Chapter II: Continuation of the Crown Which Was Changed Into a

DRY LEAF.

After ascending and descending several steps in the corridors,
which were so dark that they were lighted by lamps at midday, La
Esmeralda, still surrounded by her lugubrious escort, was thrust
by the police into a gloomy chamber. This chamber, circular in
form, occupied the ground floor of one of those great towers,
which, even in our own century, still pierce through the layer of
modern edifices with which modern Paris has covered ancient
Paris. There were no windows to this cellar; no other opening
than the entrance, which was low, and closed by an enormous iron
door. Nevertheless, light was not lacking; a furnace had been
constructed in the thickness of the wall; a large fire was
lighted there, which filled the vault with its crimson
reflections and deprived a miserable candle, which stood in one
corner, of all radiance. The iron grating which served to close
the oven, being raised at that moment, allowed only a view at the
mouth of the flaming vent-hole in the dark wall, the lower
extremity of its bars, like a row of black and pointed teeth, set
flat apart; which made the furnace resemble one of those mouths
of dragons which spout forth flames in ancient legends. By the
light which escaped from it, the prisoner beheld, all about the
room, frightful instruments whose use she did not understand. In
the centre lay a leather mattress, placed almost flat upon the
ground, over which hung a strap provided with a buckle, attached
to a brass ring in the mouth of a flat-nosed monster carved in
the keystone of the vault. Tongs, pincers, large ploughshares,
filled the interior of the furnace, and glowed in a confused heap
on the coals. The sanguine light of the furnace illuminated in
the chamber only a confused mass of horrible things.

This Tartarus was called simply, The Question Chamber.

On the bed, in a negligent attitude, sat Pierrat Torterue, the
official torturer. His underlings, two gnomes with square faces,
leather aprons, and linen breeches, were moving the iron
instruments on the coals.

In vain did the poor girl summon up her courage; on entering this
chamber she was stricken with horror.

The sergeants of the bailiff of the courts drew up in line on one
side, the priests of the officiality on the other. A clerk,
inkhorn, and a table were in one corner.

Master Jacques Charmolue approached the gypsy with a very sweet
smile.

“My dear child,” said he, “do you still persist in your denial?”

“Yes,” she replied, in a dying voice.

“In that case,” replied Charmolue, “it will be very painful for
us to have to question you more urgently than we should like.
Pray take the trouble to seat yourself on this bed. Master
Pierrat, make room for mademoiselle, and close the door.”

Pierrat rose with a growl.

“If I shut the door,” he muttered, “my fire will go out.”

“Well, my dear fellow,” replied Charmolue, “leave it open then.”

Meanwhile, la Esmeralda had remained standing. That leather bed
on which so many unhappy wretches had writhed, frightened her.
Terror chilled the very marrow of her bones; she stood there
bewildered and stupefied. At a sign from Charmolue, the two
assistants took her and placed her in a sitting posture on the
bed. They did her no harm; but when these men touched her, when
that leather touched her, she felt all her blood retreat to her
heart. She cast a frightened look around the chamber. It seemed
to her as though she beheld advancing from all quarters towards
her, with the intention of crawling up her body and biting and
pinching her, all those hideous implements of torture, which as
compared to the instruments of all sorts she had hitherto seen,
were like what bats, centipedes, and spiders are among insects
and birds.

“Where is the physician?” asked Charmolue.

“Here,” replied a black gown whom she had not before noticed.

She shuddered.

“Mademoiselle,” resumed the caressing voice of the procucrator of
the Ecclesiastical court, “for the third time, do you persist in
denying the deeds of which you are accused?”

This time she could only make a sign with her head.

“You persist?” said Jacques Charmolue. “Then it grieves me
deeply, but I must fulfil my office.”

“Monsieur le Procureur du Roi,” said Pierrat abruptly, “How shall
we begin?”

Charmolue hesitated for a moment with the ambiguous grimace of a
poet in search of a rhyme.

“With the boot,” he said at last.

The unfortunate girl felt herself so utterly abandoned by God and
men, that her head fell upon her breast like an inert thing which
has no power in itself.

The tormentor and the physician approached her simultaneously. At
the same time, the two assistants began to fumble among their
hideous arsenal.

At the clanking of their frightful irons, the unhappy child
quivered like a dead frog which is being galvanized. “Oh!” she
murmured, so low that no one heard her; “Oh, my Phœbus!” Then she
fell back once more into her immobility and her marble silence.
This spectacle would have rent any other heart than those of her
judges. One would have pronounced her a poor sinful soul, being
tortured by Satan beneath the scarlet wicket of hell. The
miserable body which that frightful swarm of saws, wheels, and
racks were about to clasp in their clutches, the being who was
about to be manipulated by the harsh hands of executioners and
pincers, was that gentle, white, fragile creature, a poor grain
of millet which human justice was handing over to the terrible
mills of torture to grind. Meanwhile, the callous hands of
Pierrat Torterue’s assistants had bared that charming leg, that
tiny foot, which had so often amazed the passers-by with their
delicacy and beauty, in the squares of Paris.

“’Tis a shame!” muttered the tormentor, glancing at these
graceful and delicate forms.

Had the archdeacon been present, he certainly would have recalled
at that moment his symbol of the spider and the fly. Soon the
unfortunate girl, through a mist which spread before her eyes,
beheld the boot approach; she soon beheld her foot encased
between iron plates disappear in the frightful apparatus. Then
terror restored her strength.

“Take that off!” she cried angrily; and drawing herself up, with
her hair all dishevelled: “Mercy!”

She darted from the bed to fling herself at the feet of the
king’s procurator, but her leg was fast in the heavy block of oak
and iron, and she sank down upon the boot, more crushed than a
bee with a lump of lead on its wing.

At a sign from Charmolue, she was replaced on the bed, and two
coarse hands adjusted to her delicate waist the strap which hung
from the ceiling.

“For the last time, do you confess the facts in the case?”
demanded Charmolue, with his imperturbable benignity.

“I am innocent.”

“Then, mademoiselle, how do you explain the circumstance laid to
your charge?”

“Alas, monseigneur, I do not know.”

“So you deny them?”

“All!”

“Proceed,” said Charmolue to Pierrat.

Pierrat turned the handle of the screw-jack, the boot was
contracted, and the unhappy girl uttered one of those horrible
cries which have no orthography in any human language.

“Stop!” said Charmolue to Pierrat. “Do you confess?” he said to
the gypsy.

“All!” cried the wretched girl. “I confess! I confess! Mercy!”

She had not calculated her strength when she faced the torture.
Poor child, whose life up to that time had been so joyous, so
pleasant, so sweet, the first pain had conquered her!

“Humanity forces me to tell you,” remarked the king’s procurator,
“that in confessing, it is death that you must expect.”

“I certainly hope so!” said she. And she fell back upon the
leather bed, dying, doubled up, allowing herself to hang
suspended from the strap buckled round her waist.

“Come, fair one, hold up a little,” said Master Pierrat, raising
her. “You have the air of the lamb of the Golden Fleece which
hangs from Monsieur de Bourgogne’s neck.”

Jacques Charmolue raised his voice,

“Clerk, write. Young Bohemian maid, you confess your
participation in the feasts, witches’ sabbaths, and witchcrafts
of hell, with ghosts, hags, and vampires? Answer.”

“Yes,” she said, so low that her words were lost in her
breathing.

“You confess to having seen the ram which Beelzebub causes to
appear in the clouds to call together the witches’ sabbath, and
which is beheld by socerers alone?”

“Yes.”

“You confess to having adored the heads of Bophomet, those
abominable idols of the Templars?”

“Yes.”

“To having had habitual dealings with the devil under the form of
a goat familiar, joined with you in the suit?”

“Yes.”

“Lastly, you avow and confess to having, with the aid of the
demon, and of the phantom vulgarly known as the surly monk, on
the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, murdered and
assassinated a captain named Phœbus de Châteaupers?”

She raised her large, staring eyes to the magistrate, and
replied, as though mechanically, without convulsion or
agitation,—

“Yes.”

It was evident that everything within her was broken.

“Write, clerk,” said Charmolue. And, addressing the torturers,
“Release the prisoner, and take her back to the court.”

When the prisoner had been “unbooted,” the procurator of the
ecclesiastical court examined her foot, which was still swollen
with pain. “Come,” said he, “there’s no great harm done. You
shrieked in good season. You could still dance, my beauty!”

Then he turned to his acolytes of the officiality,—

“Behold justice enlightened at last! This is a solace, gentlemen!
Madamoiselle will bear us witness that we have acted with all
possible gentleness.”