Notre-Dame de Paris
salvation, one’s immortality and eternity, this life and the
other; to regret that one is not a king, emperor, archangel, God,
in order that one might place a greater slave beneath her feet;
to clasp her night and day in one’s dreams and one’s thoughts,
and to behold her in love with the trappings of a soldier and to
have nothing to offer her but a priest’s dirty cassock, which
will inspire her with fear and disgust! To be present with one’s
jealousy and one’s rage, while she lavishes on a miserable,
blustering imbecile, treasures of love and beauty! To behold that
body whose form burns you, that bosom which possesses so much
sweetness, that flesh palpitate and blush beneath the kisses of
another! Oh heaven! to love her foot, her arm, her shoulder, to
think of her blue veins, of her brown skin, until one writhes for
whole nights together on the pavement of one’s cell, and to
behold all those caresses which one has dreamed of, end in
torture! To have succeeded only in stretching her upon the
leather bed! Oh! these are the veritable pincers, reddened in the
fires of hell. Oh! blessed is he who is sawn between two planks,
or torn in pieces by four horses! Do you know what that torture
is, which is imposed upon you for long nights by your burning
arteries, your bursting heart, your breaking head, your
teeth-knawed hands; mad tormentors which turn you incessantly, as
upon a red-hot gridiron, to a thought of love, of jealousy, and
of despair! Young girl, mercy! a truce for a moment! a few ashes
on these live coals! Wipe away, I beseech you, the perspiration
which trickles in great drops from my brow! Child! torture me
with one hand, but caress me with the other! Have pity, young
girl! Have pity upon me!”
The priest writhed on the wet pavement, beating his head against
the corners of the stone steps. The young girl gazed at him, and
listened to him.
When he ceased, exhausted and panting, she repeated in a low
voice,—
“Oh my Phœbus!”
The priest dragged himself towards her on his knees.
“I beseech you,” he cried, “if you have any heart, do not repulse
me! Oh! I love you! I am a wretch! When you utter that name,
unhappy girl, it is as though you crushed all the fibres of my
heart between your teeth. Mercy! If you come from hell I will go
thither with you. I have done everything to that end. The hell
where you are, shall be paradise; the sight of you is more
charming than that of God! Oh! speak! you will have none of me? I
should have thought the mountains would be shaken in their
foundations on the day when a woman would repulse such a love.
Oh! if you only would! Oh! how happy we might be. We would flee—I
would help you to flee,—we would go somewhere, we would seek that
spot on earth, where the sun is brightest, the sky the bluest,
where the trees are most luxuriant. We would love each other, we
would pour our two souls into each other, and we would have a
thirst for ourselves which we would quench in common and
incessantly at that fountain of inexhaustible love.”
She interrupted with a terrible and thrilling laugh.
“Look, father, you have blood on your fingers!”
The priest remained for several moments as though petrified, with
his eyes fixed upon his hand.
“Well, yes!” he resumed at last, with strange gentleness, “insult
me, scoff at me, overwhelm me with scorn! but come, come. Let us
make haste. It is to be to-morrow, I tell you. The gibbet on the
Grève, you know it? it stands always ready. It is horrible! to
see you ride in that tumbrel! Oh mercy! Until now I have never
felt the power of my love for you.—Oh! follow me. You shall take
your time to love me after I have saved you. You shall hate me as
long as you will. But come. To-morrow! to-morrow! the gallows!
your execution! Oh! save yourself! spare me!”
He seized her arm, he was beside himself, he tried to drag her
away.
She fixed her eye intently on him.
“What has become of my Phœbus?”
“Ah!” said the priest, releasing her arm, “you are pitiless.”
“What has become of Phœbus?” she repeated coldly.
“He is dead!” cried the priest.
“Dead!” said she, still icy and motionless “then why do you talk
to me of living?”
He was not listening to her.
“Oh! yes,” said he, as though speaking to himself, “he certainly
must be dead. The blade pierced deeply. I believe I touched his
heart with the point. Oh! my very soul was at the end of the
dagger!”
The young girl flung herself upon him like a raging tigress, and
pushed him upon the steps of the staircase with supernatural
force.
“Begone, monster! Begone, assassin! Leave me to die! May the
blood of both of us make an eternal stain upon your brow! Be
thine, priest! Never! never! Nothing shall unite us! not hell
itself! Go, accursed man! Never!”
The priest had stumbled on the stairs. He silently disentangled
his feet from the folds of his robe, picked up his lantern again,
and slowly began the ascent of the steps which led to the door;
he opened the door and passed through it.
All at once, the young girl beheld his head reappear; it wore a
frightful expression, and he cried, hoarse with rage and
despair,—
“I tell you he is dead!”
She fell face downwards upon the floor, and there was no longer
any sound audible in the cell than the sob of the drop of water
which made the pool palpitate amid the darkness.
CHAPTER V. THE MOTHER.
I do not believe that there is anything sweeter in the world than
the ideas which awake in a mother’s heart at the sight of her
child’s tiny shoe; especially if it is a shoe for festivals, for
Sunday, for baptism, the shoe embroidered to the very sole, a
shoe in which the infant has not yet taken a step. That shoe has
so much grace and daintiness, it is so impossible for it to walk,
that it seems to the mother as though she saw her child. She
smiles upon it, she kisses it, she talks to it; she asks herself
whether there can actually be a foot so tiny; and if the child be
absent, the pretty shoe suffices to place the sweet and fragile
creature before her eyes. She thinks she sees it, she does see
it, complete, living, joyous, with its delicate hands, its round
head, its pure lips, its serene eyes whose white is blue. If it
is in winter, it is yonder, crawling on the carpet, it is
laboriously climbing upon an ottoman, and the mother trembles
lest it should approach the fire. If it is summer time, it crawls
about the yard, in the garden, plucks up the grass between the
paving-stones, gazes innocently at the big dogs, the big horses,
without fear, plays with the shells, with the flowers, and makes
the gardener grumble because he finds sand in the flower-beds and
earth in the paths. Everything laughs, and shines and plays
around it, like it, even the breath of air and the ray of sun
which vie with each other in disporting among the silky ringlets
of its hair. The shoe shows all this to the mother, and makes her
heart melt as fire melts wax.
But when the child is lost, these thousand images of joy, of
charms, of tenderness, which throng around the little shoe,
become so many horrible things. The pretty broidered shoe is no
longer anything but an instrument of torture which eternally
crushes the heart of the mother. It is always the same fibre
which vibrates, the tenderest and most sensitive; but instead of
an angel caressing it, it is a demon who is wrenching at it.
One May morning, when the sun was rising on one of those dark
blue skies against which Garofolo loves to place his Descents
from the Cross, the recluse of the Tour-Roland heard a sound of
wheels, of horses and irons in the Place de Grève. She was
somewhat aroused by it, knotted her hair upon her ears in order
to deafen herself, and resumed her contemplation, on her knees,
of the inanimate object which she had adored for fifteen years.
This little shoe was the universe to her, as we have already
said. Her thought was shut up in it, and was destined never more
to quit it except at death. The sombre cave of the Tour-Roland
alone knew how many bitter imprecations, touching complaints,
prayers and sobs she had wafted to heaven in connection with that
charming bauble of rose-colored satin. Never was more despair
bestowed upon a prettier and more graceful thing.
It seemed as though her grief were breaking forth more violently
than usual; and she could be heard outside lamenting in a loud
and monotonous voice which rent the heart.
“Oh my daughter!” she said, “my daughter, my poor, dear little
child, so I shall never see thee more! It is over! It always
seems to me that it happened yesterday! My God! my God! it would
have been better not to give her to me than to take her away so
soon. Did you not know that our children are part of ourselves,
and that a mother who has lost her child no longer believes in
God? Ah! wretch that I am to have gone out that day! Lord! Lord!
to have taken her from me thus; you could never have looked at me
with her, when I was joyously warming her at my fire, when she
laughed as she suckled, when I made her tiny feet creep up my
breast to my lips? Oh! if you had looked at that, my God, you
would have taken pity on my joy; you would not have taken from me
the only love which lingered, in my heart! Was I then, Lord, so
miserable a creature, that you could not look at me before
condemning me?—Alas! Alas! here is the shoe; where is the foot?
where is the rest? Where is the child? My daughter! my daughter!
what did they do with thee? Lord, give her back to me. My knees
have been worn for fifteen years in praying to thee, my God! Is
not that enough? Give her back to me one day, one hour, one
minute; one minute, Lord! and then cast me to the demon for all
eternity! Oh! if I only knew where the skirt of your garment
trails, I would cling to it with both hands, and you would be
obliged to give me back my child! Have you no pity on her pretty
little shoe? Could you condemn a poor mother to this torture for
fifteen years? Good Virgin! good Virgin of heaven! my infant
Jesus has been taken from me, has been stolen from me; they
devoured her on a heath, they drank her blood, they cracked her
bones! Good Virgin, have pity upon me. My daughter, I want my
daughter! What is it to me that she is in paradise? I do not want
your angel, I want my child! I am a lioness, I want my whelp. Oh!
I will writhe on the earth, I will break the stones with my
forehead, and I will damn myself, and I will curse you, Lord, if
you keep my child from me! you see plainly that my arms are all
bitten, Lord! Has the good God no mercy?—Oh! give me only salt
and black bread, only let me have my daughter to warm me like a
sun! Alas! Lord my God. Alas! Lord my God, I am only a vile