Book VIII   
II. Sequel to the Crown Piece Changed into a Withered Leaf   
     
AFTER ascending and descending several flights of steps leading to passages so dark that they were lighted by lamps at mid-day, Esmeralda, still surrounded by her lugubrious attendants, was thrust by the sergeants of the guard into a chamber of sinister aspect. This chamber, circular in form, occupied the ground floor in one of those great towers which, even in our day, pierces the layer of modern edifices with which the present Paris has covered the old. There were no windows to this vault; no other opening than the low-browed entrance, closed by an enormous iron door. Yet it did not want for light. A furnace was built into the thickness of the wall, and in it a great fire, which filled the vault with its crimson glow and entirely outshone a miserable candle flickering in a corner. The iron grating which closed the furnace being raised at that moment only showed, against the flaming orifice whose licking flames danced on the grim walls, the lower extremity of its bars like a row of sharp black teeth, giving the fire the appearance of a fire-breathing dragon of the ancient myths. By the light that streamed from it the prisoner beheld, ranged round the chamber, frightful instruments the use of which she did not understand. In the middle a leather mattress was stretched almost touching the ground, and over that hung a leather strap with a buckle, attached to a copper ring held in the mouth of a flat-nosed monster carved in the keystone of the vaulted roof. Iron pincers, tongs, great ploughshares were heaped inside the furnace and glowed redhot upon the fire. The blood-red gleam of the fire only served to bring into view a confused mass of horrible objects.      1   
  This Tartarus was known simply as the “Question Chamber.”      2   
  Upon the bed sat with the utmost unconcern Pierrat Torterue, the official torturer. His assistants, two square-faced gnomes in leathern aprons and linen breeches, were turning the irons in the fire.      3   
  The poor girl might call up all her courage as she would; on entering that chamber she was seized with horror.      4   
  The myrmidons of the law ranged themselves on one side, the priests of the Office on the other. A clerk, a table and writing materials were in a corner.      5   
  Maître Jacques Charmolue approached the Egyptian with his blandest smile.      6   
  “My dear child,” said he, “do you persist in your denial?”      7   
  “Yes,” she answered in an expiring voice.      8   
  “In that case,” Charmolue went on, “it will be our painful duty to question you more urgently than we would otherwise desire. Have the goodness to seat yourself on this bed.—Maître Pierrat, kindly make room for mademoiselle, and close the door.”      9   
  Pierrat rose with a growl. “If I shut the door,’ he muttered, “my fire will go out.”     10   
  “Well, then, my good fellow,” replied Charmolue, “leave it open.”     11   
  Meanwhile, Esmeralda had remained standing. This bed of leather, on which so many poor wretches had writhed in agony, filled her with affright. Terror froze her to the marrow: she stood bewildered, stupefied. At a sign from Charmolue, the two assistants laid hold on her and placed her on the bed. They did not hurt her; but at the mere touch of these men, at the touch of the bed, she felt all her blood rush to her heart. She cast a distraught look round the chamber. She imagined she saw all these monstrous instruments of torture—which were, to the instruments of any kind she had hitherto seen, what bats, centipedes, and spiders are among birds and insects—come moving towards her from all sides to crawl over her body and pinch and bite her.     12   
  “Where is the physician?” asked Charmolue.     13   
  “Here,” answered a black gown she had not observed before.     14   
  She shuddered.     15   
  “Mademoiselle,” resumed the fawning voice of the attorney of the Ecclesiastical Court, “for the third time, do you persist in denying the facts of which you are accused?”     16   
  This time she only bent her head in assent—she was past speaking.     17   
  “You persist?” said Jacques Charmolue. “Then, to my infinite regret, I must fulfil the duty of my office.”     18   
  “Monsieur the King’s Attorney,” said Pierrat, “with which shall we begin?”     19   
  Charmolue hesitated a moment with the ambiguous grimace of a poet seeking a rhyme. “With the boot,” he said at last.     20   
  The unhappy creature felt herself so completely forsaken of God and man, that her head dropped upon her breast like a thing inert and without any power in itself. The torturer and the physician approached her together, while the two assistants began to search in their hideous collection.     21   
  At the clank of these terrible irons the wretched child started convulsively, like a poor dead frog galvanized to life.     22   
  “Oh!” she murmured, so low that no one heard her; “oh, my Phœbus!” Then she sank again into her previous immobility and her stony silence. The spectacle would have wrung any but the hearts of judges. It might have been some sin-stained soul being questioned by Satan at the flaming gate of hell. Could the miserable body on which this awful swarm of saws and wheels and pincers was preparing to fasten—could it be this gentle, pure, and fragile creature? Poor grain of millet which human justice was sending to be ground by the grewsome mill-stones of torture!     23   
  And now the horny hands of Pierrat Torterue’s assistants had brutally uncovered that charming leg, that tiny foot, which had so often astonished the passers-by with their grace and beauty in the streets of Paris.     24   
  “’Tis a pity!” growled even the torturer at the sight of the slender and delicate limbs.     25   
  Had the Archdeacon been present, he would certainly have recalled at this moment his allegory of the spider and the fly.     26   
  Now, through the mist that spread before her eyes, the unhappy girl perceived the “boot” being brought forward, saw her foot, encased between the iron-bound boards, disappear within the frightful apparatus. Terror restored her strength. “Take it away!” she cried vehemently, starting up all dishevelled: “Mercy!”     27   
  She sprang from the bed to throw herself at Charmolue’s feet, but her leg was held fast in the heavy block of oak and iron, and she sank over the boot like a bee with a leaden weight attached to its wing.     28   
  At a sign from Charmolue they replaced her on the bed, and two coarse hands fastened round her slender waist the leather strap hanging from the roof.     29   
  “For the last time, do you confess to the facts of the charge?” asked Charmolue with his imperturbable benignity,     30   
  “I am innocent,” was the answer.     31   
  “Then, mademoiselle, how do you explain the circumstances brought against you?”     32   
  “Alas, my lord, I know not.”     33   
  “You deny them?”     34   
  “All!”     35   
  “Proceed,” said Charmolue to Pierrat.     36   
  Pierrat turned the screw, the boot tightened, and the victim uttered one of those horrible screams which have no written equivalent in any human language.     37   
  “Stop!” said Charmolue to Pierrat. “Do you confess?” said he to the girl.     38   
  “All,” cried the wretched girl. “I confess! I confess! Mercy!”     39   
  She had overestimated her forces in braving the torture. Poor child! life had hitherto been so joyous, so pleasant, so sweet, the first pang of agony had overcome her!     40   
  “Humanity obliges me to tell you,” observed the King’s attorney, “that in confessing, you have only death to look forward to.”     41   
  “I hope but for that !” said she, and fell back again on the leather bed, a lifeless heap, hanging doubled over the strap buckled round her waist.     42   
  “Hold up, my pretty!” said Maître Pierrat, raising her. “You look like the golden sheep that hangs round the neck of Monsieur of Burgundy.”     43   
  Jacques Charmolue raised his voice. “Clerk, write this down. Gipsy girl, you confess your participation in the lovefeasts, Sabbaths, and orgies of hell, in company with evil spirits, witches, and ghouls? Answer!”     44   
  “Yes,” she breathed faintly.     45   
  “You admit having seen the ram which Beelzebub causes to appear in the clouds as a signal for the Sabbath, and which is only visible to witches?”     46   
  “Yes.”     47   
  “You confess to having adored the heads of Bophomet, those abominable idols of the Templars?”     48   
  “Yes.”     49   
  “To having had familiar intercourse with the devil under the form of a pet goat, included in the prosecution?”     50   
  “Yes.”     51   
  “Finally, you admit and confess to having, on the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, with the assistance of the demon and of the phantom commonly called the spectremonk, wounded and assassinated a captain named Phœbus de Châteaupers?”     52   
  She raised her glazed eyes to the magistrate and answered mechanically, without a quiver of emotion, “Yes.” It was evident that her whole being was crushed.     53   
  “Take that down,” said Charmolue to the clerk. Then, turning to the torturer, “Let the prisoner be unbound and taken back to the court.”     54   
  When the prisoner was “Unbooted,” the procurator of the Ecclesiastical Court examined her foot, still paralyzed with pain. “Come,” said he, “there’s no great harm done. You cried out in time. You could still dance, ma belle!”     55   
  And turning to the members of the Office—“At length, justice is enlightened! That is a great consolation, messieurs! Mademoiselle will bear witness that we have used all possible gentleness towards her.”

Book VIII   
III. End of the Crown Piece Changed into a Withered Leaf   
     
WHEN, pale and limping, she re-entered the Court of Justice, she was greeted by a general murmur of pleasure—arising on the part of the public from that feeling of satisfied impatience experienced at the theatre at the expiration of the last entr’acte of a play, when the curtain rises and one knows that the end is about to begin; and on the part of the judges from the hope of soon getting their supper. The little goat, too, bleated with joy. She would have run to her mistress, but they had tied her to the bench.      1   
  Night had now completely fallen. The candles, which had not been increased in number, gave so little light that the walls of the court were no longer visible. Darkness enveloped every object in a kind of mist, through which the apathetic faces of the judges were barely distinguishable. Opposite to them, at the extremity of the long hall, they could just see a vague white point standing out against the murky background. It was the prisoner.      2   
  She had dragged herself to her place. When Charmolue had magisterially installed himself in his, he sat down, then rose and said, without allowing all too much of his satisfaction at his success to become apparent: “The prisoner has confessed all.”      3   
  “Bohemian girl,” said the President, “you have confessed to all your acts of sorcery, of prostitution, and of assassination committed upon the person of Phœbus de Châteaupers?”      4   
  Her heart contracted. They could hear her sobbing through the darkness. “What you will,” she returned feebly, “only make an end of me quickly!”      5   
  “Monsieur the King’s Attorney in the Ecclesiastical Court, the court is ready to hear your requisitions.”      6   
  Maître Charmolue drew forth an appalling document, and commenced reading with much gesticulation and the exaggerated emphasis of the Bar a Latin oration, in which all the evidences of the trial were set out in Ciceronian periphrases, flanked by citations from Plautus. We regret being unable to offer our readers this remarkable composition. The author delivered it with marvellous eloquence. He had not concluded the exordium before the perspiration was streaming from his brow and his eyes starting from his head.      7   
  Suddenly, in the very middle of a rounded period, he broke off short, and his countenance, usually mild enough not to say stupid, became absolutely terrible.      8   
  “Sirs!” he cried (this time in French, for it was not in the document), “Satan is so profoundly involved in this affair, that behold him present at our councils and making a mock of the majesty of the law. Behold him!”      9   
  So saying, he pointed to the goat, which, seeing Charmolue gesticulate, thought it the right and proper thing to do like-wise, and seated on her haunches was mimicking to the best of her ability with her fore-feet and bearded head the impressive pantomime of the King’s Attorney in the Ecclesiastical Court. This, if you will remember, was one of her most engaging performances.     10   
  This incident—this final proof—produced a great effect. They bound the goat’s feet, and Charmolue resumed the thread of his eloquence.     11   
  It was long indeed, but the peroration was admirable. The last sentence ran thus—let the reader add in imagination the raucous voice and broken-winded elocution of Maître Charmolue:
             Ideo, domini, coram stryga demonstrata, crimine patente, intentione criminis existente, in nomine sanctæ ecclesiæ Nostræ-Dominæ Parisiensis, quæ est in saisina habendi omnimodam altam et bassam, justitiam in illa hac intemerata Civitatis insula, tenore præsentium declaramus nos requirere, primo, aliquandam pecuniariam indemnitatem; secundo, amendationem honorabilem ante portalium maximum Nostræ-Dominæ, ecclesiæ cathedralis; tertio, sententiam, in virtute cujus ista stryga cum sua capella, seu in trivio vulgariter dicta ‘La Grève,’ seu in insula exeunte in fluvio Sequanæ, juxta pointam jardini regalis, executæ sint.” 1   
  12   
  He resumed his cap and sat down again.     13   
  “Eheu!” groaned Gringoire, overwhelmed with grief. “Bassa latinitas.” 2     14   
  Another man in a black gown now rose near the prisoner. it was her advocate. The fasting judges began to murmur.     15   
  “Advocate,” said the President, “be brief.”     16   
  “Monsieur the President,” replied the advocate, “since the defendant has confessed the crime, I have but one word to say to these gentlemen. I bring to their notice the following passage of the Salic law: ‘If a witch have devoured a man and be convicted of it, she shall pay a fine of eight thousand deniers, which makes two hundred sous of gold.” Let the court condemn my client to the fine.”     17   
  “An abrogated clause,” said the King’s Advocate Extraordinary.     18   
  “Nego.” 3     19   
  “Put it to the vote!” suggested a councillor; “the crime is manifest, and it is late.”     20   
  The votes were taken without leaving the court. The judges gave their votes without a moment’s hesitation—they were in a hurry. One after another their heads were bared at the lugubrious question addressed to them in turn in a low voice by the President. The hapless prisoner seemed to be looking at them, but her glazed eyes no longer saw anything.     21   
  The clerk then began to write, and presently handed a long scroll of parchment to the President; after which the poor girl heard the people stirring, and an icy voice say:     22   
  “Bohemian girl, on such a day as it shall please our lord the King to appoint, at the hour of noon, you shall be taken in a tumbrel, in your shift, barefoot, a rope round your neck, before the great door of Notre Dame, there to do penance with a wax candle of two pounds’ weight in your hands; and from there you shall be taken to the Place-de-Grève, where you will be hanged and strangled on the town gibbet, and your goat likewise; and shall pay to the Office three lion-pieces of gold in reparation of the crimes, by you committed and confessed, of sorcery, magic, prostitution, and murder against the person of the Sieur Phœbus de Châteaupers. And God have mercy on your soul!”     23   
  “Oh, ’tis a dream!” she murmured, and she felt rude hands bearing her away.     24   


Note 1.  Therefore, gentlemen, the witchcraft being proved and the crime made manifest, as likewise the criminal intention, in the name of the holy church of Notre Dame de Paris, which is seized of the right of all manner of justice high and low, within this inviolate island of the city, we declare by the tenor of these presents that we require, firstly, a pecuniary compensation; secondly, penance before the great portal of the cathedral church of Notre-Dame; thirdly, a sentence, by virtue of which this witch, together with her goat, shall either in the public square, commonly called La Grève, or in the island stretching out into the river Seine, adjacent to the point of the royal gardens, be executed. [back]   
Note 2.  Oh, the monk’s Latin! [back]   
Note 3.  I say No. [back]

Book VIII   
IV. Lasciate Ogni Speranza   
     
IN the Middle Ages, when an edifice was complete there was almost as much of it under the ground as over it. Except it were built on piles, like Notre Dame, a palace, a fortress, a church, had always a double foundation. In the cathedrals it formed in some sort a second cathedral—subterranean, low-pitched, dark, mysterious—blind and dumb—under the aisles of the building above, which were flooded with light and resonant day and night with the music of the organ or the bells. Sometimes it was a sepulchre. In the palaces and fortresses it was a prison—or a sepulchre—sometimes both together. These mighty masses of masonry, of which we have explained elsewhere the formation and growth, had not mere foundations but more properly speaking roots branching out underground into chambers, passages, and stairways, the counterpart of those above. Thus the churches, palaces, and bastilles might be said to be sunk in the ground up to their middle. The vaults of an edifice formed another edifice, in which you descended instead of ascending, the subterranean storeys of which extended downward beneath the pile of exterior storeys, like those inverted forests and mountains mirrored in the waters of a lake beneath the forests and mountains of its shores.      1   
  At the Bastille Saint-Antoine, at the Palais de Justice, and at the Louvre, these subterranean edifices were prisons. The storeys of these prisons as they sank into the ground became even narrower and darker—so many zones presenting, as by a graduated scale, deeper and deeper shades of horror. Dante could find nothing better for the construction of his Inferno. These dungeon funnels usually ended in a tub-shaped pit, in which Dante placed his Satan and society the criminal condemned to death. When once a miserable being was there interred, farewell to light, air, life—ogni speranza—he never issued forth again but to the gibbet or the stake unless, indeed, he were left to rot there—which human justice called forgetting. Between mankind and the condemned, weighing upon his head, there was an accumulated mass of stone and jailers; and the whole prison, the massive fortress, was but one enormous complicated lock that barred him from the living world.      2   
  It was in one of these deep pits, in the oubliettes excavated by Saint-Louis, in the “in pace” of the Tournelle—doubtless for fear of her escaping—that they had deposited Esmeralda, now condemned to the gibbet, with the colossal Palais de Justice over her head—poor fly, that could not have moved the smallest of its stones! Truly, Providence and social law alike had been too lavish; such a profusion of misery and torture was not necessary to crush so fragile a creature.      3   
  She lay there, swallowed up by the darkness, entombed, walled, lost to the world. Any one seeing her in that state, after beholding her laughing and dancing in the sunshine, would have shuddered. Cold as night, cold as death, no breath of air to stir her locks, no human sound to reach her ear, no ray of light within her eye—broken, weighed down by chains, crouching beside a pitcher and a loaf of bread, on a heap of straw, in the pool of water formed by the oozings of the dungeon walls—motionless, almost breathless, she was even past suffering. Phœbus, the sun, noonday, the free air, the streets of Paris, dancing and applause, her tender love passages with the officer—then the priest, the old hag, the dagger, blood, torture, the gibbet—all this passed in turn before her mind, now as a golden vision of delight, now as a hideous nightmare; but her apprehension of it all was now merely that of a vaguely horrible struggle in the darkness, or of distant music still playing above ground but no longer audible at the depth to which the unhappy girl had fallen.      4   
  Since she had been here she neither waked nor slept. In that unspeakable misery, in that dungeon, she could no more distinguish waking from sleeping, dreams from reality, than day from night. All was mingled, broken, floating confusedly through her mind. She no longer felt, no longer knew, no longer thought anything definitely—at most she dreamed. Never has human creature been plunged deeper into annihilation.      5   
  Thus benumbed, frozen, petrified, scarcely had she remarked at two or three different times the sound of a trap-door opening somewhere above her head, without even admitting a ray of light, and through which a hand had thrown her down a crust of black bread. Yet this was her only surviving communication with mankind—the periodical visit of the jailer.      6   
  One thing alone still mechanically occupied her ear: over her head the moisture filtered through the mouldy stones of the vault, and at regular intervals a drop of water fell from it. She listened stupidly to the splash made by this dripping water as it fell into the pool beside her.      7   
  This drop of water falling into the pool was the only movement still perceptible around her, the only clock by which to measure time, the only sound that reached her of all the turmoil going on on earth; though, to be quite accurate, she was conscious from time to time in that sink of mire and darkness of something cold passing over her foot or her arm, and that made her shiver.      8   
  How long had she been there? She knew not. She remembered a sentence of death being pronounced somewhere against some one, and then that she herself had been carried away, and that she had awakened in silence and darkness, frozen to the bone. She had crawled along on her hands and knees, she had felt iron rings cutting her ankles, and chains had clanked. She had discovered that all around her were walls, that underneath her were wet flag-stones and a handful of straw—but there was neither lamp nor air-hole. Then she had seated herself upon the straw, and sometimes for a change of position on the lowest step of a stone flight she had come upon in the dungeon.      9   
  Once she had tried to count the black minutes marked for her by the drip of the water; but soon this mournful labour of a sick brain had discontinued of itself and left her in stupor once more.     10   
  At length, one day—or one night (for mid-day and mid-night had the same hue in this sepulchre)—she heard above her a louder noise than the turnkey generally made when bringing her loaf of bread and pitcher of water. She raised her head, and was aware of a red gleam of light through the crevices of the sort of door or trap in the roof of the vault.     11   
  At the same time the massive lock creaked, the trap-door grated on its hinges, fell back, and she saw a lantern, a hand, and the lower part of the bodies of two men, the door being too low for her to see their heads. The light stabbed her eyes so sharply that she closed them.     12   
  When she opened them again the door was closed, the lantern placed on one of the steps, and one of the two men alone was standing before her. A black monk’s robe fell to his feet, a cowl of the same hue concealed his face; nothing of his person was visible, neither his face nor his hands—it was simply a tall black shroud under which you felt rather than saw that something moved. For some moments she regarded this kind of spectre fixedly, but neither she nor it spoke. They might have been two statues confronting one another. Two things only seemed alive in this tomb: the wick of the lantern that sputtered in the night air and the drop of water falling with its monotonous splash from the roof and making the reflection of the light tremble in concentric circles on the oily surface of the pool.     13   
  At last the prisoner broke the silence. “Who are you?”     14   
  “A priest.”     15   
  The word, the tone, the voice made her start.     16   
  The priest continued in low tones:     17   
  “Are you prepared?”     18   
  “For what?”     19   
  “For death.”     20   
  “Oh!” she exclaimed, “will it be soon?”     21   
  “To-morrow.”     22   
  Her head, raised with joy, fell again on her bosom.     23   
  “’Tis very long to wait,” she sighed; “why not to-day? It could not matter to them.”     24   
  “You are, then, very wretched?” asked the priest after another silence.     25   
  “I am very cold,” said she.     26   
  She took her two feet in her hands—the habitual gesture of the unfortunate who are cold, and which we have already remarked in the recluse of the Tour-Roland—and her teeth chattered.     27   
  From under his hood the priest’s eyes appeared to be surveying the dungeon. “No light! no fire! in the water!—’tis horrible!”     28   
  “Yes,” she answered with the bewildered air which misery had given her. “The day is for every one, why do they give me only night?”     29   
  “Do you know,” resumed the priest after another silence, “why you are here?”     30   
  “I think I knew it once,” she said pressing her wasted fingers to her brow as if to aid her memory; “but I do not know now.”     31   
  Suddenly she began to weep like a child. “I want to go away from here, sir. I am cold, I am frightened, and there are beasts that crawl over me.”     32   
  “Well, then—follow me!” And so saying, the priest seized her by the arm. The unhappy girl was already frozen to the heart’s core, but yet that hand felt cold to her.     33   
  “Oh,” she murmured, “’tis the icy hand of Death! Who are you?”     34   
  The priest raised his cowl. She looked—it was the sinister face that had so long pursued her, the devilish head that she had seen above the adored head of her Phœbus, the eye that she had last seen glittering beside a dagger.     35   
  This apparition, always so fatal to her, which thus had thrust her on from misfortune to misfortune, even to an ignominious death, roused her from her stupor. The sort of veil that seemed to have woven itself over her memory was rent aside. All the details of her grewsome adventures, from the nocturnal scene at La Falourdel’s to her condemnation at La Tournelle, came back to her with a rush—not vague and confused as heretofore, but distinct, clear-cut, palpitating, terrible.     36   
  These recollections, well-nigh obliterated by excess of suffering, revived at sight of that sombre figure, as the heat of the fire brings out afresh upon the blank paper the invisible writing traced on it by sympathetic ink. She felt as if all the wounds of her heart were reopened and bleeding at once.     37   
  “Ah!” she cried, her hands covering her face with a convulsive shudder, “it is the priest!”     38   
  Then she let her arms drop helplessly and sat where she was, her head bent, her eyes fixed on the ground, speechless, shaking from head to foot.     39   
  The priest gazed at her with the eye of the kite which after long hovering high in the air above a poor lark cowering in the corn, gradually and silently lessening the formidable circles of its flight, now suddenly makes a lightning dart upon its prey and holds it panting in its talons.     40   
  “Finish,” she murmured in a whisper, “finish—the last blow!” And her head shrank in terror between her shoulders like the sheep that awaits the death-stroke of the butcher.     41   
  “You hold me in horror then?” he said at last.     42   
  She made no reply.     43   
  “Do you hold me in horror?” he repeated.     44   
  Her lips contracted as if she smiled. “Go to,” said she, “the executioner taunts the condemned! For months he has pursued me, threatened me, terrified me! But for him, my God, how happy I was! It is he who has cast me into this pit! Oh, heavens! it is he who has killed—it is he who has murdered him—my Phœbus!”     45   
  Here, bursting into tears, she lifted her eyes to the priest. “Oh, wretch! who are you?—what have I done to you that you should hate me so? Alas! what have you against me?”     46   
  “I love thee!” cried the priest.     47   
  Her tears ceased suddenly. She regarded him with an idiotic stare. He had sunk on his knees before her and enveloped her in a gaze of flame.     48   
  “Dost thou hear? I love thee!” he cried again.     49   
  “What love is that!” she shuddered.     50   
  “The love of the damned!” he answered.     51   
  Both remained silent for some minutes, crushed under the load of their emotion—he distraught, she stupefied.     52   
  “Listen,” the priest began at last, and a strange calm had come over him; “thou shalt know all. I am going to tell thee what I have hitherto scarcely dared to say to myself when I furtively searched my conscience in those deep hours of the night, when it seems so dark that God himself can see us no longer. Listen. Before I saw thee, girl, I was happy.”     53   
  “And I,” she faintly murmured.     54   
  “Do not interrupt me— Yes, I was happy, or at least judged myself to be so. I was pure—my soul was filled with limpid light. No head was lifted so high, so radiantly as mine. Priests consulted me upon chastity, ecclesiastics upon doctrine. Yes, learning was all in all to me—it was a sister, and a sister sufficed me. Not but what, in time, other thoughts came to me. More than once my flesh stirred at the passing of some female form. The power of sex and of a man’s blood that, foolish adolescent, I had thought stifled forever, had more than once shaken convulsively the iron chain of the vows that rivet me, hapless wretch, to the cold stones of the altar. But fasting, prayer, study, the mortifications of the cloister again restored the empire of the soul over the body. Also I strenuously avoided women. Besides, I had but to open a book, and all the impure vapours of my brain were dissipated by the splendid beams of learning; the gross things of this earth fled from before me, and I found myself once more calm, serene, and joyous in the presence of the steady radiance of eternal truth. So long as the foul fiend only sent against me indefinite shadows of women passing here and there before my eyes, in the church, in the streets, in the fields, and which scarce returned to me in my dreams, I vanquished him easily. Alas! if it stayed not with me, the fault lies with God, who made not man and the demon of equal strength. Listen. One day——”     55   
  Here the priest stopped, and the prisoner heard sighs issuing from his breast which seemed to tear and rend him.     56   
  He resumed. “One day I was leaning at the window of my cell. What book was I reading? Oh, all is confusion in my mind—I was reading. The window overlooked an open square. I heard a sound of a tambourine and of music. Vexed at being thus disturbed in my meditation, I looked into the square. What I saw, there were others who saw it too, and yet it was no spectacle meet for mortal eyes. There, in the middle of the open space—it was noon—a burning sun—a girl was dancing—but a creature so beautiful that God would have preferred her before the Virgin—would have chosen her to be His mother—if she had existed when He became man. Her eyes were dark and radiant; amid her raven tresses where the sun shone through were strands that glistened like threads of gold. Her feet were invisible in the rapidity of their movement, as are the spokes of a wheel when it turns at high speed. Round her head, among her ebon tresses, were discs of metal that glittered in the sun and formed about her brows a diadem of stars. Her kirtle, thick-set in spangles, twinkled all blue and studded with sparks like a summer’s night. Her brown and supple arms twined and untwined themselves about her waist like two scarfs. Her form was of bewildering beauty. Oh, the dazzling figure that stood out luminous against the very sunlight itself! Alas, girl, it was thou! Astounded, intoxicated, enchanted, I suffered myself to gaze upon thee. I watched thee long till suddenly I trembled with horror—I felt that Fate was laying hold on me.”     57   
  Gasping for breath, the priest ceased speaking for a moment, then he went on:     58   
  “Already half-fascinated, I strove to cling to something, to keep myself from slipping farther. I recalled the snares which Satan had already laid for me. The creature before me had such supernatural beauty as could only be of heaven or hell. That was no mere human girl fashioned out of particles of common clay and feebly illumined from within by the flickering ray of a woman’s soul. It was an angel!—but of darkness—of flame, not of light. At the same moment of thinking thus, I saw near thee a goat—a beast of the witches’ Sabbath, that looked at me and grinned. The midday sun gilded its horns with fire. ’Twas then I caught sight of the devil’s snare, and I no longer doubted that thou camest from hell, and that thou wast sent from thence for my perdition. I believed it.”     59   
  The priest looked the prisoner in the face and added coldly:     60   
  “And I believe so still. However, the charm acted by degrees; thy dancing set my brain in a maze; I felt the mysterious spell working within me. All that should have kept awake fell asleep in my soul, and like those who perish in the snow, I found pleasure in yielding to that slumber.     61   
  All at once thou didst begin to sing. What could I do, unhappy wretch that I was? Thy song was more enchanting still than thy dance. I tried to flee. Impossible. I was nailed, I was rooted to the spot. I felt as if the stone floor had risen and engulfed me to the knees. I was forced to remain to the end. My feet were ice, my head was on fire. At length thou didst, mayhap, take pity on me—thou didst cease to sing—didst disappear. The reflection of the dazzling vision, the echo of the enchanting music, died away by degrees from my eyes and ears. Then I fell into the embrasure of the window, more stark and helpless than a statue loosened from the pedestal. The vesper bell awoke me. I rose—I fled; but alas! there was something within me fallen to arise no more—something had come upon me from which I could not flee.”     62   
  Again he paused and then resumed: “Yes, from that day onward there was within me a man I did not know. I had recourse to all my remedies—the cloister, the altar, labour, books. Useless folly! Oh, how hollow does science sound when a head full of passion strikes against it in despair! Knowest thou, girl, what it was that now came between me and my books? It was thou, thy shadow, the image of the radiant apparition which had one day crossed my path. But that image no longer wore the same bright hue—it was sombre, funereal, black as the dark circle which haunts the vision of the imprudent eye that has gazed too fixedly at the sun.     63   
  “Unable to rid myself of it; with thy song forever throbbing in my ear, thy feet dancing on my breviary, forever in the night-watches and in my dreams feeling the pressure of thy form against my side—I desired to see thee closer, to touch thee, to know who thou wert, to see if I should find thee equal to the ideal image that I had retained of thee. In any case, I hoped that a new impression would efface the former one, for it had become insupportable. I sought thee out, I saw thee again. Woe is me! When I had seen thee twice, I longed to see thee a thousand times, to gaze at thee forever.     64   
  “After that—how stop short on that hellish incline?—after that my soul was no longer my own. The other end of the thread which the demon had woven about my wings was fastened to his cloven foot. I became vagrant and wandering like thyself—I waited for thee under porches—I spied thee out at the corners of streets—I watched thee from the top of my tower. Each evening I returned more charmed, more despairing, more bewitched, more lost than before.     65   
  “I had learned who thou wast—a gipsy—a Bohemian—a gitana—a zingara. How could I doubt of the witchcraft? Listen. I hoped that a prosecution would rid me of the spell. A sorceress had bewitched Bruno of Ast; he had her burned, and was cured. I knew this. I would try this remedy. First, I had thee forbidden the Parvis of Notre Dame, hoping to forget thee if thou camest no more. Thou didst not heed it. Thou camest again. Then I had the idea of carrying thee off. One night I attempted it. We were two of us. Already we had thee fast, when that miserable officer came upon the scene. He delivered thee, and so began thy misfortunes—and mine—and his own as well. At length, not knowing what to do or what was to become of me, I denounced thee to the Holy Office.     66   
  “I thought that I should thus be cured like Bruno of Ast. I thought too, confusedly, that a prosecution would deliver thee into my hands, that once in prison I should hold thee, that thou couldst not then escape me—that thou hadst possessed me long enough for me to possess thee in my turn. When one sets out upon an evil path, one should go the whole way—’tis madness to stop midway in the monstrous! The extremity of crime has its delirium of joy. A priest and a witch may taste of all delights in one another’s arms on the straw pallet of a dungeon.     67   
  “So I denounced thee. ’Twas then I began to terrify thee whenever I met thee. The plot which I was weaving against thee, the storm which I was brewing over thy head, burst from me in muttered threats and lightning glances. And yet I hesitated. My project had appalling aspects from which I shrank.     68   
  “It may be that I would have renounced it—that my hideous thought would have withered in my brain without bearing fruit. I thought it would always depend on myself either to follow up or set aside this prosecution. But every evil thought is inexorable and will become an act; and there, where I thought myself all-powerful, Fate was more powerful than I. Alas! alas! ’tis Fate has laid hold on thee and cast thee in among the dread wheels of the machinery I had constructed in secret! Listen. I have almost done.     69   
  “One day—it was again a day of sunshine—a man passes me who speaks thy name and laughs with the gleam of lust in his eyes. Damnation! I followed him. Thou knowest the rest——”     70   
  He ceased.     71   
  The girl could find but one word—“Oh, my Phœbus!”     72   
  “Not that name!” exclaimed the priest, grasping her arm with violence. “Utter not that name! Oh, wretched that we are, ’tis that name has undone us! Nay, rather we have all undone one another through the inexplicable play of Fate! Thou art suffering, art thou not? Thou art cold; the darkness blinds thee, the dungeon wraps thee round; but mayhap thou hast still more light shining within thee—were it only thy childish love for the fatuous being who was trifling with thy heart! while I—I bear the dungeon within me; within, my heart is winter, ice, despair—black night reigns in my soul! Knowest thou all that I have suffered? I was present at the trial. I was seated among the members of the Office. Yes, one of those priestly cowls hid the contortions of the damned. When they led thee in, I was there; while they questioned thee, I was there. Oh, den of wolves! It was my own crime—my own gibbet that I saw slowly rising above thy head. At each deposition, each proof, each pleading, I was present—I could count thy every step along that dolorous path. was there, too, when that wild beast—oh, I had not foreseen the torture! Listen. I followed thee in the chamber of anguish; I saw thee disrobed and half-naked under the vile hands of the torturer; saw thy foot—that foot I would have given an empire to press one kiss upon and die; that foot which I would have rejoiced to feel crushing my head—that foot I saw put into the horrible boot that turns the limbs of a human being into gory pulp. Oh, miserable that I am! while I lacerated my at this, I had a poniard under my gown with which I lacerated my breast. At thy cry I plunged it into my flesh—a second cry from thee and it should have pierced my heart. Look—I believe it still bleeds.”     73   
  He opened his cassock. His breast was indeed scored as by a tiger’s claws, and in his side was a large, badly healed wound.     74   
  The prisoner recoiled in horror.     75   
  “Oh, girl!” cried the priest, “have pity on me! Thou deemest thyself miserable—alas! alas! thou knowest not what misery is. Oh, to love a woman—to be a priest—to be hated—to love her with all the fury of one’s soul, to feel that for the least of her smiles one would give one’s blood, one’s vitals, fame, salvation, immortality, and eternity—this life and the life to come; to regret not being a king, a genius, an emperor, an archangel—God—that one might place a greater slave beneath her feet; to clasp her day and night in one’s dreams, one’s thoughts—and then to see her in love with the trappings of a soldier, and have naught to offer her but the unsightly cassock of a priest, which she will only regard with fear and disgust! To be present with one’s jealousy and rage while she lavishes on a miserable, brainless swashbuckler her whole treasure of love and beauty! To see that form that enflames you, that soft bosom, that flesh panting and glowing under the kisses of another! Dear heaven—to adore her foot, her arm, her shoulder, to dream of her blue veins, her sun-browned skin till one writhes whole nights upon the stones of one’s cell, and to see all those caresses, which one has dreamed of lavishing on her, end in her torture! To have succeeded only in laying her on the bed of leather! Oh, these are the irons heated in the fires of hell! Oh, blest is he who is sawn asunder, torn by four horses! Knowest thou what that torture is, endured through long nights from your seething arteries, a breaking heart, a bursting head—burying your teeth in your own hands—fell tormentors that unceasingly turn you as on a burning gridiron over a thought of love, of jealousy, and of despair! Have mercy, girl! One moment’s respite from my torment—a handful of ashes on this white heat! Wipe away, I conjure thee, the drops of agony that trickle from my brow! Child, torture me with one hand, but caress me with the other! Have pity, girl—have pity on me!”     76   
  The priest writhed on the wet floor and beat his head against the corner of the stone steps. The girl listened to him—gazed at him.     77   
  When he ceased, exhausted and panting, she repeated under her breath: “Oh, my Phœbus!”     78   
  The priest dragged himself to her on his knees.     79   
  “I beseech thee,” he cried, “if thou hast any bowels of compassion, repulse me not! Oh, I love thee! I am a wretch! When thou utterest that name, unhappy girl, ’tis as if thou wert grinding every fibre of my heart between thy teeth! Have pity! if thou comest from hell, I go thither with thee. I have done amply to deserve that. The hell where thou art shall be my paradise—the sight of thee is more to be desired than that of God! Oh, tell me, wilt thou have none of me? I would have thought the very mountains had moved ere a woman would have rejected such a love! Oh, if thou wouldst—how happy we could be! We would flee—I could contrive thy escape—we would go some-where—we would seek that spot on earth where the sun shines brightest, the trees are most luxuriant, the sky the bluest. We would love—would mingle our two souls together—would each have an inextinguishable thirst for the other, which we would quench at the inexhaustible fountain of our love!”     80   
  She interrupted him with a horrible and strident laugh: “Look, holy father, there is blood upon your nails!”     81   
  The priest remained for some moments as if petrified, his eyes fixed on his hand.     82   
  “Well, be it so,” he continued at last, with strange calm; “insult me, taunt me, overwhelm me with scorn, but come—come away. Let us hasten. ’Tis for to-morrow, I tell thee. The gibbet of La Grève—thou knowest—it is always in readiness. ’Tis horrible!—to see thee carried in that tumbrel! Oh, have pity! I never felt till now how much I loved thee. Oh, follow me! Thou shalt take time to love me after I have saved thee. Thou shalt hate me as long as thou wilt—but come. To-morrow—to-morrow—the gibbet!—thy execution! Oh, save thyself! spare me!” He seized her by the arm distractedly and sought to drag her away.     83   
  She turned her fixed gaze upon him. “What has become of Phœbus?”     84   
  “Ah,” said the priest, letting go her arm, “you have no mercy!”     85   
  “What has become of Phœbus?” she repeated stonily.     86   
  “Dead!” cried the priest.     87   
  “Dead?” said she, still icy and motionless; “then why talk to me of living?”     88   
  He was not listening to her.     89   
  “Ah, yes,” he said, as if speaking to himself, “he must be dead. The knife went deep. I think I reached his heart with the point. Oh, my soul was in that dagger to the very point!”     90   
  The girl threw herself upon him with the fury of a tigress, and thrust him towards the steps with supernatural strength.     91   
  “Begone, monster! Begone, assassin! Leave me to die! May the blood of both of us be an everlasting stain upon thy brow! Be thine, priest? Never! never! no power shall unite us—not hell itself! Begone, accursed—never!”     92   
  The priest stumbled against the steps. He silently disengaged his feet from the folds of his robe, took up his lantern, and began slowly to ascend the steps leading to the door. He opened the door and went out.     93   
  Suddenly she saw his head reappear. His face wore a frightful expression, and he cried with a voice hoarse with rage and despair:     94   
  “I tell thee he is dead!”     95   
  She fell on her face to the floor. No sound was now audible in the dungeon but the tinkle of the drop of water which ruffled the surface of the pool in the darkness.

Book VIII   
V. The Mother   
     
I DOUBT if there be anything in the world more enchanting to a mother’s heart than the thoughts awakened by the sight of her child’s little shoe—more especially when it is the holiday shoe, the Sunday, the christening shoe—the shoe embroidered to the very sole, a shoe in which the child has not yet taken a step. The shoe is so tiny, has such a charm in it, it is so impossible for it to walk, that it is to the mother as if she saw her child. She smiles at it, kisses it, babbles to it; she asks herself if it can be that there is a foot so small, and should the child be absent, the little shoe suffices to bring back to her vision the sweet and fragile creature.      1   
  She imagines she sees it—she does see it—living, laughing, with its tender hands, its little round head, its dewy lips, its clear bright eyes. If it be winter, there it is creeping about the carpet, laboriously clambering over a stool, and the mother trembles lest it come too near the fire. If it be summer, it creeps about the garden, plucks up the grass between the stones, gazes with the artless courage of childhood at the great dogs, the great horses, plays with the shell borders, with the flowers, and makes the gardener scold when he finds sand in the flower-beds and earth on all the paths. The whole world smiles, and shines, and plays round it like itself, even to the breeze and the sunbeams that wanton in its curls. The shoe brings up all this before the mother’s eye, and her heart melts thereat like wax before the fire.      2   
  But if the child be lost, these thousand images of joy, of delight, of tenderness crowded round the little shoe become so many pictures of horror. The pretty embroidered thing is then an instrument of torture eternally racking the mother’s heart. It is still the same string that vibrates—the deepest, most sensitive of the human heart—but instead of the caressing touch of an angel’s hand, it is a demon’s horrid clutch upon it.      3   
  One morning, as the May sun rose into one of those deep blue skies against which Garofalo loves to set his Descents from the Cross, the recluse of the Tour-Roland heard a sound of wheels and horses and the clanking of iron in the Place de Grève. But little moved by it, she knotted her hair over her ears to deaden the sound, and resumed her contemplation of the object she had been adoring on her knees for fifteen years. That little shoe, as we have already said, was to her the universe. Her thoughts were wrapped up in it, never to leave it till death. What bitter imprecations she had sent up to heaven, what heart-rending plaints, what prayers and sobs over this charming rosy toy, the gloomy cell of the Tour-Roland alone knew. Never was greater despair lavished upon a thing so engaging and so pretty.      4   
  On this morning it seemed as though her grief found more than usually violent expression, and her lamentations could be heard in the street as she cried aloud in monotonous tones that wrung the heart:      5   
  “Oh, my child!” she moaned, “my child! my dear and hapless babe! shall I never see thee more? All hope is over! It seems to me always as if it had happened but yesterday. My God! my God! to have taken her from me so soon, it had been better never to have given her to me at all. Knowest thou not that our children are flesh of our flesh, and that a mother who has lost her child believes no longer in God? Ah, wretched that I am, to have gone out that day! Lord! Lord! to have taken her from me so! Thou canst never have looked upon us together—when I warmed her, all sweet and rosy, at my fire—when I suckled her—when I made her little feet creep up my bosom to my lips! Ah, hadst thou seen that, Lord, thou wouldst have had pity on my joy—hadst not taken from me the only thing left for me to love! Was I so degraded a creature, Lord, that thou couldst not look at me before condemning me? Woe! woe is me!—there is the shoe—but the foot—where is it?—where is the rest—where is the child? My babe, my babe! what have they done with thee? Lord, give her back to me! For fifteen years have I worn away my knees in prayer to thee, O God—is that not enough? Give her back to me for one day, one hour, one minute—only one minute, Lord, and then cast me into hell for all eternity! Ah, did I but know where to find one corner of the hem of thy garment, I would cling to it with both hands and importune thee till thou wast forced to give me back my child! See its pretty little shoe—hast thou no pity on it, Lord? Canst thou condemn a poor mother to fifteen years of such torment? Holy Virgin—dear mother in heaven! my Infant Jesus—they have taken it from me—they have stolen it, they have devoured it on the wild moor—have drunk its blood—have gnawed its bones; Blessed Virgin, have pity on me! My babe—I want my babe! What care I that she is in paradise? I will have none of your angels—I want my child! I am a lioness, give me my cub. Oh, I will writhe on the ground—I will dash my forehead against the stones—will damn myself, and curse thee, Lord, if thou keepest my child from me! Thou seest that my arms are gnawed all over—has the good God no pity? Oh, give me but a little black bread and salt, only let me have my child to warm me like the sun! Alas! O Lord my God, I am the vilest of sinners, but my child made me pious—I was full of religion out of love for her, and I beheld thee through her smiles as through an opening in heaven. Oh, let me only once, once more only, once more draw this little shoe on to her sweet rosy little foot, and I will die, Holy Mother, blessing thee! Ah, fifteen years—she will be a woman grown now! Unhappy child! is it then indeed true that I shall never see her more?—not even in heaven, for there I shall never go. Oh, woe is me! to have to say, There is her shoe, and that is all I shall ever have of her!”      6   
  The unhappy creature threw herself upon the shoe—her consolation and her despair for so many years—and her very soul was rent with sobs as on the first day. For to a mother who has lost her child, it is always the first day—that grief never grows old. The mourning garments may wear out and lose their sombre hue, the heart remains black as on the first day.      7   
  At that moment the blithe, fresh voices of children passing the cell struck upon her ear. Whenever children met her eye or ear, the poor mother cast herself into the darkest corner of her living sepulchre, as if she sought to bury her head in the stone wall that she might not hear them. This time, contrary to her habit, she started up and listened eagerly for one of them had said: “They are going to hang a gipsy woman to-day.”      8   
  With the sudden bound of the spider which we have seen rush upon the fly at the shaking of his web, she ran to her loophole which looked out, as the reader knows, upon the Place de Grève. In effect, a ladder was placed against the gibbet, and the hangman’s assistant was busy adjusting the chains rusted by the rain. A few people stood round.      9   
  The laughing group of children was already far off. The sachette looked about for a passer-by of whom she might make inquiries. Close to her cell she caught sight of a priest making believe to study the public breviary, but who was much less taken up with the lattice-guarded volume than with the gibbet, towards which, ever and anon, he cast a savage, scowling glance. She recognised him as the reverend Archdeacon of Josas, a saintly man.     10   
  “Father,” she asked, “who is to be hanged there?”     11   
  The priest looked at her without replying. She repeated her question.     12   
  “I do not know,” he answered.     13   
  “Some children passing said that it was an Egyptian woman,” said the recluse.     14   
  “I think it is,” returned the priest. Paquette la Chantefleurie broke into a hyena laugh.     15   
  “Listen,” said the Archdeacon, “it appears that you hate the gipsy women exceedingly?”     16   
  “Hate them!” cried the recluse. “They are ghouls and stealers of children! They devoured my little girl, my babe, my only child! I have no heart in my body—they have eaten it!”     17   
  She was terrible. The priest regarded her coldly.     18   
  “There is one that I hate above the rest,” she went on, “and that I have cursed—a young one—about the age my child would be if this one’s mother had not devoured her. Each time that this young viper passes my cell my blood boils!”     19   
  “Well, my sister, let your heart rejoice,” said the priest, stony as a marble statue on a tomb, “for ’tis that one you will see die.”     20   
  His head fell upon his breast and he went slowly away.     21   
  The recluse waved her arms with joy. “I foretold it to her that she would swing up there! Priest, I thank thee!” cried she, and she began pacing backward and forward in front of her loophole with dishevelled locks and flaming eyes, striking her shoulder against the wall with the savage air of a caged wolf that has long been hungry and feels that the hour of its repast draws near.

Book VIII   
VI. Three Various Hearts of Men   
     
PH�BUS, however, was not dead. Men of his sort are not so easily killed. When Maître Philippe Lheulier, the King’s advocate extraordinary, had said to poor Esmeralda: “He is dying,” it was by mistake or jest. When the Archdeacon said to the condemned girl, “He is dead!” the fact is that he knew nothing about it; but he believed it to be true, he counted upon it, and hoped it earnestly. It would have been too much to expect that he should give the woman he loved good tidings of his rival. Any man would have done the same in his place.      1   
  Not indeed that Phœbus’s wound had not been serious, but it had been less so than the Archdeacon flattered himself. The leech, to whose house the soldiers of the watch had conveyed him in the first instance, had, for a week, feared for his life, and, indeed, had told him so in Latin. But youth and a vigorous constitution had triumphed, and, as often happens, notwithstanding prognostics and diagnostics, Nature had amused herself by saving the patient in spite of the physician. It was while he was still stretched upon a sickbed that he underwent the first interrogations at the hands of Philippe Lheulier and the examiners of the Holy Office, which had annoyed him greatly. So, one fine morning, feeling himself recovered, he had left his gold spurs in payment to the man of drugs, and had taken himself off. For the rest, this had in no way impeded the course of justice. The law of that day had but few scruples about the clearness and precision of the proceedings against a criminal. Provided the accused was finally hanged, that was sufficient. At it was, the judges had ample proof against Esmeralda. They held Phœbus to be dead, and that decided the matter.      2   
  As to Phœbus, he had fled to no great distance. He had simply rejoined his company, then on garrison duty at Queue-en-Brie, in the province of Ile de France, a few stages from Paris.      3   
  After all, he had no great desire to appear in person at the trial. He had a vague impression that he would cut a somewhat ridiculous figure. Frankly, he did not quite know what to make of the whole affair. Irreligious, yet credulous like every soldier who is nothing but a soldier, when he examined the particulars of that adventure, he was not altogether without his suspicions as to the goat, as to the curious circumstances of his first meeting with Esmeralda, as to the means, no less strange, by which she had betrayed the secret of her love, as to her being a gipsy, finally as to the spectre-monk. He discerned in all these incidents far more of magic than of love—probably a witch, most likely the devil; in fine, a drama, or in the language of the day, a mystery—and a very disagreeable one—in which he had an extremely uncomfortable part: that of the person who receives all the kicks and none of the applause. The captain was greatly put out by this; he felt that kind of shame which La Fontaine so admirably defines:
           “Ashamed as a fox would be, caught by a hen.”   
   4   
  He hoped, however, that the affair would not be noised abroad, and that, he being absent, his name would hardly be mentioned in connection with it; or, at any rate, would not be heard beyond the court-room of the Tournelle. And in this he judged aright—there was no Criminal Gazette in those days, and as hardly a week passed without some coiner being boiled alive, some witch hanged, or heretic sent to the stake at one or other of the numberless “justices” of Paris, people were so accustomed to see the old feudal Themis at every crossway, her arms bare and sleeves rolled up, busy with her pitchforks, her gibbets, and her pillories, that scarcely any notice was taken of her. The beau monde of that age hardly knew the name of the poor wretch passing at the corner of the street; at most, it was the populace that regaled itself on these gross viands. An execution was one of the ordinary incidents of the public way, like the braisier of the pie-man or the butcher’s slaughter-house. The executioner was but a butcher, only a little more skilled than the other.      5   
  Phœbus, therefore, very soon set his mind at rest on the subject of the enchantress Esmeralda, or Similar, as he called her, of the dagger-thrust he had received from the gipsy or the spectre-monk (it mattered little to him which), and the issue of the trial. But no sooner was his heart vacant on that score, than the image of Fleur-de-Lys returned to it—for the heart of Captain Phœbus, like Nature, abhorred a vacuum.      6   
  Moreover, Queue-en-Brie was not a diverting place—a village of farriers and herd-girls with rough hands, a straggling row of squalid huts and cabins bordering the high-road for half a league—in short, a world’s end.      7   
  Fleur-de-Lys was his last flame but one, a pretty girl, a charming dot; and so one fine morning, being quite cured of his wound, and fairly presuming that after the interval of two months the business of the gipsy girl must be over and forgotten, the amorous cavalier pranced up in high feather to the door of the ancestral mansion of the Gondelauriers. He paid no attention to a very numerous crowd collecting in the Place du Parvis before the great door of Notre Dame. Remembering that it was the month of May, he concluded that it was some procession—some Whitsuntide or other festival—tied his steed up to the ring at the porch, and gaily ascended the stair to his fair betrothed.      8   
  He found her alone with her mother.      9   
  On the heart of Fleur-de-Lys the scene of the gipsy with her goat and its accursed alphabet, combined with her lover’s long absences, still weighed heavily. Nevertheless, when she saw her captain enter, she found him so handsome in his brand-new doublet and shining baldrick, and wearing so impassioned an air, that she blushed with pleasure. The noble damsel herself was more charming than ever. Her magnificent golden tresses were braided to perfection, she was robed in that azure blue which so well becomes a blonde—a piece of coquetry she had learned from Colombe—and her eyes were swimming in that dewy languor which is still more becoming.     10   
  Phœbus, who in the matter of beauty had been reduced to the country wenches of Queue-en-Brie, was ravished by Fleur-de-Lys, which lent our officer so pressing and gallant an air that his peace was made forthwith. The Lady of Gondelaurier herself, still maternally seated in her great chair, had not the heart to scold him. As for Fleur-de-Lys, her reproaches died away in tender cooings.     11   
  The young lady was seated near the window still engaged upon her grotto of Neptune. The captain leaned over the back of her seat, while she murmured her fond upbraidings.     12   
  “What have you been doing with yourself these two long months, unkind one?”     13   
  “I swear,” answered Phœbus, somewhat embarrassed by this question, “that you are beautiful enough to make an archbishop dream.”     14   
  She could not repress a smile.     15   
  “Go to—go to, sir. Leave the question of my beauty and answer me. Fine beauty, to be sure!”     16   
  “Well, dearest cousin, I was in garrison.”     17   
  “And where, if you please? and why did you not come and bid me adieu?”     18   
  “At Queue-en-Brie.”     19   
  Phœbus was delighted that the first question had helped him to elude the second.     20   
  “But that is quite near, monsieur; how is it you never once came to see me?”     21   
  This was seriously embarrassing.     22   
  “Because—well—the service—and besides, charming cousin, I have been ill.”     23   
  “Ill?” she exclaimed in alarm.     24   
  “Yes—wounded.”     25   
  “Wounded!” The poor girl was quite upset.     26   
  “Oh, do not let that frighten you,” said Phœbus carelessly; “it was nothing. A quarrel—a mere scratch—what does it signify to you?”     27   
  “What does it signify to me?” cried Fleur-de-Lys, lifting her beautiful eyes full of tears. “Oh, you cannot mean what you say. What was it all about—I will know.”     28   
  “Well, then, my fair one, I had some words with Mahé Fédy—you know—the lieutenant of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and each of us ripped up a few inches of the other’s skin—that is all.”     29   
  The inventive captain knew very well that an affair of honour always sets off a man to advantage in a woman’s eye. And sure enough, Fleur-de-Lys looked up into his fine face with mingled sensations of fear, pleasure, and admiration. However, she did not feel entirely reassured.     30   
  “I only hope you are completely cured, my Phœbus!” she said. “I am not acquainted with your Mahé Fédy; but he must be an odious wretch. And what was this quarrel about?”     31   
  Here Phœbus, whose imagination was not particularly creative, began to be rather at a loss how to beat a convenient retreat out of his encounter.     32   
  “Oh, how should I know?—a mere trifle—a horse—a hasty word! Fair cousin,” said he, by way of changing the conversation, “what is all this going on in the Parvis?” He went to the window. “Look, fair cousin, there is a great crowd in the Place.”     33   
  “I do not know,” answered Fleur-de-Lys; “it seems a witch is to do penance this morning before the church on her way to the gallows.”     34   
  So entirely did the captain believe the affair of Esmeralda to be terminated, that he took little heed of these words of Fleur-de-Lys. Nevertheless, he asked a careless question or two.     35   
  “Who is this witch?”     36   
  “I am sure I do not know.”     37   
  “And what is she said to have done?”     38   
  Again she shrugged her white shoulders.     39   
  “I do not know.”     40   
  “Oh, by ’r Lord!” exclaimed the mother, “there are so many sorceresses nowadays that they burn them, I dare swear, without knowing their names. As well might you try to know the name of every cloud in heaven. But, after all, we may make ourselves easy; the good God keeps his register above.” Here the venerable lady rose and approached the window. “Lord,” she cried, “you are right, Phœbus, there is indeed a great concourse of the people—some of them even, God save us, on the very roofs! Ah, Phœbus, that brings back to me my young days and the entry of Charles VII, when there were just such crowds—I mind not precisely in what year. When I speak of that to you it doubtless sounds like something very old, but to me it is as fresh as to-day. Oh, it was a far finer crowd than this! Some of them climbed up on to the battlements of the Porte Saint-Antoine. The King had the Queen on the crupper behind him; and after their highnesses came all the ladies mounted behind their lords. I remember, too, there was much laughter because by the side of Amanyon de Garlande, who was very short, there came the Sire Matefelon, a knight of gigantic stature, who had killed the English in heaps. It was very fine. Then followed a procession of all the nobles of France, with their oriflammes fluttering red before one. There were some with pennons and some with banners—let me think—the Sire de Calan had a pennon, Jean de Châteaumorant a banner, and a richer than any of the others except the Duke of Bourbon. Alas! ’tis sad to think that all that has been, and that nothing of it now remains!”     41   
  The two young people were not listening to the worthy dowager. Phœbus had returned to lean over the back of his lady-love’s chair—a charming post which revealed to his libertine glance so many exquisite things, and enabled him to divine so many more that, ravished by that satin-shimmering skin, he said to himself, “How can one love any but a blonde?”     42   
  Neither spoke. The girl lifted to him, from time to time, a glance full of tenderness and devotion, and their locks mingled in a ray of the vernal sunshine.     43   
  “Phœbus,” said Fleur-de-Lys suddenly, in a half-whisper, “we are to marry in three months—swear to me that you have never loved any woman but myself.”     44   
  “I swear it, fairest angel!” returned Phœbus; and his passionate glance combined with the sincere tone of his voice to convince Fleur-de-Lys of the truth of his assertion. And, who knows, perhaps he believed it himself at the moment.     45   
  Meanwhile the good mother, rejoiced to see the two young people in such perfect accord, had left the apartment to attend to some domestic matter. Phœbus was aware of the fact, and this solitude à deux so emboldened the enterprising captain that some strange ideas began to arise in his mind. Fleur-de-Lys loved him—he was betrothed to her—she was alone with him—his old inclination for her had revived—not perhaps in all its primitive freshness, but certainly in all its ardour—after all, it was no great crime to cut a little of one’s own corn in the blade. I know not if these thoughts passed distinctly through his mind; but at any rate, Fleur-de-Lys suddenly took alarm at the expression of his countenance. She looked about her and discovered that her mother was gone.     46   
  “Heavens!” said she, blushing and uneasy, “I am very hot.”     47   
  “I think, indeed,” replied Phœbus, “that it cannot be far from noon. The sun is oppressive—the best remedy is to draw the curtain.”     48   
  “No, no!” cried the girl; “on the contrary, it is air I need.”     49   
  And like the doe which scents the hounds, she started up, ran to the window, flung it wide, and took refuge on the balcony. Phœbus, not overpleased, followed her.     50   
  The Place de Paris of Notre Dame, upon which, as the reader is aware, the balcony looked down, presented at that moment a sinister and unusual appearance, which forthwith changed the nature of the timid damoiselle’s alarm.     51   
  An immense crowd, extending into all the adjacent streets, filled the whole square. The breast-high wall surrounding the Parvis itself would not have sufficed alone to keep it clear; but it was lined by a close hedge of sergeants of the town-guard and arquebusiers, culverin in hand. Thanks to this grove of pikes and arquebuses the Parvis was empty. The entrance to it was guarded by a body of the bishop’s halberdiers. The great doors of the church were closed, forming a strong contrast to the innumerable windows round the Place, which, open up to the very gables, showed hundreds of heads piled one above another like the cannon-balls in an artillery ground. The prevailing aspect of this multitude was gray, dirty, repulsive. The spectacle they were awaiting was evidently one that has the distinction of calling forth all that is most bestial and unclean in the populace—impossible to imagine anything more repulsive than the sounds which arose from this seething mass of yellow caps and frowzy heads, and there were fewer shouts than shrill bursts of laughter—more women than men.     52   
  From time to time some strident voice pierced the general hum.     53   
  “Hi there! Mahiet Baliffre! will they hang her here?”     54   
  “Simpleton, this is the penance in her shift—the Almighty is going to cough a little Latin in her face! That is always done here at noon. If ’tis the gallows you want, you must go to the Grève.”     55   
  “I’ll go there afterward.”     56   
     
  “Tell me, La Boucanbry, is it true that she refused to have a confessor?”     57   
  “So they say, La Bechaigne.”     58   
  “Did you ever see such a heathen?”     59   
     
  “Sir, ’tis the custom here. The justiciary of the Palais is bound to deliver up the malefactor, ready sentenced for execution—if a layman, to the Provost of Paris; if a cleric, to the official court of the bishopric.”     60   
  “Sir, I thank you.”     61   
     
  “Oh, mon Dieu!” said Fleur-de-Lys, “the poor creature!” And this thought tinged with sadness the look she cast over the crowd. The captain, much more interested in her than in this dirty rabble, had laid an amorous hand upon her waist. She turned round with a smile half of pleasure, half of entreaty.     62   
  “Prithee, Phœbus, let be! If my mother entered and saw your hand—”     63   
  At this moment the hour of noon boomed slowly from the great clock of Notre Dame. A murmur of satisfaction burst from the crowd. The last vibration of the twelfth stroke had hardly died away before all the heads were set in one direction, like waves before a sudden gust of wind, and a great shout went up from the square, the windows, the roofs: “Here she comes!”     64   
  Fleur-de-Lys clasped her hands over her eyes that she might not see.     65   
  “Sweetheart,” Phœbus hastened to say, “shall we go in?”     66   
  “No,” she returned, and the eyes that she had just closed from fear she opened again from curiosity.     67   
  A tumbrel drawn by a strong Normandy draught-horse, and closely surrounded by horsemen in violet livery with white crosses, had just entered the Place from the Rue Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs. The sergeants of the watch opened a way for it through the people by vigorous use of their thonged scourges. Beside the tumbrel rode a few officers of justice and the police, distinguishable by their black garments and their awkwardness in the saddle. Maître Jacques Charmolue figured at their head.     68   
  In the fatal cart a girl was seated, her hands tied behind her, but no priest by her side. She was in her shift, and her long black hair (it was the custom then not to cut it till reaching the foot of the gibbet) fell unbound about her neck and over her half-naked shoulders.     69   
  Through these waving locks—more lustrous than the raven’s wing—you caught a glimpse of a great rough brown rope, writhing and twisting, chafing the girl’s delicate shoulder-blades, and coiled about her fragile neck like an earthworm round a flower. Below this rope glittered a small amulet adorned with green glass, which, doubtless, she had been allowed to retain, because nothing is refused to those about to die. The spectators raised above her at the windows could see her bare legs as she sat in the tumbrel, and which she strove to conceal as if from a last remaining instinct of her sex. At her feet lay a little goat, also strictly bound. The criminal was holding her ill-fastened shift together with her teeth. It looked as though, despite her extreme misery, she was still conscious of the indignity of being thus exposed half-naked before all eyes. Alas! it is not for such frightful trials as this that feminine modesty was made.     70   
  “Holy Saviour!” cried Fleur-de-Lys excitedly to the captain. “Look, cousin! if it is not your vile gipsy girl with the goat!”     71   
  She turned round to Phœbus. His eyes were fixed on the tumbrel. He was very pale.     72   
  “What gipsy girl with a goat?” he faltered.     73   
  “How,” returned Fleur-de-Lys, “do you not remember?”     74   
  Phœbus did not let her finish. “I do not know what you mean.”     75   
  He made one step to re-enter the room, but Fleur-de-Lys whose jealousy lately so vehement was now reawakened by the sight of the detested gipsy—Fleur-de-Lys stopped him by a glance full of penetration and mistrust. She recollected vaguely having heard something of an officer whose name had been connected with the trial of this sorceress.     76   
  “What ails you?” said she to Phœbus; “one would think that the sight of this woman disconcerted you.”     77   
  Phœbus forced a laugh. “Me? Not the least in the world! Oh, far from it!”     78   
  “Then stay,” she returned imperiously, “and let us see it out.”     79   
  So there was nothing for the unlucky captain but to remain. However, it reassured him somewhat to see that the criminal kept her eyes fixed on the bottom of the tumbrel. It was but too truly Esmeralda. In this last stage of ignominy and misfortune, she was still beautiful—her great dark eyes looked larger from the hollowing of her cheeks, her pale profile was pure and unearthly. She resembled her former self as a Virgin of Masaccio resembles one of Raphael’s—frailer, more pinched, more attenuated.     80   
  For the rest, there was nothing in her whole being that did not seem to be shaken to its foundations; and, except for her last poor attempt at modesty, she abandoned herself completely to chance, so thoroughly had her spirit been broken by torture and despair. Her body swayed with every jolt of the tumbrel like something dead or disjointed. Her gaze was blank and distraught. A tear hung in her eye, but it was stationary and as if frozen there.     81   
  Meanwhile the dismal cavalcade had traversed the crowd amid yells of joy and the struggles of the curious. Nevertheless, in strict justice be it said, that on seeing her so beautiful and so crushed by affliction, many, even the most hard-hearted, were moved to pity.     82   
  The tumbrel now entered the Parvis and stopped in front of the great door. The escort drew up in line on either side. Silence fell upon the crowd, and amid that silence, surcharged with solemnity and anxious anticipation, the two halves of the great door opened apparently of themselves on their creaking hinges and disclosed the shadowy depths of the sombre church in its whole extent, hung with black, dimly lighted by a few tapers glimmering in the far distance on the high altar, and looking like a black and yawning cavern in the midst of the sunlit Place. At the far end, in the gloom of the chancel, a gigantic cross of silver was dimly visible against a black drapery that fell from the roof to the floor. The nave was perfectly empty, but the heads of a few priests could be seen stirring vaguely in the distant choir-stalls, and as the great door opened, there rolled from the church a solemn, far-reaching, monotonous chant, hurling at the devoted head of the criminal fragments of the penitential psalms:     83   
  “Non timebo millia populi circumdantis me. Exsurge, Domine; salvum me fac, Deus!     84   
  “Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intraverunt apuæ usque ad animam meam.     85   
  “Infixus sum in limo profundi; et non est substantia.”     86   
  At the same time an isolated voice, not in the choir, intoned from the step of the high altar this impressive offertory:     87   
  “Qui verbum meum audit, et credit ei qui misit me, habet vitam æternam et in judicium non venit; sed transit a morte in vitam.”     88   
  This chant intoned by a few old men lost in the gloom of the church, and directed at this beautiful creature full of youth and life, wooed by the balmy air of spring, and bathed in sunshine, was the mass for the dead.     89   
  The multitude listened with pious attention.     90   
  The hapless, terrified girl seemed to lose all sight and consciousness in this view into the dark bowels of the church. Her white lips moved as if she prayed, and when the hangman’s assistant advanced to help her down from the tumbrel, he heard a low murmur from her—“Phœbus!”     91   
  They untied her hands and made her descend from the cart, accompanied by her goat, which they had also unbound, and which bleated with delight at finding itself free. She was then made to walk barefoot over the rough pavement to the bottom of the flight of steps leading up to the door. The rope she had round her neck trailed after her like a serpent in pursuit.     92   
  The chant ceased inside the church. A great cross of gold and a file of wax tapers set themselves in motion in the gloom. The halberds of the bishop’s guard clanked, and a few moments later a long procession of priests in their chasubles and deacons in their dalmatics advancing, solemnly chanting, towards the penitent, came into her view and that of the crowd. But her eye was arrested by the one who led the procession, immediately behind the cross-bearer.     93   
  “Oh,” she murmured with a shudder, “’tis he again—the priest!”     94   
  It was the Archdeacon. On his left walked the subchanter, on his right the precentor, armed with his wand of office. He advanced with head thrown back, his eyes fixed and wide, chanting with a loud voice:     95   
  “De ventre inferi clamavi, et exaudisti vocem meam.     96   
  “Et projecisti me in profundum corde maris, et flumen circumdedit me.”     97   
  As he came into the broad daylight under the high Gothic doorway, enveloped in a wide silver cope barred with a black cross, he was so pale, that more than one among the crowd thought that it was one of the marble bishops off some tomb in the choir come to receive on the threshold of the grave her who was about to die.     98   
  No less pale and marble than himself, she was scarcely aware that they had thrust a heavy lighted taper of yellow wax into her hand; she did not listen to the raucous voice of the clerk as he read out the terrible wording of the penance; when she was bidden to answer Amen, she answered Amen.     99   
  The first thing that brought back to her any life and strength was seeing the priest sign to his followers to retire, and he advanced alone towards her. Then, indeed, she felt the blood rush boiling to her head, and a last remaining spark of indignation flamed up in that numbed and frozen spirit.    100   
  The Archdeacon approached her slowly. Even in her dire extremity, she saw his lustful eye wander in jealousy and desire over her half-nude form. Then he said to her in a loud voice:    101   
  “Girl have you asked pardon of God for your sins and offences?” He bent over her and whispered (the spectators supposing that he was receiving her last confession): “Wilt thou be mine? I can save thee yet!”    102   
  She regarded him steadfastly: “Begone, devil, or I will denounce thee!”    103   
  A baleful smile curled his lips. “They would not believe thee. Thou wouldst but be adding a scandal to a crime. Answer quickly! Wilt thou be mine?”    104   
  “What hast thou done with my Phœbus?”    105   
  “He is dead,” said the priest.    106   
  At that moment the miserable Archdeacon raised his eyes mechanically, and there, at the opposite side of the Place, on the balcony of the Gondelaurier’s house, was the captain himself, standing by the side of Fleur-de-Lys. He staggered, passed his hand over his eyes, looked again, murmured a curse, and every feature became distorted with rage.    107   
  “Then die thou too!” he muttered between his teeth. “No one shall have thee!” Then lifting his hand over the gipsy girl, he cried in a sepulchral voice: “I nunc, anima anceps, et sit tibi Deus misericors!”    108   
  This was the awful formula with which it was customary to close this lugubrious ceremonial. It was the accepted signal from the priest to the executioner.    109   
  The people fell upon their knees.    110   
  “Kyrie eleison!” said the priest standing under the arched doorway.    111   
  “Kyrie eleison!” repeated the multitude in that murmur that runs over a sea of heads like the splashing of stormy waves.    112   
  “Amen,” responded the Archdeacon. And he turned his back upon the doomed girl, his head fell on his breast, he crossed his hands, rejoined his train of priests, and vanished a moment afterward with the cross, the tapers and the copes under the dim arches of the cathedral, and his sonorous voice gradually died away in the choir chanting this cry of human despair.    113   
  “Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt!”    114   
  The intermittent clank of the butt-ends of the guards’ pikes growing fainter by degrees in the distance, sounded like the hammer of a clock striking the last hour of the condemned.    115   
  All this time the doors of Notre Dame had remained wide open, affording a view of the interior of the church, empty, desolate, draped in black, voiceless, its lights extinguished.    116   
  The condemned girl remained motionless on the spot where they had placed her, awaiting what they would do with her. One of the sergeants had to inform Maître Charmolue that matters had reached this point, as during the foregoing scene he had been wholly occupied in studying the bas-relief of the great doorway, which, according to some, represents Abraham’s sacrifice, and according to others, the great alchemistic operation—the sun being figured by the angel, the fire by the fagot, and the operator by Abraham.    117   
  They had much ado to draw him away from this contemplation; but at last he turned round, and at a sign from him, two men in yellow, the executioner’s assistants, approached the gipsy to tie her hands again.    118   
  At the moment of reascending the fatal cart and moving on towards her final scene, the hapless girl was seized perhaps by some last heart-rending desire for life. She raised her dry and burning eyes to heaven, to the sun, to the silvery clouds intermingling with patches of brilliant blue, then she cast them around her, upon the ground, the people, the houses. Suddenly, while the man in yellow was pinioning her arms, she uttered a piercing cry—a cry of joy. On the balcony at the corner of the Place she had descried him—her lover—her lord—her life—Phœbus!    119   
  The judge had lied, the priest had lied—it was he indeed, she could not doubt it—he stood there alive and handsome, in his brilliant uniform, a plume on his head, a sword at his side.    120   
  “Phœbus!” she cried, “my Phœbus!” and she tried to stretch out her arms to him, but they were bound.    121   
  Then she saw that the captain frowned, that a beautiful girl who was leaning upon his arm looked at him with scornful lips and angry eyes; whereupon Phœbus said some words which did not reach her ear, and they both hastily disappeared through the casement of the balcony, which immediately closed behind then.    122   
  “Phœbus!” she cried wildly, “can it be that thou believest it?”    123   
  A monstrous thought had just suggested itself to her—she remembered that she had been condemned for murder committed on the person of Phœbus de Châteaupers.    124   
  She had borne all till now, but this last blow was too heavy. She fell senseless to the ground.    125   
  “Come,” said Charmolue impatiently, “lift her into the cart, and let us be done with it.”    126   
  No one had yet remarked in the gallery of royal statues immediately over the arches of the doorway a strange spectator, who, until then, had observed all that passed with such absolute immobility, a neck so intently stretched, a face so distorted, that, but for his habiliments—half red, half violet—he might have been taken for one of the stone gargoyles through whose mouths the long rain-pipes of the Cathedral have emptied themselves for six hundred years. This spectator had lost no smallest detail of all that had taken place before the entrance to Notre Dame since the hour of noon. At the very beginning, no one paying the least attention to him, he had firmly attached to one of the small columns of the gallery a stout knotted rope, the other end of which reached to the ground. This done, he had settled himself to quietly look on, only whistling from time to time as a blackbird flew past him.    127   
  Now, at the moment when the executioner’s assistants were preparing to carry out Charmolue’s phlegmatic order, he threw his leg over the balustrade of the gallery, seized the rope with his hands, his knees and his feet, and proceeded to slide down the face of the Cathedral like a drop of water down a window-pane; ran at the two men with the speed of a cat just dropped from a house-top, knocked the pair down with two terrific blows of his fist, picked up the gipsy in one hand as a child would a doll, and with one bound was inside the church, holding the girl high above his head as he shouted in a voice of thunder:    128   
  “Sanctuary!”    129   
  This was all accomplished with such rapidity, that had it been night the whole scene might have passed by the glare of a single flash of lightning.    130   
  “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” roared the crowd, and the clapping of ten thousand hands made Quasimodo’s single eye sparkle with joy and pride.    131   
  This shock brought the girl to her senses. She opened her eyes, looked at Quasimodo, then closed them suddenly as if in terror at the sight of her deliverer.    132   
  Charmolue stood dumfounded, and the executioners and the whole escort with him; for once within the walls of Notre Dame the criminal was inviolable. The Cathedral was a place of sanctuary; all human justice was powerless beyond the threshold.    133   
  Quasimodo had halted within the central doorway. His broad feet seemed to rest as solidly on the floor of the church as the heavy Roman pillars themselves. His great shock head was sunk between his shoulders like that of a lion, which likewise has a mane but no neck. The trembling girl hung in his horny hands like a white drapery; but he held her with anxious care, as if fearful of breaking or brushing the bloom off her—as if he felt that she was something delicate and exquisite and precious, and made for other hands than his.    134   
  At moments he seemed hardly to dare to touch her, even with his breath; then again he would strain her tightly to his bony breast as if she were his only possession, his treasure—as the mother of this child would have done. His cyclops eye, bent upon her, enveloped her in flood of tenderness, of grief, and pity, and then rose flashing with determined courage. Women laughed and cried, the crowd stamped with enthusiasm, for at this moment Quasimodo had a beauty of his own. Verily, this orphan, this foundling, this outcast, was wonderful to look upon: he felt himself august in his strength; he looked that society from which he was banished, and against whose plans he had so forcefully intervened, squarely in the face; he boldly defied that human justice from which he had just snatched its prey, all these tigers now forced to gnash their empty jaws, these myrmidons of the law, these judges, these executioners—this whole force of the King which he, the meanest of his subjects, had set at naught by the force of God.    135   
  Then, too, how affecting was this protection offered by a creature so misshapen to one so unfortunate—a girl condemned to death, save by Quasimodo!—the extremes of physical and social wretchedness meeting and assisting one another.    136   
  Meanwhile, after tasting his triumph for a few brief moments, Quasimodo suddenly plunged with his burden into the church. The people, ever delighted at a display of prowess, followed him with their eyes through the dim nave, only regretting that he had so quickly withdrawn himself from their acclamations. Suddenly he reappeared at one end of the gallery of royal statues, which he traversed, running like a madman, lifting his booty high in his arms and shouting “Sanctuary!” The plaudits of the crowd burst forth anew. Having dashed along the gallery, he vanished again into the interior of the Cathedral, and a moment afterward reappeared on the upper platform, still bearing the Egyptian in his arms, still running madly, still shouting “Sanctuary!” and the multitude still applauding. At last he made his third appearance on the summit of the tower of the great bell, from whence he seemed to show exultingly to the whole city the woman he had rescued, and his thundering voice—that voice which was heard so seldom, and never by him at all, repeated thrice with frenzied vehemence, even into the very clouds: “Sanctuary! Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”    137   
  “Noël! Noël!” roared the people in return, till the immense volume of acclamation resounded upon the opposite shore of the river to the astonishment of the crowd assembled in the Place de Grève, and among them the recluse, whose hungry eye was still fixed upon the gibbet.

Book IX   
I. Delirium   
     
CLAUDE FROLLO was no longer in Notre Dame when his adopted son so abruptly cut the fatal noose in which the unhappy Archdeacon had caught the Egyptian and himself at the same time. On entering the sacristy, he had torn off alb, cope, and stole, had tossed them into the hands of the amazed verger, escaped by the private door of the cloister, ordered a wherryman of the “Terrain” to put him across to the left bank of the Seine, and had plunged into the steep streets of the University, knowing not whither he went, meeting at every step bands of men and women pressing excitedly towards the Pont Saint-Michel in the hope of “still arriving in time” to see the witch hanged—pale, distraught, confused, more blinded and scared than any bird of night set free and flying before a troop of children in broad daylight. He was no longer conscious of where he was going, what were his thoughts, his imaginations. He went blindly on, walking, running, taking the streets at random, without any definite plan, save the one thought of getting away from the Grève, the horrible Grève, which he felt confusedly to be behind him.      1   
  In this manner he proceeded the whole length of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and at last left the town by the Porte Saint-Victor. He continued his flight so long as he could see, on turning round, the bastioned walls of the University, and the sparse houses of the faubourg; but when at last a ridge of rising ground completely hid hateful Paris from his view—when he could imagine himself a hundred leagues away from it, in the country, in a desert—he stopped and dared to draw a free breath.      2   
  Frightful thoughts now crowded into his mind. He saw clearly into his soul and shuddered. He thought of the unfortunate girl he had ruined and who had ruined him. He let his haggard eye pursue the tortuous paths along which Fate had driven them to their separate destinies up to the point of junction where she had pitilessly shattered them one against the other. He thought of the folly of lifelong vows, of the futility of chastity, science, religion, and virtue, of the impotence of God. He pursued these arguments with wicked gusto, and the deeper he sank in the slough the louder laughed the Satan within him. And discovering, as he burrowed thus into his soul, how large a portion Nature had assigned in it to the passions, he smiled more sardonically than before. He shook up from the hidden depths of his heart all his hatred, all his wickedness; and he discovered with the calm eye of the physician examining a patient that this same hatred and wickedness were but the outcome of perverted love—that love, the source of every human virtue, turned to things unspeakable in the heart of a priest, and that a man constituted as he was, by becoming a priest, made of himself a demon—and he laughed horribly. But suddenly he grew pale again as he contemplated the worst side of his fatal passion—of that corrosive, venomous, malignant, implacable love which had brought the one to the gallows and the other to hell—her to death, him to damnation.      3   
  And then his laugh came again when he remembered that phœbus was living; that, after all, the captain was alive and gay and happy, with a finer uniform than ever, and a new mistress whom he brought to see the old one hanged. And he jeered sardonically at himself to think that of all the human beings whose death he had desired, the Egyptian, the one creature he did not hate, was the only one he had succeeded in destroying.      4   
  From the captain, his thoughts wandered to the crowd of that morning, and he was seized with a fresh kind of jealousy. He reflected that the people, the whole population, had beheld the woman he loved—divested of all but a single garment—almost nude. He wrung his hands in agony at the thought that the woman, a mere glimpse of whose form veiled in shadows and seen by his eye alone would have afforded him the supreme measure of bliss, had been given thus, in broad daylight, at high noon, to the gaze of a whole multitude, clad as for a bridal night. He wept with rage over all these mysteries of love profaned, sullied, stripped, withered forever. He wept with rage to think how many impure eyes that ill fastened garment had satisfied; that this fair creature, this virgin lily, this cup of purity and all delights to which he would only have set his lips in fear and trembling, had been converted into a public trough, as it were, at which the vilest of the populace of Paris, the thieves, the beggars, the lackeys, had come to drink in common of a pleasure—shameless, obscene, depraved.      5   
  Again, when he sought to picture to himself the happiness that might have been his had she not been a gipsy and he a priest; had phœbus not existed, and had she but loved him; when he told himself that a life of serenity and love would have been possible to him too; that at that very moment there were happy couples to be found here and there on earth, whiling away the hours in sweet communing, in orange groves, by the Brookside, under the setting sun or a starry night; and that had God so willed it, he might have made with her one of those thrice-blessed couples, his heart melted in tenderness and despair.      6   
  Oh, it was she! still and forever she!—that fixed idea that haunted him incessantly, that tortured him, gnawed his brain, wrung his very vitals! He regretted nothing, he repented of nothing; all that he had done he was ready to do again; better a thousand times see her in the hands of the hangman than the arms of the soldier; but he suffered, he suffered so madly that there were moments when he tore his hair in handfuls from his head to see if it had not turned white.      7   
  At one moment it occurred to him that this, perhaps, was the very minute at which the hideous chain he had seen in the morning was tightening its noose of iron round that fragile and slender neck. Great drops of agony burst from every pore at the thought.      8   
  At another moment he took a diabolical pleasure in torturing himself by bringing before his mind’s eye a simultaneous picture of Emeralds as he had seen her for the first time—filled with life and careless joy, gaily attired, dancing, airy, melodious—and Emeralds at her last hour, in her shift, a rope about her neck, slowly ascending with her naked feet the painful steps of the gibbet. He brought this double picture so vividly before him that a terrible cry burst from him.      9   
  While this hurricane of despair was upheaving, shattering, tearing, bending, uprooting everything within his soul, he gazed absently at the prospect around him. Some fowls were busily pecking and scratching at his feet; bright-coloured beetles ran to and for in the sunshine; overhead, groups of dappled cloud sailed in a deep-blue sky; on the horizon the spire of the Abbey of Saint victor reared its slate obelisk above the rising ground; and the miller of the Butte-Copeaux whistled as he watched the busily turning sails of his mill. All this industrious, orderly, tranquil activity, recurring around him under a thousand different aspects, hurt him. He turned to flee once more.     10   
  He wandered thus about the country till the evening. This fleeing from Nature, from life, from himself, from mankind, from God, went on through the whole day. Now he would throw himself face downward on the ground, digging up the young blades of corn with his nails; or he would stand still in the middle of some deserted village street, his thoughts so insupportable that he would seize his head in both hands as if to tear it from his shoulders and dash it on the stones.     11   
  Towards the hour of sunset, he took counsel with himself and found that he was well-nigh mad. The storm that had raged in him since the moment that he lost both the hope and the desire to save the gipsy, had left him without one sane idea, one rational thought. His reason lay prostrate on the verge of utter destruction. But two distinct images remained in his mind: Emeralds and the gibbet. The rest was darkness. These two images in conjunction formed to his mind a ghastly group, and the more strenuously he fixed upon them such power of attention and thought as remained to him, the more he saw them increase according to a fantastic progression—the one in grace, in charm, in beauty, in luster; the other in horror; till, at last, Emeralds appeared to him as a star, and the gibbet as a huge fleshliness arm. Strange to say, during all this torture he never seriously thought of death. Thus was the wretched man constituted; he clung to life—maybe, indeed, he saw hell in the background.     12   
  Meanwhile night was coming on apace. The living creature still existing within him began confusedly to think of return. He imagined himself far from Paris, but on looking about him he discovered that he had but been travelling in a circle round the University. The spire of Saint-Sulpice and the three lofty pinnacles of Saint-Germaindes-Prés broke the sky-line on his right. He bent his steps in that direction. When he heard the “Qui vive?” of the Abbot’s guard round the battlemented walls of Saint-Germain, he turned aside, took a path lying before him between the abbey mill and the lazaretto, and found himself in a few minutes on the edge of the Pré aux-Clercs—the Students’ Meadow. This ground was notorious for the brawls and tumults which went on in it day and night; it was a “hydra” to the poor monks of Saint-Germain—Quod monachis Sancti Germani pratensis hydra fuit, clericis nova semper dissidionum capita suscitantibus. 1     13   
  The Archdeacon feared meeting some one there, he dreaded the sight of a human face; he would not enter the streets till the latest moment possible. He therefore skirted the Pré-aux-Clercs, took the solitary path that lay between it and the Dieu-Neuf, and at length reached the water-side. There Dom Claude found a boatman, who for a few deniers took him up the river as far as the extreme point of the island of the City, and landed him on that deserted tongue of land on which the reader has already seen Gringoire immersed in reverie, and which extended beyond the royal gardens parallel to the island of the cattleferry.     14   
  The monotonous rocking of the boat and the ripple of the water in some degree soothed the unhappy man. When the boatman had taken his departure, Claude remained on the bank in a kind of stupor, looking straight before him and seeing the surrounding objects only through a distorting mist which converted the whole scene into a kind of phantasmagoria. The exhaustion of a violent grief will often produce this effect upon the mind.     15   
  The sun had set behind the lofty Tour-de-Nesle. It was the hour of twilight. The sky was pallid, the river was white. Between these two pale surfaces, the left bank of the Seine, on which his eyes were fixed, reared its dark mass, and, dwindling to a point in the perspective, pierced the mists of the horizon like a black arrow. It was covered with houses, their dim silhouettes standing out sharply against the pale background of sky and river. Here and there windows began to twinkle like holes in a brasier. The huge black obelisk thus isolated between the two white expanses of sky and river—particularly wide at this point—made a singular impression on Dom Claude, such as a man would experience lying on his back at the foot of Strassburg Cathedral and gazing up at the immense spire piercing the dim twilight of the sky above his head. Only here it was Claude who stood erect and the spire that lay at his feet; but as the river, by reflecting the sky, deepened infinitely the abyss beneath him, the vast promontory seemed springing as boldly into the void as any cathedral spire. The impression on him was therefore the same, and moreover, in this respect, stronger and more profound, in that not only was it the spire of Strassburg Cathedral, but a spire two leagues high—something unexampled, gigantic, immeasurable—an edifice such as mortal eye had never yet beheld—a Tower of Babel. The chimneys of the houses, the battlemented walls, the carved roofs and gables, the spire of the Augustines, the Tour-de-Nesle, all the projections that broke the line of the colossal obelisk heightened the illusion by their bizarre effect, presenting to the eye all the effect of a florid and fantastic sculpture.     16   
  In this condition of hallucination Claude was persuaded that with living eye he beheld the veritable steeple of hell. The myriad lights scattered over the entire height of the fearsome tower were to him so many openings into the infernal fires—the voices and sounds which rose from it the shrieks and groans of the damned. Fear fell upon him, he clapped his hands to his ears that he might hear no more, turned his back that he might not see, and with long strides fled away from the frightful vision.     17   
  But the vision was within him.     18   
  When he came into the streets again, the people passing to and for in the light of the shop-fronts appeared to him like a moving company of spectres round about him. There were strange roarings in his ears—wild imaginings disturbed his brain. He saw not the houses, nor road, nor vehicles, neither men nor women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects merging into one another at their point of contact. At the corner of the Rue de la Barillerie he passed a chandler’s shop, over the front of which hung, according to immemorial custom, a row of tin hoops garnished with wooden candles, which swayed in the wind and clashed together like castanets. He seemed to hear the skeletons on the gibbets of Montfaucon rattling their bones together.     19   
  “Oh,” he muttered, “the night wind drives them one against another, and mingles the clank of their chains with the rattle of their bones! Maybe she is there among them!”     20   
  Confused and bewildered, he knew not where he went. A few steps farther on he found himself on the Pont Saint-Michel. There was a light in a low window close by: he approached it. Through the cracked panes he saw into a dirty room which awakened some dim recollection in his mind. By the feeble rays of a squalid lamp he discerned a young man, with a fair and joyous face, who with much boisterous laughter was embracing a tawdry, shamelessly dressed girl. Beside the lamp sat an old woman spinning and singing in a quavering voice. In the pauses of the young man’s laughter the priest caught fragments of the old woman’s song. It was weird and horrible:
           “Growl, Grève! bark, Grè!   
Spin, spin, my distaff brave!   
Let the hangman have his cord   
That whistles in the prison yard,   
Growl, Grève! bark, Grève!   
     
“Hemp that makes the pretty rope,   
Sow it widely, give it scope;   
Better hemp than wheaten sheaves;   
Thief there’s none that ever thieves   
The pretty rope, the hempen rope.   
     
“Growl, Grève! bark, Grève!   
To see the girl of pleasure brave   
Dangling on the gibbet high,   
Every window is an eye.   
Growl, Grève! bark, Grève!”   
  21   
  And the young man laughed and fondled the girl all the while. The old woman was La Falourdel, the girl was a courtesan of the town, and the young man was his brother Jehan.     22   
  He continued to look on at the scene—as well see this as any other.     23   
  He saw Jehan go to a window at the back of the room, open it, glance across at the quay where a thousand lighted windows twinkled, and then heard him say as he closed the window:     24   
  “As I live, it is night already! The townsfolk are lighting their candles, and God Almighty his stars.”     25   
  Jehan returned to his light o’ love, and smashing a bottle that stood on a table, he exclaimed: “Empty, cor-bœuf!—and I’ve no money! Isabeau, my chuck, I shall never be satisfied with Jupiter till he has turned your two white breasts into two black bottles, that I may suck Beaune wine from them day and night!”     26   
  With this delicate pleasantry, which made the courtesan laugh, Jehan left the house.     27   
  Dom Claude had barely time to throw himself on the ground to escape meeting his brother face to face and being recognised. Happily the street was dark and the scholar drunk. Nevertheless he did notice the figure lying prone in the mud.     28   
  “Oh! oh!” said he, “here’s somebody has had a merry time of it to-day!”     29   
  He gave Dom Claude a push with his foot, while the older man held his breath with fear.     30   
  “Dead drunk!” exclaimed Jehan. “Bravo, he is full. A veritable leech dropped off a wine cask—and bald into the bargain,” he added as he stooped. “’Tis an old man! Fortunate senex!”     31   
  “For all that,” Dom Claude heard him say as he continued his way, “wisdom is a grand thing, and my brother the Archdeacon is a lucky man to be wise and always have money!”     32   
  The Archdeacon then rose and hastened at the top of his speed towards Notre Dame, the huge towers of which he could see rising through the gloom above the houses.     33   
  But when he reached the Parvis, breathless and panting, he dared not lift his eyes to the baleful edifice.     34   
  “Oh,” he murmured, “can it really be that such a thing took place here to-day—this very morning?”     35   
  He presently ventured a glance at the church. Its front was dark. The sky behind glittered with stars; the crescent moon, in her flight upward from the horizon, that moment touched the summit of the right-hand tower, and seemed to perch, like a luminons bird, on the black edge of the sculptured balustrade.     36   
  The cloister gate was shut, but the Archdeacon always carried the key of the tower in which his laboratory was, and he now made use of it to enter the church.     37   
  He found it dark and silent as a cavern. By the thick shadows that fell from all sides in broad patches, he knew that the hangings of the morning’s ceremony had not yet been removed. The great silver cross glittered far off through the gloom, sprinkled here and there with shining points, like the Milky Way of that sepulchral night. The windows of the choir showed, above the black drapery, the upper extremity of their pointed arches, the stained glass of which, shot through by a ray of moonlight, had only the uncertain colours of the night—an indefinable violet, white, and blue, of a tint to be found only in the faces of the dead. To the Archdeacon this half circle of pallid Gothic window-tops surrounding the choir seemed like the mitres of bishops gone to perdition. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he thought they were a circle of ghastly faces looking down upon him.     38   
  He fled on through the church. Then it seemed to him that the church took to itself life and motion—swayed and heaved; that each massive column had turned to an enormous limb beating the ground with its broad stone paw; and that the gigantic Cathedral was nothing but a prodigious elephant, snorting and stamping, with its pillars for legs, its two towers for tusks, and the immense black drapery for caparison.     39   
  Thus his delirium or his madness had reached such a pitch of intensity, that the whole external world had become to the unhappy wretch one great Apocalypse—visible, palpable, appalling.     40   
  He found one minute’s respite. Plunging into the side aisle, he caught sight, behind a group of pillars, of a dim red light. He ran to it as to a star of safety. It was the modest lamp which illumined day and night the public breviary of Notre Dame under its iron trellis. He cast his eye eagerly over the sacred book, in the hope of finding there some word of consolation or encouragement. The volume lay open at this passage of Job, over which he ran his bloodshot eye: “Then a spirit passed before my face, and I felt a little breath, and the hair of my flesh stood up.”     41   
  On reading these dismal words, he felt like a blind man who finds himself wounded by the stick he had picked up for his guidance. His knees bent under him, and he sank upon the pavement thinking of her who had died that day. So many hideous fumes passed through and out of his brain that he felt as if his head had become one of the chimneys of hell.     42   
  He must have remained long in that position—past thought, crushed and passive in the clutch of the Fiend. At last some remnant of strength returned to him, and he bethought him of taking refuge in the tower, beside his faithful Quasimodo. He rose to his feet, and fear being still upon him, he took the lamp of the breviary to light him. It was sacrilege—but he was beyond regarding such trifles.     43   
  Slowly he mounted the stairway of the tower, filled with a secret dread which was likely to be shared by the few persons traversing the Parvis at that hour and saw the mysterious light ascending so late from loophole to loophole up to the top of the steeple.     44   
  Suddenly he felt a breath of cold air on his face, and found himself under the doorway of the upper gallery. The air was sharp, the sky streaked with clouds in broad white streamers, which drifted into and crushed one another like river ice breaking up after a thaw. The crescent moon floating in their midst looked like some celestial bark set fast among these icebergs of the air.     45   
  He glanced downward through the row of slender columns which joins the two towers and let his eye rest for a moment on the silent multitude of the roofs of Paris, shrouded in a veil of mist and smoke—jagged, innumerable, crowded, and small, like the waves of a tranquil sea in a summer’s night.     46   
  The young moon shed but a feeble ray, which imparted an ashy hue to earth and sky.     47   
  At this moment the tower clock lifted its harsh and grating voice. It struck twelve. The priest recalled the hour of noon—twelve hours had passed.     48   
  “Oh,” he whispered to himself, “she must be cold by now!” A sudden puff of wind extinguished his lamp, and almost at the same instant, at the opposite corner of the tower, he saw a shade—a something white—a shape, a female form appear. He trembled. Beside this woman stood a little goat that mingled its bleating with the last quaverings of the clock.     49   
  He had the strength to look. It was she.     50   
  She was pale and heavy-eyed. Her hair fell round her shoulders as in the morning, but there was no rope about her neck, her hands were unbound. She was free, she was dead.     51   
  She was clad in white raiment, and a white veil was over her head.     52   
  She moved towards him slowly looking up to heaven, followed by the unearthly goat. He felt turned to stone—too petrified to fly. At each step that she advanced, he fell back—that was all. In this manner he re-entered the dark vault of the stairs. He froze at the thought that she might do the same; had she done so, he would have died of horror.     53   
  She came indeed as far as the door, halted there for some moments, gazing fixedly into the darkness, but apparently without perceiving the priest, and passed on. She appeared to him taller than he remembered her in life—he saw the moon through her white robe—he heard her breath.     54   
  When she had passed by, he began to descend the stairs with the same slow step he had observed in the specter—thinking himself a specter too—haggard, his hair erect, the extinguished lamp still in his hand. And as he descended the spiral stairs he distinctly heard a voice laughing and repeating in his ears: “Then a spirit passed before my face, and I felt a little breath, and the hair of my flesh stood up.”     55   


Note 1.  Because to the monks of Saint-Germain this meadow was a hydra ever raising its head anew in the brawls of the clerks. [back]

   
Book IX   
II. Humpbacked, One-Eyed, Lame   
     
DOWN to the time of Louis XI, every town in France had its place of sanctuary, forming, in the deluge of penal laws and barbarous jurisdictions, that inundated the cities, islands, as it were, which rose above the level of human justice. Any criminal landing upon one of them was safe. In every town there were almost as many of these places of refuge as there were of execution. It was the abuse of impunity side by side with the abuse of capital punishment—two evils seeking to correct one another. The royal palaces, the mansions of the princes, and, above all, the churches, had right of sanctuary. Sometimes a whole town that happened to require repealing was turned temporarily into a place of refuge. Louis XI made all Paris a sanctuary in I467.      1   
  Once set foot within the refuge, and the person of the criminal was sacred; but he had to beware of leaving it—one step outside the sanctuary, and he fell back into the waters. The wheel, the gibbet, the strappado, kept close guard round the place of refuge, watching incessantly for their prey, like sharks about a vessel. Thus, men under sentence of death had been known to grow gray in a cloister, on the stairs of a palace, in the grounds of an abbey, under the porch of a church—in so far, the sanctuary itself was but a prison under another name.      2   
  It sometimes happened that a solemn decree of parliament would violate the sanctuary, and reconsign the condemned into the hands of the executioner; but this was of rare occurrence. The parliaments stood in great awe of the bishops, and if it did come to a brush between the two robes, the gown generally had the worst of it against the cassock. Occasionally, however, as in the case of the assassination of Petit-Jean, the executioner of Paris, and in that of Emery Rousseau, the murderer of Jean Valleret, justice would overleap the barriers of the Church, and pass on to the execution of its sentence. But, except armed with a decree of parliament, woe betide him who forcibly violated a place of sanctuary! We know what befell Robert de Clermont, Marshal of France, and Jean de Chalons, Marshal of Champagne; and yet it was only about a certain Perrin Marc, a moneychanger’s assistant and a vile assassin; but the two marshals had forced the doors of the Church of Saint-Méry—therein lay the enormity of the transgression.      3   
  According to tradition, these places of refuge were so surrounded by an atmosphere of reverence that it even affected animals. Thus Aymoin relates that a stag, hunted by King Dagobert, having taken refuge beside the tomb of Saint-Denis, the hounds stopped the chase and stood barking.      4   
  The churches usually had a cell set apart for these refugees. In I407, Nicolas Flamel had one built in Saint-Jacquesde-la-Boucherie which cost him four livres, six sous, sixteen deniers parisis.      5   
  In Notre Dame it was a cell constructed over one of the side aisles, under the buttresses and facing towards the cloister, exactly on the spot where the wife of the present concierge of the towers has made herself a garden—which is to the hanging gardens of Babylon as a lettuce to a palm tree, as a portress to Semiramis.      6   
  There it was that, after his frantic and triumphant course round the towers and galleries, Quasimodo had deposited Esmeralda. So long as the course had lasted the girl had remained almost unconscious, having only a vague perception that she was rising in the air—that she was floating—flying—being borne upward away from the earth. Ever and anon she heard the wild laugh, the raucous voice of Quasimodo in her ear: she half opened her eyes and saw beneath her confusedly the thousand roofs of Paris, tile and slate like a red and blue mosaic—and above her head Quasimodo’s frightful and jubilant face. Then her eye-lids closed; she believed that all was finished, that she had been executed during her swoon, and that the hideous genio who had ruled her destiny had resumed possession of her soul and was bearing it away. She dared not look at him, but resigned herself utterly.      7   
  But when the bell-ringer, panting and dishevelled, had deposited her in the cell of refuge, when she felt his great hands gently untying the cords that cut her arms, she experienced that shock which startles out of their sleep the passengers of a vessel that strikes on a rock in the middle of a dark night. So were her thoughts awakened, and her senses returned to her one by one. She perceived that she was in Notre Dame, she remembered that she had been snatched from the hands of the executioner, that Phœbus was living, and that phœbus loved her no more; and these last two thoughts—the one so sweet, the other so bitter—presenting themselves simultaneously to the poor creature, she turned to Quasimodo, who still stood before her, filling her with terror, and said:      8   
  “Why did you save me?”      9   
  He looked at her anxiously, striving to divine her words. She repeated her question, at which he gave her another look of profound sadness, and, to her amazement, hastened away.     10   
  In a few minutes he returned, carrying a bundle which he threw at her feet. It was some wearing apparel deposited for her by some charitable women. At this she cast down her eyes over her person, saw that she was nearly naked, and blushed. Life was coming back to her.     11   
  Quasimodo seemed to feel something of this modest shame. He veiled his eye with his broad hand and left her once more, but this time with reluctant steps.     12   
  She hastened to clothe herself in the white robe and the white veil Supplied to her. It was the habit of a novice of the Hôtel-Dieu.     13   
  She had scarcely finished when she saw Quasimodo returning, carrying a basket under one arm and a mattress under the other. The basket contained a bottle and bread and a few other provisions. He set the basket on the ground and said, “Eat.” He spread the mattress on the stone floor—“Sleep,” he said.     14   
  It was his own food, his own bed, that the poor bell-ringer had been to fetch.     15   
  The gipsy raised her eyes to him to thank him, but she could not bring herself to utter a word. The poor devil was in truth too frightful. She dropped her head with a shudder.     16   
  “I frighten you,” said he. “I am very ugly I know. Do not look upon me. Listen to what I have to say. In the daytime you must remain here, but at night you may go where you will about the church. But go not one step outside the church by day or night. You would be lost. They would kill you, and I should die.”     17   
  Touched by his words, she raised her head to answer him. He had disappeared. She found herself alone, musing upon the strange words of this almost monster and struck by the tone of his voice—so harsh, and yet so gentle.     18   
  She presently examined her cell. It was a chamber some six feet square, with a small window and a door following the slight incline of the roofing of flat stones outside. Several gargoyles with animal heads seemed bending down and stretching their necks to look in at her window. Beyond the roof she caught a glimpse of a thousand chimney-tops from which rose the smoke of the many hearths of Paris—a sad sight to the poor gipsy—a foundling, under sentence of death, an unhappy outcast without country, or kindred, or home!     19   
  At the moment when the thought of her friendless plight assailed her more poignantly than ever before, she was startled—everything frightened her now—by a shaggy, bearded head rubbing against her knees. It was the poor little goat, the nimble Djali, which had made its escape and followed her at the moment when Quasimodo scattered Charmolue’s men, and had been lavishing its caresses in vain at her feet for nearly an hour without obtaining a single glance from her. Its mistress covered it with kisses.     20   
  “Oh, Djali!” she exclaimed, “how could I have forgotten thee thus? And dost thou still love me? Oh, thou—thou art not ungrateful!”     21   
  And then, as if some invisible hand had lifted the weight which had lain so long upon her heart and kept back her tears, she began to weep, and as the tears flowed all that was harshest and most bitter in her grief and pain was washed away.     22   
  When night fell she found the air so sweet, the moonlight so soothing, that she ventured to make the round of the high gallery that surrounds the church; and it brought her some relief, so calm and distant did earth seem to her from that height.

Book IX   
III. Deaf   
     
ON waking the next morning, she discovered to her surprise that she had slept—poor girl, she had so long been a stranger to sleep. A cheerful ray from the rising sun streamed through her window and fell upon her face. But with the sun something else looked in at her window that frightened her—the unfortunate countenance of Quasimodo. Involuntarily she closed her eyes to shut out the sight, but in vain; she still seemed to see through her rosy eye-lids that goblin face—one-eyed, broken-toothed, mask-like. Then, while she continued to keep her eyes shut, she heard a grating voice say in gentlest accents:      1   
  “Be not afraid. I am a friend. I did but come to watch you sleeping. That cannot hurt you, can it, that I should come and look at you asleep? What can it matter to you if I am here so long as your eyes are shut? Now I will go. There, I am behind the wall—you may open your eyes again.”      2   
  There was something more plaintive still than his words, and that was the tone in which they were spoken. Much touched, the gipsy opened her eyes. It was true, he was no longer at the window. She ran to it and saw the poor hunchback crouching against a corner of the wall in an attitude of sorrow and resignation. Overcoming with an effort the repulsion he inspired in her, “Come back,” she said softly. From the movement of her lips, Quasimodo understood that she was driving him away; he therefore rose and hobbled off slowly, with hanging head, not venturing to lift even his despairing glance to the girl.      3   
  “Come hither!” she called, but he kept on his way. At this she hastened out of the cell, ran after him, and put her hand on his arm. At her touch Quasimodo thrilled from head to foot. He lifted a suppliant eye, and perceiving that she was drawing him towards her, his whole face lit up with tenderness and delight. She would have had him enter her cell, but he remained firmly on the threshold. “No, no,” said he; “the owl goes not into the nest of the lark.”      4   
  She proceeded, therefore, to nestle down prettily on her couch, with the goat asleep at her feet, and both remained thus for some time motionless, gazing in silence—he at so much beauty, she at so much ugliness. Each moment revealed to her some fresh deformity. Her eyes wandered from the bowed knees to the humped back, from the humped back to the cyclops eye. She could not imagine how so misshapen a being could carry on existence. And yet there was diffused over the whole such an air of melancholy and gentleness that she began to be reconciled to it.      5   
  He was the first to break the silence.      6   
  “You were telling me to come back?”      7   
  She nodded in affirmation and said, “Yes.”      8   
  He understood the motion of her head. “Alas!” he said, and hesitated as if reluctant to finish the sentence; “you see, I am deaf.”      9   
  “Poor soul!” exclaimed the gipsy with a look of kindly pity.     10   
  He smiled sorrowfully. “Ah! you think I was bad enough without that? Yes, I am deaf. That is the way I am made! ’Tis horrible, in truth. And you—you are so beautiful.”     11   
  In the poor creature’s tone there was so profound a consciousness of his pitiable state, that she had not the resolution to utter a word of comfort. Besides, he would not have heard it. He continued:     12   
  “Never did I realize my deformity as I do now. When I compare myself with you, I do indeed pity myself—poor unhappy monster that I am! Confess—I look to you like some terrible beast? You—you are like a sunbeam, a drop of dew, the song of a bird! While I am something fearsome—neither man nor beast—a something that is harder, more trodden underfoot, more unsightly than a stone by the wayside!” And he laughed—the most heart-rending kind of laughter in all the world.     13   
  “Yes, I am deaf,” he went on. “But you can speak to me by signs and gestures. I have a master who talks to me in that manner. And then I shall soon know your will by the motion of your lips and by your face.”     14   
  “Well, then,” she said, smiling, “tell me why you saved me.”     15   
  He looked at her attentively while she spoke.     16   
  “I understood,” he replied, “you were asking why I saved you. You have forgotten a poor wretch who tried to carry you off one night—a wretch to whom, next day, you brought relief on the shameful pillory. A drop of water—a little pity—that is more than my whole life could repay. You have forgotten—he remembers.”     17   
  She listened to him with profound emotion. A tear rose to the bell-ringer’s eye, but it did not fall; he seemed to make it a point of honour that it should not fall.     18   
  “Listen,” he said, when he had regained control over himself. “We have very high towers here; a man, if he fell from one, would be dead before he reached the ground. If ever you desire me to throw myself down, you have but to say the word—a glance will suffice.”     19   
  He turned to go. Unhappy as the gipsy girl herself was, this grotesque creature awakened some compassion in her. She signed to him to remain.     20   
  “No, no,” he answered, “I may not stay here too long. I am not at my ease while you look at me. It is only from pity that you do not turn away your eyes. I will go to a spot where I can see you without being seen in my turn. It will be better.     21   
  He drew from his pocket a little metal whistle.     22   
  “Here,” he said, “when you have need of me, when you wish me to come, when you are not too disgusted to look at me, then sound this whistle; I can hear that.”     23   
  He laid the whistle on the floor and hastened away.

Book IX   
IV. Earthenware and Crystal   
     
THE DAYS succeeded one another.      1   
  Little by little tranquillity returned to Esmeralda’s spirits. Excess of suffering, like excess of joy, is a condition too violent to last. The human heart is incapable of remaining long in any extreme. The gipsy had endured such agonies that her only remaining emotion at its recollection was amazement.      2   
  With the feeling of security hope returned to her. She was outside the pale of society, of life; but she had a vague sense that it was not wholly impossible that she should re-enter it—as if dead but having in reserve a key to open her tomb.      3   
  The terrible images that had so long haunted her withdrew by degrees. All the grewsome phantoms—Pierrat Torterue, Jacques Charmolue, and the rest, even the priest himself—faded from her mind.      4   
  And then—Phœbus was living; she was sure of it, she had seen him.      5   
  The fact of phœbus being alive was all in all to her. After the series of earthquake shocks that had overturned everything, left no stone standing on another in her soul, one feeling alone had stood fast, and that was her love for the soldier. For love is like a tree; it grows of itself, strikes its roots deep into our being, and often continues to flourish and keep green over a heart in ruins.      6   
  And the inexplicable part of it is, that the blinder this passion the more tenacious is it. It is never more firmly seated than when it has no sort of reason.      7   
  Assuredly Esmeralda could not think of the captain without pain. Assuredly it was dreadful that he too should have been deceived, should have believed it possible that the dagger-thrust had been dealt by her who would have given a thousand lives for him. And yet he was not so much to blame, for had she not confessed her crime? Had she not yielded, weak woman that she was, to the torture? The fault was hers, and hers alone. She ought rather to have let them tear the nails from her feet than such an avowal from her lips. Still, could she but see Phœbus once again, for a single minute, it needed but a word, a look, to undeceive him, to bring him back to her. She did not doubt it for a moment. She closed her eyes to the meaning of various singular things, or put a plausible construction on them: the chance presence of Phœbus on the day of her penance, the lady who stood beside him—his sister, no doubt. The explanation was most unlikely, but she contented herself with it because she wished to believe that Phœbus still loved her, and her alone. Had he not sworn it to her? And what more did she need—simple and credulous creature that she was? Besides, throughout the whole affair, were not appearances far more strongly against her than against him? So she waited—she hoped.      8   
  Added to this, the church itself, the vast edifice wrapping her round on all sides, protecting, saving her, was a sovereign balm. The solemn lines of its architecture, the religious attitude of all the objects by which the girl was surrounded, the serene and pious thoughts that breathed, so to speak, from every pore of these venerable stones, acted upon her unceasingly. Sounds arose from it, too, of such blessedness and such majesty that they soothed that tortured spirit. The monotonous chants of the priests and the responses of the people—sometimes an inarticulate murmur, sometimes a roll of thunder; the harmonious trembling of the windows, the blast of the organ like a hive of enormous bees, that entire orchestra with its gigantic gamut ascending and descending incessantly—from the voice of the multitude to that of a single bell—deadened her memory, her imagination, her pain. The bells in especial lulled her. A potent magnetism flowed from the vast metal domes and rocked her on its waves.      9   
  Thus, each succeeding morn found her calmer, less pale, breathing more freely. And as the wounds of her spirit healed, her outward grace and beauty bloomed forth again, but richer, more composed. Her former character also returned—something even of her gaiety, her pretty pout, her love for her goat, her pleasure in singing, her delicate modesty. She was careful to retire into the most secluded corner of her cell when dressing in the mornings, less some one from the neighbouring attics should see her through the little window.     10   
  When her dreams of Phœbus left her the leisure, the gipsy sometimes let her thoughts stray to Quasimodo—the only link, the only means of communication with mankind, with life, that remained to her. Hapless creature! she was more cut off from the world than Quasimodo himself. She knew not what to think of the singular friend whom chance had given her. She often reproached herself that hers was not the gratitude that could veil her eyes, but it was useless—she could not accustom herself to the poor bell-ringer. He was too repulsive.     11   
  She had left the whistle he gave her lying on the ground; which, however, did not prevent Quasimodo from appearing from time to time during the first days. She did her very utmost not to turn away in disgust when he brought her the basket of provisions and the pitcher of water, but he instantly perceived the slightest motion of the kind, and hastened sorrowfully away.     12   
  Once he happened to come at the moment she was caressing Djali. He stood a few minutes pensively contemplating the charming group, and at last said, shaking his heavy, misshapen head:     13   
  “My misfortune is that I am still too much like a man. Would I were a beast outright like that goat!”     14   
  She raised her eyes to him in astonishment.     15   
  He answered her look. “Oh, I know very well why.” And he went away.     16   
  Another time he presented himself at the door of the cell (into which he never entered) while Esmeralda was singing an old Spanish ballad, the words of which she did not understand, but which had lingered in her ear because the gipsy women had sung her to sleep with it when a child. At the sight of the hideous face appearing suddenly, the girl broke off with an involuntary gesture of fright. The unhappy bell-ringer fell upon his knees on the threshold, and with a suppliant look clasped his great shapeless hands. “Oh!” he said in piteous accents, “I conjure you to continue—do not drive me away!”     17   
  Unwilling to pain him, she tremblingly resumed her song, and by degrees her fright wore off, till she abandoned herself wholly to the slow and plaintive measure of the air. He, the while, had remained upon his knees, his hands clasped as if in prayer—attentive, scarcely breathing—his gaze fixed on the gipsy’s radiant eyes. He seemed to hear the music of her voice in those twin stars.     18   
  Another time again, he approached her with an awkward and timid air. “Listen,” said he with an effort, “I have something to say to you.” She signed to him that she was listening. He sighed deeply, opened his lips, seemed for a moment to be on the point of speaking, then looked her in the face, shook his head, and slowly withdrew, his forehead bowed in his hand, leaving the Egyptian wondering and amazed.     19   
  Among the grotesques sculptured on the wall, there was one for which he had a particular affection, and with which he often seemed to exchange fraternal looks. Once the gipsy heard him say to it: “Oh! why am I not fashioned of stone like thee?”     20   
  At length, one morning Esmeralda had advanced to the edge of the roof and was looking down into the Place over the sharp roof-ridge of Saint-Jean le Rond. Quasimodo stood behind her, as was his habit, that he might spare her as much as possible the pain of seeing him. Suddenly the gipsy started; a tear and a flash of joy shone together in her eyes; she fell on her knees, and stretching out her arms in anguish towards the Place:     21   
  “Phœbus!” she cried, “come! come to me! one word, one single word, for the love of heaven! Phœbus! Phœbus!”     22   
  Her voice, her face, her gesture, her whole attitude had the heart-rending aspect of a shipwrecked mariner making signals of distress to some gay vessel passing on the distant horizon in a gleam of sunshine.     23   
  Leaning over in his turn, Quasimodo perceived the object of this tender and agonizing prayer—a young man, a soldier, a handsome cavalier glittering in arms and gay attire, who was caracoling through the Place and sweeping his plumed hat to a lady smiling down on him from a balcony. The officer could not hear the unhappy girl calling to him. He was too far off.     24   
  But the poor deaf ringer heard. A profound sigh heaved his breast. He turned away. His heart was swelling with the tears he drove back; his two clenched fists went up convulsively to his head, and when he drew them away they each held a handful of his rough red hair.     25   
  The Egyptian paid no heed to him.     26   
  “Damnation!” he muttered, as he ground his teeth, “so that is how a man should be—he need only have a handsome outside!”     27   
  Meanwhile she was still on her knees crying out in terrible agitation:     28   
  “Oh!—now he is dismounting from his horse—he is going into that house—Phœbus! He does not hear me. Phœbus! The shameless woman, to be speaking to him at the same time that I do! Phœbus!Phœbus!”     29   
  The deaf man watched her. He understood her gestures, and the poor bell-ringer’s eye filled with tears, though he let not one of them fall. Presently he pulled her gently by the hem of her sleeve. She turned round. He had assumed an untroubled mien.     30   
  “Shall I go and fetch him?” he asked quietly.     31   
  She gave a cry of joy. “Oh, go! Go quickly—run! hasten! it is that officer! that officer—bring him to me, and I will love thee!”     32   
  She clasped his knees. He could not refrain from shaking his head mournfully.     33   
  “I will bring him to you,” he said in a low voice; then, turning away his head, he strode to the stair-case, suffocating with sobs.     34   
  By the time he reached the Place there was nothing to be seen but the horse fastened to the door of the Gondelaurier’s house. The captain had gone in.     35   
  Quasimodo looked up at the roof of the Cathedral. Esmeralda was still in the same place, in the same attitude. He made her a melancholy sign of the head, then established himself with his back against one of the posts of the porch, determined to wait until the captain came out.     36   
  It was, at the Logis Gondelaurier, one of those gala days which precede a wedding. Quasimodo saw many people go in, but nobody come away. From time to time he looked up at the church roof. The gipsy never stirred from her post any more than he. A groom came, untied the horse and led him away to the stables of the mansion.     37   
  The whole day passed thus. Quasimodo leaning against the post, Esmeralda on the roof, Phœbus, no doubt, at the feet of Fleur-de-Lys.     38   
  Night fell at last—a dark night without a moon. Quasimodo might strain his gaze towards Esmeralda, she faded into a mere glimmer of light in the gloaming—then nothing; all was swallowed up in darkness.     39   
  He now saw the whole façade of the Gondelaurier mansion illuminated from top to bottom. He saw one after another the windows in the Place lit up, one after another also he saw the lights disappear from them; for he remained the whole evening at his post. The officer never came out. When the last wayfarer had gone home, when every window of the other houses was dark, Quasimodo, quite alone, remained lost in the shadows. The Parvis of Notre Dame was not lighted in those days.     40   
  However, the windows of the Gondelaurier mansion blazed on even after midnight. Quasimodo, motionless, and ever on the alert, saw a ceaseless crowd of moving, dancing shadows pass across the many-coloured windows. Had he not been deaf, in proportion as the murmur of slumbering Paris died away, he would have heard more and more distinctly from within the Logis Gondelaurier the sound of revelry, of laughter, and of music.     41   
  Towards one in the morning the guests began to depart. Quasimodo, crouching in the deep shadow, watched them all as they passed under the torch-lit doorway. The captain was not among them.     42   
  He was filled with sadness; now and then he looked up into the air like one weary of waiting. Great black clouds, heavy and ragged, hung in deep festoons under the starry arch of night—the cobwebs of the celestial roof.     43   
  At one of these moments he suddenly saw the folding glass door on to the balcony, the stone balustrade of which was dimly visible above him, open cautiously and give passage to a couple, behind whom it closed noiselessly. It was a male and female figure, in whom Quasimodo had no difficulty in recognising the handsome captain and the young lady he had seen that morning welcoming the officer from that same balcony. The Place was in complete darkness, and a thick crimson curtain which had fallen over the glass door as soon as it closed, intercepted any ray of light from the apartment within.     44   
  The young couple, as far as our deaf spectator could judge without hearing a word of what they said, appeared to abandon themselves to a very tender tête-à-tête. The lady had evidently permitted the officer to encircle her waist with his arm, and was not too energetically resisting a kiss.     45   
  Quasimodo witnessed this scene from below—all the more attractive that it was not intended for any strange eye. With bitterness and pain he looked on at so much happiness, so much beauty. After all, nature was not altogether mute in the poor wretch, and though his back was crooked, his nerves were not less susceptible than another man’s. He thought of the miserable share in life that Providence had meted out to him; that woman, and the joys of love, must forever pass him by; that he could never attain to being more than a spectator of the felicity of others. But that which wrung his heart most in this scene, and added indignation to his chagrin, was that the gipsy would suffer were she to behold it. To be sure, the night was very dark, and Esmeralda, if she still remained at her post (and he did not doubt it), was too far off, considering that he himself could barely distinguish the lovers on the balcony; this consoled him somewhat.     46   
  Meanwhile the conversation above became more and more ardent. The lady appeared to be entreating the officer to solicit no more from her; but all that Quasimodo could distinguish were the clasped white hands, the mingled smiles and tears, the soft eyes of the girl uplifted to the stars, the man’s burning gaze devouring her.     47   
  Fortunately for the girl, whose resistance was growing weaker, the door of the balcony opened suddenly, and an elder lady appeared; the fair maid seemed confused, the officer disgusted, and all three returned inside.     48   
  A moment afterward a horse clattered under the porch, and the gay officer wrapped in his military cloak passed Quasimodo quickly.     49   
  The bell-ringer let him turn the corner of the street, and ran after him with his ape-like nimbleness, calling, “Hé there! captain!”     50   
  The captain drew up. “What does this rascal want with me?” said he, peering through the darkness at the queer, uncouth figure hobbling after him.     51   
  Quasimodo came up to him, and boldly taking the horse by the bridle, said, “Follow me, captain; there’s one here would have speech of you.”     52   
  “Horns of the devil!” growled Phœbus, “here’s a villainous, ragged bird methinks I’ve seen somewhere before. Now, then, my friend, let go my horse’s rein, I tell thee——”     53   
  “Captain,” returned the deaf ringer, “are you not asking me who it is?”     54   
  “I am telling thee to let go my horse,” retorted Phœ bus impatiently. “What does the fellow mean by hanging at my charger’s rein? Dost take my beast for a gallows?”     55   
  Far from leaving hold of the horse, Quasimodo was preparing to turn him round. Unable to explain to himself the officer’s resistance, he hastened to say: “Come, captain, ’tis a woman awaits you,” and he added with an effort, “a woman who loves you.”     56   
  “A droll rascal!” said the captain, “who thinks me obliged to run after every woman that loves me, or says she does; especially, if perchance she is anything like thee, owl-faced one! Go—tell her who sent thee that I am going to be married, and she may go to the devil!”     57   
  “Hark you!” cried Quasimodo, thinking with a single word to overcome his hesitation; “come, monseigneur, ’tis the gipsy girl you wot of!”     58   
  This word did indeed make a tremendous impression on Phœbus, but not the kind the hunchback expected. It will be remembered that the gallant officer had retired from the balcony with Fleur-de-Lys a few minutes before Quasimodo saved the condemned girl out of Charmolue’s hands. Since then, in all his visits to the Gondelaurier mansion, he had taken good care not to mention the woman, the recollection of whom, after all, was painful to him; and Fleur-de-Lys, on her part, had not deemed it politic to tell him that the gipsy was alive. Consequently Phœbus believed poor “Similar,” as he called her, to be dead, and what’s more, for a month or two. Added to which, the captain had been thinking for some moments past that the night was pitch dark; that, combined with the sepulchral voice and supernatural ugliness of the strange messenger, it was past midnight; that the street was as deserted as on the night the spectremonk had accosted him, and that his horse had snorted violently at sight of the hunchback.     59   
  “The gipsy girl!” he exclaimed, almost in fear. “How now, comest thou from the other world?” and his hand went to his dagger-hilt.     60   
  “Quick, quick!” said the hunchback, trying to lead the horse on. “This way.”     61   
  Phœbus planted a vigorous kick in the middle of his chest. Quasimodo’s eye flashed. He made as if to throw himself on the captain, but checked himself suddenly. “Oh,” he exclaimed “’tis well for you there’s some one that loves you!” He laid particular stress on the “some one,” then dropping the horse’s bridle, “Go your way!” he cried.     62   
  Phœbus put spurs to his horse and galloped off, swearing lustily.     63   
  Quasimodo watched him disappear down the dark street. “Oh,” murmured the poor deaf hunchback, “to think of refusing that!”     64   
  He returned to the Cathedral, lit his lamp, and mounted the stairs of the tower. As he had surmised, the gipsy was where he had left her.     65   
  The moment she caught sight of him she ran to him. “Alone!” she cried, clasping her beautiful hands in despair. “I did not find him,” answered Quasimodo coldly.     66   
  “You should have waited the whole night through!” she retorted vehemently.     67   
  He saw her angry gesture and understood the reproach. “I will watch better another time,” he said, hanging his head.     68   
  “Get you gone!” said she.     69   
  He left her. She was displeased with him. But he had chosen rather to be misjudged by her than give her pain. He kept all the grief to himself.     70   
  From that day forward the gipsy saw him no more; he came no more to her cell. At most she would catch a glimpse now and then of the bell-ringer’s countenance looking mournfully down upon her from the summit of a tower, but directly she perceived him he would vanish.     71   
  We must confess that she was not greatly affected by this voluntary withdrawal of the hunchback. In her heart she was grateful to him for it. Nor did Quasimodo delude himself upon the subject.     72   
  She saw him no more, but she felt the presence of a good genius about her. Her provisions were renewed by an invisible hand while she slept. One morning she found a cage of birds on her window-sill. Above her cell there was a sculptured figure that frightened her. She had given evidence of this more than once in Quasimodo’s presence. One morning (for all these things were done in the night) she woke to find it gone. It had been broken away, and whoever had climbed up to that figure must have risked his life.     73   
  Sometimes, in the evening, she would hear a voice concealed under the leaden eaves of the steeple, singing, as if to lull her to sleep, a melancholy and fantastic song, without rhyme or rhythm, such as a deaf man might make:
                 “Look not on the face,   
      Maiden, look upon the heart.   
The heart of a fair youth is oft unsightly;   
There be hearts that cannot hold love long.   
      Maiden, the pine’s not fair to see,   
      Not fair to see as the poplar is,   
      But it keeps its green the winter through.   
     
      “Alas, ’tis vain to speak like this!   
      What is not fair ought not to be;   
      Beauty will only beauty love;   
      April looks not on January.   
     
      “Beauty is perfect.   
      Beauty can do all.   
Beauty is the only thing that does not live by halves.   
      The raven flies only by day.   
      The owl flies only by night.   
      The swan flies day and night.”   
  74   
  One morning when she rose she found two vases full of flowers standing at the window. One of them was of glass, very beautiful in shape and colour, but cracked; it had let all the water in it run out, and the flowers it held were faded. The other was of earthenware, rude and common, but it retained all the water, so that its flowers remained fresh and blooming.     75   
  I knew not if she acted with intention, but Esmeralda took the faded nosegay and wore it in her bosom all day.     76   
  That day the voice from the tower was silent.     77   
  She did not greatly care. She passed her days in caressing Djali, in watching the door of the Gondelaurier mansion, in talking to herself about Phœbus, and crumbling her bread to the swallows.     78   
  Besides, she had altogether ceased to see or hear Quasimodo. The poor bell-ringer seemed to have disappeared from the church. However, one night as she lay awake thinking of her handsome captain, she was startled by hearing the sound of breathing near her cell. She rose, and saw by the light of the moon a shapeless mass lying across her door. It was Quasimodo sleeping there upon the stones.

Book IX   
V. The Key of the Porte Rouge   
     
MEANWHILE public talk had acquainted the Archdeacon with the miraculous manner in which the gipsy girl had been saved. He knew not what his feelings were when he learned this. He had reconciled himself to the thought of Esmeralda’s death, and so had regained some peace of mind—he had touched the depths of possible affliction. The human heart (and Dom Claude had meditated upon these matters) cannot hold more than a given quantity of despair. When the sponge is soaked, an ocean may pass over it without its absorbing one drop more.      1   
  Now Esmeralda dead, the sponge was full; the last word had been said for Dom Claude on this earth. But to know her living, and Phœbus too, was to take up his martyrdom, his pangs, his schemes and alternatives—in short, his whole life again. And Claude was weary of it all.      2   
  When he learned the news, he shut himself up in his cell in the cloister. He did not appear at the conferences of the chapter, nor at any of the services of the church, and closed his door to every one, even the bishop. He kept himself thus immured for several weeks. He was judged to be ill, as indeed he was.      3   
  What was he doing while shut up thus? With what thoughts was the unhappy man contending. Was he making a last stand against his fatal passion—combining some final plan of death for her and perdition for himself?      4   
  His Jehan, his beloved brother, his spoiled darling, came once to his door and knocked, swore, entreated, told his name a dozen times over. The door remained closed.      5   
  He passed whole days with his face pressed against his window, for from thence he could see the cell of Esmeralda, and often the girl herself with her goat, sometimes with Quasimodo. He remarked the deaf hunchback’s assiduities, his obedience, his delicate and submissive ways with the gipsy. He remembered—for he had a long memory, and memory is the scourge of the jealous—the peculiar look the bell-ringer had fixed upon the dancing girl on a certain evening, and he asked himself what motive could have urged Quasimodo to save her. He was witness of a thousand little scenes between the gipsy and the hunchback, the pantomime of which, seen at that distance and commented on by his passion, seemed very tender to him. He mistrusted the capricious fancy of woman. And presently he was vaguely conscious of entertaining a jealousy such as he never could have anticipated—a jealousy that made him redden with shame and indignation.      6   
  “The captain,” thought he, “well, that might pass; but this one—!” The idea overwhelmed him.      7   
  His nights were dreadful. Since ever he learned that the gipsy girl was alive, the cold images of spectres and the grave which had possessed him for a whole day, vanished, and the flesh returned to torment him. He writhed upon his bed to know the girl so near him.      8   
  Each night his delirious imagination called up Esmeralda before him in all the attitudes most calculated to inflame his blood. He saw her swooning over the stabbed officer, her fair, uncovered bosom crimsoned with the young man’s blood—at that moment of poignant delight when the Archdeacon had imprinted on her pallid lips that kiss of which, half dead as she was, the unhappy girl had felt the burning pressure. Again he beheld her disrobed by the rude hands of the torturers, saw them lay bare and thrust into the hideous boot with its iron screws her tiny foot, her round and delicate leg, her white and supple knee. He saw that ivory knee alone left visible outside Torterue’s horrible apparatus. Finally, he pictured to himself the girl in her shift, the rope round her neck, her shoulders and her feet bare, almost naked, as he had seen her that last day and he clenched his hands in agony, and a long shiver ran through him.      9   
  At last one night these images so cruelly inflamed his celibate’s blood that he tore his pillow with his teeth, leaped from his bed, threw a surplice over his night garment, and left his cell, lamp in hand, haggard, half naked, the fire of madness in his eyes.     10   
  He knew where to find the key of the Porte Rouge, the communication between the cloister and the church, and, as we know, he always carried with him a key to the tower stair-case.