Jacques Coppenole Character Analysis

We should add that Coppenole was of the people, just as the crowd around him was of the people. Thus the contact between him and it had been prompt, electric and, as it were, on level terms. The Flemish hosier’s haughty quip had humiliated the courtiers and aroused, in all these plebian souls, some sense of dignity as yet, in the fifteenth century, dim and uncertain. This hosier who had just answered the cardinal back was an equal: a sweet thought indeed for poor devils used to showing respect and obedience to the servants of the serjeants of the bailiff of the Abbot of Sainte-Genevive, the cardinal’s train-bearer.

There was something about this spectacle which made the head spin, it had some peculiar power to bewitch and intoxicate hard to convey to a reader of our own day and from our own salons. Picture to yourself a succession of faces displaying all the known geometrical shapes one after the other, from triangle to trapezium, from cone to polyhedron; every known human expression, from anger to lust; every age of man, from the wrinkles of the newly born to the wrinkles of the dying crone; a whole religious phantasmagoria, from Faunus to Beelzebub; every kind of animal profile, from jaws to beaks and from muzzles to snouts. It was as if all those mascarons on the Pont-Neuf, nightmares turned to stone by the hand of Germain Pilon, had taken on life and breath and had come, one by one.

We should add that Coppenole was of the people, just as the crowd around him was of the people. Thus the contact between him and it had been prompt, electric and, as it were, on level terms. The Flemish hosier’s haughty quip had humiliated the courtiers and aroused, in all these plebian souls, some sense of dignity as yet, in the fifteenth century, dim and uncertain. This hosier who had just answered the cardinal back was an equal: a sweet thought indeed for poor devils used to showing respect and obedience to the servants of the serjeants of the bailiff of the Abbot of Sainte-Genevive, the cardinal’s train-bearer.

There was something about this spectacle which made the head spin, it had some peculiar power to bewitch and intoxicate hard to convey to a reader of our own day and from our own salons. Picture to yourself a succession of faces displaying all the known geometrical shapes one after the other, from triangle to trapezium, from cone to polyhedron; every known human expression, from anger to lust; every age of man, from the wrinkles of the newly born to the wrinkles of the dying crone; a whole religious phantasmagoria, from Faunus to Beelzebub; every kind of animal profile, from jaws to beaks and from muzzles to snouts. It was as if all those mascarons on the Pont-Neuf, nightmares turned to stone by the hand of Germain Pilon, had taken on life and breath and had come, one by one.