FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA.

Night comes on early in January. The streets were already dark when

Gringoire issued forth from the Courts.

This gloom pleased him; he was in haste to reach some obscure and deserted alley, in

order there to meditate at his ease, and in order that the philosopher might place the

first dressing upon the wound of the poet.

Philosophy, moreover, was his sole refuge, for he did not know where he was to lodge

for the night.

After the brilliant failure of his first theatrical venture, he dared not return to

the lodging which he occupied in the Rue Grenier-sur-l'Eau, opposite to the Port-au-

Foin, having depended upon receiving from

monsieur the provost for his epithalamium, the wherewithal to pay Master Guillaume

Doulx-Sire, farmer of the taxes on cloven- footed animals in Paris, the rent which he

owed him, that is to say, twelve sols

parisian; twelve times the value of all that he possessed in the world, including

his trunk-hose, his shirt, and his cap.

After reflecting a moment, temporarily sheltered beneath the little wicket of the

prison of the treasurer of the Sainte- Chappelle, as to the shelter which he would

select for the night, having all the

pavements of Paris to choose from, he remembered to have noticed the week

previously in the Rue de la Savaterie, at the door of a councillor of the parliament,

a stepping stone for mounting a mule, and

to have said to himself that that stone would furnish, on occasion, a very

excellent pillow for a mendicant or a poet.

He thanked Providence for having sent this happy idea to him; but, as he was preparing

to cross the Place, in order to reach the tortuous labyrinth of the city, where

meander all those old sister streets, the

Rues de la Barillerie, de la Vielle- Draperie, de la Savaterie, de la Juiverie,

etc., still extant to-day, with their nine- story houses, he saw the procession of the

Pope of the Fools, which was also emerging

from the court house, and rushing across the courtyard, with great cries, a great

flashing of torches, and the music which belonged to him, Gringoire.

This sight revived the pain of his self- love; he fled.

In the bitterness of his dramatic misadventure, everything which reminded him

of the festival of that day irritated his wound and made it bleed.

He was on the point of turning to the Pont Saint-Michel; children were running about

here and there with fire lances and rockets.

"Pest on firework candles!" said Gringoire; and he fell back on the Pont au Change.

To the house at the head of the bridge there had been affixed three small banners,

representing the king, the dauphin, and Marguerite of Flanders, and six little

pennons on which were portrayed the Duke of

Austria, the Cardinal de Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, and Madame Jeanne de France, and

Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon, and I know not whom else; all being illuminated with

torches.

The rabble were admiring. "Happy painter, Jehan Fourbault!" said

Gringoire with a deep sigh; and he turned his back upon the bannerets and pennons.

A street opened before him; he thought it so dark and deserted that he hoped to there

escape from all the rumors as well as from all the gleams of the festival.

At the end of a few moments his foot came in contact with an obstacle; he stumbled

and fell.

It was the May truss, which the clerks of the clerks' law court had deposited that

morning at the door of a president of the parliament, in honor of the solemnity of

the day.

Gringoire bore this new disaster heroically; he picked himself up, and

reached the water's edge.

After leaving behind him the civic Tournelle and the criminal tower, and

skirted the great walls of the king's garden, on that unpaved strand where the

mud reached to his ankles, he reached the

western point of the city, and considered for some time the islet of the Passeur-aux-

Vaches, which has disappeared beneath the bronze horse of the Pont Neuf.

The islet appeared to him in the shadow like a black mass, beyond the narrow strip

of whitish water which separated him from it.

One could divine by the ray of a tiny light the sort of hut in the form of a beehive

where the ferryman of cows took refuge at night.

"Happy ferryman!" thought Gringoire; "you do not dream of glory, and you do not make

marriage songs! What matters it to you, if kings and

Duchesses of Burgundy marry?

You know no other daisies (marguerites) than those which your April greensward

gives your cows to browse upon; while I, a poet, am hooted, and shiver, and owe twelve

sous, and the soles of my shoes are so

transparent, that they might serve as glasses for your lantern!

Thanks, ferryman, your cabin rests my eyes, and makes me forget Paris!"

He was roused from his almost lyric ecstacy, by a big double Saint-Jean

cracker, which suddenly went off from the happy cabin.

It was the cow ferryman, who was taking his part in the rejoicings of the day, and

letting off fireworks. This cracker made Gringoire's skin bristle

up all over.

"Accursed festival!" he exclaimed, "wilt thou pursue me everywhere?

Oh! good God! even to the ferryman's!"

Then he looked at the Seine at his feet, and a horrible temptation took possession

of him: "Oh!" said he, "I would gladly drown

myself, were the water not so cold!"

Then a desperate resolution occurred to him.

It was, since he could not escape from the Pope of the Fools, from Jehan Fourbault's

bannerets, from May trusses, from squibs and crackers, to go to the Place de Greve.

"At least," he said to himself, "I shall there have a firebrand of joy wherewith to

warm myself, and I can sup on some crumbs of the three great armorial bearings of

royal sugar which have been erected on the public refreshment-stall of the city."

-BOOK SECOND. CHAPTER II.

THE PLACE DE GREVE.

There remains to-day but a very imperceptible vestige of the Place de

Greve, such as it existed then; it consists in the charming little turret, which

occupies the angle north of the Place, and

which, already enshrouded in the ignoble plaster which fills with paste the delicate

lines of its sculpture, would soon have disappeared, perhaps submerged by that

flood of new houses which so rapidly devours all the ancient facades of Paris.

The persons who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de Greve without casting a

glance of pity and sympathy on that poor turret strangled between two hovels of the

time of Louis XV., can easily reconstruct

in their minds the aggregate of edifices to which it belonged, and find again entire in

it the ancient Gothic place of the fifteenth century.

It was then, as it is to-day, an irregular trapezoid, bordered on one side by the

quay, and on the other three by a series of lofty, narrow, and gloomy houses.

By day, one could admire the variety of its edifices, all sculptured in stone or wood,

and already presenting complete specimens of the different domestic architectures of

the Middle Ages, running back from the

fifteenth to the eleventh century, from the casement which had begun to dethrone the

arch, to the Roman semicircle, which had been supplanted by the ogive, and which

still occupies, below it, the first story

of that ancient house de la Tour Roland, at the corner of the Place upon the Seine, on

the side of the street with the Tannerie.

At night, one could distinguish nothing of all that mass of buildings, except the

black indentation of the roofs, unrolling their chain of acute angles round the

place; for one of the radical differences

between the cities of that time, and the cities of the present day, lay in the

facades which looked upon the places and streets, and which were then gables.

For the last two centuries the houses have been turned round.

In the centre of the eastern side of the Place, rose a heavy and hybrid

construction, formed of three buildings placed in juxtaposition.

It was called by three names which explain its history, its destination, and its

architecture: "The House of the Dauphin," because Charles V., when Dauphin, had

inhabited it; "The Marchandise," because it

had served as town hall; and "The Pillared House" (domus ad piloria), because of a

series of large pillars which sustained the three stories.

The city found there all that is required for a city like Paris; a chapel in which to

pray to God; a plaidoyer, or pleading room, in which to hold hearings, and to repel, at

need, the King's people; and under the roof, an arsenac full of artillery.

For the bourgeois of Paris were aware that it is not sufficient to pray in every

conjuncture, and to plead for the franchises of the city, and they had always

in reserve, in the garret of the town hall, a few good rusty arquebuses.

The Greve had then that sinister aspect which it preserves to-day from the

execrable ideas which it awakens, and from the sombre town hall of Dominique Bocador,

which has replaced the Pillared House.

It must be admitted that a permanent gibbet and a pillory, "a justice and a ladder," as

they were called in that day, erected side by side in the centre of the pavement,

contributed not a little to cause eyes to

be turned away from that fatal place, where so many beings full of life and health have

agonized; where, fifty years later, that fever of Saint Vallier was destined to have

its birth, that terror of the scaffold, the

most monstrous of all maladies because it comes not from God, but from man.

It is a consoling idea (let us remark in passing), to think that the death penalty,

which three hundred years ago still encumbered with its iron wheels, its stone

gibbets, and all its paraphernalia of

torture, permanent and riveted to the pavement, the Greve, the Halles, the Place

Dauphine, the Cross du Trahoir, the Marche aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfaucon, the

barrier des Sergents, the Place aux Chats,

the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint Jacques, without

reckoning the innumerable ladders of the provosts, the bishop of the chapters, of

the abbots, of the priors, who had the

decree of life and death,--without reckoning the judicial drownings in the

river Seine; it is consoling to-day, after having lost successively all the pieces of

its armor, its luxury of torment, its

penalty of imagination and fancy, its torture for which it reconstructed every

five years a leather bed at the Grand Chatelet, that ancient suzerain of feudal

society almost expunged from our laws and

our cities, hunted from code to code, chased from place to place, has no longer,

in our immense Paris, any more than a dishonored corner of the Greve,--than a

miserable guillotine, furtive, uneasy,

shameful, which seems always afraid of being caught in the act, so quickly does it

disappear after having dealt its blow.

-BOOK SECOND. CHAPTER III.

KISSES FOR BLOWS.

When Pierre Gringoire arrived on the Place de Greve, he was paralyzed.

He had directed his course across the Pont aux Meuniers, in order to avoid the rabble

on the Pont au Change, and the pennons of Jehan Fourbault; but the wheels of all the

bishop's mills had splashed him as he

passed, and his doublet was drenched; it seemed to him besides, that the failure of

his piece had rendered him still more sensible to cold than usual.

Hence he made haste to draw near the bonfire, which was burning magnificently in

the middle of the Place. But a considerable crowd formed a circle

around it.

"Accursed Parisians!" he said to himself (for Gringoire, like a true dramatic poet,

was subject to monologues) "there they are obstructing my fire!

Nevertheless, I am greatly in need of a chimney corner; my shoes drink in the

water, and all those cursed mills wept upon me!

That devil of a Bishop of Paris, with his mills!

I'd just like to know what use a bishop can make of a mill!

Does he expect to become a miller instead of a bishop?

If only my malediction is needed for that, I bestow it upon him! and his cathedral,

and his mills!

Just see if those boobies will put themselves out!

Move aside! I'd like to know what they are doing there!

They are warming themselves, much pleasure may it give them!

They are watching a hundred fagots burn; a fine spectacle!"

On looking more closely, he perceived that the circle was much larger than was

required simply for the purpose of getting warm at the king's fire, and that this

concourse of people had not been attracted

solely by the beauty of the hundred fagots which were burning.

In a vast space left free between the crowd and the fire, a young girl was dancing.

Whether this young girl was a human being, a fairy, or an angel, is what Gringoire,

sceptical philosopher and ironical poet that he was, could not decide at the first

moment, so fascinated was he by this dazzling vision.

She was not tall, though she seemed so, so boldly did her slender form dart about.

She was swarthy of complexion, but one divined that, by day, her skin must possess

that beautiful golden tone of the Andalusians and the Roman women.

Her little foot, too, was Andalusian, for it was both pinched and at ease in its

graceful shoe.