Notre-Dame de Paris Victor Hugo (mobile ebook reader .txt) 📖

seignory, to hang the bailiff. For God’s sake, sire! send before tomorrow morning.”

The king looked him full in the face. “I have told you tomorrow morning.”

It was one of those looks to which one does not reply. After a silence, Louis XI raised his voice once more⁠—

“You should know that, Gossip Jacques. What was⁠—”

He corrected himself. “What is the bailiff’s feudal jurisdiction?”

“Sire, the bailiff of the palace has the Rue Calendre as far as the Rue de l’Herberie, the Place Saint-Michel, and the localities vulgarly known as the Mureaux, situated near the church of Notre-Dame des Champs (here Louis XI raised the brim of his hat), which hotels number thirteen, plus the Cour des Miracles, plus the Maladerie, called the Banlieue, plus the whole highway which begins at that Maladerie and ends at the Porte Sainte-Jacques. Of these diverse places he is voyer, high, middle, and low, justiciary, full seigneur.”

“Bless me!” said the king, scratching his left ear with his right hand, “that makes a goodly bit of my city! Ah! monsieur the bailiff was king of all that.”

This time he did not correct himself. He continued dreamily, and as though speaking to himself⁠—

“Very fine, monsieur the bailiff! You had there between your teeth a pretty slice of our Paris.”

All at once he broke out explosively, “Pasque-Dieu! What people are those who claim to be voyers, justiciaries, lords and masters in our domains? who have their tollgates at the end of every field? their gallows and their hangman at every crossroad among our people? So that as the Greek believed that he had as many gods as there were fountains, and the Persian as many as he beheld stars, the Frenchman counts as many kings as he sees gibbets! Pardieu! ’tis an evil thing, and the confusion of it displeases me. I should greatly like to know whether it be the mercy of God that there should be in Paris any other lord than the king, any other judge than our parliament, any other emperor than ourselves in this empire! By the faith of my soul! the day must certainly come when there shall exist in France but one king, one lord, one judge, one headsman, as there is in paradise but one God!”

He lifted his cap again, and continued, still dreamily, with the air and accent of a hunter who is cheering on his pack of hounds: “Good, my people! bravely done! break these false lords! do your duty! at them! have at them! pillage them! take them! sack them!⁠ ⁠… Ah! you want to be kings, messeigneurs? On, my people on!”

Here he interrupted himself abruptly, bit his lips as though to take back his thought which had already half escaped, bent his piercing eyes in turn on each of the five persons who surrounded him, and suddenly grasping his hat with both hands and staring full at it, he said to it: “Oh! I would burn you if you knew what there was in my head.”

Then casting about him once more the cautious and uneasy glance of the fox re-entering his hole⁠—

“No matter! we will succor monsieur the bailiff. Unfortunately, we have but few troops here at the present moment, against so great a populace. We must wait until tomorrow. The order will be transmitted to the City and everyone who is caught will be immediately hung.”

“By the way, sire,” said Gossip Coictier, “I had forgotten that in the first agitation, the watch have seized two laggards of the band. If your majesty desires to see these men, they are here.”

“If I desire to see them!” cried the king. “What! Pasque-Dieu! You forget a thing like that! Run quick, you, Olivier! Go, seek them!”

Master Olivier quitted the room and returned a moment later with the two prisoners, surrounded by archers of the guard. The first had a coarse, idiotic, drunken and astonished face. He was clothed in rags, and walked with one knee bent and dragging his leg. The second had a pallid and smiling countenance, with which the reader is already acquainted.

The king surveyed them for a moment without uttering a word, then addressing the first one abruptly⁠—

“What’s your name?”

“Gieffroy Pincebourde.”

“Your trade.”

“Outcast.”

“What were you going to do in this damnable sedition?”

The outcast stared at the king, and swung his arms with a stupid air.

He had one of those awkwardly shaped heads where intelligence is about as much at its ease as a light beneath an extinguisher.

“I know not,” said he. “They went, I went.”

“Were you not going to outrageously attack and pillage your lord, the bailiff of the palace?”

“I know that they were going to take something from someone. That is all.”

A soldier pointed out to the king a billhook which he had seized on the person of the vagabond.

“Do you recognize this weapon?” demanded the king.

“Yes; ’tis my billhook; I am a vine-dresser.”

“And do you recognize this man as your companion?” added Louis XI, pointing to the other prisoner.

“No, I do not know him.”

“That will do,” said the king, making a sign with his finger to the silent personage who stood motionless beside the door, to whom we have already called the reader’s attention.

“Gossip Tristan, here is a man for you.”

Tristan l’Hermite bowed. He gave an order in a low voice to two archers, who led away the poor vagabond.

In the meantime, the king had approached the second prisoner, who was perspiring in great drops: “Your name?”

“Sire, Pierre Gringoire.”

“Your trade?”

“Philosopher, sire.”

“How do you permit yourself, knave, to go and besiege our friend, monsieur the bailiff of the palace, and what have you to say concerning this popular agitation?”

“Sire, I had nothing to do with it.”

“Come, now! you wanton wretch, were not you apprehended by the watch in that bad company?”

“No, sire, there is a mistake. ’Tis a fatality. I make tragedies. Sire, I entreat your majesty to listen to me. I am a poet. ’Tis the melancholy way of men of my profession to roam the streets by