Angelique - Part 5. The Court of Miracles Chapter 1 - Read online

ANGELIQUE LOOKED AT THE FACE OF THE MONK BECHER through the window. Indifferent to the thawing snow that was dripping from the roof on to her shoulders, she remained standing in the darkness outside the inn of‘The Green Trellis*.
The monk was sitting before a tin pitcher and drinking with a fixed stare. Angelique could see him quite distinctly, despite the thick window- pane. The inside of the tavern was not very smoky. The monks and clerics who made up the bulk of the patronage of‘The Green Trellis’ did not care much for the pipe. They came here to drink and, above all, to play draughts and dice.
“Hey, sister, you oughtn’t to be outside on a night like this. Haven’t you anything to toss into the pot?’’
Angelique turned round to see who was addressing her in such a strange language, but she could not see anyone. Suddenly the moon emerged between two clouds and disclosed at her feet the squat shape of a dwarf. He was raising two fingers crossed in a peculiar way. She remembered the gesture the Moor Kouassi-Ba had shown her one day, saying: “Cross your fingers like this and my friends say: ‘It’s all right, you’re one of ours.’ ”
Mechanically she made Kouassi-Ba’s sign. A wide grin split the midget’s face.
“You’re one of the gang, I thought as much. But I can’t place you. Do you belong to Rodogone the Egyptian, Toothless Jean, Bluejacket or The Raven?”
Without answering him, Angelique turned away and began to stare at Friar Bccher again through the window. With a leap the dwarf jumped on to the window-sill. The light from the inn lit his big face, above which sat a dirty felt hat. He had plump, round hands and tiny feet in canvas shoes.
“Where’s the customer you can’t take your eyes off?”
“Over there, the one sitting in the comer.”
“Do you think that squint-eyed old sack of bones will pay you much for your trouble?”
Angelique took a deep breath. Life suddenly began to course in her veins again. At last she knew what she had to do.
“That's the man I must kill,” she said.
The dwarf quickly passed a deft hand around her waist.
“You haven't even got a knife. How will you manage?”
For the first time, Angelique gazed attentively at this weird creature who had popped out of the pavement like a rat, like one of the loathsome animals of the night that invaded Paris with the gathering darkness.
She had been roaming aimlessly, wildly, in the night for hours. What instinct of hate, what hunter’s flair, had led her to ‘The Green Trellis', where she had recognised the monk Becher?
“Come with me, Marquise,” the dwarf said suddenly, jumping down to the ground. “Lqf's go to the Saints-Innocents. You can arrange with the fellows there how to bounce your pigeon.”
She followed him unhesitatingly. The dwarf walked ahead of her with a rolling gait.
“My name is Barcarole,” he said after a while. “Isn't it a pretty name, as pretty as me? Hoo! Hoo!”
He gave a sort of joyous whoop, cut a caper, then kneaded a ball of snow and mud, which he flung at the window of a house.
“Let's go, my pet,” he went on, quickening his step, “or the chamber¬pots of these good burghers whom we've kept from snoring will come pouring down on our heads.”
No sooner had he spoken than a shutter slammed and Angelique had to leap aside to avoid the shower he had foretold.
The dwarf had vanished. Angelique went on walking. Her feet got bogged in the mud. Her clothes were damp, but she did not feel the cold. A low whistle drew her attention to the mouth of a sewer. Out of its opening appeared the dwarf Barcarole.
“Forgive me for giving you the slip, Marquise, but I went to fetch my pal, Wood-Bottom Janir.”
Behind him, a second squat figure extricated itself from the sewer-hole. He was not a dwarf but a legless cripple, a trunk of a man sitting in an enormous wooden bowl. In his knobby hands were two wooden handles by which he propelled himself from one paving-stone to another.
The monster scrutinised Angelique. He had a bestial face, sprouting with pimples. His sparse hair was carefully combed back over his shiny skull. His only garment consisted of a sort of blue cloth tunic with gold- braided buttonholes and lapels which must have belonged to a noble officer. Wearing a high collar with an impeccable stock, he was an extra¬ordinary sight. After peering at the young woman for a long time, he cleared his throat and spat at her revoltingly. She stared at him in amaze¬ment, then wiped herself with a handful of snow.
“It's all right,” said the cripple, satisfied. “She’s respectful. She realises whom she’s talking to.”
“Talking! Hm! That’s one way of putting it!” exclaimed Barcarole. He burst into his whooping laughter. “Hoo! Hoo! Aren’t I witty ?”
“Give me my hat,” said Wood-Bottom.
He put on a felt hat adorned with a handsome plume. Then, gripping his wooden handles, he started off.
“What does she want?” he inquired after a moment.
“Someone to help her bounce an enemy.”
“That might be arranged. Who does she belong to?”
“Can’t find out. . . .”
Gradually, as they proceeded through the streets, other figures joined them. First she heard whisdes coming from dark recesses, rising from the river-banks or from the depth of courtyards. Then beggars would appear, with long beards, barefoot, in wide, tattered capes, old hags who were mere bundles of rags tied with string and big rosaries, blind men and cripples who would swing their crutches over their shoulders to walk faster, hunchbacks who had had no time to remove their humps. Genuine paupers and invalids mingled with the bogus beggars.
Angelique found it hard to understand their thieves’ talk studded with quaint terms. At a cross-roads a group of armed killers with swaggering moustaches came up to them. She thought they were soldiers or perhaps even watchmen, but she quickly realised that they were just bandits in disguise.
Recoiling at the sight of die newcomers’ wolf eyes, she glanced back¬ward and saw herself encircled by these hideous shapes.
“Afraid, my pretty one?” said one of the bandits, putting an arm around her waist.
She slapped his arm down and said no. And as he persevered, she slapped his face. This produced a commotion during which Angelique wondered what would happen to her. But she was not afraid. For too long, hatred and revolt had been smouldering in her heart, were con¬centrating in an overwhelming urge to bite, claw, scratch eyes out. Thus hurled into the bottom of the abyss, she found herself in natural harmony with the wild beasts that surrounded her.
The queer Wood-Bottom was the one who eventually restored order with his authority and his frantic bellowing. This truncated man possessed a booming, sepulchral voice which sent a shudder through those around him whenever he used it, and he finally prevailed.
His vehement words quashed the quarrel. Looking at the killer who had started it, Angflique saw that his face was furrowed with rivulets of blood and that he was holding a hand over his eyes. But the others were laughing.
“Oho! She’s settled your account, the wench!”
Angflique heard herself laughing too, with an unfamiliar, provocative laughter. So it was no harder than that to tread the depths of hell? Fear? What was fear? A non-existent feeling. It was all right for those Paris burghers who trembled as they heard the beggars of die underworld pass beneath their windows on their way to the Churchyard of the Saints- Innocents to see their prince, the Great Coesre.
“Who does she belong to?” someone asked again.
“To us!” roared Wood-Bottom. “And let everyone take notice!”
He was allowed to take the lead. None of the beggars, not even those with a nimble pair of legs, tried to overtake the human trunk. As they approached a steeply mounting street, two of the bogus soldiers, called drilles, rushed forward to lift the cripple’s bucket-base and carry him up.
The stench of the district became all-pervading and horrible. Meat and cheese and rotting vegetables in the gutters, and over all the reek of putrefaction; it was the district of the Halles, the central market, sealed by that dreadful flesh-eater, the graveyard of the Saints-Innocents.
Angelique had never been to the Saints-Innocents although this grue¬some place was one of the most popular rendezvous in Paris. One even met great ladies there, who came to choose their books or lingerie among the shops set up under the charnel-houses. It was a familiar sight in the day-time to see elegant noblemen and their mistresses strolling from arcade to arcade, carelessly pushing aside stray bones or skulls with the tips of their canes, while chanting funeral processions passed by. ■
At night this privileged spot, where, traditionally, no one could be arrested, served as a refuge for rogues and ruffians, and libertines came here to choose their partners in debauchery among the bawds.
As they were approaching the precincts, whose crumbling wall gave access to the interior at several spots, a crier of the dead came out of the main gate, dressed in his long black gown embroidered with skulls and crossed bones and silver tear-drops. On seeing the group, he said placidly: “I can inform you that there is a dead man in the rue de la Ferronnerie. Some poor are wanted for the procession tomorrow. Everyone will get ten sols and a black smock or coat.”
“We’ll go, we’ll go,” cried some toothless old hags.
They were on the point of proceeding forthwith to the given address, but the others berated them and Wood-Bottom roared once again and abused them copiously:
“Damnation! Who in hell’s name do you think you are to pursue your bloody business while the Great Coesre is waiting? What the devil am I doing with such a miserable bunch of hags? What are manners coming to? . . ”
Shamefaced, the harridans hung their heads and their chins quivered. Then they all slipped into the graveyard through one hole or another.
The crier of the dead walked away, shaking his little bell. At the cross¬roads he stopped, raised his face towards the moon, and chanted mourn¬fully:
“Hark, all ye who're asleep in bed,
Pray God for the dead. . . .”
Angclique walked, wide-eyed, through the vast area with its centuries- old throng of corpses. Here and there wide common graves gaped, already half-full with corpses sewn into their shrouds, and waiting for a new contingent of bodies before being closed. Stone slabs placed directly on the ground marked the graves of the more well-to-do families. But tills was the graveyard of the poor. The nobility were buried at Saint Paul’s.
The moon, which had at last decided to rule over a cloudless sky, now illuminated the thin film of snow which covered the roofs of the church and the surrounding buildings. The Croix des Bureaux, a tall metal crucifix, standing near the Preacher s Pulpit in the centre of the yard, gleamed softly.
The cold mitigated the nauseous stench. Anyhow, nobody seemed to attach any importance to it, and Angelique herself breathed with in¬difference the decay-saturated air.
What drew Angelique’s gaze and dumbfounded her to such a degree that she felt she was the prey of a nightmare were the four galleries radiating from the church, which formed the enclosure of the graveyard. These constructions dating from the Middle Ages rose above a basement formed by a cloister with vaulted arcades where the merchants set up their stalls in the day-time. But above the cloister were garrets covered with tiled roofs and resting, on the graveyard side, on wooden piles, thus leaving open bays between the roofs and the vaults. All these bays were crammed with bones. Thousands and thousands of skulls and pieces of skeletons were piled up there. Lofts of death, gorged with their gruesome harvest, they exposed to the eyes and meditation of the living an unbelievable stack of skulls; the air dried them and time reduced them to dust, but a new supply extracted from the soil of the graveyard ceaselessly replaced them.
All over the place, near the graves, she could see piles of skeletons arranged in bundles, or the sinister white balls of skulk, carefully stacked by the grave-digger, which tomorrow would be stored in the lofts.
“What . . . what is this?” stammered Angelique, to whom such a sight seemed incredible, afraid she might have gone out of her mind.
Perched on the tablet of a tombstone, the dwarf Barcarole eyed her quizzically.
“The boneyard,” he replied, “the boneyard of the Innocents, the finest in Paris.”
He added after a moment's silence:
“Where have you sprung from, girl? Never seen this before?”
She went and sat down beside him.
Ever since she had, almost unwittingly, belaboured the drilles face with her nails, they had all left her in peace and did not speak to her. Whenever curious or lewd glances strayed towards her, there was always someone to offer a warning:
“Wood-Bottom says she is ours. Hands off, boys.”
Angelique did not notice that the area all around her, which had been almost deserted when they arrived, was gradually filling up with a formid¬able, tatterdemalion crowd.
The sight of the boneyard held her spellbound. She did not know that this macabre taste for piling up skeletons was peculiar to Paris. All the big churches of the capital strove to compete with the Innocents. Angelique thought it was horrible and the dwarf Barcarole thought it was mar¬vellous. He murmured:
“. . . death at last before them rose.
Oh! the pain of departing this world And knowing not whither one goes.”
Angelique slowly turned towards him.
“You are a poet?”
“That's not me talking, but the little Gutter-Poet.”
The flame flared up in her and revived her.
“You know him?”
“Do I! He is the poet of the Pont-Neuf.”
“Him, too, I want to kill.”
The dwarf leaped up like a toad.
“Hey! Easy there! He's my pal.”
He looked around, taking the others со witness, and tapped his fore¬head.
“She's mad! She wants to bounce everybody!”
There was a sudden clamour, and the crowd opened to make way for a weird procession.
In the lead walked a very long, lean individual, whose bare feet trod the slushy snow. An abundant white mane hung to his shoulders, but his face was hairless. One could have taken him for an old woman, and perhaps he wasn’t a man, despite his hose and ragged tunic. With his jutting cheek¬bones, lustreless, glaucous eyes deep-set in their hollow sockets, he was as sexless as a skeleton and very much in keeping with this lugubrious setting. He was carrying a long pike from which dangled the impaled body of a dead dog.
Next to him a fat little man, also beardless, was brandishing a broom.
After these two strange standard-bearers came a hurdy-gurdy grinder, who was busily turning the handle of his instrument. The musician’s originality consisted in an enormous straw-hat which reached down almost to his shoulders. But he had cut a hole in the front part of the brim and his mocking eyes could be seen gleaming through it. He was followed by a child who was lustily drumming on the bottom of a copper basin.
“Would you like me to tell you the names of these very famous gentle-men?” the dwarf asked Angelique.
He added with a wink:
“You know the sign, but I can see you aren’t one of us. The ones you see out in front are the Big Eunuch and the Little Eunuch. The Big Eunuch has been at death’s door for years, but he never dies. The Little Eunuch is the keeper of the Great Coesre’s women. He is carrying the emblem of the king of the underworld.”
“A broom?”
“Hush! Don’t make fun of it. That broom can do a thorough house¬cleaning. Behind them are Thibault the hurdy-gurdy man and his page, Linot. And here come the king of the underworld’s ladies.”
Under their grimy bonnets the women he pointed out showed the bloated faces and deep-ringed eyes of prostitutes. Some were still good¬looking and they all cast insolent glances around them, but only the first one, an adolescent, almost a child, had some freshness. Despite the cold, her bosom was bared and she proudly exhibited her young, full-blown breasts.
There followed the torch-bearers, the sword-wearing musketeers, the beggars and bogus pilgrims of Saint-Jacques, and then, with creaking axles,, there appeared a heavy wheelbarrow which was pushed by a giant with vacant eyes and a prominent lower lip.
“That’s Bavottant, the Great Coesre’s idiot,” the dwarf announced.
Behind the idiot a white-bearded personage closed the procession, clad in a black gown whose pockets bulged with parchment scrolls. From his girdle hung three rods, an ink-horn and some goose-quills.
“That’s Jean the Greybeard, the Great Coesre’s arch-henchman, the one who lays down the law of the kingdom of the underworld.”
“And where is the Great Coesre himself?”
“In the wheelbarrow.”
“In the barrow?” repeated Angelique, flabbergasted.
She hoisted herself up a little to get a better view. The wheelbarrow had come to a stop before the Preachers Pulpit which was in the centre of the graveyard, raised by a few steps and sheltered by a conical roof.
The idiot Bavottant stooped and picked something up from the wheel-barrow, then sat down at the top of the dais and placed the thing on his lap.
“Good God!” sighed Angelique.
She was seeing the Great Coesre. He was a creature with a monstrous torso which ended in the scrawny white legs of a child of two. The powerful head was adorned with a hirsute black mane around which a dirty towel was wrapped which hid his scurvy scalp. The deep-set eyes under the bushy brows had a hard glint. He wore a thick black moustache, its tips raised like fangs.
“Нее! Нее!” Barcarole jeered, savouring Angelique’s surprise “You’ll learn, my lass, that here, with us, the little ones rule over the big ones. Do you know who may become Great Coesre when Squat Rolin croaks?”
He whispered into her ear:
“Wood-Bottom.”
Then, nodding his big head:
“It’s a law of nature. It takes brains to rule over the rabble. And that’s what is amiss when one has too much leg. What do you think, Lightfoot?”
The man called Lightfoot smiled. He had just sat down on the edge of the grave and he was putting his hand over his chest as if he were in pain. He was a very young man, with a gentle, simple look. He said in a breathless voice:
“You are right, Barcarole. It’s better to have a head than a pair of legs. For when your legs give out, there’s nothing left.”
Angelique looked with surprise at the young man’s legs, which were long and sinewy.
He smiled sadly.
“Oh! I’ve still got them but I can hardly move them any more. I was a runner for Monsieur de La Sabliere; and then, one day, when I had covered almost twenty leagues, my heart gave out. And since then I can no longer walk.”
“You can t walk any more because you've run too much!” cried the dwarf, cutting a caper. “Ho! Ho!”
“Shut up, Barco,” growled a voice, “you're a pain in the neck.”
A powerful fist grabbed the dwarf by his tunic and sent him rolling among a heap of bones. ,
“That misbegotten squirt is an awful bore, isn't he, my beauty?”
The man who had just stepped in bent over Angelique. Oppressed by so much deformity and horror, she found a kind of relief in the new¬comer’s handsomeness. She could not very well make out his face, which was hidden by the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat on which a meagre plume was stuck. She could guess, however, that he had regular features, big eyes, a well-shaped mouth. He was in the full flush of youth. His brown hand rested on the hilt of a short dagger fastened to his belt.
“Whom do you belong to, pretty wench?” he asked in an ingratiating voice, in which a faint foreign accent rang.
She did not reply and looked away disdainfully.
On the steps of the pulpit, in front of the Great Coesre and his giant idiot, someone had just placed the copper basin which had previously served the child as a drum. And the people of the gueuserie came forward, one after the other, to throw into the copper the levy exacted by their prince.
Everyone was taxed according to his speciality. The dwarf, who had moved close to Angelique again, informed her in an undertone of the ranking of all this beggar-folk which, ever since Paris had existed, had codified the exploitation of public charity.
He pointed out the nodi.s, who were respectably dressed and affected a shamefaced air as they held out their hands. They would tell passers-by that they used to be honourable folk whose houses had been burned down and whose property had been plundered in the war. The mercandiers pretended that they were former merchants stripped by highway robbers, and the convertis would confess that they had been smitten by divine grace and were going to become Catholics. After pocketing their premium, they would go and get converted all over again in another parish.
The drilles and the tiarquois, who were former soldiers, exacted, alms with their swords, threatened and frightened peaceful burghers, while the ‘orphans’, small children who held each other by the hand and wept from hunger, sought to soften the citizens' hearts.
All these beggar-folk paid homage to the Great Coesre, who maintained order among the rival bands. Sols, icus and even gold pieces fell into the copper basin.
The dark-skinned man did not take his eyes off Angelique. He drew close to her, touched her shoulder lightly with his hand and, as she was about to shrink back, said quickly:
“I am Rodogone the Egyptian. I have four thousand people under me in Paris. All the passing gipsies pay me a levy, and so do the dark women who read the future in people’s hands. Do you want to be one of my women?”
She did not answer. The moon was moving above the spire of the church and the boneyard. Before the Preacher’s Pulpit the procession of real and false invalids was now passing, those who had crippled themselves deliberately in order to attract compassion and those who, when evening fell, could throw away their crutches and bandages. That was why their lair had been nicknamed the Court of Miracles.
They had come from the rue de la Truanderie, from the Passage du Caire, from the suburbs of Saint Denis, Saint-Martin and Saint-Marcel, from the rue de la Jussienne and Sainte-Marie-l’Egyptienne, all these bogus sick: the scrofulous, the ailing, the lame, the misshapen, the outcasts and; finally, the frances-mitous who, twenty times a day, collapsed dying at the foot of a boundary-post after tying their arm with a string to stop the beating of their pulse; and, one after the other, they tossed their dues before the hideous little idol whose sceptre they had accepted.
Rodogone the Egyptian put his hand once again on Angelique’s shoulder. This time she did not draw away. His hand was warm and alive, and she felt so cold! The man was strong, and she was weak. She turned her eyes towards him and sought, in the shadow of his hat, the features of this face which did not inspire her with horror. She saw the gipsy’s long eyes gleam like white enamel He uttered a curse between his teeth and leaned heavily towards her.
“Do you want to be a ‘marquise’? Yes, I believe I’d go as far as that!”
“Would you help me to kill someone?” she asked.
The bandit threw his head back in a fearful, soundless laugh.
“Ten, twenty, if you like. You have but to point him out and I swear to you that before dawn he’ll have spilled his guts on the pavement.”
He spat into his hand and held it out to her.
“Shake! It’s a deal.”
But she put her hands behind her back, shaking her head.
“Not yet.”
The other swore again, then stepped away but without taking his eyes off her.
“You’re stubborn. But I want you. I’ll have you.”
Angflique passed her hand over her brow. Who was it who had said the same nasty, greedy words? She could not remember.
A brawl broke out among two soldiers. The beggars’ parade being over, it was now the turn of the rogues. There appeared on the scene the worst bandits of the capital, not only cut-purses and coat-snatchers, but murderers for hire, thieves and pick-locks, and, mingling with them, profligate students, valets, former galley-slaves and a vast assortment of foreigners cast up by the hazards of war: Spaniards, Irishmen, Germans, Swiss, and gipsies too.
Suddenly, the principal henchmen of the Great Coesre cut a path through the crowd by lashing out with their rods and made their way towards the tomb against which Angelique was leaning. Only when she saw these ill-shaven men loom before her did she realise that they had come for her. The old man called Jean the Greybeard was leading them.
“The king of the underworld asks who this wench is,” he said, pointing to her.
Rodogone passed his arm peremptorily round the young woman’s waist.
“Don’t move,” he whispered. “I’ll deal with this.”
He pulled her towards the Preacher’s Pulpit, holding her tightly all the while. He cast arrogant and yet suspicious glances at the crowd all around them, as if he feared that an enemy might appear and wrest his prey from him.
His boots were of fine leather and the cloth of his tunic had no patches. Angelique’s mind recorded these details without her being aware of it. The man did not frighten her. He was used to force and fighting. She submitted to his hold like a vanquished woman who needs a master.
When he arrived before the Great Coesre, the Egyptian craned his neck forward, spat and said:
“I, Due d’Egypte, take this woman for my marquise.”
“No, you don’t,” said a quiet, brutal voice behind them.
Rodogone wheeled round.
“Calembredaine!”
A few steps away in the moonlight stood the man with the violet wen who twice before had risen with a jeer in Angelique’s path.
He was as tall as Rodogone and broader. His tattered clothes showed his sinewy arms and hairy chest. Well set-up, his legs wide apart, his thumbs stuck in his leather belt, he stared at the gipsy insolently. His athletic body was younger than his hideous face under its bushy grey shock of hair. Through the dirty strands gleamed his single eye. The other was hidden by*a black patch. The moon shone full on him and behind him the snow glistened on the roofs of the charnel-houses.
‘Oh! the horror of this place !* Angflique thought. ‘The horror of this place!*
She shrank back towards Rodogone. The Due d*Egypte was busily reeling off a string of abuse against his impassive adversary.
“Cur, son of a bitch, devil’s scamp, carrion, this will finish badly . . . there is one too many here. . . .”
“Shut your trap,” retorted Calembredaine.
Then he spat in the direction of the Great Cocsre, which seemed to be the traditional mark of homage, and flung into the copper basin a heavier purse than Rodogone’s.
A sudden burst of laughter shook the dreadful runt of a man sitting on the idiot’s knees.
“I have a good mind to put this beauty up for auction,” he cried in a rasping croak. “Let her be stripped so that the lads can judge the mer-chandise. For the time being Calembredaine is one up. Your turn, Rodogone.”
The beggars yelled with delight. Hideous hands were reaching out towards Angelique. The Egyptian pushed her behind him and drew his dagger. At that moment, Calembredaine stooped and flung a round, white projectile which hit his foe on the wrist. The projectile rolled away. Horrified, Angelique saw that it was a skull.
The Egyptian’s weapon had fallen to the ground. Calembredaine had him by the middle. The two bandits grappled so violently that their bones cracked. They rolled in the mud.
This touched off a frightful battle. The representatives of five or six rival bands of Paris hurled themselves upon one another. Those who had swords or daggers struck wildly and blood spurted. The others, imitating Calembredaine, picked up skulls and threw them like cannon-balls.
Angelique tried to flee, but forceful hands gripped her and brought her back to the pulpit, where the arch-henchmen of the Great Coesre held her tightly. The Great Coesre himself surveyed the battle, twirling his moustache.
Jean the Greybeard had seized the copper basin. The idiot Bavottant and the Big Eunuch were laughing in such a way as to make one’s flesh creep. Thibault the hurdy-gurdy grinder turned his handle and sang as loud as he could. The old beggar women, who got jostled and trampled on, screamed like harpies.
Angelique saw a crippled old man with only one leg hitting’Wood- Bottom’s head with his crutch as hard as he could, as if he were trying to
hammer nails into it. A rapier pierced his belly and he collapsed over the legless cripple.
Barcarole and the Great Coesre’s women had taken refuge on the roof of a charnel-house and there helped themselves to the plentiful reserve of skulls to bombard the battlefield.
With all these strident screams, shrieks, groans, there now mingled the cries of the inhabitants of the rue des Fers and the rue de la Lingerie, who, leaning out of their windows, above this witches’ cauldron, appealed to the Holy Virgin and clamoured for the men of the watch.
The moon was slowly moving down over the horizon.
Rodogone and Calembredaine were still fighting like mad dogs. Blow followed upon blow. They were of even strength. Suddenly there was a cry of amazement which spread in widening ripples. Rodogone had vanished as if by magic. Panic and the fear of a miracle gripped these un¬believers. But he could be heard to shout. A blow of Calembredaine’s fist had hurled him to the bottom of a common pit in the graveyard. Recovering his wits among the dead, he was begging to be pulled out.
A gale of laughter shook the closest bystanders and spread to the other spectators. The craftsmen and workmen in the neighbouring streets lis¬tened, with sweating brows, to this thunderburst of laughter that succeeded the cries of murder. The women at the windows crossed themselves.
Suddenly a silvery bell tinkled, announcing the Angelus. A stream of blasphemies and obscenities rose from the churchyard into the grey night. But the other churches replied.
It was time to flee. Like owls or demons fearing the light, the people of the underworld left the graveyard of the Saints-Innocents.
In the grimy dawn, with its faint rosy tint like pale blood, Calembre¬daine stood before Angelique and looked at her, laughing.
“She is yours,” said the Great Coesre.
Once again Angelique ran towards the fencing. But the same brutal hands caught and paralysed her. A gag of rags choked her. She went on struggling, then lost consciousness.