Notre-Dame de Paris
At her feet lay a little goat, bound. The condemned girl held
together with her teeth her imperfectly fastened shift. One would
have said that she suffered still more in her misery from being
thus exposed almost naked to the eyes of all. Alas! modesty is
not made for such shocks.
“Jesus!” said Fleur-de-Lys hastily to the captain. “Look fair
cousin, ’tis that wretched Bohemian with the goat.”
So saying, she turned to Phœbus. His eyes were fixed on the
tumbrel. He was very pale.
“What Bohemian with the goat?” he stammered.
“What!” resumed Fleur-de-Lys, “do you not remember?”
Phœbus interrupted her.
“I do not know what you mean.”
He made a step to re-enter the room, but Fleur-de-Lys, whose
jealousy, previously so vividly aroused by this same gypsy, had
just been re-awakened, Fleur-de-Lys gave him a look full of
penetration and distrust. She vaguely recalled at that moment
having heard of a captain mixed up in the trial of that witch.
“What is the matter with you?” she said to Phœbus, “one would
say, that this woman had disturbed you.”
Phœbus forced a sneer,—
“Me! Not the least in the world! Ah! yes, certainly!”
“Remain, then!” she continued imperiously, “and let us see the
end.”
The unlucky captain was obliged to remain. He was somewhat
reassured by the fact that the condemned girl never removed her
eyes from the bottom of the cart. It was but too surely la
Esmeralda. In this last stage of opprobrium and misfortune, she
was still beautiful; her great black eyes appeared still larger,
because of the emaciation of her cheeks; her pale profile was
pure and sublime. She resembled what she had been, in the same
degree that a virgin by Masaccio, resembles a virgin of
Raphael,—weaker, thinner, more delicate.
Moreover, there was nothing in her which was not shaken in some
sort, and which with the exception of her modesty, she did not
let go at will, so profoundly had she been broken by stupor and
despair. Her body bounded at every jolt of the tumbrel like a
dead or broken thing; her gaze was dull and imbecile. A tear was
still visible in her eyes, but motionless and frozen, so to
speak.
Meanwhile, the lugubrious cavalcade has traversed the crowd amid
cries of joy and curious attitudes. But as a faithful historian,
we must state that on beholding her so beautiful, so depressed,
many were moved with pity, even among the hardest of them.
The tumbrel had entered the Parvis.
It halted before the central portal. The escort ranged themselves
in line on both sides. The crowd became silent, and, in the midst
of this silence full of anxiety and solemnity, the two leaves of
the grand door swung back, as of themselves, on their hinges,
which gave a creak like the sound of a fife. Then there became
visible in all its length, the deep, gloomy church, hung in
black, sparely lighted with a few candles gleaming afar off on
the principal altar, opened in the midst of the Place which was
dazzling with light, like the mouth of a cavern. At the very
extremity, in the gloom of the apse, a gigantic silver cross was
visible against a black drapery which hung from the vault to the
pavement. The whole nave was deserted. But a few heads of priests
could be seen moving confusedly in the distant choir stalls, and,
at the moment when the great door opened, there escaped from the
church a loud, solemn, and monotonous chanting, which cast over
the head of the condemned girl, in gusts, fragments of melancholy
psalms,—
“_Non timebo millia populi circumdantis me: exsurge, Domine;
salvum me fac, Deus!_”
“_Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intraverunt aquæ usque ad animam
meam_.
“_Infixus sum in limo profundi; et non est substantia_.”
At the same time, another voice, separate from the choir, intoned
upon the steps of the chief altar, this melancholy offertory,—
“_Qui verbum meum audit, et credit ei qui misit me, habet vitam
æternam et in judicium non venit; sed transit a morte in
vitam._”[46]
This chant, which a few old men buried in the gloom sang from
afar over that beautiful creature, full of youth and life,
caressed by the warm air of spring, inundated with sunlight was
the mass for the dead.
The people listened devoutly.
The unhappy girl seemed to lose her sight and her consciousness
in the obscure interior of the church. Her white lips moved as
though in prayer, and the headsman’s assistant who approached to
assist her to alight from the cart, heard her repeating this word
in a low tone,—“Phœbus.”
They untied her hands, made her alight, accompanied by her goat,
which had also been unbound, and which bleated with joy at
finding itself free: and they made her walk barefoot on the hard
pavement to the foot of the steps leading to the door. The rope
about her neck trailed behind her. One would have said it was a
serpent following her.
Then the chanting in the church ceased. A great golden cross and
a row of wax candles began to move through the gloom. The
halberds of the motley beadles clanked; and, a few moments later,
a long procession of priests in chasubles, and deacons in
dalmatics, marched gravely towards the condemned girl, as they
drawled their song, spread out before her view and that of the
crowd. But her glance rested on the one who marched at the head,
immediately after the cross-bearer.
“Oh!” she said in a low voice, and with a shudder, “’tis he
again! the priest!”
It was in fact, the archdeacon. On his left he had the
sub-chanter, on his right, the chanter, armed with his official
wand. He advanced with head thrown back, his eyes fixed and wide
open, intoning in a strong voice,—
“_De ventre inferi clamavi, et exaudisti vocem meam_.
“_Et projecisti me in profundum in corde maris, et flumem
circumdedit me._”[47]
At the moment when he made his appearance in the full daylight
beneath the lofty arched portal, enveloped in an ample cope of
silver barred with a black cross, he was so pale that more than
one person in the crowd thought that one of the marble bishops
who knelt on the sepulchral stones of the choir had risen and was
come to receive upon the brink of the tomb, the woman who was
about to die.
She, no less pale, no less like a statue, had hardly noticed that
they had placed in her hand a heavy, lighted candle of yellow
wax; she had not heard the yelping voice of the clerk reading the
fatal contents of the apology; when they told her to respond with
_Amen_, she responded _Amen_. She only recovered life and force
when she beheld the priest make a sign to her guards to withdraw,
and himself advance alone towards her.
Then she felt her blood boil in her head, and a remnant of
indignation flashed up in that soul already benumbed and cold.
The archdeacon approached her slowly; even in that extremity, she
beheld him cast an eye sparkling with sensuality, jealousy, and
desire, over her exposed form. Then he said aloud,—
“Young girl, have you asked God’s pardon for your faults and
shortcomings?”
He bent down to her ear, and added (the spectators supposed that
he was receiving her last confession): “Will you have me? I can
still save you!”
She looked intently at him: “Begone, demon, or I will denounce
you!”
He gave vent to a horrible smile: “You will not be believed. You
will only add a scandal to a crime. Reply quickly! Will you have
me?”
“What have you done with my Phœbus?”
“He is dead!” said the priest.
At that moment the wretched archdeacon raised his head
mechanically and beheld at the other end of the Place, in the
balcony of the Gondelaurier mansion, the captain standing beside
Fleur-de-Lys. He staggered, passed his hand across his eyes,
looked again, muttered a curse, and all his features were
violently contorted.
“Well, die then!” he hissed between his teeth. “No one shall have
you.” Then, raising his hand over the gypsy, he exclaimed in a
funereal voice:—“_I nunc, anima anceps, et sit tibi Deus
misericors!_”[48]
This was the dread formula with which it was the custom to
conclude these gloomy ceremonies. It was the signal agreed upon
between the priest and the executioner.
The crowd knelt.
“_Kyrie eleison_,”[49] said the priests, who had remained beneath
the arch of the portal.
“_Kyrie eleison_,” repeated the throng in that murmur which runs
over all heads, like the waves of a troubled sea.
“_Amen_,” said the archdeacon.
He turned his back on the condemned girl, his head sank upon his
breast once more, he crossed his hands and rejoined his escort of
priests, and a moment later he was seen to disappear, with the
cross, the candles, and the copes, beneath the misty arches of
the cathedral, and his sonorous voice was extinguished by degrees
in the choir, as he chanted this verse of despair,—
“_Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt_.”[50]
At the same time, the intermittent clash of the iron butts of the
beadles’ halberds, gradually dying away among the columns of the
nave, produced the effect of a clock hammer striking the last
hour of the condemned.
The doors of Notre-Dame remained open, allowing a view of the
empty desolate church, draped in mourning, without candles, and
without voices.
The condemned girl remained motionless in her place, waiting to
be disposed of. One of the sergeants of police was obliged to
notify Master Charmolue of the fact, as the latter, during this
entire scene, had been engaged in studying the bas-relief of the
grand portal which represents, according to some, the sacrifice
of Abraham; according to others, the philosopher’s alchemical
operation: the sun being figured forth by the angel; the fire, by
the fagot; the artisan, by Abraham.
There was considerable difficulty in drawing him away from that
contemplation, but at length he turned round; and, at a signal
which he gave, two men clad in yellow, the executioner’s
assistants, approached the gypsy to bind her hands once more.
The unhappy creature, at the moment of mounting once again the
fatal cart, and proceeding to her last halting-place, was seized,
possibly, with some poignant clinging to life. She raised her
dry, red eyes to heaven, to the sun, to the silvery clouds, cut
here and there by a blue trapezium or triangle; then she lowered
them to objects around her, to the earth, the throng, the houses;
all at once, while the yellow man was binding her elbows, she
uttered a terrible cry, a cry of joy. Yonder, on that balcony, at
the corner of the Place, she had just caught sight of him, of her
friend, her lord, Phœbus, the other apparition of her life!
The judge had lied! the priest had lied! it was certainly he, she