Notre-Dame de Paris
a little amazed to see the Flemish ambassador, on concluding his
inspection of the knave thus placed beneath his eyes, bestow a
friendly tap on that ragged shoulder. The beggar turned round;
there was surprise, recognition, a lighting up of the two
countenances, and so forth; then, without paying the slightest
heed in the world to the spectators, the hosier and the wretched
being began to converse in a low tone, holding each other’s
hands, in the meantime, while the rags of Clopin Trouillefou,
spread out upon the cloth of gold of the dais, produced the
effect of a caterpillar on an orange.
The novelty of this singular scene excited such a murmur of mirth
and gayety in the hall, that the cardinal was not slow to
perceive it; he half bent forward, and, as from the point where
he was placed he could catch only an imperfect view of
Trouillerfou’s ignominious doublet, he very naturally imagined
that the mendicant was asking alms, and, disgusted with his
audacity, he exclaimed: “Bailiff of the Courts, toss me that
knave into the river!”
“Cross of God! monseigneur the cardinal,” said Coppenole, without
quitting Clopin’s hand, “he’s a friend of mine.”
“Good! good!” shouted the populace. From that moment, Master
Coppenole enjoyed in Paris as in Ghent, “great favor with the
people; for men of that sort do enjoy it,” says Philippe de
Comines, “when they are thus disorderly.” The cardinal bit his
lips. He bent towards his neighbor, the Abbé of Sainte-Geneviève,
and said to him in a low tone,—“Fine ambassadors monsieur the
archduke sends here, to announce to us Madame Marguerite!”
“Your eminence,” replied the abbé, “wastes your politeness on
these Flemish swine. _Margaritas ante porcos_, pearls before
swine.”
“Say rather,” retorted the cardinal, with a smile, “_Porcos ante
Margaritam_, swine before the pearl.”
The whole little court in cassocks went into ecstacies over this
play upon words. The cardinal felt a little relieved; he was
quits with Coppenole, he also had had his jest applauded.
Now, will those of our readers who possess the power of
generalizing an image or an idea, as the expression runs in the
style of to-day, permit us to ask them if they have formed a very
clear conception of the spectacle presented at this moment, upon
which we have arrested their attention, by the vast parallelogram
of the grand hall of the palace.
In the middle of the hall, backed against the western wall, a
large and magnificent gallery draped with cloth of gold, into
which enter in procession, through a small, arched door, grave
personages, announced successively by the shrill voice of an
usher. On the front benches were already a number of venerable
figures, muffled in ermine, velvet, and scarlet. Around the
dais—which remains silent and dignified—below, opposite,
everywhere, a great crowd and a great murmur. Thousands of
glances directed by the people on each face upon the dais, a
thousand whispers over each name. Certainly, the spectacle is
curious, and well deserves the attention of the spectators. But
yonder, quite at the end, what is that sort of trestle work with
four motley puppets upon it, and more below? Who is that man
beside the trestle, with a black doublet and a pale face? Alas!
my dear reader, it is Pierre Gringoire and his prologue.
We have all forgotten him completely.
This is precisely what he feared.
From the moment of the cardinal’s entrance, Gringoire had never
ceased to tremble for the safety of his prologue. At first he had
enjoined the actors, who had stopped in suspense, to continue,
and to raise their voices; then, perceiving that no one was
listening, he had stopped them; and, during the entire quarter of
an hour that the interruption lasted, he had not ceased to stamp,
to flounce about, to appeal to Gisquette and Liénarde, and to
urge his neighbors to the continuance of the prologue; all in
vain. No one quitted the cardinal, the embassy, and the
gallery—sole centre of this vast circle of visual rays. We must
also believe, and we say it with regret, that the prologue had
begun slightly to weary the audience at the moment when his
eminence had arrived, and created a diversion in so terrible a
fashion. After all, on the gallery as well as on the marble
table, the spectacle was the same: the conflict of Labor and
Clergy, of Nobility and Merchandise. And many people preferred to
see them alive, breathing, moving, elbowing each other in flesh
and blood, in this Flemish embassy, in this Episcopal court,
under the cardinal’s robe, under Coppenole’s jerkin, than
painted, decked out, talking in verse, and, so to speak, stuffed
beneath the yellow amid white tunics in which Gringoire had so
ridiculously clothed them.
Nevertheless, when our poet beheld quiet reestablished to some
extent, he devised a stratagem which might have redeemed all.
“Monsieur,” he said, turning towards one of his neighbors, a
fine, big man, with a patient face, “suppose we begin again.”
“What?” said his neighbor.
“Hé! the Mystery,” said Gringoire.
“As you like,” returned his neighbor.
This semi-approbation sufficed for Gringoire, and, conducting his
own affairs, he began to shout, confounding himself with the
crowd as much as possible: “Begin the mystery again! begin
again!”
“The devil!” said Joannes de Molendino, “what are they jabbering
down yonder, at the end of the hall?” (for Gringoire was making
noise enough for four.) “Say, comrades, isn’t that mystery
finished? They want to begin it all over again. That’s not fair!”
“No, no!” shouted all the scholars. “Down with the mystery! Down
with it!”
But Gringoire had multiplied himself, and only shouted the more
vigorously: “Begin again! begin again!”
These clamors attracted the attention of the cardinal.
“Monsieur Bailiff of the Courts,” said he to a tall, black man,
placed a few paces from him, “are those knaves in a holy-water
vessel, that they make such a hellish noise?”
The bailiff of the courts was a sort of amphibious magistrate, a
sort of bat of the judicial order, related to both the rat and
the bird, the judge and the soldier.
He approached his eminence, and not without a good deal of fear
of the latter’s displeasure, he awkwardly explained to him the
seeming disrespect of the audience: that noonday had arrived
before his eminence, and that the comedians had been forced to
begin without waiting for his eminence.
The cardinal burst into a laugh.
“On my faith, the rector of the university ought to have done the
same. What say you, Master Guillaume Rym?”
“Monseigneur,” replied Guillaume Rym, “let us be content with
having escaped half of the comedy. There is at least that much
gained.”
“Can these rascals continue their farce?” asked the bailiff.
“Continue, continue,” said the cardinal, “it’s all the same to
me. I’ll read my breviary in the meantime.”
The bailiff advanced to the edge of the estrade, and cried, after
having invoked silence by a wave of the hand,—
“_Bourgeois_, rustics, and citizens, in order to satisfy those
who wish the play to begin again, and those who wish it to end,
his eminence orders that it be continued.”
Both parties were forced to resign themselves. But the public and
the author long cherished a grudge against the cardinal.
So the personages on the stage took up their parts, and Gringoire
hoped that the rest of his work, at least, would be listened to.
This hope was speedily dispelled like his other illusions;
silence had indeed, been restored in the audience, after a
fashion; but Gringoire had not observed that at the moment when
the cardinal gave the order to continue, the gallery was far from
full, and that after the Flemish envoys there had arrived new
personages forming part of the _cortège_, whose names and ranks,
shouted out in the midst of his dialogue by the intermittent cry
of the usher, produced considerable ravages in it. Let the reader
imagine the effect in the midst of a theatrical piece, of the
yelping of an usher, flinging in between two rhymes, and often in
the middle of a line, parentheses like the following,—
“Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator to the king in the
Ecclesiastical Courts!”
“Jehan de Harlay, equerry guardian of the office of chevalier of
the night watch of the city of Paris!”
“Messire Galiot de Genoilhac, chevalier, seigneur de Brussac,
master of the king’s artillery!”
“Master Dreux-Raguier, surveyor of the woods and forests of the
king our sovereign, in the land of France, Champagne and Brie!”
“Messire Louis de Graville, chevalier, councillor, and
chamberlain of the king, admiral of France, keeper of the Forest
of Vincennes!”
“Master Denis le Mercier, guardian of the house of the blind at
Paris!” etc., etc., etc.
This was becoming unbearable.
This strange accompaniment, which rendered it difficult to follow
the piece, made Gringoire all the more indignant because he could
not conceal from himself the fact that the interest was
continually increasing, and that all his work required was a
chance of being heard.
It was, in fact, difficult to imagine a more ingenious and more
dramatic composition. The four personages of the prologue were
bewailing themselves in their mortal embarrassment, when Venus in
person, (_vera incessa patuit dea_) presented herself to them,
clad in a fine robe bearing the heraldic device of the ship of
the city of Paris. She had come herself to claim the dolphin
promised to the most beautiful. Jupiter, whose thunder could be
heard rumbling in the dressing-room, supported her claim, and
Venus was on the point of carrying it off,—that is to say,
without allegory, of marrying monsieur the dauphin, when a young
child clad in white damask, and holding in her hand a daisy (a
transparent personification of Mademoiselle Marguerite of
Flanders) came to contest it with Venus.
Theatrical effect and change.
After a dispute, Venus, Marguerite, and the assistants agreed to
submit to the good judgment of time holy Virgin. There was
another good part, that of the king of Mesopotamia; but through
so many interruptions, it was difficult to make out what end he
served. All these persons had ascended by the ladder to the
stage.
But all was over; none of these beauties had been felt nor
understood. On the entrance of the cardinal, one would have said
that an invisible magic thread had suddenly drawn all glances
from the marble table to the gallery, from the southern to the
western extremity of the hall. Nothing could disenchant the
audience; all eyes remained fixed there, and the new-comers and
their accursed names, and their faces, and their costumes,
afforded a continual diversion. This was very distressing. With