Part 58

Master Jacques Charmolue approached the gypsy with a very sweet smile. “My dear child,” said he, “do you still persist in your denial?” “Yes,” she replied, in a dying voice. “In that case,” replied Charmolue, “it will be very painful for us to have to question you more urgently than we should like. Pray take the trouble to seat yourself on this bed. Master Pierrat, make room for mademoiselle, and close the door.” Pierrat rose with a growl. “If I shut the door,” he muttered, “my fire will go out.” “Well, my dear fellow,” replied Charmolue, “leave it open then.” Meanwhile, la Esmeralda had remained standing. That leather bed on which so many unhappy wretches had writhed, frightened her. Terror chilled the very marrow of her bones; she stood there bewildered and stupefied. At a sign from Charmolue, the two assistants took her and placed her in a sitting posture on the bed. They did her no harm; but when these men touched her, when that leather touched her, she felt all her blood retreat to her heart. She cast a frightened look around the chamber. It seemed to her as though she beheld advancing from all quarters towards her, with the intention of crawling up her body and biting and pinching her, all those hideous implements of torture, which as compared to the instruments of all sorts she had hitherto seen, were like what bats, centipedes, and spiders are among insects and birds. “Where is the physician?” asked Charmolue. “Here,” replied a black gown whom she had not before noticed. She shuddered. “Mademoiselle,” resumed the caressing voice of the procucrator of the Ecclesiastical court, “for the third time, do you persist in denying the deeds of which you are accused?” This time she could only make a sign with her head. “You persist?” said Jacques Charmolue. “Then it grieves me deeply, but I must fulfil my office.” “Monsieur le Procureur du Roi,” said Pierrat abruptly, “How shall we begin?” Charmolue hesitated for a moment with the ambiguous grimace of a poet in search of a rhyme. “With the boot,” he said at last. The unfortunate girl felt herself so utterly abandoned by God and men, that her head fell upon her breast like an inert thing which has no power in itself. The tormentor and the physician approached her simultaneously. At the same time, the two assistants began to fumble among their hideous arsenal. At the clanking of their frightful irons, the unhappy child quivered like a dead frog which is being galvanized. “Oh!” she murmured, so low that no one heard her; “Oh, my Phœbus!” Then she fell back once more into her immobility and her marble silence. This spectacle would have rent any other heart than those of her judges. One would have pronounced her a poor sinful soul, being tortured by Satan beneath the scarlet wicket of hell. The miserable body which that frightful swarm of saws, wheels, and racks were about to clasp in their clutches, the being who was about to be manipulated by the harsh hands of executioners and pincers, was that gentle, white, fragile creature, a poor grain of millet which human justice was handing over to the terrible mills of torture to grind. Meanwhile, the callous hands of Pierrat Torterue’s assistants had bared that charming leg, that tiny foot, which had so often amazed the passers-by with their delicacy and beauty, in the squares of Paris. “’Tis a shame!” muttered the tormentor, glancing at these graceful and delicate forms. Had the archdeacon been present, he certainly would have recalled at that moment his symbol of the spider and the fly. Soon the unfortunate girl, through a mist which spread before her eyes, beheld the boot approach; she soon beheld her foot encased between iron plates disappear in the frightful apparatus. Then terror restored her strength. “Take that off!” she cried angrily; and drawing herself up, with her hair all dishevelled: “Mercy!” She darted from the bed to fling herself at the feet of the king’s procurator, but her leg was fast in the heavy block of oak and iron, and she sank down upon the boot, more crushed than a bee with a lump of lead on its wing. At a sign from Charmolue, she was replaced on the bed, and two coarse hands adjusted to her delicate waist the strap which hung from the ceiling. “For the last time, do you confess the facts in the case?” demanded Charmolue, with his imperturbable benignity. “I am innocent.” “Then, mademoiselle, how do you explain the circumstance laid to your charge?” “Alas, monseigneur, I do not know.” “So you deny them?” “All!” “Proceed,” said Charmolue to Pierrat. Pierrat turned the handle of the screw-jack, the boot was contracted, and the unhappy girl uttered one of those horrible cries which have no orthography in any human language. “Stop!” said Charmolue to Pierrat. “Do you confess?” he said to the gypsy. “All!” cried the wretched girl. “I confess! I confess! Mercy!” She had not calculated her strength when she faced the torture. Poor child, whose life up to that time had been so joyous, so pleasant, so sweet, the first pain had conquered her! “Humanity forces me to tell you,” remarked the king’s procurator, “that in confessing, it is death that you must expect.” “I certainly hope so!” said she. And she fell back upon the leather bed, dying, doubled up, allowing herself to hang suspended from the strap buckled round her waist. “Come, fair one, hold up a little,” said Master Pierrat, raising her. “You have the air of the lamb of the Golden Fleece which hangs from Monsieur de Bourgogne’s neck.” Jacques Charmolue raised his voice, “Clerk, write. Young Bohemian maid, you confess your participation in the feasts, witches’ sabbaths, and witchcrafts of hell, with ghosts, hags, and vampires? Answer.” “Yes,” she said, so low that her words were lost in her breathing. “You confess to having seen the ram which Beelzebub causes to appear in the clouds to call together the witches’ sabbath, and which is beheld by socerers alone?” “Yes.” “You confess to having adored the heads of Bophomet, those abominable idols of the Templars?” “Yes.” “To having had habitual dealings with the devil under the form of a goat familiar, joined with you in the suit?” “Yes.” “Lastly, you avow and confess to having, with the aid of the demon, and of the phantom vulgarly known as the surly monk, on the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, murdered and assassinated a captain named Phœbus de Châteaupers?” She raised her large, staring eyes to the magistrate, and replied, as though mechanically, without convulsion or agitation,— “Yes.” It was evident that everything within her was broken. “Write, clerk,” said Charmolue. And, addressing the torturers, “Release the prisoner, and take her back to the court.” When the prisoner had been “unbooted,” the procurator of the ecclesiastical court examined her foot, which was still swollen with pain. “Come,” said he, “there’s no great harm done. You shrieked in good season. You could still dance, my beauty!” Then he turned to his acolytes of the officiality,— “Behold justice enlightened at last! This is a solace, gentlemen! Madamoiselle will bear us witness that we have acted with all possible gentleness.” CHAPTER III. END OF THE CROWN WHICH WAS TURNED INTO A DRY LEAF. When she re-entered the audience hall, pale and limping, she was received with a general murmur of pleasure. On the part of the audience there was the feeling of impatience gratified which one experiences at the theatre at the end of the last entr’acte of the comedy, when the curtain rises and the conclusion is about to begin. On the part of the judges, it was the hope of getting their suppers sooner. The little goat also bleated with joy. He tried to run towards his mistress, but they had tied him to the bench. Night was fully set in. The candles, whose number had not been increased, cast so little light, that the walls of the hall could not be seen. The shadows there enveloped all objects in a sort of mist. A few apathetic faces of judges alone could be dimly discerned. Opposite them, at the extremity of the long hall, they could see a vaguely white point standing out against the sombre background. This was the accused. She had dragged herself to her place. When Charmolue had installed himself in a magisterial manner in his own, he seated himself, then rose and said, without exhibiting too much self-complacency at his success,—“The accused has confessed all.” “Bohemian girl,” the president continued, “have you avowed all your deeds of magic, prostitution, and assassination on Phœbus de Châteaupers.” Her heart contracted. She was heard to sob amid the darkness. “Anything you like,” she replied feebly, “but kill me quickly!” “Monsieur, procurator of the king in the ecclesiastical courts,” said the president, “the chamber is ready to hear you in your charge.” Master Charmolue exhibited an alarming note book, and began to read, with many gestures and the exaggerated accentuation of the pleader, an oration in Latin, wherein all the proofs of the suit were piled up in Ciceronian periphrases, flanked with quotations from Plautus, his favorite comic author. We regret that we are not able to offer to our readers this remarkable piece. The orator pronounced it with marvellous action. Before he had finished the exordium, the perspiration was starting from his brow, and his eyes from his head. All at once, in the middle of a fine period, he interrupted himself, and his glance, ordinarily so gentle and even stupid, became menacing. “Gentlemen,” he exclaimed (this time in French, for it was not in his copy book), “Satan is so mixed up in this affair, that here he is present at our debates, and making sport of their majesty. Behold!” So saying, he pointed to the little goat, who, on seeing Charmolue gesticulating, had, in point of fact, thought it appropriate to do the same, and had seated himself on his haunches, reproducing to the best of his ability, with his forepaws and his bearded head the pathetic pantomine of the king’s procurator in the ecclesiastical court. This was, if the reader remembers, one of his prettiest accomplishments. This incident, this last proof, produced a great effect. The goat’s hoofs were tied, and the king’s procurator resumed the thread of his eloquence. It was very long, but the peroration was admirable. Here is the concluding phrase; let the reader add the hoarse voice and the breathless gestures of Master Charmolue, “_Ideo, domni, coram stryga demonstrata, crimine patente, intentione criminis existente, in nomine sanctæ ecclesiæ Nostræ-Dominæ Parisiensis quæ est in saisina habendi omnimodam altam et bassam justitiam in illa hac intemerata Civitatis insula, tenore præsentium declaremus nos requirere, primo, aliquamdam pecuniariam indemnitatem; secundo, amendationem honorabilem ante portalium maximum Nostræ-Dominæ, ecclesiæ cathedralis; tertio, sententiam in virtute cujus ista styrga cum sua capella, seu in trivio vulgariter dicto_ la Grève, _seu in insula exeunte in fluvio Secanæ, juxta pointam juardini regalis, executatæ sint!_”[45]