“Girl, have you asked pardon of God for your sins and offences?” He bent over her and whispered (the spectators supposing that he was receiving her last confession): “Wilt thou be mine? I can save thee yet!”
She regarded him steadfastly: “Begone, devil, or I will denounce thee!”
A baleful smile curled his lips. “They would not believe thee. Thou wouldst but be adding a scandal to a crime. Answer quickly! Wilt thou be mine?”
“What hast thou done with my Phœbus?”
“He is dead,” said the priest.
At that moment the miserable Archdeacon raised his eyes mechanically, and there, at the opposite side of the Place, on the balcony of the Gondelaurier’s house, was the captain himself, standing by the side of Fleur-de-Lys. He staggered, passed his hand over his eyes, looked again, murmured a curse, and every feature became distorted with rage.
“Then die thou too!” he muttered between his teeth. “No one shall have thee!” Then lifting his hand over the gipsy girl, he cried in a sepulchral voice: “I nunc, anima anceps, et sit tibi Deus misericors!”
This was the awful formula with which it was customary to close this lugubrious ceremonial. It was the accepted signal from the priest to the executioner.
The people fell upon their knees.
“Kyrie eleison!” said the priests standing under the arched doorway.
“Kyrie eleison!” repeated the multitude in that murmur that runs over a sea of heads like the splashing of stormy waves.
“Amen,” responded the Archdeacon. And he turned his back upon the doomed girl, his head fell on his breast, he crossed his hands, rejoined his train of priests, and vanished a moment afterward with the cross, the tapers and the copes under the dim arches of the cathedral, and his sonorous voice gradually died away in the choir chanting this cry of human despair:
“Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt!”
The intermittent clank of the butt-ends of the guards’ pikes growing fainter by degrees in the distance, sounded like the hammer of a clock striking the last hour of the condemned.
All this time the doors of Notre-Dame had remained wide open, affording a view of the interior of the church, empty, desolate, draped in black, voiceless, its lights extinguished.
The condemned girl remained motionless on the spot where they had placed her, awaiting what they would do with her. One of the sergeants had to inform Maître Charmolue that matters had reached this point, as during the foregoing scene he had been wholly occupied in studying the bas-relief of the great doorway, which, according to some, represents Abraham’s sacrifice, and according to others, the great alchemistic operation— the sun being figured by the angel, the fire by the fagot, and the operator by Abraham.
They had much ado to draw him away from this contemplation; but at last he turned round, and at a sign from him, two men in yellow, the executioner’s assistants, approached the gipsy to tie her hands again.
At the moment of reascending the fatal cart and moving on towards her final scene, the hapless girl was seized perhaps by some last heart-rending desire for life. She raised her dry and burning eyes to