Notre-Dame de Paris
acclaimed, and proclaimed Pope and Prince of Fools, in the
cortège of the Duke of Egypt, the King of Thunes, and the Emperor
of Galilee! One thing is certain, and that is, that there was not
a soul in the crowd, not even himself, though in turn triumphant
and the sufferer, who set forth this combination clearly in his
thought. Gringoire and his philosophy were missing at this
spectacle.
Soon Michel Noiret, sworn trumpeter to the king, our lord,
imposed silence on the louts, and proclaimed the sentence, in
accordance with the order and command of monsieur the provost.
Then he withdrew behind the cart, with his men in livery
surcoats.
Quasimodo, impassible, did not wince. All resistance had been
rendered impossible to him by what was then called, in the style
of the criminal chancellery, “the vehemence and firmness of the
bonds” which means that the thongs and chains probably cut into
his flesh; moreover, it is a tradition of jail and wardens, which
has not been lost, and which the handcuffs still preciously
preserve among us, a civilized, gentle, humane people (the
galleys and the guillotine in parentheses).
He had allowed himself to be led, pushed, carried, lifted, bound,
and bound again. Nothing was to be seen upon his countenance but
the astonishment of a savage or an idiot. He was known to be
deaf; one might have pronounced him to be blind.
They placed him on his knees on the circular plank; he made no
resistance. They removed his shirt and doublet as far as his
girdle; he allowed them to have their way. They entangled him
under a fresh system of thongs and buckles; he allowed them to
bind and buckle him. Only from time to time he snorted noisily,
like a calf whose head is hanging and bumping over the edge of a
butcher’s cart.
“The dolt,” said Jehan Frollo of the Mill, to his friend Robin
Poussepain (for the two students had followed the culprit, as was
to have been expected), “he understands no more than a cockchafer
shut up in a box!”
There was wild laughter among the crowd when they beheld
Quasimodo’s hump, his camel’s breast, his callous and hairy
shoulders laid bare. During this gayety, a man in the livery of
the city, short of stature and robust of mien, mounted the
platform and placed himself near the victim. His name speedily
circulated among the spectators. It was Master Pierrat Torterue,
official torturer to the Châtelet.
He began by depositing on an angle of the pillory a black
hour-glass, the upper lobe of which was filled with red sand,
which it allowed to glide into the lower receptacle; then he
removed his parti-colored surtout, and there became visible,
suspended from his right hand, a thin and tapering whip of long,
white, shining, knotted, plaited thongs, armed with metal nails.
With his left hand, he negligently folded back his shirt around
his right arm, to the very armpit.
In the meantime, Jehan Frollo, elevating his curly blonde head
above the crowd (he had mounted upon the shoulders of Robin
Poussepain for the purpose), shouted: “Come and look, gentle
ladies and men! they are going to peremptorily flagellate Master
Quasimodo, the bellringer of my brother, monsieur the archdeacon
of Josas, a knave of oriental architecture, who has a back like a
dome, and legs like twisted columns!”
And the crowd burst into a laugh, especially the boys and young
girls.
At length the torturer stamped his foot. The wheel began to turn.
Quasimodo wavered beneath his bonds. The amazement which was
suddenly depicted upon his deformed face caused the bursts of
laughter to redouble around him.
All at once, at the moment when the wheel in its revolution
presented to Master Pierrat, the humped back of Quasimodo, Master
Pierrat raised his arm; the fine thongs whistled sharply through
the air, like a handful of adders, and fell with fury upon the
wretch’s shoulders.
Quasimodo leaped as though awakened with a start. He began to
understand. He writhed in his bonds; a violent contraction of
surprise and pain distorted the muscles of his face, but he
uttered not a single sigh. He merely turned his head backward, to
the right, then to the left, balancing it as a bull does who has
been stung in the flanks by a gadfly.
A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another and
another, and still others. The wheel did not cease to turn, nor
the blows to rain down.
Soon the blood burst forth, and could be seen trickling in a
thousand threads down the hunchback’s black shoulders; and the
slender thongs, in their rotatory motion which rent the air,
sprinkled drops of it upon the crowd.
Quasimodo had resumed, to all appearance, his first
imperturbability. He had at first tried, in a quiet way and
without much outward movement, to break his bonds. His eye had
been seen to light up, his muscles to stiffen, his members to
concentrate their force, and the straps to stretch. The effort
was powerful, prodigious, desperate; but the provost’s seasoned
bonds resisted. They cracked, and that was all. Quasimodo fell
back exhausted. Amazement gave way, on his features, to a
sentiment of profound and bitter discouragement. He closed his
single eye, allowed his head to droop upon his breast, and
feigned death.
From that moment forth, he stirred no more. Nothing could force a
movement from him. Neither his blood, which did not cease to
flow, nor the blows which redoubled in fury, nor the wrath of the
torturer, who grew excited himself and intoxicated with the
execution, nor the sound of the horrible thongs, more sharp and
whistling than the claws of scorpions.
At length a bailiff from the Châtelet clad in black, mounted on a
black horse, who had been stationed beside the ladder since the
beginning of the execution, extended his ebony wand towards the
hour-glass. The torturer stopped. The wheel stopped. Quasimodo’s
eye opened slowly.
The scourging was finished. Two lackeys of the official torturer
bathed the bleeding shoulders of the patient, anointed them with
some unguent which immediately closed all the wounds, and threw
upon his back a sort of yellow vestment, in cut like a chasuble.
In the meanwhile, Pierrat Torterue allowed the thongs, red and
gorged with blood, to drip upon the pavement.
All was not over for Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour
of pillory which Master Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously
added to the sentence of Messire Robert d’Estouteville; all to
the greater glory of the old physiological and psychological play
upon words of Jean de Cumène, _Surdus absurdus_: a deaf man is
absurd.
So the hour-glass was turned over once more, and they left the
hunchback fastened to the plank, in order that justice might be
accomplished to the very end.
The populace, especially in the Middle Ages, is in society what
the child is in the family. As long as it remains in its state of
primitive ignorance, of moral and intellectual minority, it can
be said of it as of the child,—
’Tis the pitiless age.
We have already shown that Quasimodo was generally hated, for
more than one good reason, it is true. There was hardly a
spectator in that crowd who had not or who did not believe that
he had reason to complain of the malevolent hunchback of
Notre-Dame. The joy at seeing him appear thus in the pillory had
been universal; and the harsh punishment which he had just
suffered, and the pitiful condition in which it had left him, far
from softening the populace had rendered its hatred more
malicious by arming it with a touch of mirth.
Hence, the “public prosecution” satisfied, as the bigwigs of the
law still express it in their jargon, the turn came of a thousand
private vengeances. Here, as in the Grand Hall, the women
rendered themselves particularly prominent. All cherished some
rancor against him, some for his malice, others for his ugliness.
The latter were the most furious.
“Oh! mask of Antichrist!” said one.
“Rider on a broom handle!” cried another.
“What a fine tragic grimace,” howled a third, “and who would make
him Pope of the Fools if to-day were yesterday?”
“’Tis well,” struck in an old woman. “This is the grimace of the
pillory. When shall we have that of the gibbet?”
“When will you be coiffed with your big bell a hundred feet under
ground, cursed bellringer?”
“But ’tis the devil who rings the Angelus!”
“Oh! the deaf man! the one-eyed creature! the hunch-back! the
monster!”
“A face to make a woman miscarry better than all the drugs and
medicines!”
And the two scholars, Jehan du Moulin, and Robin Poussepain, sang
at the top of their lungs, the ancient refrain,—
“Une hart
Pour le pendard!
Un fagot
Pour le magot!”[33]
A thousand other insults rained down upon him, and hoots and
imprecations, and laughter, and now and then, stones.
Quasimodo was deaf but his sight was clear, and the public fury
was no less energetically depicted on their visages than in their
words. Moreover, the blows from the stones explained the bursts
of laughter.
At first he held his ground. But little by little that patience
which had borne up under the lash of the torturer, yielded and
gave way before all these stings of insects. The bull of the
Asturias who has been but little moved by the attacks of the
picador grows irritated with the dogs and banderilleras.
He first cast around a slow glance of hatred upon the crowd. But
bound as he was, his glance was powerless to drive away those
flies which were stinging his wound. Then he moved in his bonds,
and his furious exertions made the ancient wheel of the pillory
shriek on its axle. All this only increased the derision and
hooting.
Then the wretched man, unable to break his collar, like that of a
chained wild beast, became tranquil once more; only at intervals
a sigh of rage heaved the hollows of his chest. There was neither
shame nor redness on his face. He was too far from the state of
society, and too near the state of nature to know what shame was.
Moreover, with such a degree of deformity, is infamy a thing that
can be felt? But wrath, hatred, despair, slowly lowered over that
hideous visage a cloud which grew ever more and more sombre, ever
more and more charged with electricity, which burst forth in a
thousand lightning flashes from the eye of the cyclops.
Nevertheless, that cloud cleared away for a moment, at the
passage of a mule which traversed the crowd, bearing a priest. As
far away as he could see that mule and that priest, the poor
victim’s visage grew gentler. The fury which had contracted it
was followed by a strange smile full of ineffable sweetness,
gentleness, and tenderness. In proportion as the priest
approached, that smile became more clear, more distinct, more