“Oh!” she said in a low voice, and with a shudder, “’tis he

again! the priest!”

It was in fact, the archdeacon. On his left he had the

sub-chanter, on his right, the chanter, armed with his official

wand. He advanced with head thrown back, his eyes fixed and wide

open, intoning in a strong voice,—

“_De ventre inferi clamavi, et exaudisti vocem meam_.

“_Et projecisti me in profundum in corde maris, et flumem

circumdedit me._”[47]

At the moment when he made his appearance in the full daylight

beneath the lofty arched portal, enveloped in an ample cope of

silver barred with a black cross, he was so pale that more than

one person in the crowd thought that one of the marble bishops

who knelt on the sepulchral stones of the choir had risen and was

come to receive upon the brink of the tomb, the woman who was

about to die.

She, no less pale, no less like a statue, had hardly noticed that

they had placed in her hand a heavy, lighted candle of yellow

wax; she had not heard the yelping voice of the clerk reading the

fatal contents of the apology; when they told her to respond with

_Amen_, she responded _Amen_. She only recovered life and force

when she beheld the priest make a sign to her guards to withdraw,

and himself advance alone towards her.

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 Phœbus?”

“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

misericors!_”[48]

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_,”[49] said the priests, who had remained beneath

the arch of the portal.

“_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_.”[50]

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.

The doors of Notre-Dame remained open, allowing a view of the

empty desolate church, draped in mourning, without candles, and

without voices.

The condemned girl remained motionless in her place, waiting to

be disposed of. One of the sergeants of police was obliged to

notify Master Charmolue of the fact, as the latter, during this

entire scene, had been engaged in studying the bas-relief of the

grand portal which represents, according to some, the sacrifice

of Abraham; according to others, the philosopher’s alchemical

operation: the sun being figured forth by the angel; the fire, by

the fagot; the artisan, by Abraham.

There was considerable difficulty in drawing him away from that

contemplation, but at length he turned round; and, at a signal

which he gave, two men clad in yellow, the executioner’s

assistants, approached the gypsy to bind her hands once more.

The unhappy creature, at the moment of mounting once again the

fatal cart, and proceeding to her last halting-place, was seized,

possibly, with some poignant clinging to life. She raised her

dry, red eyes to heaven, to the sun, to the silvery clouds, cut

here and there by a blue trapezium or triangle; then she lowered

them to objects around her, to the earth, the throng, the houses;

all at once, while the yellow man was binding her elbows, she

uttered a terrible cry, a cry of joy. Yonder, on that balcony, at

the corner of the Place, she had just caught sight of him, of her

friend, her lord, Phœbus, the other apparition of her life!

The judge had lied! the priest had lied! it was certainly he, she

could not doubt it; he was there, handsome, alive, dressed in his

brilliant uniform, his plume on his head, his sword by his side!

“Phœbus!” she cried, “my Phœbus!”

And she tried to stretch towards him arms trembling with love and

rapture, but they were bound.

Then she saw the captain frown, a beautiful young girl who was

leaning against him gazed at him with disdainful lips and

irritated eyes; then Phœbus uttered some words which did not

reach her, and both disappeared precipitately behind the window

opening upon the balcony, which closed after them.

“Phœbus!” she cried wildly, “can it be you believe it?” A

monstrous thought had just presented itself to her. She

remembered that she had been condemned to death for murder

committed on the person of Phœbus de Châteaupers.

She had borne up until that moment. But this last blow was too

harsh. She fell lifeless on the pavement.

“Come,” said Charmolue, “carry her to the cart, and make an end

of it.”

No one had yet observed in the gallery of the statues of the

kings, carved directly above the arches of the portal, a strange

spectator, who had, up to that time, observed everything with

such impassiveness, with a neck so strained, a visage so hideous

that, in his motley accoutrement of red and violet, he might have

been taken for one of those stone monsters through whose mouths

the long gutters of the cathedral have discharged their waters

for six hundred years. This spectator had missed nothing that had

taken place since midday in front of the portal of Notre-Dame.

And at the very beginning he had securely fastened to one of the

small columns a large knotted rope, one end of which trailed on

the flight of steps below. This being done, he began to look on

tranquilly, whistling from time to time when a blackbird flitted

past. Suddenly, at the moment when the superintendent’s

assistants were preparing to execute Charmolue’s phlegmatic

order, he threw his leg over the balustrade of the gallery,

seized the rope with his feet, his knees and his hands; then he

was seen to glide down the façade, as a drop of rain slips down a

window-pane, rush to the two executioners with the swiftness of a

cat which has fallen from a roof, knock them down with two

enormous fists, pick up the gypsy with one hand, as a child would

her doll, and dash back into the church with a single bound,

lifting the young girl above his head and crying in a formidable

voice,—

“Sanctuary!”

This was done with such rapidity, that had it taken place at

night, the whole of it could have been seen in the space of a

single flash of lightning.

“Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” repeated the crowd; and the clapping of

ten thousand hands made Quasimodo’s single eye sparkle with joy

and pride.

This shock restored the condemned girl to her senses. She raised

her eyelids, looked at Quasimodo, then closed them again

suddenly, as though terrified by her deliverer.

Charmolue was stupefied, as well as the executioners and the

entire escort. In fact, within the bounds of Notre-Dame, the

condemned girl could not be touched. The cathedral was a place of

refuge. All temporal jurisdiction expired upon its threshold.

Quasimodo had halted beneath the great portal, his huge feet

seemed as solid on the pavement of the church as the heavy Roman

pillars. His great, bushy head sat low between his shoulders,

like the heads of lions, who also have a mane and no neck. He

held the young girl, who was quivering all over, suspended from

his horny hands like a white drapery; but he carried her with as

much care as though he feared to break her or blight her. One

would have said that he felt that she was a delicate, exquisite,

precious thing, made for other hands than his. There were moments

when he looked as if not daring to touch her, even with his

breath. Then, all at once, he would press her forcibly in his

arms, against his angular bosom, like his own possession, his

treasure, as the mother of that child would have done. His

gnome’s eye, fastened upon her, inundated her with tenderness,

sadness, and pity, and was suddenly raised filled with

lightnings. Then the women laughed and wept, the crowd stamped

with enthusiasm, for, at that moment Quasimodo had a beauty of

his own. He was handsome; he, that orphan, that foundling, that

outcast, he felt himself august and strong, he gazed in the face

of that society from which he was banished, and in which he had

so powerfully intervened, of that human justice from which he had

wrenched its prey, of all those tigers whose jaws were forced to

remain empty, of those policemen, those judges, those

executioners, of all that force of the king which he, the meanest

of creatures, had just broken, with the force of God.

And then, it was touching to behold this protection which had

fallen from a being so hideous upon a being so unhappy, a

creature condemned to death saved by Quasimodo. They were two

extremes of natural and social wretchedness, coming into contact

and aiding each other.

Meanwhile, after several moments of triumph, Quasimodo had

plunged abruptly into the church with his burden. The populace,

fond of all prowess, sought him with their eyes, beneath the

gloomy nave, regretting that he had so speedily disappeared from

their acclamations. All at once, he was seen to re-appear at one

of the extremities of the gallery of the kings of France; he

traversed it, running like a madman, raising his conquest high in

his arms and shouting: “Sanctuary!” The crowd broke forth into

fresh applause. The gallery passed, he plunged once more into the

interior of the church. A moment later, he re-appeared upon the

upper platform, with the gypsy still in his arms, still running

madly, still crying, “Sanctuary!” and the throng applauded.

Finally, he made his appearance for the third time upon the

summit of the tower where hung the great bell; from that point he

seemed to be showing to the entire city the girl whom he had

saved, and his voice of thunder, that voice which was so rarely

heard, and which he never heard himself, repeated thrice with

frenzy, even to the clouds: “Sanctuary! Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”

“Noël! Noël!” shouted the populace in its turn; and that immense

acclamation flew to astonish the crowd assembled at the Grève on

the other bank, and the recluse who was still waiting with her

eyes riveted on the gibbet.

BOOK NINTH.

CHAPTER I. DELIRIUM.

Claude Frollo was no longer in Notre-Dame when his adopted son so

abruptly cut the fatal web in which the archdeacon and the gypsy

were entangled. On returning to the sacristy he had torn off his

alb, cope, and stole, had flung all into the hands of the

stupefied beadle, had made his escape through the private door of

the cloister, had ordered a boatman of the Terrain to transport

him to the left bank of the Seine, and had plunged into the hilly

streets of the University, not knowing whither he was going,

encountering at every step groups of men and women who were

hurrying joyously towards the Pont Saint-Michel, in the hope of

still arriving in time to see the witch hung there,—pale, wild,

more troubled, more blind and more fierce than a night bird let

loose and pursued by a troop of children in broad daylight. He no

longer knew where he was, what he thought, or whether he were

dreaming. He went forward, walking, running, taking any street at

haphazard, making no choice, only urged ever onward away from the

Grève, the horrible Grève, which he felt confusedly, to be behind

him.

In this manner he skirted Mount Sainte-Geneviève, and finally

emerged from the town by the Porte Saint-Victor. He continued his

flight as long as he could see, when he turned round, the

turreted enclosure of the University, and the rare houses of the

suburb; but, when, at length, a rise of ground had completely

concealed from him that odious Paris, when he could believe

himself to be a hundred leagues distant from it, in the fields,

in the desert, he halted, and it seemed to him that he breathed

more freely.

Then frightful ideas thronged his mind. Once more he could see

clearly into his soul, and he shuddered. He thought of that

unhappy girl who had destroyed him, and whom he had destroyed. He

cast a haggard eye over the double, tortuous way which fate had

caused their two destinies to pursue up to their point of

intersection, where it had dashed them against each other without

mercy. He meditated on the folly of eternal vows, on the vanity

of chastity, of science, of religion, of virtue, on the

uselessness of God. He plunged to his heart’s content in evil

thoughts, and in proportion as he sank deeper, he felt a Satanic

laugh burst forth within him.

And as he thus sifted his soul to the bottom, when he perceived

how large a space nature had prepared there for the passions, he

sneered still more bitterly. He stirred up in the depths of his

heart all his hatred, all his malevolence; and, with the cold

glance of a physician who examines a patient, he recognized the

fact that this malevolence was nothing but vitiated love; that

love, that source of every virtue in man, turned to horrible

things in the heart of a priest, and that a man constituted like

himself, in making himself a priest, made himself a demon. Then

he laughed frightfully, and suddenly became pale again, when he

considered the most sinister side of his fatal passion, of that

corrosive, venomous malignant, implacable love, which had ended

only in the gibbet for one of them and in hell for the other;

condemnation for her, damnation for him.

And then his laughter came again, when he reflected that Phœbus

was alive; that after all, the captain lived, was gay and happy,

had handsomer doublets than ever, and a new mistress whom he was

conducting to see the old one hanged. His sneer redoubled its

bitterness when he reflected that out of the living beings whose

death he had desired, the gypsy, the only creature whom he did

not hate, was the only one who had not escaped him.

Then from the captain, his thought passed to the people, and

there came to him a jealousy of an unprecedented sort. He

reflected that the people also, the entire populace, had had

before their eyes the woman whom he loved exposed almost naked.

He writhed his arms with agony as he thought that the woman whose

form, caught by him alone in the darkness would have been supreme

happiness, had been delivered up in broad daylight at full

noonday, to a whole people, clad as for a night of

voluptuousness. He wept with rage over all these mysteries of

love, profaned, soiled, laid bare, withered forever. He wept with

rage as he pictured to himself how many impure looks had been

gratified at the sight of that badly fastened shift, and that

this beautiful girl, this virgin lily, this cup of modesty and

delight, to which he would have dared to place his lips only

trembling, had just been transformed into a sort of public bowl,

whereat the vilest populace of Paris, thieves, beggars, lackeys,

had come to quaff in common an audacious, impure, and depraved

pleasure.

And when he sought to picture to himself the happiness which he

might have found upon earth, if she had not been a gypsy, and if

he had not been a priest, if Phœbus had not existed and if she

had loved him; when he pictured to himself that a life of

serenity and love would have been possible to him also, even to

him; that there were at that very moment, here and there upon the

earth, happy couples spending the hours in sweet converse beneath

orange trees, on the banks of brooks, in the presence of a

setting sun, of a starry night; and that if God had so willed, he

might have formed with her one of those blessed couples,—his

heart melted in tenderness and despair.

Oh! she! still she! It was this fixed idea which returned

incessantly, which tortured him, which ate into his brain, and

rent his vitals. He did not regret, he did not repent; all that

he had done he was ready to do again; he preferred to behold her

in the hands of the executioner rather than in the arms of the

captain. But he suffered; he suffered so that at intervals he

tore out handfuls of his hair to see whether it were not turning

white.

Among other moments there came one, when it occurred to him that

it was perhaps the very minute when the hideous chain which he

had seen that morning, was pressing its iron noose closer about

that frail and graceful neck. This thought caused the

perspiration to start from every pore.

There was another moment when, while laughing diabolically at

himself, he represented to himself la Esmeralda as he had seen

her on that first day, lively, careless, joyous, gayly attired,

dancing, winged, harmonious, and la Esmeralda of the last day, in

her scanty shift, with a rope about her neck, mounting slowly

with her bare feet, the angular ladder of the gallows; he figured

to himself this double picture in such a manner that he gave vent

to a terrible cry.

While this hurricane of despair overturned, broke, tore up, bent,

uprooted everything in his soul, he gazed at nature around him.

At his feet, some chickens were searching the thickets and

pecking, enamelled beetles ran about in the sun; overhead, some

groups of dappled gray clouds were floating across the blue sky;

on the horizon, the spire of the Abbey Saint-Victor pierced the

ridge of the hill with its slate obelisk; and the miller of the

Copeaue hillock was whistling as he watched the laborious wings

of his mill turning. All this active, organized, tranquil life,

recurring around him under a thousand forms, hurt him. He resumed

his flight.

He sped thus across the fields until evening. This flight from

nature, life, himself, man, God, everything, lasted all day long.

Sometimes he flung himself face downward on the earth, and tore

up the young blades of wheat with his nails. Sometimes he halted

in the deserted street of a village, and his thoughts were so

intolerable that he grasped his head in both hands and tried to

tear it from his shoulders in order to dash it upon the pavement.

Towards the hour of sunset, he examined himself again, and found

himself nearly mad. The tempest which had raged within him ever

since the instant when he had lost the hope and the will to save

the gypsy,—that tempest had not left in his conscience a single

healthy idea, a single thought which maintained its upright

position. His reason lay there almost entirely destroyed. There

remained but two distinct images in his mind, la Esmeralda and

the gallows; all the rest was blank. Those two images united,

presented to him a frightful group; and the more he concentrated

what attention and thought was left to him, the more he beheld

them grow, in accordance with a fantastic progression, the one in

grace, in charm, in beauty, in light, the other in deformity and

horror; so that at last la Esmeralda appeared to him like a star,

the gibbet like an enormous, fleshless arm.

One remarkable fact is, that during the whole of this torture,

the idea of dying did not seriously occur to him. The wretch was

made so. He clung to life. Perhaps he really saw hell beyond it.

Meanwhile, the day continued to decline. The living being which

still existed in him reflected vaguely on retracing its steps. He

believed himself to be far away from Paris; on taking his

bearings, he perceived that he had only circled the enclosure of

the University. The spire of Saint-Sulpice, and the three lofty

needles of Saint Germain-des-Prés, rose above the horizon on his

right. He turned his steps in that direction. When he heard the

brisk challenge of the men-at-arms of the abbey, around the

crenelated, circumscribing wall of Saint-Germain, he turned

aside, took a path which presented itself between the abbey and

the lazar-house of the bourg, and at the expiration of a few

minutes found himself on the verge of the Pré-aux-Clercs. This

meadow was celebrated by reason of the brawls which went on there

night and day; it was the hydra of the poor monks of

Saint-Germain: _quod monachis Sancti-Germaini pratensis hydra

fuit, clericis nova semper dissidiorum capita suscitantibus_. The

archdeacon was afraid of meeting some one there; he feared every

human countenance; he had just avoided the University and the

Bourg Saint-Germain; he wished to re-enter the streets as late as

possible. He skirted the Pré-aux-Clercs, took the deserted path

which separated it from the Dieu-Neuf, and at last reached the

water’s edge. There Dom Claude found a boatman, who, for a few

farthings in Parisian coinage, rowed him up the Seine as far as

the point of the city, and landed him on that tongue of abandoned

land where the reader has already beheld Gringoire dreaming, and

which was prolonged beyond the king’s gardens, parallel to the

Ile du Passeur-aux-Vaches.

The monotonous rocking of the boat and the ripple of the water

had, in some sort, quieted the unhappy Claude. When the boatman

had taken his departure, he remained standing stupidly on the

strand, staring straight before him and perceiving objects only

through magnifying oscillations which rendered everything a sort

of phantasmagoria to him. The fatigue of a great grief not

infrequently produces this effect on the mind.

The sun had set behind the lofty Tour-de-Nesle. It was the

twilight hour. The sky was white, the water of the river was

white. Between these two white expanses, the left bank of the

Seine, on which his eyes were fixed, projected its gloomy mass

and, rendered ever thinner and thinner by perspective, it plunged

into the gloom of the horizon like a black spire. It was loaded

with houses, of which only the obscure outline could be

distinguished, sharply brought out in shadows against the light

background of the sky and the water. Here and there windows began

to gleam, like the holes in a brazier. That immense black obelisk

thus isolated between the two white expanses of the sky and the

river, which was very broad at this point, produced upon Dom

Claude a singular effect, comparable to that which would be

experienced by a man who, reclining on his back at the foot of

the tower of Strasbourg, should gaze at the enormous spire

plunging into the shadows of the twilight above his head. Only,

in this case, it was Claude who was erect and the obelisk which

was lying down; but, as the river, reflecting the sky, prolonged

the abyss below him, the immense promontory seemed to be as

boldly launched into space as any cathedral spire; and the

impression was the same. This impression had even one stronger

and more profound point about it, that it was indeed the tower of

Strasbourg, but the tower of Strasbourg two leagues in height;

something unheard of, gigantic, immeasurable; an edifice such as

no human eye has ever seen; a tower of Babel. The chimneys of the

houses, the battlements of the walls, the faceted gables of the

roofs, the spire of the Augustines, the tower of Nesle, all these

projections which broke the profile of the colossal obelisk added

to the illusion by displaying in eccentric fashion to the eye the

indentations of a luxuriant and fantastic sculpture.

Claude, in the state of hallucination in which he found himself,

believed that he saw, that he saw with his actual eyes, the bell

tower of hell; the thousand lights scattered over the whole

height of the terrible tower seemed to him so many porches of the

immense interior furnace; the voices and noises which escaped

from it seemed so many shrieks, so many death groans. Then he

became alarmed, he put his hands on his ears that he might no

longer hear, turned his back that he might no longer see, and

fled from the frightful vision with hasty strides.

But the vision was in himself.

When he re-entered the streets, the passers-by elbowing each

other by the light of the shop-fronts, produced upon him the

effect of a constant going and coming of spectres about him.

There were strange noises in his ears; extraordinary fancies

disturbed his brain. He saw neither houses, nor pavements, nor

chariots, nor men and women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects

whose edges melted into each other. At the corner of the Rue de

la Barillerie, there was a grocer’s shop whose porch was

garnished all about, according to immemorial custom, with hoops

of tin from which hung a circle of wooden candles, which came in

contact with each other in the wind, and rattled like castanets.

He thought he heard a cluster of skeletons at Montfaucon clashing

together in the gloom.

“Oh!” he muttered, “the night breeze dashes them against each

other, and mingles the noise of their chains with the rattle of

their bones! Perhaps she is there among them!”

In his state of frenzy, he knew not whither he was going. After a

few strides he found himself on the Pont Saint-Michel. There was

a light in the window of a ground-floor room; he approached.

Through a cracked window he beheld a mean chamber which recalled

some confused memory to his mind. In that room, badly lighted by

a meagre lamp, there was a fresh, light-haired young man, with a

merry face, who amid loud bursts of laughter was embracing a very

audaciously attired young girl; and near the lamp sat an old

crone spinning and singing in a quavering voice. As the young man

did not laugh constantly, fragments of the old woman’s ditty

reached the priest; it was something unintelligible yet

frightful,—

“Grève, aboie, Grève, grouille!

File, file, ma quenouille,

File sa corde au bourreau,

Qui siffle dans le préau,

Grève, aboie, Grève, grouille!

“La belle corde de chanvre!

Semez d’Issy jusqu’à Vanvre

Du chanvre et non pas du blé.

Le voleur n’a pas volé

La belle corde de chanvre.

“Grève, grouille, Grève, aboie!

Pour voir la fille de joie,

Prendre au gibet chassieux,

Les fenêtres sont des yeux.

Grève, grouille, Grève, aboie!”[51]

Thereupon the young man laughed and caressed the wench. The crone

was la Falourdel; the girl was a courtesan; the young man was his

brother Jehan.

He continued to gaze. That spectacle was as good as any other.

He saw Jehan go to a window at the end of the room, open it, cast

a glance on the quay, where in the distance blazed a thousand

lighted casements, and he heard him say as he closed the sash,—

“’Pon my soul! How dark it is; the people are lighting their

candles, and the good God his stars.”

Then Jehan came back to the hag, smashed a bottle standing on the

table, exclaiming,—

“Already empty, _cor-bœuf!_ and I have no more money! Isabeau, my

dear, I shall not be satisfied with Jupiter until he has changed

your two white nipples into two black bottles, where I may suck

wine of Beaune day and night.”

This fine pleasantry made the courtesan laugh, and Jehan left the

room.

Dom Claude had barely time to fling himself on the ground in

order that he might not be met, stared in the face and recognized

by his brother. Luckily, the street was dark, and the scholar was

tipsy. Nevertheless, he caught sight of the archdeacon prone upon

the earth in the mud.

“Oh! oh!” said he; “here’s a fellow who has been leading a jolly

life, to-day.”

He stirred up Dom Claude with his foot, and the latter held his

breath.

“Dead drunk,” resumed Jehan. “Come, he’s full. A regular leech

detached from a hogshead. He’s bald,” he added, bending down,

“’tis an old man! _Fortunate senex!_”

Then Dom Claude heard him retreat, saying,—

“’Tis all the same, reason is a fine thing, and my brother the

archdeacon is very happy in that he is wise and has money.”

Then the archdeacon rose to his feet, and ran without halting,

towards Notre-Dame, whose enormous towers he beheld rising above

the houses through the gloom.

At the instant when he arrived, panting, on the Place du Parvis,

he shrank back and dared not raise his eyes to the fatal edifice.

“Oh!” he said, in a low voice, “is it really true that such a

thing took place here, to-day, this very morning?”

Still, he ventured to glance at the church. The front was sombre;

the sky behind was glittering with stars. The crescent of the

moon, in her flight upward from the horizon, had paused at the

moment, on the summit of the light hand tower, and seemed to have

perched itself, like a luminous bird, on the edge of the

balustrade, cut out in black trefoils.

The cloister door was shut; but the archdeacon always carried

with him the key of the tower in which his laboratory was

situated. He made use of it to enter the church.

In the church he found the gloom and silence of a cavern. By the

deep shadows which fell in broad sheets from all directions, he

recognized the fact that the hangings for the ceremony of the

morning had not yet been removed. The great silver cross shone

from the depths of the gloom, powdered with some sparkling

points, like the milky way of that sepulchral night. The long

windows of the choir showed the upper extremities of their arches

above the black draperies, and their painted panes, traversed by

a ray of moonlight had no longer any hues but the doubtful colors

of night, a sort of violet, white and blue, whose tint is found

only on the faces of the dead. The archdeacon, on perceiving

these wan spots all around the choir, thought he beheld the

mitres of damned bishops. He shut his eyes, and when he opened

them again, he thought they were a circle of pale visages gazing

at him.

He started to flee across the church. Then it seemed to him that

the church also was shaking, moving, becoming endued with

animation, that it was alive; that each of the great columns was

turning into an enormous paw, which was beating the earth with

its big stone spatula, and that the gigantic cathedral was no

longer anything but a sort of prodigious elephant, which was

breathing and marching with its pillars for feet, its two towers

for trunks and the immense black cloth for its housings.

This fever or madness had reached such a degree of intensity that

the external world was no longer anything more for the unhappy

man than a sort of Apocalypse,—visible, palpable, terrible.

For one moment, he was relieved. As he plunged into the side

aisles, he perceived a reddish light behind a cluster of pillars.

He ran towards it as to a star. It was the poor lamp which

lighted the public breviary of Notre-Dame night and day, beneath

its iron grating. He flung himself eagerly upon the holy book in

the hope of finding some consolation, or some encouragement

there. The hook lay open at this passage of Job, over which his

staring eye glanced,—

“And a spirit passed before my face, and I heard a small voice,

and the hair of my flesh stood up.”

On reading these gloomy words, he felt that which a blind man

feels when he feels himself pricked by the staff which he has

picked up. His knees gave way beneath him, and he sank upon the

pavement, thinking of her who had died that day. He felt so many

monstrous vapors pass and discharge themselves in his brain, that

it seemed to him that his head had become one of the chimneys of

hell.

It would appear that he remained a long time in this attitude, no

longer thinking, overwhelmed and passive beneath the hand of the

demon. At length some strength returned to him; it occurred to

him to take refuge in his tower beside his faithful Quasimodo. He

rose; and, as he was afraid, he took the lamp from the breviary

to light his way. It was a sacrilege; but he had got beyond

heeding such a trifle now.

He slowly climbed the stairs of the towers, filled with a secret

fright which must have been communicated to the rare passers-by

in the Place du Parvis by the mysterious light of his lamp,

mounting so late from loophole to loophole of the bell tower.

All at once, he felt a freshness on his face, and found himself

at the door of the highest gallery. The air was cold; the sky was

filled with hurrying clouds, whose large, white flakes drifted

one upon another like the breaking up of river ice after the

winter. The crescent of the moon, stranded in the midst of the

clouds, seemed a celestial vessel caught in the ice-cakes of the

air.

He lowered his gaze, and contemplated for a moment, through the

railing of slender columns which unites the two towers, far away,

through a gauze of mists and smoke, the silent throng of the

roofs of Paris, pointed, innumerable, crowded and small like the

waves of a tranquil sea on a sum-mer night.

The moon cast a feeble ray, which imparted to earth and heaven an

ashy hue.

At that moment the clock raised its shrill, cracked voice.

Midnight rang out. The priest thought of midday; twelve o’clock

had come back again.

“Oh!” he said in a very low tone, “she must be cold now.”

All at once, a gust of wind extinguished his lamp, and almost at

the same instant, he beheld a shade, a whiteness, a form, a

woman, appear from the opposite angle of the tower. He started.

Beside this woman was a little goat, which mingled its bleat with

the last bleat of the clock.

He had strength enough to look. It was she.

She was pale, she was gloomy. Her hair fell over her shoulders as

in the morning; but there was no longer a rope on her neck, her

hands were no longer bound; she was free, she was dead.

She was dressed in white and had a white veil on her head.

She came towards him, slowly, with her gaze fixed on the sky. The

supernatural goat followed her. He felt as though made of stone

and too heavy to flee. At every step which she took in advance,

he took one backwards, and that was all. In this way he retreated

once more beneath the gloomy arch of the stairway. He was chilled

by the thought that she might enter there also; had she done so,

he would have died of terror.

She did arrive, in fact, in front of the door to the stairway,

and paused there for several minutes, stared intently into the

darkness, but without appearing to see the priest, and passed on.

She seemed taller to him than when she had been alive; he saw the

moon through her white robe; he heard her breath.

When she had passed on, he began to descend the staircase again,

with the slowness which he had observed in the spectre, believing

himself to be a spectre too, haggard, with hair on end, his

extinguished lamp still in his hand; and as he descended the

spiral steps, he distinctly heard in his ear a voice laughing and

repeating,—

“A spirit passed before my face, and I heard a small voice, and

the hair of my flesh stood up.”

CHAPTER II. HUNCHBACKED, ONE EYED, LAME.

Every city during the Middle Ages, and every city in France down

to the time of Louis XII. had its places of asylum. These

sanctuaries, in the midst of the deluge of penal and barbarous

jurisdictions which inundated the city, were a species of islands

which rose above the level of human justice. Every criminal who

landed there was safe. There were in every suburb almost as many

places of asylum as gallows. It was the abuse of impunity by the

side of the abuse of punishment; two bad things which strove to

correct each other. The palaces of the king, the hôtels of the

princes, and especially churches, possessed the right of asylum.

Sometimes a whole city which stood in need of being repeopled was

temporarily created a place of refuge. Louis XI. made all Paris a

refuge in 1467.

His foot once within the asylum, the criminal was sacred; but he

must beware of leaving it; one step outside the sanctuary, and he

fell back into the flood. The wheel, the gibbet, the strappado,

kept good guard around the place of refuge, and lay in watch

incessantly for their prey, like sharks around a vessel. Hence,

condemned men were to be seen whose hair had grown white in a

cloister, on the steps of a palace, in the enclosure of an abbey,

beneath the porch of a church; in this manner the asylum was a

prison as much as any other. It sometimes happened that a solemn

decree of parliament violated the asylum and restored the

condemned man to the executioner; but this was of rare

occurrence. Parliaments were afraid of the bishops, and when

there was friction between these two robes, the gown had but a

poor chance against the cassock. Sometimes, however, as in the

affair of the assassins of Petit-Jean, the headsman of Paris, and

in that of Emery Rousseau, the murderer of Jean Valleret, justice

overleaped the church and passed on to the execution of its

sentences; but unless by virtue of a decree of Parliament, woe to

him who violated a place of asylum with armed force! The reader

knows the manner of death of Robert de Clermont, Marshal of

France, and of Jean de Châlons, Marshal of Champagne; and yet the

question was only of a certain Perrin Marc, the clerk of a

money-changer, a miserable assassin; but the two marshals had

broken the doors of St. Méry. Therein lay the enormity.

Such respect was cherished for places of refuge that, according

to tradition, animals even felt it at times. Aymoire relates that

a stag, being chased by Dagobert, having taken refuge near the

tomb of Saint-Denis, the pack of hounds stopped short and barked.

Churches generally had a small apartment prepared for the

reception of supplicants. In 1407, Nicolas Flamel caused to be

built on the vaults of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, a chamber

which cost him four livres six sous, sixteen farthings, parisis.

At Notre-Dame it was a tiny cell situated on the roof of the side

aisle, beneath the flying buttresses, precisely at the spot where

the wife of the present janitor of the towers has made for

herself a garden, which is to the hanging gardens of Babylon what

a lettuce is to a palm-tree, what a porter’s wife is to a

Semiramis.

It was here that Quasimodo had deposited la Esmeralda, after his

wild and triumphant course. As long as that course lasted, the

young girl had been unable to recover her senses, half

unconscious, half awake, no longer feeling anything, except that

she was mounting through the air, floating in it, flying in it,

that something was raising her above the earth. From time to time

she heard the loud laughter, the noisy voice of Quasimodo in her

ear; she half opened her eyes; then below her she confusedly

beheld Paris checkered with its thousand roofs of slate and

tiles, like a red and blue mosaic, above her head the frightful

and joyous face of Quasimodo. Then her eyelids drooped again; she

thought that all was over, that they had executed her during her

swoon, and that the misshapen spirit which had presided over her

destiny, had laid hold of her and was bearing her away. She dared

not look at him, and she surrendered herself to her fate. But

when the bellringer, dishevelled and panting, had deposited her

in the cell of refuge, when she felt his huge hands gently

detaching the cord which bruised her arms, she felt that sort of

shock which awakens with a start the passengers of a vessel which

runs aground in the middle of a dark night. Her thoughts awoke

also, and returned to her one by one. She saw that she was in

Notre-Dame; she remembered having been torn from the hands of the

executioner; that Phœbus was alive, that Phœbus loved her no

longer; and as these two ideas, one of which shed so much

bitterness over the other, presented themselves simultaneously to

the poor condemned girl; she turned to Quasimodo, who was

standing in front of her, and who terrified her; she said to

him,—

“Why have you saved me?”

He gazed at her with anxiety, as though seeking to divine what

she was saying to him. She repeated her question. Then he gave

her a profoundly sorrowful glance and fled. She was astonished.

A few moments later he returned, bearing a package which he cast

at her feet. It was clothing which some charitable women had left

on the threshold of the church for her.

Then she dropped her eyes upon herself and saw that she was

almost naked, and blushed. Life had returned.

Quasimodo appeared to experience something of this modesty. He

covered his eyes with his large hand and retired once more, but

slowly.

She made haste to dress herself. The robe was a white one with a

white veil,—the garb of a novice of the Hôtel-Dieu.

She had barely finished when she beheld Quasimodo returning. He

carried a basket under one arm and a mattress under the other. In

the basket there was a bottle, bread, and some provisions. He set

the basket on the floor and said, “Eat!” He spread the mattress

on the flagging and said, “Sleep.”

It was his own repast, it was his own bed, which the bellringer

had gone in search of.

The gypsy raised her eyes to thank him, but she could not

articulate a word. She dropped her head with a quiver of terror.

Then he said to her.—

“I frighten you. I am very ugly, am I not? Do not look at me;

only listen to me. During the day you will remain here; at night

you can walk all over the church. But do not leave the church

either by day or by night. You would be lost. They would kill

you, and I should die.”

She was touched and raised her head to answer him. He had

disappeared. She found herself alone once more, meditating upon

the singular words of this almost monstrous being, and struck by

the sound of his voice, which was so hoarse yet so gentle.

Then she examined her cell. It was a chamber about six feet

square, with a small window and a door on the slightly sloping

plane of the roof formed of flat stones. Many gutters with the

figures of animals seemed to be bending down around her, and

stretching their necks in order to stare at her through the

window. Over the edge of her roof she perceived the tops of

thousands of chimneys which caused the smoke of all the fires in

Paris to rise beneath her eyes. A sad sight for the poor gypsy, a

foundling, condemned to death, an unhappy creature, without

country, without family, without a hearthstone.

At the moment when the thought of her isolation thus appeared to

her more poignant than ever, she felt a bearded and hairy head

glide between her hands, upon her knees. She started (everything

alarmed her now) and looked. It was the poor goat, the agile

Djali, which had made its escape after her, at the moment when

Quasimodo had put to flight Charmolue’s brigade, and which had

been lavishing caresses on her feet for nearly an hour past,

without being able to win a glance. The gypsy covered him with

kisses.

“Oh! Djali!” she said, “how I have forgotten thee! And so thou

still thinkest of me! Oh! thou art not an ingrate!”

At the same time, as though an invisible hand had lifted the

weight which had repressed her tears in her heart for so long,

she began to weep, and, in proportion as her tears flowed, she

felt all that was most acrid and bitter in her grief depart with

them.

Evening came, she thought the night so beautiful that she made

the circuit of the elevated gallery which surrounds the church.

It afforded her some relief, so calm did the earth appear when

viewed from that height.

CHAPTER III. DEAF.

On the following morning, she perceived on awaking, that she had

been asleep. This singular thing astonished her. She had been so

long unaccustomed to sleep! A joyous ray of the rising sun

entered through her window and touched her face. At the same time

with the sun, she beheld at that window an object which

frightened her, the unfortunate face of Quasimodo. She

involuntarily closed her eyes again, but in vain; she fancied

that she still saw through the rosy lids that gnome’s mask,

one-eyed and gap-toothed. Then, while she still kept her eyes

closed, she heard a rough voice saying, very gently,—

“Be not afraid. I am your friend. I came to watch you sleep. It

does not hurt you if I come to see you sleep, does it? What

difference does it make to you if I am here when your eyes are

closed! Now I am going. Stay, I have placed myself behind the

wall. You can open your eyes again.”

There was something more plaintive than these words, and that was

the accent in which they were uttered. The gypsy, much touched,

opened her eyes. He was, in fact, no longer at the window. She

approached the opening, and beheld the poor hunchback crouching

in an angle of the wall, in a sad and resigned attitude. She made

an effort to surmount the repugnance with which he inspired her.

“Come,” she said to him gently. From the movement of the gypsy’s

lips, Quasimodo thought that she was driving him away; then he

rose and retired limping, slowly, with drooping head, without

even daring to raise to the young girl his gaze full of despair.

“Do come,” she cried, but he continued to retreat. Then she

darted from her cell, ran to him, and grasped his arm. On feeling

her touch him, Quasimodo trembled in every limb. He raised his

suppliant eye, and seeing that she was leading him back to her

quarters, his whole face beamed with joy and tenderness. She

tried to make him enter the cell; but he persisted in remaining

on the threshold. “No, no,” said he; “the owl enters not the nest

of the lark.”

Then she crouched down gracefully on her couch, with her goat

asleep at her feet. Both remained motionless for several moments,

considering in silence, she so much grace, he so much ugliness.

Every moment she discovered some fresh deformity in Quasimodo.

Her glance travelled from his knock knees to his humped back,

from his humped back to his only eye. She could not comprehend

the existence of a being so awkwardly fashioned. Yet there was so

much sadness and so much gentleness spread over all this, that

she began to become reconciled to it.

He was the first to break the silence. “So you were telling me to

return?”

She made an affirmative sign of the head, and said, “Yes.”

He understood the motion of the head. “Alas!” he said, as though

hesitating whether to finish, “I am—I am deaf.”

“Poor man!” exclaimed the Bohemian, with an expression of kindly

pity.

He began to smile sadly.

“You think that that was all that I lacked, do you not? Yes, I am

deaf, that is the way I am made. ’Tis horrible, is it not? You

are so beautiful!”

There lay in the accents of the wretched man so profound a

consciousness of his misery, that she had not the strength to say

a word. Besides, he would not have heard her. He went on,—

“Never have I seen my ugliness as at the present moment. When I

compare myself to you, I feel a very great pity for myself, poor

unhappy monster that I am! Tell me, I must look to you like a

beast. You, you are a ray of sunshine, a drop of dew, the song of

a bird! I am something frightful, neither man nor animal, I know

not what, harder, more trampled under foot, and more unshapely

than a pebble stone!”

Then he began to laugh, and that laugh was the most heartbreaking

thing in the world. He continued,—

“Yes, I am deaf; but you shall talk to me by gestures, by signs.

I have a master who talks with me in that way. And then, I shall

very soon know your wish from the movement of your lips, from

your look.”

“Well!” she interposed with a smile, “tell me why you saved me.”

He watched her attentively while she was speaking.

“I understand,” he replied. “You ask me why I saved you. You have

forgotten a wretch who tried to abduct you one night, a wretch to

whom you rendered succor on the following day on their infamous

pillory. A drop of water and a little pity,—that is more than I

can repay with my life. You have forgotten that wretch; but he

remembers it.”

She listened to him with profound tenderness. A tear swam in the

eye of the bellringer, but did not fall. He seemed to make it a

sort of point of honor to retain it.

“Listen,” he resumed, when he was no longer afraid that the tear

would escape; “our towers here are very high, a man who should

fall from them would be dead before touching the pavement; when

it shall please you to have me fall, you will not have to utter

even a word, a glance will suffice.”

Then he rose. Unhappy as was the Bohemian, this eccentric being

still aroused some compassion in her. She made him a sign to

remain.

“No, no,” said he; “I must not remain too long. I am not at my

ease. It is out of pity that you do not turn away your eyes. I

shall go to some place where I can see you without your seeing

me: it will be better so.”

He drew from his pocket a little metal whistle.

“Here,” said he, “when you have need of me, when you wish me to

come, when you will not feel too much horror at the sight of me,

use this whistle. I can hear this sound.”

He laid the whistle on the floor and fled.

CHAPTER IV. EARTHENWARE AND CRYSTAL.

Day followed day. Calm gradually returned to the soul of la

Esmeralda. Excess of grief, like excess of joy is a violent thing

which lasts but a short time. The heart of man cannot remain long

in one extremity. The gypsy had suffered so much, that nothing

was left her but astonishment. With security, hope had returned

to her. She was outside the pale of society, outside the pale of

life, but she had a vague feeling that it might not be impossible

to return to it. She was like a dead person, who should hold in

reserve the key to her tomb.

She felt the terrible images which had so long persecuted her,

gradually departing. All the hideous phantoms, Pierrat Torterue,

Jacques Charmolue, were effaced from her mind, all, even the

priest.

And then, Phœbus was alive; she was sure of it, she had seen him.

To her the fact of Phœbus being alive was everything. After the

series of fatal shocks which had overturned everything within

her, she had found but one thing intact in her soul, one

sentiment,—her love for the captain. Love is like a tree; it

sprouts forth of itself, sends its roots out deeply through our

whole being, and often continues to flourish greenly over a heart

in ruins.

And the inexplicable point about it is that the more blind is

this passion, the more tenacious it is. It is never more solid

than when it has no reason in it.

La Esmeralda did not think of the captain without bitterness, no

doubt. No doubt it was terrible that he also should have been

deceived; that he should have believed that impossible thing,

that he could have conceived of a stab dealt by her who would

have given a thousand lives for him. But, after all, she must not

be too angry with him for it; had she not confessed her crime?

had she not yielded, weak woman that she was, to torture? The

fault was entirely hers. She should have allowed her finger nails

to be torn out rather than such a word to be wrenched from her.

In short, if she could but see Phœbus once more, for a single

minute, only one word would be required, one look, in order to

undeceive him, to bring him back. She did not doubt it. She was

astonished also at many singular things, at the accident of

Phœbus’s presence on the day of the penance, at the young girl

with whom he had been. She was his sister, no doubt. An

unreasonable explanation, but she contented herself with it,

because she needed to believe that Phœbus still loved her, and

loved her alone. Had he not sworn it to her? What more was

needed, simple and credulous as she was? And then, in this

matter, were not appearances much more against her than against

him? Accordingly, she waited. She hoped.

Let us add that the church, that vast church, which surrounded

her on every side, which guarded her, which saved her, was itself

a sovereign tranquillizer. The solemn lines of that architecture,

the religious attitude of all the objects which surrounded the

young girl, the serene and pious thoughts which emanated, so to

speak, from all the pores of that stone, acted upon her without

her being aware of it. The edifice had also sounds fraught with

such benediction and such majesty, that they soothed this ailing

soul. The monotonous chanting of the celebrants, the responses of

the people to the priest, sometimes inarticulate, sometimes

thunderous, the harmonious trembling of the painted windows, the

organ, bursting forth like a hundred trumpets, the three

belfries, humming like hives of huge bees, that whole orchestra

on which bounded a gigantic scale, ascending, descending

incessantly from the voice of a throng to that of one bell,

dulled her memory, her imagination, her grief. The bells, in

particular, lulled her. It was something like a powerful

magnetism which those vast instruments shed over her in great

waves.

Thus every sunrise found her more calm, breathing better, less

pale. In proportion as her inward wounds closed, her grace and

beauty blossomed once more on her countenance, but more

thoughtful, more reposeful. Her former character also returned to

her, somewhat even of her gayety, her pretty pout, her love for

her goat, her love for singing, her modesty. She took care to

dress herself in the morning in the corner of her cell for fear

some inhabitants of the neighboring attics might see her through

the window.

When the thought of Phœbus left her time, the gypsy sometimes

thought of Quasimodo. He was the sole bond, the sole connection,

the sole communication which remained to her with men, with the

living. Unfortunate girl! she was more outside the world than

Quasimodo. She understood not in the least the strange friend

whom chance had given her. She often reproached herself for not

feeling a gratitude which should close her eyes, but decidedly,

she could not accustom herself to the poor bellringer. He was too

ugly.

She had left the whistle which he had given her lying on the

ground. This did not prevent Quasimodo from making his appearance

from time to time during the first few days. She did her best not

to turn aside with too much repugnance when he came to bring her

her basket of provisions or her jug of water, but he always

perceived the slightest movement of this sort, and then he

withdrew sadly.

Once he came at the moment when she was caressing Djali. He stood

pensively for several minutes before this graceful group of the

goat and the gypsy; at last he said, shaking his heavy and

ill-formed head,—

“My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should

like to be wholly a beast like that goat.”

She gazed at him in amazement.

He replied to the glance,—

“Oh! I well know why,” and he went away.

On another occasion he presented himself at the door of the cell

(which he never entered) at the moment when la Esmeralda was

singing an old Spanish ballad, the words of which she did not

understand, but which had lingered in her ear because the gypsy

women had lulled her to sleep with it when she was a little

child. At the sight of that villanous form which made its

appearance so abruptly in the middle of her song, the young girl

paused with an involuntary gesture of alarm. The unhappy

bellringer fell upon his knees on the threshold, and clasped his

large, misshapen hands with a suppliant air. “Oh!” he said,

sorrowfully, “continue, I implore you, and do not drive me away.”

She did not wish to pain him, and resumed her lay, trembling all

over. By degrees, however, her terror disappeared, and she

yielded herself wholly to the slow and melancholy air which she

was singing. He remained on his knees with hands clasped, as in

prayer, attentive, hardly breathing, his gaze riveted upon the

gypsy’s brilliant eyes.

On another occasion, he came to her with an awkward and timid

air. “Listen,” he said, with an effort; “I have something to say

to you.” She made him a sign that she was listening. Then he

began to sigh, half opened his lips, appeared for a moment to be

on the point of speaking, then he looked at her again, shook his

head, and withdrew slowly, with his brow in his hand, leaving the

gypsy stupefied. Among the grotesque personages sculptured on the

wall, there was one to whom he was particularly attached, and

with which he often seemed to exchange fraternal glances. Once

the gypsy heard him saying to it,—

“Oh! why am not I of stone, like you!”

At last, one morning, la Esmeralda had advanced to the edge of

the roof, and was looking into the Place over the pointed roof of

Saint-Jean le Rond. Quasimodo was standing behind her. He had

placed himself in that position in order to spare the young girl,

as far as possible, the displeasure of seeing him. All at once

the gypsy started, a tear and a flash of joy gleamed

simultaneously in her eyes, she knelt on the brink of the roof

and extended her arms towards the Place with anguish, exclaiming:

“Phœbus! come! come! a word, a single word in the name of heaven!

Phœbus! Phœbus!” Her voice, her face, her gesture, her whole

person bore the heartrending expression of a shipwrecked man who

is making a signal of distress to the joyous vessel which is

passing afar off in a ray of sunlight on the horizon.

Quasimodo leaned over the Place, and saw that the object of this

tender and agonizing prayer was a young man, a captain, a

handsome cavalier all glittering with arms and decorations,

prancing across the end of the Place, and saluting with his plume

a beautiful lady who was smiling at him from her balcony.

However, the officer did not hear the unhappy girl calling him;

he was too far away.

But the poor deaf man heard. A profound sigh heaved his breast;

he turned round; his heart was swollen with all the tears which

he was swallowing; his convulsively-clenched fists struck against

his head, and when he withdrew them there was a bunch of red hair

in each hand.

The gypsy paid no heed to him. He said in a low voice as he

gnashed his teeth,—

“Damnation! That is what one should be like! ’Tis only necessary

to be handsome on the outside!”

Meanwhile, she remained kneeling, and cried with extraordinary

agitation,—

“Oh! there he is alighting from his horse! He is about to enter

that house!—Phœbus!—He does not hear me! Phœbus!—How wicked that

woman is to speak to him at the same time with me! Phœbus!

Phœbus!”

The deaf man gazed at her. He understood this pantomime. The poor

bellringer’s eye filled with tears, but he let none fall. All at

once he pulled her gently by the border of her sleeve. She turned

round. He had assumed a tranquil air; he said to her,—

“Would you like to have me bring him to you?”

She uttered a cry of joy.

“Oh! go! hasten! run! quick! that captain! that captain! bring

him to me! I will love you for it!”

She clasped his knees. He could not refrain from shaking his head

sadly.

“I will bring him to you,” he said, in a weak voice. Then he

turned his head and plunged down the staircase with great

strides, stifling with sobs.

When he reached the Place, he no longer saw anything except the

handsome horse hitched at the door of the Gondelaurier house; the

captain had just entered there.

He raised his eyes to the roof of the church. La Esmeralda was

there in the same spot, in the same attitude. He made her a sad

sign with his head; then he planted his back against one of the

stone posts of the Gondelaurier porch, determined to wait until

the captain should come forth.

In the Gondelaurier house it was one of those gala days which

precede a wedding. Quasimodo beheld many people enter, but no one

come out. He cast a glance towards the roof from time to time;

the gypsy did not stir any more than himself. A groom came and

unhitched the horse and led it to the stable of the house.

The entire day passed thus, Quasimodo at his post, la Esmeralda

on the roof, Phœbus, no doubt, at the feet of Fleur-de-Lys.

At length night came, a moonless night, a dark night. Quasimodo

fixed his gaze in vain upon la Esmeralda; soon she was no more

than a whiteness amid the twilight; then nothing. All was

effaced, all was black.

Quasimodo beheld the front windows from top to bottom of the

Gondelaurier mansion illuminated; he saw the other casements in

the Place lighted one by one, he also saw them extinguished to

the very last, for he remained the whole evening at his post. The

officer did not come forth. When the last passers-by had returned

home, when the windows of all the other houses were extinguished,

Quasimodo was left entirely alone, entirely in the dark. There

were at that time no lamps in the square before Notre-Dame.

Meanwhile, the windows of the Gondelaurier mansion remained

lighted, even after midnight. Quasimodo, motionless and

attentive, beheld a throng of lively, dancing shadows pass

athwart the many-colored painted panes. Had he not been deaf, he

would have heard more and more distinctly, in proportion as the

noise of sleeping Paris died away, a sound of feasting, laughter,

and music in the Gondelaurier mansion.

Towards one o’clock in the morning, the guests began to take

their leave. Quasimodo, shrouded in darkness watched them all

pass out through the porch illuminated with torches. None of them

was the captain.

He was filled with sad thoughts; at times he looked upwards into

the air, like a person who is weary of waiting. Great black

clouds, heavy, torn, split, hung like crape hammocks beneath the

starry dome of night. One would have pronounced them spiders’

webs of the vault of heaven.

In one of these moments he suddenly beheld the long window on the

balcony, whose stone balustrade projected above his head, open

mysteriously. The frail glass door gave passage to two persons,

and closed noiselessly behind them; it was a man and a woman.

It was not without difficulty that Quasimodo succeeded in

recognizing in the man the handsome captain, in the woman the

young lady whom he had seen welcome the officer in the morning

from that very balcony. The place was perfectly dark, and a

double crimson curtain which had fallen across the door the very

moment it closed again, allowed no light to reach the balcony

from the apartment.

The young man and the young girl, so far as our deaf man could

judge, without hearing a single one of their words, appeared to

abandon themselves to a very tender tête-à-tête. The young girl

seemed to have allowed the officer to make a girdle for her of

his arm, and gently repulsed a kiss.

Quasimodo looked on from below at this scene which was all the

more pleasing to witness because it was not meant to be seen. He

contemplated with bitterness that beauty, that happiness. After

all, nature was not dumb in the poor fellow, and his human

sensibility, all maliciously contorted as it was, quivered no

less than any other. He thought of the miserable portion which

Providence had allotted to him; that woman and the pleasure of

love, would pass forever before his eyes, and that he should

never do anything but behold the felicity of others. But that

which rent his heart most in this sight, that which mingled

indignation with his anger, was the thought of what the gypsy

would suffer could she behold it. It is true that the night was

very dark, that la Esmeralda, if she had remained at her post

(and he had no doubt of this), was very far away, and that it was

all that he himself could do to distinguish the lovers on the

balcony. This consoled him.

Meanwhile, their conversation grew more and more animated. The

young lady appeared to be entreating the officer to ask nothing

more of her. Of all this Quasimodo could distinguish only the

beautiful clasped hands, the smiles mingled with tears, the young

girl’s glances directed to the stars, the eyes of the captain

lowered ardently upon her.

Fortunately, for the young girl was beginning to resist but

feebly, the door of the balcony suddenly opened once more and an

old dame appeared; the beauty seemed confused, the officer

assumed an air of displeasure, and all three withdrew.

A moment later, a horse was champing his bit under the porch, and

the brilliant officer, enveloped in his night cloak, passed

rapidly before Quasimodo.

The bellringer allowed him to turn the corner of the street, then

he ran after him with his ape-like agility, shouting: “Hey there!

captain!”

The captain halted.

“What wants this knave with me?” he said, catching sight through

the gloom of that hipshot form which ran limping after him.

Meanwhile, Quasimodo had caught up with him, and had boldly

grasped his horse’s bridle: “Follow me, captain; there is one

here who desires to speak with you!

“_Cornemahom_!” grumbled Phœbus, “here’s a villanous; ruffled

bird which I fancy I have seen somewhere. Holà master, will you

let my horse’s bridle alone?”

“Captain,” replied the deaf man, “do you not ask me who it is?”

“I tell you to release my horse,” retorted Phœbus, impatiently.

“What means the knave by clinging to the bridle of my steed? Do

you take my horse for a gallows?”

Quasimodo, far from releasing the bridle, prepared to force him

to retrace his steps. Unable to comprehend the captain’s

resistance, he hastened to say to him,—

“Come, captain, ’tis a woman who is waiting for you.” He added

with an effort: “A woman who loves you.”

“A rare rascal!” said the captain, “who thinks me obliged to go

to all the women who love me! or who say they do. And what if, by

chance, she should resemble you, you face of a screech-owl? Tell

the woman who has sent you that I am about to marry, and that she

may go to the devil!”

“Listen,” exclaimed Quasimodo, thinking to overcome his

hesitation with a word, “come, monseigneur! ’tis the gypsy whom

you know!”

This word did, indeed, produce a great effect on Phœbus, but not

of the kind which the deaf man expected. It will be remembered

that our gallant officer had retired with Fleur-de-Lys several

moments before Quasimodo had rescued the condemned girl from the

hands of Charmolue. Afterwards, in all his visits to the

Gondelaurier mansion he had taken care not to mention that woman,

the memory of whom was, after all, painful to him; and on her

side, Fleur-de-Lys had not deemed it politic to tell him that the

gypsy was alive. Hence Phœbus believed poor “Similar” to be dead,

and that a month or two had elapsed since her death. Let us add

that for the last few moments the captain had been reflecting on

the profound darkness of the night, the supernatural ugliness,

the sepulchral voice of the strange messenger; that it was past

midnight; that the street was deserted, as on the evening when

the surly monk had accosted him; and that his horse snorted as it

looked at Quasimodo.

“The gypsy!” he exclaimed, almost frightened. “Look here, do you

come from the other world?”

And he laid his hand on the hilt of his dagger.

“Quick, quick,” said the deaf man, endeavoring to drag the horse

along; “this way!”

Phœbus dealt him a vigorous kick in the breast.

Quasimodo’s eye flashed. He made a motion to fling himself on the

captain. Then he drew himself up stiffly and said,—

“Oh! how happy you are to have some one who loves you!”

He emphasized the words “some one,” and loosing the horse’s

bridle,—

“Begone!”

Phœbus spurred on in all haste, swearing. Quasimodo watched him

disappear in the shades of the street.

“Oh!” said the poor deaf man, in a very low voice; “to refuse

that!”

He re-entered Notre-Dame, lighted his lamp and climbed to the

tower again. The gypsy was still in the same place, as he had

supposed.

She flew to meet him as far off as she could see him. “Alone!”

she cried, clasping her beautiful hands sorrowfully.

“I could not find him,” said Quasimodo coldly.

“You should have waited all night,” she said angrily.

He saw her gesture of wrath, and understood the reproach.

“I will lie in wait for him better another time,” he said,

dropping his head.

“Begone!” she said to him.

He left her. She was displeased with him. He preferred to have

her abuse him rather than to have afflicted her. He had kept all

the pain to himself.

From that day forth, the gypsy no longer saw him. He ceased to

come to her cell. At the most she occasionally caught a glimpse

at the summit of the towers, of the bellringer’s face turned

sadly to her. But as soon as she perceived him, he disappeared.

We must admit that she was not much grieved by this voluntary

absence on the part of the poor hunchback. At the bottom of her

heart she was grateful to him for it. Moreover, Quasimodo did not

deceive himself on this point.

She no longer saw him, but she felt the presence of a good genius

about her. Her provisions were replenished by an invisible hand

during her slumbers. One morning she found a cage of birds on her

window. There was a piece of sculpture above her window which

frightened her. She had shown this more than once in Quasimodo’s

presence. One morning, for all these things happened at night,

she no longer saw it, it had been broken. The person who had

climbed up to that carving must have risked his life.

Sometimes, in the evening, she heard a voice, concealed beneath

the wind screen of the bell tower, singing a sad, strange song,

as though to lull her to sleep. The lines were unrhymed, such as

a deaf person can make.

Ne regarde pas la figure,

Jeune fille, regarde le cœur.

Le cœur d’un beau jeune homme est souvent difforme.

Il y a des cœurs où l’amour ne se conserve pas.

Jeune fille, le sapin n’est pas beau,

N’est pas beau comme le peuplier,

Mais il garde son feuillage l’hiver.

Hélas! à quoi bon dire cela?

Ce qui n’est pas beau a tort d’être;

La beauté n’aime que la beauté,

Avril tourne le dos à janvier.

La beauté est parfaite,

La beauté peut tout,

La beauté est la seule chose qui n’existe pas à demi.

Le corbeau ne vole que le jour,

Le hibou ne vole que la nuit,

Le cygne vole la nuit et le jour.[52]

One morning, on awaking, she saw on her window two vases filled

with flowers. One was a very beautiful and very brilliant but

cracked vase of glass. It had allowed the water with which it had

been filled to escape, and the flowers which it contained were

withered. The other was an earthenware pot, coarse and common,

but which had preserved all its water, and its flowers remained

fresh and crimson.

I know not whether it was done intentionally, but La Esmeralda

took the faded nosegay and wore it all day long upon her breast.

That day she did not hear the voice singing in the tower.

She troubled herself very little about it. She passed her days in

caressing Djali, in watching the door of the Gondelaurier house,

in talking to herself about Phœbus, and in crumbling up her bread

for the swallows.

She had entirely ceased to see or hear Quasimodo. The poor

bellringer seemed to have disappeared from the church. One night,

nevertheless, when she was not asleep, but was thinking of her

handsome captain, she heard something breathing near her cell.

She rose in alarm, and saw by the light of the moon, a shapeless

mass lying across her door on the outside. It was Quasimodo

asleep there upon the stones.

CHAPTER V. THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR.

In the meantime, public rumor had informed the archdeacon of the

miraculous manner in which the gypsy had been saved. When he

learned it, he knew not what his sensations were. He had

reconciled himself to la Esmeralda’s death. In that matter he was

tranquil; he had reached the bottom of personal suffering. The

human heart (Dom Claude had meditated upon these matters) can

contain only a certain quantity of despair. When the sponge is

saturated, the sea may pass over it without causing a single drop

more to enter it.

Now, with la Esmeralda dead, the sponge was soaked, all was at an

end on this earth for Dom Claude. But to feel that she was alive,

and Phœbus also, meant that tortures, shocks, alternatives, life,

were beginning again. And Claude was weary of all this.

When he heard this news, he shut himself in his cell in the

cloister. He appeared neither at the meetings of the chapter nor

at the services. He closed his door against all, even against the

bishop. He remained thus immured for several weeks. He was

believed to be ill. And so he was, in fact.

What did he do while thus shut up? With what thoughts was the

unfortunate man contending? Was he giving final battle to his

formidable passion? Was he concocting a final plan of death for

her and of perdition for himself?

His Jehan, his cherished brother, his spoiled child, came once to

his door, knocked, swore, entreated, gave his name half a score

of times. Claude did not open.

He passed whole days with his face close to the panes of his

window. From that window, situated in the cloister, he could see

la Esmeralda’s chamber. He often saw herself with her goat,

sometimes with Quasimodo. He remarked the little attentions of

the ugly deaf man, his obedience, his delicate and submissive

ways with the gypsy. He recalled, for he had a good memory, and

memory is the tormentor of the jealous, he recalled the singular

look of the bellringer, bent on the dancer upon a certain

evening. He asked himself what motive could have impelled

Quasimodo to save her. He was the witness of a thousand little

scenes between the gypsy and the deaf man, the pantomime of

which, viewed from afar and commented on by his passion, appeared

very tender to him. He distrusted the capriciousness of women.

Then he felt a jealousy which he could never have believed

possible awakening within him, a jealousy which made him redden

with shame and indignation: “One might condone the captain, but

this one!” This thought upset him.

His nights were frightful. As soon as he learned that the gypsy

was alive, the cold ideas of spectre and tomb which had

persecuted him for a whole day vanished, and the flesh returned

to goad him. He turned and twisted on his couch at the thought

that the dark-skinned maiden was so near him.

Every night his delirious imagination represented la Esmeralda to

him in all the attitudes which had caused his blood to boil most.

He beheld her outstretched upon the poniarded captain, her eyes

closed, her beautiful bare throat covered with Phœbus’s blood, at

that moment of bliss when the archdeacon had imprinted on her

pale lips that kiss whose burn the unhappy girl, though half

dead, had felt. He beheld her, again, stripped by the savage

hands of the torturers, allowing them to bare and to enclose in

the boot with its iron screw, her tiny foot, her delicate rounded

leg, her white and supple knee. Again he beheld that ivory knee

which alone remained outside of Torterue’s horrible apparatus.

Lastly, he pictured the young girl in her shift, with the rope

about her neck, shoulders bare, feet bare, almost nude, as he had

seen her on that last day. These images of voluptuousness made

him clench his fists, and a shiver run along his spine.

One night, among others, they heated so cruelly his virgin and

priestly blood, that he bit his pillow, leaped from his bed,

flung on a surplice over his shirt, and left his cell, lamp in

hand, half naked, wild, his eyes aflame.

He knew where to find the key to the red door, which connected

the cloister with the church, and he always had about him, as the

reader knows, the key of the staircase leading to the towers.

CHAPTER VI. CONTINUATION OF THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR.

That night, la Esmeralda had fallen asleep in her cell, full of

oblivion, of hope, and of sweet thoughts. She had already been

asleep for some time, dreaming as always, of Phœbus, when it

seemed to her that she heard a noise near her. She slept lightly

and uneasily, the sleep of a bird; a mere nothing waked her. She

opened her eyes. The night was very dark. Nevertheless, she saw a

figure gazing at her through the window; a lamp lighted up this

apparition. The moment that the figure saw that la Esmeralda had

perceived it, it blew out the lamp. But the young girl had had

time to catch a glimpse of it; her eyes closed again with terror.

“Oh!” she said in a faint voice, “the priest!”

All her past unhappiness came back to her like a flash of

lightning. She fell back on her bed, chilled.

A moment later she felt a touch along her body which made her

shudder so that she straightened herself up in a sitting posture,

wide awake and furious.

The priest had just slipped in beside her. He encircled her with

both arms.

She tried to scream and could not.

“Begone, monster! begone assassin!” she said, in a voice which

was low and trembling with wrath and terror.

“Mercy! mercy!” murmured the priest, pressing his lips to her

shoulder.

She seized his bald head by its remnant of hair and tried to

thrust aside his kisses as though they had been bites.

“Mercy!” repeated the unfortunate man. “If you but knew what my

love for you is! ’Tis fire, melted lead, a thousand daggers in my

heart.”

She stopped his two arms with superhuman force.

“Let me go,” she said, “or I will spit in your face!”

He released her. “Vilify me, strike me, be malicious! Do what you

will! But have mercy! love me!”

Then she struck him with the fury of a child. She made her

beautiful hands stiff to bruise his face. “Begone, demon!”

“Love me! love me! pity!” cried the poor priest returning her

blows with caresses.

All at once she felt him stronger than herself.

“There must be an end to this!” he said, gnashing his teeth.

She was conquered, palpitating in his arms, and in his power. She

felt a wanton hand straying over her. She made a last effort, and

began to cry: “Help! Help! A vampire! a vampire!”

Nothing came. Djali alone was awake and bleating with anguish.

“Hush!” said the panting priest.

All at once, as she struggled and crawled on the floor, the

gypsy’s hand came in contact with something cold and metallic—it

was Quasimodo’s whistle. She seized it with a convulsive hope,

raised it to her lips and blew with all the strength that she had

left. The whistle gave a clear, piercing sound.

“What is that?” said the priest.

Almost at the same instant he felt himself raised by a vigorous

arm. The cell was dark; he could not distinguish clearly who it

was that held him thus; but he heard teeth chattering with rage,

and there was just sufficient light scattered among the gloom to

allow him to see above his head the blade of a large knife.

The priest fancied that he perceived the form of Quasimodo. He

assumed that it could be no one but he. He remembered to have

stumbled, as he entered, over a bundle which was stretched across

the door on the outside. But, as the newcomer did not utter a

word, he knew not what to think. He flung himself on the arm

which held the knife, crying: “Quasimodo!” He forgot, at that

moment of distress, that Quasimodo was deaf.

In a twinkling, the priest was overthrown and a leaden knee

rested on his breast.

From the angular imprint of that knee he recognized Quasimodo;

but what was to be done? how could he make the other recognize

him? the darkness rendered the deaf man blind.

He was lost. The young girl, pitiless as an enraged tigress, did

not intervene to save him. The knife was approaching his head;

the moment was critical. All at once, his adversary seemed

stricken with hesitation.

“No blood on her!” he said in a dull voice.

It was, in fact, Quasimodo’s voice.

Then the priest felt a large hand dragging him feet first out of

the cell; it was there that he was to die. Fortunately for him,

the moon had risen a few moments before.

When they had passed through the door of the cell, its pale rays

fell upon the priest’s countenance. Quasimodo looked him full in

the face, a trembling seized him, and he released the priest and

shrank back.

The gypsy, who had advanced to the threshold of her cell, beheld

with surprise their roles abruptly changed. It was now the priest

who menaced, Quasimodo who was the suppliant.

The priest, who was overwhelming the deaf man with gestures of

wrath and reproach, made the latter a violent sign to retire.

The deaf man dropped his head, then he came and knelt at the

gypsy’s door,—“Monseigneur,” he said, in a grave and resigned

voice, “you shall do all that you please afterwards, but kill me

first.”

So saying, he presented his knife to the priest. The priest,

beside himself, was about to seize it. But the young girl was

quicker than he; she wrenched the knife from Quasimodo’s hands

and burst into a frantic laugh,—“Approach,” she said to the

priest.

She held the blade high. The priest remained undecided.

She would certainly have struck him.

Then she added with a pitiless expression, well aware that she

was about to pierce the priest’s heart with thousands of red-hot

irons,—

“Ah! I know that Phœbus is not dead!”

The priest overturned Quasimodo on the floor with a kick, and,

quivering with rage, darted back under the vault of the

staircase.

When he was gone, Quasimodo picked up the whistle which had just

saved the gypsy.

“It was getting rusty,” he said, as he handed it back to her;

then he left her alone.

The young girl, deeply agitated by this violent scene, fell back

exhausted on her bed, and began to sob and weep. Her horizon was

becoming gloomy once more.

The priest had groped his way back to his cell.

It was settled. Dom Claude was jealous of Quasimodo!

He repeated with a thoughtful air his fatal words: “No one shall

have her.”

BOOK TENTH.

CHAPTER I. GRINGOIRE HAS MANY GOOD IDEAS IN SUCCESSION.—RUE DES

BERNARDINS.

As soon as Pierre Gringoire had seen how this whole affair was

turning, and that there would decidedly be the rope, hanging, and

other disagreeable things for the principal personages in this

comedy, he had not cared to identify himself with the matter

further. The outcasts with whom he had remained, reflecting that,

after all, it was the best company in Paris,—the outcasts had

continued to interest themselves in behalf of the gypsy. He had

thought it very simple on the part of people who had, like

herself, nothing else in prospect but Charmolue and Torterue, and

who, unlike himself, did not gallop through the regions of

imagination between the wings of Pegasus. From their remarks, he

had learned that his wife of the broken crock had taken refuge in

Notre-Dame, and he was very glad of it. But he felt no temptation

to go and see her there. He meditated occasionally on the little

goat, and that was all. Moreover, he was busy executing feats of

strength during the day for his living, and at night he was

engaged in composing a memorial against the Bishop of Paris, for

he remembered having been drenched by the wheels of his mills,

and he cherished a grudge against him for it. He also occupied

himself with annotating the fine work of Baudry-le-Rouge, Bishop

of Noyon and Tournay, _De Cupa Petrarum_, which had given him a

violent passion for architecture, an inclination which had

replaced in his heart his passion for hermeticism, of which it

was, moreover, only a natural corollary, since there is an

intimate relation between hermeticism and masonry. Gringoire had

passed from the love of an idea to the love of the form of that

idea.

One day he had halted near Saint Germain-l’Auxerrois, at the

corner of a mansion called “For-l’Évêque” (the Bishop’s

Tribunal), which stood opposite another called “For-le-Roi” (the

King’s Tribunal). At this For-l’Évêque, there was a charming

chapel of the fourteenth century, whose apse was on the street.

Gringoire was devoutly examining its exterior sculptures. He was

in one of those moments of egotistical, exclusive, supreme,

enjoyment when the artist beholds nothing in the world but art,

and the world in art. All at once he feels a hand laid gravely on

his shoulder. He turns round. It was his old friend, his former

master, monsieur the archdeacon.

He was stupefied. It was a long time since he had seen the

archdeacon, and Dom Claude was one of those solemn and

impassioned men, a meeting with whom always upsets the

equilibrium of a sceptical philosopher.

The archdeacon maintained silence for several minutes, during

which Gringoire had time to observe him. He found Dom Claude

greatly changed; pale as a winter’s morning, with hollow eyes,

and hair almost white. The priest broke the silence at length, by

saying, in a tranquil but glacial tone,—

“How do you do, Master Pierre?”

“My health?” replied Gringoire. “Eh! eh! one can say both one

thing and another on that score. Still, it is good, on the whole.

I take not too much of anything. You know, master, that the

secret of keeping well, according to Hippocrates; _id est: cibi,

potus, somni, venus, omnia moderata sint_.”

“So you have no care, Master Pierre?” resumed the archdeacon,

gazing intently at Gringoire.

“None, i’ faith!”

“And what are you doing now?”

“You see, master. I am examining the chiselling of these stones,

and the manner in which yonder bas-relief is thrown out.”

The priest began to smile with that bitter smile which raises

only one corner of the mouth.

“And that amuses you?”

“’Tis paradise!” exclaimed Gringoire. And leaning over the

sculptures with the fascinated air of a demonstrator of living

phenomena: “Do you not think, for instance, that yon

metamorphosis in bas-relief is executed with much adroitness,

delicacy and patience? Observe that slender column. Around what

capital have you seen foliage more tender and better caressed by

the chisel. Here are three raised bosses of Jean Maillevin. They

are not the finest works of this great master. Nevertheless, the

naïvete, the sweetness of the faces, the gayety of the attitudes

and draperies, and that inexplicable charm which is mingled with

all the defects, render the little figures very diverting and

delicate, perchance, even too much so. You think that it is not

diverting?”

“Yes, certainly!” said the priest.

“And if you were to see the interior of the chapel!” resumed the

poet, with his garrulous enthusiasm. “Carvings everywhere. ’Tis

as thickly clustered as the head of a cabbage! The apse is of a

very devout, and so peculiar a fashion that I have never beheld

anything like it elsewhere!”

Dom Claude interrupted him,—

“You are happy, then?”

Gringoire replied warmly;—

“On my honor, yes! First I loved women, then animals. Now I love

stones. They are quite as amusing as women and animals, and less

treacherous.”

The priest laid his hand on his brow. It was his habitual

gesture.

“Really?”

“Stay!” said Gringoire, “one has one’s pleasures!” He took the

arm of the priest, who let him have his way, and made him enter

the staircase turret of For-l’Évêque. “Here is a staircase! every

time that I see it I am happy. It is of the simplest and rarest

manner of steps in Paris. All the steps are bevelled underneath.

Its beauty and simplicity consist in the interspacing of both,

being a foot or more wide, which are interlaced, interlocked,

fitted together, enchained enchased, interlined one upon another,

and bite into each other in a manner that is truly firm and

graceful.”

“And you desire nothing?”

“No.”

“And you regret nothing?”

“Neither regret nor desire. I have arranged my mode of life.”

“What men arrange,” said Claude, “things disarrange.”

“I am a Pyrrhonian philosopher,” replied Gringoire, “and I hold

all things in equilibrium.”

“And how do you earn your living?”

“I still make epics and tragedies now and then; but that which

brings me in most is the industry with which you are acquainted,

master; carrying pyramids of chairs in my teeth.”

“The trade is but a rough one for a philosopher.”

“’Tis still equilibrium,” said Gringoire. “When one has an idea,

one encounters it in everything.”

“I know that,” replied the archdeacon.

After a silence, the priest resumed,—

“You are, nevertheless, tolerably poor?”

“Poor, yes; unhappy, no.”

At that moment, a trampling of horses was heard, and our two

interlocutors beheld defiling at the end of the street, a company

of the king’s unattached archers, their lances borne high, an

officer at their head. The cavalcade was brilliant, and its march

resounded on the pavement.

“How you gaze at that officer!” said Gringoire, to the

archdeacon.

“Because I think I recognize him.”

“What do you call him?”

“I think,” said Claude, “that his name is Phœbus de Châteaupers.”

“Phœbus! A curious name! There is also a Phœbus, Comte de Foix. I

remember having known a wench who swore only by the name of

Phœbus.”

“Come away from here,” said the priest. “I have something to say

to you.”

From the moment of that troop’s passing, some agitation had

pierced through the archdeacon’s glacial envelope. He walked on.

Gringoire followed him, being accustomed to obey him, like all

who had once approached that man so full of ascendency. They

reached in silence the Rue des Bernardins, which was nearly

deserted. Here Dom Claude paused.

“What have you to say to me, master?” Gringoire asked him.

“Do you not think that the dress of those cavaliers whom we have

just seen is far handsomer than yours and mine?”

Gringoire tossed his head.

“I’ faith! I love better my red and yellow jerkin, than those

scales of iron and steel. A fine pleasure to produce, when you

walk, the same noise as the Quay of Old Iron, in an earthquake!”

“So, Gringoire, you have never cherished envy for those handsome

fellows in their military doublets?”

“Envy for what, monsieur the archdeacon? their strength, their

armor, their discipline? Better philosophy and independence in

rags. I prefer to be the head of a fly rather than the tail of a

lion.”

“That is singular,” said the priest dreamily. “Yet a handsome

uniform is a beautiful thing.”

Gringoire, perceiving that he was in a pensive mood, quitted him

to go and admire the porch of a neighboring house. He came back

clapping his hands.

“If you were less engrossed with the fine clothes of men of war,

monsieur the archdeacon, I would entreat you to come and see this

door. I have always said that the house of the Sieur Aubry had

the most superb entrance in the world.”

“Pierre Gringoire,” said the archdeacon, “What have you done with

that little gypsy dancer?”

“La Esmeralda? You change the conversation very abruptly.”

“Was she not your wife?”

“Yes, by virtue of a broken crock. We were to have four years of

it. By the way,” added Gringoire, looking at the archdeacon in a

half bantering way, “are you still thinking of her?”

“And you think of her no longer?”

“Very little. I have so many things. Good heavens, how pretty

that little goat was!”

“Had she not saved your life?”

“’Tis true, pardieu!”

“Well, what has become of her? What have you done with her?”

“I cannot tell you. I believe that they have hanged her.”

“You believe so?”

“I am not sure. When I saw that they wanted to hang people, I

retired from the game.”

“That is all you know of it?”

“Wait a bit. I was told that she had taken refuge in Notre-Dame,

and that she was safe there, and I am delighted to hear it, and I

have not been able to discover whether the goat was saved with

her, and that is all I know.”

“I will tell you more,” cried Dom Claude; and his voice, hitherto

low, slow, and almost indistinct, turned to thunder. “She has in

fact, taken refuge in Notre-Dame. But in three days justice will

reclaim her, and she will be hanged on the Grève. There is a

decree of parliament.”

“That’s annoying,” said Gringoire.

The priest, in an instant, became cold and calm again.

“And who the devil,” resumed the poet, “has amused himself with

soliciting a decree of reintegration? Why couldn’t they leave

parliament in peace? What harm does it do if a poor girl takes

shelter under the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame, beside the

swallows’ nests?”

“There are satans in this world,” remarked the archdeacon.

“’Tis devilish badly done,” observed Gringoire.

The archdeacon resumed after a silence,—

“So, she saved your life?”

“Among my good friends the outcasts. A little more or a little

less and I should have been hanged. They would have been sorry

for it to-day.”

“Would not you like to do something for her?”

“I ask nothing better, Dom Claude; but what if I entangle myself

in some villanous affair?”

“What matters it?”

“Bah! what matters it? You are good, master, that you are! I have

two great works already begun.”

The priest smote his brow. In spite of the calm which he

affected, a violent gesture betrayed his internal convulsions

from time to time.

“How is she to be saved?”

Gringoire said to him; “Master, I will reply to you; _Il padelt_,

which means in Turkish, ‘God is our hope.’”

“How is she to be saved?” repeated Claude dreamily.

Gringoire smote his brow in his turn.

“Listen, master. I have imagination; I will devise expedients for

you. What if one were to ask her pardon from the king?”

“Of Louis XI.! A pardon!”

“Why not?”

“To take the tiger’s bone from him!”

Gringoire began to seek fresh expedients.

“Well, stay! Shall I address to the midwives a request

accompanied by the declaration that the girl is with child!”

This made the priest’s hollow eye flash.

“With child! knave! do you know anything of this?”

Gringoire was alarmed by his air. He hastened to say, “Oh, no,

not I! Our marriage was a real _forismaritagium_. I stayed

outside. But one might obtain a respite, all the same.”

“Madness! Infamy! Hold your tongue!”

“You do wrong to get angry,” muttered Gringoire. “One obtains a

respite; that does no harm to any one, and allows the midwives,

who are poor women, to earn forty deniers parisis.”

The priest was not listening to him!

“But she must leave that place, nevertheless!” he murmured, “the

decree is to be executed within three days. Moreover, there will

be no decree; that Quasimodo! Women have very depraved tastes!”

He raised his voice: “Master Pierre, I have reflected well; there

is but one means of safety for her.”

“What? I see none myself.”

“Listen, Master Pierre, remember that you owe your life to her. I

will tell you my idea frankly. The church is watched night and

day; only those are allowed to come out, who have been seen to

enter. Hence you can enter. You will come. I will lead you to

her. You will change clothes with her. She will take your

doublet; you will take her petticoat.”

“So far, it goes well,” remarked the philosopher, “and then?”

“And then? she will go forth in your garments; you will remain

with hers. You will be hanged, perhaps, but she will be saved.”

Gringoire scratched his ear, with a very serious air. “Stay!”

said he, “that is an idea which would never have occurred to me

unaided.”

At Dom Claude’s proposition, the open and benign face of the poet

had abruptly clouded over, like a smiling Italian landscape, when

an unlucky squall comes up and dashes a cloud across the sun.

“Well! Gringoire, what say you to the means?”

“I say, master, that I shall not be hanged, perchance, but that I

shall be hanged indubitably.

“That concerns us not.”

“The deuce!” said Gringoire.

“She has saved your life. ’Tis a debt that you are discharging.”

“There are a great many others which I do not discharge.”

“Master Pierre, it is absolutely necessary.”

The archdeacon spoke imperiously.

“Listen, Dom Claude,” replied the poet in utter consternation.

“You cling to that idea, and you are wrong. I do not see why I

should get myself hanged in some one else’s place.”

“What have you, then, which attaches you so strongly to life?”

“Oh! a thousand reasons!”

“What reasons, if you please?”

“What? The air, the sky, the morning, the evening, the moonlight,

my good friends the thieves, our jeers with the old hags of

go-betweens, the fine architecture of Paris to study, three great

books to make, one of them being against the bishops and his

mills; and how can I tell all? Anaxagoras said that he was in the

world to admire the sun. And then, from morning till night, I

have the happiness of passing all my days with a man of genius,

who is myself, which is very agreeable.”

“A head fit for a mule bell!” muttered the archdeacon. “Oh! tell

me who preserved for you that life which you render so charming

to yourself? To whom do you owe it that you breathe that air,

behold that sky, and can still amuse your lark’s mind with your

whimsical nonsense and madness? Where would you be, had it not

been for her? Do you then desire that she through whom you are

alive, should die? that she should die, that beautiful, sweet,

adorable creature, who is necessary to the light of the world and

more divine than God, while you, half wise, and half fool, a vain

sketch of something, a sort of vegetable, which thinks that it

walks, and thinks that it thinks, you will continue to live with

the life which you have stolen from her, as useless as a candle

in broad daylight? Come, have a little pity, Gringoire; be

generous in your turn; it was she who set the example.”

The priest was vehement. Gringoire listened to him at first with

an undecided air, then he became touched, and wound up with a

grimace which made his pallid face resemble that of a new-born

infant with an attack of the colic.

“You are pathetic!” said he, wiping away a tear. “Well! I will

think about it. That’s a queer idea of yours.—After all,” he

continued after a pause, “who knows? perhaps they will not hang

me. He who becomes betrothed does not always marry. When they

find me in that little lodging so grotesquely muffled in

petticoat and coif, perchance they will burst with laughter. And

then, if they do hang me,—well! the halter is as good a death as

any. ’Tis a death worthy of a sage who has wavered all his life;

a death which is neither flesh nor fish, like the mind of a

veritable sceptic; a death all stamped with Pyrrhonism and

hesitation, which holds the middle station betwixt heaven and

earth, which leaves you in suspense. ’Tis a philosopher’s death,

and I was destined thereto, perchance. It is magnificent to die

as one has lived.”

The priest interrupted him: “Is it agreed.”

“What is death, after all?” pursued Gringoire with exaltation. “A

disagreeable moment, a toll-gate, the passage of little to

nothingness. Some one having asked Cercidas, the Megalopolitan,

if he were willing to die: ‘Why not?’ he replied; ‘for after my

death I shall see those great men, Pythagoras among the

philosophers, Hecatæus among historians, Homer among poets,

Olympus among musicians.’”

The archdeacon gave him his hand: “It is settled, then? You will

come to-morrow?”

This gesture recalled Gringoire to reality.

“Ah! i’ faith no!” he said in the tone of a man just waking up.

“Be hanged! ’tis too absurd. I will not.”

“Farewell, then!” and the archdeacon added between his teeth:

“I’ll find you again!”

“I do not want that devil of a man to find me,” thought

Gringoire; and he ran after Dom Claude. “Stay, monsieur the

archdeacon, no ill-feeling between old friends! You take an

interest in that girl, my wife, I mean, and ’tis well. You have

devised a scheme to get her out of Notre-Dame, but your way is

extremely disagreeable to me, Gringoire. If I had only another

one myself! I beg to say that a luminous inspiration has just

occurred to me. If I possessed an expedient for extricating her

from a dilemma, without compromising my own neck to the extent of

a single running knot, what would you say to it? Will not that

suffice you? Is it absolutely necessary that I should be hanged,

in order that you may be content?”

The priest tore out the buttons of his cassock with impatience:

“Stream of words! What is your plan?”

“Yes,” resumed Gringoire, talking to himself and touching his

nose with his forefinger in sign of meditation,—“that’s it!—The

thieves are brave fellows!—The tribe of Egypt love her!—They will

rise at the first word!—Nothing easier!—A sudden stroke.—Under

cover of the disorder, they will easily carry her off!—Beginning

to-morrow evening. They will ask nothing better.

“The plan! speak,” cried the archdeacon shaking him.

Gringoire turned majestically towards him: “Leave me! You see

that I am composing.” He meditated for a few moments more, then

began to clap his hands over his thought, crying: “Admirable!

success is sure!”

“The plan!” repeated Claude in wrath.

Gringoire was radiant.

“Come, that I may tell you that very softly. ’Tis a truly gallant

counter-plot, which will extricate us all from the matter.

Pardieu, it must be admitted that I am no fool.”

He broke off.

“Oh, by the way! is the little goat with the wench?”

“Yes. The devil take you!”

“They would have hanged it also, would they not?”

“What is that to me?”

“Yes, they would have hanged it. They hanged a sow last month.

The headsman loveth that; he eats the beast afterwards. Take my

pretty Djali! Poor little lamb!”

“Malediction!” exclaimed Dom Claude. “You are the executioner.

What means of safety have you found, knave? Must your idea be

extracted with the forceps?”

“Very fine, master, this is it.”

Gringoire bent his head to the archdeacon’s head and spoke to him

in a very low voice, casting an uneasy glance the while from one

end to the other of the street, though no one was passing. When

he had finished, Dom Claude took his hand and said coldly: “’Tis

well. Farewell until to-morrow.”

“Until to-morrow,” repeated Gringoire. And, while the archdeacon

was disappearing in one direction, he set off in the other,

saying to himself in a low voice: “Here’s a grand affair,

Monsieur Pierre Gringoire. Never mind! ’Tis not written that

because one is of small account one should take fright at a great

enterprise. Bitou carried a great bull on his shoulders; the

water-wagtails, the warblers, and the buntings traverse the

ocean.”

CHAPTER II. TURN VAGABOND.

On re-entering the cloister, the archdeacon found at the door of

his cell his brother Jehan du Moulin, who was waiting for him,

and who had beguiled the tedium of waiting by drawing on the wall

with a bit of charcoal, a profile of his elder brother, enriched

with a monstrous nose.

Dom Claude hardly looked at his brother; his thoughts were

elsewhere. That merry scamp’s face whose beaming had so often

restored serenity to the priest’s sombre physiognomy, was now

powerless to melt the gloom which grew more dense every day over

that corrupted, mephitic, and stagnant soul.

“Brother,” said Jehan timidly, “I am come to see you.”

The archdeacon did not even raise his eyes.

“What then?”

“Brother,” resumed the hypocrite, “you are so good to me, and you

give me such wise counsels that I always return to you.”

“What next?”

“Alas! brother, you were perfectly right when you said to

me,—“Jehan! Jehan! _cessat doctorum doctrina, discipulorum

disciplina_. Jehan, be wise, Jehan, be learned, Jehan, pass not

the night outside of the college without lawful occasion and due

leave of the master. Cudgel not the Picards: _noli, Joannes,

verberare Picardos_. Rot not like an unlettered ass, _quasi

asinus illitteratus_, on the straw seats of the school. Jehan,

allow yourself to be punished at the discretion of the master.

Jehan go every evening to chapel, and sing there an anthem with

verse and orison to Madame the glorious Virgin Mary.”—Alas! what

excellent advice was that!”

“And then?”

“Brother, you behold a culprit, a criminal, a wretch, a

libertine, a man of enormities! My dear brother, Jehan hath made

of your counsels straw and dung to trample under foot. I have

been well chastised for it, and God is extraordinarily just. As

long as I had money, I feasted, I lead a mad and joyous life. Oh!

how ugly and crabbed behind is debauch which is so charming in

front! Now I have no longer a blank; I have sold my napery, my

shirt and my towels; no more merry life! The beautiful candle is

extinguished and I have henceforth, only a wretched tallow dip

which smokes in my nose. The wenches jeer at me. I drink water. I

am overwhelmed with remorse and with creditors.”

“The rest?” said the archdeacon.

“Alas! my very dear brother, I should like to settle down to a

better life. I come to you full of contrition, I am penitent. I

make my confession. I beat my breast violently. You are quite

right in wishing that I should some day become a licentiate and

sub-monitor in the college of Torchi. At the present moment I

feel a magnificent vocation for that profession. But I have no

more ink and I must buy some; I have no more paper, I have no

more books, and I must buy some. For this purpose, I am greatly

in need of a little money, and I come to you, brother, with my

heart full of contrition.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes,” said the scholar. “A little money.”

“I have none.”

Then the scholar said, with an air which was both grave and

resolute: “Well, brother, I am sorry to be obliged to tell you

that very fine offers and propositions are being made to me in

another quarter. You will not give me any money? No. In that case

I shall become a professional vagabond.”

As he uttered these monstrous words, he assumed the mien of Ajax,

expecting to see the lightnings descend upon his head.

The archdeacon said coldly to him,—

“Become a vagabond.”

Jehan made him a deep bow, and descended the cloister stairs,

whistling.

At the moment when he was passing through the courtyard of the

cloister, beneath his brother’s window, he heard that window

open, raised his eyes and beheld the archdeacon’s severe head

emerge.

“Go to the devil!” said Dom Claude; “here is the last money which

you will get from me?”

At the same time, the priest flung Jehan a purse, which gave the

scholar a big bump on the forehead, and with which Jehan

retreated, both vexed and content, like a dog who had been stoned

with marrow bones.

CHAPTER III. LONG LIVE MIRTH.

The reader has probably not forgotten that a part of the Cour de

Miracles was enclosed by the ancient wall which surrounded the

city, a goodly number of whose towers had begun, even at that

epoch, to fall to ruin. One of these towers had been converted

into a pleasure resort by the vagabonds. There was a dram-shop in

the underground story, and the rest in the upper stories. This

was the most lively, and consequently the most hideous, point of

the whole outcast den. It was a sort of monstrous hive, which

buzzed there night and day. At night, when the remainder of the

beggar horde slept, when there was no longer a window lighted in

the dingy façades of the Place, when not a cry was any longer to

be heard proceeding from those innumerable families, those

ant-hills of thieves, of wenches, and stolen or bastard children,

the merry tower was still recognizable by the noise which it

made, by the scarlet light which, flashing simultaneously from

the air-holes, the windows, the fissures in the cracked walls,

escaped, so to speak, from its every pore.

The cellar then, was the dram-shop. The descent to it was through

a low door and by a staircase as steep as a classic Alexandrine.

Over the door, by way of a sign there hung a marvellous daub,

representing new sous and dead chickens,[53] with this, pun

below: _Aux sonneurs pour les trépassés_,—The ringers for the

dead.

One evening when the curfew was sounding from all the belfries in

Paris, the sergeants of the watch might have observed, had it

been granted to them to enter the formidable Court of Miracles,

that more tumult than usual was in progress in the vagabonds’

tavern, that more drinking was being done, and louder swearing.

Outside in the Place, there, were many groups conversing in low

tones, as when some great plan is being framed, and here and

there a knave crouching down engaged in sharpening a villanous

iron blade on a paving-stone.

Meanwhile, in the tavern itself, wine and gaming offered such a

powerful diversion to the ideas which occupied the vagabonds’

lair that evening, that it would have been difficult to divine

from the remarks of the drinkers, what was the matter in hand.

They merely wore a gayer air than was their wont, and some weapon

could be seen glittering between the legs of each of them,—a

sickle, an axe, a big two-edged sword or the hook of an old

hackbut.

The room, circular in form, was very spacious; but the tables

were so thickly set and the drinkers so numerous, that all that

the tavern contained, men, women, benches, beer-jugs, all that

were drinking, all that were sleeping, all that were playing, the

well, the lame, seemed piled up pell-mell, with as much order and

harmony as a heap of oyster shells. There were a few tallow dips

lighted on the tables; but the real luminary of this tavern, that

which played the part in this dram-shop of the chandelier of an

opera house, was the fire. This cellar was so damp that the fire

was never allowed to go out, even in midsummer; an immense

chimney with a sculptured mantel, all bristling with heavy iron

andirons and cooking utensils, with one of those huge fires of

mixed wood and peat which at night, in village streets make the

reflection of forge windows stand out so red on the opposite

walls. A big dog gravely seated in the ashes was turning a spit

loaded with meat before the coals.

Great as was the confusion, after the first glance one could

distinguish in that multitude, three principal groups which

thronged around three personages already known to the reader. One

of these personages, fantastically accoutred in many an oriental

rag, was Mathias Hungadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and Bohemia. The

knave was seated on a table with his legs crossed, and in a loud

voice was bestowing his knowledge of magic, both black and white,

on many a gaping face which surrounded him. Another rabble

pressed close around our old friend, the valiant King of Thunes,

armed to the teeth. Clopin Trouillefou, with a very serious air

and in a low voice, was regulating the distribution of an

enormous cask of arms, which stood wide open in front of him and

from whence poured out in profusion, axes, swords, bassinets,

coats of mail, broadswords, lance-heads, arrows, and

viretons,[54] like apples and grapes from a horn of plenty. Every

one took something from the cask, one a morion, another a long,

straight sword, another a dagger with a cross-shaped hilt. The

very children were arming themselves, and there were even

cripples in bowls who, in armor and cuirass, made their way

between the legs of the drinkers, like great beetles.

Finally, a third audience, the most noisy, the most jovial, and

the most numerous, encumbered benches and tables, in the midst of

which harangued and swore a flute-like voice, which escaped from

beneath a heavy armor, complete from casque to spurs. The

individual who had thus screwed a whole outfit upon his body, was

so hidden by his warlike accoutrements that nothing was to be

seen of his person save an impertinent, red, snub nose, a rosy

mouth, and bold eyes. His belt was full of daggers and poniards,

a huge sword on his hip, a rusted cross-bow at his left, and a

vast jug of wine in front of him, without reckoning on his right,

a fat wench with her bosom uncovered. All mouths around him were

laughing, cursing, and drinking.

Add twenty secondary groups, the waiters, male and female,

running with jugs on their heads, gamblers squatting over taws,

merelles,[55] dice, vachettes, the ardent game of tringlet,

quarrels in one corner, kisses in another, and the reader will

have some idea of this whole picture, over which flickered the

light of a great, flaming fire, which made a thousand huge and

grotesque shadows dance over the walls of the drinking shop.

As for the noise, it was like the inside of a bell at full peal.

The dripping-pan, where crackled a rain of grease, filled with

its continual sputtering the intervals of these thousand

dialogues, which intermingled from one end of the apartment to

the other.

In the midst of this uproar, at the extremity of the tavern, on

the bench inside the chimney, sat a philosopher meditating with

his feet in the ashes and his eyes on the brands. It was Pierre

Gringoire.

“Be quick! make haste, arm yourselves! we set out on the march in

an hour!” said Clopin Trouillefou to his thieves.

A wench was humming,—

“Bonsoir mon père et ma mère,

Les derniers couvrent le feu.”[56]

Two card players were disputing,—

“Knave!” cried the reddest faced of the two, shaking his fist at

the other; “I’ll mark you with the club. You can take the place

of Mistigri in the pack of cards of monseigneur the king.”

“Ugh!” roared a Norman, recognizable by his nasal accent; “we are

packed in here like the saints of Caillouville!”