Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (60 page)

“I’ll tell you more,” cried Dom Claude; and his voice, hitherto so low, slow, and almost muffled, became as loud as thunder. “She did indeed take refuge in Notre-Dame. But within three days justice will again overtake her, and she will be hanged upon the Place de Grève. Parliament has issued a decree.”

“That’s a pity!” said Gringoire.

The priest, in the twinkling of an eye, had recovered his coldness and calm.

“And who the devil,” resumed the poet, “has amused himself by soliciting an order of restitution? Why couldn’t he have left Parliament in peace? What harm does it do if a poor girl takes shelter under the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame, alongside of the swallows’ nests?”

“There are Satans in the world,” replied the archdeacon.

“That’s a devilish bad job,” observed Gringoire.

The archdeacon resumed, after a pause,—

“So she saved your life?”

“From my good friends the Vagrants. A little more, or a little less, and I should have been hanged. They would be very sorry for it now.”

“Don’t you want to do anything to help her?”

“With all my heart, Dom Claude; but what if I should get myself into trouble?”

“What would that matter?”

“What! what would it matter? How kind you are, master! I have two great works but just begun.”

The priest struck his forehead. In spite of his feigned calmness, an occasional violent gesture betrayed his inward struggles.

“How is she to be saved?”

Gringoire said: “Master, I might answer,
‘Il padelt,’
which is Turkish for, ‘God is our hope.’”

“How is she to be saved?” dreamily repeated the archdeacon.

Gringoire in his turn clapped his hand to his head.

“See here, master, I have a lively imagination; I will devise various expedients. Suppose the king were asked to pardon her?”

“Louis XI,—to pardon!”

“Why not?”

“As well try to rob a tiger of his bone!”

Gringoire set to work to find some fresh solution of the difficulty.

“Well!—stop!—Do you want me to draw up a petition to the midwives declaring the girl to be pregnant?”

This made the priest’s hollow eye flash.

“Pregnant, villain! do you know anything about it?”

Gringoire was terrified by his expression. He made haste to say, “Oh, no, not I! our marriage was a true
forismaritagium.
I was entirely left out. But at any rate, we should gain time.”

“Folly! infamy! be silent!”

“You are wrong to be so vexed,” grumbled Gringoire. “We should gain time; it would do no one any harm, and the midwives, who are poor women, would earn forty Paris pence.”

The priest paid no attention to him.

“And yet she must be got away!” he muttered. “The order will be executed within three days! Besides, even if there were no order, that Quasimodo! Women have very depraved tastes!” He raised his voice: “Master Pierre, I considered it well; there’s but one means of salvation for her.”

“What is it? I, for my part, see none.”

“Listen, Master Pierre, and remember that you owe your life to her. I will frankly tell you my idea. The church is watched night and day. No one is allowed to come out but those who are seen to go in. Therefore, you can go in. You will come, and I will take you to her. You will change clothes with her. She will put on your doublet; you will put on her gown.”

“So far, so good,” remarked the philosopher. “What next?”

“What next? She will walk out in your clothes; you will stay behind in hers. Perhaps they may hang you, but she will be saved.”

Gringoire scratched his ear, with a very grave look.

“There!” said he; “that’s an idea which would never have occurred to me.”

At Dom Claude’s unexpected proposition, the poet’s benign and open face had suddenly darkened, like a smiling Italian landscape when some fatal blast sweeps a cloud across the sun.

“Well, Gringoire, what do you say to the plan?”

“I say, master, that they would not hang me
perhaps,
but they would hang me without the slightest doubt.”

“That does not concern us!”

“The Devil it doesn‘t!” said Gringoire.

“She saved your life. You would only be paying your debt.”

“There are plenty of others which I have not paid.”

“Master Pierre, it absolutely must be done.”

The archdeacon spoke with authority.

“Listen to me, Dom Claude,” replied the dismayed poet. “You cling to that idea, and you are wrong. I don’t see why I should be hanged in another person’s stead.”

“What makes you so fond of life?”

“Oh, a thousand things!”

“What are they, if you please?”

“What? The air, the sky, morning and evening, moonlight, my good friends the Vagabonds, our larks with the girls, the architectural beauties of Paris to study, three big books to write,—one of which is directed against the bishop and his mills,—and I know not what else. Anaxagoras said that he came into the world to admire the sun; and besides, I have the pleasure of spending all my days, from morning till night, with a man of genius, to wit, myself, and that is a mighty agreeable thing.”

“Rattle-pate!” muttered the archdeacon. “Well, speak; who preserved that life of yours which you find so delightful? To whom do you owe it that you still breathe this air, behold that sky, and are still able to amuse your feather-brain with trifles and nonsense? Where would you be now, but for her? Would you have her die, to whom you owe your life,—have her die, that sweet, lovely, adorable creature, necessary to the light of the world, more divine than God himself, while you, half madman and half sage, a mere sketch of something or other, a sort of vegetable growth which fancies that it walks and fancies that it thinks,—you are to go on living with the life of which you have robbed her, as useless as a candle at high noon? Come, have a little pity, Gringoire; be generous in your turn; she set you the example.”

The priest was excited. At first Gringoire listened with an air of indecision; then he relented, and ended by pulling a tragic grimace, which made his pallid face look like that of a new-born baby with the colic.

“You are pathetic!” said he, wiping away a tear. “Well, I will consider it. That’s an odd idea of yours. After all,” he added, after a pause, “who knows? Perhaps they would not hang me. Betrothal is not always marriage. When they find me in her cell, so ridiculously arrayed, in cap and petticoats, perhaps they’ll burst out laughing. And then, if they do hang me, why, the rope is like any other death; or, rather, it’s not like any other death. It is a death worthy of the wise man who has wavered and swung to and fro all his life,—a death which is neither fish nor flesh, like the spirit of the genuine sceptic; a death fully impressed with Pyrrhonism and uncertainty, a happy medium between heaven and earth, which leaves one in suspense. It is the right death for a philosopher, and perhaps I was predestined to it. It is magnificent to die as one has lived.”

The priest interrupted him: “Is it agreed?”

“What is death, after all?” continued Gringoire, with exaltation. “An unpleasant moment, a turnpike gate, the passage from little to nothing. Some one having asked Cercidas, of Magalopolis, if he was willing to die, ‘Why not?’ he answered: ‘for after my death I shall see those great men,—Pythagoras among the philosophers, Hecatæus among the historians, Homer among the poets, Olympus among the musicians.”’

The archdeacon offered him his hand. “It is settled, then? You will come tomorrow.”

This gesture brought Gringoire back to reality.

“Oh, no; by my faith!” said he in the tone of a man awaking from sleep. “To be hanged! That is too absurd. I’ll not do it.”

“Farewell, then!” and the archdeacon added between his teeth, “I shall see you again!”

“I have no desire to see that devil of a man again,” thought Gringoire; and he hurried after Dom Claude. “Stay, Sir Archdeacon; no malice between old friends! You take an interest in that girl,—in my wife, I should say; it is well. You have planned a stratagem for rescuing her from Notre-Dame; but your scheme is a very disagreeable one for me, Gringoire. Suppose I have another! I warn you that a most brilliant inspiration has just occurred to me. What if I have a suitable plan for getting her out of her evil plight without compromising my own neck in the least of slip-nooses, what would you say? Wouldn’t that satisfy you? Is it absolutely necessary that I should be hanged, to suit you?”

The priest impatiently wrenched the buttons from his cassock, saying, “What a flood of words! What is your scheme?”

“Yes,” resumed Gringoire, talking to himself, and laying his finger to his nose in token of his absorption, “that’s just it! The Vagabonds are brave fellows. The gipsy nation love her! They will rise at a single word! Nothing easier! A sudden attack; amidst the confusion she can readily be carried off. Tomorrow night. They will ask nothing better.”

“Your plan! speak!” said the priest, shaking him roughly.

Gringoire turned majestically towards him. “Let me alone! Don’t you see that I am in the throes of composition?” He reflected for a few moments more, then clapped his hands in delight, exclaiming, “Capital! success is assured!”

“Your plan!” angrily repeated Claude.

Gringoire was radiant.

“Come close, and let me whisper it to you. It is really a jolly countermine, and one which will get us all out of difficulty. Zounds! you must confess that I am no fool.”

He interrupted himself,—

“Oh, by the way! is the little goat still with the girl?”

“Yes. May the foul fiend fly away with you!”

“They were going to hang her too, were they not?”

“What is that to me?”

“Yes, they would have hanged her. They did hang a sow last month. The hangman likes that; he eats the animal afterwards. Hang my pretty Djali! Poor little lamb!”

“Curses on you!” cried Dom Claude. “You are the executioner yourself. What means of saving her have you hit upon, rascal? Must I tear your idea from you with the forceps?”

“Softly, master! It is this.”

Gringoire bent to the archdeacon’s ear, and whispered to him, casting an anxious glance up and down the street meanwhile, although there was no one in sight. When he ended, Dom Claude took his hand and said coldly, “It is well. Until tomorrow, then.”

“Until tomorrow,” repeated Gringoire. And as the archdeacon departed in one direction, he moved away in the other, muttering. “Here’s a pretty business, Master Pierre Gringoire! Never mind! It shall not be said that because a man is little he is afraid of a great enterprise. Biton carried a full-grown bull upon his shoulders; wag-tails, black-caps, and stone-chats cross the sea.”

T
he archdeacon, on returning to the cloisters, found his brother, Jehan du Moulin, awaiting him at the door of his cell. He had whiled away the fatigue of waiting by drawing upon the wall in charcoal his elder brother’s profile, enriched with an exaggerated nose.

Dom Claude scarcely looked at his brother; he had other cares. That merry roguish face, whose radiance had so often brightened the priest’s gloomy countenance, was now incapable of dissipating the clouds which grew daily thicker over that corrupt, mephitic, stagnant soul.

“Brother,” timidly said Jehan, “I have come to see you.”

The archdeacon did not even deign to look at him.

“Well?”

“Brother,” continued the hypocrite, “you are so good to me, and you give me such good advice, that I am always coming back to you.”

“Well?”

“Alas! brother, how right you were when you said to me, ‘Jehan! Jehan!
cessat doctorum doctrina, discipulorum, disciplina!
Jehan, be prudent; Jehan, be studious; Jehan, do not wander outside the college bounds at night without just cause and leave from your master. Do not quarrel with the Picards
(noli, Joannes, verberare Picardos).
Do not lie and molder like an illiterate ass
(quasi asinus illiteratus)
amidst the litter of the schools. Jehan, suffer yourself to be punished at the discretion of your master. Jehan, go to chapel every evening, and sing an anthem with a collect and prayer to our Glorious Lady, the Virgin Mary.’ Alas! What excellent counsels were these!”

“Well?”

“Brother, you see before you a guilty wretch, a criminal, a miserable sinner, a libertine, a monster! My dear brother, Jehan has trampled your advice beneath his feet. I am fitly punished for it, and the good God is strangely just. So long as I had money I rioted and reveled and led a jolly life. Oh, how charming is the face of Vice, but how ugly and crooked is her back! Now, I have not a single silver coin; I have sold my table-cloth, my shirt, and my towel; no more feasting for me! The wax candle has burned out, and I have nothing left but a wretched tallow dip, which reeks in my nostrils. The girls laugh at me. I drink water. I am tormented by creditors and remorse.”

“What else?” said the archdeacon.

“Alas! dearest brother, I would fain lead a better life. I came to you full of contrition. I am penitent. I confess my sins. I beat my breast lustily. You were quite right to wish me to become a licentiate, and submonitor of the College de Torchi. I now feel that I have the strongest vocation for that office. But I have no ink, I must buy some; I have no pens, I must buy some; I have no paper, I have no books, I must buy some. I am in great want of a little money for all these things, and I come to you, brother, with a contrite heart.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes,” said the student. “A little money.”

“I have none.”

The student then said with a grave and at the same time resolute air, “Very well, brother: I am sorry to be obliged to tell you that very fine offers and propositions have been made me by another party. You will not give me the money? No? In that case, I shall turn Vagabond.”