Notre-Dame de Paris
real eagle liards! ’Tis dazzling!”
Jehan remained dignified and immovable. Several liards had rolled
into the mud; the captain in his enthusiasm stooped to pick them
up. Jehan restrained him.
“Fye, Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers!”
Phœbus counted the coins, and turning towards Jehan with
solemnity, “Do you know, Jehan, that there are three and twenty
sous parisis! whom have you plundered to-night, in the Street
Cut-Weazand?”
Jehan flung back his blonde and curly head, and said,
half-closing his eyes disdainfully,—
“We have a brother who is an archdeacon and a fool.”
“_Corne de Dieu!_” exclaimed Phœbus, “the worthy man!”
“Let us go and drink,” said Jehan.
“Where shall we go?” said Phœbus; “‘To Eve’s Apple.’”
“No, captain, to ‘Ancient Science.’ An old woman sawing a basket
handle;[39] ’tis a rebus, and I like that.”
“A plague on rebuses, Jehan! the wine is better at ‘Eve’s Apple’;
and then, beside the door there is a vine in the sun which cheers
me while I am drinking.”
“Well! here goes for Eve and her apple,” said the student, and
taking Phœbus’s arm. “By the way, my dear captain, you just
mentioned the Rue Coupe-Gueule[40] That is a very bad form of
speech; people are no longer so barbarous. They say,
Coupe-Gorge[41].”
The two friends set out towards “Eve’s Apple.” It is unnecessary
to mention that they had first gathered up the money, and that
the archdeacon followed them.
The archdeacon followed them, gloomy and haggard. Was this the
Phœbus whose accursed name had been mingled with all his thoughts
ever since his interview with Gringoire? He did not know it, but
it was at least a Phœbus, and that magic name sufficed to make
the archdeacon follow the two heedless comrades with the stealthy
tread of a wolf, listening to their words and observing their
slightest gestures with anxious attention. Moreover, nothing was
easier than to hear everything they said, as they talked loudly,
not in the least concerned that the passers-by were taken into
their confidence. They talked of duels, wenches, wine pots, and
folly.
At the turning of a street, the sound of a tambourine reached
them from a neighboring square. Dom Claude heard the officer say
to the scholar,—
“Thunder! Let us hasten our steps!”
“Why, Phœbus?”
“I’m afraid lest the Bohemian should see me.”
“What Bohemian?”
“The little girl with the goat.”
“La Smeralda?”
“That’s it, Jehan. I always forget her devil of a name. Let us
make haste, she will recognize me. I don’t want to have that girl
accost me in the street.”
“Do you know her, Phœbus?”
Here the archdeacon saw Phœbus sneer, bend down to Jehan’s ear,
and say a few words to him in a low voice; then Phœbus burst into
a laugh, and shook his head with a triumphant air.
“Truly?” said Jehan.
“Upon my soul!” said Phœbus.
“This evening?”
“This evening.”
“Are you sure that she will come?”
“Are you a fool, Jehan? Does one doubt such things?”
“Captain Phœbus, you are a happy gendarme!”
The archdeacon heard the whole of this conversation. His teeth
chattered; a visible shiver ran through his whole body. He halted
for a moment, leaned against a post like a drunken man, then
followed the two merry knaves.
At the moment when he overtook them once more, they had changed
their conversation. He heard them singing at the top of their
lungs the ancient refrain,—
Les enfants des Petits-Carreaux
Se font pendre comme des veaux[42].
CHAPTER VII. THE MYSTERIOUS MONK.
The illustrious wine shop of “Eve’s Apple” was situated in the
University, at the corner of the Rue de la Rondelle and the Rue
de la Bâtonnier. It was a very spacious and very low hall on the
ground floor, with a vaulted ceiling whose central spring rested
upon a huge pillar of wood painted yellow; tables everywhere,
shining pewter jugs hanging on the walls, always a large number
of drinkers, a plenty of wenches, a window on the street, a vine
at the door, and over the door a flaring piece of sheet-iron,
painted with an apple and a woman, rusted by the rain and turning
with the wind on an iron pin. This species of weather-vane which
looked upon the pavement was the signboard.
Night was falling; the square was dark; the wine-shop, full of
candles, flamed afar like a forge in the gloom; the noise of
glasses and feasting, of oaths and quarrels, which escaped
through the broken panes, was audible. Through the mist which the
warmth of the room spread over the window in front, a hundred
confused figures could be seen swarming, and from time to time a
burst of noisy laughter broke forth from it. The passers-by who
were going about their business, slipped past this tumultuous
window without glancing at it. Only at intervals did some little
ragged boy raise himself on tiptoe as far as the ledge, and hurl
into the drinking-shop, that ancient, jeering hoot, with which
drunken men were then pursued: “Aux Houls, saouls, saouls,
saouls!”
Nevertheless, one man paced imperturbably back and forth in front
of the tavern, gazing at it incessantly, and going no further
from it than a pikeman from his sentry-box. He was enveloped in a
mantle to his very nose. This mantle he had just purchased of the
old-clothes man, in the vicinity of the “Eve’s Apple,” no doubt
to protect himself from the cold of the March evening, possibly
also, to conceal his costume. From time to time he paused in
front of the dim window with its leaden lattice, listened,
looked, and stamped his foot.
At length the door of the dram-shop opened. This was what he
appeared to be waiting for. Two boon companions came forth. The
ray of light which escaped from the door crimsoned for a moment
their jovial faces.
The man in the mantle went and stationed himself on the watch
under a porch on the other side of the street.
“_Corne et tonnerre!_” said one of the comrades. “Seven o’clock
is on the point of striking. ’Tis the hour of my appointed
meeting.”
“I tell you,” repeated his companion, with a thick tongue, “that
I don’t live in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles, _indignus qui
inter mala verba habitat_. I have a lodging in the Rue
Jean-Pain-Mollet, _in vico Johannis Pain-Mollet_. You are more
horned than a unicorn if you assert the contrary. Every one knows
that he who once mounts astride a bear is never after afraid; but
you have a nose turned to dainties like Saint-Jacques of the
hospital.”
“Jehan, my friend, you are drunk,” said the other.
The other replied staggering, “It pleases you to say so, Phœbus;
but it hath been proved that Plato had the profile of a hound.”
The reader has, no doubt, already recognized our two brave
friends, the captain and the scholar. It appears that the man who
was lying in wait for them had also recognized them, for he
slowly followed all the zigzags that the scholar caused the
captain to make, who being a more hardened drinker had retained
all his self-possession. By listening to them attentively, the
man in the mantle could catch in its entirety the following
interesting conversation,—
“_Corbacque!_ Do try to walk straight, master bachelor; you know
that I must leave you. Here it is seven o’clock. I have an
appointment with a woman.”
“Leave me then! I see stars and lances of fire. You are like the
Château de Dampmartin, which is bursting with laughter.”
“By the warts of my grandmother, Jehan, you are raving with too
much rabidness. By the way, Jehan, have you any money left?”
“Monsieur Rector, there is no mistake; the little butcher’s shop,
_parva boucheria_.”
“Jehan! my friend Jehan! You know that I made an appointment with
that little girl at the end of the Pont Saint-Michel, and I can
only take her to the Falourdel’s, the old crone of the bridge,
and that I must pay for a chamber. The old witch with a white
moustache would not trust me. Jehan! for pity’s sake! Have we
drunk up the whole of the curé’s purse? Have you not a single
parisis left?”
“The consciousness of having spent the other hours well is a just
and savory condiment for the table.”
“Belly and guts! a truce to your whimsical nonsense! Tell me,
Jehan of the devil! have you any money left? Give it to me,
_bédieu!_ or I will search you, were you as leprous as Job, and
as scabby as Cæsar!”
“Monsieur, the Rue Galiache is a street which hath at one end the
Rue de la Verrerie, and at the other the Rue de la Tixeranderie.”
“Well, yes! my good friend Jehan, my poor comrade, the Rue
Galiache is good, very good. But in the name of heaven collect
your wits. I must have a sou parisis, and the appointment is for
seven o’clock.”
“Silence for the rondo, and attention to the refrain,—
“Quand les rats mangeront les cas,
Le roi sera seigneur d’Arras;
Quand la mer, qui est grande et lée
Sera à la Saint-Jean gelée,
On verra, par-dessus la glace,
Sortir ceux d’Arras de leur place.”[43]
“Well, scholar of Antichrist, may you be strangled with the
entrails of your mother!” exclaimed Phœbus, and he gave the
drunken scholar a rough push; the latter slipped against the
wall, and slid flabbily to the pavement of Philip Augustus. A
remnant of fraternal pity, which never abandons the heart of a
drinker, prompted Phœbus to roll Jehan with his foot upon one of
those pillows of the poor, which Providence keeps in readiness at
the corner of all the street posts of Paris, and which the rich
blight with the name of “a rubbish-heap.” The captain adjusted
Jehan’s head upon an inclined plane of cabbage-stumps, and on the
very instant, the scholar fell to snoring in a magnificent bass.
Meanwhile, all malice was not extinguished in the captain’s
heart. “So much the worse if the devil’s cart picks you up on its
passage!” he said to the poor, sleeping clerk; and he strode off.
The man in the mantle, who had not ceased to follow him, halted
for a moment before the prostrate scholar, as though agitated by
indecision; then, uttering a profound sigh, he also strode off in
pursuit of the captain.
We, like them, will leave Jehan to slumber beneath the open sky,
and will follow them also, if it pleases the reader.
On emerging into the Rue Saint-André-des-Arcs, Captain Phœbus
perceived that some one was following him. On glancing sideways
by chance, he perceived a sort of shadow crawling after him along
the walls. He halted, it halted; he resumed his march, it resumed
its march. This disturbed him not overmuch. “Ah, bah!” he said to
himself, “I have not a sou.”
He paused in front of the College d’Autun. It was at this college
that he had sketched out what he called his studies, and, through