This was a formidable harangue.

“Well said, by my soul!” cried the Emperor of Galilee, smashing his wine pot to prop up his table. “Clopin Trouillefou preaches like a Holy Pope!”

“Messeigneurs the Emperors and the Kings,” said Gringoire coolly (for somehow or other his courage had returned to him and he spoke resolutely), “you fail to understand. My name is Pierre Gringoire. I am a poet, the author of a Morality which was performed this morning in the great Hall of the Palais.”

“Ah! ’tis thou, Maître, is it?” answered Clopin. “I was there myself, par la tête de Dieu! Well, comrade, is it any reason because thou weariedst us to death this morning that thou shouldst not be hanged to- night?”

“I shall not get out of this so easily,” thought Gringoire. However, he had a try for it. “I see no reason why the poets should not come under the head of vagabonds,” he said. “As to thieves, Mercurius was one—”

Here Clopin interrupted him: “Thou wastest time with thy patter. Pardieu, man, be hanged quietly and without more ado!”

“Pardon me, Monsieur the King of Tunis,” returned Gringoire, disputing the ground inch by inch; “it is well worth your trouble—one moment—hear me—you will not condemn me without a hearing—”

In truth, his luckless voice was drowned by the hubbub around him. The child was scraping his kettle with greater vigour than ever, and, as a climax, an old woman had just placed on the hot trivet a pan of fat, which made as much noise, spitting and fizzling over the fire, as a yelling troop of children running after a mask at Carnival time.

Meanwhile, Clopin Trouillefou, after conferring a moment with his brothers of Egypt and of Galilee, the latter of whom was quite drunk, cried sharply, “Silence!” As neither the frying-pan nor the kettle paid any attention, but continued their duet, he jumped down from his barrel, gave one kick to the kettle, which sent it rolling ten paces from the child, and another to the frying-pan, upsetting all the fat into the fire; then he solemnly remounted his throne, heedless of the smothered cries of the child or the grumbling of the old woman, whose supper was vanishing in beautiful white flames.

At a sign from Trouillefou, the duke, the emperor, the archisuppôts, and the cagoux came and ranged themselves round him in a horse-shoe, of which Gringoire, upon whom they still kept a tight hold, occupied the centre. It was a semicircle of rags and tatters, of pitchforks and hatchets, of reeling legs and great bare arms, of sordid, haggard, and sottish faces. In the midst of this Round Table of the riffraff, Clopin Trouillefou, as Doge of this Senate, as head of this Peerage, as Pope of this Conclave, dominated the heterogeneous mass; in the first place by the whole height of his barrel, and then by virtue of a lofty, fierce, and formidable air which made his eye flash and rectified in his savage countenance the bestial type of the vagabond race. He was like a wild boar among swine.

“Look you,” said he to Gringoire, stroking his unsightly chin with his horny hand. “I see no reason why you should not be hanged. To be sure, the prospect does not seem to please you; but that is simply because you townsfolk are not used to it—you make such a tremendous business of it. After all, we mean you no harm. But here’s one way of getting out of it for the moment. Will you be one of us?”

One may imagine the effect of this suggestion on Gringoire, who saw life slipping from his grasp, and had already begun to loosen his hold on it. He clutched it again with all his might.

“That will I most readily,” he replied.