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Gringoire set out to follow the gypsy at all hazards He had seen her, accooat, take to the Rue de la Coutellerie; he took the Rue de la Coutellerie
"Why not?" he said to hioire, a practical philosopher of the streets of Paris, had noticed that nothing isa pretty wo There was in this voluntary abdication of his freewill, in this fancy sub itself to another fancy, which suspects it not, a mixture of fantastic independence and blind obedience, so indescribable, interoire,--a spirit essentially co the extremities of all extremes, incessantly suspended between all hu one by the other He was fond of co himself to Mahomet's coffin, attracted in two different directions by two loadstones, and hesitating eternally between the heights and the depths, between the vault and the pavement, between fall and ascent, between zenith and nadir
If Gringoire had lived in our day, what a fine middle course he would hold between classicism and romanticism!
But he was not sufficiently primitive to live three hundred years, and 'tis a pity His absence is a void which is but too sensibly felt to-day
Moreover, for the purpose of thus following passers-by (and especially feoire was fond of doing, there is no better disposition than ignorance of where one is going to sleep
So he walked along, very thoughtfully, behind the young girl, who hastened her pace andhome and the taverns--the only shops which had been open that day--closing
"After all," he half thought to hiypsies have kindly hearts Who knows?--"
And in the points of suspense which he placed after this reticence in hisideas
Meanwhile, froeois closing their doors, he caught some scraps of their conversation, which broke the thread of his pleasant hypotheses
Noo oldeach other
"Do you know that it is cold, Master Thibaut Fernicle?" (Gringoire had been aware of this since the beginning of the winter) "Yes, indeed, Master Boniface Diso to have a winter such as we had three years ago, in '80, ood cost eight sous the , Master Thibaut, compared with the winter of 1407, when it froze from St Martin's Day until Candleistrar of the parliament froze every three words, in the Grand Chaistration of justice"