“Ohè! Hennequin Dandèche! Ohè! Jehan Pincebourde!” they bawled at the pitch of their voices, “old Eustache Moubon, the ironmonger at the corner, is just dead. We’ve got his straw mattress, and we’re going to make a bonfire of it. Come on!”
And with that they flung the mattress right on top of Gringoire, whom they had come up to without perceiving, while at the same time one of them took a handful of straw and lit it at the Blessed Virgin’s lamp.
“Mort-Christ!” gasped Gringoire, “am I going to be too hot now?”
The moment was critical. He was on the point of being caught between fire and water. He made a superhuman effort —such as a coiner would make to escape being boiled alive —staggered to his feet, heaved the mattress back upon the boys, and fled precipitately.
“Holy Virgin!” yelled the gamins, “it is the iron-monger’s ghost!”
And they too ran away.
The mattress remained master of the field. Belleforêt, Father Le Juge, and Corrozet assert that next day it was picked up by the clergy of that district and conveyed with great pomp and ceremony to the treasury of the Church of Saint Opportune, where, down to 1789 the sacristan drew a handsome income from the great miracle worked by the image of the Virgin at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil, the which, by its mere presence, had on the memorable night between the sixth and seventh of January, 1482, exorcised the defunct Eustache Moubon, who, to balk the devil, had, when dying, cunningly hidden his soul in his mattress.
Chapter 6 - The Broken Pitcher
After running for some time as fast as his legs could carry him without knowing whither, rushing head foremost into many a street corner, leaping gutters, traversing numberless alleys, courts, and streets, seeking flight and passage among the endless meanderings of the old street round the Halles, exploring in his blind panic what the elegant Latin of the Charters describes as “tota via, cheminum et viaria,” our poet suddenly drew up short, first because he was out of breath, and secondly because an unexpected idea gripped his mind.
“It appears to me, Ma?tre Pierre Gringoire,” he apostrophized himself, tapping his forehead, “that you must be demented to run thus. Those little ragamuffins were just as frightened of you as you of them. If I mistake not, you heard the clatter of their sabots making off southward, while you were fleeing to the north. Now of two things one: either they ran away, and the mattress, forgotten in their flight, is precisely the hospitable bed you have been searching for since the morning, and which Our Lady conveys to you miraculously as a reward for having composed in her honour a Morality accompanied by triumphs and mummeries; or, on the other hand, the boys have not run away, and, in that case, they have set fire to the mattress, which will be exactly the fire you are in need of to cheer, warm, and dry you. In either case—good fire or good bed—the mattress is a gift from Heaven. The thrice-blessed Virgin Mary at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil has maybe caused Eustache Moubon to die for that identical purpose, and it is pure folly on your part to rush off headlong, like a Picard running from a Frenchman, leaving behind what you are seeking in front —decidedly you are an idiot!”
Accordingly, he began to retrace his steps, and with much seeking, ferreting about, nose on the scent, and ears pricked, he endeavoured to find his way back to that blessed mattress —but in vain. It was one maze of intersecting houses, blind alleys, and winding streets, among which he hesitated and wavered continually, more bewildered and entangled in this network of dark alleys than he would have been in the real labyrinth of the Hotel des Tournelles. Finally he lost patience and swore aloud: “A malediction upon these alleys! The devil himself must have made them after the pattern of his pitchfork!”
Somewhat relieved by this outburst, next moment his nerve was completely restored by catching sight of a red glow at the end of a long, narrow street.
“Heaven be praised!” said he, “there it is—that must be the blaze of my mattress,” and likening himself to a pilot in danger of foundering in the night, “Salve,” he added piously, “Salve maris stella!” but whether this fragment of litany was addressed to the Virgin or to the mattress, we really are unable to say.
He had advanced but a few steps down the narrow street, which was on an incline, unpaved, and more and more miry as it neared the bottom, when he became aware of a curious fact. The street was not deserted. Here and there he caught sight of vague and indeterminate shapes, all crawling in the direction of the light that flickered at the end of the street, like those lumbering insects which creep at night from one blade of grass to another towards a shepherd’s fire.
Nothing makes one more boldly venturesome than the consciousness of an empty pocket. Gringoire, therefore, continued his way and soon came up with the last of these weird objects dragging itself clumsily after the rest. On closer inspection he perceived that it was nothing but a miserable fragment, a stump of a man hobbling along painfully on his two hands like a mutilated grasshopper with only its front legs left. As he passed this kind of human spider it addressed him in a lamentable whine: “La buona mancia, signor! la buona mancia!” 1
“The devil fly away with thee!” said Gringoire, “and me too, if I know what that means.” And he passed on.
He reached another of those ambulatory bundles and examined it. It was a cripple with only one leg and one arm, but so legless and so armless that the complicated system of crutches and wooden legs on which he was supported gave him all the appearance of a scaffolding in motion. Gringoire, who dearly loved noble and classical similes, compared him in his own mind to the living tripod of Vulcan.
The living tripod greeted him as he passed by, lifting his hat to the height of Gringoire’s chin and holding it there like a barber’s basin while he shouted in his ear: “Senor caballero, para comprar un pedaso de pan!” 2
“It appears,” said Gringoire, “that this one talks also; but it’s a barbarous lingo, and he is luckier than I if he understands it.” Then striking his forehead with a sudden change of thought—“That reminds me—what the devil did they mean this morning with their Esmeralda?”
He started to quicken his pace, but for the third time something barred the way. This something, or rather some one, was blind, a little blind man with a bearded, Jewish face, who, lunging in the space round him with a stick, and towed along by a great dog, snuffled out to him in a strong, Hungarian accent: “Facitote caritatem!” 3
“Thank goodness!” exclaimed Pierre Gringoire, “at last here’s one who can speak a Christian language. I must indeed have a benevolent air for them to ask alms of me, considering the present exhausted condition of my purse. My friend,” and he turned to the blind man, “last week I sold my last shirt, or rather, as you are acquainted only with the language of Cicero, ’Vendidi hebdomade super transita meum ultimuman chemisam.”’
So saying, he turned his back on the blind man and pursued his way. But the blind man proceeded to quicken his pace at the same time, and behold the cripple and the stump also came hurrying forward with great clatter and rattle of crutches and supports, and all three tumbling over one another at poor Gringoire’s heels, favoured him with their several songs. “Caritatem!” whined the blind man. “La buona mancia!” piped the stump, and the cripple took up the strain with “Un pedaso de pan!”
Gringoire stopped his ears. “Oh, tower of Babel!” he cried, and set off running. The blind man ran, the cripple ran, the stump ran.
And as he penetrated farther down the street, the maimed, the halt, and the blind began to swarm round him, while one-armed or one-eyed men, and lepers covered with sores, issued from the houses, some from little streets adjacent, some from the bowels of the earth, howling, bellowing, yelping, hobbling, and clattering along, all pressing forward towards the glow and wallowing in the mud like slugs after the rain.
Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not at all sure of what would come of all this, walked on bewildered in the midst of this swarm, upsetting the halt, striding over the stumps, his feet entangled in that ant-hill of cripples, like the English captain who was beset by a legion of crabs.
It occurred to him to attempt to retrace his steps, but it was too late. The herd had closed up behind him and his three beggars held him fast. He went on, therefore, compelled at once by that irresistible flood, by fear, and by a sensation of giddiness which made the whole thing seem like some horrible nightmare.
At last he reached the end of the street. It opened into an immense square in which a multitude of scattered lights were flickering through the misty gloom. Gringoire precipitated himself into it, hoping by the speed of his legs to escape the three maimed spectres who had fastened themselves on to him.
“Onde vas hombre?” 4 cried the cripple, tossing aside his complicated supports and running after him with as good a pair of legs as ever measured a geometrical pace upon the pavements of Paris; while the stump, standing erect upon his feet, bonneted Gringoire with the heavy iron-rimmed platter which served him as a support, and the blind man stared him in the face with great flaming eyes.
“Where am I?” asked the terrified poet.
“In the Court of Miracles,” replied a fourth spectre who had joined them.
“Truly,” said Gringoire, “I see that here the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, but where is the Saviour?”
Their only answer was a sinister laugh.
The poor poet looked about him. He was, in fact, in that Cour des Miracles where never honest man penetrated at such an hour—a magic circle wherein any officer of the Chatelet or sergeant of the Provostry intrepid enough to risk entering vanished in morsels—a city of thieves, a hideous sore on the face of Paris; a drain whence flowed forth each morning, to return at night, that stream of iniquity, of mendacity, and vagabondage which flows forever through the streets of a capital; a monstrous hive to which all the hornets that prey on the social order return at night, laden with their booty; a fraudulent hospital where the Bohemian, the unfrocked monk, the ruined scholar, the good-for-nothing of every nation —Spaniards, Italians, Germans—and of every creed—Jews, Turks, and infidels—beggars covered with painted sores during the day were transformed at night into robbers: in a word, a vast green-room, serving at that period for all the actors in that eternal drama of robbery, prostitution, and murder enacted on the streets of Paris.
It was a vast open space, irregular and ill-paved, as were all the squares of Paris at that time. Fires, around which swarmed strange groups, gleamed here and there. It was one ceaseless movement and clamour, shrieks of laughter, the wailing of babies, the voices of women. The hands and heads of this crowd threw a thousand grotesque outlines on the luminous background. The light of the fires flickered over the ground mingled with huge indefinite shadows, and across it from time to time passed some animal-like man or man-like animal. The boundary lines between race and species seemed here effaced as in a pandemonium. Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health and sickness, all seemed to be in common with this people; all was shared, mingled, confounded, superimposed, each one participated in all.
The faint and unsteady gleam of the fires enabled Gringoire through all his perturbation to distinguish that the great square was enclosed in a hideous framework of ancient houses, which, with their mouldering, shrunken, stooping fronts, each pierced by one or two round lighted windows, looked to him in the dark like so many old women’s heads, monstrous and cross-grained, ranged in a circle, and blinking down upon these witches’ revels.
It was like another and an unknown world, undreamt of, shapeless, crawling, swarming, fantastic.
Gringoire, growing momentarily more affrighted, held by the three beggars as by so many vices, bewildered by a crowd of other faces that bleated and barked round him—the luckless Gringoire strove to collect his mind sufficiently to remember whether this was really Saturday—the witches’ Sabbath. But all his efforts were useless—the link between his memory and his brain was broken; and doubtful of everything, vacillating between what he saw and what he felt, he asked himself this insoluble question: “If I am I, then what is this? If this is real, then what am I?”
At this moment an intelligible cry detached itself from the buzzing of the crowd surrounding him: “Take him to the King! Take him to the King!”
“Holy Virgin!” muttered Gringoire, “the King of this place? He must be a goat!”
“To the King! To the King!” they shouted in chorus.
They dragged him away, each striving to fasten his claws on him; but the three beggars would not loose their hold, and tore him from the others, yelling: “He belongs to us!”
The poet’s doublet, already sadly ailing, gave up the ghost in this struggle.
In traversing the horrible place his giddiness passed off, and after proceeding a few paces he had entirely recovered his sense of reality. He began to adapt himself to the atmosphere of the place. In the first moments there had arisen from his poet’s head, or perhaps quite simply and prosaically from his empty stomach, a fume, a vapour, so to speak, which, spreading itself between him and the surrounding objects, had permitted him to view them only through the incoherent mist of a nightmare, that distorting twilight of our dreams which exaggerates and misplaces every outline, crowding objects together in disproportionate groups, transforming ordinary things into chimeras and men into monstrous phantoms. By degrees, this hallucination gave place to a less bewildered, less exaggerated state of mind. The real forced itself upon him—struck upon his eyes—struck against his feet —and demolished, piece by piece, the terrifying vision by which at first he had imagined himself surrounded. He now perforce was aware that he was walking not through the Styx, but through the mud; that he was being hustled not by demons, but by thieves; that not his soul, but in simple sooth his life, was in danger (since he was without that invaluable conciliator which interposes so efficaciously between the robber and the honest man—the purse); in short, on examining the orgy more closely and in colder blood, he was obliged to climb down from the witches’ Sabbath to the pot-house.
And, in truth, the Court of Miracles was nothing more nor less than a huge tavern; but a tavern for brigands, as red with blood as ever it was with wine.
The spectacle which presented itself to him when his ragged escort at last brought him to the goal of his march, was not calculated to incline his mind to poetry, even though it were the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the pot-house. Were we not writing of the fifteenth century, we would say that Gringoire had come down from Michael Angelo to Callot.
