he. "Vagabond, Aesopus certainly
was; Homerus was a beggar; Mercurius was a thief--"

Clopin interrupted him: "I believe that you are trying to blarney us
with your jargon. Zounds! let yourself be hung, and don't kick up such a
row over it!"

"Pardon me, monseigneur, the King of Thunes," replied Gringoire,
disputing the ground foot by foot. "It is worth trouble--One
moment!--Listen to me--You are not going to condemn me without having
heard me"--

His unlucky voice was, in fact, drowned in the uproar which rose around
him. The little boy scraped away at his cauldron with more spirit than
ever; and, to crown all, an old woman had just placed on the tripod a
frying-pan of grease, which hissed away on the fire with a noise similar
to the cry of a troop of children in pursuit of a masker.

In the meantime, Clopin Trouillefou appeared to hold a momentary
conference with the Duke of Egypt, and the Emperor of Galilee, who
was completely drunk. Then he shouted shrilly: "Silence!" and, as the
cauldron and the frying-pan did not heed him, and continued their duet,
he jumped down from his hogshead, gave a kick to the boiler, which
rolled ten paces away bearing the child with it, a kick to the
frying-pan, which upset in the fire with all its grease, and gravely
remounted his throne, without troubling himself about the stifled
tears of the child, or the grumbling of the old woman, whose supper was
wasting away in a fine white flame.

Trouillefou made a sign, and the duke, the emperor, and the passed
masters of pickpockets, and the isolated robbers, came and ranged
themselves around him in a horseshoe, of which Gringoire, still roughly
held by the body, formed the centre. It was a semicircle of rags,
tatters, tinsel, pitchforks, axes, legs staggering with intoxication,
huge, bare arms, faces sordid, dull, and stupid. In the midst of this
Round Table of beggary, Clopin Trouillefou,--as the doge of this senate,
as the king of this peerage, as the pope of this conclave,--dominated;
first by virtue of the height of his hogshead, and next by virtue of
an indescribable, haughty, fierce, and formidable air, which caused his
eyes to flash, and corrected in his savage profile the bestial type of
the race of vagabonds. One would have pronounced him a boar amid a herd
of swine.

"Listen," said he to Gringoire, fondling his misshapen chin with his
horny hand; "I don't see why you should not be hung. It is true that
it appears to be repu