Notre-Dame de Paris (Oxford World's Classics)

by Hugo, Victor

  In the fateful cart sat a girl, arms bound behind her back, but no priest beside her. She wore a shift, her long, black hair (it was then the custom to cut it off only at the foot of the gallows) fell loose over her breast and her half-uncovered shoulders.

  Across that undulating, hair, darker than a raven’s wing, could be seen twisting and knotting a thick grey, coarse rope, chafing her delicate collarbones and twining round the poor girl’s charming neck like an earthworm on a flower. Under the rope sparkled a little amulet decorated with green glass beads, which she had been allowed to keep, no doubt because nothing is refused to those about to die. The spectators in the windows could see at the bottom of the tumbril her bare legs which she was trying to tuck out of sight beneath her as though from a last feminine instinct. At her feet lay a little goat all trussed up. The condemned girl held up in her teeth the shift which had not been properly fastened. It was as though even in her misery it pained her to be thus exposed almost naked to every eye. Alas! modesty was not intended for shuddering like hers.

  ‘Jesus!’ Fleur-de-Lys said sharply to the captain. ‘Look, fair cousin! It’s that horrid gypsy girl with the goat!’

  So saying, she turned round to Phoebus. He had his eyes fixed on the tumbril. He was very pale.

  ‘What gypsy with the goat?’ he stammered.

  ‘What!’ went on Fleur-de-Lys; ‘don’t you remember?’

  Phoebus interrupted her; ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  He took a step to go inside. But Fleur-de-Lys, whose jealousy, so keenly aroused only recently by the same gypsy girl, had just been reawakened, gave him a penetrating and mistrustful glance. At that moment she vaguely remembered hearing something about a captain mixed up in the trial of this witch.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said to Phoebus. ‘Anyone would think that woman has upset you!’

  Phoebus tried hard to laugh it off. ‘Me! not a bit of it. Ah! well, yes!’

  ‘Then stay here,’ she went on imperiously, ‘and let’s watch to the end.’

  The unfortunate captain was obliged to stay. He was somewhat reassured by the fact that the condemned girl did not take her eyes off the floor of the tumbril. It was only too genuinely la Esmeralda. Reduced to this bottom rung of ignominy and misfortune she was still beautiful, her large dark eyes seemed larger still because her cheeks were so wasted, her livid profile was pure and sublime. She bore the same resemblance to what she had been as a Virgin by Masaccio* to a Virgin by Raphael: frailer, thinner, more gaunt.

  There was nothing in her, moreover, which was not in some sense being tossed about and which, but for modesty, she had not abandoned to chance, so profoundly was she shattered by stupor and despair. Her body bounced with every jolt of the tumbril like a thing dead or broken. Her gaze was dull and demented. A tear still showed in her eyes, but it did not move and was so to speak frozen.

  Meanwhile the dismal cavalcade had passed through the crowd amid cries of joy and people straining to see. We must, however, say, for the sake of historical fidelity, that seeing her so lovely and in such distress many had been moved to pity, even some of the hardest hearts. The tumbril had entered the Parvis.

  In front of the central portal it stopped. The escort lined up on either side. The crowd fell silent, and amid that silence, both solemn and anxious, the two halves of the great door turned, as if of their own accord, on their hinges, which creaked as shrilly as a fife. Then the church could be seen in all its length, stretching into the deep interior, dark, hung with mourning, dimly lit by a few candles twinkling in the distance on the high altar, opening like a cave mouth in the middle of a square filled with dazzling light. Right at the back, in the shadows of the apse, a gigantic silver cross could just be made out, spread out over a black drape hanging from the vaulting to the pavement. The nave was completely deserted. However, the heads of a few priests in the distant choir-stalls could vaguely be seen moving about, and at the moment when the great door opened there came from the church the sound of a grave, sonorous, and monotonous chant, casting over the condemned woman’s head, as it were, in one gust after another, fragments of dismal psalms.*

  ‘Non timebo millia populi circumdantis me: exsurge, Domine; salvum me fac, Deus!’ [Ps. 3: 6—I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people that have set themselves against me round about. Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God!]

  ‘… Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intraverunt aquae usque ad animam meam.’ [Ps. 69: i—Save me, O God, for the waters are come in unto my soul.]

  ‘… Infixus sum in limo profundi; et non est substantia.’ [Ps. 69: 2—I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing.]

  At the same time another voice, separate from the choir, intoned from the steps of the high altar this melancholy offertory:

  ‘Qui verbum meum audit, et credit ei qui misit me, habet vitam aeternam et injudicium non venit; sed transit a morte in vitam.’ [John 5: 24—He that heareth my word and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death into life.]

  This chant, which some old men lost in the distant darkness were chanting over this beautiful creature, full of youth and life, caressed by the warm air of springtime, bathed in sunshine, was the mass for the dead.

  The people listened devoutly.

  The bewildered, unfortunate girl seemed to have lost all sight and reason within the dark interior of the church. Her bloodless lips moved as though in prayer, and when the executioner’s assistant came up to help her down from the tumbril, he heard her repeating in an undertone the word: Phoebus.

  Her hands were untied, she was made to get down, accompanied by her goat, which had been also untied and was bleating with joy at feeling free, and they made her walk barefoot over the hard pavement to the foot of the steps of the portal. The rope round her neck trailed behind her. It was like a snake following her.

  Then the chant in the church broke off. A great golden cross and a line of candles moved off in the shadows. The halberds of the colourfully dressed beadles rang on the floor, and a few moments later a long procession of priests in chasubles and deacons in dalmatics, chanting as they advanced gravely towards the condemned girl, came within her sight and the eyes of the crowd. But her gaze fixed on the one walking at the head, immediately after the crucifer. ‘Oh!’ she whispered, shuddering, ‘it’s him again! The priest!’

  It was indeed the archdeacon. On his left he had the succentor, on his right the precentor armed with his staff of office. He came on, head thrown back, eyes staring and open wide, chanting in a loud voice:

  ‘De venire inferi clamavi, et exaudisti vocem meam, et projecisti me in profundum in corde maris, et flumen circumdedit me.’ [Jonah 2: 2–3—out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice, for thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods encompassed me.]

  When he appeared in full daylight under the high Gothic portal, wrapped in a huge silver cope, emblazoned with a black cross, he was so pale that more than one of those watching in the crowd thought that it was one of those marble bishops, kneeling on the tombstones in the choir, who had risen and was coming to receive on the threshold of the grave one who was about to die.

  She, equally pale and equally like a statue, had hardly noticed that someone had put a heavy, lighted, yellow wax candle into her hand; she had not listened to the clerk’s yapping voice reading out the fateful tenor of the public penance; when she had been told to answer ‘Amen’, she had answered ‘Amen’. To give her back some life and strength it took the sight of the priest bidding the guards step back and then advancing on his own towards her.

  Then she felt the blood seething in her head, and a last spark of indignation kindled in her already numb and chilled soul.

  The archdeacon slowly came up to her. Even in this extremity she saw him stare at her nakedness with an eye glittering with lust, jealousy, and desire. Then he said to her aloud: ‘Girl, have you asked God’s forgiveness for you
r faults and failings?’ He bent over to speak in her ear and added (the spectators thought he was hearing her last confession): ‘Will you have me? I can still save you!’

  She fixed her eyes on him: ‘Away with you, demon! or I’ll denounce you.’

  He began to smile a horrible smile: ‘They won’t believe you—you would only be adding a scandal to a crime—answer quickly! Will you have me?’

  ‘What have you done with my Phoebus?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said the priest.

  At that moment the miserable archdeacon raised his head automatically and saw, at the far end of the square, on the balcony of the Gondelaurier mansion, the captain standing next to Fleur-de-Lys. He swayed, passed his hand over his eyes, looked again, muttered a malediction, and all his features contracted violently.

  ‘Very well! Die then!’ he said between his teeth. ‘No one will have you.’

  Then lifting his hand over the gypsy he cried in a funereal voice:

  ‘I nunc, anima anceps, et sit tibi Deus misericors!’ [Go now, dubious soul, and may God be merciful to you.]

  This was the fearsome formula which customarily concluded these sombre ceremonies. It was the agreed signal from the priest to the executioner.

  The people knelt.

  ‘Kyrie Eleison,’ said the priests who had remained beneath the arched doorway.

  ‘Kyrie Eleison,’ repeated the crowd in a murmur running over their heads like water lapping in a choppy sea.

  ‘Amen’ said the archdeacon.

  He turned his back on the condemned girl, his head sank back on to his chest, he folded his hands, rejoined his procession of priests, and a moment later he was seen disappearing, with the cross, candles, and copes, beneath the hazy arches of the cathedral; and his sonorous voice gradually died away in the choir as he chanted the despairing verse:

  ‘Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt!’ [Jonah 2: 3—All thy billows and thy waves passed over me.]

  At the same time the intermittent clanging of the iron-tipped shafts of the beadles’ halberds, gradually fading away beneath the bays of the nave, sounded like the hammer of a clock striking the condemned’s last hour.

  Meanwhile the doors of Notre-Dame had stayed open, revealing the church empty, desolate, in mourning, without candles and without voices.

  The condemned girl stayed unmoving where she was, waiting for them to dispose of her. One of the sergeants of the wand had to draw Maître Charmolue’s attention to this, for, throughout this scene, he had been busy studying the bas-relief of the main doorway which represents, according to some, Abraham’s sacrifice, according to others the alchemists’ process, portraying the sun by the angel, the fire by the faggots, the operator by Abraham.

  With considerable difficulty he was torn away from this contemplation, but at last he turned round, and at a sign from him two men in yellow, the executioner’s assistants, came up to the gypsy to fasten her hands again.

  The unfortunate girl, just as she was going back into the fateful tumbril on her way to her final destination, was seized, perhaps, by some anguished longing for life. She raised her dry, bloodshot eyes to the sky, the sun, the silvery clouds broken here and there by trapezoid and triangular patches of blue, then lowered them to look around her, at the ground, the crowd, the houses … Suddenly, while the man in yellow was binding her elbows, she uttered a terrible cry, a cry of joy. On the balcony, over there in the corner of the square, she had just caught sight of him, him, her friend, her lord, Phoebus, the other apparition in her life! The judge had lied! The priest had lied! It was really him. There could be no doubt about it, there he was, handsome, alive, dressed in his dazzling uniform, plume on head, sword at side!

  ‘Phoebus!’ she cried, ‘my Phoebus!’

  And she tried to stretch out her arms to him, trembling with love and rapture, but they were bound.

  Then she saw her captain frown, and a beautiful girl, who was leaning back on him, look at him with scornful lip and angry eye, then Phoebus spoke some words, which did not reach her, and the two of them hurriedly disappeared behind the balcony window, which closed behind them.

  ‘Phoebus!’ she cried frantically, ‘do you believe it?’

  A monstrous thought had just occurred to her. She remembered that she had been convicted of murder against the person of Phoebus de Châteaupers.

  She had endured everything up till then. But this final blow was too harsh. She fell to the pavement inert.

  ‘Come,’ said Charmolue, ‘carry her on to the cart and let’s get this finished!’

  No one had yet noticed in the gallery of the statues of the kings, carved immediately above the arches of the doorway, a strange spectator who had so far been observing everything so impassively, his neck so outstretched, his face so deformed, that but for his costume, half red and half violet, he could have been taken for one of those stone monsters through whose jaws the cathedral’s long gutters have been discharging for six hundred years. This spectator had missed nothing of what had been going on since midday before the portal of Notre-Dame. And from the very first moments, without anyone thinking of watching him, he had firmly secured to one of the colonnets of the gallery a stout knotted rope, its end trailing down on the steps below. With that done, he had been calmly watching, whistling from time to time when a blackbird passed by. Suddenly, at the moment when the executioner’s assistants were preparing to carry out Charmolue’s phlegmatic order, he climbed over the balustrade of the gallery, gripped the rope with feet, knees and hands, then they saw him slither down the façade, like a raindrop sliding along a window pane, run towards the two executioners as swiftly as a cat fallen from a roof, lay them low with his two huge fists, pick up the gypsy in one hand, like a child with its doll, and in a single bound leap back into the church, lifting the girl over his head and crying in a formidable voice: ‘Asylum!’

  This all happened so fast that had it been night time, everything could have been seen by the light of a single flash of lightning.

  ‘Asylum! asylum!’ the crowd repeated, and the clapping of ten thousand hands made Quasimodo’s one eye sparkle with joy and pride.

  The shock brought the girl back to her senses. She opened an eye, looked at Quasimodo, then abruptly closed it again, as if terrified by her saviour.

  Charmolue remained dumbfounded, as did the executioners and the escort. Within the precincts of Notre-Dame, the condemned girl was in fact inviolable. The cathedral was a place of refuge. All human justice expired on its threshold.

  Quasimodo had stopped beneath the great portal. His broad feet seemed to stand as solidly on the pavement of the church as the heavy Romanesque pillars. His massive shaggy head was sunk on his shoulders like a lion’s; they too have a mane and no neck. He held the trembling girl, hanging from his calloused hands like some white drapery; but he carried her so carefully that he seemed to be afraid of breaking or withering her. It was as though he felt that she was something delicate, exquisite, and precious, made for other hands than his. At times he looked as though he did not dare to touch her, not even with his breath. Then, all of a sudden, he would clasp her tightly in his arms, against his angular breast, as his property, as his treasure, as this child’s mother would have done; his gnome’s eye, looking down on her, showered her with tenderness, grief, and pity, and suddenly looked up again, flashing. Then the women laughed and cried, the crowd stamped with enthusiasm, for at that moment Quasimodo truly had a beauty of his own. He was beautiful, he, the orphan, the foundling, the reject, he felt august and strong, he looked society in the face, that society from which he had been banished, and in which he was intervening so powerfully, that human justice whose prey he had snatched, all these tigers forced to chew on emptiness, those police agents, those judges, those executioners, all that royal might, which he had just broken, he the lowliest of the low, with the might of God.

  Besides it was very affecting, this protection coming from so deformed a creature upon so unhappy a being, a gir
l condemned to death rescued by Quasimodo. It was two extremes of wretchedness, of nature and of society, meeting and helping each other.

  Meanwhile, after some minutes of triumph, Quasimodo had abruptly plunged into the church with his burden. The people, enthusiastic about any daring deed, tried to spy him in the darkness of the nave, regretting that he had so soon removed himself from their applause. Suddenly they saw him reappear at one end of the gallery of the kings of France, he ran along it like a man demented, raising his conquest in his arms and shouting: ‘Asylum!’ The crowd broke into fresh applause. When he reached the end of the gallery, he plunged back inside the church. A moment later he reappeared on the upper platform with the gypsy still in his arms, still running like a madman, still shouting: ‘Asylum!’ And the crowd applauded. Finally he made a third appearance, on top of the great bell’s tower; from there he seemed to be displaying proudly to the whole town the girl whom he had rescued and his thunderous voice, the voice that was so seldom heard by anyone, and which he himself could never hear, repeated three times, in a frenzy, up into the clouds: ‘Asylum! asylum! asylum!’

  ‘Noël! Noël!’ cried the people for their part, and this immense acclamation could be heard on the opposite bank of the Seine, amazing the crowd on the Grève and the recluse who was still waiting with eyes fixed on the gibbet.

  BOOK NINE

  I

  FEVER

  CLAUDE FROLLO was no longer in Notre-Dame when his adoptive son so abruptly cut through the fatal knot in which the unhappy archdeacon had trapped the gypsy girl and trapped himself. On his return to the sacristy he had ripped off alb, stole, and cope, tossed the lot into the hands of the astonished beadle; he had made his escape through the concealed door into the cloister, ordered a boatman from the Terrain to take him across to the left bank of the Seine, and had plunged into the steep streets of the University, without any idea where he was going, at every step running into bands of men and women gleefully hurrying towards the Pont Saint-Michel in the hope of ‘getting there in time’ to see the witch hanged; he was pale, distraught, more confused, more blind, more unapproachable than a night bird released and pursued by a pack of children in broad daylight. He no longer knew where he was, what he was thinking about, whether he was dreaming. He went on, walking, running, taking any street at random, making no choice, simply driven on all the time by the Grève, by the horrible Grève, which he vaguely felt lay behind him.