“I admit, master, that it is better to philosophize and poetize, to blow fire in a furnace or receive it from heaven, than to be balancing cats in the public squares. And when you suddenly addressed me, I felt as stupid as an ass in front of a roasting-pit. But what’s to be done, messire? One must eat to live, and the finest Alexandrine verses are nothing between the teeth as compared with a piece of cheese. Now, I composed for the Lady Margaret of Flanders that famous epithalamium, as you know, and the town has not paid me for it, pretending that it was not good enough; as if for four crowns you could give them a tragedy of Sophocles! Hence, see you, I was near dying of hunger. Happily I am fairly strong in the jaws; so I said to my jaw: ’Perform some feats of strength and equilibrium—feed yourself. Ale te ipsam.’ A band of vagabonds who are become my very good friends, taught me twenty different herculean feats; and now I feed my teeth every night with the bread they have earned in the day. After all, concedo, I concede that it is but a sorry employ of my intellectual faculties, and that man is not made to pass his life in tambourining and carrying chairs in his teeth. But, reverend master, it is not enough to pass one’s life; one must keep it.”

Dom Claude listened in silence. Suddenly his deep-set eye assumed so shrewd and penetrating an expression that Gringoire felt that the innermost recesses of his soul were being explored.

“Very good, Master Pierre; but how is it that you are now in company with this Egyptian dancing girl?”

“Faith!” returned Gringoire, “because she is my wife and I am her husband.”

The priest’s sombre eyes blazed.

“And hast thou done that, villain!” cried he, grasping Gringoire furiously by the arm; “hast thou been so abandoned of God as to lay hand on this girl?”

“By my hope of paradise, reverend sir,” replied Gringoire, trembling in every limb, “I swear to you that I have never touched her, if that be what disturbs you.”

“What then is thy talk of husband and wife?” said the priest.

Gringoire hastened to relate to him as succinctly as possible what the reader already knows: his adventure in the Court of Miracles and his broken-pitcher marriage. The marriage appeared as yet to have had no result whatever, the gipsy girl continuing every night to defraud him of his conjugal rights as on that first one. “ ’Tis mortifying, and that’s the truth,” he concluded; “but it all comes of my having had the ill-luck to espouse a virgin.”

“What do you mean?” asked the Archdeacon, whom the tale gradually tranquillized.

“It is difficult to explain,” returned the poet. “There is superstition in it. My wife, as an old thief among us called the Duke of Egypt has told me, is a foundling—or a lostling, which is the same thing. She wears about her neck an amulet which, they declare, will some day enable her to find her parents again, but which would lose its virtue if the girl lost hers. Whence it follows that we both of us remain perfectly virtuous.”

“Thus, you believe, Maître Pierre,” resumed Claude, whose brow was rapidly clearing, “that this creature has never yet been approached by any man?”

“Why, Dom Claude, how should a man fight against a superstition? She has got that in her head. I hold it to be rare enough to find this nunlike prudery keeping itself so fiercely aloof among all these easily conquered gipsy girls. But she has three things to protect her: the Duke of Egypt, who has taken her under his wing, reckoning, may-be, to sell her later on to some fat abbot or other; her whole tribe, who hold her in singular veneration, like the Blessed Virgin herself; and a certain pretty little dagger, which the jade always carries about with her, despite the provost’s ordinances, and which darts out in her hand when you squeeze her waist. ’Tis a fierce wasp, believe me!”