"Horror!" exclaimed the young girl, hiding her face in her hands. "My Phoebus! Oh, this is hell!"
"Do you persist in your denial?" demanded the president coldly.
"Do I deny it?" she said with terrible accents; and she rose with flashing eyes.
The president continued squarely,-"Then how do you explain the facts laid to your charge?"
She replied in a broken voice,-"I have already told you. I do not know. 'Twas a priest, a priest whom I do not know; an infernal priest who pursues me!"
"That is it," retorted the judge; "the surly monk."
"Oh, gentlemen! have mercy! I am but a poor girl--"
"Of Egypt," said the judge.
Master Jacques Charmolue interposed sweetly,-"In view of the sad obstinacy of the accused, I demand the application of the torture."
"Granted," said the president.
The unhappy girl quivered in every limb. But she rose at the command of the men with partisans, and walked with a tolerably firm step, preceded by Charmolue and the priests of the officiality, between two rows of halberds, towards a medium-sized door which suddenly opened and closed again behind her, and which produced upon the grief-stricken Gringoire the effect of a horrible mouth which had just devoured her.
When she disappeared, they heard a plaintive bleating; it was the little goat mourning.
The sitting of the court was suspended. A counsellor having remarked that the gentlemen were fatigued, and that it would be a long time to wait until the torture was at an end, the president replied that a magistrate must know how to sacrifice himself to his duty.
"What an annoying and vexatious hussy," said an aged judge, "to get herself put to the question when one has not supped!"