A street opened before him; he thought it so dark and deserted that he hoped to there escape from all the rumors as well as from all the gleams of the festival.

At the end of a few moments his foot came in contact with an obstacle; he stumbled and fell.

It was the May truss, which the clerks of the clerks' law court had deposited that morning at the door of a president of the parliament, in honor of the solemnity of the day.
Gringoire bore this new disaster heroically; he picked himself up, and reached the water's edge.

After leaving behind him the civic Tournelle* and the criminal tower, and skirted the great walls of the king's garden, on that unpaved strand where the mud reached to his ankles, he reached the western point of the city, and considered for some time the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches, which has disappeared beneath the bronze horse of the Pont Neuf.

The islet appeared to him in the shadow like a black mass, beyond the narrow strip of whitish water which separated him from it.