5: The Woman of Pleasure's Child

Il n'est bon bec que de Paris.

(There's no good gossip but in Paris.)

François Villon, Ballade des Femmes de Paris, from Le Grand Testament

Claude Frollo, bruised and battered by his fall and exhausted by fever, lay in Mother Sibylle's panelled bedroom. He spent a great deal of time sleeping, and when he was awake, the sisters spoon-fed him with broth or gruel. It would be some time before he knew what had happened to him, or even where he was: not for the first time, reality and delirium mingled, leaving him uncertain what was memory, what was fever-dream. So let us leave him to rest, until he is a little stronger and more clear-headed.

Downstairs, Esméralda threw herself into the task of nursing her mother back to health. Although repelled by Pâquette's oozing sores – which, she thought, could have made her a good living begging as a malingreuse – she helped the sisters bathe, salve and bind them. She encouraged her to eat – the sisters made sure that she got good food, regardless of the day of the week. ("There are no fast-days for invalids," Mother Sibylle insisted.) She combed her hair; she tried to make her look pretty in her ill-fitting charity clothes. Pierre was reminded of a child playing with a new doll, albeit an awkward, rather ugly one. The thought frightened him: children soon grow bored or bad-tempered, and throw away once-cherished toys in pique. He knew, too, that Esméralda idealised beyond reason those she loved. After fifteen years apart, the two young women had much to learn about each other. He wondered whether the daughter's unconditional adoration would survive what he had already begun to surmise about Pâquette from her conversation. He guessed that Esméralda had paid no attention at all to what she had told the authorities in the Grève. He waited anxiously, guessing that, whatever happened, he would be expected to pick up the pieces. Esméralda always expected more than she gave.

Indeed, it did not take many days for the cracks to appear. One morning, after helping change Pâquette's dressings, Esméralda forced her to look at herself in a hand-mirror.

"See, mother, you're still beautiful!"

"Don't talk nonsense!"

"But now your hair's clean, it's curling prettily, just like mine!"

"When did it get so grey? Oh, what a fright I look, Agnès!"

Her daughter grinned. "You're starting to look better – for your age!"

"The cheek of it! – Mind, I still keep thinking I should be one-and-twenty, and the horror it gives me to see…! That fifteen years have brought me to this! You should put me in a field to scare the crows!"

"Don't be silly! We'll make a proper, plump, middle-aged matron of you yet, have no fear!"

Pâquette laughed, shaking her head. "You can make me as plump as you like, but I wouldn't know how to be one! I was twenty-one when I was walled in: I don't know how to be 'middle-aged'! And as for 'propriety' – why, when I was young, in Reims…"

"What was it like then, mother?"

"Sweet and bitter, bitter and sweet. Oh, my dear, my dear…" A wistful look entered her sunken eyes.

"Are you thinking of my father? You must tell me everything you know about him!"

Pâquette smiled gently: "My father was Étienne Guybertaut, and he was a minstrel on the boats there. He was very accomplished: he knew many beautiful songs, by Machaut, and even old ones by that Comte Thibaut, who was King of Navarre. He had played for King Charles, and for the Virgin of Orléans, more than fifty years ago! My mother – your grandmother – was called Gilberte Pradon; she was much younger than him – I think he had been married before, but I'm not sure. He died when I was no more than ten or so: it seems so long ago…"

"You've told me this already! That is all about your father!" Esméralda said petulantly. "What about my father?"

"Your father?" Her mother looked nervous.

"Yes. When were you married? Did my father die? Is he still living somewhere?"

Silence. Then: "God alone knows."

"What does that mean?"

Pâquette steeled herself. "It's not an easy story to tell, Agnès. Promise you will not hate me for it?"

"Hate you? Oh, mother darling, how could I? I've just found you again after so long!"

She began carefully: "It was the year of the king's coronation. I was fourteen years old, poor but pretty in those days. My mother and I used to take in sewing – a lot of fine work, with beads and pearls – and we made trinkets and trimmings, and sold a little haberdashery, too. But my mother was starting to ail by then."

"But what of my father?"

"The Vicomte de Cormontreuil saw me going to church, and fell in love with me. He was not much older than myself, very handsome, very chivalrous! He said I would look even prettier in church with a fine gold cross around my neck. So, in exchange for that, I gave him something else, that could not be replaced."

Esméralda let the meaning sink in. So her mother had not been married, which meant she was a bastard. On the other hand… "You mean my father is a nobleman?" She was thrilled: it reminded her of herself and Phœbus. Why, if she could tell Phœbus that she was of noble birth, albeit a love-child… She had always known she must be noble, from the richness of the little satin shoe!

"– No," her mother continued. "No, he was expected to make a good marriage, so of course he let me go. But with the coronation, there were all sorts of splendid men in town: the king's master of horse, Messire de Triancourt; the sergeant-at-arms, Messire de Beaulion; Aubergeon, the king's carver; de Frépus, the Dauphin's barber; the royal cook, Le Moine…" She sighed wistfully at the memories stirred. "Oh, those were the best of times! I laughed my way from bed to bed because they loved my even teeth!"

"But which of them was my father?" (If not exactly noble, then a member of the royal household would do just as well, she thought.)

"None of them! No, you weren't born till I was in my twentieth year: St Paula's feast-day in '66. Times were harder by then. My mother was dead. I'd been with a vielle-player for a while – Guillaume Racine was his name: I used to sing for him. Then there was Thierry, who used to light the lamps… Then it came down to a thieving scoundrel of a pimp, who would beat me if I didn't bring in enough money from the taverns and the stews. You could be his, but I doubt it from your looks. I can't remember all the paying customers I had, obviously."

By now, Esméralda was staring blankly at her.

"Yes, I was a harlot."

The girl remained silent, stunned. Yes, yes, she vaguely recalled her mother saying something of the sort in the Grève, but didn't penitents always exaggerate their past sins to amplify their present virtue? She had not believed she had meant it.

"Are you all right?"

"I don't know." This was not how it was meant to be. Her mother was supposed to be a princess, or a noblewoman, a great lady of some sort, at least. That was what she had always dreamed. The fine needlework and beading of her little satin shoe had told her so. "And you mean you've no idea who my father was?"

She shrugged her bony shoulders. "No. I don't remember. Anything from a pedlar to a priest: I've had them all."

"Priests?" the girl cried in disgust: if her father should be a priest…!

"So? All cats are grey in the dark! Clergy pay well, and, naked, they're no different –"

"Mother!"

"It was a long time ago, Agnès!"

"But – a whore!"

"I was an anchoress far longer."

"But what does that make me?"

"No more and no less than what you've always been. What does it matter?" And she sang croakily, as if dandling a child, a verse of an old song:

"Li rossignol est ton pere,
Qui chante sor la ramee
El plus haut boscage.
La seraine elle est ta mere,
Qui chante en la mer salee,
El plus haut rivage."*

"Mother, it's not funny! I kept myself pure – I believed I'd never find you if I didn't! I suffered for it! Why couldn't you? Why couldn't you?"

She put her arms around the girl, and clasped her to her thin, bandaged breasts. "Then you wouldn't be here, would you, my precious baby? You were the best thing that ever happened to me in my life! After all those men… Some of them were sweet, but oh, some were brutes…"

Her daughter wriggled free. "Don't touch me!"

"And don't you think I've suffered, too? I paid for my sins every day for fifteen years – fifteen long years of prayer and fasting and penance and pain. Oh, Agnès, I was sure that it was for my sins you were taken from me!"

"My name isn't Agnès; it's Esméralda!"

"I named you myself, for the virgin-martyr St Agnes! I bore you a few days after her feast, on St Paula's, but I liked her name better! And her pictures, with her little lamb, as you have your pretty little goat –"

"You bring the saints into this! You!"

"Why not? I lived like the holy Magdalene – like Marie of Egypt… It was hard – you've no idea how hard! My grief for you overwhelmed me, but sometimes… I've a sensual nature: it's how I'm made! I lost all shame at fourteen, and they say it's the chief sin of us women! I'd see young men passing my cell, or – worse – bringing me their griefs and troubles, and asking me to pray for them. One might have fine legs, another beautiful eyes, another comely shoulders, and in my mind, I'd picture them…" She broke off, collecting herself. "And so I'd flog myself until I swooned. I made my body, once the fairest in all Champagne, foul and ugly. I beat my desires out of me, until all I had left was my desire to see you once more on this earth before I died!"

"Then I pity you for it, but I can't love you!"

Esméralda ran through the house – almost knocking over stout little Sister Louise, who was carrying an armful of freshly laundered bed-linen – and out into the yard. She flung her arms around Djali's neck, and wept into her soft coat. The goat bleated sympathetically.

Pierre, meanwhile, had gone out to try to earn a few sous on the streets with some of his old tricks. They had all agreed it was too soon to risk a public comeback performance either by Esméralda or by Djali the World's Most Erudite Goat. He hoped they might receive a formal pardon for the former, while the latter needed to add some less incriminating words to her vocabulary. He hoped none would check (or hold it against him, if they did) that, in his defence of Esméralda, he had exaggerated (i.e. lied outright) about being a graduate: however, the job of an advocate, in his opinion, at least, was to bend the truth to his client's advantage. Besides, the education he had received from Dom Claude had been easily the equal of, if not superior to, that of any student of the university, as his tutor had often reminded him: if he had forgotten much of it since, that was his own doing. As a war-orphan, who had grown up scavenging on the streets, he had been lucky to have such a benefactor. However, he had already discovered that other parts of his education were far more lucrative.

He had borrowed a chair from the sisters, and scooped up (with some howls and several scratches) a one-eared stray cat from the street corner, in order to reprise his most impressive feats of balancing.

A small crowd of spectators soon gathered, and a good number of coins (although none of great value) were thrown at his feet. Nevertheless, his new partner had no intention of working with him permanently. Once untied from the chair, the cat looked as unimpressed as cats always do, and stalked off with an air of injured dignity.

"Still, it's a delight it is to see you performing again, messire!" said a woman struggling with a shopping basket in one hand and a fidgeting seven-year-old in the other. "My little Michel is a great admirer of yours – aren't you?"

The child pulled out his tongue. His mother elbowed him.

"Anyway," she went on, "it's good to have something cheerful! Dreadful things have been happening lately hereabouts!"

"The attack on the cathedral? Yes, I heard about it," Pierre said, feigning innocence and ignorance.

"And then the poor archdeacon! – But you must have heard about him, too!"

"What? Which one?" (There were, after all, three serving the diocese. But from what Esméralda had said about last seeing Claude running off in a distracted state to call the guards, Pierre was already worried.)

"Monsieur of Josas: Dom Claude Frollo."

He gulped. "Why? What's happened to him?"

"Well, his brother thrown from the tower in the riot! And then he himself –! Oh, it was terrible!"

"He's dead, too?"

"Well, no, I haven't heard that, but my neighbour heard it from her cousin, who saw it happen…"

"Saw what?"

"The very morning after, he fell from the North Tower!"

"Then he is dead!"

"Oh, no – he hit a house on the way down, and they caught him when he fell off that! He was still alive then, though he must have been badly hurt! God alone knows if he fell or jumped, or if he was trying to fly, like some said!"

"I heard," interrupted a man, a joiner or cooper, judging by his dress, "that that demon-child of his threw him off, to crack his soul out of his body, to take it off to Hell!"

Pierre passed his hand over his eyes. "Pasque-Dieu!" he muttered.

"You know him?"

"He was my teacher, and my friend."

"Oh, I'm sorry!" the woman said. "But people are saying all sorts of things, and the poor fellow not even in his grave! Demon-child, indeed!"

"I want to see the demon!" piped Michel. "Better than that ugly cat! It only had one ear!"

"Oh, shut up!" his mother scolded.

Pierre felt queasy. My old friend, he thought, what has become of you? If Esméralda had told him the truth – and he saw no reason for her to have lied – about the archdeacon's desire for her, about him forcing her to choose between him or death, and his betrayal of her, then… Was he possessed, or sick? He remembered the priest's obsessive questions about the state of his marriage and the gypsy girl's chastity; his blushes, too. When they had met at the For-l'Evêque, and plotted her escape, he had noticed how ill Claude had looked – the corpse-like pallor, the eyes blazing from hollow sockets, the sunken cheeks, the scant hair almost white. He had changed almost beyond recognition over these past few months, most drastically in recent weeks.

"Thank you for this news," he said. "It is… sad to hear."

He picked up the coins from the ground, and put them in the purse at his belt. Somehow, it was difficult to concentrate on balancing pyramids of chairs and cats with the thought of a man falling from a high tower. Cats, at least, tend to land on their feet.

He saw young Simon, who was struggling back to the house with a bucket of rapidly melting ice.

"What's this? Can you manage?"

"Better than you could, I bet!" the boy retorted, looking Pierre up and down. "Besides, you've got your chair! I been all the way to the ice-house for this, for him upstairs!"

"That's a lot of trouble! Surely the well-water's cold enough?"

"Not for Mother Sibylle! She won't have her young gentleman dyin' of wound-fever, she says!"

"Very wise! Who is this gentleman, anyway, that she's so attentive to him – a kinsman?"

"I don't think so. Definitely a gentleman, though, to be upstairs. My friend André – he lives across the street from me – says it's that priest."

"What priest?" he asked apprehensively.

"The one what was tryin' to fly: the tall, baldy one that goes around with the hunchbacked lad. André saw it: his mam sent him to tell the sisters. But I didn't see myself, so… And they don't want it talked about! Spreading scandal's a sin, Sister Geneviève says!"

Pierre felt a mixture of relief and anguish: relief that his teacher was still alive and was being nursed so attentively; anguish at what the news of his proximity might do to Esméralda. He decided to say nothing of it to her yet. She had enough to worry about with her mother's delicate health; and besides, if the archdeacon were as severely injured as everyone implied, she would have no need for alarm.

Simon clattered into the kitchen with his bucket. After depositing his chair there, Pierre went first to see Djali, tethered with her own bucket (filled with delicious vegetable stalks and peelings) in the yard. He hoped that she was learning to tolerate the hens, and they her.

But he was surprised to find Esméralda kneeling on the ground, her expression disconsolate, and her arms around the little goat's neck.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

She did not answer.

He patted the goat. Her fur felt damp in places.

"Have you been crying into my goat?"

"My goat. She was my goat first! – Oh, Djali, will they take everything of mine from me?"

"What's wrong?" He wondered for a moment if she knew about Claude, but decided otherwise. "It's nothing about your mother, is it?"

"Yes, it is," she sniffed.

"She's all right, isn't she? Or is she ill? What is it?"

"We've been quarrelling."

"Oh! Your first quarrel – so soon?" And he laughed.

"It's not funny… I'm starting to wish I'd never found her…"

"That seems excessive! Tell me all about it!"

"She doesn't know who my father is."

"So? Mishaps of that nature can happen to the best of people!"

"Because she was taking paying customers at the time."

"She – what?"

"She was a whore. A 'woman of pleasure'. A strumpet. A trull. Whatever you want to call it! A prostitute!"

Pierre scratched his chin. "Well, you should know as well as I do that that doesn't make her a bad person! Not necessarily, anyway! We've both grown up on the streets! Look at the Cour de Miracles! A better bunch of thieves, cut-throats and harlots you could never find – at least when they're not trying to hang you!"

"You're taking her side!"

"No, I'm just… Well, I just can't understand why you're so upset! You were lost to each other; you found each other after fifteen years, during which time she's lived a – an exemplary life of piety and penance – and you're fretting about what she was doing before!"

Esméralda sighed deeply. "What does it make me, though?"

"The same person you always were, only no longer an orphan."

"No, a whore's bastard!"

"I'm not sure how that's any more awkward socially than being a gypsy of unknown origins! And surely it says a great deal for her love for you that she had you at all? Often enough, when women of that kind fall pregnant –"

"– But I'm not even from one of her noble lovers! That would have been something! Her first seducer was a vicomte! But no… Just some paying customer!"

"So long as he did pay, eh? Far worse if he'd been the sort to run off without paying!"

"But I kept myself pure in order to find her!"

That stung Pierre. She had rebuffed him with a knife on their 'wedding night', but then – oh God! – He recalled how he had at first refused to believe that she could have been the girl arrested at the brothel for wounding Phœbus. The virtuous Esméralda, in one of the lowest 'houses of assignation', with a notorious rake? Had she spurned all suitors, it would have been one matter; but to spurn him for that? If he invested so much of his heart in the innocent affection of Djali, or in his new interest in architecture, it was at least in part from the sting of that disillusion.

"As pure as at La Falourdel's, with that popinjay captain?" he said bitterly.

"I've told you, nothing happened there! Your vile priest friend saw to that!"

"– But if he hadn't? How different is that from her and her vicomte?"

She hesitated, trembling. "That is base of you, Pierre Gringoire! Base!" She burst into tears again. "I kept myself chaste, but what was she? I kept myself pure, and my reward is to find a mother who is… a harlot! Why did I even try…!"

He put one arm around her, the other around Djali. "There, there…" He was not sure which of them was in greater need of consolation.

He let Esméralda cry her troubles out of her system, giving her his handkerchief. It was unbecoming for her to use the goat, he thought.

Pâquette was sitting with her head in her hands when Sister Louise came in with a change of linen.

"That girl of yours is like a whirlwind! She nearly knocked me over, sheets and all! – Oh, is something the matter, my lamb?"

"May I talk to you?

"Yes, of course." She sat down on the coverlet beside her.

"The old man…?"

"Oh, he won't hear until you're right up close and shouting!" She bawled: "Isn't that right, Geoffroi?"

"What did you say, sister?" he called from the other side of the partition.

"See?"

The younger woman sighed. "Thank you. Do you have children?"

"Bore eight, raised five, buried three – and two husbands besides."

"I'm sure I don't know how to raise mine. When we were last together, she was fourteen months old; now she's sixteen, and – and…"

"You don't know what to do with her now? You knew her when she was a baby, but as a grown woman she's a stranger, is that it?"

She half-smiled. "Yes! I don't know how to be a mother to her now… I hardly even know how I should comport myself at my time of life! But there's worse, too…" And she told her story over again to the pink-faced little woman.

"So: you were a sinner, but you repented, and God saw fit to restore your child to you? Instead of the prodigal son, the prodigal mother! That means we need to get more 'fatted calf' inside you, my girl, little by little! Geneviève's got a good, thick broth of it cooking, for you and for that poor boy…"

"You're all so very kind!"

"Well, that daughter of yours needs to come down a peg or two, if she thinks she knows better than our good Lord and our blessed Lady what's in people's hearts! Mind, they're all the same at her age – thinking they know it all, and better than their elders! But is it true she's the one that used to dance in the streets, with that dear little goat?"

"Yes, it is! Before I knew she was mine, I used to curse her from my window for her heathen shamelessness. The strange tricks fortune plays on us!"

"Indeed, so she can hardly cast any stones at you! And there was that scandal about the stabbing of that captain, even if, as Messire Gringoire says, it was all a mistake… That hardly looks good!"

"But she is a good girl, I promise you. She was tempted, but unlike me, she didn't fall."

"Hm," said Louise, shaking her head, "that may be the trouble with her! Pride, pride, the worst of sins…"

A little later, Pierre led Esméralda back into the house. She looked subdued and red around the eyes and nose – as did her mother. They embraced wordlessly. A temporary truce, then…

"I'm sorry if I'm not the sort of mother you wanted," Pâquette said softly. "But I can try, now, if you'll let me."

"It was the little shoes," the girl said. "The one I carried – it looked fit for a princess!

"I made those shoes for you myself, with love. Every stitch and every bead. What I had to do to earn them, and all the other finery I dressed you in – yes, be ashamed of me if you will, but I didn't want you to have to go the same road. It was to be fine lovers and a finer husband for you, my dear!"

"It's just that I always hoped… I mean, if I were noble-born, even bastard-wise, I could marry one, couldn't I?"

"And why ever would you be wanting to do that, when you've got a good, sweet lad like our Pierre here? Even if he has no proper trade – yet."

Pierre winced at the barbs in her words, even as he was glad to hear her praise him.

"Mother, there are stories I need to tell you…" Esméralda whispered.

* Pâquette has adapted a stanza from an old reverdie or spring song, Voulez vous que je vous chant, changing 'mon' and 'ma' to 'ton' and 'ta', in order to address it to her daughter:

The nightingale's your father,
Who sings on branching tree,
In woods that grow so high.
The siren is your mother,
Who sings in salty sea,
The steepest shore hard by.

To be continued: A case of mistaken identity…