Notre-Dame de Paris
sinner; but my daughter made me pious. I was full of religion for
the love of her, and I beheld you through her smile as through an
opening into heaven. Oh! if I could only once, just once more, a
single time, put this shoe on her pretty little pink foot, I
would die blessing you, good Virgin. Ah! fifteen years! she will
be grown up now!—Unhappy child! what! it is really true then I
shall never see her more, not even in heaven, for I shall not go
there myself. Oh! what misery to think that here is her shoe, and
that that is all!”
The unhappy woman flung herself upon that shoe; her consolation
and her despair for so many years, and her vitals were rent with
sobs as on the first day; because, for a mother who has lost her
child, it is always the first day. That grief never grows old.
The mourning garments may grow white and threadbare, the heart
remains dark.
At that moment, the fresh and joyous cries of children passed in
front of the cell. Every time that children crossed her vision or
struck her ear, the poor mother flung herself into the darkest
corner of her sepulchre, and one would have said, that she sought
to plunge her head into the stone in order not to hear them. This
time, on the contrary, she drew herself upright with a start, and
listened eagerly. One of the little boys had just said,—
“They are going to hang a gypsy to-day.”
With the abrupt leap of that spider which we have seen fling
itself upon a fly at the trembling of its web, she rushed to her
air-hole, which opened as the reader knows, on the Place de
Grève. A ladder had, in fact, been raised up against the
permanent gibbet, and the hangman’s assistant was busying himself
with adjusting the chains which had been rusted by the rain.
There were some people standing about.
The laughing group of children was already far away. The sacked
nun sought with her eyes some passer-by whom she might question.
All at once, beside her cell, she perceived a priest making a
pretext of reading the public breviary, but who was much less
occupied with the “lectern of latticed iron,” than with the
gallows, toward which he cast a fierce and gloomy glance from
time to time. She recognized monsieur the archdeacon of Josas, a
holy man.
“Father,” she inquired, “whom are they about to hang yonder?”
The priest looked at her and made no reply; she repeated her
question. Then he said,—
“I know not.”
“Some children said that it was a gypsy,” went on the recluse.
“I believe so,” said the priest.
Then Paquette la Chantefleurie burst into hyena-like laughter.
“Sister,” said the archdeacon, “do you then hate the gypsies
heartily?”
“Do I hate them!” exclaimed the recluse, “they are vampires,
stealers of children! They devoured my little daughter, my child,
my only child! I have no longer any heart, they devoured it!”
She was frightful. The priest looked at her coldly.
“There is one in particular whom I hate, and whom I have cursed,”
she resumed; “it is a young one, of the age which my daughter
would be if her mother had not eaten my daughter. Every time that
that young viper passes in front of my cell, she sets my blood in
a ferment.”
“Well, sister, rejoice,” said the priest, icy as a sepulchral
statue; “that is the one whom you are about to see die.”
His head fell upon his bosom and he moved slowly away.
The recluse writhed her arms with joy.
“I predicted it for her, that she would ascend thither! Thanks,
priest!” she cried.
And she began to pace up and down with long strides before the
grating of her window, her hair dishevelled, her eyes flashing,
with her shoulder striking against the wall, with the wild air of
a female wolf in a cage, who has long been famished, and who
feels the hour for her repast drawing near.
CHAPTER VI. THREE HUMAN HEARTS DIFFERENTLY CONSTRUCTED.
Phœbus was not dead, however. Men of that stamp die hard. When
Master Philippe Lheulier, advocate extraordinary of the king, had
said to poor Esmeralda; “He is dying,” it was an error or a jest.
When the archdeacon had repeated to the condemned girl; “He is
dead,” the fact is that he knew nothing about it, but that he
believed it, that he counted on it, that he did not doubt it,
that he devoutly hoped it. It would have been too hard for him to
give favorable news of his rival to the woman whom he loved. Any
man would have done the same in his place.
It was not that Phœbus’s wound had not been serious, but it had
not been as much so as the archdeacon believed. The physician, to
whom the soldiers of the watch had carried him at the first
moment, had feared for his life during the space of a week, and
had even told him so in Latin. But youth had gained the upper
hand; and, as frequently happens, in spite of prognostications
and diagnoses, nature had amused herself by saving the sick man
under the physician’s very nose. It was while he was still lying
on the leech’s pallet that he had submitted to the interrogations
of Philippe Lheulier and the official inquisitors, which had
annoyed him greatly. Hence, one fine morning, feeling himself
better, he had left his golden spurs with the leech as payment,
and had slipped away. This had not, however, interfered with the
progress of the affair. Justice, at that epoch, troubled itself
very little about the clearness and definiteness of a criminal
suit. Provided that the accused was hung, that was all that was
necessary. Now the judge had plenty of proofs against la
Esmeralda. They had supposed Phœbus to be dead, and that was the
end of the matter.
Phœbus, on his side, had not fled far. He had simply rejoined his
company in garrison at Queue-en-Brie, in the Isle-de-France, a
few stages from Paris.
After all, it did not please him in the least to appear in this
suit. He had a vague feeling that he should play a ridiculous
figure in it. On the whole, he did not know what to think of the
whole affair. Superstitious, and not given to devoutness, like
every soldier who is only a soldier, when he came to question
himself about this adventure, he did not feel assured as to the
goat, as to the singular fashion in which he had met La
Esmeralda, as to the no less strange manner in which she had
allowed him to divine her love, as to her character as a gypsy,
and lastly, as to the surly monk. He perceived in all these
incidents much more magic than love, probably a sorceress,
perhaps the devil; a comedy, in short, or to speak in the
language of that day, a very disagreeable mystery, in which he
played a very awkward part, the role of blows and derision. The
captain was quite put out of countenance about it; he experienced
that sort of shame which our La Fontaine has so admirably
defined,—
Ashamed as a fox who has been caught by a fowl.
Moreover, he hoped that the affair would not get noised abroad,
that his name would hardly be pronounced in it, and that in any
case it would not go beyond the courts of the Tournelle. In this
he was not mistaken, there was then no _Gazette des Tribunaux;_
and as not a week passed which had not its counterfeiter to boil,
or its witch to hang, or its heretic to burn, at some one of the
innumerable justices of Paris, people were so accustomed to
seeing in all the squares the ancient feudal Themis, bare armed,
with sleeves stripped up, performing her duty at the gibbets, the
ladders, and the pillories, that they hardly paid any heed to it.
Fashionable society of that day hardly knew the name of the
victim who passed by at the corner of the street, and it was the
populace at the most who regaled themselves with this coarse
fare. An execution was an habitual incident of the public
highways, like the braising-pan of the baker or the
slaughter-house of the knacker. The executioner was only a sort
of butcher of a little deeper dye than the rest.
Hence Phœbus’s mind was soon at ease on the score of the
enchantress Esmeralda, or Similar, as he called her, concerning
the blow from the dagger of the Bohemian or of the surly monk (it
mattered little which to him), and as to the issue of the trial.
But as soon as his heart was vacant in that direction,
Fleur-de-Lys returned to it. Captain Phœbus’s heart, like the
physics of that day, abhorred a vacuum.
Queue-en-Brie was a very insipid place to stay at then, a village
of farriers, and cow-girls with chapped hands, a long line of
poor dwellings and thatched cottages, which borders the grand
road on both sides for half a league; a tail (queue), in short,
as its name imports.
Fleur-de-Lys was his last passion but one, a pretty girl, a
charming dowry; accordingly, one fine morning, quite cured, and
assuming that, after the lapse of two months, the Bohemian affair
must be completely finished and forgotten, the amorous cavalier
arrived on a prancing horse at the door of the Gondelaurier
mansion.
He paid no attention to a tolerably numerous rabble which had
assembled in the Place du Parvis, before the portal of
Notre-Dame; he remembered that it was the month of May; he
supposed that it was some procession, some Pentecost, some
festival, hitched his horse to the ring at the door, and gayly
ascended the stairs to his beautiful betrothed.
She was alone with her mother.
The scene of the witch, her goat, her cursed alphabet, and
Phœbus’s long absences, still weighed on Fleur-de-Lys’s heart.
Nevertheless, when she beheld her captain enter, she thought him
so handsome, his doublet so new, his baldrick so shining, and his
air so impassioned, that she blushed with pleasure. The noble
damsel herself was more charming than ever. Her magnificent blond
hair was plaited in a ravishing manner, she was dressed entirely
in that sky blue which becomes fair people so well, a bit of
coquetry which she had learned from Colombe, and her eyes were
swimming in that languor of love which becomes them still better.
Phœbus, who had seen nothing in the line of beauty, since he left
the village maids of Queue-en-Brie, was intoxicated with
Fleur-de-Lys, which imparted to our officer so eager and gallant
an air, that his peace was immediately made. Madame de
Gondelaurier herself, still maternally seated in her big
arm-chair, had not the heart to scold him. As for Fleur-de-Lys’s
reproaches, they expired in tender cooings.
The young girl was seated near the window still embroidering her
grotto of Neptune. The captain was leaning over the back of her
chair, and she was addressing her caressing reproaches to him in
a low voice.
“What has become of you these two long months, wicked man?”
“I swear to you,” replied Phœbus, somewhat embarrassed by the
question, “that you are beautiful enough to set an archbishop to
dreaming.”
She could not repress a smile.