Notre-Dame de Paris
deafness of the accused, thought that the latter had answered, as
all accused do in general, and therefore he pursued, with his
mechanical and stupid self-possession,—
“Very well. And your age?”
Again Quasimodo made no reply to this question. The judge
supposed that it had been replied to, and continued,—
“Now, your profession?”
Still the same silence. The spectators had begun, meanwhile, to
whisper together, and to exchange glances.
“That will do,” went on the imperturbable auditor, when he
supposed that the accused had finished his third reply. “You are
accused before us, _primo_, of nocturnal disturbance; _secundo_,
of a dishonorable act of violence upon the person of a foolish
woman, _in præjudicium meretricis; tertio_, of rebellion and
disloyalty towards the archers of the police of our lord, the
king. Explain yourself upon all these points.—Clerk, have you
written down what the prisoner has said thus far?”
At this unlucky question, a burst of laughter rose from the
clerk’s table caught by the audience, so violent, so wild, so
contagious, so universal, that the two deaf men were forced to
perceive it. Quasimodo turned round, shrugging his hump with
disdain, while Master Florian, equally astonished, and supposing
that the laughter of the spectators had been provoked by some
irreverent reply from the accused, rendered visible to him by
that shrug of the shoulders, apostrophized him indignantly,—
“You have uttered a reply, knave, which deserves the halter. Do
you know to whom you are speaking?”
This sally was not fitted to arrest the explosion of general
merriment. It struck all as so whimsical, and so ridiculous, that
the wild laughter even attacked the sergeants of the
Parloi-aux-Bourgeois, a sort of pikemen, whose stupidity was part
of their uniform. Quasimodo alone preserved his seriousness, for
the good reason that he understood nothing of what was going on
around him. The judge, more and more irritated, thought it his
duty to continue in the same tone, hoping thereby to strike the
accused with a terror which should react upon the audience, and
bring it back to respect.
“So this is as much as to say, perverse and thieving knave that
you are, that you permit yourself to be lacking in respect
towards the Auditor of the Châtelet, to the magistrate committed
to the popular police of Paris, charged with searching out
crimes, delinquencies, and evil conduct; with controlling all
trades, and interdicting monopoly; with maintaining the
pavements; with debarring the hucksters of chickens, poultry, and
water-fowl; of superintending the measuring of fagots and other
sorts of wood; of purging the city of mud, and the air of
contagious maladies; in a word, with attending continually to
public affairs, without wages or hope of salary! Do you know that
I am called Florian Barbedienne, actual lieutenant to monsieur
the provost, and, moreover, commissioner, inquisitor,
_controller_, and examiner, with equal power in provostship,
bailiwick, preservation, and inferior court of judicature?—”
There is no reason why a deaf man talking to a deaf man should
stop. God knows where and when Master Florian would have landed,
when thus launched at full speed in lofty eloquence, if the low
door at the extreme end of the room had not suddenly opened, and
given entrance to the provost in person. At his entrance Master
Florian did not stop short, but, making a half-turn on his heels,
and aiming at the provost the harangue with which he had been
withering Quasimodo a moment before,—
“Monseigneur,” said he, “I demand such penalty as you shall deem
fitting against the prisoner here present, for grave and
aggravated offence against the court.”
And he seated himself, utterly breathless, wiping away the great
drops of sweat which fell from his brow and drenched, like tears,
the parchments spread out before him. Messire Robert
d’Estouteville frowned and made a gesture so imperious and
significant to Quasimodo, that the deaf man in some measure
understood it.
The provost addressed him with severity, “What have you done that
you have been brought hither, knave?”
The poor fellow, supposing that the provost was asking his name,
broke the silence which he habitually preserved, and replied, in
a harsh and guttural voice, “Quasimodo.”
The reply matched the question so little that the wild laugh
began to circulate once more, and Messire Robert exclaimed, red
with wrath,—
“Are you mocking me also, you arrant knave?”
“Bellringer of Notre-Dame,” replied Quasimodo, supposing that
what was required of him was to explain to the judge who he was.
“Bellringer!” interpolated the provost, who had waked up early
enough to be in a sufficiently bad temper, as we have said, not
to require to have his fury inflamed by such strange responses.
“Bellringer! I’ll play you a chime of rods on your back through
the squares of Paris! Do you hear, knave?”
“If it is my age that you wish to know,” said Quasimodo, “I think
that I shall be twenty at Saint Martin’s day.”
This was too much; the provost could no longer restrain himself.
“Ah! you are scoffing at the provostship, wretch! Messieurs the
sergeants of the mace, you will take me this knave to the pillory
of the Grève, you will flog him, and turn him for an hour. He
shall pay me for it, _tête Dieu!_ And I order that the present
judgment shall be cried, with the assistance of four sworn
trumpeters, in the seven castellanies of the viscomty of Paris.”
The clerk set to work incontinently to draw up the account of the
sentence.
“_Ventre Dieu!_ ’tis well adjudged!” cried the little scholar,
Jehan Frollo du Moulin, from his corner.
The provost turned and fixed his flashing eyes once more on
Quasimodo. “I believe the knave said ‘_Ventre Dieu!_’ Clerk, add
twelve deniers Parisian for the oath, and let the vestry of Saint
Eustache have the half of it; I have a particular devotion for
Saint Eustache.”
In a few minutes the sentence was drawn up. Its tenor was simple
and brief. The customs of the provostship and the viscomty had
not yet been worked over by President Thibaut Baillet, and by
Roger Barmne, the king’s advocate; they had not been obstructed,
at that time, by that lofty hedge of quibbles and procedures,
which the two jurisconsults planted there at the beginning of the
sixteenth century. All was clear, expeditious, explicit. One went
straight to the point then, and at the end of every path there
was immediately visible, without thickets and without turnings;
the wheel, the gibbet, or the pillory. One at least knew whither
one was going.
The clerk presented the sentence to the provost, who affixed his
seal to it, and departed to pursue his round of the audience
hall, in a frame of mind which seemed destined to fill all the
jails in Paris that day. Jehan Frollo and Robin Poussepain
laughed in their sleeves. Quasimodo gazed on the whole with an
indifferent and astonished air.
However, at the moment when Master Florian Barbedienne was
reading the sentence in his turn, before signing it, the clerk
felt himself moved with pity for the poor wretch of a prisoner,
and, in the hope of obtaining some mitigation of the penalty, he
approached as near the auditor’s ear as possible, and said,
pointing to Quasimodo, “That man is deaf.”
He hoped that this community of infirmity would awaken Master
Florian’s interest in behalf of the condemned man. But, in the
first place, we have already observed that Master Florian did not
care to have his deafness noticed. In the next place, he was so
hard of hearing that he did not catch a single word of what the
clerk said to him; nevertheless, he wished to have the appearance
of hearing, and replied, “Ah! ah! that is different; I did not
know that. An hour more of the pillory, in that case.”
And he signed the sentence thus modified.
“’Tis well done,” said Robin Poussepain, who cherished a grudge
against Quasimodo. “That will teach him to handle people
roughly.”
CHAPTER II. THE RAT-HOLE.
The reader must permit us to take him back to the Place de Grève,
which we quitted yesterday with Gringoire, in order to follow la
Esmeralda.
It is ten o’clock in the morning; everything is indicative of the
day after a festival. The pavement is covered with rubbish;
ribbons, rags, feathers from tufts of plumes, drops of wax from
the torches, crumbs of the public feast. A goodly number of
_bourgeois_ are “sauntering,” as we say, here and there, turning
over with their feet the extinct brands of the bonfire, going
into raptures in front of the Pillar House, over the memory of
the fine hangings of the day before, and to-day staring at the
nails that secured them a last pleasure. The venders of cider and
beer are rolling their barrels among the groups. Some busy
passers-by come and go. The merchants converse and call to each
other from the thresholds of their shops. The festival, the
ambassadors, Coppenole, the Pope of the Fools, are in all mouths;
they vie with each other, each trying to criticise it best and
laugh the most. And, meanwhile, four mounted sergeants, who have
just posted themselves at the four sides of the pillory, have
already concentrated around themselves a goodly proportion of the
populace scattered on the Place, who condemn themselves to
immobility and fatigue in the hope of a small execution.
If the reader, after having contemplated this lively and noisy
scene which is being enacted in all parts of the Place, will now
transfer his gaze towards that ancient demi-Gothic,
demi-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland, which forms the corner
on the quay to the west, he will observe, at the angle of the
façade, a large public breviary, with rich illuminations,
protected from the rain by a little penthouse, and from thieves
by a small grating, which, however, permits of the leaves being
turned. Beside this breviary is a narrow, arched window, closed
by two iron bars in the form of a cross, and looking on the
square; the only opening which admits a small quantity of light
and air to a little cell without a door, constructed on the
ground-floor, in the thickness of the walls of the old house, and
filled with a peace all the more profound, with a silence all the
more gloomy, because a public place, the most populous and most
noisy in Paris swarms and shrieks around it.
This little cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly three
centuries, ever since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in
mourning for her father who died in the Crusades, had caused it
to be hollowed out in the wall of her own house, in order to
immure herself there forever, keeping of all her palace only this
lodging whose door was walled up, and whose window stood open,