Notre-Dame de Paris (Oxford World's Classics)

by Hugo, Victor

  It is hard to convey any idea of the degree of proud and blissful satisfaction which the hideous, mournful features of Quasimodo had come to express in the course of the journey from the Palais to the Grève. It was the first time he had ever enjoyed any feeling of self-esteem. Hitherto all he had known was humiliation, contempt for his condition, disgust for his person. Thus, stone-deaf as he was, he was relishing, like a real pope, the acclamations of this crowd which he hated because he felt hated by them. His people might be a collection of fools, cripples, thieves, and beggars, no matter! They were for all that a people, and he was their sovereign. And he took seriously all these ironic cheers, all this mock respect mingled, we must add, with a little very real fear on the crowd’s part. For the hunchback was robust; the bow-legs were nimble; the deaf man was spiteful; three qualities to temper ridicule.

  However, that the new Pope of Fools realized inwardly the feelings he experienced or those which he inspired is something we find it hard to believe. The mind lodged in that misshapen body was itself inevitably incomplete and deaf. Thus what it felt at that moment was absolutely vague, indistinct, and confused. Only joy came through, pride was dominant. That gloomy, unhappy face beamed radiantly.

  It caused, therefore, no little surprise and alarm when just as Quasimodo, in this state of semi-intoxication, was passing triumphantly before the Maison-aux-Piliers, a man was seen suddenly to dart from the crowd, and with an angry gesture tear from Quasimodo’s hands the gilded wooden crozier, emblem of his Fools’ papacy.

  The man who had acted so rashly was the individual with the bald forehead who, a moment before, blending with the group round the gypsy girl, had chilled the poor girl with his menacing and hateful words. He was in ecclesiastical dress. Just as he emerged from the crowd Gringoire, who had not noticed him until then, recognized him: ‘My word!’ he cried in amazement, ‘it’s my master in Hermes, Dom Claude Frollo the archdeacon! What the devil is he up to with that ugly one-eyed creature? He’ll be eaten up alive.’

  A cry of terror did indeed go up. The formidable Quasimodo had plunged down from his litter, and women averted their gaze so that they would not see him tear the archdeacon to pieces.

  He reached the priest in one bound, looked at him, and fell on his knees.

  The priest tore off the tiara, smashed the crozier, ripped the tinsel cope.

  Quasimodo remained kneeling, with head bowed and hands clasped.

  There then took place between them a strange dialogue of signs and gestures, for neither spoke. The priest, upright, angry, menacing, imperious: Quasimodo prostrate, humble, suppliant. Yet it is certain that Quasimodo could have squashed the priest just with his thumb.

  At length the archdeacon, roughly shaking Quasimodo’s powerful shoulder, signed to him to rise and follow him.

  Quasimodo rose.

  Then the confraternity of Fools, recovering from their initial stupefaction, tried to defend their pope, who had been so rudely dethroned. The Egyptians, the Argoteers, and all the law clerks came yelping round the priest.

  Quasimodo placed himself in front of the priest, flexed the muscles of his athletic fists and looked at the assailants, grinding his teeth like an angry tiger.

  The priest resumed his look of sombre gravity, made a sign to Quasimodo, and silently withdrew.

  Quasimodo walked in front of him, scattering the crowd as he went along.

  When they had passed through the crowd out of the square, a horde of curious and idle people tried to follow them. Quasimodo then took up the rearguard, and followed the archdeacon walking backwards, squat, snarling, monstrous, bristling, flexing his limbs, licking his boar-like tusks, growling like a wild beast, and sending huge ripples through the crowd with a mere look or gesture.

  The two of them were allowed to plunge into a dark, narrow street, where no one dared venture after them. The nightmare image of Quasimodo grinding his teeth was itself enough to bar entry.

  ‘That’s all very wonderful,’ said Gringoire, ‘but where the devil am I going to find some supper?’

  IV

  THE DISADVANTAGES OF FOLLOWING A PRETTY WOMAN THROUGH THE STREETS AT NIGHT

  GRINGOIRE, trusting entirely to luck, had begun following the gypsy girl. He had seen her and her goat take the rue de la Coutellerie; he had taken the rue de la Coutellerie.

  ‘Why not?’ he had said to himself.

  Gringoire, as a practical philosopher of the Paris streets, had noticed that nothing is more conducive to reverie than following a pretty woman without knowing where she is going. In this voluntary abdication of one’s own free will, in this fancy submitting to another’s quite unsuspecting fancy, there is a mixture of capricious independence and blind obedience, an indefinable middle term between slavery and freedom, which was to Gringoire’s liking, with his essentially mixed, indecisive and complex mind, holding tenuously to every extreme, suspended between every human propensity, cancelling out one by another. He liked to compare himself to Mahomet’s tomb, attracted in opposite directions by two lodestones, eternally hesitating between high and low, ceiling and floor, falling and rising, zenith and nadir.

  If Gringoire were living in our day, what a fine balance he would have struck between Classic and Romantic!

  But he was not primitive enough to live for three hundred years, more’s the pity! His absence leaves a vacuum which is felt only too keenly today.

  However, for following passers-by (especially female ones) through the streets, something Gringoire enjoyed doing, there is no better frame of mind.

  He was therefore in reflective mood as he walked behind the girl, who quickened her pace and made her pretty goat fairly trot along as she saw the townsfolk going home and the taverns closing, for no other shops had been open that day.

  ‘After all,’ ran his thoughts, more or less, ‘she must live somewhere; gypsy women are kind-hearted—who knows?’

  And the row of dots which followed his mental reticence implied some rather pleasing vague ideas.

  Meanwhile, as he passed from time to time the last groups of townsfolk closing their doors, he caught some scraps of their conversations which broke the thread of his attractive hypotheses.

  Now it was two old men meeting.

  ‘Maître Thibaut Fernicle, it’s cold, don’t you know?’

  (Gringoire had known that since the beginning of winter.)

  ‘Yes, indeed, Maître Boniface Disome! Are we going to have another winter like the one three years ago, in ‘80, when wood cost 8 sous a bundle?’

  ‘Bah! that’s nothing, Maître Thibaut, compared to the winter of 1407, when it froze from Martinmas to Candlemas! And so hard that the parliamentary clerk’s pen froze, in the Great Chamber, with every three words! They couldn’t go on recording the proceedings.’

  Further on it was two women at neighbouring windows, their candles sputtering in the fog.

  ‘Did your husband tell you about the accident, Mademoiselle La Boudraque?’

  ‘No. What happened then, Mademoiselle Turquant?’

  ‘The horse belonging to Monsieur Gilles Godin, notary at the Châtelet, took fright at the Flemings and their procession and knocked down Maître Philippot Avrillot, a Celestine* oblate.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘A civilian horse! That’s going a bit far. If it had been a cavalry horse, all well and good!’

  And the windows closed. But not without breaking Gringoire’s train of thought.

  Fortunately he soon recovered it, and easily picked up the thread again, thanks to the gypsy girl, and thanks to Djali, who were walking in front of him: two finely made, delicate, charming creatures, whose dainty feet, shapely form, graceful demeanour he admired, almost mixing them up as he watched; in their understanding and close friendship he saw them both as two girls, in their light, nimble, surefooted step they both seemed like little goats.

  The streets meanwhile were with every moment becoming darker and lonelier. The curfew had sounde
d long ago, and it was only at rare intervals that anyone passed by on the pavement or that a light shone at a window. Gringoire, following the gypsy, had entered the impenetrable maze of alleys, crossroads, and cul-de-sacs surrounding the ancient burial place of the Holy Innocents, which resembled nothing so much as a skein of thread tangled up by a cat. ‘There’s not much logic to these streets!’ said Gringoire, lost in the innumerable twists and turns, continually doubling back on themselves, but through which the girl followed a path which she seemed to know well, without hesitating and walking ever faster and faster. As for him, he would not have had the slightest idea where he was had he not noticed in passing, at a bend in the street, the octagonal bulk of the pillory in the Halles, its open-work top boldly silhouetted against a window where a light still showed in the rue Verdelet.

  For the past few moments he had attracted the girl’s attention; she had looked round at him uneasily several times; once she had even stopped dead, and taken advantage of a ray of light emerging from a half-closed baker’s shop to stare at him from head to foot; then, after this searching look, Gringoire had seen her make the little pout he had noticed already, and she had gone on.

  This little pout incited Gringoire’s reflection. There was certainly an element of scorn and mockery in the graceful little grimace. So he was beginning to hang his head, count the cobble stones, and follow the girl at a slightly greater distance when, as she turned into a street where he lost her from sight, he heard her give a piercing shriek.

  He quickened his step.

  The street was quite dark. However, a wick of tow soaked in oil, burning in an iron cage at the feet of the Blessed Virgin at the street corner, enabled Gringoire to make out the gypsy girl struggling in the arms of two men who were trying to muffle her cries. The poor little goat, frightened to death, dropped its horns and bleated.

  ‘Help, gentlemen of the watch!’ cried Gringoire, and stepped forward boldly. One of the men holding the girl turned towards him. It was the formidable figure of Quasimodo.

  Gringoire did not take to his heels, but nor did he advance another step.

  Quasimodo came up to him, flung him to the ground four paces away with a backhanded blow, and swiftly plunged into the shadows, carrying the girl hanging limply over his arm like a silk scarf. His companion followed, and the poor goat ran after them, bleating piteously.

  ‘Murder! murder!’ cried the unfortunate gypsy girl.

  ‘Stop right there, you wretches, and let go of that wench!’ cried in a voice of thunder a horseman who suddenly emerged from a crossroads nearby.

  It was a captain of the archers of the King’s troop,* armed from head to foot, broadsword in his hand.

  He snatched the gypsy girl from the astounded Quasimodo’s grasp, put her across his saddle, and just as the redoubtable hunchback, recovering from his surprise, rushed at him to take back his prey, fifteen or sixteen archers appeared, following close behind their captain, their great swords at the ready. It was a squadron of the King’s troop on counter-patrol by order of Robert d’Estouteville, keeper of the Provostry of Paris.

  Quasimodo was surrounded, seized, trussed up. He bellowed, foamed at the mouth, bit, and, if it had been daytime, there can be no doubt that his face alone, made even more hideous by anger, would have put the whole squadron to flight. But the dark deprived him of his most fearful weapon: his ugliness.

  His companion had disappeared during the struggle.

  The gypsy sat up gracefully on the officer’s saddle, rested her hands on the young man’s shoulders and gazed at him for a few seconds, as though enchanted by his good looks and the timely assistance he had just brought her. Then, the first to break the silence, she said, making her sweet voice sweeter still: ‘What is your name, Monsieur le gendarme?’*

  ‘Captain Phoebus de Chateâupers, at your service, my beauty!’ replied the officer, drawing himself up.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  And while Captain Phoebus was twirling his Burgundian moustache, she slipped down from the horse, like an arrow dropping to the ground, and made off.

  She disappeared faster than a streak of lightning.

  ‘By the Pope’s navel!’ said the captain, getting them to tighten Quasimodo’s bonds, ‘I’d rather have kept the wench.’

  ‘What do you expect, captain?’ said one of the troopers. ‘The linnet has flown, we’re left with the bat.’

  V

  THE DISADVANTAGES (CONTINUED)

  GRINGOIRE, stunned by his fall, still lay on the ground in front of the good Virgin at the street corner. He gradually came to his senses; at first he floated for a short time in a kind of half-somnolent daydream, not wholly unpleasant, in which the airy figures of the gypsy girl and the goat blended with the solid weight of Quasimodo’s fist. This state did not last long. A very lively impression of cold in that part of his body which was in contact with the ground all at once woke him up and brought his mind back up to the surface. ‘What’s making me so chilly?’ he suddenly asked himself. He noticed then that he was lying pretty well in the middle of the gutter.

  ‘Devil take that one-eyed hunchback!’ he muttered between his teeth and tried to get up. But he was too dizzy and too bruised. He had to stay where he was. His hand, however, moved quite freely; he held his nose and resigned himself.

  ‘Paris mud,’ he thought (for he was now pretty sure that the gutter was definitely going to be his room for the night, ‘and what is there to do in a room but dream?’)* ‘Paris mud has a particularly nasty stench. It must contain a lot of nitre and sal volatile. At any rate, that is the opinion of Maître Nicolas* and the hermetics….’

  The word ‘hermetics’ suddenly brought to his mind the image of Archdeacon Claude Frollo. He recalled the violent scene of which he had caught just a glimpse, the gypsy girl struggling with two men, the fact that Quasimodo had had a companion, and the grim, haughty face of the archdeacon passed vaguely through his memory.

  ‘That would be strange!’ he thought. And he began with that datum and on that basis to construct a fantastic assembly of hypotheses, the philosophers’ house of cards, then suddenly, coming back to reality again: ‘Oh! oh! I’m freezing!’ he cried.

  His position was indeed becoming less and less tenable. Every molecule of water in the gutter removed a molecule of the caloric radiating around Gringoire’s waist, and the process of establishing equilibrium between his body’s temperature and that of the gutter water had painfully begun.

  Trouble of a quite different kind suddenly assailed him.

  A group of children, those little barefoot savages who have always run around the Paris streets under the eternal name of urchins, gamins, and who, when we were children too, threw stones at all of us when we came out of school in the afternoon, because our trousers were not ragged, a swarm of these young rascals ran to the crossroads where Gringoire lay, laughing and shouting as though unconcerned about the neighbours trying to sleep. They dragged after them some kind of shapeless sack; and were making enough noise with their clogs alone to wake the dead. Gringoire, who had not yet quite reached that state, half rose.

  ‘Hey! Hennequin Dandèche! Hey! Jehan Pincebourde!’ they yelled at the top of their voices, ‘old Eustache Moubon, the ironmonger on the corner, has just died. We’ve got his palliasse, we’re going to make a bonfire with it! It’s the Flemings today!’

  And with that they threw the palliasse right over Gringoire, whom they had come upon without seeing him. At the same time one of them took a handful of straw which he went to light from the wick in front of the good Virgin.

  ‘Christ’s death!’ muttered Gringoire, ‘am I going to be too hot now?’

  The moment was critical. He was about to be caught between fire and water; he made a superhuman effort, like a counterfeiter about to be boiled alive trying to escape. He rose to his feet, threw the palliasse back at the urchins and fled.

  ‘Holy Virgin!’ cried the children; ‘the ironmonger’s ghost!’

  And th
ey ran off too.

  The palliasse remained master of the battlefield. Belleforêt, Father le Juge, and Corrozet* assure us that next day it was collected with great ceremony by the local clergy and borne to the treasury of the church of Sainte-Opportune,* where up to 1789 the sacristan made a tidy income from the great miracle of the statue of the Virgin on the corner of the rue Mauconseil who had, by the mere fact of her presence, on the memorable night of 6 to 7 January 1482 exorcized the deceased Eustache Moubon who, to trick the devil, had, as he died, cunningly hidden his soul in his palliasse.

  VI

  THE BROKEN PITCHER

  AFTER running at full pelt for some time, with no idea where he was going, rushing round many a street corner, stepping over many a gutter, crossing many an alley, cul-de-sac, crossroads, seeking an escape route and passage through all the twists and turns of the old cobbles of the Halles, exploring in his panic what the beautiful Latin of the charters calls tota via, cheminum et viaria [every road, pathway, and thoroughfare], our poet suddenly stopped, first because he was out of breath, then because he was pulled up short by a dilemma which had just occurred to him. ‘It seems to me, Maître Pierre Gringoire,’ he said to himself, pressing a finger to his forehead, ‘that you are running away like a featherbrain. The little rascals were just as scared of you as you were of them. It seems to me, I tell you, that you heard the clatter of their clogs running off to the south, while you ran north. Now one of two things must have happened: either they have made themselves scarce, in which case the palliasse they must have forgotten in their terror is precisely that hospitable bed you have been chasing after since this morning, and which Our Lady the Virgin miraculously sent you as a reward for composing in her honour a morality accompanied by triumphs and mummeries; or the children have not made themselves scarce, in which case they have set the palliasse alight, and there you will find the excellent fire you need to cheer you up, dry you, and warm you. In either case, good fire or good bed, the palliasse is a gift from heaven. The Blessed Virgin Mary, at the corner of the rue Mauconseil, may well have caused Eustache Moubon to die just to that end, and it’s silly of you to run away like that, helterskelter like a Picard with a Frenchman after him, leaving behind the very thing you were chasing after; and you are a fool!’