Notes

On the Place de Greve there is an old house called the Roland Tower. It has a small window, closed with two bars and overlooking the square. It is the only opening that allows a little air and day to arrive to a small cell without door, made in the teat of the wall of the old house. This cell is best known in Paris as Trou Aura.

Back in the day, the Roland Tower cell was occupied by a poor woman called La Sachette. If the reader wants to know who La Sachette is, all he has to do is listen to the conversation of the three women who go to Place de Greve.

"Let us hurry, Miss Mariette," said the youngest, "Otherwise, we will arrive too late."

“Don’t worry, the hunchback will stay in the pillory for two hours, we have time. I hear drumming," said Gervaise, "I think it’s little Esmeralda working her goat. Quick Mariette! Hurry up and drag your boy!”

'The bohemian?' said Mariette, shaking her son’s hand, 'God forbid! She would steal my child from me. Come, Eustache.' And they start to run on the Strike.

Audard and Gervaise join her.

'This girl is stealing your child?' said Gervaise, 'What idea!'

"The bag thinks the same thing about gypsies." said Audard, "But you Mariette, why are you running away from them?"

'Oh,' said Mariette, grasping in her hands her child’s round head, 'I don’t want what happened to Paquette la Chantefleurie to happen to me.'

'Tell us her story, my dear Mariette,' said Gervaise, taking her arm.

'I would,' replied Mariette, 'Paquette was a pretty eighteen-year-old girl. She was so beautiful and so pretty, she was called the Chantefleurie everywhere. In 1476, Paquette gave birth to a little girl. I’m not telling you about her joy. She spent all her money on the little Anise. The girl even had small pink satin shoes embroidered with gold.

One day, strangers arrived. They had curly hair and silver rings in their ears. They were reading the future in their hands. They also said they were stealing from the children. Poor Chantefleurie wanted to know if her pretty little Anise would ever be an empress or queen, and she had brought the child to know her future. A gypsy woman told him her daughter would be a beauty, a queen.

The next day, while her child was sleeping, she went to tell a neighbor what the bohemian had told her. When she returned, she found her door wide open. The child was no longer there. Instead of her sweet little Anise, there was a little monster. Hideous, lame, one-eyed. She went to see the gypsies, but they were gone. The next day, her hair was gray. The day after, she was gone.”

'I understand now,' adds Gervaise, 'why are you afraid of gypsies. And what has become of the Chantefleurie?'

“Ah...we never knew.”

“And the monster left by the witches at the Chantefleurie in exchange for his daughter? What did we do with it? I hope we drowned it!”

'No,' replied Mariette, 'The Archbishop took an interest in the child and sent him to Paris to be exposed on the wooden bed at Notre Dame as a child found.'

While speaking thus, the three bourgeois had arrived near the house of the Roland Tower. Audard said to the other two,

“Don’t look all three at a time in the hole, because you risk scaring the Sachette.”

The cell was narrow. In an angle, a woman was crouching. His chin was resting on his knees, which his two crossed arms pressed tightly against his chest. Her long grey hair fell on her face, along her legs to her feet.

“What do you call this woman?” asks Mariette.

“We call it the Sachette.”

'And I,' said Mariette, 'I call her Paquette la Chantefleurie.' and putting a finger on her mouth, she beckons Audard stupefied, to pass her head through the skylight, and to look.

Audard looks. The Sachette has her eyes fixed on a small pink satin shoe.

__________

The crowd laughs at the pillory. A ladder leads to the upper platform on which we can see a horizontal wheel made of rotating wood. Quasimodo was tied on this wheel on his knees and arms behind his back. The executioner Pierre au Torterue lowered his shirt to the waist and hit him with a whip.

The blood flows on Quasimodo’s shoulders and on the hump. At the hundredth stroke, the wheel stops spinning. The hunchback is left tied to the plank because he has one hour of pillory left. Suddenly he screams with a furious voice, which looks more like barking than a human cry.

“Something to drink!”

The crowd laughs at him and laughs.

'To drink!' repeats Quasimodo.

At this moment, a young girl comes out of the crowd. Quasimodo’s eye shines. She’s the gypsy girl he tried to abduct the night before, and he knows he’s being punished for it. She climbs the ladder quickly, approaches him without saying a word, and gives him a drink. Then a big tear comes out of Quasimodo’s eye and falls slowly along his deformed face. This is the first time that Quasimodo cries. He drinks a long time and when he’s done drinking he holds out his lips to kiss the girl’s hand. Frightened, the girl pulls her hand away and the poor deaf person stares at her with a look of sadness. At this moment, the recluse of the Roland Tower sees the gypsy on the pillory, and cries,

'Cursed are you!'

The Esmeralda fades and comes down from the pillory trembling.