by Hugo, Victor
The girl seemed to be taking no notice of him; she came and went, moved a stool, talked to her goat, pouted now and then. At length she came to sit by the table and Gringoire was able to contemplate her at leisure.
You were once a child, reader, and perhaps you are fortunate enough to be one still. You must then more than once (and speaking for myself, I have spent whole days at it, the most profitable of my life) have followed from bush to bush, beside a running brook, on a sunny day, some lovely green or blue dragonfly, darting in zigzag flight, kissing the tip of every branch. You will recall the loving curiosity with which your mind and eyes fastened on that little whirlwind, humming and whirring on its purple and azure wings, in the midst of which floated an elusive shape, veiled by the very speed of its movement. The aerial creature whose shape could be vaguely discerned through the vibrating wings seemed to you chimerical, imaginary, impossible to touch, impossible to see. But when at last the dragonfly rested on the tip of a reed and you were able to examine with bated breath the long gauzy wings, the long enamel body, the two crystal globes, how utterly astonished you were and how afraid to see the form once more disappear into shadow and the living creature into a chimera! Recall these impressions, and you will easily realize what Gringoire felt as he contemplated in visible and palpable form that Esmeralda of whom, up till then, he had caught only a glimpse through a whirlwind of dance, song, and excitement.
Plunging deeper and deeper into his reverie: ‘So that,’ he said to himself, following her vaguely with his eyes, ‘is what la Esmeralda is! A celestial creature! A street dancer! So much and so little! It was she who dealt the final blow to my mystery play this morning, she who saved my life this evening. My evil genius! My good angel! A pretty woman, upon my word—and who must love me madly to have taken me as she did. Come to think,’ he said, suddenly standing, with that feeling for the authentic which formed the basis of his character and philosophy, ‘I am not too sure how it has come about, but I am her husband!’
With this idea in his mind and in his eyes he approached the girl in so military and gallant a manner that she drew back.
‘What do you want with me?’ she said.
‘How can you ask, adorable Esmeralda?’ Gringoire replied in such passionate tones that he himself was astonished to hear himself speak like that.
The gypsy opened wide her large eyes. ‘I don’t know what you mean!’
‘Come now,’ Gringoire went on, getting more and more worked up, and thinking that after all he was only dealing with a Court of Miracles virtue, ‘am I not yours, sweetheart? Are you not mine?’
And in all innocence he took her by the waist.
The gypsy girl’s bodice slipped through his hands like an eelskin. With one bound she leaped to the far end of the cell, stooped, and straightened up again with a small dagger in her hand before Gringoire even had time to see where the dagger had come from; angry and proud, her lips puffed out, nostrils flaring, cheeks apple-red, eyes flashing lightning. At the same time the little goat put itself in front of her, and confronted Gringoire in battle order, bristling with two pretty, gilded, and very sharp horns. This all happened in less than no time.
The dragonfly had become a wasp and would be only too happy to sting.
Our philosopher stood dumbfounded, his eyes passing bemused from the goat to the girl in turn.
‘Holy Virgin!’ he said finally when he had recovered sufficiently from his surprise to speak; ‘there’s a sporting pair!’
The gypsy girl broke silence in her turn.
‘You must be a very bold rascal!’
‘Forgive me, mademoiselle,’ Gringoire said with a smile, ‘but why did you take me for a husband?’
‘Ought I to have let them hang you?’
Gringoire bit his lips. ‘Well then, ‘he said, ‘I am not yet as successful in Cupid as I thought. But what was the point, then, of breaking that poor pitcher?’
Meanwhile Esmeralda’s dagger and the goat’s horns stayed on the defensive.
‘Mademoiselle Esmeralda,’ said the poet, ‘let’s come to terms. I’m not clerk of the court at the Châtelet, and I’m not going to quibble at your carrying a dagger in Paris in defiance of the ordinances and prohibitions of Monsieur the Provost. All the same, you will be aware that Noël Lescripvain was fined a week ago 10 sols parisis for carrying a short sword. Now that’s none of my business, and I’ll come to the point. I swear by my share of paradise that I won’t come near you without your leave and permission; but give me some supper.’
Basically Gringoire, like Monsieur Despréaux,* was ‘not a very passionate man’. He was not one of those swashbuckling military braggarts who take girls by storm. In love as in everything else he was all for temporizing and the middle course; and a good supper, in friendly intimacy, seemed to him, especially when he was hungry, an excellent interlude between the prologue and dénouement of an amorous adventure.
The gypsy girl made no reply. She made her scornful little pout, cocked her head like a bird, then burst out laughing, and the dainty little dagger disappeared as it had emerged, without Gringoire being able to see where the bee hid its sting.
A moment later a loaf of rye bread, a slice of bacon, some shrivelled apples, and a jug of beer lay on the table. Gringoire began eating ravenously. To hear the furious clinking of his iron fork on the earthenware plate, anyone would have thought that his love had all turned into appetite.
The girl sitting in front of him watched him in silence, obviously preoccupied with some other thought, at which she smiled from time to time, while her hand gently stroked the goat’s intelligent head, pressed softly between her knees.
A yellow wax candle lit up this scene of voracity and reflection.
Meanwhile, the first mewlings of his stomach quietened, Gringoire felt a certain false shame at seeing that all that remained was one apple. ‘Aren’t you eating, Mademoiselle Esmeralda?’
She replied with a negative nod of her head, and her pensive gaze fixed on the room’s vaulted ceiling.
‘What the devil is she so interested in?’ wondered Gringoire, looking at what she was looking at: ‘It can’t be that grinning dwarf carved on the keystone that’s absorbing all her attention. Devil take it! I can stand that comparison!’
He raised his voice: ‘Mademoiselle!’
She did not seem to hear.
He went on still louder: ‘Mademoiselle Esmeralda!’
A waste of time. The girl’s mind was somewhere else, and Gringoire’s voice was quite unable to bring it back again. Fortunately the goat took a hand. It began gently tugging its mistress’s sleeve. ‘What do you want, Djali?’ the gypsy girl said sharply, as though waking up with a start.
‘She’s hungry,’ said Gringoire, delighted to have started some conversation.
La Esmeralda began crumbling some bread, which Djali ate gracefully from the hollow of her hand.
However, Gringoire did not give her time to resume her reverie. He ventured a delicate question.
‘So you don’t want me for a husband?’
The girl stared at him and said: ‘No.’
‘For a lover?’ Gringoire went on.
She pouted, and answered: ‘No.’
‘For a friend?’ continued Gringoire.
She stared at him again, and after a moment’s thought: ‘Perhaps.’
This ‘perhaps’, so dear to philosophers, emboldened Gringoire.
‘Do you know what friendship is?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ the gypsy answered. ‘It means being brother and sister, two souls touching but not merging, two fingers of the same hand.’
‘And love?’ Gringoire continued.
‘Oh! love!’ she said, her voice trembling and her eyes radiant. ‘That is being two and yet only one. A man and a woman fusing into an angel. It’s heaven.’
As the street dancer said this, Gringoire was particularly struck by her beauty, which seemed to be in perfect harmony with the almost oriental exaltation of the words.
Her pure, rose-red lips were half smiling; her calm, innocent forehead was at times overclouded by her thoughts, like a mirror by a breath; and from her long, dark, lowered eyelashes shone a kind of ineffable light which gave her profile that ideal sweetness which Raphael* later found at the mystic point of intersection of virginity, maternity, and divinity.
Gringoire pressed on none the less.
‘What must one be to please you?’
‘A man.’
‘And what am I then?’ he asked.
‘A man has a helmet on his head, a sword in his hand, and golden spurs on his heels.’
‘Right,’ said Gringoire, ‘without a horse you can’t be a man. Do you love anyone?’
‘As a lover?’
‘As a lover.’
She remained thoughtful for a moment, then she said with an odd expression: ‘I shall soon know.’
‘Why not this evening?’ the poet went on fondly. ‘Why not me?’
She looked at him gravely. ‘I can only love a man able to protect me.’
Gringoire went red and took the point. It was obvious that the girl was referring to his feeble support in the critical situation in which she had been two hours earlier. That memory, effaced by his other adventures that evening, came back to him. He smote his forehead.
‘Talking of which, mademoiselle, that is where I should have begun. Forgive me for being so foolishly distracted. How did you manage, then, to escape from Quasimodo’s clutches?’
The question startled the gypsy girl. ‘Oh! the horrible hunchback!’ she said, burying her face in her hands, and shivering as though bitterly cold.
‘Horrible indeed!’ said Gringoire, who was not giving up his idea, ‘but how were you able to escape from him?’
La Esmeralda smiled, sighed, and remained silent.
‘Do you know why he followed you?’ Gringoire went on, trying to revert to his question in a roundabout way.
‘I don’t know,’ said the girl. And added sharply: ‘But you were following me too, why was that?’
‘To tell the truth,’ Gringoire answered, ‘I don’t know either.’
There was silence. Gringoire slashed at the table with his knife, the girl smiled and seemed to be looking at something through the wall. Suddenly she began singing in a scarcely articulate voice:
Quando las pintadas aves
Mudas estas y la tierra …
[When the coloured birds are silent and the earth …]’*
She broke off abruptly and started fondling Djali.
‘That’s a pretty animal you have there,’ said Gringoire.
‘She’s my sister,’ she answered.
‘Why do they call you la Esmeralda?’ asked the poet.
‘I have no idea.’
‘Come now!’
She pulled from her bosom a sort of little oblong sachet, which hung round her neck on a chain of adrezarach seeds. The sachet gave off a strong smell of camphor. It was covered in green silk, and at its centre had a large, green, glass bead, in imitation of an emerald.
‘Perhaps because of this,’ she said.
Gringoire tried to take the sachet. She drew back.
‘Don’t touch it. It’s an amulet; you would hurt the charm, or the charm would hurt you.’
The poet grew increasingly curious. ‘Who gave it to you?’
She put a finger to her lip and hid the amulet in her bosom. He tried some other questions but she barely answered.
‘What does the word la Esmeralda mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘What language is it?’
‘Egyptian, I think.’
‘I suspected as much,’ said Gringoire.’ You don’t come from France?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Are your parents alive?’
She began singing to an old tune:
My father’s a bird—my mother’s another,
I can cross the water without a skiff,
I can cross the water without a boat,
My mother’s a bird—my father’s another.
‘Very good,’ said Gringoire. ‘How old were you when you came to France?’
‘Very young.’
‘To Paris?’
‘Last year. Just as we entered by the Porte-Papale I saw the reed-warbler on the wing; it was the end of August; I said: “It will be a hard winter.”’
‘It has been,’ said Gringoire, delighted to have started some conversation; ‘I have spent it blowing on my fingers. So you have the gift of prophecy?’
She became monosyllabic again: ‘No.’
‘That man you call the Duke of Egypt, is he the chief of your tribe?’
‘Yes.’
‘But he’s the one who married us,’ the poet timidly observed.
She made her usual pretty pout. ‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘My name? If you want to know, it’s Pierre Gringoire.’
‘I know a finer one,’ she said.
‘That’s unkind!’ the poet went on. ‘No matter, you won’t make me angry. Look, perhaps you’ll like me when you know me better, and anyhow you told me your story so trustingly that I owe you a bit of mine. You must know, then, that my name is Pierre Gringoire, and I’m the son of the tax-farmer for the Gonesse district. My father was hanged by the Burgundians and my mother ripped open by the Picards at the time of the siege of Paris twenty years ago. So I was an orphan at 6, with nothing beween my bare feet and the pavements of Paris. I don’t know how I filled in the time between 6 and 16. Here a fruit seller would give me a plum, there a baker would throw me a crust; at night I would get myself picked up by the watch, who would put me in prison, and there I’d find a bundle of straw. All that didn’t stop me growing up tall and thin, as you can see. In winter I’d warm myself in the sun, under the porch of the Hôtel de Sens, and I thought it quite absurd that the great bonfire on Midsummer’s Eve should be kept for the dog-days. At 16 I tried to find a trade. I sampled them all, one after another. I became a soldier, but I wasn’t brave enough. I became a monk, but I wasn’t devout enough. And I can’t drink too much either. In despair I went in as an apprentice carpenter in the timber trade; but I wasn’t strong enough. I felt more inclined to be a schoolmaster; it’s true I couldn’t read; but that’s no bar. After a while I realized that I lacked something whatever I tried; and when I saw that I was good for nothing, of my own free will I became a poet and composer of rhymes. That’s a trade you can always take up when you are a vagrant, and it’s better than stealing, as some of my larcenous young friends advised me to do.
‘One fine day I was lucky enough to meet Dom Claude Frollo, the reverend archdeacon of Notre-Dame. He took an interest in me, and it’s thanks to him that today I am a real scholar, knowing Latin from Cicero’s Offices to the Mortuology of the Celestine fathers, and no barbarian in scholastics, poetics, rhythmics, or even hermetics, the wisdom of wisdoms. I am the author of the mystery performed today, with great success and attended by a great throng of people in the Great Hall of the Palais, no less. I have also written a book which will run to six hundred pages on the prodigious comet of 1465, which drove one man mad. I have had other successes as well. Being something of an armourer, I worked on that great bombard of Jean Maugue, which, as you know, burst on the Pont de Charenton the day they tried it out, and killed twenty-four spectators. You see I am by no means such a bad match. I know lots of very attractive tricks to teach your goat; for instance, how to mimic that damned Pharisee the Bishop of Paris, whose mill-wheels splash passers-by the whole length of the Pont-aux-Meuniers. And then my mystery will bring me in a lot of hard cash, if they ever pay me for it. In short I am at your service, I, my wit, my knowledge, and my learning, ready to live with you, mademoiselle, as it may please you, in chastity or mutual enjoyment, husband and wife, if that suits you, brother and sister, if that suits you better.’
Gringoire fell silent, waiting to see the effect of his harangue on the girl. Her eyes were fixed on the ground.
/> ‘Phoebus,’ she said in an undertone. Then, turning to the poet: ‘What does it mean, Phoebus?’
Gringoire, unsure what connection there might be between his speech and this question, was not averse to showing off his erudition. He preened himself as he replied: ‘It’s a Latin word meaning sun.’
‘Sun,’ she repeated.
‘It’s the name of a certain handsome archer, who was a god,’ Gringoire added.
‘A god!’ repeated the gypsy girl. And her tone had something both thoughtful and passionate about it.
At that moment one of her bracelets came undone and dropped on the ground. Gringoire swiftly stooped to pick it up. When he stood up again the girl and the goat had disappeared. He heard the sound of a bolt. A small door, no doubt giving access to a neighbouring cell, was being closed from the outside.
‘Has she at least left me a bed?’ said our philosopher.
He made a tour of the cell. The only piece of furniture suitable for sleeping on was a fairly long wooden chest, though it had a carved lid, as a result of which when Gringoire stretched out on it he felt somewhat like Micromegas* lying down full length across the Alps.
‘Come on,’ he said, adjusting himself as best he could. ‘One must take what comes. But this is an odd wedding night. It’s a pity. That wedding with the broken pitcher had something artless and old-fashioned about it that I rather liked.’
BOOK THREE
I
NOTRE-DAME
