henriette la Gaultière, Gauchère la Violette, all four widows, all four dames
of the Chapel Étienne Haudry, who had quitted their house with the
permission of their mistress, and in conformity with the statutes of Pierre
d’Ailly, in order to come and hear the sermon.
However, if these good Haudriettes were, for the moment, complying
with the statutes of Pierre d’Ailly, they certainly violated with joy those of
Michel de Brache, and the Cardinal of Pisa, which so inhumanly enjoined
silence upon them.

“What is this, sister?” said Agnès to Gauchère, gazing at the little
creature exposed, which was screaming and writhing on the wooden bed,
terrified by so many glances.
“What is to become of us,” said Jehanne, “if that is the way children are
made now?”
“I’m not learned in the matter of children,” resumed Agnès, “but it must
be a sin to look at this one.”
“’Tis not a child, Agnès.”
“’Tis an abortion of a monkey,” remarked Gauchère.
“’Tis a miracle,” interposed Henriette la Gaultière.
“Then,” remarked Agnès, “it is the third since the Sunday of the Lætare:
for, in less than a week, we had the miracle of the mocker of pilgrims
divinely punished by Notre-Dame d’Aubervilliers, and that was the second
miracle within a month.”
“This pretended foundling is a real monster of abomination,” resumed
Jehanne.
“He yells loud enough to deafen a chanter,” continued Gauchère. “Hold
your tongue, you little howler!”
“To think that Monsieur of Reims sent this enormity to Monsieur of
Paris,” added la Gaultière, clasping her hands.
“I imagine,” said Agnès la Herme, “that it is a beast, an animal,—the fruit
of a Jew and a sow; something not Christian, in short, which ought to be
thrown into the fire or into the water.”
“I really hope,” resumed la Gaultière, “that nobody will apply for it.”
“Ah, good heavens!” exclaimed Agnès; “those poor nurses yonder in the
foundling asylum, which forms the lower end of the lane as you go to the
river, just beside Monseigneur the bishop! what if this little monster were to
be carried to them to suckle? I’d rather give suck to a vampire.”
“How innocent that poor la Herme is!” resumed Jehanne; “don’t you see,
sister, that this little monster is at least four years old, and that he would
have less appetite for your breast than for a turnspit.”
The “little monster” we should find it difficult ourselves to describe him
otherwise, was, in fact, not a new-born child. It was a very angular and very
lively little mass, imprisoned in its linen sack, stamped with the cipher of

Messire Guillaume Chartier, then bishop of Paris, with a head projecting.
That head was deformed enough; one beheld only a forest of red hair, one
eye, a mouth, and teeth. The eye wept, the mouth cried, and the teeth
seemed to ask only to be allowed to bite. The whole struggled in the sack,
to the great consternation of the crowd, which increased and was renewed
incessantly around it.
Dame Aloïse de Gondelaurier, a rich and noble woman, who held by the
hand a pretty girl about five or six years of age, and dragged a long veil
about, suspended to the golden horn of her headdress, halted as she passed
the wooden bed, and gazed for a moment at the wretched creature, while
her charming little daughter, Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, spelled out with
her tiny, pretty finger, the permanent inscription attached to the wooden
bed: “Foundlings.”
“Really,” said the dame, turning away in disgust, “I thought that they
only exposed children here.”
She turned her back, throwing into the basin a silver florin, which rang
among the liards, and made the poor goodwives of the chapel of Étienne
Haudry open their eyes.
A moment later, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, the king’s
protonotary, passed, with an enormous missal under one arm and his wife
on the other (Damoiselle Guillemette la Mairesse), having thus by his side
his two regulators,—spiritual and temporal.
“Foundling!” he said, after examining the object; “found, apparently, on
the banks of the river Phlegethon.”
“One can only see one eye,” observed Damoiselle Guillemette; “there is
a wart on the other.”
“It’s not a wart,” returned Master Robert Mistricolle, “it is an egg which
contains another demon exactly similar, who bears another little egg which
contains another devil, and so on.”
“How do you know that?” asked Guillemette la Mairesse.
“I know it pertinently,” replied the protonotary.
“Monsieur le protonotare,” asked Gauchère, “what do you prognosticate
of this pretended foundling?”
“The greatest misfortunes,” replied Mistricolle.

“Ah! good heavens!” said an old woman among the spectators, “and that
besides our having had a considerable pestilence last year, and that they say
that the English are going to disembark in a company at Harfleur.”
“Perhaps that will prevent the queen from coming to Paris in the month
of September,” interposed another; “trade is so bad already.”
“My opinion is,” exclaimed Jehanne de la Tarme, “that it would be better
for the louts of Paris, if this little magician were put to bed on a fagot than
on a plank.”
“A fine, flaming fagot,” added the old woman.
“It would be more prudent,” said Mistricolle.
For several minutes, a young priest had been listening to the reasoning of
the Haudriettes and the sentences of the notary. He had a severe face, with a
large brow, a profound glance. He thrust the crowd silently aside,
scrutinized the “little magician,” and stretched out his hand upon him. It
was high time, for all the devotees were already licking their chops over the
“fine, flaming fagot.”
“I adopt this child,” said the priest.
He took it in his cassock and carried it off. The spectators followed him
with frightened glances. A moment later, he had disappeared through the
“Red Door,” which then led from the church to the cloister.
When the first surprise was over, Jehanne de la Tarme bent down to the
ear of la Gaultière,—
“I told you so, sister,—that young clerk, Monsieur Claude Frollo, is a
sorcerer.”

CHAPTER II.
CLAUDE FROLLO.

In fact, Claude Frollo was no common person.
He belonged to one of those middle-class families which were called
indifferently, in the impertinent language of the last century, the high
bourgeoise or the petty nobility. This family had inherited from the brothers
Paclet the fief of Tirechappe, which was dependent upon the Bishop of
Paris, and whose twenty-one houses had been in the thirteenth century the
object of so many suits before the official. As possessor of this fief, Claude
Frollo was one of the twenty-seven seigneurs keeping claim to a manor in
fee in Paris and its suburbs; and for a long time, his name was to be seen
inscribed in this quality, between the Hôtel de Tancarville, belonging to
Master François Le Rez, and the college of Tours, in the records deposited
at Saint Martin des Champs.
Claude Frollo had been destined from infancy, by his parents, to the
ecclesiastical profession. He had been taught to read in Latin; he had been
trained to keep his eyes on the ground and to speak low. While still a child,
his father had cloistered him in the college of Torchi in the University.
There it was that he had grown up, on the missal and the lexicon.
Moreover, he was a sad, grave, serious child, who studied ardently, and
learned quickly; he never uttered a loud cry in recreation hour, mixed but
little in the bacchanals of the Rue du Fouarre, did not know what it was to
dare alapas et capillos laniare, and had cut no figure in that revolt of 1463,
which the annalists register gravely, under the title of “The sixth trouble of
the University.” He seldom rallied the poor students of Montaigu on the
cappettes from which they derived their name, or the bursars of the college
of Dormans on their shaved tonsure, and their surtout parti-colored of
bluish-green, blue, and violet cloth, azurini coloris et bruni, as says the
charter of the Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes.

On the other hand, he was assiduous at the great and the small schools of
the Rue Saint Jean de Beauvais. The first pupil whom the Abbé de Saint
Pierre de Val, at the moment of beginning his reading on canon law, always
perceived, glued to a pillar of the school Saint-Vendregesile, opposite his
rostrum, was Claude Frollo, armed with his horn ink-bottle, biting his pen,
scribbling on his threadbare knee, and, in winter, blowing on his fingers.
The first auditor whom Messire Miles d’Isliers, doctor in decretals, saw
arrive every Monday morning, all breathless, at the opening of the gates of
the school of the Chef-Saint-Denis, was Claude Frollo. Thus, at sixteen
years of age, the young clerk might have held his own, in mystical theology,
against a father of the church; in canonical theology, against a father of the
councils; in scholastic theology, against a doctor of Sorbonne.
Theology conquered, he had plunged into decretals. From the “Master of
Sentences,” he had passed to the “Capitularies of Charlemagne;” and he had
devoured in succession, in his appetite for science, decretals upon decretals,
those of Theodore, Bishop of Hispalus; those of Bouchard, Bishop of
Worms; those of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; next the decretal of Gratian,
which succeeded the capitularies of Charlemagne; then the collection of
Gregory IX.; then the Epistle of Superspecula, of Honorius III. He rendered
clear and familiar to himself that vast and tumultuous period of civil law
and canon law in conflict and at strife with each other, in the chaos of the
Middle Ages,—a period which Bishop Theodore opens in 618, and which
Pope Gregory closes in 1227.
Decretals digested, he flung himself upon medicine, on the liberal arts.
He studied the science of herbs, the science of unguents; he became an
expert in fevers and in contusions, in sprains and abcesses. Jacques d’
Espars would have received him as a physician; Richard Hellain, as a
surgeon. He also passed through all the degrees of licentiate, master, and
doctor of arts. He studied the languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, a triple
sanctuary then very little frequented. His was a veritable fever for acquiring
and hoarding, in the matter of science. At the age of eighteen, he had made
his way through the four faculties; it seemed to the young man that life had
but one sole object: learning.
It was towards this epoch, that the excessive heat of the summer of 1466
caused that grand outburst of the plague which carried off more than forty
thousand souls in the vicomty of Paris, and among others, as Jean de Troyes

states, “Master Arnoul, astrologer to the king, who was a very fine man,
both wise and pleasant.” The rumor spread in the University that the Rue
Tirechappe was especially devastated by the malady. It was there that
Claude’s parents resided, in the midst of their fief. The young scholar
rushed in great alarm to the paternal mansion. When he entered it, he found
that both father and mother had died on the preceding day. A very young
brother of his, who was in swaddling clothes, was still alive and crying
abandoned in his cradle. This was all that remained to Claude of his family;
the young man took the child under his arm and went off in a pensive mood.
Up to that moment, he had lived only in science; he now began to live in
life.
This catastrophe was a crisis in Claude’s existence. Orphaned, the eldest,
head of the family at the age of nineteen, he felt himself rudely recalled
from the reveries of school to the realities of this world. Then, moved with
pity, he was seized with passion and devotion towards that child, his
brother; a sweet and strange thing was a human affection to him, who had
hitherto loved his books alone.
This affection developed to a singular point; in a soul so new, it was like
a first love. Separated since infancy from his parents, whom he had hardly
known; cloistered and immured, as it were, in his books; eager above all
things to study and to learn; exclusively attentive up to that time, to his
intelligence which broadened in science, to his imagination, which
expanded in letters,—the poor scholar had not yet had time to feel the place
of his heart.
This young brother, without mother or father, this little child which had
fallen abruptly from heaven into his arms, made a new man of him. He
perceived that there was something else in the world besides the
speculations of the Sorbonne, and the verses of Homer; that man needed
affections; that life without tenderness and without love was only a set of
dry, shrieking, and rending wheels. Only, he imagined, for he was at the age
when illusions are as yet replaced only by illusions, that the affections of
blood and family were the sole ones necessary, and that a little brother to
love sufficed to fill an entire existence.
He threw himself, therefore, into the love for his little Jehan with the
passion of a character already profound, ardent, concentrated; that poor frail
creature, pretty, fair-haired, rosy, and curly,—that orphan with another

orphan for his only support, touched him to the bottom of his heart; and
grave thinker as he was, he set to meditating upon Jehan with an infinite
compassion. He kept watch and ward over him as over something very
fragile, and very worthy of care. He was more than a brother to the child; he
became a mother to him.
Little Jehan had lost his mother while he was still at the breast; Claude
gave him to a nurse. Besides the fief of Tirechappe, he had inherited from
his father the fief of Moulin, which was a dependency of the square tower
of Gentilly; it was a mill on a hill, near the château of Winchestre (Bicêtre).
There was a miller’s wife there who was nursing a fine child; it was not far
from the university, and Claude carried the little Jehan to her in his own
arms.
From that time forth, feeling that he had a burden to bear, he took life
very seriously. The thought of his little brother became not only his
recreation, but the object of his studies. He resolved to consecrate himself
entirely to a future for which he was responsible in the sight of God, and
never to have any other wife, any other child than the happiness and fortune
of his brother. Therefore, he attached himself more closely than ever to the
clerical profession. His merits, his learning, his quality of immediate vassal
of the Bishop of Paris, threw the doors of the church wide open to him. At
the age of twenty, by special dispensation of the Holy See, he was a priest,
and served as the youngest of the chaplains of Notre-Dame the altar which
is called, because of the late mass which is said there, altare pigrorum.
There, plunged more deeply than ever in his dear books, which he quitted
only to run for an hour to the fief of Moulin, this mixture of learning and
austerity, so rare at his age, had promptly acquired for him the respect and
admiration of the monastery. From the cloister, his reputation as a learned
man had passed to the people, among whom it had changed a little, a
frequent occurrence at that time, into reputation as a sorcerer.
It was at the moment when he was returning, on Quasimodo day, from
saying his mass at the Altar of the Lazy, which was by the side of the door
leading to the nave on the right, near the image of the Virgin, that his
attention had been attracted by the group of old women chattering around
the bed for foundlings.
Then it was that he approached the unhappy little creature, which was so
hated and so menaced. That distress, that deformity, that abandonment, the

thought of his young brother, the idea which suddenly occurred to him, that
if he were to die, his dear little Jehan might also be flung miserably on the
plank for foundlings,—all this had gone to his heart simultaneously; a great
pity had moved in him, and he had carried off the child.
When he removed the child from the sack, he found it greatly deformed,
in very sooth. The poor little wretch had a wart on his left eye, his head
placed directly on his shoulders, his spinal column was crooked, his breast
bone prominent, and his legs bowed; but he appeared to be lively; and
although it was impossible to say in what language he lisped, his cry
indicated considerable force and health. Claude’s compassion increased at
the sight of this ugliness; and he made a vow in his heart to rear the child
for the love of his brother, in order that, whatever might be the future faults
of the little Jehan, he should have beside him that charity done for his sake.
It was a sort of investment of good works, which he was effecting in the
name of his young brother; it was a stock of good works which he wished to
amass in advance for him, in case the little rogue should some day find
himself short of that coin, the only sort which is received at the toll-bar of
paradise.
He baptized his adopted child, and gave him the name of Quasimodo,
either because he desired thereby to mark the day, when he had found him,
or because he wished to designate by that name to what a degree the poor
little creature was incomplete, and hardly sketched out. In fact, Quasimodo,
blind, hunchbacked, knock-kneed, was only an “almost.”

CHAPTER III.
IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE.

Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up. He had become a few years
previously the bellringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to his father by adoption,
Claude Frollo,—who had become archdeacon of Josas, thanks to his
suzerain, Messire Louis de Beaumont,—who had become Bishop of Paris,
at the death of Guillaume Chartier in 1472, thanks to his patron, Olivier Le
Daim, barber to Louis XI., king by the grace of God.
So Quasimodo was the ringer of the chimes of Notre-Dame.
In the course of time there had been formed a certain peculiarly intimate
bond which united the ringer to the church. Separated forever from the
world, by the double fatality of his unknown birth and his natural deformity,
imprisoned from his infancy in that impassable double circle, the poor
wretch had grown used to seeing nothing in this world beyond the religious
walls which had received him under their shadow. Notre-Dame had been to
him successively, as he grew up and developed, the egg, the nest, the house,
the country, the universe.
There was certainly a sort of mysterious and pre-existing harmony
between this creature and this church. When, still a little fellow, he had
dragged himself tortuously and by jerks beneath the shadows of its vaults,
he seemed, with his human face and his bestial limbs, the natural reptile of
that humid and sombre pavement, upon which the shadow of the
Romanesque capitals cast so many strange forms.
Later on, the first time that he caught hold, mechanically, of the ropes to
the towers, and hung suspended from them, and set the bell to clanging, it
produced upon his adopted father, Claude, the effect of a child whose
tongue is unloosed and who begins to speak.

It is thus that, little by little, developing always in sympathy with the
cathedral, living there, sleeping there, hardly ever leaving it, subject every
hour to the mysterious impress, he came to resemble it, he incrusted himself
in it, so to speak, and became an integral part of it. His salient angles fitted
into the retreating angles of the cathedral (if we may be allowed this figure
of speech), and he seemed not only its inhabitant but more than that, its
natural tenant. One might almost say that he had assumed its form, as the
snail takes on the form of its shell. It was his dwelling, his hole, his
envelope. There existed between him and the old church so profound an
instinctive sympathy, so many magnetic affinities, so many material
affinities, that he adhered to it somewhat as a tortoise adheres to its shell.
The rough and wrinkled cathedral was his shell.
It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally all the similes which
we are obliged to employ here to express the singular, symmetrical, direct,
almost consubstantial union of a man and an edifice. It is equally
unnecessary to state to what a degree that whole cathedral was familiar to
him, after so long and so intimate a cohabitation. That dwelling was
peculiar to him. It had no depths to which Quasimodo had not penetrated,
no height which he had not scaled. He often climbed many stones up the
front, aided solely by the uneven points of the carving. The towers, on
whose exterior surface he was frequently seen clambering, like a lizard
gliding along a perpendicular wall, those two gigantic twins, so lofty, so
menacing, so formidable, possessed for him neither vertigo, nor terror, nor
shocks of amazement.
To see them so gentle under his hand, so easy to scale, one would have
said that he had tamed them. By dint of leaping, climbing, gambolling amid
the abysses of the gigantic cathedral he had become, in some sort, a monkey
and a goat, like the Calabrian child who swims before he walks, and plays
with the sea while still a babe.
Moreover, it was not his body alone which seemed fashioned after the
Cathedral, but his mind also. In what condition was that mind? What bent
had it contracted, what form had it assumed beneath that knotted envelope,
in that savage life? This it would be hard to determine. Quasimodo had been
born one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame. It was with great difficulty, and by dint
of great patience that Claude Frollo had succeeded in teaching him to talk.
But a fatality was attached to the poor foundling. Bellringer of Notre-Dame

at the age of fourteen, a new infirmity had come to complete his
misfortunes: the bells had broken the drums of his ears; he had become
deaf. The only gate which nature had left wide open for him had been
abruptly closed, and forever.
In closing, it had cut off the only ray of joy and of light which still made
its way into the soul of Quasimodo. His soul fell into profound night. The
wretched being’s misery became as incurable and as complete as his
deformity. Let us add that his deafness rendered him to some extent dumb.
For, in order not to make others laugh, the very moment that he found
himself to be deaf, he resolved upon a silence which he only broke when he
was alone. He voluntarily tied that tongue which Claude Frollo had taken so
much pains to unloose. Hence, it came about, that when necessity
constrained him to speak, his tongue was torpid, awkward, and like a door
whose hinges have grown rusty.
If now we were to try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo through that
thick, hard rind; if we could sound the depths of that badly constructed
organism; if it were granted to us to look with a torch behind those non-
transparent organs to explore the shadowy interior of that opaque creature,
to elucidate his obscure corners, his absurd no-thoroughfares, and suddenly
to cast a vivid light upon the soul enchained at the extremity of that cave,
we should, no doubt, find the unhappy Psyche in some poor, cramped, and
ricketty attitude, like those prisoners beneath the Leads of Venice, who
grew old bent double in a stone box which was both too low and too short
for them.
It is certain that the mind becomes atrophied in a defective body.
Quasimodo was barely conscious of a soul cast in his own image, moving
blindly within him. The impressions of objects underwent a considerable
refraction before reaching his mind. His brain was a peculiar medium; the
ideas which passed through it issued forth completely distorted. The
reflection which resulted from this refraction was, necessarily, divergent
and perverted.
Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations of judgment, a
thousand deviations, in which his thought strayed, now mad, now idiotic.
The first effect of this fatal organization was to trouble the glance which
he cast upon things. He received hardly any immediate perception of them.
The external world seemed much farther away to him than it does to us.

The second effect of his misfortune was to render him malicious.
He was malicious, in fact, because he was savage; he was savage because
he was ugly. There was logic in his nature, as there is in ours.
His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of still greater
malevolence: “Malus puer robustus,” says Hobbes.
This justice must, however be rendered to him. Malevolence was not,
perhaps, innate in him. From his very first steps among men, he had felt
himself, later on he had seen himself, spewed out, blasted, rejected. Human
words were, for him, always a raillery or a malediction. As he grew up, he
had found nothing but hatred around him. He had caught the general
malevolence. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been
wounded.
After all, he turned his face towards men only with reluctance; his
cathedral was sufficient for him. It was peopled with marble figures,—
kings, saints, bishops,—who at least did not burst out laughing in his face,
and who gazed upon him only with tranquillity and kindliness. The other
statues, those of the monsters and demons, cherished no hatred for him,
Quasimodo. He resembled them too much for that. They seemed rather, to
be scoffing at other men. The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the
monsters were his friends and guarded him. So he held long communion
with them. He sometimes passed whole hours crouching before one of these
statues, in solitary conversation with it. If any one came, he fled like a lover
surprised in his serenade.
And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the universe, and all
nature beside. He dreamed of no other hedgerows than the painted
windows, always in flower; no other shade than that of the foliage of stone
which spread out, loaded with birds, in the tufts of the Saxon capitals; of no
other mountains than the colossal towers of the church; of no other ocean
than Paris, roaring at their bases.
What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that which aroused
his soul, and made it open its poor wings, which it kept so miserably folded
in its cavern, that which sometimes rendered him even happy, was the bells.
He loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them. From the
chime in the spire, over the intersection of the aisles and nave, to the great
bell of the front, he cherished a tenderness for them all. The central spire
and the two towers were to him as three great cages, whose birds, reared by

himself, sang for him alone. Yet it was these very bells which had made him
deaf; but mothers often love best that child which has caused them the most
suffering.
It is true that their voice was the only one which he could still hear. On
this score, the big bell was his beloved. It was she whom he preferred out of
all that family of noisy girls which bustled above him, on festival days. This
bell was named Marie. She was alone in the southern tower, with her sister
Jacqueline, a bell of lesser size, shut up in a smaller cage beside hers. This
Jacqueline was so called from the name of the wife of Jean Montagu, who
had given it to the church, which had not prevented his going and figuring
without his head at Montfaucon. In the second tower there were six other
bells, and, finally, six smaller ones inhabited the belfry over the crossing,
with the wooden bell, which rang only between after dinner on Good Friday
and the morning of the day before Easter. So Quasimodo had fifteen bells in
his seraglio; but big Marie was his favorite.
No idea can be formed of his delight on days when the grand peal was
sounded. At the moment when the archdeacon dismissed him, and said,
“Go!” he mounted the spiral staircase of the clock tower faster than any one
else could have descended it. He entered perfectly breathless into the aerial
chamber of the great bell; he gazed at her a moment, devoutly and lovingly;
then he gently addressed her and patted her with his hand, like a good
horse, which is about to set out on a long journey. He pitied her for the
trouble that she was about to suffer. After these first caresses, he shouted to
his assistants, placed in the lower story of the tower, to begin. They grasped
the ropes, the wheel creaked, the enormous capsule of metal started slowly
into motion. Quasimodo followed it with his glance and trembled. The first
shock of the clapper and the brazen wall made the framework upon which it
was mounted quiver. Quasimodo vibrated with the bell.
“Vah!” he cried, with a senseless burst of laughter. However, the
movement of the bass was accelerated, and, in proportion as it described a
wider angle, Quasimodo’s eye opened also more and more widely,
phosphoric and flaming. At length the grand peal began; the whole tower
trembled; woodwork, leads, cut stones, all groaned at once, from the piles
of the foundation to the trefoils of its summit. Then Quasimodo boiled and
frothed; he went and came; he trembled from head to foot with the tower.
The bell, furious, running riot, presented to the two walls of the tower

alternately its brazen throat, whence escaped that tempestuous breath,
which is audible leagues away. Quasimodo stationed himself in front of this
open throat; he crouched and rose with the oscillations of the bell, breathed
in this overwhelming breath, gazed by turns at the deep place, which
swarmed with people, two hundred feet below him, and at that enormous,
brazen tongue which came, second after second, to howl in his ear.
It was the only speech which he understood, the only sound which broke
for him the universal silence. He swelled out in it as a bird does in the sun.
All of a sudden, the frenzy of the bell seized upon him; his look became
extraordinary; he lay in wait for the great bell as it passed, as a spider lies in
wait for a fly, and flung himself abruptly upon it, with might and main.
Then, suspended above the abyss, borne to and fro by the formidable
swinging of the bell, he seized the brazen monster by the ear-laps, pressed it
between both knees, spurred it on with his heels, and redoubled the fury of
the peal with the whole shock and weight of his body. Meanwhile, the tower
trembled; he shrieked and gnashed his teeth, his red hair rose erect, his
breast heaving like a bellows, his eye flashed flames, the monstrous bell
neighed, panting, beneath him; and then it was no longer the great bell of
Notre-Dame nor Quasimodo: it was a dream, a whirlwind, a tempest,
dizziness mounted astride of noise; a spirit clinging to a flying crupper, a
strange centaur, half man, half bell; a sort of horrible Astolphus, borne away
upon a prodigious hippogriff of living bronze.
The presence of this extraordinary being caused, as it were, a breath of
life to circulate throughout the entire cathedral. It seemed as though there
escaped from him, at least according to the growing superstitions of the
crowd, a mysterious emanation which animated all the stones of Notre-
Dame, and made the deep bowels of the ancient church to palpitate. It
sufficed for people to know that he was there, to make them believe that
they beheld the thousand statues of the galleries and the fronts in motion.
And the cathedral did indeed seem a docile and obedient creature beneath
his hand; it waited on his will to raise its great voice; it was possessed and
filled with Quasimodo, as with a familiar spirit. One would have said that
he made the immense edifice breathe. He was everywhere about it; in fact,
he multiplied himself on all points of the structure. Now one perceived with
affright at the very top of one of the towers, a fantastic dwarf climbing,
writhing, crawling on all fours, descending outside above the abyss, leaping
from projection to projection, and going to ransack the belly of some

sculptured gorgon; it was Quasimodo dislodging the crows. Again, in some
obscure corner of the church one came in contact with a sort of living
chimera, crouching and scowling; it was Quasimodo engaged in thought.
Sometimes one caught sight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous head and a
bundle of disordered limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope; it was
Quasimodo ringing vespers or the Angelus. Often at night a hideous form
was seen wandering along the frail balustrade of carved lacework, which
crowns the towers and borders the circumference of the apse; again it was
the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then, said the women of the neighborhood,
the whole church took on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes
and mouths were opened, here and there; one heard the dogs, the monsters,
and the gargoyles of stone, which keep watch night and day, with
outstretched neck and open jaws, around the monstrous cathedral, barking.
And, if it was a Christmas Eve, while the great bell, which seemed to emit
the death rattle, summoned the faithful to the midnight mass, such an air
was spread over the sombre façade that one would have declared that the
grand portal was devouring the throng, and that the rose window was
watching it. And all this came from Quasimodo. Egypt would have taken
him for the god of this temple; the Middle Ages believed him to be its
demon: he was in fact its soul.
To such an extent was this disease that for those who know that
Quasimodo has existed, Notre-Dame is to-day deserted, inanimate, dead.
One feels that something has disappeared from it. That immense body is
empty; it is a skeleton; the spirit has quitted it, one sees its place and that is
all. It is like a skull which still has holes for the eyes, but no longer sight.

CHAPTER IV.
THE DOG AND HIS MASTER.

Nevertheless, there was one human creature whom Quasimodo excepted
from his malice and from his hatred for others, and whom he loved even
more, perhaps, than his cathedral: this was Claude Frollo.
The matter was simple; Claude Frollo had taken him in, had adopted him,
had nourished him, had reared him. When a little lad, it was between
Claude Frollo’s legs that he was accustomed to seek refuge, when the dogs
and the children barked after him. Claude Frollo had taught him to talk, to
read, to write. Claude Frollo had finally made him the bellringer. Now, to
give the big bell in marriage to Quasimodo was to give Juliet to Romeo.
Hence Quasimodo’s gratitude was profound, passionate, boundless; and
although the visage of his adopted father was often clouded or severe,
although his speech was habitually curt, harsh, imperious, that gratitude
never wavered for a single moment. The archdeacon had in Quasimodo the
most submissive slave, the most docile lackey, the most vigilant of dogs.
When the poor bellringer became deaf, there had been established between
him and Claude Frollo, a language of signs, mysterious and understood by
themselves alone. In this manner the archdeacon was the sole human being
with whom Quasimodo had preserved communication. He was in sympathy
with but two things in this world: Notre-Dame and Claude Frollo.
There is nothing which can be compared with the empire of the
archdeacon over the bellringer; with the attachment of the bellringer for the
archdeacon. A sign from Claude and the idea of giving him pleasure would
have sufficed to make Quasimodo hurl himself headlong from the summit
of Notre-Dame. It was a remarkable thing—all that physical strength which
had reached in Quasimodo such an extraordinary development, and which
was placed by him blindly at the disposition of another. There was in it, no
doubt, filial devotion, domestic attachment; there was also the fascination

of one spirit by another spirit. It was a poor, awkward, and clumsy
organization, which stood with lowered head and supplicating eyes before a
lofty and profound, a powerful and superior intellect. Lastly, and above all,
it was gratitude. Gratitude so pushed to its extremest limit, that we do not
know to what to compare it. This virtue is not one of those of which the
finest examples are to be met with among men. We will say then, that
Quasimodo loved the archdeacon as never a dog, never a horse, never an
elephant loved his master.

CHAPTER V.
MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO.

In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years of age; Claude Frollo, about
thirty-six. One had grown up, the other had grown old.
Claude Frollo was no longer the simple scholar of the college of Torchi,
the tender protector of a little child, the young and dreamy philosopher who
knew many things and was ignorant of many. He was a priest, austere,
grave, morose; one charged with souls; monsieur the archdeacon of Josas,
the bishop’s second acolyte, having charge of the two deaneries of
Montlhéry, and Châteaufort, and one hundred and seventy-four country
curacies. He was an imposing and sombre personage, before whom the
choir boys in alb and in jacket trembled, as well as the machicots[25], and
the brothers of Saint-Augustine and the matutinal clerks of Notre-Dame,
when he passed slowly beneath the lofty arches of the choir, majestic,
thoughtful, with arms folded and his head so bent upon his breast that all
one saw of his face was his large, bald brow.
Dom Claude Frollo had, however, abandoned neither science nor the
education of his young brother, those two occupations of his life. But as
time went on, some bitterness had been mingled with these things which
were so sweet. In the long run, says Paul Diacre, the best lard turns rancid.
Little Jehan Frollo, surnamed (du Moulin) “of the Mill” because of the
place where he had been reared, had not grown up in the direction which
Claude would have liked to impose upon him. The big brother counted
upon a pious, docile, learned, and honorable pupil. But the little brother,
like those young trees which deceive the gardener’s hopes and turn
obstinately to the quarter whence they receive sun and air, the little brother
did not grow and did not multiply, but only put forth fine bushy and
luxuriant branches on the side of laziness, ignorance, and debauchery. He

was a regular devil, and a very disorderly one, who made Dom Claude
scowl; but very droll and very subtle, which made the big brother smile.
Claude had confided him to that same college of Torchi where he had
passed his early years in study and meditation; and it was a grief to him that
this sanctuary, formerly edified by the name of Frollo, should to-day be
scandalized by it. He sometimes preached Jehan very long and severe
sermons, which the latter intrepidly endured. After all, the young
scapegrace had a good heart, as can be seen in all comedies. But the sermon
over, he none the less tranquilly resumed his course of seditions and
enormities. Now it was a béjaune or yellow beak (as they called the new
arrivals at the university), whom he had been mauling by way of welcome;
a precious tradition which has been carefully preserved to our own day.
Again, he had set in movement a band of scholars, who had flung
themselves upon a wine-shop in classic fashion, quasi classico excitati, had
then beaten the tavern-keeper “with offensive cudgels,” and joyously
pillaged the tavern, even to smashing in the hogsheads of wine in the cellar.
And then it was a fine report in Latin, which the sub-monitor of Torchi
carried piteously to Dom Claude with this dolorous marginal comment,—
Rixa; prima causa vinum optimum potatum. Finally, it was said, a thing
quite horrible in a boy of sixteen, that his debauchery often extended as far
as the Rue de Glatigny.
Claude, saddened and discouraged in his human affections, by all this,
had flung himself eagerly into the arms of learning, that sister which, at
least does not laugh in your face, and which always pays you, though in
money that is sometimes a little hollow, for the attention which you have
paid to her. Hence, he became more and more learned, and, at the same
time, as a natural consequence, more and more rigid as a priest, more and
more sad as a man. There are for each of us several parallelisms between
our intelligence, our habits, and our character, which develop without a
break, and break only in the great disturbances of life.
As Claude Frollo had passed through nearly the entire circle of human
learning—positive, exterior, and permissible—since his youth, he was
obliged, unless he came to a halt, ubi defuit orbis, to proceed further and
seek other aliments for the insatiable activity of his intelligence. The
antique symbol of the serpent biting its tail is, above all, applicable to
science. It would appear that Claude Frollo had experienced this. Many

grave persons affirm that, after having exhausted the fas of human learning,
he had dared to penetrate into the nefas. He had, they said, tasted in
succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from
hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit. He had taken his
place by turns, as the reader has seen, in the conferences of the theologians
in Sorbonne,—in the assemblies of the doctors of art, after the manner of
Saint-Hilaire,—in the disputes of the decretalists, after the manner of Saint-
Martin,—in the congregations of physicians at the holy water font of Notre-
Dame, ad cupam Nostræ-Dominæ. All the dishes permitted and approved,
which those four great kitchens called the four faculties could elaborate and
serve to the understanding, he had devoured, and had been satiated with
them before his hunger was appeased. Then he had penetrated further,
lower, beneath all that finished, material, limited knowledge; he had,
perhaps, risked his soul, and had seated himself in the cavern at that
mysterious table of the alchemists, of the astrologers, of the hermetics, of
which Averroès, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicolas Flamel hold the end in the
Middle Ages; and which extends in the East, by the light of the seven-
branched candlestick, to Solomon, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster.
That is, at least, what was supposed, whether rightly or not. It is certain
that the archdeacon often visited the cemetery of the Saints-Innocents,
where, it is true, his father and mother had been buried, with other victims
of the plague of 1466; but that he appeared far less devout before the cross
of their grave than before the strange figures with which the tomb of
Nicolas Flamel and Claude Pernelle, erected just beside it, was loaded.
It is certain that he had frequently been seen to pass along the Rue des
Lombards, and furtively enter a little house which formed the corner of the
Rue des Ecrivans and the Rue Marivault. It was the house which Nicolas
Flamel had built, where he had died about 1417, and which, constantly
deserted since that time, had already begun to fall in ruins,—so greatly had
the hermetics and the alchemists of all countries wasted away the walls,
merely by carving their names upon them. Some neighbors even affirm that
they had once seen, through an air-hole, Archdeacon Claude excavating,
turning over, digging up the earth in the two cellars, whose supports had
been daubed with numberless couplets and hieroglyphics by Nicolas Flamel
himself. It was supposed that Flamel had buried the philosopher’s stone in
the cellar; and the alchemists, for the space of two centuries, from Magistri
to Father Pacifique, never ceased to worry the soil until the house, so

cruelly ransacked and turned over, ended by falling into dust beneath their
feet.
Again, it is certain that the archdeacon had been seized with a singular
passion for the symbolical door of Notre-Dame, that page of a conjuring
book written in stone, by Bishop Guillaume de Paris, who has, no doubt,
been damned for having affixed so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred
poem chanted by the rest of the edifice. Archdeacon Claude had the credit
also of having fathomed the mystery of the colossus of Saint Christopher,
and of that lofty, enigmatical statue which then stood at the entrance of the
vestibule, and which the people, in derision, called “Monsieur Legris.” But,
what every one might have noticed was the interminable hours which he
often employed, seated upon the parapet of the area in front of the church,
in contemplating the sculptures of the front; examining now the foolish
virgins with their lamps reversed, now the wise virgins with their lamps
upright; again, calculating the angle of vision of that raven which belongs to
the left front, and which is looking at a mysterious point inside the church,
where is concealed the philosopher’s stone, if it be not in the cellar of
Nicolas Flamel.
It was, let us remark in passing, a singular fate for the Church of Notre-
Dame at that epoch to be so beloved, in two different degrees, and with so
much devotion, by two beings so dissimilar as Claude and Quasimodo.
Beloved by one, a sort of instinctive and savage half-man, for its beauty, for
its stature, for the harmonies which emanated from its magnificent
ensemble; beloved by the other, a learned and passionate imagination, for
its myth, for the sense which it contains, for the symbolism scattered
beneath the sculptures of its front,—like the first text underneath the second
in a palimpsest,—in a word, for the enigma which it is eternally
propounding to the understanding.
Furthermore, it is certain that the archdeacon had established himself in
that one of the two towers which looks upon the Grève, just beside the
frame for the bells, a very secret little cell, into which no one, not even the
bishop, entered without his leave, it was said. This tiny cell had formerly
been made almost at the summit of the tower, among the ravens’ nests, by
Bishop Hugo de Besançon[26] who had wrought sorcery there in his day.
What that cell contained, no one knew; but from the strand of the Terrain, at
night, there was often seen to appear, disappear, and reappear at brief and

regular intervals, at a little dormer window opening upon the back of the
tower, a certain red, intermittent, singular light which seemed to follow the
panting breaths of a bellows, and to proceed from a flame, rather than from
a light. In the darkness, at that height, it produced a singular effect; and the
goodwives said: “There’s the archdeacon blowing! hell is sparkling up
yonder!”
There were no great proofs of sorcery in that, after all, but there was still
enough smoke to warrant a surmise of fire, and the archdeacon bore a
tolerably formidable reputation. We ought to mention however, that the
sciences of Egypt, that necromancy and magic, even the whitest, even the
most innocent, had no more envenomed enemy, no more pitiless
denunciator before the gentlemen of the officialty of Notre-Dame. Whether
this was sincere horror, or the game played by the thief who shouts, “stop
thief!” at all events, it did not prevent the archdeacon from being considered
by the learned heads of the chapter, as a soul who had ventured into the
vestibule of hell, who was lost in the caves of the cabal, groping amid the
shadows of the occult sciences. Neither were the people deceived thereby;
with any one who possessed any sagacity, Quasimodo passed for the
demon; Claude Frollo, for the sorcerer. It was evident that the bellringer
was to serve the archdeacon for a given time, at the end of which he would
carry away the latter’s soul, by way of payment. Thus the archdeacon, in
spite of the excessive austerity of his life, was in bad odor among all pious
souls; and there was no devout nose so inexperienced that it could not smell
him out to be a magician.
And if, as he grew older, abysses had formed in his science, they had also
formed in his heart. That at least, is what one had grounds for believing on
scrutinizing that face upon which the soul was only seen to shine through a
sombre cloud. Whence that large, bald brow? that head forever bent? that
breast always heaving with sighs? What secret thought caused his mouth to
smile with so much bitterness, at the same moment that his scowling brows
approached each other like two bulls on the point of fighting? Why was
what hair he had left already gray? What was that internal fire which
sometimes broke forth in his glance, to such a degree that his eye resembled
a hole pierced in the wall of a furnace?
These symptoms of a violent moral preoccupation, had acquired an
especially high degree of intensity at the epoch when this story takes place.

More than once a choir-boy had fled in terror at finding him alone in the
church, so strange and dazzling was his look. More than once, in the choir,
at the hour of the offices, his neighbor in the stalls had heard him mingle
with the plain song, ad omnem tonum, unintelligible parentheses. More than
once the laundress of the Terrain charged “with washing the chapter” had
observed, not without affright, the marks of nails and clenched fingers on
the surplice of monsieur the archdeacon of Josas.
However, he redoubled his severity, and had never been more exemplary.
By profession as well as by character, he had always held himself aloof
from women; he seemed to hate them more than ever. The mere rustling of
a silken petticoat caused his hood to fall over his eyes. Upon this score he
was so jealous of austerity and reserve, that when the Dame de Beaujeu, the
king’s daughter, came to visit the cloister of Notre-Dame, in the month of
December, 1481, he gravely opposed her entrance, reminding the bishop of
the statute of the Black Book, dating from the vigil of Saint-Barthélemy,
1334, which interdicts access to the cloister to “any woman whatever, old or
young, mistress or maid.” Upon which the bishop had been constrained to
recite to him the ordinance of Legate Odo, which excepts certain great
dames, aliquæ magnates mulieres, quæ sine scandalo vitari non possunt.
And again the archdeacon had protested, objecting that the ordinance of the
legate, which dated back to 1207, was anterior by a hundred and twenty-
seven years to the Black Book, and consequently was abrogated in fact by
it. And he had refused to appear before the princess.
It was also noticed that his horror for Bohemian women and gypsies had
seemed to redouble for some time past. He had petitioned the bishop for an
edict which expressly forbade the Bohemian women to come and dance and
beat their tambourines on the place of the Parvis; and for about the same
length of time, he had been ransacking the mouldy placards of the officialty,
in order to collect the cases of sorcerers and witches condemned to fire or
the rope, for complicity in crimes with rams, sows, or goats.

CHAPTER VI.
UNPOPULARITY.

The archdeacon and the bellringer, as we have already said, were but
little loved by the populace great and small, in the vicinity of the cathedral.
When Claude and Quasimodo went out together, which frequently
happened, and when they were seen traversing in company, the valet behind
the master, the cold, narrow, and gloomy streets of the block of Notre-
Dame, more than one evil word, more than one ironical quaver, more than
one insulting jest greeted them on their way, unless Claude Frollo, which
was rarely the case, walked with head upright and raised, showing his
severe and almost august brow to the dumbfounded jeerers.
Both were in their quarter like “the poets” of whom Régnier speaks,—
“All sorts of persons run after poets,
As warblers fly shrieking after owls.”

Sometimes a mischievous child risked his skin and bones for the
ineffable pleasure of driving a pin into Quasimodo’s hump. Again, a young
girl, more bold and saucy than was fitting, brushed the priest’s black robe,
singing in his face the sardonic ditty, “niche, niche, the devil is caught.”
Sometimes a group of squalid old crones, squatting in a file under the
shadow of the steps to a porch, scolded noisily as the archdeacon and the
bellringer passed, and tossed them this encouraging welcome, with a curse:
“Hum! there’s a fellow whose soul is made like the other one’s body!” Or a
band of schoolboys and street urchins, playing hop-scotch, rose in a body
and saluted him classically, with some cry in Latin: “Eia! eia! Claudius cum
claudo!”
But the insult generally passed unnoticed both by the priest and the
bellringer. Quasimodo was too deaf to hear all these gracious things, and
Claude was too dreamy.

BOOK FIFTH.

CHAPTER I.
ABBAS BEATI MARTINI.

Dom Claude’s fame had spread far and wide. It procured for him, at
about the epoch when he refused to see Madame de Beaujeu, a visit which
he long remembered.
It was in the evening. He had just retired, after the office, to his canon’s
cell in the cloister of Notre-Dame. This cell, with the exception, possibly, of
some glass phials, relegated to a corner, and filled with a decidedly
equivocal powder, which strongly resembled the alchemist’s “powder of
projection,” presented nothing strange or mysterious. There were, indeed,
here and there, some inscriptions on the walls, but they were pure sentences
of learning and piety, extracted from good authors. The archdeacon had just
seated himself, by the light of a three-jetted copper lamp, before a vast
coffer crammed with manuscripts. He had rested his elbow upon the open
volume of Honorius d’Autun, De predestinatione et libero arbitrio, and he
was turning over, in deep meditation, the leaves of a printed folio which he
had just brought, the sole product of the press which his cell contained. In
the midst of his revery there came a knock at his door. “Who’s there?” cried
the learned man, in the gracious tone of a famished dog, disturbed over his
bone.
A voice without replied, “Your friend, Jacques Coictier.” He went to open
the door.
It was, in fact, the king’s physician; a person about fifty years of age,
whose harsh physiognomy was modified only by a crafty eye. Another man
accompanied him. Both wore long slate-colored robes, furred with minever,
girded and closed, with caps of the same stuff and hue. Their hands were
concealed by their sleeves, their feet by their robes, their eyes by their caps.
“God help me, messieurs!” said the archdeacon, showing them in; “I was
not expecting distinguished visitors at such an hour.” And while speaking in

this courteous fashion he cast an uneasy and scrutinizing glance from the
physician to his companion.
“’Tis never too late to come and pay a visit to so considerable a learned
man as Dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe,” replied Doctor Coictier, whose
Franche-Comté accent made all his phrases drag along with the majesty of a
train-robe.
There then ensued between the physician and the archdeacon one of
those congratulatory prologues which, in accordance with custom, at that
epoch preceded all conversations between learned men, and which did not
prevent them from detesting each other in the most cordial manner in the
world. However, it is the same nowadays; every wise man’s mouth
complimenting another wise man is a vase of honeyed gall.
Claude Frollo’s felicitations to Jacques Coictier bore reference
principally to the temporal advantages which the worthy physician had
found means to extract, in the course of his much envied career, from each
malady of the king, an operation of alchemy much better and more certain
than the pursuit of the philosopher’s stone.
“In truth, Monsieur le Docteur Coictier, I felt great joy on learning of the
bishopric given your nephew, my reverend seigneur Pierre Versé. Is he not
Bishop of Amiens?”
“Yes, monsieur Archdeacon; it is a grace and mercy of God.”
“Do you know that you made a great figure on Christmas Day at the head
of your company of the chamber of accounts, Monsieur President?”
“Vice-President, Dom Claude. Alas! nothing more.”
“How is your superb house in the Rue Saint-André des Arcs coming on?
’Tis a Louvre. I love greatly the apricot tree which is carved on the door,
with this play of words: ‘A L’ABRI-COTIER—Sheltered from reefs.’”
“Alas! Master Claude, all that masonry costeth me dear. In proportion as
the house is erected, I am ruined.”
“Ho! have you not your revenues from the jail, and the bailiwick of the
Palais, and the rents of all the houses, sheds, stalls, and booths of the
enclosure? ’Tis a fine breast to suck.”
“My castellany of Poissy has brought me in nothing this year.”

“But your tolls of Triel, of Saint-James, of Saint-Germain-en-Laye are
always good.”
“Six score livres, and not even Parisian livres at that.”
“You have your office of counsellor to the king. That is fixed.”
“Yes, brother Claude; but that accursed seigneury of Poligny, which
people make so much noise about, is worth not sixty gold crowns, year out
and year in.”
In the compliments which Dom Claude addressed to Jacques Coictier,
there was that sardonical, biting, and covertly mocking accent, and the sad
cruel smile of a superior and unhappy man who toys for a moment, by way
of distraction, with the dense prosperity of a vulgar man. The other did not
perceive it.
“Upon my soul,” said Claude at length, pressing his hand, “I am glad to
see you and in such good health.”
“Thanks, Master Claude.”
“By the way,” exclaimed Dom Claude, “how is your royal patient?”
“He payeth not sufficiently his physician,” replied the doctor, casting a
side glance at his companion.
“Think you so, Gossip Coictier,” said the latter.
These words, uttered in a tone of surprise and reproach, drew upon this
unknown personage the attention of the archdeacon which, to tell the truth,
had not been diverted from him a single moment since the stranger had set
foot across the threshold of his cell. It had even required all the thousand
reasons which he had for handling tenderly Doctor Jacques Coictier, the all-
powerful physician of King Louis XI., to induce him to receive the latter
thus accompanied. Hence, there was nothing very cordial in his manner
when Jacques Coictier said to him,—
“By the way, Dom Claude, I bring you a colleague who has desired to see
you on account of your reputation.”
“Monsieur belongs to science?” asked the archdeacon, fixing his piercing
eye upon Coictier’s companion. He found beneath the brows of the stranger
a glance no less piercing or less distrustful than his own.
He was, so far as the feeble light of the lamp permitted one to judge, an
old man about sixty years of age and of medium stature, who appeared

somewhat sickly and broken in health. His profile, although of a very
ordinary outline, had something powerful and severe about it; his eyes
sparkled beneath a very deep superciliary arch, like a light in the depths of a
cave; and beneath his cap which was well drawn down and fell upon his
nose, one recognized the broad expanse of a brow of genius.
He took it upon himself to reply to the archdeacon’s question,—
“Reverend master,” he said in a grave tone, “your renown has reached
my ears, and I wish to consult you. I am but a poor provincial gentleman,
who removeth his shoes before entering the dwellings of the learned. You
must know my name. I am called Gossip Tourangeau.”
“Strange name for a gentleman,” said the archdeacon to himself.
Nevertheless, he had a feeling that he was in the presence of a strong and
earnest character. The instinct of his own lofty intellect made him recognize
an intellect no less lofty under Gossip Tourangeau’s furred cap, and as he
gazed at the solemn face, the ironical smile which Jacques Coictier’s
presence called forth on his gloomy face, gradually disappeared as twilight
fades on the horizon of night. Stern and silent, he had resumed his seat in
his great armchair; his elbow rested as usual, on the table, and his brow on
his hand. After a few moments of reflection, he motioned his visitors to be
seated, and, turning to Gossip Tourangeau he said,—
“You come to consult me, master, and upon what science?”
“Your reverence,” replied Tourangeau, “I am ill, very ill. You are said to
be great Æsculapius, and I am come to ask your advice in medicine.”
“Medicine!” said the archdeacon, tossing his head. He seemed to
meditate for a moment, and then resumed: “Gossip Tourangeau, since that
is your name, turn your head, you will find my reply already written on the
wall.”
Gossip Tourangeau obeyed, and read this inscription engraved above his
head: “Medicine is the daughter of dreams.—JAMBLIQUE.”
Meanwhile, Doctor Jacques Coictier had heard his companion’s question
with a displeasure which Dom Claude’s response had but redoubled. He
bent down to the ear of Gossip Tourangeau, and said to him, softly enough
not to be heard by the archdeacon: “I warned you that he was mad. You
insisted on seeing him.”

“’Tis very possible that he is right, madman as he is, Doctor Jacques,”
replied his comrade in the same low tone, and with a bitter smile.
“As you please,” replied Coictier dryly. Then, addressing the archdeacon:
“You are clever at your trade, Dom Claude, and you are no more at a loss
over Hippocrates than a monkey is over a nut. Medicine a dream! I suspect
that the pharmacopolists and the master physicians would insist upon
stoning you if they were here. So you deny the influence of philtres upon
the blood, and unguents on the skin! You deny that eternal pharmacy of
flowers and metals, which is called the world, made expressly for that
eternal invalid called man!”
“I deny,” said Dom Claude coldly, “neither pharmacy nor the invalid. I
reject the physician.”
“Then it is not true,” resumed Coictier hotly, “that gout is an internal
eruption; that a wound caused by artillery is to be cured by the application
of a young mouse roasted; that young blood, properly injected, restores
youth to aged veins; it is not true that two and two make four, and that
emprostathonos follows opistathonos.”
The archdeacon replied without perturbation: “There are certain things of
which I think in a certain fashion.”
Coictier became crimson with anger.
“There, there, my good Coictier, let us not get angry,” said Gossip
Tourangeau. “Monsieur the archdeacon is our friend.”
Coictier calmed down, muttering in a low tone,—
“After all, he’s mad.”
“Pasque-dieu, Master Claude,” resumed Gossip Tourangeau, after a
silence, “You embarrass me greatly. I had two things to consult you upon,
one touching my health and the other touching my star.”
“Monsieur,” returned the archdeacon, “if that be your motive, you would
have done as well not to put yourself out of breath climbing my staircase. I
do not believe in Medicine. I do not believe in Astrology.”
“Indeed!” said the man, with surprise.
Coictier gave a forced laugh.
“You see that he is mad,” he said, in a low tone, to Gossip Tourangeau.
“He does not believe in astrology.”

“The idea of imagining,” pursued Dom Claude, “that every ray of a star
is a thread which is fastened to the head of a man!”
“And what then, do you believe in?” exclaimed Gossip Tourangeau.
The archdeacon hesitated for a moment, then he allowed a gloomy smile
to escape, which seemed to give the lie to his response: “Credo in Deum.”
“Dominum nostrum,” added Gossip Tourangeau, making the sign of the
cross.
“Amen,” said Coictier.
“Reverend master,” resumed Tourangeau, “I am charmed in soul to see
you in such a religious frame of mind. But have you reached the point, great
savant as you are, of no longer believing in science?”
“No,” said the archdeacon, grasping the arm of Gossip Tourangeau, and a
ray of enthusiasm lighted up his gloomy eyes, “no, I do not reject science. I
have not crawled so long, flat on my belly, with my nails in the earth,
through the innumerable ramifications of its caverns, without perceiving far
in front of me, at the end of the obscure gallery, a light, a flame, a
something, the reflection, no doubt, of the dazzling central laboratory where
the patient and the wise have found out God.”
“And in short,” interrupted Tourangeau, “what do you hold to be true and
certain?”
“Alchemy.”
Coictier exclaimed, “Pardieu, Dom Claude, alchemy has its use, no
doubt, but why blaspheme medicine and astrology?”
“Naught is your science of man, naught is your science of the stars,” said
the archdeacon, commandingly.
“That’s driving Epidaurus and Chaldea very fast,” replied the physician
with a grin.
“Listen, Messire Jacques. This is said in good faith. I am not the king’s
physician, and his majesty has not given me the Garden of Dædalus in
which to observe the constellations. Don’t get angry, but listen to me. What
truth have you deduced, I will not say from medicine, which is too foolish a
thing, but from astrology? Cite to me the virtues of the vertical
boustrophedon, the treasures of the number ziruph and those of the number
zephirod!”

“Will you deny,” said Coictier, “the sympathetic force of the collar bone,
and the cabalistics which are derived from it?”
“An error, Messire Jacques! None of your formulas end in reality.
Alchemy on the other hand has its discoveries. Will you contest results like
this? Ice confined beneath the earth for a thousand years is transformed into
rock crystals. Lead is the ancestor of all metals. For gold is not a metal,
gold is light. Lead requires only four periods of two hundred years each, to
pass in succession from the state of lead, to the state of red arsenic, from red
arsenic to tin, from tin to silver. Are not these facts? But to believe in the
collar bone, in the full line and in the stars, is as ridiculous as to believe
with the inhabitants of Grand-Cathay that the golden oriole turns into a
mole, and that grains of wheat turn into fish of the carp species.”
“I have studied hermetic science!” exclaimed Coictier, “and I affirm—”
The fiery archdeacon did not allow him to finish: “And I have studied
medicine, astrology, and hermetics. Here alone is the truth.” (As he spoke
thus, he took from the top of the coffer a phial filled with the powder which
we have mentioned above), “here alone is light! Hippocrates is a dream;
Urania is a dream; Hermes, a thought. Gold is the sun; to make gold is to be
God. Herein lies the one and only science. I have sounded the depths of
medicine and astrology, I tell you! Naught, nothingness! The human body,
shadows! the planets, shadows!”
And he fell back in his armchair in a commanding and inspired attitude.
Gossip Touraugeau watched him in silence. Coictier tried to grin, shrugged
his shoulders imperceptibly, and repeated in a low voice,—
“A madman!”
“And,” said Tourangeau suddenly, “the wondrous result,—have you
attained it, have you made gold?”
“If I had made it,” replied the archdeacon, articulating his words slowly,
like a man who is reflecting, “the king of France would be named Claude
and not Louis.”
The stranger frowned.
“What am I saying?” resumed Dom Claude, with a smile of disdain.
“What would the throne of France be to me when I could rebuild the empire
of the Orient?”
“Very good!” said the stranger.

“Oh, the poor fool!” murmured Coictier.
The archdeacon went on, appearing to reply now only to his thoughts,—
“But no, I am still crawling; I am scratching my face and knees against
the pebbles of the subterranean pathway. I catch a glimpse, I do not
contemplate! I do not read, I spell out!”
“And when you know how to read!” demanded the stranger, “will you
make gold?”
“Who doubts it?” said the archdeacon.
“In that case Our Lady knows that I am greatly in need of money, and I
should much desire to read in your books. Tell me, reverend master, is your
science inimical or displeasing to Our Lady?”
“Whose archdeacon I am?” Dom Claude contented himself with
replying, with tranquil hauteur.
“That is true, my master. Well! will it please you to initiate me? Let me
spell with you.”
Claude assumed the majestic and pontifical attitude of a Samuel.
“Old man, it requires longer years than remain to you, to undertake this
voyage across mysterious things. Your head is very gray! One comes forth
from the cavern only with white hair, but only those with dark hair enter it.
Science alone knows well how to hollow, wither, and dry up human faces;
she needs not to have old age bring her faces already furrowed.
Nevertheless, if the desire possesses you of putting yourself under
discipline at your age, and of deciphering the formidable alphabet of the
sages, come to me; ’tis well, I will make the effort. I will not tell you, poor
old man, to go and visit the sepulchral chambers of the pyramids, of which
ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower of Babylon, nor the immense
white marble sanctuary of the Indian temple of Eklinga. I, no more than
yourself, have seen the Chaldean masonry works constructed according to
the sacred form of the Sikra, nor the temple of Solomon, which is
destroyed, nor the stone doors of the sepulchre of the kings of Israel, which
are broken. We will content ourselves with the fragments of the book of
Hermes which we have here. I will explain to you the statue of Saint
Christopher, the symbol of the sower, and that of the two angels which are
on the front of the Sainte-Chapelle, and one of which holds in his hands a
vase, the other, a cloud—”

Here Jacques Coictier, who had been unhorsed by the archdeacon’s
impetuous replies, regained his saddle, and interrupted him with the
triumphant tone of one learned man correcting another,—“Erras amice
Claudi. The symbol is not the number. You take Orpheus for Hermes.”
“’Tis you who are in error,” replied the archdeacon, gravely. “Dædalus is
the base; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the edifice,—that is all. You shall
come when you will,” he continued, turning to Tourangeau, “I will show
you the little parcels of gold which remained at the bottom of Nicholas
Flamel’s alembic, and you shall compare them with the gold of Guillaume
de Paris. I will teach you the secret virtues of the Greek word, peristera.
But, first of all, I will make you read, one after the other, the marble letters
of the alphabet, the granite pages of the book. We shall go to the portal of
Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond at the Sainte-Chapelle, then to
the house of Nicholas Flamel, Rue Manvault, to his tomb, which is at the
Saints-Innocents, to his two hospitals, Rue de Montmorency. I will make
you read the hieroglyphics which cover the four great iron cramps on the
portal of the hospital Saint-Gervais, and of the Rue de la Ferronnerie. We
will spell out in company, also, the façade of Saint-Côme, of Sainte-
Geneviève-des-Ardents, of Saint Martin, of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie
—.”
For a long time, Gossip Tourangeau, intelligent as was his glance, had
appeared not to understand Dom Claude. He interrupted.
“Pasque-dieu! what are your books, then?”
“Here is one of them,” said the archdeacon.
And opening the window of his cell he pointed out with his finger the
immense church of Notre-Dame, which, outlining against the starry sky the
black silhouette of its two towers, its stone flanks, its monstrous haunches,
seemed an enormous two-headed sphinx, seated in the middle of the city.
The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time in silence,
then extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards the printed book which
lay open on the table, and his left towards Notre-Dame, and turning a sad
glance from the book to the church,—“Alas,” he said, “this will kill that.”
Coictier, who had eagerly approached the book, could not repress an
exclamation. “Hé, but now, what is there so formidable in this: ‘GLOSSA
IN EPISTOLAS D. PAULI, Norimbergæ, Antonius Koburger, 1474.’ This is

not new. ’Tis a book of Pierre Lombard, the Master of Sentences. Is it
because it is printed?”
“You have said it,” replied Claude, who seemed absorbed in a profound
meditation, and stood resting, his forefinger bent backward on the folio
which had come from the famous press of Nuremberg. Then he added these
mysterious words: “Alas! alas! small things come at the end of great things;
a tooth triumphs over a mass. The Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish
kills the whale, the book will kill the edifice.”
The curfew of the cloister sounded at the moment when Master Jacques
was repeating to his companion in low tones, his eternal refrain, “He is
mad!” To which his companion this time replied, “I believe that he is.”
It was the hour when no stranger could remain in the cloister. The two
visitors withdrew. “Master,” said Gossip Tourangeau, as he took leave of
the archdeacon, “I love wise men and great minds, and I hold you in
singular esteem. Come to-morrow to the Palace des Tournelles, and inquire
for the Abbé de Sainte-Martin, of Tours.”
The archdeacon returned to his chamber dumbfounded, comprehending
at last who Gossip Tourangeau was, and recalling that passage of the
register of Sainte-Martin, of Tours:—Abbas beati Martini, SCILICET REX
FRANCIÆ, est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam præbendam
quam habet sanctus Venantius, et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii.
It is asserted that after that epoch the archdeacon had frequent
conferences with Louis XI., when his majesty came to Paris, and that Dom
Claude’s influence quite overshadowed that of Olivier le Daim and Jacques
Coictier, who, as was his habit, rudely took the king to task on that account.

CHAPTER II.
THIS WILL KILL THAT.

Our lady readers will pardon us if we pause for a moment to seek what
could have been the thought concealed beneath those enigmatic words of
the archdeacon: “This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice.”
To our mind, this thought had two faces. In the first place, it was a
priestly thought. It was the affright of the priest in the presence of a new
agent, the printing press. It was the terror and dazzled amazement of the
men of the sanctuary, in the presence of the luminous press of Gutenberg. It
was the pulpit and the manuscript taking the alarm at the printed word:
something similar to the stupor of a sparrow which should behold the angel
Legion unfold his six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who
already hears emancipated humanity roaring and swarming; who beholds in
the future, intelligence sapping faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world
shaking off Rome. It was the prognostication of the philosopher who sees
human thought, volatilized by the press, evaporating from the theocratic
recipient. It was the terror of the soldier who examines the brazen battering
ram, and says:—“The tower will crumble.” It signified that one power was
about to succeed another power. It meant, “The press will kill the church.”
But underlying this thought, the first and most simple one, no doubt,
there was in our opinion another, newer one, a corollary of the first, less
easy to perceive and more easy to contest, a view as philosophical and
belonging no longer to the priest alone but to the savant and the artist. It
was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was about to
change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation
would no longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner;
that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for
the book of paper, more solid and still more durable. In this connection the

archdeacon’s vague formula had a second sense. It meant, “Printing will kill
architecture.”
In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the
Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book of humanity, the
principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as
a force or as an intelligence.
When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when the mass
of reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that
speech naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, men
transcribed them on the soil in a manner which was at once the most visible,
most durable, and most natural. They sealed each tradition beneath a
monument.
The first monuments were simple masses of rock, “which the iron had
not touched,” as Moses says. Architecture began like all writing. It was first
an alphabet. Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and each letter was
a hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the
capital on the column. This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the
same moment, on the surface of the entire world. We find the “standing
stones” of the Celts in Asian Siberia; in the pampas of America.
Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone, they coupled
those syllables of granite, and attempted some combinations. The Celtic
dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words.
Some, especially the tumulus, are proper names. Sometimes even, when
men had a great deal of stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase. The
immense pile of Karnac is a complete sentence.
At last they made books. Traditions had brought forth symbols, beneath
which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree beneath its foliage; all these
symbols in which humanity placed faith continued to grow, to multiply, to
intersect, to become more and more complicated; the first monuments no
longer sufficed to contain them, they were overflowing in every part; these
monuments hardly expressed now the primitive tradition, simple like
themselves, naked and prone upon the earth. The symbol felt the need of
expansion in the edifice. Then architecture was developed in proportion
with human thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads and a
thousand arms, and fixed all this floating symbolism in an eternal, visible,
palpable form. While Dædalus, who is force, measured; while Orpheus,

who is intelligence, sang;—the pillar, which is a letter; the arcade, which is
a syllable; the pyramid, which is a word,—all set in movement at once by a
law of geometry and by a law of poetry, grouped themselves, combined,
amalgamated, descended, ascended, placed themselves side by side on the
soil, ranged themselves in stories in the sky, until they had written under the
dictation of the general idea of an epoch, those marvellous books which
were also marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Rhamseion of
Egypt, the Temple of Solomon.
The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of all these
edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon, for example, was not
alone the binding of the holy book; it was the holy book itself. On each one
of its concentric walls, the priests could read the word translated and
manifested to the eye, and thus they followed its transformations from
sanctuary to sanctuary, until they seized it in its last tabernacle, under its
most concrete form, which still belonged to architecture: the arch. Thus the
word was enclosed in an edifice, but its image was upon its envelope, like
the human form on the coffin of a mummy.
And not only the form of edifices, but the sites selected for them,
revealed the thought which they represented, according as the symbol to be
expressed was graceful or grave. Greece crowned her mountains with a
temple harmonious to the eye; India disembowelled hers, to chisel therein
those monstrous subterranean pagodas, borne up by gigantic rows of granite
elephants.
Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world, from the most
immemorial pagoda of Hindustan, to the cathedral of Cologne, architecture
was the great handwriting of the human race. And this is so true, that not
only every religious symbol, but every human thought, has its page and its
monument in that immense book.
All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy. This law of
liberty following unity is written in architecture. For, let us insist upon this
point, masonry must not be thought to be powerful only in erecting the
temple and in expressing the myth and sacerdotal symbolism; in inscribing
in hieroglyphs upon its pages of stone the mysterious tables of the law. If it
were thus,—as there comes in all human society a moment when the sacred
symbol is worn out and becomes obliterated under freedom of thought,
when man escapes from the priest, when the excrescence of philosophies

and systems devour the face of religion,—architecture could not reproduce
this new state of human thought; its leaves, so crowded on the face, would
be empty on the back; its work would be mutilated; its book would be
incomplete. But no.
Let us take as an example the Middle Ages, where we see more clearly
because it is nearer to us. During its first period, while theocracy is
organizing Europe, while the Vatican is rallying and reclassing about itself
the elements of a Rome made from the Rome which lies in ruins around the
Capitol, while Christianity is seeking all the stages of society amid the
rubbish of anterior civilization, and rebuilding with its ruins a new
hierarchic universe, the keystone to whose vault is the priest—one first
hears a dull echo from that chaos, and then, little by little, one sees, arising
from beneath the breath of Christianity, from beneath the hand of the
barbarians, from the fragments of the dead Greek and Roman architectures,
that mysterious Romanesque architecture, sister of the theocratic masonry
of Egypt and of India, inalterable emblem of pure catholicism,
unchangeable hieroglyph of the papal unity. All the thought of that day is
written, in fact, in this sombre, Romanesque style. One feels everywhere in
it authority, unity, the impenetrable, the absolute, Gregory VII.; always the
priest, never the man; everywhere caste, never the people.
But the Crusades arrive. They are a great popular movement, and every
great popular movement, whatever may be its cause and object, always sets
free the spirit of liberty from its final precipitate. New things spring into life
every day. Here opens the stormy period of the Jacqueries, Pragueries, and
Leagues. Authority wavers, unity is divided. Feudalism demands to share
with theocracy, while awaiting the inevitable arrival of the people, who will
assume the part of the lion: Quia nominor leo. Seignory pierces through
sacerdotalism; the commonality, through seignory. The face of Europe is
changed. Well! the face of architecture is changed also. Like civilization, it
has turned a page, and the new spirit of the time finds her ready to write at
its dictation. It returns from the crusades with the pointed arch, like the
nations with liberty.
Then, while Rome is undergoing gradual dismemberment, Romanesque
architecture dies. The hieroglyph deserts the cathedral, and betakes itself to
blazoning the donjon keep, in order to lend prestige to feudalism. The
cathedral itself, that edifice formerly so dogmatic, invaded henceforth by

the bourgeoisie, by the community, by liberty, escapes the priest and falls
into the power of the artist. The artist builds it after his own fashion.
Farewell to mystery, myth, law. Fancy and caprice, welcome. Provided the
priest has his basilica and his altar, he has nothing to say. The four walls
belong to the artist. The architectural book belongs no longer to the priest,
to religion, to Rome; it is the property of poetry, of imagination, of the
people. Hence the rapid and innumerable transformations of that
architecture which owns but three centuries, so striking after the stagnant
immobility of the Romanesque architecture, which owns six or seven.
Nevertheless, art marches on with giant strides. Popular genius amid
originality accomplish the task which the bishops formerly fulfilled. Each
race writes its line upon the book, as it passes; it erases the ancient
Romanesque hieroglyphs on the frontispieces of cathedrals, and at the most
one only sees dogma cropping out here and there, beneath the new symbol
which it has deposited. The popular drapery hardly permits the religious
skeleton to be suspected. One cannot even form an idea of the liberties
which the architects then take, even toward the Church. There are capitals
knitted of nuns and monks, shamelessly coupled, as on the hall of chimney
pieces in the Palais de Justice, in Paris. There is Noah’s adventure carved to
the last detail, as under the great portal of Bourges. There is a bacchanalian
monk, with ass’s ears and glass in hand, laughing in the face of a whole
community, as on the lavatory of the Abbey of Bocherville. There exists at
that epoch, for thought written in stone, a privilege exactly comparable to
our present liberty of the press. It is the liberty of architecture.
This liberty goes very far. Sometimes a portal, a façade, an entire church,
presents a symbolical sense absolutely foreign to worship, or even hostile to
the Church. In the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicholas
Flamel, in the fifteenth, wrote such seditious pages. Saint-Jacques de la
Boucherie was a whole church of the opposition.
Thought was then free only in this manner; hence it never wrote itself out
completely except on the books called edifices. Thought, under the form of
edifice, could have beheld itself burned in the public square by the hands of
the executioner, in its manuscript form, if it had been sufficiently imprudent
to risk itself thus; thought, as the door of a church, would have been a
spectator of the punishment of thought as a book. Having thus only this
resource, masonry, in order to make its way to the light, flung itself upon it
from all quarters. Hence the immense quantity of cathedrals which have

covered Europe—a number so prodigious that one can hardly believe it
even after having verified it. All the material forces, all the intellectual
forces of society converged towards the same point: architecture. In this
manner, under the pretext of building churches to God, art was developed in
its magnificent proportions.
Then whoever was born a poet became an architect. Genius, scattered in
the masses, repressed in every quarter under feudalism as under a testudo of
brazen bucklers, finding no issue except in the direction of architecture,—
gushed forth through that art, and its Iliads assumed the form of cathedrals.
All other arts obeyed, and placed themselves under the discipline of
architecture. They were the workmen of the great work. The architect, the
poet, the master, summed up in his person the sculpture which carved his
façades, painting which illuminated his windows, music which set his bells
to pealing, and breathed into his organs. There was nothing down to poor
poetry,—properly speaking, that which persisted in vegetating in
manuscripts,—which was not forced, in order to make something of itself,
to come and frame itself in the edifice in the shape of a hymn or of prose;
the same part, after all, which the tragedies of Æschylus had played in the
sacerdotal festivals of Greece; Genesis, in the temple of Solomon.
Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the principal
writing, the universal writing. In that granite book, begun by the Orient,
continued by Greek and Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages wrote the last
page. Moreover, this phenomenon of an architecture of the people following
an architecture of caste, which we have just been observing in the Middle
Ages, is reproduced with every analogous movement in the human
intelligence at the other great epochs of history. Thus, in order to enunciate
here only summarily, a law which it would require volumes to develop: in
the high Orient, the cradle of primitive times, after Hindoo architecture
came Phœnician architecture, that opulent mother of Arabian architecture;
in antiquity, after Egyptian architecture, of which Etruscan style and
cyclopean monuments are but one variety, came Greek architecture (of
which the Roman style is only a continuation), surcharged with the
Carthaginian dome; in modern times, after Romanesque architecture came
Gothic architecture. And by separating there three series into their
component parts, we shall find in the three eldest sisters, Hindoo
architecture, Egyptian architecture, Romanesque architecture, the same
symbol; that is to say, theocracy, caste, unity, dogma, myth, God: and for

the three younger sisters, Phœnician architecture, Greek architecture,
Gothic architecture, whatever, nevertheless, may be the diversity of form
inherent in their nature, the same signification also; that is to say, liberty, the
people, man.
In the Hindu, Egyptian, or Romanesque architecture, one feels the priest,
nothing but the priest, whether he calls himself Brahmin, Magian, or Pope.
It is not the same in the architectures of the people. They are richer and less
sacred. In the Phœnician, one feels the merchant; in the Greek, the
republican; in the Gothic, the citizen.
The general characteristics of all theocratic architecture are immutability,
horror of progress, the preservation of traditional lines, the consecration of
the primitive types, the constant bending of all the forms of men and of
nature to the incomprehensible caprices of the symbol. These are dark
books, which the initiated alone understand how to decipher. Moreover,
every form, every deformity even, has there a sense which renders it
inviolable. Do not ask of Hindoo, Egyptian, Romanesque masonry to
reform their design, or to improve their statuary. Every attempt at perfecting
is an impiety to them. In these architectures it seems as though the rigidity
of the dogma had spread over the stone like a sort of second petrifaction.
The general characteristics of popular masonry, on the contrary, are
progress, originality, opulence, perpetual movement. They are already
sufficiently detached from religion to think of their beauty, to take care of it,
to correct without relaxation their parure of statues or arabesques. They are
of the age. They have something human, which they mingle incessantly
with the divine symbol under which they still produce. Hence, edifices
comprehensible to every soul, to every intelligence, to every imagination,
symbolical still, but as easy to understand as nature. Between theocratic
architecture and this there is the difference that lies between a sacred
language and a vulgar language, between hieroglyphics and art, between
Solomon and Phidias.
If the reader will sum up what we have hitherto briefly, very briefly,
indicated, neglecting a thousand proofs and also a thousand objections of
detail, he will be led to this: that architecture was, down to the fifteenth
century, the chief register of humanity; that in that interval not a thought
which is in any degree complicated made its appearance in the world, which
has not been worked into an edifice; that every popular idea, and every

religious law, has had its monumental records; that the human race has, in
short, had no important thought which it has not written in stone. And why?
Because every thought, either philosophical or religious, is interested in
perpetuating itself; because the idea which has moved one generation
wishes to move others also, and leave a trace. Now, what a precarious
immortality is that of the manuscript! How much more solid, durable,
unyielding, is a book of stone! In order to destroy the written word, a torch
and a Turk are sufficient. To demolish the constructed word, a social
revolution, a terrestrial revolution are required. The barbarians passed over
the Coliseum; the deluge, perhaps, passed over the Pyramids.
In the fifteenth century everything changes.
Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more
durable and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy.
Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg’s letters of lead are about to supersede
Orpheus’s letters of stone.
The book is about to kill the edifice.
The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother
of revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which is totally
renewed; it is human thought stripping off one form and donning another; it
is the complete and definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent
which since the days of Adam has represented intelligence.
In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile,
irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of
architecture it made a mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a
century and a place. Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters
itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once.
We repeat, who does not perceive that in this form it is far more
indelible? It was solid, it has become alive. It passes from duration in time
to immortality. One can demolish a mass; how can one extirpate ubiquity?
If a flood comes, the mountains will have long disappeared beneath the
waves, while the birds will still be flying about; and if a single ark floats on
the surface of the cataclysm, they will alight upon it, will float with it, will
be present with it at the ebbing of the waters; and the new world which
emerges from this chaos will behold, on its awakening, the thought of the
world which has been submerged soaring above it, winged and living.

And when one observes that this mode of expression is not only the most
conservative, but also the most simple, the most convenient, the most
practicable for all; when one reflects that it does not drag after it bulky
baggage, and does not set in motion a heavy apparatus; when one compares
thought forced, in order to transform itself into an edifice, to put in motion
four or five other arts and tons of gold, a whole mountain of stones, a whole
forest of timber-work, a whole nation of workmen; when one compares it to
the thought which becomes a book, and for which a little paper, a little ink,
and a pen suffice,—how can one be surprised that human intelligence
should have quitted architecture for printing? Cut the primitive bed of a
river abruptly with a canal hollowed out below its level, and the river will
desert its bed.
Behold how, beginning with the discovery of printing, architecture
withers away little by little, becomes lifeless and bare. How one feels the
water sinking, the sap departing, the thought of the times and of the people
withdrawing from it! The chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth
century; the press is, as yet, too weak, and, at the most, draws from
powerful architecture a superabundance of life. But practically beginning
with the sixteenth century, the malady of architecture is visible; it is no
longer the expression of society; it becomes classic art in a miserable
manner; from being Gallic, European, indigenous, it becomes Greek and
Roman; from being true and modern, it becomes pseudo-classic. It is this
decadence which is called the Renaissance. A magnificent decadence,
however, for the ancient Gothic genius, that sun which sets behind the
gigantic press of Mayence, still penetrates for a while longer with its rays
that whole hybrid pile of Latin arcades and Corinthian columns.
It is that setting sun which we mistake for the dawn.
Nevertheless, from the moment when architecture is no longer anything
but an art like any other; as soon as it is no longer the total art, the
sovereign art, the tyrant art,—it has no longer the power to retain the other
arts. So they emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and
take themselves off, each one in its own direction. Each one of them gains
by this divorce. Isolation aggrandizes everything. Sculpture becomes
statuary, the image trade becomes painting, the canon becomes music. One
would pronounce it an empire dismembered at the death of its Alexander,
and whose provinces become kingdoms.

Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those
splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century.
Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time as the arts.
The arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already made large incisions into
Catholicism. The sixteenth century breaks religious unity. Before the
invention of printing, reform would have been merely a schism; printing
converted it into a revolution. Take away the press; heresy is enervated.
Whether it be Providence or Fate, Gutenburg is the precursor of Luther.
Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set, when
the Gothic genius is forever extinct upon the horizon, architecture grows
dim, loses its color, becomes more and more effaced. The printed book, the
gnawing worm of the edifice, sucks and devours it. It becomes bare,
denuded of its foliage, and grows visibly emaciated. It is petty, it is poor, it
is nothing. It no longer expresses anything, not even the memory of the art
of another time. Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts, because
human thought is abandoning it, it summons bunglers in place of artists.
Glass replaces the painted windows. The stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor.
Farewell all sap, all originality, all life, all intelligence. It drags along, a
lamentable workshop mendicant, from copy to copy. Michael Angelo, who,
no doubt, felt even in the sixteenth century that it was dying, had a last idea,
an idea of despair. That Titan of art piled the Pantheon on the Parthenon,
and made Saint-Peter’s at Rome. A great work, which deserved to remain
unique, the last originality of architecture, the signature of a giant artist at
the bottom of the colossal register of stone which was closed forever. With
Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable architecture, which survived
itself in the state of a spectre, do? It takes Saint-Peter in Rome, copies it and
parodies it. It is a mania. It is a pity. Each century has its Saint-Peter’s of
Rome; in the seventeenth century, the Val-de-Grâce; in the eighteenth,
Sainte-Geneviève. Each country has its Saint-Peter’s of Rome. London has
one; Petersburg has another; Paris has two or three. The insignificant
testament, the last dotage of a decrepit grand art falling back into infancy
before it dies.
If, in place of the characteristic monuments which we have just
described, we examine the general aspect of art from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century, we notice the same phenomena of decay and phthisis.
Beginning with François II., the architectural form of the edifice effaces

itself more and more, and allows the geometrical form, like the bony
structure of an emaciated invalid, to become prominent. The fine lines of art
give way to the cold and inexorable lines of geometry. An edifice is no
longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron. Meanwhile, architecture is tormented
in her struggles to conceal this nudity. Look at the Greek pediment
inscribed upon the Roman pediment, and vice versâ. It is still the Pantheon
on the Parthenon: Saint-Peter’s of Rome. Here are the brick houses of Henri
IV., with their stone corners; the Place Royale, the Place Dauphine. Here are
the churches of Louis XIII., heavy, squat, thickset, crowded together, loaded
with a dome like a hump. Here is the Mazarin architecture, the wretched
Italian pasticcio of the Four Nations. Here are the palaces of Louis XIV.,
long barracks for courtiers, stiff, cold, tiresome. Here, finally, is Louis XV.,
with chiccory leaves and vermicelli, and all the warts, and all the fungi,
which disfigure that decrepit, toothless, and coquettish old architecture.
From François II. to Louis XV., the evil has increased in geometrical
progression. Art has no longer anything but skin upon its bones. It is
miserably perishing.
Meanwhile what becomes of printing? All the life which is leaving
architecture comes to it. In proportion as architecture ebbs, printing swells
and grows. That capital of forces which human thought had been expending
in edifices, it henceforth expends in books. Thus, from the sixteenth century
onward, the press, raised to the level of decaying architecture, contends
with it and kills it. In the seventeenth century it is already sufficiently the
sovereign, sufficiently triumphant, sufficiently established in its victory, to
give to the world the feast of a great literary century. In the eighteenth,
having reposed for a long time at the Court of Louis XIV., it seizes again
the old sword of Luther, puts it into the hand of Voltaire, and rushes
impetuously to the attack of that ancient Europe, whose architectural
expression it has already killed. At the moment when the eighteenth century
comes to an end, it has destroyed everything. In the nineteenth, it begins to
reconstruct.
Now, we ask, which of the three arts has really represented human
thought for the last three centuries? which translates it? which expresses not
only its literary and scholastic vagaries, but its vast, profound, universal
movement? which constantly superposes itself, without a break, without a
gap, upon the human race, which walks a monster with a thousand legs?—
Architecture or printing?

It is printing. Let the reader make no mistake; architecture is dead;
irretrievably slain by the printed book,—slain because it endures for a
shorter time,—slain because it costs more. Every cathedral represents
millions. Let the reader now imagine what an investment of funds it would
require to rewrite the architectural book; to cause thousands of edifices to
swarm once more upon the soil; to return to those epochs when the throng
of monuments was such, according to the statement of an eye witness, “that
one would have said that the world in shaking itself, had cast off its old
garments in order to cover itself with a white vesture of churches.” Erat
enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, candidam
ecclesiarum vestem indueret. (GLABER RADOLPHUS.)
A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How can it
surprise us that all human thought flows in this channel? This does not
mean that architecture will not still have a fine monument, an isolated
masterpiece, here and there. We may still have from time to time, under the
reign of printing, a column made I suppose, by a whole army from melted
cannon, as we had under the reign of architecture, Iliads and Romanceros,
Mahabâhrata, and Nibelungen Lieds, made by a whole people, with
rhapsodies piled up and melted together. The great accident of an architect
of genius may happen in the twentieth century, like that of Dante in the
thirteenth. But architecture will no longer be the social art, the collective
art, the dominating art. The grand poem, the grand edifice, the grand work
of humanity will no longer be built: it will be printed.
And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally, it will no
longer be mistress. It will be subservient to the law of literature, which
formerly received the law from it. The respective positions of the two arts
will be inverted. It is certain that in architectural epochs, the poems, rare it
is true, resemble the monuments. In India, Vyasa is branching, strange,
impenetrable as a pagoda. In Egyptian Orient, poetry has like the edifices,
grandeur and tranquillity of line; in antique Greece, beauty, serenity, calm;
in Christian Europe, the Catholic majesty, the popular naïvete, the rich and
luxuriant vegetation of an epoch of renewal. The Bible resembles the
Pyramids; the Iliad, the Parthenon; Homer, Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth
century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the
last Gothic cathedral.

Thus, to sum up what we have hitherto said, in a fashion which is
necessarily incomplete and mutilated, the human race has two books, two
registers, two testaments: masonry and printing; the Bible of stone and the
Bible of paper. No doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles, laid so
broadly open in the centuries, it is permissible to regret the visible majesty
of the writing of granite, those gigantic alphabets formulated in colonnades,
in pylons, in obelisks, those sorts of human mountains which cover the
world and the past, from the pyramid to the bell tower, from Cheops to
Strasbourg. The past must be reread upon these pages of marble. This book,
written by architecture, must be admired and perused incessantly; but the
grandeur of the edifice which printing erects in its turn must not be denied.
That edifice is colossal. Some compiler of statistics has calculated, that if
all the volumes which have issued from the press since Gutenberg’s day
were to be piled one upon another, they would fill the space between the
earth and the moon; but it is not that sort of grandeur of which we wished to
speak. Nevertheless, when one tries to collect in one’s mind a
comprehensive image of the total products of printing down to our own
days, does not that total appear to us like an immense construction, resting
upon the entire world, at which humanity toils without relaxation, and
whose monstrous crest is lost in the profound mists of the future? It is the
anthill of intelligence. It is the hive whither come all imaginations, those
golden bees, with their honey.
The edifice has a thousand stories. Here and there one beholds on its
staircases the gloomy caverns of science which pierce its interior.
Everywhere upon its surface, art causes its arabesques, rosettes, and laces to
thrive luxuriantly before the eyes. There, every individual work, however
capricious and isolated it may seem, has its place and its projection.
Harmony results from the whole. From the cathedral of Shakespeare to the
mosque of Byron, a thousand tiny bell towers are piled pell-mell above this
metropolis of universal thought. At its base are written some ancient titles
of humanity which architecture had not registered. To the left of the
entrance has been fixed the ancient bas-relief, in white marble, of Homer; to
the right, the polyglot Bible rears its seven heads. The hydra of the
Romancero and some other hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Nibelungen
bristle further on.

Nevertheless, the prodigious edifice still remains incomplete. The press,
that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap of
society, belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work. The whole
human race is on the scaffoldings. Each mind is a mason. The humblest fills
his hole, or places his stone. Rétif de La Bretonne brings his hod of plaster.
Every day a new course rises. Independently of the original and individual
contribution of each writer, there are collective contingents. The eighteenth
century gives the Encyclopedia, the revolution gives the Moniteur.
Assuredly, it is a construction which increases and piles up in endless
spirals; there also are confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable
labor, eager competition of all humanity, refuge promised to intelligence, a
new Flood against an overflow of barbarians. It is the second tower of
Babel of the human race.

BOOK SIXTH.

CHAPTER I.
AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT
MAGISTRACY.

A very happy personage in the year of grace 1482, was the noble
gentleman Robert d’Estouteville, chevalier, Sieur de Beyne, Baron d’Ivry
and Saint Andry en la Marche, counsellor and chamberlain to the king, and
guard of the provostship of Paris. It was already nearly seventeen years
since he had received from the king, on November 7, 1465, the comet year,
[27] that fine charge of the provostship of Paris, which was reputed rather a
seigneury than an office. Dignitas, says Joannes Lœmnœus, quæ cum non
exigua potestate politiam concernente, atque prærogativis multis et juribus
conjuncta est. A marvellous thing in ’82 was a gentleman bearing the king’s
commission, and whose letters of institution ran back to the epoch of the
marriage of the natural daughter of Louis XI. with Monsieur the Bastard of
Bourbon.
The same day on which Robert d’Estouteville took the place of Jacques
de Villiers in the provostship of Paris, Master Jehan Dauvet replaced
Messire Helye de Thorrettes in the first presidency of the Court of
Parliament, Jehan Jouvenel des Ursins supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in
the office of chancellor of France, Regnault des Dormans ousted Pierre Puy
from the charge of master of requests in ordinary of the king’s household.
Now, upon how many heads had the presidency, the chancellorship, the
mastership passed since Robert d’Estouteville had held the provostship of
Paris. It had been “granted to him for safekeeping,” as the letters patent
said; and certainly he kept it well. He had clung to it, he had incorporated
himself with it, he had so identified himself with it that he had escaped that
fury for change which possessed Louis XI., a tormenting and industrious
king, whose policy it was to maintain the elasticity of his power by frequent
appointments and revocations. More than this; the brave chevalier had

obtained the reversion of the office for his son, and for two years already,
the name of the noble man Jacques d’Estouteville, equerry, had figured
beside his at the head of the register of the salary list of the provostship of
Paris. A rare and notable favor indeed! It is true that Robert d’Estouteville
was a good soldier, that he had loyally raised his pennon against “the league
of public good,” and that he had presented to the queen a very marvellous
stag in confectionery on the day of her entrance to Paris in 14.... Moreover,
he possessed the good friendship of Messire Tristan l’Hermite, provost of
the marshals of the king’s household. Hence a very sweet and pleasant
existence was that of Messire Robert. In the first place, very good wages, to
which were attached, and from which hung, like extra bunches of grapes on
his vine, the revenues of the civil and criminal registries of the provostship,
plus the civil and criminal revenues of the tribunals of Embas of the
Châtelet, without reckoning some little toll from the bridges of Mantes and
of Corbeil, and the profits on the craft of Shagreen-makers of Paris, on the
corders of firewood and the measurers of salt. Add to this the pleasure of
displaying himself in rides about the city, and of making his fine military
costume, which you may still admire sculptured on his tomb in the abbey of
Valmont in Normandy, and his morion, all embossed at Montlhéry, stand
out a contrast against the parti-colored red and tawny robes of the aldermen
and police. And then, was it nothing to wield absolute supremacy over the
sergeants of the police, the porter and watch of the Châtelet, the two
auditors of the Châtelet, auditores castelleti, the sixteen commissioners of
the sixteen quarters, the jailer of the Châtelet, the four enfeoffed sergeants,
the hundred and twenty mounted sergeants, with maces, the chevalier of the
watch with his watch, his sub-watch, his counter-watch and his rear-watch?
Was it nothing to exercise high and low justice, the right to interrogate, to
hang and to draw, without reckoning petty jurisdiction in the first resort (in
prima instantia, as the charters say), on that viscomty of Paris, so nobly
appanaged with seven noble bailiwicks? Can anything sweeter be imagined
than rendering judgments and decisions, as Messire Robert d’Estouteville
daily did in the Grand Châtelet, under the large and flattened arches of
Philip Augustus? and going, as he was wont to do every evening, to that
charming house situated in the Rue Galilée, in the enclosure of the royal
palace, which he held in right of his wife, Madame Ambroise de Loré, to
repose after the fatigue of having sent some poor wretch to pass the night in
“that little cell of the Rue de Escorcherie, which the provosts and aldermen

of Paris used to make their prison; the same being eleven feet long, seven
feet and four inches wide, and eleven feet high?”[28]
And not only had Messire Robert d’Estouteville his special court as
provost and vicomte of Paris; but in addition he had a share, both for eye
and tooth, in the grand court of the king. There was no head in the least
elevated which had not passed through his hands before it came to the
headsman. It was he who went to seek M. de Nemours at the Bastille Saint
Antoine, in order to conduct him to the Halles; and to conduct to the Grève
M. de Saint-Pol, who clamored and resisted, to the great joy of the provost,
who did not love monsieur the constable.
Here, assuredly, is more than sufficient to render a life happy and
illustrious, and to deserve some day a notable page in that interesting
history of the provosts of Paris, where one learns that Oudard de Villeneuve
had a house in the Rue des Boucheries, that Guillaume de Hangest
purchased the great and the little Savoy, that Guillaume Thiboust gave the
nuns of Sainte-Geneviève his houses in the Rue Clopin, that Hugues
Aubriot lived in the Hôtel du Porc-Épic, and other domestic facts.
Nevertheless, with so many reasons for taking life patiently and joyously,
Messire Robert d’Estouteville woke up on the morning of the seventh of
January, 1482, in a very surly and peevish mood. Whence came this ill
temper? He could not have told himself. Was it because the sky was gray?
or was the buckle of his old belt of Montlhéry badly fastened, so that it
confined his provostal portliness too closely? had he beheld ribald fellows,
marching in bands of four, beneath his window, and setting him at defiance,
in doublets but no shirts, hats without crowns, with wallet and bottle at their
side? Was it a vague presentiment of the three hundred and seventy livres,
sixteen sous, eight farthings, which the future King Charles VII. was to cut
off from the provostship in the following year? The reader can take his
choice; we, for our part, are much inclined to believe that he was in a bad
humor, simply because he was in a bad humor.
Moreover, it was the day after a festival, a tiresome day for every one,
and above all for the magistrate who is charged with sweeping away all the
filth, properly and figuratively speaking, which a festival day produces in
Paris. And then he had to hold a sitting at the Grand Châtelet. Now, we have
noticed that judges in general so arrange matters that their day of audience
shall also be their day of bad humor, so that they may always have some

one upon whom to vent it conveniently, in the name of the king, law, and
justice.
However, the audience had begun without him. His lieutenants, civil,
criminal, and private, were doing his work, according to usage; and from
eight o’clock in the morning, some scores of bourgeois and bourgeoises,
heaped and crowded into an obscure corner of the audience chamber of
Embas du Châtelet, between a stout oaken barrier and the wall, had been
gazing blissfully at the varied and cheerful spectacle of civil and criminal
justice dispensed by Master Florian Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet,
lieutenant of monsieur the provost, in a somewhat confused and utterly
haphazard manner.
The hall was small, low, vaulted. A table studded with fleurs-de-lis stood
at one end, with a large arm-chair of carved oak, which belonged to the
provost and was empty, and a stool on the left for the auditor, Master
Florian. Below sat the clerk of the court, scribbling; opposite was the
populace; and in front of the door, and in front of the table were many
sergeants of the provostship in sleeveless jackets of violet camlet, with
white crosses. Two sergeants of the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, clothed in their
jackets of Toussaint, half red, half blue, were posted as sentinels before a
low, closed door, which was visible at the extremity of the hall, behind the
table. A single pointed window, narrowly encased in the thick wall,
illuminated with a pale ray of January sun two grotesque figures,—the
capricious demon of stone carved as a tail-piece in the keystone of the
vaulted ceiling, and the judge seated at the end of the hall on the fleurs-de-
lis.
Imagine, in fact, at the provost’s table, leaning upon his elbows between
two bundles of documents of cases, with his foot on the train of his robe of
plain brown cloth, his face buried in his hood of white lamb’s skin, of
which his brows seemed to be of a piece, red, crabbed, winking, bearing
majestically the load of fat on his cheeks which met under his chin, Master
Florian Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet.
Now, the auditor was deaf. A slight defect in an auditor. Master Florian
delivered judgment, none the less, without appeal and very suitably. It is
certainly quite sufficient for a judge to have the air of listening; and the
venerable auditor fulfilled this condition, the sole one in justice, all the
better because his attention could not be distracted by any noise.

Moreover, he had in the audience, a pitiless censor of his deeds and
gestures, in the person of our friend Jehan Frollo du Moulin, that little
student of yesterday, that “stroller,” whom one was sure of encountering all
over Paris, anywhere except before the rostrums of the professors.
“Stay,” he said in a low tone to his companion, Robin Poussepain, who
was grinning at his side, while he was making his comments on the scenes
which were being unfolded before his eyes, “yonder is Jehanneton du
Buisson. The beautiful daughter of the lazy dog at the Marché-Neuf!—
Upon my soul, he is condemning her, the old rascal! he has no more eyes
than ears. Fifteen sous, four farthings, parisian, for having worn two
rosaries! ’Tis somewhat dear. Lex duri carminis. Who’s that? Robin Chief-
de-Ville, hauberkmaker. For having been passed and received master of the
said trade! That’s his entrance money. He! two gentlemen among these
knaves! Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly Two equerries, Corpus Christi!
Ah! they have been playing at dice. When shall I see our rector here? A
hundred livres parisian, fine to the king! That Barbedienne strikes like a
deaf man,—as he is! I’ll be my brother the archdeacon, if that keeps me
from gaming; gaming by day, gaming by night, living at play, dying at play,
and gaming away my soul after my shirt. Holy Virgin, what damsels! One
after the other my lambs. Ambroise Lécuyère, Isabeau la Paynette, Bérarde
Gironin! I know them all, by Heavens! A fine! a fine! That’s what will teach
you to wear gilded girdles! ten sous parisis! you coquettes! Oh! the old
snout of a judge! deaf and imbecile! Oh! Florian the dolt! Oh! Barbedienne
the blockhead! There he is at the table! He’s eating the plaintiff, he’s eating
the suits, he eats, he chews, he crams, he fills himself. Fines, lost goods,
taxes, expenses, loyal charges, salaries, damages, and interests, gehenna,
prison, and jail, and fetters with expenses are Christmas spice cake and
marchpanes of Saint-John to him! Look at him, the pig!—Come! Good!
Another amorous woman! Thibaud-la-Thibaude, neither more nor less! For
having come from the Rue Glatigny! What fellow is this? Gieffroy
Mabonne, gendarme bearing the crossbow. He has cursed the name of the
Father. A fine for la Thibaude! A fine for Gieffroy! A fine for them both!
The deaf old fool! he must have mixed up the two cases! Ten to one that he
makes the wench pay for the oath and the gendarme for the amour!
Attention, Robin Poussepain! What are they going to bring in? Here are
many sergeants! By Jupiter! all the bloodhounds of the pack are there. It
must be the great beast of the hunt—a wild boar. And ’tis one, Robin, ’tis

one. And a fine one too! Hercle! ’tis our prince of yesterday, our Pope of the
Fools, our bellringer, our one-eyed man, our hunchback, our grimace! ’Tis
Quasimodo!”
It was he indeed.
It was Quasimodo, bound, encircled, roped, pinioned, and under good
guard. The squad of policemen who surrounded him was assisted by the
chevalier of the watch in person, wearing the arms of France embroidered
on his breast, and the arms of the city on his back. There was nothing,
however, about Quasimodo, except his deformity, which could justify the
display of halberds and arquebuses; he was gloomy, silent, and tranquil.
Only now and then did his single eye cast a sly and wrathful glance upon
the bonds with which he was loaded.
He cast the same glance about him, but it was so dull and sleepy that the
women only pointed him out to each other in derision.
Meanwhile Master Florian, the auditor, turned over attentively the
document in the complaint entered against Quasimodo, which the clerk
handed him, and, having thus glanced at it, appeared to reflect for a
moment. Thanks to this precaution, which he always was careful to take at
the moment when on the point of beginning an examination, he knew
beforehand the names, titles, and misdeeds of the accused, made cut and
dried responses to questions foreseen, and succeeded in extricating himself
from all the windings of the interrogation without allowing his deafness to
be too apparent. The written charges were to him what the dog is to the
blind man. If his deafness did happen to betray him here and there, by some
incoherent apostrophe or some unintelligible question, it passed for
profundity with some, and for imbecility with others. In neither case did the
honor of the magistracy sustain any injury; for it is far better that a judge
should be reputed imbecile or profound than deaf. Hence he took great care
to conceal his deafness from the eyes of all, and he generally succeeded so
well that he had reached the point of deluding himself, which is, by the way,
easier than is supposed. All hunchbacks walk with their heads held high, all
stutterers harangue, all deaf people speak low. As for him, he believed, at
the most, that his ear was a little refractory. It was the sole concession
which he made on this point to public opinion, in his moments of frankness
and examination of his conscience.

Having, then, thoroughly ruminated Quasimodo’s affair, he threw back
his head and half closed his eyes, for the sake of more majesty and
impartiality, so that, at that moment, he was both deaf and blind. A double
condition, without which no judge is perfect. It was in this magisterial
attitude that he began the examination.
“Your name?”
Now this was a case which had not been “provided for by law,” where a
deaf man should be obliged to question a deaf man.
Quasimodo, whom nothing warned that a question had been addressed to
him, continued to stare intently at the judge, and made no reply. The judge,
being deaf, and being in no way warned of the deafness of the accused,
thought that the latter had answered, as all accused do in general, and
therefore he pursued, with his mechanical and stupid self-possession,—
“Very well. And your age?”
Again Quasimodo made no reply to this question. The judge supposed
that it had been replied to, and continued,—
“Now, your profession?”
Still the same silence. The spectators had begun, meanwhile, to whisper
together, and to exchange glances.
“That will do,” went on the imperturbable auditor, when he supposed that
the accused had finished his third reply. “You are accused before us, primo,
of nocturnal disturbance; secundo, of a dishonorable act of violence upon
the person of a foolish woman, in præjudicium meretricis; tertio, of
rebellion and disloyalty towards the archers of the police of our lord, the
king. Explain yourself upon all these points.—Clerk, have you written
down what the prisoner has said thus far?”
At this unlucky question, a burst of laughter rose from the clerk’s table
caught by the audience, so violent, so wild, so contagious, so universal, that
the two deaf men were forced to perceive it. Quasimodo turned round,
shrugging his hump with disdain, while Master Florian, equally astonished,
and supposing that the laughter of the spectators had been provoked by
some irreverent reply from the accused, rendered visible to him by that
shrug of the shoulders, apostrophized him indignantly,—
“You have uttered a reply, knave, which deserves the halter. Do you
know to whom you are speaking?”

This sally was not fitted to arrest the explosion of general merriment. It
struck all as so whimsical, and so ridiculous, that the wild laughter even
attacked the sergeants of the Parloi-aux-Bourgeois, a sort of pikemen,
whose stupidity was part of their uniform. Quasimodo alone preserved his
seriousness, for the good reason that he understood nothing of what was
going on around him. The judge, more and more irritated, thought it his
duty to continue in the same tone, hoping thereby to strike the accused with
a terror which should react upon the audience, and bring it back to respect.
“So this is as much as to say, perverse and thieving knave that you are,
that you permit yourself to be lacking in respect towards the Auditor of the
Châtelet, to the magistrate committed to the popular police of Paris, charged
with searching out crimes, delinquencies, and evil conduct; with controlling
all trades, and interdicting monopoly; with maintaining the pavements; with
debarring the hucksters of chickens, poultry, and water-fowl; of
superintending the measuring of fagots and other sorts of wood; of purging
the city of mud, and the air of contagious maladies; in a word, with
attending continually to public affairs, without wages or hope of salary! Do
you know that I am called Florian Barbedienne, actual lieutenant to
monsieur the provost, and, moreover, commissioner, inquisitor, controller,
and examiner, with equal power in provostship, bailiwick, preservation, and
inferior court of judicature?—”
There is no reason why a deaf man talking to a deaf man should stop.
God knows where and when Master Florian would have landed, when thus
launched at full speed in lofty eloquence, if the low door at the extreme end
of the room had not suddenly opened, and given entrance to the provost in
person. At his entrance Master Florian did not stop short, but, making a
half-turn on his heels, and aiming at the provost the harangue with which he
had been withering Quasimodo a moment before,—
“Monseigneur,” said he, “I demand such penalty as you shall deem fitting
against the prisoner here present, for grave and aggravated offence against
the court.”
And he seated himself, utterly breathless, wiping away the great drops of
sweat which fell from his brow and drenched, like tears, the parchments
spread out before him. Messire Robert d’Estouteville frowned and made a
gesture so imperious and significant to Quasimodo, that the deaf man in
some measure understood it.

The provost addressed him with severity, “What have you done that you
have been brought hither, knave?”
The poor fellow, supposing that the provost was asking his name, broke
the silence which he habitually preserved, and replied, in a harsh and
guttural voice, “Quasimodo.”
The reply matched the question so little that the wild laugh began to
circulate once more, and Messire Robert exclaimed, red with wrath,—
“Are you mocking me also, you arrant knave?”
“Bellringer of Notre-Dame,” replied Quasimodo, supposing that what
was required of him was to explain to the judge who he was.
“Bellringer!” interpolated the provost, who had waked up early enough to
be in a sufficiently bad temper, as we have said, not to require to have his
fury inflamed by such strange responses. “Bellringer! I’ll play you a chime
of rods on your back through the squares of Paris! Do you hear, knave?”
“If it is my age that you wish to know,” said Quasimodo, “I think that I
shall be twenty at Saint Martin’s day.”
This was too much; the provost could no longer restrain himself.
“Ah! you are scoffing at the provostship, wretch! Messieurs the sergeants
of the mace, you will take me this knave to the pillory of the Grève, you
will flog him, and turn him for an hour. He shall pay me for it, tête Dieu!
And I order that the present judgment shall be cried, with the assistance of
four sworn trumpeters, in the seven castellanies of the viscomty of Paris.”
The clerk set to work incontinently to draw up the account of the
sentence.
“Ventre Dieu! ’tis well adjudged!” cried the little scholar, Jehan Frollo du
Moulin, from his corner.
The provost turned and fixed his flashing eyes once more on Quasimodo.
“I believe the knave said ‘Ventre Dieu!’ Clerk, add twelve deniers Parisian
for the oath, and let the vestry of Saint Eustache have the half of it; I have a
particular devotion for Saint Eustache.”
In a few minutes the sentence was drawn up. Its tenor was simple and
brief. The customs of the provostship and the viscomty had not yet been
worked over by President Thibaut Baillet, and by Roger Barmne, the king’s
advocate; they had not been obstructed, at that time, by that lofty hedge of

quibbles and procedures, which the two jurisconsults planted there at the
beginning of the sixteenth century. All was clear, expeditious, explicit. One
went straight to the point then, and at the end of every path there was
immediately visible, without thickets and without turnings; the wheel, the
gibbet, or the pillory. One at least knew whither one was going.
The clerk presented the sentence to the provost, who affixed his seal to it,
and departed to pursue his round of the audience hall, in a frame of mind
which seemed destined to fill all the jails in Paris that day. Jehan Frollo and
Robin Poussepain laughed in their sleeves. Quasimodo gazed on the whole
with an indifferent and astonished air.
However, at the moment when Master Florian Barbedienne was reading
the sentence in his turn, before signing it, the clerk felt himself moved with
pity for the poor wretch of a prisoner, and, in the hope of obtaining some
mitigation of the penalty, he approached as near the auditor’s ear as
possible, and said, pointing to Quasimodo, “That man is deaf.”
He hoped that this community of infirmity would awaken Master
Florian’s interest in behalf of the condemned man. But, in the first place, we
have already observed that Master Florian did not care to have his deafness
noticed. In the next place, he was so hard of hearing that he did not catch a
single word of what the clerk said to him; nevertheless, he wished to have
the appearance of hearing, and replied, “Ah! ah! that is different; I did not
know that. An hour more of the pillory, in that case.”
And he signed the sentence thus modified.
“’Tis well done,” said Robin Poussepain, who cherished a grudge against
Quasimodo. “That will teach him to handle people roughly.”

CHAPTER II.
THE RAT-HOLE.

The reader must permit us to take him back to the Place de Grève, which
we quitted yesterday with Gringoire, in order to follow la Esmeralda.
It is ten o’clock in the morning; everything is indicative of the day after a
festival. The pavement is covered with rubbish; ribbons, rags, feathers from
tufts of plumes, drops of wax from the torches, crumbs of the public feast.
A goodly number of bourgeois are “sauntering,” as we say, here and there,
turning over with their feet the extinct brands of the bonfire, going into
raptures in front of the Pillar House, over the memory of the fine hangings
of the day before, and to-day staring at the nails that secured them a last
pleasure. The venders of cider and beer are rolling their barrels among the
groups. Some busy passers-by come and go. The merchants converse and
call to each other from the thresholds of their shops. The festival, the
ambassadors, Coppenole, the Pope of the Fools, are in all mouths; they vie
with each other, each trying to criticise it best and laugh the most. And,
meanwhile, four mounted sergeants, who have just posted themselves at the
four sides of the pillory, have already concentrated around themselves a
goodly proportion of the populace scattered on the Place, who condemn
themselves to immobility and fatigue in the hope of a small execution.
If the reader, after having contemplated this lively and noisy scene which
is being enacted in all parts of the Place, will now transfer his gaze towards
that ancient demi-Gothic, demi-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland,
which forms the corner on the quay to the west, he will observe, at the angle
of the façade, a large public breviary, with rich illuminations, protected
from the rain by a little penthouse, and from thieves by a small grating,
which, however, permits of the leaves being turned. Beside this breviary is a
narrow, arched window, closed by two iron bars in the form of a cross, and
looking on the square; the only opening which admits a small quantity of

light and air to a little cell without a door, constructed on the ground-floor,
in the thickness of the walls of the old house, and filled with a peace all the
more profound, with a silence all the more gloomy, because a public place,
the most populous and most noisy in Paris swarms and shrieks around it.
This little cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly three centuries, ever
since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in mourning for her father who
died in the Crusades, had caused it to be hollowed out in the wall of her
own house, in order to immure herself there forever, keeping of all her
palace only this lodging whose door was walled up, and whose window
stood open, winter and summer, giving all the rest to the poor and to God.
The afflicted damsel had, in fact, waited twenty years for death in this
premature tomb, praying night and day for the soul of her father, sleeping in
ashes, without even a stone for a pillow, clothed in a black sack, and
subsisting on the bread and water which the compassion of the passers-by
led them to deposit on the ledge of her window, thus receiving charity after
having bestowed it. At her death, at the moment when she was passing to
the other sepulchre, she had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to afflicted
women, mothers, widows, or maidens, who should wish to pray much for
others or for themselves, and who should desire to inter themselves alive in
a great grief or a great penance. The poor of her day had made her a fine
funeral, with tears and benedictions; but, to their great regret, the pious
maid had not been canonized, for lack of influence. Those among them who
were a little inclined to impiety, had hoped that the matter might be
accomplished in Paradise more easily than at Rome, and had frankly
besought God, instead of the pope, in behalf of the deceased. The majority
had contented themselves with holding the memory of Rolande sacred, and
converting her rags into relics. The city, on its side, had founded in honor of
the damoiselle, a public breviary, which had been fastened near the window
of the cell, in order that passers-by might halt there from time to time, were
it only to pray; that prayer might remind them of alms, and that the poor
recluses, heiresses of Madame Rolande’s vault, might not die outright of
hunger and forgetfulness.
Moreover, this sort of tomb was not so very rare a thing in the cities of
the Middle Ages. One often encountered in the most frequented street, in
the most crowded and noisy market, in the very middle, under the feet of
the horses, under the wheels of the carts, as it were, a cellar, a well, a tiny
walled and grated cabin, at the bottom of which a human being prayed night

and day, voluntarily devoted to some eternal lamentation, to some great
expiation. And all the reflections which that strange spectacle would
awaken in us to-day; that horrible cell, a sort of intermediary link between a
house and the tomb, the cemetery and the city; that living being cut off from
the human community, and thenceforth reckoned among the dead; that lamp
consuming its last drop of oil in the darkness; that remnant of life flickering
in the grave; that breath, that voice, that eternal prayer in a box of stone;
that face forever turned towards the other world; that eye already
illuminated with another sun; that ear pressed to the walls of a tomb; that
soul a prisoner in that body; that body a prisoner in that dungeon cell, and
beneath that double envelope of flesh and granite, the murmur of that soul
in pain;—nothing of all this was perceived by the crowd. The piety of that
age, not very subtle nor much given to reasoning, did not see so many
facets in an act of religion. It took the thing in the block, honored,
venerated, hallowed the sacrifice at need, but did not analyze the sufferings,
and felt but moderate pity for them. It brought some pittance to the
miserable penitent from time to time, looked through the hole to see
whether he were still living, forgot his name, hardly knew how many years
ago he had begun to die, and to the stranger, who questioned them about the
living skeleton who was perishing in that cellar, the neighbors replied
simply, “It is the recluse.”
Everything was then viewed without metaphysics, without exaggeration,
without magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet
been invented, either for things of matter or for things of the mind.
Moreover, although people were but little surprised by it, the examples of
this sort of cloistration in the hearts of cities were in truth frequent, as we
have just said. There were in Paris a considerable number of these cells, for
praying to God and doing penance; they were nearly all occupied. It is true
that the clergy did not like to have them empty, since that implied
lukewarmness in believers, and that lepers were put into them when there
were no penitents on hand. Besides the cell on the Grève, there was one at
Montfaucon, one at the Charnier des Innocents, another I hardly know
where,—at the Clichon House, I think; others still at many spots where
traces of them are found in traditions, in default of memorials. The
University had also its own. On Mount Sainte-Geneviève a sort of Job of
the Middle Ages, for the space of thirty years, chanted the seven penitential
psalms on a dunghill at the bottom of a cistern, beginning anew when he

had finished, singing loudest at night, magna voce per umbras, and to-day,
the antiquary fancies that he hears his voice as he enters the Rue du Puits-
qui-parle—the street of the “Speaking Well.”
To confine ourselves to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we must say that it
had never lacked recluses. After the death of Madame Roland, it had stood
vacant for a year or two, though rarely. Many women had come thither to
mourn, until their death, for relatives, lovers, faults. Parisian malice, which
thrusts its finger into everything, even into things which concern it the least,
affirmed that it had beheld but few widows there.
In accordance with the fashion of the epoch, a Latin inscription on the
wall indicated to the learned passer-by the pious purpose of this cell. The
custom was retained until the middle of the sixteenth century of explaining
an edifice by a brief device inscribed above the door. Thus, one still reads in
France, above the wicket of the prison in the seignorial mansion of
Tourville, Sileto et spera; in Ireland, beneath the armorial bearings which
surmount the grand door to Fortescue Castle, Forte scutum, salus ducum; in
England, over the principal entrance to the hospitable mansion of the Earls
Cowper: Tuum est. At that time every edifice was a thought.
As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland, these two
words had been carved in large Roman capitals over the window,—

TU, ORA.

And this caused the people, whose good sense does not perceive so much
refinement in things, and likes to translate Ludovico Magno by Porte Saint-
Denis, to give to this dark, gloomy, damp cavity, the name of “The Rat-
Hole.” An explanation less sublime, perhaps, than the other; but, on the
other hand, more picturesque.

CHAPTER III.
HISTORY OF A LEAVENED CAKE OF MAIZE.

At the epoch of this history, the cell in the Tour-Roland was occupied. If
the reader desires to know by whom, he has only to lend an ear to the
conversation of three worthy gossips, who, at the moment when we have
directed his attention to the Rat-Hole, were directing their steps towards the
same spot, coming up along the water’s edge from the Châtelet, towards the
Grève.
Two of these women were dressed like good bourgeoises of Paris. Their
fine white ruffs; their petticoats of linsey-woolsey, striped red and blue;
their white knitted stockings, with clocks embroidered in colors, well drawn
upon their legs; the square-toed shoes of tawny leather with black soles,
and, above all, their headgear, that sort of tinsel horn, loaded down with
ribbons and laces, which the women of Champagne still wear, in company
with the grenadiers of the imperial guard of Russia, announced that they
belonged to that class wives which holds the middle ground between what
the lackeys call a woman and what they term a lady. They wore neither
rings nor gold crosses, and it was easy to see that, in their ease, this did not
proceed from poverty, but simply from fear of being fined. Their
companion was attired in very much the same manner; but there was that
indescribable something about her dress and bearing which suggested the
wife of a provincial notary. One could see, by the way in which her girdle
rose above her hips, that she had not been long in Paris. Add to this a
plaited tucker, knots of ribbon on her shoes—and that the stripes of her
petticoat ran horizontally instead of vertically, and a thousand other
enormities which shocked good taste.
The two first walked with that step peculiar to Parisian ladies, showing
Paris to women from the country. The provincial held by the hand a big boy,
who held in his a large, flat cake.

We regret to be obliged to add, that, owing to the rigor of the season, he
was using his tongue as a handkerchief.
The child was making them drag him along, non passibus æquis, as
Virgil says, and stumbling at every moment, to the great indignation of his
mother. It is true that he was looking at his cake more than at the pavement.
Some serious motive, no doubt, prevented his biting it (the cake), for he
contented himself with gazing tenderly at it. But the mother should have
rather taken charge of the cake. It was cruel to make a Tantalus of the
chubby-cheeked boy.
Meanwhile, the three demoiselles (for the name of dames was then
reserved for noble women) were all talking at once.
“Let us make haste, Demoiselle Mahiette,” said the youngest of the three,
who was also the largest, to the provincial, “I greatly fear that we shall
arrive too late; they told us at the Châtelet that they were going to take him
directly to the pillory.”
“Ah, bah! what are you saying, Demoiselle Oudarde Musnier?”
interposed the other Parisienne. “There are two hours yet to the pillory. We
have time enough. Have you ever seen any one pilloried, my dear
Mahiette?”
“Yes,” said the provincial, “at Reims.”
“Ah, bah! What is your pillory at Reims? A miserable cage into which
only peasants are turned. A great affair, truly!”
“Only peasants!” said Mahiette, “at the cloth market in Reims! We have
seen very fine criminals there, who have killed their father and mother!
Peasants! For what do you take us, Gervaise?”
It is certain that the provincial was on the point of taking offence, for the
honor of her pillory. Fortunately, that discreet damoiselle, Oudarde Musnier,
turned the conversation in time.
“By the way, Damoiselle Mahiette, what say you to our Flemish
Ambassadors? Have you as fine ones at Reims?”
“I admit,” replied Mahiette, “that it is only in Paris that such Flemings
can be seen.”
“Did you see among the embassy, that big ambassador who is a hosier?”
asked Oudarde.

“Yes,” said Mahiette. “He has the eye of a Saturn.”
“And the big fellow whose face resembles a bare belly?” resumed
Gervaise. “And the little one, with small eyes framed in red eyelids, pared
down and slashed up like a thistle head?”
“’Tis their horses that are worth seeing,” said Oudarde, “caparisoned as
they are after the fashion of their country!”
“Ah my dear,” interrupted provincial Mahiette, assuming in her turn an
air of superiority, “what would you say then, if you had seen in ’61, at the
consecration at Reims, eighteen years ago, the horses of the princes and of
the king’s company? Housings and caparisons of all sorts; some of damask
cloth, of fine cloth of gold, furred with sables; others of velvet, furred with
ermine; others all embellished with goldsmith’s work and large bells of gold
and silver! And what money that had cost! And what handsome boy pages
rode upon them!”
“That,” replied Oudarde dryly, “does not prevent the Flemings having
very fine horses, and having had a superb supper yesterday with monsieur,
the provost of the merchants, at the Hôtel-de-Ville, where they were served
with comfits and hippocras, and spices, and other singularities.”
“What are you saying, neighbor!” exclaimed Gervaise. “It was with
monsieur the cardinal, at the Petit Bourbon that they supped.”
“Not at all. At the Hôtel-de-Ville.
“Yes, indeed. At the Petit Bourbon!”
“It was at the Hôtel-de-Ville,” retorted Oudarde sharply, “and Dr.
Scourable addressed them a harangue in Latin, which pleased them greatly.
My husband, who is sworn bookseller told me so.”
“It was at the Petit Bourbon,” replied Gervaise, with no less spirit, “and
this is what monsieur the cardinal’s procurator presented to them: twelve
double quarts of hippocras, white, claret, and red; twenty-four boxes of
double Lyons marchpane, gilded; as many torches, worth two livres a piece;
and six demi-queues[29] of Beaune wine, white and claret, the best that
could be found. I have it from my husband, who is a cinquantenier[30], at
the Parloir-aux Bourgeois, and who was this morning comparing the
Flemish ambassadors with those of Prester John and the Emperor of
Trebizond, who came from Mesopotamia to Paris, under the last king, and
who wore rings in their ears.”

“So true is it that they supped at the Hôtel-de-Ville,” replied Oudarde but
little affected by this catalogue, “that such a triumph of viands and comfits
has never been seen.”
“I tell you that they were served by Le Sec, sergeant of the city, at the
Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, and that that is where you are mistaken.”
“At the Hôtel-de-Ville, I tell you!”
“At the Petit-Bourbon, my dear! and they had illuminated with magic
glasses the word Hope, which is written on the grand portal.”
“At the Hôtel-de-Ville! At the Hôtel-de-Ville! And Husson-le-Voir played
the flute!”
“I tell you, no!”
“I tell you, yes!”
“I say, no!”
Plump and worthy Oudarde was preparing to retort, and the quarrel
might, perhaps, have proceeded to a pulling of caps, had not Mahiette
suddenly exclaimed,—“Look at those people assembled yonder at the end
of the bridge! There is something in their midst that they are looking at!”
“In sooth,” said Gervaise, “I hear the sounds of a tambourine. I believe
’tis the little Esmeralda, who plays her mummeries with her goat. Eh, be
quick, Mahiette! redouble your pace and drag along your boy. You are come
hither to visit the curiosities of Paris. You saw the Flemings yesterday; you
must see the gypsy to-day.”
“The gypsy!” said Mahiette, suddenly retracing her steps, and clasping
her son’s arm forcibly. “God preserve me from it! She would steal my child
from me! Come, Eustache!”
And she set out on a run along the quay towards the Grève, until she had
left the bridge far behind her. In the meanwhile, the child whom she was
dragging after her fell upon his knees; she halted breathless. Oudarde and
Gervaise rejoined her.
“That gypsy steal your child from you!” said Gervaise. “That’s a singular
freak of yours!”
Mahiette shook her head with a pensive air.
“The singular point is,” observed Oudarde, “that la sachette has the same
idea about the Egyptian woman.”

“What is la sachette?” asked Mahiette.
“Hé!” said Oudarde, “Sister Gudule.”
“And who is Sister Gudule?” persisted Mahiette.
“You are certainly ignorant of all but your Reims, not to know that!”
replied Oudarde. “’Tis the recluse of the Rat-Hole.”
“What!” demanded Mahiette, “that poor woman to whom we are carrying
this cake?”
Oudarde nodded affirmatively.
“Precisely. You will see her presently at her window on the Grève. She
has the same opinion as yourself of these vagabonds of Egypt, who play the
tambourine and tell fortunes to the public. No one knows whence comes her
horror of the gypsies and Egyptians. But you, Mahiette—why do you run so
at the mere sight of them?”
“Oh!” said Mahiette, seizing her child’s round head in both hands, “I
don’t want that to happen to me which happened to Paquette la
Chantefleurie.”
“Oh! you must tell us that story, my good Mahiette,” said Gervaise,
taking her arm.
“Gladly,” replied Mahiette, “but you must be ignorant of all but your
Paris not to know that! I will tell you then (but ’tis not necessary for us to
halt that I may tell you the tale), that Paquette la Chantefleurie was a pretty
maid of eighteen when I was one myself, that is to say, eighteen years ago,
and ’tis her own fault if she is not to-day, like me, a good, plump, fresh
mother of six and thirty, with a husband and a son. However, after the age
of fourteen, it was too late! Well, she was the daughter of Guybertant,
minstrel of the barges at Reims, the same who had played before King
Charles VII., at his coronation, when he descended our river Vesle from
Sillery to Muison, when Madame the Maid of Orleans was also in the boat.
The old father died when Paquette was still a mere child; she had then no
one but her mother, the sister of M. Pradon, master-brazier and coppersmith
in Paris, Rue Parin-Garlin, who died last year. You see she was of good
family. The mother was a good simple woman, unfortunately, and she
taught Paquette nothing but a bit of embroidery and toy-making which did
not prevent the little one from growing very large and remaining very poor.
They both dwelt at Reims, on the river front, Rue de Folle-Peine. Mark this:

For I believe it was this which brought misfortune to Paquette. In ’61, the
year of the coronation of our King Louis XI. whom God preserve! Paquette
was so gay and so pretty that she was called everywhere by no other name
than la Chantefleurie—blossoming song. Poor girl! She had handsome
teeth, she was fond of laughing and displaying them. Now, a maid who
loves to laugh is on the road to weeping; handsome teeth ruin handsome
eyes. So she was la Chantefleurie. She and her mother earned a precarious
living; they had been very destitute since the death of the minstrel; their
embroidery did not bring them in more than six farthings a week, which
does not amount to quite two eagle liards. Where were the days when
Father Guybertant had earned twelve sous parisian, in a single coronation,
with a song? One winter (it was in that same year of ’61), when the two
women had neither fagots nor firewood, it was very cold, which gave la
Chantefleurie such a fine color that the men called her Paquette![31] and
many called her Pâquerette![32] and she was ruined.—Eustache, just let me
see you bite that cake if you dare!—We immediately perceived that she was
ruined, one Sunday when she came to church with a gold cross about her
neck. At fourteen years of age! do you see? First it was the young Vicomte
de Cormontreuil, who has his bell tower three leagues distant from Reims;
then Messire Henri de Triancourt, equerry to the King; then less than that,
Chiart de Beaulion, sergeant-at-arms; then, still descending, Guery
Aubergeon, carver to the King; then, Macé de Frépus, barber to monsieur
the dauphin; then, Thévenin le Moine, King’s cook; then, the men growing
continually younger and less noble, she fell to Guillaume Racine, minstrel
of the hurdy-gurdy and to Thierry de Mer, lamplighter. Then, poor
Chantefleurie, she belonged to every one: she had reached the last sou of
her gold piece. What shall I say to you, my damoiselles? At the coronation,
in the same year, ’61, ’twas she who made the bed of the king of the
debauchees! In the same year!”
Mahiette sighed, and wiped away a tear which trickled from her eyes.
“This is no very extraordinary history,” said Gervaise, “and in the whole
of it I see nothing of any Egyptian women or children.”
“Patience!” resumed Mahiette, “you will see one child.—In ’66, ’twill be
sixteen years ago this month, at Sainte-Paule’s day, Paquette was brought to
bed of a little girl. The unhappy creature! it was a great joy to her; she had
long wished for a child. Her mother, good woman, who had never known

what to do except to shut her eyes, her mother was dead. Paquette had no
longer any one to love in the world or any one to love her. La Chantefleurie
had been a poor creature during the five years since her fall. She was alone,
alone in this life, fingers were pointed at her, she was hooted at in the
streets, beaten by the sergeants, jeered at by the little boys in rags. And then,
twenty had arrived: and twenty is an old age for amorous women. Folly
began to bring her in no more than her trade of embroidery in former days;
for every wrinkle that came, a crown fled; winter became hard to her once
more, wood became rare again in her brazier, and bread in her cupboard.
She could no longer work because, in becoming voluptuous, she had grown
lazy; and she suffered much more because, in growing lazy, she had become
voluptuous. At least, that is the way in which monsieur the curé of Saint-
Remy explains why these women are colder and hungrier than other poor
women, when they are old.”
“Yes,” remarked Gervaise, “but the gypsies?”
“One moment, Gervaise!” said Oudarde, whose attention was less
impatient. “What would be left for the end if all were in the beginning?
Continue, Mahiette, I entreat you. That poor Chantefleurie!”
Mahiette went on.
“So she was very sad, very miserable, and furrowed her cheeks with
tears. But in the midst of her shame, her folly, her debauchery, it seemed to
her that she should be less wild, less shameful, less dissipated, if there were
something or some one in the world whom she could love, and who could
love her. It was necessary that it should be a child, because only a child
could be sufficiently innocent for that. She had recognized this fact after
having tried to love a thief, the only man who wanted her; but after a short
time, she perceived that the thief despised her. Those women of love require
either a lover or a child to fill their hearts. Otherwise, they are very
unhappy. As she could not have a lover, she turned wholly towards a desire
for a child, and as she had not ceased to be pious, she made her constant
prayer to the good God for it. So the good God took pity on her, and gave
her a little daughter. I will not speak to you of her joy; it was a fury of tears,
and caresses, and kisses. She nursed her child herself, made swaddling-
bands for it out of her coverlet, the only one which she had on her bed, and
no longer felt either cold or hunger. She became beautiful once more, in
consequence of it. An old maid makes a young mother. Gallantry claimed

her once more; men came to see la Chantefleurie; she found customers
again for her merchandise, and out of all these horrors she made baby
clothes, caps and bibs, bodices with shoulder-straps of lace, and tiny
bonnets of satin, without even thinking of buying herself another coverlet.
—Master Eustache, I have already told you not to eat that cake.—It is
certain that little Agnès, that was the child’s name, a baptismal name, for it
was a long time since la Chantefleurie had had any surname—it is certain
that that little one was more swathed in ribbons and embroideries than a
dauphiness of Dauphiny! Among other things, she had a pair of little shoes,
the like of which King Louis XI. certainly never had! Her mother had
stitched and embroidered them herself; she had lavished on them all the
delicacies of her art of embroideress, and all the embellishments of a robe
for the good Virgin. They certainly were the two prettiest little pink shoes
that could be seen. They were no longer than my thumb, and one had to see
the child’s little feet come out of them, in order to believe that they had
been able to get into them. ’Tis true that those little feet were so small, so
pretty, so rosy! rosier than the satin of the shoes! When you have children,
Oudarde, you will find that there is nothing prettier than those little hands
and feet.”
“I ask no better,” said Oudarde with a sigh, “but I am waiting until it
shall suit the good pleasure of M. Andry Musnier.”
“However, Paquette’s child had more that was pretty about it besides its
feet. I saw her when she was only four months old; she was a love! She had
eyes larger than her mouth, and the most charming black hair, which
already curled. She would have been a magnificent brunette at the age of
sixteen! Her mother became more crazy over her every day. She kissed her,
caressed her, tickled her, washed her, decked her out, devoured her! She lost
her head over her, she thanked God for her. Her pretty, little rosy feet above
all were an endless source of wonderment, they were a delirium of joy! She
was always pressing her lips to them, and she could never recover from her
amazement at their smallness. She put them into the tiny shoes, took them
out, admired them, marvelled at them, looked at the light through them, was
curious to see them try to walk on her bed, and would gladly have passed
her life on her knees, putting on and taking off the shoes from those feet, as
though they had been those of an Infant Jesus.”

“The tale is fair and good,” said Gervaise in a low tone; “but where do
gypsies come into all that?”
“Here,” replied Mahiette. “One day there arrived in Reims a very queer
sort of people. They were beggars and vagabonds who were roaming over
the country, led by their duke and their counts. They were browned by
exposure to the sun, they had closely curling hair, and silver rings in their
ears. The women were still uglier than the men. They had blacker faces,
which were always uncovered, a miserable frock on their bodies, an old
cloth woven of cords bound upon their shoulder, and their hair hanging like
the tail of a horse. The children who scrambled between their legs would
have frightened as many monkeys. A band of excommunicates. All these
persons came direct from lower Egypt to Reims through Poland. The Pope
had confessed them, it was said, and had prescribed to them as penance to
roam through the world for seven years, without sleeping in a bed; and so
they were called penancers, and smelt horribly. It appears that they had
formerly been Saracens, which was why they believed in Jupiter, and
claimed ten livres of Tournay from all archbishops, bishops, and mitred
abbots with croziers. A bull from the Pope empowered them to do that.
They came to Reims to tell fortunes in the name of the King of Algiers, and
the Emperor of Germany. You can readily imagine that no more was needed
to cause the entrance to the town to be forbidden them. Then the whole
band camped with good grace outside the gate of Braine, on that hill where
stands a mill, beside the cavities of the ancient chalk pits. And everybody in
Reims vied with his neighbor in going to see them. They looked at your
hand, and told you marvellous prophecies; they were equal to predicting to
Judas that he would become Pope. Nevertheless, ugly rumors were in
circulation in regard to them; about children stolen, purses cut, and human
flesh devoured. The wise people said to the foolish: “Don’t go there!” and
then went themselves on the sly. It was an infatuation. The fact is, that they
said things fit to astonish a cardinal. Mothers triumphed greatly over their
little ones after the Egyptians had read in their hands all sorts of marvels
written in pagan and in Turkish. One had an emperor; another, a pope;
another, a captain. Poor Chantefleurie was seized with curiosity; she wished
to know about herself, and whether her pretty little Agnès would not
become some day Empress of Armenia, or something else. So she carried
her to the Egyptians; and the Egyptian women fell to admiring the child,
and to caressing it, and to kissing it with their black mouths, and to

marvelling over its little band, alas! to the great joy of the mother. They
were especially enthusiastic over her pretty feet and shoes. The child was
not yet a year old. She already lisped a little, laughed at her mother like a
little mad thing, was plump and quite round, and possessed a thousand
charming little gestures of the angels of paradise.
“She was very much frightened by the Egyptians, and wept. But her
mother kissed her more warmly and went away enchanted with the good
fortune which the soothsayers had foretold for her Agnès. She was to be a
beauty, virtuous, a queen. So she returned to her attic in the Rue Folle-
Peine, very proud of bearing with her a queen. The next day she took
advantage of a moment when the child was asleep on her bed, (for they
always slept together), gently left the door a little way open, and ran to tell a
neighbor in the Rue de la Séchesserie, that the day would come when her
daughter Agnès would be served at table by the King of England and the
Archduke of Ethiopia, and a hundred other marvels. On her return, hearing
no cries on the staircase, she said to herself: ‘Good! the child is still asleep!’
She found her door wider open than she had left it, but she entered, poor
mother, and ran to the bed.—The child was no longer there, the place was
empty. Nothing remained of the child, but one of her pretty little shoes. She
flew out of the room, dashed down the stairs, and began to beat her head
against the wall, crying: ‘My child! who has my child? Who has taken my
child?’ The street was deserted, the house isolated; no one could tell her
anything about it. She went about the town, searched all the streets, ran
hither and thither the whole day long, wild, beside herself, terrible, snuffing
at doors and windows like a wild beast which has lost its young. She was
breathless, dishevelled, frightful to see, and there was a fire in her eyes
which dried her tears. She stopped the passers-by and cried: ‘My daughter!
my daughter! my pretty little daughter! If any one will give me back my
daughter, I will be his servant, the servant of his dog, and he shall eat my
heart if he will.’ She met M. le Curé of Saint-Remy, and said to him:
‘Monsieur, I will till the earth with my finger-nails, but give me back my
child!’ It was heartrending, Oudarde; and I saw a very hard man, Master
Ponce Lacabre, the procurator, weep. Ah! poor mother! In the evening she
returned home. During her absence, a neighbor had seen two gypsies ascend
up to it with a bundle in their arms, then descend again, after closing the
door. After their departure, something like the cries of a child were heard in
Paquette’s room. The mother, burst into shrieks of laughter, ascended the

stairs as though on wings, and entered.—A frightful thing to tell, Oudarde!
Instead of her pretty little Agnès, so rosy and so fresh, who was a gift of the
good God, a sort of hideous little monster, lame, one-eyed, deformed, was
crawling and squalling over the floor. She hid her eyes in horror. ‘Oh!’ said
she, ‘have the witches transformed my daughter into this horrible animal?’
They hastened to carry away the little club-foot; he would have driven her
mad. It was the monstrous child of some gypsy woman, who had given
herself to the devil. He appeared to be about four years old, and talked a
language which was no human tongue; there were words in it which were
impossible. La Chantefleurie flung herself upon the little shoe, all that
remained to her of all that she loved. She remained so long motionless over
it, mute, and without breath, that they thought she was dead. Suddenly she
trembled all over, covered her relic with furious kisses, and burst out
sobbing as though her heart were broken. I assure you that we were all
weeping also. She said: ‘Oh, my little daughter! my pretty little daughter!
where art thou?’—and it wrung your very heart. I weep still when I think of
it. Our children are the marrow of our bones, you see.—My poor Eustache!
thou art so fair!—If you only knew how nice he is! yesterday he said to me:
‘I want to be a gendarme, that I do.’ Oh! my Eustache! if I were to lose
thee!—All at once la Chantefleurie rose, and set out to run through Reims,
screaming: ‘To the gypsies’ camp! to the gypsies’ camp! Police, to burn the
witches!’ The gypsies were gone. It was pitch dark. They could not be
followed. On the morrow, two leagues from Reims, on a heath between
Gueux and Tilloy, the remains of a large fire were found, some ribbons
which had belonged to Paquette’s child, drops of blood, and the dung of a
ram. The night just past had been a Saturday. There was no longer any
doubt that the Egyptians had held their Sabbath on that heath, and that they
had devoured the child in company with Beelzebub, as the practice is
among the Mahometans. When La Chantefleurie learned these horrible
things, she did not weep, she moved her lips as though to speak, but could
not. On the morrow, her hair was gray. On the second day, she had
disappeared.
“’Tis in truth, a frightful tale,” said Oudarde, “and one which would
make even a Burgundian weep.”
“I am no longer surprised,” added Gervaise, “that fear of the gypsies
should spur you on so sharply.”

“And you did all the better,” resumed Oudarde, “to flee with your
Eustache just now, since these also are gypsies from Poland.”
“No,” said Gervais, “’tis said that they come from Spain and Catalonia.”
“Catalonia? ’tis possible,” replied Oudarde. “Pologne, Catalogne,
Valogne, I always confound those three provinces, One thing is certain, that
they are gypsies.”
“Who certainly,” added Gervaise, “have teeth long enough to eat little
children. I should not be surprised if la Smeralda ate a little of them also,
though she pretends to be dainty. Her white goat knows tricks that are too
malicious for there not to be some impiety underneath it all.”
Mahiette walked on in silence. She was absorbed in that revery which is,
in some sort, the continuation of a mournful tale, and which ends only after
having communicated the emotion, from vibration to vibration, even to the
very last fibres of the heart. Nevertheless, Gervaise addressed her, “And did
they ever learn what became of la Chantefleurie?” Mahiette made no reply.
Gervaise repeated her question, and shook her arm, calling her by name.
Mahiette appeared to awaken from her thoughts.
“What became of la Chantefleurie?” she said, repeating mechanically the
words whose impression was still fresh in her ear; then, making an effort to
recall her attention to the meaning of her words, “Ah!” she continued
briskly, “no one ever found out.”
She added, after a pause,—
“Some said that she had been seen to quit Reims at nightfall by the
Fléchembault gate; others, at daybreak, by the old Basée gate. A poor man
found her gold cross hanging on the stone cross in the field where the fair is
held. It was that ornament which had wrought her ruin, in ’61. It was a gift
from the handsome Vicomte de Cormontreuil, her first lover. Paquette had
never been willing to part with it, wretched as she had been. She had clung
to it as to life itself. So, when we saw that cross abandoned, we all thought
that she was dead. Nevertheless, there were people of the Cabaret les
Vantes, who said that they had seen her pass along the road to Paris,
walking on the pebbles with her bare feet. But, in that case, she must have
gone out through the Porte de Vesle, and all this does not agree. Or, to speak
more truly, I believe that she actually did depart by the Porte de Vesle, but
departed from this world.”

“I do not understand you,” said Gervaise.
“La Vesle,” replied Mahiette, with a melancholy smile, “is the river.”
“Poor Chantefleurie!” said Oudarde, with a shiver,—“drowned!”
“Drowned!” resumed Mahiette, “who could have told good Father
Guybertant, when he passed under the bridge of Tingueux with the current,
singing in his barge, that one day his dear little Paquette would also pass
beneath that bridge, but without song or boat.
“And the little shoe?” asked Gervaise.
“Disappeared with the mother,” replied Mahiette.
“Poor little shoe!” said Oudarde.
Oudarde, a big and tender woman, would have been well pleased to sigh
in company with Mahiette. But Gervaise, more curious, had not finished her
questions.
“And the monster?” she said suddenly, to Mahiette.
“What monster?” inquired the latter.
“The little gypsy monster left by the sorceresses in Chantefleurie’s
chamber, in exchange for her daughter. What did you do with it? I hope you
drowned it also.”
“No.” replied Mahiette.
“What? You burned it then? In sooth, that is more just. A witch child!”
“Neither the one nor the other, Gervaise. Monseigneur the archbishop
interested himself in the child of Egypt, exorcised it, blessed it, removed the
devil carefully from its body, and sent it to Paris, to be exposed on the
wooden bed at Notre-Dame, as a foundling.”
“Those bishops!” grumbled Gervaise, “because they are learned, they do
nothing like anybody else. I just put it to you, Oudarde, the idea of placing
the devil among the foundlings! For that little monster was assuredly the
devil. Well, Mahiette, what did they do with it in Paris? I am quite sure that
no charitable person wanted it.”
“I do not know,” replied the Rémoise, “’twas just at that time that my
husband bought the office of notary, at Beru, two leagues from the town,
and we were no longer occupied with that story; besides, in front of Beru,
stand the two hills of Cernay, which hide the towers of the cathedral in
Reims from view.”

While chatting thus, the three worthy bourgeoises had arrived at the
Place de Grève. In their absorption, they had passed the public breviary of
the Tour-Roland without stopping, and took their way mechanically towards
the pillory around which the throng was growing more dense with every
moment. It is probable that the spectacle which at that moment attracted all
looks in that direction, would have made them forget completely the Rat-
Hole, and the halt which they intended to make there, if big Eustache, six
years of age, whom Mahiette was dragging along by the hand, had not
abruptly recalled the object to them: “Mother,” said he, as though some
instinct warned him that the Rat-Hole was behind him, “can I eat the cake
now?”
If Eustache had been more adroit, that is to say, less greedy, he would
have continued to wait, and would only have hazarded that simple question,
“Mother, can I eat the cake, now?” on their return to the University, to
Master Andry Musnier’s, Rue Madame la Valence, when he had the two
arms of the Seine and the five bridges of the city between the Rat-Hole and
the cake.
This question, highly imprudent at the moment when Eustache put it,
aroused Mahiette’s attention.
“By the way,” she exclaimed, “we are forgetting the recluse! Show me
the Rat-Hole, that I may carry her her cake.”
“Immediately,” said Oudarde, “’tis a charity.”
But this did not suit Eustache.
“Stop! my cake!” said he, rubbing both ears alternatively with his
shoulders, which, in such cases, is the supreme sign of discontent.
The three women retraced their steps, and, on arriving in the vicinity of
the Tour-Roland, Oudarde said to the other two,—
“We must not all three gaze into the hole at once, for fear of alarming the
recluse. Do you two pretend to read the Dominus in the breviary, while I
thrust my nose into the aperture; the recluse knows me a little. I will give
you warning when you can approach.”
She proceeded alone to the window. At the moment when she looked in,
a profound pity was depicted on all her features, and her frank, gay visage
altered its expression and color as abruptly as though it had passed from a
ray of sunlight to a ray of moonlight; her eye became humid; her mouth

contracted, like that of a person on the point of weeping. A moment later,
she laid her finger on her lips, and made a sign to Mahiette to draw near and
look.
Mahiette, much touched, stepped up in silence, on tiptoe, as though
approaching the bedside of a dying person.
It was, in fact, a melancholy spectacle which presented itself to the eyes
of the two women, as they gazed through the grating of the Rat-Hole,
neither stirring nor breathing.
The cell was small, broader than it was long, with an arched ceiling, and
viewed from within, it bore a considerable resemblance to the interior of a
huge bishop’s mitre. On the bare flagstones which formed the floor, in one
corner, a woman was sitting, or rather, crouching. Her chin rested on her
knees, which her crossed arms pressed forcibly to her breast. Thus doubled
up, clad in a brown sack, which enveloped her entirely in large folds, her
long, gray hair pulled over in front, falling over her face and along her legs
nearly to her feet, she presented, at the first glance, only a strange form
outlined against the dark background of the cell, a sort of dusky triangle,
which the ray of daylight falling through the opening, cut roughly into two
shades, the one sombre, the other illuminated. It was one of those spectres,
half light, half shadow, such as one beholds in dreams and in the
extraordinary work of Goya, pale, motionless, sinister, crouching over a
tomb, or leaning against the grating of a prison cell.
It was neither a woman, nor a man, nor a living being, nor a definite
form; it was a figure, a sort of vision, in which the real and the fantastic
intersected each other, like darkness and day. It was with difficulty that one
distinguished, beneath her hair which spread to the ground, a gaunt and
severe profile; her dress barely allowed the extremity of a bare foot to
escape, which contracted on the hard, cold pavement. The little of human
form of which one caught a sight beneath this envelope of mourning,
caused a shudder.
That figure, which one might have supposed to be riveted to the
flagstones, appeared to possess neither movement, nor thought, nor breath.
Lying, in January, in that thin, linen sack, lying on a granite floor, without
fire, in the gloom of a cell whose oblique air-hole allowed only the cold
breeze, but never the sun, to enter from without, she did not appear to suffer
or even to think. One would have said that she had turned to stone with the

cell, ice with the season. Her hands were clasped, her eyes fixed. At first
sight one took her for a spectre; at the second, for a statue.
Nevertheless, at intervals, her blue lips half opened to admit a breath, and
trembled, but as dead and as mechanical as the leaves which the wind
sweeps aside.
Nevertheless, from her dull eyes there escaped a look, an ineffable look,
a profound, lugubrious, imperturbable look, incessantly fixed upon a corner
of the cell which could not be seen from without; a gaze which seemed to
fix all the sombre thoughts of that soul in distress upon some mysterious
object.
Such was the creature who had received, from her habitation, the name of
the “recluse”; and, from her garment, the name of “the sacked nun.”
The three women, for Gervaise had rejoined Mahiette and Oudarde,
gazed through the window. Their heads intercepted the feeble light in the
cell, without the wretched being whom they thus deprived of it seeming to
pay any attention to them. “Do not let us trouble her,” said Oudarde, in a
low voice, “she is in her ecstasy; she is praying.”
Meanwhile, Mahiette was gazing with ever-increasing anxiety at that
wan, withered, dishevelled head, and her eyes filled with tears. “This is
very singular,” she murmured.
She thrust her head through the bars, and succeeded in casting a glance at
the corner where the gaze of the unhappy woman was immovably riveted.
When she withdrew her head from the window, her countenance was
inundated with tears.
“What do you call that woman?” she asked Oudarde.
Oudarde replied,—
“We call her Sister Gudule.”
“And I,” returned Mahiette, “call her Paquette la Chantefleurie.”
Then, laying her finger on her lips, she motioned to the astounded
Oudarde to thrust her head through the window and look.
Oudarde looked and beheld, in the corner where the eyes of the recluse
were fixed in that sombre ecstasy, a tiny shoe of pink satin, embroidered
with a thousand fanciful designs in gold and silver.

Gervaise looked after Oudarde, and then the three women, gazing upon
the unhappy mother, began to weep.
But neither their looks nor their tears disturbed the recluse. Her hands
remained clasped; her lips mute; her eyes fixed; and that little shoe, thus
gazed at, broke the heart of any one who knew her history.
The three women had not yet uttered a single word; they dared not speak,
even in a low voice. This deep silence, this deep grief, this profound
oblivion in which everything had disappeared except one thing, produced
upon them the effect of the grand altar at Christmas or Easter. They
remained silent, they meditated, they were ready to kneel. It seemed to them
that they were ready to enter a church on the day of Tenebræ.
At length Gervaise, the most curious of the three, and consequently the
least sensitive, tried to make the recluse speak:
“Sister! Sister Gudule!”
She repeated this call three times, raising her voice each time. The
recluse did not move; not a word, not a glance, not a sigh, not a sign of life.
Oudarde, in her turn, in a sweeter, more caressing voice,—“Sister!” said
she, “Sister Sainte-Gudule!”
The same silence; the same immobility.
“A singular woman!” exclaimed Gervaise, “and one not to be moved by a
catapult!”
“Perchance she is deaf,” said Oudarde.
“Perhaps she is blind,” added Gervaise.
“Dead, perchance,” returned Mahiette.
It is certain that if the soul had not already quitted this inert, sluggish,
lethargic body, it had at least retreated and concealed itself in depths
whither the perceptions of the exterior organs no longer penetrated.
“Then we must leave the cake on the window,” said Oudarde; “some
scamp will take it. What shall we do to rouse her?”
Eustache, who, up to that moment had been diverted by a little carriage
drawn by a large dog, which had just passed, suddenly perceived that his
three conductresses were gazing at something through the window, and,
curiosity taking possession of him in his turn, he climbed upon a stone post,

elevated himself on tiptoe, and applied his fat, red face to the opening,
shouting, “Mother, let me see too!”
At the sound of this clear, fresh, ringing child’s voice, the recluse
trembled; she turned her head with the sharp, abrupt movement of a steel
spring, her long, fleshless hands cast aside the hair from her brow, and she
fixed upon the child, bitter, astonished, desperate eyes. This glance was but
a lightning flash.
“Oh my God!” she suddenly exclaimed, hiding her head on her knees,
and it seemed as though her hoarse voice tore her chest as it passed from it,
“do not show me those of others!”
“Good day, madam,” said the child, gravely.
Nevertheless, this shock had, so to speak, awakened the recluse. A long
shiver traversed her frame from head to foot; her teeth chattered; she half
raised her head and said, pressing her elbows against her hips, and clasping
her feet in her hands as though to warm them,—
“Oh, how cold it is!”
“Poor woman!” said Oudarde, with great compassion, “would you like a
little fire?”
She shook her head in token of refusal.
“Well,” resumed Oudarde, presenting her with a flagon; “here is some
hippocras which will warm you; drink it.”
Again she shook her head, looked at Oudarde fixedly and replied,
“Water.”
Oudarde persisted,—“No, sister, that is no beverage for January. You
must drink a little hippocras and eat this leavened cake of maize, which we
have baked for you.”
She refused the cake which Mahiette offered to her, and said, “Black
bread.”
“Come,” said Gervaise, seized in her turn with an impulse of charity, and
unfastening her woolen cloak, “here is a cloak which is a little warmer than
yours.”
She refused the cloak as she had refused the flagon and the cake, and
replied, “A sack.”

“But,” resumed the good Oudarde, “you must have perceived to some
extent, that yesterday was a festival.”
“I do perceive it,” said the recluse; “’tis two days now since I have had
any water in my crock.”
She added, after a silence, “’Tis a festival, I am forgotten. People do well.
Why should the world think of me, when I do not think of it? Cold charcoal
makes cold ashes.”
And as though fatigued with having said so much, she dropped her head
on her knees again. The simple and charitable Oudarde, who fancied that
she understood from her last words that she was complaining of the cold,
replied innocently, “Then you would like a little fire?”
“Fire!” said the sacked nun, with a strange accent; “and will you also
make a little for the poor little one who has been beneath the sod for these
fifteen years?”
Every limb was trembling, her voice quivered, her eyes flashed, she had
raised herself upon her knees; suddenly she extended her thin, white hand
towards the child, who was regarding her with a look of astonishment.
“Take away that child!” she cried. “The Egyptian woman is about to pass
by.”
Then she fell face downward on the earth, and her forehead struck the
stone, with the sound of one stone against another stone. The three women
thought her dead. A moment later, however, she moved, and they beheld her
drag herself, on her knees and elbows, to the corner where the little shoe
was. Then they dared not look; they no longer saw her; but they heard a
thousand kisses and a thousand sighs, mingled with heartrending cries, and
dull blows like those of a head in contact with a wall. Then, after one of
these blows, so violent that all three of them staggered, they heard no more.
“Can she have killed herself?” said Gervaise, venturing to pass her head
through the air-hole. “Sister! Sister Gudule!”
“Sister Gudule!” repeated Oudarde.
“Ah! good heavens! she no longer moves!” resumed Gervaise; “is she
dead? Gudule! Gudule!”
Mahiette, choked to such a point that she could not speak, made an effort.
“Wait,” said she. Then bending towards the window, “Paquette!” she said,
“Paquette le Chantefleurie!”

A child who innocently blows upon the badly ignited fuse of a bomb, and
makes it explode in his face, is no more terrified than was Mahiette at the
effect of that name, abruptly launched into the cell of Sister Gudule.
The recluse trembled all over, rose erect on her bare feet, and leaped at
the window with eyes so glaring that Mahiette and Oudarde, and the other
woman and the child recoiled even to the parapet of the quay.
Meanwhile, the sinister face of the recluse appeared pressed to the
grating of the air-hole. “Oh! oh!” she cried, with an appalling laugh; “’tis
the Egyptian who is calling me!”
At that moment, a scene which was passing at the pillory caught her wild
eye. Her brow contracted with horror, she stretched her two skeleton arms
from her cell, and shrieked in a voice which resembled a death-rattle, “So
’tis thou once more, daughter of Egypt! ’Tis thou who callest me, stealer of
children! Well! Be thou accursed! accursed! accursed! accursed!”

CHAPTER IV.
A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER.

These words were, so to speak, the point of union of two scenes, which
had, up to that time, been developed in parallel lines at the same moment,
each on its particular theatre; one, that which the reader has just perused, in
the Rat-Hole; the other, which he is about to read, on the ladder of the
pillory. The first had for witnesses only the three women with whom the
reader has just made acquaintance; the second had for spectators all the
public which we have seen above, collecting on the Place de Grève, around
the pillory and the gibbet.
That crowd which the four sergeants posted at nine o’clock in the
morning at the four corners of the pillory had inspired with the hope of
some sort of an execution, no doubt, not a hanging, but a whipping, a
cropping of ears, something, in short,—that crowd had increased so rapidly
that the four policemen, too closely besieged, had had occasion to “press”
it, as the expression then ran, more than once, by sound blows of their
whips, and the haunches of their horses.
This populace, disciplined to waiting for public executions, did not
manifest very much impatience. It amused itself with watching the pillory, a
very simple sort of monument, composed of a cube of masonry about six
feet high and hollow in the interior. A very steep staircase, of unhewn stone,
which was called by distinction “the ladder,” led to the upper platform,
upon which was visible a horizontal wheel of solid oak. The victim was
bound upon this wheel, on his knees, with his hands behind his back. A
wooden shaft, which set in motion a capstan concealed in the interior of the
little edifice, imparted a rotatory motion to the wheel, which always
maintained its horizontal position, and in this manner presented the face of
the condemned man to all quarters of the square in succession. This was
what was called “turning” a criminal.

As the reader perceives, the pillory of the Grève was far from presenting
all the recreations of the pillory of the Halles. Nothing architectural, nothing
monumental. No roof to the iron cross, no octagonal lantern, no frail,
slender columns spreading out on the edge of the roof into capitals of
acanthus leaves and flowers, no waterspouts of chimeras and monsters, on
carved woodwork, no fine sculpture, deeply sunk in the stone.
They were forced to content themselves with those four stretches of
rubble work, backed with sandstone, and a wretched stone gibbet, meagre
and bare, on one side.
The entertainment would have been but a poor one for lovers of Gothic
architecture. It is true that nothing was ever less curious on the score of
architecture than the worthy gapers of the Middle Ages, and that they cared
very little for the beauty of a pillory.
The victim finally arrived, bound to the tail of a cart, and when he had
been hoisted upon the platform, where he could be seen from all points of
the Place, bound with cords and straps upon the wheel of the pillory, a
prodigious hoot, mingled with laughter and acclamations, burst forth upon
the Place. They had recognized Quasimodo.
It was he, in fact. The change was singular. Pilloried on the very place
where, on the day before, he had been saluted, acclaimed, and proclaimed
Pope and Prince of Fools, in the cortège of the Duke of Egypt, the King of
Thunes, and the Emperor of Galilee! One thing is certain, and that is, that
there was not a soul in the crowd, not even himself, though in turn
triumphant and the sufferer, who set forth this combination clearly in his
thought. Gringoire and his philosophy were missing at this spectacle.
Soon Michel Noiret, sworn trumpeter to the king, our lord, imposed
silence on the louts, and proclaimed the sentence, in accordance with the
order and command of monsieur the provost. Then he withdrew behind the
cart, with his men in livery surcoats.
Quasimodo, impassible, did not wince. All resistance had been rendered
impossible to him by what was then called, in the style of the criminal
chancellery, “the vehemence and firmness of the bonds” which means that
the thongs and chains probably cut into his flesh; moreover, it is a tradition
of jail and wardens, which has not been lost, and which the handcuffs still
preciously preserve among us, a civilized, gentle, humane people (the
galleys and the guillotine in parentheses).

He had allowed himself to be led, pushed, carried, lifted, bound, and
bound again. Nothing was to be seen upon his countenance but the
astonishment of a savage or an idiot. He was known to be deaf; one might
have pronounced him to be blind.
They placed him on his knees on the circular plank; he made no
resistance. They removed his shirt and doublet as far as his girdle; he
allowed them to have their way. They entangled him under a fresh system
of thongs and buckles; he allowed them to bind and buckle him. Only from
time to time he snorted noisily, like a calf whose head is hanging and
bumping over the edge of a butcher’s cart.
“The dolt,” said Jehan Frollo of the Mill, to his friend Robin Poussepain
(for the two students had followed the culprit, as was to have been
expected), “he understands no more than a cockchafer shut up in a box!”
There was wild laughter among the crowd when they beheld
Quasimodo’s hump, his camel’s breast, his callous and hairy shoulders laid
bare. During this gayety, a man in the livery of the city, short of stature and
robust of mien, mounted the platform and placed himself near the victim.
His name speedily circulated among the spectators. It was Master Pierrat
Torterue, official torturer to the Châtelet.
He began by depositing on an angle of the pillory a black hour-glass, the
upper lobe of which was filled with red sand, which it allowed to glide into
the lower receptacle; then he removed his parti-colored surtout, and there
became visible, suspended from his right hand, a thin and tapering whip of
long, white, shining, knotted, plaited thongs, armed with metal nails. With
his left hand, he negligently folded back his shirt around his right arm, to
the very armpit.
In the meantime, Jehan Frollo, elevating his curly blonde head above the
crowd (he had mounted upon the shoulders of Robin Poussepain for the
purpose), shouted: “Come and look, gentle ladies and men! they are going
to peremptorily flagellate Master Quasimodo, the bellringer of my brother,
monsieur the archdeacon of Josas, a knave of oriental architecture, who has
a back like a dome, and legs like twisted columns!”
And the crowd burst into a laugh, especially the boys and young girls.
At length the torturer stamped his foot. The wheel began to turn.
Quasimodo wavered beneath his bonds. The amazement which was

suddenly depicted upon his deformed face caused the bursts of laughter to
redouble around him.
All at once, at the moment when the wheel in its revolution presented to
Master Pierrat, the humped back of Quasimodo, Master Pierrat raised his
arm; the fine thongs whistled sharply through the air, like a handful of
adders, and fell with fury upon the wretch’s shoulders.
Quasimodo leaped as though awakened with a start. He began to
understand. He writhed in his bonds; a violent contraction of surprise and
pain distorted the muscles of his face, but he uttered not a single sigh. He
merely turned his head backward, to the right, then to the left, balancing it
as a bull does who has been stung in the flanks by a gadfly.
A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another and another,
and still others. The wheel did not cease to turn, nor the blows to rain down.
Soon the blood burst forth, and could be seen trickling in a thousand
threads down the hunchback’s black shoulders; and the slender thongs, in
their rotatory motion which rent the air, sprinkled drops of it upon the
crowd.
Quasimodo had resumed, to all appearance, his first imperturbability. He
had at first tried, in a quiet way and without much outward movement, to
break his bonds. His eye had been seen to light up, his muscles to stiffen,
his members to concentrate their force, and the straps to stretch. The effort
was powerful, prodigious, desperate; but the provost’s seasoned bonds
resisted. They cracked, and that was all. Quasimodo fell back exhausted.
Amazement gave way, on his features, to a sentiment of profound and bitter
discouragement. He closed his single eye, allowed his head to droop upon
his breast, and feigned death.
From that moment forth, he stirred no more. Nothing could force a
movement from him. Neither his blood, which did not cease to flow, nor the
blows which redoubled in fury, nor the wrath of the torturer, who grew
excited himself and intoxicated with the execution, nor the sound of the
horrible thongs, more sharp and whistling than the claws of scorpions.
At length a bailiff from the Châtelet clad in black, mounted on a black
horse, who had been stationed beside the ladder since the beginning of the
execution, extended his ebony wand towards the hour-glass. The torturer
stopped. The wheel stopped. Quasimodo’s eye opened slowly.

The scourging was finished. Two lackeys of the official torturer bathed
the bleeding shoulders of the patient, anointed them with some unguent
which immediately closed all the wounds, and threw upon his back a sort of
yellow vestment, in cut like a chasuble. In the meanwhile, Pierrat Torterue
allowed the thongs, red and gorged with blood, to drip upon the pavement.
All was not over for Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour of
pillory which Master Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to the
sentence of Messire Robert d’Estouteville; all to the greater glory of the old
physiological and psychological play upon words of Jean de Cumène,
Surdus absurdus: a deaf man is absurd.
So the hour-glass was turned over once more, and they left the
hunchback fastened to the plank, in order that justice might be
accomplished to the very end.
The populace, especially in the Middle Ages, is in society what the child
is in the family. As long as it remains in its state of primitive ignorance, of
moral and intellectual minority, it can be said of it as of the child,—
’Tis the pitiless age.

We have already shown that Quasimodo was generally hated, for more
than one good reason, it is true. There was hardly a spectator in that crowd
who had not or who did not believe that he had reason to complain of the
malevolent hunchback of Notre-Dame. The joy at seeing him appear thus in
the pillory had been universal; and the harsh punishment which he had just
suffered, and the pitiful condition in which it had left him, far from
softening the populace had rendered its hatred more malicious by arming it
with a touch of mirth.
Hence, the “public prosecution” satisfied, as the bigwigs of the law still
express it in their jargon, the turn came of a thousand private vengeances.
Here, as in the Grand Hall, the women rendered themselves particularly
prominent. All cherished some rancor against him, some for his malice,
others for his ugliness. The latter were the most furious.
“Oh! mask of Antichrist!” said one.
“Rider on a broom handle!” cried another.
“What a fine tragic grimace,” howled a third, “and who would make him
Pope of the Fools if to-day were yesterday?”

“’Tis well,” struck in an old woman. “This is the grimace of the pillory.
When shall we have that of the gibbet?”
“When will you be coiffed with your big bell a hundred feet under
ground, cursed bellringer?”
“But ’tis the devil who rings the Angelus!”
“Oh! the deaf man! the one-eyed creature! the hunch-back! the monster!”
“A face to make a woman miscarry better than all the drugs and
medicines!”
And the two scholars, Jehan du Moulin, and Robin Poussepain, sang at
the top of their lungs, the ancient refrain,—
“Une hart
Pour le pendard!
Un fagot
Pour le magot!”[33]

A thousand other insults rained down upon him, and hoots and
imprecations, and laughter, and now and then, stones.
Quasimodo was deaf but his sight was clear, and the public fury was no
less energetically depicted on their visages than in their words. Moreover,
the blows from the stones explained the bursts of laughter.
At first he held his ground. But little by little that patience which had
borne up under the lash of the torturer, yielded and gave way before all
these stings of insects. The bull of the Asturias who has been but little
moved by the attacks of the picador grows irritated with the dogs and
banderilleras.
He first cast around a slow glance of hatred upon the crowd. But bound
as he was, his glance was powerless to drive away those flies which were
stinging his wound. Then he moved in his bonds, and his furious exertions
made the ancient wheel of the pillory shriek on its axle. All this only
increased the derision and hooting.
Then the wretched man, unable to break his collar, like that of a chained
wild beast, became tranquil once more; only at intervals a sigh of rage
heaved the hollows of his chest. There was neither shame nor redness on his
face. He was too far from the state of society, and too near the state of
nature to know what shame was. Moreover, with such a degree of
deformity, is infamy a thing that can be felt? But wrath, hatred, despair,

slowly lowered over that hideous visage a cloud which grew ever more and
more sombre, ever more and more charged with electricity, which burst
forth in a thousand lightning flashes from the eye of the cyclops.
Nevertheless, that cloud cleared away for a moment, at the passage of a
mule which traversed the crowd, bearing a priest. As far away as he could
see that mule and that priest, the poor victim’s visage grew gentler. The fury
which had contracted it was followed by a strange smile full of ineffable
sweetness, gentleness, and tenderness. In proportion as the priest
approached, that smile became more clear, more distinct, more radiant. It
was like the arrival of a Saviour, which the unhappy man was greeting. But
as soon as the mule was near enough to the pillory to allow of its rider
recognizing the victim, the priest dropped his eyes, beat a hasty retreat,
spurred on rigorously, as though in haste to rid himself of humiliating
appeals, and not at all desirous of being saluted and recognized by a poor
fellow in such a predicament.
This priest was Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo.
The cloud descended more blackly than ever upon Quasimodo’s brow.
The smile was still mingled with it for a time, but was bitter, discouraged,
profoundly sad.
Time passed on. He had been there at least an hour and a half, lacerated,
maltreated, mocked incessantly, and almost stoned.
All at once he moved again in his chains with redoubled despair, which
made the whole framework that bore him tremble, and, breaking the silence
which he had obstinately preserved hitherto, he cried in a hoarse and furious
voice, which resembled a bark rather than a human cry, and which was
drowned in the noise of the hoots—“Drink!”
This exclamation of distress, far from exciting compassion, only added
amusement to the good Parisian populace who surrounded the ladder, and
who, it must be confessed, taken in the mass and as a multitude, was then
no less cruel and brutal than that horrible tribe of robbers among whom we
have already conducted the reader, and which was simply the lower stratum
of the populace. Not a voice was raised around the unhappy victim, except
to jeer at his thirst. It is certain that at that moment he was more grotesque
and repulsive than pitiable, with his face purple and dripping, his eye wild,
his mouth foaming with rage and pain, and his tongue lolling half out. It
must also be stated that if a charitable soul of a bourgeois or bourgeoise, in

the rabble, had attempted to carry a glass of water to that wretched creature
in torment, there reigned around the infamous steps of the pillory such a
prejudice of shame and ignominy, that it would have sufficed to repulse the
good Samaritan.
At the expiration of a few moments, Quasimodo cast a desperate glance
upon the crowd, and repeated in a voice still more heartrending: “Drink!”
And all began to laugh.
“Drink this!” cried Robin Poussepain, throwing in his face a sponge
which had been soaked in the gutter. “There, you deaf villain, I’m your
debtor.”
A woman hurled a stone at his head,—
“That will teach you to wake us up at night with your peal of a dammed
soul.”
“He, good, my son!” howled a cripple, making an effort to reach him
with his crutch, “will you cast any more spells on us from the top of the
towers of Notre-Dame?”
“Here’s a drinking cup!” chimed in a man, flinging a broken jug at his
breast. “’Twas you that made my wife, simply because she passed near you,
give birth to a child with two heads!”
“And my cat bring forth a kitten with six paws!” yelped an old crone,
launching a brick at him.
“Drink!” repeated Quasimodo panting, and for the third time.
At that moment he beheld the crowd give way. A young girl, fantastically
dressed, emerged from the throng. She was accompanied by a little white
goat with gilded horns, and carried a tambourine in her hand.
Quasimodo’s eyes sparkled. It was the gypsy whom he had attempted to
carry off on the preceding night, a misdeed for which he was dimly
conscious that he was being punished at that very moment; which was not
in the least the case, since he was being chastised only for the misfortune of
being deaf, and of having been judged by a deaf man. He doubted not that
she had come to wreak her vengeance also, and to deal her blow like the
rest.
He beheld her, in fact, mount the ladder rapidly. Wrath and spite
suffocate him. He would have liked to make the pillory crumble into ruins,

and if the lightning of his eye could have dealt death, the gypsy would have
been reduced to powder before she reached the platform.
She approached, without uttering a syllable, the victim who writhed in a
vain effort to escape her, and detaching a gourd from her girdle, she raised
it gently to the parched lips of the miserable man.
Then, from that eye which had been, up to that moment, so dry and
burning, a big tear was seen to fall, and roll slowly down that deformed
visage so long contracted with despair. It was the first, in all probability,
that the unfortunate man had ever shed.
Meanwhile, he had forgotten to drink. The gypsy made her little pout,
from impatience, and pressed the spout to the tusked month of Quasimodo,
with a smile.
He drank with deep draughts. His thirst was burning.
When he had finished, the wretch protruded his black lips, no doubt, with
the object of kissing the beautiful hand which had just succoured him. But
the young girl, who was, perhaps, somewhat distrustful, and who
remembered the violent attempt of the night, withdrew her hand with the
frightened gesture of a child who is afraid of being bitten by a beast.
Then the poor deaf man fixed on her a look full of reproach and
inexpressible sadness.
It would have been a touching spectacle anywhere,—this beautiful, fresh,
pure, and charming girl, who was at the same time so weak, thus hastening
to the relief of so much misery, deformity, and malevolence. On the pillory,
the spectacle was sublime.
The very populace were captivated by it, and began to clap their hands,
crying,—
“Noël! Noël!”
It was at that moment that the recluse caught sight, from the window of
her bole, of the gypsy on the pillory, and hurled at her her sinister
imprecation,—
“Accursed be thou, daughter of Egypt! Accursed! accursed!”

CHAPTER V.
END OF THE STORY OF THE CAKE.

La Esmeralda turned pale and descended from the pillory, staggering as
she went. The voice of the recluse still pursued her,—
“Descend! descend! Thief of Egypt! thou shalt ascend it once more!”
“The sacked nun is in one of her tantrums,” muttered the populace; and
that was the end of it. For that sort of woman was feared; which rendered
them sacred. People did not then willingly attack one who prayed day and
night.
The hour had arrived for removing Quasimodo. He was unbound, the
crowd dispersed.
Near the Grand Pont, Mahiette, who was returning with her two
companions, suddenly halted,—
“By the way, Eustache! what did you do with that cake?”
“Mother,” said the child, “while you were talking with that lady in the
bole, a big dog took a bite of my cake, and then I bit it also.”
“What, sir, did you eat the whole of it?” she went on.
“Mother, it was the dog. I told him, but he would not listen to me. Then I
bit into it, also.”
“’Tis a terrible child!” said the mother, smiling and scolding at one and
the same time. “Do you see, Oudarde? He already eats all the fruit from the
cherry-tree in our orchard of Charlerange. So his grandfather says that he
will be a captain. Just let me catch you at it again, Master Eustache. Come
along, you greedy fellow!”