Notre-Dame de Paris
towns, and that Naso died in exile among the Muscovites. But may
the devil flay me if I understand what they mean with their
Esmeralda! What is that word, in the first place?—’tis Egyptian!”
BOOK SECOND.
CHAPTER I. FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA.
Night comes on early in January. The streets were already dark
when Gringoire issued forth from the Courts. This gloom pleased
him; he was in haste to reach some obscure and deserted alley, in
order there to meditate at his ease, and in order that the
philosopher might place the first dressing upon the wound of the
poet. Philosophy, moreover, was his sole refuge, for he did not
know where he was to lodge for the night. After the brilliant
failure of his first theatrical venture, he dared not return to
the lodging which he occupied in the Rue Grenier-sur-l’Eau,
opposite to the Port-au-Foin, having depended upon receiving from
monsieur the provost for his epithalamium, the wherewithal to pay
Master Guillaume Doulx-Sire, farmer of the taxes on cloven-footed
animals in Paris, the rent which he owed him, that is to say,
twelve sols parisian; twelve times the value of all that he
possessed in the world, including his trunk-hose, his shirt, and
his cap. After reflecting a moment, temporarily sheltered beneath
the little wicket of the prison of the treasurer of the
Sainte-Chappelle, as to the shelter which he would select for the
night, having all the pavements of Paris to choose from, he
remembered to have noticed the week previously in the Rue de la
Savaterie, at the door of a councillor of the parliament, a
stepping stone for mounting a mule, and to have said to himself
that that stone would furnish, on occasion, a very excellent
pillow for a mendicant or a poet. He thanked Providence for
having sent this happy idea to him; but, as he was preparing to
cross the Place, in order to reach the tortuous labyrinth of the
city, where meander all those old sister streets, the Rues de la
Barillerie, de la Vieille-Draperie, de la Savaterie, de la
Juiverie, etc., still extant to-day, with their nine-story
houses, he saw the procession of the Pope of the Fools, which was
also emerging from the court house, and rushing across the
courtyard, with great cries, a great flashing of torches, and the
music which belonged to him, Gringoire. This sight revived the
pain of his self-love; he fled. In the bitterness of his dramatic
misadventure, everything which reminded him of the festival of
that day irritated his wound and made it bleed.
He was on the point of turning to the Pont Saint-Michel; children
were running about here and there with fire lances and rockets.
“Pest on firework candles!” said Gringoire; and he fell back on
the Pont au Change. To the house at the head of the bridge there
had been affixed three small banners, representing the king, the
dauphin, and Marguerite of Flanders, and six little pennons on
which were portrayed the Duke of Austria, the Cardinal de
Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, and Madame Jeanne de France, and Monsieur
the Bastard of Bourbon, and I know not whom else; all being
illuminated with torches. The rabble were admiring.
“Happy painter, Jehan Fourbault!” said Gringoire with a deep
sigh; and he turned his back upon the bannerets and pennons. A
street opened before him; he thought it so dark and deserted that
he hoped to there escape from all the rumors as well as from all
the gleams of the festival. At the end of a few moments his foot
came in contact with an obstacle; he stumbled and fell. It was
the May truss, which the clerks of the clerks’ law court had
deposited that morning at the door of a president of the
parliament, in honor of the solemnity of the day. Gringoire bore
this new disaster heroically; he picked himself up, and reached
the water’s edge. After leaving behind him the civic Tournelle[7]
and the criminal tower, and skirted the great walls of the king’s
garden, on that unpaved strand where the mud reached to his
ankles, he reached the western point of the city, and considered
for some time the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches, which has
disappeared beneath the bronze horse of the Pont Neuf. The islet
appeared to him in the shadow like a black mass, beyond the
narrow strip of whitish water which separated him from it. One
could divine by the ray of a tiny light the sort of hut in the
form of a beehive where the ferryman of cows took refuge at
night.
“Happy ferryman!” thought Gringoire; “you do not dream of glory,
and you do not make marriage songs! What matters it to you, if
kings and Duchesses of Burgundy marry? You know no other daisies
(_marguerites_) than those which your April greensward gives your
cows to browse upon; while I, a poet, am hooted, and shiver, and
owe twelve sous, and the soles of my shoes are so transparent,
that they might serve as glasses for your lantern! Thanks,
ferryman, your cabin rests my eyes, and makes me forget Paris!”
He was roused from his almost lyric ecstacy, by a big double
Saint-Jean cracker, which suddenly went off from the happy cabin.
It was the cow ferryman, who was taking his part in the
rejoicings of the day, and letting off fireworks.
This cracker made Gringoire’s skin bristle up all over.
“Accursed festival!” he exclaimed, “wilt thou pursue me
everywhere? Oh! good God! even to the ferryman’s!”
Then he looked at the Seine at his feet, and a horrible
temptation took possession of him:
“Oh!” said he, “I would gladly drown myself, were the water not
so cold!”
Then a desperate resolution occurred to him. It was, since he
could not escape from the Pope of the Fools, from Jehan
Fourbault’s bannerets, from May trusses, from squibs and
crackers, to go to the Place de Grève.
“At least,” he said to himself, “I shall there have a firebrand
of joy wherewith to warm myself, and I can sup on some crumbs of
the three great armorial bearings of royal sugar which have been
erected on the public refreshment-stall of the city.”
CHAPTER II. THE PLACE DE GRÈVE.
There remains to-day but a very imperceptible vestige of the
Place de Grève, such as it existed then; it consists in the
charming little turret, which occupies the angle north of the
Place, and which, already enshrouded in the ignoble plaster which
fills with paste the delicate lines of its sculpture, would soon
have disappeared, perhaps submerged by that flood of new houses
which so rapidly devours all the ancient façades of Paris.
The persons who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de Grève
without casting a glance of pity and sympathy on that poor turret
strangled between two hovels of the time of Louis XV., can easily
reconstruct in their minds the aggregate of edifices to which it
belonged, and find again entire in it the ancient Gothic place of
the fifteenth century.
It was then, as it is to-day, an irregular trapezoid, bordered on
one side by the quay, and on the other three by a series of
lofty, narrow, and gloomy houses. By day, one could admire the
variety of its edifices, all sculptured in stone or wood, and
already presenting complete specimens of the different domestic
architectures of the Middle Ages, running back from the fifteenth
to the eleventh century, from the casement which had begun to
dethrone the arch, to the Roman semicircle, which had been
supplanted by the ogive, and which still occupies, below it, the
first story of that ancient house de la Tour Roland, at the
corner of the Place upon the Seine, on the side of the street
with the Tannerie. At night, one could distinguish nothing of all
that mass of buildings, except the black indentation of the
roofs, unrolling their chain of acute angles round the place; for
one of the radical differences between the cities of that time,
and the cities of the present day, lay in the façades which
looked upon the places and streets, and which were then gables.
For the last two centuries the houses have been turned round.
In the centre of the eastern side of the Place, rose a heavy and
hybrid construction, formed of three buildings placed in
juxtaposition. It was called by three names which explain its
history, its destination, and its architecture: “The House of the
Dauphin,” because Charles V., when Dauphin, had inhabited it;
“The Marchandise,” because it had served as town hall; and “The
Pillared House” (_domus ad piloria_), because of a series of
large pillars which sustained the three stories. The city found
there all that is required for a city like Paris; a chapel in
which to pray to God; a _plaidoyer_, or pleading room, in which
to hold hearings, and to repel, at need, the King’s people; and
under the roof, an _arsenac_ full of artillery. For the
_bourgeois_ of Paris were aware that it is not sufficient to pray
in every conjuncture, and to plead for the franchises of the
city, and they had always in reserve, in the garret of the town
hall, a few good rusty arquebuses. The Grève had then that
sinister aspect which it preserves to-day from the execrable
ideas which it awakens, and from the sombre town hall of
Dominique Bocador, which has replaced the Pillared House. It must
be admitted that a permanent gibbet and a pillory, “a justice and
a ladder,” as they were called in that day, erected side by side
in the centre of the pavement, contributed not a little to cause
eyes to be turned away from that fatal place, where so many
beings full of life and health have agonized; where, fifty years
later, that fever of Saint Vallier was destined to have its
birth, that terror of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all
maladies because it comes not from God, but from man.
It is a consoling idea (let us remark in passing), to think that
the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still encumbered
with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its
paraphernalia of torture, permanent and riveted to the pavement,
the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross du Trahoir,
the Marché aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfaucon, the barrier
des Sergents, the Place aux Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis,
Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint Jacques, without
reckoning the innumerable ladders of the provosts, the bishop of
the chapters, of the abbots, of the priors, who had the decree of
life and death,—without reckoning the judicial drownings in the
river Seine; it is consoling to-day, after having lost
successively all the pieces of its armor, its luxury of torment,
its penalty of imagination and fancy, its torture for which it
reconstructed every five years a leather bed at the Grand
Châtelet, that ancient suzerain of feudal society almost expunged
from our laws and our cities, hunted from code to code, chased
from place to place, has no longer, in our immense Paris, any