ill take me this knave to the pillory of the
Greve, you will flog him, and turn him for an hour. He shall pay me for
it, _tete Dieu_! And I order that the present judgment shall be cried,
with the assistance of four sworn trumpeters, in the seven castellanies
of the viscomty of Paris."

The clerk set to work incontinently to draw up the account of the
sentence.

"_Ventre Dieu_! 'tis well adjudged!" cried the little scholar, Jehan
Frollo du Moulin, from his corner.

The provost turned and fixed his flashing eyes once more on Quasimodo.
"I believe the knave said '_Ventre Dieu_' Clerk, add twelve deniers
Parisian for the oath, and let the vestry of Saint Eustache have the
half of it; I have a particular devotion for Saint Eustache."

In a few minutes the sentence was drawn up. Its tenor was simple and
brief. The customs of the provostship and the viscomty had not yet
been worked over by President Thibaut Baillet, and by Roger Barmne, the
king's advocate; they had not been obstructed, at that time, by that
lofty hedge of quibbles and procedures, which the two jurisconsults
planted there at the beginning of the sixteenth century. All was clear,
expeditious, explicit. One went straight to the point then, and at the
end of every path there was immediately visible, without thickets and
without turnings; the wheel, the gibbet, or the pillory. One at least
knew whither one was going.

The clerk presented the sentence to the provost, who affixed his seal to
it, and departed to pursue his round of the audience hall, in a frame
of mind which seemed destined to fill all the jails in Paris that day.
Jehan Frollo and Robin Poussepain laughed in their sleeves. Quasimodo
gazed on the whole with an indifferent and astonished air.

However, at the moment when Master Florian Barbedienne was reading the
sentence in his turn, before signing it, the clerk felt himself moved
with pity for the poor wretch of a prisoner, and, in the hope of
obtaining some mitigation of the penalty, he approached as near the
auditor's ear as possible, and said, pointing to Quasimodo, "That man is
deaf."

He hoped that this community of infirmity would awaken Master Florian's
interest in behalf of the condemned man. But, in the first place, we
have already observed that Master Florian did not care to have his
deafness noticed. In the next place, he was so hard of hearing That he
did not catch a single word of what the clerk said to him; nevertheless,
he wi