Chapter I: An Impartial Glance at the Ancient Magistracy

A very happy personage in the year of grace 1482, was the noble
gentleman Robert d’Estouteville, chevalier, Sieur de Beyne, Baron
d’Ivry and Saint Andry en la Marche, counsellor and chamberlain
to the king, and guard of the provostship of Paris. It was
already nearly seventeen years since he had received from the
king, on November 7, 1465, the comet year,[27] that fine charge
of the provostship of Paris, which was reputed rather a seigneury
than an office. _Dignitas_, says Joannes Lœmnœus, _quæ cum non
exigua potestate politiam concernente, atque prærogativis multis
et juribus conjuncta est_. A marvellous thing in ’82 was a
gentleman bearing the king’s commission, and whose letters of
institution ran back to the epoch of the marriage of the natural
daughter of Louis XI. with Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon.

The same day on which Robert d’Estouteville took the place of
Jacques de Villiers in the provostship of Paris, Master Jehan
Dauvet replaced Messire Helye de Thorrettes in the first
presidency of the Court of Parliament, Jehan Jouvenel des Ursins
supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of chancellor of
France, Regnault des Dormans ousted Pierre Puy from the charge of
master of requests in ordinary of the king’s household. Now, upon
how many heads had the presidency, the chancellorship, the
mastership passed since Robert d’Estouteville had held the
provostship of Paris. It had been “granted to him for
safekeeping,” as the letters patent said; and certainly he kept
it well. He had clung to it, he had incorporated himself with it,
he had so identified himself with it that he had escaped that
fury for change which possessed Louis XI., a tormenting and
industrious king, whose policy it was to maintain the elasticity
of his power by frequent appointments and revocations. More than
this; the brave chevalier had obtained the reversion of the
office for his son, and for two years already, the name of the
noble man Jacques d’Estouteville, equerry, had figured beside his
at the head of the register of the salary list of the provostship
of Paris. A rare and notable favor indeed! It is true that Robert
d’Estouteville was a good soldier, that he had loyally raised his
pennon against “the league of public good,” and that he had
presented to the queen a very marvellous stag in confectionery on
the day of her entrance to Paris in 14.... Moreover, he possessed
the good friendship of Messire Tristan l’Hermite, provost of the
marshals of the king’s household. Hence a very sweet and pleasant
existence was that of Messire Robert. In the first place, very
good wages, to which were attached, and from which hung, like
extra bunches of grapes on his vine, the revenues of the civil
and criminal registries of the provostship, plus the civil and
criminal revenues of the tribunals of Embas of the Châtelet,
without reckoning some little toll from the bridges of Mantes and
of Corbeil, and the profits on the craft of Shagreen-makers of
Paris, on the corders of firewood and the measurers of salt. Add
to this the pleasure of displaying himself in rides about the
city, and of making his fine military costume, which you may
still admire sculptured on his tomb in the abbey of Valmont in
Normandy, and his morion, all embossed at Montlhéry, stand out a
contrast against the parti-colored red and tawny robes of the
aldermen and police. And then, was it nothing to wield absolute
supremacy over the sergeants of the police, the porter and watch
of the Châtelet, the two auditors of the Châtelet, _auditores
castelleti_, the sixteen commissioners of the sixteen quarters,
the jailer of the Châtelet, the four enfeoffed sergeants, the
hundred and twenty mounted sergeants, with maces, the chevalier
of the watch with his watch, his sub-watch, his counter-watch and
his rear-watch? Was it nothing to exercise high and low justice,
the right to interrogate, to hang and to draw, without reckoning
petty jurisdiction in the first resort (_in prima instantia_, as
the charters say), on that viscomty of Paris, so nobly appanaged
with seven noble bailiwicks? Can anything sweeter be imagined
than rendering judgments and decisions, as Messire Robert
d’Estouteville daily did in the Grand Châtelet, under the large
and flattened arches of Philip Augustus? and going, as he was
wont to do every evening, to that charming house situated in the
Rue Galilée, in the enclosure of the royal palace, which he held
in right of his wife, Madame Ambroise de Loré, to repose after
the fatigue of having sent some poor wretch to pass the night in
“that little cell of the Rue de Escorcherie, which the provosts
and aldermen of Paris used to make their prison; the same being
eleven feet long, seven feet and four inches wide, and eleven
feet high?”[28]

And not only had Messire Robert d’Estouteville his special court
as provost and vicomte of Paris; but in addition he had a share,
both for eye and tooth, in the grand court of the king. There was
no head in the least elevated which had not passed through his
hands before it came to the headsman. It was he who went to seek
M. de Nemours at the Bastille Saint Antoine, in order to conduct
him to the Halles; and to conduct to the Grève M. de Saint-Pol,
who clamored and resisted, to the great joy of the provost, who
did not love monsieur the constable.

Here, assuredly, is more than sufficient to render a life happy
and illustrious, and to deserve some day a notable page in that
interesting history of the provosts of Paris, where one learns
that Oudard de Villeneuve had a house in the Rue des Boucheries,
that Guillaume de Hangest purchased the great and the little
Savoy, that Guillaume Thiboust gave the nuns of Sainte-Geneviève
his houses in the Rue Clopin, that Hugues Aubriot lived in the
Hôtel du Porc-Épic, and other domestic facts.

Nevertheless, with so many reasons for taking life patiently and
joyously, Messire Robert d’Estouteville woke up on the morning of
the seventh of January, 1482, in a very surly and peevish mood.
Whence came this ill temper? He could not have told himself. Was
it because the sky was gray? or was the buckle of his old belt of
Montlhéry badly fastened, so that it confined his provostal
portliness too closely? had he beheld ribald fellows, marching in
bands of four, beneath his window, and setting him at defiance,
in doublets but no shirts, hats without crowns, with wallet and
bottle at their side? Was it a vague presentiment of the three
hundred and seventy livres, sixteen sous, eight farthings, which
the future King Charles VII. was to cut off from the provostship
in the following year? The reader can take his choice; we, for
our part, are much inclined to believe that he was in a bad
humor, simply because he was in a bad humor.

Moreover, it was the day after a festival, a tiresome day for
every one, and above all for the magistrate who is charged with
sweeping away all the filth, properly and figuratively speaking,
which a festival day produces in Paris. And then he had to hold a
sitting at the Grand Châtelet. Now, we have noticed that judges
in general so arrange matters that their day of audience shall
also be their day of bad humor, so that they may always have some
one upon whom to vent it conveniently, in the name of the king,
law, and justice.

However, the audience had begun without him. His lieutenants,
civil, criminal, and private, were doing his work, according to
usage; and from eight o’clock in the morning, some scores of
_bourgeois_ and _bourgeoises_, heaped and crowded into an obscure
corner of the audience chamber of Embas du Châtelet, between a
stout oaken barrier and the wall, had been gazing blissfully at
the varied and cheerful spectacle of civil and criminal justice
dispensed by Master Florian Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet,
lieutenant of monsieur the provost, in a somewhat confused and
utterly haphazard manner.

The hall was small, low, vaulted. A table studded with
fleurs-de-lis stood at one end, with a large arm-chair of carved
oak, which belonged to the provost and was empty, and a stool on
the left for the auditor, Master Florian. Below sat the clerk of
the court, scribbling; opposite was the populace; and in front of
the door, and in front of the table were many sergeants of the
provostship in sleeveless jackets of violet camlet, with white
crosses. Two sergeants of the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, clothed in
their jackets of Toussaint, half red, half blue, were posted as
sentinels before a low, closed door, which was visible at the
extremity of the hall, behind the table. A single pointed window,
narrowly encased in the thick wall, illuminated with a pale ray
of January sun two grotesque figures,—the capricious demon of
stone carved as a tail-piece in the keystone of the vaulted
ceiling, and the judge seated at the end of the hall on the
fleurs-de-lis.

Imagine, in fact, at the provost’s table, leaning upon his elbows
between two bundles of documents of cases, with his foot on the
train of his robe of plain brown cloth, his face buried in his
hood of white lamb’s skin, of which his brows seemed to be of a
piece, red, crabbed, winking, bearing majestically the load of
fat on his cheeks which met under his chin, Master Florian
Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet.

Now, the auditor was deaf. A slight defect in an auditor. Master
Florian delivered judgment, none the less, without appeal and
very suitably. It is certainly quite sufficient for a judge to
have the air of listening; and the venerable auditor fulfilled
this condition, the sole one in justice, all the better because
his attention could not be distracted by any noise.

Moreover, he had in the audience, a pitiless censor of his deeds
and gestures, in the person of our friend Jehan Frollo du Moulin,
that little student of yesterday, that “stroller,” whom one was
sure of encountering all over Paris, anywhere except before the
rostrums of the professors.

“Stay,” he said in a low tone to his companion, Robin Poussepain,
who was grinning at his side, while he was making his comments on
the scenes which were being unfolded before his eyes, “yonder is
Jehanneton du Buisson. The beautiful daughter of the lazy dog at
the Marché-Neuf!—Upon my soul, he is condemning her, the old
rascal! he has no more eyes than ears. Fifteen sous, four
farthings, parisian, for having worn two rosaries! ’Tis somewhat
dear. _Lex duri carminis_. Who’s that? Robin Chief-de-Ville,
hauberkmaker. For having been passed and received master of the
said trade! That’s his entrance money. He! two gentlemen among
these knaves! Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly Two equerries,
_Corpus Christi!_ Ah! they have been playing at dice. When shall
I see our rector here? A hundred livres parisian, fine to the
king! That Barbedienne strikes like a deaf man,—as he is! I’ll be
my brother the archdeacon, if that keeps me from gaming; gaming
by day, gaming by night, living at play, dying at play, and
gaming away my soul after my shirt. Holy Virgin, what damsels!
One after the other my lambs. Ambroise Lécuyère, Isabeau la
Paynette, Bérarde Gironin! I know them all, by Heavens! A fine! a
fine! That’s what will teach you to wear gilded girdles! ten sous
parisis! you coquettes! Oh! the old snout of a judge! deaf and
imbecile! Oh! Florian the dolt! Oh! Barbedienne the blockhead!
There he is at the table! He’s eating the plaintiff, he’s eating
the suits, he eats, he chews, he crams, he fills himself. Fines,
lost goods, taxes, expenses, loyal charges, salaries, damages,
and interests, gehenna, prison, and jail, and fetters with
expenses are Christmas spice cake and marchpanes of Saint-John to
him! Look at him, the pig!—Come! Good! Another amorous woman!
Thibaud-la-Thibaude, neither more nor less! For having come from
the Rue Glatigny! What fellow is this? Gieffroy Mabonne, gendarme
bearing the crossbow. He has cursed the name of the Father. A
fine for la Thibaude! A fine for Gieffroy! A fine for them both!
The deaf old fool! he must have mixed up the two cases! Ten to
one that he makes the wench pay for the oath and the gendarme for
the amour! Attention, Robin Poussepain! What are they going to
bring in? Here are many sergeants! By Jupiter! all the
bloodhounds of the pack are there. It must be the great beast of
the hunt—a wild boar. And ’tis one, Robin, ’tis one. And a fine
one too! _Hercle!_ ’tis our prince of yesterday, our Pope of the
Fools, our bellringer, our one-eyed man, our hunchback, our
grimace! ’Tis Quasimodo!”

It was he indeed.

It was Quasimodo, bound, encircled, roped, pinioned, and under
good guard. The squad of policemen who surrounded him was
assisted by the chevalier of the watch in person, wearing the
arms of France embroidered on his breast, and the arms of the
city on his back. There was nothing, however, about Quasimodo,
except his deformity, which could justify the display of halberds
and arquebuses; he was gloomy, silent, and tranquil. Only now and
then did his single eye cast a sly and wrathful glance upon the
bonds with which he was loaded.

He cast the same glance about him, but it was so dull and sleepy
that the women only pointed him out to each other in derision.

Meanwhile Master Florian, the auditor, turned over attentively
the document in the complaint entered against Quasimodo, which
the clerk handed him, and, having thus glanced at it, appeared to
reflect for a moment. Thanks to this precaution, which he always
was careful to take at the moment when on the point of beginning
an examination, he knew beforehand the names, titles, and
misdeeds of the accused, made cut and dried responses to
questions foreseen, and succeeded in extricating himself from all
the windings of the interrogation without allowing his deafness
to be too apparent. The written charges were to him what the dog
is to the blind man. If his deafness did happen to betray him
here and there, by some incoherent apostrophe or some
unintelligible question, it passed for profundity with some, and
for imbecility with others. In neither case did the honor of the
magistracy sustain any injury; for it is far better that a judge
should be reputed imbecile or profound than deaf. Hence he took
great care to conceal his deafness from the eyes of all, and he
generally succeeded so well that he had reached the point of
deluding himself, which is, by the way, easier than is supposed.
All hunchbacks walk with their heads held high, all stutterers
harangue, all deaf people speak low. As for him, he believed, at
the most, that his ear was a little refractory. It was the sole
concession which he made on this point to public opinion, in his
moments of frankness and examination of his conscience.

Having, then, thoroughly ruminated Quasimodo’s affair, he threw
back his head and half closed his eyes, for the sake of more
majesty and impartiality, so that, at that moment, he was both
deaf and blind. A double condition, without which no judge is
perfect. It was in this magisterial attitude that he began the
examination.

“Your name?”

Now this was a case which had not been “provided for by law,”
where a deaf man should be obliged to question a deaf man.

Quasimodo, whom nothing warned that a question had been addressed
to him, continued to stare intently at the judge, and made no
reply. The judge, being deaf, and being in no way warned of the
deafness of the accused, thought that the latter had answered, as
all accused do in general, and therefore he pursued, with his
mechanical and stupid self-possession,—

“Very well. And your age?”

Again Quasimodo made no reply to this question. The judge
supposed that it had been replied to, and continued,—

“Now, your profession?”

Still the same silence. The spectators had begun, meanwhile, to
whisper together, and to exchange glances.

“That will do,” went on the imperturbable auditor, when he
supposed that the accused had finished his third reply. “You are
accused before us, _primo_, of nocturnal disturbance; _secundo_,
of a dishonorable act of violence upon the person of a foolish
woman, _in præjudicium meretricis; tertio_, of rebellion and
disloyalty towards the archers of the police of our lord, the
king. Explain yourself upon all these points.—Clerk, have you
written down what the prisoner has said thus far?”

At this unlucky question, a burst of laughter rose from the
clerk’s table caught by the audience, so violent, so wild, so
contagious, so universal, that the two deaf men were forced to
perceive it. Quasimodo turned round, shrugging his hump with
disdain, while Master Florian, equally astonished, and supposing
that the laughter of the spectators had been provoked by some
irreverent reply from the accused, rendered visible to him by
that shrug of the shoulders, apostrophized him indignantly,—

“You have uttered a reply, knave, which deserves the halter. Do
you know to whom you are speaking?”

This sally was not fitted to arrest the explosion of general
merriment. It struck all as so whimsical, and so ridiculous, that
the wild laughter even attacked the sergeants of the
Parloi-aux-Bourgeois, a sort of pikemen, whose stupidity was part
of their uniform. Quasimodo alone preserved his seriousness, for
the good reason that he understood nothing of what was going on
around him. The judge, more and more irritated, thought it his
duty to continue in the same tone, hoping thereby to strike the
accused with a terror which should react upon the audience, and
bring it back to respect.

“So this is as much as to say, perverse and thieving knave that
you are, that you permit yourself to be lacking in respect
towards the Auditor of the Châtelet, to the magistrate committed
to the popular police of Paris, charged with searching out
crimes, delinquencies, and evil conduct; with controlling all
trades, and interdicting monopoly; with maintaining the
pavements; with debarring the hucksters of chickens, poultry, and
water-fowl; of superintending the measuring of fagots and other
sorts of wood; of purging the city of mud, and the air of
contagious maladies; in a word, with attending continually to
public affairs, without wages or hope of salary! Do you know that
I am called Florian Barbedienne, actual lieutenant to monsieur
the provost, and, moreover, commissioner, inquisitor,
_controller_, and examiner, with equal power in provostship,
bailiwick, preservation, and inferior court of judicature?—”

There is no reason why a deaf man talking to a deaf man should
stop. God knows where and when Master Florian would have landed,
when thus launched at full speed in lofty eloquence, if the low
door at the extreme end of the room had not suddenly opened, and
given entrance to the provost in person. At his entrance Master
Florian did not stop short, but, making a half-turn on his heels,
and aiming at the provost the harangue with which he had been
withering Quasimodo a moment before,—

“Monseigneur,” said he, “I demand such penalty as you shall deem
fitting against the prisoner here present, for grave and
aggravated offence against the court.”

And he seated himself, utterly breathless, wiping away the great
drops of sweat which fell from his brow and drenched, like tears,
the parchments spread out before him. Messire Robert
d’Estouteville frowned and made a gesture so imperious and
significant to Quasimodo, that the deaf man in some measure
understood it.

The provost addressed him with severity, “What have you done that
you have been brought hither, knave?”

The poor fellow, supposing that the provost was asking his name,
broke the silence which he habitually preserved, and replied, in
a harsh and guttural voice, “Quasimodo.”

The reply matched the question so little that the wild laugh
began to circulate once more, and Messire Robert exclaimed, red
with wrath,—

“Are you mocking me also, you arrant knave?”

“Bellringer of Notre-Dame,” replied Quasimodo, supposing that
what was required of him was to explain to the judge who he was.

“Bellringer!” interpolated the provost, who had waked up early
enough to be in a sufficiently bad temper, as we have said, not
to require to have his fury inflamed by such strange responses.
“Bellringer! I’ll play you a chime of rods on your back through
the squares of Paris! Do you hear, knave?”

“If it is my age that you wish to know,” said Quasimodo, “I think
that I shall be twenty at Saint Martin’s day.”

This was too much; the provost could no longer restrain himself.

“Ah! you are scoffing at the provostship, wretch! Messieurs the
sergeants of the mace, you will take me this knave to the pillory
of the Grève, you will flog him, and turn him for an hour. He
shall pay me for it, _tête Dieu!_ And I order that the present
judgment shall be cried, with the assistance of four sworn
trumpeters, in the seven castellanies of the viscomty of Paris.”

The clerk set to work incontinently to draw up the account of the
sentence.

“_Ventre Dieu!_ ’tis well adjudged!” cried the little scholar,
Jehan Frollo du Moulin, from his corner.

The provost turned and fixed his flashing eyes once more on
Quasimodo. “I believe the knave said ‘_Ventre Dieu!_’ Clerk, add
twelve deniers Parisian for the oath, and let the vestry of Saint
Eustache have the half of it; I have a particular devotion for
Saint Eustache.”

In a few minutes the sentence was drawn up. Its tenor was simple
and brief. The customs of the provostship and the viscomty had
not yet been worked over by President Thibaut Baillet, and by
Roger Barmne, the king’s advocate; they had not been obstructed,
at that time, by that lofty hedge of quibbles and procedures,
which the two jurisconsults planted there at the beginning of the
sixteenth century. All was clear, expeditious, explicit. One went
straight to the point then, and at the end of every path there
was immediately visible, without thickets and without turnings;
the wheel, the gibbet, or the pillory. One at least knew whither
one was going.

The clerk presented the sentence to the provost, who affixed his
seal to it, and departed to pursue his round of the audience
hall, in a frame of mind which seemed destined to fill all the
jails in Paris that day. Jehan Frollo and Robin Poussepain
laughed in their sleeves. Quasimodo gazed on the whole with an
indifferent and astonished air.

However, at the moment when Master Florian Barbedienne was
reading the sentence in his turn, before signing it, the clerk
felt himself moved with pity for the poor wretch of a prisoner,
and, in the hope of obtaining some mitigation of the penalty, he
approached as near the auditor’s ear as possible, and said,
pointing to Quasimodo, “That man is deaf.”

He hoped that this community of infirmity would awaken Master
Florian’s interest in behalf of the condemned man. But, in the
first place, we have already observed that Master Florian did not
care to have his deafness noticed. In the next place, he was so
hard of hearing that he did not catch a single word of what the
clerk said to him; nevertheless, he wished to have the appearance
of hearing, and replied, “Ah! ah! that is different; I did not
know that. An hour more of the pillory, in that case.”

And he signed the sentence thus modified.

“’Tis well done,” said Robin Poussepain, who cherished a grudge
against Quasimodo. “That will teach him to handle people
roughly.”