by Hugo, Victor
‘Eh! but… that’s my nasty animal,’ said old Falourdel, ‘and I recognize both of them right enough!’
Jacques Charmolue intervened: ‘If it please you, messieurs, we shall proceed with the interrogation of the goat.’
It was indeed the second accused. At that time nothing could be simpler than putting an animal on trial for sorcery. You will find among others in the Provostry accounts for 1466 a curious detail of the expenses incurred in the trial of Gillet-Soulart and his sow, ‘executed for their demerits at Corbeil’. Everything is there, the cost of digging pits to put the sow in, the five hundred bundles of sticks collected from the harbour at Morsant, the three pints of wine and the bread, the victim’s last meal, fraternally shared with the executioner, down to the eleven days of guarding and feeding the sow at 8 deniers parisis a day. Sometimes they went even further than animals. The capitularies of Charlemagne and Louis the Debonair inflict heavy punishments on fiery phantoms which take the liberty of appearing in the air.
Meanwhile the attorney in ecclesiastical courts had cried: ‘If the demon possessing this goat, which has resisted all attempts at exorcism, persists in its wickedness, and if it shocks the court thereby, we warn it that we shall be compelled to require the gallows or the stake for it.’
Gringoire was in a cold sweat. Charmolue picked up the gypsy’s tambourine from a table and, presenting it to the goat in a certain way, asked it: ‘What time is it?’
The goat looked at him shrewdly, lifted a gilded hoof and knocked seven times. It was indeed seven o’clock. A movement of terror went through the crowd.
Gringoire could not stand it.
‘She’s damning herself!’ he shouted loudly. ‘You can see very well that she doesn’t know what she is doing.’
‘Silence, the churls at the end of the hall!’ the usher called sharply.
Jacques Charmolue, with the help of similar manœuvres with the tambourine, made the goat perform a number of other tricks, the day’s date, the month of the year and so on, which the reader has already witnessed. And by an optical illusion peculiar to judicial proceedings, those same spectators who had perhaps more than once applauded Djali’s innocent tricks at street corners, were terrified by them under the vaulting of the Palais de Justice. The goat was definitely the devil.
It was much worse when the King’s attorney emptied on to the floor a certain leather pouch full of movable letters which Djali wore round her neck, and they saw the goat pull out with her hoof from the scattered alphabet the fateful name: PHOEBUS. The spells of which the captain had been the victim seemed to be irresistibly demonstrated, and, in the eyes of all, the gypsy girl, that delightful dancer who had so often dazzled passers-by with her grace, was just a horrible vampire.
For the rest she gave no sign of life. Neither Djali’s graceful movements, nor the lawyers’ threats, not the muffled imprecations of the audience, nothing reached her mind any more.
A sergeant had to shake her mercilessly, and the president had to raise his voice solemnly, to arouse her:
‘Girl, you are of Bohemian race, given to malefices. You have, acting in complicity with the bewitched goat implicated in the charge, on the night of 29 March last, murdered and stabbed, in league with the powers of darkness, with the help of charms and practices, a captain of the archers of the King’s ordinance, Phoebus de Châteaupers. Do you persist in your denial?’
‘Horrors!’ cried the girl, burying her face in her hands. ‘My Phoebus! Oh! this is hell!’
‘Do you persist in your denial?’ the president asked coldly.
‘Yes, I deny it!’ she said in a terrible voice, standing up with flashing eyes.
The president continued bluntly: ‘Then how do you explain the facts with which you are charged?’
She replied in broken tones: ‘I have already said, I don’t know. It’s a priest. A priest I don’t know. An infernal priest who is pursuing me!’
‘That’s right,’ the judge went on. ‘The bogey-monk.’
‘O my lords! have mercy! I am only a poor girl …’
‘From Egypt,’ said the judge.
Maître Jacques Charmolue spoke up gently: ‘In view of the painful obstinacy of the accused, I call for the question to be applied.’
‘Granted,’ said the president.
The wretched girl trembled in every limb. She stood up, however, at an order from the guard, and walked quite steadily, preceded by Charmolue and the priests from the officiality, between two rows of halberds, to a side door, which opened suddenly and closed behind her, making the dejected Gringoire think of horrible jaws which had just devoured her.
When she disappeared a plaintive bleating was heard. It was the little goat crying.
The hearing was suspended. When one councillor remarked that they were all tired and it would be a long time to wait until the torture was finished, the president replied that a magistrate must be ready to sacrifice himself to his duty.
‘What a tiresome, disagreeable hussy,’ said one old judge, ‘having them apply the question to her when we have not yet had supper!’
II
THE GOLD ÉCU TURNED INTO A DRY LEAF (CONTINUED)
AFTER going up and down steps in corridors so gloomy that they were lit by lamps even in daytime, la Esmeralda, still surrounded by her mournful procession, was pushed by the palace sergeants into a sinister chamber. This chamber, circular in shape, occupied the ground floor of one of those massive towers which still in our own day break through the layer of modern buildings with which new Paris has covered the old. This cellar had no windows, no other opening than the entrance, low and closed by an enormous iron door. There was, however, no shortage of light. A furnace was set into the thickness of the wall. A massive fire burned within it, the reflection of its red glare filling the cellar and depriving a wretched candle standing in a corner of any radiance. The iron portcullis used to close the furnace was raised for the moment, and revealed only, at the mouth of the hole flaming out from the dark wall, the lower end of its bars, like a row of sharp, black teeth, with spaces in between, making the furnace look like one of those dragons’ mouths which belch out flame in legend. By its light the prisoner could see all around the room dreadful instruments of which she did not understand the use. In the middle a leather mattress lay almost touching the ground, and hanging above it was a strap with a buckle, fastened to a brass ring held in the jaws of a flat-nosed monster carved on the keystone of the vault. There was a clutter of tongs, pincers, great ploughshares inside the furnace, all reddening together on the coals. All that the blood-red glow from the furnace lit up throughout the room was a jumble of horrible things.
This Tartarus was simply called ‘the question-chamber’.
On the bed Pierrat Torterue, the sworn torturer, sat nonchalantly. His assistants, two square-faced gnomes, in leather aprons and canvas breeches, were moving the ironware about on the coals.
The poor girl had summoned up her courage in vain. As she entered this room she was struck with horror.
The sergeants of the palace bailiff lined up on one side, the priests from the officiality on the other. A clerk, a writing case, and a table were in a corner. Maître Jacques Charmolue approached the gypsy, smiling very gently: ‘My dear child,’ he said, ‘do you persist then in your denial?’
‘Yes,’ she answered in an already dying voice.
‘In that case,’ Charmolue went on, ‘it will grieve us deeply to question you more insistently than we should like. Kindly take the trouble to sit on that bed. Maître Pierrat, make room for mademoiselle and shut the door.’
Pierrat stood up grumbling: ‘If I shut the door,’ he muttered, ‘my fire will go out.’
‘All right, my dear fellow,’ rejoined Charmolue, ‘leave it open.’
Meanwhile la Esmeralda remained standing. That leather bed, on which so many poor wretches had writhed, appalled her. Terror froze the marrow of her bones. She stood there aghast and stupefied. At a sign from Charmolue, the two assista
nts took her and sat her down on the bed. They did not hurt her, but when these men touched her, when the leather touched her, she felt all her blood run back into her heart. She looked round the room distraught. She imagined she saw moving and advancing from every side towards her, so as to clamber along her body and bite and pinch her, all those shapeless instruments of torture, which were, among all the instruments of every kind which she had seen up till then, what bats, millipedes, and spiders are among insects and birds.
‘Where is the doctor?’ asked Charmolue.
‘Here,’ answered a black robe she had not noticed before.
She shuddered.
‘Mademoiselle,’ went on the caressing voice of the attorney in ecclesiastical courts, ‘for the third time, do you persist in denying the facts of which you are accused?’
This time she could only nod her head. Her voice failed her.
‘You persist?’ said Jacques Charmolue. ‘Then, I’m desperately sorry, but I must fulfil the duties of my office.’
‘Monsieur the King’s attorney,’ Pierrat said brusquely, ‘what shall we start with?’
Charmolue hesitated for a moment with the ambiguous frown of a poet searching for a rhyme. ‘The boot,’ he said in the end.
The unfortunate girl felt so thoroughly abandoned by God and man that her head fell on her breast like some inert thing with no strength of its own.
The torturer and the doctor came up to her together. At the same time the two assistants began rummaging through their hideous arsenal.
At the jangling of these frightful irons the wretched child started like a dead frog being galvanized. ‘Oh!’ she murmured, so softly that no one heard her, ‘oh, my Phoebus!’ Then she sank back into her immobility and marmoreal silence. Such a sight would have rent the heart of anyone but a judge. It was like some poor, sinful soul being questioned by Satan beneath the crimson wicket-gate of hell. The wretched body to which that dreadful swarm of saws, wheels, and racks was about to cling, the being about to be handled by the rough hands of executioners and their pincers, was this gentle, fair, fragile creature. Poor grain of millet given over by human justice to be ground in the fearful mills of torture!
Meanwhile the calloused hands of Pierrat Torterue’s assistants had brutally stripped the charming leg, the dainty foot which had so often filled passers-by with wonder at their grace and beauty in the streets of Paris.
‘It’s a pity,’ growled the torturer as he looked at such graceful and delicate limbs. If the archdeacon had been present he would surely have remembered his symbolic spider and fly. Soon the unfortunate creature saw through the cloud spreading over her eyes the boot approaching, soon she saw her foot enclosed between the iron-bound boards and disappear into the fearful apparatus. Then terror gave her back her strength. ‘Take that off!’ she cried in a rage. And, sitting up all dishevelled: ‘Mercy!’
She sprang off the bed to throw herself at the feet of the King’s attorney, but her leg was caught in the heavy block of oak and iron, and she collapsed over the boot, more broken than a bee with a damaged wing.
At a sign from Charmolue, she was put back on the bed, and two huge hands secured round her delicate waist the strap hanging from the vaulting.
‘For the last time, do you admit the facts of the case?’ Charmolue asked with his imperturbable benignity.
‘I am innocent.’
‘Then, mademoiselle, how do you explain the circumstances with which you are charged?’
‘Alas, my lord! I don’t know.’
‘So you deny it?’
‘Everything!’
‘Go ahead,’ said Charmolue to Pierrat.
Pierrat turned the handle of the screw, the boot tightened, and the unfortunate girl let out one of those terrible screams for which no human language has a written equivalent.
‘Stop,’ Charmolue told Pierrat. ‘Do you confess?’ he said to the gypsy.
‘Everything!’ cried the wretched girl. ‘I confess! I confess! mercy!’
She had miscalculated her strength in facing the question. Poor child, whose life up till then had been so joyful, so smooth, so sweet, the first pain had overcome her.
‘Humanity obliges me to tell you,’ observed the King’s attorney, ‘that by confessing you must expect the death penalty.’
‘I hope so,’ she said. And fell back on the leather bed, dying, bent double, letting herself hang from the strap buckled over her chest.
‘Up there, my beauty, hold yourself up a bit,’ said Maître Pierrat as he raised her. ‘You look like that golden sheep the Duke of Burgundy wears round his neck.’
Jacques Charmolue raised his voice. ‘Clerk, write: Young Bohemian girl, you confess that you have taken part in the agapes, sabbath, and malefices of hell, with larvae, masks, and vampires? Answer.’
‘Yes,’ she said so quietly that the word was covered by her breathing.
‘You admit to seeing the ram that Beelzebub makes appear in the clouds to convene the sabbath, and is seen only by sorcerers?’
‘Yes.’
‘You confess to worshipping the heads of Bophomet, the Templars’ abominable idols?’*
‘Yes.’
‘To having had habitual dealings with the devil in the form of a familiar she-goat, jointly charged with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Finally, you admit and confess to having, with the help of the demon, and the phantom commonly known as the bogey-monk, on the night of 29 March past, murdered and assassinated a captain named Phoebus de Châteaupers?’
She looked up at the magistrate with her large, staring eyes, and answered like a machine, without tension or tremor: ‘Yes.’ It was obvious that everything in her was shattered.
‘Write, clerk,’ said Charmolue. And, addressing the torturer: ‘Have the prisoner unfastened and brought back to the hearing.’
When the prisoner was ‘unshod’, the attorney in ecclesiastical courts examined her foot, still numb from the pain. ‘Come along!’ he said, ‘there’s no great harm done. You cried out in time. You would still be able to dance, my beauty!’
Then he turned to his acolytes from the officiality: ‘There at last justice is enlightened! It is a relief, messieurs! Mademoiselle will testify to the fact that we acted with all possible gentleness.’
III
END OF THE GOLD ÉCU TURNED INTO A DRY LEAF
WHEN she came back into the courtroom, pale and limping, she was greeted by a general murmur of pleasure. On the audience’s part there was the feeling of impatience rewarded which one experiences in the theatre at the end of the last interval in the play, when the curtain goes up and the end is about to begin. On the judges’ part it was the hope of being soon able to sit down to supper. The little goat too bleated with delight. It tried to run to its mistress, but it had been tied to the bench.
It was now completely dark. The candles, whose number had not been increased, gave so little light that one could not see the walls of the hall. Darkness wrapped every object in a kind of haze. The apathetic faces of some of the judges just barely emerged. Facing them, at the end of the long hall, they could see a vague white blur standing out against the gloomy background. It was the accused.
She had dragged herself to her place. When Charmolue had installed himself magisterially in his, he sat down, then stood up again and said, without betraying too much vanity at his success: ‘The accused has admitted everything.’
‘Bohemian girl,’ the president put in, ‘you have admitted all your acts of magic, prostitution, and murder against Phoebus de Châteaupers?’
Her heart constricted. She could be heard sobbing in the shadows. ‘Whatever you will,’ she answered feebly, ‘but kill me quickly.’
‘Monsieur the King’s attorney in ecclesiastical courts,’ said the president, ‘the court is ready to hear your requisitions.’
Maître Charmolue displayed an intimidating register, and began reading with a wealth of gesture and the exaggerated accents of advocacy a Latin oration
in which all the evidence of the charges was stacked upon Ciceronian periphrases flanked by quotations from Plautus, his favourite comic author. We regret being unable to offer our readers this remarkable piece. The orator delivered it with a marvellous range of actions. Before he had even finished his exordium the sweat was already running off his brow and his eyes were bulging. Suddenly, right in the middle of a period, he broke off, and his expression, usually quite gentle and even stupid, became thunderous: ‘Messieurs,’ he cried (this time in French, for it was not in his text), ‘Satan is so much involved in this affair that there he is, present at our proceedings and aping their majesty. Look!’
So saying he pointed to the little goat, who, seeing Charmolue gesticulate, had indeed thought it appropriate to do the same, and had sat down on its rump, copying as best it could with its forelegs and bearded face the emotional pantomime of the King’s attorney in ecclesiastical courts. This was, you may remember, one of the goat’s most charming talents. This incident, this last proof, produced a great effect. They tied the goat’s hooves together, and the King’s attorney resumed the thread of his eloquence.
It took a very long time, but the peroration was admirable. Here is the final sentence; add to it Maître Charmolue’s hoarse voice and breathless gestures:
Ideo, Domni, coram stryga demonstrata, crimine patente, intentione criminis existente, in nomine sanctae ecclesiae Nostrae-Dominae Parisiensis, quae est in saisina habendi omnimodam altam et bassam justitiam in ilia hac intemerata Civitatis insula, tenore praesentium declaramus nos requirere; primo, aliquandam pecuniariam indemnitatem; secundo, amendationem honorabilem ante portalium maximum Nostrae-Dominae, ecclesiae cathedralis; tertio, sententiam in virtute cujus ista stryga cum sua capella, seu in trivio vulgariter dicto la Grève, seu in insula exeunte in fluvio Sequanae, juxta pointam jardinis regalis, executae sint!
