At a sign from Charmolue they replaced her on the bed, and two coarse hands fastened round her slender waist the leather strap hanging from the roof.
“For the last time, do you confess to the facts of the charge?” asked Charmolue with his imperturbable benignity.
“I am innocent,” was the answer.
“Then, mademoiselle, how do you explain the circumstances brought against you?”
“Alas, my lord, I know not.”
“You deny them?”
“All!”
“Proceed,” said Charmolue to Pierrat.
Pierrat turned the screw, the boot tightened, and the victim uttered one of those horrible screams which have no written equivalent in any human language.
“Stop!” said Charmolue to Pierrat. “Do you confess?” said he to the girl.
“All,” cried the wretched girl. “I confess! I confess! Mercy!”
She had overestimated her forces in braving the torture. Poor child! life had hitherto been so joyous, so pleasant, so sweet, the first pang of agony had overcome her!
“Humanity obliges me to tell you,” observed the King’s attorney, “that in confessing, you have only death to look forward to.”
“I hope but for that!” said she, and fell back again on the leather bed, a lifeless heap, hanging doubled over the strap buckled round her waist.
“Hold up, my pretty!” said Ma?tre Pierrat, raising her. “You look like the golden sheep that hangs round the neck of Monsieur of Burgundy.”
Jacques Charmolue raised his voice. “Clerk, write this down. Gipsy girl, you confess your participation in the love-feasts, Sabbaths, and orgies of hell, in company with evil spirits, witches, and ghouls? Answer!”
“Yes,” she breathed faintly.
“You admit having seen the ram which Beelzebub causes to appear in the clouds as a signal for the Sabbath, and which is only visible to witches?”
“Yes.”
“You confess to having adored the heads of Bophomet, those abominable idols of the Templars?”
“Yes.”
“To having had familiar intercourse with the devil under the form of a pet goat, included in the prosecution?”
“Yes.”
“Finally, you admit and confess to having, on the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, with the assistance of the demon and of the phantom commonly called the spectre-monk, wounded and assassinated a captain named Ph?bus de Chateaupers?”
She raised her glazed eyes to the magistrate and answered mechanically, without a quiver of emotion, “Yes.” It was evident that her whole being was crushed.
“Take that down,” said Charmolue to the clerk. Then, turning to the torturer, “Let the prisoner be unbound and taken back to the court.”
When the prisoner was “unbooted,” the procurator of the Ecclesiastical Court examined her foot, still paralyzed with pain. “Come,” said he, “there’s no great harm done. You cried out in time. You could still dance, ma belle!”
And turning to the members of the Office— “At length, justice is enlightened! That is a great consolation, messieurs! Mademoiselle will bear witness that we have used all possible gentleness towards her.”
Chapter 3 - End of the Crown Piece changed into A Withered Leaf
When, pale and limping, she re-entered the Court of Justice, she was greeted by a general murmur of pleasure— arising on the part of the public from that feeling of satisfied impatience experienced at the theatre at the expiration of the last entr’ acte of a play, when the curtain rises and one knows that the end is about to begin; and on the part of the judges from the hope of soon getting their supper. The little goat, too, bleated with joy. She would have run to her mistress, but they had tied her to the bench.
Night had now completely fallen. The candles, which had not been increased in number, gave so little light that the walls of the court were no longer visible. Darkness enveloped every object in a kind of mist, through which the apathetic faces of the judges were barely distinguishable. Opposite to them, at the extremity of the long hall, they could just see a vague white point standing out against the murky background. It was the prisoner.
She had dragged herself to her place. When Charmolue had magisterially installed himself in his, he sat down, then rose and said, without allowing all too much of his satisfaction at his success to become apparent: “The prisoner has confessed all.”
“Bohemian girl,” said the President, “you have confessed to all your acts of sorcery, of prostitution, and of assassination committed upon the person of Ph?bus de Chateaupers?”
Her heart contracted. They could hear her sobbing through the darkness. “What you will,” she returned feebly, “only make an end of me quickly!”
“Monsieur the King’s Attorney in the Ecclesiastical Court, the court is ready to hear your requisitions.”
Ma?tre Charmolue drew forth an appalling document, and commenced reading with much gesticulation and the exaggerated emphasis of the Bar a Latin oration, in which all the evidences of the trial were set out in Ciceronian periphrases, flanked by citations from Plautus. We regret being unable to offer our readers this remarkable composition. The author delivered it with marvellous eloquence. He had not concluded the exordium before the perspiration was streaming from his brow and his eyes starting from his head.
Suddenly, in the very middle of a rounded period, he broke off short, and his countenance, usually mild enough not to say stupid, became absolutely terrible.
“Sirs!” he cried (this time in French, for it was not in the document), “Satan is so profoundly involved in this affair, that behold him present at our councils and making a mock of the majesty of the law. Behold him!”
So saying, he pointed to the goat, which, seeing Charmolue gesticulate, thought it the right and proper thing to do likewise, and seated on her haunches was mimicking to the best of her ability with her fore-feet and bearded head the impressive pantomime of the King’s Attorney in the Ecclesiastical Court. This, if you will remember, was one of her most engaging performances.
This incident— this final proof— produced a great effect. They bound the goat’s feet, and Charmolue resumed the thread of his eloquence.
It was long indeed, but the peroration was admirable. The last sentence ran thus— let the reader add in imagination the raucous voice and broken-winded elocution of Ma?tre Charmolue:
Ideo, domini, coram stryga demonstrata, crimine patente, intentione criminis existente, in nomine sanct? ecclesi? Nostr?-Domin? Parisiensis, qu? est in saisina habendi omnimodam altam et bassam, justitiam in illa hac intemerata Civitatis insula, tenore pr?sentium declaramus nos requirere, primo, aliquandam pecuniariam indemnitatem; secundo, amendationem honorabilem ante portalium maximum Nostr?-Domin?, ecclesi? cathedralis; tertio, sententiam, in virtute cujus ista stryga cum sua capella, seu in trivio vulgariter dicto ’la Grève,’ seu in insula exeunte in fluvio Sequan?, juxta pointam jardini regalis, execut? sint.”1
He resumed his cap and sat down again.
“Eheu!” groaned Gringoire, overwhelmed with grief. “Bassa latinitas.”2
Another man in a black gown now rose near the prisoner. It was her advocate. The fasting judges began to murmur.
“Advocate,” said the President, “be brief.”
“Monsieur the President,” replied the advocate, “since the defendant has confessed the crime, I have but one word to say to these gentlemen. I bring to their notice the following passage of the Salic law: ’If a witch have devoured a man and be convicted of it, she shall pay a fine of eight thousand deniers, which makes two hundred sous of gold.’ Let the court condemn my client to the fine.”
“An abrogated clause,” said the King’s Advocate Extraordinary.
“Nego.”3
“Put it to the vote!” suggested a councillor; “the crime is manifest, and it is late.”
The votes were taken without leaving the court. The judges gave their votes without a moment’s hesitation— they were in a hurry. One after another their heads were bared at the lugubrious question addressed to them in turn in a low voice by the President. The hapless prisoner seemed to be looking at them, but her glazed eyes no longer saw anything.
The clerk then began to write, and presently handed a long scroll of parchment to the President; after which the poor girl heard the people stirring, and an icy voice say:
“Bohemian girl, on such a day as it shall please our lord the King to appoint, at the hour of noon, you shall be taken in a tumbrel, in your shift, barefoot, a rope round your neck, before the great door of Notre-Dame, there to do penance with a wax candle of two pounds’ weight in your hands; and from there you shall be taken to the Place-de-Grève, where you will be hanged and strangled on the town gibbet, and your goat likewise; and shall pay to the Office three lion-pieces of gold in reparation of the crimes, by you committed and confessed, of sorcery, magic, prostitution, and murder against the person of the Sieur Ph?bus de Chateaupers. And God have mercy on your soul!”
“Oh, ’tis a dream!” she murmured, and she felt rude hands bearing her away.
______________________
1 Therefore, gentlemen, the witchcraft being proved and the crime made manifest, as likewise the criminal intention, in the name of the holy church of Notre-Dame de Paris, which is seized of the right of all manner of justice high and low, within this inviolate island of the city, we declare by the tenor of these presents that we require, firstly, a pecuniary compensation; secondly, penance before the great portal of the cathedral church of Notre-Dame; thirdly, a sentence, by virtue of which this witch, together with her goat, shall either in the public square, commonly called La Grève, or in the island stretching out into the river Seine, adjacent to the point of the royal gardens, be executed.
2 Oh, the monk’s Latin!
3 I say No.
Chapter 4 - Lasciate Ogni Speranza
In the Middle Ages, when an edifice was complete there was almost as much of it under the ground as over it. Except it were built on piles, like Notre-Dame, a palace, a fortress, a church, had always a double foundation. In the cathedrals it formed in some sort a second cathedral— subterranean, low-pitched, dark, mysterious— blind and dumb—under the aisles of the building above, which were flooded with light and resonant day and night with the music of the organ or the bells. Sometimes it was a sepulchre. In the palaces and fortresses it was a prison— or a sepulchre— sometimes both together. These mighty masses of masonry, of which we have explained elsewhere the formation and growth, had not mere foundations, but more properly speaking roots branching out underground into chambers, passages, and stairways, the counterpart of those above. Thus the churches, palaces, and bastilles might be said to be sunk in the ground up to their middle. The vaults of an edifice formed another edifice, in which you descended instead of ascending, the subterranean storeys of which extended downward beneath the pile of exterior storeys, like those inverted forests and mountains mirrored in the waters of a lake beneath the forests and mountains of its shores.
At the Bastille Saint-Antoine, at the Palais de Justice, and at the Louvre, these subterranean edifices were prisons. The storeys of these prisons as they sank into the ground became even narrower and darker— so many zones presenting, as by a graduated scale, deeper and deeper shades of horror. Dante could find nothing better for the construction of his Inferno. These dungeon funnels usually ended in a tub-shaped pit, in which Dante placed his Satan and society the criminal condemned to death. When once a miserable being was there interred, farewell to light, air, life— ogni speranza— he never issued forth again but to the gibbet or the stake unless, indeed, he were left to rot there— which human justice called forgetting. Between mankind and the condemned, weighing upon his head, there was an accumulated mass of stone and jailers; and the whole prison, the massive fortress, was but one enormous complicated lock that barred him from the living world.
It was in one of these deep pits, in the oubliettes excavated by Saint-Louis, in the “in pace” of the Tournelle— doubtless for fear of her escaping— that they had deposited Esmeralda, now condemned to the gibbet, with the colossal Palais de Justice over her head— poor fly, that could not have moved the smallest of its stones! Truly, Providence and social law alike had been too lavish; such a profusion of misery and torture was not necessary to crush so fragile a creature.
She lay there, swallowed up by the darkness, entombed, walled, lost to the world. Any one seeing her in that state, after beholding her laughing and dancing in the sunshine, would have shuddered. Cold as night, cold as death, no breath of air to stir her locks, no human sound to reach her ear, no ray of light within her eye— broken, weighed down by chains, crouching beside a pitcher and a loaf of bread, on a heap of straw, in the pool of water formed by the oozings of the dungeon walls— motionless, almost breathless, she was even past suffering. Ph?bus, the sun, noonday, the free air, the streets of Paris, dancing and applause, her tender love passages with the officer— then the priest, the old hag, the dagger, blood, torture, the gibbet— all this passed in turn before her mind, now as a golden vision of delight, now as a hideous nightmare; but her apprehension of it all was now merely that of a vaguely horrible struggle in the darkness, or of distant music still playing above ground but no longer audible at the depth to which the unhappy girl had fallen.
Since she had been here she neither waked nor slept. In that unspeakable misery, in that dungeon, she could no more distinguish waking from sleeping, dreams from reality, than day from night. All was mingled, broken, floating confusedly through her mind. She no longer felt, no longer knew, no longer thought anything definitely— at most she dreamed. Never has human creature been plunged deeper into annihilation.
Thus benumbed, frozen, petrified, scarcely had she remarked at two or three different times the sound of a trap-door opening somewhere above her head, without even admitting a ray of light, and through which a hand had thrown her down a crust of black bread. Yet this was her only surviving communication with mankind— the periodical visit of the jailer.
One thing alone still mechanically occupied her ear: over her head the moisture filtered through the mouldy stones of the vault, and at regular intervals a drop of water fell from it. She listened stupidly to the splash made by this dripping water as it fell into the pool beside her.
This drop of water falling into the pool was the only movement still perceptible around her, the only clock by which to measure time, the only sound that reached her of all the turmoil going on on earth; though, to be quite accurate, she was conscious from time to time in that sink of mire and darkness of something cold passing over her foot or her arm, and that made her shiver.
