Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo (best electronic book reader TXT) 📕

to be hanged. ‘Tis a very simple matter, gentlemen and honest bourgeois! as you treat our people in your abode, so we treat you in ours! The law which you apply to vagabonds, vagabonds apply to you. ‘Tis your fault if it is harsh. One really must behold the grimace of an honest man above the hempen collar now and then; that renders the thing honorable. Come, friend, divide your rags gayly among these damsels. I am going to have you hanged to amuse the vagabonds, and you are to give them your purse to drink your health. If you have any mummery to go through with, there’s a very good God the Father in that mortar yonder, in stone, which we stole from Saint-Pierre aux Boeufs. You have four minutes in which to fling your soul at his head.”

The harangue was formidable.

“Well said, upon my soul! Clopin Trouillefou preaches like the Holy Father the Pope!” exclaimed the Emperor of Galilee, smashing his pot in order to prop up his table.

“Messeigneurs, emperors, and kings,” said Gringoire coolly (for I know not how, firmness had returned to him, and he spoke with resolution), “don’t think of such a thing; my name is Pierre Gringoire. I am the poet whose morality was presented this morning in the grand hall of the Courts.”

“Ah! so it was you, master!” said Clopin. “I was there, xête Dieu! Well! comrade, is that any reason, because you bored us to death this morning, that you should not be hung this evening?”

“I shall find difficulty in getting out of it,” said Gringoire to himself. Nevertheless, he made one more effort: “I don’t see why poets are not classed with vagabonds,” said he. “Vagabond, Aesopus certainly was; Homerus was a beggar; Mercurius was a thief—”

Clopin interrupted him: “I believe that you are trying to blarney us with your jargon. Zounds! let yourself be hung, and don’t kick up such a row over it!”

“Pardon me, monseigneur, the King of Thunes,” replied Gringoire, disputing the ground foot by foot. “It is worth trouble—One moment!—Listen to me—You are not going to condemn me without having heard me”—

His unlucky voice was, in fact, drowned in the uproar which rose around him. The little boy scraped away at his cauldron with more spirit than ever; and, to crown all, an old woman had just placed on the tripod a frying-pan of grease, which hissed away on the fire with a noise similar to the cry of a troop of children in pursuit of a masker.

In the meantime, Clopin Trouillefou appeared to hold a momentary conference with the Duke of Egypt, and the Emperor of Galilee, who was completely drunk. Then he shouted shrilly: “Silence!” and, as the cauldron and the frying-pan did not heed him, and continued their duet, he jumped down from his hogshead, gave a kick to the boiler, which rolled ten paces away bearing the child with it, a kick to the frying-pan, which upset in the fire with all its grease, and gravely remounted his throne, without troubling himself about the stifled tears of the child, or the grumbling of the old woman, whose supper was wasting away in a fine white flame.

Trouillefou made a sign, and the duke, the emperor, and the passed masters of pickpockets, and the isolated robbers, came and ranged themselves around him in a horseshoe, of which Gringoire, still roughly held by the body, formed the centre. It was a semicircle of rags, tatters, tinsel, pitchforks, axes, legs staggering with intoxication, huge, bare arms, faces sordid, dull, and stupid. In the midst of this Round Table of beggary, Clopin Trouillefou,—as the doge of this senate, as the king of this peerage, as the pope of this conclave,— dominated; first by virtue of the height of his hogshead, and next by virtue of an indescribable, haughty, fierce, and formidable air, which caused his eyes to flash, and corrected in his savage profile the bestial type of the race of vagabonds. One would have pronounced him a boar amid a herd of swine.

“Listen,” said he to Gringoire, fondling his misshapen chin with his horny hand; “I don’t see why you should not be hung. It is true that it appears to be repugnant to you; and it is very natural, for you bourgeois are not accustomed to it. You form for yourselves a great idea of the thing. After all, we don’t wish you any harm. Here is a means of extricating yourself from your predicament for the moment. Will you become one of us?”

The reader can judge of the effect which this proposition produced upon Gringoire, who beheld life slipping away from him, and who was beginning to lose his hold upon it. He clutched at it again with energy.

“Certainly I will, and right heartily,” said he.

“Do you consent,” resumed Clopin, “to enroll yourself among the people of the knife?”

“Of the knife, precisely,” responded Gringoire.

“You recognize yourself as a member of the free bourgeoisie?”* added the King of Thunes.

A high-toned sharper.

“Of the free bourgeoisie.”

“Subject of the Kingdom of Argot?”

“Of the Kingdom of Argot*.”

Thieves.

“A vagabond?”

“A vagabond.”

“In your soul?”

“In my soul.”

“I must call your attention to the fact,” continued the king, “that you will be hung all the same.”

“The devil!” said the poet.

“Only,” continued Clopin imperturbably, “you will be hung later on, with more ceremony, at the expense of the good city of Paris, on a handsome stone gibbet, and by honest men. That is a consolation.”

“Just so,” responded Gringoire.

“There are other advantages. In your quality of a high-toned sharper, you will not have to pay the taxes on mud, or the poor, or lanterns, to which the bourgeois of Paris are subject.”

“So be it,” said the poet. “I agree. I am a vagabond, a thief, a sharper, a man of the knife, anything you please; and I am all that already, monsieur, King of Thunes, for I am a philosopher; et omnia in philosophia, omnes in philosopho continentur,—all things are contained in philosophy, all men in the philosopher, as you know.”

The King of Thunes scowled.

“What do you take me for, my friend? What Hungarian Jew patter are you jabbering at us? I don’t know Hebrew. One isn’t a Jew because one is a bandit. I don’t even steal any longer. I’m above that; I kill. Cut-throat, yes; cutpurse, no.”

Gringoire tried to slip in some excuse between these curt words, which wrath rendered more and more jerky.

“I ask your pardon, monseigneur. It is not Hebrew; ‘tis Latin.”

“I tell you,” resumed Clopin angrily, “that I’m not a Jew, and that I’ll have you hung, belly of the synagogue, like that little shopkeeper of Judea, who is by your side, and whom I entertain strong hopes of seeing nailed to a counter one of these days, like the counterfeit coin that he is!”

So saying, he pointed his finger at the little, bearded Hungarian Jew who had accosted Gringoire with his facitote caritatem, and who, understanding no other language beheld with surprise the King of Thunes’s ill-humor overflow upon him.

At length Monsieur Clopin calmed down.

“So you will be a vagabond, you knave?” he said to our poet.

“Of course,” replied the poet.

“Willing is not all,” said the surly Clopin; “good will doesn’t put one onion the more into the soup, and ‘tis good for nothing except to go to Paradise with; now, Paradise and the thieves’ band are two different things. In order to be received among the thieves,* you must prove that you are good for something, and for that purpose, you must search the manikin.”

L’argot.

“I’ll search anything you like,” said Gringoire.

Clopin made a sign. Several thieves detached themselves from the circle, and returned a moment later. They brought two thick posts, terminated at their lower extremities in spreading timber supports, which made them stand readily upon the ground; to the upper extremity of the two posts they fitted a cross-beam, and the whole constituted a very pretty portable gibbet, which Gringoire had the satisfaction of beholding rise before him, in a twinkling. Nothing was lacking, not even the rope, which swung gracefully over the cross-beam.

“What are they going to do?” Gringoire asked himself with some uneasiness. A sound of bells, which he heard at that moment, put an end to his anxiety; it was a stuffed manikin, which the vagabonds were suspending by the neck from the rope, a sort of scarecrow dressed in red, and so hung with mule-bells and larger bells, that one might have tricked out thirty Castilian mules with them. These thousand tiny bells quivered for some time with the vibration of the rope, then gradually died away, and finally became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool placed beneath the manikin,— “Climb up there.”

“Death of the devil!” objected Gringoire; “I shall break my neck. Your stool limps like one of Martial’s distiches; it has one hexameter leg and one pentameter leg.”

“Climb!” repeated Clopin.

Gringoire mounted the stool, and succeeded, not without some oscillations of head and arms, in regaining his centre of gravity.

“Now,” went on the King of Thunes, “twist your right foot round your left leg, and rise on the tip of your left foot.”

“Monseigneur,” said Gringoire, “so you absolutely insist on my breaking some one of my limbs?”

Clopin tossed his head.

“Hark ye, my friend, you talk too much. Here’s the gist of the matter in two words: you are to rise on tiptoe, as I tell you; in that way you will be able to reach the pocket of the manikin, you will rummage it, you will pull out the purse that is there,—and if you do all this without our hearing the sound of a bell, all is well: you shall be a vagabond. All we shall then have to do, will be to thrash you soundly for the space of a week.”

“Ventre-Dieu! I will be careful,” said Gringoire. “And suppose I do make the bells sound?”

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

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

“Listen, once more. You are to search the manikin, and take away its purse; if a single bell stirs during the operation, you will be hung. Do you understand that?”

“Good,” said Gringoire; “I understand that. And then?”

“If you succeed in removing the purse without our hearing the bells, you are a vagabond, and you will be thrashed for eight consecutive days. You understand now, no doubt?”

“No, monseigneur; I no longer understand. Where is the advantage to me? hanged in one case, cudgelled in the other?”

“And a vagabond,” resumed Clopin, “and a vagabond; is that nothing? It is for your interest that we should beat you, in order to harden you to blows.”

“Many thanks,” replied the poet.

“Come, make haste,” said the king, stamping upon his cask, which resounded like a huge drum! Search the manikin, and let there be an end to this! I warn you for the last time, that if I hear a single bell, you