“Ph?bus!” she cried wildly, “can it be that thou believest it?”
A monstrous thought had just suggested itself to her— she remembered that she had been condemned for murder committed on the person of Ph?bus de Chateaupers.
She had borne all till now, but this last blow was too heavy. She fell senseless to the ground.
“Come,” said Charmolue impatiently, “lift her into the cart, and let us be done with it.”
No one had yet remarked in the gallery of royal statues immediately over the arches of the doorway a strange spectator, who, until then, had observed all that passed with such absolute immobility, a neck so intently stretched, a face so distorted, that, but for his habiliments— half red, half violet— he might have been taken for one of the stone gargoyles through whose mouths the long rain-pipes of the Cathedral have emptied themselves for six hundred years. This spectator had lost no smallest detail of all that had taken place before the entrance to Notre-Dame since the hour of noon. At the very beginning, no one paying the least attention to him, he had firmly attached to one of the small columns of the gallery a stout knotted rope, the other end of which reached to the ground. This done, he had settled himself to quietly look on, only whistling from time to time as a blackbird flew past him.
Now, at the moment when the executioner’s assistants were preparing to carry out Charmolue’s phlegmatic order, he threw his leg over the balustrade of the gallery, seized the rope with his hands, his knees and his feet, and proceeded to slide down the face of the Cathedral like a drop of water down a window-pane; ran at the two men with the speed of a cat just dropped from a house-top, knocked the pair down with two terrific blows of his fist, picked up the gipsy in one hand as a child would a doll, and with one bound was inside the church, holding the girl high above his head as he shouted in a voice of thunder:
“Sanctuary!”
This was all accomplished with such rapidity, that had it been night the whole scene might have passed by the glare of a single flash of lightning.
“Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” roared the crowd, and the clapping of ten thousand hands made Quasimodo’s single eye sparkle with joy and pride.
This shock brought the girl to her senses. She opened her eyes, looked at Quasimodo, then closed them suddenly as if in terror at the sight of her deliverer.
Charmolue stood dumfounded, and the executioners and the whole escort with him; for once within the walls of Notre-Dame the criminal was inviolable. The Cathedral was a place of sanctuary; all human justice was powerless beyond the threshold.
Quasimodo had halted within the central doorway. His broad feet seemed to rest as solidly on the floor of the church as the heavy Roman pillars themselves. His great shock head was sunk between his shoulders like that of a lion, which likewise has a mane but no neck. The trembling girl hung in his horny hands like a white drapery; but he held her with anxious care, as if fearful of breaking or brushing the bloom off her— as if he felt that she was something delicate and exquisite and precious, and made for other hands than his. At moments he seemed hardly to dare to touch her, even with his breath; then again he would strain her tightly to his bony breast as if she were his only possession, his treasure— as the mother of this child would have done. His cyclops eye, bent upon her, enveloped her in a flood of tenderness, of grief, and pity, and then rose flashing with determined courage. Women laughed and cried, the crowd stamped with enthusiasm, for at this moment Quasimodo had a beauty of his own. Verily, this orphan, this foundling, this outcast, was wonderful to look upon: he felt himself august in his strength; he looked that society from which he was banished, and against whose plans he had so forcefully intervened, squarely in the face; he boldly defied that human justice from which he had just snatched its prey, all these tigers now forced to gnash their empty jaws, these myrmidons of the law, these judges, these executioners— this whole force of the King which he, the meanest of his subjects, had set at naught by the force of God.
Then, too, how affecting was this protection offered by a creature so misshapen to one so unfortunate— a girl condemned to death, saved by Quasimodo!— the extremes of physical and social wretchedness meeting and assisting one another.
Meanwhile, after tasting his triumph for a few brief moments, Quasimodo suddenly plunged with his burden into the church. The people, ever delighted at a display of prowess, followed him with their eyes through the dim nave, only regretting that he had so quickly withdrawn himself from their acclamations. Suddenly he reappeared at one end of the gallery of royal statues, which he traversed, running like a madman, lifting his booty high in his arms and shouting “Sanctuary!” The plaudits of the crowd burst forth anew. Having dashed along the gallery, he vanished again into the interior of the Cathedral, and a moment afterward reappeared on the upper platform, still bearing the Egyptian in his arms, still running madly, still shouting “Sanctuary!” and the multitude still applauding. At last he made his third appearance on the summit of the tower of the great bell, from whence he seemed to show exultingly to the whole city the woman he had rescued, and his thundering voice— that voice which was heard so seldom, and never by him at all, repeated thrice with frenzied vehemence, even into the very clouds: “Sanctuary! Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”
“No?l! No?l!” roared the people in return, till the immense volume of acclamation resounded upon the opposite shore of the river to the astonishment of the crowd assembled in the Place de Grève, and among them the recluse, whose hungry eye was still fixed upon the gibbet.
BOOK IX
Chapter 1 - Delirium
Claude Frollo was no longer in Notre-Dame when his adopted son so abruptly cut the fatal noose in which the unhappy Archdeacon had caught the Egyptian and himself at the same time. On entering the sacristy, he had torn off alb, cope, and stole, had tossed them into the hands of the amazed verger, escaped by the private door of the cloister, ordered a wherryman of the “Terrain” to put him across to the left bank of the Seine, and had plunged into the steep streets of the University, knowing not whither he went, meeting at every step bands of men and women pressing excitedly towards the Pont Saint-Michel in the hope of “still arriving in time” to see the witch hanged— pale, distraught, confused, more blinded and scared than any bird of night set free and flying before a troop of children in broad daylight. He was no longer conscious of where he was going, what were his thoughts, his imaginations. He went blindly on, walking, running, taking the streets at random, without any definite plan, save the one thought of getting away from the Grève, the horrible Grève, which he felt confusedly to be behind him.
In this manner he proceeded the whole length of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and at last left the town by the Porte Saint-Victor. He continued his flight so long as he could see, on turning round, the bastioned walls of the University, and the sparse houses of the faubourg; but when at last a ridge of rising ground completely hid hateful Paris from his view— when he could imagine himself a hundred leagues away from it, in the country, in a desert— he stopped and dared to draw a free breath.
Frightful thoughts now crowded into his mind. He saw clearly into his soul and shuddered. He thought of the unfortunate girl he had ruined and who had ruined him. He let his haggard eye pursue the tortuous paths along which Fate had driven them to their separate destinies up to the point of junction where she had pitilessly shattered them one against the other. He thought of the folly of lifelong vows, of the futility of chastity, science, religion, and virtue, of the impotence of God. He pursued these arguments with wicked gusto, and the deeper he sank in the slough the louder laughed the Satan within him. And discovering, as he burrowed thus into his soul, how large a portion Nature had assigned in it to the passions, he smiled more sardonically than before. He shook up from the hidden depths of his heart all his hatred, all his wickedness; and he discovered with the calm eye of the physician examining a patient that this same hatred and wickedness were but the outcome of perverted love— that love, the source of every human virtue, turned to things unspeakable in the heart of a priest, and that a man constituted as he was, by becoming a priest, made of himself a demon— and he laughed horribly. But suddenly he grew pale again as he contemplated the worst side of his fatal passion— of that corrosive, venomous, malignant, implacable love which had brought the one to the gallows and the other to hell— her to death, him to damnation.
And then his laugh came again when he remembered that Ph?bus was living; that, after all, the captain was alive and gay and happy, with a finer uniform than ever, and a new mistress whom he brought to see the old one hanged. And he jeered sardonically at himself to think that of all the human beings whose death he had desired, the Egyptian, the one creature he did not hate, was the only one he had succeeded in destroying.
From the captain, his thoughts wandered to the crowd of that morning, and he was seized with a fresh kind of jealousy. He reflected that the people, the whole population, had beheld the woman he loved— divested of all but a single garment— almost nude. He wrung his hands in agony at the thought that the woman, a mere glimpse of whose form veiled in shadows and seen by his eye alone would have afforded him the supreme measure of bliss, had been given thus, in broad daylight, at high noon, to the gaze of a whole multitude, clad as for a bridal night. He wept with rage over all these mysteries of love profaned, sullied, stripped, withered forever. He wept with rage to think how many impure eyes that ill-fastened garment had satisfied; that this fair creature, this virgin lily, this cup of purity and all delights to which he would only have set his lips in fear and trembling, had been converted into a public trough, as it were, at which the vilest of the populace of Paris, the thieves, the beggars, the lackeys, had come to drink in common of a pleasure— shameless, obscene, depraved.
Again, when he sought to picture to himself the happiness that might have been his had she not been a gipsy and he a priest; had Ph?bus not existed, and had she but loved him; when he told himself that a life of serenity and love would have been possible to him too; that at that very moment there were happy couples to be found here and there on earth, whiling away the hours in sweet communings, in orange groves, by the brook-side, under the setting sun or a starry night; and that had God so willed it, he might have made with her one of those thrice-blessed couples, his heart melted in tenderness and despair.
Oh, it was she! still and forever she!— that fixed idea that haunted him incessantly, that tortured him, gnawed his brain, wrung his very vitals! He regretted nothing, he repented of nothing; all that he had done he was ready to do again; better a thousand times see her in the hands of the hangman than the arms of the soldier; but he suffered, he suffered so madly that there were moments when he tore his hair in handfuls from his head to see if it had not turned white.
At one moment it occurred to him that this, perhaps, was the very minute at which the hideous chain he had seen in the morning was tightening its noose of iron round that fragile and slender neck. Great drops of agony burst from every pore at the thought.
At another moment he took a diabolical pleasure in torturing himself by bringing before his mind’s eye a simultaneous picture of Esmeralda as he had seen her for the first time— filled with life and careless joy, gaily attired, dancing, airy, melodious— and Esmeralda at her last hour, in her shift, a rope about her neck, slowly ascending with her naked feet the painful steps of the gibbet. He brought this double picture so vividly before him that a terrible cry burst from him.
While this hurricane of despair was upheaving, shattering, tearing, bending, uprooting everything within his soul, he gazed absently at the prospect around him. Some fowls were busily pecking and scratching at his feet; bright-coloured beetles ran to and fro in the sunshine; overhead, groups of dappled cloud sailed in a deep-blue sky; on the horizon the spire of the Abbey of Saint-Victor reared its slate obelisk above the rising ground; and the miller of the Butte-Copeaux whistled as he watched the busily turning sails of his mill. All this industrious, orderly, tranquil activity, recurring around him under a thousand different aspects, hurt him. He turned to flee once more.
He wandered thus about the country till the evening. This fleeing from Nature, from life, from himself, from mankind, from God, went on through the whole day. Now he would throw himself face downward on the ground, digging up the young blades of corn with his nails; or he would stand still in the middle of some deserted village street, his thoughts so insupportable that he would seize his head in both hands as if to tear it from his shoulders and dash it on the stones.
Towards the hour of sunset, he took counsel with himself and found that he was well-nigh mad. The storm that had raged in him since the moment that he lost both the hope and the desire to save the gipsy, had left him without one sane idea, one rational thought. His reason lay prostrate on the verge of utter destruction. But two distinct images remained in his mind: Esmeralda and the gibbet. The rest was darkness. These two images in conjunction formed to his mind a ghastly group, and the more strenuously he fixed upon them such power of attention and thought as remained to him, the more he saw them increase according to a fantastic progression— the one in grace, in charm, in beauty, in lustre; the other in horror; till, at last, Esmeralda appeared to him as a star, and the gibbet as a huge fleshless arm. Strange to say, during all this torture he never seriously thought of death. Thus was the wretched man constituted; he clung to life— may-be, indeed, he saw hell in the background.
Meanwhile night was coming on apace. The living creature still existing within him began confusedly to think of return. He imagined himself far from Paris, but on looking about him he discovered that he had but been travelling in a circle round the University. The spire of Saint-Sulpice and the three lofty pinnacles of Saint-Germain-des-Prés broke the sky-line on his right. He bent his steps in that direction. When he heard the “Qui vive?” of the Abbot’s guard round the battlemented walls of Saint-Germain, he turned aside, took a path lying before him between the abbey mill and the lazaretto, and found himself in a few minutes on the edge of the Pré-aux-Clercs— the Students’ Meadow. This ground was notorious for the brawls and tumults which went on in it day and night; it was a “hydra” to the poor monks of Saint-Germain— Quod monachis Sancti Germani pratensis hydra fuit, clericis nova semper dissidionum capita suscitantibus.1 The Archdeacon feared meeting some one there, he dreaded the sight of a human face; he would not enter the streets till the latest moment possible. He therefore skirted the Préaux-Clercs, took the solitary path that lay between it and the Dieu-Neuf, and at length reached the water-side. There Dom Claude found a boatman, who for a few deniers took him up the river as far as the extreme point of the island of the City, and landed him on that deserted tongue of land on which the reader has already seen Gringoire immersed in reverie, and which extended beyond the royal gardens parallel to the island of the cattle-ferry.
