Delirium

Claude Frollo was no longer in Notre-Dame when his adopted son so abruptly cut the fatal noose in which the unhappy Archdeacon had caught the Egyptian and himself at the same time. On entering the sacristy, he had torn off alb, cope, and stole, had tossed them into the hands of the amazed verger, escaped by the private door of the cloister, ordered a wherryman of the “Terrain” to put him across to the left bank of the Seine, and had plunged into the steep streets of the University, knowing not whither he went, meeting at every step bands of men and women pressing excitedly towards the Pont Saint- Michel in the hope of “still arriving in time” to see the witch hanged— pale, distraught, confused, more blinded and scared than any bird of night set free and flying before a troop of children in broad daylight. He was no longer conscious of where he was going, what were his thoughts, his imaginations. He went blindly on, walking, running, taking the streets at random, without any definite plan, save the one thought of getting away from the Grève, the horrible Grève, which he felt confusedly to be behind him.

In this manner he proceeded the whole length of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and at last left the town by the Porte Saint-Victor. He continued his flight so long as he could see, on turning round, the bastioned walls of the University, and the sparse houses of the faubourg; but when at last a ridge of rising ground completely hid hateful Paris from his view— when he could imagine himself a hundred leagues away from it, in the country, in a desert— he stopped and dared to draw a free breath.

Frightful thoughts now crowded into his mind. He saw clearly into his soul and shuddered. He thought of the unfortunate girl he had ruined and who had ruined him. He let his haggard eye pursue the tortuous paths along which Fate had driven them to their separate destinies up to the point of junction where she had pitilessly shattered them one against the other. He thought of the folly of lifelong vows, of the futility of chastity, science, religion, and virtue, of the impotence of God. He pursued these arguments with wicked gusto, and the deeper he sank in the slough the louder laughed the Satan within him. And discovering, as he burrowed thus into his soul, how large a portion Nature had assigned in it to the passions, he smiled more sardonically than before. He shook up from the hidden depths of his heart all his hatred, all his wickedness; and he discovered with the calm eye of the physician examining a patient that this same hatred and wickedness were but the outcome of perverted love— that love, the source of every human virtue, turned to things unspeakable in the heart of a priest, and that a man constituted as he was, by becoming a priest, made of himself a demon— and he laughed horribly. But suddenly he grew pale again as he contemplated the worst side of his fatal passion— of that corrosive, venomous, malignant, implacable love which had brought the one to the gallows and the other to hell— her to death, him to damnation.

And then his laugh came again when he remembered that Phœbus was living; that, after all, the captain was alive and gay and happy, with a finer uniform than ever, and a new mistress whom he brought to see the old one hanged. And he jeered sardonically at himself to think that of all the human beings whose death he had desired, the Egyptian, the one creature he did not hate, was the only one he had succeeded in destroying.

From the captain, his thoughts wandered to the crowd of that morning, and he was seized with a fresh kind of jealousy. He reflected that the people, the whole population, had beheld the woman he loved— divested of all but a single garment— almost nude. He wrung his hands in agony at the thought that the woman, a mere glimpse of whose form veiled in shadows and seen by his eye alone would have afforded him the supreme measure of bliss, had been given thus, in broad daylight, at high noon, to the gaze of a whole multitude, clad as for a bridal night. He wept with rage over all these mysteries of love profaned, sullied, stripped, withered forever. He wept with rage to think how many impure eyes that ill- fastened garment had satisfied; that this fair creature, this virgin lily, this cup of purity and all delights to which he would only have set his lips in fear and trembling, had been converted into a public trough, as it were, at which the vilest of the populace of Paris, the thieves, the beggars, the lackeys, had come to drink in common of a pleasure— shameless, obscene, depraved.

Again, when he sought to picture to himself the happiness that might have been his had she not been a gipsy and he a priest; had Phœbus not existed, and had she but loved him; when he told himself that a