The reader must permit us to take him back to the Place de Greve, whichwe quitted yesterday with Gringoire, in order to follow la Esmeralda.
It is ten o'clock in the morning; everything is indicative of the dayafter a festival. The pavement is covered with rubbish; ribbons, rags,feathers from tufts of plumes, drops of wax from the torches, crumbs ofthe public feast. A goodly number of bourgeois are "sauntering," as wesay, here and there, turning over with their feet the extinct brands ofthe bonfire, going into raptures in front of the Pillar House, over thememory of the fine hangings of the day before, and to-day staring at thenails that secured them a last pleasure. The venders of cider and beerare rolling their barrels among the groups. Some busy passers-bycome and go. The merchants converse and call to each other from thethresholds of their shops. The festival, the ambassadors, Coppenole,the Pope of the Fools, are in all mouths; they vie with each other, eachtrying to criticise it best and laugh the most. And, meanwhile, fourmounted sergeants, who have just posted themselves at the four sidesof the pillory, have already concentrated around themselves a goodlyproportion of the populace scattered on the Place, who condemnthemselves to immobility and fatigue in the hope of a small execution.
If the reader, after having contemplated this lively and noisy scenewhich is being enacted in all parts of the Place, will now transferhis gaze towards that ancient demi-Gothic, demi-Romanesque house of theTour-Roland, which forms the corner on the quay to the west, he willobserve, at the angle of the facade, a large public breviary, with richilluminations, protected from the rain by a little penthouse, and fromthieves by a small grating, which, however, permits of the leaves beingturned. Beside this breviary is a narrow, arched window, closed by twoiron bars in the form of a cross, and looking on the square; the onlyopening which admits a small quantity of light and air to a little cellwithout a door, constructed on the ground-floor, in the thickness of thewalls of the old house, and filled with a peace all the more profound,with a silence all the more gloomy, because a public place, the mostpopulous and most noisy in Paris swarms and shrieks around it.
This little cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly threecenturies, ever since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in mourning forher father who died in the Crusades, had caused it to be hollowed outin the wall of her own house, in order to immure herself there forever,keeping of all her palace only this lodging whose door was walled up,and whose window stood open, winter and summer, giving all the rest tothe poor and to God. The afflicted damsel had, in fact, waited twentyyears for death in this premature tomb, praying night and day forthe soul of her father, sleeping in ashes, without even a stone for apillow, clothed in a black sack, and subsisting on the bread and waterwhich the compassion of the passers-by led them to deposit on the ledgeof her window, thus receiving charity after having bestowed it. At herdeath, at the moment when she was passing to the other sepulchre, shehad bequeathed this one in perpetuity to afflicted women, mothers,widows, or maidens, who should wish to pray much for others or forthemselves, and who should desire to inter themselves alive in a greatgrief or a great penance. The poor of her day had made her a finefuneral, with tears and benedictions; but, to their great regret, thepious maid had not been canonized, for lack of influence. Those amongthem who were a little inclined to impiety, had hoped that the mattermight be accomplished in Paradise more easily than at Rome, and hadfrankly besought God, instead of the pope, in behalf of the deceased.The majority had contented themselves with holding the memory of Rolandesacred, and converting her rags into relics. The city, on its side, hadfounded in honor of the damoiselle, a public breviary, which had beenfastened near the window of the cell, in order that passers-by mighthalt there from time to time, were it only to pray; that prayer mightremind them of alms, and that the poor recluses, heiresses of MadameRolande's vault, might not die outright of hunger and forgetfulness.
Moreover, this sort of tomb was not so very rare a thing in the citiesof the Middle Ages. One often encountered in the most frequented street,in the most crowded and noisy market, in the very middle, under the feetof the horses, under the wheels of the carts, as it were, a cellar, awell, a tiny walled and grated cabin, at the bottom of which a humanbeing prayed night and day, voluntarily devoted to some eternallamentation, to some great expiation. And all the reflections which thatstrange spectacle would awaken in us to-day; that horrible cell, a sortof intermediary link between a house and the tomb, the cemetery andthe city; that living being cut off from the human community, andthenceforth reckoned among the dead; that lamp consuming its last dropof oil in the darkness; that remnant of life flickering in the grave;that breath, that voice, that eternal prayer in a box of stone;that face forever turned towards the other world; that eye alreadyilluminated with another sun; that ear pressed to the walls of a tomb;that soul a prisoner in that body; that body a prisoner in that dungeoncell, and beneath that double envelope of flesh and granite, the murmurof that soul in pain;--nothing of all this was perceived by the crowd.The piety of that age, not very subtle nor much given to reasoning, didnot see so many facets in an act of religion. It took the thing in theblock, honored, venerated, hallowed the sacrifice at need, but did notanalyze the sufferings, and felt but moderate pity for them. It broughtsome pittance to the miserable penitent from time to time, lookedthrough the hole to see whether he were still living, forgot his name,hardly knew how many years ago he had begun to die, and to the stranger,who questioned them about the living skeleton who was perishing in thatcellar, the neighbors replied simply, "It is the recluse."
Everything was then viewed without metaphysics, without exaggeration,without magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yetbeen invented, either for things of matter or for things of the mind.
Moreover, although people were but little surprised by it, the examplesof this sort of cloistration in the hearts of cities were in truthfrequent, as we have just said. There were in Paris a considerablenumber of these cells, for praying to God and doing penance; they werenearly all occupied. It is true that the clergy did not like to havethem empty, since that implied lukewarmness in believers, and thatlepers were put into them when there were no penitents on hand. Besidesthe cell on the Greve, there was one at Montfaucon, one at the Charnierdes Innocents, another I hardly know where,--at the Clichon House, Ithink; others still at many spots where traces of them are found intraditions, in default of memorials. The University had also its own. OnMount Sainte-Genevieve a sort of Job of the Middle Ages, for the spaceof thirty years, chanted the seven penitential psalms on a dunghill atthe bottom of a cistern, beginning anew when he had finished, singingloudest at night, _magna voce per umbras_, and to-day, theantiquary fancies that he hears his voice as he enters the Rue duPuits-qui-parle--the street of the "Speaking Well."
To confine ourselves to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we must say thatit had never lacked recluses. After the death of Madame Roland, ithad stood vacant for a year or two, though rarely. Many women had comethither to mourn, until their death, for relatives, lovers, faults.Parisian malice, which thrusts its finger into everything, even intothings which concern it the least, affirmed that it had beheld but fewwidows there.
In accordance with the fashion of the epoch, a Latin inscription on thewall indicated to the learned passer-by the pious purpose of this cell.The custom was retained until the middle of the sixteenth century ofexplaining an edifice by a brief device inscribed above the door.Thus, one still reads in France, above the wicket of the prison in theseignorial mansion of Tourville, _Sileto et spera_; in Ireland, beneaththe armorial bearings which surmount the grand door to Fortescue Castle,_Forte scutum, salus ducum_; in England, over the principal entranceto the hospitable mansion of the Earls Cowper: _Tuum est_. At that timeevery edifice was a thought.
As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland, these twowords had been carved in large Roman capitals over the window,--
TU, ORA.
And this caused the people, whose good sense does not perceive
so muchrefinement in things, and likes to translate _Ludovico Magno_ by "PorteSaint-Denis," to give to this dark, gloomy, damp cavity, the name of"The Rat-Hole." An explanation less sublime, perhaps, than the other;but, on the other hand, more picturesque.
CHAPTER III. HISTORY OF A LEAVENED CAKE OF MAIZE.