Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

empty ring of stone, through which the competitors were to thrust their heads, while two barrels,
procured from goodness knows where, and balanced precariously on the top of one another, enabled
them to mount up to it. It was then agreed that, in order that the impression of the grimace might reach
the beholder in full unbroken purity, each candidate, whether male or female (for there could be a female
pope), was to cover his face and remain concealed in the chapel till the moment of his appearance.
In an instant the chapel was filled with competitors, and the doors closed upon them.
From his place on the platform Coppenole ordered everything, directed everything, arranged
everything. During the hubbub, and pretexting vespers and other affairs of importance, the Cardinal, no
less disconcerted than Gringoire, retired with his whole suite, and the crowd, which had evinced so lively
an interest in his arrival, was wholly unmoved by his departure. Guillaume Rym alone noticed the rout of
his Eminence.
Popular attention, like the sun, pursued its even course. Starting at one end of the Hall, it remained
stationary for a time in the middle, and was now at the other end. The marble table, the brocade-covered
platform, had had their day; now it was the turn of the Chapel of Louis XI. The field was clear for every
sort of folly; the Flemings and the rabble were masters of the situation.
The pulling of faces began. The first to appear in the opening—eye-lids turned inside out, the gaping
mouth of a ravening beast, the brow creased and wrinkled like the hussar boots of the Empire
period—was greeted with such a roar of inextinguishable laughter that Homer would have taken all these
ragamuffins for gods.
Nevertheless, the great Hall was anything rather than Olympus, as Gringoire’s poor Jupiter knew to his
cost. A second, a third distortion followed, to be succeeded by another and another; and with each one
the laughter redoubled, and the crowd stamped and roared its delight. There was in the whole scene a
peculiar frenzy, a certain indescribable sense of intoxication and fascination almost impossible to convey
to the reader of our times and social habits.
Picture to yourself a series of faces representing successively every geometrical form, from the triangle
to the trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; every human expression, from rage to lewdness; every
stage of life, from the creases of the newly born to the wrinkles of hoary age; every phantasm of
mythology and religion, from Faunus to Beelzebub; every animal head, from the buffalo to the eagle.
from the shark to the bulldog. Conceive all the grotesques of the Pont-Neuf, those nightmares turned to
stone under the hand of Germain Pilon, inspired with the breath of life, and rising up one by one to stare
you in the face with gleaming eyes; all the masks of the Carnival of Venice passing in procession before
you—in a word, a human kaleidoscope.
The orgy became more and more Flemish. Tenniers himself could have given but a feeble idea of it; a
Salvator Rosa battle-piece treated as a bacchic feast would be nearer the mark. There were no longer
scholars, ambassadors, burghers, men or women; neither Clopin Trouillefou nor Gilles Lecornu nor
Marie Quatrelivres nor Robin Poussepain. The individual was swallowed up in the universal license. The
great Hall was simply one vast furnace of effrontery and unbridled mirth, in which every mouth was a
yell, every countenance a grimace, every individual a posture. The whole mass shrieked and bellowed.
Every new visage that came grinning and gnashing to the window was fresh fuel to the furnace. And
from this seething multitude, like steam from a caldron, there rose a hum—shrill, piercing, sibilant, as
from a vast swarm of gnats.