Chapter Chapter 44 · HUNCHBACKED, ONE EYED, LAME.

. HUNCHBACKED, ONE EYED, LAME.

Every city during the Middle Ages, and every city in France down

to the time of Louis XII. had its places of asylum. These

sanctuaries, in the midst of the deluge of penal and barbarous

jurisdictions which inundated the city, were a species of islands

which rose above the level of human justice. Every criminal who

landed there was safe. There were in every suburb almost as many

places of asylum as gallows. It was the abuse of impunity by the

side of the abuse of punishment; two bad things which strove to

correct each other. The palaces of the king, the hôtels of the

princes, and especially churches, possessed the right of asylum.

Sometimes a whole city which stood in need of being repeopled was

temporarily created a place of refuge. Louis XI. made all Paris a

refuge in 1467.

His foot once within the asylum, the criminal was sacred; but he

must beware of leaving it; one step outside the sanctuary, and he

fell back into the flood. The wheel, the gibbet, the strappado,

kept good guard around the place of refuge, and lay in watch

incessantly for their prey, like sharks around a vessel. Hence,

condemned men were to be seen whose hair had grown white in a

cloister, on the steps of a palace, in the enclosure of an abbey,

beneath the porch of a church; in this manner the asylum was a

prison as much as any other. It sometimes happened that a solemn

decree of parliament violated the asylum and restored the

condemned man to the executioner; but this was of rare

occurrence. Parliaments were afraid of the bishops, and when

there was friction between these two robes, the gown had but a

poor chance against the cassock. Sometimes, however, as in the

affair of the assassins of Petit-Jean, the headsman of Paris, and

in that of Emery Rousseau, the murderer of Jean Valleret, justice

overleaped the church and passed on to the execution of its

sentences; but unless by virtue of a decree of Parliament, woe to

him who violated a place of asylum with armed force! The reader

knows the manner of death of Robert de Clermont, Marshal of

France, and of Jean de Châlons, Marshal of Champagne; and yet the

question was only of a certain Perrin Marc, the clerk of a

money-changer, a miserable assassin; but the two marshals had

broken the doors of St. Méry. Therein lay the enormity.

Such respect was cherished for places of refuge that, according

to tradition, animals even felt it at times. Aymoire relates that

a stag, being chased by Dagobert, having taken refuge near the

tomb of Saint-Denis, the pack of hounds stopped short and barked.

Churches generally had a small apartment prepared for the

reception of supplicants. In 1407, Nicolas Flamel caused to be

built on the vaults of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, a chamber

which cost him four livres six sous, sixteen farthings, parisis.

At Notre-Dame it was a tiny cell situated on the roof of the side

aisle, beneath the flying buttresses, precisely at the spot where

the wife of the present janitor of the towers has made for

herself a garden, which is to the hanging gardens of Babylon what

a lettuce is to a palm-tree, what a porter’s wife is to a

Semiramis.

It was here that Quasimodo had deposited la Esmeralda, after his

wild and triumphant course. As long as that course lasted, the

young girl had been unable to recover her senses, half

unconscious, half awake, no longer feeling anything, except that

she was mounting through the air, floating in it, flying in it,

that something was raising her above the earth. From time to time

she heard the loud laughter, the noisy voice of Quasimodo in her

ear; she half opened her eyes; then below her she confusedly

beheld Paris checkered with its thousand roofs of slate and

tiles, like a red and blue mosaic, above her head the frightful

and joyous face of Quasimodo. Then her eyelids drooped again; she

thought that all was over, that they had executed her during her

swoon, and that the misshapen spirit which had presided over her

destiny, had laid hold of her and was bearing her away. She dared

not look at him, and she surrendered herself to her fate. But

when the bellringer, dishevelled and panting, had deposited her

in the cell of refuge, when she felt his huge hands gently

detaching the cord which bruised her arms, she felt that sort of

shock which awakens with a start the passengers of a vessel which

runs aground in the middle of a dark night. Her thoughts awoke

also, and returned to her one by one. She saw that she was in

Notre-Dame; she remembered having been torn from the hands of the

executioner; that Phœbus was alive, that Phœbus loved her no

longer; and as these two ideas, one of which shed so much

bitterness over the other, presented themselves simultaneously to

the poor condemned girl; she turned to Quasimodo, who was

standing in front of her, and who terrified her; she said to

him,—

“Why have you saved me?”

He gazed at her with anxiety, as though seeking to divine what

she was saying to him. She repeated her question. Then he gave

her a profoundly sorrowful glance and fled. She was astonished.

A few moments later he returned, bearing a package which he cast

at her feet. It was clothing which some charitable women had left

on the threshold of the church for her.

Then she dropped her eyes upon herself and saw that she was

almost naked, and blushed. Life had returned.

Quasimodo appeared to experience something of this modesty. He

covered his eyes with his large hand and retired once more, but

slowly.

She made haste to dress herself. The robe was a white one with a

white veil,—the garb of a novice of the Hôtel-Dieu.

She had barely finished when she beheld Quasimodo returning. He

carried a basket under one arm and a mattress under the other. In

the basket there was a bottle, bread, and some provisions. He set

the basket on the floor and said, “Eat!” He spread the mattress

on the flagging and said, “Sleep.”

It was his own repast, it was his own bed, which the bellringer

had gone in search of.

The gypsy raised her eyes to thank him, but she could not

articulate a word. She dropped her head with a quiver of terror.

Then he said to her.—

“I frighten you. I am very ugly, am I not? Do not look at me;

only listen to me. During the day you will remain here; at night

you can walk all over the church. But do not leave the church

either by day or by night. You would be lost. They would kill

you, and I should die.”

She was touched and raised her head to answer him. He had

disappeared. She found herself alone once more, meditating upon

the singular words of this almost monstrous being, and struck by

the sound of his voice, which was so hoarse yet so gentle.

Then she examined her cell. It was a chamber about six feet

square, with a small window and a door on the slightly sloping

plane of the roof formed of flat stones. Many gutters with the

figures of animals seemed to be bending down around her, and

stretching their necks in order to stare at her through the

window. Over the edge of her roof she perceived the tops of

thousands of chimneys which caused the smoke of all the fires in

Paris to rise beneath her eyes. A sad sight for the poor gypsy, a

foundling, condemned to death, an unhappy creature, without

country, without family, without a hearthstone.

At the moment when the thought of her isolation thus appeared to

her more poignant than ever, she felt a bearded and hairy head

glide between her hands, upon her knees. She started (everything

alarmed her now) and looked. It was the poor goat, the agile

Djali, which had made its escape after her, at the moment when

Quasimodo had put to flight Charmolue’s brigade, and which had

been lavishing caresses on her feet for nearly an hour past,

without being able to win a glance. The gypsy covered him with

kisses.

“Oh! Djali!” she said, “how I have forgotten thee! And so thou

still thinkest of me! Oh! thou art not an ingrate!”

At the same time, as though an invisible hand had lifted the

weight which had repressed her tears in her heart for so long,

she began to weep, and, in proportion as her tears flowed, she

felt all that was most acrid and bitter in her grief depart with

them.

Evening came, she thought the night so beautiful that she made

the circuit of the elevated gallery which surrounds the church.

It afforded her some relief, so calm did the earth appear when

viewed from that height.