by Hugo, Victor
Then he retraced his steps, trying to find his bearings, ferreting around, sniffing the wind, ears alert, making every effort to find the blessed palliasse. But in vain. There was nothing but rows of houses intersecting, blind alleys, multiple crossroads, amidst which he was constantly hesitating and doubtful, more baffled and stuck in this tangle of dark alleys than he would have been in the actual maze of the Hôtel des Tournelles. In the end he lost patience and solemnly exclaimed: ‘A curse on crossroads! It’s the devil who made them in the image of his fork!’
This outburst made him feel a bit better, and a kind of reddish reflection which he noticed just then at the end of a long, narrow alley completed the restoration of his morale. ‘Praise God!’ he said. ‘There it is! That’s my palliasse burning.’ And comparing himself to the sailor foundering in the darkness:* ‘Salve,’ he added piously, ‘salve maris Stella [Hail, star of the sea].’*
Was he addressing this fragment of the litany to the Blessed Virgin or to the palliasse? We have absolutely no idea.
He had gone scarcely more than a few steps down the long alley, which was on a slope, unpaved and increasingly steep and muddy, when he noticed something rather peculiar. It was not empty. Here and there along its length vague, shapeless masses crawled, all moving towards the light flickering at the end of the street, like those heavy insects which at night drag themselves along from one blade of grass to the next towards a shepherd’s fire.
Nothing makes a man more adventurous than an empty feeling behind his waistband. Gringoire kept on, and had soon caught up with the most sluggish of these larva-like shapes, which trailed behind the others. As he approached he saw that it was quite simply a wretched cripple with no legs, hopping along on his hands, like a maimed daddy-long-legs with only two feet left. Just as he passed this species of spider with a human face, it lifted up to him a piteous voice:
‘La buona mancia, signor! la buona mancia! [Alms, sir! alms!]’*
‘The devil take you,’ said Gringoire, ‘and me with you, if I know what you mean!’
And he passed on.
He caught up with another of these moving shapes and examined it. It was a cripple, short of both a leg and an arm, and so mutilated that the complicated system of crutches and wooden legs which held him up made him look like a builder’s scaffolding on the move. Gringoire, ready with noble Classical comparisons, mentally compared him with Vulcan’s living tripod.
The living tripod saluted him as he went by, but by raising his hat no higher than Gringoire’s chin, like a shaving-dish, and crying in his ear: ‘Señor caballero, para comprar un pedaso de pan! [Noble sir, to buy a crust of bread!]’*
‘It seems,’ said Gringoire, ‘that this one talks too; but it’s a harsh tongue, and he is more fortunate than I if he understands it.’
Then, striking his forehead at a sudden switch of ideas: ‘Come to think of it, what the devil did they mean this morning with their Esmeralda?
He tried to walk faster; but for the third time something obstructed his path. This something, or rather someone, was a blind man, a little blind man with a bearded Jewish face, who, as he swept the area round him with a stick, with a big dog towing him along, said in a nasal Hungarian accent: ‘Facitote caritatem! [Give of your charity!].’
‘That’s good!’ said Pierre Gringoire; ‘here at last is one who speaks a Christian language. I must have a very eleemosynary look about me for anyone to ask for my charity with my purse as lean as it is. My friend,’ and he turned towards the blind man, ‘I sold my last shirt last week; that is, since you only understand Cicero’s language: Vendidi hebdomada nuper transita meam ultimam chemisam.’*
Saying which, he turned his back on the blind man and continued on his way; but the blind man began to lengthen his stride at the same time as he did, and then up came the cripple, up came the legless man, in great haste and with a great din from the wooden bowl holding the stump of the one and from the crutches supporting the other, clattering over the stones. Then all three, jostling close behind Gringoire, began singing their song at him:
‘Caritatemr sang the blind man.
‘La buona mancia!’ sang the legless man.
And the cripple took up the musical phrase as he repeated: ‘Un pedaso de pan!’
Gringoire stopped up his ears. ‘Oh, Tower of Babel!’ he cried.
He started to run. The blind man ran. The cripple ran. The legless man ran.
And then, as he plunged further down the street, legless men, blind men, cripples, swarmed round him, and men with one arm, or with one eye, and lepers with their sores, some coming out of the houses, some from little side streets, some from the cellar openings, shouting, bellowing, yelping, all hobbling, bobbing along, hurrying towards the light, wallowing in the mire like slugs after rain.
Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not too sure what was going to come of all this, walked in dismay among the others, turning the cripples aside, stepping over the ones with no legs, getting his feet tangled in this anthill of the disabled, like the English captain who was sucked under by an army of crabs.
It occurred to him to try to retrace his steps. But it was too late. The whole legion had closed ranks behind him, and his three beggars held him fast. So he went on, driven at once by this irresistible tide, by fear, and by a dizziness which made it all seem to him like a horrible dream.
At last he reached the end of the street. It opened on to a huge square, where a thousand scattered lights flickered in the hazy night fog. Gringoire rushed into it, hoping that his fleetness of foot would enable him to escape from the three infirm spectres clinging on to him.
‘Onde vas, hombre? [Where are you going, man?]’ cried the cripple, throwing away his crutches and running after him on the best two legs that ever measured a full stride on the Paris pavements.
Meanwhile the legless man, standing on his own two feet, stuck his heavy iron-shod bowl over Gringoire’s head, and the blind man looked straight at him with blazing eyes.
‘Where am I?’ asked the terrified poet.
‘In the Court of Miracles,’ replied a fourth spectre who had accosted them.
‘Upon my soul,’ went on Gringoire, ‘I can see the blind watching and the lame running; but where is the Saviour?’
They answered with a burst of sinister laughter.
The poor poet looked around him. He was indeed in that redoubtable Court of Miracles, where no honest man had ever penetrated at such an hour; a magic circle where the officers of the Châtelet and the sergeants of the Provostry who ventured in disappeared in small bits; the thieves’ city, a hideous wen on the face of Paris; a sewer from which there seeped every morning and to which returned every night to stagnate that gutter stream of vice, beggary, and vagrancy which is always overflowing in the streets of capital cities; a monstrous hive to which all the hornets of the social order bring back their booty every evening; a counterfeit hospital where the gypsy, the unfrocked monk, the ruined student, the dregs of every nation, Spaniards, Italians, Germans, of every religion, Jews, Christians, Muslims, idolaters, covered in simulated sores, were beggars by day and at night transformed themselves into robbers; an immense changing room, in a word, where at that time all the actors dressed and undressed for the endless drama of robbery, prostitution, and murder played out in the Paris streets.
It was a vast open square, irregular and badly paved like all the Paris squares at that time. Fires, around which strange groups swarmed, glowed brightly here and there. Everything was hustle and bustle and shouting. Shrill laughter, small children squalling, women’s voices. The hands and heads of the people in this crowd, standing out dark against the luminous background, were silhouetted in one weird gesture after another. At times on the ground, where the light from the fires flickered and merged with great amorphous shadows, a dog could be seen going by, looking like a man, or a man, looking like a dog. Boundaries between races and species seemed to be erased in this city as in a pandemonium. Men, women, animal
s, sex, health, sickness, everything seemed to be held in common by these people; everything went together, mingled, merged, superimposed; everyone shared in everything.
The wavering, feeble illumination from the fires enabled Gringoire to make out, confused as he was, all round the vast square a hideous frame of old houses, whose rotten, shrivelled, stunted façades, each pierced by one or two lighted attic windows, looked to him in the darkness like the heads of old women, standing in a circle, monstrous and baleful, watching the witches’ sabbath with blinking eyes.
It was like a new world, unknown, unheard of, misshapen, reptilian, teeming, fantastic.
Gringoire, more and more frightened, gripped by the three beggars as though by three sets of pincers, deafened by a crowd of other faces barking all round him in a ceaseless swell, the unfortunate Gringoire tried to collect his wits together and remember whether it was a sabbath, a Saturday. But his efforts were in vain; the thread of his memory and his thoughts was broken; and doubting everything, drifting from what he saw to what he felt, he asked himself the insoluble question: ‘If I am, does this exist? If this exists, am I?’
At that moment a distinct cry went up from the buzzing throng that surrounded him: ‘Take him to the King! Take him to the King!’
‘Holy Virgin!’ muttered Gringoire, ‘the King of this place must be a he-goat.’
‘To the King! the King!’ every voice repeated.
They dragged him off. They vied with each other to get their clutches on him. But the three beggars would not let him go, and tore him away from the others, shouting: ‘He’s ours!’
The poet’s already ailing doublet gave its last gasp in the struggle.
As he crossed this awful square his dizziness cleared. After a few steps he had regained a sense of reality. He began to adjust to the atmosphere of the place. At the start fumes, a vapour, so to speak, had risen from his poet’s head, or perhaps, quite simply and prosaically, from his empty stomach and this, interposed between objects and himself, had let him glimpse them only through the incoherent haze of nightmare, through the obscurity of those dreams which blur every edge, distort every shape, piling up objects into disproportionate groups, inflating things into chimeras and people into phantoms. Gradually these hallucinations were succeeded by a vision less distraught and less exaggerating. Reality dawned around him, touched his sight, touched his feet, and bit by bit dismantled all the poetry of terror with which he had at first believed himself to be surrounded. He was forced to realize that he was not walking in the Styx but in the mire, that he was not being jostled by devils but by robbers; that it was not his soul that was at stake but quite simply his life (since he lacked the precious intermediary which so effectively conciliates thief and honest man: a purse). Finally, as he examined the orgy more closely and coolly, he fell from a witches’ sabbath to a tavern.
The Court of Miracles was in fact just a tavern, but a thieves’ tavern, as red with blood as with wine.
The sight that met his eyes, once his ragged escort delivered him at his destination, was not such as to bring him back to poetry, not even the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic, brutal reality of the tavern. If we were not in the fifteenth century, we should say that Gringoire had descended from Michelangelo to Callot.*
Round a great fire burning on a large round flagstone, with flames licking at the red-hot legs of a trivet which for the moment was empty, were set some worm-eaten tables, here and there, at random, without any pot-boy with an orderly eye having bothered to arrange them in parallel, or at least see that they did not intersect at too unusual an angle. On these tables glistened pots dripping wine and beer, and round these pots were gathered numerous Bacchic countenances, flushed from the fire and the wine. There was a jovial-looking man with a big belly loudly kissing a fleshy, thick-set harlot. There was a kind of sham soldier, narquois as they are called in argot, whistling as he unwound the dressing from his sham wound, and stretching his sound, healthy knee, wrapped up since morning in countless bindings; as the other side of the coin, a malingreux was getting his ‘God’s leg’* ready for the morning with celandine and ox-blood. Two tables away a coquillart, in full pilgrim’s garb, was spelling out the complaint of Sainte-Reine, not forgetting the chant and the nasal whine. Elsewhere a young hubin was having an epilepsy lesson from an old sabouleux who was teaching him the art of foaming at the mouth by chewing a bit of soap. Beside them a dropsy sufferer was deflating himself, and making four or five women thieves hold their noses as they squabbled at the same table over a child they had stolen that evening. All these circumstances, two centuries later, ‘seemed so ridiculous to the Court,’ as Sauval says, ‘that they were served up as a pastime to the King and an introduction to the royal ballet Night, divided into four parts and danced at the Petit-Bourbon theatre.’ ‘Never,’ adds an eye-witness of 1653, ‘have the sudden metamorphoses of the Court of Miracles been more felicitously depicted. Benserade prepared us for it with some very racy verses.’*
From all sides guffaws of laughter and obscene songs could be heard. Everyone played his own game, with comments and oaths, paying no heed to his neighbour. Pots banged together, rows broke out as they clashed, and when a pot was chipped from the impact rags were torn.
A big dog sat on its rump, looking at the fire. There were some children involved in this orgy. The stolen child cried and yelled. Another, a big lad of 4, sat with his legs dangling on a bench that was too high for him, with the table coming up to his chin, never saying a word. A third was solemnly using his finger to spread over the table the melted tallow dripping from a candle. A fourth small boy, squatting in the mud, was almost lost in a cauldron which he was scraping with a tile, producing a sound to make Stradivarius swoon.
A barrel stood by the fire, and on the barrel sat a beggar. It was the King on his throne.
Gringoire’s three captors led him before this barrel, and the whole Bacchanalia fell silent for a moment, except for the cauldron with the child inside.
Gringoire did not dare breathe or raise his eyes.
‘Hombre, quita tu sombrero [Man, take your hat off],’ said one of the three rogues who had claimed him; and before he had understood what that meant, the other had taken off his hat. A wretched bycocket, it is true, but still good for a day of sunshine or a day of rain. Gringoire sighed.
Meanwhile the King, from the top of his cask, addressed him: ‘What sort of rogue is this?’
Gringoire gave a start. That voice, although full of menace, recalled to him another voice which had that morning struck the first blow at his mystery play with its nasal whine in the midst of the audience: ‘Charity, please!’ He raised his head. It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.
Clopin Trouillefou, dressed up in his royal insignia, was no more and no less ragged; the sore on his arm had already disappeared. In his hand he carried one of those whips with white leather thongs used at that time by the sergeants of the wand for pushing back the crowd, and which were called boullayes. On his head he wore a kind of circular headgear, closed on top; but it was hard to tell whether it was a child’s padded bonnet or a king’s crown, the two are so much alike.
Meanwhile Gringoire, without knowing why, felt somewhat more hopeful at recognizing in the King of the Court of Miracles his cursed beggar from the Great Hall.
‘Maître,’ he stammered, ‘My lord … Sire … How should I address you?’ he said in the end, having reached the top note of his crescendo, and at a loss to know how to go still higher or come down again.
‘My lord, Majesty, comrade, address me as you please. But hurry up. What have you to say in your defence?’
‘In your defence,’ thought Gringoire. ‘I don’t like that.’ He replied, stuttering: ‘I am the man who this morning …’
‘By the devil’s nails!’ Clopin intervened, ‘your name, rogue, and no more. You stand before three mighty sovereigns: me, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Tunis, successor to the great coësre, supreme suzerain of the kingdom of Argot; Matth
ias Hunyadi Spicati, Duke of Egypt and Bohemia, that yellow old chap you see over there with a duster round his head; Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat fellow who isn’t listening to us, there fondling a harlot. We are your judges. You entered the kingdom of Argot without being an Argoteer, you violated the privileges of our city. You must be punished, unless you are a capon, a franc-mitou or a rifodé, that is in the argot of honest men, a thief, a beggar, or a vagrant. Are you anything of that sort? Justify yourself. State your occupation.’
‘Alas!’ said Gringoire, ‘I do not have that honour. I am the author …’
‘That’ll do,’ Trouillefou broke in, without letting him finish. ‘You’ll be hanged. It’s quite simple, messieurs, all you respectable citizens, we treat your people in our city just as you treat ours in yours. The same law that you apply to truands, the truands apply to you. It’s your fault if it’s a bad law. Now and then we need to see an honest man grimacing above the hempen collar; it makes the whole business honourable. Come on, friend, share out your rags gladly with these ladies. I’m going to have you hanged to amuse the truands and you’re going to give them your purse to drink to it. If you have some mumbo-jumbo to get through first, over there in that mortar there is a very fine stone God the Father which we stole from Saint-Pierre-aux-Bœeufs. You’ve got four minutes to cast your soul at his head.’
