“ ’Ah!’ she cried, ’can these sorceresses have changed my little girl into this frightful beast?’ They removed the misshapen lump as quickly as possible out of her sight; it would have driven her mad. It was a boy, the monstrous offspring of some Egyptian woman and the Foul Fiend, about four years old, and speaking a language like no human tongue, impossible to understand. La Chantefleurie had thrown herself upon the little shoe, all that remained to her of her heart’s delight, and lay so long motionless, without a word or a breath, that we thought she was dead. But suddenly her whole body began to tremble, and she fell to covering her relic with frantic kisses, sobbing the while as if her heart would break. I do assure you, we were all weeping with her as she cried: ’Oh, my little girl! my pretty little girl! where art thou?’ It rent the very soul to hear her; I weep now when I think of it. Our children, look you, are the very marrow of our bones.—My poor little Eustache, thou too art so beautiful!—Could you but know how clever he is! It was but yesterday he said to me, ’Mother, I want to be a soldier.’—Oh, my Eustache, what if I were to lose thee!—Well, of a sudden, La Chantefleurie sprang to her feet and ran through the streets of the town crying: ’To the camp of the Egyptians! to the camp of the Egyptians! Sergeants, to burn the witches!’ The Egyptians were gone—deep night had fallen, and they could not be pursued. Next day, two leagues from Reims, on a heath between Gueux and Tilloy, were found the remains of a great fire, some ribbons that had belonged to Paquette’s child, some drops of blood, and goat’s dung. The night just past had been that of Saturday. Impossible to doubt that the gipsies had kept their Sabbath on this heath, and had devoured the infant in company with Beelzebub, as is the custom among the Mahometans. When La Chantefleurie heard of these horrible things she shed no tear, her lips moved as if to speak, but no words came. On the morrow her hair was gray, and the day after that she had disappeared.”
“A terrible story indeed,” said Oudarde, “and one that would draw tears from a Burgundian!”
“I do not wonder now,” added Gervaise, “that the fear of the Egyptians should pursue you.”
“And you were the better advised,” said Oudarde, “in running away with your Eustache, seeing that these, too, are Egyptians from Poland.”
“No,” said Gervaise, “it is said they come from Spain and Catalonia.”
“Catalonia? Well, that may be,” answered Oudarde. “Polognia, Catalonia, Valonia—I always confound those three provinces. The sure thing is that they’re Egyptians.”
“And as sure,” added Gervaise, “that they’ve teeth long enough to eat little children. And I would not be surprised if La Esmeralda did a little of that eating, for all she purses up her mouth so small. That white goat of hers knows too many cunning tricks that there should not be some devilry behind it.”
Mahiette pursued her way in silence, sunk in that kind of reverie which is in some sort a prolongation of any pitiful tale, and does not cease till it has spread its emotion, wave upon wave, to the innermost recesses of the heart.
“And was it never known what became of La Chantefleurie?” asked Gervaise. But Mahiette made no reply till Gervaise, repeating her question, and shaking her by the arm, seemed to awaken her from her musings.
“What became of Chantefleurie?” said she, mechanically repeating the words just fresh in her ear; then, with an effort, to recall her attention to their sense: “Ah,” she added quickly, “that was never known.”
After a pause she went on: “Some said they had seen her leave the town in the dusk by the Fléchembault gate; others, at the break of day by the old Basée gate. A poor man found her gold cross hung upon the stone cross in the field where the fair is held. It was that trinket that had ruined her in ’61—a gift from the handsome Vicomte de Cormontreuil, her first lover. Paquette would never part with it, even in her greatest poverty—she clung to it as to her life. So, seeing this cross abandoned, we all thought she must be dead. Nevertheless, some people at the Cabaret des Vautes came forward and protested they had seen her pass by on the road to Paris, walking barefoot over the rough stones. But then she must have gone out by the Vesle gate, and that does not agree with the rest. Or rather, I incline to the belief that she did leave by the Vesle gate, but to go out of the world.”
“I do not understand,” said Gervaise.
“The Vesle,” replied Mahiette with a mournful sigh, “is the river.”
“Alas, poor Chantefleurie!” said Oudarde with a shudder, “drowned?”
“Drowned!” said Mahiette. “And who could have foretold to the good father Guybertaut, when he was passing down the stream under the Tinqueux bridge, singing in his boat, that one day his dear little Paquette should pass under that same bridge, but without either boat or song!”
“And the little shoe?” asked Gervaise.
“Vanished with the mother.”
“Poor little shoe!” sighed Oudarde; fat, tender-hearted creature, she would have been very well pleased to go on sighing in company with Mahiette; but Gervaise, of a more inquiring disposition, was not at an end of her questions.
“And the little monster?” she suddenly said to Mahiette.
“What monster?”
“The little gipsy monster left by the black witches in the place of Chantefleurie’s little girl. What was done with it? I trust you had it drowned?”
“No,” answered Mahiette, “we did not.”
“What? burned, then? I’ faith, a better way for a witch’s spawn!”
“Neither drowned nor burned, Gervaise. His Lordship the archbishop took pity on the child of Egypt, exorcised it, blessed it, carefully cast the devil out of its body, and then sent it to Paris to be exposed as a foundling on the wooden bed in front of Notre-Dame.”
“Ah, these bishops,” grumbled Gervaise; “because they are learned, forsooth, they can never do anything like other folks! Think of it, Oudarde—to put the devil among the foundlings! for of course the little monster was the devil. Well, Mahiette, and what did they do with him in Paris? I’ll answer for it that no charitable person would have it.”
“I know not,” answered the lady of Reims. “It was just at the time when my husband purchased the office of clerk to the Court of Justice at Beru, two leagues distant from the city, and we thought no further of the story, particularly that just in front of Beru are the two little hills of Cernay, which hide the towers of the Cathedral from view.”
Meanwhile, the three worthy burgher wives had reached the Place de Grève. Absorbed in conversation, however, they had passed the public breviary of the Tour-Roland without noticing it, and were directing their steps mechanically towards the pillory round which the crowd increased from moment to moment. It is possible that the sight which at that instant drew all eyes towards it would have completely driven the Rat-Hole and the pious halt they intended making there from their minds, had not fat, six-year-old Eustache, dragging at Mahiette’s side, recalled it to them suddenly.
“Mother,” said he, as if some instinct apprised him that they had left the Rat-Hole behind, “now may I eat the cake?”
Had Eustache been more astute, that is to say, less greedy, he would have waited, and not till they had returned to the University, to Maitre Andry Musnier’s house in the Rue Madame-la-Valence, and he had put the two arms of the Seine and the five bridges of the city between the Rat-Hole and the cake, would he have hazarded this question.
Imprudent though the question was on Eustache’s part, it recalled his mother to her charitable purpose.
“That reminds me,” exclaimed she, “we were forgetting the nun! Show me this Rat-Hole of yours, that I may give her the cake.”
“Right gladly,” said Oudarde; “it will be a charity.”
This was quite out of Eustache’s reckoning.
“It’s my cake!” said he, drawing up first one shoulder and then the other till they touched his ears—a sign, in such cases, of supreme dissatisfaction.
The three women retraced their steps and presently reached the Tour-Roland.
Said Oudarde to the other two: “We must not all look into the cell at once, lest we frighten the recluse. Do you two make as if you were reading Dominus in the breviary, while I peep in at the window. The sachette knows me somewhat. I will give you a sign when you may come.”
Accordingly, she went alone to the window. As her gaze penetrated the dim interior, profound pity overspread her countenance, and her frank and wholesome face changed as suddenly in expression and hue as if it had passed out of the sunshine into moonlight. Her eyes moistened and her lips contracted as before an outbreak of tears. The next moment she laid her finger on her lips and signed to Mahiette to come and look.
Mahiette advanced, tremulous, silent, on tip-toe, as one approaching a death-bed.
It was, in truth, a sorrowful spectacle which presented itself to the eyes of the two women, as they gazed, motionless and breathless, through the barred aperture of the Rat-Hole.
The cell was small, wider than it was deep, with a vaulted, Gothic ceiling, giving it much the aspect of the inside of a bishop’s mitre. Upon the bare flag-stones which formed its floor, in a corner a woman was seated, or rather crouching, her chin resting on her knees, which her tightly clasped arms pressed close against her breast. Cowering together thus, clothed in a brown sack which enveloped her entirely in its large folds, her long, gray hair thrown forward and falling over her face along her sides and down to her feet, she seemed, at the first glance, but a shapeless heap against the gloomy background of the cell, a dark triangle which the daylight struggling through the window divided sharply into two halves, one light, the other dark—one of those spectres, half light, half shade, such as one sees in dreams, or in one of Goya’s extraordinary works—pale, motionless, sinister, crouching on a tomb or leaning against the bars of a prison. You could not say definitely that it was a woman, a man, a living being of any sort; it was a figure, a vision in which the real and the imaginary were interwoven like light and shadow. Beneath the hair that fell all about it to the ground, you could just distinguish the severe outline of an emaciated face, just catch a glimpse under the edge of the garment of the extremity of a bare foot, clinging cramped and rigid to the frozen stones. The little of human form discernible under that penitential covering sent a shudder through the beholder.
This figure, which might have been permanently fixed to the stone floor, seemed wholly without motion, thought, or breath. In that thin covering of sackcloth, in January, lying on the bare stones, without a fire, in the shadow of a cell whose oblique loophole admitted only the northeast wind, but never the sunshine, she seemed not to suffer, not even to feel. You would have thought she had turned to stone with the dungeon, to ice with the season. Her hands were clasped, her eyes fixed; at the first glance you took her for a spectre; at the second, for a statue.
However, at intervals, her livid lips parted with a breath and quivered, but the movement was as dead and mechanical as leaves separated by the breeze; while from those dull eyes came a look, ineffable, deep, grief-stricken, unwavering, immutably fixed on a corner of the cell which was not visible from without; a gaze which seemed to concentrate all the gloomy thoughts of that agonized soul upon some mysterious object.
Such was the being who, from her habitation, was called the recluse, and from her sackcloth garment, the sachette.
The three women—for Gervaise had joined Mahiette and Oudarde—looked through the window, and though their heads intercepted the feeble light of the cell, its miserable tenant seemed unaware of their scrutiny.
“Let us not disturb her,” whispered Oudarde; “she is in one of her ecstasies, she is praying.”
Meanwhile Mahiette gazed in ever-increasing earnestness upon that wan and withered face and that dishevelled head, and her eyes filled with tears. “That would indeed be strange!” she murmured.
She pushed her head through the cross-bars of the window, and succeeded in obtaining a glimpse into that corner of the cell upon which the unfortunate woman’s eyes were immovably fixed. When she withdrew her head, her face was bathed in tears.
“What do you call that woman?” she asked of Oudarde.
“We call her Sister Gudule,” was the reply.
“And I,” said Mahiette, “I call her Paquette la Chantefleurie!”
Then, with her finger on her lips, she signed to the amazed Oudarde to look through the bars of the window in her turn. Oudarde did so, and saw in that corner, upon which the eye of the recluse was fixed in gloomy trance, a little shoe of rose-coloured satin covered with gold and silver spangles. Gervaise took her turn after Oudarde, after which the three women gazing upon the unhappy mother mingled their tears of distress and compassion.
But neither their scrutiny nor their weeping had stirred the recluse. Her hands remained tightly locked, her lips silent, her eyes fixed, and to any one who knew her story that little shoe thus gazed at was a heart-breaking sight.
None of the three women had uttered a word; they dared not speak, not even in a whisper. This deep silence, this profound grief, this abstraction, in which all things were forgotten save that one, affected them like the sight of the High Altar at Easter or at Christmastide. A sense of being in some holy place came upon them; they were ready to fall on their knees.
At length Gervaise, the most inquiring of the three, and therefore the least sensitive, endeavoured to get speech of the recluse. “Sister Gudule! Sister!” she called repeatedly, raising her voice louder each time.
The recluse never stirred. Not a word, not a glance, not a breath, not a sign of life.
Oudarde, in a softer and more caressing tone, tried in her turn. “Sister!” she called; “Sister Gudule!”
The same silence, the same immobility.
“A strange woman indeed!” cried Gervaise; “no bombard would make her move.”
“Perhaps she is deaf,” suggested Oudarde.
“Or blind,” added Gervaise.
“Perhaps she is dead,” said Mahiette. In truth, if the soul had not actually quitted that inert, motionless, lethargic body, at least it had withdrawn itself to such inaccessible depths that the perceptions of the external organs were powerless to reach it.
“There remains nothing for us to do, then,” said Oudarde, “but to leave the cake on the ledge of the window. But then, some boy will be sure to take it away. What can we do to arouse her?”
Eustache, whose attention up till now had been distracted by the passing of a little cart drawn by a great dog, now noticed that his three companions were looking at something through the window above him, and, seized in his turn with curiosity, he mounted upon a stone, stood on tip-toe, and stretched up his round, rosy face to the hole, crying, ”Mother, let me see too!”
