Genius, story, characters and ability to make you cry is all Victor Hugo's. I own nothing.

Once For All

{Chapter I}

Nothing Left

He uttered a violent cry, like the wretch to whom a red-hot iron is applied. 'Die, then!' said he, grinding his teeth. She saw his frightful look and strove to fly. But he seized her, shook her, threw her upon the ground, and walked rapidly toward the angle of the Tour-Roland, dragging her after him over the pavement by her fair hands.
When he had reached it he turned to her:
'Once for all, wilt thou be mine?'
She answered him with emphasis:
'No!'
Then he called in a loud voice:
'Gudule! Gudule! here's the gypsy-woman! take thy revenge!'
The young girl felt herself seized suddenly by the elbow. She looked; it was a fleshless arm extended through a loop-hole in the wall, and held her with a hand of iron. 'Hold fast!' said the priest; 'it's the gypsy-woman escaped. Do not let her go. I'm going to fetch the sergeants. Thou shalt see her hanged.' ...

Day began to dawn. An ashy gleam dimly lighted this scene, and the gibbet grew more and more distinct in the Place. On the other side, towards the bridge of Notre-Dame, the poor victim thought she heard the sound of the horsemen approaching.
'Madame!' she cried, clasping her hands and falling upon her knees… 'madame, have pity!... Let me fly, let me go. Have mercy! I do not wish to die thus!' ...

Henriet Cousin…dragged the young girl out of the cell, and her mother after her. The eyes of the mother were also closed. The sun was rising at that moment ...

They pushed [Gudule] away with brutal violence, and it was remarked that her head fell back heavily upon the ground. They raised her; she fell back again. She was dead. The hangman, who had not loosed his hold of the young girl, kept on up the ladder.

Dom Claude, however, had not retreated to the sanctity of Notre-Dame after rousing the soldiers. He felt an inexplicable force pushing him back the way he had come, back to the Grève. With no resistance left in him, he obeyed, as helpless as a child's leaf-raft on the surging waters of the Seine. Fate, it seemed, was not yet finished with him. He emerged from the shadows of the bridge houses as one bereft of will, a body without its soul.

"Proceed, Friend Henriet." It was the voice of Tristan l'Hermite. The archdeacon shrank back against the door of the nearest house as a big man in black appeared from the other side of the gibbet. He was dragging something white.

It was she.

At the sight of the young girl, life rushed again into the cold heart of the priest. All he had sacrificed, all he had suffered, all the words of love he had torn from his soul to give the gypsy only a quarter of an hour before, and all the hatred she had spit back into his face—oh, the cursed, cursed name of Phoebus! it was all for naught. She was going to die. She was going to the noose he had prepared for her.

And he would have no choice but to watch. Everything in him desired to flee from the fatal spot; but, as on the first day he had seen her he was nailed, rooted to the ground. If anything, he took one step forward; that was all. His eye, burning and feverish, followed the movement of the executioner up the permanent ladder to the gibbet. The gypsy lay motionless, draped like a silken scarf over his shoulder. The archdeacon thought she was already dead.

~o~

Henriet Cousin lowered the girl to the stone floor of the gibbet, cursing the unmanly tears that started down his cheek at the sight of the heap of sackcloth crumpled at the foot of the ladder. At the contact of the cold stone, La Esmeralda opened her eyes.

"Ah, no!" she cried, raising herself on her arms and shrinking away from the man in black. "Save me, my mother!" She let her gaze drop and searched wildly for the woman who had been clinging to her. But her mother did not answer.

"Come, little one," Henriet Cousin said, endeavoring to approach her again. "Let it be done quickly." He motioned for his assistant.

The gypsy-girl stared at him in dumb terror, as if she had forgotten why she was there. A smaller man climbed up behind the girl, dressed in a matching apron of brown and gray. Without a word he encircled the poor prisoner's waist with his wiry arm and lifted her to her feet. Henriet Cousin pulled the rope from its coil on his arm.

"No! No!" La Esmeralda struggled against the hold of the executioner's assistant; she remembered her execution; she was frantic. "Let me go! I do not want to die!"

"It is the king's will." Henriet Cousin's voice faltered. But he stretched out his hand to the young girl's head, the fatal loop suspended from his fingers. "It is the king's will," he repeated.

At that moment, La Esmeralda let her horrified glance drop from the gibbet to the Place de Grève. A few people peered out of their casements; a few more stood watching from outside the ring of Tristan l'Hermite's men. They watched, unconcerned, as if the gypsy were a young heifer bleating in the butcher's stall at the market. Some hurried on their way without even raising their gaze to the spectacle on the gibbet. Another hanging would come soon enough after this sorceress was dead, with proper merriment all around. They would watch that instead.

But there was one in the early morning light that was conscious of nothing else; the eye of the priest never left the gypsy. He was hardly aware of the drops of blood that fell from his tightly clenched fists, so absorbed he was in the last moments of La Esmeralda's earthly sojourn. Once before he had believed her dead, and he had tasted Hell; now when she could not escape her fate any more, he wanted to be there. It would be his fate as well, he reflected, for when the soul departs, how can the body live again? La Esmeralda's death would banish the evil from his heart, but it would tear the good away as well, he thought. He would have nothing left. Soulless and heartless...Dom Claude would be more dead than she.

The gypsy-girl's gaze fell at last upon the priest, his rigid figure robed in black, clutching the corner of the house as if it were an island in a tempest. The archdeacon saw fury spark in those beautiful African eyes, but he could not look away. Though it pained him more than the searing knife-wound in his side, he could not look away.

The executioner's rope slipped over her head.

La Esmeralda cried out again, drawing her hands up to tear the hempen cord from her neck. She fell to her knees before Henriet Cousin as she struggled. "Mercy, monsieur! I beg of you, let me go!" she pleaded once more. "I do not want to die!"

But he would hear no more. "Get her up," he ordered the silent man in the leather apron. "Finish it."

The gypsy girl shuddered as she felt the man's hands on her shoulders again, but she had no more strength left. All was driven from her by the terror of the rope; the eyes she lifted to the archdeacon were filled only with desperation. It was the last earthly look of one condemned to die. Her lips moved faintly. "I don't want to die!" she repeated.

Dom Claude started forward like the drowning one to whom a life line is thrown.

La Esmeralda felt rough arms bear her to the center of the platform.

"Save me!" she whispered.