Chapter I: From Charybdis to Scylla

Night comes on early in January. The streets were already dark
when Gringoire issued forth from the Courts. This gloom pleased
him; he was in haste to reach some obscure and deserted alley, in
order there to meditate at his ease, and in order that the
philosopher might place the first dressing upon the wound of the
poet. Philosophy, moreover, was his sole refuge, for he did not
know where he was to lodge for the night. After the brilliant
failure of his first theatrical venture, he dared not return to
the lodging which he occupied in the Rue Grenier-sur-l’Eau,
opposite to the Port-au-Foin, having depended upon receiving from
monsieur the provost for his epithalamium, the wherewithal to pay
Master Guillaume Doulx-Sire, farmer of the taxes on cloven-footed
animals in Paris, the rent which he owed him, that is to say,
twelve sols parisian; twelve times the value of all that he
possessed in the world, including his trunk-hose, his shirt, and
his cap. After reflecting a moment, temporarily sheltered beneath
the little wicket of the prison of the treasurer of the
Sainte-Chappelle, as to the shelter which he would select for the
night, having all the pavements of Paris to choose from, he
remembered to have noticed the week previously in the Rue de la
Savaterie, at the door of a councillor of the parliament, a
stepping stone for mounting a mule, and to have said to himself
that that stone would furnish, on occasion, a very excellent
pillow for a mendicant or a poet. He thanked Providence for
having sent this happy idea to him; but, as he was preparing to
cross the Place, in order to reach the tortuous labyrinth of the
city, where meander all those old sister streets, the Rues de la
Barillerie, de la Vieille-Draperie, de la Savaterie, de la
Juiverie, etc., still extant to-day, with their nine-story
houses, he saw the procession of the Pope of the Fools, which was
also emerging from the court house, and rushing across the
courtyard, with great cries, a great flashing of torches, and the
music which belonged to him, Gringoire. This sight revived the
pain of his self-love; he fled. In the bitterness of his dramatic
misadventure, everything which reminded him of the festival of
that day irritated his wound and made it bleed.

He was on the point of turning to the Pont Saint-Michel; children
were running about here and there with fire lances and rockets.

“Pest on firework candles!” said Gringoire; and he fell back on
the Pont au Change. To the house at the head of the bridge there
had been affixed three small banners, representing the king, the
dauphin, and Marguerite of Flanders, and six little pennons on
which were portrayed the Duke of Austria, the Cardinal de
Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, and Madame Jeanne de France, and Monsieur
the Bastard of Bourbon, and I know not whom else; all being
illuminated with torches. The rabble were admiring.

“Happy painter, Jehan Fourbault!” said Gringoire with a deep
sigh; and he turned his back upon the bannerets and pennons. A
street opened before him; he thought it so dark and deserted that
he hoped to there escape from all the rumors as well as from all
the gleams of the festival. At the end of a few moments his foot
came in contact with an obstacle; he stumbled and fell. It was
the May truss, which the clerks of the clerks’ law court had
deposited that morning at the door of a president of the
parliament, in honor of the solemnity of the day. Gringoire bore
this new disaster heroically; he picked himself up, and reached
the water’s edge. After leaving behind him the civic Tournelle[7]
and the criminal tower, and skirted the great walls of the king’s
garden, on that unpaved strand where the mud reached to his
ankles, he reached the western point of the city, and considered
for some time the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches, which has
disappeared beneath the bronze horse of the Pont Neuf. The islet
appeared to him in the shadow like a black mass, beyond the
narrow strip of whitish water which separated him from it. One
could divine by the ray of a tiny light the sort of hut in the
form of a beehive where the ferryman of cows took refuge at
night.

“Happy ferryman!” thought Gringoire; “you do not dream of glory,
and you do not make marriage songs! What matters it to you, if
kings and Duchesses of Burgundy marry? You know no other daisies
(_marguerites_) than those which your April greensward gives your
cows to browse upon; while I, a poet, am hooted, and shiver, and
owe twelve sous, and the soles of my shoes are so transparent,
that they might serve as glasses for your lantern! Thanks,
ferryman, your cabin rests my eyes, and makes me forget Paris!”

He was roused from his almost lyric ecstacy, by a big double
Saint-Jean cracker, which suddenly went off from the happy cabin.
It was the cow ferryman, who was taking his part in the
rejoicings of the day, and letting off fireworks.

This cracker made Gringoire’s skin bristle up all over.

“Accursed festival!” he exclaimed, “wilt thou pursue me
everywhere? Oh! good God! even to the ferryman’s!”

Then he looked at the Seine at his feet, and a horrible
temptation took possession of him:

“Oh!” said he, “I would gladly drown myself, were the water not
so cold!”

Then a desperate resolution occurred to him. It was, since he
could not escape from the Pope of the Fools, from Jehan
Fourbault’s bannerets, from May trusses, from squibs and
crackers, to go to the Place de Grève.

“At least,” he said to himself, “I shall there have a firebrand
of joy wherewith to warm myself, and I can sup on some crumbs of
the three great armorial bearings of royal sugar which have been
erected on the public refreshment-stall of the city.”