Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

“Then by the window.”
“It is too narrow.”
“Widen it, then,” said Tristan impatiently. “Hast thou no pickaxes?”
The mother, still on guard at the opening to her den, watched them intently. She had ceased to hope,
ceased to wish for anything. All she knew was that she would not have them take her daughter from her.
Henriet Cousin went and fetched the box of executioner’s tools from the shed of the Maison-aux-Piliers;
also, from the same place, the double ladder, which he immediately set up against the gibbet. Five or six
of the provost’s men provided themselves with crowbars and pickaxes, and Tristan accompanied them to
the window of the cell.
“Old woman,” said the provost in stern tones, “give up the girl to us quietly.”
She gazed at him vacantly.
“Tête-Dieu!” exclaimed Tristan, “Why dost thou hinder us from hanging this witch as the King
commands?”
The wretched creature broke into her savage laugh again.
“Why do I hinder you? She is my daughter.”
The tone in which she uttered these words sent a shudder even through Henriet Cousin himself.
“I am sorry,” returned the provost. “But it is the good pleasure of the King.”
Whereat she cried, her dreadful laugh ringing louder than before:
“What is he to me—thy King? I tell thee it is my daughter.”
“Break through the wall!” commanded Tristan.
To do this it was only necessary to loosen a course of stone underneath the loophole. When the mother
heard the picks and lever sapping her fortress, she uttered a blood-curdling cry, and then started running
round and round her cell with startling quickness—a wild-beast habit she had learned from her long
years of confinement in that cage. She said no word, but her eyes blazed. The soldiers felt their blood run
cold.
Suddenly she snatched up her stone in both hands, laughed, and hurled it at the workmen. The stone,
ill-thrown, for her hands were trembling, touched no one, but fell harmless at the feet of Tristan’s horse.
She gnashed her teeth.
Meanwhile, though the sun had not yet risen, it was broad daylight, and the old, moss-grown chimneys
of the Maisonaux-Piliers flushed rosy red. It was the hour when the windows of the earliest risers in the
great city were thrown cheerfully open. A countryman or so, a few fruit-sellers, going to the markets on
their asses, were beginning to cross the Grève, and halted for a moment to gaze with astonishment at the
group of soldiers gathered about the Rat-Hole, then passed on their way.
The recluse had seated herself on the ground close beside her daughter, covering her with her body, her