第 十一 章 · RESULT OF THE DANGERS.

. RESULT OF THE DANGERS.

Gringoire, thoroughly stunned by his fall, remained on the

pavement in front of the Holy Virgin at the street corner. Little

by little, he regained his senses; at first, for several minutes,

he was floating in a sort of half-somnolent revery, which was not

without its charm, in which æriel figures of the gypsy and her

goat were coupled with Quasimodo’s heavy fist. This state lasted

but a short time. A decidedly vivid sensation of cold in the part

of his body which was in contact with the pavement, suddenly

aroused him and caused his spirit to return to the surface.

“Whence comes this chill?” he said abruptly, to himself. He then

perceived that he was lying half in the middle of the gutter.

“That devil of a hunchbacked cyclops!” he muttered between his

teeth; and he tried to rise. But he was too much dazed and

bruised; he was forced to remain where he was. Moreover, his hand

was tolerably free; he stopped up his nose and resigned himself.

“The mud of Paris,” he said to himself—for decidedly he thought

that he was sure that the gutter would prove his refuge for the

night; and what can one do in a refuge, except dream?—“the mud of

Paris is particularly stinking; it must contain a great deal of

volatile and nitric salts. That, moreover, is the opinion of

Master Nicholas Flamel, and of the alchemists—”

The word _alchemists_ suddenly suggested to his mind the idea of

Archdeacon Claude Frollo. He recalled the violent scene which he

had just witnessed in part; that the gypsy was struggling with

two men, that Quasimodo had a companion; and the morose and

haughty face of the archdeacon passed confusedly through his

memory. “That would be strange!” he said to himself. And on that

fact and that basis he began to construct a fantastic edifice of

hypothesis, that card-castle of philosophers; then, suddenly

returning once more to reality, “Come! I’m freezing!” he

ejaculated.

The place was, in fact, becoming less and less tenable. Each

molecule of the gutter bore away a molecule of heat radiating

from Gringoire’s loins, and the equilibrium between the

temperature of his body and the temperature of the brook, began

to be established in rough fashion.

Quite a different annoyance suddenly assailed him. A group of

children, those little bare-footed savages who have always roamed

the pavements of Paris under the eternal name of _gamins_, and

who, when we were also children ourselves, threw stones at all of

us in the afternoon, when we came out of school, because our

trousers were not torn—a swarm of these young scamps rushed

towards the square where Gringoire lay, with shouts and laughter

which seemed to pay but little heed to the sleep of the

neighbors. They were dragging after them some sort of hideous

sack; and the noise of their wooden shoes alone would have roused

the dead. Gringoire who was not quite dead yet, half raised

himself.

“Ohé, Hennequin Dandèche! Ohé, Jehan Pincebourde!” they shouted

in deafening tones, “old Eustache Moubon, the merchant at the

corner, has just died. We’ve got his straw pallet, we’re going to

have a bonfire out of it. It’s the turn of the Flemish to-day!”

And behold, they flung the pallet directly upon Gringoire, beside

whom they had arrived, without espying him. At the same time, one

of them took a handful of straw and set off to light it at the

wick of the good Virgin.

“S’death!” growled Gringoire, “am I going to be too warm now?”

It was a critical moment. He was caught between fire and water;

he made a superhuman effort, the effort of a counterfeiter of

money who is on the point of being boiled, and who seeks to

escape. He rose to his feet, flung aside the straw pallet upon

the street urchins, and fled.

“Holy Virgin!” shrieked the children; “’tis the merchant’s

ghost!”

And they fled in their turn.

The straw mattress remained master of the field. Belleforêt,

Father Le Juge, and Corrozet affirm that it was picked up on the

morrow, with great pomp, by the clergy of the quarter, and borne

to the treasury of the church of Saint Opportune, where the

sacristan, even as late as 1789, earned a tolerably handsome

revenue out of the great miracle of the Statue of the Virgin at

the corner of the Rue Mauconseil, which had, by its mere

presence, on the memorable night between the sixth and seventh of

January, 1482, exorcised the defunct Eustache Moubon, who, in

order to play a trick on the devil, had at his death maliciously

concealed his soul in his straw pallet.