Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (55 page)

There was one moment among the rest when it occurred to him that this was possibly the minute when the hideous chain which he had seen that morning was drawing its iron noose closer and ever closer around that slender, graceful neck. This idea made the perspiration start from every pore.

There was another moment when, while laughing devilishly at himself, he pictured at one and the same time Esmeralda as he had first seen her,—alert, heedless, happy, gaily dressed, dancing, winged, and harmonious,—and Esmeralda as he had last seen her, in her shift, with the rope about her neck, slowly approaching with her bare feet the cruel gallows; and this double picture was so vivid that he uttered a terrible cry.

While this whirlwind of despair overwhelmed, crushed, broke, bent, and uprooted everything in his soul, he considered the scene around him. At his feet some hens were pecking and scratching among the bushes, enameled beetles crawled in the sun; above his head, groups of dappled grey clouds sailed over the blue sky; in the horizon, the spire of the Abbey of Saint-Victor cut the curve of the hill with its slated obelisk; and the miller of the Butte-Copeaux whistled as he watched the busy wheels of his mill go round. All this active, industrious, tranquil life, reproduced around him in a thousand forms, hurt him. He again tried to escape.

Thus he ran through the fields until nightfall. This flight from Nature, life, himself, man, God, everything, lasted the entire day. Sometimes he threw himself face downwards upon the earth, and tore up the young corn with his nails: sometimes he paused in some deserted village street; and his thoughts were so unendurable that he seized his head in both hands and tried to snatch it from his shoulders that he might dash it to pieces upon the ground.

Towards sunset he examined himself anew, and found that he was almost mad. The tempest which had been raging within him from the instant that he lost all hope and will to save the gipsy girl had not left a single sane idea, a single sound thought, in his brain. His reason was laid low by it, was almost wholly destroyed by it. His mind retained but two distinct images,—Esmeralda and the scaffold ; all else was black. Those two closely connected images presented a frightful group; and the more he fixed upon them such power of attention and intellect as he still retained, the more they seemed to grow, by a fantastic progression,—the one in grace, charm, beauty, light, the other in horror; so that at last Esmeralda appeared to him as a star, the gibbet as an enormous fleshless arm.

It was a remarkable thing that in spite of all this torment he never seriously thought of suicide. The wretch was so constituted. He clung to life. Perhaps he really saw hell lurking in the background.

Meantime, the day continued to decline. That spark of life which still burned within him dreamed dimly of returning home. He fancied himself remote from Paris; but on examination he discovered that he had merely made the circuit of the University. The spire of Saint-Sulpice and the three lofty pinnacles of Saint-Germain-des-Prés rose above the horizon on his right. He proceeded in that direction. When he heard the challenge of the abbot’s men-at-arms around the battlemented walls of Saint-Germain he turned aside, took a footpath which he saw between the abbey mill and the lazaretto of the suburb, and in a few moments found himself at the edge of the Pré-aux-Clercs. This meadow was famous for the riots going on there continually, day and night; it was the “hydra-headed monster” of the poor monks of Saint-Germain:
“Quod monachis Sancti-Germani pratensis hydra fuit, clericis nova semper dissidiorum capita suscitantibus.”
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The archdeacon dreaded meeting some one there; he was afraid of any human face; he had shunned the University and the village of Saint-Germain; he was determined not to enter the city streets any earlier than he could help.

He skirted the Pré-aux-Clercs, took the deserted path dividing it from the Dieu-Neuf, and at last reached the bank of the river. There he found a boatman, who for a few farthings rowed him up the Seine as far as the City, where he landed him on that strip of waste land where the reader has already seen Gringoire indulging in a reverie, and which extended beyond the king’s gardens, parallel with the island of the Passeur-aux-Vaches.

The monotonous rocking of the boat and the ripple of the water had somewhat stupefied the unhappy Claude. When the boatman had gone, he stood upon the shore in a dazed condition, staring straight forward, and seeing everything in a sort of luminous mist which seemed to dance before his eyes. The fatigue of great grief often produces this effect upon the brain.

The sun had set behind the tall Tour de Nesle. It was twilight. The sky was silvery, the water in the river was silvery too. Between these two silver whites, the left bank of the Seine, upon which his eyes were riveted, stretched its somber length, and, tapering in the distance, faded away at last among the hazes of the horizon in the shape of a black spire. It was covered with houses, whose dark outlines only were visible, cast in strong relief against the bright background of cloud and water. Here and there windows began to glow like live embers. The vast black obelisk thus detached between the two white masses of sky and river, the latter very broad just here, produced a strange effect on Don Claude,—such as might be felt by a man lying flat on his back at the foot of the Strasburg cathedral, and gazing up at the huge spire piercing the twilight shadows over his head. Only here, Claude was standing and the obelisk lying low; but as the river, by reflecting the sky, prolonged the abyss beneath, the vast promontory seemed to shoot into space as boldly as any cathedral spire; and the impression produced was the same. The impression was made even stronger and more singular by the fact that it was indeed the Strasburg steeple, but the Strasburg steeple two leagues high,—something unheard-of, gigantic, immeasurable; a structure such as no human eye ever beheld; a Tower of Babel. The chimneys of the houses, the battlements of the wall, the carved gables of the roofs, the spire of the Augustine monastery, the Tour de Nesle, all these projections which marred the outline of the colossal obelisk, added to the illusion by grotesquely counterfeiting to the eye the indentations of some rich and fantastic carving.

Claude, in the state of hallucination in which he then was, believed that he saw—saw with his bodily eyes—the pinnacles of hell; the countless lights scattered from end to end of the awful tower appeared to him like so many doors leading to the vast furnace within; the voices and the sounds which arose from it, like so many shrieks and groans. Then he was terrified; he clapped his hands to his ears that he might not hear them, turned his back that he might not see, and hastened away from the fearful vision.

But the vision was within him.

When he once more entered the city streets, the passing people elbowing each other in the light of the shop windows affected him like the never-ending coming and going of specters. There were strange noises in his ears; extraordinary images troubled his senses. He saw neither houses, nor pavement, nor chariots, nor men and women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects which melted into one another. At the corner of the Rue de la Barillerie there was a grocer’s shop, the sloping roof of which was, according to immemorial custom, hung with tin hoops, from each of which was suspended a circle of wooden candles, which clattered and clashed in the wind like castanets. He fancied he heard the heap of skeletons at Montfaucon knocking their bones against one another in the darkness.

“Oh,” he muttered, “the night wind dashes them together, and mingles the sound of their chains with the rattle of their bones! Perhaps she too is there among them!”

Bewildered and distracted, he knew not where he went. After walking a few steps, he found himself upon the Pont Saint-Michel. There was a light at the window of a room on the ground-floor; he went up to it. Through a cracked pane he saw a dirty room, which roused a vague memory in his brain. In this room, dimly lighted by a small lamp, there was a fresh, fair-haired, merry-faced youth, who with loud bursts of laughter kissed a gaudily-dressed girl; and near the lamp sat an old woman spinning and singing in a cracked voice. As the young man occasionally ceased laughing, fragments of the old woman’s song reached the priest; it was something unintelligible and frightful:—

Hereupon the young man laughed, and caressed the girl. The old woman was La Falourdel; the girl was a woman of the town; the young man was his brother Jehan.

He continued to gaze. As well this sight as another.

He saw Jehan go to a window at the back of the room, open it, cast a glance at the quay, where countless lighted windows gleamed in the distance, and he heard him say, as he closed the window,—

“By my soul! it is night already. The citizens have lighted their candles, and the good God his stars.”

Then Jehan went back to the girl and broke a bottle which stood on the table, exclaiming,—

“Empty already, by Jove! and I have no more money! Isabeau, my love, I shall never feel content with Jupiter until he turns your two white breasts into two black bottles, whence I may suck Beaune wine night and day.”

This witticism made the girl laugh, and Jehan sallied forth.

Dom Claude had barely time to throw himself on the ground, lest he should be encountered, looked in the face, and recognized by his brother. Luckily, the street was dark, and the student was drunk. However, he noticed the archdeacon lying on the pavement in the mire.

“Ho! ho!” said he; “here’s a fellow who has led a jolly life today.”

With his foot he stirred Dom Claude, who held his breath.

“Dead drunk,” continued Jehan. “Well, he is full,—a regular leech dropped from a cask because he can suck no more. He is bald,” he added, stooping; “he is an old man! Fortunate
senex!”
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Then Dom Claude heard him move off, saying,—

“All the same, reason is a fine thing, and my brother the archdeacon is very lucky to be both wise and rich.”

The archdeacon then rose, and ran at full speed in the direction of Notre-Dame, whose enormous towers rose before him in the darkness above the surrounding houses.

When, quite breathless, he reached the square in front of the cathedral, he shrank back, and dared not raise his eyes to the fatal building.

“Oh,” said he in a low tone, “is it indeed true that such a thing can have occurred here today,—this very morning?”

Still he ventured to look at the church. The front was dark; the sky behind it glittered with stars. The crescent moon, which had just risen above the horizon, had that instant paused at the summit of the right-hand tower, and seemed to have perched, like a luminous bird, on the edge of the railing, which was cut into black trefoils.

The cloister door was closed, but the archdeacon always carried about him the key to the tower in which was his laboratory. He now used it to let himself into the church.

Inside, all was gloomy and silent as the tomb. By the heavy shadows falling on all sides in broad masses, he knew that the hangings put up for the morning’s ceremonies had not yet been removed. The great silver cross gleamed through the darkness, dotted with sparkling points of light, like the milky way of this sepulchral night. The long choir windows showed the tops of their pointed arches above the black drapery, the panes, traversed by a moonbeam, wearing only the doubtful colors of the night,—a sort of violet, white, and blue, in tints which are found nowhere else save on the face of the dead. The archdeacon, seeing these pale points of arches all around the choir, fancied that he beheld the miters of bishops who had been damned. He shut his eyes, and when he reopened them, he imagined that there was a circle of ashen faces gazing at him.

He fled across the church. Then it seemed to him that the church, too, moved, stirred, breathed, and lived; that each big column became a monstrous leg, which pawed the ground with its broad stone hoof; and that the vast cathedral was only a sort of prodigious elephant, which panted and trampled, with pillars for feet, its two towers for tusks, and the immense black draperies for caparison.

Thus his fever, or mania, had attained such a degree of intensity that the external world had ceased to be to the unfortunate man anything more than a sort of Apocalypse, visible, tangible, terrifying.

For one moment he was comforted. As he entered the aisles, he perceived, behind a group of pillars, a reddish light, towards which he hastened as towards a star. It was the poor lamp which burned day and night above the public breviary of Notre-Dame, under its iron grating. He fell eagerly to reading the sacred book, in the hope of finding some consolation or some encouragement. The volume was open at this passage from Job, over which his fixed eye ran:—

“Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up.”

On reading this melancholy passage, he felt as a blind man feels who is pricked by the staff which he has picked up. His knees gave way beneath him, and he sank to the ground, thinking of her who had that day perished. Such awful fumes rose up and penetrated his brain that it seemed to him as if his head had become one of the mouths of hell.

He remained some time in this position, incapable of thought, crushed and powerless in the hand of the demon that possessed him. At last, some measure of strength returned to him; it occurred to him to take refuge in the tower with his faithful Quasimodo. He rose, and as he was frightened, he took, to light his steps, the lamp from the breviary. This was a sacrilege, but he had ceased to heed such trifles.