“There is one yonder, under the shed of the Pillar-House,” replied the man.

“There is one yonder, under the shed of the Pillar-House,” replied the man. “Is it on this justice that the thing is to be done?” he added, pointing to the stone gibbet.

“Yes.”

“Ho, hé!” continued the man with a huge laugh, which was still more brutal than that of the provost, “we shall not have far to go.”

“Make haste!” said Tristan, “you shall laugh afterwards.”

In the meantime, the recluse had not uttered another word since Tristan had seen her daughter and all hope was lost. She had flung the poor gypsy, half dead, into the corner of the cellar, and had placed herself once more at the window with both hands resting on the angle of the sill like two claws. In this attitude she was seen to cast upon all those soldiers her glance which had become wild and frantic once more. At the moment when Rennet Cousin approached her cell, she showed him so savage a face that he shrank back.

“Monseigneur,” he said, returning to the provost, “which am I to take?”

“The young one.”

“So much the better, for the old one seemeth difficult.”

“Poor little dancer with the goat!” said the old sergeant of the watch.

Rennet Cousin approached the window again. The mother’s eyes made his own droop. He said with a good deal of timidity,—

“Madam”—

She interrupted him in a very low but furious voice,—

“What do you ask?”

“It is not you,” he said, “it is the other.”

“What other?”

“The young one.”

She began to shake her head, crying,—

“There is no one! there is no one! there is no one!”

“Yes, there is!” retorted the hangman, “and you know it well. Let me take the young one. I have no wish to harm you.”

She said, with a strange sneer,—

“Ah! so you have no wish to harm me!”

“Let me have the other, madam; ’tis monsieur the provost who wills it.”

She repeated with a look of madness,—

“There is no one here.”

“I tell you that there is!” replied the executioner. “We have all seen that there are two of you.”

“Look then!” said the recluse, with a sneer. “Thrust your head through the window.”

The executioner observed the mother’s finger-nails and dared not.

“Make haste!” shouted Tristan, who had just ranged his troops in a circle round the Rat-Hole, and who sat on his horse beside the gallows.

Rennet returned once more to the provost in great embarrassment. He had flung his rope on the ground, and was twisting his hat between his hands with an awkward air.

“Monseigneur,” he asked, “where am I to enter?”

“By the door.”

“There is none.”

“By the window.”

“’Tis too small.”

“Make it larger,” said Tristan angrily. “Have you not pickaxes?”

The mother still looked on steadfastly from the depths of her cavern. She no longer hoped for anything, she no longer knew what she wished, except that she did not wish them to take her daughter.

Rennet Cousin went in search of the chest of tools for the night man, under the shed of the Pillar-House. He drew from it also the double ladder, which he immediately set up against the gallows. Five or six of the provost’s men armed themselves with picks and crowbars, and Tristan betook himself, in company with them, towards the window.

“Old woman,” said the provost, in a severe tone, “deliver up to us that girl quietly.”

She looked at him like one who does not understand.

“Tête Dieu!” continued Tristan, “why do you try to prevent this sorceress being hung as it pleases the king?”

The wretched woman began to laugh in her wild way.

“Why? She is my daughter.”

The tone in which she pronounced these words made even Henriet Cousin shudder.

“I am sorry for that,” said the provost, “but it is the king’s good pleasure.”

She cried, redoubling her terrible laugh,—

“What is your king to me? I tell you that she is my daughter!”

“Pierce the wall,” said Tristan.

In order to make a sufficiently wide opening, it sufficed to dislodge one course of stone below the window. When the mother heard the picks and crowbars mining her fortress, she uttered a terrible cry; then she began to stride about her cell with frightful swiftness, a wild beasts’ habit which her cage had imparted to her. She no longer said anything, but her eyes flamed. The soldiers were chilled to the very soul.

All at once she seized her paving stone, laughed, and hurled it with both fists upon the workmen. The stone, badly flung (for her hands trembled), touched no one, and fell short under the feet of Tristan’s horse. She gnashed her teeth.

In the meantime, although the sun had not yet risen, it was broad daylight; a beautiful rose color enlivened the ancient, decayed chimneys of the Pillar-House. It was the hour when the earliest windows of the great city open joyously on the roofs. Some workmen, a few fruit-sellers on their way to the markets on their asses, began to traverse the Grève; they halted for a moment before this group of soldiers clustered round the Rat-Hole, stared at it with an air of astonishment and passed on.

The recluse had gone and seated herself by her daughter, covering her with her body, in front of her, with staring eyes, listening to the poor child, who did not stir, but who kept murmuring in a low voice, these words only, “Phœbus! Phœbus!” In proportion as the work of the demolishers seemed to advance, the mother mechanically retreated, and pressed the young girl closer and closer to the wall. All at once, the recluse beheld the stone (for she was standing guard and never took her eyes from it), move, and she heard Tristan’s voice encouraging the workers. Then she aroused from the depression into which she had fallen during the last few moments, cried out, and as she spoke, her voice now rent the ear like a saw, then stammered as though all kind of maledictions were pressing to her lips to burst forth at once.

“Ho! ho! ho! Why this is terrible! You are ruffians! Are you really going to take my daughter? Oh! the cowards! Oh! the hangman lackeys! the wretched, blackguard assassins! Help! help! fire! Will they take my child from me like this? Who is it then who is called the good God?”

Then, addressing Tristan, foaming at the mouth, with wild eyes, all bristling and on all fours like a female panther,—

“Draw near and take my daughter! Do not you understand that this woman tells you that she is my daughter? Do you know what it is to have a child? Eh! lynx, have you never lain with your female? have you never had a cub? and if you have little ones, when they howl have you nothing in your vitals that moves?”

“Throw down the stone,” said Tristan; “it no longer holds.”

The crowbars raised the heavy course. It was, as we have said, the mother’s last bulwark.

She threw herself upon it, she tried to hold it back; she scratched the stone with her nails, but the massive block, set in movement by six men, escaped her and glided gently to the ground along the iron levers.

The mother, perceiving an entrance effected, fell down in front of the opening, barricading the breach with her body, beating the pavement with her head, and shrieking with a voice rendered so hoarse by fatigue that it was hardly audible,—

“Help! fire! fire!”

“Now take the wench,” said Tristan, still impassive.

The mother gazed at the soldiers in such formidable fashion that they were more inclined to retreat than to advance.

“Come, now,” repeated the provost. “Here you, Rennet Cousin!”

No one took a step.

The provost swore,—

“Tête de Christ! my men of war! afraid of a woman!”

“Monseigneur,” said Rennet, “do you call that a woman?”

“She has the mane of a lion,” said another.

“Come!” repeated the provost, “the gap is wide enough. Enter three abreast, as at the breach of Pontoise. Let us make an end of it, death of Mahom! I will make two pieces of the first man who draws back!”

Placed between the provost and the mother, both threatening, the soldiers hesitated for a moment, then took their resolution, and advanced towards the Rat-Hole.

When the recluse saw this, she rose abruptly on her knees, flung aside her hair from her face, then let her thin flayed hands fall by her side. Then great tears fell, one by one, from her eyes; they flowed down her cheeks through a furrow, like a torrent through a bed which it has hollowed for itself.

At the same time she began to speak, but in a voice so supplicating, so gentle, so submissive, so heartrending, that more than one old convict-warder around Tristan who must have devoured human flesh wiped his eyes.

“Messeigneurs! messieurs the sergeants, one word. There is one thing which I must say to you. She is my daughter, do you see? my dear little daughter whom I had lost! Listen. It is quite a history. Consider that I knew the sergeants very well. They were always good to me in the days when the little boys threw stones at me, because I led a life of pleasure. Do you see? You will leave me my child when you know! I was a poor woman of the town. It was the Bohemians who stole her from me. And I kept her shoe for fifteen years. Stay, here it is. That was the kind of foot which she had. At Reims! La Chantefleurie! Rue Folle-Peine! Perchance, you knew about that. It was I. In your youth, then, there was a merry time, when one passed good hours. You will take pity on me, will you not, gentlemen? The gypsies stole her from me; they hid her from me for fifteen years. I thought her dead. Fancy, my good friends, believed her to be dead. I have passed fifteen years here in this cellar, without a fire in winter. It is hard. The poor, dear little shoe! I have cried so much that the good God has heard me. This night he has given my daughter back to me. It is a miracle of the good God. She was not dead. You will not take her from me, I am sure. If it were myself, I would say nothing; but she, a child of sixteen! Leave her time to see the sun! What has she done to you? nothing at all. Nor have I. If you did but know that she is all I have, that I am old, that she is a blessing which the Holy Virgin has sent to me! And then, you are all so good! You did not know that she was my daughter; but now you do know it. Oh! I love her! Monsieur, the grand provost. I would prefer a stab in my own vitals to a scratch on her finger! You have the air of such a good lord! What I have told you explains the matter, does it not? Oh! if you have had a mother, monseigneur! you are the captain, leave me my child! Consider that I pray you on my knees, as one prays to Jesus Christ! I ask nothing of any one; I am from Reims, gentlemen; I own a little field inherited from my uncle, Mahiet Pradon. I am no beggar. I wish nothing, but I do want my child! oh! I want to keep my child! The good God, who is the master, has not given her back to me for nothing! The king! you say the king! It would not cause him much pleasure to have my little daughter killed! And then, the king is good! she is my daughter! she is my own daughter! She belongs not to the king! she is not yours! I want to go away! we want to go away! and when two women pass, one a mother and the other a daughter, one lets them go! Let us pass! we belong in Reims. Oh! you are very good, messieurs the sergeants, I love you all. You will not take my dear little one, it is impossible! It is utterly impossible, is it not? My child, my child!”

We will not try to give an idea of her gestures, her tone, of the tears which she swallowed as she spoke, of the hands which she clasped and then wrung, of the heart-breaking smiles, of the swimming glances, of the groans, the sighs, the miserable and affecting cries which she mingled with her disordered, wild, and incoherent words. When she became silent Tristan l’Hermite frowned, but it was to conceal a tear which welled up in his tiger’s eye. He conquered this weakness, however, and said in a curt tone,—

“The king wills it.”

Then he bent down to the ear of Rennet Cousin, and said to him in a very low tone,—

“Make an end of it quickly!” Possibly, the redoubtable provost felt his heart also failing him.

The executioner and the sergeants entered the cell. The mother offered no resistance, only she dragged herself towards her daughter and threw herself bodily upon her. The gypsy beheld the soldiers approach. The horror of death reanimated her,—

“Mother!” she shrieked, in a tone of indescribable distress, “Mother! they are coming! defend me!”

“Yes, my love, I am defending you!” replied the mother, in a dying voice; and clasping her closely in her arms, she covered her with kisses. The two lying thus on the earth, the mother upon the daughter, presented a spectacle worthy of pity.

Rennet Cousin grasped the young girl by the middle of her body, beneath her beautiful shoulders. When she felt that hand, she cried, “Heuh!” and fainted. The executioner who was shedding large tears upon her, drop by drop, was about to bear her away in his arms. He tried to detach the mother, who had, so to speak, knotted her hands around her daughter’s waist; but she clung so strongly to her child, that it was impossible to separate them. Then Rennet Cousin dragged the young girl outside the cell, and the mother after her. The mother’s eyes were also closed.

At that moment, the sun rose, and there was already on the Place a fairly numerous assembly of people who looked on from a distance at what was being thus dragged along the pavement to the gibbet. For that was Provost Tristan’s way at executions. He had a passion for preventing the approach of the curious.

There was no one at the windows. Only at a distance, at the summit of that one of the towers of Notre-Dame which commands the Grève, two men outlined in black against the light morning sky, and who seemed to be looking on, were visible.