Part 41

“Ah!” said Gringoire, “yonder is the Logis Barbeau. Look, master, do you see that cluster of black roofs making strange angles, down there beneath that low, wispy, smeared, and dirty mass of clouds where the moon is all crushed and spilled like the yolk of a broken egg? It is a fine house. There is a chapel crowned with a little vault full of well-cut ornaments. Above it you can see the belfry most delicately pierced. There is also a pleasant garden, consisting of a pond, an aviary, an echo, a bowling green, a labyrinth, a house for wild beasts, and a quantity of leafy walks very agreeable to Venus. There is besides a knavish tree which they call *the wanton*, for having served the pleasures of a famous princess and a gallant and witty constable of France. Alas! we poor philosophers are to a constable what a square of cabbages and radishes is to the garden of the Louvre. What does it matter, after all? Human life, for the great as for us, is mingled of good and evil. Sorrow is ever beside joy, the spondee next the dactyl. My master, I must tell you the story of the Logis Barbeau. It ends in a tragic fashion. It was in 1319, under the reign of Philippe V, the longest-lived of the kings of France. The moral of the tale is that the temptations of the flesh are pernicious and malignant. Let us not dwell too fondly with our eyes on the neighbor’s wife, however tickled our senses may be by her beauty. Fornication is a very libertine thought. Adultery is a curiosity of another’s voluptuousness… Ho there! the noise is redoubling yonder!”

The tumult, in fact, was growing around Notre-Dame. They listened. Cries of victory could be heard distinctly enough. Suddenly a hundred torches, setting the helmets of men-at-arms a-sparkle, spread over the church at every height, on the towers, on the galleries, beneath the flying buttresses. These torches seemed to be searching for something; and soon the distant clamors reached the fugitives distinctly: “The Egyptian! the witch! death to the Egyptian!”

The unhappy girl let her head fall into her hands, and the unknown began to row furiously toward the shore. Meanwhile our philosopher was reflecting. He pressed the goat in his arms, and drew softly away from the Bohemian, who clung more and more closely to him, as to the only refuge left her.

It is certain that Gringoire was in a cruel perplexity. He bethought him that the goat also, *according to existing law*, would be hanged if recaptured, that it would be a great pity, poor Djali! that he had too many of the condemned already hanging after him, and that his companion asked nothing better than to take charge of the Egyptian. A violent struggle was going on within his thoughts, in which, like the Jupiter of the Iliad, he weighed now the Egyptian, now the goat; and he looked from one to the other with eyes moist with tears, saying between his teeth: “Yet I cannot save you both.”

A shock at last warned them that the boat had touched land. The sinister hubbub still filled the Cité. The unknown rose, came to the Egyptian, and would have taken her arm to help her down. She repulsed him, and clung to Gringoire’s sleeve, who, for his part, occupied with the goat, almost repulsed her. Then she sprang alone from the boat. She was so troubled that she knew not what she did, nor where she went. She remained thus for a moment stupefied, watching the water flow. When she came a little to herself, she was alone on the quay with the unknown. It appears that Gringoire had profited by the moment of landing to slip away with the goat into the block of houses in the Rue Grenier-sur-l’eau.

The poor Egyptian shuddered to find herself alone with that man. She would have spoken, cried out, called Gringoire; her tongue was inert in her mouth, and no sound issued from her lips. Suddenly she felt the unknown’s hand upon hers. It was a cold and strong hand. Her teeth chattered, she grew paler than the moonbeam that lit her. The man said not a word. He began to mount with great strides toward the Place de Grève, holding her by the hand. At that instant she vaguely felt that destiny is an irresistible force. She had no spring left in her; she let herself be dragged, running while he walked. The quay at this point sloped upward. It seemed to her, nevertheless, that she was descending a slope.

She looked on all sides. Not a passer-by. The quay was absolutely deserted. She heard no noise, she felt no movement of men, save in the tumultuous and glowing Cité, from which she was separated only by an arm of the Seine, and whence her name reached her mingled with cries of death. The rest of Paris lay around her in great blocks of shadow.

Meanwhile the dark man still dragged her on with the same silence and the same rapidity. She could recall none of the places through which she passed. In passing before a lighted window, she made an effort, stiffened suddenly, and cried: “Help!”

The bourgeois to whom the window belonged opened it, appeared there in his shirt with his lamp, looked upon the quay with a bewildered air, uttered some words which she did not hear, and closed his shutter. It was the last gleam of hope going out.

The black man uttered not a syllable; he held her fast, and began again to walk more quickly. She resisted no longer, and followed him, broken.

From time to time she gathered a little strength, and said in a voice broken by the jolting of the pavement and the breathlessness of the run: “Who are you? who are you?” He answered not.

They arrived thus, still along the quay, at a rather large square. There was a little moonlight. It was the Grève. One could distinguish in the midst a kind of black cross standing upright. It was the gallows. She recognized all that, and saw where she was.

The man stopped, turned toward her, and raised his hood.

“Oh!” she stammered, petrified, “I knew well it was he again!”

It was the priest. He had the air of his own ghost. It is an effect of the moonlight. It seems that by that light one sees only the specters of things.

“Listen,” said he to her; and she shuddered at the sound of that fatal voice which she had not heard for a long time. He continued. He articulated with those brief and panting jerks which, by their shocks, reveal deep inward tremblings. “Listen. We are here. I am going to speak to you. This is the Grève. This is an extreme point. Destiny delivers us each to the other. I am going to decide your life; you, my soul. Here is a square and a night beyond which one sees nothing. Listen to me, then. I am going to tell you… First, do not speak to me of your Phoebus. (In saying this he went to and fro like a man who cannot keep still, and dragged her after him.) Do not speak to me of him. Do you see? if you pronounce that name, I know not what I shall do, but it will be terrible.”

That said, like a body which finds its center of gravity, he became motionless again. But his words betrayed no less agitation. His voice grew lower and lower.

“Do not turn your head away thus. Listen to me. This is a serious matter. First, this is what has happened.—No one shall laugh at all this, I swear to you.—What was I saying? remind me! ah!—There is a decree of the court which gives you back to the scaffold. I have just drawn you from their hands. But there they are, pursuing you. Look.”

He stretched his arm toward the Cité. The search, in fact, seemed to be continuing there. The noises drew nearer. The tower of the Lieutenant’s house, situated opposite the Grève, was full of noise and light, and one saw soldiers running on the opposite quay, with torches and these cries: “The Egyptian! where is the Egyptian? Death! death!”

“You see well that they pursue you, and that I do not lie to you. I, I love you.—Do not open your mouth, do not speak to me rather, if it is to tell me you hate me. I am resolved to hear that no more.—I have just saved you. Let me first finish.—I can save you wholly. I have prepared all. It is for you to will it. As you please, I can.”

He broke off violently. “No, that is not what must be said.”

And running, and making her run, for he did not release her, he walked straight to the gallows, and pointed it out to her with his finger:

“Choose between us two,” said he coldly.

She tore herself from his hands and fell at the foot of the gallows, embracing that funereal support. Then she turned her beautiful head half around, and looked at the priest over her shoulder. One would have said a holy Virgin at the foot of the cross. The priest had remained motionless, his finger still raised toward the gallows, keeping his gesture like a statue.

At last the Egyptian said to him: “He horrifies me less than you do.”

Then he let his arm fall slowly, and looked at the pavement with deep dejection. “If these stones could speak,” he murmured, “yes, they would say that here is a man most unhappy.”

He resumed. The young girl, kneeling before the gallows and lost in her long hair, let him speak without interrupting him. He now had a plaintive and gentle accent which contrasted painfully with the haughty asperity of his features.

“I, I love you. Oh! that is yet most true. Does nothing then issue outward of this fire which burns my heart! Alas! young girl, night and day, yes, night and day, does that deserve no pity? It is a love of night and of day, I tell you, it is a torture.—Oh! I suffer too much, my poor child!—It is a thing worthy of compassion, I assure you. You see that I speak to you gently. I could wish that you had no longer that horror of me.—In short, a man who loves a woman, it is not his fault!—Oh! my God!—How! you will never pardon me then? You will hate me always! It is then finished! That is what makes me bad, you see, and horrible to myself!—You do not even look at me! You think of something else, perhaps, while I speak to you standing and trembling on the threshold of our eternity, both of us!—Above all, do not speak to me of the officer! What! I would throw myself at your knees, what! I would kiss, not your feet, you would not wish it, but the earth which is under your feet, what! I would sob like a child, I would tear from my breast, not words, but my heart and my bowels, to tell you that I love you, all would be useless, all!—And yet you have nothing in your soul but tenderness and clemency, you are radiant with the fairest sweetness, you are wholly suave, good, merciful, and charming. Alas! you have no cruelty save for me alone! Oh! what a fatality!”

He hid his face in his hands. The young girl heard him weep. It was the first time. Thus standing and shaken by sobs, he was more wretched and more suppliant than on his knees. He wept thus for a certain time.

“Come!” he pursued, those first tears past, “I find no words. Yet I had well thought of what I would say to you. Now I tremble and shiver, I fail at the decisive instant, I feel something supreme which envelops us, and I stammer. Oh! I shall fall upon the pavement if you do not take pity on me, pity on yourself. Do not condemn us both. If you knew how I love you! what a heart is my heart! Oh! what a desertion of all virtue! what a desperate abandonment of myself! Doctor, I scoff at science; gentleman, I tear my name; priest, I make of the missal a pillow of lust, I spit in the face of my God! all this for thee, enchantress! to be more worthy of thy hell! and thou wilt not of the damned! Oh! that I tell thee all! more still, something more horrible, oh! more horrible!…”

In pronouncing these last words, his air became quite distracted. He was silent an instant, and resumed as speaking to himself, and in a loud voice:

“Cain, what hast thou done with thy brother?”

There was yet another silence, and he pursued:

“What I have done with him, Lord? I took him in, I brought him up, I nourished him, I loved him, I idolized him, and I killed him! Yes, Lord, behold they have just crushed his head before me upon the stone of thy house, and it is because of me, because of this woman, because of her…”

His eye was wild. His voice was dying away, he repeated yet several times, mechanically, with rather long intervals, like a bell prolonging its last vibration: “Because of her…—Because of her…”

Then his tongue articulated no longer any perceptible sound, his lips nevertheless kept moving. Suddenly he collapsed upon himself like something falling to ruin, and remained on the ground without motion, his head in his knees.

A brushing of the young girl, who drew back her foot from under him, brought him to. He passed his hand slowly over his hollow cheeks, and looked for some moments with stupor at his fingers, which were wet. “What!” he murmured, “I have wept!”

And turning suddenly toward the Egyptian with an unutterable anguish:

“Alas! you have looked coldly upon my weeping! Child! know you that these tears are lava? Is it then quite true? of the man one hates nothing touches. You would see me die, you would laugh. Oh! I will not see you die! One word! one single word of pardon! Do not tell me that you love me, tell me only that you are willing, that suffices, I will save you. Else… Oh! the hour passes, I beseech you by all that is sacred, wait not till I am become stone again like that gallows which claims you too! Think that I hold our two destinies in my hand, that I am mad, that is terrible, that I can let all fall, and that there is beneath us a bottomless abyss, unhappy one, where my fall shall pursue thine through eternity! One word of kindness! say one word! nothing but one word!”

She opened her mouth to answer him. He threw himself on his knees before her to gather with adoration the word, perhaps softened, which was to issue from her lips. She said to him: “You are a murderer!”

The priest took her in his arms with fury and began to laugh with an abominable laugh.

“Well, yes! murderer!” said he, “and I shall have thee. Thou wilt not have me for slave, thou shalt have me for master. I shall have thee. I have a den where I will drag thee. Thou shalt follow me, thou must needs follow me, or I deliver thee up! Thou must die, fair one, or be mine! be the priest’s! be the apostate’s! be the murderer’s! from this very night, hearest thou that? Come! joy! come! kiss me, mad girl! The tomb or my bed!”

His eye sparkled with impurity and rage. His lascivious mouth reddened the young girl’s neck. She struggled in his arms. He covered her with foaming kisses.

“Do not bite me, monster!” she cried. “Oh! the loathsome, foul thing! leave me! I will tear out your vile gray hairs and fling them in handfuls in your face!”

He reddened, he paled, then he let her go and looked at her with a dark air. She thought herself victorious, and pursued: “I tell thee I am my Phoebus’s, that it is Phoebus I love, that it is Phoebus who is fair! Thou, priest, art old! thou art ugly! Begone!”

He uttered a violent cry, like the wretch to whom a red-hot iron is applied. “Then die!” said he through a gnashing of teeth. She saw his dreadful look, and would have fled. He seized her again, he shook her, he flung her on the ground, and walked with rapid steps toward the angle of the Tour-Roland, dragging her after him upon the pavement by her beautiful hands.

Arrived there, he turned toward her:

“One last time, wilt thou be mine?”

She answered with force:

“No.”

Then he cried in a loud voice:

“Gudule! Gudule! here is the Egyptian! avenge thyself!”

The young girl felt herself suddenly seized by the elbow. She looked. It was a withered arm which issued from a dormer in the wall and held her like a hand of iron.

“Hold fast!” said the priest. “It is the Egyptian escaped. Do not let her go. I am going to fetch the sergeants. You shall see her hanged.”

A guttural laugh answered these bloody words from within the wall: “Hah! hah! hah!” The Egyptian saw the priest withdraw, running in the direction of the Pont Notre-Dame. A cavalcade was heard on that side.

The young girl had recognized the wicked recluse. Breathless with terror, she tried to free herself. She writhed, she made several convulsive starts of agony and despair, but the other held her with unheard-of strength. The bony and lean fingers which bruised her were clenched upon her flesh and closed around it. One would have said that this hand was riveted to her arm. It was more than a chain, more than a collar, more than an iron ring, it was an intelligent and living pincer which issued from a wall.

Exhausted, she fell back against the wall, and then the fear of death seized her. She thought of the beauty of life, of youth, of the sight of the sky, of the aspects of nature, of love, of Phoebus, of all that was fleeing and all that was approaching, of the priest who denounced her, of the executioner who was about to come, of the gallows which was there. Then she felt the horror mount even to the roots of her hair, and she heard the lugubrious laugh of the recluse who said to her in a low voice: “Hah! hah! hah! thou shalt be hanged!”

She turned, dying, toward the dormer, and she saw the wild face of the sachette through the bars.

“What have I done you?” said she, almost lifeless.

The recluse answered not; she began to mumble with a chanting, irritated, and mocking intonation: “Daughter of Egypt! daughter of Egypt! daughter of Egypt!”

The unhappy Esmeralda let her head fall among her hair, understanding that she had not to do with a human being.

Suddenly the recluse cried out, as if the Egyptian’s question had taken all that time to reach her thought:

“What hast thou done me? sayest thou!—Ah! what thou hast done me, Egyptian! Well! listen.—I had a child, I! seest thou? I had a child! a child, I tell thee!—A pretty little girl!—My Agnès,” she went on, distracted, and kissing something in the darkness. “Well! seest thou, daughter of Egypt? they took my child from me, they stole my child, they ate my child. That is what thou hast done me.”

The young girl answered like the lamb:

“Alas! I was perhaps not born then!”

“Oh! yes!” returned the recluse, “thou must have been born. Thou wast of that age. Thus!—It is fifteen years that I am here, fifteen years that I suffer, fifteen years that I pray, fifteen years that I beat my head against the four walls.—I tell thee it was Egyptians who stole her from me, hearest thou that? and who ate her with their teeth. Hast thou a heart? figure to thyself what it is, a child that plays, a child that sucks, a child that sleeps. So innocent! Well, that, that is what they took from me, what they killed me! The good God knows it well!—Today it is my turn, I am going to eat of the Egyptian.—Oh! that I would bite thee well if the bars did not hinder me. My head is too big!—The poor little one! while she slept! And if they woke her in taking her, she may have cried in vain, I was not there!—Ah! mothers of Egypt, you have eaten my child! come see yours.”

Then she began to laugh or to gnash her teeth, the two things resembled each other on that furious face. Day began to dawn. A reflection of ashes vaguely lit this scene, and the gallows became more and more distinct in the square. On the other side, toward the Pont Notre-Dame, the poor condemned girl thought she heard the noise of cavalry drawing near.

“Madame!” she cried, joining her hands and falling on her two knees, disheveled, distraught, mad with fright, “madame! have pity. They are coming. I have done you nothing. Will you see me die in this horrible fashion before your eyes? You have pity, I am sure of it. It is too frightful. Let me save myself. Release me! Mercy! I do not wish to die thus!”

“Give me back my child!” said the recluse.

“Mercy! mercy!”

“Give me back my child!”

“Release me, in heaven’s name!”

“Give me back my child!”

This time again, the young girl fell back, exhausted, broken, having already the glassy look of one who is in the pit.

“Alas!” she stammered, “you seek your child. I, I seek my parents.”

“Give me back my little Agnès!” pursued Gudule. “Thou knowest not where she is? Then die!—I will tell thee. I was a girl of joy, I had a child, they took my child from me.—They are Egyptians. Thou seest well that thou must die. When thy mother the Egyptian comes to claim thee, I will say to her: Mother, look at that gallows!—Or else give me back my child.—Knowest thou where she is, my little girl? See, let me show thee. Here is her shoe, all I have left of her. Knowest thou where the fellow is? If thou knowest, tell me, and if it be but at the other end of the earth, I will go seek it on my knees.”

In speaking thus, with her other arm stretched out of the dormer, she showed the Egyptian the little embroidered shoe. It was already light enough to distinguish its shape and colors.

“Show me that shoe,” said the Egyptian, trembling. “God! God!” And at the same time, with the hand she had free, she quickly opened the little pouch ornamented with green glass beads which she wore at her neck.

“Go! go!” growled Gudule, “search thy amulet of the devil!” Suddenly she stopped, trembled in all her body, and cried with a voice which came from the depths of her entrails: “My daughter!”

The Egyptian had just drawn from the pouch a little shoe exactly like the other. To this little shoe was attached a parchment on which this *carme* was written:

_When thou the fellow shalt regain,_ _Thy mother’s arms shall thee enchain._

In less time than a flash of lightning, the recluse had compared the two shoes, read the inscription of the parchment, and, pressing her face radiant with celestial joy against the bars of the dormer, cried:

“My daughter! my daughter!”

“My mother!” answered the Egyptian.

Here we renounce the attempt to depict it.

The wall and the iron bars were between them two. “Oh! the wall!” cried the recluse. “Oh! to see her and not to embrace her! Thy hand! thy hand!”

The young girl passed her arm through the dormer to her; the recluse threw herself upon that hand, fastened her lips to it, and remained there, lost in that kiss, giving no other sign of life than a sob which from time to time heaved her flanks. Meanwhile she wept in torrents, in silence, in the shadow, like a night rain. The poor mother emptied by floods upon that adored hand the black and deep well of tears which was within her, and into which all her grief had filtered drop by drop for fifteen years.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”