Part 22

--Can you conceive such insolence! a bell-ringer carrying off a girl, like a viscount! a churl poaching on the game of gentlemen! This is rare indeed. For the rest, he paid dearly for it. Master Pierrat Torterue is the roughest groom that ever curried a knave, and I will tell you, if it may please you, that your ringer's hide passed gallantly through his hands.

--Poor man!" said the gypsy, in whom these words revived the memory of the scene at the pillory.

The captain burst out laughing. "Horn of a bull! there's pity as well placed as a feather on a pig's rump! May I be as round-bellied as a pope, if..."

He stopped short. "Pardon, ladies! I believe I was about to let fall some foolishness.

--Fie, sir!" said the Gaillefontaine.

--He speaks his own language to that creature!" added Fleur-de-Lys in a half-voice, whose vexation grew from moment to moment. That vexation did not diminish when she saw the captain, enchanted with the gypsy and above all with himself, pirouette on his heel, repeating with a naive and soldierly gross gallantry: "A fine girl, upon my soul!

--Rather savagely dressed," said Diane de Christeuil, with her laugh of beautiful teeth.

This remark was a ray of light to the others. It made them see the vulnerable side of the Egyptian. Unable to bite at her beauty, they flung themselves upon her costume.

--But it is true, little one," said the Montmichel, "where did you get the notion to run about the streets thus without wimple or gorget?

--There's a short skirt to make one tremble," added the Gaillefontaine.

--My dear," pursued Fleur-de-Lys rather sharply, "you will be picked up by the sergeants of the watch for your gilded girdle.

--Little one, little one," resumed the Christeuil with an implacable smile, "if you were to put a sleeve honestly upon your arm, it would be less burnt by the sun."

It was truly a spectacle worthy of a spectator more intelligent than Phoebus, to see how these fair maidens, with their envenomed and irritated tongues, serpentined, glided and writhed around the street dancer. They were cruel and graceful. They probed, they malignantly pried with words into her poor and foolish finery of spangles and rags. There were laughs, ironies, endless humiliations. Sarcasms rained down upon the Egyptian, and haughty kindness, and wicked glances. One would have thought those young Roman ladies who amused themselves by thrusting golden pins into the bosom of a beautiful slave. One would have said elegant greyhound huntresses turning, nostrils open, eyes ardent, around a poor woodland doe whom the master's glance forbids them to devour.

What was she, after all, before these high-born girls, but a miserable public-place dancer! They seemed to take no account of her presence, and spoke of her, before her, to herself, aloud, as of something rather unclean, rather abject and rather pretty.

The gypsy was not insensible to these pin-pricks. From time to time a blush of shame, a flash of anger inflamed her eyes or her cheeks; a disdainful word seemed to hesitate on her lips; she made with contempt that little grimace the reader knows in her. But she held her peace. Immobile, she fixed upon Phoebus a resigned, sad and gentle gaze. There was also happiness and tenderness in that look. One would have said she restrained herself, for fear of being driven away.

Phoebus, for his part, laughed, and took the gypsy's side with a mixture of impertinence and pity.

--Let them say, little one!" he repeated, making his golden spurs jingle, "without doubt, your attire is a little extravagant and wild; but, charming girl as you are, what does that matter?

--My God!" cried the blonde Gaillefontaine, straightening her swan's neck with a bitter smile, "I see that the king's men-at-arms take fire easily at Egyptian eyes.

--And why not?" said Phoebus.

At this answer, carelessly flung by the captain like a stray stone he did not even watch fall, Colombe began to laugh, and Diane, and Amelotte, and Fleur-de-Lys, to whom at the same moment a tear came to the eyes.

The gypsy, who had lowered her gaze to the ground at the words of Colombe de Gaillefontaine, raised it again radiant with joy and pride, and fixed it once more upon Phoebus. She was very beautiful at that moment.

The old lady, who observed this scene, felt offended and understood not.

--Holy Virgin!" she suddenly cried, "what is it there that stirs in my legs? Ahi! the ugly beast!"

It was the goat, which had come in search of her mistress, and which, in hurrying toward her, had begun by entangling its horns in the heap of stuff that the noble lady's garments piled upon her feet when she sat.

It was a diversion. The gypsy, without a word, disengaged it.

--Oh! there's the little she-goat with golden feet!" cried Bérangère, jumping for joy.

The gypsy squatted on her knees, and pressed against her cheek the caressing head of the goat. One would have said she asked its pardon for having left it thus.

Meanwhile Diane had bent to Colombe's ear.

--Eh! my God! why did I not think of it sooner? It is the gypsy with the goat. They say she is a witch, and that her goat performs very miraculous antics.

--Well," said Colombe, "the goat must divert us in its turn, and do us a miracle."

Diane and Colombe addressed themselves briskly to the Egyptian.

--Little one, make your goat do a miracle then.

--I know not what you mean," answered the dancer.

--A miracle, a magic, a sorcery, in short.

--I know not." And she fell again to caressing the pretty beast, repeating: "Djali! Djali!"

At this moment Fleur-de-Lys noticed a embroidered leather pouch hung at the goat's neck. "What is that?" she asked the Egyptian.

The Egyptian raised her great eyes to her, and answered her gravely: "It is my secret."

--I should like to know what your secret is," thought Fleur-de-Lys.

Meanwhile the good lady had risen in ill humor. "Now then, gypsy, if neither you nor your goat have anything to dance for us, what are you doing here?"

The gypsy, without answering, slowly directed herself toward the door. But the nearer she approached it, the more her step slackened. An invincible magnet seemed to hold her back. Suddenly she turned her eyes, wet with tears, upon Phoebus, and stopped.

--True God!" cried the captain, "one does not go thus. Come back, and dance us something. By the way, fair love, what is your name?

--La Esmeralda," said the dancer, without taking her eyes from him.

At that strange name, a foolish laugh broke out among the young girls.

--There," said Diane, "is a terrible name for a damsel!

--You see well," resumed Amelotte, "that she is a charmeress.

--My dear," solemnly cried dame Aloïse, "your parents did not fish that name from the baptismal font."

Meanwhile, for some minutes, without anyone paying her heed, Bérangère had drawn the goat into a corner of the chamber with a marchpane. In an instant, they were both good friends. The curious child had detached the pouch hung at the goat's neck, had opened it, and emptied upon the mat what it contained. It was an alphabet, each letter inscribed separately upon a little boxwood tablet. Scarcely were these playthings spread upon the mat than the child saw with surprise the goat, for whom this was doubtless one of its _miracles_, draw certain letters with its golden hoof and arrange them, gently pushing them, in a particular order. At the end of an instant, this formed a word that the goat seemed practiced in writing, so little did it hesitate to shape it, and Bérangère suddenly cried out, clasping her hands with admiration:

--Godmother Fleur-de-Lys, see what the goat has just done!

Fleur-de-Lys ran up and shuddered. The letters arranged upon the floor formed this word:

_PHOEBUS._

--Did the goat write that?" she asked in an altered voice.

--Yes, godmother," answered Bérangère.

It was impossible to doubt it; the child could not write.

--That is the secret!" thought Fleur-de-Lys.

Meanwhile, at the child's cry, everyone had run up, the mother, the young girls, the gypsy, and the officer.

The gypsy saw the foolish thing the goat had just done. She turned red, then pale, and began to tremble like a culprit before the captain, who looked at her with a smile of satisfaction and astonishment.

--_Phoebus_!" whispered the stupefied young girls, "it is the captain's name!

--You have a wonderful memory!" said Fleur-de-Lys to the petrified gypsy. Then bursting into sobs: "Oh!" she stammered painfully, hiding her face in her two beautiful hands, "she is a sorceress!" And she heard a voice yet more bitter say deep in her heart: "She is a rival!"

She fell fainting.

--My daughter! my daughter!" cried the frightened mother. "Begone, gypsy of hell!"

La Esmeralda gathered up in a twinkling the ill-fated letters, signed to Djali, and went out by one door, while Fleur-de-Lys was carried off by the other.

Captain Phoebus, left alone, hesitated a moment between the two doors; then he followed the gypsy.

II

HOW A PRIEST AND A PHILOSOPHER ARE TWO

The priest whom the young girls had noticed at the top of the northern tower leaning over the square and so attentive to the gypsy's dance, was indeed the archdeacon Claude Frollo.

Our readers have not forgotten the mysterious cell that the archdeacon had reserved for himself in that tower. (I know not, by the way, if it is not the same one whose interior can still be seen today through a small square dormer window, opened to the east at man's height, upon the platform from which the towers spring: a hovel, now bare, empty and dilapidated, whose ill-plastered walls are _ornamented_ here and there, at this hour, with a few wretched yellow engravings representing cathedral façades. I presume this hole is inhabited concurrently by bats and spiders, and that there is thereby made upon the flies a double war of extermination.)

Every day, an hour before sunset, the archdeacon mounted the tower stair, and shut himself in this cell, where he sometimes passed whole nights. That day, at the moment when, arrived before the low door of the retreat, he put into the lock the complicated little key he always carried on him in the pouch hung at his side, a sound of tambourine and castanets reached his ear. This noise came from the Parvis square. The cell, we have said already, had but one dormer looking upon the church's flank. Claude Frollo had precipitately withdrawn the key, and an instant later he was upon the top of the tower, in the dark and absorbed attitude where the damsels had perceived him.

He was there, grave, motionless, absorbed in a gaze and a thought. All Paris was beneath his feet, with the thousand spires of its buildings and its circular horizon of soft hills, with its river winding under its bridges and its people undulating in its streets, with its cloud of smokes, with the mountainous chain of its roofs pressing Notre-Dame in its redoubled meshes. But in all that city, the archdeacon looked only at one point of the pavement, the Parvis square; in all that crowd, at but one figure, the gypsy.

It would have been difficult to say of what nature was that gaze, and whence came the flame that darted from it. It was a fixed gaze, and yet full of trouble and tumult. And in the profound immobility of all his body, scarce agitated at intervals by a mechanical shiver, like a tree in the wind, in the stiffness of his elbows more marble than the balustrade they leaned on, in the petrified smile that contracted his face, one would have said there was no longer anything living in Claude Frollo but the eyes.

The gypsy danced. She made her tambourine turn upon the tip of her finger, and tossed it in the air dancing Provençal sarabands; agile, light, joyous and not feeling the weight of the dreadful gaze that fell plumb upon her head.

The crowd swarmed around her; from time to time, a man clad in a yellow and red jacket made the circle, then came back to sit on a chair a few paces from the dancer, and took the goat's head upon his knees. This man seemed to be the gypsy's companion. Claude Frollo, from the elevated point where he was placed, could not distinguish his features.

From the moment the archdeacon had glimpsed this unknown, his attention seemed to divide between the dancer and him, and his face grew darker and darker. All at once he drew himself up, and a trembling ran through his whole body: "What is that man?" said he between his teeth, "I had always seen her alone!"

Then he plunged again under the tortuous vault of the spiral stair, and descended. In passing before the bell-ringers' room which stood ajar, he saw a thing that struck him: he saw Quasimodo who, leaning from an opening of those slate shutters that resemble enormous blinds, was also looking, he, into the square. He was in the grip of so deep a contemplation that he took no heed of his adoptive father's passing. His wild eye had a singular expression. It was a charmed and gentle gaze. "This is strange!" murmured Claude. "Is it the Egyptian he looks at thus?" He continued to descend. At the end of some minutes, the anxious archdeacon issued into the square by the door at the foot of the tower.

--What has become of the gypsy?" said he, mingling with the group of spectators the tambourine had gathered.

--I know not," answered one of his neighbors, "she has just disappeared. I think she went to do some fandango in the house opposite, where they called her."

In the place of the Egyptian, upon that same carpet whose arabesques were effaced a moment before under the capricious design of her dance, the archdeacon saw only the red and yellow man, who, to earn in his turn a few testons, walked around the circle, elbows on hips, head thrown back, face red, neck stretched, with a chair between his teeth. Upon this chair, he had tied a cat that a neighbor had lent and which swore most frightfully.

--Our Lady!" cried the archdeacon at the moment when the mountebank, sweating great drops, passed before him with his pyramid of chair and cat, "what is master Pierre Gringoire doing there?"

The severe voice of the archdeacon struck the poor devil with such a commotion that he lost his balance with his whole edifice, and chair and cat fell pell-mell upon the heads of the bystanders, amid an unextinguishable hooting.

It is probable that master Pierre Gringoire (for it was indeed he) would have had a sorry account to settle with the cat's neighbor, and all the bruised and scratched faces around him, had he not hastened to profit by the tumult to take refuge in the church, whither Claude Frollo had signed him to follow.

The cathedral was already dark and deserted. The side-aisles were full of shadows, and the chapel lamps began to star themselves, so black did the vaults become. Only the great rose-window of the façade, whose thousand colors were steeped in a horizontal ray of sun, shone in the gloom like a heap of diamonds and threw to the other end of the nave its dazzling specter.

When they had taken some steps, dom Claude leaned against a pillar and looked fixedly at Gringoire. That gaze was not the one Gringoire feared, ashamed as he was to have been surprised by a grave and learned person in this buffoon's costume. The priest's glance had nothing mocking or ironical; it was serious, tranquil and piercing. The archdeacon broke the silence first.

--Come hither, master Pierre. You will explain many things to me. And first, whence comes it that one has not seen you for well-nigh two months, and one finds you in the crossways, in fine array, truly! parti-colored of yellow and red like an apple of Caudebec?

--My lord," said Gringoire piteously, "it is indeed a prodigious rig, and you see me more abashed than a cat capped with a calabash. It is very ill done, I feel it, to expose before the sergeants of the watch, under this jacket, the humerus of a Pythagorean philosopher to be cudgeled. But what would you have, my reverend master? the fault is my old doublet's, which basely abandoned me at the beginning of winter, under pretext that it was falling to rags and needed to go rest in the ragman's basket. What to do? civilization has not yet reached the point where one can go quite naked, as the ancient Diogenes would have it. Add that a very cold wind was blowing, and it is not in January that one can successfully attempt this new step for humanity. This jacket presented itself. I took it, and left there my old black gown, which, for a hermetic like me, was very ill hermetically closed. Here I am then in a histrion's habit, like saint Genesius. What would you have? it is an eclipse. Apollo well kept the swine for Admetus.

--You make there a fine trade!" resumed the archdeacon.

--I grant, my master, that it is better to philosophize and poetize, to blow the flame in the furnace or receive it from heaven, than to carry cats upon a buckler. Also when you accosted me I was as silly as an ass before a spit. But what would you have, my lord? one must live every day, and the finest alexandrine verses are not worth under the tooth a morsel of Brie cheese. Now, I made for Madame Margaret of Flanders that famous epithalamium you know, and the city does not pay me for it, under pretext that it was not excellent, as if one could give for four crowns a tragedy of Sophocles. I was then about to die of hunger. Happily I found myself a little strong in the jaw, and I said to that jaw: "Do feats of strength and balance, feed thyself. _Ale te ipsam_[76]." A heap of knaves, who have become my good friends, taught me twenty Herculean tricks, and now I give every evening to my teeth the bread they earned in the day by the sweat of my brow. After all, _concedo_, I concede that it is a sorry employment of my intellectual faculties, and that man is not made to spend his life tambourining and biting chairs. But, reverend master, it suffices not to spend one's life, one must earn it."

Dom Claude listened in silence. All at once his sunken eye took so sagacious and penetrating an expression that Gringoire felt, as it were, searched to the bottom of his soul by that gaze.

--Very well, master Pierre, but whence comes it that you are now in company with that Egyptian dancer?

--Faith!" said Gringoire, "it is that she is my wife and I am her husband."

The priest's dark eye flamed.

--Would you have done that, wretch?" he cried, furiously seizing Gringoire's arm; "would you have been so forsaken of God as to lay hand on that girl?

--On my share of paradise, my lord," answered Gringoire trembling in all his limbs, "I swear to you I have never touched her, if that is what troubles you.

--And what mean you then by husband and wife?" said the priest.

Gringoire hastened to tell him, as succinctly as possible, all that the reader already knows, his adventure of the Court of Miracles and his marriage at the broken jug. It appears, besides, that this marriage had as yet produced no result, and that every evening the gypsy slipped from him his wedding night as on the first day. "It is a disappointment," said he in ending, "but it holds to my having had the misfortune to marry a virgin.

--What would you say?" asked the archdeacon, who had by degrees calmed at this tale.

--It is rather hard to explain," answered the poet. "It is a superstition. My wife is, as an old rogue we call among us the duke of Egypt told me, a foundling, or lost, which is the same thing. She wears at her neck an amulet which, they assure, will one day make her meet her parents, but which would lose its virtue if the young girl lost hers. It follows thence that we both remain very virtuous.

--Therefore," resumed Claude, whose brow cleared more and more at this account, "you believe, master Pierre, that this creature has been approached by no man?

--What would you have, dom Claude, that a man do with a superstition? She has that in her head. I esteem it is surely a rarity, this nun's prudery that keeps itself wild amid these gypsy girls so easily tamed. But she has to protect herself three things: the duke of Egypt who took her under his safeguard, counting perhaps to sell her to some damned abbot; all her tribe who hold her in singular veneration, as a Notre-Dame; and a certain dainty dagger that the wench always carries on her in some corner, despite the provost's ordinances, and which they make come out in her hands by pressing her waist. She's a fierce wasp, I tell you!"

The archdeacon plied Gringoire with questions.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”