Part 18

In a few minutes the judgment was drawn up. Its tenor was simple and brief. The custom of the provostry and viscounty of Paris had not yet been shaped by President Thibaut Baillet and by Roger Barmne, the king's attorney. It was not yet obstructed by that tall thicket of quibbles and procedures which those two jurisconsults planted there at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Everything there was clear, expeditious, explicit. One walked straight to the goal, and at the end of every path one immediately perceived, without underbrush and without detour, the wheel, the gibbet, or the pillory. At least one knew where one was going.

The clerk presented the sentence to the provost, who affixed his seal, and went out to continue his round through the courtrooms, with a frame of mind that must have populated all the jails of Paris that day. Jehan Frollo and Robin Poussepain laughed under their breath. Quasimodo looked on at it all with an air of indifferent and astonished.

Meanwhile the clerk, at the moment when Master Florian Barbedienne in his turn was reading the judgment in order to sign it, felt moved with pity for the poor devil of a condemned man, and, hoping to obtain some mitigation of punishment, approached as near as he could to the auditor's ear and said to him, pointing to Quasimodo: "This man is deaf."

He hoped that this community of infirmity would awaken Master Florian's interest in favor of the condemned. But, first, we have already observed that Master Florian did not care to have his deafness noticed. Next, he was so hard of hearing that he did not catch a word of what the clerk said to him; nevertheless, he wished to seem to have heard, and answered: "Ah! ah! that is different. I did not know that. An additional hour of the pillory, then, in that case."

And he signed the sentence thus modified.

"Serves him right," said Robin Poussepain, who bore Quasimodo a grudge, "that will teach him to handle people roughly."

II

THE RAT-HOLE

Let the reader permit us to lead him back to the Place de Grève, which we left yesterday with Gringoire to follow the Esmeralda.

It is ten o'clock in the morning. Everything there smells of the day after the feast. The pavement is covered with debris, ribbons, rags, plumes from the panaches, drops of wax from the torches, crumbs from the public banquet. A good number of bourgeois are strolling, as we say, here and there, stirring with their foot the extinguished embers of the bonfire, rapt in admiration before the Maison-aux-Piliers at the memory of the fine hangings of the eve, and looking today at the nails, the last pleasure. The sellers of cider and beer roll their barrels through the groups. Some busy passers-by go and come. The shopkeepers talk and call to one another from the thresholds of their shops. The feast, the ambassadors, Coppenole, the pope of fools, are on every tongue. It is a contest who shall comment best and laugh most. And yet four mounted sergeants who have just posted themselves at the four sides of the pillory have already concentrated around them a good portion of the populace scattered over the square, who condemn themselves to immobility and boredom in hope of a little execution.

If now the reader, after contemplating this lively and garish scene which plays out at every point of the square, casts his eyes toward that old half-Gothic, half-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland which makes the corner of the quay on the west, he may remark at the angle of the facade a large public breviary with rich illuminations, protected from the rain by a little awning, and from thieves by a grating which nevertheless allows it to be leafed through. Beside this breviary is a narrow ogee dormer window, closed with two crossed iron bars, opening onto the square, the only opening which lets a little air and daylight into a small doorless cell contrived on the ground floor in the thickness of the wall of the old house, and full of a peace all the more profound, of a silence all the more dreary, that a public square, the most populous and most noisy in Paris, swarms and clamors all around it.

This cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly three centuries, since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in mourning for her father dead on the crusade, had caused it to be hollowed out in the wall of her own house to shut herself up there forever, keeping of her palace only this lodging whose door was walled up and whose window was left open, winter as summer, giving all the rest to the poor and to God. The disconsolate damsel had indeed awaited death for twenty years in this anticipatory tomb, praying night and day for the soul of her father, sleeping in the ashes, without even a stone for a pillow, clad in a black sack, and living only on what the pity of passers-by deposited of bread and water on the sill of her window, thus receiving charity after having bestowed it. At her death, at the moment of passing into the other sepulcher, she had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to afflicted women, mothers, widows, or daughters, who should have much to pray for others or for themselves, and who should wish to bury themselves alive in great sorrow or in great penitence. The poor of her time had made her fair funeral of tears and blessings; but, to their great regret, the pious maiden could not be canonized a saint, for lack of connections. Those among them who were somewhat impious had hoped that the thing would be done in paradise more easily than at Rome, and had quite simply prayed to God for the deceased, for want of the pope. Most had contented themselves with holding the memory of Rolande as sacred and making relics of her rags. The city, for its part, had founded, for the damsel, a public breviary which was set into the wall near the window of the cell, so that passers-by might stop there from time to time, if only to pray, that prayer might lead to alms, and that the poor recluses, heirs of Madame Rolande's vault, might not die there quite of hunger and forgetfulness.

It was not, moreover, a very rare thing in the cities of the middle ages, this sort of tomb. One met often, in the most frequented street, in the most motley and deafening market, right in the midst, beneath the feet of horses, beneath the wheel of carts as it were, a cellar, a well, a hovel walled and grated, at the bottom of which prayed day and night a human being, voluntarily devoted to some eternal lamentation, to some great expiation. And all the reflections that this strange spectacle would awaken in us today, this horrible cell, a sort of intermediate ring between house and tomb, between cemetery and city, this living being cut off from the human community and henceforth counted among the dead, this lamp consuming its last drop of oil in the shadow, this remnant of life flickering in a pit, this breath, this voice, this eternal prayer in a stone box, this face forever turned toward the other world, this eye already illuminated by another sun, this ear pressed to the walls of the tomb, this soul prisoner in this body, this body prisoner in this dungeon, and beneath this double envelope of flesh and granite the humming of this soul in pain, none of all that was perceived by the crowd. The somewhat unreasoning and unsubtle piety of that time did not see so many facets to an act of religion. It took the thing in bulk, and honored, venerated, sanctified as need be the sacrifice, but did not analyze its sufferings and pitied them but poorly. It brought from time to time some pittance to the miserable penitent, looked through the hole whether he still lived, ignored his name, scarcely knew for how many years he had begun to die, and to the foreigner who questioned them about the living skeleton rotting in that cellar, the neighbors answered simply, if it was a man: "It is the recluse"; if it was a woman: "It is the recluse."

All was seen thus then, without metaphysics, without exaggeration, without magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet been invented, neither for the things of matter, nor for the things of spirit.

Besides, although they marveled at it little, examples of this kind of cloistering in the midst of cities were, in truth, frequent, as we were saying just now. There were in Paris quite a good number of these cells for praying to God and doing penance; they were almost all occupied. It is true that the clergy did not care to leave them empty, which implied lukewarmness among believers, and that they put lepers there when they had no penitents. Besides the lodge of the Grève, there was one at Montfaucon, one at the charnel-house of the Innocents, another I no longer know where, at the Clichon house, I believe. Still others in many places where one finds their trace in traditions, for want of monuments. The University had also its own. On Mount Sainte-Geneviève a sort of Job of the middle ages sang for thirty years the seven Penitential Psalms upon a dungheap, at the bottom of a cistern, beginning again when he had finished, chanting louder by night, _magna voce per umbras_[69], and today the antiquary still thinks he hears his voice on entering the street of the _Puits-qui-parle_.

To keep to the lodge of the Tour-Roland, we must say that it had never been idle of recluses. Since the death of Madame Rolande, it had rarely been vacant a year or two. Many women had come there to weep, unto death, for relatives, for lovers, for faults. The Parisian malice which meddles in everything, even the things that concern it least, pretended that one had seen few widows there.

According to the fashion of the epoch, a Latin legend, inscribed on the wall, indicated to the lettered passer-by the pious destination of this cell. The custom was preserved until the middle of the sixteenth century of explaining an edifice by a brief device written above the door. Thus one still reads in France above the wicket of the prison of the seigneurial house of Tourville: _Sileto et spera_[70]; in Ireland, beneath the escutcheon surmounting the great door of Fortescue castle: _Forte scutum, salus ducum_[71]; in England, on the principal entrance of the hospital manor of the counts Cowper: _Tuum est_[72]. For in those days every edifice was a thought.

As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland, one had engraved in large Roman letters above the window these two words:

TU, ORA[73].

Which caused the people, whose good sense does not see so much fineness in things and willingly translates _Ludovico Magno_ by _Porte Saint-Denis_, to give this black, dark, and damp cavity the name of _Rat-Hole_. An explanation less sublime perhaps than the other, but picturesque in compensation.

III

HISTORY OF A CAKE WITH MAIZE LEAVEN

At the epoch when this history takes place, the cell of the Tour-Roland was occupied. If the reader desires to know by whom, he has only to listen to the conversation of three worthy gossips who, at the moment when we fixed his attention on the Rat-Hole, were directing themselves precisely the same way in coming up from the Châtelet toward the Grève, along the water.

Two of these women were dressed as good bourgeois of Paris. Their fine white gorget, their skirt of striped russet red and blue, their white knit stockings, with corners embroidered in color, well drawn up on the leg, their square shoes of fawn leather with black soles and above all their headgear, that sort of tinsel horn overloaded with ribbons and lace which the Champenoises still wear, concurrently with the grenadiers of the Russian imperial guard, announced that they belonged to that class of rich shopkeepers which holds the middle between what lackeys call _a woman_ and what they call _a lady_. They wore neither rings nor gold crosses, and it was easy to see that it was not poverty in them, but quite ingenuously fear of the fine. Their companion was tricked out much the same, but there was in her dress and in her bearing that indefinable something which smells of the wife of a provincial notary. One saw by the manner in which her belt came up above her hips that she had not long been in Paris. Add to that a pleated gorget, bows of ribbon on the shoes, that the stripes of her skirt were in the width and not in the length, and a thousand other enormities at which good taste took offense.

The two first walked with that step peculiar to Parisiennes who show Paris to provincials. The provincial held by the hand a big boy who held by his a big cake.

We are sorry to have to add that, given the rigor of the season, he was making a handkerchief of his tongue.

The child let himself be dragged, _non passibus aequis_, as Virgil says[74], and stumbled at every moment, to the great outcry of his mother. It is true that he looked more at the cake than at the pavement. No doubt some grave reason prevented him from biting it (the cake), for he contented himself with regarding it tenderly. But the mother should have charged herself with the cake. There was cruelty in making a Tantalus of the chubby-cheeked fellow.

Meanwhile the three damoiselles (for the name of _dames_ was then reserved for noblewomen) spoke all at once.

"Make haste, damoiselle Mahiette," said the youngest of the three, who was also the stoutest, to the provincial. "I am greatly afraid we shall arrive too late. We were told at the Châtelet that they were going to lead him straight to the pillory."

"Ah bah! what are you saying there, damoiselle Oudarde Musnier?" replied the other Parisienne. "He will stay two hours at the pillory. We have time. Have you ever seen a pillorying, my dear Mahiette?"

"Yes," said the provincial, "at Reims."

"Ah bah! what is that, your pillory of Reims? A wretched cage where they only turn peasants. That is a great matter!"

"Only peasants!" said Mahiette, "at the Cloth-Market at Reims! We saw there very fine criminals, who had killed father and mother! Peasants! whom do you take us for, Gervaise?"

It is certain that the provincial was on the point of getting angry, for the honor of her pillory. Happily the discreet damoiselle Oudarde Musnier turned the conversation aside in time.

"By the way, damoiselle Mahiette, what do you say of our Flemish ambassadors? have you any as fine at Reims?"

"I confess," answered Mahiette, "that there is only Paris for seeing Flemings like those."

"Did you see among the embassy that great ambassador who is a hosier?" asked Oudarde.

"Yes," said Mahiette. "He has the air of a Saturn."

"And that fat one whose face resembles a naked belly?" resumed Gervaise. "And that little one who has little eyes bordered with a red eyelid, jagged and tattered like a thistle-head?"

"Their horses are what is fine to see," said Oudarde, "being clothed as they are in the fashion of their country!"

"Ah! my dear," interrupted the provincial Mahiette, taking in her turn an air of superiority, "what would you say then if you had seen, in 61, at the coronation of Reims, eighteen years ago, the horses of the princes and of the king's company! Housings and caparisons of all sorts; some of damask, of fine cloth of gold, lined with sable; others, of velvet, lined with ermine; others, all laden with goldsmith's work and great gold and silver bells; and the money that cost! And the fine page children who were upon them!"

"That does not prevent," replied dryly damoiselle Oudarde, "that the Flemings have very fine horses and that they made yesterday a superb supper at the house of the provost of the merchants, at the Hôtel de Ville, where they were served comfits, hippocras, spices, and other singularities."

"What are you saying there, my neighbor?" cried Gervaise. "It is at the house of the cardinal, at the Petit-Bourbon, that the Flemings supped."

"Not so. At the Hôtel de Ville!"

"Indeed so. At the Petit-Bourbon!"

"It is so well at the Hôtel de Ville," resumed Oudarde with acerbity, "that the doctor Scourable made them a harangue in Latin, wherewith they remained much satisfied. It is my husband, who is a sworn bookseller, who told me so."

"It is so well at the Petit-Bourbon," answered Gervaise no less vivaciously, "that here is what the procureur of the cardinal presented them with: twelve double quarts of white, claret, and vermilion hippocras; twenty-four boxes of double Lyon marchpane gilded; as many torches of two pounds apiece, and six half-kegs of Beaune wine, white and claret, the best that could be found. I hope that is positive. I hold it from my husband, who is a fiftyman at the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, and who was this morning making the comparison of the Flemish ambassadors with those of Prester John and of the emperor of Trebizond who came from Mesopotamia to Paris under the last king, and who had rings in their ears."

"It is so true that they supped at the Hôtel de Ville," replied Oudarde, little moved by this display, "that one never saw such a triumph of meats and comfits."

"I tell you, I, that they were served by Le Sec, sergeant of the city, at the Petit-Bourbon, and that is what misleads you."

"At the Hôtel de Ville, I tell you!"

"At the Petit-Bourbon, my dear! so well that they had illuminated in magic glasses the word _Espérance_ which is written on the great portal."

"At the Hôtel de Ville! at the Hôtel de Ville! Even that Husson le Voir played the flute!"

"I tell you no!"

"I tell you yes!"

"I tell you no!"

The good stout Oudarde was preparing to reply, and the quarrel might perhaps have come to the headgears, if Mahiette had not suddenly cried out:

"Look at those people who have gathered yonder at the end of the bridge! There is something in their midst that they are looking at."

"In truth," said Gervaise, "I hear a tambourine. I believe it is little Smeralda doing her antics with her goat. Come quick, Mahiette! double your pace and drag your boy. You came here to visit the curiosities of Paris. You saw the Flemings yesterday; you must see the Egyptian today."

"The Egyptian!" said Mahiette, turning back abruptly and clutching her son's arm tightly. "God keep her from me! She would steal my child from me!—Come, Eustache!"

And she set to running on the quay toward the Grève, until she had left the bridge well behind her. Meanwhile the child, whom she dragged, fell on his knees; she stopped out of breath. Oudarde and Gervaise caught up with her.

"This Egyptian steal your child?" said Gervaise. "You have a strange fancy there."

Mahiette shook her head with a pensive air.

"What is singular," observed Oudarde, "is that the sachette has the same idea of the Egyptians."

"What is the sachette?" said Mahiette.

"Why," said Oudarde, "sister Gudule."

"What is it, then," resumed Mahiette, "that sister Gudule?"

"You are indeed from your Reims, not to know that!" answered Oudarde. "It is the recluse of the Rat-Hole."

"How!" asked Mahiette, "that poor woman to whom we are bringing this cake?"

Oudarde made an affirmative sign with her head.

"Precisely. You will see her presently at her window on the Grève. She has the same look as you upon these Egyptian vagabonds who tambourine and tell fortunes to the public. One does not know whence comes to her that horror of zingari and Egyptians. But you, Mahiette, why do you thus take flight, merely at seeing them?"

"Oh!" said Mahiette, seizing between her two hands the round head of her child, "I do not wish that which happened to Paquette la Chantefleurie to happen to me!"

"Ah! there is a story you are going to tell us, my good Mahiette," said Gervaise, taking her arm.

"Willingly," answered Mahiette, "but you must be well of your Paris not to know that. I shall tell you then—though there is no need to stop for the telling—that Paquette la Chantefleurie was a pretty girl of eighteen when I was one too, that is to say eighteen years ago, and that it is her fault if she is not today, like me, a good stout fresh mother of six-and-thirty, with a man and a boy. Besides, from the age of fourteen it was too late!—She was then the daughter of Guybertaut, boat-minstrel at Reims, the same who had played before King Charles VII, at his coronation, when he descended our river of Vesle from Sillery to Muison, and the Maid herself was in the boat. The old father died when Paquette was still quite a child; she had therefore only her mother left, sister of Master Mathieu Pradon, master pewterer and brazier in Paris, rue Parin-Garlin, who died last year. You see she was of family. The mother was a good woman, unfortunately, and taught Paquette nothing but a little trinketry and knickknackery which did not prevent the little one from growing very tall and remaining very poor. The two dwelt together at Reims along the river, rue de Folle-Peine. Note this well; I believe it is that which brought misfortune to Paquette. In 61, the year of the coronation of our king Louis the Eleventh, whom God guard, Paquette was so gay and so pretty that she was called nowhere but the Chantefleurie. Poor girl! She had pretty teeth, she loved to laugh to show them. Now, a girl who loves to laugh sets out toward weeping; pretty teeth lose pretty eyes. She was then the Chantefleurie. She and her mother earned their living hardly. They had fallen low since the death of the minstrel. Their trinketry brought them scarcely more than six deniers a week, which does not quite make two eagle-liards. Where was the time when father Guybertaut earned twelve Parisian sous in a single coronation with one song? One winter—it was in that same year 61—the two women had neither logs nor faggots, and it was very cold, which gave such fine colors to the Chantefleurie that the men called her: Paquette! that several called her Pâquerette! and that she was lost.—Eustache! that I see you bite the cake!—We saw at once that she was lost, one Sunday that she came to church with a gold cross on her neck.—At fourteen years! do you see that!—It was first the young viscount of Cormontreuil, who has his bell-tower three quarters of a league from Reims; then, messire Henri de Triancourt, king's equerry; then, less than that, Chiart de Beaulion, sergeant-at-arms; then, still descending, Guery Aubergeon, king's carving valet; then, Macé de Frépus, barber to Monseigneur the Dauphin; then, Thevenin le Moine, king's cook; then, thus always from younger to less noble, she fell to Guillaume Racine, viol minstrel, and to Thierry de Mer, lantern-maker. Then, poor Chantefleurie, she was all to all. She had arrived at the last sou of her gold piece. What shall I tell you, mesdamoiselles? At the coronation, in the same year 61, it is she who made the bed of the king of ribalds! In the same year!"

Mahiette sighed, and wiped a tear that rolled in her eyes.

"There is a story which is not very extraordinary," said Gervaise, "and I see in all that neither Egyptians nor children.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”