Part 43

Then, turning to Tristan, foaming, with wild eyes, on all fours like a panther, and all bristling:

“Come a little closer to take my daughter! Do you not understand that this woman tells you she is her daughter? Do you know what a child one has is? Eh! lynx, have you never lain with your she-wolf? never had a wolf-cub? and if you have little ones, when they howl, is there nothing in your belly that stirs?

—Put down the stone, said Tristan, it no longer holds.”

The levers lifted the heavy slab. It was, as we have said, the mother’s last rampart. She threw herself upon it, she tried to hold it back, she scratched the stone with her nails, but the massive block, set in motion by six men, escaped her and slid gently to the ground along the iron levers.

The mother, seeing the entrance made, fell before the opening across it, barricading the breach with her body, writhing her arms, striking the pavement with her head, and crying in a voice hoarse with fatigue that could scarcely be heard: “Help! fire! fire!

—Now, take the daughter,” said Tristan, still impassive.

The mother looked at the soldiers in so formidable a manner that they were more inclined to retreat than to advance.

“Come now,” resumed the provost. “Henriet Cousin, you!”

No one took a step.

The provost swore: “Christ’s head! my men-at-arms! afraid of a woman!

—My lord,” said Henriet, “you call that a woman?

—She has a lion’s mane!” said another.

—Come!” retorted the provost, “the opening is wide enough. Enter three abreast, as at the breach of Pontoise. Let us finish, by Mahomet’s death! The first who retreats, I’ll cut in two!”

Placed between the provost and the mother, both threatening, the soldiers hesitated a moment, then, making up their minds, advanced toward the Rat-Hole.

When the recluse saw this, she abruptly rose on her knees, pushed her hair from her face, then let her lean and scraped hands fall upon her thighs. Then great tears came one by one from her eyes; they descended by a wrinkle along her cheeks like a torrent along the bed it has hollowed for itself. At the same time she began to speak, but in a voice so supplicating, so gentle, so submissive and so piercing, that around Tristan more than one old sergeant who would have eaten human flesh wiped his eyes.

“My lords! gentlemen sergeants, a word! It is a thing I must tell you. She is my daughter, you see? my dear little daughter whom I had lost! Listen. It is a story. Imagine that I know the gentlemen sergeants very well. They were always good to me in the old days when the little boys threw stones at me because I led the life of love. You see? you will leave me my child, when you know! I am a poor girl of joy. It was the gypsies who stole her from me. And I have kept her shoe for fifteen years. See, here it is. She had that foot. At Reims! La Chantefleurie! Rue Folle-Peine! You may have known that. It was I. In your youth, then, it was a fine time. We passed good quarter-hours. You will take pity on me, will you not, my lords? The Egyptians stole her from me, they hid her from me for fifteen years. I thought her dead. Imagine, my good friends, that I thought her dead, I have spent fifteen years here, in this cellar, without fire in winter. That is hard, that is. The poor dear little shoe! I cried so much that the good God heard me. This night, he gave me back my daughter. It is a miracle of the good God. She was not dead. You will not take her from me, I am sure. Even if it were myself, I would not say, but her, a child of sixteen! let her have time to see the sun!—What has she done to you? nothing at all. Nor have I. If you knew that I have only her, that I am old, that it is a blessing the holy Virgin sends me. And then you are all so good! You did not know it was my daughter, now you know it. Oh! I love her! Monsieur the grand provost, I would rather have a hole in my bowels than a scratch on her finger! You look like a good lord! What I tell you explains the matter, does it not? Oh! if you have had a mother, my lord! you are the captain, leave me my child! Consider that I beg you on my knees, as one prays to a Jesus Christ! I ask nothing of anyone, I am of Reims, my lords, I have a little field of my uncle Mahiet Pradon. I am no beggar. I want nothing, but I want my child! Oh! I want to keep my child! The good God, who is the master, did not give her back to me for nothing! The king! you say the king! It will already not give him much pleasure that my little girl be killed! And then the king is good! She is my daughter! she is my daughter, mine! she is not the king’s! she is not yours! I want to go away! we want to go away! In short, two women passing, one the mother and the other the daughter, they are let pass! Let us pass! we are of Reims. Oh! you are very good, gentlemen sergeants, I love you all. You will not take my dear little one, it is impossible! Is it not quite impossible? My child! my child!”

We shall not attempt to give an idea of her gesture, her accent, the tears she swallowed as she spoke, the hands she clasped and then wrung, the heartrending smiles, the drowned looks, the moans, the sighs, the miserable and gripping cries that she mingled with her disordered, mad and disconnected words. When she fell silent, Tristan l’Hermite frowned, but it was to hide a tear that rolled in his tiger’s eye. He overcame this weakness, however, and said in a curt tone: “The king wills it.”

Then he bent to Henriet Cousin’s ear, and said to him in a low voice: “Finish quickly!” The dreadful provost perhaps felt his own heart fail him too.

The executioner and the sergeants entered the little cell. The mother made no resistance, only she dragged herself toward her daughter and threw herself bodily upon her.

The Egyptian saw the soldiers approach. The horror of death revived her.

“My mother!” she cried with an inexpressible accent of distress, “my mother! they are coming! defend me!”

“Yes, my love, I defend you!” replied the mother in a faint voice, and, clasping her tightly in her arms, she covered her with kisses. Both thus upon the ground, the mother upon the girl, made a spectacle worthy of pity.

Henriet Cousin took the young girl by the body beneath her beautiful shoulders. When she felt that hand, she went “Heuh!” and fainted. The executioner, who let great tears fall drop by drop upon her, wished to lift her in his arms. He tried to detach the mother, who had as it were knotted her two hands around her daughter’s waist, but she was so powerfully clinging to her child that it was impossible to separate them. Henriet Cousin then dragged the young girl out of the cell, and the mother after her. The mother also kept her eyes closed.

The sun was rising at that moment, and there was already on the square a fair gathering of people who looked from a distance at what was thus dragged upon the pavement toward the gibbet. For it was the custom of provost Tristan at executions to prevent the curious from approaching.

There was no one at the windows. One saw only from afar, at the top of that one of the towers of Notre-Dame which overlooks the Grève, two men detached in black against the clear morning sky, who seemed to be looking.

Henriet Cousin stopped with what he dragged at the foot of the fatal ladder, and, scarcely breathing, so much did the thing move his pity, he passed the rope around the adorable neck of the young girl. The unhappy child felt the horrible touch of the hemp. She lifted her eyelids, and saw the gaunt arm of the stone gibbet, extended above her head. Then she shook herself, and cried in a high and rending voice: “No! no! I will not!” The mother, whose head was buried and lost beneath her daughter’s garments, said not a word; only one saw her whole body tremble and heard her redouble her kisses upon her child. The executioner profited by this moment to quickly untie the arms with which she clasped the condemned girl. Whether from exhaustion or despair, she let him do it. Then he took the young girl upon his shoulder, from which the charming creature fell back gracefully folded in two over his great head. Then he set his foot on the ladder to climb.

At this moment the mother, crouched upon the pavement, opened her eyes completely. Without uttering a cry, she rose with a terrible expression, then, like a beast upon its prey, she threw herself upon the executioner’s hand and bit it. It was a flash. The executioner howled with pain. They ran up. They withdrew with difficulty his bloody hand from between the mother’s teeth. She kept a deep silence. She was pushed back rather brutally, and it was noticed that her head fell heavily upon the pavement. They raised her. She let herself fall again. It was that she was dead.

The executioner, who had not let go of the young girl, began again to climb the ladder.

II

“LA CREATURA BELLA BIANCO VESTITA”[132] (DANTE)

When Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the Egyptian was no longer there, that while he defended her she had been taken away, he took his hair in both hands and stamped with surprise and grief. Then he began to run all over the church, seeking his gypsy, uttering strange cries at every corner of the wall, scattering his red hairs upon the pavement. It was precisely the moment when the king’s archers entered victorious into Notre-Dame, also seeking the Egyptian. Quasimodo helped them there, without suspecting, the poor deaf man, their fatal intentions; he believed that the enemies of the Egyptian were the truands. He himself led Tristan l’Hermite to every possible hiding-place, opened for him the secret doors, the double bottoms of the altars, the back sacristies. If the unhappy girl had still been there, it was he who would have delivered her.

When the weariness of finding nothing had repelled Tristan, who was not easily repelled, Quasimodo continued to search alone. He went twenty times, a hundred times around the church, lengthwise, crosswise, from top to bottom, mounting, descending, running, calling, crying, scenting, prying, rummaging, thrusting his head into every hole, pushing a torch under every vault, desperate, mad. A male who has lost his female is not more roaring nor more wild. At last when he was sure, quite sure that she was no longer there, that it was done, that she had been stolen from him, he slowly remounted the tower stair, that stair which he had scaled with such violence and triumph the day he saved her. He passed again by the same places, his head low, without voice, without tears, almost without breath. The church was deserted again and fallen back into its silence. The archers had left it to hunt the sorceress in the Cité. Quasimodo, left alone in that vast Notre-Dame, so besieged and so tumultuous a moment before, took again the path of the cell where the Egyptian had slept so many weeks under his guard.

In approaching it, he fancied that perhaps he would find her there again. When, at the turn of the gallery which gives onto the roof of the low sides, he caught sight of the narrow cell with its little window and its little door, crouched under a great flying buttress like a bird’s nest under a branch, the heart failed the poor man, and he leaned against a pillar so as not to fall. He imagined that she had perhaps gone back in, that some good genius had no doubt brought her back, that this cell was too tranquil, too safe and too charming for her not to be there, and he dared not take another step, for fear of breaking his illusion. “Yes,” he said to himself, “she is perhaps sleeping, or she is praying. Let us not disturb her.”

At last he gathered his courage, he advanced on tiptoe, he looked, he entered. Empty! the cell was still empty. The unhappy deaf man went around it with slow steps, lifted the bed and looked beneath, as if she could be hidden between the flagstone and the mattress, then he shook his head and remained stupid. All at once he furiously crushed his torch underfoot, and, without saying a word, without uttering a sigh, he precipitated himself at full run, head against the wall, and fell fainting on the pavement.

When he came to, he threw himself upon the bed, he rolled there, he kissed with frenzy the place still warm where the young girl had slept, he remained there some minutes motionless as if he would expire there, then he rose, streaming with sweat, panting, senseless, and began to beat the walls with his head with the frightful regularity of the clapper of his bells, and the resolution of a man who wishes to break them. At last he fell a second time, exhausted; he dragged himself on his knees out of the cell and crouched facing the door, in an attitude of astonishment.

He remained thus more than an hour without making a movement, his eye fixed on the deserted cell, darker and more pensive than a mother seated between an empty cradle and a full coffin. He uttered not a word; only, at long intervals, a sob violently shook his whole body, but a sob without tears, like those summer lightnings which make no noise.

It appears that it was then, seeking in the depths of his desolate reverie who could be the unexpected ravisher of the Egyptian, that he thought of the archdeacon. He remembered that dom Claude alone had a key to the stair which led to the cell, he recalled his nocturnal attempts upon the young girl, the first of which he Quasimodo had aided, the second which he had prevented. He recalled a thousand details, and soon doubted no longer that the archdeacon had taken the Egyptian from him. However such was his respect for the priest, gratitude, devotion, love for this man had roots so deep in his heart that they resisted, even at this moment, the claws of jealousy and despair.

He thought that the archdeacon had done this, and the blood-and-death anger he would have felt toward anyone else, from the moment it was a question of Claude Frollo, turned in the poor deaf man into an increase of pain.

At the moment when his thought thus fixed upon the priest, as the dawn whitened the flying buttresses, he saw at the upper story of Notre-Dame, at the elbow made by the exterior balustrade which turns around the apse, a figure who walked. This figure came from his side. He recognized it. It was the archdeacon.

Claude went with a grave and slow step. He did not look before him as he walked, he directed himself toward the northern tower, but his face was turned sideways, toward the right bank of the Seine, and he held his head high, as if he had tried to see something over the roofs. The owl often has this oblique attitude. It flies toward one point and looks at another.—The priest thus passed above Quasimodo without seeing him.

The deaf man, whom this sudden apparition had petrified, saw him disappear under the door of the stair of the northern tower. The reader knows that this tower is the one from which the Hôtel de Ville is seen. Quasimodo rose and followed the archdeacon.

Quasimodo mounted the tower stair to mount it, to know why the priest mounted it. Besides, the poor bell-ringer knew not what he would do, he Quasimodo, what he would say, what he wanted. He was full of fury and full of fear. The archdeacon and the Egyptian clashed in his heart.

When he had reached the top of the tower, before coming out of the shadow of the stair and entering the platform, he examined with care where the priest was. The priest had his back to him. There is a balustrade pierced with openwork which surrounds the platform of the bell-tower. The priest, whose eyes plunged upon the city, had his chest leaning against that one of the four sides of the balustrade which looks toward the Notre-Dame bridge.

Quasimodo, advancing behind him on cat’s feet, went to see what he thus looked at.

The priest’s attention was so absorbed elsewhere that he heard not the deaf man walk near him.

It is a magnificent and charming spectacle, Paris, and Paris above all then, seen from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame in the fresh lights of a summer dawn. One could be, that day, in July. The sky was perfectly serene. A few belated stars went out there upon various points, and there was a very brilliant one in the east in the clearest of the sky. The sun was at the moment of appearing. Paris began to stir. A very white and very pure light made vividly stand out to the eye all the planes that its thousand houses present to the east. The giant shadow of the bell-towers went from roof to roof from one end of the great city to the other. There were already quarters which spoke and made noise. Here a stroke of a bell, there a stroke of a hammer, yonder the complicated clatter of a moving cart. Already some smokes discharged here and there over all that surface of roofs as through the fissures of an immense solfatara. The river, which wrinkles its water at the arches of so many bridges, at the point of so many islands, was all moiré with folds of silver. Around the city, outside the ramparts, the view was lost in a great circle of flaky vapors through which one confusedly distinguished the indefinite line of the plains and the graceful swell of the hills. All sorts of floating rumors dispersed over this half-awakened city. Toward the east the morning wind drove across the sky some white wools torn from the fleece of mist of the hills.

In the Parvis, some good women who had their milk-pot in hand showed with astonishment the singular dilapidation of the great door of Notre-Dame and two streams of lead frozen between the cracks of the sandstone. That was all that remained of the tumult of the night. The fire lighted by Quasimodo between the towers had gone out. Tristan had already cleared the square and had the dead thrown into the Seine. Kings like Louis XI take care to wash the pavement quickly after a massacre.

Outside the balustrade of the tower, precisely below the point where the priest had stopped, there was one of those fantastic stone gutters which bristle upon Gothic edifices, and in a crevice of this gutter two pretty gillyflowers in bloom, shaken and made as if alive by the breath of the air, made each other playful salutations. Above the towers, high up, far off at the bottom of the sky, one heard little cries of birds.

But the priest listened to, looked at none of all that. He was of those men for whom there are no mornings, no birds, no flowers. In that immense horizon which took on so many aspects around him, his contemplation was concentrated upon a single point.

Quasimodo burned to ask him what he had done with the Egyptian. But the archdeacon seemed at this moment to be outside the world. He was visibly in one of those violent minutes of life when one would not feel the earth crumble. The eyes invariable fixed upon a certain place, he remained motionless and silent; and this silence and this immobility had something so dreadful that the savage bell-ringer shuddered before it and dared not run against it. Only, and it was still a manner of interrogating the archdeacon, he followed the direction of his visual ray, and in this way the glance of the unhappy deaf man fell upon the Place de Grève.

He thus saw what the priest looked at. The ladder was raised near the permanent gibbet. There was some people in the square and many soldiers. A man dragged upon the pavement a white thing to which a black thing was attached. This man stopped at the foot of the gibbet.

Here there passed something that Quasimodo did not see well. It is not that his single eye had not kept its long range, but there was a thick of soldiers which prevented distinguishing all. Besides at this instant the sun appeared, and such a flood of light overflowed over the horizon that one would have said all the points of Paris, spires, chimneys, gables, caught fire at once.

Then the man began to mount the ladder. Then Quasimodo saw him distinctly again. He carried a woman upon his shoulder, a young girl dressed in white, this young girl had a knot at the neck. Quasimodo recognized her.

It was she.

The man thus arrived at the top of the ladder. There he arranged the knot. Here the priest, to see better, knelt upon the balustrade.

All at once the man abruptly pushed the ladder with his heel, and Quasimodo who had not breathed for some instants saw swing at the end of the rope, two fathoms above the pavement, the unhappy child with the man crouched feet upon her shoulders. The rope made several turns upon itself, and Quasimodo saw run along the body of the Egyptian horrible convulsions. The priest for his part, neck stretched, eye out of head, contemplated this frightful group of the man and the young girl, of the spider and the fly.

At the moment when it was most hideous, a laugh of a demon, a laugh that one can have only when one is no longer man, burst upon the livid face of the priest. Quasimodo heard not this laugh, but he saw it. The bell-ringer recoiled a few steps behind the archdeacon, and all at once, rushing upon him with fury, with his two great hands he pushed him by the back into the abyss over which dom Claude was leaning.

The priest cried: “Damnation!” and fell.

The gutter above which he found himself stopped him in his fall. He clung to it with desperate hands, and, at the moment when he opened his mouth to utter a second cry, he saw pass at the edge of the balustrade, above his head, the formidable and vengeful face of Quasimodo.

Then he was silent.

The abyss was below him. A fall of more than two hundred feet, and the pavement.

In this terrible situation, the archdeacon said not a word, uttered not a moan. Only he writhed upon the gutter with unheard-of efforts to remount. But his hands had no hold upon the granite, his feet scraped the blackened wall, without biting into it. Persons who have mounted the towers of Notre-Dame know that there is a swelling of the stone immediately below the balustrade. It is upon this re-entering angle that the miserable archdeacon exhausted himself. He had not to do with a perpendicular wall, but with a wall which fled beneath him.

Quasimodo had only to reach him the hand to draw him from the gulf, but he did not so much as look at him. He looked at the Grève. He looked at the gibbet. He looked at the Egyptian.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”