The Hunchback of Notre Dame (11 page)

CHAPTER VI

Esmeralda

W
e are delighted to be able to inform our readers that during the whole of this scene Gringoire and his play had stood their ground. His actors, spurred on by him, had not stopped spouting his verses, and he had not given over listening. He had resigned himself to the uproar, and was determined to go on to the bitter end, not despairing of recovering some portion of public attention. This ray of hope revived when he saw Quasimodo, Coppenole, and the deafening escort of the Pope of Fools leave the hall with a tremendous noise. The crowd followed eagerly on their heels. “Good!” said he to himself; “now we have got rid of all the marplots.” Unfortunately, all the marplots meant the whole audience. In the twinkling of an eye, the great hall was empty.

To be exact, there still remained a handful of spectators, some scattered, others grouped around the pillars, women, old men, or children, who had had enough of the tumult and the hurly-burly. A few students still lingered, astride of the window-frames, gazing into the square.

“Well,” thought Gringoire, “here are still enough to hear the end of my mystery. There are but few, but it is a picked public, an intellectual audience.”

A moment later, a melody meant to produce the greatest effect at the appearance of the Holy Virgin was missing. Gringoire saw that his musicians had been borne off by the procession of the Pope of Fools. “Proceed,” he said stoically.

He went up to a group of townspeople who seemed to him to be talking about his play. This is the fragment of conversation which he caught:—

“You know, Master Cheneteau, the Hotel de Navarre, which belonged to M. de Nemours?”

“Yes, opposite the Braque Chapel.”

“Well, the Treasury Department has just left it to Guillaume Alexandre, the painter of armorial bearings, for six pounds and eight pence Paris a year.”

“How high rents are getting to be!”

“Well, well!” said Gringoire with a sigh; “the rest are listening.”

“Comrades!” shouted one of the young scamps in the window; “Esmeralda! Esmeralda is in the square!”

This cry had a magical effect. Every one in the hall rushed to the windows, climbing up the walls to get a glimpse, and repeating, “Esmeralda! Esmeralda!”

At the same time a great noise of applause was heard outside.

“What do they mean by their ‘Esmeralda’?” said Gringoire, clasping his hands in despair. “Oh, heavens! I suppose the windows are the attraction now!”

He turned back again to the marble table, and saw that the play had stopped. It was just the moment when Jupiter should have appeared with his thunder. Now Jupiter stood motionless at the foot of the stage.

“Michel Giborne!” cried the angry poet, “what are you doing there? Is that playing your part? Go up, I tell you!”

“Alas!” said Jupiter, “one of the students has taken away the ladder.”

Gringoire looked. It was but too true. All communication was cut off between his plot and its solution.

“The rascal!” he muttered; “and why did he carry off that ladder?”

“That he might see Esmeralda,” piteously responded Jupiter. “He said, ‘Stay, there’s a ladder which is doing no one any good!’ and he took it.”

This was the finishing stroke. Gringoire received it with submission.

“May the devil seize you!” said he to the actors; “and if I am paid, you shall be too.”

Then he beat a retreat, with drooping head, but last to leave, like a general who has fought a brave fight.

And as he descended the winding Palace staircase, he muttered between his teeth: “A pretty pack of donkeys and clowns these Parisians are! They come to hear a miracle-play, and then pay no heed to it! Their whole minds are absorbed in anybody and everybody, —in Clopin Trouillefou, the Cardinal, Coppenole, Quasimodo, the devil! but in Madame Virgin Mary not a whit. If I had known, I’d have given you your fill of Virgin Marys. And I,—to come to see faces, and to see nothing but backs! to be a poet, and to have the success of an apothecary! True, Homer begged his way through Greek villages, and Naso died in exile among the Muscovites. But may the devil flay me if I know what they mean by their ‘Esmeralda’! What kind of a word is that, anyhow? It must be Egyptian!”

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

From Charybdis to Scylla

N
ight falls early in January. The streets were already dark when Gringoire left the Palace. This nightfall pleased him. He longed to find some dark and solitary alley where he might meditate at his ease, and let the philosopher apply the first healing balm to the poet’s wounds. Besides, philosophy was his only refuge; for he knew not where to find shelter. After the total failure of his first theatrical effort he dared not return to the lodging which he had occupied, opposite the Hay-market, in the Rue Grenier-sur- l‘Eau, having reckoned upon what the provost was to give him for his epithalamium to pay Master Guillaume Doulx-Sire, farmer of the taxes on cloven-footed animals in Paris, the six months’ rent which he owed him, namely, twelve Paris pence,—twelve times the worth of everything that he owned in the world, including his breeches, his shirt, and his hat. After a moment’s pause for reflection, temporarily sheltered under the little gateway of the prison of the treasurer of the Sainte-Chapelle, as to what refuge he should seek for the night, having all the pavements of Paris at his disposition, he remembered having noticed, the week before, in the Rue de la Savaterie, at the door of a Parliamentary Councillor, a stone block for mounting a mule, and having said to himself that this stone would, on occasion, make a very excellent pillow for a beggar or a poet. He thanked Providence for sending him so good an idea; but as he prepared to cross the Palace courtyard on his way to the crooked labyrinth of the city, formed by the windings of all those antique sisters, the Rues de la Barillerie, de la Vieille-Draperie, de la Savaterie, de la Juiverie, etc., still standing at the present day with their nine-story houses, he saw the procession of the Pope of Fools, which was also just issuing from the Palace and rushing across the courtyard, with loud shouts, an abundance of glaring torches, and his (Gringoire’s) own music. This sight opened the wound to his self-esteem; he fled. In the bitterness of dramatic misfortune, all that recalled the day’s festival incensed him, and made his wound bleed afresh.

He meant to cross the Pont Saint-Michel; some children were careering up and down there with rockets and crackers.

“A plague on all fireworks!” said Gringoire; and he turned towards the Pont-au-Change. The houses at the head of the bridge were adorned with three large banners representing the king, the dauphin, and Margaret of Flanders, and six little bannerets with portraits of the Duke of Austria, Cardinal de Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, and Madame Jeanne de France, the Bastard of Bourbon, and I know not who besides, —all lighted up by torches. The mob gazed in admiration.

“Lucky painter, Jehan Fourbault!” said Gringoire, with a heavy sigh; and he turned his back on banners and bannerets. A street opened directly before him: it looked so dark and deserted that he hoped it would afford a way of escape from every echo as well as every reflection of the festival: he plunged down it. In a few moments he struck his foot against something, stumbled, and fell. It was the big bunch of hawthorn which the members of the basoche had that morning placed at the door of a president of the Parliament, in honor of the day. Gringoire bore this new misfortune bravely; he rose and walked to the bank of the river. Leaving behind him the civil and criminal towers, and passing by the great walls of the royal gardens, along the unpaved shore where the mud was ankle-deep, he reached the western end of the city, and for some time contemplated the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches, which has since vanished beneath the bronze horse on the Pont Neuf. The islet lay before him in the darkness,—a black mass across the narrow strip of whitish water which lay between him and it. The rays of a tiny light dimly revealed a sort of beehive-shaped hut in which the cows’ ferryman sought shelter for the night.

“Lucky ferryman!” thought Gringoire; “you never dream of glory, and you write no wedding songs! What are the marriages of kings and Burgundian duchesses to you? You know no Marguerites save those which grow upon your turf in April for the pasturage of your cows! and I, poet that I am, am hooted, and I shiver, and I owe twelve pence, and the soles of my shoes are so thin that you might use them for glasses in your lantern. Thanks, ferryman! Your hut rests my eyes and makes me forget Paris.”

He was roused from his almost lyric ecstasy by a huge double-headed rocket, which was suddenly sent up from the blessed cabin. The ferryman was taking his part in the festivities of the day, and setting off a few fireworks.

The explosion set Gringoire’s teeth on edge.

“Accursed festival!” he exclaimed, “will you pursue me forever, —oh, my God! even to the ferryman’s house?”

He gazed at the Seine at his feet and a horrible temptation overcame him.

“Ah!” said he, “how cheerfully I would drown myself if the water were not so cold!”

Then he took a desperate resolve. It was, since he could not escape from the Pope of Fools, Jehan Fourbault’s flags, the bunches of hawthorn, the rockets, and squibs, to plunge boldly into the very heart of the gaiety and go directly to the Place de Grève.

“At least,” thought he, “I may find some brands from the bonfire to warm myself, and I may sup on some crumbs from the three great sugar escutcheons which were to be served on the public sideboard.”

CHAPTER II

The Place de Grève

B
ut very slight traces now remain of the Place de Grève as it existed at the time of which we write; all that is left is the picturesque little tower at the northern corner of the square; and that, already buried beneath the vulgar whitewash which incrusts the sharp edges of its carvings, will soon disappear perhaps, drowned in that flood of new houses which is so rapidly swallowing up all the old façades of Paris.

People who, like ourselves, never pass through the Place de Crève without giving a glance of sympathy and pity to the poor little tower, choked between two hovels of the time of Louis XV, may readily reconstruct in fancy the entire mass of buildings to which it belonged, and as it were restore the old Gothic square of the fifteenth century.

It was, as it still is, an irregular square, bounded on one side by the quay, and on the other three by a number of tall, narrow, gloomy houses. By day one might admire the variety of its edifices, all carved in stone or wood, and presenting perfect specimens of the various kinds of mediæval domestic architecture, going back from the fifteenth to the eleventh century, from the casement window which was beginning to supersede the pointed arch, to the semi-circular arch of the Romance period, which gave way to the pointed arch, and which still occupied below it the first story of that old house called Tour de Roland, on the corner of the square nearest the Seine, close to the Rue de la Tannerie. At night, nothing could be seen of this mass of buildings but the dark indented line of the roofs stretching their chain of acute angles round the square. For it is one of the radical differences between modern and ancient towns, that nowadays the fronts of the houses face upon the squares and streets, and in old times it was the gable ends. In two centuries the houses have turned round.

In the middle of the eastern side of the square stood a heavy and hybrid construction composed of three houses together. It was known by three names, which explain its history, its purpose, and its architecture. The Maison au Dauphin, because Charles V occupied it while dauphin; the Marchandise, because it was used as the Town Hall; the Maison-aux-Piliers
(domus ad piloria),
on account of a series of thick columns which supported its three stories. There the city found everything required for a well-to-do town like Paris—a chapel in which to pray to God; a court of special pleas, where audience was given, and if necessary “the king’s men put down;” and in the garrets an “arsenal” full of artillery. For the citizens of Paris, knowing that it is not always enough to pray and plead for the liberties of the town, always had a good rusty arquebus or two in reserve in an attic of the Town Hall.

Even then the Place de Grève had the same forbidding aspect which the detestable ideas clinging about it awaken, and the gloomy Town Hall built by Dominique Bocador, which has taken the place of the Maison-aux-Piliers, still gives it. It must be confessed that a permanent gibbet and pillory,—“a justice and a ladder,” as they were then called,—standing side by side in the middle of the flagstones, largely contributed to make men turn away from that fatal square where so many beings full of life and health have died in agony; where the Saint Vallier’s fever was destined to spring to life some fifty years later,—that disease which was nothing but dread of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all maladies, because it came not from God, but from man.

It is a consoling thought (let us say in passing) that the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still cumbered the Place de Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross du Trahoir, the Marché-aux-Pourceaux, the hideous Montfaucon, the Porte Bandet, Place-aux-chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, and Barrière-des-Sergents, with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its machinery of torture, permanently built into the pavement; not to mention the countless pillories belonging to provosts, bishops, chapters, abbots, and priors administering justice; to say nothing of the legal drownings in the river Seine,—it is a consolation that in the present day, having successively lost all the pieces of her armor, her refinements of torture, her purely capricious and wilful penal laws, her torture for the administration of which she made afresh every five years a leather bed at the Grand-Châtelet, that ancient sovereign of feudal society, almost outlawed and exiled from our cities, hunted from code to code, driven from place to place, now possesses in all vast Paris but one dishonored corner of the Place de Grève, but one wretched guillotine, furtive, timid, and ashamed, seeming ever in dread of being taken in the very act, so swiftly does it vanish after it has dealt its deadly stroke!