________________________________________________
_ 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
cortege 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~!"*
* A rope for the gallows bird! A fagot for the ape.
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, be 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,--
"Noel! Noel!"
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!" _
Read next: VOLUME I: BOOK SIXTH: Chapter 4 - A Tear for a Drop of Water
Read previous: VOLUME I: BOOK SIXTH: Chapter 2 - The Rat-hole
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