Part 34

All her past unhappiness came back to her like a flash of lightning. She fell back upon her bed, frozen.

A moment later, she felt along her body a contact that made her shudder so violently that she started up, awake and furious, upon her seat.

The priest had just slipped close to her. He was encircling her with both arms.

She wanted to cry out, and could not.

“Begone, monster! begone, assassin!” she said in a voice trembling and low from excess of anger and terror.

“Mercy! mercy!” murmured the priest, imprinting his lips upon her shoulders.

She took his bald head in both hands by its remaining hairs, and strove to thrust away his kisses as if they had been bites.

“Mercy!” repeated the unhappy man. “If you but knew what my love for you is! It is fire, molten lead, a thousand knives in my heart!”

And he held her two arms with a superhuman force. Beside herself: “Let me go,” she said to him, “or I will spit in your face!”

He let her go. “Degrade me, strike me, be cruel! do what you will! but mercy! love me!”

Then she struck him with the fury of a child. She stiffened her beautiful hands to bruise his face. “Begone, fiend!

“Love me! love me! pity!” cried the poor priest, rolling upon her and answering her blows with caresses.

Suddenly, she felt him stronger than herself. “This must end!” said he, gnashing his teeth.

She was subjugated, palpitating, broken, in his arms, at his mercy. She felt a wanton hand wandering over her. She made a last effort, and began to cry: “Help! to me! a vampire! a vampire!”

Nothing came. Djali alone was awake, and bleated in anguish.

“Be silent!” said the priest, panting.

Suddenly, struggling, crawling upon the floor, the Egyptian girl’s hand met something cold and metallic. It was Quasimodo’s whistle. She seized it with a convulsive gesture of hope, raised it to her lips, and whistled with all the strength that remained to her. The whistle gave a clear, shrill, piercing sound.

“What is that?” said the priest.

Almost at the same instant he felt himself seized by a vigorous arm; the cell was dark, he could not clearly distinguish who thus held him; but he heard teeth chatter with rage, and there was just light enough scattered through the gloom for him to see a broad knife-blade gleam above his head.

The priest thought he caught sight of Quasimodo’s form. He supposed it could be no other. He remembered having stumbled on entering against a bundle stretched across the door outside. However, as the new-comer uttered not a word, he knew not what to believe. He threw himself upon the arm that held the knife, crying: “Quasimodo!” He forgot, in this moment of distress, that Quasimodo was deaf.

In the twinkling of an eye the priest was thrown down, and felt a leaden knee press upon his chest. From the angular impress of that knee, he recognized Quasimodo. But what was to be done? how, on his side, to be recognized by him? night made the deaf man blind.

He was lost. The young girl, pitiless, like an irritated tigress, did not interpose to save him. The knife drew near his head. The moment was critical. Suddenly his adversary seemed to hesitate. “No blood upon her!” said he in a hollow voice.

It was indeed the voice of Quasimodo.

Then the priest felt the large hand that was dragging him by the foot out of the cell. There he was to die. Happily for him, the moon had risen a few moments before.

When they had passed the door of the little lodging, its pale ray fell upon the priest’s face. Quasimodo looked him in the face, a trembling seized him, he let go the priest, and recoiled.

The Egyptian girl, who had advanced to the threshold of the cell, saw with surprise the parts suddenly reversed. It was now the priest who threatened, Quasimodo who entreated.

The priest, overwhelming the deaf man with angry and reproachful gestures, motioned him violently to withdraw.

The deaf man bowed his head, then came and knelt before the Egyptian girl’s door. “My lord,” said he, in a grave and resigned voice, “do afterwards what shall please you; but kill me first.”

As he spoke, he presented his knife to the priest. The priest, beside himself, sprang upon it; but the young girl was quicker than he. She snatched the knife from Quasimodo’s hands, and burst into laughter with fury. She held the blade high. The priest stood irresolute. She would certainly have struck. “You dare not approach now, coward!” she cried to him. Then she added, with a pitiless expression, and well knowing that she was about to pierce the priest’s heart with a thousand red-hot irons: “Ah! I know that Phoebus is not dead!”

The priest overturned Quasimodo with a kick and plunged again, shuddering with rage, under the vault of the staircase.

When he was gone, Quasimodo picked up the whistle which had just saved the Egyptian girl. “It was getting rusty,” said he, as he returned it to her. Then he left her alone.

The young girl, overwhelmed by this violent scene, fell exhausted upon her bed, and began to weep with sobs. Her horizon became gloomy again.

For his part, the priest had groped his way back to his cell.

It was done. Dom Claude was jealous of Quasimodo!

He repeated, with a thoughtful air, his fatal words: “No one shall have her!”

BOOK TENTH

I

GRINGOIRE HAS SEVERAL GOOD IDEAS IN SUCCESSION IN THE RUE DES BERNARDINS

Since Pierre Gringoire had seen how the whole affair was turning, and that decidedly there would be rope, hanging, and other disagreeables for the principal characters of this comedy, he had troubled himself no further to meddle in it. The truands, among whom he had remained considering that, in the last result, they were the best company in Paris, the truands had continued to interest themselves in the Egyptian girl. He had found that very natural on the part of folks who, like her, had no other prospect than Charmolue and Torterue, and who did not ride, as he did, in the imaginary regions between the two wings of Pegasus. He had learned from their talk that his bride of the broken jug had taken refuge in Notre-Dame, and he was glad of it. But he had not even the temptation to go and see her there. He sometimes thought of the little goat, and that was all. Besides, by day he performed feats of strength to live, and by night he elaborated a memoir against the bishop of Paris, for he remembered having been flooded by the wheels of his mills, and bore him a grudge therefor. He also occupied himself with commenting on the fine work of Baudry le Rouge, bishop of Noyon and Tournay, De cupa petrarum, which had given him a violent taste for architecture; a bent which had replaced in his heart his passion for hermetism, of which, moreover, it was but a natural corollary, since there is an intimate link between the hermetic art and masonry. Gringoire had passed from the love of an idea to the love of the form of that idea.

One day, he had stopped near Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, at the corner of a dwelling called Le For-l’Évêque, which faced another called Le For-le-Roi. There was at that For-l’Évêque a charming chapel of the fourteenth century, the chevet of which gave upon the street. Gringoire was devoutly examining its outer sculptures. He was in one of those moments of selfish, exclusive, supreme enjoyment, when the artist sees in the world nothing but art, and sees the world in art. Suddenly, he felt a hand gravely laid upon his shoulder. He turns round. It was his former friend, his former master, monsieur the archdeacon.

He remained stupefied. It was long since he had seen the archdeacon, and Dom Claude was one of those solemn and passionate men whose encounter always disturbs the equilibrium of a sceptical philosopher.

The archdeacon kept silence for some moments, during which Gringoire had leisure to observe him. He found Dom Claude much changed, pale as a winter morning, the eyes hollow, the hair almost white. It was the priest who at length broke the silence, saying in a tranquil but icy tone: “How do you do, master Pierre?”

“My health? answered Gringoire. Hem! hem! one may say this and that of it. Still, on the whole, it is good. I take too much of nothing. You know, master, the secret of being well, according to Hippocrates, id est cibi, potus, somni, Venus, omnia moderata sint.”

“You have then no care, master Pierre?” resumed the archdeacon, looking fixedly at Gringoire.

“Faith, no.”

“And what are you doing now?”

“You see, my master. I am examining the cut of these stones, and the fashion in which this bas-relief is hollowed out.”

The priest began to smile, with that bitter smile which lifts but one corner of the mouth. “And that amuses you?”

“It is paradise!” cried Gringoire. And bending over the sculptures with the dazzled air of a showman of living wonders: “Is it not that you find, for example, that metamorphosis of low relief executed with much skill, delicacy, and patience? Look at this little column. Round what capital have you seen leaves more tender and better caressed by the chisel? Here are three round bosses by Jean Maillevin. They are not the finest works of that great genius. Nevertheless, the naïveté, the softness of the faces, the gaiety of the attitudes and draperies, and that inexplicable charm which mingles in all the faults, render the little figures right merry and delicate, perhaps even too much.—You find that is not diverting?”

“Indeed it is!” said the priest.

“And if you saw the inside of the chapel!” resumed the poet with his talkative enthusiasm. “Sculptures everywhere. It is thick as a cabbage heart! The apse is in a most devout and so peculiar a fashion that I have seen nothing like it elsewhere!”

Dom Claude interrupted him: “You are happy then?”

Gringoire answered with warmth:

“In truth, yes! I first loved women, then beasts. Now I love stones. It is quite as amusing as beasts and women, and less perfidious.”

The priest put his hand upon his brow. It was his habitual gesture.

“In very truth!”

“See here!” said Gringoire; “one has enjoyments!” He took the priest’s arm, who let himself be led, and made him enter under the turret of the staircase of the For-l’Évêque. “There is a staircase! every time I see it, I am happy. It is the step of the simplest and rarest manner in Paris. All the steps are undercut beneath. Its beauty and simplicity consist in the treads of the one and the other, bearing a foot or so, which are interlaced, mortised, fitted, chained, encased, dovetailed one into the other, and bite into each other in a truly firm and pretty fashion!”

“And you desire nothing?”

“No.”

“And you regret nothing?”

“Neither regret nor desire. I have arranged my life.”

“What men arrange, said Claude, things disarrange.”

“I am a Pyrrhonian philosopher,” answered Gringoire, “and I hold all in equilibrium.”

“And how do you earn your living?”

“I still make here and there epics and tragedies; but what brings me in most is the trade you know me by, my master. Carrying pyramids of chairs upon my teeth.”

“The trade is coarse for a philosopher.”

“It is still equilibrium,” said Gringoire. “When one has a thought, one finds it in everything.”

“I know it,” answered the archdeacon.

After a silence, the priest resumed: “You are nevertheless rather wretched?”

“Wretched, yes; unhappy, no.”

At this moment, a noise of horses was heard, and our two interlocutors saw defile at the end of the street a company of the king’s ordinance archers, lances high, the officer at their head. The cavalcade was brilliant and rang upon the pavement.

“How you look at that officer!” said Gringoire to the archdeacon.

“It is that I think I recognize him.”

“What do you call him?”

“I think, said Claude, that he is named Phoebus de Châteaupers.”

“Phoebus! a name of curiosity! There is also Phoebus, count of Foix. I remember having known a girl who swore only by Phoebus.”

“Come away,” said the priest. “I have something to say to you.”

Since the passage of that troop, some agitation had been perceptible beneath the icy envelope of the archdeacon. He began to walk. Gringoire followed him, accustomed to obey him, as did all who had once approached this man full of ascendency. They arrived in silence as far as the rue des Bernardins, which was fairly deserted. Dom Claude stopped there.

“What have you to say to me, my master?” asked Gringoire.

“Do you not find,” answered the archdeacon with an air of deep reflection, “that the habit of those horsemen we have just seen is finer than yours and mine?”

Gringoire shook his head.

“My faith! I prefer my yellow and red frock to those scales of iron and steel. Fine pleasure, to make in walking the same noise as the Quai de la Ferraille in an earthquake!”

“Then, Gringoire, you have never envied those fine fellows in war-jackets?”

“Envied what, monsieur the archdeacon? their strength, their armor, their discipline? Better is philosophy and independence in rags. I had rather be head of a fly than tail of a lion.”

“That is singular,” said the priest dreamily. “A fine livery is yet fine.”

Gringoire, seeing him thoughtful, left him to go admire the porch of a neighboring house. He came back clapping his hands. “If you were less occupied with the fine clothes of the men of war, monsieur the archdeacon, I would beg you to go see that door. I have always said, sir Aubry’s house has the most superb entrance in the world.”

“Pierre Gringoire,” said the archdeacon, “what have you done with that little Egyptian dancer?”

“La Esmeralda? You change the conversation very abruptly.”

“Was she not your wife?”

“Yes, by means of a broken jug. We had four years of it.—By the way,” added Gringoire, looking at the archdeacon with a half-mocking air, “do you still think of her then?”

“And you, do you think of her no more?”

“Little.—I have so many things!… My God, how pretty that little goat was!”

“Did not that Bohemian save your life?”

“That is devilish true.”

“Well! what has become of her? what have you done with her?”

“I will not tell you. I believe they hanged her.”

“You believe?”

“I am not sure. When I saw they wanted to hang people, I withdrew from the game.”

“Is that all you know of it?”

“Wait. I was told that she had taken refuge in Notre-Dame, and that she was safe there, and I am delighted at it, and I could not discover whether the goat had escaped with her, and that is all I know of it.”

“I am going to tell you more of it,” cried Dom Claude; and his voice, hitherto low, slow, and almost dull, had become thundering. “She is indeed refugeed in Notre-Dame. But in three days justice will take her thence again, and she will be hanged at the Grève. There is a decree of the parliament.”

“That is vexatious,” said Gringoire.

The priest, in the twinkling of an eye, had become cold and calm again.

“And who the devil,” resumed the poet, “has amused himself soliciting a writ of reintegration? Could they not leave the parliament quiet? What does it matter that a poor girl shelters under the flying-buttresses of Notre-Dame beside the swallows’ nests?”

“There are satans in the world,” answered the archdeacon.

“That is devilishly ill-contrived,” observed Gringoire.

The archdeacon resumed after a silence:

“Then she saved your life?”

“Among my good friends the truands. A little more, a little less, I was hanged. They would be sorry for it to-day.”

“Would you not do anything for her?”

“I ask no better, Dom Claude. But if I go to entangle an ugly affair about my body?”

“What matters it!”

“Bah! what matters it! You are good, you, my master! I have two great works begun.”

The priest struck his brow. Despite the calm he affected, from time to time a violent gesture revealed his inward convulsions.

“How to save her?”

Gringoire said to him: “My master, I will answer you: Il padelt, which means in Turkish: God is our hope.”

“How to save her?” repeated Claude dreamily.

Gringoire in his turn struck his brow.

“Listen, my master. I have imagination. I am going to find you expedients.—If one asked grace of the king?”

“Of Louis XI? a grace?”

“Why not?”

“Go take his bone from the tiger!”

Gringoire began to seek new solutions.

“Well! see here—Will you that I address to the matrons a petition with declaration that the girl is with child?”

That made the hollow pupil of the priest sparkle.

“With child! knave! do you know anything of it?”

Gringoire was frightened at his air. He hastened to say: “Oh! not I! Our marriage was a true forismaritagium. I remained outside. But at least one would obtain a respite.”

“Folly! infamy! be silent!”

“You are wrong to be angry,” grumbled Gringoire. “One obtains a respite, it harms no one, and it makes the matrons gain forty deniers parisis, who are poor women.”

The priest did not listen to him.

“Yet she must get out of there!” he murmured. “The decree is executable within three days! Besides, there would be no decree, that Quasimodo! Women have very depraved tastes!” He raised his voice: “Master Pierre, I have well reflected, there is but one means of salvation for her.”

“Which? I, for my part, see no more.”

“Listen, master Pierre, remember that you owe her your life. I am going to tell you frankly my idea. The church is watched day and night. None are allowed to leave it but those who have been seen to enter. You will therefore be able to enter. You will come. I will introduce you to her. You will change clothes with her. She will take your doublet, you will take her skirt.”

“That goes well thus far,” observed the philosopher. “And then?”

“And then? She will go out in your clothes; you will remain in hers. They will perhaps hang you, but she will be saved.”

Gringoire scratched his ear with a very serious air.

“See here!” said he, “that is an idea which would never have come to me alone.”

At Dom Claude’s unexpected proposition, the open and benign countenance of the poet had suddenly clouded over, like a smiling landscape of Italy when an untoward gust of wind crushes a cloud upon the sun.

“Well, Gringoire! what say you to the means?”

“I say, my master, that perhaps they will not hang me, but that indubitably they will hang me.”

“That concerns us not.”

“Plague take it!” said Gringoire.

“She saved your life. It is a debt you are paying.”

“There are many others I do not pay!”

“Master Pierre, it must absolutely be.”

The archdeacon spoke with authority.

“Listen, Dom Claude,” answered the poet, quite cast down. “You are set upon this idea, and you are wrong. I do not see why I should be hanged in another’s place.”

“What then have you so much that binds you to life?”

“Ah! a thousand reasons!”

“Which, if you please?”

“Which? The air, the sky, the morning, the evening, the moonlight, my good friends the truands, our warm carouses with the wenchlings, the fine architectures of Paris to study, three big books to make, whereof one against the bishop and his mills, how should I know? Anaxagoras said he was in the world to admire the sun. And then I have the happiness of passing all my days from morning to night with a man of genius who is myself, and that is very agreeable.”

“Head to make a bell!” grumbled the archdeacon. “Eh! speak, this life you make so charming, who has preserved it for you? To whom do you owe the breathing of this air, the seeing of this sky, and the still being able to amuse your lark’s mind with trifles and follies? Without her, where would you be? You would have her die then, she by whom you are living? have that creature die, beautiful, sweet, adorable, necessary to the light of the world, more divine than God! while you, half-wise and half-fool, vain sketch of something, a sort of vegetable that thinks it walks and thinks it thinks, you will continue to live with the life you have stolen from her, as useless as a candle at midday? Come, a little pity, Gringoire! be generous in your turn. She began.”

The priest was vehement. Gringoire listened to him at first with an indeterminate air, then he softened, and ended by making a tragic grimace which made his pale face resemble that of a new-born babe with the colic.

“You are pathetic,” said he, wiping away a tear. “Well! I will think of it.—It is a queer idea you have hit upon there.—After all,” he pursued after a silence, “who knows? perhaps they will not hang me. She does not always wed who weds. When they find me in that lodging, so grotesquely tricked out, in petticoat and coif, perhaps they will burst out laughing.—And then, if they hang me, well! the rope, it is a death like another, or, to speak better, it is not a death like another. It is a death worthy of the sage who has oscillated all his life, a death which is neither flesh nor fish, like the spirit of the true sceptic, a death all imbued with Pyrrhonism and hesitation, which holds the middle between heaven and earth, which leaves you in suspense. It is a death of a philosopher, and I was perhaps predestined thereto. It is magnificent to die as one has lived.”

The priest interrupted him: “Is it agreed?”

“What is death, after all?” pursued Gringoire with exaltation. “A bad moment, a toll, the passage of a little thing to nothing. Some one having asked Cercidas the Megalopolitan if he would die willingly: ‘Why not?’ answered he; ‘for after my death I shall see those great men, Pythagoras among philosophers, Hecatæus among historians, Homer among poets, Olympus among musicians.’”

The archdeacon offered him his hand. “Then it is said? you will come to-morrow.”

This gesture brought Gringoire back to the positive.

“Ah! faith no!” said he in the tone of a man waking. “To be hanged! it is too absurd. I will not.”

“Farewell then!” And the archdeacon added between his teeth: “I will find you again!”

“I will not that this devil of a man find me,” thought Gringoire; and he ran after Dom Claude. “See here, monsieur the archdeacon, no ill-humor between old friends! You interest yourself in that girl, in my wife, I mean, that is well. You have imagined a stratagem to get her safe out of Notre-Dame, but your means is extremely disagreeable for me, Gringoire.—If I had another, I!—I warn you one has just occurred to me at this instant, a very luminous inspiration.—If I had an expedient idea to draw her out of the bad pass without compromising my neck with the least running knot, what would you say? would not that suffice you? Is it absolutely necessary that I be hanged for you to be content?”

The priest was tearing with impatience the buttons of his cassock. “Stream of words! What is your means?”

“Yes,” resumed Gringoire, speaking to himself and touching his nose with his index in sign of meditation, “that is it! The truands are brave fellows.—The tribe of Egypt loves her.—They will rise at the first word.—Nothing easier.—A surprise.—In the confusion, she will be easily carried off.—As early as to-morrow evening… they will ask nothing better.”

“The means! speak,” said the priest, shaking him.

Gringoire turned majestically toward him: “Leave me then! you see well that I am composing.” He reflected yet some moments. Then he began to clap his hands at his thought, crying: “Admirable! sure success!”

“The means!” resumed Claude in anger.

Gringoire was radiant.

“Come, that I may tell you that in a whisper. It is a countermine truly gallant, and which gets us all out of the scrape. Pardieu! it must be owned I am no fool.”

He interrupted himself: “Hark ye! is the little goat with the girl?”

“Yes. The devil take you!”

“It is that they would have hanged her too, would they not?”

“What is that to me?

“Stories of the world, in your language.”