Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

woes.
The respite was short. The female voice which had interrupted the gipsy’s dance now broke in upon her
song:
“Silence, grasshooper of hell!” she cried out of the same dark corner of the Place.
The poor “cigale” stopped short. Grainier clapped his hands to his ears.
“Oh!” he cried, “accursed, broken-toothed saw that comes to break the lyre!”
The rest of the audience agreed with him. “The foul fiend take the old sachette!” growled more than
one of them, and the invisible spoil-sport might have had reason to repent of her attacks on the gipsy, if
the attention of crowd had not been distracted by the procession of the Pope of Fools, now pouring into
the Place de Grève, after making the tour of the streets with its blaze of torches and its deafening hubbub.
This procession which our readers saw issuing from the Palais de Justice had organized itself en route,
and had been recruited by all the ruffians, all the idle pickpockets and unemployed vagabonds of Paris,
so that by this time it had reached most respectable proportions.
First came Egypt, the Duke of the Gipsies at the head, on horseback, with his counts on foot holding his
bridle and stirrups and followed by the whole gipsy tribe, men and women, pell-mell, their children
screeching on their shoulders, and all of them, duke, counts, and rabble, in rags and tinsel. Then came the
Kingdom of Argot, otherwise all the vagabonds in France, marshalled in order of their various ranks, the
lowest being first. Thus they marched, four abreast, bearing the divers insignia of their degrees in that
strange faculty, most of them maimed in one way or another, some halt, some minus a hand—the
courtauds de boutanche (shoplifters), the coquillarts (pilgrims), the hubins (housebreakers), the
sabouleux (sham epileptics), the calots (dotards), the francs-mitoux (“schnorrers”), the polissons (street
rowdies), the piètres (sham cripples), the capons (card-sharpers), the malingreux (infirm), the
marcandiers (hawkers), the narquois (thimble-riggers), the orphelines (pickpockets), the archisuppôts
(arch-thieves), and the cagoux (master-thieves)—a list long enough to have wearied Homer himself. It
was not without difficulty that in the middle of a conclave of cagoux and archisuppôts one discovered the
King of Argot, the Grand Coësre, huddled up in a little cart drawn by two great dogs. The Kingdom of
Argot was followed by the Empire of Galilee, led by Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, walking
majestically in a purple, wine-stained robe, preceded by mummers performing sham-fights and
war-dances, and surrounded by his macebearers, his satellites, and his clerks of the exchequer. Last of all
came the members of the Basoche with their garlanded maypoles, their black robes, their music worthy
of a witches’ Sabbath, and their great yellow wax candles. In the center of this crowd the great officers of
the Con fraternity of Fools bore on their shoulders a sort of litter more loaded with candles than the
shrine of Sainte-Genevieve at the time of the plague. And on it, resplendent in cope, choosier, and miter,
sat enthroned the new Pope of the Fools, Quasimodo, the hunchback, the bell ringer of Notre Dame.
Each section of this grotesque procession had its special music. The gipsies scraped their balafos 26 and
banged their tambourines. The Arguers—not a very musical race—had got no further than the viola, the
cow horn, and the Gothic rebel of the twelfth century. The Empire of Galilee was not much
better—scarcely that you distinguished in its music the squeak of some primitive fiddle dating from the
infancy of the art, and still confined to the relax. But it was round the Fools’ Pope that all the musical
treasures of the age were gathered in one glorious discordance—treble rebels, tenor rebels, not to