“Holá, good-day to you Monsieur the Rector Thibaut! Tybalde aleator!7 old numskull! old gamester!”
“God save you! How often did you throw double six last night?”
“Oh, just look at the lantern-jawed old face of him—all livid and drawn and battered from his love of dice and gaming!”
“Where are you off to like that, Thibaut, Tybalde ad dados, 8 turning your back on the University and trotting towards the town?”
“Doubtless he is going to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodè!” 9 cried Jehan Frollo.
The whole ribald crew repeated the pun in a voice of thunder and with furious clapping of hands.
“You are off to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodè, aren’t you, Monsieur the Rector, own partner to the devil!”
Now came the turn of the other dignitaries.
“Down with the beadles! Down with the mace-bearers!”
“Tell me, Robin Poussepain, who is that one over there?”
“It is Gilbert de Suilly, Gilbertus de Soliaco, the Chancellor of the College of Autun.”
“Here, take my shoe—you have a better place than I have—throw it in his face!”
“Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces!” 10
“Down with the six theologians in their white surplices!”
“Are those the theologians? I took them for the six white geese Sainte-Geneviéve pays to the Town as tribute for the fief of Roogny.”
“Down with the physicians!”
“Down with all the pompous and squabbling disputations!”
“Here goes my cap at thy head, Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviéve; I owe thee a grudge. He gave my place in the Nation of Normandy to little Ascaino Falzaspada, who as an Italian, belongs of right to the Province of Bourges.”
“ ’Tis an injustice!” cried the scholars in chorus. “Down with the Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviéve!”
“Ho, there, Ma?tre Joachim de Ladehors! Ho, Louis Dahuille! Ho, Lambert Hoctement!”
“The devil choke the Procurator of the Nation of Germany!”
“And the chaplains of the Sainte-Chapelle in their gray amices; cum tunicis grisis!”
“Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis!”
“There go the Masters of Art! Oh, the fine red copes! and oh, the fine black ones!”
“That makes a fine tail for the Rector!”
“He might be the Doge of Venice going to espouse the sea.”
“Look, Jehan, the canons of Sainte-Geneviéve!”
“The foul fiend take the whole lot of them!”
“Abbè Claude Choart! Doctor Claude Choart, do you seek Marie la Giffarde?”
“You’ll find her in the Rue Glatigny.”
“Bed-making for the King of the Bawdies!”
“She pays her fourpence—quatuor denarios.”
“Aut unum bombum.”
“Would you have her pay you with one on the nose?”
“Comrades! Ma?tre Simon Sanguin, the elector of the Nation of Picardy, with his wife on the saddle behind him.”
“Post equitem sedet atra cura.” 11
“Good-day to you, Monsieur the Elector!”
“Good-night to you, Madame the Electress!”
“Lucky dogs to be able to see all that!” sighed Joannes de Molendino, still perched among the acanthus leaves of his capital.
Meanwhile the bookseller of the University, Ma?tre Andry Musnier, leaned over and whispered to the Court furrier, Ma?tre Gilles Lecornu:
“I tell you, monsieur, ’tis the end of the world. Never has there been such unbridled license among the scholars. It all comes of these accursed inventions—they ruin everything—the artillery, the culverine, the blunderbuss, and above all, printing, that second pestilence brought us from Germany. No more manuscripts—no more books! Printing gives the death-blow to bookselling. It is the beginning of the end.”
“I, too, am well aware of it by the increasing preference for velvet stuffs,” said the furrier.
At that moment it struck twelve.
A long-drawn “Ah!” went up from the crowd.
The scholars held their peace. There ensued a general stir and upheaval, a great shuffling of feet and movement of heads, much coughing and blowing of noses; everyone resettled himself, rose on tip-toe, placed himself in the most favourable position obtainable. Then deep silence, every neck outstretched, every mouth agape, every eye fixed on the marble table. Nothing appeared; only the four sergeants were still at their posts, stiff and motionless as four painted statues. Next, all eyes turned towards the platform reserved for the Flemish envoys. The door remained closed and the platform empty. Since daybreak the multitude had been waiting for three things—the hour of noon, the Flemish ambassadors, and the Mystery-Play. Noon alone had kept the appointment. It was too bad. They waited one, two, three, five minutes—a quarter of an hour—nothing happened. Then anger followed on the heels of impatience; indignant words flew hither and thither, though in suppressed tones as yet. “The Mystery, the Mystery!” they murmured sullenly. The temper of the crowd began to rise rapidly. The warning growls of the gathering storm rumbled overhead. It was Jehan du Moulin who struck out the first flash.
“Let’s have the Mystery, and the devil take the Flemings!” he cried at the pitch of his voice, coiling himself about his pillar like a serpent.
The multitude clapped its approval.
“The Mystery, the Mystery!” they repeated, “and to the devil with all Flanders!”
“Give us the Mystery at once,” continued the scholar, “or it’s my advice we hang the provost of the Palais by way of both Comedy and Morality.”
“Well said!” shouted the crowd, “and let’s begin the hanging by stringing up his sergeants.”
A great roar of applause followed. The four poor devils grew pale and glanced apprehensively at one another. The multitude surged towards them, and they already saw the frail wooden balustrade that formed the only barrier between them and the crowd bulge and give way under the pressure from without.
The moment was critical.
“At them! At them!” came from all sides.
At that instant the curtain of the dressing-room we have described was raised to give passage to a personage, the mere sight of whom suddenly arrested the crowd, and, as if by magic, transformed its anger into curiosity.
“Silence! Silence!”
But slightly reassured and trembling in every limb, the person in question advanced to the edge of the marble table with a profusion of bows which, the nearer he approached, assumed more and more the character of genuflections.
By this time quiet had been gradually restored, and there only remained that faint hum which always rises out of the silence of a great crowd.
“Messieurs the bourgeois,” he began, “and Mesdemoiselles the bourgeoises, we shall have the honour of declaiming and performing before his Eminence Monsieur the Cardinal a very fine Morality entitled ’The Good Judgment of Our Lady the Virgin Mary.’ I play Jupiter. His Eminence accompanies at this moment the most honourable Embassy of the Duke of Austria, just now engaged in listening to the harangue of Monsieur the Rector of the University at the Porte Baudets. As soon as the Most Reverend the Cardinal arrives we will commence.”
Certainly nothing less than the direct intervention of Jupiter could have saved the four unhappy sergeants of the provost of the Palais from destruction. Were we so fortunate as to have invented this most veracious history and were therefore liable to be called to task for it by Our Lady of Criticism, not against us could the classical rule be cited, Nec deus intersit.
For the rest, the costume of Seigneur Jupiter was very fine, and had contributed not a little towards soothing the crowd by occupying its whole attention. Jupiter was arrayed in a “brigandine” or shirt of mail of black velvet thickly studded with gilt nails, on his head was a helmet embellished with silver-gilt buttons, and but for the rouge and the great beard which covered respectively the upper and lower half of his face, but for the roll of gilded pasteboard in his hand studded with iron spikes and bristling with jagged strips of tinsel, which experienced eyes at once recognised as the dread thunder-bolt, and were it not for his flesh-coloured feet, sandalled and beribboned á la Grecque, you would have been very apt to mistake him for one of M. de Berry’s company of Breton archers.
_____________________
1 Notre-Dame de Paris was begun July 30, 1830.
2 The term Gothic used in its customary sense is quite incorrect, but is hallowed by tradition. We accept it, therefore, and use it like the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the latter half of the Middle Ages, of which the pointed arch forms the central idea, and which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the round arch is the prevailing feature.—Author’s Note.
3
In truth it was a sorry game
When in Paris Dame Justice,
Having gorged herself with spice,
Set all her palace in a flame
.
The application of these lines depends, unfortunately, on an untranslatable play on the word èpice, which means both spice and lawyers’ fees.
4 Old French money was reckoned according to two standards, that of Paris (parisis) and Tours (tournois); the livre parisis, the old franc, having twenty-five sols or sous, and the livre tournois twenty sols.—Translator’s Note.
5 Cuckold.
6 Horned and hairy.
7 Thibaut, thou gamester.
8 Thibaut towards losses.
9 A pun. Thibaut aux dés; i. e., Thibaut with the dice.
10 Freely translated: There’ll be rotten apples thrown at heads to-day.
11 Behind the rider sits black care.
Chapter 2 - Pierre Gringoire
Unfortunately, the admiration and satisfaction so universally excited by his costume died out during his harangue, and when he reached the unlucky concluding words, “As soon as his Reverence the Cardinal arrives, we will begin,” his voice was drowned in a tempest of hooting.
“Begin on the spot! The Mystery, the Mystery at once!” shouted the audience, the shrill voice of Joannes de Molendino sounding above all the rest, and piercing the general uproar like the fife in a charivari at N?mes.
“Begin!” piped the boy.
“Down with Jupiter and the Cardinal de Bourbon!” yelled Robin Poussepain and the other scholars perched on the window-sill.
“The Morality!” roared the crowd. “At once—on the spot. The sack and the rope for the players and the Cardinal!”
Poor Jupiter, quaking, bewildered, pale beneath his rouge, dropped his thunder-bolt and took his helmet in his hand; then bowing and trembling: “His Eminence,” he stammered, “the Ambassadors—Madame Marguerite of Flanders—” he could get no farther. Truth to tell, he was afraid of being hanged by the populace for beginning too late, hanged by the Cardinal for being too soon; on either side he beheld an abyss—that is to say, a gibbet.
Mercifully some one arrived upon the scene to extricate him from the dilemma and assume the responsibility.
An individual standing inside the balustrade in the space left clear round the marble table, and whom up till now no one had noticed, so effectually was his tall and spare figure concealed from view by the thickness of the pillar against which he leaned—this person, thin, sallow, light-haired, young still, though furrowed of brow and cheek, with gleaming eye and smiling mouth, clad in black serge threadbare and shiny with age, now approached the marble table and signed to the wretched victim. But the other was too perturbed to notice.
The newcomer advanced a step nearer. “Jupiter,” said he, “my dear Jupiter.”
The other heard nothing.
At last the tall young man losing patience, shouted almost in his face: “Michel Giborne!”
“Who calls?” said Jupiter, starting as if from a trance.
“It is I,” answered the stranger in black.
“Ah!” said Jupiter.
“Begin at once,” went on the other. “Do you content the people—I will undertake to appease Monsieur the provost, who, in his turn, will appease Monsieur the Cardinal.”
Jupiter breathed again.
“Messeigneurs the bourgeois,” he shouted with all the force of his lungs to the audience, which had not ceased to hoot him, “we are going to begin.”
“Evoe Jupiter! Plaudite cives!”1 yelled the scholars.
“No?l! No?l!” shouted the people.
There was a deafening clapping of hands, and the Hall still rocked with plaudits after Jupiter had retired behind his curtain.
Meanwhile the unknown personage who had so magically transformed the storm into a calm, had modestly re-entered the penumbra of his pillar, where doubtless he would have remained, unseen, unheard, and motionless as before, had he not been lured out of it by two young women who, seated in the first row of spectators, had witnessed his colloquy with Michel Giborne—Jupiter.
“Maitre,” said one of them, beckoning to him to come nearer.
“Hush, my dear Liènarde,” said her companion, a pretty, rosy-cheeked girl, courageous in the consciousness of her holiday finery, “he doesn’t belong to the University—he’s a layman. You mustn’t say ’Ma?tre’ to him, you must say ’Messire.’ ”
“Messire,” resumed Liènarde.
The stranger approached the balustrade.
“What can I do for you, mesdemoiselles?” he asked eagerly.
“Oh, nothing!” said Liènarde, all confused; “it is my neighbour, Gisquette la Gencienne, who wants to speak to you.”
“Not at all,” said Gisquette, blushing, “it was Liènarde who called you ’Maitre,’ and I told her she ought to say ’Messire.’ ”
The two girls cast down their eyes. The stranger, nothing loath to start a conversation with them, looked at them smilingly.
“So you have nothing to say to me, ladies?”
“Oh, nothing at all,” Gisquette declared.
“No, nothing,” added Liènarde.
The tall young man made as if to retire, but the two inquiring damsels were not inclined to let him go so soon.
“Messire,” began Gisquette with the impetuous haste of a woman taking a resolve, “it appears you are acquainted with the soldier who is going to play the part of Madame the Virgin in the Mystery.”
“You mean the part of Jupiter,” returned the unknown.
“Yes, of course!” said Liènarde. “Isn’t she stupid? So you know Jupiter?”
“Michel Giborne? Yes, madame.”
“He has a splendid beard,” said Liènarde.
“Will it be very fine what they are going to say?” asked Gisquette shyly.
“Extremely fine, mademoiselle,” responded the unknown without the slightest hesitation.
“What is it to be?” asked Liènarde.
“ ’The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin,’ a Morality, an it please you, mademoiselle.”
“Ah! that’s different,” rejoined Liènarde.
A short silence ensued. It was broken by the young man.
“It is an entirely new Morality,” said he, “and has never been used before.”
“Then it is not the same as they gave two years ago on the day of the entry of Monsieur the Legate, in which there were three beautiful girls to represent certain personages—”
“Sirens,” said Liènarde.
“And quite naked,” added the young man.
Liènarde modestly cast down her eyes. Gisquette glanced at her and then followed her example.
