by Hugo, Victor
BOOK SIX
I
AN IMPARTIAL LOOK AT THE OLD MAGISTRACY
A MOST fortunate person in the year of grace 1482 was the noble gentleman Robert d’Estouteville,* knight, Sieur of Beyne, baron of Ivri and Saint-Andry in la Marché, counsellor and chamberlain to the King, keeper of the Provostry of Paris. It was already close on seventeen years since he had, on 7 November 1465, in the year of the comet,1 received from the King this fine post of Provost of Paris, reputed more of a lordship than an office. Dignitas, says Joannes Loemnoeus, quae non cum exigua potestate politiam concernente, atque praerogativis multis et juribus conjuncta est [a dignity which is accompanied by no small power of police, and many prerogatives and rights]. A gentleman holding the King’s commission with letters of appointment going back to the time of the marriage* of Louis XI’s natural daughter to the Bastard of Bourbon was something wondrous in 1482. The same day that Robert d’Estouteville had replaced Jacques de Villiers as Provost of Paris, Maître Jean Dauvet replaced Messire Hèlye de Thorettes as First President of the Court of Parliament, Jean Jouvenel des Ursins supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of Chancellor of France, Regnault des Dormans relieved Pierre Puy of the post of Master of Requests in Ordinary in the King’s household. Now, upon how many heads had the presidency, the chancellorship, and the mastership fallen since Robert d’Estouteville had held the Provostship of Paris! It had been ‘granted into his keeping’ said the letters patent, and he had indeed kept it well. He had clung to it, embodied himself in it, identified himself with it. So much so that he had escaped the mania for change which possessed Louis XI, a distrustful, quarrelsome, hard-working king, bent on preserving through frequent appointments and dismissals the elasticity of his power. Moreover, the gallant knight had obtained for his son the reversion of his office, and for the past two years now the name of the noble Jacques d’Estouteville, Esquire, figured beside his own at the head of the register of the ordinary of the Provostry of Paris. A rare and signal favour indeed! It is true that Robert d’Estouteville was a good soldier, that he had loyally raised his pennon against the ‘League of the public weal’,* and had presented to the queen a most wonderful stag made of preserves on the day of her entry into Paris in 14[67].* He moreover enjoyed the friendship of Messire Tristan l’Hermite, Provost-Marshal of the King’s household. So it was a very agreeable and pleasant existence that Maître Robert led. First there was an excellent salary, to which were attached, hanging like extra bunches on his vine, the revenue from the civil and criminal registries of the Provostry, plus the revenues, civil and criminal, from the lower courts of the Châtelet, not to mention some small tolls from the bridges of Mantes and Corbeil, profits from the duty on blacksmiths’ iron in Paris, and from the assizers of firewood and inspectors of salt. Add to that the pleasure of displaying as he rode about the town his fine fighting dress (which you can still admire today carved on his tomb at the abbey of Valmont in Normandy), and his helmet, badly dented at Montlhéry,* all this contrasting with the half-red, half-tan robes of the échevins and quarteniers. And then, did it count for nothing to have supreme authority over the sergeants of the douzaine, the keeper and watch of the Châtelet, the two auditors of the Châtelet, auditores Castelleti, the sixteen commissioners of the sixteen districts, the gaoler of the Châtelet, the four hereditary sergeants, the hundred and twenty mounted sergeants, the hundred and twenty sergeants of the wand, or catchpoles, the captain of the watch with his watch, under-watch, counter-watch and rear-watch? Was it nothing to exercise justice, high and low, with the right to turn, hang, and draw, not to mention petty jurisdiction of first instance, in prima instantia, as the charters have it, over this viscounty of Paris, so splendidly appanaged with seven noble bailiwicks? Can any sweeter pleasure be imagined than that of passing sentence and judgement, as Messire Robert d’Estouteville did every day in the Grand Châtelet, beneath Philip-Augustus’s broad, flattened arches? And to go every evening, as was his wont, to that charming house in the rue Galilee, in the precincts of the Palais-Royal, which he held in the right of his wife, Madame Ambroise de Lore, to rest from the fatigue of sending some poor devil to spend his night in ‘that little cell in the rue de l’Escorcherie, which the provosts and échevins of Paris were wont to use as their prison; it being 11 feet long, 7 feet 4 inches wide and n feet high.’1
Not only did Messire Robert d’Estouteville have his personal right of justice as Provost and Viscount of Paris, he also had a share, as spectator and participant, in the King’s high justice. There was no head of any distinction which had not passed through his hands before falling to the executioner. He it was who had gone to fetch Monsieur de Nemours from the Bastille Saint-Antoine and bring him to the Halles, and to bring Monsieur de Saint-Pol to the Grève, despite the objections and protests of the same, much to the delight of Monsieur the Provost, who was no friend of Monsieur the Constable.*
That is certainly more than enough to make for a happy and illustrious life, and one day to earn a notable page in that interesting history of the Provosts of Paris, in which we learn that Oudard de Villeneuve had a house in the rue des Boucheries, that Guillaume de Hangest bought the Great and Little Savoy, that Guillaume Thiboust donated to the nuns of Sainte-Geneviève his houses in the rue Clopin, that Hugues Aubriot lived at the Hôtel du Pore-Épic, and other facts of a domestic nature.
However, with so many reasons for taking life with patience and enjoyment, Messire Robert d’Estouteville had woken up on the morning of 7 January 1482 very grumpy and in a vile temper. What had caused such a mood? He could not have explained it himself. Was it because the sky was grey? or because the buckle of his old swordbelt from Montlhéry had been pulled too tight, and constricted his provostial girth in too military a fashion? that he had seen in the street, passing by beneath his window, some ribald fellows making fun of him, a gang of four of them going along with no shirts under their doublets, no crowns to their hats, wallet and bottle at their side? Was it a vague premonition of the 370 livres 16 sous 8 deniers that the future King Charles VIII was going to cut from the income of the provostship? The reader can take his choice; for our part we should be inclined to believe quite simply that he was in a bad temper because he was in a bad temper.
Besides, it was the day following a holiday, a tiresome day for everyone, and above all for the magistrate responsible for clearing all the rubbish, literal and figurative, left by a holiday in Paris. Moreover he was due to hold a sitting at the Grand Châtelet. Now we have observed that judges generally arrange things so that the day when they are sitting is also the day when they are in a bad temper, in order always to have someone on whom to vent their spleen conveniently, in the name of the king, the law, and justice.
The hearing, however, had begun without him. His deputies for civil, criminal, and private cases were doing his job for him, as was customary, and since eight o’clock in the morning some scores of townsfolk, men and women, packed and squashed in a dark corner of the lower court of the Châtelet, between a stout oak barrier and the wall, had been blissfully looking at the varied and delightful spectacle of civil and criminal justice being dispensed by Maître Florian Barbedienne, auditor at the Châtelet, deputy to Monsieur the Provost, a little confusedly and quite at random.
The room was small, low, and vaulted. At the back was a table covered with fleurs-de-lys, with a great carved oak armchair, which was the Provost’s, and empty, and a stool on the left for the auditor, Maître Florian. Below sat the clerk of the court, scribbling away. Facing them were the people, and in front of the door and the table numerous provost sergeants in purple camlet tunics with white crosses. Two sergeants from the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, in their All Saints Day jacket, half red and half blue, stood guard before a low, closed door, visible at the back behind the table. A single pointed window, tightly set into the thick wall, let a wan beam of January daylight fall on two grotesque figures, the fanciful stone devil carved as a cul-de-lampe on the keystone of the vault, and the judge s
itting at the far end of the room upon the fleurs-de-lys.
Imagine, indeed, sitting at the Provost’s table, between two bundles of case documents, crouched down on his elbows, his foot on his robe of plain brown cloth, face buried in the white lambswool trimming, from which his eyebrows seemed to have been cut too, red-faced, surly, blinking, majestically carrying fat, fleshy cheeks which met beneath his chin, Maître Florian Barbedienne, auditor at the Châtelet.
Now the auditor was deaf—a slight defect in an auditor. Maître Florian none the less delivered his judgements without appeal and most appropriately. It is certainly enough for a judge to appear to be listening; and the venerable auditor fulfilled this condition, the only one essential to good justice, all the better for the fact that no noise could distract his attention.
For the rest, there was in the audience a merciless observer of his deeds and action in the person of our friend Jehan Frollo du Moulin, the young student of the day before, that rambler whom one was always sure to meet anywhere in Paris except in front of the professor’s chair.
‘Look,’ he said in an undertone to his companion, Robert Poussepain, who sniggered beside him as he gave a commentary on the scenes being enacted before their eyes, ‘there’s Jehanneton du Buisson, the pretty daughter of that idle dog at the Marché Neuf. ‘Pon my soul, the old man is finding her guilty. His sight’s no better than his hearing. 15 sous 4 deniers parisis for wearing two sets of beads! That’s a bit dear. Lex dun carminis [Law of the harsh formula]. Who’s that? Robin Chief-de-Ville, hauberk maker!—for having been passed and admitted master of the said trade?—that’s his entrance fee. Ha! two gentlemen among these rascals! Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly. Two esquires, corpus Christi! Oh! they’ve been playing dice. When shall I see our rector here?* A fine of a hundred livres parisis to the King! Old Barbedienne really lays it on—deaf to argument as he is! May I change places with my brother the archdeacon if that is going to stop me gambling, gambling day and night, living and dying a gambler, gambling away my soul when I’ve already lost my shirt! Holy Virgin, look at all those girls! One after another, my ewe lambs! Ambroise Lécuyère! Isabeau la Paynette! Bérarde Gironin! I know them all, by God! Fine them! fine them! That’ll teach you to wear gold belts! Ten sols parisisl Flibbertigibbets!—Oh! what a snout on that deaf old idiot of a judge! O Florian, you oaf! O Barbedienne, you clod! He’s making a meal of it! He gobbles up plaintiffs, gobbles up lawsuits, eats, chews, stuffs himself, crams himself to the brim. Fines, lost property, taxes, expenses, reasonable costs, wages, damages and interests, torture, prison, gaol, stocks with costs, are so much Christmas pie and midsummer marzipan for him! Look at the old pig! Right! good, another light of love! Thibaud la Thibaude, no less! For leaving the rue Glatigny!—Who is this fellow? Gieffroy Mabonne, crossbowman. He took the name of the Father in vain. Fine our Thibaude! Fine our Gieffroy! Fine them both! Deaf old fool! He must have mixed up the cases! Ten to one he makes the girl pay for swearing and the soldier for making love! Look out, Robert Poussepain! Who are they going to bring in? That’s a lot of sergeants! By Jove! all the hounds in the pack are there! They must have bagged something really big! A wild boar! It is a boar! It is, it is! And a fine one at that! By Hercules! It’s our prince from yesterday, our Pope of Fools, our bell-ringer, our one-eyed, grimacing hunchback! It’s Quasimodo!’
It was none other.
It was Quasimodo roped, trussed, tied, and bound, and heavily guarded. The squad of sergeants surrounding him was attended by the captain of the watch in person, bearing the arms of France embroidered on his chest and those of the town on his back. There was, however, nothing about Quasimodo, apart from his deformity, to justify this display of halberds and arquebuses. He was sullen, silent, and calm. His single eye just occasionally cast a covert look of anger at the bonds holding him.
He looked around him too, but in so lifeless and sleepy a way that the women only pointed him out to each other to scoff.
Meanwhile Maître Florian, the auditor, attentively leafed through the dossier of the charges brought against Quasimodo, which the clerk handed him, and once he had glanced at it, seemed to be reflecting for a moment. Thanks to this precaution, which he always made sure of taking just before proceeding to an interrogation, he knew in advance the names, titles, and offences of the accused, made expected rejoinders to expected answers, and managed to negotiate successfully all the twists and turns of the interrogation without making his deafness too obvious. The dossier of the case was for him like a dog to a blind man. If it so happened that his infirmity was revealed now and then by some inconsequential comment or some unintelligible question, some took it for profundity, others for imbecility. In both cases the honour of the magistracy remained intact; for it is much better that a judge should be reputed imbecile or profound than deaf. He therefore took great pains to conceal his deafness from all eyes, and usually succeeded so well that he had ended by deceiving himself. Besides, that is easier than one might think. All hunchbacks go about with their heads high, all stammerers hold forth, all deaf people mumble. As for him, he thought that at the very most his hearing was a little refractory. This was the only concession on the matter that he made to public opinion, in his moments of frankness and self-examination.
Thus, having duly ruminated over Quasimodo’s case, he threw back his head and half closed his eyes, to appear more majestic and impartial, with the result that at that moment he was at once deaf and blind—twin conditions without which no judge is perfect. It was in this magisterial attitude that he commenced his interrogation.
‘Your name?’
Now here we have a case which had not been ‘foreseen by the law’, that of one deaf man having to interrogate another.
Quasimodo, wholly unaware of the question addressed to him, continued to stare at the judge and did not answer. The judge, deaf, and wholly unaware that the accused was deaf, thought that he had answered, as all accused persons generally did, and went on with his stupid and mechanical self-assurance.
‘Right. Your age?’
Quasimodo did not answer this question either. The judge thought it had been answered, and continued:
‘Now, your calling?’
The same silence as before. The audience, however, began to whisper and exchange looks.
‘That will do,’ went on the imperturbable auditor when he assumed that the accused had completed his third answer. ‘You stand accused before us: primo, of causing nocturnal disturbance; secundo, of indecent assault against the person of a loose woman, in praejudicium meretricis [to the detriment of a harlot]; tertio, of rebellious and disloyal conduct towards the archers of the ordinance of the king, our master. Explain yourself on all these points—clerk, have you written down what the accused has said so far?’
At this unfortunate question a roar of laughter went up from the clerks to the public, so violent, uncontrollable, contagious, and universal that the two deaf men could not help noticing. Quasimodo turned round, scornfully shrugging his hump, while Maître Florian, as surprised as he was, and supposing the spectators’ laughter to have been provoked by some disrespectful reply from the accused, made visible for him by that scornful shrug, addressed him indignantly:
‘The answer you have just given, you rogue, deserves the halter! Do you know whom you are talking to?’
This outburst was not likely to halt an explosion of general mirth. It seemed so incongruous and irrelevant that the uncontrollable laughter spread even to the sergeants from the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, like knaves of spades whose stupidity was part of the uniform. Quasimodo alone remained serious, for the good reason that he could understand none of what was going on around him. The judge, increasingly angry, thought that he ought to continue in the same tone, hoping thus to strike such terror into the accused that it would react on the public and instil some respect in them once more.
