CHAPTER V. RESULT OF THE DANGERS.
Gringoire, thoroughly stunned by his fall, remained on the pavementin front of the Holy Virgin at the street corner. Little by little, heregained his senses; at first, for several minutes, he was floating in asort of half-somnolent revery, which was not without its charm, in whichaeriel figures of the gypsy and her goat were coupled with Quasimodo'sheavy fist. This state lasted but a short time. A decidedly vividsensation of cold in the part of his body which was in contact with thepavement, suddenly aroused him and caused his spirit to return to thesurface.
"Whence comes this chill?" he said abruptly, to himself. He thenperceived that he was lying half in the middle of the gutter.
"That devil of a hunchbacked cyclops!" he muttered between his teeth;and he tried to rise. But he was too much dazed and bruised; he wasforced to remain where he was. Moreover, his hand was tolerably free; hestopped up his nose and resigned himself.
"The mud of Paris," he said to himself--for decidedly he thought that hewas sure that the gutter would prove his refuge for the night; and whatcan one do in a refuge, except dream?--"the mud of Paris is particularlystinking; it must contain a great deal of volatile and nitric salts.That, moreover, is the opinion of Master Nicholas Flamel, and of thealchemists--"
The word "alchemists" suddenly suggested to his mind the idea ofArchdeacon Claude Frollo. He recalled the violent scene which he hadjust witnessed in part; that the gypsy was struggling with two men,that Quasimodo had a companion; and the morose and haughty face ofthe archdeacon passed confusedly through his memory. "That would bestrange!" he said to himself. And on that fact and that basis he beganto construct a fantastic edifice of hypothesis, that card-castle ofphilosophers; then, suddenly returning once more to reality, "Come! I'mfreezing!" he ejaculated.
The place was, in fact, becoming less and less tenable. Each moleculeof the gutter bore away a molecule of heat radiating from Gringoire'sloins, and the equilibrium between the temperature of his body and thetemperature of the brook, began to be established in rough fashion.
Quite a different annoyance suddenly assailed him. A group of children,those little bare-footed savages who have always roamed the pavementsof Paris under the eternal name of _gamins_, and who, when we were alsochildren ourselves, threw stones at all of us in the afternoon, when wecame out of school, because our trousers were not torn--a swarm of theseyoung scamps rushed towards the square where Gringoire lay, with shoutsand laughter which seemed to pay but little heed to the sleep of theneighbors. They were dragging after them some sort of hideous sack;and the noise of their wooden shoes alone would have roused the dead.Gringoire who was not quite dead yet, half raised himself.
"Ohe, Hennequin Dandeche! Ohe, Jehan Pincebourde!" they shouted indeafening tones, "old Eustache Moubon, the merchant at the corner, hasjust died. We've got his straw pallet, we're going to have a bonfire outof it. It's the turn of the Flemish to-day!"
And behold, they flung the pallet directly upon Gringoire, beside whomthey had arrived, without espying him. At the same time, one of themtook a handful of straw and set off to light it at the wick of the goodVirgin.
"S'death!" growled Gringoire, "am I going to be too warm now?"
It was a critical moment. He was caught between fire and water; he madea superhuman effort, the effort of a counterfeiter of money who is onthe point of being boiled, and who seeks to escape. He rose to his feet,flung aside the straw pallet upon the street urchins, and fled.
"Holy Virgin!" shrieked the children; "'tis the merchant's ghost!"
And they fled in their turn.
The straw mattress remained master of the field. Belleforet, FatherLe Juge, and Corrozet affirm that it was picked up on the morrow, withgreat pomp, by the clergy of the quarter, and borne to the treasuryof the church of Saint Opportune, where the sacristan, even as late as1789, earned a tolerably handsome revenue out of the great miracle ofthe Statue of the Virgin at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil, whichhad, by its mere presence, on the memorable night between the sixth andseventh of January, 1482, exorcised the defunct Eustache Moubon, who,in order to play a trick on the devil, had at his death maliciouslyconcealed his soul in his straw pallet.
CHAPTER VI. THE BROKEN JUG.