“Messire,” said Gringoire, piteously, “it is, in fact, an amazing accoutrement. You see me no more comfortable in it than a cat coiffed with a calabash. ‘Tis very ill done, I am conscious, to expose messieurs the sergeants of the watch to the liability of cudgelling beneath this cassock the humerus of a Pythagorean philosopher. But what would you have, my reverend master? ‘tis the fault of my ancient jerkin, which abandoned me in cowardly wise, at the beginning of the winter, under the pretext that it was falling into tatters, and that it required repose in the basket of a rag-picker. What is one to do? Civilization has not yet arrived at the point where one can go stark naked, as ancient Diogenes wished. Add that a very cold wind was blowing, and ‘tis not in the month of January that one can successfully attempt to make humanity take this new step. This garment presented itself, I took it, and I left my ancient black smock, which, for a hermetic like myself, was far from being hermetically closed. Behold me then, in the garments of a stage-player, like Saint Genest. What would you have? ‘tis an eclipse. Apollo himself tended the flocks of Admetus.”
“‘Tis a fine profession that you are engaged in!” replied the archdeacon.
“I agree, my master, that ‘tis better to philosophize and poetize, to blow the flame in the furnace, or to receive it from carry cats on a shield.  But what would you have, messire? One must eat every day, and the finest Alexandrine verses are not worth a bit of Brie cheese. Now, I made for Madame Marguerite of Flanders, that famous epithalamium, as you know, and the city will not pay me, under the pretext that it was not excellent; as though one could give a tragedy of Sophocles for four crowns! Hence, I was on the point of dying with hunger. Happily, I found that I was rather strong in the jaw; so I said to this jaw,—perform some feats of strength and of equilibrium: nourish thyself. Ale te ipsam. A pack of beggars who have become my good friends, have taught me twenty sorts of herculean feats, and now I give to my teeth every evening the bread which they have earned during the day by the sweat of my brow. After all, concede, I grant that it is a sad employment for my intellectual faculties, and that man is not made to pass his life in beating the tambourine and biting chairs. But, reverend master, it is not sufficient to pass one’s life, one must earn the means for life.”
Dom Claude listened in silence. All at once his deep-set eye assumed so sagacious and penetrating an expression, that Gringoire felt himself, so to speak, searched to the bottom of the soul by that glance.
“Very good, Master Pierre; but how comes it that you are now in company with that gypsy dancer?”
“In faith!” said Gringoire, “‘tis because she is my wife and I am her husband.”
The priest’s gloomy eyes flashed into flame.
 Gringoire made haste to relate to him as succinctly as possible, all that the reader already knows, his adventure in the Court of Miracles and the broken-crock marriage. It appeared, moreover, that this marriage had led to no results whatever, and that each evening the gypsy girl cheated him of his nuptial right as on the first day. “‘Tis a mortification,” he said in conclusion, “but that is because I have had the misfortune to wed a virgin.”
“What do you mean?” demanded the archdeacon, who had been gradually appeased by this recital.
“‘Tis very difficult to explain,” replied the poet. “It is a superstition. My wife is, according to what an old thief, who is called among us the Duke of Egypt, has told me, a foundling or a lost child, which is the same thing. She wears on her neck an amulet which, it is affirmed, will cause her to meet her parents some day, but which will lose its virtue if the young girl loses hers. Hence it follows that both of us remain very virtuous.”
“So,” resumed Claude, whose brow cleared more and more, “you believe, Master Pierre, that this creature has not been approached by any man?”
“What would you have a man do, Dom Claude, as against a superstition? She has got that in her head. I assuredly esteem as a rarity this nunlike prudery which is preserved untamed amid those Bohemian girls who are so easily brought into subjection. But she has three things to protect her: the Duke of Egypt, who has taken her under his safeguard, reckoning, perchance, on selling her to some gay abbé; all his tribe, who hold her in singular veneration, like a Notre-Dame; and a certain tiny poignard, which the buxom dame always wears about her, in some nook, in spite of the ordinances of the provost, and which one causes to fly out into her hands by squeezing her waist. ‘Tis a proud wasp, I can tell you!”
The archdeacon pressed Gringoire with questions.
La Esmeralda, in the judgment of Gringoire, was an inoffensive and charming creature, pretty, with the exception of a pout which was peculiar to her; a naïve and passionate damsel, ignorant of everything and enthusiastic about everything; not yet aware of the difference between a man and a woman, even in her dreams; made like that; wild especially over dancing, noise, the open air; a sort of woman bee, with invisible wings on her feet, and living in a whirlwind. She owed this nature to the wandering life which she had always led. Gringoire had succeeded in learning that, while a mere child, she had traversed Spain and Catalonia, even to Sicily; he believed that she had even been taken by the caravan of Zingari, of which she formed a part, to the kingdom of Algiers, a country situated in Achaia, which country adjoins, on one side Albania and Greece; on the other, the Sicilian Sea, which is the road to Constantinople. The Bohemians, said Gringoire, were vassals of the King of Algiers, in his quality of chief of the White Moors. One thing is certain, that la Esmeralda had come to France while still very young, by way of Hungary. From all these countries the young girl had brought back fragments of queer jargons, songs, and strange ideas, which made her language as motley as her costume, half Parisian, half African. However, the people of the quarters which she frequented loved her for her gayety, her daintiness, her lively manners, her dances, and her songs. She believed herself to be hated, in all the city, by but two persons, of whom she often spoke in terror: the sacked nun of the Tour-Roland, a villanous recluse who cherished some secret grudge against these gypsies, and who cursed the poor dancer every time that the latter passed before her window; and a priest, who never met her without casting at her looks and words which frightened her.
The mention of this last circumstance disturbed the archdeacon greatly, though Gringoire paid no attention to his perturbation; to such an extent had two months sufficed to cause the heedless poet to forget the singular details of the evening on which he had met the gypsy, and the presence of the archdeacon in it all. Otherwise, the little dancer feared nothing; she did not tell fortunes, which protected her against those trials for magic which were so frequently instituted against gypsy women. And then, Gringoire held the position of her brother, if not of her husband. After all, the philosopher endured this sort of platonic marriage very patiently. It meant a shelter and bread at least. Every morning, he set out from the lair of the thieves, generally with the gypsy; he helped her make her collections of targes* and little blanks** in the squares; each evening he returned to the same roof with her, allowed her to bolt herself into her little chamber, and slept the sleep of the just. A very sweet existence, taking it all in all, he said, and well adapted to revery. And then, on his soul and conscience, the philosopher was not very sure that he was madly in love with the gypsy. He loved her goat almost as dearly. It was a charming animal, gentle, intelligent, clever; a learned goat. Nothing was more common in the Middle Ages than these learned animals, which amazed people greatly, and often led their instructors to the stake. But the witchcraft of the goat with the golden hoofs was a very innocent species of magic. Gringoire explained them to the archdeacon, whom these details seemed to interest deeply. In the majority of cases, it was sufficient to present the tambourine to the goat in such or such a manner, in order to obtain from him the trick desired. He had been trained to this by the gypsy, who possessed, in these delicate arts, so rare a talent that two months had sufficed to teach the goat to write, with movable letters, the word “Phoebus.”
* An ancient Burgundian coin. ** An ancient French coin.
“‘Phoebus!’” said the priest; “why ‘Phoebus’?”
“I know not,” replied Gringoire. “Perhaps it is a word which she believes to be endowed with some magic and secret virtue. She often repeats it in a low tone when she thinks that she is alone.”
“Are you sure,” persisted Claude, with his penetrating glance, “that it is only a word and not a name?”
“The name of whom?” said the poet.
“How should I know?” said the priest.
“This is what I imagine, messire. These Bohemians are something like Guebrs, and adore the sun. Hence, Phoebus.”
“That does not seem so clear to me as to you, Master Pierre.”
“After all, that does not concern me. Let her mumble her Phoebus at her pleasure. One thing is certain, that Djali loves me almost as much as he does her.”
“Who is Djali?”
“The goat.”
The archdeacon dropped his chin into his hand, and appeared to reflect for a moment. All at once he turned abruptly to Gringoire once more.
“And do you swear to me that you have not touched her?”
“Whom?” said Gringoire; “the goat?”
“No, that woman.”
“My wife? I swear to you that I have not.”
“You are often alone with her?”
“A good hour every evening.”
Porn Claude frowned.
“Oh! oh! Solus cum sola non cogitabuntur orare Pater Noster.”
“Upon my soul, I could say the Pater, and the Ave Maria, and the Credo in Deum patrem omnipotentem without her paying any more attention to me than a chicken to a church.”
“Swear to me, by the body of your mother,” repeated the archdeacon violently, “that you have not touched that creature with even the tip of your finger.”
“I will also swear it by the head of my father, for the two things have more affinity between them. But, my reverend master, permit me a question in my turn.”
“Speak, sir.”
“What concern is it of yours?”
The archdeacon’s pale face became as crimson as the cheek of a young girl. He remained for a moment without answering; then, with visible embarrassment,—
“Listen, Master Pierre Gringoire. You are not yet damned, so far as I know. I take an interest in you, and wish you well. Now the least contact with that Egyptian of the demon would make you the vassal of Satan. You know that ‘tis always the body which ruins the soul. Woe to you if you approach that woman! That is all.”
“I tried once,” said Gringoire, scratching his ear; “it was the first day: but I got stung.”
“You were so audacious, Master Pierre?” and the priest’s brow clouded over again.
“On another occasion,” continued the poet, with a smile, “I peeped through the keyhole, before going to bed, and I beheld the most delicious dame in her shift that ever made a bed creak under her bare foot.”
“Go to the devil!” cried the priest, with a terrible look; and, giving the amazed Gringoire a push on the shoulders, he plunged, with long strides, under the gloomiest arcades of the cathedral.
After the morning in the pillory, the neighbors of Notre-Dame thought they noticed that Quasimodo’s ardor for ringing had grown cool. Formerly, there had been peals for every occasion, long morning serenades, which lasted from prime to compline; peals from the belfry for a high mass, rich scales drawn over the smaller bells for a wedding, for a christening, and mingling in the air like a rich embroidery of all sorts of charming sounds. The old church, all vibrating and sonorous, was in a perpetual joy of bells. One was constantly conscious of the presence of a spirit of noise and caprice, who sang through all those mouths of brass. Now that spirit seemed to have departed; the cathedral seemed gloomy, and gladly remained silent; festivals and funerals had the simple peal, dry and bare, demanded by the ritual, nothing more. Of the double noise which constitutes a church, the organ within, the bell without, the organ alone remained. One would have said that there was no longer a musician in the belfry. Quasimodo was always there, nevertheless; what, then, had happened to him? Was it that the shame and despair of the pillory still lingered in the bottom of his heart, that the lashes of his tormentor’s whip reverberated unendingly in his soul, and that the sadness of such treatment had wholly extinguished in him even his passion for the bells? or was it that Marie had a rival in the heart of the bellringer of Notre-Dame, and that the great bell and her fourteen sisters were neglected for something more amiable and more beautiful?
It chanced that, in the year of grace 1482, Annunciation Day fell on Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of March. That day the air was so pure and light that Quasimodo felt some returning affection for his bells. He therefore ascended the northern tower while the beadle below was opening wide the doors of the church, which were then enormous panels of stout wood, covered with leather, bordered with nails of gilded iron, and framed in carvings “very artistically elaborated.”
On arriving in the lofty bell chamber, Quasimodo gazed for some time at the six bells and shook his head sadly, as though groaning over some foreign element which had interposed itself in his heart between them and him. But when he had set them to swinging, when he felt that cluster of bells moving under his hand, when he saw, for he did not hear it, the palpitating octave ascend and descend that sonorous scale, like a bird hopping from branch to branch; when the demon Music, that demon who shakes a sparkling bundle of strette, trills and arpeggios, had taken possession of the poor deaf man, he became happy once more, he forgot everything, and his heart expanding, made his face beam.
He went and came, he beat his hands together, he ran from rope to rope, he animated the six singers with voice and gesture, like the leader of an orchestra who is urging on intelligent musicians.
“Go on,” said he, “go on, go on, Gabrielle, pour out all thy noise into the Place, ‘tis a festival to-day. No laziness, Thibauld; thou art relaxing; go on, go on, then, art thou rusted, thou sluggard? That is well! quick! quick! let not thy clapper be seen! Make them all deaf like me. That’s it, Thibauld, bravely done! Guillaume! Guillaume! thou art the largest, and Pasquier is the smallest, and Pasquier does best. Let us wager that those who hear him will understand him better than they understand thee. Good! good! my Gabrielle, stoutly, more stoutly! Eli! what are you doing up aloft there, you two Moineaux (sparrows)? I do not see you making the least little shred of noise. What is the meaning of those beaks of copper which seem to be gaping when they should sing? Come, work now, ‘tis the Feast of the Annunciation. The sun is fine, the chime must be fine also. Poor Guillaume! thou art all out of breath, my big fellow!”
He was wholly absorbed in spurring on his bells, all six of which vied with each other in leaping and shaking their shining haunches, like a noisy team of Spanish mules, pricked on here and there by the apostrophes of the muleteer.
All at once, on letting his glance fall between the large slate scales which cover the perpendicular wall of the bell tower at a certain height, he beheld on the square a young girl, fantastically dressed, stop, spread out on the ground a carpet, on which a small goat took up its post, and a group of spectators collect around her. This sight suddenly changed the course of his ideas, and congealed his enthusiasm as a breath of air congeals melted rosin. He halted, turned his back to the bells, and crouched down behind the projecting roof of slate, fixing upon the dancer that dreamy, sweet, and tender look which had already astonished the archdeacon on one occasion. Meanwhile, the forgotten bells died away abruptly and all together, to the great disappointment of the lovers of bell ringing, who were listening in good faith to the peal from above the Pont du Change, and who went away dumbfounded, like a dog who has been offered a bone and given a stone.
It chanced that upon a fine morning in this same month of March, I think it was on Saturday the 29th, Saint Eustache’s day, our young friend the student, Jehan Frollo du Moulin, perceived, as he was dressing himself, that his breeches, which contained his purse, gave out no metallic ring. “Poor purse,” he said, drawing it from his fob, “what! not the smallest parisis! how cruelly the dice, beer-pots, and Venus have depleted thee! How empty, wrinkled, limp, thou art! Thou resemblest the throat of a fury! I ask you, Messer Cicero, and Messer Seneca, copies of whom, all dog’s-eared, I behold scattered on the floor, what profits it me to know, better than any governor of the mint, or any Jew on the Pont aux Changeurs, that a golden crown stamped with a crown is worth thirty-five unzains of twenty-five sous, and eight deniers parisis apiece, and that a crown stamped with a crescent is worth thirty-six unzains of twenty-six sous, six deniers tournois apiece, if I have not a single wretched black liard to risk on the double-six! Oh! Consul Cicero! this is no calamity from which one extricates one’s self with periphrases, quemadmodum, and verum enim vero!”
He dressed himself sadly. An idea had occurred to him as he laced his boots, but he rejected it at first; nevertheless, it returned, and he put on his waistcoat wrong side out, an evident sign of violent internal combat. At last he dashed his cap roughly on the floor, and exclaimed: “So much the worse! Let come of it what may. I am going to my brother! I shall catch a sermon, but I shall catch a crown.”
Then he hastily donned his long jacket with furred half-sleeves, picked up his cap, and went out like a man driven to desperation.
He descended the Rue de la Harpe toward the City. As he passed the Rue de la Huchette, the odor of those admirable spits, which were incessantly turning, tickled his olfactory apparatus, and he bestowed a loving glance toward the Cyclopean roast, which one day drew from the Franciscan friar, Calatagirone, this pathetic exclamation: Veramente, queste rotisserie sono cosa stupenda!* But Jehan had not the wherewithal to buy a breakfast, and he plunged, with a profound sigh, under the gateway of the Petit-Châtelet, that enormous double trefoil of massive towers which guarded the entrance to the City.
* Truly, these roastings are a stupendous thing!
He did not even take the trouble to cast a stone in passing, as was the usage, at the miserable statue of that Périnet Leclerc who had delivered up the Paris of Charles VI. to the English, a crime which his effigy, its face battered with stones and soiled with mud, expiated for three centuries at the corner of the Rue de la Harpe and the Rue de Buci, as in an eternal pillory.
The Petit-Pont traversed, the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève crossed, Jehan de Molendino found himself in front of Notre-Dame. Then indecision seized upon him once more, and he paced for several minutes round the statue of M. Legris, repeating to himself with anguish: “The sermon is sure, the crown is doubtful.”
He stopped a beadle who emerged from the cloister,—“Where is monsieur the archdeacon of Josas?”
“I believe that he is in his secret cell in the tower,” said the beadle; “I should advise you not to disturb him there, unless you come from some one like the pope or monsieur the king.”
Jehan clapped his hands.
“Bécliable! here’s a magnificent chance to see the famous sorcery cell!”
This reflection having brought him to a decision, he plunged resolutely into the small black doorway, and began the ascent of the spiral of Saint-Gilles, which leads to the upper stories of the tower. “I am going to see,” he said to himself on the way. “By the ravens of the Holy Virgin! it must needs be a curious thing, that cell which my reverend brother hides so secretly!  Bédieu! I care no more for the philosopher’s stone than for a pebble, and I would rather find over his furnace an omelette of Easter eggs and bacon, than the biggest philosopher’s stone in the world.”’
On arriving at the gallery of slender columns, he took breath for a moment, and swore against the interminable staircase by I know not how many million cartloads of devils; then he resumed his ascent through the narrow door of the north tower, now closed to the public. Several moments after passing the bell chamber, he came upon a little landing-place, built in a lateral niche, and under the vault of a low, pointed door, whose enormous lock and strong iron bars he was enabled to see through a loophole pierced in the opposite circular wall of the staircase. Persons desirous of visiting this door at the present day will recognize it by this inscription engraved in white letters on the black wall: “J’ADORE CORALIE, 1823. SIGNE UGENE.” “Signé” stands in the text.
“Ugh!” said the scholar; “‘tis here, no doubt.”
The key was in the lock, the door was very close to him; he gave it a gentle push and thrust his head through the opening.
The reader cannot have failed to turn over the admirable works of Rembrandt, that Shakespeare of painting. Amid so many marvellous engravings, there is one etching in particular, which is supposed to represent Doctor Faust, and which it is impossible to contemplate without being dazzled. It represents a gloomy cell; in the centre is a table loaded with hideous objects; skulls, spheres, alembics, compasses, hieroglyphic parchments. The doctor is before this table clad in his large coat and covered to the very eyebrows with his furred cap. He is visible only to his waist. He has half risen from his immense arm-chair, his clenched fists rest on the table, and he is gazing with curiosity and terror at a large luminous circle, formed of magic letters, which gleams from the wall beyond, like the solar spectrum in a dark chamber. This cabalistic sun seems to tremble before the eye, and fills the wan cell with its mysterious radiance. It is horrible and it is beautiful.
Something very similar to Faust’s cell presented itself to Jehan’s view, when he ventured his head through the half-open door. It also was a gloomy and sparsely lighted retreat. There also stood a large arm-chair and a large table, compasses, alembics, skeletons of animals suspended from the ceiling, a globe rolling on the floor, hippocephali mingled promiscuously with drinking cups, in which quivered leaves of gold, skulls placed upon vellum checkered with figures and characters, huge manuscripts piled up wide open, without mercy on the cracking corners of the parchment; in short, all the rubbish of science, and everywhere on this confusion dust and spiders’ webs; but there was no circle of luminous letters, no doctor in an ecstasy contemplating the flaming vision, as the eagle gazes upon the sun.
Nevertheless, the cell was not deserted. A man was seated in the arm-chair, and bending over the table. Jehan, to whom his back was turned, could see only his shoulders and the back of his skull; but he had no difficulty in recognizing that bald head, which nature had provided with an eternal tonsure, as though desirous of marking, by this external symbol, the archdeacon’s irresistible clerical vocation.
Jehan accordingly recognized his brother; but the door had been opened so softly, that nothing warned Dom Claude of his presence. The inquisitive scholar took advantage of this circumstance to examine the cell for a few moments at his leisure. A large furnace, which he had not at first observed, stood to the left of the arm-chair, beneath the window. The ray of light which penetrated through this aperture made its way through a spider’s circular web, which tastefully inscribed its delicate rose in the arch of the window, and in the centre of which the insect architect hung motionless, like the hub of this wheel of lace. Upon the furnace were accumulated in disorder, all sorts of vases, earthenware bottles, glass retorts, and mattresses of charcoal. Jehan observed, with a sigh, that there was no frying-pan. “How cold the kitchen utensils are!” he said to himself.
In fact, there was no fire in the furnace, and it seemed as though none had been lighted for a long time. A glass mask, which Jehan noticed among the utensils of alchemy, and which served no doubt, to protect the archdeacon’s face when he was working over some substance to be dreaded, lay in one corner covered with dust and apparently forgotten. Beside it lay a pair of bellows no less dusty, the upper side of which bore this inscription incrusted in copper letters: SPIRA SPERA.
Other inscriptions were written, in accordance with the fashion of the hermetics, in great numbers on the walls; some traced with ink, others engraved with a metal point. There were, moreover, Gothic letters, Hebrew letters, Greek letters, and Roman letters, pell-mell; the inscriptions overflowed at haphazard, on top of each other, the more recent effacing the more ancient, and all entangled with each other, like the branches in a thicket, like pikes in an affray. It was, in fact, a strangely confused mingling of all human philosophies, all reveries, all human wisdom. Here and there one shone out from among the rest like a banner among lance heads. Generally, it was a brief Greek or Roman device, such as the Middle Ages knew so well how to formulate.—Unde? Inde?—Homo homini monstrurn-Ast’ra, castra, nomen, numen.—Meya Bibklov, ueya xaxov.—Sapere aude. Fiat ubi vult—etc.; sometimes a word devoid of all apparent sense, Avayxoqpayia, which possibly contained a bitter allusion to the regime of the cloister; sometimes a simple maxim of clerical discipline formulated in a regular hexameter Coelestem dominum terrestrem dicite dominum. There was also Hebrew jargon, of which Jehan, who as yet knew but little Greek, understood nothing; and all were traversed in every direction by stars, by figures of men or animals, and by intersecting triangles; and this contributed not a little to make the scrawled wall of the cell resemble a sheet of paper over which a monkey had drawn back and forth a pen filled with ink.
The whole chamber, moreover, presented a general aspect of abandonment and dilapidation; and the bad state of the utensils induced the supposition that their owner had long been distracted from his labors by other preoccupations. Meanwhile, this master, bent over a vast manuscript, ornamented with fantastical illustrations, appeared to be tormented by an idea which incessantly mingled with his meditations. That at least was Jehan’s idea, when he heard him exclaim, with the thoughtful breaks of a dreamer thinking aloud,—
“Yes, Manou said it, and Zoroaster taught it! the sun is born from fire, the moon from the sun; fire is the soul of the universe; its elementary atoms pour forth and flow incessantly upon the world through infinite channels! At the point where these currents intersect each other in the heavens, they produce light; at their points of intersection on earth, they produce gold. Light, gold; the same thing! From fire to the concrete state. The difference between the visible and the palpable, between the fluid and the solid in the same substance, between water and ice, nothing more. These are no dreams; it is the general law of nature. But what is one to do in order to extract from science the secret of this general law? What! this light which inundates my hand is gold! These same atoms dilated in accordance with a certain law need only be condensed in accordance with another law. How is it to be done? Some have fancied by burying a ray of sunlight, Averroës,—yes, ‘tis Averroës,—Averroës buried one under the first pillar on the left of the sanctuary of the Koran, in the great Mahometan mosque of Cordova; but the vault cannot be opened for the purpose of ascertaining whether the operation has succeeded, until after the lapse of eight thousand years.
“The devil!” said Jehan, to himself, “‘tis a long while to wait for a crown!”
“Others have thought,” continued the dreamy archdeacon, “that it would be better worth while to operate upon a ray of Sirius. But ‘tis exceeding hard to obtain this ray pure, because of the simultaneous presence of other stars whose rays mingle with it. Flamel esteemed it more simple to operate upon terrestrial fire. Flamel! there’s predestination in the name! Flamma! yes, fire. All lies there. The diamond is contained in the carbon, gold is in the fire. But how to extract it? Magistri affirms that there are certain feminine names, which possess a charm so sweet and mysterious, that it suffices to pronounce them during the operation. Let us read what Manon says on the matter: ‘Where women are honored, the divinities are rejoiced; where they are despised, it is useless to pray to God. The mouth of a woman is constantly pure; it is a running water, it is a ray of sunlight. The name of a woman should be agreeable, sweet, fanciful; it should end in long vowels, and resemble words of benediction.’ Yes, the sage is right; in truth, Maria, Sophia, la Esmeral—Damnation! always that thought!”
And he closed the book violently.
He passed his hand over his brow, as though to brush away the idea which assailed him; then he took from the table a nail and a small hammer, whose handle was curiously painted with cabalistic letters.
“For some time,” he said with a bitter smile, “I have failed in all my experiments! one fixed idea possesses me, and sears my brain like fire. I have not even been able to discover the secret of Cassiodorus, whose lamp burned without wick and without oil. A simple matter, nevertheless—”
“The deuce!” muttered Jehan in his beard.
“Hence,” continued the priest, “one wretched thought is sufficient to render a man weak and beside himself! Oh! how Claude Pernelle would laugh at me. She who could not turn Nicholas Flamel aside, for one moment, from his pursuit of the great work! What! I hold in my hand the magic hammer of Zéchiélé! at every blow dealt by the formidable rabbi, from the depths of his cell, upon this nail, that one of his enemies whom he had condemned, were he a thousand leagues away, was buried a cubit deep in the earth which swallowed him. The King of France himself, in consequence of once having inconsiderately knocked at the door of the thermaturgist, sank to the knees through the pavement of his own Paris. This took place three centuries ago. Well! I possess the hammer and the nail, and in my hands they are utensils no more formidable than a club in the hands of a maker of edge tools. And yet all that is required is to find the magic word which Zéchiélé pronounced when he struck his nail.”
“What nonsense!” thought Jehan.
“Let us see, let us try!” resumed the archdeacon briskly. “Were I to succeed, I should behold the blue spark flash from the head of the nail. Emen-Hétan! Emen-Hétan! That’s not it. Sigéani! Sigéani! May this nail open the tomb to any one who bears the name of Phoebus!  Always and eternally the same idea!”
And he flung away the hammer in a rage. Then he sank down so deeply on the arm-chair and the table, that Jehan lost him from view behind the great pile of manuscripts. For the space of several minutes, all that he saw was his fist convulsively clenched on a book. Suddenly, Dom Claude sprang up, seized a compass and engraved in silence upon the wall in capital letters, this Greek word
ANANKE.
“My brother is mad,” said Jehan to himself; “it would have been far more simple to write Fatum, every one is not obliged to know Greek.”

The student watched his brother with surprise. He did not know, he who wore his heart on his sleeve, he who observed only the good old law of Nature in the world, he who allowed his passions to follow their inclinations, and in whom the lake of great emotions was always dry, so freely did he let it off each day by fresh drains,—he did not know with what fury the sea of human passions ferments and boils when all egress is denied to it, how it accumulates, how it swells, how it overflows, how it hollows out the heart; how it breaks in inward sobs, and dull convulsions, until it has rent its dikes and burst its bed. The austere and glacial envelope of Claude Frollo, that cold surface of steep and inaccessible virtue, had always deceived Jehan. The merry scholar had never dreamed that there was boiling lava, furious and profound, beneath the snowy brow of AEtna.
We do not know whether he suddenly became conscious of these things; but, giddy as he was, he understood that he had seen what he ought not to have seen, that he had just surprised the soul of his elder brother in one of its most secret altitudes, and that Claude must not be allowed to know it. Seeing that the archdeacon had fallen back into his former immobility, he withdrew his head very softly, and made some noise with his feet outside the door, like a person who has just arrived and is giving warning of his approach.
“Enter!” cried the archdeacon, from the interior of his cell; “I was expecting you. I left the door unlocked expressly; enter Master Jacques!”
The scholar entered boldly. The archdeacon, who was very much embarrassed by such a visit in such a place, trembled in his arm-chair.
Dom Claude’s visage had resumed its severe expression.
“What are you come for?”
“Brother,” replied the scholar, making an effort to assume a decent, pitiful, and modest mien, and twirling his cap in his hands with an innocent air; “I am come to ask of you—”
“What?”
“A little lecture on morality, of which I stand greatly in need,” Jehan did not dare to add aloud,—“and a little money of which I am in still greater need.” This last member of his phrase remained unuttered.
“Monsieur,” said the archdeacon, in a cold tone, “I am greatly displeased with you.”
“Alas!” sighed the scholar.
Dom Claude made his arm-chair describe a quarter circle, and gazed intently at Jehan.
“I am very glad to see you.”
This was a formidable exordium. Jehan braced himself for a rough encounter.
 What affray was that in which you bruised with a cudgel a little vicomte, Albert de Ramonchamp?”
“Oh!” said Jehan, “a vast thing that! A malicious page amused himself by splashing the scholars, by making his horse gallop through the mire!”
“Who,” pursued the archdeacon, “is that Mahiet Fargel, whose gown you have torn? Tunicam dechiraverunt, saith the complaint.”
“Ah bah! a wretched cap of a Montaigu! Isn’t that it?”
“The complaint says tunicam and not cappettam. Do you know Latin?”
Jehan did not reply.
“Yes,” pursued the priest shaking his head, “that is the state of learning and letters at the present day. The Latin tongue is hardly understood, Syriac is unknown, Greek so odious that ‘tis accounted no ignorance in the most learned to skip a Greek word without reading it, and to say, ‘Groecum est non legitur.’”
The scholar raised his eyes boldly. “Monsieur my brother, doth it please you that I shall explain in good French vernacular that Greek word which is written yonder on the wall?”
“What word?”
“‘ANANKE.”
A slight flush spread over the cheeks of the priest with their high bones, like the puff of smoke which announces on the outside the secret commotions of a volcano. The student hardly noticed it.
“Well, Jehan,” stammered the elder brother with an effort, “What is the meaning of yonder word?”
“FATE.”
Dom Claude turned pale again, and the scholar pursued carelessly.
“And that word below it, graved by the same hand, ‘Ayáyvela, signifies ‘impurity.’ You see that people do know their Greek.”
And the archdeacon remained silent. This Greek lesson had rendered him thoughtful.
Master Jehan, who possessed all the artful ways of a spoiled child, judged that the moment was a favorable one in which to risk his request. Accordingly, he assumed an extremely soft tone and began,—
“My good brother, do you hate me to such a degree as to look savagely upon me because of a few mischievous cuffs and blows distributed in a fair war to a pack of lads and brats, quibusdam marmosetis? You see, good Brother Claude, that people know their Latin.”
But all this caressing hypocrisy did not have its usual effect on the severe elder brother. Cerberus did not bite at the honey cake. The archdeacon’s brow did not lose a single wrinkle.
“What are you driving at?” he said dryly.
“Well, in point of fact, this!” replied Jehan bravely, “I stand in need of money.”
At this audacious declaration, the archdeacon’s visage assumed a thoroughly pedagogical and paternal expression.
“You know, Monsieur Jehan, that our fief of Tirechappe, putting the direct taxes and the rents of the nine and twenty houses in a block, yields only nine and thirty livres, eleven sous, six deniers, Parisian. It is one half more than in the time of the brothers Paclet, but it is not much.”
“I need money,” said Jehan stoically.
“You know that the official has decided that our twenty-one houses should he moved full into the fief of the Bishopric, and that we could redeem this homage only by paying the reverend bishop two marks of silver gilt of the price of six livres parisis. Now, these two marks I have not yet been able to get together. You know it.”
“I know that I stand in need of money,” repeated Jehan for the third time.
“And what are you going to do with it?”
This question caused a flash of hope to gleam before Jehan’s eyes. He resumed his dainty, caressing air.
 There is no intention of cutting a dash in the taverns with your unzains, and of strutting about the streets of Paris in a caparison of gold brocade, with a lackey, cum meo laquasio. No, brother, ‘tis for a good work.”
“What good work?” demanded Claude, somewhat surprised.
“Two of my friends wish to purchase an outfit for the infant of a poor Haudriette widow. It is a charity. It will cost three forms, and I should like to contribute to it.”
“What are names of your two friends?”
“Pierre l’Assommeur and Baptiste Croque-Oison*.”
* Peter the Slaughterer; and Baptist Crack-Gosling.
“Hum,” said the archdeacon; “those are names as fit for a good work as a catapult for the chief altar.”
It is certain that Jehan had made a very bad choice of names for his two friends. He realized it too late.
“And then,” pursued the sagacious Claude, “what sort of an infant’s outfit is it that is to cost three forms, and that for the child of a Haudriette? Since when have the Haudriette widows taken to having babes in swaddling-clothes?”
Jehan broke the ice once more.
“Eh, well! yes! I need money in order to go and see Isabeau la Thierrye to-night; in the Val-d’ Amour!”
“Impure wretch!” exclaimed the priest.
“Avayveia!” said Jehan.
This quotation, which the scholar borrowed with malice, perchance, from the wall of the cell, produced a singular effect on the archdeacon. He bit his lips and his wrath was drowned in a crimson flush.
“Begone,” he said to Jehan. “I am expecting some one.”
The scholar made one more effort.
“Brother Claude, give me at least one little parisis to buy something to eat.”
“How far have you gone in the Decretals of Gratian?” demanded Dom Claude.
“I have lost my copy books.
“Where are you in your Latin humanities?”
“My copy of Horace has been stolen.”
“Where are you in Aristotle?”
“I’ faith! brother what father of the church is it, who says that the errors of heretics have always had for their lurking place the thickets of Aristotle’s metaphysics? A plague on Aristotle! I care not to tear my religion on his metaphysics.”
“Young man,” resumed the archdeacon, “at the king’s last entry, there was a young gentleman, named Philippe de Comines, who wore embroidered on the housings of his horse this device, upon which I counsel you to meditate: Qui non laborat, non manducet.”

All at once he turned round to Claude with the agile quickness of a wagtail.
“So, my good brother, you refuse me a sou parisis, wherewith to buy a crust at a baker’s shop?”
“Qui non laborat, non manducet.”
At this response of the inflexible archdeacon, Jehan hid his head in his hands, like a woman sobbing, and exclaimed with an expression of despair: “Orororororoi.”
“What is the meaning of this, sir?” demanded Claude, surprised at this freak.
“What indeed!” said the scholar; and he lifted to Claude his impudent eyes into which he had just thrust his fists in order to communicate to them the redness of tears; “‘tis Greek! ‘tis an anapaest of AEschylus which expresses grief perfectly.”
And here he burst into a laugh so droll and violent that it made the archdeacon smile. It was Claude’s fault, in fact: why had he so spoiled that child?
“Oh! good Brother Claude,” resumed Jehan, emboldened by this smile, “look at my worn out boots. Is there a cothurnus in the world more tragic than these boots, whose soles are hanging out their tongues?”
The archdeacon promptly returned to his original severity.
 “I will learn Gratian by heart, I will believe firmly in God, I will be a regular Pythagoras of science and virtue. But one little parisis, in mercy! Would you have famine bite me with its jaws which are gaping in front of me, blacker, deeper, and more noisome than a Tartarus or the nose of a monk?”
Dom Claude shook his wrinkled head: “Qui non laborat—”
Jehan did not allow him to finish.
“Well,” he exclaimed, “to the devil then! Long live joy! I will live in the tavern, I will fight, I will break pots and I will go and see the wenches.” And thereupon, he hurled his cap at the wall, and snapped his fingers like castanets.
The archdeacon surveyed him with a gloomy air.
“Jehan, you have no soul.”
“In that case, according to Epicurius, I lack a something made of another something which has no name.”
“Jehan, you must think seriously of amending your ways.”
“Oh, come now,” cried the student, gazing in turn at his brother and the alembics on the furnace, “everything is preposterous here, both ideas and bottles!”
“Jehan, you are on a very slippery downward road. Do you know whither you are going?”
“To the wine-shop,” said Jehan.
“The wine-shop leads to the pillory.”
“‘Tis as good a lantern as any other, and perchance with that one, Diogenes would have found his man.”
“The pillory leads to the gallows.”
“The gallows is a balance which has a man at one end and the whole earth at the other. ‘Tis fine to be the man.”
“The gallows leads to hell.”
“‘Tis a big fire.”.
“Jehan, Jehan, the end will be bad.”
“The beginning will have been good.”
At that moment, the sound of a footstep was heard on the staircase.
“Silence!” said the archdeacon, laying his finger on his mouth, “here is Master Jacques. Listen, Jehan,” he added, in a low voice; “have a care never to speak of what you shall have seen or heard here. Hide yourself quickly under the furnace, and do not breathe.”
The scholar concealed himself; just then a happy idea occurred to him.
“By the way, Brother Claude, a form for not breathing.”
“Silence! I promise.”
“You must give it to me.”
“Take it, then!” said the archdeacon angrily, flinging his purse at him.
Jehan darted under the furnace again, and the door opened.
The personage who entered wore a black gown and a gloomy mien. The first point which struck the eye of our Jehan (who, as the reader will readily surmise, had ensconced himself in his nook in such a manner as to enable him to see and hear everything at his good pleasure) was the perfect sadness of the garments and the visage of this new-corner. There was, nevertheless, some sweetness diffused over that face, but it was the sweetness of a cat or a judge, an affected, treacherous sweetness. He was very gray and wrinkled, and not far from his sixtieth year, his eyes blinked, his eyebrows were white, his lip pendulous, and his hands large. When Jehan saw that it was only this, that is to say, no doubt a physician or a magistrate, and that this man had a nose very far from his mouth, a sign of stupidity, he nestled down in his hole, in despair at being obliged to pass an indefinite time in such an uncomfortable attitude, and in such bad company.
The archdeacon, in the meantime, had not even risen to receive this personage. He had made the latter a sign to seat himself on a stool near the door, and, after several moments of a silence which appeared to be a continuation of a preceding meditation, he said to him in a rather patronizing way, “Good day, Master Jacques.”
“Greeting, master,” replied the man in black.
There was in the two ways in which “Master Jacques” was pronounced on the one hand, and the “master” by preeminence on the other, the difference between monseigneur and monsieur, between domine and domne. It was evidently the meeting of a teacher and a disciple.
“Well!” resumed the archdeacon, after a fresh silence which Master Jacques took good care not to disturb, “how are you succeeding?”
“Alas! master,” said the other, with a sad smile, “I am still seeking the stone. Plenty of ashes. But not a spark of gold.”
Dom Claude made a gesture of impatience. “I am not talking to you of that, Master Jacques Charmolue, but of the trial of your magician. Is it not Marc Cenaine that you call him? the butler of the Court of Accounts? Does he confess his witchcraft?  That man is a stone. We might have him boiled in the Marché aux Pourceaux, before he would say anything. Nevertheless, we are sparing nothing for the sake of getting at the truth; he is already thoroughly dislocated, we are applying all the herbs of Saint John’s day; as saith the old comedian Plautus,—
‘Advorsum stimulos, laminas, crucesque, compedesque, Nerros, catenas, carceres, numellas, pedicas, boias.’
Nothing answers; that man is terrible. I am at my wit’s end over him.”
“You have found nothing new in his house?”
“I’ faith, yes,” said Master Jacques, fumbling in his pouch; “this parchment. There are words in it which we cannot comprehend. The criminal advocate, Monsieur Philippe Lheulier, nevertheless, knows a little Hebrew, which he learned in that matter of the Jews of the Rue Kantersten, at Brussels.”
So saying, Master Jacques unrolled a parchment. “Give it here,” said the archdeacon.  “‘Emen-Hétan!’ ‘Tis the cry of the vampires when they arrive at the witches’ sabbath. Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso!  Hax, pax, max! that refers to medicine. A formula against the bite of mad dogs. Master Jacques! you are procurator to the king in the Ecclesiastical Courts: this parchment is abominable.”
“We will put the man to the torture once more. Here again,” added Master Jacques, fumbling afresh in his pouch, “is something that we have found at Marc Cenaine’s house.”
It was a vessel belonging to the same family as those which covered Dom Claude’s furnace.
“Ah!” said the archdeacon, “a crucible for alchemy.”
“I will confess to you,” continued Master Jacques, with his timid and awkward smile, “that I have tried it over the furnace, but I have succeeded no better than with my own.”
The archdeacon began an examination of the vessel. “What has he engraved on his crucible? Och! och! the word which expels fleas! That Marc Cenaine is an ignoramus! I verily believe that you will never make gold with this! ‘Tis good to set in your bedroom in summer and that is all!”
“Since we are talking about errors,” said the king’s procurator, “I have just been studying the figures on the portal below before ascending hither; is your reverence quite sure that the opening of the work of physics is there portrayed on the side towards the Hôtel-Dieu, and that among the seven nude figures which stand at the feet of Notre-Dame, that which has wings on his heels is Mercurius?”
“Yes,” replied the priest; “‘tis Augustin Nypho who writes it, that Italian doctor who had a bearded demon who acquainted him with all things. However, we will descend, and I will explain it to you with the text before us.”
“Thanks, master,” said Charmolue, bowing to the earth. “By the way, I was on the point of forgetting. When doth it please you that I shall apprehend the little sorceress?”
“What sorceress?”
“That gypsy girl you know, who comes every day to dance on the church square, in spite of the official’s prohibition! She hath a demoniac goat with horns of the devil, which reads, which writes, which knows mathematics like Picatrix, and which would suffice to hang all Bohemia.  A pretty creature, on my soul, that dancer! The handsomest black eyes! Two Egyptian carbuncles! When shall we begin?”
The archdeacon was excessively pale.
“I will tell you that hereafter,” he stammered, in a voice that was barely articulate; then he resumed with an effort, “Busy yourself with Marc Cenaine.”
“Be at ease,” said Charmolue with a smile; “I’ll buckle him down again for you on the leather bed when I get home. But ‘tis a devil of a man; he wearies even Pierrat Torterue himself, who hath hands larger than my own. As that good Plautus saith,—
‘Nudus vinctus, centum pondo, es quando pendes per pedes.’
The torture of the wheel and axle! ‘Tis the most effectual! He shall taste it!”
Dom Claude seemed absorbed in gloomy abstraction. He turned to Charmolue,—
“Master Pierrat—Master Jacques, I mean, busy yourself with Marc Cenaine.”
“Yes, yes, Dom Claude. Poor man! he will have suffered like Mummol. What an idea to go to the witches’ sabbath! a butler of the Court of Accounts, who ought to know Charlemagne’s text; Stryga vel masea!—In the matter of the little girl,—Smelarda, as they call her,—I will await your orders. Ah! as we pass through the portal, you will explain to me also the meaning of the gardener painted in relief, which one sees as one enters the church. Is it not the Sower? Hé! master, of what are you thinking, pray?”
Dom Claude, buried in his own thoughts, no longer listened to him. Charmolue, following the direction of his glance, perceived that it was fixed mechanically on the great spider’s web which draped the window. At that moment, a bewildered fly which was seeking the March sun, flung itself through the net and became entangled there. On the agitation of his web, the enormous spider made an abrupt move from his central cell, then with one bound, rushed upon the fly, which he folded together with his fore antennae, while his hideous proboscis dug into the victim’s bead. “Poor fly!” said the king’s procurator in the ecclesiastical court; and he raised his hand to save it. The archdeacon, as though roused with a start, withheld his arm with convulsive violence.
“Master Jacques,” he cried, “let fate take its course!” The procurator wheeled round in affright; it seemed to him that pincers of iron had clutched his arm. The priest’s eye was staring, wild, flaming, and remained riveted on the horrible little group of the spider and the fly.
“Oh, yes!” continued the priest, in a voice which seemed to proceed from the depths of his being, “behold here a symbol of all. She flies, she is joyous, she is just born; she seeks the spring, the open air, liberty: oh, yes! but let her come in contact with the fatal network, and the spider issues from it, the hideous spider! Poor dancer! poor, predestined fly! Let things take their course, Master Jacques, ‘tis fate! Alas! Claude, thou art the spider! Claude, thou art the fly also! Thou wert flying towards learning, light, the sun. Thou hadst no other care than to reach the open air, the full daylight of eternal truth; but in precipitating thyself towards the dazzling window which opens upon the other world,—upon the world of brightness, intelligence, and science—blind fly! senseless, learned man! thou hast not perceived that subtle spider’s web, stretched by destiny betwixt the light and thee—thou hast flung thyself headlong into it, and now thou art struggling with head broken and mangled wings between the iron antennae of fate! Master Jacques! Master Jacques! let the spider work its will!”
“I assure you,” said Charmolue, who was gazing at him without comprehending him, “that I will not touch it. But release my arm, master, for pity’s sake! You have a hand like a pair of pincers.”
The archdeacon did not hear him. “Oh, madman!” he went on, without removing his gaze from the window. “And even couldst thou have broken through that formidable web, with thy gnat’s wings, thou believest that thou couldst have reached the light? Alas! that pane of glass which is further on, that transparent obstacle, that wall of crystal, harder than brass, which separates all philosophies from the truth, how wouldst thou have overcome it? Oh, vanity of science! how many wise men come flying from afar, to dash their heads against thee! How many systems vainly fling themselves buzzing against that eternal pane!”
He became silent. These last ideas, which had gradually led him back from himself to science, appeared to have calmed him.  I am impatient to succeed.”
The archdeacon shook his head, with a bitter smile. “Master Jacques read Michel Psellus’ ‘Dialogus de Energia et Operatione Daemonum.’ What we are doing is not wholly innocent.”
“Speak lower, master! I have my suspicions of it,” said Jacques Charmolue. “But one must practise a bit of hermetic science when one is only procurator of the king in the ecclesiastical court, at thirty crowns tournois a year. Only speak low.”
At that moment the sound of jaws in the act of mastication, which proceeded from beneath the furnace, struck Charmolue’s uneasy ear.
“What’s that?” he inquired.
It was the scholar, who, ill at ease, and greatly bored in his hiding-place, had succeeded in discovering there a stale crust and a triangle of mouldy cheese, and had set to devouring the whole without ceremony, by way of consolation and breakfast. As he was very hungry, he made a great deal of noise, and he accented each mouthful strongly, which startled and alarmed the procurator.
“‘Tis a cat of mine,” said the archdeacon, quickly, “who is regaling herself under there with a mouse.”
This explanation satisfied Charmolue.
“In fact, master,” he replied, with a respectful smile, “all great philosophers have their familiar animal. You know what Servius saith: ‘Nullus enim locus sine genio est,—for there is no place that hath not its spirit.’”
But Dom Claude, who stood in terror of some new freak on the part of Jehan, reminded his worthy disciple that they had some figures on the façade to study together, and the two quitted the cell, to the accompaniment of a great “ouf!” from the scholar, who began to seriously fear that his knee would acquire the imprint of his chin.
“Te Deum Laudamus!” exclaimed Master Jehan, creeping out from his hole, “the screech-owls have departed. Och! och! Hax! pax! max! fleas! mad dogs! the devil! I have had enough of their conversation!  And mouldy cheese to boot! Come on! Let us descend, take the big brother’s purse and convert all these coins into bottles!”
He cast a glance of tenderness and admiration into the interior of the precious pouch, readjusted his toilet, rubbed up his boots, dusted his poor half sleeves, all gray with ashes, whistled an air, indulged in a sportive pirouette, looked about to see whether there were not something more in the cell to take, gathered up here and there on the furnace some amulet in glass which might serve to bestow, in the guise of a trinket, on Isabeau la Thierrye, finally pushed open the door which his brother had left unfastened, as a last indulgence, and which he, in his turn, left open as a last piece of malice, and descended the circular staircase, skipping like a bird.
In the midst of the gloom of the spiral staircase, he elbowed something which drew aside with a growl; he took it for granted that it was Quasimodo, and it struck him as so droll that he descended the remainder of the staircase holding his sides with laughter. On emerging upon the Place, he laughed yet more heartily.
He stamped his foot when he found himself on the ground once again. “Oh!” said he, “good and honorable pavement of Paris, cursed staircase, fit to put the angels of Jacob’s ladder out of breath! What was I thinking of to thrust myself into that stone gimlet which pierces the sky; all for the sake of eating bearded cheese, and looking at the bell-towers of Paris through a hole in the wall!”
He advanced a few paces, and caught sight of the two screech owls, that is to say, Dom Claude and Master Jacques Charmolue, absorbed in contemplation before a carving on the façade. He approached them on tiptoe, and heard the archdeacon say in a low tone to Charmolue: “‘Twas Guillaume de Paris who caused a Job to be carved upon this stone of the hue of lapis-lazuli, gilded on the edges. Job represents the philosopher’s stone, which must also be tried and martyrized in order to become perfect, as saith Raymond Lulle: Sub conservatione formoe speciftoe salva anima.”
“That makes no difference to me,” said Jehan, “‘tis I who have the purse.”
At that moment he heard a powerful and sonorous voice articulate behind him a formidable series of oaths. “Sang Dieu! Ventre-.Dieu! Bédieu! Corps de Dieu! Nombril de Belzebuth! Nom d’un pape! Come et tonnerre.”
“Upon my soul!” exclaimed Jehan, “that can only be my friend, Captain Phoebus!”
This name of Phoebus reached the ears of the archdeacon at the moment when he was explaining to the king’s procurator the dragon which is hiding its tail in a bath, from which issue smoke and the head of a king. Dom Claude started, interrupted himself and, to the great amazement of Charmolue, turned round and beheld his brother Jehan accosting a tall officer at the door of the Gondelaurier mansion.
It was, in fact, Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers. He was backed up against a corner of the house of his betrothed and swearing like a heathen.
“By my faith! Captain Phoebus,” said Jehan, taking him by the hand, “you are cursing with admirable vigor.”
“Horns and thunder!” replied the captain.
“Horns and thunder yourself!” replied the student. “Come now, fair captain, whence comes this overflow of fine words?”
“Pardon me, good comrade Jehan,” exclaimed Phoebus, shaking his hand, “a horse going at a gallop cannot halt short. Now, I was swearing at a hard gallop. I have just been with those prudes, and when I come forth, I always find my throat full of curses, I must spit them out or strangle, ventre et tonnerre!”
“Will you come and drink?” asked the scholar.
This proposition calmed the captain.
“I’m willing, but I have no money.”
“But I have!”
“Bah! let’s see it!”
Jehan spread out the purse before the captain’s eyes, with dignity and simplicity. Meanwhile, the archdeacon, who had abandoned the dumbfounded Charmolue where he stood, had approached them and halted a few paces distant, watching them without their noticing him, so deeply were they absorbed in contemplation of the purse.
Phoebus exclaimed: “A purse in your pocket, Jehan! ‘tis the moon in a bucket of water, one sees it there but ‘tis not there. There is nothing but its shadow. Pardieu! let us wager that these are pebbles!”
Jehan replied coldly: “Here are the pebbles wherewith I pave my fob!”
And without adding another word, he emptied the purse on a neighboring post, with the air of a Roman saving his country.
“True God!” muttered Phoebus, “targes, big-blanks, little blanks, mailles,* every two worth one of Tournay, farthings of Paris, real eagle liards! ‘Tis dazzling!”
* An ancient copper coin, the forty-fourth part of a sou or the twelfth part of a farthing.
Jehan remained dignified and immovable. Several liards had rolled into the mud; the captain in his enthusiasm stooped to pick them up. Jehan restrained him.
“Fye, Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers!”
Phoebus counted the coins, and turning towards Jehan with solemnity, “Do you know, Jehan, that there are three and twenty sous parisis! whom have you plundered to-night, in the Street Cut-Weazand?”
Jehan flung back his blonde and curly head, and said, half-closing his eyes disdainfully,—
“We have a brother who is an archdeacon and a fool.”
“Corne de Dieu!” exclaimed Phoebus, “the worthy man!”
“Let us go and drink,” said Jehan.
“Where shall we go?” said Phoebus; “‘To Eve’s Apple.’”
“No, captain, to ‘Ancient Science.’ An old woman sawing a basket handle*; ‘tis a rebus, and I like that.”
* Une vielle qui scie une anse.
“A plague on rebuses, Jehan! the wine is better at ‘Eve’s Apple’; and then, beside the door there is a vine in the sun which cheers me while I am drinking.”
“Well! here goes for Eve and her apple,” said the student, and taking Phoebus’s arm. “By the way, my dear captain, you just mentioned the Rue Coupe-Gueule* That is a very bad form of speech; people are no longer so barbarous. They say, Coupe-Gorge**.”
* Cut-Weazand Street. ** Cut-Throat Street.
The two friends set out towards “Eve’s Apple.” It is unnecessary to mention that they had first gathered up the money, and that the archdeacon followed them.
The archdeacon followed them, gloomy and haggard. Was this the Phoebus whose accursed name had been mingled with all his thoughts ever since his interview with Gringoire? He did not know it, but it was at least a Phoebus, and that magic name sufficed to make the archdeacon follow the two heedless comrades with the stealthy tread of a wolf, listening to their words and observing their slightest gestures with anxious attention. Moreover, nothing was easier than to hear everything they said, as they talked loudly, not in the least concerned that the passers-by were taken into their confidence. They talked of duels, wenches, wine pots, and folly.
At the turning of a street, the sound of a tambourine reached them from a neighboring square. Dom Claude heard the officer say to the scholar,—
“Thunder! Let us hasten our steps!”
“Why, Phoebus?”
“I’m afraid lest the Bohemian should see me.”
“What Bohemian?”
“The little girl with the goat.”
“La Smeralda?”
“That’s it, Jehan. I always forget her devil of a name. Let us make haste, she will recognize me. I don’t want to have that girl accost me in the street.”
“Do you know her, Phoebus?”
Here the archdeacon saw Phoebus sneer, bend down to Jehan’s ear, and say a few words to him in a low voice; then Phoebus burst into a laugh, and shook his head with a triumphant air.
“Truly?” said Jehan.
“Upon my soul!” said Phoebus.
 Does one doubt such things?”
“Captain Phoebus, you are a happy gendarme!”
The archdeacon heard the whole of this conversation. His teeth chattered; a visible shiver ran through his whole body. He halted for a moment, leaned against a post like a drunken man, then followed the two merry knaves.
At the moment when he overtook them once more, they had changed their conversation. He heard them singing at the top of their lungs the ancient refrain,—
Les enfants des Petits-Carreaux Se font pendre cornme des veaux*.
* The children of the Petits Carreaux let themselves be hung like calves.
The illustrious wine shop of “Eve’s Apple” was situated in the University, at the corner of the Rue de la Rondelle and the Rue de la Bâtonnier. It was a very spacious and very low hail on the ground floor, with a vaulted ceiling whose central spring rested upon a huge pillar of wood painted yellow; tables everywhere, shining pewter jugs hanging on the walls, always a large number of drinkers, a plenty of wenches, a window on the street, a vine at the door, and over the door a flaring piece of sheet-iron, painted with an apple and a woman, rusted by the rain and turning with the wind on an iron pin. This species of weather-vane which looked upon the pavement was the signboard.
Night was falling; the square was dark; the wine-shop, full of candles, flamed afar like a forge in the gloom; the noise of glasses and feasting, of oaths and quarrels, which escaped through the broken panes, was audible. Through the mist which the warmth of the room spread over the window in front, a hundred confused figures could be seen swarming, and from time to time a burst of noisy laughter broke forth from it. The passers-by who were going about their business, slipped past this tumultuous window without glancing at it. Only at intervals did some little ragged boy raise himself on tiptoe as far as the ledge, and hurl into the drinking-shop, that ancient, jeering hoot, with which drunken men were then pursued: “Aux Houls, saouls, saouls, saouls!”
Nevertheless, one man paced imperturbably back and forth in front of the tavern, gazing at it incessantly, and going no further from it than a pikernan from his sentry-box. He was enveloped in a mantle to his very nose. This mantle he had just purchased of the old-clothes man, in the vicinity of the “Eve’s Apple,” no doubt to protect himself from the cold of the March evening, possibly also, to conceal his costume. From time to time he paused in front of the dim window with its leaden lattice, listened, looked, and stamped his foot.
At length the door of the dram-shop opened. This was what he appeared to be waiting for. Two boon companions came forth. The ray of light which escaped from the door crimsoned for a moment their jovial faces.
The man in the mantle went and stationed himself on the watch under a porch on the other side of the street.
“Corne et tonnerre!” said one of the comrades. “Seven o’clock is on the point of striking. ‘Tis the hour of my appointed meeting.”
“I tell you,” repeated his companion, with a thick tongue, “that I don’t live in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles, indignus qui inter mala verba habitat. I have a lodging in the Rue Jean-Pain-Mollet, in vico Johannis Pain-Mollet. You are more horned than a unicorn if you assert the contrary. Every one knows that he who once mounts astride a bear is never after afraid; but you have a nose turned to dainties like Saint-Jacques of the hospital.”
“Jehan, my friend, you are drunk,” said the other.
The other replied staggering, “It pleases you to say so, Phoebus; but it hath been proved that Plato had the profile of a hound.”
The reader has, no doubt, already recognized our two brave friends, the captain and the scholar. It appears that the man who was lying in wait for them had also recognized them, for he slowly followed all the zigzags that the scholar caused the captain to make, who being a more hardened drinker had retained all his self-possession. By listening to them attentively, the man in the mantle could catch in its entirety the following interesting conversation,—
“Corbacque!  Here it is seven o’clock. I have an appointment with a woman.”
“Leave me then! I see stars and lances of fire. You are like the Chateau de Dampmartin, which is bursting with laughter.”
“By the warts of my grandmother, Jehan, you are raving with too much rabidness. By the way, Jehan, have you any money left?”
“Monsieur Rector, there is no mistake; the little butcher’s shop, parva boucheria.”
“Jehau! my friend Jehan! You know that I made an appointment with that little girl at the end of the Pont Saint-Michel, and I can only take her to the Falourdel’s, the old crone of the bridge, and that I must pay for a chamber. The old witch with a white moustache would not trust me. Jehan! for pity’s sake! Have we drunk up the whole of the curé’s purse? Have you not a single parisis left?”
“The consciousness of having spent the other hours well is a just and savory condiment for the table.”
“Belly and guts! a truce to your whimsical nonsense! Tell me, Jehan of the devil! have you any money left? Give it to me, bédieu! or I will search you, were you as leprous as Job, and as scabby as Caesar!”
“Monsieur, the Rue Galiache is a street which hath at one end the Rue de la Verrerie, and at the other the Rue de la Tixeranderie.”
“Well, yes! my good friend Jehan, my poor comrade, the Rue Galiache is good, very good. But in the name of heaven collect your wits. I must have a sou parisis, and the appointment is for seven o’clock.”
“Silence for the rondo, and attention to the refrain,—
“Quand les rats mangeront les cas, Le roi sera seigneur d’Arras; Quand la mer, qui est grande et le(e Sera a la Saint-Jean gele(e, On verra, par-dessus la glace, Sortir ceux d’Arras de leur place*.”
* When the rats eat the cats, the king will be lord of Arras; when the sea which is great and wide, is frozen over at St. John’s tide, men will see across the ice, those who dwell in Arras quit their place.
“Well, scholar of Antichrist, may you be strangled with the entrails of your mother!” exclaimed Phoebus, and he gave the drunken scholar a rough push; the latter slipped against the wall, and slid flabbily to the pavement of Philip Augustus. A remnant of fraternal pity, which never abandons the heart of a drinker, prompted Phoebus to roll Jehan with his foot upon one of those pillows of the poor, which Providence keeps in readiness at the corner of all the street posts of Paris, and which the rich blight with the name of “a rubbish-heap.” The captain adjusted Jehan’s head upon an inclined plane of cabbage-stumps, and on the very instant, the scholar fell to snoring in a magnificent bass. Meanwhile, all malice was not extinguished in the captain’s heart. “So much the worse if the devil’s cart picks you up on its passage!” he said to the poor, sleeping clerk; and he strode off.
The man in the mantle, who had not ceased to follow him, halted for a moment before the prostrate scholar, as though agitated by indecision; then, uttering a profound sigh, he also strode off in pursuit of the captain.
We, like them, will leave Jehan to slumber beneath the open sky, and will follow them also, if it pleases the reader.
On emerging into the Rue Saint-André-des-Arcs, Captain Phoebus perceived that some one was following him. On glancing sideways by chance, he perceived a sort of shadow crawling after him along the walls. He halted, it halted; he resumed his march, it resumed its march. This disturbed him not overmuch. “Ah, bah!” he said to himself, “I have not a sou.”
He paused in front of the College d’Autun. It was at this college that he had sketched out what he called his studies, and, through a scholar’s teasing habit which still lingered in him, he never passed the façade without inflicting on the statue of Cardinal Pierre Bertrand, sculptured to the right of the portal, the affront of which Priapus complains so bitterly in the satire of Horace, Olim truncus eram ficulnus. He had done this with so much unrelenting animosity that the inscription, Eduensis episcopus, had become almost effaced. Therefore, he halted before the statue according to his wont. The street was utterly deserted.  On arriving near him, it halted and remained more motionless than the statue of Cardinal Bertrand. Meanwhile, it riveted upon Phoebus two intent eyes, full of that vague light which issues in the night time from the pupils of a cat.
The captain was brave, and would have cared very little for a highwayman, with a rapier in his hand. But this walking statue, this petrified man, froze his blood. There were then in circulation, strange stories of a surly monk, a nocturnal prowler about the streets of Paris, and they recurred confusedly to his memory. He remained for several minutes in stupefaction, and finally broke the silence with a forced laugh.
  Try your hand near by here. In the chapel of this college there is some wood of the true cross set in silver.”
The hand of the shadow emerged from beneath its mantle and descended upon the arm of Phoebus with the grip of an eagle’s talon; at the same time the shadow spoke,—
“Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers!”
“What, the devil!” said Phoebus, “you know my name!”
“I know not your name alone,” continued the man in the mantle, with his sepulchral voice. “You have a rendezvous this evening.”
“Yes,” replied Phoebus in amazement.
“At seven o’clock.”
“In a quarter of an hour.”
“At la Falourdel’s.”
“Precisely.”
“The lewd hag of the Pont Saint-Michel.”
“Of Saint Michel the archangel, as the Pater Noster saith.”
“Impious wretch!” muttered the spectre. “With a woman?”
“Confiteor,—I confess—.”
“Who is called—?”
“La Smeralda,” said Phoebus, gayly. All his heedlessness had gradually returned.
At this name, the shadow’s grasp shook the arm of Phoebus in a fury.
“Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers, thou liest!”
Any one who could have beheld at that moment the captain’s inflamed countenance, his leap backwards, so violent that he disengaged himself from the grip which held him, the proud air with which he clapped his hand on his swordhilt, and, in the presence of this wrath the gloomy immobility of the man in the cloak,—any one who could have beheld this would have been frightened. There was in it a touch of the combat of Don Juan and the statue.
“Christ and Satan!” exclaimed the captain. “That is a word which rarely strikes the ear of a Châteaupers! Thou wilt not dare repeat it.”
“Thou liest!” said the shadow coldly.
The captain gnashed his teeth. Surly monk, phantom, superstitions,—he had forgotten all at that moment. He no longer beheld anything but a man, and an insult.
“Ah! this is well!” he stammered, in a voice stifled with rage. He drew his sword, then stammering, for anger as well as fear makes a man tremble: “Here! On the spot! Come on! Swords! Swords! Blood on the pavement!”
But the other never stirred. When he beheld his adversary on guard and ready to parry,—
“Captain Phoebus,” he said, and his tone vibrated with bitterness, “you forget your appointment.”
The rages of men like Phoebus are milk-soups, whose ebullition is calmed by a drop of cold water. This simple remark caused the sword which glittered in the captain’s hand to be lowered.
“Captain,” pursued the man, “to-morrow, the day after to-morrow, a month hence, ten years hence, you will find me ready to cut your throat; but go first to your rendezvous.”
“In sooth,” said Phoebus, as though seeking to capitulate with himself, “these are two charming things to be encountered in a rendezvous,—a sword and a wench; but I do not see why I should miss the one for the sake of the other, when I can have both.”
He replaced his sword in its scabbard.
“Go to your rendezvous,” said the man.
“Monsieur,” replied Phoebus with some embarrassment, “many thanks for your courtesy. In fact, there will be ample time to-morrow for us to chop up father Adam’s doublet into slashes and buttonholes. I am obliged to you for allowing me to pass one more agreeable quarter of an hour. I certainly did hope to put you in the gutter, and still arrive in time for the fair one, especially as it has a better appearance to make the women wait a little in such cases. But you strike me as having the air of a gallant man, and it is safer to defer our affair until to-morrow. So I will betake myself to my rendezvous; it is for seven o’clock, as you know.” Here Phoebus scratched his ear. “Ah. Corne Dieu! I had forgotten! I haven’t a sou to discharge the price of the garret, and the old crone will insist on being paid in advance. She distrusts me.”
“Here is the wherewithal to pay.”
Phoebus felt the stranger’s cold hand slip into his a large piece of money. He could not refrain from taking the money and pressing the hand.
“Vrai Dieu!” he exclaimed, “you are a good fellow!”
“One condition,” said the man. “Prove to me that I have been wrong and that you were speaking the truth. Hide me in some corner whence I can see whether this woman is really the one whose name you uttered.”
“Oh!” replied Phoebus, “‘tis all one to me. We will take, the Sainte-Marthe chamber; you can look at your ease from the kennel hard by.”
“Come then,” said the shadow.
“At your service,” said the captain, “I know not whether you are Messer Diavolus in person; but let us be good friends for this evening; to-morrow I will repay you all my debts, both of purse and sword.”
They set out again at a rapid pace. At the expiration of a few minutes, the sound of the river announced to them that they were on the Pont Saint-Michel, then loaded with houses.
“I will first show you the way,” said Phoebus to his companion, “I will then go in search of the fair one who is awaiting me near the Petit-Châtelet.”
His companion made no reply; he had not uttered a word since they had been walking side by side. Phoebus halted before a low door, and knocked roughly; a light made its appearance through the cracks of the door.
“Who is there?” cried a toothless voice.
“Corps-Dieu! Tête-Dieu! Ventre-Dieu!” replied the captain.
The door opened instantly, and allowed the new-corners to see an old woman and an old lamp, both of which trembled.
The interior of the den was no less dilapitated than she; there were chalk walls, blackened beams in the ceiling, a dismantled chimney-piece, spiders’ webs in all the corners, in the middle a staggering herd of tables and lame stools, a dirty child among the ashes, and at the back a staircase, or rather, a wooden ladder, which ended in a trap door in the ceiling.
On entering this lair, Phoebus’s mysterious companion raised his mantle to his very eyes. Meanwhile, the captain, swearing like a Saracen, hastened to “make the sun shine in a crown” as saith our admirable Régnier.
“The Sainte-Marthe chamber,” said he.
 It was the coin which the man in the black mantle had given to Phoebus.
The old crone made a sign to the two gentlemen, as she called them, to follow her, and mounted the ladder in advance of them. On arriving at the upper story, she set her lamp on a coffer, and, Phoebus, like a frequent visitor of the house, opened a door which opened on a dark hole. “Enter here, my dear fellow,” he said to his companion. The man in the mantle obeyed without a word in reply, the door closed upon him; he heard Phoebus bolt it, and a moment later descend the stairs again with the aged hag. The light had disappeared.
Claude Frollo (for we presume that the reader, more intelligent than Phoebus, has seen in this whole adventure no other surly monk than the archdeacon), Claude Frollo groped about for several moments in the dark lair into which the captain had bolted him. It was one of those nooks which architects sometimes reserve at the point of junction between the roof and the supporting wall. A vertical section of this kennel, as Phoebus had so justly styled it, would have made a triangle. Moreover, there was neither window nor air-hole, and the slope of the roof prevented one from standing upright. Accordingly, Claude crouched down in the dust, and the plaster which cracked beneath him; his head was on fire; rummaging around him with his hands, he found on the floor a bit of broken glass, which he pressed to his brow, and whose cool-ness afforded him some relief.
What was taking place at that moment in the gloomy soul of the archdeacon? God and himself could alone know.
In what order was he arranging in his mind la Esmeralda, Phoebus, Jacques Charmolue, his young brother so beloved, yet abandoned by him in the mire, his archdeacon’s cassock, his reputation perhaps dragged to la Falourdel’s, all these adventures, all these images? I cannot say.
He had been waiting a quarter of an hour; it seemed to him that he had grown a century older. All at once he heard the creaking of the boards of the stairway; some one was ascending. The trapdoor opened once more; a light reappeared. There was a tolerably large crack in the worm-eaten door of his den; he put his face to it. In this manner he could see all that went on in the adjoining room. The cat-faced old crone was the first to emerge from the trap-door, lamp in hand; then Phoebus, twirling his moustache, then a third person, that beautiful and graceful figure, la Esmeralda. The priest beheld her rise from below like a dazzling apparition. Claude trembled, a cloud spread over his eyes, his pulses beat violently, everything rustled and whirled around him; he no longer saw nor heard anything.
When he recovered himself, Phoebus and Esmeralda were alone seated on the wooden coffer beside the lamp which made these two youthful figures and a miserable pallet at the end of the attic stand out plainly before the archdeacon’s eyes.
Beside the pallet was a window, whose panes broken like a spider’s web upon which rain has fallen, allowed a view, through its rent meshes, of a corner of the sky, and the moon lying far away on an eiderdown bed of soft clouds.
The young girl was blushing, confused, palpitating. Her long, drooping lashes shaded her crimson cheeks. The officer, to whom she dared not lift her eyes, was radiant. Mechanically, and with a charmingly unconscious gesture, she traced with the tip of her finger incoherent lines on the bench, and watched her finger. Her foot was not visible. The little goat was nestling upon it.
The captain was very gallantly clad; he had tufts of embroidery at his neck and wrists; a great elegance at that day.
It was not without difficulty that Dom Claude managed to hear what they were saying, through the humming of the blood, which was boiling in his temples.
(A conversation between lovers is a very commonplace affair. It is a perpetual “I love you.” A musical phrase which is very insipid and very bald for indifferent listeners, when it is not ornamented with some fioriture; but Claude was not an indifferent listener.)
“Oh!” said the young girl, without raising her eyes, “do not despise me, monseigneur Phoebus. I feel that what I am doing is not right.”
“Despise you, my pretty child!” replied the officer with an air of superior and distinguished gallantry, “despise you, tête-Dieu! and why?”
“For having followed you!”
“On that point, my beauty, we don’t agree.
The young girl looked at him in affright: “Hate me! what have I done?”
“For having required so much urging.”
“Alas!” said she, “‘tis because I am breaking a vow. I shall not find my parents! The amulet will lose its virtue. But what matters it? What need have I of father or mother now?”
So saying, she fixed upon the captain her great black eyes, moist with joy and tenderness.
“Devil take me if I understand you!” exclaimed Phoebus. La Esmeralda remained silent for a moment, then a tear dropped from her eyes, a sigh from her lips, and she said,—“Oh! monseigneur, I love you.”
Such a perfume of chastity, such a charm of virtue surrounded the young girl, that Phoebus did not feel completely at his ease beside her. But this remark emboldened him: “You love me!” he said with rapture, and he threw his arm round the gypsy’s waist. He had only been waiting for this opportunity.
The priest saw it, and tested with the tip of his finger the point of a poniard which he wore concealed in his breast.
“Phoebus,” continued the Bohemian, gently releasing her waist from the captain’s tenacious hands, “You are good, you are generous, you are handsome; you saved me, me who am only a poor child lost in Bohemia.   I love your name; I love your sword. Draw your sword, Phoebus, that I may see it.”
“Child!” said the captain, and he unsheathed his sword with a smile.
The gypsy looked at the hilt, the blade; examined the cipher on the guard with adorable curiosity, and kissed the sword, saying,—
“You are the sword of a brave man. I love my captain.” Phoebus again profited by the opportunity to impress upon her beautiful bent neck a kiss which made the young girl straighten herself up as scarlet as a poppy. The priest gnashed his teeth over it in the dark.
“Phoebus,” resumed the gypsy, “let me talk to you. Pray walk a little, that I may see you at full height, and that I may hear your spurs jingle. How handsome you are!”
The captain rose to please her, chiding her with a smile of satisfaction,—
“What a child you are! By the way, my charmer, have you seen me in my archer’s ceremonial doublet?”
“Alas! no,” she replied.
“It is very handsome!”
Phoebus returned and seated himself beside her, but much closer than before.

“No, no, I will not listen to you. Do you love me?   I love thee, and I have never loved any one but thee.”
The captain had repeated this phrase so many times, in many similar conjunctures, that he delivered it all in one breath, without committing a single mistake.
“Oh!” she murmured, “this is the moment when one should die!”
Phoebus found “the moment” favorable for robbing her of another kiss, which went to torture the unhappy archdeacon in his nook. “Die!” exclaimed the amorous captain, “What are you saying, my lovely angel? ‘Tis a time for living, or Jupiter is only a scamp! Die at the beginning of so sweet a thing! Corne-de-boeuf, what a jest! It is not that. Listen, my dear Similar, Esmenarda—Pardon! you have so prodigiously Saracen a name that I never can get it straight. ‘Tis a thicket which stops me short.”
“Good heavens!” said the poor girl, “and I thought my name pretty because of its singularity! But since it displeases you, I would that I were called Goton.”
“Ah! do not weep for such a trifle, my graceful maid! ‘tis a name to which one must get accustomed, that is all. When I once know it by heart, all will go smoothly. Listen then, my dear Similar; I adore you passionately. I love you so that ‘tis simply miraculous. I know a girl who is bursting with rage over it—”
The jealous girl interrupted him: “Who?”
“What matters that to us?” said Phoebus; “do you love me?”
“Oh!”—said she.
“Well! that is all. You shall see how I love you also. May the great devil Neptunus spear me if I do not make you the happiest woman in the world. We will have a pretty little house somewhere. I will make my archers parade before your windows. They are all mounted, and set at defiance those of Captain Mignon. There are voulgiers, cranequiniers and hand couleveiniers*. I will take you to the great sights of the Parisians at the storehouse of Rully. Eighty thousand armed men, thirty thousand white harnesses, short coats or coats of mail; the sixty-seven banners of the trades; the standards of the parliaments, of the chamber of accounts, of the treasury of the generals, of the aides of the mint; a devilish fine array, in short! I will conduct you to see the lions of the Hôtel du Roi, which are wild beasts. All women love that.”
* Varieties of the crossbow.
For several moments the young girl, absorbed in her charming thoughts, was dreaming to the sound of his voice, without listening to the sense of his words.
“Oh! how happy you will be!” continued the captain, and at the same time he gently unbuckled the gypsy’s girdle.
“What are you doing?” she said quickly. This “act of violence” had roused her from her revery.
“Nothing,” replied Phoebus, “I was only saying that you must abandon all this garb of folly, and the street corner when you are with me.”
“When I am with you, Phoebus!” said the young girl tenderly.
She became pensive and silent once more.
The captain, emboldened by her gentleness, clasped her waist without resistance; then began softly to unlace the poor child’s corsage, and disarranged her tucker to such an extent that the panting priest beheld the gypsy’s beautiful shoulder emerge from the gauze, as round and brown as the moon rising through the mists of the horizon.
The young girl allowed Phoebus to have his way. She did not appear to perceive it. The eye of the bold captain flashed.
Suddenly she turned towards him,—
“Phoebus,” she said, with an expression of infinite love, “instruct me in thy religion.”
“My religion!” exclaimed the captain, bursting with laughter, “I instruct you in my religion! Corne et tonnerre! What do you want with my religion?”
“In order that we may be married,” she replied.
The captain’s face assumed an expression of mingled surprise and disdain, of carelessness and libertine passion.
“Ah, bah!” said he, “do people marry?”

“My beautiful love,” resumed Phoebus, tenderly, “what nonsense is this? A great thing is marriage, truly! one is none the less loving for not having spit Latin into a priest’s shop!”
While speaking thus in his softest voice, he approached extremely near the gypsy; his caressing hands resumed their place around her supple and delicate waist, his eye flashed more and more, and everything announced that Monsieur Phoebus was on the verge of one of those moments when Jupiter himself commits so many follies that Homer is obliged to summon a cloud to his rescue.
But Dom Claude saw everything. The door was made of thoroughly rotten cask staves, which left large apertures for the passage of his hawklike gaze. This brown-skinned, broad-shouldered priest, hitherto condemned to the austere virginity of the cloister, was quivering and boiling in the presence of this night scene of love and voluptuousness. This young and beautiful girl given over in disarray to the ardent young man, made melted lead flow in his-veins; his eyes darted with sensual jealousy beneath all those loosened pins. Any one who could, at that moment, have seen the face of the unhappy man glued to the wormeaten bars, would have thought that he beheld the face of a tiger glaring from the depths of a cage at some jackal devouring a gazelle. His eye shone like a candle through the cracks of the door.
All at once, Phoebus, with a rapid gesture, removed the gypsy’s gorgerette. The poor child, who had remained pale and dreamy, awoke with a start; she recoiled hastily from the enterprising officer, and, casting a glance at her bare neck and shoulders, red, confused, mute with shame, she crossed her two beautiful arms on her breast to conceal it. Had it not been for the flame which burned in her cheeks, at the sight of her so silent and motionless, one would have declared her a statue of Modesty. Her eyes were lowered.
But the captain’s gesture had revealed the mysterious amulet which she wore about her neck.
“What is that?” he said, seizing this pretext to approach once more the beautiful creature whom he had just alarmed.
“Don’t touch it!” she replied, quickly, “‘tis my guardian. It will make me find my family again, if I remain worthy to do so. Oh, leave me, monsieur le capitaine! My mother! My poor mother! My mother! Where art thou? Come to my rescue! Have pity, Monsieur Phoebus, give me back my gorgerette!”
Phoebus retreated amid said in a cold tone,—
“Oh, mademoiselle! I see plainly that you do not love me!”
“I do not love him!” exclaimed the unhappy child, and at the same time she clung to the captain, whom she drew to a seat beside her. “I do not love thee, my Phoebus? What art thou saying, wicked man, to break my heart? Oh, take me! take all! do what you will with me, I am thine. What matters to me the amulet! What matters to me my mother! ‘Tis thou who art my mother since I love thee! Phoebus, my beloved Phoebus, dost thou see me? ‘Tis I. Look at me; ‘tis the little one whom thou wilt surely not repulse, who comes, who comes herself to seek thee. My soul, my life, my body, my person, all is one thing—which is thine, my captain. Well, no! We will not marry, since that displeases thee; and then, what am I? a miserable girl of the gutters; whilst thou, my Phoebus, art a gentleman. A fine thing, truly! A dancer wed an officer! I was mad. No, Phoebus, no; I will be thy mistress, thy amusement, thy pleasure, when thou wilt; a girl who shall belong to thee. I was only made for that, soiled, despised, dishonored, but what matters it?—beloved. I shall be the proudest and the most joyous of women. And when I grow old or ugly, Phoebus, when I am no longer good to love you, you will suffer me to serve you still. Others will embroider scarfs for you; ‘tis I, the servant, who will care for them.  You will have that pity, will you not, Phoebus? Meanwhile, take me! here, Phoebus, all this belongs to thee, only love me! We gypsies need only air and love.”
So saying, she threw her arms round the officer’s neck; she looked up at him, supplicatingly, with a beautiful smile, and all in tears. Her delicate neck rubbed against his cloth doublet with its rough embroideries. She writhed on her knees, her beautiful body half naked. The intoxicated captain pressed his ardent lips to those lovely African shoulders. The young girl, her eyes bent on the ceiling, as she leaned backwards, quivered, all palpitating, beneath this kiss.
All at once, above Phoebus’s head she beheld another head; a green, livid, convulsed face, with the look of a lost soul; near this face was a hand grasping a poniard.—It was the face and hand of the priest; he had broken the door and he was there. Phoebus could not see him. The young girl remained motionless, frozen with terror, dumb, beneath that terrible apparition, like a dove which should raise its head at the moment when the hawk is gazing into her nest with its round eyes.
She could not even utter a cry. She saw the poniard descend upon Phoebus, and rise again, reeking.
“Maledictions!” said the captain, and fell.
She fainted.

When she recovered her senses, she was surrounded by soldiers of the watch they were carrying away the captain, bathed in his blood the priest had disappeared; the window at the back of the room which opened on the river was wide open; they picked up a cloak which they supposed to belong to the officer and she heard them saying around her,
“‘Tis a sorceress who has stabbed a captain.”
Gringoire and the entire Court of Miracles were suffering mortal anxiety. For a whole month they had not known what had become of la Esmeralda, which greatly pained the Duke of Egypt and his friends the vagabonds, nor what had become of the goat, which redoubled Gringoire’s grief. One evening the gypsy had disappeared, and since that time had given no signs of life. All search had proved fruitless. Some tormenting bootblacks had told Gringoire about meeting her that same evening near the Pont Saint-Michel, going off with an officer; but this husband, after the fashion of Bohemia, was an incredulous philosopher, and besides, he, better than any one else, knew to what a point his wife was virginal. He had been able to form a judgment as to the unconquerable modesty resulting from the combined virtues of the amulet and the gypsy, and he had mathematically calculated the resistance of that chastity to the second power. Accordingly, he was at ease on that score.
Still he could not understand this disappearance. It was a profound sorrow. He would have grown thin over it, had that been possible. He had forgotten everything, even his literary tastes, even his great work, De figuris regularibus et irregularibus, which it was his intention to have printed with the first money which he should procure (for he had raved over printing, ever since he had seen the “Didascalon” of Hugues de Saint Victor, printed with the celebrated characters of Vindelin de Spire).
One day, as he was passing sadly before the criminal Tournelle, he perceived a considerable crowd at one of the gates of the Palais de Justice.
“What is this?” he inquired of a young man who was coming out.
“I know not, sir,” replied the young man. “‘Tis said that they are trying a woman who hath assassinated a gendarme. It appears that there is sorcery at the bottom of it, the archbishop and the official have intervened in the case, and my brother, who is the archdeacon of Josas, can think of nothing else. Now, I wished to speak with him, but I have not been able to reach him because of the throng, which vexes me greatly, as I stand in need of money.”
“Alas! sir,” said Gringoire, “I would that I could lend you some, but, my breeches are worn to holes, and ‘tis not crowns which have done it.”
He dared not tell the young man that he was acquainted with his brother the archdeacon, to whom he had not returned after the scene in the church; a negligence which embarrassed him.
The scholar went his way, and Gringoire set out to follow the crowd which was mounting the staircase of the great chamber.  The populace which he had joined walked and elbowed in silence. After a slow and tiresome march through a long, gloomy corridor, which wound through the court-house like the intestinal canal of the ancient edifice, he arrived near a low door, opening upon a hall which his lofty stature permitted him to survey with a glance over the waving heads of the rabble.
The hall was vast and gloomy, which latter fact made it appear still more spacious. The day was declining; the long, pointed windows permitted only a pale ray of light to enter, which was extinguished before it reached the vaulted ceiling, an enormous trellis-work of sculptured beams, whose thousand figures seemed to move confusedly in the shadows, many candles were already lighted here and there on tables, and beaming on the heads of clerks buried in masses of documents. The anterior portion of the ball was occupied by the crowd; on the right and left were magistrates and tables; at the end, upon a platform, a number of judges, whose rear rank sank into the shadows, sinister and motionless faces. The walls were sown with innumerable fleurs-de-lis. A large figure of Christ might be vaguely descried above the judges, and everywhere there were pikes and halberds, upon whose points the reflection of the candles placed tips of fire.
“Monsieur,” Gringoire inquired of one of his neighbors, “who are all those persons ranged yonder, like prelates in council?”
“Monsieur,” replied the neighbor, “those on the right are the counsellors of the grand chamber; those on the left, the councillors of inquiry; the masters in black gowns, the messires in red.”
“Who is that big red fellow, yonder above them, who is sweating?” pursued Gringoire.
“It is monsieur the president.”
“And those sheep behind him?” continued Gringoire, who as we have seen, did not love the magistracy, which arose, possibly, from the grudge which he cherished against the Palais de Justice since his dramatic misadventure.
“They are messieurs the masters of requests of the king’s household.”
“And that boar in front of him?”
“He is monsieur the clerk of the Court of Parliament.”
“And that crocodile on the right?”
“Master Philippe Lheulier, advocate extraordinary of the king.”
“And that big, black tom-cat on the left?”
“Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator of the king in the Ecclesiastical Court, with the gentlemen of the officialty.”
“Come now, monsieur,” said Gringoire, “pray what are all those fine fellows doing yonder?”
“They are judging.”
“Judging whom? I do not see the accused.”
“‘Tis a woman, sir. You cannot see her. She has her back turned to us, and she is hidden from us by the crowd. Stay, yonder she is, where you see a group of partisans.”
“Who is the woman?” asked Gringoire. “Do you know her name?”
“No, monsieur, I have but just arrived. I merely assume that there is some sorcery about it, since the official is present at the trial.”
“Come!” said our philosopher, “we are going to see all these magistrates devour human flesh. ‘Tis as good a spectacle as any other.”
“Monsieur,” remarked his neighbor, “think you not, that Master Jacques Charmolue has a very sweet air?”
“Hum!” replied Gringoire. “I distrust a sweetness which hath pinched nostrils and thin lips.”
Here the bystanders imposed silence upon the two chatterers. They were listening to an important deposition.
“Messeigneurs,” said an old woman in the middle of the hall, whose form was so concealed beneath her garments that one would have pronounced her a walking heap of rags; “Messeigneurs, the thing is as true as that I am la Falourdel, established these forty years at the Pont Saint Michel, and paying regularly my rents, lord’s dues, and quit rents; at the gate opposite the house of Tassin-Caillart, the dyer, which is on the side up the river—a poor old woman now, but a pretty maid in former days, my lords. Some one said to me lately, ‘La Falourdel, don’t use your spinning-wheel too much in the evening; the devil is fond of combing the distaffs of old women with his horns. ‘Tis certain that the surly monk who was round about the temple last year, now prowls in the City.  One evening I was spinning on my wheel, there comes a knock at my door; I ask who it is. They swear. I open. Two men enter. A man in black and a handsome officer. Of the black man nothing could be seen but his eyes, two coals of fire. All the rest was hat and cloak. They say to me,—‘The Sainte-Marthe chamber.’—‘Tis my upper chamber, my lords, my cleanest. They give me a crown. I put the crown in my drawer, and I say: ‘This shall go to buy tripe at the slaughter-house of la Gloriette to-morrow.’ We go up stairs. On arriving at the upper chamber, and while my back is turned, the black man disappears. That dazed me a bit. The officer, who was as handsome as a great lord, goes down stairs again with me. He goes out. In about the time it takes to spin a quarter of a handful of flax, he returns with a beautiful young girl, a doll who would have shone like the sun had she been coiffed.  That set me to thinking. The girl does not concern me, but the goat! I love not those beasts, they have a beard and horns. They are so like a man. And then, they smack of the witches, sabbath. However, I say nothing. I had the crown. That is right, is it not, Monsieur Judge? I show the captain and the wench to the upper chamber, and I leave them alone; that is to say, with the goat. I go down and set to spinning again—I must inform you that my house has a ground floor and story above. I know not why I fell to thinking of the surly monk whom the goat had put into my head again, and then the beautiful girl was rather strangely decked out. All at once, I hear a cry upstairs, and something falls on the floor and the window opens. I run to mine which is beneath it, and I behold a black mass pass before my eyes and fall into the water. It was a phantom clad like a priest. It was a moonlight night. I saw him quite plainly. He was swimming in the direction of the city. Then, all of a tremble, I call the watch. The gentlemen of the police enter, and not knowing just at the first moment what the matter was, and being merry, they beat me. I explain to them. We go up stairs, and what do we find? my poor chamber all blood, the captain stretched out at full length with a dagger in his neck, the girl pretending to be dead, and the goat all in a fright. ‘Pretty work!’ I say, ‘I shall have to wash that floor for more than a fortnight. It will have to be scraped; it will be a terrible job.’ They carried off the officer, poor young man, and the wench with her bosom all bare. But wait, the worst is that on the next day, when I wanted to take the crown to buy tripe, I found a dead leaf in its place.”
The old woman ceased. A murmur of horror ran through the audience.
“That phantom, that goat,—all smacks of magic,” said one of Gringoire’s neighbors.
“And that dry leaf!” added another.
“No doubt about it,” joined in a third, “she is a witch who has dealings with the surly monk, for the purpose of plundering officers.”
Gringoire himself was not disinclined to regard this as altogether alarming and probable.
“Goody Falourdel,” said the president majestically, “have you nothing more to communicate to the court?”
“No, monseigneur,” replied the crone, “except that the report has described my house as a hovel and stinking; which is an outrageous fashion of speaking. The houses on the bridge are not imposing, because there are such multitudes of people; but, nevertheless, the butchers continue to dwell there, who are wealthy folk, and married to very proper and handsome women.”
The magistrate who had reminded Gringoire of a crocodile rose,—
“Silence!” said he. “I pray the gentlemen not to lose sight of the fact that a dagger was found on the person of the accused. Goody Falourdel, have you brought that leaf into which the crown which the demon gave you was transformed?
“Yes, monseigneur,” she replied; “I found it again. Here it is.”
A bailiff banded the dead leaf to the crocodile, who made a doleful shake of the head, and passed it on to the president, who gave it to the procurator of the king in the ecclesiastical court, and thus it made the circuit of the hail.
“It is a birch leaf,” said Master Jacques Charmolue. “A fresh proof of magic.”
A counsellor took up the word.
“Witness, two men went upstairs together in your house: the black man, whom you first saw disappear and afterwards swimming in the Seine, with his priestly garments, and the officer. Which of the two handed you the crown?” The old woman pondered for a moment and then said,—“The officer.”
A murmur ran through the crowd.
“Ah!” thought Gringoire, “this makes some doubt in my mind.”
But Master Philippe Lheulier, advocate extraordinary to the king, interposed once more.
“I will recall to these gentlemen, that in the deposition taken at his bedside, the assassinated officer, while declaring that he had a vague idea when the black man accosted him that the latter might be the surly monk, added that the phantom had pressed him eagerly to go and make acquaintance with the accused; and upon his, the captain’s, remarking that he had no money, he had given him the crown which the said officer paid to la Falourdel. Hence, that crown is the money of hell.”
This conclusive observation appeared to dissipate all the doubts of Gringoire and the other sceptics in the audience.
“You have the documents, gentlemen,” added the king’s advocate, as he took his seat; “you can consult the testimony of Phoebus de Châteaupers.”
At that name, the accused sprang up, her head rose above the throng. Gringoire with horror recognized la Esmeralda.
She was pale; her tresses, formerly so gracefully braided and spangled with sequins, hung in disorder; her lips were blue, her hollow eyes were terrible. Alas!
“Phoebus!” she said, in bewilderment; “where is he?
“Well!” said the king’s advocate roughly, “he is dying. Are you satisfied?”
The unhappy girl fell back on her criminal’s seat, speechless, tearless, white as a wax figure.

“Bailiff, bring in the second accused.”
All eyes turned towards a small door, which opened, and, to the great agitation of Gringoire, gave passage to a pretty goat with horns and hoofs of gold. The elegant beast halted for a moment on the threshold, stretching out its neck as though, perched on the summit of a rock, it had before its eyes an immense horizon. Suddenly it caught sight of the gypsy girl, and leaping over the table and the head of a clerk, in two bounds it was at her knees; then it rolled gracefully on its mistress’s feet, soliciting a word or a caress; but the accused remained motionless, and poor Djali himself obtained not a glance.
“Eh, why—‘tis my villanous beast,” said old Falourdel, “I recognize the two perfectly!”
Jacques Charmolue interfered.
“If the gentlemen please, we will proceed to the examination of the goat.” He was, in fact, the second criminal. Nothing more simple in those days than a suit of sorcery instituted against an animal. We find, among others in the accounts of the provost’s office for 1466, a curious detail concerning the expenses of the trial of Gillet-Soulart and his sow, “executed for their demerits,” at Corbeil. Everything is there, the cost of the pens in which to place the sow, the five hundred bundles of brushwood purchased at the port of Morsant, the three pints of wine and the bread, the last repast of the victim fraternally shared by the executioner, down to the eleven days of guard and food for the sow, at eight deniers parisis each. Sometimes, they went even further than animals. The capitularies of Charlemagne and of Louis le Débonnaire impose severe penalties on fiery phantoms which presume to appear in the air.
Meanwhile the procurator had exclaimed: “If the demon which possesses this goat, and which has resisted all exorcisms, persists in its deeds of witchcraft, if it alarms the court with them, we warn it that we shall be forced to put in requisition against it the gallows or the stake. Gringoire broke out into a cold perspiration. Charmolue took from the table the gypsy’s tambourine, and presenting it to the goat, in a certain manner, asked the latter,—
“What o’clock is it?”
The goat looked at it with an intelligent eye, raised its gilded hoof, and struck seven blows.
It was, in fact, seven o’clock. A movement of terror ran through the crowd.
Gringoire could not endure it.
“He is destroying himself!” he cried aloud; “You see well that he does not know what he is doing.”
“Silence among the louts at the end of the hail!” said the bailiff sharply.
Jacques Charmolue, by the aid of the same manoeuvres of the tambourine, made the goat perform many other tricks connected with the date of the day, the month of the year, etc., which the reader has already witnessed. And, by virtue of an optical illusion peculiar to judicial proceedings, these same spectators who had, probably, more than once applauded in the public square Djali’s innocent magic were terrified by it beneath the roof of the Palais de Justice. The goat was undoubtedly the devil.
It was far worse when the procurator of the king, having emptied upon a floor a certain bag filled with movable letters, which Djali wore round his neck, they beheld the goat extract with his hoof from the scattered alphabet the fatal name of Phoebus. The witchcraft of which the captain had been the victim appeared irresistibly demonstrated, and in the eyes of all, the gypsy, that ravishing dancer, who had so often dazzled the passers-by with her grace, was no longer anything but a frightful vampire.
However, she betrayed no sign of life; neither Djali’s graceful evolutions, nor the menaces of the court, nor the suppressed imprecations of the spectators any longer reached her mind.
In order to arouse her, a police officer was obliged to shake her unmercifully, and the president had to raise his voice,—“Girl, you are of the Bohemian race, addicted to deeds of witchcraft. You, in complicity with the bewitched goat implicated in this suit, during the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, murdered and stabbed, in concert with the powers of darkness, by the aid of charms and underhand practices, a captain of the king’s arches of the watch, Phoebus de Châteaupers.  “My Phoebus!
“Do I deny it?” she said with terrible accents; and she rose with flashing eyes.
The president continued squarely,—
“Then how do you explain the facts laid to your charge?”
She replied in a broken voice,—
“I have already told you. I do not know. ‘Twas a priest, a priest whom I do not know; an infernal priest who pursues me!”
“That is it,” retorted the judge; “the surly monk.”
“Oh, gentlemen! have mercy! I am but a poor girl—”
“Of Egypt,” said the judge.
Master Jacques Charmolue interposed sweetly,—
“In view of the sad obstinacy of the accused, I demand the application of the torture.”
“Granted,” said the president.
The unhappy girl quivered in every limb. But she rose at the command of the men with partisans, and walked with a tolerably firm step, preceded by Charmolue and the priests of the officiality, between two rows of halberds, towards a medium-sized door which suddenly opened and closed again behind her, and which produced upon the grief-stricken Gringoire the effect of a horrible mouth which had just devoured her.
When she disappeared, they heard a plaintive bleating; it was the little goat mourning.
The sitting of the court was suspended. A counsellor having remarked that the gentlemen were fatigued, and that it would be a long time to wait until the torture was at an end, the president replied that a magistrate must know how to sacrifice himself to his duty.
“What an annoying and vexatious hussy,” said an aged judge, “to get herself put to the question when one has not supped!”
After ascending and descending several steps in the corridors, which were so dark that they were lighted by lamps at mid-day, La Esmeralda, still surrounded by her lugubrious escort, was thrust by the police into a gloomy chamber. This chamber, circular in form, occupied the ground floor of one of those great towers, which, even in our own century, still pierce through the layer of modern edifices with which modern Paris has covered ancient Paris. There were no windows to this cellar; no other opening than the entrance, which was low, and closed by an enormous iron door. Nevertheless, light was not lacking; a furnace had been constructed in the thickness of the wall; a large fire was lighted there, which filled the vault with its crimson reflections and deprived a miserable candle, which stood in one corner, of all radiance. The iron grating which served to close the oven, being raised at that moment, allowed only a view at the mouth of the flaming vent-hole in the dark wall, the lower extremity of its bars, like a row of black and pointed teeth, set flat apart; which made the furnace resemble one of those mouths of dragons which spout forth flames in ancient legends. By the light which escaped from it, the prisoner beheld, all about the room, frightful instruments whose use she did not understand. In the centre lay a leather mattress, placed almost flat upon the ground, over which hung a strap provided with a buckle, attached to a brass ring in the mouth of a flat-nosed monster carved in the keystone of the vault. Tongs, pincers, large ploughshares, filled the interior of the furnace, and glowed in a confused heap on the coals. The sanguine light of the furnace illuminated in the chamber only a confused mass of horrible things.
This Tartarus was called simply, The Question Chamber.
On the bed, in a negligent attitude, sat Pierrat Torterue, the official torturer. His underlings, two gnomes with square faces, leather aprons, and linen breeches, were moving the iron instruments on the coals.
In vain did the poor girl summon up her courage; on entering this chamber she was stricken with horror.
The sergeants of the bailiff of the courts drew up in line on one side, the priests of the officiality on the other. A clerk, inkhorn, and a table were in one corner.
Master Jacques Charmolue approached the gypsy with a very sweet smile.

“In that case,” replied Charmolue, “it will be very painful for us to have to question you more urgently than we should like. Pray take the trouble to seat yourself on this bed. Master Pierrat, make room for mademoiselle, and close the door.”
Pierrat rose with a growl.

Meanwhile, la Esmeralda had remained standing. That leather bed on which so many unhappy wretches had writhed, frightened her. Terror chilled the very marrow of her bones; she stood there bewildered and stupefied. At a sign from Charmolue, the two assistants took her and placed her in a sitting posture on the bed. They did her no harm; but when these men touched her, when that leather touched her, she felt all her blood retreat to her heart. She cast a frightened look around the chamber. It seemed to her as though she beheld advancing from all quarters towards her, with the intention of crawling up her body and biting and pinching her, all those hideous implements of torture, which as compared to the instruments of all sorts she had hitherto seen, were like what bats, centipedes, and spiders are among insects and birds.
“Where is the physician?” asked Charmolue.
“Here,” replied a black gown whom she had not before noticed.
She shuddered.
“Mademoiselle,” resumed the caressing voice of the procucrator of the Ecclesiastical court, “for the third time, do you persist in denying the deeds of which you are accused?”
This time she could only make a sign with her head.
“You persist?” said Jacques Charmolue. “Then it grieves me deeply, but I must fulfil my office.”
“Monsieur le Procureur du Roi,” said Pierrat abruptly, “How shall we begin?”
Charmolue hesitated for a moment with the ambiguous grimace of a poet in search of a rhyme.
“With the boot,” he said at last.

The tormentor and the physician approached her simultaneously. At the same time, the two assistants began to fumble among their hideous arsenal.
 “Oh!” she murmured, so low that no one heard her; “Oh, my Phoebus!” Then she fell back once more into her immobility and her marble silence. This spectacle would have rent any other heart than those of her judges.  The miserable body which that frightful swarm of saws, wheels, and racks were about to clasp in their clutches, the being who was about to be manipulated by the harsh hands of executioners and pincers, was that gentle, white, fragile creature, a poor grain of millet which human justice was handing over to the terrible mills of torture to grind. Meanwhile, the callous hands of Pierrat Torterue’s assistants had bared that charming leg, that tiny foot, which had so often amazed the passers-by with their delicacy and beauty, in the squares of Paris.
“‘Tis a shame!” muttered the tormentor, glancing at these graceful and delicate forms.
Had the archdeacon been present, he certainly would have recalled at that moment his symbol of the spider and the fly. Soon the unfortunate girl, through a mist which spread before her eyes, beheld the boot approach; she soon beheld her foot encased between iron plates disappear in the frightful apparatus. Then terror restored her strength.
“Take that off!” she cried angrily; and drawing herself up, with her hair all dishevelled: “Mercy!”
She darted from the bed to fling herself at the feet of the king’s procurator, but her leg was fast in the heavy block of oak and iron, and she sank down upon the boot, more crushed than a bee with a lump of lead on its wing.
At a sign from Charmolue, she was replaced on the bed, and two coarse hands adjusted to her delicate waist the strap which hung from the ceiling.
“For the last time, do you confess the facts in the case?” demanded Charmolue, with his imperturbable benignity.
“I am innocent.”
“Then, mademoiselle, how do you explain the circumstance laid to your charge?”
“Alas, monseigneur, I do not know.”
“So you deny them?”
“All!”
“Proceed,” said Charmolue to Pierrat.
Pierrat turned the handle of the screw-jack, the boot was contracted, and the unhappy girl uttered one of those horrible cries which have no orthography in any human language.
“Stop!” said Charmolue to Pierrat. “Do you confess?” he said to the gypsy.
“All!” cried the wretched girl. “I confess! I confess! Mercy!”
She had not calculated her strength when she faced the torture.
“Humanity forces me to tell you,” remarked the king’s procurator, “that in confessing, it is death that you must expect.”
“I certainly hope so!” said she. And she fell back upon the leather bed, dying, doubled up, allowing herself to hang suspended from the strap buckled round her waist.
“Come, fair one, hold up a little,” said Master Pierrat, raising her. “You have the air of the lamb of the Golden Fleece which hangs from Monsieur de Bourgogne’s neck.”
Jacques Charmolue raised his voice,
“Clerk, write. Young Bohemian maid, you confess your participation in the feasts, witches’ sabbaths, and witchcrafts of hell, with ghosts, hags, and vampires? Answer.”
“Yes,” she said, so low that her words were lost in her breathing.
“You confess to having seen the ram which Beelzebub causes to appear in the clouds to call together the witches’ sabbath, and which is beheld by socerers alone?”
“Yes.”
“You confess to having adored the heads of Bophomet, those abominable idols of the Templars?”
“Yes.”
“To having had habitual dealings with the devil under the form of a goat familiar, joined with you in the suit?”
“Yes.”
“Lastly, you avow and confess to having, with the aid of the demon, and of the phantom vulgarly known as the surly monk, on the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, murdered and assassinated a captain named Phoebus de Châteaupers?”
She raised her large, staring eyes to the magistrate, and replied, as though mechanically, without convulsion or agitation,—
“Yes.”
It was evident that everything within her was broken.
“Write, clerk,” said Charmolue. And, addressing the torturers, “Release the prisoner, and take her back to the court.”
When the prisoner had been “unbooted,” the procurator of the ecclesiastical court examined her foot, which was still swollen with pain. “Come,” said he, “there’s no great harm done. You shrieked in good season. You could still dance, my beauty!”
Then he turned to his acolytes of the officiality,—“Behold justice enlightened at last! This is a solace, gentlemen! Madamoiselle will bear us witness that we have acted with all possible gentleness.”
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 Châteaupers.”
Her heart contracted. She was heard to sob amid the darkness.

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 quae 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 Grève, 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 Grève, 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 Châteaupers. May God have mercy on your soul!”
“Oh! ‘tis a dream!” she murmured; and she felt rough hands bearing her away.
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.