Angelique - Part 4. The Doomed Man of Notre Dame Chapter 12 - Read online

1n the night that was still black though dawn was approaching, the snow was falling and the wind swept enormous flakes before it. Stumbling in the thick, white carpet, the court-room audience left the Palace of Justice. Lanterns swayed at the carriage-doors.
Angelique, a solitary figure, walked away through the dark streets of Paris. At the moment of leaving the Palace a commotion had separated her from the nun.
Mechanically she took the way that led to the enclosure of the Temple. Her mind was blank; she longed only to be back in her little room near Florimond’s little cradle.
How long did it last, that stumbling walk? . . . The streets were deserted. In this frightful weather even the rogues kept underground. Hardly any noise came from the taverns, for the night was drawing to a close, and the drunkards who had not gone home to their lodgings were snoring under the tables or confiding their misfortunes to some drowsing trollop. The snow decked the city in a gloomy silence.
As she approached the fortified walls of the Temple, Angflique re-membered that the gates must be closed. But she heard the muffled sounds of the dock of Notre Dame and counted five strokes. The bailiff would open in an hour. She passed the drawbridge and went to cower under the vault of the postem-gate. Thawing snowflakes ran along her face. Fortunately, the ample thick woollen gown of the religious dress, with its many petticoats, vast wimple and hooded cloak, had protected her well. But her feet were icy.
The baby stirred inside her. She put her hand over her body and pressed it with sudden rage. Why should that child live when Joffrey was going to die? . . .
At that moment, the moving curtain of snow was torn asunder, and a monstrous, panting shape came bounding under the vault.
After a first movement of fright, Angelique recognised the dog Sorbonne. He had put his paws on her shoulder and was licking her face with his rough tongue. Angflique fondled him, scanning the darkness where the snowflakes were still falling in a tight swirl. Sorbonne meant Desgrez. Desgrez would come, and with him, hope. He would have an idea. He would tell her what more she could do to save Joffrey.
She heard the young man's step on the wooden bridge. He was advancing cautiously.
“ Are you there?” he whispered.
“Yes.”
He came closer. She could not see him, but he was talking to her from so near-by that the tobacco smell on his breath reminded her dreadfully of Joffrey's kisses.
“They tried to arrest me as I was leaving the Palace. Sorbonne throttled one of the constables. I was able to get away. The dog followed your track and led me here. You must disappear now. Do you understand? You will no longer use your name, you will attempt no more moves, nothing. Otherwise you will find yourself in the Seine some morning, like Father Kircher, and your son will be an orphan twice over. As for me, I had foreseen this atrocious outcome. A horse is waiting for me at the Gate of Saint-Martin. In a few hours, Г11 be far away.”
Angelique clutched at the lawyer's soaked jacket. Her teeth were chattering.
“You aren't leaving? . . . You aren't abandoning me?”
He gripped the young woman's slender wrists and loosened the clenched fingers.
“I staked everything for you, and I have lost everything, except my skin”
“But tell me . . . tell me what I can do for my husband?”
“All that you can do for him . .
He faltered, then spoke fast:
“Go and see the hangman and bribe him so that he'll strangle him . . . before the fire. That way he won't suffer. Here, take these thirty tcus”
She felt a purse being slipped into her hand. Without another word, he walked away. The dog hesitated to follow his master. He came back to Angclique and lifted towards her his good, friendly eyes. Desgrez whistled. The dog pricked his ears and bounded away into the night.
The hangman, Maitre Aubin, lived in Pillory Square facing the fish market. He had to lodge there and nowhere else. The letters of investiture of the executioners of Paris had stipulated this detail since time im¬memorial. All the shops and stands on the square belonged to him and he rented them to small shopkeepers. Moreover, he had the right to levy from each stand on the market one handful of the displayed green vegetable or corn, one freshwater-fish, one sea-fish, and one truss of hay.
If the fishwives were the queens of the market, the hangman was its secret, despised lord.
Angclique went to see him at nightfall. Young Rope-round-thc-neck was her guide. Even at this late hour, the district was still bustling with activity. Through the rue de la Poterie and the rue de la Fromagerie, Angelique penetrated into this colourful quarter which rang with the strident shouts of the ladies of the fish market, who, famed for their ruddy faces and their picturesque language, formed a privileged guild of traders. Dogs were fighting for refuse in the gutters. Carts of hay and timber blocked the streets. Over all hung a smell of fresh fish.
A nauseous stench coming from the near-by graveyard of Saints- Innocents and its horrible charnel-houses, where the bones of Parisians had been piling up for five hundred years, mingled with these strong odours and with those of meats and cheeses.
The pillory stood in the middle of the square. It was a kind of octagonal tower with a pointed roof. The construction comprised a ground floor and a single storey above with high, vaulted windows, through which one caught a glimpse of the big iron wheel which was situated in the centre of the tower. .
A thief was on view there tonight, his head and hands passed through the holes which ran all around the wheel. Now and then, the wheel was set in motion by one of the hangman's assistants. The thief's face, blue with cold, and his dangling hands emerged alternately in the windows like the macabre figure of a mechanical dock, and the assembled spectators laughed at his grimaces.
“It’s Jactance,” someone said, “the biggest cut-purse in the market.” “Oh, now we’ll know him!”
“Let him show his face in the neighbourhood, and servants and dealers will shout: ‘Beware the cut-purse !* ”
“You can pack up your scissors, my friend, they’ll be of no more use!” There was quite a big crowd at the foot of the pillory. But if there was a throng at this place, it was not so much in order to gaze at the exposed thief as to make a deal with the hangman’s assistants.
“See, Madame,” said Rope-round-the-neck with a certain pride, “they are people who want to have tickets for tomorrow’s execution. It’s sure there won’t be enough to go round.”
He showed her the notice that the criers had been trumpeting at all the street-comers that very morning:
“Maitre Aubin, executioner ordinary of high and low justice of the dty and suburbs of Paris, announces that he will rent seats on liis scaffold at a reasonable price, for watching the fire that will be lit on the Place de Greve for a sorcerer. Tickets can be obtained at the pillory from his assistants. The seats will be marked with a fleur-de-lis and the tickets with a Cross of Saint Andr£.”
“Would you like me to get you a ticket, if you have the wherewithal?” the hangman’s apprentice suggested obligingly.
“Oh no!” said Angelique, horrified.
“You have a right to it,” said the other philosophically, “because with¬out a ticket you won’t be able to get near. Hardly anybody comes for hangings: people are used to them. But the stake's a rarity. There’ll be a press of people, you can take my word for it; Maitre Aubin says he’s all hot and bothered at the thought of it. He doesn’t like it when there’s too much of a crowd yelling all around him. He says you never know what may come over them. Well, here we are, Madame. Do walk in.”
The room into which Rope-round-the-neck had shown her was clean and well-kept. The candles had been lit. Around the table, three little neatly-dressed girls, with fair curls under their woollen bonnets, were eating gruel out of wooden bowls. By the fire-place, the hangman’s wife mended her husband’s scarlet singlet.
“Greetings, Maitressc,” said the apprentice. “I brought this woman here. She wants to talk to the old man.”
“He’s at the Palace of Justice. He won’t be long. Sit down, my dear.” Angllique sat down on a bench against the wall. The woman glanced
at her out of the corner of her eye but did not ask any questions, as any other housewife would have done. How many haggard-faced women she had seen—distraught mothers, desperate daughters—seated on that bench waiting to beg the hangman to render a last favour, to relieve a beloved one from pain . . . ! How many had come to this peaceful home, with hands full of gold or threats on their lips, to plead for the executioners help in a supreme, impossible escape!
Hearing a footfall on the threshold, Angflique half rose. The new¬comer was a young priest, who carefully wiped his thick, mud-covered boots before coming in.
“Maitre Aubin isn’t in?”
“He won’t be long. Do come in, Monsieur Г Abbe, and make yourself comfortable by the fireside.”
“It’s very kind of you, Madame. I am a mission priest and I’ve been appointed to assist the condemned man tomorrow. I’ve come to see Maitre Aubin to show him my credentials signed by the lieutenant of police, and to ask him to let me see that poor man. A night of prayer isn’t too much to prepare yourself for death.”
“Certainly,” said the hangman’s wife. “Sit down, Monsieur Г Abbe, and dry your coat. Rope-round-the-neck, throw a log on the fire.”
She dropped the red singlet and took up her distaff.
“You are a brave man,” she went on. “You aren’t afraid of a sorcerer?” “All God’s creatures, even the guiltiest ones, deserve our pity when the hour of death has come. But this man isn’t guilty. He is innocent of the hideous crime he is accused of.”
“They all say that!” said the hangman’s wife philosophically.
“If Monsieur Vincent were alive, there wouldn’t be a stake tomorrow. I heard him speak with anxiety, a few hours before his death, of the injustice that was about to be done to a nobleman of the kingdom. Were he alive, he’d have climbed on to the stake himself beside the condenmed man to shout to the people to bum him rather than an innocent man.” “Ah! that’s just what’s torturing my poor husband,” the woman cried. “You can’t imagine, Monsieur Г Abbe, how much he’s worried about tomorrow’s execution. He’s had six Masses read at Saint-Eustache, one in each side-chapel. And he’ll have another read at the high altar.”
“If Monsieur Vincent were still here . . .”
“. . . there’d be no more thieves and witches, and we’d be left without work.”
“You’d sell herrings in the market, or flowers on the Pont-Neuf, and you’d be no worse off.”
“Why, no . . .’’said the woman, laughing.
Angelique gazed at the priest. He was young, but the fire of Monsieur Vincent glowed in him; he had big hands and the plain, simple ways of a man of the people. He’d have had the same attitude before the King. But Angelique did not move. For two days now, her eyes had been smarting with all the tears she had shed in her lonely little room. She had no tears left now; her heart was numb. No balm could soothe the gaping wound. Out of her despair an evil flower had been bom: hatred. ‘What they make him suffer, I shall pay back to them a hundredfold.’ She had drawn from this resolution a purpose in living. Could one forgive someone like Becher? . . .
She remained motionless, stiff, her hands clenched under her cape around the purse that Dcsgrez had given her.
“Believe it or not, Monsieur Г Abbe,” the hangman’s wife was saying, “but my greatest sin is pride.”
“Now there you astound me!” the priest exclaimed, smacking his hands on his knees. “I don’t wish to lack in charity, my daughter, but you who are loathed by all on account of your husband’s profession, you whose very neighbours turn away muttering when you pass, I wonder where you can possibly find cause for pride and conceit.”
“Yes, that’s a fact,” sighed the poor woman. “And yet, when I see my man, well planted on his legs, lift his big axe and, bang! lop off a head * with a single stroke, I can’t help being proud of him. It’s not so easy, you know, Monsieur Г Abbe, to manage it with a single stroke.”
“You make me shudder, my daughter,” said the priest.
He added pensively:
“One cannot sound the human heart.”
Just then the door opened. A square-shouldered giant walked in with a calm, heavy stride. He growled a greeting and glanced around with the imperious air of someone who is always within his rights. His fleshy face, pitted by pock-marks, had coarse, impassive features. He did not look a wicked man, but cold and hard like a stone mask. He had the face of a man who must neither laugh nor weep, an undertaker’s face ... or a King’s, thought Angelique, who suddenly found that, despite his coarse craftsman’s jacket, he bore a resemblance to Louis XIV.
This was the hangman.
She got up, and so did the priest, who wordlessly held out his letter of introduction.
Maltre Aubin stepped over to a candle to read it.
“Very well,” he said. “Tomorrow at dawn I’ll take you along with me.” , *
“Couldn’t I be admitted tonight?”
“Impossible. Everything’s closed. I’m the only one who can take you in to the condemned man and, frankly speaking, Monsieur le Сигё, I want to have a bite. All the other workmen are forbidden to work after curfew. But for me day or night is all one. When it comes over them to make a patient confess, those gendemen of the high courts get themselves into such a state, they’d all but go and sleep there! They gave him everything today: water, the boot, and the rack.”
The priest wrung his hands.
“The unfortunate man! Alone in the darkness of a dungeon with his pain, his anguish at approaching death! О God, help him!”
The hangman cast a suspicious glance at him.
“You aren’t, going to make any trouble, are you? I’ve quite enough with that Friar Becher at my heels, who never thinks I’m doing enough. By Saint-Come and Saint-Sloi, I think if anyone’s possessed by the devil, it’s he rather than the other!”
While talking, Maitre Aubin was emptying the vast pockets of his jacket. He flung a few objects on the table, and suddenly the little girls gave a cry of admiration. A cry of horror answered them.
With dilated eyes, Angelique had recognised, among a few gold pieces, the little pearl-inlaid case in which Joffrey used to keep the small tobacco- sticks he liked to smoke. With a swift gesture she could not check, she grasped it and pressed it against her. Without any sign of annoyance, the hangman opened her fingers and retrieved the case.
“Gently, my girl. What I find in the pockets of a condemned man is mine by rights.”
“You’re a thief!” she gasped, “an infamous ghoul, a despoilcr of corpses!”
The man composedly went and took from the mantelpiece a chiselled silver casket and stored his booty away in it without answering. The woman went on spinning, nodding her head. She murmured in an apologetic tone, looking at the priest:
“They always say that, you know. You mustn’t mind them. Yet surely this one ought to realise that we don’t get much out of it when they burn a fellow. I can’t even recover the body to make a little extra with the fat, which the apothecaries ask for, and the bones, which ”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, my daughter!” said the priest, putting his hands to his ears.
He stared at Angelique with eyes that were brimming over with com-passion. But she was not looking at him. She was trembling and biting her lips. She had insulted the hangman! He would now refuse the grim plea she had come to make.
With the same heavy, rolling gait, Maitre Aubin walked round the table and went up to her. With his thumbs in his wide belt, he calmly looked her up and down.
“Apart from that, what can I do for you?”
Trembling and unable to utter a word, she held out the purse. He took it, weighed it in his hand, then stared again at Angelique with his in¬expressive eyes.
“You want him to be strangled? . .
She nodded.
The man opened the purse, let a few crowns slip into his big palm and said:
“All right, it’ll be done.”
Noticing the horrified gaze of the young priest, who had followed this conversation, he frowned.
“You won’t talk, Father, will you? I’m risking a packet, you see. If I were caught, I’d have no end of troubles. I have to manage it at the very last moment when the smoke’s hiding the stake from the public. It’s to do a favour, you see?”
“Yes ... I shan’t talk,” the abbe said with an effort. “I . . . you can rely on me.”
“I scare you, eh?” said the hangman. “It’s the first time you’ll be assisting a condemned man?”
“During the wars, when I used to bring the troops the comforts collected by Monsieur Vincent, many a time I went to accompany the poor fellows to be hanged, to the very foot of the tree. But that was war, the horrors and fever of war . . . whereas here . . .”
His helpless gesture motioned towards the fair-haired little girls sitting before their bowls. ■
“Here, it’s the law,” the hangman said, not without grandeur.
He leaned over the table familiarly, like a man eager for a chat.
“I like you, Father. You remind me of a prison chaplain whom I worked with for a long time. I can say this for him, that all the condemned men whom the two of us led died kissing the crucifix. When it was all over, he used to weep as if he’d lost his own child, and he’d be so white that many a time I had to force him to have a glass of wine to recover. I always have a pitcher of good wine with me You never can tell what may happen, especially with apprentices. My father was a hangman’s assistant when they quartered Ravaillac the regicide in the Place de Greve. He told me ... ah well, perhaps you wouldn’t enjoy this sort of story. I’ll tell you later when you are more used to them. Anyhow, I used to say to that chaplain sometimes: ‘Father, d’you think I’ll be damned?* And he'd say: ‘Hangman, if you’re damned, I’ll ask God to damn me with you. . . Look, Father, 1*11 show you something that’ll help to put your mind at rest.”
After foraging again in his numerous pockets, Maitre Aubin displayed a small flask.
"It’s a recipe I have from my father, who himself had it from his uncle, who was a hangman under Henri IV. It’s made up for me in great secrecy by an apothecary who is a friend of mine, and whom I supply, in exchange, with human skulls for the manufactory of his magistral powder. He says that magistral powder is a sovereign remedy for gravel and apoplexy, but it needs the skull of a young man who’s died a violent death. That’s his business, after all. . . . I supply him with a skull or two, and he concocts my potion without breathing a word. When I give a few drops of this to a condemned man, he becomes quite cheerful and he suffers less. I only give it to those who’ve families that pay. But still, it’s doing them a good turn, isn’t it, Monsieur Г Abbe?”
Angelique was listening open-mouthed. The hangman turned towards her.
“You want me to give him some tomorrow morning?”
She managed to utter through white lips:
“I . . . I have no more money.”
“There’ll be no extra charge,” said Maitre Aubin, bouncing the purse in his hand.
He pulled the small silver casket towards him again and put the purse inside. Mumbling a vague farewell, Angelique walked towards the door and left.
She felt like vomiting. Her whole body pained her. Yet the bustling square, still ringing with shouts and laughter, seemed to her less unbear¬able than the sinister atmosphere of the hangman’s house. The shop doors were open despite the cold. It was the hour of day when neighbours were chatting in the porches. The archers were conducting the thief, who had been taken down from the pillory, to the Chatclet prison; a swarm of ragamuffins pursued them with snowballs.
Angelique heard a hurrying tread behind her. The little abbe appeared, out of breath.
“My sister . . . my poor sister,” he stammered. “I couldn’t let you go away like that!”
She shrank back with a sudden movement. In the semi-darkness, faintly lit by a dim shop-lantern, the frightened churchman saw a face of translucent whiteness in which two eyes glowed with an almost phos¬phorescent glint.
“Leave me,” Angelique said in a metallic voice. “You can’t do any¬thing for me.”
“My sister, pray to God. . . .”
“It’s in the name of God that my innocent husband will be burned tomorrow.”
“My sister, do not aggravate your sorrows by revolting against Heaven. Remember that it was in the name of God that Our Lord was cruci¬fied”
“Your prattle drives me mad!” Angelique shouted in a shrill voice which seemed to her to come from far away. “I shan’t stop until I in turn have struck one of your kind, until I’ve made him perish in the same tortures. . . .”
She leaned against the wall, put her hands to her face and a dreadful sob shook her.
“Since you will see him ... tell him that I love him, that I love him . . . Tell him ... ah! that he made me happy. And then ... ask him what name I shall give the child that will be born.”
“I shall do so, my sister.”
He wanted to take her hand, but she avoided him and continued on her way.
The priest gave up following her. Bowed by the weight of human sorrows, he walked away through the narrow streets.
Angelique hastened towards the Temple. It seemed to her that her ears were booming, for she suddenly heard shouts around her:
“Peyrac! Peyrac!”
She finally stopped. This time it wasn’t a dream.
“. . . but Peyrac, all agree ... to Satan himself . . .”
Perched on one of the milestones that riders used, to hoist themselves into the saddle, a skinny little scamp was bellowing at the top of his hoarse voice the last verses of a song, of which he had a bundle of copies under his arm.
The young woman came back and asked for a leaflet. The coarse paper still smelled of fresh printer’s ink. Angelique could not read the words in the dark lane. She folded it and walked on. As she was approaching the Temple, the thought of Florimond grew uppermost in her mind. She was always worried to leave him alone now that he toddled about so much. You almost had to tie him up in his cradle, and this was not at all to the child’s liking. Usually, he would cry during all the time of his mother’s absence, and she’d find him coughing and feverish on her return.. She did not dare to ask Madame Scarron to look after him, for ever since her husband had come to trial the cripple’s widow avoided her and almost crossed herself when she passed.
On the staircase, Angelique heard the baby’s sobs and she hurried upstairs.
“Неге I am, my treasure, my little prince. What a big boy you are!”
She quickly threw a log into the hearth and put the pan with the child’s food on the andirons. Florimond screamed even more lustily and flung out his arms. She released him from his prison at last, and he stopped as if by magic, deigning even to smile most engagingly.
“You are a little bandit,” said Angelique, wiping his tear-stained little face. Her heart melted. She raised Florimond in her arms and gazed at him in the light of the fire, that made a red spark twinkle in the child’s black eyes.
“Litde king! Adorable little god! You are all that’s left. How beauti¬ful you arc!”
Florimond seemed to understand what she was saying. He arched his little waist and smiled with a kind of innocent, self-assured pride. His attitude loudly proclaimed that he knew he was the centre of the world. She caressed him and played with him. He chatted like a little bird. Madame Cordeau often said that he was much in advance of his age as far as talking went. His syntax was far from perfect, but he knew very well how to make himself understood. When his mother had given him a bath and put him to bed, he demanded that she sing him a cradle-song, the one about the Green Mill.
Angelique tried hard to stop her voice breaking.
“Again! Again!” clamoured Florimond.
Then he put his thumb back into his mouth with a blissful air. She did not mind his being so tyrannical and thoughtless. She feared the moment when she would find herself alone again, waiting for the night to end. When Florimond had fallen asleep, she gazed at him deeply, then rose and stretched her aching body. Were the tortures that had broken Joflrey thus reverberating in her? The hangman’s words came back to her with unbearable pain: “They gave him everything today: water, the boot and the rack.” She did not know exactly what horrors those words concealed, but she knew that they had tormented the man she loved. Oh! let it be over soon!
She said aloud:
“Tomorrow you’ll be at peace, my love. You’ll at last be freed from ignorant men. . .
On the table, the song-sheet she had bought had come unfolded. She took the candle over to it and read:
Far below in his bottomless pit,
Satan in front of his mirror would sit And think men were perfidious To say his face was hideous.
The poem went on to describe in sometimes funny, frequently foul, terms Satan’s perplexity as he wondered whether, all told, his face, so much maligned by the image-makers of cathedrals, could not honourably stand comparison with the faces of mankind. Hell offered to organise a beauty contest with the next arrivals from Earth.
Just then, three rogues in the fire were thrown,
Wicked magicians, every one.
And soon as they were roasted To hell the three were posted.
The first man’s face was coloured blue,
The second man’s had a jet-black hue.
But Peyrac, all agree,
Was ugliest of the three.
No one will be surprised to know That when these monsters arrived below,
Hell itself shook with fright At such a dreadful sight,
And the prize for beauty, while all applauded,
To Satan himself was duly awarded.
Angelique’s eyes ran on to the signature: ‘Claude le Petit, the Gutter- Poet’.
With bitterness in her mouth, she crumpled the sheet.
‘Him, too, I’ll kill!’ she thought.