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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IIL THE CARDINAL. FOR Gringoire! The noise of all the big cannon crackers fired on St. John's day, the discharge of twenty crooked arquebuses, the report of that famous serpentine of the Tower of Bill... More

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IIL THE CARDINAL. FOR Gringoire! The noise of all the big cannon crackers fired on St. John's day, the discharge of twenty crooked arquebuses, the report of that famous serpentine of the Tower of Billy, which, during the siege of Paris, on Sunday, Sept. 29,1465, killed seven Burgundians at one shot, the explosion of all the gunpowder stored at the Temple Gate, would have rent his ears less rudely, at that solemn and dramatic moment, than did those few words dropping from the mouth of an usher: " His Eminence, Cardinal Bourbon!" Not that Pierre Gringoire feared the Cardinal or scorned him; he was neither so weak nor so conceited. A genuine eclectic, as he would be called nowadays, Gringoire was one of those firm and lofty, calm and temperate souls, who always contrive to choose a happy medium (stare in dimidio rerum), and who are full of sense and liberal philosophy, although they have a high regard for cardinals. Precious and perpetual race of philosophers, to whom, as to another Ariadne, wisdom seems to have given a guiding clew which they have gone on unwinding from the beginning of the world, as they journeyed through the labyrinth of human things! They are to be found in every age, ever the same; that is, always in harmony with the age. And, to say nothing of our Pierre Gringoire, who would represent them in the fifteenth century if we could succeed in portraying him as he deserves, it is assuredlytheir spirit which animated Father du Breuil in the sixteenth, when he wrote these simple and sublime words, worthy of all the ages: " I am a Parisian in nationality and a Parrhisian in speech; Parrhisia being a Greek word signifying ' freedom of speech ;' the which I have used even towards the cardinals, uncle and brother to the Prince of Conty; always with due resp...

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