Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com
Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com
Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
face of <strong>Paris</strong>; a drain whence flowed forth each morning, to return at night, that stream of iniquity, of<br />
mendacity, and vagabondage which flows forever through the streets of a capital; a monstrous hive to<br />
which all the hornets that prey on the social or<strong>de</strong>r return at night, la<strong>de</strong>n with their booty; a fraudulent<br />
hospital where the Bohemian, the unfrocked monk, the ruined scholar, the good-for-nothing of every<br />
nation—Spaniards, Italians, Germans—and of every creed—Jews, Turks, and infi<strong>de</strong>ls—beggars covered<br />
with painted sores during the day were transformed at night into robbers; in a word, a vast green-room,<br />
serving at that period for all the actors in that eternal drama of robbery, prostitution, and mur<strong>de</strong>r enacted<br />
on the streets of <strong>Paris</strong>.<br />
It was a vast open space, irregular and ill-paved, as were all the squares of <strong>Paris</strong> at that time. Fires,<br />
around which swarmed strange groups, gleamed here and there. It was one ceaseless movement and<br />
clamour, shrieks of laughter, the wailing of babies, the voices of women. The hands and heads of this<br />
crowd threw a thousand grotesque outlines on the luminous background. The light of the fires flickered<br />
over the ground mingled with huge in<strong>de</strong>finite shadows, and across it from time to time passed some<br />
animal-like man or man-like animal. The boundary lines between race and species seemed here effaced<br />
as in a pan<strong>de</strong>monium. Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health and sickness, all seemed to be in <strong>com</strong>mon<br />
with this people; all was shared, mingled, confoun<strong>de</strong>d, superimposed, each one participated in all.<br />
The faint and unsteady gleam of the fires enabled Gringoire through all his perturbation to distinguish<br />
that the great square was enclosed in a hi<strong>de</strong>ous framework of ancient houses, which, with their<br />
moul<strong>de</strong>ring, shrunken, stooping fronts, each pierced by one or two round lighted windows, looked to him<br />
in the dark like so many old women’s heads, monstrous and cross-grained, ranged in a circle, and<br />
blinking down upon these witches’ revels.<br />
It was like another and an unknown world, undreamt of, shapeless, crawling, swarming, fantastic.<br />
Gringoire, growing momentarily more affrighted, held by the three beggars as by so many vices,<br />
bewil<strong>de</strong>red by a crowd of other faces that bleated and barked round him—the luckless Gringoire strove<br />
to collect his mind sufficiently to remember whether this was really Saturday—the witches’ Sabbath. But<br />
all his efforts were useless—the link between his memory and his brain was broken; and doubtful of<br />
everything, vacillating between what he saw and what he felt, he asked himself this insoluble question:<br />
“If I am I, then what is this? If this is real, then what am I?”<br />
At this moment an intelligible cry <strong>de</strong>tached itself from the buzzing of the crowd surrounding him:<br />
“Take him to the King! Take him to the King!”<br />
“Holy Virgin!” muttered Gringoire, “the King of this place? He must be a goat!”<br />
“To the King! To the King!” they shouted in chorus.<br />
They dragged him away, each striving to fasten his claws on him; but the three beggars would not loose<br />
their hold, and tore him from the others, yelling: “He belongs to us!”<br />
The poet’s doublet, already sadly ailing, gave up the ghost in this struggle.<br />
In traversing the horrible place his giddiness passed off, and after proceeding a few paces he had<br />
entirely recovered his sense of reality. He began to adapt himself to the atmosphere of the place. In the<br />
first moments there had arisen from his poet’s head, or perhaps quite simply and prosaically from his<br />
empty stomach, a fume, a vapour, so to speak, which, spreading itself between him and the surrounding