The monotonous rocking of the boat and the ripple of the water in some degree soothed the unhappy man. When the boatman had taken his departure, Claude remained on the bank in a kind of stupor, looking straight before him and seeing the surrounding objects only through a distorting mist which converted the whole scene into a kind of phantasmagoria.
The exhaustion of a violent grief will often produce this effect upon the mind.
The sun had set behind the lofty Tour-de-Nesle. It was the hour of twilight. The sky was pallid, the river was white. Between these two pale surfaces, the left bank of the Seine, on which his eyes were fixed, reared its dark mass, and, dwindling to a point in the perspective, pierced the mists of the horizon like a black arrow. It was covered with houses, their dim silhouettes standing out sharply against the pale background of sky and river. Here and there windows began to twinkle like holes in a brasier. The huge black obelisk thus isolated between the two white expanses of sky and river— particularly wide at this point— made a singular impression on Dom Claude, such as a man would experience lying on his back at the foot of Strassburg Cathedral and gazing up at the immense spire piercing the dim twilight of the sky above his head. Only here it was Claude who stood erect and the spire that lay at his feet; but as the river, by reflecting the sky, deepened infinitely the abyss beneath him, the vast promontory seemed springing as boldly into the void as any cathedral spire. The impression on him was therefore the same, and moreover, in this respect, stronger and more profound, in that not only was it the spire of Strassburg Cathedral, but a spire two leagues high— something unexampled, gigantic, immeasurable— an edifice such as mortal eye had never yet beheld— a Tower of Babel. The chimneys of the houses, the battlemented walls, the carved roofs and gables, the spire of the Augustines, the Tour-de-Nesle, all the projections that broke the line of the colossal obelisk heightened the illusion by their bizarre effect, presenting to the eye all the effect of a florid and fantastic sculpture.
In this condition of hallucination Claude was persuaded that with living eye he beheld the veritable steeple of hell. The myriad lights scattered over the entire height of the fearsome tower were to him so many openings into the infernal fires— the voices and sounds which rose from it the shrieks and groans of the damned. Fear fell upon him, he clapped his hands to his ears that he might hear no more, turned his back that he might not see, and with long strides fled away from the frightful vision.
But the vision was within him.
When he came into the streets again, the people passing to and fro in the light of the shop-fronts appeared to him like a moving company of spectres round about him. There were strange roarings in his ears— wild imaginings disturbed his brain. He saw not the houses, nor road, nor vehicles, neither men nor women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects merging into one another at their point of contact. At the corner of the Rule de la Barillerie he passed a chandler’s shop, over the front of which hung, according to immemorial custom, a row of tin hoops garnished with wooden candles, which swayed in the wind and clashed together like castanets. He seemed to hear the skeletons on the gibbets of Montfaucon rattling their bones together.
“Oh,” he muttered, “the night wind drives them one against another, and mingles the clank of their chains with the rattle of their bones! May-be she is there among them!”
Confused and bewildered, he knew not where he went. A few steps farther on he found himself on the Pont Saint-Michel. There was a light in a low window close by: he approached it. Through the cracked panes he saw into a dirty room which awakened some dim recollection in his mind. By the feeble rays of a squalid lamp he discerned a young man, with a fair and joyous face, who with much boisterous laughter was embracing a tawdry, shamelessly dressed girl. Beside the lamp sat an old woman spinning and singing in a quavering voice. In the pauses of the young man’s laughter the priest caught fragments of the old woman’s song. It was weird and horrible:
“Growl, Grève! bark, Grève!
Spin, spin, my distaff brave!
Let the hangman have his cord
That whistles in the prison yard,
Growl, Grève! bark, Grève!
“Hemp that makes the pretty rope,
Sow it widely, give it scope;
Better hemp than wheaten sheaves;
Thief there’s none that ever thieves
The pretty rope, the hempen rope.
“Growl, Grève! bark, Grève!
To see the girl of pleasure brave
Dangling on the gibbet high,
Every window is an eye.
Growl, Grève! bark, Grève!”
And the young man laughed and fondled the girl all the while. The old woman was La Falourdel, the girl was a courtesan of the town, and the young man was his brother Jehan.
He continued to look on at the scene— as well see this as any other.
He saw Jehan go to a window at the back of the room, open it, glance across at the quay where a thousand lighted windows twinkled, and then heard him say as he closed the window:
“As I live, it is night already! The townsfolk are lighting their candles, and God Almighty his stars.”
Jehan returned to his light o’ love, and smashing a bottle that stood on a table, he exclaimed: “Empty, cor-b?uf!— and I’ve no money! Isabeau, my chuck, I shall never be satisfied with Jupiter till he has turned your two white breasts into two black bottles, that I may suck Beaune wine from them day and night!”
With this delicate pleasantry, which made the courtesan laugh, Jehan left the house.
Dom Claude had barely time to throw himself on the ground to escape meeting his brother face to face and being recognised. Happily the street was dark and the scholar drunk. Nevertheless he did notice the figure lying prone in the mud.
“Oh! oh!” said he, “here’s somebody has had a merry time of it to-day!”
He gave Dom Claude a push with his foot, while the older man held his breath with fear.
“Dead drunk!” exclaimed Jehan. “Bravo, he is full. A veritable leech dropped off a wine cask— and bald into the bargain,” he added as he stooped. “’Tis an old man! Fortunate senex!”
“For all that,” Dom Claude heard him say as he continued his way, “wisdom is a grand thing, and my brother the Archdeacon is a lucky man to be wise and always have money!”
The Archdeacon then rose and hastened at the top of his speed towards Notre-Dame, the huge towers of which he could see rising through the gloom above the houses.
But when he reached the Parvis, breathless and panting, he dared not lift his eyes to the baleful edifice.
“Oh,” he murmured, “can it really be that such a thing took place here to-day— this very morning?”
He presently ventured a glance at the church. Its front was dark. The sky behind glittered with stars; the crescent moon, in her flight upward from the horizon, that moment touched the summit of the right-hand tower, and seemed to perch, like a luminous bird, on the black edge of the sculptured balustrade.
The cloister gate was shut, but the Archdeacon always carried the key of the tower in which his laboratory was, and he now made use of it to enter the church.
He found it dark and silent as a cavern. By the thick shadows that fell from all sides in broad patches, he knew that the hangings of the morning’s ceremony had not yet been removed. The great silver cross glittered far off through the gloom, sprinkled here and there with shining points, like the Milky Way of that sepulchral night. The windows of the choir showed, above the black drapery, the upper extremity of their pointed arches, the stained glass of which, shot through by a ray of moonlight, had only the uncertain colours of the night— an indefinable violet, white, and blue, of a tint to be found only in the faces of the dead. To the Archdeacon this half circle of pallid Gothic window-tops surrounding the choir seemed like the mitres of bishops gone to perdition. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he thought they were a circle of ghastly faces looking down upon him.
He fled on through the church. Then it seemed to him that the church took to itself life and motion— swayed and heaved; that each massive column had turned to an enormous limb beating the ground with its broad stone paw; and that the gigantic Cathedral was nothing but a prodigious elephant, snorting and stamping, with its pillars for legs, its two towers for tusks, and the immense black drapery for caparison.
Thus his de?irium or his madness had reached such a pitch of intensity, that the whole external world had become to the unhappy wretch one great Apocalypse— visible, palpable, appalling.
He found one minute’s respite. Plunging into the side aisle, he caught sight, behind a group of pillars, of a dim red light. He ran to it as to a star of safety. It was the modest lamp which illumined day and night the public breviary of Notre-Dame under its iron trellis. He cast his eye eagerly over the sacred book, in the hope of finding there some word of consolation or encouragement. The volume lay open at this passage of Job, over which he ran his blood-shot eye: “Then a spirit passed before my face, and I felt a little breath, and the hair of my flesh stood up.”
On reading these dismal words, he felt like a blind man who finds himself wounded by the stick he had picked up for his guidance. His knees bent under him, and he sank upon the pavement thinking of her who had died that day. So many hideous fumes passed through and out of his brain that he felt as if his head had become one of the chimneys of hell.
He must have remained long in that position— past thought, crushed and passive in the clutch of the Fiend. At last some remnant of strength returned to him, and he be-thought him of taking refuge in the tower, beside his faithful Quasimodo. He rose to his feet, and fear being still upon him, he took the lamp of the breviary to light him. It was sacrilege— but he was beyond regarding such trifles.
Slowly he mounted the stairway of the tower, filled with a secret dread which was likely to be shared by the few persons traversing the Parvis at that hour and saw the mysterious light ascending so late from loophole to loophole up to the top of the steeple.
Suddenly he felt a breath of cold air on his face, and found himself under the doorway of the upper gallery. The air was sharp, the sky streaked with clouds in broad white streamers, which drifted into and crushed one another like river ice breaking up after a thaw. The crescent moon floating in their midst looked like some celestial bark set fast among these icebergs of the air.
He glanced downward through the row of slender columns which joins the two towers and let his eye rest for a moment on the silent multitude of the roofs of Paris, shrouded in a veil of mist and smoke— jagged, innumerable, crowded, and small, like the waves of a tranquil sea in a summer’s night.
The young moon shed but a feeble ray, which imparted an ashy hue to earth and sky.
At this moment the tower clock lifted its harsh and grating voice. It struck twelve. The priest recalled the hour of noon— twelve hours had passed.
“Oh,” he whispered to himself, “she must be cold by now!” A sudden puff of wind extinguished his lamp, and almost at the same instant, at the opposite corner of the tower, he saw a shade— a something white— a shape, a female form appear. He trembled. Beside this woman stood a little goat that mingled its bleating with the last quaverings of the clock.
He had the strength to look. It was she.
She was pale and heavy-eyed. Her hair fell round her shoulders as in the morning, but there was no rope about her neck, her hands were unbound. She was free, she was dead.
She was clad in white raiment, and a white veil was over her head.
She moved towards him slowly looking up to heaven, followed by the unearthly goat. He felt turned to stone— too petrified to fly. At each step that she advanced, he fell back— that was all. In this manner he re-entered the dark vault of the stairs. He froze at the thought that she might do the same; had she done so, he would have died of horror.
She came indeed as far as the door, halted there for some moments, gazing fixedly into the darkness, but apparently without perceiving the priest, and passed on. She appeared to him taller than he remembered her in life— he saw the moon through her white robe— he heard her breathe.
When she had passed by, he began to descend the stairs with the same slow step he had observed in the spectre— thinking himself a spectre too— haggard, his hair erect, the extinguished lamp still in his hand. And as he descended the spiral stairs he distinctly heard a voice laughing and repeating in his ears: “Then a spirit passed before my face, and I felt a little breath, and the hair of my flesh stood up.”
______________________
1 Because to the monks of Saint-Germain this meadow was a hydra ever raising its head anew in the brawls of the clerks.
Chapter 2 - Humpbacked, One-eyed, Lame
Down to the time of Louis XII, every town in France had its place of sanctuary, forming, in the deluge of penal laws and barbarous jurisdictions that inundated the cities, islands, as it were, which rose above the level of human justice. Any criminal landing upon one of them was safe. In every town there were almost as many of these places of refuge as there were of execution. It was the abuse of impunity side by side with the abuse of capital punishment— two evils seeking to correct one another. The royal palaces, the mansions of the princes, and, above all, the churches, had right of sanctuary. Sometimes a whole town that happened to require repeopling was turned temporarily into a place of refuge. Louis XI made all Paris a sanctuary in 1467.
Once set foot within the refuge, and the person of the criminal was sacred; but he had to beware of leaving it— one step outside the sanctuary, and he fell back into the waters. The wheel, the gibbet, the strappado, kept close guard round the place of refuge, watching incessantly for their prey, like sharks about a vessel. Thus, men under sentence of death had been known to grow gray in a cloister, on the stairs of a palace, in the grounds of an abbey, under the porch of a church— in so far, the sanctuary itself was but a prison under another name.
It sometimes happened that a solemn decree of parliament would violate the sanctuary, and reconsign the condemned into the hands of the executioner; but this was of rare occurrence. The parliaments stood in great awe of the bishops, and if it did come to a brush between the two robes, the gown generally had the worst of it against the cassock. Occasionally, however, as in the case of the assassination of Petit-Jean, the executioner of Paris, and in that of Emery Rousseau, the murderer of Jean Valleret, justice would overleap the barriers of the Church, and pass on to the execution of its sentence. But, except armed with a decree of parliament, woe betide him who forcibly violated a place of sanctuary! We know what befell Robert de Clermont, Marshal of France, and Jean de Chalons, Marshal of Champagne; and yet it was only about a certain Perrin Marc, a money-changer’s assistant and a vile assassin; but the two marshals had forced the doors of the Church of Saint-Méry— therein lay the enormity of the transgression.
