Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo (e reader for manga txt) 📕

Night was falling; the square was dark; the wine-shop, full of candles, flamed afar like a forge in the gloom; the noise of glasses and feasting, of oaths and quarrels, which escaped through the broken panes, was audible. Through the mist which the warmth of the room spread over the window in front, a hundred confused figures could be seen swarming, and from time to time a burst of noisy laughter broke forth from it. The passersby who were going about their business, slipped past this tumultuous window without glancing at it. Only at intervals did some little ragged boy raise himself on tiptoe as far as the ledge, and hurl into the drinking-shop, that ancient, jeering hoot, with which drunken men were then pursued: “Aux Houls, saouls, saouls, saouls!”

Nevertheless, one man paced imperturbably back and forth in front of the tavern, gazing at it incessantly, and going no further from it than a pikeman from his sentry-box. He was enveloped in a mantle to his very nose. This mantle he had just purchased of the old-clothes man, in the vicinity of the “Eve’s Apple,” no doubt to protect himself from the cold of the March evening, possibly also, to conceal his costume. From time to time he paused in front of the dim window with its leaden lattice, listened, looked, and stamped his foot.

At length the door of the dram-shop opened. This was what he appeared to be waiting for. Two boon companions came forth. The ray of light which escaped from the door crimsoned for a moment their jovial faces.

The man in the mantle went and stationed himself on the watch under a porch on the other side of the street.

“Corne et tonnerre!” said one of the comrades. “Seven o’clock is on the point of striking. ’Tis the hour of my appointed meeting.”

“I tell you,” repeated his companion, with a thick tongue, “that I don’t live in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles, indignus qui inter mala verba habitat. I have a lodging in the Rue Jean-Pain-Mollet, in vico Johannis Pain-Mollet. You are more horned than a unicorn if you assert the contrary. Everyone knows that he who once mounts astride a bear is never after afraid; but you have a nose turned to dainties like Saint-Jacques of the hospital.”

“Jehan, my friend, you are drunk,” said the other.

The other replied staggering, “It pleases you to say so, Phoebus; but it hath been proved that Plato had the profile of a hound.”

The reader has, no doubt, already recognized our two brave friends, the captain and the scholar. It appears that the man who was lying in wait for them had also recognized them, for he slowly followed all the zigzags that the scholar caused the captain to make, who being a more hardened drinker had retained all his self-possession. By listening to them attentively, the man in the mantle could catch in its entirety the following interesting conversation⁠—

“Corbacque! Do try to walk straight, master bachelor; you know that I must leave you. Here it is seven o’clock. I have an appointment with a woman.”

“Leave me then! I see stars and lances of fire. You are like the Château de Dampmartin, which is bursting with laughter.”

“By the warts of my grandmother, Jehan, you are raving with too much rabidness. By the way, Jehan, have you any money left?”

“Monsieur Rector, there is no mistake; the little butcher’s shop, parva boucheria.”

“Jehan! my friend Jehan! You know that I made an appointment with that little girl at the end of the Pont Saint-Michel, and I can only take her to the Falourdel’s, the old crone of the bridge, and that I must pay for a chamber. The old witch with a white moustache would not trust me. Jehan! for pity’s sake! Have we drunk up the whole of the curé’s purse? Have you not a single parisis left?”

“The consciousness of having spent the other hours well is a just and savory condiment for the table.”

“Belly and guts! a truce to your whimsical nonsense! Tell me, Jehan of the devil! have you any money left? Give it to me, bédieu! or I will search you, were you as leprous as Job, and as scabby as Caesar!”

“Monsieur, the Rue Galiache is a street which hath at one end the Rue de la Verrerie, and at the other the Rue de la Tixeranderie.”

“Well, yes! my good friend Jehan, my poor comrade, the Rue Galiache is good, very good. But in the name of heaven collect your wits. I must have a sou parisis, and the appointment is for seven o’clock.”

“Silence for the rondo, and attention to the refrain⁠—

“Quand les rats mangeront les cas,
Le roi sera seigneur d’Arras;
Quand la mer, qui est grande et lée
Sera à la Saint-Jean gelée,
On verra, par-dessus la glace,
Sortir ceux d’Arras de leur place.”43

“Well, scholar of Antichrist, may you be strangled with the entrails of your mother!” exclaimed Phoebus, and he gave the drunken scholar a rough push; the latter slipped against the wall, and slid flabbily to the pavement of Philip Augustus. A remnant of fraternal pity, which never abandons the heart of a drinker, prompted Phoebus to roll Jehan with his foot upon one of those pillows of the poor, which Providence keeps in readiness at the corner of all the street posts of Paris, and which the rich blight with the name of “a rubbish-heap.” The captain adjusted Jehan’s head upon an inclined plane of cabbage-stumps, and on the very instant, the scholar fell to snoring in a magnificent bass. Meanwhile, all malice was not extinguished in the captain’s heart. “So much the worse if the devil’s cart picks you up on its passage!” he said to the poor, sleeping clerk; and he strode off.

The man in the mantle, who had not ceased to follow him, halted for a moment before the prostrate scholar, as