The magistrate who reminded Gringoire of a crocodile now rose. “Peace!” said he. “I would beg you gentlemen not to lose sight of the fact that a dagger was found on the accused. Woman Falourdel, have you brought with you the withered leaf into which the crown was transformed that the demon gave you?”
“Yes, my lord. I found it again. Here it is.”
An usher handed the dead leaf to the crocodile, who, with a doleful shake of the head, passed it to the President, who sent it on to the procurator of the Ecclesiastical Court, so that it finally made the round of the hall.
“’Tis a beech leaf,” said Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue, “an additional proof of magic!”
A councillor then took up the word. “Witness, you say two men went up together in your house: the man in black whom you first saw disappear and then swimming in the Seine in priest’s habit, and the officer. Which of the two gave you the crown?”
The hag reflected for a moment, then answered, “It was the officer.”
A murmur ran through the crowd.
“Ah,” thought Gringoire, “that somewhat shakes my conviction.”
But Ma?tre Philippe Lheulier again interposed. “I would remind you, gentlemen, that in the deposition taken down at his beside the murdered officer, while stating that a vague suspicion had crossed his mind at the instant when the black man accosted him, that it might be the spectre-monk, added, that the phantom had eagerly urged him to go and meet the accused, and on his (the captain’s) observing that he was without money, had given him the crown which the said officer paid to La Falourdel. Thus the crown is a coin of hell.”
This conclusive observation appeared to dissipate all doubts entertained by Gringoire or any other sceptics among the listeners.
“Gentlemen, you have the documents in hand,” added the advocate as he seated himself, “you can consult the deposition of Ph?bus de Chateaupers.”
At this name the accused started up. Her head was now above the crowd. Gringoire, aghast, recognised Esmeralda.
She was deadly pale; her hair, once so charmingly braided and spangled with sequins, fell about her in disorder; her lips were blue, her sunken eyes horrifying. Alas!
“Ph?bus!” she cried distraught, “where is he? Oh, my lords, before you kill me, in mercy tell me if he yet lives!”
“Silence, woman!” answered the President; “that is not our concern.”
“Oh, in pity, tell me if he lives!” she cried again, clasping her beautiful wasted hands; and her chains clanked as she moved.
“Well, then,” said the King’s advocate dryly, “he is at the point of death. Does that satisfy you?”
The wretched girl fell back in her seat, speechless, tearless, white as a waxen image.
The President leaned down to a man at his feet who wore a gilded cap and a black gown, a chain round his neck, and a wand in his hand.
“Usher, bring in the second accused.”
All eyes were turned towards a little door which opened, and to Gringoire’s great trepidation gave entrance to a pretty little goat with gilded horns and hoofs. The graceful creature stood a moment on the threshold stretching her neck exactly as if, poised on the summit of a rock, she had a vast expanse before her eyes. Suddenly she caught sight of the gipsy girl, and leaping over the table and the head of the clerk in two bounds, she was at her mistress’s knee. She then crouched at Esmeralda’s feet, begging for a word or a caress; but the prisoner remained motionless, even little Djali could not win a glance from her.
“Why— ’tis my ugly brute,” said old Falourdel, “and now I recognise them both perfectly!”
“An it please you, gentlemen, we will proceed to the interrogation of the goat.”
This, in effect, was the second criminal. Nothing was more common in those days than a charge of witchcraft against an animal. For instance, in the Provostry account for 1466 there is a curious specification of the expenses of the action against Gillet Soulart and his sow, “executed for their demerits” at Corbeil. Everything is detailed— the cost of the pit to put the sow into; the five hundred bundles of wood from the wharf of Morsant; the three pints of wine and the bread, the victims’ last meal, fraternally shared by the executioner; and even the eleven days’ custody and keep of the sow at eight deniers parisis per day. At times they went beyond animals. The capitularies of Charlemagne and Louis le Debonnaire impose severe penalties on fiery phantoms who had the assurance to appear in the air.
Meanwhile the procurator of the Ecclesiastical Court exclaimed, “If the demon that possesses this goat, and which has resisted every exorcism, persist in his sorceries, if he terrify the court thereby, we forewarn him that we shall be constrained to proceed against him with the gibbet or the stake.”
Gringoire broke out in a cold sweat.
Charmolue then took from the table the gipsy’s tambourine, and presenting it in a certain manner to the goat, he asked: “What is the time of day?”
The goat regarded him with a sagacious eye, lifted her gilded hoof, and struck seven strokes. It was in truth seven o’clock. A thrill of horror ran through the crowd.
Gringoire could contain himself no longer. “She will be her own ruin!” he exclaimed aloud. “You can see for yourself she has no knowledge of what she is doing.”
“Silence down there!” cried the usher sharply.
Jacques Charmolue, by means of the same man?uvrings with the tambourine, made the goat perform several other tricks in connection with the date of the day, the month of the year, etc., which the reader has already witnessed. And by an optical illusion peculiar to judicial proceedings, these same spectators, who doubtless had often applauded Djali’s innocent performances in the public streets, were terrified by them under the roof of the Palais de Justice. The goat was indisputably the devil.
It was much worse, however, when the procurator, having emptied on the floor a certain little leather bag full of movable letters hanging from Djali’s neck, the goat was seen to separate from the scattered alphabet the letters of the fatal name “Ph?bus.” The magic of which the captain had been a victim seemed incontrovertibly proven; and, in the eyes of all, the gipsy girl, the charming dancer who had so often dazzled the passer-by with her exquisite grace, was nothing more nor less than a horrible witch.
As for her, she gave no sign of life. Neither Djali’s pretty tricks nor the menaces of the lawyers, nor the stifled imprecations of the spectators— nothing reached her apprehension any more.
At last, in order to rouse her, a sergeant had to shake her pitilessly by the arm, and the President solemnly raised his voice:
“Girl, you are of the race of Bohemians, and given to sorcery. In company with your accomplice, the bewitched goat, also implicated in this charge, you did, on the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, in concert with the powers of darkness, and by the aid of charms and spells, wound and poniard a captain of the King’s archers, Ph?bus de Chateaupers by name. Do you persist in your denial?”
“Horrors!” cried the girl, covering her face with her hands. “My Ph?bus! Oh, this is hell!”
“Do you persist in your denial?” repeated the President coldly.
“Of course I deny it!” she answered in terrible tones; and she rose to her feet and her eyes flashed.
“Then how do you explain the facts laid to your charge?” continued the President sternly.
“I have already said,” she answered brokenly, “I do not know. It is a priest, a priest who is unknown to me; a devilish priest who persecutes me—”
“There you have it,” interrupted the judge; “the spectre-monk.”
“Oh, my lords, have pity! I am but a poor girl— ”
“Of Egypt,” said the judge.
Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue here interposed in his mildest tones: “In view of the painful obstinacy of the accused, I demand that she be put to the question.”
“Accorded,” said the President.
A shudder ran through the frame of the hapless girl. She rose, however, at the order of the partisan-bearers, and walked with a tolerably firm step, preceded by Charmolue and the priests of the Office and between two lines of halberds, towards a masked door, which suddenly opened and shut again upon her, seeming to the dejected Gringoire like a horrible maw swallowing her up.
After she had disappeared a plaintive bleat was heard. It was the little goat.
The sitting was suspended. A councillor having observed that the gentleman were fatigued, and that it would be a long time to wait till the torture was over, the President replied that a magistrate should be able to sacrifice himself to his duty.
“The troublesome and vexatious jade,” said an old judge, “to force us to apply the question when we have not yet supped!”
Chapter 2 - Sequel to the Crown Piece changed into A Withered Leaf
After ascending and descending several flights of steps leading to passages so dark that they were lighted by lamps at mid-day, Esmeralda, still surrounded by her lugubrious attendants, was thrust by the sergeants of the guard into a chamber of sinister aspect. This chamber, circular in form, occupied the ground floor in one of those great towers which, even in our day, pierces the layer of modern edifices with which the present Paris has covered the old. There were no windows to this vault; no other opening than the lowbrowed entrance, closed by an enormous iron door. Yet it did not want for light. A furnace was built into the thickness of the wall, and in it a great fire, which filled the vault with its crimson glow and entirely outshone a miserable candle flickering in a corner. The iron grating which closed the furnace being raised at that moment only showed, against the flaming orifice whose licking flames danced on the grim walls, the lower extremity of its bars like a row of sharp black teeth, giving the fire the appearance of a fire-breathing dragon of the ancient myths. By the light that streamed from it the prisoner beheld, ranged round the chamber, frightful instruments the use of which she did not understand. In the middle a leather mattress was stretched almost touching the ground, and over that hung a leather strap with a buckle, attached to a copper ring held in the mouth of a flat-nosed monster carved in the keystone of the vaulted roof. Iron pincers, tongs, great ploughshares were heaped inside the furnace and glowed red-hot upon the fire. The blood-red gleam of the fire only served to bring into view a confused mass of horrible objects.
This Tartarus was known simply as the “Question Chamber.”
Upon the bed sat with the utmost unconcern Pierrat Torterue, the official torturer. His assistants, two squarefaced gnomes in leathern aprons and linen breeches, were turning the irons in the fire.
The poor girl might call up all her courage as she would; on entering that chamber she was seized with horror.
The myrmidons of the law ranged themselves on one side, the priests of the Office on the other. A clerk, a table and writing materials were in a corner.
Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue approached the Egyptian with his blandest smile.
“My dear child,” said he, “do you persist in your denial?”
“Yes,” she answered in an expiring voice.
“In that case,” Charmolue went on, “it will be our painful duty to question you more urgently than we would otherwise desire. Have the goodness to seat yourself on this bed.— Ma?tre Pierrat, kindly make room for mademoiselle, and close the door.”
Pierrat rose with a growl. “If I shut the door,” he muttered, “my fire will go out.”
“Well, then, my good fellow,” replied Charmolue, “leave it open.”
Meanwhile, Esmeralda had remained standing. This bed of leather, on which so many poor wretches had writhed in agony, filled her with affright. Terror froze her to the marrow: she stood bewildered, stupefied. At a sign from Charmolue, the two assistants laid hold on her and placed her on the bed. They did not hurt her; but at the mere touch of these men, at the touch of the bed, she felt all her blood rush to her heart. She cast a distraught look round the chamber. She imagined she saw all these monstrous instruments of torture— which were, to the instruments of any kind she had hitherto seen, what bats, centipeds, and spiders are among birds and insects— come moving towards her from all sides to crawl over her body and pinch and bite her.
“Where is the physician?” asked Charmolue.
“Here,” answered a black gown she had not observed before.
She shuddered.
“Mademoiselle,” resumed the fawning voice of the attorney of the Ecclesiastical Court, “for the third time, do you persist in denying the facts of which you are accused?”
This time she only bent her head in assent— she was past speaking.
“You persist?” said Jacques Charmolue. “Then, to my infinite regret, I must fulfil the duty of my office.”
“Monsieur the King’s Attorney,” said Pierrat, “with which shall we begin?”
Charmolue hesitated a moment with the ambiguous grimace of a poet seeking a rhyme. “With the boot,” he said at last.
The unhappy creature felt herself so completely forsaken of God and man, that her head dropped upon her breast like a thing inert and without any power in itself. The torturer and the physician approached her together, while the two assistants began to search in their hideous collection.
At the clank of these terrible irons the wretched child started convulsively, like a poor dead frog galvanized to life.
“Oh!” she murmured, so low that no one heard her; “oh, my Ph?bus!” Then she sank again into her previous immobility and but her stony silence. The spectacle would have wrung any but the hearts of judges. It might have been some sin-stained soul being questioned by Satan at the flaming gate of hell. Could the miserable body on which this awful swarm of saws and wheels and pincers was preparing to fasten— could it be this gentle, pure, and fragile creature? Poor grain of millet which human justice was sending to be ground by the grewsome mill-stones of torture!
And now the horny hands of Pierrat Torterue’s assistants had brutally uncovered that charming leg, that tiny foot, which had so often astonished the passers-by with their grace and beauty in the streets of Paris.
“‘Tis a pity!” growled even the torturer at the sight of the slender and delicate limbs.
Had the Archdeacon been present, he would certainly have recalled at this moment his allegory of the spider and the fly.
Now, through the mist that spread before her eyes, the unhappy girl perceived the “boot” being brought forward, saw her foot, encased between the iron-bound boards, disappear within the frightful apparatus. Terror restored her strength. “Take it away!” she cried vehemently, starting up all dishevelled: “Mercy!”
She sprang from the bed to throw herself at Charmolue’s feet, but her leg was held fast in the heavy block of oak and iron, and she sank over the boot like a bee with a leaden weight attached to its wing.
