He watched her as she wandered the sanctuary, her bare feet padding silently over the centuries-old flagstones.  She clasped her hands over her heart, her midnight dark eyes gazing up at the vast expanse over her head and at the splendid rose window.  Although he had seen this expression of awed adoration in many a traveler new to Notre Dame cathedral, Claude followed this ragged gypsy with his eyes as intently as she studied the church.

            La Esmeralda… that was what the Parisians called her.  It was Spanish for emerald if he recalled correctly.  Appropriate, he decided, given the gathers of green cloth that made up her somewhat short skirt.  Her brown skin glowed darkly among the lily-skinned parishioners, like a splendid raven among common pigeons.  The metal beads that hung in her hair glistened in the multi-colored light from the stained glass, adding a thousand new hues to that sunlight-sparkled hair.  The dark ringlets reached to her waist and he found himself tracing the outline with two trembling fingers.  The offending hand was snatched back instantly and cradled against his chest as if burned.

            His eyes burned as he watched, entranced, like a moth drawn to the deadly flame.  His soul trembled to its very depths, a thousand forbidden thoughts crossed and revolved in his mind.  He had seen her dance and had wondered if her body was as graceful and tempting when unclothed.  Visions of her lying on his bed, sated and pleased by the lust that coursed through his veins even now… her eyes smoky with the same yearning that burned in his own dark eyes.

            Oh, such deliciously sinful thoughts…   thoughts that made him recoil and enticed him all at once.  Twenty years of self-imposed celibacy had not been effortless, certainly… but never had his mettle been tested like this before.  This young girl had waked something within his soul, something that had lain dormant and peaceful until she passed beneath his gaze.  Now… this spirit inside of him was alert and hungry.

            He tore himself away from the edge of the balcony, slowing stepping back until the gypsy was hidden from his view.  He leaned heavily against the cold stone wall behind him, panting as though he had just run across the entirety of his city.  Luck was with him in that no one was about on that level, either near him or across the vast cathedral from him.  No one could see that this cold and calculating priest of Notre Dame, the only one who treated his own sins as harshly, or harsher than those of his congregation… above all of that power and prestige… he was still a man at his most basic level.

            This was lunacy!  His brain railed and screamed until he felt as though he'd been pummeling his head against the balustrade.  He was a priest!  And not just any priest, the blessed archdeacon of Notre Dame cathedral!  How could he possibly be thinking such licentious, sordid thoughts?  How could he let that willful, albeit beautiful slip of a girl bewitch him into such torrid and tempting fantasies?  He would not tolerate such waywardness from any of the lesser priests… he would not accept it in himself either!

            Jaw set although his eyes still smoldered with unfulfilled thirst, he pulled himself away from the wall and hurried to his private chambers.  Bothering only to draw the bolts on the door, he all but ripped his cassock from his body and seized the oft-used, but recently abandoned cat of nine tails that laid inconspicuously at the side of his desk.

            "Thou shalt not!" he growled through clenched teeth as the first blow cracked across the skin of his back.

            It wasn't long before blood flowed freely down his tortured back, streaming in rivulets across the pale flesh from the lacerations.  Still, his hand never paused for rest either from exertion or pain.  Only when he could no longer wield the whip with enough force to do damage did he stop and collapse forward on the cold stone his cell floor, his breath coming in harsh gasps tinged with moans.  His back felt as though it had been run through a meat grinder; a raw, bloody mess.

            But the aching desire that had filled his veins over an hour earlier had not abated.  Even as the merciless whip had painted red stripes on his back, he could not rid his mind's eye of that gypsy girl.  Truth be told, the more fiercely he chastised himself, the more sordid his fantasies became.  He was plagued by smoky images of the girl tied to his bed, her naked body glowing dusky in the moonlight, her eyes beseeching him to come and take her before releasing her.  In reverse, he was restrained to that same bed, tied in his sleep by the gypsy's competent hands.  She emerged upon him from the deepest shadows, teasing his resisting flesh with her breath and tongue, making him beg for her body in release.  A hundred wicked images that made his blood boil and his heart thunder in his chest.

            He stumbled to his plain, flat bed, falling onto its roughly-blanketed surface and burying his face in the feather-filled pillow.  The flesh of his back screamed for treatment… but other flesh screamed for a different sort of relief.  It was this pain that the virgin priest took down with him into oblivion, only one word on his lips.

            "Esmeralda…"