He meant to cross the Pont Saint-Michel; some children were careering up and down there with rockets and crackers.
“A plague on all fireworks!” said Gringoire; and he turned towards the Pont-au-Change. The houses at the head of the bridge were adorned with three large banners representing the king, the dauphin, and Margaret of Flanders, and six little bannerets with portraits of the Duke of Austria, Cardinal de Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, and Madame Jeanne de France, the Bastard of Bourbon, and I know not who besides, —all lighted up by torches. The mob gazed in admiration.
“Lucky painter, Jehan Fourbault!” said Gringoire, with a heavy sigh; and he turned his back on banners and bannerets. A street opened directly before him: it looked so dark and deserted that he hoped it would afford a way of escape from every echo as well as every reflection of the festival: he plunged down it. In a few moments he struck his foot against something, stumbled, and fell. It was the big bunch of hawthorn which the members of the basoche had that morning placed at the door of a president of the Parliament, in honor of the day. Gringoire bore this new misfortune bravely; he rose and walked to the bank of the river. Leaving behind him the civil and criminal towers, and passing by the great walls of the royal gardens, along the unpaved shore where the mud was ankle-deep, he reached the western end of the city, and for some time contemplated the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches, which has since vanished beneath the bronze horse on the Pont Neuf. The islet lay before him in the darkness,—a black mass across the narrow strip of whitish water which lay between him and it. The rays of a tiny light dimly revealed a sort of beehive-shaped hut in which the cows’ ferryman sought shelter for the night.
“Lucky ferryman!” thought Gringoire; “you never dream of glory, and you write no wedding songs! What are the marriages of kings and Burgundian duchesses to you? You know no Marguerites save those which grow upon your turf in April for the pasturage of your cows! and I, poet that I am, am hooted, and I shiver, and I owe twelve pence, and the soles of my shoes are so thin that you might use them for glasses in your lantern. Thanks, ferryman! Your hut rests my eyes and makes me forget Paris.”
He was roused from his almost lyric ecstasy by a huge double-headed rocket, which was suddenly sent up from the blessed cabin. The ferryman was taking his part in the festivities of the day, and setting off a few fireworks.
The explosion set Gringoire’s teeth on edge.
“Accursed festival!” he exclaimed, “will you pursue me forever, —oh, my God! even to the ferryman’s house?”
He gazed at the Seine at his feet and a horrible temptation overcame him.
“Ah!” said he, “how cheerfully I would drown myself if the water were not so cold!”
Then he took a desperate resolve. It was, since he could not escape from the Pope of Fools, Jehan Fourbault’s flags, the bunches of hawthorn, the rockets, and squibs, to plunge boldly into the very heart of the gaiety and go directly to the Place de Grève.
“At least,” thought he, “I may find some brands from the bonfire to warm myself, and I may sup on some crumbs from the three great sugar escutcheons which were to be served on the public sideboard.”
CHAPTER II
The Place de Grève But very slight traces now remain of the Place de Grève as it existed at the time of which we write; all that is left is the picturesque little tower at the northern corner of the square; and that, already buried beneath the vulgar whitewash which incrusts the sharp edges of its carvings, will soon disappear perhaps, drowned in that flood of new houses which is so rapidly swallowing up all the old fa?ades of Paris.
People who, like ourselves, never pass through the Place de Crève without giving a glance of sympathy and pity to the poor little tower, choked between two hovels of the time of Louis XV, may readily reconstruct in fancy the entire mass of buildings to which it belonged, and as it were restore the old Gothic square of the fifteenth century.
It was, as it still is, an irregular square, bounded on one side by the quay, and on the other three by a number of tall, narrow, gloomy houses. By day one might admire the variety of its edifices, all carved in stone or wood, and presenting perfect specimens of the various kinds of medi?val domestic architecture, going back from the fifteenth to the eleventh century, from the casement window which was beginning to supersede the pointed arch, to the semi-circular arch of the Romance period, which gave way to the pointed arch, and which still occupied below it the first story of that old house called Tour de Roland, on the corner of the square nearest the Seine, close to the Rue de la Tannerie. At night, nothing could be seen of this mass of buildings but the dark indented line of the roofs stretching their chain of acute angles round the square. For it is one of the radical differences between modern and ancient towns, that nowadays the fronts of the houses face upon the squares and streets, and in old times it was the gable ends. In two centuries the houses have turned round.