As they crossed the horrid square his vertigo vanished. After walking a few steps, a sense of reality returned. He began to grow accustomed to the atmosphere of the place. At first, from his poetic head, or perhaps, quite simply and quite prosaically, from his empty stomach, there had arisen certain fumes, a vapor as it were, which, spreading itself between him and other objects, prevented him from seeing anything save through a confused nightmare mist, through those dream-like shadows which render every outline vague, distort every shape, combine all objects into exaggerated groups, and enlarge things into chimeras and men into ghosts. By degrees this delusion. gave way to a less wild and less deceitful vision. Reality dawned upon him, blinded him, ran against him, and bit by bit destroyed the frightful poetry with which he had at first fancied himself surrounded. He could not fail to see that he was walking, not in the Styx, but in the mire; that he was pushed and elbowed, not by demons but by thieves; that it was not his soul, but merely his life which was in danger (since he lacked that precious conciliator which pleads so powerfully with the bandit for the honest man, a purse). Finally, examining the revels more closely and with greater calmness, he descended from the Witches' Sabbath to the pot-house. The Court of Miracles was indeed only a pot-house, but a pot-house of thieves, as red with blood as with wine. The spectacle presented to his eyes when his tattered escort at last landed him at his journey's end was scarcely fitted to bring him back to poetry, even were it the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the tavern. If we were not living in the fifteenth century, we should say that Gringoire had fallen from Michael Angelo to Callot. Around a large fire burning upon a great round flag-stone, and lapping with its flames the rusty legs of a trivet empty for the moment, stood a number of worm-eaten tables here and there, in dire confusion, no lackey of any geometrical pretensions having deigned to adjust their parallelism, or at least to see that they did not cross each other at angles too unusual. Upon these tables glittered various pots and jugs dripping with wine and beer, and around these jugs were seated numerous Bacchanalian faces, purple with fire and wine. One big-bellied man with a jolly face was administering noisy kisses to a brawny, thickset woman. A rubbie, or old vagrant, whistled as he loosed the bandages from his mock wound, and rubbed his sound, healthy knee, which had been swathed all day in ample ligatures. Beyond him was a mumper, preparing his "visitation from God"- his sore leg with suet and ox-blood. Two tables farther on, a sham pilgrim, in complete pilgrim dress, was spelling out the lament of Sainte-Reine, not forgetting the snuffle and the twang. In another place a young scamp who imposed on the charitable by pretending to have been bitten by a mad dog, was taking a lesson of an old dummy chucker in the art of frothing at the mouth by chewing a bit of soap. By their side a dropsical man was reducing his size, making four or five. doxies hold their noses as they sat at the same table, quarrelling over a child which they had stolen during the evening, all circumstances which, two centuries later, "seemed so ridiculous. to the court," as Sauval says, "that they served as diversion to the king, and as the opening to a royal ballet entitled 'Night,' divided in four parts, and danced at the Petit Bourbon Theatre." "Never," adds an eye-witness in 1653, "have the sudden changes of the Court of Miracles been more happily hit off. Benserade prepared us for them by some very fine verses." Coarse laughter was heard on every hand, with vulgar songs. Every man expressed himself in his own way, carping and swearing, without heeding his neighbor. Some hobnobbed, and quarrels arose from the clash of their mugs, and the breaking of their mugs was the cause of many torn rags. A big dog squatted on his tail, gazing into the fire. Some children took their part in the orgies. The stolen child cried and screamed; while another, a stout boy of four, sat on a high bench, with his legs dangling, his chin just coming above the table, and not speaking a word. A third was gravely smearing the table with melted tallow as it ran from the candle. Another, a little fellow, crouched in the mud, almost lost in a kettle which he was scraping with a potsherd, making a noise which would. have distracted Stradivarius. A cask stood near the fire, and a beggar sat on the cask. This was the king upon his throne. The three who held Gringoire led him up to this cask, and all the revellers were hushed for a moment, except the caldron inhabited by the child. Gringoire dared not breathe or raise his eyes. "Hombre, quita tu sombrero!" said one of the three scoundrels who held him; and before he had made up his mind what this meant, another snatched his hat, a shabby headpiece, to be sure, but still useful on sunny or on rainy days. Gringoire sighed. But the king, from the height of his barrel, addressed him,"Who is this varlet?" Gringoire started. The voice, although threatening in tone, reminded him of another voice which had that same morning dealt the first blow to his mystery by whining out from the audience, "Charity, kind souls!" He lifted his head. It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou. Clopin Trouillefou, decked with his royal insignia, had not a tatter more or less than usual. The wound on his arm had vanished. In his hand he held one of those whips with whit-leather thongs then used by serjeants of the wand to keep back the crowd, and called "boullayes." Upon his head he wore a circular coif, closed at the top; but it was hard to say whether it was a child's pad or a king's crown, so similar are the two things. Still, Gringoire, without knowing why, felt his hopes revive when he recognized this accursed beggar of the Great Hall in the king of the Court of Miracles. "Master," stuttered he, "My lord-Sire- How shall I address you?" he said at last, reaching the culminating point of his crescendo, and not knowing how to rise higher or to redescend. "My lord, your Majesty, or comrade. Call me what you will; but make haste. What have you to say in your defence?" "In your defence," thought Gringoire; "I don't like the sound of that." He resumed stammeringly, "I am he who this morning-" "By the devil's claws!" interrupted Clopin, "your name, varlet, and nothing more. Hark ye. You stand before three mighty sovereigns: me, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Tunis,1 successor to the Grand Coëre, the king of rogues, lord paramount of the kingdom of Cant; Mathias Hungadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt2 and Bohemia, that yellow old boy you see yonder with a clout about his head, Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilce,3 that fat fellow who pays no heed to us, but caresses that wanton. We are your judges. You have entered the kingdom of Cant, the land of thieves, without being a member of the confraternity; you have violated the privileges of our city. You must be punished, unless you be either prig, mumper, or cadger; 1 Slang term for king of mendicants. 8 Chief of the gamblers. that is, in the vulgar tongue of honest folks, either thief, beggar, or tramp. Are you anything of the sort? Justify yourself; state your character." "Alas!" said Gringoire, "I have not that honor. I am the author-" "Enough!" cried Trouillefou, not allowing him to finish his sentence. "You must be hanged. Quite a simple matter, my honest citizens! As you treat our people when they enter your domain, so we treat yours when they intrude among us. The law which you mete out to vagabonds, the vagabonds mete out to you. It is your own fault if it be evil. It is quite necessary that we should occasionally see an honest man grin through a hempen collar; it makes the thing honorable. Come, friend, divide your rags cheerfully among these young ladies. I will have you hanged to amuse the vagabonds, and you shall give them your purse to pay for a drink. If you have any mummeries to perform, over yonder in that mortar there's a capital God the Father, in stone, which we stole from the Church of Saint-Pierre-aux-Boeufs. You have four minutes to fling your soul at his head." This was a terrible speech. "Well said, upon my soul! Clopin Trouillefou preaches as well as any pope!" exclaimed the Emperor of Galilee, smashing his jug to prop up his table. "Noble emperors and kings," said Gringoire with great coolness (for his courage had mysteriously returned, and he spoke firmly), "you do not consider what you're doing. My name is Pierre Gringoire; I am the poet whose play was performed this morning in the Great Hall of the Palace." "Oh, is it you, sirrah?" said Clopin. "I was there, God's wounds! Well, comrade, because you bored us this morning, is that any reason why we should not hang you to-night?" "I shall have hard work to get off," thought Gringoire. But yet he made one more effort. "I don't see," said he, "why poets should not be classed with vagabonds. Esop was a vagrant; Homer was a beggar; Mercury was a thief-" Clopin interrupted him: "I believe you mean to cozen us with your lingo. Good God! be hanged, and don't make such a row about it!" "Excuse me, my lord King of Tunis," replied Gringoire, disputing every inch of the ground. "Is it worth while An instant Hear me You will not condemn me unheard - His melancholy voice was indeed lost in the uproar around him. The little boy scraped his kettle more vigorously than ever; and to cap the climax, an old woman had just placed a frying-pan full of fat upon the trivet, and it crackled over the flames with a noise like the shouts of an army of children in chase of some masquerader. However, Clopin Trouillefou seemed to be conferring for a moment with the Duke of Egypt and the Emperor of Galilee, the latter being entirely drunk. Then he cried out sharply, "Silence, I say!" and as the kettle and the frying-pan paid no heed, but kept up their duet, he leaped from his cask, dealt a kick to the kettle, which rolled ten paces or more with the child, another kick to the frying-pan, which upset all the fat into the fire, and then gravely reascended his throne, utterly regardless of the little one's stifled sobs and the grumbling of the old woman whose supper had vanished in brilliant flames. Trouillefou made a sign, and the duke, the emperor, the arch thieves, and the gonnofs' ranged themselves around him in the form of a horseshoe, Gringoire, still roughly grasped by the shoulders, occupying the centre. It was a semicircle of rags, of tatters, of tinsel, of pitchforks, of axes, of staggering legs, of bare brawny arms, of sordid, dull, stupid faces. In the middle of this Round Table of beggary Clopin Trouillefou reigned preeminent, as the doge of this senate, the king of this assembly of peers, the pope of this conclave, pre-eminent in the first place by the height of his cask, then by a peculiarly haughty, savage, and tremendous air, which made his eyes flash, and amended in his fierce profile the bestial type of the vagrant. He seemed a wild boar among swine. "Hark ye," he said to Gringoire, caressing his shapeless chin with his horny hand; "I see no reason why you should not be hanged. To be sure, you seem to dislike the idea, and it's very plain that you worthy cits are not used to it; you've got an exaggerated idea of the thing. After all, we wish you no harm. There is one way of getting you out of the difficulty for the time being. Will you join us?" My reader may fancy the effect of this proposal upon Gringoire, who saw his life escaping him, and had already begun to lose his hold upon it. He clung to it once more with vigor. 1 The kingdom of the Grand Coëre, or king of rogues, was divided into as many districts as there were provinces in France, each superintended by a "gonnof," or expert, who trained the uninitiated. |