hey might serve as glasses
for your lantern! Thanks, ferryman, your cabin rests my eyes, and makes
me forget Paris!"

He was roused from his almost lyric ecstacy, by a big double Saint-Jean
cracker, which suddenly went off from the happy cabin. It was the cow
ferryman, who was taking his part in the rejoicings of the day, and
letting off fireworks.

This cracker made Gringoire's skin bristle up all over.

"Accursed festival!" he exclaimed, "wilt thou pursue me everywhere? Oh!
good God! even to the ferryman's!"

Then he looked at the Seine at his feet, and a horrible temptation took
possession of him:

"Oh!" said he, "I would gladly drown myself, were the water not so
cold!"

Then a desperate resolution occurred to him. It was, since he could not
escape from the Pope of the Fools, from Jehan Fourbault's bannerets,
from May trusses, from squibs and crackers, to go to the Place de Greve.

"At least," he said to himself, "I shall there have a firebrand of joy
wherewith to warm myself, and I can sup on some crumbs of the three
great armorial bearings of royal sugar which have been erected on the
public refreshment-stall of the city."

CHAPTER II. THE PLACE DE GREVE.

There remains to-day but a very imperceptible vestige of the Place
de Greve, such as it existed then; it consists in the charming little
turret, which occupies the angle north of the Place, and which, already
enshrouded in the ignoble plaster which fills with paste the delicate
lines of its sculpture, would soon have disappeared, perhaps submerged
by that flood of new houses which so rapidly devours all the ancient
facades of Paris.

The persons who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de Greve without
casting a glance of pity and sympathy on that poor turret strangled
between two hovels of the time of Louis XV., can easily reconstruct in
their minds the aggregate of edifices to which it belonged, and find
again entire in it the ancient Gothic place of the fifteenth century.

It was then, as it is to-day, an irregular trapezoid, bordered on one
side by the quay, and on the other three by a series of lofty, narrow,
and gloomy houses. By day, one could admire the variety of its edifices,
all sculptured in stone or wood, and already presenting complete
specimens of the different domestic architectures of the Middle Ages,
running back from the fifteenth to the eleventh century, from the
casement which had begun to dethrone the arch, to the