The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo Read Free Book Online Page B

to burn up the documents, and to burn the Palace of Justice in order to burn the Record Office; consequently, therefore, no fire in 1618. The old Palace would still be standing, with its great hall; I might be able to say to my reader, “Go and look at it,” and we should thus both of us be spared the need,—I of writing, and he of reading, an indifferent description; which proves this novel truth,—that great events have incalculable results.
    True, Ravaillac may very possibly have had no accomplices; or his accomplices, if he chanced to have any, need have had no hand in the fire of 1618. There are two other very plausible explanations: first, the huge “star of fire, a foot broad and a foot and a half high,” which fell, as every one knows, from heaven upon the Palace after midnight on the 7th of March; second, Théophile’s verses:— d
“In Paris sure it was a sorry game
When, fed too fat with fees, the frisky Dame
Justice set all her palace in a flame.”
    Whatever we may think of this triple explanation,—political, physical, and poetical,—of the burning of the Palace of Justice in 1618, one unfortunate fact remains: namely, the fire. Very little is now left, thanks to this catastrophe, and thanks particularly to the various and successive restorations which have finished what it spared,—very little is now left of this first home of the King of France, of this palace, older than the Louvre, so old even in the time of Philip the Fair that in it they sought for traces of the magnificent buildings erected by King Robert and described by Helgaldus. Almost everything is gone. What has become of the chancery office, Saint Louis’ bridal chamber? What of the garden where he administered justice, “clad in a camlet coat, a sleeveless surcoat of linsey-woolsey, and over it a mantle of black serge, reclining upon carpets, with Joinville?” Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismond, that of Charles IV, and that of John Lackland? Where is the staircase from which Charles VI issued his edict of amnesty; the flag-stone upon which Marcel, in the dauphin’s presence, strangled Robert of Clermont and the Marshal of Champagne? The wicket-gate where the bulls of Benedict the antipope were destroyed, and through which departed those who brought them, coped and mitred in mockery, thus doing public penance throughout Paris? And the great hall, with its gilding, its azure, its pointed arches, its statues, its columns, its great vaulted roof thickly covered with carvings, and the golden room, and the stone lion, which stood at the door, his head down, his tail between his legs, like the lions around Solomon’s throne, in the humble attitude that befits strength in the presence of justice, and the beautiful doors, and the gorgeous windows, and the wrought-iron work which discouraged Biscornette, and Du Hancy’s dainty bits of carving? What has time done, what have men done with these marvels? What has been given to us in exchange for all this,—for all this ancient French history, all this Gothic art? The heavy elliptic arches of M. de Brosse, the clumsy architect of the St. Gervais portal,—so much for art; and for history we have the gossipy memories of the big pillar still echoing and re-echoing with the gossip of the Patrus.
    This is not much. Let us go back to the genuine great hall of the genuine old Palace.
    The two ends of this huge parallelogram were occupied, the one by the famous marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick, that there never was seen, as the old Court Rolls express it in a style which would give Gargantua an appetite, “such another slice of marble in the world;” the other by the chapel in which Louis XI had his statue carved kneeling before the Virgin, and into which, wholly indifferent to the fact that he left two vacant spaces in the procession of royal images, he ordered the removal of the figures of Charlemagne and Saint Louis, believing these two saints to be in high favor with