Page:Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (tr. Shoberl, 1833).djvu/27

 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. 5

It is, indeed, possible that the accomplices of Ravaillac had no hand in the fire of 16'18. There are two other plausible ways of accounting for it ; first, the great " star of fire, a foot broad, and a foot and a half high," which fell, as every body knows, from the sky upon the Palace on the 7th of March, after midnight ; secondly, this stanza of Theophile: --

Certes ce fut un triste jeu, Quand à Paris dame Justice, Pour avoir mangé trop d'épice, Se mil tout le palais en feu. Whatever may be thought of this threefold explanation, political, physical, and poetical, of the burning of the Palace of Justice in 1618, the fact of the fire is unfor-tunately most certain. Owing to this catastrophe, and, above all, to the successive restorations which have swept away what it spared, very little is now left of this elder Palace of the Louvre, already so ancient in the time of Philip the Fair, that the traces of the magnificent build- ings erected by King Robert, and described by Hegaldus, had then to be sought for. What has become of the Chancery Chamber, where St. Louis consummated his marriage? the garden where he administered justice, habited in a camlet coat, a surcoat of linsey-woolsey without sleeves, and a mantle over all, of black serge, reclining upon carpets with Joinville? Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismond? -- that of Charles IV.? -- that of John Lackland? Where is the flight of steps from which Charles VI. promulgated his edict of amnesty? -- the slab whereon Marcel murdered, in the presence of the dauphin, Robert de Clermont and the Marechal de Cham- pagne? -- the wicket where the bulls of the anti-pope Benedict were torn in pieces, and whence those who had brought them were taken, coped and mitred in derision, and carried in procession through all Paris ? the great hall, with its gilding, its azure, its pointed arches, its statues, its pillars, its immense vaulted roof, cut and carved all over? -- and the gilded chamber? -- and the stone lion at the gate, kneeling, with head couched and tail between his legs, like the lions of King Solomon's throne, in the B 3