“And if you were to see the interior of the chapel!” resumed the poet, with his garrulous enthusiasm. “Carvings everywhere.
‘Tis as thickly clustered as the head of a cabbage!
The apse is of a very devout, and so peculiar a fashion that I have never beheld anything like it elsewhere!”
Dom Claude interrupted him,—
“You are happy, then?”
Gringoire replied warmly;—
“On my honor, yes!
First I loved women, then animals.
Now I love stones.
They are quite as amusing as women and animals, and less treacherous.”
The priest laid his hand on his brow.
It was his habitual gesture.
“Really?”
“Stay!” said Gringoire, “one has one’s pleasures!”
He took the arm of the priest, who let him have his way, and made him enter the staircase turret of For-l’Eveque.
“Here is a staircase! every time that I see it I am happy.
It is of the simplest and rarest manner of steps in Paris.
All the steps are bevelled underneath.
Its beauty and simplicity consist in the interspacing of both, being a foot or more wide, which are interlaced, interlocked, fitted together, enchained enchased, interlined one upon another, and bite into each other in a manner that is truly firm and graceful.”
“And you desire nothing?”
“No.”
“And you regret nothing?”
“Neither regret nor desire.
I have arranged my mode of life.”
“What men arrange,” said Claude, “things disarrange.”
“I am a Pyrrhonian philosopher,” replied Gringoire, “and I hold all things in equilibrium.”
“And how do you earn your living?”
“I still make epics and tragedies now and then; but that which brings me in most is the industry with which you are acquainted, master; carrying pyramids of chairs in my teeth.”
“The trade is but a rough one for a philosopher.”
“‘Tis still equilibrium,” said Gringoire.
“When one has an idea, one encounters it in everything.”
“I know that,” replied the archdeacon.
After a silence, the priest resumed,—
“You are, nevertheless, tolerably poor?”
“Poor, yes; unhappy, no.”
At that moment, a trampling of horses was heard, and our two interlocutors beheld defiling at the end of the street, a company of the king’s unattached archers, their lances borne high, an officer at their head. The cavalcade was brilliant, and its march resounded on the pavement.
“How you gaze at that officer!” said Gringoire, to the archdeacon.
“Because I think I recognize him.”
“What do you call him?”
“I think,” said Claude, “that his name is Phoebus de Chateaupers.”
“Phoebus!
A curious name!
There is also a Phoebus, Comte de Foix.
I remember having known a wench who swore only by the name of Phoebus.”
“Come away from here,” said the priest. “I have something to say to you.”
From the moment of that troop’s passing, some agitation had pierced through the archdeacon’s glacial envelope.
He walked on.
Gringoire followed him, being accustomed to obey him, like all who had once approached that man so full of ascendency.
They reached in silence the Rue des Bernardins, which was nearly deserted.
Here Dom Claude paused.