rator of the king, having emptied upon a
floor a certain bag filled with movable letters, which Djali wore round
his neck, they beheld the goat extract with his hoof from the scattered
alphabet the fatal name of Phoebus. The witchcraft of which the captain
had been the victim appeared irresistibly demonstrated, and in the eyes
of all, the gypsy, that ravishing dancer, who had so often dazzled
the passers-by with her grace, was no longer anything but a frightful
vampire.

However, she betrayed no sign of life; neither Djali's graceful
evolutions, nor the menaces of the court, nor the suppressed
imprecations of the spectators any longer reached her mind.

In order to arouse her, a police officer was obliged to shake her
unmercifully, and the president had to raise his voice,--"Girl, you
are of the Bohemian race, addicted to deeds of witchcraft. You, in
complicity with the bewitched goat implicated in this suit, during
the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, murdered and stabbed, in
concert with the powers of darkness, by the aid of charms and underhand
practices, a captain of the king's arches of the watch, Phoebus de
Chateaupers. Do you persist in denying it?"

"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 plai