The Court of Miracles was indeed only a tavern, but a tavern of thieves, as red with blood as with wine.
The spectacle presented to his eyes when his tattered escort at last landed him at his journey’s end was scarcely fitted to bring him back to poetry, even were it the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the tavern. If we were not living in the fifteenth century, we should say that Gringoire had fallen from Michael Angelo to Callot.
Around a large fire burning upon a great round flagstone, and lapping with its flames the rusty legs of a trivet empty for the moment, stood a number of worm-eaten tables here and there, in dire confusion, no lackey of any geometrical pretensions having deigned to adjust their parallelism, or at least to see that they did not cross each other at angles too unusual. Upon these tables glittered various pots and jugs dripping with wine and beer, and around these jugs were seated numerous Bacchanalian faces, purple with fire and wine. One big-bellied man with a jolly face was administering noisy kisses to a brawny, thickset woman. A rubbie, or old vagrant, whistled as he loosed the bandages from his mock wound, and rubbed his sound, healthy knee, which had been swathed all day in ample ligatures. Beyond him was a malingerer, preparing his “visitation from God”—his sore leg—with suet and ox-blood. Two tables farther on, a sham pilgrim, in complete pilgrim dress, was spelling out the lament of Sainte-Reine, not forgetting the snuffle and the twang. In another place a young scamp who imposed on the charitable by pretending to have been bitten by a mad dog, was taking a lesson of an old cadger in the art of frothing at the mouth by chewing a bit of soap. By their side a dropsical man was reducing his size, making four or five hags hold their noses as they sat at the same table, quarrelling over a child which they had stolen during the evening,—all circumstances which, two centuries later, “seemed so ridiculous to the court,” as Sauval says, “that they served as diversion to the King, and as the opening to a royal ballet entitled ‘Night,’ divided into four parts, and danced at the Petit Bourbon Theatre.” “Never,” adds an eye-witness in 1653, “have the sudden changes of the Court of Miracles been more happily hit off. Benserade prepared us for them by some very fine verses.”
Coarse laughter was heard on every hand, with vulgar songs. Every man expressed himself in his own way, carping and swearing, without heeding his neighbor. Some hob-nobbed, and quarrels arose from the clash of their mugs, and the breaking of their mugs was the cause of many torn rags.
A big dog squatted on his tail, gazing into the fire. Some children took their part in the orgies. The stolen child cried and screamed; while another, a stout boy of four, sat on a high bench, with his legs dangling, his chin just coming above the table, and not speaking a word. A third was gravely smearing the table with melted tallow as it ran from the candle. Another, a little fellow crouched in the mud, almost lost in a kettle which he was scraping with a potsherd, making a noise which would have distracted Stradivarius.
A cask stood near the fire, and a beggar sat on the cask. This was the king upon his throne.
The three who held Gringoire led him up to this cask, and all the revellers were hushed for a moment, except the caldron inhabited by the child.
Gringoire dared not breathe or raise his eyes.
“Hombre, quita tu sombrero!”aj said one of the three scoundrels who held him; and before he had made up his mind what this meant, another snatched his hat,—a shabby head-piece to be sure, but still useful on sunny or on rainy days. Gringoire sighed.
But the king, from the height of his barrel, addressed him,— “Who is this rascal?”
Gringoire started. The voice, although threatening in tone, reminded him of another voice which had that same morning dealt the first blow to his mystery by whining out from the audience, “Charity, kind souls!” He lifted his head. It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.
Clopin Trouillefou, decked with his royal insignia, had not a tat ter more or less than usual. The wound on his arm had vanished.
In his hand he held one of those whips with whit-leather thongs then used by sergeants of the wand to keep back the crowd, and called “boullayes.” Upon his head he wore a circular bonnet closed at the top; but it was hard to say whether it was a child’s cap or a king’s crown, so similar are the two things.
Still, Gringoire, without knowing why, felt his hopes revive when he recognized this accursed beggar of the Great Hall in the King of the Court of Miracles.
“Master,” stuttered he, “My lord—Sire—How shall I address you?” he said at last, reaching the culminating point of his crescendo, and not knowing how to rise higher or to re-descend.