Part 30

He hoped, moreover, that the affair would not get abroad, that his name, in his absence, would be barely pronounced there and in any case would not resound beyond the rail of the Tournelle. In this he was not mistaken; there was then no *Gazette des Tribunaux*, and as hardly a week passed without its coiner boiled, or its witch hanged, or its heretic burned at one of the innumerable *justices* of Paris, people were so accustomed to seeing, in every crossroads, old feudal Themis, with bare arms and sleeves rolled up, doing her work at the gallows, the ladders and the pillories, that they scarcely took notice of it. The fine world of that time hardly knew the name of the patient who passed at the street corner, and the populace at most regaled itself with that coarse fare. An execution was a habitual incident of the public way, like the brazier of the fritter-seller or the slaughtering of the knacker. The executioner was but a sort of butcher a little darker than another.

Phoebus therefore very promptly set his mind at rest concerning the enchantress Esmeralda, or Similar, as he called her, concerning the stab of the gypsy or the surly monk (little did it matter to him), and concerning the issue of the trial. But as soon as his heart was vacant on that side, the image of Fleur-de-Lys returned there. The heart of Captain Phoebus, like the physics of that time, had a horror of a vacuum.

It was, besides, a very insipid abode, that Queue-en-Brie, a village of farriers and dairy-women with chapped hands, a long string of hovels and cottages which borders the high road on both sides for half a league; a *tail*, in short.

Fleur-de-Lys was his next-to-last passion, a pretty girl, a charming dowry; therefore, one fine morning, quite cured, and presuming well that after two months the gypsy's affair must be finished and forgotten, the loverly cavalier arrived, prancing, at the door of the Gondelaurier house.

He paid no attention to a rather numerous crowd which was gathering in the parvis square, before the portal of Notre-Dame; he remembered that it was the month of May, he supposed some procession, some Pentecost, some feast, tied his horse to the ring of the porch, and mounted joyfully to his fair betrothed.

She was alone with her mother.

Fleur-de-Lys had always on her heart the scene of the sorceress, her goat, her accursed alphabet, and the long absences of Phoebus. However, when she saw her captain enter, she thought him looking so well, his doublet so new, his baldric so shining and his air so passionate that she blushed with pleasure. The noble damsel was herself more charming than ever. Her magnificent blond hair was braided to ravishment, she was all clad in that sky-blue which becomes white skins so well, a coquetry that Colombe had taught her, and had her eye drowned in that languor of love which becomes them even better.

Phoebus, who had seen nothing in the way of beauty since the wenches of Queue-en-Brie, was intoxicated with Fleur-de-Lys, which gave our officer so eager and so gallant a manner that his peace was made at once. Madame de Gondelaurier herself, always maternally seated in her great armchair, had not the strength to scold him. As for Fleur-de-Lys's reproaches, they expired in tender cooings.

The young girl was seated near the window, still embroidering her grotto of Neptunus. The captain stood leaning on the back of her chair, and she addressed to him, in a half-voice, her caressing scoldings.

"What have you become then, these two long months, wicked one?"

"I swear to you," answered Phoebus, a little embarrassed by the question, "that you are beautiful enough to make an archbishop dream."

She could not help smiling.

"That is well, that is well, monsieur. Leave my beauty alone, and answer me. Fine beauty, truly!"

"Well then! dear cousin, I was recalled to hold garrison."

"And where, if you please? and why did you not come to say farewell?"

"At Queue-en-Brie."

Phoebus was delighted that the first question helped him evade the second.

"But that is quite near, monsieur. How is it you did not come to see me once?"

Here Phoebus was seriously embarrassed.

"It is that... the service... and then, charming cousin, I have been ill."

"Ill!" she repeated, frightened.

"Yes... wounded."

"Wounded!"

The poor child was all upset.

"Oh! do not be alarmed at that," said Phoebus negligently, "it is nothing. A quarrel, a sword-thrust; what is that to you?"

"What is that to me!" cried Fleur-de-Lys, raising her beautiful eyes full of tears. "Oh! you do not say what you think in saying that. What is this sword-thrust? I want to know all."

"Well! dear beauty, I had a brawl with Mahé Fédy, you know? the lieutenant of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and we ripped each other some inches of skin. That is all."

The lying captain knew full well that a matter of honor always sets a man off in a woman's eyes. Indeed, Fleur-de-Lys looked him in the face all moved with fear, pleasure and admiration. She was not, however, completely reassured.

"Provided you are quite wholly cured, my Phoebus!" said she. "I do not know your Mahé Fédy, but he is a ugly man. And whence came this quarrel?"

Here Phoebus, whose imagination was but very moderately creative, began to know no longer how to extricate himself from his feat of prowess.

"Oh! how should I know?... a nothing, a horse, a word! Dear cousin," he cried to change the conversation, "what is that noise in the Parvis?"

He approached the window. "Oh! my God, fair cousin, there is a great crowd in the square!"

"I do not know," said Fleur-de-Lys; "it appears there is a sorceress who is to make honorable amends this morning before the church, to be hanged afterwards."

The captain believed so well the Esmeralda affair ended that he was very little moved by Fleur-de-Lys's words. He put to her, however, a question or two.

"What is this sorceress called?"

"I do not know," she answered.

"And what is she said to have done?"

She shrugged her white shoulders again this time.

"I do not know."

"Oh! my God Jesus!" said the mother, "there are so many sorcerers now, that they burn them, I believe, without knowing their names. It were as well to try to know the name of every cloud in the sky. After all, one may be easy. The good God keeps his register." Here the venerable lady rose and came to the window. "Lord!" said she, "you are right, Phoebus. There is a great crowd of common folk. There are some, blessed be God! even on the roofs.--Do you know, Phoebus? that recalls my fine time to me. The entry of King Charles VII, when there was so many people too.--I no longer know in what year.--When I speak to you of that, is it not? that makes you feel it as something old, and me as something young.--Oh! it was a far finer people than at present. There were some even on the machicolations of the Saint-Antoine gate. The king had the queen on the croup, and after their highnesses came all the ladies on the croup of all the lords. I remember that they laughed greatly, because beside Amanyon de Garlande, who was very short of stature, there was the sire Matefelon, a knight of gigantic stature, who had killed Englishmen by heaps. It was very fine. A procession of all the gentlemen of France with their oriflammes glowing to the eye. There were those with pennon and those with banner. How should I know? the sire de Calan, with pennon; Jean de Châteaumorant, with banner; the sire de Coucy, with banner, and more starred than any of the others, except the duke of Bourbon...--Alas! how sad a thing it is to think that all that existed and that nothing of it remains!"

The two lovers did not listen to the respectable dowager. Phoebus had come back to lean on the back of his betrothed's chair, a charming post whence his libertine gaze plunged into all the openings of Fleur-de-Lys's collar. That gorget gaped so aptly, and let him see so many exquisite things and let him guess so many others, that Phoebus, dazzled by that skin with a satin reflection, said to himself: "How can one love anything but a white woman?"

Both kept silence. The young girl raised from time to time upon him ravished and soft eyes, and their hair mingled in a ray of the spring sun.

"Phoebus," said Fleur-de-Lys suddenly in a low voice, "we are to marry in three months, swear to me that you have never loved any other woman than me."

"I swear it to you, fair angel!" answered Phoebus, and his passionate gaze joined, to convince Fleur-de-Lys, the sincere accent of his voice. He believed himself perhaps, at this moment, in it.

Meanwhile the good mother, charmed to see the betrothed in such perfect understanding, had just gone out of the apartment to attend to some domestic detail. Phoebus perceived it, and this solitude so emboldened the adventurous captain that there mounted to his brain some very strange ideas. Fleur-de-Lys loved him, he was her betrothed, she was alone with him, his old taste for her had reawakened, not in all its freshness, but in all its ardor; after all, it is no great crime to eat a little of one's wheat in the blade; I know not if these thoughts passed through his mind, but what is certain is that Fleur-de-Lys was suddenly frightened at the expression of his gaze. She looked around her, and saw her mother no more.

"My God!" said she, red and uneasy, "I am so warm!"

"I believe indeed," answered Phoebus, "that it is not far from noon. The sun is troublesome. There is nothing but to close the curtains."

"No, no," cried the poor little one, "I need air, on the contrary." And like a doe who feels the breath of the pack, she rose, ran to the window, opened it, and precipitated herself upon the balcony.

Phoebus, rather vexed, followed her there.

The square of the Parvis Notre-Dame, upon which the balcony gave, as is known, presented at this moment a sinister and singular spectacle which abruptly changed the nature of the timid Fleur-de-Lys's fright.

An immense crowd, which flowed back into all the adjacent streets, encumbered the square properly so called. The little wall breast-high which surrounded the Parvis would not have sufficed to keep it free, had it not been doubled by a thick hedge of sergeants of the eleven-score and of arquebusiers, the culverin in hand. Thanks to this thicket of pikes and arquebuses, the Parvis was empty. The entrance was guarded by a body of halberdiers with the arms of the bishop. The wide doors of the church were closed, which contrasted with the innumerable windows of the square, which, open even upon the gables, let see thousands of heads heaped up about like piles of cannon-balls in an artillery park.

The surface of this crowd was gray, dirty and earthy. The spectacle it awaited was evidently of those which have the privilege of extracting and calling forth what there is most loathsome in the population. Nothing so hideous as the noise which escaped from that swarming of yellow coifs and sordid hair. In this crowd, there were more laughs than cries, more women than men.

From time to time some shrill and vibrant voice pierced the general rumor.

"Holloa! Mahiet Baliffre! is she to be hanged there?"

"Imbecile! it is here the honorable amends, in smock; the good God is going to cough Latin in her face! That is always done here, at noon. If it is the gallows you want, go to the Grève."

"I will go after."

"Say then, la Boucandry? is it true that she refused a confessor?"

"It appears so, la Bechaigne."

"See there, the pagan!"

"Monsieur, it is the custom. The bailiff of the Palais is bound to deliver the malefactor fully judged, for execution, if it is a layman, to the provost of Paris; if it is a clerk, to the official of the bishopric."

"I thank you, monsieur."

"Oh! my God," said Fleur-de-Lys, "the poor creature!"

This thought filled with sorrow the gaze she let wander over the populace. The captain, much more occupied with her than with that heap of rabble, amorously rumpled his girdle from behind. She turned back suppliant and smiling.

"I pray you, leave me, Phoebus! if my mother came in, she would see your hand!"

At this moment noon slowly struck on the clock of Notre-Dame. A murmur of satisfaction burst from the crowd. The last vibration of the twelfth stroke was scarce extinguished when all the heads flocked like waves under a gust of wind, and an immense clamor rose from the windows and the roofs: "There she is!"

Fleur-de-Lys put her hands on her eyes not to see.

"Charming one," said Phoebus to her, "will you go in?"

"No," she answered; and those eyes which she had just closed through fear, she reopened through curiosity.

A tumbrel drawn by a strong Norman cart-horse and wholly enveloped in cavalry in violet livery with white crosses, had just debouched upon the square by the rue Saint-Pierre-aux-Boeufs. The sergeants of the watch cleared it a passage through the people with great blows of their wands. Beside the tumbrel some officers of justice and police, recognizable by their black costume and their awkward way of sitting a horse. Master Jacques Charmolue paraded at their head.

In the fatal cart, a young girl was seated, her arms bound behind her back, without a priest beside her. She was in her smock, her long black hair (the fashion then was to cut it only at the foot of the gibbet) fell scattered on her throat and on her half-bared shoulders.

Through that undulating hair, more shining than a raven's plumage, one saw writhe and knot a great gray and rough rope which chafed her fragile clavicles and rolled around the charming neck of the poor girl like an earthworm on a flower. Beneath that rope glittered a little amulet adorned with green glass beads which had been left her doubtless because nothing is refused to those who are about to die. The spectators placed at the windows could perceive at the bottom of the tumbrel her bare legs which she strove to hide under her, as by a last instinct of woman. At her feet there was a little goat tied. The condemned girl held with her teeth her ill-fastened smock. It would have seemed that she still suffered in her misery to be thus delivered almost naked to all eyes. Alas! it is not for such shudderings that modesty is made.

"Jesus!" said Fleur-de-Lys quickly to the captain, "look, fair cousin! it is that ugly gypsy with the goat!"

In speaking thus she turned back toward Phoebus. He had his eyes fixed on the tumbrel. He was very pale.

"What gypsy with the goat?" said he, stammering.

"How!" resumed Fleur-de-Lys, "do you not remember?..."

Phoebus interrupted her.

"I know not what you mean."

He made a step to go in. But Fleur-de-Lys, whose jealousy, lately so vividly stirred by that same Egyptian, had just reawakened, Fleur-de-Lys cast him a glance full of penetration and distrust. She recalled vaguely at this moment having heard tell of a captain mixed up in the trial of that sorceress.

"What ails you?" said she to Phoebus, "one would say that woman troubled you."

Phoebus strove to sneer.

"I! not in the least! Ah, indeed!"

"Then stay," she resumed imperiously, "and let us see to the end."

The luckless captain was forced to remain. What reassured him a little was that the condemned girl did not detach her gaze from the flooring of her tumbrel. It was but too truly the Esmeralda. On that last step of opprobrium and misfortune, she was still beautiful; her great black eyes seemed still greater because of the wasting of her cheeks, her livid profile was pure and sublime. She resembled what she had been as a Virgin of Masaccio resembles a Virgin of Raphael: weaker, thinner, leaner.

From the rest, there was nothing in her which did not, as it were, jolt, and which, except her modesty, she did not let go at random, so deeply had she been broken by stupor and despair. Her body rebounded at all the jolts of the tumbrel like a dead or broken thing. Her look was dull and mad. One still saw a tear in her pupil, but motionless and, so to speak, frozen.

Meanwhile the lugubrious cavalcade had crossed the crowd amid cries of joy and curious attitudes. We must say, however, to be a faithful historian, that in seeing her so beautiful and so overwhelmed, many had been moved to pity, and among the hardest.

The tumbrel had entered the Parvis.

Before the central portal, it stopped. The escort ranged itself in battle order on the two sides. The crowd was silent, and in the midst of that silence full of solemnity and anxiety the two leaves of the great door turned, as of themselves, on their hinges which grated with a fife-like noise. Then one saw in all its length the profound church, dark, hung with mourning, scarcely lighted by some tapers scintillating afar on the high altar, open like a tavern's mouth in the midst of the square dazzling with light. At the far end, in the shadow of the apse, one glimpsed a gigantic silver cross, spread upon a black cloth which fell from the vault to the pavement. All the nave was deserted. However, one saw confusedly move some heads of priests in the distant stalls of the choir, and at the moment when the great door opened there escaped from the church a grave, bursting and monotonous chant which cast, as by gusts, upon the head of the condemned girl fragments of lugubrious psalms.

"...Non timebo millia populi circumdantis me; exsurge, Domine; salvum me fac, Deus! "...Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intraverunt aquæ usque ad animam meam. "...Infixus sum in limo profundi; et non est substantia."

At the same time another voice, isolated from the choir, intoned on the step of the high altar this melancholy offertory:

"Qui verbum meum audit, et credit ei qui misit me, habet vitam æternam et in judicium non venit; sed transit a morte in vitam."

This chant which some old men, lost in their shadows, sang from afar upon that beautiful creature, full of youth and of life, caressed by the tepid air of spring, flooded with sunlight, it was the mass of the dead.

The people listened with recollection.

The unhappy one, bewildered, seemed to lose her sight and her thought in the dark entrails of the church. Her white lips moved as if she prayed, and when the hangman's varlet approached her to help her down from the tumbrel, he heard her repeating in a low voice this word: Phoebus.

They unbound her hands, they made her descend accompanied by her goat which they had also unbound, and which bleated for joy at feeling free, and they made her walk barefoot on the hard pavement to the foot of the portal steps. The rope she had about her neck trailed behind her. One would have said a serpent following her.

Then the chant ceased in the church. A great cross of gold and a file of tapers set themselves in motion in the shadow. One heard the halberd of the particolored Swiss ring, and some moments after a long procession of priests in chasubles and deacons in dalmatics, which came gravely and in psalmody toward the condemned girl, unfolded to her sight and to the eyes of the crowd. But her gaze stopped at him who marched at the head, immediately after the cross-bearer.

"Oh!" said she very low, shuddering, "it is he again! the priest!"

It was indeed the archdeacon. He had at his left the sub-chanter and at his right the chanter armed with the staff of his office. He advanced, his head thrown back, his fixed eyes open, singing in a strong voice:

"De ventre inferi clamavi, et exaudisti vocem meam. "Et projecisti me in profundum in corde maris, et flumen circumdedit me."

At the moment when he appeared in the full light under the high pointed portal, enveloped in a vast silver cope barred with a black cross, he was so pale that more than one thought in the crowd that it was one of the marble bishops, kneeling on the sepulchral stones of the choir, who had risen and who came to receive at the threshold of the tomb her who was about to die.

She, no less pale and no less statue, she had scarce perceived that they had put in her hand a heavy taper of yellow wax lighted, she had not listened to the glib voice of the clerk reading the fatal tenor of the honorable amends; when she was told to answer *Amen*, she had answered Amen. It needed, to give her back some life and some force, that she saw the priest make sign to her guards to withdraw and advance alone toward her.

Then she felt her blood boil in her head, and a remnant of indignation rekindled in that soul already numb and cold.

The archdeacon approached her slowly. Even in this extremity, she saw him cast upon her nudity an eye sparkling with lust, jealousy and desire. Then he said to her in a loud voice: "Young girl, have you asked God pardon for your faults and your failings?" He bent to her ear, and added (the spectators thought that he was receiving her last confession): "Will you have me? I can still save you!"

She looked at him fixedly: "Begone, demon! or I denounce you."

He began to smile with a horrible smile. "They will not believe you.--You will but add a scandal to a crime.--Answer quickly! will you have me?"

"What have you done with my Phoebus?"

"He is dead," said the priest.

At this moment the miserable archdeacon raised his head mechanically, and saw at the other end of the square, at the balcony of the Gondelaurier house, the captain standing near Fleur-de-Lys. He staggered, passed his hand over his eyes, looked again, murmured a curse, and all his features contracted violently.

"Well then! die, thou!" said he between his teeth. "No one shall have thee."

Then raising his hand over the Egyptian, he cried in a funereal voice:

"*I nunc, anima anceps, et sit tibi Deus misericors!*"

It was the dreadful formula with which one was wont to close those dark ceremonies. It was the agreed signal of the priest to the hangman.

The people knelt.

"*Kyrie Eleison*," said the priests remaining under the pointed portal.

"*Kyrie Eleison*," repeated the crowd with that murmur which runs over all heads like the lapping of an agitated sea.

"*Amen*," said the archdeacon.

He turned his back to the condemned girl, his head fell upon his chest, his hands crossed, he rejoined his cortège of priests, and a moment after one saw him disappear, with the cross, the tapers and the copes, under the misty arches of the cathedral; and his sonorous voice was extinguished by degrees in the choir in singing this verse of despair:

"...*Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt!*"

At the same time the intermittent resounding of the iron-shod shaft of the Swiss halberds, dying little by little under the intercolumniations of the nave, produced the effect of a clock-hammer striking the last hour of the condemned girl.

Meanwhile the doors of Notre-Dame had remained open, showing the church empty, desolate, in mourning, without tapers and without voice.

The condemned girl remained motionless in her place, awaiting that they should dispose of her. It needed that one of the sergeants-at-mace warned master Charmolue of it, who, during all this scene, had set himself to study the bas-relief of the great portal which represents, according to some, the sacrifice of Abraham, according to others, the philosophical operation, figuring the sun by the angel, the fire by the fagot, the workman by Abraham.

They had some trouble to tear him from that contemplation, but at last he turned, and at a sign he made two men clothed in yellow, the hangman's varlets, approached the Egyptian to tie her hands again.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”