Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

The cell was small, wider than it was deep, with a vaulted, Gothic ceiling, giving it much the aspect of
the inside of a bishop’s mitre. Upon the bare flag-stones which formed its floor, in a corner a woman was
seated, or rather crouching, her chin resting on her knees, which her tightly clasped arms pressed close
against her breast. Cowering together thus, clothed in a brown sack which enveloped her entirely in its
large folds, her long, gray hair thrown forward and falling over her face along her sides and down to her
feet, she seemed, at the first glance, but a shapeless heap against the gloomy background of the cell, a
dark triangle which the daylight struggling through the window divided sharply into two halves, one
light, the other dark—one of those spectres, half light, half shade, such as one sees in dreams, or in one
of Goya’s extraordinary works—pale, motionless, sinister, crouching on a tomb or leaning against the
bars of a prison. You could not say definitely that it was a woman, a man, a living being of any sort; it
was a figure, a vision in which the real and the imaginary were interwoven like light and shadow.
Beneath the hair that fell all about it to the ground, you could just distinguish the severe outline of an
emaciated face, just catch a glimpse under the edge of the garment of the extremity of a bare foot,
clinging cramped and rigid to the frozen stones. The little of human form discernible under that
penitential covering sent a shudder through the beholder.
This figure, which might have been permanently fixed to the stone floor, seemed wholly without
motion, thought, or breath. In that thin covering of sackcloth, in January, lying on the bare stones,
without a fire, in the shadow of a cell whose oblique loophole admitted only the northeast wind, but
never the sunshine, she seemed not to suffer, not even to feel. You would have thought she had turned to
stone with the dungeon, to ice with the season. Her hands were clasped, her eyes fixed; at the first glance
you took her for a spectre; at the second, for a statue.
However, at intervals, her livid lips parted with a breath and quivered, but the movement was as dead
and mechanical as leaves separated by the breeze; while from those dull eyes came a look, ineffable,
deep, grief-stricken, unwavering, immutably fixed on a corner of the cell which was not visible from
without; a gaze which seemed to concentrate all the gloomy thoughts of that agonized soul upon some
mysterious object.
Such was the being who, from her habitation, was called the recluse, and from her sackcloth garment,
the sachette.
The three women—for Gervaise had joined Mahiette and Oudarde—looked through the window, and
though their heads intercepted the feeble light of the cell, its miserable tenant seemed unaware of their
scrutiny.
“Let us not disturb her,” whispered Oudarde; “she is in one of her ecstasies, she is praying.”
Meanwhile Mahiette gazed in ever-increasing earnestness upon that wan and withered face and that
dishevelled head, and her eyes filled with tears. “That would indeed be strange!” she murmured.
She pushed her head through the cross-bars of the window, and succeeded in obtaining a glimpse into
that corner of the cell upon which the unfortunate woman’s eyes were immovably fixed. When she
withdrew her head, her face was bathed in tears.
“What do you call that woman?” she asked of Oudarde.
“We call her Sister Gudule,” was the reply.