Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (16 page)

Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors and not knowing what would happen next, walked timidly through the rest, going around the lame, striding over the cripples, his feet entangled in this ant-hill of deformity and disease, like that English captain caught fast by an army of land-crabs.

He thought of retracing his steps; but it was too late. The entire legion had closed up behind him, and his three beggars pressed him close. He therefore went on, driven alike by this irresistible stream, by fear, and by a dizzy feeling which made all this seem a horrible dream.

At last he reached the end of the street. It opened into a vast square, where a myriad scattered lights twinkled through the dim fog of night. Gringoire hurried forward, hoping by the swiftness of his legs to escape the three infirm specters who had fastened themselves upon him.

“Onde vas, hombre?”
^ai
cried the lame man, throwing away his crutches, and running after him with the best pair of legs that ever measured a geometric pace upon the pavements of Paris.

Then the stump, erect upon his feet, clapped his heavy iron-bound bowl upon Gringoire’s head, and the blind man glared at him with flaming eyes.

“Where am I?” asked the terrified poet.

“In the Court of Miracles,” replied a fourth specter, who had just accosted them.

“By my soul!” replied Gringoire; “I do indeed behold blind men seeing and lame men running; but where is the Savior?”

They answered with an evil burst of laughter.

The poor poet glanced around him. He was indeed in that fearful Court of Miracles, which no honest man had ever entered at such an hour; the magic circle within whose lines the officers of the Châtelet, and the Provost’s men who ventured to penetrate it, disappeared in morsels; a city of thieves, a hideous wart upon the face of Paris; the sewer whence escaped each morning, returning to stagnate at night, that rivulet of vice, mendicity, and vagrancy, perpetually overflowing the streets of every great capital; a monstrous hive, receiving nightly all the drones of the social order with their booty; the lying hospital, where the gipsy, the unfrocked monk, the ruined scholar, the scapegrace of every nation, Spanish, Italian, and German, and of every creed, Jew, Christian, Mohametan, and idolater, covered with painted sores, beggars by day, were transformed into robbers by night,—in short, a huge cloak-room, used at this period for the dressing and undressing of all the actors in the everlasting comedy enacted in the streets of Paris by theft, prostitution, and murder.

It was a vast square, irregular and ill-paved, like every other square in Paris at that time. Fires, around which swarmed strange groups, gleamed here and there. People came and went, and shouted and screamed. There was a sound of shrill laughter, of the wailing of children and the voices of women. The hands, the heads of this multitude, black against the luminous background, made a thousand uncouth gestures. At times, a dog which looked like a man, or a man who looked like a dog, passed over the space of ground lit up by the flames, blended with huge and shapeless shadows. The limits of race and species seemed to fade away in this city as in some pandemonium. Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health, disease, all seemed to be in common among these people; all was blended, mingled, confounded, superimposed; each partook of all.

The feeble flickering light of the fires enabled Gringoire to distinguish, in spite of his alarm, all around the vast square a hideous framing of ancient houses whose worm-eaten, worn, misshapen fronts, each pierced by one or two lighted garret windows, looked to him in the darkness like the huge heads of old women ranged in a circle, monstrous and malign, watching and winking at the infernal revels.

It was like a new world, unknown, unheard of, deformed, creeping, swarming, fantastic.

Gringoire, more and more affrighted, caught by the three beggars, as if by three pairs of pincers, confused by the mass of other faces which snarled and grimaced about him,—the wretched Gringoire tried to recover sufficient presence of mind to recall whether it was Saturday or not. But his efforts were in vain; the thread of his memory and his thoughts was broken; and doubting everything, hesitating between what he saw and what he felt, he asked himself the unanswerable questions: “If I be I, are these things really so? If these things be so, am I really I?”

At this instant a distinct cry arose from the buzzing mob which surrounded him: “Take him to the King! take him to the King!”

“Holy Virgin!” muttered Gringoire, “the King of this region should be a goat.”

“To the King! to the King!” repeated every voice.

He was dragged away. Each one vied with the other in fastening his claws upon him. But the three beggars never loosed their hold, and tore him from the others, howling, “He is ours!”

The poet’s feeble doublet breathed its last in the struggle.

As they crossed the horrid square his vertigo vanished. After walking a few steps, a sense of reality returned. He began to grow accustomed to the atmosphere of the place. At first, from his poetic head, or perhaps, quite simply and quite prosaically, from his empty stomach, there had arisen certain fumes, a vapor as it were, which, spreading itself between him and other objects, prevented him from seeing anything save through a confused nightmare mist, through those dream-like shadows which render every outline vague, distort every shape, combine all objects into exaggerated groups, and enlarge things into chimeras and men into ghosts. By degrees this delusion gave way to a less wild and less deceitful vision. Reality dawned upon him, blinded him, ran against him, and bit by bit destroyed the frightful poetry with which he had at first fancied himself surrounded. He could not fail to see that he was walking, not in the Styx, but in the mire; that he was pushed and elbowed, not by demons but by thieves; that it was not his soul, but merely his life which was in danger (since he lacked that precious conciliator which pleads so powerfully with the bandit for the honest man,—a purse). Finally, examining the revels more closely and with greater calmness, he descended from the Witches’ Sabbath to the tavern.

The Court of Miracles was indeed only a tavern, but a tavern of thieves, as red with blood as with wine.

The spectacle presented to his eyes when his tattered escort at last landed him at his journey’s end was scarcely fitted to bring him back to poetry, even were it the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the tavern. If we were not living in the fifteenth century, we should say that Gringoire had fallen from Michael Angelo to Callot.

Around a large fire burning upon a great round flagstone, and lapping with its flames the rusty legs of a trivet empty for the moment, stood a number of worm-eaten tables here and there, in dire confusion, no lackey of any geometrical pretensions having deigned to adjust their parallelism, or at least to see that they did not cross each other at angles too unusual. Upon these tables glittered various pots and jugs dripping with wine and beer, and around these jugs were seated numerous Bacchanalian faces, purple with fire and wine. One big-bellied man with a jolly face was administering noisy kisses to a brawny, thickset woman. A rubbie, or old vagrant, whistled as he loosed the bandages from his mock wound, and rubbed his sound, healthy knee, which had been swathed all day in ample ligatures. Beyond him was a malingerer, preparing his “visitation from God”—his sore leg—with suet and ox-blood. Two tables farther on, a sham pilgrim, in complete pilgrim dress, was spelling out the lament of Sainte-Reine, not forgetting the snuffle and the twang. In another place a young scamp who imposed on the charitable by pretending to have been bitten by a mad dog, was taking a lesson of an old cadger in the art of frothing at the mouth by chewing a bit of soap. By their side a dropsical man was reducing his size, making four or five hags hold their noses as they sat at the same table, quarrelling over a child which they had stolen during the evening,—all circumstances which, two centuries later, “seemed so ridiculous to the court,” as Sauval says, “that they served as diversion to the King, and as the opening to a royal ballet entitled ‘Night,’ divided into four parts, and danced at the Petit Bourbon Theatre.” “Never,” adds an eye-witness in 1653, “have the sudden changes of the Court of Miracles been more happily hit off. Benserade prepared us for them by some very fine verses.”

Coarse laughter was heard on every hand, with vulgar songs. Every man expressed himself in his own way, carping and swearing, without heeding his neighbor. Some hob-nobbed, and quarrels arose from the clash of their mugs, and the breaking of their mugs was the cause of many torn rags.

A big dog squatted on his tail, gazing into the fire. Some children took their part in the orgies. The stolen child cried and screamed; while another, a stout boy of four, sat on a high bench, with his legs dangling, his chin just coming above the table, and not speaking a word. A third was gravely smearing the table with melted tallow as it ran from the candle. Another, a little fellow crouched in the mud, almost lost in a kettle which he was scraping with a potsherd, making a noise which would have distracted Stradivarius.

A cask stood near the fire, and a beggar sat on the cask. This was the king upon his throne.

The three who held Gringoire led him up to this cask, and all the revellers were hushed for a moment, except the caldron inhabited by the child.

Gringoire dared not breathe or raise his eyes.

“Hombre,
quita
tu sombrero!”
^aj
said one of the three scoundrels who held him; and before he had made up his mind what this meant, another snatched his hat,—a shabby head-piece to be sure, but still useful on sunny or on rainy days. Gringoire sighed.

But the king, from the height of his barrel, addressed him,—

“Who is this rascal?”

Gringoire started. The voice, although threatening in tone, reminded him of another voice which had that same morning dealt the first blow to his mystery by whining out from the audience, “Charity, kind souls!” He lifted his head. It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.

Clopin Trouillefou, decked with his royal insignia, had not a tat ter more or less than usual. The wound on his arm had vanished.

In his hand he held one of those whips with whit-leather thongs then used by sergeants of the wand to keep back the crowd, and called “boullayes.” Upon his head he wore a circular bonnet closed at the top; but it was hard to say whether it was a child’s cap or a king’s crown, so similar are the two things.

Still, Gringoire, without knowing why, felt his hopes revive when he recognized this accursed beggar of the Great Hall in the King of the Court of Miracles.

“Master,” stuttered he, “My lord—Sire—How shall I address you?” he said at last, reaching the culminating point of his crescendo, and not knowing how to rise higher or to re-descend.

“My lord, your Majesty, or comrade. Call me what you will; but make haste. What have you to say in your defense?”

“ ‘In your defense,’ ” thought Gringoire; “I don’t like the sound of that.” He resumed stammeringly, “I am he who this morning—”

“By the devil’s claws!” interrupted Clopin, “your name, rascal, and nothing more. Hark ye. You stand before three mighty sover eigns: me, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Tunis,
^ak
successor to the Grand Coëre, the king of rogues, lord paramount of the kingdom of Slang; Mathias Hungadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt
^al
and Bohemia, that yellow old boy you see yonder with a clout about his head, Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee,
^am
that fat fellow who pays no heed to us, but caresses that wench. We are your judges. You have entered the kingdom of Slang, the land of thieves, without being a member of the confraternity; you have violated the privileges of our city. You must be punished, unless you be either prig, mumper, or cadger; that is, in the vulgar tongue of honest folks, either thief, beggar, or tramp. Are you anything of the sort? Justify yourself; state your character.”

“Alas!” said Gringoire, “I have not that honor. I am the author—”

“Enough!” cried Trouillefou, not allowing him to finish his sentence. “You must be hanged. Quite a simple matter, my honest citizens! As you treat our people when they enter your domain, so we treat yours when they intrude among us. The law which you mete out to vagabonds, the vagabonds mete out to you. It is your own fault if it be evil. It is quite necessary that we should occasionally see an honest man grin ever through a hempen collar; it makes the thing honorable. Come, friend, divide your rags cheerfully among these young ladies. I will have you hanged to amuse the vagabonds, and you shall give them your purse to pay for a drink. If you have any mummeries to perform, over yonder in that mortar there’s a capital God the Father, in stone, which we stole from the Church of Saint-Pierre-aux-Bœufs. You have four minutes to fling your soul at his head.”

This was a terrible speech.

“Well said, upon my soul! Clopin Trouillefou preaches as well as any pope!” exclaimed the Emperor of Galilee, smashing his jug to prop up his table.

“Noble emperors and kings,” said Gringoire with great coolness (for his courage had mysteriously returned, and he spoke firmly), “you do not consider what you’re doing. My name is Pierre Gringoire; I am the poet whose play was performed this morning in the Great Hall of the Palace.”

“Oh, is it you, sirrah?” said Clopin. “I was there, God’s wounds! Well, comrade, because you bored us this morning, is that any reason why we should not hang you tonight?”

“I shall have hard work to get off,” thought Gringoire. But yet he made one more effort. “I don’t see,” said he, “why poets should not be classed with vagabonds. Æsop was a vagrant; Homer was a beggar; Mercury was a thief—”

Clopin interrupted him: “I believe you mean to cozen us with your lingo. Good God! be hanged, and don’t make such a row about it!”