Angelique - Part 4. The Doomed Man of Notre Dame Chapter 13 - Read online

‘A WIFE MUST FOLLOW HER HUSBAND,’ Angclique said to herself, as the sun rose and a sparkling pure sky spread over the spires of the city.
So she would go. She would follow him to the very last stage. She would have to take care not to betray herself for she was still running the risk of getting herself arrested. But perhaps he would notice her* would recognise her. . . .
She went down the stairs with the sleeping Florimond in her arms and knocked at Madame Cordeau s door.
“Can I leave him with you for a few hours, Madame Cordeau?”
The old woman turned her sad witch-like face towards her.
“Put him into my bed, I'll mind him for you. It's as it should be, poor lamb! The hangman looks after the father, the hangman’s widow will look after the son. Go, my child, and pray to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows that she may help you in your grief.”
Like a sleepwalker, the young woman crossed the Temple Gate and headed in the direction of the Place de Greve. The mist over the Seine was just rising and disclosed the fine buildings of the Hotel de Ville on the edge of the vast square. It was very cold, but the blue sky held promise of a sunny day.
In the foreground of the square a high cross had been set up on a stone base near the gallows from which the body of a hanged man was swaying. A substantial crowd had begun to collect and was clustering around the gibbet.
“It’s the Moor,” someone said.
“No, it’s the other one. They strung him up when it was still dark. The sorcerer will see him when he arrives on his tumbrel.”
“But his face is quite black.”
“That’s because of the hanging. His face was already blue before. You know the song? . . .”
Someone started humming:
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. . . .
And the prize for beauty, while all applauded,
To Satan himself was duly awarded.
Angelique put her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. She had just recognised in the misshapen body with its bloated face and swollen tongue the Saxon, Fritz Hauer.
A youngster in rags looked at her and laughed:
“The wench here is already swooning. What’ll she do when they roast the sorcerer!”
“It seems that women stuck to him like flies to honey.”
“No wonder: he was richer than the King, that’s why!”
“He made all that gold by devil’s work.”
Shivering, the young woman clasped her cloak about her. A fat pork- butcher, standing on the doorstep of his shop, said to her good-naturedly:
“You should go away from here, my girl. What’s going on here isn’t a sight for an expectant mother.’’
Angdique stubbornly shook her head. After scrutinising her wan face and her wild, staring eyes, the butcher shrugged his shoulders. He knew the dismal figures that came roaming around the gallows and the scaffold.
“Is this the place of the execution?” Angelique asked in a toneless voice.
“It depends on which one you’ve come for. I know they’re hanging a journalist at the Chatelet this morning. But if it’s for the sorcerer, it’s here all right, on the Greve. See, there’s the stake over there.”
The stake had been put up some distance away, almost at the river’s edge. It was an enormous platform of stacked faggots, at the top of which was a post. A small ladder was required to reach the top of it. A few yards away, the scaffold which served for decapitations was fitted out with stools on which the first ticket-holders of booked scats were beginning to take their places.
A dry wind rose and lashed the reddened faces with a fine snow-dust. A little old woman came to take shelter under the pork-butcher’s porch.
“It’s chilly this morning. I wouldn’t have minded staying snugly round my brazier selling my fish in the market. But I promised my sister I’d bring her back a piece of the wizard’s bone for her rheumatism.”
“It seems it’s effective.”
“Yes. The barber of the rue de la Savonnerie told me he’d pound it for me with a little poppy-seed oil. There’s nothing better for pain, he says.”
“It won’t be easy to get hold of some. Maitrc Aubin, the hangman, has asked for a double guard of archers.”
“Of course, he wants to keep the choicest bits for himself, that flesh¬eating devil’s handyman! But, hangman or no, everyone will have his share,” said the old woman, baring her rotten teeth.
“At Notre Dame you might have more luck in getting hold of a piece of his shirt.”
Angelique felt a cold sweat dampening her spine. She had forgotten the first part of the ghasdy programme: the public apology at Notre Dame. Hurriedly she began to run towards the rue de la Coutellerie, but the stream of people pouring into the square like teeming ants blocked her way and pushed her back. Never, never would she be able to reach Notre Dame in time! *
The fat pork-butcher left his doorstep and came up to her.
“You want to go to Notre Dame?” he asked under his breath in a com-passionate voice.
“Yes,” she stammered. “I didn’t remember . . . I . . .”
“Listen, this is what you do. Cross the square and go down to the wine- docks. There you ask a boatman to take you across to Saint-Landry. You’ll be at Notre Dame in five minutes.”
She thanked him and broke into a run again. The pork-butcher had given her good advice. For a few sols, a boatman took her in his boat and, with three strokes of his oars, landed her at the jetty of Saint-Landry. Looking at the tall, timbered houses standing in the mire of rotting fruit, she vaguely remembered that bright morning when Barbe had told her: “Down there, before the Hotel de Ville, is the Place de Greve. I saw a witch being burned. . . .”
Angelique was running. The street she had taken was behind the chapter-houses at the back of Notre Dame and it was almost empty. But the rumbling noise of the crowd reached her, punctuated by the deep, sinister notes of the knell. Angelique was running. She never knew by what superhuman strength she managed to fight her way through the serried ranks of spectators, and by what miracle she found herself in the front row, just outside the cathedral.
Just then, a long roar announced the arrival of the condemned man. The crowd was so tightly packed that the procession could hardly move forward. The hangman’s assistants were trying to thrust the people aside with mighty lashes of their great whips. At last a small wooden tumbrel appeared. It was one of the rough-hewn vehicles in which the city’s gar¬bage was collected. Traces of mud and straw still clung to it.
Towering over this ignominious equipage, Maitre Aubin, upright, with his fists on his hips, in scarlet hose and singlet and his chest emblazoned with the city arms, gazed sombrely down at the roaring populace. The priest was sitting on the edge of the cart. The mob clamoured for the wizard, who could not be seen.
“He must be lying on the bottom,” said a woman next to Angelique. “They say he is half dead.”
“I hope not,” her neighbour exclaimed spontaneously—a pretty girl with fresh cheeks.
The tumbrel meanwhile had come to a stop by the statue of the Great Faster. Archers on horseback, their halberds pointed horizontally, were holding the populace at a distance. Some policemen, surrounded by a crowd of monks of various brotherhoods, were moving across the square.
A sudden surge threw Ang&ique back. She screamed and clawed her way back to the front row like a fury.
The knell continued to toll over a crowd that had suddenly become silent. In an open space a ghostlike apparition had emerged and was climbing the steps. Angelique's blurred eyes saw nothing but this sil¬houette of shimmering whiteness. Then she suddenly noticed that the condemned man had one arm over the hangman’s shoulder, the other over the chaplain’s, and that he was actually being dragged; he was unable to use his legs. His head with its long black hair was hanging down.
He was preceded by a monk who was carrying an enormous taper the flame of which swayed in the wind. Angflique recognised Conan Becher, his face contorted with ecstasy and spiteful glee. Around his neck an enormous white crucifix hung down to his knees and made him stumble. He seemed to be performing a grotesque dance of death in front of the condemned man.
The procession advanced with nightmarish slowness. When they had reached the pavement outside the cathedral, the group stopped before the porch of the Last Judgement. A rope was dangling from the condemned man's neck. A bare foot beneath the white shirt was posed on the icy stone flags.
’That isn’t Joffrey,’ Angelique thought.
It wasn’t the man she had known, so fastidious and elegant, enjoying all the pleasures of life. It was some wretch, like all the wretches who had come here before him, barefooted, in a shirt, the rope round the neck.
At that moment, Joffrey de Peyrac raised his head. In the shrunken, colourless, deformed face, the immense eyes alone shone with a sombre glow.
A woman gave a piercing scream:
“He’s looking at me. He’ll bewitch me."
But the Comte de Peyrac was not looking at the public. He was gazing straight ahead at the assembled old stone saints on the grey front of Notre Dame. What prayer was he addressing to them? What promise did he receive? Did he see them at all?
A court clerk had stepped up on his left and read out the sentence in a nasal voice. The tolling knell had stopped. But the words could hardly be heard.
“. . . for the crime of abduction, enticement, impiety . . . magic . . . be delivered into the hands of high justice . . . taken bareheaded and barefoot ... ask public pardon ... a burning taper in his hand, and kneeling. . . .”
Conan Becher then pronounced the words of “amende honorable”, the public apology.
“I admit the crimes of which I am accused. I ask pardon of God. I accept my punishment in expiation of my faults.”
The chaplain had taken the taper which the condemned man was unable to hold. The people waited for the guilty man’s voice to rise and they were growing impatient.
“Speak up, devil’s henchman!”
“So you want to bum in hell with your master?”
Angelique had the impression that her husband was gathering up his last bit of strength. A wave of life coursed through his livid face. He pulled himself up on the hangman’s and the priest’s shoulders. He seemed to grow till his head towered over Maitre Aubin. A second before he opened his mouth, Angelique had guessed, with love’s intuition, what he was going to do.
And suddenly, in the frosty air, a deep, vibrant, extraordinary voice rang out.
The Golden Voice of the Kingdom was to be heard for the last time.
It sang, in the langue d’oc, a Beamais refrain which Angelique recognised:
“Lesgenolsjlexez am lo cap encli A vos reclam la reginaplazent Flor de lasflors, nou Jhdsusprds nayssenga Vulhatzguarda lacientatde Tholoza. . . .”
Angelique alone understood the meaning:
. . . With knees bent and bowing head I commend myself to you, gentle queen,
Flower of flowers in whom Jesus had his birth Kindly watch over the city of Toulouse . . .
Most gentle flower in which we take shelter . . .
Most gentle flower where everything blooms . . .
Keep Toulouse always flowering. . . .
Angelique felt a pain like a dagger-stroke shoot through her, and she uttered a cry.
The cry rose alone in a sudden, terrible silence. For the singer’s voice had stopped. Friar Becher had lifted his ivory crucifix and had struck the mouth of the condemned man, whose head fell forward while a red saliva spilled from his lips to the ground. But almost at once Joffrey pulled himself up again.
“Conan Becher,” he cried in the same clear, ringing voice, “I shall meet you before God’s tribunal ere the month is out.”
A shudder of fright seemed to run through the populace, and there was an outburst of furious yells which stifled the Comte de Peyrac’s voice. The spectators were convulsed with rage, in the grip of a delirious in¬dignation. But what had provoked this outburst was not so much the friar's gesture as the condemned man's arrogance. Never had there been such an outrage on the square of Notre Dame! To sing! ... He had dared to sing! If he had at least intoned a hymn! But the condemned man had sung in a foreign tongue, a diabolical tongue. . . .
Like some monstrous wave the stampeding crowd lifted Angelique up. Carried, crushed, trampled on, she found herself at last in the recess of a porch. She pushed open a door. The darkness of the empty cathedral received her, gasping and panting.
She tried to control herself, to control the pain that gripped her. The baby had stirred violently inside her while Joffrey sang.
The shouts outside were muffled as they reached her. For several minutes the clamour rose to a kind of paroxysm, then it gradually subsided.
‘I must leave, I must go to the Place de Grevc,' Angelique told herself.
And she left the shelter of the sanctuary. On the square outside, a group of men and women was fighting on the spot where Becher had hit the Count de Peyrac.
“I’ve got it, the wizard’s tooth,” one of them cried.
And he ran away, pursued by the others. A woman was waving a white rag.
“I managed to cut off a piece of his shirt. Who wants it? It brings luck.”
Angelique was running. Beyond the bridge of Notre Dame she came again upon the throng that was escorting the tumbrel. But in the rue de la Vanncrie and in the rue de la Coutellcrie, it became almost impossible to advance. She begged people to let her pass. Nobody listened. They seemed delirious. Under the warm rays of sunshine, the snow was slipping from the roofs and falling in heavy lumps on their heads and shoulders. But nobody paid any heed.
At last Angelique managed to reach the corner of the square. At that very moment she saw a huge flame spring up from the stake. With her arms flung up, she heard herself shrieking like a madwoman: 4
“He’s burning! He’s burning! . . .”
Wildly she fought her way through to the stake. The heat of the blaze reached her. Stirred up by the wind, the fire roared.
There was a thunder-like, hail-like crackling. What were those, human shapes that fidgeted in the yellow blaze of the flames. Who was that man,
clad in scarlet, who was moving around the stake, plunging his flaming torch into the bottom layers of faggots?
Who was that man in the black cassock, clutching the step-ladder, with seared eyebrows, who, with a crucifix held in his outstretched arm, was crying:
“Hope! Hope!”
Who was that man caught inside that blazing furnace? Oh God! could there be a living being inside that blaze? No, it wasn’t alive, since the hangman had strangled him!
“Hear how he screams !’* people were saying.
“No, no, he doesn’t scream, he’s dead,’’ Angelique kept repeating.
And she put her hands to her ears, thinking she heard from that fiery curtain she knew not what heart-rending clamour.
“How he screams! How he screams!” the crowd was saying.
And others complained:
“Why did they put a hood over his head? We want to see his grimaces!”
A shower of white leaves blown about by a whirlwind escaped from the brazier and scattered in ashes over people’s heads.
“They are the books of devilry that are burning with him. . .
The wind suddenly beat down the flames. Angelique saw, in a flash, the stack of books from the library of the Gay Learning and, behind it, the post to which a black, motionless form was tied, its head covered by a dark hood.
She fainted.