by Hugo, Victor
‘That means then, master of perversity and violence that you are, that you presume to show disrespect for the auditor of the Châtelet, the magistrate appointed to police the people of Paris, responsible for investigating crimes, offences, and misconduct, for supervising all trades and preventing monopoly, for the upkeep of roadways, for preventing the regrating of poultry, fowl, and wildfowl, for assizing firewood and other sorts of wood, for cleansing the town of sludge and the air of contagious diseases, for being constantly concerned with the public good, in a word, without fee or hope of payment! Do you know that my name is Florian Barbedienne, Monsieur the Provost’s own deputy, and, what is more, commissioner, investigator, comptroller and examiner with equal powers in the Provostry, Bailiwick, Conservancy* and presidial courts?’
There is no reason why one deaf man talking to another should ever stop. God knows where and when Maître Florian would have made landfall, thus launched in full sail on the high seas of eloquence, if the low door at the back had not suddenly opened to admit Monsieur the Provost in person.
At this entrance Maître Florian did not stop short, but turning round on his heel, and abruptly aiming at the Provost the harangue with which he had been bombarding Quasimodo a moment before: ‘Monseigneur,’ he said, ‘I request such penalty as may please you against the accused here present for gross and wondrous contempt of court.’
And he sat down quite out of breath, wiping off great drops of sweat which fell from his brow like tears, soaking the parchments spread out before him. Messire Robert d’Estouteville frowned and gestured so imperiously and meaningfully to Quasimodo to pay attention, that the deaf man understood to some degree.
The Provost addressed him sternly: ‘What have you done then to be here, scoundrel?’
The poor devil, assuming that the Provost was asking his name, broke his customary silence and answered in a hoarse, guttural voice: ‘Quasimodo.’
The reply bore so little relevance to the question that the uncontrollable laughter began again, and Messire Robert cried out, red with fury: ‘Are you scoffing at me too, you arrant rogue?’
‘Bell-ringer of Notre-Dame,’ answered Quasimodo, thinking that he was meant to explain to the judge who he was.
‘Bell-ringer!’ the Provost went on, having woken up that morning in such a bad temper, as we have said, that his fury did not need to be stirred up by such strange replies. ‘Bell-ringer! I’ll have you thrashed with a full peal of rods on your back through all the crossroads of Paris. Do you understand, you rascal?’
‘If it’s my age you want to know,’ said Quasimodo,’ I think I’ll be 20 at Martinmas.’
This was really going too far; the Provost could stand no more.
‘Ah! you scoff at the Provostship, you wretch! Sergeants of the wand, you’ll take this rascal to the pillory of the Grève, you’ll flog him, and turn him round for an hour. He’ll pay for it, by God! and I want this present sentence publicly cried, with four sworn trumpeters in attendance, through the seven castellanies of the viscounty of Paris.’
The clerk at once began drafting the sentence.
‘God’s belly! that’s a good sentence!’ the young student Jehan Frollo du Moulin cried out from his corner.
The Provost turned round and again glared at Quasimodo:
‘I believe the rascal said “God’s belly!”—Clerk, add a fine of 12 deniers parisis for swearing, half of it to go to the fabric fund of Saint-Eustache. I have a particular devotion to Saint-Eustache.’
In a few minutes the sentence was drawn up. Its tenor was brief and simple. The customary of the Provostry and viscounty of Paris had not yet been worked on by President Thibaut Baillet and Roger Barmne, advocate to the King. It had not yet then been obstructed by the tall forest of chicanery and legal procedure which these two jurisconsults planted there at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Everything was clear, expeditious, explicit. It went straight to the point, and you could see at once, at the end of every path, without the complication of undergrowth or sidetrack, the wheel, the gibbet, or the pillory. At least you knew where you were going.
The clerk handed the sentence to the Provost, who affixed his seal to it, and left to continue his round of the courtrooms, in a frame of mind which must have filled up all the gaols of Paris that day. Jehan Frollo and Robert Poussepain were laughing up their sleeves. Quasimodo regarded it all with an air of indifference and surprise.
Meanwhile the clerk, just as Maître Florian Barbedienne was reading over the sentence in his turn before signing it, felt moved by pity for the poor devil who had been condemned and, in the hope of obtaining some mitigation of the punishment, came as close as he could to the auditor’s ear and said to him, pointing to Quasimodo: ‘That man is deaf.’
He hoped that this shared infirmity would arouse Maître Florian’s interest in favour of the condemned man. But first of all we have already observed that Maître Florian did not like his deafness to be noticed. Then, he was so hard of hearing that he did not catch a word of what the clerk said; however, he wanted to give the impression that he had heard, and replied: ‘Aha! that’s different. I didn’t know that. An extra hour in the pillory, in that case.’
And he signed the sentence thus modified.
‘That serves him right,’ said Robert Poussepain, who still bore a grudge againt Quasimodo; ‘that will teach him to be rough with people.’
II
THE RAT-HOLE
WITH the reader’s permission, we shall now go back to the Place de Grève, which we left yesterday with Gringoire in order to follow la Esmeralda.
It is ten o’clock in the morning. There are signs everywhere of the day after a public holiday. The roadway is covered with litter, ribbons, scraps of cloth, feathers from plumes, drops of wax from torches, crumbs from the public banquet. A good many townsfolk are strolling about, stirring the charred brands of the bonfire with their feet, going into raptures before the Maison-aux-Piliers, recalling the fine hangings of the previous day as they look this morning at the nails, all that remains of that pleasure. The beer and cider vendors are rolling their barrels among the groups of people. A few passers-by come and go about their business. Tradesmen chat and call out to each other from the doorway of their shops. The festivities, the ambassadors, Coppenole, the Pope of Fools, are on everyone’s lips, each trying to outdo the others in apt comment and hearty laughter. Meanwhile, four mounted sergeants who have just stationed themselves at the four corners of the pillory have already concentrated around them a fair proportion of the populace scattered across the square, who condemn themselves to boredom and immobility in the hope of seeing some minor punishment executed.
If the reader, after contemplating the lively, noisy scene being played out in every part of the square, will now turn his eyes on to that ancient half-Gothic, half-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland, which stands at the western corner of the quayside, he will observe in the angle of the façade a large public breviary, richly illuminated, protected from the rain by a little canopy, and from thieves by a grille, which, however, leaves room to turn the pages. Beside this breviary is a narrow, pointed window, closed by two intersecting iron bars, looking on to the square, the only opening which admits a little fresh air and daylight to a small doorless cell, set at ground level in the thickness of the old house’s wall, and filled with a peace made all the more profound, a silence made all the more mournful by the fact that a public square, the noisiest and busiest in Paris, teems and yells all around.
This cell had been famous in Paris for nearly three centuries, ever since Madame Rolande of the Tour-Roland, in mourning for her father who had died on the Crusades, had had it hollowed out from the wall of her own house and there shut herself up for ever, retaining of her palace nothing but this dwelling, of which the door was walled up and the window open, winter and summer; all the rest she gave to the poor and to God. The desolate lady had in fact waited twenty years for death in this anticipated tomb, praying night and day for her father’s
soul, sleeping on ashes, without so much as a stone for a pillow, wearing a black sack, and subsisting only on whatever bread and water compassionate passers-by left on her window ledge, thus receiving charity after she had exercised it. At her death, at the moment of passing over to another tomb, she had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to women in affliction, mothers, widows, or daughters, who had much praying to do for others or for themselves, and wished to be buried alive in great grief or great penitence. The poor of her time had given her a fine funeral with their tears and blessings; but to their great regret the pious maid could not be canonized as a saint for want of patronage. Those among them who were not as pious as they ought to have been had hoped that the matter could be settled more easily in paradise than in Rome, and had simply prayed to God for the deceased, instead of to the Pope. Most people had been content to hold Rolande’s memory sacred and make relics out of her rags. The town, for its part, had founded a public breviary in the lady’s honour, and fastened it near the window of her cell, so that passers-by might stop there from time to time, if only to offer a prayer; that prayer might make them think of alms, and thus the poor recluses, heirs to Madame Rolande’s tomb, should not perish completely from hunger and neglect.
This kind of tomb was in any case by no means rare in towns in the Middle Ages. One would often encounter, in the busiest streets, in the gaudiest and noisiest market, right in the middle, beneath the horses’ hooves, virtually beneath the carts’ wheels, a cellar, a well, a walled and barred cell, in the depths of which some human being prayed day and night, voluntarily dedicated to some endless lamentation, some great expiation. And all the reflections aroused in us today by such a strange spectacle, such a horrible cell, a kind of intermediate link between a home and a tomb, cemetery and city, this living creature cut off from human companionship and henceforth counted among the dead, this lamp burning its last drop of oil in the shadows, this remnant of life flickering in a grave, this breath, this voice, this unceasing prayer in a stone coffin, this face for ever turned towards another world, this eye lit already by another sun, this ear pressed to the walls of the tomb, this soul imprisoned in the body, this body imprisoned in its dungeon, and beneath the double envelope of flesh and granite the droning of that soul in distress, that all went unnoticed by the crowd. The piety of those days, little given to reasoning and none too subtle, could not see so many facets in a religious act. It took the thing as a whole, and honoured, venerated, if need be sanctified, but did not analyse the suffering involved and felt no particular pity for it. From time to time it brought a pittance to the wretched penitent, looked into the hole to see whether the person inside was still alive, did not know his name, hardly knew how many years it had been since he had begun to die, and to a stranger enquiring about the living skeleton rotting in this cellar, the neighbours would simply answer: ‘He’s the recluse’, or if it were a woman: ‘She’s the recluse.’
That is how people saw everything in those days, without metaphysics, without exaggeration, without a magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet been invented, either for material things of for those of the spirit.
Besides, although they aroused no great wonder, examples of this kind of claustration in the midst of towns were, in fact, frequent, as we have just said. In Paris there were quite a number of such cells for praying to God and doing penance; almost all were occupied. It is true that the clergy did not like to leave them empty, which would imply a lack of fervour among the faithful, and lepers were put in when there were no penitents. Apart from the cell on the Grève, there was one at Montfaucon, one at the charnel-house of the Innocents, another—just where I have forgotten—at the Logis Clichon, I believe. There were still more in many places where their traces can be found in traditions, in the absence of any monuments. The University too had its own. On the Montagne Sainte-Genèvieve a kind of medieval Job spent thirty years on a dungheap, at the bottom of a cistern, singing the seven penitential psalms, and, once he had finished, starting all over again, chanting in a louder voice at night, magna voce per umbras, and the antiquary today still has the impression of hearing his voice as he turns into the rue du Puits-qui-parle [Talking-well].*
To limit ourselves to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we have to say that it had never been short of recluses. Since the death of Madame Rolande it had rarely been vacant for a year or two. Many women had come there to weep, until they died, for parents, lovers, sins. The malice of Parisians who interfere in everything, even what concerns them least, claimed that few widows had been seen there.
In accordance with the fashion of the time, a Latin inscription on the wall indicated to the literate passer-by the pious purpose of the cell. Up to the middle of the sixteenth century the custom was maintained of explaining a building by some brief device written over the door. Thus in France you can still read over the wicket of the seigneurial prison at Tourville: Sileto et spera [Be silent and hope]; in Ireland, under the shield placed on top of the main gate of the castle of Fortescue: Forte scutum, salus ducum [a strong shield, the safety of leaders]; in England, over the main entrance to the hospitable manor of the Earls Cowper: Tuum est [it is yours]. That is because at that time every building was an idea.
As there was no door to the walled-up cell of the Tour-Roland, someone had carved over the window in Romanesque capital letters the two words: TU, ORA [you, pray]
As a result, the people, whose good sense does not see the finer points of things and cheerfully translates Ludovico Magno [to Louis the Great] by Porte Saint-Denis, had given this dark, dismal, dank cavity the name Trou-aux-Rats* [Rat-hole]—a less sublime description perhaps than the other, but on the other hand more picturesque.
III
THE STORY OF A MAIZE CAKE
AT the time of which we are writing the Tour-Roland cell was occupied. If the reader wishes to know by whom, he has only to listen in to the conversation of three worthy gossips who, at the moment when we fixed our attention on the Rat-hole, were proceeding in the very same direction as they walked beside the river up from the Châtelet towards the Grève.
Two of these women were dressed like good townswomen of Paris. Their fine white gorgets, their red-and-white striped tiretaine skirts, their white knitted stockings, with coloured embroidery at the ankles, pulled trimly over the leg, their square shoes of fawn leather with black soles, and especially their headdress, a sort of tinsel horn loaded with ribbons and lace, such as women still wear in Champagne, in common with the grenadiers of the Russian Imperial Guard, proclaimed that they belonged to that class of rich tradespeople which comes midway between what servants call ‘a woman’ and what they call ‘a lady’. They did not wear rings, or gold crosses, and it was easy to see that in their case this was due not to poverty but quite simply for fear of incurring a fine. Their companion was got up in much the same way, but there was something about her dress and bearing which had a whiff of the country lawyer’s wife. You could see from the way her belt came up above her hips that she had not been long in Paris. Add to that a pleated gorget, ribbon-bows on her shoes, the stripes on her skirt running horizontally and not vertically, and countless other enormities offensive to good taste.
The first two women walked with the step peculiar to Parisians showing provincials around Paris. The provincial woman held a stout lad by the hand, and he in turn held a large cake.
It pains us to have to add that, given the rigours of the season, he was using his tongue as a handkerchief.
The boy had to be dragged along, non passibus aequis [not with even steps], as Virgil puts it, and kept stumbling, to his mother’s loud protests. It is true that his eyes were more on the cake than the pavement. No doubt he had some serious reason for not biting into it (the cake), for he contented himself with gazing at it affectionately. But his mother ought to have carried the cake herself. It was cruel to make a Tantalus of the big, chubby lad.
Meanwhile the three damoiselles (for the title dame was at that time reserved for
noblewomen) were all talking at once.
‘Let’s hurry, Damoiselle Mahiette,’ said the youngest of the three, who was also the fattest, to the provincial woman. ‘I’m very much afraid that we may get there too late. They told us at the Châtelet that they were taking him to the pillory straightaway.’
‘Bah! what are you talking about, Damoiselle Oudarde Musnier?’ replied the other Parisian. ‘He’ll stay two hours in the pillory. We’ve plenty of time. Have you ever seen anyone put in the pillory, my dear Mahiette?’
‘Yes,’ said the provincial lady, ‘at Reims.’
‘Bah! what’s that, your pillory at Reims? A wretched cage where they only turn peasants. That’s not up to much!’
‘Only peasants!’ said Mahiette. ‘At the Marché-aux-Draps! At Reims! We’ve seen some really splendid criminals there; some had killed both father and mother! Peasants indeed! What do you take us for, Gervaise?’
The provincial was certainly about to lose her temper for the honour of her pillory. Fortunately the prudent Damoiselle Oudarde Musnier changed the subject in time.
‘By the way, Damoiselle Mahiette, what do you think of our Flemish ambassadors? Do you have any as fine as that in Reims?’
‘I admit,’ answered Mahiette, ‘that it’s only in Paris that you see Flemings like that.’
‘Did you see that tall one in the embassy who is a hosier?’ asked Oudarde.
‘Yes,’ said Mahiette, ‘he looked like a Saturn.’
‘And that fat one with a face like a bare belly?’ Gervaise went on, ‘and the little one with little eyes, with red-rimmed eyelids, all plucked and jagged like a thistle-head?’
‘It’s their horses that are such a brave sight,’ said Oudarde, ‘all dressed up in the fashion of their country!’
‘Ah! my dear,’ broke in the provincial Mahiette, putting on a superior air in her turn, ‘what would you have said then if you had seen, in ‘61, at the coronation in Reims, eighteen years ago,* the horses of the princes and the King’s company! Hangings and caparisons of every kind; some of damask, fine cloth of gold, trimmed with sable fur; others of velvet, trimmed with ermine; others again covered with jewellery and great gold and silver bells! And the money it cost! And the handsome young pageboys riding them!’
