“Really,” said the lady, turning away in disgust, “I thought they only put children here!”
She turned her back, throwing into the basin a silver coin which jingled loudly among the copper pence, and made the four good women from the Etienne Haudry Home stare.
A moment later, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, prothonotary to the king, passed with a huge missal under one arm and his wife under the other （Damoiselle Guillemette la Mairesse）， being thus armed on either hand with his spiritual and his temporal advisers.
“A foundling,” said he, after examination, “found apparently on the shores of the river Phlegethon!”
“It sees with but one eye,” remarked Damoiselle Guillemette; “there is a wart over the other.”
“That is no wart,” replied Master Robert Mistricolle; “that is an egg which holds just such another demon, who also bears another little egg containing another demon, and so on ad infinitum.”
“How do you know?” asked Guillemette la Mairesse.
“I know it for very good reasons,” answered the prothonotary.
“Mr. Prothonotary,” inquired Gauchère la Violette, “what do you predict from this pretended foundling?”
“The greatest misfortunes,” replied Mistricolle.
“Ah, good heavens!” said an old woman in the audience; “no wonder we had such a great plague last year, and that they say the English are going to land at Harfleur!”
“Perhaps it will prevent the queen from coming to Paris in September,” added another; “and trade ’s so bad already!”
“It is my opinion,” cried Jehanne de la Tarme, “that it would be better for the people of Paris if this little sorcerer here were laid on a fagot rather than a board.”
“A fine flaming fagot!” added the old woman.
“That would be more prudent,” said Mistricolle.
For some moments a young priest had been listening to the arguments of the Haudriettes and the sententious decrees of the prothonotary. His was a stern face, with a broad brow and penetrating eye. He silently put aside the crowd, examined the “little sorcerer,” and stretched his hand over him. It was high time; for all the godly old women were already licking their lips at the thought of the “fine flaming fagot.”
“I adopt this child,” said the priest.
He wrapped it in his cassock and bore it away. The spectators looked after him with frightened eyes. A moment later he had vanished through the Porte Rouge, which then led from the church to the cloisters.
When their first surprise was over, Jehanne de la Tarme whispered in La Gaultière’s ear,— “I always told you, sister, that that young scholar Monsieur Claude Frollo was a wizard.”
CHAPTER II
Claude Frollo
Indeed, Claude Frollo was no ordinary character. He belonged to one of those middle-class families called indifferently, in the impertinent language of the last century, the better class of citizens, or petty nobility. This family had inherited from the brothers Paclet the estate of Tirechappe, which was held of the Bishop of Paris, and the twenty-one houses belonging to which had been the subject of so many suits before the judge of the bishop’s court during the thirteenth century. As holder of this fief, Claude Frollo was one of the one hundred and forty-one lords and nobles claiming memorial dues in Paris and its suburbs; and his name was long to be seen inscribed, in that capacity, between those of the Hotel de Tancarville, belonging to Master Fran?ois le Rez, and the College of Tours, in the cartulary deposited for safe keeping at Saint-Martin des Champs.
Claude Frollo had from early childhood been destined by his parents to enter the ranks of the clergy. He was taught to read in Latin; he was trained to look down and speak low. While still very young his father put him at the convent School of Torchi in the University. There he grew up on the missal and the lexicon.
He was moreover a sad, serious, sober child, who loved study and learned quickly. He never shouted at play, took little part in the riotous frolics of the Rue du Fouarre, knew not what it was to “dare alapas et capillos laniare,”bc and had no share in the mutiny of 1463, which historians gravely set down as the “sixth disturbance at the University.” It seldom occurred to him to tease the poor scholars of Montaigu about their capotes,—the little hoods from which they took their name,—or the bursars of the College of Dormans about their smooth tonsure, and their motley garb of grey, blue, and violet cloth, “azurini coloris et bruni,” as the charter of Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes words it.