Chapter 1 — VOLUME I. BOOK FIRST.

CHAPTER I.
THE GRAND HALL.

Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to-day,
the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the
city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal.

The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has
preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in the event which thus set the
bells and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment from early morning. It was
neither an assault by the Picards nor the Burgundians, nor a hunt led along in
procession, nor a revolt of scholars in the town of Laas, nor an entry of “our
much dread lord, monsieur the king,” nor even a pretty hanging of male and
female thieves by the courts of Paris. Neither was it the arrival, so frequent
in the fifteenth century, of some plumed and bedizened embassy. It was barely
two days since the last cavalcade of that nature, that of the Flemish
ambassadors charged with concluding the marriage between the dauphin and
Marguerite of Flanders, had made its entry into Paris, to the great annoyance
of M. le Cardinal de Bourbon, who, for the sake of pleasing the king, had been
obliged to assume an amiable mien towards this whole rustic rabble of Flemish
burgomasters, and to regale them at his Hôtel de Bourbon, with a very “pretty
morality, allegorical satire, and farce,” while a driving rain drenched the
magnificent tapestries at his door.

bourgeois

What put the “whole population of Paris in commotion,” as Jehan de Troyes
expresses it, on the sixth of January, was the double solemnity, united from
time immemorial, of the Epiphany and the Feast of Fools.

On that day, there was to be a bonfire on the Place de Grève, a maypole at the
Chapelle de Braque, and a mystery at the Palais de Justice. It had been cried,
to the sound of the trumpet, the preceding evening at all the cross roads, by
the provost’s men, clad in handsome, short, sleeveless coats of violet camelot,
with large white crosses upon their breasts.

So the crowd of citizens, male and female, having closed their houses and
shops, thronged from every direction, at early morn, towards some one of the
three spots designated.

Each had made his choice; one, the bonfire; another, the maypole; another, the
mystery play. It must be stated, in honor of the good sense of the loungers of
Paris, that the greater part of this crowd directed their steps towards the
bonfire, which was quite in season, or towards the mystery play, which was to
be presented in the grand hall of the Palais de Justice (the courts of law),
which was well roofed and walled; and that the curious left the poor, scantily
flowered maypole to shiver all alone beneath the sky of January, in the
cemetery of the Chapel of Braque.

The populace thronged the avenues of the law courts in particular, because they
knew that the Flemish ambassadors, who had arrived two days previously,
intended to be present at the representation of the mystery, and at the
election of the Pope of the Fools, which was also to take place in the grand
hall.

It was no easy matter on that day, to force one’s way into that grand hall,
although it was then reputed to be the largest covered enclosure in the world
(it is true that Sauval had not yet measured the grand hall of the Château of
Montargis). The palace place, encumbered with people, offered to the curious
gazers at the windows the aspect of a sea; into which five or six streets, like
so many mouths of rivers, discharged every moment fresh floods of heads. The
waves of this crowd, augmented incessantly, dashed against the angles of the
houses which projected here and there, like so many promontories, into the
irregular basin of the place. In the centre of the lofty Gothic façade of the palace, the grand
staircase, incessantly ascended and descended by a double current, which, after
parting on the intermediate landing-place, flowed in broad waves along its
lateral slopes,—the grand staircase, I say, trickled incessantly into the
place, like a cascade into a lake. The cries, the laughter, the trampling of
those thousands of feet, produced a great noise and a great clamor. From time
to time, this noise and clamor redoubled; the current which drove the crowd
towards the grand staircase flowed backwards, became troubled, formed
whirlpools. This was produced by the buffet of an archer, or the horse of one
of the provost’s sergeants, which kicked to restore order; an admirable
tradition which the provostship has bequeathed to the constablery, the
constablery to the maréchaussée, the maréchaussée to our
gendarmeri of Paris.

maréchaussée

maréchaussée

gendarmeri

Thousands of good, calm, bourgeois faces thronged the windows, the
doors, the dormer windows, the roofs, gazing at the palace, gazing at the
populace, and asking nothing more; for many Parisians content themselves with
the spectacle of the spectators, and a wall behind which something is going on
becomes at once, for us, a very curious thing indeed.

bourgeois

If it could be granted to us, the men of 1830, to mingle in thought with those
Parisians of the fifteenth century, and to enter with them, jostled, elbowed,
pulled about, into that immense hall of the palace, which was so cramped on
that sixth of January, 1482, the spectacle would not be devoid of either
interest or charm, and we should have about us only things that were so old
that they would seem new.

With the reader’s consent, we will endeavor to retrace in thought, the
impression which he would have experienced in company with us on crossing the
threshold of that grand hall, in the midst of that tumultuous crowd in
surcoats, short, sleeveless jackets, and doublets.

And, first of all, there is a buzzing in the ears, a dazzlement in the eyes.
Above our heads is a double ogive vault, panelled with wood carving, painted
azure, and sown with golden fleurs-de-lis; beneath our feet a pavement of black
and white marble, alternating. A few paces distant, an enormous pillar, then
another, then another; seven pillars in all, down the length of the hall,
sustaining the spring of the arches of the double vault, in the centre of its
width. Around four of the pillars, stalls of merchants, all sparkling with
glass and tinsel; around the last three, benches of oak, worn and polished by
the trunk hose of the litigants, and the robes of the attorneys. Around the
hall, along the lofty wall, between the doors, between the windows, between the
pillars, the interminable row of all the kings of France, from Pharamond down:
the lazy kings, with pendent arms and downcast eyes; the valiant and combative
kings, with heads and arms raised boldly heavenward. Then in the long, pointed
windows, glass of a thousand hues; at the wide entrances to the hall, rich
doors, finely sculptured; and all, the vaults, pillars, walls, jambs,
panelling, doors, statues, covered from top to bottom with a splendid blue and
gold illumination, which, a trifle tarnished at the epoch when we behold it,
had almost entirely disappeared beneath dust and spiders in the year of grace,
1549, when du Breul still admired it from tradition.

Let the reader picture to himself now, this immense, oblong hall, illuminated
by the pallid light of a January day, invaded by a motley and noisy throng
which drifts along the walls, and eddies round the seven pillars, and he will
have a confused idea of the whole effect of the picture, whose curious details
we shall make an effort to indicate with more precision.

It is certain, that if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henri IV., there would
have been no documents in the trial of Ravaillac deposited in the clerk’s
office of the Palais de Justice, no accomplices interested in causing the said
documents to disappear; hence, no incendiaries obliged, for lack of better
means, to burn the clerk’s office in order to burn the documents, and to burn
the Palais de Justice in order to burn the clerk’s office; consequently, in
short, no conflagration in 1618. The old Palais would be standing still, with
its ancient grand hall; I should be able to say to the reader, “Go and look at
it,” and we should thus both escape the necessity,—I of making, and he of
reading, a description of it, such as it is. Which demonstrates a new truth:
that great events have incalculable results.

It is true that it may be quite possible, in the first place, that Ravaillac
had no accomplices; and in the second, that if he had any, they were in no way
connected with the fire of 1618. Two other very plausible explanations exist:
First, the great flaming star, a foot broad, and a cubit high, which fell from
heaven, as every one knows, upon the law courts, after midnight on the seventh
of March; second, Théophile’s quatrain,—

“Sure, ’twas but a sorry game
When at Paris, Dame Justice,
Through having eaten too much spice,
Set the palace all aflame.”

Whatever may be thought of this triple explanation, political, physical, and
poetical, of the burning of the law courts in 1618, the unfortunate fact of the
fire is certain. Very little to-day remains, thanks to this
catastrophe,—thanks, above all, to the successive restorations which have
completed what it spared,—very little remains of that first dwelling of the
kings of France,—of that elder palace of the Louvre, already so old in the time
of Philip the Handsome, that they sought there for the traces of the
magnificent buildings erected by King Robert and described by Helgaldus. Nearly
everything has disappeared. What has become of the chamber of the chancellery,
where Saint Louis consummated his marriage? the garden where he administered
justice, “clad in a coat of camelot, a surcoat of linsey-woolsey, without
sleeves, and a sur-mantle of black sandal, as he lay upon the carpet with
Joinville?” Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismond? and that of Charles
IV.? that of Jean the Landless? Where is the staircase, from which Charles VI.
promulgated his edict of pardon? the slab where Marcel cut the throats of
Robert de Clermont and the Marshal of Champagne, in the presence of the
dauphin? the wicket where the bulls of Pope Benedict were torn, and whence
those who had brought them departed decked out, in derision, in copes and
mitres, and making an apology through all Paris? and the grand hall, with its
gilding, its azure, its statues, its pointed arches, its pillars, its immense
vault, all fretted with carvings? and the gilded chamber? and the stone lion,
which stood at the door, with lowered head and tail between his legs, like the
lions on the throne of Solomon, in the humiliated attitude which befits force
in the presence of justice? and the beautiful doors? and the stained glass? and
the chased ironwork, which drove Biscornette to despair? and the delicate
woodwork of Hancy? What has time, what have men done with these marvels? What
have they given us in return for all this Gallic history, for all this Gothic
art? The heavy flattened arches of M. de Brosse, that awkward architect of the
Saint-Gervais portal. So much for art; and, as for history, we have the
gossiping reminiscences of the great pillar, still ringing with the tattle of
the Patru.

It is not much. Let us return to the veritable grand hall of the veritable old
palace. The two extremities of this gigantic parallelogram were occupied, the
one by the famous marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick that, as the
ancient land rolls—in a style that would have given Gargantua an appetite—say,
“such a slice of marble as was never beheld in the world”; the other by the
chapel where Louis XI. had himself sculptured on his knees before the Virgin,
and whither he caused to be brought, without heeding the two gaps thus made in
the row of royal statues, the statues of Charlemagne and of Saint Louis, two
saints whom he supposed to be great in favor in heaven, as kings of France.
This chapel, quite new, having been built only six years, was entirely in that
charming taste of delicate architecture, of marvellous sculpture, of fine and
deep chasing, which marks with us the end of the Gothic era, and which is
perpetuated to about the middle of the sixteenth century in the fairylike
fancies of the Renaissance. The little open-work rose window, pierced above the
portal, was, in particular, a masterpiece of lightness and grace; one would
have pronounced it a star of lace.

In the middle of the hall, opposite the great door, a platform of gold brocade,
placed against the wall, a special entrance to which had been effected through
a window in the corridor of the gold chamber, had been erected for the Flemish
emissaries and the other great personages invited to the presentation of the
mystery play.

It was upon the marble table that the mystery was to be enacted, as usual. It
had been arranged for the purpose, early in the morning; its rich slabs of
marble, all scratched by the heels of law clerks, supported a cage of
carpenter’s work of considerable height, the upper surface of which, within
view of the whole hall, was to serve as the theatre, and whose interior, masked
by tapestries, was to take the place of dressing-rooms for the personages of
the piece. A ladder, naively placed on the outside, was to serve as means of
communication between the dressing-room and the stage, and lend its rude rungs
to entrances as well as to exits. There was no personage, however unexpected,
no sudden change, no theatrical effect, which was not obliged to mount that
ladder. Innocent and venerable infancy of art and contrivances!

Four of the bailiff of the palace’s sergeants, perfunctory guardians of all the
pleasures of the people, on days of festival as well as on days of execution,
stood at the four corners of the marble table.

The piece was only to begin with the twelfth stroke of the great palace clock
sounding midday. It was very late, no doubt, for a theatrical representation,
but they had been obliged to fix the hour to suit the convenience of the
ambassadors.

Now, this whole multitude had been waiting since morning. A goodly number of
curious, good people had been shivering since daybreak before the grand
staircase of the palace; some even affirmed that they had passed the night
across the threshold of the great door, in order to make sure that they should
be the first to pass in. The crowd grew more dense every moment, and, like
water, which rises above its normal level, began to mount along the walls, to
swell around the pillars, to spread out on the entablatures, on the cornices,
on the window-sills, on all the salient points of the architecture, on all the
reliefs of the sculpture. Hence, discomfort, impatience, weariness, the liberty
of a day of cynicism and folly, the quarrels which break forth for all sorts of
causes—a pointed elbow, an iron-shod shoe, the fatigue of long waiting—had
already, long before the hour appointed for the arrival of the ambassadors,
imparted a harsh and bitter accent to the clamor of these people who were shut
in, fitted into each other, pressed, trampled upon, stifled. Nothing was to be
heard but imprecations on the Flemish, the provost of the merchants, the
Cardinal de Bourbon, the bailiff of the courts, Madame Marguerite of Austria,
the sergeants with their rods, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Bishop
of Paris, the Pope of the Fools, the pillars, the statues, that closed door,
that open window; all to the vast amusement of a band of scholars and lackeys
scattered through the mass, who mingled with all this discontent their teasing
remarks, and their malicious suggestions, and pricked the general bad temper
with a pin, so to speak.

Among the rest there was a group of those merry imps, who, after smashing the
glass in a window, had seated themselves hardily on the entablature, and from
that point despatched their gaze and their railleries both within and without,
upon the throng in the hall, and the throng upon the Place. It was easy to see,
from their parodied gestures, their ringing laughter, the bantering appeals
which they exchanged with their comrades, from one end of the hall to the
other, that these young clerks did not share the weariness and fatigue of the
rest of the spectators, and that they understood very well the art of
extracting, for their own private diversion from that which they had under
their eyes, a spectacle which made them await the other with patience.

“Upon my soul, so it’s you, ‘Joannes Frollo de Molendino!’” cried one of them,
to a sort of little, light-haired imp, with a well-favored and malign
countenance, clinging to the acanthus leaves of a capital; “you are well named
John of the Mill, for your two arms and your two legs have the air of four
wings fluttering on the breeze. How long have you been here?”

“By the mercy of the devil,” retorted Joannes Frollo, “these four hours and
more; and I hope that they will be reckoned to my credit in purgatory. I heard
the eight singers of the King of Sicily intone the first verse of seven o’clock
mass in the Sainte-Chapelle.”

“Fine singers!” replied the other, “with voices even more pointed than their
caps! Before founding a mass for Monsieur Saint John, the king should have
inquired whether Monsieur Saint John likes Latin droned out in a Provençal
accent.”

“He did it for the sake of employing those accursed singers of the King of
Sicily!” cried an old woman sharply from among the crowd beneath the window. “I
just put it to you! A thousand livres parisi for a mass! and out of the
tax on sea fish in the markets of Paris, to boot!”

livres parisi

“Peace, old crone,” said a tall, grave person, stopping up his nose on the side
towards the fishwife; “a mass had to be founded. Would you wish the king to
fall ill again?”

“Bravely spoken, Sire Gilles Lecornu, master furrier of king’s robes!” cried
the little student, clinging to the capital.

A shout of laughter from all the students greeted the unlucky name of the poor
furrier of the king’s robes.

“Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!” said some.

“Cornutus et hirsutus, horned and hairy,” another went on.

Cornutus et hirsutus

“He! of course,” continued the small imp on the capital, “What are they
laughing at? An honorable man is Gilles Lecornu, brother of Master Jehan
Lecornu, provost of the king’s house, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, first
porter of the Bois de Vincennes,—all bourgeois of Paris, all married,
from father to son.”

bourgeois

The gayety redoubled. The big furrier, without uttering a word in reply, tried
to escape all the eyes riveted upon him from all sides; but he perspired and
panted in vain; like a wedge entering the wood, his efforts served only to bury
still more deeply in the shoulders of his neighbors, his large, apoplectic
face, purple with spite and rage.

At length one of these, as fat, short, and venerable as himself, came to his
rescue.

“Abomination! scholars addressing a bourgeois in that fashion in my day
would have been flogged with a fagot, which would have afterwards been used to
burn them.”

bourgeois

The whole band burst into laughter.

“Holà hé! who is scolding so? Who is that screech owl of evil fortune?”

“Hold, I know him” said one of them; “’tis Master Andry Musnier.”

“Because he is one of the four sworn booksellers of the university!” said the
other.

“Everything goes by fours in that shop,” cried a third; “the four nations, the
four faculties, the four feasts, the four procurators, the four electors, the
four booksellers.”

“Well,” began Jean Frollo once more, “we must play the devil with them.”

“Musnier, we’ll burn your books.”

“Musnier, we’ll beat your lackeys.”

“Musnier, we’ll kiss your wife.”

“That fine, big Mademoiselle Oudarde.”

“Who is as fresh and as gay as though she were a widow.”

“Devil take you!” growled Master Andry Musnier.

“Master Andry,” pursued Jean Jehan, still clinging to his capital, “hold your
tongue, or I’ll drop on your head!”

Master Andry raised his eyes, seemed to measure in an instant the height of the
pillar, the weight of the scamp, mentally multiplied that weight by the square
of the velocity and remained silent.

Jehan, master of the field of battle, pursued triumphantly:

“That’s what I’ll do, even if I am the brother of an archdeacon!”

“Fine gentry are our people of the university, not to have caused our
privileges to be respected on such a day as this! However, there is a maypole
and a bonfire in the town; a mystery, Pope of the Fools, and Flemish
ambassadors in the city; and, at the university, nothing!”

“Nevertheless, the Place Maubert is sufficiently large!” interposed one of the
clerks established on the window-sill.

“Down with the rector, the electors, and the procurators!” cried Joannes.

“We must have a bonfire this evening in the Champ-Gaillard,” went on the other,
“made of Master Andry’s books.”

“And the desks of the scribes!” added his neighbor.

“And the beadles’ wands!”

“And the spittoons of the deans!”

“And the cupboards of the procurators!”

“And the hutches of the electors!”

“And the stools of the rector!”

“Down with them!” put in little Jehan, as counterpoint; “down with Master
Andry, the beadles and the scribes; the theologians, the doctors and the
decretists; the procurators, the electors and the rector!”

“The end of the world has come!” muttered Master Andry, stopping up his ears.

“By the way, there’s the rector! see, he is passing through the Place,” cried
one of those in the window.

Each rivalled his neighbor in his haste to turn towards the Place.

“Is it really our venerable rector, Master Thibaut?” demanded Jehan Frollo du
Moulin, who, as he was clinging to one of the inner pillars, could not see what
was going on outside.

“Yes, yes,” replied all the others, “it is really he, Master Thibaut, the
rector.”

It was, in fact, the rector and all the dignitaries of the university, who were
marching in procession in front of the embassy, and at that moment traversing
the Place. The students crowded into the window, saluted them as they passed
with sarcasms and ironical applause. The rector, who was walking at the head of
his company, had to support the first broadside; it was severe.

“Good day, monsieur le recteur! Holà hé! good day there!”

“How does he manage to be here, the old gambler? Has he abandoned his dice?”

“How he trots along on his mule! her ears are not so long as his!”

“Holà hé! good day, monsieur le recteur Thibaut! Tybalde aleator! Old
fool! old gambler!”

Tybalde aleator

“God preserve you! Did you throw double six often last night?”

“Oh! what a decrepit face, livid and haggard and drawn with the love of
gambling and of dice!”

“Where are you bound for in that fashion, Thibaut, Tybalde ad dados,
with your back turned to the university, and trotting towards the town?”

Tybalde ad dados

“He is on his way, no doubt, to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodé?” cried Jehan du M. Moulin.

The entire band repeated this quip in a voice of thunder, clapping their hands
furiously.

“You are going to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodé, are you not, monsieur
le recteur, gamester on the side of the devil?”

Then came the turns of the other dignitaries.

“Down with the beadles! down with the mace-bearers!”

“Tell me, Robin Pouissepain, who is that yonder?”

“He is Gilbert de Suilly, Gilbertus de Soliaco, the chancellor of the
College of Autun.”

Gilbertus de Soliaco

“Hold on, here’s my shoe; you are better placed than I, fling it in his face.”

“Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces.”

Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces

“Down with the six theologians, with their white surplices!”

“Are those the theologians? I thought they were the white geese given by
Sainte-Geneviève to the city, for the fief of Roogny.”

“Down with the doctors!”

“Down with the cardinal disputations, and quibblers!”

“My cap to you, Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève! You have done me a wrong. ’Tis
true; he gave my place in the nation of Normandy to little Ascanio Falzapada,
who comes from the province of Bourges, since he is an Italian.”

“That is an injustice,” said all the scholars. “Down with the Chancellor of
Sainte-Geneviève!”

“Ho hé! Master Joachim de Ladehors! Ho hé! Louis Dahuille! Ho hé Lambert
Hoctement!”

“May the devil stifle the procurator of the German nation!”

“And the chaplains of the Sainte-Chapelle, with their gray amices; cum
tunices grisis!”

amices; cum
tunices grisis

“Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis!”

Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis

“Holà hé! Masters of Arts! All the beautiful black copes! all the fine red
copes!”

“They make a fine tail for the rector.”

“One would say that he was a Doge of Venice on his way to his bridal with the
sea.”

“Say, Jehan! here are the canons of Sainte-Geneviève!”

“To the deuce with the whole set of canons!”

“Abbé Claude Choart! Doctor Claude Choart! Are you in search of Marie la
Giffarde?”

“She is in the Rue de Glatigny.”

“She is making the bed of the king of the debauchees.”

“She is paying her four deniers quatuor denarios.”

quatuor denarios

“Aut unum bombum.”

Aut unum bombum

“Would you like to have her pay you in the face?”

“Comrades! Master Simon Sanguin, the Elector of Picardy, with his wife on the
crupper!”

“Post equitem sedet atra cura—behind the horseman sits black care.”

Post equitem sedet atra cura

“Courage, Master Simon!”

“Good day, Mister Elector!”

“Good night, Madame Electress!”

“How happy they are to see all that!” sighed Joannes de Molendino, still
perched in the foliage of his capital.

Meanwhile, the sworn bookseller of the university, Master Andry Musnier, was
inclining his ear to the furrier of the king’s robes, Master Gilles Lecornu.

“I tell you, sir, that the end of the world has come. No one has ever beheld
such outbreaks among the students! It is the accursed inventions of this
century that are ruining everything,—artilleries, bombards, and, above all,
printing, that other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books! printing
will kill bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing nigh.”

“I see that plainly, from the progress of velvet stuffs,” said the
fur-merchant.

At this moment, midday sounded.

“Ha!” exclaimed the entire crowd, in one voice.

The scholars held their peace. Then a great hurly-burly ensued; a vast movement
of feet, hands, and heads; a general outbreak of coughs and handkerchiefs; each
one arranged himself, assumed his post, raised himself up, and grouped himself.
Then came a great silence; all necks remained outstretched, all mouths remained
open, all glances were directed towards the marble table. Nothing made its
appearance there. The bailiff’s four sergeants were still there, stiff,
motionless, as painted statues. All eyes turned to the estrade reserved for the
Flemish envoys. The door remained closed, the platform empty. This crowd had
been waiting since daybreak for three things: noonday, the embassy from
Flanders, the mystery play. Noonday alone had arrived on time.

On this occasion, it was too much.

They waited one, two, three, five minutes, a quarter of an hour; nothing came.
The dais remained empty, the theatre dumb. In the meantime, wrath had succeeded
to impatience. Irritated words circulated in a low tone, still, it is true.
“The mystery! the mystery!” they murmured, in hollow voices. Heads began to
ferment. A tempest, which was only rumbling in the distance as yet, was
floating on the surface of this crowd. It was Jehan du Moulin who struck the
first spark from it.

“The mystery, and to the devil with the Flemings!” he exclaimed at the full
force of his lungs, twining like a serpent around his pillar.

The crowd clapped their hands.

“The mystery!” it repeated, “and may all the devils take Flanders!”

“We must have the mystery instantly,” resumed the student; “or else, my advice
is that we should hang the bailiff of the courts, by way of a morality and a
comedy.”

“Well said,” cried the people, “and let us begin the hanging with his
sergeants.”

A grand acclamation followed. The four poor fellows began to turn pale, and to
exchange glances. The crowd hurled itself towards them, and they already beheld
the frail wooden railing, which separated them from it, giving way and bending
before the pressure of the throng.

It was a critical moment.

“To the sack, to the sack!” rose the cry on all sides.

At that moment, the tapestry of the dressing-room, which we have described
above, was raised, and afforded passage to a personage, the mere sight of whom
suddenly stopped the crowd, and changed its wrath into curiosity as by
enchantment.

“Silence! silence!”

The personage, but little reassured, and trembling in every limb, advanced to
the edge of the marble table with a vast amount of bows, which, in proportion
as he drew nearer, more and more resembled genuflections.

In the meanwhile, tranquillity had gradually been restored. All that remained
was that slight murmur which always rises above the silence of a crowd.

“Messieurs the bourgeois,” said he, “and mesdemoiselles the
bourgeoises, we shall have the honor of declaiming and representing,
before his eminence, monsieur the cardinal, a very beautiful morality which has
for its title, ‘The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin Mary.’ I am to play
Jupiter. His eminence is, at this moment, escorting the very honorable embassy
of the Duke of Austria; which is detained, at present, listening to the
harangue of monsieur the rector of the university, at the gate Baudets. As soon
as his illustrious eminence, the cardinal, arrives, we will begin.”

bourgeois

bourgeoises

It is certain, that nothing less than the intervention of Jupiter was required
to save the four unfortunate sergeants of the bailiff of the courts. If we had
the happiness of having invented this very veracious tale, and of being, in
consequence, responsible for it before our Lady Criticism, it is not against us
that the classic precept, Nec deus intersit, could be invoked. Moreover,
the costume of Seigneur Jupiter, was very handsome, and contributed not a
little towards calming the crowd, by attracting all its attention. Jupiter was
clad in a coat of mail, covered with black velvet, with gilt nails; and had it
not been for the rouge, and the huge red beard, each of which covered one-half
of his face,—had it not been for the roll of gilded cardboard, spangled, and
all bristling with strips of tinsel, which he held in his hand, and in which
the eyes of the initiated easily recognized thunderbolts,—had not his feet been
flesh-colored, and banded with ribbons in Greek fashion, he might have borne
comparison, so far as the severity of his mien was concerned, with a Breton
archer from the guard of Monsieur de Berry.

Nec deus intersit