The Hunchback of Notre Dame (34 page)

“Phœbus,” whispered the astonished girls. “Why, that’s the captain’s name!”

“You have a marvellous memory!” said Fleur-de-Lys to the stupefied gipsy. Then bursting into sobs, she stammered out in an agony, hiding her face in her lovely hands, “Oh, she is a witch!” and she heard a voice more bitter yet, which said to her inmost heart, “She is your rival!”

She fell fainting to the floor.

“My daughter! my daughter!” screamed the terrified mother. “Begone, you devilish gipsy!”

Esmeralda picked up the unlucky letters in the twinkling of an eye, made a sign to Djali, and went out at one door as Fleur-de-Lys was borne away by another.

Captain Phœbus, left alone, hesitated a moment between the two doors; then he followed the gipsy.

CHAPTER II

Showing that a Priest and a Philosopher Are Two Very Different Persons

T
he priest whom the girls had noticed on the top of the north tower, leaning over to look into the square and watching the gipsy’s dance so closely, was no other than Claude Frollo.

Our readers have not forgotten the mysterious cell which the archdeacon reserved to himself in that tower. (I do not know, let me observe by the way, whether or not this be the same cell, the interior of which may still be seen through a tiny grated loop-hole, opening to the eastward, at about the height of a man from the floor, upon the platform from which the towers spring; a mere hole, now bare, empty, and dilapidated, the ill-plastered walls “adorned” here and there, at the present time, with a few wretched yellow engravings, representing various cathedral fronts. I presume that this hole is conjointly inhabited by bats and spiders, and that consequently a double war of extermination is waged against flies.)

Every day, an hour before sunset, the archdeacon climbed the tower stairs and shut himself up in this cell, where he often passed whole nights. On this special day, just as, having reached the low door of his retreat, he was fitting into the lock the complicated little key, which he always carried about with him in the purse hanging at his side, the sound of tambourine and castanets struck upon his ear. The sound came from the square in front of the cathedral. The cell, as we have already said, had but one window looking upon the roof of the church. Claude Frollo hastily withdrew the key, and an instant later he was upon the top of the tower, in the gloomy and meditative attitude in which the ladies had seen him.

There he was, serious and motionless, absorbed in one sight, one thought. All Paris lay beneath his feet, with its countless spires and its circular horizon of gently sloping hills, with its river winding beneath its bridges, and its people flowing through its streets, with its cloud of smoke and its mountainous chain of roofs crowding Notre-Dame close with their double rings of tiles; but of this whole city the archdeacon saw only one corner,—the square in front of the cathedral; only one figure in all that crowd,—the gipsy.

It would have been hard to explain the nature of his gaze, and the source of the fire which flashed from his eyes. It was a fixed gaze, and yet it was full of agitation and trouble. And from the perfect repose of his whole body, scarcely shaken by an occasional involuntary shiver, like a tree stirred by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more stony than the railing upon which they rested; from the rigid smile which contracted his face, you would have said that there was nothing living about Claude Frollo but his eyes.

The gipsy danced; she twirled her tambourine upon the tip of her finger, and tossed it into the air as she danced her Provençal sarabands: light, alert, and gay, quite unconscious of the weight of that terrible gaze which fell perpendicularly upon her head.

The crowd swarmed about her. Now and then a man accoutred in a loose red and yellow coat waved the people back into a circle, then sat down again in a chair a few paces away from the dancer, and let the goat lay its head upon his knees. This man seemed to be the gipsy’s comrade. From the lofty point where he stood, Claude Frollo could not distinguish his features.

From the moment that the archdeacon observed this stranger, his attention seemed to be divided between him and the dancer, and his face grew blacker and blacker. Suddenly he straightened himself up, and trembled from head to foot. “Who is that man?” he muttered between his teeth. “I have always seen her alone till now!”

Then he plunged down the winding stairs once more. As he passed the half-open belfry door, he saw something which struck him: he saw Quasimodo, who, leaning from an opening in one of those slate pent-houses which look like huge Venetian blinds, was also gazing steadily out into the square. He was so absorbed in looking that he paid no heed to his foster father’s presence. His savage eye had a strange expression; it looked both charmed and gentle. “How strange!” murmured Claude. “Can he be looking at the gipsy?” He continued his descent. In a few moments the anxious archdeacon came out into the square through the door at the foot of the tower.

“What has become of the gipsy girl?” he said, joining the group of spectators called together by the sound of the tambourine.

“I don’t know,” answered one of his neighbors. “She has just vanished. I think she has gone to dance some sort of a fandango in the house over opposite, where they called her in.”

In the gipsy’s place, upon the same carpet whose pattern had but just now seemed to vanish beneath the capricious figures of her dance, the archdeacon saw no one but the red-and-yellow man, who, hoping to gain a few coppers in his turn, was walking round the ring, his elbows on his hips, his head thrown back, his face scarlet, his neck stretched to its utmost extent, and a chair between his teeth. Upon this chair was fastened a cat, lent by a neighboring woman, which spit and squalled in desperate alarm.

“By‘r Lady!” cried the archdeacon, as the mountebank, dripping with perspiration, passed him with his pyramid of chair and cat, “what is Master Pierre Gringoire doing here?”

The archdeacon’s stern voice so agitated the poor wretch that he lost his balance, and his entire structure, chair, cat, and all, fell pell-mell upon the heads of the spectators, amid a storm of inextinguishable shouts and laughter.

Master Pierre Gringoire (for it was indeed he) would probably have had a serious account to settle with the mistress of the cat, and the owners of all the bruised and scratched faces around him, if he had not hastily availed himself of the confusion to take refuge in the church, where Claude Frollo had beckoned him to follow.

The cathedral was dark and deserted; the side aisles were full of shadows, and the lamps in the chapels began to twinkle like stars, so black had the arched roofs grown. Only the great rose-window in the front, whose myriad hues were still bathed in a ray from the setting sun, gleamed through the darkness like a mass of diamonds, and threw a dazzling reflection to the farther end of the nave.

When they had gone a few paces, Dom Claude leaned his back against a pillar and looked steadily at Gringoire. It was not such a look as Gringoire had dreaded, in his shame at being caught by a grave and learned person in this merry-andrew attire. The priest’s glance had nothing mocking or ironical about it; it was serious, calm, and piercing. The archdeacon was first to break the silence.

“Come hither, Master Pierre. You have many matters to explain to me. And, first of all, how comes it that I have not seen you for these two months past, and that I now find you in the streets, in a pretty plight indeed,—half red and half yellow, like a Caudebec apple?”

“Sir,” said Gringoire, in piteous tones, “it is in sooth a monstrous garb, and I feel as much abashed as a cat with a calabash on her head. ‘Tis very ill done, I feel, to expose the gentlemen of the watch to the risk of cudgelling the shoulders of a Pythagorean philosopher under this loose coat. But what else could I do, my reverend master? The blame belongs entirely to my old doublet, which basely deserted me at the very beginning of winter, on the plea that it was falling to pieces, and must needs take a little rest in some rag-picker’s basket. What could I do? Civilization has not yet reached the point where a man may go naked, as Diogenes of old desired. Besides, the wind blew very cold, and the month of January is not a good time to introduce such a new measure to mankind with any hope of success. This coat offered itself; I accepted it, and left behind my old black frock, which, for a Hermetic like myself, was far from being hermetically closed. So here I am in the dress of a mountebank, like Saint Genest. How can I help it? It is an eclipse; but even Apollo kept the swine of Admetus.”

“A fine trade you have there,” replied the archdeacon.

“I confess, master, that it is far better to philosophize and poet ize, to blow the flame in the furnace, or to receive it from heaven, than to carry cats upon your shield; so, when you addressed me, I felt as silly as any donkey before a turnspit. But what was I to do, sir? A man must live; and the finest Alexandrine verses are not such good eating as a bit of Brie cheese. Now, I wrote that famous epithalamium for Margaret of Flanders, which you know all about, and the city has never paid me, under the pretext that it was not very good; as if one could furnish such tragedies as those of Sophocles for four crowns! I almost starved to death. Luckily, I discovered that I had rather a strong jaw. I said to this jaw of mine, ‘Perform some feats of strength and balancing; feed yourself,’—
Ale te ipsam.
A lot of tatterdemalions, with whom I have made friends, taught me some score of Herculean tricks, and now I give my teeth every night the bread which I have earned through the day by the sweat of my brow. After all (
concedo
), I confess that it is a sad waste of my intellectual faculties, and that man was never made to spend his life in drumming on the tambourine and biting into chairs. But, reverend master, it is not enough to spend one’s life; one must earn his living.”

Dom Claude listened in silence. All at once his sunken eyes assumed so sagacious and penetrating an expression that Gringoire felt that the look searched his inmost soul.

“Very good, Master Pierre; but how comes it that you are now keeping company with that gipsy dancing-girl?”

“I’ faith!” said Gringoire, “because she is my wife and I am her husband.”

The priest’s gloomy eyes blazed with wrath.

“Have you done this, miserable fellow?” cried he, furiously seizing Gringoire by the arm! “Can you have been so forsaken of God as to have laid your hands upon that girl?”

“By my hopes of paradise, my lord,” replied Gringoire, trembling in every limb, “I swear to you that I have never laid a finger upon her, if that is what disturbs you.”

“Then, what do you mean by talking about husband and wife?” said the priest.

Gringoire hastily gave him as brief an account as possible of his adventure in the Court of Miracles, and his marriage with the broken jug, all of which the reader already knows. It seemed, moreover, that this marriage had as yet had no result, the gipsy always contriving to slip away and leave him as she had done on their wedding night. “It is very mortifying,” said he in conclusion, “but that’s the consequence of my being so unlucky as to marry a virgin.”

“What do you mean?” asked the archdeacon, who had gradually grown calmer as he listened to this tale.

“That’s not easy to explain,” replied the poet. “It’s a superstition. My wife, according to an old prig whom we call the Duke of Egypt, is a foundling or a lost child, which comes to the same thing in the end. She wears about her neck an amulet which they say will some day restore her to her parents, but which will lose its virtue should the young girl lose hers. Hence it follows that we are both leading the most virtuous of lives.”

“Then,” continued Claude, whose brow had cleared more and more, “you think, Master Pierre, that this creature has never been approached by any man?”

“What chance, Dom Claude, could any man have against a superstition? She has a mania upon this point. I certainly consider it a great rarity to find such nun-like prudery fiercely maintained in the midst of those gipsy girls, who are so easily tamed. But she has three safeguards,—the Duke of Egypt, who has taken her under his protection, perhaps intending to sell her to some gentleman priest; her whole tribe, who hold her in singular veneration, as if she were another Virgin Mary; and a certain dainty little dagger, which the hussy always carries somewhere about her, in spite of the provost’s orders against wearing concealed weapons, and which always springs into her hand if you do but clasp her waist. She’s a regular wasp, I can tell you!”

The archdeacon pressed Gringoire with questions.

In Gringoire’s opinion Esmeralda was a charming, harmless creature, pretty, if it were not for a grimace which she was always making; a simple, affectionate girl, ignorant of all evil, and enthusiastic about everything; particularly fond of dancing, of noise, of the open air; a sort of woman bee, with invisible wings to her feet, and living in a whirl. She owed this nature to the wandering life which she had always led. Gringoire had managed to find out that while still a child she had traveled through Spain and Catalonia, to Sicily; he even fancied that she was taken, by the caravan of gipsies to which she belonged, to the kingdom of Algiers, a country situated in Achaia, which Achaia, on one side borders Albania and Greece, on the other the Sicilian sea, which is the road to Constantinople. The gipsies, said Gringoire, are vassals of the King of Algiers, in his capacity of chief of the nation of white Moors. One thing is certain, that Esmeralda came to France when very young, by way of Hungary. From all these countries the girl had gathered scraps of strange tongues, queer songs and notions, which made her conversation as motley a piece of patchwork as her dress, half Parisian and half African. Moreover, the people of those quarters of the town which she frequented, loved her for her gaiety, her gracefulness, her lively ways, her dances, and her songs. She knew but two persons in the whole city who disliked her, of whom she often spoke with terror,—the
sachette
of the Tour-Roland, a dreadful recluse who had some special spite against all gipsies, and cursed the poor dancer every time she passed her window; and a priest, who never met her without looking at her and speaking to her in a way that frightened her. This latter circumstance greatly troubled the archdeacon, although Gringoire paid but little heed to his agitation; so completely had two months sufficed to blot from the careless poet’s mind the singular details of that evening upon which he first met the gipsy, and the archdeacon’s presence on that occasion. Except for this, the little dancer feared nothing; she never told fortunes, which prevented all danger of a trial for witchcraft, such as was frequently brought against the other gipsy women. And then, Gringoire took the place of a brother, if not of a husband, to her. After all, the philosopher bore this kind of Platonic marriage very patiently. At any rate, it ensured him food and lodging. Every morning he set forth from the vagrant’s headquarters, generally in Esmeralda’s company; he helped her to reap her harvest of coin along the streets; every night he shared the same roof with her, allowing her to bolt herself into her tiny cell, and slept the sleep of the just. A very pleasant life, take it all in all, he thought, and very conducive to reverie. And then, in his innermost soul the philosopher was not so absolutely sure that he was desperately in love with the girl. He loved her goat almost as well. It was a charming animal, gentle, intelligent, quick,—a learned goat. Nothing was more common in the Middle Ages than these learned animals, at which men mar veled vastly, and which often conducted their instructors to the stake. And yet, the sorceries of the goat with the golden hoofs were very innocent tricks. Gringoire explained them to the archdeacon, whom these particulars seemed to interest greatly. All that was necessary, in most cases, was to hold the tambourine out to the goat in such or such a fashion, to make the creature perform the desired trick. It had been trained to do all this by the gipsy girl, who had such rare skill as an instructor that it took her only two months to teach the goat to write the word “Phœbus” with movable letters.