“It will be far finer to-day,” broke in their interlocutor at last, who had listened to them with evident impatience.

“You can promise us that this Mystery will be a fine one?” said Gisquette.

“Most assuredly I can,” he replied; then added with a certain solemnity, “Mesdemoiselles, I am myself the author of it.”

“Truly?” exclaimed the girls in amazement.

“Yes, truly,” asserted the poet with conscious pride. “That is to say, there are two of us—Jehan Marchand, who sawed the planks and put up the wooden structure of the theatre, and I, who wrote the piece. My name is Pierre Gringoire.”

Not with greater pride could the author of the Cid have said, “I am Pierre Corneille.”

Our readers cannot have failed to note that some time had elapsed between the moment at which Jupiter withdrew behind the curtain, and that at which the author thus abruptly revealed himself to the unsophisticated admiration of Gisquette and Liènarde. Strange to say, all this crowd, so tumultuous but a few minutes ago, were now waiting patiently with implicit faith in the player’s word. A proof of the everlasting truth still demonstrated in our theatres, that the best means of making the public wait patiently is to assure them that the performance is about to begin.

However, the scholar Joannes was not so easily lulled. “Holá!” he shouted suddenly into the midst of the peaceful expectation which had succeeded the uproar, “Jupiter! Madame the Virgin! Ye devil’s mountebanks! would you mock us? The piece! the piece. Do you begin this moment, or we will—”

This was enough. Immediately a sound of music from high- and low-pitched instruments was heard underneath the structure, the curtain was raised, four party-coloured and painted figures issued from it, and clambering up the steep ladder on to the upper platform, ranged themselves in a row fronting the audience, whom they greeted with a profound obeisance. The symphony then ceased. The Mystery began.

After receiving ample meed of applause in return for their bows, the four characters proceeded, amid profound silence, to deliver a prologue which we willingly spare the reader. Besides, just as in our own day, the public was far more interested in the costumes the actors wore than the parts they enacted—and therein they chose the better part.

All four were attired in party-coloured robes, half yellow, half white, differing from one another only in material; the first being of gold and silver brocade, the second of silk, the third of woollen stuff, the fourth of linen. The first of these figures carried a sword in his right hand, the second two golden keys, the third a pair of scales, the fourth a spade; and for the benefit of such sluggish capacities as might have failed to penetrate the transparency of these attributes, on the hem of the brocade robe was embroidered in enormous black letters, “I am Nobility,” on the silk one “I am Clergy,” on the woollen one “I am Commerce,” on the linen one “I am Labour.” The sex of the two male allegories was plainly indicated by the comparative shortness of their tunics and their Phrygian caps, whereas the female characters wore robes of ample length and hoods on their heads.

It would also have required real perverseness not to have understood from the poetic imagery of the prologue that Labour was espoused to Commerce, and Clergy to Nobility, and that the two happy couples possessed between them a magnificent golden dolphin (dauphin) which they proposed to adjudge only to the most beautiful damsel. Accordingly, they were roaming the world in search of this Fair One, and, after rejecting successively the Queen of Golconda, the Princess of Trebizonde, the daughter of the Grand Khan of Tartary, etc, etc., Labour and Commerce, Clergy and Nobility, had come to rest themselves awhile on the marble table of the Palais de Justice, and to deliver themselves before an honoured audience