The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Виктор Мари Гюго
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practising the lament of the Holy Queen, not forgetting the drone and the nasal drawl. Further on, a young scamp was taking a lesson in epilepsy from an old pretender, who was instructing him in the art of foaming at the mouth, by chewing a morsel of soap. Beside him, a man with the dropsy was getting rid of his swelling, and making four or five female thieves, who were disputing at the same table, over a child who had been stolen that evening, hold their noses. All circumstances which, two centuries later, “seemed so ridiculous to the court,” as Sauval says, “that they served as a pastime to the king, and as an introduction to the royal ballet of Night, divided into four parts and danced on the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon.” “Never,” adds an eye witness of 1653, “have the sudden metamorphoses of the Court of Miracles been more happily presented. Benserade prepared us for it by some very gallant verses.”
Loud laughter everywhere, and obscene songs. Each one held his own course, carping and swearing, without listening to his neighbor. Pots clinked, and quarrels sprang up at the shock of the pots, and the broken pots made rents in the rags.
A big dog, seated on his tail, gazed at the fire. Some children were mingled in this orgy. The stolen child wept and cried. Another, a big boy four years of age, seated with legs dangling, upon a bench that was too high for him, before a table that reached to his chin, and uttering not a word. A third, gravely spreading out upon the table with his finger, the melted tallow which dripped from a candle. Last of all, a little fellow crouching in the mud, almost lost in a cauldron, which he was scraping with a tile, and from which he was evoking a sound that would have made Stradivarius swoon.
Near the fire was a hogshead, and on the hogshead a beggar. This was the king on his throne.
The three who had Gringoire in their clutches led him in front of this hogshead, and the entire bacchanal rout fell silent for a moment, with the exception of the cauldron inhabited by the child.
Gringoire dared neither breathe nor raise his eyes.
“Hombre, quita tu somberro!” said one of the three knaves, in whose grasp he was, and, before he had comprehended the meaning, the other had snatched his hat—a wretched headgear, it is true, but still good on a sunny day or when there was but little rain. Gringoire sighed.
Meanwhile the king addressed him, from the summit of his cask,
“Who is this rogue?”
Gringoire shuddered. That voice, although accentuated by menace, recalled to him another voice, which, that very morning, had dealt the deathblow to his mystery, by drawling, nasally, in the midst of the audience, “Charity, please!” He raised his head. It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.
Clopin Trouillefou, arrayed in his royal insignia, wore neither one rag more nor one rag less. The sore upon his arm had already disappeared. He held in his hand one of those whips made of thongs of white leather, which police sergeants then used to repress the crowd, and which were called boullayes. On his head he wore a sort of headgear, bound round and closed at the top. But it was difficult to make out whether it was a child’s cap or a king’s crown, the two things bore so strong a resemblance to each other.
Meanwhile Gringoire, without knowing why, had regained some hope, on recognizing in the King of the Cour des Miracles his accursed mendicant of the Grand Hall.
“Master,” stammered he; “monseigneur—sire—how ought I to address you?” he said at length, having reached the culminating point of his crescendo, and knowing neither how to mount higher, nor to descend again.
“Monseigneur, his majesty, or comrade, call me what you please. But make haste. What have you to say in your own defence?”
“In your own defence?” thought Gringoire, “that displeases me.” He resumed, stuttering, “I am he, who this morning—”
“By the devil’s claws!” interrupted Clopin, “your name, knave, and nothing more. Listen. You are in the presence of three powerful sovereigns: myself, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Thunes, successor to the Grand Coësre, supreme suzerain of the Realm of Argot; Mathias Hunyadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and of Bohemia, the old yellow fellow whom you see yonder, with a dish clout round his head; Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat fellow who is not listening to us but caressing a wench. We are your judges. You have entered the Kingdom of Argot, without being an argotier; you have violated the privileges of our city. You must be punished unless you are a capon, a franc-mitou or a rifodé; that is to say, in the slang of honest folks, a thief, a beggar, or a vagabond. Are you anything of that sort? Justify yourself; announce your titles.”
“Alas!” said Gringoire, “I have not that honor. I am the author—”
“That is sufficient,” resumed Trouillefou, without permitting him to finish. “You are going 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 center. 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