All the people laughed, especially the children and the young girls.
At last the executioner stamped his foot. The wheel began to turn. Quasimodo reeled in spite of his bonds. The astonishment suddenly depicted upon his misshapen face redoubled the bursts of laughter around him.
Suddenly, just as the wheel in its revolution presented to Master Pierrat Quasimodo’s mountainous back, Master Pierrat raised his arm; the thin lashes hissed through the air like a brood of vipers, and fell furiously upon the wretched man’s shoulders.
Quasimodo started as if roused abruptly from a dream. He began to understand. He writhed in his bonds; surprise and pain distorted the muscles of his face, but he did not heave a sigh. He merely bent his head back, to the right, then to the left, shaking it like a bull stung in the flank by a gad-fly.
A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another, and another, and so on and on. The wheel did not cease from turning, or the blows from raining down.
Soon the blood spurted; it streamed in countless rivulets over the hunchback’s swarthy shoulders; and the slender thongs, as they swung in the air, sprinkled it in drops among the crowd.
Quasimodo had resumed, apparently at least, his former impassivity. He had tried at first, secretly and without great visible effort, to burst his bonds. His eye kindled, his muscles stiffened, his limbs gathered all their force, and the straps and chains stretched. The struggle was mighty, prodigious, desperate; but the tried and tested fetters of the provosty held firm. They cracked; and that was all. Quasimodo fell back exhausted. Surprise gave way, upon his features, to a look of bitter and profound dejection. He closed his single eye, dropped his head upon his breast, and feigned death.
Thenceforth he did not budge. Nothing could wring a movement from him, neither his blood, which still flowed, nor the blows, which increased in fury, nor the rage of the executioner, who became excited and intoxicated by his work, nor the noise of the horrid lashes, keener and sharper than the stings of wasps.
At last an usher from the Chatelet, dressed in black, mounted on a black horse, who had been posted beside the ladder from the beginning of the execution of the sentence, extended his ebony wand towards the hour-glass. The executioner paused. The wheel stopped. Quasimodo’s eye reopened slowly.
The flagellation was ended. Two attendants of the executioner washed the victim’s bleeding shoulders, rubbed them with some salve which at once closed all the wounds, and threw over his back a piece of yellow cotton cloth cut after the pattern of a priest’s cope. Meanwhile Pierrat Torterue let his red lashes soaked with blood drip upon the pavement.
But all was not over for Quasimodo. He had still to spend in the pillory that hour so judiciously added by Master Florian Barbedienne to the sentence of Master Robert d‘Estouteville,—all to the greater glory of Jean de Cumène’s old physiological and psychological pun: “Surdus absurdus.”cf
The hour-glass was therefore turned, and the hunchback was left bound to the plank as before, in order that justice might be executed to the utmost.
The people, particularly in the Middle Ages, were to society what the child is to a family. So long as they remain in their primitive condition of ignorance, of moral and intellectual nonage, it may be said of that as of a child,— “It is an age without pity.”
We have already shown that Quasimodo was the object of universal hatred,—for more than one good reason, it is true. There was hardly a single spectator in the crowd who had not—or did not think he had—grounds for complaint against the malicious hunchback of Notre-Dame. Every one was delighted to see him in the pillory; and the severe punishment which he had just received, and the piteous state in which it had left him, far from softening the hearts of the populace, had made their hatred keener by adding to it a spice of merriment.
Thus, “public vengeance,” as the legal jargon still styles it, once satisfied, a thousand private spites took their turn at revenge. Here, as in the Great Hall, the women made themselves especially conspicuous. All bore him a grudge,—some for his mischief, others for his ugliness. The latter were the more furious.
“Oh, you image of Antichrist!” said one.
“Broomstick-rider!” cried another.
“What a fine tragic face!” yelled a third. “It would surely make you the Pope of Fools if today were only yesterday.”
“That’s right,” added an old woman. “This is the pillory face. When shall we have the gallows face?”
“When shall we see you buried a hundred feet below ground, with your big bell upon your head, you cursed bell-ringer?”