~Le corbeau ne vole que le jour, Le hibou ne vole que la nuit,
Le cygne vole la nuit et le jour~.*
* Look not at the face, young girl, look at the heart. The heart of a handsome young man is often deformed. There are hearts in which love does not keep. Young girl, the pine is not beautiful; it is not beautiful like the poplar, but it keeps its foliage in winter. Alas! What is the use of saying that? That which is not beautiful has no right to exist; beauty loves only beauty; April turns her back on January. Beauty is perfect, beauty can do all things, beauty is the only thing which does not exist by halves. The raven flies only by day, the owl flies only by night, the swan flies by day and by night.
One morning, on awaking, she saw on her window two vases filled with flowers. One was a very beautiful and very brilliant but cracked vase of glass. It had allowed the water with which it had been filled to escape, and the flowers which it contained were withered. The other was an earthenware pot, coarse and common, but which had preserved all its water, and its flowers remained fresh and crimson.
I know not whether it was done intentionally, but La Esmeralda took the faded nosegay and wore it all day long upon her breast.
That day she did not hear the voice singing in the tower.
She troubled herself very little about it. She passed her days in caressing Djali, in watching the door of the Gondelaurier house, in talking to herself about Phoebus, and in crumbling up her bread for the swallows.
She had entirely ceased to see or hear Quasimodo. The poor bellringer seemed to have disappeared from the church. One night, nevertheless, when she was not asleep, but was thinking of her handsome captain, she heard something breathing near her cell. She rose in alarm, and saw by the light of the moon, a shapeless mass lying across her door on the outside. It was Quasimodo asleep there upon the stones.
CHAPTER V.
THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR.
In the meantime, public minor had informed the archdeacon of the miraculous manner in which the gypsy had been saved. When he learned it, he knew not what his sensations were. He had reconciled himself to la Esmeralda’s death. In that matter he was tranquil; he had reached the bottom of personal suffering. The human heart (Dora Claude had meditated upon these matters) can contain only a certain quantity of despair. When the sponge is saturated, the sea may pass over it without causing a single drop more to enter it.
Now, with la Esmeralda dead, the sponge was soaked, all was at an end on this earth for Dom Claude. But to feel that she was alive, and Phoebus also, meant that tortures, shocks, alternatives, life, were beginning again. And Claude was weary of all this.
When he heard this news, he shut himself in his cell in the cloister. He appeared neither at the meetings of the chapter nor at the services. He closed his door against all, even against the bishop. He remained thus immured for several weeks. He was believed to be ill. And so he was, in fact.
What did he do while thus shut up? With what thoughts was the unfortunate man contending? Was he giving final battle to his formidable passion? Was he concocting a final plan of death for her and of perdition for himself?
His Jehan, his cherished brother, his spoiled child, came once to his door, knocked, swore, entreated, gave his name half a score of times. Claude did not open.
He passed whole days with his face close to the panes of his window. From that window, situated in the cloister, he could see la Esmeralda’s chamber. He often saw herself with her goat, sometimes with Quasimodo. He remarked the little attentions of the ugly deaf man, his obedience, his delicate and submissive ways with the gypsy. He recalled, for he had a good memory, and memory is the tormentor of the jealous, he recalled the singular look of the bellringer, bent on the dancer upon a certain evening. He asked himself what motive could have impelled Quasimodo to save her. He was the witness of a thousand little scenes between the gypsy and the deaf man, the pantomime of which, viewed from afar and commented on by his passion, appeared very tender to him. He distrusted the capriciousness of women. Then he felt a jealousy which be could never have believed possible awakening within him, a jealousy which made him redden with shame and indignation: “One might condone the captain, but this one!” This thought upset him.
His nights were frightful. As soon as he learned that the gypsy was alive, the cold ideas of spectre and tomb which had persecuted him for a whole day vanished, and the flesh returned to goad him. He turned and twisted on his couch at the thought that the dark-skinned maiden was so near him.
Every night his delirious imagination represented la Esmeralda to him in all the attitudes which had caused his blood to boil most. He beheld her outstretched upon the poniarded captain, her eyes closed, her beautiful bare throat covered with Phoebus’s blood, at that moment of bliss when the archdeacon had imprinted on her pale lips that kiss whose burn the unhappy girl, though half dead, had felt. He beheld her, again, stripped by the savage hands of the torturers, allowing them to bare and to enclose in the boot with its iron screw, her tiny foot, her delicate rounded leg, her white and supple knee. Again he beheld that ivory knee which alone remained outside of Torterue’s horrible apparatus. Lastly, he pictured the young girl in her shift, with the rope about her neck, shoulders bare, feet bare, almost nude, as he had seen her on that last day. These images of voluptuousness made him clench his fists, and a shiver run along his spine.
One night, among others, they heated so cruelly his virgin and priestly blood, that he bit his pillow, leaped from his bed, flung on a surplice over his shirt, and left his cell, lamp in hand, half naked, wild, his eyes aflame.
He knew where to find the key to the red door, which connected the cloister with the church, and he always had about him, as the reader knows, the key of the staircase leading to the towers.
CHAPTER VI.
CONTINUATION OF THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR.
That night, la Esmeralda had fallen asleep in her cell, full of oblivion, of hope, and of sweet thoughts. She had already been asleep for some time, dreaming as always, of Phoebus, when it seemed to her that she heard a noise near her. She slept lightly and uneasily, the sleep of a bird; a mere nothing waked her. She opened her eyes. The night was very dark. Nevertheless, she saw a figure gazing at her through the window; a lamp lighted up this apparition. The moment that the figure saw that la Esmeralda had perceived it, it blew out the lamp. But the young girl had had time to catch a glimpse of it; her eyes closed again with terror.
“Oh!” she said in a faint voice, “the priest!”
All her past unhappiness came back to her like a flash of lightning. She fell back on her bed, chilled.
A moment later she felt a touch along her body which made her shudder so that she straightened herself up in a sitting posture, wide awake and furious.
The priest had just slipped in beside her. He encircled her with both arms.
She tried to scream and could not.
“Begone, monster! begone assassin!” she said, in a voice which was low and trembling with wrath and terror.
“Mercy! mercy!” murmured the priest, pressing his lips to her shoulder.
She seized his bald head by its remnant of hair and tried to thrust aside his kisses as though they had been bites.
“Mercy!” repeated the unfortunate man. “If you but knew what my love for you is! ‘Tis fire, melted lead, a thousand daggers in my heart.”
She stopped his two arms with superhuman force.
“Let me go,” she said, “or I will spit in your face!”
He released her. “Vilify me, strike me, be malicious! Do what you will! But have mercy! love me!”
Then she struck him with the fury of a child. She made her beautiful hands stiff to bruise his face. “Begone, demon!”
“Love me! love mepity!” cried the poor priest returning her blows with caresses.
All at once she felt him stronger than herself.
“There must be an end to this!” he said, gnashing his teeth.
She was conquered, palpitating in his arms, and in his power. She felt a wanton hand straying over her. She made a last effort, and began to cry: “Help! Help! A vampire! a vampire!”
Nothing came. Djali alone was awake and bleating with anguish.
“Hush!” said the panting priest.
All at once, as she struggled and crawled on the floor, the gypsy’s hand came in contact with something cold and metal- lic-it was Quasimodo’s whistle. She seized it with a convulsive hope, raised it to her lips and blew with all the strength that she had left. The whistle gave a clear, piercing sound.
“What is that?” said the priest.
Almost at the same instant he felt himself raised by a vigorous arm. The cell was dark; he could not distinguish clearly who it was that held him thus; but he heard teeth chattering with rage, and there was just sufficient light scattered among the gloom to allow him to see above his head the blade of a large knife.
The priest fancied that he perceived the form of Quasimodo. He assumed that it could be no one but he. He remembered to have stumbled, as he entered, over a bundle which was stretched across the door on the outside. But, as the newcomer did not utter a word, he knew not what to think. He flung himself on the arm which held the knife, crying: “Quasimodo!” He forgot, at that moment of distress, that Quasimodo was deaf.
In a twinkling, the priest was overthrown and a leaden knee rested on his breast.
From the angular imprint of that knee he recognized Quasimodo; but what was to be done? how could he make the other recognize him? the darkness rendered the deaf man blind.
He was lost. The young girl, pitiless as an enraged tigress, did not intervene to save him. The knife was approaching his head; the moment was critical. All at once, his adversary seemed stricken with hesitation.
“No blood on her!” he said in a dull voice.
It was, in fact, Quasimodo’s voice.
Then the priest felt a large hand dragging him feet first out of the cell; it was there that he was to die. Fortunately for him, the moon had risen a few moments before.
When they had passed through the door of the cell, its pale rays fell upon the priest’s countenance. Quasimodo looked him full in the face, a trembling seized him, and he released the priest and shrank back.
The gypsy, who had advanced to the threshold of her cell, beheld with surprise their roles abruptly changed. It was now the priest who menaced, Quasimodo who was the suppliant.
The priest, who was overwhelming the deaf man with gestures of wrath and reproach, made the latter a violent sign to retire.
The deaf man dropped his head, then he came and knelt at the gypsy’s door,–“Monseigneur,” he said, in a grave and resigned voice, “you shall do all that you please afterwards, but kill me first.”
So saying, he presented his knife to the priest. The priest, beside himself, was about to seize it. But the young girl was quicker than be; she wrenched the knife from Quasimodo’s hands and burst into a frantic laugh,–“Approach,” she said to the priest.
She held the blade high. The priest remained undecided.
She would certainly have struck him.
Then she added with a pitiless expression, well aware that she was about to pierce the priest’s heart with thousands of red-hot irons,–
“Ah! I know that Phoebus is not dead!
The priest overturned Quasimodo on the floor with a kick, and, quivering with rage, darted back under the vault of the staircase.
When he was gone, Quasimodo picked up the whistle which had just saved the gypsy.
“It was getting rusty,” he said, as he handed it back to her; then he left her alone.
The young girl, deeply agitated by this violent scene, fell back exhausted on her bed, and began to sob and weep. Her horizon was becoming gloomy once more.
The priest had groped his way back to his cell.
It was settled. Dom Claude was jealous of Quasimodo!
He repeated with a thoughtful air his fatal words: “No one shall have her.”
BOOK TENTH.
CHAPTER I.
GRINGOIRE HAS MANY GOOD IDEAS IN SUCCESSION.–RUE DES BERNARDINS.
As soon as Pierre Gringoire had seen how this whole affair was turning, and that there would decidedly be the rope, hanging, and other disagreeable things for the principal personages in this comedy, he had not cared to identify himself with the matter further. The outcasts with whom he had remained, reflecting that, after all, it was the best company in Paris,–the outcasts had continued to interest themselves in behalf of the gypsy. He had thought it very simple on the part of people who had, like herself, nothing else in prospect but Charmolue and Torterue, and who, unlike himself, did not gallop through the regions of imagination between the wings of Pegasus. From their remarks, he had learned that his wife of the broken crock had taken refuge in Notre-Dame, and he was very glad of it. But he felt no temptation to go and see her there. He meditated occasionally on the little goat, and that was all. Moreover, he was busy executing feats of strength during the day for his living, and at night he was engaged in composing a memorial against the Bishop of Paris, for he remembered having been drenched by the wheels of his mills, and he cherished a grudge against him for it. He also occupied himself with annotating the fine work of Baudry-le- Rouge, Bishop of Noyon and Tournay, _De Cupa Petrarum_, which had given him a violent passion for architecture, an inclination which had replaced in his heart his passion for hermeticism, of which it was, moreover, only a natural corollary, since there is an intimate relation between hermeticism and masonry. Gringoire had passed from the love of an idea to the love of the form of that idea.
One day he had halted near Saint Germain-l’Auxerrois, at the corner of a mansion called “For-l’Evêque ” (the Bishop’s Tribunal), which stood opposite another called “For-le-Roi” (the King’s Tribunal). At this For-l’Evêque, there was a charming chapel of the fourteenth century, whose apse was on the street. Gringoire was devoutly examining its exterior sculptures. He was in one of those moments of egotistical, exclusive, supreme, enjoyment when the artist beholds nothing in the world but art, and the world in art. All at once he feels a hand laid gravely on his shoulder. He turns round. It was his old friend, his former master, monsieur the archdeacon.
He was stupefied. It was a long time since he had seen the archdeacon, and Dom Claude was one of those solemn and impassioned men, a meeting with whom always upsets the equilibrium of a sceptical philosopher.
The archdeacon maintained silence for several minutes, during which Gringoire had time to observe him. He found Dom Claude greatly changed; pale as a winter’s morning, with hollow eyes, and hair almost white. The priest broke the silence at length, by saying, in a tranquil but glacial tone,–
“How do you do, Master Pierre?”
“My health?” replied Gringoire. “Eh! eh! one can say both one thing and another on that score. Still, it is good, on the whole. I take not too much of anything. You know, master, that the secret of keeping well, according to Hippocrates; ~id est: cibi, potus, somni, venus, omnia moderata sint~.”
“So you have no care, Master Pierre?” resumed the archdeacon, gazing intently at Gringoire.
“None, i’ faith!”
“And what are you doing now?”
“You see, master. I am examining the chiselling of these stones, and the manner in which yonder bas-relief is thrown out.”
The priest began to smile with that bitter smile which raises only one corner of the mouth.
“And that amuses you?”
“‘Tis paradise!” exclaimed Gringoire. And leaning over the sculptures with the fascinated air of a demonstrator of living phenomena: “Do you not think, for instance, that yon metamorphosis in bas-relief is executed with much adroitness, delicacy and patience? Observe that slender column. Around what capital have you seen foliage more tender and better caressed by the chisel. Here are three raised bosses of Jean Maillevin. They are not the finest works of this great master. Nevertheless, the naivete, the sweetness of the faces, the gayety of the attitudes and draperies, and that inexplicable charm which is mingled with all the defects, render the little figures very diverting and delicate, perchance, even too much so. You think that it is not diverting?”
“Yes, certainly!” said the priest.
“And if you were to see the interior of the chapel!” resumed the poet, with his garrulous enthusiasm. “Carvings everywhere. ‘Tis as thickly clustered as the head of a cabbage! The apse is of a very devout, and so peculiar a fashion that I have never beheld anything like it elsewhere!”
Dom Claude interrupted him,–
“You are happy, then?”
Gringoire replied warmly;–
“On my honor, yes! First I loved women, then animals. Now I love stones. They are quite as amusing as women and animals, and less treacherous.”
The priest laid his hand on his brow. It was his habitual gesture.
“Really?”
“Stay!” said Gringoire, “one has one’s pleasures!” He took the arm of the priest, who let him have his way, and made him enter the staircase turret of For-l’Evêque. “Here is a staircase! every time that I see it I am happy. It is of the simplest and rarest manner of steps in Paris. All the steps are bevelled underneath. Its beauty and simplicity consist in the interspacing of both, being a foot or more wide, which are interlaced, interlocked, fitted together, enchained enchased, interlined one upon another, and bite into each other in a manner that is truly firm and graceful.”
“And you desire nothing?”
“No.”
“And you regret nothing?”
“Neither regret nor desire. I have arranged my mode of life.”
“What men arrange,” said Claude, “things disarrange.”
“I am a Pyrrhonian philosopher,” replied Gringoire, “and I hold all things in equilibrium.”
“And how do you earn your living?”
“I still make epics and tragedies now and then; but that which brings me in most is the industry with which you are acquainted, master; carrying pyramids of chairs in my teeth.”
“The trade is but a rough one for a philosopher.”
“‘Tis still equilibrium,” said Gringoire. “When one has an idea, one encounters it in everything.”
“I know that,” replied the archdeacon.
After a silence, the priest resumed,–
“You are, nevertheless, tolerably poor?”
“Poor, yes; unhappy, no.”
At that moment, a trampling of horses was heard, and our two interlocutors beheld defiling at the end of the street, a company of the king’s unattached archers, their lances borne high, an officer at their head. The cavalcade was brilliant, and its march resounded on the pavement.
“How you gaze at that officer!” said Gringoire, to the archdeacon.
“Because I think I recognize him.”
“What do you call him?”
“I think,” said Claude, “that his name is Phoebus de Châteaupers.”
“Phoebus! A curious name! There is also a Phoebus, Comte de Foix. I remember having known a wench who swore only by the name of Phoebus.”
“Come away from here,” said the priest. “I have something to say to you.”
From the moment of that troop’s passing, some agitation had pierced through the archdeacon’s glacial envelope. He walked on. Gringoire followed him, being accustomed to obey him, like all who had once approached that man so full of ascendency. They reached in silence the Rue des Bernardins, which was nearly deserted. Here Dom Claude paused.
“What have you to say to me, master?” Gringoire asked him.
“Do you not think that the dress of those cavaliers whom we have just seen is far handsomer than yours and mine?”
Gringoire tossed his head.
“I’ faith! I love better my red and yellow jerkin, than those scales of iron and steel. A fine pleasure to produce, when you walk, the same noise as the Quay of Old Iron, in an earthquake!”
“So, Gringoire, you have never cherished envy for those handsome fellows in their military doublets?”
“Envy for what, monsieur the archdeacon? their strength, their armor, their discipline? Better philosophy and independence in rags. I prefer to be the head of a fly rather than the tail of a lion.”
“That is singular,” said the priest dreamily. “Yet a handsome uniform is a beautiful thing.”
Gringoire, perceiving that he was in a pensive mood, quitted him to go and admire the porch of a neighboring house. He came back clapping his hands.
“If you were less engrossed with the fine clothes of men of war, monsieur the archdeacon, I would entreat you to come and see this door. I have always said that the house of the Sieur Aubry had the most superb entrance in the world.”
“Pierre Gringoire,” said the archdeacon, “What have you done with that little gypsy dancer?”
“La Esmeralda? You change the conversation very abruptly.”
“Was she not your wife?”
“Yes, by virtue of a broken crock. We were to have four years of it. By the way,” added Gringoire, looking at the archdeacon in a half bantering way, “are you still thinking of her?”
“And you think of her no longer?”
“Very little. I have so many things. Good heavens, how pretty that little goat was!”
“Had she not saved your life?”
“‘Tis true, pardieu!”
“Well, what has become of her? What have you done with her?”
“I cannot tell you. I believe that they have hanged her.”
“You believe so?”
“I am not sure. When I saw that they wanted to hang people, I retired from the game.”
“That is all you know of it?”
“Wait a bit. I was told that she had taken refuge in Notre-Dame, and that she was safe there, and I am delighted to hear it, and I have not been able to discover whether the goat was saved with her, and that is all I know.”
“I will tell you more,” cried Dom Claude; and his voice, hitherto low, slow, and almost indistinct, turned to thunder. “She has in fact, taken refuge in Notre-Dame. But in three days justice will reclaim her, and she will be hanged on the Grève. There is a decree of parliament.”
“That’s annoying,” said Gringoire.
The priest, in an instant, became cold and calm again.
“And who the devil,” resumed the poet, “has amused himself with soliciting a decree of reintegration? Why couldn’t they leave parliament in peace? What harm does it do if a poor girl takes shelter under the flying buttresses of Notre- Dame, beside the swallows’ nests?”
“There are satans in this world,” remarked the archdeacon.
“‘Tis devilish badly done,” observed Gringoire.
The archdeacon resumed after a silence,–
“So, she saved your life?”
“Among my good friends the outcasts. A little more or a little less and I should have been hanged. They would have been sorry for it to-day.”
“Would not you like to do something for her?”
“I ask nothing better, Dom Claude; but what if I entangle myself in some villanous affair?”
“What matters it?”
“Bah! what matters it? You are good, master, that you are! I have two great works already begun.”
The priest smote his brow. In spite of the calm which he affected, a violent gesture betrayed his internal convulsions from time to time.
“How is she to be saved?”
Gringoire said to him; “Master, I will reply to you; ~Il padelt~, which means in Turkish, ‘God is our hope.'”
“How is she to be saved?” repeated Claude dreamily.
Gringoire smote his brow in his turn.
“Listen, master. I have imagination; I will devise expedients for you. What if one were to ask her pardon from the king?”
“Of Louis XI.! A pardon!”
“Why not?”
“To take the tiger’s bone from him!”
Gringoire began to seek fresh expedients.
“Well, stay! Shall I address to the midwives a request accompanied by the declaration that the girl is with child!”
This made the priest’s hollow eye flash.
“With child! knave! do you know anything of this?”
Gringoire was alarmed by his air. He hastened to say, “Oh, no, not I! Our marriage was a real ~forismaritagium~. I stayed outside. But one might obtain a respite, all the same.”
“Madness! Infamy! Hold your tongue!”
“You do wrong to get angry,” muttered Gringoire. “One obtains a respite; that does no harm to any one, and allows the midwives, who are poor women, to earn forty deniers parisis.”
The priest was not listening to him!
“But she must leave that place, nevertheless!” he murmured, “the decree is to be executed within three days. Moreover, there will be no decree; that Quasimodo! Women have very depraved tastes!” He raised his voice: “Master Pierre, I have reflected well; there is but one means of safety for her.”
“What? I see none myself.”
“Listen, Master Pierre, remember that you owe your life to her. I will tell you my idea frankly. The church is watched night and day; only those are allowed to come out, who have been seen to enter. Hence you can enter. You will come. I will lead you to her. You will change clothes with her. She will take your doublet; you will take her petticoat.”
“So far, it goes well,” remarked the philosopher, “and then?”
“And then? she will go forth in your garments; you will remain with hers. You will be hanged, perhaps, but she will be saved.”
Gringoire scratched his ear, with a very serious air. “Stay!” said he, “that is an idea which would never have occurred to me unaided.”
At Dom Claude’s proposition, the open and benign face of the poet had abruptly clouded over, like a smiling Italian landscape, when an unlucky squall comes up and dashes a cloud across the sun.
“Well! Gringoire, what say you to the means?”
“I say, master, that I shall not be hanged, perchance, but that I shall be hanged indubitably.
“That concerns us not.”
“The deuce!” said Gringoire.
“She has saved your life. ‘Tis a debt that you are discharging.”
“There are a great many others which I do not discharge.”
“Master Pierre, it is absolutely necessary.”
The archdeacon spoke imperiously.”
“Listen, Dom Claude,” replied the poet in utter consternation. You cling to that idea, and you are wrong. I do not see why I should get myself hanged in some one else’s place.”
“What have you, then, which attaches you so strongly to life?”
“Oh! a thousand reasons!”
“What reasons, if you please?”
“What? The air, the sky, the morning, the evening, the moonlight, my good friends the thieves, our jeers with the old hags of go-betweens, the fine architecture of Paris to study, three great books to make, one of them being against the bishops and his mills; and how can I tell all? Anaxagoras said that he was in the world to admire the sun. And then, from morning till night, I have the happiness of passing all my days with a man of genius, who is myself, which is very agreeable.”
“A head fit for a mule bell!” muttered the archdeacon. “Oh! tell me who preserved for you that life which you render so charming to yourself? To whom do you owe it that you breathe that air, behold that sky, and can still amuse your lark’s mind with your whimsical nonsense and madness? Where would you be, had it not been for her? Do you then desire that she through whom you are alive, should die? that she should die, that beautiful, sweet, adorable creature, who is necessary to the light of the world and more divine than God, while you, half wise, and half fool, a vain sketch of something, a sort of vegetable, which thinks that it walks, and thinks that it thinks, you will continue to live with the life which you have stolen from her, as useless as a candle in broad daylight? Come, have a little pity, Gringoire; be generous in your turn; it was she who set the example.”
The priest was vehement. Gringoire listened to him at first with an undecided air, then he became touched, and wound up with a grimace which made his pallid face resemble that of a new-born infant with an attack of the colic.
“You are pathetic!” said he, wiping away a tear. “Well! I will think about it. That’s a queer idea of yours.–After all,” he continued after a pause, “who knows? perhaps they will not hang me. He who becomes betrothed does not always marry. When they find me in that little lodging so grotesquely muffled in petticoat and coif, perchance they will burst with laughter. And then, if they do hang me,–well! the halter is as good a death as any. ‘Tis a death worthy of a sage who has wavered all his life; a death which is neither flesh nor fish, like the mind of a veritable sceptic; a death all stamped with Pyrrhonism and hesitation, which holds the middle station betwixt heaven and earth, which leaves you in suspense. ‘Tis a philosopher’s death, and I was destined thereto, perchance. It is magnificent to die as one has lived.”
The priest interrupted him: “Is it agreed.”
“What is death, after all?” pursued Gringoire with exaltation. “A disagreeable moment, a toll-gate, the passage of little to nothingness. Some one having asked Cercidas, the Megalopolitan, if he were willing to die: ‘Why not?’ he replied; ‘for after my death I shall see those great men, Pythagoras among the philosophers, Hecataeus among historians, Homer among poets, Olympus among musicians.'”
The archdeacon gave him his hand: “It is settled, then? You will come to-morrow?”
This gesture recalled Gringoire to reality.
“Ah! i’ faith no!” he said in the tone of a man just waking up. “Be hanged! ’tis too absurd. I will not.”
“Farewell, then!” and the archdeacon added between his teeth: “I’ll find you again!”
“I do not want that devil of a man to find me,” thought Gringoire; and he ran after Dom Claude. “Stay, monsieur the archdeacon, no ill-feeling between old friends! You take an interest in that girl, my wife, I mean, and ’tis well. You have devised a scheme to get her out of Notre-Dame, but your way is extremely disagreeable to me, Gringoire. If I had only another one myself! I beg to say that a luminous inspiration has just occurred to me. If I possessed an expedient for extricating her from a dilemma, without compromising my own neck to the extent of a single running knot, what would you say to it? Will not that suffice you? Is it absolutely necessary that I should be hanged, in order that you may be content?”
The priest tore out the buttons of his cassock with impatience: “Stream of words! What is your plan?”
“Yes,” resumed Gringoire, talking to himself and touching his nose with his forefinger in sign of meditation,–“that’s it!–The thieves are brave fellows!–The tribe of Egypt love her!–They will rise at the first word!–Nothing easier!–A sudden stroke.–Under cover of the disorder, they will easily carry her off!–Beginning to-morrow evening. They will ask nothing better.
“The plan! speak,” cried the archdeacon shaking him.
Gringoire turned majestically towards him: “Leave me! You see that I am composing.” He meditated for a few moments more, then began to clap his hands over his thought, crying: “Admirable! success is sure!”
“The plan!” repeated Claude in wrath.
Gringoire was radiant.
“Come, that I may tell you that very softly. ‘Tis a truly gallant counter-plot, which will extricate us all from the matter. Pardieu, it must be admitted that I am no fool.”
He broke off.
“Oh, by the way! is the little goat with the wench?”
“Yes. The devil take you!”
“They would have hanged it also, would they not?”
“What is that to me?”
“Yes, they would have hanged it. They hanged a sow last month. The headsman loveth that; he eats the beast afterwards. Take my pretty Djali! Poor little lamb!”
“Malediction!” exclaimed Dom Claude. “You are the executioner. What means of safety have you found, knave? Must your idea be extracted with the forceps?”
“Very fine, master, this is it.”
Gringoire bent his head to the archdeacon’s head and spoke to him in a very low voice, casting an uneasy glance the while from one end to the other of the street, though no one was passing. When he had finished, Dom Claude took his hand and said coldly : “‘Tis well. Farewell until to-morrow.”
“Until to-morrow,” repeated Gringoire. And, while the archdeacon was disappearing in one direction, he set off in the other, saying to himself in a low voice: “Here’s a grand affair, Monsieur Pierre Gringoire. Never mind! ‘Tis not written that because one is of small account one should take fright at a great enterprise. Bitou carried a great bull on his shoulders; the water-wagtails, the warblers, and the buntings traverse the ocean.”
CHAPTER II.
TURN VAGABOND.
On re-entering the cloister, the archdeacon found at the door of his cell his brother Jehan du Moulin, who was waiting for him, and who had beguiled the tedium of waiting by drawing on the wall with a bit of charcoal, a profile of his elder brother, enriched with a monstrous nose.
Dom Claude hardly looked at his brother; his thoughts were elsewhere. That merry scamp’s face whose beaming had so often restored serenity to the priest’s sombre physiognomy, was now powerless to melt the gloom which grew more dense every day over that corrupted, mephitic, and stagnant soul.
“Brother,” said Jehan timidly, “I am come to see you.”
The archdeacon did not even raise his eyes.
“What then?”
“Brother,” resumed the hypocrite, “you are so good to me, and you give me such wise counsels that I always return to you.”
“What next?”
“Alas! brother, you were perfectly right when you said to me,–“Jehan! Jehan! ~cessat doctorum doctrina, discipulorum disciplina~. Jehan, be wise, Jehan, be learned, Jehan, pass not the night outside of the college without lawful occasion and due leave of the master. Cudgel not the Picards: ~noli, Joannes, verberare Picardos~. Rot not like an unlettered ass, ~quasi asinus illitteratus~, on the straw seats of the school. Jehan, allow yourself to be punished at the discretion of the master. Jehan go every evening to chapel, and sing there an anthem with verse and orison to Madame the glorious Virgin Mary.–Alas! what excellent advice was that!”
“And then?”
“Brother, you behold a culprit, a criminal, a wretch, a libertine, a man of enormities! My dear brother, Jehan hath made of your counsels straw and dung to trample under foot. I have been well chastised for it, and God is extraordinarily just. As long as I had money, I feasted, I lead a mad and joyous life. Oh! how ugly and crabbed behind is debauch which is so charming in front! Now I have no longer a blank; I have sold my napery, my shirt and my towels; no more merry life! The beautiful candle is extinguished and I have henceforth, only a wretched tallow dip which smokes in my nose. The wenches jeer at me. I drink water.–I am overwhelmed with remorse and with creditors.
“The rest?” said the archdeacon.
“Alas! my very dear brother, I should like to settle down to a better life. I come to you full of contrition, I am penitent. I make my confession. I beat my breast violently. You are quite right in wishing that I should some day become a licentiate and sub-monitor in the college of Torchi. At the present moment I feel a magnificent vocation for that profession. But I have no more ink and I must buy some; I have no more paper, I have no more books, and I must buy some. For this purpose, I am greatly in need of a little money, and I come to you, brother, with my heart full of contrition.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes,” said the scholar. “A little money.”
“I have none.”
Then the scholar said, with an air which was both grave and resolute: “Well, brother, I am sorry to be obliged to tell you that very fine offers and propositions are being made to me in another quarter. You will not give me any money? No. In that case I shall become a professional vagabond.”
As he uttered these monstrous words, he assumed the mien of Ajax, expecting to see the lightnings descend upon his head.
The archdeacon said coldly to him,-
“Become a vagabond.”
Jehan made him a deep bow, and descended the cloister stairs, whistling.
At the moment when he was passing through the courtyard of the cloister, beneath his brother’s window, he heard that window open, raised his eyes and beheld the archdeacon’s severe head emerge.
“Go to the devil!” said Dom Claude; “here is the last money which you will get from me?”
At the same time, the priest flung Jehan a purse, which gave the scholar a big bump on the forehead, and with which Jehan retreated, both vexed and content, like a dog who had been stoned with marrow bones.
CHAPTER III.
LONG LIVE MIRTH.
The reader has probably not forgotten that a part of the Cour de Miracles was enclosed by the ancient wall which surrounded the city, a goodly number of whose towers had begun, even at that epoch, to fall to ruin. One of these towers had been converted into a pleasure resort by the vagabonds. There was a drain-shop in the underground story, and the rest in the upper stories. This was the most lively, and consequently the most hideous, point of the whole outcast den. It was a sort of monstrous hive, which buzzed there night and day. At night, when the remainder of the beggar horde slept, when there was no longer a window lighted in the dingy façades of the Place, when not a cry was any longer to be heard proceeding from those innumerable families, those ant-hills of thieves, of wenches, and stolen or bastard children, the merry tower was still recognizable by the noise which it made, by the scarlet light which, flashing simultaneously from the air-holes, the windows, the fissures in the cracked walls, escaped, so to speak, from its every pore.
The cellar then, was the dram-shop. The descent to it was through a low door and by a staircase as steep as a classic Alexandrine. Over the door, by way of a sign there hung a marvellous daub, representing new sons and dead chickens,* with this, pun below: ~Aux sonneurs pour les trépassés~,–The wringers for the dead.
* ~Sols neufs: poulets tués~.
One evening when the curfew was sounding from all the belfries in Paris, the sergeants of the watch might have observed, had it been granted to them to enter the formidable Court of Miracles, that more tumult than usual was in progress in the vagabonds’ tavern, that more drinking was being done, and louder swearing. Outside in the Place, there, were many groups conversing in low tones, as when some great plan is being framed, and here and there a knave crouching down engaged in sharpening a villanous iron blade on a paving-stone.
Meanwhile, in the tavern itself, wine and gaming offered such a powerful diversion to the ideas which occupied the vagabonds’ lair that evening, that it would have been difficult to divine from the remarks of the drinkers, what was the matter in hand. They merely wore a gayer air than was their wont, and some weapon could be seen glittering between the legs of each of them,–a sickle, an axe, a big two-edged sword or the hook of an old hackbut.
The room, circular in form, was very spacious; but the tables were so thickly set and the drinkers so numerous, that all that the tavern contained, men, women, benches, beer-jugs, all that were drinking, all that were sleeping, all that were playing, the well, the lame, seemed piled up pell-mell, with as much order and harmony as a heap of oyster shells. There were a few tallow dips lighted on the tables; but the real luminary of this tavern, that which played the part in this dram-shop of the chandelier of an opera house, was the fire. This cellar was so damp that the fire was never allowed to go out, even in midsummer; an immense chimney with a sculptured mantel, all bristling with heavy iron andirons and cooking utensils, with one of those huge fires of mixed wood and peat which at night, in village streets make the reflection of forge windows stand out so red on the opposite walls. A big dog gravely seated in the ashes was turning a spit loaded with meat before the coals.
Great as was the confusion, after the first glance one could distinguish in that multitude, three principal groups which thronged around three personages already known to the reader. One of these personages, fantastically accoutred in many an oriental rag, was Mathias Hungadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and Bohemia. The knave was seated on a table with his legs crossed, and in a loud voice was bestowing his knowledge of magic, both black and white, on many a gaping face which surrounded him. Another rabble pressed close around our old friend, the valiant King of Thunes, armed to the teeth. Clopin Trouillefou, with a very serious air and in a low voice, was regulating the distribution of an enormous cask of arms, which stood wide open in front of him and from whence poured out in profusion, axes, swords, bassinets, coats of mail, broadswords, lance-heads, arrows, and viretons,* like apples and grapes from a horn of plenty. Every one took something from the cask, one a morion, another a long, straight sword, another a dagger with a cross–shaped hilt. The very children were arming themselves, and there were even cripples in bowls who, in armor and cuirass, made their way between the legs of the drinkers, like great beetles.
* An arrow with a pyramidal head of iron and copper spiral wings, by which a rotatory motion was communicated.
Finally, a third audience, the most noisy, the most jovial, and the most numerous, encumbered benches and tables, in the midst of which harangued and swore a flute-like voice, which escaped from beneath a heavy armor, complete from casque to spurs. The individual who had thus screwed a whole outfit upon his body, was so hidden by his warlike accoutrements that nothing was to be seen of his person save an impertinent, red, snub nose, a rosy mouth, and bold eyes. His belt was full of daggers and poniards, a huge sword on his hip, a rusted cross-bow at his left, and a vast jug of wine in front of him, without reckoning on his right, a fat wench with her bosom uncovered. All mouths around him were laughing, cursing, and drinking.
Add twenty secondary groups, the waiters, male and female, running with jugs on their heads, gamblers squatting over taws, merelles,* dice, vachettes, the ardent game of tringlet, quarrels in one corner, kisses in another, and the reader will have some idea of this whole picture, over which flickered the light of a great, flaming fire, which made a thousand huge and grotesque shadows dance over the walls of the drinking shop.
* A game played on a checker-board containing three concentric sets of squares, with small stones. The game consisted in getting three stones in a row.
As for the noise, it was like the inside of a bell at full peal.
The dripping-pan, where crackled a rain of grease, filled with its continual sputtering the intervals of these thousand dialogues, which intermingled from one end of the apartment to the other.
In the midst of this uproar, at the extremity of the tavern, on the bench inside the chimney, sat a philosopher meditating with his feet in the ashes and his eyes on the brands. It was Pierre Gringoire.
“Be quick! make haste, arm yourselves! we set out on the march in an hour!” said Clopin Trouillefou to his thieves.
A wench was humming,–
“~Bonsoir mon père et ma mere,
Les derniers couvrent le feu~.”*
* Good night, father and mother, the last cover up the fire.
Two card players were disputing,–
“Knave!” cried the reddest faced of the two, shaking his fist at the other; “I’ll mark you with the club. You can take the place of Mistigri in the pack of cards of monseigneur the king.”
“Ugh!” roared a Norman, recognizable by his nasal accent; “we are packed in here like the saints of Caillouville!”
“My sons,” the Duke of Egypt was saying to his audience, in a falsetto voice, “sorceresses in France go to the witches’ sabbath without broomsticks, or grease, or steed, merely by means of some magic words. The witches of Italy always have a buck waiting for them at their door. All are bound to go out through the chimney.”
The voice of the young scamp armed from head to foot, dominated the uproar.
“Hurrah! hurrah!” he was shouting. “My first day in armor! Outcast! I am an outcast. Give me something to drink. My friends, my name is Jehan Frollo du Moulin, and I am a gentleman. My opinion is that if God were a ~gendarme~, he would turn robber. Brothers, we are about to set out on a fine expedition. Lay siege to the church, burst in the doors, drag out the beautiful girl, save her from the judges, save her from the priests, dismantle the cloister, burn the bishop in his palace–all this we will do in less time than it takes for a burgomaster to eat a spoonful of soup. Our cause is just, we will plunder Notre-Dame and that will be the end of it. We will hang Quasimodo. Do you know Quasimodo, ladies? Have you seen him make himself breathless on the big bell on a grand Pentecost festival! ~Corne du Père~! ’tis very fine! One would say he was a devil mounted on a man. Listen to me, my friends; I am a vagabond to the bottom of my heart, I am a member of the slang thief gang in my soul, I was born an independent thief. I have been rich, and I have devoured all my property. My mother wanted to make an officer of me; my father, a sub-deacon; my aunt, a councillor of inquests; my grandmother, prothonotary to the king; my great aunt, a treasurer of the short robe,–and I have made myself an outcast. I said this to my father, who spit his curse in my face; to my mother, who set to weeping and chattering, poor old lady, like yonder fagot on the and-irons. Long live mirth! I am a real Bicêtre. Waitress, my dear, more wine. I have still the wherewithal to pay. I want no more Surène wine. It distresses my throat. I’d as lief, ~corboeuf~! gargle my throat with a basket.”
Meanwhile, the rabble applauded with shouts of laughter; and seeing that the tumult was increasing around him, the scholar cried,–.
“Oh! what a fine noise! ~Populi debacchantis populosa debacchatio~!” Then he began to sing, his eye swimming in ecstasy, in the tone of a canon intoning vespers, ~Quoe cantica! quoe organa! quoe cantilenoe! quoe meloclioe hic sine fine decantantur! Sonant melliflua hymnorum organa, suavissima angelorum melodia, cantica canticorum mira~! He broke off: “Tavern-keeper of the devil, give me some supper!”
There was a moment of partial silence, during which the sharp voice of the Duke of Egypt rose, as he gave instructions to his Bohemians.
“The weasel is called Adrune; the fox, Blue-foot, or the Racer of the Woods; the wolf, Gray-foot, or Gold-foot; the bear the Old Man, or Grandfather. The cap of a gnome confers invisibility, and causes one to behold invisible things. Every toad that is baptized must be clad in red or black velvet, a bell on its neck, a bell on its feet. The godfather holds its head, the godmother its hinder parts. ‘Tis the demon Sidragasum who hath the power to make wenches dance stark naked.”
“By the mass!” interrupted Jehan, “I should like to be the demon Sidragasum.”
Meanwhile, the vagabonds continued to arm themselves and whisper at the other end of the dram-shop.
“That poor Esmeralda!” said a Bohemian. “She is our sister. She must be taken away from there.”
“Is she still at Notre-Dame?” went on a merchant with the appearance of a Jew.
“Yes, pardieu!”
“Well! comrades!” exclaimed the merchant, “to Notre-Dame! So much the better, since there are in the chapel of Saints Féréol and Ferrution two statues, the one of John the Baptist, the other of Saint-Antoine, of solid gold, weighing together seven marks of gold and fifteen estellins; and the pedestals are of silver-gilt, of seventeen marks, five ounces. I know that; I am a goldsmith.”
Here they served Jehan with his supper. As he threw himself back on the bosom of the wench beside him, he exclaimed,–
“By Saint Voult-de-Lucques, whom people call Saint Goguelu, I am perfectly happy. I have before me a fool who gazes at me with the smooth face of an archduke. Here is one on my left whose teeth are so long that they hide his
chin. And then, I am like the Marshal de Gié at the siege of Pontoise, I have my right resting on a hillock. ~Ventre- Mahom~! Comrade! you have the air of a merchant of tennis- balls; and you come and sit yourself beside me! I am a nobleman, my friend! Trade is incompatible with nobility. Get out of that! Hola hé! You others, don’t fight! What, Baptiste Croque-Oison, you who have such a fine nose are going to risk it against the big fists of that lout! Fool! ~Non cuiquam datum est habere nasum~–not every one is favored with a nose. You are really divine, Jacqueline Ronge-Oreille! ’tis a pity that you have no hair! Holà! my name is Jehan Frollo, and my brother is an archdeacon. May the devil fly off with him! All that I tell you is the truth. In turning vagabond, I have gladly renounced the half of a house situated in paradise, which my brother had promised me. ~Dimidiam domum in paradiso~. I quote the text. I have a fief in the Rue Tirechappe, and all the women are in love with me, as true as Saint Eloy was an excellent goldsmith, and that the five trades of the good city of Paris are the tanners, the tawers, the makers of cross-belts, the purse-makers, and the sweaters, and that Saint Laurent was burnt with eggshells. I swear to you, comrades.
“~Que je ne beuvrai de piment,
Devant un an, si je cy ment~.*
* That I will drink no spiced and honeyed wine for a year, if I am lying now.
“‘Tis moonlight, my charmer; see yonder through the window how the wind is tearing the clouds to tatters! Even thus will I do to your gorget.–Wenches, wipe the children’s noses and snuff the candles.–Christ and Mahom! What am I eating here, Jupiter? Ohé! innkeeper! the hair which is not on the heads of your hussies one finds in your omelettes. Old woman! I like bald omelettes. May the devil confound you!–A fine hostelry of Beelzebub, where the hussies comb their heads with the forks!
“~Et je n’ai moi,
Par la sang-Dieu!
Ni foi, ni loi,
Ni feu, ni lieu,
Ni roi,
Ni Dieu.”*
* And by the blood of God, I have neither faith nor law, nor fire nor dwelling-place, nor king nor God.
In the meantime, Clopin Trouillefou had finished the distribution of arms. He approached Gringoire, who appeared to be plunged in a profound revery, with his feet on an andiron.
“Friend Pierre,” said the King of Thunes, “what the devil are you thinking about?”
Gringoire turned to him with a melancholy smile.
“I love the fire, my dear lord. Not for the trivial reason that fire warms the feet or cooks our soup, but because it has sparks. Sometimes I pass whole hours in watching the sparks. I discover a thousand things in those stars which are sprinkled over the black background of the hearth. Those stars are also worlds.”
“Thunder, if I understand you!” said the outcast. “Do you know what o’clock it is?”
“I do not know,” replied Gringoire.
Clopin approached the Duke of Egypt.
“Comrade Mathias, the time we have chosen is not a good one. King Louis XI. is said to be in Paris.”
“Another reason for snatching our sister from his claws,” replied the old Bohemian.
“You speak like a man, Mathias,” said the King of Thunes. “Moreover, we will act promptly. No resistance is to be feared in the church. The canons are hares, and we are in force. The people of the parliament will be well balked to-morrow when they come to seek her! Guts of the pope I don’t want them to hang the pretty girl!”
Chopin quitted the dram-shop.
Meanwhile, Jehan was shouting in a hoarse voice:
“I eat, I drink, I am drunk, I am Jupiter! Eh! Pierre, the Slaughterer, if you look at me like that again, I’ll fillip the dust off your nose for you.”
Gringoire, torn from his meditations, began to watch the wild and noisy scene which surrounded him, muttering between his teeth: “~Luxuriosa res vinum et tumultuosa ebrietas~. Alas! what good reason I have not to drink, and how excellently spoke Saint-Benoit: ‘~Vinum apostatare facit etiam sapientes!'”
At that moment, Clopin returned and shouted in a voice of thunder: “Midnight!”
At this word, which produced the effect of the call to boot and saddle on a regiment at a halt, all the outcasts, men, women, children, rushed in a mass from the tavern, with great noise of arms and old iron implements.
The moon was obscured.
The Cour des Miracles was entirely dark. There was not a single light. One could make out there a throng of men and women conversing in low tones. They could be heard buzzing, and a gleam of all sorts of weapons was visible in the darkness. Clopin mounted a large stone.
“To your ranks, Argot!”* he cried. “Fall into line, Egypt! Form ranks, Galilee!”
* Men of the brotherhood of slang: thieves.
A movement began in the darkness. The immense multitude appeared to form in a column. After a few minutes, the King of Thunes raised his voice once more,–
“Now, silence to march through Paris! The password is, ‘Little sword in pocket!’ The torches will not be lighted till we reach Notre-Dame! Forward, march!”
Ten minutes later, the cavaliers of the watch fled in terror before a long procession of black and silent men which was descending towards the Pont an Change, through the tortuous streets which pierce the close-built neighborhood of the markets in every direction.
CHAPTER IV.
AN AWKWARD FRIEND.
That night, Quasimodo did not sleep. He had just made his last round of the church. He had not noticed, that at the moment when he was closing the doors, the archdeacon had passed close to him and betrayed some displeasure on seeing him bolting and barring with care the enormous iron locks which gave to their large leaves the solidity of a wall. Dom Claude’s air was even more preoccupied than usual. Moreover, since the nocturnal adventure in the cell, he had constantly abused Quasimodo, but in vain did he ill treat, and even beat him occasionally, nothing disturbed the submission, patience, the devoted resignation of the faithful bellringer. He endured everything on the part of the archdeacon, insults, threats, blows, without murmuring a complaint. At the most, he gazed uneasily after Dom Claude when the latter ascended the staircase of the tower; but the archdeacon had abstained from presenting himself again before the gypsy’s eyes.
On that night, accordingly, Quasimodo, after having cast a glance at his poor bells which he so neglected now, Jacqueline, Marie, and Thibauld, mounted to the summit of the Northern tower, and there setting his dark lanturn, well closed, upon the leads, he began to gaze at Paris. The night, as we have already said, was very dark. Paris which, so to speak was not lighted at that epoch, presented to the eye a confused collection of black masses, cut here and there by the whitish curve of the Seine. Quasimodo no longer saw any light with the exception of one window in a distant edifice, whose vague and sombre profile was outlined well above the roofs, in the direction of the Porte Sainte-Antoine. There also, there was some one awake.
As the only eye of the bellringer peered into that horizon of mist and night, he felt within him an inexpressible uneasiness. For several days he had been upon his guard. He had perceived men of sinister mien, who never took their eyes from the young girl’s asylum, prowling constantly about the church. He fancied that some plot might be in process of formation against the unhappy refugee. He imagined that there existed a popular hatred against her, as against himself, and that it was very possible that something might happen soon. Hence he remained upon his tower on the watch, “dreaming in his dream-place,” as Rabelais says, with his eye directed alternately on the cell and on Paris, keeping faithful guard, like a good dog, with a thousand suspicions in his mind.
All at once, while he was scrutinizing the great city with that eye which nature, by a sort of compensation, had made so piercing that it could almost supply the other organs which Quasimodo lacked, it seemed to him that there was something singular about the Quay de la Vieille-Pelleterie, that there was a movement at that point, that the line of the parapet, standing out blackly against the whiteness of the water was not straight and tranquil, like that of the other quays, but that it undulated to the eye, like the waves of a river, or like the heads of a crowd in motion.
This struck him as strange. He redoubled his attention. The movement seemed to be advancing towards the City. There was no light. It lasted for some time on the quay; then it gradually ceased, as though that which was passing were entering the interior of the island; then it stopped altogether, and the line of the quay became straight and motionless again.
At the moment when Quasimodo was lost in conjectures, it seemed to him that the movement had re-appeared in the Rue du Parvis, which is prolonged into the city perpendicularly to the façade of Notre-Dame. At length, dense as was the darkness, he beheld the head of a column debouch from that street, and in an instant a crowd–of which nothing could be distinguished in the gloom except that it was a crowd–spread over the Place.
This spectacle had a terror of its own. It is probable that this singular procession, which seemed so desirous of concealing itself under profound darkness, maintained a silence no less profound. Nevertheless, some noise must have escaped it, were it only a trampling. But this noise did not even reach our deaf man, and this great multitude, of which he saw hardly anything, and of which he heard nothing, though it was marching and moving so near him, produced upon him the effect of a rabble of dead men, mute, impalpable, lost in a smoke. It seemed to him, that he beheld advancing towards him a fog of men, and that he saw shadows moving in the shadow.
Then his fears returned to him, the idea of an attempt against the gypsy presented itself once more to his mind. He was conscious, in a confused way, that a violent crisis was approaching. At that critical moment he took counsel with himself, with better and prompter reasoning than one would have expected from so badly organized a brain. Ought he to awaken the gypsy? to make her escape? Whither? The streets were invested, the church backed on the river. No boat, no issue!–There was but one thing to be done; to allow himself to be killed on the threshold of Notre-Dame, to resist at least until succor arrived, if it should arrive, and not to trouble la Esmeralda’s sleep. This resolution once taken, he set to examining the enemy with more tranquillity.
The throng seemed to increase every moment in the church square. Only, he presumed that it must be making very little noise, since the windows on the Place remained closed. All at once, a flame flashed up, and in an instant seven or eight lighted torches passed over the heads of the crowd, shaking their tufts of flame in the deep shade. Quasimodo then beheld distinctly surging in the Parvis a frightful herd of men and women in rags, armed with scythes, pikes, billhooks and partisans, whose thousand points glittered. Here and there black pitchforks formed horns to the hideous faces. He vaguely recalled this populace, and thought that he recognized all the heads who had saluted him as Pope of the Fools some months previously. One man who held a torch in one hand and a club in the other, mounted a stone post and seemed to be haranguing them. At the same time the strange army executed several evolutions, as though it were taking up its post around the church. Quasimodo picked up his lantern and descended to the platform between the towers, in order to get a nearer view, and to spy out a means of defence.
Clopin Trouillefou, on arriving in front of the lofty portal of Notre-Dame had, in fact, ranged his troops in order of battle. Although he expected no resistance, he wished, like a prudent general, to preserve an order which would permit him to face, at need, a sudden attack of the watch or the police. He had accordingly stationed his brigade in such a manner that, viewed from above and from a distance, one would have pronounced it the Roman triangle of the battle of Ecnomus, the boar’s head of Alexander or the famous wedge of Gustavus Adolphus. The base of this triangle rested on the back of the Place in such a manner as to bar the entrance of the Rue du Parvis; one of its sides faced Hôtel-Dieu, the other the Rue Saint-Pierre-aux-Boeufs. Clopin Trouillefou had placed himself at the apex with the Duke of Egypt, our friend Jehan, and the most daring of the scavengers.
An enterprise like that which the vagabonds were now undertaking against Notre-Dame was not a very rare thing in the cities of the Middle Ages. What we now call the “police” did not exist then. In populous cities, especially in capitals, there existed no single, central, regulating power. Feudalism had constructed these great communities in a singular manner. A city was an assembly of a thousand seigneuries, which divided it into compartments of all shapes and sizes. Hence, a thousand conflicting establishments of police; that is to say, no police at all. In Paris, for example, independently of the hundred and forty-one lords who laid claim to a manor, there were five and twenty who laid claim to a manor and to administering justice, from the Bishop of Paris, who had five hundred streets, to the Prior of Notre- Dame des Champs, who had four. All these feudal justices recognized the suzerain authority of the king only in name. All possessed the right of control over the roads. All were at home. Louis XI., that indefatigable worker, who so largely began the demolition of the feudal edifice, continued by Richelieu and Louis XIV. for the profit of royalty, and finished by Mirabeau for the benefit of the people,–Louis XI. had certainly made an effort to break this network of seignories which covered Paris, by throwing violently across them all two or three troops of general police. Thus, in 1465, an order to the inhabitants to light candles in their windows at nightfall, and to shut up their dogs under penalty of death; in the same year, an order to close the streets in the evening with iron chains, and a prohibition to wear daggers or weapons of offence in the streets at night. But in a very short time, all these efforts at communal legislation fell into abeyance. The bourgeois permitted the wind to blow out their candles in the windows, and their dogs to stray; the iron chains were stretched only in a state of siege; the prohibition to wear daggers wrought no other changes than from the name of the Rue Coupe-Gueule to the name of the Rue-Coupe-Gorge* which is an evident progress. The old scaffolding of feudal jurisdictions remained standing; an immense aggregation of bailiwicks and seignories crossing each other all over the city, interfering with each other, entangled in one another, enmeshing each other, trespassing on each other; a useless thicket of watches, sub-watches and counter-watches, over which, with armed force, passed brigandage, rapine, and sedition. Hence, in this disorder, deeds of violence on the part of the populace directed against a palace, a hotel, or house in the most thickly populated quarters, were not unheard-of occurrences. In the majority of such cases, the neighbors did not meddle with the matter unless the pillaging extended to themselves. They stopped up their ears to the musket shots, closed their shutters, barricaded their doors, allowed the matter to be concluded with or without the watch, and the next day it was said in Paris, “Etienne Barbette was broken open last night. The Marshal de Clermont was seized last night, etc.” Hence, not only the royal habitations, the Louvre, the Palace, the Bastille, the Tournelles, but simply seignorial residences, the Petit-Bourbon, the Hôtel de Sens, the Hôtel d’ Angoulême, etc., had battlements on their walls, and machicolations over their doors. Churches were guarded by their sanctity. Some, among the number Notre-Dame, were fortified. The Abbey of Saint-German-des-Pres was castellated like a baronial mansion, and more brass expended about it in bombards than in bells. Its fortress was still to be seen in 1610. To-day, barely its church remains.
* Cut-throat. Coupe-gueule being the vulgar word for cut-weazand.
Let us return to Notre-Dame.
When the first arrangements were completed, and we must say, to the honor of vagabond discipline, that Clopin’s orders were executed in silence, and with admirable precision, the worthy chief of the band, mounted on the parapet of the church square, and raised his hoarse and surly voice, turning towards Notre-Dame, and brandishing his torch whose light, tossed by the wind, and veiled every moment by its own smoke, made the reddish façade of the church appear and disappear before the eye.
“To you, Louis de Beaumont, bishop of Paris, counsellor in the Court of Parliament, I, Clopin Trouillefou, king of Thunes, grand Coësre, prince of Argot, bishop of fools, I say: Our sister, falsely condemned for magic, hath taken refuge in your church, you owe her asylum and safety. Now the Court of Parliament wishes to seize her once more there, and you consent to it; so that she would be hanged to-morrow in the Grève, if God and the outcasts were not here. If your church is sacred, so is our sister; if our sister is not sacred, neither is your church. That is why we call upon you to return the girl if you wish to save your church, or we will take possession of the girl again and pillage the church, which will be a good thing. In token of which I here plant my banner, and may God preserve you, bishop of Paris,”
Quasimodo could not, unfortunately, hear these words uttered with a sort of sombre and savage majesty. A vagabond presented his banner to Clopin, who planted it solemnly between two paving-stones. It was a pitchfork from whose points hung a bleeding quarter of carrion meat.
That done, the King of Thunes turned round and cast his eyes over his army, a fierce multitude whose glances flashed almost equally with their pikes. After a momentary pause,–“Forward, my Sons!” he cried; “to work, locksmiths!”
Thirty bold men, square shouldered, and with pick-lock faces, stepped from the ranks, with hammers, pincers, and bars of iron on their shoulders. They betook themselves to the principal door of the church, ascended the steps, and were soon to be seen squatting under the arch, working at the door with pincers and levers; a throng of vagabonds followed them to help or look on. The eleven steps before the portal were covered with them.
But the door stood firm. “The devil! ’tis hard and obstinate!” said one. “It is old, and its gristles have become bony,” said another. “Courage, comrades!” resumed Clopin. “I wager my head against a dipper that you will have opened the door, rescued the girl, and despoiled the chief altar before a single beadle is awake. Stay! I think I hear the lock breaking up.”
Clopin was interrupted by a frightful uproar which re- sounded behind him at that moment. He wheeled round. An enormous beam had just fallen from above; it had crushed a dozen vagabonds on the pavement with the sound of a cannon, breaking in addition, legs here and there in the crowd of beggars, who sprang aside with cries of terror. In a twinkling, the narrow precincts of the church parvis were cleared. The locksmiths, although protected by the deep vaults of the portal, abandoned the door and Clopin himself retired to a respectful distance from the church.
“I had a narrow escape!” cried Jehan. “I felt the wind, of it, ~tête-de-boeuf~! but Pierre the Slaughterer is slaughtered!”
It is impossible to describe the astonishment mingled with fright which fell upon the ruffians in company with this beam.
They remained for several minutes with their eyes in the air, more dismayed by that piece of wood than by the king’s twenty thousand archers.
“Satan!” muttered the Duke of Egypt, “this smacks of magic!”
“‘Tis the moon which threw this log at us,” said Andry the Red.
“Call the moon the friend of the Virgin, after that!” went on Francois Chanteprune.
“A thousand popes!” exclaimed Clopin, “you are all fools!” But he did not know how to explain the fall of the beam.
Meanwhile, nothing could be distinguished on the façade, to whose summit the light of the torches did not reach. The heavy beam lay in the middle of the enclosure, and groans were heard from the poor wretches who had received its first shock, and who had been almost cut in twain, on the angle of the stone steps.
The King of Thunes, his first amazement passed, finally found an explanation which appeared plausible to his companions.
“Throat of God! are the canons defending themselves? To the sack, then! to the sack!”
“To the sack!” repeated the rabble, with a furious hurrah. A discharge of crossbows and hackbuts against the front of the church followed.
At this detonation, the peaceable inhabitants of the surrounding houses woke up; many windows were seen to open, and nightcaps and hands holding candles appeared at the casements.
“Fire at the windows,” shouted Clopin. The windows were immediately closed, and the poor bourgeois, who had hardly had time to cast a frightened glance on this scene of gleams and tumult, returned, perspiring with fear to their wives, asking themselves whether the witches’ sabbath was now being held in the parvis of Notre-Dame, or whether there was an assault of Burgundians, as in ’64. Then the husbands thought of theft; the wives, of rape; and all trembled.
“To the sack!” repeated the thieves’ crew; but they dared not approach. They stared at the beam, they stared at the church. The beam did not stir, the edifice preserved its calm and deserted air; but something chilled the outcasts.
“To work, locksmiths!” shouted Trouillefou. “Let the door be forced!”
No one took a step.
“Beard and belly!” said Clopin, “here be men afraid of a beam.”
An old locksmith addressed him–
“Captain, ’tis not the beam which bothers us, ’tis the door, which is all covered with iron bars. Our pincers are powerless against it.”
“What more do you want to break it in?” demanded Clopin.
“Ah! we ought to have a battering ram.”
The King of Thunes ran boldly to the formidable beam, and placed his foot upon it: “Here is one!” he exclaimed; “’tis the canons who send it to you.” And, making a mocking salute in the direction of the church, “Thanks, canons!”
This piece of bravado produced its effects,–the spell of the beam was broken. The vagabonds recovered their courage; soon the heavy joist, raised like a feather by two hundred vigorous arms, was flung with fury against the great door which they had tried to batter down. At the sight of that long beam, in the half-light which the infrequent torches of the brigands spread over the Place, thus borne by that crowd of men who dashed it at a run against the church, one would have thought that he beheld a monstrous beast with a thousand feet attacking with lowered head the giant of stone.
At the shock of the beam, the half metallic door sounded like an immense drum; it was not burst in, but the whole cathedral trembled, and the deepest cavities of the edifice were heard to echo.
At the same moment, a shower of large stones began to fall from the top of the façade on the assailants.
“The devil!” cried Jehan, “are the towers shaking their balustrades down on our heads?”
But the impulse had been given, the King of Thunes had set the example. Evidently, the bishop was defending himself, and they only battered the door with the more rage, in spite of the stones which cracked skulls right and left.
It was remarkable that all these stones fell one by one; but they followed each other closely. The thieves always felt two at a time, one on their legs and one on their heads. There were few which did not deal their blow, and a large layer of dead and wounded lay bleeding and panting beneath the feet of the assailants who, now grown furious, replaced each other without intermission. The long beam continued to belabor the door, at regular intervals, like the clapper of a bell, the stones to rain down, the door to groan.
The reader has no doubt divined that this unexpected resistance which had exasperated the outcasts came from Quasimodo.
Chance had, unfortunately, favored the brave deaf man.
When he had descended to the platform between the towers, his ideas were all in confusion. He had run up and down along the gallery for several minutes like a madman, surveying from above, the compact mass of vagabonds ready to hurl itself on the church, demanding the safety of the gypsy from the devil or from God. The thought had occurred to him of ascending to the southern belfry and sounding the alarm, but before he could have set the bell in motion, before Marie’s voice could have uttered a single clamor, was there not time to burst in the door of the church ten times over? It was precisely the moment when the locksmiths were advancing upon it with their tools. What was to be done?
All at once, he remembered that some masons had been at work all day repairing the wall, the timber-work, and the roof of the south tower. This was a flash of light. The wall was of stone, the roof of lead, the timber-work of wood. (That prodigious timber-work, so dense that it was called “the forest.”)
Quasimodo hastened to that tower. The lower chambers were, in fact, full of materials. There were piles of rough blocks of stone, sheets of lead in rolls, bundles of laths, heavy beams already notched with the saw, heaps of plaster.
Time was pressing, The pikes and hammers were at work below. With a strength which the sense of danger increased tenfold, he seized one of the beams–the longest and heaviest; he pushed it out through a loophole, then, grasping it again outside of the tower, he made it slide along the angle of the balustrade which surrounds the platform, and let it fly into the abyss. The enormous timber, during that fall of a hundred and sixty feet, scraping the wall, breaking the carvings, turned many times on its centre, like the arm of a windmill flying off alone through space. At last it reached the ground, the horrible cry arose, and the black beam, as it rebounded from the pavement, resembled a serpent leaping.
Quasimodo beheld the outcasts scatter at the fall of the beam, like ashes at the breath of a child. He took advantage of their fright, and while they were fixing a superstitious glance on the club which had fallen from heaven, and while they were putting out the eyes of the stone saints on the front with a discharge of arrows and buckshot, Quasimodo was silently piling up plaster, stones, and rough blocks of stone, even the sacks of tools belonging to the masons, on the edge of the balustrade from which the beam had already been hurled.
Thus, as soon as they began to batter the grand door, the shower of rough blocks of stone began to fall, and it seemed to them that the church itself was being demolished over their heads.
Any one who could have beheld Quasimodo at that moment would have been frightened. Independently of the projectiles which he had piled upon the balustrade, he had collected a heap of stones on the platform itself. As fast as the blocks on the exterior edge were exhausted, he drew on the heap. Then he stooped and rose, stooped and rose again with incredible activity. His huge gnome’s head bent over the balustrade, then an enormous stone fell, then another, then another. From time to time, he followed a fine stone with his eye, and when it did good execution, he said, “Hum!”
Meanwhile, the beggars did not grow discouraged. The thick door on which they were venting their fury had already trembled more than twenty times beneath the weight of their oaken battering-ram, multiplied by the strength of a hundred men. The panels cracked, the carved work flew into splinters, the hinges, at every blow, leaped from their pins, the planks yawned, the wood crumbled to powder, ground between the iron sheathing. Fortunately for Quasimodo, there was more iron than wood.
Nevertheless, he felt that the great door was yielding. Although he did not hear it, every blow of the ram reverberated simultaneously in the vaults of the church and within it. From above he beheld the vagabonds, filled with triumph and rage, shaking their fists at the gloomy façade; and both on the gypsy’s account and his own he envied the wings of the owls which flitted away above his head in flocks.
His shower of stone blocks was not sufficient to repel the assailants.
At this moment of anguish, he noticed, a little lower down than the balustrade whence he was crushing the thieves, two long stone gutters which discharged immediately over the great door; the internal orifice of these gutters terminated on the pavement of the platform. An idea occurred to him; he ran in search of a fagot in his bellringer’s den, placed on this fagot a great many bundles of laths, and many rolls of lead, munitions which he had not employed so far, and having arranged this pile in front of the hole to the two gutters, he set it on fire with his lantern.
During this time, since the stones no longer fell, the outcasts ceased to gaze into the air. The bandits, panting like a pack of hounds who are forcing a boar into his lair, pressed tumultuously round the great door, all disfigured by the battering ram, but still standing. They were waiting with a quiver for the great blow which should split it open. They vied with each other in pressing as close as possible, in order to dash among the first, when it should open, into that opulent cathedral, a vast reservoir where the wealth of three centuries had been piled up. They reminded each other with roars of exultation and greedy lust, of the beautiful silver crosses, the fine copes of brocade, the beautiful tombs of silver gilt, the great magnificences of the choir, the dazzling festivals, the Christmasses sparkling with torches, the Easters sparkling with sunshine,–all those splendid solemneties wherein chandeliers, ciboriums, tabernacles, and reliquaries, studded the altars with a crust of gold and diamonds. Certainly, at that fine moment, thieves and pseudo sufferers, doctors in stealing, and vagabonds, were thinking much less of delivering the gypsy than of pillaging Notre-Dame. We could even easily believe that for a goodly number among them la Esmeralda was only a pretext, if thieves needed pretexts.
All at once, at the moment when they were grouping themselves round the ram for a last effort, each one holding his breath and stiffening his muscles in order to communicate all his force to the decisive blow, a howl more frightful still than that which had burst forth and expired beneath the beam, rose among them. Those who did not cry out, those who were still alive, looked. Two streams of melted lead were falling from the summit of the edifice into the thickest of the rabble. That sea of men had just sunk down beneath the boiling metal, which had made, at the two points where it fell, two black and smoking holes in the crowd, such as hot water would make in snow. Dying men, half consumed and groaning with anguish, could be seen writhing there. Around these two principal streams there were drops of that horrible rain, which scattered over the assailants and entered their skulls like gimlets of fire. It was a heavy fire which overwhelmed these wretches with a thousand hailstones.
The outcry was heartrending. They fled pell-mell, hurling the beam upon the bodies, the boldest as well as the most timid, and the parvis was cleared a second time.
All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery, higher than the central rose window, there was a great flame rising between the two towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a vast, disordered, and furious flame, a tongue of which was borne into the smoke by the wind, from time to time. Below that fire, below the gloomy balustrade with its trefoils showing darkly against its glare, two spouts with monster throats were vomiting forth unceasingly that burning rain, whose silvery stream stood out against the shadows of the lower façade. As they approached the earth, these two jets of liquid lead spread out in sheaves, like water springing from the thousand holes of a watering-pot. Above the flame, the enormous towers, two sides of each of which were visible in sharp outline, the one wholly black, the other wholly red, seemed still more vast with all the immensity of the shadow which they cast even to the sky.
Their innumerable sculptures of demons and dragons assumed a lugubrious aspect. The restless light of the flame made them move to the eye. There were griffins which had the air of laughing, gargoyles which one fancied one heard yelping, salamanders which puffed at the fire, tarasques* which sneezed in the smoke. And among the monsters thus roused from their sleep of stone by this flame, by this noise, there was one who walked about, and who was seen, from time to time, to pass across the glowing face of the pile, like a bat in front of a candle.
* The representation of a monstrous animal solemnly drawn about in Tarascon and other French towns.
Without doubt, this strange beacon light would awaken far away, the woodcutter of the hills of Bicêtre, terrified to behold the gigantic shadow of the towers of Notre-Dame quivering over his heaths.
A terrified silence ensued among the outcasts, during which nothing was heard, but the cries of alarm of the canons shut up in their cloister, and more uneasy than horses in a burning stable, the furtive sound of windows hastily opened and still more hastily closed, the internal hurly-burly of the houses and of the Hôtel-Dieu, the wind in the flame, the last death-rattle of the dying, and the continued crackling of the rain of lead upon the pavement.
In the meanwhile, the principal vagabonds had retired beneath the porch of the Gondelaurier mansion, and were holding a council of war.
The Duke of Egypt, seated on a stone post, contemplated the phantasmagorical bonfire, glowing at a height of two hundred feet in the air, with religious terror. Clopin Trouillefou bit his huge fists with rage.
“Impossible to get in!” he muttered between his teeth.
“An old, enchanted church!” grumbled the aged Bohemian, Mathias Hungadi Spicali.
“By the Pope’s whiskers!” went on a sham soldier, who had once been in service, “here are church gutters spitting melted lead at you better than the machicolations of Lectoure.”
“Do you see that demon passing and repassing in front of the fire?” exclaimed the Duke of Egypt.
“Pardieu, ’tis that damned bellringer, ’tis Quasimodo,” said Clopin.
The Bohemian tossed his head. “I tell you, that ’tis the spirit Sabnac, the grand marquis, the demon of fortifications. He has the form of an armed soldier, the head of a lion. Sometimes he rides a hideous horse. He changes men into stones, of which he builds towers. He commands fifty legions ‘Tis he indeed; I recognize him. Sometimes he is clad in a handsome golden robe, figured after the Turkish fashion.”
“Where is Bellevigne de l’Etoile?” demanded Clopin.
“He is dead.”
Andry the Red laughed in an idiotic way: “Notre-Dame is making work for the hospital,” said he.