by Hugo, Victor
Thus the gypsy’s reception was extraordinarily glacial. They looked her up and down, then looked at each other, and it had all been said. They had understood one another. Meanwhile the girl waited for someone to speak to her, so overcome that she did not dare to raise her eyelids.
The captain was the first to break the silence: ‘Upon my word,’ he said in his fearlessly fatuous voice, ‘what a charming creature she is! What do you think of her, fair cousin?’
This remark, which a more delicate admirer would at least have uttered in a low voice, was not of a kind to dispel the feminine jealousies keeping a keen look-out on each other in the gypsy’s presence.
Fleur-de-Lys answered the captain with a sugary affectation of disdain: ‘Not bad.’
The others were whispering.
At length Madame Aloïse, who was no less jealous than the rest because she was jealous for her daughter, addressed the dancer: ‘Come here, little girl.’
‘Come here, little girl,’ Bérangère repeated with comical dignity, she who did not come up to her waist.
The gypsy approached the noble lady.
‘Fair child,’ said Phoebus pompously, taking a few steps towards her himself, ‘I do not know if I have the supreme good fortune to be recognized by you …’
She interrupted him with a smile and a look full of the utmost sweetness: ‘Oh! yes,’ she said.
‘She has a good memory,’ observed Fleur-de-Lys.
‘Well, now,’ Phoebus went on, ‘you got away very smartly the other evening. Do I frighten you?’
‘Oh! no,’ said the gypsy.
In the tone of that ‘oh! no’, coming after the ‘oh! yes’, there was some ineffable quality which made Fleur-de-Lys feel hurt.
‘In your place you left me, my fair one,’ went on the captain, whose tongue was loosened now that he was speaking to a girl from the streets, ‘a pretty surly rascal, one-eyed and hunchbacked, the bishop’s bell-ringer, as I believe. I’m told he is an archdeacon’s bastard and born of the devil. He has some funny name, Ember Days, Palm Sunday, Shrove Tuesday, I don’t recall! The name of some big feast-day, anyhow! So he was taking the liberty of abducting you, as if you were made for beadles! That’s a bit much. What the devil did he want with you then, that screech-owl? Eh, tell me!’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied.
‘Can you imagine such insolence! A bell-ringer abducting a girl, like a viscount! A peasant poaching noblemen’s game! That’s uncommon cheek. Anyhow he paid dearly for it. Maître Pierrat Torterue is the roughest groom who ever curried a rogue, and I can tell you, if that gives you any pleasure, that your bell-ringer’s hide got a proper tanning at his hands.’
‘Poor man!’ said the gypsy, for whom these words revived memories of the scene at the pillory.
The captain roared with laughter: ‘Corne de baœuf! your pity is about as well placed as a feather in a pig’s arse! May I be as pot-bellied as a pope if …’
He stopped short: ‘I beg your pardon, ladies! I think I was about to come out with something silly.’
‘Fie on you, sir!’ said la Gaillefontaine.
‘He talks to that creature in her own language!’ Fleur-de-Lys added in an undertone, her resentment growing with every moment. That resentment did not lessen when she saw the captain, enchanted by the gypsy and above all with himself, spin on his heel as he repeated with the crude, naïve gallantry of a soldier: ‘A lovely girl, upon my soul!’
‘Dressed pretty much as a savage,’ said Diane de Christeuil, showing off her beautiful teeth as she laughed.
That remark was a beam of light for the others. Unable to carp at her beauty, they pounced on her attire.
‘That’s true enough, little girl,’ said la Montmichel. ‘Where did you learn to run about the streets like that without a wimple or a gorget?’
‘That’s a fearfully short skirt,’ added la Gaillefontaine.
‘My dear,’ Fleur-de-Lys continued rather acidly, ‘you’ll get yourself picked up by the sergeants of the douzaine for that gilt belt of yours.’
‘Little girl, little girl,’ la Christeuil went on with an implacable smile, ‘if you wore decent sleeves on your arms they wouldn’t get so sunburnt.’
It was truly a sight worthy of a more intelligent spectator than Phoebus to see how these lovely girls, with their poisonous, angry tongues, coiled, slithered, and twisted round the street dancer. They were at once cruel and graceful. They probed and pried with their malicious words into her poor outlandish costume of sequins and gaudy rags. They never stopped their mocking, ironic, humiliating comments. Sarcasms, patronizing benevolence, spiteful glances rained down upon the gypsy. It was like watching those young Roman ladies who would amuse themselves by sticking gold pins into the breast of some beautiful slave girl. It was like a pack of elegant greyhounds circling, with flaring nostrils and blazing eyes, round some poor woodland doe which their master’s eye forbids them to devour.
After all, what was a wretched dancer of the public squares to these girls of noble family? They seemed to ignore her presence, and spoke about her, in front of her, directly to her, aloud, as if she were something rather grubby, rather despicable, and rather pretty.
The gypsy was not indifferent to these pinpricks. From time to time a flush of shame, a flash of anger, inflamed her eyes or her cheeks; a disdainful word seemed to tremble on her lips; she made her little grimace of contempt, with which the reader is familiar; but she kept silent. Unmoving, she fixed on Phoebus a look of sad, gentle resignation. There was happiness and affection too in that look. It was as though she was containing herself for fear of being driven away.
As for Phoebus, he laughed and took the gypsy’s part with a mixture of impertinence and pity.
‘Let them talk, little girl!’ he repeated, jangling his spurs, ‘no doubt your dress is a bit eccentric and wild; but with a girl as charming as you, what does that matter?’
‘Good heavens!’ cried fair-haired Gaillefontaine, straightening her swan-like neck and smiling bitterly, ‘I see that messieurs the archers of the King’s ordinance are easily set alight by beautiful gypsy eyes.’
‘Why not?’ said Phoebus.
At this reply, casually tossed away by the captain like a stray stone whose fall one does not bother to observe, Colombe began to laugh, and Diane, and Amelotte, and Fleur-de-Lys, to whose eyes a tear came at the same time.
The gypsy, who had dropped her eyes to the ground at Colombe de Gaillefontaine’s words, raised them, radiant with joy and pride, and gazed again at Phoebus. She was very beautiful at that moment.
The old lady, who was watching the scene, felt offended and did not understand.
‘Holy Virgin!’ she suddenly cried out, ‘what’s that moving against my legs? Oh! the nasty animal!’
It was the goat that had just arrived in search of its mistress and, as it rushed towards her, had begun by getting its horns caught in the pile of material which the noble lady’s clothes heaped up over her feet when she was sitting down.
It caused a diversion. The gypsy, without speaking a word, freed the goat.
‘Oh! there’s the little goat with golden hooves!’ cried Bérangère, jumping for joy.
The gypsy crouched down on her knees, and rested the goat’s head against her cheek as it caressed her. It was as though she was asking forgiveness for leaving it like that.
Meanwhile Diane had leaned over into Colombe’s ear. ‘Eh! Goodness! Why didn’t I think of it before? She’s the gypsy with the goat. They say she’s a witch, and that her goat performs quite miraculous tricks.’
‘Very well,’ said Colombe, ‘the goat must entertain us in its turn and do a miracle for us.’
Diane and Colombe eagerly spoke to the gypsy. ‘Little girl, get your goat to do a miracle for us.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ the dancer replied.
‘A miracle, a piece of magic, witchcraft, you know.’
‘I don’t know.’ And she went back to stroking the pr
etty creature, saying over and over: ‘Djali! Djali!’
At that moment Fleur-de-Lys noticed a little embroidered leather bag hanging from the goat’s neck. ‘What’s that?’ she asked the gypsy.
The gypsy raised her large eyes towards her and answered gravely: ‘That’s my secret.’
‘I would very much like to know what your secret is,’ thought Fleur-de-Lys.
Meanwhile the good lady had stood up irritably. ‘Well then, young gypsy, if neither you nor your goat have any dancing to show us, what are you doing in here?’
The gypsy, without replying, went slowly towards the door. But the nearer she came to it, the slower her steps. An irresistible magnet seemed to be holding her back. Suddenly she turned her eyes, wet with tears, on Phoebus and stopped.
‘God’s truth!’ cried the captain, ‘you can’t go off like that. Come back and dance something for us. By the way, my lovely, what’s your name?’
‘La Esmeralda,’ said the dancer, without taking her eyes off him.
At this strange name the girls burst out into uncontrollable mirth.
‘That,’ said Diane, ‘is a terrible name for a young lady!’
‘You can see,’ Amelotte put in, ‘that she’s an enchantress.’
‘My dear,’ Dame Aloïise exclaimed solemnly, ‘your parents never fished up that name for you from the baptismal font.’
Meanwhile, for the past few minutes, unnoticed, Bérangère had enticed the goat into a corner of the room with a bit of marzipan. In a moment they had become great friends. The inquisitive child had removed the bag from round the goat’s neck, opened it and emptied the contents on to the matting. It was an alphabet with each letter separately inscribed on a little boxwood block. No sooner had the toys been spread out on the matting than the child was surprised to see the goat, one of whose ‘miracles’ this no doubt was, pull out certain letters with its gilded hoof, and gently push them so as to arrange them in a certain order. After a moment this made a word which the goat had seemingly been trained to write, for it composed it with so little hesitation, and Bérangère suddenly cried out, clasping her hands together in wonder:
‘Godmother Fleur-de-Lys, come and see what the goat has just done!’
Fleur-de-Lys ran to her and gave a start. The letters arranged on the floor composed the word: ‘PHOEBUS’.
‘Did the goat write that?’ she asked in a changed voice.
‘Yes, godmother,’ answered Bérangère.
No doubt was possible; the child could not write.
‘So that’s the secret!’ thought Fleur-de-Lys.
Meanwhile the child’s cry had brought everyone running, the mother, the girls, the gypsy, and the officer.
The gypsy saw the folly that the goat had just committed. She went red, then pale, and began trembling like a guilty thing in front of the captain, who looked at her with a smile of pleasure and amazement.
‘Phoebus!’ the girls whispered, dumbfounded; ‘that’s the captain’s name!’
‘You have a wonderful memory!’ Fleur-de-Lys said to the petrified gypsy. Then bursting into sobs: ‘Oh!’ she stammered in her grief, hiding her face in her lovely hands, ‘She’s a magician!’ And she heard a still more bitter voice tell her in her inmost heart: ‘She’s a rival!’
She fell down in a faint.
‘My daughter! my daughter!’ cried the terrified mother. ‘Be off with you, you gypsy from hell!’
La Esmeralda picked up the ill-fated letters in an instant, beckoned to Djali, and went out by one door as Fleur-de-Lys was carried out by the other.
Captain Phoebus, left alone, hesitated for a moment between the two doors; then followed the gypsy girl.
II
A PRIEST AND A PHILOSOPHER ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS
THE priest whom the girls had noticed on top of the north tower, leaning out over the square and so intently watching the gypsy’s dance, was indeed archdeacon Claude Frollo.
Readers will not have forgotten the mysterious cell that the archdeacon had reserved for himself in that tower. (I am not sure, be it said in passing, that it is not the same into which you can still look today through a little square window, open to the east at a man’s height, on the platform from which the towers spring: a squalid chamber, at present bare, empty and dilapidated, the peeling plaster of the walls decorated here and there at the moment with a few sorry engravings of cathedral façades. I assume that this hole is jointly inhabited by bats and spiders, and is consequently the scene of a double war of extermination against flies.)
Every day, an hour before sunset, the archdeacon would climb the tower stairs and shut himself up in this cell, sometimes staying there all night. On that day, just as he arrived outside the low door of the cubby-hole and was inserting in the lock the intricate little key which he always carried with him in the wallet hanging by his side, the sound of tambourine and castanets reached his ear. That sound came from the Place du Parvis. The cell, as already mentioned, had only one window, giving on to the rear of the church. Claude Frollo hurriedly extracted the key, and a moment later was standing on top of the tower in the attitude of sombre meditation in which the young ladies had noticed him.
He stood there grave and motionless, absorbed by one look and one thought. The whole of Paris lay at his feet, with the countless spires of its buildings and its circle of gentle hills on the horizon, with its river winding under the bridges and its people flowing through the streets, with the cloud of smoke rising from its chimneys, with its steep roofs pressing round Notre-Dame in a close-knit chain. But in this whole town the archdeacon was looking at a single point on the ground: the Place du Parvis; in all that crowd, at a single figure: the gypsy girl.
It would be hard to say what kind of look it was, or the source of the flame that sprang from it. The look was fixed, yet turbulent and stormy. And seeing the profound stillness of his whole body, barely stirring at intervals in an involuntary shudder, like a tree in the breeze, his elbows, set more stiffly than the marble on which they rested, the petrified smile contorting his features, one would have said that nothing was still alive in Claude Frollo except his eyes.
The gypsy danced. She whirled her tambourine round on her fingertips, threw it into the air as she danced Provençal sarabands; nimble, light, and joyous, unaware of the fearful look plunging so heavily straight down on to her head.
The crowd was teeming around her; from time to time a man got up in a red and yellow tabard would push them into a circle, then go back and sit on a chair a few feet from the dancer, and take the goat’s head in his lap. This man seemed to be the gypsy’s companion. From the height where he stood, Claude Frollo could not make out his features.
The moment the archdeacon noticed this unknown man his attention seemed to be divided between the dancer and him, and his expression grew darker and darker. Suddenly he straightened up and his whole body trembled. ‘Who is that man?’ he muttered. ‘I have always seen her alone before!’
Then he dived back under the twisting vault of the spiral staircase and went down again. As he passed by the door of the ringing chamber, which stood ajar, he saw something that struck him; he saw Quasimodo, leaning at an opening of those slate louvres which look like huge Venetian blinds, also looking down on to the square. He was rapt in such profound contemplation that he was unaware of his adoptive father passing by. His wild eye bore a singular expression; a look both enchanted and gentle. ‘That’s odd!’ murmured Claude. ‘Is it the gypsy he’s looking at like that?’
He continued on his way down. After a few minutes the worried archdeacon emerged into the square by the door at the bottom of the tower.
‘What’s happened to the gypsy?’ he said, joining the group of onlookers which had been attracted by the tambourine.
‘I don’t know,’ replied one of his neighbours. ‘She has just disappeared. I think she’s gone to dance some fandango in that house opposite, where they called her in.’
In the gypsy’s place, on the same carpet w
hose pattern of arabesques had been concealed a moment before by the capricious movements of her dance, all the archdeacon could see was the man in red and yellow who, to earn a few coins in his turn, was parading round the circle, elbows on hips, head thrown back, face scarlet, neck extended, with a chair held between his teeth. On the chair he had tied a cat, lent by a woman nearby, which was swearing with terror.
‘By Our Lady!’ cried the archdeacon just as the tumbler, sweating profusely, passed him with his pyramid of chair and cat, ‘what is Maître Pierre Gringoire doing there?’
The archdeacon’s stern voice threw the poor devil into such a commotion that he lost his balance, and his whole edifice with it, so that chair and cat fell pell-mell on the bystanders’ heads, amid an inextinguishable chorus of boos.
It is likely that Maître Pierre Gringoire (for it was indeed he) would have had an awkward score to settle with the cat’s owner, and all the bruised and scratched faces surrounding him, if he had not hastened to take advantage of the uproar to seek refuge in the church, whither Claude Frollo had beckoned him to follow.
