Four sergeants of the provost of the Palais—the appointed superintendents of all popular holidays, whether festivals or executions—stood on duty at the four corners of the marble table.

The piece was not to commence till the last stroke of noon of the great clock of the Palais. To be sure, this was very late for a theatrical performance; but they had been obliged to suit the convenience of the ambassadors.

Now, all this multitude had been waiting since the early morning; indeed, a considerable number of these worthy spectators had stood shivering and chattering their teeth with cold since break of day before the grand stair-case of the Palais; some even declared that they had spent the night in front of the great entrance to make sure of being the first to get in. The crowd became denser every moment, and like water that overflows its boundaries, began to mount the walls, to surge round the pillars, to rise up and cover the cornices, the window-sills, every projection and every coign of vantage in architecture or sculpture. The all-prevailing impatience, discomfort, and weariness, the license of a holiday approvedly dedicated to folly, the quarrels incessantly arising out of a sharp elbow or an iron-shod heel, the fatigue of long waiting —all conduced to give a tone of bitterness and acerbity to the clamour of this closely packed, squeezed, hustled, stifled throng long before the hour at which the ambassadors were expected. Nothing was to be heard but grumbling and imprecations against the Flemings, the Cardinal de Bourbon, the Chief Magistrate, Madame Marguerite of Austria, the beadles, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Bishop of Paris, the Fools’ Pope, the pillars, the statues, this closed door, yonder open window—to the huge diversion of the bands of scholars and lackeys distributed through the crowd, who mingled their gibes and pranks with this seething mass of dissatisfaction, aggravating the general ill-humour by perpetual pin-pricks.

There was one group in particular of these joyous young demons who, after knocking out the glass of a window, had boldly seated themselves in the frame, from whence they could cast their gaze and their banter by turns at the crowd inside the Hall and that outside in the Place. By their aping gestures, their yells of laughter, by their loud interchange of opprobrious epithets with comrades at the other side of the Hall, it was very evident that these budding literati by no means shared the boredom and fatigue of the rest of the gathering, and that they knew very well how to extract out of the scene actually before them sufficient entertainment of their own to enable them to wait patiently for the other.

“Why, by my soul, ’tis Joannes Frollo de Molendino!” cried one of them to a little fair-haired imp with a handsome mischievous face, who had swarmed up the pillar and was clinging to the foliage of its capital; “well are you named Jehan of the Mill, for your two arms and legs are just like the sails of a wind- mill. How long have you been here?”

“By the grace of the devil,” returned Joannes Frollo, “over four hours, and I sincerely trust they may be deducted from my time in purgatory. I heard the eight chanters of the King of Sicily start High Mass at seven in the Sainte-Chapelle.”

“Fine chanters forsooth!” exclaimed the other, “their voices are sharper than the peaks of their caps! The King had done better, before founding a Mass in honour of M. Saint-John, to inquire if M. Saint- John was fond of hearing Latin droned with a Provençal accent.”

“And was it just for the sake of employing these rascally chanters of the King of Sicily that he did that?” cried an old woman bitterly in the crowd beneath the window. “I ask you—a thousand livres parisis⁴

“Peace! old woman,” replied a portly and solemn personage, who was holding his nose as he stood beside the fishwife; “a Mass had to be founded. Would you have the King fall sick again?”

“Bravely said, Sir Gilles Lecornu,⁵