by Victor Hugo
“A terrible story indeed,” said Oudarde, “and one that would make a Burgundian weep!”
“I am no longer surprised,” added Gervaise, “that the fear of the gipsies haunts you so.”
“And you had all the more reason,” continued Oudarde, “to run away with your Eustache just now, because these are also Polish gipsies.”
“Not at all,” said Gervaise; “they say they came from Spain and Catalonia.”
“Catalonia? That may be,” replied Oudarde; “Polonia, Catalonia, Valonia,—those places are all one to me; I always mix them up. There’s one thing sure; they are gipsies.”
“And their teeth are certainly long enough to eat little children. And I should not be a bit surprised if Smeralda ate a little too, for all her dainty airs. Her white goat plays too many clever tricks to be all right.”
Mahiette walked on in silence. She was absorbed in that sort of reverie which seems to be the continuation of a painful story, and which does not cease until it has imparted its own emotion, throb by throb, to the innermost fibers of the heart. Gervaise, however, addressed her: “And did no one ever know what became of Chantefleurie?” Mahiette made no answer. Gervaise repeated the question, shaking her arm and calling her by name as she did so. Mahiette seemed to wake from her dream.
“What became of Chantefleurie?” she said, mechanically repeating the words whose sound was still fresh in her ear; then, making an effort to fix her attention upon the meaning of the words, she said quickly, “Oh, no one ever knew.”
She added, after a pause:—
“Some said they saw her leave Rheims at dusk by the Porte Fléchembault; others, at daybreak, by the old Porte Basée. A poor man found her gold cross hanging to the stone cross in the fairgrounds. It was that trinket which caused her ruin in ‘61. It was a gift from the handsome Vicomte de Cormontreuil, her first lover. Paquette never would part with it, however poor she might be. She clung to it like her own life. So when this cross was found, we all thought that she was dead. Still, there were people at Cabaret-les-Vautes who said they saw her pass by on the road to Paris, walking barefoot over the stones. But in that case she must have left town by the Porte de Vesle, and all these stories don’t agree; or, rather, I believe she did actually leave by the Porte de Vesle, but that she left this world.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Gervaise.
“The Vesle,” replied Mahiette, with a melancholy smile, “is the river.”
“Poor Chantefleurie!” said Oudarde, with a shudder; “drowned!”
“Drowned!” returned Mahiette; “and who could have told good father Guybertaut, when he floated down the river beneath the Pont de Tinquex, singing in his boat, that his dear little Paquette would one day pass under that same bridge, but without boat or song?”
“And the little shoe?” asked Gervaise.
“It disappeared with the mother,” replied Mahiette.
“Poor little shoe!” said Oudarde.
Oudarde, a fat and tender-hearted woman, would have been quite content to sigh in company with Mahiette; but Gervaise, who was more curious, had not come to the end of her questions.
“And the monster?” she suddenly said to Mahiette.
“What monster?” asked the latter.
“The little gipsy monster left by the witches in Chantefleurie’s room in exchange for her daughter. What did you do with it? I really hope you drowned it too.”
“Not a bit of it,” replied Mahiette.
“What! You burned it then? After all, that was better. A sorcerer’s child!”
“Nor that either, Gervaise. My lord the archbishop took an interest in the gipsy child; he exorcised it, blessed it, carefully took the devil out of the boy’s body, and sent him to Paris to be exposed upon the wooden bed at Notre-Dame, as a foundling.”
“These bishops,” grumbled Gervaise, “never do anything like other people, just because they are so learned. Just think, Oudarde, of putting the devil among the foundlings! For that little monster is sure to have been the devil. Well, Mahiette, what did they do with him in Paris! I’m sure no charitable person would take him.”
“I don’t know,” replied the native of Rheims; “it was just at that very time that my husband bought the clerk’s office at Beru, two leagues away from town, and we thought no more about the matter; particularly as near Beru there are the two hills of Cernay, which quite hide the spires of the Rheims cathedral.”
While talking thus, the three worthy women had reached the Place de Grève. In their preoccupation, they had passed the public breviary of the Tour-Roland without stopping, and were proceeding mechanically towards the pillory, around which the crowd increased momentarily. Probably the sight which at this instant attracted every eye would have made them completely forget the Rat-Hole, and the visit which they meant to pay, if the sturdy six-year-old Eustache, whom Mahiette led by the hand, had not suddenly reminded them of it by saying, as if some instinct warned him that the Rat-Hole lay behind him, “Mother, may I eat the cake now?”
Had Eustache been more crafty, that is to say less greedy, he would have waited still longer, and would not have risked the timid question, “Mother, may I eat the cake now?” until they were safe at home again, at Master Andry Musnier’s house, in the University, in the Rue Madame-la-Valence, when both branches of the Seine and the five bridges of the City would have been between the Rat-Hole and the cake.
This same question, a very rash one at the time that Eustache asked it, roused Mahiette’s attention.
“By the way,” she exclaimed, “we are forgetting the recluse! Show me your Rat-Hole, that I may carry her my cake.”
“Directly,” said Oudarde. “It’s a true charity.”
This was not at all to Eustache’s liking.
“Oh, my cake! my cake!” he whined, hunching up first one shoulder and then the other,—always a sign of extreme displeasure in such cases.
The three women retraced their steps, and as they approached the Tour-Roland, Oudarde said to the other two:—
“It will never do for all three of us to peep in at the hole at once, lest we should frighten the sachette. You two must pretend to be reading the Lord’s Prayer in the breviary while I put my nose in at the window; she knows me slightly. I’ll tell you when to come.”
She went to the window alone. As soon as she looked in, profound pity was expressed in every feature, and her bright frank face changed color as quickly as if it had passed from sunlight into moonlight; her eyes grew moist, her mouth quivered as if she were about to weep. A moment later, she put her finger to her lips and beckoned to Mahiette.
Mahiette silently joined her, on tiptoe as if by the bedside of a dying person.
It was indeed a sad sight which lay before the two women, as they gazed without moving or breathing through the grated window of the Rat-Hole.
The cell was small, wider than it was long, with a vaulted roof, and seen from within looked like the inside of an exaggerated bishop’s miter. Upon the bare stone floor, in a corner, sat, or rather crouched a woman. Her chin rested on her knees, which her crossed arms pressed closely against her breast. Bent double in this manner, clad in brown sackcloth, which covered her loosely from head to foot, her long grey locks drawn forward and falling over her face, down her legs to her feet, she seemed at first sight some strange shape outlined against the dark background of the cell, a sort of blackish triangle, which the ray of light entering at the window divided into two distinct bands of light and shadow. She looked like one of those specters, half darkness and half light, which we see in dreams, and in the extraordinary work of Goya,—pale, motionless, forbidding, cowering upon a tomb or clinging to the grating of a dungeon. It was neither man nor woman, nor living being, nor any definite form; it was a figure; a sort of vision in which the real and the imaginary were blended like twilight and daylight. Beneath her disheveled hair, which fell to the ground, the outlines of a stern and emaciated profile were barely visible; the tip of one bare foot jus
t peeped from the hem of her garment, seeming to be curled up on the hard, cold floor. The little of human form which could be dimly seen beneath that mourning garb made the beholder shudder.
This figure, which seemed rooted to the ground, appeared to have neither motion, thought, nor breath. In that thin sackcloth, in January, lying half naked on a granite floor, without fire, in the darkness of a dungeon, whose slanting window never admitted the sun, only the icy blast, she did not seem to suffer, or even to feel.
She seemed to have been turned to stone like her cell, to ice like the season. Her hands were clasped, her eyes were fixed. At the first glance, she seemed a specter, at the second, a statue.
And yet at intervals her blue lips were parted by a breath, and trembled; but they seemed as dead and as destitute of will as leaves blowing in the wind.
Yet her dull eyes gazed with an ineffable expression, a deep, mournful, serious, perpetually fixed expression, on a corner of the cell hidden from those outside; her look seemed to connect all the somber thoughts of her distressed soul with some mysterious object.
Such was the creature who was called “the recluse” from her habitation, and “sachette” from her dress.
The three women—for Gervaise had joined Mahiette and Oudarde—peered through the window. Their heads cut off the faint light which entered the dungeon; but the wretched inmate seemed unconscious of her loss, and paid no attention to them. “Don’t disturb her,” said Oudarde in low tones; “she is in one of her ecstatic fits: she is praying.”
But Mahiette still gazed with ever-increasing anxiety at the wan, wrinkled face, and those disheveled locks, and her eyes filled with tears. “How strange that would be!” she muttered.
She put her head through the iron bars, and at last contrived to get a glimpse of the corner upon which the unhappy woman’s eyes were forever riveted.
When she withdrew her head from the window, her face was bathed in tears.
“What is that woman’s name?” she asked Oudarde.
Oudarde answered,—
“We call her Sister Gudule.”
“And I,” returned Mahiette,—“I call her Paquette Chantefleurie.”
Then, putting her finger to her lip, she signed to the amazed Oudarde to put her head through the aperture and look.
Oudarde looked, and saw, in the corner upon which the recluse’s eye was fixed in such sad ecstasy, a tiny pink satin shoe, embroidered with gold and silver spangles.
Gervaise looked in after Oudarde, and then the three women began to weep at the sight of that miserable mother.
However, neither their looks nor their tears disturbed the recluse. Her hands were still clasped, her lips dumb, her eyes set; and to those who knew her story it was heartrending to see her sit and gaze at that little shoe.
The three had not yet breathed a word; they dared not speak, even in a whisper. This profound silence, this great grief, this entire oblivion of all but one thing, affected them like the high altar at Easter or at Christmas-tide. They were silent, absorbed, ready to fall upon their knees. They felt as if they had just gone into church on Holy Saturday and heard the Tenebrœ.
At last Gervaise, the most curious, and consequently the least sensitive of the three, made an attempt to draw the recluse into conversation: “Sister! Sister Gudule!”
She repeated the call three times, raising her voice each time. The recluse did not stir; there was not a word, not a look, not a sign of life.
Oudarde, in her turn, in a gentler and more affectionate tone, said, “Sister! holy Sister Gudule!”
The same silence, the same absolute repose as before.
“What a strange woman!” cried Gervaise; “I don’t believe she would mind a cannonade!”
“Perhaps she’s deaf,” said Oudarde.
“Maybe blind,” added Gervaise.
“Perhaps dead,” said Mahiette.
Certainly, if the soul had not already quitted that inert, torpid, lethargic body, it had at least withdrawn into it and concealed itself in depths to which the perceptions of the external organs did not penetrate.
“We shall have to leave the cake on the window-sill,” said Oudarde; “but then some boy will steal it. How can we rouse her?”
