Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

“Give me back my child!”
Once again the girl sank down exhausted, powerless, her eyes already glazed, as if in death.
“Alas!” she stammered, “you seek your child; I—I seek my parents.”
“Give me back my little Agnes!” Gudule went on. “Thou knowest not where she is? Then die! I will tell
thee. I was a wanton, I had a child, they stole my child. It was the gipsies. Thou seest plainly that thou
must die. When thy mother the gipsy comes to seek for thee, I shall say to her, ‘Mother, behold that
gibbet!’ Else give me back my child! Dost thou know where she is, my little girl? Here, let me show thee.
Here is her shoe; ’tis all that’s left to me of her. Dost know where the fellow to it is? If thou knowest, tell
me, and I will go on my knees to fetch it, even to the other end of the world.”
So saying, she thrust her other hand through the window and held up before the gipsy girl the little
embroidered shoe. There was just light enough to distinguish its shape and its colour.
“Let me see that shoe!” said the gipsy with a start. “Oh, God in heaven!” And at the same time, with
the hand she had free, she eagerly opened the little bag she wore about her neck.
“Go to, go to!” muttered Gudule; “search in thy devil’s amulet——”
She broke off suddenly, her whole frame shook, and in a voice that seemed to come from the innermost
depths of her being, she cried: “My daughter!”
For the gipsy had drawn from the amulet bag a little shoe the exact counterpart of the other. To the
shoe was attached a slip of parchment, on which was written this couplet:
“When thou the fellow of this shalt see,
Thy mother will stretch out her arms to thee.”
Quicker than a flash of lightning the recluse had compared the two shoes, read the inscription on the
parchment, then pressed her face, radiant with ineffable joy, against the cross-bars of the loophole,
crying again:
“My daughter! my daughter!”
“Mother!” returned the gipsy girl.
Here description fails us.
But the wall and the iron bars divided them. “Oh, the wall!” cried the recluse. “Oh, to see her and not
embrace her! Thy hand—give me thy hand!”
The girl put her hand through the opening, and the mother threw herself upon it, pressing her lips to it,
remaining thus lost to everything but that kiss, giving no sign of life but a sob that shook her frame at
long intervals. For the poor mother was weeping in torrents in the silence and darkness of her cell, like
rain falling in the night; pouring out in a flood upon that adored hand all that deep dark font of tears
which her grief had gathered in her heart, drop by drop, during fifteen long years.
Suddenly she lifted her head, threw back her long gray hair from her face, and without a word began
tearing at the bars of her window with the fury of a lioness. But the bars stood firm. She then went and
fetched from the back of her cell a large paving-stone, which served her for a pillow, and hurled it