Part 32

Nevertheless he ventured to look at the church. The facade was dark. The sky behind it sparkled with stars. The crescent of the moon, which had just flown up from the horizon, was at that moment halted at the summit of the right-hand tower, and seemed to have perched, like a luminous bird, upon the edge of the balustrade cut into black trefoils.

The cloister door was shut. But the archdeacon always carried on him the key to the tower where his laboratory was. He used it to enter the church.

He found in the church an obscurity and a silence like that of a cavern. From the great shadows that fell on all sides in broad swathes, he recognized that the hangings of the morning ceremony had not yet been removed. The great silver cross glimmered at the heart of the darkness, sprinkled with a few sparkling points, like the Milky Way of that night of the sepulcher. The long windows of the choir showed above the black drapery the upper extremity of their pointed arches, whose stained glass, pierced by a ray of moonlight, had now only the doubtful colors of night, a kind of violet, white, and blue whose tint is found again only on the faces of the dead. The archdeacon, catching sight all around the choir of those pallid points of the arches, thought he saw the miters of damned bishops. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he thought it was a circle of pale faces that was looking at him.

He began to flee across the church. Then it seemed to him that the church too was stirring, moving, coming to life, living, that each great column became an enormous paw that beat the ground with its broad stone spatula, and that the gigantic cathedral was no more than a kind of prodigious elephant that breathed and walked with its pillars for feet, its two towers for trunk, and the immense black cloth for caparison.

Thus fever or madness had reached such a degree of intensity that the outer world was for the unfortunate man no more than a kind of visible, palpable, frightful apocalypse.

He was relieved for a moment. As he plunged beneath the low side-aisles, he caught sight, behind a cluster of pillars, of a reddish glow. He ran to it as to a star. It was the poor lamp that day and night lit the public breviary of Notre-Dame beneath its iron grille. He threw himself avidly upon the holy book, in the hope of finding there some consolation or some encouragement. The book was open at that passage of Job, over which his fixed eye wandered:

“And a spirit passed before my face, and I heard a small breath, and the hair of my flesh stood up [116].”

At this dismal reading, he felt what the blind man feels who is pricked by the staff he has picked up. His knees gave way beneath him, and he sank upon the pavement, thinking of her who had died in the day. He felt so many monstrous fumes pass and pour out into his brain that it seemed to him his head had become one of the chimneys of hell.

It appears he remained long in this posture, thinking no more, engulfed and passive beneath the hand of the demon. At length some strength returned to him; he thought of going to take refuge in the tower near his faithful Quasimodo. He rose, and, as he was afraid, he took for light the lamp of the breviary. It was a sacrilege; but he was no longer at the point of minding such a trifle.

He slowly climbed the tower stairs, full of a secret dread which the mysterious light of his lamp, mounting so late from loophole to loophole to the top of the belfry, must spread even to the rare passers-by of the Parvis.

Suddenly he felt a certain coolness upon his face and found himself beneath the door of the highest gallery. The air was cold; the sky was driving clouds whose broad white blades overflowed one upon another, crushing at the angles, and figured a breakup of river in winter. The crescent of the moon, stranded amid the clouds, seemed a celestial vessel caught in those icicles of the air.

He lowered his gaze and contemplated for an instant, between the colonnette grille that unites the two towers, far off, through a gauze of mists and smokes, the silent throng of the roofs of Paris, pointed, innumerable, crowded, and small like the waves of a tranquil sea on a summer night.

The moon cast a faint ray that gave to sky and earth a tint of ashes.

At that moment the clock raised its shrill and cracked voice. Midnight struck. The priest thought of noon. It was the twelve hours returning.

“Oh!” he said to himself very low, “she must be cold by now!”

Suddenly a gust of wind extinguished his lamp, and almost at the same instant he saw appear, at the opposite angle of the tower, a shadow, a whiteness, a form, a woman. He shuddered. Beside that woman there was a little goat, which mingled its bleating with the last bleating of the clock.

He had the strength to look. It was she.

She was pale, she was dark. Her hair fell upon her shoulders as in the morning. But no more rope about the neck, no more bound hands. She was free, she was dead.

She was clothed in white and had a white veil upon her head.

She came toward him, slowly, looking at the sky. The supernatural goat followed her. He felt himself of stone and too heavy to flee. At each step she made forward, he made one backward, and that was all. He thus re-entered beneath the dark vault of the staircase. He was frozen by the idea that she was perhaps going to enter there too; had she done so, he would have died of terror.

She arrived indeed before the door of the staircase, stopped there a few moments, looked fixedly into the shadow, but without seeming to see the priest, and passed on. She appeared to him taller than when she lived; he saw the moon through her white robe; he heard her breathing.

When she had passed, he began to descend the staircase, with the slowness he had seen in the specter, believing himself a specter likewise, haggard, his hair straight up, his extinguished lamp still in his hand; and, as he descended the spiral steps, he distinctly heard in his ear a voice that laughed and repeated:

“…A spirit passed before my face, and I heard a small breath, and the hair of my flesh stood up.”

II

HUNCHBACK, ONE-EYED, LAME

Every city in the middle ages, and, down to Louis XII, every city in France had its places of asylum. These places of asylum, amid the deluge of penal laws and barbarous jurisdictions that inundated the city, were kinds of islands that rose above the level of human justice. Any criminal who landed there was saved. There were in a suburb almost as many places of asylum as places of the gallows. It was the abuse of impunity beside the abuse of punishments, two evil things which strove to correct one another. The palaces of the king, the hotels of princes, the churches above all had right of asylum. Sometimes of a whole city of which there was need to replenish the population one made temporarily a place of refuge. Louis XI made Paris an asylum in 1467.

Once the foot was in the asylum, the criminal was sacred; but he must take care not to go out. A step outside the sanctuary, he fell back into the flood. The wheel, the gibbet, the rack kept good guard around the place of refuge, and ceaselessly watched their prey like sharks around the vessel. One has seen condemned men who thus grew white in a cloister, on the staircase of a palace, in the tillage of an abbey, beneath a church porch; in this way the asylum was a prison like another. It happened sometimes that a solemn decree of the parliament violated the refuge and restored the condemned man to the executioner; but the thing was rare. The parliaments were shy of the bishops, and, when those two robes came to rub against each other, the simarre had not the best of it against the cassock. At times, however, as in the affair of the murderers of Petit-Jean, hangman of Paris, and in that of Emery Rousseau, killer of Jean Valleret, justice jumped over the church and went beyond the execution of its sentences; but, unless by decree of the parliament, woe to him who violated with armed hand a place of asylum! One knows what was the death of Robert de Clermont, marshal of France, and of Jean de Châlons, marshal of Champagne; and yet it was only a matter of a certain Perrin Marc, clerk of a money-changer, a wretched assassin; but the two marshals had broken the doors of Saint-Méry. There lay the enormity.

There was around the refuges such respect, that, according to tradition, it sometimes reached even the animals. Aymoin relates that a stag, hunted by Dagobert, having taken refuge near the tomb of Saint Denis, the pack stopped short, baying.

The churches ordinarily had a little chamber prepared to receive the suppliants. In 1407, Nicolas Flamel had built them, upon the vaults of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, a chamber which cost him four pounds six sous sixteen deniers parisis.

At Notre-Dame, it was a cell established upon the roof of the low side-aisles beneath the flying buttresses, facing the cloister, precisely at the spot where the wife of the present concierge of the towers has made herself a garden, which is to the hanging gardens of Babylon what a lettuce is to a palm tree, what a portress is to Semiramis.

It was there that, after his frenzied and triumphal course upon the towers and galleries, Quasimodo had deposited La Esmeralda. As long as that course had lasted, the young girl had not been able to recover her senses, half asleep, half awake, feeling nothing more save that she was rising in the air, that she floated there, that she flew there, that something lifted her above the earth. From time to time, she heard the bursting laugh, the noisy voice of Quasimodo at her ear; she half-opened her eyes; then beneath her she confusedly saw Paris speckled with its thousand roofs of slate and tile like a red and blue mosaic, above her head the frightful and joyous face of Quasimodo. Then her eyelid fell; she believed all was finished, that she had been executed during her swoon, and that the misshapen spirit which had presided over her destiny had taken her again and was bearing her away. She dared not look at him and let herself go.

But when the disheveled and panting ringer had deposited her in the cell of the refuge, when she felt his great hands gently untie the rope that bruised her arms, she experienced that kind of start which wakes with a jerk the passengers of a vessel that touches ground in the midst of a dark night. Her thoughts awoke also, and came back to her one by one. She saw that she was in Notre-Dame, she remembered having been torn from the hands of the executioner, that Phoebus was alive, that Phoebus no longer loved her, and these two ideas, of which the one spread so much bitterness over the other, presenting themselves together to the poor condemned girl, she turned toward Quasimodo who stood before her, and who frightened her. She said to him: “Why have you saved me?”

He looked at her anxiously as if seeking to guess what she was saying to him. She repeated her question. Then he cast upon her a look profoundly sad, and fled.

She remained astonished.

A few moments after he returned, bringing a packet which he threw at her feet. They were garments which charitable women had left for her at the threshold of the church. Then she lowered her eyes upon herself, saw herself almost naked, and blushed. Life was returning.

Quasimodo appeared to feel something of this modesty. He veiled his gaze with his broad hand and withdrew once more, but with slow steps.

She hastened to clothe herself. It was a white robe with a white veil. A novice’s habit from the Hôtel-Dieu.

She had scarce finished when she saw Quasimodo return. He carried a basket under one arm and a mattress under the other. There was in the basket a bottle, bread, and some provisions. He set the basket on the ground, and said: “Eat.” He spread the mattress on the flagstone, and said: “Sleep.”

It was his own meal, it was his own bed that the ringer had gone to fetch.

The Egyptian raised her eyes upon him to thank him; but she could not utter a word. The poor devil was truly horrible. She lowered her head with a start of fear.

Then he said to her: “I frighten you. I am very ugly, am I not? Do not look at me. Only listen to me.—By day, you will stay here; by night, you may walk about the whole church. But do not leave the church, neither by day nor by night. You would be lost. They would kill you and I should die.”

Moved, she raised her head to answer him. He had disappeared. She found herself alone, dreaming of the strange words of that almost monstrous being, and struck by the sound of his voice which was so rough and yet so gentle.

Then, she examined her cell. It was a chamber of some six square feet, with a little dormer window and a door upon the slightly inclined plane of the roof of flat stones. Several gutters with figures of animals seemed to lean about her and stretch their necks to see her through the dormer. At the edge of her roof, she caught sight of the tops of a thousand chimneys which sent up before her eyes the smokes of all the fires of Paris. A sad spectacle for the poor Egyptian, foundling, condemned to death, unhappy creature, without country, without family, without hearth.

At the moment when the thought of her isolation thus appeared to her, more poignant than ever, she felt a hairy and bearded head slip into her hands, upon her knees. She started (everything frightened her now), and looked. It was the poor goat, the agile Djali, who had escaped after her, at the moment when Quasimodo had dispersed Charmolue’s band, and who had been lavishing caresses at her feet for nearly an hour, without being able to obtain a glance. The Egyptian covered her with kisses. “Oh! Djali,” said she, “how I had forgotten you! Do you still think of me then! Oh! you are not ungrateful, you!” At the same time, as if an invisible hand had lifted the weight that had compressed her tears in her heart so long, she began to weep; and as her tears flowed, she felt go away with them what there was of bitterest and most bitter in her sorrow.

When evening came, she found the night so beautiful, the moon so soft, that she made the round of the high gallery that encloses the church. She felt some relief from it, so calm did the earth seem to her, seen from that height.

III

DEAF

The next morning, on waking, she perceived that she had slept. This singular thing astonished her. It was so long since she had been unused to sleep. A glad ray of the rising sun entered by her dormer and struck her face. At the same moment as the sun, she saw at that dormer an object that frightened her, the unhappy face of Quasimodo. Involuntarily she closed her eyes, but in vain; she still believed she saw through her pink eyelid that gnome’s mask, one-eyed and gap-toothed. Then, keeping her eyes shut, she heard a rough voice which said very gently:

“Do not be afraid. I am your friend. I had come to see you sleep, that does you no harm, does it, that I come to see you sleep? What does it matter to you that I am here when you have your eyes closed? Now I am going away. See, I have put myself behind the wall. You may open your eyes again.”

There was something yet more plaintive than those words, it was the accent with which they were pronounced. The Egyptian, touched, opened her eyes. He was no longer indeed at the dormer. She went to that dormer, and saw the poor hunchback crouched at an angle of wall, in a painful and resigned attitude. She made an effort to overcome the repulsion he inspired in her. “Come,” said she gently. At the movement of the Egyptian’s lips, Quasimodo believed she was dismissing him; then he rose and withdrew limping, slowly, his head lowered, without even daring to lift upon the young girl his look full of despair. “Come then,” she cried. But he continued to go away. Then she threw herself out of her cell, ran to him, and took his arm. On feeling himself touched by her, Quasimodo trembled in all his limbs. He raised his supplicating eye, and, seeing that she was bringing him back near her, all his face shone with joy and tenderness. She wished to make him enter her cell, but he obstinately remained upon the threshold. “No, no,” said he, “the owl does not enter the lark’s nest.”

Then she squatted gracefully upon her couch with her goat asleep at her feet. They both remained some instants motionless, considering each other in silence, he so much grace, she so much ugliness. Each moment, she discovered in Quasimodo some fresh deformity. Her gaze wandered from his knock-kneed legs to his hunched back, from his hunched back to his single eye. She could not comprehend that a being so awkwardly sketched should exist. Yet there was over all that so much sadness and sweetness spread that she began to grow used to it.

He broke this silence first. “You were telling me then to come back?”

She made a sign of the head affirmatively, saying: “Yes.”

He understood the sign of the head. “Alas!” said he as if hesitating to finish, “it is that… I am deaf.”

“Poor man!” cried the Bohemian with an expression of kindly pity.

He began to smile painfully. “You find that was all I lacked, do you not? Yes, I am deaf. That is how I am made. It is horrible, is it not true? You are so beautiful, you!”

There was in the accent of the wretch a sentiment so profound of his misery that she had not the strength to say a word. Besides, he would not have heard her. He pursued:

“Never have I seen my ugliness as at this moment. When I compare myself to you, I pity myself well, poor unhappy monster that I am! I must seem to you like a beast, say.—You, you are a ray of sunlight, a drop of dew, a bird’s song!—I, I am something frightful, neither man nor animal, a something more hard, more trampled underfoot and more deformed than a pebble!”

Then he began to laugh, and that laugh was the most heart-rending thing in the world. He continued:

“Yes, I am deaf. But you will speak to me by gestures, by signs. I have a master who talks with me in that fashion. And then, I shall soon know your will by the movement of your lips, by your look.”

“Well!” she resumed, smiling, “tell me why you saved me.”

He looked at her attentively while she spoke.

“I understood,” he answered. “You ask me why I saved you. You have forgotten a wretch who tried to carry you off one night, a wretch to whom the very next day you brought help upon their infamous pillory. A drop of water and a little pity, that is more than I can repay with my life. You have forgotten that wretch; he, he remembered.”

She listened to him with a profound tenderness. A tear rolled in the ringer’s eye, but it did not fall. He seemed to make a kind of point of honor of devouring it.

“Listen,” he went on when he no longer feared that the tear would escape, “we have there towers well high, a man who fell from them would be dead before touching the pavement; when it shall please you that I fall from them, you will not even need a word, a glance will suffice.”

Then he rose. This strange being, unhappy as the Bohemian was, still awakened some compassion in her. She made him a sign to stay.

“No, no,” said he, “I must not stay too long. I am not at ease when you look at me. It is out of pity that you do not turn away your eyes. I am going somewhere whence I shall see you without your seeing me. That will be better.”

He drew from his pocket a little metal whistle. “Here,” said he, “when you have need of me, when you wish me to come, when you shall not have too much horror to see me, you will whistle with this. I hear that sound.”

He set the whistle on the ground and fled.

IV

SANDSTONE AND CRYSTAL

Calm was returning little by little to the soul of La Esmeralda. Excess of grief, like excess of joy, is a violent thing that lasts but a short while. The heart of man cannot remain long at an extremity. The Bohemian had suffered so much that there remained to her only astonishment.

With safety hope had returned to her. She was outside society, outside life, but she vaguely felt that it might perhaps not be impossible to re-enter them. She was like a dead woman who held in reserve a key to her tomb.

She felt withdraw from her little by little the terrible images that had so long obsessed her. All the hideous phantoms, Pierrat Torterue, Jacques Charmolue, faded from her mind, all, the priest himself.

And then, Phoebus lived, she was sure of it, she had seen him. The life of Phoebus, that was everything. After the series of fatal shocks which had brought all to ruin in her, she had found standing in her soul but one thing, but one sentiment, her love for the captain. For love is like a tree, it grows of itself, casts its roots deeply into all our being, and often continues to be green upon a heart in ruins.

And what is inexplicable is that the more blind this passion is, the more tenacious it is. It is never more solid than when it has no reason in itself.

No doubt La Esmeralda did not think of the captain without bitterness. No doubt it was frightful that he too had been deceived, that he had believed that impossible thing, that he had been able to comprehend a stab of the knife coming from her who would have given a thousand lives for him. But after all, one must not bear him too much grudge: had she not confessed *her crime*? had she not yielded, weak woman, to torture? All the fault was hers. She ought rather to have let her nails be torn out than utter such a word. In short, that she see Phoebus but once, but one minute, a single word, a single look would suffice to undeceive him, to bring him back. She doubted it not. She also bewildered herself over many singular things, over the chance of the presence of Phoebus on the day of the amende honorable, over the young girl with whom he was. It was his sister, no doubt. A unreasonable explanation, but with which she contented herself, because she had need to believe that Phoebus still loved her and loved her alone. Had he not sworn it to her? What more did she need, naive and credulous as she was? And then, in this affair, were not the appearances rather against her than against him? She waited then. She hoped.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”