“Good,” said he, “there goes the disturbing element.”
But unfortunately the disturbing element comprised the entire public. In a twinkling the Hall was empty.
To be exact, a sprinkling of spectators still remained, scattered about singly or grouped round the pillars—women, old men, and children who had had enough of the noise and the tumult. A few scholars sat astride the windows looking down into the Place.
“Well,” thought Gringoire, “here we have at least enough to listen to the end of my Mystery. They are few, but select —a lettered audience.”
A moment afterward it was discovered that a band of music, which should have been immensely effective at the entry of the Blessed Virgin, was missing. Gringoire found that his musicians had been pressed into the service of the Pope of Fools. “Go on without it,” he said stoically.
Approaching a group of townsfolk who appeared to be discussing his play, he caught the following scraps of conversation:
“Ma?tre Cheneteau, you know the H?tel de Navarre, which used to belong to M. de Nemours?”
“Opposite the Chapelle de Braque—yes.”
“Well, the fiscal authorities have just let it to Guillaume Alisandre, the historical painter, for six livres eight sols parisis a year.”
“How rents are rising!”
“Come,” thought Gringoire with a sigh, “at least the others are listening.”
“Comrades!” suddenly cried one of the young rascals at the window, “Esmeralda—Esmeralda down in the Place!”
The name acted like a charm. Every soul in the Hall rushed to the window, clambering up the walls to see, and repeating “Esmeralda! Esmeralda!” while from the outside came a great burst of applause.
“Now what do they mean with their ’Esmeralda’?” Gringoire inquired, clasping his hands in despair. “Ah, mon Dieu! it appears that the windows are the attraction now.”
He turned towards the marble table and discovered that the play had suffered an interruption. It was the moment at which Jupiter was to appear on the scene with his thunder. But Jupiter was standing stock-still below the stage.
“Michel Giborne, what are you doing there?” cried the exasperated poet. “Is that playing your part? Get up on the stage at once.”
“Alas!” said Jupiter, “one of the scholars has just taken away the ladder.”
Gringoire looked. It was but too true; the connection between the knot of his play and the untying had been cut.
“Rascal,” he muttered, “what did he want with the ladder?”
“To help him to see Esmeralda,” answered Jupiter, in an injured tone. “He said, ’Hallo, here’s a ladder that nobody’s using,’ and away he went with it.”
This was the last straw. Gringoire accepted it with resignation.
“May the devil fly away with you!” said he to the actors, “and if I am paid you shall be.” Whereupon he beat a retreat, hanging his head, but the last in the field, like a general who has made a good fight.
“A precious set of boobies and asses, these Parisians!” he growled between his teeth, as he descended the tortuous stairs of the Palais. “They come to hear a Mystery, and don’t listen to a word. They’ve been taken up with all the world—with Clopin Trouillefou, with the Cardinal, with Coppenole, with Quasimodo, with the devil; but with Madame the Virgin Mary not a bit. Dolts! if I had only known! I’d have given you some Virgin Marys with a vengeance. To think that I should have come here to see faces and found nothing but backs! I, a poet, to have the success of an apothecary! True, Homerus had to beg his bread through the Greek villages, and Ovidius Naso died in exile among the Muscovites. But the devil flay me if I know what they mean with their Esmeralda. To begin with, where can the word come from?—ah, it’s Egyptian.”
BOOK II
Chapter 1 - From Scylla to Charybdis
Night falls early in January. It was already dark in the streets when Gringoire quitted the Palais, which quite suited his taste, for he was impatient to reach some obscure and deserted alley where he might meditate in peace, and where the philosopher might apply the first salve to the wounds of the poet. Philosophy was his last refuge, seeing that he did not know where to turn for a night’s lodging. After the signal miscarriage of his first effort, he had not the courage to return to his lodging in the Rue Grenier-sur-l’Eau, opposite the hay-wharf, having counted on receiving from Monsieur the Provost for his epithalamium the wherewithal to pay Ma?tre Guillaume Doulx-Sire, farmer of the cattle taxes in Paris, the six months’ rent he owed him; that is to say, twelve sols parisis, or twelve times the value of all he possessed in the world, including his breeches, his shirt, and his beaver.
Resting for a moment under the shelter of the little gateway of the prison belonging to the treasurer of the Sainte-Chapelle, he considered what lodging he should choose for the night, having all the pavements of Paris at his disposal. Suddenly he remembered having noticed in the preceding week, at the door of one of the parliamentary counsellors in the Rue de la Savaterie, a stone step, used for mounting on mule-back, and having remarked to himself that that stone might serve excellently well as a pillow to a beggar or a poet. He thanked Providence for having sent him this happy thought, and was just preparing to cross the Place du Palais and enter the tortuous labyrinth of the city, where those ancient sisters, the streets of la Baillerie, la Vielle-Draperie, la Savaterie, la Juiverie, etc., pursue their mazy windings, and are still standing to this day with their nine-storied houses, when he caught sight of the procession of the Pope of Fools, as it issued from the Palais and poured across his path with a great uproar, accompanied by shouts and glare of torches and Gringoire’s own band of music.
The sight touched his smarting vanity, and he fled. In the bitterness of his dramatic failure everything that reminded him of the unlucky festival exasperated him and made his wounds bleed afresh.
He would have crossed the Pont Saint-Michel, but children were running up and down with squibs and rockets.
“A murrain on the fire-works!” exclaimed Gringoire, turning back to the Pont-au-Change. In front of the houses at the entrance to the bridge they had attached three banners of cloth, representing the King, the Dauphin, and Marguerite of Flanders, and also six smaller banners or draplets on which were “pourtraicts” of the Duke of Austria, the Cardinal de Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, Mme. Jeanne de France, and Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon, and some one else, the whole lighted up by flaming cressets. The crowd was lost in admiration.
“Lucky painter, Jehan Fourbault,” said Gringoire with a heavy sigh, and turned his back upon the banners and the bannerets. A street opened before him so dark and deserted that it offered him every prospect of escape from all the sounds and the illuminations of the festival. He plunged into it. A few moments afterward his foot struck against an obstacle, he tripped and fell. It was the great bunch of may which the clerks of the Basoche had laid that morning at the door of one of the presidents of the parliament, in honour of the day.
Gringoire bore this fresh mishap with heroism; he picked himself up and made for the water-side. Leaving behind him the Tournelle Civile and the Tour Criminelle, and skirting the high walls of the royal gardens, ankle-deep in mud, he reached the western end of the city, and stopped for some time in contemplation of the islet of the Passeur-aux-vaches or ferry-man of the cattle, since buried under the bronze horse of the Pont-Neuf. In the gloom the islet looked to him like a black blot across the narrow, gray-white stream that separated him from it. One could just make out by a faint glimmer of light proceeding from it, the hive-shaped hut in which the ferry-man sheltered for the night.
“Happy ferry-man,” thought Gringoire, “thou aspirest not to fame; thou composest no epithalamiums. What carest thou for royal marriages or for Duchesses of Burgundy? Thou reckest of no Marguerites but those with which April pies the meadows for thy cows to crop. And I, a poet, am hooted at, and I am shivering, and I owe twelve sous, and my shoe-soles are worn so thin they would do to glaze thy lantern. I thank thee, ferry-man; thy cabin is soothing to my sight, and makes me forget Paris.”
Here he was startled out of his well-nigh lyric ecstasy by the explosion of a great double rocket which suddenly went up from the thrice happy cabin. It was the ferry-man adding his contribution to the festivities of the day by letting off some fire-works.
At this Gringoire fairly bristled with rage.
“Accursed festival!” cried he; “is there no escape from it?—not even on the cattle ferry-man’s islet?”
He gazed on the Seine at his feet, and a horrible temptation assailed him.
“Oh, how gladly would I drown myself,” said he, “if only the water were not so cold!”
It was then he formed the desperate resolve that, as there was no escape from the Pope of Fools, from Jehan Fourbault’s painted banners, from the bunches of may, from the squibs and rockets, he would boldly cast himself into the very heart of the merry-making and go to the Place de Gréve.
“There at least,” he reflected, “I may manage to get a brand from the bonfire whereat to warm myself, and to sup off some remnant of the three great armorial devices in sugar which have been set out on the public buffets of the city.”
Chapter 2 - The Place De Gréve
There remains but one slight vestige of the Place de Gréve as it was in those days; namely, the charming little turret at the northern angle of the square, and that, buried as it is already under the unsightly coating of whitewash which obliterates the spirited outlines of its carvings, will doubtless soon have disappeared altogether, submerged under that flood of raw, new buildings which is rapidly swallowing up all the old facades of Paris.
Those who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de Gréve without a glance of pity and sympathy for the poor little turret squeezed between two squalid houses of the time of Louis XV, can easily conjure up in fancy the ensemble of edifices of which it formed a part, and so regain a complete picture of the old Gothic square of the fifteenth century.
Then, as now, it was an irregular square bounded on one side by the quay, and at the others by rows of tall, narrow, and gloomy houses. By daylight, there was much to admire in the diversity of these edifices, all sculptured in wood or stone, and offering, even then, perfect examples of the various styles of architecture in the Middle Ages, ranging from the fifteenth back to the eleventh century, from the perpendicular, which was beginning to oust the Gothic, to the Roman which the Gothic had supplanted, and which still occupied beneath it the first story of the ancient Tour de Roland, at the corner of the square adjoining the Seine on the side of the Rue de la Tannerie. At night, nothing was distinguishable of this mass of buildings but the black and jagged outline of the roofs encircling the Place with their chain of sharp-pointed gables. For herein consists one of the radical differences between the cities of that day and the present, that whereas now the fronts of the houses look on the squares and streets, then it was their backs. During the last two centuries the houses have completely turned about.
In the centre of the eastern side of the square rose a clumsy and hybrid pile formed of three separate buildings joined together. It was known by three names, which explain its history, its purpose, and its style of architecture: the Maison au Dauphin, because Charles V had inhabited it as Dauphin; the Marchandise, because it was used as the Town Hall; the Maison-aux-Piliers (domus ad pitorum), because of the row of great pillars that supported its three storeys. Here the city found all that was necessary to a good city like Paris: a chapel for its prayers, a plaidoyer or court-room wherein to hear causes and, at need, to give a sharp set-down to the King’s men-at-arms, and in the garrets an arsenal stocked with ammunition. For the good citizens of Paris knew full well that it is not sufficient at all junctures to depend either on prayer or the law for maintaining the franchises of the city, and have always some good old rusty blunderbuss or other in reserve in the attic of the H?tel de Ville.
La Gréve already had that sinister aspect which it still retains owing to the execrable associations it calls up, and the frowning H?tel de Ville of Dominique Bocador which has replaced the Maison-aux-Piliers. It must be admitted that a gibbet and a pillory—a justice and a ladder, as they were then called—set up side by side in the middle of the Place, went far to make the passer-by turn in aversion from this fatal spot, where so many human beings throbbing with life and health have been done to death, and which fifty years later was to engender the Saint-Vallier fever, that morbid terror of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all maladies, because it comes not from the hand of God but of man.
It is a consoling thought, let it be said in passing, to remember that the death penalty, which three centuries ago encumbered with its spiked wheels, its stone gibbets, all its dread apparatus of death permanently fixed into the ground, the Place de Gréve, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cours du Trahoir, the Marchè-aux-Pourceaux or pig-market, awful Montfaucon, the Barriére-des-Sergents, the Place-au-Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint-Jacques, not to mention the pillories under the jurisdiction of the Bishop, of the Chapters, of the Abbots, of the Priors; nor the judicial drownings in the Seine—it is consoling, we repeat, to reflect that after losing, one by one, all the pieces of its dread panoply: its multiplicity of executions, its fantastically cruel sentences, its rack at the Grand Chatelet— the leather stretcher of which had to be renewed every five years—that ancient suzerain of feudal society is to-day wellnigh banished from our laws and our cities, tracked from code to code, hunted from place to place, till in all great Paris it has but one dishonoured corner it can call its own—in the Place de Gréve; but one wretched guillotine, furtive, craven, shameful, that always seems to fear being caught red-handed, so quickly does it vanish after dealing its fatal blow.
Chapter 3 - Besos Para Golpes1
By the time Pierre Gringoire reached the Place de Gréve he was chilled to the bone. He had made his way across the Pont-aux-Meuniers—the Millers’ bridge—to avoid the crowd on the Pont-au-Change and the sight of Jehan Fourbault’s banners; but the wheel of the episcopal mills had splashed him as he passed, and his coat was wet through. In addition, it seemed to him that the failure of his play made him feel the cold more keenly. He hastened, therefore, to get near the splendid bonfire burning in the middle of the Place, but found it surrounded by a considerable crowd.
“Perdition take these Parisians!” said he to himself—for as a true dramatic poet, Gringoire was greatly addicted to monologue—“now they prevent me getting near the fire— and Heaven knows I have need of a warm corner! My shoes are veritable sponges, and those cursed mill-wheels have been raining upon me. Devil take the Bishop of Paris and his mills! I’d like to know what a bishop wants with a mill. Does he expect he may some day have to turn miller instead of bishop? If he is only waiting for my curse to effect this transformation, he is welcome to it, and may it include his cathedral and his mills as well. Now, let us see if these varlets will make room for me. What are they doing there, I’d like to know. Warming themselves—a fine pleasure indeed! Watching a pile of fagots burn—a grand spectacle, i’ faith!”
