The words she sang were in a tongue unknown to Gringoire and apparently to herself, so little did the expression she put into her song fit the sense of the words. Thus, on her lips these four lines were full of sparkling gaiety:

And the next moment Gringoire’s eyes filled with tears at the expression she put into this verse:

However, the prevailing note in her singing was joyousness, and, like the birds, she seemed to sing from pure serenity and lightness of heart.

The gipsy’s song disturbed Gringoire’s reverie, but only as a swan ruffles the water. He listened in a sort of trance, unconscious of all around him. It was the first moment for many hours that he forgot his woes.

The respite was short. The female voice which had interrupted the gipsy’s dance now broke in upon her song:

“Silence, grasshopper of hell!” she cried out of the same dark corner of the Place.

The poor “cigale” stopped short. Gringoire clapped his hands to his ears.

“Oh!” he cried, “accursed, broken-toothed saw that comes to break the lyre!”

The rest of the audience agreed with him. “The foul fiend take the old sachette!” growled more than one of them, and the invisible spoil-sport might have had reason to repent of her attacks on the gipsy, if the attention of the crowd had not been distracted by the procession of the Pope of Fools, now pouring into the Place de Gréve, after making the tour of the streets with its blaze of torches and its deafening hubbub.

This procession which our readers saw issuing from the Palais de Justice had organized itself en route, and had been recruited by all the ruffians, all the idle pickpockets and unemployed vagabonds of Paris, so that by this time it had reached most respectable proportions.

First came Egypt, the Duke of the Gipsies at the head, on horseback, with his counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrups and followed by the whole gipsy tribe, men and women, pell-mell, their children screeching on their shoulders, and all of them, duke, counts, and rabble, in rags and tinsel. Then came the Kingdom of Argot, otherwise all the vagabonds in France, marshalled in order of their various ranks, the lowest being first. Thus they marched, four abreast, bearing the divers insignia of their degrees in that strange faculty, most of them maimed in one way or another, some halt, some minus a hand—the courtauds de boutanche (shoplifters), the coquillarts (pilgrims), the hubins (house-breakers), the sabouleux (sham epileptics), the calots (dotards), the francs-mitoux (“schnorrers”), the polissons (street rowdies), the piétres (sham cripples), the capons (card-sharpers), the malingreux (infirm), the marcandiers (hawkers), the narquois (thimble-riggers), the orphelines (pickpockets), the archisuppôts (arch-thieves), and the cagoux (master-thieves)—a list long enough to have wearied Homer himself. It was not without difficulty that in the middle of a conclave of cagoux and archisuppôts one discovered the King of Argot, the Grand Coësre, huddled up in a little cart drawn by two great dogs. The Kingdom of Argot was followed by the Empire of Galilee, led by Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, walking majestically in a purple, wine-stained robe, preceded by mummers performing sham-fights and war-dances, and surrounded by his mace-bearers, his satellites, and his clerks of the exchequer. Last of all came the members of the Basoche with their garlanded may-poles, their black robes, their music worthy of a witches’ Sabbath, and their great yellow wax candles. In the centre of this crowd the great officers of the Confraternity of Fools bore on their shoulders a sort of litter more loaded with candles than the shrine of Sainte-Geneviéve