Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

“One condition,” said the man; “prove to me that I was wrong, and that you spoke the truth. Hide me
in some corner whence I may see whether this woman be really she whom you named.”
“Oh,” answered Phœbus, “I have not the slightest objection. We shall use the ‘Sainte-Marthe room,’
and you can see into it as much as you like from a little den at one side of it.”
“Come, then,” said the shade.
“At your service,” said the captain. “For all I know, you may be Messer Diabolus in person. But let’s
be good friends to-night; to-morrow I will pay you all my debts—both of the purse and the sword.”
They went forward at a rapid pace, and in a few moments the sound of the river below told them that
they were on the Pont Saint-Michel, at that time lined with houses.
“I will get you in first,” said Phœbus to his companion, “and then go and fetch the lady, who was to
wait for me near the Petit-Châtelet.”
His companion made no reply. Since they had been walking side by side he had not uttered a word.
Phœbus stopped in front of a low door and knocked loudly. A light shone through the crevices of the
door.
“Who’s there?” cried a quavering old voice.
“Corps-Dieu! Tête-Dieu! Ventre-Dieu!” answered the captain.
The door opened on the instant, revealing to the new-comers an old woman and an old lamp, both of
them trembling. The old woman was bent double, clothed in rags, her palsied head, out of which peered
two little blinking eyes, tied up in a kerchief, and wrinkles everywhere—her hands, her face, her neck;
her lips were fallen in over her gums, and all round her mouth were tufts of white bristles, giving her the
whiskered look of a cat.
The interior of the hovel was no less dilapidated than herself—the plaster dropping from the walls,
smoke-blackened beams, a dismantled chimney-piece, cobwebs in every corner; in the middle a tottering
company of broken-legged tables and stools, in the cinders a dirty child, and at the back a stair-case, or
rather a wooden ladder, leading to a trap-door in the ceiling.
As he entered this den, Phœbus’s mysterious companion pulled his cloak up to his eyes. Meanwhile the
captain, swearing like a Saracen, hastened to produce his crown piece.
“The ‘Sainte-Marthe room,’” he said as he presented it.
The old hag treated him like a lord and shut up the ècu in a drawer. It was the coin Phœbus had
received form the man in the cloak. No sooner was her back turned, than the little tousle-headed
ragamuffin playing in the cinders stole to the drawer, adroitly abstracted the coin, and replaced it by a
withered leaf which he plucked from a fagot.
The old woman signed to the two gentlemen, as she entitled them, to follow her, and ascended the
ladder. Arrived on the upper floor she set down her lamp upon a chest, and Phœbus, as one knowing the
ways of the house, opened a side door giving access to a small dark space.
“In here, my dear fellow,” said he to his companion. The man in the cloak obeyed without a word. The