Chapter III: Kisses for Blows

When Pierre Gringoire arrived on the Place de Grève, 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. She danced, she turned, she whirled rapidly about on an old
Persian rug, spread negligently under her feet; and each time
that her radiant face passed before you, as she whirled, her
great black eyes darted a flash of lightning at you.

All around her, all glances were riveted, all mouths open; and,
in fact, when she danced thus, to the humming of the Basque
tambourine, which her two pure, rounded arms raised above her
head, slender, frail and vivacious as a wasp, with her corsage of
gold without a fold, her variegated gown puffing out, her bare
shoulders, her delicate limbs, which her petticoat revealed at
times, her black hair, her eyes of flame, she was a supernatural
creature.

“In truth,” said Gringoire to himself, “she is a salamander, she
is a nymph, she is a goddess, she is a bacchante of the Menelean
Mount!”

At that moment, one of the salamander’s braids of hair became
unfastened, and a piece of yellow copper which was attached to
it, rolled to the ground.

“Hé, no!” said he, “she is a gypsy!”

All illusions had disappeared.

She began her dance once more; she took from the ground two
swords, whose points she rested against her brow, and which she
made to turn in one direction, while she turned in the other; it
was a purely gypsy effect. But, disenchanted though Gringoire
was, the whole effect of this picture was not without its charm
and its magic; the bonfire illuminated, with a red flaring light,
which trembled, all alive, over the circle of faces in the crowd,
on the brow of the young girl, and at the background of the Place
cast a pallid reflection, on one side upon the ancient, black,
and wrinkled façade of the House of Pillars, on the other, upon
the old stone gibbet.

Among the thousands of visages which that light tinged with
scarlet, there was one which seemed, even more than all the
others, absorbed in contemplation of the dancer. It was the face
of a man, austere, calm, and sombre. This man, whose costume was
concealed by the crowd which surrounded him, did not appear to be
more than five and thirty years of age; nevertheless, he was
bald; he had merely a few tufts of thin, gray hair on his
temples; his broad, high forehead had begun to be furrowed with
wrinkles, but his deep-set eyes sparkled with extraordinary
youthfulness, an ardent life, a profound passion. He kept them
fixed incessantly on the gypsy, and, while the giddy young girl
of sixteen danced and whirled, for the pleasure of all, his
revery seemed to become more and more sombre. From time to time,
a smile and a sigh met upon his lips, but the smile was more
melancholy than the sigh.

The young girl, stopped at length, breathless, and the people
applauded her lovingly.

“Djali!” said the gypsy.

Then Gringoire saw come up to her, a pretty little white goat,
alert, wide-awake, glossy, with gilded horns, gilded hoofs, and
gilded collar, which he had not hitherto perceived, and which had
remained lying curled up on one corner of the carpet watching his
mistress dance.

“Djali!” said the dancer, “it is your turn.”

And, seating herself, she gracefully presented her tambourine to
the goat.

“Djali,” she continued, “what month is this?”

The goat lifted its fore foot, and struck one blow upon the
tambourine. It was the first month in the year, in fact.

“Djali,” pursued the young girl, turning her tambourine round,
“what day of the month is this?”

Djali raised his little gilt hoof, and struck six blows on the
tambourine.

“Djali,” pursued the Egyptian, with still another movement of the
tambourine, “what hour of the day is it?”

Djali struck seven blows. At that moment, the clock of the Pillar
House rang out seven.

The people were amazed.

“There’s sorcery at the bottom of it,” said a sinister voice in
the crowd. It was that of the bald man, who never removed his
eyes from the gypsy.

She shuddered and turned round; but applause broke forth and
drowned the morose exclamation.

It even effaced it so completely from her mind, that she
continued to question her goat.

“Djali, what does Master Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of the
pistoliers of the town do, at the procession of Candlemas?”

Djali reared himself on his hind legs, and began to bleat,
marching along with so much dainty gravity, that the entire
circle of spectators burst into a laugh at this parody of the
interested devoutness of the captain of pistoliers.

“Djali,” resumed the young girl, emboldened by her growing
success, “how preaches Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator to
the king in the ecclesiastical court?”

The goat seated himself on his hind quarters, and began to bleat,
waving his fore feet in so strange a manner, that, with the
exception of the bad French, and worse Latin, Jacques Charmolue
was there complete,—gesture, accent, and attitude.

And the crowd applauded louder than ever.

“Sacrilege! profanation!” resumed the voice of the bald man.

The gypsy turned round once more.

“Ah!” said she, “’tis that villanous man!” Then, thrusting her
under lip out beyond the upper, she made a little pout, which
appeared to be familiar to her, executed a pirouette on her heel,
and set about collecting in her tambourine the gifts of the
multitude.

Big blanks, little blanks, targes[8] and eagle liards showered
into it.

All at once, she passed in front of Gringoire. Gringoire put his
hand so recklessly into his pocket that she halted. “The devil!”
said the poet, finding at the bottom of his pocket the reality,
that is, to say, a void. In the meantime, the pretty girl stood
there, gazing at him with her big eyes, and holding out her
tambourine to him and waiting. Gringoire broke into a violent
perspiration.

If he had all Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have given
it to the dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru, and, moreover,
America had not yet been discovered.

Happily, an unexpected incident came to his rescue.

“Will you take yourself off, you Egyptian grasshopper?” cried a
sharp voice, which proceeded from the darkest corner of the
Place.

The young girl turned round in affright. It was no longer the
voice of the bald man; it was the voice of a woman, bigoted and
malicious.

However, this cry, which alarmed the gypsy, delighted a troop of
children who were prowling about there.

“It is the recluse of the Tour-Roland,” they exclaimed, with wild
laughter, “it is the sacked nun who is scolding! Hasn’t she
supped? Let’s carry her the remains of the city refreshments!”

All rushed towards the Pillar House.

In the meanwhile, Gringoire had taken advantage of the dancer’s
embarrassment, to disappear. The children’s shouts had reminded
him that he, also, had not supped, so he ran to the public
buffet. But the little rascals had better legs than he; when he
arrived, they had stripped the table. There remained not so much
as a miserable _camichon_ at five sous the pound. Nothing
remained upon the wall but slender fleurs-de-lis, mingled with
rose bushes, painted in 1434 by Mathieu Biterne. It was a meagre
supper.

It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper, it is a
still less pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where one is
to sleep. That was Gringoire’s condition. No supper, no shelter;
he saw himself pressed on all sides by necessity, and he found
necessity very crabbed. He had long ago discovered the truth,
that Jupiter created men during a fit of misanthropy, and that
during a wise man’s whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy
in a state of siege. As for himself, he had never seen the
blockade so complete; he heard his stomach sounding a parley, and
he considered it very much out of place that evil destiny should
capture his philosophy by famine.

This melancholy revery was absorbing him more and more, when a
song, quaint but full of sweetness, suddenly tore him from it. It
was the young gypsy who was singing.

Her voice was like her dancing, like her beauty. It was
indefinable and charming; something pure and sonorous, aerial,
winged, so to speak. There were continual outbursts, melodies,
unexpected cadences, then simple phrases strewn with aerial and
hissing notes; then floods of scales which would have put a
nightingale to rout, but in which harmony was always present;
then soft modulations of octaves which rose and fell, like the
bosom of the young singer. Her beautiful face followed, with
singular mobility, all the caprices of her song, from the wildest
inspiration to the chastest dignity. One would have pronounced
her now a mad creature, now a queen.

The words which she sang were in a tongue unknown to Gringoire,
and which seemed to him to be unknown to herself, so little
relation did the expression which she imparted to her song bear
to the sense of the words. Thus, these four lines, in her mouth,
were madly gay,—

Un cofre de gran riqueza
Hallaron dentro un pilar,
Dentro del, nuevas banderas
Con figuras de espantar.[9]

And an instant afterwards, at the accents which she imparted to
this stanza,—

Alarabes de cavallo
Sin poderse menear,
Con espadas, y los cuellos,
Ballestas de buen echar,

Gringoire felt the tears start to his eyes. Nevertheless, her
song breathed joy, most of all, and she seemed to sing like a
bird, from serenity and heedlessness.

The gypsy’s song had disturbed Gringoire’s revery as the swan
disturbs the water. He listened in a sort of rapture, and
forgetfulness of everything. It was the first moment in the
course of many hours when he did not feel that he suffered.

The moment was brief.

The same woman’s voice, which had interrupted the gypsy’s dance,
interrupted her song.

“Will you hold your tongue, you cricket of hell?” it cried, still
from the same obscure corner of the place.

The poor “cricket” stopped short. Gringoire covered up his ears.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, “accursed saw with missing teeth, which comes
to break the lyre!”

Meanwhile, the other spectators murmured like himself; “To the
devil with the sacked nun!” said some of them. And the old
invisible kill-joy might have had occasion to repent of her
aggressions against the gypsy had their attention not been
diverted at this moment by the procession of the Pope of the
Fools, which, after having traversed many streets and squares,
debouched on the Place de Grève, with all its torches and all its
uproar.

This procession, which our readers have seen set out from the
Palais de Justice, had organized on the way, and had been
recruited by all the knaves, idle thieves, and unemployed
vagabonds in Paris; so that it presented a very respectable
aspect when it arrived at the Grève.

First came Egypt. The Duke of Egypt headed it, on horseback, with
his counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrups for him;
behind them, the male and female Egyptians, pell-mell, with their
little children crying on their shoulders; all—duke, counts, and
populace—in rags and tatters. Then came the Kingdom of Argot;
that is to say, all the thieves of France, arranged according to
the order of their dignity; the minor people walking first. Thus
defiled by fours, with the divers insignia of their grades, in
that strange faculty, most of them lame, some cripples, others
one-armed, shop clerks, pilgrims, _hubins_, bootblacks,
thimble-riggers, street arabs, beggars, the blear-eyed beggars,
thieves, the weakly, vagabonds, merchants, sham soldiers,
goldsmiths, passed masters of pickpockets, isolated thieves. A
catalogue that would weary Homer. In the centre of the conclave
of the passed masters of pickpockets, one had some difficulty in
distinguishing the King of Argot, the grand coësre, so called,
crouching in a little cart drawn by two big dogs. After the
kingdom of the Argotiers, came the Empire of Galilee. Guillaume
Rousseau, Emperor of the Empire of Galilee, marched majestically
in his robe of purple, spotted with wine, preceded by buffoons
wrestling and executing military dances; surrounded by his
macebearers, his pickpockets and clerks of the chamber of
accounts. Last of all came the corporation of law clerks, with
its maypoles crowned with flowers, its black robes, its music
worthy of the orgy, and its large candles of yellow wax. In the
centre of this crowd, the grand officers of the Brotherhood of
Fools bore on their shoulders a litter more loaded down with
candles than the reliquary of Sainte-Geneviève in time of pest;
and on this litter shone resplendent, with crosier, cope, and
mitre, the new Pope of the Fools, the bellringer of Notre-Dame,
Quasimodo the hunchback.

Each section of this grotesque procession had its own music. The
Egyptians made their drums and African tambourines resound. The
slang men, not a very musical race, still clung to the goat’s
horn trumpet and the Gothic rubebbe of the twelfth century. The
Empire of Galilee was not much more advanced; among its music one
could hardly distinguish some miserable rebec, from the infancy
of the art, still imprisoned in the _ré-la-mi_. But it was around
the Pope of the Fools that all the musical riches of the epoch
were displayed in a magnificent discord. It was nothing but
soprano rebecs, counter-tenor rebecs, and tenor rebecs, not to
reckon the flutes and brass instruments. Alas! our readers will
remember that this was Gringoire’s orchestra.

It is difficult to convey an idea of the degree of proud and
blissful expansion to which the sad and hideous visage of
Quasimodo had attained during the transit from the Palais de
Justice, to the Place de Grève. It was the first enjoyment of
self-love that he had ever experienced. Down to that day, he had
known only humiliation, disdain for his condition, disgust for
his person. Hence, deaf though he was, he enjoyed, like a
veritable pope, the acclamations of that throng, which he hated
because he felt that he was hated by it. What mattered it that
his people consisted of a pack of fools, cripples, thieves, and
beggars? it was still a people and he was its sovereign. And he
accepted seriously all this ironical applause, all this derisive
respect, with which the crowd mingled, it must be admitted, a
good deal of very real fear. For the hunchback was robust; for
the bandy-legged fellow was agile; for the deaf man was
malicious: three qualities which temper ridicule.

We are far from believing, however, that the new Pope of the
Fools understood both the sentiments which he felt and the
sentiments which he inspired. The spirit which was lodged in this
failure of a body had, necessarily, something incomplete and deaf
about it. Thus, what he felt at the moment was to him, absolutely
vague, indistinct, and confused. Only joy made itself felt, only
pride dominated. Around that sombre and unhappy face, there hung
a radiance.

It was, then, not without surprise and alarm, that at the very
moment when Quasimodo was passing the Pillar House, in that
semi-intoxicated state, a man was seen to dart from the crowd,
and to tear from his hands, with a gesture of anger, his crosier
of gilded wood, the emblem of his mock popeship.

This man, this rash individual, was the man with the bald brow,
who, a moment earlier, standing with the gypsy’s group had
chilled the poor girl with his words of menace and of hatred. He
was dressed in an ecclesiastical costume. At the moment when he
stood forth from the crowd, Gringoire, who had not noticed him up
to that time, recognized him: “Hold!” he said, with an
exclamation of astonishment. “Eh! ’tis my master in Hermes, Dom
Claude Frollo, the archdeacon! What the devil does he want of
that old one-eyed fellow? He’ll get himself devoured!”

A cry of terror arose, in fact. The formidable Quasimodo had
hurled himself from the litter, and the women turned aside their
eyes in order not to see him tear the archdeacon asunder.

He made one bound as far as the priest, looked at him, and fell
upon his knees.

The priest tore off his tiara, broke his crozier, and rent his
tinsel cope.

Quasimodo remained on his knees, with head bent and hands
clasped. Then there was established between them a strange
dialogue of signs and gestures, for neither of them spoke. The
priest, erect on his feet, irritated, threatening, imperious;
Quasimodo, prostrate, humble, suppliant. And, nevertheless, it is
certain that Quasimodo could have crushed the priest with his
thumb.

At length the archdeacon, giving Quasimodo’s powerful shoulder a
rough shake, made him a sign to rise and follow him.

Quasimodo rose.

Then the Brotherhood of Fools, their first stupor having passed
off, wished to defend their pope, so abruptly dethroned. The
Egyptians, the men of slang, and all the fraternity of law
clerks, gathered howling round the priest.

Quasimodo placed himself in front of the priest, set in play the
muscles of his athletic fists, and glared upon the assailants
with the snarl of an angry tiger.

The priest resumed his sombre gravity, made a sign to Quasimodo,
and retired in silence.

Quasimodo walked in front of him, scattering the crowd as he
passed.

When they had traversed the populace and the Place, the cloud of
curious and idle were minded to follow them. Quasimodo then
constituted himself the rearguard, and followed the archdeacon,
walking backwards, squat, surly, monstrous, bristling, gathering
up his limbs, licking his boar’s tusks, growling like a wild
beast, and imparting to the crowd immense vibrations, with a look
or a gesture.

Both were allowed to plunge into a dark and narrow street, where
no one dared to venture after them; so thoroughly did the mere
chimera of Quasimodo gnashing his teeth bar the entrance.

“Here’s a marvellous thing,” said Gringoire; “but where the deuce
shall I find some supper?”