The Mother — The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

A child’s festival shoe is sweet to a mother, and terrible once the child is lost. For fifteen years the recluse of the Tour-Roland has knelt before a little rose-coloured satin shoe, all that remains of her stolen daughter. On a May morning, wheels and irons sound in the Place de Grève. She knots her hair over her ears and turns back to the shoe, crying that a mother who has lost a child no longer believes in God. She wants her daughter, not an angel.

A passing boy says a gypsy is to be hanged that day. She rushes to the air-hole. A ladder stands against the gibbet, and the hangman’s assistant fits chains rusted by the rain. The archdeacon of Josas pretends to read his breviary while his eyes return to the gallows. He will not name the prisoner at first, then agrees it is a gypsy. Paquette la Chantefleurie laughs like a hyena and curses the young gypsy of the age her daughter would be. Cold as a statue, he says this is the one she will see die, and walks away. She paces the grating in fierce joy, a caged wolf who smells her meal.