The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

by Victor Hugo

  He began by placing on one corner of the pillory a black hour-glass, the upper part of which was full of red sand, which dropped slowly into the lower half; then he took off his party-colored coat, and there was seen hanging from his right hand a slim, slender whip with long white thongs, shining, knotted, braided, armed with metal tips. With his left hand he carelessly rolled his right shirt-sleeve up to his armpit.

  Meanwhile Jehan Frollo shouted, lifting his fair curly head high above the crowd (he had climbed Robin Poussepain's shoulders for the express purpose), "Come and see, gentlemen and ladies! They are going straightway to flog Master Quasimodo, the bell-ringer of my brother the archdeacon of Josas, a strange specimen of Oriental architecture, with a dome for his back and twisted columns for legs."

  All the people laughed, especially the children and the young girls.

  At last the executioner stamped his foot. The wheel began to turn. Quasimodo reeled in spite of his bonds. The astonishment suddenly depicted upon his misshapen face redoubled the bursts of laughter around him.

  Suddenly, just as the wheel in its revolution presented to Master Pierrat Quasimodo's mountainous back, Master Pierrat raised his arm; the thin lashes hissed through the air like a brood of vipers, and fell furiously upon the wretched man's shoulders.

  Quasimodo started as if roused abruptly from a dream. He began to understand. He writhed in his bonds; surprise and pain distorted the muscles of his face, but he did not heave a sigh. He merely bent his head back, to the right, then to the left, shaking it like a bull stung in the flank by a gad-fly.

  A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another, and another, and so on and on. The wheel did not cease from turning, or the blows from raining down.

  Soon the blood spurted; it streamed in countless rivulets over the hunchback's swarthy shoulders; and the slender thongs, as they swung in the air, sprinkled it in drops among the crowd.

  Quasimodo had resumed, apparently at least, his former impassivity. He had tried at first, secretly and without great visible effort, to burst his bonds. His eye kindled, his muscles stiffened, his limbs gathered all their force, and the straps and chains stretched. The struggle was mighty, prodigious, desperate; but the tried and tested fetters of the provosty held firm. They cracked; and that was all. Quasimodo fell back exhausted. Surprise gave way, upon his features, to a look of bitter and profound dejection. He closed his single eye, dropped his head upon his breast, and feigned death.

  Thenceforth he did not budge. Nothing could wring a movement from him, neither his blood, which still flowed, nor the blows, which increased in fury, nor the rage of the executioner, who became excited and intoxicated by his work, nor the noise of the horrid lashes, keener and sharper than the stings of wasps.

  At last an usher from the Chatelet, dressed in black, mounted on a black horse, who had been posted beside the ladder from the beginning of the execution of the sentence, extended his ebony wand towards the hour-glass. The executioner paused. The wheel stopped. Quasimodo's eye reopened slowly.

  The flagellation was ended. Two attendants of the executioner washed the victim's bleeding shoulders, rubbed them with some salve which at once closed all the wounds, and threw over his back a piece of yellow cotton cloth cut after the pattern of a priest's cope. Meanwhile Pierrat Torterue let his red lashes soaked with blood drip upon the pavement.

  But all was not over for Quasimodo. He had still to spend in the pillory that hour so judiciously added by Master Florian Barbedienne to the sentence of Master Robert d'Estouteville,--all to the greater glory of Jean de Cumene's old physiological and psychological pun: "Surdus absurdus."cf

  The hour-glass was therefore turned, and the hunchback was left bound to the plank as before, in order that justice might be executed to the utmost.

  The people, particularly in the Middle Ages, were to society what the child is to a family. So long as they remain in their primitive condition of ignorance, of moral and intellectual nonage, it may be said of that as of a child,--

  "It is an age without pity."

  We have already shown that Quasimodo was the object of universal hatred,--for more than one good reason, it is true. There was hardly a single spectator in the crowd who had not--or did not think he had--grounds for complaint against the malicious hunchback of Notre-Dame. Every one was delighted to see him in the pillory; and the severe punishment which he had just received, and the piteous state in which it had left him, far from softening the hearts of the populace, had made their hatred keener by adding to it a spice of merriment.

  Thus, "public vengeance," as the legal jargon still styles it, once satisfied, a thousand private spites took their turn at revenge. Here, as in the Great Hall, the women made themselves especially conspicuous. All bore him a grudge,--some for his mischief, others for his ugliness. The latter were the more furious.

  "Oh, you image of Antichrist!" said one.

  "Broomstick-rider!" cried another.

  "What a fine tragic face!" yelled a third. "It would surely make you the Pope of Fools if today were only yesterday."

  "That's right," added an old woman. "This is the pillory face. When shall we have the gallows face?"

  "When shall we see you buried a hundred feet below ground, with your big bell upon your head, you cursed bell-ringer?"

  "And to think that it's this demon that rings the Angelus!"

  "Oh, you deaf man! you blind man! you hunchback! you monster!"

  And the two students, Jehan du Moulin and Robin Poussepain, sang at the top of their voices the old popular refrain:--

  "A halter for the gallows-bird!

  A fagot for the ugly ape!"

  Countless other insults rained upon him, mingled with hoots, curses, laughter, and occasional stones.

  Quasimodo was deaf, but his sight was capital, and the fury of the mob was no less forcibly painted on their faces than in their words. Besides, the stones which struck him explained the peals of laughter.

  He bore it for a time; but little by little his patience, which had resisted the torturer's whip, gave way, and rebelled against all these insect stings. The Asturian bull, which pays but little heed to the attacks of the picador, is maddened by the dogs and the banderillos.

  At first he glanced slowly and threateningly around the crowd; but, bound fast as he was, his glance was impotent to drive away those flies which galled his wounds. Then he struggled in his fetters, and his frantic efforts made the old pillory wheel creak upon its timbers. All this only increased the shouts and derision of the crowd.

  Then the wretched man, unable to break the collar which held him chained like a wild beast, became quiet again; only at intervals a sigh of rage heaved his breast. His face showed no trace of mortification or shame. He was too far removed from the existing state of society, and too nearly allied to a state of nature, to know what shame was. Besides, it is doubtful if infamy be a thing which can be felt by one afflicted with that degree of deformity. But rage, hate, despair, slowly veiled the hideous face with a cloud which grew darker and darker, more and more heavily charged with an electricity revealed by countless flashes from the eye of the Cyclop.

  However, this cloud was lightened for a moment as a mule passed through the crowd, bearing a priest on his back. As soon as he saw that mule and that priest, the poor sufferer's face softened. The fury which convulsed it gave way to a strange smile, full of ineffable sweetness, affection, and tenderness. As the priest approached, this smile became more pronounced, more distinct, more radiant. It was as if the unhappy man hailed the coming of a Savior. Yet, when the mule was near enough to the pillory for his rider to recognize the prisoner, the priest cast down his eyes, turned back abruptly, spurred his animal on either side as if in haste to avoid humiliating appeals, and very far from anxious to be greeted and recognized by a poor devil in such a plight.

  The priest was the archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo.

  The cloud grew darker than ever upon the face of Quasimodo. The smile lingered for
some time, although it became bitter, dejected, profoundly sad.

  Time passed. He had been there at least an hour and a half, wounded, ill-treated, incessantly mocked, and almost stoned to death.

  Suddenly he again struggled in his chains with renewed despair, which made all the timbers that held him quiver; and breaking the silence which he had hitherto obstinately kept, he cried in a hoarse and furious voice more like the bark of a dog than a human cry, and which drowned the sound of the hooting, "Water!"

  This exclamation of distress, far from exciting compassion, only increased the amusement of the good Parisian populace who surrounded the ladder, and who, it must be confessed, taken in the mass and as a multitude, were at this time scarcely less cruel and brutish than that horrible tribe of Vagrant Vagabonds to whom we have already introduced the reader, and who were simply the lowest stratum of the people. Not a voice was raised around the wretched sufferer, except to mock at his thirst.

  Certainly he was at this moment more grotesque and repulsive than he was pitiable, with his livid and streaming face, his wild eye, his mouth foaming with rage and suffering, and his tongue protruding. It must also be acknowledged, that, even had there been in the throng any charitable soul tempted to give a cup of cold water to the miserable creature in his agony, so strong an idea of shame and ignominy was attached to the infamous steps of the pillory, that this alone would have sufficed to repel the Good Samaritan.

  In a few minutes Quasimodo cast a despairing look upon the crowd, and repeated in a still more heartrending voice, "Water!"

  Every one laughed.

  "Drink that!" shouted Robin Poussepain, flinging in his face a sponge which had been dragged through the gutter. "There, you deaf monster! I owe you something."

  A woman aimed a stone at his head:--

  "That will teach you to wake us at night with your cursed chimes!"

  "Well, my boy!" howled a cripple, striving to reach him with his crutch, "will you cast spells on us again from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame?"

  "Here's a porringer to drink out of!" added a man, letting fly a broken jug at his breast. " 'Twas you who made my wife give birth to a double-headed child, just by walking past her."

  "And my cat have a kitten with six feet!" shrieked an old woman, hurling a tile at him.

  "Water!" repeated the gasping Quasimodo for the third time.

  At this moment he saw the crowd separate. A young girl, oddly dressed, stepped from their midst. She was accompanied by a little white goat with gilded horns, and held a tambourine in her hand.

  Quasimodo's eye gleamed. It was the gipsy girl whom he had tried to carry off the night before,--a feat for which he dimly felt that he was even now being punished; which was not in the least true, since he was only punished for the misfortune of being deaf, and having been tried by a deaf judge. He did not doubt that she too came to be avenged, and to take her turn at him with the rest.

  He watched her nimbly climb the ladder. Rage and spite choked him. He longed to destroy the pillory; and had the lightning of his eye had power to blast, the gipsy girl would have been reduced to ashes long before she reached the platform.

  Without a word she approached the sufferer, who vainly writhed and twisted to avoid her, and loosening a gourd from her girdle, she raised it gently to the parched lips of the miserable wretch.

  Then from that eye, hitherto so dry and burning, a great tear trickled, and rolled slowly down the misshapen face, so long convulsed with despair. It was perhaps the first that the unfortunate man had ever shed.10

  But he forgot to drink. The gipsy girl made her customary little grimace of impatience, and, smilingly, pressed the neck of the gourd to Quasimodo's jagged mouth.

  He drank long draughts; his thirst was ardent.

  When he had done, the poor wretch put out his black lips, doubtless to kiss the fair hand which had helped him. But the girl, perhaps not quite free from distrust, and mindful of the violent attempt of the previous night, withdrew her hand with the terrified gesture of a child who fears being bitten by a wild animal.

  Then the poor deaf man fixed upon her a look of reproach and unutterable sorrow.

  It would anywhere have been a touching sight, to see this lovely girl, fresh, pure, charming, and yet so weak, thus devoutly hastening to the help of so much misery, deformity, and malice. Upon a pillory, the sight was sublime.

  The people themselves were affected by it, and began to clap their hands and shout,--

  "Noel! Noel!"

  It was at this instant that the recluse saw, from the window of her cell, the gipsy girl upon the pillory, and hurled her ominous curse at her head:--

  "May you be accursed, daughter of Egypt! accursed! accursed!"

  CHAPTER V

  End of the Story of the Cake

  Esmeralda turned pale, and descended from the pillory with faltering steps. The voice of the recluse still pursued her:--"Come down! come down, you gipsy thief! You will go up again!"

  "The sachette has one of her ill turns today," muttered the people, and they said no more; for women of this sort were held in much awe, which made them sacred. No one liked to attack those who prayed night and day.

  The hour had come to release Quasimodo. He was unbound, and the mob dispersed.

  Near the Grand-Pont, Mahiette, who was returning home with her two companions, stopped suddenly:--

  "By the way, Eustache, what have you done with the cake?"

  "Mother," said the child, "while you were talking to the woman in that hole, there came a big dog and bit a piece out of my cake; so then I took a bite too."

  "What, sir!" she continued, "did you eat it all?"

  "Mother, it was the dog. I told him not to eat it, but he wouldn't mind me. So then I took a bite too; that's all!"

  "What a bad boy you are!" said his mother, smiling and scolding at once. "Only think, Oudarde! he ate every cherry on the tree in our orchard at Charlerange; so his grandfather says that he is sure to be a soldier. Let me catch you at it again, Master Eustache! Get along, you greedy boy!"

  BOOK SEVEN

  CHAPTER I

  On the Danger of Confiding a Secret to a Goat

  Several weeks had passed.11

  It was early in March. The sun, which Dubartas,cg that classic father of periphrase, had not yet dubbed "the grand duke of candles," was none the less bright and gay. It was one of those spring days which are so full of sweetness and beauty that all Paris, flocking into the squares and parks, keeps holiday as if it were a Sunday. On such clear, warm, peaceful days, there is one particular hour when the porch of Notre-Dame is especially worthy of admiration. It is the moment when the sun, already sinking towards the west, almost exactly faces the cathedral. Its rays, becoming more and more level, withdraw slowly from the pavement of the square, and climb the perpendicular face of the church, the shadows setting off the countless figures in high relief, while the great central rose-window flames like the eye of a Cyclop lighted up by reflections from his forge.

  It was just that hour.

  Opposite the lofty cathedral, reddened by the setting sun, upon the stone balcony built over the porch of a handsome Gothic house at the corner of the square and the Rue du Parvis, a group of lovely young girls were laughing and chatting gracefully and playfully. By the length of the veil which hung from the peak of their pointed coif, twined with pearls, down to their heels, by the fineness of the embroidered tucker which covered their shoulders, but still revealed, in the pleasing fashion of the day, the swell of their fair virgin bosoms, by the richness of their under petticoats, even costlier than their upper garments (wonderful refinement!), by the gauze, the silk, the velvet in which they were arrayed, and especially by the whiteness of their hands, which proved that they led a life of idle ease, it was easy to guess that these were rich heiresses. They were in fact Damoiselle Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her companions, Diane de Christeuil, Amelotte de Montmichel, Colombe de Gaillefontaine, and the little De Champchevrier, all daughters
of noble houses, just now visiting the widowed Madame de Gondelaurier, on account of Monseigneur de Beaujeu and his wife, who were coming to Paris in April to choose maids of honor to meet the Dauphiness Marguerite in Picardy and receive her from the hands of the Flemings. Now, all the country squires for thirty miles around aspired to win this favor for their daughters, and many of them had already been brought or sent to Paris. The damsels in question were intrusted by their parents to the discreet and reverend care of Madame Aloise de Gondelaurier, the widow of a former officer of the king's cross-bowmen, living in retirement, with her only daughter, in her house on the square in front of Notre-Dame.

  The balcony upon which the young girls sat opened from a room richly hung with fawn-colored Flemish leather stamped with golden foliage. The transverse beams on the ceiling diverted the eye by countless grotesque carvings, painted and gilded. Splendid enamels glittered here and there upon sculptured presses. A boar's head made of earthenware crowned a superb sideboard, the two steps of which showed that the mistress of the house was the wife or widow of a knight banneret. At the end of the room, beside a tall chimney-piece covered with armorial bearings and escutcheons, sat, in a rich red velvet arm-chair, Madame de Gondelaurier, whose fifty-five years were as plainly written in her garments as on her face. Near her stood a young man of aristocratic though somewhat arrogant and swaggering mien,--one of those fine fellows about whom all women agree, although serious men and physiog nomists shrug their shoulders at them. This youthful cavalier wore the brilliant uniform of a captain of the archers of the household troops, which is too much like the dress of Jupiter, described in the first part of' this story, for us to inflict a second description of it upon the reader.

  The damsels were seated, some in the room, some upon the balcony, the former upon squares of Utrecht velvet with golden corner-pieces, the latter on oaken stools carved with flowers and figures. Each held upon her knees a portion of a large piece of tapestry, at which they were all working together, and a long end of which trailed over the matting that covered the floor.