“Faith no!”said he in the tone of a man who awakens.
“Let myself be hanged?—’tis too absurd! I will not.”
“God be with you, then!”and the Archdeacon muttered between his teeth, “We shall meet again!”
“I have no desire to meet that devil of a man again,”thought Gringoire. He ran after Dom Claude. “Hark you, Monsieur the Archdeacon, no offence between old friends! You are interested in this girl—my wife I mean—that’s very well. You have devised a stratagem for getting her safely out of Notre-Dame, but your plan is highly unpleasant for me, Gringoire. If I only had another to suggest!—Let me tell you that a most luminous inspiration has this instant come to me. How if I had a practicable scheme for extricating her from this tight place without exposing my own neck to the slightest danger of a slip-knot, what would you say? Would not that suffice you? Is it absolutely necessary that I should be hanged to satisfy you?”
The priest was tearing at the buttons of his soutane with impatience. “Oh, babbling stream of words! Out with thy plan!”
“Yes,”said Gringoire, speaking to himself and rubbing his nose with his forefinger in sign of deep cogitation; “that’s it! The vagabonds are good-hearted fellows! The tribe of Egypt loves her. They will rise at a word. Nothing easier. A surprise—and under cover of the disorder, carry her off— perfectly easily! This very next night. Nothing would please them better.”
“The plan—speak!”said the priest, shaking him.
Gringoire turned to him majestically.
“Let me be! see you not that I am composing?”He ruminated again for a few moments, then began to clap his hands at his thought. “Admirable!”he cried, “an assured success!”
“The plan!”repeated Claude, enraged.
Gringoire was radiant. “Hist!”said he, “let me tell it you in a whisper. ’Tis a counterplot that’s really brilliant, and will get us all clear out of the affair. Pardieu! you must admit that I’m no fool.”
He stopped short. “Ah, but the little goat—is she with the girl?”
“Yes—yes—devil take thee! go on!”
“They would hang her too, would they not?”
“What’s that to me?”
“Yes, they would hang her. They hanged a sow last month, sure enough. The hangman likes that—he eats the beast afterward. Hang my pretty Djali! Poor sweet lamb!”
“A murrain on thee!”cried Dom Claude. “ ’Tis thou art the hangman. What plan for saving her hast thou found, rascal? Must thou be delivered of thy scheme with the forceps?”
“Gently, master. This is it.”Gringoire bent to the Archdeacon’s ear and spoke very low, casting an anxious glance up and down the street, in which, however, there was not a soul to be seen. When he had finished, Dom Claude touched his hand and said coldly: “ ’Tis well. Till to-morrow, then.”
“Till to-morrow,”repeated Gringoire, and while the Archdeacon retreated in one direction, he went off in the other, murmuring to himself: “This is a nice business, M. Pierre Gringoire! Never mind, it’s not to say because one’s of small account one need be frightened at a great undertaking. Biton carried a great bull on his shoulders; wagtails and linnets cross the ocean.”
Chapter 2 - Turn Vagabond
The Archdeacon, on returning to the cloister, found his brother, Jehan of the Mill, watching for him at the door of his cell, having whiled away the tediousness of waiting by drawing on the wall with a piece of charcoal a profile portrait of his elder brother enriched by a nose of preposterous dimensions.
Dom Claude scarcely glanced at his brother. He had other things to think of. That laughing, scampish face, whose beams had so often lifted the gloom from the sombre countenance of the priest, had now no power to dissipate the mists that gathered ever more thickly over that festering, mephitic, stagnant soul.
“Brother,”Jehan began timidly, “I have come to see you.”
The Archdeacon did not even glance at him. “Well?”
“Brother,”continued the little hypocrite, “you are so good to me, and you bestow upon me such excellent advice, that I always come back to you.”
“What further?”
“Alas, brother, you were very right when you said to me: ‘Jehan! Jehan! cessat doctorum doctrina, discipulorum disciplina. Jehan, be staid; Jehan, be studious; Jehan, spend not thy nights outside the college without lawful occasion and leave of the masters. Come not to blows with the Picards—noli, Joannes, verbe rare Picardos. Lie not rotting like an unlettered ass—quasi asinus illiteratus—among the straw of the schools. Jehan, let thyself be chastised at the discretion of the master. Jehan, go every evening to chapel and sing an anthem with verse and prayer in praise of Our Lady the Virgin Mary.’ Alas! how excellent was that advice!”
“And then?”
“Brother, you see before you a guilty wretch, a miscreant, a profligate, a monster! My dear brother, Jehan has used your counsel as mere straw and dung to be trodden under foot. Well am I chastised for it, and the heavenly Father is extraordinarily just. So long as I had money I spent it in feasting, folly, and profligacy. Ah, how hideous and vile is the back view of debauchery compared with the smiling countenance she faces us with! Now I have not a single sou left; I’ve sold my coverlet, my shirt, and my towel—no merry life for me any longer! The fair taper is extinguished, and nothing remains to me but its villainous snuff that stinks in my nostrils. The girls make mock of me. I drink water. I am harassed by remorse and creditors.”
“The end?”said the Archdeacon.
“Ah, best of brothers, I would fain lead a better life. I come to you full of contrition. I am penitent. I acknowledge my sins. I beat my breast with heavy blows. You are very right to desire that I should one day become a licentiate and sub-monitor of the Collège de Torchi. I now feel a remarkable vocation for that office. But I have no more ink left—I shall be obliged to buy some; I have no pens left— I must buy some; no more paper, no books—I must buy them. For that purpose I am sorely in need of the financial wherewithal. And I come to you, my brother, with a heart full of contrition.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes,”said the scholar. “A little money.”
“I have none.”
The scholar assumed an air of gravity and resolution: “Very good, brother, then I am sorry to have to inform you that I have received from other quarters very advantageous offers and proposals. You will not give me any money? No? In that case I shall turn Vagabond.”And with this portentous word he adopted the mien of an Ajax awaiting the lightning.
The Archdeacon answered, unmoved:
“Then turn Vagabond.”
Jehan made him a profound bow, and descended the cloister stair-case, whistling.
As he passed through the court-yard of the cloister under his brother’s window, he heard that window open, looked up, and saw the Archdeacon’s stern countenance leaning out of it. “Get thee to the devil!”called Dom Claude; “here is the last money thou shalt have of me.”
So saying, the priest tossed down a purse to Jehan, which raised a large bump on his forehead, and with which he set off, at once angry and delighted, like a dog that has been pelted with marrow-bones.
Chapter 3 - Vive La Joie
The reader may perhaps remember that a portion of the Court of Miracles was enclosed by the ancient wall of the city, a good many towers of which were beginning at that time to fall into decay. One of these towers had been converted by the truands into a place of entertainment, with a tavern in the basement, and the rest in the upper storeys. This tower was the most animated, and consequently the most hideous, spot in the whole Vagabond quarter—a monstrous hive, buzzing day and night. At night, when the rest of the rabble were asleep—when not a lighted window was to be seen in the squalid fronts of the houses round the Place, when all sound had ceased in the innumerable tenements with their swarms of thieves, loose women, stolen or bastard children— the joyous tower could always be distinguished by the uproar that issued from it, and by the crimson glow of light streaming out from the loopholes, the windows, the fissures in the gaping walls, escaping, as it were, from every pore.
The tavern, as we have said, was in the basement. The descent to it was through a low door and down a steep, narrow stair. Over the door, by way of sign, hung an extraordinary daub representing new-coined sols and dead fowls, with the punning legend underneath, Aux sonneurs1 pour les trépassés!—The ringers for the dead.
One evening, when the curfew was ringing from all the steeples of Paris, the sergeants of the watch, could they have entered the redoubtable Court of Miracles, might have remarked that a greater hubbub than usual was going on in the tavern of the Vagabonds; that they were drinking deeper and swearing harder. Without, in the Place, were a number of groups conversing in low tones, as when some great plot is brewing, and here and there some fellow crouched down and sharpened a villainous iron blade on a flag-stone.
Meanwhile, in the tavern itself, wine and gambling formed so strong a diversion to the ideas that occupied the Vagabonds, that it would have been difficult to gather from the conversation of the drinkers what the matter was which so engaged them. Only they wore a gayer air than usual, and every one of them had some weapon or other gleaming between his knees—a pruning-hook, an axe, a broadsword, or the crook of some ancient blunderbuss.
The hall, which was circular in form, was very spacious; but the tables were so crowded together and the drinkers so numerous, that the whole contents of the tavern—men, women, benches, tankards, drinkers, sleepers, gamblers, the able-bodied and the crippled—seemed thrown pell-mell together, with about as much order and harmony as a heap of oyster-shells. A few tallow candles guttered on the table; but the real source of light to the tavern, that which sustained in the cabaret the character of the chandelier in an opera-house, was the fire. This cellar was so damp that the fire was never allowed to go out, even in the height of summer; an immense fire-place with a carved chimney-piece, and crowded with heavy andirons and cooking utensils, contained one of those huge fires of wood and turf which in a village street at night cast the deep red glow of the forge windows on the opposite wall. A great dog, gravely seated in the ashes, was turning a spit hung with meat.
In spite of the prevailing confusion, after the first glance three principal groups might be singled out, pressing round the several personages already known to the reader. One of these personages, fantastically bedizened with many an Oriental gaud, was Mathias Hungadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and Bohemia. The old rogue was seated cross-legged on a table, his finger upraised, exhibiting in a loud voice his skill in white and black magic to many an open-mouthed face that surrounded him.
Another crowd was gathered thick round our old friend the King of Tunis, armed to the teeth. Clopin Trouillefou, with a very serious mien and in a low voice, was superintending the ransacking of an enormous cask full of arms staved open before him and disgorging a profusion of axes, swords, firelocks, coats of mail, lance and pike heads, crossbows and arrows, like apples and grapes from a cornucopia. Each one took something from the heap—one a morion, another a rapier, a third a cross-hilted dagger. The very children were arming, and even the worst cripples, mere torsos of men, all barbed and cuirassed, were crawling about among the legs of the drinkers like so many great beetles.
And lastly, a third audience—much the noisiest, most jovial, and numerous of the lot—crowded the benches and tables, listening to the haranguing and swearing of a flutelike voice which proceeded from a figure dressed in a complete suit of heavy armour from casque to spurs. The individual thus trussed up in full panoply was so buried under his warlike accoutrements that nothing of his person was visible but an impudent tip-tilted nose, a lock of golden hair, a rosy mouth, and a pair of bold blue eyes. His belt bristled with daggers and poniards, a large sword hung at one side, a rusty cross-bow at the other, a vast jug of wine stood before him, and in his right arm he held a strapping wench with uncovered bosom. Every mouth in his neighbourhood was laughing, drinking, swearing.
Add to these twenty minor groups; the serving men and women running to and fro with wine and beer-cans on their heads, the players absorbed in the various games of hazard—billes (a primitive form of billiards), dice, cards, backgammon, the intensely exciting “tringlet”(a form of spilikins), quarrels in one corner, kisses in another—and some idea may be formed of the scene, over which flickered the light of the great blazing fire, setting a thousand grotesque and enormous shadows dancing on the tavern walls.
As to the noise—the place might have been the inside of a bell in full peal, while any intervals that might occur in the hubbub were filled by the spluttering of the dripping-pan in front of the fire.
In the midst of all this uproar, on a bench inside the fireplace, a philosopher sat and meditated, with his feet in the ashes and his eyes fixed on the blaze. It was Pierre Gringoire.
“Now, then, look alive, arm yourselves—we march in an hour!”said Clopin Trouillefou to his rascals.
A girl sang a snatch of song:
“Father and mother dear, good-night;
The last to go put out the light.”
Two card-players were disputing. “Knave!”cried the reddest-faced of the two, shaking his fist at the other, “I’ll so mark thee thou mightest take the place of knave of clubs in our lord the King’s own pack of cards!”
“Ouf!”roared one, whose nasal drawl betrayed him as a Norman; “we are packed together here like the saints of Caillouville!”
“Children,”said the Duke of Egypt to his audience in a falsetto voice, “the witches of France go to the Sabbaths without ointment, or broomsticks, or any other mount, by a few magic words only. The witches of Italy have always a goat in readiness at the door. All are bound to go up the chimney.”
The voice of the young scamp armed cap-á-pie dominated the hubbub.
“No?l! No?l!”he cried. “My first day in armour! A Vagabond! I’m a Vagabond, body of Christ! pour me some wine! My friends, my name is Jehan Frollo of the Mill, and I’m a gentleman. It’s my opinion that if the Almighty were a man-at-arms he’d turn robber. Brothers, we are bound on a great expedition. We are doughty men. Lay siege to the church, break in the doors, bring out the maid, save her from the judges, save her from the priests, dismantle the cloister, burn the bishop in his house—we’ll do all this in less time than it takes a burgomaster to eat a mouthful of soup. Our cause is a righteous one—we loot Notre-Dame, and there you are! We’ll hang Quasimodo. Are you acquainted with Quasimodo, fair ladies? Have you seen him snorting on the back of the big bell on a day of high festival? Corne du Père! ’tis a grand sight—you’d say it was a devil astride a gaping maw. Hark ye, my friends; I am a truand to the bottom of my heart, I am Argotier to the soul, I’m a born Cagou. I was very rich, but I’ve spent all I had. My mother wanted to make me an officer, my father a subdeacon, my aunt a criminal councillor, my grandmother a protonotary, but I made myself a Vagabond. I told my father so, and he spat his curse in my face; my mother, the good old lady, fell to weeping and spluttering like the log in that fire-place. So hey for a merry life! I’m a whole madhouse in myself. Landlady, my duck, some more wine—I’ve got some money left yet, but no more of that Suresnes, it rasps my throat. Why, corb?uf, it’s like gargling with a basket!”
