Bab Bab 25 · THE RAT-HOLE.

. THE RAT-HOLE.

The reader must permit us to take him back to the Place de Grève,

which we quitted yesterday with Gringoire, in order to follow la

Esmeralda.

It is ten o’clock in the morning; everything is indicative of the

day after a festival. The pavement is covered with rubbish;

ribbons, rags, feathers from tufts of plumes, drops of wax from

the torches, crumbs of the public feast. A goodly number of

_bourgeois_ are “sauntering,” as we say, here and there, turning

over with their feet the extinct brands of the bonfire, going

into raptures in front of the Pillar House, over the memory of

the fine hangings of the day before, and to-day staring at the

nails that secured them a last pleasure. The venders of cider and

beer are rolling their barrels among the groups. Some busy

passers-by come and go. The merchants converse and call to each

other from the thresholds of their shops. The festival, the

ambassadors, Coppenole, the Pope of the Fools, are in all mouths;

they vie with each other, each trying to criticise it best and

laugh the most. And, meanwhile, four mounted sergeants, who have

just posted themselves at the four sides of the pillory, have

already concentrated around themselves a goodly proportion of the

populace scattered on the Place, who condemn themselves to

immobility and fatigue in the hope of a small execution.

If the reader, after having contemplated this lively and noisy

scene which is being enacted in all parts of the Place, will now

transfer his gaze towards that ancient demi-Gothic,

demi-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland, which forms the corner

on the quay to the west, he will observe, at the angle of the

façade, a large public breviary, with rich illuminations,

protected from the rain by a little penthouse, and from thieves

by a small grating, which, however, permits of the leaves being

turned. Beside this breviary is a narrow, arched window, closed

by two iron bars in the form of a cross, and looking on the

square; the only opening which admits a small quantity of light

and air to a little cell without a door, constructed on the

ground-floor, in the thickness of the walls of the old house, and

filled with a peace all the more profound, with a silence all the

more gloomy, because a public place, the most populous and most

noisy in Paris swarms and shrieks around it.

This little cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly three

centuries, ever since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in

mourning for her father who died in the Crusades, had caused it

to be hollowed out in the wall of her own house, in order to

immure herself there forever, keeping of all her palace only this

lodging whose door was walled up, and whose window stood open,

winter and summer, giving all the rest to the poor and to God.

The afflicted damsel had, in fact, waited twenty years for death

in this premature tomb, praying night and day for the soul of her

father, sleeping in ashes, without even a stone for a pillow,

clothed in a black sack, and subsisting on the bread and water

which the compassion of the passers-by led them to deposit on the

ledge of her window, thus receiving charity after having bestowed

it. At her death, at the moment when she was passing to the other

sepulchre, she had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to afflicted

women, mothers, widows, or maidens, who should wish to pray much

for others or for themselves, and who should desire to inter

themselves alive in a great grief or a great penance. The poor of

her day had made her a fine funeral, with tears and benedictions;

but, to their great regret, the pious maid had not been

canonized, for lack of influence. Those among them who were a

little inclined to impiety, had hoped that the matter might be

accomplished in Paradise more easily than at Rome, and had

frankly besought God, instead of the pope, in behalf of the

deceased. The majority had contented themselves with holding the

memory of Rolande sacred, and converting her rags into relics.

The city, on its side, had founded in honor of the damoiselle, a

public breviary, which had been fastened near the window of the

cell, in order that passers-by might halt there from time to

time, were it only to pray; that prayer might remind them of

alms, and that the poor recluses, heiresses of Madame Rolande’s

vault, might not die outright of hunger and forgetfulness.

Moreover, this sort of tomb was not so very rare a thing in the

cities of the Middle Ages. One often encountered in the most

frequented street, in the most crowded and noisy market, in the

very middle, under the feet of the horses, under the wheels of

the carts, as it were, a cellar, a well, a tiny walled and grated

cabin, at the bottom of which a human being prayed night and day,

voluntarily devoted to some eternal lamentation, to some great

expiation. And all the reflections which that strange spectacle

would awaken in us to-day; that horrible cell, a sort of

intermediary link between a house and the tomb, the cemetery and

the city; that living being cut off from the human community, and

thenceforth reckoned among the dead; that lamp consuming its last

drop of oil in the darkness; that remnant of life flickering in

the grave; that breath, that voice, that eternal prayer in a box

of stone; that face forever turned towards the other world; that

eye already illuminated with another sun; that ear pressed to the

walls of a tomb; that soul a prisoner in that body; that body a

prisoner in that dungeon cell, and beneath that double envelope

of flesh and granite, the murmur of that soul in pain;—nothing of

all this was perceived by the crowd. The piety of that age, not

very subtle nor much given to reasoning, did not see so many

facets in an act of religion. It took the thing in the block,

honored, venerated, hallowed the sacrifice at need, but did not

analyze the sufferings, and felt but moderate pity for them. It

brought some pittance to the miserable penitent from time to

time, looked through the hole to see whether he were still

living, forgot his name, hardly knew how many years ago he had

begun to die, and to the stranger, who questioned them about the

living skeleton who was perishing in that cellar, the neighbors

replied simply, “It is the recluse.”

Everything was then viewed without metaphysics, without

exaggeration, without magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The

microscope had not yet been invented, either for things of matter

or for things of the mind.

Moreover, although people were but little surprised by it, the

examples of this sort of cloistration in the hearts of cities

were in truth frequent, as we have just said. There were in Paris

a considerable number of these cells, for praying to God and

doing penance; they were nearly all occupied. It is true that the

clergy did not like to have them empty, since that implied

lukewarmness in believers, and that lepers were put into them

when there were no penitents on hand. Besides the cell on the

Grève, there was one at Montfaucon, one at the Charnier des

Innocents, another I hardly know where,—at the Clichon House, I

think; others still at many spots where traces of them are found

in traditions, in default of memorials. The University had also

its own. On Mount Sainte-Geneviève a sort of Job of the Middle

Ages, for the space of thirty years, chanted the seven

penitential psalms on a dunghill at the bottom of a cistern,

beginning anew when he had finished, singing loudest at night,

_magna voce per umbras_, and to-day, the antiquary fancies that

he hears his voice as he enters the Rue du Puits-qui-parle—the

street of the “Speaking Well.”

To confine ourselves to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we must say

that it had never lacked recluses. After the death of Madame

Roland, it had stood vacant for a year or two, though rarely.

Many women had come thither to mourn, until their death, for

relatives, lovers, faults. Parisian malice, which thrusts its

finger into everything, even into things which concern it the

least, affirmed that it had beheld but few widows there.

In accordance with the fashion of the epoch, a Latin inscription

on the wall indicated to the learned passer-by the pious purpose

of this cell. The custom was retained until the middle of the

sixteenth century of explaining an edifice by a brief device

inscribed above the door. Thus, one still reads in France, above

the wicket of the prison in the seignorial mansion of Tourville,

_Sileto et spera_; in Ireland, beneath the armorial bearings

which surmount the grand door to Fortescue Castle, _Forte scutum,

salus ducum_; in England, over the principal entrance to the

hospitable mansion of the Earls Cowper: _Tuum est_. At that time

every edifice was a thought.

As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland, these

two words had been carved in large Roman capitals over the

window,—

TU, ORA.

And this caused the people, whose good sense does not perceive so

much refinement in things, and likes to translate _Ludovico

Magno_ by _Porte Saint-Denis_, to give to this dark, gloomy, damp

cavity, the name of “The Rat-Hole.” An explanation less sublime,

perhaps, than the other; but, on the other hand, more

picturesque.