Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

itself over her memory was rent aside. All the details of her grewsome adventures, from the nocturnal
scene at La Falourdel’s to her condemnation at La Tournelle, came back to her with a rush—not vague
and confused as heretofore, but distinct, clear-cut, palpitating, terrible.
These recollections, well-nigh obliterated by excess of suffering, revived at sight of that sombre figure,
as the heat of the fire brings out afresh upon the blank paper the invisible writing traced on it by
sympathetic ink. She felt as if all the wounds of her heart were reopened and bleeding at once.
“Ah!” she cried, her hands covering her face with a convulsive shudder, “it is the priest!”
Then she let her arms drop helplessly and sat where she was, her head bent, her eyes fixed on the
ground, speechless, shaking from head to foot.
The priest gazed at her with the eye of the kite which after long hovering high in the air above a poor
lark cowering in the corn, gradually and silently lessening the formidable circles of its flight, now
suddenly makes a lightning dart upon its prey and holds it panting in its talons.
“Finish,” she murmured in a whisper, “finish—the last blow!” And her head shrank in terror between
her shoulders like the sheep that awaits the death-stroke of the butcher.
“You hold me in horror then?” he said at last.
She made no reply.
“Do you hold me in horror?” he repeated.
Her lips contracted as if she smiled. “Go to,” said she, “the executioner taunts the condemned! For
months he has pursued me, threatened me, terrified me! But for him, my God, how happy I was! It is he
who has cast me into this pit! Oh, heavens! it is he who has killed—it is he who has murdered him—my
Phœbus!”
Here, bursting into tears, she lifted her eyes to the priest. “Oh, wretch! who are you?—what have I
done to you that you should hate me so? Alas! what have you against me?”
“I love thee!” cried the priest.
Her tears ceased suddenly. She regarded him with an idiotic stare. He had sunk on his knees before her
and enveloped her in a gaze of flame.
“Dost thou hear? I love thee!” he cried again.
“What love is that!” she shuddered.
“The love of the damned!” he answered.
Both remained silent for some minutes, crushed under the load of their emotion—he distraught, she
stupefied.
“Listen,” the priest began at last, and a strange calm had come over him; “thou shalt know all. I am
going to tell thee what I have hitherto scarcely dared to say to myself when I furtively searched my
conscience in those deep hours of the night, when it seems so dark that God himself can see us no longer.
Listen. Before I saw thee, girl, I was happy.”