第 二十四 章 · AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRACY.

. AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRACY.

A very happy personage in the year of grace 1482, was the noble

gentleman Robert d’Estouteville, chevalier, Sieur de Beyne, Baron

d’Ivry and Saint Andry en la Marche, counsellor and chamberlain

to the king, and guard of the provostship of Paris. It was

already nearly seventeen years since he had received from the

king, on November 7, 1465, the comet year,[27] that fine charge

of the provostship of Paris, which was reputed rather a seigneury

than an office. _Dignitas_, says Joannes Lœmnœus, _quæ cum non

exigua potestate politiam concernente, atque prærogativis multis

et juribus conjuncta est_. A marvellous thing in ’82 was a

gentleman bearing the king’s commission, and whose letters of

institution ran back to the epoch of the marriage of the natural

daughter of Louis XI. with Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon.

The same day on which Robert d’Estouteville took the place of

Jacques de Villiers in the provostship of Paris, Master Jehan

Dauvet replaced Messire Helye de Thorrettes in the first

presidency of the Court of Parliament, Jehan Jouvenel des Ursins

supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of chancellor of

France, Regnault des Dormans ousted Pierre Puy from the charge of

master of requests in ordinary of the king’s household. Now, upon

how many heads had the presidency, the chancellorship, the

mastership passed since Robert d’Estouteville had held the

provostship of Paris. It had been “granted to him for

safekeeping,” as the letters patent said; and certainly he kept

it well. He had clung to it, he had incorporated himself with it,

he had so identified himself with it that he had escaped that

fury for change which possessed Louis XI., a tormenting and

industrious king, whose policy it was to maintain the elasticity

of his power by frequent appointments and revocations. More than

this; the brave chevalier had obtained the reversion of the

office for his son, and for two years already, the name of the

noble man Jacques d’Estouteville, equerry, had figured beside his

at the head of the register of the salary list of the provostship

of Paris. A rare and notable favor indeed! It is true that Robert

d’Estouteville was a good soldier, that he had loyally raised his

pennon against “the league of public good,” and that he had

presented to the queen a very marvellous stag in confectionery on

the day of her entrance to Paris in 14.... Moreover, he possessed

the good friendship of Messire Tristan l’Hermite, provost of the

marshals of the king’s household. Hence a very sweet and pleasant

existence was that of Messire Robert. In the first place, very

good wages, to which were attached, and from which hung, like

extra bunches of grapes on his vine, the revenues of the civil

and criminal registries of the provostship, plus the civil and

criminal revenues of the tribunals of Embas of the Châtelet,

without reckoning some little toll from the bridges of Mantes and

of Corbeil, and the profits on the craft of Shagreen-makers of

Paris, on the corders of firewood and the measurers of salt. Add

to this the pleasure of displaying himself in rides about the

city, and of making his fine military costume, which you may

still admire sculptured on his tomb in the abbey of Valmont in

Normandy, and his morion, all embossed at Montlhéry, stand out a

contrast against the parti-colored red and tawny robes of the

aldermen and police. And then, was it nothing to wield absolute

supremacy over the sergeants of the police, the porter and watch

of the Châtelet, the two auditors of the Châtelet, _auditores

castelleti_, the sixteen commissioners of the sixteen quarters,

the jailer of the Châtelet, the four enfeoffed sergeants, the

hundred and twenty mounted sergeants, with maces, the chevalier

of the watch with his watch, his sub-watch, his counter-watch and

his rear-watch? Was it nothing to exercise high and low justice,

the right to interrogate, to hang and to draw, without reckoning

petty jurisdiction in the first resort (_in prima instantia_, as

the charters say), on that viscomty of Paris, so nobly appanaged

with seven noble bailiwicks? Can anything sweeter be imagined

than rendering judgments and decisions, as Messire Robert

d’Estouteville daily did in the Grand Châtelet, under the large

and flattened arches of Philip Augustus? and going, as he was

wont to do every evening, to that charming house situated in the

Rue Galilée, in the enclosure of the royal palace, which he held

in right of his wife, Madame Ambroise de Loré, to repose after

the fatigue of having sent some poor wretch to pass the night in

“that little cell of the Rue de Escorcherie, which the provosts

and aldermen of Paris used to make their prison; the same being

eleven feet long, seven feet and four inches wide, and eleven

feet high?”[28]

And not only had Messire Robert d’Estouteville his special court

as provost and vicomte of Paris; but in addition he had a share,

both for eye and tooth, in the grand court of the king. There was

no head in the least elevated which had not passed through his

hands before it came to the headsman. It was he who went to seek

M. de Nemours at the Bastille Saint Antoine, in order to conduct

him to the Halles; and to conduct to the Grève M. de Saint-Pol,

who clamored and resisted, to the great joy of the provost, who

did not love monsieur the constable.

Here, assuredly, is more than sufficient to render a life happy

and illustrious, and to deserve some day a notable page in that

interesting history of the provosts of Paris, where one learns

that Oudard de Villeneuve had a house in the Rue des Boucheries,

that Guillaume de Hangest purchased the great and the little

Savoy, that Guillaume Thiboust gave the nuns of Sainte-Geneviève

his houses in the Rue Clopin, that Hugues Aubriot lived in the

Hôtel du Porc-Épic, and other domestic facts.

Nevertheless, with so many reasons for taking life patiently and

joyously, Messire Robert d’Estouteville woke up on the morning of

the seventh of January, 1482, in a very surly and peevish mood.

Whence came this ill temper? He could not have told himself. Was

it because the sky was gray? or was the buckle of his old belt of

Montlhéry badly fastened, so that it confined his provostal

portliness too closely? had he beheld ribald fellows, marching in

bands of four, beneath his window, and setting him at defiance,

in doublets but no shirts, hats without crowns, with wallet and

bottle at their side? Was it a vague presentiment of the three

hundred and seventy livres, sixteen sous, eight farthings, which

the future King Charles VII. was to cut off from the provostship

in the following year? The reader can take his choice; we, for

our part, are much inclined to believe that he was in a bad

humor, simply because he was in a bad humor.

Moreover, it was the day after a festival, a tiresome day for

every one, and above all for the magistrate who is charged with

sweeping away all the filth, properly and figuratively speaking,

which a festival day produces in Paris. And then he had to hold a

sitting at the Grand Châtelet. Now, we have noticed that judges

in general so arrange matters that their day of audience shall

also be their day of bad humor, so that they may always have some

one upon whom to vent it conveniently, in the name of the king,

law, and justice.

However, the audience had begun without him. His lieutenants,

civil, criminal, and private, were doing his work, according to

usage; and from eight o’clock in the morning, some scores of

_bourgeois_ and _bourgeoises_, heaped and crowded into an obscure

corner of the audience chamber of Embas du Châtelet, between a

stout oaken barrier and the wall, had been gazing blissfully at

the varied and cheerful spectacle of civil and criminal justice

dispensed by Master Florian Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet,

lieutenant of monsieur the provost, in a somewhat confused and

utterly haphazard manner.

The hall was small, low, vaulted. A table studded with

fleurs-de-lis stood at one end, with a large arm-chair of carved

oak, which belonged to the provost and was empty, and a stool on

the left for the auditor, Master Florian. Below sat the clerk of

the court, scribbling; opposite was the populace; and in front of

the door, and in front of the table were many sergeants of the

provostship in sleeveless jackets of violet camlet, with white

crosses. Two sergeants of the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, clothed in

their jackets of Toussaint, half red, half blue, were posted as

sentinels before a low, closed door, which was visible at the

extremity of the hall, behind the table. A single pointed window,

narrowly encased in the thick wall, illuminated with a pale ray

of January sun two grotesque figures,—the capricious demon of

stone carved as a tail-piece in the keystone of the vaulted

ceiling, and the judge seated at the end of the hall on the

fleurs-de-lis.

Imagine, in fact, at the provost’s table, leaning upon his elbows

between two bundles of documents of cases, with his foot on the

train of his robe of plain brown cloth, his face buried in his

hood of white lamb’s skin, of which his brows seemed to be of a

piece, red, crabbed, winking, bearing majestically the load of

fat on his cheeks which met under his chin, Master Florian

Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet.

Now, the auditor was deaf. A slight defect in an auditor. Master

Florian delivered judgment, none the less, without appeal and

very suitably. It is certainly quite sufficient for a judge to

have the air of listening; and the venerable auditor fulfilled

this condition, the sole one in justice, all the better because

his attention could not be distracted by any noise.

Moreover, he had in the audience, a pitiless censor of his deeds

and gestures, in the person of our friend Jehan Frollo du Moulin,

that little student of yesterday, that “stroller,” whom one was

sure of encountering all over Paris, anywhere except before the

rostrums of the professors.

“Stay,” he said in a low tone to his companion, Robin Poussepain,

who was grinning at his side, while he was making his comments on

the scenes which were being unfolded before his eyes, “yonder is

Jehanneton du Buisson. The beautiful daughter of the lazy dog at

the Marché-Neuf!—Upon my soul, he is condemning her, the old

rascal! he has no more eyes than ears. Fifteen sous, four

farthings, parisian, for having worn two rosaries! ’Tis somewhat

dear. _Lex duri carminis_. Who’s that? Robin Chief-de-Ville,

hauberkmaker. For having been passed and received master of the

said trade! That’s his entrance money. He! two gentlemen among

these knaves! Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly Two equerries,

_Corpus Christi!_ Ah! they have been playing at dice. When shall

I see our rector here? A hundred livres parisian, fine to the

king! That Barbedienne strikes like a deaf man,—as he is! I’ll be

my brother the archdeacon, if that keeps me from gaming; gaming

by day, gaming by night, living at play, dying at play, and

gaming away my soul after my shirt. Holy Virgin, what damsels!

One after the other my lambs. Ambroise Lécuyère, Isabeau la

Paynette, Bérarde Gironin! I know them all, by Heavens! A fine! a

fine! That’s what will teach you to wear gilded girdles! ten sous

parisis! you coquettes! Oh! the old snout of a judge! deaf and

imbecile! Oh! Florian the dolt! Oh! Barbedienne the blockhead!

There he is at the table! He’s eating the plaintiff, he’s eating

the suits, he eats, he chews, he crams, he fills himself. Fines,

lost goods, taxes, expenses, loyal charges, salaries, damages,

and interests, gehenna, prison, and jail, and fetters with

expenses are Christmas spice cake and marchpanes of Saint-John to

him! Look at him, the pig!—Come! Good! Another amorous woman!

Thibaud-la-Thibaude, neither more nor less! For having come from

the Rue Glatigny! What fellow is this? Gieffroy Mabonne, gendarme

bearing the crossbow. He has cursed the name of the Father. A

fine for la Thibaude! A fine for Gieffroy! A fine for them both!

The deaf old fool! he must have mixed up the two cases! Ten to

one that he makes the wench pay for the oath and the gendarme for

the amour! Attention, Robin Poussepain! What are they going to

bring in? Here are many sergeants! By Jupiter! all the

bloodhounds of the pack are there. It must be the great beast of

the hunt—a wild boar. And ’tis one, Robin, ’tis one. And a fine

one too! _Hercle!_ ’tis our prince of yesterday, our Pope of the

Fools, our bellringer, our one-eyed man, our hunchback, our

grimace! ’Tis Quasimodo!”

It was he indeed.

It was Quasimodo, bound, encircled, roped, pinioned, and under

good guard. The squad of policemen who surrounded him was

assisted by the chevalier of the watch in person, wearing the

arms of France embroidered on his breast, and the arms of the

city on his back. There was nothing, however, about Quasimodo,

except his deformity, which could justify the display of halberds

and arquebuses; he was gloomy, silent, and tranquil. Only now and

then did his single eye cast a sly and wrathful glance upon the

bonds with which he was loaded.

He cast the same glance about him, but it was so dull and sleepy

that the women only pointed him out to each other in derision.

Meanwhile Master Florian, the auditor, turned over attentively

the document in the complaint entered against Quasimodo, which

the clerk handed him, and, having thus glanced at it, appeared to

reflect for a moment. Thanks to this precaution, which he always

was careful to take at the moment when on the point of beginning

an examination, he knew beforehand the names, titles, and

misdeeds of the accused, made cut and dried responses to

questions foreseen, and succeeded in extricating himself from all

the windings of the interrogation without allowing his deafness

to be too apparent. The written charges were to him what the dog

is to the blind man. If his deafness did happen to betray him

here and there, by some incoherent apostrophe or some

unintelligible question, it passed for profundity with some, and

for imbecility with others. In neither case did the honor of the

magistracy sustain any injury; for it is far better that a judge

should be reputed imbecile or profound than deaf. Hence he took

great care to conceal his deafness from the eyes of all, and he

generally succeeded so well that he had reached the point of

deluding himself, which is, by the way, easier than is supposed.

All hunchbacks walk with their heads held high, all stutterers

harangue, all deaf people speak low. As for him, he believed, at

the most, that his ear was a little refractory. It was the sole

concession which he made on this point to public opinion, in his

moments of frankness and examination of his conscience.

Having, then, thoroughly ruminated Quasimodo’s affair, he threw

back his head and half closed his eyes, for the sake of more

majesty and impartiality, so that, at that moment, he was both

deaf and blind. A double condition, without which no judge is

perfect. It was in this magisterial attitude that he began the

examination.

“Your name?”

Now this was a case which had not been “provided for by law,”

where a deaf man should be obliged to question a deaf man.

Quasimodo, whom nothing warned that a question had been addressed

to him, continued to stare intently at the judge, and made no

reply. The judge, being deaf, and being in no way warned of the

deafness of the accused, thought that the latter had answered, as

all accused do in general, and therefore he pursued, with his

mechanical and stupid self-possession,—

“Very well. And your age?”

Again Quasimodo made no reply to this question. The judge

supposed that it had been replied to, and continued,—

“Now, your profession?”

Still the same silence. The spectators had begun, meanwhile, to

whisper together, and to exchange glances.

“That will do,” went on the imperturbable auditor, when he

supposed that the accused had finished his third reply. “You are

accused before us, _primo_, of nocturnal disturbance; _secundo_,

of a dishonorable act of violence upon the person of a foolish

woman, _in præjudicium meretricis; tertio_, of rebellion and

disloyalty towards the archers of the police of our lord, the

king. Explain yourself upon all these points.—Clerk, have you

written down what the prisoner has said thus far?”

At this unlucky question, a burst of laughter rose from the

clerk’s table caught by the audience, so violent, so wild, so

contagious, so universal, that the two deaf men were forced to

perceive it. Quasimodo turned round, shrugging his hump with

disdain, while Master Florian, equally astonished, and supposing

that the laughter of the spectators had been provoked by some

irreverent reply from the accused, rendered visible to him by

that shrug of the shoulders, apostrophized him indignantly,—

“You have uttered a reply, knave, which deserves the halter. Do

you know to whom you are speaking?”

This sally was not fitted to arrest the explosion of general

merriment. It struck all as so whimsical, and so ridiculous, that

the wild laughter even attacked the sergeants of the

Parloi-aux-Bourgeois, a sort of pikemen, whose stupidity was part

of their uniform. Quasimodo alone preserved his seriousness, for

the good reason that he understood nothing of what was going on

around him. The judge, more and more irritated, thought it his

duty to continue in the same tone, hoping thereby to strike the

accused with a terror which should react upon the audience, and

bring it back to respect.

“So this is as much as to say, perverse and thieving knave that

you are, that you permit yourself to be lacking in respect

towards the Auditor of the Châtelet, to the magistrate committed

to the popular police of Paris, charged with searching out

crimes, delinquencies, and evil conduct; with controlling all

trades, and interdicting monopoly; with maintaining the

pavements; with debarring the hucksters of chickens, poultry, and

water-fowl; of superintending the measuring of fagots and other

sorts of wood; of purging the city of mud, and the air of

contagious maladies; in a word, with attending continually to

public affairs, without wages or hope of salary! Do you know that

I am called Florian Barbedienne, actual lieutenant to monsieur

the provost, and, moreover, commissioner, inquisitor,

_controller_, and examiner, with equal power in provostship,

bailiwick, preservation, and inferior court of judicature?—”

There is no reason why a deaf man talking to a deaf man should

stop. God knows where and when Master Florian would have landed,

when thus launched at full speed in lofty eloquence, if the low

door at the extreme end of the room had not suddenly opened, and

given entrance to the provost in person. At his entrance Master

Florian did not stop short, but, making a half-turn on his heels,

and aiming at the provost the harangue with which he had been

withering Quasimodo a moment before,—

“Monseigneur,” said he, “I demand such penalty as you shall deem

fitting against the prisoner here present, for grave and

aggravated offence against the court.”

And he seated himself, utterly breathless, wiping away the great

drops of sweat which fell from his brow and drenched, like tears,

the parchments spread out before him. Messire Robert

d’Estouteville frowned and made a gesture so imperious and

significant to Quasimodo, that the deaf man in some measure

understood it.

The provost addressed him with severity, “What have you done that

you have been brought hither, knave?”

The poor fellow, supposing that the provost was asking his name,

broke the silence which he habitually preserved, and replied, in

a harsh and guttural voice, “Quasimodo.”

The reply matched the question so little that the wild laugh

began to circulate once more, and Messire Robert exclaimed, red

with wrath,—

“Are you mocking me also, you arrant knave?”

“Bellringer of Notre-Dame,” replied Quasimodo, supposing that

what was required of him was to explain to the judge who he was.

“Bellringer!” interpolated the provost, who had waked up early

enough to be in a sufficiently bad temper, as we have said, not

to require to have his fury inflamed by such strange responses.

“Bellringer! I’ll play you a chime of rods on your back through

the squares of Paris! Do you hear, knave?”

“If it is my age that you wish to know,” said Quasimodo, “I think

that I shall be twenty at Saint Martin’s day.”

This was too much; the provost could no longer restrain himself.

“Ah! you are scoffing at the provostship, wretch! Messieurs the

sergeants of the mace, you will take me this knave to the pillory

of the Grève, you will flog him, and turn him for an hour. He

shall pay me for it, _tête Dieu!_ And I order that the present

judgment shall be cried, with the assistance of four sworn

trumpeters, in the seven castellanies of the viscomty of Paris.”

The clerk set to work incontinently to draw up the account of the

sentence.

“_Ventre Dieu!_ ’tis well adjudged!” cried the little scholar,

Jehan Frollo du Moulin, from his corner.

The provost turned and fixed his flashing eyes once more on

Quasimodo. “I believe the knave said ‘_Ventre Dieu!_’ Clerk, add

twelve deniers Parisian for the oath, and let the vestry of Saint

Eustache have the half of it; I have a particular devotion for

Saint Eustache.”

In a few minutes the sentence was drawn up. Its tenor was simple

and brief. The customs of the provostship and the viscomty had

not yet been worked over by President Thibaut Baillet, and by

Roger Barmne, the king’s advocate; they had not been obstructed,

at that time, by that lofty hedge of quibbles and procedures,

which the two jurisconsults planted there at the beginning of the

sixteenth century. All was clear, expeditious, explicit. One went

straight to the point then, and at the end of every path there

was immediately visible, without thickets and without turnings;

the wheel, the gibbet, or the pillory. One at least knew whither

one was going.

The clerk presented the sentence to the provost, who affixed his

seal to it, and departed to pursue his round of the audience

hall, in a frame of mind which seemed destined to fill all the

jails in Paris that day. Jehan Frollo and Robin Poussepain

laughed in their sleeves. Quasimodo gazed on the whole with an

indifferent and astonished air.

However, at the moment when Master Florian Barbedienne was

reading the sentence in his turn, before signing it, the clerk

felt himself moved with pity for the poor wretch of a prisoner,

and, in the hope of obtaining some mitigation of the penalty, he

approached as near the auditor’s ear as possible, and said,

pointing to Quasimodo, “That man is deaf.”

He hoped that this community of infirmity would awaken Master

Florian’s interest in behalf of the condemned man. But, in the

first place, we have already observed that Master Florian did not

care to have his deafness noticed. In the next place, he was so

hard of hearing that he did not catch a single word of what the

clerk said to him; nevertheless, he wished to have the appearance

of hearing, and replied, “Ah! ah! that is different; I did not

know that. An hour more of the pillory, in that case.”

And he signed the sentence thus modified.

“’Tis well done,” said Robin Poussepain, who cherished a grudge

against Quasimodo. “That will teach him to handle people

roughly.”