The Madonna of Notre Dame Read Online Free PDF Page B

going home, his head buzzing and his body weary. In the square, amid idle tourists, Eiffel Tower trinket sellers, and gypsy beggars, the woman whom guards and sacristans nicknamed Madame Pipi seemed to be dozing on a bench in the shade of Charlemagne’s equestrian statue. A little earlier that morning, she had been syphoned out as part of the general evacuation ordered by the cathedral rector. His thoughts still absorbed by the image of the dead young woman lying on the stone floor, Kern with his eyes had absentmindedly followed the eccentric old lady’s absurd, flowery hat. He’d seen it struggling to stay afloat above the noisy flood of tourists pushed toward the emergency exit, tossed about like a wisp of straw, desperately trying to swim against the current, losing a few plastic poppies on the way, and finally vanishing into the whirlwind funnel of the Portal of the Last Judgment.
    When the priest walked past her, she seemed to miraculously wake up from her nap. She gave him a worried look, bordering on panic, as usual, and made an unsure gesture at him. Kern reciprocated her greeting and picked up the pace. Not today. Not now. This time she’d have to wait to tell him about her apocalyptic visions, her paranoid delirium, and the satanic attacks only she had been chosen to witness, as well as the dazzling retaliations to which only the Virgin seemed to hold the secret. Kern didn’t know what kind of chaotic path could have led Madame Pipi to that permanent chair in Notre Dame, three or four yards from the Virgin of the Pillar where, every morning, she came to lay her anguish. What could she have possibly suffered that she now came to seek, like a daily fix, the benevolent gaze of the marble Madonna? Nobody among the cathedral staff knew anything, or at least not much, about the old lady with the flowery hat. They didn’t even know her name. Very few priests had heard her confession. All that could be gathered about herwas that she’d had a youth marked by a violent father; fear was her constant traveling companion, followed by solitude, then a slow descent into a kind of mental confinement, an increasing dependence on things religious, and a more and more airtight mutism from which she always seemed about to emerge but never succeeded. In other words, she suffered from the kind of—hateful as the term may be—madness that some cathedral regulars sometimes appeared to border on.
    Over the course of the eleven summers he spent neglecting his Poissy parish in order to stand in at Notre Dame during the month of August, Father Kern had had the time to get to know these cathedral strays. In that respect, it was probably not very different from the Middle Ages: the cathedral doors were open all day to those damaged by life, those who couldn’t find their place in a brutal world reserved for the strong, a world they’d been hurled into by an accident of birth, and who, in their search for a bubble of comfort or illusion, had found refuge in this huge church at the heart of Île de la Cité. There were quite a few of them, men and women, who, every morning, as soon as the cathedral opened, would go into the nave, to a chair they’d abandoned the day before, and stay there until evening, impervious to the army of tourists invading the aisles. These strays seemed to float between two worlds, staring into space or at a Virgin, a figure of Christ, or a candle, for hours on end. Nobody would ever think of moving them. Sometimes, you had to gently hush them when they entered into direct communication with God or Mary, and engaged in an overly loud conversation. And every so often, you had to take a rag and wipe up the floor under their chairs.
    This time, however, Father Kern was going home and his heart would be, like the cathedral doors, exceptionally shut for a few hours.
    On the suburban train taking him back to Poissy, he tried to put some order in his thoughts. First, there was the haunting image of the girl lying on