บทที่ บทที่ 27 · A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER.

. A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER.

These words were, so to speak, the point of union of two scenes,

which had, up to that time, been developed in parallel lines at

the same moment, each on its particular theatre; one, that which

the reader has just perused, in the Rat-Hole; the other, which he

is about to read, on the ladder of the pillory. The first had for

witnesses only the three women with whom the reader has just made

acquaintance; the second had for spectators all the public which

we have seen above, collecting on the Place de Grève, around the

pillory and the gibbet.

That crowd which the four sergeants posted at nine o’clock in the

morning at the four corners of the pillory had inspired with the

hope of some sort of an execution, no doubt, not a hanging, but a

whipping, a cropping of ears, something, in short,—that crowd had

increased so rapidly that the four policemen, too closely

besieged, had had occasion to “press” it, as the expression then

ran, more than once, by sound blows of their whips, and the

haunches of their horses.

This populace, disciplined to waiting for public executions, did

not manifest very much impatience. It amused itself with watching

the pillory, a very simple sort of monument, composed of a cube

of masonry about six feet high and hollow in the interior. A very

steep staircase, of unhewn stone, which was called by distinction

“the ladder,” led to the upper platform, upon which was visible a

horizontal wheel of solid oak. The victim was bound upon this

wheel, on his knees, with his hands behind his back. A wooden

shaft, which set in motion a capstan concealed in the interior of

the little edifice, imparted a rotatory motion to the wheel,

which always maintained its horizontal position, and in this

manner presented the face of the condemned man to all quarters of

the square in succession. This was what was called “turning” a

criminal.

As the reader perceives, the pillory of the Grève was far from

presenting all the recreations of the pillory of the Halles.

Nothing architectural, nothing monumental. No roof to the iron

cross, no octagonal lantern, no frail, slender columns spreading

out on the edge of the roof into capitals of acanthus leaves and

flowers, no waterspouts of chimeras and monsters, on carved

woodwork, no fine sculpture, deeply sunk in the stone.

They were forced to content themselves with those four stretches

of rubble work, backed with sandstone, and a wretched stone

gibbet, meagre and bare, on one side.

The entertainment would have been but a poor one for lovers of

Gothic architecture. It is true that nothing was ever less

curious on the score of architecture than the worthy gapers of

the Middle Ages, and that they cared very little for the beauty

of a pillory.

The victim finally arrived, bound to the tail of a cart, and when

he had been hoisted upon the platform, where he could be seen

from all points of the Place, bound with cords and straps upon

the wheel of the pillory, a prodigious hoot, mingled with

laughter and acclamations, burst forth upon the Place. They had

recognized Quasimodo.

It was he, in fact. The change was singular. Pilloried on the

very place where, on the day before, he had been saluted,

acclaimed, and proclaimed Pope and Prince of Fools, in the

cortège of the Duke of Egypt, the King of Thunes, and the Emperor

of Galilee! One thing is certain, and that is, that there was not

a soul in the crowd, not even himself, though in turn triumphant

and the sufferer, who set forth this combination clearly in his

thought. Gringoire and his philosophy were missing at this

spectacle.

Soon Michel Noiret, sworn trumpeter to the king, our lord,

imposed silence on the louts, and proclaimed the sentence, in

accordance with the order and command of monsieur the provost.

Then he withdrew behind the cart, with his men in livery

surcoats.

Quasimodo, impassible, did not wince. All resistance had been

rendered impossible to him by what was then called, in the style

of the criminal chancellery, “the vehemence and firmness of the

bonds” which means that the thongs and chains probably cut into

his flesh; moreover, it is a tradition of jail and wardens, which

has not been lost, and which the handcuffs still preciously

preserve among us, a civilized, gentle, humane people (the

galleys and the guillotine in parentheses).

He had allowed himself to be led, pushed, carried, lifted, bound,

and bound again. Nothing was to be seen upon his countenance but

the astonishment of a savage or an idiot. He was known to be

deaf; one might have pronounced him to be blind.

They placed him on his knees on the circular plank; he made no

resistance. They removed his shirt and doublet as far as his

girdle; he allowed them to have their way. They entangled him

under a fresh system of thongs and buckles; he allowed them to

bind and buckle him. Only from time to time he snorted noisily,

like a calf whose head is hanging and bumping over the edge of a

butcher’s cart.

“The dolt,” said Jehan Frollo of the Mill, to his friend Robin

Poussepain (for the two students had followed the culprit, as was

to have been expected), “he understands no more than a cockchafer

shut up in a box!”

There was wild laughter among the crowd when they beheld

Quasimodo’s hump, his camel’s breast, his callous and hairy

shoulders laid bare. During this gayety, a man in the livery of

the city, short of stature and robust of mien, mounted the

platform and placed himself near the victim. His name speedily

circulated among the spectators. It was Master Pierrat Torterue,

official torturer to the Châtelet.

He began by depositing on an angle of the pillory a black

hour-glass, the upper lobe of which was filled with red sand,

which it allowed to glide into the lower receptacle; then he

removed his parti-colored surtout, and there became visible,

suspended from his right hand, a thin and tapering whip of long,

white, shining, knotted, plaited thongs, armed with metal nails.

With his left hand, he negligently folded back his shirt around

his right arm, to the very armpit.

In the meantime, Jehan Frollo, elevating his curly blonde head

above the crowd (he had mounted upon the shoulders of Robin

Poussepain for the purpose), shouted: “Come and look, gentle

ladies and men! they are going to peremptorily flagellate Master

Quasimodo, the bellringer of my brother, monsieur the archdeacon

of Josas, a knave of oriental architecture, who has a back like a

dome, and legs like twisted columns!”

And the crowd burst into a laugh, especially the boys and young

girls.

At length the torturer stamped his foot. The wheel began to turn.

Quasimodo wavered beneath his bonds. The amazement which was

suddenly depicted upon his deformed face caused the bursts of

laughter to redouble around him.

All at once, at the moment when the wheel in its revolution

presented to Master Pierrat, the humped back of Quasimodo, Master

Pierrat raised his arm; the fine thongs whistled sharply through

the air, like a handful of adders, and fell with fury upon the

wretch’s shoulders.

Quasimodo leaped as though awakened with a start. He began to

understand. He writhed in his bonds; a violent contraction of

surprise and pain distorted the muscles of his face, but he

uttered not a single sigh. He merely turned his head backward, to

the right, then to the left, balancing it as a bull does who has

been stung in the flanks by a gadfly.

A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another and

another, and still others. The wheel did not cease to turn, nor

the blows to rain down.

Soon the blood burst forth, and could be seen trickling in a

thousand threads down the hunchback’s black shoulders; and the

slender thongs, in their rotatory motion which rent the air,

sprinkled drops of it upon the crowd.

Quasimodo had resumed, to all appearance, his first

imperturbability. He had at first tried, in a quiet way and

without much outward movement, to break his bonds. His eye had

been seen to light up, his muscles to stiffen, his members to

concentrate their force, and the straps to stretch. The effort

was powerful, prodigious, desperate; but the provost’s seasoned

bonds resisted. They cracked, and that was all. Quasimodo fell

back exhausted. Amazement gave way, on his features, to a

sentiment of profound and bitter discouragement. He closed his

single eye, allowed his head to droop upon his breast, and

feigned death.

From that moment forth, he stirred no more. Nothing could force a

movement from him. Neither his blood, which did not cease to

flow, nor the blows which redoubled in fury, nor the wrath of the

torturer, who grew excited himself and intoxicated with the

execution, nor the sound of the horrible thongs, more sharp and

whistling than the claws of scorpions.

At length a bailiff from the Châtelet clad in black, mounted on a

black horse, who had been stationed beside the ladder since the

beginning of the execution, extended his ebony wand towards the

hour-glass. The torturer stopped. The wheel stopped. Quasimodo’s

eye opened slowly.

The scourging was finished. Two lackeys of the official torturer

bathed the bleeding shoulders of the patient, anointed them with

some unguent which immediately closed all the wounds, and threw

upon his back a sort of yellow vestment, in cut like a chasuble.

In the meanwhile, Pierrat Torterue allowed the thongs, red and

gorged with blood, to drip upon the pavement.

All was not over for Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour

of pillory which Master Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously

added to the sentence of Messire Robert d’Estouteville; all to

the greater glory of the old physiological and psychological play

upon words of Jean de Cumène, _Surdus absurdus_: a deaf man is

absurd.

So the hour-glass was turned over once more, and they left the

hunchback fastened to the plank, in order that justice might be

accomplished to the very end.

The populace, especially in the Middle Ages, is in society what

the child is in the family. As long as it remains in its state of

primitive ignorance, of moral and intellectual minority, it can

be said of it as of the child,—

’Tis the pitiless age.

We have already shown that Quasimodo was generally hated, for

more than one good reason, it is true. There was hardly a

spectator in that crowd who had not or who did not believe that

he had reason to complain of the malevolent hunchback of

Notre-Dame. The joy at seeing him appear thus in the pillory had

been universal; and the harsh punishment which he had just

suffered, and the pitiful condition in which it had left him, far

from softening the populace had rendered its hatred more

malicious by arming it with a touch of mirth.

Hence, the “public prosecution” satisfied, as the bigwigs of the

law still express it in their jargon, the turn came of a thousand

private vengeances. Here, as in the Grand Hall, the women

rendered themselves particularly prominent. All cherished some

rancor against him, some for his malice, others for his ugliness.

The latter were the most furious.

“Oh! mask of Antichrist!” said one.

“Rider on a broom handle!” cried another.

“What a fine tragic grimace,” howled a third, “and who would make

him Pope of the Fools if to-day were yesterday?”

“’Tis well,” struck in an old woman. “This is the grimace of the

pillory. When shall we have that of the gibbet?”

“When will you be coiffed with your big bell a hundred feet under

ground, cursed bellringer?”

“But ’tis the devil who rings the Angelus!”

“Oh! the deaf man! the one-eyed creature! the hunch-back! the

monster!”

“A face to make a woman miscarry better than all the drugs and

medicines!”

And the two scholars, Jehan du Moulin, and Robin Poussepain, sang

at the top of their lungs, the ancient refrain,—

“Une hart

Pour le pendard!

Un fagot

Pour le magot!”[33]

A thousand other insults rained down upon him, and hoots and

imprecations, and laughter, and now and then, stones.

Quasimodo was deaf but his sight was clear, and the public fury

was no less energetically depicted on their visages than in their

words. Moreover, the blows from the stones explained the bursts

of laughter.

At first he held his ground. But little by little that patience

which had borne up under the lash of the torturer, yielded and

gave way before all these stings of insects. The bull of the

Asturias who has been but little moved by the attacks of the

picador grows irritated with the dogs and banderilleras.

He first cast around a slow glance of hatred upon the crowd. But

bound as he was, his glance was powerless to drive away those

flies which were stinging his wound. Then he moved in his bonds,

and his furious exertions made the ancient wheel of the pillory

shriek on its axle. All this only increased the derision and

hooting.

Then the wretched man, unable to break his collar, like that of a

chained wild beast, became tranquil once more; only at intervals

a sigh of rage heaved the hollows of his chest. There was neither

shame nor redness on his face. He was too far from the state of

society, and too near the state of nature to know what shame was.

Moreover, with such a degree of deformity, is infamy a thing that

can be felt? But wrath, hatred, despair, slowly lowered over that

hideous visage a cloud which grew ever more and more sombre, ever

more and more charged with electricity, which burst forth in a

thousand lightning flashes from the eye of the cyclops.

Nevertheless, that cloud cleared away for a moment, at the

passage of a mule which traversed the crowd, bearing a priest. As

far away as he could see that mule and that priest, the poor

victim’s visage grew gentler. The fury which had contracted it

was followed by a strange smile full of ineffable sweetness,

gentleness, and tenderness. In proportion as the priest

approached, that smile became more clear, more distinct, more

radiant. It was like the arrival of a Saviour, which the unhappy

man was greeting. But as soon as the mule was near enough to the

pillory to allow of its rider recognizing the victim, the priest

dropped his eyes, beat a hasty retreat, spurred on rigorously, as

though in haste to rid himself of humiliating appeals, and not at

all desirous of being saluted and recognized by a poor fellow in

such a predicament.

This priest was Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo.

The cloud descended more blackly than ever upon Quasimodo’s brow.

The smile was still mingled with it for a time, but was bitter,

discouraged, profoundly sad.

Time passed on. He had been there at least an hour and a half,

lacerated, maltreated, mocked incessantly, and almost stoned.

All at once he moved again in his chains with redoubled despair,

which made the whole framework that bore him tremble, and,

breaking the silence which he had obstinately preserved hitherto,

he cried in a hoarse and furious voice, which resembled a bark

rather than a human cry, and which was drowned in the noise of

the hoots—“Drink!”

This exclamation of distress, far from exciting compassion, only

added amusement to the good Parisian populace who surrounded the

ladder, and who, it must be confessed, taken in the mass and as a

multitude, was then no less cruel and brutal than that horrible

tribe of robbers among whom we have already conducted the reader,

and which was simply the lower stratum of the populace. Not a

voice was raised around the unhappy victim, except to jeer at his

thirst. It is certain that at that moment he was more grotesque

and repulsive than pitiable, with his face purple and dripping,

his eye wild, his mouth foaming with rage and pain, and his

tongue lolling half out. It must also be stated that if a

charitable soul of a _bourgeois_ or _bourgeoise_, in the rabble,

had attempted to carry a glass of water to that wretched creature

in torment, there reigned around the infamous steps of the

pillory such a prejudice of shame and ignominy, that it would

have sufficed to repulse the good Samaritan.

At the expiration of a few moments, Quasimodo cast a desperate

glance upon the crowd, and repeated in a voice still more

heartrending: “Drink!”

And all began to laugh.

“Drink this!” cried Robin Poussepain, throwing in his face a

sponge which had been soaked in the gutter. “There, you deaf

villain, I’m your debtor.”

A woman hurled a stone at his head,—

“That will teach you to wake us up at night with your peal of a

dammed soul.”

“He, good, my son!” howled a cripple, making an effort to reach

him with his crutch, “will you cast any more spells on us from

the top of the towers of Notre-Dame?”

“Here’s a drinking cup!” chimed in a man, flinging a broken jug

at his breast. “’Twas you that made my wife, simply because she

passed near you, give birth to a child with two heads!”

“And my cat bring forth a kitten with six paws!” yelped an old

crone, launching a brick at him.

“Drink!” repeated Quasimodo panting, and for the third time.

At that moment he beheld the crowd give way. A young girl,

fantastically dressed, emerged from the throng. She was

accompanied by a little white goat with gilded horns, and carried

a tambourine in her hand.

Quasimodo’s eyes sparkled. It was the gypsy whom he had attempted

to carry off on the preceding night, a misdeed for which he was

dimly conscious that he was being punished at that very moment;

which was not in the least the case, since he was being chastised

only for the misfortune of being deaf, and of having been judged

by a deaf man. He doubted not that she had come to wreak her

vengeance also, and to deal her blow like the rest.

He beheld her, in fact, mount the ladder rapidly. Wrath and spite

suffocate him. He would have liked to make the pillory crumble

into ruins, and if the lightning of his eye could have dealt

death, the gypsy would have been reduced to powder before she

reached the platform.

She approached, without uttering a syllable, the victim who

writhed in a vain effort to escape her, and detaching a gourd

from her girdle, she raised it gently to the parched lips of the

miserable man.

Then, from that eye which had been, up to that moment, so dry and

burning, a big tear was seen to fall, and roll slowly down that

deformed visage so long contracted with despair. It was the

first, in all probability, that the unfortunate man had ever

shed.

Meanwhile, he had forgotten to drink. The gypsy made her little

pout, from impatience, and pressed the spout to the tusked month

of Quasimodo, with a smile.

He drank with deep draughts. His thirst was burning.

When he had finished, the wretch protruded his black lips, no

doubt, with the object of kissing the beautiful hand which had

just succoured him. But the young girl, who was, perhaps,

somewhat distrustful, and who remembered the violent attempt of

the night, withdrew her hand with the frightened gesture of a

child who is afraid of being bitten by a beast.

Then the poor deaf man fixed on her a look full of reproach and

inexpressible sadness.

It would have been a touching spectacle anywhere,—this beautiful,

fresh, pure, and charming girl, who was at the same time so weak,

thus hastening to the relief of so much misery, deformity, and

malevolence. On the pillory, the spectacle was sublime.

The very populace were captivated by it, and began to clap their

hands, crying,—

“Noël! Noël!”

It was at that moment that the recluse caught sight, from the

window of her bole, of the gypsy on the pillory, and hurled at

her her sinister imprecation,—

“Accursed be thou, daughter of Egypt! Accursed! accursed!”