When she re-entered the audience hall, pale and limping,
she was received with a general murmur of pleasure. On the
part of the audience there was the feeling of impatience
gratified which one experiences at the theatre at the end of
the last entr'acte of the comedy, when the curtain rises and
the conclusion is about to begin. On the part of the judges,
it was the hope of getting their suppers sooner.
The little goat also bleated with joy. He tried to run
towards his mistress, but they had tied him to the bench.
Night was fully set in. The candles, whose number had not
been increased, cast so little light, that the walls of the hall
could not be seen. The shadows there enveloped all objects
in a sort of mist. A few apathetic faces of judges alone could
be dimly discerned. Opposite them, at the extremity of the
long hail, they could see a vaguely white point standing out
against the sombre background. This was the accused.
She had dragged herself to her place. When Charmolue
had installed himself in a magisterial manner in his own, he
seated himself, then rose and said, without exhibiting too
much self-complacency at his success,--"The accused has
confessed all."
"Bohemian girl," the president continued, "have you avowed all
your deeds of magic, prostitution, and assassination on
Phoebus de Chateaupers."
Her heart contracted. She was heard to sob amid the darkness.
"Anything you like," she replied feebly, "but kill me quickly!"
"Monsieur, procurator of the king in the ecclesiastical
courts," said the president, "the chamber is ready to hear you
in your charge."
Master Charmolue exhibited an alarming note book, and began to
read, with many gestures and the exaggerated accentuation of the
pleader, an oration in Latin, wherein all the proofs of the suit
were piled up in Ciceronian periphrases, flanked with quotations
from Plautus, his favorite comic author. We regret that we are
not able to offer to our readers this remarkable piece. The
orator pronounced it with marvellous action. Before he had
finished the exordium, the perspiration was starting from his
brow, and his eyes from his bead.
All at once, in the middle of a fine period, he interrupted
himself, and his glance, ordinarily so gentle and even stupid,
became menacing.
"Gentlemen," he exclaimed (this time in French, for it was
not in his copy book), "Satan is so mixed up in this affair,
that here he is present at our debates, and making sport of
their majesty. Behold!"
So saying, he pointed to the little goat, who, on seeing
Charmolue gesticulating, had, in point of fact, thought it
appropriate to do the same, and had seated himself on his
haunches, reproducing to the best of his ability, with his
forepaws and his bearded head the pathetic pantomine of the
king's procurator in the ecclesiastical court. This was, if the
reader remembers, one of his prettiest accomplishments. This
incident, this last proof, produced a great effect. The goat's
hoofs were tied, and the king's procurator resumed the thread
of his eloquence.
It was very long, but the peroration was admirable. Here
is the concluding phrase; let the reader add the hoarse voice
and the breathless gestures of Master Charmolue,
"~Ideo, domni, coram stryga demonstrata, crimine patente,
intentione criminis existente, in nornine sanctoe ecclesioe Nostroe-
Domince Parisiensis quoe est in saisina habendi omnimodam
altam et bassam justitiam in illa hac intemerata Civitatis insula,
tenore proesentium declaremus nos requirere, primo, aliquamdam
pecuniariam indemnitatem; secundo, amendationem honorabilem
ante portalium maximum Nostroe-Dominoe, ecclesioe cathedralis;
tertio, sententiani in virtute cujus ista styrga cum sua
capella, seu in trivio vulgariter dicto~ la Gr¨¨ve, ~seu in insula
exeunte in fluvio Secanoe, juxta pointam juardini regalis, executatoe
sint~!"*
* The substance of this exordium is contained in the president's
sentence.
He put on his cap again and seated himself.
"Eheu!" sighed the broken-hearted Gringoire, "~bassa latinitas~--bastard
latin!"
Another man in a black gown rose near the accused; he was
her lawyer.--The judges, who were fasting, began to grumble.
"Advocate, be brief," said the president.
"Monsieur the President," replied the advocate, "since the
defendant has confessed the crime, I have only one word to
say to these gentlemen. Here is a text from the Salic law;
'If a witch hath eaten a man, and if she be convicted of it,
she shall pay a fine of eight thousand deniers, which amount
to two hundred sous of gold.' May it please the chamber
to condemn my client to the fine?"
"An abrogated text," said the advocate extraordinary of the king.
"Nego, I deny it," replied the advocate.
"Put it to the vote!" said one of the councillors; "the
crime is manifest, and it is late."
They proceeded to take a vote without leaving the room.
The judges signified their assent without giving their reasons,
they were in a hurry. Their capped heads were seen uncovering
one after the other, in the gloom, at the lugubrious question
addressed to them by the president in a low voice. The
poor accused had the appearance of looking at them, but her
troubled eye no longer saw.
Then the clerk began to write; then he handed a long parch-
ment to the president.
Then the unhappy girl heard the people moving, the pikes
clashing, and a freezing voice saying to her,--"Bohemian
wench, on the day when it shall seem good to
our lord the king, at the hour of noon, you will be taken in a
tumbrel, in your shift, with bare feet, and a rope about your
neck, before the grand portal of Notre-Dame, and you will
there make an apology with a wax torch of the weight of
two pounds in your hand, and thence you will be conducted to
the Place de Gr¨¨ve, where you will be hanged and strangled
on the town gibbet; and likewise your goat; and you will pay
to the official three lions of gold, in reparation of the crimes
by you committed and by you confessed, of sorcery and
magic, debauchery and murder, upon the person of the Sieur
Phoebus de Chateaupers. May God have mercy on your soul!"
"Oh! 'tis a dream!" she murmured; and she felt rough hands bearing
her away.
CHAPTER IV.
~LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA~--LEAVE ALL HOPE BEHIND, YE WHO ENTER HERE.
In the Middle Ages, when an edifice was complete, there
was almost as much of it in the earth as above it. Unless
built upon piles, like Notre-Dame, a palace, a fortress, a
church, had always a double bottom. In cathedrals, it was,
in some sort, another subterranean cathedral, low, dark,
mysterious, blind, and mute, under the upper nave which was
overflowing with light and reverberating with organs and bells
day and night. Sometimes it was a sepulchre. In palaces,
in fortresses, it was a prison, sometimes a sepulchre also,
sometimes both together. These mighty buildings, whose
mode of formation and vegetation we have elsewhere explained,
had not simply foundations, but, so to speak, roots
which ran branching through the soil in chambers, galleries,
and staircases, like the construction above. Thus churches,
palaces, fortresses, had the earth half way up their bodies.
The cellars of an edifice formed another edifice, into which
one descended instead of ascending, and which extended
its subterranean grounds under the external piles of the
monument, like those forests and mountains which are reversed
in the mirror-like waters of a lake, beneath the forests and
mountains of the banks.
At the fortress of Saint-Antoine, at the Palais de Justice of
Paris, at the Louvre, these subterranean edifices were prisons.
The stories of these prisons, as they sank into the soil, grew
constantly narrower and more gloomy. They were so many
zones, where the shades of horror were graduated. Dante
could never imagine anything better for his hell. These
tunnels of cells usually terminated in a sack of a lowest
dungeon, with a vat-like bottom, where Dante placed Satan,
where society placed those condemned to death. A miserable
human existence, once interred there; farewell light, air, life,
~ogni speranza~--every hope; it only came forth to the scaffold
or the stake. Sometimes it rotted there; human justice
called this "forgetting." Between men and himself, the
condemned man felt a pile of stones and jailers weighing down
upon his head; and the entire prison, the massive bastille
was nothing more than an enormous, complicated lock, which
barred him off from the rest of the world.
It was in a sloping cavity of this description, in the
~oubliettes~ excavated by Saint-Louis, in the ~inpace~ of the
Tournelle, that la Esmeralda had been placed on being condemned
to death, through fear of her escape, no doubt, with the colossal
court-house over her head. Poor fly, who could not have
lifted even one of its blocks of stone!
Assuredly, Providence and society had been equally unjust;
such an excess of unhappiness and of torture was not necessary
to break so frail a creature.
There she lay, lost in the shadows, buried, hidden, immured.
Any one who could have beheld her in this state, after having
seen her laugh and dance in the sun, would have shuddered.
Cold as night, cold as death, not a breath of air in her tresses,
not a human sound in her ear, no longer a ray of light in her
eyes; snapped in twain, crushed with chains, crouching beside
a jug and a loaf, on a little straw, in a pool of water, which
was formed under her by the sweating of the prison walls;
without motion, almost without breath, she had no longer the
power to suffer; Phoebus, the sun, midday, the open air, the
streets of Paris, the dances with applause, the sweet babblings
of love with the officer; then the priest, the old crone,
the poignard, the blood, the torture, the gibbet; all this did,
indeed, pass before her mind, sometimes as a charming and
golden vision, sometimes as a hideous nightmare; but it was
no longer anything but a vague and horrible struggle, lost in
the gloom, or distant music played up above ground, and
which was no longer audible at the depth where the unhappy
girl had fallen.
Since she had been there, she had neither waked nor slept.
In that misfortune, in that cell, she could no longer
distinguish her waking hours from slumber, dreams from reality,
any more than day from night. All this was mixed, broken,
floating, disseminated confusedly in her thought. She no
longer felt, she no longer knew, she no longer thought; at
the most, she only dreamed. Never had a living creature
been thrust more deeply into nothingness.
Thus benumbed, frozen, petrified, she had barely noticed
on two or three occasions, the sound of a trap door opening
somewhere above her, without even permitting the passage of
a little light, and through which a hand had tossed her a bit
of black bread. Nevertheless, this periodical visit of the
jailer was the sole communication which was left her with
mankind.
A single thing still mechanically occupied her ear; above
her head, the dampness was filtering through the mouldy
stones of the vault, and a drop of water dropped from them
at regular intervals. She listened stupidly to the noise made
by this drop of water as it fell into the pool beside her.
This drop of water falling from time to time into that pool,
was the only movement which still went on around her, the
only clock which marked the time, the only noise which
reached her of all the noise made on the surface of the earth.
To tell the whole, however, she also felt, from time to time,
in that cesspool of mire and darkness, something cold passing
over her foot or her arm, and she shuddered.
How long had she been there? She did not know. She
had a recollection of a sentence of death pronounced somewhere,
against some one, then of having been herself carried
away, and of waking up in darkness and silence, chilled to
the heart. She had dragged herself along on her hands.
Then iron rings that cut her ankles, and chains had rattled.
She had recognized the fact that all around her was wall, that
below her there was a pavement covered with moisture and a
truss of straw; but neither lamp nor air-hole. Then she had
seated herself on that straw and, sometimes, for the sake of
changing her attitude, on the last stone step in her dungeon.
For a while she had tried to count the black minutes measured
off for her by the drop of water; but that melancholy
labor of an ailing brain had broken off of itself in her
head, and had left her in stupor.
At length, one day, or one night, (for midnight and midday
were of the same color in that sepulchre), she heard above her
a louder noise than was usually made by the turnkey when he
brought her bread and jug of water. She raised her head,
and beheld a ray of reddish light passing through the crevices
in the sort of trapdoor contrived in the roof of the ~inpace~.
At the same time, the heavy lock creaked, the trap grated
on its rusty hinges, turned, and she beheld a lantern, a hand,
and the lower portions of the bodies of two men, the door
being too low to admit of her seeing their heads. The light
pained her so acutely that she shut her eyes.
When she opened them again the door was closed, the lantern
was deposited on one of the steps of the staircase; a
man alone stood before her. A monk's black cloak fell to his
feet, a cowl of the same color concealed his face. Nothing
was visible of his person, neither face nor hands. It was a
long, black shroud standing erect, and beneath which
something could be felt moving. She gazed fixedly for
several minutes at this sort of spectre. But neither he
nor she spoke. One would have pronounced them two statues
confronting each other. Two things only seemed alive in that
cavern; the wick of the lantern, which sputtered on account
of the dampness of the atmosphere, and the drop of water
from the roof, which cut this irregular sputtering with its
monotonous splash, and made the light of the lantern quiver
in concentric waves on the oily water of the pool.
At last the prisoner broke the silence.
"Who are you?"
"A priest."
The words, the accent, the sound of his voice made her tremble.
The priest continued, in a hollow voice,--
"Are you prepared?"
"For what?"
"To die."
"Oh!" said she, "will it be soon?"
"To-morrow."
Her head, which had been raised with joy, fell back upon
her breast.
"'Tis very far away yet!" she murmured; "why could they not
have done it to-day?"
"Then you are very unhappy?" asked the priest, after a silence.
"I am very cold," she replied.
She took her feet in her hands, a gesture habitual with
unhappy wretches who are cold, as we have already seen in the
case of the recluse of the Tour-Roland, and her teeth chattered.
The priest appeared to cast his eyes around the dungeon from beneath
his cowl.
"Without light! without fire! in the water! it is horrible!"
"Yes," she replied, with the bewildered air which unhappiness
had given her. "The day belongs to every one, why do
they give me only night?"
"Do you know," resumed the priest, after a fresh silence,
"why you are here?"
"I thought I knew once," she said, passing her thin fingers
over her eyelids, as though to aid her memory, "but I know
no longer."
All at once she began to weep like a child.
"I should like to get away from here, sir. I am cold, I am
afraid, and there are creatures which crawl over my body."
"Well, follow me."
So saying, the priest took her arm. The unhappy girl was
frozen to her very soul. Yet that hand produced an impression
of cold upon her.
"Oh!" she murmured, "'tis the icy hand of death. Who are you?"
The priest threw back his cowl; she looked. It was the
sinister visage which had so long pursued her; that demon's
head which had appeared at la Falourdel's, above the head of
her adored Phoebus; that eye which she last had seen glittering
beside a dagger.
This apparition, always so fatal for her, and which had thus
driven her on from misfortune to misfortune, even to torture,
roused her from her stupor. It seemed to her that the sort of
veil which had lain thick upon her memory was rent away.
All the details of her melancholy adventure, from the nocturnal
scene at la Falourdel's to her condemnation to the Tournelle,
recurred to her memory, no longer vague and confused
as heretofore, but distinct, harsh, clear, palpitating, terrible.
These souvenirs, half effaced and almost obliterated by
excess of suffering, were revived by the sombre figure which
stood before her, as the approach of fire causes letters traced
upon white paper with invisible ink, to start out perfectly
fresh. It seemed to her that all the wounds of her heart
opened and bled simultaneously.
"Hah!" she cried, with her hands on her eyes, and a convulsive
trembling, "'tis the priest!"
Then she dropped her arms in discouragement, and remained
seated, with lowered head, eyes fixed on the ground, mute and
still trembling.
The priest gazed at her with the eye of a hawk which has
long been soaring in a circle from the heights of heaven over a
poor lark cowering in the wheat, and has long been silently
contracting the formidable circles of his flight, and has
suddenly swooped down upon his prey like a flash of lightning,
and holds it panting in his talons.
She began to murmur in a low voice,--
"Finish! finish! the last blow!" and she drew her head
down in terror between her shoulders, like the lamb awaiting
the blow of the butcher's axe.
"So I inspire you with horror?" he said at length.
She made no reply.
"Do I inspire you with horror?" he repeated.
Her lips contracted, as though with a smile.
"Yes," said she, "the headsman scoffs at the condemned.
Here he has been pursuing me, threatening me, terrifying me
for months! Had it not been for him, my God, how happy it
should have been! It was he who cast me into this abyss!
Oh heavens! it was he who killed him! my Phoebus!"
Here, bursting into sobs, and raising her eyes to the priest,--
"Oh! wretch, who are you? What have I done to you?
Do you then, hate me so? Alas! what have you against me?"
"I love thee!" cried the priest.
Her tears suddenly ceased, she gazed at him with the look
of an idiot. He had fallen on his knees and was devouring
her with eyes of flame.
"Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again.
"What love!" said the unhappy girl with a shudder.
He resumed,--
"The love of a damned soul."
Both remained silent for several minutes, crushed beneath
the weight of their emotions; he maddened, she stupefied.
"Listen," said the priest at last, and a singular calm had
come over him; "you shall know all I am about to tell you
that which I have hitherto hardly dared to say to myself,
when furtively interrogating my conscience at those deep
hours of the night when it is so dark that it seems as though
God no longer saw us. Listen. Before I knew you, young
girl, I was happy."
"So was I!" she sighed feebly.
"Do not interrupt me. Yes, I was happy, at least I believed
myself to be so. I was pure, my soul was filled with
limpid light. No head was raised more proudly and more
radiantly than mine. Priests consulted me on chastity; doctors,
on doctrines. Yes, science was all in all to me; it was a
sister to me, and a sister sufficed. Not but that with age
other ideas came to me. More than once my flesh had been
moved as a woman's form passed by. That force of sex and
blood which, in the madness of youth, I had imagined that I
had stifled forever had, more than once, convulsively raised
the chain of iron vows which bind me, a miserable wretch, to
the cold stones of the altar. But fasting, prayer, study, the
mortifications of the cloister, rendered my soul mistress of
my body once more, and then I avoided women. Moreover, I
had but to open a book, and all the impure mists of my brain
vanished before the splendors of science. In a few moments,
I felt the gross things of earth flee far away, and I found
myself once more calm, quieted, and serene, in the presence of
the tranquil radiance of eternal truth. As long as the demon
sent to attack me only vague shadows of women who passed
occasionally before my eyes in church, in the streets, in
the fields, and who hardly recurred to my dreams, I easily
vanquished him. Alas! if the victory has not remained with
me, it is the fault of God, who has not created man and the
demon of equal force. Listen. One day--
Here the priest paused, and the prisoner heard sighs of
anguish break from his breast with a sound of the death rattle.
He resumed,--
"One day I was leaning on the window of my cell. What
book was I reading then? Oh! all that is a whirlwind in my
head. I was reading. The window opened upon a Square. I
heard a sound of tambourine and music. Annoyed at being
thus disturbed in my revery, I glanced into the Square. What
I beheld, others saw beside myself, and yet it was not a
spectacle made for human eyes. There, in the middle of the
pavement,--it was midday, the sun was shining brightly,--a
creature was dancing. A creature so beautiful that God
would have preferred her to the Virgin and have chosen her
for his mother and have wished to be born of her if she had
been in existence when he was made man! Her eyes were
black and splendid; in the midst of her black locks, some
hairs through which the sun shone glistened like threads
of gold. Her feet disappeared in their movements like the
spokes of a rapidly turning wheel. Around her head, in her
black tresses, there were disks of metal, which glittered in
the sun, and formed a coronet of stars on her brow. Her
dress thick set with spangles, blue, and dotted with a
thousand sparks, gleamed like a summer night. Her brown,
supple arms twined and untwined around her waist, like two
scarfs. The form of her body was surprisingly beautiful.
Oh! what a resplendent figure stood out, like something
luminous even in the sunlight! Alas, young girl, it was thou!
Surprised, intoxicated, charmed, I allowed myself to gaze
upon thee. I looked so long that I suddenly shuddered with
terror; I felt that fate was seizing hold of me."
The priest paused for a moment, overcome with emotion.
Then he continued,--
"Already half fascinated, I tried to cling fast to something
and hold myself back from falling. I recalled the snares which
Satan had already set for me. The creature before my eyes
possessed that superhuman beauty which can come only from
heaven or hell. It was no simple girl made with a little of
our earth, and dimly lighted within by the vacillating ray of
a woman's soul. It was an angel! but of shadows and flame,
and not of light. At the moment when I was meditating
thus, I beheld beside you a goat, a beast of witches, which
smiled as it gazed at me. The midday sun gave him golden
horns. Then I perceived the snare of the demon, and I no
longer doubted that you had come from hell and that you had
come thence for my perdition. I believed it."
Here the priest looked the prisoner full in the face, and
added, coldly,--
"I believe it still. Nevertheless, the charm operated little
by little; your dancing whirled through my brain; I felt the
mysterious spell working within me. All that should have
awakened was lulled to sleep; and like those who die in the
snow, I felt pleasure in allowing this sleep to draw on. All
at once, you began to sing. What could I do, unhappy
wretch? Your song was still more charming than your dancing.
I tried to flee. Impossible. I was nailed, rooted to the
spot. It seemed to me that the marble of the pavement had
risen to my knees. I was forced to remain until the end.
My feet were like ice, my head was on fire. At last you took
pity on me, you ceased to sing, you disappeared. The reflection
of the dazzling vision, the reverberation of the enchanting
music disappeared by degrees from my eyes and my ears.
Then I fell back into the embrasure of the window, more
rigid, more feeble than a statue torn from its base. The
vesper bell roused me. I drew myself up; I fled; but alas!
something within me had fallen never to rise again, something
had come upon me from which I could not flee."
He made another pause and went on,--
"Yes, dating from that day, there was within me a man
whom I did not know. I tried to make use of all my remedies.
The cloister, the altar, work, books,--follies! Oh, how
hollow does science sound when one in despair dashes against
it a head full of passions! Do you know, young girl, what I
saw thenceforth between my book and me? You, your shade,
the image of the luminous apparition which had one day
crossed the space before me. But this image had no longer
the same color; it was sombre, funereal, gloomy as the black
circle which long pursues the vision of the imprudent man
who has gazed intently at the sun.
"Unable to rid myself of it, since I heard your song
humming ever in my head, beheld your feet dancing always
on my breviary, felt even at night, in my dreams, your form
in contact with my own, I desired to see you again, to touch
you, to know who you were, to see whether I should really
find you like the ideal image which I had retained of you, to
shatter my dream, perchance, with reality. At all events, I
hoped that a new impression would efface the first, and the
first had become insupportable. I sought you. I saw you
once more. Calamity! When I had seen you twice, I wanted
to see you a thousand times, I wanted to see you always.
Then--how stop myself on that slope of hell?--then I no
longer belonged to myself. The other end of the thread
which the demon had attached to my wings he had fastened
to his foot. I became vagrant and wandering like yourself.
I waited for you under porches, I stood on the lookout for
you at the street corners, I watched for you from the summit
of my tower. Every evening I returned to myself more
charmed, more despairing, more bewitched, more lost!
"I had learned who you were; an Egyptian, Bohemian,
gypsy, zingara. How could I doubt the magic? Listen. I
hoped that a trial would free me from the charm. A witch
enchanted Bruno d'Ast; he had her burned, and was cured. I
knew it. I wanted to try the remedy. First I tried to have
you forbidden the square in front of Notre-Dame, hoping to
forget you if you returned no more. You paid no heed to it.
You returned. Then the idea of abducting you occurred to
me. One night I made the attempt. There were two of us.
We already had you in our power, when that miserable officer
came up. He delivered you. Thus did he begin your unhappiness,
mine, and his own. Finally, no longer knowing what to
do, and what was to become of me, I denounced you to the official.
"I thought that I should be cured like Bruno d'Ast. I also
had a confused idea that a trial would deliver you into my
hands; that, as a prisoner I should hold you, I should have
you; that there you could not escape from me; that you had
already possessed me a sufficiently long time to give me the
right to possess you in my turn. When one does wrong, one
must do it thoroughly. 'Tis madness to halt midway in the
monstrous! The extreme of crime has its deliriums of joy.
A priest and a witch can mingle in delight upon the truss of
straw in a dungeon!
"Accordingly, I denounced you. It was then that I terrified
you when we met. The plot which I was weaving against
you, the storm which I was heaping up above your head, burst
from me in threats and lightning glances. Still, I hesitated.
My project had its terrible sides which made me shrink back.
"Perhaps I might have renounced it; perhaps my hideous
thought would have withered in my brain, without bearing
fruit. I thought that it would always depend upon me to
follow up or discontinue this prosecution. But every evil
thought is inexorable, and insists on becoming a deed; but
where I believed myself to be all powerful, fate was more
powerful than I. Alas! 'tis fate which has seized you and
delivered you to the terrible wheels of the machine which I
had constructed doubly. Listen. I am nearing the end.
"One day,--again the sun was shining brilliantly--I behold
man pass me uttering your name and laughing, who carries
sensuality in his eyes. Damnation! I followed him; you
know the rest."
He ceased.
The young girl could find but one word:
"Oh, my Phoebus!"
"Not that name!" said the priest, grasping her arm
violently. "Utter not that name! Oh! miserable wretches
that we are, 'tis that name which has ruined us! or, rather
we have ruined each other by the inexplicable play of fate!
you are suffering, are you not? you are cold; the night makes
you blind, the dungeon envelops you; but perhaps you still
have some light in the bottom of your soul, were it only your
childish love for that empty man who played with your heart,
while I bear the dungeon within me; within me there is
winter, ice, despair; I have night in my soul.
"Do you know what I have suffered? I was present at your
trial. I was seated on the official's bench. Yes, under one of
the priests' cowls, there were the contortions of the
damned. When you were brought in, I was there; when you were
questioned, I was there.--Den of wolves!--It was my crime, it
was my gallows that I beheld being slowly reared over your
head. I was there for every witness, every proof, every plea;
I could count each of your steps in the painful path; I was
still there when that ferocious beast--oh! I had not foreseen
torture! Listen. I followed you to that chamber of anguish.
I beheld you stripped and handled, half naked, by the infamous
hands of the tormentor. I beheld your foot, that foot
which I would have given an empire to kiss and die, that
foot, beneath which to have had my head crushed I should have
felt such rapture,--I beheld it encased in that horrible boot,
which converts the limbs of a living being into one bloody
clod. Oh, wretch! while I looked on at that, I held beneath
my shroud a dagger, with which I lacerated my breast. When
you uttered that cry, I plunged it into my flesh; at a second
cry, it would have entered my heart. Look! I believe that it
still bleeds."
He opened his cassock. His breast was in fact, mangled as
by the claw of a tiger, and on his side he had a large and
badly healed wound.
The prisoner recoiled with horror.
"Oh!" said the priest, "young girl, have pity upon me!
You think yourself unhappy; alas! alas! you know not what
unhappiness is. Oh! to love a woman! to be a priest! to be
hated! to love with all the fury of one's soul; to feel that one
would give for the least of her smiles, one's blood, one's vitals,
one's fame, one's salvation, one's immortality and eternity, this
life and the other; to regret that one is not a king, emperor,
archangel, God, in order that one might place a greater slave
beneath her feet; to clasp her night and day in one's dreams
and one's thoughts, and to behold her in love with the
trappings of a soldier and to have nothing to offer her but a
priest's dirty cassock, which will inspire her with fear and
disgust! To be present with one's jealousy and one's rage,
while she lavishes on a miserable, blustering imbecile,
treasures of love and beauty! To behold that body whose form
burns you, that bosom which possesses so much sweetness,
that flesh palpitate and blush beneath the kisses of another!
Oh heaven! to love her foot, her arm, her shoulder, to think
of her blue veins, of her brown skin, until one writhes for
whole nights together on the pavement of one's cell, and to
behold all those caresses which one has dreamed of, end in
torture! To have succeeded only in stretching her upon the
leather bed! Oh! these are the veritable pincers, reddened
in the fires of hell. Oh! blessed is he who is sawn between
two planks, or torn in pieces by four horses! Do you know
what that torture is, which is imposed upon you for long
nights by your burning arteries, your bursting heart, your
breaking head, your teeth-knawed hands; mad tormentors
which turn you incessantly, as upon a red-hot gridiron, to a
thought of love, of jealousy, and of despair! Young girl,
mercy! a truce for a moment! a few ashes on these live
coals! Wipe away, I beseech you, the perspiration which
trickles in great drops from my brow! Child! torture me
with one hand, but caress me with the other! Have pity,
young girl! Have pity upon me!"
The priest writhed on the wet pavement, beating his head
against the corners of the stone steps. The young girl gazed
at him, and listened to him.
When he ceased, exhausted and panting, she repeated in a
low voice,--
"Oh my Phoebus!"
The priest dragged himself towards her on his knees.
"I beseech you," he cried, "if you have any heart, do not
repulse me! Oh! I love you! I am a wretch! When you
utter that name, unhappy girl, it is as though you crushed all
the fibres of my heart between your teeth. Mercy! If you
come from hell I will go thither with you. I have done
everything to that end. The hell where you are, shall he
paradise; the sight of you is more charming than that of God!
Oh! speak! you will have none of me? I should have thought
the mountains would be shaken in their foundations on the
day when a woman would repulse such a love. Oh! if you
only would! Oh! how happy we might be. We would flee--I
would help you to flee,--we would go somewhere, we would
seek that spot on earth, where the sun is brightest, the sky
the bluest, where the trees are most luxuriant. We would
love each other, we would pour our two souls into each other,
and we would have a thirst for ourselves which we would
quench in common and incessantly at that fountain of
inexhaustible love."
She interrupted with a terrible and thrilling laugh.
"Look, father, you have blood on your fingers!"
The priest remained for several moments as though petrified,
with his eyes fixed upon his hand.
"Well, yes!" he resumed at last, with strange gentleness,
"insult me, scoff at me, overwhelm me with scorn! but come,
come. Let us make haste. It is to be to-morrow, I tell you.
The gibbet on the Gr¨¨ve, you know it? it stands always
ready. It is horrible! to see you ride in that tumbrel! Oh
mercy! Until now I have never felt the power of my love
for you.--Oh! follow me. You shall take your time to love
me after I have saved you. You shall hate me as long as you
will. But come. To-morrow! to-morrow! the gallows! your
execution! Oh! save yourself! spare me!"
He seized her arm, he was beside himself, he tried to drag
her away.
She fixed her eye intently on him.
"What has become of my Phoebus?"
"Ah!" said the priest, releasing her arm, "you are pitiless."
"What has become of Phoebus?" she repeated coldly.
"He is dead!" cried the priest.
"Dead!" said she, still icy and motionless "then why do
you talk to me of living?"
He was not listening to her.
"Oh! yes," said he, as though speaking to himself, "he
certainly must be dead. The blade pierced deeply. I believe
I touched his heart with the point. Oh! my very soul was at
the end of the dagger!"
The young girl flung herself upon him like a raging tigress,
and pushed him upon the steps of the staircase with
supernatural force.
"Begone, monster! Begone, assassin! Leave me to die!
May the blood of both of us make an eternal stain upon your
brow! Be thine, priest! Never! never! Nothing shall unite
us! not hell itself! Go, accursed man! Never!"
The priest had stumbled on the stairs. He silently disentangled
his feet from the folds of his robe, picked up his lantern
again, and slowly began the ascent of the steps which led
to the door; he opened the door and passed through it.
All at once, the young girl beheld his head reappear; it
wore a frightful expression, and he cried, hoarse with rage
and despair,--
"I tell you he is dead!"
She fell face downwards upon the floor, and there was no
longer any sound audible in the cell than the sob of the drop
of water which made the pool palpitate amid the darkness.
CHAPTER V.