Victor Marie Hugo (1802–1885). Notre Dame de Paris.
The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. 1917.
VI. Three Various Hearts of Men
P
Not indeed that Phœbus’s wound had not been serious, but it had been less so than the Archdeacon flattered himself. The leech, to whose house the soldiers of the watch had conveyed him in the first instance, had, for a week, feared for his life, and, indeed, had told him so in Latin. But youth and a vigorous constitution had triumphed, and, as often happens, notwithstanding prognostics and diagnostics, Nature had amused herself by saving the patient in spite of the physician. It was while he was still stretched upon a sickbed that he underwent the first interrogations at the hands of Philippe Lheulier and the examiners of the Holy Office, which had annoyed him greatly. So, one fine morning, feeling himself recovered, he had left his gold spurs in payment to the man of drugs, and had taken himself off. For the rest, this had in no way impeded the course of justice. The law of that day had but few scruples about the clearness and precision of the proceedings against a criminal. Provided the accused was finally hanged, that was sufficient. At it was, the judges had ample proof against Esmeralda. They held Phœbus to be dead, and that decided the matter.
As to Phœbus, he had fled to no great distance. He had simply rejoined his company, then on garrison duty at Queue-en-Brie, in the province of Ile de France, a few stages from Paris.
After all, he had no great desire to appear in person at the trial. He had a vague impression that he would cut a somewhat ridiculous figure. Frankly, he did not quite know what to make of the whole affair. Irreligious, yet credulous like every soldier who is nothing but a soldier, when he examined the particulars of that adventure, he was not altogether without his suspicions as to the goat, as to the curious circumstances of his first meeting with Esmeralda, as to the means, no less strange, by which she had betrayed the secret of her love, as to her being a gipsy, finally as to the spectre-monk. He discerned in all these incidents far more of magic than of love—probably a witch, most likely the devil; in fine, a drama, or in the language of the day, a mystery—and a very disagreeable one—in which he had an extremely uncomfortable part: that of the person who receives all the kicks and none of the applause. The captain was greatly put out by this; he felt that kind of shame which La Fontaine so admirably defines:
He hoped, however, that the affair would not be noised abroad, and that, he being absent, his name would hardly be mentioned in connection with it; or, at any rate, would not be heard beyond the court-room of the Tournelle. And in this he judged aright—there was no Criminal Gazette in those days, and as hardly a week passed without some coiner being boiled alive, some witch hanged, or heretic sent to the stake at one or other of the numberless “justices” of Paris, people were so accustomed to see the old feudal Themis at every crossway, her arms bare and sleeves rolled up, busy with her pitchforks, her gibbets, and her pillories, that scarcely any notice was taken of her. The beau monde of that age hardly knew the name of the poor wretch passing at the corner of the street; at most, it was the populace that regaled itself on these gross viands. An execution was one of the ordinary incidents of the public way, like the braisier of the pie-man or the butcher’s slaughter-house. The executioner was but a butcher, only a little more skilled than the other.
Phœbus, therefore, very soon set his mind at rest on the subject of the enchantress Esmeralda, or Similar, as he called her, of the dagger-thrust he had received from the gipsy or the spectre-monk (it mattered little to him which), and the issue of the trial. But no sooner was his heart vacant on that score, than the image of Fleur-de-Lys returned to it—for the heart of Captain Phœbus, like Nature, abhorred a vacuum.
Moreover, Queue-en-Brie was not a diverting place—a village of farriers and herd-girls with rough hands, a straggling row of squalid huts and cabins bordering the high-road for half a league—in short, a world’s end.
Fleur-de-Lys was his last flame but one, a pretty girl, a charming dot; and so one fine morning, being quite cured of his wound, and fairly presuming that after the interval of two months the business of the gipsy girl must be over and forgotten, the amorous cavalier pranced up in high feather to the door of the ancestral mansion of the Gondelauriers. He paid no attention to a very numerous crowd collecting in the Place du Parvis before the great door of Notre Dame. Remembering that it was the month of May, he concluded that it was some procession—some Whitsuntide or other festival—tied his steed up to the ring at the porch, and gaily ascended the stair to his fair betrothed.
He found her alone with her mother.
On the heart of Fleur-de-Lys the scene of the gipsy with her goat and its accursed alphabet, combined with her lover’s long absences, still weighed heavily. Nevertheless, when she saw her captain enter, she found him so handsome in his brand-new doublet and shining baldrick, and wearing so impassioned an air, that she blushed with pleasure. The noble damsel herself was more charming than ever. Her magnificent golden tresses were braided to perfection, she was robed in that azure blue which so well becomes a blonde—a piece of coquetry she had learned from Colombe—and her eyes were swimming in that dewy languor which is still more becoming.
Phœbus, who in the matter of beauty had been reduced to the country wenches of Queue-en-Brie, was ravished by Fleur-de-Lys, which lent our officer so pressing and gallant an air that his peace was made forthwith. The Lady of Gondelaurier herself, still maternally seated in her great chair, had not the heart to scold him. As for Fleur-de-Lys, her reproaches died away in tender cooings.
The young lady was seated near the window still engaged upon her grotto of Neptune. The captain leaned over the back of her seat, while she murmured her fond upbraidings.
“What have you been doing with yourself these two long months, unkind one?”
“I swear,” answered Phœbus, somewhat embarrassed by this question, “that you are beautiful enough to make an archbishop dream.”
She could not repress a smile.
“Go to—go to, sir. Leave the question of my beauty and answer me. Fine beauty, to be sure!”
“Well, dearest cousin, I was in garrison.”
“And where, if you please? and why did you not come and bid me adieu?”
“At Queue-en-Brie.”
Phœbus was delighted that the first question had helped him to elude the second.
“But that is quite near, monsieur; how is it you never once came to see me?”
This was seriously embarrassing.
“Because—well—the service—and besides, charming cousin, I have been ill.”
“Ill?” she exclaimed in alarm.
“Yes—wounded.”
“Wounded!” The poor girl was quite upset.
“Oh, do not let that frighten you,” said Phœbus carelessly; “it was nothing. A quarrel—a mere scratch—what does it signify to you?”
“What does it signify to me?” cried Fleur-de-Lys, lifting her beautiful eyes full of tears. “Oh, you cannot mean what you say. What was it all about—I will know.”
“Well, then, my fair one, I had some words with Mahé Fédy—you know—the lieutenant of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and each of us ripped up a few inches of the other’s skin—that is all.”
The inventive captain knew very well that an affair of honour always sets off a man to advantage in a woman’s eye. And sure enough, Fleur-de-Lys looked up into his fine face with mingled sensations of fear, pleasure, and admiration. However, she did not feel entirely reassured.
“I only hope you are completely cured, my Phœbus!” she said. “I am not acquainted with your Mahé Fédy; but he must be an odious wretch. And what was this quarrel about?”
Here Phœbus, whose imagination was not particularly creative, began to be rather at a loss how to beat a convenient retreat out of his encounter.
“Oh, how should I know?—a mere trifle—a horse—a hasty word! Fair cousin,” said he, by way of changing the conversation, “what is all this going on in the Parvis?” He went to the window. “Look, fair cousin, there is a great crowd in the Place.”
“I do not know,” answered Fleur-de-Lys; “it seems a witch is to do penance this morning before the church on her way to the gallows.”
So entirely did the captain believe the affair of Esmeralda to be terminated, that he took little heed of these words of Fleur-de-Lys. Nevertheless, he asked a careless question or two.
“Who is this witch?”
“I am sure I do not know.”
“And what is she said to have done?”
Again she shrugged her white shoulders.
“I do not know.”
“Oh, by ’r Lord!” exclaimed the mother, “there are so many sorceresses nowadays that they burn them, I dare swear, without knowing their names. As well might you try to know the name of every cloud in heaven. But, after all, we may make ourselves easy; the good God keeps his register above.” Here the venerable lady rose and approached the window. “Lord,” she cried, “you are right, Phœbus, there is indeed a great concourse of the people—some of them even, God save us, on the very roofs! Ah, Phœbus, that brings back to me my young days and the entry of Charles VII, when there were just such crowds—I mind not precisely in what year. When I speak of that to you it doubtless sounds like something very old, but to me it is as fresh as to-day. Oh, it was a far finer crowd than this! Some of them climbed up on to the battlements of the Porte Saint-Antoine. The King had the Queen on the crupper behind him; and after their highnesses came all the ladies mounted behind their lords. I remember, too, there was much laughter because by the side of Amanyon de Garlande, who was very short, there came the Sire Matefelon, a knight of gigantic stature, who had killed the English in heaps. It was very fine. Then followed a procession of all the nobles of France, with their oriflammes fluttering red before one. There were some with pennons and some with banners—let me think—the Sire de Calan had a pennon, Jean de Châteaumorant a banner, and a richer than any of the others except the Duke of Bourbon. Alas! ’tis sad to think that all that has been, and that nothing of it now remains!”
The two young people were not listening to the worthy dowager. Phœbus had returned to lean over the back of his lady-love’s chair—a charming post which revealed to his libertine glance so many exquisite things, and enabled him to divine so many more that, ravished by that satin-shimmering skin, he said to himself, “How can one love any but a blonde?”
Neither spoke. The girl lifted to him, from time to time, a glance full of tenderness and devotion, and their locks mingled in a ray of the vernal sunshine.
“Phœbus,” said Fleur-de-Lys suddenly, in a half-whisper, “we are to marry in three months—swear to me that you have never loved any woman but myself.”
“I swear it, fairest angel!” returned Phœbus; and his passionate glance combined with the sincere tone of his voice to convince Fleur-de-Lys of the truth of his assertion. And, who knows, perhaps he believed it himself at the moment.
Meanwhile the good mother, rejoiced to see the two young people in such perfect accord, had left the apartment to attend to some domestic matter. Phœbus was aware of the fact, and this solitude à deux so emboldened the enterprising captain that some strange ideas began to arise in his mind. Fleur-de-Lys loved him—he was betrothed to her—she was alone with him—his old inclination for her had revived—not perhaps in all its primitive freshness, but certainly in all its ardour—after all, it was no great crime to cut a little of one’s own corn in the blade. I know not if these thoughts passed distinctly through his mind; but at any rate, Fleur-de-Lys suddenly took alarm at the expression of his countenance. She looked about her and discovered that her mother was gone.
“Heavens!” said she, blushing and uneasy, “I am very hot.”
“I think, indeed,” replied Phœbus, “that it cannot be far from noon. The sun is oppressive—the best remedy is to draw the curtain.”
“No, no!” cried the girl; “on the contrary, it is air I need.”
And like the doe which scents the hounds, she started up, ran to the window, flung it wide, and took refuge on the balcony. Phœbus, not overpleased, followed her.
The Place de Paris of Notre Dame, upon which, as the reader is aware, the balcony looked down, presented at that moment a sinister and unusual appearance, which forthwith changed the nature of the timid damoiselle’s alarm.
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, Phœbus, 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,” Phœbus 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 Bœufs. 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. Maître 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 Phœbus. 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?”
Phœbus 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 Phœbus; “one would think that the sight of this woman disconcerted you.”
Phœbus 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 apuæ 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 æternam 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 hangman’s assistant advanced to help her down from the tumbrel, he heard a low murmur from her—“Phœbus!”
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 subchanter, 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 Phœbus?”
“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 priest 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 Maître 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 lover—her lord—her life—Phœbus!
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.
“Phœbus!” she cried, “my Phœbus!” 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 Phœbus said some words which did not reach her ear, and they both hastily disappeared through the casement of the balcony, which immediately closed behind then.
“Phœbus!” 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 Phœbus de Châteaupers.
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 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, save 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!”
“Noël! Noël!” 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.