Angelique - Part 4. The Doomed Man of Notre Dame Chapter 14 - Read online

SHE CAME TO HERSELF in the pork-butcher’s shop in the Place de Greve.
‘Oh! I’ve such a pain,’ she thought as she sat up.
Had she gone blind? Why was it so dark? A woman with a candle¬stick in her hand was bending over her.
“You’re better now, dear! I was afraid you might be dead. A doctor came and gave you a blood-letting. But it’s my idea, if you want to know, that you are in labour.”
“Oh nof ’ said Angelique, putting her hand on her belly. “I am not expecting for another three weeks. Why is it so dark?”
“Faith, it’s getting late. They have rung the Angelus.”
“And the stake?”
“It’s all over/' said the pork-butcher’s wife, lowering her voice. “But it lasted a long time. What a day, my friend! The body wasn’t entirely burnt till two hours after noon. And when the ashes were being scattered, there was a real battle. Everybody wanted some. They almost tore the hangman to pieces!”
She added after a moment’s silence:
“You knew the wizard?”
“No,” said Angelique with an effort, “I don’t know what came over me. It’s the first time I’ve seen anything like this.”
“Yes, it gives you a turn. We shopkeepers of the Place de Greve, we see so much, it no longer impresses us. We even feel as if we’ve missed some¬thing when there isn’t a hanged man on the gibbet.”
Angelique would have liked to thank these good people. But she only had some small change on her. She said she would come back and repay them for the doctor’s visit.
In the blue twilight, the belfry of the Hotel de Ville was ringing the close of work. The cold was sharp with the falling dusk. At the far end of the square, the wind was kindling a huge red flower of glowing embers: these were the last remnants of the stake.
As Angelique was prowling around it, a humble figure moved out of the shadow of the scaffold. It was the chaplain. He came closer. She recoiled with horror, for he was bringing with him, in the folds of his cassock, an unbearable smell of burnt wood and roasted flesh.
“I knew you would come, my sister,” he said. “I was waiting for you. I wanted to tell you that your husband died like a Christian. He was ready and unrebellious. He regretted leaving this life, but he had no fear of death. He told me several times that he was looking forward to coming face to face with the Master of all things. I believe he drew great comfort from the certainty that he would know at last . . .”
The abbe’s voice expressed hesitation and a certain astonishment.
“That he would know at last whether or not the earth revolves.”
“Oh!” Angelique exclaimed, revived by a sudden anger. “Isn’t that just like him! Men are all alike. He doesn’t care whether he leaves me on this earth, revolving or not, in misery and despair!”
“No, my sister! He repeated to me over and over again: ‘Tell her that I love her. She filled my life with happiness. Alas, I shall have been but a passing stage in hers but I trust her to chart her own course.’ He also said that he wished the name of Cantor to be given to the child to be bom, if it is a boy, and Clemence, if it is a girl.”
Cantor de Marmont, the troubadour of Languedoc, С1ётедое Isaure, the muse of the Floral Games ofToulouse . . .
How distant all this was! How unreal it all was in the face of the lurid hours that Ang6lique was living. She was now endeavouring to reach the Temple, but she walked with great difficulty. For a few moments she prodded her grievance against Joffrey. This grievance sustained her. Of course, Joffrey had not cared whether she was eaten up with pain and tears. What’s the worth of a woman’s thoughts? . . . Provided he, on the yonder side of life, would at last find an answer to the questions that had been haunting his scientific mind! . . .
Suddenly, a flood of tears streamed over Angelique’s face and she had to lean against a wall to prevent herself from falling.
‘Oh, Joffrey, my love,’ she murmured. ‘You know at last whether the earth revolves or not! . . . Be happy in all eternity!’
The pain in her body became racking and unbearable. She felt her whole being break asunder. Then she understood that she was going to give birth.
She was far from the Temple. In her aimless walk she had lost her way. She saw she was near the Bridge of Notre Dame. A cart was rumbling over it. Angelique hailed the driver:
“I am ill. Can you take me to the H6tel-Dieu?”
“I’m on my way there,” the man replied. “I’m going to collect a load there for the graveyard. I am the fellow who drives the dead. Climb in, pretty lady.”
“What name will you give him, my daughter?”
“Cantor.” ‘
“Cantor! That’s not a Christian name.”
“I don’t care,” said Angelique. “Give me my child.”
She took the red, still damp little thing from the arms of the midwife. The virago who had welcomed him on this sorrowful earth had bundled him up in a rag of dirty linen.
The day was not over: midnight had not yet sounded from the lilied clock of the Palace of Justice, and the doomed man’s child was bom.
Ang£lique’s heart was broken. Her body had been racked, her bowels torn. Angelique had died at the same time as Joffrey. With the little Cantor, a new Angflique was bom, a new woman in whom there scarcely survived a trace of the strange sweetness and ingenuousness of the former Angelique. The wildness and harshness that had vibrated in the un¬disciplined girl of Monteloup came to the fore again, rushed like a black river through the open breach of her distress and her terror.
With one hand she pushed away her neighbour, a frail, burning creature who was sofdy raving in a delirium. A third woman, shoved against the edge of the bed, protested. She was suffering from a slow haemorrhage which had not stopped since morning. The sweetish smell of blood which impregnated the straw-pallet was nauseating. Angelique pulled a second rug towards her. The third occupant of the bed again protested feebly.
‘Those two are here to die/ thought the young mother. ‘So my baby and I might as well try to keep warm and get out of here alive/
With wide-open, wild eyes, she saw in the stinking darkness the yellow light of tallow-lamps shine through the tom curtains of the bed.
‘What an odd thing Г she thought. For Joffrey had died, but Angelique was the one to be in hell.
In this nauseous den, where the foul smell of filth and blood hovered thick as fog, she heard sobs, wails and groans as if she were deep in a nightmare. The shrill screams of babies never ceased. It was like an endless singsong which mounted, then subsided, then rose again at another end of the ward.
It was icy cold despite the wheeled braziers put at the intersection of the corridors, for the draught dispelled their warmth. Angelique learned in what far-reaching experience the poor people’s fear of hospitals was rooted. Wasn’t it the ante-room of death?
How could they survive this accumulation of disease and filth, where convalescents mingled with contagious patients, where surgeons operated on soiled tables with razors which, a few hours earlier, had served to shave the beards of the local customers in their shops?
Dawn approached. The bells could be heard ringing for Mass. Angelique remembered the dead of the Hotel-Dieu whom the nuns lined up before the porch at this hour and whom a tumbrel would take to the graveyard of Saints-Innoccnts. A tepid wintry sun might light the Gothic fasadc of the ancient hospital, but the limbs of the poor dead, sewn in their shrouds, would never come to life again.
A hand pulled back the curtains of the bed. Three male nurses in grimy smocks cast a glance at the three women on the pallet, then seized the last one, the woman with the haemorrhage, and put her on a stretcher. Angelique saw that the poor woman was dead. There was also the body of a child on the stretcher.
Angelique looked again at her baby, whom she held pressed against her. Why wasn’t he crying? Was he dead too? No, he was asleep, with clenched fists and a peaceful expression on his face, a strange one for a new¬born baby. He did not seem to have the slightest inkling that he was a child of sorrow and disgrace. His face looked like a rose-bud, and his skull was covered with a fine, fair down. But Angelique kept shaking him, afraid lest he might be dead or dying. Then he would lift his eyelids over blue, filmy eyes, and fall asleep again.
In the ward, nuns bent over the beds of other women in confinement. They certainly were devoted and displayed a courage which could find sustenance in God alone. But they were to cope with insoluble problems.
Clutching at her ardent wish to live, Angelique forced herself to drink the contents of a bowl that was handed to her. Then, in order to forget her feverish neighbour and the blood-soaked mattress, she sought strength in sleep. Ш-defmed visions passed before her closed eyelids. She thought of Gontran. He was walking somewhere on the roads of France; he would stop by a hridge to pay the toll and, to spare his purse, would make a portrait of the toll-keeper. . . .
Why did she think of Gontran, who had become a poor wanderer on his tour of France but who at least was wandering under a pure sky? Gontran was like those surgeons who were there bending over an aching body imbued with the fervent determination to discover the secret of life and death. In the half-sleep in which she hovered detached from earthly contingencies, Angelique discovered that Gontran was one of the most precious men in the world . . . just like those surgeons. . . . But why were they no more than poor barbers, shopkeepers held in low esteem, when their role was so important? . . . Why was Gontran, who carried a world inside him and the power to rouse the enthusiasm even of kings, only a poor, needy, lowly craftsman? . . . Why think of such useless things when you had to gather up all your bodily strength to escape from hell? . . .
Angelique stayed only four days at the Hotel-Dieu. Fierce and hard, she demanded the best blankets for herself, forbade the midwife to touch her or her baby with her dirty fingers. She would take from the proffered trays two bowls of food instead of one. One morning, she tore off the clean apron which a nun had just put over her dress, and before the poor novice could run to call her superior, she had tom the apron up into bandages to swaddle the baby and bind herself.
She countered all remonstrances with a fierce silence and gazed at her interlocutors out of scornful, implacable eyes. There was a gipsy in the ward who declared to her companions: “This green-eyed girl is a sooth-
i”
sayer!
She spoke only once, when one of the administrators of the H6tel-Dieu came in person to reproach her, holding a scented handkerchief to his nose.
“I have been notified, my daughter, that you object to another sick person sharing this bed which has kindly been granted to you by public charity. It even appears that you have already thrown down on the floor two women, who were too weak to defend themselves. Aren’t you ashamed of this attitude? The Hotel-Dieu owes it to itself to receive all the sick who are brought here, and there are not enough beds to go round.”
“In that case, you would do better to sew up at once in shrouds the sick that are sent to you !” Angelique replied bluntly. “In the hospitals founded by Monsieur Vincent, each patient has a bed to himself! But you did not want anyone to come and reform your unworthy methods, because you would have had to render accounts. What happens to all those gifts of public charity you mention, and to the moneys contributed by the State? People’s hearts must be very ungenerous and the State very poor if you can’t buy enough bundles of straw to change the bedding every day for those poor wretches who soil themselves and whom you let rot in their filth! Oh, I am sure that if Monsieur Vincent’s ghost comes back to roam the Hotel-Dieu, it must weep with sorrow!”
The administrator’s eyes, behind his handkerchief, bulged with amaze-ment. In the fifteen years that he had been managing the Hotel-Dieu he had certainly had to cope at times with unruly individuals, vociferating fishwives, foul-spoken prostitutes. But never had there risen, from those miserable couches, so blunt an answer in such polished language.
“Woman,” he said, drawing himself up in all his dignity, “I can see
from your words that you are strong enough to return to your home. You
can leave this place, where you do not appreciate the kindness shown to »» '
you.
“I shall be only too glad to,” Angelique retorted bitingly, “but before doing so I demand that the clothes which were taken away from me when I arrived here, and were piled up with all the rags of the sufferers from smallpox, venereal disease and the plague, be washed in front of me in clean water. If not, I shall walk out of this hospital in a shift and shout in the square of Notre Dame that the donations from the wealthy and from the public funds are lining the pockets of the administrators of the Hotel- Dieu. I’ll appeal to Monsieur Vincent, the conscience of the kingdom. I’ll cry so loud that the King himself will ask to check the accounts of your establishment.”
“If you do that,” he said, bending forward with a cruel expression, “I’ll have you seized and locked up with the lunatics.”
She trembled but did not give ground. The reputation the gipsy had given her crossed her mind.
“Then let me warn you that if you perpetrate this fresh infamy, all your family will die in the coming year.*’
‘There’s no risk in making such a statement,* she thought, stretching out again on her squalid straw-mattress. ‘Men are so stupid! . .
The air in the streets of Paris, which she had formerly found so evil-smelling, seemed pure and delicious when she found herself free at last, alive and dressed in clean clothes outside the repulsive building.
She was walking almost gaily, holding her baby in her arms. Only one thing worried her: she had very little milk, and Cantor, who had so far behaved like a model child, was beginning to complain. He had cried all night long, pulling avidly at her empty breast.
‘At the Temple there are herds of goats,* she thought. ‘I shall bring up my child on goat-milk. Never mind if he grows up to be a romping young goat.’
And what had become of Florimond? Widow Cordeau surely hadn’t abandoned him. She was a kind woman. But Angelique felt as if she had left her first-born years ago.
People passed her with tapers in their hands. A smell of hot pancakes came drifting from the houses. She told herself that this must be the second of February. People were celebrating the presentation of the Child Jesus at the Temple and the Purification of the Virgin Mary by exchang¬ing gifts of candles, according to a tradition that had given this day the name of Candlemas.
‘Poor little Jesus!’ Angelique thought, kissing Cantor’s brow, as she passed through the gate of the Temple.
As she was approaching Widow Cordeau’s house, she heard a child crying. Her heart jumped, for she had the intuition that it was Florimond. Stumbling in the snow, a little figure appeared, pursued by ragamuffins, pelting him with snowballs.
“Sorcerer! Hey, little Sorcerer! Show us your horns!”
Angelique rushed forward with a scream, seized the child in her arms and, hugging him against her, plunged into the kitchen, where the old woman was peeling onions in front of the hearth.
“How can you let those ruffians torment him?”
Widow Cordeau passed die back of her hand over her eyes.
“Ho, ho, my daughter, don’t shout so much! I looked after your little one all right while you were gone, though I wasn’t so sure I’d ever see you again. But I can’t have him on my hands all day long, after all. I put him out so that he’d have some fresh air. What do you expect me to do when the kids call him ‘Sorcerer’? It’s a fact, isn’t it, that his father was burned in the Place de Greve? He’ll just have to get used to it. My boy was not much bigger than he when they started flinging pebbles after him and calling him ‘Rope-round-the-neck*. Oh! the little darling!” the old woman exclaimed, dropping her knife and coming towards her with an ecstatic face to admire Cantor.
In her poor little room, which she entered again with a sense of well¬being, Angelique placed her two children on the bed and hastened to make a fire.
“I am so happy,” declared Florimond over and over again, looking at her with his sparkling black eyes.
He clung to her.
“You won’t leave me again, Maman?”
“No, my treasure. Just look at the pretty baby I brought back for you.
“I don’t like him,” Florimond prompdy declared, snuggling up to her with a jealous air.
Angelique unswaddled Cantor and took him over to the fire. He stretched his little limbs and yawned. Heavens! By what miracle had she been able to give birth to such a fat baby amidst such torments!
For a few days longer, Angelique lived peacefully enough in the en¬closure. She had a little money and was hoping for Raymond’s return. But one afternoon she was summoned by the bailiff of the Temple, who was in charge of the private police of this so-called privileged district.
“My daughter,” he said unceremoniously, “I have to notify you on behalf of the Grand Prior that you will have to leave the enclosure. As you know, he extends his protection only to those whose reputation cannot in any way harm the good name of his little principality. You will have to go.”
Angelique opened her mouth to ask what they were holding against her. Then she thought of throwing herself at the feet of the Due de Vendome, the Grand Prior. But she remembered the King’s words: “I don’t ever want to hear of you again!”
So they knew who she was! They were still afraid of her, perhaps. . . . She understood that it was useless to ask the Jesuits to support her. They had loyally helped her as long as there had been something to defend. But now that the die was cast, they would keep all those in the background who, like Raymond, had been compromised in this painful affair.
“Very well,” she said through clenched teeth. “I shall leave the enclosure before nightfall.” .
Back in her room, she packed all her belongings into a small leather trunk, wrapped up her two children warmly, and loaded the lot on a barrow. Widow Cordeau was out at the market. Angflique left a little purse on the table.
‘When I am a little better off, I shall come back and be more generous/ she promised herself.
“Are we going for a walk, Maman?” inquired Florimond.
“We are going back to Aunt Hortense.”
“We’ll see Baba?”
It was the name he had given to Barbe.
Yes.
He clapped his hands. He gazed all around him with delight.
Pushing her wheelbarrow through the streets, slushy with mud and thawed snow, Angelique kept looking at the two little faces of the children who were closely pressed to each other under the blanket. The fate of these frail creatures weighed like lead upon her.
Above the roofs the sky was clear and swept clean of clouds. There would be no frost tonight, for the weather had been warming up for the last few days, and the poor felt hope stir in their breasts again as they sat by their firelcss hearths.
In the rue Saint-Landry, Barbe gave a great cry as she recognised Florimond. The child stretched his arms out to her and kissed her delightedly.
“Oh God, my little angel!’’ the servant stammered.
Her lips trembled, her eyes were filled with tears. She was staring fixedly at Angelique as if she were a ghost risen from the grave. Was she comparing this thin, hard-faced woman, more poorly dressed than her¬self, with the woman who had rung at the same door only a few months ago?
Angelique wondered curiously whether, from her attic-window, Barbe had watched the fire in the Place deGreve. . . .
A stifled exclamation from the staircase made her turn round. Hortense, holding a torch in her hand, seemed transfixed with horror. Behind her, on the landing, Maitre Fallot de Sance appeared. He was wigless, clothed in a dressing-gown, with an embroidered bonnet on his head. His lips dropped open with fright at the sight of his sister-in-law.
At last, after an interminable silence, Hortense managed to raise a stiff, trembling arm.
“Go away!” she said tonelessly. “My roof has sheltered an accursed family for too long already.”
“Shut up, you fool!” Angelique replied, with a shrug.
She walked up to the foot of the staircase and raised her eyes towards her sister.
“I am going,” she said. “But I ask you to take in these innocent little mites who cannot do you any harm.”
“Go away!” Hortense repeated.
Angelique turned towards Barbe, who was hugging Florimond and Cantor in her arms.
“I entrust them to you, Barbe, my girl. Look, here’s all the money 1 have left, to buy milk for them. Cantor doesn’t need a nurse, he likes goat’s milk. . . .”
“Go away! Go away! Go away!” screamed Hortense in a shrill crescendo.
And she began to stamp her foot.
Angelique walked towards the door. Her last backward glance was not for her children, but for her sister.
The candle in Hortense’s hand flickered and cast frightful shadows on her contorted face.
‘And yet,’ thought Angelique, ‘didn’t the two of us watch the little lady of Monteloup, the ghost with outstretched hands that used to pass through our rooms? . . . And we’d nestle close to each other with fright in our big bed. . . .’
She shut the door behind her. For a moment, she stopped to look at one of the clerks who, perched on a step-ladder, was lighting the big lantern before Maitre Fallot de Sance’s office.
Then, turning away, she plunged into Paris.