Notre-Dame de Paris
Oudarde replied,—
“We call her Sister Gudule.”
“And I,” returned Mahiette, “call her Paquette la Chantefleurie.”
Then, laying her finger on her lips, she motioned to the
astounded Oudarde to thrust her head through the window and look.
Oudarde looked and beheld, in the corner where the eyes of the
recluse were fixed in that sombre ecstasy, a tiny shoe of pink
satin, embroidered with a thousand fanciful designs in gold and
silver.
Gervaise looked after Oudarde, and then the three women, gazing
upon the unhappy mother, began to weep.
But neither their looks nor their tears disturbed the recluse.
Her hands remained clasped; her lips mute; her eyes fixed; and
that little shoe, thus gazed at, broke the heart of any one who
knew her history.
The three women had not yet uttered a single word; they dared not
speak, even in a low voice. This deep silence, this deep grief,
this profound oblivion in which everything had disappeared except
one thing, produced upon them the effect of the grand altar at
Christmas or Easter. They remained silent, they meditated, they
were ready to kneel. It seemed to them that they were ready to
enter a church on the day of Tenebræ.
At length Gervaise, the most curious of the three, and
consequently the least sensitive, tried to make the recluse
speak:
“Sister! Sister Gudule!”
She repeated this call three times, raising her voice each time.
The recluse did not move; not a word, not a glance, not a sigh,
not a sign of life.
Oudarde, in her turn, in a sweeter, more caressing
voice,—“Sister!” said she, “Sister Sainte-Gudule!”
The same silence; the same immobility.
“A singular woman!” exclaimed Gervaise, “and one not to be moved
by a catapult!”
“Perchance she is deaf,” said Oudarde.
“Perhaps she is blind,” added Gervaise.
“Dead, perchance,” returned Mahiette.
It is certain that if the soul had not already quitted this
inert, sluggish, lethargic body, it had at least retreated and
concealed itself in depths whither the perceptions of the
exterior organs no longer penetrated.
“Then we must leave the cake on the window,” said Oudarde; “some
scamp will take it. What shall we do to rouse her?”
Eustache, who, up to that moment had been diverted by a little
carriage drawn by a large dog, which had just passed, suddenly
perceived that his three conductresses were gazing at something
through the window, and, curiosity taking possession of him in
his turn, he climbed upon a stone post, elevated himself on
tiptoe, and applied his fat, red face to the opening, shouting,
“Mother, let me see too!”
At the sound of this clear, fresh, ringing child’s voice, the
recluse trembled; she turned her head with the sharp, abrupt
movement of a steel spring, her long, fleshless hands cast aside
the hair from her brow, and she fixed upon the child, bitter,
astonished, desperate eyes. This glance was but a lightning
flash.
“Oh my God!” she suddenly exclaimed, hiding her head on her
knees, and it seemed as though her hoarse voice tore her chest as
it passed from it, “do not show me those of others!”
“Good day, madam,” said the child, gravely.
Nevertheless, this shock had, so to speak, awakened the recluse.
A long shiver traversed her frame from head to foot; her teeth
chattered; she half raised her head and said, pressing her elbows
against her hips, and clasping her feet in her hands as though to
warm them,—
“Oh, how cold it is!”
“Poor woman!” said Oudarde, with great compassion, “would you
like a little fire?”
She shook her head in token of refusal.
“Well,” resumed Oudarde, presenting her with a flagon; “here is
some hippocras which will warm you; drink it.”
Again she shook her head, looked at Oudarde fixedly and replied,
“Water.”
Oudarde persisted,—“No, sister, that is no beverage for January.
You must drink a little hippocras and eat this leavened cake of
maize, which we have baked for you.”
She refused the cake which Mahiette offered to her, and said,
“Black bread.”
“Come,” said Gervaise, seized in her turn with an impulse of
charity, and unfastening her woolen cloak, “here is a cloak which
is a little warmer than yours.”
She refused the cloak as she had refused the flagon and the cake,
and replied, “A sack.”
“But,” resumed the good Oudarde, “you must have perceived to some
extent, that yesterday was a festival.”
“I do perceive it,” said the recluse; “’tis two days now since I
have had any water in my crock.”
She added, after a silence, “’Tis a festival, I am forgotten.
People do well. Why should the world think of me, when I do not
think of it? Cold charcoal makes cold ashes.”
And as though fatigued with having said so much, she dropped her
head on her knees again. The simple and charitable Oudarde, who
fancied that she understood from her last words that she was
complaining of the cold, replied innocently, “Then you would like
a little fire?”
“Fire!” said the sacked nun, with a strange accent; “and will you
also make a little for the poor little one who has been beneath
the sod for these fifteen years?”
Every limb was trembling, her voice quivered, her eyes flashed,
she had raised herself upon her knees; suddenly she extended her
thin, white hand towards the child, who was regarding her with a
look of astonishment. “Take away that child!” she cried. “The
Egyptian woman is about to pass by.”
Then she fell face downward on the earth, and her forehead struck
the stone, with the sound of one stone against another stone. The
three women thought her dead. A moment later, however, she moved,
and they beheld her drag herself, on her knees and elbows, to the
corner where the little shoe was. Then they dared not look; they
no longer saw her; but they heard a thousand kisses and a
thousand sighs, mingled with heartrending cries, and dull blows
like those of a head in contact with a wall. Then, after one of
these blows, so violent that all three of them staggered, they
heard no more.
“Can she have killed herself?” said Gervaise, venturing to pass
her head through the air-hole. “Sister! Sister Gudule!”
“Sister Gudule!” repeated Oudarde.
“Ah! good heavens! she no longer moves!” resumed Gervaise; “is
she dead? Gudule! Gudule!”
Mahiette, choked to such a point that she could not speak, made
an effort. “Wait,” said she. Then bending towards the window,
“Paquette!” she said, “Paquette le Chantefleurie!”
A child who innocently blows upon the badly ignited fuse of a
bomb, and makes it explode in his face, is no more terrified than
was Mahiette at the effect of that name, abruptly launched into
the cell of Sister Gudule.
The recluse trembled all over, rose erect on her bare feet, and
leaped at the window with eyes so glaring that Mahiette and
Oudarde, and the other woman and the child recoiled even to the
parapet of the quay.
Meanwhile, the sinister face of the recluse appeared pressed to
the grating of the air-hole. “Oh! oh!” she cried, with an
appalling laugh; “’tis the Egyptian who is calling me!”
At that moment, a scene which was passing at the pillory caught
her wild eye. Her brow contracted with horror, she stretched her
two skeleton arms from her cell, and shrieked in a voice which
resembled a death-rattle, “So ’tis thou once more, daughter of
Egypt! ’Tis thou who callest me, stealer of children! Well! Be
thou accursed! accursed! accursed! accursed!”
CHAPTER IV. A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER.
These words were, so to speak, the point of union of two scenes,
which had, up to that time, been developed in parallel lines at
the same moment, each on its particular theatre; one, that which
the reader has just perused, in the Rat-Hole; the other, which he
is about to read, on the ladder of the pillory. The first had for
witnesses only the three women with whom the reader has just made
acquaintance; the second had for spectators all the public which
we have seen above, collecting on the Place de Grève, around the
pillory and the gibbet.
That crowd which the four sergeants posted at nine o’clock in the
morning at the four corners of the pillory had inspired with the
hope of some sort of an execution, no doubt, not a hanging, but a
whipping, a cropping of ears, something, in short,—that crowd had
increased so rapidly that the four policemen, too closely
besieged, had had occasion to “press” it, as the expression then
ran, more than once, by sound blows of their whips, and the
haunches of their horses.
This populace, disciplined to waiting for public executions, did
not manifest very much impatience. It amused itself with watching
the pillory, a very simple sort of monument, composed of a cube
of masonry about six feet high and hollow in the interior. A very
steep staircase, of unhewn stone, which was called by distinction
“the ladder,” led to the upper platform, upon which was visible a
horizontal wheel of solid oak. The victim was bound upon this
wheel, on his knees, with his hands behind his back. A wooden
shaft, which set in motion a capstan concealed in the interior of
the little edifice, imparted a rotatory motion to the wheel,
which always maintained its horizontal position, and in this
manner presented the face of the condemned man to all quarters of
the square in succession. This was what was called “turning” a
criminal.
As the reader perceives, the pillory of the Grève was far from
presenting all the recreations of the pillory of the Halles.
Nothing architectural, nothing monumental. No roof to the iron
cross, no octagonal lantern, no frail, slender columns spreading
out on the edge of the roof into capitals of acanthus leaves and
flowers, no waterspouts of chimeras and monsters, on carved
woodwork, no fine sculpture, deeply sunk in the stone.
They were forced to content themselves with those four stretches
of rubble work, backed with sandstone, and a wretched stone
gibbet, meagre and bare, on one side.
The entertainment would have been but a poor one for lovers of
Gothic architecture. It is true that nothing was ever less
curious on the score of architecture than the worthy gapers of
the Middle Ages, and that they cared very little for the beauty
of a pillory.
The victim finally arrived, bound to the tail of a cart, and when
he had been hoisted upon the platform, where he could be seen
from all points of the Place, bound with cords and straps upon
the wheel of the pillory, a prodigious hoot, mingled with
laughter and acclamations, burst forth upon the Place. They had
recognized Quasimodo.
It was he, in fact. The change was singular. Pilloried on the
very place where, on the day before, he had been saluted,