Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

Pierrat—Maître Jacques, I should say—look to Marc Cenaine.”
“Yes, yes, Dom Claude. Poor man! he will have suffered like Mummol. But what a thing to do—to visit
the witches’ Sabbath!—and he butler to the Court of Accounts, who must know Charlemagne’s
regulation: ‘Stryga vel masca.” 73 As to the little girl—Smeralda, as they call her—I shall await your
orders. Ah! as we pass through the door you will explain to me also the signification of that gardener
painted on the wall just as you enter the church. Is that not the Sower? Hé! master, what are you thinking
about?”
Dom Claude, fathoms deep in his own thoughts, was not listening to him. Charmolue, following the
direction of his eyes, saw that they were fixed blankly on the spider’s web which curtained the little
window. At this moment a foolish fly, courting the March sunshine, threw itself against the net, and was
caught fast. Warned by the shaking of his web, the enormous spider darted out of his central cell, and
with one bound rushed upon the fly, promptly doubled it up, and with its horrible sucker began scooping
out the victim’s head. “Poor fly!” said the King’s attorney, and lifted his hand to rescue it. The
Archdeacon, as if starting out of his sleep, held back his arm with a convulsive clutch.
“Maître Jacques,” he cried, “let fate have its way!”
Maître Jacques turned round in alarm; he felt as if his arm were in an iron vice. The eye of the priest
was fixed, haggard, glaring, and remained fascinated by the horrible scene between the spider and the
fly.
“Ah, yes!” the priest went on, in a voice that seemed to issue from the depths of his being, “there is a
symbol of the whole story. She flies, she is joyous, she has but just entered life; she courts the spring, the
open air, freedom; yes, but she strikes against the fatal web—the spider darts out, the deadly spider!
Hapless dancer! Poor, doomed fly! Maître Jacques, let be—it is fate! Alas! Claude, thou art the spider.
But Claude, thou are also the fly! Thou didst wing thy flight towards knowledge, the light, the sun. Thy
one care was to reach the pure air, the broad beams of truth eternal; but in hastening towards the
dazzling loophole which opens on another world—a world of brightness, of intelligence, of true
knowledge—infatuated fly! insensate sage! thou didst not see the cunning spider’s web, by destiny
suspended between the light and thee; thou didst hurl thyself against it, poor fool, and now thou dost
struggle with crushed head and mangled wings between the iron claws of Fate! Maître Jacques, let the
spider work its will!”
“I do assure you,” said Charmolue, who gazed at him in bewilderment, “that I will not touch it. But in
pity, master, loose my arm; you have grip of iron.”
The Archdeacon did not heed him. “Oh, madman!” he continued, without moving his eyes from the
loophole. “And even if thou couldst have broken through that formidable web with thy midge’s wing’s,
thinkest thou to have attained the light! Alas! that glass beyond—that transparent obstacle, that wall of
crystal harder than brass, the barrier between all our philosophy and the truth—how couldst thou have
passed through that? Oh, vanity of human knowledge! how many sages have come fluttering from afar to
dash their heads against thee! How many clashing systems buzz vainly about that everlasting barrier!”
He was silent. These last ideas, by calling off his thoughts from himself to science, appeared to have
calmed him, and Jacques Charmolue completely restored him to a sense of reality by saying: “Come,
master, when are you going to help me towards the making of gold? I long to succeed.”