Free Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Victor Hugo Page A

allegories was clearly shown to every sensible beholder by their shorter gowns and by their peculiar headdress, —a flat cap called a cramignole; while the two feminine allegories, clad in longer garments, wore hoods.
    One must also have been wilfully dull not to gather from the poetical prologue that Labor was wedded to Commerce, and Religion to Nobility, and that the two happy pairs owned in common a superb golden dolphin, p which they desired to bestow only on the fairest of the fair: They were therefore journeying through the world in search of this beauty; and having in turn rejected the Queen of Golconda, the Princess of Trebizond, the daughter of the Chain of Tartary, etc., Labor and Religion, Nobility and Trade, were now resting on the marble table in the Palace of Justice, spouting to their simple audience as many long sentences and maxims as would suffice the Faculty of Arts for all the examinations, sophisms, determi nances, figures, and acts required at the examinations at which the masters took their degrees.
    All this was indeed very fine.
    But in the crowd upon whom the four allegorical personages poured such floods of metaphor, each trying to outdo the other, there was no more attentive ear, no more anxious heart, no more eager eye, no neck more outstretched, than the eye, the ear, the neck, and the heart of the author, the poet, the worthy Pierre Gringoire, who could not resist, a moment previous, the delight of telling his name to two pretty girls. He had withdrawn a few paces from them, behind his pillar; and there he listened, looked, and enjoyed. The kindly plaudits which greeted the opening lines of his prologue still rang in his innermost soul, and he was completely absorbed in that kind of ecstatic contemplation with which an author watches his ideas falling one by one from the actor’s lips amid the silence of a vast assembly. Happy Pierre Gringoire!
    We regret to say that this first ecstasy was very soon disturbed. Gringoire had scarcely placed his lips to this intoxicating draught of joy and triumph, when a drop of bitterness was blended with it.
    A ragged beggar, who could reap no harvest, lost as he was in the midst of the crowd, and who doubtless failed to find sufficient to atone for his loss in the pockets of his neighbors, hit upon the plan of perching himself upon some conspicuous point, in order to attract eyes and alms. He therefore hoisted himself, during the first lines of the prologue, by the aid of the columns of the dais, up to the top of the high railing running around it; and there he sat, soliciting the attention and the pity of the multitude, by the sight of his rags, and a hideous sore which covered his right arm. Moreover, he uttered not a word.
    His silence permitted the prologue to go on without interruption, and no apparent disorder would have occurred if ill luck had not led the student Joannes to note the beggar and his grimaces, from his own lofty post. A fit of mad laughter seized upon the young rogue, who, regardless of the fact that he was interrupting the performance and disturbing the general concentration of thought, cried merrily,—
    “Just look at that impostor asking alms!”
    Any one who has thrown a stone into a frog-pond or fired a gun into a flock of birds, can form some idea of the effect which these incongruous words produced in the midst of the universal attention. Gringoire shuddered as at an electric shock. The prologue was cut short, and every head was turned, in confusion, towards the beggar, who, far from being put out of countenance, regarded this incident as a good occasion for a harvest, and began to whine, with an air of great distress, his eyes half closed, “Charity, kind people!”
    “Why, upon my soul,” continued Joannes, “it is Clopin Trouillefou! Hello there, my friend! Did you find the wound on your leg inconvenient, that you have transferred it to your arm?”
    So saying, with monkey-like skill he flung a small silver coin into the