isadventure, everything which reminded him of the festival of that day
irritated his wound and made it bleed.

58

He was on the point of turning to the Pont Saint-Michel; children were
running about here and there with fire lances and rockets.

"Pest on firework candles!" said Gringoire; and he fell back on the Pont
au Change. To the house at the head of the bridge there had been affixed
three small banners, representing the king, the dauphin, and Marguerite
of Flanders, and six little pennons on which were portrayed the Duke of
Austria, the Cardinal de Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, and Madame Jeanne de
France, and Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon, and I know not whom else;
all being illuminated with torches. The rabble were admiring.

"Happy painter, Jehan Fourbault!" said Gringoire with a deep sigh;
and he turned his back upon the bannerets and pennons. A street opened
before him; he thought it so dark and deserted that he hoped to there
escape from all the rumors as well as from all the gleams of the
festival. At the end of a few moments his foot came in contact with an
obstacle; he stumbled and fell. It was the May truss, which the clerks
of the clerks' law court had deposited that morning at the door of
a president of the parliament, in honor of the solemnity of the day.
Gringoire bore this new disaster heroically; he picked himself up, and
reached the water's edge. After leaving behind him the civic Tournelle*
and the criminal tower, and skirted the great walls of the king's
garden, on that unpaved strand where the mud reached to his ankles, he
reached the western point of the city, and considered for some time
the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches, which has disappeared beneath the
bronze horse of the Pont Neuf. The islet appeared to him in the shadow
like a black mass, beyond the narrow strip of whitish water which
separated him from it. One could divine by the ray of a tiny light the
sort of hut in the form of a beehive where the ferryman of cows took
refuge at night.

* A chamber of the ancient parliament of Paris.

"Happy ferryman!" thought Gringoire; "you do not dream of glory, and
you do not make marriage songs! What matters it to you, if kings and
Duchesses of Burgundy marry? You know no other daisies (_marguerites_)
than those which your April greensward gives your cows to browse upon;
while I, a poet, am hooted, and shiver, and owe twelve sous, and the
soles of my shoes are so transparent, that t