Book 11 - The Hunchback of Notre Dame Audiobook by Victor Hugo (Chs 1-4)

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BOOK ELEVENTH. CHAPTER I - PART 1.
THE LITTLE SHOE.
La Esmeralda was sleeping at the moment when the outcasts assailed the church.
Soon the ever-increasing uproar around the edifice, and the uneasy bleating of her
goat which had been awakened, had roused her from her slumbers.
She had sat up, she had listened, she had looked; then, terrified by the light and
noise, she had rushed from her cell to see.
The aspect of the Place, the vision which was moving in it, the disorder of that
nocturnal assault, that hideous crowd, leaping like a cloud of frogs, half seen in
the gloom, the croaking of that hoarse
multitude, those few red torches running and crossing each other in the darkness
like the meteors which streak the misty surfaces of marshes, this whole scene
produced upon her the effect of a
mysterious battle between the phantoms of the witches' sabbath and the stone monsters
of the church.
Imbued from her very infancy with the superstitions of the Bohemian tribe, her
first thought was that she had caught the strange beings peculiar to the night, in
their deeds of witchcraft.
Then she ran in terror to cower in her cell, asking of her pallet some less
terrible nightmare.
But little by little the first vapors of terror had been dissipated; from the
constantly increasing noise, and from many other signs of reality, she felt herself
besieged not by spectres, but by human beings.
Then her fear, though it did not increase, changed its character.
She had dreamed of the possibility of a popular mutiny to tear her from her asylum.
The idea of once more recovering life, hope, Phoebus, who was ever present in her
future, the extreme helplessness of her condition, flight cut off, no support, her
abandonment, her isolation,--these thoughts and a thousand others overwhelmed her.
She fell upon her knees, with her head on her bed, her hands clasped over her head,
full of anxiety and tremors, and, although a gypsy, an idolater, and a pagan, she
began to entreat with sobs, mercy from the
good Christian God, and to pray to our Lady, her hostess.
For even if one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one is always of
the religion of the temple which is nearest at hand.
She remained thus prostrate for a very long time, trembling in truth, more than
praying, chilled by the ever-closer breath of that furious multitude, understanding
nothing of this outburst, ignorant of what
was being plotted, what was being done, what they wanted, but foreseeing a terrible
issue. In the midst of this anguish, she heard
some one walking near her.
She turned round. Two men, one of whom carried a lantern, had
just entered her cell. She uttered a feeble cry.
"Fear nothing," said a voice which was not unknown to her, "it is I."
"Who are you?" she asked. "Pierre Gringoire."
This name reassured her.
She raised her eyes once more, and recognized the poet in very fact.
But there stood beside him a black figure veiled from head to foot, which struck her
by its silence.
"Oh!" continued Gringoire in a tone of reproach, "Djali recognized me before you!"
The little goat had not, in fact, waited for Gringoire to announce his name.
No sooner had he entered than it rubbed itself gently against his knees, covering
the poet with caresses and with white hairs, for it was shedding its hair.
Gringoire returned the caresses.
"Who is this with you?" said the gypsy, in a low voice.
"Be at ease," replied Gringoire. "'Tis one of my friends."
Then the philosopher setting his lantern on the ground, crouched upon the stones, and
exclaimed enthusiastically, as he pressed Djali in his arms,--
"Oh! 'tis a graceful beast, more considerable no doubt, for it's neatness
than for its size, but ingenious, subtle, and lettered as a grammarian!
Let us see, my Djali, hast thou forgotten any of thy pretty tricks?
How does Master Jacques Charmolue?..." The man in black did not allow him to
finish.
He approached Gringoire and shook him roughly by the shoulder.
Gringoire rose. "'Tis true," said he: "I forgot that we are
in haste.
But that is no reason master, for getting furious with people in this manner.
My dear and lovely child, your life is in danger, and Djali's also.
They want to hang you again.
We are your friends, and we have come to save you.
Follow us." "Is it true?" she exclaimed in dismay.
"Yes, perfectly true.
Come quickly!" "I am willing," she stammered.
"But why does not your friend speak?"
"Ah!" said Gringoire, "'tis because his father and mother were fantastic people who
made him of a taciturn temperament." She was obliged to content herself with
this explanation.
Gringoire took her by the hand; his companion picked up the lantern and walked
on in front. Fear stunned the young girl.
She allowed herself to be led away.
The goat followed them, frisking, so joyous at seeing Gringoire again that it made him
stumble every moment by thrusting its horns between his legs.
"Such is life," said the philosopher, every time that he came near falling down; "'tis
often our best friends who cause us to be overthrown."
They rapidly descended the staircase of the towers, crossed the church, full of shadows
and solitude, and all reverberating with uproar, which formed a frightful contrast,
and emerged into the courtyard of the cloister by the red door.
The cloister was deserted; the canons had fled to the bishop's palace in order to
pray together; the courtyard was empty, a few frightened lackeys were crouching in
dark corners.
They directed their steps towards the door which opened from this court upon the
Terrain. The man in black opened it with a key which
he had about him.
Our readers are aware that the Terrain was a tongue of land enclosed by walls on the
side of the City and belonging to the chapter of Notre-Dame, which terminated the
island on the east, behind the church.
They found this enclosure perfectly deserted.
There was here less tumult in the air. The roar of the outcasts' assault reached
them more confusedly and less clamorously.
The fresh breeze which follows the current of a stream, rustled the leaves of the only
tree planted on the point of the Terrain, with a noise that was already perceptible.
But they were still very close to danger.
The nearest edifices to them were the bishop's palace and the church.
It was plainly evident that there was great internal commotion in the bishop's palace.
Its shadowy mass was all furrowed with lights which flitted from window to window;
as, when one has just burned paper, there remains a sombre edifice of ashes in which
bright sparks run a thousand eccentric courses.
Beside them, the enormous towers of Notre- Dame, thus viewed from behind, with the
long nave above which they rise cut out in black against the red and vast light which
filled the Parvis, resembled two gigantic andirons of some cyclopean fire-grate.
What was to be seen of Paris on all sides wavered before the eye in a gloom mingled
with light.
Rembrandt has such backgrounds to his pictures.
The man with the lantern walked straight to the point of the Terrain.
There, at the very brink of the water, stood the wormeaten remains of a fence of
posts latticed with laths, whereon a low vine spread out a few thin branches like
the fingers of an outspread hand.
Behind, in the shadow cast by this trellis, a little boat lay concealed.
The man made a sign to Gringoire and his companion to enter.
The goat followed them.
The man was the last to step in.
Then he cut the boat's moorings, pushed it from the shore with a long boat-hook, and,
seizing two oars, seated himself in the bow, rowing with all his might towards
midstream.
The Seine is very rapid at this point, and he had a good deal of trouble in leaving
the point of the island. Gringoire's first care on entering the boat
was to place the goat on his knees.
He took a position in the stern; and the young girl, whom the stranger inspired with
an indefinable uneasiness, seated herself close to the poet.
When our philosopher felt the boat sway, he clapped his hands and kissed Djali between
the horns. "Oh!" said he, "now we are safe, all four
of us."
He added with the air of a profound thinker, "One is indebted sometimes to
fortune, sometimes to ruse, for the happy issue of great enterprises."
The boat made its way slowly towards the right shore.
The young girl watched the unknown man with secret terror.
He had carefully turned off the light of his dark lantern.
A glimpse could be caught of him in the obscurity, in the bow of the boat, like a
spectre.
His cowl, which was still lowered, formed a sort of mask; and every time that he spread
his arms, upon which hung large black sleeves, as he rowed, one would have said
they were two huge bat's wings.
Moreover, he had not yet uttered a word or breathed a syllable.
No other noise was heard in the boat than the splashing of the oars, mingled with the
rippling of the water along her sides.
"On my soul!" exclaimed Gringoire suddenly, "we are as cheerful and joyous as young
owls! We preserve the silence of Pythagoreans or
fishes!
Pasque-Dieu! my friends, I should greatly like to have some one speak to me.
The human voice is music to the human ear. 'Tis not I who say that, but Didymus of
Alexandria, and they are illustrious words.
Assuredly, Didymus of Alexandria is no mediocre philosopher.--One word, my lovely
child! say but one word to me, I entreat you.
By the way, you had a droll and peculiar little pout; do you still make it?
Do you know, my dear, that parliament hath full jurisdiction over all places of
asylum, and that you were running a great risk in your little chamber at Notre-Dame?
Alas! the little bird trochylus maketh its nest in the jaws of the crocodile.--Master,
here is the moon re-appearing. If only they do not perceive us.
We are doing a laudable thing in saving mademoiselle, and yet we should be hung by
order of the king if we were caught. Alas! human actions are taken by two
handles.
That is branded with disgrace in one which is crowned in another.
He admires Cicero who blames Catiline. Is it not so, master?
What say you to this philosophy?
I possess philosophy by instinct, by nature, ut apes geometriam.--Come! no one
answers me. What unpleasant moods you two are in!
I must do all the talking alone.
That is what we call a monologue in tragedy.--Pasque-Dieu!
I must inform you that I have just seen the king, Louis XI., and that I have caught
this oath from him,--Pasque-Dieu!
They are still making a hearty howl in the city.--'Tis a villanous, malicious old
king. He is all swathed in furs.
He still owes me the money for my epithalamium, and he came within a nick of
hanging me this evening, which would have been very inconvenient to me.--He is
niggardly towards men of merit.
He ought to read the four books of Salvien of Cologne, Adversits Avaritiam.
In truth!
'Tis a paltry king in his ways with men of letters, and one who commits very barbarous
cruelties. He is a sponge, to soak money raised from
the people.
His saving is like the spleen which swelleth with the leanness of all the other
members.
Hence complaints against the hardness of the times become murmurs against the
prince.
Under this gentle and pious sire, the gallows crack with the hung, the blocks rot
with blood, the prisons burst like over full bellies.
This king hath one hand which grasps, and one which hangs.
He is the procurator of Dame Tax and Monsieur Gibbet.
The great are despoiled of their dignities, and the little incessantly overwhelmed with
fresh oppressions. He is an exorbitant prince.
I love not this monarch.
And you, master?" The man in black let the garrulous poet
chatter on.
He continued to struggle against the violent and narrow current, which separates
the prow of the City and the stem of the island of Notre-Dame, which we call to-day
the Isle St. Louis.
"By the way, master!" continued Gringoire suddenly.
"At the moment when we arrived on the Parvis, through the enraged outcasts, did
your reverence observe that poor little devil whose skull your deaf man was just
cracking on the railing of the gallery of the kings?
I am near sighted and I could not recognize him.
Do you know who he could be?"
The stranger answered not a word. But he suddenly ceased rowing, his arms
fell as though broken, his head sank on his breast, and la Esmeralda heard him sigh
convulsively.
She shuddered. She had heard such sighs before.
The boat, abandoned to itself, floated for several minutes with the stream.
But the man in black finally recovered himself, seized the oars once more and
began to row against the current.
He doubled the point of the Isle of Notre Dame, and made for the landing-place of the
Port an Foin.
"Ah!" said Gringoire, "yonder is the Barbeau mansion.--Stay, master, look: that
group of black roofs which make such singular angles yonder, above that heap of
black, fibrous grimy, dirty clouds, where
the moon is completely crushed and spread out like the yolk of an egg whose shell is
broken.--'Tis a fine mansion. There is a chapel crowned with a small
vault full of very well carved enrichments.
Above, you can see the bell tower, very delicately pierced.
There is also a pleasant garden, which consists of a pond, an aviary, an echo, a
mall, a labyrinth, a house for wild beasts, and a quantity of leafy alleys very
agreeable to Venus.
There is also a rascal of a tree which is called 'the lewd,' because it favored the
pleasures of a famous princess and a constable of France, who was a gallant and
a wit.--Alas! we poor philosophers are to a
constable as a plot of cabbages or a radish bed to the garden of the Louvre.
What matters it, after all? human life, for the great as well as for us, is a mixture
of good and evil.
Pain is always by the side of joy, the spondee by the dactyl.--Master, I must
relate to you the history of the Barbeau mansion.
It ends in tragic fashion.
It was in 1319, in the reign of Philippe V., the longest reign of the kings of
France.
The moral of the story is that the temptations of the flesh are pernicious and
malignant.
Let us not rest our glance too long on our neighbor's wife, however gratified our
senses may be by her beauty. Fornication is a very libertine thought.
Adultery is a prying into the pleasures of others--Ohe! the noise yonder is
redoubling!" The tumult around Notre-Dame was, in fact,
increasing.
They listened. Cries of victory were heard with tolerable
distinctness.
All at once, a hundred torches, the light of which glittered upon the helmets of men
at arms, spread over the church at all heights, on the towers, on the galleries,
on the flying buttresses.
These torches seemed to be in search of something; and soon distant clamors reached
the fugitives distinctly:--"The gypsy! the sorceress! death to the gypsy!"
The unhappy girl dropped her head upon her hands, and the unknown began to row
furiously towards the shore. Meanwhile our philosopher reflected.
He clasped the goat in his arms, and gently drew away from the gypsy, who pressed
closer and closer to him, as though to the only asylum which remained to her.
It is certain that Gringoire was enduring cruel perplexity.
He was thinking that the goat also, "according to existing law," would be hung
if recaptured; which would be a great pity, poor Djali! that he had thus two condemned
creatures attached to him; that his
companion asked no better than to take charge of the gypsy.
A violent combat began between his thoughts, in which, like the Jupiter of the
Iliad, he weighed in turn the gypsy and the goat; and he looked at them alternately
with eyes moist with tears, saying between his teeth:
"But I cannot save you both!" A shock informed them that the boat had
reached the land at last.
The uproar still filled the city. The unknown rose, approached the gypsy, and
endeavored to take her arm to assist her to alight.
She repulsed him and clung to the sleeve of Gringoire, who, in his turn, absorbed in
the goat, almost repulsed her. Then she sprang alone from the boat.
She was so troubled that she did not know what she did or whither she was going.
Thus she remained for a moment, stunned, watching the water flow past; when she
gradually returned to her senses, she found herself alone on the wharf with the
unknown.
It appears that Gringoire had taken advantage of the moment of debarcation to
slip away with the goat into the block of houses of the Rue Grenier-sur-l'Eau.
The poor gypsy shivered when she beheld herself alone with this man.
She tried to speak, to cry out, to call Gringoire; her tongue was dumb in her
mouth, and no sound left her lips.
All at once she felt the stranger's hand on hers.
It was a strong, cold hand. Her teeth chattered, she turned paler than
the ray of moonlight which illuminated her.
The man spoke not a word. He began to ascend towards the Place de
Greve, holding her by the hand. At that moment, she had a vague feeling
that destiny is an irresistible force.
She had no more resistance left in her, she allowed herself to be dragged along,
running while he walked. At this spot the quay ascended.
But it seemed to her as though she were descending a slope.
She gazed about her on all sides. Not a single passer-by.
The quay was absolutely deserted.
She heard no sound, she felt no people moving save in the tumultuous and glowing
city, from which she was separated only by an arm of the Seine, and whence her name
reached her, mingled with cries of "Death!"
The rest of Paris was spread around her in great blocks of shadows.
Meanwhile, the stranger continued to drag her along with the same silence and the
same rapidity.
She had no recollection of any of the places where she was walking.
As she passed before a lighted window, she made an effort, drew up suddenly, and cried
out, "Help!"
The bourgeois who was standing at the window opened it, appeared there in his
shirt with his lamp, stared at the quay with a stupid air, uttered some words which
she did not understand, and closed his shutter again.
It was her last gleam of hope extinguished.
The man in black did not utter a syllable; he held her firmly, and set out again at a
quicker pace. She no longer resisted, but followed him,
completely broken.
From time to time she called together a little strength, and said, in a voice
broken by the unevenness of the pavement and the breathlessness of their flight,
"Who are you?
Who are you?" He made no reply.
They arrived thus, still keeping along the quay, at a tolerably spacious square.
It was the Greve.
In the middle, a sort of black, erect cross was visible; it was the gallows.
She recognized all this, and saw where she was.
The man halted, turned towards her and raised his cowl.
"Oh!" she stammered, almost petrified, "I knew well that it was he again!"
It was the priest.
He looked like the ghost of himself; that is an effect of the moonlight, it seems as
though one beheld only the spectres of things in that light.
"Listen!" he said to her; and she shuddered at the sound of that fatal voice which she
had not heard for a long time.
He continued speaking with those brief and panting jerks, which betoken deep internal
convulsions. "Listen! we are here.
I am going to speak to you.
This is the Greve. This is an extreme point.
Destiny gives us to one another. I am going to decide as to your life; you
will decide as to my soul.
Here is a place, here is a night beyond which one sees nothing.
Then listen to me. I am going to tell you...In the first
place, speak not to me of your Phoebus.
(As he spoke thus he paced to and fro, like a man who cannot remain in one place, and
dragged her after him.) Do not speak to me of him.
Do you see?
If you utter that name, I know not what I shall do, but it will be terrible."
Then, like a body which recovers its centre of gravity, he became motionless once more,
but his words betrayed no less agitation.
His voice grew lower and lower. "Do not turn your head aside thus.
Listen to me. It is a serious matter.
In the first place, here is what has happened.--All this will not be laughed at.
I swear it to you.--What was I saying? Remind me!
Oh!--There is a decree of Parliament which gives you back to the scaffold.
I have just rescued you from their hands. But they are pursuing you.
Look!"
He extended his arm toward the City. The search seemed, in fact, to be still in
progress there.
The uproar drew nearer; the tower of the lieutenant's house, situated opposite the
Greve, was full of clamors and light, and soldiers could be seen running on the
opposite quay with torches and these cries, "The gypsy!
Where is the gypsy! Death!
Death!"
"You see that they are in pursuit of you, and that I am not lying to you.
I love you.--Do not open your mouth; refrain from speaking to me rather, if it
be only to tell me that you hate me.
I have made up my mind not to hear that again.--I have just saved you.--Let me
finish first. I can save you wholly.
I have prepared everything.
It is yours at will. If you wish, I can do it."
He broke off violently. "No, that is not what I should say!"
As he went with hurried step and made her hurry also, for he did not release her, he
walked straight to the gallows, and pointed to it with his finger,--
"Choose between us two," he said, coldly.
She tore herself from his hands and fell at the foot of the gibbet, embracing that
funereal support, then she half turned her beautiful head, and looked at the priest
over her shoulder.
One would have said that she was a Holy Virgin at the foot of the cross.
The priest remained motionless, his finger still raised toward the gibbet, preserving
his attitude like a statue.
At length the gypsy said to him,-- "It causes me less horror than you do."
Then he allowed his arm to sink slowly, and gazed at the pavement in profound
dejection.
"If these stones could speak," he murmured, "yes, they would say that a very unhappy
man stands here." He went on.
The young girl, kneeling before the gallows, enveloped in her long flowing
hair, let him speak on without interruption.
He now had a gentle and plaintive accent which contrasted sadly with the haughty
harshness of his features. "I love you.
Oh! how true that is!
So nothing comes of that fire which burns my heart!
Alas! young girl, night and day--yes, night and day I tell you,--it is torture.
Oh! I suffer too much, my poor child.
'Tis a thing deserving of compassion, I assure you.
You see that I speak gently to you.
I really wish that you should no longer cherish this horror of me.--After all, if a
man loves a woman, 'tis not his fault!--Oh, my God!--What!
So you will never pardon me?
You will always hate me? All is over then.
It is that which renders me evil, do you see? and horrible to myself.--You will not
even look at me!
You are thinking of something else, perchance, while I stand here and talk to
you, shuddering on the brink of eternity for both of us!
Above all things, do not speak to me of the officer!--I would cast myself at your
knees, I would kiss not your feet, but the earth which is under your feet; I would sob
like a child, I would tear from my breast
not words, but my very heart and vitals, to tell you that I love you;--all would be
useless, all!--And yet you have nothing in your heart but what is tender and merciful.
You are radiant with the most beautiful mildness; you are wholly sweet, good,
pitiful, and charming. Alas!
You cherish no ill will for any one but me alone!
Oh! what a fatality!" He hid his face in his hands.
The young girl heard him weeping.
It was for the first time. Thus erect and shaken by sobs, he was more
miserable and more suppliant than when on his knees.
He wept thus for a considerable time.
"Come!" he said, these first tears passed, "I have no more words.
I had, however, thought well as to what you would say.
Now I tremble and shiver and break down at the decisive moment, I feel conscious of
something supreme enveloping us, and I stammer.
Oh! I shall fall upon the pavement if you do not take pity on me, pity on yourself.
Do not condemn us both. If you only knew how much I love you!
What a heart is mine!
Oh! what desertion of all virtue! What desperate abandonment of myself!
A doctor, I mock at science; a gentleman, I tarnish my own name; a priest, I make of
the missal a pillow of sensuality, I spit in the face of my God! all this for thee,
enchantress! to be more worthy of thy hell!
And you will not have the apostate! Oh! let me tell you all! more still,
something more horrible, oh! Yet more horrible!...."
As he uttered these last words, his air became utterly distracted.
He was silent for a moment, and resumed, as though speaking to himself, and in a strong
voice,--
"Cain, what hast thou done with thy brother?"
There was another silence, and he went on-- "What have I done with him, Lord?
I received him, I reared him, I nourished him, I loved him, I idolized him, and I
have slain him!
Yes, Lord, they have just dashed his head before my eyes on the stone of thine house,
and it is because of me, because of this woman, because of her."
His eye was wild.
His voice grew ever weaker; he repeated many times, yet, mechanically, at tolerably
long intervals, like a bell prolonging its last vibration: "Because of her.--Because
of her."
Then his tongue no longer articulated any perceptible sound; but his lips still
moved.
All at once he sank together, like something crumbling, and lay motionless on
the earth, with his head on his knees.
A touch from the young girl, as she drew her foot from under him, brought him to
himself.
He passed his hand slowly over his hollow cheeks, and gazed for several moments at
his fingers, which were wet, "What!" he murmured, "I have wept!"
And turning suddenly to the gypsy with unspeakable anguish,--
"Alas! you have looked coldly on at my tears!
Child, do you know that those tears are of lava?
Is it indeed true? Nothing touches when it comes from the man
whom one does not love.
If you were to see me die, you would laugh. Oh! I do not wish to see you die!
One word! A single word of pardon!
Say not that you love me, say only that you will do it; that will suffice; I will save
you. If not--oh! the hour is passing.
I entreat you by all that is sacred, do not wait until I shall have turned to stone
again, like that gibbet which also claims you!
Reflect that I hold the destinies of both of us in my hand, that I am mad,--it is
terrible,--that I may let all go to destruction, and that there is beneath us a
bottomless abyss, unhappy girl, whither my fall will follow yours to all eternity!
One word of kindness! Say one word! only one word!"
She opened her mouth to answer him.
He flung himself on his knees to receive with adoration the word, possibly a tender
one, which was on the point of issuing from her lips.
She said to him, "You are an assassin!"
The priest clasped her in his arms with fury, and began to laugh with an abominable
laugh. "Well, yes, an assassin!" he said, "and I
will have you.
You will not have me for your slave, you shall have me for your master.
I will have you! I have a den, whither I will drag you.
You will follow me, you will be obliged to follow me, or I will deliver you up!
You must die, my beauty, or be mine! belong to the priest! belong to the apostate!
belong to the assassin! this very night, do you hear?
Come! joy; kiss me, mad girl!
The tomb or my bed!" His eyes sparkled with impurity and rage.
His lewd lips reddened the young girl's neck.
She struggled in his arms.
He covered her with furious kisses. "Do not bite me, monster!" she cried.
"Oh! the foul, odious monk! leave me! I will tear out thy ugly gray hair and
fling it in thy face by the handful!"
He reddened, turned pale, then released her and gazed at her with a gloomy air.
She thought herself victorious, and continued,--
"I tell you that I belong to my Phoebus, that 'tis Phoebus whom I love, that 'tis
Phoebus who is handsome! you are old, priest! you are ugly!
Begone!"
He gave vent to a horrible cry, like the wretch to whom a hot iron is applied.
"Die, then!" he said, gnashing his teeth. She saw his terrible look and tried to fly.
He caught her once more, he shook her, he flung her on the ground, and walked with
rapid strides towards the corner of the Tour-Roland, dragging her after him along
the pavement by her beautiful hands.
On arriving there, he turned to her,-- "For the last time, will you be mine?"
She replied with emphasis,-- "No!"
Then he cried in a loud voice,--
"Gudule! Gudule! here is the gypsy! take your
vengeance!" The young girl felt herself seized suddenly
by the elbow.
She looked. A fleshless arm was stretched from an
opening in the wall, and held her like a hand of iron.
"Hold her well," said the priest; "'tis the gypsy escaped.
Release her not. I will go in search of the sergeants.
You shall see her hanged."
-BOOK ELEVENTH. CHAPTER I - PART 2.
THE LITTLE SHOE.
A guttural laugh replied from the interior of the wall to these bloody words--"Hah!
hah! hah!"--The gypsy watched the priest retire in the direction of the Pont Notre-
Dame.
A cavalcade was heard in that direction. The young girl had recognized the spiteful
recluse. Panting with terror, she tried to disengage
herself.
She writhed, she made many starts of agony and despair, but the other held her with
incredible strength.
The lean and bony fingers which bruised her, clenched on her flesh and met around
it. One would have said that this hand was
riveted to her arm.
It was more than a chain, more than a fetter, more than a ring of iron, it was a
living pair of pincers endowed with intelligence, which emerged from the wall.
She fell back against the wall exhausted, and then the fear of death took possession
of her.
She thought of the beauty of life, of youth, of the view of heaven, the aspects
of nature, of her love for Phoebus, of all that was vanishing and all that was
approaching, of the priest who was
denouncing her, of the headsman who was to come, of the gallows which was there.
Then she felt terror mount to the very roots of her hair and she heard the mocking
laugh of the recluse, saying to her in a very low tone: "Hah! hah! hah! you are
going to be hanged!"
She turned a dying look towards the window, and she beheld the fierce face of the
sacked nun through the bars. "What have I done to you?" she said, almost
lifeless.
The recluse did not reply, but began to mumble with a singsong irritated, mocking
intonation: "Daughter of Egypt! daughter of Egypt! daughter of Egypt!"
The unhappy Esmeralda dropped her head beneath her flowing hair, comprehending
that it was no human being she had to deal with.
All at once the recluse exclaimed, as though the gypsy's question had taken all
this time to reach her brain,--"'What have you done to me?' you say!
Ah! what have you done to me, gypsy!
Well! listen.--I had a child! you see!
I had a child! a child, I tell you!--a pretty little girl!--my Agnes!" she went on
wildly, kissing something in the dark.-- "Well! do you see, daughter of Egypt? they
took my child from me; they stole my child; they ate my child.
That is what you have done to me." The young girl replied like a lamb,--
"Alas! perchance I was not born then!"
"Oh! yes!" returned the recluse, "you must have been born.
You were among them.
She would be the same age as you! so!--I have been here fifteen years; fifteen years
have I suffered; fifteen years have I prayed; fifteen years have I beat my head
against these four walls--I tell you that
'twas the gypsies who stole her from me, do you hear that? and who ate her with their
teeth.--Have you a heart? imagine a child playing, a child sucking; a child sleeping.
It is so innocent a thing!--Well! that, that is what they took from me, what they
killed. The good God knows it well!
To-day, it is my turn; I am going to eat the gypsy.--Oh!
I would bite you well, if the bars did not prevent me!
My head is too large!--Poor little one! while she was asleep!
And if they woke her up when they took her, in vain she might cry; I was not there!--
Ah! gypsy mothers, you devoured my child! come see your own."
Then she began to laugh or to gnash her teeth, for the two things resembled each
other in that furious face. The day was beginning to dawn.
An ashy gleam dimly lighted this scene, and the gallows grew more and more distinct in
the square.
On the other side, in the direction of the bridge of Notre-Dame, the poor condemned
girl fancied that she heard the sound of cavalry approaching.
"Madam," she cried, clasping her hands and falling on her knees, dishevelled,
distracted, mad with fright; "madam! have pity!
They are coming.
I have done nothing to you. Would you wish to see me die in this
horrible fashion before your very eyes? You are pitiful, I am sure.
It is too frightful.
Let me make my escape. Release me!
Mercy. I do not wish to die like that!"
"Give me back my child!" said the recluse.
"Mercy! Mercy!"
"Give me back my child!" "Release me, in the name of heaven!"
"Give me back my child!"
Again the young girl fell; exhausted, broken, and having already the glassy eye
of a person in the grave. "Alas!" she faltered, "you seek your child,
I seek my parents."
"Give me back my little Agnes!" pursued Gudule.
"You do not know where she is? Then die!--I will tell you.
I was a woman of the town, I had a child, they took my child.
It was the gypsies. You see plainly that you must die.
When your mother, the gypsy, comes to reclaim you, I shall say to her: 'Mother,
look at that gibbet!--Or, give me back my child.
Do you know where she is, my little daughter?
Stay! I will show you.
Here is her shoe, all that is left me of her.
Do you know where its mate is?
If you know, tell me, and if it is only at the other end of the world, I will crawl to
it on my knees."
As she spoke thus, with her other arm extended through the window, she showed the
gypsy the little embroidered shoe. It was already light enough to distinguish
its shape and its colors.
"Let me see that shoe," said the gypsy, quivering.
"God! God!"
And at the same time, with her hand which was at liberty, she quickly opened the
little bag ornamented with green glass, which she wore about her neck.
"Go on, go on!" grumbled Gudule, "search your demon's amulet!"
All at once, she stopped short, trembled in every limb, and cried in a voice which
proceeded from the very depths of her being: "My daughter!"
The gypsy had just drawn from the bag a little shoe absolutely similar to the
other.
To this little shoe was attached a parchment on which was inscribed this
charm,-- Quand le parell retrouveras Ta mere te
tendras les bras.*
* When thou shalt find its mate, thy mother will stretch out her arms to thee.
Quicker than a flash of lightning, the recluse had laid the two shoes together,
had read the parchment and had put close to the bars of the window her face beaming
with celestial joy as she cried,--
"My daughter! my daughter!" "My mother!" said the gypsy.
Here we are unequal to the task of depicting the scene.
The wall and the iron bars were between them.
"Oh! the wall!" cried the recluse. "Oh! to see her and not to embrace her!
Your hand! your hand!"
The young girl passed her arm through the opening; the recluse threw herself on that
hand, pressed her lips to it and there remained, buried in that kiss, giving no
other sign of life than a sob which heaved her breast from time to time.
In the meanwhile, she wept in torrents, in silence, in the dark, like a rain at night.
The poor mother poured out in floods upon that adored hand the dark and deep well of
tears, which lay within her, and into which her grief had filtered, drop by drop, for
fifteen years.
All at once she rose, flung aside her long gray hair from her brow, and without
uttering a word, began to shake the bars of her cage cell, with both hands, more
furiously than a lioness.
The bars held firm.
Then she went to seek in the corner of her cell a huge paving stone, which served her
as a pillow, and launched it against them with such violence that one of the bars
broke, emitting thousands of sparks.
A second blow completely shattered the old iron cross which barricaded the window.
Then with her two hands, she finished breaking and removing the rusted stumps of
the bars.
There are moments when woman's hands possess superhuman strength.
A passage broken, less than a minute was required for her to seize her daughter by
the middle of her body, and draw her into her cell.
"Come let me draw you out of the abyss," she murmured.
When her daughter was inside the cell, she laid her gently on the ground, then raised
her up again, and bearing her in her arms as though she were still only her little
Agnes, she walked to and fro in her little
room, intoxicated, frantic, joyous, crying out, singing, kissing her daughter, talking
to her, bursting into laughter, melting into tears, all at once and with vehemence.
"My daughter! my daughter!" she said.
"I have my daughter! here she is! The good God has given her back to me!
Ha you! come all of you! Is there any one there to see that I have
my daughter?
Lord Jesus, how beautiful she is! You have made me wait fifteen years, my
good God, but it was in order to give her back to me beautiful.--Then the gypsies did
not eat her!
Who said so? My little daughter! my little daughter!
Kiss me. Those good gypsies!
I love the gypsies!--It is really you!
That was what made my heart leap every time that you passed by.
And I took that for hatred! Forgive me, my Agnes, forgive me.
You thought me very malicious, did you not?
I love you. Have you still the little mark on your
neck? Let us see.
She still has it.
Oh! you are beautiful! It was I who gave you those big eyes,
mademoiselle. Kiss me.
I love you.
It is nothing to me that other mothers have children; I scorn them now.
They have only to come and see. Here is mine.
See her neck, her eyes, her hair, her hands.
Find me anything as beautiful as that! Oh! I promise you she will have lovers,
that she will!
I have wept for fifteen years. All my beauty has departed and has fallen
to her. Kiss me."
She addressed to her a thousand other extravagant remarks, whose accent
constituted their sole beauty, disarranged the poor girl's garments even to the point
of making her blush, smoothed her silky
hair with her hand, kissed her foot, her knee, her brow, her eyes, was in raptures
over everything.
The young girl let her have her way, repeating at intervals and very low and
with infinite tenderness, "My mother!"
"Do you see, my little girl," resumed the recluse, interspersing her words with
kisses, "I shall love you dearly? We will go away from here.
We are going to be very happy.
I have inherited something in Reims, in our country.
You know Reims? Ah! no, you do not know it; you were too
small!
If you only knew how pretty you were at the age of four months!
Tiny feet that people came even from Epernay, which is seven leagues away, to
see!
We shall have a field, a house. I will put you to sleep in my bed.
My God! my God! who would believe this? I have my daughter!"
"Oh, my mother!" said the young girl, at length finding strength to speak in her
emotion, "the gypsy woman told me so.
There was a good gypsy of our band who died last year, and who always cared for me like
a nurse. It was she who placed this little bag about
my neck.
She always said to me: 'Little one, guard this jewel well!
'Tis a treasure. It will cause thee to find thy mother once
again.
Thou wearest thy mother about thy neck.'-- The gypsy predicted it!"
The sacked nun again pressed her daughter in her arms.
"Come, let me kiss you!
You say that prettily. When we are in the country, we will place
these little shoes on an infant Jesus in the church.
We certainly owe that to the good, holy Virgin.
What a pretty voice you have! When you spoke to me just now, it was
music!
Ah! my Lord God! I have found my child again!
But is this story credible? Nothing will kill one--or I should have
died of joy."
And then she began to clap her hands again and to laugh and to cry out: "We are going
to be so happy!"
At that moment, the cell resounded with the clang of arms and a galloping of horses
which seemed to be coming from the Pont Notre-Dame, amid advancing farther and
farther along the quay.
The gypsy threw herself with anguish into the arms of the sacked nun.
"Save me! save me! mother! they are coming!"
"Oh, heaven! what are you saying?
I had forgotten! They are in pursuit of you!
What have you done?" "I know not," replied the unhappy child;
"but I am condemned to die."
"To die!" said Gudule, staggering as though struck by lightning; "to die!" she repeated
slowly, gazing at her daughter with staring eyes.
"Yes, mother," replied the frightened young girl, "they want to kill me.
They are coming to seize me. That gallows is for me!
Save me! save me!
They are coming! Save me!"
The recluse remained for several moments motionless and petrified, then she moved
her head in sign of doubt, and suddenly giving vent to a burst of laughter, but
with that terrible laugh which had come back to her,--
"Ho! ho! no! 'tis a dream of which you are telling me.
Ah, yes!
I lost her, that lasted fifteen years, and then I found her again, and that lasted a
minute! And they would take her from me again!
And now, when she is beautiful, when she is grown up, when she speaks to me, when she
loves me; it is now that they would come to devour her, before my very eyes, and I her
mother!
Oh! no! these things are not possible. The good God does not permit such things as
that." Here the cavalcade appeared to halt, and a
voice was heard to say in the distance,--
"This way, Messire Tristan! The priest says that we shall find her at
the Rat-Hole." The noise of the horses began again.
The recluse sprang to her feet with a shriek of despair.
"Fly! fly! my child! All comes back to me.
You are right.
It is your death! Horror!
Maledictions! Fly!"
She thrust her head through the window, and withdrew it again hastily.
"Remain," she said, in a low, curt, and lugubrious tone, as she pressed the hand of
the gypsy, who was more dead than alive.
"Remain! Do not breathe!
There are soldiers everywhere. You cannot get out.
It is too light."
Her eyes were dry and burning.
She remained silent for a moment; but she paced the cell hurriedly, and halted now
and then to pluck out handfuls of her gray hairs, which she afterwards tore with her
teeth.
Suddenly she said: "They draw near. I will speak with them.
Hide yourself in this corner. They will not see you.
I will tell them that you have made your escape.
That I released you, i' faith!"
She set her daughter (down for she was still carrying her), in one corner of the
cell which was not visible from without.
She made her crouch down, arranged her carefully so that neither foot nor hand
projected from the shadow, untied her black hair which she spread over her white robe
to conceal it, placed in front of her her
jug and her paving stone, the only articles of furniture which she possessed, imagining
that this jug and stone would hide her. And when this was finished she became more
tranquil, and knelt down to pray.
The day, which was only dawning, still left many shadows in the Rat-Hole.
At that moment, the voice of the priest, that infernal voice, passed very close to
the cell, crying,--
"This way, Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers." At that name, at that voice, la Esmeralda,
crouching in her corner, made a movement. "Do not stir!" said Gudule.
She had barely finished when a tumult of men, swords, and horses halted around the
cell.
The mother rose quickly and went to post herself before her window, in order to stop
it up. She beheld a large troop of armed men, both
horse and foot, drawn up on the Greve.
The commander dismounted, and came toward her.
"Old woman!" said this man, who had an atrocious face, "we are in search of a
witch to hang her; we were told that you had her."
The poor mother assumed as indifferent an air as she could, and replied,--
"I know not what you mean." The other resumed, "Tete Dieu!
What was it that frightened archdeacon said?
Where is he?" "Monseigneur," said a soldier, "he has
disappeared."
"Come, now, old madwoman," began the commander again, "do not lie.
A sorceress was given in charge to you. What have you done with her?"
The recluse did not wish to deny all, for fear of awakening suspicion, and replied in
a sincere and surly tone,--
"If you are speaking of a big young girl who was put into my hands a while ago, I
will tell you that she bit me, and that I released her.
There!
Leave me in peace." The commander made a grimace of
disappointment. "Don't lie to me, old spectre!" said he.
"My name is Tristan l'Hermite, and I am the king's gossip.
Tristan the Hermit, do you hear?"
He added, as he glanced at the Place de Greve around him, "'Tis a name which has an
echo here."
"You might be Satan the Hermit," replied Gudule, who was regaining hope, "but I
should have nothing else to say to you, and I should never be afraid of you."
"Tete-Dieu," said Tristan, "here is a crone!
Ah! So the witch girl hath fled! And in which direction did she go?"
Gudule replied in a careless tone,--
"Through the Rue du Mouton, I believe." Tristan turned his head and made a sign to
his troop to prepare to set out on the march again.
The recluse breathed freely once more.
"Monseigneur," suddenly said an archer, "ask the old elf why the bars of her window
are broken in this manner." This question brought anguish again to the
heart of the miserable mother.
Nevertheless, she did not lose all presence of mind.
"They have always been thus," she stammered.
"Bah!" retorted the archer, "only yesterday they still formed a fine black cross, which
inspired devotion." Tristan east a sidelong glance at the
recluse.
"I think the old dame is getting confused!" The unfortunate woman felt that all
depended on her self-possession, and, although with death in her soul, she began
to grin.
Mothers possess such strength. "Bah!" said she, "the man is drunk.
'Tis more than a year since the tail of a stone cart dashed against my window and
broke in the grating.
And how I cursed the carter, too." "'Tis true," said another archer, "I was
there." Always and everywhere people are to be
found who have seen everything.
This unexpected testimony from the archer re-encouraged the recluse, whom this
interrogatory was forcing to cross an abyss on the edge of a knife.
But she was condemned to a perpetual alternative of hope and alarm.
"If it was a cart which did it," retorted the first soldier, "the stumps of the bars
should be thrust inwards, while they actually are pushed outwards."
"Ho! ho!" said Tristan to the soldier, "you have the nose of an inquisitor of the
Chatelet. Reply to what he says, old woman."
"Good heavens!" she exclaimed, driven to bay, and in a voice that was full of tears
in despite of her efforts, "I swear to you, monseigneur, that 'twas a cart which broke
those bars.
You hear the man who saw it. And then, what has that to do with your
gypsy?" "Hum!" growled Tristan.
"The devil!" went on the soldier, flattered by the provost's praise, "these fractures
of the iron are perfectly fresh." Tristan tossed his head.
She turned pale.
"How long ago, say you, did the cart do it?"
"A month, a fortnight, perhaps, monseigheur, I know not."
"She first said more than a year," observed the soldier.
"That is suspicious," said the provost.
"Monseigneur!" she cried, still pressed against the opening, and trembling lest
suspicion should lead them to thrust their heads through and look into her cell;
"monseigneur, I swear to you that 'twas a cart which broke this grating.
I swear it to you by the angels of paradise.
If it was not a cart, may I be eternally damned, and I reject God!"
"You put a great deal of heat into that oath;" said Tristan, with his inquisitorial
glance.
The poor woman felt her assurance vanishing more and more.
She had reached the point of blundering, and she comprehended with terror that she
was saying what she ought not to have said.
Here another soldier came up, crying,-- "Monsieur, the old hag lies.
The sorceress did not flee through the Rue de Mouton.
The street chain has remained stretched all night, and the chain guard has seen no one
pass." Tristan, whose face became more sinister
with every moment, addressed the recluse,--
"What have you to say to that?" She tried to make head against this new
incident, "That I do not know, monseigneur; that I
may have been mistaken.
I believe, in fact, that she crossed the water."
"That is in the opposite direction," said the provost, "and it is not very likely
that she would wish to re-enter the city, where she was being pursued.
You are lying, old woman."
"And then," added the first soldier, "there is no boat either on this side of the
stream or on the other." "She swam across," replied the recluse,
defending her ground foot by foot.
"Do women swim?" said the soldier. "Tete Dieu! old woman!
You are lying!" repeated Tristan angrily. "I have a good mind to abandon that
sorceress and take you.
A quarter of an hour of torture will, perchance, draw the truth from your throat.
Come! You are to follow us."
She seized on these words with avidity.
"As you please, monseigneur. Do it.
Do it. Torture.
I am willing.
Take me away. Quick, quick! let us set out at once!--
During that time," she said to herself, "my daughter will make her escape."
"'S death!" said the provost, "what an appetite for the rack!
I understand not this madwoman at all."
An old, gray-haired sergeant of the guard stepped out of the ranks, and addressing
the provost,-- "Mad in sooth, monseigneur.
If she released the gypsy, it was not her fault, for she loves not the gypsies.
I have been of the watch these fifteen years, and I hear her every evening cursing
the Bohemian women with endless imprecations.
If the one of whom we are in pursuit is, as I suppose, the little dancer with the goat,
she detests that one above all the rest." Gudule made an effort and said,--
"That one above all."
The unanimous testimony of the men of the watch confirmed the old sergeant's words to
the provost.
Tristan l'Hermite, in despair at extracting anything from the recluse, turned his back
on her, and with unspeakable anxiety she beheld him direct his course slowly towards
his horse.
"Come!" he said, between his teeth, "March on! let us set out again on the quest.
I shall not sleep until that gypsy is hanged."
But he still hesitated for some time before mounting his horse.
Gudule palpitated between life and death, as she beheld him cast about the Place that
uneasy look of a hunting dog which instinctively feels that the lair of the
beast is close to him, and is loath to go away.
At length he shook his head and leaped into his saddle.
Gudule's horribly compressed heart now dilated, and she said in a low voice, as
she cast a glance at her daughter, whom she had not ventured to look at while they were
there, "Saved!"
The poor child had remained all this time in her corner, without breathing, without
moving, with the idea of death before her.
She had lost nothing of the scene between Gudule and Tristan, and the anguish of her
mother had found its echo in her heart.
She had heard all the successive snappings of the thread by which she hung suspended
over the gulf; twenty times she had fancied that she saw it break, and at last she
began to breathe again and to feel her foot on firm ground.
At that moment she heard a voice saying to the provost: "Corboeuf!
Monsieur le Prevot, 'tis no affair of mine, a man of arms, to hang witches.
The rabble of the populace is suppressed. I leave you to attend to the matter alone.
You will allow me to rejoin my company, who are waiting for their captain."
The voice was that of Phoebus de Chateaupers; that which took place within
her was ineffable.
He was there, her friend, her protector, her support, her refuge, her Phoebus.
She rose, and before her mother could prevent her, she had rushed to the window,
crying,--
"Phoebus! aid me, my Phoebus!" Phoebus was no longer there.
He had just turned the corner of the Rue de la Coutellerie at a gallop.
But Tristan had not yet taken his departure.
The recluse rushed upon her daughter with a roar of agony.
She dragged her violently back, digging her nails into her neck.
A tigress mother does not stand on trifles. But it was too late.
Tristan had seen.
"He! he!" he exclaimed with a laugh which laid bare all his teeth and made his face
resemble the muzzle of a wolf, "two mice in the trap!"
"I suspected as much," said the soldier.
Tristan clapped him on the shoulder,-- "You are a good cat!
Come!" he added, "where is Henriet Cousin?" A man who had neither the garments nor the
air of a soldier, stepped from the ranks.
He wore a costume half gray, half brown, flat hair, leather sleeves, and carried a
bundle of ropes in his huge hand. This man always attended Tristan, who
always attended Louis XI.
"Friend," said Tristan l'Hermite, "I presume that this is the sorceress of whom
we are in search. You will hang me this one.
Have you your ladder?"
"There is one yonder, under the shed of the Pillar-House," replied the man.
"Is it on this justice that the thing is to be done?" he added, pointing to the stone
gibbet.
"Yes." "Ho, he!" continued the man with a huge
laugh, which was still more brutal than that of the provost, "we shall not have far
to go."
"Make haste!" said Tristan, "you shall laugh afterwards."
In the meantime, the recluse had not uttered another word since Tristan had seen
her daughter and all hope was lost.
She had flung the poor gypsy, half dead, into the corner of the cellar, and had
placed herself once more at the window with both hands resting on the angle of the sill
like two claws.
In this attitude she was seen to cast upon all those soldiers her glance which had
become wild and frantic once more.
At the moment when Rennet Cousin approached her cell, she showed him so savage a face
that he shrank back. "Monseigneur," he said, returning to the
provost, "which am I to take?"
"The young one." "So much the better, for the old one
seemeth difficult." "Poor little dancer with the goat!" said
the old sergeant of the watch.
Rennet Cousin approached the window again. The mother's eyes made his own droop.
He said with a good deal of timidity,-- "Madam"--
She interrupted him in a very low but furious voice,--
"What do you ask?" "It is not you," he said, "it is the
other."
"What other?" "The young one."
She began to shake her head, crying,-- "There is no one! there is no one! there is
no one!"
"Yes, there is!" retorted the hangman, "and you know it well.
Let me take the young one. I have no wish to harm you."
She said, with a strange sneer,--
"Ah! so you have no wish to harm me!" "Let me have the other, madam; 'tis
monsieur the provost who wills it." She repeated with a look of madness,--
"There is no one here."
"I tell you that there is!" replied the executioner.
"We have all seen that there are two of you."
"Look then!" said the recluse, with a sneer.
"Thrust your head through the window." The executioner observed the mother's
finger-nails and dared not.
"Make haste!" shouted Tristan, who had just ranged his troops in a circle round the
Rat-Hole, and who sat on his horse beside the gallows.
Rennet returned once more to the provost in great embarrassment.
He had flung his rope on the ground, and was twisting his hat between his hands with
an awkward air.
"Monseigneur," he asked, "where am I to enter?"
"By the door." "There is none."
"By the window."
"'Tis too small." "Make it larger," said Tristan angrily.
"Have you not pickaxes?" The mother still looked on steadfastly from
the depths of her cavern.
She no longer hoped for anything, she no longer knew what she wished, except that
she did not wish them to take her daughter.
Rennet Cousin went in search of the chest of tools for the night man, under the shed
of the Pillar-House.
He drew from it also the double ladder, which he immediately set up against the
gallows.
Five or six of the provost's men armed themselves with picks and crowbars, and
Tristan betook himself, in company with them, towards the window.
"Old woman," said the provost, in a severe tone, "deliver up to us that girl quietly."
She looked at him like one who does not understand.
"Tete Dieu!" continued Tristan, "why do you try to prevent this sorceress being hung as
it pleases the king?" The wretched woman began to laugh in her
wild way.
"Why? She is my daughter." The tone in which she pronounced these
words made even Henriet Cousin shudder. "I am sorry for that," said the provost,
"but it is the king's good pleasure."
She cried, redoubling her terrible laugh,-- "What is your king to me?
I tell you that she is my daughter!" "Pierce the wall," said Tristan.
In order to make a sufficiently wide opening, it sufficed to dislodge one course
of stone below the window.
When the mother heard the picks and crowbars mining her fortress, she uttered a
terrible cry; then she began to stride about her cell with frightful swiftness, a
wild beasts' habit which her cage had imparted to her.
She no longer said anything, but her eyes flamed.
The soldiers were chilled to the very soul.
All at once she seized her paving stone, laughed, and hurled it with both fists upon
the workmen.
The stone, badly flung (for her hands trembled), touched no one, and fell short
under the feet of Tristan's horse. She gnashed her teeth.
In the meantime, although the sun had not yet risen, it was broad daylight; a
beautiful rose color enlivened the ancient, decayed chimneys of the Pillar-House.
It was the hour when the earliest windows of the great city open joyously on the
roofs.
Some workmen, a few fruit-sellers on their way to the markets on their asses, began to
traverse the Greve; they halted for a moment before this group of soldiers
clustered round the Rat-Hole, stared at it with an air of astonishment and passed on.
The recluse had gone and seated herself by her daughter, covering her with her body,
in front of her, with staring eyes, listening to the poor child, who did not
stir, but who kept murmuring in a low voice, these words only, "Phoebus!
Phoebus!"
In proportion as the work of the demolishers seemed to advance, the mother
mechanically retreated, and pressed the young girl closer and closer to the wall.
All at once, the recluse beheld the stone (for she was standing guard and never took
her eyes from it), move, and she heard Tristan's voice encouraging the workers.
Then she aroused from the depression into which she had fallen during the last few
moments, cried out, and as she spoke, her voice now rent the ear like a saw, then
stammered as though all kind of
maledictions were pressing to her lips to burst forth at once.
"Ho! ho! ho! Why this is terrible!
You are ruffians!
Are you really going to take my daughter? Oh! the cowards!
Oh! the hangman lackeys! the wretched, blackguard assassins!
Help! help! fire!
Will they take my child from me like this? Who is it then who is called the good God?"
Then, addressing Tristan, foaming at the mouth, with wild eyes, all bristling and on
all fours like a female panther,--
"Draw near and take my daughter! Do not you understand that this woman tells
you that she is my daughter? Do you know what it is to have a child?
Eh! lynx, have you never lain with your female? have you never had a cub? and if
you have little ones, when they howl have you nothing in your vitals that moves?"
"Throw down the stone," said Tristan; "it no longer holds."
The crowbars raised the heavy course. It was, as we have said, the mother's last
bulwark.
She threw herself upon it, she tried to hold it back; she scratched the stone with
her nails, but the massive block, set in movement by six men, escaped her and glided
gently to the ground along the iron levers.
The mother, perceiving an entrance effected, fell down in front of the
opening, barricading the breach with her body, beating the pavement with her head,
and shrieking with a voice rendered so
hoarse by fatigue that it was hardly audible,--
"Help! fire! fire!" "Now take the wench," said Tristan, still
impassive.
The mother gazed at the soldiers in such formidable fashion that they were more
inclined to retreat than to advance. "Come, now," repeated the provost.
"Here you, Rennet Cousin!"
No one took a step. The provost swore,--
"Tete de Christ! my men of war! afraid of a woman!"
"Monseigneur," said Rennet, "do you call that a woman?"
"She has the mane of a lion," said another. "Come!" repeated the provost, "the gap is
wide enough.
Enter three abreast, as at the breach of Pontoise.
Let us make an end of it, death of Mahom! I will make two pieces of the first man who
draws back!"
Placed between the provost and the mother, both threatening, the soldiers hesitated
for a moment, then took their resolution, and advanced towards the Rat-Hole.
When the recluse saw this, she rose abruptly on her knees, flung aside her hair
from her face, then let her thin flayed hands fall by her side.
Then great tears fell, one by one, from her eyes; they flowed down her cheeks through a
furrow, like a torrent through a bed which it has hollowed for itself.
At the same time she began to speak, but in a voice so supplicating, so gentle, so
submissive, so heartrending, that more than one old convict-warder around Tristan who
must have devoured human flesh wiped his eyes.
"Messeigneurs! messieurs the sergeants, one word.
There is one thing which I must say to you.
She is my daughter, do you see? my dear little daughter whom I had lost!
Listen. It is quite a history.
Consider that I knew the sergeants very well.
They were always good to me in the days when the little boys threw stones at me,
because I led a life of pleasure.
Do you see? You will leave me my child when you know!
I was a poor woman of the town. It was the Bohemians who stole her from me.
And I kept her shoe for fifteen years.
Stay, here it is. That was the kind of foot which she had.
At Reims! La Chantefleurie!
Rue Folle-Peine!
Perchance, you knew about that. It was I.
In your youth, then, there was a merry time, when one passed good hours.
You will take pity on me, will you not, gentlemen?
The gypsies stole her from me; they hid her from me for fifteen years.
I thought her dead.
Fancy, my good friends, believed her to be dead.
I have passed fifteen years here in this cellar, without a fire in winter.
It is hard.
The poor, dear little shoe! I have cried so much that the good God has
heard me. This night he has given my daughter back to
me.
It is a miracle of the good God. She was not dead.
You will not take her from me, I am sure. If it were myself, I would say nothing; but
she, a child of sixteen!
Leave her time to see the sun! What has she done to you? nothing at all.
Nor have I.
If you did but know that she is all I have, that I am old, that she is a blessing which
the Holy Virgin has sent to me! And then, you are all so good!
You did not know that she was my daughter; but now you do know it.
Oh! I love her! Monsieur, the grand provost.
I would prefer a stab in my own vitals to a scratch on her finger!
You have the air of such a good lord! What I have told you explains the matter,
does it not?
Oh! if you have had a mother, monsiegneur! you are the captain, leave me my child!
Consider that I pray you on my knees, as one prays to Jesus Christ!
I ask nothing of any one; I am from Reims, gentlemen; I own a little field inherited
from my uncle, Mahiet Pradon. I am no beggar.
I wish nothing, but I do want my child! oh!
I want to keep my child! The good God, who is the master, has not
given her back to me for nothing! The king! you say the king!
It would not cause him much pleasure to have my little daughter killed!
And then, the king is good! she is my daughter! she is my own daughter!
She belongs not to the king! she is not yours!
I want to go away! we want to go away! and when two women pass, one a mother and the
other a daughter, one lets them go!
Let us pass! we belong in Reims. Oh! you are very good, messieurs the
sergeants, I love you all. You will not take my dear little one, it is
impossible!
It is utterly impossible, is it not? My child, my child!"
We will not try to give an idea of her gestures, her tone, of the tears which she
swallowed as she spoke, of the hands which she clasped and then wrung, of the heart-
breaking smiles, of the swimming glances,
of the groans, the sighs, the miserable and affecting cries which she mingled with her
disordered, wild, and incoherent words.
When she became silent Tristan l'Hermite frowned, but it was to conceal a tear which
welled up in his tiger's eye. He conquered this weakness, however, and
said in a curt tone,--
"The king wills it." Then he bent down to the ear of Rennet
Cousin, and said to him in a very low tone,--
"Make an end of it quickly!"
Possibly, the redoubtable provost felt his heart also failing him.
The executioner and the sergeants entered the cell.
The mother offered no resistance, only she dragged herself towards her daughter and
threw herself bodily upon her. The gypsy beheld the soldiers approach.
The horror of death reanimated her,--
"Mother!" she shrieked, in a tone of indescribable distress, "Mother! they are
coming! defend me!"
"Yes, my love, I am defending you!" replied the mother, in a dying voice; and clasping
her closely in her arms, she covered her with kisses.
The two lying thus on the earth, the mother upon the daughter, presented a spectacle
worthy of pity.
Rennet Cousin grasped the young girl by the middle of her body, beneath her beautiful
shoulders. When she felt that hand, she cried, "Heuh!"
and fainted.
The executioner who was shedding large tears upon her, drop by drop, was about to
bear her away in his arms.
He tried to detach the mother, who had, so to speak, knotted her hands around her
daughter's waist; but she clung so strongly to her child, that it was impossible to
separate them.
Then Rennet Cousin dragged the young girl outside the cell, and the mother after her.
The mother's eyes were also closed.
At that moment, the sun rose, and there was already on the Place a fairly numerous
assembly of people who looked on from a distance at what was being thus dragged
along the pavement to the gibbet.
For that was Provost Tristan's way at executions.
He had a passion for preventing the approach of the curious.
There was no one at the windows.
Only at a distance, at the summit of that one of the towers of Notre-Dame which
commands the Greve, two men outlined in black against the light morning sky, and
who seemed to be looking on, were visible.
Rennet Cousin paused at the foot of the fatal ladder, with that which he was
dragging, and, barely breathing, with so much pity did the thing inspire him, he
passed the rope around the lovely neck of the young girl.
The unfortunate child felt the horrible touch of the hemp.
She raised her eyelids, and saw the fleshless arm of the stone gallows extended
above her head. Then she shook herself and shrieked in a
loud and heartrending voice: "No! no!
I will not!"
Her mother, whose head was buried and concealed in her daughter's garments, said
not a word; only her whole body could be seen to quiver, and she was heard to
redouble her kisses on her child.
The executioner took advantage of this moment to hastily loose the arms with which
she clasped the condemned girl. Either through exhaustion or despair, she
let him have his way.
Then he took the young girl on his shoulder, from which the charming creature
hung, gracefully bent over his large head. Then he set his foot on the ladder in order
to ascend.
At that moment, the mother who was crouching on the pavement, opened her eyes
wide.
Without uttering a cry, she raised herself erect with a terrible expression; then she
flung herself upon the hand of the executioner, like a beast on its prey, and
bit it.
It was done like a flash of lightning. The headsman howled with pain.
Those near by rushed up. With difficulty they withdrew his bleeding
hand from the mother's teeth.
She preserved a profound silence. They thrust her back with much brutality,
and noticed that her head fell heavily on the pavement.
They raised her, she fell back again.
She was dead. The executioner, who had not loosed his
hold on the young girl, began to ascend the ladder once more.
-BOOK ELEVENTH. CHAPTER II.
THE BEAUTIFUL CREATURE CLAD IN WHITE. (Dante.)
When Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the gypsy was no longer there, that
while he had been defending her she had been abducted, he grasped his hair with
both hands and stamped with surprise and
pain; then he set out to run through the entire church seeking his Bohemian, howling
strange cries to all the corners of the walls, strewing his red hair on the
pavement.
It was just at the moment when the king's archers were making their victorious
entrance into Notre-Dame, also in search of the gypsy.
Quasimodo, poor, deaf fellow, aided them in their fatal intentions, without suspecting
it; he thought that the outcasts were the gypsy's enemies.
He himself conducted Tristan l'Hermite to all possible hiding-places, opened to him
the secret doors, the double bottoms of the altars, the rear sacristries.
If the unfortunate girl had still been there, it would have been he himself who
would have delivered her up.
When the fatigue of finding nothing had disheartened Tristan, who was not easily
discouraged, Quasimodo continued the search alone.
He made the tour of the church twenty times, length and breadth, up and down,
ascending and descending, running, calling, shouting, peeping, rummaging, ransacking,
thrusting his head into every hole, pushing a torch under every vault, despairing, mad.
A male who has lost his female is no more roaring nor more haggard.
At last when he was sure, perfectly sure that she was no longer there, that all was
at an end, that she had been snatched from him, he slowly mounted the staircase to the
towers, that staircase which he had
ascended with so much eagerness and triumph on the day when he had saved her.
He passed those same places once more with drooping head, voiceless, tearless, almost
breathless.
The church was again deserted, and had fallen back into its silence.
The archers had quitted it to track the sorceress in the city.
Quasimodo, left alone in that vast Notre- Dame, so besieged and tumultuous but a
short time before, once more betook himself to the cell where the gypsy had slept for
so many weeks under his guardianship.
As he approached it, he fancied that he might, perhaps, find her there.
When, at the turn of the gallery which opens on the roof of the side aisles, he
perceived the tiny cell with its little window and its little door crouching
beneath a great flying buttress like a
bird's nest under a branch, the poor man's heart failed him, and he leaned against a
pillar to keep from falling.
He imagined that she might have returned thither, that some good genius had, no
doubt, brought her back, that this chamber was too tranquil, too safe, too charming
for her not to be there, and he dared not
take another step for fear of destroying his illusion.
"Yes," he said to himself, "perchance she is sleeping, or praying.
I must not disturb her."
At length he summoned up courage, advanced on tiptoe, looked, entered.
Empty. The cell was still empty.
The unhappy deaf man walked slowly round it, lifted the bed and looked beneath it,
as though she might be concealed between the pavement and the mattress, then he
shook his head and remained stupefied.
All at once, he crushed his torch under his foot, and, without uttering a word, without
giving vent to a sigh, he flung himself at full speed, head foremost against the wall,
and fell fainting on the floor.
When he recovered his senses, he threw himself on the bed and rolling about, he
kissed frantically the place where the young girl had slept and which was still
warm; he remained there for several moments
as motionless as though he were about to expire; then he rose, dripping with
perspiration, panting, mad, and began to beat his head against the wall with the
frightful regularity of the clapper of his
bells, and the resolution of a man determined to kill himself.
At length he fell a second time, exhausted; he dragged himself on his knees outside the
cell, and crouched down facing the door, in an attitude of astonishment.
He remained thus for more than an hour without making a movement, with his eye
fixed on the deserted cell, more gloomy, and more pensive than a mother seated
between an empty cradle and a full coffin.
He uttered not a word; only at long intervals, a sob heaved his body violently,
but it was a tearless sob, like summer lightning which makes no noise.
It appears to have been then, that, seeking at the bottom of his lonely thoughts for
the unexpected abductor of the gypsy, he thought of the archdeacon.
He remembered that Dom Claude alone possessed a key to the staircase leading to
the cell; he recalled his nocturnal attempts on the young girl, in the first of
which he, Quasimodo, had assisted, the second of which he had prevented.
He recalled a thousand details, and soon he no longer doubted that the archdeacon had
taken the gypsy.
Nevertheless, such was his respect for the priest, such his gratitude, his devotion,
his love for this man had taken such deep root in his heart, that they resisted, even
at this moment, the talons of jealousy and despair.
He reflected that the archdeacon had done this thing, and the wrath of blood and
death which it would have evoked in him against any other person, turned in the
poor deaf man, from the moment when Claude
Frollo was in question, into an increase of grief and sorrow.
At the moment when his thought was thus fixed upon the priest, while the daybreak
was whitening the flying buttresses, he perceived on the highest story of Notre-
Dame, at the angle formed by the external
balustrade as it makes the turn of the chancel, a figure walking.
This figure was coming towards him. He recognized it.
It was the archdeacon.
Claude was walking with a slow, grave step.
He did not look before him as he walked, he was directing his course towards the
northern tower, but his face was turned aside towards the right bank of the Seine,
and he held his head high, as though trying to see something over the roofs.
The owl often assumes this oblique attitude.
It flies towards one point and looks towards another.
In this manner the priest passed above Quasimodo without seeing him.
The deaf man, who had been petrified by this sudden apparition, beheld him
disappear through the door of the staircase to the north tower.
The reader is aware that this is the tower from which the Hotel-de-Ville is visible.
Quasimodo rose and followed the archdeacon.
Quasimodo ascended the tower staircase for the sake of ascending it, for the sake of
seeing why the priest was ascending it.
Moreover, the poor bellringer did not know what he (Quasimodo) should do, what he
should say, what he wished. He was full of fury and full of fear.
The archdeacon and the gypsy had come into conflict in his heart.
When he reached the summit of the tower, before emerging from the shadow of the
staircase and stepping upon the platform, he cautiously examined the position of the
priest.
The priest's back was turned to him. There is an openwork balustrade which
surrounds the platform of the bell tower.
The priest, whose eyes looked down upon the town, was resting his breast on that one of
the four sides of the balustrades which looks upon the Pont Notre-Dame.
Quasimodo, advancing with the tread of a wolf behind him, went to see what he was
gazing at thus.
The priest's attention was so absorbed elsewhere that he did not hear the deaf man
walking behind him.
Paris is a magnificent and charming spectacle, and especially at that day,
viewed from the top of the towers of Notre- Dame, in the fresh light of a summer dawn.
The day might have been in July.
The sky was perfectly serene. Some tardy stars were fading away at
various points, and there was a very brilliant one in the east, in the brightest
part of the heavens.
The sun was about to appear; Paris was beginning to move.
A very white and very pure light brought out vividly to the eye all the outlines
that its thousands of houses present to the east.
The giant shadow of the towers leaped from roof to roof, from one end of the great
city to the other. There were several quarters from which were
already heard voices and noisy sounds.
Here the stroke of a bell, there the stroke of a hammer, beyond, the complicated
clatter of a cart in motion.
Already several columns of smoke were being belched forth from the chimneys scattered
over the whole surface of roofs, as through the fissures of an immense sulphurous
crater.
The river, which ruffles its waters against the arches of so many bridges, against the
points of so many islands, was wavering with silvery folds.
Around the city, outside the ramparts, sight was lost in a great circle of fleecy
vapors through which one confusedly distinguished the indefinite line of the
plains, and the graceful swell of the heights.
All sorts of floating sounds were dispersed over this half-awakened city.
Towards the east, the morning breeze chased a few soft white bits of wool torn from the
misty fleece of the hills.
In the Parvis, some good women, who had their milk jugs in their hands, were
pointing out to each other, with astonishment, the singular dilapidation of
the great door of Notre-Dame, and the two
solidified streams of lead in the crevices of the stone.
This was all that remained of the tempest of the night.
The bonfire lighted between the towers by Quasimodo had died out.
Tristan had already cleared up the Place, and had the dead thrown into the Seine.
Kings like Louis XI. are careful to clean the pavement quickly after a massacre.
Outside the balustrade of the tower, directly under the point where the priest
had paused, there was one of those fantastically carved stone gutters with
which Gothic edifices bristle, and, in a
crevice of that gutter, two pretty wallflowers in blossom, shaken out and
vivified, as it were, by the breath of air, made frolicsome salutations to each other.
Above the towers, on high, far away in the depths of the sky, the cries of little
birds were heard. But the priest was not listening to, was
not looking at, anything of all this.
He was one of the men for whom there are no mornings, no birds, no flowers.
In that immense horizon, which assumed so many aspects about him, his contemplation
was concentrated on a single point.
Quasimodo was burning to ask him what he had done with the gypsy; but the archdeacon
seemed to be out of the world at that moment.
He was evidently in one of those violent moments of life when one would not feel the
earth crumble.
He remained motionless and silent, with his eyes steadily fixed on a certain point; and
there was something so terrible about this silence and immobility that the savage
bellringer shuddered before it and dared not come in contact with it.
Only, and this was also one way of interrogating the archdeacon, he followed
the direction of his vision, and in this way the glance of the unhappy deaf man fell
upon the Place de Greve.
Thus he saw what the priest was looking at. The ladder was erected near the permanent
gallows. There were some people and many soldiers in
the Place.
A man was dragging a white thing, from which hung something black, along the
pavement. This man halted at the foot of the gallows.
Here something took place which Quasimodo could not see very clearly.
It was not because his only eye had not preserved its long range, but there was a
group of soldiers which prevented his seeing everything.
Moreover, at that moment the sun appeared, and such a flood of light overflowed the
horizon that one would have said that all the points in Paris, spires, chimneys,
gables, had simultaneously taken fire.
Meanwhile, the man began to mount the ladder.
Then Quasimodo saw him again distinctly.
He was carrying a woman on his shoulder, a young girl dressed in white; that young
girl had a noose about her neck. Quasimodo recognized her.
It was she.
The man reached the top of the ladder. There he arranged the noose.
Here the priest, in order to see the better, knelt upon the balustrade.
All at once the man kicked away the ladder abruptly, and Quasimodo, who had not
breathed for several moments, beheld the unhappy child dangling at the end of the
rope two fathoms above the pavement, with the man squatting on her shoulders.
The rope made several gyrations on itself, and Quasimodo beheld horrible convulsions
run along the gypsy's body.
The priest, on his side, with outstretched neck and eyes starting from his head,
contemplated this horrible group of the man and the young girl,--the spider and the
fly.
At the moment when it was most horrible, the laugh of a demon, a laugh which one can
only give vent to when one is no longer human, burst forth on the priest's livid
face.
Quasimodo did not hear that laugh, but he saw it.
The bellringer retreated several paces behind the archdeacon, and suddenly hurling
himself upon him with fury, with his huge hands he pushed him by the back over into
the abyss over which Dom Claude was leaning.
The priest shrieked: "Damnation!" and fell. The spout, above which he had stood,
arrested him in his fall.
He clung to it with desperate hands, and, at the moment when he opened his mouth to
utter a second cry, he beheld the formidable and avenging face of Quasimodo
thrust over the edge of the balustrade above his head.
Then he was silent. The abyss was there below him.
A fall of more than two hundred feet and the pavement.
In this terrible situation, the archdeacon said not a word, uttered not a groan.
He merely writhed upon the spout, with incredible efforts to climb up again; but
his hands had no hold on the granite, his feet slid along the blackened wall without
catching fast.
People who have ascended the towers of Notre-Dame know that there is a swell of
the stone immediately beneath the balustrade.
It was on this retreating angle that miserable archdeacon exhausted himself.
He had not to deal with a perpendicular wall, but with one which sloped away
beneath him.
Quasimodo had but to stretch out his hand in order to draw him from the gulf; but he
did not even look at him. He was looking at the Greve.
He was looking at the gallows.
He was looking at the gypsy.
The deaf man was leaning, with his elbows on the balustrade, at the spot where the
archdeacon had been a moment before, and there, never detaching his gaze from the
only object which existed for him in the
world at that moment, he remained motionless and mute, like a man struck by
lightning, and a long stream of tears flowed in silence from that eye which, up
to that time, had never shed but one tear.
Meanwhile, the archdeacon was panting. His bald brow was dripping with
perspiration, his nails were bleeding against the stones, his knees were flayed
by the wall.
He heard his cassock, which was caught on the spout, crack and rip at every jerk that
he gave it.
To complete his misfortune, this spout ended in a leaden pipe which bent under the
weight of his body. The archdeacon felt this pipe slowly giving
way.
The miserable man said to himself that, when his hands should be worn out with
fatigue, when his cassock should tear asunder, when the lead should give way, he
would be obliged to fall, and terror seized upon his very vitals.
Now and then he glanced wildly at a sort of narrow shelf formed, ten feet lower down,
by projections of the sculpture, and he prayed heaven, from the depths of his
distressed soul, that he might be allowed
to finish his life, were it to last two centuries, on that space two feet square.
Once, he glanced below him into the Place, into the abyss; the head which he raised
again had its eyes closed and its hair standing erect.
There was something frightful in the silence of these two men.
While the archdeacon agonized in this terrible fashion a few feet below him,
Quasimodo wept and gazed at the Greve.
The archdeacon, seeing that all his exertions served only to weaken the fragile
support which remained to him, decided to remain quiet.
There he hung, embracing the gutter, hardly breathing, no longer stirring, making no
longer any other movements than that mechanical convulsion of the stomach, which
one experiences in dreams when one fancies himself falling.
His fixed eyes were wide open with a stare.
He lost ground little by little, nevertheless, his fingers slipped along the
spout; he became more and more conscious of the feebleness of his arms and the weight
of his body.
The curve of the lead which sustained him inclined more and more each instant towards
the abyss.
He beheld below him, a frightful thing, the roof of Saint-Jean le Rond, as small as a
card folded in two.
He gazed at the impressive carvings, one by one, of the tower, suspended like himself
over the precipice, but without terror for themselves or pity for him.
All was stone around him; before his eyes, gaping monsters; below, quite at the
bottom, in the Place, the pavement; above his head, Quasimodo weeping.
In the Parvis there were several groups of curious good people, who were tranquilly
seeking to divine who the madman could be who was amusing himself in so strange a
manner.
The priest heard them saying, for their voices reached him, clear and shrill: "Why,
he will break his neck!" Quasimodo wept.
At last the archdeacon, foaming with rage and despair, understood that all was in
vain. Nevertheless, he collected all the strength
which remained to him for a final effort.
He stiffened himself upon the spout, pushed against the wall with both his knees, clung
to a crevice in the stones with his hands, and succeeded in climbing back with one
foot, perhaps; but this effort made the
leaden beak on which he rested bend abruptly.
His cassock burst open at the same time.
Then, feeling everything give way beneath him, with nothing but his stiffened and
failing hands to support him, the unfortunate man closed his eyes and let go
of the spout.
He fell. Quasimodo watched him fall.
A fall from such a height is seldom perpendicular.
The archdeacon, launched into space, fell at first head foremost, with outspread
hands; then he whirled over and over many times; the wind blew him upon the roof of a
house, where the unfortunate man began to break up.
Nevertheless, he was not dead when he reached there.
The bellringer saw him still endeavor to cling to a gable with his nails; but the
surface sloped too much, and he had no more strength.
He slid rapidly along the roof like a loosened tile, and dashed upon the
pavement. There he no longer moved.
Then Quasimodo raised his eyes to the gypsy, whose body he beheld hanging from
the gibbet, quivering far away beneath her white robe with the last shudderings of
anguish, then he dropped them on the
archdeacon, stretched out at the base of the tower, and no longer retaining the
human form, and he said, with a sob which heaved his deep chest,--"Oh! all that I
have ever loved!"
-BOOK ELEVENTH. CHAPTER III.
THE MARRIAGE OF PHOEBUS.
Towards evening on that day, when the judiciary officers of the bishop came to
pick up from the pavement of the Parvis the dislocated corpse of the archdeacon,
Quasimodo had disappeared.
A great many rumors were in circulation with regard to this adventure.
No one doubted but that the day had come when, in accordance with their compact,
Quasimodo, that is to say, the devil, was to carry off Claude Frollo, that is to say,
the sorcerer.
It was presumed that he had broken the body when taking the soul, like monkeys who
break the shell to get at the nut. This is why the archdeacon was not interred
in consecrated earth.
Louis XI. died a year later, in the month of August, 1483.
As for Pierre Gringoire, he succeeded in saving the goat, and he won success in
tragedy.
It appears that, after having tasted astrology, philosophy, architecture,
hermetics,--all vanities, he returned to tragedy, vainest pursuit of all.
This is what he called "coming to a tragic end."
This is what is to be read, on the subject of his dramatic triumphs, in 1483, in the
accounts of the "Ordinary:" "To Jehan Marchand and Pierre Gringoire, carpenter
and composer, who have made and composed
the mystery made at the Chatelet of Paris, at the entry of Monsieur the Legate, and
have ordered the personages, clothed and dressed the same, as in the said mystery
was required; and likewise, for having made
the scaffoldings thereto necessary; and for this deed,--one hundred livres."
Phoebus de Chateaupers also came to a tragic end.
He married.
-BOOK ELEVENTH. CHAPTER IV.
THE MARRIAGE OF QUASIMODO.
We have just said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre-Dame on the day of
the gypsy's and of the archdeacon's death. He was not seen again, in fact; no one knew
what had become of him.
During the night which followed the execution of la Esmeralda, the night men
had detached her body from the gibbet, and had carried it, according to custom, to the
cellar of Montfaucon.
Montfaucon was, as Sauval says, "the most ancient and the most superb gibbet in the
kingdom."
Between the faubourgs of the Temple and Saint Martin, about a hundred and sixty
toises from the walls of Paris, a few bow shots from La Courtille, there was to be
seen on the crest of a gentle, almost
imperceptible eminence, but sufficiently elevated to be seen for several leagues
round about, an edifice of strange form, bearing considerable resemblance to a
Celtic cromlech, and where also human sacrifices were offered.
Let the reader picture to himself, crowning a limestone hillock, an oblong mass of
masonry fifteen feet in height, thirty wide, forty long, with a gate, an external
railing and a platform; on this platform
sixteen enormous pillars of rough hewn stone, thirty feet in height, arranged in a
colonnade round three of the four sides of the mass which support them, bound together
at their summits by heavy beams, whence
hung chains at intervals; on all these chains, skeletons; in the vicinity, on the
plain, a stone cross and two gibbets of secondary importance, which seemed to have
sprung up as shoots around the central
gallows; above all this, in the sky, a perpetual flock of crows; that was
Montfaucon.
At the end of the fifteenth century, the formidable gibbet which dated from 1328,
was already very much dilapidated; the beams were wormeaten, the chains rusted,
the pillars green with mould; the layers of
hewn stone were all cracked at their joints, and grass was growing on that
platform which no feet touched.
The monument made a horrible profile against the sky; especially at night when
there was a little moonlight on those white skulls, or when the breeze of evening
brushed the chains and the skeletons, and swayed all these in the darkness.
The presence of this gibbet sufficed to render gloomy all the surrounding places.
The mass of masonry which served as foundation to the odious edifice was
hollow.
A huge cellar had been constructed there, closed by an old iron grating, which was
out of order, into which were cast not only the human remains, which were taken from
the chains of Montfaucon, but also the
bodies of all the unfortunates executed on the other permanent gibbets of Paris.
To that deep charnel-house, where so many human remains and so many crimes have
rotted in company, many great ones of this world, many innocent people, have
contributed their bones, from Enguerrand de
Marigni, the first victim, and a just man, to Admiral de Coligni, who was its last,
and who was also a just man.
As for the mysterious disappearance of Quasimodo, this is all that we have been
able to discover.
About eighteen months or two years after the events which terminate this story, when
search was made in that cavern for the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two
days previously, and to whom Charles VIII.
had granted the favor of being buried in Saint Laurent, in better company, they
found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in
its embrace.
One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a garment
which had once been white, and around her neck was to be seen a string of adrezarach
beads with a little silk bag ornamented
with green glass, which was open and empty. These objects were of so little value that
the executioner had probably not cared for them.
The other, which held this one in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man.
It was noticed that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his shoulder
blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other.
Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, and it
was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had
come thither and had died there.
When they tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to
dust.