by Victor Hugo
"Not a bit of it," replied Mahiette.
"What! You burned it then? After all, that was better. A sorcerer's child!"
"Nor that either, Gervaise. My lord the archbishop took an interest in the gipsy child; he exorcised it, blessed it, carefully took the devil out of the boy's body, and sent him to Paris to be exposed upon the wooden bed at Notre-Dame, as a foundling."
"These bishops," grumbled Gervaise, "never do anything like other people, just because they are so learned. Just think, Oudarde, of putting the devil among the foundlings! For that little monster is sure to have been the devil. Well, Mahiette, what did they do with him in Paris! I'm sure no charitable person would take him."
"I don't know," replied the native of Rheims; "it was just at that very time that my husband bought the clerk's office at Beru, two leagues away from town, and we thought no more about the matter; particularly as near Beru there are the two hills of Cernay, which quite hide the spires of the Rheims cathedral."
While talking thus, the three worthy women had reached the Place de Greve. In their preoccupation, they had passed the public breviary of the Tour-Roland without stopping, and were proceeding mechanically towards the pillory, around which the crowd increased momentarily. Probably the sight which at this instant attracted every eye would have made them completely forget the Rat-Hole, and the visit which they meant to pay, if the sturdy six-year-old Eustache, whom Mahiette led by the hand, had not suddenly reminded them of it by saying, as if some instinct warned him that the Rat-Hole lay behind him, "Mother, may I eat the cake now?"
Had Eustache been more crafty, that is to say less greedy, he would have waited still longer, and would not have risked the timid question, "Mother, may I eat the cake now?" until they were safe at home again, at Master Andry Musnier's house, in the University, in the Rue Madame-la-Valence, when both branches of the Seine and the five bridges of the City would have been between the Rat-Hole and the cake.
This same question, a very rash one at the time that Eustache asked it, roused Mahiette's attention.
"By the way," she exclaimed, "we are forgetting the recluse! Show me your Rat-Hole, that I may carry her my cake."
"Directly," said Oudarde. "It's a true charity."
This was not at all to Eustache's liking.
"Oh, my cake! my cake!" he whined, hunching up first one shoulder and then the other,--always a sign of extreme displeasure in such cases.
The three women retraced their steps, and as they approached the Tour-Roland, Oudarde said to the other two:--
"It will never do for all three of us to peep in at the hole at once, lest we should frighten the sachette. You two must pretend to be reading the Lord's Prayer in the breviary while I put my nose in at the window; she knows me slightly. I'll tell you when to come."
She went to the window alone. As soon as she looked in, profound pity was expressed in every feature, and her bright frank face changed color as quickly as if it had passed from sunlight into moonlight; her eyes grew moist, her mouth quivered as if she were about to weep. A moment later, she put her finger to her lips and beckoned to Mahiette.
Mahiette silently joined her, on tiptoe as if by the bedside of a dying person.
It was indeed a sad sight which lay before the two women, as they gazed without moving or breathing through the grated window of the Rat-Hole.
The cell was small, wider than it was long, with a vaulted roof, and seen from within looked like the inside of an exaggerated bishop's miter. Upon the bare stone floor, in a corner, sat, or rather crouched a woman. Her chin rested on her knees, which her crossed arms pressed closely against her breast. Bent double in this manner, clad in brown sackcloth, which covered her loosely from head to foot, her long grey locks drawn forward and falling over her face, down her legs to her feet, she seemed at first sight some strange shape outlined against the dark background of the cell, a sort of blackish triangle, which the ray of light entering at the window divided into two distinct bands of light and shadow. She looked like one of those specters, half darkness and half light, which we see in dreams, and in the extraordinary work of Goya,--pale, motionless, forbidding, cowering upon a tomb or clinging to the grating of a dungeon. It was neither man nor woman, nor living being, nor any definite form; it was a figure; a sort of vision in which the real and the imaginary were blended like twilight and daylight. Beneath her disheveled hair, which fell to the ground, the outlines of a stern and emaciated profile were barely visible; the tip of one bare foot just peeped from the hem of her garment, seeming to be curled up on the hard, cold floor. The little of human form which could be dimly seen beneath that mourning garb made the beholder shudder.
This figure, which seemed rooted to the ground, appeared to have neither motion, thought, nor breath. In that thin sackcloth, in January, lying half naked on a granite floor, without fire, in the darkness of a dungeon, whose slanting window never admitted the sun, only the icy blast, she did not seem to suffer, or even to feel.
She seemed to have been turned to stone like her cell, to ice like the season. Her hands were clasped, her eyes were fixed. At the first glance, she seemed a specter, at the second, a statue.
And yet at intervals her blue lips were parted by a breath, and trembled; but they seemed as dead and as destitute of will as leaves blowing in the wind.
Yet her dull eyes gazed with an ineffable expression, a deep, mournful, serious, perpetually fixed expression, on a corner of the cell hidden from those outside; her look seemed to connect all the somber thoughts of her distressed soul with some mysterious object.
Such was the creature who was called "the recluse" from her habitation, and "sachette" from her dress.
The three women--for Gervaise had joined Mahiette and Oudarde--peered through the window. Their heads cut off the faint light which entered the dungeon; but the wretched inmate seemed unconscious of her loss, and paid no attention to them. "Don't disturb her," said Oudarde in low tones; "she is in one of her ecstatic fits: she is praying."
But Mahiette still gazed with ever-increasing anxiety at the wan, wrinkled face, and those disheveled locks, and her eyes filled with tears. "How strange that would be!" she muttered.
She put her head through the iron bars, and at last contrived to get a glimpse of the corner upon which the unhappy woman's eyes were forever riveted.
When she withdrew her head from the window, her face was bathed in tears.
"What is that woman's name?" she asked Oudarde.
Oudarde answered,--
"We call her Sister Gudule."
"And I," returned Mahiette,--"I call her Paquette Chantefleurie."
Then, putting her finger to her lip, she signed to the amazed Oudarde to put her head through the aperture and look.
Oudarde looked, and saw, in the corner upon which the recluse's eye was fixed in such sad ecstasy, a tiny pink satin shoe, embroidered with gold and silver spangles.
Gervaise looked in after Oudarde, and then the three women began to weep at the sight of that miserable mother.
However, neither their looks nor their tears disturbed the recluse. Her hands were still clasped, her lips dumb, her eyes set; and to those who knew her story it was heartrending to see her sit and gaze at that little shoe.
The three had not yet breathed a word; they dared not speak, even in a whisper. This profound silence, this great grief, this entire oblivion of all but one thing, affected them like the high altar at Easter or at Christmas-tide. They were silent, absorbed, ready to fall upon their knees. They felt as if they had just gone into church on Holy Saturday and heard the Tenebroe.
At last Gervaise, the most curious, and consequently the least sensitive of the three, made an attempt to draw the recluse into conversation: "Sister! Sister Gudule!"
She repeated the call three times, raising her voice each time. The recluse did not stir; there was not a word, not a look, not a sign of life.
Oudarde, in her turn, in a gentler and more affectionate tone, said, "Sister! holy
Sister Gudule!"
The same silence, the same absolute repose as before.
"What a strange woman!" cried Gervaise; "I don't believe she would mind a cannonade!"
"Perhaps she's deaf," said Oudarde.
"Maybe blind," added Gervaise.
"Perhaps dead," said Mahiette.
Certainly, if the soul had not already quitted that inert, torpid, lethargic body, it had at least withdrawn into it and concealed itself in depths to which the perceptions of the external organs did not penetrate.
"We shall have to leave the cake on the window-sill," said Oudarde; "but then some boy will steal it. How can we rouse her?"
Eustache, who had thus far been absorbed in a little wagon drawn by a big dog, which was just passing, suddenly noticed that his three companions were looking at something through the window, and, seized by curiosity in his turn, he scrambled upon a post, stood on tiptoe, and put his fat, rosy face to the opening, shouting,
"Mother, let me see, too!"
At the sound of this childish voice, clear, fresh, and ringing, the recluse trembled. She turned her head with the abrupt, quick, motion of a steel spring, her long, thin hands brushed the hair from her face, and she fixed her astonished, unhappy, despairing eyes upon the child. The look was like a flash of lightning.
"Oh, my God!" she instantly exclaimed, hiding her head upon her knees, and it seemed as if her hoarse voice tore her chest, "at least do not show me those of others!"
"Good-morning, madame," said the child, gravely.
But the shock had, as it were, aroused the recluse. A long shudder ran through her entire frame from head to foot; her teeth chattered; she half raised her head, and said, as she pressed her elbows to her sides and took her feet in her hands as if to warm them,--
"Oh, how bitterly cold!"
"Poor woman!" said Oudarde, pitifully; "would you like a little fire?"
She shook her head in token of refusal.
"Well," added Oudarde, offering her a bottle, "here is some hippocras, which will warm you; drink."
She again shook her head, looked steadily at Oudarde, and answered, "Water."
Oudarde insisted. "No, sister, water is no fit drink for January. You must drink a little hippocras, and eat this wheaten cake, which we have made for you."
She put aside the cake which Mahiette offered her, and said, "Some black bread."
"Come," said Gervaise, feeling a charitable impulse in her turn, and unfastening her woollen mantle, "here is a covering somewhat warmer than yours. Throw this over your shoulders."
She refused the mantle as she had the bottle and the cake, and answered, "A cloth."
"But," resumed the kind-hearted Oudarde, "you must have seen that yesterday was a holiday."
"I knew it," said the recluse; "for two days I have had no water in my jug."
She added after a pause: "On a holiday, every one forgets me. They do well. Why should people remember me, who never think of them? When the fire goes out, the ashes are soon cold."
And as if wearied by so many words, she let her head fall upon her knees once more. The simple and charitable Oudarde, who interpreted her last words as another complaint of the cold, answered innocently, "Then wouldn't you like a little fire?"
"Fire!" said the recluse in a singular tone; "and will you give me a little for the poor baby too,--the baby who has been under ground these fifteen years?"
She trembled in every limb, her voice quivered, her eyes flashed; she had risen to her knees; she suddenly stretched her thin white hand towards the child, who was looking at her in surprise.
"Take away that child!" she cried. "The gipsy woman will soon pass by."
Then she fell face downwards, and her forehead struck the floor, with the sound of one stone upon another. The three women thought her dead. But a moment later she stirred, and they saw her drag herself upon her hands and knees to the corner where the little shoe lay. They dared not look longer; they turned away their eyes; but they heard a thousand kisses and a thousand sighs, mingled with agonizing cries and dull blows like those of a head dashed against a wall; then after one of these blows, so violent that they all three started, they heard nothing more.
"Has she killed herself?" said Gervaise, venturing to put her head through the bars. "Sister! Sister Gudule!"
"Sister Gudule!" repeated Oudarde.
"Oh, heavens! She does not move!" exclaimed Gervaise. "Can she indeed be dead? Gudule! Gudule!"
Mahiette, until now so choked by emotion that she could not speak, made an effort. "Wait a minute," she said; then going to the window, she cried, "Paquette! Paquette Chantefleurie!"
A child who innocently blows on an ill-lighted firecracker and makes it explode in his face, is no more alarmed than was Mahiette at the effect of the name so suddenly flung into Sister Gudule's cell.
The recluse trembled from head to foot, sprang to her bare feet, and rushed to the window with such flaming eyes that Mahiette, Oudarde, the other woman and the child retreated to the farthest edge of the quay.
But still the forbidding face of the recluse remained pressed against the window-bars. "Oh! oh!" she screamed with a terrible laugh, "the gipsy woman calls me!"
At this instant the scene which was passing at the pillory caught her wild eye. Her brow wrinkled with horror; she stretched her skeleton arms from her cell and cried in a voice which sounded like a death-rattle, "Have you come again, you daughter of Egypt? Is it you who call me, you child-stealer? Well! may you be accursed! accursed! accursed! accursed!"
CHAPTER IV
A Tear for a Drop of Water
These words were, so to speak, the connecting link between two scenes which up to this instant had gone on simultaneously, each upon its own particular stage: one, of which we have just read, at the Rat-Hole; the other, of which we shall now read, at the pillory. The former was witnessed only by the three women whose acquaintance the reader has just made, the spectators of the latter consisted of the crowd of people whom we saw some time since gathering in the Place de Greve, about the gibbet and the pillory.
This crowd, whom the sight of the four officers posted at the four corners of the pillory ever since nine in the morning led to expect an execution of some sort, perhaps not a hanging, but a whipping, cropping of ears, or something of the sort, this crowd had grown so rapidly that the four officers, too closely hemmed in, were more than once obliged to drive the people back by a free use of their whips and their horses' heels.
The populace, well accustomed to wait for public executions, betrayed no great impatience. They amused themselves by looking at the pillory,--a very simple structure, consisting of a cube of masonry some ten feet high, and hollow within. A very steep flight of stairs of unhewn stone., called the ladder, led to the upper platform, upon which was a horizontal wheel made of oak. The victim was bound to this wheel in a kneeling posture, with his hands behind him. A wooden shaft, set in motion by a capstan concealed inside the machine, made the wheel revolve horizontally, thus presenting the prisoner's face to each side of the square in turn. This was called "turning" a criminal.
It is evident that the pillory of the Place de Greve was far from possessing all the attractions of the pillory of the Halles. There was nothing architectural or monumental about it. It had no roof with an iron cross, no octagonal lantern, no slender columns expanding at the edge of the roof into capitals composed of acanthus-leaves and flowers, no huge fantastic gutter-spouts, no carved wood-work, no delicate sculpture cut deep into the stone.
Here the spectator must needs be content with the four rough walls, two stone facings, and a shabby stone gibbet, plain and bare.
The treat would have been a sorry one for lovers of Gothic architecture. It is true that no one was ever less interested in monuments than your good burghers of the Middle Ages, who paid very little heed to the beauty of a pillory.
The victim appeared at last, tied to the tail of a cart; and when he had been hoisted to the top of the platform, where he coul
d be seen from all parts of the square bound to the wheel of the pillory with straps and ropes, a prodigious hooting, mingled with shouts and laughter, burst from the spectators. They had recognized Quasimodo.
It was indeed he. It was a strange reverse. He was now pilloried on the same place where he was the day before hailed, acclaimed, and proclaimed Pope and Prince of Fools, and attended by the Duke of Egypt, the King of Tunis, the Emperor of Galilee! One thing is certain; there was not a soul in the crowd, not even himself, in turn triumphant and a victim, who could distinctly draw a mental comparison between these two situations. Gringoire and his philosophy were lacking at spectacle.
Soon Michel Noiret, sworn trumpeter to our lord the king, imposed silence on all beholders, and proclaimed the sentence, according to the provost's order and command. He then retired behind the cart, with his men in livery coats.
Quasimodo, utterly impassive, never winked. All resistance on his part was rendered impossible by what was then called, in the language of criminal law, "the vehemence and firmness of the bonds;" which means that the chains and thongs probably cut into his flesh. This, by-the-bye, is a tradition of the jail and the convict prison which is not yet lost, and which the handcuffs still preserve as a precious relic among us, civilized, mild, and humane as we are (not to mention the guillotine and the galleys).
He allowed himself to be led, pushed, carried, lifted, tied, and re-tied. His face revealed nothing more than the surprise of a savage or an idiot. He was known to be deaf; he seemed to be blind.
He was placed upon his knees on the circular plank; he made no resistance. He was stripped of shirt and doublet to the waist; he submitted. He was bound with a fresh system of straps and buckles; he suffered himself to be buckled and bound. Only from time to time he breathed heavily, like a calf whose head hangs dangling from the back of the butcher's cart.
"The blockhead!" said Jehan Frollo du Moulin to his friend Robin Poussepain (for the two students had followed the victim, as a matter of course); "he understands no more about it than a cockchafer shut up in a box!"
A shout of laughter ran through the crowd when Quasimodo's hump, his camel breast, his horny, hairy shoulders, were bared to view. During this burst of merriment, a man in the city livery, short of stature, and strong, mounted the platform and took his place by the prisoner's side. His name was soon circulated among the spectators. It was Master Pierrat Torterue, sworn torturer of the Chatelet.