Notre-Dame De Paris
These words were, so to speak, the point of union of two scenes, whichhad, up to that time, been developed in parallel lines at the samemoment, each on its particular theatre; one, that which the reader hasjust perused, in the Rat-Hole; the other, which he is about to read, onthe ladder of the pillory. The first had for witnesses only the threewomen with whom the reader has just made acquaintance; the second hadfor spectators all the public which we have seen above, collecting onthe Place de Greve, around the pillory and the gibbet.
That crowd which the four sergeants posted at nine o'clock in themorning at the four corners of the pillory had inspired with the hopeof some sort of an execution, no doubt, not a hanging, but a whipping,a cropping of ears, something, in short,--that crowd had increased sorapidly that the four policemen, too closely besieged, had had occasionto "press" it, as the expression then ran, more than once, by soundblows of their whips, and the haunches of their horses.
This populace, disciplined to waiting for public executions, did notmanifest very much impatience. It amused itself with watching thepillory, a very simple sort of monument, composed of a cube of masonryabout six feet high and hollow in the interior. A very steep staircase,of unhewn stone, which was called by distinction "the ladder," led tothe upper platform, upon which was visible a horizontal wheel of solidoak. The victim was bound upon this wheel, on his knees, with his handsbehind his back. A wooden shaft, which set in motion a capstan concealedin the interior of the little edifice, imparted a rotatory motion tothe wheel, which always maintained its horizontal position, and in thismanner presented the face of the condemned man to all quarters of thesquare in succession. This was what was called "turning" a criminal.
As the reader perceives, the pillory of the Greve was far frompresenting all the recreations of the pillory of the Halles. Nothingarchitectural, nothing monumental. No roof to the iron cross, nooctagonal lantern, no frail, slender columns spreading out on the edgeof the roof into capitals of acanthus leaves and flowers, no waterspoutsof chimeras and monsters, on carved woodwork, no fine sculpture, deeplysunk in the stone.
They were forced to content themselves with those four stretches ofrubble work, backed with sandstone, and a wretched stone gibbet, meagreand bare, on one side.
The entertainment would have been but a poor one for lovers of Gothicarchitecture. It is true that nothing was ever less curious on the scoreof architecture than the worthy gapers of the Middle Ages, and that theycared very little for the beauty of a pillory.
The victim finally arrived, bound to the tail of a cart, and when he hadbeen hoisted upon the platform, where he could be seen from all pointsof the Place, bound with cords and straps upon the wheel of the pillory,a prodigious hoot, mingled with laughter and acclamations, burst forthupon the Place. They had recognized Quasimodo.
It was he, in fact. The change was singular. Pilloried on the very placewhere, on the day before, he had been saluted, acclaimed, and proclaimedPope and Prince of Fools, in the cortege of the Duke of Egypt, the Kingof Thunes, and the Emperor of Galilee! One thing is certain, and thatis, that there was not a soul in the crowd, not even himself, though inturn triumphant and the sufferer, who set forth this combination clearlyin his thought. Gringoire and his philosophy were missing at thisspectacle.
Soon Michel Noiret, sworn trumpeter to the king, our lord, imposedsilence on the louts, and proclaimed the sentence, in accordance withthe order and command of monsieur the provost. Then he withdrew behindthe cart, with his men in livery surcoats.
Quasimodo, impassible, did not wince. All resistance had been renderedimpossible to him by what was then called, in the style of the criminalchancellery, "the vehemence and firmness of the bonds" which means thatthe thongs and chains probably cut into his flesh; moreover, it is atradition of jail and wardens, which has not been lost, and which thehandcuffs still preciously preserve among us, a civilized, gentle,humane people (the galleys and the guillotine in parentheses).
He had allowed himself to be led, pushed, carried, lifted, bound,and bound again. Nothing was to be seen upon his countenance but theastonishment of a savage or an idiot. He was known to be deaf; one mighthave pronounced him to be blind.
They placed him on his knees on the circular plank; he made noresistance. They removed his shirt and doublet as far as his girdle; heallowed them to have their way. They entangled him under a fresh systemof thongs and buckles; he allowed them to bind and buckle him. Only fromtime to time he snorted noisily, like a calf whose head is hanging andbumping over the edge of a butcher's cart.
"The dolt," said Jehan Frollo of the Mill, to his friend RobinPoussepain (for the two students had followed the culprit, as was tohave been expected), "he understands no more than a cockchafer shut upin a box!"
There was wild laughter among the crowd when they beheld Quasimodo'shump, his camel's breast, his callous and hairy shoulders laid bare.During this gayety, a man in the livery of the city, short of statureand robust of mien, mounted the platform and placed himself near thevictim. His name speedily circulated among the spectators. It was MasterPierrat Torterue, official torturer to the Chatelet.
He began by depositing on an angle of the pillory a black hour-glass,the upper lobe of which was filled with red sand, which it allowedto glide into the lower receptacle; then he removed his parti-coloredsurtout, and there became visible, suspended from his right hand, athin and tapering whip of long, white, shining, knotted, plaited thongs,armed with metal nails. With his left hand, he negligently folded backhis shirt around his right arm, to the very armpit.
In the meantime, Jehan Frollo, elevating his curly blonde head abovethe crowd (he had mounted upon the shoulders of Robin Poussepain for thepurpose), shouted: "Come and look, gentle ladies and men! they aregoing to peremptorily flagellate Master Quasimodo, the bellringer ofmy brother, monsieur the archdeacon of Josas, a knave of orientalarchitecture, who has a back like a dome, and legs like twistedcolumns!"
And the crowd burst into a laugh, especially the boys and young girls.
At length the torturer stamped his foot. The wheel began to turn.Quasimodo wavered beneath his bonds. The amazement which was suddenlydepicted upon his deformed face caused the bursts of laughter toredouble around him.
All at once, at the moment when the wheel in its revolution presented toMaster Pierrat, the humped back of Quasimodo, Master Pierrat raised hisarm; the fine thongs whistled sharply through the air, like a handful ofadders, and fell with fury upon the wretch's shoulders.
Quasimodo leaped as though awakened with a start. He began tounderstand. He writhed in his bonds; a violent contraction of surpriseand pain distorted the muscles of his face, but he uttered not a singlesigh. He merely turned his head backward, to the right, then to theleft, balancing it as a bull does who has been stung in the flanks by agadfly.
A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another and another,and still others. The wheel did not cease to turn, nor the blows to raindown.
Soon the blood burst forth, and could be seen trickling in a thousandthreads down the hunchback's black shoulders; and the slender thongs, intheir rotatory motion which rent the air, sprinkled drops of it upon thecrowd.
Quasimodo had resumed, to all appearance, his first imperturbability. Hehad at first tried, in a quiet way and without much outward movement,to break his bonds. His eye had been seen to light up, his musclesto stiffen, his members to concentrate their force, and the strapsto stretch. The effort was powerful, prodigious, desperate; but theprovost's seasoned bonds resisted. They cracked, and that was all.Quasimodo fell back exhausted. Amazement gave way, on his features, toa sentiment of profound and bitter discouragement. He closed his singleeye, allowed his head to droop upon his breast, and feigned death.
From that moment forth, he stirred no more. Nothing could force amovement from him. Neither his blood, which did not cease to flow, northe blows which redoubled in fury, nor the wrath of the torturer, whogrew excited himself and intoxicated with the execution, nor the soundof the horrible t
hongs, more sharp and whistling than the claws ofscorpions.
At length a bailiff from the Chatelet clad in black, mounted on a blackhorse, who had been stationed beside the ladder since the beginningof the execution, extended his ebony wand towards the hour-glass. Thetorturer stopped. The wheel stopped. Quasimodo's eye opened slowly.
The scourging was finished. Two lackeys of the official torturer bathedthe bleeding shoulders of the patient, anointed them with some unguentwhich immediately closed all the wounds, and threw upon his back a sortof yellow vestment, in cut like a chasuble. In the meanwhile, PierratTorterue allowed the thongs, red and gorged with blood, to drip upon thepavement.
All was not over for Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour ofpillory which Master Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to thesentence of Messire Robert d'Estouteville; all to the greater gloryof the old physiological and psychological play upon words of Jean deCumene, _Surdus absurdus_: a deaf man is absurd.
So the hour-glass was turned over once more, and they left the hunchbackfastened to the plank, in order that justice might be accomplished tothe very end.
The populace, especially in the Middle Ages, is in society what thechild is in the family. As long as it remains in its state of primitiveignorance, of moral and intellectual minority, it can be said of it asof the child,--
'Tis the pitiless age.
We have already shown that Quasimodo was generally hated, for more thanone good reason, it is true. There was hardly a spectator in that crowdwho had not or who did not believe that he had reason to complain of themalevolent hunchback of Notre-Dame. The joy at seeing him appear thusin the pillory had been universal; and the harsh punishment which he hadjust suffered, and the pitiful condition in which it had left him, farfrom softening the populace had rendered its hatred more malicious byarming it with a touch of mirth.
Hence, the "public prosecution" satisfied, as the bigwigs of the lawstill express it in their jargon, the turn came of a thousand privatevengeances. Here, as in the Grand Hall, the women rendered themselvesparticularly prominent. All cherished some rancor against him, some forhis malice, others for his ugliness. The latter were the most furious.
"Oh! mask of Antichrist!" said one.
"Rider on a broom handle!" cried another.
"What a fine tragic grimace," howled a third, "and who would make himPope of the Fools if to-day were yesterday?"
"'Tis well," struck in an old woman. "This is the grimace of thepillory. When shall we have that of the gibbet?"
"When will you be coiffed with your big bell a hundred feet underground, cursed bellringer?"
"But 'tis the devil who rings the Angelus!"
"Oh! the deaf man! the one-eyed creature! the hunch-back! the monster!"
"A face to make a woman miscarry better than all the drugs andmedicines!"
And the two scholars, Jehan du Moulin, and Robin Poussepain, sang at thetop of their lungs, the ancient refrain,--
"_Une hart Pour le pendard! Un fagot Pour le magot_!"*
* A rope for the gallows bird! A fagot for the ape.
A thousand other insults rained down upon him, and hoots andimprecations, and laughter, and now and then, stones.
Quasimodo was deaf but his sight was clear, and the public fury wasno less energetically depicted on their visages than in their words.Moreover, the blows from the stones explained the bursts of laughter.
At first he held his ground. But little by little that patience whichhad borne up under the lash of the torturer, yielded and gave way beforeall these stings of insects. The bull of the Asturias who has been butlittle moved by the attacks of the picador grows irritated with the dogsand banderilleras.
He first cast around a slow glance of hatred upon the crowd. But boundas he was, his glance was powerless to drive away those flies whichwere stinging his wound. Then he moved in his bonds, and his furiousexertions made the ancient wheel of the pillory shriek on its axle. Allthis only increased the derision and hooting.
Then the wretched man, unable to break his collar, like that of achained wild beast, became tranquil once more; only at intervals a sighof rage heaved the hollows of his chest. There was neither shame norredness on his face. He was too far from the state of society, and toonear the state of nature to know what shame was. Moreover, with sucha degree of deformity, is infamy a thing that can be felt? But wrath,hatred, despair, slowly lowered over that hideous visage a cloudwhich grew ever more and more sombre, ever more and more charged withelectricity, which burst forth in a thousand lightning flashes from theeye of the cyclops.
Nevertheless, that cloud cleared away for a moment, at the passage ofa mule which traversed the crowd, bearing a priest. As far away ashe could see that mule and that priest, the poor victim's visage grewgentler. The fury which had contracted it was followed by a strangesmile full of ineffable sweetness, gentleness, and tenderness. Inproportion as the priest approached, that smile became more clear, moredistinct, more radiant. It was like the arrival of a Saviour, which theunhappy man was greeting. But as soon as the mule was near enough to thepillory to allow of its rider recognizing the victim, the priest droppedhis eyes, beat a hasty retreat, spurred on rigorously, as though inhaste to rid himself of humiliating appeals, and not at all desirous ofbeing saluted and recognized by a poor fellow in such a predicament.
This priest was Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo.
The cloud descended more blackly than ever upon Quasimodo's brow. Thesmile was still mingled with it for a time, but was bitter, discouraged,profoundly sad.
Time passed on. He had been there at least an hour and a half,lacerated, maltreated, mocked incessantly, and almost stoned.
All at once he moved again in his chains with redoubled despair, whichmade the whole framework that bore him tremble, and, breaking thesilence which he had obstinately preserved hitherto, he cried in ahoarse and furious voice, which resembled a bark rather than a humancry, and which was drowned in the noise of the hoots--"Drink!"
This exclamation of distress, far from exciting compassion, only addedamusement to the good Parisian populace who surrounded the ladder, andwho, it must be confessed, taken in the mass and as a multitude, wasthen no less cruel and brutal than that horrible tribe of robbers amongwhom we have already conducted the reader, and which was simply thelower stratum of the populace. Not a voice was raised around the unhappyvictim, except to jeer at his thirst. It is certain that at that momenthe was more grotesque and repulsive than pitiable, with his face purpleand dripping, his eye wild, his mouth foaming with rage and pain, andhis tongue lolling half out. It must also be stated that if a charitablesoul of a bourgeois or _bourgeoise_, in the rabble, had attempted tocarry a glass of water to that wretched creature in torment, therereigned around the infamous steps of the pillory such a prejudice ofshame and ignominy, that it would have sufficed to repulse the goodSamaritan.
At the expiration of a few moments, Quasimodo cast a desperate glanceupon the crowd, and repeated in a voice still more heartrending:"Drink!"
And all began to laugh.
"Drink this!" cried Robin Poussepain, throwing in his face a spongewhich had been soaked in the gutter. "There, you deaf villain, I'm yourdebtor."
A woman hurled a stone at his head,--
"That will teach you to wake us up at night with your peal of a dammedsoul."
"He, good, my son!" howled a cripple, making an effort to reach him withhis crutch, "will you cast any more spells on us from the top of thetowers of Notre-Dame?"
"Here's a drinking cup!" chimed in a man, flinging a broken jug at hisbreast. "'Twas you that made my wife, simply because she passed nearyou, give birth to a child with two heads!"
"And my cat bring forth a kitten with six paws!" yelped an old crone,launching a brick at him.
"Drink!" repeated Quasimodo panting, and for the third time.
At that moment he beheld the crowd give way. A young girl, fantasticallydressed, emerged from the throng. She was accompanied by a litt
le whitegoat with gilded horns, and carried a tambourine in her hand.
Quasimodo's eyes sparkled. It was the gypsy whom he had attempted tocarry off on the preceding night, a misdeed for which he was dimlyconscious that he was being punished at that very moment; which wasnot in the least the case, since he was being chastised only for themisfortune of being deaf, and of having been judged by a deaf man. Hedoubted not that she had come to wreak her vengeance also, and to dealher blow like the rest.
He beheld her, in fact, mount the ladder rapidly. Wrath and spitesuffocate him. He would have liked to make the pillory crumble intoruins, and if the lightning of his eye could have dealt death, the gypsywould have been reduced to powder before she reached the platform.
She approached, without uttering a syllable, the victim who writhed ina vain effort to escape her, and detaching a gourd from her girdle, sheraised it gently to the parched lips of the miserable man.
Then, from that eye which had been, up to that moment, so dry andburning, a big tear was seen to fall, and roll slowly down that deformedvisage so long contracted with despair. It was the first, in allprobability, that the unfortunate man had ever shed.
Meanwhile, he had forgotten to drink. The gypsy made her little pout,from impatience, and pressed the spout to the tusked month of Quasimodo,with a smile.
He drank with deep draughts. His thirst was burning.
When he had finished, the wretch protruded his black lips, no doubt,with the object of kissing the beautiful hand which had just succouredhim. But the young girl, who was, perhaps, somewhat distrustful, and whoremembered the violent attempt of the night, withdrew her hand with thefrightened gesture of a child who is afraid of being bitten by a beast.
Then the poor deaf man fixed on her a look full of reproach andinexpressible sadness.
It would have been a touching spectacle anywhere,--this beautiful,fresh, pure, and charming girl, who was at the same time so weak, thushastening to the relief of so much misery, deformity, and malevolence.On the pillory, the spectacle was sublime.
The very populace were captivated by it, and began to clap their hands,crying,--
"Noel! Noel!"
It was at that moment that the recluse caught sight, from the window ofher bole, of the gypsy on the pillory, and hurled at her her sinisterimprecation,--
"Accursed be thou, daughter of Egypt! Accursed! accursed!"
CHAPTER V. END OF THE STORY OF THE CAKE.