Page:Victor Hugo - Notre Dame de Paris (tr. Haynes, 1902).djvu/47

 NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS BOOK I THE GREAT HALL Precisely three hundred and forty-eight years six months and nineteen days ago * Paris was awakened by the sound of the pealing of all the bells within the triple enclosing walls of the city, the University, and the town.

Yet the 6th of January, 1482, was not a day of which his- tory has preserved the record. There was nothing of peculiar note in the event which set all the bells and the good people of Paris thus in motion from early dawn. It was neither an assault by Picards or Burgundians, nor a holy image carried in procession, nor a riot of the students in the vineyard of Laas, nor the entry into the city of " our most dread Lord the King," nor even a fine stringing up of thieves, male and female, at the Justice of Paris. Neither was it the unexpected arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth century, of some foreign ambassador with his beplumed and gold-laced retinue. Scarce two days had elapsed since the last cavalcade of this description, that of the Flemish envoys charged with the mission to conclude the marriage between the Dauphin and Margaret of Flanders, had made its entry into Paris, to the great annoyance of Monsieur the Cardinal of Bourbon, who, to please the King, had been obliged to extend a gracious reception to this boorish company of Flemish burgomasters, and entertain them in his Hotel de Bourbon with a " most pleasant

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 * Notre-Dame de Paris was begun July 30, 1830.