The Hunchback of Notre Dame (56 page)

“Ah!” said Jacques, “that he is their lord.”

“Really!”

“Yes, Sire. They are rascals from the Court of Miracles. They have long complained of the provost, whose vassals they are. They refuse to recognize him either as justiciary or road-surveyor.”

“Ay, say you so!” returned the king, with a smile of satisfaction which he vainly strove to disguise.

“In all their petitions to Parliament,” added Jacques, “they claim that they have but two masters,—your Majesty and their God, who is, I believe, the devil.”

“Hah!” said the king.

He rubbed his hands; he laughed that inward laugh which makes the face radiant; he could not disguise his joy, although he tried at times to compose himself. No one understood his mood, not even Master Olivier. He was silent for a moment, with a pensive but contented air.

“Are they strong in numbers?” he asked suddenly.

“Indeed they are, Sire,” replied Compere Jacques.

“How many?”

“At least six thousand.”

The king could not help exclaiming, “Good!” He added, “Are they armed?”

“With scythes, pikes, hackbuts, mattocks, and all sorts of danger ous weapons.

The king seemed by no means alarmed at this account. Compere Jacques felt obliged to add,—

“If your Majesty send not promptly to the provost’s aid, he is lost.”

“We will send,” said the king, with an assumed expression of seriousness. “It is well. Certainly we will send. The provost is our friend. Six thousand! They are determined knaves. Their boldness is marvelous, and we are greatly wroth at it; but we have few people about us tonight. It will be time enough in the morning.”

Compere Jacques exclaimed, “Straightway, Sire! The provost’s house may be sacked twenty times over, the seigniory profaned, and the provost hanged, by then. For the love of God, Sire, send before tomorrow morning!”

The king looked him in the face. “I said tomorrow.” It was one of those looks which admit of no reply. After a pause, Louis XI again raised his voice. “Compère Jacques, you must know—What was—” He corrected himself. “What is the Provost’s feudal jurisdiction?”

“Sire, the Provost of the Palace has jurisdiction from the Rue de la Calandre to the Rue de l‘Herberie, the Place Saint-Michel, and the places commonly called the Mureaux, situated near the church of Notre-Dame des Champs [here the king lifted the brim of his hat], which residences are thirteen in number; besides the Court of Miracles, the lazaretto known as the Banlieue, and all the highway beginning at this lazar-house and ending at the Porte Saint-Jacques. Of these divers places he is road-surveyor, high, low, and middle justiciary, and lord paramount.”

“Hey-day!” said the king, scratching his left ear with his right hand; “that is a goodly slice of my city. And so the provost was king of all that?”

This time he did not correct himself. He continued to muse, and as if speaking to himself, said,—

“Have a care, Sir Provost! You had a very pretty piece of our Paris in your grasp. ”

All at once he burst forth. “By the Rood! Who are all these people who claim to be commissioners of highways, justiciaries, lords, and masters in our midst; who have their toll-gate in every bit of field, their gibbet and their hangman at every cross-road among our people, in such fashion that, as the Greek believed in as many gods as there were fountains, and the Persian in as many as he saw stars, the Frenchman now counts as many kings as he sees gallows? By the Lord! this thing is evil, and the confusion likes me not. I would fain know whether it be by the grace of God that there are other inspectors of highways in Paris than the king, other justice than that administered by our Parliament, and other emperor than ourselves in this realm! By the faith of my soul! the day must come when France shall know but one king, one lord, one judge, one heads-man, even as there is but one God in paradise!”

He again raised his cap, and went on, still meditating, with the look and tone of a hunter loosing and urging on his pack of dogs: “Good! my people! bravely done! destroy these false lords! do your work. At them, boys! at them! Plunder them, capture them, strip them! Ah, you would fain be kings, gentlemen? On, my people, on!”

Here he stopped abruptly, bit his lip, as if to recall a thought which had half escaped him, bent his piercing eye in turn upon each of the five persons who stood around him, and all at once, seizing his hat in both hands, and staring steadily at it, he thus addressed it: “Oh, I would burn you if you knew my secret thoughts!”

Then again casting about him the attentive, anxious glance of a fox returning by stealth to his earth, he added,—

“It matters not; we will succor the provost. Unfortunately, we have but few troops here to send forth at this moment against so large a populace. We must needs wait until tomorrow. Order shall be restored in the City, and all who are taken shall be strung up on the spot.”

“By-the-bye, Sire!” said Compere Coictier, “I forgot it in my first dismay,—the watch has caught two stragglers of the band. If it please your Majesty to see these men, they are here.”

“If it please me to see them!” cried the king. “Now, by the Rood! do you forget such things! Run quickly, you, Olivier! go and fetch them.”

Master Olivier went out, and returned a moment after with the two prisoners, surrounded by archers of the ordnance. The first had a fat, stupid face, with a drunken and astonished stare. He was dressed in rags, and bent his knee and dragged his foot as he walked. The second was a pale, smiling fellow, whom the reader already knows.

The king studied them for an instant without speaking, then abruptly addressed the first:—

“Your name?”

“Gieffroy Pincebourde.”

“Your business?”

“A Vagabond.”

“What part did you mean to play in this damnable revolt?”

The Vagabond looked at the king, swinging his arms with a dull look. His was one of those misshapen heads, where the understanding flourishes as ill as the flame beneath an extinguisher.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The others went, so I went too.”

“Did you not intend outrageously to attack and plunder your lord the Provost of the Palace?”

“I know that they were going to take something from some one. That’s all I know.”

A soldier showed the king a pruning-hook, which had been found upon the fellow.

“Do you recognize this weapon?” asked the king.

“Yes, it is my pruning-hook; I am a vine-dresser.”

“And do you acknowledge this man as your companion?” added Louis XI, pointing to the other prisoner.

“No. I do not know him.”

“Enough,” said the king. And beckoning to the silent, motionless person at the door, whom we have already pointed out to our readers: —

“Friend Tristan, here is a man for you.”

Tristan l‘Hermite bowed. He gave an order in a low voice to two archers, who led away the poor Vagrant.

Meantime, the king approached the second prisoner, who was in a profuse perspiration. “Your name?”

“Sire, Pierre Gringoire.”

“Your trade?”

“A philosopher, Sire!”

“How dared you, varlet, go and beset our friend the Provost of the Palace, and what have you to say about this uprising of the people?”

“Sire, I had naught to do with it.”

“Come, come, rascal! were you not taken by the watch in this evil company?”

“No, Sire; there is a mistake. It was an accident. I write tragedies. Sire, I entreat your Majesty to hear me. I am a poet. It is the melancholy whim of people of my profession to roam the streets after dark. I passed this way tonight. It was a mere chance. I was wrongfully arrested; I am innocent of this civil storm. Your Majesty sees that the Vagabond did not recognize me. I conjure your Majesty—”

“Silence!” said the king, betwixt two gulps of his tisane. “You stun me.”

Tristan l‘Hermite stepped forward, and pointing at Gringoire, said,—

“Sire, may we hang this one too?”

It was the first time that he had spoken.

“Pooh!” negligently answered the king. “I see no reason to the contrary.”

“But I see a great many!” said Gringoire.

Our philosopher was at this moment greener than any olive. He saw by the king’s cold and indifferent manner that his only resource was in something very pathetic, and he threw himself at the feet of Louis XI, exclaiming with frantic gestures,—

“Sire, your Majesty will deign to hear me. Sire, let not your thunders fall upon so small a thing as I! The thunderbolts of God never strike a lettuce. Sire, you are an august and very mighty monarch; have pity on a poor honest man, who would find it harder to kindle a revolt than an icicle to emit a spark. Most gracious lord, magnanimity is a virtue of kings and of royal beasts. Alas! rigor does but anger the minds of men; the fierce blasts of winter could not make the traveler doff his cloak, while the sun shining down, little by little warmed him to such a degree that he stripped to his shirt. Sire, you are the sun. I protest to you, my sovereign lord and master, that I am not of the company of the Vagrants. I am neither disorderly nor a thief. Rebellion and brigandage arc not of Apollo’s train. I am not one to rush into those clouds which burst in thunders of sedition. I am a faithful vassal of your Majesty. A good subject should feel the same jealousy for the glory of his king that the husband feels for the honor of his wife, the same affection with which the son responds to his father’s love; he should burn with zeal for his house, for the increase of his service. Any other passion which possessed him would be mere madness. Such, Sire, are my political maxims. Do not, therefore, judge me to be a rebel and a plunderer, by my ragged dress. If you will but pardon me, Sire, I will wear it threadbare at the knees in praying to God for you night and morning! Alas! I am not exceeding rich, ‘tis true. I am indeed rather poor; but not vicious, for all that. It is not my fault. Every one knows that great wealth is not to be derived from literature, and that the most accomplished writers have not always much fire in winter. Lawyers get all the grain, and leave nothing but the chaff for the rest of the learned professions. There are forty most excellent proverbs about the tattered cloak of the philosopher. Oh, Sire, clemency is the only light which can illumine the interior of a great soul! Clemency bears the torch for all the other virtues. Without her, they are but blind, and gropers after God. Mercy, which is the same thing as clemency, produces those loving subjects who are the most potent body-guard of princes. What matters it to you,—to you whose majesty dazzles all who behold it,—if there be one poor man the more upon the earth, a poor innocent philosopher floundering in the darkness of calamity, with an empty stomach and an empty purse? Besides, Sire, I am a scholar. Great kings add a pearl to their crown when they encourage letters. Hercules did not disdain the title of Musagetes. Matthias Corvinus favored Jean of Monroyal, the ornament of mathematics. Now, it is a poor way of protecting letters, to hang the learned. What a blot upon Alexander’s fame if he had hanged Aristotle! The deed would not have been a tiny patch upon the visage of his reputation to enhance its beauty, but a malignant ulcer to disfigure it. Sire, I wrote a most fitting epithalamium for the Lady of Flanders, and my lord the most august Dauphin. That is no fire-brand of rebellion. Your Majesty sees that I am no mere scribbler, that I have studied deeply, and that I have much natural eloquence. Pardon me, Sire. By so doing, you will perform an act of gallantry to Our Lady; and I vow that I am mightily frightened at the very idea of being hanged!”

So saying, the much distressed Gringoire kissed the king’s slippers, and Guillaume Rym whispered to Coppenole, “He does well to crawl upon the floor. Kings are like Jupiter of Crete,—they have no ears but in their feet.” And, regardless of the Cretan Jove, the hosier responded, with a grave smile, his eye fixed on Gringoire: “Oh, ‘tis well done! I fancy I hear Councillor Hugonet begging me for mercy.”

When Gringoire paused at last for lack of breath, he raised his head, trembling, to the king, who was scratching with his nail a spot on the knee of his breeches; then his Majesty drank from the goblet of tisane. He spoke not a word, however, and the silence tortured Gringoire. At last the king looked at him. “What a dreadful bawler!” said he. Then, turning towards Tristan l‘Hermite: “Bah! let him go!”

Gringoire fell backwards, overcome with joy.

“Scot-free!” grumbled Tristan. “Don’t your Majesty want me to cage him for a while?”

“Friend,” rejoined Louis XI, “do you think it is for such birds as these that we have cages made at an expense of three hundred and sixty-seven pounds eight pence three farthings? Let this wanton rascal depart incontinently, and dismiss him with a beating.”

“Oh,” cried Gringoire, “what a noble king!”

And for fear of a contrary order, he hastened towards the door, which Tristan opened for him with a very bad grace. The soldiers followed, driving him before them with sturdy blows, which Gringoire bore like the true Stoic philosopher that he was.

The king’s good humor, since the revolt against the Provost was announced to him, appeared in everything he did. This unusual clemency was no small proof of it. Tristan l‘Hermite, in his corner, wore the surly look of a dog who has seen a bone, but had none.

The king, meantime, merrily drummed the march of Pont-Audemer with his fingers on the arm of his chair. He was a dissembling prince, but more skilled in hiding his troubles than his joy. These outward manifestations of delight at any good news sometimes went to extraordinary lengths,—as on the death of Charles the Bold, when he vowed a silver balustrade to Saint-Martin of Tours; and on his accession to the throne, when he forgot to order his father’s obsequies.

“Ha, Sire!” suddenly exclaimed Jacques Coictier, “what has become of that sharp fit of illness for which your Majesty summoned me?”

“Oh,” said the king, “indeed, I suffer greatly, good compere. I have a ringing in my ears, and cruel pains in my chest.”

Coictier took the king’s hand, and began to feel his pulse with a knowing air.

“See, Coppenole,” said Rym in a low voice; “there he is, between Coictier and Tristan. They make up his entire court,—a doctor for himself, a hangman for the rest of the world!”