Then she felt her blood boil in her head, and a remnant of indignation flashed up in that soul already benumbed and cold.
The archdeacon approached her slowly; even in that extremity, she beheld him cast an eye sparkling with sensuality, jealousy, and desire, over her exposed form. Then he said aloud,-"Young girl, have you asked God's pardon for your faults and shortcomings?"
He bent down to her ear, and added (the spectators supposed that he was receiving her last confession): "Will you have me? I can still save you!"
She looked intently at him: "Begone, demon, or I will denounce you!"
He gave vent to a horrible smile: "You will not be believed. You will only add a scandal to a crime. Reply quickly! Will you have me?"
"What have you done with my Phoebus?"
"He is dead!" said the priest.
At that moment the wretched archdeacon raised his head mechanically and beheld at the other end of the Place, in the balcony of the Gondelaurier mansion, the captain standing beside Fleur-de-Lys. He staggered, passed his hand across his eyes, looked again, muttered a curse, and all his features were violently contorted.
"Well, die then!" he hissed between his teeth. "No one shall have you." Then, raising his hand over the gypsy, he exclaimed in a funereal voice:--"~I nunc, anima anceps, et sit tibi Deus misenicors~!"* * "Go now, soul, trembling in the balance, and God have mercy upon thee."
This was the dread formula with which it was the custom to conclude these gloomy ceremonies. It was the signal agreed upon between the priest and the executioner.
The crowd knelt.
"~Kyrie eleison~,"* said the priests, who had remained beneath the arch of the portal.
* "Lord have mercy upon us."
"~Kyrie eleison~," repeated the throng in that murmur which runs over all heads, like the waves of a troubled sea.
"Amen," said the archdeacon.
He turned his back on the condemned girl, his head sank upon his breast once more, he crossed his hands and rejoined his escort of priests, and a moment later he was seen to disappear, with the cross, the candles, and the copes, beneath the misty arches of the cathedral, and his sonorous voice was extinguished by degrees in the choir, as he chanted this verse of despair,-"~Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt."* * "All thy waves and thy billows have gone over me."
At the same time, the intermittent clash of the iron butts of the beadles' halberds, gradually dying away among the columns of the nave, produced the effect of a clock hammer striking the last hour of the condemned.