Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

And he filled in the asterisks which followed this discreet break with I know not what engaging fancies.
Meanwhile, from time to time, as he passed the last groups of burghers closing their doors, he caught
scraps of their conversation which broke the charmed spell of his happy imaginings.
Now it was two old men accosting each other:
“Maître Thibaut Fernicle, do you know that it is very cold?” (Grainier had known it ever since the
winter set in.)
“You are right there, Maître Boniface Disome. Are we going to have another winter like three years
ago, in ’80, when wood cost eight sols a load?”
“Bah, Maître Thibaut! it is nothing to the winter of 1407—when there was frost from Martinmas to
Candlemas, and so sharp that at every third word the ink froze in the pen of the registrar of the
parliament, which interrupted the recording of the judgments——”
Farther on were two gossips at their windows with candles that spluttered in the foggy air.
“Has your husband told you of the accident, Mlle. La Boudraque?”
“No; what is it, Mlle. Turquant?”
“Why, the horse of M. Gilles Godin, notary at the Châtelet, was startled by the Flemings and their
procession and knocked down Maître Phillipot Avrillot, a Celestine lay-brother.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, truly.”
“Just an ordinary horse too! That’s rather too bad. If it had been a cavalry horse, now!”
And the windows were shut again; but not before Grainier had lost the thread of his ideas.
Fortunately he soon picked it up again, and had no difficulty in resuming it, thanks to the gipsy and to
Djali, who continued to walk before him—two graceful, delicate creatures, whose small feet, pretty
forms, and engaging ways he admired exceedingly, almost confounding them in his contemplation:
regarding them for their intelligence and good fellowship both as girls, while for their sure-footed, light
and graceful gait, they might both have been goats.
Meanwhile the streets were momentarily becoming darker and more deserted. Curfew had rung long
ago, and it was only at rare intervals that one encountered a foot-passenger in the street or a light in a
window. In following the gipsy, Grainier had become involved in that inextricable maze of alleys, lanes,
and culs-de-sac which surrounds the ancient burial-ground of the Holy Innocents, and which resembles
nothing so much as a skein of cotton ravelled by a kitten.
“Very illogical streets, i’ faith!” said Grainier, quite lost in the thousand windings which seemed forever
to return upon themselves, but through which the girl followed a path apparently quite familiar to her,
and at an increasingly rapid pace. For his part, he would have been perfectly ignorant of his whereabouts,
had he not caught sight at a turning of the octagonal mass of the pillory of the Halles, the perforated top
of which was outlined sharply against a solitary lighted window in the Rue Verdelet.