ce, "suppose we begin again."

"What?" said his neighbor.

"He! the Mystery," said Gringoire.

"As you like," returned his neighbor.

This semi-approbation sufficed for Gringoire, and, conducting his own
affairs, he began to shout, confounding himself with the crowd as much
as possible: "Begin the mystery again! begin again!"

"The devil!" said Joannes de Molendino, "what are they jabbering down
yonder, at the end of the hall?" (for Gringoire was making noise enough
for four.) "Say, comrades, isn't that mystery finished? They want to
begin it all over again. That's not fair!"

"No, no!" shouted all the scholars. "Down with the mystery! Down with
it!"

But Gringoire had multiplied himself, and only shouted the more
vigorously: "Begin again! begin again!"

These clamors attracted the attention of the cardinal.

"Monsieur Bailiff of the Courts," said he to a tall, black man, placed a
few paces from him, "are those knaves in a holy-water vessel, that they
make such a hellish noise?"

The bailiff of the courts was a sort of amphibious magistrate, a sort
of bat of the judicial order, related to both the rat and the bird, the
judge and the soldier.

He approached his eminence, and not without a good deal of fear of
the latter's displeasure, he awkwardly explained to him the seeming
disrespect of the audience: that noonday had arrived before his
eminence, and that the comedians had been forced to begin without
waiting for his eminence.

The cardinal burst into a laugh.

"On my faith, the rector of the university ought to have done the same.
What say you, Master Guillaume Rym?"

"Monseigneur," replied Guillaume Rym, "let us be content with having
escaped half of the comedy. There is at least that much gained."

"Can these rascals continue their farce?" asked the bailiff.

"Continue, continue," said the cardinal, "it's all the same to me. I'll
read my breviary in the meantime."

The bailiff advanced to the edge of the estrade, and cried, after having
invoked silence by a wave of the hand,--

"Bourgeois, rustics, and citizens, in order to satisfy those who wish
the play to begin again, and those who wish it to end, his eminence
orders that it be continued."

Both parties were forced to resign themselves. But the public and the
author long cherished a grudge against the cardinal.

So the personages on the stage took up their parts, and Gringoire hoped
that the rest of his work, at least, would be listened