In the middle of the eastern side of the square stood a heavy and hybrid construction composed of three houses together. It was known by three names, which explain its history, its purpose, and its architecture. The Maison au Dauphin, because Charles V occupied it while dauphin; the Marchandise, because it was used as the Town Hall; the Maison-aux-Piliers （domus ad piloria）， on account of a series of thick columns which supported its three stories. There the city found everything required for a well-to-do town like Paris—a chapel in which to pray to God; a court of special pleas, where audience was given, and if necessary “the king’s men put down;” and in the garrets an “arsenal” full of artillery. For the citizens of Paris, knowing that it is not always enough to pray and plead for the liberties of the town, always had a good rusty arquebus or two in reserve in an attic of the Town Hall.
Even then the Place de Grève had the same forbidding aspect which the detestable ideas clinging about it awaken, and the gloomy Town Hall built by Dominique Bocador, which has taken the place of the Maison-aux-Piliers, still gives it. It must be confessed that a permanent gibbet and pillory,—“a justice and a ladder,” as they were then called,—standing side by side in the middle of the flagstones, largely contributed to make men turn away from that fatal square where so many beings full of life and health have died in agony; where the Saint Vallier’s fever was destined to spring to life some fifty years later,—that disease which was nothing but dread of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all maladies, because it came not from God, but from man.
It is a consoling thought （let us say in passing） that the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still cumbered the Place de Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross du Trahoir, the Marché-aux-Pourceaux, the hideous Montfaucon, the Porte Bandet, Place-aux-chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, and Barrière-des-Sergents, with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its machinery of torture, permanently built into the pavement; not to mention the countless pillories belonging to provosts, bishops, chapters, abbots, and priors administering justice; to say nothing of the legal drownings in the river Seine,—it is a consolation that in the present day, having successively lost all the pieces of her armor, her refinements of torture, her purely capricious and wilful penal laws, her torture for the administration of which she made afresh every five years a leather bed at the Grand-Chatelet, that ancient sovereign of feudal society, almost outlawed and exiled from our cities, hunted from code to code, driven from place to place, now possesses in all vast Paris but one dishonored corner of the Place de Grève, but one wretched guillotine, furtive, timid, and ashamed, seeming ever in dread of being taken in the very act, so swiftly does it vanish after it has dealt its deadly stroke!
CHAPTER III
Besos Para Golpesw
When Pierre Gringoire reached the Place de Grève, he was benumbed. He had come by way of the Pont-aux-Meuniers to avoid the mob on the Pont-au-Change and Jehan Fourbault’s flags; but the wheels of all the bishop’s mills had bespattered him as he crossed, and his coat was soaked; moreover, it seemed to him that the failure of his play had made him more sensitive to cold than ever. He therefore made haste to draw near the bonfire which still blazed gloriously in the middle of the square; but a considerable crowd formed a circle round about it.
“Damned Parisians!” said he to himself （for Gringoire, like all true dramatic poets, was given to monologues）， “there they stand blocking my way to the fire! and yet I greatly need a good warm chimney-corner; my shoes leak, and all those cursed mills have dripped upon me! Devil take the Bishop of Paris and his mills! I would really like to know what a bishop wants with a mill! does he expect to turn miller? If he is merely waiting for my curse, I give it to him cheerfully, and to his cathedral and his mills into the bargain! Now just let’s see if any of those boors will disturb themselves for me! What on earth are they doing there? Warming themselves indeed; a fine amusement! Watching to see a hundred fagots burn; a fine sight, truly!”
Looking more closely, he saw that the circle was far larger than was necessary for the crowd to warm themselves at the royal bonfire, and that the large number of spectators was not attracted solely by the beauty of the hundred blazing fagots.
In the vast space left free between the crowd and the fire a young girl was dancing.
Whether this young girl was a human being, or a fairy, or an angel, was more than Gringoire, cynic philosopher and sarcastic poet though he was, could for a moment decide, so greatly was he fascinated by the dazzling vision.