by Hugo, Victor
Meanwhile the sinister face of the recluse appeared, pressed against the window bars. ‘Oh! oh!’ she cried with a terrifying laugh, ‘it’s the gypsy woman calling me!’
At that moment the scene round the pillory caught her frantic eye. Her brow wrinkled with horror. She stuck two skeletal arms out of her cell, and cried out in a voice like a death-rattle: ‘So it’s you, daughter of Egypt! You calling me, child-stealer! All right! Curses on you! curses! curses! curses!’
IV
A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER
THESE words were, so to speak, the point of intersection of two scenes which had up to then developed in parallel, simultaneously, each on its own stage; the one, which you have just read, at the Rat-hole, the other, which you are about to read, on the ladder of the pillory. The only witnesses to the first were the three women whose acquaintance the reader has just made; the spectators of the second were all the people whom we saw earlier, collecting in the Place de Grève around the pillory and the gibbet.
That crowd had been led to expect some sort of execution from the presence of the four sergeants posted since nine in the morning at each corner of the pillory, doubtless not a hanging, but a whipping, an ear-cropping, in a word, something; that crowd had swollen so rapidly that the four sergeants, hemmed in too closely, had more than once needed to ‘compress’ it, as the expression then went, by laying about them with their cudgels and backing their horses into it.
This mass of people, well trained in waiting for public executions, were not showing signs of undue impatience. They amused themselves looking at the pillory, a very simple sort of monument consisting of a cube of masonry some ten feet high, hollow inside. A very steep set of rough stone steps, known as the ‘ladder’ par excellence, led to the upper platform, on which could be seen a horizontal wheel of solid oak. The victim was fastened on to this wheel, kneeling, with his arms behind his back. A timber shaft, activated by a capstan concealed inside the small structure, set the wheel rotating, always fixed in a horizontal plane, and thus presented the condemned man’s face to each corner of the square in succession. This was termed ‘turning’ a criminal.
As you can see, the pillory in the Grève was a long way from affording all the entertainment of the pillory in the Halles. Nothing architectural. Nothing monumental. No roof of iron crosses, no octagonal lantern, no slender columns rising to spread out on the edge of the roof into capitals of acanthus and flowers, no chimerical and monstrous waterspouts, no carved timbers, no delicate sculpture deeply cut into the stone. One had to be content with these four rubble walls and two sandstone backplates, and a mean stone gibbet, meagre and bare, beside it.
It would have been a poor treat for lovers of Gothic architecture. It is true that no one was less interested in monuments than our good onlookers of the Middle Ages, and they cared very little about the beauty of a pillory.
The victim arrived at last, tied to the tail of a cart, and when he had been hoisted on to the platform, when he could be seen from every corner of the square bound with ropes and straps on to the pillory wheel, a prodigious booing, mixed with laughter and cheering, broke out in the square. They had recognized Quasimodo.
It was indeed he. It was a strange reversal. Pilloried in the selfsame square where only the day before he had been greeted, acclaimed, and adjudged Pope and Prince of Fools, in procession with the Duke of Egypt, the King of Tunis, and the Emperor of Galilee. One thing is certain: there was not a mind in the crowd, not even his, in turn hero and victim, which could draw any clear conclusion from this connection. Gringoire and his philosophy were missing from this spectacle.
Soon Michel Noiret, sworn trumpeter of our lord the King, had the churls brought to silence and proclaimed the sentence, in accordance with the ordinance and command of Monsieur the Provost. Then he withdrew behind the cart with his men in their liveried tunics.
Quasimodo, impassive, did not blink. All resistance had been made impossible for him by what was then termed, in the style of the criminal chancellery, ‘the vehemence and firmness of his bonds’, which means that the thongs and chains were probably cutting into his flesh. That in any case is one tradition of the gaols and galleys which has not been abandoned, and which handcuffs still preciously preserve among us, a civilized, gentle, humane people (hard labour and the guillotine in parentheses).
He had let himself be led and pushed, carried, perched, bound and bound again. All that could be read on his face was the astonishment of a savage or an idiot. He was known to be deaf, it was as though he were also blind.
He was made to kneel on the circular planks, he let them do it. They stripped him of shirt and doublet down to his waist, he let them do it. They trussed him up in a new system of straps and buckles, he let them buckle and bind him. He merely snorted noisily from time to time, like a calf with its head hanging and jolting over the side of the butcher’s cart.
‘The dolt,’ Jehan Frollo du Moulin said to his friend Robin Poussepain (for the two students had followed the victim, as might be expected); ‘he doesn’t understand any more than a cockchafer shut up in a box!’
The crowd could not control their mirth when they saw Quasimodo’s naked hump, his camel’s chest, his calloused, shaggy shoulders. While all this merriment was going on, a short sturdy-looking man in the town’s livery climbed up on to the platform and stood by the victim. His name ran quickly through the public. It was Maître Pierrat Torterue, sworn torturer of the Châtelet.
He began by setting down in one corner of the pillory a black hourglass, whose upper cup was filled with red sand which filtered through to the lower one. Then he took off his parti-coloured surcoat, and they saw hanging from his right hand a thin, slender whip of long, white, shiny, knotted, plaited thongs, armed with metal hooks. With his left hand he casually rolled up his shirt sleeve round his right arm up to the armpit.
Meanwhile Jehan Frollo raised his fair curly head above the crowd (climbing on Robin Poussepain’s shoulders to that end) and cried: ‘Come and look, ladies and gentlemen! They are about to give a peremptory flogging to Maître Quasimodo, bell-ringer to my brother, Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas, a weird bit of oriental architecture, with a dome for a back, and twisted columns for legs!’
And the crowd laughed, especially the children and the girls.
At length the torturer stamped his foot. The wheel began to turn. Quasimodo staggered in his bonds. The stupefaction suddenly depicted on his deformed features provoked renewed gusts of laughter all round.
Suddenly, just as the rotating wheel presented Quasimodo’s mountainous back to Maître Pierrat, the latter raised his arm. The slender thongs hissed sharply through the air like a bunch of snakes and came down furiously on the poor wretch’s shoulders.
Quasimodo jerked up as if suddenly roused from sleep. He was beginning to understand. He writhed in his bonds; a violent spasm of surprise and pain distorted the muscles of his face; but he uttered not a sigh. He merely turned his head backwards, to the right, then to the left, swinging it about like a bull stung on its flank by a horsefly.
A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another, continously. The wheel did not stop turning nor the blows raining down. Soon the blood spurted, and could be seen trickling in countless streams over the hunchback’s black shoulders, and the slender thongs as they whirled slashing through the air sprinkled drops of it over the crowd.
Quasimodo had resumed, at least apparently, his original impassivity. He had first tried silently and with no great outward effort to burst his bonds. They had seen his eye blaze, his muscles tense, his limbs gather themselves, and the straps and chains stretch. The effort was mighty, prodigious, desperate; but the provostry’s old restraints held out. They creaked, and that was all. Quasimodo fell back in exhaustion. The stupefaction written on his features gave way to a mood of bitter, profound dejection. He closed his one eye, let his head drop on to his chest and looked as if he were dead.
From then on he did not stir. Nothing co
uld force the slightest movement out of him. Not his blood, which flowed incessantly, nor the blows which fell with redoubled frenzy, nor the fury of the torturer who was working himself up and becoming intoxicated with his work of execution, not the sound of the dreadful thongs whistling through the air shriller than a cloud of mosquitoes.
At last an usher from the Châtelet dressed in black, riding a black horse, who had been stationed beside the ladder since the execution began, stretched out his ebony rod towards the hourglass. The torturer stopped. The wheel stopped. Quasimodo slowly opened his eye.
The flogging was over. The assistants of the sworn torturer washed the victim’s bloody shoulders, rubbed them with some ointment or other which at once closed up all the wounds, and threw over his back a kind of yellow wrap shaped like a chasuble. Meanwhile Pierrat Torterue was shaking out over the pavement the thongs of his whip, all reddened and soaked with blood.
All was not over for Quasimodo. He still had to undergo the extra hour in the pillory which Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added on to the sentence of Messire Robert d’Estouteville; all to the greater glory of the old physiological and psychological wordplay of John Comenius:* surdus absurdus [deaf, absurd].
So the hourglass was turned the other way up and the hunchback was left bound to the plank so that justice should be done to the very end.
The common people, especially in the Middle Ages, are to society what the child is to the family. As long as they remain in this state of primal ignorance, moral and intellectual minors, it may be said of them as of the child: ‘That age is without pity.’* We have already shown that Quasimodo was generally detested, for more than one good reason, it is true. There was hardly a spectator in this crowd who did not have, or believe he had, cause for complaint against the evil hunchback of Notre-Dame. There had been universal delight at seeing him appear in the pillory; and the harsh punishment which he had just undergone, and the pitiful state in which it had left him, far from moving the populace to pity, had made their hatred more spiteful by sharpening it with an occasion for merriment.
So, once the vindicte publique [public vengeance] was satisfied, as the jurists of our own day still put it in their legal jargon, it was the turn of countless private vengeances. Here, as in the Great Hall, it was especially the women who burst out. They all bore him some grudge, some for his malice, others for his ugliness. The latter were the most violent.
‘Oh! mask of Antichrist!’ said one.
‘Broomstick-rider!’ cried another.
‘What a fine tragic grimace,’ yelled a third; ‘it would make you Pope of Fools if today were yesterday!’
‘That’s good,’ went on an old woman. ‘That’s his pillory face. When do we see his gallows one?’
‘When will you have your great bell stuck on your head and put a hundred feet under the ground, cursed ringer?’
‘Yet it’s this devil who rings the Angelus!’
‘Oh! you deaf! one-eyed! hunchbacked! monster!’
‘There’s a face would bring about an abortion better than any medicines or pharmatics!’
And the two students, Jehan du Moulin and Robin Poussepain, sang at the top of their voices the popular old refrain:
A halter for the gallows-bird,
A faggot for this monkey face!
Countless other insults rained down on him, with boos, and imprecations, and roars of laughter, and now and then stones.
Quasimodo was deaf, but he could see clearly enough, and the people’s fury was written no less vigorously on their faces than in their words. Besides, the stones that hit him explained the laughter.
He stuck it out at first. But gradually his patience, hardened under the torturer’s whip, bent and gave way before all these insect bites. The Asturian bull, unmoved by the picador’s attacks, is irritated by the dogs and banderillas.
He began by looking round the crowd threateningly. But trussed as he was, his look was quite unable to drive away these flies biting at his wound. Then he struggled in his bonds, and his frenzied convulsions made the old pillory wheel creak on its boards. All that only increased the catcalls and jeers.
Then the poor wretch, unable to burst the bonds which chained him like a wild animal, grew quiet again. Only intermittently did a groan of rage swell every cavity in his chest. His face showed no sign of shame or blushes. He was too far from the social state and too near the state of nature to know what shame was. Besides, with such a degree of deformity, is infamy something that can be felt? But anger, hatred, despair slowly covered that hideous face with a cloud that grew darker and darker, full of more and more electricity which burst out as incessant lightning flashes from that Cyclops’ eye.
However, this cloud lightened momentarily as a mule passed through the crowd with a priest on its back. At his first distant sight of this mule and this priest the poor victim’s face softened, the fury contracting it gave way to a strange smile, full of ineffable gentleness, docility, and affection. As the priest drew nearer this smile became clearer, more distinct, more radiant. It was as though the poor wretch was greeting the arrival of a saviour. However, just as the mule came close enough to the pillory for its rider to recognize the victim, the priest dropped his eyes, abruptly turned back, spurred his mule as though in a hurry to avoid humiliating recriminations and most unwilling to be greeted and recognized by a poor devil in such a situation.
This priest was the archdeacon, Dom Claude Frollo.
The cloud returned blacker than ever to Quasimodo’s brow. The smile still mingled with it for a time, but now bitter, dejected, profoundly sad.
Time went by. He had been there for at least an hour and a half, lacerated, abused, mocked without respite, and almost stoned to death.
Suddenly he struggled again in his chains in renewed desperation, which shook the whole framework supporting him, and breaking the silence which he had obstinately kept so far, he cried in a hoarse, furious voice, more like a bark than a human cry, and rising above the noise of jeers: ‘A drink!’
This exclamation of distress, far from exciting compassion, was added entertainment for the good Parisian people round the ladder and who, it must be said, taken in the mass and as a multitude, were then scarcely less cruel and less brutalized than that horrible tribe of truands to whom we have already introduced the reader, and who were quite simply the lowest stratum of the people. Not one voice was raised around the unhappy victim but to mock him for his thirst. Certainly at that moment he was even more grotesque and repulsive than pitiable, with his streaming, purple face, his distraught eye, his mouth frothing with rage and pain, his tongue half lolling out. It must be said too that had there been in the throng any charitable soul, any respectable man or woman of the town, who might have felt tempted to bring a glass of water to this wretched creature in distress, there reigned about the infamous steps of the pillory such a prejudice of shame and ignominy as would have repelled the good Samaritan.
After a few minutes Quasimodo looked round the crowd despairingly, and repeated in a still more heart-rending voice: ‘Drink!’
And they all laughed.
‘Drink this!’ cried Robin Poussepain, throwing into his face a sponge that had been dragged through the gutter. ‘Here, you deaf rascal! I am in your debt.’
A woman hurled a stone at his head: ‘That’ll teach you to wake us up at night with your damned ringing!’
‘Hey there, lad!’ shouted a cripple as he tried hard to hit him with his crutch, ‘will you go on casting spells on us from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame?’
‘Here’s a drinking bowl,’ went on another man, hitting him in the chest with a broken pitcher. ‘Just going by in front of my wife you made her give birth to a child with two heads!’
‘And made my cat have a kitten with six paws,’ yelped an old woman, throwing a tile at him.
‘Drink!’ Quasimodo gasped for the third time.
At that moment he saw the people draw aside. A strangely dressed girl came out f
rom the throng. She was accompanied by a little white goat with gilded horns, and carried a tambourine in her hand.
Quasimodo’s eye flashed. It was the gypsy girl whom he had tried to abduct the previous night, an assault for which he dimly felt he was being punished at that very moment; which anyhow was not remotely the case, since he was being punished only for the misfortune of being deaf and having come before a deaf judge. He did not doubt that she too had come for her revenge and would add her blow like everyone else.
In fact he saw her spring quickly up the ladder. Anger and frustration choked him. He would have liked to be able to bring the pillory crashing to the ground, and if the lightning in his eye could have struck her, the gypsy would have been reduced to dust before reaching the platform.
Without a word she approached the victim who twisted about in vain to escape her, and taking a gourd from off her belt, she gently brought it to the poor wretch’s parched lips.
Then from that eye, which up to then had been so dry and burnt up, a big tear could be seen slowly rolling down that misshapen face, so long distorted by despair. It was perhaps the first tear the unfortunate creature had ever shed.
Meanwhile he forgot about drinking. The gypsy girl made her little pout of impatience, and pressed the neck of the gourd to Quasimodo’s tusky mouth. He drank a long draught. His thirst was burning.
When he had finished, the poor wretch extended his black lips, no doubt to kiss the lovely hand that had just come to his aid. But the girl, perhaps somewhat wary, remembering the violent attempt of the night before, withdrew her hand with the frightened gesture of a child afraid of being bitten by an animal.
Then the poor deaf creature gave her a reproachful look, filled with inexpressible sadness.
It would have been a touching spectacle anywhere, this beautiful girl, fresh, pure, charming and at the same time so weak, coming thus piously to the help of so much misery, deformity, and malice. On a pillory the spectacle was sublime.