“Oh, image of the Antichrist!” cried one.
“Thou rider on the broomstick!” screamed another.
“Oh, the fine tragical grimace!” yelled a third, “and that would have made him Pope of Fools if to-day had been yesterday.”
“Good!” chimed in an old woman, “this is the pillory grin. When are we going to see him grin through a noose?”
“When shall we see thee bonneted by thy great bell and driven a hundred feet underground, thrice-cursed bell-ringer?”
“And to think that this foul fiend should ring the Angelus!”
“Oh, the misbegotten hunchback! the monster!”
“To look at him is enough to make a woman miscarry better than any medicines or pharmacy.”
And the two scholars, Jehan of the Mill and Robin Poussepain, struck in at the pitch of their voices with the refrain of an old popular song:
“A halter
For the gallows rogue,
A fagot
For the witch’s brat.”
A thousand abusive epithets were hurled at him, with hoots and imprecations and bursts of laughter, and now and then a stone or two.
Quasimodo was deaf, but he saw very clearly, and the fury of the populace was not less forcibly expressed in their faces than in their words. Besides, the stones that struck him explained the bursts of laughter.
At first he bore it well enough. But, by degrees, the patience that had remained inflexible under the scourge of the torturer relaxed and broke down under the insect stings. The Asturian bull that bears unmoved the attack of the picadors is exasperated by the dogs and banderillas.
Slowly he cast a look of menace over the crowd; but, bound hand and foot as he was, his glance was impotent to drive away these flies that stung his wounds. He shook himself in his toils, and his furious struggles made the old wheel of the pillory creak upon its timbers; all of which merely served to increase the hooting and derision.
Then the poor wretch, finding himself unable to burst his fetters, became quiet again; only at intervals a sigh of rage burst from his tortured breast. No flush of shame dyed that face. He was too far removed from social convention, too near a state of nature, to know what shame was. In any case, at that degree of deformity, is a sense of infamy possible? But resentment, hatred, and despair slowly spread a cloud over that hideous countenance, growing ever more gloomy, ever more charged with electricity, which flashed in a thousand lightnings from the eye of the Cyclops.
Nevertheless, the cloud lifted a moment, at the appearance of a mule which passed through the crowd, ridden by a priest. From the moment that he caught sight of the priest, the poor victim’s countenance softened, and the rage that distorted it gave place to a strange soft smile full of ineffable tenderness.
As the priest approached nearer, this smile deepened, became more distinct, more radiant, as though the poor creature hailed the advent of a saviour. Alas! no sooner was the mule come near enough to the pillory for its rider to recognise the person of the culprit, than the priest cast down his eyes, turned his steed abruptly, and hastened away, as if anxious to escape any humiliating appeal, and not desirous of being recognised and greeted by a poor devil in such a position.
This priest was the Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo.
And now the cloud fell thicker and darker than before over the face of Quasimodo. The smile still lingered for a while, but it was bitter, disheartened, unutterably sad.
Time was passing: he had been there for at least an hour and a half, lacerated, abused, mocked, and well-nigh stoned to death.
Suddenly he renewed his struggles against his bonds with such desperation that the old structure on which he was fixed rocked beneath him. Then, breaking the silence he had obstinately preserved, he cried aloud in a hoarse and furious voice, more like the cry of a dog than a human being, and that rang above the hooting and the shouts, “Water!”
This cry of distress, far from moving them to compassion, only added to the amusement of the populace gathered round the pillory, who, it must be admitted, taking them in a mass, were scarcely less cruel and brutal than that debased tribe of vagabonds whom we have already introduced to the reader. Not a voice was raised around the unhappy victim save in mockery of his thirst. Undoubtedly his appearance at that moment—with his purple, streaming face, his eye bloodshot and distraught, the foam of rage and pain upon his lips, his lolling tongue—made him an object rather of repulsion than of pity; but we are bound to say that had there even been among the crowd some kind, charitable soul tempted to carry a cup of water to that poor wretch in agony, there hung round the steps of the pillory, in the prejudice of the times, an atmosphere of infamy and shame dire enough to have repelled the Good Samaritan himself.
At the end of a minute or two Quasimodo cast his despairing glance over the crowd once more, and cried in yet more heart-rending tones, “Water!”
Renewed laughter on all sides.
“Drink that!” cried Robin Poussepain, throwing in his face a sponge soaked in the kennel. “Deaf rogue, I am thy debtor.”
A woman launched a stone at his head—“That shall teach thee to wake us at night with thy accursed ringing.”
“Ah-ha, my lad,” bawled a cripple, trying to reach him with his crutch, “wilt thou cast spells on us again from the towers of Notre-Dame, I wonder?”
“Here’s a porringer to drink out of,” said a man, hurling a broken pitcher at his breast. “Tis thou, that only by passing before her, caused my wife to be brought to bed of a child with two heads!”
“And my cat of a kit with six legs!” screamed an old woman as she flung a tile at him.
“Water!” gasped Quasimodo for the third time.
At that moment he saw the crowd part and a young girl in fantastic dress issue from it; she was accompanied by a little white goat with gilded horns, and carried a tambourine in her hand.
Quasimodo’s eye flashed. It was the gipsy girl he had attempted to carry off the night before, for which piece of daring he felt in some confused way he was being chastised at that very moment; which was not in the least the case, seeing that he was punished only for the misfortune of being deaf and having had a deaf judge. However, he doubted not that she, too, had come to have her revenge and to aim a blow at him like the rest.
He beheld her rapidly ascend the steps. Rage and vexation choked him; he would have burst the pillory in fragments if he could, and if the flash of his eye had possessed the lightning’s power, the gipsy would have been reduced to ashes before ever she reached the platform.
Without a word she approached the culprit, who struggled vainly to escape her, and detaching a gourd bottle from her girdle, she raised it gently to those poor parched lips.
Then from that eye, hitherto so dry and burning, there rolled a great tear which trickled down the uncouth face, so long distorted by despair and pain—the first, maybe, the hapless creature had ever shed.
But he had forgotten to drink. The gipsy impatiently made her little familiar grimace; then, smiling, held the neck of the gourd to Quasimodo’s tusked mouth.
He drank in long draughts; he was consumed with thirst.
When, at last, he had finished, the poor wretch advanced his black lips—no doubt to kiss the fair hands which had just brought him relief; but the girl, mistrusting him perhaps, and remembering the violent attempt of the night before, drew back her hand with the frightened gesture of a child expecting to be bitten by some animal. Whereat the poor, deaf creature fixed upon her a look full of reproach and sadness.
In any place it would have been a touching spectacle to see a beautiful girl—so fresh, so pure, so kind, and so unprotected—hastening thus to succour so much of misery, of deformity and wickedness. On a pillory, it became sublime.
The people themselves were overcome by it, and clapped their hands, shouting, “No?l! No?l!”
It was at this moment that the recluse, through the loophole of her cell, caught sight of the gipsy girl on the steps of the pillory, and launched her sinister imprecation: “Cursed be thou, daughter of Egypt! cursed! cursed!”
Chapter 5 - The end of the Wheaten Cake
Esmeralda blanched and swayed as she descended the steps of the pillory, the voice of the recluse pursuing her as she went: “Come down! come down! Ah, thou Egyptian thief, thou shalt yet return there again!”
“The sachette is in one of her tantrums,” murmured the people; but they went no further, for these women were feared, which made them sacred. In those days they were shy of attacking a person who prayed day and night.
The hour had now arrived for releasing Quasimodo. They unfastened him from the pillory, and the crowd dispersed.
Near the Grand-Pont, Mahiette, who was going away with her companions, suddenly stopped. “Eustache,” she said, “what hast thou done with the cake?”
“Mother,” answered the child, “while you were talking to the dame in the hole a great dog came and took a bite of my cake, and so then I too had a bite.”
“What, sir,” she cried, “you have eaten it all!”
“Mother, it was the dog. I told him, but he would not listen; then I bit a piece too.”
“ ’Tis a shocking boy!” said the mother, smiling fondly while she scolded. “Look you, Oudarde, already he eats by himself all the cherries in our little orchard at Charlerange. So his grandfather predicts he will be a captain.—Let me catch you at it again, Monsieur Eustache. Go, greedy lion!”
BOOK VII
Chapter 1 - Showing the danger of Confiding one’s Secret to a Goat
Several weeks had elapsed.
It was the beginning of March, and though Du Bartas,1 that classic ancestor of the periphrase, had not yet styled the sun “the Grand Duke of the Candles,” his rays were none the less bright and cheerful. It was one of those beautiful mild days of early spring that draw all Paris out into the squares and promenades as if were a Sunday. On these days of clear air, of warmth, and of serenity there is one hour in particular at which the great door of Notre-Dame is seen at its best. That is at the moment when the sun, already declining in the west, stands almost directly opposite the front of the Cathedral; when his rays, becoming more and more horizontal, slowly retreat from the flag-stones of the Place and creep up the sheer face of the building, making its innumerable embossments stand forth from the shadow, while the great central rose-window flames like a Cyclops’s eye lit up by the glow of a forge.
It was at this hour.
Opposite to the lofty Cathedral, now reddened by the setting sun, on the stone balcony over the porch of a handsome Gothic house at the corner formed by the Place and the Rue du Parvis, a group of fair damsels were laughing and talking with a great display of pretty airs and graces. By the length of the veils which fell from the tip of their pearl-encircled pointed coif down to their heels; by the delicacy of the embroidered chemisette which covered the shoulders but permitted a glimpse—according to the engaging fashion of the day—of the swell of the fair young bosom; by the richness of their under-petticoats, more costly than the overdress (exquisite refinement); by the gauze, the silk, the velvet stuffs, and, above all, by the whiteness of their hands, which proclaimed them idle and unemployed, it was easy to divine that they came of noble and wealthy families. They were, in effect, the Damoiselle Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her companions, Diane de Christeuil, Amelotte de Montmichel, Colombe de Gaillefontaine, and the little De Champchevrier—all daughters of good family, gathered together at this moment in the house of the widowed Mme. Alo?se de Gondelaurier, on account of Monseigneur the Lord of Beaujeu and Madame Anne, his wife, who were coming to Paris in April in order to choose the maids-in-waiting for the Dauphiness Margaret when they went to Picardy to receive her from the hands of the Flemings. So all the little landed proprietors for thirty leagues round were eager to procure this honour for their daughters, and many of them had already brought or sent them to Paris. The above-mentioned maidens had been confided by their parents to the discreet and unimpeachable care of Mme. Alo?se de Gondelaurier, the widow of a captain of the King’s archers, and now living in elegant retirement with her only daughter in her mansion in the Place du Parvis, Notre-Dame, at Paris.
The balcony on which the girls were seated opened out of a room richly hung with tawny-coloured Flanders leather stamped with gold foliage. The beams that ran in parallel lines across the ceiling charmed the eye by their thousand fantastic carvings, painted and gilt. Gorgeous enamels gleamed here and there from the doors of inlaid cabinets; a wild boar’s head in faience crowned a magnificent side-board, the two steps of which proclaimed the mistress of the house to be the wife or widow of a knight banneret. At the further end of the room, in a rich red velvet chair, beside a lofty chimney-piece, blazoned from top to bottom with coats of arms, sat Mme. de Gondelaurier, whose five-and-fifty years were no less distinctly written on her dress than on her face.
Beside her stood a young man whose native air of breeding was somewhat heavily tinged with vanity and bravado—one of those handsome fellows whom all women are agreed in adoring, let wiseacres and physiognomists shake their heads as they will. This young cavalier wore the brilliant uniform of a captain of the King’s archers, which too closely resembles the costume of Jupiter, which the reader has had an opportunity of admiring at the beginning of this history, for us to inflict on him a second description.
The damoiselles were seated, some just inside the room, some on the balcony, on cushions of Utrecht velvet with gold corners, or on elaborately carved oak stools. Each of them held on her knees part of a great piece of needlework on which they were all engaged, while a long end of it lay spread over the matting which covered the floor.
They were talking among themselves with those whispers and stifled bursts of laughter which are the sure signs of a young man’s presence among a party of girls. The young man himself who set all these feminite wiles in motion, appeared but little impressed thereby, and while the pretty creatures vied with one another in their endeavours to attract his attention, he was chiefly occupied in polishing the buckle of his sword-belt with his doeskin glove.
From time to time the old lady addressed him in a low voice, and he answered as well as might be with a sort of awkward and constrained politeness. From the smiles and significant gestures of Madame Alo?se, and the meaning glances she threw at her daughter, Fleur-de-Lys, as she talked to the captain, it was evident that the conversation turned on some betrothal already accomplished or a marriage in the near future between the young man and the daughter of the house. Also, from the cold and embarrassed air of the officer, it was plainly to be seen than, as far as he was concerned, there was no longer any question of love. His whole demeanour expressed a degree of constraint and ennui such as a modern subaltern would translate in the admirable language of to-day by, “What a beastly bore!”
