Book VI   
V. End of the Wheaten Cake   
     
ESMERALDA blanched and swayed as she descended the steps of the pillory, the voice of the recluse pursuing her as she went: “Come down! come down! Ah, thou Egyptian thief, thou shalt yet return there again!”      1   
  “The Sachette is in one of her tantrums,” murmured the people; but they went no further, for these women were feared, which made them sacred. In those days they were shy of attacking a person who prayed day and night.      2   
  The hour had now arrived for releasing Quasimodo. They unfastened him from the pillory, and the crowd dispersed.      3   
  Near the Grand-Pont, Mahiette, who was going away with her companions, suddenly stopped. “Eustache,” she said, “what hast thou done with the cake?”      4   
  “Mother,” answered the child, “while you were talking to the dame in the hole a great dog came and took a bite of my cake, and so then I too had a bite.”      5   
  “What sir,” she cried, “you have eaten it all!”      6   
  “Mother, it was the dog. I told him, but he would not listen; then I bit a piece too.”      7   
  “’Tis a shocking boy!” said the mother, smiling fondly while she scolded. “Look you, Oudarde, already at eats by himself all the cherries in our little orchard at Charlerange. So his grandfather predicts he will be a captain.—Let me catch you at it again, Monsieur Eustache. Go, greedy lion!”

Book VII   
I. Showing the Danger of Confiding One’s Secret to a Goat   
     
SEVERAL weeks had elapsed.      1   
  It was the beginning of March, and though Du Bartas, 1 that classic ancestor of the periphrase, had not yet styled the sun “the Grand Duke of the Candles,” his rays were none the less bright and cheerful. It was one of those beautiful mild days of early spring that draw all Paris out into the squares and promenades as if it were a Sunday. On these days of clear air, of warmth, and of serenity there is one hour in particular at which the great door of Notre Dame is seen at its best. That is at the moment when the sun, already declining in the west, stands almost directly opposite the front of the Cathedral; when his rays, becoming more and more horizontal, slowly retreat from the flag-stones of the Place and creep up the sheer face of the building, making its innumerable embossments stand forth from the shadow, while the great central rose-window flames like a Cyclops’s eye lit up by the glow of a forge.      2   
  It was at this hour.      3   
  Opposite to the lofty Cathedral, now reddened by the setting sun, on the stone balcony over the porch of a handsome Gothic house at the corner formed by the Place and the Rue du Parvis, a group of fair damsels were laughing and talking with a great display of pretty airs and graces. By the length of the veils which fell from the tip of their pearl-encircled pointed coif down to their heels; by the delicacy of the embroidered chemisette which covered the shoulders but permitted a glimpse—according to the engaging fashion of the day—of the swell of the fair young bosom; by the richness of their under-petticoats, more costly than the overdress (exquisite refinement); by the gauze, the silk, the velvet stuffs, and, above all, by the whiteness of their hands, which proclaimed them idle and unemployed, it was easy to divine that they came of noble and wealthy families. They were in effect, the Damoiselle Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her companions, Diane de Christeuil, Amelotte de Montmichel, Colombe de Gaillefontaine, and the little De Champchevrier—all daughters of good family, gathered together at this moment in the house of the widowed Mme. Aloïse de Gondelaurier, on account of Monseigneur the Lord of Beaujeu and Madame Anne, his wife, who were coming to Paris in April in order to choose the maids-in-waiting for the Dauphiness Margaret when they went to Picardy to receive her from the hands of the Flemings. So all the little landed proprietors for thirty leagues round were eager to procure this honour for their daughters, and many of them had already brought or sent them to Paris. The above-mentioned maidens had been confided by their parents to the discreet and unimpeachable care of Mme. Aloïse de Gondelaurier, the widow of a captain of the King’s archers, and now living in elegant retirement with her only daughter in her mansion in the Place du Parvis, Notre Dame, at Paris.      4   
  The balcony on which the girls were seated opened out of a room richly hung with tawny-coloured Flanders leather stamped with gold foliage. The beams that ran in parallel lines across the ceiling charmed the eye by their thousand fantastic carvings, painted and gilt. Gorgeous enamels gleamed here and there from the doors of inlaid cabinets; a wild boar’s head in faience crowned a magnificent side-board, the two steps of which proclaimed the mistress of the house to be the wife or widow of a knight banneret. At the further end of the room, in a rich red velvet chair, beside a lofty chimney-piece, blazoned from top to bottom with coats of arms, sat Mme. de Gondelaurier, whose five-and-fifty years were no less distinctly written on her dress than on her face.      5   
  Beside her stood a young man whose native air of breeding was somewhat heavily tinged with vanity and bravado—one of those handsome fellows whom all women are agreed in adoring, let wiseacres and physiognomists shake their heads as they will. This young cavalier wore the brilliant uniform of a captain of the King’s archers, which too closely resembles the costume of Jupiter, which the reader has had an opportunity of admiring at the beginning of this history, for us to inflict on him a second description.      6   
  The damoiselles were seated, some just inside the room, some on the balcony, on cushions of Utrecht velvet with gold corners, or on elaborately carved oak stools. Each of them held on her knees part of a great piece of needlework on which they were all engaged, while a long end of it lay spread over the matting which covered the floor.      7   
  They were talking among themselves with those whispers and stifled bursts of laughter which are the sure signs of a young man’s presence among a party of girls. The young man himself who set all these feminine wiles in motion, appeared but little impressed thereby, and while the pretty creatures vied with one another in their endeavours to attract his attention, he was chiefly occupied in polishing the buckle of his sword-belt with his doeskin glove.      8   
  From time to time the old lady addressed him in a low voice, and he answered as well as might be with a sort of awkward and constrained politeness. From the smiles and significant gestures of Madame Aloïse, and the meaning glances she threw at her daughter, Fleur-de-Lys, as she talked to the captain, it was evident that the conversation turned on some betrothal already accomplished or a marriage in the near future between the young man and the daughter of the house. Also, from the cold and embarrassed air of the officer, it was plainly to be seen that, as far as he was concerned, there was no longer any question of love. His whole demeanour expressed a degree of constraint and ennui such as a modern subaltern would translate in the admirable language of to-day by, “What a beastly bore!”      9   
  The good lady, infatuated like many another mother with her daughter, never noticed the officer’s lack of enthusiasm; but gave herself infinite pains to call his attention in a whisper to the matchless grace with which Fleur-de-Lys used her needle or unwound her silk thread.     10   
  “Look, little cousin,” said she, pulling him by the sleeve and speaking into his ear, “look at her now—now, as she bends.”     11   
  “Quite so,” replied the young man; and he fell back into his former icy and abstracted silence.     12   
  The next moment he had to lean down again to Madame Aloïse. “Have you ever,” said she, “seen a blither and more engaging creature than your intended? She is all lily-white and golden. Those hands, how perfect and accomplished! and that neck has it not all the ravishing curves of a swan’s? How I envy you at times! and how fortunate you are in being a man, naughty rake that you are! Is not my Fleur-de-Lys beautiful to adoration, and you head over ears in love with her?”     13   
  “Assuredly,” he replied, thinking of something else.     14   
  “Speak to her, then,” said Madame Aloïse, pushing him by the shoulder. “Go and say something to her; you have grown strangely timid.”     15   
  We can assure our readers that timidity was no virtue or fault of the captain. He made an effort, however, to do as he was bid.     16   
  “Fair cousin,” said he, approaching Fleur-de-Lys, “what is the subject of this piece of tapestry you are working at?”     17   
  “Fair cousin,” answered Fleur-de-Lys somewhat pettishly, “I have already informed you three times. It is the grotto of Neptune.”     18   
  It was evident that Fleur-de-Lys saw more plainly than her mother through the cold and absent manner of the captain. He felt the necessity of pursuing the conversation further.     19   
  “And who is to benefit by all this fine Neptunery?” he asked.     20   
  “It is for the Abbey of Saint-Antoine-des-Champs,” answered Fleur-de-Lys, without raising her eyes.     21   
  The captain picked up a corner of the tapestry. “And pray, fair cousin, who may be this big, puffy-cheeked gendarme blowing a trumpet?”     22   
  “That is Triton,” she replied.     23   
  There was still a touch of resentment in the tone of these brief answers, and the young man understood perfectly that it behooved him to whisper in her ear some pretty nothing, some stereotyped gallantry—no matter what. He bent over her accordingly, but his imagination could furnish nothing more tender or personal than: “Why does your mother always wear a gown emblazoned with her heraldic device, as our grandmothers did in the time of Charles VII? Prithee, fair cousin, tell her that is no longer the fashion of the day, and that these hinges and laurel-trees embroidered on her gown make her appear like a walking mantel-piece. Nobody sits on their banner like that nowadays, I do assure you!”     24   
  Fleur-de-Lys raised her fine eyes to him reproachfully. “And is that all you have to assure me of?” she asked in low tones.     25   
  Meanwhile the good Dame Aloïse, overjoyed to see them thus leaning together and whispering, exclaimed as she trifled with the clasps of her book of hours: “Touching scene of love!”     26   
  The captain, more and more embarrassed, returned helplessly to the subject of the tapestry. “I’ faith, a charming piece of work!” he exclaimed.     27   
  At this juncture Colombe de Gaillefontaine, another pink-and-white, golden-haired beauty, dressed in a pale blue damask, ventured a shy remark to Fleur-de-Lys, hoping however that the handsome soldier would answer her.     28   
  “Dear Gondelaurier, have you seen the tapestries at the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon?”     29   
  “Is not that where there is a garden belonging to the Linenkeeper of the Louvre?” asked Diane de Christeuil with a laugh; for having beautiful teeth she laughed on all occasions.     30   
  “And where there is a great ancient tower, part of the old wall of Paris?” added Amelotte de Montmichel, a charming, curly-haired, bright-complexioned brunette, who had a trick of sighing, just as Diane laughed, without any valid reason.     31   
  “My dear Colombe,” said Dame Aloïse, “do you mean the Hôtel which belonged to M. de Bacqueville in the reign of King Charles VI? There are, in effect, some superb high-warp tapestries there.”     32   
  “Charles VI—King Charles VI!” muttered the young officer, twirling his mustache. “Heavens! how far back does the old lady’s memory reach?”     33   
  “Superb tapestries!” repeated Mme. de Gondelaurier. “So much so, indeed, that they are accounted absolutely unique.”     34   
  At this moment Berangère de Champchevrier, a slip of a little girl of seven, who had been looking down into the Place through the carved trefoils of the balcony, cried out: “Oh, godmother Fleur-de-Lys, do look at this pretty girl dancing and playing the tambourine in the street in the middle of that ring of people!”     35   
  The penetrating rattle of a tambourine rose up to them from the square.     36   
  “Some gipsy of Bohemia,” said Fleur-de-Lys, turning her head carelessly towards the square.     37   
  “Let us look—let us look!” cried her companions, eagerly running to the balustrade, while she followed more slowly, musing on the coldness of her betrothed. The latter, thankful for this incident, which cut short an embarrassing conversation, returned to the other end of the apartment with the well-contented air of a soldier relieved from duty.     38   
  Yet it was an easy and pleasant service, that of being on duty at the side of the fair Fleur-de-Lys, and time was when he had thought it so. But the captain had gradually wearied of it, and the thought of his approaching marriage grew more distasteful to him every day. Moreover, he was of inconstant disposition, and, we are bound to confess, of somewhat vulgar proclivities. Although of very noble birth, he had with his uniform adopted many of the low habits of the common soldier. The tavern and all that belongs to it delighted him; and he was never at his ease but amid gross language, military gallantries, facile beauties, and easy conquests. Nevertheless, he had received from his family a certain amount of education and polish, but he had too early been allowed to run loose, had been thrust too young into garrison life, and the varnish of polite manner had not been sufficiently thick to withstand the constant friction of the soldier’s harness. Though still visiting her occasionally, from some last remnant of kindly feeling, he felt himself increasingly constrained in the presence of Fleur-de-Lys; partly because by dint of dividing his love so freely on all sides, he had very little left for her; partly because in the presence of these stiff, decorous, and well-bred beauties, he went in constant fear lest his tongue, accustomed to the great oaths of the guard-room, should suddenly get the better of him and rap out some word that would appal them.     39   
  And yet with all this he combined great pretensions to elegance, to sumptuous dress, and noble bearing. Let the reader reconcile these qualities for himself. I am merely the historian.     40   
  He had been standing for some moments, in silence, leaning against the chimney-piece, thinking of something or perhaps of nothing at all, when Fleur-de-Lys suddenly turning round addressed him. After all, it went very much against the poor girl’s heart to keep up any show of coldness towards him.     41   
  “Cousin, did you not tell us of a little gipsy girl you had rescued out of the hands of a band of robbers about two months ago, when you were going the counter-watch at night?”     42   
  “I believe I did, fair cousin,” answered the captain.     43   
  “Well,” she resumed, “perhaps this is the very girl dancing now in the Parvis. Come and see if you recognise her, Cousin Phœbus.”     44   
  A secret desire for reconciliation sounded through this gentle invitation to her side, and in the care she took to call him by his name. Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers (for it is he whom the reader has had before him since the beginning of this chapter) accordingly slowly approached the balcony.     45   
  “Look,” said Fleur-de-Lys, tenderly laying her hand on his arm, “look at the girl dancing there in the ring. Is that your gipsy?”     46   
  Phœbus looked. “Yes,” said he, “I know her by her goat.”     47   
  “Oh, what a pretty little goat!” cried Amelotte, clapping her hands delightedly.     48   
  “Are its horns real gold?” asked Berangère.     49   
  Without rising from her seat, Dame Aloïse inquired: “Is that one of the band of Bohemians who arrived last year by the Porte Gibard?”     50   
  “Lady mother,” said Fleur-de-Lys gently, “that gate is now called Porte d’Enfer.”     51   
  Mlle. de Gondelaurier was well aware how much the captain was shocked by her mother’s antiquated modes of expression. Indeed, he muttered with a disdainful laugh: “Porte Gibard! Porte Gibard! That is to give passage to King Charles VI, no doubt!”     52   
  “Godmother!” exclaimed Berangère, whose quick and restless eyes were suddenly attracted to the top of the towers of Notre Dame. “Who is that man in black up there?”     53   
  All the girls looked up. A man was leaning with his elbows on the topmost parapet of the northern tower which looked towards the Grève. It was a priest—as could be seen by his dress—and they could clearly distinguish his face, which was resting on his two hands. He stood as motionless as a statue, and in his gaze, fixed steadily on the Place beneath him, there was something of the immobility of the kite looking down upon the sparrow’s nest it has just discovered.     54   
  “It is Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas,” said Fleur-de-Lys.     55   
  “You must have good sight to recognise him at this distance,” observed La Gaillefontaine.     56   
  “How he glares at the little dancer!” said Diane de Christeuil.     57   
  “Then let the Egyptian beware,” said Fleur-de-Lys, “for he loves not Egypt.”     58   
  “’Tis a pity he should look at her like that,” added Amelotte de Montmichel, “for she dances most bewitchingly.”     59   
  “Cousin Phœ,” said Fleur-de-Lys impulsively, “since you know this gipsy girl, will you not beckon to her to come up here—it will divert us.”     60   
  “Oh, yes!” cried the other girls, clapping their hands gleefully.     61   
  “What a madcap idea!” replied Phœbus. “Doubtless she has forgotten me, and I do not even know her name. However, as you wish it, mesdamoiselles, I will see what I can do.” And leaning over the balcony he called out, “Little one!”     62   
  The dancing girl was not playing her tambourine at that moment. She turned her head towards the spot from which the voice came, her brilliant eyes caught sight of Phœbus, and she suddenly stood still.     63   
  “Little one,” repeated the captain, and he motioned to her to come up.     64   
  The girl looked at him again, and then blushed as if a flame had risen to her cheeks, and taking her tambourine under her arm, she made her way through the gaping crowd towards the door of the house whence Phœbus called her, her step slow and uncertain, and with the troubled glance of a bird yielding to the fascination of a serpent.     65   
  A moment later the tapestry was raised, and the gipsy appeared on the threshold of the room, flushed, shy, panting, her great eyes lowered, not daring to advance a step farther.     66   
  Berangère clapped her hands.     67   
  But the dancing girl stood motionless in the doorway. Her sudden appearance produced a curious effect on the group. There is no doubt that a vague and indistinct desire to please the handsome officer animated the whole party, and that the brilliant uniform was the target at which they aimed all their coquettish darts; also, from the time of his being present there had arisen among them a certain covert rivalry, scarcely acknowledged to themselves, but which was none the less constantly revealed in their gestures and in their remarks. Nevertheless, as they all possessed much the same degree of beauty, they fought with the same weapons, and each might reasonably hope for victory. The arrival of the gipsy roughly destroyed this equilibrium. Her beauty was of so rare a quality that the moment she entered the room she seemed to illuminate it with a sort of light peculiar to herself. In this restricted space, in this rich frame of sombre hangings and dark panelling, she was incomparably more beautiful and radiant than in the open square. It was like bringing a torch out of the daylight into the shade. The noble maidens were dazzled by her in spite of themselves. Each one felt that her beauty had in some degree suffered. Consequently they instantly and with one accord changed their line of battle (if we may be allowed the term) without a single word having passed between them. For the instincts of women understand and respond to one another far quicker than the intelligence of men. A common foe stood in their midst; they all felt it, and combined for defence. One drop of wine is sufficient to tinge a whole glass of water; to diffuse a certain amount of ill temper throughout a gathering of pretty women, it is only necessary for one still prettier to arrive upon the scene, especially if there is but one man of the company.     68   
  Thus the gipsy girl’s reception was glacial in its coldness. They looked her up and down, then turned to each other, and all was said; they were confederates. Meanwhile the girl, waiting in vain for them to address her, was so covered with confusion that she dared not raise her eyes.     69   
  The captain was the first to break the silence. “I’ faith,” he said, with his air of fatuous assurance, “a bewitching creature! What say you, fair cousin?”     70   
  This remark, which a more tactful admirer would at least have made in an undertone, was not calculated to allay the feminine jealousy so sharply on the alert in the presence of the gipsy girl.     71   
  Fleur-de-Lys answered her fiancé in an affected tone of contemptuous indifference, “Ah, not amiss.”     72   
  The others put their heads together and whispered.     73   
  At last Madame Aloïse, not the least jealous of the party because she was so for her daughter, accosted the dancer:     74   
  “Come hither, little one.”     75   
  “Come hither, little one,” repeated, with comical dignity, Berangère, who would have reached about to her elbow.     76   
  The Egyptian advanced towards the noble lady.     77   
  “Pretty one,” said Phœbus, impressively advancing on his side a step or two towards her, “I know not if I enjoy the supreme felicity of being remembered by you; but—”     78   
  She interrupted him, with a smile and a glance of infinite sweetness—“Oh, yes,” she said.     79   
  “She has a good memory,” observed Fleur-de-Lys.     80   
  “Well,” resumed Phœbus, “but you fled in a great hurry that evening. Were you frightened of me?”     81   
  “Oh, no,” answered the gipsy. And in the tone of this “Oh, no,” following on the “Oh, yes,” there was an indefinable something which stabbed poor Fleur-de-Lys to the heart.     82   
  “You left in your stead, ma belle,” continued the soldier, whose tongue was loosened now that he spoke to a girl of the streets, “a wry-faced, one-eyed hunchback varlet—the Bishop’s bell-ringer, by what I can hear. They tell me he is an archdeacon’s bastard and a devil by birth. He has a droll name too—Ember Week—Palm Sunday—Shrove Tuesday—something of that kind—some bell-ringing festival name, at any rate. And so he had the assurance to carry you off, as if you were made for church beadles! It was like his impudence. And what the devil did he want with you, this screech-owl, eh?”     83   
  “I do not know,” she answered.     84   
  “Conceive of such insolence! A bell-ringer to carry off a girl, like a vicomte—a clown poaching on a gentleman’s preserves! Unheard-of presumption! For the rest, he paid dearly for it. Master Pierrat Torterue is the roughest groom that ever curried a rascal; and I can tell you, for your satisfaction, that your bell-ringer’s hide got a thorough dressing at his hands.”     85   
  “Poor man!” murmured the gipsy, recalling at these words the scene of the pillory.     86   
  The captain burst out laughing. “Corne de bœuf! your pity is as well-placed as a feather in a sow’s tail! May I have a paunch like a pope, if—” He drew up short. “Crave your pardon, mesdames! I believe I was on the point of forgetting myself.”     87   
  “Fie, sir!” said La Gaillefontaine.     88   
  “He speaks to this creature in her own language,” said Fleur-de-Lys under her breath, her vexation increasing with every moment. Nor was this vexation diminished by seeing the captain delighted with the gipsy girl, but still more with himself, turn on his heel and repeat with blatant and soldier-like gallantry: “A lovely creature on my soul!”     89   
  “Very barbarously dressed!” observed Diane de Christeuil, showing her white teeth.     90   
  This remark was a flash of light to the others. It showed them where to direct their attack on the gipsy. There being no vulnerable spot in her beauty, they threw themselves upon her dress.     91   
  “That is very true,” said La Montmichel. “Pray, how comest thou to be running thus barenecked about the streets, without either gorget or kerchief?”     92   
  “And a petticoat so short as to fill one with alarm,” added La Gaillefontaine.     93   
  “My girl,” continued Fleur-de-Lys spitefully, “thou wilt certainly be fined for that gold belt.”     94   
  “My poor girl,” said Diane, with a cruel smile, “if thou hadst the decency to wear sleeves on thy arms, they would not be so burned by the sun.”     95   
  It was a sight worthy of a more intelligent spectator than Phœbus, to watch how these high-born maidens darted their envenomed tongues, and coiled and glided and wound serpent-like about the hapless dancing girl. Smiling and cruel, they pitilessly searched and appraised all her poor artless finery of spangles and tinsel. Then followed the heartless laugh, the cutting irony, humiliation without end. Sarcasm, supercilious praise, and spiteful glances descended on the gipsy girl from every side. One might have judged them to be those high-born Roman ladies who amused themselves by thrusting golden pins into the bosom of a beautiful slave, or graceful greyhounds circling with distended nostrils and flaming eyes round some poor hind of the forest, and only prevented by their master’s eye from devouring it piecemeal. And what was she after all to these high-born damsels but a miserable dancing girl of the streets? They seemed to ignore the fact of her presence altogether, and spoke of her to her face as of something degraded and unclean, though diverting enough to make jest of.     96   
  The Egyptian was not insensible to these petty stings. From time to time a blush of shame burned in her cheek, a flash of anger in her eyes; a disdainful retort seemed to tremble on her lips, and she made the little contemptuous pout with which the reader is familiar. But she remained silent, motionless, her eyes fixed on Phœbus with a look of resignation infinitely sweet and sad. In this gaze there mingled, too, both joy and tenderness; she seemed to restrain herself for fear of being driven away.     97   
  As for Phœbus, he laughed and took the gipsy’s part with a mixture of impertinence and pity.     98   
  “Let them talk, child!” he said, jingling his gold spurs. “Doubtless your costume is somewhat strange and extravagant; but when a girl is so charming as you, what does it matter?”     99   
  “Mon Dieu!” cried La Gaillefontaine, drawing up her swanlike neck, with a bitter smile. “It is evident that Messieurs the King’s archers take fire easily at the bright gipsy eyes.”    100   
  “Why not?” said Phœbus.    101   
  At this rejoinder, uttered carelessly by the captain, as one throws a stone at random without troubling to see where it falls, Colombe began to laugh and Amelotte and Diane and Fleur-de-Lys, though a tear rose at the same time to the eye of the latter.    102   
  The gipsy girl, who had dropped her eyes as Colombe and La Gaillefontaine spoke, raised them now all radiant with joy and pride and fixed them again on Phœbus. At that moment she was dazzlingly beautiful.    103   
  The elder lady, while she observed the scene, felt vaguely incensed without knowing exactly why.    104   
  “Holy Virgin!” she suddenly exclaimed, “what is this rubbing against my legs? Ah, the horrid beast!”    105   
  It was the goat, just arrived in search of its mistress, and which, in hurrying towards her, had got its horns entangled in the voluminous folds of the noble lady’s gown, which always billowed round her wherever she sat.    106   
  This caused a diversion, and the gipsy silently freed the little creature.    107   
  “Ah, it is the little goat with the golden hoofs!” cried Berangère, jumping with joy.    108   
  The gipsy girl crouched on her knees and pressed her cheek fondly against the goat’s sleek head, as if begging its forgiveness for having left it behind.    109   
  At this Diane bent over and whispered in Colombe’s ear:    110   
  “Ah, how did I not think of it before? This is the gipsy girl with the goat. They say she is a witch, and that her goat performs some truly miraculous tricks.”    111   
  “Very well,” said Colombe; “then let the goat amuse us in its turn, and show us a miracle.”    112   
  Diane and Colombe accordingly addressed the gipsy eagerly.    113   
  “Girl, make thy goat perform a miracle for us.”    114   
  “I do not know what you mean,” answered the gipsy.    115   
  “A miracle—a conjuring trick—a feat of witchcraft, in fact.”    116   
  “I do not understand,” she repeated, and fell to caressing the pretty creature again, murmuring fondly. “Djali! Djali!”    117   
  At that moment Fleur-de-Lys remarked a little embroidered leather bag hanging round the goat’s neck. “What is that?” she asked of the gipsy.    118   
  The gipsy raised her large eyes to her and answered gravely, “That is my secret.”    119   
  Meanwhile the lady of the house had risen. “Come, gipsy girl,” she exclaimed angrily; “if thou and thy goat will not dance for us, what do you here?”    120   
  Without a word the gipsy rose and turned towards the door. But the nearer she approached it, the more reluctant became her step. An irresistible magnet seemed to hold her back. Suddenly she turned her brimming eyes on Phœbus, and stood still.    121   
  “Vrai Dieu!” cried the captain, “you shall not leave us thus. Come back and dance for us. By-the-bye, sweetheart, how are you called?”    122   
  “Esmeralda,” answered the dancing girl, without taking her eyes off him.    123   
  At this strange name the girls burst into a chorus of laughter.    124   
  “Truly a formidable name for a demoiselle!” sneered Diane.    125   
  “You see now,” said Amelotte, “that she is a sorceress.”    126   
  “Child,” exclaimed Dame Aloïse solemnly, “your parents never drew that name for you out of the baptismal font!”    127   
  For some minutes past Berangère, to whom nobody was paying any attention, had managed to entice the goat into a corner with a piece of marchpane, and immediately they had become the best of friends. The inquisitive child had then detached the little bag from the goat’s neck, opened it, and emptied its contents on to the floor. It was an alphabet, each letter being written separately on a small tablet of wood. No sooner were these toys displayed on the matting than, to the child’s delighted surprise, the goat (of whose miracles this was no doubt one) proceeded to separate certain letters with her golden fore-foot, and by dint of pushing them gently about arranged them in a certain order. In a minute they formed a word, which the goat seemed practised in composing, to judge by the ease with which she accomplished the task. Berangère clasped her hands in admiration.    128   
  “Godmother Fleur-de-Lys,” she cried, “come and see what the goat has done!”    129   
  Fleur-de-Lys ran to look, and recoiled at the sight. The letters disposed upon the floor formed the word,
           
P-H-O-E-B-U-S.
 130   
  “The goat put that word together?” she asked excitedly.    131   
  “Yes, godmother,” answered Berangère. It was impossible to doubt it; the child could not spell.    132   
  “So this is the secret,” thought Fleur-de-Lys.    133   
  By this time the rest of the party had come forward to look—the mother, the girls, the gipsy, the young soldier.    134   
  The Bohemian saw the blunder the goat had involved her in. She turned red and white, and then began to tremble like a guilty creature before the captain, who gazed at her with a smile of satisfaction and astonishment.    135   
  “Phœbus!” whispered the girls in amazement; “that is the name of the captain!”    136   
  “You have a wonderful memory!” said Fleur-de-Lys to the stupefied gipsy girl. Then, bursting into tears: “Oh,” she sobbed, “she is a sorceress!” While a still more bitter voice whispered in her inmost heart, “She is a rival!” And she swooned in her mother’s arms.    137   
  “My child! my child!” cried the terrified mother. “Begone, diabolical gipsy!”    138   
  In a trice Esmeralda gathered up the unlucky letters, made a sign to Djali, and quitted the room by one door, as they carried Fleur-de-Lys out by another.    139   
  Captain Phœbus, left alone, hesitated a moment between the two doors—then followed the gipsy girl.    140   


Note 1.  A popular French poet of the sixteenth century, whose poem on The Divine Week and Works was translated by Joshua Sylvester in the reign of James I. [back]

   
Book VII   
II. Showing That a Priest and a Philosopher Are Not the Same   
     
THE PRIEST whom the young girls had remarked leaning over the top of the north tower of the Cathedral and gazing so intently at the gipsy’s dancing, was no other than the Archdeacon Claude Frollo.      1   
  Our readers have not forgotten the mysterious cell which the Archdeacon had appropriated to himself in this tower. (By the way, I do not know but what it is the same, the interior of which may be seen to this day through a small square window, opening to the east at about a man’s height from the floor upon the platform from which the towers spring—a mere den now, naked, empty, and falling to decay, the ill-plastered walls of which are decorated here and there, at the present moment, by some hideous yellow engravings of cathedral fronts. I presume that this hole is jointly inhabited by bats and spiders, so that a double war of extermination is being carried on there against the flies.)      2   
  Every day, an hour before sunset, the Archdeacon mounted the stair of the tower and shut himself up in this cell, where he sometimes spent whole nights. On this day, just as he reached the low door of his retreat and was preparing to insert in the lock the small and intricate key he always carried about with him in the pouch hanging at his side, the jingle of a tambourine and of castanets suddenly smote on his ear, rising up from the Place du Parvis. The cell, as we have said, had but one window looking over the transept roof. Claude Frollo hastily withdrew the key, and in another moment was on the summit of the tower, in that gloomy and intent attitude in which he had been observed by the group of girls.      3   
  There he stood, grave, motionless, absorbed in one object, one thought. All Paris was spread out at his feet, with her thousand turrets, her undulating horizon, her river winding under the bridges, her stream of people flowing to and fro in the streets; with the cloud of smoke rising from her many chimneys; with her chain of crested roofs pressing in ever tightening coils round about Notre Dame. But in all that great city the Archdeacon beheld but one spot—the Place du Parvis; and in that crowd but one figure—that of the gipsy girl.      4   
  It would have been difficult to analyze the nature of that gaze, or to say whence sprang the flame that blazed in it. His eyes were fixed and yet full of anguish and unrest; and from the profound immobility of his whole body, only faintly agitated now and then by an involuntary tremor, like a tree shaken by the wind; from his rigid arms, more stony than the balustrade on which they leaned, and the petrified smile that distorted his countenance, you would have said that nothing of Claude Frollo was alive save his eyes.      5   
  The gipsy girl was dancing and twirling her tambourine on the tip of her finger, throwing it aloft in the air while she danced the Provençal saraband; agile, airy, joyous, wholly unconscious of the sinister gaze falling directly on her head.      6   
  The crowd swarmed round her; from time to time, a man tricked out in a long red and yellow coat, went round to keep the circle clear, and then returned to a seat a few paces from the dancer, and took the head of the goat upon his knee. This man appeared to be the companion of the gipsy girl. Claude Frollo, from his elevated position, could not distinguish his features.      7   
  No sooner had the Archdeacon caught sight of this individual, than his attention seemed divided between him and the dancer, and his face became more and more overcast. Suddenly he drew himself up, and a tremor ran through his whole frame. “Who can that man be?” he muttered between his teeth; “I have always seen her alone hitherto.”      8   
  He then vanished under the winding roof of the spiral staircase, and proceeded to descend. As he passed the half-open door of the belfry, he saw something which made him pause. It was Quasimodo, leaning out of an opening in one of the great projecting slate eaves and likewise looking down into the Place, but so profoundly absorbed in contemplation that he was unaware of the passing of his adopted father. His savage eye had a singular expression—a mingled look of fondness and delight.      9   
  “How strange!” murmured Claude. “Can he too be looking at the Egyptian?” He continued his descent, and in a few moments the troubled Archdeacon entered the Place by the door at the bottom of the tower.     10   
  “What has become of the gipsy?” said he, as he mingled with the crowd which the sound of the tambourine had drawn together.     11   
  “I know not,” answered a bystander; “she has just disappeared. They called to her from the house opposite, and so I think she must have gone to dance some fandango there.”     12   
  Instead of the Egyptian, on the same carpet, of which the arabesques but a moment before seemed to vanish beneath the fantastic weavings of her dances, the Archdeacon now beheld only the red and yellow man; who, in order to earn an honest penny in his turn, was parading round the circle, his arms akimbo, his head thrown back, very red in the face, and balancing a chair between his teeth. On this chair he had fastened a cat which a woman in the crowd had lent him, and which was swearing with fright.     13   
  “Notre Dame!” cried the Archdeacon, as the mountebank, the perspiration pouring off his face, passed before him with his pyramid of cat and chair—“What does Maître Pierre Gringoire here?”     14   
  The stern voice of the Archdeacon so startled the poor devil that he lost his balance, and with it his whole erection, and the chair and the cat came toppling over right on to the heads of the spectators and in the midst of a deafening uproar.     15   
  It is probable that Pierre Gringoire (for it was indeed he) would have had a fine account to settle with the owner of the cat, not to speak of all the bruised and scratched faces round him, had he not hastily availed himself of the tumult and taken refuge in the Cathedral, whither Claude Frollo beckoned him to follow.     16   
  The Cathedral was already dark and deserted, the transepts were full of deepest shadow, and the lamps of the chapels were beginning to twinkle like stars under the black vault of the roof. The great central rose-window alone, whose thousand tints were flooded by a horizontal stream of evening sunshine, gleamed in the shadow like a star of diamonds and cast its dazzling image on the opposite side of the nave.     17   
  When they had proceeded a few steps, Dom Claude leaned against a pillar and regarded Gringoire steadfastly. This look was not the one Gringoire had feared to encounter in his shame at being surprised by so grave and learned a personage in his merry-andrew costume. There was in the priest’s gaze no touch of disdain or mockery; it was serious, calm, and searching. The Archdeacon was the first to break silence.     18   
  “Now Maître Pierre, you have many things to explain to me. And first, how comes it that I have seen nothing of you for the last two months, and then find you in the public street in noble guise i’ sooth!—part red, part yellow, like a Caudebec apple!”     19   
  “Messire,” answered Gringoire plaintively, “it is in very truth a preposterous outfit, and you behold me about as comfortable as a cat with a pumpkin on its head. It is, I acknowledge, an ill deed on my part to expose the gentlemen of the watch to the risk of belabouring, under this motley coat, the back of a Pythagorean philosopher. But what would you, my reverend master? The fault lies with my old doublet, which basely deserted me at the beginning of winter under the protest that it was falling in rags, and that it was under the necessity of reposing itself in the ragman’s pack. Que faire? Civilization has not yet reached that point that one may go quite naked, as old Diogenes would have wished. Add to this that the wind blew very cold, and the month of January is not the season to successfully initiate mankind into this new mode. This coat offered itself, I accepted it, and abandoned my old black tunic, which, for a hermetic such as I am, was far from being hermetically closed. Behold me then, in my buffoon’s habit, like Saint-Genestus. What would you have?—it is an eclipse. Apollo, as you know, tended the flocks of Admetes.”     20   
  “A fine trade this you have adopted!” remarked the Archdeacon.     21   
  “I admit, master, that it is better to philosophize and poetize, to blow fire in a furnace or receive it from heaven, than to be balancing cats in the public squares. And when you suddenly addressed me, I felt as stupid as an ass in front of a roasting-pit. But what’s to be done, messire? One must eat to live, and the finest Alexandrine verses are nothing between the teeth as compared with a piece of cheese. Now, I composed for the Lady Margaret of Flanders that famous epithalamium, as you know, and the town has not paid me for it, pretending that it was not good enough; as if for four crowns you could give them a tragedy of Sophocles! Hence, see you, I was near dying of hunger. Happily I am fairly strong in the jaws; so I said to my jaw: ‘Perform some feats of strength and equilibrium—feed yourself. Ale to ipsam.’ A band of vagabonds who are become my very good friends, taught me twenty different herculean feats; and now I feed my teeth every night with the bread they have earned in the day. After all, concedo, I concede that it is but a sorry employ of my intellectual faculties, and that man is not made to pass his life in tambourining and carrying chairs in his teeth. But, reverend master, it is not enough to pass one’s life; one must keep it.”     22   
  Dom Claude listened in silence. Suddenly his deep-set eye assumed so shrewd and penetrating an expression that Gringoire felt that the innermost recesses of his soul were being explored.     23   
  “Very good, Master Pierre; but how is it that you are now in company with this Egyptian dancing girl?”     24   
  “Faith!” returned Gringoire, “because she is my wife and I am her husband.”     25   
  The priest’s sombre eyes blazed.     26   
  “And hast thou done that, villain!” cried he, grasping Gringoire furiously by the arm; “hast thou been so abandoned of God as to lay hand on this girl?”     27   
  “By my hope of paradise, reverend sir,” replied Gringoire, trembling in every limb, “I swear to you that I have never touched her, if that be what disturbs you.”     28   
  “What then is thy talk of husband and wife?” said the priest.     29   
  Gringoire hastened to relate to him as succinctly as possible what the reader already knows: his adventure in the Court of Miracles and his broken-pitcher marriage. The marriage appeared as yet to have had no result whatever, the gipsy girl continuing every night to defraud him of his conjugal rights as on that first one. “’Tis mortifying, and that’s the truth,” he concluded; “but it all comes of my having had the ill-luck to espouse a virgin.”     30   
  “What do you mean?” asked the Archdeacon, whom the tale gradually tranquilized.     31   
  “It is difficult to explain,” returned the poet. “There is superstition in it. My wife, as an old thief among us called the Duke of Egypt has told me, is a foundling—or a lostling, which is the same thing. She wears about her neck an amulet which, they declare, will some day enable her to find her parents again, but which would lose its virtue if the girl lost hers. Whence it follows that we both of us remain perfectly virtuous.”     32   
  “Thus, you believe, Maître Pierre,” resumed Claude, whose brow was rapidly clearing, “that this creature has never yet been approached by any man?”     33   
  “Why, Dom Claude, how should a man fight against a superstition? She has got that in her head. I hold it to be rare enough to find this nunlike prudery keeping itself so fiercely aloof among all these easily conquered gipsy girls.     34   
  “But she has three things to protect her: the Duke of Egypt, who has taken her under his wing, reckoning, may-be, to sell her later on to some fat abbot or other; her whole tribe, who hold her in singular veneration, like the Blessed Virgin herself; and a certain pretty little dagger, which the jade always carries about with her, despite the provost’s ordinances, and which darts out in her hand when you squeeze her waist. ’Tis a fierce wasp, believe me!”     35   
  The Archdeacon pressed Gringoire with questions.     36   
  By Gringoire’s account, Esmeralda was a harmless and charming creature; pretty, apart from a little grimace which was peculiar to her; artless and impassioned; ignorant of everything and enthusiastic over everything; fond above all things of dancing, of all the stir and movement of the open air; not dreaming as yet of the difference between man and woman; a sort of human bee, with invisible wings to her feet, and living in a perpetual whirlwind. She owed this nature to the wandering life she had led. Gringoire had ascertained that, as quite a little child, she had gone all through Spain and Catalonia, and into Sicily; he thought even that the caravan of Zingari, to which she belonged, had carried her into the kingdom of Algiers—a country situated in Achaia, which Achaia was adjoining on one side to lesser Albania and Greece, and on the other to the sea of the Sicilies, which is the way to Constantinople. The Bohemians, said Gringoire, were vassals of the King of Algeria, in his capacity of Chief of the nation of the White Moors. Certain it was that Esmeralda had come into France while yet very young by way of Hungary.     37   
  From all these countries the girl had brought with her fragments of fantastic jargons, outlandish songs and ideas which made her language almost as motley as her half-Egyptian, half-Parisian costume. For the rest, the people of the quarters which she frequented loved her for her gaiety, her kindness, her lively ways, for her dancing and her songs. In all the town she believed herself to be hated by two persons only, of whom she often spoke with dread: the sachette of the Tour-Roland, an evil-tempered recluse who cherished an unreasoning malice against gipsies, and who cursed the poor dancer every time she passed before her window; and a priest, who never crossed her path without hurling at her words and looks that terrified her. This last circumstance perturbed the Archdeacon greatly, though Gringoire paid no heed to the fact, the two months that had elapsed having sufficed to obliterate from the thoughtless poet’s mind the singular details of that evening on which he had first encountered the gipsy girl, and the circumstance of the Archdeacon’s presence on that occasion. For the rest, the little dancer feared nothing; she did not tell fortunes, and consequently was secure from those persecutions for magic so frequently instituted against the gipsy women. And then Gringoire was at least a brother to her, if he could not be a husband. After all, the philosopher endured very patiently this kind of platonic marriage. At all events it insured him food and a lodging. Each morning he set out from the thieves’ quarter, most frequently in company with the gipsy girl; he helped her to gain her little harvest of small coin in the streets; and each evening they returned to the same roof, he let her bolt herself into her own little chamber, and then slept the sleep of the just. A very agreeable existence on the whole, said he, and very favourable to reflection. Besides, in his heart and inner conscience, the philosopher was not quite sure that he was desperately in love with the gipsy. He loved her goat almost as much. It was a charming beast, gentle, intelligent, not to say intellectual; a goat of parts. (Nothing was commoner in the Middle Ages than these trained animals, which created immense wonderment among the uninitiated, but frequently brought their instructor to the stake.) However, the sorceries of the goat with the gilded hoofs were of a very innocent nature. Gringoire explained them to the Archdeacon, who appeared strangely interested in these particulars. In most cases it was sufficient to present the tambourine to the goat in such or such a manner, for it to perform the desired trick. It had been trained to this by its mistress, who had such a singular talent for these devices that two months had sufficed her to teach the goat to compose, with movable letters, the word Phœbus.     38   
  “‘Phœbus!’” said the priest; “why ‘Phœbus’?”     39   
  “I do not know,” answered Gringoire. “Perhaps it is a word that she thinks endowed with some magic and secret virtue. She often murmurs it to herself when she believes herself alone.”     40   
  “Are you sure,” rejoined Claude, with his searching look, “that it is only a word—that it is not a name?”     41   
  “The name of whom?” said the poet.     42   
  “How should I know?” said the priest.     43   
  “This is what I imagine, messire. These Bohemians are something of Guebers, and worship the sun: hence this Phœbus.”     44   
  “That does not seem so evident to me as it does to you, Maître Pierre.”     45   
  “After all, it’s no matter to me. Let her mumble her Phœbus to her heart’s content. What I know for certain is that Djali loves me already almost as much as her mistress.”     46   
  “Who is Djali?”     47   
  “That is the goat.”     48   
  The Archdeacon leant his chin on his hand and seemed to reflect for a moment. Suddenly he turned brusquely to Gringoire:     49   
  “And you swear to me that you have not touched her?”     50   
  “Whom?” asked Gringoire; “the goat?”     51   
  “No, this woman.”     52   
  “My wife? I swear I have not.”     53   
  “And yet you are often alone with her.”     54   
  “Every night for a full hour.”     55   
  Dom Claude frowned. “Oh! oh! Solus cum sola non cogitabuntur orare Pater Noster.” 1      56   
  “By my soul, I might say Paters and Ave Marias and the Credo without her paying any more attention to me than a hen to a church.”     57   
  “Swear to me, by thy mother’s body,” said the Archdeacon vehemently, “that thou hast not so much as touched that woman with the tip of thy finger.”     58   
  “I will swear it too by my father’s head, for the two things have more than one connection. But, reverend master, permit me one question in return.”     59   
  “Speak, sir,”     60   
  “What does that signify to you?”     61   
  The Archdeacon’s pale face flushed like the cheek of a young girl. He was silent for a moment, and then replied with visible embarrassment:     62   
  “Hark you, Maître Pierre Gringoire. You are not yet damned, as far as I know. I am interested in you, and wish you well. Now, the slightest contact with that demon of a gipsy girl will infallibly make you a servant of Satanas. You know ’tis always the body that ruins the soul. Woe betide you if you come nigh that woman! I have spoken.”     63   
  “I did try it once,” said Gringoire, scratching his ear. “That was on the first day, but I only got stung for my pains.”     64   
  “You had that temerity, Maître Gringoire?” and the priest’s brow darkened again.     65   
  “Another time,” continued the poet, with a grin, “before I went to bed, I looked through her key-hole, and beheld the most delicious damsel in her shift that ever made a bedstead creak under her naked foot.”     66   
  “To the foul fiend with thee!” cried the priest, with a look of fury; and thrusting the amazed Gringoire from him by the shoulder, he plunged with long strides into the impenetrable gloom of the Cathedral arches.     67   


Note 1.  A man and a woman alone together will not think of saying Pater Nosters. [back]

   
Book VII   
III. The Bells   
     
SINCE his taste of the pillory, the neighbours in the vicinity of Notre Dame thought they perceived a remarkable abatement in Quasimodo’s rage for bell-ringing. Before that time the smallest excuse set the bells going—long morning chimes that lasted from prime to compline; full peals for a high mass, full-toned runs flashing up and down the smaller bells for a wedding or a christening, and filling the air with an exquisite network of sweet sound. The ancient minster, resonant and vibrating to her foundations, lived in a perpetual jubilant tumult of bells. Some self-willed spirit of sound seemed to have entered into her and to be sending forth a never-ending song from all those brazen throats. And now that spirit had departed. The Cathedral seemed wilfully to maintain a sullen silence. Festivals and burials had their simple accompaniment, plain and meagre—what the Church demanded—not a note beyond. Of the two voices that proceed from a church—that of the organ within and the bells without—only the organ remained. It seemed as though there were no longer any musicians in the belfries. Nevertheless, Quasimodo was still there; what had come over him? Was it that the shame and despair of the pillory still lingered in his heart, that his soul still quivered under the lash of the torturer, that his horror of such treatment had swallowed up all other feeling in him, even his passion for the bells?—or was it rather that Marie had a rival in the heart of the bell-ringer of Notre Dame, and that the great bell and her fourteen sisters were being neglected for something more beautiful?      1   
  It happened that in this year of grace 1482, the Feast of the Annunciation fell on Tuesday, the 25th of March. On that day the air was so pure and light that Quasimodo felt some return of affection for his bells. He accordingly ascended the northern tower, while the beadle below threw wide the great doors of the church, which consisted, at that time, of enormous panels of strong wood, padded with leather, bordered with gilded iron nails, and framed in carving “very skilfully wrought.”      2   
  Arrived in the lofty cage of the bells, Quasimodo gazed for some time with a sorrowful shake of the head at his six singing birds, as if he mourned over something alien that had come between him and his old loves. But when he had set them going, when he felt the whole cluster of bells move under his hands, when he saw—for he could not hear it—the palpitating octave ascending and descending in that enormous diapason, like a bird fluttering from bough to bough—when the demon of music, with his dazzling shower of stretti, trills, and arpeggios, had taken possession of the poor deaf creature, then he became happy once more, he forgot his former woes, and as the weight lifted from his heart his face lit up with joy.      3   
  To and fro he hurried, clapped his hands, ran from one rope to the other, spurring on his six singers with mouth and hands, like the conductor of an orchestra urging highly trained musicians.      4   
  “Come, Gabrielle,” said he, “come now, pour all thy voice into the Place, to-day is high festival. Thibauld, bestir thyself, thou art lagging behind; on with thee, art grown rusty, sluggard? That is well—quick! quick! led not the clapper be seen. Make them all deaf like me. That’s the way, my brave Thibauld. Guillaume! Guillaume! thou art the biggest, and Pasquier is the smallest, and yet Pasquier works better than thou. I warrant that those who can hear would say so too. Right so, my Garbrielle! louder, louder! Hey! you two up there, you sparrows, what are you about? I do not see you make the faintest noise? What ails those brazen beaks of yours that look to be yawning when they should be singing? Up, up, to your work! ’Tis the Feast of the Annunciation. The sun shines bright, and we’ll have a merry peal. What, Guillaume! Out of breath, my poor fat one!”      5   
  He was entirely absorbed in urging on his bells, the whole six of them rearing and shaking their polished backs like a noisy team of Spanish mules spurred forward by the cries of the driver.      6   
  Happening, however, to glance between the large slate tiles which cover, up to a certain height, the perpendicular walls of the steeple, he saw down in the square a fantastically dressed girl spreading out a carpet, on which a little goat came and took up its position and a group of spectators formed a circle round. This sight instantly changed the current of his thoughts, and cooled his musical enthusiasm as a breath of cold air congeals a stream of flowing resin. He stood still, turned his back on the bells, and crouching down behind the slate eaves fixed on the dancer that dreamy, tender, and softened look which once already had astonished the Archdeacon. Meanwhile the neglected bells suddenly fell silent, to the great disappointment of lovers of carillons who were listening in all good faith from the Pont-aux-Change, and now went away as surprised and disgusted as a dog that has been offered a bone and gets a stone instead.

Book VII   
IV. Fate   
     
ONE fine morning in the same month of March—it was Saturday, the 29th, St. Eustache’s Day, I think—our young friend, Jehan Frollo of the Mill, discovered, while putting on his breeches, that his purse gave forth no faintest chink of coin. “Poor purse!” said he, drawing it out of his pocket, “what, not a single little parisis? How cruelly have dice, Venus, and pots of beer disembowelled thee! Behold thee empty, wrinkled, and flabby, like the bosom of a fury! I would ask you, Messer Cicero and Messer Seneca, whose dog-eared volumes I see scattered upon the floor, of what use is it for me to know better than any master of the Mint or a Jew of the Pont-aux-Change that a gold crown piece is worth thirty-five unzain at twenty-five sous eight deniers parisis each, if I have not a single miserable black liard to risk upon the double-six? Oh, Consul Cicero! this is not a calamity from which one can extricate one’s self by periphrases—by quemadmodum, and verum enim vero!”      1   
  He completed his toilet dejectedly. An idea occurred to him as he was lacing his boots which he at first rejected: it returned, however, and he put on his vest wrong side out, a sure sign of a violent inward struggle. At length he cast his cap vehemently on the ground, and exclaimed: “Be it so! the worst has come to the worst—I shall go to my brother. I shall catch a sermon, I know, but also I shall catch a crown piece.”      2   
  He threw himself hastily into his fur-edged gown, picked up his cap, and rushed out with an air of desperate resolve.      3   
  He turned down the Rue de la Harpe towards the City. Passing the Rue de la Huchette, the odour wafted from those splendid roasting-spits which turned incessantly, tickled his olfactory nerves, and he cast a lustful eye into the Cyclopean kitchen which once extorted from the Franciscan monk, Calatigiron, the pathetic exclamation: “Veramente, queste rotisserie sono cosa stupenda!” But Jehan had not the wherewithal to obtain a breakfast, so with a profound sigh he passed on under the gateway of the Petit-Châtelet, the enormous double trio of massive towers guarding the entrance to the City.      4   
  He did not even take time to throw the customary stone at the dishonoured statue of that Perinet Leclerc who betrayed the Paris of Charles VI to the English, a crime which his effigy, its face all battered with stones and stained with mud, expiated during three centuries at the corner of the streets de la Harpe and de Bussy, as on an everlasting pillory.      5   
  Having crossed the Petit-Pont and walked down the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, Jehan de Molendino found himself in front of Notre Dame. Then all his indecision returned, and he circled for some minutes round the statue of “Monsieur Legris,” repeating to himself with a tortured mind:      6   
  “The sermon is certain, the florin is doubtful.”      7   
  He stopped a beadle who was coming from the cloister. “Where is Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas?”      8   
  “In his secret cell in the tower, I believe,” answered the man; “but I counsel you not to disturb him, unless you come from some one such as the Pope or the King himself.”      9   
  Jehan clapped his hands.     10   
  “Bédiable! what a magnificent chance for seeing the famous magician’s cave!”     11   
  This decided him, and he advanced resolutely through the little dark doorway, and began to mount the spiral staircase of Saint-Gilles, which leads to the upper stories of the tower.     12   
  “We shall see!” he said as he proceeded. “By the pangs of the Virgin! it must be a curious place, this cell which my reverend brother keeps so strictly concealed. They say he lights up hell’s own fires there on which to cook the philosopher’s stone. Bédieu! I care no more for the philospher’s stone than for a pebble; and I’d rather find on his furnace an omelet of Easter eggs in lard, than the biggest philosopher’s stone in the world!”     13   
  Arrived at the gallery of the colonnettes, he stopped a moment to take breath and to call down ten million cartloads of devils on the interminable stairs. He then continued his ascent by the narrow doorway of the northern tower, now prohibited to the public. A moment or two after passing the belfry, he came to a small landing in a recess with a low Gothic door under the vaulted roof, while a loophole opposite in the circular wall of the staircase enabled him to distinguish its enormous lock and powerful iron sheeting. Any one curious to inspect this door at the present day will recognise it by this legend inscribed in white letters on the black wall: “j’adore Coralie, 1823. Signé, Ugène.” (This signé is included in the inscription.)     14   
  “Whew!” said the scholar; “this must be it.”     15   
  The key was in the lock, the door slightly ajar; he gently pushed it open and poked his head round it.     16   
  The reader is undoubtedly acquainted with the works of Rembrandt—the Shakespeare of painting. Among the many wonderful engravings there is one etching in particular representing, as is supposed, Doctor Faustus, which it is impossible to contemplate without measureless admiration. There is a gloomy chamber; in the middle stands a table loaded with mysterious and repulsive objects—death’s heads, spheres, alembics, compasses, parchments covered with hieroglyphics. Behind this table, which hides the lower part of him, stands the Doctor wrapped in a wide gown, his head covered by a fur cap reaching to his eyebrows. He has partly risen from his immense arm-chair, his clenched fists are leaning on the table, while he gazes in curiosity and terror at a luminous circle of magic letters shining on the wall in the background like the solar spectrum in a camera obscura. This cabalistic sun seems actually to scintillate, and fills the dim cell with its mysterious radiance. It is horrible and yet beautiful.     17   
  Something very similar to Faust’s study presented itself to Jehan’s view as he ventured his head through the half-open door. Here, too, was a sombre, dimly lighted cell, a huge arm-chair, and a large table, compasses, alembics, skeletons of animals hanging from the ceiling, a celestial globe rolling on the floor, glass phials full of quivering goldleaf, skulls lying on sheets of vellum covered with figures and written characters, thick manuscripts open and piled one upon another regardless of the creased corners of the parchment; in short, all the rubbish of science—dust and cobwebs covering the whole heap. But there was no circle of luminous letters, no doctor contemplating in ecstasy the flamboyant vision as an eagle gazes at the sun.     18   
  Nevertheless the cell was not empty. A man was seated in the arm-chair, leaning over the table. Jehan could see nothing but his broad shoulders and the back of his head; but he had no difficulty in recognising that bald head, which nature seemed to have provided with a permanent tonsure, as if to mark by this external sign the irresistible clerical vocation of the Archdeacon.     19   
  Thus Jehan recognised his brother; but the door had been opened so gently that Dom Claude was unaware of his presence. The prying little scholar availed himself of this opportunity to examine the cell for a few minutes at his ease. A large furnace, which he had not remarked before, was to the left of the arm-chair under the narrow window. The ray of light that penetrated through this opening traversed the circular web of a spider, who had tastefully woven her delicate rosace in the pointed arch of the window and now sat motionless in the centre of this wheel of lace. On the furnace was a disordered accumulation of vessels of every description, stone bottles, glass retorts and bundles of charcoal. Jehan observed with a sigh that there was not a single cooking utensil.     20   
  In any case there was no fire in the furnace, nor did any appear to have been lighted there for a long time. A glass mask which Jehan noticed among the alchemistic implements, used doubtless to protect the Archdeacon’s face when he was engaged in compounding some deadly substance, lay forgotten in a corner, thick with dust. Beside it lay a pair of bellows equally dusty, the upper side of which bore in letters of copper the motto: “Spiro, spero.” 1     21   
  Following the favourite custom of the hermetics, the walls were inscribed with many legends of this description; some traced in ink, others engraved with a metal point; Gothic characters, Hebrew, Greek and Roman, pell-mell; inscribed at random, overlapping each other, the more recent effacing the earlier ones, and all interlacing and mingled like the branches of a thicket or the pikes in a mêlée. And, in truth, it was a confused fray between all the philosophies, all the schemes, the wisdom of the human mind. Here and there one shone among the others like a banner among the lanceheads, but for the most part they consisted of some brief heads, Latin or Greek sentence, so much in favour in the Middle Ages, such as: “Unde? Inde?—Homo homini monstrum.—Astra, castra.—Nomen, numen.—[Greek]—Sapere aude.—Flat ubi vult,” etc. 2 Or sometimes a word devoid of all meaning as [Greek], which perhaps concealed some bitter allusion to the rules of the cloister; sometimes a simple maxim of monastic discipline set forth in a correct hexameter: “Cœlesten Dominum, terrestrem dicite domnum.” 3     22   
  Here and there, too, were obscure Hebrew passages, of which Jehan, whose Greek was already of the feeblest, understood nothing at all; and the whole crossed and recrossed in all directions with stars and triangles, human and animal figures, till the wall of the cell looked like a sheet of paper over which a monkey has dragged a pen full of ink.     23   
  Altogether the general aspect of the study was one of complete neglect and decay; and the shocking condition of the implements led inevitably to the conclusion that their owner had long been diverted from his labours by pursuits of some other kind.     24   
  The said owner, meanwhile, bending over a vast manuscript adorned with bizarre paintings, appeared to be tormented by some idea which incessantly interrupted his meditations. So at least Jehan surmised as he listened to his musing aloud, with the intermittent pauses of a person talking in his dreams.     25   
  “Yes,” he exclaimed, “Manou said it, and Zoroaster taught the same! the sun is born of fire, the moon of the sun. Fire is the soul of the Great All, its elementary atoms are diffused and constantly flowing by an infinity of currents throughout the universe. At the points where these currents cross each other in the heavens, they produce light; at their points of intersection in the earth, they produce gold. Light—gold; it is the same thing—fire in its concrete state; merely the difference between the visible and the palpable, the fluid and the solid in the same substance, between vapour and ice—nothing more. This is no dream; it is the universal law of Nature. But how to extract from science the secret of this universal law? What! this light that bathes my hand is gold! All that is necessary is to condense by a certain law these same atoms dilated by certain other laws! Yes; but how? Some have thought of burying a ray of sunshine. Averroës—yes, it was Averroës—buried one under the first pillar to the left of the sanctuary of the Koran, in the great Mosque of Cordova; but the vault was not to be opened to see if the operation was successful under eight thousand years.”     26   
  “Diable!” said Jehan to himself, “rather a long time to wait for a florin!”     27   
  “Others have thought,” continued the Archdeacon musingly, “that it were better to experiment upon a ray from Sirius. But it is difficult to obtain this ray pure, on account of the simultaneous presence of other stars whose rays mingle with it. Flamel considers it simpler to operate with terrestrial fire. Flamel! there’s predestination in the very name! Flamma! yes, fire—that is all. The diamond exists already in the charcoal, gold in fire—But how to extract it? Magistri affirms that there are certain female names which possess so sweet and mysterious a charm, that it suffices merely to pronounce them during the operation. Let us see what Manou says on the subject: ‘Where women are held in honour, the gods are well pleased: where they are despised, it is useless to pray to God. The mouth of a woman is constantly pure; it is as a running stream, as a ray of sunshine. The name of a woman should be pleasing, melodious, and give food to the imagination—should end in long vowels, and sound like a benediction.’ Yes, yes, the sage is right; for example, Maria—Sophia—Esmeral—Damnation! Ever that thought!”     28   
  And he closed the book with a violent slam.     29   
  He passed his hand over his brow as if to chase away the thought that haunted him. Then taking from the table a nail and a small hammer, the handle of which bore strange, painted, cabalistic figures—     30   
  “For some time,” said he with a bitter smile, “I have failed in all my experiments. A fixed idea possesses me, and tortures my brain like the presence of a fiery stigma. I have not even succeeded in discovering the secret of Cassiodorus, whose lamp burned without wick or oil. Surely a simple matter enough!”     31   
  “The devil it is!” muttered Jehan between his teeth.     32   
  “One miserable thought, then,” continued the priest, “suffices to sap a man’s will and render him feeble-minded. Oh, how Claude Pernelle would mock at me—she who could not for one moment divert Nicholas Flamel from the pursuit of his great work! What! I hold in my hand the magic hammer of Zechieles! At every blow which, from the depths of his cell, the redoubtable rabbi struck with this hammer upon this nail that one among his enemies whom he had condemned would, even were he two thousand leagues away, sink an arm’s length into the earth which swallowed him up. The King of France himself, for having one night inadvertently struck against the door of the magician, sank up to his knees in his own pavement of Paris. This happened not three centuries ago. Well, I have the hammer and the nail, and yet these implements are no more formidable in my hands than a hammer in the hand of a smith. And yet all that is wanting is the magic word which Zechieles pronounced as he struck upon the nail.”     33   
  “A mere trifle!” thought Jehan.     34   
  “Come, let us try,” resumed the Archdeacon eagerly. “If I succeed, I shall see the blue spark fly from the head of the nail. Emen-Héten! Emen-Héten! That is not it—Sigeani! Sigeani! May this nail open the grave for whomsoever bears the name of Phœbus! A curse upon it again! Forever that same thought!”     35   
  He threw away the hammer angrily. He then sank so low in his arm-chair and over the table that Jehan lost sight of him. For some minutes he could see nothing but a hand clenched convulsively on a book. Suddenly Dom Claude arose, took a pair of compasses, and in silence engraved upon the wall in capitals the Greek word:
           
[Greek].
  36   
  “My brother’s a fool,” said Jehan to himself; “it would have been much simpler to write Fatum. Everybody is not obliged to know Greek.”     37   
  The Archdeacon reseated himself in his chair and clasped his forehead between his two hands, like a sick person whose head is heavy and burning.     38   
  The scholar watched his brother with surprise. He had no conception—he who always wore his heart upon his sleeve, who observed no laws but the good old laws of nature, who allowed his passions to flow according to their natural tendencies, and in whom the lake of strong emotions was always dry, so many fresh channels did he open for it daily—he had no conception with what fury that sea of human passions ferments and boils when it is refused all egress; how it gathers strength, swells, and overflows; how it wears away the heart; how it breaks forth in inward sobs and stifled convulsions, until it has rent its banks and overflowed its bed.     39   
  The austere and icy exterior of Claude Frollo, that cold surface of rugged and inaccessible virtue, had always deceived Jehan. The light-hearted scholar had never dreamed of the lava, deep, boiling, furious, beneath the snow of Ætna.     40   
  We do not know whether any sudden perception of this kind crossed Jehan’s mind; but, scatter-brained as he was, he understood that he had witnessed something he ought never to have seen; that he had surprised the soul of his elder brother in one of its most secret attitudes, and that Claude must not discover it. Perceiving that the Archdeacon had fallen back into his previous immobility, he withdrew his head very softly and made a slight shuffling of feet behind the door, as of some one approaching and giving warning of the fact.     41   
  “Come in!” cried the Archdeacon, from within his cell. “I was expecting you, and left the key in the door on purpose. Come in, Maˆtre Jacques!”     42   
  The scholar entered boldly. The Archdeacon much embarrassed by such a visitor in this particular place started violently in his arm-chair.     43   
  “What! is it you, Jehan?”     44   
  “A J at any rate,” said the scholar, with his rosy, smiling, impudent face.     45   
  The countenance of Dom Claude had resumed its severe expression. “What are you doing here?”     46   
  “Brother,” answered the scholar, endeavouring to assume a sober, downcast, and modest demeanour, and twisting his cap in his hands with an appearance of artlessness, “I have come to beg of you.”     47   
  “What?”     48   
  “A moral lesson of which I have great need,” he had not the courage to add—“and a little money of which my need is still greater.” The last half of his sentence remained unspoken.     49   
  “Sir,” said the Archdeacon coldly, “I am greatly displeased with you.”     50   
  “Alas!” sighed the scholar.     51   
  Dom Claude described a quarter of a circle with his chair, and regarded Jehan sternly. “I am very glad to see you.”     52   
  This was a formidable exordium. Jehan prepared for a sharp encounter.     53   
  “Jehan, every day they bring me complaints of you. What is this about a scuffle in which you belaboured a certain little vicomte, Albert de Ramonchamp?”     54   
  “Oh,” said Jehan, “a mere trifle! An ill-conditioned page, who amused himself with splashing the scholars by galloping his horse through the mud.”     55   
  “And what is this about Mahiet Fargel, whose gown you have torn? ‘Tunicam dechiraverunt,’ says the charge.”     56   
  “Pah! a shabby Montaigu cape. What’s there to make such a coil about?”     57   
  “The complaint says tunicam, not cappettam. Do you understand Latin?”     58   
  Jehan did not reply.     59   
  “Yes,” went on the priest shaking his head, “this is what study and letters have come to now! The Latin tongue is scarcely understood, Syriac unknown, the Greek so abhorred that it is not accounted ignorance in the most learned to miss over a Greek word when reading, and to say, Græcum est non legitur.”     60   
  The scholar raised his eyes boldly. “Brother, shall I tell you in good French the meaning of that Greek word over there upon the wall?”     61   
  “Which word?”     62   
  [Greek].     63   
  A faint flush crept into the parchment cheeks of the Archdeacon, like a puff of smoke giving warning of the unseen commotions of a volcano. The scholar hardly noted it.     64   
  “Well, Jehan,” faltered the elder brother with an effort, “what does the word mean?”     65   
  “Fatality.”     66   
  Dom Claude grew pale again, and the scholar went on heedlessly:     67   
  “And the word underneath it, inscribed by the same hand, [Greek] signifies ‘impurity.’ You see, we know our Greek.”     68   
  The Archdeacon was silent. This lesson in Greek had set him musing.     69   
  Little Jehan, who had all the cunning of a spoilt child, judged the moment favourable for hazarding his request. Adopting, therefore, his most insinuating tones, he began:     70   
  “Do you hate me so much, good brother, as to look thus grim on account of a few poor scufflings and blows dealt all in fair fight with a pack of boys and young monkeys—quibusdam marmosetis? You see, good brother Claude, we know our Latin.”     71   
  But this caressing hypocrisy failed in its customary effect on the severe elder brother. Cerberus would not take the honeyed sop. Not a furrow in the Archdeacon’s brow was smoothed. “What are you aiming at?” he asked dryly.     72   
  “Well, then, to be plain, it is this,” answered Jehan stoutly, “I want money.”     73   
  At this piece of effrontery the Archdeacon at once became the school-master, the stern parent.     74   
  “You are aware, Monsieur Jehan, that our fief of Tirechappe, counting together both the ground rents and the rents of the twenty-one houses, only brings in twenty-nine livres, eleven sous, six deniers parisis. That is half as much again as in the time of the brothers Paclet, but it is not much.”     75   
  “I want some money,” repeated Jehan stolidly.     76   
  “You know that the Ecclesiastical Court decided that our twenty-one houses were held in full fee of the bishopric, and that we could only redeem this tribute by paying to his Reverence the Bishop two marks silver gilt of the value of six livres parisis. Now, I have not yet been able to collect these two marks, and you know it.”     77   
  “I know that I want money,” repeated Jehan for the third time.     78   
  “And what do you want it for?”     79   
  This question brought a ray of hope to Jehan’s eyes. He assumed his coaxing, demure air once more.     80   
  “Look you, dear brother Claude, I do not come to you with any bad intent. I do not purpose to squander your money in a tavern, or ruffle it through the streets of Paris in gold brocade and with my lackey behind me—cum meo laquasio. No, brother, ’tis for a good work.”     81   
  “What good work?” asked Claude, somewhat surprised.     82   
  “Why, two of my friends wish to purchase some swaddling-clothes for the infant of a poor widow of the Haudriette Convent. ’Tis a charity. It will cost three florins, and I would like to add my contribution.”     83   
  “Who are your two friends?”     84   
  “Pierre l’Assommeur 4 and Baptiste Croque-Oison.” 5     85   
  “Humph!” said the Archdeacon; “these are names that go as fitly with a good work as a bombard upon a high altar.”     86   
  It cannot be denied that Jehan had not been happy in the choice of names for his two friends. He felt it when it was too late.     87   
  “Besides,” continued the shrewd Claude, “what sort of swaddling-clothes are they which cost three florins—and for the infant of a Haudriette? Since when, pray, do the Haudriette widows have babes in swaddling-clothes?”     88   
  Jehan broke the ice definitely.     89   
  “Well, then, I want some money to go and see Isabeau la Thierrye this evening at the Val-d’ Amour!”     90   
  “Vile profligate!” cried the priest.     91   
  “[Greek],” retorted Jehan.     92   
  This quotation, selected by the boy no doubt in sheer malice from those on the wall of the cell, produced a singular effect upon the priest. He bit his lip, and his anger was lost in his confusion.     93   
  “Get you gone!” said he to Jehan; “I am expecting some one.”     94   
  The scholar made one last attempt.     95   
  “Brother Claude, give me at least one little parisis to get some food.”     96   
  “How far have you advanced in the Decretals of Gratian?” asked Dom Claude.     97   
  “I have lost my note-books.”     98   
  “Where are you in Latin classics?”     99   
  “Somebody stole my copy of Horatius.”    100   
  “And where in Aristotle?”    101   
  “Faith, brother! what Father of the Church is it who says that the errors of heretics have ever found shelter among the thickets of Aristotle’s metaphysics? A straw for Aristotle! I will never mangle my religion on his metaphysics.”    102   
  “Young man,” replied the Archdeacon, “at the last entry of the King into Paris, there was a gentleman named Philippe de Comines, who displayed embroidered on his saddle-cloth this motto—which I counsel you to ponder well: ‘Qui non laborat non manducet.’” 6    103   
  The scholar stood a moment silent, his eyes bent on the ground, his countenance chagrined. Suddenly he turned towards Claude with the quick motion of a wagtail.    104   
  “So, good brother, you refuse me even a sou to buy a crust of bread?”    105   
  “Qui non laborat non manducet.”    106   
  At this inflexible answer Jehan buried his face in his hands, like a woman sobbing, and cried in a voice of despair:    107   
  “[Greek]!”    108   
  “What do you mean by this, sir?” demanded Claude, taken aback at this freak.    109   
  “Well, what?” said the scholar, raising a pair of impudent eyes into which he had been thrusting his fists to make them appear red with tears; “it’s Greek! it is an anapæst of Æschylus admirably expressive of grief.” And he burst into a fit of laughter so infections and uncontrolled that the Archdeacon could not refrain from smiling. After all, it was Claude’s own fault: why had he so spoiled the lad?    110   
  “Oh, dear brother Claude,” Jehan went on, emboldened by this smile, “look at my broken shoes. Is there a more tragic buskin in the world than a boot that gapes thus and puts out its tongue?”    111   
  The Archdeacon had promptly resumed his former severity.    112   
  “I will send you new shoes, but no money.”    113   
  “Only one little parisis, brother,” persisted the suppliant Jehan. “I will learn Gratian by heart, I am perfectly ready to believe in God, I will be a very Pythagoras of science and virtue. But one little parisis, for pity’s sake! Would you have me devoured by famine, which stands staring me in the face with open maw, blacker, deeper, more noisome than Tartarus or a monk’s nose——?”    114   
  Dom Claude shook his head—“Qui non laborat——”    115   
  Jehan did not let him finish. “Well!” he cried, “to the devil, then! Huzza! I’ll live in the taverns, I’ll fight, I’ll break heads and wine cups, I’ll visit the lasses and go to the devil!”    116   
  And so saying, he flung his cap against the wall and snapped his fingers like castanets.    117   
  The Archdeacon regarded him gravely. “Jehan,” said he, “you have no soul.”    118   
  “In that case, according to Epicurus, I lack an unknown something made of another something without a name.”    119   
  “Jehan, you must think seriously of amending your ways.”    120   
  “Ah ça!” cried the scholar, looking from his brother to the alembics on the furnaces, “everything seems awry here—tempers as well as bottles!”    121   
  “Jehan, you are on a slippery downward path. Know you whither you are going?”    122   
  “To the tavern,” answered Jehan promptly.    123   
  “The tavern leads to the pillory.”    124   
  “’Tis as good a lantern as any other, and one, may-be, with which Diogenes would have found his man.”    125   
  “The pillory leads to the gibbet.”    126   
  “The gibbet is a balance with a man at one end and the whole world at the other. It is good to be the man.”    127   
  “The gibbet leads to hell.”    128   
  “That’s a good big fire.”    129   
  “Jehan, Jehan! all this will have a bad end!”    130   
  “It will have had a good beginning.”    131   
  At this moment there was a sound of footsteps on the stairs.    132   
  “Silence!” said the Archdeacon, his finger on his lips, “here is Maître Jacques. Hark you, Jehan,” he added in a low voice, “beware of ever breathing a word of what you have seen or heard here. Hide yourself quickly under this furnace, and do not make a sound.”    133   
  The scholar was creeping under the furnace when a happy thought struck him.    134   
  “Brother Claude, a florin for keeping still!”    135   
  “Silence! I promise it you!”    136   
  “No, give it me now.”    137   
  “Take it, then!” said the Archdeacon, flinging him his whole pouch angrily. Jehan crept under the furnace, and the door opened.    138   


Note 1.  Blow, hope. [back]   
Note 2.  Whence, whither?—Man is a monster unto men.—The stars, a fortress.—The name, a wonder.—A great book, a great evil.—Dare to be wise.—It bloweth where it listeth. [back]   
Note 3.  Account the Lord of heaven thy ruler upon earth. [back]   
Note 4.  The slaughterer. [back]   
Note 5.  The rook. [back]   
Note 6.  He who will not work shall not eat. [back]

Book VII   
V. The Two Men in Black   
     
THE PERSON who entered wore a black gown and a morose air. What at the first glance struck our friend Jehan (who, as may be supposed, so placed himself in his retreat as to be able to see and hear all at his ease) was the utter dejection manifest both in the garments and the countenance of the new-comer. There was, however, a certain meekness diffused over that face; but it was the meekness of a cat or of a judge—a hypocritical gentleness. He was very gray and wrinkled, about sixty, with blinking eye-lids, white eye-brows, a pendulous lip, and large hands. When Jehan saw that it was nothing more—that is to say, merely some physician or magistrate, and that the man’s nose was a long way from his mouth, a sure sign of stupidity—he ensconced himself deeper in his hole, desperate at being forced to pass an indefinite time in such an uncomfortable posture and such dull company.      1   
  The Archdeacon had not even risen to greet this person. He motioned him to a stool near the door, and after a few moments’ silence, during which he seemed to be pursuing some previous meditation, he remarked in a patronizing tone:      2   
  “Good-day to you, Maître,”Jacques.”      3   
  “And to you greeting, Maître,” responded the man in black.      4   
  There was between these two greetings—the offhand Maître Jacques of the one, and the obsequious Maître of the other—the difference between “Sir” and “Your Lordship,” of domne and domine. It was evidently the meeting between master and disciple.      5   
  “Well,” said the Archdeacon, after another interval of silence which Maître Jacques took care not to break, “will you succeed?”      6   
  “Alas, master,” replied the other with a mournful smile, “I use the bellows assiduously—cinders and to spare—but not a spark of gold.”      7   
  Dom Claude made a gesture of impatience. “That is not what I allude to, Maître Jacques Charmolue, but to the charge against your sorcerer—Marc Cenaine, you call him, I think—butler to the Court of Accounts. Did he confess his wizardry when you put him to the question?”      8   
  “Alas, no,” replied Maître Jacques, with his deprecating smile. “We have not that consolation. The man is a perfect stone. We might boil him in the pig-market, and we should get no word out of him. However, we spare no pains to arrive at the truth. Every joint is already dislocated on the rack; we have put all our irons in the fire, as the old comic writer Plautus has it:
           ‘Advorsum stimulos, laminas, crucesque, compedesque,   
Nervos, catenas, carceres, numellas, pedicas, boias.’   
But all to no purpose. That man is terrible. ’Tis love’s labour lost!”      9   
  “You have found nothing fresh in his house?”     10   
  “Oh, yes,” said Maître Jacques, fumbling in his pouch, “this parchment. There are words on it that we do not understand. And yet, monsieur, the criminal advocate, Philippe Lheulier, knows a little Hebrew, which he learned in an affair with the Jews of the Rue Kantersten, at Brussels.” So saying, Maître Jacques unrolled a parchment.     11   
  “Give it to me,” said the Archdeacon. “Magic pure and simple, Maître Jacques!” he cried, as he cast his eyes over the scroll. “‘Emen-Hétan!’ that is the cry of the ghouls when they arrive at the witches’ Sabbath. ‘Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso!’ that is the conjuration which rebinds the devil in hell. ‘Hax, pax, max!’ that refers to medicine—a spell against the bite of a mad dog. Maître Jacques, you are King’s attorney in the Ecclesiastical Court; this parchment is an abomination.”     12   
  “We will put him again to the question. Then here is something else,” added Maître Jacques, fumbling once more in his bag, “which we found at Marc Cenaine’s.”     13   
  It was a vessel of the same family as those which encumbered the furnace of Dom Claude. “Ah,” said the Archdeacon, “an alchemist’s crucible.”     14   
  “I don’t mind confessing to you,” Maître Jacques went on, with his timid and constrained smile, “that I have tried it over the furnace, but succeeded no better than with my own.”     15   
  The Archdeacon examined the vessel. “What has he inscribed on his crucible? ‘Och! och!’—the word for driving away fleas? Your Marc Cenaine is an ignoramus! I can well believe that you could not make gold with this! It will be useful to put in your sleeping alcove in the summer, but for nothing more.”     16   
  “Since we are on the subject of errors,” said the King’s attorney, “before coming up I was studying the doorway down below; is your Reverence quite sure that the beginnings of Nature’s workings are represented there on the side towards the Hôtel-Dieu, and that among the seven naked figures at the feet of Our Lady, that with wings to his heels is Mercurius?”     17   
  “Yes,” answered the priest; “so Augustin Nypho writes—that Italian doctor who had a bearded familiar which taught him everything. But we will go down, and I will explain it to you from the text.”     18   
  “Thank you, master,” said Charmolue, bending to the ground. “By-the-bye, I had forgotten! When do you wish me to arrest the little witch?”     19   
  “What witch?”     20   
  “That gipsy girl, you know, who comes and dances every day in the Parvis, in defiance of the prohibition. She has a familiar spirit in the shape of a goat with devil’s horns—it can read and write and do arithmetic—enough to hang all Bohemia. The charge is quite ready and would soon be drawn up. A pretty creature, on my soul, that dancing girl!—the finest black eyes in the world—two Egyptian carbuncles. When shall we begin?”     21   
  The Archdeacon had grown deadly pale.     22   
  “I will let you know,” he stammered in almost inaudible tones, then added with an effort: “Attend you to Marc Cenaine.”     23   
  “Never fear,” answered Charmolue smiling. “As soon as I get back he shall be strapped down again to the leather bed. But it is a very devil of a man. He tires out Pierrat Torterue himself, who has larger hands than I. As says our good Plautus—     24   
  ‘Nudus vinctus, centum pondo, es quando pendes per pedes.’ 1 The screw—that is our modest effectual instrument—we shall try that.”     25   
  Dom Claude seemed sunk in gloomy abstraction. He now turned to Charmolue. “Maître Pierrat—Maître Jacques, I should say—look to Marc Cenaine.”     26   
  “Yes, yes, Dom Claude. Poor man! he will have suffered like Mummol. But what a thing to do—to visit the witches’ Sabbath!—and he butler to the Court of Accounts, who must know Charlemagne’s regulation: ‘Stryga vel masca.” 2 As to the little girl—Smeralda, as they call her—I shall await your orders. Ah! as we pass through the door you will explain to me also the signification of that gardener painted on the wall just as you enter the church. Is that not the Sower? Hé! master, what are you thinking about?”     27   
  Dom Claude, fathoms deep in his own thoughts, was not listening to him. Charmolue, following the direction of his eyes, saw that they were fixed blankly on the spider’s web which curtained the little window. At this moment a foolish fly, courting the March sunshine, threw itself against the net, and was caught fast. Warned by the shaking of his web, the enormous spider darted out of his central cell, and with one bound rushed upon the fly, promptly doubled it up, and with its horrible sucker began scooping out the victim’s head. “Poor fly!” said the King’s attorney, and lifted his hand to rescue it. The Archdeacon, as if starting out of his sleep, held back his arm with a convulsive clutch.     28   
  “Maître Jacques,” he cried, “let fate have its way!”     29   
  Maître Jacques turned round in alarm; he felt as if his arm were in an iron vice. The eye of the priest was fixed, haggard, glaring, and remained fascinated by the horrible scene between the spider and the fly.     30   
  “Ah, yes!” the priest went on, in a voice that seemed to issue from the depths of his being, “there is a symbol of the whole story. She flies, she is joyous, she has but just entered life; she courts the spring, the open air, freedom; yes, but she strikes against the fatal web—the spider darts out, the deadly spider! Hapless dancer! Poor, doomed fly! Maître Jacques, let be—it is fate! Alas! Claude, thou art the spider. But Claude, thou are also the fly! Thou didst wing thy flight towards knowledge, the light, the sun. Thy one care was to reach the pure air, the broad beams of truth eternal; but in hastening towards the dazzling loophole which opens on another world—a world of brightness, of intelligence, of true knowledge—infatuated fly! insensate sage! thou didst not see the cunning spider’s web, by destiny suspended between the light and thee; thou didst hurl thyself against it, poor fool, and now thou dost struggle with crushed head and mangled wings between the iron claws of Fate! Maître Jacques, let the spider work its will!”     31   
  “I do assure you,” said Charmolue, who gazed at him in bewilderment, “that I will not touch it. But in pity, master, loose my arm; you have grip of iron.”     32   
  The Archdeacon did not heed him. “Oh, madman!” he continued, without moving his eyes from the loophole. “And even if thou couldst have broken through that formidable web with thy midge’s wing’s, thinkest thou to have attained the light! Alas! that glass beyond—that transparent obstacle, that wall of crystal harder than brass, the barrier between all our philosophy and the truth—how couldst thou have passed through that? Oh, vanity of human knowledge! how many sages have come fluttering from afar to dash their heads against thee! How many clashing systems buzz vainly about that everlasting barrier!”     33   
  He was silent. These last ideas, by calling off his thoughts from himself to science, appeared to have calmed him, and Jacques Charmolue completely restored him to a sense of reality by saying: “Come, master, when are you going to help me towards the making of gold? I long to succeed.”     34   
  The Archdeacon shrugged his shoulders with a bitter smile.     35   
  “Maître Jacques, read Michael Psellus’s Dialogus de Energia et Operatione Dæmonum. What we are doing is not quite innocent.”     36   
  “Speak lower, master! I have my doubts,” said Charmolue. “But one is forced to play the alchemist a little when one is but a poor attorney in the Ecclesiastical Court at thirty crowns tournois a year. Only let us speak low.”     37   
  At this moment a sound of chewing and crunching from the direction of the furnace struck on the apprehensive ear of Maître Jacques.     38   
  “What is that?” he asked.     39   
  It was the scholar, who, very dull and cramped in his hiding-place, had just discovered a stale crust and a corner of mouldy cheese, and had without more ado set to work upon both by way of breakfast and amusement. As he was very hungry, he made a great noise, giving full play to his teeth at every mouthful, and thus aroused the alarm of the King’s attorney.     40   
  “It is my cat,” the Archdeacon hastily replied; “she must have got hold of a mouse in there.”     41   
  This explanation entirely satisfied Charmolue. “True, master,” he said with an obsequious smile, “all great philosophers have some familiar animal. You know what Servius says: ‘Nullus enim locus sine genio est.”’ 3     42   
  Meanwhile, Dom Claude, fearing some new freak of Jehan’s reminded his worthy disciple that they had the figures in the doorway to study together. They therefore quitted the cell, to the enormous relief of the scholar, who had begun to have serious fears that his chin would take root in his knees.     43   


Note 1.  Naked and bound thou weighest a hundred pounds when hung up by the feet. [back]   
Note 2.  A witch or ghost. [back]   
Note 3.  There is no place without its guardian spirit. [back]

   
Book VII   
VI. Of the Result of Launching a String of Seven Oaths in a Public Square   
     
“TE Deum laudamus!” exclaimed Master Jehan, crawling out of his hole; “the two old owls have gone at last. Och! och! Hax! pax! max!—fleas!—mad dogs!—the devil! I’ve had enough of their conversation. My head hums like a belfry. And mouldy cheese into the bargain! Well, cheer up! let’s be off with the big brother’s purse and convert all these coins into bottles.”      1   
  He cast a look of fond admiration into the interior of the precious pouch, adjusted his dress, rubbed his shoes, dusted his shabby sleeves, which were white with ashes, whistled a tune, cut a lively step or two, looked about the cell to see if there was anything else worth taking, rummaged about the furnace and managed to collect a glass amulet or so by way of trinket to give to Isabeau la Thierrye, and finally opened the door, which his brother had left unfastened as a last indulgence, and which he in turn left open as a lost piece of mischief, and descended the spiral staircase, hopping like a bird. In the thick darkness of the winding stairs he stumbled against something which moved out of the way with a growl. He surmised that it was Quasimodo, which circumstance so tickled his fancy that he descended the rest of the stairs holding his sides with laughter. He was still laughing when he issued out into the square.      2   
  He stamped his foot when he found himself on level ground.      3   
  “Oh, most excellent and honourable pavement of Paris!” he exclaimed. “Oh, cursed staircase, that would wind the very angels of Jacob’s ladder! What was I thinking of to go and thrust myself up that stone gimlet that pierces the sky, just to eat bearded cheese and look at the steeples of Paris through a hole in the wall!”      4   
  He went on a few steps, and caught sight of the “two owls” lost in contemplation of the sculpture in the doorway. Approaching them softly on tip-toe, he heard the Archdeacon say in low tones to Charmolue: “It was Guillaume of Paris who had the Job engraven on the lapis-lazuli coloured stone. Job represents the philosopher’s stone, which also must be tried and tormented in order to become perfect, as Raymond Lulle says: ‘Sub conservatione formæ specificæ salva anima.”’ 1       5   
  “It’s all one to me,” said Jehan; “I’ve got the purse.”      6   
  At that moment he heard a powerful and ringing voice behind him give vent to a string of terrible oaths:      7   
  “Sang-Dieu! Ventre-Dieu! Bé-Dieu! Corps de Dieu! Nombril de Belzébuth! Nom d’un pape! Corne et tonnerre!”      8   
  “My soul on it!” exclaimed Jehan, “that can be no other than my friend Captain Phœbus!”      9   
  The name Phœbus reached the ear of the Archdeacon just as he was explaining to the King’s attorney the meaning of the dragon hiding its tail in a caldron from which issued smoke and a king’s head. Dom Claude started and broke off short to the great astonishment of Charmolue, then turned and saw his brother Jehan accosting a tall officer at the door of the Gondelaurier mansion.     10   
  It was, in fact, Captain Phœbus Châteaupers. He was leaning his back against a corner of the house of his betrothed and swearing like a Turk.     11   
  “My faith, Captain Phœbus,” said Jehan, taking his hand, “but you are a wonderfully spirited swearer!”     12   
  “Thunder and devils!” answered the captain.     13   
  “Thunder and devils to you!” retorted the scholar. “How now, my gentle captain, whence this overflow of elegant language?”     14   
  “Your pardon, friend Jehan!” cried Phœbus, shaking his hand, “a runaway horse can’t be pulled up short! Now I was swearing at full gallop. I’ve just been with those mincing prudes, and by the time I come away my throat’s so full of oaths that I must spit them out, or by thunder I should choke!”     15   
  “Come and have a drink?” asked the scholar.     16   
  This proposal calmed the young soldier.     17   
  “With all my heart, but I’ve no money.”     18   
  “But I have.”     19   
  “Nonsense! let’s see.”     20   
  With an air of good-natured superiority Jehan displayed the purse before his friend’s eyes.     21   
  Meanwhile the Archdeacon, leaving Charmolue standing gaping had approached the two and stopped a few paces off, observing them without their noticing him, so absorbed were they in examining the contents of the purse.     22   
  “A purse in your pocket, Jehan!” exclaimed Phœbus, “why, ’tis the moon in a pail of water—one sees it, but it is not there, it is only the reflection. Par Dieu! I’ll wager it’s full of pebbles!”     23   
  “These are the pebbles with which I pave my breeches pockets,” answered Jehan coldly; and without further wasting of words he emptied the purse on a corner-stone near by, with the air of a Roman saving his country.     24   
  “As I live!” muttered Phœbus, “targes! grands blancs! petits blancs! deniers parisis! and real eagle pieces! ’Tis enough to stagger one!”     25   
  Jehan preserved his dignified and impassive air. A few liards had rolled into the mud; the captain in his enthusiasm stooped to pick them up. But Jehan restrained him.     26   
  “Fie, Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers!”     27   
  Phœbus counted the money, and turning solemnly to Jehan: “Do you know, Jehan,” said he, “that there are twenty-three sous parisis here? Whom did you rob last night in the Rue Coupe-Gueule?”     28   
  Jehan tossed his curly head. “How if one has a brother,” he said, narrowing his eyes as if in scorn, “an archdeacon and a simpleton?”     29   
  “Corne de Dieu!” cried Phœbus, “the worthy man!”     30   
  “Let’s go and drink,” said Jehan.     31   
  “Where shall we go?” said Phœbus, “to the Pomme d’Eve?”     32   
  “No, captain, let’s go to the Vieille-Science.”     33   
  “A fig for your Vieille-Science, Jehan! the wine is better at the Pomme d’Eve; besides, there’s a vine at the door that cheers me while I drink.”     34   
  “Very well, then—here goes for Eve and her apple,” said the scholar, taking Phœbus by the arm. “By-the-bye, my dear captain, you spoke just now of the Rue Coupe-Gueule. 2 That is very grossly said; we are not so barbarous now—we call it Rue Coupe-Gorge.” 3     35   
  The two friends turned their steps towards the Pomme d’Eve. Needless to say they first gathered up the money, and the Archdeacon followed them.     36   
  Followed them with a haggard and gloomy countenance. Was this the Phœbus whose accursed name, since his interview with Gringoire, had mingled with his every thought? He did not know, but at any rate it was a Phœbus, and this magic name was a sufficient magnet to draw the Archdeacon after the two thoughtless companions with stealthy step listening to all they said, anxiously attentive to their slightest gesture. For the rest, there was no difficulty in hearing all they had to say, so loudly did they talk, so little did they hesitate to let the passer-by share their confidences. Their talk was of duels, women, wine, folly of all sorts.     37   
  As they turned a corner, the sound of a tambourine came to them from a neighbouring side street. Dom Claude heard the officer say to the scholar:     38   
  “Thunder! let’s quicken our pace!”     39   
  “Why, Phœbus?”     40   
  “I’m afraid the gipsy will see me.”     41   
  “What gipsy?”     42   
  “The girl with the goat.”     43   
  “Esmeralda?”     44   
  “That’s it, Jehan. I always forget her deuce of a name. Let us hurry past or she will recognise me, and I don’t want the girl to accost me in the street.”     45   
  “Do you know her then, Phœbus?”     46   
  At first, the Archdeacon saw Phœ lean over with a grin and whisper something in Jehan’s ear. Phœbus then burst out laughing, and threw up his head with a triumphant air.     47   
  “In very truth?” said Jehan.     48   
  “Upon my soul!”     49   
  “To-night?”     50   
  “To-night.”     51   
  “Are you sure she’ll come?”     52   
  “But you must be mad, Jehan. Is there ever any doubt about these things?”     53   
  “Captain Phœbus, you are a lucky warrior!”     54   
  The Archdeacon overheard all this conversation. His teeth chattered. A visible shudder ran through his whole frame. He stopped a moment to lean against a post like a drunken man; then he followed the track of the two boon companions.     55   
  When he came up with them again they had changed the subject. They were singing at the top of their voices the refrain of an old song:
           “The lads, the dice who merrily throw,   
Merrily to the gallows go.”   
  56   


Note 1.  By preserving it under a special form the soul is saved. [back]   
Note 2.  Cut-weasand. [back]   
Note 3.  Cut-throat. [back]

Book VII   
VII. The Spectre-Monk   
     
THE FAR-FAMED cabaret of the Pomme d’Eve was situated in the University, at the corner of the Rue de la Rondelle and the Rue du Bâtonnier. It consisted of one spacious room on the ground floor, the central arch of its very low ceiling supported by a heavy wooden pillar painted yellow. There were tables all round, shining pewter pots hanging on the walls, a constant crowd of drinkers, and girls in abundance. A single window looked on to the street; there was a vine at the door, and over the door a creaking sheet of iron having a woman and an apple painted on it, rusted by the rain and swinging in the wind—this was the sign-board.      1   
  Night was falling; the street was pitch-dark, and the cabaret, blazing with candles, flared from afar like a forge in the gloom, while through the broken window-panes came a continuous uproar of clinking glasses, feasting, oaths, and quarrels. Through the mist which the heat of the room diffused over the glass of the door a confused swarm of figures could be seen, and now and then came a roar of laughter. The people going to and fro upon their business hastened past this noisy casement with averted eyes. Only now and then some little ragamuffin would stand on tip-toe until he just reached the window-ledge, and shout into the cabaret the old jeering cry with which in those days they used to follow drunkards: “Aux Houls, saouls, saouls, saouls!”      2   
  One man, however, was pacing imperturbably backward and forward in front of the noisy tavern, never taking his eye off it, nor going farther away from it than a sentry from his box. He was cloaked to the eyes, which cloak he had just purchased at a clothier’s shop near the Pomme d’Eve, perhaps to shield himself from the keen wind of a March night, perhaps also to conceal his dress. From time to time he stopped before the dim latticed casement, listening, peering in, stamping his feet.      3   
  At length the door of the cabaret opened—this was evidently what he had been waiting for—and a pair of boon companions came out. The gleam of light that streamed out of the doorway glowed for a moment on their flushed and jovial faces. The man in the cloak went and put himself on the watch again under a porch on the opposite side of the street.      4   
  “Corne et tonnerre!” said one of the two carousers. “It’s on the stroke of seven—the hour of my rendezvous.”      5   
  “I tell you,” said his companion, speaking thickly, “I don’t live in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles—indignus qui inter mala verba habitat. My lodging is in the Rue Jean-Pain-Mollet—in vico Johannis-Pain-Mollet, and you’re more horny than a unicorn if you say the contrary. Everybody knows that he who once rides on a bear’s back never knows fear again; but you’ve a nose for smelling out a dainty piece like Saint-Jacques de l’Hôpital!”      6   
  “Jehan, my friend, you’re drunk,” said the other.      7   
  His friend replied with a lurch. “It pleases you to say so, Phœbus; but it is proved that Plato had the profile of a hound.”      8   
  Doubtless the reader has already recognised our two worthy friends, the captain and the scholar. It seems that the man who was watching them in the dark had recognised them too, for he followed slowly all the zigzags which the scholar obliged the captain to make, who, being a more seasoned toper, had retained his self-possession. Listening intently to them, the man in the cloak overheard the whole of the following interesting conversation:      9   
  “Corbacque! Try to walk straight, sir bachelor. You know that I must leave you anon. It is seven o’clock, and I have an appointment with a woman.”     10   
  “Leave me then! I see stars and spears of fire. You’re like the Château of Dampmartin that burst with laughter.”     11   
  “By the warts of my grandmother! Jehan, that’s talking nonsense with a vengeance! Look you, Jehan, have you no money left?”     12   
  “Monsieur the Rector, it is without a mistake: the little slaughter-house—parva boucheria!”     13   
  “Jehan! friend Jehan! you know I promised to meet that girl at the end of the Saint-Michel bridge; that I can take her nowhere but to La Falourdel’s, and that I must pay for the room. The old white-whiskered jade won’t give me credit. Jehan, I beseech you! Have we drunk the whole contents of the curé’s pouch?”     14   
  “The consciousness of having employed the other hours well is a right and savoury condiment to our table.”     15   
  “Liver and spleen! a truce to your gibberish! Tell me, little limb of the devil, have you any money left? Give it me, or, by Heaven, I’ll search you though you were as leprous as Job and as scabby as Cæsar!”     16   
  “Sir, the Rue Galliache is a street which has the Rue de la Verrerie at one end and the Rue de la Tixanderie at the other.”     17   
  “Yes, yes, my good friend Jehan—my poor boy—the Rue Galliache—yes, you’re right, quite right. But for the love of Heaven collect yourself! I want but one sou parisis, and seven o’clock is the hour.”     18   
  “Silence all round and join in the chorus:
           “‘When the rats have every cat devoured,   
The king shall of Arras be the lord;   
When the sea, so deep and wide,   
Shall be frozen over at midsummertide,   
Then out upon the ice you’ll see   
How the men of Arras their town shall flee.’”   
  19   
  “Well, scholar of Antichrist, the foul fiend strangle thee!” cried Phœbus, roughly pushing the tipsy scholar, who reeled against the wall and slid gently down upon the pavement of Philippe Augustus. Out of that remnant of fraternal sympathy which never wholly deserts the heart of a bottle companion, Phœbus with his foot rolled Jehan to one of those pillows of the poor which Heaven provides at every street corner of Paris, and which the rich scornfully stigmatize with the name of rubbish-heap. The captain propped Jehan’s head upon an inclined plane of cabbage-stumps, and forth-with the scholar struck up a magnificent tenor snore. However, the captain still entertained some slight grudge against him. “So much the worse for thee if the dust-cart come and shovel thee up in passing,” said he to the poor, slumbering student; and he went on his way.     20   
  The man with the cloak, who still dogged his footsteps, halted a moment as if struggling with some resolve; then, heaving a deep sigh, he went on after the soldier.     21   
  Like them, we will leave Jehan sleeping under the friendly eye of heaven, and, with the reader’s permission, follow their steps.     22   
  On turning into the Rue Saint-André-des-Arcs, Captain Phœbus perceived that some one was following him. Happening to glance behind him, he saw a sort of shade creeping after him along the wall. He stopped, it stopped; he went on, the shade also moved forward. However, it caused him but little uneasiness. “Ah, bah!” he said to himself, “I haven’t a sou on me.”     23   
  In front of the College d’Autun he made a halt. It was here that he had shuffled through what he was pleased to call his studies, and from a naughty school-boy habit which still clung to him he never passed the College without offering to the statue of Cardinal Pierre Bertram, which stood to the right of the entrance, that kind of affront of which Priapus complains so bitterly in Horace’s satire: “Olim truncus eram ficulnus.”     24   
  He therefore paused as usual at the effigy of the cardinal. The street was perfectly empty. As he was preparing to proceed on his way, he saw the shadow approaching him slowly; so slowly that he had the leisure to observe that it wore a cloak and a hat. Arrived at his side, it stopped and stood as motionless as the statue of the cardinal; but it fixed on Phœbus a pair of piercing eyes which gleamed with the strange light that the pupils of a cat give forth at night.     25   
  The captain was no coward, and would have cared very little for a robber rapier in hand; but this walking statue, this petrified man, froze his blood. Queer stories were going about at that time of a spectre-monk who nightly roamed the streets of Paris, and these stories now returned confusedly to his mind. He stood for a moment bewildered and stupefied, and then broke the silence.     26   
  “Sir,” said he, forcing a laugh, “if you are a thief, which I trust is the case, you look to me for all the world like a heron attacking a nutshell. My good fellow, I am a ruined youth of family. But try your luck here—in the chapel of this College you will find a piece of the true cross set in silver.”     27   
  The hand of the shade came forth from under its cloak and fell upon Phœbus’s arm with the grip of an eagle’s talons, while at the same time it spoke. “Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers!” it said.     28   
  “The devil!” exclaimed Phœbus; “you know my name?”     29   
  “I know more than your name,” returned the cloaked man in sepulchral tones. “I know that you have a rendezvous to-night.”     30   
  “Yes, I have,” answered Phœbus in amazement.     31   
  “At seven o’clock.”     32   
  “In a quarter of an hour.”     33   
  “At La Falourdel’s.”     34   
  “Precisely.”     35   
  “The old procuress of the Pont Saint-Michel.”     36   
  “Of Saint-Michael the Archangel, as says the paternoster.”     37   
  “Impious one!” growled the spectre. “With a woman?”     38   
  “Confiteor—I confess it.”     39   
  “Whose name is——”     40   
  “La Smeralda,” said Phœbus lightly; all his carelessness returned to him.     41   
  At this name the spectre’s grip tightened, and he shook the captain’s arm furiously.     42   
  “Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers, thou liest!”Any one beholding at that moment the flame of anger that rushed to the soldier’s face, his recoil—so violent that it relieved him from the other’s clutch, the haughty air with which he laid his hand upon the hilt of his sword, and, in face of that passionate resentment, the sullen immobility of the man in the cloak—any one beholding this would have been startled. It was like the combat between Don Juan and the statue.     43   
  “Christ and Satan!” cried the captain, “that’s a word that seldom attacks the ear of a Châteaupers! Thou darest not repeat it!”     44   
  “Thou liest!” said the shade coldly.     45   
  The captain ground his teeth. Spectre-monk, phantom, superstitions—all were forgotten at this moment. He saw only a man and an insult.     46   
  “Ha—very good!” he stammered, his voice choking with rage, and he drew his sword, still stammering—for passion makes a man tremble as well as fear. “Draw,” he cried, “here—on the spot—draw and defend yourself! There shall be blood upon these stones!”     47   
  The other never stirred. Then, as he saw his adversary on guard and ready to run him through—“Captain Phœbus,” said he, and his voice shook with bitterness, “you are forgetting your assignation.”     48   
  The angry fits of such men as Phœbus are like boiling milk of which a drop of cold water will stay the ebullition. These few words brought down the point of the sword which glittered in the captain’s hand.     49   
  “Captain,” continued the man, “to-morrow—the day after—a month—ten years hence—you will find me ready to cut your throat; but now go to your rendezvous.”     50   
  “Why, in truth,” said Phœbus, as if parleying with himself, “a sword and a girl are two charming things with which to have a rendezvous; but I see no reason why I should miss the one for the sake of the other, when I can have them both.” And with that he put up his sword.     51   
  “Go to your rendezvous,” repeated the unknown.     52   
  “Sir,” said Phœbus with some embarrassment, “thanks for your courtesy. You are right, there will be plenty of time to-morrow for us to mutually make slashes and button-holes in father Adam’s doublet. I am obliged to you for thus permitting me to pass another agreeable quarter of an hour. I was indeed in hopes of laying you in the gutter, and yet arriving in time for the lady, all the more that it is not amiss to make women wait for you a little on such occasions. But you seem to be a fellow of mettle, so it will be safer to put it off till to-morrow. So now I will be off to my rendezvous; it is for seven o’clock, you know.” Here Phœbus scratched his ear. “Ah, corne Dieu! I’d forgotten—I have not a sou to pay the hire of the garret, and the old hag will want to be paid in advance—she will not trust me.”     53   
  “Here is the wherewithal to pay.”     54   
  Phœbus felt the cold hand of the unknown slip a large coin into his. He could not refrain from accepting the money and grasping the hand.     55   
  “God’s truth!” he exclaimed, “but you are a good fellow!”     56   
  “One condition,” said the man; “prove to me that I was wrong, and that you spoke the truth. Hide me in some corner whence I may see whether this woman be really she whom you named.”     57   
  “Oh,” answered Phœbus, “I have not the slightest objection. We shall use the ‘Sainte-Marthe room,’ and you can see into it as much as you like from a little den at one side of it.”     58   
  “Come, then,” said the shade.     59   
  “At your service,” said the captain. “For all I know, you may be Messer Diabolus in person. But let’s be good friends to-night; to-morrow I will pay you all my debts—both of the purse and the sword.”     60   
  They went forward at a rapid pace, and in a few moments the sound of the river below told them that they were on the Pont Saint-Michel, at that time lined with houses.     61   
  “I will get you in first,” said Phœbus to his companion, “and then go and fetch the lady, who was to wait for me near the Petit-Châtelet.”     62   
  His companion made no reply. Since they had been walking side by side he had not uttered a word. Phœbus stopped in front of a low door and knocked loudly. A light shone through the crevices of the door.     63   
  “Who’s there?” cried a quavering old voice.     64   
  “Corps-Dieu! Tête-Dieu! Ventre-Dieu!” answered the captain.     65   
  The door opened on the instant, revealing to the new-comers an old woman and an old lamp, both of them trembling. The old woman was bent double, clothed in rags, her palsied head, out of which peered two little blinking eyes, tied up in a kerchief, and wrinkles everywhere—her hands, her face, her neck; her lips were fallen in over her gums, and all round her mouth were tufts of white bristles, giving her the whiskered look of a cat.     66   
  The interior of the hovel was no less dilapidated than herself—the plaster dropping from the walls, smoke-blackened beams, a dismantled chimney-piece, cobwebs in every corner; in the middle a tottering company of broken-legged tables and stools, in the cinders a dirty child, and at the back a stair-case, or rather a wooden ladder, leading to a trap-door in the ceiling.     67   
  As he entered this den, Phœbus’s mysterious companion pulled his cloak up to his eyes. Meanwhile the captain, swearing like a Saracen, hastened to produce his crown piece.      68   
  “The ‘Sainte-Marthe room,’” he said as he presented it.     69   
  The old hag treated him like a lord and shut up the ècu in a drawer. It was the coin Phœbus had received form the man in the cloak. No sooner was her back turned, than the little tousle-headed ragamuffin playing in the cinders stole to the drawer, adroitly abstracted the coin, and replaced it by a withered leaf which he plucked from a fagot.     70   
  The old woman signed to the two gentlemen, as she entitled them, to follow her, and ascended the ladder. Arrived on the upper floor she set down her lamp upon a chest, and Phœbus, as one knowing the ways of the house, opened a side door giving access to a small dark space.     71   
  “In here, my dear fellow,” said he to his companion. The man in the cloak obeyed without a word. The door closed behind him; he heard Phœbus bolt it, and a moment afterward return down the ladder with the old woman. The light had disappeared.

Book VII   
VIII. The Convenience of Windows Overlooking the River   
     
CLAUDE FROLLO—for we presume the reader, more intelligent than Phœbus, has seen throughout this adventure no other spectre-monk than the Archdeacon—Claude Frollo groped about him for some moments in the darksome hole into which the captain had thrust him. It was one of those corners which builders sometimes reserve in the angle between the roof and the supporting wall. The vertical section of this den, as Phœbus had very aptly termed it, would have exhibited a triangle. It had no window of any description, and the slope of the roof prevented one standing upright in it. Claude, therefore, was forced to crouch in the dust and the plaster that cracked under him. His head was burning. Groping about him on the floor, he found a piece of broken glass which he pressed to his forehead, and so found some slight relief from its coldness.      1   
  What was passing at that moment in the dark soul of the Archdeacon? God and himself alone knew.      2   
  According to what fatal order was he disposing in his thoughts La Esmeralda, Phœbus, Jacques Charmolue, his fondly loved young brother, abandoned by him in the gutter, his cloth, his reputation perhaps, dragged thus into the house of the notorious old procuress—all these images—these wild doings? I cannot say; but it is very certain that they formed a horrible group in his mind’s eye.      3   
  He had been waiting a quarter of an hour, and he felt that he had aged a century in that time. Suddenly he heard the wooden ladder creak. Some one was ascending it. The trap-door opened again, and once more the light made its appearance. In the worm-eaten door of his retreat there was a crack; to this he pressed his face and could thus see all that went on in the adjoining space. The old cat-faced hag came first through the trap-door, lamp in hand; then followed Phœbus, twirling his mustaches; and lastly a third person, a beautiful and graceful figure—La Esmeralda. To the priest she issued from below like a dazzling apparition. Claude shook, a mist spread before his eyes, his pulses throbbed violently, everything turned round him, there was a roaring in his ears; he saw and heard no more.      4   
  When he came to himself again, Phœbus and Esmeralda were alone, seated upon the wooden chest beside the lamp, the light of which revealed to the Archdeacon the two youthful figures and a miserable pallet at the back of the attic.      5   
  Close to the couch was a window, the casement of which, cracked and bulging like a spider’s web in the rain, showed through its broken strands a small patch of sky, and far down it the moon reclining on a pillow of soft clouds.      6   
  The girl was blushing, panting, confused. Her long, drooping lashes shaded her glowing cheeks. The officer, to whom she dared not lift her eyes, was radiant. Mechanically, and with a ravishing coy air, she was tracing incoherent lines on the bench with the tip of her finger, her eyes following the movement. Her foot was hidden, for the little goat was lying on it.      7   
  The captain was arrayed for conquest, with ruffles of gold lace at his throat and wrists—the extreme of elegance in those days.      8   
  It was not without difficulty that Dom Claude could hear their conversation, so loudly did the blood beat in his ears.      9   
  A dull affair enough, the conversation of a pair of lovers—one never-ending “I love you”; a musical phrase, but terribly monotonous and insipid to the indifferent listener. But Claude was no indifferent listener.     10   
  “Oh,” said the girl, without lifting her eyes, “do not despise me, Monseigneur Phœbus. I feel that I am doing very wrong!”     11   
  “Despise you, pretty one!” returned the officer with an air of superior and princely gallantry, “despise you,Tête-Dieu, and what for?”     12   
  “For having followed you.”     13   
  “On that score, my charmer, we do not at all agree. I ought not to despise, but to hate you.”     14   
  The girl looked up at him frightened. “Hate me! What have I done?”     15   
  “Why, you have taken so much soliciting.”     16   
  “Alas!” said she, “it is that I am breaking a vow—I shall never find my parents—the amulet will lose its virtue—but what of that?—what need have I of a father or mother now?” And she fixed on the soldier her large dark eyes, dewy with tenderness and delight.     17   
  “The devil fly away with me if I know what you mean!” cried Phœbus.     18   
  Esmeralda was silent for a moment, then a tear rose to her eyes, and a sigh to her lips, as she murmured, “Oh, sir, I love you!”     19   
  There was around the girl such a halo of chastity, such a perfume of virtue, that Phœbus was not quite at his ease with her. These words, however, emboldened him. “You love me!” he exclaimed with transport, and threw his arm round the gipsy’s waist. He had only been on the lookout for an opportunity.     20   
  The priest beheld this, and tried with his finger-tip the edge of the dagger which he kept concealed in his bosom.     21   
  “Phœbus,” the gipsy went on, at the same time gently disengaging her waist from the officer’s clinging hands, “you are good, you are generous, you are handsome. You saved me—me, who am but a poor wandering gipsy girl. I had long dreamed of an officer who should save my life. It was of you I dreamed before I met you, my Phœbus. The officer of my dream wore a fine uniform like yours, a grand look, a sword. You are called Phœbus; it is a beautiful name. I love your name; I love your sword. Draw your sword, Phœbus, and let me look at it.”     22   
  “Child!” said the captain, unsheathing his sword with an indulgent smile.     23   
  The Egyptian looked at the hilt, at the blade, examined with adorable curiosity the monogram on the guard, and then kissed the sword. “You are the sword of a brave man,” she said. “I love my officer.”     24   
  Here Phœbus availed himself of the opportunity, as she bent over the sword, to press a kiss upon her fair neck which made the girl flush crimson and draw herself up, while the priest ground his teeth in the darkness.     25   
  “Phœbus,” the gipsy resumed, “let me talk to you. But first, pray you, walk about a little that I may see you at your full height, and hear the ring of your spurs. How handsome you are!”     26   
  The captain rose to please her, chiding her the while with a smile of satisfied vanity. “What a child it is! Apropos, sweetheart, have you ever seen me in gala uniform?”     27   
  “Alas! no,” said she.     28   
  “Ah, that’s worth looking at!” He reseated himself beside the gipsy, but much closer this time than before. “Listen, my sweet——”     29   
  The gipsy girl gave two or three little taps of her pretty hand on his mouth with a playfulness that was full of childlike grace and gaiety. “No, no, I will not listen to anything. Do you love me? I want you to tell me if you love me.”     30   
  “Do I love thee, angel of my life!” exclaimed the captain, sinking on one knee before her. “I am thine—body, blood, and soul; all, all would I give for thee. I love thee, and have never loved but thee.”     31   
  The captain had so often repeated this sentence, on so many similar occasions, that he delivered it at one breath, and without a single blunder. At this passionate declaration the Egyptian raised to the dingy ceiling—which here took the place of heaven—a look full of ineffable happiness. “Oh,” she murmured, “this is the moment at which one should die!”     32   
  Phœbus found “the moment” more suitable for snatching another kiss, which went to torture the miserable Archdeacon in his hiding-place.     33   
  “Die!” cried the amorous captain. “What are you saying, my angel? This is the time to live, or Jupiter is but a scoundrel! To die at the beginning of so delicious an occasion! Corne de bæuf—that were a poor joke indeed! No, indeed. Listen, my dear Similar, Esmenarda—Pardon me! but you’ve got a name so prodigiously Saracen that I can’t get it out properly—’tis a thicket that always brings me up short.”     34   
  “Alas!” said the poor girl, “and I used to like the name for its singularity. But since it displeases you, I would I were called Goton.”     35   
  “Oh, ’tis not worth crying about, sweetheart! It’s a name one must get accustomed to, that’s all. Once I know it by heart, ’twill come readily enough. Listen, then, my Similar, I love you to distraction—it’s positively miraculous how much I love you. I know a little girl who is bursting with rage over it.”     36   
  “Who is that?” the gipsy broke in jealously.     37   
  “What does it matter to us?” answered Phœbus. “Do you love me?”     38   
  “Oh!” said she.     39   
  “Well, that’s enough. You shall see how much I love you too. May the great demon Neptune stick me on his fork, if I don’t make you the happiest creature living. We’ll have a pretty little lodging somewhere. My archers shall parade before your windows. They are all mounted, and cut out those of Captain Mignon completely. There are billmen, cross-bowmen, and culverin-men. I will take you to the great musters of the Paris men-at-arms at the Grange de Rully. That’s a very magnificent sight. Eighty thousand sixty-seven banners of the trade guilds; the standards of the Parliament, of the Chamber of Accounts, the Public Treasury, of the Workers in the Mint—in short, a devilish fine show! Then I’ll take you to see the lions at the King’s palace—beasts of prey, you know—women always like that.”     40   
  For some minutes the girl, absorbed in her own happy thoughts, had been dreaming to the sound of his voice with out attending to his words.     41   
  “Oh, how happy you will be,” continued the soldier, and at the same time gently unfastening the gipsy’s belt.     42   
  “What are you doing?” she said brusquely—this forceful proceeding had roused her from her dreams.     43   
  “Nothing,” answered Phœbus. “I was only saying that you would have to put away all this mountebank, street dancer costume when you are going to be with me.”     44   
  “To be with you, my Phœbus.” said the girl fondly, and she fell silent and dreamy again.     45   
  Emboldened by her gentleness the captain clasped his arm about her waist without her offering any resistance; he then began softly to unlace the pretty creature’s bodice, and so disarranged her neckerchief, that from out of it the panting priest beheld the gipsy’s beautiful bare shoulder rise, round and dusky as the moon through a misty horizon.     46   
  The girl let Phœbus work his will. She seemed unconscious of what he was doing. The captain’s eyes gleamed. Suddenly she turned to him “Phœbus,” she said with a look of boundless love, “teach me your religion.”     47   
  “My religion!” exclaimed the captain with a guffaw. “Teach you my religion! Thunder and lightning! what do you want with my religion?”     48   
  “That we may be married,” answered she.     49   
  A mingled look of surprise, disdain, unconcern, and licentious passion swept over the captain’s face. “Ah, bah!” said he, “who talks of marriage?”     50   
  The gipsy turned pale, and let her head droop sadly on her breast.     51   
  “Sweetheart,” went on Phœbus fondly, “what matters such foolery as marriage? Shall we be any less loving for not having gabbled some Latin in a priest’s shop?”     52   
  And as he said this in his most insinuating tones, he drew still closer to the gipsy; his caressing arms had resumed their clasp about that slender, pliant waist; his eye kindled more and more, and everything proclaimed that Captain Phœbus was obviously approaching one of those moments at which Jupiter himself behaves so foolishly that worthy old Homer is obliged to draw a cloud over the scene.     53   
  Dom Claude, however, saw everything. The door was merely of worm-eaten old puncheon ribs, and left between them ample passage for his vulture gaze. This dark-skinned, broad-shouldered priest, condemned hitherto to the austere chastity of the cloister, shivered and burned alternately at this night-scene of love and passion. The sight of this lovely, dishevelled girl in the arms of a young and ardent lover turned the blood in his veins to molten lead. He felt an extraordinary commotion within him; his eye penetrated with lascivious jealously under all these unfastened clasps and laces. Any one seeing the wretched man’s countenance pressed close against the worm-eaten bars would have taken it for the face of a tiger looking through his cage at some jackal devouring a gazelle.     54   
  By a sudden, rapid movement Phœbus snatched the gipsy’s kerchief completely off her neck. The poor girl, who had sat pale and dreamy, started from her reverie. She brusquely tore herself away from the too enterprising young officer, and catching sight of her bare neck and shoulders, blushing, confused, and mute with shame, she crossed her beautiful arms over her bosom to hide it. But for the flame that burned in her cheeks, to see her thus standing, silent and motionless, with drooping eyes, you would have taken her for a statue of Modesty.     55   
  But this action of the captain’s had laid bare the mysterious amulet which she wore round her neck.     56   
  “What is that?” he asked, seizing this pretext for once more approaching the beautiful creature he had frightened away.     57   
  “Do not touch it,” she answered quickly, “it is my protection. Through it I shall find my parents again if I remain worthy of that. Oh, leave me, Monsieur le Captaine! Mother! my poor mother! where art thou? Come to my aid! Have pity, Monsieur Phœbus—give me back my kerchief to cover my bosom.”     58   
  But Phœbus drew back coldly. “Ah, mademoiselle,” he said, “I see very plainly that you do not love me!”     59   
  “Not love him!” cried the poor unhappy child, clinging wildly to him and drawing him down to the seat beside her. “I do not love thee, my Phœbus? What words are these, cruel, to rend my heart! Oh, come—take me! take all! do with me what thou wilt! I am thine. What matters the amulet! What is my mother to me now! Thou art father and mother to me now, since I love thee! Phœbus, beloved, look at me—see, ’tis I—’tis that poor little one whom thou wilt not spurn from thee, and who comes, who comes herself to seek thee. My soul, my life, myself—all, all belong to thee, my captain. Well, so be it—we will not marry, since it is not thy wish. Besides, what am I but a miserable child of the gutter, while thou, my Phœbus, art a gentleman. A fine thing, truly! A dancing girl to espouse an officer! I was mad! No, Phœbus, I will be thy paramour, thy toy, thy pleasure—what thou wilt—only something that belongs to thee—for what else was I made? Soiled, despised, dishonoured, what care I? if only I be loved I shall be the proudest and happiest of women. And when I shall be old and ugly, when I am no longer worthy of your love, monseigneur, you will suffer me to serve you. Others will embroider scarfs for you—I, the handmaid, will have care of them. You will let me polish your spurs, brush your doublet, and rub the dust from off your riding-boots—will you not, Phœbus? You will grant me so much? And meanwhile, take me—I am thine—only love me! We gipsies, that is all we ask—love and the free air of heaven!”     60   
  Speaking thus, she threw her arms around the soldier’s neck and raised her eyes to his in fond entreaty, smiling through her tears. Her tender bosom was chafed by the woolen doublet and its rough embroidery as the fair, half-nude form clung to his breast. The captain, quite intoxicated, pressed his lips to those exquisite shoulders, and the girl, lying back in his arms, with half-closed eyes, glowed and trembled under his kisses.     61   
  Suddenly above the head of Phœbus she beheld another head—a livid, convulsed face with the look as of one of the damned, and beside that face a raised hand holding a dagger. It was the face and the hand of the priest. He had broken in the door and stood behind the pair. Phœbus could not see him.     62   
  The girl lay motionless, petrified and speechless with terror at the appalling apparition, like a dove that raises her head and catches the terrible keen eye of the hawk fixed upon her nest.     63   
  She was unable to even cry out. She saw the dagger descend upon Phœbus and rise again, reeking.     64   
  “Malediction!” groaned the captain, and fell.     65   
  The girl swooned, but at the moment ere her eyes closed and she lost all consciousness, she seemed to feel a fiery pressure on her lips, a kiss more searing than the brand of the torturer.     66   
  When she came to her senses she found herself surrounded by the soldiers of the watch; the captain was being borne away bathed in his blood, the priest had vanished, the window at the back of the room overlooking the river was wide open; they picked up a cloak which they supposed to belong to the officer, and she heard them saying to one another:     67   
  “It is a witch who has stabbed a captain.”

Book VIII   
I. The Crown Piece Changed into a Withered Leaf   
     
GRINGOIRE and the whole Court of Miracles were in a state of mortal anxiety. For a whole long month nobody knew what had become of Esmeralda, which greatly distressed the Duke of Egypt and his friends the Vagabonds—nor what had become of her goat, which doubled the distress of Gringoire. One evening the Egyptian had disappeared, and from that moment had given no sign of life. All searching and inquiries had been fruitless. Some malicious beggars declared that they had met her on the evening in question in the neighbourhood of the Pont Saint-Michel in company with an officer, but this husband à la mode de Bohème was a most incredulous philosopher, and, besides, he knew better than any one to what extent his wife was still a maid. He had had an opportunity of judging how impregnable was the chastity resulting from the combined virtues of the amulet and the gipsy’s own feelings, and he had mathematically calculated the power of resistance of the last-mentioned factor. On that score, therefore he was quite easy.      1   
  Consequently he was quite unable to account for this disappearance, which was a source of profound regret to him. He would have lost flesh over it had such a thing been possible. As it was, he had forgotten everything over this subject, even to his literary tastes, even to his great opus: Defiguris regularibus et irregularibus, which he counted on getting printed as soon as he had any money. For he raved about printing ever since he had any the Didascolon of Hugues de Saint-Victor printed with the famous types of Wendelin of Spires.      2   
  One day, as he was passing dejectedly before the Tournelle Criminelle, he observed a small crowd at one of the doors of the Palais de Justice.      3   
  “What is going on?” he asked of a young man who was coming out.      4   
  “I do not know, sir,” replied the young man. “They say a woman is being tried for the murder of a soldier. As there would seem to be some witchcraft in the business, the Bishop and the Holy Office have interfered in the case, and my brother, who is Archdeacon of Josas, spends his whole time there. As it happened, I wished to speak with him, but I could not get near him for the crowd—which annoys me very much, for I want money.”      5   
  “Alack, sir,” said Gringoire, “I would I had any to lend you, but though my breeches pockets are in holes, it is not from the weight of coin in them.”      6   
  He did not venture to tell the youth that he knew his brother the Archdeacon, whom he had never visited since the scene in the church—a neglect which some his conscience.      7   
  The scholar went his way, and Gringoire proceeded to follow the crowd ascending the stairs to the court-room. To his mind, there was nothing equal to the spectacle of a trial for dissipating melancholy, the judges exhibiting, as a rule, such extremely diverting stupidity. The crowd with whom he mingled walked and elbowed one another in silence. After a protracted and uneventful pilgrimage through a long dark passage which would through a Palais like the intestinal canal of the old edifice, he arrived at a low door opening into a court-room which his superior height enabled him to explore over the swaying heads of the multitude.      8   
  The hall was vast and shadowy, which made it appear still larger. The day was declining, the long pointed windows admitted only a few pale rays of light, which died out before they reached the vaulted ceiling, and enormous trellis-work of carved wood, the thousand figures of which seemed to stir confusedly in the gloom. Several candles were already lighted on the tables, and gleamed on the heads of the law clerks buried in bundles of documents. The lower end of the hall was occupied by the crowd; to right and left sat gowned lawyers at tables; at the other extremity upon a raised platform were a number of judges, the back rows plunged in darkness—motionless and sinister figures. The walls were closely powdered with fleurs-de-lis, a great figure of Christ might be vaguely distinguished above the heads of the judges, and everywhere pikes and halberds, their points tipped with fire by the glimmering rays of the candles.      9   
  “Sir,” said Gringoire to one of his neighbors, “who are all those persons yonder, ranged like prelates in council?”     10   
  “Sir,” answered the man, “those on the right are the Councillors of the High Court, and those on the left the Examining Councillors—the maitres in black gowns, the messires in red ones.”     11   
  “And above them, there,” continued Gringoire, “who is the big, red-faced one sweating so profusely?”     12   
  “That is Monsieur the President.”     13   
  “And those sheepsheads behind him?” Gringoire went on—we know that he had no great love for the magistrature, owing, may-be, to the grudge he bore against the Palais de Justice ever since his dramatic misadventure.     14   
  “Those are the lawyers of the Court of Appeal of the Royal Palace.”     15   
  “And that wild boar in front of them?”     16   
  “Is the Clerk of the Court of Parliaments.”     17   
  “And that crocodile to the right of him?”     18   
  “Maitre Philippe Lheulier, King’s advocate extraordinary.”     19   
  “And to the left, that big black cat?”     20   
  “Maître Jacques Charmolue, procurator in the Ecclesiastical Court, with the members of the Holy Office.”     21   
  “And may I ask, sir,” said Gringoire, “what all these worthies are about?”     22   
  “They are trying some one.”     23   
  “Trying whom? I see no prisoner.”     24   
  “It is a woman, sir. You cannot see her. She has her back turned to us, and is hidden by the crowd. Look, she is over there where you see that group of partisans.”     25   
  “Who is the woman?” asked Gringoire; “do you know her name?”     26   
  “No, sir, I have but just arrived. I conclude, however, from the presence of the Office that there is some question of witchcraft in the matter.”     27   
  “Ah, ha!” said our philosopher, “so we shall have the pleasure of seeing these black gowns devouring human flesh! Well, it is a spectacle as good as any other.”     28   
  “Do you not think, sir, that Maître Jacques Charmolue has a very kindly air?” observed his neighbour.     29   
  “Hum!” responded Gringoire. “I am somewhat distrustful of kindness that has such thin nostrils and sharp lips.”     30   
  Here the bystanders imposed silence on the two talkers. An important deposition was being heard.     31   
  “My lords,” an old woman was saying, whose face and shape generally was so muffled in her garments that she looked like an animated heap of rags; “my lords, the thing is as true as that I am La Falourdel, for forty years a householder on the Pont Saint-Michel, and paying regularly all rents and dues and ground taxes—the door opposite to the house of Tassin-Caillart, the dyer, which is on the side looking up the river. A poor old woman now, a pretty girl once-a-days, my lords! Only a few days before, they said to me: ‘La Falourdel, do not spin too much of an evening, the devil is fond of combing old women’s distaffs with his horns. ’Tis certain that the spectre-monk who haunted the Temple last year is going about the city just now; take care, La Falourdel, that he does not knock at your door.’ I ask who’s there. Some one swears. I open the door. Two men come in—a man in black with a handsome officer. You could see nothing of the black with a handsome officer. You could see nothing of the black man but his eyes—two live coals—all the rest hat and cloak. So they say to me: ‘The Sainte-Marthe room’—that is my upper room, my lords, my best one, and they give me a crown. I shut the crown in a drawer, and says I: ‘That will do to buy tripe to-morrow at the slaughterhouse of La Gloriette.’ We go upstairs. Arrived at the upper room, as I turn my back a moment, the man in black disappears. This astonishes me somewhat. The officer, who was handsome and grand as a lord, comes down again with me. He leaves the house, but in about the time to spin a quarter of a skein he returns with a beautiful young girl—a poppet who would have shone like a star had her locks been properly braided. Following her came a goat—a great goat—whether black or white I can’t remember. This set me to thinking. The girl—that does not concern me—but the goat! I don’t like those animals with their beards and horns—it’s too like a man.     32   
  “Besides, that smells of witchcraft. However, I say nothing. I had the crown piece. That is only fair, is it not, my lord judge? So I show the captain and the girl into the upper room and leave them alone—that is to say, with the goat. I go down and get to my spinning again. I must tell you that my house has a ground floor and an upper storey; the back looks out on to the river, as do all the houses on the bridge, and the groundfloor window and the window of the upper floor open on to the water. Well, as I was saying, I sat down again to my spinning. I don’t know why, but I began thinking about the spectre-monk whom the goat had brought to my mind, and that the pretty girl was dressed very outlandish, when all at once I hear a cry overhead and something fall on the floor, and then the window opening. I run to mine, which is just underneath, and see a black mass drop into the water—a phantom dressed like a priest. It was moonlight, so I saw it quite plainly. It swam away towards the city. Then, all of a tremble, I called the watch. The gentlemen of the guard came in, and at first, not knowing what was the matter, they made merry over it and began to beat me. I explained to them. We go upstairs, and what do we find? My unfortunate room swimming in blood, the captain stretched his whole length on the floor with a dagger in his neck, the girl making as if she were dead, and the goat in a fury. ‘A pretty business,’ say I. ‘’Twill be a fortnight’s work to clean up these boards. It must be scraped—a terrible job!’ They carried away the officer, poor young man, and the girl—half-naked. But stay—the worst is to come. The next morning, when I went to take the crown to buy my tripe, I found a withered leaf in its place!”     33   
  The old beldame ceased. A murmur of horror went round the place. “That phantom, that goat—all this savours of magic,” said one of Gringoire’s neighbours. “And that withered leaf,” added another. “There can be no doubt,” went on a third, “that it’s some witch who has commerce with the spectre-monk to plunder officers.” Gringoire himself was not far from thinking this connection both probable and alarming.     34   
  “Woman Falourdel,” said the President with majesty, “have you nothing further to declare to the court?”     35   
  “No, my lord,” answered the woman, “unless that in the report my house has been named a tumble-down and stinking hovel, which is insulting language. The houses on the bridge are not very handsome, because they swarm with people; but, nevertheless, the butchers live there, and they are wealthy men with handsome and careful wives.”     36   
  The magistrate who reminded Gringoire of a crocodile now rose.     37   
  “Peace!” said he. “I would beg you gentlemen not to lose sight of the fact that a dagger was found on the accused. Woman Falourdel, have you brought with you the withered leaf into which the crown was transformed that the demon gave you?”     38   
  “Yes, my lord. I found it again. Here it is.”     39   
  An usher handed the dead leaf to the crocodile, who, with a doleful shake of the head, passed it to the President, who sent it on to the procurator of the Ecclesiastical Court, so that it finally made the round of the hall.     40   
  “’Tis a beech leaf,” said Maître Jacques Charmolue, “an additional proof of magic!”     41   
  A councillor then took up the word. “Witness, you say two men went up together in your house: the man in black whom you first saw disappear and then swimming in the Seine in priest’s habit, and the officer. Which of the two gave you the crown?”     42   
  The hag reflected for a moment, then answered, “It was the officer.”     43   
  A murmur ran through the crowd.     44   
  “Ah,” thought Gringoire, “that somewhat shakes my conviction.”     45   
  But Maître Philippe Lheulier again interposed. “I would remind you, gentlemen, that in the deposition taken down at his bedside the murdered officer, while stating that a vague suspicion had crossed his mind at the instant when the black man accosted him, that it might be the spectre-monk, added, that the phantom had eagerly urged him to go and meet the accused, and on his (the captain’s) observing that he was without money, had given him the crown which the said officer paid to La Falourdel. Thus the crown is a coin of hell.”     46   
  This conclusive observation appeared to dissipate all doubts entertained by Gringoire or any other sceptics among the listeners.     47   
  “Gentlemen, you have the documents in hand,” added the advocate as he seated himself, “you can consult the deposition of Phœbus de Châteaupers.”     48   
  At this name the accused started up. Her head was now above the crowd. Gringoire, aghast, recognised Esmeralda.     49   
  She was deadly pale; her hair, once so charmingly braided and spangled with sequins, fell about her in disorder; her lips were blue, her sunken eyes horrifying. Alas!     50   
  “Phœbus!” she cried distraught, “where is he? Oh, my lords, before you kill me, in mercy tell me if he yet lives!”     51   
  “Silence, woman!” answered the President; “that is not our concern.”     52   
  “Oh, in pity, tell me if he lives!” she cried again, clasping her beautiful wasted hands; and her chains clanked as she moved.     53   
  “Well, then,” said the King’s advocate dryly, “he is at the point of death. Does that satisfy you?”     54   
  The wretched girl fell back in her seat, speechless, tearless, white as a waxen image.     55   
  The President leaned down to a man at his feet who wore a gilded cap and a black gown, a chain round his neck, and a wand in his hand.     56   
  “Usher, bring in the second accused.”     57   
  All eyes were turned towards a little door which opened, and to Gringoire’s great trepidation gave entrance to a pretty little goat with gilded horns and hoofs. The graceful creature stood a moment on the threshold stretching her neck exactly as if, poised on the summit of a rock, she had a vast expanse before her eyes. Suddenly she caught sight of the gipsy girl, and leaping over the table and the head of the clerk in two bounds, she was at her mistress’s knee. She then crouched at Esmeralda’s feet, begging for a word or a caress; but the prisoner remained motionless, even little Djali could not win a glance from her.     58   
  “Why—’tis my ugly brute,” said old Falourdel, “and now I recognise them both perfectly!”     59   
  “An it please you, gentlemen, we will proceed to the interrogation of the goat.”     60   
  This, in effect, was the second criminal. Nothing was more common in those days than a charge of witchcraft against an animal. For instance, in the Provostry account for 1466 there is a curious specification of the expenses of the action against Gillet Soulart and his sow, “executed for their demerits” at Corbeil. Everything is detailed—the cost of the pit to put the sow into; the five hundred bundles of wood from the wharf of Morsant; the three pints of wine and the bread, the victims’ last meal, fraternally shared by the executioner; and even the eleven days’ custody and keep of the sow at eight deniers parisis per day. At times they went beyond animals. The capitularies of Charlemagne and Louis le Débonnaire impose severe penalties on fiery phantoms who had the assurance to appear in the air.     61   
  Meanwhile the procurator of the Ecclesiastical Court exclaimed, “If the demon that possesses this goat, and which has resisted every exorcism, persist in his sorceries, if he terrify the court thereby, we forewarn him that we shall be constrained to proceed against him with the gibbet or the stake.”     62   
  Gringoire broke out in a cold sweat.     63   
  Charmolue then took from the table the gipsy’s tambourine, and presenting it in a certain manner to the goat, he asked: “What is the time of day?”     64   
  The goat regarded him with a sagacious eye, lifted her gilded hoof, and struck seven strokes. It was in truth seven o’clock. A thrill of horror ran through the crowd.     65   
  Gringoire could contain himself no longer. “She will be her own ruin!” he exclaimed aloud. “You can see for yourself she has no knowledge of what she is doing.”     66   
  “Silence down there!” cried the usher sharply.     67   
  Jacques Charmolue, by means of the same manœuvrings with the tambourine, made the goat perform several other tricks in connection with the date of the day, the month of the year, etc., which the reader has already witnessed. And by an optical illusion peculiar to judicial proceedings, these same spectators, who doubtless had often applauded Djali’s innocent performances in the public streets, were terrified by them under the roof of the Palais de Justice. The goat was indisputably the devil.     68   
  It was much worse, however, when the procurator, having emptied on the floor a certain little leather bag full of movable letters hanging from Djali’s neck, the goat was seen to separate from the scattered alphabet the letters of the fatal name “Phœbus.” The magic of which the captain had been a victim seemed incontrovertibly proven; and, in the eyes of all, the gipsy girl, the charming dancer who had so often dazzled the passer-by with her exquisite grace, was nothing more nor less than a horrible witch.     69   
  As for her, she gave no sign of life. Neither Djali’s pretty tricks nor the menaces of the lawyers, nor the stifled imprecations of the spectators—nothing reached her apprehension any more.     70   
  At last, in order to rouse her, a sergeant had to shake her pitilessly by the arm, and the President solemnly raised his voice:     71   
  “Girl, you are of the race of Bohemians, and given to sorcery. In company with your accomplice, the bewitched goat, also implicated in this charge, you did, on the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, in concert with the powers of darkness, and by the aid of charms and shells, wound and poniard a captain of the King’s archers, Phœbus de Châteaupers by name. Do you persist in your denial?”     72   
  “Horrors!” cried the girl, covering her face with her hands. “My Phœbus! Oh, this is hell!”     73   
  “Do you persist in your denial?” repeated the President coldly.     74   
  “Of course I deny it!” she answered in terrible tones; and she rose to her feet and her eyes flashed.     75   
  “Then how do you explain the facts laid to your charge?” continued the President sternly.     76   
  “I have already said,” she answered brokenly, “I do not know. It is a priest, a priest who is unknown to me; a devilish priest who persecutes me——”     77   
  “There you have it,” interrupted the judge; “the spectremonk.”     78   
  “Oh, my lords, have pity! I am but a poor girl——”     79   
  “Of Egypt,” said the judge.     80   
  Maître Jacques Charmolue here interposed in his mildest tones: “In view of the painful obstinacy of the accused, I demand that she be put to the question.”     81   
  “Accorded,” said the President.     82   
  A shudder ran through the frame of the hapless girl. She rose, however, at the order of the partisan-bearers, and walked with a tolerably firm step, preceded by Charmolue and the priests of the Office and between two lines of halberds, towards a masked door, which suddenly opened and shut again upon her, seeming to the dejected Gringoire like a horrible maw swallowing her up.     83   
  After she had disappeared a plaintive bleat was heard. It was the little goat.     84   
  The sitting was suspended. A councillor having observed that the gentlemen were fatigued, and that it would be a long time to wait till the torture was over, the President replied that a magistrate should be able to sacrifice himself to his duty.     85   
  “The troublesome and vexatious jade,” said an old judge, “to force us to apply the question when we have not yet supped!”