“She had flung her arms around the officer’s neck, supplicating him with a smile shining through her tears. Her delicate throat was scratched by the rough lace. The intoxicated captain glued his burning lips on the rounded Moorish shoulders. The young girl, kneeling, her eyes looking upward, her head thrown back, quivered under the kiss. All at once, above the stooping head of Phœbus, she beheld another head, with a livid, convulsed face, wearing the look of a damned soul; near it was a hand armed with a dagger. It was the face and hand of the priest; he had burst through the door, and was there. Phœbus could not perceive him. The girl was frozen stiff and mute by the fear-inspiring apparition,—like a dove raising its head as the osprey stares over its nest with its round, unwinking eyes. She could not even utter a scream. She saw the poniard fall on Phœbus and rise smoking.
“‘Malediction!’ groaned the captain, and he fell.
“She swooned.
“As her eyes closed, as feeling vanished from her, she fancied she felt impressed on her lips a print of fire, a kiss more burning than the executioner’s red-hot branding-iron.
“When she came to herself, she was surrounded by the soldiers of the watch. They carried away the captain, bathed in his blood; the priest had disappeared (the window at the end of the room, looking on the river, was wide open); a cloak was picked up which they supposed belonged to the officer, and she heard it said around her, ‘She is a witch that has stabbed a captain.’”
The thrilling narrative proceeds with the imprisonment of the poor girl, the false confession of murder and witchcraft extorted by the terrible torture of rack and screw and pincer, the visit of the archdeacon, and his extraordinary confession of maddening love. In the course of his long and fervid and impetuous appeal for her favor, he says:
“‘Oh, I had not foreseen the torture! Listen: I followed thee into that chamber of agony; I looked upon thy rough treatment by the torturer’s infamous hands. I saw thy foot, which to kiss and die at I would give an empire, I saw it crushed by the horrible irons which have made of living limbs raw flesh and a pool of blood. While I beheld this, I wielded under my gown a dagger, with which I furrowed my breast. At the scream thou gavest, I buried it in my flesh; look, it still bleeds.’”
“‘Oh, to love a woman, to be a priest, to be hated! to love her with all the fury of one’s soul, to be willing to give for the least of her smiles one’s blood, salvation, immortality and eternity, this life and the other; to regret not being a king, genius, emperor, archangel, that a greater slave might be at her feet; to have her mingling day and night in one’s thoughts and dreams; and to see her enamored of a soldier’s livery, and only have to offer her a priest’s coarse gown which is frightful to and detested by her! To be present with rage and jealousy while she lavishes on a despicable, empty-brained dog her treasures of love and beauty! To see that body whose sight makes you burn, that bosom so peerless, that satin flesh redden under another’s kisses! Oh, to love her arms and neck, to think of her blue veins visible through her brown skin, almost to writhe whole nights through on the pavement of one’s cell, and see all the caresses dreamed of end with the torture!’”
The priest’s nightly dreams, we are told, were dreadful. Writhing on his bed, “his delirious fancy represented Esmeralda in all the attitudes that could make blood boil in one’s veins. He saw her as when he had stabbed the captain, her white throat spotted with the blood of Phœbus, when the archdeacon had impressed on her shoulders that kiss which, though half dying then, she had felt scorch her.” One night he became so inflamed with his uncontrollable passion that he sought relief by a visit to the gipsy’s cell, to which he had access. His entrance awakened and bewildered her.