The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [122]
Mahiette silently joined her, on tiptoe as if by the bedside of a dying person.
It was indeed a sad sight which lay before the two women, as they gazed without moving or breathing through the grated window of the Rat-Hole.
The cell was small, wider than it was long, with a vaulted roof, and seen from within looked like the inside of an exaggerated bishop’s miter. Upon the bare stone floor, in a corner, sat, or rather crouched a woman. Her chin rested on her knees, which her crossed arms pressed closely against her breast. Bent double in this manner, clad in brown sackcloth, which covered her loosely from head to foot, her long grey locks drawn forward and falling over her face, down her legs to her feet, she seemed at first sight some strange shape outlined against the dark background of the cell, a sort of blackish triangle, which the ray of light entering at the window divided into two distinct bands of light and shadow. She looked like one of those specters, half darkness and half light, which we see in dreams, and in the extraordinary work of Goya,—pale, motionless, forbidding, cowering upon a tomb or clinging to the grating of a dungeon. It was neither man nor woman, nor living being, nor any definite form; it was a figure; a sort of vision in which the real and the imaginary were blended like twilight and daylight. Beneath her disheveled hair, which fell to the ground, the outlines of a stern and emaciated profile were barely visible; the tip of one bare foot just peeped from the hem of her garment, seeming to be curled up on the hard, cold floor. The little of human form which could be dimly seen beneath that mourning garb made the beholder shudder.
This figure, which seemed rooted to the ground, appeared to have neither motion, thought, nor breath. In that thin sackcloth, in January, lying half naked on a granite floor, without fire, in the darkness of a dungeon, whose slanting window never admitted the sun, only the icy blast, she did not seem to suffer, or even to feel.
She seemed to have been turned to stone like her cell, to ice like the season. Her hands were clasped, her eyes were fixed. At the first glance, she seemed a specter, at the second, a statue.
And yet at intervals her blue lips were parted by a breath, and trembled; but they seemed as dead and as destitute of will as leaves blowing in the wind.
Yet her dull eyes gazed with an ineffable expression, a deep, mournful, serious, perpetually fixed expression, on a corner of the cell hidden from those outside; her look seemed to connect all the somber thoughts of her distressed soul with some mysterious object.
Such was the creature who was called “the recluse” from her habitation, and “sachette” from her dress.
The three women—for Gervaise had joined Mahiette and Oudarde—peered through the window. Their heads cut off the faint light which entered the dungeon; but the wretched inmate seemed unconscious of her loss, and paid no attention to them. “Don’t disturb her,” said Oudarde in low tones; “she is in one of her ecstatic fits: she is praying.”
But Mahiette still gazed with ever-increasing anxiety at the wan, wrinkled face, and those disheveled locks, and her eyes filled with tears. “How strange that would be!” she muttered.
She put her head through the iron bars, and at last contrived to get a glimpse of the corner upon which the unhappy woman’s eyes were forever riveted.
When she withdrew her head from the window, her face was bathed in tears.
“What is that woman’s name?” she asked Oudarde.
Oudarde answered,—
“We call her Sister Gudule.”
“And I,” returned Mahiette,—“I call her Paquette Chantefleurie.”
Then, putting her finger to her lip, she signed to the amazed Oudarde to put her head through the aperture and look.
Oudarde looked, and saw, in the corner upon which the recluse’s eye was fixed in such sad ecstasy, a tiny pink satin shoe, embroidered with gold and silver spangles.
Gervaise looked in after Oudarde, and then the three