Part 42

Suddenly, she rose, swept her long gray hair back from her forehead, and, without a word, began to shake the bars of her cell with both hands more furiously than a lioness. The bars held fast. Then she went to fetch from a corner of her dungeon a large paving-stone that served her as a pillow, and hurled it against them with such violence that one of the bars snapped, sending off a thousand sparks. A second blow utterly shattered the old iron cross that barred the window. Then with her two hands she finished breaking and forcing apart the rusted stumps of the bars. There are moments when a woman's hands possess a superhuman strength.

The passage cleared—and it had taken less than a minute—she seized her daughter by the waist and drew her into her cell. "Come! let me fish you out of the abyss!" she murmured.

When her daughter was in the cell, she set her gently on the ground, then took her up again, and carrying her in her arms as if she were still her little Agnès, she paced to and fro in the narrow lodging, drunk, frantic, joyous, shouting, singing, kissing her daughter, speaking to her, bursting with laughter, melting into tears, all at once and with wild abandon.

"My daughter! my daughter!" she said. "I have my daughter! here she is. The good Lord has given her back to me. Hey, all of you! is there anyone there to see that I have my daughter? Lord Jesus, how beautiful she is! You made me wait fifteen years for her, my good God, but it was to give her back to me beautiful.—So the Egyptians had not eaten her after all! Who ever said that? My little girl! my little girl! kiss me. Those good Egyptians! I love the Egyptians.—It is truly you. So that is why my heart leapt every time you passed. I who took that for hatred! Forgive me, my Agnès, forgive me. You found me very wicked, didn't you? I love you.—Your little token at your neck, do you still have it? let me see. She still has it. Oh! you are beautiful! It is I who made those great eyes of yours, mademoiselle. Kiss me. I love you. I care not at all that other mothers have children, I mock them well now. They have only to come. Here is mine. See her neck, her eyes, her hair, her hand. Find me something as beautiful as that! Oh, I promise you she shall have lovers, that one! I wept for fifteen years. All my beauty went away, and hers came. Kiss me!"

She poured out a thousand other extravagant speeches whose accent was all their beauty, disordered the poor girl's clothing until she blushed, smoothed her silken tresses with her hand, kissed her foot, her knee, her brow, her eyes, rapturous over all. The young girl let her do as she would, repeating at intervals very low and with infinite tenderness: "My mother!"

"You see, my little girl," the recluse went on, punctuating every word with kisses, "you see, I shall love you dearly. We shall leave this place. We are going to be very happy. I inherited something at Reims, in our country. You know Reims? Ah! no, you don't know that, you were too little! If you knew how pretty you were at four months! Such little feet that people came out of curiosity from Épernay, which is seven leagues away, to see them! We shall have a field, a house. I shall lay you in my bed. My God! my God! who would believe this? I have my daughter!"

"Oh, my mother!" said the young girl, finding at last the strength to speak in her emotion, "the Egyptian woman had told me so. There is a good Egyptian of ours who died last year, and who had always tended me like a nurse. It was she who put this pouch at my neck. She would always say to me: 'Little one, keep this jewel well. It is a treasure. It will make you find your mother again. You carry your mother at your neck.' She had foretold it, the Egyptian!"

The sack-woman clasped her daughter in her arms again.

"Come, let me kiss you! you say that prettily. When we are in the country, we shall shoe a church Infant Jesus with the little shoes. We owe that much to the good holy Virgin. My God! what a pretty voice you have! When you spoke to me just now, it was music! Ah, my God Lord! I have found my child again! But is this story believable? One dies of nothing, for I did not die of joy."

And then she fell to clapping her hands and laughing and crying: "We are going to be happy!"

At that moment the little cell rang with a clatter of arms and a galloping of horses that seemed to issue from the Notre-Dame bridge and draw nearer along the quay. The Egyptian threw herself in anguish into the sack-woman's arms.

"Save me! save me! my mother! they are coming!" The recluse turned pale.

"O heaven! what are you saying there? I had forgotten! they are after you! What have you done?"

"I know not," answered the unhappy child, "but I am condemned to die."

"To die!" said Gudule, reeling as under a thunderbolt. "To die!" she repeated slowly, and looked at her daughter with her fixed eye.

"Yes, my mother," resumed the young girl, distraught, "they want to kill me. They are coming to take me. That gallows is for me! Save me! save me! they are arriving! save me!"

The recluse remained some instants motionless as if petrified, then she shook her head in sign of doubt, and suddenly breaking into a laugh—but her frightful laugh that had come back to her:

"Ho! ho! no! it is a dream you are telling me there. Ah! yes! I would have lost her, it would have lasted fifteen years, and then I would find her again, and it would last a minute! And they would take her from me again! and it is now that she is beautiful, that she is grown, that she speaks to me, that she loves me, it is now that they would come eat her before my very eyes, I who am the mother! Oh no! such things are not possible. The good God does not permit that."

Here the cavalcade seemed to halt, and a distant voice was heard saying: "This way, sir Tristan! The priest says we shall find her at the Rat-Hole." The noise of horses began again.

The recluse stood up with a despairing cry. "Flee! flee! my child! It all comes back to me. You are right. It is your death! Horror! curse! Flee!"

She put her head to the window, and drew it back quickly.

"Stay," she said in a low, brief, and lugubrious voice, convulsively clutching the hand of the Egyptian, more dead than alive. "Stay! do not breathe! there are soldiers everywhere. You cannot get out. It is too light."

Her eyes were dry and burning. She remained a moment without speaking. She only paced with great strides in the cell, and stopped at intervals to tear out handfuls of gray hair which she then bit with her teeth.

Suddenly she said: "They are drawing near. I will speak to them. Hide in this corner. They will not see you. I will tell them you escaped, that I let you go, faith!"

She set her daughter down—for she was still carrying her—in an angle of the cell not visible from without. She crouched her, arranged her carefully so that neither foot nor hand should pass beyond the shadow, untied her black hair which she spread over her white dress to mask it, placed before her her jug and her paving-stone, the only furniture she had, imagining that this jug and this stone would hide her. And when it was done, more tranquil, she knelt and prayed. The day, which was only just breaking, still left much darkness in the Rat-Hole.

At this instant, the priest's voice—that infernal voice—passed very near the cell, crying: "This way, Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers!"

At that name, at that voice, the Esmeralda, crouched in her corner, made a movement.

"Do not stir!" said Gudule.

She had scarce finished when a tumult of men, swords, and horses stopped about the cell. The mother rose very quickly and went to post herself before her window to block it. She saw a great troop of armed men, foot and horse, ranged on the Grève. He who commanded them alighted and came toward her. "Old woman," said this man, who had an atrocious face, "we are seeking a sorceress to hang her; we were told you had her."

The poor mother assumed the most indifferent air she could, and answered:

"I do not quite know what you mean."

The other resumed: "God's head! what was that frightened archdeacon bawling? Where is he?"

"My lord," said a soldier, "he has disappeared."

"Now then, old madwoman," the commander went on, "do not lie to me. A sorceress was given you to guard. What have you done with her?"

The recluse would not deny all, for fear of awakening suspicion, and answered in a sincere and surly tone:

"If you speak of a tall young girl they had fastened to my hands just now, I tell you she bit me and that I let her go. There. Leave me in peace."

The commander made a disappointed grimace.

"Do not go lying to me, old specter," he went on, "I am called Tristan l'Hermite, and I am the king's crony. Tristan l'Hermite, do you hear?" He added, looking about the Grève: "It is a name that echoes here."

"You might be Satan l'Hermite," Gudule replied, who was taking heart again, "I should have nothing else to tell you and I should not fear you."

"God's head!" said Tristan, "here is a gossip! Ah! the sorceress girl has escaped! and by what way did she go?"

Gudule answered in a careless tone:

"By the Rue du Mouton, I believe."

Tristan turned his head, and signed to his troop to prepare to set off again. The recluse breathed.

"My lord," suddenly said an archer, "ask the old fairy why the bars of her window are broken in that fashion."

This question drove anguish back into the miserable mother's heart. She did not, however, lose all presence of mind. "They have always been so," she stammered.

"Bah!" said the archer, "yesterday still they made a fine black cross that inspired devotion."

Tristan cast a sidelong glance at the recluse.

"I think the gossip is troubled!"

The unfortunate woman felt that everything depended on her composure, and, death in her soul, she began to snigger. Mothers have such strengths.

"Bah!" said she, "the man is drunk. More than a year ago the back of a stone-cart ran into my window and stove in the grating. So much so that I cursed the carter."

"That is true," said another archer, "I was there."

There are always people everywhere who have seen everything. This unexpected testimony from the archer revived the recluse, to whom this interrogation made her cross an abyss on the edge of a knife.

But she was condemned to a continual alternation of hope and alarm.

"If it is a cart that did that," said the first soldier, "the broken ends of the bars should be bent inward, whereas they are drawn outward."

"He! he!" said Tristan to the soldier, "you have the nose of a Châtelet examiner. Answer what he says, old woman!"

"My God!" she cried, at bay and despite herself in a voice full of tears, "I swear to you, my lord, that it is a cart that broke these bars. You hear that this man saw it. And then, what does it matter for your Egyptian?"

"Hum!" growled Tristan.

"The devil!" said the soldier, flattered by the provost's praise, "the fractures of the iron are quite fresh!"

Tristan shook his head. She paled. "How long ago, you say, was this cart?"

"A month, perhaps a fortnight, my lord. I do not know anymore."

"She first said more than a year," observed the soldier.

"This is suspicious," said the provost.

"My lord," she cried, still glued to the window and trembling lest suspicion should prompt them to thrust their heads in and look into the cell, "my lord, I swear to you that it is a cart that broke this grating. I swear it by the holy angels of paradise. If it is not a cart, may I be eternally damned and renounce God!"

"You put great heat into that oath!" said Tristan with his inquisitor's glance.

The poor woman felt her assurance more and more vanishing. She was now making blunders, and she understood with terror that she was not saying what she should have said.

Here, another soldier arrived crying: "My lord, the old fairy lies. The sorceress did not escape by the Mouton street. The chain of the street has remained drawn all night, and the chain-guard saw no one pass."

Tristan, whose face grew more sinister every instant, challenged the recluse: "What have you to say to that?"

She tried yet again to face this new turn: "That I know not, my lord, that I may have been mistaken. I think she did cross the water indeed."

"It is the opposite side," said the provost. "There is, however, little likelihood that she would wish to re-enter the Cité where she was being pursued. You lie, old woman!"

"And besides," added the first soldier, "there is no boat on this side of the water nor on the other."

"She must have swum across," replied the recluse, defending the ground step by step.

"Do women swim?" said the soldier.

"God's head! old woman! you lie! you lie!" resumed Tristan angrily. "I am much inclined to leave this sorceress be, and hang you instead. A quarter-hour of questioning will perhaps draw the truth from your gullet. Come! you shall follow us."

She seized these words avidly.

"As you wish, my lord. Do it. Do it. The questioning, I am willing. Take me away. Quick, quick! let us go at once." Meanwhile, she thought, my daughter will escape.

"Death-God!" said the provost, "what an appetite for the rack! I understand nothing of this madwoman."

An old sergeant of the watch with a gray head stepped from the ranks, and addressed the provost:

"Mad indeed, my lord! If she let the Egyptian go, it is not her fault, for she does not love the Egyptians. It is fifteen years that I have kept watch, and that I have heard her every evening rail at the Bohemian women with endless curses. If the one we pursue is, as I believe, the little goat-dancer, she hates that one above all."

Gudule made an effort and said: "That one above all."

The unanimous testimony of the watchmen confirmed to the provost the old sergeant's words. Tristan l'Hermite, despairing of extracting anything from the recluse, turned his back on her, and she saw with inexpressible anxiety him slowly make toward his horse.

"Come," said he between his teeth, "on the road! let us return to the search. I shall not sleep until the Egyptian is hanged."

Yet he hesitated some time before mounting. Gudule palpitated between life and death as she saw him cast about the place that uneasy look of a hunting dog who scents the lair near him and resists going away. At last he shook his head and sprang into the saddle. Gudule's horribly compressed heart dilated, and she said in a low voice, casting a glance at her daughter, whom she had not yet dared look at since they had been there: "Saved!"

The poor child had remained all this time in her corner, without breathing, without moving, with the idea of death standing before her. She had lost nothing of the scene between Gudule and Tristan, and each of her mother's anguishes had echoed in her. She had heard all the successive crackings of the thread that held her suspended over the gulf, she had thought twenty times to see it break, and began at last to breathe and feel her foot on firm ground. At this moment, she heard a voice saying to the provost:

"Corboeuf! Mr. Provost, it is not my affair, mine, a man-at-arms, to hang sorceresses. The rabble of the people is down. I leave you to work alone. You will agree that I go rejoin my company, since it is without a captain." That voice was that of Phoebus de Châteaupers. What passed in her is ineffable. He was then there, her friend, her protector, her support, her refuge, her Phoebus! She rose, and before her mother could prevent her, she had thrown herself to the window crying:

"Phoebus! to me, my Phoebus!"

Phoebus was no longer there. He had just turned at a gallop the corner of the Rue de la Coutellerie. But Tristan was not yet gone.

The recluse flung upon her daughter with a roar. She dragged her violently backward, digging her nails into her neck. A tigress mother does not look so closely. But it was too late, Tristan had seen.

"He! he!" he cried with a laugh that dislodged all his teeth and made his face resemble a wolf's muzzle, "two mice in the mouse-trap!"

"I suspected as much," said the soldier.

Tristan struck him on the shoulder: "You are a good cat!—Come," he added, "where is Henriet Cousin?"

A man who had neither the clothing nor the look of the soldiers stepped from their ranks. He wore a parti-colored gray and brown costume, flat hair, leather sleeves, and a bundle of cords in his thick hand. This man always accompanied Tristan, who always accompanied Louis XI.

"Friend," said Tristan l'Hermite, "I presume this is the sorceress we sought. You shall hang that for me. Have you your ladder?"

"There is one under the shed of the Pillar-House," answered the man. "Is it to that justice there that we shall do the thing?" he pursued, pointing to the stone gibbet.

"Yes."

"Ho hey!" said the man with a coarse laugh more bestial even than the provost's, "we shall not have far to go."

"Hurry!" said Tristan. "You shall laugh afterward."

Meanwhile, since Tristan had seen her daughter and all hope was lost, the recluse had not yet said a word. She had flung the poor Egyptian, half-dead, into the corner of the vault, and had replaced herself at the window, her two hands against the angle of the entablature like two claws. In this posture, one saw her intrepidly cast upon all these soldiers her look, which had become wild and senseless again. At the moment Henriet Cousin approached the cell, she made him a face so savage that he drew back.

"My lord," said he, returning to the provost, "which must we take?"

"The young one."

"So much the better. For the old one looks troublesome."

"Poor little goat-dancer!" said the old sergeant of the watch.

Henriet Cousin drew near the window. The mother's eye made his fall. He said rather timidly:

"Madame..."

She interrupted him in a very low and furious voice: "What do you ask?"

"It is not you," said he, "I want. It is the other."

"What other?"

"The young one."

She fell to shaking her head, crying: "There is no one! There is no one! There is no one!"

"Yes!" resumed the executioner, "you know well. Let me take the young one. I do not wish to harm you, you."

She said with a strange snigger:

"Ah! you do not wish to harm me, me!"

"Let me have the other, madame; it is the will of the provost."

She repeated in a mad air: "There is no one."

"I tell you yes!" replied the executioner. "We have all seen that you were two."

"Look rather!" said the recluse, sniggering. "Thrust your head through the window."

The executioner examined the mother's nails, and dared not.

"Hurry!" cried Tristan, who had just ranged his troop in a circle about the Rat-Hole and who held himself on horse near the gibbet.

Henriet returned to the provost yet again, quite embarrassed. He had set his cord on the ground, and turned his hat awkwardly in his hands.

"My lord," he asked, "how to enter?"

"By the door."

"There is none."

"By the window."

"It is too narrow."

"Widen it," said Tristan angrily. "Have you not picks?"

From the depth of her den, the mother, still on the watch, looked on. She hoped no more, she knew not what she wished, but she would not that they take her daughter.

Henriet Cousin went to fetch the box of tools for the low works under the shed of the Pillar-House. He drew from it also the double ladder, which he at once applied to the gibbet. Five or six men of the provost's office armed themselves with picks and levers, and Tristan directed himself with them toward the window.

"Old woman," said the provost in a severe tone, "give us this girl of your own grace."

She looked at him as when one understands not.

"God's head!" resumed Tristan, "what have you to hinder this sorceress from being hanged as pleases the king?"

The miserable woman fell to laughing her fierce laugh.

"What I have to do with it? She is my daughter."

The accent with which she pronounced that word made even Henriet Cousin himself shudder.

"I am sorry for it," said the provost, "but it is the good pleasure of the king."

She cried, redoubling her terrible laugh: "What is your king to me? I tell you she is my daughter!"

"Pierce the wall," said Tristan.

It sufficed, to make an opening wide enough, to unbed a course of stone below the window. When the mother heard the picks and levers sap her fortress, she gave a frightful cry, then she fell to turning with a frightful speed about her cell, a habit of wild beast that the cage had given her. She said no more, but her eyes flamed. The soldiers were chilled to the bottom of their hearts.

Suddenly she took her paving-stone, laughed, and threw it with both fists at the workers. The stone, ill-thrown, for her hands trembled, touched no one, and stopped under the feet of Tristan's horse. She gnashed her teeth.

Meanwhile, though the sun was not yet risen, it was broad day, a fine pink hue cheered the worm-eaten old chimneys of the Pillar-House. It was the hour when the earliest windows of the great city open joyously upon the roofs. Some peasants, some fruiterers going to the markets on their asses, began to cross the Grève; they stopped a moment before this group of soldiers heaped about the Rat-Hole, considered it with astonished air, and passed on.

The recluse had gone to sit near her daughter, covering her with her body, before her, her eye fixed, listening to the poor child who did not stir, and who murmured in a low voice for all speech: "Phoebus! Phoebus!" As the demolishers' work seemed to advance, the mother drew back mechanically, and pressed the young girl more and more against the wall. Suddenly the recluse saw the stone (for she kept sentinel and did not quit it with her eye) give way, and she heard Tristan's voice encouraging the workers. Then she came out of the prostration into which she had fallen for some instants, and cried, and while she spoke her voice now tore the ear like a saw, now stammered as if all curses had crowded on her lips to burst forth at once.

"Ho! ho! ho! But it is horrible! You are brigands! Are you truly going to take my daughter from me? I tell you she is my daughter! Oh! cowards! Oh! hangman lackeys! miserable blackguard assassins! Help! help! fire! But will they take my child thus? Who then is called the good God?"

“Stories of the world, in your language.”