Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

BOOK EIGHTH. CHAPTER 1. THE CROWN CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF. (continued)

In order to arouse her, a police officer was obliged to shake her unmercifully, and the president had to raise his voice,--"Girl, you are of the Bohemian race, addicted to deeds of witchcraft. You, in complicity with the bewitched goat implicated in this suit, during the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, murdered and stabbed, in concert with the powers of darkness, by the aid of charms and underhand practices, a captain of the king's arches of the watch, Phoebus de Châteaupers. Do you persist in denying it?"

"Horror!" exclaimed the young girl, hiding her face in her hands. "My Phoebus! Oh, this is hell!"

"Do you persist in your denial?" demanded the president coldly.

"Do I deny it?" she said with terrible accents; and she rose with flashing eyes.

The president continued squarely,--

"Then how do you explain the facts laid to your charge?"

She replied in a broken voice,--

"I have already told you. I do not know. 'Twas a priest, a priest whom I do not know; an infernal priest who pursues me!"

"That is it," retorted the judge; "the surly monk."

"Oh, gentlemen! have mercy! I am but a poor girl--"

"Of Egypt," said the judge.

Master Jacques Charmolue interposed sweetly,--

"In view of the sad obstinacy of the accused, I demand the application of the torture."

"Granted," said the president.

The unhappy girl quivered in every limb. But she rose at the command of the men with partisans, and walked with a tolerably firm step, preceded by Charmolue and the priests of the officiality, between two rows of halberds, towards a medium-sized door which suddenly opened and closed again behind her, and which produced upon the grief-stricken Gringoire the effect of a horrible mouth which had just devoured her.