Chapter V: Result of the Dangers

Gringoire, thoroughly stunned by his fall, remained on the
pavement in front of the Holy Virgin at the street corner. Little
by little, he regained his senses; at first, for several minutes,
he was floating in a sort of half-somnolent revery, which was not
without its charm, in which æriel figures of the gypsy and her
goat were coupled with Quasimodo’s heavy fist. This state lasted
but a short time. A decidedly vivid sensation of cold in the part
of his body which was in contact with the pavement, suddenly
aroused him and caused his spirit to return to the surface.

“Whence comes this chill?” he said abruptly, to himself. He then
perceived that he was lying half in the middle of the gutter.

“That devil of a hunchbacked cyclops!” he muttered between his
teeth; and he tried to rise. But he was too much dazed and
bruised; he was forced to remain where he was. Moreover, his hand
was tolerably free; he stopped up his nose and resigned himself.

“The mud of Paris,” he said to himself—for decidedly he thought
that he was sure that the gutter would prove his refuge for the
night; and what can one do in a refuge, except dream?—“the mud of
Paris is particularly stinking; it must contain a great deal of
volatile and nitric salts. That, moreover, is the opinion of
Master Nicholas Flamel, and of the alchemists—”

The word _alchemists_ suddenly suggested to his mind the idea of
Archdeacon Claude Frollo. He recalled the violent scene which he
had just witnessed in part; that the gypsy was struggling with
two men, that Quasimodo had a companion; and the morose and
haughty face of the archdeacon passed confusedly through his
memory. “That would be strange!” he said to himself. And on that
fact and that basis he began to construct a fantastic edifice of
hypothesis, that card-castle of philosophers; then, suddenly
returning once more to reality, “Come! I’m freezing!” he
ejaculated.

The place was, in fact, becoming less and less tenable. Each
molecule of the gutter bore away a molecule of heat radiating
from Gringoire’s loins, and the equilibrium between the
temperature of his body and the temperature of the brook, began
to be established in rough fashion.

Quite a different annoyance suddenly assailed him. A group of
children, those little bare-footed savages who have always roamed
the pavements of Paris under the eternal name of _gamins_, and
who, when we were also children ourselves, threw stones at all of
us in the afternoon, when we came out of school, because our
trousers were not torn—a swarm of these young scamps rushed
towards the square where Gringoire lay, with shouts and laughter
which seemed to pay but little heed to the sleep of the
neighbors. They were dragging after them some sort of hideous
sack; and the noise of their wooden shoes alone would have roused
the dead. Gringoire who was not quite dead yet, half raised
himself.

“Ohé, Hennequin Dandèche! Ohé, Jehan Pincebourde!” they shouted
in deafening tones, “old Eustache Moubon, the merchant at the
corner, has just died. We’ve got his straw pallet, we’re going to
have a bonfire out of it. It’s the turn of the Flemish to-day!”

And behold, they flung the pallet directly upon Gringoire, beside
whom they had arrived, without espying him. At the same time, one
of them took a handful of straw and set off to light it at the
wick of the good Virgin.

“S’death!” growled Gringoire, “am I going to be too warm now?”

It was a critical moment. He was caught between fire and water;
he made a superhuman effort, the effort of a counterfeiter of
money who is on the point of being boiled, and who seeks to
escape. He rose to his feet, flung aside the straw pallet upon
the street urchins, and fled.

“Holy Virgin!” shrieked the children; “’tis the merchant’s
ghost!”

And they fled in their turn.

The straw mattress remained master of the field. Belleforêt,
Father Le Juge, and Corrozet affirm that it was picked up on the
morrow, with great pomp, by the clergy of the quarter, and borne
to the treasury of the church of Saint Opportune, where the
sacristan, even as late as 1789, earned a tolerably handsome
revenue out of the great miracle of the Statue of the Virgin at
the corner of the Rue Mauconseil, which had, by its mere
presence, on the memorable night between the sixth and seventh of
January, 1482, exorcised the defunct Eustache Moubon, who, in
order to play a trick on the devil, had at his death maliciously
concealed his soul in his straw pallet.