The reader must permit us to take him back to the Place
de Gr¨¨ve, which we quitted yesterday with Gringoire, in
order to follow la Esmeralda.
It is ten o'clock in the morning; everything is indicative of
the day after a festival. The pavement is covered with rubbish;
ribbons, rags, feathers from tufts of plumes, drops of wax
from the torches, crumbs of the public feast. A goodly
number of bourgeois are "sauntering," as we say, here and
there, turning over with their feet the extinct brands of
the bonfire, going into raptures in front of the Pillar House,
over the memory of the fine hangings of the day before, and
to-day staring at the nails that secured them a last pleasure.
The venders of cider and beer are rolling their barrels among
the groups. Some busy passers-by come and go. The merchants
converse and call to each other from the thresholds of
their shops. The festival, the ambassadors, Coppenole, the
Pope of the Fools, are in all mouths; they vie with each
other, each trying to criticise it best and laugh the most.
And, meanwhile, four mounted sergeants, who have just
posted themselves at the four sides of the pillory, have
already concentrated around themselves a goodly proportion
of the populace scattered on the Place, who condemn themselves
to immobility and fatigue in the hope of a small execution.
If the reader, after having contemplated this lively and
noisy scene which is being enacted in all parts of the Place,
will now transfer his gaze towards that ancient demi-Gothic,
demi-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland, which forms the
corner on the quay to the west, he will observe, at the angle
of the fa?ade, a large public breviary, with rich illuminations,
protected from the rain by a little penthouse, and from thieves
by a small grating, which, however, permits of the leaves being
turned. Beside this breviary is a narrow, arched window,
closed by two iron bars in the form of a cross, and looking on
the square; the only opening which admits a small quantity
of light and air to a little cell without a door, constructed on
the ground-floor, in the thickness of the walls 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 most populous
and most noisy in Paris swarms and shrieks around it.
This little cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly three
centuries, ever since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in
mourning for her father who died in the Crusades, had caused
it to be hollowed out in 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 to the
poor and to God. The afflicted damsel had, in fact, waited
twenty years for death in this premature tomb, praying night
and day for the soul of her father, sleeping in ashes, without
even a stone for a pillow, clothed in a black sack, and
subsisting on the bread and water which the compassion of the
passers-by led them to deposit on the ledge of her window,
thus receiving charity after having bestowed it. At her death,
at the moment when she was passing to the other sepulchre,
she had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to afflicted women,
mothers, widows, or maidens, who should wish to pray much
for others or for themselves, and who should desire to inter
themselves alive in a great grief or a great penance. The
poor of her day had made her a fine funeral, with tears and
benedictions; but, to their great regret, the pious maid had
not been canonized, for lack of influence. Those among them
who were a little inclined to impiety, had hoped that the matter
might be accomplished in Paradise more easily than at Rome,
and had frankly besought God, instead of the pope, in behalf
of the deceased. The majority had contented themselves with
holding the memory of Rolande sacred, and converting her
rags into relics. The city, on its side, had founded in honor
of the damoiselle, a public breviary, which had been fastened
near the window of the cell, in order that passers-by might
halt there from time to time, were it only to pray; that prayer
might remind them of alms, and that the poor recluses, heiresses
of Madame Rolande's vault, might not die outright of
hunger and forgetfulness.
Moreover, this sort of tomb was not so very rare a thing in
the cities of the Middle Ages. One often encountered in
the most frequented street, in the most crowded and noisy
market, in the very middle, under the feet of the horses,
under the wheels of the carts, as it were, a cellar, a well, a
tiny walled and grated cabin, at the bottom of which a human
being prayed night and day, voluntarily devoted to some eternal
lamentation, to some great expiation. And all the reflections
which that strange spectacle would awaken in us to-day;
that horrible cell, a sort of intermediary link between a house
and the tomb, the cemetery and the city; that living being
cut off from the human community, and thenceforth reckoned
among the dead; that lamp consuming its last drop of 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
already illuminated 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 dungeon cell, and beneath that double
envelope of flesh and granite, the murmur of 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, did not see so many facets in an act of religion.
It took the thing in the block, honored, venerated, hallowed
the sacrifice at need, but did not analyze the sufferings, and
felt but moderate pity for them. It brought some pittance to
the miserable penitent from time to time, looked through 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 that cellar, 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 yet been invented, either for things of
matter or for things of the mind.
Moreover, although people were but little surprised by it,
the examples of this sort of cloistration in the hearts of cities
were in truth frequent, as we have just said. There were in
Paris a considerable number of these cells, for praying to God
and doing penance; they were nearly all occupied. It is true
that the clergy did not like to have them empty, since that
implied lukewarmness in believers, and that lepers were put
into them when there were no penitents on hand. Besides the
cell on the Gr¨¨ve, there was one at Montfau?on, one at the
Charnier des Innocents, another I hardly know where,--at
the Clichon House, I think; others still at many spots where
traces of them are found in traditions, in default of memorials.
The University had also its own. On Mount Sainte-Genevi¨¨ve
a sort of Job of the Middle Ages, for the space of thirty
years, chanted the seven penitential psalms on a dunghill
at the bottom of a cistern, beginning anew when he had
finished, singing loudest at night, ~magna voce per umbras~,
and to-day, the antiquary fancies that he hears his voice
as he enters the Rue du Puits-qui-parle--the street of the
"Speaking Well."
To confine ourselves to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we must
say that it had never lacked recluses. After the death of
Madame Roland, it had stood vacant for a year or two,
though rarely. Many women had come thither to mourn,
until their death, for relatives, lovers, faults. Parisian
malice, which thrusts its finger into everything, even into
things which concern it the least, affirmed that it had beheld
but few widows there.
In accordance with the fashion of the epoch, a Latin
inscription on the wall indicated to the learned passer-by the
pious purpose of this cell. The custom was retained until
the middle of the sixteenth century of explaining an edifice
by a brief device inscribed above the door. Thus, one still
reads in France, above the wicket of the prison in the seignorial
mansion of Tourville, ~Sileto et spera~; in Ireland, beneath
the armorial bearings which surmount the grand door to
Fortescue Castle, ~Forte scutum, salus ducum~; in England,
over the principal entrance to the hospitable mansion of the
Earls Cowper: ~Tuum est~. At that time every edifice was
a thought.
As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland,
these two words had been carved in large Roman capitals
over the window,--
TU, ORA.
And this caused the people, whose good sense does not
perceive so much refinement in things, and likes to translate
_Ludovico Magno_ by "Porte Saint-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.