Once again the girl sank down exhausted, powerless, her eyes already glazed, as if in death.    102   
  “Alas!” she stammered, “you seek your child; I—I seek my parents.”    103   
  “Give me back my little Agnes!” Gudule went on. “Thou knowest not where she is? Then die! I will tell thee. I was a wanton, I had a child, they stole my child. It was the gipsies. Thou seest plainly that thou must die. When thy mother the gipsy comes to seek for thee, I shall say to her, ‘Mother, behold that gibbet!’ Else give me back my child! Dost thou know where she is, my little girl? Here, let me show thee. Here is her shoe; ’tis all that’s left to me of her. Dost know where the fellow to it is? If thou knowest, tell me, and I will go on my knees to fetch it, even to the other end of the world.”    104   
  So saying, she thrust her other hand through the window and held up before the gipsy girl the little embroidered shoe. There was just light enough to distinguish its shape and its colour.    105   
  “Let me see that shoe!” said the gipsy with a start. “Oh, God in heaven!” And at the same time, with the hand she had free, she eagerly opened the little bag she wore about her neck.    106   
  “Go to, go to!” muttered Gudule; “search in thy devil’s amulet——”    107   
  She broke off suddenly, her whole frame shook, and in a voice that seemed to come from the innermost depths of her being, she cried: “My daughter!”    108   
  For the gipsy had drawn from the amulet bag a little shoe the exact counterpart of the other. To the shoe was attached a slip of parchment, on which was written this couplet:
           “When thou the fellow of this shalt see,   
Thy mother will stretch out her arms to thee.”   
 109   
  Quicker than a flash of lightning the recluse had compared the two shoes, read the inscription on the parchment, then pressed her face, radiant with ineffable joy, against the cross-bars of the loophole, crying again:    110   
  “My daughter! my daughter!”    111   
  “Mother!” returned the gipsy girl.    112   
  Here description fails us.    113   
  But the wall and the iron bars divided them. “Oh, the wall!” cried the recluse. “Oh, to see her and not embrace her! Thy hand—give me thy hand!”    114   
  The girl put her hand through the opening, and the mother threw herself upon it, pressing her lips to it, remaining thus lost to everything but that kiss, giving no sign of life but a sob that shook her frame at long intervals. For the poor mother was weeping in torrents in the silence and darkness of her cell, like rain falling in the night; pouring out in a flood upon that adored hand all that deep dark font of tears which her grief had gathered in her heart, drop by drop, during fifteen long years.    115   
  Suddenly she lifted her head, threw back her long gray hair from her face, and without a word began tearing at the bars of her window with the fury of a lioness. But the bars stood firm. She then went and fetched from the back of her cell a large paving-stone, which served her for a pillow, and hurled it against them with such force that one of the bars broke with a shower of sparks, and a second blow completely smashed the old iron cross-bar that barricaded the hole. Then, using her whole force, she succeeded in loosening and wrenching out the rusty stumps. There are moments when a woman’s hands are possessed of superhuman strength.    116   
  The passage cleared—and it had taken her less than a minute to do it—she leaned out, seized her daughter round the waist, and drew her into the cell.    117   
  “Come,” she murmured, “let me drag thee out of the pit.”    118   
  As soon as she had her daughter in the cell, she set her gently on the ground; then catching her up in her arms again, as if she were still only the baby Agnes, she carried her to and fro in the narrow cell, intoxicated, beside herself with joy, shouting, singing, kissing her daughter, babbling to her, laughing, melting into tears—all at the same time, all with frenzied vehemence.    119   
  “My daughter! my daughter!” said she. “I have my daughter again—’tis she! God has given her back to me. Hey there! come all of you! Is there anybody to see that I’ve got my daughter? Lord Jesus, how beautiful she is! Thou hast made me wait fifteen years, oh, my God, but it was only that thou mightest give her back to me so beautiful. And the gipsy women had not eaten her! Who told me that they had? My little girl—my little one—kiss me. Those good gipsies! I love the gipsies. So it is thou indeed? And it was that that made my heart leap every time thou didst pass by. And to think that I took it for hatred! Forgive me, my Agnes, forgive me! Thou thoughtest me very wicked, didst thou not? I love thee. Hast thou then that little mark still on thy neck? Let me see. Yes, she has it still. Oh, how fair thou art! ’Twas from me you got those big eyes, my lady. Kiss me. I love thee. What is it to me that other women have children? I can laugh at them now! Let them only come and look. Here is mine. Look at her neck, her eyes, her hair, her hand. Find me anything as beautiful as that! Oh, I’ll warrant you she’ll have plenty of lovers, this one! I have wept for fifteen years. All my beauty that I lost has gone to her. Kiss me!”    120   
  She said a thousand tender and extravagant things to her, the beauty of which lay in their tone, disarranged the poor child’s garments till she blushed, smoothed her silken tresses with her hand, kissed her foot, her knee, her forehead, her eyes, went into raptures over everything, the girl letting her do as she would, only repeating at intervals, very low and with ineffable sweetness the word “Mother!”    121   
  “Hark thee, my little girl,” resumed the recluse, interrupting her words constantly with kisses, “hark thee, I shall love thee and take good care of thee. We will go away from here. We are going to be so happy! I have inherited somewhat in Reims—in our country. Thou knowest Reims,—thou canst not, thou wert too little. Couldst thou but know how pretty thou wert at four months old—such tiny feet that people came all the way from Epernay, five leagues off, to see them. We shall have a field and a house. Thou shalt sleep in my own bed. Oh, my God! who would believe it? I have my daughter again!”    122   
  “Oh, mother!” said the girl, finding strength at last to speak in her emotion, “the gipsy woman spoke true. There was a good gipsy woman among our people who died last year, and who had always taken care of me like a fostermother. It was she who hung this little bag round my neck. She used always to say to me: ‘Child, guard this trinket well; ’tis a treasure; it will make thee find thy mother again. Thou wearest thy mother about thy neck!” She foretold it—the gipsy woman.”    123   
  Again the sachette clasped her daughter in her arms. “Come, let me kiss thee; thou sayest that so prettily. When we are back in our own home, we will put the little shoes on the feet of an Infant Jesus in a church. We owe so much to the dear Virgin. Lord, what a sweet voice thou hast! When thou wert speaking to me just now it was just like music. Oh, Father in heaven, have I found my child again? Could any one believe such a story? Surely, nothing can kill one, for I have not died of joy.” And she began clapping her hands and laughing as she cried: “Oh, we are going to be so happy!”    124   
  At that moment the cell resounded to the clank of arms and the galloping of horses, coming apparently from the Pont Notre Dame and hastening nearer and nearer along the quay. The girl threw herself in anguish into the sachette’s arms.    125   
  “Save me! save me! Mother, they are coming!”    126   
  The recluse grew pale. “Oh, heaven! what dost thou say? I had forgotten; they are pursuing thee. What hast thou done?”    127   
  “I know not,” answered the unhappy girl, “but I am condemned to death.”    128   
  “To death!” said Gudule, staggering as if struck by thunder-bolt. “Death!” she repeated slowly, and fixed her daughter with wide staring eyes.    129   
  “Yes, mother,” repeated the girl distractedly, “they want to kill me. They are coming to hang me. That gallows is for me. Save me! save me! Here they come; oh, save me!”    130   
  The recluse stood for a moment as if petrified, then shook her head in doubt, and finally burst into a fit of laughter—the horrid laughter of her former days.    131   
  “Oh, oh, no! ’tis a dream thou art telling me. What, I should have lost her for fifteen years, and then should find her, but only for a minute! And they would take her from me now—now that she is so beautiful, that she is a woman grown, that she speaks to me and loves me! And now they would come and devour her under my very eyes—who am her mother! Oh, no, such things are not possible. God would never permit it.”    132   
  The cavalcade now apparently made a halt, and a distant voice could be heard saying: “This way, Messire Tristan! The priest told us we should find her at the Rat-Hole.” The tramp of horses commenced again.    133   
  The recluse started up with a cry of despair: “Fly, fly, my child! It all comes back to me now. Thou art right. They seek thy death! Horror! Malediction!—Fly!”    134   
  She thrust her head through the window, but drew it back again hastily.    135   
  “Stay where you are,” she said in a quick, terrified whisper, convulsively pressing the hand of the girl, who was already more dead than alive. “Keep still, do not breathe, there are soldiers everywhere. Thou canst not go out. It is too late.”    136   
  Her eyes were dry and burning. For a few moments she did not speak, but paced her cell with rapid steps, stopping at intervals to pluck out whole strands of her gray hair and tear them with her teeth.    137   
  “They are coming,” she said suddenly; “I will speak to them. Do thou hide in that corner. They will not see thee. I will tell them that thou hast escaped—that I let thee go!”    138   
  She carried her daughter to a corner of the cell which could not be seen from outside; made her crouch down; disposed her carefully so that neither foot nor hand came beyond the shadow; spread her long black hair round her to cover the white robe, and set up the pitcher and flag-stone, the only furniture she had, in front of her, trusting that they would conceal her. This done, finding herself calmer, she knelt down and prayed. The day, which was only just dawning, left abundant darkness still in the Rat-Hole.    139   
  At this moment the voice of the priest—that voice from hell—sounded close to the cell, crying: “This way, Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers!”    140   
  At that name, uttered by that voice, Esmeralda, cowering in her corner, made a movement.    141   
  “Do not stir!” murmured Gudule.    142   
  She had scarcely spoken before a tumultuous crowd of men and horses stopped in front of the cell. The mother rose hastily and posted herself at the loophole to cover the aperture. She beheld a strong body of armed men, horse and foot, drawn up in the Grève. Their commander dismounted and came towards her.    143   
  “Old woman,” said this man, whose face wore a repulsive expression, “we are seeking a witch to hang her. They tell us you had hold of her.”    144   
  The poor mother assumed the most unconscious air she was able.    145   
  “I do not quite take your meaning,” she answered.    146   
  “Tête-Dieu! Then what was this story of the crazy Archdeacon’s?” said Tristan. “Where is he?”    147   
  “My lord,” said one of the soldiers, “he has disappeared.”    148   
  “Go to, old hag,” the commander went on; “lie not to me. A witch was given into thy hand. What hast thou done with her?    149   
  The recluse feared to deny altogether lest she should arouse suspicion, so she answered in a truthful but surly tone:    150   
  “If you mean a strong young wench that they thrust into my hands awhile ago, I can tell you that she bit me, and I let her go. That’s all I know. Leave me in peace.”    151   
  The commander pulled a disappointed face. “Let me have no lies, old spectre!” he said. “My name is Tristan l’Hermite, and I am the King’s Gossip. Tristan l’Hermite, dost thou hear?” and he added, casting his eyes round the Place de Grève, “ ’tis a name that has echoes here.”    152   
  “And if you were Satan l’Hermite,” retorted Gudule, gathering hope, “I would have nothing different to say to you, nor would I be afraid of you!”    153   
  “Tête-Dieu!” exclaimed Tristan, “here’s a vixen! So the witch girl escaped! And which way did she go?”    154   
  “Through the Rue du Mouton, I think,” answered Gudule carelessly.    155   
  Tristan turned and signed to his men to prepare for resuming their march. The recluse breathed again.    156   
  “Monseigneur,” said an archer suddenly, “ask the old beldame how it is that her window-bars are broken thus?”    157   
  This question plunged the wretched mother back into despair. Still she did not lose all presence of mind. “They were always so,” she stammered.    158   
  “Bah!” returned the archer, “only yesterday they made a fine black cross that inclined one to devotion.”    159   
  Tristan glanced askance at the recluse. “The beldame seems uneasy,” he said.    160   
  The unhappy woman felt that all depended on her keeping up her self-possession, and so, with death in her heart, she began to laugh at them. Mothers are capable of efforts such as this.    161   
  “Bah!” said she, “the man is drunk. ’Tis more than a year since the back of a cart laden with stones ran against my window and burst the bars. I mind me well how I railed at the driver.”    162   
  “It’s true,” said another archer, “I was there.”    163   
  There always people to be found in all places who have seen everything.    164   
  This unlooked-for testimony revived the spirits of the recluse, to whom this interrogatory was like crossing an abyss on the edge of a knife.    165   
  But she was doomed to a continual see-saw between hope and alarm.    166   
  “If a cart had done that,” resumed the first soldier, “the stumps of the bars must have been driven inward, whereas they have been forced outward.”    167   
  “Ha! ha!” said Tristan to the soldier, “thou hast the nose of a cross-examiner at the Chôtelet! Answer what he says, old woman!”    168   
  “Mon Dieu!” she exclaimed, reduced to the last extremity, and bursting into tears in spite of herself; “I swear to you, my lord, that it was a cart that broke those bars: you hear that man say he saw it. Besides, what has that to do with your gipsy?”    169   
  “H’m!” growled Tristan.    170   
  “Diable!” continued the soldier, flattered by the provost’s commendation; “the iron looks quite fresh broken.”    171   
  Tristan shook his head. Gudule turned pale. “How long is it, say you, since the affair of the cart?”    172   
  “A month; a fortnight may-be, my lord; I do not remember.”    173   
  “At first she said above a year!” remarked the soldier.    174   
  “That looks queer!” said the provost.    175   
  “Monseigneur!” she cried, still filling the window, and trembling lest suspicion should prompt them to put their heads through and look into the cell; “monseigneur, I swear to you that it was a cart that broke this grating. I swear it by all the holy angels in paradise. If it was not a cart, may I go to everlasting perdition and deny my God!”    176   
  “Thou art very urgent in that oath of thine!” said Tristan with his inquisitorial glance.    177   
  The poor creature felt her assurance ebbing fast away. She was making blunders, and had a terrible consciousness that she was not saying what she should have said.    178   
  Here another soldier came up, crying: “Monseigneur, the old wife lies. The witch cannot have got away by the Rue du Mouton, for the chain was across the street all night, and the watchman saw no one pass.”    179   
  “What hast thou to say to that?” asked Tristan, whose countenance grew every moment more forbidding.    180   
  She strove to offer a bold front to this fresh incident. “Why, monseigneur, I do not know; I must have made a mistake, I suppose. In fact, now I come to think of it, I believe she crossed the water.”    181   
  “That’s at the opposite side of the Place,” said the provost. “And then it’s not very likely that she should want to return to the city where they were making search for her. Thou liest, old woman!”    182   
  “Besides,” added the first soldier, “there’s no boat either on this side or the other.”    183   
  “She will have swam across then,” said the recluse, fighting her ground inch by inch.    184   
  “Do women swim?” said the soldier.    185   
  “Tête-Dieu! old woman, thou liest, thou liest!” cried Tristan angrily. “I’ve a good mind to leave the witch and take thee instead. A little quarter of an hour’s question would soon drag the truth out of thy old throat. Come. Thou shalt go along with us!”    186   
  She caught eagerly at these words.    187   
  “As you will, my lord; do as you say. The question! I am quite ready to submit to it. Carry me with you. Quick! let us go at once!—and meantime,” thought she, “my daughter can escape.”    188   
  “Mort-Dieu!” said the provost, “what a thirst for the rack! This crazy old wife’s quite beyond my comprehension.”    189   
  A grizzled old sergeant of the watch now stepped out of the ranks and addressed the provost. “Crazy indeed, monseigneur! If she let the gipsy go, ’tis not her fault, for she has no love for gipsy women. For fifteen years I’ve held the watch here, and every night I hear her calling down curses without end on these Bohemian women. If the one we’re looking for is, as I believe, the little dancer with the goat, she hated her beyond all the rest.”    190   
  Gudule gathered up her strength:    191   
  “Yes, her beyond all the rest,” she repeated.    192   
  The unanimous testimony of the men of the watch confirmed what the old sergeant had said. Tristan l’Hermite, despairing of getting anything out of the recluse, turned his back on her, and, with irrepressible anxiety, she saw him slowly return to his horse.    193   
  “Come!” he growled between his teeth. “Forward! we must continue the search. I will not sleep till the gipsy has been hanged.”    194   
  Nevertheless, he lingered a moment before mounting. Gudule hung between life and death as she saw him scanning the Place with the restless look of the hound that instinctively feels himself near the lair of his quarry, and is reluctant to go away. At last he shook his head, and sprang into the saddle.    195   
  Gudule’s heart, so horribly contracted, now expanded, and she whispered, with a glance towards her daughter, whom she had not ventured to look at since the arrival of her pursuers, “Saved!”    196   
  All this time the poor child had remained in her corner, without breathing, without moving a muscle, death staring her in the face. She had lost no word of the scene between Gudule and Tristan, and each pang of her mother’s had echoed in her own heart. She had heard each successive crack of the thread that held her suspended over the abyss, and twenty times she thought to see it snap. Only now did she begin to take breath and feel the ground steady under her feet.    197   
  At this moment she heard a voice call to the provost: “Corbœuf! Monsieur the Provost, it’s none of my business as a man-at-arms to hang witches. The rabble populace is put down; I leave you to do your own work alone. You will permit me to return to my company, who are meanwhile without a captain.”    198   
  The voice was that of Phœbus de Châteaupers. What passed in her breast is impossible to describe. He was there, her friend, her protector, her safeguard, her refuge—her Phœbus! She started to her feet, and before her mother could prevent her had sprung to the loophole, crying:    199   
  “Phœbus! To me, my Phœbus!”    200   
  Phœbus was no longer there. He had just galloped round the corner of the Rue de la Coutellerie. But Tristan had not yet gone away.    201   
  The recluse rushed at her daughter with a snarl of rage and dragged her violently back, her nails entering the flesh of the girl’s neck. But the mother turned tigress has no thought of careful handling. Too late. Tristan had seen it all.    202   
  “Hè! hè!” he chuckled with a grin that bared all his teeth and made his face wolfish; “two mice in the trap!”    203   
  “I suspected as much,” said the soldier. Tristan slapped him on the shoulder. “Thou art a good cat! Now, then,” he added, “where is Henriet Cousin?”    204   
  A man, having neither the dress nor the appearance of a soldier, stepped out from their ranks. He wore a suit half gray, half brown, with leather sleeves, and carried a coil of rope in his great hand. This man was in constant attendance on Tristan, who was in constant attendance on Louis XI.    205   
  “Friend,” said Tristan l’Hermite, “I conclude that this is the witch we are in search of. Thou wilt hang me that one. Hast thou thy ladder?”    206   
  “There is one under the shed at the Maison-aux-Piliers,” answered the man. “Is it at the gallows over there we’re to do the job?” he continued, pointing to the gibbet.    207   
  “Yes.”    208   
  “So, ho!” said the man, with a coarse laugh more brutal even than the provost’s, “we shall not have far to go!”    209   
  “Make haste,” said Tristan, “and do thy laughing afterward.”    210   
  Since the moment when Tristan had seen her daughter, and all hope was lost, the recluse had not uttered a word. She had thrown the poor girl, half dead, into a corner of the cell and resumed her post at the window, her two hands spread on the stone sill like two talons. In this attitude she faced the soldiers unflinchingly with a gaze that was once more savage and distraught. As Henriet Cousin approached the cell, she fixed him with such a wild beast glare that he shrank back.    211   
  “Monseigneur,” said he, turning back to the provost, “which must I take?”    212   
  “The young one.”    213   
  “So much the better; the old one seems none too easy.”    214   
  “Poor little dancer!” said the sergeant of the watch.    215   
  Henriet Cousin advanced once more to the window. The mother’s eye made his own droop.    216   
  “Madame,” he began timidly—    217   
  She interrupted him in a whisper of concentrated fury:    218   
  “What wilt thou?”    219   
  “It is not you,” he said, “but the other one.”    220   
  “What other one?”    221   
  “The young one.”    222   
  She shook her head violently. “There is nobody! nobody! nobody!” she cried.    223   
  “Yes, there is!” returned the hangman, “as you very well know. Let me take the girl. I mean no harm to you.”    224   
  “Ah! ha!” she said, with a wild laugh; “you mean no harm to me?”    225   
  “Let me take the other, good wife; ’tis the provost’s orders.”    226   
  “There is nobody else,” she repeated distractedly.    227   
  “But I tell you there is!” retorted the hangman. “We all saw the two of you.”    228   
  “Thou hadst best look, then,” said the recluse with a mad chuckle. “Thrust thy head through the window.”    229   
  The hangman considered the nails of the mother, and dared not.    230   
  “Haste thee now!” cried Tristan, who had drawn up his men in a circle round the Rat-Hole, and stationed himself on horseback near the gibbet.    231   
  Henriet returned to the provost in perplexity. He laid the coil of rope on the ground, and was twisting his cap nervously in his hands.    232   
  “Monseigneur,” he asked, “how must I get in?”    233   
  “By the door.”    234   
  “There is none.”    235   
  “Then by the window.”    236   
  “It is too narrow.”    237   
  “Widen it, then,” said Tristan impatiently. “Hast thou no pickaxes?”    238   
  The mother, still on guard at the opening to her den, watched them intently. She had ceased to hope, ceased to wish for anything. All she knew was that she would not have them take her daughter from her.    239   
  Henriet Cousin went and fetched the box of executioner’s tools from the shed of the Maison-aux-Piliers; also, from the same place, the double ladder, which he immediately set up against the gibbet. Five or six of the provost’s men provided themselves with crowbars and pickaxes, and Tristan accompanied them to the window of the cell.    240   
  “Old woman,” said the provost in stern tones, “give up the girl to us quietly.”    241   
  She gazed at him vacantly.    242   
  “Tête-Dieu!” exclaimed Tristan, “Why dost thou hinder us from hanging this witch as the King commands?”    243   
  The wretched creature broke into her savage laugh again.    244   
  “Why do I hinder you? She is my daughter.”    245   
  The tone in which she uttered these words sent a shudder even through Henriet Cousin himself.    246   
  “I am sorry,” returned the provost. “But it is the good pleasure of the King.”    247   
  Whereat she cried, her dreadful laugh ringing louder than before:    248   
  “What is he to me—thy King? I tell thee it is my daughter.”    249   
  “Break through the wall!” commanded Tristan.    250   
  To do this it was only necessary to loosen a course of stone underneath the loophole. When the mother heard the picks and lever sapping her fortress, she uttered a blood-curdling cry, and then started running round and round her cell with startling quickness—a wild-beast habit she had learned from her long years of confinement in that cage. She said no word, but her eyes blazed. The soldiers felt their blood run cold.    251   
  Suddenly she snatched up her stone in both hands, laughed, and hurled it at the workmen. The stone, ill-thrown, for her hands were trembling, touched no one, but fell harmless at the feet of Tristan’s horse. She gnashed her teeth.    252   
  Meanwhile, though the sun had not yet risen, it was broad daylight, and the old, moss-grown chimneys of the Maisonaux-Piliers flushed rosy red. It was the hour when the windows of the earliest risers in the great city were thrown cheerfully open. A countryman or so, a few fruit-sellers, going to the markets on their asses, were beginning to cross the Grève, and halted for a moment to gaze with astonishment at the group of soldiers gathered about the Rat-Hole, then passed on their way.    253   
  The recluse had seated herself on the ground close beside her daughter, covering her with her body, her eyes fixed, listening to the poor child, who, as she lay motionless, kept murmuring the one word, “Phœbus! Phœbus!”    254   
  As the work of demolition seemed to advance, so the mother drew mechanically farther back, pressing the girl closer and closer against the wall. All at once she saw the stone, from which she had never taken her eyes, begin to give way, and heard the voice of Tristan urging on the men. At this she awoke from the kind of stupor into which she had fallen for a few moments, and cried aloud; and her voice as she spoke now lacerated the ear like the rasp of a saw, now faltered and choked as if every kind of execration crowded to her lips to burst forth at once. “Ho, ho, ho! but ’tis horrible! Robbers! brigands! Are ye truly coming to take my daughter from me? I tell you, ’tis my own child! Oh, cowards! oh, hangman’s slaves! miserable hired cut throats and assassins! Help! help! Fire! And can they have the heart to take my child from me thus? Who is it then they call the good God in heaven?”    255   
  Then, addressing herself to Tristan, foaming, glaring, bristling, on all-fours like a panther: “Now come and dare to take my daughter from me. Dost thou not understand when this woman tells thee ’tis her daughter? Dost thou know what it is to have a child, eh, thou wolf? Hast thou never lain with thy mate? Hast never had a cub by her? And if thou hast little ones, when they howl, is there never an answering stir within thee?”    256   
  “Down with the stone,” said Tristan; “it is loose enough now.”    257   
  The crowbars heaved the heavy block. It was the mother’s last bulwark. She threw herself upon it, trying to hold it in its place; she furrowed the stone with her nails—in vain; the great mass, displaced by half a dozen men, escaped her grasp and slid slowly to the ground along the iron levers.    258   
  The mother, seeing the breach effected, then cast herself across the opening, barring it with her body, writhing, striking her head against the floor, and shrieking in a voice so hoarse with anguish and fatigue that the words were hardly articulate:    259   
  “Help! Fire! Help!”    260   
  “Now, then, take the girl,” said Tristan imperturbably.    261   
  The mother faced the soldiers with so menacing a glare that they seemed more fain to retreat than advance.    262   
  “Forward!” cried the provost. “Henriet Cousin—you!”    263   
  No one advanced a step.    264   
  The provost rapped out an oath. “Tëte-Christ! my soldiers afraid of a woman!”    265   
  “Monseigneur,” ventured Henriet, “you call that a woman?”    266   
  “She has a bristling mane like a lion,” said another.    267   
  “Forward!” repeated the provost. “The gap is large enough. Enter three abreast, as at the breach of Pontoise. Let’s make an end of it, death of Mahomet! The first man that draws back, I cleave him in two!”    268   
  Fixed thus between the devil and deep sea, the soldiers hesitated a moment, then, deciding for the lesser evil, advanced upon the Rat-Hole.    269   
  When the recluse saw this, she swept back her long hair from her eyes, struggled to her knees, and dropped her bleeding and emaciated hands upon them. Great tears welled up one by one to her eyes and rolled down a long furrow in her cheeks, like a torrent down the bed it has hollowed out. And then she began to speak, but in a voice so suppliant, so gentle, so submissive and heart-breaking that more than one hardened old fire-eater in Tristan’s company furtively wiped his eyes.    270   
  “Good sirs,” said she, “messieurs the sergeants, one word. There is a thing I must tell you. This is my daughter, look you—my dear little child who was lost to me! Listen, ’tis quite a story. It may surprise you, but I know messieurs the sergeants well. They were always good to me in the days when the little urchins threw stones at me because I was a wanton. Look you; you will leave me my child when you know all! I was a poor wanton. The gipsies stole her from me—by the same token I have kept her shoe these fifteen years. Look, here it is. She had a foot like that. At Reims. La Chantefleurie! Rue Folle-Peine! Perhaps you knew of this? It was I. In your young days; then it was a merry time, and there were merry doings! You will have pity on me, won’t you, good sirs? The gipsies stole her, and hid her from me for fifteen years. I thought her dead. Picture to yourself, my good friends, that I thought her dead. I have passed fifteen years here, in this stone, cave, without any fire in winter. That is hard. The poor, sweet little shoe! I cried so long to God that he heard me. This night he gave me back my child. She was not dead. You will not take her from me, I am sure. Even if ’twere me you wanted, I would not mind; but a child of sixteen! Leave her a little while longer to live in the sunshine! What has she done to you? nothing at all. Nor I either. If you only knew—I have no one but her. I am old—this is a blessing sent me from the Holy Virgin! And then, you are all so good! you did not know that it was my daughter; but now you know. Oh, I love her! Monsieur the Chief Provost, I would rather have a stab in my body than a scratch on her little finger! You have the air of a kind gentleman! What I tell you now explains the whole matter, surely? Oh! if you have a mother, sir—you are the captain, leave me my child! See how I entreat you on my knees, as we pray to Jesus Christ! I ask not alms of any one. Sirs, I come from Reims; I have a little field from my uncle Mahiet Pradon. I am not a beggar. I want nothing—nothing but my child! Oh, I want to keep my child! The good God, who is master over all, has not given her back to me for nothing. The King!—you say the King! It cannot give him much pleasure that they should kill my daughter! Besides, the King is good! She is my daughter; mine, not the King’s! She does not belong to him! I will go away! we will both go. After all, just two women passing along the road—a mother and her daughter; you let them go their way in peace! Let us go; we come from Reims. Oh, you are kind, messieurs the sergeants. I have nothing to say against you. You will not take my darling; it is not possible! Say it is not possible! My child! My child!”    271   
  We shall not attempt to convey any idea of her gestures, her accent, the tears that trickled over her lips as she spoke, her clasping, writhing hands, the heart-breaking smiles, the agonized looks, the sighs, the moans, the miserable and soul-stirring sobs she mingled with these frenzied, incoherent words. When she ceased, Tristan l’Hermite knit his brows, but it was to hide a tear that glistened in his tiger’s eye. He conquered this weakness, however, and said brusquely: “It is the King’s will.”    272   
  Then leaning down to Henriet Cousin’s ear, he whispered hurriedly, “Do thy business quickly.” It may be that the redoubtable provost felt his heart failing him—even his.    273   
  The hangman and the sergeant accordingly entered the cell. The mother made no attempt at resistance; she only dragged herself over to her daughter and threw herself distractedly upon her.    274   
  The girl saw the soldiers advancing towards her, and the horror of death revived her senses.    275   
  “Mother!” she cried in a tone of indescribable anguish; “oh, mother! they are coming! defend me!”    276   
  “Yes, yes, dear love, I am defending thee!” answered the mother in expiring tones; and clasping her frantically in her arms, she covered her face with kisses. To see them together on the ground, the mother thus protecting her child, was a sight to wring the stoniest heart.    277   
  Henriet Cousin took hold of the gipsy girl under her beautiful shoulders. At the touch of that hand she gave a little shuddering cry and swooned. The executioner, from whose eyes big tears were dropping, would have carried her away and sought to unclasp the mother’s arms, which were tightly coiled about her daughter’s waist, but she held on to her child with such an iron grasp that he found it utterly impossible to separate them. He therefore had to drag the girl out of the cell, and the mother along with her. The mother’s eyes, too, were closed.    278   
  The sun rose at this moment, and already there was a considerable crowd of people in the Place looking from a distance at what was being dragged over the ground to the gibbet. For this was Tristan’s way at executions. His one idea was to prevent the curious from coming too near.    279   
  There was nobody at the windows. Only, in the far distance, on the summit of that tower of Notre Dame which looks toward the Grève, two men, their dark figures standing out black against the clear morning sky, appeared to be watching the scene.    280   
  Henriet Cousin stopped with his burden at the foot of the fatal ladder, and with faltering breath, such a pity did he think it, he passed the rope round the girl’s exquisite neck. At the horrible contact of the hempen rope, the poor child opened her eyes and beheld the skeleton arm of the gibbet extended over her head. She struggled to free herself, and cried out in an agonized voice: “No! no! I will not! I will not!” The mother, whose head was buried in her daughter’s robe, said no word, but a long shudder ran through her whole frame, and they could hear the frenzied kisses she bestowed upon her child. The hangman seized this moment to wrench asunder the arms clasped round the doomed girl, and whether from exhaustion or despair, they yielded. He then lifted the girl to his shoulder, where the slender creature hung limp and helpless against his uncouth head, and set foot upon the ladder to ascend.    281   
  At this moment the mother, who had sunk in a heap on the ground, opened her eyes wide. A blood-curdling look came over her face; without a word she started to her feet, and in a lightning flash flung herself, like a wild beast on its prey, on the hangman’s hand, biting it to the bone. The man howled with pain; the others ran to his assistance, and with difficulty released his bleeding hand from the mother’s teeth. Still she uttered no sound. They thrust her back with brutal roughness, and she fell, her head striking heavily on the stones. They raised her up; she fell back again. She was dead.    282   
  The hangman, who had kept his hold on the girl, began once more to ascend the ladder.    283   


Note 1.  The salt tax. [back]

Book XI   
II. La Creatura Bella Bianco Vestita—Dante   
     
WHEN Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the gipsy girl was gone, that while he was defending her she had been carried off, he clutched his hair with both hands, and stamped with surprise and grief; and then set off running, searching the Cathedral from top to bottom for his gipsy, uttering strange unearthly cries, strewing the pavement with his red hair. It was the very moment at which the King’s archers forced their victorious way into Notre Dame, likewise on the hunt for the gipsy. Poor deaf Quasimodo, never suspecting their sinister intentions (he took the truands to be the enemies of the gipsy girl), did his utmost to assist them. It was he who led Tristan l’Hermite into every possible nook and cranny, opened secret doors, double bottoms of altars, hidden sacristies. Had the unhappy girl still been there, it would have been Quasimodo himself who betrayed her into the hands of the soldiers.      1   
  When Tristan, who was not easily discouraged, gave up the search as hopeless, Quasimodo continued it alone. Twenty times, a hundred times over, did he go through the church, from end to end, from top to bottom; ascending, descending, running here, calling there, peering, searching, thrusting his head into every hole, holding up a torch under every vault, desperate, frenzied, moaning like a beast that has lost his mate.      2   
  At length, when he had made himself sure—quite, quite sure—that she was gone, that it had come to the worst, that they had stolen her from him, he slowly reascended the lower stairs—those stairs which he had mounted so nimbly and triumphantly on the day he had saved her. He now went over the same ground with dejectedly drooping head, voiceless, tearless, with bated breath. The church was once more solitary and silent. The archers had quitted it to pursue their search for the sorceress in the city. Quasimodo, left alone now in the vast Cathedral, so thronged and tumultuous but a moment before, made his way to the cell where the gipsy girl had slept for so many weeks under his watchful protection.      3   
  As he drew near it he tried to delude himself that he might find her there after all. When, on reaching the bend of the gallery that looks down on the roof of the side aisle, he could see the narrow cell with its little window and its little door, lying close under one of the great buttresses, like a bird’s nest under a bough, the poor creature’s heart failed him, and he had to lean against the pillar to save himself from falling. He pictured to himself that perchance she had returned; that some good genius had brought her back; that this little nest was too quiet, too safe, too cosy for her not to be there; and he dared not venture a step nearer for fear of dispelling his illusion. “Yes,” he said to himself, “may-be she sleeps, or she is at her prayers. I will not disturb her.”      4   
  At last he summoned up courage, advanced on tip-toe, looked in, entered. Empty! The cell was still empty. Slowly the unhappy man made the tour of the little place, lifted up her pallet and looked beneath it, as if she could be hiding between it and the stone floor, shook his head, and stood staring stupidly. Suddenly he furiously stamped out his torch, and without uttering a word or breathing a sigh, he hurled himself with all his strength head-foremost against the wall and fell senseless to the ground.      5   
  When he came to himself, he flung himself on the bed, rolling on it and pressing frenzied kisses on the pillow, which still bore the imprint of her head. Here he lay for some minutes, motionless as the dead, then rose, panting, crazed, and fell to beating his head against the wall with the appalling regularity of the stroke of a clock and the resolution of a man determined to break his skull. At length he dropped down exhausted, then crawled outside the cell, and remained crouching, motionless, opposite to the door for a full hour, his eyes fixed on the deserted cell, sunk in a gloomier, more mournful reverie than a mother seated between an empty cradle and a tenanted coffin. He spoke no word; only at intervals a deep sob convulsed his whole frame, but a sob that brought no tears, like the silent flashes of summer lightning.      6   
  It was then that, striving amid his despairing memories to divine who could possibly have been the unforeseen ravisher of the gipsy girl, the thought of the Archdeacon flashed into his mind. He remembered that Dom Claude alone possessed a key of the stair-case leading to the cell; he recalled his nocturnal attempts upon Esmeralda, the first of which he Quasimodo, had assisted, the second prevented. He called to mind a thousand various details, and soon was convinced that it was the Archdeacon who had taken the gipsy from him. Nevertheless, such was his reverence for the priest, so deeply were gratitude, devotion, and love for this man rooted in his heart, that they resisted, even at this supreme moment, the fangs of jealousy and despair. The moment that Claude Frollo was concerned, the bloodthirsty, deadly resentment he would have felt against any other individual was turned in the poor bell-ringer’s breast simply into an increase of his sorrow.      7   
  At the moment when his thoughts were thus fixed upon the priest, as the dawn was beginning to gleam upon the buttresses, he beheld on the upper storey of the Cathedral, at the angle of the balustrade that runs round the outside of the chancel, a figure advancing in his direction. He recognised it—it was the Archdeacon.      8   
  Claude was moving with a slow and heavy step. He did not look before him as he walked, his face was turned aside towards the right bank of the Seine, and he held his head up as if endeavouring to obtain a view of something across the roofs. The owl has often that sidelong attitude, flying in one direction while it gazes in another. In this manner the priest passed along above Quasimodo without catching sight of him.      9   
  The deaf spectator, petrified by this sudden apparition, saw the figure disappear through the door leading to the stair of the northern tower, which, as the reader is aware, commands a view of the Hôtel-de-Ville.     10   
  Quasimodo rose and followed the Archdeacon, mounting the stair after him to find out why the priest was going there. Not that the poor bell-ringer had any definite idea of what he himself was going to do or say, or even what he wanted. He was full of rage and full of dread. The Archdeacon and the Egyptian clashed together in his heart.     11   
  On reaching the top of the tower, and before issuing from the shade of the stair-case, he cautiously investigated the position of the priest. The Archdeacon had his back towards him. An openwork balustrade surrounds the platform of the steeple; the priest, whose eyes were fixed upon the town, was leaning forward against that side of the square balustrade which faces the Pont Notre Dame.     12   
  With noiseless tread Quasimodo stole up behind him, to see what he was so intently gazing at, and the priest’s attention was so entirely absorbed elsewhere that he did not hear the step of the hunchback near him.     13   
  It is a magnificent and enchanting spectacle—and yet more so in those days—that view of Paris from the summit of the towers of Notre Dame, in the sparkling light of a summer’s dawn. It must have been a day early in July. The sky was perfectly serene; a few lingering stars, here and there, were slowly fading, and eastward, in the clearest part of the sky, hung one of great brilliancy. The sun was on the point of rising. Paris was beginning to stir, the endless variety of outline presented by its buildings on the eastern side showing up vividly in the singularly pure white light, while the gigantic shadow of the steeples crept from roof to roof, traversing the great city from one end to the other. Already voices and sounds were arising in several quarters of the town; here the clang of a bell, there the stroke of a hammer, elsewhere the complicated clatter of a cart in motion. The smoke from chimneys curled up here and there out of the mass of roofs, as if through the fissures of some great solfatara. The river, swirling its waters under its many bridges, round the points of innumerable islands, was diapered in shimmering silver. Around the city, outside the ramparts, the view melted into a great circle of fleecy vapour, through which the indefinite line of the plain and the soft undulation of the hills were faintly visible. All sorts of indeterminate sounds floated over the half-awakened city. In the east, a few downy white flakes, plucked from the misty mantle of the hills, fled across the sky before the morning breeze.     14   
  Down in the Parvis, some housewives, milk-pot in hand, were pointing out to one another in astonishment the extraordinary condition of the great door of Notre Dame, and the two streams of lead congealed between the fissures of the stones. This was all that remained of the tumult of the night before. The pile kindled by Quasimodo between the towers was extinct. Tristan had already cleared the débris from the Place and thrown the bodies into the Seine. Kings like Louis XI are careful to clean the pavements with all expedition after a massacre.     15   
  Outside the balustrade of the tower, immediately underneath the spot where the priest had taken up his position, was one of those fantastically carved gargoyles which diversify the exterior of Gothic buildings, and in a crevice of it, two graceful sprigs of wall-flower in full bloom were tossing, and, as if inspired with life by the breath of the morning, made sportive salutation to each other, while from over the towers, far up in the sky, came the shrill twittering of birds.     16   
  But the priest neither saw nor heard anything of all this. He was one of those men for whom there are neither mornings, nor birds, nor flowers. In that immense horizon spread around him, in such infinite variety of aspect, his gaze was concentrated upon one single point.     17   
  Quasimodo burned to ask him what he had done with the gipsy girl; but the Archdeacon seemed at that moment altogether beyond this world. He was evidently in one of those crucial moments of life when the earth itself might fall in ruins without our perceiving it.     18   
  With his eyes unwaveringly fixed upon a certain spot, he stood motionless and silent; but in that silence and that immobility there was something so appalling that the dauntless bell-ringer shuddered at the sight, and dared not disturb him. All that he did—and it was one way of interrogating the priest—was to follow the direction of his gaze, so that in this way the eye of the poor hunchback was guided to the Place de Grève.     19   
  Thus he suddenly discovered what the priest was looking at. A ladder was placed against the permanent gibbet; there were some people in the Place and a number of soldiers; a man was dragging along the ground something white, to which something black was clinging; the man halted at the foot of the gibbet.     20   
  Here something took place which Quasimodo could not very distinctly see; not that his eye had lost its singularly long vision, but that there was a body of soldiers in the way, which prevented him seeing everything. Moreover, at that instant the sun rose and sent such a flood of light over the horizon that it seemed as if every point of Paris—spires, chimneys, gables—were taking fire at once.     21   
  Now the man began to mount the ladder, and Quasimodo saw him again distinctly. He was carrying a female figure over his shoulder—a girlish figure in white; there was a noose round the girl’s neck. Quasimodo recognised her. It was She!     22   
  The man arrived with his burden at the top of the ladder. There he arranged the noose.     23   
  At this the priest, to have a better view, placed himself on his knees on the balustrade.     24   
  Suddenly the man kicked away the ladder with his heel, and Quasimodo, who for some minutes had not drawn a breath, saw the hapless girl, with the feet of the man pressing upon her shoulders, swinging from the end of the rope, some feet from the ground. The rope made several turns upon itself, and Quasimodo beheld horrible contortions jerking the body of the gipsy girl. The priest, meanwhile, with out-stretched neck and starting eyeballs, contemplated this frightful group of the man and the girl—the spider and the fly!     25   
  At the moment when the horror of the scene was at its height, a demoniacal laugh—a laugh that can only come from one who has lost all semblance of humanity—burst from the livid lips of the priest.     26   
  Quasimodo did not hear that laugh, but he saw it. Retreating a few paces behind the Archdeacon, the hunchback suddenly made a rush at him, and with his two great hands against Dom Claude’s back, thrust him furiously into the abyss over which he had been leaning.     27   
  The priest screamed “Damnation!” and fell.     28   
  The stone gargoyle under the balustrade broke his fall. He clung to it with a frantic grip, and opened his mouth to utter a cry for help; but at the same moment the formidable and avenging face of Quasimodo rose over the edge of the balustrade above him—and he was silent.     29   
  Beneath him was the abyss, a fall of full two hundred feet and the pavement. In this dreadful situation the Archdeacon said not a word, breathed not a groan. He writhed upon the gargoyle, making incredible efforts to climb up it; but his hand slipped on the smooth granite, his feet scraped the blackened wall without gaining a foothold. Those who have ascended the towers of Notre Dame know that the stone-work swells out immediately beneath the balustrade. It was on the retreating curve of this ridge that the wretched priest was exhausting his efforts. It was not even with a perpendicular wall that he was contending, but with one that sloped away under him.     30   
  Quasimodo had only to stretch out a hand to draw him out of the gulf, but he never so much as looked at him. He was absorbed in watching the Grève; watching the gibbet; watching the gipsy girl.     31   
  The hunchback was leaning, with his elbows on the balustrade, in the very place where the Archdeacon had been a moment before; and there, keeping his eye fixed on the only object that existed for him at that moment, he stood mute and motionless as a statue, save for the long stream of tears that flowed from that eye which, until then, had never shed but one.     32   
  Meanwhile the Archdeacon panted and struggled, drops of agony pouring from his bald forehead, his nails torn and bleeding on the stones, his knees grazed against the wall. He heard his soutane, which had caught on a projection of the stone rain-pipe, tear away at each movement he made. To complete his misfortune, the gutter itself ended in a leaden pipe which he could feel slowly bending under the weight of his body, and the wretched man told himself that when his hands should be worn out with fatigue, when his cassock should be rent asunder, when that leaden pipe should be completely bent, he must of necessity fall, and terror gripped his vitals. Once or twice he had wildly looked down upon a sort of narrow ledge formed, some ten feet below him, by the projection of the sculpture, and he implored Heaven, from the bottom of his agonized soul, to be allowed to spend the remainder of his life on that space of two feet square, though it were to last a hundred years. Once he ventured to look down into the Place, but when he lifted his head again his eyes were closed and his hair stood erect.     33   
  There was something appalling in the silence of these two men. While the Archdeacon hung in agony but a few feet below him, Quasimodo gazed upon the Place de Grève and wept.     34   
  The Archdeacon, finding that his struggles to raise himself only served to bend the one feeble point of support that remained to him, at length resolved to remain still. There he hung, clinging to the rain-pipe, scarcely drawing breath, with no other motion but the mechanical contractions of the body we feel in dreams when we imagine we are falling. His eyes were fixed and wide in a stare of pain and bewilderment. Little by little he felt himself going; his fingers slipped upon the stone; he was conscious more and more of the weakness of his arm and the weight of his body; the piece of lead strained ever farther downward.     35   
  Beneath him—frightful vision—he saw the sharp roof of Saint-Jean-le-Rond like a card bent double. One by one he looked at the impassive sculptured figures round the tower, suspended, like himself, over the abyss, but without terror for themselves or pity for him. All about him was stone—the grinning monsters before his eyes; below, in the Place, the pavement; over his head, Quasimodo.     36   
  Down in the Parvis a group of worthy citizens were staring curiously upward, and wondering what madman it could be amusing himself after so strange a fashion. The priest could hear them say, for their voices rose clear and shrill in the quiet air: “He will certainly break his neck!”     37   
  Quasimodo was weeping.     38   
  At length the priest, foaming with impotent rage and terror, felt that all was unavailing, but gathered what strength still remained to him for one final effort. He drew himself up by the gutter, thrust himself out from the wall by both knees, dug his hands in a cleft of the stone-work, and managed to scramble up about one foot higher; but the force he was obliged to use made the leaden beak that supported him bend suddenly downward, and the strain rent his cassock through. Then, finding everything giving way under him, having only his benumbed and powerless hands by which to cling to anything, the wretched man closed his eyes, loosened his hold, and dropped.     39   
  Quasimodo watched him falling. A fall from such a height is rarely straight. The priest launched into space, fell at first head downward and his arms outstretched, then turned over on himself several times. The wind drove him against the roof of a house, where the unhappy man got his first crashing shock. He was not dead, however, and the hunchback saw him grasp at the gable to save himself; but the slope was too sheer, his strength was exhausted: he slid rapidly down the roof, like a loosened tile, and rebounded on to the pavement. There he lay motionless at last.     40   
  Quasimodo returned his gaze to the gipsy girl, whose body, dangling in its white robe from the gibbet, he beheld from afar quivering in the last agonies of death; then he let it drop once more on the Archdeacon, lying in a shapeless heap at the foot of the tower, and with a sigh that heaved his deep chest, he murmured: “Oh! all that I have ever loved!”

   
Book XI   
III. The Marriage of Phœbus   
     
TOWARDS the evening of that day, when the bishop’s officers of justice came to remove the shattered remains of the Archdeacon from the Parvis, Quasimodo had disappeared.      1   
  This circumstance gave rise to many rumours. Nobody doubted, however, that the day had at length arrived when, according to the compact, Quasimodo—otherwise the devil—was to carry off Claude Frollo—otherwise the sorcerer. It was presumed that he had broken the body in order to extract the soul, as a monkey cracks a nut-shell to get at the kernel.      2   
  It was for this reason the Archdeacon was denied Christian burial.      3   
  Louis XI died the following year, in August, 1483.      4   
  As for Pierre Gringoire, he not only succeeded in saving the goat, but gained considerable success as a writer of tragedies. It appears that after dabbling in astronomy, philosophy, architecture, hermetics—in short, every variety of craze—he returned to tragedy, which is the craziest of the lot. This is what he called “coming to a tragic end.” Touching his dramatic triumphs, we read in the royal privy accounts for 1483:      5   
  “To Jehan Marchand and Pierre Gringoire, carpenter and composer, for making and composing the Mystery performed at the Châtelet of Paris on the day of the entry of Monsieur the Legate; for duly ordering the characters, with properties and habiliments proper to the said Mystery, as likewise for constructing the wooden stages necessary for the same: one hundred livres.”      6   
  Phœbus de Châteaupers also came to a tragic end—he married.      7

Book XI   
IV. The Marriage of Quasimodo   
     
WE have already said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre Dame on the day of the death of the gipsy girl and the Archdeacon. He was never seen again, nor was it known what became of him.      1   
  In the night following the execution of Esmeralda, the hangman’s assistants took down her body from the gibbet and carried it, according to custom, to the great charnel vault of Montfaucon.      2   
  Montfaucon, to use the words of Sauval, was “the most ancient and the most superb gibbet in the kingdom.” Between the faubourgs of the Temple and Saint-Martin, about a hundred and sixty toises from the wall of Paris and a few bow-shots from La Courtille, there stood on the highest point of a very slight eminence, but high enough to be visible for several leagues round, an edifice of peculiar form, much resembling a Celtic cromlech, and claiming like the cromlech its human sacrifices.      3   
  Let the reader imagine a huge oblong mass of masonry fifteen feet high, thirty feet wide, and forty feet long, on a plaster base, with a door, an external railing, and a platform; on this platform sixteen enormous pillars of rough hewn stone, thirty feet high, ranged as a colonnade round three of the four sides of the immense block supporting them, and connected at the top by heavy beams, from which hung chains at regular intervals; at each of these chains, skeletons; close by, in the plain, a stone cross and two secondary gibbets, rising like shoots of the great central tree; in the sky, hovering over the whole, a perpetual crowd of carrion crows.      4   
  There you have Montfaucon.      5   
  By the end of the fifteenth century, this formidable gibbet, which had stood since 1328, had fallen upon evil days. The beams were worm-eaten, the chains corroded with rust, the pillars green with mould, the blocks of hewn stone gaped away from one another, and grass was growing on the platform on which no human foot ever trod now. The structure showed a ghastly silhouette against the sky—especially at night, when the moonlight gleamed on whitened skulls, and the evening breeze, sweeping through the chains and skeletons, set them rattling in the gloom. The presence of this gibbet sufficed to cast a blight over every spot within the range of its accursed view.      6   
  The mass of masonry that formed the base of the repulsive edifice was hollow, and an immense cavern had been constructed in it, closed by an old battered iron grating, into which were thrown not only the human relics that fell from the chains of Montfaucon itself, but also the bodies of the victims of all the other permanent gibbets of Paris. To that deep charnel-house, where so many human remains and the memory of so many crimes have rotted and mingled together, many a great one of the earth, and many an innocent victim have contributed their bones, from Enguerrand de Martigny, who inaugurated Montfaucon, and was one of the just, down to Admiral de Coligny—likewise one of the just—who closed it. As for Quasimodo’s mysterious disappearance, all that we have been able to ascertain on the subject is this:      7   
  About a year and a half or two years after the concluding events of this story, when search was being made in the pit of Montfaucon for the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days before, and to whom Charles VIII granted the favour of being interred at Saint-Laurent in better company, there were found among these hideous carcases two skeletons, the one clasped in the arms of the other. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, had still about it some tattered remnants of a garment that had once been white, and about its neck was a string of beads together with a small silken bag ornamented with green glass, but open and empty. These objects had been of so little value that the executioner, doubtless, had scorned to take them. The other skeleton, which held this one in so close a clasp, was that of a man. It was observed that the spine was crooked, the skull compressed between the shoulder-blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. There was no rupture of the vertebræ at the nape of the neck, from which it was evident that the man had not been hanged. He must, therefore, have come of himself and died there.      8   
  When they attempted to detach this skeleton from the one it was embracing, it fell to dust.      9

Appendix   
     
NOTE I


On the title-page of the manuscript of Notre Dame de Paris there is the following note:      1   
  “I wrote the first three or four pages of Notre Dame de Paris on July 25, 1830. The Revolution of July interrupted me. Then my dear little Adèle came into the world (bless her!). I recommenced writing Notre Dame de Paris on September 1, and the work was concluded on January 15, 1831.”      2   
 
NOTE II


Chapter I, “The Great Hall,” began thus in the manuscript:      3   
  “Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to-day, July 25, 1830.”      4   
  The words “July 25, 1830,” were scratched out.      5   
  The date September 1 is put in at the paragraph beginning “If it could be given to us men of 1830,” etc.      6   
  At the bottom of the last page is written: “January 15, 1831, half past six in the evening.”      7   
 
NOTE III


The manuscript of Notre Dame de Paris has hardly an erasure. The corrections are confined to a few titles of chapters.      8   
  The chapter “The Story of a Wheaten Cake” was originally entitled “The Story of the Courtesan’s Child.”      9   
  The chapter “Showing that a Priest and a Philosopher are Not the Same” was “The Philosopher Married.”     10   
  The chapter “The Little Shoe” was “The Goat Saved.”     11

Preface

   So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century -- the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light -- are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world; -- in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.

Hauteville House, 1862.


Contents


Book First. -- A Just Man

I. M. Myriel.................................... 1
II. M. Myriel becomes M. Welcome................. 4
III. A Hard Bishopric for a Good Bishop........... 10
IV. Works corresponding to Words................. 12
V. Monseigneur Bienvenu made his Cassocks last too long 20
VI. Who guarded his House for him................ 22
VII. Cravatte...................................... 29
VIII. Philosophy after Drinking..................... 31
IX. The Brother as depicted by the Sister........ 37
X. The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light 40
XI. A Restriction................................. 53
XII. The Solitude of Monseigneur Welcome........... 58
XIII. What he believed.............................. 61
XIV. What he thought............................... 65


Book Second. -- The Fall

I. The Evening of a Day of Walking............... 69
II. Prudence counselled to Wisdom................. 82
III. The Heroism of Passive Obedience.............. 90
IV. Details concerning the Cheese-Dairies of Pontarlier 92
V. Tranquillity.................................. 96
VI. Jean Valjean.................................. 97
VII. The Interior of Despair....................... 103
VIII. Billows and Shadows........................... 111
IX. New Troubles.................................. 114
X. The Man aroused............................... 115



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XI. What he does................................. 118
XII. The Bishop works............................. 123
XIII. Little Gervais............................... 126


Book Third. -- In the Year 1817

I. The Year 1817................................ 137
II. A Double Quartette........................... 143
III. Four and Four................................ 148
IV. Tholomyes is so Merry that he sings a Spanish Ditty 151
V. At Bombardas................................. 155
VI. A Chapter in which they adore Each Other..... 158
VII. The Wisdom of Tholomyes...................... 159
VIII. The Death of a Horse......................... 165
IX. A Merry End to Mirth......................... 168


Book Fourth. -- To Confide is Sometimes To Deliver Into a Person's Power

I. One Mother meets Another Mother.............. 172
II. First Sketch of Two Unprepossessing Figures.. 182
III. The Lark..................................... 184


Book Fifth. -- The Descent

I. The History of a Progress in Black Glass Trinkets 188
II. Madeleine.................................... 189
III. Sums deposited with Laffitte................. 193
IV. M. Madeleine in Mourning..................... 197
V. Vague Flashes on the Horizon................. 199
VI. Father Fauchelevent.......................... 205
VII. Fauchelevent becomes a Gardener in Paris..... 208
VIII. Madame Victurnien expends Thirty Francs on Morality 210
IX. Madame Victurnien's Success.................. 213
X. Result of the Success........................ 215
XI. Christus nos Liberavit....................... 221



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XII. M. Bamatabois's Inactivity................... 222
XIII. The Solution of Some Questions connected with the
Municipal Police......................... 225


Book Sixth. -- Javert

I. The Beginning of Repose...................... 236
II. How Jean may become Champ.................... 240


Book Seventh. -- The Champmathieu Affair

I. Sister Simplice.............................. 250
II. The Perspicacity of Master Scaufflaire....... 253
III. A Tempest in a Skull......................... 258
IV. Forms assumed by Suffering during Sleep...... 279
V. Hindrances................................... 283
VI. Sister Simplice put to the Proof............. 296
VII. The Traveller on his Arrival takes Precautions for De-
parture................................... 303
VIII. An Entrance by Favor......................... 308
IX. A Place where Convictions are in Process of Formation 312
X. The System of Denials........................ 319
XI. Champmathieu more and more Astonished........ 327


Book Eighth. -- A Counter-Blow

I. In what Mirror M. Madeleine contemplates his Hair 333
II. Fantine Happy................................ 336
III. Javert Satisfied............................. 340
IV. Authority reasserts its Rights............... 344
V. A Suitable Tomb.............................. 349

Book First


M. Myriel


   IN 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D. He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D. since 1806.

   Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be the heir of his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen or twenty, in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was said that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed, though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and to gallantry.


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   The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the parliamentary families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were dispersed. M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the Revolution. There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she had long suffered. He had no children. What took place next in the fate of M. Myriel? The ruin of the French society of the olden days, the fall of his own family, the tragic spectacles of '93, which were, perhaps, even more alarming to the emigrants who viewed them from a distance, with the magnifying powers of terror, -- did these cause the ideas of renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst of these distractions, these affections which absorbed his life, suddenly smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which sometimes overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public catastrophes would not shake, by striking at his existence and his fortune? No one could have told: all that was known was, that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.

   In 1804, M. Myriel was the Cure of B. [Brignolles]. He was already advanced in years, and lived in a very retired manner.

   About the epoch of the coronation, some petty affair connected with his curacy -- just what, is not precisely known -- took him to Paris. Among other powerful persons to whom he went to solicit aid for his parishioners was M. le Cardinal Fesch. One day, when the Emperor had come to visit his uncle, the worthy Cure, who was waiting in the anteroom, found himself present when His Majesty passed. Napoleon, on finding himself observed with a certain curiosity by this old man, turned round and said abruptly: --

   "Who is this good man who is staring at me?"

   "Sire," said M. Myriel, "you are looking at a good man, and I at a great man. Each of us can profit by it."

   That very evening, the Emperor asked the Cardinal the name of the Cure, and some time afterwards M. Myriel was utterly astonished to learn that he had been appointed Bishop of D.


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   What truth was there, after all, in the stories which were invented as to the early portion of M. Myriel's life? No one knew. Very few families had been acquainted with the Myriel family before the Revolution.

   M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many months which talk, and very few heads which think. He was obliged to undergo it although he was a bishop, and because he was a bishop. But after all, the rumors with which his name was connected were rumors only, -- noise, sayings, words; less than words -- palabres, as the energetic language of the South expresses it.

   However that may be, after nine years of episcopal power and of residence in D., all the stories and subjects of conversation which engross petty towns and petty people at the outset had fallen into profound oblivion. No one would have dared to mention them; no one would have dared to recall them.

   M. Myriel had arrived at D. accompanied by an elderly spinster, Mademoiselle Baptistine, who was his sister, and ten years his junior.

   Their only domestic was a female servant of the same age as Mademoiselle Baptistine, and named Madame Magloire, who, after having been the servant of M. le Cure, now assumed the double title of maid to Mademoiselle and housekeeper to Monseigneur.

   Mademoiselle Baptistine was a long, pale, thin, gentle creature; she realized the ideal expressed by the word "respectable"; for it seems that a woman must needs be a mother in order to be venerable. She had never been pretty; her whole life, which had been nothing but a succession of holy deeds, had finally conferred upon her a sort of pallor and transparency; and as she advanced in years she had acquired what may be called the beauty of goodness. What had been leanness in her youth had become transparency in her maturity; and this diaphaneity allowed the angel to be seen. She was a soul rather than a virgin. Her person seemed made of a shadow; there was hardly sufficient body to provide for sex;


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a little matter enclosing a light; large eyes forever drooping; -- a mere pretext for a soul's remaining on the earth.

   Madame Magloire was a little, fat, white old woman, corpulent and bustling; always out of breath, -- in the first place, because of her activity, and in the next, because of her asthma.

   On his arrival, M. Myriel was installed in the episcopal palace with the honors required by the Imperial decrees, which class a bishop immediately after a major-general. The mayor and the president paid the first call on him, and he, in turn, paid the first call on the general and the prefect.

   The installation over, the town waited to see its bishop at work.

M. Myriel becomes M. Welcome


   THE episcopal palace of D. adjoins the hospital.

   The episcopal palace was a huge and beautiful house, built of stone at the beginning of the last century by M. Henri Puget, Doctor of Theology of the Faculty of Paris, Abbe of Simore, who had been Bishop of D. in 1712. This palace was a genuine seignorial residence. Everything about it had a grand air, -- the apartments of the Bishop, the drawing-rooms, the chambers, the principal courtyard, which was very large, with walks encircling it under arcades in the old Florentine fashion, and gardens planted with magnificent trees. In the dining-room, a long and superb gallery which was situated on the ground-floor and opened on the gardens, M. Henri Puget had entertained in state, on July 29, 1714, My Lords Charles Brulart de Genlis, archbishop; Prince d'Embrun; Antoine de Mesgrigny, the capuchin, Bishop of Grasse; Philippe de Vendome, Grand Prior of France, Abbe of Saint Honore de Lerins; Francois de Berton de Crillon, bishop, Baron de Vence; Cesar de Sabran de Forcalquier, bishop, Seignor of Glandeve; and Jean Soanen, Priest of the Oratory, preacher in ordinary to the king, bishop, Seignor of Senez. The portraits


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of these seven reverend personages decorated this apartment; and this memorable date, the 29th of July, 1714, was there engraved in letters of gold on a table of white marble.

   The hospital was a low and narrow building of a single story, with a small garden.

   Three days after his arrival, the Bishop visited the hospital. The visit ended, he had the director requested to be so good as to come to his house.

   "Monsieur the director of the hospital," said he to him, "how many sick people have you at the present moment?"

   "Twenty-six, Monseigneur."

   "That was the number which I counted," said the Bishop.

   "The beds," pursued the director, "are very much crowded against each other."

   "That is what I observed."

   "The halls are nothing but rooms, and it is with difficulty that the air can be changed in them."

   "So it seems to me."

   "And then, when there is a ray of sun, the garden is very small for the convalescents."

   "That was what I said to myself."

   "In case of epidemics, -- we have had the typhus fever this year; we had the sweating sickness two years ago, and a hundred patients at times, -- we know not what to do."

   "That is the thought which occurred to me."

   "What would you have, Monseigneur?" said the director. "One must resign one's self."

   This conversation took place in the gallery dining-room on the ground-floor.

   The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he turned abruptly to the director of the hospital.

   "Monsieur," said he, "how many beds do you think this hall alone would hold?"

   "Monseigneur's dining-room?" exclaimed the stupefied director.

   The Bishop cast a glance round the apartment, and seemed to be taking measures and calculations with his eyes.


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   "It would hold full twenty beds," said he, as though speaking to himself. Then, raising his voice: --

   "Hold, Monsieur the director of the hospital, I will tell you something. There is evidently a mistake here. There are thirty-six of you, in five or six small rooms. There are three of us here, and we have room for sixty. There is some mistake, I tell you; you have my house, and I have yours. Give me back my house; you are at home here."

   On the following day the thirty-six patients were installed in the Bishop's palace, and the Bishop was settled in the hospital.

   M. Myriel had no property, his family having been ruined by the Revolution. His sister was in receipt of a yearly income of five hundred francs, which sufficed for her personal wants at the vicarage. M. Myriel received from the State, in his quality of bishop, a salary of fifteen thousand francs. On the very day when he took up his abode in the hospital, M. Myriel settled on the disposition of this sum once for all, in the following manner. We transcribe here a note made by his own hand: --

NOTE ON THE REGULATION OF MY HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES.

For the little seminary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,500 livres

Society of the mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 "

For the Lazarists of Montdidier . . . . . . . . . . 100 "

Seminary for foreign missions in Paris . . . . . . 200 "

Congregation of the Holy Spirit . . . . . . . . . . 150 "

Religious establishments of the Holy Land . . . . . 100 "

Charitable maternity societies . . . . . . . . . . 300 "

Extra, for that of Arles . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 "

Work for the amelioration of prisons . . . . . . . 400 "

Work for the relief and delivery of prisoners . . . 500 "

To liberate fathers of families incarcerated for debt 1,000 "

Addition to the salary of the poor teachers of the diocese

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,000 "

Public granary of the Hautes-Alpes . . . . . . . . 100 "

Congregation of the ladies of D., of Manosque, and of

Sisteron, for the gratuitous instruction of poor

girls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,500 "

For the poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6,000 "

My personal expenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,000 "

-- -- --

Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15,000 "




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   M. Myriel made no change in this arrangement during the entire period that he occupied the see of D. As has been seen, he called it regulating his household expenses.

   This arrangement was accepted with absolute submission by Mademoiselle Baptistine. This holy woman regarded Monseigneur of D. as at one and the same time her brother and her bishop, her friend according to the flesh and her superior according to the Church. She simply loved and venerated him. When he spoke, she bowed; when he acted, she yielded her adherence. Their only servant, Madame Magloire, grumbled a little. It will be observed that Monsieur the Bishop had reserved for himself only one thousand livres, which, added to the pension of Mademoiselle Baptistine, made fifteen hundred francs a year. On these fifteen hundred francs these two old women and the old man subsisted.

   And when a village curate came to D., the Bishop still found means to entertain him, thanks to the severe economy of Madame Magloire, and to the intelligent administration of Mademoiselle Baptistine.

   One day, after he had been in D. about three months, the Bishop said: --

   "And still I am quite cramped with it all!"

   "I should think so!" exclaimed Madame Magloire. "Monseigneur has not even claimed the allowance which the department owes him for the expense of his carriage in town, and for his journeys about the diocese. It was customary for bishops in former days."

   "Hold!" cried the Bishop, "you are quite right, Madame Magloire."

   And he made his demand.

   Some time afterwards the General Council took this demand under consideration, and voted him an annual sum of three thousand francs, under this heading: Allowance to M. the Bishop for expenses of carriage, expenses of posting, and expenses of pastoral visits.

   This provoked a great outcry among the local burgesses; and a senator of the Empire, a former member of the Council of


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the Five Hundred which favored the 18 Brumaire, and who was provided with a magnificent senatorial office in the vicinity of the town of D., wrote to M. Bigot de Preameneu, the minister of public worship, a very angry and confidential note on the subject, from which we extract these authentic lines: --

   "Expenses of carriage? What can be done with it in a town of less than four thousand inhabitants? Expenses of journeys? What is the use of these trips, in the first place? Next, how can the posting be accomplished in these mountainous parts? There are no roads. No one travels otherwise than on horseback. Even the bridge between Durance and Chateau-Arnoux can barely support ox-teams. These priests are all thus, greedy and avaricious. This man played the good priest when he first came. Now he does like the rest; he must have a carriage and a posting-chaise, he must have luxuries, like the bishops of the olden days. Oh, all this priesthood! Things will not go well, M. le Comte, until the Emperor has freed us from these black-capped rascals. Down with the Pope! [Matters were getting embroiled with Rome.] For my part, I am for Caesar alone." Etc., etc.

   

The Episcopal Palace.


   On the other hand, this affair afforded great delight to Madame Magloire. "Good," said she to Mademoiselle Baptistine; "Monseigneur began with other people, but he has had to wind up with himself, after all. He has regulated all his charities. Now here are three thousand francs for us! At last!"

   That same evening the Bishop wrote out and handed to his sister a memorandum conceived in the following terms: --
EXPENSES OF CARRIAGE AND CIRCUIT.

For furnishing meat soup to the patients in the hospital. 1,500 livres

For the maternity charitable society of Aix . . . . . . . 250 "

For the maternity charitable society of Draguignan . . . 250 "

For foundlings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 "

For orphans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 "

-- --

Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,000 "




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   Such was M. Myriel's budget.

   As for the chance episcopal perquisites, the fees for marriage bans, dispensations, private baptisms, sermons, benedictions, of churches or chapels, marriages, etc., the Bishop levied them on the wealthy with all the more asperity, since he bestowed them on the needy.

   After a time, offerings of money flowed in. Those who had and those who lacked knocked at M. Myriel's door, -- the latter in search of the alms which the former came to deposit. In less than a year the Bishop had become the treasurer of all benevolence and the cashier of all those in distress. Considerable sums of money passed through his hands, but nothing could induce him to make any change whatever in his mode of life, or add anything superfluous to his bare necessities.

   Far from it. As there is always more wretchedness below than there is brotherhood above, all was given away, so to speak, before it was received. It was like water on dry soil; no matter how much money he received, he never had any. Then he stripped himself.

   The usage being that bishops shall announce their baptismal names at the head of their charges and their pastoral letters, the poor people of the country-side had selected, with a sort of affectionate instinct, among the names and prenomens of their bishop, that which had a meaning for them; and they never called him anything except Monseigneur Bienvenu [Welcome]. We will follow their example, and will also call him thus when we have occasion to name him. Moreover, this appellation pleased him.

   "I like that name," said he. "Bienvenu makes up for the Monseigneur."

   We do not claim that the portrait herewith presented is probable; we confine ourselves to stating that it resembles the original.

A Hard Bishopric for a Good Bishop


   THE Bishop did not omit his pastoral visits because he had converted his carriage into alms. The diocese of D. is a fatiguing one. There are very few plains and a great many mountains; hardly any roads, as we have just seen; thirty-two curacies, forty-one vicarships, and two hundred and eighty-five auxiliary chapels. To visit all these is quite a task.

   The Bishop managed to do it. He went on foot when it was in the neighborhood, in a tilted spring-cart when it was on the plain, and on a donkey in the mountains. The two old women accompanied him. When the trip was too hard for them, he went alone.

   One day he arrived at Senez, which is an ancient episcopal city. He was mounted on an ass. His purse, which was very dry at that moment, did not permit him any other equipage. The mayor of the town came to receive him at the gate of the town, and watched him dismount from his ass, with scandalized eyes. Some of the citizens were laughing around him. "Monsieur the Mayor," said the Bishop, "and Messieurs Citizens, I perceive that I shock you. You think it very arrogant in a poor priest to ride an animal which was used by Jesus Christ. I have done so from necessity, I assure you, and not from vanity."

   In the course of these trips he was kind and indulgent, and talked rather than preached. He never went far in search of his arguments and his examples. He quoted to the inhabitants of one district the example of a neighboring district. In the cantons where they were harsh to the poor, he said: "Look at the people of Briancon! They have conferred on the poor, on widows and orphans, the right to have their meadows mown three days in advance of every one else. They rebuild their houses for them gratuitously when they are ruined. Therefore it is a country which is blessed by God. For a


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whole century, there has not been a single murderer among them."

   

M. Myriel's House.


   In villages which were greedy for profit and harvest, he said: "Look at the people of Embrun! If, at the harvest season, the father of a family has his son away on service in the army, and his daughters at service in the town, and if he is ill and incapacitated, the cure recommends him to the prayers of the congregation; and on Sunday, after the mass, all the inhabitants of the village -- men, women, and children -- go to the poor man's field and do his harvesting for him, and carry his straw and his grain to his granary." To families divided by questions of money and inheritance he said: "Look at the mountaineers of Devolny, a country so wild that the nightingale is not heard there once in fifty years. Well, when the father of a family dies, the boys go off to seek their fortunes, leaving the property to the girls, so that they may find husbands." To the cantons which had a taste for lawsuits, and where the farmers ruined themselves in stamped paper, he said: "Look at those good peasants in the valley of Queyras! There are three thousand souls of them. Mon Dieu! it is like a little republic. Neither judge nor bailiff is known there. The mayor does everything. He allots the imposts, taxes each person conscientiously, judges quarrels for nothing, divides inheritances without charge, pronounces sentences gratuitously; and he is obeyed, because he is a just man among simple men." To villages where he found no schoolmaster, he quoted once more the people of Queyras: "Do you know how they manage?" he said. "Since a little country of a dozen or fifteen hearths cannot always support a teacher, they have schoolmasters who are paid by the whole valley, who make the round of the villages, spending a week in this one, ten days in that, and instruct them. These teachers go to the fairs. I have seen them there. They are to be recognized by the quill pens which they wear in the cord of their hat. Those who teach reading only have one pen; those who teach reading and reckoning have two pens; those who teach reading, reckoning, and Latin have three pens. But


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what a disgrace to be ignorant! Do like the people of Queyras!"

   Thus he discoursed gravely and paternally; in default of examples, he invented parables, going directly to the point, with few phrases and many images, which characteristic formed the real eloquence of Jesus Christ. And being convinced himself, he was persuasive.

Works corresponding to Words


   His conversation was gay and affable. He put himself on a level with the two old women who had passed their lives beside him. When he laughed, it was the laugh of a schoolboy. Madame Magloire liked to call him Your Grace [Votre Grandeur]. One day he rose from his arm-chair, and went to his library in search of a book. This book was on one of the upper shelves. As the bishop was rather short of stature, he could not reach it. "Madame Magloire," said he, "fetch me a chair. My greatness [grandeur] does not reach as far as that shelf."

   One of his distant relatives, Madame la Comtesse de Lo, rarely allowed an opportunity to escape of enumerating, in his presence, what she designated as "the expectations" of her three sons. She had numerous relatives, who were very old and near to death, and of whom her sons were the natural heirs. The youngest of the three was to receive from a grand-aunt a good hundred thousand livres of income; the second was the heir by entail to the title of the Duke, his uncle; the eldest was to succeed to the peerage of his grandfather. The Bishop was accustomed to listen in silence to these innocent and pardonable maternal boasts. On one occasion, however, he appeared to be more thoughtful than usual, while Madame de Lo was relating once again the details of all these inheritances and all these "expectations." She interrupted herself impatiently: "Mon Dieu, cousin! What are you thinking


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about?" "I am thinking," replied the Bishop, "of a singular remark, which is to be found, I believe, in St. Augustine, -- 'Place your hopes in the man from whom you do not inherit.' "

   At another time, on receiving a notification of the decease of a gentleman of the country-side, wherein not only the dignities of the dead man, but also the feudal and noble qualifications of all his relatives, spread over an entire page: "What a stout back Death has!" he exclaimed. "What a strange burden of titles is cheerfully imposed on him, and how much wit must men have, in order thus to press the tomb into the service of vanity!"

   He was gifted, on occasion, with a gentle raillery, which almost always concealed a serious meaning. In the course of one Lent, a youthful vicar came to D., and preached in the cathedral. He was tolerably eloquent. The subject of his sermon was charity. He urged the rich to give to the poor, in order to avoid hell, which he depicted in the most frightful manner of which he was capable, and to win paradise, which he represented as charming and desirable. Among the audience there was a wealthy retired merchant, who was somewhat of a usurer, named M. Geborand, who had amassed two millions in the manufacture of coarse cloth, serges, and woollen galloons. Never in his whole life had M. Geborand bestowed alms on any poor wretch. After the delivery of that sermon, it was observed that he gave a sou every Sunday to the poor old beggar-women at the door of the cathedral. There were six of them to share it. One day the Bishop caught sight of him in the act of bestowing this charity, and said to his sister, with a smile, "There is M. Geborand purchasing paradise for a sou."

   When it was a question of charity, he was not to be rebuffed even by a refusal, and on such occasions he gave utterance to remarks which induced reflection. Once he was begging for the poor in a drawing-room of the town; there was present the Marquis de Champtercier, a wealthy and avaricious old man, who contrived to be, at one and the same time, an ultra-royalist and an ultra-Voltairian. This variety of man has actually


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existed. When the Bishop came to him, he touched his arm, "You must give me something, M. le Marquis." The Marquis turned round and answered dryly, "I have poor people of my own, Monseigneur." "Give them to me," replied the Bishop.

   One day he preached the following sermon in the cathedral: --

   "My very dear brethren, my good friends, there are thirteen hundred and twenty thousand peasants' dwellings in France which have but three openings; eighteen hundred and seventeen thousand hovels which have but two openings, the door and one window; and three hundred and forty-six thousand cabins besides which have but one opening, the door. And this arises from a thing which is called the tax on doors and windows. Just put poor families, old women and little children, in those buildings, and behold the fevers and maladies which result! Alas! God gives air to men; the law sells it to them. I do not blame the law, but I bless God. In the department of the Isere, in the Var, in the two departments of the Alpes, the Hautes, and the Basses, the peasants have not even wheelbarrows; they transport their manure on the backs of men; they have no candles, and they burn resinous sticks, and bits of rope dipped in pitch. That is the state of affairs throughout the whole of the hilly country of Dauphine. They make bread for six months at one time; they bake it with dried cow-dung. In the winter they break this bread up with an axe, and they soak it for twenty-four hours, in order to render it eatable. My brethren, have pity! behold the suffering on all sides of you!"

   Born a Provencal, he easily familiarized himself with the dialect of the south. He said, "En be! moussu, ses sage?" as in lower Languedoc; "Onte anaras passa?" as in the Basses-Alpes; "Puerte un bouen moutu embe un bouen fromage grase," as in upper Dauphine. This pleased the people extremely, and contributed not a little to win him access to all spirits. He was perfectly at home in the thatched cottage and in the mountains. He understood how to say the grandest


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things in the most vulgar of idioms. As he spoke all tongues, he entered into all hearts.

   Moreover, he was the same towards people of the world and towards the lower classes. He condemned nothing in haste and without taking circumstances into account. He said, "Examine the road over which the fault has passed."

   Being, as he described himself with a smile, an ex-sinner, he had none of the asperities of austerity, and he professed, with a good deal of distinctness, and without the frown of the ferociously virtuous, a doctrine which may be summed up as follows: --

   "Man has upon him his flesh, which is at once his burden and his temptation. He drags it with him and yields to it. He must watch it, cheek it, repress it, and obey it only at the last extremity. There may be some fault even in this obedience; but the fault thus committed is venial; it is a fall, but a fall on the knees which may terminate in prayer.

   "To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err, fall, sin if you will, but be upright.

   "The least possible sin is the law of man. No sin at all is the dream of the angel. All which is terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation."

   When he saw everyone exclaiming very loudly, and growing angry very quickly, "Oh! oh!" he said, with a smile; "to all appearance, this is a great crime which all the world commits. These are hypocrisies which have taken fright, and are in haste to make protest and to put themselves under shelter."

   He was indulgent towards women and poor people, on whom the burden of human society rest. He said, "The faults of women, of children, of the feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands, the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise."

   He said, moreover, "Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed.


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The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow."

   It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.

   One day he heard a criminal case, which was in preparation and on the point of trial, discussed in a drawing-room. A wretched man, being at the end of his resources, had coined counterfeit money, out of love for a woman, and for the child which he had had by her. Counterfeiting was still punishable with death at that epoch. The woman had been arrested in the act of passing the first false piece made by the man. She was held, but there were no proofs except against her. She alone could accuse her lover, and destroy him by her confession. She denied; they insisted. She persisted in her denial. Thereupon an idea occurred to the attorney for the crown. He invented an infidelity on the part of the lover, and succeeded, by means of fragments of letters cunningly presented, in persuading the unfortunate woman that she had a rival, and that the man was deceiving her. Thereupon, exasperated by jealousy, she denounced her lover, confessed all, proved all.

   The man was ruined. He was shortly to be tried at Aix with his accomplice. They were relating the matter, and each one was expressing enthusiasm over the cleverness of the magistrate. By bringing jealousy into play, he had caused the truth to burst forth in wrath, he had educed the justice of revenge. The Bishop listened to all this in silence. When they had finished, he inquired, --

   "Where are this man and woman to be tried?"

   "At the Court of Assizes."

   He went on, "And where will the advocate of the crown be tried?"

   A tragic event occurred at D. A man was condemned to death for murder. He was a wretched fellow, not exactly educated, not exactly ignorant, who had been a mountebank at fairs, and a writer for the public. The town took a great interest


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in the trial. On the eve of the day fixed for the execution of the condemned man, the chaplain of the prison fell ill. A priest was needed to attend the criminal in his last moments. They sent for the cure. It seems that he refused to come, saying, "That is no affair of mine. I have nothing to do with that unpleasant task, and with that mountebank: I, too, am ill; and besides, it is not my place." This reply was reported to the Bishop, who said, "Monsieur le Cure is right: it is not his place; it is mine."

   He went instantly to the prison, descended to the cell of the "mountebank," called him by name, took him by the hand, and spoke to him. He passed the entire day with him, forgetful of food and sleep, praying to God for the soul of the condemned man, and praying the condemned man for his own. He told him the best truths, which are also the most simple. He was father, brother, friend; he was bishop only to bless. He taught him everything, encouraged and consoled him. The man was on the point of dying in despair. Death was an abyss to him. As he stood trembling on its mournful brink, he recoiled with horror. He was not sufficiently ignorant to be absolutely indifferent. His condemnation, which had been a profound shock, had, in a manner, broken through, here and there, that wall which separates us from the mystery of things, and which we call life. He gazed incessantly beyond this world through these fatal breaches, and beheld only darkness. The Bishop made him see light.

   On the following day, when they came to fetch the unhappy wretch, the Bishop was still there. He followed him, and exhibited himself to the eyes of the crowd in his purple camail and with his episcopal cross upon his neck, side by side with the criminal bound with cords.

   He mounted the tumbril with him, he mounted the scaffold with him. The sufferer, who had been so gloomy and cast down on the preceding day, was radiant. He felt that his soul was reconciled, and he hoped in God. The Bishop embraced him, and at the moment when the knife was about to fall, he said to him: "God raises from the dead him whom


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man slays; he whom his brothers have rejected finds his Father once more. Pray, believe, enter into life: the Father is there." When he descended from the scaffold, there was something in his look which made the people draw aside to let him pass. They did not know which was most worthy of admiration, his pallor or his serenity. On his return to the humble dwelling, which he designated, with a smile, as his palace, he said to his sister, "I have just officiated pontifically."

   Since the most sublime things are often those which are the least understood, there were people in the town who said, when commenting on this conduct of the Bishop, "It is affectation."

   This, however, was a remark which was confined to the drawing-rooms. The populace, which perceives no jest in holy deeds, was touched, and admired him.

   As for the Bishop, it was a shock to him to have beheld the guillotine, and it was a long time before he recovered from it.

   In fact, when the scaffold is there, all erected and prepared, it has something about it which produces hallucination. One may feel a certain indifference to the death penalty, one may refrain from pronouncing upon it, from saying yes or no, so long as one has not seen a guillotine with one's own eyes: but if one encounters one of them, the shock is violent; one is forced to decide, and to take part for or against. Some admire it, like de Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria. The guillotine is the concretion of the law; it is called vindicte; it is not neutral, and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their interrogation point around this chopping-knife. The scaffold is a vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of wood, iron and cords.

   It seems as though it were a being, possessed of I know not what sombre initiative; one would say that this piece of carpenter's work saw, that this machine heard, that this mechanism


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understood, that this wood, this iron, and these cords were possessed of will. In the frightful meditation into which its presence casts the soul the scaffold appears in terrible guise, and as though taking part in what is going on. The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted.

   Therefore, the impression was terrible and profound; on the day following the execution, and on many succeeding days, the Bishop appeared to be crushed. The almost violent serenity of the funereal moment had disappeared; the phantom of social justice tormented him. He, who generally returned from all his deeds with a radiant satisfaction, seemed to be reproaching himself. At times he talked to himself, and stammered lugubrious monologues in a low voice. This is one which his sister overheard one evening and preserved: "I did not think that it was so monstrous. It is wrong to become absorbed in the divine law to such a degree as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing?"

   In course of time these impressions weakened and probably vanished. Nevertheless, it was observed that the Bishop thenceforth avoided passing the place of execution.

   M. Myriel could be summoned at any hour to the bedside of the sick and dying. He did not ignore the fact that therein lay his greatest duty and his greatest labor. Widowed and orphaned families had no need to summon him; he came of his own accord. He understood how to sit down and hold his peace for long hours beside the man who had lost the wife of his love, of the mother who had lost her child. As he knew the moment for silence he knew also the moment for speech. Oh, admirable consoler! He sought not to efface sorrow by forgetfulness, but to magnify and dignify it by hope. He said: --

   "Have a care of the manner in which you turn towards the dead. Think not of that which perishes. Gaze steadily. You


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will perceive the living light of your well-beloved dead in the depths of heaven." He knew that faith is wholesome. He sought to counsel and calm the despairing man, by pointing out to him the resigned man, and to transform the grief which gazes upon a grave by showing him the grief which fixes its gaze upon a star.