rs and lackeys scattered
through the mass, who mingled with all this discontent their teasing
remarks, and their malicious suggestions, and pricked the general bad
temper with a pin, so to speak.

Among the rest there was a group of those merry imps, who, after
smashing the glass in a window, had seated themselves hardily on
the entablature, and from that point despatched their gaze and their
railleries both within and without, upon the throng in the hall, and the
throng upon the Place. It was easy to see, from their parodied gestures,
their ringing laughter, the bantering appeals which they exchanged with
their comrades, from one end of the hall to the other, that these
young clerks did not share the weariness and fatigue of the rest of the
spectators, and that they understood very well the art of extracting,
for their own private diversion from that which they had under their
eyes, a spectacle which made them await the other with patience.

"Upon my soul, so it's you, 'Joannes Frollo de Molendino!'" cried one
of them, to a sort of little, light-haired imp, with a well-favored and
malign countenance, clinging to the acanthus leaves of a capital; "you
are well named John of the Mill, for your two arms and your two legs
have the air of four wings fluttering on the breeze. How long have you
been here?"

"By the mercy of the devil," retorted Joannes Frollo, "these four
hours and more; and I hope that they will be reckoned to my credit in
purgatory. I heard the eight singers of the King of Sicily intone the
first verse of seven o'clock mass in the Sainte-Chapelle."

"Fine singers!" replied the other, "with voices even more pointed than
their caps! Before founding a mass for Monsieur Saint John, the king
should have inquired whether Monsieur Saint John likes Latin droned out
in a Provencal accent."

"He did it for the sake of employing those accursed singers of the King
of Sicily!" cried an old woman sharply from among the crowd beneath the
window. "I just put it to you! A thousand _livres parisi_ for a mass!
and out of the tax on sea fish in the markets of Paris, to boot!"

"Peace, old crone," said a tall, grave person, stopping up his nose on
the side towards the fishwife; "a mass had to be founded. Would you wish
the king to fall ill again?"

"Bravely spoken, Sire Gilles Lecornu, master furrier of king's robes!"
cried the little student, clinging to the capital.

A shout of laughter from all the students greeted