Master Charmolue exhibited an alarming note book, and began to read, with many gestures and the exaggerated accentuation of the pleader, an oration in Latin, wherein all the proofs of the suit were piled up in Ciceronian periphrases, flanked with quotations from Plautus, his favorite comic author.
We regret that we are not able to offer to our readers this remarkable piece.
The orator pronounced it with marvellous action.
Before he had finished the exordium, the perspiration was starting from his brow, and his eyes from his bead.
All at once, in the middle of a fine period, he interrupted himself, and his glance, ordinarily so gentle and even stupid, became menacing.
“Gentlemen,” he exclaimed (this time in French, for it was not in his copy book), “Satan is so mixed up in this affair, that here he is present at our debates, and making sport of their majesty.
Behold!”
So saying, he pointed to the little goat, who, on seeing Charmolue gesticulating, had, in point of fact, thought it appropriate to do the same, and had seated himself on his haunches, reproducing to the best of his ability, with his forepaws and his bearded head the pathetic pantomine of the king’s procurator in the ecclesiastical court. This was, if the reader remembers, one of his prettiest accomplishments. This incident, this last proof, produced a great effect.
The goat’s hoofs were tied, and the king’s procurator resumed the thread of his eloquence.
It was very long, but the peroration was admirable. Here is the concluding phrase; let the reader add the hoarse voice and the breathless gestures of Master Charmolue,
“Ideo, domni, coram stryga demonstrata, crimine patente, intentione criminis existente, in nornine sanctoe ecclesioe Nostroe-Domince Parisiensis quae est in saisina habendi omnimodam altam et bassam justitiam in illa hac intemerata Civitatis insula, tenore proesentium declaremus nos requirere, primo, aliquamdam pecuniariam indemnitatem; secundo, amendationem honorabilem ante portalium maximum Nostroe-Dominoe, ecclesioe cathedralis; tertio, sententiani in virtute cujus ista styrga cum sua capella, seu in trivio vulgariter dicto la Greve, seu in insula exeunte in fluvio Secanoe, juxta pointam juardini regalis, executatoe sint!”
He put on his cap again and seated himself.
“Eheu!” sighed the broken-hearted Gringoire, “bassa latinitas—bastard latin!”
Another man in a black gown rose near the accused; he was her lawyer.—The judges, who were fasting, began to grumble.
“Advocate, be brief,” said the president.
“Monsieur the President,” replied the advocate, “since the defendant has confessed the crime, I have only one word to say to these gentlemen. Here is a text from the Salic law;
‘If a witch hath eaten a man, and if she be convicted of it, she shall pay a fine of eight thousand deniers, which amount to two hundred sous of gold.’ May it please the chamber to condemn my client to the fine?”
“An abrogated text,” said the advocate extraordinary of the king.
“Nego, I deny it,” replied the advocate.
“Put it to the vote!” said one of the councillors; “the crime is manifest, and it is late.”
They proceeded to take a vote without leaving the room.
The judges signified their assent without giving their reasons, they were in a hurry.
Their capped heads were seen uncovering one after the other, in the gloom, at the lugubrious question addressed to them by the president in a low voice.
The poor accused had the appearance of looking at them, but her troubled eye no longer saw.
Then the clerk began to write; then he handed a long parch-ment to the president.
Then the unhappy girl heard the people moving, the pikes clashing, and a freezing voice saying to her,—“Bohemian wench, on the day when it shall seem good to our lord the king, at the hour of noon, you will be taken in a tumbrel, in your shift, with bare feet, and a rope about your neck, before the grand portal of Notre-Dame, and you will there make an apology with a wax torch of the weight of two pounds in your hand, and thence you will be conducted to the Place de Greve, where you will be hanged and strangled on the town gibbet; and likewise your goat; and you will pay to the official three lions of gold, in reparation of the crimes by you committed and by you confessed, of sorcery and magic, debauchery and murder, upon the person of the Sieur Phoebus de Chateaupers.
May God have mercy on your soul!”
“Oh! ‘tis a dream!” she murmured; and she felt rough hands bearing her away.
CHAPTER IV. LEAVE ALL HOPE BEHIND, YE WHO ENTER HERE.
In the Middle Ages, when an edifice was complete, there was almost as much of it in the earth as above it.
Unless built upon piles, like Notre-Dame, a palace, a fortress, a church, had always a double bottom.
In cathedrals, it was, in some sort, another subterranean cathedral, low, dark, mysterious, blind, and mute, under the upper nave which was overflowing with light and reverberating with organs and bells day and night.
Sometimes it was a sepulchre.
In palaces, in fortresses, it was a prison, sometimes a sepulchre also, sometimes both together.
These mighty buildings, whose mode of formation and vegetation we have elsewhere explained, had not simply foundations, but, so to speak, roots which ran branching through the soil in chambers, galleries, and staircases, like the construction above.
Thus churches, palaces, fortresses, had the earth half way up their bodies.
The cellars of an edifice formed another edifice, into which one descended instead of ascending, and which extended its subterranean grounds under the external piles of the monument, like those forests and mountains which are reversed in the mirror-like waters of a lake, beneath the forests and mountains of the banks.
At the fortress of Saint-Antoine, at the Palais de Justice of Paris, at the Louvre, these subterranean edifices were prisons.
The stories of these prisons, as they sank into the soil, grew constantly narrower and more gloomy.
They were so many zones, where the shades of horror were graduated.
Dante could never imagine anything better for his hell.
These tunnels of cells usually terminated in a sack of a lowest dungeon, with a vat-like bottom, where Dante placed Satan, where society placed those condemned to death.
A miserable human existence, once interred there; farewell light, air, life, ogni speranza—every hope; it only came forth to the scaffold or the stake.
Sometimes it rotted there; human justice called this “forgetting.”
Between men and himself, the condemned man felt a pile of stones and jailers weighing down upon his head; and the entire prison, the massive bastille was nothing more than an enormous, complicated lock, which barred him off from the rest of the world.
It was in a sloping cavity of this description, in the oubliettes excavated by Saint-Louis, in the inpace of the Tournelle, that la Esmeralda had been placed on being condemned to death, through fear of her escape, no doubt, with the colossal court-house over her head.
Poor fly, who could not have lifted even one of its blocks of stone!
Assuredly, Providence and society had been equally unjust; such an excess of unhappiness and of torture was not necessary to break so frail a creature.
There she lay, lost in the shadows, buried, hidden, immured.
Any one who could have beheld her in this state, after having seen her laugh and dance in the sun, would have shuddered.