“Eheu!” said the agonized Gringoire; “bassa latinitas!”da
Another man in a black gown, near the prisoner, rose. This was her lawyer. The judges, being hungry, began to murmur.
“Be brief, Sir Lawyer,” said the president.
“Mr. President,” replied the lawyer, “the defendant having confessed her crime, I have but a few words to say to the bench. It is laid down in the Salic law that ‘If a witch have devoured a man, and she be convicted of the crime, she shall pay a fine of eight thousand farthings, which make two hundred pence in gold.’ May it please the court to sentence my client to pay this fine.”
“That law is obsolete,” said the king’s proxy.
“Nego,”db replied the lawyer.
“Put it to the vote!” said a councillor; “the crime is clear, and it is late.”
The question was put to the vote without leaving the hall. The judges nodded assent; they were in haste. Their hooded heads were uncovered one after the other in the darkness, in response to the fatal question put to them in a low tone by the president. The poor prisoner seemed to be looking at them, but her dim eyes saw nothing.
The clerk began to write; then he handed the president a lengthy parchment.
The unhappy girl heard a stir among the people, the pikes clashed, and an icy voice said:— “Gipsy girl, upon such day as it shall please the lord our king, at the hour of noon, you shall be taken in a tumbrel, in your shift, barefoot, a rope around your neck, to the square before the great door of Notre-Dame, and shall there do proper penance, with a wax candle of the weight of two pounds in your hand; and thence you shall be taken to the Place de Grève, where you shall be hanged and strangled on the city gibbet; and likewise this your goat; and you shall pay to the judges of the Bishop’s Court three golden lions, in atonement for the crimes by you committed and by you confessed, of sorcery, magic, prostitution, and murder, upon the person of Lord Phoebus de Chateaupers! And may God have mercy on your soul!”
“Oh, it is a dream!” she murmured; and she felt rude hands bear her away.
CHAPTER IV
Lasciate Ogni Speranzadc
In the Middle Ages, when a building was finished, there was almost as much of it below as above ground. Unless built upon piles, like Notre-Dame, a palace, a fortress, a church, had always a double foundation. In the case of cathedrals, it was almost like another and subterranean cathedral, low, dark, mysterious, blind and mute, beneath the upper nave, which blazed with light and echoed with the sound of organ and bells day and night; sometimes it was a sepulcher. In palaces and fortresses it was a prison; sometimes, too, a tomb, sometimes a combination of both. These mighty structures, whose mode of formation and slow growth we have explained elsewhere, had not merely foundations, but as it were roots which extended under the earth, branching out into rooms, galleries, staircases, in imitation of the building above. Thus churches, palaces, and fortresses were buried midway in the earth. The cellars of an edifice formed another edifice, into which one descended instead of ascending, and whose subterranean stories were evolved below the pile of upper stories of the monument, like those forests and mountains seen reversed in the mirroring water of a lake beneath the forests and mountains on its shore.
In the Bastille Saint-Antoine, the Palace of Justice at Paris, and the Louvre, these underground structures were prisons. The various stories of these prisons as they sank deeper into the ground became darker and more contracted. They formed so many zones presenting various degrees of horror. Dante could have found no better image of his hell. These tunnel-like dungeons usually ended in a deep hole like a tub, such as Dante chose for the abode of Satan, and where society placed those condemned to death. When once any poor wretch was buried there, he bade farewell to light, air, life, all hope; he never left it save for the gallows or the stake. Sometimes he lay there and rotted. Human justice styled this “forgetting.” Between mankind and himself the prisoner felt that a mountain of stones and jailers weighed him down; and the entire prison, the massive fortress, became but a huge complicated lock which shut him off from the living world.
It was in a dungeon-hole of this kind, in one of the oubliettes dug by Saint Louis, the in pacedd of the Tournelle, that Esmeralda was placed when condemned to the gallows, doubtless lest she should try to escape, with the colossal Palace of Justice above her head. Poor fly, which could not have stirred the smallest one of the unhewn stones!
Certainly Providence and mankind were equally unjust. Such a lavish display of misery and torment was needless to crush so frail a creature.