"Ah! you are scoffing at the provostship, wretch! Messieurs the sergeants of the mace, you will take me this knave to the pillory of the Grève, 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 viscointy of Paris."
The clerk set to work incontinently to draw up the account of the sentence.
"Venire 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 viscointy 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 till all the jails in Paris that day. Jehan Frollo and Kobin 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
