To the onlookers at their windows, the palace square, which was packed with people, resembled a sea into which, like so many river-mouths, five or six streets were constantly disgorging fresh torrents of heads. As they continued to swell, the waves of people collided with the corners of the houses which, here and there, jutted out into the irregular basin of the square like so many promontories. In the center of the palace’s tall Gothic facade, twin streams flowed up and down the great staircase without interruption and then, after breaking halfway, below the entrance steps, spread down the two ramps at the sides in broad waves, so that the great staircase emptied ceaselessly into the square like a waterfall into a lake.
Hanged by the populace for waiting, hanged by the cardinal for not waiting; either way he could see only the abyss, that is a gallows.
Gringoire was what today we would call a true eclectic, one of those elevated, steady, moderate, calm spirits who manage always to steer a middle course […] and are full of reason and liberal philosophy, while yet making due allowance for cardinals […] They are to be found, quite unchanging, in every age, that is, ever in conformity with the times.
He always went about in the midst of a small court of bishops and abbots of good family, who were bawdy, lecherous and great carousers should need arise; more than once the good worshippers at Saint-Germain d’Auxerre had been shocked, when passing of an evening beneath the lighted windows of the Bourbon mansion, to hear the same voices they had heard chanting vespers during the day intoning, to the clink of glasses, the bacchic proverb of Benedict XII, the pope who added a third wreath to the papal tiara: Bibamus papaliter.
We should add that Coppenole was of the people, just as the crowd around him was of the people. Thus the contact between him and it had been prompt, electric and, as it were, on level terms. The Flemish hosier’s haughty quip had humiliated the courtiers and aroused, in all these plebian souls, some sense of dignity as yet, in the fifteenth century, dim and uncertain. This hosier who had just answered the cardinal back was an equal: a sweet thought indeed for poor devils used to showing respect and obedience to the servants of the serjeants of the bailiff of the Abbot of Sainte-Genevive, the cardinal’s train-bearer.
There was something about this spectacle which made the head spin, it had some peculiar power to bewitch and intoxicate hard to convey to a reader of our own day and from our own salons. Picture to yourself a succession of faces displaying all the known geometrical shapes one after the other, from triangle to trapezium, from cone to polyhedron; every known human expression, from anger to lust; every age of man, from the wrinkles of the newly born to the wrinkles of the dying crone; a whole religious phantasmagoria, from Faunus to Beelzebub; every kind of animal profile, from jaws to beaks and from muzzles to snouts. It was as if all those mascarons on the Pont-Neuf, nightmares turned to stone by the hand of Germain Pilon, had taken on life and breath and had come, one by one.
It must be said that a gibbet and pillory, a ‘justice’ and a ‘ladder’ as they were then called, stood permanently side by side in the middle of the paving and helped not a little to avert people’s gaze from that fateful square, where so many human beings full of life and vigor had met their death, and where, fifty years later, ‘Saint-Vallier’s fever’ would be born, that sickness of the terror of the scaffold and the most monstrous of all sicknesses because it comes not from God but from men.
It is comforting, as I say, that today, having lost all the pieces of her armor one by one, her superfluity of torments, her inventive and fantastic punishments, the torture for which, every five years, she remade a leather bed in the Grand-Châtelet, this old suzeraine of feudal society has been almost eliminated from our laws and our towns, has been hunted down from code to code and driven out town-square by town-square, until now, in all the vastness of Paris, she has only one dishonored corner of the Grève and one miserable guillotine, furtive, anxious and ashamed, which always vanishes very swiftly after it has done its work, as if it were afraid of being caught in the act!
Around her, all eyes were fixed and all mouths agape; and as she danced, to the drumming of the tambourine she held above her head in her two pure, round arms, slender, frail, quick as a wasp, with her golden, unpleated bodice, her billowing, brightly-colored dress, her bare shoulders, her slender legs, uncovered now and again by her skirt, her black hair, her fiery eyes, she was indeed a supernatural creature.
[…] it was lit by the harsh red light of the bonfire, which flickered brightly on the encircling faces of the crowd and on the dark forehead of the girl, while at the far end of the square it cast a pale glimmer, mingled with the swaying of the shadows, on the black and wrinkled old facade of the Maison-aux-Piliers on one side and the stone arms of the gallows on the other.
Neither crust nor resting-place; he found necessity crowding in on him from all sides and thought necessity mighty churlish. He had long ago discovered this truth, that Jupiter created man in a fit of misanthropy and that, throughout his life, the sage’s destiny lays siege to his philosophy.
This was the first taste he had ever had of the delights of vanity. Hitherto, he had known only humiliation, contempt for his condition and disgust for his person. And so, stone deaf though he was, he relished the acclamation of the crowd like a real pope, that crowd which he had detested because he felt it detested him. What did it matter that his people was a pack of fools, cripples, thieves and beggars, it was still a people and he its sovereign. And he took all the ironic applause and mock respect seriously, although it should be said that mixed in with it, among the crowd, went an element of very real fear.
Such voluntary abdication of one’s free will, such a subjection of one’s own fancy to that of some unsuspecting other person, has about it a mixture of whimsical independence and blind obedience, a sort of compromise between servitude and freedom which appealed to Gringoire, whose mind was essentially a mixed one, both complex and indecisive, holding gingerly on to all extremes, constantly suspended between all human propensities.
Had Gringoire lived in our own day, how beautifully he would have bisected the Classics and Romantics!
In this city, the boundaries between races and species seemed to have been abolished, as in a pandemonium. Amongst this population, men, women, animals, age, sex, health, sickness, all seemed communal; everything fitted together, was merged, mingled and superimposed; everyone was part of everything.
As you use our kind among you, so we use your kind among us. The law you apply to the truants, the truants apply to you. If it’s a vicious one, that’s your fault. We need now and again to see a respectable face above a hempen collar; it makes the whole thing honorable.
[…] a vast symphony in stone, as it were; the colossal handiwork of a man and a people, a whole both one and complex, like its sisters, the Iliad and the Romanceros; the prodigious sum contributed by all the resources of an age where, on every stone, you can see, standing out in a hundred ways, the imagination of the workman, disciplined by the genius of the artist; a sort of human creation, in short, as powerful and as fecund as that divine creation whose twin characteristics of variety and eternity it seems to have purloined.
And what we have said here of the facade has to be said of the church as a whole; and what we have said of the cathedral church of Paris has to be said of all the churches of medieval Christendom. Everything is of a piece in this logical, well-proportioned art, which originated in itself. To measure the toe is to measure the giant.
They make us aware to what extent architecture is a primitive thing, demonstrating as they do, like the cyclopean remains, the pyramids of Egypt, or the gigantic Hindu pagodas, that architecture’s greatest products are less individual than social creations; the offspring of nations in labor rather than the outpouring of men of genius; the deposit left behind by a nation; the accumulation of the centuries; the residue from the successive evaporations of human society; in short, a kind of formation. Each wave of time lays down its alluvium, each race deposits its own stratum on the monument, each individual contributes his stone. Thus do the beavers, and the bees; and thus does man. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a beehive.
Most of these privileges, be it remarked in passing—and there were better ones than this—had been extorted from the king by revolts and mutinies. Such is the immemorial pattern. The king only lets go when the people snatches.
He realized there were other things in the world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne and the verses of Homerus, that man has need of affection, that without tenderness and love life was just a harsh and mechanical clockwork, in need of lubrication.
So it was that, little by little, developing always in harmony with the cathedral, living in it, sleeping in it, hardly ever leaving it, subject day in and day out to its mysterious pressure, he came to resemble it, to be incrusted on it, as it were, to form an integral part of it. […] One might almost say that he had taken on its shape, just as the snail takes on the shape of its shell. It was his abode, his hole, his envelope. So deep was the instinctive sympathy between the old church and himself, so numerous the magnetic and material affinities, that he somehow adhered to it like the tortoise to its shell. The gnarled cathedral was his carapace.
‘No,’ said the archdeacon, seizing Compere Tourangeau by the arm, and a spark of enthusiasm rekindling in his lifeless pupils, ‘No, I don’t deny science. I have not crawled all this time on my belly with my nails in the earth, along the countless passages of the cavern without glimpsing, far ahead of me, at the end of the unlit gallery, a light, a flame, something, doubtless the reflection from the dazzling central laboratory where the wise and the patient have taken God by surprise.’
Firstly, it was the thought of a priest. It was the alarm felt by the priesthood before a new agent: the printing-press. It was the terror and bewilderment felt by a man of the sanctuary before the luminous press of Gutenberg. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken and the written word, taking fright at the printed word; something like the stupor felt by a sparrow were it to see the angel legion unfold its six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the restless surge of an emancipated mankind, who can see that future time when intelligence will undermine faith, opinion dethrone belief and the world shake off Rome.
In those days they saw everything thus, without metaphysics, without exaggeration, without a magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet been invented, either for material things or for the things of the spirit.
He, who wore his heart on his sleeve, who observed none of the world’s laws except the law of nature, who allowed his passions to escape through his inclinations, and in whom the reservoir of strong emotion was always dry, so many fresh drains did he dig for it each morning, he had no idea of how the sea of human passions rages and ferments and boils once it is refused all outlet, of how it accumulates and increases and flows over, of how it scours the heart and breaks out into inward sobs and dumb convulsions, until it has torn down its dykes and burst its bed. Jehan had always been deceived by Claude Frollo’s austere and icy exterior, that chill surface of precipitous and inaccessible virtue. That this seething, raging lava bubbled deep beneath the snowclad brow of Etna had never occurred to the cheerful student.
When one does evil one must do the whole evil. To be only half a monster is insanity. There is ecstasy in an extreme of crime.
