Notre-Dame de Paris
gypsies should spur you on so sharply.”
“And you did all the better,” resumed Oudarde, “to flee with your
Eustache just now, since these also are gypsies from Poland.”
“No,” said Gervais, “’tis said that they come from Spain and
Catalonia.”
“Catalonia? ’tis possible,” replied Oudarde. “Pologne, Catalogne,
Valogne, I always confound those three provinces, One thing is
certain, that they are gypsies.”
“Who certainly,” added Gervaise, “have teeth long enough to eat
little children. I should not be surprised if la Smeralda ate a
little of them also, though she pretends to be dainty. Her white
goat knows tricks that are too malicious for there not to be some
impiety underneath it all.”
Mahiette walked on in silence. She was absorbed in that revery
which is, in some sort, the continuation of a mournful tale, and
which ends only after having communicated the emotion, from
vibration to vibration, even to the very last fibres of the
heart. Nevertheless, Gervaise addressed her, “And did they ever
learn what became of la Chantefleurie?” Mahiette made no reply.
Gervaise repeated her question, and shook her arm, calling her by
name. Mahiette appeared to awaken from her thoughts.
“What became of la Chantefleurie?” she said, repeating
mechanically the words whose impression was still fresh in her
ear; then, making an effort to recall her attention to the
meaning of her words, “Ah!” she continued briskly, “no one ever
found out.”
She added, after a pause,—
“Some said that she had been seen to quit Reims at nightfall by
the Fléchembault gate; others, at daybreak, by the old Basée
gate. A poor man found her gold cross hanging on the stone cross
in the field where the fair is held. It was that ornament which
had wrought her ruin, in ’61. It was a gift from the handsome
Vicomte de Cormontreuil, her first lover. Paquette had never been
willing to part with it, wretched as she had been. She had clung
to it as to life itself. So, when we saw that cross abandoned, we
all thought that she was dead. Nevertheless, there were people of
the Cabaret les Vantes, who said that they had seen her pass
along the road to Paris, walking on the pebbles with her bare
feet. But, in that case, she must have gone out through the Porte
de Vesle, and all this does not agree. Or, to speak more truly, I
believe that she actually did depart by the Porte de Vesle, but
departed from this world.”
“I do not understand you,” said Gervaise.
“La Vesle,” replied Mahiette, with a melancholy smile, “is the
river.”
“Poor Chantefleurie!” said Oudarde, with a shiver,—“drowned!”
“Drowned!” resumed Mahiette, “who could have told good Father
Guybertant, when he passed under the bridge of Tingueux with the
current, singing in his barge, that one day his dear little
Paquette would also pass beneath that bridge, but without song or
boat.
“And the little shoe?” asked Gervaise.
“Disappeared with the mother,” replied Mahiette.
“Poor little shoe!” said Oudarde.
Oudarde, a big and tender woman, would have been well pleased to
sigh in company with Mahiette. But Gervaise, more curious, had
not finished her questions.
“And the monster?” she said suddenly, to Mahiette.
“What monster?” inquired the latter.
“The little gypsy monster left by the sorceresses in
Chantefleurie’s chamber, in exchange for her daughter. What did
you do with it? I hope you drowned it also.”
“No.” replied Mahiette.
“What? You burned it then? In sooth, that is more just. A witch
child!”
“Neither the one nor the other, Gervaise. Monseigneur the
archbishop interested himself in the child of Egypt, exorcised
it, blessed it, removed the devil carefully from its body, and
sent it to Paris, to be exposed on the wooden bed at Notre-Dame,
as a foundling.”
“Those bishops!” grumbled Gervaise, “because they are learned,
they do nothing like anybody else. I just put it to you, Oudarde,
the idea of placing the devil among the foundlings! For that
little monster was assuredly the devil. Well, Mahiette, what did
they do with it in Paris? I am quite sure that no charitable
person wanted it.”
“I do not know,” replied the Rémoise, “’twas just at that time
that my husband bought the office of notary, at Beru, two leagues
from the town, and we were no longer occupied with that story;
besides, in front of Beru, stand the two hills of Cernay, which
hide the towers of the cathedral in Reims from view.”
While chatting thus, the three worthy _bourgeoises_ had arrived
at the Place de Grève. In their absorption, they had passed the
public breviary of the Tour-Roland without stopping, and took
their way mechanically towards the pillory around which the
throng was growing more dense with every moment. It is probable
that the spectacle which at that moment attracted all looks in
that direction, would have made them forget completely the
Rat-Hole, and the halt which they intended to make there, if big
Eustache, six years of age, whom Mahiette was dragging along by
the hand, had not abruptly recalled the object to them: “Mother,”
said he, as though some instinct warned him that the Rat-Hole was
behind him, “can I eat the cake now?”
If Eustache had been more adroit, that is to say, less greedy, he
would have continued to wait, and would only have hazarded that
simple question, “Mother, can I eat the cake, now?” on their
return to the University, to Master Andry Musnier’s, Rue Madame
la Valence, when he had the two arms of the Seine and the five
bridges of the city between the Rat-Hole and the cake.
This question, highly imprudent at the moment when Eustache put
it, aroused Mahiette’s attention.
“By the way,” she exclaimed, “we are forgetting the recluse! Show
me the Rat-Hole, that I may carry her her cake.”
“Immediately,” said Oudarde, “’tis a charity.”
But this did not suit Eustache.
“Stop! my cake!” said he, rubbing both ears alternatively with
his shoulders, which, in such cases, is the supreme sign of
discontent.
The three women retraced their steps, and, on arriving in the
vicinity of the Tour-Roland, Oudarde said to the other two,—
“We must not all three gaze into the hole at once, for fear of
alarming the recluse. Do you two pretend to read the _Dominus_ in
the breviary, while I thrust my nose into the aperture; the
recluse knows me a little. I will give you warning when you can
approach.”
She proceeded alone to the window. At the moment when she looked
in, a profound pity was depicted on all her features, and her
frank, gay visage altered its expression and color as abruptly as
though it had passed from a ray of sunlight to a ray of
moonlight; her eye became humid; her mouth contracted, like that
of a person on the point of weeping. A moment later, she laid her
finger on her lips, and made a sign to Mahiette to draw near and
look.
Mahiette, much touched, stepped up in silence, on tiptoe, as
though approaching the bedside of a dying person.
It was, in fact, a melancholy spectacle which presented itself to
the eyes of the two women, as they gazed through the grating of
the Rat-Hole, neither stirring nor breathing.
The cell was small, broader than it was long, with an arched
ceiling, and viewed from within, it bore a considerable
resemblance to the interior of a huge bishop’s mitre. On the bare
flagstones which formed the floor, in one corner, a woman was
sitting, or rather, crouching. Her chin rested on her knees,
which her crossed arms pressed forcibly to her breast. Thus
doubled up, clad in a brown sack, which enveloped her entirely in
large folds, her long, gray hair pulled over in front, falling
over her face and along her legs nearly to her feet, she
presented, at the first glance, only a strange form outlined
against the dark background of the cell, a sort of dusky
triangle, which the ray of daylight falling through the opening,
cut roughly into two shades, the one sombre, the other
illuminated. It was one of those spectres, half light, half
shadow, such as one beholds in dreams and in the extraordinary
work of Goya, pale, motionless, sinister, crouching over a tomb,
or leaning against the grating of a prison cell.
It was neither a woman, nor a man, nor a living being, nor a
definite form; it was a figure, a sort of vision, in which the
real and the fantastic intersected each other, like darkness and
day. It was with difficulty that one distinguished, beneath her
hair which spread to the ground, a gaunt and severe profile; her
dress barely allowed the extremity of a bare foot to escape,
which contracted on the hard, cold pavement. The little of human
form of which one caught a sight beneath this envelope of
mourning, caused a shudder.
That figure, which one might have supposed to be riveted to the
flagstones, appeared to possess neither movement, nor thought,
nor breath. Lying, in January, in that thin, linen sack, lying on
a granite floor, without fire, in the gloom of a cell whose
oblique air-hole allowed only the cold breeze, but never the sun,
to enter from without, she did not appear to suffer or even to
think. One would have said that she had turned to stone with the
cell, ice with the season. Her hands were clasped, her eyes
fixed. At first sight one took her for a spectre; at the second,
for a statue.
Nevertheless, at intervals, her blue lips half opened to admit a
breath, and trembled, but as dead and as mechanical as the leaves
which the wind sweeps aside.
Nevertheless, from her dull eyes there escaped a look, an
ineffable look, a profound, lugubrious, imperturbable look,
incessantly fixed upon a corner of the cell which could not be
seen from without; a gaze which seemed to fix all the sombre
thoughts of that soul in distress upon some mysterious object.
Such was the creature who had received, from her habitation, the
name of the “recluse”; and, from her garment, the name of “the
sacked nun.”
The three women, for Gervaise had rejoined Mahiette and Oudarde,
gazed through the window. Their heads intercepted the feeble
light in the cell, without the wretched being whom they thus
deprived of it seeming to pay any attention to them. “Do not let
us trouble her,” said Oudarde, in a low voice, “she is in her
ecstasy; she is praying.”
Meanwhile, Mahiette was gazing with ever-increasing anxiety at
that wan, withered, dishevelled head, and her eyes filled with
tears. “This is very singular,” she murmured.
She thrust her head through the bars, and succeeded in casting a
glance at the corner where the gaze of the unhappy woman was
immovably riveted.
When she withdrew her head from the window, her countenance was
inundated with tears.
“What do you call that woman?” she asked Oudarde.