Page:Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (tr. Shoberl, 1833).djvu/24

2 had been obliged to receive this vulgar squad of Flemish burgomasters with a good grace, and to entertain them at his hôtel de Bourbon with a goodly morality, mummery, and farce, while a deluge of rain drenched the magnificent tapestry at his door.

What set in motion all the population of Paris on the 6th of January was the double solemnity, united from time immemorial, of the epiphany and the Festival of Fools. On that day there was to be an exhibition of fireworks in the Place de Grève, a May-tree planted at the chapel of Braque, and a mystery performed at the Palace of Justice. Proclamation had been made to this effect on the preceding day, with sound of trumpet in the public places, by the provost's officers in fair coats of purple camlet, with large white crosses on the breast.

That morning, therefore, all the houses and shops remained shut, and crowds of citizens of both sexes were to be seen wending their way towards one of the three places specified above. Be it, however, observed, to the honour of the taste of the cockneys of Paris, that the majority of this concourse were proceeding towards the fireworks, which were quite seasonable, or to the mystery which was to be represented in the great hall of the palace, well covered in and sheltered, and that the curious agreed to let the poor leafless May shiver all alone beneath a January sky in the cemetery of the chapel of Braque.

All the avenues to the Palace of Justice were particularly thronged, because it was known that the Flemish ambassadors, who had arrived two days before, purposed to attend the representation of the mystery, and the election of the Pope of Fools, which was also to take place in the great hall.

It was no easy matter on that day to get into this great hall, though then reputed to be the largest room in the world. To the spectators at the windows, the palace yard crowded with people had the appearance of a sea, into which five or six streets, like the mouths of so many rivers, disgorged their living streams. The waves of this sea, incessantly swelled by fresh accessions, broke against the angles of the houses, projecting here and there like pro-