Part 28

Master Charmolue produced a frightful notebook, and began to read, with forceful gestures and the exaggerated intonation of a plea, an oration in Latin in which all the proofs of the case were reared upon Ciceronian periphrases flanked by quotations from Plautus, his favorite comic poet. We regret that we cannot offer our readers this remarkable passage. The orator delivered it with marvelous histrionics. He had not finished the exordium before the sweat was already breaking from his brow and starting from his eyes.

Suddenly, in the middle of a period, he broke off, and his glance, ordinarily rather gentle and even rather stupid, became lightning.

“Gentlemen,” he cried (this time in French, for it was not in the notebook), “Satan is so mixed up in this affair that there he is attending our proceedings and making mockery of their majesties. See!”

As he spoke, he pointed with his hand at the little goat, who, seeing Charmolue gesticulate, had indeed thought it fitting to do the same, and had sat back on her haunches, reproducing as best she could, with her forelegs and bearded head, the pathetic pantomime of the king’s attorney in ecclesiastical court. It was, if the reader recalls, one of her prettiest talents. This incident, this final proof, produced a great effect. They tied the goat’s legs, and the king’s attorney took up the thread of his eloquence.

It was very long, but the peroration was admirable. Here is the last sentence; add to it the husky voice and breathless gesture of Master Charmolue:

“Ideo, Domni, coram stryga demonstrata, crimine patente, intentione criminis existente, in nomine sanctæ ecclesiæ Nostræ-Dominæ Parisiensis, quæ est in saisina habendi omnimodam altam et bassam justitiam in illa hac intemerata Civitatis insula, tenore præsentium declaramus nos requirere, primo, aliquandam pecuniarium indemnitatem; secundo, amendationem honorabilem ante portalium maximum Nostræ-Dominæ, ecclesia cathedralis; tertio, sententiam in virtute cujus ista stryga cum sua capella, seu in trivio vulgariter dicto la Grève, seu in insula exeunte in fluvio Sequanæ, juxta pointam jardini regalis, executatæ sint[105]!”

He replaced his cap, and sat down again.

“Eheu!” sighed Gringoire, heartbroken, “bassa latinitas[106]!”

Another man in a black robe rose near the accused. It was her advocate. The judges, fasting, began to murmur.

“Counsel, be brief,” said the president.

“Mr. President,” answered the advocate, “since the defendant has confessed the crime, I have but one word to say to the gentlemen. Here is a text of the Salic law: ‘If a witch has eaten a man, and is convicted thereof, she shall pay a fine of eight thousand deniers, being two hundred gold sous.’ May it please the court to condemn my client to the fine.”

“Text abrogated,” said the extraordinary king’s attorney.

“Nego[107],” replied the advocate.

“To the vote!” said a councilor; “the crime is patent, and it is late.”

They proceeded to the vote without leaving the chamber. The judges gave their opinion by cap, for they were in haste. One saw their hooded heads uncover one after another in the shadow at the lugubrious question which the president put to them in a low voice. The poor accused seemed to be looking at them, but her troubled eye no longer saw.

Then the clerk began to write; then he passed a long parchment to the president.

Then the unhappy girl heard the people stir, the pikes clash, and a icy voice which said:

“Bohemian girl, on the day it shall please our lord the king, at the hour of noon, you shall be led in a tumbril, in your shift, barefoot, a rope about your neck, before the great portal of Notre-Dame, and there make honorable amends with a wax torch of two pounds weight in your hand, and from thence be led to the Place de Grève, where you shall be hanged and strangled on the town gibbet; and your said goat likewise; and you shall pay to the official three gold lions, in reparation of the crimes, by you committed and by you confessed, of sorcery, magic, lewdness and murder upon the person of the sieur Phoebus de Châteaupers, God have your soul!”

“Oh! it is a dream!” she murmured, and she felt rough hands bearing her away.

IV

“LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZAI[108]”

In the Middle Ages, when a building was complete, there was almost as much of it beneath the earth as without. Unless built on piles, like Notre-Dame, a palace, a fortress, a church always had a double bottom. In the cathedrals, it was, so to speak, an underground cathedral, low, dark, mysterious, blind and mute, beneath the upper nave which overflowed with light and resounded day and night with organs and bells; sometimes it was a sepulcher. In the palaces, in the bastilles, it was a prison, sometimes also a sepulcher, sometimes both together. These mighty structures, whose mode of formation and growth we have explained elsewhere, had not merely foundations, but, so to say, roots which went ramifying in the soil in chambers, in galleries, in staircases like the construction above. Thus, churches, palaces, bastilles had the earth to their middle. The cellars of a building were another building into which one descended instead of mounting, and which applied its subterranean stories beneath the heap of exterior stories of the monument, like those forests and mountains which reverse themselves in the shimmering water of a lake below the forests and mountains of the bank.

In the Bastille Saint-Antoine, in the Palais de Justice of Paris, in the Louvre, these subterranean edifices were prisons. The stories of these prisons, as they sank into the ground, went narrowing and darkening. They were so many zones where the shades of horror were ranged in steps. Dante could find nothing better for his hell. These funnels of dungeons ordinarily ended in an oubliette with a cask bottom where Dante put Satan, and where society put the condemned to death. Once a wretched life was buried there, farewell to day, to air, to life, omni speranza. She came out only for the gibbet or the stake. Sometimes she rotted there. Human justice called that forgetting. Between men and him, the condemned felt weighing on his head a heap of stones and jailers, and the prison entire, the massive bastille, was no longer but an enormous complicated lock which padlocked him out of the living world.

It was in a cask bottom of this kind, in the oubliettes dug by Saint Louis, in the in-pace of the Tournelle, that they had, for fear of escape no doubt, deposited the Esmeralda condemned to the gibbet, with the colossal Palais de Justice on her head. Poor fly who could not have stirred the least of its stones!

Certainly, providence and society had been equally unjust; such a luxury of misfortune and torture was not needed to break so frail a creature.

She was there, lost in the darkness, buried, entombed, walled up. Whoever had seen her in that state, after having seen her laugh and dance in the sun, would have shuddered. Cold as the night, cold as death, no breath of air in her hair, no human sound in her ear, no gleam of day in her eyes, broken in two, crushed with chains, crouched near a jug and a loaf on a little straw in the pool of water which formed beneath her from the seepings of the dungeon, without movement, scarce breathing, she was not even at the point of suffering. Phoebus, the sun, noon, the open air, the streets of Paris, the dances to applause, the sweet love prattle with the officer, then the priest, the sorceress, the dagger, the blood, the torture, the gibbet, all that passed again through her mind, now as a singing and gilded vision, now as a misshapen nightmare; but it was no longer but a horrible and vague struggle which was lost in the darkness, or a distant music which played up there on the earth, and which was no longer heard at the depth where the unhappy girl had fallen.

Since she had been there, she neither watched nor slept. In that misfortune, in that dungeon, she could no more distinguish waking from sleep, dream from reality, than day from night. All that was mingled, broken, floating, spread confusedly in her thought. She no longer felt, she no longer knew, she no longer thought. At most she mused. Never had living creature been engulfed so far into nothingness.

Thus numbed, frozen, petrified, she had scarce noticed two or three times the noise of a trap which had opened somewhere above her, without even letting pass a little light, and through which a hand had thrown her a crust of black bread. It was, however, the only communication which remained to her with men, the periodic visit of the jailer.

One thing alone still mechanically occupied her ear: above her head the damp filtered through the mouldy stones of the vault, and at equal intervals a drop of water detached itself from it. She listened stupidly to the noise that this drop of water made falling into the pool beside her.

This drop of water falling into this pool, that was the only movement which still stirred around her, the only clock which marked time, the only sound which came to her from all the noise that is made on the surface of the earth.

To tell all, she also felt from time to time, in that cloaca of mire and darkness, something cold which passed here and there over her foot or her arm, and she shuddered.

How long she had been there, she knew not. She remembered a sentence of death pronounced somewhere against someone, then that she had been carried away, she, and that she had awakened in the night and in the silence, frozen. She had dragged herself on her hands; then iron rings had cut her ankle, and chains had sounded. She had perceived that all was wall around her, that there was beneath her a flagged stone covered with water and a truss of straw. But neither lamp nor air-hole. Then she had sat on this straw, and sometimes, to change posture, on the last step of a stone stair which was in her dungeon.

A moment, she had tried to count the black minutes measured to her by the drop of water, but soon this sad labor of a sick brain had broken of itself in her head and left her in stupor.

One day at last or one night (for midnight and noon had the same color in this sepulcher), she heard above her a noise louder than that ordinarily made by the turnkey when he brought her bread and jug. She lifted her head, and saw a reddish ray pass through the cracks of the sort of door or trap made in the vault of the in-pace. At the same time the heavy ironwork creaked, the trap grated on its rusty hinges, turned, and she saw a lantern, a hand and the lower body of two men, the door being too low for her to perceive their heads. The light wounded her so sharply that she closed her eyes.

When she reopened them, the door was shut again, the lantern was set on a step of the stair, a man, alone, was standing before her. A black cowl fell to his feet, a caffardum of the same color hid his face. Nothing of his person was visible, neither his countenance nor his hands. It was a long black shroud which stood upright, and beneath which one felt something move. She gazed fixedly for some minutes at this kind of specter. Meanwhile, neither she nor he spoke. One would have said two statues confronting each other. Only two things seemed alive in the vault; the wick of the lantern which crackled because of the dampness of the air, and the drop of water from the vault which cut this irregular crackling with its monotonous plashing and made the lantern light tremble in concentric moirés on the oily water of the pool.

At length the prisoner broke the silence:

“Who are you?”

“A priest.”

The word, the accent, the sound of voice, made her start.

The priest pursued, articulating dully:

“Are you prepared?”

“For what?”

“To die.”

“Oh!” said she, “will it be soon?”

“Tomorrow.”

Her head, which had lifted with joy, fell back against her breast. “That is still very long!” she murmured; “what does it matter to them, today?”

“Are you then very unhappy?” asked the priest after a silence.

“I am very cold,” she answered.

She took her feet in her hands, a gesture habitual to the unhappy who are cold and which we have already seen the recluse of the Tour-Roland make, and her teeth chattered.

The priest appeared to roam his eyes beneath his hood over the dungeon.

“Without light! without fire! in the water! it is horrible!”

“Yes,” she answered with the astonished air that misfortune had given her. “The day is for everyone. Why do they give me only the night?”

“Do you know,” the priest resumed after a new silence, “why you are here?”

“I think I knew it,” said she, passing her thin fingers over her eyebrows as if to aid her memory, “but I no longer know.”

Suddenly she began to weep like a child.

“I should like to get out of here, sir. I am cold, I am afraid, and there are beasts which climb up my body.”

“Well, follow me.”

As he spoke, the priest took her arm. The unhappy girl was frozen to the very entrails, yet this hand made on her the impression of cold.

“Oh!” she murmured, “it is the icy hand of death. Who are you, then?”

The priest raised his cowl. She looked. It was that sinister face which had pursued her so long, that demon’s head which had appeared to her at Falourdel’s above the adored head of her Phoebus, that eye which she had seen for the last time gleam near a dagger.

This apparition, always so fatal for her, and which had thus pushed her from misfortune to misfortune even to the scaffold, drew her from her numbness. It seemed to her that the sort of veil which had thickened over her memory was rent. All the details of her lugubrious adventure, from the nocturnal scene at Falourdel’s to her condemnation at the Tournelle, came back to her mind at once, not vague and confused as hitherto, but distinct, crude, sharp, palpitating, terrible. These half-effaced memories, and almost obliterated by excess of suffering, the dark figure she had before her revived, as the approach of fire brings out all fresh upon white paper the invisible letters one has traced there with sympathetic ink. It seemed to her that all the wounds of her heart were opening and bleeding at once.

“Ha!” she cried, her hands on her eyes and with a convulsive tremor, “it is the priest!”

Then she let her discouraged arms fall, and remained seated, head lowered, eye fixed on the ground, silent, and continuing to tremble.

The priest looked at her with the eye of a kite which has long hovered in circles from the top of the sky around a poor lark crouched in the wheat, which has long narrowed in silence the formidable circles of its flight, and has suddenly swooped on its prey like the lightning’s arrow, and holds it panting in its claw.

She began to murmur very low:

“Finish! finish! the last blow!” And she thrust her head with terror between her shoulders, like the ewe which awaits the butcher’s mallet stroke.

“Do I then inspire you with horror?” said he at last.

She answered not.

“Do I inspire you with horror?” he repeated.

Her lips contracted as if she smiled.

“Yes,” said she, “the executioner mocks the condemned. For months he has pursued me, threatened me, terrified me! But for him, my God, how happy I was! It is he who has cast me into this abyss! O heaven! it is he who killed... it is he who killed him! my Phoebus!”

Here, bursting into sobs and lifting her eyes to the priest:

“Oh! wretch! who are you? what have I done to you? do you then hate me so? Alas! what have you against me?”

“I love you!” cried the priest.

Her tears stopped suddenly. She looked at him with the gaze of an idiot. He had fallen on his knees and was devouring her with a flaming eye.

“Do you hear? I love you!” he cried again.

“What love!” said the unhappy girl shuddering.

He resumed:

“The love of a damned soul.”

Both remained some minutes silent, crushed beneath the weight of their emotions, he frenzied, she stupefied.

“Listen,” said the priest at last, and a singular calm had returned to him. “You shall know all. I will tell you what until now I have scarce dared tell myself, when I furtively questioned my conscience in those deep hours of the night when there is so much darkness that God seems no longer to see us. Listen. Before meeting you, young girl, I was happy...

“And I!” she sighed feebly.

“Do not interrupt me. Yes, I was happy, I believed myself so at least. I was pure, I had my soul full of a limpid clarity. No head rose prouder and more radiant than mine. The priests consulted me on chastity, the doctors on doctrine. Yes, science was all to me. It was a sister, and one sister sufficed me. Not that with age there had not come to me other ideas. More than once my flesh had stirred at the passing of a woman’s shape. That force of sex and of man’s blood which, foolish adolescent, I had thought to stifle for life, had more than once convulsively lifted the iron chain of vows which seals me, miserable, to the cold stones of the altar. But fasting, prayer, study, the macerations of the cloister, had made the soul mistress of the body again. And then, I avoided women. Besides, I had only to open a book for all the impure fumes of my brain to vanish before the splendor of science. In a few minutes, I felt the thick things of earth flee far away, and I found myself calm, dazzled and serene in presence of the tranquil radiance of eternal truth. So long as the demon sent to attack me only vague shadows of women who passed scattered before my eyes, in the church, in the streets, in the meadows, and who returned scarce in my dreams, I vanquished him easily. Alas! if victory has not remained with me, the fault is God’s, who has not made man and demon of equal strength.—Listen. One day...”

Here the priest stopped, and the prisoner heard issue from his breast sighs which made a noise of rattling and rending.

He resumed:

“...One day, I was leaning at the window of my cell...—What book was I reading? Oh! all that is a whirlwind in my head.—I was reading. The window gave on a square. I hear a noise of drum and music. Vexed at being thus troubled in my reverie, I look into the square. What I saw, there were others than I who saw it, and yet it was no spectacle made for human eyes. There, in the middle of the pavement,—it was noon,—a great sun,—a creature was dancing. A creature so beautiful that God would have preferred her to the Virgin, and chosen her for his mother, and would have wished to be born of her if she had existed when he made himself man! Her eyes were black and splendid; amid her black hair a few hairs which the sun pierced grew blond like threads of gold. Her feet disappeared in their motion like the rays of a wheel turning rapidly. Around her head, in her black braids, there were plates of metal which crackled in the sun and made her brow a crown of stars. Her robe sown with spangles scintillated blue and pricked with a thousand sparks like a summer night. Her supple brown arms knotted and unknotted around her waist like two scarves. The shape of her body was astonishing in beauty. Oh! the resplendent figure which detached itself like something luminous in the very light of the sun!—Alas! young girl, it was you.—Surprised, intoxicated, charmed, I let myself gaze at you. I gazed at you so much that suddenly I shuddered with horror, I felt that fate had seized me.”

The priest, oppressed, stopped yet another moment. Then he continued.

“Already half fascinated, I tried to cling to something and hold myself in my fall. I recalled the snares Satan had already laid for me. The creature who was before my eyes had that superhuman beauty which can come only from heaven or hell. This was no simple girl made with a little of our earth, and poorly lit within by the wavering ray of a woman’s soul. It was an angel! but of darkness, but of flame and not of light. At the moment I thought that, I saw near you a goat, a beast of the sabbath, which looked at me laughing. The midday sun made it horns of fire. Then I glimpsed the demon’s trap, and I doubted no more that you came from hell and that you came for my perdition. I believed it.”

Here the priest looked the prisoner full in the face and added coldly:

“I believe it still.—However, the charm operated little by little, your dance turned in my brain, I felt the mysterious malefice accomplish itself in me, all that should have watched fell asleep in my soul, and like those who die in the snow I found pleasure in letting this sleep come. Suddenly you began to sing. What could I do, wretch? Your song was yet more charming than your dance. I wished to flee. Impossible. I was nailed, I was rooted in the soil. It seemed to me that the marble of the flagstone had mounted to my knees. I must remain to the end. My feet were of ice, my head boiled. At last you perhaps took pity on me, you ceased singing, you disappeared. The reflection of the dazzling vision, the resonance of the enchanting music, faded by degrees from my eyes and ears. Then I fell in the window corner, more rigid and weaker than a loosened statue. The vespers bell awoke me. I rose, I fled, but, alas! there was in me something fallen which could not rise, something come upon me which I could not flee.”

He paused yet again, and pursued:

“Yes, from that day there was in me a man I knew not. I would use all my remedies, the cloister, the altar, work, books. Folly! Oh! how hollow sounds science when one comes to strike on it with a head full of passions in despair! Know you, young girl, what I always saw henceforth between the book and me? You, your shadow, the image of the luminous apparition which had one day traversed space before me. But this image no longer had the same color; it was dark, funereal, tenebrous like the black circle which long pursues the sight of the imprudent who has looked fixedly at the sun.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”