Gringoire, thoroughly stunned by his fall, remained on
the pavement in front of the Holy Virgin at the street corner.
Little by little, he regained his senses; at first, for several
minutes, he was floating in a sort of half-somnolent revery,
which was not without its charm, in which aeriel figures of
the gypsy and her goat were coupled with Quasimodo's heavy
fist. This state lasted but a short time. A decidedly vivid
sensation of cold in the part of his body which was in contact
with the pavement, suddenly aroused him and caused his spirit
to return to the surface.
"Whence comes this chill?" he said abruptly, to himself.
He then perceived 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 was forced to remain where he was.
Moreover, his hand was tolerably free; he stopped up his nose
and resigned himself.
"The mud of Paris," he said to himself--for decidedly he
thought that he was sure that the gutter would prove his
refuge for the night; and what can one do in a refuge, except
dream?--"the mud of Paris is particularly stinking; it must
contain a great deal of volatile and nitric salts. That,
moreover, is the opinion of Master Nicholas Flamel, and of the
alchemists--"
The word "alchemists" suddenly suggested to his mind the
idea of Archdeacon Claude Frollo. He recalled the violent
scene which he had just witnessed in part; that the gypsy was
struggling with two men, that Quasimodo had a companion;
and the morose and haughty face of the archdeacon passed
confusedly through his memory. "That would be strange!"
he said to himself. And on that fact and that basis he began
to construct a fantastic edifice of hypothesis, that card-castle
of philosophers; then, suddenly returning once more to
reality, "Come! I'm freezing!" he ejaculated.
The place was, in fact, becoming less and less tenable.
Each molecule of the gutter bore away a molecule of heat
radiating from Gringoire's loins, and the equilibrium between
the temperature of his body and the temperature 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 pavements of Paris under the eternal name of
~gamins~, and who, when we were also children ourselves, threw
stones at all of us in the afternoon, when we came out of
school, because our trousers were not torn--a swarm of these
young scamps rushed towards the square where Gringoire lay,
with shouts and laughter which seemed to pay but little heed
to the sleep of the neighbors. 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.
"Oh¨¦, Hennequin Dand¨¦che! Oh¨¨, Jehan Pincebourde!"
they shouted in deafening tones, "old Eustache Moubon, the
merchant at the corner, has just died. We've got his straw
pallet, we're going to have a bonfire out of it. It's the turn
of the Flemish to-day!"
And behold, they flung the pallet directly upon Gringoire,
beside whom they had arrived, without espying him. At the
same time, one of them took a handful of straw and set off
to light it at the wick of the good Virgin.
"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 made a superhuman effort, the effort of a counterfeiter
of money who is on the 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,
Father Le Juge, and Corrozet affirm that it was picked
up on the morrow, with great pomp, by the clergy of the
quarter, and borne to the treasury of the church of Saint
Opportune, where the sacristan, even as late as 1789, earned a
tolerably handsome revenue out of the great miracle of the
Statue of the Virgin at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil,
which had, by its mere presence, on the memorable night between
the sixth and seventh of January, 1482, exorcised the
defunct Eustache Moubon, who, in order to play a trick on
the devil, had at his death maliciously concealed his soul in
his straw pallet.
CHAPTER VI.