Part 20

“We call her Sister Gudule.

—And I,” resumed Mahiette, “call her Paquette la Chantefleurie.”

Then, putting a finger to her lips, she signed to the astonished Oudarde to put her head through the dormer window and look.

Oudarde looked, and saw, in the corner where the recluse’s eye was fixed with that dark ecstasy, a little shoe of pink satin, embroidered with a thousand spangles of gold and silver.

Gervaise looked after Oudarde, and then the three women, regarding the unhappy mother, began to weep.

Neither their glances, however, nor their tears had distracted the recluse. Her hands remained joined, her lips mute, her eyes fixed; and, for those who knew her story, that little shoe thus gazed upon rent the heart. The three women had not yet uttered a word; they dared not speak, even in a low voice. This great silence, this great sorrow, this great oblivion wherein all had vanished save one thing, produced upon them the effect of a high altar at Easter or Christmas. They were silent, they were recollected, they were ready to kneel. It seemed to them that they had entered a church on the day of Tenebrae.

At length Gervaise, the most curious of the three, and consequently the least sensitive, tried to make the recluse speak:

“Sister! Sister Gudule!”

She repeated this call three times over, raising her voice each time. The recluse did not stir. Not a word, not a look, not a sigh, not a sign of life.

Oudarde in her turn, with a softer and more coaxing voice: “Sister!” said she, “Sister Saint-Gudule!”

Same silence, same immobility.

“A strange woman!” cried Gervaise, “and one who would not be moved by a bombard!

—She is perhaps deaf,” said Oudarde with a sigh.

“Perhaps blind,” added Gervaise.

“Perhaps dead,” rejoined Mahiette.

It is certain that if the soul had not yet quitted that inert, sleeping, lethargic body, at least it had withdrawn and hidden itself in depths where the perceptions of the outward organs no longer reached.

“We must then,” said Oudarde, “leave the cake upon the window. Some child will take it. How are we to wake her?”

Eustache, who up to that moment had been diverted by a little cart drawn by a big dog, which had just passed by, suddenly perceived that his three conductresses were looking at something through the window, and, curiosity seizing him in his turn, he climbed upon a stone block, stood on tiptoe, and applied his fat vermilion face to the opening, crying: “Mother, let me see too!”

At that child’s voice, clear, fresh, sonorous, the recluse started. She turned her head with the sharp, abrupt movement of a steel spring; her two long, fleshless hands came to push back her hair upon her forehead, and she fixed upon the child eyes that were astonished, bitter, despairing. That look was but a flash.

“O my God!” she suddenly cried, hiding her head between her knees, and it seemed that her raucous voice tore her breast as it passed, “at least do not show me those of others!”

“Good day, madam,” said the child gravely.

Meanwhile this shock had, so to speak, awakened the recluse. A long shiver ran through her whole body from head to foot; her teeth chattered; she raised her head half-way, and said, drawing her elbows against her hips and taking her feet in her hands as if to warm them:

“Oh! the great cold!”

“Poor woman,” said Oudarde, in great pity, “will you have a little fire?”

She shook her head in sign of refusal.

“Well,” resumed Oudarde, presenting her a flask, “here is some hippocras that will warm you. Drink.”

She shook her head again, looked fixedly at Oudarde, and answered:

“Water.”

Oudarde insisted. “No, sister, that is no drink for January. You must drink a little hippocras and eat this cake of maize leaven which we have baked for you.”

She pushed away the cake that Mahiette offered her, and said: “Black bread.”

“Come,” said Gervaise, seized in her turn with charity, and undoing her woolen jacket, “here is a surcoat somewhat warmer than yours. Put this upon your shoulders.”

She refused the surcoat as she had the flask and the cake, and answered: “A sack.”

“But surely,” resumed good Oudarde, “you must perceive that yesterday was a feast-day.”

“I perceive it,” said the recluse; “it is two days since I have had water in my jug.”

She added after a silence: “It is a feast; they forget me. They do well. Why should the world think of me who think not of it? On dead embers, cold ashes.”

And as though weary of having spoken so much, she let her head fall back upon her knees. Simple, charitable Oudarde, who thought from her last words that she was still complaining of the cold, naively answered her: “Then will you have a little fire?”

“Fire!” said the sack-woman with a strange accent; “and will you make a little also for the poor little one who has been under ground these fifteen years?”

All her limbs trembled, her speech vibrated, her eyes shone; she had risen upon her knees. Suddenly she stretched out her white, thin hand toward the child, who was looking at her with astonished gaze: “Take away this child!” she cried. “The Egyptian is going to pass!”

Then she fell face to the ground, and her forehead struck the flagstone with the sound of stone upon stone. The three women thought her dead. A moment after, however, she moved, and they saw her drag herself on knees and elbows to the corner where the little shoe was. Then they dared not look, they saw her no more, but they heard a thousand kisses and a thousand sighs mingled with tearing cries and dull blows like those of a head dashing against a wall. Then, after one of those blows, so violent that all three staggered from it, they heard no more.

“Has she killed herself?” said Gervaise, venturing to put her head to the air-hole. “Sister! Sister Gudule!

—Sister Gudule!” repeated Oudarde.

“Ah, my God! she does not stir!” resumed Gervaise; “is she dead?—Gudule! Gudule!”

Mahiette, who had been suffocating hitherto without power to speak, made an effort. “Wait,” said she. Then bending toward the window: “Paquette!” said she, “Paquette la Chantefleurie.”

A child who ingenuously blows upon the ill-lit fuse of a cracker and gets it to explode in his eyes is not more terrified than was Mahiette at the effect of that name abruptly launched into Sister Gudule’s cell.

The recluse trembled in all her body, rose upon her bare feet, and sprang to the window with eyes so flaming that Mahiette and Oudarde and the other woman and the child recoiled to the parapet of the quay.

Meanwhile the sinister face of the recluse appeared pressed against the grating of the air-hole. “Oh! oh!” she cried, with a frightful laugh, “it is the Egyptian who calls me!”

At that moment a scene passing at the pillory arrested her haggard eye. Her brow wrinkled with horror; she stretched out beyond her lodge her two skeleton arms, and cried with a voice that resembled a rattle:

“Is it thou again, daughter of Egypt? is it thou who callest me, stealer of children! Well then, be thou accursed! accursed! accursed! accursed!”

IV

A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER

These words were, so to speak, the point of junction of two scenes which had hitherto developed themselves in parallel fashion at the same moment, each upon its own particular stage; the one, that which has just been read, in the Rat-Hole; the other, that which is about to be read, upon the ladder of the pillory. The first had had for witnesses only the three women with whom the reader has just made acquaintance; the second had had for spectators all the public we have seen above gathering upon the Place de Grève, around the pillory and the gibbet.

This crowd, to which the four sergeants, who had posted themselves since nine o’clock in the morning at the four corners of the pillory, had held out hopes of an execution of some sort—not a hanging, to be sure, but a whipping, an ear-cropping, something at last—this crowd had so rapidly increased that the four sergeants, too closely invested, had more than once had need to “press” it, as was then said, with stout blows of truncheon and horse-croup.

This populace, inured to waiting for public executions, manifested not too much impatience. It diverted itself by looking at the pillory, a species of monument very simple, composed of a cube of masonry some ten feet high, hollow within. A very steep flight of rough stone, which was par excellence called “the ladder,” led to the upper platform, upon which was seen a horizontal wheel of solid oak. They bound the patient upon this wheel, on his knees, arms behind his back. A beam of carpentry, set in motion by a windlass hidden within the little edifice, imparted a rotation to the wheel, always kept in the horizontal plane, and in this way presented the face of the condemned man successively to all points of the square. This was what was called “turning” a criminal.

As may be seen, the pillory of the Grève was far from offering all the recreations of the pillory of the Halles. Nothing architectural. Nothing monumental. No roof with iron cross, no octagonal lantern, no slender columns spreading out at the edge of the roof in capitals of acanthus and flowers, no chimerical and monstrous waterspouts, no carved timber-work, no fine sculpture deeply hollowed in the stone.

One had to content oneself with those four sides of rubble with two buttresses of freestone, and a wretched gibbet of stone, lean and bare, beside it.

The entertainment would have been meager for lovers of Gothic architecture. It is true that nothing was less curious about monuments than the worthy idlers of the middle ages, and that they cared but little for the beauty of a pillory.

The patient arrived at last tied to the tail of a cart, and when he had been hoisted upon the platform, when he could be seen from all points of the square strapped with cords and thongs upon the wheel of the pillory, a prodigious hooting mingled with laughter and acclamations burst forth in the place. They had recognized Quasimodo.

It was he indeed. The return was strange. Pilloried upon that same square where the day before he had been hailed, acclaimed, and proclaimed pope and prince of fools, in the train of the Duke of Egypt, the King of Tunis, and the Emperor of Galilee. What is certain is that there was not a mind in the crowd, not even his own, by turns triumphant and patient, that clearly disentangled this comparison in his thought. Gringoire and his philosophy were lacking to this spectacle.

Soon Michel Noiret, sworn trumpeter of the king our sire, made silence among the commons, and cried the sentence, according to the ordinance and commandment of Monsieur the Provost. Then he fell back behind the cart with his men in the livery tabards.

Quasimodo, impassive, did not wince. All resistance was rendered impossible to him by what was then called, in criminal chancery style, “the vehemence and firmness of the fastenings,” which means that the thongs and little chains probably entered into his flesh. It is, moreover, a tradition of jail and galley which has not been lost, and which the handcuffs still preserve preciously among us, a civilized, gentle, humane people (the convict-ship and the guillotine in parenthesis).

He had let himself be led and pushed, carried, perched, bound and rebound. Nothing could be guessed upon his countenance but the astonishment of a savage or an idiot. He was known to be deaf; he might have been thought blind.

They made him kneel upon the circular plank; he let himself be placed there. They stripped him of shirt and doublet to the belt; he let them do it. They enmeshed him under a new system of straps and buckles; he let himself be clasped and tied. Only from time to time he blew noisily, like a calf whose head hangs and tosses at the edge of the butcher’s cart.

“The booby,” said Jehan Frollo of the Mill to his friend Robin Poussepain (for the two scholars had followed the patient as a matter of course), “he understands no more than a cockchafer shut in a box!”

It was a fit of laughter in the crowd when they saw bare the hump of Quasimodo, his camel breast, his callous and hairy shoulders. During all this merriment, a man in the city livery, of short stature and sturdy build, mounted the platform and came to place himself near the patient. His name soon circulated in the assembly. It was Master Pierrat Torterue, sworn torturer of the Châtelet.

He began by depositing upon an angle of the pillory a black hourglass whose upper capsule was full of red sand which it let fall into the lower receiver; then he took off his parti-colored surcoat, and there was seen hanging from his right hand a slender whip of long, white, glistening, knotted thongs, braided, armed with metal claws. With his left hand he negligently folded back his shirt around his right arm to the armpit.

Meanwhile Jehan Frollo cried, raising his blond, curly head above the crowd (he had mounted for that purpose upon Robin Poussepain’s shoulders): “Come see, gentlemen, ladies! here they are about to flog peremptorily Master Quasimodo, the ringer of my brother Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas, a queer piece of Oriental architecture, who has his back in a dome and his legs in twisted columns!”

And the crowd laughed, especially the children and the young girls.

At length the torturer stamped his foot. The wheel began to turn. Quasimodo staggered under his bonds. The stupefaction which suddenly painted itself upon his deformed face made the bursts of laughter around redouble.

Suddenly, at the moment when the revolution of the wheel presented to Master Pierrat the humped back of Quasimodo, Master Pierrat raised his arm; the fine thongs whistled shrilly through the air like a handful of snakes, and fell with fury upon the shoulders of the wretch.

Quasimodo sprang upon himself, as if awakened with a start. He began to understand. He writhed in his bonds; a violent contraction of surprise and pain decomposed the muscles of his face; but he uttered not a sigh. Only he turned his head backward, to the right, then to the left, balancing it as does a bull stung in the flank by a gadfly.

A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another, and another, and ever. The wheel ceased not to turn nor the blows to rain. Soon the blood spurted; they saw it stream in a thousand threads upon the black shoulders of the hunchback, and the slender thongs, in their rotation which tore the air, scattered it in drops upon the crowd.

Quasimodo had resumed, apparently at least, his first impassibility. He had tried at first, sullenly and without much outward shock, to break his bonds. They had seen his eye kindle, his muscles stiffen, his limbs gather themselves, and the straps and little chains stretch. The effort was powerful, prodigious, desperate; but the old fetters of the provostry resisted. They cracked, and that was all. Quasimodo fell back exhausted. Stupefaction gave place upon his features to a feeling of bitter and profound discouragement. He closed his single eye, let his head fall upon his chest, and played dead.

Thenceforth he moved no more. Nothing could wring from him a movement. Neither his blood, which ceased not to flow, nor the blows which redoubled in fury, nor the anger of the torturer who excited himself and grew drunk with the execution, nor the noise of the horrible thongs, sharper and more hissing than the claws of bramble-bushes.

At length a usher of the Châtelet, clad in black, mounted upon a black horse, stationed beside the ladder since the beginning of the execution, extended his ebony rod toward the hourglass. The torturer stopped. The wheel stopped. Quasimodo’s eye reopened slowly.

The flogging was finished. Two valets of the sworn torturer washed the bleeding shoulders of the patient, rubbed them with I know not what ointment which closed all the wounds forthwith, and threw over his back a sort of yellow cloth cut like a chasuble. Meanwhile Pierrat Torterue made the red, blood-gorged thongs drip upon the pavement.

All was not finished for Quasimodo. There remained to him yet to undergo that hour of pillory which Master Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to the sentence of Messire Robert d’Estouteville; all to the greater glory of the old physiological and psychological pun of Jean de Cumène: _Surdus absurdus_[75].

They therefore turned the hourglass back, and left the hunchback fastened upon the plank that justice might be done to the end.

The people, in the middle ages especially, is in society what the child is in the family. So long as it remains in that state of first ignorance, of moral and intellectual minority, it may be said of it as of the child:

That age is without pity.

We have already shown that Quasimodo was generally hated, for more than one good reason, it is true. There was hardly a spectator in that crowd who had not, or did not believe he had, cause to complain of the ugly hunchback of Notre-Dame. The joy had been universal at seeing him appear at the pillory; and the rough execution he had just undergone, and the pitiful posture wherein it had left him, far from softening the populace, had rendered their hatred more malicious by arming it with a point of gaiety.

Accordingly, once the “public vengeance” satisfied, as the square caps still jargon today, it was the turn of a thousand private revenges. Here as in the great hall, the women especially broke out. All bore him some grudge, some for his malice, others for his ugliness. The latter were the most furious.

“Oh! mask of the Antichrist!” said one.

“Rider of a broomstick!” cried another.

“Fine tragic grimace,” howled a third, “and which would make thee pope of fools, if today were yesterday!”

“That is well,” resumed an old woman; “there is the grimace of the pillory. When for that of the gibbet?

—When wilt thou be capped with thy great bell a hundred feet underground, accursed ringer?”

“It is nevertheless this devil who rings the angelus!

—Oh! the deaf one! the one-eyed! the hunchback! the monster!

—A face to cause a miscarriage better than all medicines and philters!”

And the two scholars, Jehan of the Mill, Robin Poussepain, sang at full throat the old popular refrain:

_A halter_ _For the gallows-bird!_ _A fagot_ _For the ape!_

A thousand other insults rained, and the hoots, and the imprecations, and the laughter, and the stones here and there.

Quasimodo was deaf, but he saw clearly, and public fury was no less energetically painted upon the faces than in the words. Besides, the stones explained the bursts of laughter.

He held firm at first. But little by little that patience, which had stiffened under the torturer’s whip, gave way and lost footing before all these insect stings. The bull of Asturias, but little moved by the attacks of the picador, grows angry at the dogs and banderillos.

He cast at first a slow look of menace upon the crowd. But bound as he was, his look was powerless to chase away those flies that bit his wound. Then he struggled in his fetters, and his furious starts made the old pillory wheel creak upon its frame. At all this, the derisions and hoots increased.

Then the wretch, unable to break his collar of chained wild beast, became quiet again. Only at intervals a sigh of rage heaved all the hollows of his breast. There was upon his face neither shame nor blush. He was too far from the state of society and too near the state of nature to know what shame is. Besides, at that degree of deformity, is infamy a sensible thing? But anger, hatred, despair slowly lowered upon that hideous face a cloud ever darker, ever more charged with an electricity which burst in a thousand flashes in the eye of the Cyclops.

Meanwhile this cloud cleared for a moment, at the passing of a mule which traversed the crowd and bore a priest. As far as he could see that mule and that priest, the face of the poor patient softened. To the fury which contracted him succeeded a strange smile, full of a sweetness, a gentleness, a tenderness ineffable. As the priest drew near, that smile became clearer, more distinct, more radiant. It was like the coming of a savior whom the unhappy man saluted. However, at the moment when the mule was near enough the pillory for its rider to recognize the patient, the priest lowered his eyes, turned back abruptly, spurred on both sides, as if he had been in haste to rid himself of humiliating claims and cared little to be saluted and recognized by a poor devil in such a posture.

This priest was the Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo.

The cloud fell darker again upon Quasimodo’s brow. The smile still mingled there for a while, but bitter, discouraged, profoundly sad.

Time was passing. He had been there for an hour and a half at least, torn, maltreated, mocked without cease, and almost stoned.

Suddenly he stirred again in his chains with a redoubling of despair which made tremble the whole framework that bore him, and, breaking the silence he had obstinately kept until then, he cried with a raucous and furious voice which resembled rather a bark than a human cry and which covered the noise of the hoots: “To drink!”

This exclamation of distress, far from moving compassions, was an increase of amusement to the good Parisian populace which surrounded the ladder, and which, it must be said, taken in mass and as a multitude, was then hardly less cruel and less brutish than that horrible tribe of truands among whom we have already led the reader, and which was simply the lowest layer of the people. Not a voice arose around the unhappy patient, save to mock him for his thirst. It is certain that at this moment he was grotesque and repulsive more even than pitiable, with his empurpled and streaming face, his wild eye, his mouth foaming with anger and suffering, and his tongue half out. It must be added that, had there chanced to be in the throng some good charitable soul of burgher or burgheress tempted to bring a glass of water to that miserable creature in torment, there reigned around the infamous steps of the pillory such a prejudice of shame and ignominy that it would have sufficed to repel the good Samaritan.

At the end of some minutes, Quasimodo cast a desperate look upon the crowd, and repeated in a voice yet more heart-rending: “To drink!”

And all laughed.

“Drink this!” cried Robin Poussepain, throwing in his face a sponge dragged in the gutter. “Here, ugly deaf one! I am thy debtor.”

A woman threw a stone at his head: “That will teach thee to wake us at night with thy damned peal!”

“Well! son,” howled a cripple, making effort to reach him with his crutch, “wilt thou still throw spells at us from the towers of Notre-Dame?”

“Here is a bowl to drink from!” resumed a man, discharging at his chest a broken pitcher. “It is thou who, merely in passing before her, didst make my wife bring forth a two-headed child!”

“And my cat a six-legged cat!” glapped an old woman, throwing a tile at him.

“To drink!” repeated for the third time Quasimodo, panting.

At this moment, he saw the populace part. A young girl strangely clad came out of the crowd. She was accompanied by a little white goat with gilded horns and carried a tambourine of Basque in her hand.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”