Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (6 page)

At doors, windows, in garrets, and on roofs swarmed thousands of good plain citizens, quiet, honest people, gazing at the Palace, watching the throng, and asking nothing more; for many people in Paris are quite content to look on at others, and there are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.

If it could be permitted to us men of 1830 to mingle in imagination with those fifteenth-century Parisians, and to enter with them, pushed, jostled, and elbowed, into the vast hall of the Palace of Justice, all too small on the 6th of January, 1482, the sight would not be without interest or charm, and we should have about us only things so old as to seem brand-new.

With the reader’s consent we will endeavor to imagine the impression he would have received with us in crossing the threshold of that great hall amidst that mob in surcoats, cassocks, and coats of mail.

First of all there is a ringing in our ears, a dimness in our eyes. Above our heads, a double roof of pointed arches, wainscotted with carved wood, painted in azure, sprinkled with golden
fleur-de-lis
; beneath our feet, a pavement of black and white marble laid in alternate blocks. A few paces from us, a huge pillar, then another,—in all seven pillars down the length of the hall, supporting the spring of the double arch down the center. Around the first four columns are tradesmen’s booths, glittering with glass and tinsel; around the last three, oaken benches worn and polished by the breeches of litigants and the gowns of attorneys. Around the hall, along the lofty wall, between the doors, between the casements, between the pillars, is an unending series of statues of all the kings of France, from Pharamond down,—the sluggard kings, with loosely hanging arms and downcast eyes; the brave and warlike kings, with head and hands boldly raised to heaven. Then in the long pointed windows, glass of a thousand hues; at the wide portals of the hall, rich doors finely carved; and the whole—arches, pillars, walls, cornices, wainscot, doors, and statues—covered from top to bottom with a gorgeous coloring of blue and gold, which, somewhat tarnished even at the date when we see it, had almost disappeared under dust and cobwebs in the year of grace 1549, when Du Breuil admired it from hearsay alone.

Now, let us imagine this vast oblong hall, lit up by the wan light of a January day, taken possession of by a noisy motley mob who drift along the walls and ebb and flow about the seven columns, and we may have some faint idea of the general effect of the picture, whose strange details we will try to describe somewhat more in detail.

It is certain that if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henry IV there would have been no documents relating to his case deposited in the Record Office of the Palace of Justice; no accomplices interested in making off with the said documents, accordingly no incendiaries, forced for want of better means to burn the Record Office in order to burn up the documents, and to burn the Palace of Justice in order to burn the Record Office; consequently, therefore, no fire in 1618. The old Palace would still be standing, with its great hall; I might be able to say to my reader, “Go and look at it,” and we should thus both of us be spared the need,—I of writing, and he of reading, an indifferent description; which proves this novel truth,—that great events have incalculable results.

True, Ravaillac may very possibly have had no accomplices; or his accomplices, if he chanced to have any, need have had no hand in the fire of 1618. There are two other very plausible explanations: first, the huge “star of fire, a foot broad and a foot and a half high,” which fell, as every one knows, from heaven upon the Palace after midnight on the 7th of March; second, Théophile’s verses:—
^d

Whatever we may think of this triple explanation,—political, physical, and poetical,—of the burning of the Palace of Justice in 1618, one unfortunate fact remains: namely, the fire. Very little is now left, thanks to this catastrophe, and thanks particularly to the various and successive restorations which have finished what it spared,—very little is now left of this first home of the King of France, of this palace, older than the Louvre, so old even in the time of Philip the Fair that in it they sought for traces of the magnificent buildings erected by King Robert and described by Helgaldus. Almost everything is gone. What has become of the chancery office, Saint Louis’ bridal chamber? What of the garden where he administered justice, “clad in a camlet coat, a sleeveless surcoat of linsey-woolsey, and over it a mantle of black serge, reclining upon carpets, with Joinville?” Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismond, that of Charles IV, and that of John Lackland? Where is the staircase from which Charles VI issued his edict of amnesty; the flag-stone upon which Marcel, in the dauphin’s presence, strangled Robert of Clermont and the Marshal of Champagne? The wicket-gate where the bulls of Benedict the antipope were destroyed, and through which departed those who brought them, coped and mitred in mockery, thus doing public penance throughout Paris? And the great hall, with its gilding, its azure, its pointed arches, its statues, its columns, its great vaulted roof thickly covered with carvings, and the golden room, and the stone lion, which stood at the door, his head down, his tail between his legs, like the lions around Solomon’s throne, in the humble attitude that befits strength in the presence of justice, and the beautiful doors, and the gorgeous windows, and the wrought-iron work which discouraged Biscornette, and Du Hancy’s dainty bits of carving? What has time done, what have men done with these marvels? What has been given to us in exchange for all this,—for all this ancient French history, all this Gothic art? The heavy elliptic arches of M. de Brosse, the clumsy architect of the St. Gervais portal,—so much for art; and for history we have the gossipy memories of the big pillar still echoing and re-echoing with the gossip of the Patrus.

This is not much. Let us go back to the genuine great hall of the genuine old Palace.

The two ends of this huge parallelogram were occupied, the one by the famous marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick, that there never was seen, as the old Court Rolls express it in a style which would give Gargantua an appetite, “such another slice of marble in the world;” the other by the chapel in which Louis XI had his statue carved kneeling before the Virgin, and into which, wholly indifferent to the fact that he left two vacant spaces in the procession of royal images, he ordered the removal of the figures of Charlemagne and Saint Louis, believing these two saints to be in high favor with Heaven as being kings of France. This chapel, still quite new, having been built scarcely six years, was entirely in that charming school of refined and delicate architecture, of marvellous sculpture, of fine, deep chiselling, which marks the end of the Gothic era in France, and lasts until towards the middle of the sixteenth century in the fairy-like fancies of the Renaissance. The small rose-window over the door was an especial masterpiece of delicacy and grace; it seemed a mere star of lace.

In the center of the hall, opposite the great door, a dais covered with gold brocade, placed against the wall, to which a private entrance was arranged by means of a window from the passage to the gold room, had been built for the Flemish envoys and other great personages invited to the performance of the mystery.

This mystery, according to custom, was to be performed upon the marble table. It had been prepared for this at dawn; the superb slab of marble, scratched and marked by lawyers’ heels, now bore a high wooden cage-like scaffolding, whose upper surface, in sight of the entire hall, was to serve as stage, while the interior, hidden by tapestry hangings, was to take the place of dressing-room for the actors in the play. A ladder placed outside with frank simplicity formed the means of communication between the dressing-room and stage, and served the double office of entrance and exit. There was no character however unexpected, no sudden change, and no dramatic effect, but was compelled to climb this ladder. Innocent and venerable infancy of art and of machinery!

Four officers attached to the Palace, forced guardians of the people’s pleasures on holidays as on hanging days, stood bolt upright at the four corners of the marble table.

The play was not to begin until the twelfth stroke of noon rang from the great Palace clock. This was doubtless very late for a theatrical performance; but the ambassadors had to be consulted in regard to the time.

Now, this throng had been waiting since dawn. Many of these honest sightseers were shivering at earliest daylight at the foot of the great Palace staircase. Some indeed declared that they had spent the night lying across the great door, to be sure of getting in first. The crowd increased every moment, and, like water rising above its level, began to creep up the walls, to collect around the columns, to overflow the entablatures, the cornices, the window-sills, every projection of the architecture, and every bit of bold relief in the carvings. Then, too, discomfort, impatience, fatigue, the day’s license of satire and folly, the quarrels caused incessantly by a sharp elbow or a hob-nailed shoe, the weariness of waiting gave, long before the hour when the ambassadors were due, an acid, bitter tone to the voices of these people, shut up, pent in, crowded, squeezed, and stifled as they were. On every hand were heard curses and complaints against the Flemish, the mayor of Paris, Cardinal Bourbon, the Palace bailiff, Madame Margaret of Austria, the ushers, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Pope of Fools, the columns, the statues, this closed door, that open window,—all to the vast amusement of the groups of students and lackeys scattered through the crowd, who mingled their mischief and their malice with all this discontent, and administered, as it were, pin-pricks to the general bad humor.

Among the rest there was one group of these merry demons who, having broken the glass from a window, had boldly seated themselves astride the sill, distributing their glances and their jokes by turns, within and without, between the crowd in the hall and the crowd in the courtyard. From their mocking gestures, their noisy laughter, and the scoffs and banter which they exchanged with their comrades, from one end of the hall to the other, it was easy to guess that these young students felt none of the weariness and fatigue of the rest of the spectators, and that they were amply able, for their own private amusement, to extract from what they had before their eyes a spectacle quite diverting enough to make them wait patiently for that which was to come.

“By my soul, it’s you, Joannes Frollo de Molendino!” cried one of them to a light-haired little devil with a handsome but mischievous countenance, who was clinging to the acanthus leaves of a capital; “you are well named, Jehan du Moulin (of the mill), for your two arms and your two legs look like the four sails fluttering in the wind. How long have you been here?”

“By the foul fiend!” replied Joannes Frollo, “more than four hours, and I certainly hope that they may be deducted from my time in purgatory. I heard the King of Sicily’s eight choristers intone the first verse of high mass at seven o‘clock in the Holy Chapel.”

“Fine choristers they are!” returned the other; “their voices are sharper than the points of their caps. Before he endowed a Mass in honor of Saint John, the king might well have inquired whether Saint John liked his Latin sung with a southern twang.”

“He only did it to give work to these confounded choristers of the King of Sicily!” bitterly exclaimed an old woman in the crowd beneath the window. “Just fancy! a thousand pounds Paris for a Mass! and charged to the taxes on all salt-water fish sold in the Paris markets too!”

“Silence, old woman!” said a grave and reverend personage who was holding his nose beside the fishwoman; “he had to endow a Mass. You don’t want the king to fall ill again, do you?”

“Bravely spoken, Master Gilles Lecornu, master furrier of the king’s robes!” cried the little scholar clinging to the capital.

“Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!” said some.

“
Cornutus et hirsutus
,”
^e
replied another.

“Oh, no doubt!” continued the little demon of the capital. “What is there to laugh at? An honorable man is Gilles Lecornu, brother of Master Jehan Lecornu, provost of the king’s palace, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, head porter of the Forest of Vincennes,—all good citizens of Paris, every one of them married, from father to son!”

The mirth increased. The fat furrier, not answering a word, strove to escape the eyes fixed on him from every side, but he puffed and perspired in vain; like a wedge driven into wood, all his efforts only buried his broad apoplectic face, purple with rage and spite, the more firmly in the shoulders of his neighbors.

At last one of those neighbors, fat, short, and venerable as himself, came to his rescue.

“Abominable! Shall students talk thus to a citizen! In my day they would have been well whipped with the sticks which served to burn them afterwards.”

The entire band burst out:—

“Oh ! who sings that song? Who is this bird of ill omen?”

“Stay, I know him,” said one; “it’s Master Andry Musnier.”

“He is one of the four copyists licensed by the University!” said another.

“Everything goes by fours in that shop,” cried a third,—“four nations, four faculties, four great holidays, four proctors, four electors, four copyists.”

“Very well, then,” answered Jehan Frollo; “we must play the devil with them by fours.”

“Musnier, we’ll burn your books.”

“Musnier, we’ll beat your servant.”

“Musnier, we’ll hustle your wife.”

“That good fat Mademoiselle Oudarde.”

“Who is as fresh and as fair as if she were a widow.”

“Devil take you!” growled Master Andry Musnier.

“Master Andry,” added Jehan, still hanging on his capital, “shut up, or I’ll fall on your head!”