the court of miracles

from The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Gringoire, frightened and still pursued by his three persecutors, not knowing well what was going to happen, walked on among the others. He bumped into lepers, stumbled over the paralytics, his feet entangled in that anthill of cripples, like the English captain who found himself beleaguered by a legion of crabs.

The idea occurred to him to try to go back. But it was too late. This whole legion had closed in behind him, and the three beggars were all clutching at him. He went on, therefore, urged simultaneously by that irresistible flood, by fear, and by a dizziness which made it all seem like some kind of a horrible dream.

At last he reached the end of the street. It opened on an immense square where a thousand scattered lights flickered in the thick fog of the night. Gringoire ran into this mist, hoping to escape by his own speed these three diseased specters who had leeched on to him.

"Onde vas, hombre!" cried the cripple, throwing aside his crutches, and running after him with as good a pair of legs as ever measured a geometrical pace upon the pavements of Paris.

Meanwhile the paralytic, standing erect upon his really good feet, bonneted Gringoire with his heavy iron-sheathed bowl, and the blind man stared at him with his large flaming eyes.

"Where am I?" said the terrified poet.

 "In the Court of Miracles," answered a fourth specter who had joined them.

"O my soul," rejoined Gringoire, "I see the blind who look and the crippled who run; but where is the Saviour?"

They all answered with a burst of demonic laughter.

The poor poet looked around him. Indeed, he was in that terrible Court of Miracles, which no honest man had ever penetrated at such an hour; a magic circle where the officers of the Chatelet and the sergeants of the provosty who ventured there disappeared like crumbs; the city of thieves, a hideous wart on the face of Paris; a sewer from which there escaped every morning, and to which there returned every night to stagnate that stream of vice, poverty, and vagrancy that ever flows through the streets of capitals; a monstrous hive, to which there came every night all the bees of society with their evil spoils; a sham hospital, where the gypsy, the unfrocked monk, the discredited scholar, the good-for-nothings of every nation--Spaniards, Italians, Germans--of every religion--Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, idolaters--covered with painted sores, beggars in the daytime, transformed themselves at night into robbers; in short, an immense dressing room, where dressed and undressed that time all the actors of this eternal comedy which robbery, prostitution, and murder enact on the pavements of Paris.

It was a vast square, irregular in shape and badly paved, as all the squares of Paris were then. Fires, around which as all the squares of Paris were then. Fires, around which swarmed strange groups, were blazing here and there. All was commotion, confusion, and shouting. One heard shrieks of laughter, the wailing of children, and the high-pitched voices of women. the hands and heads of this crowd, silhouetted against a luminous background, made a thousand fantastic gestures. Now and then, on the ground, where the light of the fires danced, mixed with large undefined shadows, passed a dog resembling a man, or a man resembling a dog. Racial characteristics seemed to be effaced in this city as in a pandemonium. Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health, sickness--everything seemed to be in common among these people; everything went together, mingled, confused, super-imposed; each one took part in everything.

The faint and flickering light of the fires enabled Gringoire to distinguish, in spite of his predicament, all around this immense square, a hideous frame of old houses whose decayed, worm-eaten, and stooping fronts, each pierced by one or two lighted windows, seemed to him, in the dark, like enormous old women's heads, ranged in a circle, monstrous and crabbed, and winking upon the diabolical witchery. 

It was to him a new world, incomprehensible, deformed, creeping, crawling, fantastic.  

 Gringoire, growing more and more frightened, held by the three beggars as if by three vises, deafened by a crowd of other faces that bleated and barked around him--the unfortunate Gringoire tried to regain his presence of mind and to recollect whether this was Saturday or not. But his efforts were vain; the thread of his memory and his thoughts was broken, and doubting everything--floating between what he saw and what he felt--he asked himself this insoluble question: "If I exist, can this be? If this be so, do I exist?"