There is no reason why a deaf man talking to a deaf man should ever cease. Heaven knows when Master Florian, thus launched on the full flood of his own eloquence, would have paused, if the low door at the back of the room had not suddenly opened and admitted the provost himself.
At his entrance Master Florian did not stop short, but turning half round on his heel and abruptly addressing to the provost the harangue with which but a moment before he was overwhelming Quasimodo, he said: “My lord, I demand such sentence as it may please you to inflict upon the prisoner here present, for his grave and heinous contempt of court.”
And he sat down again quite out of breath, wiping away the big beads of moisture which ran down his face like tears, wetting the papers spread out before him. Master Robert d‘Estouteville frowned, and commanded Quasimodo’s attention by a sign so imperious and significant that even the deaf man understood something of his meaning.
The provost addressed him severely: “What brings you here, scoundrel?”
The poor wretch, supposing that the provost asked his name, broke his habitual silence, and answered in a hoarse and guttural voice, “Quasimodo.”
The answer had so little to do with the question that an irresistible laugh again ran round the room, and Master Robert cried out, red with rage,— “Would you mock me too, you arrant knave?”
“Bell-ringer of Notre-Dame,” replied Quasimodo, fancying himself called upon to explain to the judge who he was.
“Bell-ringer, indeed!” responded the provost, who, as we have already said, had waked in an ill enough humor that morning not to require any fanning of the flames of his fury by such strange answers. “Bell-ringer! I’ll have a peal of switches rung upon your back through all the streets of Paris! Do you hear me, rascal?”
“If you want to know my age,” said Quasimodo, “I believe I shall be twenty on Saint Martin’s Day.”
This was too much; the provost could bear it no longer.
“Oh, you defy the provost’s office, do you, wretch! Vergers, take this scamp to the pillory in the Place de Grève; beat him well, and then turn him for an hour. He shall pay me for this, tête-Dieu! And I order this sentence to be proclaimed, by the aid of four sworn trumpeters, throughout the seven castellanies of the jurisdiction of Paris.”
The clerk at once wrote down the sentence.
“A wise sentence, by God!” exclaimed the little student, Jehan Frollo du Moulin, from his corner.
The provost turned, and again fixed his flashing eyes upon Quasimodo: “I believe the scamp said ‘By God!’ Clerk, add a fine of twelve Paris pence for swearing, and let half of it go to the Church of Saint Eustache; I am particularly fond of Saint Eustache.”
In a few moments the sentence was drawn up. It was simple and brief in tenor. The common law of the provosty and viscounty of Paris had not yet been elaborated by the president, Thibaut Baillet, and by Roger Barmue, the king’s advocate; it was not then obscured by that mass of quirks and quibbles which these two lawyers introduced at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Everything about it was clear, expeditious, and explicit. It went straight to the mark, and at the end of every path, unconcealed by brambles or briers, the wheel, the gallows, or the pillory were plainly to be seen from the very outset. At least, you knew what was coming.
The clerk handed the sentence to the provost, who affixed his seal to it, and left the room to continue his round of the courts, in a state of mind which must have added largely that day to the population of the jails of Paris. Jehan Frollo and Robin Poussepain laughed in their sleeves. Quasimodo looked on with indifference and surprise.
But the clerk, just as Master Florian Barbedienne was reading the sentence in his turn before signing it, felt a twinge of pity for the poor devil of a prisoner, and in the hope of gaining some diminution of his punishment, leaned as close as he could to the judge’s ear, and said, pointing to Quasimodo, “That fellow is deaf.”
He hoped that their common infirmity might rouse Master Florian’s interest in the prisoner’s favor. But, in the first place, we have already observed that Master Florian did not care to have his deafness noticed. In the next place, he was so hard of hearing that he caught not one word of what the clerk said to him; and yet, he wanted to have it appear that he heard, and therefore answered. “Oho! that’s a different matter; I did not know that. Give him another hour in the pillory, in that case.”
And he signed the sentence with this modification.
“Well done!” said Robin Poussepain, who bore Quasimodo a grudge; “that will teach him to maltreat folks.”