exposed half-naked before all eyes. Alas! it is not for such frightful trials as this that feminine modesty was made.
“Holy Saviour!” cried Fleur-de-Lys excitedly to the captain. “Look, cousin! if it is not your vile gipsy girl with the goat!”
She turned round to Phœbus. His eyes were fixed on the tumbrel. He was very pale.
“What gipsy girl with a goat?” he faltered.
“How,” returned Fleur-de-Lys, “do you not remember?”
Phœbus did not let her finish. “I do not know what you mean.”
He made one step to re-enter the room, but Fleur-de-Lys, whose jealousy lately so vehement was now reawakened by the sight of the detested gipsy— Fleur-de-Lys stopped him by a glance full of penetration and mistrust. She recollected vaguely having heard something of an officer whose name had been connected with the trial of this sorceress.
“What ails you?” said she to Phœbus; “one would think that the sight of this woman disconcerted you.”
Phœbus forced a laugh. “Me? Not the least in the world! Oh, far from it!”
“Then stay,” she returned imperiously, “and let us see it out.”
So there was nothing for the unlucky captain but to remain. However, it reassured him somewhat to see that the criminal kept her eyes fixed on the bottom of the tumbrel. It was but too truly Esmeralda. In this last stage of ignominy and misfortune, she was still beautiful— her great dark eyes looked larger from the hollowing of her cheeks, her pale profile was pure and unearthly. She resembled her former self as a Virgin of Masaccio resembles one of Raphael’s — frailer, more pinched, more attenuated.
For the rest, there was nothing in her whole being that did not seem to be shaken to its foundations; and, except for her last poor attempt at modesty, she abandoned herself completely to chance, so thoroughly had her spirit been broken by torture and despair. Her body swayed with every jolt of the tumbrel like something dead or disjointed. Her gaze was blank and distraught. A tear hung in her eye, but it was stationary and as if frozen there.
Meanwhile the dismal cavalcade had traversed the crowd amid yells of joy and the struggles of the curious. Nevertheless, in strict justice be it said, that on seeing her so beautiful and so crushed by affliction, many, even the most hard-hearted, were moved to pity.
The tumbrel now entered the Parvis and stopped in front of the great door. The escort drew up in line on either side. Silence fell upon the crowd, and amid that silence, surcharged with solemnity and anxious anticipation, the two halves of the great door opened apparently of themselves on their creaking hinges and disclosed the shadowy depths of the sombre church in its whole extent, hung with black, dimly lighted by a few tapers glimmering in the far distance on the high altar, and looking like a black and yawning cavern in the midst of the sunlit Place. At the far end, in the gloom of the chancel, a gigantic cross of silver was dimly visible against a black drapery that fell from the roof to the floor. The nave was perfectly empty, but the heads of a few priests could be seen stirring vaguely in the distant choir-stalls, and as the great door opened, there rolled from the church a solemn, far-reaching, monotonous chant, hurling at the devoted head of the criminal fragments of the penitential psalms:
“Non timebo millia populi circumdantis me. Exsurge, Domine; salvum me fac, Deus!
“Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intraverunt aquæ usque ad animam meam.