Kabanata Kabanata 7 · FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA.

. 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