moments there had arisen from his poet’s head, or perhaps quite simply and prosaically from his empty stomach, a fume, a vapour, so to speak, which, spreading itself between him and the surrounding objects, had permitted him to view them only through the incoherent mist of a nightmare, that distorting twilight of our dreams which exaggerates and misplaces every outline, crowding objects together in disproportionate groups, transforming ordinary things into chimeras and men into monstrous phantoms. By degrees, this hallucination gave place to a less bewildered, less exaggerated state of mind. The real forced itself upon him—struck upon his eyes—struck against his feet —and demolished, piece by piece, the terrifying vision by which at first he had imagined himself surrounded. He now perforce was aware that he was walking not through the Styx, but through the mud; that he was being hustled not by demons, but by thieves; that not his soul, but in simple sooth his life, was in danger (since he was without that invaluable conciliator which interposes so efficaciously between the robber and the honest man—the purse); in short, on examining the orgy more closely and in colder blood, he was obliged to climb down from the witches’ Sabbath to the pot-house.

And, in truth, the Court of Miracles was nothing more nor less than a huge tavern; but a tavern for brigands, as red with blood as ever it was with wine.

The spectacle which presented itself to him when his ragged escort at last brought him to the goal of his march, was not calculated to incline his mind to poetry, even though it were the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the pot-house. Were we not writing of the fifteenth century, we would say that Gringoire had come down from Michael Angelo to Callot.

Round a great fire which burned on a large round flagstone, and glowed on the red-hot legs of a trivet, unoccupied for the moment, some worm-eaten tables were ranged haphazard, without the smallest regard to symmetry or order. On these tables stood a few overflowing tankards of wine or beer, and grouped round them many bacchanalian faces reddened both by the fire and wine. Here was a man, round of belly and jovial of face, noisily embracing a thick-set, brawny trollop of the streets. Here a sham soldier, whistling cheerfully while he unwound the bandages of his false wound, and unstiffened his sound and vigorous knee, strapped up since the morning in yards of ligature. Anon it was a malingreux—a malingerer—preparing with celandine and oxblood his “jambe de Dieu” or sore leg for the morrow. Two tables farther on a coquillart with his complete pilgrim’s suit, cockle-shell on hat, was spelling out and practising the Plaint of Sainte-Reine in its proper sing-song tone and nasal whine. Elsewhere a young hubin was taking a lesson in epilepsy from an old sabouleux, who was teaching him how to foam at the mouth by chewing a piece of soap. Close by, a dropsical man was removing his swelling, while four or five hags at the same table were quarrelling over a child they had stolen that evening. All of which circumstances two centuries later “appeared so diverting to the Court,” says Sauval, “that they furnished pastime to the King, and the opening scene of the royal ballet, entitled ’Night,’ which was divided into four parts and was danced on the stage of the Petit-Bourbon.” “And never,” adds an eye-witness in 1653, “were the sudden metamorphoses of the Cour des Miracles more happily represented. Benserade prepared us for it with some very pleasing verses.”

Loud guffaws of laughter resounded everywhere, and obscene songs. Each one said his say, passed his criticisms, and swore freely without listening to his neighbours’. Wine cups clinked and quarrels arose as the cups met, the smash of broken crockery leading further to the tearing of rags.

A great dog sat on his tail and stared into the fire. A few children mingled in this orgy. The stolen child wept and wailed; another, a bouncing boy of four, was seated with dangling legs on too high a bench, the table reaching just to his chin, and said not a word; a third was engaged in spreading over the table with his fingers the tallow from a guttering candle. Lastly, a very little one was squatting in the mud, and almost lost in a great iron pot, which he scraped out with a tile, drawing sounds from it which would have made Stradivarius swoon.

There was a barrel near the fire, and seated on the barrel a beggar. It was the King upon his throne.