Chapter V: The Key to the Red Door

In the meantime, public rumor 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 (Dom 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 Phœbus 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 Phœbus’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 virgin 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.