by Hugo, Victor
‘So, Gringoire, you have never felt envious of those handsome lads in their military actons?’
‘Envious of what, Monsieur the Archdeacon? Their strength, their armour, their discipline? Better philosophy and independence in rags. I’d rather be a fly’s head than a lion’s tail.’
‘That’s odd,’ the priest said thoughtfully. ‘A fine uniform is fine all the same.’
Gringoire, seeing him sunk in thought, left him and went to admire the porch of a house nearby. He came back clapping his hands. ‘If you were less preoccupied with the fine clothes of the army, Monsieur the Archdeacon, I would ask you to go and look at that door. I have always said Sieur Aubry’s house has the most superb entrance in the world.’
‘Pierre Gringoire,’ said the archdeacon, ‘what have you done with that little gypsy dancer?’
‘La Esmeralda? That’s a very abrupt change of subject.’
‘Wasn’t she your wife?’
‘Yes, with the help of a broken pitcher. We were to have four years’ worth. By the way,’ Gringoire added, looking at the archdeacon, half mockingly, ‘you still think of her, then?’
‘What about you, don’t you think of her any more?’
‘Not much—I have so many things—goodness, what a pretty little goat that was!’
‘Didn’t the gypsy once save your life?’
‘That’s true, by God.’
‘Well! what’s become of her? What have you done with her?’
‘I can’t tell you. I believe they hanged her.’
‘You believe?’
‘I’m not sure. Once I saw they were intending to hang someone, I threw in my hand.’
‘That’s all you know about her?’
‘Wait a moment. I was told she had taken refuge in Notre-Dame, and that she was safe there, and I’m delighted, and I haven’t been able to discover whether the goat got away with her, and that’s all I know about it.’
‘I’m going to tell you more,’ cried Dom Claude, and his voice which had been up till then quiet, slow, and almost muffled, had become thunderous. ‘She has indeed taken refuge in Notre-Dame. But in three days’ time justice will take her back from there and she will be hanged in the Grève. There’s a decree of Parliament.’
‘That’s awkward,’ said Gringoire.
The priest, in a flash, had become cold and calm again.
‘But who the devil,’ the poet went on, ‘had nothing better to do than apply for a decree of reintegration? Couldn’t they leave Parliament alone? What does it matter if a poor girl shelters under the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame beside the swallows’ nests?’
‘There are satans in the world,’ the archdeacon replied.
‘That’s a devilish bad start,’ Gringoire observed.
The archdeacon went on after a silence: ‘So she saved your life?’
‘When I was with my good friends the truands. I came within a hair’s breadth of being hanged. They would be upset today if I had been.’
‘Wouldn’t you like to do something for her?’
‘I should like nothing better, Dom Claude. But suppose it meant getting all tangled up with something nasty round my body?’
‘What does that matter?’
‘Ha! what does that matter! You are too kind, master! I have two major works already begun.’
The priest struck his forehead. Despite the calm he affected a violent gesture revealed from time to time his inner turmoil. ‘How is she to be saved?’
Gringoire said to him: ‘Master, my answer to you is Il padelt, which is Turkish for God is our hope!’*
‘How can she be saved?’ Claude repeated thoughtfully.
Gringoire in his turn smote his forehead.
‘Listen, master, I’m a man with imagination. I’ll find expedients for you—suppose we asked the King for a pardon?’
‘Louis XI? Pardon?’
‘Why not?’
‘Try taking a bone away from a tiger!’
Gringoire started looking for fresh solutions. ‘All right! Wait—would you like me to address a request to the matrons with a declaration that the girl is pregnant?’
That brought a glint to the priest’s sunken eyes.
‘Pregnant! you rascal! Have you any knowledge of that?’
Gringoire was frightened by his expression. He said hastily: ‘Oh! not me! Our marriage was a real foris maritagium [marriage to an outsider]. I stayed outside. But at least we’d get a stay of execution.’
‘Madness! Infamy! Hold your tongue!’
‘You’re wrong to lose your temper,’ muttered Gringoire. ‘We get a stay. That does no one any harm, and it makes 40 deniers parisis for the matrons, who are poor women.’
The priest was not listening to him. ‘She must get out of there, all the same!’ he murmured. ‘The decree has to be executed within three days! Besides, even if there were no decree, that Quasimodo! Women have the most depraved tastes!’ He raised his voice: ‘Maître Pierre, I have given much thought to it; there’s only one way to save her.’
‘What’s that? I can’t see one.’
‘Listen, Maître Pierre, remember that you owe her your life. I’ll tell you my idea quite frankly. The church is watched day and night. No one is allowed out but those who have been seen going in. So you’ll be able to get in. You’ll go there. I’ll take you in to her. You’ll change clothes with her. She’ll take your doublet, you’ll take her skirt.’
‘Fine so far,’ observed the philosopher. ‘And then?’
‘And then? She’ll go out in your clothes; you’ll stay behind in hers. Maybe they’ll hang you, but she’ll be saved.’
Gringoire scratched his ear with a very serious look.
‘Well now,’ he said, ‘that’s an idea which would never have occurred to me just like that.’
At Dom Claude’s unexpected proposal, the poet’s open, kindly face had suddenly darkened, like some smiling Italian landscape when an untimely gust of wind blows up and blots out the sun with a cloud.
‘Well, Gringoire? What do you say to my scheme?’
‘What I say, master, is that they won’t hang me maybe, but will hang me indubitably.’
‘That’s not our concern.’
‘Plague on it!’ said Gringoire.
‘She saved your life. You’ll be paying off a debt.’
‘There are plenty of other debts I haven’t paid!’
‘Maître Pierre, it simply has to be done.’
The archdeacon spoke with authority.
‘Listen, Dom Claude,’ the poet replied in consternation, ‘you are keen on this idea, and you’re wrong. I don’t see why I should have myself hanged in another person’s place.’
‘What do you have that makes you so attached to life?’
‘Ah! innumerable reasons!’
‘Such as, if you please?’
‘Such as? Air, sky, morning, evening, moonlight, my good friends the truands, taunting the drabs with them, the beauties of Paris architecture to study, three big books to write, one of them against the bishop and his watermills, I don’t know what else. Anaxagoras used to say that he was in the world to admire the sun. Moreover, I am fortunate enough to spend all my days from morning to evening with a man of genius, namely myself, and that’s most agreeable.’
‘Scatterbrain,’ muttered the archdeacon. ‘Eh! tell me, this life that you make so delightful for yourself, who preserved it for you?’ Whom do you have to thank for breathing this air, seeing that sky, and being still able to amuse your lark’s brain with frivolities and follies? But for her, where would you be? Do you want her to die then, she through whom you are alive? Let her die, that lovely, sweet, adorable creature, needful for the light of the world, more divine than God? While you, half wise and half foolish, empty sketch of something or other, some kind of vegetable being which believes it can walk and think, while you go on living the life of which you robbed her, useless as a candle at noonday? Come along, a little pity, Gringoire—be generous in your tur
n. It was she who did so first.’
The priest was vehement. Gringoire listened to him at first with an undecided look, then he softened, and ended by pulling a tragic grimace which made his wan face look like that of a newborn baby with colic.
‘You are very moving,’ he said, wiping away a tear. ‘All right! I’ll think about it. That’s a very odd idea of yours. After all,’ he went on after a silence, ‘who knows? Perhaps they won’t hang me. It’s not every engagement which ends with a wedding. When they find me in that cell, got up so grotesquely in skirt and coif, perhaps they’ll just roar with laughter. Anyhow, if they do hang me, all right! The rope is a death like any other, or, to be more precise, it is not like any other death. It is a death worthy of the sage who has spent his whole life oscillating, a death which is neither flesh nor fowl, like the mind of the true sceptic, a death stamped all over with Pyrrhonism and hesitation, half-way between heaven and earth, which leaves you in suspense. It’s a philosopher’s death, and perhaps that’s what I was predestined for. It’s a spendid thing to die as one has lived.’
The priest interrupted: ‘Is it agreed, then?’
‘What is death, when you come down to it?’ Gringoire continued in a state of exaltation. ‘A bad moment, a toll, a transition from not much to nothing at all. When someone asked Cercidas of Megalopolis if he would die gladly, he answered: “Why not? for after my death I shall see those great men, Pythagoras among philosophers, Hecataeus among historians, Homer among poets, Olympus among musicians.”’
The archdeacon held out his hand to him: ‘That’s settled then? You’ll come tomorrow.’
The gesture brought Gringoire back to reality. ‘Ha! my goodness, no!’ he said in the tone of a man just waking up. ‘To be hanged! it’s too absurd. I won’t do it.’
‘Farewell, then!’ And the archdeacon added between his teeth: ‘I’ll find you again!’
‘I don’t want that devil of a man to find me,’ thought Gringoire, and ran after Dom Claude. ‘Come now, Monsieur the Archdeacon, no ill feeling between old friends! You have an interest in this girl, in my wife, I mean, that’s fine. You have thought up a stratagem for getting her out of Notre-Dame safely, but your plan is extremely unpleasant for me, for Gringoire. Suppose I had another plan!—I warn you that at this very instant a most luminous inspiration has occurred to me,—suppose I had an expedient idea for extricating her from this predicament without compromising my neck with the slightest slip-knot? What would you say to that? Wouldn’t that be enough for you? Is it absolutely necessary to make you happy that I should be hanged?’
The priest was ripping buttons off his cassock with impatience. ‘A running stream of words!—What’s your plan?’
‘Yes,’ Gringoire went on, talking to himself and touching his nose with his index finger to indicate deep thought. ‘That’s it! The truands are good lads…. The tribe of Egypt is very fond of her…. They will rise up at a word. … Nothing easier—a sudden raid—under cover of the disorder, she can easily be snatched away. … By tomorrow evening … they’ll be only too pleased.’
‘The plan! Tell me,’ said the priest, shaking him.
Gringoire turned to him majestically. ‘Let me be! You can see that I am putting it together.’ He reflected for a few more minutes. Then he began to clap his hands at what he had thought up, crying: ‘Admirable! Sure to work!’
‘The plan!’ Claude went on angrily.
Gringoire was radiant. ‘Come here, let me whisper it to you. It’s a really bold countermine, and it will solve the problem for all of us. You must agree that I’m no fool.’
He broke off: ‘Oh yes! Is the little goat with the girl?’
‘Yes. Devil take you.’
‘And they would have hanged it too, wouldn’t they?’
‘What’s that to me?’
‘Yes, they would have hanged her. They hanged a sow right enough last month. The executioner likes that. He eats the animal afterwards. Hang my pretty Djali! Poor little lamb!’
‘Curses!’ exclaimed Dom Claude. ‘You’re the one who is the executioner. What way of saving her have you thought up then, you rogue? Has it got to be dragged out of you with forceps?’
‘Steady there, master! Here you are.’
Gringoire leaned over and whispered in the archdeacon’s ear, glancing anxiously up and down the street, though no one was passing by. When he had finished, Dom Claude took him by the hand and said to him coldly: ‘All right. Until tomorrow then.’
‘Till tomorrow,’ repeated Gringoire. And while the archdeacon went off one way, he took himself off in another, saying to himself in an undertone: ‘This is a fine business, Maître Pierre Gringoire. Never mind. Just because you are only a little man it doesn’t mean you’ll be scared of taking on something big. Bito* carried a great bull on his shoulders; wagtails, warblers, and wheatears fly across the ocean.’
II
BECOME A TRUAND!
ON his return to the cloister the archdeacon found waiting at the door of his cell his brother Jehan du Moulin, who had been whiling away his boredom while he waited by making a charcoal sketch on the wall of his older brother’s profile enhanced by an outsize nose.
Dom Claude hardly looked at his brother. He had other things on his mind. The cheerful scamp’s face, whose sunny beams had so often brought serenity back to the priest’s sombre countenance, was now quite powerless to dispel the mist which lay denser every day over that corrupt, mephitic, stagnant soul.
‘Brother,’ Jehan said timidly, ‘I’ve come to see you.’
The archdeacon did not even look up at him. ‘So?’
‘Brother,’ the hypocrite went on, ‘you are so kind to me, and give me such good advice, that I always come back to you.’
‘And?’
‘Alas! brother, you were so right when you told me: “Jehan, Jehan, cessat doctorum doctrina, discipulorum disciplina [the teaching of the teachers, the discipline of the disciples has slackened off]. Jehan, be good, Jehan, be studious, Jehan don’t spend the night out of college without lawful occasion and the master’s leave. Don’t beat the Picards, Noli, Joannes, verberare picardos. Don’t rot away like an illiterate donkey on the straw of the lecture-room floor. Jehan, accept your punishment at your master’s discretion. Jehan, go to chapel every evening and sing an anthem with verse and prayer to Our Lady the glorious Virgin Mary.” Alas! what most excellent advice that was!’
‘Well?’
‘You see before you, brother, a guilty man, a criminal, a wretch, a libertine, a heinous person! Brother, Jehan has treated your gracious counsels like straw and dung to be trampled underfoot. I have been well punished for it, and God has been extraordinarily just. As long as I had money, I feasted, led a wild and merry life. Oh! how debauchery, so delightful in prospect, turns out ugly and sour in retrospect! Now I don’t have a farthing left, I’ve sold my tablecloth, my shirt, and my towel, no more making merry! The good wax candle has gone out, and all I have left is a nasty tallow wick smoking in my nose. The girls laugh at me. I drink plain water. I am racked by remorse and creditors.’
‘The rest?’ said the archdeacon.
‘Alas! dearest brother, I’d like to settle down to a better life. I come to you full of contrition. I’m penitent. I confess my sins. I beat my breast with heavy blows. You are quite right to want me one day to become a graduate and sub-monitor of the Collège de Torchi. I now feel a splendid vocation for that way of life. But I’ve no ink left. I must buy some more; no quills left, I must buy some more; no paper, no books, I must buy some more. To do so I badly need a little financial support. And I come to you, brother, with a heart full of contrition.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes,’ said the student. ‘A little money.’
‘I don’t have any.’
At that the student said, looking at once grave and resolute: ‘All right, brother, I’m sorry to have to tell you that I have received from other quarters some very handsome offers and proposals. You won’t giv
e me any money?—no?—in that case I’m going to become a truand.’
As he uttered those monstrous words, he assumed the air of Ajax, expecting to see a thunderbolt come down on his head.
The archdeacon said coldly: ‘Become a truand.’
Jehan bowed low to him, and went back down the cloister stairs whistling.
Just as he was passing in the cloister garth beneath his brother’s cell window, he heard that window open, raised his head and saw the archdeacon’s stern face looking out through the opening. ‘Go to the devil!’ said Dom Claude, ‘this is the last money you will get from me.’
At the same time the priest threw a purse at Jehan which raised a big lump on the student’s forehead, and left him both amazed and pleased as he went away, like a dog pelted with marrow-bones.
III
THREE CHEERS FOR PLEASURE!
THE reader may perhaps not have forgotten that part of the Court of Miracles was enclosed by the ancient town wall, a good number of whose towers were beginning at that time to fall into ruin. One of these towers had been converted by the truands into a place of entertainment. There was a tavern in the lower room, and the rest on the floors above. This tower was the most lively, and thus the most hideous, spot in the truanderie. It was a sort of monstrous hive, humming day and night. At night, when all the rest of the beggars’ realm was asleep, when not one window in the grubby façades of the square remained lit, when there was not a cry to be heard from the hundreds of households, those swarms of thieves, harlots, and stolen or bastard children, the pleasure tower could always be identified by the noise coming from it and from the scarlet glare which, radiating at once from air-vents, windows, and fissures in the cracked walls, leaked out, so to speak, from all its pores.
The cellar, then, was the tavern. The way down to it was by a low door and stairs as steep and rigid as a Classical Alexandrine. On the door, by way of a sign, there was a monstrous daub representing newly minted sols and slaughtered chickens, with this pun underneath: Aux sonneurs pour les trépassés [At the ringers for the dead].*
