She did indeed approach the staircase door, pause there for a few moments, look steadily into the darkness, but without appearing to see the priest, and pass on. She seemed to him taller than in life; he saw the moon through her white robes; he heard her breathe.
When she had passed him, he began to descend the stairs with the same slow motion as the specter, imagining that he too was a specter,—haggard, his hair erect, his extinguished lamp still in his hand; and as he went down the spiral stairs, he distinctly heard in his ear a mocking voice, which repeated the words,— “A spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up.”
CHAPTER II
Deformed, Blind, Lame Every city in the Middle Ages—and up to the time of Louis XII every city in France—had its places of refuge, its sanctuaries. These places of refuge, amidst the deluge of penal laws and barbarous jurisdictions which flooded the city of Paris, were like so many islands rising above the level of human justice. Every criminal who landed there was saved. In each district there were almost as many places of refuge as gallows. The abuse of a privilege went side by side with the abuse of punishment,—two bad things, each striving to correct the other. Royal palaces, princely mansions, and above all churches, had the right of sanctuary; sometimes an entire town which stood in need of repopulation was given the temporary right. Louis XI made Paris a sanctuary in 1467.
Having once set foot within the sanctuary, the criminal was sacred ; but let him beware how he ventured forth: one step outside his shelter plunged him again in the billows. The wheel, the gibbet, and the strappado kept close guard around the place of refuge, and watched their prey unceasingly, like sharks in a vessel’s wake. Thus men have been known to grow grey in a convent, on a palace staircase, in abbey fields, under a church porch; so that the sanctuary became a prison in all save name. It sometimes happened that a solemn decree from Parliament violated the sanctuary, and gave up the criminal to justice; but this occurrence was rare. The Parliaments stood in some awe of the bishops; and when cowl and gown came into collision, the priest usually got the best of it. Sometimes, however, as in the matter of the assassins of Petit-Jean, the Paris hangman, and in that of Emery Rousseau, Jean Valleret’s murderer, Justice overrode the Church, and proceeded to carry out her sentences ; but, without an order from Parliament, woe to him who violated any sanctuary by armed force! We know what fate befell Robert de Clermont, Marshal of France, and Jean de Chalons, Marshal of Champagne; and yet the case in question was merely that of one Perrin Marc, a money-changer’s man, a miserable assassin. But the two marshals broke open the doors of Saint-Méry; therein lay the crime.
Such was the veneration felt for these refuges that, as tradition goes, it occasionally extended even to animals. Aymoin relates that a stag chased by Dagobert, having taken refuge near the tomb of Saint Denis, the pack stopped short, barking loudly.
Churches had usually a cell prepared to receive suppliants. In 1407 Nicolas Flamel had built for them upon the arches of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, a chamber which cost him four pounds six pence sixteen Paris farthings.
At Notre-Dame it was a cell built over the aisles under the flying buttresses, on the very spot where the wife of the present keeper of the towers has made a garden, which compares with the hanging gardens of Babylon as a lettuce with a palm-tree, or a porter’s wife with Semiramis.
It was here that Quasimodo had deposited Esmeralda after his frantic and triumphal race through the towers and galleries. While that race lasted, the young girl did not recover her senses,—half dozing, half waking, conscious only of being borne upward through the air, whether floating or flying, or lifted above the earth by some unknown power. From time to time she heard the noisy laughter, the harsh voice of Quasimodo in her ear. She half opened her eyes; then beneath her she saw dimly all Paris dotted with countless roofs of slate and tiles, like a red and blue mosaic; above her head the fearful, grinning face of Quasimodo. Her eyelids fell; she thought that all was over, that she had been hanged during her swoon, and that the misshapen spirit which ruled her destiny had again taken possession of her and carried her away. She dared not look at him, but yielded to his sway.
But when the breathless and disheveled bell-ringer laid her down in the cell of refuge, when she felt his great hands gently untie the rope which bruised her arms, she experienced that sort of shock which wakens with a start the passengers on a ship that runs aground in the middle of a dark night. Her ideas woke too, and returned to her one by one. She saw that she was still in Notre-Dame; she remembered being torn from the hangman’s hands; that Phoebus lived, that Phoebus had ceased to love her; and these two ideas, one of which lent such bitterness to the other, presenting themselves simultaneously to the poor victim, she turned to Quasimodo, who stood before her and who terrified her, saying,— “Why did you save me?”