by Hugo, Victor
Alas! he was the only spectator of his play left.
It was much worse than it had been shortly before. Now all he could see was backs.
I am mistaken. The patient, stout man, whom he had already consulted at a critical moment, still faced the stage. As for Gisquette and Liénarde, they had long since deserted.
Gringoire was deeply moved by the loyalty of his sole spectator. He went up and spoke to him, gently shaking him by the arm; for the good man was leaning on the balustrade in a light doze.
‘Monsieur,’ said Gringoire, ‘thank you.’
‘Monsieur,’ the stout man answered with a yawn, ‘what for?’
‘I can see what’s bothering you,’ the poet went on; ‘with all this noise you can’t hear properly. But don’t worry, your name will go down to posterity. What is your name, if you please?’
‘Renault Château, keeper of the seal at the Châtelet, in Paris, at your service.’
‘Monsieur, you are the only representative of the Muses here,’ said Gringoire.
‘You are too kind, monsieur,’ answered the keeper of the seal at the Châtelet.
‘You are the only one to have given the play a proper hearing. What do you think of it?’
‘Eh, eh!’ the stout magistrate answered, ‘pretty lively, to be sure.’
Gringoire had to be content with this word of praise, for thunderous applause, accompanied by a tremendous burst of cheering, cut short their conversation. The Pope of Fools had been elected.
‘Noël! Noël! Noël!’ cried people on every side.
It was indeed a quite marvellous grimace that was just then beaming through the hole in the rose-window. After all the faces, pentagonal, hexagonal, and irregular, which had succeeded each other at the window without ever achieving the grotesque ideal that imaginations fevered by the orgy had composed, it took nothing less to carry their vote than the sublime grimace which had just dazzled the assembly. Maître Coppenole himself applauded; and Clopin Trouillefou, who had been a competitor, and goodness knows the intense degree of ugliness his face could attain, confessed himself beaten. We shall do likewise. We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedral nose, that horseshoe mouth, that tiny left eye obscured by a shaggy red eyebrow, while the right eye lay completely hidden beneath an enormous wart. Those irregular teeth, with gaps here and there like the battlements of a fortress, that calloused lip, over which one of those teeth protruded like an elephant’s tusk, that cleft chin, and above all the facial expression extending over the whole, a mixture of malice, amazement, and sadness. Conjure up, if you can, this overall effect.
The acclamation was unanimous. Everyone rushed to the chapel. From it they brought in triumph the blessed Pope of Fools. But it was then that surprise and wonder reached their peak. The grimace was his ordinary face.
Or rather his whole person was grimace. A large head bristling with red hair; between his shoulders an enormous hump, the effects of which were also visible in front; an assemblage of thighs and legs so strangely distorted that they touched only at the knees and, from the front, looked like two sickle blades joined at the handle; big feet, monstrous hands; and with all that deformity a certain air of fearsome energy, agility, and courage; a strange exception to the eternal rule which says that strength, like beauty, results from harmony. Such was the pope whom the fools had just given themselves.
He looked like a giant, broken into pieces and then badly mended.
When this kind of Cyclops appeared at the entrance to the chapel, motionless, squat, and almost as broad as he was tall, ‘squared by the base’ as a great man* put it, his surcoat, half red, half violet, sprinkled with silver bells, and above all his quite perfect ugliness, at once enabled the people to recognize him, and they cried with one voice:
‘It’s Quasimodo, the bell-ringer! It’s Quasimodo the hunchback of Notre-Dame! One-eyed Quasimodo! Bandy-legged Quasimodo! Noël! Noël!’
The poor devil clearly had a choice of nicknames.
‘Watch out, any pregnant women!’ shouted the students.
‘Or any who want to be,’ Joannes put in.
The women were indeed hiding their faces.
‘Oh! the ugly monkey,’ said one.
‘As wicked as he’s ugly,’ put in another.
‘He is the devil,’ added a third.
‘I’m unlucky enough to live near Notre-Dame; all night long I hear him prowling about in the guttering.’
‘With the cats.’
‘He’s always up on our roofs.’
‘He casts spells on us down the chimney.’
‘The other evening he came to make faces at me through my attic window. I thought it was some man. I was so scared!’
‘I’m sure he goes to the witches’ sabbath. Once he left a broomstick on my roof-leads.’
‘Oh! what a horrid-looking hunchback!’
‘Oh! the evil soul!’
‘Ugh!’
The men, on the contrary, were delighted and applauded.
Quasimodo, object of the uproar, still stood at the chapel door, sombre and serious, letting them admire him.
A student, Robin Poussepain, I think, went up to laugh in his face, but came too near. Quasimodo contented himself with seizing him round the waist and hurling him ten yards into the crowd. All without uttering a word.
Maître Coppenole, struck with wonder, approached him. ‘By the Rood! Holy Father, you are the most beautifully ugly thing I’ve ever seen in my life. You deserve to be pope in Rome as well as Paris.’
So saying he cheerfully clapped him on the shoulder. Quasimodo did not stir. Coppenole went on. ‘You’re a fellow I’m longing to share a feast with, even if it cost me one of those big new douzains* What say you?’
Quasimodo made no reply.
‘By the Rood!’ said the hosier; ‘are you deaf?’
He was indeed deaf.
However, he was beginning to get tired of Coppenole’s behaviour, and suddenly turned on him, grinding his teeth so fearfully that the Flemish giant retreated, like a bulldog before a cat.
Then terror and respect cleared round this strange personage a circle at least fifteen geometrical paces in radius. An old woman explained to Maître Coppenole that Quasimodo was deaf.
‘Deaf!’ said the hosier with his coarse Flemish laugh. ‘Holy Rood! He’s the perfect pope!’
‘Eh! I know who he is,’ cried Jehan, who had finally come down from his capital for a closer look at Quasimodo; ‘he’s my brother the archdeacon’s bell-ringer. Hello, Quasimodo!’
‘Devil of a man!’ said Robin Poussepain, still aching and bruised all over from his fall. ‘He appears: he’s a hunchback. He walks: he’s bandy-legged. He looks at you: he’s one-eyed. You speak to him: he’s deaf. Well then, what’s his tongue for, this Polyphemus?’
‘He speaks when he wants to,’ said the old woman. ‘He went deaf from ringing the bells. He’s not dumb.’
‘That’s one defect missing,’ observed Jehan.
‘And he has one eye too many,’ added Robin Poussepain.
‘No he hasn’t,’ said Jehan judiciously. ‘A man with one eye is more imperfect than a completely blind one. He knows what he hasn’t got.’
Meanwhile all the beggars, all the lackeys, all the cutpurses had joined the students and gone in procession to fetch from the lawyers’ wardrobe the pasteboard tiara and mock chimer kept for the Pope of Fools. Quasimodo let them robe him without a flicker of protest and with a kind of proud docility. Then they seated him on a gaudy litter. Twelve officers of the confraternity of fools lifted him on to their shoulders; and a kind of bitter, contemptuous pleasure spread over the Cyclops’ sullen face as he saw beneath his misshapen feet the heads of handsome, straight-limbed, well-made men. Then the yelling, ragged procession moved off on the traditional inner circuit of the galleries of the Palais before parading through the streets and crossroads.
VI
LA ESMERALDA
WE are delighted to be able t
o inform our readers that during the whole of this scene Gringoire and his play had stood fast. His actors, with him spurring them on, had not left off declaiming his comedy, and he had not left off listening. He had come to terms with the din, and was determined to go on to the end, not abandoning the hope of regaining the people’s attention. This glimmer of hope revived when he saw Quasimodo, Coppenole, and the deafening procession escorting the Pope of Fools noisily leave the hall. The crowd rushed eagerly after them. ‘Good,’ he thought, ‘there go all the trouble-makers.’ Unfortunately all the trouble-makers were all the public. In a twinkling the Great Hall was empty.
Some spectators did in fact still remain, some scattered about, others grouped round the pillars, women, old folk, and children, who had had their fill of uproar and commotion. A few students had stayed astride the window ledges and were looking out on to the Place.
‘Well,’ thought Gringoire, ‘there are still enough left to hear the end of my mystery. There are only a few, but it is a superior kind of audience, an educated audience.’
After a moment a symphony, intended to produce a striking effect as the Holy Virgin arrived, failed to materialize. Gringoire realized that his band had been taken off by the procession of the Pope of Fools. ‘Carry on,’ he said stoically.
He approached a group of citizens who, he thought, were discussing his play. He caught the following scrap of conversation:
‘You know, Maître Cheneteau, the Hôtel de Navarre, which used to belong to Monsieur de Nemours?’
‘Yes, opposite the chapel of Braque.’
‘Well, the tax people have just let it to Guillaume Alixandre, the decorator, for 6 livres 8 sous a year.’
‘How rents are going up!’
‘Come!’ Gringoire said to himself with a sigh, ‘the others are listening.’
‘Comrades!’ one of the young rascals on the window suddenly cried, ‘La Esmeralda! La Esmeralda’s in the Place!’
These words had a magical effect. All those left in the hall rushed to the windows, climbing up the walls to see, and repeated: ‘La Esmeralda! la Esmeralda!’
At the same time loud applause could be heard from outside.
‘What does that mean—la Esmeralda?’ said Gringoire, clasping his hands in despair. ‘Oh goodness, it seems to be the turn of the windows now.’
He turned round towards the marble table, and saw that the performance had been interrupted. This was just the moment when Jupiter was meant to appear with his thunderbolt. But Jupiter stood motionless below the stage.
‘Michel Giborne,’ the poet cried angrily, ‘what are you doing there? Is that your part? Get up there, will you!’
‘Alas!’ said Jupiter, ‘one of the students has just taken the ladder.’
Gringoire looked. It was only too true. All communication had been severed between his dramatic knot and its resolution.
‘The rogue!’ he muttered. ‘And why did he take the ladder?’
‘To go and see la Esmeralda,’ Jupiter pathetically replied. ‘He said: “Well now, here’s a ladder no one is using!” and took it.’
This was the final blow. Gringoire accepted it with resignation. ‘Devil take you!’ he said to the actors; ‘and if I get paid you will be.’
Then he retreated, head bowed, but the last to go, like a general who has fought well.
And as he went down the winding stairs of the Palais he grumbled between his teeth: ‘These Parisians are a fine lot of asses and boors; they come to see a mystery play, and don’t listen to a word! They took an interest in everyone, Clopin Trouillefou, the cardinal, Coppenole, Quasimodo, the devil! but not a bit of interest in Our Lady the Virgin Mary. If I’d known, I’d have given you Virgin Marys, you nosy idlers! As for me, I come expecting to see faces and see nothing but backs! To be a poet and have as much success as an apothecary! It’s true Homerus went round the Greek villages begging, and Naso* died in exile among the Muscovites. But may the devil flay me if I understand what they mean with their Esmeralda! What sort of word is that anyhow? It’s Egyptiac!’
BOOK TWO
I
FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA
NIGHT comes early in January. The streets were already dark when Gringoire left the Palais. He was pleased that night had fallen; he was longing to find some dark lonely alley where he could ponder at leisure and where the philosopher could apply first aid to the wound suffered by the poet. Philosophy was in any case his only refuge, for he did not know where he could stay. After the shattering fiasco of his first attempt at drama he did not dare go back to his previous lodgings in the rue Grenier-sur-l’Eau, opposite the Port-au-Foin, having counted on what Monsieur the Provost was to give him for the epithalamium to pay Maître Guillaume Doulx-Sire, who farmed the tax on cloven-footed beasts in Paris, the six months’ rent he owed, that is, 12 sols parisis; twelve times more than the value of all his worldly possessions, including his breeches, shirt, and bycocket hat. After a moment’s reflection, while he took temporary shelter beneath the small wicket-gate of the treasurer of the Sainte-Chapelle’s prison, as to where he might decide to spend the night, with all the cobblestones in Paris to choose from, he remembered having noticed the week before, in the rue de la Savaterie, in front of a parliamentary counsellor’s door, a mounting block for mule riders, which, he had thought, might, on occasion, provide an excellent pillow for a beggar or a poet. He thanked providence for sending him such a good idea, but as he was about to cross the Place du Palais to reach the tortuous labyrinth of the City, through which wind all those serpentine old sisters, the rues de la Barillerie, de la Vieille-Draperie, de la Savaterie, de la Juiverie etc., still standing today with their nine-storey houses, he saw the Pope of Fools’ procession also leaving the Palais and rushing across his path, with loud shouts, bright torchlight, and his, Gringoire’s, band. The sight opened up again the lacerating injuries inflicted on his self-esteem: he fled. In the bitterness of his dramatic misadventures, anything that reminded him of the day’s celebration soured him and made his wound bleed again.
He intended to take the Pont Saint-Michel; children were running about on the bridge with squibs and rockets.
‘A plague on all fireworks!’ said Gringoire and fell back on the Pont-au-Change. On the houses at the approach to the bridge had been hung three banners representing the King, the Dauphin and Marguerite of Flanders, and six smaller banners portraying the Duke of Austria, the Cardinal de Bourbon, Monsieur de Beaujeu, Madame Jeanne de France, Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon, and someone or other besides; all lit up by torches. The crowd was full of admiration.
‘He’s a lucky painter, that Jehan Fourbault!’ said Gringoire with a deep sigh, and turned his back on the banners, large and small. A street opened in front of him; he found it so dark and deserted that he hoped to escape there from all the echoes and illuminations of the festival. He plunged down it. After a moment or two he stubbed his foot on an obstacle; he stumbled and fell. It was the May bundle* which the law clerks had put down that morning at the door of a parliamentary president in honour of the feast day. Gringoire heroically endured this new encounter. He picked himself up and reached the water’s edge. Leaving behind him the Tournelle civile and the Tour criminelle, and following the great wall of the king’s gardens along the unpaved river bank where the mud came up to his ankles, he came to the westernmost tip of the City, and stayed for a while looking at the little island of the cow-ferryman, passeur-aux-vaches, which has since disappeared beneath the bronze horse and the Pont-Neuf. The little island appeared in the shadows like a dark mass on the far side of the pale strip of water separating him from it. One could just make out by the beams of a little light a sort of hut, shaped like a beehive, where the ferryman sheltered at night.
‘Lucky cow-ferryman!’ thought Gringoire: ‘You don’t have dreams of glory and you don’t write epithalamia! What do kings’ weddings and duchesses of Burgundy matter to you! The only marguerites you know are the daisies that your April meadow gives your cows to gra
ze on! And I, a poet, am booed, and stand shivering with cold, and owe 12 sous, and the soles of my shoes have worn so thin that they are transparent enough to serve as glass for your lantern. Thank you, cow-ferryman, your cabin is a restful sight and makes me forget Paris!’
He was woken out of his almost lyrical ecstasy by a great double petard suddenly exploding from the blessed cabin. It was the ferryman contributing to the day’s celebrations and letting off a firework. This petard made Gringoire bristle.
‘Cursed festival!’ he cried. ‘Are you going to pursue me everywhere? Oh God! even to the ferryman’s!’
Then he looked down at the Seine at his feet, and was seized with a horrible temptation.
‘Oh!’ he said, ‘how gladly would I drown myself if the water weren’t so cold!’ Then he came to a desperate decision. It was this: since he could not escape the Pope of Fools, Jehan Fourbault’s banners, May bundles, squibs, and petards, he would boldly plunge into the very heart of the festivities and go to the Place de Grève.
‘At least,’ he thought,’ I may find there a brand from the bonfire to warm me up, and find a crumb for supper from the three great coats of arms worked in royal sugar they are bound to have set up there on the buffet offered to the public by the Town.’
II
THE PLACE DE GRÈVE
TODAY there remains only one quite imperceptible trace of the Place de Grève as it then existed. That is the charming turret which occupies the northern corner of the Place and which, already buried beneath the ignoble coats of distemper which clog the bold lines of its carvings, will perhaps soon have disappeared, submerged by the rising flood of new buildings so rapidly swallowing up all the old façades of Paris.
