by Hugo, Victor
[Therefore, gentlemen, in the presence of a proven vampire, the crime being patent, the criminal intention existent, in the name of the holy church of Notre-Dame de Paris, which is seized of the right of exercising justice of all kinds, high and low, in that undeflled island of the Cité, by the tenor of these presents we declare that we demand: first, some pecuniary indemnity; second, public penance before the great portal of the cathedral church of Notre-Dame; thirdly, a sentence by virtue of which this vampire, together with her goat, either in the square commonly called la Grève, or where the island comes to a point in the river Seine, beside the tip of the royal gardens, be executed.]
He put his cap on again and sat down.
‘Eheu!’ Gringoire sighed, heartbroken, ‘bassa latinitas [Alas! what low Latin].’
Another man in a black robe stood up by the accused. It was her advocate. The judges, still fasting, began to murmur.
‘Advocate, be brief,’ said the president.
‘Monsieur le Président,’ replied the advocate,’ since the defendant has confessed her crime, I have only one word to say to these gentlemen. Here is a text from the Salic law: “If a vampire has eaten a man, and been convicted of it, she shall pay a fine of 8,000 deniers which makes 200 gold sous.” May it please the court to condemn my client to that fine.’
‘The text has been abrogated,’ said the advocate extraordinary to the King.
‘Nego [I deny that],’ retorted the advocate.
‘Put it to the vote!’ said a counsellor. ‘The crime is patent and the hour is late.’
They proceeded to vote without leaving the hall. The judges voted by raising their caps, they were in a hurry. Their hooded heads could be seen in the shadows being uncovered one after the other as the president put the lugubrious question to them in a low voice. The poor accused seemed to be watching, but her blurred eyes no longer saw.
Then the clerk began writing; then he handed the president a long parchment scroll.
At that the wretched girl heard the people stirring, pikes clashing, and an icy voice saying:
‘Bohemian girl, on such a day as may please our lord the King, at the hour of noon, you will be taken in a tumbril, wearing a shift, barefoot, a rope round your neck, before the great portal of Notre-Dame, and there you will do public penance with a wax torch of two pounds’ weight in your hand, thence you will be taken to the Place de Grève, where you will be hanged and strangled on the town gibbet; likewise your goat; and you will pay the official 3 lions of gold in reparation for the crimes committed and confessed by you of witchcraft, magic, lechery, and murder against the person of Monsieur Phoebus de Châteaupers. May God have mercy on your soul!’
‘Oh! I’m dreaming!’ she murmured, and felt rough hands taking her away.
IV
LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA[ALL HOPE ABANDON …]
IN the Middle Ages, once a building was completed there was almost as much of it in the ground as outside. Unless it was built on piles, like Notre-Dame, a palace, a fortress, a church, always had a double bottom. In cathedrals it was, as it were, another cathedral underground, low, dark, mysterious, blind and dumb, beneath the upper nave flooded with light and resounding day and night with organ and bells; sometimes it was a sepulchre. In palaces, in fortresses, it was a prison, sometimes again a sepulchre, sometimes both together. These mighty buildings, whose method of formation and ‘Vegetation’ we have discussed elsewhere, did not simply have foundations but, so to speak, roots, whose ramifications extended into the soil as chambers, galleries, stairways, like the building constructed above. Thus churches, palaces, fortresses had earth up to their waists. A building’s cellars were another building, in which you went down instead of up, and whose underground storeys joined on beneath the pile of external storeys of the structure, like those forests and mountains reflected upside-down in the waters of a lake beneath the forests and mountains on its shore.
At the Bastille Saint-Antoine, at the Palais de Justice in Paris, at the Louvre, these underground constructions were prisons. The storeys of these prisons, as they plunged deeper into the earth, became darker and more cramped. They amounted to so many zones on a graduated scale of horror. Dante could find no better scheme for his Inferno.* These funnels of cells usually ended in a sump-like dungeon, where Dante put his Satan, and where society put those condemned to death. Once a wretched being had been buried down there it meant farewell to daylight, fresh air, life, ogni speranza [all hope]. It came out only for the gallows or the stake. Sometimes it rotted away down there. Human justice called that ‘forgetting’.* Between mankind and himself the condemned person felt weighing down on his head an accumulation of stones and gaolers, and the whole prison, the massive fortress, was just an immense, complex lock shutting him out from the world of the living.
It was in just such a sump, in the oubliettes excavated by St Louis, in the in pace of the Tournelle, that they had, doubtless for fear of an escape, deposited la Esmeralda, condemned to the gallows, with the colossal Palais de Justice over her head. Poor fly who could not have budged the smallest of its stones!
Providence and society had surely been equally unjust; such a profusion of misery and torture was not needed to shatter so frail a creature.
She was there, lost in the darkness, buried, interred, walled up. Anyone who could have seen her in such a state, after seeing her laughing and singing in the sunlight, would have shuddered. Cold as night, cold as death, no longer a breath of air through her hair, no human sound in her ear, no gleam of daylight in her eyes, broken in half, crushed with chains, squatting by a pitcher and a loaf of bread on a bit of straw amid the pool of water formed beneath her by the dampness oozing from the dungeon, unmoving, almost unbreathing; she was no longer even capable of suffering. Phoebus, the sunshine, noonday, fresh air, dancing to applause, sweet prattling of love with the officer, all that indeed still ran through her mind, sometimes as a golden, lilting vision, sometimes as a shapeless nightmare; but now it was just a vague, horrible struggle fading into the darkness, or distant music playing up there above ground, no longer audible at the depths to which the unfortunate girl had fallen.
Since she had been down there she had been neither awake nor asleep. In such misfortune, in such a dungeon, she could no longer distinguish sleeping from waking, dream from reality, day from night. It was all mixed up, broken, drifting, scattered in confusion in her mind. At most she dreamed. Never had a living creature come so close to nothingness.
Thus numb, chilled, petrified, she had hardly noticed on two or three occasions the sound of a trapdoor opening somewhere above her, without letting in even a chink of light, and through it a hand throwing her a crust of black bread. This was, however, the sole human contact remaining to her—the gaoler’s periodic visit.
Just one thing still automatically caught her ear: above her head the dampness seeped through the mouldering stones of the vault, and at regular intervals a drop of water broke away. She listened in a daze to the sound of each drop falling into the pool beside her.
This drop of water falling into the pool was the only thing that still stirred around her, the only clock to mark the time, the only sound to reach down to her out of all the sounds being produced on the earth’s surface.
In point of fact she also felt from time to time, in this cloaca of mire and darkness, something cold pass here and there over her foot or her arm, and she shivered.
How long she had been there, she did not know. She remembered a death sentence being pronounced somewhere against someone, then being taken away, and waking up in blackness and silence, frozen. She had dragged herself along on her hands, then iron rings had cut into her ankles and there had been a clanking of chains. She had realized that there was a wall all round her, that beneath her was a flagstone covered with water and a bundle of straw. But no lamp and no airhole. So, she had sat down on the straw and sometimes, to change her position, on the bottom step of some stone stairs which there were in the dungeon. For a while she had
tried to count the black minutes measured out by the drops of water, but soon this dismal labour of a sick brain had broken off of its own accord in her head and left her in a stupor.
One day finally, or one night (for midday and midnight were the same colour in this tomb) she heard above her a louder noise than that usually made by the warder when he brought her her jug and her bread. She looked up and saw a reddish beam shine through the cracks in the kind of door or trap set into the ceiling of the in pace. At the same time the heavy ironwork creaked, the trap grated on its rusty hinges, then turned, and she saw a lantern, a hand, and the lower part of the bodies of two men, the door being too low for her to see their heads. The light hurt so badly that she closed her eyes.
When she opened them again the door was once more shut, the torch set down on one of the steps; one man, on his own, stood before her. A black cowled robe fell to his feet, a caffardum* of the same colour hid his face. Nothing could be seen of his body, neither his face nor his hands. He was like a long black shroud standing upright, beneath which something could be perceived moving. She stared for a few minutes at this kind of spectre. Meanwhile neither she nor he spoke. They looked like two statues facing each other. Only two things seemed to be alive in the cellar: the wick of the lantern, sputtering from the dampness in the atmosphere, and the water dripping from the ceiling which punctuated the irregular crepitation with its own monotonous splash and made the light from the lantern tremble in concentric ripples on the oily water of the pool.
At last the prisoner broke the silence: ‘Who are you?’
‘A priest.’
The word, the accent, the sound of his voice made her shudder.
The priest went on in muffled tones: ‘Are you prepared?’
‘For what?’
‘To die.’
‘Oh!’ she said, ‘will it be soon?’
‘Tomorrow.’
Her head, which had been raised in joy, sank back on her chest. ‘That’s a long time yet!’ she murmured; ‘what difference would it make to them to do it today?’
‘So you are very unhappy?’ the priest asked after a silence.
‘I’m very cold,’ she answered.
She took her feet in her hands, a habitual gesture of unhappy creatures who are cold, already observed in the recluse of the Tour-Roland, and her teeth chattered.
The priest seemed to be looking round the dungeon, his eyes concealed beneath his hood.
‘No light! no fire! in a pool of water! It’s horrible!’
‘Yes,’ she replied with the stunned look that misfortune had given her. ‘Daylight belongs to everyone. Why do they give me only night?’
‘Do you know,’ the priest went on after a further silence, ‘why you are here?’
‘I think I once knew,’ she said, rubbing her skinny fingers over her eyebrows as though to help her remember, ‘but I don’t know now.’
Suddenly she began weeping like a child: ‘I want to get out of here, monsieur. I’m cold, I’m afraid, and there are creatures that climb over my body.’
‘Very well, follow me.’
So saying the priest took her by the arm. The wretched girl was frozen to the marrow, yet that hand felt cold to her.
‘Oh!’ she murmured, ‘it’s the icy hand of death,—who are you, then?’
The priest lifted up his hood. She looked. It was the sinister face which had been pursuing her for so long, that demon’s head which had appeared at la Falourdel’s above the beloved head of her Phoebus, that eye which she had last seen glinting beside a dagger.
This apparition, which had always been so fateful for her and had driven her from misfortune to misfortune as far as the torture chamber, roused her from her torpor. It seemed to her that the sort of veil which had shrouded her memory was being rent asunder. All the details of her dismal adventure, from the nocturnal scene at la Falourdel’s down to her condemnation at the Tournelle came back to her mind all at once, not vague and confused as they had been up till then, but distinct, raw, clear-cut, lifelike, terrible. Those half-erased memories, almost wiped away by an excess of suffering, were revived by the sombre figure before her, just as invisible letters traced with sympathetic ink stand out bold and fresh on blank paper when brought close to a fire. It seemed to her that all the wounds in her heart had re-opened at once, and were bleeding.
‘Ha!’ she cried, her hands over her eyes, trembling convulsively, ‘it’s the priest!’
Then she dropped her arms in dejection, and remained sitting, with head bowed, eyes fixed on the ground, mute, continuing to tremble.
The priest looked at her with the eye of a kite which has long been hovering in circles high up in the sky around a poor lark cowering in the corn, which has long been silently contracting the formidable circles of its flight, has suddenly fallen upon its prey like lightning, and holds it quivering in its claws.
She began murmuring very softly: ‘Finish it! finish it! the final blow!’ And in terror buried her head between her shoulders, like a sheep waiting for the butcher’s club to fall.
‘So you find me abhorrent?’ he said at last.
She did not answer. ‘Do you find me abhorrent?’ he repeated.
Her lips contracted as if she were smiling. ‘Yes,’ she said; ‘the executioner mocks the condemned man. For months now he has been pursuing me, threatening me, frightening me! But for him, my God, how happy I should have been! He’s the one who cast me into this abyss. Oh heavens! He’s the one who killed … he’s the one who killed him! my Phoebus!’
At this, bursting into sobs and looking up at the priest: ‘Oh! you wretch! Who are you? What have I done to you? Do you hate me then? Alas, what have you got against me?’
‘I love you!’ cried the priest.
Her tears suddenly ceased. She looked at him like an idiot. He had fallen to his knees and gazed longingly at her with blazing eyes.
‘Do you hear? I love you!’ he cried once more.
‘What a love!’ the unfortunate girl said, shuddering.
He went on: ‘The love of a damned soul!’
They both remained silent for some minutes, crushed by the weight of their emotions, he out of his mind, she in a daze.
‘Listen,’ the priest said at last, strangely calm again. ‘You are about to learn everything. I’m going to tell you what up till now I hardly dared to tell myself when I furtively examined my conscience during those deep hours of the night when it is so dark that it seems as though God can no longer see us. Listen. Before I met you, girl, I was happy …’
‘So was I!’ she sighed weakly.
‘Don’t interrupt. Yes, I was happy, I thought I was, at least. I was pure, my soul was filled with limpid brightness. No one raised his head more proudly and radiantly than I. Priests consulted me on chastity, learned doctors on doctrine. Yes, knowledge meant everything to me. It was like a sister, and a sister was enough for me. It’s not that other ideas did not come to me with age. More than once my flesh was excited by a woman’s form passing by. That force of sex and blood in the grown man which, as a foolish youth I thought I had stifled for life, had more than once convulsively shaken the iron chain of vows binding me, poor wretch, to the cold stones of the altar. But fasting, prayer, study, the mortifications of the cloister, had restored to the spirit mastery over the flesh. Anyhow, I avoided women. Besides, I had only to open a book for all the impure vapours of my brain to be dispelled before the splendour of knowledge. In a few minutes I felt gross earthly things recede into the distance, and I was calm, dazzled, and serene again in the presence of the tranquil radiance of eternal truth. As long as the demon sent to attack me only the vague shadows of women passing occasionally before my eyes in church, in the street, in the fields, and rarely returning in my dreams, I easily overcame him. Alas! if the victory has not remained mine, it is God’s fault for not creating man and the devil with equal strength.—Listen. One day …’
Here the priest stopped, and the prisoner heard rending sighs come from his
chest like a death-rattle.
He went on: ‘One day, I was leaning at the window of my cell.… What was I reading? Oh! it’s all spinning round in my head!—I was reading. The window overlooked a square. I heard the sound of music and a drumbeat. Annoyed at this disturbance to my reverie, I looked out on to the square. What I saw was being seen by others as well, and yet it was not a sight intended for human eyes. There, in the middle of the pavement—it was noon—bright sunshine—a creature was dancing. So beautiful a creature that God would have preferred her to the Virgin, and chosen her for his mother and wanted to be born of her if she had existed when he was made man! Her eyes were dark and splendid, in the midst of her black hair a few loose strands shone as bright as gold thread where the sun had penetrated. Her feet moved so swiftly that they became blurred like the spokes of a rapidly revolving wheel. Round her head, in her black tresses, were metal plates sparkling in the sun and forming on her brow a starry crown. Her sequined dress sparkled blue and star-spangled like a summer night. Her supple brown arms twined and untwined round her waist like two sashes. The shape of her body was of astonishing beauty. Oh! that resplendent figure standing out like something luminous in the light of the sun itself! Alas! girl, it was you. Surprised, intoxicated, spellbound, I let myself go on looking at you. I looked at you so hard that I suddenly shivered with terror, I felt in the grip of fate.’
The priest, overcome, stopped again for a moment. Then he went on:
‘Already half fascinated, I tried to cling to something to halt me in my fall. I remembered the ambushes Satan had already laid for me. The creature I had before my eyes had that more than human beauty which can come only from heaven or hell. This was no ordinary girl made from a handful of clay, dimly lit within by the flickering beam of a woman’s soul. It was an angel! but of darkness, of flames, and not of light. At the very moment that I was thinking thus, I saw a goat beside you, a beast from the sabbath, looking at me and laughing. The noonday sun gave it horns of fire. Then I glimpsed the demon’s snare, and I doubted no more that you had come from hell and had come thence for my damnation. So I believed.’
