الفصل الفصل 43 · DELIRIUM.

. DELIRIUM.

Claude Frollo was no longer in Notre-Dame when his adopted son so

abruptly cut the fatal web in which the archdeacon and the gypsy

were entangled. On returning to the sacristy he had torn off his

alb, cope, and stole, had flung all into the hands of the

stupefied beadle, had made his escape through the private door of

the cloister, had ordered a boatman of the Terrain to transport

him to the left bank of the Seine, and had plunged into the hilly

streets of the University, not knowing whither he was going,

encountering at every step groups of men and women who were

hurrying joyously towards the Pont Saint-Michel, in the hope of

still arriving in time to see the witch hung there,—pale, wild,

more troubled, more blind and more fierce than a night bird let

loose and pursued by a troop of children in broad daylight. He no

longer knew where he was, what he thought, or whether he were

dreaming. He went forward, walking, running, taking any street at

haphazard, making no choice, only urged ever onward away from the

Grève, the horrible Grève, which he felt confusedly, to be behind

him.

In this manner he skirted Mount Sainte-Geneviève, and finally

emerged from the town by the Porte Saint-Victor. He continued his

flight as long as he could see, when he turned round, the

turreted enclosure of the University, and the rare houses of the

suburb; but, when, at length, a rise of ground had completely

concealed from him that odious Paris, when he could believe

himself to be a hundred leagues distant from it, in the fields,

in the desert, he halted, and it seemed to him that he breathed

more freely.

Then frightful ideas thronged his mind. Once more he could see

clearly into his soul, and he shuddered. He thought of that

unhappy girl who had destroyed him, and whom he had destroyed. He

cast a haggard eye over the double, tortuous way which fate had

caused their two destinies to pursue up to their point of

intersection, where it had dashed them against each other without

mercy. He meditated on the folly of eternal vows, on the vanity

of chastity, of science, of religion, of virtue, on the

uselessness of God. He plunged to his heart’s content in evil

thoughts, and in proportion as he sank deeper, he felt a Satanic

laugh burst forth within him.

And as he thus sifted his soul to the bottom, when he perceived

how large a space nature had prepared there for the passions, he

sneered still more bitterly. He stirred up in the depths of his

heart all his hatred, all his malevolence; and, with the cold

glance of a physician who examines a patient, he recognized the

fact that this malevolence was nothing but vitiated love; that

love, that source of every virtue in man, turned to horrible

things in the heart of a priest, and that a man constituted like

himself, in making himself a priest, made himself a demon. Then

he laughed frightfully, and suddenly became pale again, when he

considered the most sinister side of his fatal passion, of that

corrosive, venomous malignant, implacable love, which had ended

only in the gibbet for one of them and in hell for the other;

condemnation for her, damnation for him.

And then his laughter came again, when he reflected that Phœbus

was alive; that after all, the captain lived, was gay and happy,

had handsomer doublets than ever, and a new mistress whom he was

conducting to see the old one hanged. His sneer redoubled its

bitterness when he reflected that out of the living beings whose

death he had desired, the gypsy, the only creature whom he did

not hate, was the only one who had not escaped him.

Then from the captain, his thought passed to the people, and

there came to him a jealousy of an unprecedented sort. He

reflected that the people also, the entire populace, had had

before their eyes the woman whom he loved exposed almost naked.

He writhed his arms with agony as he thought that the woman whose

form, caught by him alone in the darkness would have been supreme

happiness, had been delivered up in broad daylight at full

noonday, to a whole people, clad as for a night of

voluptuousness. He wept with rage over all these mysteries of

love, profaned, soiled, laid bare, withered forever. He wept with

rage as he pictured to himself how many impure looks had been

gratified at the sight of that badly fastened shift, and that

this beautiful girl, this virgin lily, this cup of modesty and

delight, to which he would have dared to place his lips only

trembling, had just been transformed into a sort of public bowl,

whereat the vilest populace of Paris, thieves, beggars, lackeys,

had come to quaff in common an audacious, impure, and depraved

pleasure.

And when he sought to picture to himself the happiness which he

might have found upon earth, if she had not been a gypsy, and if

he had not been a priest, if Phœbus had not existed and if she

had loved him; when he pictured to himself that a life of

serenity and love would have been possible to him also, even to

him; that there were at that very moment, here and there upon the

earth, happy couples spending the hours in sweet converse beneath

orange trees, on the banks of brooks, in the presence of a

setting sun, of a starry night; and that if God had so willed, he

might have formed with her one of those blessed couples,—his

heart melted in tenderness and despair.

Oh! she! still she! It was this fixed idea which returned

incessantly, which tortured him, which ate into his brain, and

rent his vitals. He did not regret, he did not repent; all that

he had done he was ready to do again; he preferred to behold her

in the hands of the executioner rather than in the arms of the

captain. But he suffered; he suffered so that at intervals he

tore out handfuls of his hair to see whether it were not turning

white.

Among other moments there came one, when it occurred to him that

it was perhaps the very minute when the hideous chain which he

had seen that morning, was pressing its iron noose closer about

that frail and graceful neck. This thought caused the

perspiration to start from every pore.

There was another moment when, while laughing diabolically at

himself, he represented to himself la Esmeralda as he had seen

her on that first day, lively, careless, joyous, gayly attired,

dancing, winged, harmonious, and la Esmeralda of the last day, in

her scanty shift, with a rope about her neck, mounting slowly

with her bare feet, the angular ladder of the gallows; he figured

to himself this double picture in such a manner that he gave vent

to a terrible cry.

While this hurricane of despair overturned, broke, tore up, bent,

uprooted everything in his soul, he gazed at nature around him.

At his feet, some chickens were searching the thickets and

pecking, enamelled beetles ran about in the sun; overhead, some

groups of dappled gray clouds were floating across the blue sky;

on the horizon, the spire of the Abbey Saint-Victor pierced the

ridge of the hill with its slate obelisk; and the miller of the

Copeaue hillock was whistling as he watched the laborious wings

of his mill turning. All this active, organized, tranquil life,

recurring around him under a thousand forms, hurt him. He resumed

his flight.

He sped thus across the fields until evening. This flight from

nature, life, himself, man, God, everything, lasted all day long.

Sometimes he flung himself face downward on the earth, and tore

up the young blades of wheat with his nails. Sometimes he halted

in the deserted street of a village, and his thoughts were so

intolerable that he grasped his head in both hands and tried to

tear it from his shoulders in order to dash it upon the pavement.

Towards the hour of sunset, he examined himself again, and found

himself nearly mad. The tempest which had raged within him ever

since the instant when he had lost the hope and the will to save

the gypsy,—that tempest had not left in his conscience a single

healthy idea, a single thought which maintained its upright

position. His reason lay there almost entirely destroyed. There

remained but two distinct images in his mind, la Esmeralda and

the gallows; all the rest was blank. Those two images united,

presented to him a frightful group; and the more he concentrated

what attention and thought was left to him, the more he beheld

them grow, in accordance with a fantastic progression, the one in

grace, in charm, in beauty, in light, the other in deformity and

horror; so that at last la Esmeralda appeared to him like a star,

the gibbet like an enormous, fleshless arm.

One remarkable fact is, that during the whole of this torture,

the idea of dying did not seriously occur to him. The wretch was

made so. He clung to life. Perhaps he really saw hell beyond it.

Meanwhile, the day continued to decline. The living being which

still existed in him reflected vaguely on retracing its steps. He

believed himself to be far away from Paris; on taking his

bearings, he perceived that he had only circled the enclosure of

the University. The spire of Saint-Sulpice, and the three lofty

needles of Saint Germain-des-Prés, rose above the horizon on his

right. He turned his steps in that direction. When he heard the

brisk challenge of the men-at-arms of the abbey, around the

crenelated, circumscribing wall of Saint-Germain, he turned

aside, took a path which presented itself between the abbey and

the lazar-house of the bourg, and at the expiration of a few

minutes found himself on the verge of the Pré-aux-Clercs. This

meadow was celebrated by reason of the brawls which went on there

night and day; it was the hydra of the poor monks of

Saint-Germain: _quod monachis Sancti-Germaini pratensis hydra

fuit, clericis nova semper dissidiorum capita suscitantibus_. The

archdeacon was afraid of meeting some one there; he feared every

human countenance; he had just avoided the University and the

Bourg Saint-Germain; he wished to re-enter the streets as late as

possible. He skirted the Pré-aux-Clercs, took the deserted path

which separated it from the Dieu-Neuf, and at last reached the

water’s edge. There Dom Claude found a boatman, who, for a few

farthings in Parisian coinage, rowed him up the Seine as far as

the point of the city, and landed him on that tongue of abandoned

land where the reader has already beheld Gringoire dreaming, and

which was prolonged beyond the king’s gardens, parallel to the

Ile du Passeur-aux-Vaches.

The monotonous rocking of the boat and the ripple of the water

had, in some sort, quieted the unhappy Claude. When the boatman

had taken his departure, he remained standing stupidly on the

strand, staring straight before him and perceiving objects only

through magnifying oscillations which rendered everything a sort

of phantasmagoria to him. The fatigue of a great grief not

infrequently produces this effect on the mind.

The sun had set behind the lofty Tour-de-Nesle. It was the

twilight hour. The sky was white, the water of the river was

white. Between these two white expanses, the left bank of the

Seine, on which his eyes were fixed, projected its gloomy mass

and, rendered ever thinner and thinner by perspective, it plunged

into the gloom of the horizon like a black spire. It was loaded

with houses, of which only the obscure outline could be

distinguished, sharply brought out in shadows against the light

background of the sky and the water. Here and there windows began

to gleam, like the holes in a brazier. That immense black obelisk

thus isolated between the two white expanses of the sky and the

river, which was very broad at this point, produced upon Dom

Claude a singular effect, comparable to that which would be

experienced by a man who, reclining on his back at the foot of

the tower of Strasbourg, should gaze at the enormous spire

plunging into the shadows of the twilight above his head. Only,

in this case, it was Claude who was erect and the obelisk which

was lying down; but, as the river, reflecting the sky, prolonged

the abyss below him, the immense promontory seemed to be as

boldly launched into space as any cathedral spire; and the

impression was the same. This impression had even one stronger

and more profound point about it, that it was indeed the tower of

Strasbourg, but the tower of Strasbourg two leagues in height;

something unheard of, gigantic, immeasurable; an edifice such as

no human eye has ever seen; a tower of Babel. The chimneys of the

houses, the battlements of the walls, the faceted gables of the

roofs, the spire of the Augustines, the tower of Nesle, all these

projections which broke the profile of the colossal obelisk added

to the illusion by displaying in eccentric fashion to the eye the

indentations of a luxuriant and fantastic sculpture.

Claude, in the state of hallucination in which he found himself,

believed that he saw, that he saw with his actual eyes, the bell

tower of hell; the thousand lights scattered over the whole

height of the terrible tower seemed to him so many porches of the

immense interior furnace; the voices and noises which escaped

from it seemed so many shrieks, so many death groans. Then he

became alarmed, he put his hands on his ears that he might no

longer hear, turned his back that he might no longer see, and

fled from the frightful vision with hasty strides.

But the vision was in himself.

When he re-entered the streets, the passers-by elbowing each

other by the light of the shop-fronts, produced upon him the

effect of a constant going and coming of spectres about him.

There were strange noises in his ears; extraordinary fancies

disturbed his brain. He saw neither houses, nor pavements, nor

chariots, nor men and women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects

whose edges melted into each other. At the corner of the Rue de

la Barillerie, there was a grocer’s shop whose porch was

garnished all about, according to immemorial custom, with hoops

of tin from which hung a circle of wooden candles, which came in

contact with each other in the wind, and rattled like castanets.

He thought he heard a cluster of skeletons at Montfaucon clashing

together in the gloom.

“Oh!” he muttered, “the night breeze dashes them against each

other, and mingles the noise of their chains with the rattle of

their bones! Perhaps she is there among them!”

In his state of frenzy, he knew not whither he was going. After a

few strides he found himself on the Pont Saint-Michel. There was

a light in the window of a ground-floor room; he approached.

Through a cracked window he beheld a mean chamber which recalled

some confused memory to his mind. In that room, badly lighted by

a meagre lamp, there was a fresh, light-haired young man, with a

merry face, who amid loud bursts of laughter was embracing a very

audaciously attired young girl; and near the lamp sat an old

crone spinning and singing in a quavering voice. As the young man

did not laugh constantly, fragments of the old woman’s ditty

reached the priest; it was something unintelligible yet

frightful,—

“Grève, aboie, Grève, grouille!

File, file, ma quenouille,

File sa corde au bourreau,

Qui siffle dans le préau,

Grève, aboie, Grève, grouille!

“La belle corde de chanvre!

Semez d’Issy jusqu’à Vanvre

Du chanvre et non pas du blé.

Le voleur n’a pas volé

La belle corde de chanvre.

“Grève, grouille, Grève, aboie!

Pour voir la fille de joie,

Prendre au gibet chassieux,

Les fenêtres sont des yeux.

Grève, grouille, Grève, aboie!”[51]

Thereupon the young man laughed and caressed the wench. The crone

was la Falourdel; the girl was a courtesan; the young man was his

brother Jehan.

He continued to gaze. That spectacle was as good as any other.

He saw Jehan go to a window at the end of the room, open it, cast

a glance on the quay, where in the distance blazed a thousand

lighted casements, and he heard him say as he closed the sash,—

“’Pon my soul! How dark it is; the people are lighting their

candles, and the good God his stars.”

Then Jehan came back to the hag, smashed a bottle standing on the

table, exclaiming,—

“Already empty, _cor-bœuf!_ and I have no more money! Isabeau, my

dear, I shall not be satisfied with Jupiter until he has changed

your two white nipples into two black bottles, where I may suck

wine of Beaune day and night.”

This fine pleasantry made the courtesan laugh, and Jehan left the

room.

Dom Claude had barely time to fling himself on the ground in

order that he might not be met, stared in the face and recognized

by his brother. Luckily, the street was dark, and the scholar was

tipsy. Nevertheless, he caught sight of the archdeacon prone upon

the earth in the mud.

“Oh! oh!” said he; “here’s a fellow who has been leading a jolly

life, to-day.”

He stirred up Dom Claude with his foot, and the latter held his

breath.

“Dead drunk,” resumed Jehan. “Come, he’s full. A regular leech

detached from a hogshead. He’s bald,” he added, bending down,

“’tis an old man! _Fortunate senex!_”

Then Dom Claude heard him retreat, saying,—

“’Tis all the same, reason is a fine thing, and my brother the

archdeacon is very happy in that he is wise and has money.”

Then the archdeacon rose to his feet, and ran without halting,

towards Notre-Dame, whose enormous towers he beheld rising above

the houses through the gloom.

At the instant when he arrived, panting, on the Place du Parvis,

he shrank back and dared not raise his eyes to the fatal edifice.

“Oh!” he said, in a low voice, “is it really true that such a

thing took place here, to-day, this very morning?”

Still, he ventured to glance at the church. The front was sombre;

the sky behind was glittering with stars. The crescent of the

moon, in her flight upward from the horizon, had paused at the

moment, on the summit of the light hand tower, and seemed to have

perched itself, like a luminous bird, on the edge of the

balustrade, cut out in black trefoils.

The cloister door was shut; but the archdeacon always carried

with him the key of the tower in which his laboratory was

situated. He made use of it to enter the church.

In the church he found the gloom and silence of a cavern. By the

deep shadows which fell in broad sheets from all directions, he

recognized the fact that the hangings for the ceremony of the

morning had not yet been removed. The great silver cross shone

from the depths of the gloom, powdered with some sparkling

points, like the milky way of that sepulchral night. The long

windows of the choir showed the upper extremities of their arches

above the black draperies, and their painted panes, traversed by

a ray of moonlight had no longer any hues but the doubtful colors

of night, a sort of violet, white and blue, whose tint is found

only on the faces of the dead. The archdeacon, on perceiving

these wan spots all around the choir, thought he beheld the

mitres of damned bishops. He shut his eyes, and when he opened

them again, he thought they were a circle of pale visages gazing

at him.

He started to flee across the church. Then it seemed to him that

the church also was shaking, moving, becoming endued with

animation, that it was alive; that each of the great columns was

turning into an enormous paw, which was beating the earth with

its big stone spatula, and that the gigantic cathedral was no

longer anything but a sort of prodigious elephant, which was

breathing and marching with its pillars for feet, its two towers

for trunks and the immense black cloth for its housings.

This fever or madness had reached such a degree of intensity that

the external world was no longer anything more for the unhappy

man than a sort of Apocalypse,—visible, palpable, terrible.

For one moment, he was relieved. As he plunged into the side

aisles, he perceived a reddish light behind a cluster of pillars.

He ran towards it as to a star. It was the poor lamp which

lighted the public breviary of Notre-Dame night and day, beneath

its iron grating. He flung himself eagerly upon the holy book in

the hope of finding some consolation, or some encouragement

there. The hook lay open at this passage of Job, over which his

staring eye glanced,—

“And a spirit passed before my face, and I heard a small voice,

and the hair of my flesh stood up.”

On reading these gloomy words, he felt that which a blind man

feels when he feels himself pricked by the staff which he has

picked up. His knees gave way beneath him, and he sank upon the

pavement, thinking of her who had died that day. He felt so many

monstrous vapors pass and discharge themselves in his brain, that

it seemed to him that his head had become one of the chimneys of

hell.

It would appear that he remained a long time in this attitude, no

longer thinking, overwhelmed and passive beneath the hand of the

demon. At length some strength returned to him; it occurred to

him to take refuge in his tower beside his faithful Quasimodo. He

rose; and, as he was afraid, he took the lamp from the breviary

to light his way. It was a sacrilege; but he had got beyond

heeding such a trifle now.

He slowly climbed the stairs of the towers, filled with a secret

fright which must have been communicated to the rare passers-by

in the Place du Parvis by the mysterious light of his lamp,

mounting so late from loophole to loophole of the bell tower.

All at once, he felt a freshness on his face, and found himself

at the door of the highest gallery. The air was cold; the sky was

filled with hurrying clouds, whose large, white flakes drifted

one upon another like the breaking up of river ice after the

winter. The crescent of the moon, stranded in the midst of the

clouds, seemed a celestial vessel caught in the ice-cakes of the

air.

He lowered his gaze, and contemplated for a moment, through the

railing of slender columns which unites the two towers, far away,

through a gauze of mists and smoke, the silent throng of the

roofs of Paris, pointed, innumerable, crowded and small like the

waves of a tranquil sea on a sum-mer night.

The moon cast a feeble ray, which imparted to earth and heaven an

ashy hue.

At that moment the clock raised its shrill, cracked voice.

Midnight rang out. The priest thought of midday; twelve o’clock

had come back again.

“Oh!” he said in a very low tone, “she must be cold now.”

All at once, a gust of wind extinguished his lamp, and almost at

the same instant, he beheld a shade, a whiteness, a form, a

woman, appear from the opposite angle of the tower. He started.

Beside this woman was a little goat, which mingled its bleat with

the last bleat of the clock.

He had strength enough to look. It was she.

She was pale, she was gloomy. Her hair fell over her shoulders as

in the morning; but there was no longer a rope on her neck, her

hands were no longer bound; she was free, she was dead.

She was dressed in white and had a white veil on her head.

She came towards him, slowly, with her gaze fixed on the sky. The

supernatural goat followed her. He felt as though made of stone

and too heavy to flee. At every step which she took in advance,

he took one backwards, and that was all. In this way he retreated

once more beneath the gloomy arch of the stairway. He was chilled

by the thought that she might enter there also; had she done so,

he would have died of terror.

She did arrive, in fact, in front of the door to the stairway,

and paused there for several minutes, stared intently into the

darkness, but without appearing to see the priest, and passed on.

She seemed taller to him than when she had been alive; he saw the

moon through her white robe; he heard her breath.

When she had passed on, he began to descend the staircase again,

with the slowness which he had observed in the spectre, believing

himself to be a spectre too, haggard, with hair on end, his

extinguished lamp still in his hand; and as he descended the

spiral steps, he distinctly heard in his ear a voice laughing and

repeating,—

“A spirit passed before my face, and I heard a small voice, and

the hair of my flesh stood up.”