Claude Frollo was no longer in Notre-Dame when his adopted son soabruptly cut the fatal web in which the archdeacon and the gypsy wereentangled. On returning to the sacristy he had torn off his alb, cope,and stole, had flung all into the hands of the stupefied beadle, hadmade his escape through the private door of the cloister, had ordered aboatman of the Terrain to transport him to the left bank of the Seine,and had plunged into the hilly streets of the University, not knowingwhither he was going, encountering at every step groups of men and womenwho were hurrying joyously towards the Pont Saint-Michel, in the hopeof still arriving in time to see the witch hung there,--pale, wild, moretroubled, more blind and more fierce than a night bird let loose andpursued by a troop of children in broad daylight. He no longer knewwhere he was, what he thought, or whether he were dreaming. He wentforward, walking, running, taking any street at haphazard, making nochoice, only urged ever onward away from the Greve, the horrible Greve,which he felt confusedly, to be behind him.
In this manner he skirted Mount Sainte-Genevieve, and finally emergedfrom the town by the Porte Saint-Victor. He continued his flight as longas he could see, when he turned round, the turreted enclosure of theUniversity, and the rare houses of the suburb; but, when, at length, arise of ground had completely concealed from him that odious Paris, whenhe could believe himself to be a hundred leagues distant from it, in thefields, in the desert, he halted, and it seemed to him that he breathedmore freely.
Then frightful ideas thronged his mind. Once more he could see clearlyinto his soul, and he shuddered. He thought of that unhappy girl who haddestroyed him, and whom he had destroyed. He cast a haggard eye over thedouble, tortuous way which fate had caused their two destinies to pursueup to their point of intersection, where it had dashed them against eachother without mercy. He meditated on the folly of eternal vows, onthe vanity of chastity, of science, of religion, of virtue, on theuselessness of God. He plunged to his heart's content in evil thoughts,and in proportion as he sank deeper, he felt a Satanic laugh burst forthwithin him.
And as he thus sifted his soul to the bottom, when he perceived howlarge a space nature had prepared there for the passions, he sneeredstill more bitterly. He stirred up in the depths of his heart all hishatred, all his malevolence; and, with the cold glance of a physicianwho examines a patient, he recognized the fact that this malevolencewas nothing but vitiated love; that love, that source of every virtue inman, turned to horrible things in the heart of a priest, and that a manconstituted like himself, in making himself a priest, made himself ademon. Then he laughed frightfully, and suddenly became pale again,when he considered the most sinister side of his fatal passion, of thatcorrosive, venomous malignant, implacable love, which had ended only inthe gibbet for one of them and in hell for the other; condemnation forher, damnation for him.
And then his laughter came again, when he reflected that Phoebuswas alive; that after all, the captain lived, was gay and happy, hadhandsomer doublets than ever, and a new mistress whom he was conductingto see the old one hanged. His sneer redoubled its bitterness when hereflected that out of the living beings whose death he had desired, thegypsy, the only creature whom he did not hate, was the only one who hadnot escaped him.
Then from the captain, his thought passed to the people, and there cameto him a jealousy of an unprecedented sort. He reflected that the peoplealso, the entire populace, had had before their eyes the woman whom heloved exposed almost naked. He writhed his arms with agony as he thoughtthat the woman whose form, caught by him alone in the darkness wouldhave been supreme happiness, had been delivered up in broad daylight atfull noonday, to a whole people, clad as for a night of voluptuousness.He wept with rage over all these mysteries of love, profaned, soiled,laid bare, withered forever. He wept with rage as he pictured to himselfhow many impure looks had been gratified at the sight of that badlyfastened shift, and that this beautiful girl, this virgin lily, this cupof modesty and delight, to which he would have dared to place his lipsonly trembling, had just been transformed into a sort of public bowl,whereat the vilest populace of Paris, thieves, beggars, lackeys, hadcome to quaff in common an audacious, impure, and depraved pleasure.
And when he sought to picture to himself the happiness which he mighthave found upon earth, if she had not been a gypsy, and if he had notbeen a priest, if Phoebus had not existed and if she had loved him; whenhe pictured to himself that a life of serenity and love would have beenpossible to him also, even to him; that there were at that very moment,here and there upon the earth, happy couples spending the hours in sweetconverse beneath orange trees, on the banks of brooks, in the presenceof a setting sun, of a starry night; and that if God had so willed,he might have formed with her one of those blessed couples,--his heartmelted in tenderness and despair.
Oh! she! still she! It was this fixed idea which returned incessantly,which tortured him, which ate into his brain, and rent his vitals. Hedid not regret, he did not repent; all that he had done he was readyto do again; he preferred to behold her in the hands of the executionerrather than in the arms of the captain. But he suffered; he sufferedso that at intervals he tore out handfuls of his hair to see whether itwere not turning white.
Among other moments there came one, when it occurred to him that it wasperhaps the very minute when the hideous chain which he had seenthat morning, was pressing its iron noose closer about that frail andgraceful neck. This thought caused the perspiration to start from everypore.
There was another moment when, while laughing diabolically at himself,he represented to himself la Esmeralda as he had seen her on thatfirst day, lively, careless, joyous, gayly attired, dancing, winged,harmonious, and la Esmeralda of the last day, in her scanty shift, witha rope about her neck, mounting slowly with her bare feet, the angularladder of the gallows; he figured to himself this double picture in sucha manner that he gave vent to a terrible cry.
While this hurricane of despair overturned, broke, tore up, bent,uprooted everything in his soul, he gazed at nature around him. At hisfeet, some chickens were searching the thickets and pecking, enamelledbeetles ran about in the sun; overhead, some groups of dappled grayclouds were floating across the blue sky; on the horizon, the spireof the Abbey Saint-Victor pierced the ridge of the hill with its slateobelisk; and the miller of the Copeaue hillock was whistling as hewatched the laborious wings of his mill turning. All this active,organized, tranquil life, recurring around him under a thousand forms,hurt him. He resumed his flight.
He sped thus across the fields until evening. This flight from nature,life, himself, man, God, everything, lasted all day long. Sometimes heflung himself face downward on the earth, and tore up the young bladesof wheat with his nails. Sometimes he halted in the deserted street ofa village, and his thoughts were so intolerable that he grasped his headin both hands and tried to tear it from his shoulders in order to dashit upon the pavement.
Towards the hour of sunset, he examined himself again, and found himselfnearly mad. The tempest which had raged within him ever since theinstant when he had lost the hope and the will to save the gypsy,--thattempest had not left in his conscience a single healthy idea, a singlethought which maintained its upright position. His reason lay therealmost entirely destroyed. There remained but two distinct images in hismind, la Esmeralda and the gallows; all the rest was blank. Those twoimages united, presented to him a frightful group; and the more heconcentrated what attention and thought was left to him, the more hebeheld them grow, in accordance with a fantastic progression, the one ingrace, in charm, in beauty, in light, the other in deformity and horror;so that at last la Esmeralda appeared to him like a star, the gibbetlike an enormous, fleshless arm.
One remarkable fact is, that during the whole of this torture, the ideaof dying did not seriously occur to him. The wretch was made so. Heclung to life. Perhaps he really saw hell beyond it.
Meanwhile, the day continued to decline. The living being which stillexisted in him reflected vaguely on retracing its steps. He believedhimself to be fa
r away from Paris; on taking his bearings, he perceivedthat he had only circled the enclosure of the University. The spire ofSaint-Sulpice, and the three lofty needles of Saint Germain-des-Pres,rose above the horizon on his right. He turned his steps in thatdirection. When he heard the brisk challenge of the men-at-arms of theabbey, around the crenelated, circumscribing wall of Saint-Germain, heturned aside, took a path which presented itself between the abbey andthe lazar-house of the bourg, and at the expiration of a few minutesfound himself on the verge of the Pre-aux-Clercs. This meadow wascelebrated by reason of the brawls which went on there night and day;it was the hydra of the poor monks of Saint-Germain: _quod mouachisSancti-Germaini pratensis hydra fuit, clericis nova semper dissidiorumcapita suscitantibus_. The archdeacon was afraid of meeting some onethere; he feared every human countenance; he had just avoided theUniversity and the Bourg Saint-Germain; he wished to re-enter thestreets as late as possible. He skirted the Pre-aux-Clercs, took thedeserted path which separated it from the Dieu-Neuf, and at last reachedthe water's edge. There Dom Claude found a boatman, who, for a fewfarthings in Parisian coinage, rowed him up the Seine as far as thepoint of the city, and landed him on that tongue of abandoned landwhere the reader has already beheld Gringoire dreaming, and whichwas prolonged beyond the king's gardens, parallel to the Ile duPasseur-aux-Vaches.
The monotonous rocking of the boat and the ripple of the water had, insome sort, quieted the unhappy Claude. When the boatman had taken hisdeparture, he remained standing stupidly on the strand, staring straightbefore him and perceiving objects only through magnifying oscillationswhich rendered everything a sort of phantasmagoria to him. The fatigueof a great grief not infrequently produces this effect on the mind.
The sun had set behind the lofty Tour-de-Nesle. It was the twilighthour. The sky was white, the water of the river was white. Between thesetwo white expanses, the left bank of the Seine, on which his eyes werefixed, projected its gloomy mass and, rendered ever thinner and thinnerby perspective, it plunged into the gloom of the horizon like a blackspire. It was loaded with houses, of which only the obscure outlinecould be distinguished, sharply brought out in shadows against the lightbackground of the sky and the water. Here and there windows began togleam, like the holes in a brazier. That immense black obelisk thusisolated between the two white expanses of the sky and the river,which was very broad at this point, produced upon Dom Claude a singulareffect, comparable to that which would be experienced by a man who,reclining on his back at the foot of the tower of Strasburg, should gazeat the enormous spire plunging into the shadows of the twilight abovehis head. Only, in this case, it was Claude who was erect and theobelisk which was lying down; but, as the river, reflecting the sky,prolonged the abyss below him, the immense promontory seemed to be asboldly launched into space as any cathedral spire; and the impressionwas the same. This impression had even one stronger and more profoundpoint about it, that it was indeed the tower of Strasbourg, but thetower of Strasbourg two leagues in height; something unheard of,gigantic, immeasurable; an edifice such as no human eye has ever seen;a tower of Babel. The chimneys of the houses, the battlements of thewalls, the faceted gables of the roofs, the spire of the Augustines,the tower of Nesle, all these projections which broke the profile ofthe colossal obelisk added to the illusion by displaying in eccentricfashion to the eye the indentations of a luxuriant and fantasticsculpture.
Claude, in the state of hallucination in which he found himself,believed that he saw, that he saw with his actual eyes, the bell towerof hell; the thousand lights scattered over the whole height of theterrible tower seemed to him so many porches of the immense interiorfurnace; the voices and noises which escaped from it seemed so manyshrieks, so many death groans. Then he became alarmed, he put his handson his ears that he might no longer hear, turned his back that he mightno longer see, and fled from the frightful vision with hasty strides.
But the vision was in himself.
When he re-entered the streets, the passers-by elbowing each other bythe light of the shop-fronts, produced upon him the effect of a constantgoing and coming of spectres about him. There were strange noises in hisears; extraordinary fancies disturbed his brain. He saw neitherhouses, nor pavements, nor chariots, nor men and women, but a chaos ofindeterminate objects whose edges melted into each other. At the cornerof the Rue de la Barillerie, there was a grocer's shop whose porch wasgarnished all about, according to immemorial custom, with hoops of tinfrom which hung a circle of wooden candles, which came in contact witheach other in the wind, and rattled like castanets. He thought he hearda cluster of skeletons at Montfaucon clashing together in the gloom.
"Oh!" he muttered, "the night breeze dashes them against each other,and mingles the noise of their chains with the rattle of their bones!Perhaps she is there among them!"
In his state of frenzy, he knew not whither he was going. After a fewstrides he found himself on the Pont Saint-Michel. There was a lightin the window of a ground-floor room; he approached. Through a crackedwindow he beheld a mean chamber which recalled some confused memoryto his mind. In that room, badly lighted by a meagre lamp, there was afresh, light-haired young man, with a merry face, who amid loud burstsof laughter was embracing a very audaciously attired young girl; andnear the lamp sat an old crone spinning and singing in a quaveringvoice. As the young man did not laugh constantly, fragments of the oldwoman's ditty reached the priest; it was something unintelligible yetfrightful,--
"_Greve, aboie, Greve, grouille! File, file, ma quenouille, File sa corde au bourreau, Qui siffle dans le pre au, Greve, aboie, Greve, grouille_!
"_La belle corde de chanvre! Semez d'Issy jusqu'a Vanvre Du chanvre et non pas du bleu. Le voleur n'a pas vole La belle corde de chanvre_.
"_Greve, grouille, Greve, aboie! Pour voir la fille de joie, Prendre au gibet chassieux, Les fenetres sont des yeux. Greve, grouille, Greve, aboie!_"*
* Bark, Greve, grumble, Greve! Spin, spin, my distaff, spinher rope for the hangman, who is whistling in the meadow. What abeautiful hempen rope! Sow hemp, not wheat, from Issy to Vanvre. Thethief hath not stolen the beautiful hempen rope. Grumble, Greve, bark,Greve! To see the dissolute wench hang on the blear-eyed gibbet, windowsare eyes.
Thereupon the young man laughed and caressed the wench. The crone wasla Falourdel; the girl was a courtesan; the young man was his brotherJehan.
He continued to gaze. That spectacle was as good as any other.
He saw Jehan go to a window at the end of the room, open it, cast aglance on the quay, where in the distance blazed a thousand lightedcasements, and he heard him say as he closed the sash,--
"'Pon my soul! How dark it is; the people are lighting their candles,and the good God his stars."
Then Jehan came back to the hag, smashed a bottle standing on the table,exclaiming,--
"Already empty, _cor-boeuf_! and I have no more money! Isabeau, my dear,I shall not be satisfied with Jupiter until he has changed your twowhite nipples into two black bottles, where I may suck wine of Beauneday and night."
This fine pleasantry made the courtesan laugh, and Jehan left the room.
Dom Claude had barely time to fling himself on the ground in order thathe might not be met, stared in the face and recognized by his brother.Luckily, the street was dark, and the scholar was tipsy. Nevertheless,he caught sight of the archdeacon prone upon the earth in the mud.
"Oh! oh!" said he; "here's a fellow who has been leading a jolly life,to-day."
He stirred up Dom Claude with his foot, and the latter held his breath.
"Dead drunk," resumed Jehan. "Come, he's full. A regular leech detachedfrom a hogshead. He's bald," he added, bending down, "'tis an old man!_Fortunate senex_!"
Then Dom Claude heard him retreat, saying,--
"'Tis all the same, reason is a fine thing, and my brother thearchdeacon is very happy in that he is wise and has money."
Then t
he archdeacon rose to his feet, and ran without halting, towardsNotre-Dame, whose enormous towers he beheld rising above the housesthrough the gloom.
At the instant when he arrived, panting, on the Place du Parvis, heshrank back and dared not raise his eyes to the fatal edifice.
"Oh!" he said, in a low voice, "is it really true that such a thing tookplace here, to-day, this very morning?"
Still, he ventured to glance at the church. The front was sombre; thesky behind was glittering with stars. The crescent of the moon, in herflight upward from the horizon, had paused at the moment, on the summitof the light hand tower, and seemed to have perched itself, like aluminous bird, on the edge of the balustrade, cut out in black trefoils.
The cloister door was shut; but the archdeacon always carried with himthe key of the tower in which his laboratory was situated. He made useof it to enter the church.
In the church he found the gloom and silence of a cavern. By the deepshadows which fell in broad sheets from all directions, he recognizedthe fact that the hangings for the ceremony of the morning had not yetbeen removed. The great silver cross shone from the depths of thegloom, powdered with some sparkling points, like the milky way ofthat sepulchral night. The long windows of the choir showed the upperextremities of their arches above the black draperies, and their paintedpanes, traversed by a ray of moonlight had no longer any hues but thedoubtful colors of night, a sort of violet, white and blue, whose tintis found only on the faces of the dead. The archdeacon, on perceivingthese wan spots all around the choir, thought he beheld the mitres ofdamned bishops. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them again, hethought they were a circle of pale visages gazing at him.
He started to flee across the church. Then it seemed to him that thechurch also was shaking, moving, becoming endued with animation, that itwas alive; that each of the great columns was turning into an enormouspaw, which was beating the earth with its big stone spatula, and thatthe gigantic cathedral was no longer anything but a sort of prodigiouselephant, which was breathing and marching with its pillars for feet,its two towers for trunks and the immense black cloth for its housings.
This fever or madness had reached such a degree of intensity that theexternal world was no longer anything more for the unhappy man than asort of Apocalypse,--visible, palpable, terrible.
For one moment, he was relieved. As he plunged into the side aisles, heperceived a reddish light behind a cluster of pillars. He ran towards itas to a star. It was the poor lamp which lighted the public breviaryof Notre-Dame night and day, beneath its iron grating. He flung himselfeagerly upon the holy book in the hope of finding some consolation, orsome encouragement there. The hook lay open at this passage of Job, overwhich his staring eye glanced,--
"And a spirit passed before my face, and I heard a small voice, and thehair of my flesh stood up."
On reading these gloomy words, he felt that which a blind man feels whenhe feels himself pricked by the staff which he has picked up. His kneesgave way beneath him, and he sank upon the pavement, thinking of her whohad died that day. He felt so many monstrous vapors pass and dischargethemselves in his brain, that it seemed to him that his head had becomeone of the chimneys of hell.
It would appear that he remained a long time in this attitude, no longerthinking, overwhelmed and passive beneath the hand of the demon. Atlength some strength returned to him; it occurred to him to take refugein his tower beside his faithful Quasimodo. He rose; and, as he wasafraid, he took the lamp from the breviary to light his way. It was asacrilege; but he had got beyond heeding such a trifle now.
He slowly climbed the stairs of the towers, filled with a secret frightwhich must have been communicated to the rare passers-by in the Placedu Parvis by the mysterious light of his lamp, mounting so late fromloophole to loophole of the bell tower.
All at once, he felt a freshness on his face, and found himself at thedoor of the highest gallery. The air was cold; the sky was filled withhurrying clouds, whose large, white flakes drifted one upon another likethe breaking up of river ice after the winter. The crescent of the moon,stranded in the midst of the clouds, seemed a celestial vessel caught inthe ice-cakes of the air.
He lowered his gaze, and contemplated for a moment, through the railingof slender columns which unites the two towers, far away, through agauze of mists and smoke, the silent throng of the roofs of Paris,pointed, innumerable, crowded and small like the waves of a tranquil seaon a sum-mer night.
The moon cast a feeble ray, which imparted to earth and heaven an ashyhue.
At that moment the clock raised its shrill, cracked voice. Midnight rangout. The priest thought of midday; twelve o'clock had come back again.
"Oh!" he said in a very low tone, "she must be cold now."
All at once, a gust of wind extinguished his lamp, and almost at thesame instant, he beheld a shade, a whiteness, a form, a woman, appearfrom the opposite angle of the tower. He started. Beside this woman wasa little goat, which mingled its bleat with the last bleat of the clock.
He had strength enough to look. It was she.
She was pale, she was gloomy. Her hair fell over her shoulders as in themorning; but there was no longer a rope on her neck, her hands were nolonger bound; she was free, she was dead.
She was dressed in white and had a white veil on her head.
She came towards him, slowly, with her gaze fixed on the sky. Thesupernatural goat followed her. He felt as though made of stone andtoo heavy to flee. At every step which she took in advance, he took onebackwards, and that was all. In this way he retreated once more beneaththe gloomy arch of the stairway. He was chilled by the thought that shemight enter there also; had she done so, he would have died of terror.
She did arrive, in fact, in front of the door to the stairway, andpaused there for several minutes, stared intently into the darkness, butwithout appearing to see the priest, and passed on. She seemed tallerto him than when she had been alive; he saw the moon through her whiterobe; he heard her breath.
When she had passed on, he began to descend the staircase again, withthe slowness which he had observed in the spectre, believing himself tobe a spectre too, haggard, with hair on end, his extinguished lamp stillin his hand; and as he descended the spiral steps, he distinctly heardin his ear a voice laughing and repeating,--
"A spirit passed before my face, and I heard a small voice, and the hairof my flesh stood up."
CHAPTER II. HUNCHBACKED, ONE EYED, LAME.