10: The Virgin & the Harlot

Mea mecum ludit
virginitas,
mea me detrudit
simplicitas.

(My virginity
plays games with me,
my innocence
undoes me.)

Anon. 12-13C, Tempus est iocundum (Carmina Burana MS)

To Djali's barely concealed delight (expressed through bleats which only Pierre could rightly interpret), the 'fatted calf' slain in celebration for her humans was the noisiest of the old hens with whom she was forced to lodge. She had ceased laying, and had thus outlived her usefulness.

Pâquette helped Sister Geneviève make a fine blancmange(1) of the bird, with almonds and rice. It crossed her mind that if she were a hen, she would be strangled for the pot, too – old and barren. Years of fasting had stopped her monthly courses long ago. What semblance of a figure she had owed less to nature than to the pads and bandages with which Sister Louise dressed her ulcers. And yet she was too young to accept hagdom: why were grace and beauty wasted on the likes of Agnès, who lacked the wit to use them to best advantage?

She stirred the simmering mixture.

"When it's ready, would you take a bowl up to Monsieur the Archdeacon?" Sister Geneviève asked. "It's very good and nourishing for invalids. And I'm sure it'll make a pleasant change for him to have someone his own age to sit with him. Catherine can come downstairs, then, and see to old Geoffroy."

An odd look flickered across Pâquette's eyes. "The archdeacon?"

"Why ever not, Sister Gudule? It's not as if you're strangers."

"That's true enough: he used to ask me for prayers at my cell – for years now. I remember him when he had hair!"

"Now, now! He's still got a bit! And he'd have more if he wasn't a priest!" Geneviève laughed.

"Black hair. As black as mine was, too," Pâquette said.

"I can't say I ever really noticed the colour… Poor man, he's suffered so much lately!"

More than you know, she thought.

With a coverlet over his knees, and his back supported by bolsters and pillows, Claude lay on the settle in front of the fireplace. Sister Catherine and Mother Sibylle had supported him in his first faltering steps across the room, unsteady as a newborn foal. He despised himself for his bodily weakness, his helplessness, on top of all his moral failings. How long would it be before he could climb the stairs again to his laboratory in the North Tower? How long before he could again approach the Great Work with the necessary purity of spirit?

Since Father Thierry had brought him his Book of Hours from his rooms in the cloister, he spent even more of his time in prayer. He contemplated Mother Sibylle's anguished, angular crucifix: its grimacing mouth reproached him. He remembered the words of Saint John Chrysostom: "The root, and the flower, too, of virginity is a crucified life"(2), and regretted that he no longer had the strength to mortify his flesh.

Someone tapped on the door.

"Come in!" Claude said, wearily.

Sister Catherine let the visitor in. It was a skinny woman in linen cap and plain gown – a new house-servant or a novice, he assumed – bearing a couple of bowls of food on a tray.

"Thank you, sister."

The women spoke quietly to each other: a simple hand-over of duties. Then, Sister Catherine went out. He heard her footsteps on the stairs.

Still the other stood, hesitant, in the doorway. Apart from Madame Roland's antique crucifix in her cell – with its stylised, almost boneless limbs, quite unlike the one here above the bed – Pâquette had not been this close to so under-clad a man for fifteen years. A handsome one, too. She gathered her nerves.

She stepped forward, forcing a smile, which showed the spaces between her teeth. "I've brought you some blancmange, monsieur: Sister Geneviève thought it would do you good!"

"I don't deserve all this attention…"

"Of course you do, monsieur."

He said a short grace over the tray. She added the Lord's Prayer in very bad Latin – obviously learnt by rote years ago – accidentally omitting a negative: "et nos inducas in tentationem". He did not have the heart to correct her, since she seemed quite fervent. (A later age would call it a Freudian slip.)

Then, she perched on the edge of the settle beside him, and helped him manage the spoon. His arms were weak, and his shoulder joints painful.

"Are you still very sore?"

He nodded.

"It's a miracle you weren't killed."

"No, a pity."

"Don't be silly. I'm glad you're alive."

"You're too kind."

And she was kind: one arm around his back, the other supporting his arm. He ate as much as he could: more than he had managed for a few days. She must have been a good mother, he thought.

"There! That's well done, monsieur! I'll have mine now, if it's not gone cold!"

He watched her closely while she ate. At first, with her grey hair sticking out from her cap, her missing teeth, and stiff-jointed movements, he had thought her past fifty, but he realised he was wrong. Her features were fine; the skin, drawn tight over the bones, was not much lined. Her eyes were large, with long, dark lashes. She was, like himself, in her prime, but had been ill. She had been a beauty.

This disturbed him. He felt safe with old women: below middle-age, he feared losing control emotionally and bodily. That was why he had shunned Madame de Beaujeu in December: he could not trust his own flesh near a beautiful young woman – even the king's daughter.

"I don't think I've seen you before, and yet I know you… your voice… Are you one of the sisters here?"

"Sort of. I've been here as long as you have. Nearly three months."

"That's strange…"

He knew that he had seen her before, but when or where? Memories nagged at him: incense, prayers, old Bishop Chartier in his cope… And then he thought of Esméralda in prison, gaunt and ashen: a certain tilt of the head, a curve of the lips. Perhaps he had been ill far longer than he realised, and she was Esméralda, grown older; or perhaps his obsession with the dancer was deceiving him, inscribing her features on the face of a stranger.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"In the world, Pâquette Guybertaut, called 'Chantefleurie'," she answered. "In religion, Sister Gudule. You used to ask me to pray for you. Don't you remember?"

"From the Tour Roland? Forgive me," he said. "I had not expected – You look different."

She chuckled. "Clean, you mean. And with clothes on. Proper clothes, that is, not that hair-shirt. Mind, Geneviève took half my skin off with it. After fifteen years!"

Yes, it must have been fifteen years, he thought, not long after his ordination. He had attended Bishop Chartier at the ceremony when she was walled in, as one dead to this world: a grief-crazed girl with long black hair and wild black eyes. Again, that thought…

"Esméralda."

"I am her mother. But her name's Agnès."

"Yes, yes. So Gringoire told me."

"I know," she said bluntly. "I want to talk to you about her, monsieur. There's a lot for us to talk about."

Oh dear God… He braced himself for an onslaught of accusations, to which he could only plead guilty. Attempted abduction: yes. Attempted rape: yes – if he had known how, in the grip of delirium. Leaving her to face torture and death for his own crime: yes. Even if she was a mere fraud, as Gringoire had said, a cheap, gaudy creature of coloured glass and tinsel, not the Tabula Smaragdina, he should have known better…

"If you wish to avenge yourself upon me, sister, I shall not prevent you," he said quietly.

"Avenge what, monsieur?"

"I have greatly wronged your daughter."

"No more than my daughter has greatly wronged you!"

Claude looked confused. This was not what was meant to happen; not how a devout and devoted mother ought to respond to the man who had almost destroyed her daughter's virtue, if not her life.

Pâquette laid her hand gently on his shoulder. He flinched, and so she drew back, thinking she had caused him pain; she had, but not physically.

"She won't apologise to you, but I shall," she said. "She's treated you cruelly, and I'm sorry for that. I didn't bring her up; if I had, I'd be ashamed to call her mine. And even the gypsies should have taught her better sense!"

"What do you mean?"

"For a man like you, to lower yourself so – to throw your heart and soul at her feet, to be trampled on, and her caring for no-one but a cheapskate rake of a soldier! It's a shame, monsieur! And it shames me!"

Moving his arm awkwardly, he rubbed his brow. "I – I don't understand…"

"I've tried to talk good sense into her: I've told her it was madness to refuse such a fine, learned gentleman, but she won't have it!"

"Then you're not angry with me?"

She shrugged. "Well, after a fashion, monsieur. Your manners could stand more polish where women are concerned. Nobles and truands alike may steal girls off the street, but I'd have expected better of a great scholar! You'd have had my blessing to court her properly, if you'd sought it. Mind, I'd have warned you plain that you were wasting your time on such a witless jade – which it pains me to say, being her mother! Why, she even looked down her nose at your friend Messire Gringoire, even though he is her husband of sorts."

"But… I'm a priest."

She assessed him professionally. His sufferings had only intensified his striking looks: the high cheekbones, the thin, straight nose – an ascetic face, but for those passionate eyes and delicately sensual lips. And, just as she had imagined, without his cassock, his body was well-formed: too thin at present, but broad-shouldered, and with long legs outlined by the fall of the coverlet. A pity that his chest, left bare by his unlaced chemise, and smeared with ointment, was so terribly scabbed and scarred. "Old and ugly"? Oh, Agnès, she thought, damn you for driving him into this madness…

"You're a man."

He felt like a beast being valued at a livestock market. "And you are an anchoress," he reminded her.

"Well, I was, until those wretched soldiers tore my cell apart! The front wall's a pile of rubble. I can't go back. And I won't, for God and His Mother have granted me my prayers and given me back my daughter. I must thank you for that, monsieur, even if she can be a trial to me."

He gave a bitter half-smile. "Nothing could have been further from my intention!"

"Whether you meant it or not, you brought her to me. That was God's will!"

"But I meant for her to hang – that I'd be free of her torment! Don't you see? I made her choose: the gallows or me. She chose the gallows. She even put her arms around it!" Esméralda clasping the gibbet – Esméralda gripped in the anchoress's claws: these were the last events he remembered before his fall.

Pâquette muttered something that sounded like "damn fool", but Claude did not catch the endings to be sure whether she meant him or the girl. "Well, yes, I know what she's like: I hid her in my cell, but even then she nearly got us both killed, calling for that wretched captain!"

He groaned.

She continued: "And you should've seen the commotion – the guards, and Henriet Cousin with the noose all ready, and Monsieur Tristan and the Provost! I feared they'd kill me, too! I've never known a girl so stubborn – worse than her goat!" She shook her head. "And for her to spurn a man like you!"

He trembled like a snared bird. "But I am a priest. And I have committed terrible sins. Mortal sins. I could not confess them."

"Oh, Agnès has told me all about it."

"– All?"

"All that she would, and I can fairly guess what she's kept to herself. You mustn't fret! I know you didn't succeed with her."

"That's not the point. I tried."

"Aye – when you were off your head with a raging fever!"

"But even if I were not… I had visions of her in my sleep, tormenting my flesh so that – I should have confessed it – if you wake and find pleasure in the sin, you are meant to confess it – but I dared not! I've laid sinful hands on the holy Body and Blood of Our Lord; performed the sacrifice of the Mass in a state of sin, stained to the soul by the night's impurity, by the memory of lustful dreams! It is blasphemy!"

Pâquette pursed her lips, and sucked in her already sunken cheeks.

He continued: "I know that you, too, have struggled with demons in your cell; I've heard you crying out against them, seen you scourge yourself. But you know, I suppose, that there are demons that come in female form – succubuses? It must have been one of them that took her form. They lie with a man: they steal his seed, his very essence, in the night…"

She compressed her lips still further. Claude thought it was disapproval; in fact, she was trying to suppress what would have been her filthiest laugh. If he truly believed that, he was more innocent or ignorant than she had imagined. At last, with a choking sound, she got the words out: "No, they don't."

"What do you mean?"

"Monsieur… How to say… When problems – ahem! – arise at night, it's… it's not demons. Well, not usually."

"How do you know?"

She raised an eyebrow. "You do know how I made a living, before –?"

"Yes, but…"

"It's not demons: trust me, monsieur. It's nothing unnatural."

"Are you sure?"

She nodded. "You really are a virgin, aren't you?"

He coloured faintly, and sounded defensive. "Why do you ask? Is it to mock me?"

Pâquette shook her head. She had done her share of initiating youths, so that they knew what to do in the marriage-bed. "Not at all. But it seems to me you don't know your own body very well."

"I've studied medicine and surgery."

"Not in that way. I mean, you fear your body. You didn't understand what she was making you feel. And that frightens you."

"It's sin that frightens me. I've tried to hide from women – as Jerome advises, 'I flee to make sure I be not overcome'(3) – but the thoughts – Even when I sleep! If these are not demons of lust in woman's form, sent to tempt me, then what –?"

"They're not. You're a man: most men think about women and love-making, day or night. And sometimes the thinking or dreaming fools their bodies into acting as if a woman were really with them. You're still young and, until all this daft business" – she waved her hand over his wounded breast – "you were healthy enough, I think. So it would happen to you just the same as to any other young man. Except most other young men would just go out and get themselves a girl when they need one."

"I was tempted."

"Sending your bell-ringer boy after her? Well, that was plain foolishness, wasn't it, using him to do your wooing? Any woman with eyes in her head would run a mile from his face! Not from yours, though…"

He shrank back into his pillows. "Temptation leads to fall, leads to sin… It is as much of a sin to commit adultery in one's heart, as in the flesh: I betrayed my vows to our Holy Mother Church."

The adage that crossed Pâquette's mind at this point was that one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb: if to sin in thought were as bad as to sin in deed, then the deed was preferable, as it at least afforded some pleasure at the time and sweet memories after, and did not compound the offence with hypocrisy. She had come to this conclusion over twenty years ago, and its logic had survived years of meditation and agonising penance.

"But there's no redemption without sin. If the serpent hadn't tempted Eve, nor she Adam, there would have been no cause for Christ to come to redeem us, would there?"

"It's not that simple. Tread warily lest you fall into heresy, sister: theology is a dangerous subject for the unschooled!"

"But what about the Prodigal Son? Wasn't he loved and rewarded more, after all his rambling and whoring, than the brother who stayed at home, being good, who had learned nothing?"

This struck a vulnerable spot: he thought immediately of Jehan. If only he could have his prodigal little brother back, faults and vices and all, golden curls and laughter… "But sometimes he is lost beyond recall."

"But don't you see? I was a great sinner, too, in deed, not just in thought. I got a child in my sin, and I loved her dearly, but the good Lord had her taken from me, so that I would be led to repent. And so I did my penance, so now, thanks to you, I've got her back!"

"But it really isn't that simple!"

"Of course it is! Vain little fool though she may be, she's still mine, and I'm thankful to have her back, for I was sure those witches had roasted her like a milk-pig! You should have seen the changeling they left me in her stead! God's judgement, no doubt, for my being too vain of her beauty, but it was a right devil's brat!"

"A changeling?" Claude had not heard this part of her story before. He was curious, and, in truth, he wanted to distract her so that she did not keep looking at him so disconcertingly, as if she could see through his chemise, or talking about unseemly matters.

"Yes. It was a boy-child or, rather, a boy-imp! My Agnès was but fourteen months old, but he must have been four years old at least, for he'd teeth, and prattled in some heathen tongue. Hideous he was, all crook-backed and rickety and one-eyed, with red hair like Judas Iscariot! Oh, I was mad with grief, and even madder to see that in my pretty babe's place!"

Claude knitted his brows. "And where was this?"

"In Reims, monsieur."

"Reims?" Bishop Chartier had told him that Quasimodo had been sent to the foundling bed by the Archbishop of Reims (in those days, Monseigneur Juvénal des Ursins). Surely there could not have been more than one such foundling of that age there that spring?

"Yes, monsieur. What of it?"

"It is fate… A strange fate…"

"What are you talking about?"

"The little gypsy boy. A hunchback, with red hair and crooked legs, you say?"

"Yes."

"And with one eye?"

"As good as: the other wasn't formed right, and there was some sort of wart over it… I can see him as clear as it were yesterday, squirming around on the floor, squalling and shrieking! I doubt he was quite right in his head, either. I'm surprised he'd not been drowned at birth, but they must have made money from him begging, when he was smaller and less rowdy. Still, he must be long dead by now: children like that don't make old bones."

"No. If it's the same boy, he still lives. I know. You see, there was a child of that description sent from Reims for display as a foundling here at Notre Dame. He was adopted."

"Well I never! Who'd be fool enough to do that?"

Claude sighed. "Me."

"But you're about my age, aren't you? Not much more than a boy yourself then!"

"Barely twenty: I'd needed a dispensation to be ordained! But I was passing the foundling bed after Mass, and saw some vowesses – not these sisters, but Haudriettes – poking and prodding the poor mite. They were talking about burning him alive. And so I took the him home with me. It was Quasimodo Sunday, so he got a name from the feast."

"Quasimodo the bell-ringer? Your bell-ringer? But everyone says you grew him in a glass bottle, with your alchemy!"

"What? Oh, I suppose he is something of a homunculus! – But no, I found him at Notre Dame, and raised him, and taught him to speak French, and how to read a little. When the bells took his hearing and still more of his wits, just five or six years past, I taught him to speak again, with hand-gestures. I devised the system myself."

Pâquette felt a brief spasm of shame at mentally undressing the archdeacon. For all his tormented desires, he had real saintliness in him, a measure of virtue that she could never attain. In her cell, there had been a stone wall and iron bars between her and the physical reality of men, her thoughts alone to torment her. But what had she done? She had prayed, yes – and prayer was necessary to the world, to intercede for the living, and to help the dead out of Purgatory. But she had performed no other acts of mercy: not fed or clothed the poor, not mothered the orphan. Not for the first time, she wondered if the good Lord had left her the crippled changeling as a test of her compassion, which, in the selfishness of grief, she had failed. However, like Saint Martin with the beggar, Dom Claude had done all that a good Christian should. Still, he ought not to have such eyes, and olive skin, and a lean young body…

"Well, that's a miracle!" she said "And my girl gave him water, when he was in the pillory! But knowing no better, I cursed her for it then…"

"It was I who should have been in the pillory, not he," Claude said.

"Don't say that!"

"But it's true! I scourged myself all that night… and most nights thereafter."

"Oh, I've done that, too, for years!" she said. "And with the hair-shirt on top, you should see the state of my ti– Well, no, you shouldn't! – But then, I've sinned with my body, whereas you – you are a good man! Only a good man would care for such a child, and teach him –"

"A good man would not have let him be humiliated before the mob for his own sins. A good man would not let those he loved suffer torture in his stead: him for her abduction, her for stabbing the captain…"

"You've suffered more than enough torture for both, by the look of you!"

"It's as I deserve. Quasimodo's all I have left, now. My own brother died in the fighting. I should not have let it come to this!"

"But there's Messire Gringoire, too, isn't there? He visits you. He loves you as a brother."

He sighed. "Ah, yes… Pierre!"

"You should hear how highly he speaks of you, of all the lessons you gave him! Agnès scolds him for it! He's a clever boy: I hope he'll amount to something, and keep her decently. Not all this cat and goat business. That's just not right!"

Claude nodded. "I've said the same to him myself! It's a waste of his talent!"

"I've asked him to teach me what you taught him, but he says he's such a scatterbrain, he can't remember half of it! But so far, we've talked about philosophy and goats; or maybe it was the philosophy of goats? It's hard to tell with him."

"That must be the tragic school of philosophy."

"Why do you say that, monsieur?" she asked in all innocence.

He smiled wryly. "He hasn't been teaching you Greek, then?"(4)

"No, monsieur, although I know the Kyrie's Greek, isn't it? But I'd like to know Latin properly, for my prayers. And I'd like to know… oh, lots of things!"

"For what reason?"

"If you let a bird out of a cage, monsieur, it will want to fly. It needs to know how to fly, or you ought to keep it in the cage."

He sighed. "It seems to me that the sisters are better placed for teaching all you should need, as a woman: how to keep house again, to tend the sick, to sew –"

"Oh, I've always known how to sew! That was my first trade! Fine needlework, beading, braiding, to lay gold on a seam… I sewed and beaded those sweet little pink shoes for Agnès. I mended your cassock that you'd torn in your fall, and put the buttons back on. I didn't know it was yours at first; mind, I should have guessed, with you being so tall! That was easy, though: women's work – child's play."

Women's work… Child's play… Common turns of phrase, which he knew she must have used in ignorance – and yet they gave him a start. In alchemy, they have a deeper, symbolic significance: the simple but repetitive processes of dissolution and coagulation. Solve et coagula, as Miriam of Alexandria, 'Maria the Prophetess' or 'the Jewess', enjoined: solve et coagula, over and over again, to refine the base prima materia.

"Thank you for that," he said, somewhat distracted.

She smiled. "I hope you're well enough to wear it again soon," she said, while thinking, but not too soon: she enjoyed the view through his chemise. "I'll let you get some rest now, monsieur, but you mustn't be afraid, whatever you dream. There's nothing wrong with you – nothing at all. No demons."

A strange woman, he thought: alarmingly garrulous, and just plain alarming in some respects; not much education, but no fool. And they were bound together by their children. Child's play, again… Solve et coagula…

"Where have you been, mother?" Pierre asked, with mock annoyance, when Pâquette came downstairs with the tray. "Our celebratory feast, and the sisters spirit you away!"

"I took my dinner with Monsieur of Josas," Pâquette replied. "And we talked."

"About what?" asked Esméralda, apprehensive.

"Our children, for the most part."

"You talked about me – with him?"

"Yes. I told him how sorry I was for all that had happened, and how unkind you'd been, for you have used him uncommonly ill! Poor lad! He looks so frail – and he used to be so fine-looking!"

"– And what do you mean by 'our children'? Who else?"

"His bell-ringer, your friend Quasimodo. Here's a funny thing, Agnès: the ugly little crippled boy the gypsies left in your place got sent to Paris as a foundling, and Dom Claude took him in! In a way, it makes him your brother, of sorts."

Pierre gasped: "Quasimodo! My adopted brother-in-law! Who'd have thought it?"

Esméralda turned pale.

Next chapter: Meet the Pradons…

(1) Blancmange: in the Middle Ages, a savoury chicken-and-rice dish, like a risotto or thick soup, regarded as good invalid food (the chicken was often chopped finely or minced).

(2) John Chrysostom, De Virginitate.

(3) Jerome, Contra Vigilantium.

(4) Claude is punning at Pâquette's expense: the Greek root of the word 'tragedy' literally means 'goat-song'.