الفصل الفصل 12 · THE BROKEN JUG.
. THE BROKEN JUG.
After having run for some time at the top of his speed, without
knowing whither, knocking his head against many a street corner,
leaping many a gutter, traversing many an alley, many a court,
many a square, seeking flight and passage through all the
meanderings of the ancient passages of the Halles, exploring in
his panic terror what the fine Latin of the maps calls _tota via,
cheminum et viaria_, our poet suddenly halted for lack of breath
in the first place, and in the second, because he had been
collared, after a fashion, by a dilemma which had just occurred
to his mind. “It strikes me, Master Pierre Gringoire,” he said to
himself, placing his finger to his brow, “that you are running
like a madman. The little scamps are no less afraid of you than
you are of them. It strikes me, I say, that you heard the clatter
of their wooden shoes fleeing southward, while you were fleeing
northward. Now, one of two things, either they have taken flight,
and the pallet, which they must have forgotten in their terror,
is precisely that hospitable bed in search of which you have been
running ever since morning, and which madame the Virgin
miraculously sends you, in order to recompense you for having
made a morality in her honor, accompanied by triumphs and
mummeries; or the children have not taken flight, and in that
case they have put the brand to the pallet, and that is precisely
the good fire which you need to cheer, dry, and warm you. In
either case, good fire or good bed, that straw pallet is a gift
from heaven. The blessed Virgin Marie who stands at the corner of
the Rue Mauconseil, could only have made Eustache Moubon die for
that express purpose; and it is folly on your part to flee thus
zigzag, like a Picard before a Frenchman, leaving behind you what
you seek before you; and you are a fool!”
Then he retraced his steps, and feeling his way and searching,
with his nose to the wind and his ears on the alert, he tried to
find the blessed pallet again, but in vain. There was nothing to
be found but intersections of houses, closed courts, and
crossings of streets, in the midst of which he hesitated and
doubted incessantly, being more perplexed and entangled in this
medley of streets than he would have been even in the labyrinth
of the Hôtel des Tournelles. At length he lost patience, and
exclaimed solemnly: “Cursed be cross roads! ’tis the devil who
has made them in the shape of his pitchfork!”
This exclamation afforded him a little solace, and a sort of
reddish reflection which he caught sight of at that moment, at
the extremity of a long and narrow lane, completed the elevation
of his moral tone. “God be praised!” said he, “There it is
yonder! There is my pallet burning.” And comparing himself to the
pilot who suffers shipwreck by night, “_Salve_,” he added
piously, “_salve, maris stella_!”
Did he address this fragment of litany to the Holy Virgin, or to
the pallet? We are utterly unable to say.
He had taken but a few steps in the long street, which sloped
downwards, was unpaved, and more and more muddy and steep, when
he noticed a very singular thing. It was not deserted; here and
there along its extent crawled certain vague and formless masses,
all directing their course towards the light which flickered at
the end of the street, like those heavy insects which drag along
by night, from blade to blade of grass, towards the shepherd’s
fire.
Nothing renders one so adventurous as not being able to feel the
place where one’s pocket is situated. Gringoire continued to
advance, and had soon joined that one of the forms which dragged
along most indolently, behind the others. On drawing near, he
perceived that it was nothing else than a wretched legless
cripple in a bowl, who was hopping along on his two hands like a
wounded field-spider which has but two legs left. At the moment
when he passed close to this species of spider with a human
countenance, it raised towards him a lamentable voice: “_La buona
mancia, signor! la buona mancia_!”[10]
“Deuce take you,” said Gringoire, “and me with you, if I know
what you mean!”
And he passed on.
He overtook another of these itinerant masses, and examined it.
It was an impotent man, both halt and crippled, and halt and
crippled to such a degree that the complicated system of crutches
and wooden legs which sustained him, gave him the air of a
mason’s scaffolding on the march. Gringoire, who liked noble and
classical comparisons, compared him in thought to the living
tripod of Vulcan.
This living tripod saluted him as he passed, but stopping his hat
on a level with Gringoire’s chin, like a shaving dish, while he
shouted in the latter’s ears: “_Señor cabellero, para comprar un
pedaso de pan_!”[11]
“It appears,” said Gringoire, “that this one can also talk; but
’tis a rude language, and he is more fortunate than I if he
understands it.” Then, smiting his brow, in a sudden transition
of ideas: “By the way, what the deuce did they mean this morning
with their _Esmeralda?_”
He was minded to augment his pace, but for the third time
something barred his way. This something or, rather, some one was
a blind man, a little blind fellow with a bearded, Jewish face,
who, rowing away in the space about him with a stick, and towed
by a large dog, droned through his nose with a Hungarian accent:
“_Facitote caritatem_!”
“Well, now,” said Gringoire, “here’s one at last who speaks a
Christian tongue. I must have a very charitable aspect, since
they ask alms of me in the present lean condition of my purse. My
friend,” and he turned towards the blind man, “I sold my last
shirt last week; that is to say, since you understand only the
language of Cicero: _Vendidi hebdomade nuper transita meam
ultimam chemisam_.”
That said, he turned his back upon the blind man, and pursued his
way. But the blind man began to increase his stride at the same
time; and, behold! the cripple and the legless man, in his bowl,
came up on their side in great haste, and with great clamor of
bowl and crutches, upon the pavement. Then all three, jostling
each other at poor Gringoire’s heels, began to sing their song to
him,—
“_Caritatem_!” chanted the blind man.
“_La buona mancia_!” chanted the cripple in the bowl.
And the lame man took up the musical phrase by repeating: “_Un
pedaso de pan_!”
Gringoire stopped up his ears. “Oh, tower of Babel!” he
exclaimed.
He set out to run. The blind man ran! The lame man ran! The
cripple in the bowl ran!
And then, in proportion as he plunged deeper into the street,
cripples in bowls, blind men and lame men, swarmed about him, and
men with one arm, and with one eye, and the leprous with their
sores, some emerging from little streets adjacent, some from the
air-holes of cellars, howling, bellowing, yelping, all limping
and halting, all flinging themselves towards the light, and
humped up in the mire, like snails after a shower.
Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not
knowing very well what was to become of him, marched along in
terror among them, turning out for the lame, stepping over the
cripples in bowls, with his feet imbedded in that ant-hill of
lame men, like the English captain who got caught in the
quicksand of a swarm of crabs.
The idea occurred to him of making an effort to retrace his
steps. But it was too late. This whole legion had closed in
behind him, and his three beggars held him fast. So he proceeded,
impelled both by this irresistible flood, by fear, and by a
vertigo which converted all this into a sort of horrible dream.
At last he reached the end of the street. It opened upon an
immense place, where a thousand scattered lights flickered in the
confused mists of night. Gringoire flew thither, hoping to
escape, by the swiftness of his legs, from the three infirm
spectres who had clutched him.
“_Onde vas, hombre_?” (Where are you going, my man?) cried the
cripple, flinging away his crutches, and running after him with
the best legs that ever traced a geometrical step upon the
pavements of Paris.
In the meantime the legless man, erect upon his feet, crowned
Gringoire with his heavy iron bowl, and the blind man glared in
his face with flaming eyes!
“Where am I?” said the terrified poet.
“In the Court of Miracles,” replied a fourth spectre, who had
accosted them.
“Upon my soul,” resumed Gringoire, “I certainly do behold the
blind who see, and the lame who walk, but where is the Saviour?”
They replied by a burst of sinister laughter.
The poor poet cast his eyes about him. It was, in truth, that
redoubtable Cour des Miracles, whither an honest man had never
penetrated at such an hour; the magic circle where the officers
of the Châtelet and the sergeants of the provostship, who
ventured thither, disappeared in morsels; a city of thieves, a
hideous wart on the face of Paris; a sewer, from which escaped
every morning, and whither returned every night to crouch, that
stream of vices, of mendicancy and vagabondage which always
overflows in the streets of capitals; a monstrous hive, to which
returned at nightfall, with their booty, all the drones of the
social order; a lying hospital where the bohemian, the disfrocked
monk, the ruined scholar, the ne’er-do-wells of all nations,
Spaniards, Italians, Germans,—of all religions, Jews, Christians,
Mahometans, idolaters, covered with painted sores, beggars by
day, were transformed by night into brigands; an immense
dressing-room, in a word, where, at that epoch, the actors of
that eternal comedy, which theft, prostitution, and murder play
upon the pavements of Paris, dressed and undressed.
It was a vast place, irregular and badly paved, like all the
squares of Paris at that date. Fires, around which swarmed
strange groups, blazed here and there. Every one was going,
coming, and shouting. Shrill laughter was to be heard, the
wailing of children, the voices of women. The hands and heads of
this throng, black against the luminous background, outlined
against it a thousand eccentric gestures. At times, upon the
ground, where trembled the light of the fires, mingled with
large, indefinite shadows, one could behold a dog passing, which
resembled a man, a man who resembled a dog. The limits of races
and species seemed effaced in this city, as in a pandemonium.
Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health, maladies, all seemed to be
in common among these people; all went together, they mingled,
confounded, superposed; each one there participated in all.
The poor and flickering flames of the fire permitted Gringoire to
distinguish, amid his trouble, all around the immense place, a
hideous frame of ancient houses, whose wormeaten, shrivelled,
stunted façades, each pierced with one or two lighted attic
windows, seemed to him, in the darkness, like enormous heads of
old women, ranged in a circle, monstrous and crabbed, winking as
they looked on at the Witches’ Sabbath.
It was like a new world, unknown, unheard of, misshapen,
creeping, swarming, fantastic.
Gringoire, more and more terrified, clutched by the three beggars
as by three pairs of tongs, dazed by a throng of other faces
which frothed and yelped around him, unhappy Gringoire endeavored
to summon his presence of mind, in order to recall whether it was
a Saturday. But his efforts were vain; the thread of his memory
and of his thought was broken; and, doubting everything, wavering
between what he saw and what he felt, he put to himself this
unanswerable question,—
“If I exist, does this exist? if this exists, do I exist?”
At that moment, a distinct cry arose in the buzzing throng which
surrounded him, “Let’s take him to the king! let’s take him to
the king!”
“Holy Virgin!” murmured Gringoire, “the king here must be a ram.”
“To the king! to the king!” repeated all voices.
They dragged him off. Each vied with the other in laying his
claws upon him. But the three beggars did not loose their hold
and tore him from the rest, howling, “He belongs to us!”
The poet’s already sickly doublet yielded its last sigh in this
struggle.
While traversing the horrible place, his vertigo vanished. After
taking a few steps, the sentiment of reality returned to him. He
began to become accustomed to the atmosphere of the place. At the
first moment there had arisen from his poet’s head, or, simply
and prosaically, from his empty stomach, a mist, a vapor, so to
speak, which, spreading between objects and himself, permitted
him to catch a glimpse of them only in the incoherent fog of
nightmare,—in those shadows of dreams which distort every
outline, agglomerating objects into unwieldy groups, dilating
things into chimeras, and men into phantoms. Little by little,
this hallucination was succeeded by a less bewildered and
exaggerating view. Reality made its way to the light around him,
struck his eyes, struck his feet, and demolished, bit by bit, all
that frightful poetry with which he had, at first, believed
himself to be surrounded. He was forced to perceive that he was
not walking in the Styx, but in mud, that he was elbowed not by
demons, but by thieves; that it was not his soul which was in
question, but his life (since he lacked that precious
conciliator, which places itself so effectually between the
bandit and the honest man—a purse). In short, on examining the
orgy more closely, and with more coolness, he fell from the
witches’ sabbath to the dram-shop.
The Cour des Miracles was, in fact, merely a dram-shop; but a
brigand’s dram-shop, reddened quite as much with blood as with
wine.
The spectacle which presented itself to his eyes, when his ragged
escort finally deposited him at the end of his trip, was not
fitted to bear him back to poetry, even to the poetry of hell. It
was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the tavern.
Were we not in the fifteenth century, we would say that Gringoire
had descended from Michael Angelo to Callot.
Around a great fire which burned on a large, circular flagstone,
the flames of which had heated red-hot the legs of a tripod,
which was empty for the moment, some wormeaten tables were
placed, here and there, haphazard, no lackey of a geometrical
turn having deigned to adjust their parallelism, or to see to it
that they did not make too unusual angles. Upon these tables
gleamed several dripping pots of wine and beer, and round these
pots were grouped many bacchic visages, purple with the fire and
the wine. There was a man with a huge belly and a jovial face,
noisily kissing a woman of the town, thickset and brawny. There
was a sort of sham soldier, a “naquois,” as the slang expression
runs, who was whistling as he undid the bandages from his
fictitious wound, and removing the numbness from his sound and
vigorous knee, which had been swathed since morning in a thousand
ligatures. On the other hand, there was a wretched fellow,
preparing with celandine and beef’s blood, his “leg of God,” for
the next day. Two tables further on, a palmer, with his pilgrim’s
costume complete, was practising the lament of the Holy Queen,
not forgetting the drone and the nasal drawl. Further on, a young
scamp was taking a lesson in epilepsy from an old pretender, who
was instructing him in the art of foaming at the mouth, by
chewing a morsel of soap. Beside him, a man with the dropsy was
getting rid of his swelling, and making four or five female
thieves, who were disputing at the same table, over a child who
had been stolen that evening, hold their noses. All circumstances
which, two centuries later, “seemed so ridiculous to the court,”
as Sauval says, “that they served as a pastime to the king, and
as an introduction to the royal ballet of Night, divided into
four parts and danced on the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon.”
“Never,” adds an eye witness of 1653, “have the sudden
metamorphoses of the Court of Miracles been more happily
presented. Benserade prepared us for it by some very gallant
verses.”
Loud laughter everywhere, and obscene songs. Each one held his
own course, carping and swearing, without listening to his
neighbor. Pots clinked, and quarrels sprang up at the shock of
the pots, and the broken pots made rents in the rags.
A big dog, seated on his tail, gazed at the fire. Some children
were mingled in this orgy. The stolen child wept and cried.
Another, a big boy four years of age, seated with legs dangling,
upon a bench that was too high for him, before a table that
reached to his chin, and uttering not a word. A third, gravely
spreading out upon the table with his finger, the melted tallow
which dripped from a candle. Last of all, a little fellow
crouching in the mud, almost lost in a cauldron, which he was
scraping with a tile, and from which he was evoking a sound that
would have made Stradivarius swoon.
Near the fire was a hogshead, and on the hogshead a beggar. This
was the king on his throne.
The three who had Gringoire in their clutches led him in front of
this hogshead, and the entire bacchanal rout fell silent for a
moment, with the exception of the cauldron inhabited by the
child.
Gringoire dared neither breathe nor raise his eyes.
“_Hombre, quita tu sombrero_!” said one of the three knaves, in
whose grasp he was, and, before he had comprehended the meaning,
the other had snatched his hat—a wretched headgear, it is true,
but still good on a sunny day or when there was but little rain.
Gringoire sighed.
Meanwhile the king addressed him, from the summit of his cask,—
“Who is this rogue?”
Gringoire shuddered. That voice, although accentuated by menace,
recalled to him another voice, which, that very morning, had
dealt the deathblow to his mystery, by drawling, nasally, in the
midst of the audience, “Charity, please!” He raised his head. It
was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.
Clopin Trouillefou, arrayed in his royal insignia, wore neither
one rag more nor one rag less. The sore upon his arm had already
disappeared. He held in his hand one of those whips made of
thongs of white leather, which police sergeants then used to
repress the crowd, and which were called _boullayes_. On his head
he wore a sort of headgear, bound round and closed at the top.
But it was difficult to make out whether it was a child’s cap or
a king’s crown, the two things bore so strong a resemblance to
each other.
Meanwhile Gringoire, without knowing why, had regained some hope,
on recognizing in the King of the Cour des Miracles his accursed
mendicant of the Grand Hall.
“Master,” stammered he; “monseigneur—sire—how ought I to address
you?” he said at length, having reached the culminating point of
his crescendo, and knowing neither how to mount higher, nor to
descend again.
“Monseigneur, his majesty, or comrade, call me what you please.
But make haste. What have you to say in your own defence?”
“_In your own defence?_” thought Gringoire, “that displeases me.”
He resumed, stuttering, “I am he, who this morning—”
“By the devil’s claws!” interrupted Clopin, “your name, knave,
and nothing more. Listen. You are in the presence of three
powerful sovereigns: myself, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Thunes,
successor to the Grand Coësre, supreme suzerain of the Realm of
Argot; Mathias Hunyadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and of Bohemia, the
old yellow fellow whom you see yonder, with a dish clout round
his head; Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat fellow
who is not listening to us but caressing a wench. We are your
judges. You have entered the Kingdom of Argot, without being an
_argotier_; you have violated the privileges of our city. You
must be punished unless you are a _capon_, a _franc-mitou_ or a
_rifodé_; that is to say, in the slang of honest folks,—a thief,
a beggar, or a vagabond. Are you anything of that sort? Justify
yourself; announce your titles.”
“Alas!” said Gringoire, “I have not that honor. I am the author—”
“That is sufficient,” resumed Trouillefou, without permitting him
to finish. “You are going to be hanged. ’Tis a very simple
matter, gentlemen and honest _bourgeois_! as you treat our people
in your abode, so we treat you in ours! The law which you apply
to vagabonds, vagabonds apply to you. ’Tis your fault if it is
harsh. One really must behold the grimace of an honest man above
the hempen collar now and then; that renders the thing honorable.
Come, friend, divide your rags gayly among these damsels. I am
going to have you hanged to amuse the vagabonds, and you are to
give them your purse to drink your health. If you have any
mummery to go through with, there’s a very good God the Father in
that mortar yonder, in stone, which we stole from Saint-Pierre
aux Bœufs. You have four minutes in which to fling your soul at
his head.”
The harangue was formidable.
“Well said, upon my soul! Clopin Trouillefou preaches like the
Holy Father the Pope!” exclaimed the Emperor of Galilee, smashing
his pot in order to prop up his table.
“Messeigneurs, emperors, and kings,” said Gringoire coolly (for I
know not how, firmness had returned to him, and he spoke with
resolution), “don’t think of such a thing; my name is Pierre
Gringoire. I am the poet whose morality was presented this
morning in the grand hall of the Courts.”
“Ah! so it was you, master!” said Clopin. “I was there, _par la
tête Dieu_! Well! comrade, is that any reason, because you bored
us to death this morning, that you should not be hung this
evening?”
“I shall find difficulty in getting out of it,” said Gringoire to
himself. Nevertheless, he made one more effort: “I don’t see why
poets are not classed with vagabonds,” said he. “Vagabond, Æsopus
certainly was; Homerus was a beggar; Mercurius was a thief—”
Clopin interrupted him: “I believe that you are trying to blarney
us with your jargon. Zounds! let yourself be hung, and don’t kick
up such a row over it!”
“Pardon me, monseigneur, the King of Thunes,” replied Gringoire,
disputing the ground foot by foot. “It is worth trouble—One
moment!—Listen to me—You are not going to condemn me without
having heard me”—
His unlucky voice was, in fact, drowned in the uproar which rose
around him. The little boy scraped away at his cauldron with more
spirit than ever; and, to crown all, an old woman had just placed
on the tripod a frying-pan of grease, which hissed away on the
fire with a noise similar to the cry of a troop of children in
pursuit of a masker.
In the meantime, Clopin Trouillefou appeared to hold a momentary
conference with the Duke of Egypt, and the Emperor of Galilee,
who was completely drunk. Then he shouted shrilly: “Silence!”
and, as the cauldron and the frying-pan did not heed him, and
continued their duet, he jumped down from his hogshead, gave a
kick to the boiler, which rolled ten paces away bearing the child
with it, a kick to the frying-pan, which upset in the fire with
all its grease, and gravely remounted his throne, without
troubling himself about the stifled tears of the child, or the
grumbling of the old woman, whose supper was wasting away in a
fine white flame.
Trouillefou made a sign, and the duke, the emperor, and the
passed masters of pickpockets, and the isolated robbers, came and
ranged themselves around him in a horseshoe, of which Gringoire,
still roughly held by the body, formed the centre. It was a
semicircle of rags, tatters, tinsel, pitchforks, axes, legs
staggering with intoxication, huge, bare arms, faces sordid,
dull, and stupid. In the midst of this Round Table of beggary,
Clopin Trouillefou,—as the doge of this senate, as the king of
this peerage, as the pope of this conclave,—dominated; first by
virtue of the height of his hogshead, and next by virtue of an
indescribable, haughty, fierce, and formidable air, which caused
his eyes to flash, and corrected in his savage profile the
bestial type of the race of vagabonds. One would have pronounced
him a boar amid a herd of swine.
“Listen,” said he to Gringoire, fondling his misshapen chin with
his horny hand; “I don’t see why you should not be hung. It is
true that it appears to be repugnant to you; and it is very
natural, for you _bourgeois_ are not accustomed to it. You form
for yourselves a great idea of the thing. After all, we don’t
wish you any harm. Here is a means of extricating yourself from
your predicament for the moment. Will you become one of us?”
The reader can judge of the effect which this proposition
produced upon Gringoire, who beheld life slipping away from him,
and who was beginning to lose his hold upon it. He clutched at it
again with energy.
“Certainly I will, and right heartily,” said he.
“Do you consent,” resumed Clopin, “to enroll yourself among the
people of the knife?”
“Of the knife, precisely,” responded Gringoire.
“You recognize yourself as a member of the free
_bourgeoisie?_”[12] added the King of Thunes.
“Of the free _bourgeoisie_.”
“Subject of the Kingdom of Argot?”
“Of the Kingdom of Argot[13].”
“A vagabond?”
“A vagabond.”
“In your soul?”
“In my soul.”
“I must call your attention to the fact,” continued the king,
“that you will be hung all the same.”
“The devil!” said the poet.
“Only,” continued Clopin imperturbably, “you will be hung later
on, with more ceremony, at the expense of the good city of Paris,
on a handsome stone gibbet, and by honest men. That is a
consolation.”
“Just so,” responded Gringoire.
“There are other advantages. In your quality of a high-toned
sharper, you will not have to pay the taxes on mud, or the poor,
or lanterns, to which the _bourgeois_ of Paris are subject.”
“So be it,” said the poet. “I agree. I am a vagabond, a thief, a
sharper, a man of the knife, anything you please; and I am all
that already, monsieur, King of Thunes, for I am a philosopher;
_et omnia in philosophia, omnes in philosopho continentur_,—all
things are contained in philosophy, all men in the philosopher,
as you know.”
The King of Thunes scowled.
“What do you take me for, my friend? What Hungarian Jew patter
are you jabbering at us? I don’t know Hebrew. One isn’t a Jew
because one is a bandit. I don’t even steal any longer. I’m above
that; I kill. Cut-throat, yes; cutpurse, no.”
Gringoire tried to slip in some excuse between these curt words,
which wrath rendered more and more jerky.
“I ask your pardon, monseigneur. It is not Hebrew; ’tis Latin.”
“I tell you,” resumed Clopin angrily, “that I’m not a Jew, and
that I’ll have you hung, belly of the synagogue, like that little
shopkeeper of Judea, who is by your side, and whom I entertain
strong hopes of seeing nailed to a counter one of these days,
like the counterfeit coin that he is!”
So saying, he pointed his finger at the little, bearded Hungarian
Jew who had accosted Gringoire with his _facitote caritatem_, and
who, understanding no other language beheld with surprise the
King of Thunes’s ill-humor overflow upon him.
At length Monsieur Clopin calmed down.
“So you will be a vagabond, you knave?” he said to our poet.
“Of course,” replied the poet.
“Willing is not all,” said the surly Clopin; “good will doesn’t
put one onion the more into the soup, and ’tis good for nothing
except to go to Paradise with; now, Paradise and the thieves’
band are two different things. In order to be received among the
thieves,[14] you must prove that you are good for something, and
for that purpose, you must search the manikin.”
“I’ll search anything you like,” said Gringoire.
Clopin made a sign. Several thieves detached themselves from the
circle, and returned a moment later. They brought two thick
posts, terminated at their lower extremities in spreading timber
supports, which made them stand readily upon the ground; to the
upper extremity of the two posts they fitted a cross-beam, and
the whole constituted a very pretty portable gibbet, which
Gringoire had the satisfaction of beholding rise before him, in a
twinkling. Nothing was lacking, not even the rope, which swung
gracefully over the cross-beam.
“What are they going to do?” Gringoire asked himself with some
uneasiness. A sound of bells, which he heard at that moment, put
an end to his anxiety; it was a stuffed manikin, which the
vagabonds were suspending by the neck from the rope, a sort of
scarecrow dressed in red, and so hung with mule-bells and larger
bells, that one might have tricked out thirty Castilian mules
with them. These thousand tiny bells quivered for some time with
the vibration of the rope, then gradually died away, and finally
became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of
immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the
water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to
Gringoire a rickety old stool placed beneath the manikin,—“Climb
up there.”
“Death of the devil!” objected Gringoire; “I shall break my neck.
Your stool limps like one of Martial’s distiches; it has one
hexameter leg and one pentameter leg.”
“Climb!” repeated Clopin.
Gringoire mounted the stool, and succeeded, not without some
oscillations of head and arms, in regaining his centre of
gravity.
“Now,” went on the King of Thunes, “twist your right foot round
your left leg, and rise on the tip of your left foot.”
“Monseigneur,” said Gringoire, “so you absolutely insist on my
breaking some one of my limbs?”
Clopin tossed his head.
“Hark ye, my friend, you talk too much. Here’s the gist of the
matter in two words: you are to rise on tiptoe, as I tell you; in
that way you will be able to reach the pocket of the manikin, you
will rummage it, you will pull out the purse that is there,—and
if you do all this without our hearing the sound of a bell, all
is well: you shall be a vagabond. All we shall then have to do,
will be to thrash you soundly for the space of a week.”
“_Ventre-Dieu_! I will be careful,” said Gringoire. “And suppose
I do make the bells sound?”
“Then you will be hanged. Do you understand?”
“I don’t understand at all,” replied Gringoire.
“Listen, once more. You are to search the manikin, and take away
its purse; if a single bell stirs during the operation, you will
be hung. Do you understand that?”
“Good,” said Gringoire; “I understand that. And then?”
“If you succeed in removing the purse without our hearing the
bells, you are a vagabond, and you will be thrashed for eight
consecutive days. You understand now, no doubt?”
“No, monseigneur; I no longer understand. Where is the advantage
to me? hanged in one case, cudgelled in the other?”
“And a vagabond,” resumed Clopin, “and a vagabond; is that
nothing? It is for your interest that we should beat you, in
order to harden you to blows.”
“Many thanks,” replied the poet.
“Come, make haste,” said the king, stamping upon his cask, which
resounded like a huge drum! “Search the manikin, and let there be
an end to this! I warn you for the last time, that if I hear a
single bell, you will take the place of the manikin.”
The band of thieves applauded Clopin’s words, and arranged
themselves in a circle round the gibbet, with a laugh so pitiless
that Gringoire perceived that he amused them too much not to have
everything to fear from them. No hope was left for him,
accordingly, unless it were the slight chance of succeeding in
the formidable operation which was imposed upon him; he decided
to risk it, but it was not without first having addressed a
fervent prayer to the manikin he was about to plunder, and who
would have been easier to move to pity than the vagabonds. These
myriad bells, with their little copper tongues, seemed to him
like the mouths of so many asps, open and ready to sting and to
hiss.
“Oh!” he said, in a very low voice, “is it possible that my life
depends on the slightest vibration of the least of these bells?
Oh!” he added, with clasped hands, “bells, do not ring,
hand-bells do not clang, mule-bells do not quiver!”
He made one more attempt upon Trouillefou.
“And if there should come a gust of wind?”
“You will be hanged,” replied the other, without hesitation.
Perceiving that no respite, nor reprieve, nor subterfuge was
possible, he bravely decided upon his course of action; he wound
his right foot round his left leg, raised himself on his left
foot, and stretched out his arm: but at the moment when his hand
touched the manikin, his body, which was now supported upon one
leg only, wavered on the stool which had but three; he made an
involuntary effort to support himself by the manikin, lost his
balance, and fell heavily to the ground, deafened by the fatal
vibration of the thousand bells of the manikin, which, yielding
to the impulse imparted by his hand, described first a rotary
motion, and then swayed majestically between the two posts.
“Malediction!” he cried as he fell, and remained as though dead,
with his face to the earth.
Meanwhile, he heard the dreadful peal above his head, the
diabolical laughter of the vagabonds, and the voice of
Trouillefou saying,—
“Pick me up that knave, and hang him without ceremony.” He rose.
They had already detached the manikin to make room for him.
The thieves made him mount the stool, Clopin came to him, passed
the rope about his neck, and, tapping him on the shoulder,—
“Adieu, my friend. You can’t escape now, even if you digested
with the pope’s guts.”
The word “Mercy!” died away upon Gringoire’s lips. He cast his
eyes about him; but there was no hope: all were laughing.
“Bellevigne de l’Étoile,” said the King of Thunes to an enormous
vagabond, who stepped out from the ranks, “climb upon the cross
beam.”
Bellevigne de l’Étoile nimbly mounted the transverse beam, and in
another minute, Gringoire, on raising his eyes, beheld him, with
terror, seated upon the beam above his head.
“Now,” resumed Clopin Trouillefou, “as soon as I clap my hands,
you, Andry the Red, will fling the stool to the ground with a
blow of your knee; you, François Chanteprune, will cling to the
feet of the rascal; and you, Bellevigne, will fling yourself on
his shoulders; and all three at once, do you hear?”
Gringoire shuddered.
“Are you ready?” said Clopin Trouillefou to the three thieves,
who held themselves in readiness to fall upon Gringoire. A moment
of horrible suspense ensued for the poor victim, during which
Clopin tranquilly thrust into the fire with the tip of his foot,
some bits of vine shoots which the flame had not caught. “Are you
ready?” he repeated, and opened his hands to clap. One second
more and all would have been over.
But he paused, as though struck by a sudden thought.
“One moment!” said he; “I forgot! It is our custom not to hang a
man without inquiring whether there is any woman who wants him.
Comrade, this is your last resource. You must wed either a female
vagabond or the noose.”
This law of the vagabonds, singular as it may strike the reader,
remains to-day written out at length, in ancient English
legislation. (See _Burington’s Observations_.)
Gringoire breathed again. This was the second time that he had
returned to life within an hour. So he did not dare to trust to
it too implicitly.
“Holà!” cried Clopin, mounted once more upon his cask, “holà!
women, females, is there among you, from the sorceress to her
cat, a wench who wants this rascal? Holà, Colette la Charonne!
Elisabeth Trouvain! Simone Jodouyne! Marie Piédebou! Thonne la
Longue! Bérarde Fanouel! Michelle Genaille! Claude Ronge-oreille!
Mathurine Girorou!—Holà! Isabeau-la-Thierrye! Come and see! A man
for nothing! Who wants him?”
Gringoire, no doubt, was not very appetizing in this miserable
condition. The female vagabonds did not seem to be much affected
by the proposition. The unhappy wretch heard them answer: “No!
no! hang him; there’ll be the more fun for us all!”
Nevertheless, three emerged from the throng and came to smell of
him. The first was a big wench, with a square face. She examined
the philosopher’s deplorable doublet attentively. His garment was
worn, and more full of holes than a stove for roasting chestnuts.
The girl made a wry face. “Old rag!” she muttered, and addressing
Gringoire, “Let’s see your cloak!” “I have lost it,” replied
Gringoire. “Your hat?” “They took it away from me.” “Your shoes?”
“They have hardly any soles left.” “Your purse?” “Alas!”
stammered Gringoire, “I have not even a sou.” “Let them hang you,
then, and say ‘Thank you!’” retorted the vagabond wench, turning
her back on him.
The second,—old, black, wrinkled, hideous, with an ugliness
conspicuous even in the Cour des Miracles, trotted round
Gringoire. He almost trembled lest she should want him. But she
mumbled between her teeth, “He’s too thin,” and went off.
The third was a young girl, quite fresh, and not too ugly. “Save
me!” said the poor fellow to her, in a low tone. She gazed at him
for a moment with an air of pity, then dropped her eyes, made a
plait in her petticoat, and remained in indecision. He followed
all these movements with his eyes; it was the last gleam of hope.
“No,” said the young girl, at length, “no! Guillaume Longuejoue
would beat me.” She retreated into the crowd.
“You are unlucky, comrade,” said Clopin.
Then rising to his feet, upon his hogshead. “No one wants him,”
he exclaimed, imitating the accent of an auctioneer, to the great
delight of all; “no one wants him? once, twice, three times!”
and, turning towards the gibbet with a sign of his hand, “Gone!”
Bellevigne de l’Étoile, Andry the Red, François Chanteprune,
stepped up to Gringoire.
At that moment a cry arose among the thieves: “_La Esmeralda! La
Esmeralda!_”
Gringoire shuddered, and turned towards the side whence the
clamor proceeded.
The crowd opened, and gave passage to a pure and dazzling form.
It was the gypsy.
“La Esmeralda!” said Gringoire, stupefied in the midst of his
emotions, by the abrupt manner in which that magic word knotted
together all his reminiscences of the day.
This rare creature seemed, even in the Cour des Miracles, to
exercise her sway of charm and beauty. The vagabonds, male and
female, ranged themselves gently along her path, and their brutal
faces beamed beneath her glance.
She approached the victim with her light step. Her pretty Djali
followed her. Gringoire was more dead than alive. She examined
him for a moment in silence.
“You are going to hang this man?” she said gravely, to Clopin.
“Yes, sister,” replied the King of Thunes, “unless you will take
him for your husband.”
She made her pretty little pout with her under lip. “I’ll take
him,” said she.
Gringoire firmly believed that he had been in a dream ever since
morning, and that this was the continuation of it.
The change was, in fact, violent, though a gratifying one. They
undid the noose, and made the poet step down from the stool. His
emotion was so lively that he was obliged to sit down.
The Duke of Egypt brought an earthenware crock, without uttering
a word. The gypsy offered it to Gringoire: “Fling it on the
ground,” said she.
The crock broke into four pieces.
“Brother,” then said the Duke of Egypt, laying his hands upon
their foreheads, “she is your wife; sister, he is your husband
for four years. Go.”