Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

“Of course I deny it!” she answered in terrible tones; and she rose to her feet and her eyes flashed.
“Then how do you explain the facts laid to your charge?” continued the President sternly.
“I have already said,” she answered brokenly, “I do not know. It is a priest, a priest who is unknown to
me; a devilish priest who persecutes me——”
“There you have it,” interrupted the judge; “the spectremonk.”
“Oh, my lords, have pity! I am but a poor girl——”
“Of Egypt,” said the judge.
Maître Jacques Charmolue here interposed in his mildest tones: “In view of the painful obstinacy of the
accused, I demand that she be put to the question.”
“Accorded,” said the President.
A shudder ran through the frame of the hapless girl. She rose, however, at the order of the
partisan-bearers, and walked with a tolerably firm step, preceded by Charmolue and the priests of the
Office and between two lines of halberds, towards a masked door, which suddenly opened and shut again
upon her, seeming to the dejected Gringoire like a horrible maw swallowing her up.
After she had disappeared a plaintive bleat was heard. It was the little goat.
The sitting was suspended. A councillor having observed that the gentlemen were fatigued, and that it
would be a long time to wait till the torture was over, the President replied that a magistrate should be
able to sacrifice himself to his duty.
“The troublesome and vexatious jade,” said an old judge, “to force us to apply the question when we
have not yet supped!”
II. Sequel to the Crown Piece Changed into a Withered Leaf
AFTER ascending and descending several flights of steps leading to passages so dark that they were
lighted by lamps at mid-day, Esmeralda, still surrounded by her lugubrious attendants, was thrust by the
sergeants of the guard into a chamber of sinister aspect. This chamber, circular in form, occupied the
ground floor in one of those great towers which, even in our day, pierces the layer of modern edifices
with which the present Paris has covered the old. There were no windows to this vault; no other opening
than the low-browed entrance, closed by an enormous iron door. Yet it did not want for light. A furnace
was built into the thickness of the wall, and in it a great fire, which filled the vault with its crimson glow
and entirely outshone a miserable candle flickering in a corner. The iron grating which closed the
furnace being raised at that moment only showed, against the flaming orifice whose licking flames
danced on the grim walls, the lower extremity of its bars like a row of sharp black teeth, giving the fire
the appearance of a fire-breathing dragon of the ancient myths. By the light that streamed from it the
prisoner beheld, ranged round the chamber, frightful instruments the use of which she did not
understand. In the middle a leather mattress was stretched almost touching the ground, and over that
hung a leather strap with a buckle, attached to a copper ring held in the mouth of a flat-nosed monster
carved in the keystone of the vaulted roof. Iron pincers, tongs, great ploughshares were heaped inside
the furnace and glowed redhot upon the fire. The blood-red gleam of the fire only served to bring into