Part 31

The unhappy woman, at the moment of climbing back into the fatal cart and setting out toward her final station, was perhaps seized by some wrenching regret for life. She lifted her red, dry eyes to the sky, to the sun, to the silver clouds cut here and there with blue trapezoids and triangles, then lowered them around her, upon the earth, upon the crowd, upon the houses... Suddenly, while the yellow man was binding her elbows, she uttered a terrible cry, a cry of joy. On that balcony, yonder, at the corner of the square, she had just caught sight of him, of him—her friend, her lord, Phoebus, the other apparition of her life!

The judge had lied! the priest had lied! it was indeed he, she could not doubt it; he was there, handsome, alive, clad in his brilliant livery, feather in his cap, sword at his side!

"Phoebus!" she cried, "my Phoebus!"

And she would have stretched toward him her arms trembling with love and rapture, but they were tied. Then she saw the captain frown; a beautiful young girl leaning on him looked at him with a disdainful lip and irritated eyes; then Phoebus pronounced a few words which did not reach her, and both disappeared precipitately behind the balcony's leaded glass, which closed again.

"Phoebus!" she cried in despair, "do you believe it?"

A monstrous thought had just appeared to her. She remembered that she had been condemned for murder upon the person of Phoebus de Châteaupers.

She had borne everything until then. But this last blow was too cruel. She fell motionless upon the pavement.

"Come," said Charmolue, "put her in the cart, and let us finish!"

No one had yet noticed, in the gallery of the statues of the kings, sculpted immediately above the arches of the portal, a strange spectator who had until then examined everything with such impassiveness, with so outstretched a neck, with so deformed a face, that, but for his half-red and half-violet attire, one might have taken him for one of those stone monsters through whose jaws the long gutters of the cathedral have discharged for six hundred years. This spectator had lost nothing of what had passed since noon before the portal of Notre-Dame. And from the first moments, without anyone thinking to observe him, he had firmly attached to one of the little columns of the gallery a stout knotted rope, whose end trailed below upon the steps. That done, he had set himself to look on tranquilly, and to whistle from time to time when a blackbird passed before him.

Suddenly, at the moment when the master-mason's valets were preparing to execute Charmolue's phlegmatic order, he straddled the gallery railing, seized the rope with his feet, knees, and hands, then he was seen to slide down the façade like a raindrop gliding along a pane of glass, to run toward the two executioners with the speed of a cat fallen from a roof, to fell them under two enormous fists, to snatch the Egyptian from them with one hand like a child her doll, and with a single rebound to leap back into the church, raising the young girl above his head, and crying in a tremendous voice: "Sanctuary!"

This was done with such rapidity that, had it been night, one might have seen it all by the light of a single flash of lightning.

"Sanctuary! sanctuary!" repeated the crowd, and ten thousand clappings of hands made the single eye of Quasimodo sparkle with joy and pride.

This shock brought the condemned woman back to herself. She lifted her eyelid, looked at Quasimodo, then closed it again suddenly, as though frightened by her savior.

Charmolue remained stupefied, and the executioners, and the whole escort. Indeed, within the enclosure of Notre-Dame, the condemned woman was inviolable. The cathedral was a place of refuge. All human justice expired upon its threshold.

Quasimodo had stopped beneath the great portal. His broad feet seemed as solid upon the church pavement as the heavy Romanesque pillars. His shaggy, large head sank into his shoulders like that of lions, who likewise have a mane and no neck. He held the young girl, all palpitating, suspended from his calloused hands like a white drapery; but he carried her with such care that he seemed to fear breaking or fading her. One would have said he felt that she was a delicate, exquisite, and precious thing, made for other hands than his own. At times, he seemed not to dare touch her, even with his breath. Then, suddenly, he would clasp her in his arms against his angular chest, as his own, as his treasure, as the mother of that child would have done; his gnome's eye, lowered upon her, flooded her with tenderness, sorrow, and pity, and rose again suddenly full of lightning. Then the women laughed and wept, the crowd stamped with enthusiasm, for at that moment Quasimodo had truly his beauty. He was beautiful, he—that orphan, that foundling, that outcast; he felt himself august and strong; he looked face to face upon that society from which he was banished, and into which he intervened so powerfully, that human justice from whom he had torn his prey, all those tigers forced to chew empty, those sergeants, those judges, those executioners, all that force of the king which he had just broken, he the infinitesimal, with the force of God.

And then it was a touching thing, that protection fallen from so deformed a being upon so unhappy a being, that a condemned to death saved by Quasimodo. These were the two extreme miseries of nature and of society which touched and aided each other.

Meanwhile, after a few minutes of triumph, Quasimodo had abruptly plunged back into the church with his burden. The people, in love with every feat of prowess, sought him with their eyes beneath the dark nave, regretting that he had so quickly withdrawn from their acclamations. Suddenly they saw him reappear at one end of the gallery of the kings of France; he crossed it running like a madman, raising his conquest in his arms, and crying: "Sanctuary!" The crowd burst again into applause. The gallery traversed, he plunged again into the interior of the church. A moment after, he reappeared upon the upper platform, still the Egyptian in his arms, still running with madness, still crying: "Sanctuary!" And the crowd applauded. At last he made a third appearance upon the top of the great bell tower; from there he seemed to show with pride to the whole city her whom he had saved, and his thundering voice, that voice so rarely heard and which he never heard himself, repeated three times with frenzy even into the clouds: "Sanctuary! sanctuary! sanctuary!"

—"Noël! Noël!" cried the people on their side, and this immense acclamation went to astonish on the other bank the crowd of the Grève and the recluse who still waited, her eye fixed upon the gallows.

BOOK NINTH

I

FEVER

Claude Frollo was no longer in Notre-Dame while his adopted son so abruptly cut the fatal knot in which the unhappy archdeacon had caught the Egyptian and caught himself. Returned to the sacristy, he had torn off the alb, the cope, and the stole, had flung it all into the hands of the stupefied beadle, had escaped by the concealed door of the cloister, had ordered a boatman of the Terrain to ferry him to the left bank of the Seine, and had plunged into the hilly streets of the University, not knowing where he went, meeting at every step bands of men and women who pressed joyfully toward the Saint-Michel bridge in the hope of arriving still in time to see the witch hanged, pale, bewildered, more troubled, more blind, and more savage than a night bird loosed and pursued by a troop of children in broad daylight. He no longer knew where he was, what he thought, whether he dreamed. He went, he walked, he ran, taking any street at random, not choosing, only always pushed forward by the Grève, by the horrible Grève which he confusedly felt behind him.

He skirted thus the Sainte-Geneviève mountain, and at last left the city by the Saint-Victor gate. He continued to flee, as long as he could see by turning back the enclosure of towers of the University and the few houses of the suburb; but when at last a fold of the ground had wholly hidden from him that odious Paris, when he could believe himself a hundred leagues away, in the fields, in a desert, he stopped, and it seemed to him that he breathed.

Then horrible thoughts crowded into his mind. He saw clearly again within his soul, and shuddered. He thought of that unhappy girl who had ruined him and whom he had lost. He cast a haggard eye over the double tortuous path which fate had made their two destinies follow, to the point of intersection where it had pitilessly broken them one against the other. He thought of the madness of eternal vows, of the vanity of chastity, of science, of religion, of virtue, of the uselessness of God. He plunged with full heart into evil thoughts, and, as he sank deeper into them, he felt a laugh of Satan burst within him.

And in thus digging his soul, when he saw what large place nature had prepared there for the passions, he sneered more bitterly still. He stirred at the bottom of his heart all his hatred, all his malice, and he recognized, with the cold glance of a physician who examines a patient, that this hatred, that this malice, were but love vitiated; that love, that source of all virtue in man, turned into horrible things in a priest's heart, and that a man constituted like him, in making himself a priest, made himself a demon. Then he laughed frightfully, and suddenly turned pale again considering the most sinister side of his fatal passion, of that corrosive, venomous, hateful, implacable love, which had ended only in the gallows for the one, in hell for the other: she condemned, he damned.

And then laughter came back to him, thinking that Phoebus was alive; that after all the captain lived, was merry and content, had finer doublets than ever and a new mistress whom he was bringing to see the old one hanged. His sneer redoubled when he reflected that, of living beings whose death he had wished, the Egyptian, the only creature he did not hate, was the only one he had not missed.

Then from the captain his thought passed to the people, and there came to him a jealousy of an unheard-of kind. He thought that the people also, the whole people, had had before their eyes the woman he loved, in her shift, almost naked. He wrung his arms thinking that this woman, whose form glimpsed in shadow by him alone would have been his supreme happiness, had been delivered in full daylight, at full noon, to a whole people, clad as for a night of voluptuousness. He wept with rage over all those mysteries of love profaned, soiled, laid bare, blasted forever. He wept with rage imagining how many filthy glances had found their account in that ill-tied shift; and that this beautiful girl, this virgin lily, this cup of modesty and delight, of which he had not dared approach his lips save trembling, had just been transformed into a sort of public bowl, where the vilest populace of Paris, thieves, beggars, lackeys, had come to drink in common an effrontery, impure and depraved pleasure.

And when he sought to form an idea of the happiness he might have found on earth had she not been a Bohemian and had he not been a priest, had Phoebus not existed and had she loved him; when he pictured to himself that a life of serenity and love might have been possible for him too, that there were at this very moment here and there upon the earth happy couples, lost in long converse beneath the orange trees, at the edge of the brooks, before a setting sun, a starry night; and that, if God had willed it, he might have made with her one of those blessed couples, his heart melted in tenderness and despair.

Oh! it is she! it is she! it is this fixed idea which returned without cease, which tortured him, which bit into his brain and tore his entrails. He did not regret, he did not repent; all he had done, he was ready to do again; he would rather see her in the executioner's hands than in the captain's arms, but he suffered; he suffered so much that at times he tore handfuls of hair from his head to see if it were not turning white.

There was a moment, among others, when it came to his mind that this was perhaps the minute when the hideous chain he had seen that morning was tightening its iron knot around that so frail and graceful neck. This thought made the sweat start from all his pores.

There was another moment when, while laughing diabolically at himself, he represented to himself at once the Esmeralda as he had seen her the first day, alive, careless, joyful, adorned, dancing, winged, harmonious, and the Esmeralda of the last day, in her shift, the rope about her neck, slowly mounting, with bare feet, the angular ladder of the gallows; he figured this double picture in such a way that he uttered a terrible cry.

While this hurricane of despair overturned, broke, tore, bent, uprooted everything in his soul, he looked at the nature around him. At his feet, some hens scratched the brushwood, pecking; enamelled beetles ran in the sun; above his head, the rumps of dappled grey clouds fled in a blue sky; on the horizon, the spire of the Saint-Victor abbey pierced the curve of the hill with its slate obelisk, and the miller of the Copeaux hillock watched whistling the toiling sails of his mill turn. All this active, organized, tranquil life, reproduced around him under a thousand forms, hurt him. He began to flee anew.

He ran thus across the fields until evening. This flight from nature, from life, from himself, from man, from God, from all, lasted the whole day. Sometimes he threw himself face to the ground, and tore with his nails the young wheat. Sometimes he stopped in a street of a deserted village, and his thoughts were so unbearable that he took his head in both hands and tried to tear it from his shoulders to break it on the pavement.

Toward the hour when the sun declined, he examined himself again, and found himself almost mad. The tempest which had raged within him since the instant he had lost hope and will to save the Egyptian, that tempest had left not a single sound idea, a single upright thought, in his conscience. His reason lay there, almost entirely destroyed. He had but two distinct images in his mind: the Esmeralda and the gallows. All the rest was black. These two images, brought near, presented him an frightful group, and the more he fixed upon them what remained to him of attention and thought, the more he saw them grow, according to a fantastic progression, the one in grace, in charm, in beauty, in light, the other in horror; so that at the end the Esmeralda appeared to him as a star, the gallows as an enormous fleshless arm.

A remarkable thing is that, throughout this torture, there never came to him the serious thought of death. The wretch was made thus. He clung to life. Perhaps he really saw hell behind.

Meanwhile the day continued to decline. The living being which still existed in him confusedly thought of return. He believed himself far from Paris; but, in orienting himself, he perceived that he had only circled the enclosure of the University. The spire of Saint-Sulpice and the three high pinnacles of Saint-Germain-des-Prés rose above the horizon on his right. He directed himself that way. When he heard the challenge of the men-at-arms of the abbot around the crenellated circumvallation of Saint-Germain, he turned aside, took a path which offered itself between the abbey mill and the leper-house of the borough, and at the end of a few moments found himself on the edge of the Pré-aux-Clercs. This meadow was celebrated for the tumults which were made there day and night; it was the hydra of the poor monks of Saint-Germain, quod monachis Sancti-Germani pratensis hydra fuit, clericis nova semper dissidiorum capita suscitantibus[114]. The archdeacon feared to meet someone there; he was afraid of every human face; he had just avoided the University, the Saint-Germain borough, he wished to re-enter the streets as late as possible. He skirted the Pré-aux-Clercs, took the deserted path which separated it from the Dieu-Neuf, and arrived at last on the bank of the water. There, dom Claude found a boatman who, for a few parisis deniers, made him go up the Seine to the point of the Cité, and set him down on that abandoned tongue of land where the reader has already seen Gringoire dream, and which extended beyond the king's gardens, parallel to the island of the Passeur-aux-Vaches.

The monotonous rocking of the boat and the murmur of the water had in some sort numbed the unhappy Claude. When the boatman had gone away, he remained stupidly standing on the strand, looking before him and perceiving objects only through growing oscillations which made of everything a sort of phantasmagoria. It is not rare that the fatigue of a great sorrow produces this effect upon the mind.

The sun was set behind the high Tour de Nesle. It was the hour of twilight. The sky was white, the water of the river was white. Between these two whitenesses, the left bank of the Seine, on which he had his eyes fixed, cast its somber mass, and, ever more attenuated by perspective, sank into the mists of the horizon like a black arrow. It was charged with houses, of which one distinguished only the dark silhouette, sharply relieved in shadow against the light background of sky and water. Here and there windows began to scintillate there like holes of embers. This immense black obelisk thus isolated between the two white sheets of sky and river, very broad at this spot, produced upon dom Claude a singular effect, comparable to what a man would feel, lying on his back at the foot of the Strasbourg steeple, who should watch the enormous spire sink above his head into the half-lights of the dusk. Only here it was Claude who stood and the obelisk which lay; but as the river, reflecting the sky, prolonged the abyss below him, the immense promontory seemed also boldly launched into the void like any cathedral spire; and the impression was the same. This impression had even this of strange and more profound, that it was indeed the steeple of Strasbourg, but the steeple of Strasbourg two leagues high, something unheard-of, gigantic, immeasurable, a building such as no human eye has seen, a tower of Babel. The chimneys of the houses, the crenellations of the walls, the cut gables of the roofs, the spire of the Augustines, the Tour de Nesle, all these projections which notched the profile of the colossal obelisk, added to the illusion in bizarrely playing to the eye the carvings of a dense and fantastic sculpture.

Claude, in the state of hallucination in which he found himself, believed he saw, saw with his living eyes, the steeple of hell; the thousand lights spread over the whole height of the frightful tower seemed to him so many porches of the immense interior furnace; the voices and rumors which escaped from it, so many cries, so many rattlings. Then he was afraid, he put his hands over his ears to hear no more, turned his back to see no more, and withdrew at great strides from the dreadful vision.

But the vision was within him.

When he re-entered the streets, the passers-by who jostled one another in the gleams of the shop fronts seemed to him an eternal coming and going of specters around him. He had strange clamors in his ear. Extraordinary fancies troubled his mind. He saw neither the houses, nor the pavement, nor the carts, nor the men and women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects which melted by their edges one into another. At the corner of the rue de la Barillerie, there was a grocery shop, whose awning was, according to immemorial usage, furnished around its border with those hoops of tinplate to which hangs a circle of wooden candles which strike one another in the wind, clacking like castanets. He believed he heard in the shadow the cluster of skeletons of Montfaucon striking against each other.

"Oh!" he murmured, "the night wind drives them one against the others, and mingles the noise of their chains with the noise of their bones! She is perhaps there, among them!"

Distraught, he knew not where he went. After a few steps, he found himself on the Saint-Michel bridge. There was a light at a window of a ground floor. He approached. Through a cracked pane he saw a sordid room, which awoke a confused memory in his mind. In this room, poorly lit by a meager lamp, there was a blond and fresh young man, with a joyful face, who was kissing, with great bursts of laughter, a young girl very impudently dressed. And, near the lamp, there was an old woman who spun and sang in a quavering voice. As the young man did not always laugh, the old woman's song arrived in fragments to the priest. It was something unintelligible and frightful.

Grève, bark, Grève, swarm! Spin, spin, my distaff, Spin its rope for the hangman Who whistles in the courtyard. Grève, bark, Grève, swarm! The beautiful hemp rope! Sow from Issy to Vanvre Hemp and not wheat. The thief has not stolen The beautiful hemp rope! Grève, swarm, Grève, bark! To see the joy-girl Hang on the mangy gibbet, The windows are eyes. Grève, swarm, Grève, bark!

Thereupon the young man laughed and caressed the girl. The old woman was the Falourdel; the girl, a public wench; the young man, his young brother Jehan.

He continued to look. As much this spectacle as another.

He saw Jehan go to a window which was at the back of the room, open it, cast a glance upon the quay where shone in the distance a thousand lighted cross-windows, and heard him say in closing the window: "Upon my soul! see, night is falling. The burghers light their candles and good God his stars."

Then Jehan returned to the strumpet, and broke a bottle which was on a table, crying:

"Already empty, corboeuf! and I have no more money! Isabeau, my dear, I shall not be content with Jupiter until he has changed your two white teats into two black bottles, where I may suck Beaune wine day and night."

This fine jest made the joy-girl laugh, and Jehan went out.

Dom Claude had but time to throw himself to the ground not to be met, looked in the face, and recognized by his brother. Happily the street was dark, and the scholar was drunk. He noticed nevertheless the archdeacon lying on the pavement in the mud.

"Oh! oh!" said he, "here is one who has led a merry life today."

He stirred dom Claude with his foot, who held his breath.

"Dead drunk," resumed Jehan. "Come, he is full. A true leech detached from a barrel. He is bald," added he, bending down, "it is an old man! Fortunate senex[115]!"

Then dom Claude heard him withdraw, saying:

"All the same, reason is a fine thing, and my brother the archdeacon is very happy to be wise and to have money."

The archdeacon then rose, and ran with one breath toward Notre-Dame, whose enormous towers he saw rise in the shadow above the houses.

At the instant when he arrived quite breathless upon the Parvis square, he drew back and dared not lift his eyes upon the fatal edifice. "Oh!" said he in a low voice, "is it then truly so that such a thing has passed here, today, this very morning!"

“Stories of the world, in your language.”