from serenity and heedlessness

from serenity and heedlessness

Gringoire felt the tears start to his eyes.Nevertheless, her song breathed joy, most of all, and she seemed to sing like a bird HKUE DSE.

The gypsy's song had disturbed Gringoire's revery as the swan disturbs the water.He listened in a sort of rapture, and forgetfulness of everything.It was the first moment in the course of many hours when he did not feel that he suffered.

The moment was brief.

The same woman's voice, which had interrupted the gypsy's dance, interrupted her song.

"Will you hold your tongue, you cricket of hell?" it cried, still from the same obscure corner of the place.

The poor "cricket" stopped short.Gringoire covered up his ears.

"Oh!" he exclaimed, "accursed saw with missing teeth, which comes to break the lyre!"

Meanwhile, the other spectators murmured like himself; "To the devil with the sacked nun!" said some of them. And the old invisible kill-joy might have had occasion to repent of her aggressions against the gypsy had their attention not been diverted at this moment by the procession of the pope of the Fools, which, after having traversed many streets and squares, debouched on the place de Grève, with all its torches and all its uproar.

This procession, which our readers have seen set out from the palais de Justice, had organized on the way, and had been recruited by all the knaves, idle thieves, and unemployed vagabonds in paris; so that it presented a very respectable aspect when it arrived at the Grève HKUE DSE.

First came Egypt.The Duke of Egypt headed it, on horseback, with his counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrups for him; behind them, the male and female Egyptians, pell-mell, with their little children crying on their shoulders; all--duke, counts, and populace--in rags and tatters.Then came the Kingdom of Argot; that is to say, all the thieves of France, arranged according to the order of their dignity; the minor people walking first.Thus defiled by fours, with the divers insignia of their grades, in that strange faculty, most of them lame, some cripples, others one-armed, shop clerks, pilgrim, ~hubins~, bootblacks, thimble-riggers, street arabs, beggars, the blear-eyed beggars, thieves, the weakly, vagabonds, merchants, sham soldiers, goldsmiths, passed masters of pickpockets, isolated thieves.A catalogue that would weary Homer.In the centre of the conclave of the passed masters of pickpockets, one had some difficulty in distinguishing the King of Argot, the grand co?sre, so called, crouching in a little cart drawn by two big dogs.After the kingdom of the Argotiers, came the Empire of Galilee.Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of the Empire of Galilee, marched majestically in his robe of purple, spotted with wine, preceded by buffoons wrestling and executing military dances; surrounded by his macebearers, his pickpockets and clerks of the chamber of accounts.Last of all came the corporation of law clerks, with its maypoles crowned with flowers, its black robes, its music worthy of the orgy, and its large candles of yellow wax.In the centre of this crowd, the grand officers of the Brotherhood of Fools bore on their shoulders a litter more loaded down with candles than the reliquary of Sainte-Geneviève in time of pest; and on this litter shone resplendent, with crosier, cope, and mitre, the new pope of the Fools, the bellringer of Notre-Dame, Quasimodo the hunchback HKUE DSE.