The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [260]
At the close of the fifteenth century the awful gibbet, which dated from 1328, was already very much decayed; the beams were worm-eaten, the chains rusty, the pillars green with mold; the courses of hewn stone gaped widely at the joints, and grass grew upon the platform where no foot ever trod: the structure cast a horrid shadow against the sky, particularly at night, when the moon shone feebly upon those white skulls, or when the breeze stirred chains and skeletons, and made them rattle in the darkness. The presence of this gibbet was enough to give the entire neighborhood an evil name.
The stone base of the odious structure was hollow. It had been made into a vast vault, closed by an antique grating of battered iron, into which were cast not only the human remains taken from the chains at Montfaucon, but the bodies of all the unfortunates executed upon the other permanent gallows throughout Paris. In this deep charnel-house, where so many mortal remains and so many crimes rotted together, many of the great ones of the earth, many innocent beings, have laid their bones, from Enguerrand de Marigni, who was the first victim of Montfaucon, and who was an upright man, down to Admiral de Coligni, who was the last, and who was likewise a good man.
As for the mysterious disappearance of Quasimodo, all that we have been able to discover is this:—
Some two years or eighteen months after the events which close this story, when search was made in the vault at Montfaucon for the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days previous, and to whom Charles VIII had accorded permission to be buried at Saint-Laurent in better company, among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons were found locked in a close embrace. One of the two, which was that of a woman, still had about it some fragments of a gown, of stuff once white, and about its neck was a necklace made of beads of red seeds, with a little silk bag, adorned with green glass beads, which was open and empty. These articles were doubtless of so little value that the hangman had not cared to remove them. The other skeleton, which held this in so close an embrace, was that of a man. It was noticed that his spine was curved, his head close between his shoulder-blades, and one leg shorter than the other. Moreover, his neck was not broken, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. The man to whom these bones belonged must therefore have come hither himself and died here. When an attempt was made to loose him from the skeleton which he clasped, he crumbled into dust.25
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Added to the Definitive Edition
It was through error that this edition was announced as enlarged by several new chapters. They should have been spoken of as unpublished ; for if by “new” we understand “recently made,” the chapters added to this edition are not new.26
They were written at the same time as the rest of the work; they date from the same epoch, and came from the same idea; they have always been part of the manuscript of Notre-Dame de Paris. Furthermore, the author does not understand how any one can add new developments to a work of this character. That cannot be done at will. A novel, in his opinion, is born, in a way in a certain sense necessary, with all its chapters; a drama is born with all its scenes. Do not believe that there is anything arbitrary of which this whole is composed,—this mysterious microcosm that you call a drama or a novel. Grafting and soldering act unfortunately upon works of this nature, which should spring into being at a single leap and remain such as they are. Once the thing is done, do not revise or retouch it. Once the book is published, and its sex—virile or not