Book IV   
III. Immanis Pecoris Custos, Immanior Ipse   
     
NOW, 1 by 1482, Quasimodo had come to man’s estate, and had been for several years bell-ringer at Notre Dame, by the grace of his adopted father, Claude Follow—who had become archdeacon of Josas, by the grace of his liege lord, Louis de Beaumont—who, on the death of Guillaume Charier in 1472, had become Bishop of Paris, by the grace of his patron, Olivier le Daim, barber to Louis XI, King by the grace of God.      1   
  Quasimodo then was bell-ringer of Notre Dame.      2   
  As time went on a certain indescribable bond of intimacy had formed between the bell-ringer and the church. Separated forever from the world by the double fatality of his unknown birth and his actual deformity, imprisoned since his childhood within those two impassable barriers, the unfortunate creature had grown accustomed to taking note of nothing outside the sacred walls which had afforded him a refuge within their shade. Notre Dame had been to him, as he grew up, successively the egg, the nest, his home, his country, the universe.      3   
  Certain it is that there was a sort of mysterious and pre-existent harmony between this being and this edifice. When, as a quite young child, he would drag himself about with many clumsy wrigglings and jerks in the gloom of its arches, he seemed, with his human face and beast-like limbs, the natural reptile of that dark and humid stone floor, on which the shadows of the Roman capitals fell in so many fantastic shapes.      4   
  And later, the first time he clutched mechanically at the bell-rope in the tower, clung to it and set the bell in motion, the effect to Claude, his adopted father, was that of a child whose tongue is loosened and begins to talk.      5   
  Thus, as his being unfolded itself gradually under the brooding spirit of the Cathedral; as he lived in it, slept in it, rarely went outside its walls, subject every moment to its mysterious influence, he came at last to resemble it, to blend with it and form an integral part of it. His salient angles fitted, so to speak, into the retreating angles of the edifice till he seemed not its inhabitant, but its natural tenant. He might almost be said to have taken on its shape, as the snail does that of its shell. It was his dwelling-place, his strong-hold, his husk. There existed between him and the ancient church so profound an instinctive sympathy, so many material affinities, that, in a way, he adhered to it as a tortoise to his shell. The hoary Cathedral was his carapace.      6   
  Needless to say, the reader must not accept literally the similes we are forced to employ in order to express this singular union—symmetrical, direct, consubstantial almost—between a human being and an edifice. Nor is it necessary to describe how minutely familiar he had become with every part of the Cathedral during so long and so absolute an intimacy. This was his own peculiar dwelling-place—no depths in it to which Quasimodo had not penetrated, no heights which he had not scaled. Many a time had he crawled up the sheer face of it with no aid but that afforded by the uneven surface of the sculpture. The towers, over whose surface he might often be seen creeping like a lizard up a perpendicular wall—those two giants, so lofty, so grim, so dangerous—had for him no terrors, no threats of vertigo or falls from giddy heights; to see them so gentle between his hands, so easy to scale, you would have said that he had tamed them. By dint of leaping and climbing, of sportively swinging himself across the abysses of the gigantic Cathedral, he had become in some sort both monkey and chamois, or like the Calabrian child that swims before it can run, whose first play-fellow is the sea.      7   
  Moreover, not only his body seemed to have fashioned itself after the Cathedral, but his mind also. In what condition was this soul of his? What impressions had it received, what form had it adopted behind that close-drawn veil, under the influence of that ungentle life, it would be hard to say. Quasimodo had been born halt, humpbacked, half-blind. With infinite trouble and unwearied patience Claude Follow had succeeded in teaching him to speak. But a fatality seemed to pursue the poor foundling. When, at the age of fourteen, he became a bell-ringer at Notre Dame, a fresh infirmity descended on him to complete his desolation: the bells had broken the drum of his ears and he became stone-deaf. The only door Nature had left for him wide open to the world was suddenly closed forever.      8   
  And in closing it cut off the sole ray of joy and sunshine which still penetrated to the soul of Quasimodo, and plunged that soul into deepest night. The melancholy of the unhappy creature became chronic and complete like his physical deformity. Besides, his deafness rendered him in some sort dumb; for, to escape being laughed at, from the moment he found he could not hear, he firmly imposed upon himself a silence which he rarely broke except when he was alone. Of his own free-will, he tied that tongue which Claude Follow had been at such pains to loosen. And hence it was that when necessity constrained him to speak, his tongue moved stiffly and awkwardly like a door on rusty hinges.      9   
  Were we to endeavour to pierce through that thick, hard rind and penetrate to Quasimodo’s soul; could we sound the depths of that misshapen organization; were it given to us to flash a torch into that rayless gloom, to explore the dark-some interior of that opaque structure, illumine its dim windings, its fantastic culs-de-sac, and suddenly throw a bright light on the Psyche chained in the innermost recesses of that cavern, we should doubtless find the hapless creature withered, stunted like those prisoners who grew old in the dungeons of Venice, bent double within the narrow limits of a stone chest too low and too short to permit of their stretching themselves.     10   
  It is certain that the spirit wastes in a misshapen body. Quasimodo scarcely felt within him the feeble stirrings of a soul made after his own image. His impression of objects suffered a considerable refraction before they reached his inner consciousness. His mind was a peculiar medium; the ideas that passed through it issued forth distorted. The reflection born of that refraction was necessarily divergent and crooked.     11   
  Hence his thousand optical illusions, hence the thousand aberrations of his judgment, the thousand vagaries of his thoughts, sometimes mad, sometimes idiotic.     12   
  The first effect of this fatal organization was to blur his view of things. He scarcely ever received a direct impression of them; the external world seemed to him much farther off than it does from us.     13   
  The second effect of his misfortune was to render him malevolent. He was malevolent really because he was uncivilized, and he was uncivilized because he was ill-favoured. There was method in his nature as well as in ours.     14   
  Also his physical strength, which was extraordinarily developed, was another cause of his malevolence—“Malus puer robustus,” 2 says Hobbes.     15   
  However, to do him justice, this malevolence was probably not inborn in him. From his very first experience among men, he had felt, and later he had seen, himself reviled, scorned, spat upon. For him human speech had ever been either a jibe or a curse. As he grew up, he had met nothing but disgust and ill-will on every side. What wonder that he should have caught the disease, have contracted the prevailing malice. He armed himself with the weapons that had wounded him.     16   
  But, after all, he turned his face unwillingly towards mankind. His Cathedral was sufficient for him. Was it not peopled with kings, saints, and bishops of marble who never mocked at him, but ever gazed at him with calm and benevolent eyes? And the other stone figures—the demons and monsters—they showed no hatred of Quasimodo—he looked too much akin to them for that. Rather they scoffed at other men. The saints were his friends and blessed him, the monsters were his friends and protected him. So he would commune long and earnestly with them, passing whole hours crouched in front of a statue, holding solitary converse with it. If any one happened upon him, he would fly like a lover surprised in a serenade.     17   
  And the Cathedral not only represented society; it was his world, it was all Nature to him. He dreamed of no other gardens but the stained windows ever in flower, no shade but that cast by the stone foliage spreading full of birds from the tufted capitals of the Roman pillars, no mountains but the colossal towers of the Cathedral, no ocean but Paris roaring round their base.     18   
  But what he loved best of all in that material edifice, that which awakened his soul and set the poor wings fluttering that lay so sadly folded when in that dreary dungeon, what brought him nearest to happiness, was the bells. He loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them. From the carillon in the transept steeple to the great bell over the central doorway, they all shared in his affection. The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most.     19   
  True, theirs were the only voices he could still hear. For this reason the great bell was his best beloved. She was his chosen one among that family of boisterous sisters who gambolled round him in high-days and holidays. This great bell was called Marie. She was alone in the southern tower with her sister Jacqueline, a bell of smaller calibre, hanging in a cage beside hers. This Jacqueline had been christened after the wife of Jean Montagu, who had given it to the church—a donation which had not prevented him from figuring at Montfaucon without his head. In the northern tower were six other bells, and six smaller ones shared the transept belfry with the wooden bell, which was only rung from the afternoon of Maundy Thursday till the morning of Easter eve. Quasimodo had thus fifteen bells in his seraglio, but big Marie was the favourite. What words shall describe his delight on the days when the full peal was rung? The moment the Archdeacon gave the word, he was up the spiral stair-case of the steeple quicker than any one else would have come down. He entered breathless into the aerial chamber of the great bell, gazed at her for a moment with doting fondness, then spoke softly to her and patted her as you would a good steed before starting on a long journey; sympathizing with her in the heavy task that lay before her. These preliminary caresses over, he called out to his assistants, waiting ready in the lower floor of the tower, to begin. These hung themselves to the ropes, the windlass creaked, and the huge metal dome set itself slowly in motion. Quasimodo, quivering with excitement, followed it with his eye. The first stroke of the clapper against its brazen wall shook the wood-work on which he was standing. Quasimodo vibrated with the bell. “Vah!” he shouted with a burst of insane laughter. Meanwhile the motion of the bell quickened, and in the same measure as it took a wider sweep, so the eye of Quasimodo opened more and more and blazed with a phosphorescent light.     20   
  At length the full peal began; the whole lower wood-work and blocks of stone trembled and groaned together from the piles of the foundation to the trefoils on its summit. Quasimodo, foaming at the mouth, ran to and fro, quivering with the tower from head to foot. The bell, now in full and furious swing, presented alternately to each wall of the tower its brazen maw, from which poured forth that tempestuous breath which could be heard four leagues distant. Quasimodo placed himself in front of this gaping throat, crouched down and rose again at each return of the bell, inhaled its furious breath, gazed in turn at the teeming square two hundred feet below and at the enormous brazen tongue which came at measured intervals to bellow in his ear. It was the only speech he understood, the only sound that broke for him the universal silence. He revelled in it like a bird in the sunshine.     21   
  Then, at a certain point, the frenzy of the bell would catch him; his expression grew strange and weird; waiting for the bell on its passage as a spider watches for the fly, he would fling himself headlong upon it. Then, suspended over the abyss, borne to and fro by the tremendous rush of the bell, he seized the brazen monster by its ears, pressed it between his two knees, dug his heels into it, and increased by the shock and the whole weight of his body the fury of the peal, till the tower rocked again. Meanwhile Quasimodo, shouting and gnashing his teeth, his red hair bristling, his chest heaving like a blacksmith’s bellows, his eye darting flames, his monstrous steed neighing and panting under him—it was no longer the great bell of Notre Dame or Quasimodo, it was a nightmare, a whirlwind, a tempest; Vertigo astride of Clamour; a spirit clinging to a flying saddle; a strange centaur, half man, half bell; a sort of horrible Astolpho carried off by a prodigious living hippogriff of bronze.     22   
  The presence of this extraordinary being sent, as it were, a breath of life pulsing through the whole Cathedral. There seemed to emanate from him—at least so said the exaggerating populace—a mysterious influence which animated the stones of Notre Dame and made the ancient church thrill to her deepest depths. To know that he was there was enough to make them believe they saw life and animation in the thousand statues of the galleries and portals. The old Cathedral did indeed seem docile and obedient to his hand; she awaited his command to lift up her sonorous voice; she was possessed and filled with Quasimodo as with a familiar spirit. You would have said that he made the immense building breathe. He was everywhere in it; he multiplied himself at every point of the structure. Now the terrified beholder would descry, on the topmost pinnacle of a tower, a fantastic, dwarfish figure climbing, twisting, crawling on all-fours, hanging over the abyss, leaping from projection to projection to thrust his arm down the throat of some sculptured gorgon; it was Quasimodo crow’s-nesting. Again, in some dim corner of the church one would stumble against a sort of living chimera crouching low, with sullen, furrowed brow: it was Quasimodo musing. Or again, in a steeple you caught sight of an enormous head and a bundle of confused limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope: it was Quasimodo ringing for vespers or angelus. Often at night a hideous form might be seen wandering along the delicate and lace-like parapet that crowns the towers and borders the roof of the chancel: again the hunchback of Notre Dame. At such times, said the gossips, the whole church assumed a horrible, weird, and supernatural air; eyes and mouths opened here and there; the stone dogs, the dragons, all the monsters that keep watch and ward, day and night, with necks distended and open mouths, round the huge Cathedral, were heard barking and hissing. And if it happened to be a Christmas-night when the great bell seemed to rattle in its throat as it called the faithful to the midnight mass, there was such an indescribable air of life spread over the sombre façade that the great door-way looked as if it were swallowing the entire crowd, and the rose-window staring at them. And all this proceeded from Quasimodo. Egypt would have declared him the god of this temple; the Middle Ages took him for its demon: he was its soul.     23   
  So much so, that to any one who knows that Quasimodo really lived, Notre Dame now appears deserted, inanimate, dead. One feels that something has gone out of it. This immense body is empty—a skeleton; the spirit has quitted it; one sees the place of its habitation, but that is all. It is like a skull—the holes are there for the eyes, but they are sightless.     24   


Note 1.  The guardian of a terrific beast, himself more terrible. [back]   
Note 2.  The strong youth is wicked. [back]

Book IV   
IV. The Dog and His Master   
     
THERE was, however, one human being whom Quasimodo excepted from the malice and hatred he felt for the rest of mankind, and whom he loved as much, if not more than his Cathedral: and that was Claude Frollo.      1   
  The case was simple enough. Claude Frollo had rescued him, had adopted him, fed him, brought him up. When he was little, it was between Claude Frollo’s knees that he sought refuge from the children and the dogs that ran yelping after him. Claude Frollo had taught him to speak, to read, to write. Finally, it was Claude Frollo who made him bell-ringer of Notre Dame; and to give the great bell in marriage to Quasimodo was giving Juliet to Romeo.      2   
  And in return, Quasimodo’s gratitude was deep, passionate, and boundless; and although the countenance of his adopted father was often clouded and severe, although his speech was habitually brief, harsh, imperious, never for one single moment did that gratitude falter. In Quasimodo the Archdeacon possessed the most submissive of slaves, the most obedient of servants, the most vigilant of watch-dogs. When the poor bell-ringer became deaf, between him and Claude Frollo there had been established a mysterious language of sings, intelligible to them alone. In this way, then, the Archdeacon was the sole human being with whom Quasimodo had preserved a communication. There were but two things in this world with which he had any connection: Claude Frollo and the Cathedral.      3   
  The empire of the Archdeacon over the bell-ringer, and the bell-ringer’s attachment to the Archdeacon, were absolutely unprecedented. A sign from Claude, or the idea that it would give him a moment’s pleasure, and Quasimodo would have cheerfully cast himself from the top of Notre Dame. There was something remarkable in all that physical force, so extraordinarily developed in Quasimodo, being placed by him blindly at the disposal of another. In it there was doubtless much filial devotion, of the attachment of the servant; but there was also the fascination exercised by one mind over another; it was a poor, feeble, awkward organism standing with bent head and supplicating eyes in the presence of a lofty, penetrating, and commanding intellect. Finally, and before all things, it was gratitude—gratitude pushed to such extreme limits that we should be at a loss for a comparison. That virtue is not one of those of which the brightest examples are to be found in man. Let us then say that Quasimodo loved the Archdeacon as never dog, never horse, never elephant loved his master.

Book IV   
V. Further Particulars of Claude Frollo   
     
IN 1482 Quasimodo was about twenty, Claude Frollo about thirty-six. The one had grown up, the other had grown old.      1   
  Claude Frollo was no longer the simple-minded scholar of the Torchi college, the tender guardian of a little child, the young and dreamy philosopher, who knew many things, but was ignorant of more. He was a priest—austere, grave, morose—having a cure of souls; Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas; second acolyte to the Bishop; having the charge of the two deaneries of Montlhéry and Châteaufort, and of a hundred and seventy-four rural clergy. He was an imposing and sombre personage, before whom the chorister boys in alb and tunic, the brethren of Saint-Augustine, and the clerics on early morning duty at Notre Dame, quailed and trembled, when he passed slowly under the high Gothic arches of the choir—stately, deep in thought, with folded arms, and his head bent so low upon his breast that nothing was visible of his face but his high bald forehead.      2   
  Dom 1 Claude Frollo, however, had abandoned neither science nor the education of his young brother—the two occupations of his life. But in the course of time some bitterness had mingled with these things he once had thought so sweet. With time, says Paul Diacre, even the best bacon turns rancid. Little Jehan Frollo, surnamed “of the Mill” from the place where he had been nursed, had not grown in the direction in which Claude would have wished to train him. The elder brother had counted on a pious pupil, docile, studious, and honourable. But the younger brother, like those young trees which baffle the efforts of the gardener, and turn obstinately towards that side from which they derive most air and sunshine—the younger brother increased and waxed great, and sent forth full and luxuriant branches only on the side of idleness, ignorance, and loose living. He was an unruly little devil, which made Dom Claude Knit his brows, but also very droll and very cunning, at which the elder was fain to smile. Claude had consigned him to that same Collége de Torchi in which he himself had passed his earliest years in study and seclusion; and it grieved him sorely that this retreat, once edified by the name of Frollo, should be so scandalized by it now. He would sometimes read Jehan long and stern lectures on the subject, under which the latter bore up courageously—after all, the young rascal’s heart was in the right place, as all the comedies declare; but the sermon over, he calmly resumed the evil tenor of his ways. Some times it was a béjaune, or yellow-beak, as they called the newcomers at the University—whom he had thoroughly badgered as a welcome—a valuable custom which has been carefully handed down to our day; now he had been the moving spirit of a band of scholars who had thrown themselves in classical fashion on a tavern, quasi classico excitati, then beaten the tavern-keeper “with cudgels of offensive character,” and joyously pillaged the tavern, even to staving in the hogsheads of wine. And the result was a fine report drawn up in Latin, brought by the sub-monitor of the Torchi College to Dom Claude, with piteous mien, the which bore the melancholy marginal remark, Rixa; prima causa vinum optimum potatum. 2 Finally, it was said—horrible in a lad of sixteen—that his backslidings frequently extended to the Rue de Glatigny. 3      3   
  In consequence of all this, Claude—saddened, his faith in human affection shaken—threw himself with frenzied ardour into the arms of science, that sister who at least never laughs at you in derision, and who always repays you, albeit at times in somewhat light coin, for the care you have lavished on her. He became, therefore, more and more erudite, and, as a natural consequence, more and more rigid as a priest, less and less cheerful as a man. In each of us there are certain parallels between our mind, our manners, and our characters which develop in unbroken continuity, and are only shaken by the great cataclysms of life.      4   
  Claude Frollo, having in his youth gone over the entire circle of human knowledge, positive, external, and lawful, was under the absolute necessity, unless he was to stop ubi defuit orbis, 4 of going farther afield in search of food for the insatiable appetite of his mind. The ancient symbol of the serpent biting its tail is especially appropriate to learning, as Claude Frollo had evidently proved. Many trustworthy persons asserted that, after having exhausted the fas of human knowledge, he had had the temerity to penetrate into the nefas, had tasted in succession all the apples of the Tree of Knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had finished by eating of the forbidden fruit. He had taken his seat by turns, as the reader has seen, at the conferences of the theologians at the Sorbonne, at the disputations of the decretalists near the image of Saint-Martin, at the meetings of the Faculty of Arts near the image of Saint-Hilary, at the confabulations of the physicians near the bénitier of Notre Dame, ad cupam Nostræ-Dominæ all the viands, permitted and approved which those four great kitchens, called the four Faculties, could prepare and set before the intelligence, he had devoured, and satiety had come upon him before his hunger was appeased. Then he had penetrated farther afield, had dug deeper, underneath all that finit, material, limited knowledge; he had risked his soul, and had seated himself at that mystic table of the Alchemists, the Astrologers, the Hermetics of which Averroës, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicolas Flamel occupy one end in the Middle Ages, and which reaches back in the East, under the rays of the seven-branched candlestick, to Solomon, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster.      5   
  So, at least, it was supposed, whether rightly or not.      6   
  It is certainly true that the Archdeacon frequently visited the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, where, to be sure, his mother and father lay buried with the other victims of the plague of 1466; but he seemed much less devoutly interested in the cross on their grave than in the strange figures covering the tombs of Nicolas Flamel and Claude Pernelle close by.      7   
  It is certainly true that he had often been seen stealing down the Rue des Lombards and slipping furtively into a little house which formed the corner of the Rue des Ecrivains and the Rue Marivault. This was the house which Nicolas Flamel had built, in which he died about 1417, and which, uninhabited ever since, was beginning to fall into decay, so much had the Hermetics and Alchemists from all the ends of the world worn away its walls by merely engraving their names upon them. Some of the neighbours even declared how, through a hole in the wall, they had seen the Archdeacon digging and turning over the earth in those two cellars, of which the door-jambs had been scrawled over with innumerable verses and hieroglyphics by Nicolas Flamel himself. It was supposed that Flamel had buried here the philosopher’s stone; and for two centuries the Alchemists, from Magistri to Père Pacifique, never ceased to burrow in that ground, till at last the house, so cruelly ransacked and undermined, crumbled into dust under their feet.      8   
  Again, it is true that the Archdeacon was seized with a remarkable passion for the symbolical portal of Notre Dame, that page of incantation written in stone by Bishop Guillaume of Paris, who is without doubt among the damned for having attached so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred poem eternally chanted by the rest of the edifice. The Archdeacon Claude was also credited with having solved the mystery of the colossal Saint-Christopher, and of that tall, enigmatical statue which stood then at the entrance of the Parvis of the Cathedral, and derisively styled by the people Monsieur le Gris—old curmudgeon. But what nobody could fail to observe, were the interminable hours he would sometimes spend, seated on the parapet of the Parvis, lost in contemplation of the statues; now looking fixedly at the Foolish Virgins with their overturned lamps, now at the Wise Virgins with their lamps upright; at other times calculating the angle of vision of that raven perched on the left side of the central door and peering at a mysterious point inside the church, where most certainly the philosopher’s stone is hidden, if it is not in Nicolas Flamel’s cellar.      9   
  It was a singular destiny, we may remark in passing, for the Cathedral of Notre Dame to be thus beloved in different degrees and with so much devotion by two creatures so utterly dissimilar as Claude Frollo and Quasimodo; loved by the one—rudimentary, instinctive, savage—for its beauty, its lofty stature, the harmonies that flowed from its magnificent ensemble; loved by the other—a being of cultured and perfervid imagination—for its significance, its mystical meaning, the symbolic language lurking under the sculptures of its façade, like the first manuscript under the second in a palimpsest—in a word, for the enigma it eternally propounded to the intelligence.     10   
  Furthermore, it is certain that in one of the towers which overlooks the Grève, close by the cage of the bells, the Archdeacon had fitted up for himself a little cell of great secrecy, into which no one ever entered—not even the Bishop, without his leave. This cell had been constructed long ago, almost at the summit of the tower among the crows’ nests, by Bishop Hugh of Besançon, 5 who had played the necromancer there in his time. What this cell contained nobody knew; but on many a night from the shore of the terrain, from which a little round window at the back of the tower was visible, an unaccountable, intermittent red glow might be seen, coming and going at regular intervals, as if in response to the blowing of a pair of bellows, and as if it proceeded rather from a flame than a light. In the darkness, and at that height, the effect was very singular, and the old wives would say, “There’s the Archdeacon blowing his bellows again! Hell-fire is blazing up there!”     11   
  After all, these were no great proofs of sorcery; but still there was sufficient smoke to warrant the supposition of flame, and the Archdeacon therefore stood in decidedly bad odour. And yet we are bound to say that the occult sciences, that necromancy, magic—even of the whitest and most innocent—had no more virulent foe, no more merciless denouncer before the Holy Office of Notre Dame than himself. Whether this abhorrence was sincere, or merely the trick of the pickpocket who cries “Stop thief!” it did not prevent the learned heads of the Chapter regarding him as a soul adventuring into the very fore-court of hell, lost among the holes and underground workings of the Cabala, groping in the baleful gloom of occult science. The people, of course, were not to be hood-winked for a moment—any one with a grain of sense could see that Quasimodo was a demon, and Claude Frollo a sorcerer; and it was patent that the bell-ringer was bound to the Archdeacon for a certain time, after which he would carry off his master’s soul in guise of payment. Consequently, in spite of the excessive austerity of his life, the Archdeacon was in bad repute with all pious people, and there was no devout nose, however inexperienced, that did not smell out the wizard in him.     12   
  Yet, if with advancing years deep fissures had opened in his mind, in his heart they were no less deep. So, at least, they had reason to think who narrowly scanned that face in which the soul shone forth as through a murky cloud. Else why that bald and furrowed brow, that constantly bowed head, those sighs that forever rent his breast? What secret thought sent that bitter smile to his lips at the selfsame moment that his frowning brows approached each other like two bulls about to fight? Why were his remaining hairs already gray? Whence came that inward fire that blazed at times in his eyes, till they looked like holes pierced in the wall of a furnace?     13   
  These symptoms of violent moral preoccupation had developed to an extraordinary degree of intensity at the period of our narrative. More than once had a chorister boy field in terror when coming upon him suddenly in the Cathedral, so strange and piercing was his gaze. More than once, at the hour of service, had the occupant of the next stall in the choir heard him interspersing the plain song, ad omnem tonum, with unintelligible parentheses. More than once had the laundress of the terrain, whose duty it was to “wash the Chapter,” noticed with alarm the marks of finger-nails and clinched hands in the surplice of Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas.     14   
  However, he grew doubly austere, and his life had never been more exemplary. By inclination, as well as by calling, he had always kept severely aloof from women; now he seemed to hate them more virulently than ever. The mere rustle of a silken kirtle was sufficient to make him bring his cowl down over his eyes. So jealous were his reserve and his austerity on this point, that when the King’s daughter, the Lady of Beaujeu, came in December, I48I, to visit the cloister of Notre Dame, he earnestly opposed her admittance, reminding the Bishop of the statute in the Black Book, dated Saint-Bartholomew’s Eve, I334, forbidding access to the clositer to every woman whatsoever, “young or old, mistress or serving-maid.” Upon which the Bishop had been constrained to quote the ordinance of the legate Odo, which makes exception in favour of “certain ladies of high degree, who might not be turned away without offence”—“aliquæ magnates mulieres, quæ’ sine scandale vitari non possunt.” But the Archdeacon persisted in his protest, objecting that the legate’s ordinance, dating from as far back as I207, was anterior to the Black Book by a hundred and twenty-seven years, and thus practically abrogated by it, and he refused to appear before the princess.     15   
  It was, moreover, noticed that, for some time past, his horror of gipsy-women and all Zingari in general had remarkably increased. He had solicited from the Bishop an edict expressly forbidding gipsies to dance or play the tambourine within the Parvis of the Cathedral; and simultaneously he was rummaging among the musty archives of the Holy Office, in order to collect all the cases of necromancers and sorcerers condemned to the flames or the halter for complicity in witchcraft with sows, he, or she-goats.     16   


Note 1.  Title attaching to a certain class of the priesthood, equivalent to “The Reverend.” [back]   
Note 2.  A brawl, the immediate result of too liberal potations. [back]   
Note 3.  A street of ill-fame. [back]   
Note 4.  Where the world comes to an end. [back]   
Note 5.  Hugo II de Bisuncio, 1326–1332—AUTHOR’S NOTE. [back]

   
Book IV   
VI. Unpopularity   
     
THE ARCHDEACON and the bell-ringer found, as we have said before, but little favour with the people, great or small, in the purlieus of the Cathedral. If Claude and Quasimodo went abroad, as occasionally happened, and they were seen in company—the servant following his master—traversing the chilly, narrow, and gloomy streets in the vicinity of Notre Dame, many an abusive word, many a mocking laugh or opprobrious gibe would harass them on their passage unless Claude Frollo—though this was rare—walked with head erect and haughty bearing, offering a stern and well-nigh imperial front to the startled gaze of his assailants.      1   
  The couple shared in the neighbourhood the fate of those poets of whom Régnier says:
           “Toutes sortes de gens vont après les poètes,   
Comme après les hiboux vont criant les fauvettes.” 1   
   2   
  Now some ill-conditioned monkey would risk his skin and bones for the ineffable pleasure of sticking a pin in Quasimodo’s hump, or some pretty wench, with more freedom and impudence than was seemly, would brush the priest’s black robe, thrusting her face into his, while she sang the naughty song beginning:
           “Niche, niche, le diable est pris!” 2   
   3   
  Anon, a group of squalid old women, crouching in the shade on the steps of a porch, would abuse the Archdeacon and the bell-ringer roundly as they passed, or hurl after them with curses the flattering remark: “There goes one whose soul is like the other one’s body!” Or, another time, it would be a band of scholars playing at marbles or hopscotch who would rise in a body and salute them in classical manner, with some Latin greeting such as “Eia! Eia! Claudius cum claudo!” 3      4   
  But, as a rule, these amenities passed unheeded by either the priest or the bell-ringer. Quasimodo was too deaf, and Claude too immersed in thought to hear them.      5   


Note 1. 
           All sorts of people run after the poets,   
As after the owls fly screaming the linnets.   
 [back]   
Note 2. 
           Hide, hide, the devil is caught!   
 [back]   
Note 3. 
           Ho! ho! Claude with the cripple!   
 [back]

   
Book V   
I. The Abbot of St.-Martin’s   
     
THE FAME of Dom Claude Frollo had spread abroad. To it, just about the time of his refusal to encounter the Lady of Beaujeu, he owed a visit which remained long in his memory.      1   
  It happened one evening. Claude had just retired after the evening office to his canonical cell in the cloister of Notre Dame. Beyond a few glass phials pushed away into a corner and containing some powder which looked suspiciously like an explosive, the cell had nothing noteworthy or mysterious about it. Here and there were some inscriptions on the walls, but they consisted purely of learned axioms or pious extracts from worthy authors. The Archdeacon had just seated himself at a huge oak chest covered with manuscripts, and lighted by a three-armed brass lamp. He leaned his elbow on an open tome: Honorius of Autun’s De prædestinatione et libero arbitrio, 1 while he musingly turned over the leaves of a printed folio he had just brought over, the sole production of the printing-press which stood in his cell. His reverie was broken by a knock at the door.      2   
  “Who’s there?” called the scholar in the friendly tone of a famished dog disturbed over a bone.      3   
  “A friend—Jacques Coictier,” answered a voice outside.      4   
  He rose and opened the door.      5   
  It was, in fact, the King’s physician, a man of some fifty years, the hardness of whose expression was somewhat mitigated by a look of great cunning. He was accompanied by another man. Both wore long, slate-gray, squirrel-lined robes, fastened from top to bottom and belted round the middle, and caps of the same stuff and colour. Their hands disappeared in their sleeves, their feet under their robes, and their eyes under their caps.      6   
  “God save me, messire!” said the Archdeacon, as he admitted them; “I was far from expecting so flattering a visit at this late hour.” And while he spoke thus courteously, he glanced suspiciously and shrewdly from the physician to his companion.      7   
  “It is never too late to pay a visit to so eminent a scholar as Dom Claude Frollo of Tirechappe,” replied Doctor Coictier, whose Burgundian accent let his sentences trail along with all the majestic effect of a long-trained robe.      8   
  The physician and the Archdeacon them embarked upon one of those congratulatory prologues with which, at that period, it was customary to usher in every conversation between scholars, which did not prevent them most cordially detesting one another. For the rest, it is just the same to-day; the mouth of every scholar who compliments another is a vessel full of honeyed gall.      9   
  The felicitations addressed by Claude to Jacques Coictier alluded chiefly to the numerous material advantages the worthy physician had succeeded in extracting, in the course of his much-envied career, from each illness of the King—a surer and more profitable kind of alchemy than the pursuit of the philosopher’s stone.     10   
  “Truly, Doctor Coiciter, I was greatly rejoiced to learn of the promotion of your nephew, my reverend Superior, Pierre Versé, to a bishopric. He is made Bishop of Amiens, is he not?”     11   
  “Yes, Monsieur the Archdeacon, it is a gracious and merciful gift of the Lord.”     12   
  “Let me tell you you made a brave show on Christmasday at the head of your company of the Chamber of Accountants, Monsieur the President.”     13   
  “Vice-President, Dom Claude. Alas! nothing more.”     14   
  “How fares it with your superb mansion in the Rue Saint-Andry des Arcs? It is in very truth a Louvre! And I am much taken by the apricot-tree sculptured on the door, with the pleasant play of words inscribed beneath it, ‘A L’ABRI-COTIER.’”     15   
  “Well, well, Maitre Claude, all this masons’ work costs me dearly. In the same measure as my house rises higher, my funds sink lower.”     16   
  “Oho! Have you not your revenues from the jail, and the Provostship of the Palais de Justice, and the rents from all the houses, workshops, booths, and market-stalls within the circuit of Paris? That is surely an excellent milch cow.”     17   
  “My castellany of Poissy has not brought me in a sou this year.”     18   
  “But your toll dues at Triel, Saint-James, and Saint-Germain-en-Laye—they are always profitable?”     19   
  “Six times twenty livres only, and not even Paris money at that.”     20   
  “But you have your appointment as Councillor to the King—that means a fixed salary surely?”     21   
  “Yes, Colleague Claude, but that cursed Manor of Poligny, they make such a coil about, is not worth more to me than sixty gold crowns—taking one year with another.”     22   
  The compliments which Dom Claude thus addressed to Jacques Coictier were uttered in that tone of veiled, bitter, sardonic raillery, with that grievous, yet cruel, smile of a superior and unfortunate man, who seeks a moment’s distraction in playing on the gross vanity of the vulgarly prosperous man. The other was quite unconscious of it.     23   
  “By my soul!” said Claude at last, pressing his hand, “I rejoice to see you in such excellent health.”     24   
  “Thank you, Maitre Claude.”     25   
  “Speaking of health,” cried Dom Claude, “how is your royal patient?”     26   
  “He does not pay his doctor sufficiently well,” said the physician with a side glance at his companion.     27   
  “Do you really think that, friend Coictier?” said the stranger.     28   
  These words, uttered in a tone of surprise and reproach, recalled the Archdeacon’s attention to the stranger’s presence, though, to tell the truth, he had never, from the moment he crossed the threshold, quite turned away from this unknown guest. Indeed, it required the thousand reasons Claude had for humouring the all-powerful physician of Louis XI to make him consent to receive him thus accompanied. Therefore, his expression was none of the friendliest when Jacques Coictier said to him:     29   
  “By-the-bye, Dom Claude, I have brought a colleague, who was most desirous of seeing one of whom he has heard so much.”     30   
  “Monsieur is a scholar?” asked the Archdeacon, fixing Coictier’s companion with a penetrating eye. But from under the brows of the stranger he met a glance not less keen or less suspicious than his own.     31   
  He was, so far as one could judge by the feeble rays of the lamp, a man of about sixty, of middle height, and apparently ailing and broken. His face, although the features were sufficiently commonplace, had something commanding and severe; his eye glittered under the deep arch of his brow like a beacon-light far down a cavern; and under the cap, pulled down almost to his nose, one divined instinctively the broad forehead of a genius.     32   
  He took upon himself to answer the Archdeacon’s inquiry.     33   
  “Reverend sir,” said he in grave tones, “your fame has reached me, and I was desirous of consulting you. I am but a poor gentleman from the provinces who takes the shoes off his feet before entering the presence of the learned. I must acquaint you with my name: they call me Compère 2 Tourangeau.”     34   
  “Singular name for a gentleman,” thought the Archdeacon. Nevertheless, he felt himself in the presence of something powerful and commanding. The instinct of his high intelligence led him to suspect one no less high beneath the fur-trimmed cap of Compère Tourangeau; and as he scrutinized that quiet figure, the sneering smile that twitched round the corners of his morose mouth as he talked to Coictier faded slowly away, like the sunset glow from an evening sky.     35   
  He had seated himself again, gloomy and silent, in his great arm-chair, his elbow had resumed its accustomed place on the table, his head leaning on his hand.     36   
  After a few moments of deep reflection, he signed to his two visitors to be seated, and then addressed himself to Compère Tourangeau.     37   
  “You came to consult me, sir, and on what subject?”     38   
  “Your Reverence,” answered Tourangeau, “I am sick, very sick. Rumour says you are a great Æsculapius, and I am come to ask your advice as to a remedy.”     39   
  “A remedy!” exclaimed the Archdeacon, shaking his head. He seemed to consider for a moment, and then resumed: “Compère Tourangeau—since that is your name—turn your head. You will find my answer written on the wall.”     40   
  Tourangeau did as he was bid, and read the following inscription on the wall, above his head: “Medicine is the daughter of dreams.—IAMBLICHUS.”     41   
  Doctor Jacques Coictier had listened to his companion’s question with a vexation which Dom Claude’s answer only served to increase. He now leaned over to Tourangeau and whispered, too low for the Archdeacon’s ear: “Did I not warn you that he was a crack-brained fool? You were set upon seeing him.”     42   
  “But it might very well be that he is right in his opinion, this madman, Doctor Jacques,” returned his friend in the same tone, and with a bitter smile.     43   
  “Just as you please,” answered Coictier dryly. “You are very quick in your decision, Dom Claude, and Hippocrates apparently presents no more difficulties to you than a nut to a monkey. Medicine a dream! I doubt if the apothecaries and doctors, were they here, could refrain from stoning you. So you deny the influence of philters on the blood, of unguents on the flesh? You deny the existence of that eternal pharmacy of flowers and metals which we call the World, created expressly for the benefit of that eternal invalid we call Man!”     44   
  “I deny the existence,” answered Dom Claude coldly, “neither of the pharmacy nor the invalid. I deny that of the physician.”     45   
  “Then, I presume it is not true,” Coictier went on with rising hear, “that gout is an internal eruption; that a shotwound may be healed by the outward application of a roasted mouse; that young blood, injected in suitable quantities, will restore youth to aged veins; it is not true that two and two make four, and that emprosthotonos follows upon opisthotonos?”     46   
  “There are certain matters about which I think in a certain way,” the Archdeacon replied unmoved.     47   
  Coictier flushed an angry red.     48   
  “Come, come, my good Coictier, do not let us get angry,” said Compère Tourangeau, “the reverend Archdeacon is our host.”     49   
  Coictier calmed down, but growled to himself: “He’s a madman, for all that.”     50   
  “Pasque Dieu!” resumed Tourangeau, after a short silence; “you put me in a very embarrassing position, Maître Claude. I looked to obtaining two opinions from you, one as to my health, the other as to my star.”     51   
  “Monsieur,” returned the Archdeacon, “if that is your idea, you would have done better not to waste your health in mounting my stairs. I do not believe in medicine, and I do not believe in astrology.”     52   
  “Is that so?” exclaimed the good man in surprise.     53   
  Coictier burst into a forced laugh.     54   
  “You must admit now that he’s mad,” he said in low tones to Tourangeau; “he does not believe in astrology.”     55   
  “How can any one possibly believe,” continued Dom Claude, “that every ray of a star is a thread attached to a man’s head?”     56   
  “And what do you believe in then?” cried Tourangeau.     57   
  The Archdeacon hesitated for a moment, then, with a sombre smile which seemed to give the lie to his words, he answered, “Credo in Deum.”     58   
  “Dominum nostrum,” added Tourangeau, making the sign of the cross.     59   
  “Amen,” said Coictier.     60   
  “Reverend sir,” resumed Tourangeau, “I am charmed to my soul to find you so firm in the faith. But, erudite scholar that you are, have you reached the point of no longer believing in science?”     61   
  “No!” cried the Archdeacon, grasping Tourangeau’s arm, while a gleam of enthusiasm flashed in his sunken eye; “no, I do not deny science. I have not crawled so long on my belly with my nails dug in the earth through all the innumerable windings of that dark mine, without perceiving in the far distance—at the end of the dim passage—a light, a flame, a something; the reflection, no doubt, from that dazzling central laboratory in which the patient and the wise have come upon God.”     62   
  “And finally,” interrupted Tourangeau, “what do you hold for true and certain?”     63   
  “Alchemy!”     64   
  Coictier exclaimed aloud, “Pardieu, Dom Claude, there is doubtless much truth in alchemy, but why blaspheme against medicine and astrology?”     65   
  “Null is your science of man, your science of the heavens null,” said the Archdeacon imperiously.     66   
  “But that’s dealing hardly with Epidaurus and Chaldea,” returned the physician with a sneering laugh.     67   
  “Listen, Messire Jacques. I speak in all good faith. I am not physician to the King, and his Majesty did not give me a Labyrinth in which to observe the constellations. Nay, be not angry, but listen to what I say: what truths have you extracted from the study—I will not say of medicine, which is too foolish a matter—but from astrology? Explain to me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon, 3 or the treasures contained in the numeral ziruph, and in those of the numeral zephirod.”     68   
  “Will you deny,” said Coictier, “the sympathetic influence of the clavicula, and that it is the key to all cabalistic science?”     69   
  “Errors, Messire Jacques! None of your formulas have anything definite to show, whereas alchemy has its actual discoveries. Can you contest such results as these, for instance—ice, buried underground for two thousand years, is converted into rock crystal; lead is the progenitor of all metals (for gold is not a metal, gold is light); lead requires but four periods of two hundred years each to pass successively from the condition of lead to that of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to silver. Are these facts, or are they not? But to believe in the clavicula, in the mystic significance of the junction of two lines, in the stars, is as ridiculous as to believe, like the inhabitants of Cathay, that the oriole changes into a mole, and grains of wheat into crap-like fish.”     70   
  “I have studied hermetics,” cried Coictier, “and I affirm——”     71   
  The impetuous Archdeacon would not let him finish. “And I—I have studied medicine, astrology, and hermetics. Here alone is truth” (and as he spoke he took up one of those phials of glass of which mention has been made), “here alone is light! Hippocrates—a dream;—Urania a dream; Hermes—a phantasm. Gold is the sun; to make gold is to be God. There is the one and only science. I have sounded medicine and astrology to their depths—null, I tell you—null and void! The human body—darkness! the stars—darkness!”     72   
  He sank into his chair with a compelling and inspired gesture. Tourangeau observed him in silence; Coictier forced a disdainful laugh, shrugging his shoulders imperceptibly while he repeated under his breath, “Madman.”     73   
  “Well,” said Tourangeau suddenly, “and the transcendental result—have you achieved it? Have you succeeded in making gold?”     74   
  “If I had,” answered the Archdeacon, dropping his words slowly like a man in a reverie, “the name of the King of France would be Claude and not Louis.”     75   
  Tourangeau bent his brow.     76   
  “Pah, what am I saying?” resumed Dom Claude with a disdainful smile. “What would the throne of France be to me when I could reconstruct the Empire of the East?”     77   
  “Well done!” exclaimed Tourangeau.     78   
  “Poor ass!” murmured Coictier.     79   
  “No,” the Archdeacon went on, as if in answer to his own thoughts, “I am still crawling, still bruising my face and my Knees against the stones of the subterranean path. Fitful glimpses I catch, but nothing clear. I cannot read—I am but conning the alphabet.”     80   
  “And when you have learned to read, will you be able to make gold?”     81   
  “Who doubts it?” answered the Archdeacon.     82   
  “In that case—Our Lady knows I am in dire need of money—I would gladly learn to read in your books. Tell me, reverend master, is not your science inimical and displeasing to Our Lady, thing you?”     83   
  To this question of Tourangeau’s Dom Claude contented himself by making answer with quiet dignity, “Whose priest am I?”     84   
  “True, true, master. Well, then, will it please you to initiate me? Let me learn to spell with you?”     85   
  Claude assumed the majestic and sacerdotal attitude of a Samuel.     86   
  “Old man, it would require more years than yet remain to you to undertake this journey across the world of mystery. Your head is very gray! One emerges from the cave with white hair, but one must enter it with black. Science knows very well how to furrow and wither up the face of man without assistance; she has no need that age should bring to her faces that are already wrinkled. Nevertheless, if you are possessed by the desire to put yourself under tutelage at your age, and to decipher the awful alphabet of Wisdom, well and good, come to me, I will do what I can. I will not bid you, poor graybeard, go visit the sepulchral chambers of the Pyramids, of which the ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower of Babylon, nor the vast marble sanctuary of the Indian Temple of Eklinga. I have not seen, any more than you have, the Chaldean walls built in accordance with the sacred formula of Sikra, nor the Temple of Solomon which was destroyed, nor the stone doors of the sepulchres of the Kings, of Israel which are broken in pieces. Such fragments of the Book of Hermes as we have here will suffice us. I will explain to you the statue of Saint-Christopher, the symbol of the Sower, and that of the two angels in the door of the Sainte-Chapelle, of whom one has his hand in a stone vessel, and the other in a cloud.”     87   
  Here Jacques Coictier, who had been quite confounded by the Archdeacon’s tempestuous flow of eloquence, recovered his composure and struck in with the triumphant tone of one scholar setting another right:     88   
  “Erras, amice Claudi—there you are in error. The symbol is not the numeral. You mistake Orpheus for Hermes.”     89   
  “It is you who are in error,” returned the Archdeacon with dignity; “Dædalus is the foundation; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the edifice—the whole structure. Come whenever it please you,” he continued, turning to Tourangeau. “I will show you the particles of gold left in the bottom of Nicolas Flamel’s crucible which you can compare with the gold of Guillaume de Paris. I will instruct you in the secret virtues of the Greek word peristera. But before all things, you shall read, one after another, the letters of the marble alphabet, the pages of the granite book. We will go from the doorway of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond to the Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house of Nicolas Flamel in the Rue Marivault, to his tomb in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, to his two hospices in the Rue de Montmorency. You shall read the hieroglyphics with which the four great iron bars in the porch of the Hospice of Saint-Gervais are covered. Together we will spell out the façades of Saint-Côme, of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents, Saint-Martin, Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie——”     90   
  For some time past, Tourangeau, with all his intelligence, appeared unable to follow Dom Claude. He broke in now:     91   
  “Pasque Dieu! but what are these books of yours?”     92   
  “Here is one,” replied the Archdeacon; and opening the window of his cell, he pointed to the mighty Cathedral of Notre Dame, the black silhouette of its two towers, its stone sides, and its huge roof sharply outlined against the starry sky, and looking like an enormous two-headed sphinx crouching in the midst of the city.     93   
  For some moments the Archdeacon contemplated the gigantic edifice in silence; then, sighing deeply, he pointed with his right hand to the printed book lying open on his table, and with his left to Notre Dame, and casting a mournful glance from the book to the church:     94   
  “Alas!” he said. “This will destroy that.”     95   
  Coictier, who had bent eagerly over the book, could not repress an exclamation of disappointment. “Hé! but what is there so alarming in this? Glossa in Epistolas Pauli, Norimbergæ, Antonius Koburger, 1474. That is not new. It is a book of Petrus Lombardus, the Magister Sententiarum. Do you mean because it is printed?”     96   
  “You have said it,” returned Claude, who stood apparently absorbed in profound meditation, with his finger on the folio which had issued from the famous printing-press of Nuremberg. Presently he uttered these dark words: “Woe! woe! the small brings down the great; a tooth triumphs over a whole mass! The Nile rat destroys the crocodile, the sword-fish destroys the whale, the book will destroy the edifice!”     97   
  The curfew of the cloister rang at this moment as Doctor Jacques whispered to his companion his everlasting refrain of “He is mad!” To which the companion replied this time, “I believe he is.”     98   
  It was the hour after which no stranger might remain in the cloister. The two visitors prepared to retire.     99   
  “Maître,” said Compère Tourangeau, as he took leave of the Archdeacon, “I have a great regard for scholars and great spirits, and I hold you in peculiar esteem. Come tomorrow to the Palais des Tournelles, and ask for the Abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours.”    100   
  The Archdeacon returned to his cell dumfounded, comprehending at last who the personage calling himself Compère Tourangeau really was: for he called to mind this passage in the Charter of Saint-Martin of Tours: Abbas, beati Martini, scilicet Rex Franciæ, est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam præbendam quam habet sanctus, Venantius, et debet sedere in sede thesaurii. 4    101   
  It is asserted that from that time onward the Archdeacon conferred frequently with Louis XI, whenever his Majesty came to Paris, and that the King’s regard for Dom Claude put Oliver le Daim and Jacques Coictier quite in the shade, the latter of whom, as was his custom, rated the King soundly in consequence.    102   


Note 1.  Of Predestination and Free-Will. [back]   
Note 2.  Goodman, gossip. [back]   
Note 3.  Writing from right to left and back again from left to right without breaking off the lines. [back]   
Note 4.  The Abbot of Saint-Martin, that is to say the King of France, is canon, according to custom, and has the small benefice which Saint-Venantis had, and shall sit in the seat of the treasurer. [back]

Book V   
II. This Will Destroy That   
     
OUR fair readers must forgive us if we halt a moment here and endeavour to unearth the idea hidden under the Archdeacon’s enigmatical words:      1   
  “This will destroy That. The Book will destroy the Edifice.”      2   
  To our mind, this thought has two aspects. In the first place it was a view pertaining to the priest—it was the terror of the ecclesiastic before a new force—printing. It was the servant of the dim sanctuary scared and dazzled by the light that streamed from Gutenberg’s press. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken and the written word quailing before the printed word—something of the stupefaction of the sparrow at beholding the Heavenly Host spread their six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the far-off roar and tumult of emancipated humanity; who, gazing into the future, sees intelligence sapping the foundations of faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off the yoke of Rome; the prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought volatilized by the press, evaporating out to the theocratic receiver; the terror of the besieged soldier gazing at the steel battering-ram and saying to himself, “The citadel must fall.” It signified that one great power was to supplant another great power. It meant, The Printing-Press will destroy the Church.      3   
  But underlying this thought—the first and no doubt the less complex of the two—there was, in our opinion, a second, a more modern—a corollary to the former idea, less on the surface and more likely to be contested; a view fully as philosophic, but pertaining no longer exclusively to the priest, but to the scholar and the artist likewise. It was a premonition that human thought, in changing its outward form, was also about to change its outward mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would, in future, be embodied in a new material, a new fashion; that the book of stone, so solid and so enduring, was to give way to the book of paper, more solid and more enduring still. In this respect the vague formula of the Archdeacon had a second meaning—that one Art would dethrone another Art: Printing will destroy Architecture.      4   
  In effect, from the very beginning of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era inclusive, architecture is the great book of the human race, man’s chief means of expressing the various stages of his development, whether physical or mental.      5   
  When the memory of the primitive races began to be surcharged, when the load of tradition carried about by the human family grew so heavy and disordered that the word, naked and fleeting, ran danger of being lost by the way, they transcribed it on the ground by the most visible, the most lasting, and at the same time most natural means. They enclosed each tradition in a monument.      6   
  The first monuments were simply squares of rock “which had not been touched by iron,” as says Moses. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. A stone was planted upright and it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and on every hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column. Thus did the primitive races act at the same moment over the entire face of the globe. One finds the “upright stone” of the Celts in Asiatic Siberia and on the pampas of America.      7   
  Presently they constructed words. Stone was laid upon stone, these granite syllables were coupled together, the word essayed some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words—some of them, the tumulus in particular, are proper names. Occasionally, when there were many stones and a vast expanse of ground, they wrote a sentence. The immense mass of stones at Karnac is already a complete formula.      8   
  Last of all they made books. Traditions had ended by bringing forth symbols, under which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree under its foliage. These symbols, in which all humanity believed, continued to grow and multiply, becoming more and more complex; the primitive monuments—themselves scarcely expressing the original traditions, and, like them, simple, rough-hewn, and planted in the soil—no longer sufficed to contain them; they overflowed at every point. Of necessity the symbol must expand into the edifice. Architecture followed the development of human thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads, a thousand arms, and caught and concentrated in one eternal, visible, tangible form all this floating symbolism. While Dædalus, who is strength, was measuring; while Orpheus, who is intelligence, was singing—the pillar, which is a letter; the arch, which is a syllable; the pyramid, which is a word, set in motion at once by a law of geometry and a law of poetry, began to group themselves together, to combine, to blend, to sink, to rise, stood side by side on the ground, piled themselves up into the sky, till, to the dictation of the prevailing idea of the epoch, they had written these marvelous books which are equally marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Pyramids of Egypt, and the Temple of Solomon.      9   
  The parent idea, the Word, was not only contained in the foundation of these edifices, but in their structure. Solomon’s Temple, for example, was not simply the cover of the sacred book, it was the sacred book itself. On each of its concentric enclosures the priest might read the Word translated and made manifest to the eye, might follow its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, till at last he could lay hold upon it in its final tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which yet was architecture—the Ark. Thus the Word was enclosed in the edifice, but its image was visible on its outer covering, like the human figure depicted on the coffin of a mummy.     10   
  Again, not only the structure of the edifice but its situation revealed the idea it embodied. According as the thought to be expressed was gracious or sombre, Greece crowned her mountains with temples harmonious to the eye; India disembowelled herself to hew out those massive subterranean pagodas which are supported by rows of gigantic granite elephants.     11   
  Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world—from the most immemorial temple of Hindustan to the Cathedral at Cologne—architecture has been the great manuscript of the human race. And this is true to such a degree, that not only every religious symbol, but every human thought, has its page and its memorial in that vast book.     12   
  Every civilization begins with theocracy and ends with democracy.     13   
  The reign of many masters succeeding the reign of one is written in architecture. For—and this point we must emphasize—it must not be supposed that it is only capable of building temples, of expressing only the sacerdotal myth and symbolism, of transcribing in hieroglyphics on its stone pages the mysterious Tables of the Law. Were this the case, then—seeing that in every human society there comes a moment when the sacred symbol is worn out, and is obliterated by the free thought, when the man breaks away from the priest, when the growth of philosophies and systems eats away the face of religion—architecture would be unable to reproduce this new phase of the human mind: its leaves, written upon the right side, would be blank on the reverse; its work would be cut short; its book incomplete. But that is not the case.     14   
  Take, for example, the epoch of the Middle Ages, which is clearer to us because it is nearer. During its first period, while theocracy is organizing Europe, while the Vatican is collecting and gathering round it the elements of a new Rome, constructed out of the Rome which lay in fragments round the Capitol, while Christianity goes forth to search among the ruins of a former civilization, and out of its remains to build up a new hierarchic world of which sacerdotalism is the keystone, we hear it stirring faintly through the chaos; then gradually, from under the breath of Christianity, from under the hands of the barbarians, out of the rubble of dead architectures, Greek and Roman—there emerges that mysterious Romanesque architecture, sister of the theocratic buildings of Egypt and India, inalterable emblem of pure Catholicism, immutable hieroglyph of papal unity. The whole tendency of the time is written in this sombre Romanesque style. Everywhere it represents authority, unity, the imperturbable, the absolute, Gregory VII; always the priest, never the man: everywhere the caste, never the people.     15   
  Then come the Crusades, a great popular movement, and every popular movement, whatever its cause or its aim, has as its final precipitation the spirit of liberty. Innovations struggled forth to the light. At this point begins the stormy period of the Peasant wars, the revolts of the Burghers, the Leagues of the Princes. Authority totters, unity is split and branches off into two directions. Feudalism demands to divide the power with theocracy before the inevitable advent of the people, who, as ever, will take the lion’s share—Quia nominor leo. Hence we see feudalism thrusting up through theocracy, and the people’s power again through feudalism. The whole face of Europe is altered. Very good; the face of architecture alters with it. Like civilization, she has turned a page, and the new spirit of the times finds her prepared to write to his dictation. She has brought home with her from the crusades the pointed arch, as the nations have brought free thought. Henceforward, as Rome is gradually dismembered, so the Romanesque architecture dies out. The hieroglyphic deserts the Cathedral, and goes to assist heraldry in heightening the prestige of feudalism. The Cathedral itself, once so imbued with dogma, invaded now by the commonalty, by the spirit of freedom, escapes from the priest, and falls under the dominion of the artist. The artist fashions it after his own good pleasure. Farewell to mystery, to myth, to rule. Here fantasy and caprice are a law unto themselves. Provided the priest has his basilica and his altar, he has nothing further to say in the matter. The four walls belong to the artist. The stone book belongs no more to the priest, to religion, to Rome, but to imagination, to poetry, to the people. From thenceforward occur these rapid and innumerable transformations of an architecture only lasting three centuries, so striking after the six or seven centuries of stagnant immobility of the Romanesque style. Meanwhile, Art marches on with giant strides, and popular originality plays what was formerly the Bishop’s part. Each generation in passing inscribes its line in the book; it rubs out the ancient Roman hieroglyphics from the frontispiece—hardly that one sees here and there some dogma glimmering faintly through the new symbol overlying it. The framework of religion is scarcely perceptible through this new drapery. One can scarcely grasp the extent of the license practised at that time by the architects, even on the churches. Such are the shamelessly intertwined groups of monks and nuns on the capitals of the Gallery of Chimney-Pieces in the Palais de Justice; the episode out of the history of Noah sculptured “to the letter” over the Cathedral door at Bourges; the bacchic monk, with ass’s ears and glass in hand, grinning in the face of a whole congregation, carved on a stone basin of the Abbey of Bocherville. For the thought written in stone there existed at that period a privilege perfectly comparable to the present liberty of the press. It was the liberty of architecture.     16   
  And the liberty went far. At times a door, a façade, nay, even an entire church, presents a symbolical meaning wholly unconnected with worship, even inimical to the Church itself. In the thirteenth century, Guillaume of Paris, and in the fifteenth, Nicolas Flamel wrote such seditious pages. Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was a complete volume of opposition.     17   
  This was the only form, however, in which free thought was possible, and therefore found full expression only in those books called edifices. Under that form it might have looked on at its own burning at the hands of the common hangman had it been so imprudent as to venture into manuscript: the thought embodied in the church door would have assisted at the death agony of the thought expressed in the book. Therefore, having but this one outlet, it rushed towards it from all parts; and hence the countless mass of Cathedrals spread over all Europe, a number so prodigious that it seems incredible, even after verifying it with one’s own eyes. All the material, all the intellectual forces of society, converged to that one point—architecture. In this way, under the pretext of building churches to the glory of God, the art developed to magnificent proportions.     18   
  In those days, he who was born a poet became an architect. All the genius scattered among the masses and crushed down on every side under feudalism, as under a testudo of brazen bucklers, finding no outlet but in architecture, escaped by way of that art, and its epics found voice in cathedrals. All other arts obeyed and put themselves at the service of the one. They were the artisans of the great work; the architect summed up in his own person, sculpture, which carved his façade; painting, which dyed his windows in glowing colours; music, which set his bells in motion and breathed in his organ pipes. Even poor Poetry—properly so called, who still persisted in eking out a meagre existence in manuscript—was obliged, if she was to be recognised at all, to enroll herself in the service of the edifice, either as hymn or prosody; the small part played, after all, by the tragedies of æschylus in the sacerdotal festivals of Greece, and the Book of Genesis in the Temple of Solomon.     19   
  Thus, till Gutenberg’s time, architecture is the chief, the universal form of writing; in this stone book, begun by the East, continued by Ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages have written the last page. For the rest, this phenomenon of an architecture belonging to the people succeeding an architecture belonging to a caste, which we have observed in the Middle Ages, occurs in precisely analogous stages in human intelligence at other great epochs of history. Thus—to sum up here in a few lines a law which would call for volumes to do it justice—in the Far East, the cradle of primitive history, after Hindu architecture comes the Phœnician, that fruitful mother of Arabian architecture; in antiquity, Egyptian architecture—of which the Etruscan style and the Cyclopean monuments are but a variety—is succeeded by the Greek, of which the Roman is merely a prolongation burdened with the Carthaginian dome; in modern times, after Romanesque architecture comes the Gothic. And if we separate each of these three divisions, we shall find that the three elder sisters—Hindu, Egyptian, and Roman architecture—stand for the same idea: namely, theocracy, caste, unity, dogma, God; and that the three younger sisters—Phœnician, Greek, Gothic—whatever the diversity of expression inherent to their nature, have also the same significance: liberty, the people, humanity.     20   
  Call him Brahmin, Magi, or Pope, according as you speak of Hindu, Egyptian, or Roman buildings, it is always the priest, and nothing but the priest. Very different are the architectures of the people; they are more opulent and less saintly. In the Phœnician you see the merchant, in the Greek the republican, in the Gothic the burgess.     21   
  The general characteristics of all theocratic architectures are immutability, horror of progress, strict adherence to traditional lines, the consecration of primitive types, the adaptation of every aspect of man and nature to the incomprehensible whims of symbolism. Dark and mysterious book, which only the initiated can decipher! Furthermore, every form, every deformity even, in them has a meaning which renders it inviolable. Never ask of Hindu, Egyptian, or Roman architecture to change its designs or perfect its sculpture. To it, improvement in any shape or form is an impiety. Here the rigidity of dogma seems spread over the stone like a second coating of petrifaction.     22   
  On the other hand, the main characteristics of the popular architectures are diversity, progress, originality, richness of design, perpetual change. They are already sufficiently detached from religion to take thought for their beauty, to tend it, to alter and improve without ceasing their garniture of statues and arabesques. They go with their times. They have something human in them which they constantly infuse into the divine symbols in which they continue to express themselves. Here you get edifices accessible to every spirit, every intelligence, every imagination; symbolic still, but as easily understood as the signs of Nature. Between this style of architecture and the theocratic there is the same difference as between the sacred and the vulgar tongue, between hieroglyphics and art, between Solomon and Phidias.     23   
  In fact, if we sum up what we have just roughly pointed out—disregarding a thousand details of proof and also exceptions to the rule—it comes briefly to this: that down to the fifteenth century, architecture was the chief recorder of the human race; that during that space no single thought that went beyond the absolutely fundamental, but was embodied in some edifice; that every popular idea, like every religious law, has had its monuments; finally, that the human race has never conceived an important thought that it has not written down in stone. And why? Because every thought, whether religious or philosophic, is anxious to be perpetuated; because the idea which has stirred one generation longs to stir others, and to leave some lasting trace. But how precarious is the immortality of the manuscript! How far more solid, enduring, and resisting a book is the edifice! To destroy the written word there is need only of a torch and a Turk. To destroy the constructed word there is need of a social revolution, a terrestrial upheaval. The barbarians swept over the Coliseum; the deluge, perhaps, over the Pyramids.     24   
  In the fifteenth century all is changed.     25   
  Human thought discovers a means of perpetuating itself, not only more durable and more resisting than architecture, but also simpler and more easy of achievement. Architecture is dethroned, the stone letters of Orpheus must give way to Gutenberg’s letters of lead.     26   
  The Book will destroy the Edifice.     27   
  The invention of printing is the greatest event of history. It is the parent revolution; it is a fundamental change in mankind’s mode of expression; it is human thought putting off one shape to don another; it is the complete and definite sloughing of the skin of that serpent who, since the days of Adam, has symbolized intelligence.     28   
  Under the form of printing, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, intangible, indestructible; it mingles with the very air. In the reign of architecture it became a mountain, and took forceful possession of an era, of a country. Now it is transformed into a flock of birds, scattering to the four winds and filling the whole air and space.     29   
  We repeat: who does not admit that in this form thought is infinitely more indelible? The stone has become inspired with life. Durability has been exchanged for immortality. One can demolish substance, but how extirpate ubiquity? Let a deluge come—the birds will still be flying above the waters long after the mountain has sunk from view; and let but a single ark float upon the face of the cataclysm, and they will seek safety upon it and there await the subsiding of the waters; and the new world rising out of this chaos will behold when it wakes, hovering over it, winged and unharmed, the thought of the world that has gone down.     30   
  And when one notes that this mode of expression is not only the most preservative, but also the simplest, the most convenient, the most practicable for all; when one considers that it is not hampered by a great weight of tools and clumsy appurtenances; when one compares the thought, forced, in order to translate itself into an edifice, to call to its assistance four or five other arts and tons of gold, to collect a mountain of stones, a forest of wood, a nation of workmen—when one compares this with the thought that only asks for a little paper, a little ink, and a pen in order to become a book, is it any wonder that human intelligence deserted architecture for printing?     31   
  Then observe too, how, after the discovery of printing, architecture gradually becomes dry, withered, naked; how the water visibly sinks, the sap ceases to rise, the thought of the times and of the peoples deserts it. This creeping paralysis is hardly perceptible in the fifteenth century, the press is too feeble as yet, and what it does abstract from all-powerful architecture is but the superfluity of its strength. But by the sixteenth century the malady is pronounced. Already architecture is no longer the essential expression of social life; it assumes miserable classic airs; from Gallican, European, indigenous, it becomes bastard Greek and Roman, from the genius and the modern it becomes pseudo-antique. This decadence we call the Renaissance—a magnificent decadence nevertheless, for the ancient Gothic genius, that sun now sinking behind the gigantic printing-press of Mayence, sheds for a little while its last rays over this hybrid mass of Romanesque arches and Corinthian colonnades.     32   
  And it is this sunset that we take for the dawn of a new day.     33   
  However, from the moment that architecture is nothing more than an art like any other—is no longer the sum total of art, the sovereign, the tyrant—it is powerless to monopolize the services of the others, who accordingly emancipate themselves, throw off the yoke of the architect and go their separate ways. Each art gains by this divorce. Thus isolated, each waxes great. Stone-masonry becomes sculpture; pious illumination, painting; the restricted chant blooms out into concerted music. It is like an empire falling asunder on the death of its Alexander, and each province becoming an independent kingdom.     34   
  For here begins the period of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina—those luminaries of the dazzling firmament of the sixteenth century.     35   
  And with the arts, thought, too, breaks its bonds on all sides. The free-thinkers of the Middle Ages had already inflicted deep wounds on Catholicism. The sixteenth century rends religious unity in pieces. Before printing, the Reformation would merely have been a schism: printing made it a revolution. Take away the press, and heresy is paralyzed. Look on it as fatal or providential, Gutenberg is the forerunner of Luther.     36   
  But when the sun of the Middle Ages has wholly set, when the radiance of Gothic genius has faded forever from the horizon of art, architecture, too, grows slowly pale, wan and lifeless. The printed book, that gnawing worm, sucks the life-blood from her and devours her. She droops, she withers, she wastes away before the eye. She becomes mean and poor, of no account, conveying nothing to the mind—not even the memory of the art of other days. Reduced to her own exertions, deserted by the other arts because human thought has left her in the lurch, she has to employ the artisan in default of the artist. Plain glass replaces the glowing church window, the stone-mason the sculptor; farewell to vital force, to originality, life or intelligence; as a lamentable beggar of the studios she drags herself from copy to copy. Michael Angelo, doubtless sensible of her approaching end, made one last despairing effort in her aid. That Titan of the world of art piled the Pantheon on the Parthenon and so made Saint-Peter’s of Rome—a gigantic work that deserved to remain unique, the last originality of architecture, the signature of a mighty artist at the bottom of the colossal register of stone thus closed. But Michael Angelo once dead, what does this wretched architecture do, which only survives as a spectre, as a shade? She takes Saint-Peter’s and copies, parodies it. It becomes a mania with her, a thing to weep at: in the seventeenth century the Val-de-Grâce, in the eighteenth, Sainte-Geneviève. Every country has its Saint-Peter’s. London has hers, St. Petersburg hers, Paris even two or three—a legacy of triviality, the last drivellings of a grand but decrepit art, fallen into second childhood before its final dissolution.     37   
  If, instead of the characteristic monuments like those of which we have spoken, we examine the general aspect of the art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we shall find everywhere the same evidences of decrepitude and decay. From the time of Francis II the form of the edifice lets the geometrical outline show through more and more, like the bony framework through the skin of an emaciated body. The generous curves of art give place to the cold and inexorable lines of geometry. An edifice is no longer an edifice, it is a polyhedron. Architecture, however, is at infinite pains to cover her nakedness, and hence the Greek pediment set in the Roman pediment and vice versa. It is always the Pantheon on the Parthenon, Saint-Peter’s at Rome. Such are the brick houses with stone corners of the time of Henri IV, the Place Royale, the Place Dauphine. Such are the churches of Louis XIII, heavy, squat, compressed, with a dome like a hump. Thus, too, is the Mazarin architecture, the poor Italian pasticcio of the Quatre-Nations, the palaces of Louis XIV, mere court barracks, endless, frigid, wearisome; and finally, the style of Louis XV with its chicory-leaf and vermicelli ornaments, and all the warts and growths disfiguring that aged, toothless, demoralized coquette. From Francis II to Louis XV the malady progressed in geometrical ratio. The art is reduced to skin and bone, her life ebbs miserably away.     38   
  Meanwhile, what of the art of printing? All the vital force taken from architecture streams to her. As architecture sinks, so printing rises and expands. The store of strength spent hitherto by human thought on edifices is now bestowed on books; till, by the sixteenth century, the press, grown now to the level of her shrunken rival, wrestles with her and prevails. In the seventeenth century she is already so absolute, so victorious, so firmly established on her throne, that she can afford to offer to the world the spectacle of a great literary era. In the eighteenth century, after long idleness at the Court of Louis XIV, she takes up again the ancient sword of Luther, thrusts it into Voltaire’s hand, and runs full tilt at that antiquated Europe whom she has already robbed of all architectural expression. Thus, as the eighteenth century ends she has accomplished her work of destruction; with the nineteenth century she begins to construct.     39   
  Now which of these two arts, we ask, represents in truth the course of human thought during three centuries; which of the two transmits, expresses, not only its fleeting literary and scholastic fashions, but its vast, profound, all-embracing tendencies? Which of the two has fitted itself like a skin, without a crease or gap, over that thousand-footed, never-resting monster, the human race? Architecture or Printing?     40   
  Printing. Let no one mistake: architecture is dead—dead beyond recall, killed by the printed book, killed because it is less durable, killed because it is more costly. Every Cathedral represents a million. Imagine now the sums necessary for the rewriting of that architectural tome; for those countless edifices to spread once more over the land; to return to the days when their abundance was such that from the testimony of an eye-witness “you would have thought that the world had cast off its old raiment and clad itself anew in a white raiment of churches.” Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, candidam ecclesiarum vestem indueret. (GLABER RUDOLPHUS.)     41   
  A book takes so little time in the making, costs so little, and can reach so far. What wonder that human thought should choose that path? Though this is not to say that architecture will not, from time to time, put forth some splendid monument, some isolated master-piece. There is no reason why, under the reign of printing, we should not, some time or other, have an obelisk constructed, say, by an entire army out of melted cannon, as, under the reign of architecture, we had the Iliads, the Romants, the Mahabharatas, and the Nibelungen, built by whole nations with the welded fragments of a thousand epics. The great good fortune of possessing an architect of genius may befall the twentieth century, as Dante came to the thirteenth. But architecture will never again be the social, the collective, the dominant art. The great epic, the great monument, the great master-piece of mankind will never again be built; it will be printed.     42   
  And even if, by some fortuitous accident, architecture should revive, she will never again be mistress. She will have to submit to those laws which she once imposed upon literature. The respective positions of the two arts will be reversed. Certainly, under the reign of architecture, the poems—rare, it is true—resemble the monuments of the time. The Indian Vyasa is strange, variegated, unfathomable, like the native pagoda. In Egypt the poetry shares the grand and tranquil lines of the edifices; in ancient Greece it has their beauty, serenity, and calm; in Christian Europe, the majesty of the Church, the simplicity of the people, the rich and luxuriant vegetation of a period of rebirth. The Bible corresponds to the Pyramids, the Iliad to the Parthenon, Homer to Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothic minster.     43   
  Thus, to put it shortly, mankind has two books, two registers, two testaments: Architecture and Printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper. Doubtless, in contemplating these two Bibles, spread open wide through the centuries, one is fain to regret the visible majesty of the granite writing, those gigantic alphabets in the shape of colonnades, porches, and obelisks; these mountains, as it were, the work of man’s hand spread over the whole world and filling the past, from the pyramid to the steeple, from Cheops to Strassburg. The past should be read in these marble pages; the books written by architecture can be read and reread, with never-diminishing interest; but one cannot deny the grandeur of the edifice which printing has raised in its turn.     44   
  That edifice is colossal. I do not know what statistician it was who calculated that by piling one upon another all the volumes issued from the press since Gutenberg, you would bridge the space between the earth and the moon—but it is not to that kind of greatness we allude. Nevertheless, if we try to form a collective picture of the combined results of printing down to our own times, does it not appear as a huge structure, having the whole world for foundation, and the whole human race for its ceaselessly active workmen, and whose pinnacles tower up into the impenetrable mist of the future? It is the swarming ant-hill of intellectual forces; the hive to which all the golden-winged messengers of the imagination return, laden with honey. This prodigious edifice has a thousand storeys, and remains forever incomplete. The press, that giant engine, incessantly absorbing all the intellectual forces of society, disgorges, as incessantly, new materials for its work. The entire human race is on the scaffolding; every mind is a mason. Even the humblest can fill up a gap, or lay another brick. Each day another layer is put on. Independently of the individual contribution, there are certain collective donations. The eighteenth century presents the Encyclopedia, the Revolution the Moniteur. Undoubtedly this, too, is a structure, growing and piling itself up in endless spiral lines; here, too, there is confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labour, a furious contest between the whole of mankind, an ark of refuge for the intelligence against another deluge, against another influx of barbarism.     45   
  It is the second Tower of Babel.

Book VI   
I. An Impartial Glance at the Ancient Magistracy   
     
A MIGHTY fortunate personage in the year of grace 1482, was the noble knight, Robert d’Estouteville, Sieur of Beyne, Baron of Ivry and Saint-Andry in the March, Councillor and Chamberlain to the King, and Warden of the Provostry of Paris. It was well-nigh seventeen years ago since he had received from the King, on November 7, 1465—the year of the comet 1 —this fine appointment of Provost of Paris, reputed rather a seigneurie than an office. Dignitas, says Joannes Lœmnœus, quæ, cum non exigua potestate politiam concernente, atque prærogativis multis et juribus conjuncta est. 2 It was indeed a thing to marvel at that in 1482 a gentleman should be holding the King’s commission, whose letters of appointment dated back to the date of the marriage of a natural daughter of Louis XI with Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon. On the same day on which Robert d’Estouteville had replaced Jacques de Villiers in the Provostry of Paris, Maître Jehan Dauvet superseded Messire Hélye de Thorrettes as Chief President of the Court of Parliament, Jehan Jouvenel des Ursins supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of Chancellor of France, and Regnault des Dormans turned Pierre Puy out of the post of Master of Common Pleas to the royal palace. But over how many heads had that Presidency, that Chancellorship, and that Mastership passed since Robert d’Estouteville held the Provostship of Paris! It had been “given unto his keeping,” said the letters patent; and well indeed had he kept the same. He had clung to it, incorporated himself into it, had so identified himself with it that he had managed to escape that mania for change which so possessed Louis XI, a close-fisted, scheming king, who sought to maintain, by frequent appointments and dismissals, the elasticity of his power. Furthermore, the worthy knight had procured the reversion of his post for his son, and for two years now the name of the noble M. Jacques d’Estouteville, Knight, had figured beside that of his father at the head of the roll of the Provostry of Paris—in truth, a rare and signal favour! To be sure, Robert d’Estouteville was a good soldier, had loyally raised his banner for the King against the “League of the Public Weal,” and on the entry of the Queen into Paris in 14—had presented her with a wonderful stag composed of confectionery. Besides this, he was on a very friendly footing with Messire Tristan l’Hermite, Provost-Marshal of the King’s palace. So Messire Robert’s existence was an easy and pleasant one. First of all, he enjoyed very good pay, to which were attached and hanging like extra grapes on his vine, the revenues from the civil and criminal registries of the Provostry, the revenues, civil and criminal, accruing from the auditory courts of the Châtelet, not to speak of many a comfortable little toll-due from the bridges of Mantes and Corbeil, and the profits from the taxes levied on the grain-dealers, as on the measurers of wood and salt. Add to this, the pleasure of displaying on his official rides through the city—in shining contrast to the party-coloured gowns, half red, half tan, of the sheriffs and district officers—his fine military accoutrements, which you may admire to this day, sculptured on his tomb in the Valmont Abbey in Normandy, and his morion with all the bruises in it got at Montlhæry. Then, it was no mean thing to have authority over the constables of the Palais de Justice, over the warder and the Commandant of the Châtelet, the two auditors of the Châtelet (auditores Castelleti), the sixteen commissioners of the sixteen districts, the jailer of the Châtelet, the four enfeoffed officers of the peace, the hundred and twenty mounted officers of the peace, the hundred and twenty officers of the rod, the captain of the watch with his patrol, his under-patrol, his counter-and-night-patrol. Was it nothing to exercise supreme and secondary jurisdiction, to have the right of pillory, hanging, and dragging at the cart’s tail, besides minor jurisdiction in the first resort (in prima instantia, as the old charters have it) over the whole viscomty of Paris, so gloriously endowed with the revenues of seven noble bailiwicks? Can you conceive of anything more gratifying than to mete out judgment and sentence, as Messire Robert d’Estouteville did every day in the Grand Châtelet, under the wide, low-pitched Gothic arches of Philip Augustus; and to retire, as he was wont, every evening to that charming house in Rue Galilée, within the purlieus of the Palais Royal, which he held by right of his wife, Dame Ambroise de Loré, where he could rest from the fatigues of having sent some poor devil to pass the night on his part in that “little cell of the Rue de l’Escorcherie, which the provosts and sheriffs of Paris frequently used as a prison—the same measuring eleven feet in length, seven feet and four inches in width, and eleven feet in height?” 3      1   
  And not only had Messire Robert d’Estouteville his special jurisdictional offices as Provost of Paris, but also he had his seat, with power over life and death, in the King’s Supreme Court. There was no head of any account but had passed through his hands before falling to the executioner. It was he who had fetched the Comte de Nemours from the Bastille Saint-Antoine, to convey him to the Halles; he who had escorted the Comte de Saint-Pol to the Place de Grève, who stormed and wept, to the huge delight of Monsieur the Provost, who bore no love to Monsieur the Constable.      2   
  Here, assuredly, was more than sufficient to make a man’s life happy and illustrious and to merit some day a noteworthy page in that interesting chronicle of the Provosts of Paris, from which we learn that Oudard de Villeneuve owned a house in the Rue des Boucheries, that Guillaume de Hangast bought the great and the little Savoie mansion, that Guillaume Thiboust gave his houses in the Rue Clopin to the Sisters of Sainte-Geneviève, that Hugues Aubriot lived in the Hôtel du Porc-epic, and other facts of a domestic character.      3   
  Nevertheless, in spite of all these reasons for taking life easily and pleasantly, Messire Robert d’Estouteville had risen on the morning of January 7, 1482, feeling as sulky and dangerous in temper as a bear with a sore head; why, he would have been at a loss to say. Was it because the sky was gloomy? because the buckle of his old sword-belt—another relic of Montlhéry—was clasped too tight, and girded up his fair, round, provostorial port in all too military a fashion—or because he had just seen a band of tattered varlets, who had jeered at him as they passed below his windows walking four abreast, in doublets without shirts, in hats without brims, and wallet and bottle hanging at their sides?      4   
  Or was it the vague premonition of the loss of those three hundred and seventy livres, sixteen sols, eight deniers, of which in the following year the future King Charles VIII was going to dock the revenues of the Provostry? The reader may take his choice, but for our part we are inclined to the opinion that he was in bad temper because—he was in a bad temper.      5   
  Besides, it was the day after a holiday, a day distasteful to everybody, especially to the magistrate whose business it was to sweep up all the dirt—literally and figuratively—which a Paris holiday inevitably brings with it. Then, too, he was to sit that day at the Grand Châtelet; and we have noticed that the judges generally manage that their day of sitting shall also be their day of ill-humour, in that they may have some one on whom conveniently to vent their spleen in the name of the King, justice, and the law.      6   
  The sitting, however, had begun without him. His deputies in civil, criminal, and private causes were acting for him as usual; and by eight o’clock in the morning, some scores of townsfolk, men and women, crowded up between the wall and a strong barrier of oak in a dark corner of the court of the Châtelet, were blissfully assisting at the varied and exhilarating spectacle of the law, civil and criminal, as administered by Maître Florian Barbedienne, examining judge at the Châtelet, and deputy for Monsieur the Provost, an office he performed in a manner somewhat mixed and altogether haphazard.      7   
  The hall was small, low, and vaulted, furnished at the far end with a table figured over with fleur de lis, a great, carved oak chair for the Provost, and therefore empty, and a stool at the left side for Maître Florian. Lower down sat the clerk, scribbling fast. Opposite to them were the people; while before the door and before the table were stationed a number of sergeants of the Provostry, in violet woollen jerkins, with white crosses on their breasts. Two sergeants of the Common Hall in their “All-Saints” jackets—half red, half blue—stood sentinel at a low, closed door which was visible in the back-ground behind the table. A solitary Gothic window, deeply embedded in the wall, shed the pale light of a January morning on two grotesque figures—the whimsical stone devil, carved on the keystone of the vaulted ceiling, and the judge sitting at the back of the Hall bending over the fleur de lis of the table.      8   
  Picture to yourself that figure at the table, leaning on his elbows between two bundles of documents, his foot wrapped in the tail of his plain brown gown, the face in its frame of white lambskin, of which the eye-brows seem to be a piece—red, scowling, blinking, carrying with dignity the load of fat that met under his chin—and you have Maître Florian Barbedienne, examining judge at the Châtelet.      9   
  Now, Maître Florian was deaf—rather a drawback for an examining judge—but none the less did he mete out judgment without appeal and with great propriety. Surely it is sufficient that a judge should appear to listen, and the venerable auditor the better filled this condition—the sole essential to the good administration of justice—in that his attention could not be distracted by any sound.     10   
  However, he had among the onlookers a merciless critic of deeds and manners in the person of our friend, Jehan Frollo of the Mill, the little scholar of yesterday’s scenes, the little loafer one was certain to encounter anywhere in Paris, save in the lecture-room of the professors.     11   
  “Look,” whispered he to his companion, Robin Poussepain, who sat beside him in fits of suppressed laughter at his comments on the scene before them, “why, there’s Jehanneton du Buisson, the pretty lass of that old lazy-bones at the Marché-Neuf! On my soul, he means to fine her, the old dotard! Fifteen sols, four deniers parisis for wearing two rosaries! That’s rather dear! Lex duri carminis— who’s this? Robin Chief-de-Ville, hauberk-maker, for being passed and admitted a master in the said craft. Ah! his entrance fee. What! Two gentlemen among this rabble! Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly, two squires Corpus Christi! Oh, for throwing dice! When shall we see our Rector here, I wonder? A fine of a hundred livres parisis to the King! Barbedienne lays about him, like a deaf one—as he is. May I be my brother the archdeacon, if that shall hinder me from playing; from playing by day, and playing by night, living at play, dying at play, and staking my soul after I have staked my shirt! Holy Virgin! what a lot of girls! One at a time, my lambkins! Ambrose Lécuyère, Isabeau la Paynette, Bèrarde Gironin! By heavens, I know them all! A fine! a fine! ten sols parisis; that’ll teach you minxes to wear gilded girdles! Oh, the ancient sheep’s-head of a judge, deaf and doting! Ah, Florian thou dolt! Oh, Barbedienne thou booby! Do but look at him there at table—he dines off the litigant—he dines off the case—he eats—he chews—he gobbles—he fills himself! Fines, unclaimed goods, dues, costs, expenses, wages, damages, torture, imprisonment, and pillory and fetters, and loss of right—all are to him as Christmas comfits and midsummer marchpane! Look at him, the swine! Good! it begins again. Another light o’ love! Thibaude-la-Thibaude, as I live! For having come out of the Rue Glatigny! Who’s this young shaver? Gieffroy Mabonne, cross-bowman. He blasphemed the name of God the Father. Thibaude a fine! Gieffroy a fine! A fine for both of them! The deaf old blockhead, he is sure to have mixed up the two. Ten to one that he makes the girl pay for the oath, and the soldier for the amour! Attention, Robin Poussepain! Who are they bringing in now? What a crowd of tip-staffs! By Jupiter, the whole pack of hounds! This must be the grand catch of the day. A wild boar at least. It is one Robin! it is—and a fine specimen too! Hercules! it is our prince of yesterday, our Pope of Fools, our bell-ringer, our hunchback, our grimace! It is Quasimodo!”     12   
  It was indeed.     13   
  It was Quasimodo, bound about with cords, tightly pinioned, and under a strong guard. The detachment of officers surrounding him was led by the Captain of the watch in person, with the arms of France embroidered on his breast, and those of the City of Paris on his back. However, apart from his ugliness, there was nothing about Quasimodo to warrant this show of halberds and arquebuses. He was moody, silent, and composed, only casting from time to time a sullen and angry glance out of his one eye at the cords that bound him. He cast this same glance at his surroundings, but it was so dazed and drowsy that the women only pointed him out in derision to one another.     14   
  Meanwhile, Maître Florian was busy turning over the pages of the charge drawn up against Quasimodo, handed to him by the clerk, and, having glanced at it, seemed to commune with himself for a moment. Thanks to this precaution, which he was always careful to employ before proceeding with his examination, he knew in advance the name, quality, and offence of the delinquent, made prearranged replies to foreseen questions, and contrived to find his way through all the sinuosities of the cross-examination without too openly betraying his deafness. The written charge was to him as the dog to the blind man. If it happened, now and then, that his infirmity became evident through some unintelligible address, or some question wide of the mark, it passed with some for profundity, and with others for imbecility. In either case, the honour of the magistracy underwent no diminution; better far that a judge should be reputed imbecile or profound rather than deaf. He therefore took such precautions to conceal his deafness from others, and usually succeeded so well, that he had come at last to deceive himself on the subject—an easier matter than one might suppose; for all hunchbacks walk with head erect; all stammerers are fond of talking; deaf people invariably speak in a whisper. For his part, he thought, at most, that perhaps his ear was a trifle less quick than other people’s. This was the sole concession he would make to public opinion in his rare moments of candour and self-examination.     15   
  Having then ruminated well on Quasimodo’s case, he threw back his head and half-closed his eyes, by way of extra dignity and impartiality, with the result that, for the moment, he was both blind and deaf—a twofold condition without which no judge is really perfect.     16   
  In this magisterial attitude he commenced his examination.     17   
  “Your name?”     18   
  Now here was a case which had not been “provided for by the law”—the interrogation of one deaf person by another in similar plight.     19   
  Quasimodo, who had no hint of the fact that he was being addressed, continued to regard the judge fixedly, but made no reply. The judge, deaf himself, and unaware of the deafness of the accused, imagined he had answered, as accused persons generally did, and continued with his usual stupid and mechanical self-confidence:     20   
  “Very good—your age?”     21   
  Quasimodo made no answer to this question either, but the judge, fancying he had done so, went on:     22   
  “Now, your calling?”     23   
  Continued silence. The bystanders, however, began to whisper and look at each other.     24   
  “That will do,” returned the imperturbable magistrate when he concluded that the accused had finished his third answer. “You stand charged before us, primo, with nocturnal disturbance; secundo, with unjustifiable violence to the person of a light woman, in prejudicium meretricis; tertio, of rebellion and contempt against the archers of our Lord the King. Explain yourself on these points.—Clerk, have you written down what the accused has said so far?”     25   
  At this unlucky question there was an explosion of laughter, beginning with the clerk and spreading to the crowd—so violent, so uncontrollable, so contagious, so universal, that neither of the deaf men could help perceiving it. Quasimodo turned round and shrugged his high shoulders disdainfully, while Maître Florian, as surprised as he, and supposing that the laughter of the spectators had been provoked by some unseemly reply from the accused, rendered visible to him by that shrug, addressed him indignantly:     26   
  “Fellow, that last answer of yours deserves the halter. Do you know to whom you are speaking?”     27   
  This sally was hardly calculated to extinguish the outburst of general hilarity. The thing was so utterly absurd and topsy-turvy, that the wild laughter seized even the sergeants of the Common Hall, a sort of pikemen whose stolidity was part of their uniform. Quasimodo alone preserved his gravity, for the very good reason that he had no idea what was occurring round him. The judge, growing more and more irritated, thought it proper to continue in the same tone, hoping thereby to strike such terror to the heart of the prisoner as would react on the audience and recall them to a sense of due respect.     28   
  “It would seem, then, headstrong and riotous knave that you are, that you would dare to flout the auditor of the Châtelet; the magistrate entrusted with the charge of the public safety of Paris; whose duty it is to search into all crimes, delinquencies, and evil courses; to control all trades and forbid monopolies; to repair the pavements; to prevent the retail hawking of poultry and game, both feathered and furred; to superintend the measuring of firewood and all other kinds of wood; to purge the city of filth, and the air of all contagious distemper—in a word, to slave continually for the public welfare without fee or recompense, or hope of any. Know you that my name is Florian Barbedienne, deputy to Monsieur the Provost himself, and, moreover, commissioner, investigator, controller, and examiner, with equal power in provostry, bailiwick, registration, and presidial court——”     29   
  There is no earthly reason why a deaf man talking to a deaf man should ever stop. God alone knows where and when Maître Florian would have come to anchor, once launched in full sail on the ocean of his eloquence, had not the low door at the back of the hall suddenly opened, and given passage to Monsieur the Provost in person.     30   
  At his entrance Maître Florian did not stop, but wheeling half round, and suddenly aiming at the Provost the thunderbolts which up to now he had launched at Quasimodo:     31   
  “Monseigneur,” he said, “I demand such penalty as shall seem fitting to you against the accused here present for flagrant and unprecedented contempt of court.”     32   
  He seated himself breathless, wiping away the great drops that fell from his forehead and splashed like tears upon the documents spread out before him. Messire Robert d’Estouteville knit his brows and signed to Quasimodo with a gesture so imperious and significant, that the deaf hunchback in some degree understood.     33   
  The Provost addressed him sternly: “What hast thou done, rascal, to be brought hither?”     34   
  The poor wretch, supposing that the Provost was asking his name, now broke his habitual silence and answered in hoarse, guttural tones, “Quasimodo.”     35   
  The answer corresponded so little with the question that the former unbridled merriment threatened to break out again, and Messire Robert, crimson with anger, roared, “Dost dare to mock me too, arch-rogue?”     36   
  “Bell-ringer of Notre Dame,” continued Quasimodo, thinking that he must explain to the judges who he was.     37   
  “Bell-ringer!” returned the Provost, who, as we know, had risen that morning in so vile a temper that there was no need to add fresh fuel to the fire by such unwarrantable impudence. “Bell-ringer indeed! They shall ring a carillon of rods on thy back at every street corner of Paris. Hearest thou, rascal?”     38   
  “If it is my age you desire to know,” said Quasimodo, “I think I shall be twenty come Martinmas.”     39   
  This was going too far; the Provost could contain himself no longer.     40   
  “Ha, miserable knave, thou thinkest to make sport of the law! Sergeant of the rod, you will take this fellow to the pillory in the Grève and there flog him and turn him for an hour. He shall pay for this, tête-Dieu! And I command that this sentence be proclaimed by means of the four legally appointed trumpeters at the seven castellanies of the jurisdiction of Paris.”     41   
  The clerk proceeded forthwith to put the sentence on record.     42   
  “Ventre-Dieu! I call that giving judgment in good style!” said little Jehan Frollo of the Mill, from his secluded corner.     43   
  The Provost turned and again transfixed Quasimodo with blazing eye. “I believe the rascal said ‘Ventre-Dieu!’ Clerk, you will add twelve deniers parisis as a fine for swearing, and let one-half of it go to the Church of Saint-Eustache. I have a particular devotion for Saint-Eustache.”     44   
  A few minutes later and the sentence was drawn up. The language was brief and simple. The legal procedure of the Provostry and bailiwick of Paris had not yet been elaborated by the President, Thibaut Baillet, and Roger Barmne, King’s advocate, and therefore not yet obscured by that forest of chicanery and circumlocution planted in it by these two lawyers at the beginning of the sixteenth century. All was still clear, rapid, and to the point. There was no beating about the bush, and straight before you, at the end of every path, you had a full view of the wheel, the gibbet, or the pillory. You knew, at least, exactly where you were.     45   
  The clerk presented the sentence to the Provost, who affixed his seal to it and then departed, to continue his round through the several courts of law, in a frame of mind which seemed likely, for that day, to fill every jail in Paris. Jehan Frollo and Robin Poussepain were laughing in their sleeve, while Quasimodo regarded the whole scene with an air of surprise and indifference.     46   
  Nevertheless, the clerk, while Maître Florian was engaged in reading over the judgment before signing it in his turn, felt some qualms of compassion for the poor devil under sentence, and in the hope of obtaining some mitigation of his penalties, bent as near as he could to the examiner’s ear, and said, pointing to Quasimodo, “The man is deaf.”     47   
  He hoped that the knowledge of a common infirmity would awaken Maître Florian’s interest in favour of the condemned. But in the first place, as we have already explained, Maître Florian did not like to have his deafness commented upon; and secondly, that he was so hard of hearing that he did not catch one word the clerk was saying. Desiring, however, to conceal this fact, he replied: “Ah! that makes all the difference. I did not know that. In that case, one more hour of pillory for him.” And, the modification made, he signed the sentence.     48   
  “And serve him right too,” said Robin Poussepain, who still owed Quasimodo a grudge; “that’ll teach him to handle folks so roughly.”     49   


Note 1.  This comet, for deliverance from which, Pope Calixtus, uncle to Borgia, ordered public prayer, is the same which reappeared in 1835.—AUTHOR’S NOTE. [back]   
Note 2.  A dignity to which is attached no little power in dealing with the public safety, together with many prerogatives and rights. [back]   
Note 3.  Crown accounts, 1383—AUTHOR’S NOTE. [back]

Book VI   
II. The Rat-Hole   
     
WITH the reader’s permission we will now return to the Place de Grève, which was quitted yesterday with Gringoire, to follow Esmeralda.      1   
  It is ten in the morning, and everywhere are the unmistakable signs of the day after a public holiday. The ground is strewn with débris of every description, ribbons, rags, plumes, drops of wax from the torches, scraps from the public feast. A good many of the townsfolk are “loafing about”—as we would say to-day—turning over the extinguished brands of the bonfire, standing in front of the Maison aux Piliers rapturously recalling the fine hangings of the day before, and gazing now at the nails which fastened them—last taste of vanished joy—while the venders of beer and cider roll their casks among the idle groups. A few pass to and fro, intent on business; the tradespeople gossip and call to one another from their shop doors. The Festival, the Ambassadors, Coppenole, the Pope of Fools, are in every mouth, each vying with the other as to who shall make the wittiest comments and laugh the loudest; while four mounted officers of the peace, who have just posted themselves at the four corners of the pillory, have already drawn away a considerable portion of the idlers scattered about the square, who cheerfully submit to any amount of tediousness and waiting, in expectation of a little exhibition of Justice.      2   
  If now, after contemplating this stirring and clamorous scene which is being enacted at every corner of the Place, the reader will turn his attention towards the ancient building—half Gothic, half Romanesque—called the Tour-Roland, forming the western angle of the quay, he will notice, at one of its corners, a large, richly illuminated breviary for the use of the public, protected from the rain by a small penthouse and from thieves by a grating, which, however, allows of the passer-by turning over the leaves. Close beside this breviary is a narrow, pointed window looking on to the square and closed by an iron cross-bar, the only aperture by which a little air and light can penetrate to a small, doorless cell constructed on the level of the ground within the thickness of the wall of the old mansion and filled with a quiet the more profound, a silence the more oppressive, that a public square, the noisiest and most populous in Paris, is swarming and clamouring round it.      3   
  This cell has been famous in Paris for three centuries, ever since Mme. Rolande of the Tour-Roland, mourning for her father who died in the Crusades, had caused it to be hollowed out of the wall of her house and shut herself up in it forever; retaining of all her great mansion but this one poor chamber, the door of which was walled up and the window open to the elements winter and summer, and giving the rest of her possessions to the poor and to God. The inconsolable lady had lingered on for twenty years awaiting death in this premature tomb, praying night and day for the soul of her father, making her bed on the cold ground without even a stone for a pillow, clothed in sackcloth, and living only upon such bread and water as the compassionate might deposit on the ledge of her window—thus receiving charity after bestowing it. At her death, at the moment of her passing to another sepulchre, she had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to women in affliction—mothers, widows, or maidens—who should have many prayers to offer up on behalf of others or of themselves, and should choose to bury themselves alive for some great grief or some great penitence. The poor of her time had honoured her funeral with tears and benedictions; but, to their great regret, the pious lady had been unable to receive canonization for lack of interest in the right quarter. Nevertheless, those among them who were not quite so pious as they should have been, trusting that the matter might be more easily arranged in heaven than in Rome, had frankly offered up their prayers for the deceased to God himself, in default of the Pope. The majority, however, had contented themselves with holding Rolande’s memory sacred, and converting her rags into relics. The town, for its part, had founded, in pursuance of the lady’s intention, a public breviary, which had been permanently fixed beside the window of the cell, that the passer-by might halt there for a moment, if only to pray; that prayer might suggest almsgiving, and thus the poor recluses, inheriting the stone cell of Mme. Rolande, be saved from perishing outright of hunger and neglect.      4   
  These living tombs were by no means rare in the cities of the Middle Ages. Not infrequently, in the very midst of the busiest street, the most crowded, noisy market-place, under the very hoofs of the horses and wheels of the wagons, you might come upon a vault, a pit, a walled and grated cell, out of the depths of which a human being, voluntarily dedicated to some everlasting lamentation, or some great expiation, offered up prayer unceasingly day and night.      5   
  But all the reflections that such a strange spectacle would awaken in us at the present day; that horrible cell; a sort of intermediate link between the dwelling and the grave, between the cemetery and the city; that living being cut off from the communion of mankind and already numbered with the dead; that lamp consuming its last drop of oil in the darkness; that remnant of life flickering out in the pit; that whisper, that voice, that never-ending prayer encased in stone: that eye already illumined by another sun; that ear inclined attentive to the walls of a tomb; that soul imprisoned in a body, itself a prisoner within that dungeon, and from out that double incarnation of flesh and stone, the perpetual plaint of a soul in agony—nothing of all this reached the apprehension of the crowd. The piety of that day, little given to analyzing or subtle reasoning, did not regard a religious act from so many points of view. It accepted the thing as a whole, honoured, lauded, and if need be, made a saint of the sacrifice, but did not dwell upon its sufferings nor even greatly pity it. From time to time the charitable world brought some dole to the wretched penitent, peered through the window to see if he yet lived, was ignorant of his name, scarcely knew how many years ago he had begun to die, and to the stranger who questioned them respecting the living skeleton rotting in that cave, they would simply answer: “It is the recluse.”      6   
  This was the way they looked at things in those days, without metaphysics, neither enlarging nor diminishing, with the naked eye. The microscope had not been invented yet for the examination either of material or spiritual objects.      7   
  Examples of this kind of living burial in the heart of the town were, although they excited but little remark, frequently to be met with, as we have said before. In Paris there was a considerable number of these cells of penitence and prayer, and nearly all of them were occupied. It is true the clergy took particular care that they should not be left empty, as that implied lukewarmness in the faithful; so when penitents were not to the fore, lepers were put in instead. Besides the cell at the Grève, already described, there was one at Montfaucon, one at the charnel-house of the Innocents, another, I forget just where—at the Logis-Clichon, I fancy; and others at many different spots, where, in default of monuments, their traces are still to be found in tradition. The University certainly had one; on the hill of Saint-Germain a sort of mediæval Job sat for thirty years, singing the penitential psalms on a dung-heap at the bottom of a dry well, beginning anew as soon as he came to the end, and singing louder in the night-time—magna voce per umbras; and to-day the antiquary still fancies that he hears his voice as he enters the Rue du Puits-qui-parle: the street of the Talking Well.      8   
  To confine ourselves here to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we confess that it had seldom lacked a tenant—since Mme. Rolande’s death it had rarely been vacant, even for a year or two. Many a woman had shut herself up there to weep until death for her parents, her lovers, or her frailties. Parisian flippancy, which will meddle with everything, especially with such as are outside its province, declared that very few widows had been observed among the number.      9   
  After the manner of the period, a Latin legend inscribed upon the wall notified to the lettered wayfarer the pious purpose of the cell. This custom of placing a brief distinguishing motto above the entrance to a building continued down to the middle of the sixteenth century. Thus, in France, over the gateway of the prison belonging to the Manor-house of Tourville, stands, Sileto et spera; in Ireland, under the escutcheon above the great gateway of Fortescue Castle, Forte scutum, salus ducum; and in England, over the principal entrance of the hospitable mansion of the Earls Cowper, Tuum est. For in those days every edifice expressed a special meaning.     10   
  As there was no door to the walled-up cell of the Tour-Roland, they had engraved above the window in great Roman characters the two words:
           
TU, ORA 1
  11   
  Whence it came about that the people, whose healthy common sense fails to see the subtle side of things, and cheerfully translates Ludovico Magno by Porte Saint-Denis, had corrupted the words over this dark, damp, gloomy, cavity into Trou-aux-rats, or Rat-Hole—a rendering less sublime perhaps than the original; but, on the other hand, decidedly more picturesque.     12   


Note 1.  Pray thou. [back]

Book VI   
III. The Story of a Wheaten Cake   
     
AT the time at which the events of this story occurred, the cell of the Tour-Roland was occupied, and if the reader desires to know by whom, he has only to listen to the conversation of three worthy gossips, who, at the moment when we attracted his attention to the Rat-Hole, were directing their steps to that very spot, going along the river-side from the Châtelet towards the Place de Grève.      1   
  Two of these women were dressed after the fashion of the good burgher wives of Paris; their fine white gorgets, striped red and blue woollen kirtles, white knitted hose with embroidered clocks, trimly pulled up over their legs, their square-toed shoes of tan-coloured leather with black soles, and above all, their head-dress—a sort of tinsel-covered horn, loaded with ribbons and lace, still worn by the women of Champagne, and the Grenadiers of the Russian imperial guard—proclaimed them to belong to that class of rich tradeswomen who hold the medium between what servants call “a woman” and what they call “a lady.” They wore neither rings nor gold crosses; but it was easy to perceive that this was owing not to poverty, but simply out of fear of the fine incurred by so doing. Their companion’s dress was very much the same; but there was in her appearance and manner an indefinable something which betrayed the wife of the country notary. Her way of wearing her girdle so high above her hips would alone have proved that it was long since she had been in Paris, without mentioning that her gorget was plaited, that she wore knots of ribbon on her shoes, that the stripes of her kirtle ran round instead of down and a dozen other crimes against the prevailing mode.      2   
  The first two walked with that air peculiar to Parisiennes showing the town to country cousins. The countrywoman held by the hand a chubby little boy, who in his hand held a big wheaten cake—and we regret to have to add that, owing to the inclemency of the weather, he was using his tongue as a pocket-handkerchief.      3   
  The boy let himself be dragged along—non passibus aquis, as Virgil says—with uneven steps, stumbling every minute, to the great annoyance of his mother. It is true that he looked oftener at the cake than on the ground. Some very serious reason must have prevented him from biting into the cake, for he contented himself with merely gazing at it affectionately. But the mother would have done better to take charge of the tempting morsel herself. It was cruel to make a Tantalus of poor chubby-cheeks.      4   
  Meanwhile, the three “damoiselles” (for the title of “dame” was reserved then for the women of noble birth) were all talking at once.      5   
  “We must hasten, Damoiselle Mahiette,” said the youngest of the three, who was also the fattest, to their country friend. “I fear me we shall be too late. They told us at the Châtelet that he was to be carried to the pillory immediately.”      6   
  “Ah—bah! What are you talking about, Damoiselle Oudarde Musnier?” returned the other Parisienne. “He will be a good two hours on the pillory. We have plenty of time. Have you ever seen anybody pilloried, my dear Mahiette?”      7   
  “Yes,” said Mahiette, “at Reims.”      8   
  “Pooh! what’s your pillory at Reims? A paltry cage where they put nobody but clowns! That’s not worth calling a pillory!”      9   
  “Nobody but clowns!” cried Mahiette. “In the Cloth-Market at Reims! Let me tell you, we have had some very fine criminals there—who had killed father and mother! Clowns indeed! What do you take me for, Gervaise?”     10   
  And there is no doubt the country lady was on the point of flying into a rage for this disparagement of her pillory, but fortunately the discreet Damoiselle Oudarde Musnier turned the conversation in time.     11   
  “By-the-bye, Damoiselle Mahiette, what think you of our Flemish Ambassadors? Have you any as grand at Reims?”     12   
  “I must confess,” answered Mahiette, “that it’s only in Paris you see such Flemings as these.”     13   
  “Did you see among the embassy that great Ambassador who’s a hosier?” asked Oudarde.     14   
  “Yes,” said Mahiette, “he looks like a Saturn.”     15   
  “And that fat one, with a face like a bare paunch,” Gervaise went on; “and the little one, with small, blinking eyes and red eye-lids with half the lashes pulled out like a withered thistle?”     16   
  “But their horses are a treat to look at,” said Oudarde, “all dressed after the fashion of their country!”     17   
  “Ah, my dear,” interrupted country Mahiette, assuming in her turn an air of superiority, “what would you have said then, if you had seen the horses of the Princess and the whole retinue of the King at the coronation at Reims in ’61—twenty-one years ago! Such housings and caparisons! Some of Damascus cloth, fine cloth of gold, and lined with sable fur; others of velvet and ermine; others heavy with goldsmith’s work and great tassels of gold and silver! And the money that it must all have cost! And the beautiful pages riding them!”     18   
  “But for all that,” replied Damoiselle Oudarde dryly, “the Flemings have splendid horses; and yesterday a sumptuous supper was given them by Monsieur the Provost-Merchant at the Hôtel-de-Ville, at which sweetmeats, and hippocras, and spices, and the like delicacies, were set before them.”     19   
  “What are you saying, neighbour!” exclaimed Gervaise. “Why, it was with the Lord Cardinal, at the Petit-Bourbon, that the Flemings supped.”     20   
  “Not at all! At the Hô-de-Ville!”     21   
  “No, it wasn’t—it was at the Petit-Bourbon.”     22   
  “I know that it was at the Hôtel-de-Ville,” retorted Oudarde sharply, “for the very good reason that Doctor Scourable made them a speech in Latin, with which they were very well satisfied. My husband told me, and he is one of the sworn booksellers.”     23   
  “And I know that it was at the Petit-Bourbon,” responded Gervaise no less warmly, “for I can tell you exactly what my Lord Cardinal’s purveyor set before them: twelve double quarts of hippocras, white, pale, and red; twenty-four boxes of gilded double marchpanes of Lyons; four-and-twenty wax torches of two pounds apiece; and six demi-hogsheads of Beaune wine, both white and yellow, the best that could be procured. I hope that’s proof enough! I have it from my husband, who’s Captain of the fifty guards at the Châtelet, who only this morning was making a comparison between the Flemish Ambassadors and those of Prester John and the Emperor of Trebizonde, who came to Paris from Mesopotamia and wore rings in their ears.”     24   
  “So true is it that they supped at the Hôtel-de-Ville,” replied Oudarde, quite unmoved by this string of evidence, “that never was seen so fine a show of meats and delicacies.”     25   
  “I tell you they were served by Le Sec, the town sergeant at the Petit-Bourbon, and that is what has put you wrong.”     26   
  “At the Hôtel-de-Ville, I say.”     27   
  “At the Petit-Bourbon, my dear! And what’s more, they lit up the word ‘Hope,’ which stands over the great doorway, with fairy glasses.”     28   
  “At the Hôtel-de-Ville! At the Hôtel-de-Ville!—for Husson le Voir played the flute to them.”     29   
  “I tell you, no!”     30   
  “I tell you, yes!”     31   
  “I tell you, no!”     32   
  The good, fat Oudarde was preparing to reply, and the quarrel would no doubt have ended in the pulling of caps, had not Mahiette suddenly made a diversion by exclaiming:     33   
  “Look at those people gathered over there at the end of the bridge. There’s something in the middle of the crowd that they’re looking at.”     34   
  “True,” said Gervaise. “I hear a tambourine. I think it must be little Esmeralda doing tricks with her goat. Quick, Mahiette, mend your pace and bring your boy! You came to see the sights of Paris. Yesterday you saw the Flemings; to-day you must see the gipsy.”     35   
  “The gipsy!” cried Mahiette, turning round and clutching her boy by the arm. “God preserve us! She might steal my child! Come, Eustache!”     36   
  And she set off running along the quay towards the Grève till she had left the bridge far behind her. Presently the boy, whom she dragged rapidly after her, stumbled and fell on his knees. She drew up breathless, and Oudarde and Gervaise were able to join her.     37   
  “That gipsy steal your child!” said Gervaise. “What a very strange notion!”     38   
  Mahiette shook her head thoughtfully.     39   
  “The strange thing about it,” observed Oudarde, “is that the sachette has the same notion about the Egyptian women.”     40   
  “The sachette?” asked Mahiette. “What is that?”     41   
  “Why, Sister Gudule, to be sure,” answered Oudarde.     42   
  “And who is Sister Gudule?”     43   
  “It is very evident that you have lived in Reims not to know that!” exclaimed Oudarde. “That is the nun in the Rat-Hole.”     44   
  “What?” said Mahiette, “not the poor woman we are taking this cake to?”     45   
  Oudarde nodded. “Yes, the very one. You will see her directly at her window looking on the Grève. She thinks the same as you about these vagabonds of Egypt that go about with their tambourines and fortune-telling. Nobody knows why she has this abhorrence of Zingari and Egyptians. But you, Mahiette, why should you run away at the mere sight of them?”     46   
  “Oh,” answered Mahiette, clasping her boy’s fair head to her bosom, “I would not have that happen to me that happened to Paquette la Chantefleurie.”     47   
  “Oh, you must tell us that story, my good Mahiette,” said Gervaise, taking her arm.     48   
  “Willingly,” returned Mahiette, “but it is very evident that you have lived in Paris not to know it! Well, you must know—but there is no need for us to stand still while I tell you the story—that Paquette la Chantefleurie was a pretty girl of eighteen when I too was one—that is to say, eighteen years ago—and has had only herself to blame if she’s not, like me, a buxom, hearty woman of six-and-thirty, with a husband and a fine boy. But there!—from the time she was fourteen it was too late! I must tell you, then, that she was the daughter of Guybertaut, a boat-minstrel at Reims, the same that played before King Charles VII at his coronation, when he went down our river Vesle from Sillery to Muison, and had Mme. la Pucelle—the Maid of Orleans—in the same boat with him. The old father died when Paquette was quite little, so she had only her mother, who was sister to M. Pradon, a master-brasier and tinsmith in Paris, Rue Parin-Garlin, and who died last year—so you see, she was of good family. The mother was a simple, easy-going creature, unfortunately, and never taught her anything really useful—just a little needlework and toy-making, which did not prevent her growing tall and strong, and remaining very poor. They lived together at Reims, by the river-side, in the Rue de Folle-Peine—mark that!—for I believe that is what brought trouble to Paquette. Well, in ’61—the year of the Coronation of our King Louis XI, whom God preserve!—Paquette was so gay and so fair that she was known far and wide as ‘La Chantefleurie’—poor girl! She had pretty teeth, and she was fond of laughing, to show them. Now, a girl who is overfond of laughing is well on the way to tears; pretty teeth are the ruin of pretty eyes—and thus it befell Chantefleurie. She and her mother had a hard struggle to gain a living; they had sunk very low since the father’s death—their needlework brought them in barely six deniers a week, which is not quite two liards. Time was when Guybertaut had got twelve sols parisis at a coronation for a single song! One winter—it was that same year of ’61—the two women had not a log or a fagot, and it was very cold, and this gave Chantefleurie such a beautiful colour in her cheeks that the men all looked after her and she was ruined.—Eustache! just led me see you take a bite out of that cake!—We saw in a moment that she was ruined when one Sunday she came to church with a gold cross on her neck. At fourteen—what do you say to that? The first was the young Vicomte de Cormontreuil, whose castle is about three-quarters of a mile from Reims; then it was Messire Henri de Triancourt, the King’s outrider; then, coming down the scale, Chiart de Beaulion, a man-at-arms! then, still lower, Guery Aubergeon, king’s carver; then Macè de Frèpus, barber to Monsieur the Dauphin; then Thèvenin le Moine, one of the royal cooks; then, still going down, from the young to the old, from high to low birth, she fell to Guillaume Racine, viol player, and to Thierry de Mer, lamp-maker. After that, poor Chantefleurie, she became all things to all men and had come to her last sou. What think you, damoiselle, at the coronation, in that same year ’61, it was she who made the bed for the chief of the bawdies!—in that same year!” Mahiette sighed and wiped away a tear.     49   
  “But I see nothing so very extraordinary in this story,” said Gervaise, “and there is no word either of Egyptians or children.”     50   
  “Patience,” returned Mahiette; “as for the child, I am just coming to that. In ’66, sixteen years ago this month, on Saint-Paul’s day, Paquette was brought to bed of a little girl. Poor creature, she was overjoyed—she had long craved to have a child. Her mother, foolish woman, who had never done anything but close her eyes to what was going on, her mother was dead. Paquette had no one in the world to love or to love her. For the five years since she had fallen, poor Paquette had been a miserable creature. She was alone, all alone in the world, pointed at, shouted at through the streets, beaten by the sergeants, and jeered at by little ragged boys. Besides, she was already twenty, and twenty means old age for a courtesan. Her frailty now began to bring her in no more than did her needlework formerly; for every line in her face she lost a crown in her pocket. Winter came hard to her again, wood was growing scarce in her fire-place and bread in her cupboard. She could not work, because, by giving way to pleasure she had given way to idleness, and she felt hardships the more because by giving way to idleness she had given way to pleasure. At least, that is how Monsieur the Curé of Saint-Rémy explains why those sort of women feel cold and hunger more than other poor females do when they get old.”     51   
  “Yes,” observed Gervaise, “but about these gipsies?”     52   
  “Wait a moment, Gervaise,” said Oudarde, who was of a less impatient temperament; “what should we have at the end if everything was at the beginning? Go on, Mahiette, I pray you. Alas, poor Chantefleurie!”     53   
  “Well,” Mahiette continued, “so she was very sad and very wretched, and her cheeks grew hollow with her perpetual tears. But in all her shame, her infamy, her loneliness, she felt she would be less ashamed, less infamous, less deserted, if only there was something or somebody in the world she could love, or that would love her. She knew it would have to be a child, for only a child could be ignorant enough for that. This she had come to see after trying to love a robber—the only man who would have anything to do with her—but in a little while she found that even the robber despised her. These light-o’-loves must needs always have a lover or a child to fill their hearts, or they are most unhappy. As she could not get a lover, all her desire turned towards having a child; and, as she had all along been pious, she prayed unceasingly to God to send her one. So God took compassion on her and sent her a little girl. I will not try to describe to you her joy—it was a passion of tears and kisses and caresses. She suckled it herself, and made swaddling-bands for it out of her coverlet—the only one she had upon her bed, but now she felt neither cold nor hunger. Her beauty came back to her—an old maid makes a young mother—and poor Chantefleurie went back to her old trade and found customers for her wares, and laid out the wages of her sin in swaddling-clothes and bibs and tuckers, lace robes, and little satin caps—without so much as a thought for a new coverlet for herself.     54   
  “Master Eustache, did I not tell you not to eat that cake?—In truth, the little Agnès, that was the child’s name—its baptismal name, for, as to a surname, it was long since Chantefleurie had lost hers—in very truth, the little one was more of a mass of ribbons and broideries than ever a dauphiness of Dauphiny! Among other things, she had a pair of little shoes such as King Louis himself never had the like. Her mother had stitched them and embroidered them herself, bestowing upon them all her art and the ornament that ought more properly to belong to a robe for Our Lady. In good sooth, they were the prettiest little rose-coloured shoes that ever were seen; no longer at most than my thumb, and unless you saw the babe’s little feet come out of them, you never would have believed that they could get in. To be sure the little feet were so small, so pretty, so rosy!—rosier than the satin of the shoes! When you have children of your own, Oudarde, you will know that there is nothing in the world so pretty as those little hands and feet.”     55   
  “I ask nothing better,” said Oudarde with a sigh; “but I must await the good pleasure of M. Andry Musnier.”     56   
  “However,” resumed Mahiette, “pretty feet were not the only beauty that Paquette’s child possessed. I saw her when she was four months old—a chuck!—with eyes bigger than her mouth, and beautiful soft, black hair that curled already. She would have made a fine brunette at sixteen! Her mother loved her more day by day. She hugged and kissed and fondled her, washed her, tricked her out in all her finery, devoured her—one moment half-crazed, the next thanking God for the gift of this babe. But its pretty rosy feet were her chief delight and wonder—a very delirium of joy! She was forever pressing her lips to them, forever marvelling at their smallness. She would put them into the little shoes, take them out again, wonder at them, hold them up to the light; she was sorry even to teach them to take a step or two on her bed, and would gladly have passed the rest of her life on her knees, covering and uncovering those little feet, like those of an Infant Jesus.”     57   
  “The tale is all very well,” said Gervaise, half to herself; “but where is Egypt in all this?”     58   
  “Here,” replied Mahiette. “One day there came to Reims some very outlandish sort of gentry—beggars and vagabonds—wandering about the country, led by their dukes and counts. Their faces were sun-burnt, their hair all curling, and they had silver rings in their ears. The women were even more ill-favoured than the men. Their faces were blacker and always uncovered, their only clothing an old woolen cloth tied over their shoulders, and a sorry rocket under that, and the hair hanging loose like a horse’s tail. The children that scrambled about between their feet would have frightened the monkeys. An excommunicated band! They had come direct from Lower Egypt to Reims by way of Poland. The Pope had confessed them, so they said, and had laid on them the penance of wandering for seven years through the world without ever sleeping in a bed. So they called themselves penitents and stank most horribly. It would seem they had formerly been Saracens, and that is why they believed in Jupiter, and demanded ten lives tournois from all Archbishops, Bishops, and Abbots endowed with crosier and mitre. It was a bull of the Pope that got them that. They came to Reims to tell fortunes in the name of the King of Algiers, and the Emperor of Germany. As you may suppose, that was quite enough for them to be forbidden to enter the town. Then the whole band encamped without demur near the Braine gate, upon that mound where there’s a wind-mill, close by the old chalk-pits. And of course all Reims was agog to see them. They looked in your hand, and prophesied most wonderful things—they were quite bold enough to have foretold to Judas that he would be Pope. At the same time, there were ugly stories about them—of stolen children, and cutpurses, and the eating of human flesh. The prudent warned the foolish, and said, ‘Go not near them!’ and then went themselves by stealth. Everybody was carried away by it. In sober truth, they told you things to have amazed a Cardinal! The mothers made much of their children after the gipsy women had read in their hands all manner of miracles written in Pagan and in Turkish. One had an Emperor, another a Pope, a third a Captain. Poor Chantefleurie caught the fever of curiosity. She wanted to know what she had got, and whether her pretty little Agnès would not one day be Empress of Armenia or the like. So she carried her to the Egyptians, and the Egyptian women admired the child, fondled it, kissed it with their black mouths, and were lost in wonder over its little hands—alas! to the great joy of its mother. Above all, they were delighted with its pretty feet and pretty shoes. The child was not yet a year old, and was just beginning to prattle a word or two—laughed and crowed at her mother—was fat and round, and had a thousand little gestures of the angels in Paradise. The child was frightened at the black gipsy woman, and cried; but the mother only kissed her the more, and carried her away, overjoyed at the good fortune the prophetess had foretold to her Agnès. She would become a famous beauty—a wonder—a queen. So she returned to her garret in the Rue Folle-Peine, proud to bring back with her a queen. The next day she seized a moment when the child was asleep on her bed—for it always slept with her—left the door ajar, and ran to tell a neighbour in the Rue de la Séchesserie that the day would come when her daughter Agnès would be served at her table by the King of England and the Duke of Ethiopia, and a hundred other surprises. On her return, hearing no sound as she mounted her stair, she said, ‘Good, the child is still asleep.’ She found the door more open than she had left it; she entered, and ran to the bed—poor mother!—the child was gone, the place empty. There was no trace left of the child, excepting one of its little shoes. She fled out of the room and down the stairs and began beating her head against the wall, crying: ‘My child! Who has my child? Who has taken my child from me?’ The street was empty, the house stood by itself, no one could tell her anything. She hastened through the city, searching every street, running hither and thither the whole day, mad, distraught, terrible to behold, looking in at every door and every window like a wild beast robbed of its young. She was breathless, dishevelled, terrifying, with a flame in her eyes that dried her tears. She stopped the passers-by and cried, ‘My child! my child! my pretty little girl! To him who will restore my child to me I will be a servant, the servant of his dog—and he may eat my heart if he will!’ She met Monsieur the Curé of Saint-Rémy, and to him she said: ‘Monsieur the Curé, I will dig the earth with my nails, but give me back my child!’ Oudarde, it was heart-rending, and I saw a very hard man, Maître Ponce Lacabre the attorney, shedding tears. Ah, the poor mother! At night she returned to her home. During her absence, a neighbour had seen two Egyptian women steal up her stair with a bundle in their arms, then come down again after closing the door, and hasten away. Afterward she had heard something that sounded like a child’s cry from Paquette’s room. The mother broke into mad laughter, sprang up the stair as if she had wings, burst open the door like an explosion of artillery, and entered the room. Horrible to relate, Oudarde, instead of her sweet little Agnès, so rosy and fresh, a gift from Heaven, a sort of hideous little monster, crippled, one-eyed, all awry, was crawling and whimpering on the floor. She covered her eyes in horror.     59   
  “‘Ah!’ she cried, ‘can these sorceresses have changed my little girl into this frightful beast?’ They removed the misshapen lump as quickly as possible out of her sight; it would have driven her mad. It was a boy, the monstrous offspring of some Egyptian woman and the Foul Fiend, about four years old, and speaking a language like no human tongue, impossible to understand. La Chantefleurie had thrown herself upon the little shoe, all that remained to her of her heart’s delight, and lay so long motionless, without a word or a breath, that we thought she was dead. But suddenly her whole body began to tremble, and she fell to covering her relic with frantic kisses, sobbing the while as if her heart would break. I do assure you, we were all weeping with her as she cried: ‘Oh, my little girl! my pretty little girl! where art thou?’ It rent the very soul to hear her; I weep now when I think of it. Our children, look you, are the very marrow of our bones.—My poor little Eustache, thou too art so beautiful!—Could you but know how clever he is! It was but yesterday he said to me, ‘Mother, I want to be a soldier.’—Oh, my Eustache, what if I were to lose thee!—Well, of a sudden, La Chantefleurie sprang to her feet and ran through the streets of the town crying: ‘To the camp of the Egyptians! to the camp of the Egyptians! Sergeants, to burn the witches!’ The Egyptians were gone—deep night had fallen, and they could not be pursued. Next day, two leagues from Reims, on a heath between Gueux and Tilloy, were found the remains of a great fire, some ribbons that had belonged to Paquette’s child, some drops of blood, and goat’s dung. The night just past had been that of Saturday. Impossible to doubt that the gipsies had kept their Sabbath on this heath, and had devoured the infant in company with Beelzebub, as is the custom among the Mahometans. When La Chantefleurie heard of these horrible things she shed no tear, her lips moved as if to speak, but no words came. On the morrow her hair was gray, and the day after that she had disappeared.’     60   
  “A terrible story indeed,” said Oudarde, “and one that would draw tears from a Burgundian!”     61   
  “I do not wonder now,” added Gervaise, “that the fear of the Egyptians should pursue you.”     62   
  “And you were the better advised,” said Oudarde, “in running away with your Eustache, seeing that these, too, are Egyptians from Poland.”     63   
  “No,” said Gervaise, “it is said they come from Spain and Catalonia.”     64   
  “Catalonia? Well, that may be,” answered Oudarde. “Polognia, Catalonia, Valonia—I always confound those three provinces. The sure thing is that they’re Egyptians.”     65   
  “And as sure,” added Gervaise, “that they’ve teeth long enough to eat little children. And I would not be surprised if La Esmeralda did a little of that eating, for all she purses up her mouth so small. That white goat of hers knows too many cunning tricks that there should not be some devilry behind it.”     66   
  Mahiette pursued her way in silence, sunk in that kind of reverie which is in some sort a prolongation of any pitiful tale, and does not cease till it has spread its emotion, wave upon wave, to the innermost recesses of the heart.     67   
  “And was it never known what became of La Chantefleurie?” asked Gervaise. But Mahiette made no reply till Gervaise, repeating her question, and shaking her by the arm, seemed to awaken her from her musings.     68   
  “What became of Chantefleurie?” said she, mechanically repeating the words just fresh in her ear; then, with an effort, to recall her attention to their sense: “Ah,” she added quickly, “that was never known.”     69   
  After a pause she went on: “Some said they had seen her leave the town in the dusk by the Fléchembault gate; others, at the break of day by the old Basée gate. A poor man found her gold cross hung upon the stone cross in the field where the fair is held. It was that trinket that had ruined her in ’6I—a gift from the handsome Vicomte de Cormontreuil, her first lover. Paquette would never part with it, even in her greatest poverty—she clung to it as to her life. So, seeing this cross abandoned, we all thought she must be dead. Nevertheless, some people at the Cabaret des Vautes came forward and protested they had seen her pass by on the road to Paris, walking barefoot over the rough stones. But then she must have gone out by the Vesle gate, and that does not agree with the rest. Or rather, I incline to the belief that she did leave by the Vesle gate, but to go out of the world.”     70   
  “I do not understand,” said Gervaise.     71   
  “The Vesle,” replied Mahiette with a mournful sigh, “is the river.”     72   
  “Alas, poor Chantefleurie!” said Oudarde with a shudder, “drowned?”     73   
  “Drowned!” said Mahiette. “And who could have fore-told to the good father Guybertaut, when he was passing down the stream under the Tinqueux bridge, singing in his boat, that one day his dear little Paquette should pass under that same bridge, but without either boat or song!”     74   
  “And the little shoe?” asked Gervaise.     75   
  “Vanished with the mother.”     76   
  “Poor little shoe!” sighed Oudarde; fat, tender-hearted creature, she would have been very well pleased to go on sighing in company with Mahiette; but Gervaise, of a more inquiring disposition, was not at an end of her questions.     77   
  “And the little monster?” she suddenly said to Mahiette.     78   
  “What monster?”     79   
  “The little gipsy monster left by the black witches in the place of Chantefleurie’s little girl. What was done with it? I trust you had it drowned?”     80   
  “No,” answered Mahiette, “we did not.”     81   
  “What? burned, then? I’ faith, a better way for a witch’s spawn!”     82   
  “Neither drowned nor burned, Gervaise. His Lordship the archbishop took pity on the child of Egypt, exorcised it, blessed it, carefully cast the devil out of its body, and then sent it to Paris to be exposed as a foundling on the wooden bed in front of Notre Dame.”     83   
  “Ah, these bishops,” grumbled Gervaise; “because they are learned, forsooth, they can never do anything like other folks! Think of it, Oudarde—to put the devil among the foundlings! for of course the little monster was the devil. Well, Mahiette, and what did they do with him in Paris? I’ll answer for it that no charitable person would have it.”     84   
  “I know not,” answered the lady of Reims. “It was just at the time when my husband purchased the office of clerk to the Court of Justice at Beru, two leagues distant from the city, and we thought no further of the story, particularly that just in front of Beru are the two little hills of Cernay, which hide the towers of the Cathedral from view.”     85   
  Meanwhile, the three worthy burgher wives had reached the Place de Grève. Absorbed in conversation, however, they had passed the public breviary of the Tour-Roland without noticing it, and were directing their steps mechanically towards the pillory round which the crowd increased from moment to moment. It is possible that the sight which at that instant drew all eyes towards it would have completely driven the Rat-Hole and the pious halt they intended making there from their minds, had not fat, six-year-old Eustache, dragging at Mahiette’s side, recalled it to them suddenly.     86   
  “Mother,” said he, as if some instinct apprised him that they had left the Rat-Hole behind, “now may I eat the cake?”     87   
  Had Eustache been more astute, that is to say, less greedy, he would have waited, and not till they had returned to the University, to Maître Andry Musnier’s house in the Rue Madame-la-Valence, and he had put the two arms of the Seine and the five bridges of the city between the Rat-Hole and the cake, would he have hazarded this question.     88   
  Imprudent though the question was on Eustache’s part, it recalled his mother to her charitable purpose.     89   
  “That reminds me,” exclaimed she, “we were forgetting the nun! Show me this Rat-Hole of yours, that I may give her the cake.”     90   
  “Right gladly,” said Oudarde; “it will be a charity.”     91   
  This was quite out of Eustache’s reckoning.     92   
  “It’s my cake!” said he, drawing up first one shoulder and then the other till they touched his ears—a sign, in such cases, of supreme dissatisfaction.     93   
  The three women retraced their steps and presently reached the Tour-Roland.     94   
  Said Oudarde to the other two: “We must not all look into the cell at once, lest we frighten the recluse. Do you two make as if you were reading Dominus in the breviary, while I peep in at the window. The sachette knows me somewhat. I will give you a sign when you may come.”     95   
  Accordingly, she went alone to the window. As her gaze penetrated the dim interior, profound pity overspread her countenance, and her frank and wholesome face changed as suddenly in expression and hue as if it had passed out of the sunshine into moonlight. Her eyes moistened and her lips contracted as before an outbreak of tears. The next moment she laid her finger on her lips and signed to Mahiette to come and look.     96   
  Mahiette advanced, tremulous, silent, on tip-toe, as one approaching a death-bed.     97   
  It was, in truth, a sorrowful spectacle which presented itself to the eyes of the two women, as they gazed, motionless and breathless, through the barrel aperture of the Rat-Hole.     98   
  The cell was small, wider than it was deep, with a vaulted, Gothic ceiling, giving it much the aspect of the inside of a bishop’s mitre. Upon the bare flag-stones which formed its floor, in a corner a woman was seated, or rather crouching, her chin resting on her knees, which her tightly clasped arms pressed close against her breast. Cowering together thus, clothed in a brown sack which enveloped her entirely in its large folds, her long, gray hair thrown forward and falling over her face along her sides and down to her feet, she seemed, at the first glance, but a shapeless heap against the gloomy background of the cell, a dark triangle which the daylight struggling through the window divided sharply into two halves, one light, the other dark—one of those spectres, half light, half shade, such as one sees in dreams, or in one of Goya’s extraordinary works—pale, motionless, sinister, crouching on a tomb or leaning against the bars of a prison. You could not say definitely that it was a woman, a man, a living being of any sort; it was a figure, a vision in which the real and the imaginary were interwoven like light and shadow. Beneath the hair that fell all about it to the ground, you could just distinguish the severe outline of an emaciated face, just catch a glimpse under the edge of the garment of the extremity of a bare foot, clinging cramped and rigid to the frozen stones. The little of human form discernible under that penitential covering sent a shudder through the beholder.     99   
  This figure, which might have been permanently fixed to the stone floor, seemed wholly without motion, thought, or breath. In that thin covering of sackcloth, in January, lying on the bare stones, without a fire, in the shadow of a cell whose oblique loophole admitted only the northeast wind, but never the sunshine, she seemed not to suffer, not even to feel. You would have thought she had turned to stone with the dungeon, to ice with the season. Her hands were clasped, her eyes fixed; at the first glance you took her for a spectre; at the second, for a statue.    100   
  However, at intervals, her livid lips parted with a breath and quivered, but the movement was as dead and mechanical as leaves separated by the breeze; while from those dull eyes came a look, ineffable, deep, grief-stricken, unwavering, immutably fixed on a corner of the cell which was not visible from without; a gaze which seemed to concentrate all the gloomy thoughts of that agonized soul upon some mysterious object.    101   
  Such was the being who, from her habitation, was called the recluse, and from her sackcloth garment, the sachette.    102   
  The three women—for Gervaise had joined Mahiette and Oudarde—looked through the window, and though their heads intercepted the feeble light of the cell, its miserable tenant seemed unaware of their scrutiny.    103   
  “Let us not disturb her,” whispered Oudarde; “she is in one of her ecstasies, she is praying.”    104   
  Meanwhile Mahiette gazed in ever-increasing earnestness upon that wan and withered face and that dishevelled head, and her eyes filled with tears. “That would indeed be strange!” she murmured.    105   
  She pushed her head through the cross-bars of the window, and succeeded in obtaining a glimpse into that corner of the cell upon which the unfortunate woman’s eyes were immovably fixed. When she withdrew her head, her face was bathed in tears.    106   
  “What do you call that woman?” she asked of Oudarde.    107   
  “We call her Sister Gudule,” was the reply.    108   
  “And I,” said Mahiette, “I call her Paquette la Chantefleurie!”    109   
  Then, with her finger on her lips, she signed to the amazed Oudarde to look through the bars of the window in her turn. Oudarde did so, and saw in that corner, upon which the eye of the recluse was fixed in gloomy trance, a little shoe of rose-coloured satin covered with gold and silver spangles. Gervaise took her turn after Oudarde, after which the three women gazing upon the unhappy mother mingled their tears of distress and compassion.    110   
  But neither their scrutiny nor their weeping had stirred the recluse. Her hands remained tightly locked, her lips silent, her eyes fixed, and to any one who knew her story that little shoe thus gazed at was a heart-breaking sight.    111   
  None of the three women had uttered a word; they dared not speak, not even in a whisper. This deep silence, this profound grief, this abstraction, in which all things were forgotten save that one, affected them like the sight of the High Altar at Easter or at Christmastide. A sense of being in some holy place came upon them; they were ready to fall on their knees.    112   
  At length Gervaise, the most inquiring of the three, and therefore the least sensitive, endeavoured to get speech of the recluse. “Sister Gudule! Sister!” she called repeatedly, raising her voice louder each time.    113   
  The recluse never stirred. Not a word, not a glance, not a breath, not a sign of life.    114   
  Oudarde, in a softer and more caressing tone, tried in her turn. “Sister!” she called; “Sister Gudule!”    115   
  The same silence, the same immobility.    116   
  “A strange woman indeed!” cried Gervaise; “no bombard would make her move.”    117   
  “Perhaps she is deaf,” suggested Oudarde.    118   
  “Or blind,” added Gervaise.    119   
  “Perhaps she is dead,” said Mahiette. In truth, if the soul had not actually quitted that inert, motionless, lethargic body, at least it had withdrawn itself to such inaccessible depths that the perceptions of the external organs were powerless to reach it.    120   
  “There remains nothing for us to do, then,” said Oudarde, “but to leave the cake on the ledge of the window. But then, some boy will be sure to take it away. What can we do to arouse her?”    121   
  Eustache, whose attention up till now had been distracted by the passing of a little cart drawn by a great dog, now noticed that his three companions were looking at something through the window above him, and, seized in his turn with curiosity, he mounted upon a stone, stood on tip-toe, and stretched up his round, rosy face to the hole, crying, “Mother, let me see too!”    122   
  At the sound of the child’s clear, fresh, ringing voice the recluse started violently. She turned her head with the sharp and sudden motion of a steel spring, the two long, fleshless hands drew aside the veil of hair from her brow, and she fixed upon the child a pair of bewildered and despairing eyes.    123   
  It was but a glance. “Oh, my God!” she cried, suddenly burying her face in her knees, and it seemed as if her hoarse voice tore her breast in passing, “in pity do not show me those of others!”    124   
  “Good-morrow, dame,” said the child soberly.    125   
  The shock had awakened the recluse from her trance. A long shiver ran through her from head to foot, her teeth chattered, she half raised her head, and pressing her arms to her sides, she took her feet in her hands as if to warm them.    126   
  “Oh, the bitter cold!” she murmured.    127   
  “Poor soul!” said Oudarde in deepest pity, “will you have a little fire?”    128   
  She shook her head in token of refusal.    129   
  “Then,” Oudarde went on, holding out a flask to her, “here is hippocras; that will warm you—drink.”    130   
  She shook her head again and looked fixedly at Oudarde, “Water,” she said.    131   
  “No, sister,” Oudarde insisted, “that is no drink for a January day. You must have a little hippocras, and eat this wheaten cake we have baked for you.”    132   
  She pushed away the cake Mahiette held out to her, and said, “Some black bread.”    133   
  “Come,” said Gervaise, seized with charity in her turn, and taking off her woollen cloak, “here is a cloak something warmer than yours. Put it round your shoulders.”    134   
  But she refused this as she had done the flask and the cake. “A sack,” she answered.    135   
  “But you must have something to show that yesterday was a holiday!” urged the good Oudarde.    136   
  “I know it well,” answered the recluse; “these two days I have had no water in my pitcher.”    137   
  After a moment’s silence she continued, “It is a holiday, so they forget me. They do well. Why should the world think of me, who think not of it? Cold ashes to a dead brand!”    138   
  And as if exhausted by having said thus much, she let her head fall again upon her knees. The simple-minded, compassionate Oudarde gathering from these last words that the poor woman was still lamenting at the cold, said once more:    139   
  “Then will you not have some fire?”    140   
  “Fire!” answered the woman in a strange tone, “and will you make a fire for the poor little one that has been under the ground these fifteen years?”    141   
  She trembled in every limb, her voice shook, her eyes gleamed, she had risen to her knees. Suddenly she stretched out a thin and bloodless hand and pointed to the child, who gazed at her round-eyed and wondering. “Take away that child,” she cried, “the Egyptian is coming by!”    142   
  Then she fell on her face on the ground, her forehead striking the floor with the sound of stone upon stone. The three women thought her dead; but a moment afterward she stirred, and they saw her drag herself on her hands and knees to the corner where the little shoe lay. At this they dared look no longer; they saw her not, but they heard the sound of a tempest of sighs and kisses, mingled with heartrending cries and dull blows as of a head being struck against a wall; then, after one of these blows, so violent that they all three recoiled in horror, deep silence.    143   
  “Can she have killed herself?” asked Gervaise, venturing her head through the bars. “Sister! Sister Gudule!”    144   
  “Sister Gudule!” echoed Oudarde.    145   
  “Alas, she does not move!” cried Gervaise; “can she be dead? Gudule! Gudule!”    146   
  Mahiette, whom deep emotion had rendered speechless, now made an effort. “Wait a moment,” said she; then going close to the window—“Paquette!” she cried—“Paquette la Chantefleurie!”    147   
  A child blowing unsuspiciously on the half-lighted match of a petard, causing it suddenly to explode in his face, would not be more appalled than Mahiette at the effect of this name, thus unexpectedly launched into Sister Gudule’s cell.    148   
  The recluse shook in every limb, then, rising to her feet, she sprang at the loophole with eyes so blazing that the three women and the child all fell back to the very edge of the quay.    149   
  Meanwhile the terrible face of the recluse remained close to the grating. “Oh! oh!” she cried, with a horrible laugh, “it is the Egyptian woman calling me!”    150   
  At that moment a scene which was taking place on the pillory caught her haggard eye. Her brow contracted with horror, she stretched her two skeleton arms through the cross-bars, and cried in a voice like the rattle in a dying throat, “’Tis thou again, daughter of Egypt! ’Tis thou calling me, stealer of children! Accursed be thou forever—accursed! accursed! accursed!”

   
Book VI   
IV. A Tear for a Drop of Water   
     
THE CONCLUDING words of the foregoing chapter may be described as the point of junction of two scenes which, till that moment, had been running parallel, each on its own particular stage; the one—which we have just been following—at the Rat-Hole; the other—now to be described—on the pillory. The former had been witnessed only by the three women with whom the reader has just been made acquainted; the latter had for audience the whole crowd which we saw gathering in the Place de Grève round the pillory and the gibbet.      1   
  This crowd, in whom the sight of the four sergeants stationed since nine in the morning at the four corners of the pillory had roused the pleasing expectation of a penal exhibition of some sort—not, perhaps, a hanging, but a flogging, a cutting off of ears or the like—this crowd had increased so rapidly that the four mounted men, finding themselves too closely pressed, had more than once been under the necessity of “tightening” it, as they called it then, by great lashes of their whips and their horses’ heels.      2   
  The populace, well accustomed to waiting for public executions, manifested but little impatience. They amused themselves by looking at the pillory, a very simple structure, consisting of a hollow cube of masonry some ten feet in height. A steep flight of steps of unhewn stone—called par excellence the ladder—led to the top platform, on which lay horizontally a wheel of stout oak. To this wheel the victim was bound kneeling and with his hands pinioned behind him; a shaft of timber, set in motion by a windlass concealed in the interior of the structure, caused the wheel to rotate horizontally, thus presenting the face of the culprit to every point of the Place in succession. This was called “turning” the criminal.      3   
  It will be seen from the description that the pillory of the Grève was far from possessing the many attractions of that at the Halles. Here was nothing architectural, nothing monumental—no roof embellished with an iron cross, no octagon lantern tower, no slender pilasters blossoming out against the edge of the roof into acanthus-leafed and flowery capitals, no fantastic, dragon-headed gargoyles, no carved wood-work, no delicate sculpture cut deeply into the stone.      4   
  One had to be content with the four rough-hewn sides of stone and an ugly stone gibbet, mean and bare, at the side of it. The show would have been a poor one to the amateur of Gothic architecture, but truly nobody could be more indifferent in the matter of architecture than the good burghers of the Middle Ages; they cared not a jot for the beauty of a pillory.      5   
  At last the culprit arrived, tied to a cart’s tail, and soon as he was hoisted on to the platform and, bound with cords and straps to the wheel, was plainly visible from every point of the Place, a prodigious hooting mingled with laughter and acclamations burst from the assembled crowd. They had recognised Quasimodo.      6   
  It was indeed he. Strange turn of fortune’s wheel!—to be pilloried on the same spot on which, but the day before, he had been saluted, acclaimed Pope and Prince of Fools, and counted in his train the Duke of Egypt, the King of Tunis, and the Emperor of Galilee. One thing, however, is certain, there was no mind in that crowd, not even his own, though in turn the victor and the vanquished, that thought of drawing this parallel. Gringoire and his philosophy were lacking at this spectacle.      7   
  Presently Michel Noiret, appointed trumpeter to our lord the King, after imposing silence on the people, made proclamation of the sentence, pursuant to the ordinance and command of the Lord Provost. He then fell back behind the cart with his men.      8   
  Quasimodo, quite impassive, never stirred a muscle. All resistance was impossible to him by reason of what, in the parlance of the old criminal law, was described as “the strength and firmness of the bonds”—in other words, the cords and chains probably cut into his flesh. This tradition of the dungeon and the galleys has been handed down to us and carefully preserved among us civilized, tender-hearted, humane people in the shape of the manacles—not forgetting the bagnio and the guillotine, of course.      9   
  Quasimodo had passively let himself be led, thrust, carried, hoisted up, bound and rebound. Nothing was to be discovered in his face but the bewilderment of the savage or the idiot. He was known to be deaf; he might also have been blind.     10   
  They thrust him on to his knees on the wheel, they stripped him to the waist; he made no resistance. They bound him down with a fresh arrangement of cords and leathern thongs; he let them bind and strap him. Only from time to time he breathed heavily, like a calf whose head swings and bumps over the edge of a butcher’s cart.     11   
  “The blockhead,” said Jehan Frollo of the Mill to his friend Robin Poussepain (for the two scholars had followed the culprit, as in duty bound), “he knows no more what it’s all about than a bumble-bee shut in a box!”     12   
  There was a great burst of laughter from the crowd when, stripped naked to their view, they caught sight of Quasimodo’s hump, his camel’s breast, his brawny, hairy shoulders. During the merriment a man in the livery of the Town, short of stature and of burly make, ascended to the platform and stationed himself beside the culprit. His name was quickly circulated among the spectators. It was Master Pierrat Torterue, official torturer to the Châtelet.     13   
  He first proceeded to deposit on a corner of the pillory a black hour-glass, the upper cup of which was filled with red sand, which ran into the lower receptacle; he then divested himself of his party-coloured doublet, and dangling from his right hand there appeared a scourge with long, slender, white thongs—shining, knotted, interlaced—and armed with metal claws. With his left hand he carelessly drew the shirtsleeve up his right arm as high as the shoulder.     14   
  At this Jehan Frollo, lifting his curly, fair head above the crowd (for which purpose he had mounted on the shoulders of Robin Poussepain), shouted: “Walk up, walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and see them scourge Maître Quasimodo, bell-ringer to my brother the reverend archdeacon of Josas, a rare specimen of Oriental architecture, with a domed back, and twisted columns for legs!”     15   
  And the crowd roared again, especially the young people.     16   
  The torturer now stamped his foot; the wheel began to move. Quasimodo swayed under his bonds, and the amazement suddenly depicted on that misshapen countenance gave a fresh impulse to the peals of laughter round about.     17   
  Suddenly, at the moment when the wheel in its rotation presented to Master Pierrat Quasimodo’s enormous back, the torturer raised his arm, the thongs hissed shrilly through the air, like a handful of vipers, and fell with fury on the shoulders of the hapless wretch.     18   
  Quasimodo recoiled as if suddenly startled out of sleep. Now he began to understand. He writhed in his bonds, the muscles of his face contracted violently in surprise and pain, but not a sound escaped him. He only rolled his head from side to side, like a bull stung in the flank by a gadfly.     19   
  A second stroke followed the first, then a third, and another, and another. The wheel ceased not to turn, nor the lashes to rain down. Soon the blood began to flow; it trickled in a thousand streams over the dark shoulders of the hunchback, and the keen thongs, as they swung round in the air, scattered it in showers over the multitude.     20   
  Quasimodo had resumed, in appearance at least, his former impassibility. At first he had striven, silently and without any great external movement, to burst his bonds. His eye kindled, his muscles contracted, his limbs gathered themselves up. The effort was powerful, strenuous, desperate, and the cords and straps were strained to their utmost tension; but the seasoned bonds of the provostry held. They cracked, but that was all. Quasimodo desisted, exhausted by the effort, and the stupefaction on his face was succeeded by an expression of bitter and hopeless discouragement. He closed his single eye, dropped his head upon his breast, and gave no further sign of life.     21   
  Thenceforward he did not stir; nothing could wring a movement from him—neither the blood, that did not cease to flow, nor the strokes which fell with redoubled fury, nor the violence of the torturer, who had worked himself into a state of frenzy, nor the shrill and strident whistle of the scourge.     22   
  At length an usher of the Châtelet, clad in black, mounted on a black horse, and stationed at the foot of the ladder since the beginning of the chastisement, pointed with his ebony staff to the hour-glass. The torturer held his hand, the wheel stopped. Quasimodo slowly reopened his eye.     23   
  The scourging was over. Two assistants of the torturer bathed the lacerated shoulders of the culprit, applied to them some kind of unguent which immediately closed the wounds, and threw over his back a yellow cloth shaped like a chasuble; Pierrat Torterue meanwhile letting the blood drain from the lashes of his scourge in great drops on to the ground.     24   
  But all was not yet over for poor Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour on the pillory which Maître Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to the sentence of Messire Robert d’Estouteville; and all merely to prove the truth of John of Cumenes’s ancient physiological and psychological jeu de mots: Surdus absurdus.     25   
  They accordingly turned the hour-glass, and left the hunchback bound to the wheel, that justice might run its course to the end.     26   
  The people—particularly in the Middle Ages—are to society what the child is in the family; and as long as they are allowed to remain at that primitive stage of ignorance, of moral and intellectual nonage, it may be said of them as of childhood—“It is an age that knows not pity.”     27   
  We have already shown that Quasimodo was universally hated—for more than one good reason, it must be admitted—for there was hardly an individual among the crowd of spectators but had or thought he had some cause of complaint against the malevolent hunchback of Notre Dame. All had rejoiced to see him make his appearance on the pillory; and the severe punishment he had just undergone, and the pitiable plight in which it had left him, so far from softening the hearts of the populace, had rendered their hatred more malicious by pointing it with the sting of merriment.     28   
  Accordingly, “public vengeance”—vindicte publique, as the jargon of the law courts still has it—being satisfied, a thousand private revenges now had their turn. Here, as in the great Hall, the women were most in evidence. Every one of them had some grudge against him—some for his wicked deeds, others for his ugly face—and the latter were the most incensed of the two.     29   
  “Oh, image of the Antichrist!” cried one.     30   
  “Thou rider on the broomstick!” screamed another.     31   
  “Oh, the fine tragical grimace!” yelled a third, “and that would have made him Pope of Fools if to-day had been yesterday.”     32   
  “Good!” chimed in an old woman, “this is the pillory grin. When are we going to see him grin through a noose?”     33   
  “When shall we see thee bonneted by thy great bell and driven a hundred feet underground, thrice-cursed bell-ringer?”     34   
  “And to think that this foul fiend should ring the Angelus!”     35   
  “Oh, the misbegotten hunchback! the monster!”     36   
  “To look at him is enough to make a woman miscarry better than any medicines or pharmacy.”     37   
  And the two scholars, Jehan of the Mill and Robin Poussepain, struck in at the pitch of their voices with the refrain of an old popular song:
               “A halter   
For the gallows rogue,   
    A fagot   
For the witch’s brat.”   
  38   
  A thousand abusive epithets were hurled at him, with hoots and imprecations and bursts of laughter, and now and then a stone or two.     39   
  Quasimodo was deaf, but he saw very clearly, and the fury of the populace was not less forcibly expressed in their faces than in their words. Besides, the stones that struck him explained the bursts of laughter.     40   
  At first he bore it well enough. But, by degrees, the patience that had remained inflexible under the scourge of the torturer relaxed and broke down under the insect stings. The Austrian bull that bears unmoved the attack of the picadors is exasperated by the dogs and banderillas.     41   
  Slowly he cast a look of menace over the crowd; but, bound hand and foot as he was, his glance was impotent to drive away these flies that stung his wounds. He shook himself in his toils, and his furious struggles made the old wheel of the pillory creak upon its timbers; all of which merely served to increase the hooting and derision.     42   
  Then the poor wretch, finding himself unable to burst his fetters, became quiet again; only at intervals a sigh of rage burst from his tortured breast. No flush of shame dyed that face. He was too far removed from social convention, too near a state of nature to know what shame was. In any case, at that degree of deformity, is a sense of infamy possible? But resentment, hatred, and despair slowly spread a cloud over that hideous countenance, growing ever more gloomy, ever more charged with electricity, which flashed in a thousand lightnings from the eye of the Cyclops.     43   
  Nevertheless, the cloud lifted a moment, at the appearance of a mule which passed through the crowd, ridden by a priest. From the moment that he caught sight of the priest, the poor victim’s countenance softened, and the rage that distorted it gave place to a strange soft smile full of ineffable tenderness. As the priest approached nearer, this smile deepened, became more distinct, more radiant, as though the poor creature hailed the advent of a saviour. Alas! no sooner was the mule come near enough to the pillory for its rider to recognise the person of the culprit, than the priest cast down his eyes, turned his steed abruptly, and hastened away, as if anxious to escape any humiliating appeal, and not desirous of being recognised and greeted by a poor devil in such a position.     44   
  This priest was the Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo.     45   
  And now the cloud fell thicker and darker than before over the face of Quasimodo. The smile still lingered for a while, but it was bitter, disheartened, unutterably sad.     46   
  Time was passing: he had been there for at least an hour and a half, lacerated, abused, mocked, and well-nigh stoned to death.     47   
  Suddenly he renewed his struggles against his bonds with such desperation that the old structure on which he was fixed rocked beneath him. Then, breaking the silence he had obstinately preserved, he cried aloud in a hoarse and furious voice, more like the cry of a dog than a human being, and that rang above the hooting and the shouts, “Water!”     48   
  This cry of distress, far from moving them to compassion, only added to the amusement of the populace gathered round the pillory, who, it must be admitted, taking them in a mass, were scarcely less cruel and brutal than that debased tribe of vagabonds whom we have already introduced to the reader. Not a voice was raised around the unhappy victim save in mockery of his thirst. Undoubtedly his appearance at that moment—with his purple, streaming face, his eye bloodshot and distraught, the foam of rage and pain upon his lips, his lolling tongue—made him an object rather of repulsion than of pity; but we are bound to say that had there even been among the crowd some kind, charitable soul tempted to carry a cup of water to that poor wretch in agony, there hung round the steps of the pillory, in the prejudice of the times, an atmosphere of infamy and shame dire enough to have repelled the Good Samaritan himself.     49   
  At the end of a minute or two Quasimodo cast his despairing glance over the crowd once more, and cried in yet more heart-rending tones, “Water!”     50   
  Renewed laughter on all sides.     51   
  “Drink that!” cried Robin Poussepain, throwing in his face a sponge soaked in the kennel. “Deaf rogue, I am thy debtor.”     52   
  A woman launched a stone at his head—“That shall teach thee to wake us at night with thy accursed ringing.”     53   
  “Ah-ha, my lad,” bawled a cripple, trying to reach him with his crutch, “wilt thou cast spells on us again from the towers of Notre Dame, I wonder?”     54   
  “Here’s a porringer to drink out of,” said a man, hurling a broken pitcher at his breast. “’Tis thou, that only by passing before her, caused my wife to be brought to bed of a child with two heads!”     55   
  “And my cat of a kit with six legs!” screamed an old woman as she flung a tile at him.     56   
  “Water!” gasped Quasimodo for the third time.     57   
  At that moment he saw the crowd part a young girl in fantastic dress issue from it; she was accompanied by a little white goat with gilded horns, and carried a tambourine in her hand.     58   
  Quasimodo’s eye flashed. It was the gipsy girl he had attempted to carry off the night before, for which piece of daring he felt in some confused way he was being chastised at that very moment; which was not in the least the case, seeing that he was punished only for the misfortune of being deaf and having had a deaf judge. However, he doubted not that she, too, had come to have her revenge and to aim a blow at him like the rest.     59   
  He beheld her rapidly ascend the steps. Rage and vexation choked him; he would have burst the pillory in fragments if he could, and if the flash of his eye had possessed the lightning’s power, the gipsy would have been reduced to ashes before ever she reached the platform.     60   
  Without a word she approached the culprit, who struggled vainly to escape her, and detaching a gourd bottle from her girdle, she raised it gently to those poor parched lips.     61   
  Then from that eye, hitherto so dry and burning, there rolled a great tear which trickled down the uncouth face, so long distorted by despair and pain—the first, maybe, the hapless creature had ever shed.     62   
  But he had forgotten to drink. The gipsy impatiently made her little familiar grimace; then, smiling, held the neck of the gourd to Quasimodo’s tusked mouth.     63   
  He drank in long draughts; eh was consumed with thirst.     64   
  When, at last, he had finished, the poor wretch advanced his black lips—no doubt to kiss the fair hands which had just brought him relief; but the girl, mistrusting him perhaps, and remembering the violent attempt of the night before, drew back her hand with the frightened gesture of a child expecting to be bitten by some animal. Whereat the poor, deaf creature fixed upon her a look full of reproach and sadness.     65   
  In any place it would have been a touching spectacle to see a beautiful girl—so fresh, so pure, so kind, and so unprotected—hastening thus to succour so much of misery, of deformity and wickedness. On a pillory, it became sublime.     66   
  The people themselves were overcome by it, and clapped their hands, shouting, “Noël! Noël!”     67   
  It was at this moment that the recluse through the loophole of her cell, caught sight of the gipsy girl on the steps of the pillory, and launched her sinister imprecation: “Cursed be thou, daughter of Egypt! cursed! cursed!”