by Hugo, Victor
We shall not attempt to give any idea of her gestures, her tone, the tears she swallowed as she spoke, the way she clasped and then wrung her hands, her heart-rending smiles, her tearful glances, the groans, the sighs, the chilling cries of misery mingled with her muddled, crazy, incoherent words. When she fell silent, Tristan l’Hermite frowned, but that was to hide a tear welling up into his tigerish eye. He overcame that weakness, however, and said curtly: ‘It is the King’s will.’
Then he bent over Henriet Cousin’s ear and whispered: ‘Get it over quickly!’ Perhaps even the formidable Provost felt his heart failing him.
The hangman and the sergeants entered the cell. The mother offered no resistance, she just dragged herself over to her daughter and threw herself headlong over her. The gypsy saw the soldiers approaching. The horror of death revived her. ‘Mother!’ she cried in tones of indescribable distress, ‘mother! They’re coming! Defend me!’
‘Yes, my love, I’ll defend you!’ her mother answered in a feeble voice, and hugging her tightly in her arms smothered her with kisses. The two of them lying like that upon the ground, the mother on top of her daughter, made a pitiable sight.
Henriet Cousin grasped the girl round the middle, under her lovely shoulders. When she felt his hand she gasped: ‘Ugh!’ and fainted. The hangman, shedding great tears on her, drop by drop, tried to pick her up in his arms. He attempted to pull the mother loose, for she had, so to speak, knotted both hands around her daughter’s waist, but she clung to the child so tenaciously that it was impossible to separate them. So Henriet Cousin dragged the girl out of the cell, with her mother behind her. The mother too kept her eyes closed.
The sun was coming up just at that moment, and there was already a considerable crowd of people gathered in the square, watching from a distance to see who it was being dragged like that over the pavement to the gibbet. For such was Provost Tristan’s custom at executions. He had a mania for preventing curious spectators from coming anywhere near.
There was no one at the windows, only in the distance, on top of the tower of Notre-Dame that overlooks the Grève, two men could be seen, standing out in black against the clear morning sky, apparently watching.
Henriet Cousin stopped at the foot of the fatal ladder with what he was dragging, and hardly breathing, so moved to pity was he, put the rope round the girl’s adorable neck. The unfortunate child felt the horrible touch of the hemp. She opened her eyes, and saw the gaunt arm of the stone gibbet stretched out above her head. Then she shook herself, and cried out in a loud, heart-rending voice: ‘No! no! I don’t want to!’ The mother, whose head was buried and hidden beneath her daughter’s clothes, did not say a word; but her whole body could be seen to shudder and she could be heard kissing her daughter more intensely than ever. The hangman took advantage of that moment swiftly to break the grip of the arms with which she clasped the condemned girl. Either from exhaustion or despair, she let him do it. Then he slung the girl over his shoulder, whence the charming creature hung down gracefully, bent double over his massive head. Then he put his foot on the ladder to go up.
At that moment the mother, lying huddled on the paving, fully opened her eyes. She did not utter a cry, but stood up straight with a terrible expression and then hurled herself, like a beast at its prey, upon the hangman’s hand and bit him. It happened in a flash. The hangman howled with pain. Some men rushed up. With difficulty they pulled his bleeding hand free from the mother’s teeth. She maintained a profound silence. They pushed her away quite brutally, and noticed that her head fell back heavily on the paving. They picked her up again. Again she fell back. She was, in fact, dead.
The hangman, who had not loosed the girl, started up the ladder again.
II
LA CREATURA BELLA BIANCO VESTITA (DANTE)*[THE LOVELY CREATURE ROBED IN WHITE]
WHEN Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the gypsy was no longer there, that while he was defending her she had been abducted, he gripped his hair with both hands and stamped the ground in surprise and grief. Then he began running all over the church, looking for his gypsy, bellowing strange cries at every corner of the walls, scattering his red hair over the pavement. It was exactly at this moment that the King’s archers made their victorious entry into Notre-Dame, also looking for the gypsy. Quasimodo helped them, never suspecting, poor deaf creature, their fatal intentions; he believed the gypsy girl’s enemies were the truands. He himself led Tristan l’Hermite to all the possible hiding places, opened secret doors for him, false altar backs, inner sacristies. Had the unfortunate girl still been there, he would have been the one to deliver her up. When Tristan, weary at never finding anything, gave up in discouragement, and he was not easily discouraged, Quasimodo continued the search by himself. He went all round the church, twenty, a hundred times, back and forth, from top to bottom, climbing, descending, running, calling, shouting, sniffing, ferreting, rummaging, poking his head into every hole, pushing a torch under every vault, crazy with despair. A male animal who had lost its mate could not have roared more loudly nor been more frantic. At last, when he was sure, quite sure, that she was no longer there, that it was finished, that someone had stolen her from him, he went back slowly up the tower staircase, that staircase he had scaled in such excitement and triumph the day he had rescued her. He passed by the same places, his head drooping, without speaking, without weeping, almost without breathing. The church was once more deserted and plunged into silence. The archers had left it to hunt down the witch in the Cité. Quasimodo, remaining on his own in the vastness of Notre-Dame, a moment before under such tumultuous siege, made his way back to the cell where the gypsy had slept for so many weeks with him as her guard. As he approached it he imagined that he might perhaps find her there. When, at a bend in the gallery overlooking the roof of the side-aisles, he saw the narrow cell with its little window and little door, huddled under a huge flying buttress like a bird’s nest under a branch, the poor man’s heart failed him, and he leaned against a pillar to stop himself falling. He imagined that she might perhaps have returned, that some good spirit had no doubt brought her back, that the little cell was too peaceful, too safe, too delightful for her not to be there, and he dared not take another step for fear of shattering his illusion. ‘Yes,’ he told himself, ‘she may be asleep, or praying. Let’s not disturb her.’
He finally gathered up his courage, advanced on tiptoe, looked, and went in. Empty! the cell was still empty. The unhappy deaf man went round it slowly, lifted up the bed and looked underneath, as if she might be hidden between the floor and the mattress, then shook his head and stayed bemused. All of a sudden he furiously stamped out his torch, and without a word or a sigh rushed full tilt to hit his head against the wall and fell unconscious to the floor.
When he came to, he flung himself on the bed, rolled about on it, frantically kissed the place, still warm, where the girl had slept, stayed motionless there for a few minutes as if he was about to expire, then stood up, pouring with sweat, panting, out of his mind, and began banging his head against the walls with the frightening regularity of one of his bell clappers and the determination of a man wanting to break his own skull. At length he fell down a second time, exhausted; he dragged himself out of the cell on his knees, and crouched down facing the door in an attitude of astonishment. He stayed like that for over an hour without stirring, his eye fixed on the deserted cell, more gloomy and pensive than a mother sitting between an empty cradle and a full coffin. He did not utter a word; only, at long intervals, a sob violently shook his whole body, but it was a sob without tears, like summer lightning which makes no sound.
It was apparently then that, as he was trying to work out in the depths of his desolate reflections who could so unexpectedly have abducted the gypsy, he thought of the archdeacon. He remembered that Dom Claude was the only person with a key to the staircase leading to the cell, he recalled his nocturnal attempts on the girl, the first of which Quasimodo had assisted, the second prevented. He recalled c
ountless details, and soon no longer doubted that the archdeacon had taken the gypsy from him. However, such was his respect for the priest, his gratitude, devotion, love for the man were so deeply rooted in his heart that they held out even at that moment against the claws of jealousy and despair.
He reflected that the archdeacon had done this thing, and the bloody, murderous anger which he would have felt against anyone else turned, once Claude Frollo was involved, into an increase in the poor man’s grief.
Just when his thoughts were thus fixed upon the priest, as dawn whitened the flying buttresses, he saw on the upper storey of Notre-Dame, at the angle in the outer balustrade which runs round the apse, a figure walking. This figure was coming in his direction. He recognized it. It was the archdeacon. Claude was pacing slowly and solemnly. He was not looking ahead as he walked, he was making for the north tower, but his face was turned to the side, towards the right bank of the Seine, and he held his head high, as though he were trying to see something over the rooftops. Owls often present this oblique attitude. They fly in one direction and look towards another—the priest thus passed by above Quasimodo without seeing him.
The deaf man, who had been petrified by this sudden apparition, saw him disappear under the doorway to the north tower staircase. The reader knows that it is from this tower that one can see the Hôtel de Ville. Quasimodo rose and followed the archdeacon.
Quasimodo climbed the tower stairs for the sake of climbing them, to find out why the priest was climbing them. For the rest, the poor bellringer did not know what he, Quasimodo, would do, what he would say, what he wanted. He was filled with fury, and filled with fear. The archdeacon and the gypsy clashed in his heart.
When he reached the top of the tower, before coming out of the shadows of the staircase and going on to the platform, he looked cautiously to see where the priest was. The priest had his back to him. There is an open-work balustrade running round the bell-tower platform. The priest was gazing down upon the town, with his chest resting on that one of the four sides of the balustrade which looks out on the Pont Notre-Dame.
Quasimodo came up stealthily behind him to see what he was looking at. The priest’s attention was so taken up elsewhere that he did not hear the deaf man’s steps behind him.
Paris is a splendid and attractive sight, the Paris of those days especially, seen from the top of the tower of Notre-Dame in the fresh light of a summer dawn. That day it might have been July. The sky was perfectly clear. A few lingering stars were fading out at various points, and there was one very brilliant one in the east in the brightest part of the sky. The sun was about to come up. Paris was beginning to stir. A very pure, white light brought out vividly to the eye all the different planes which the hundreds of houses present to the east. The gigantic shadow of the church towers went from roof to roof, from one end of the great city to the other. Some districts were already talking and making a noise. Here a bell rang out, there a hammer, over there the complex clatter of a moving cart. Already here and there smoke poured out over this whole surface, as though from the fissures of some immense sulphur field. The river, water ruffling against the arches of so many bridges, the tips of so many islands, was all a-shimmer with silvery pleats. Round the city, outside the ramparts, the eye was lost in a great ring of fluffy vapours through which one could dimly discern the indefinite line of the plains and the graceful swelling of the hills. All sorts of sounds drifted and scattered all over the city, now half awake. Over to the east the morning breeze chased across the sky a few white shreds of cottonwool torn from the hazy fleece covering the hills.
Down in the Parvis some good women, carrying their milk-jugs, pointed out to each other in astonishment the strangely dilapidated state of the main door of Notre-Dame, and two congealed streams of lead between the cracks in the sandstone. That was all that remained of the previous night’s tumult. The pyre that Quasimodo had lit between the towers had gone out. Tristan had already cleaned up the square and had the dead thrown into the Seine. Kings like Louis XI take care to wash down the pavement quickly after a massacre.
Beyond the tower balustrade, exactly beneath the spot where the priest had stopped, there was one of those fancifully carved stone waterspouts which bristle all over Gothic buildings, and in a crevice of this spout, two pretty wallflowers in bloom, shaking and almost brought alive by the breeze, were greeting each other with playful bows. Above the towers, far up in the sky, faint bird-cries could be heard.
But the priest was neither listening nor looking at any of this. He was one of those men for whom there are no mornings, no birds, no flowers. In all that vast horizon, with such diverse aspects all around him, his contemplation was concentrated on a single point.
Quasimodo was burning to ask him what he had done with the gypsy. But at that moment the archdeacon seemed not to be of this world. He was obviously at one of those violent moments in life when one would not feel the earth crumble. With his eyes fixed unwaveringly on a certain spot, he remained motionless and silent; and there was something about this silence and immobility so fearsome that the savage bell-ringer trembled before it and did not dare risk a clash. All he did, and it was another way of interrogating the archdeacon, was to follow the direction of his line of sight, and in that way the eye of the unfortunate deaf man fell on the Place de Grève.
Thus he saw what the priest was looking at. The ladder had been put up beside the permanent gibbet. There were a few of the people in the square and a lot of soldiers. A man was dragging over the pavement something white to which something black was attached. The man stopped at the foot of the gibbet.
Here something took place that Quasimodo could not see clearly. It was not that his single eye was any less able to see at long range, but there was a mass of soldiers preventing him from making out everything. Besides, at that moment the sun appeared and such a flood of light overflowed the horizon that it was as though every pointed projection in Paris—spires, chimneys, gables—caught fire at once.
Meanwhile the man began climbing the ladder. Now Quasimodo could see him distinctly. He carried a woman over his shoulder, a girl dressed in white, and the girl had a noose round her neck. Quasimodo recognized her. It was her!
Thus the man reached the top of the ladder. There he adjusted the noose. At that point the priest knelt down on the balustrade to have a better view.
The man suddenly pushed the ladder away with a sharp kick of his heel, and Quasimodo, who had been holding his breath for some moments, saw swaying at the end of the rope, some twelve feet above the ground, the unfortunate child with the man crouching with his feet on her shoulders. The rope spun round several times and Quasimodo saw the gypsy’s body seized with horrible convulsions. The priest for his part, craning his neck, was gazing with bulging eyes at the dreadful tableau of man and girl, spider and fly.
At the moment of greatest horror, a diabolical laugh, a laugh possible only for one who is no longer human, burst out from the priest’s livid face. Quasimodo could not hear the laugh, but he saw it. The bell-ringer retreated a step or two behind the archdeacon, and suddenly, rushing at him furiously, pushed him in the back with both his huge hands, down into the abyss over which Dom Claude was leaning.
The priest cried: ‘Damnation!’ and fell.
The rainspout above which he had been leaning broke his fall. He clung to it with desperate hands, and just as he opened his mouth to cry out a second time, he saw passing over the balustrade, above his head, the fearsome, vengeful face of Quasimodo. So he was silent.
The abyss lay beneath him. A fall of more than two hundred feet, and the pavement. In this terrible situation the archdeacon spoke not one word, let out not one groan. He simply writhed about on the spout in the most incredible efforts to climb up again. But his hands had no hold on the granite, his feet just scratched the blackened wall without getting a grip. Those who have climbed up the towers of Notre-Dame know that there is a bulge in the stonework immediately beneath the balustrade. It was on this re-
entrant angle that the wretched archdeacon was exhausting himself. He did not have a vertical wall to deal with, but one sloping away under him.
Quasimodo would have needed only to stretch out his hand to haul him back from the gulf, but he simply did not look at him. He was looking at the Grève. Looking at the gibbet. Looking at the gypsy. The deaf man was leaning with his elbows on the balustrade in the place where the archdeacon had been a moment before, and there, never taking his eyes off the only object there was for him in the world at that moment, he stayed unmoving and dumb like a man struck by a thunderbolt, and a long stream of tears flowed silently from that eye which until then had only ever shed a single tear.
Meanwhile the archdeacon was panting. His bald forehead ran with sweat, his nails bled on the stonework, his knees were rubbing raw on the wall. He could hear his cassock, which had caught on the rainspout, tearing and coming unstitched every time he gave a jerk. As a crowning misfortune, the spout ended in a lead pipe which was bending under the weight of his body. The archdeacon could feel this pipe slowly giving way. He told himself, wretched man, that once his hands became too tired to hold on, once his cassock was completely torn, once the lead pipe finally gave way, he must inevitably fall, and terror gripped his bowels. At times he looked wildly at a kind of narrow ledge some ten feet below, formed by chance in the sculptures, and he begged heaven from the depths of his soul in distress that he might finish out his life on that space of two square feet, even if it were to last a hundred years. Once he looked beneath him, into the abyss; when he raised his head again his eyes were closed and his hair standing on end.
The silence of these two men was frightening. While the archdeacon faced death so horribly a few feet away, Quasimodo wept and looked at the Grève.
