"Vagabond, Aesopus certainly was; Homerus was a beggar; Mercurius was a thief--" Clopin interrupted him: "I believe that you are trying to blarney us with your jargon.

Zounds! let yourself be hung, and don't kick up such a row over it!" "Pardon me, monseigneur, the King of Thunes," replied Gringoire, disputing the ground foot by foot.

"It is worth trouble--One moment!--Listen to me--You are not going to condemn me without having heard me"-- His unlucky voice was, in fact, drowned in the uproar which rose around him.

The little boy scraped away at his cauldron with more spirit than ever; and, to crown all, an old woman had just placed on the tripod a frying-pan of grease, which hissed away on the fire with a noise similar to the cry of a troop of children in pursuit of a masker.
In the meantime, Clopin Trouillefou appeared to hold a momentary conference with the Duke of Egypt, and the Emperor of Galilee, who was completely drunk.

Then he shouted shrilly: "Silence!" and, as the cauldron and the frying-pan did not heed him, and continued their duet, he jumped down from his hogshead, gave a kick to the boiler, which rolled ten paces away bearing the child with it, a kick to the frying-pan, which upset in the fire with all its grease, and gravely remounted his throne, without troubling himself about the stifled tears of the child, or the grumbling of the old woman, whose supper was wasting away in a fine white flame.
Trouillefou made a sign, and the duke, the emperor, and the passed masters of pickpockets, and the isolated robbers, came and ranged themselves around him in a horseshoe, of which Gringoire, still roughly held by the body, formed the centre.