th cloth of gold, into which enter in
procession, through a small, arched door, grave personages, announced
successively by the shrill voice of an usher. On the front benches were
already a number of venerable figures, muffled in ermine, velvet, and
scarlet. Around the dais--which remains silent and dignified--below,
opposite, everywhere, a great crowd and a great murmur. Thousands of
glances directed by the people on each face upon the dais, a thousand
whispers over each name. Certainly, the spectacle is curious, and well
deserves the attention of the spectators. But yonder, quite at the end,
what is that sort of trestle work with four motley puppets upon it, and
more below? Who is that man beside the trestle, with a black doublet
and a pale face? Alas! my dear reader, it is Pierre Gringoire and his
prologue.

We have all forgotten him completely.

This is precisely what he feared.

From the moment of the cardinal's entrance, Gringoire had never ceased
to tremble for the safety of his prologue. At first he had enjoined the
actors, who had stopped in suspense, to continue, and to raise their
voices; then, perceiving that no one was listening, he had stopped them;
and, during the entire quarter of an hour that the interruption lasted,
he had not ceased to stamp, to flounce about, to appeal to Gisquette and
Lienarde, and to urge his neighbors to the continuance of the prologue;
all in vain. No one quitted the cardinal, the embassy, and the
gallery--sole centre of this vast circle of visual rays. We must also
believe, and we say it with regret, that the prologue had begun slightly
to weary the audience at the moment when his eminence had arrived, and
created a diversion in so terrible a fashion. After all, on the gallery
as well as on the marble table, the spectacle was the same: the conflict
of Labor and Clergy, of Nobility and Merchandise. And many people
preferred to see them alive, breathing, moving, elbowing each other in
flesh and blood, in this Flemish embassy, in this Episcopal court, under
the cardinal's robe, under Coppenole's jerkin, than painted, decked
out, talking in verse, and, so to speak, stuffed beneath the yellow amid
white tunics in which Gringoire had so ridiculously clothed them.

Nevertheless, when our poet beheld quiet reestablished to some extent,
he devised a stratagem which might have redeemed all.

"Monsieur," he said, turning towards one of his neighbors, a fine, big
man, with a patient fa