by Hugo, Victor
Those who, like ourselves, never pass by the Place de Grève without sparing a look of pity and sympathy for that poor turret, squeezed between two ramshackle Louis XIV buildings, can easily reconstruct in their mind’s eye the whole collection of buildings to which it belonged and thus recreate in its entirety the old Gothic Place of the fifteenth century.
It formed, as it does today, an irregular trapezium, bounded on one side by the river quay, and on the other three by a series of tall, narrow, gloomy houses. In the daytime one could admire the variety of its buildings, all carved in stone or wood, and already offering complete samples of the different types of medieval domestic architecture, going back from the fifteenth through to the eleventh century, from the casement which was beginning to oust the ogive, back to the round Romanesque arch which the ogive had supplanted, and which still occupied, beneath the ogive, the first floor of that ancient house of the Tour-Roland, in the corner of the Place giving on to the Seine, on the rue de la Tannerie side. At night all that could be distinguished of this mass of buildings was the dark serrated outline of the roofs unfolding their chain of acute angles round the Place. For one of the basic differences between towns then and now is that today it is the façades which look on to squares and streets, while then it was the gables. For the past two centuries houses have turned about.
In the centre of the eastern side of the Place rose a heavy, heterogeneous construction consisting of three houses in juxtaposition. It was known by three names, explaining its history, purpose, and architecture: the Maison du Dauphin., because Charles V as Dauphin had lived there; the Marchandise, because it served as the Town Hall; the Maison-aux-Piliers (domus ad pilorid), because of a series of large pillars supporting its three storeys. There the town could find everything that a good town like Paris needs: a chapel, for prayer; a courtroom, for hearing pleas, and, if necessary, putting the King’s men in their place; and in the loft, an arsenal full of artillery. For the burghers of Paris know that it is not enough in every contingency to pray or to plead for the freedoms of the City, and always have in reserve in a loft of the Hôtel de Ville some good old rusty arquebus.
The Grève then already had the sinister aspect still preserved today by the execrable image it evokes, and Dominique Boccador’s* gloomy Hôtel de Ville, which has replaced the Maison-aux-Piliers. It must be said that a permanent gallows and pillory, a ‘justice’ and a ‘ladder’ as they were then called, standing side by side in the middle of the paving, contributed not a little to making people avert their gaze from this fatal site, where so many beings full of life and health had breathed their last; where fifty years later was to be born that Saint-Vallier’s* fever, that sickness which is a terror of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all sicknesses, because it comes not from God but from man.
It is a comforting thought, be it said in passing, that the death penalty which, three hundred years ago still cluttered up with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, its whole apparatus of punishment permanently fixed into the pavement, the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Croix-du-Trahoir, the Marché-aux-Pourceaux, the hideous Montfaucon, the Barrière des Sergents, the Place-aux-Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint-Jacques, not to mention the countless ‘ladders’ of the provosts, the bishop, the chapter, the abbots, the priors with rights of jurisdiction; not to speak of judicial execution by drowning in the river Seine; it is comforting to think that today, having lost one by one all the pieces of her armour, her profusion of torments, her imaginative and fanciful punishments, her torture for which she had a new leather bed made every five years at the Grand Châtelet, that old sovereign ruler of feudal society, almost expelled from our laws and our towns, hunted from code to code, driven from place to place, has nothing left in all our vast city of Paris but one dishonoured corner of the Grève, one wretched guillotine, furtive, anxious, ashamed, seemingly always afraid of being caught red-handed, to judge by the haste with which it disappears once it has done its job.
III
BBS OS PARA GOLPES*
BY the time Pierre Gringoire reached the Place de Grève he was numb with cold. He had gone by way of the Pont-aux-Meuniers to avoid the throng at the Pont-au-Change and Jehan Fourbault’s banners; but the wheels of all the bishop’s water-mills had splashed him as he went by and his smock was wringing wet. Moreover, the failure of his play seemed to have made him feel the cold much more. So he hurried to get near the splendid bonfire blazing in the middle of the square. But a considerable crowd was massed all round it.
‘Damned Parisians!’ he said to himself, for Gringoire, like any true dramatic poet, was given to monologues; ‘now they’re blocking me from the fire! Yet I could really do with a fireside corner. My shoes leak and all those blasted mill-wheels have given me a cold shower! Devil take the Bishop of Paris and his water-mills! I’d like to know what use a mill is to a bishop! Does he expect to change from being a bishop into a miller? If all he needs for that is my curse, then I freely give it to him, his cathedral, and his mills! Just see whether these idlers will move aside! What are they doing there, I ask you? They are having a warm; fine way to enjoy yourself! They’re watching a hundred faggots burn; a fine entertainment!’
Looking more closely, he realized that the circle was much wider than it needed to be for enjoying the warmth of the bonfire and that such a mass of spectators had not been attracted merely by the beauty of a hundred faggots blazing away.
In the huge open space left between the crowd and the fire, a girl was dancing.
Whether this girl was a human being, a fairy, or an angel was something that Gringoire, sceptical philosopher, ironic poet though he was, could not decide straight away, so fascinated was he by the dazzling vision.
She was not very tall, but her slim figure stood so boldly straight that she seemed to be so. She was dark, but one could see that in daylight her skin would have the fine golden glow of Andalusian and Roman women. Her small foot too was Andalusian, for it fitted both snugly and easily into her dainty shoe. She was dancing, turning, whirling on an old Persian carpet, thrown down carelessly beneath her feet; and each time her radiant face passed before you as she spun round her great, dark eyes flashed lightning.
Around her everyone gazed open-mouthed; and in truth, while she danced like that, to the thrumming of a tambourine held above her head by her two pure, shapely arms, slim, frail, lively as a wasp, with her golden unpleated bodice, her brightly coloured dress swirling out, her bare shoulders, her slender legs uncovered now and then by her skirt, her dark hair, her blazing eyes, she was a supernatural creature.
‘Truly,’ thought Gringoire, ‘she’s a salamander,* a nymph, a goddess, a Bacchante from Mount Maenalus!’*
Just then one of the braids of the ‘salamander’s’ hair came undone, and a small brass coin that was attached to it rolled on to the ground.
‘Oh no!’ he said, ‘she’s a gypsy.’
Every illusion had been dispelled.
She started to dance again. She picked up two swords from the ground, balanced them by the tips on her forehead and made them turn in one direction while she turned in the other. She was indeed quite simply a gypsy. But disenchanted though Gringoire was, the overall scene was not without glamour and magic: the bonfire cast a harsh red glare which flickered brightly over the circle of faces in the crowd, over the girl’s brown forehead, and on the square behind cast a pale reflection mingled with their wavering shadows, on one side upon the black, wrinkled old façade of the Maison-aux-Piliers, on the other on the stone arms of the gibbet.
Among the hundreds of faces stained scarlet by this glow, there was one which seemed even more absorbed than all the others in contemplating the dancer. It was a man’s face, austere, calm, sombre. This man, whose clothes were concealed by the crowd around him, did not look more than 35 years old; yet he was bald; at his temples he had scarcely more than a few scanty tufts of hair already grey; his broad, high forehead was beginning to be furrowed
with wrinkles; but in his deep-set eyes shone an extraordinary youthfulness, ardent vitality, intense passion. He never took his eyes off the gypsy girl, and while the wild 16-year-old danced and leaped about to the delight of all, his private reverie seemed to become more and more sombre. From time to time a smile and a sigh met on his lips, but the smile revealed more pain than the sigh.
Out of breath, the girl stopped at last, and the people applauded her warmly.
‘Djali,’ said the girl.
Then Gringoire saw a pretty little white she-goat come up, nimble, lively, glossy, with gilded horns, gilded hooves, a gilded collar; he had not noticed it before, for it had remained crouching up till then on a corner of the carpet, watching its mistress dance.
‘Djali,’ said the dancer, ‘now it’s your turn.’
And as she sat down, she gracefully held out her tambourine to the goat.
‘Djali,’ she continued, ‘what month of the year is it?’
The goat raised its foreleg and struck the tambourine once. It was indeed the first month of the year. The crowd applauded.
‘Djali,’ the girl went on, turning the tambourine round, ‘what day of the month is it?’ Djali raised her little golden hoof and struck the tambourine six times.
‘Djali,’ the gypsy continued, once more moving the tambourine about, ‘what hour of the day is it?’
Djali tapped seven times. At the same moment the clock on the Maison-aux-Piliers struck seven o’clock. The people marvelled.
‘There’s witchcraft behind that,’ said a sinister voice in the crowd. It was that of the bald man who never took his eyes off the gypsy girl.
She shuddered and turned away; but applause broke out, drowning the peevish exclamation. The applause in fact so effectively wiped it from her mind that she continued her questioning of the goat.
‘Djali, how does Maître Guichard Grand-Rémy, captain of the municipal pistoleers, behave in the Candlemas procession?’
Djali stood up on her hindlegs and began bleating as she marched, with such charming gravity that the entire circle of spectators burst out laughing at this parody of the self-centred piety of the pistoleer captain.
‘Djali,’ went on the girl, emboldened by her growing success, ‘how does Maître Jacques Charmolue, the King’s attorney in the ecclesiastical court, look when he preaches?’
The goat sat down on its rump and began bleating, waving its forelegs about so quaintly that, apart from the bad French and bad Latin, it was Jacques Charmolue to the life, gestures, accent, posture, and all.
And the crowd applauded even louder.
‘Sacrilege! Profanation!’ went on the bald man’s voice.
The gypsy girl turned round again.
‘Ah!’ she said, ‘it’s that nasty man!’ Then sticking out her lower lip, she pouted slightly in what seemed like a familiar expression with her, turned on her heel, and began collecting the crowd’s contributions in a tambourine.
All sorts of small coins rained down, grands blancs, petits blancs, targes, liards-à l’aigle* Suddenly she passed in front of Gringoire. He stuck his hand in his pocket in such a daze that she stopped. ‘Oh, hell!’ said the poet, finding reality, that is emptiness, at the bottom of his pocket. Meanwhile the pretty girl was there, looking at him with her huge eyes, holding out the tambourine, waiting. Gringoire was dripping with perspiration.
If he had had all the riches of Peru in his pocket he would certainly have given it all to the dancer; but Gringoire did not have Peru, and anyhow America had not yet been discovered.
Fortunately an unexpected incident came to his rescue. ‘Will you go away, you Egyptian locust?’ cried a shrill voice from the darkest corner of the Place. The girl turned round in fright. This was not the bald man’s voice now; it was a woman’s voice, pious and malicious.
However, this cry, which frightened the gypsy girl, delighted a band of children who were prowling about. ‘It’s the recluse from the Tour-Roland,’ they shouted, laughing wildly, ‘it’s the sachette* grumbling! Hasn’t she had any supper? Let’s fetch her some scraps from the public buffet.’
They all rushed off to the Maison-aux-Piliers.
Meanwhile Gringoire had taken advantage of the dancer’s confusion to disappear. The children’s shouts reminded him that he had not had any supper either. So he ran off to the buffet. But the little rascals ran faster than he did; when he got there they had cleared the board. There was not so much left as one of those wretched camichons* that sell for five sous the pound. All that remained on the wall were the delicate fleurs-de-lys, intertwined with rose bushes, painted in 1434 by Mathurin Biterne. That was not much of a supper.
Going to bed with no supper is tiresome enough; it is even less fun to go without supper and no prospect of a bed for the night. Gringoire had come to that. No bread, no bed; he saw necessity hemming him in on every side, and found necessity most unmannerly. He had long ago discovered the truth, that Jupiter created men in a fit of misanthropy and throughout the wise man’s life his fate lays siege to his philosophy. As for him, he had never known such a total blockade; he could hear his stomach rumbling in surrender, and thought it very unfair that ill fate should starve his philosophy into capitulation.
He was becoming more and more engrossed in this melancholy reverie when a song, strange but sweet, suddenly tore him out of it. It was the gypsy girl singing.
The same qualities held good for her voice as for her dancing and her beauty. It was indefinable and charming; something pure, resonant, airy, winged, so to speak. It flowed continuously in passages of soaring lyricism, melodies, unexpected cadences, then simple phrases sprinkled with sharp, sibilant notes, cascades of scales which would have defeated a nightingale, but where the harmony was always present, then softly rippling octaves, rising and falling like the young singer’s breast. Her lovely features followed every caprice of her song with peculiar mobility, from the wildest inspiration to the chastest dignity. At one moment she seemed like a mad woman, at the next a queen.
She sang words in a language unknown to Gringoire, and apparently unknown to her too, so little did the expression she gave to her song relate to the sense of the words. Thus these four lines in her mouth expressed wild gaiety:
Un cofre de gran riqueza
Hallaron dentro un pilar,
Dentro del, nuevas banderas
Con figuras de espantar.
And a moment later she gave this verse such a tone that Gringoire felt the tears spring to his eyes:
Alarabes de cavallo
Sin poderse menear,
Con espadas, y los cuellos,
Ballestas de buen echar.*
Yet her song breathed joy above all, and she seemed to sing, like a bird, out of serene and carefree happiness.
The gypsy’s song had disturbed Gringoire’s reflections, but in the same way as a swan disturbs the water. He listened to it in a kind of trance, as if oblivious of all else. It was the first time for many hours that he felt no pain.
The moment was brief.
The voice of the same woman who had interrupted the gypsy-girl’s dance now interrupted her song.
‘Will you shut up, you cicada from hell?’ she cried, still from the same dark corner of the square.
The poor cicada stopped dead. Gringoire blocked up his ears. ‘Oh!’ he cried, ‘cursed toothless saw, come to break the lyre!’
Meanwhile the other spectators were grumbling like him. ‘Devil take the sachette!’ more than one was saying. And the invisible old spoil-sport might have had cause to regret her attacks on the gypsy if at that very moment they had not been distracted by the Pope of Fools’ procession, which after wending its way through many a street and crossing was now debouching into the Place de Grève with all its torches and clamour.
That procession, which our readers saw leaving the Palais, had been organized as it went along, and had recruited all that Paris had to offer by way of rogues, idle thieves, and available vagabonds, so that it was looking of respectabl
e size when it reached the Grève.
First came Egypt. The Duke of Egypt at the head, on horseback, with his counts on foot, holding his bridle and stirrups; behind them the Egyptian men and women in no particular order, with their small children yelling on their shoulders; all of them, the duke, counts, ordinary people, in rags and tinsel. Then came the realm of Argot, thieves’ cant; that is to say, all the thieves of France, ranked in order of dignity, the lowest going first. There thus filed by in column of four, wearing the different insignia of their degrees in this strange faculty, most of them disabled in some way, some limping, some with only one arm, the courtauds de boutanche, coquillarts, hubins, sabouleux, calots, francsmitoux, polissons, piètres, capons, malingreux, rifodés, marcandiers, narquois, orphans, archisuppôts, cagoux, an enumeration to make Homer weary. In the midst of the conclave of cagoux and archisuppôts, the King of Argot, or the great coësre,* could just be made out, squatting in a little cart drawn by two big dogs.* After the kingdom of the Argoteers came the empire of Galilee. Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee,* marched majestically in his purple, wine-stained, robe, preceded by mummers hitting each other and doing a war dance, surrounded by his mace-bearers, his henchmen and clerks from his counting-house. Last came the law clerks, the basoche,* with maypoles wreathed in flowers, their black gowns, music fit for a witches’ sabbath, and great candles of yellow wax. In the middle of this crowd the high officers of the confraternity of Fools bore on their shoulders a litter more heavily laden with candles than the reliquary of Sainte-Geneviève* in time of plague. And upon this litter shone in splendour, decked in cross, cope, and mitre, the new Pope of Fools, the bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, Quasimodo the Hunchback.
Each section of this grotesque procession had its own particular music. The Egyptians banged away on their balafos* and African tambourines. The Argoteers, an unmusical race, had progressed no further than the viol, the buccina, and the Gothic rebec of the twelfth century. The empire of Galilee was hardly more advanced; one could just make out in its music some wretched rebec from the infancy of the musical art, still confined to re-la-mi* But it was around the Pope of Fools that all the musical riches of the period were displayed in magnificent cacophony. It was all treble rebecs, counter-tenor rebecs, tenor rebecs, not to mention flutes and brass. Alas! our readers will recall that this was Gringoire’s orchestra!
