The Hunchback of Notre Dame (15 page)

Coarse laughter was heard on every hand, with vulgar songs. Every man expressed himself in his own way, carping and swearing, without heeding his neighbor. Some hob-nobbed, and quarrels arose from the clash of their mugs, and the breaking of their mugs was the cause of many torn rags.

A big dog squatted on his tail, gazing into the fire. Some children took their part in the orgies. The stolen child cried and screamed; while another, a stout boy of four, sat on a high bench, with his legs dangling, his chin just coming above the table, and not speaking a word. A third was gravely smearing the table with melted tallow as it ran from the candle. Another, a little fellow crouched in the mud, almost lost in a kettle which he was scraping with a potsherd, making a noise which would have distracted Stradivarius.

A cask stood near the fire, and a beggar sat on the cask. This was the king upon his throne.

The three who held Gringoire led him up to this cask, and all the revellers were hushed for a moment, except the caldron inhabited by the child.

Gringoire dared not breathe or raise his eyes.

“Hombre,
quita
tu sombrero!”
^aj
said one of the three scoundrels who held him; and before he had made up his mind what this meant, another snatched his hat,—a shabby head-piece to be sure, but still useful on sunny or on rainy days. Gringoire sighed.

But the king, from the height of his barrel, addressed him,—

“Who is this rascal?”

Gringoire started. The voice, although threatening in tone, reminded him of another voice which had that same morning dealt the first blow to his mystery by whining out from the audience, “Charity, kind souls!” He lifted his head. It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.

Clopin Trouillefou, decked with his royal insignia, had not a tat ter more or less than usual. The wound on his arm had vanished.

In his hand he held one of those whips with whit-leather thongs then used by sergeants of the wand to keep back the crowd, and called “boullayes.” Upon his head he wore a circular bonnet closed at the top; but it was hard to say whether it was a child’s cap or a king’s crown, so similar are the two things.

Still, Gringoire, without knowing why, felt his hopes revive when he recognized this accursed beggar of the Great Hall in the King of the Court of Miracles.

“Master,” stuttered he, “My lord—Sire—How shall I address you?” he said at last, reaching the culminating point of his crescendo, and not knowing how to rise higher or to re-descend.

“My lord, your Majesty, or comrade. Call me what you will; but make haste. What have you to say in your defense?”

“ ‘In your defense,’ ” thought Gringoire; “I don’t like the sound of that.” He resumed stammeringly, “I am he who this morning—”

“By the devil’s claws!” interrupted Clopin, “your name, rascal, and nothing more. Hark ye. You stand before three mighty sover eigns: me, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Tunis,
^ak
successor to the Grand Coëre, the king of rogues, lord paramount of the kingdom of Slang; Mathias Hungadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt
^al
and Bohemia, that yellow old boy you see yonder with a clout about his head, Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee,
^am
that fat fellow who pays no heed to us, but caresses that wench. We are your judges. You have entered the kingdom of Slang, the land of thieves, without being a member of the confraternity; you have violated the privileges of our city. You must be punished, unless you be either prig, mumper, or cadger; that is, in the vulgar tongue of honest folks, either thief, beggar, or tramp. Are you anything of the sort? Justify yourself; state your character.”

“Alas!” said Gringoire, “I have not that honor. I am the author—”

“Enough!” cried Trouillefou, not allowing him to finish his sentence. “You must be hanged. Quite a simple matter, my honest citizens! As you treat our people when they enter your domain, so we treat yours when they intrude among us. The law which you mete out to vagabonds, the vagabonds mete out to you. It is your own fault if it be evil. It is quite necessary that we should occasionally see an honest man grin ever through a hempen collar; it makes the thing honorable. Come, friend, divide your rags cheerfully among these young ladies. I will have you hanged to amuse the vagabonds, and you shall give them your purse to pay for a drink. If you have any mummeries to perform, over yonder in that mortar there’s a capital God the Father, in stone, which we stole from the Church of Saint-Pierre-aux-Bœufs. You have four minutes to fling your soul at his head.”

This was a terrible speech.

“Well said, upon my soul! Clopin Trouillefou preaches as well as any pope!” exclaimed the Emperor of Galilee, smashing his jug to prop up his table.

“Noble emperors and kings,” said Gringoire with great coolness (for his courage had mysteriously returned, and he spoke firmly), “you do not consider what you’re doing. My name is Pierre Gringoire; I am the poet whose play was performed this morning in the Great Hall of the Palace.”

“Oh, is it you, sirrah?” said Clopin. “I was there, God’s wounds! Well, comrade, because you bored us this morning, is that any reason why we should not hang you tonight?”

“I shall have hard work to get off,” thought Gringoire. But yet he made one more effort. “I don’t see,” said he, “why poets should not be classed with vagabonds. Æsop was a vagrant; Homer was a beggar; Mercury was a thief—”

Clopin interrupted him: “I believe you mean to cozen us with your lingo. Good God! be hanged, and don’t make such a row about it!”

“Excuse me, my lord King of Tunis,” replied Gringoire, disputing every inch of the ground. “Is it worth while—An instant—Hear me—You will not condemn me unheard—”

His melancholy voice was indeed lost in the uproar around him. The little boy scraped his kettle more vigorously than ever; and, to cap the climax, an old woman had just placed a frying-pan full of fat upon the trivet, and it crackled over the flames with a noise like the shouts of an army of children in chase of some mas querader.

However, Clopin Trouillefou seemed to be conferring for a moment with the Duke of Egypt and the Emperor of Galilee, the latter being entirely drunk. Then he cried out sharply, “Silence, I say!” and as the kettle and the frying-pan paid no heed, but kept up their duet, he leaped from his cask, dealt a kick to the kettle, which rolled ten paces or more with the child, another kick to the frying-pan, which upset all the fat into the fire, and then gravely reascended his throne, utterly regardless of the little one’s stifled sobs and the grumbling of the old woman whose supper had vanished in brilliant flames.

Trouillefou made a sign, and the duke, the emperor, the arch thieves, and the dignitaries of the kingdom ranged themselves around him in the form of a horseshoe, Gringoire, still roughly grasped by the shoulders, occupying the center. It was a semicircle of rags, of tatters, of tinsel, of pitchforks, of axes, of staggering legs, of bare brawny arms, of sordid, dull, stupid faces. In the middle of this Round Table of beggary Clopin Trouillefou reigned pre-eminent, as the doge of this senate, the king of this assembly of peers, the pope of this conclave,—pre-eminent in the first place by the height of his cask, then by a peculiarly haughty, savage, and tremendous air, which made his eyes flash, and amended in his fierce profile the bestial type of the vagrant. He seemed a wild boar among swine.

“Hark ye,” he said to Gringoire, caressing his shapeless chin with his horny hand; “I see no reason why you should not be hanged. To be sure, you seem to dislike the idea, and it’s very plain that you worthy townsfolk are not used to it; you’ve got an exaggerated idea of the thing. After all, we wish you no harm. There is one way of getting you out of the difficulty for the time being. Will you join us?”

My reader may fancy the effect of this proposal upon Gringoire, who saw his life escaping him, and had already begun to lose his hold upon it. He clung to it once more with vigor.

“I will indeed, with all my heart,” said he.

“Do you agree,” resumed Clopin, “to enroll yourself among the gentry of the chive.”
^an

“Of the chive, exactly,” answered Gringoire.

“Do you acknowledge yourself a member of the rogues’ brigade?” continued the King of Tunis.

“Of the rogues’ brigade.”

“A subject of the kingdom of Slang?”

“Of the kingdom of Slang.”

“A vagrant?”

“A vagrant.”

“At heart?”

“At heart.”

“I would call your attention to the fact,” added the King, “that you will be hanged none the less.”

“The devil!” said the poet.

“Only,” continued Clopin, quite unmoved, “you will be hanged later, with more ceremony, at the cost of the good city of Paris, on a fine stone gallows, and by honest men. That is some consolation.”

“As you say,” responded Gringoire.

“There are other advantages. As a member of the rogues’ brigade you will have to pay no taxes for pavements, for the poor, or for lighting the streets, to all of which the citizens of Paris are subject.”

“So be it,” said the poet; “I consent. I am a vagrant, a man of Slang, a member of the rogues’ brigade, a man of the chive,—what you will; and I was all this long ago, Sir King of Tunis, for I am a philosopher;
et omnia in philosophia, omnes in philosopho continentur,
^ao
as you know.”

The King of Tunis frowned.

“What do you take me for, mate? What Hungarian Jew’s gibberish are you giving us? I don’t know Hebrew. I’m no Jew, if I am a thief. I don’t even steal now; I am above that; I kill. Cutthroat, yes; cutpurse, no.”

Gringoire tried to slip in some excuse between these brief phrases which anger made yet more abrupt.

“I beg your pardon, my lord. It is not Hebrew, it is Latin.”

“I tell you,” replied Clopin, furiously, “that I am no Jew, and that I will have you hanged,—by the synagogue, I will!-together with that paltry Judean cadger beside you, whom I mightily hope I may some day see nailed to a counter, like the counterfeit coin that he is!”

So saying, he pointed to the little Hungarian Jew with the beard, who had accosted Gringoire with his
“Facitote caritatem,”
and who, understanding no other language, was amazed at the wrath which the King of Tunis vented upon him.

At last my lord Clopin became calm.

“So, rascal,” said he to our poet, “you wish to become a vagrant?”

“Undoubtedly,” replied the poet.

“It is not enough merely to wish,” said the surly Clopin; “goodwill never added an onion to the soup, and is good for nothing but a passport to paradise; now, paradise and Slang are two distinct things. To be received into the kingdom of Slang, you must prove that you are good for something; and to prove this you must search the manikin.“
^ap

“I will search,” said Gringoire, “as much as ever you like.”

Clopin made a sign. A number of Slangers stepped from the circle and returned immediately, bringing a couple of posts finished at the lower end with broad wooden feet, which made them stand firmly upon the ground; at the upper end of the two posts they arranged a crossbeam, the whole forming a very pretty portable gallows, which Gringoire had the pleasure of seeing erected before him in the twinkling of an eye. Nothing was wanting, not even the rope, which swung gracefully from the crossbeam.

“What are they going to do?” wondered Gringoire with some alarm. A sound of bells which he heard at the same moment put an end to his anxiety; it was a manikin, or puppet, that the vagrants hung by the neck to the cord,—a sort of scarecrow, dressed in red, and so loaded with little bells and hollow brasses that thirty Castilian mules might have been tricked out with them. These countless tinklers jingled for some time with the swaying of the rope, then the sound died away by degrees, and finally ceased when the manikin had been restored to a state of complete immobility by that law of the pendulum which has superseded the clepsydra and the hour-glass.

Then Clopin, showing Gringoire a rickety old footstool, placed under the manikin, said,—

“Climb up there!”

“The devil!” objected Gringoire; “I shall break my neck. Your stool halts like one of Martial’s couplets; one foot has six syllables and one foot has but five.”

“Climb up!” repeated Clopin.

Gringoire mounted the stool, and succeeded, though not without considerable waving of head and arms, in recovering his center of gravity.

“Now,” resumed the King of Tunis, “twist your right foot round your left leg, and stand on tiptoe with your left foot.”

“My lord,” said Gringoire, “are you absolutely determined to make me break a limb?”

Clopin tossed his head.

“Hark ye, mate; you talk too much. I will tell you in a couple of words what I expect you to do: you are to stand on tiptoe, as I say; in that fashion you can reach the manikin’s pockets; you are to search them; you are to take out a purse which you will find there; and if you do all this without ringing a single bell, it is well: you shall become a vagrant. We shall have nothing more to do but to baste you with blows for a week.”

“Zounds! I shall take good care,” said Gringoire. “And if I ring the bells?”

“Then you shall be hanged. Do you understand?”

“I don’t understand at all,” answered Gringoire.

“Listen to me once more. You are to search the manikin and steal his purse; if but a single bell stir in the act, you shall be hanged. Do you understand that?”

“Good,” said Gringoire, “I understand that. What next?”

“If you manage to get the purse without moving the bells, you are a vagrant, and you shall be basted with blows for seven days in succession. You understand now, I suppose?”

“No, my lord; I no longer understand. Where is the advantage? I shall be hanged in the one case, beaten in the other?”

“And as a vagrant,” added Clopin, “and as a vagrant; does that count for nothing? It is for your own good that we shall beat you, to harden you against blows.”