something indescribable, intermediate between slavery
and liberty, which pleased Gringoire,--a spirit essentially compound,
undecided, and complex, holding the extremities of all extremes,
incessantly suspended between all human propensities, and neutralizing
one by the other. He was fond of comparing himself to Mahomet's coffin,
attracted in two different directions by two loadstones, and hesitating
eternally between the heights and the depths, between the vault and the
pavement, between fall and ascent, between zenith and nadir.

If Gringoire had lived in our day, what a fine middle course he would
hold between classicism and romanticism!

But he was not sufficiently primitive to live three hundred years,
and 'tis a pity. His absence is a void which is but too sensibly felt
to-day.

Moreover, for the purpose of thus following passers-by (and especially
female passers-by) in the streets, which Gringoire was fond of doing,
there is no better disposition than ignorance of where one is going to
sleep.

So he walked along, very thoughtfully, behind the young girl, who
hastened her pace and made her goat trot as she saw the bourgeois
returning home and the taverns--the only shops which had been open that
day--closing.

"After all," he half thought to himself, "she must lodge somewhere;
gypsies have kindly hearts. Who knows?--"

And in the points of suspense which he placed after this reticence in
his mind, there lay I know not what flattering ideas.

Meanwhile, from time to time, as he passed the last groups of bourgeois
closing their doors, he caught some scraps of their conversation, which
broke the thread of his pleasant hypotheses.

Now it was two old men accosting each other.

"Do you know that it is cold, Master Thibaut Fernicle?" (Gringoire had
been aware of this since the beginning of the winter.)

"Yes, indeed, Master Boniface Disome! Are we going to have a winter
such as we had three years ago, in '80, when wood cost eight sous the
measure?"

"Bah! that's nothing, Master Thibaut, compared with the winter of 1407,
when it froze from St. Martin's Day until Candlemas! and so cold that
the pen of the registrar of the parliament froze every three words, in
the Grand Chamber! which interrupted the registration of justice."

Further on there were two female neighbors at their windows, holding
candles, which the fog caused to sputter.

"Has your husband told you about the mishap, Mademoiselle la Boudraque