Notre-Dame de Paris
“Yes,” she said, so low that her words were lost in her
breathing.
“You confess to having seen the ram which Beelzebub causes to
appear in the clouds to call together the witches’ sabbath, and
which is beheld by socerers alone?”
“Yes.”
“You confess to having adored the heads of Bophomet, those
abominable idols of the Templars?”
“Yes.”
“To having had habitual dealings with the devil under the form of
a goat familiar, joined with you in the suit?”
“Yes.”
“Lastly, you avow and confess to having, with the aid of the
demon, and of the phantom vulgarly known as the surly monk, on
the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, murdered and
assassinated a captain named Phœbus de Châteaupers?”
She raised her large, staring eyes to the magistrate, and
replied, as though mechanically, without convulsion or
agitation,—
“Yes.”
It was evident that everything within her was broken.
“Write, clerk,” said Charmolue. And, addressing the torturers,
“Release the prisoner, and take her back to the court.”
When the prisoner had been “unbooted,” the procurator of the
ecclesiastical court examined her foot, which was still swollen
with pain. “Come,” said he, “there’s no great harm done. You
shrieked in good season. You could still dance, my beauty!”
Then he turned to his acolytes of the officiality,—
“Behold justice enlightened at last! This is a solace, gentlemen!
Madamoiselle will bear us witness that we have acted with all
possible gentleness.”
CHAPTER III. END OF THE CROWN WHICH WAS TURNED INTO A DRY LEAF.
When she re-entered the audience hall, pale and limping, she was
received with a general murmur of pleasure. On the part of the
audience there was the feeling of impatience gratified which one
experiences at the theatre at the end of the last entr’acte of
the comedy, when the curtain rises and the conclusion is about to
begin. On the part of the judges, it was the hope of getting
their suppers sooner.
The little goat also bleated with joy. He tried to run towards
his mistress, but they had tied him to the bench.
Night was fully set in. The candles, whose number had not been
increased, cast so little light, that the walls of the hall could
not be seen. The shadows there enveloped all objects in a sort of
mist. A few apathetic faces of judges alone could be dimly
discerned. Opposite them, at the extremity of the long hall, they
could see a vaguely white point standing out against the sombre
background. This was the accused.
She had dragged herself to her place. When Charmolue had
installed himself in a magisterial manner in his own, he seated
himself, then rose and said, without exhibiting too much
self-complacency at his success,—“The accused has confessed all.”
“Bohemian girl,” the president continued, “have you avowed all
your deeds of magic, prostitution, and assassination on Phœbus de
Châteaupers.”
Her heart contracted. She was heard to sob amid the darkness.
“Anything you like,” she replied feebly, “but kill me quickly!”
“Monsieur, procurator of the king in the ecclesiastical courts,”
said the president, “the chamber is ready to hear you in your
charge.”
Master Charmolue exhibited an alarming note book, and began to
read, with many gestures and the exaggerated accentuation of the
pleader, an oration in Latin, wherein all the proofs of the suit
were piled up in Ciceronian periphrases, flanked with quotations
from Plautus, his favorite comic author. We regret that we are
not able to offer to our readers this remarkable piece. The
orator pronounced it with marvellous action. Before he had
finished the exordium, the perspiration was starting from his
brow, and his eyes from his head.
All at once, in the middle of a fine period, he interrupted
himself, and his glance, ordinarily so gentle and even stupid,
became menacing.
“Gentlemen,” he exclaimed (this time in French, for it was not in
his copy book), “Satan is so mixed up in this affair, that here
he is present at our debates, and making sport of their majesty.
Behold!”
So saying, he pointed to the little goat, who, on seeing
Charmolue gesticulating, had, in point of fact, thought it
appropriate to do the same, and had seated himself on his
haunches, reproducing to the best of his ability, with his
forepaws and his bearded head the pathetic pantomine of the
king’s procurator in the ecclesiastical court. This was, if the
reader remembers, one of his prettiest accomplishments. This
incident, this last proof, produced a great effect. The goat’s
hoofs were tied, and the king’s procurator resumed the thread of
his eloquence.
It was very long, but the peroration was admirable. Here is the
concluding phrase; let the reader add the hoarse voice and the
breathless gestures of Master Charmolue,
“_Ideo, domni, coram stryga demonstrata, crimine patente,
intentione criminis existente, in nomine sanctæ ecclesiæ
Nostræ-Dominæ Parisiensis quæ est in saisina habendi omnimodam
altam et bassam justitiam in illa hac intemerata Civitatis
insula, tenore præsentium declaremus nos requirere, primo,
aliquamdam pecuniariam indemnitatem; secundo, amendationem
honorabilem ante portalium maximum Nostræ-Dominæ, ecclesiæ
cathedralis; tertio, sententiam in virtute cujus ista styrga cum
sua capella, seu in trivio vulgariter dicto_ la Grève, _seu in
insula exeunte in fluvio Secanæ, juxta pointam juardini regalis,
executatæ sint!_”[45]
He put on his cap again and seated himself.
“_Eheu!_” sighed the broken-hearted Gringoire, “_bassa
latinitas_—bastard latin!”
Another man in a black gown rose near the accused; he was her
lawyer. The judges, who were fasting, began to grumble.
“Advocate, be brief,” said the president.
“Monsieur the President,” replied the advocate, “since the
defendant has confessed the crime, I have only one word to say to
these gentlemen. Here is a text from the Salic law; ‘If a witch
hath eaten a man, and if she be convicted of it, she shall pay a
fine of eight thousand deniers, which amount to two hundred sous
of gold.’ May it please the chamber to condemn my client to the
fine?”
“An abrogated text,” said the advocate extraordinary of the king.
“_Nego_, I deny it,” replied the advocate.
“Put it to the vote!” said one of the councillors; “the crime is
manifest, and it is late.”
They proceeded to take a vote without leaving the room. The
judges signified their assent without giving their reasons, they
were in a hurry. Their capped heads were seen uncovering one
after the other, in the gloom, at the lugubrious question
addressed to them by the president in a low voice. The poor
accused had the appearance of looking at them, but her troubled
eye no longer saw.
Then the clerk began to write; then he handed a long parchment to
the president.
Then the unhappy girl heard the people moving, the pikes
clashing, and a freezing voice saying to her,—
“Bohemian wench, on the day when it shall seem good to our lord
the king, at the hour of noon, you will be taken in a tumbrel, in
your shift, with bare feet, and a rope about your neck, before
the grand portal of Notre-Dame, and you will there make an
apology with a wax torch of the weight of two pounds in your
hand, and thence you will be conducted to the Place de Grève,
where you will be hanged and strangled on the town gibbet; and
likewise your goat; and you will pay to the official three lions
of gold, in reparation of the crimes by you committed and by you
confessed, of sorcery and magic, debauchery and murder, upon the
person of the Sieur Phœbus de Châteaupers. May God have mercy on
your soul!”
“Oh! ’tis a dream!” she murmured; and she felt rough hands
bearing her away.
CHAPTER IV. _LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA_—LEAVE ALL HOPE BEHIND, YE
WHO ENTER HERE.
In the Middle Ages, when an edifice was complete, there was
almost as much of it in the earth as above it. Unless built upon
piles, like Notre-Dame, a palace, a fortress, a church, had
always a double bottom. In cathedrals, it was, in some sort,
another subterranean cathedral, low, dark, mysterious, blind, and
mute, under the upper nave which was overflowing with light and
reverberating with organs and bells day and night. Sometimes it
was a sepulchre. In palaces, in fortresses, it was a prison,
sometimes a sepulchre also, sometimes both together. These mighty
buildings, whose mode of formation and _vegetation_ we have
elsewhere explained, had not simply _foundations_, but, so to
speak, roots which ran branching through the soil in chambers,
galleries, and staircases, like the construction above. Thus
churches, palaces, fortresses, had the earth half way up their
bodies. The cellars of an edifice formed another edifice, into
which one descended instead of ascending, and which extended its
subterranean grounds under the external piles of the monument,
like those forests and mountains which are reversed in the
mirror-like waters of a lake, beneath the forests and mountains
of the banks.
At the fortress of Saint-Antoine, at the Palais de Justice of
Paris, at the Louvre, these subterranean edifices were prisons.
The stories of these prisons, as they sank into the soil, grew
constantly narrower and more gloomy. They were so many zones,
where the shades of horror were graduated. Dante could never
imagine anything better for his hell. These tunnels of cells
usually terminated in a sack of a lowest dungeon, with a vat-like
bottom, where Dante placed Satan, where society placed those
condemned to death. A miserable human existence, once interred
there; farewell light, air, life, _ogni speranza_—every hope; it
only came forth to the scaffold or the stake. Sometimes it rotted
there; human justice called this _forgetting_. Between men and
himself, the condemned man felt a pile of stones and jailers
weighing down upon his head; and the entire prison, the massive
bastille was nothing more than an enormous, complicated lock,
which barred him off from the rest of the world.
It was in a sloping cavity of this description, in the
_oubliettes_ excavated by Saint-Louis, in the _inpace_ of the
Tournelle, that la Esmeralda had been placed on being condemned
to death, through fear of her escape, no doubt, with the colossal
court-house over her head. Poor fly, who could not have lifted
even one of its blocks of stone!
Assuredly, Providence and society had been equally unjust; such
an excess of unhappiness and of torture was not necessary to
break so frail a creature.
There she lay, lost in the shadows, buried, hidden, immured. Any
one who could have beheld her in this state, after having seen
her laugh and dance in the sun, would have shuddered. Cold as