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-BOOK NINTH. CHAPTER V.
THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR.
In the meantime, public minor had informed the archdeacon of the miraculous manner in
which the gypsy had been saved. When he learned it, he knew not what his
sensations were.
He had reconciled himself to la Esmeralda's death.
In that matter he was tranquil; he had reached the bottom of personal suffering.
The human heart (Dora Claude had meditated upon these matters) can contain only a
certain quantity of despair.
When the sponge is saturated, the sea may pass over it without causing a single drop
more to enter it.
Now, with la Esmeralda dead, the sponge was soaked, all was at an end on this earth for
Dom Claude.
But to feel that she was alive, and Phoebus also, meant that tortures, shocks,
alternatives, life, were beginning again. And Claude was weary of all this.
When he heard this news, he shut himself in his cell in the cloister.
He appeared neither at the meetings of the chapter nor at the services.
He closed his door against all, even against the bishop.
He remained thus immured for several weeks. He was believed to be ill.
And so he was, in fact.
What did he do while thus shut up? With what thoughts was the unfortunate man
contending? Was he giving final battle to his
formidable passion?
Was he concocting a final plan of death for her and of perdition for himself?
His Jehan, his cherished brother, his spoiled child, came once to his door,
knocked, swore, entreated, gave his name half a score of times.
Claude did not open.
He passed whole days with his face close to the panes of his window.
From that window, situated in the cloister, he could see la Esmeralda's chamber.
He often saw herself with her goat, sometimes with Quasimodo.
He remarked the little attentions of the ugly deaf man, his obedience, his delicate
and submissive ways with the gypsy.
He recalled, for he had a good memory, and memory is the tormentor of the jealous, he
recalled the singular look of the bellringer, bent on the dancer upon a
certain evening.
He asked himself what motive could have impelled Quasimodo to save her.
He was the witness of a thousand little scenes between the gypsy and the deaf man,
the pantomime of which, viewed from afar and commented on by his passion, appeared
very tender to him.
He distrusted the capriciousness of women.
Then he felt a jealousy which he could never have believed possible awakening
within him, a jealousy which made him redden with shame and indignation: "One
might condone the captain, but this one!"
This thought upset him. His nights were frightful.
As soon as he learned that the gypsy was alive, the cold ideas of spectre and tomb
which had persecuted him for a whole day vanished, and the flesh returned to goad
him.
He turned and twisted on his couch at the thought that the dark-skinned maiden was so
near him.
Every night his delirious imagination represented la Esmeralda to him in all the
attitudes which had caused his blood to boil most.
He beheld her outstretched upon the poniarded captain, her eyes closed, her
beautiful bare throat covered with Phoebus's blood, at that moment of bliss
when the archdeacon had imprinted on her
pale lips that kiss whose burn the unhappy girl, though half dead, had felt.
He beheld her, again, stripped by the savage hands of the torturers, allowing
them to bare and to enclose in the boot with its iron screw, her tiny foot, her
delicate rounded leg, her white and supple knee.
Again he beheld that ivory knee which alone remained outside of Torterue's horrible
apparatus.
Lastly, he pictured the young girl in her shift, with the rope about her neck,
shoulders bare, feet bare, almost nude, as he had seen her on that last day.
These images of voluptuousness made him clench his fists, and a shiver run along
his spine.
One night, among others, they heated so cruelly his *** and priestly blood, that
he bit his pillow, leaped from his bed, flung on a surplice over his shirt, and
left his cell, lamp in hand, half naked, wild, his eyes aflame.
He knew where to find the key to the red door, which connected the cloister with the
church, and he always had about him, as the reader knows, the key of the staircase
leading to the towers.