Part 27

--Humph! replied Gringoire. I mistrust a gentleness that has pinched nostrils and thin lips."

Here the neighbors imposed silence on the two talkers. They were listening to an important deposition.

"My lords," said, in the middle of the hall, an old woman whose face was so hidden beneath her garments that one would have said a walking heap of rags, "my lords, the thing is as true as it is true that I am the Falourdel, established these forty years on the Pont Saint-Michel, and paying exactly rents, dues, and quit-rents, the door opposite the house of Tassin-Caillart, the dyer, which is on the upstream side of the water.--A poor old woman now, a pretty girl once, my lords! They have been telling me for some days: La Falourdel, do not spin your distaff too late at night, the devil likes to comb old women's flax with his horns. It is certain that the surly monk, who was last year on the side of the Temple, now prowls about the Cité. La Falourdel, beware lest he knock at your door.--One evening, I was spinning at my distaff, someone knocks at my door. I ask who it is. They swear. I open. Two men enter. A black man with a handsome officer. One saw only the black man's eyes, two embers. All the rest was cloak and hat. Then they say to me: 'The chamber of Sainte-Marthe.'--That is my room upstairs, my lords, my neatest. They give me a crown. I put the crown in my drawer, and I say: 'That will be to buy tripe tomorrow at the shambles of the Gloriette.'--We go up. Arrived at the room above, while I turned my back, the black man disappeared. That astonished me a little. The officer, who was handsome as a great lord, came down again with me. He goes out. The time to spin a quarter of a skein, he comes back with a beautiful young girl, a doll who would have shone like the sun had she been coiffed. She had with her a he-goat, a large he-goat, black or white, I no longer know. That sets me thinking. The girl, that is no concern of mine, but the goat!... I do not like those beasts, they have a beard and horns. That resembles a man. And then, it smells of Saturday. However, I said nothing. I had the crown. That is fair, is it not, Mr. Judge? I take the girl and the captain up to the room above, and leave them alone, that is to say with the goat. I go down and return to my spinning.--I must tell you that my house has a ground floor and a first story, it gives at the back upon the river, like the other houses of the bridge, and the window of the ground floor and the window of the first open upon the water.--I was then spinning. I know not why I thought of that surly monk whom the goat had put back into my head, and then the pretty girl was somewhat wildly decked out.--Suddenly, I hear a cry above, and something falling on the floor, and the window opening. I run to mine which is below, and I see pass before my eyes a black mass falling into the water. It was a phantom dressed as a priest. The moon shone clear. I saw him very well. He was swimming toward the Cité. Then, all a-tremble, I call the watch. These gentlemen of the dozen enter, and even at first, not knowing what it was about, as they were in merry mood, they beat me. I explained to them. We go up, and what do we find? my poor room all in blood, the captain stretched at full length with a dagger in his neck, the girl playing dead, and the goat all startled.--Good, said I, I shall have more than a fortnight to scrub the floor. It will have to be scraped, it will be terrible.--They carried off the officer, poor young man! and the girl all disheveled.--Wait. The worst is that the next day, when I went to take the crown to buy the tripe, I found a dry leaf in its place."

The old woman was silent. A murmur of horror circulated in the audience. "That phantom, that goat, all that smells of magic," said a neighbor of Gringoire. "And that dry leaf!" added another. "No doubt," resumed a third, "it is a witch who has dealings with the surly monk to rob officers." Gringoire himself was not far from finding all this combination frightful and plausible.

"Woman Falourdel," said the president with majesty, "have you nothing more to say to justice?"

"No, my lord," answered the old woman, "save that in the report they have called my house a tortuous and stinking hovel, which is outrageously spoken. The houses of the bridge are not of great appearance, because there is a swarm of people, but nevertheless butchers dwell there, who are rich folk and married to very cleanly beautiful women."

The magistrate who had struck Gringoire as a crocodile rose. "Silence!" said he. "I pray gentlemen not to lose sight that a dagger was found upon the accused. Woman Falourdel, did you bring this dry leaf into which the crown the demon gave you was transformed?"

"Yes, my lord," she answered, "I found it again. Here it is."

An usher passed the dead leaf to the crocodile, who made a gloomy sign with his head and passed it to the president, who sent it back to the king's prosecutor in the ecclesiastical court, so that it made the round of the hall. "It is a birch leaf," said Master Jacques Charmolue. "New proof of magic."

A counselor took the word.

"Witness, two men went up with you at the same time. The black man, whom you first saw disappear, then swim in the Seine in priest's clothes, and the officer.--Which of the two gave you the crown?"

The old woman reflected a moment and said: "It was the officer." A rumor ran through the crowd. "Ah!" thought Gringoire, "that makes my conviction hesitate."

Meanwhile Master Philippe Lheulier, the king's extraordinary advocate, intervened again. "I remind gentlemen that, in his deposition written at his bedside, the murdered officer, declaring that he had a vague thought, at the moment the black man accosted him, that it might very well be the surly monk, added that the phantom had urgently pressed him to go and make acquaintance with the accused, and upon his observation, as captain, that he was without money, had given him the crown wherewith the said officer paid the Falourdel. Therefore the crown is a coin of hell."

This conclusive observation seemed to dissipate all doubts in Gringoire and the other skeptics of the audience.

"Gentlemen have the dossier of the pieces," added the king's advocate as he sat down, "they may consult the statement of Phoebus de Châteaupers."

At that name the accused rose. Her head rose above the crowd. Gringoire, horror-struck, recognized the Esmeralda.

She was pale; her hair, formerly so gracefully braided and spangled with sequins, fell in disorder; her lips were blue; her hollow eyes frightened. Alas!

"Phoebus!" said she with bewilderment, "where is he? Oh my lords! before you kill me, for mercy's sake, tell me if he still lives!"

"Be silent, woman," answered the president. "That is not our affair."

"Oh! for pity's sake, tell me if he is alive!" she repeated, joining her beautiful wasted hands; and one heard her chains shiver along her robe.

"Well!" said the king's advocate dryly, "he is dying.--Are you satisfied?"

The unhappy girl fell back on her stool, voiceless, tearless, white as a waxen image.

The president bent toward a man placed at his feet, who had a gold cap and a black robe, a chain about his neck and a rod in his hand.

"Usher, bring in the second accused."

All eyes turned toward a small door which opened, and, to Gringoire's great palpitation, gave passage to a pretty goat with horns and feet of gold. The elegant creature stopped a moment on the threshold, stretching its neck, as if, poised on the tip of a rock, it had before its eyes an immense horizon. Suddenly it caught sight of the gypsy, and, leaping over the table and the head of a clerk, in two bounds it was at her knees. Then it rolled gracefully at its mistress's feet, soliciting a word or a caress; but the accused remained motionless, and poor Djali herself had not a glance.

"Why, this is my ugly beast," said old Falourdel, "and I know them both right well."

Jacques Charmolue intervened. "If it please gentlemen, we shall proceed to the interrogation of the goat."

It was indeed the second accused. Nothing was then simpler than a suit of sorcery brought against an animal. One finds, among others, in the accounts of the provostship for 1466, a curious detail of the costs of the trial of Gillet-Soulart and his sow, _executed for their misdeeds_, at Corbeil. All is there, the cost of the pits to put the sow in, the five hundred faggots of brushwood taken at the port of Morsant, the three pints of wine and the bread, last meal of the patient fraternally shared by the executioner, up to the eleven days of guard and feeding of the sow at eight deniers parisis each. Sometimes even they went further than the beasts. The capitularies of Charlemagne and of Louis the Débonnaire inflict grave penalties upon flaming phantoms who should permit themselves to appear in the air.

Meanwhile the prosecutor in the ecclesiastical court had cried: "If the demon who possesses this goat and who has resisted all exorcisms persists in his malefices, if he thus terrifies the court, we warn him that we shall be forced to demand against him the gallows or the stake."

Gringoire broke into a cold sweat. Charmolue took from a table the gypsy's tambourine, and, presenting it in a certain fashion to the goat, he asked it:

"What time is it?"

The goat looked at him with an intelligent eye, raised its gilded foot and struck seven times. It was indeed seven o'clock. A movement of terror ran through the crowd.

Gringoire could bear it no longer.

"She is lost!" he cried aloud. "You see well that she knows not what she does."

"Silence to the churls at the end of the hall!" said the usher sourly.

Jacques Charmolue, by the same maneuvers of the tambourine, made the goat perform several other mumming tricks, upon the date of the day, the month of the year, etc., of which the reader has already been witness. And, by an illusion of optics proper to judicial debates, those same spectators, who perhaps had more than once applauded in the crossways the innocent antics of Djali, were frightened thereby under the vaults of the Palais de Justice. The goat was decidedly the devil.

It was worse still, when the king's prosecutor having emptied on the floor a certain leather bag full of movable letters that Djali had about her neck, one saw the goat extract from the scattered alphabet that fatal name: _Phoebus_. The sorceries of which the captain had been victim appeared irresistibly demonstrated, and, in the eyes of all, the gypsy, that ravishing dancer who had so often dazzled the passers-by with her grace, was no longer but a frightful striga.

Moreover she gave no sign of life. Neither the graceful evolutions of Djali, nor the threats of the prosecution, nor the muffled imprecations of the audience, nothing any longer reached her thought.

It needed, to wake her, that a sergeant should shake her without pity and that the president should raise his voice solemnly:

"Girl, you are of gypsy race, given to malefices. You have, in complicity with the enchanted goat implicated in this suit, on the night of the 29th of March last, wounded and stabbed, in concert with the powers of darkness, by means of charms and practices, a captain of the archers of the king's ordinance, Phoebus de Châteaupers. Do you persist in denying?"

"Horror!" cried the young girl, hiding her face in her hands. "My Phoebus! Oh! it is hell!"

"Do you persist in denying?" asked the president coldly.

"If I deny it!" said she in a terrible accent, and she had risen and her eye flashed.

The president continued squarely:

"Then how do you explain the facts charged against you?"

She answered in a broken voice:

"I have already said it. I know not. It is a priest. A priest whom I know not. An infernal priest who persecutes me!"

"That is it," resumed the judge, "the surly monk."

"Oh my lords! have pity! I am but a poor girl..."

"Of Egypt," said the judge.

Master Jacques Charmolue took the word with gentleness:

"In view of the painful obstinacy of the accused, I demand the application of the question."

"Granted," said the president.

The unhappy girl trembled in all her body. She rose nevertheless at the order of the halberdiers, and walked with a rather firm step, preceded by Charmolue and the priests of the officiality, between two rows of halberds, toward a postern door which opened suddenly and closed upon her, which to the sad Gringoire had the effect of a horrible mouth that had just devoured her.

When she disappeared, one heard a plaintive bleating. It was the little goat weeping.

The session was suspended. A counselor having observed that gentlemen were fatigued and that it would be very long to wait until the end of the torture, the president answered that a magistrate should know how to sacrifice himself to his duty.

"The tiresome and unpleasant hussy," said an old judge, "who gets herself put to the question when one has not supped!"

II

CONTINUATION OF THE CROWN CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF

After some degrees mounted and descended in corridors so dark that they were lit with lamps at broad noon, the Esmeralda, still surrounded by her lugubrious cortege, was pushed by the sergeants of the palace into a sinister chamber. This chamber, of round shape, occupied the ground floor of one of those great towers which still pierce, in our century, the layer of modern edifices with which the new Paris has covered the old. No window to this vault, no other opening than the entrance, low and barred with an enormous iron door. Light nevertheless was not lacking there. A furnace was constructed in the thickness of the wall. A great fire was kindled there, which filled the vault with its red reflections, and stripped of all radiance a miserable candle placed in a corner. The iron grating which served to close the furnace, raised at this moment, let be seen, at the orifice of the flaming air-hole upon the tenebrous wall, only the lower extremity of its bars, like a row of black, sharp, and spaced teeth, which made the forge resemble one of those dragon mouths that cast flames in the legends. By the light that escaped thence, the prisoner saw all around the chamber fearful instruments whose use she understood not. In the middle lay a leather mattress almost upon the ground, on which hung a strap with a buckle, attached to a brass ring bitten by a flat-nosed monster sculpted in the keystone of the vault. Tongs, pincers, broad ploughshares, encumbered the inside of the furnace and glowed pell-mell upon the embers. The bloody gleam of the forge lit in all the chamber only a confusion of horrible things.

This tartarus was called simply _the chamber of the question_.

Upon the bed was nonchalantly seated Pierrat Torterue, the sworn torturer. His valets, two gnomes with square faces, leather aprons, linen breeches, stirred the ironware upon the coals.

The poor girl, though she had gathered her courage, in penetrating into this chamber felt horror.

The sergeants of the bailiff of the Palace ranged themselves on one side, the priests of the officiality on the other. A clerk, an inkstand and a table were in a corner. Master Jacques Charmolue approached the gypsy with a very sweet smile.

"My dear child," said he, "you persist then in denying?"

"Yes," she answered in a voice already extinguished.

"In that case," resumed Charmolue, "it will be very painful for us to question you with more instance than we could wish.--Be pleased to take the trouble to seat yourself upon this bed.--Master Pierrat, make room for mademoiselle, and close the door."

Pierrat rose with a grunt.

"If I close the door," he murmured, "my fire will go out."

"Well, my dear," replied Charmolue, "leave it open."

Meanwhile the Esmeralda remained standing. This leather bed, where so many wretches had writhed, terrified her. Terror froze the marrow of her bones. She was there, affrighted and stupid. At a sign from Charmolue, the two valets took her and placed her seated upon the bed. They did her no harm, but when these men touched her, when this leather touched her, she felt all her blood flow back to her heart. She cast a wild glance around the chamber. It seemed to her that she saw move and walk from all sides toward her, to climb along her body and bite and pinch her, all those deformed instruments of torture, which were, among the instruments of every kind she had hitherto seen, what bats, centipedes and spiders are among insects and birds.

"Where is the physician?" asked Charmolue.

"Here," answered a black robe she had not yet perceived.

She shuddered.

"Mademoiselle," resumed the caressing voice of the prosecutor in the ecclesiastical court, "for the third time do you persist in denying the facts whereof you are accused?"

This time she could only make a sign with her head. Her voice failed her.

"You persist?" said Jacques Charmolue. "Then I am desolated, but I must fulfill the duty of my office."

"Mr. King's Prosecutor," said Pierrat abruptly, "where shall we begin?"

Charmolue hesitated a moment with the ambiguous grimace of a poet seeking a rhyme.

"By the boot," said he at last.

The unfortunate felt so profoundly abandoned by God and men that her head fell upon her breast like an inert thing that has no strength in itself.

The torturer and the physician approached her at once. At the same time, the two valets began to rummage in their hideous arsenal.

At the clinking of those dreadful irons, the unhappy child started like a dead frog that is galvanized. "Oh!" she murmured, so low that none heard her, "oh my Phoebus!" Then she plunged again into her immobility and her silence of marble. This spectacle would have rent any heart but the hearts of judges. One would have said a poor sinful soul questioned by Satan under the scarlet wicket of hell. The miserable body whereto this frightful ant-heap of saws, wheels and racks was about to cling, the being about to be handled by those harsh hands of executioners and tongs, was then this sweet, white and fragile creature. Poor grain of millet that human justice gave to grind between the dreadful mills of torture!

Meanwhile the callous hands of the valets of Pierrat Torterue had brutally laid bare that charming leg, that little foot which had so often marveled the passers-by with their grace and beauty in the crossways of Paris.

"'Tis a pity!" grumbled the torturer considering those forms so graceful and so delicate. Had the archdeacon been present, certainly he would have remembered at this moment his symbol of the spider and the fly.

Soon the unhappy girl saw, through a cloud that spread over her eyes, approach the _boot_, soon she saw her foot, fitted between the iron-bound boards, disappear under the frightful apparatus. Then terror gave her back strength. "Take that off me!" she cried with vehemence. And, rising all disheveled: "Mercy!"

She sprang from the bed to throw herself at the feet of the king's prosecutor, but her leg was caught in the heavy block of oak and ironwork, and she collapsed upon the boot, more broken than a bee that should have lead upon its wing.

At a sign from Charmolue, they replaced her upon the bed, and two great hands fastened to her slender waist the strap that hung from the vault.

"A last time, do you confess the facts of the case?" asked Charmolue with his imperturbable benignity.

"I am innocent."

"Then, madam, how do you explain the circumstances charged against you?"

"Alas, my lord! I know not."

"You deny then?"

"All!"

"Do it," said Charmolue to Pierrat.

Pierrat turned the handle of the screw, the boot tightened, and the unhappy girl uttered one of those horrible cries which have no spelling in any human tongue.

"Stop," said Charmolue to Pierrat. "Do you confess?" he said to the gypsy.

"All!" cried the wretched girl. "I confess! I confess! mercy!"

She had not calculated her strength in facing the question. Poor child whose life until then had been so joyous, so sweet, so gentle, the first pain had vanquished her.

"Humanity obliges me to tell you," observed the king's prosecutor, "that in confessing it is death you must expect."

"I hope so," said she. And she fell back upon the leather bed, dying, bent double, letting herself hang from the strap buckled on her breast.

"Come, my beauty, support yourself a little," said Master Pierrat, raising her. "You look like the golden sheep that is at the neck of monsieur de Bourgogne."

Jacques Charmolue raised his voice.

"Clerk, write.--Gypsy girl, you confess your participation in the revels, sabbaths and malefices of hell, with the larvae, masks and stryges? Answer."

"Yes," said she, so low that her word was lost in her breath.

"You confess having seen the ram that Beelzebub causes to appear in the clouds to gather the sabbath, and which is seen only by sorcerers?"

"Yes."

"You confess having adored the heads of Baphomet, those abominable idols of the Templars?"

"Yes."

"Having had habitual commerce with the devil under the form of a familiar goat, joined to this suit?"

"Yes."

"Finally, you avow and confess having, by the aid of the demon, and of the phantom vulgarly called the surly monk, on the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, wounded and assassinated a captain named Phoebus de Châteaupers?"

She raised upon the magistrate her great fixed eyes, and answered as mechanically, without convulsion and without shock: "Yes." It was evident that all was broken in her.

"Write, clerk," said Charmolue. And addressing the torturers: "Let the prisoner be unbound, and taken back to the audience."

When the prisoner was _unshod_, the prosecutor in the ecclesiastical court examined her foot still numb with pain.

"Come!" said he, "there is no great harm. You cried in time. You could still dance, my beauty!"

Then he turned toward his acolytes of the officiality. "Here at last is justice enlightened! That relieves, gentlemen! Mademoiselle will bear us this witness, that we have acted with all possible gentleness."

III

END OF THE CROWN CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF

When she re-entered, pale and limping, the hall of audience, a general murmur of pleasure welcomed her. On the part of the audience, it was that sentiment of satisfied impatience one feels at the theatre at the expiration of the last intermission of the comedy, when the curtain rises and the end is about to begin. On the part of the judges, it was hope of soon supping. The little goat also bleated with joy. It would have run to its mistress, but it had been tied to the bench.

Night had fully come. The candles, whose number had not been increased, cast so little light that one did not see the walls of the hall. The darkness there enveloped all objects in a sort of mist. A few apathetic faces of judges stood out barely therein. Opposite them, at the end of the long hall, they could see a point of vague whiteness detach itself upon the dark ground. It was the accused.

She had dragged herself to her place. When Charmolue had installed himself magisterially in his, he sat down, then rose again, and said, without letting too much vanity of his success appear:

"The accused has confessed all."

"Gypsy girl," resumed the president, "you have confessed all your facts of magic, of prostitution and of assassination upon Phoebus de Châteaupers?"

Her heart tightened. One heard her sob in the shadow.

"All that you will," she answered faintly, "but kill me quickly!"

"Mr. King's Prosecutor in the ecclesiastical court," said the president, "the chamber is ready to hear you in your demands."

“Stories of the world, in your language.”