She could not even utter a cry. She saw the dagger descend upon Ph?bus and rise again reeking.
“Malediction!” said the captain; and he fell.
She fainted.
As her eyes closed, as all consciousness left her, she fancied she felt a fiery touch upon her lips, a kiss more burning than the torturer’s red-hot iron.
When she recovered her senses she was surrounded by the soldiers of the watch, some of whom were just carrying off the captain bathed in his own blood; the priest had vanished; the window at the back of the room, which opened upon the river, was wide open; some one picked up a cloak which he supposed belonged to the officer, and she heard the soldiers say,— “She is a sorceress who has stabbed a captain.”
BOOK EIGHT
CHAPTER I
The Crown Piece Changed to a Dry Leaf Gringoire and the entire Court of Miracles were in a terrible state of anxiety. Esmeralda had not been heard from for a whole long month, which greatly grieved the Duke of Egypt and his friends the Vagrants; nor did any one know what had become of her goat, which redoubled Gringoire’s grief. One night the gipsy girl had disappeared, and since then had given no sign of life. All search for her was vain. Some malicious sham epileptics told Gringoire that they had met her that same evening near the Pont Saint-Michel, walking with an officer; but this husband, after the fashion of Bohemia, was an incredulous philosopher, and besides, he knew better than any one else how chaste his wife was. He had been able to judge what invincible modesty resulted from the two combined virtues of the amulet and the gipsy, and he had made a mathematical calculation of the resistance of that chastity multiplied into itself. He was therefore quite easy on this point.
But he could not explain her disappearance. It was a great grief to him, and he would have grown thin from fretting had such a thing been possible. He had, forgotten everything else,—even his literary tastes, even his great work, “De figuris regularibus et irregularibus,”cy which he intended to have printed with the first money which he might have （for he raved about printing ever since he had seen the Didascalon of Hugues de Saint-Victor printed with the celebrated types of Wendelin de Spire）。
One day, as he was walking sadly by the Tournelle, he noticed a crowd before one of the doors of the Palace of Justice.
“What’s the matter?” he asked a young man who was just coming out.
“I don’t know, sir,” replied the young man. “I hear that they are trying a woman who .murdered a man-at-arms. As it seems that there was witchcraft about it, the bishop and the judge of the Bishop’s Court have interfered in the matter; and my brother, who is archdeacon of Josas, spends his entire time here. Now, I wanted to speak to him; but I could not get at him on account of the crowd, which annoys me mightily, for I am in need of money.”
“Alas! sir,” said Gringoire, “I wish I could lend you some; but if my breeches are full of holes, it is not from the weight of coins.”
He dared not tell the young man that he knew his brother the archdeacon, whom he had not revisited since the scene in the church,—a neglect which embarrassed him.
The student went his way, and Gringoire followed the crowd, going up the stairs to the Great Hall. He considered that there was nothing like the sight of a criminal trial to dispel melancholy, the judges being generally most delightfully stupid. The people with whom he had mingled walked on and elbowed one another in silence. After a slow and tiresome progress through a long dark passage which wound through the Palace like the intestinal canal of the ancient edifice, he reached a low door opening into a hall, which his tall figure enabled him to examine over the moving heads of the mob.
The hall was huge and ill-lighted, which made it seem still larger. Evening was coming on; the long-pointed windows admitted but a faint ray of daylight, which faded before it reached the vaulted ceiling,—an enormous lattice-work of carved beams, whose countless figures seemed to move confusedly in the shadow. There were already several lighted candles here and there on the tables, and shining upon the heads of clerks bending over musty papers. The front of the hall was occupied by the crowd; to the right and left there were lawyers in their robes, and tables; in the background, upon a dais, a number of judges, the last rows of whom were lost in the darkness; their faces were forbidding and unmoved. The walls were plentifully sprinkled with fleurs-de-lis. A huge crucifix was dimly visible over the heads of the judges, and everywhere there were pikes and halberds tipped with fire by the light of the candles.
“Sir,” asked Gringoire of one of his neighbors, “who are all those people drawn up in line yonder, like prelates in council?”