Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

At last the prisoner broke the silence. “Who are you?”
“A priest.”
The word, the tone, the voice made her start.
The priest continued in low tones:
“Are you prepared?”
“For what?”
“For death.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, “will it be soon?”
“To-morrow.”
Her head, raised with joy, fell again on her bosom.
“’Tis very long to wait,” she sighed; “why not to-day? It could not matter to them.”
“You are, then, very wretched?” asked the priest after another silence.
“I am very cold,” said she.
She took her two feet in her hands—the habitual gesture of the unfortunate who are cold, and which we
have already remarked in the recluse of the Tour-Roland—and her teeth chattered.
From under his hood the priest’s eyes appeared to be surveying the dungeon. “No light! no fire! in the
water!—’tis horrible!”
“Yes,” she answered with the bewildered air which misery had given her. “The day is for every one,
why do they give me only night?”
“Do you know,” resumed the priest after another silence, “why you are here?”
“I think I knew it once,” she said pressing her wasted fingers to her brow as if to aid her memory; “but
I do not know now.”
Suddenly she began to weep like a child. “I want to go away from here, sir. I am cold, I am frightened,
and there are beasts that crawl over me.”
“Well, then—follow me!” And so saying, the priest seized her by the arm. The unhappy girl was already
frozen to the heart’s core, but yet that hand felt cold to her.
“Oh,” she murmured, “’tis the icy hand of Death! Who are you?”
The priest raised his cowl. She looked—it was the sinister face that had so long pursued her, the
devilish head that she had seen above the adored head of her Phœbus, the eye that she had last seen
glittering beside a dagger.
This apparition, always so fatal to her, which thus had thrust her on from misfortune to misfortune,
even to an ignominious death, roused her from her stupor. The sort of veil that seemed to have woven