by Hugo, Victor
He thus passed round the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and finally left the town by the Porte Saint-Victor. He continued to flee for as long as he could see, when he turned his head, the ring of the University’s towers and the scattered houses of the suburbs, but when at last a fold in the ground completely hid that hateful Paris from his sight, when he could feel that he was a hundred leagues away, in the country, in a desert, he stopped and seemed able to breathe again.
Then dreadful thoughts crowded into his mind. He saw clearly again into his soul, and shuddered. He thought of the unfortunate girl who had caused his ruin, and whom he had ruined. He cast a haggard eye over the tortuous double path which fatality had made their two destinies follow up to their point of intersection, where fatality again had smashed them mercilessly against each other. He thought of the folly of eternal vows, the futility of chastity, science, religion, virtue, the pointlessness of God. He indulged these evil thoughts to his heart’s content, and as he plunged ever deeper he felt breaking out within him a burst of satanic laughter.
As he thus delved into his soul, when he saw what spacious provision nature had made in it for passions, he laughed all the more bitterly. He stirred up all the hatred, all the malice in his innermost heart, and recognized, with the cool eye of a physician examining a patient, that this hatred and malice was nothing but vitiated love; that love, source of every human virtue, could, in a priest’s heart, turn into something horrible, and that a man constituted like him, by becoming a priest became a devil. Then he gave a dreadful laugh, and suddenly paled again as he contemplated the most sinister aspect of his fatal passion, of that corrosive, poisonous, hateful, implacable love whose only outcome had been the gallows for one of them, hell for the other: she condemned, he damned.
And then he laughed again, at the thought that Phoebus was still alive, that after all the captain was living, was merry and contented, had finer actons than ever, and a new mistress whom he was taking to see the old one hang. His mirth increased as he reflected that of all the living beings whose death he had wanted, the gypsy, the only creature he did not hate, was the only target he had not missed.
Then, from the captain his thoughts passed to the people, and an unprecedented kind of jealousy came over him. He thought how the people too, the whole crowd, had seen with their very eyes the woman he loved, in a shift, almost naked. He writhed at the thought that this woman, whose figure half seen in the shadows by him alone would have brought him supreme happiness, had been delivered up in broad daylight, at high noon, to the whole multitude of people, dressed as though for a night of sensual delight. He wept with rage over all these mysteries of love, now profaned, soiled, exposed, withered for ever. He wept with rage as he imagined how many prurient watchers had found satisfaction in the loosely fastened shift; and in the thought that this lovely girl, this virgin lily, this cup of modesty and delights to which he would only have dared to bring his lips in fear and trembling, had just been transformed into a kind of public trough, at which the meanest rabble in Paris, thieves, beggars, lackeys, had come to drink in common their shameless, impure, and depraved pleasure.
And when he tried to picture to himself the happiness he might have found on earth if she had not been a gypsy and he had not been a priest, if Phoebus had not existed, and she had loved him; when he imagined that a life of serenity and love might have been possible even for him, that at that very moment here and there on earth there were happy couples, absorbed in long conversations under orange-trees, beside running brooks, in the presence of a setting sun, of a starry sky; and that if God had so wished he could have formed with her one of those blessed couples, his heart melted with tenderness and despair.
Oh! her! it’s her! This was the fixed idea which kept continually returning, torturing him, eating away at his brain, tearing at his vitals. He had no regrets, he was not sorry; all he had done, he was ready to do again; he would rather see her in the executioner’s hands than on the captain’s arm, but he was suffering; suffering so much at times that he tore out handfuls of hair to see whether it had gone white.
There was one moment among others when it occurred to him that at that very minute the hideous chain he had seen that morning might be tightening its iron noose around that neck, so slender and graceful. The thought made the sweat gush from his every pore.
There was another moment when, while laughing diabolically at himself, he simultaneously pictured Esmeralda as he had first seen her, lively, carefree, joyful, all dressed up, dancing, winged, harmonious, and the Esmeralda of her last day, in a shift, the rope round her neck, slowly climbing, barefoot, the sharp steps up to the gibbet; this double image was so vivid that he let out a terrible cry.
While this hurricane of despair shattered, smashed, tore up, bent, uprooted everything in his soul, he looked at nature around him. At his feet a few hens were pecking as they foraged in the undergrowth, enamelled beetles ran about in the sunshine; above his head a few clusters of dappled-grey clouds were scudding across a blue sky; on the horizon the steeple of the abbey of Saint-Victor thrust its slate-covered obelisk across the curving contour of the hillside, and the miller of the Butte Copeaux whistled as he watched the sails of his windmill diligently spinning round. All this active, organized, tranquil life, reproduced around him in countless forms, upset him. He embarked once more on flight.
He hurried thus across country until evening. This flight from nature, life, himself, mankind, God, from everything, lasted all day. Sometimes he would throw himself face downwards on the ground and tear up the young corn with his fingernails. Sometimes he would stop in some deserted village street, and his thoughts were so unbearable that he would clutch his head in both hands and try to rip it from his shoulders and smash it on the paving-stones.
About the time the sun was going down he examined himself afresh, and found that he was almost mad. The storm which had raged in him from the moment when he had lost all hope and will to save the gypsy had left in his consciousness not a single sane idea, not a single thought still upright. His reason lay there, almost wholly destroyed. There were only two distinct images left in his mind: la Esmeralda and the gallows. All the rest was darkness. These two images brought together confronted him with a terrifying group, and the more he concentrated on them what remained of his powers of attention and thought, the more he saw them grow, in a fantastic progression, the one in grace, charm, beauty, light, the other in horror, so that in the end la Esmeralda appeared to him as a star, the gibbet as a huge fleshless arm.
It is worthy of note that during all this torment the idea of dying never seriously occurred to him. That was how the wretch was made. He clung to life. Perhaps he really did see hell beyond.
Meanwhile daylight continued to fade. The living being which still existed in him vaguely thought of going back. He believed he was a long way from Paris; but, taking his bearings, he realized that he had simply been circling round the wall of the University. The steeple of Saint-Sulpice and the three tall spires of Saint-Germain-des-Prés rose above the horizon to his right. He made off in that direction. When he heard the abbot’s men-at-arms crying out their challenges around the crenellated circumvallation of Saint-Germain, he turned aside, took a path he found between the abbey mill and the leper house of the village, and after a few moments found himself on the edge of the Pré-aux-Clercs. This Pré, or meadow, was famous for the uproar which went on there day and night; it was the ‘hydra’ of the poor monks of Saint-Germain, quod monachis Sancti-Germani pratensis hydra fuit, clericis nova semper dissidiorum capita suscitantibus [which was the hydra of the monks of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, since the clerks were always raising new heads of disagreement]. The archdeacon was afraid of meeting someone there; he feared every human face; he had just avoided the University and the Bourg Saint-Germain, he did not want to return to the streets until the last possible moment. He skirted the Pré-aux-Clercs, took the deserted path separating it from the Dieu-Neuf, and finally arrived at the water’s edge. Ther
e Dom Claude found a boatman who, for a few deniers parisis, took him back up the Seine as far as the tip of the Cité, and set him down on that abandoned strip of land where the reader has already seen Gringoire dreaming, and which extended beyond the king’s gardens, parallel to the island of the passeur-aux-vaches [cow-ferryman].
The monotonous rocking of the boat and the lapping of the water had somehow numbed the unhappy Claude. When the boatman had taken himself off, he remained standing on the bank in a stupor, looking straight ahead and now seeing objects only through magnifying oscillations which turned everything into a kind of phantasmagoria. It is not unusual for the weariness caused by extreme grief to have this effect on the mind.
The sun had gone down behind the lofty Tour de Nesle. It was the moment of half-light. The sky was white, the river water was white. Between these two patches of white, the left bank of the Seine, at which he was gazing, thrust forth its dark mass, and dwindling steadily in perspective, plunged into the hazy horizon like a black arrow. It was laden with houses, of which only the dark silhouette could be made out, boldly picked out in black against the light background of sky and water. Here and there windows were beginning to sparkle like glowing embers. This huge black obelisk thus isolated between the two white sheets of sky and river, very broad at that spot, made a peculiar impression on Dom Claude, comparable to that which a man would experience if he were to Îie on the ground, on his back, at the foot of the steeple of Strasbourg and look up at the huge spire above his head plunging into the shadowy twilight. Only here it was Dom Claude who was upright and the obelisk which was recumbent; but as the river, reflecting the sky, prolonged the abyss below him, the immense promontory seemed to be soaring as boldly into the void as any cathedral spire; and the impression was the same. What was strange and profound about this impression was that it was indeed the Strasbourg steeple, but a Strasbourg steeple two leagues high, something incredible, gigantic, immeasurable, a structure such as had been seen by no human eye, a Tower of Babel. The chimneys of the houses, the crenellations of the walls, the carved roof-gables, the spire of the Augustins, the Tour de Nesle, all these projections indenting the profile of the colossal obelisk, added to the optical illusion with their weird simulation of the jagged carvings of some fantastic, luxuriant sculpture. Claude, in the state of hallucination in which he found himself, thought he was seeing with his living eyes the steeple of hell; the countless lights distributed along the whole height of the horrifying tower appeared to him like so many openings into the huge inner furnaces; the voices and murmurs coming from it, like so many cries, so many death-rattles. Then he felt afraid, he put his hands over his ears so that he should hear no more, turned his back so that he should see no more, and strode away from the fearful vision.
But the vision was within him.
When he came back to the streets, the passers-by jostling in the glow from the shop fronts appeared to him like spectres going everlastingly to and fro around him. There was a strange roaring in his ears, extraordinary fantasies disturbed his mind. He did not see houses, or pavements, or carts, or men and women, but a chaotic jumble of indeterminate objects merging at the edges into one another. On the corner of the rue de la Barillerie there was a grocer’s shop, whose awning, in accordance with immemorial custom, was decorated all round with tin hoops with a circle of wooden candles hanging from them, clashing together like castanets in the wind. He thought that what he heard banging together in the shadows was the bundle of skeletons at Montfaucon.*
‘Oh!’ he murmured, ‘the night wind is blowing them together, mingling the sound of their chains with that of their bones! Perhaps she is there among them!’
Distraught, he did not know where he was going. After a few steps he found himself on the Pont Saint-Michel. There was a light in one of the ground-floor windows. He came closer. Through a cracked pane of glass he saw a sordid room, which awoke a confused memory in his mind. In that room, poorly lit by a meagre lamp, was a fresh, merry-looking, fair young man embracing, with great bellows of laughter, a girl most shamelessly attired. And by the lamp was an old woman spinning and singing in a quavering voice. As the young man did not laugh all the time, the old woman’s song reached the priest in snatches. It was something unintelligible and awful:
Grève bay, Grève rumble!
Spin, my distaff spin.
Spin the rope for the hangman.
Whistling there in the prison yard.
Grève bay, Grève rumble.
Fine hempen rope!
Sow hemp and not corn
In the fields both far and wide.*
No thief has ever stolen
Fine hempen rope.
Rumble Grève, bay Grève!
To see the harlot swing
From the bleary gallows,
Windows are your eyes.
Rumble Grève, bay Grève!
Wheupon the young man laughed and fondled the girl. The old woman was la Falourdel; the girl a common whore; the young man, his young brother Jehan.
He went on looking. This show was as good as any other.
He saw Jehan go to a window at the back of the room, open it, look out on to the quay where hundreds of lighted casements shone in the distance, and heard him say as he closed the window again: ‘Upon my soul! It’s dark already. The townsfolk are lighting their candles and God lights up his stars.’
Then, Jehan went back to the wench, and broke a bottle which was on a table, exclaiming:
‘Empty already, corbœuf! and I’ve no money left! Isabeau, my dear, I shan’t be pleased with Jupiter until he changes your two white tits into two black bottles, from which I can suck Beaune wine day and night.’
This witty sally made the wench laugh, and Jehan left.
Dom Claude just had time to fling himself to the ground to avoid a meeting, face to face, with his brother and being recognized by him. Fortunately the street was dark, and the student drunk. He noticed the archdeacon, however, lying in the mire on the roadway.
‘Oh! oh!’ he said, ‘here’s one who’s been making merry today.’
With his foot he pushed Dom Claude, who was holding his breath.
‘Dead drunk,’ Jehan went on. ‘Come on then, he’s full. A proper leech pulled off a barrel. He’s bald,’ he added, stooping down; ‘he’s an old man! Fortunate senex! [Fortunate old man!] ‘*
Then Dom Claude heard him go off, saying: ‘It’s all the same, reason’s a fine thing, and my brother the archdeacon is indeed a lucky man to be wise and have money too.’
The archdeacon got up then, and hurried without pausing for breath towards Notre-Dame, whose enormous towers he could see looming in the darkness above the houses.
At the moment when he arrived panting at the Place du Parvis he recoiled and did not dare look up at the fatal building. ‘Oh!’ he said in a low voice, ‘can it really be true that such a thing took place here, today, this very morning!’
However, he risked a look at the church. The façade was dark. The sky behind sparkled with stars. The crescent moon, which had just taken off above the horizon, stopped at that moment on top of the right-hand tower and seemed to be perching, like some luminous bird, on the edge of the balustrade, with its pattern of cut-out trefoils.
The cloister door was closed. But the archdeacon always had on him the key to the tower where his laboratory was. He used it to enter the church.
The church he found as dark and silent as a cave. From the great shadows which fell on all sides in wide patches he realized that the hangings from that morning’s ceremony had not yet been taken down. The great silver cross glimmered in the depths of the darkness, sprinkled with a few points of twinkling light, like the Milky Way of that sepulchral night. The tall windows of the choir revealed above the black drapes the upper extremities of their pointed arches, and the stained glass in them displayed in the light of a passing moonbeam only the dubious colours of the night, a violet, a white, and a blue of a shade to be found only on the face of the dead. The archde
acon, as he remarked all round the choir the pallid tips of these lancets, thought he was seeing the mitres of bishops consigned to damnation. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he thought there was a circle of pale faces watching him.
He began to flee through the church. Then it seemed to him that the church too was shaking, moving, stirring, coming alive, that every massive column had become an enormous foot striking the ground with its broad stone spatula, that the gigantic cathedral had become nothing but a sort of prodigious elephant breathing and walking with pillars for feet, the two towers for trunks, and the huge black drapery for caparison.
Thus the unfortunate man’s fever or madness had reached such a degree of intensity that the outside world had become for him nothing but a kind of visible, palpable, terrifying apocalypse.
For a moment he felt relieved. As he plunged into the side aisles he saw, behind a cluster of pillars, a reddish gleam. He ran to it as to a star. It was the mean lamp which day and light lit up the public breviary of Notre-Dame, beneath its iron mesh. He pounced eagerly upon the holy book, in the hope of finding there some consolation or encouragement. The book lay open at this passage from Job [4: 15] which he scanned with staring eyes: ‘Then a spirit passed before my face; I heard a small breath; the hair of my flesh stood up.’*
Reading this dismal text his sensations were those of a blind man when he feels himself pricked by the stick he has just picked up. His knees gave way from under him, and he collapsed on the pavement, thinking of her who had died that day. He felt so many monstrous fumes pass and discharge into his brain that his head seemed as if it had become one of the chimneys of hell.
