Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (40 page)

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

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

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

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

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

The priest’s gloomy eyes blazed with wrath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The archdeacon pressed Gringoire with questions.

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

“Phoebus,” said the priest; “and why ‘Phœbus’?”

“I don’t know,” answered Gringoire. “It may be a word which she thinks has some secret magic virtue. She often repeats it in an undertone when she thinks she is alone.”

“Are you sure,” returned Claude, with his penetrating glance, “that it is a word, and not a name?”

“Whose name?” said the poet.

“How do I know?” said the priest.

“This is what I believe, sir. These gipsies are a kind of fire-worshippers, and worship the sun. Hence, ‘Phœbus.”’

“That is not so clear to me as to you, Master Pierre.”

“Never mind; it doesn’t concern me. Let her mumble her ‘Phœbus’ as much as she likes. I’m sure of one thing; and that is, that Djali is almost as fond of me as of her.”

“Who is Djali?”

“That’s the goat.”

The archdeacon rested his chin on his hand, and seemed for a moment lost in thought. Suddenly he turned abruptly to Gringoire.

“And you swear that you have never touched her?”

“Who?” said Gringoire,—“the goat?”

“No, that woman.”

“My wife? I swear I never have.”

“And you are often alone with her?”

“A good hour every evening.”

Dom Claude frowned.

“Oh! oh!
Solus cum sola non cogitabuntur orare Pater noster.”
^ch

“By my soul! I might repeat the
Pater,
and the
Ave Maria,
and the Credo in Deum
patrem omnipotentem,
without her taking any more notice of me than a hen would of a church.”

“Swear to me by your mother’s soul,” repeated the archdeacon, vehemently, “that you have never laid the tip of your finger upon the girl.”

“I will swear it by my father’s head as well, if you like. But, my reverend master, let me ask one question in my turn.”

“Speak, sir.”

“What difference does it make to you?”

The archdeacon’s pale face turned red as a girl’s cheek. For a moment he made no answer; then, with evident embarrassment, he said,—

“Hark ye, Master Pierre Gringoire. You are not yet damned, so far as I know. I am interested in you, and wish you well. Now, the slightest contact with that devilish gipsy girl would make you the slave of Satan. You know that it is always the body which destroys the soul. Woe betide you if you approach that woman! That is all.”

“I tried it once,” said Gringoire, scratching his ear. “That was the first day; but I got stung.”

“Had you the effrontery, Master Pierre?”

And the priest’s face clouded.

“Another time,” said the poet, smiling, “I peeped through her keyhole before I went to bed, and I saw, in her shift, as delicious a damsel as ever made a bed creak beneath her naked foot.”

“Go to the devil!” cried the priest, with a terrible look; and pushing away the amazed Gringoire by the shoulders, he was soon lost to sight beneath the gloomiest arches of the cathedral.

E
ver since the morning when he was pilloried, the people living in the neighborhood of Notre-Dame fancied that Quasimodo’s zeal for bell-ringing had grown very cold. Up to that time he had pulled the bells upon every occasion and no occasion at all; their music sounded from prime to complines; the belfry rang a peal for high mass, or the bells sounded a merry chime for a wedding or a christening, mingling and blending in the air like a rich embroidery of all sorts of melodious sounds. The old church, resonant and re-echoing, was forever sounding its joy-bells. There seemed to be an ever-present spirit of noise and caprice, which shouted and sang through those brazen tongues. Now that spirit seemed to have vanished; the cathedral seemed somber, and given over to silence; for festivals and funerals there was still the simple tolling, dry and bare, such as the ritual required, and nothing more; of the double noise which a church sends forth, from its organ within and its bells without, only the organ remained. It seemed as if there were no musician left in the belfry towers. And yet, Quasimodo was still there. What had happened to him? Did the shame and despair felt upon the pillory still rankle within him; did the executioner’s lashes still tingle in his soul; and had the agony caused by such treatment killed all emotion within him, even his passion for the bells? Or had big Marie a rival in the heart of the ringer of Notre-Dame, and were the big bell and her fourteen sisters neglected for a fairer and more attractive object?

It happened that in this year of grace 1482 the Feast of the Annunciation fell upon Tuesday, the 25th of March. On that day the air was so pure and so clear that Quasimodo felt some slight return of his love for the bells. He therefore climbed up into the north tower, while below, the beadle threw wide open the church doors, which were then made of huge panels of hard wood covered with leather, edged with gilded iron nails, and framed in carvings “very cunningly wrought.”

The high belfry cage reached, Quasimodo gazed at the six bells for some time with a sad shake of the head, as if mourning over the strange thing which had come between his heart and them. But when he had set them swinging; when he felt that cluster of bells vibrating beneath his touch; when he saw—for he could not hear—the quivering octave run up and down that sonorous scale as a bird hops from twig to twig; when the demon of music, that demon which shakes a dazzling sheaf of runs, trills, and arpeggios, had taken possession of the poor deaf fellow,—then he was happy again; he forgot everything; and as his heart swelled with bliss his face grew radiant.

He came and went, he clapped his hands, he ran from one rope to another, he encouraged the six singers with voice and gesture, as the leader of an orchestra spurs on intelligent performers.

“Go on,” he cried; “go on, Gabrielle! Pour all your music into the public square; this is a high holiday. Thibauld, no laziness! your pace is slackening; go on, go on, I say! Are you growing rusty, sluggard? That’s good! quick! quick! don’t let me see the clapper. Make them all as deaf as I am. That’s it, Thibauld! bravely done! Guillaume! Guillaume! you are the biggest of them all, and Pasquier is the smallest, and yet Pasquier rings the best. I’ll wager that they who can hear, hear him better than they do you. Good! good! my Gabrielle! louder! louder! Hollo! what are you two doing up there, you Sparrows? I don’t see you make the very least noise, What are those brazen beaks about yonder, that they seem to yawn when they should be singing? There, work away! ‘Tis the Feast of the Annunciation. The sun shines bright; we want a fine peal of bells. Poor Guillaume! you’re quite out of breath, my fat lad.”