Notre-Dame de Paris
night, cold as death, not a breath of air in her tresses, not a
human sound in her ear, no longer a ray of light in her eyes;
snapped in twain, crushed with chains, crouching beside a jug and
a loaf, on a little straw, in a pool of water, which was formed
under her by the sweating of the prison walls; without motion,
almost without breath, she had no longer the power to suffer;
Phœbus, the sun, midday, the open air, the streets of Paris, the
dances with applause, the sweet babblings of love with the
officer; then the priest, the old crone, the poignard, the blood,
the torture, the gibbet; all this did, indeed, pass before her
mind, sometimes as a charming and golden vision, sometimes as a
hideous nightmare; but it was no longer anything but a vague and
horrible struggle, lost in the gloom, or distant music played up
above ground, and which was no longer audible at the depth where
the unhappy girl had fallen.
Since she had been there, she had neither waked nor slept. In
that misfortune, in that cell, she could no longer distinguish
her waking hours from slumber, dreams from reality, any more than
day from night. All this was mixed, broken, floating,
disseminated confusedly in her thought. She no longer felt, she
no longer knew, she no longer thought; at the most, she only
dreamed. Never had a living creature been thrust more deeply into
nothingness.
Thus benumbed, frozen, petrified, she had barely noticed on two
or three occasions, the sound of a trapdoor opening somewhere
above her, without even permitting the passage of a little light,
and through which a hand had tossed her a bit of black bread.
Nevertheless, this periodical visit of the jailer was the sole
communication which was left her with mankind.
A single thing still mechanically occupied her ear; above her
head, the dampness was filtering through the mouldy stones of the
vault, and a drop of water dropped from them at regular
intervals. She listened stupidly to the noise made by this drop
of water as it fell into the pool beside her.
This drop of water falling from time to time into that pool, was
the only movement which still went on around her, the only clock
which marked the time, the only noise which reached her of all
the noise made on the surface of the earth.
To tell the whole, however, she also felt, from time to time, in
that cesspool of mire and darkness, something cold passing over
her foot or her arm, and she shuddered.
How long had she been there? She did not know. She had a
recollection of a sentence of death pronounced somewhere, against
some one, then of having been herself carried away, and of waking
up in darkness and silence, chilled to the heart. She had dragged
herself along on her hands. Then iron rings that cut her ankles,
and chains had rattled. She had recognized the fact that all
around her was wall, that below her there was a pavement covered
with moisture and a truss of straw; but neither lamp nor
air-hole. Then she had seated herself on that straw and,
sometimes, for the sake of changing her attitude, on the last
stone step in her dungeon. For a while she had tried to count the
black minutes measured off for her by the drop of water; but that
melancholy labor of an ailing brain had broken off of itself in
her head, and had left her in stupor.
At length, one day, or one night, (for midnight and midday were
of the same color in that sepulchre), she heard above her a
louder noise than was usually made by the turnkey when he brought
her bread and jug of water. She raised her head, and beheld a ray
of reddish light passing through the crevices in the sort of
trapdoor contrived in the roof of the _inpace_.
At the same time, the heavy lock creaked, the trap grated on its
rusty hinges, turned, and she beheld a lantern, a hand, and the
lower portions of the bodies of two men, the door being too low
to admit of her seeing their heads. The light pained her so
acutely that she shut her eyes.
When she opened them again the door was closed, the lantern was
deposited on one of the steps of the staircase; a man alone stood
before her. A monk’s black cloak fell to his feet, a cowl of the
same color concealed his face. Nothing was visible of his person,
neither face nor hands. It was a long, black shroud standing
erect, and beneath which something could be felt moving. She
gazed fixedly for several minutes at this sort of spectre. But
neither he nor she spoke. One would have pronounced them two
statues confronting each other. Two things only seemed alive in
that cavern; the wick of the lantern, which sputtered on account
of the dampness of the atmosphere, and the drop of water from the
roof, which cut this irregular sputtering with its monotonous
splash, and made the light of the lantern quiver in concentric
waves on the oily water of the pool.
At last the prisoner broke the silence.
“Who are you?”
“A priest.”
The words, the accent, the sound of his voice made her tremble.
The priest continued, in a hollow voice,—
“Are you prepared?”
“For what?”
“To die.”
“Oh!” said she, “will it be soon?”
“To-morrow.”
Her head, which had been raised with joy, fell back upon her
breast.
“’Tis very far away yet!” she murmured; “why could they not have
done it to-day?”
“Then you are very unhappy?” asked the priest, after a silence.
“I am very cold,” she replied.
She took her feet in her hands, a gesture habitual with unhappy
wretches who are cold, as we have already seen in the case of the
recluse of the Tour-Roland, and her teeth chattered.
The priest appeared to cast his eyes around the dungeon from
beneath his cowl.
“Without light! without fire! in the water! it is horrible!”
“Yes,” she replied, with the bewildered air which unhappiness had
given her. “The day belongs to every one, why do they give me
only night?”
“Do you know,” resumed the priest, after a fresh silence, “why
you are here?”
“I thought I knew once,” she said, passing her thin fingers over
her eyelids, as though to aid her memory, “but I know no longer.”
All at once she began to weep like a child.
“I should like to get away from here, sir. I am cold, I am
afraid, and there are creatures which crawl over my body.”
“Well, follow me.”
So saying, the priest took her arm. The unhappy girl was frozen
to her very soul. Yet that hand produced an impression of cold
upon her.
“Oh!” she murmured, “’tis the icy hand of death. Who are you?”
The priest threw back his cowl; she looked. It was the sinister
visage which had so long pursued her; that demon’s head which had
appeared at la Falourdel’s, above the head of her adored Phœbus;
that eye which she last had seen glittering beside a dagger.
This apparition, always so fatal for her, and which had thus
driven her on from misfortune to misfortune, even to torture,
roused her from her stupor. It seemed to her that the sort of
veil which had lain thick upon her memory was rent away. All the
details of her melancholy adventure, from the nocturnal scene at
la Falourdel’s to her condemnation to the Tournelle, recurred to
her memory, no longer vague and confused as heretofore, but
distinct, harsh, clear, palpitating, terrible. These souvenirs,
half effaced and almost obliterated by excess of suffering, were
revived by the sombre figure which stood before her, as the
approach of fire causes letters traced upon white paper with
invisible ink, to start out perfectly fresh. It seemed to her
that all the wounds of her heart opened and bled simultaneously.
“Hah!” she cried, with her hands on her eyes, and a convulsive
trembling, “’tis the priest!”
Then she dropped her arms in discouragement, and remained seated,
with lowered head, eyes fixed on the ground, mute and still
trembling.
The priest gazed at her with the eye of a hawk which has long
been soaring in a circle from the heights of heaven over a poor
lark cowering in the wheat, and has long been silently
contracting the formidable circles of his flight, and has
suddenly swooped down upon his prey like a flash of lightning,
and holds it panting in his talons.
She began to murmur in a low voice,—
“Finish! finish! the last blow!” and she drew her head down in
terror between her shoulders, like the lamb awaiting the blow of
the butcher’s axe.
“So I inspire you with horror?” he said at length.
She made no reply.
“Do I inspire you with horror?” he repeated.
Her lips contracted, as though with a smile.
“Yes,” said she, “the headsman scoffs at the condemned. Here he
has been pursuing me, threatening me, terrifying me for months!
Had it not been for him, my God, how happy it should have been!
It was he who cast me into this abyss! Oh heavens! it was he who
killed him! my Phœbus!”
Here, bursting into sobs, and raising her eyes to the priest,—
“Oh! wretch, who are you? What have I done to you? Do you then,
hate me so? Alas! what have you against me?”
“I love thee!” cried the priest.
Her tears suddenly ceased, she gazed at him with the look of an
idiot. He had fallen on his knees and was devouring her with eyes
of flame.
“Dost thou understand? I love thee!” he cried again.
“What love!” said the unhappy girl with a shudder.
He resumed,—
“The love of a damned soul.”
Both remained silent for several minutes, crushed beneath the
weight of their emotions; he maddened, she stupefied.
“Listen,” said the priest at last, and a singular calm had come
over him; “you shall know all I am about to tell you that which I
have hitherto hardly dared to say to myself, when furtively
interrogating my conscience at those deep hours of the night when
it is so dark that it seems as though God no longer saw us.
Listen. Before I knew you, young girl, I was happy.”
“So was I!” she sighed feebly.
“Do not interrupt me. Yes, I was happy, at least I believed
myself to be so. I was pure, my soul was filled with limpid
light. No head was raised more proudly and more radiantly than
mine. Priests consulted me on chastity; doctors, on doctrines.
Yes, science was all in all to me; it was a sister to me, and a
sister sufficed. Not but that with age other ideas came to me.
More than once my flesh had been moved as a woman’s form passed
by. That force of sex and blood which, in the madness of youth, I
had imagined that I had stifled forever had, more than once,
convulsively raised the chain of iron vows which bind me, a
miserable wretch, to the cold stones of the altar. But fasting,
prayer, study, the mortifications of the cloister, rendered my
soul mistress of my body once more, and then I avoided women.
Moreover, I had but to open a book, and all the impure mists of