Gringoire scratched his ear, with a very grave look.
“There!” said he; “that’s an idea which would never have occurred to me.”
At Dom Claude’s unexpected proposition, the poet’s benign and open face had suddenly darkened, like a smiling Italian landscape when some fatal blast sweeps a cloud across the sun.
“Well, Gringoire, what do you say to the plan?”
“I say, master, that they would not hang me perhaps, but they would hang me without the slightest doubt.”
“That does not concern us!”
“The Devil it doesn‘t!” said Gringoire.
“She saved your life. You would only be paying your debt.”
“There are plenty of others which I have not paid.”
“Master Pierre, it absolutely must be done.”
The archdeacon spoke with authority.
“Listen to me, Dom Claude,” replied the dismayed poet. “You cling to that idea, and you are wrong. I don’t see why I should be hanged in another person’s stead.”
“What makes you so fond of life?”
“Oh, a thousand things!”
“What are they, if you please?”
“What? The air, the sky, morning and evening, moonlight, my good friends the Vagabonds, our larks with the girls, the architectural beauties of Paris to study, three big books to write,—one of which is directed against the bishop and his mills,—and I know not what else. Anaxagoras said that he came into the world to admire the sun; and besides, I have the pleasure of spending all my days, from morning till night, with a man of genius, to wit, myself, and that is a mighty agreeable thing.”
“Rattle-pate!” muttered the archdeacon. “Well, speak; who preserved that life of yours which you find so delightful? To whom do you owe it that you still breathe this air, behold that sky, and are still able to amuse your feather-brain with trifles and nonsense? Where would you be now, but for her? Would you have her die, to whom you owe your life,—have her die, that sweet, lovely, adorable creature, necessary to the light of the world, more divine than God himself, while you, half madman and half sage, a mere sketch of something or other, a sort of vegetable growth which fancies that it walks and fancies that it thinks,—you are to go on living with the life of which you have robbed her, as useless as a candle at high noon? Come, have a little pity, Gringoire; be generous in your turn; she set you the example.”
The priest was excited. At first Gringoire listened with an air of indecision; then he relented, and ended by pulling a tragic grimace, which made his pallid face look like that of a new-born baby with the colic.
“You are pathetic!” said he, wiping away a tear. “Well, I will consider it. That’s an odd idea of yours. After all,” he added, after a pause, “who knows? Perhaps they would not hang me. Betrothal is not always marriage. When they find me in her cell, so ridiculously arrayed, in cap and petticoats, perhaps they’ll burst out laughing. And then, if they do hang me, why, the rope is like any other death; or, rather, it’s not like any other death. It is a death worthy of the wise man who has wavered and swung to and fro all his life,—a death which is neither fish nor flesh, like the spirit of the genuine sceptic; a death fully impressed with Pyrrhonism and uncertainty, a happy medium between heaven and earth, which leaves one in suspense. It is the right death for a philosopher, and perhaps I was predestined to it. It is magnificent to die as one has lived.”
The priest interrupted him: “Is it agreed?”
“What is death, after all?” continued Gringoire, with exaltation. “An unpleasant moment, a turnpike gate, the passage from little to nothing. Some one having asked Cercidas, of Magalopolis, if he was willing to die, ‘Why not?’ he answered: ‘for after my death I shall see those great men,—Pythagoras among the philosophers, Hecat?us among the historians, Homer among the poets, Olympus among the musicians.”’
The archdeacon offered him his hand. “It is settled, then? You will come tomorrow.”
This gesture brought Gringoire back to reality.
“Oh, no; by my faith!” said he in the tone of a man awaking from sleep. “To be hanged! That is too absurd. I’ll not do it.”
“Farewell, then!” and the archdeacon added between his teeth, “I shall see you again!”
“I have no desire to see that devil of a man again,” thought Gringoire; and he hurried after Dom Claude. “Stay, Sir Archdeacon; no malice between old friends! You take an interest in that girl,—in my wife, I should say; it is well. You have planned a stratagem for rescuing her from Notre-Dame; but your scheme is a very disagreeable one for me, Gringoire. Suppose I have another! I warn you that a most brilliant inspiration has just occurred to me. What if I have a suitable plan for getting her out of her evil plight without compromising my own neck in the least of slip-nooses, what would you say? Wouldn’t that satisfy you? Is it absolutely necessary that I should be hanged, to suit you?”