At the sound of the child’s clear, fresh, ringing voice the recluse started violently. She turned her head with the sharp and sudden motion of a steel spring, the two long, fleshless hands drew aside the veil of hair from her brow, and she fixed upon the child a pair of bewildered and despairing eyes.
It was but a glance. “Oh, my God!” she cried, suddenly burying her face in her knees, and it seemed as if her hoarse voice tore her breast in passing, ”in pity do not Show me those of others!”
“Good-morrow, dame,” said the child soberly.
The shock had awakened the recluse from her trance. A long shiver ran through her from head to foot, her teeth chattered, she half raised her head, and pressing her arms to her sides, she took her feet in her hands as if to warm them.
“Oh, the bitter cold!” she murmured.
“Poor soul!” said Oudarde in deepest pity, “will you have a little fire?”
She shook her head in token of refusal.
“Then,” Oudarde went on, holding out a flask to her, “here is hippocras; that will warm you -- drink.”
She shook her head again and looked fixedly at Oudarde. “Water,” she said.
“No, sister,” Oudarde insisted, ”that is no drink for a January day. You must have a little hippocras, and eat this wheaten cake we have baked for you.”
She pushed away the cake Mahiette held out to her, and said, “Some black bread.”
“Come,” said Gervaise, seized with charity in her turn, and taking off her woollen cloak, “here is a cloak something warmer than yours. Put it round your shoulders.”
But she refused this as she had done the flask and the cake. “A sack,” she answered.
“But you must have something to show that yesterday was a holiday!” urged the good Oudarde.
“I know it well,” answered the recluse; “these two days I have had no water in my pitcher.”
After a moment’s silence she continued, “It is a holiday, so they forget me. They do well. Why should the world think of me, who think not of it? Cold ashes to a dead brand!”
And as if exhausted by having said thus much, she let her head fall again upon her knees. The simple-minded, compassionate Oudarde gathering from these last words that the poor woman was still lamenting at the cold, said once more:
“Then will you not have some fire?”
“Fire!” answered the woman in a strange tone, “and will you make a fire for the poor little one that has been under the ground these fifteen years?”
She trembled in every limb, her voice shook, her eyes gleamed, she had risen to her knees. Suddenly she stretched out a thin and bloodless hand and pointed to the child, who gazed at her round-eyed and wondering. “Take away that child,” she cried, “the Egyptian is coming by!”
Then she fell on her face on the ground, her forehead striking the floor with the sound of stone upon stone. The three women thought her dead; but a moment afterward she stirred, and they saw her drag herself on her hands and knees to the corner where the little shoe lay. At this they dared look no longer; they saw her not, but they heard the sound of a tempest of sighs and kisses, mingled with heart-rending cries and dull blows as of a head being struck against a wall; then, after one of these blows, so violent that they all three recoiled in horror, deep silence.
“Can she have killed herself?” asked Gervaise, venturing her head through the bars. “Sister! Sister Gudule!”
“Sister Gudule!” echoed Oudarde.
“Alas, she does not move!” cried Gervaise; “can she be dead? Gudule! Gudule!”
Mahiette, whom deep emotion had rendered speechless, now made an effort. “Wait a moment,” said she; then going close to the window—“Paquette!” she cried—“Paquette la Chantefleurie!”
A child blowing unsuspiciously on the half-lighted match of a petard, causing it suddenly to explode in his face, would not be more appalled than Mahiette at the effect of this name, thus unexpectedly launched into Sister Gudule’s cell.
The recluse shook in every limb, then, rising to her feet, she sprang at the loophole with eyes so blazing that the three women and the child all fell back to the very edge of the quay.
Meanwhile the terrible face of the recluse remained close to the grating. “Oh! oh!” she cried, with a horrible laugh, “it is the Egyptian woman calling me!”
At that moment a scene which was taking place on the pillory caught her haggard eye. Her brow contracted with horror, she stretched her two skeleton arms through the cross-bars, and cried in a voice like the rattle in a dying throat, “’Tis thou again, daughter of Egypt! ’Tis thou calling me, stealer of children! Accursed be thou forever—accursed! accursed! accursed!”
Chapter 4 - A Tear for a Drop of Water
The concluding words of the foregoing chapter may be described as the point of junction of two scenes which, till that moment, had been running parallel, each on its own particular stage; the one—which we have just been following—at the Rat-Hole; the other—now to be described—on the pillory. The former had been witnessed only by the three women with whom the reader has just been made acquainted; the latter had for audience the whole crowd which we saw gathering in the Place de Grève round the pillory and the gibbet.
This crowd, in whom the sight of the four sergeants stationed since nine in the morning at the four corners of the pillory had roused the pleasing expectation of a penal exhibition of some sort—not, perhaps, a hanging, but a flogging, a cutting off of ears or the like—this crowd had increased so rapidly that the four mounted men, finding themselves too closely pressed, had more than once been under the necessity of “tightening” it, as they called it then, by great lashes of their whips and their horses’ heels.
The populace, well accustomed to waiting for public executions, manifested but little impatience. They amused themselves by looking at the pillory, a very simple structure, consisting of a hollow cube of masonry some ten feet in height. A steep flight of steps of unhewn stone—called par excellence the ladder—led to the top platform, on which lay horizontally a wheel of stout oak. To this wheel the victim was bound kneeling and with his hands pinioned behind him; a shaft of timber, set in motion by a windlass concealed in the interior of the structure, caused the wheel to rotate horizontally, thus presenting the face of the culprit to every point of the Place in succession. This was called “turning” the criminal.
It will be seen from the description that the pillory of the Grève was far from possessing the many attractions of that at the Halles. Here was nothing architectural, nothing monumental—no roof embellished with an iron cross, no octagon lantern tower, no slender pilasters blossoming out against the edge of the roof into acanthus-leafed and flowery capitals, no fantastic, dragon-headed gargoyles, no carved wood-work, no delicate sculpture cut deeply into the stone.
One had to be content with the four rough-hewn sides of stone and an ugly stone gibbet, mean and bare, at the side of it. The show would have been a poor one to the amateur of Gothic architecture, but truly nobody could be more indifferent in the matter of architecture than the good burghers of the Middle Ages; they cared not a jot for the beauty of a pillory.
At last the culprit arrived, tied to a cart’s tail, and as soon as he was hoisted on to the platform and, bound with cords and straps to the wheel, was plainly visible from every point of the Place, a prodigious hooting mingled with laughter and acclamations burst from the assembled crowd. They had recognised Quasimodo.
It was indeed he. Strange turn of fortune’s wheel!—to be pilloried on the same spot on which, but the day before, he had been saluted, acclaimed Pope and Prince of Fools, and counted in his train the Duke of Egypt, the King of Tunis, and the Emperor of Galilee. One thing, however, is certain, there was no mind in that crowd, not even his own, though in turn the victor and the vanquished, that thought of drawing this parallel. Gringoire and his philosophy were lacking at this spectacle.
Presently Michel Noiret, appointed trumpeter to our lord the King, after imposing silence on the people, made proclamation of the sentence, pursuant to the ordinance and command of the Lord Provost. He then fell back behind the cart with his men.
Quasimodo, quite impassive, never stirred a muscle. All resistance was impossible to him by reason of what, in the parlance of the old criminal law, was described as “the strength and firmness of the bonds”—in other words, the cords and chains probably cut into his flesh. This tradition of the dungeon and the galleys has been handed down to us and carefully preserved among us civilized, tender-hearted, humane people in the shape of the manacles—not forgetting the bagnio and the guillotine, of course.
Quasimodo had passively let himself be led, thrust, carried, hoisted up, bound and rebound. Nothing was to be discovered in his face but the bewilderment of the savage or the idiot. He was known to be deaf; he might also have been blind.
They thrust him on to his knees on the wheel, they stripped him to the waist; he made no resistance. They bound him down with a fresh arrangement of cords and leathern thongs; he let them bind and strap him. Only from time to time he breathed heavily, like a calf whose head swings and bumps over the edge of a butcher’s cart.
“The blockhead,” said Jehan Frollo of the Mill to his friend Robin Poussepain (for the two scholars had followed the culprit, as in duty bound), “he knows no more what it’s all about than a bumble-bee shut in a box!”
There was a great burst of laughter from the crowd when, stripped naked to their view, they caught sight of Quasimodo’s hump, his camel’s breast, his brawny, hairy shoulders. During the merriment a man in the livery of the Town, short of stature and of burly make, ascended to the platform and stationed himself beside the culprit. His name was quickly circulated among the spectators. It was Master Pierrat Torterue, official torturer to the Chatelet.
He first proceeded to deposit on a corner of the pillory a black hour-glass, the upper cup of which was filled with red sand, which ran into the lower receptacle; he then divested himself of his party-coloured doublet, and dangling from his right hand there appeared a scourge with long, slender, white thongs—shining, knotted, interlaced—and armed with metal claws. With his left hand he carelessly drew the shirt-sleeve up his right arm as high as the shoulder.
At this Jehan Frollo, lifting his curly, fair head above the crowd (for which purpose he had mounted on the shoulders of Robin Poussepain), shouted: “Walk up, walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and see them scourge Ma?tre Quasimodo, bell-ringer to my brother the reverend archdeacon of Josas, a rare specimen of Oriental architecture, with a domed back, and twisted columns for legs!”
And the crowd roared again, especially the young people.
The torturer now stamped his foot; the wheel began to move. Quasimodo swayed under his bonds, and the amazement suddenly depicted on that misshapen countenance gave a fresh impulse to the peals of laughter round about.
Suddenly, at the moment when the wheel in its rotation presented to Master Pierrat Quasimodo’s enormous back, the torturer raised his arm, the thongs hissed shrilly through the air, like a handful of vipers, and fell with fury on the shoulders of the hapless wretch.
Quasimodo recoiled as if suddenly startled out of sleep. Now he began to understand. He writhed in his bonds, the muscles of his face contracted violently in surprise and pain, but not a sound escaped him. He only rolled his head from side to side, like a bull stung in the flank by a gadfly.
A second stroke followed the first, then a third, and another, and another. The wheel ceased not to turn, nor the lashes to rain down. Soon the blood began to flow; it trickled in a thousand streams over the dark shoulders of the hunchback, and the keen thongs, as they swung round in the air, scattered it in showers over the multitude.
Quasimodo had resumed, in appearance at least, his former impassibility. At first he had striven, silently and without any great external movement, to burst his bonds. His eye kindled, his muscles contracted, his limbs gathered themselves up. The effort was powerful, strenuous, desperate, and the cords and straps were strained to their utmost tension; but the seasoned bonds of the provostry held. They cracked, but that was all. Quasimodo desisted, exhausted by the effort, and the stupefaction on his face was succeeded by an expression of bitter and hopeless discouragement. He closed his single eye, dropped his head upon his breast, and gave no further sign of life.
Thenceforward he did not stir; nothing could wring a movement from him—neither the blood, that did not cease to flow, nor the strokes which fell with redoubled fury, nor the violence of the torturer, who had worked himself into a state of frenzy, nor the shrill and strident whistle of the scourge.
At length an usher of the Chatelet, clad in black, mounted on a black horse, and stationed at the foot of the ladder since the beginning of the chastisement, pointed with his ebony staff to the hour-glass. The torturer held his hand, the wheel stopped. Quasimodo slowly reopened his eye.
The scourging was over. Two assistants of the torturer bathed the lacerated shoulders of the culprit, applied to them some kind of unguent which immediately closed the wounds, and threw over his back a yellow cloth shaped like a chasuble; Pierrat Torterue meanwhile letting the blood drain from the lashes of his scourge in great drops on to the ground.
But all was not yet over for poor Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour on the pillory which Ma?tre Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to the sentence of Messire Robert d’Estouteville; and all merely to prove the truth of John of Cumenes’s ancient physiological and psychological jeu de mots: Surdus absurdus.
They accordingly turned the hour-glass, and left the hunch-back bound to the wheel, that justice might run its course to the end.
The people—particularly in the Middle Ages—are to society what the child is in the family; and as long as they are allowed to remain at that primitive stage of ignorance, of moral and intellectual nonage, it may be said of them as of childhood—“It is an age that knows not pity.”
We have already shown that Quasimodo was universally hated—for more than one good reason, it must be admitted—for there was hardly an individual among the crowd of spectators but had or thought he had some cause of complaint against the malevolent hunchback of Notre-Dame. All had rejoiced to see him make his appearance on the pillory; and the severe punishment he had just undergone, and the pitiable plight in which it had left him, so far from softening the hearts of the populace, had rendered their hatred more malicious by pointing it with the sting of merriment.
Accordingly, “public vengeance”—vindicte publique, as the jargon of the law courts still has it—being satisfied, a thousand private revenges now had their turn. Here, as in the great Hall, the women were most in evidence. Every one of them had some grudge against him—some for his wicked deeds, others for his ugly face—and the latter were the most incensed of the two.
