Chapter II: The Rat-Hole

The reader must permit us to take him back to the Place de Grève,
which we quitted yesterday with Gringoire, in order to follow la
Esmeralda.

It is ten o’clock in the morning; everything is indicative of the
day after a festival. The pavement is covered with rubbish;
ribbons, rags, feathers from tufts of plumes, drops of wax from
the torches, crumbs of the public feast. A goodly number of
_bourgeois_ are “sauntering,” as we say, here and there, turning
over with their feet the extinct brands of the bonfire, going
into raptures in front of the Pillar House, over the memory of
the fine hangings of the day before, and to-day staring at the
nails that secured them a last pleasure. The venders of cider and
beer are rolling their barrels among the groups. Some busy
passers-by come and go. The merchants converse and call to each
other from the thresholds of their shops. The festival, the
ambassadors, Coppenole, the Pope of the Fools, are in all mouths;
they vie with each other, each trying to criticise it best and
laugh the most. And, meanwhile, four mounted sergeants, who have
just posted themselves at the four sides of the pillory, have
already concentrated around themselves a goodly proportion of the
populace scattered on the Place, who condemn themselves to
immobility and fatigue in the hope of a small execution.

If the reader, after having contemplated this lively and noisy
scene which is being enacted in all parts of the Place, will now
transfer his gaze towards that ancient demi-Gothic,
demi-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland, which forms the corner
on the quay to the west, he will observe, at the angle of the
façade, a large public breviary, with rich illuminations,
protected from the rain by a little penthouse, and from thieves
by a small grating, which, however, permits of the leaves being
turned. Beside this breviary is a narrow, arched window, closed
by two iron bars in the form of a cross, and looking on the
square; the only opening which admits a small quantity of light
and air to a little cell without a door, constructed on the
ground-floor, in the thickness of the walls of the old house, and
filled with a peace all the more profound, with a silence all the
more gloomy, because a public place, the most populous and most
noisy in Paris swarms and shrieks around it.

This little cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly three
centuries, ever since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in
mourning for her father who died in the Crusades, had caused it
to be hollowed out in the wall of her own house, in order to
immure herself there forever, keeping of all her palace only this
lodging whose door was walled up, and whose window stood open,
winter and summer, giving all the rest to the poor and to God.
The afflicted damsel had, in fact, waited twenty years for death
in this premature tomb, praying night and day for the soul of her
father, sleeping in ashes, without even a stone for a pillow,
clothed in a black sack, and subsisting on the bread and water
which the compassion of the passers-by led them to deposit on the
ledge of her window, thus receiving charity after having bestowed
it. At her death, at the moment when she was passing to the other
sepulchre, she had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to afflicted
women, mothers, widows, or maidens, who should wish to pray much
for others or for themselves, and who should desire to inter
themselves alive in a great grief or a great penance. The poor of
her day had made her a fine funeral, with tears and benedictions;
but, to their great regret, the pious maid had not been
canonized, for lack of influence. Those among them who were a
little inclined to impiety, had hoped that the matter might be
accomplished in Paradise more easily than at Rome, and had
frankly besought God, instead of the pope, in behalf of the
deceased. The majority had contented themselves with holding the
memory of Rolande sacred, and converting her rags into relics.
The city, on its side, had founded in honor of the damoiselle, a
public breviary, which had been fastened near the window of the
cell, in order that passers-by might halt there from time to
time, were it only to pray; that prayer might remind them of
alms, and that the poor recluses, heiresses of Madame Rolande’s
vault, might not die outright of hunger and forgetfulness.

Moreover, this sort of tomb was not so very rare a thing in the
cities of the Middle Ages. One often encountered in the most
frequented street, in the most crowded and noisy market, in the
very middle, under the feet of the horses, under the wheels of
the carts, as it were, a cellar, a well, a tiny walled and grated
cabin, at the bottom of which a human being prayed night and day,
voluntarily devoted to some eternal lamentation, to some great
expiation. And all the reflections which that strange spectacle
would awaken in us to-day; that horrible cell, a sort of
intermediary link between a house and the tomb, the cemetery and
the city; that living being cut off from the human community, and
thenceforth reckoned among the dead; that lamp consuming its last
drop of oil in the darkness; that remnant of life flickering in
the grave; that breath, that voice, that eternal prayer in a box
of stone; that face forever turned towards the other world; that
eye already illuminated with another sun; that ear pressed to the
walls of a tomb; that soul a prisoner in that body; that body a
prisoner in that dungeon cell, and beneath that double envelope
of flesh and granite, the murmur of that soul in pain;—nothing of
all this was perceived by the crowd. The piety of that age, not
very subtle nor much given to reasoning, did not see so many
facets in an act of religion. It took the thing in the block,
honored, venerated, hallowed the sacrifice at need, but did not
analyze the sufferings, and felt but moderate pity for them. It
brought some pittance to the miserable penitent from time to
time, looked through the hole to see whether he were still
living, forgot his name, hardly knew how many years ago he had
begun to die, and to the stranger, who questioned them about the
living skeleton who was perishing in that cellar, the neighbors
replied simply, “It is the recluse.”

Everything was then viewed without metaphysics, without
exaggeration, without magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The
microscope had not yet been invented, either for things of matter
or for things of the mind.

Moreover, although people were but little surprised by it, the
examples of this sort of cloistration in the hearts of cities
were in truth frequent, as we have just said. There were in Paris
a considerable number of these cells, for praying to God and
doing penance; they were nearly all occupied. It is true that the
clergy did not like to have them empty, since that implied
lukewarmness in believers, and that lepers were put into them
when there were no penitents on hand. Besides the cell on the
Grève, there was one at Montfaucon, one at the Charnier des
Innocents, another I hardly know where,—at the Clichon House, I
think; others still at many spots where traces of them are found
in traditions, in default of memorials. The University had also
its own. On Mount Sainte-Geneviève a sort of Job of the Middle
Ages, for the space of thirty years, chanted the seven
penitential psalms on a dunghill at the bottom of a cistern,
beginning anew when he had finished, singing loudest at night,
_magna voce per umbras_, and to-day, the antiquary fancies that
he hears his voice as he enters the Rue du Puits-qui-parle—the
street of the “Speaking Well.”

To confine ourselves to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we must say
that it had never lacked recluses. After the death of Madame
Roland, it had stood vacant for a year or two, though rarely.
Many women had come thither to mourn, until their death, for
relatives, lovers, faults. Parisian malice, which thrusts its
finger into everything, even into things which concern it the
least, affirmed that it had beheld but few widows there.

In accordance with the fashion of the epoch, a Latin inscription
on the wall indicated to the learned passer-by the pious purpose
of this cell. The custom was retained until the middle of the
sixteenth century of explaining an edifice by a brief device
inscribed above the door. Thus, one still reads in France, above
the wicket of the prison in the seignorial mansion of Tourville,
_Sileto et spera_; in Ireland, beneath the armorial bearings
which surmount the grand door to Fortescue Castle, _Forte scutum,
salus ducum_; in England, over the principal entrance to the
hospitable mansion of the Earls Cowper: _Tuum est_. At that time
every edifice was a thought.

As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland, these
two words had been carved in large Roman capitals over the
window,—

TU, ORA.

And this caused the people, whose good sense does not perceive so
much refinement in things, and likes to translate _Ludovico
Magno_ by _Porte Saint-Denis_, to give to this dark, gloomy, damp
cavity, the name of “The Rat-Hole.” An explanation less sublime,
perhaps, than the other; but, on the other hand, more
picturesque.