Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

that nobody’s using,’ and away he went with it.”
This was the last straw. Grainier accepted it with resignation.
“May the devil fly away with you!” said he to the actors, “and if I am paid you shall be.” Whereupon he
beat a retreat, hanging his head, but the last in the field, like a general who has made a good fight.
“A precious set of boobies and asses, these Parisians!” he growled between his teeth, as he descended
the tortuous stairs of the Palais. “They come to hear a Mystery, and don’t listen to a word. They’ve been
taken up with all the world—with Clopin Trouillefou, with the Cardinal, with Coppenole, with
Quasimodo, with the devil; but with Madame the Virgin Mary not a bit. Dolts! if I had only known! I’d
have given you some Virgin Marys with a vengeance. To think that I should have come here to see faces
and found nothing but backs! I, a poet, to have the success of an apothecary! True, Homerus had to beg
his bread through the Greek villages, and Ovidius Naso died in exile among the Muscovites. But the
devil flay me if I know what they mean with their Esmeralda. To begin with, where can the word come
from?—ah, it’s Egyptian.”
Book II
I. From Scylla to Charybdis
NIGHT falls early in January. It was already dark in the streets when Grainier quitted the Palais, which
quite suited his taste, for he was impatient to reach some obscure and deserted alley where he might
meditate in peace, and where the philosopher might apply the first salve to the wounds of the poet.
Philosophy was his last refuge, seeing that he did not know where to turn for a night’s lodging. After the
signal miscarriage of his first effort, he had not the courage to return to his lodging in the Rue
Grenier-sur-l’Eau, opposite the hay-wharf, having counted on receiving from Monsieur the Provost for
his epithalamium the wherewithal to pay Maître Guillaume Doulx-Sire, farmer of the cattle taxes in
Paris, the six months’ rent he owed him; that is to say, twelve sols parisis, or twelve times the value of all
he possessed in the world, including his breeches, his shirt, and his beaver.
Resting for a moment under the shelter of the little gateway of the prison belonging to the treasurer of
the Sainte-Chapelle he considered what lodging he should choose for the night, having all the pavements
of Paris at his disposal. Suddenly he remembered having noticed in the preceding week, at the door of
one of the parliamentary counsellors in the Rue de la Savaterie, a stone step, used for mounting on
mule-back, and having remarked to himself that that stone might serve excellently well as a pillow to a
beggar or a poet. He thanked Providence for having sent him this happy thought, and was just preparing
to cross the Place du Palais and enter the tortuous labyrinth of the city, where those ancient sisters, the
streets of la Baillerie, la Vielle-Draperie, la Savaterie, la Juiverie, etc., pursue their mazy windings, and
are still standing to this day with their nine-storied houses, when he caught sight of the procession of the
Pope of Fools, as it issued from the Palais and poured across his path with a great uproar, accompanied
by shouts and glare of torches and Gringoire’s own band of music.
The sight touched his smarting vanity, and he fled. In the bitterness of his dramatic failure everything
that reminded him of the unlucky festival exasperated him and made his wounds bleed afresh.