Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (9 page)

All at once, in the very middle of a quarrel between Mademoiselle Commerce and Madame Nobility, just as Master Labor pronounced this wonderful line,—the door leading to the platform, which had hitherto remained so inopportunely closed, was still more inopportunely opened, and the ringing voice of the usher abruptly announced: “His Eminence, Monseigneur the Cardinal de Bourbon!”

P
oor Gringoire! The noise of all the big cannon crackers fired on St. John’s day, the discharge of twenty crooked arquebuses, the thunder of that famous serpentine of the Tower of Billy, which, during the siege of Paris, on Sunday, Sept. 29, 1465, killed seven Burgundians at one shot, the explosion of all the gunpowder stored at the Temple Gate, would have assailed his ears less rudely, at that solemn and dramatic moment, than did those few words dropping from the mouth of an usher: “His Eminence, Monseigneur the Cardinal de Bourbon!”

Not that Pierre Gringoire feared the Cardinal or scorned him; he was neither so weak nor so conceited. A genuine eclectic, as he would be called nowadays, Gringoire was one of those firm and lofty, calm and temperate souls, who always contrive to choose a happy medium
(stare in dimidio rerum),
and who are full of sense and liberal philosophy, although they have a high regard for cardinals. Precious and perpetual race of philosophers, to whom, as to another Ariadne, wisdom seems to have given a ball of thread which they have gone on unwinding from the beginning of the world, as they journeyed through the labyrinth of human things! They are to be found in every age, ever the same; that is, always in harmony with the age. And, to say nothing of our Pierre Gringoire, who would represent them in the fifteenth century if we could succeed in portraying him as he deserves, it is assuredly their spirit which animated Father du Breuil in the sixteenth, when he wrote these simple and sublime words, worthy of all the ages: “I am a Parisian in nationality and parrhisian in speech;
parrhisia
being a Greek word signifying ‘freedom of speech;’ the which I have used even towards the cardinals, uncle and brother to the Prince of Conty; always with due respect for their greatness, and without offending any man among their followers, which is much.”

The disagreeable effect which the Cardinal produced on Pierre Gringoire, therefore, partook neither of hatred nor of scorn. Quite the contrary; our poet had too much good sense and too threadbare a coat not to attach especial value to the fact that many an allusion in his prologue, and particularly those in glorification of the dauphin, son of the Lion of France, might be heard by a most eminent ear. But interest is not all-powerful in the noble nature of poets. Let us suppose the entity of the poet to be represented by the number ten: it is certain that a chemist, who should analyze and “phar macopœize” it, as Rabelais says, would find it to be composed of one part self-interest to nine parts of self-esteem. Now, at the moment that the door was thrown open to admit the Cardinal, Gringoire’s nine parts of self-esteem, swollen and inflated by the breath of public admiration, were in a state of abnormal development, before which the imperceptible molecule of self-interest, which we just now discovered in the constitution of poets, vanished and faded into insignificance, precious ingredient though it was,—the ballast of reality and humanity, without which they would never descend to earth. Gringoire enjoyed feeling, seeing, handling, as it were, an entire assembly,—of rascals, it is true, but what did that matter? They were stupefied, petrified, and almost stifled by the incommensurable tirades with which every portion of his epithalamium bristled. I affirm that he himself partook of the general beatitude, and that, unlike La Fontaine, who, on witnessing a performance of his own comedy, “The Florentine,” inquired, “What clown wrote that rhap sody?” Gringoire would gladly have asked his neighbor, “Whose is this masterpiece?” You may judge the effect produced on him by the abrupt and untimely arrival of the Cardinal.

His fears were but too soon realized. The entrance of his Eminence distracted the audience. Every head was turned towards the platform. No one listened. “The Cardinal! the Cardinal!” repeated every tongue. The unfortunate prologue was a second time cut short.

The Cardinal paused for a moment on the threshold. While he cast an indifferent glance over the assembly, the uproar increased. Every one wished to get a better view of him. Every one tried to see who could best stretch his neck over his neighbor’s shoulders.

He was indeed a great personage, and one the sight of whom was well worth any other spectacle. Charles, the Cardinal de Bourbon, Archbishop and Count of Lyons, Primate of the Gauls, was at the same time related to Louis XI through his brother, Pierre, Lord of Beaujeu, who had married the eldest daughter of the king, and related to Charles the Bold through his mother, Agnes of Burgundy. Now, the dominant feature, the characteristic and distinctive trait in the character of the Primate of the Gauls, was his courtier-like spirit and his devotion to those in power. It is easy to imagine the countless difficulties in which his double kinship had involved him, and all the temporal reefs between which his spiritual bark had been forced to manoeuvre lest it should founder upon either Louis or Charles,—that Charybdis and that Scylla which had swallowed up the Duke of Nemours and the Constable of Saint-Pol. Heaven be thanked, he had escaped tolerably well from the voyage, and had reached Rome without accident. But although he was safe in port, and indeed because he was safe in port, he never recalled without a tremor the various haps and mishaps of his political life, so long full of alarms and labors. He was therefore wont to say that the year 1476 had been to him both black and white; meaning that in one and the same year he had lost his mother, the Duchess of Bourbonnais, and his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, and that one loss had consoled him for the other.

However, he was a very good fellow; he led a joyous life as cardinal, cheered himself willingly with the royal wine of Chaillot, was not averse to Richarde de la Garmoise and Thomasse la Sail larde, preferred to bestow alms upon pretty maids rather than aged matrons, and for all these reasons was very agreeable to the populace of Paris. He always went surrounded by a small court of bishops and priests of lofty lineage, gallant, jovial, and fond of feasting on occasion; and more than once the good devotees of St. Germain d‘Auxerre, as they passed by night beneath the brightly lighted windows of the Cardinal’s residence, had been scandalized on hearing the same voices which had sung vespers for them that day, now chanting to the clink of glasses the Bacchic adage of Benedict III,—that pope who added a third crown to the tiara,—
“Bibamus papaliter.”
^q

It was undoubtedly this popularity, so justly acquired, which saved him, on his entrance, from any unpleasant reception on the part of the mob, so dissatisfied but a moment before, and but little inclined to respect a cardinal on the very day when they were to elect a pope of their own. But Parisians are not given to hoarding up grudges; and then, by insisting that the play should begin, the good citizens had shown their authority, thus getting the better of the Cardinal: and this triumph sufficed them. Besides, the Cardinal was a remarkably handsome man; he had a very gorgeous red robe which was most becoming; which is as much as to say that all the women, and consequently the better half of the audience, were on his side. Certainly, it would have been unjust, and in very bad taste, to boo a cardinal for being late for the play, when he is handsome and wears his red robe gracefully.

He entered, therefore, bowed to the assembly with that hereditary smile which the great have for the people, and walked slowly towards his scarlet velvet arm-chair with an air of being absorbed in thoughts of far other things. His escort, or what we should now call his staff of bishops and priests, flocked after him upon the dais, not without renewed curiosity and confusion on the part of the spectators. Every man tried to point them out and name them; every man knew at least one among them: this one, the Bishop of Marseilles, Alaudet, if I remember rightly; that one, the Dean of St. Denis; another, Robert de Lespinasse, Abbot of St. Germain des Prés, the libertine brother of one of the mistresses of Louis XI,—all with endless mistakes and mispronunciations. As for the students, they swore heartily. It was their day, their Feast of Fools, their Saturnalia, the annual orgies of the basoche
^r
and the schools. No iniquity but was allowable and sacred upon that day. And then there were plenty of giddy girls in the crowd,—Simone Quatrelivres, Agnès la Gadine, Robine Piédebou. Was it not the least that they could do to swear at their ease and blaspheme a little on so fine a day, in so goodly a company of churchmen and courtesans? Neither were they slow to seize the opportunity; and in the midst of the uproar came a terrific outburst of oaths and obscenities from their lawless lips,—the lips of a set of students and scholars restrained all the rest of the year by their dread of the hot iron of Saint Louis. Poor Saint Louis! how they set him at defiance in his own Palace of Justice! Each of them selected from the newcomers on the dais a black or grey, a white or purple gown for his own victim. As for Joannes Frollo de Molendino, in his quality of brother to an archdeacon he boldly attacked the red cassock, and bawled at the top of his voice, fixing his impudent eyes full on the Cardinal,
“Cappa repleta
mero!”
^s

All these details, boldly set down here for the edification of the reader, were so covered by the general noise and confusion, that they were lost before they reached the daïs; besides which, the Cardinal would have paid but little heed to them, had he heard them, the license of that particular day was so well established a fact in the history of public morals. He had, moreover,—and his countenance showed how fully it absorbed him,—quite another cause of concern following him closely, and stepping upon the platform almost at the same moment as himself; namely, the Flemish ambassadors.

Not that he was much of a politician, or that he troubled himself much about the possible results of the marriage of his cousin, Lady Margaret of Burgundy, with his cousin Charles, Dauphin of Vienna ; he cared very little about the duration of the friendship patched up between the Duke of Austria and the King of France, or about the King of England’s opinion of the slight put upon his daughter! and he tested the royal vintage of Chaillot every evening, without suspecting that a few flasks of that same wine (slightly doctored and improved by Doctor Coictier, to be sure), cordially presented to Edward IV by Louis XI would one fine day rid Louis XI of Edward IV. The very honorable embassy of the Duke of Austria brought none of these cares to the Cardinal’s mind, but it troubled him in another way. It was indeed rather hard, and we have already spoken a word in regard to it in an earlier page of this book, to be forced to welcome and entertain—he, Charles of Bourbon—these nondescript citizens; he, a cardinal, to condescend to aldermen; he, a Frenchman and a
bon-viveur,
to befriend Flemish beer-drinkers, and in public too! This was assuredly one of the most painful farces he had ever been compelled to play for the King’s pleasure.

Still, he turned to the door with the best grace in the world (so well had he trained himself) when the usher announced in ringing tones, “The envoys from the Duke of Austria!” Needless to say, the entire audience did the same.

Then entered, two by two, with a gravity in vivid contrast to the lively ecclesiastical escort of the Cardinal, the forty-eight ambassadors of Maximilian of Austria, headed by the reverend father in God, Jehan, Abbot of Saint-Bertin, Chancellor of the Golden Fleece, and Jacques de Goy, Lord of Dauby, high bailiff of Ghent. A profound silence fell upon the assembly, followed by stifled laughter at all the absurd names and all the commonplace titles which each of these personages calmly transmitted to the usher, who instantly hurled names and titles pell-mell, and horribly mangled, at the heads of the crowd. There were Master Loys Roelof, alderman of the city of Louvain; Master Clays d‘Etuelde, alderman of Brussels; Master Paul de Baeurst, Lord of Voirmizelle, president of Flanders; Master Jehan Coleghens, burgomaster of the city of Antwerp; Master George de la Moere, head sheriff of the Court of Law of the town of Ghent; Master Gheldolf van der Hage, head sheriff of the court of equity of the same town; and the Lord of Bier becque, and Jehan Pinnock, and Jehan Dymaerzelle, etc., etc., etc.: bailiffs, aldermen, burgomasters; burgomasters, aldermen, bailiffs; all stiff, starched, and strait-laced, dressed in their Sunday best of velvet and damask, wearing flat black velvet caps on their heads, with large tassels of gold thread from Cyprus; honest Flemish figures after all, severe and dignified faces, of the race of those whom Rembrandt portrayed so gravely and forcibly against the dark background of his “Night Watch,”—personages every one of whom bore it written upon his brow that Maximilian of Austria was right in “confiding fully,” as his proclamation had it, “in their good sense, valor, experience, loyalty, and good qualities.”

But there was one exception. This was a man with a cunning, intelligent, crafty face, the face of a monkey combined with that of a diplomatist, to meet whom the Cardinal stepped forward three paces, bowing low, and yet who bore a name no more high sounding than “Guillaume Rym, councillor and pensionary of the town of Ghent.”

Few persons there knew what Guillaume Rym was,—a rare genius, who in time of revolution would have appeared with renown in the foremost rank, but who in the fifteenth century was reduced to the lowest intrigues, and to “living by sapping and mining,” as the Duke of St. Simon expresses it. However, he was appreciated by the greatest “sapper” in Europe; he planned and plotted with Louis XI on familiar terms, and often laid his hand on the king’s secret necessities.

All these things were utterly unknown to this throng, who marvelled at the politeness shown by the Cardinal to this scurvy Flemish bailiff.