Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

He would have crossed the Pont Saint-Michel, but children were running up and down with squibs and
rockets.
“A murrain on the fire-works!” exclaimed Grainier, turning back to the Pont-au-Change. In front of the
houses at the entrance to the bridge they had attached three banners of cloth, representing the King, the
Dauphin, and Marguerite of Flanders, and also six smaller banners or draplets on which were
“pourtraicts” of the Duke of Austria, the Cardinal de Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, Mme. Jeanne de France,
and Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon, and some one else, the whole lighted up by flaming cressets. The
crowd was lost in admiration.
“Lucky painter, Jehan Fourbault,” said Grainier with a heavy sigh, and turned his back upon the banners
and the bannerets. A street opened before him so dark and deserted that it offered him every prospect of
escape from all the sounds and the illuminations of the festival. He plunged into it. A few moments
afterward his foot struck against an obstacle, he tripped and fell. It was the great bunch of may which the
clerks of the Basoche had laid that morning at the door of one of the presidents of the parliament, in
honour of the day.
Gringoire bore this fresh mishap with heroism, he picked himself up and made for the water-side.
Leaving behind him the Tournelle Civile and the Tour Criminelle, and skirting the high walls of the royal
gardens, ankle-deep in mud, he reached the western end of the city, and stopped for some time in
contemplation of the islet of the Passeur-aux-vaches or ferry-man of the cattle, since buried under the
bronze horse of the Pont-Neuf. In the gloom the islet looked to him like a black blot across the narrow,
gray-white stream that separated him from it. One could just make out by a faint glimmer of light
proceeding from it, the hive-shaped hut in which the ferry-man sheltered for the night.
“Happy ferry-man,” thought Grainier, “thou aspirest not to fame; thou composest no epithalamiums.
What carest thou for royal marriages or for Duchesses of Burgundy? Thou reckest of no Marguerites but
those with which April pies the meadows for thy cows to crop. And I, a poet, am hooted at, and I am
shivering, and I owe twelve sous, and my shoe-soles are worn so thin they would do to glaze thy lantern.
I thank thee, ferry-man; thy cabin is soothing to my sight, and makes me forget Paris.”
Here he was startled out of his well-nigh lyric ecstasy by the explosion of a great double rocket which
suddenly went up from the thrice happy cabin. It was the ferry-man adding his contribution to the
festivities of the day by letting off some fire-works.
At this Grainier fairly bristled with rage.
“Accursed festival!” cried he; “is there no escape from it?—not even on the cattle ferry-man’s islet?”
He gazed on the Seine at his feet, and a horrible temptation assailed him.
“Oh, how gladly would I drown myself,” said he, “if only the water were not so cold!”
It was then he formed the desperate resolve that, as there was no escape from the Pope of Fools, from
Jehan Four-bault’s painted banners, from the bunches of may, from the squibs and rockets, he would
boldly cast himself into the very heart of the merry-making and go to the Place de Grève.
“There at least,” he reflected, “I may manage to get a brand from the bonfire whereat to warm myself,
and to sup off some remnant of the three great armorial devices in sugar which have been set out on the
public buffets of the city.”