nd the stem of the island of Notre-Dame, which we call
to-day the Isle St. Louis.

"By the way, master!" continued Gringoire suddenly. "At the moment
when we arrived on the Parvis, through the enraged outcasts, did your
reverence observe that poor little devil whose skull your deaf man was
just cracking on the railing of the gallery of the kings? I am near
sighted and I could not recognize him. Do you know who he could be?"

The stranger answered not a word. But he suddenly ceased rowing,
his arms fell as though broken, his head sank on his breast, and la
Esmeralda heard him sigh convulsively. She shuddered. She had heard such
sighs before.

The boat, abandoned to itself, floated for several minutes with the
stream. But the man in black finally recovered himself, seized the oars
once more and began to row against the current. He doubled the point of
the Isle of Notre Dame, and made for the landing-place of the Port an
Foin.

"Ah!" said Gringoire, "yonder is the Barbeau mansion.--Stay, master,
look: that group of black roofs which make such singular angles yonder,
above that heap of black, fibrous grimy, dirty clouds, where the moon is
completely crushed and spread out like the yolk of an egg whose shell
is broken.--'Tis a fine mansion. There is a chapel crowned with a small
vault full of very well carved enrichments. Above, you can see the bell
tower, very delicately pierced. There is also a pleasant garden, which
consists of a pond, an aviary, an echo, a mall, a labyrinth, a house
for wild beasts, and a quantity of leafy alleys very agreeable to Venus.
There is also a rascal of a tree which is called 'the lewd,' because it
favored the pleasures of a famous princess and a constable of France,
who was a gallant and a wit.--Alas! we poor philosophers are to a
constable as a plot of cabbages or a radish bed to the garden of the
Louvre. What matters it, after all? human life, for the great as well
as for us, is a mixture of good and evil. Pain is always by the side
of joy, the spondee by the dactyl.--Master, I must relate to you the
history of the Barbeau mansion. It ends in tragic fashion. It was in
1319, in the reign of Philippe V., the longest reign of the kings of
France. The moral of the story is that the temptations of the flesh are
pernicious and malignant. Let us not rest our glance too long on our
neighbor's wife, however gratified our senses may be by her beauty.
Fornication is a very libertine thought. Adulte