by Hugo, Victor
Here the priest looked directly at the prisoner and added coldly:
‘I still believe so. Meanwhile the spell was gradually working, your dance whirled round in my brain, I felt the mysterious malefice taking effect within me, all that should have been vigilant in my soul fell asleep, and like those who die in the snow I enjoyed letting sleep come. Suddenly you began to sing. What could I do, wretch that I am? Your singing was even more enchanting than your dancing. I tried to flee. I could not. I was pinned, rooted to the ground. It seemed to me that the marble floor slabs had risen up to my knees. I had to stay to the end. My feet were like ice, my head was boiling. At last, you felt sorry for me, perhaps, you stopped singing, you disappeared. The reflection of that dazzling vision, the echo of that enchanting music gradually faded from my eyes and ears. Then I fell down in the window embrasure, stiffer and weaker than a dislodged statue. The bell for vespers roused me. I rose, I fled, but, alas! something in me had fallen and could not be raised again, something had come upon me from which I could not flee.’
He paused once more, then continued:
‘Yes, from that day on there was a man in me whom I did not know. I tried to use all my remedies, the cloister, the altar, work, books. Madness! Oh! how hollow science rings when one desperately bangs a head filled with passions against it! Do you know, girl, what from then on I would see between the book and me? You, your shadow, the image of the luminous apparition which had one day crossed the space before me. But that image was no longer the same colour; it was gloomy, funereal, dark as the black circle which long dogs the sight of anyone who has been unwise enough to stare at the sun.
‘Unable to get rid of it, hearing your song always ringing in my heart, seeing your feet always dancing over my breviary, feeling always in my dreams at night the smooth touch of your shape upon my flesh, I tried to see you again, to touch you, to find out who you were, to see if I would find you anything like the ideal image of you which had remained with me, perhaps to break my dream with the reality. In any case I hoped that a new impression would wipe out the original one, and that first impression had become unbearable. I looked for you. I saw you again. Disaster! When I had seen you twice, I wanted to see you a thousand times, I wanted to see you always. Then—how can one check the hellish slide?—then I was no longer my own master. The other end of the string that the devil had fastened to my wings he had tied to your foot. I wandered aimlessly like you. I waited for you in doorways, I spied on you at street corners, I watched out for you from the top of my tower. Each evening I came back into myself more spellbound, more desperate, more bewildered, more damned!
‘I had found out who you were, gypsy, Bohemian, gitane, Zingara, what doubt could there be that magic was involved? Listen. I hoped that bringing you to trial would release me from the spell. A sorceress had bewitched Bruno of Asti, he had her burned and was cured. I knew that. I wanted to try that remedy. I tried first to have you banned from the Parvis Notre-Dame, hoping to forget you if you did not come back any more. You realized that. You came back. Then the idea occurred to me of abducting you. One night I made an attempt. There were two of us. We already had you in our grasp when that wretched officer turned up. He rescued you. In doing so he began your misfortunes, and mine, and his own. Finally, no longer knowing what to do or what would become of me, I denounced you to the official. I thought that I would be cured, like Bruno of Asti. I also thought in a confused way that a trial would deliver you into my hands, that I could hold you in a prison, I would have you, that you would not be able to escape me there, that you had possessed me long enough for me to possess you in my turn. In doing wrong one must go the whole way. It’s crazy to stop half-way in what is monstrous! The extreme in crime brings delirious joy. A priest and a witch can melt in transports of delight on the straw of a dungeon floor!
‘So I denounced you. It was then that I terrified you when we met. The plot that I was hatching against you, the storm that I was piling up over your head, broke out from me in threats and glances like lightning. However, I still hesitated. My plan had frightening aspects which held me back.
‘Perhaps I would have given it up, perhaps my hideous idea would have withered in my brain without bearing fruit. I believed that it would always depend on me whether to continue or interrupt this case. But every evil thought is inexorable and tries to become a deed; but where I believed myself omnipotent, fate was more powerful than I. Alas! alas! it is fate that took you and delivered you up to the dreadful mechanism of the apparatus that I had secretly constructed! Listen—I am nearly at an end.
‘One day—another day of bright sunshine—I saw a man pass by who spoke your name, and laughed, and whose eyes were full of lust. Damnation! I followed him. You know the rest.’
He fell silent. The girl could find only one word: ‘Oh, my Phoebus!’
‘Not that name!’ said the priest, gripping her violently by the arm. ‘Don’t say that name! Oh! wretches that we are, that is the name that has ruined us! Or rather we have all ruined each other through the inexplicable play of fatality! You are suffering, aren’t you? You are cold, the darkness makes you blind, the dungeon envelops you, but perhaps you still have some light in your innermost depths, even if it is only your childish love for that hollow man who toyed with your-heart! Whereas I carry my dungeon within me, within me is winter, ice, despair. I have dark night in my soul. Do you know all that I have suffered? I was present at your trial. I sat on the official’s bench. Yes, beneath one of those priestly hoods were the writhings of a damned soul. When they brought you in, I was there; when they interrogated you, I was there. Den of wolves!—it was my crime, my gallows that I saw built up slowly over your head. Each witness, each piece of evidence, each lawyer’s speech, I was there; I could count every step you took along the via dolorosa I was even there when that wild beast … Oh! I hadn’t foreseen torture! Listen. I followed you into the chamber of pain. I saw you undressed and handled half naked by the torturer’s infamous hands. I saw your foot, that foot for which I would have given an empire to kiss just once and die, that foot which I should have been so overjoyed to feel crushing my head, I saw that foot clamped in that horrible boot which turns the limbs of a living creature into bloody mush. Oh! wretch that I am! While I saw that, I had a dagger under my shroud with which I was gashing my breast. When you cried out I dug it into my flesh; if you had cried a second time it would have gone into my heart! Look. I think it is still bleeding.’
He opened his cassock. His breast was indeed lacerated as though by a tiger’s claw, and in his side was a large wound which had not properly closed.
The prisoner recoiled with horror.
‘Oh!’ said the priest, ‘have pity on me, girl! You think you are unhappy, alas! alas! you don’t know what unhappiness is. Oh! to love a woman! to be a priest! to be hated! to love her with all the frenzy in one’s soul, to feel that for the least of her smiles one would give one’s blood, one’s entrails, reputation, salvation, immortality and eternity, this life and the next; to regret not being a king, emperor, archangel, god, so that she could have a greater slave at her feet; to embrace her night and day in dreams and thoughts; and see her in love with a soldier’s uniform! and to have nothing to offer her but a dingy priest’s cassock which would fill her with fear and disgust! To be there, jealous and furious, while she lavishes on this wretched swaggering fool treasures of love and beauty! To see that body whose shape makes you burn, that breast so soft and sweet, that flesh thrill and flush under another’s kisses! O heavens! To love her foot, her arm, her shoulder, think about her blue veins, her brown skin, to the point of writhing all night on your cell’s stone floor, and then to see all the caresses you dreamed of end up as torture! To have succeeded only in laying her down on the leather bed! Oh! there are the real pincers made red-hot in hell-fire! Oh! happy is he who is sawn between two planks, torn apart by four horses! Do you know what it is to undergo the torment inflicted during long nights by seething arteries, bursting heart, sp
litting head, teeth biting at your hands; relentless torturers who turn you over and over unceasingly, as on a burning gridiron, on a thought of love, jealousy, despair! Mercy, girl! a moment’s truce! a few ashes on the coals! Wipe away, I beseech you, the great drops of sweat streaming from my brow! Child! torture me with one hand, but caress me with the other! Have pity, girl; have pity on me!’
The priest was rolling on the ground in the water and banging his skull on the corners of the stone steps. The girl listened to him, looked at him. When he fell silent, exhausted and panting, she repeated faintly: ‘Oh! my Phoebus!’
The priest dragged himself towards her on his knees. ‘I beseech you,’ he cried, ‘if you have feelings, do not reject me! Oh! I love you! I am a wretch! When you say that name, unhappy creature, it is as though you were crushing every fibre in my heart between your teeth! Mercy! If you have come from hell, I am going there with you. I have done everything to that end. Hell with you there is my heaven, the sight of you is more delightful than that of God! Oh! tell me! won’t you have anything to do with me, then? The day a woman spurned such a love I should have thought the mountains would move. Oh! if you were willing! Oh! how happy we could be! We would run away—I would make you run away—we would go somewhere, look for the place on earth with the most sunshine, the most trees, the most blue sky. We should love each other, pour out our two souls into each other, and feel insatiable thirst for each other, slaking it together and unceasingly from this cup of ever-flowing love.’
She interrupted him with a loud and terrible laugh. ‘Just look, father! you have blood on your nails!’
The priest stayed as though petrified for a few moments, his gaze fixed on his hand.
‘Very well, yes!’ he went on at last, strangely gentle, ‘insult me, mock me, crush me! But come, come. We must make haste. It’s for tomorrow, I tell you—the gibbet on the Grève, you know? It’s always ready. It’s horrible! to see you step into that tumbril! Oh! mercy!—I had never realized as I do now how much I loved you—Oh! follow me. You can take your time loving me after I have saved you. You can hate me for as long as you like. But come! Tomorrow! tomorrow! the gibbet! your execution! Oh! save yourself! spare me!’
He seized her arm, he was distraught, he tried to drag her along.
She stared at him fixedly: ‘What has become of my Phoebus?’
‘Ah!’ said the priest, letting go of her arm, ‘you are pitiless!’
‘What has become of Phoebus?’ she repeated coldly.
‘He’s dead!’ the priest cried.
‘Dead!’ she said, still glacial and unmoving; ‘then why do you talk to me of living?’
He was not listening to her: ‘Oh! yes,’ he said, as though talking to himself, ‘he must surely be dead. The blade went in very deep. I think I touched his heart with the tip. Oh! I was alive right down to the tip of the dagger!’
The girl hurled herself upon him like a raging tigress, and thrust him on to the stairs with supernatural strength. ‘Go, monster! Go, murderer! Let me die! May the blood of us both stain your brow eternally! Be yours, priest? Never! never! Nothing will unite us, not even hell! Go, curses on you! Never!’
The priest had stumbled to the stairs. In silence he freed his feet from the folds of his robe, picked up his lantern and began slowly climbing the steps up to the door; he opened the door once more and went out.
Suddenly the girl saw his head reappear, a terrifying expression on his face, and he cried with a groan of rage and despair: ‘I tell you he is dead!’
She fell face down on the ground; and there was no other sound now to be heard in the dungeon but the sigh of the water dripping and sending ripples through the pool in the darkness.
V
THE MOTHER
I DO not think that there can be anything in the world happier than the thoughts awakened in a mother’s heart at the sight of her child’s little shoe. Above all if it is the shoe for special occasions, Sundays, christening, the shoe embroidered even under the sole, a shoe in which the child has not yet taken a step. That shoe is so tiny and graceful, it is so impossible for it to walk, that for the mother it is as if she were seeing her child. She smiles at it, kisses it, talks to it. She wonders if a foot can really be so small; and if the child is not there, the dainty shoe is enough to bring back before her eyes the soft and fragile creature. She imagines she can see him, she does see him, all of him, living, joyful, with his delicate hands, round head, pure lips, untroubled eyes with the whites still tinged with blue. If it is winter, he is there, crawling on the carpet, clambering laboriously on to a stool, and his mother is fearful in case he goes too near the fire. If it is summer, he is creeping about in the yard, in the garden, pulling up grass from between the paving stones, looking innocently at the big dogs, the big horses, quite unafraid, playing with the ornamental shells, the flowers, and making the gardener grumble at finding sand in the flowerbeds and soil on the paths. Everything around him is as smiling, beaming, radiant as himself, down to the breath of wind and the ray of sunlight frolicking in rivalry through his downy curls. The shoe shows the mother all this and makes her heart melt like wax before a fire.
But when the child is lost, these countless images of joy, delight, tenderness crowding round the little shoe become so many objects of horror. The pretty embroidered shoe is now just an instrument of torture everlastingly crushing the mother’s heart. It is still the same fibre vibrating, the deepest and most sensitive one; but instead of an angel stroking it, it is a demon who plucks it cruelly.
One morning, when the May sun was rising on one of those dark blue skies against which Garofalo* likes to set his Descents from the Cross, the recluse of the Tour-Roland heard the sound of wheels, horses, and clanking iron from the Place de Grève. It hardly roused her, but she tied her hair over her ears to shut it out and went back to gazing on bended knees at the inanimate object which she had been worshipping for the past fifteen years. This little shoe, as already related, was the whole world for her. Her thoughts were locked up in it, never to leave it until her death. What bitter imprecations, pathetic laments, prayers, and sobs she had raised to heaven over the charming pink satin bauble only the gloomy hole in the Tour-Roland knew. Never has more despair been lavished on a more graceful and dainty object.
On that morning it seemed that her grief was bursting out even more violently than usual, and she could be heard from outside lamenting in a loud, monotonous voice which pierced the heart.
‘Oh! my daughter!’ she was saying, ‘my daughter! My poor dear little child! So I shall never see you again. So it’s all over! It still seems as if it happened yesterday! O God, God, it would have been better never to have given her to me at all if you were going to take her back so soon. Don’t you know, then, that our children come from our wombs, and that a mother who has lost her child no longer believes in God?—Ah! wretch that I am to have gone out that day!—Lord! Lord! to have taken her from me like that, you can never have watched me with her, when I warmed her at my fire and she was so happy, when she smiled at me as she sucked at my breast, when I walked her little feet all the way up my chest to my lips! Oh! if you had seen that, God, you would have had pity on my joy, you would not have taken from me the only love left in my heart! Was I then such a miserable creature, Lord, that you couldn’t look at me before condemning me? Alas! alas! here is the shoe, but where’s the foot? Where is the rest? Where is the child? My daughter, my daughter! What have they done with you? Lord, give her back to me! I have scraped my knees raw praying to you for fifteen years, God, isn’t that enough? Give her back to me for a day, an hour, a minute, one minute, Lord! And then cast me to the demon for all eternity! Oh! if I knew where the hem of your garment was trailing, I should cling to it with both hands, and you would have to give me back my child! Her pretty little shoe, Lord, have you no pity for it? Can you condemn a poor mother to fifteen years of such torture? Good Virgin! good Virgin in heaven! my own baby Jesus is what they have taken from me, stolen from me, t
hey’ve eaten my baby on some heath, drunk her blood, chewed her bones! Good Virgin, have pity on me! My daughter! I need my daughter! What is it to me that she is in paradise? I don’t want your angel, I want my child! I am a lioness, I want my cub. Oh! I shall writhe on the ground, break stone with my forehead, damn myself, and curse you, Lord, if you keep my child from me! You can see how I have gnawed at my arms, Lord! Has the good God no pity?—Oh! give me nothing but salt and black bread if I may only have my daughter to warm me up like a sun! Alas! Lord God, I am only a vile sinner; but my daughter made me pious. I was full of religion for love of her; and I saw you through her smile as though through an opening in the heavens.—Oh! if only I could just once, once more, once only, put this shoe on her pretty little pink foot, I would die, good Virgin, blessing you!—Ah! fifteen years! She would be grown up now! Unfortunate child! Why! it’s quite true then, I shall never see her again, not even in heaven! for I shan’t go there. Oh! what misery! to think that her shoe is there and that’s all!’
The unhappy woman had flung herself upon this shoe, her consolation and despair for so many years, and her heart was racked with sobs as on the first day. For it is always the first day for a mother who has lost her child. That grief never grows old. The mourning weeds may wear out and fade; the heart stays black.
At that moment the fresh, joyous sound of children’s voices passed by the cell. Every time children caught her eye or her ear the poor mother would rush to the darkest corner of her tomb, and it was as if she was trying to bury her head in the stone so that she would not hear them. This time, on the contrary, she sat up as if with a start and listened eagerly. One of the boys had just said: ‘It’s because they are going to hang a gypsy woman today.’
