in!" murmured Gringoire, "the king here must be a ram."

"To the king! to the king!" repeated all voices.

They dragged him off. Each vied with the other in laying his claws upon
him. But the three beggars did not loose their hold and tore him from
the rest, howling, "He belongs to us!"

The poet's already sickly doublet yielded its last sigh in this
struggle.

While traversing the horrible place, his vertigo vanished. After taking
a few steps, the sentiment of reality returned to him. He began to
become accustomed to the atmosphere of the place. At the first moment
there had arisen from his poet's head, or, simply and prosaically,
from his empty stomach, a mist, a vapor, so to speak, which, spreading
between objects and himself, permitted him to catch a glimpse of them
only in the incoherent fog of nightmare,--in those shadows of dreams
which distort every outline, agglomerating objects into unwieldy groups,
dilating things into chimeras, and men into phantoms. Little by little,
this hallucination was succeeded by a less bewildered and exaggerating
view. Reality made its way to the light around him, struck his eyes,
struck his feet, and demolished, bit by bit, all that frightful poetry
with which he had, at first, believed himself to be surrounded. He was
forced to perceive that he was not walking in the Styx, but in mud, that
he was elbowed not by demons, but by thieves; that it was not his soul
which was in question, but his life (since he lacked that precious
conciliator, which places itself so effectually between the bandit and
the honest man--a purse). In short, on examining the orgy more closely,
and with more coolness, he fell from the witches' sabbath to the
dram-shop.

The Cour des Miracles was, in fact, merely a dram-shop; but a brigand's
dram-shop, reddened quite as much with blood as with wine.

The spectacle which presented itself to his eyes, when his ragged escort
finally deposited him at the end of his trip, was not fitted to bear him
back to poetry, even to the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the
prosaic and brutal reality of the tavern. Were we not in the fifteenth
century, we would say that Gringoire had descended from Michael Angelo
to Callot.

Around a great fire which burned on a large, circular flagstone, the
flames of which had heated red-hot the legs of a tripod, which was
empty for the moment, some wormeaten tables were placed, here and there,
haphazard, no lackey of a geometrica