An immense crowd, extending into all the adjacent streets, filled the whole square. The breast-high wall surrounding the Parvis itself would not have sufficed alone to keep it clear; but it was lined by a close hedge of sergeants of the town-guard and arquebusiers, culverin in hand. Thanks to this grove of pikes and arquebuses the Parvis was empty. The entrance to it was guarded by a body of the bishop’s halberdiers. The great doors of the church were closed, forming a strong contrast to the innumerable windows round the Place, which, open up to the very gables, showed hundreds of heads piled one above another like the cannon-balls in an artillery ground. The prevailing aspect of this multitude was gray, dirty, repulsive. The spectacle they were awaiting was evidently one that has the distinction of calling forth all that is most bestial and unclean in the populace— impossible to imagine anything more repulsive than the sounds which arose from this seething mass of yellow caps and frowzy heads, and there were fewer shouts than shrill bursts of laughter— more women than men.
From time to time some strident voice pierced the general hum.
“Hi there! Mahiet Baliffre! will they hang her here?”
“Simpleton, this is the penance in her shift— the Almighty is going to cough a little Latin in her face! That is always done here at noon. If ’tis the gallows you want, you must go to the Grève.”
“I’ll go there afterward.”
“Tell me, La Boucanbry, is it true that she refused to have a confessor?”
“So they say, La Bechaigne.”
“Did you ever see such a heathen?”
“Sir, ’tis the custom here. The justiciary of the Palais is bound to deliver up the malefactor, ready sentenced for execution— if a layman, to the Provost of Paris; if a cleric, to the official court of the bishopric.”
“Sir, I thank you.”
“Oh, mon Dieu!” said Fleur-de-Lys, “the poor creature!”
And this thought tinged with sadness the look she cast over the crowd. The captain, much more interested in her than in this dirty rabble, had laid an amorous hand upon her waist. She turned round with a smile half of pleasure, half of entreaty.
“Prithee, Ph?bus, let be! If my mother entered and saw your hand— ”
At this moment the hour of noon boomed slowly from the great clock of Notre-Dame. A murmur of satisfaction burst from the crowd. The last vibration of the twelfth stroke had hardly died away before all the heads were set in one direction, like waves before a sudden gust of wind, and a great shout went up from the square, the windows, the roofs: “Here she comes!”
Fleur-de-Lys clasped her hands over her eyes that she might not see.
“Sweetheart,” Ph?bus hastened to say, “shall we go in?”
“No,” she returned, and the eyes that she had just closed from fear she opened again from curiosity.
A tumbrel drawn by a strong Normandy draught-horse, and closely surrounded by horsemen in violet livery with white crosses, had just entered the Place from the Rue Saint-Pierre aux B?ufs. The sergeants of the watch opened a way for it through the people by vigorous use of their thonged scourges. Beside the tumbrel rode a few officers of justice and the police, distinguishable by their black garments and their awkwardness in the saddle. Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue figured at their head.
In the fatal cart a girl was seated, her hands tied behind her, but no priest by her side. She was in her shift, and her long black hair (it was the custom then not to cut it till reaching the foot of the gibbet) fell unbound about her neck and over her half-naked shoulders.
Through these waving locks— more lustrous than the raven’s wing— you caught a glimpse of a great rough brown rope, writhing and twisting, chafing the girl’s delicate shoulder-blades, and coiled about her fragile neck like an earthworm round a flower. Below this rope glittered a small amulet adorned with green glass, which, doubtless, she had been allowed to retain, because nothing is refused to those about to die. The spectators raised above her at the windows could see her bare legs as she sat in the tumbrel, and which she strove to conceal as if from a last remaining instinct of her sex. At her feet lay a little goat, also strictly bound. The criminal was holding her ill-fastened shift together with her teeth. It looked as though, despite her extreme misery, she was still conscious of the indignity of being thus exposed half-naked before all eyes. Alas! it is not for such frightful trials as this that feminine modesty was made.
“Holy Saviour!” cried Fleur-de-Lys excitedly to the captain. “Look, cousin! if it is not your vile gipsy girl with the goat!”
She turned round to Ph?bus. His eyes were fixed on the tumbrel. He was very pale.
“What gipsy girl with a goat?” he faltered.
“How,” returned Fleur-de-Lys, “do you not remember?”
Ph?bus did not let her finish. “I do not know what you mean.”
He made one step to re-enter the room, but Fleur-de-Lys, whose jealousy lately so vehement was now reawakened by the sight of the detested gipsy— Fleur-de-Lys stopped him by a glance full of penetration and mistrust. She recollected vaguely having heard something of an officer whose name had been connected with the trial of this sorceress.
“What ails you?” said she to Ph?bus; “one would think that the sight of this woman disconcerted you.”
Ph?bus forced a laugh. “Me? Not the least in the world! Oh, far from it!”
“Then stay,” she returned imperiously, “and let us see it out.”
So there was nothing for the unlucky captain but to remain. However, it reassured him somewhat to see that the criminal kept her eyes fixed on the bottom of the tumbrel. It was but too truly Esmeralda. In this last stage of ignominy and misfortune, she was still beautiful— her great dark eyes looked larger from the hollowing of her cheeks, her pale profile was pure and unearthly. She resembled her former self as a Virgin of Masaccio resembles one of Raphael’s — frailer, more pinched, more attenuated.
For the rest, there was nothing in her whole being that did not seem to be shaken to its foundations; and, except for her last poor attempt at modesty, she abandoned herself completely to chance, so thoroughly had her spirit been broken by torture and despair. Her body swayed with every jolt of the tumbrel like something dead or disjointed. Her gaze was blank and distraught. A tear hung in her eye, but it was stationary and as if frozen there.
Meanwhile the dismal cavalcade had traversed the crowd amid yells of joy and the struggles of the curious. Nevertheless, in strict justice be it said, that on seeing her so beautiful and so crushed by affliction, many, even the most hard-hearted, were moved to pity.
The tumbrel now entered the Parvis and stopped in front of the great door. The escort drew up in line on either side. Silence fell upon the crowd, and amid that silence, surcharged with solemnity and anxious anticipation, the two halves of the great door opened apparently of themselves on their creaking hinges and disclosed the shadowy depths of the sombre church in its whole extent, hung with black, dimly lighted by a few tapers glimmering in the far distance on the high altar, and looking like a black and yawning cavern in the midst of the sunlit Place. At the far end, in the gloom of the chancel, a gigantic cross of silver was dimly visible against a black drapery that fell from the roof to the floor. The nave was perfectly empty, but the heads of a few priests could be seen stirring vaguely in the distant choir-stalls, and as the great door opened, there rolled from the church a solemn, far-reaching, monotonous chant, hurling at the devoted head of the criminal fragments of the penitential psalms:
“Non timebo millia populi circumdantis me. Exsurge, Domine; salvum me fac, Deus!
“Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intraverunt aqu? usque ad animam meam.
“Infixus sum in limo profundi; et non est substantia.”
At the same time an isolated voice, not in the choir, intoned from the step of the high altar this impressive offertory:
“Qui verbum meum audit, et credit ei qui misit me, habet vitam ?ternam et in judicium non venit; sed transit a morte in vitam.”
This chant intoned by a few old men lost in the gloom of the church, and directed at this beautiful creature full of youth and life, wooed by the balmy air of spring, and bathed in sunshine, was the mass for the dead.
The multitude listened with pious attention.
The hapless, terrified girl seemed to lose all sight and consciousness in this view into the dark bowels of the church. Her white lips moved as if she prayed, and when the hang-man’s assistant advanced to help her down from the tumbrel, he heard a low murmur from her— “Ph?bus!”
They untied her hands and made her descend from the cart, accompanied by her goat, which they had also unbound, and which bleated with delight at finding itself free. She was then made to walk barefoot over the rough pavement to the bottom of the flight of steps leading up to the door. The rope she had round her neck trailed after her like a serpent in pursuit.
The chant ceased inside the church. A great cross of gold and a file of wax tapers set themselves in motion in the gloom. The halberds of the bishop’s guard clanked, and a few moments later a long procession of priests in their chasubles and deacons in their dalmatics advancing, solemnly chanting, towards the penitent, came into her view and that of the crowd. But her eye was arrested by the one who led the procession, immediately behind the cross-bearer.
“Oh,” she murmured with a shudder, “’tis he again— the priest!”
It was the Archdeacon. On his left walked the sub-chanter, on his right the precentor, armed with his wand of office. He advanced with head thrown back, his eyes fixed and wide, chanting with a loud voice:
“De ventre inferi clamavi, et exaudisti vocem meam.
“Et projecisti me in profundum corde maris et flumen circumdedit me.”
As he came into the broad daylight under the high Gothic doorway, enveloped in a wide silver cope barred with a black cross, he was so pale, that more than one among the crowd thought that it was one of the marble bishops off some tomb in the choir come to receive on the threshold of the grave her who was about to die.
No less pale and marble than himself, she was scarcely aware that they had thrust a heavy lighted taper of yellow wax into her hand; she did not listen to the raucous voice of the clerk as he read out the terrible wording of the penance; when she was bidden to answer Amen, she answered Amen.
The first thing that brought back to her any life and strength was seeing the priest sign to his followers to retire, and he advanced alone towards her. Then, indeed, she felt the blood rush boiling to her head, and a last remaining spark of indignation flamed up in that numbed and frozen spirit.
The Archdeacon approached her slowly. Even in her dire extremity, she saw his lustful eye wander in jealousy and desire over her half-nude form. Then he said to her in a loud voice:
“Girl, have you asked pardon of God for your sins and offences?” He bent over her and whispered (the spectators supposing that he was receiving her last confession): “Wilt thou be mine? I can save thee yet!”
She regarded him steadfastly: “Begone, devil, or I will denounce thee!”
A baleful smile curled his lips. “They would not believe thee. Thou wouldst but be adding a scandal to a crime. Answer quickly! Wilt thou be mine?”
“What hast thou done with my Ph?bus?”
“He is dead,” said the priest.
At that moment the miserable Archdeacon raised his eyes mechanically, and there, at the opposite side of the Place, on the balcony of the Gondelaurier’s house, was the captain himself, standing by the side of Fleur-de-Lys. He staggered, passed his hand over his eyes, looked again, murmured a curse, and every feature became distorted with rage.
“Then die thou too!” he muttered between his teeth. “No one shall have thee!” Then lifting his hand over the gipsy girl, he cried in a sepulchral voice: “I nunc, anima anceps, et sit tibi Deus misericors!”
This was the awful formula with which it was customary to close this lugubrious ceremonial. It was the accepted signal from the priest to the executioner.
The people fell upon their knees.
“Kyrie eleison!” said the priests standing under the arched doorway.
“Kyrie eleison!” repeated the multitude in that murmur that runs over a sea of heads like the splashing of stormy waves.
“Amen,” responded the Archdeacon. And he turned his back upon the doomed girl, his head fell on his breast, he crossed his hands, rejoined his train of priests, and vanished a moment afterward with the cross, the tapers and the copes under the dim arches of the cathedral, and his sonorous voice gradually died away in the choir chanting this cry of human despair:
“Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt!”
The intermittent clank of the butt-ends of the guards’ pikes growing fainter by degrees in the distance, sounded like the hammer of a clock striking the last hour of the condemned.
All this time the doors of Notre-Dame had remained wide open, affording a view of the interior of the church, empty, desolate, draped in black, voiceless, its lights extinguished.
The condemned girl remained motionless on the spot where they had placed her, awaiting what they would do with her. One of the sergeants had to inform Ma?tre Charmolue that matters had reached this point, as during the foregoing scene he had been wholly occupied in studying the bas-relief of the great doorway, which, according to some, represents Abraham’s sacrifice, and according to others, the great alchemistic operation— the sun being figured by the angel, the fire by the fagot, and the operator by Abraham.
They had much ado to draw him away from this contemplation; but at last he turned round, and at a sign from him, two men in yellow, the executioner’s assistants, approached the gipsy to tie her hands again.
At the moment of reascending the fatal cart and moving on towards her final scene, the hapless girl was seized perhaps by some last heart-rending desire for life. She raised her dry and burning eyes to heaven, to the sun, to the silvery clouds intermingling with patches of brilliant blue, then she cast them around her, upon the ground, the people, the houses. Suddenly, while the man in yellow was pinioning her arms, she uttered a piercing cry— a cry of joy. On the balcony at the corner of the Place she had descried him— her love— her lord— her life— Ph?bus!
The judge had lied, the priest had lied— it was he indeed, she could not doubt it— he stood there alive and handsome, in his brilliant uniform, a plume on his head, a sword at his side.
“Ph?bus!” she cried, “my Ph?bus!” and she tried to stretch out her arms to him, but they were bound.
Then she saw that the captain frowned, that a beautiful girl who was leaning upon his arm looked at him with scornful lips and angry eyes; whereupon Ph?bus said some words which did not reach her ear, and they both hastily disappeared through the casement of the balcony, which immediately closed behind them.
