by Hugo, Victor
Tristan cast a sidelong look at the recluse. ‘I think the old girl is getting upset!’
The luckless woman realized that everything depended on putting on a bold face, and with death in her heart she began to snigger. Mothers have that kind of strength. ‘Tush!’ she said, ‘the man’s drunk. More than a year ago the tail of a cart carrying stones hit my window and smashed in the grating. I can tell you, I gave the carter a piece of my mind!’
‘That’s true,’ said another archer, ‘I was there.’
There are always people everywhere who have seen everything. The unhoped-for testimony of the archer put new spirit into the recluse for whom this interrogation was like crossing over an abyss on a knife-edge.
But she was condemned to continual alternation of hope and alarm.
‘If a cart did that,’ the first soldier retorted, ‘the stumps of the bars should be pushed inwards, whereas they are bent outwards.’
‘Ha! ha!’ Tristan said to the soldier, ‘you’ve got a nose like an investigator at the Châtelet. Answer what he says, old woman!’
‘For goodness’ sake!’ she cried, feeling cornered, and in a tearful voice despite herself, ‘I swear to you, my lord, that it was a cart that broke those bars. You’ve heard that this man saw it. Anyhow, what’s that got to do with your gypsy?’
‘The devil!’ went on the soldier, flattered by the Provost’s praise, ‘the breaks in the iron are quite fresh!’
Tristan nodded. She went pale. ‘How long ago, do you say, was this cart business?’
‘A month, maybe two weeks, my lord. I don’t remember.’
‘First of all she said more than a year,’ observed the soldier.
‘That’s suspicious!’ said the Provost.
‘My lord,’ she cried, still pressed up against the window, trembling with fear lest suspicion should prompt them to stick their heads through and look into the cell, ‘my lord, I swear to you that it was a cart broke this grating. I swear by the holy angels in paradise. If it was not a cart, may I be eternally damned and I deny God.’
‘You’re putting a lot of warmth into that oath!’ said Tristan with his inquisitorial look.
The poor woman felt her assurance slipping away more and more. She had begun making blunders, and realized with terror that she was not saying what she should have said.
At this point another soldier arrived, shouting: ‘My lord, the old hag is lying. The witch didn’t escape by the rue du Mouton. The chain has been stretched across the street all night, and the chain-keeper has seen no one go by.’
Tristan, whose expression was becoming more sinister every moment, addressed the recluse: ‘What do you have to say to that?’
She tried once more to face up to this new incident. ‘I don’t know, my lord, I may have been mistaken. I think she crossed the water, in fact.’
‘That’s in the opposite direction,’ said the Provost. ‘It’s not very likely, though, that she’d want to go back to the Cité where they were pursuing her. You’re lying, old woman!’
‘Anyhow,’ added the first soldier, ‘there isn’t a boat on this side of the water or on the other.’
‘She must have swum across,’ replied the recluse, defending her ground inch by inch.
‘Can women swim?’ asked the soldier.
‘God’s head! old woman! you’re lying! you’re lying!’ Tristan angrily went on. ‘I’ve a good mind to drop this witch hunt and take you in. Perhaps a quarter of an hour of the question will drag the truth out of you. Come on! You’ll come along with us.’
She seized on his words eagerly—’As you wish, my lord. Go on. Go on. The question, I don’t mind. Take me along. Quick! quick! Let’s go right away.’ During that time, she was thinking, my daughter can escape.
‘God’s death!’ said the Provost, ‘how greedy she is for the rack! I can’t make head nor tail of this mad old woman.’
A grizzled old sergeant of the watch stepped forward and addressed the Provost: ‘Mad, indeed, my lord! If she let the gypsy go, it’s not her fault, for she has no liking for gypsies. I’ve done fifteen years in the watch, and every evening I’ve heard her cursing gypsy women and calling down endless execrations on them. If the one we are after is, as I believe, the little dancer with the goat, she hates her above all.’
Gudule made an effort and said: ‘Above all that one.’
The unanimous testimony of the men of the watch confirmed the old sergeant’s words for the Provost. Despairing of getting anything out of the recluse, Tristan l’Hermite turned his back on her and with inexpressible anxiety she saw him walk slowly towards his horse. ‘Come on,’ he said between his teeth, ‘on our way! Resume the search. I shan’t sleep until the gypsy girl has been hanged.’
He still hesitated a while, however, before mounting his horse. Gudule palpitated between life and death as she watched him scanning the square with the restless look of a hunting-dog that senses the quarry’s lair nearby and is reluctant to move away. At last he shook his head and swung into the saddle. Gudule’s heart, so horribly compressed, now dilated, and she murmured, casting a glance at her daughter whom she had not yet dared to look at since the men’s arrival: ‘Saved!’
The poor child had stayed in her corner all that time without breathing or stirring, the image of death standing before her. She had missed nothing of the scene between Gudule and Tristan, and each of her mother’s fits of anguish had found an echo in her. She had heard each successive strain. On the thread holding her suspended over the abyss, a score of times she had thought she was about to see it snap, and she was at last beginning to breathe again and feel her feet on firm ground. Just then she heard a voice saying to the Provost:
‘Corbœuf! Monsieur the Provost, I’m a soldier and it’s not my business to hang witches. The rabble has been put down. Allow me to rejoin my company, because it’s without its captain.’ The voice was that of Phoebus de Châteaupers. What took place within her defies description. So he was there, her friend, protector, support, refuge, her Phoebus! She stood up, and before her mother could stop her, she hurled herself at the window, crying: ‘Phoebus! come to me, my Phoebus!’
Phoebus was no longer there. He had just galloped off round the corner of the rue de la Coutellerie. But Tristan had not gone yet.
The recluse rushed at her daughter roaring. She pulled her back violently, digging her nails into the girl’s neck. A mother tigress is not too particular about such details. But it was too late. Tristan had seen.
‘Ha! ha!’ he cried, with a laugh that bared his teeth and made his face look like a wolfs muzzle, ‘two mice in the mouse-hole!’
‘I suspected as much,’ said the soldier.
Tristan clapped him on the shoulder: ‘You make a good cat! Come on,’ he added, ‘where’s Henriet Cousin?’
A man who had neither the dress nor the bearing of the soldiers stepped out of their ranks. He wore a particoloured outfit, half grey, half brown; he had straight hair, leather sleeves, and a bundle of rope in his huge fist. This man was constantly in Tristan’s company, as Tristan was constantly in that of Louis XL
‘My friend,’ said Tristan l’Hermite, ‘I presume that’s the witch we’ve been looking for. You’ll hang it for me. Have you got your ladder?’
‘There’s one over in the shed at the Maison-aux-Piliers,’ the man answered. ‘Is that the gallows we’re going to use for the job?’ he continued, pointing to the stone gibbet.
‘Yes.’
‘Ho! ho!’ the man went on, with a coarse laugh even more bestial than the Provost’s, ‘we shan’t have far to go.’
‘Get a move on,’ said Tristan. ‘You can laugh afterwards.’
Meanwhile, ever since Tristan had seen her daughter and all hope was lost, the recluse had not uttered a word. She had flung the poor gypsy, half dead, into the corner of the cellar, and had resumed her position at the window, both hands resting on the corner of the ledge like a pair of talons. They saw her in this attitude fearlessly eyeing all tho
se soldiers with a gaze which had become once more wild and crazy. When Henriet Cousin approached the cell she made such a savage face at him that he fell back.
‘My lord,’ he said returning to the Provost, ‘which one am I to take?’
‘The young one.’
‘That’s good, for the old one looks troublesome.’
‘That poor little dancer with her goat!’ said the old sergeant of the watch.
Henriet Cousin went back back to the window. The look in the mother’s eyes made him lower his own. He said rather timidly:
‘Madame …’
She interrupted in a very low, furious voice: ‘What do you want?’
‘Not you,’ he said, ‘the other one.’
‘What other one?’
‘The girl.’
She began to shake her head and shout: ‘There’s no one here! There’s no one here! There’s no one here!’
‘Yes, there is,’ the hangman went on, ‘as you know very well. Let me take the girl. I don’t want to hurt you.’
She said with an odd sort of giggle: ‘Ah! you don’t want to hurt me!’
‘Let me take the other one, madame; that is the wish of Monsieur the Provost.’
She repeated crazily: ‘There’s no one here.’
‘I tell you there is!’ replied the hangman. ‘We’ve all seen that there are two of you.’
‘Take a look!’ jeered the recluse. ‘Stick your head through the window.’
The hangman studied the mother’s fingernails and did not dare.
‘Hurry up!’ shouted Tristan, who had just posted his troops in a circle round the Rat-hole, and was waiting on horseback beside the gibbet.
Henriet went back to the Provost once more, wholly at a loss. He had put down his rope on the ground, and was awkwardly rolling his hat in his hands. ‘My lord,’ he asked, ‘how do I get in?’
‘Through the door.’
‘There isn’t one.’
‘Through the window.’
‘It’s too narrow.’
‘Widen it,’ Tristan said angrily. ‘Don’t you have any picks?’
From the depths of her cave the mother, still in the same position, was watching. She no longer had any hope, she no longer knew what she wanted, but she did not want them to take her daughter away from her.
Henriet Cousin went to fetch the hangman’s box of tools from the shed at the Maison-aux-Piliers. He also took from there the double ladder, which he set up right against the gibbet. Five or six men from the Provostry armed themselves with picks and crowbars, and Tristan made his way with them to the window.
‘Old woman,’ said the Provost in a stern tone, ‘hand over that girl to us without any fuss.’
She looked at him like someone failing to understand.
‘God’s head!’ Tristan went on, ‘what’s wrong with you, trying to prevent the witch from being hanged at the King’s pleasure?’
The wretched woman began to laugh her wild laugh. ‘What’s wrong with me? She’s my daughter.’
The tone in which she uttered that word made even Henriet Cousin shudder.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ the Provost replied. ‘But such is the King’s good pleasure.’
With her terrible laugh growing even louder she cried: ‘What does your king matter to me? I tell you she’s my daughter!’
‘Break through the wall,’ said Tristan.
To make a wide enough opening they had only to dislodge one course of stone underneath the window. When the mother heard the picks and crowbars sapping her fortress, she let out a frightful scream, then began racing round her cell at terrifying speed, a habit of wild animals which she had acquired from being caged up. She did not say anything more, but her eyes blazed. The soldiers’ blood ran cold.
Suddenly she picked up her paving stone, laughed, and flung it with both hands at the men working. The stone, badly aimed, for her hands were trembling, did not hit anyone, and came to rest under the hooves of Tristan’s horse. She ground her teeth.
Meanwhile, although the sun was not yet up, it was broad daylight, a fine rosy tint brightened up the rotten old chimneys of the Maison-aux-Piliers. It was the hour when the first early-morning windows in the great city open cheerfully upon the roofs. A few peasants, a few fruiterers going to market on their donkeys, were beginning to cross the Grève. They stopped for a moment in front of this body of soldiers massed around the Rat-hole, gazed in amazement, and went on their way.
The recluse had gone to sit down by her daughter, putting her own body in front of her as a shield, her eyes staring, listening to the poor child who did not stir and whose only utterance was a low murmur: ‘Phoebus! Phoebus!’ As the work of demolition seemed to be making progress, the mother automatically moved back, pressing the girl more and more tightly against the wall. The recluse suddenly saw the stone shift (for she was standing guard and never took her eyes off it), and heard Tristan’s voice encouraging the workmen. At that, she emerged from the state of collapse into which she had fallen for a few moments, and cried out, and while she spoke her voice at one moment rent the ear like a saw, at the next stammered as if every possible malediction had crowded upon her lips to burst out simultaneously. ‘Oh! oh! This is horrible! You are brigands! Are you really going to take my daughter from me? I tell you she’s my daughter! Oh! you cowards! hangman’s lackeys! miserable murdering churls! Help! Help! Fire! But are they going to take my child from me just like that? Who is it they call the good God, then?’
Then, foaming at the mouth, wild-eyed, on all fours like a panther, bristling all over, she addressed Tristan: ‘Come a bit nearer to take my daughter! Can’t you understand that this woman is telling you it’s her daughter? Do you know what it is to have a child? Eh, you lynx, haven’t you ever lain with your mate? Haven’t you ever had a cub? And if you do have little ones, isn’t there something inside you that is stirred when they howl?’
‘Lower the stone,’ said Tristan; ‘it’s loose now.’
The crowbars raised the heavy stone course. It was, as we have said, the mother’s last rampart. She threw herself upon it, tried to hold it back, dug her nails into the stone, but the massive block, set moving by six men, escaped from her and slid gently to the ground along the iron bars.
When the mother saw that they had now made a way in, she fell across the opening, barricading the breach with her body, wringing her arms, banging her head against the stone floor, and crying in a barely audible voice made hoarse by exhaustion: ‘Help! fire! fire!’
‘Now take the girl,’ said the ever-impassive Tristan.
The mother gave the soldiers such a fearful glare that they felt more like retreating than advancing.
‘Go on, then,’ the Provost went on. ‘You, Henriet Cousin!’
No one moved.
The Provost swore: ‘Christ’s head! my soldiers! scared of a woman!’
‘My lord,’ said Henriet, ‘do you call that a woman?’
‘She has a lion’s mane!’ said another.
‘Go on!’ the Provost retorted, ‘the opening is wide enough. Go in three abreast, as at the breach at Pontoise. Let’s have done, Mahomet’s death! The first man who falls back, I’ll cut him in two!’
Caught between the Provost and the mother, both threatening, the soldiers hesitated a moment, then, making up their minds, advanced on the Rat-hole.
When the recluse saw that, she abruptly knelt upright, pushed her hair away from her face, then let her torn, skinny hands drop on to her thighs. Then great tears fell from her eyes one by one, and ran down her furrowed cheeks like a torrent in the bed it has scoured out. At the same time she began to speak, but in tones so beseeching, so gentle, so submissive and so harrowing, that around Tristan more than one old sergeant who would have eaten human flesh was wiping his eyes.
‘My lords! messieurs the sergeants, one word! There’s something I must tell you. She’s my daughter, do you see? The dear little daughter I had lost! Listen. It’s quite a story. I am well acquain
ted with messieurs the sergeants, believe me. They were always kind to me at the time when little boys used to throw stones at me because I led a life of shame. You see? you’ll let me keep my child when you know! I’m a poor harlot. It was the gypsy women who stole her from me. I’ve even kept her shoe these fifteen years. Look, here it is! That was her little foot. At Reims! Chantefleurie! rue Folle-Peine! You may have known it. That was me. When you were young, those were good times. We had some merry moments. You’ll have pity on me, won’t you my lords? The gypsies stole her from me, they hid her from me for fifteen years. I thought she was dead. Imagine, my good friends, I thought she was dead. I’ve spent fifteen years in this cellar, without a fire in winter. That’s hard, that is. Poor dear little shoe! I cried out so much that the good Lord heard me. Last night he gave me back my daughter. It was a miracle from the good Lord. She wasn’t dead. You won’t take her from me, I’m sure. Now, if it was me, I wouldn’t say that, but her, a child of 16! Let her have time to see the sun! What’s she done to you? Nothing at all. Nor have I—if only you knew that she’s all I’ve got, that I am old, that she’s a blessing sent to me by the Holy Virgin. And then you are all so kind! You didn’t know she was my daughter, but you know now. Oh! I love her! Monsieur the High Provost, I’d rather have a hole in my insides than see a scratch on her finger. You are someone who looks like a kind lord! What I’m telling you explains it all, doesn’t it? Oh! if you ever had a mother, my lord! You are the captain, let me keep my child! Look at me praying to you on my knees as one prays to Jesus Christ! I’m not asking anything from anyone, but I want my child! Oh! I want to keep my child! The good Lord, who is the master, didn’t give her back to me for nothing! The King! the King, you say! He won’t get much pleasure from having my little girl killed! And he’s a kind king too! She’s my daughter! my daughter, mine! She doesn’t belong to the King! She’s not yours! I want to go away! We want to go away! Come now, when two women are passing by, one mother, the other daughter, you let them through! Let us through! We’re from Reims. Oh! you’re very kind, messieurs the sergeants, I love you all. You won’t take my dear little daughter from me, you can’t! It’s quite impossible, isn’t it? My child! my child!’