s appearance. In less than an instant,
the chapel was crowded with competitors, upon whom the door was then
closed.

Coppenole, from his post, ordered all, directed all, arranged all.
During the uproar, the cardinal, no less abashed than Gringoire, had
retired with all his suite, under the pretext of business and vespers,
without the crowd which his arrival had so deeply stirred being in the
least moved by his departure. Guillaume Rym was the only one who noticed
his eminence's discomfiture. The attention of the populace, like the
sun, pursued its revolution; having set out from one end of the hall,
and halted for a space in the middle, it had now reached the other end.
The marble table, the brocaded gallery had each had their day; it was
now the turn of the chapel of Louis XI. Henceforth, the field was open
to all folly. There was no one there now, but the Flemings and the
rabble.

The grimaces began. The first face which appeared at the aperture,
with eyelids turned up to the reds, a mouth open like a maw, and a
brow wrinkled like our hussar boots of the Empire, evoked such an
inextinguishable peal of laughter that Homer would have taken all these
louts for gods. Nevertheless, the grand hall was anything but Olympus,
and Gringoire's poor Jupiter knew it better than any one else. A second
and third grimace followed, then another and another; and the laughter
and transports of delight went on increasing. There was in this
spectacle, a peculiar power of intoxication and fascination, of which it
would be difficult to convey to the reader of our day and our salons any
idea.

Let the reader picture to himself a series of visages presenting
successively all geometrical forms, from the triangle to the trapezium,
from the cone to the polyhedron; all human expressions, from wrath
to lewdness; all ages, from the wrinkles of the new-born babe to the
wrinkles of the aged and dying; all religious phantasmagories, from Faun
to Beelzebub; all animal profiles, from the maw to the beak, from the
jowl to the muzzle. Let the reader imagine all these grotesque figures
of the Pont Neuf, those nightmares petrified beneath the hand of Germain
Pilon, assuming life and breath, and coming in turn to stare you in the
face with burning eyes; all the masks of the Carnival of Venice passing
in succession before your glass,--in a word, a human kaleidoscope.

The orgy grew more and more Flemish. Teniers could have given but a very
imperfect idea