The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [184]
When he appeared in full daylight under the lofty pointed arch of the portal, wrapped in a vast cope of cloth of silver embroidered with a black cross, he was so pale that more than one of the crowd thought that he must be one of those marble bishops kneeling upon the monuments in the choir, who had risen and come forth to receive on the threshold of the tomb her who was about to die.
She, no less pale and no less rigid, hardly noticed that a heavy lighted taper of yellow wax had been placed in her hand; she did not hear the shrill voice of the clerk reading the fatal lines of the penance; when she was told to answer “Amen,” she answered “Amen.” Nor was she restored to any slight sense of life and strength until she saw the priest sign to her jailers to retire, and himself advance alone towards her.
Then the blood boiled in her veins, and a lingering spark of indignation was rekindled in that already numb, cold soul.
The archdeacon approached her slowly; even in this extremity she saw him gaze upon her nakedness with eyes glittering with passion, jealousy, and desire. Then he said to her aloud, “Young girl, have you asked God to pardon your faults and failings?”
He bent to her ear and added (the spectators supposed that he was receiving her last confession). “Will you be mine? I can save you even yet!”
She gazed steadily at him: “Begone, demon! or I will denounce you!”
He smiled a horrible smile. “No one will believe you; you would only add a scandal to a crime. Answer quickly! Will you be mine?”
“What have you done with my Phœbus?”
“He is dead!” said the priest.
At this moment the miserable archdeacon raised his head mechanically, and saw at the opposite end of the square, upon the balcony of the Gondelaurier house, the captain standing beside Fleur-de-Lys. He staggered, passed his hand over his eyes, looked again, murmured a curse, and all his features were violently convulsed.
“So be it! die yourself!” he muttered. “No one else shall possess you.”
Then, raising his hand above the gipsy girl’s head, he exclaimed in funereal tones, “I nunc, anima anceps, et sit tibi Deus misericors!”dh
This was the awful formula with which these somber ceremonies were wont to close. It was the signal agreed upon between the priest and the executioner.
The people knelt.
“Kyrie, eleison,” said the priests beneath the arch of the portal.
“Kyrie, eleison,” repeated the multitude with a noise which rose above their heads like the roar of a tempestuous sea.
“Amen,” said the archdeacon.
He turned his back upon the prisoner, his head again fell upon his breast, his hands were crossed, he rejoined his train of priests, and a moment later he disappeared, with cross, candles, and copes, beneath the dim arches of the cathedral, and his sonorous voice faded slowly down the choir, chanting these words of despair:
“Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt!”di
At the same time the intermittent echo of the iron-bound shaft of the beadles’ halberds, dying away by degrees between the columns of the nave, seemed like the hammer of a clock sounding the prisoner’s final hour.
Meantime the doors of Notre-Dame remained open, revealing the church, empty, desolate, clad in mourning, silent and un-lighted.
The prisoner stood motionless in her place, awaiting her doom. One of the vergers was obliged to warn Master Charmolue, who during this scene had been studying the bas-relief upon the great porch, which represents, according to some, the Sacrifice of Abraham ; according to others, the great Alchemical Operation, the sun being typified by the angel, the fire by the fagot, and the operator by Abraham.
He was with some difficulty withdrawn from this contemplation; but at last he turned, and at a sign from him, two men clad in yellow, the executioner’s aids, approached the gipsy girl to refasten her hands.
The unhappy creature, as she was about to remount the fatal tumbrel and advance on her last journey, was perhaps seized by some poignant regret for the life she was so soon to lose. She raised her dry and fevered