Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

fact. However, tranquillity had gradually been restored, Jehan was silent, the beggar was counting the
small change in his hat, and the play had once more got the upper hand.
Sooth to say, it was a very fine work which, it seems to us, might well be turned to account even now
with a few modifications. The exposition, perhaps somewhat lengthy and dry, but strictly according to
prescribed rules, was simple, and Gringoire, in the inner sanctuary of his judgment, frankly admired its
perspicuity.
As one might very well suppose, the four allegorical personages were somewhat fatigued after having
travelled over three parts of the globe without finding an opportunity of disposing suitably of their golden
dolphin. Thereupon, a long eulogy on the marvellous fish, with a thousand delicate allusions to the young
betrothed of Marguerite of Flanders—who at that moment was languishing in dismal seclusion at
Amboise, entirely unaware that Labour and Clergy, Nobility and Commerce, had just made the tour of
the world on his behalf. The said dolphin, then, was handsome, was young, was brave; above all
(splendid origin of all the royal virtues) he was the son of the Lion of France. Now I maintain that this
bold metaphor is admirable, and the natural history of the stage has no occasion on a day of allegory and
royal epithalamium to take exception at a dolphin who is son to a lion. These rare and Pindaric
combinations merely prove the poet’s enthusiasm. Nevertheless, in justice to fair criticism be it said, the
poet might have developed this beautiful idea in less than two hundred lines. On the other hand, by the
arrangements of Monsieur the Provost, the Mystery was to last from noon till four o’clock, and they were
obliged to say something. Besides, the people listened very patiently.
Suddenly, in the very middle of a quarrel between Dame Commerce and my Lady Nobility, and just as
Labour was pronouncing this wonderful line:
“Beast more triumphant ne’er in woods I’ve seen,”
the door of the reserved platform which up till then had remained inopportunely closed, now opened still
more inopportunely, and the stentorian voice of the usher announced “His Eminence Monseigneur the
Cardinal de Bourbon!”
III. The Cardinal
ALAS, poor Gringoire! The noise of the double petards let off on Saint-John’s Day, a salvo of twenty
arque-buses, the thunder of the famous culverin of the Tour de Billy, which on September 29, 1465,
during the siege of Paris, killed seven Burgundians at a blow, the explosion of the whole stock of
gunpowder stored at the Temple Gate would have assailed his ears less rudely at this solemn and
dramatic moment than those few words from the lips of the usher: “His Eminence the Cardinal de
Bourbon!”
Not that Pierre Gringoire either feared the Cardinal or despised him; he was neither so weak nor so
presumptuous. A true eclectic, as nowadays he would be called, Gringoire was of those firm and elevated
spirits, moderate and calm, who ever maintain an even balance—stare in dimidio rerum—and who are
full of sense and liberal philosophy, to whom Wisdom, like another Ariadne, seems to have given a ball
of thread which they have gone on unwinding since the beginning of all things through the labyrinthine
paths of human affairs. One comes upon them in all ages and ever the same; that is to say, ever
conforming to the times. And without counting our Pierre Gringoire, who would represent them in the
fifteenth century if we could succeed in conferring on him the distinction he merits, it was certainly their
spirit which inspired Father de Bruel in the sixteenth century, when he wrote the following sublimely