by Victor Hugo
True, Ravaillac may very possibly have had no accomplices; or his accomplices, if he chanced to have any, need have had no hand in the fire of 1618. There are two other very plausible explanations: first, the huge “star of fire, a foot broad and a foot and a half high,” which fell, as every one knows, from heaven upon the Palace after midnight on the 7th of March; second, Théophile’s verses:—d
“In Paris sure it was a sorry game
When, fed too fat with fees, the frisky Dame
Justice set all her palace in a flame.”
Whatever we may think of this triple explanation,—political, physical, and poetical,—of the burning of the Palace of Justice in 1618, one unfortunate fact remains: namely, the fire. Very little is now left, thanks to this catastrophe, and thanks particularly to the various and successive restorations which have finished what it spared,—very little is now left of this first home of the King of France, of this palace, older than the Louvre, so old even in the time of Philip the Fair that in it they sought for traces of the magnificent buildings erected by King Robert and described by Helgaldus. Almost everything is gone. What has become of the chancery office, Saint Louis’ bridal chamber? What of the garden where he administered justice, “clad in a camlet coat, a sleeveless surcoat of linsey-woolsey, and over it a mantle of black serge, reclining upon carpets, with Joinville?” Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismond, that of Charles IV, and that of John Lackland? Where is the staircase from which Charles VI issued his edict of amnesty; the flag-stone upon which Marcel, in the dauphin’s presence, strangled Robert of Clermont and the Marshal of Champagne? The wicket-gate where the bulls of Benedict the antipope were destroyed, and through which departed those who brought them, coped and mitred in mockery, thus doing public penance throughout Paris? And the great hall, with its gilding, its azure, its pointed arches, its statues, its columns, its great vaulted roof thickly covered with carvings, and the golden room, and the stone lion, which stood at the door, his head down, his tail between his legs, like the lions around Solomon’s throne, in the humble attitude that befits strength in the presence of justice, and the beautiful doors, and the gorgeous windows, and the wrought-iron work which discouraged Biscornette, and Du Hancy’s dainty bits of carving? What has time done, what have men done with these marvels? What has been given to us in exchange for all this,—for all this ancient French history, all this Gothic art? The heavy elliptic arches of M. de Brosse, the clumsy architect of the St. Gervais portal,—so much for art; and for history we have the gossipy memories of the big pillar still echoing and re-echoing with the gossip of the Patrus.
This is not much. Let us go back to the genuine great hall of the genuine old Palace.
The two ends of this huge parallelogram were occupied, the one by the famous marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick, that there never was seen, as the old Court Rolls express it in a style which would give Gargantua an appetite, “such another slice of marble in the world;” the other by the chapel in which Louis XI had his statue carved kneeling before the Virgin, and into which, wholly indifferent to the fact that he left two vacant spaces in the procession of royal images, he ordered the removal of the figures of Charlemagne and Saint Louis, believing these two saints to be in high favor with Heaven as being kings of France. This chapel, still quite new, having been built scarcely six years, was entirely in that charming school of refined and delicate architecture, of marvellous sculpture, of fine, deep chiselling, which marks the end of the Gothic era in France, and lasts until towards the middle of the sixteenth century in the fairy-like fancies of the Renaissance. The small rose-window over the door was an especial masterpiece of delicacy and grace; it seemed a mere star of lace.
In the center of the hall, opposite the great door, a dais covered with gold brocade, placed against the wall, to which a private entrance was arranged by means of a window from the passage to the gold room, had been built for the Flemish envoys and other great personages invited to the performance of the mystery.
This mystery, according to custom, was to be performed upon the marble table. It had been prepared for this at dawn; the superb slab of marble, scratched and marked by lawyers’ heels, now bore a high wooden cage-like scaffolding, whose upper surface, in sight of the entire hall, was to serve as stage, while the interior, hidden by tapestry hangings, was to take the place of dressing-room for the actors in the play. A ladder placed outside with frank simplicity formed the means of communication between the dressing-room and stage, and served the double office of entrance and exit. There was no character however unexpected, no sudden change, and no dramatic effect, but was compelled to climb this ladder. Innocent and venerable infancy of art and of machinery!
Four officers attached to the Palace, forced guardians of the people’s pleasures on holidays as on hanging days, stood bolt upright at the four corners of the marble table.
The play was not to begin until the twelfth stroke of noon rang from the great Palace clock. This was doubtless very late for a theatrical performance; but the ambassadors had to be consulted in regard to the time.
Now, this throng had been waiting since dawn. Many of these honest sightseers were shivering at earliest daylight at the foot of the great Palace staircase. Some indeed declared that they had spent the night lying across the great door, to be sure of getting in first. The crowd increased every moment, and, like water rising above its level, began to creep up the walls, to collect around the columns, to overflow the entablatures, the cornices, the window-sills, every projection of the architecture, and every bit of bold relief in the carvings. Then, too, discomfort, impatience, fatigue, the day’s license of satire and folly, the quarrels caused incessantly by a sharp elbow or a hob-nailed shoe, the weariness of waiting gave, long before the hour when the ambassadors were due, an acid, bitter tone to the voices of these people, shut up, pent in, crowded, squeezed, and stifled as they were. On every hand were heard curses and complaints against the Flemish, the mayor of Paris, Cardinal Bourbon, the Palace bailiff, Madame Margaret of Austria, the ushers, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Pope of Fools, the columns, the statues, this closed door, that open window,—all to the vast amusement of the groups of students and lackeys scattered through the crowd, who mingled their mischief and their malice with all this discontent, and administered, as it were, pin-pricks to the general bad humor.
Among the rest there was one group of these merry demons who, having broken the glass from a window, had boldly seated themselves astride the sill, distributing their glances and their jokes by turns, within and without, between the crowd in the hall and the crowd in the courtyard. From their mocking gestures, their noisy laughter, and the scoffs and banter which they exchanged with their comrades, from one end of the hall to the other, it was easy to guess that these young students felt none of the weariness and fatigue of the rest of the spectators, and that they were amply able, for their own private amusement, to extract from what they had before their eyes a spectacle quite diverting enough to make them wait patiently for that which was to come.
“By my soul, it’s you, Joannes Frollo de Molendino!” cried one of them to a light-haired little devil with a handsome but mischievous countenance, who was clinging to the acanthus leaves of a capital; “you are well named, Jehan du Moulin (of the mill), for your two arms and your two legs look like the four sails fluttering in the wind. How long have you been here?”
“By the foul fiend!” replied Joannes Frollo, “more than four hours, and I certainly hope that they may be deducted from my time in purgatory. I heard the King of Sicily’s eight choristers intone the first verse of high mass at seven o‘clock in the Holy Chapel.”
“Fine choristers they are!” returned the other; “their voices are sharper than the points of their caps. Before he endowed a Mass in honor of Saint John, the king might well have inquired whether Saint John liked his Latin sung with a southern twang.”
“He only did it to give work to these confounded choristers of the
King of Sicily!” bitterly exclaimed an old woman in the crowd beneath the window. “Just fancy! a thousand pounds Paris for a Mass! and charged to the taxes on all salt-water fish sold in the Paris markets too!”
“Silence, old woman!” said a grave and reverend personage who was holding his nose beside the fishwoman; “he had to endow a Mass. You don’t want the king to fall ill again, do you?”
“Bravely spoken, Master Gilles Lecornu, master furrier of the king’s robes!” cried the little scholar clinging to the capital.
“Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!” said some.
“Cornutus et hirsutus,”e replied another.
“Oh, no doubt!” continued the little demon of the capital. “What is there to laugh at? An honorable man is Gilles Lecornu, brother of Master Jehan Lecornu, provost of the king’s palace, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, head porter of the Forest of Vincennes,—all good citizens of Paris, every one of them married, from father to son!”
The mirth increased. The fat furrier, not answering a word, strove to escape the eyes fixed on him from every side, but he puffed and perspired in vain; like a wedge driven into wood, all his efforts only buried his broad apoplectic face, purple with rage and spite, the more firmly in the shoulders of his neighbors.
At last one of those neighbors, fat, short, and venerable as himself, came to his rescue.
“Abominable! Shall students talk thus to a citizen! In my day they would have been well whipped with the sticks which served to burn them afterwards.”
The entire band burst out:—
“Oh ! who sings that song? Who is this bird of ill omen?”
“Stay, I know him,” said one; “it’s Master Andry Musnier.”
“He is one of the four copyists licensed by the University!” said another.
“Everything goes by fours in that shop,” cried a third,—“four nations, four faculties, four great holidays, four proctors, four electors, four copyists.”
“Very well, then,” answered Jehan Frollo; “we must play the devil with them by fours.”
“Musnier, we’ll burn your books.”
“Musnier, we’ll beat your servant.”
“Musnier, we’ll hustle your wife.”
“That good fat Mademoiselle Oudarde.”
“Who is as fresh and as fair as if she were a widow.”
“Devil take you!” growled Master Andry Musnier.
“Master Andry,” added Jehan, still hanging on his capital, “shut up, or I’ll fall on your head!”
Master Andry raised his eyes, seemed for a moment to be measuring the height of the column, the weight of the rascal, mentally multiplied that weight by the square of the velocity, and was silent.
Jehan, master of the field of battle, went on triumphantly:—
“I’d do it, though I am the brother of an arch-deacon!”
“Fine fellows, our University men are, not even to have insisted upon our rights on such a day as this! For, only think of it, there is a Maypole and a bonfire in the Town; a miracle play, the Pope of Fools, and Flemish ambassadors in the City; and at the University—nothing!”
“And yet Maubert Square is big enough!” answered one of the scholars established on the window-seat.
“Down with the rector, the electors, and the proctors!” shouted Joannes.
“We must build a bonfire tonight in the Gaillard Field,” went on the other, “with Master Andry’s books.”
“And the desks of the scribes,” said his neighbor.
“And the beadles’ wands!”
“And the deans’ spittoons!”
“And the proctors’ cupboards!”
“And the electors’ bread-bins!”
“And the rector’s footstools!”
“Down with them!” went on little Jehan, mimicking a droning psalm-tune; “down with Master Andry, the beadles, and the scribes; down with theologians, doctors, and decretists; proctors, electors, and rector!”
“Is the world coming to an end?” muttered Master Andry, stopping his ears as he spoke.
“Speaking of the rector, there he goes through the square!” shouted one of those in the window.
Every one turned towards the square.
“Is it really our respectable rector, Master Thibaut?” asked Jehan Frollo du Moulin, who, clinging to one of the inner columns, could see nothing of what was going on outside.
“Yes, yes,” replied the rest with one accord, “it is really he, Master Thibaut, the rector.”
It was indeed the rector and all the dignitaries of the University going in procession to meet the ambassadors, and just at this moment crossing the Palace yard. The scholars, crowding in the window, greeted them, as they passed, with sarcasms and mock applause. The rector, who walked at the head of his company, received the first volley, which was severe:—
“Good-morning, Sir Rector! Hello there! Good-morning, I say!”
“How does he happen to be here, the old gambler? Has he forsaken his dice?”
“How he ambles along on his mule! The animal’s ears are not as long as his own.”
“Hello there! Good-day to you, Master Rector Thibaut! Tybalde aleator!f old fool! old gambler!”
“God keep you! did you throw many double sixes last night?”
“Oh, look at his lead-colored old face, wrinkled and worn with love of cards and dice!”
“Whither away so fast, Thibaut, Tybalde ad dados,g turning your back on the University and trotting straight towards town?”
“He’s probably going to look for a lodging in Tybaldice Street,” shouted Jehan du Moulin.
The entire band repeated the silly joke in a shout like thunder, and with frantic clapping of hands.
“You’re going to look for a lodging in Tybaldice Street, are you not, Sir Rector, you devil’s advocate?”
Then came the turn of the other officials.
“Down with the beadles! down with the mace-bearers!”
“Say, you Robin Poussepain, who’s that fellow yonder?”
“That’s Gilbert de Suilly, Gilbertus de Soliaco, Chancellor of the College of Autun.”
“Here’s my shoe; you’ve got a better place than I; fling it in his face.”
“Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces.”h
“Down with the six theologians in the white surplices!”
“Are those theologians? I thought they were six white geese given to the city by Saint Geneviève for the fief of Roogny.”
“Down with the doctors!”
“Down with all the pompous and jocose disputations.”
“Take my cap, Chancellor of St. Geneviève! You did me an injustice,—and that’s the truth; he gave my place in the nation of Normandy to little Ascanio Falzaspada, who belongs to the province of Bourges, being an Italian.”
“Rank injustice,” exclaimed all the students. “Down with the Chancellor of St. Geneviève.”
“Ho there, Master Joachim de Ladehors! Ho there, Louis Dahuille! Hollo, Lambert Hoctement!”
“May the devil smother the proctor of the German nation!”
“And the chaplains of the Holy Chapel, with their grey amices, cum tunicis grisis!”
“Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis!”i
“Ho there! you Masters of Arts! See all the fine black copes! See all the fine red copes!”
“That makes a fine tail for the rector!”
“You would think it was a Venetian doge on his way to wed the sea.”
“I say, Jehan! look at the Canons of St. Geneviève!”
“To the devil with all Canons!”
“Abbot Claude Choart! Doctor Claude Choart! Are you looking for Marie la Giffarde?”
“She lives in Glatigny Street.”
“She’s bedmaker to the king of scamps.”
“She’s paying her four farthings, quatuor denarios.”
“Aut unum bombum.”j
“Would you like her to pay you in the nose?”
“Comrades! there goes Master Simon Sanguin the Elector
from Picardy, with his wife behind him!”
“Post equitem sedet atra cura.”k
“Cheer up, Master Simon!”
“Good-day to you, Sir Elector!”
“Good-night to you, Madame Electress!”
“How lucky they are to see so much!” sighed Joannes de Molendino, still perched among the foliage of his column.
Meanwhile, the licensed copyist to the University, Master Andry Musnier, leaned towards the ear of the furrier of the king’s robes, Master Gilles Lecornu.
“I tell you, sir, this is the end of the world. The students never were so riotous before; it’s the cursed inventions of the age that are ruining us all,—artillery, bombards, serpentines, and particularly printing, that other German pestilence. No more manuscripts, no more books! Printing is death to bookselling. The end of the world is at hand.”
“So I see by the rage for velvet stuffs,” said the furrier.
At this instant the clock struck twelve.
“Ha!” cried the entire throng with but a single voice.
The students were silent. Then began a great stir; a great moving of feet and heads; a general outbreak of coughing and handkerchiefs; everybody shook himself, arranged himself, raised himself on tiptoe, placed himself to the best advantage. Then came deep silence; every neck was stretched, every mouth was opened wide, every eye was turned towards the marble table. Nothing was to be seen there. The four officers still stood stiff and motionless as four coloured statues. Every eye turned towards the dais reserved for the Flemish ambassadors. The door was still shut and the dais empty. The throng has been waiting since dawn for three things: noon, the Flemish ambassadors, and the mystery. Noon alone arrived punctually.
Really it was too bad.
They waited one, two, three, five minutes, a quarter of an hour; nothing happened. The dais was still deserted, the theater mute. Rage followed in the footsteps of impatience. Angry words passed from mouth to mouth, though still in undertones, to be sure. “The mystery! the mystery!” was the low cry.
