Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

oot,” he said at last.
The unhappy creature felt herself so completely forsaken of God and man, that her head dropped upon
her breast like a thing inert and without any power in itself. The torturer and the physician approached
her together, while the two assistants began to search in their hideous collection.
At the clank of these terrible irons the wretched child started convulsively, like a poor dead frog
galvanized to life.
“Oh!” she murmured, so low that no one heard her; “oh, my Phœbus!” Then she sank again into her
previous immobility and her stony silence. The spectacle would have wrung any but the hearts of judges.
It might have been some sin-stained soul being questioned by Satan at the flaming gate of hell. Could the
miserable body on which this awful swarm of saws and wheels and pincers was preparing to
fasten—could it be this gentle, pure, and fragile creature? Poor grain of millet which human justice was
sending to be ground by the grewsome mill-stones of torture!
And now the horny hands of Pierrat Torterue’s assistants had brutally uncovered that charming leg,
that tiny foot, which had so often astonished the passers-by with their grace and beauty in the streets of
Paris.
“’Tis a pity!” growled even the torturer at the sight of the slender and delicate limbs.
Had the Archdeacon been present, he would certainly have recalled at this moment his allegory of the
spider and the fly.
Now, through the mist that spread before her eyes, the unhappy girl perceived the “boot” being brought
forward, saw her foot, encased between the iron-bound boards, disappear within the frightful apparatus.
Terror restored her strength. “Take it away!” she cried vehemently, starting up all dishevelled:
“Mercy!”
She sprang from the bed to throw herself at Charmolue’s feet, but her leg was held fast in the heavy
block of oak and iron, and she sank over the boot like a bee with a leaden weight attached to its wing.
At a sign from Charmolue they replaced her on the bed, and two coarse hands fastened round her
slender waist the leather strap hanging from the roof.
“For the last time, do you confess to the facts of the charge?” asked Charmolue with his imperturbable
benignity,
“I am innocent,” was the answer.
“Then, mademoiselle, how do you explain the circumstances brought against you?”
“Alas, my lord, I know not.”
“You deny them?”
“All!”
“Proceed,” said Charmolue to Pierrat.
Pierrat turned the screw, the boot tightened, and the victim uttered one of those horrible screams which