taken her under his safeguard,
reckoning, perchance, on selling her to some gay abbe; all his tribe,
who hold her in singular veneration, like a Notre-Dame; and a certain
tiny poignard, which the buxom dame always wears about her, in some
nook, in spite of the ordinances of the provost, and which one causes to
fly out into her hands by squeezing her waist. 'Tis a proud wasp, I can
tell you!"

The archdeacon pressed Gringoire with questions.

La Esmeralda, in the judgment of Gringoire, was an inoffensive and
charming creature, pretty, with the exception of a pout which was
peculiar to her; a naive and passionate damsel, ignorant of everything
and enthusiastic about everything; not yet aware of the difference
between a man and a woman, even in her dreams; made like that; wild
especially over dancing, noise, the open air; a sort of woman bee, with
invisible wings on her feet, and living in a whirlwind. She owed this
nature to the wandering life which she had always led. Gringoire had
succeeded in learning that, while a mere child, she had traversed Spain
and Catalonia, even to Sicily; he believed that she had even been taken
by the caravan of Zingari, of which she formed a part, to the kingdom
of Algiers, a country situated in Achaia, which country adjoins, on one
side Albania and Greece; on the other, the Sicilian Sea, which is the
road to Constantinople. The Bohemians, said Gringoire, were vassals of
the King of Algiers, in his quality of chief of the White Moors. One
thing is certain, that la Esmeralda had come to France while still very
young, by way of Hungary. From all these countries the young girl had
brought back fragments of queer jargons, songs, and strange ideas, which
made her language as motley as her costume, half Parisian, half African.
However, the people of the quarters which she frequented loved her for
her gayety, her daintiness, her lively manners, her dances, and her
songs. She believed herself to be hated, in all the city, by but two
persons, of whom she often spoke in terror: the sacked nun of the
Tour-Roland, a villanous recluse who cherished some secret grudge
against these gypsies, and who cursed the poor dancer every time that
the latter passed before her window; and a priest, who never met her
without casting at her looks and words which frightened her.

The mention of this last circumstance disturbed the archdeacon greatly,
though Gringoire paid no attention to his perturbation; to such an