Author’s Biography
Victor Hugo was born on the 26th of February, 1802, at Besan?on, where his father, an officer in Moreau’s army, was commanding a battalion. His first three years were spent in Corsica; in 1805 his mother took her family to Paris, but rejoined her husband, at Avellino, in South Italy, in 1807. General Hugo, as the father presently became, was appointed a governor in Spain, from which the English under Wellington dislodged himself and his family in 1812. Returning to Paris, Victor was put to school until 1818, when he made up his mind that literature should be his profession. That he was still under classical influences was proved by his first volume, the “Odes et Poésies” of 1822. It gained him a pension from Louis XVIII, and was followed next year by his earliest novel, “Han d’Islande.” The romantic movement now spread to France, and Hugo was one of its earliest adherents; he took the lead in revolt by publishing his “Odes” in 1826 and his “Cromwell” in 1827. It was in the preface to the latter that his famous formula of the Romantic faith was issued. He first took a place, however, among the leading lyric poets of Europe with his “Orientales” of 1829. This was a crowning year in Victor Hugo’s career; it saw the production of “Hernani” and the composition of “Marion Delorme” and “Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné.” From this time forth his plays, novels, and lyrical poems were poured forth in three parallel and continuous streams. “Notre-Dame de Paris” was published on the 13th of February, 1831. For the next ten years the life of Victor Hugo was one of continual prosperity and ever-ascending fame. Among his dramas, “Ruy Blas” belongs to 1838, and among the collections of his poems “Les Voix Intérieures” to 1837. He was elected to the French Academy in 1841 and created a peer of France in 1845. He had been in sympathy with the Government, but when the Royalists fell and Napoleon arrived on the scene, Victor Hugo became a violent radical. As a member of the Legislative Assembly he opposed the Coup d’état, and was exiled at the close of 1851, taking up his residence in Brussels. Here the violence of his attacks on Napoleon III led to his expulsion from Belgium, and in the summer of 1852 he settled at St. Héliers, in Jersey, whence he sent out the fierce sheaf of “Les Chatiments” in the following year. Jersey, in its turn, became too hot to hold him, and in the autumn of 1855 he took up his abode at Hauteville House, Guernsey, where he resided for fifteen years. His occupation during the earlier part of his stay at Guernsey was the composition of “La Légende des Siècles,” the first portion of which appeared in 1859. Victor Hugo’s huge novel, “Les Misérables,” was published in 1862, and his fantastic work on Shakespeare in 1864. Two grotesquely romantic novels, “Les Travailleurs de la Mer” and “L’Homme Qui Rit,” belong respectively to 1866 and 1869. The Napoleon dynasty having fallen, Hugo immediately reappeared in France (September 5, 1870) and endured his share of the sufferings of the siege of Paris. After somewhat unsuccessfully acting a part in the politics of reconstruction, Hugo withdrew to Brussels, from which town he was driven in May, 1871, for his expressed sympathy with the Paris Commune. He now retired from the feuds of politics and devoted himself mainly to poetry, only one novel, “Quatre-vingt-treize,” 1874, belonging to this latest period of his career. From December, 1871, the residence of Hugo was Paris, where he lived with his widowed daughter-in-law and her children; in 1875 he was elected a perpetual senator. For fourteen years he enjoyed, in full serenity and strength, the splendours of an old age of extreme celebrity; it was said that he entered, during his lifetime, into immortality. In the spring of 1885 he took a chill while riding, as he loved to do, on the outside of an omnibus. His heart gradually gave way, and he died on the 22d of May. He received from the city of Paris a funeral of extreme pomp, and the Panthéon was prepared for his reception, after the coffin had been lying in public state, for twenty-four hours, under the Arc de Triomphe. 
E. G.
Author's Preface
To The Edition of 1832
The announcement that this edition was furnished with several fresh chapters was incorrect; they should have been described as hitherto unpublished. For, if by fresh one understands newly written, then the chapters added to this edition are not fresh ones. They were written at the same time as the rest of the work; they date from the same period, were engendered by the same thought, and from the first formed part of the manuscript of Notre-Dame de Paris. Moreover, the author cannot imagine adding new developments to a work of this nature, the thing being once finished and done with. That cannot be done at will. To his idea, a novel is, in a sense, necessarily born with all its chapters complete, a drama with all its scenes. Do not let us think there is anything arbitrary in the particular number of parts which go to make up that whole—that mysterious microcosm which we call a novel or a drama. Neither joins nor patches are ever effectual in such a work, which ought to be fashioned in a single piece, and so be left, as best may be. The thing once done, listen to no second thoughts; attempt no touchings up of the book once given to the world, its sex, virile or otherwise, once recognised and acknowledged; the child, having once uttered its first cry, is born, is fashioned in that way and no other; father or mother are powerless to alter it, it belongs to the air and the sun; let it live or die as it is. Is your book a failure? Tant pis, but do not add chapters to those which have already failed. Is it defective?—it should have been completed before birth. Your tree is gnarled? You will not straighten it out. Your novel phthisical, not viable? You will never give it the life that is lacking to it. Your drama is born lame? Believe me, it is futile to supply it with a wooden leg. 
The author is therefore particularly anxious that the public should know that the interpolated chapters were not written expressly for this new edition. They were not included in the previous editions for a very simple reason. When Notre-Dame de Paris was being printed the first time, the packet of manuscript containing these chapters went astray, so that they would either have had to be rewritten or omitted. The author considered that the only chapters of real import were the two dealing specially with art and history, but that their omission would in no way disturb the course of the drama; and that the public being unconscious of their absence, he alone would be in the secret of this hiatus. He decided then for the omission, not only for the above reason, but because, it must be confessed, his indolence shrank affrighted from the task of rewriting the lost chapters. Rather would he have written a new book altogether. 
Meanwhile, these chapters have reappeared, and the author seizes the first opportunity to restore them to their proper place, thus presenting his work complete—such as he imagined it, well or ill, lasting or perishable; but in the form he desired it to have. 
Paris, October 20, 1832. 
Author's Preface
To The Edition of 1831
Some years ago, when visiting, or, more properly speaking, thoroughly exploring the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the writer came upon the word 
’ANáGKH1 
graven on the wall in a dim corner of one of the towers. 
In the outline and slope of these Greek capitals, black with age and deeply scored into the stone, there were certain peculiarities characteristic of Gothic calligraphy which at once betrayed the hand of the medi?val scribe. 
But most of all, the writer was struck by the dark and fateful significance of the word; and he pondered long and deeply over the identity of that anguished soul that would not quit the world without imprinting this stigma of crime or misfortune on the brow of the ancient edifice. 
Since then the wall has been plastered over or scraped—I forget which—and the inscription has disappeared. For thus, during the past two hundred years, have the marvellous churches of the Middle Ages been treated. Defacement and mutilation have been their portion—both from within and from without. The priest plasters them over, the architect scrapes them; finally the people come and demolish them altogether. 
Hence, save only the perishable memento dedicated to it here by the author of this book, nothing remains of the mysterious word graven on the sombre tower of Notre-Dame, nothing of the unknown destiny it so mournfully recorded. The man who inscribed that word passed centuries ago from among men; the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the Cathedral; soon, perhaps, the Cathedral itself will have vanished from the face of the earth. 
This word, then, the writer has taken for the text of his book. 
February, 1831. 
___________________
1 Fate, destiny. 
BOOK I
Chapter 1 - The Great Hall
Precisely three hundred and forty-eight years six months and nineteen days ago1 Paris was awakened by the sound of the pealing of all the bells within the triple enclosing walls of the city, the Univeristy, and the town. 
Yet the 6th of January, 1482, was not a day of which history has preserved the record. There was nothing of peculiar note in the event which set all the bells and the good people of Paris thus in motion from early dawn. It was neither an assault by Picards or Burgundians, nor a holy image carried in procession, nor a riot of the students in the vineyard of Laas, nor the entry into the city of “our most dread Lord the King,” nor even a fine stringing up of thieves, male and female, at the Justice of Paris. Neither was it the unexpected arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth century, of some foreign ambassador with his beplumed and gold-laced retinue. Scarce two days had elapsed since the last cavalcade of this description, that of the Flemish envoys charged with the mission to conclude the marriage between the Dauphin and Margaret of Flanders, had made its entry into Paris, to the great annoyance of Monsieur the Cardinal of Bourbon, who, to please the King, had been obliged to extend a gracious reception to this boorish company of Flemish burgomasters, and entertain them in his H?tel de Bourbon with a “most pleasant morality play, drollery, and farce,” while a torrent of rain drenched the splendid tapestries at his door. 
The 6th of January, which “set the whole population of Paris in a stir,” as Jehan de Troyes relates, was the date of the double festival—united since time immemorial—of the Three Kings, and the Feast of Fools. 
On this day there was invariably a bonfire on the Place de Gréve, a may-pole in front of the Chapelle de Braque, and a mystery-play at the Palais de Justice, as had been proclaimed with blare of trumpets on the preceding day in all the streets by Monsieur the Provost’s men, arrayed in tabards of violet camlet with great white crosses on the breast. 
The stream of people accordingly made their way in the morning from all parts of the town, their shops and houses being closed, to one or other of these points named. Each one had chosen his share of the entertainments—some the bonfire, some the may-pole, others the Mystery. To the credit of the traditional good sense of the Paris “cit” be it said that the majority of the spectators directed their steps towards the bonfire, which was entirely seasonable, or the Mystery, which was to be performed under roof and cover in the great Hall of the Palais de Justice, and were unanimous in leaving the poor scantily decked may-pole to shiver alone under the January sky in the cemetery of the Chapelle de Braque. 
The crowd flocked thickest in the approaches to the Palais, as it was known that the Flemish envoys intended to be present at the performance of the Mystery, and the election of the Pope of Fools, which was likewise to take place in the great Hall. 
It was no easy matter that day to penetrate into the great Hall, then reputed the largest roofed-in space in the world. (It is true that, at that time, Sauval had not yet measured the great hall of the Castle of Montargis.) To the gazers from the windows, the square in front of the Palais, packed as it was with people, presented the aspect of a lake into which five or six streets, like so many river mouths, were each moment pouring fresh floods of heads. The ever-swelling waves of this multitude broke against the angles of the houses, which projected here and there, like promontories, into the irregular basin of the Place. 
In the centre of the high Gothic 2 fa?de of the Palais was the great flight of steps, incessantly occupied by a double stream ascending and descending, which, after being broken by the intermediate landing, spread in broad waves over the two lateral flights. 
Down this great stair-case the crowd poured continuously into the Place like a cascade into a lake, the shouts, the laughter, the trampling of thousands of feet making a mighty clamour and tumult. From time to time the uproar redoubled, the current which bore the crowd towards the grand stairs was choked, thrown back, and formed into eddies, when some archer thrust back the crowd, or the horse of one of the provost’s men kicked out to restore order; an admirable tradition which has been faithfully handed down through the centuries to our present gendarmerie of Paris. 
Every door and window and roof swarmed with good, placid, honest burgher faces gazing at the Palais and at the crowd, and asking no better amusement. For there are many people in Paris quite content to be the spectators of spectators; and to us a wall, behind which something is going on, is a sufficiently exciting spectacle. 
If we of the nineteenth century could mingle in imagination with these Parisians of the fifteenth century, could push our way with that hustling, elbowing, stamping crowd into the immense Hall of the Palais, so cramped on that 6th of January, 1482, the scene would not be without interest or charm for us, and we would find ourselves surrounded by things so old that to us they would appear quite new. 
With the reader’s permission we will attempt to evoke in thought the impression he would have experienced in crossing with us the threshold of that great Hall amid that throng in surcoat, doublet, and kirtle. 
At first there is nothing but a dull roar in our ears and a dazzle in our eyes. Overhead, a roof of double Gothic arches, panelled with carved wood, painted azure blue, and diapered with golden fleur de lis; underfoot, a pavement in alternate squares of black and white. A few paces off is an enormous pillar, and another—seven in all down the length of the hall, supporing in the centre line the springing arches of the double groining. Around the first four pillars are stalls all glittering with glassware and trinkets, and around the last three are oaken benches, worn smooth and shining by the breeches of the litigants and the gowns of the attorneys. Ranged along the lofty walls, between the doors, between the windows, between the pillars, is the interminable series of statues of the rulers of France from Pharamond downward; the “Rois fainèants,” with drooping eyes and indolent hanging arms; the valiant warrior kings, with head and hands boldly uplifted in the sight of heaven. The tall, pointed windows glow in a thousand colours; at the wide entrances to the Hall are richly carved doors; and the whole—roof, pillars, walls, cornices, doors, statues—is resplendent from top to bottom in a coating of blue and gold, already somewhat tarnished at the period of which we write, but which had almost entirely disappeared under dust and cobwebs in the year of grace 1549, when Du Breuil alluded to it in terms of admiration, but from hearsay only. 
Now let the reader picture to himself that immense, oblong Hall under the wan light of a January morning and invaded by a motley, noisy crowd, pouring along the walls and eddying round the pillars, and he will have some idea of the scene as a whole, the peculiarities of which we will presently endeavour to describe more in detail. 
Assuredly if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henri IV there would have been no documents relating to his trial to be deposited in the Record office of the Palais de Justice; no accomplices interested in causing those documents to disappear, and consequently no incendiaries compelled, in default of a better expedient, to set fire to the Record office in order to destroy the documents, and to burn down the Palais de Justice in order to burn the Record office—in short, no conflagration of 1618. The old Palais would still be standing with its great Hall, and I could say to the reader “Go and see for yourself,” and we should both be exempt of the necessity, I of writing, he of reading this description, such as it is. All of which goes to prove the novel truth, that great events have incalculable consequences. 
To be sure, it is quite possible that Ravaillac had no accomplices, also that, even if he had, they were in no way accessory to the fire of 1618. There exist two other highly plausible explanations. In the first place, the great fiery star a foot wide and an ell high, which, as every mother’s son knows, fell from heaven on to the Palais on the 7th of March just after midnight; and secondly, Thèophile’s quatrain, which runs: 
“Certes, ce fut un triste jeu
Quand á Paris dame Justice,
Pour avoir mangè trop d’èpice
Se mit tout le palais en feu.”3
Whatever one may think of this triple explanation—political, physical, and poetical—of the burning of the Palais de Justice in 1618, about one fact there is unfortunately no doubt, and that is the fire itself. 
Thanks to this disaster, and more still to the successive restorations which destroyed what the fire had spared, very little remains of this first residence of the Kings of France, of this original palace of the Louvre, so old even in the time of Philip the Fair, that in it they sought for traces of the magnificent buildings erected by King Robert and described by Helgaldus. Nearly all has gone. What has become of the Chancery Chamber in which St. Louis “consummated his marriage”? what of the garden where he administered justice, “clad in a jerkin of camlet, a surcoat of coarse woollen stuff without sleeves, and over all a mantle of black ’sandal,’ and reclining on a carpet with Joinville”? Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismund? where that of Charles IV? that of John Lackland? Where is the flight of steps from which Charles VI proclaimed his “Edict of Pardon”? the flag-stone whereon, in the presence of the Dauphin, Marcel strangled Robert de Clermont and the Marshal de Champange? the wicket where the bulls of the anti-Pope Benedict were torn up, and through which the bearers of them marched out, mitred and coped in mock state, to publicly make the amende honorable through the streets of Paris? and the great Hall with its blue and gold, its Gothic windows, its statues, its pillars, its immense vaulted roof so profusely carved —and the gilded chamber—and the stone lion kneeling at the door with head abased and tail between its legs, like the lions of Solomon’s throne, in that attitude of humility which beseems Strength in the presence of Justice? and the beautiful doors, and the gorgeous-hued windows, and the wrought iron-work which discouraged Biscornette—and the delicate cabinet-work of Du Hancy? How has time, how has man, served these marvels? What have they given us in exchange for all this, for this great page of Gallic history, for all this Gothic art? The uncouth, surbased arches of M. de Brosse, the clumsy architect of the great door of Saint-Gervais— so much for art; and as regards history, we have the gossipy memoirs of the Great Pillar, which still resounds with the old wives’ tales of such men as Patru. 
Well, that is not much to boast of. Let us return to the real great Hall of the real old Palais. 
The two extremities of this huge parallelogram were occupied, the one by the famous marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick that, say the old territorial records in a style that would whet the appetite of a Gargantua, “Never was such a slab of marble seen in the world”; the other by the chapel in which Louis XI caused his statue to be sculptured kneeling in front of the Virgin, and to which he had transferred—indifferent to the fact that thereby two niches were empty in the line of royal statues—those of Charlemagne and Saint-Louis: two saints who, as Kings of France, he supposed to be high in favour in heaven. This chapel, which was still quite new, having been built scarcely six years, was carried out entirely in that charming style of delicate architecture, with its marvellous stone-work, its bold and exquisite tracery, which marks in France the end of the Gothic period, and lasts on into the middle of the sixteenth century in the ethereal fantasies of the Renaissance. The little fretted stone rose-window above the door was in particular a master-piece of grace and lightness—a star of lace. 
In the centre of the Hall, opposite the great entrance, they had erected for the convenience of the Flemish envoys and other great personages invited to witness the performance of the Mystery, a raised platform covered with gold brocade and fixed against the wall, to which a special entrance had been contrived by utilizing a window into the passage from the Gilded Chamber. 
According to custom, the performance was to take place upon the marble table, which had been prepared for that purpose since the morning. On the magnificent slab, all scored by the heels of the law-clerks, stood a high wooden erection, the upper floor of which, visible from every part of the Hall, was to serve as the stage, while its interior, hung round with draperies, furnished a dressing-room for the actors. A ladder, frankly placed in full view of the audience, formed the connecting link between stage and dressing-room, and served the double office of entrance and exit. There was no character however unexpected, no change of scene, no stage effect, but was obliged to clamber up this ladder. Dear and guileless infancy of art and of stage machinery! 
Four sergeants of the provost of the Palais—the appointed superintendents of all popular holidays, whether festivals or executions—stood on duty at the four corners of the marble table. 
The piece was not to commence till the last stroke of noon of the great clock of the Palais. To be sure, this was very late for a theatrical performance; but they had been obliged to suit the convenience of the ambassadors. 
Now, all this multitude had been waiting since the early morning; indeed, a considerable number of these worthy spectators had stood shivering and chattering their teeth with cold since break of day before the grand stair-case of the Palais; some even declared that they had spent the night in front of the great entrance to make sure of being the first to get in. The crowd became denser every moment, and like water that overflows its boundaries, began to mount the walls, to surge round the pillars, to rise up and cover the cornices, the window-sills, every projection and every coign of vantage in architecture or sculpture. The all-prevailing impatience, discomfort, and weariness, the license of a holiday approvedly dedicated to folly, the quarrels incessantly arising out of a sharp elbow or an iron-shod heel, the fatigue of long waiting —all conduced to give a tone of bitterness and acerbity to the clamour of this closely packed, squeezed, hustled, stifled throng long before the hour at which the ambassadors were expected. Nothing was to be heard but grumbling and imprecations against the Flemings, the Cardinal de Bourbon, the Chief Magistrate, Madame Marguerite of Austria, the beadles, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Bishop of Paris, the Fools’ Pope, the pillars, the statues, this closed door, yonder open window—to the huge diversion of the bands of scholars and lackeys distributed through the crowd, who mingled their gibes and pranks with this seething mass of dissatisfaction, aggravating the general ill-humour by perpetual pin-pricks. 
There was one group in particular of these joyous young demons who, after knocking out the glass of a window, had boldly seated themselves in the frame, from whence they could cast their gaze and their banter by turns at the crowd inside the Hall and that outside in the Place. By their aping gestures, their yells of laughter, by their loud interchange of opprobrious epithets with comrades at the other side of the Hall, it was very evident that these budding literati by no means shared the boredom and fatigue of the rest of the gathering, and that they knew very well how to extract out of the scene actually before them sufficient entertainment of their own to enable them to wait patiently for the other. 
“Why, by my soul, ’tis Joannes Frollo de Molendino!” cried one of them to a little fair-haired imp with a handsome mischievous face, who had swarmed up the pillar and was clinging to the foliage of its capital; “well are you named Jehan of the Mill, for your two arms and legs are just like the sails of a wind-mill. How long have you been here?” 
“By the grace of the devil,” returned Joannes Frollo, “over four hours, and I sincerely trust they may be deducted from my time in purgatory. I heard the eight chanters of the King of Sicily start High Mass at seven in the Sainte-Chapelle.” 
“Fine chanters forsooth!” exclaimed the other, “their voices are sharper than the peaks of their caps! The King had done better, before founding a Mass in honour of M. Saint-John, to inquire if M. Saint-John was fond of hearing Latin droned with a Proven?al accent.” 
“And was it just for the sake of employing these rascally chanters of the King of Sicily that he did that?” cried an old woman bitterly in the crowd beneath the window. “I ask you—a thousand livres parisis4 for a Mass, and that too to be charged on the license for selling salt-water fish in the fish-market of Paris.” 
“Peace! old woman,” replied a portly and solemn personage, who was holding his nose as he stood beside the fishwife; “a Mass had to be founded. Would you have the King fall sick again?” 
“Bravely said, Sir Gilles Lecornu,5 master furrier to the royal wardrobe!” cried the little scholar clinging to the capital. 
A burst of laughter from the whole band of scholars greeted the unfortunate name of the hapless Court furrier. 
“Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!” shouted some. 
“Cornitus et hirsutus!” 6 responded another. 
“Why, of course,” continued the little wretch on the capital. “But what is there to laugh about? A worthy man is Gilles Lecornu, brother to Master Jehan Lecornu, provost of the Royal Palais, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, head keeper of the Forest of Vincennes, all good citizens of Paris, married every one of them from father to son!” 
The mirth redoubled. The portly furrier answered never a word, but did his best to escape the attention directed to him from all sides; but he puffed and panted in vain. Like a wedge being driven into wood, his struggles only served to fix his broad apoplectic face, purple with anger and vexation, more firmly between the shoulders of his neighbours. 
At last one of these neighbours, fat, pursy, and worthy as himself, came to his aid. 
“Out upon these graceless scholars who dare to address a burgher in such a manner! In my day they would have first been beaten with sticks, and then burnt on them.” 
This set the whole band agog. 
“Holá! hè! what tune’s this? Who’s that old bird of ill omen?” 
“Oh, I know him!” exclaimed one; “it’s Ma?tre Andry Musnier.” 
“Yes, he’s one of the four booksellers by appointment to the University,” said another. 
“Everything goes by fours in that shop!” cried a third. “Four nations, four faculties, four holidays, four procurators, four electors, four booksellers.” 
“Very good,” returned Jehan Frollo, “we’ll quadruple the devil for them.” 
“Musnier, we’ll burn thy books.” 
“Musnier, we’ll beat thy servants.” 
“Musnier, we’ll tickle thy wife.” 
“The good, plump Mlle. Oudarde.” 
“Who is as buxom and merry as if she were already a widow.” 
“The devil fly away with you all,” growled Ma?tre Andry Musnier. 
“Ma?tre Andry,” said Jehan, still hanging fast to his capital, “hold thy tongue, or I fall plump on thy head.” 
Ma?tre Andry looked up, appeared to calculate for a moment the height of the pillar and the weight of the little rascal, mentally multiplied that weight by the square of the velocity —and held his peace. Whereupon Jehan, left master of the field, added triumphantly, “And I’d do it too, though I am the brother of an archdeacon.” 
“A fine set of gentlemen those of ours at the University, not even on a day like this do they see that we get our rights. There’s a may-pole and a bonfire in the town, a Fools’ Pope and Flemish ambassadors in the city, but at the University, nothing!” 
“And yet the Place Maubert is large enough,” observed one of the youngsters, ensconced in a corner of the window-ledge. 
“Down with the Rector, the electors, and the procurators!” yelled Jehan. 
“We’ll make a bonfire to-night in the Champs-Gaillard with Ma?tre Andry’s books!” added another. 
“And the desks of the scribes!” cried his neighbour. 
“And the wands of the beadles!” 
“And the spittoons of the deans!” 
“And the muniment chests of the procurators!” 
“And the tubs of the doctors!” 
“And the stools of the Rector!” 
“Down!” bellowed little Jehan in a roaring bass; “down with Ma?tre Andry, the beadles and the scribes; down with the theologians, the physicians, and the priests; down with the procurators, the electors, and the Rector!!” 
“ ’Tis the end of the world!” muttered Ma?tre Andry, stopping his ears. 
“Talk of the Rector—there he goes down the square!” cried one of those in the window. And they all strained to catch a glimpse. 
“Is it in truth our venerable Rector, Ma?tre Thibaut?” inquired Jehan Frollo du Moulin, who from his pillar in the interior of the Hall could see nothing of what went on outside. 
“Yes, yes,” responded the others in chorus, “it is Ma?tre Thibaut, the Rector himself.” 
It was in fact the Rector, accompanied by all the dignitaries of the University going in procession to receive the ambassadors, and in the act of crossing the Place du Palais. The scholars crowding at the window greeted them as they passed with gibes and ironical plaudits. The Rector marching at the head of his band received the first volley—it was a heavy one. 
“Good-day, Monsieur the Rector—Holá there! Good-day to you!” 
“How comes it that the old gambler has managed to be here? Has he then actually left his dice?” 
“Look at him jogging alone on his mule—its ears are not as long as his own!” 
“Holá, good-day to you Monsieur the Rector Thibaut! Tybalde aleator!7 old numskull! old gamester!” 
“God save you! How often did you throw double six last night?” 
“Oh, just look at the lantern-jawed old face of him—all livid and drawn and battered from his love of dice and gaming!” 
“Where are you off to like that, Thibaut, Tybalde ad dados, 8 turning your back on the University and trotting towards the town?” 
“Doubtless he is going to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodè!” 9 cried Jehan Frollo. 
The whole ribald crew repeated the pun in a voice of thunder and with furious clapping of hands. 
“You are off to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodè, aren’t you, Monsieur the Rector, own partner to the devil!” 
Now came the turn of the other dignitaries. 
“Down with the beadles! Down with the mace-bearers!” 
“Tell me, Robin Poussepain, who is that one over there?” 
“It is Gilbert de Suilly, Gilbertus de Soliaco, the Chancellor of the College of Autun.” 
“Here, take my shoe—you have a better place than I have—throw it in his face!” 
“Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces!” 10 
“Down with the six theologians in their white surplices!” 
“Are those the theologians? I took them for the six white geese Sainte-Geneviéve pays to the Town as tribute for the fief of Roogny.” 
“Down with the physicians!” 
“Down with all the pompous and squabbling disputations!” 
“Here goes my cap at thy head, Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviéve; I owe thee a grudge. He gave my place in the Nation of Normandy to little Ascaino Falzaspada, who as an Italian, belongs of right to the Province of Bourges.” 
“ ’Tis an injustice!” cried the scholars in chorus. “Down with the Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviéve!” 
“Ho, there, Ma?tre Joachim de Ladehors! Ho, Louis Dahuille! Ho, Lambert Hoctement!” 
“The devil choke the Procurator of the Nation of Germany!” 
“And the chaplains of the Sainte-Chapelle in their gray amices; cum tunicis grisis!” 
“Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis!” 
“There go the Masters of Art! Oh, the fine red copes! and oh, the fine black ones!” 
“That makes a fine tail for the Rector!” 
“He might be the Doge of Venice going to espouse the sea.” 
“Look, Jehan, the canons of Sainte-Geneviéve!” 
“The foul fiend take the whole lot of them!” 
“Abbè Claude Choart! Doctor Claude Choart, do you seek Marie la Giffarde?” 
“You’ll find her in the Rue Glatigny.” 
“Bed-making for the King of the Bawdies!” 
“She pays her fourpence—quatuor denarios.” 
“Aut unum bombum.” 
“Would you have her pay you with one on the nose?” 
“Comrades! Ma?tre Simon Sanguin, the elector of the Nation of Picardy, with his wife on the saddle behind him.” 
“Post equitem sedet atra cura.” 11 
“Good-day to you, Monsieur the Elector!” 
“Good-night to you, Madame the Electress!” 
“Lucky dogs to be able to see all that!” sighed Joannes de Molendino, still perched among the acanthus leaves of his capital. 
Meanwhile the bookseller of the University, Ma?tre Andry Musnier, leaned over and whispered to the Court furrier, Ma?tre Gilles Lecornu: 
“I tell you, monsieur, ’tis the end of the world. Never has there been such unbridled license among the scholars. It all comes of these accursed inventions—they ruin everything—the artillery, the culverine, the blunderbuss, and above all, printing, that second pestilence brought us from Germany. No more manuscripts—no more books! Printing gives the death-blow to bookselling. It is the beginning of the end.” 
“I, too, am well aware of it by the increasing preference for velvet stuffs,” said the furrier. 
At that moment it struck twelve. 
A long-drawn “Ah!” went up from the crowd. 
The scholars held their peace. There ensued a general stir and upheaval, a great ffling of feet and movement of heads, much coughing and blowing of noses; everyone resettled himself, rose on tip-toe, placed himself in the most favourable position obtainable. Then deep silence, every neck outstretched, every mouth agape, every eye fixed on the marble table. Nothing appeared; only the four sergeants were still at their posts, stiff and motionless as four painted statues. Next, all eyes turned towards the platform reserved for the Flemish envoys. The door remained closed and the platform empty. Since daybreak the multitude had been waiting for three things—the hour of noon, the Flemish ambassadors, and the Mystery-Play. Noon alone had kept the appointment. It was too bad. They waited one, two, three, five minutes—a quarter of an hour—nothing happened. Then anger followed on the heels of impatience; indignant words flew hither and thither, though in suppressed tones as yet. “The Mystery, the Mystery!” they murmured sullenly. The temper of the crowd began to rise rapidly. The warning growls of the gathering storm rumbled overhead. It was Jehan du Moulin who struck out the first flash. 
“Let’s have the Mystery, and the devil take the Flemings!” he cried at the pitch of his voice, coiling himself about his pillar like a serpent. 
The multitude clapped its approval. 
“The Mystery, the Mystery!” they repeated, “and to the devil with all Flanders!” 
“Give us the Mystery at once,” continued the scholar, “or it’s my advice we hang the provost of the Palais by way of both Comedy and Morality.” 
“Well said!” shouted the crowd, “and let’s begin the hanging by stringing up his sergeants.” 
A great roar of applause followed. The four poor devils grew pale and glanced apprehensively at one another. The multitude surged towards them, and they already saw the frail wooden balustrade that formed the only barrier between them and the crowd bulge and give way under the pressure from without. 
The moment was critical. 
“At them! At them!” came from all sides. 
At that instant the curtain of the dressing-room we have described was raised to give passage to a personage, the mere sight of whom suddenly arrested the crowd, and, as if by magic, transformed its anger into curiosity. 
“Silence! Silence!” 
But slightly reassured and trembling in every limb, the person in question advanced to the edge of the marble table with a profusion of bows which, the nearer he approached, assumed more and more the character of genuflections. 
By this time quiet had been gradually restored, and there only remained that faint hum which always rises out of the silence of a great crowd. 
“Messieurs the bourgeois,” he began, “and Mesdemoiselles the bourgeoises, we shall have the honour of declaiming and performing before his Eminence Monsieur the Cardinal a very fine Morality entitled ’The Good Judgment of Our Lady the Virgin Mary.’ I play Jupiter. His Eminence accompanies at this moment the most honourable Embassy of the Duke of Austria, just now engaged in listening to the harangue of Monsieur the Rector of the University at the Porte Baudets. As soon as the Most Reverend the Cardinal arrives we will commence.” 
Certainly nothing less than the direct intervention of Jupiter could have saved the four unhappy sergeants of the provost of the Palais from destruction. Were we so fortunate as to have invented this most veracious history and were therefore liable to be called to task for it by Our Lady of Criticism, not against us could the classical rule be cited, Nec deus intersit. 
For the rest, the costume of Seigneur Jupiter was very fine, and had contributed not a little towards soothing the crowd by occupying its whole attention. Jupiter was arrayed in a “brigandine” or shirt of mail of black velvet thickly studded with gilt nails, on his head was a helmet embellished with silver-gilt buttons, and but for the rouge and the great beard which covered respectively the upper and lower half of his face, but for the roll of gilded pasteboard in his hand studded with iron spikes and bristling with jagged strips of tinsel, which experienced eyes at once recognised as the dread thunder-bolt, and were it not for his flesh-coloured feet, sandalled and beribboned á la Grecque, you would have been very apt to mistake him for one of M. de Berry’s company of Breton archers. 
_____________________
1 Notre-Dame de Paris was begun July 30, 1830. 
2 The term Gothic used in its customary sense is quite incorrect, but is hallowed by tradition. We accept it, therefore, and use it like the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the latter half of the Middle Ages, of which the pointed arch forms the central idea, and which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the round arch is the prevailing feature.—Author’s Note. 
3 
In truth it was a sorry game
When in Paris Dame Justice,
Having gorged herself with spice,
Set all her palace in a flame
. 
The application of these lines depends, unfortunately, on an untranslatable play on the word èpice, which means both spice and lawyers’ fees.
4 Old French money was reckoned according to two standards, that of Paris (parisis) and Tours (tournois); the livre parisis, the old franc, having twenty-five sols or sous, and the livre tournois twenty sols.—Translator’s Note. 
5 Cuckold. 
6 Horned and hairy. 
7 Thibaut, thou gamester. 
8 Thibaut towards losses. 
9 A pun. Thibaut aux dés; i. e., Thibaut with the dice. 
10 Freely translated: There’ll be rotten apples thrown at heads to-day. 
11 Behind the rider sits black care. 
Chapter 2 - Pierre Gringoire
Unfortunately, the admiration and satisfaction so universally excited by his costume died out during his harangue, and when he reached the unlucky concluding words, “As soon as his Reverence the Cardinal arrives, we will begin,” his voice was drowned in a tempest of hooting. 
“Begin on the spot! The Mystery, the Mystery at once!” shouted the audience, the shrill voice of Joannes de Molendino sounding above all the rest, and piercing the general uproar like the fife in a charivari at N?mes. 
“Begin!” piped the boy. 
“Down with Jupiter and the Cardinal de Bourbon!” yelled Robin Poussepain and the other scholars perched on the window-sill. 
“The Morality!” roared the crowd. “At once—on the spot. The sack and the rope for the players and the Cardinal!” 
Poor Jupiter, quaking, bewildered, pale beneath his rouge, dropped his thunder-bolt and took his helmet in his hand; then bowing and trembling: “His Eminence,” he stammered, “the Ambassadors—Madame Marguerite of Flanders—” he could get no farther. Truth to tell, he was afraid of being hanged by the populace for beginning too late, hanged by the Cardinal for being too soon; on either side he beheld an abyss—that is to say, a gibbet. 
Mercifully some one arrived upon the scene to extricate him from the dilemma and assume the responsibility. 
An individual standing inside the balustrade in the space left clear round the marble table, and whom up till now no one had noticed, so effectually was his tall and spare figure concealed from view by the thickness of the pillar against which he leaned—this person, thin, sallow, light-haired, young still, though furrowed of brow and cheek, with gleaming eye and smiling mouth, clad in black serge threadbare and shiny with age, now approached the marble table and signed to the wretched victim. But the other was too perturbed to notice. 
The newcomer advanced a step nearer. “Jupiter,” said he, “my dear Jupiter.” 
The other heard nothing. 
At last the tall young man losing patience, shouted almost in his face: “Michel Giborne!” 
“Who calls?” said Jupiter, starting as if from a trance. 
“It is I,” answered the stranger in black. 
“Ah!” said Jupiter. 
“Begin at once,” went on the other. “Do you content the people—I will undertake to appease Monsieur the provost, who, in his turn, will appease Monsieur the Cardinal.” 
Jupiter breathed again. 
“Messeigneurs the bourgeois,” he shouted with all the force of his lungs to the audience, which had not ceased to hoot him, “we are going to begin.” 
“Evoe Jupiter! Plaudite cives!”1 yelled the scholars. 
“No?l! No?l!” shouted the people. 
There was a deafening clapping of hands, and the Hall still rocked with plaudits after Jupiter had retired behind his curtain. 
Meanwhile the unknown personage who had so magically transformed the storm into a calm, had modestly re-entered the penumbra of his pillar, where doubtless he would have remained, unseen, unheard, and motionless as before, had he not been lured out of it by two young women who, seated in the first row of spectators, had witnessed his colloquy with Michel Giborne—Jupiter. 
“Maitre,” said one of them, beckoning to him to come nearer. 
“Hush, my dear Liènarde,” said her companion, a pretty, rosy-cheeked girl, courageous in the consciousness of her holiday finery, “he doesn’t belong to the University—he’s a layman. You mustn’t say ’Ma?tre’ to him, you must say ’Messire.’ ” 
“Messire,” resumed Liènarde. 
The stranger approached the balustrade. 
“What can I do for you, mesdemoiselles?” he asked eagerly. 
“Oh, nothing!” said Liènarde, all confused; “it is my neighbour, Gisquette la Gencienne, who wants to speak to you.” 
“Not at all,” said Gisquette, blushing, “it was Liènarde who called you ’Maitre,’ and I told her she ought to say ’Messire.’ ” 
The two girls cast down their eyes. The stranger, nothing loath to start a conversation with them, looked at them smilingly. 
“So you have nothing to say to me, ladies?” 
“Oh, nothing at all,” Gisquette declared. 
“No, nothing,” added Liènarde. 
The tall young man made as if to retire, but the two inquiring damsels were not inclined to let him go so soon. 
“Messire,” began Gisquette with the impetuous haste of a woman taking a resolve, “it appears you are acquainted with the soldier who is going to play the part of Madame the Virgin in the Mystery.” 
“You mean the part of Jupiter,” returned the unknown. 
“Yes, of course!” said Liènarde. “Isn’t she stupid? So you know Jupiter?” 
“Michel Giborne? Yes, madame.” 
“He has a splendid beard,” said Liènarde. 
“Will it be very fine what they are going to say?” asked Gisquette shyly. 
“Extremely fine, mademoiselle,” responded the unknown without the slightest hesitation. 
“What is it to be?” asked Liènarde. 
“ ’The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin,’ a Morality, an it please you, mademoiselle.” 
“Ah! that’s different,” rejoined Liènarde. 
A short silence ensued. It was broken by the young man. 
“It is an entirely new Morality,” said he, “and has never been used before.” 
“Then it is not the same as they gave two years ago on the day of the entry of Monsieur the Legate, in which there were three beautiful girls to represent certain personages—” 
“Sirens,” said Liènarde. 
“And quite naked,” added the young man. 
Liènarde modestly cast down her eyes. Gisquette glanced at her and then followed her example. 
“It was a very pleasant sight,” continued the young man, unabashed. “But the Morality to-day was composed expressly for Madame the Lady of Flanders.” 
“Will they sing any bergerettes?” asked Gisquette. 
“Fie!” exclaimed the unknown; “love-songs in a Morality? The different sorts of plays must not be confounded. Now, if it were sotie,2 well and good—” 
“What a pity!” returned Gisquette. “That day at the Ponceau fountain there were wild men and women who fought with one another and formed themselves into different groups, singing little airs and love-songs.” 
“What is suitable for a legate,” remarked the unknown dryly, “would not be seemly for a princess.” 
“And close by,” Liènarde went on, “a number of deep-toned instruments played some wonderful melodies.” 
“And for the refreshment of the passer-by,” added Gisquette, “the fountains spouted wine and milk and hypocras from three mouths, and every one drank that would.” 
“And a little below the Ponceau fountain at the Trinitè,” continued Liènarde, “there was a Passion Play acted without words.” 
“Yes, so there was!” cried Gisquette. “Our Lord on the cross and the two thieves to right and left of him.” 
Here the two friends, warming to the recollection of the legate’s entry, both began talking at once. “And farther on, at the Porte-aux-Peintres, were other persons very richly dressed.” 
“And at the Fountain of the Holy Innocents, that huntsman pursuing a him with great barking of dogs and blowing of horns.” 
“And near the slaughter-house of Paris, that wooden erection representing the fortress of Dieppe.” 
“And you remember, Gisquette, just as the legate passed they sounded the assault, and all the English had their throats cut.” 
“And near the Chatelet Gate were some very fine figures.” 
“And on the Pont-au-Change, too, which was all hung with draperies.” 
“And when the legate passed over it they let fly more than two hundred dozen birds of all kinds. That was beautiful, Liènarde!” 
“It will be far finer to-day,” broke in their interlocutor at last, who had listened to them with evident impatience. 
“You can promise us that this Mystery will be a fine one?” said Gisquette. 
“Most assuredly I can,” he replied; then added with a certain solemnity, “Mesdemoiselles, I am myself the author of it.” 
“Truly?” exclaimed the girls in amazement. 
“Yes, truly,” asserted the poet with conscious pride. “That is to say, there are two of us—Jehan Marchand, who sawed the planks and put up the wooden structure of the theatre, and I, who wrote the piece. My name is Pierre Gringoire.” 
Not with greater pride could the author of the Cid have said, “I am Pierre Corneille.” 
Our readers cannot have failed to note that some time had elapsed between the moment at which Jupiter withdrew behind the curtain, and that at which the author thus abruptly revealed himself to the unsophisticated admiration of Gisquette and Liènarde. Strange to say, all this crowd, so tumultuous but a few minutes ago, were now waiting patiently with implicit faith in the player’s word. A proof of the everlasting truth still demonstrated in our theatres, that the best means of making the public wait patiently is to assure them that the performance is about to begin. 
However, the scholar Joannes was not so easily lulled. “Holá!” he shouted suddenly into the midst of the peaceful expectation which had succeeded the uproar, “Jupiter! Madame the Virgin! Ye devil’s mountebanks! would you mock us? The piece! the piece. Do you begin this moment, or we will—” 
This was enough. Immediately a sound of music from high- and low-pitched instruments was heard underneath the structure, the curtain was raised, four party-coloured and painted figures issued from it, and clambering up the steep ladder on to the upper platform, ranged themselves in a row fronting the audience, whom they greeted with a profound obeisance. The symphony then ceased. The Mystery began. 
After receiving ample meed of applause in return for their bows, the four characters proceeded, amid profound silence, to deliver a prologue which we willingly spare the reader. Besides, just as in our own day, the public was far more interested in the costumes the actors wore than the parts they enacted—and therein they chose the better part. 
All four were attired in party-coloured robes, half yellow, half white, differing from one another only in material; the first being of gold and silver brocade, the second of silk, the third of woollen stuff, the fourth of linen. The first of these figures carried a sword in his right hand, the second two golden keys, the third a pair of scales, the fourth a spade; and for the benefit of such sluggish capacities as might have failed to penetrate the transparency of these attributes, on the hem of the brocade robe was embroidered in enormous black letters, “I am Nobility,” on the silk one “I am Clergy,” on the woollen one “I am Commerce,” on the linen one “I am Labour.” The sex of the two male allegories was plainly indicated by the comparative shortness of their tunics and their Phrygian caps, whereas the female characters wore robes of ample length and hoods on their heads. 
It would also have required real perverseness not to have understood from the poetic imagery of the prologue that Labour was espoused to Commerce, and Clergy to Nobility, and that the two happy couples possessed between them a magnificent golden dolphin (dauphin) which they proposed to adjudge only to the most beautiful damsel. Accordingly, they were roaming the world in search of this Fair One, and, after rejecting successively the Queen of Golconda, the Princess of Trebizonde, the daughter of the Grand Khan of Tartary, etc, etc., Labour and Commerce, Clergy and Nobility, had come to rest themselves awhile on the marble table of the Palais de Justice, and to deliver themselves before an honoured audience of a multitude of sententious phrases, moral maxims, sophisms, flowers of speech, as were freely dispensed in those days by the Faculty of Arts or at the examinations at which the Masters took their degree. 
All this was, in effect, very fine. 
Meanwhile, in all that crowd over which the four allegorical figures were pouring out floods of metaphor, no ear was more attentive, no heart more palpitating, no eye more eager, no neck more outstretched than the eye, the ear, the heart, the neck of the poet-author, our good Pierre Gringoire, who but a little while before had been unable to resist the joy of revealing his name to a couple of pretty girls. He had retired again behind his pillar, a few paces from them, where he stood gazing, listening, relishing. The favourable applause which had greeted the opening of his prologue was still thrilling through his vitals; and he was completely carried away by that kind of contemplative ecstasy with which the dramatic author follows his ideas as they drop one by one from the lips of the actor amid the silence of a vast audience. Happy Pierre Gringoire! 
Sad to say, however, this first ecstasy was but of short duration. Scarcely had Gringoire raised this intoxicating cup of triumph and delight to his lips than a drop of bitterness came to mingle with it. 
A beggar, a shocking tatterdemalion, too tightly squeezed in among the crowd to be able to collect his usual harvest, or, in all probability, had not found sufficient to indemnify himself in the pockets of his immediate neighbours, had conceived the bright idea of perching himself in some conspicuous spot from whence he might attract the gaze and the alms of the benevolent. To this end, during the opening lines of the prologue, he had managed to hoist himself up by the pillars of the reserved platform on to the cornice which projected around the foot of its balustrade, where he seated himself, soliciting the attention and the pity of the throng by his rags and a hideous sore covering his right arm. He did not, however, utter a word. 
The silence he preserved allowed of the prologue proceeding without let or hindrance, nor would any noticeable disturbance have occurred if, as luck would have it, the scholar Jehan had not, from his own high perch, espied the beggar and his antics. A wild fit of laughter seized the graceless young rascal, and, unconcerned at interrupting the performance and distracting the attention of the audience, he cried delightedly: 
“Oh, look at that old fraud over there begging!” 
Any one who has ever thrown a stone into a frog-pond, or fired into a covey of birds, will have some idea of the effect of these incongruous words breaking in upon the all-pervading quiet. Gringoire started as if he had received an electric shock. The prologue broke off short, and all heads turned suddenly towards the beggar, who, far from being disconcerted, only saw in this incident an excellent opportunity for gathering a harvest, and at once began whining in a piteous voice with half-closed eyes: “Charity, I pray you!” 
“Why, upon my soul!” cried Jehan, “if it isn’t Clopin Trouillefou! Holá! friend, so thy sore was troublesome on thy leg that thou hast removed it to thine arm?” and so saying, with the dexterity of a monkey he tossed a small silver piece into the greasy old beaver which the beggar held out with his diseased arm. The man received both alms and sarcasm without wincing, and resumed his doleful petition: “Charity, I pray you!” 
This episode had distracted the audience not a little, and a good many of the spectators, Robin Poussepain and the rest of the students at the head, delightedly applauded this absurd duet improvised in the middle of the prologue between the scholar with his shrill, piping voice, and the beggar with his imperturbable whine. 
Gringoire was seriously put out. Recovering from his first stupefaction, he pulled himself together hurriedly and shouted to the four actors on the stage: “Go on! que diable! go on!” without deigning even a glance of reprobation at the two brawlers. 
At that moment he felt a pluck at the edge of his surcoat, and turning round, not in the best of humours, he forced an unwilling smile to his lips, for it was the pretty hand of Gisquette la Gencienne thrust through the balustrade and thus soliciting his attention. 
“Monsieur,” said the girl, “are they going on?” 
“To be sure,” Gringoire replied, half offended by the question. 
“In that case, messire,” she continued, ’will you of your courtesy explain to me—” 
“What they are going to say?” broke in Gringoire. “Well, listen.” 
“No,” said Gisquette; “but what they have already said.” 
Gringoire started violently like a man touched in an open wound. “A pestilence on the witless little dunce!” he muttered between his teeth; and from that moment Gisquette was utterly lost in his estimation. 
Meanwhile the actors had obeyed his injunction, and the public, seeing that they were beginning to speak, resettled itself to listen; not, however, without having lost many a beautiful phrase in the soldering of the two parts of the piece which had so abruptly been cut asunder. Gringoire reflected bitterly on this fact. However, tranquility had gradually been restored, Jehan was silent, the beggar was counting the small change in his hat, and the play had once more got the upper hand. 
Sooth to say, it was a very fine work which, it seems to us, might well be turned to account even now with a few modifications. The exposition, perhaps somewhat lengthy and dry, but strictly according to prescribed rules, was simple, and Gringoire, in the inner sanctuary of his judgment, frankly admired its perspicuity. 
As one might very well suppose, the four allegorical personages were somewhat fatigued after having travelled over three parts of the globe without finding an opportunity of disposing suitably of their golden dolphin. Thereupon, a long eulogy on the marvellous fish, with a thousand delicate allusions to the young betrothed of Marguerite of Flanders— who at that moment was languishing in dismal seclusion at Amboise, entirely unaware that Labour and Clergy, Nobility and Commerce, had just made the tour of the world on his behalf. The said dolphin, then, was handsome, was young, was brave; above all (splendid origin of all the royal virtues) he was the son of the Lion of France. Now I maintain that this bold metaphor is admirable, and the natural history of the stage has no occasion on a day of allegory and royal epithalamium to take exception at a dolphin who is son to a lion. These rare and Pindaric combinations merely prove the poet’s enthusiasm. Nevertheless, in justice to fair criticism be it said, the poet might have developed this beautiful idea in less than two hundred lines. On the other hand, by the arrangements of Monsieur the Provost, the Mystery was to last from noon till four o’clock, and they were obliged to say something. Besides, the people listened very patiently. 
Suddenly, in the very middle of a quarrel between Dame Commerce and my Lady Nobility, and just as Labour was pronouncing this wonderful line: 
“Beast more triumphant ne’er in woods I’ve seen,” 
the door of the reserved platform which up till then had remained inopportunely closed, now opened still more inopportunely, and the stentorian voice of the usher announced “His Eminence Monseigneur the Cardinal de Bourbon!” 
_____________________
1 Hail, Jupiter! Citizens, applaud! 
2 A satirical play very much in vogue during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 
Chapter 3 - The Cardinal
Alas, poor Gringoire! The noise of the double petards let off on Saint-John’s Day, a salvo of twenty arquebuses, the thunder of the famous culverin of the Tour de Billy, which on September 29, 1465, during the siege of Paris, killed seven Burgundians at a blow, the explosion of the whole stock of gunpowder stored at the Temple Gate would have assailed his ears less rudely at this solemn and dramatic moment than those few words from the lips of the usher: “His Eminence the Cardinal de Bourbon!” 
Not that Pierre Gringoire either feared the Cardinal or despised him; he was neither so weak nor so presumptuous. A true eclectic, as nowadays he would be called, Gringoire was of those firm and elevated spirits, moderate and calm, who ever maintain an even balance—Stare in dimidio rerum— and who are full of sense and liberal philosophy, to whom Wisdom, like another Ariadne, seems to have given a ball of thread which they have gone on unwinding since the beginning of all things through the labyrinthine paths of human affairs. One comes upon them in all ages and ever the same; that is to say, ever conforming to the times. And without counting our Pierre Gringoire, who would represent them in the fifteenth century if we could succeed in conferring on him the distinction he merits, it was certainly their spirit which inspired Father de Bruel in the sixteenth century, when he wrote the following sublimely na?ve words, worthy of all ages: “I am Parisian by nation, and parrhisian by speech, since parrhisia in Greek signifies freedom of speech, which freedom I have used even towards Messeigneurs the Cardinals, uncle and brother to Monseigneur the Prince de Conty: albeit with due respect for their high degree and without offending any one of their train, which is saying much.” 
There was therefore neither dislike of the Cardinal nor contemptuous indifference to his presence in the unpleasing impression made on Gringoire. Quite the contrary; for our poet had too much common sense and too threadbare a doublet not to attach particular value to the fact that many an allusion in his prologue, and more especially the glorification of the dolphin, son of the Lion of France, would fall upon the ear of an Eminentissime. But self-interest is not the predominating quality in the noble nature of the poet. Supposing the entity of the poet to be expressed by the number ten, it is certain that a chemist in analyzing and “pharmacopoeizing” it, as Rabelais terms it, would find it to be composed of one part self-interest to nine parts of self-esteem. 
Now, at the moment when the door opened for the Cardinal’s entry, Gringoire’s nine parts of self-esteem, swollen and inflated by the breath of popular admiration, were in a state of prodigious enlargement, obliterating that almost imperceptible molecule of self-interest which we just now pointed out as a component part of the poet’s constitution—a priceless ingredient, be it said, the ballast of common sense and humanity, without which they would forever wander in the clouds. Gringoire was revelling in the delights of seeing, of, so to speak, touching, an entire assemblage (common folk, it is true, but what of that?) stunned, petrified, suffocated almost by the inexhaustible flow of words which poured down upon them from every point of his epithalamium. I affirm that he shared in the general beatitude, and that, unlike La Fontaine, who, at the performance of his comedy Florentin, inquired, “What bungler wrote this balderdash?” Gringoire would gladly have asked his neighbours, “Who is the author of this master-piece?” Judge, therefore, of the effect produced on him by the abrupt and ill-timed arrival of the Cardinal. 
And his worst fears were but too fully realized. The entry of his Eminence set the whole audience in commotion. Every head was turned towards the gallery. You could not hear yourself speak. “The Cardinal! The Cardinal!” resounded from every mouth. For the second time the unfortunate prologue came to an abrupt stop. 
The Cardinal halted for a moment on the threshold of the platform, and while he cast a glance of indifference over the crowd the uproar increased. Each one wanted a good view, and strained to raise his head above his neighbour’s. 
And in truth he was a very exalted personage, the sight of whom was worth any amount of Mysteries. Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon, Archbishop and Count of Lyons, Primate of all Gaul, was related to Louis XI through his brother, Pierre, Lord of Beaujeu, who had married the King’s eldest daughter, and to Charles the Bold through his mother, Agnes of Burgundy. The dominant trait, the prevailing and most striking feature in the character of the Primate of Gaul, was his courtier spirit and unswerving devotion to the powers that be. One may imagine the innumerable perplexities in which these two relationships involved him, and through what temporal shoals he had to steer his spiritual bark in order to avoid being wrecked either on Louis or on Charles, that Scylla and Charybdis which had swallowed up both the Duke of Nemours and the Constable of Saint-Pol. Heaven be praised, however, he had managed the voyage well, and had come safely to anchor in Rome without mishap. Yet, although he was in port, and precisely because he was in port, he never recalled without a qualm of uneasiness the many changes and chances of his long and stormy political voyage, and he often said that the year 1476 had been for him both black and white; meaning that in that year he had lost his mother, the Duchess of Bourbonnais, and his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, and that the one death had consoled him for the other. 
For the rest, he was a proper gentleman; led the pleasant life befitting a cardinal, was ever willing to make merry on the royal vintage of Chaillot, had no objection to Richarde de la Garmoise and Thomasse la Saillarde, would rather give alms to a pretty girl than an old woman, for all of which reasons he was high in favour with the populace of Paris. He was always surrounded by a little court of bishops and abbots of high degree, gay and sociable gentlemen, never averse to a thorough good dinner; and many a time had the pious gossips of Saint-Germain d’Auxerre been scandalized in passing at night under the lighted windows of the H?tel de Bourbon, to hear the selfsame voices which erstwhile had chanted vespers for them now trolling out, to the jingle of glasses, the bacchanalian verses of Benedict XII (the Pope who added the third crown to the tiara) beginning “Bibamus papaliter” (Let us drink like Popes). 
Without doubt it was this well-earned popularity which saved him from any demonstration of ill-will on the part of the crowd, so dissatisfied but a moment before, and but little disposed to evince respect towards a Cardinal on the very day they were going to elect a Pope of their own. But the Parisians bear very little malice; besides, having forced the performance to commence of their own authority, they had worsted the Cardinal, and their victory sufficed them. Moreover, Monseigneur was a handsome man, and he wore his handsome red robe excellently well; which is equivalent to saying that he had all the women, and consequently the greater part of the audience, on his side. Decidedly it would have shown great want both of justice and of good taste to hoot a Cardinal for coming late to the play, when he is a handsome man and wears his red robe with so handsome an air. 
He entered then, greeted the audience with that smile which the great instinctively bestow upon the people, and slowly directed his steps towards his chair of scarlet velvet, his mind obviously preoccupied by some very different matter. His train, or what we should now call his staff, of bishops and abbots, streamed after him on to the platform, greatly increasing the disturbance and the curiosity down among the spectators. Each one was anxious to point them out or name them, to show that he knew at least one of them; some pointing to the Bishop of Marseilles—Alaudet, if I remember right —some to the Dean of Saint-Denis, others again to Robert de Lespinasse, Abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Près, the dissolute brother of a mistress of Louis XI, all with much ribald laughter and scurrilous jesting. 
As for the scholars, they swore like troopers. This was their own especial day, their Feast of Fools, their Saturnalia, the annual orgy of the Basoche1 and the University—no turpitude, no foulness of language but was right and proper to that day. Besides, there was many a madcap light o’ love down in the crowd to spur them on—Simone Quatrelivres, Agnés la Gadine, Robine Pièdebou. It was the least that could be expected, that they should be allowed to curse at their ease and blaspheme a little on so joyful an occasion and in such good company—churchmen and courtesans. Nor did they hesitate to take full advantage thereof, and into the midst of the all-prevailing hubbub there poured an appalling torrent of blasphemies and enormities of every description from these clerks and scholars, tongue-tied all the rest of the year through fear of the branding-iron of Saint-Louis. Poor Saint-Louis, they were snapping their fingers at him in his own Palais de Justice. Each one of them had singled out among the new arrivals some cassock—black or gray, white or violet —Joannes Frollo de Molendino, as brother to an archdeacon, having audaciously assailed the red robe, fixing his bold eyes on the Cardinal and yelling at the pitch of his voice, “Cappa repleta mero!” Oh, cassock full of wine! 
But all these details which we thus lay bare for the edification of the reader were so overborne by the general clamour that they failed altogether to reach the reserved platform. In any case the Cardinal would have taken but little heed of them, such license being entirely in keeping with the manners of the day. Besides, his mind was full of something else, as was evident by his preoccupied air; a cause of concern which followed close upon his heels and entered almost at the time with him on to the platform. This was the Flemish Embassy. 
Not that he was a profound politician and thus concerned for the possible consequences of the marriage between his one cousin, Madame Marguerite of Burgundy, and his other cousin, the Dauphin Charles; little he cared how long the patched-up friendship between the Duke of Austria and the King of France would last, nor how the King of England would regard this slight offered to his daughter, and he drank freely each evening of the royal vintage of Chaillot, never dreaming that a few flagons of this same wine (somewhat revised and corrected, it is true), cordially presented to Edward IV by Louis XI, would serve one fine day to rid Louis XI of Edward IV. No, “the most honourable Embassy of Monsieur the Duke of Austria” brought none of these anxieties to the Cardinal’s mind; the annoyance came from another quarter. In truth, it was no small hardship, as we have already hinted at the beginning of this book, that he, Charles of Bourbon, should be forced to offer a courteous welcome and entertainment to a squad of unknown burghers; he, the Cardinal, receive mere sheriffs; he, the Frenchman, a polished bon-viveur, and these beer-drinking Flemish boors—and all this in public too! Faith, it was one of the most irksome parts he had ever had to play at the good pleasure of the King. 
However, he had studied that part so well, that when the usher announced in sonorous tones, “Messieurs, the Envoys of Monsieur the Duke of Austria,” he turned towards the door with the most courteous grace in the world. Needless to say, every head in the Hall turned in the same direction. 
Thereupon there entered, walking two and two, and with a gravity of demeanour which contrasted strongly with the flippant manner of the Cardinal’s ecclesiastical following, the forty-eight ambassadors of Maximilian of Austria, led by the Reverend Father in God, Jehan, Abbot of Saint-Bertin, Chancellor of the Golden Fleece, and Jacques de Goy, Sieur Dauby, baillie of Ghent. Deep silence fell upon the assemblage, only broken by suppressed titters at the uncouth names and bourgeois qualifications which each of these persons transmitted with imperturbable gravity to the usher, who proceeded to hurl name and title unrecognisably mixed and mutilated, at the crowd below. There was Master Loys Roelof, Sheriff of the City of Louvain; Messire Clays d’Etuelde, Sheriff of Brussels; Messire Paul de Baeust, Sieur of Voirmizelle, President of Flanders; Master Jehan Coleghens, Burgomaster of the City of Antwerp; Master George de la Moere, High Sheriff of the Court of Law of the City of Ghent; Master Gheldolf van der Hage, High Sheriff to the Parchons, or Succession Offices of the same city; and the Sieur de Bierbecque, and Jehan Pinnock, and Jehan Dymaerzelle, and so on and so on; baillies, sheriffs, burgomasters; burgomasters, sheriffs, baillies; wooden, formal figures, stiff with velvet and damask, their heads covered by birettas of black velvet with great tassels of gold thread of Cyprus—good Flemish heads, nevertheless, dignified and sober faces, akin to those which stand out so strong and earnest from the dark background of Rembrandt’s “Night Round”; faces which all bore witness to the perspicacity of Maximilian of Austria in confiding “to the full,” as his manifesto ran, “in their good sense, valour, experience, loyalty, and high principles.” 
There was one exception, however, a subtle, intelligent, crafty face, a curious mixture of the ape and the diplomatist, towards whom the Cardinal advanced three paces and bowed profoundly, but who, nevertheless, was simply named Guillaume Rym, Councillor and Pensionary2 of the City of Ghent. 
Few people at that time recognised the true significance of Guillaume Rym. A rare genius who, in revolutionary times, would have appeared upon the surface of events, the fifteenth century compelled him to expend his fine capacities on underground intrigue—to live in the saps, as Saint-Simon expresses it. For the rest, he found full appreciation with the first “sapper” of Europe, being intimately associated with Louis XI in his plots, and often had a hand in the secret machinations of the King. All of which things were entirely beyond the ken of the multitude, who were much astonished at the deferential politeness of the Cardinal towards this insignificant looking little Flemish functionary. 
______________________
1 The company and jurisdiction of the Paris lawyers, founded 1303. 
2 Title, in those days, of the first Minister of State in Holland. 
Chapter 4 - Master Jacques Coppenole
While the Pensionary of Ghent and his Eminence were exchanging very low bows and a few words in a tone still lower, a tall man, large-featured and of powerful build, prepared to enter abreast with Guillaume Rym—the mastiff with the fox—his felt hat and leathern jerkin contrasting oddly with all the surrounding velvet and silk. Presuming that it was some groom gone astray, the usher stopped him: 
“Hold, friend, this is not your way!” 
The man in the leathern jerkin shouldered him aside. 
“What does the fellow want of me?” said he in a voice which drew the attention of the entire Hall to the strange colloquy; “ seest not that I am one of them?” 
“Your name?” demanded the usher. 
“Jacques Coppenole.” 
“Your degree?” 
“Hosier, at the sign of the ’Three Chains’ in Ghent.” 
The usher recoiled. To announce sheriff and burgomaster was bad enough; but a hosier—no, that passed all bounds! The Cardinal was on thorns. Everybody was staring and listening. For two whole days had his Eminence been doing his utmost to lick these Flemish bears into shape in order to make them somewhat presentable in public—this contretemps was a rude shock. 
Meanwhile Guillaume Rym turned to the usher and with his diplomatic smile, “Announce Ma?itre Jacques Coppenole, Clerk to the Sheriffs of the City of Ghent,” he whispered to him very softly. 
“Usher,” added the Cardinal loudly, “announce Ma?tre Jacques Coppenole, Clerk to the Sheriffs of the illustrious City of Ghent.” 
This was a mistake. Left to himself, Guillaume Rym would have dexterously settled the difficulty; but Coppenole had heard the Cardinal. 
“No, Croix-Dieu!” he said in a voice of thunder, “Jacques Coppenole, hosier. Hearest thou, usher? Nothing more, nothing less! God’s cross! Hosier is as fine a title as any other! Many a time Monsieur the Archduke has looked for his glove1 among my hose!” 
There was a roar of laughter and applause. A pun is instantly taken up in Paris, and never fails of applause. 
Add to this that Coppenole was one of the people, and that the throng beneath him was also composed of the people, wherefore, the understanding between them and him had been instantaneous, electric, and, so to speak, from the same point of view. The Flemish hosier’s high and mighty way of putting down the courtiers stirred in these plebeian breasts a certain indefinable sense of self-respect, vague and embryonic as yet in the fifteenth century. And this hosier, who just now had held his own so stoutly before the Cardinal, was one of themselves—a most comfortable reflection to poor devils accustomed to pay respect and obedience to the servants of the servants of the Abbot of Sainte-Geneviéve, the Cardinal’s train-bearer. 
Coppenole saluted his Eminence haughtily, who courteously returned the greeting of the all-powerful burgher, whom even Louis XI feared. Then, while Guillaume Rym, “that shrewd and malicious man,” as Philippe de Comines says, followed them both with a mocking and supercilious smile, each sought their appointed place, the Cardinal discomfited and anxious, Coppenole calm and dignified, and thinking no doubt that after all his title of hosier was as good as any other, and that Mary of Burgundy, the mother of that Margaret whose marriage Coppenole was helping to arrange, would have feared him less as cardinal than as hosier. For it was not a cardinal who would have stirred up the people of Ghent against the favourites of the daughter of Charles the Bold, and no cardinal could have hardened the crowd with a word against her tears and entreaties when the Lady of Flanders came to supplicate her people for them, even at the foot of their scaffold; whereas the hosier had but to lift his leather-clad arm, and off went your heads my fine gentlemen, Seigneur Guy d’Hymbercourt and Chancellor Guillaume Hugonet! 
Yet this was not all that was in store for the poor Cardinal; he was to drink to the dregs the cup of humiliation—the penalty of being in such low company. 
The reader may perhaps remember the impudent mendicant who, at the beginning of the Prologue, had established himself upon the projection just below the Cardinal’s platform. The arrival of the illustrious guests had in nowise made him quit his position, and while prelates and ambassadors were packed on the narrow platform like Dutch herrings in a barrel, the beggar sat quite at his ease with his legs crossed comfortably on the architrave. It was a unique piece of insolence, but nobody had noticed it as yet, the attention of the public being directed elsewhere. For his part, he took no notice of what was going on, but kept wagging his head from side to side with the unconcern of a Neapolitan lazzarone, and mechanically repeating his droning appeal, “Charity, I pray you!” Certain it was, he was the only person in the whole vast audience who never even deigned to turn his head at the altercation between Coppenole and the usher. Now, it so chanced that the master hosier of Ghent, with whom the people were already so much in sympathy and on whom all eyes were fixed, came and seated himself in the first row on the platform, just above the beggar. What was the amazement of the company to see the Flemish ambassador, after examining the strange figure beneath him, lean over and clap the ragged shoulder amicably. The beggar turned—surprise, recognition, and pleasure beamed from the two faces—then, absolutely regardless of their surroundings, the hosier and the sham leper fell to conversing in low tones and hand clasped in hand, Clopin Trouillefou’s ragged arm against the cloth of gold draperies of the balustrade, looking like a caterpillar on an orange. 
The novelty of this extraordinary scene excited such a stir of merriment in the Hall that the Cardinal’s attention was attracted. He bent forward, but being unable from where he sat to do more than catch a very imperfect glimpse of Trouillefou’s unsightly coat, he naturally imagined that it was merely a beggar asking alms, and, incensed at his presumption— 
“Monsieur the Provost of the Palais, fling me this rascal into the river!” he cried. 
“Croix-Dieu! Monseigneur the Cardinal,” said Coppenole without leaving hold of Trouillefou’s hand, “it’s a friend of mine.” 
“No?l! No?l!” shouted the crowd; and from that moment Master Coppenole enjoyed in Paris as in Ghent “great favour with the people, as men of his stamp always do,” says Philippe de Comines, “when they are thus indifferent to authority.” 
The Cardinal bit his lip, then he leaned over to his neighbour, the Abbot of Sainte-Geneviéve: 
“Droll ambassadors these, whom Monsieur the Archduke sends to announce Madame Marguerite to us,” he said in a half whisper. 
“Your Eminence wastes his courtesy on these Flemish hogs,” returned the Abbot. “Margaritas ante porcos.” 
“Say rather,” retorted the Cardinal with a smile, “Porcos ante Margaritam.” 
This little jeu de mots sent the whole cassocked court into ecstasies. The Cardinal’s spirits rose somewhat; he was quits now with Coppenole—he, too, had had a pun applauded. 
And now, with such of our readers as have the power to generalize an image and an idea, as it is the fashion to say nowadays, permit us to ask if they are able to form a clear picture of the scene presented by the vast parallelogram of the great Hall at the moment to which we draw their attention. In the middle of the western wall is the magnificent and spacious platform draped with cloth of gold, entered by a small Gothic doorway, through which files a procession of grave and reverend personages whose names are announced in succession by the strident voice of the usher. The first benches are already occupied by a crowd of venerable figures muffled in robes of ermine, velvet, and scarlet cloth. Around this platform—on which reigns decorous silence—below, opposite, everywhere, the seething multitude, the continuous hum of voices, all eyes fixed on every face on the platform, a thousand muttered repetitions of each name. In truth, a curious spectacle and worthy of the attention of the spectators. But stay, what is that kind of erection at the opposite end of the Hall, having four party-coloured puppets on it and four others underneath; and who is that pale figure standing beside it clad in sombre black? Alas! dear reader, it is none other than Pierre Gringoire and his Prologue, both of which we had utterly forgotten. 
And that is exactly what he had feared. 
From the moment when the Cardinal entered, Gringoire had never ceased to exert himself to keep his Prologue above water. First he had vehemently urged the actors, who had faltered, and stopped short, to proceed and raise their voices; then, perceiving that nobody was listening to them, he stopped them again, and during the quarter of an hour the interruption had lasted had never ceased tapping his foot impatiently, fuming, calling upon Gisquette and Liènarde, urging those near him to insist on the continuation of the Prologue—in vain. Not one of them would transfer his attention from the Cardinal, the Embassy, the platform—the one centre of this vast radius of vision. It must also be admitted, and we say it with regret, that by the time his Eminence appeared on the scene and caused so marked a diversion, the audience was beginning to find the Prologue just a little tedious. After all, whether you looked at the platform or the marble table, the play was the same—the conflict between Labour and Clergy, Aristocracy and Commerce. And most of them preferred to watch these personages as they lived and breathed, elbowing each other in actual flesh and blood on the platform, in the Flemish Embassy, under the Cardinal’s robe or Coppenole’s leathern jerkin, than painted, tricked out, speaking in stilted verse, mere dummies stuffed into yellow and white tunics, as Gringoire represented them. 
Nevertheless, seeing tranquility somewhat restored, our poet bethought him of a stratagem which might have been the saving of the whole thing. 
“Monsieur,” said he, addressing a man near him, a stout, worthy person with a long-suffering countenance, “now, how would it be if they were to begin it again?” 
“What?” asked the man. 
“Why, the Mystery,” said Gringoire. 
“Just as you please,” returned the other. 
This half consent was enough for Gringoire, and taking the business into his own hands, he began calling out, making himself as much one of the crowd as possible: “Begin the Mystery again! Begin again!” 
“What the devil’s all the hubbub about down there?” said Joannes de Molendino (for Gringoire was making noise enough for half a dozen). “What, comrades, is the Mystery not finished and done with? They are going to begin again; that’s not fair!” 
“No! no!” shouted the scholars in chorus. “Down with the Mystery—down with it!” 
But Gringoire only multiplied himself and shouted the louder, “Begin again! begin again!” 
These conflicting shouts at last attracted the attention of the Cardinal. 
“Monsieur the Provost of the Palais,” said he to a tall man in black standing a few paces from him, “have these folk gone demented that they are making such an infernal noise?” 
The Provost of the Palais was a sort of amphibious magistrate; the bat, as it were, of the judicial order, partaking at once of the nature of the rat and the bird, the judge and the soldier. 
He approached his Eminence, and with no slight fear of his displeasure, explained in faltering accents the unseemly behaviour of the populace: how, the hour of noon having arrived before his Eminence, the players had been forced into commencing without waiting for his Eminence. 
The Cardinal burst out laughing. 
“By my faith, Monsieur the Rector of the University might well have done likewise. What say you Ma?tre Guillaume Rym?” 
“Monseigneur,” replied Rym, “let us be content with having missed half the play. That is so much gained at any rate.” 
“Have the fellows permission to proceed with their mummeries?” inquired the Provost. 
“Oh, proceed, proceed,” returned the Cardinal; “ ’tis all one to me. Meanwhile I can be reading my breviary.” 
The Provost advanced to the front of the platform, and after obtaining silence by a motion of the hand, called out: 
“Burghers, country and townsfolk, to satisfy those who desire the play should begin again and those who desire it should finish, his Eminence orders that it should continue.” 
Thus both parties had to be content. Nevertheless, both author and audience long bore the Cardinal a grudge in consequence. 
The persons on the stage accordingly resumed the thread of their discourse, and Gringoire hoped that at least the remainder of his great work would get a hearing. But this hope was doomed to speedy destruction like his other illusions. Silence had indeed been established to a certain extent, but Gringoire had not observed that when the Cardinal gave the order for the Mystery to proceed, the platform was far from being filled, and that the Flemish ambassadors were followed by other persons belonging to the rest of the cortég, whose names and titles, hurled intermittently by the usher into the midst of his dialogue, caused considerable havoc therein. Imagine the effect in a drama of to-day of the doorkeeper bawling between the lines, or even between the first two halves of an alexandrine, such parentheses as these: 
“Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue, Procurator of the King in the Ecclesiastical Court!” 
“Jehan de Harlay, Esquire, Officer of the Mounted Night Watch of the City of Paris!” 
“Messire Galiot de Genoilhac, Knight, Lord of Brussac, Chief of the King’s Artillery!” 
“Ma?tre Dreux-Raguier, Inspector of Waters and Forests of our Lord the King, throughout the lands of France, Champagne, and Brie!” 
“Messire Louis de Graville, Knight, Councillor and Chamberlain to the King, Admiral of France, Ranger of the Forest of Vincennes!” 
“Ma?tre Denis le Mercier, Custodian to the House for the Blind in Paris!” etc., etc., etc. 
It was insufferable. 
This peculiar accompaniment, which made it so difficult to follow the piece, was the more exasperating to Gringoire as he was well aware that the interest increased rapidly as the work advanced, and that it only wanted hearing to be a complete success. It would indeed be difficult to imagine a plot more ingeniously and dramatically constructed. The four characters of the Prologue were still engaged in bewailing their hopeless dilemma when Venus herself, vera incessu patuit dea, appeared before them, wearing a splendid robe emblazoned with the ship of the city of Paris.2 She had come to claim for herself the dolphin promised to the Most Fair. She had the support of Jupiter, whose thunder was heard rumbling in the dressing-room, and the goddess was about to bear away her prize—in other words, to espouse Monsieur the Dauphin —when a little girl, clad in white damask, and holding a daisy in her hand (transparent personification of Marguerite of Flanders), arrived on the scene to contest it with Venus. Coup de thèatre and quick change. After a brisk dispute, Marguerite, Venus, and the side characters agreed to refer the matter to the good judgment of the Blessed Virgin. There was another fine part, that of Don Pedro, King of Mesopotamia; but it was difficult amid so many interruptions to make out exactly what was his share in the transaction. And all this had scrambled up the ladder. 
But the play was done for; not one of these many beauties was heard or understood. It seemed as if, with the entrance of the Cardinal, an invisible and magic thread had suddenly drawn all eyes from the marble table to the platform, from the southern to the western side of the Hall. Nothing could break the spell, all eyes were tenaciously fixed in that direction, and each fresh arrival, his detestable name, his appearance his dress, made a new diversion. Excepting Gisquette and Liènarde, who turned from time to time if Gringoire plucked them by the sleeve, and the big, patient man, not a soul was listening, not one face was turned towards the poor, deserted Morality. Gringoire looked upon an unbroken vista of profiles. 
With what bitterness did he watch his fair palace of fame and poetry crumble away bit by bit! And to think that these same people had been on the point of rioting from impatience to hear his piece! And now that they had got it, they cared not a jot for it—the very same performance which had commenced amid such unanimous applause. Eternal flow and ebb of popular favour! And to think they had nearly hanged the sergeants of the Provost! What would he not have given to go back to that honey-sweet moment! 
However, at last all the guests had arrived and the usher’s brutal monologue perforce came to an end. Gringoire heaved a sigh of relief. The actors spouted away bravely. Then, what must Master Coppenole the hosier do but start up suddenly, and in the midst of undivided attention deliver himself of the following abominable harangue: 
“Messires the burghers and squires of Paris, hang me if I know what we’re all doing here. To be sure, I do perceive over in that corner on a sort of stage some people who look as if they were going to fight. I do not know if this is what you call a Mystery, but I am quite certain it is not very amusing. They wrestle only with their tongues. For the last quarter of an hour I have been waiting to see the first blow struck, but nothing happens. They are poltroons, and maul one another only with foul words. You should have had some fighters over from London or Rotterdam, then there would have been some pretty fisticuffing if you like— blows that could have been heard out on the Place. But these are sorry folk. They should at least give us a Morris-dance or some such mummery. This is not what I had been given to expect. I had been promised a Feast of Fools and the election of a Pope. We too have our pope of fools at Ghent, in that we are behind nobody. Croix-Dieu! This is how we manage it. We get a crowd together as here; then everybody in turn thrusts his head through a hole and pulls a face at the others. The one who by universal consent makes the ugliest face is chosen Pope. That’s our way. It’s most diverting. Shall we choose your Pope after the same fashion? It would at any rate be less tedious than listening to these babblers. If they like to take their turn at grimacing they’re welcome. What say you, my masters? We have here sufficiently queer samples of both sexes to give us a good Flemish laugh, and enough ugly faces to justify our hopes of a beautiful grimace.” 
Gringoire would fain have replied, but stupefaction, wrath, and indignation rendered him speechless. Besides, the proposal of the popular hosier was received with such enthusiasm by these townsfolk, so flattered by being addressed as squires, that further resistance was useless. There was nothing for it but to go with the stream. Gringoire buried his face in his hands, not being fortunate enough to possess a mantle wherewith to veil his countenance like the Agamemnon of Timanthes. 
______________________
1 A pun on the word gant (glove) and Gand, the French name for the city of Ghent. 
2 The arms of the city of Paris show a ship on heaving billows and the motto “Fluctuat nec mergitur.” 
Chapter 5 - Quasimodo
In a twinkling burghers, students, and Basochians had set to work, and all was ready to carry out Coppenole’s suggestion. The little chapel facing the marble table was chosen as the mise en scéne of the grimaces. A pane of glass was broken out of the charming rose-window above the door, leaving an empty ring of stone, through which the competitors were to thrust their heads, while two barrels, procured from goodness knows where, and balanced precariously on the top of one another, enabled them to mount up to it. It was then agreed that, in order that the impression of the grimace might reach the beholder in full unbroken purity, each candidate, whether male or female (for there could be a female pope), was to cover his face and remain concealed in the chapel till the moment of his appearance. 
In an instant the chapel was filled with competitors, and the doors closed upon them. 
From his place on the platform Coppenole ordered everything, directed everything, arranged everything. During the hubbub, and pretexting vespers and other affairs of importance, the Cardinal, no less disconcerted than Gringoire, retired with his whole suite, and the crowd, which had evinced so lively an interest in his arrival, was wholly unmoved by his departure. Guillaume Rym alone noticed the rout of his Eminence. 
Popular attention, like the sun, pursued its even course. Starting at one end of the Hall, it remained stationary for a time in the middle, and was now at the other end. The marble table, the brocade-covered platform, had had their day; now it was the turn of the Chapel of Louis XI. The field was clear for every sort of folly; the Flemings and the rabble were masters of the situation. 
The pulling of faces began. The first to appear in the opening—eye-lids turned inside out, the gaping mouth of a ravening beast, the brow creased and wrinkled like the hussar boots of the Empire period—was greeted with such a roar of inextinguishable laughter that Homer would have taken all these ragamuffins for gods. 
Nevertheless, the great Hall was anything rather than Olympus, as Gringoire’s poor Jupiter knew to his cost. A second, a third distortion followed, to be succeeded by another and another; and with each one the laughter redoubled, and the crowd stamped and roared its delight. There was in the whole scene a peculiar frenzy, a certain indescribable sense of intoxication and fascination almost impossible to convey to the reader of our times and social habits. 
Picture to yourself a series of faces representing successively every geometrical form, from the triangle to the trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; every human expression, from rage to lewdness; every stage of life, from the creases of the newly born to the wrinkles of hoary age; every phantasm of mythology and religion, from Faunus to Beelzebub; every animal head, from the buffalo to the eagle, from the shark to the bulldog. Conceive all the grotesques of the Pont-Neuf, those nightmares turned to stone under the hand of Germain Pilon, inspired with the breath of life, and rising up one by one to stare you in the face with gleaming eyes; all the masks of the Carnival of Venice passing in procession before you—in a word, a human kaleidoscope. 
The orgy became more and more Flemish. Tenniers himself could have given but a feeble idea of it; a Salvator Rosa battle-piece treated as a bacchic feast would be nearer the mark. There were no longer scholars, ambassadors, burghers, men or women; neither Clopin Trouillefou nor Gilles Lecornu nor Marie Quatrelivres nor Robin Pousse-pain. The individual was swallowed up in the universal license. The great Hall was simply one vast furnace of effrontery and unbridled mirth, in which every mouth was a yell, every countenance a grimace, every individual a posture. The whole mass shrieked and bellowed. Every new visage that came grinning and gnashing to the window was fresh fuel to the furnace. And from this seething multitude, like steam from a caldron, there rose a hum—shrill, piercing, sibilant, as from a vast swarm of gnats. 
“Oh! oh! malediction!” 
“Oh, look at that face!” 
“That’s no good.” 
“Show us another.” 
“Guillemette Maugrepuis, look at that ox-muzzle. It only wants horns. It can’t be thy husband.” 
“The next!” 
“Ventre du pape! What sort of a face do you call that?” 
“Holá there—that’s cheating! no more than the face is to be shown!” 
“Is that Perette Callebotte?—devil take her—it’s just what she would do!” 
“No?l! No?l!” 
“I shall choke!” 
“Here’s one whose ears won’t come through.” 
And so on, and so on. 
To do our friend Jehan justice, however, he was still visible in the midst of the pandemonium, high up on his pillar like a ship’s boy in the mizzen, gesticulating like a maniac, his mouth wide open and emitting sounds that nobody heard; not because they were drowned by the all-pervading clamour, terrific as it was, but because doubtless they had reached the limit at which shrill sounds are audible—the twelve thousand vibrations of Sauveur, or the eight thousand of Biot. 
As to Gringoire, the first moment of depression over, he had regained his self-possession, had stiffened his back against adversity. 
“Go on,” said he for the third time to his players. “Go on, you speaking machines,” and proceeded to pace with long strides in front of the marble table. At one moment he was seized with the desire to go and present himself at the round window, if only for the gratification of pulling a face at this thankless crowd. “But no,” he said to himself, “that would be beneath our dignity—no vengeance. We will fight on to the end. The power of poetry over the people is great. I shall yet regain my hold. We shall see which will win the day, belles-lettres or grimaces.” 
Alas! he was the sole spectator of his piece. 
No, I am wrong. The big, patient man, whom he had already consulted at a critical moment, still faced the stage. As to Gisquette and Liènarde, they had long since deserted him. 
Touched to the heart by the stanchness of this audience of one, Gringoire went up to him and accosted him, shaking him gently by the arm, for the good man was leaning against the balustrade dozing comfortably. 
“Sir,” said Gringoire, “I thank you.” 
“Sir,” returned the big man with a yawn, “for what?” 
“I see the cause of your annoyance,” resumed the poet. “This infernal din prevents your listening in comfort. But never fear, your name shall go down to posterity. Your name, if I may ask?” 
“Renault Chateau, Keeper of the Seal of the Chatelet of Paris, at your service.” 
“Sir, you are the sole representative of the Muses,” said Gringoire. 
“You are too good, sir,” replied the Keeper of the Seal of Chatelet. 
“The one person who has paid suitable attention to the piece. What do you think of it?” 
“H’m, h’m,” replied the big official drowsily. “Really quite entertaining.” 
Gringoire had to be content with this faint praise, for the conversation was abruptly cut short by a thunder of applause mingled with shouts of acclamation. The Fools had elected their Pope. 
“No?l! No?l! No?l!” roared the crowd from all sides. 
In truth, the grimace that beamed through the broken rose-window at this moment was nothing short of miraculous. After all the faces—pentagonal, hexagonal, and heteroclite— which had succeeded each other in the stone frame, without which had succeeded each other in the stone frame, without realizing the grotesque ideal set up by the inflamed popular imagination, nothing inferior to the supreme effort now dazzling the spectators would have sufficed to carry every vote. Master Coppenole himself applauded, and Clopin Trouillefou, who had competed—and Lord knows to what heights his ugliness could attain—had to own himself defeated. We will do likewise, nor attempt to convey to the reader a conception of that tetrahedral nose, that horse-shoe mouth, of that small left eye obscured by a red and bristling brow, while the right disappeared entirely under a monstrous wart, of those uneven teeth, with breaches here and there like the crenated walls of a fortress, of that horny lip over which one of the teeth projected like an elephant’s tusk, of that cloven chin, nor, above all, of the expression overlying the whole—an indefinable mixture of malice, bewilderment, and sadness. Picture such an cnsemble to yourself if you can. 
There was not a single dissentient voice. They rushed to the Chapel and in triumph dragged forth the thrice lucky Pope of Fools. Then surprise and admiration reached the culminating point—he had but shown his natural countenance. 
Rather, let us say, his whole person was a grimace. An enormous head covered with red bristles; between the shoulders a great hump balanced by one in front; a system of thighs and legs so curiously misplaced that they only touched at the knees, and, viewed from the front, appeared like two sickles joined at the handles; huge splay feet, monstrous hands, and, with all this deformity, a nameless impression of formidable strength, agility, and courage—strange exception to the eternal rule, which decrees that strength, like beauty, shall be the outcome of harmony. 
Such was he whom the Fools had chosen for their Pope. He looked like a giant broken and badly repaired. 
The moment this species of Cyclops appeared in the doorway of the Chapel, standing motionless, squat, almost as broad as he was long, squared by the base, as a great man has described it, he was instantly recognised by his party-coloured coat, half red, half violet, sprinkled with little silver bells, and above all, by the perfection of his ugliness. 
“ ’Tis Quasimodo the bell-ringer!” shouted the people with one voice; “Quasimodo the Hunchback of Notre-Dame! Quasimodo the one-eyed! Quasimodo the bandy-legged! No?l! No?l!” 
The poor devil had evidently a large stock of nicknames to choose from. 
“Let all pregnant women beware!” cried the scholars. 
“Or those that wish to be!” added Joannes. 
And in effect the women hastily covered their faces. 
“Oh, the hideous ape!” exclaimed one. 
“And as wicked as he is ugly,” returned another. 
“ ’Tis the devil himself,” added a third. 
“I am unlucky enough to live near Notre-Dame. I hear him scrambling about the leads all night.” 
“With the cats.” 
“He’s forever on our roofs.” 
“He casts spells at us down our chimneys.” 
“The other night he came and made faces at me through my sky-light window. I thought it was a man. What a fright I got!” 
“I am certain he goes to the witches’ Sabbath. He once left a broom on my leads.” 
“Oh, his horrid hunchback’s face!” 
“Oh, the wicked creature!” 
“Fie upon him!” 
On the other hand, the men were enchanted and applauded vociferously. 
Meanwhile Quasimodo, the object of all this uproar, stood grave and unmoved in the doorway of the Chapel, and suffered himself to be admired. One of the scholars, Robin Poussepain I think it was, came up and laughed in his face —somewhat too close. Without a word Quasimodo seized him by the belt and tossed him into the crowd full ten paces off. 
“God’s cross! Holy Father!” exclaimed Master Coppenole in amazement. “Yours is the rarest ugliness I have ever beheld in all my born days. You deserve to be Pope of Rome, as well as of Paris.” And so saying, he clapped a jovial hand on the hunchback’s shoulder. 
Quasimodo did not stir. “Now here’s a fellow,” continued Coppenole, “I have a mind to dine with, even if it cost me a new douzain of twelve livres tournois. What say you?” 
Quasimodo made no reply. 
“Croix-Dieu!” cried the hosier, “art deaf?” 
As a matter of fact he was deaf. 
However, he began to be annoyed by Coppenole’s manner, and suddenly turned upon him with such a snarl that the Flemish giant recoiled like a bulldog before a cat. 
The result of this was that a circle of terror and respect, with a radius of at least fifteen geometric paces, was formed around the alarming personage. 
An old woman explained to Master Coppenole that Quasimodo was deaf. 
“Deaf?” cried the hosier with his great Flemish guffaw; “Croix-Dieu! then he’s every inch a Pope!” 
“Why, I know him!” exclaimed Jehan, who by this time had clambered down from his pillar to examine the hunchback more closely. “It’s my brother the Archdeacon’s bell-ringer. Good-day, Quasimodo.” 
“The man’s a devil,” growled Robin Poussepain, still giddy from his fall. “He shows himself, and you discover he is a hunchback; he walks, and he is bow-legged; he looks at you, and he has only one eye; you speak to him, and he is deaf. Why, what does this Polyphemus do with his tongue?” 
“He can speak when he likes,” said the old woman. “He is deaf from the bell-ringing; he is not dumb.” 
“That’s all that’s wanting to make him perfect,” remarked Jehan. 
“And he has an eye too many.” 
“Not at all,” said Jehan judicially; “a one-eyed man is more incomplete than a blind one, for he is conscious of what he lacks.” 
Meanwhile all the beggars, all the lackeys, all the cutpurses, had tacked themselves on to the scholars, and gone in procession to the wardrobe of the Basoche to fetch the pasteboard tiara and the mock robe reserved for the Fool’s Pope, with which Quasimodo permitted himself to be invested without turning a hair, and with a sort of proud docility. They then seated him on a chair, twelve officers of the Fraternity of Fools lifted him on their shoulders, and a gleam of bitter and disdainful satisfaction lit up the morose face of the Cyclops as he saw the heads of all these fine, strong, straight-limbed men beneath his misshapen feet. 
Then the whole bellowing, tattered crew set itself in motion to make the customary round of the interior galleries of the Palais, before marching through the streets and by-ways of the city. 
Chapter 6 - Esmeralda
We are charmed to be able to inform our readers that during this whole scene Gringoire and his piece held their own. Spurred on by him, the actors had not ceased to declaim, nor he to listen. He had contributed his share to the clamour and was determined to stand fast to the end; nor did he despair of finally regaining the attention of the public. This spark of hope revived when he beheld Quasimodo, Coppenole, and the yelling cortége of the Pope of Fools troop out of the Hall with deafening uproar, the crowd eagerly at their heels. 
“Good,” said he, “there goes the disturbing element.” 
But unfortunately the disturbing element comprised the entire public. In a twinkling the Hall was empty. 
To be exact, a sprinkling of spectators still remained, scattered about singly or grouped round the pillars—women, old men, and children who had had enough of the noise and the tumult. A few scholars sat astride the windows looking down into the Place. 
“Well,” thought Gringoire, “here we have at least enough to listen to the end of my Mystery. They are few, but select —a lettered audience.” 
A moment afterward it was discovered that a band of music, which should have been immensely effective at the entry of the Blessed Virgin, was missing. Gringoire found that his musicians had been pressed into the service of the Pope of Fools. “Go on without it,” he said stoically. 
Approaching a group of townsfolk who appeared to be discussing his play, he caught the following scraps of conversation: 
“Ma?tre Cheneteau, you know the H?tel de Navarre, which used to belong to M. de Nemours?” 
“Opposite the Chapelle de Braque—yes.” 
“Well, the fiscal authorities have just let it to Guillaume Alisandre, the historical painter, for six livres eight sols parisis a year.” 
“How rents are rising!” 
“Come,” thought Gringoire with a sigh, “at least the others are listening.” 
“Comrades!” suddenly cried one of the young rascals at the window, “Esmeralda—Esmeralda down in the Place!” 
The name acted like a charm. Every soul in the Hall rushed to the window, clambering up the walls to see, and repeating “Esmeralda! Esmeralda!” while from the outside came a great burst of applause. 
“Now what do they mean with their ’Esmeralda’?” Gringoire inquired, clasping his hands in despair. “Ah, mon Dieu! it appears that the windows are the attraction now.” 
He turned towards the marble table and discovered that the play had suffered an interruption. It was the moment at which Jupiter was to appear on the scene with his thunder. But Jupiter was standing stock-still below the stage. 
“Michel Giborne, what are you doing there?” cried the exasperated poet. “Is that playing your part? Get up on the stage at once.” 
“Alas!” said Jupiter, “one of the scholars has just taken away the ladder.” 
Gringoire looked. It was but too true; the connection between the knot of his play and the untying had been cut. 
“Rascal,” he muttered, “what did he want with the ladder?” 
“To help him to see Esmeralda,” answered Jupiter, in an injured tone. “He said, ’Hallo, here’s a ladder that nobody’s using,’ and away he went with it.” 
This was the last straw. Gringoire accepted it with resignation. 
“May the devil fly away with you!” said he to the actors, “and if I am paid you shall be.” Whereupon he beat a retreat, hanging his head, but the last in the field, like a general who has made a good fight. 
“A precious set of boobies and asses, these Parisians!” he growled between his teeth, as he descended the tortuous stairs of the Palais. “They come to hear a Mystery, and don’t listen to a word. They’ve been taken up with all the world—with Clopin Trouillefou, with the Cardinal, with Coppenole, with Quasimodo, with the devil; but with Madame the Virgin Mary not a bit. Dolts! if I had only known! I’d have given you some Virgin Marys with a vengeance. To think that I should have come here to see faces and found nothing but backs! I, a poet, to have the success of an apothecary! True, Homerus had to beg his bread through the Greek villages, and Ovidius Naso died in exile among the Muscovites. But the devil flay me if I know what they mean with their Esmeralda. To begin with, where can the word come from?—ah, it’s Egyptian.” 
BOOK II
Chapter 1 - From Scylla to Charybdis
Night falls early in January. It was already dark in the streets when Gringoire quitted the Palais, which quite suited his taste, for he was impatient to reach some obscure and deserted alley where he might meditate in peace, and where the philosopher might apply the first salve to the wounds of the poet. Philosophy was his last refuge, seeing that he did not know where to turn for a night’s lodging. After the signal miscarriage of his first effort, he had not the courage to return to his lodging in the Rue Grenier-sur-l’Eau, opposite the hay-wharf, having counted on receiving from Monsieur the Provost for his epithalamium the wherewithal to pay Ma?tre Guillaume Doulx-Sire, farmer of the cattle taxes in Paris, the six months’ rent he owed him; that is to say, twelve sols parisis, or twelve times the value of all he possessed in the world, including his breeches, his shirt, and his beaver. 
Resting for a moment under the shelter of the little gateway of the prison belonging to the treasurer of the Sainte-Chapelle, he considered what lodging he should choose for the night, having all the pavements of Paris at his disposal. Suddenly he remembered having noticed in the preceding week, at the door of one of the parliamentary counsellors in the Rue de la Savaterie, a stone step, used for mounting on mule-back, and having remarked to himself that that stone might serve excellently well as a pillow to a beggar or a poet. He thanked Providence for having sent him this happy thought, and was just preparing to cross the Place du Palais and enter the tortuous labyrinth of the city, where those ancient sisters, the streets of la Baillerie, la Vielle-Draperie, la Savaterie, la Juiverie, etc., pursue their mazy windings, and are still standing to this day with their nine-storied houses, when he caught sight of the procession of the Pope of Fools, as it issued from the Palais and poured across his path with a great uproar, accompanied by shouts and glare of torches and Gringoire’s own band of music. 
The sight touched his smarting vanity, and he fled. In the bitterness of his dramatic failure everything that reminded him of the unlucky festival exasperated him and made his wounds bleed afresh. 
He would have crossed the Pont Saint-Michel, but children were running up and down with squibs and rockets. 
“A murrain on the fire-works!” exclaimed Gringoire, turning back to the Pont-au-Change. In front of the houses at the entrance to the bridge they had attached three banners of cloth, representing the King, the Dauphin, and Marguerite of Flanders, and also six smaller banners or draplets on which were “pourtraicts” of the Duke of Austria, the Cardinal de Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, Mme. Jeanne de France, and Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon, and some one else, the whole lighted up by flaming cressets. The crowd was lost in admiration. 
“Lucky painter, Jehan Fourbault,” said Gringoire with a heavy sigh, and turned his back upon the banners and the bannerets. A street opened before him so dark and deserted that it offered him every prospect of escape from all the sounds and the illuminations of the festival. He plunged into it. A few moments afterward his foot struck against an obstacle, he tripped and fell. It was the great bunch of may which the clerks of the Basoche had laid that morning at the door of one of the presidents of the parliament, in honour of the day. 
Gringoire bore this fresh mishap with heroism; he picked himself up and made for the water-side. Leaving behind him the Tournelle Civile and the Tour Criminelle, and skirting the high walls of the royal gardens, ankle-deep in mud, he reached the western end of the city, and stopped for some time in contemplation of the islet of the Passeur-aux-vaches or ferry-man of the cattle, since buried under the bronze horse of the Pont-Neuf. In the gloom the islet looked to him like a black blot across the narrow, gray-white stream that separated him from it. One could just make out by a faint glimmer of light proceeding from it, the hive-shaped hut in which the ferry-man sheltered for the night. 
“Happy ferry-man,” thought Gringoire, “thou aspirest not to fame; thou composest no epithalamiums. What carest thou for royal marriages or for Duchesses of Burgundy? Thou reckest of no Marguerites but those with which April pies the meadows for thy cows to crop. And I, a poet, am hooted at, and I am shivering, and I owe twelve sous, and my shoe-soles are worn so thin they would do to glaze thy lantern. I thank thee, ferry-man; thy cabin is soothing to my sight, and makes me forget Paris.” 
Here he was startled out of his well-nigh lyric ecstasy by the explosion of a great double rocket which suddenly went up from the thrice happy cabin. It was the ferry-man adding his contribution to the festivities of the day by letting off some fire-works. 
At this Gringoire fairly bristled with rage. 
“Accursed festival!” cried he; “is there no escape from it?—not even on the cattle ferry-man’s islet?” 
He gazed on the Seine at his feet, and a horrible temptation assailed him. 
“Oh, how gladly would I drown myself,” said he, “if only the water were not so cold!” 
It was then he formed the desperate resolve that, as there was no escape from the Pope of Fools, from Jehan Fourbault’s painted banners, from the bunches of may, from the squibs and rockets, he would boldly cast himself into the very heart of the merry-making and go to the Place de Gréve. 
“There at least,” he reflected, “I may manage to get a brand from the bonfire whereat to warm myself, and to sup off some remnant of the three great armorial devices in sugar which have been set out on the public buffets of the city.” 
Chapter 2 - The Place De Gréve
There remains but one slight vestige of the Place de Gréve as it was in those days; namely, the charming little turret at the northern angle of the square, and that, buried as it is already under the unsightly coating of whitewash which obliterates the spirited outlines of its carvings, will doubtless soon have disappeared altogether, submerged under that flood of raw, new buildings which is rapidly swallowing up all the old facades of Paris. 
Those who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de Gréve without a glance of pity and sympathy for the poor little turret squeezed between two squalid houses of the time of Louis XV, can easily conjure up in fancy the ensemble of edifices of which it formed a part, and so regain a complete picture of the old Gothic square of the fifteenth century. 
Then, as now, it was an irregular square bounded on one side by the quay, and at the others by rows of tall, narrow, and gloomy houses. By daylight, there was much to admire in the diversity of these edifices, all sculptured in wood or stone, and offering, even then, perfect examples of the various styles of architecture in the Middle Ages, ranging from the fifteenth back to the eleventh century, from the perpendicular, which was beginning to oust the Gothic, to the Roman which the Gothic had supplanted, and which still occupied beneath it the first story of the ancient Tour de Roland, at the corner of the square adjoining the Seine on the side of the Rue de la Tannerie. At night, nothing was distinguishable of this mass of buildings but the black and jagged outline of the roofs encircling the Place with their chain of sharp-pointed gables. For herein consists one of the radical differences between the cities of that day and the present, that whereas now the fronts of the houses look on the squares and streets, then it was their backs. During the last two centuries the houses have completely turned about. 
In the centre of the eastern side of the square rose a clumsy and hybrid pile formed of three separate buildings joined together. It was known by three names, which explain its history, its purpose, and its style of architecture: the Maison au Dauphin, because Charles V had inhabited it as Dauphin; the Marchandise, because it was used as the Town Hall; the Maison-aux-Piliers (domus ad pitorum), because of the row of great pillars that supported its three storeys. Here the city found all that was necessary to a good city like Paris: a chapel for its prayers, a plaidoyer or court-room wherein to hear causes and, at need, to give a sharp set-down to the King’s men-at-arms, and in the garrets an arsenal stocked with ammunition. For the good citizens of Paris knew full well that it is not sufficient at all junctures to depend either on prayer or the law for maintaining the franchises of the city, and have always some good old rusty blunderbuss or other in reserve in the attic of the H?tel de Ville. 
La Gréve already had that sinister aspect which it still retains owing to the execrable associations it calls up, and the frowning H?tel de Ville of Dominique Bocador which has replaced the Maison-aux-Piliers. It must be admitted that a gibbet and a pillory—a justice and a ladder, as they were then called—set up side by side in the middle of the Place, went far to make the passer-by turn in aversion from this fatal spot, where so many human beings throbbing with life and health have been done to death, and which fifty years later was to engender the Saint-Vallier fever, that morbid terror of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all maladies, because it comes not from the hand of God but of man. 
It is a consoling thought, let it be said in passing, to remember that the death penalty, which three centuries ago encumbered with its spiked wheels, its stone gibbets, all its dread apparatus of death permanently fixed into the ground, the Place de Gréve, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cours du Trahoir, the Marchè-aux-Pourceaux or pig-market, awful Montfaucon, the Barriére-des-Sergents, the Place-au-Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint-Jacques, not to mention the pillories under the jurisdiction of the Bishop, of the Chapters, of the Abbots, of the Priors; nor the judicial drownings in the Seine—it is consoling, we repeat, to reflect that after losing, one by one, all the pieces of its dread panoply: its multiplicity of executions, its fantastically cruel sentences, its rack at the Grand Chatelet— the leather stretcher of which had to be renewed every five years—that ancient suzerain of feudal society is to-day wellnigh banished from our laws and our cities, tracked from code to code, hunted from place to place, till in all great Paris it has but one dishonoured corner it can call its own—in the Place de Gréve; but one wretched guillotine, furtive, craven, shameful, that always seems to fear being caught red-handed, so quickly does it vanish after dealing its fatal blow. 
Chapter 3 - Besos Para Golpes1
By the time Pierre Gringoire reached the Place de Gréve he was chilled to the bone. He had made his way across the Pont-aux-Meuniers—the Millers’ bridge—to avoid the crowd on the Pont-au-Change and the sight of Jehan Fourbault’s banners; but the wheel of the episcopal mills had splashed him as he passed, and his coat was wet through. In addition, it seemed to him that the failure of his play made him feel the cold more keenly. He hastened, therefore, to get near the splendid bonfire burning in the middle of the Place, but found it surrounded by a considerable crowd. 
“Perdition take these Parisians!” said he to himself—for as a true dramatic poet, Gringoire was greatly addicted to monologue—“now they prevent me getting near the fire— and Heaven knows I have need of a warm corner! My shoes are veritable sponges, and those cursed mill-wheels have been raining upon me. Devil take the Bishop of Paris and his mills! I’d like to know what a bishop wants with a mill. Does he expect he may some day have to turn miller instead of bishop? If he is only waiting for my curse to effect this transformation, he is welcome to it, and may it include his cathedral and his mills as well. Now, let us see if these varlets will make room for me. What are they doing there, I’d like to know. Warming themselves—a fine pleasure indeed! Watching a pile of fagots burn—a grand spectacle, i’ faith!” 
On looking closer, however, he perceived that the circle was much wider than necessary for merely warming one’s self at the King’s bonfire, and that such a crowd of spectators was not attracted solely by the beauty of a hundred blazing fagots. In the immense space left free between the crowd and the fire a girl was dancing, but whether she was a human being, a sprite, or an angel, was what Gringoire—sceptical philosopher, ironical poet though he might be—was unable for the moment to determine, so dazzled was he by the fascinating vision. 
She was not tall, but her slender and elastic figure made her appear so. Her skin was brown, but one guessed that by day it would have the warm golden tint of the Andalusian and Roman women. Her small foot too, so perfectly at ease in its narrow, graceful shoe, was quite Andalusian. She was dancing, pirouetting, whirling on an old Persian carpet spread carelessly on the ground, and each time her radiant face passed before you, you caught the flash of her great dark eyes. 
The crowd stood round her open-mouthed, every eye fixed upon her, and in truth, as she danced thus to the drumming of a tambourine held high above her head by her round and delicate arms, slender, fragile, airy as a wasp, with her gold-laced bodice closely moulded to her form, her bare shoulders, her gaily striped skirt swelling out round her, affording glimpses of her exquisitely shaped limbs, the dusky masses of her hair, her gleaming eyes, she seemed a creature of some other world. 
“In very truth,” thought Gringoire, “it is a salamander —a nymph—’tis a goddess—a bacchante of Mount M?nalus!” 
At this moment a tress of the “salamander’s” hair became uncoiled, and a piece of brass attached to it fell to the ground. 
“Why, no,” said he, “’tis a gipsy!” and all illusion vanished. 
She resumed her performance. Taking up two swords from the ground, she leaned the points against her forehead, and twisted them in one direction while she herself turned in another. 
True, she was simply a gipsy; but however disenchanted Gringoire might feel, the scene was not without its charm, nor a certain weird magic under the glaring red light of the bonfire, which flared over the ring of faces and the figure of the dancing girl and cast a pale glimmer among the wavering shadows at the far end of the Place, flickering over the black and corrugated front of the old Maison-aux-Piliers, or the stone arms of the gibbet opposite. 
Among the many faces dyed crimson by this glow was one which, more than all the others, seemed absorbed in contemplation of the dancer. It was the face of a man, austere, calm, and sombre. His costume was hidden by the crowd pressing round him; but though he did not appear to be more than thirty-five, he was bald, showing only a few sparse locks at the temples and they already gray. The broad high forehead was furrowed, but in the deep-set eyes there glowed an extraordinary youthfulness, a fervid vitality, a consuming passion. Those eyes never moved from the gipsy, and the longer the girl danced and bounded in all the unrestrained grace of her sixteen years, delighting the populace, the gloomier did his thoughts seem to become. Ever and anon a smile and a sigh would meet upon his lips, but the smile was the more grievous of the two. 
At last, out of breath with her exertion, the girl stopped, and the people applauded with all their heart. 
“Djali!” cried the gipsy. 
At this there appeared a pretty little white goat, lively, intelligent, and glossy, with gilded horns and hoofs and a gilt collar, which Gringoire had not observed before, as it had been lying on a corner of the carpet, watching its mistress dance. 
“Djali,” said the dancing girl, “it is your turn now,” and seating herself, she gracefully held out her tambourine to the goat. 
“Now, Djali,” she continued, “which month of the year is it?” 
The goat lifted its fore-foot and tapped once on the tambourine. It was in fact the first month. The crowd applauded. 
“Djali,” resumed the girl, reversing the tambourine, “what day of the month is it?” 
Djali lifted her little golden hoof and gave six strokes on the tambourine. 
“Djali,” continued the gipsy girl, again changing the position of the tambourine, “what hour of the day is it?” 
Djali gave seven strokes. At the same instant the clock of the Maison-aux-Piliers struck seven. 
The people were lost in admiration and astonishment. 
“There is witchcraft in this,” said a sinister voice in the crowd. It came from the bald man, who had never taken his eyes off the gipsy. 
The girl ddered and turned round, but the applause burst out afresh and drowned the morose exclamation— effaced it, indeed, so completely from her mind that she continued to interrogate her goat. 
“Djali, show us how Ma?tre Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of the town sharp-shooters, walks in the procession at Candlemas.” 
Djali stood up on her hind legs and began to bleat, while she strutted along with such a delightful air of gravity that the whole circle of spectators, irresistibly carried away by this parody on the devotional manner of the captain of the sharp-shooters, burst into a roar of laughter. 
“Djali,” resumed the girl, emboldened by her increasing success, “show us Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue, the King’s Procurator in the Ecclesiastical Court, when he preaches.” 
The goat sat up on its hind quarters and proceeded to bleat and wave its fore-feet in so comical a fashion that— excepting the bad French and worse Latin—it was Jacques Charmolue, gesture, accent, attitude, to the life. 
The crowd applauded ecstatically. 
“Sacrilege! profanation!” exclaimed the voice of the bald man once more. 
The gipsy girl turned round again. “Ah,” said she, “it is that hateful man!” then, with a disdainful pout of her under lip, which seemed a familiar little grimace with her, she turned lightly on her heels and began collecting the contributions of the bystanders in her tambourine. 
Grands blancs, petits blancs, targes, liards á l’aigle, every description of small coin, were now showered upon her. Suddenly, just as she was passing Gringoire, he, in sheer absence of mind, thrust his hand into his pocket, so that the girl stopped in front of him. 
“Diable!” exclaimed the poet, finding at the bottom of his pocket reality—in other words, nothing. And yet, here was this pretty girl, her great eyes fixed on him, holding out her tambourine expectantly. Gringoire broke out in a cold perspiration. If he had had all Peru in his pocket, he would most certainly have handed it to the dancing girl, but Gringoire did not possess Peru—and in any case America had not yet been discovered. 
Fortunately an unexpected occurrence came to his relief. 
“Get thee gone from here, locust of Egypt!” cried a harsh voice from the darkest corner of the Place. 
The girl turned in alarm. This was not the voice of the bald man; it was the voice of a woman, one full of fanaticism and malice. However, the exclamation which startled the gipsy girl highly delighted a noisy band of children prowling about the Place. 
“’Tis the recluse of the Tour-Roland!” they cried with discordant shouts of laughter; “’tis the sachette 2 scolding again. Has she not had any supper? Let’s take her something from the public buffet!” and they rushed in a mass towards the Maison-aux-Piliers. 
Meanwhile Gringoire had taken advantage of the dancing girl’s perturbation to eclipse himself, and the children’s mocking shouts reminded him that he too had had no supper. He hastened to the buffet, but the little rascals had been too quick for him, and by the time he arrived they had swept the board. There was not even a miserable piece of honey-bread at five sous the pound. Nothing was left against the wall but the slender fleur de lis and roses painted there in 1434 by Mathieu Biterne—in sooth, a poor kind of supper. 
It is not exactly gay to have to go to bed supperless, but it is still less entertaining neither to have supped nor to know where you are going to get a bed. Yet this was Gringoire’s plight—without a prospect of food or lodging. He found himself pressed on all sides by necessity, and he considered necessity extremely hard on him. He had long ago discovered this truth—that Jupiter created man during a fit of misanthropy, and throughout life the destiny of the wise man holds his philosophy in a state of siege. For his own part, Gringoire had never seen the blockade so complete. He heard his stomach sound a parley, and he thought it too bad that his evil fate should be enabled to take his philosophy by famine. 
He was sinking deeper and deeper into this melancholy mood, when his attention was suddenly aroused by the sound of singing, most sweet but full of strange and fantastic modulations. It was the gipsy girl. 
Her voice, like her dancing and her beauty, had some indefinable and charming quality—something pure and sonorous; something, so to speak, soaring, winged. Her singing was a ceaseless flow of melody, of unexpected cadences, of simple phrases dotted over with shrill and staccato notes, of liquid runs that would have taxed a nightingale, but in which the harmony was never lost, of soft octave undulations that rose and fell like the bosom of the fair singer. And all the while her beautiful face expressed with singular mobility all the varying emotions of her song, from the wildest inspiration to the most virginal dignity—one moment a maniac, the next a queen. 
The words she sang were in a tongue unknown to Gringoire and apparently to herself, so little did the expression she put into her song fit the sense of the words. Thus, on her lips these four lines were full of sparkling gaiety: 
“Un cofre de gran riqueza
Halloran dentro un pilar;
Dentro del, nuevas banderas
Con figuras de espantar.” 3
And the next moment Gringoire’s eyes filled with tears at the expression she put into this verse: 
“Alarabes de cavallo
Sin poderse menear,
Con espadas, y a los cuellos
Ballestas de buen echar.” 4
However, the prevailing note in her singing was joyousness, and, like the birds, she seemed to sing from pure serenity and lightness of heart. 
The gipsy’s song disturbed Gringoire’s reverie, but only as a swan ruffles the water. He listened in a sort of trance, unconscious of all around him. It was the first moment for many hours that he forgot his woes. 
The respite was short. The female voice which had interrupted the gipsy’s dance now broke in upon her song: 
“Silence, grasshopper of hell!” she cried out of the same dark corner of the Place. 
The poor “cigale” stopped short. Gringoire clapped his hands to his ears. 
“Oh!” he cried, “accursed, broken-toothed saw that comes to break the lyre!” 
The rest of the audience agreed with him. “The foul fiend take the old sachette!” growled more than one of them, and the invisible spoil-sport might have had reason to repent of her attacks on the gipsy, if the attention of the crowd had not been distracted by the procession of the Pope of Fools, now pouring into the Place de Gréve, after making the tour of the streets with its blaze of torches and its deafening hubbub. 
This procession which our readers saw issuing from the Palais de Justice had organized itself en route, and had been recruited by all the ruffians, all the idle pickpockets and unemployed vagabonds of Paris, so that by this time it had reached most respectable proportions. 
First came Egypt, the Duke of the Gipsies at the head, on horseback, with his counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrups and followed by the whole gipsy tribe, men and women, pell-mell, their children screeching on their shoulders, and all of them, duke, counts, and rabble, in rags and tinsel. Then came the Kingdom of Argot, otherwise all the vagabonds in France, marshalled in order of their various ranks, the lowest being first. Thus they marched, four abreast, bearing the divers insignia of their degrees in that strange faculty, most of them maimed in one way or another, some halt, some minus a hand—the courtauds de boutanche (shoplifters), the coquillarts (pilgrims), the hubins (house-breakers), the sabouleux (sham epileptics), the calots (dotards), the francs-mitoux (“schnorrers”), the polissons (street rowdies), the piétres (sham cripples), the capons (card-sharpers), the malingreux (infirm), the marcandiers (hawkers), the narquois (thimble-riggers), the orphelines (pickpockets), the archisupp?ts (arch-thieves), and the cagoux (master-thieves)—a list long enough to have wearied Homer himself. It was not without difficulty that in the middle of a conclave of cagoux and archisupp?ts one discovered the King of Argot, the Grand Co?sre, huddled up in a little cart drawn by two great dogs. The Kingdom of Argot was followed by the Empire of Galilee, led by Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, walking majestically in a purple, wine-stained robe, preceded by mummers performing sham-fights and war-dances, and surrounded by his mace-bearers, his satellites, and his clerks of the exchequer.  of all came the members of the Basoche with their garlanded may-poles, their black robes, their music worthy of a witches’ Sabbath, and their great yellow wax candles. In the centre of this crowd the great officers of the Confraternity of Fools bore on their shoulders a sort of litter more loaded with candles than the shrine of Sainte-Geneviéve at the time of the plague. And on it, resplendent in cope, crosier, and mitre, sat enthroned the new Pope of the Fools, Quasimodo, the hunchback, the bell-ringer of Notre-Dame. 
Each section of this grotesque procession had its special music. The gipsies scraped their balafos 5 and banged their tambourines. The Argotiers—not a very musical race—had got no further than the viol, the cow-horn, and the Gothic rebec of the twelfth century. The Empire of Galilee was not much better—scarcely that you distinguished in its music the squeak of some primitive fiddle dating from the infancy of the art, and still confined to the re-la-mi. But it was round the Fools’ Pope that all the musical treasures of the age were gathered in one glorious discordance— treble rebecs, tenor rebecs, not to mention flutes and brasses. Alas, our readers will remember that this was Gringoire’s orchestra. 
It would be difficult to convey an idea of the degree of beatitude and proud satisfaction which had gradually spread over the sad and hideous countenance of Quasimodo during his progress from the Palais to the Place de Gréve. It was the first gleam of self-approbation he had ever experienced. Hitherto, humiliation, disdain, disgust alone had been his portion. Deaf as he was, he relished like any true Pope the acclamations of the multitude, whom he hated because he felt they hated him. What matter that his people were a rabble of Fools, of halt and maimed, of thieves, of beggars? They were a people and he was a sovereign. And he accepted seriously all this ironical applause, all this mock reverence, with which, however, we are bound to say, there was mingled a certain amount of perfectly genuine fear. For the hunchback was very strong, and though bow-legged, was active, and though deaf, was resentful—three qualities which have a way of tempering ridicule. 
For the rest, it is highly improbable that the new Pope of Fools was conscious either of the sentiments he experienced or of those which he inspired. The mind lodged in that misshapen body must inevitably be itself defective and dim, so that whatever he felt at that moment, he was aware of it but in a vague, uncertain, confused way. But joy pierced the gloom and pride predominated. Around that sombre and unhappy countenance there was a halo of light. 
It was therefore not without surprise and terror that suddenly, just as Quasimodo in this semi-ecstatic state was passing the Maison-aux-Piliers in his triumphant progress, they saw a man dart from the crowd, and with a gesture of hate, snatch from his hand the crosier of gilt wood, the emblem of his mock papacy. 
This bold person was the same man who, a moment before, had scared the poor gipsy girl with his words of menace and hatred. He wore the habit of an ecclesiastic, and the moment he disengaged himself from the crowd, Gringoire, who had not observed him before, recognised him. “Tiens!” said he with a cry of astonishment, “it is my master in Hermetics, Dom Claude Frollo the Archdeacon. What the devil can he want with that one-eyed brute? He will assuredly be devoured!” 
Indeed, a cry of terror rose from the crowd, for the formidable hunchback had leapt from his seat, and the women turned their heads that they might not see the Archdeacon torn limb from limb. 
He made one bound towards the priest, looked in his face, and fell on his knees before him. 
The priest then snatched off his tiara, broke his crosier in two, and rent his cope of tinsel, Quasimodo remaining on his knees with bent head and clasped hands. 
On this there began a strange dialogue between the two of signs and gestures, for neither of them uttered a word: the priest standing angry, menacing, masterful; Quasimodo prostrate before him, humbled and suppliant; and yet Quasimodo could certainly have crushed the priest with his finger and thumb. 
At last, with a rough shake of the dwarf’s powerful shoulder, the Archdeacon made him a sign to rise and follow him. 
Quasimodo rose to his feet. 
At this the Fraternity of Fools, the first stupor of surprise passed, prepared to defend their Pope thus rudely dethroned, while the Egyptians, the Argotiers, and the Basoche in a body closed yelping round the priest. 
But Quasimodo, placing himself in front of the Archdeacon, brought the muscles of his brawny fists into play and faced the assailants with the snarl of an angry tiger. 
The priest, returned to his gloomy gravity, signed to Quasimodo and withdrew in silence, the hunchback walking before him and scattering the crowd in his passage. 
When they had made their way across the Place the curious and idle rabble made as if to follow, whereupon Quasimodo took up his position in the rear and followed the Archdeacon, facing the crowd, thick-set, snarling, hideous, shaggy, ready for a spring, gnashing his tusks, growling like a wild beast, and causing wild oscillations in the crowd by a mere gesture or a look. 
So they were allowed to turn unhindered into a dark and narrow street, where no one ventured to follow them, so effectually was the entrance barred by the mere image of Quasimodo and his gnashing fangs. 
“A most amazing incident!” said Gringoire; “but where the devil am I to find a supper?” 
______________________
1 A kiss brings pain. 
2 Nun of the Order of the Sack, or of the Penitence of Christ. 
3 
A chest richly decorated
They found in a well,
And in it new banners
With figures most terrifying.
4 
Arab horsemen they are,
Looking like statues,
With swords, and over their shoulders
Cross-bows that shoot well.
5 A primitive stringed instrument of negro origin. 
Chapter 4 - The Mishaps Consequent on Following a Pretty Woman Through the Streets at Night
At a venture, Gringoire set off to follow the gipsy girl. He had seen her and her goat turn into the Rue de la Coutellerie, so he too turned down the Rue de la Coutellerie. 
“Why not?” said he to himself. 
Now, Gringoire, being a practical philosopher of the streets of Paris, had observed that nothing is more conducive to pleasant reverie than to follow a pretty woman without knowing where she is going. There is in this voluntary abdication of one’s free-will, in this subordination of one’s whim to that of another person who is totally unconscious of one’s proceedings, a mixture of fanciful independence and blind obedience, an indefinable something between slavery and freedom which appealed to Gringoire, whose mind was essentially mixed, vacillating, and complex, touching in turn all extremes, hanging continually suspended between all human propensities, and letting one neutralize the other. He was fond of comparing himself to Mahomet’s coffin, attracted equally by two loadstones, and hesitating eternally between heaven and earth, between the roof and the pavement, between the fall and the ascension, between the zenith and the nadir. 
Had Gringoire lived in our day, how admirably he would have preserved the golden mean between the classical and the romantic. But he was not primitive enough to live three hundred years, a fact much to be deplored; his absence creates a void only too keenly felt in these days. 
For the rest, nothing disposes one more readily to follow passengers through the streets—especially female ones, as Gringoire had a weakness for doing—than not to know where to find a bed. 
He therefore walked all pensively after the girl, who quickened her pace, making her pretty little goat trot beside her, as she saw the townsfolk going home, and the taverns —the only shops that had been open that day—preparing to close. 
“After all,” he thought, “she must lodge somewhere— gipsy women are kind-hearted—who knows…?” 
And he filled in the asterisks which followed this discreet break with I know not what engaging fancies. 
Meanwhile, from time to time, as he passed the last groups of burghers closing their doors, he caught scraps of their conversation which broke the charmed spell of his happy imaginings. 
Now it was two old men accosting each other: 
“Ma?tre Thibaut Fernicle, do you know that it is very cold?” (Gringoire had known it ever since the winter set in.) 
“You are right there, Ma?tre Boniface Disome. Are we going to have another winter like three years ago, in ’80, when wood cost eight sols a load?” 
“Bah, Ma?tre Thibaut! it is nothing to the winter of 1407 —when there was frost from Martinmas to Candlemas, and so sharp that at every third word the ink froze in the pen of the registrar of the parliament, which interrupted the recording of the judgments—” 
Farther on were two gossips at their windows with candles that spluttered in the foggy air. 
“Has your husband told you of the accident, Mlle. La Boudraque?” 
“No; what is it, Mlle. Turquant?” 
“Why, the horse of M. Gilles Godin, notary at the Chatelet, was startled by the Flemings and their procession and knocked down Ma?tre Phillipot Avrillot, a Celestine lay-brother.” 
“Is that so?” 
“Yes, truly.” 
“Just an ordinary horse too! That’s rather too bad. If it had been a cavalry horse, now!” 
And the windows were t again; but not before Gringoire had lost the thread of his ideas. 
Fortunately he soon picked it up again, and had no difficulty in resuming it, thanks to the gipsy and to Djali, who continued to walk before him—two graceful, delicate creatures, whose small feet, pretty forms, and engaging ways he admired exceedingly, almost confounding them in his contemplation: regarding them for their intelligence and good fellowship both as girls, while for their sure-footed, light and graceful gait, they might both have been goats. 
Meanwhile the streets were momentarily becoming darker and more deserted. Curfew had rung long ago, and it was only at rare intervals that one encountered a foot-passenger in the street or a light in a window. In following the gipsy, Gringoire had become involved in that inextricable maze of alleys, lanes, and culs-de-sac which surrounds the ancient burial-ground of the Holy Innocents, and which resembles nothing so much as a skein of cotton ravelled by a kitten. 
“Very illogical streets, i’ faith!” said Gringoire, quite lost in the thousand windings which seemed forever to return upon themselves, but through which the girl followed a path apparently quite familiar to her, and at an increasingly rapid pace. For his part, he would have been perfectly ignorant of his whereabouts, had he not caught sight at a turning of the octagonal mass of the pillory of the Halles, the perforated top of which was outlined sharply against a solitary lighted window in the Rue Verdelet. 
For some moments the girl had been aware of his presence, turning round two or three times uneasily; once, even, she had stopped short, and taking advantage of a ray of light from a half-open bakehouse door, had scanned him steadily from head to foot; then, with the little pouting grimace which Gringoire had already noticed, she had proceeded on her way. 
That little moue gave Gringoire food for reflection. There certainly was somewhat of disdain and mockery in that captivating grimace. In consequence he hung his head and began to count the paving-stones, and to follow the girl at a more respectful distance. Suddenly, at a street corner which for the moment had caused him to lose sight of her, he heard her utter a piercing shriek. He hastened forward. The street was very dark, but a twist of cotton steeped in oil that burned behind an iron grating at the feet of an image of the Virgin, enabled Gringoire to descry the gipsy struggling in the arms of two men who were endeavouring to stifle her cries. The poor, frightened little goat lowered its horns and bleated piteously. 
“Help! help! gentlemen of the watch!” cried Gringoire, advancing bravely. One of the men holding the girl turned towards him—it was the formidable countenance of Quasimodo. 
Gringoire did not take to his heels, but neither did he advance one step. 
Quasimodo came at him, dealt him a blow that hurled him four paces off on the pavement, and disappeared rapidly into the darkness, carrying off the girl hanging limply over one of his arms like a silken scarf. His companion followed him, and the poor little goat ran after them bleating piteously. 
“Murder! murder!” screamed the hapless gipsy. 
“Hold, villains, and drop that wench!” thundered a voice suddenly, and a horseman sprang out from a neighbouring cross-road. 
It was a captain of the Royal Archers, armed cap-á-pie, and sabre in hand. 
He snatched the gipsy from the grasp of the stupefied Quasimodo and laid her across his saddle; and as the redoubtable hunchback, recovered from his surprise, was about to throw himself upon him and recover his prey, fifteen or sixteen archers who had followed close upon their captain appeared, broadsword in hand. It was a detachment going the night rounds by order of M. d’Estouteville, commandant of the Provostry of Paris. 
Quasimodo was instantly surrounded, seized, and bound. He roared, he foamed, he bit, and had it been daylight, no doubt his face alone, rendered still more hideous by rage, would have put the whole detachment to flight. But darkness deprived him of his most formidable weapon—his ugliness. 
His companion had vanished during the struggle. 
The gipsy girl sat up lightly on the officer’s saddle, put her two hands on the young man’s shoulders, and regarded him fixedly for several seconds, obviously charmed by his good looks and grateful for the service he had just rendered her. 
She was the first to break the silence. Infusing a still sweeter tone into her sweet voice, she said: “Monsieur the Gendarme, how are you called?” 
“Captain Ph?bus de Chateaupers, at your service, ma belle.” 
“Thank you,” she replied; and while Monsieur the Captain was occupied in twirling his mustache á la Burguignonne, she slid from the saddle like a falling arrow and was gone—no lightning could have vanished more rapidly. 
“Nombril du Pape!” swore the captain while he made them tighten Quasimodo’s bonds. “I would rather have kept the girl.” 
“Well, captain,” returned one of the men, “though the bird has flown, we’ve got the bat safe.” 
Chapter 5 - Sequel of the Mishap
Gringoire, stunned by his fall, lay prone upon the pavement in front of the image of Our Lady at the corner of the street. By slow degrees his senses returned, but for some moments he lay in a kind of half-somnolent state—not without its charms—in which the airy figures of the gipsy and her goat mingled strangely with the weight of Quasimodo’s fist. This condition, however, was of short duration. A very lively sense of cold in that portion of his frame which was in contact with the ground woke him rudely from his dreams, and brought his mind back to the realities. 
“Whence comes this coolness?” he hastily said to himself, and then he discovered that he was lying in the middle of the gutter. 
“Devil take that hunchback Cyclops!” he growled as he attempted to rise. But he was still too giddy and too bruised from his fall. There was nothing for it but to lie where he was. He still had the free use of his hands, however, so he held his nose and resigned himself to his fate. 
“The mud of Paris,” thought he drowsily—for he now felt pretty well convinced that he would have to put up with the kennel as a bed—“has a most potent stink. It must contain a large amount of volatile and nitric acids, which is also the opinion of Ma?tre Nicolas Flamel and of the alchemists.” 
The word alchemist suddenly recalled the Archdeacon Claude Frollo to his mind. He remembered the scene of violence of which he had just caught a glimpse—that the gipsy was struggling between two men, that Quasimodo had had a companion, and then the morose and haughty features of the Archdeacon passed vaguely through his memory. “That would be strange,” thought he, and immediately with this datum and from this basis began raising a fantastic edifice of hypothesis, that house of cards of the philosophers. Then, returning suddenly to the practical, “Why, I am freezing!” he cried. 
His position was indeed becoming less and less tenable. Each molecule of water in the gutter carried away a molecule of heat from Gringoire’s loins, and the equilibrium between the temperature of the body and the temperature of the water was being established in a rapid and painful manner. 
Presently he was assailed by an annoyance of quite another character. 
A troop of children, of those little barefooted savages who in all times have run about the streets of Paris under the immemorial name of “gamins,” and who, when we too were young, would throw stones at us when we came out of school because our breeches were not in rags—a swarm of these young gutter-snipes came running towards the spot where Gringoire lay, laughing and shouting in a manner that showed little regard for the slumbers of their neighbours. After them they dragged some shapeless bundle, and the clatter of their wooden shoes alone was enough to wake the dead. Gringoire, who had not quite reached that pass, raised himself up on his elbow. 
“Ohè! Hennequin Dandèche! Ohè! Jehan Pincebourde!” they bawled at the pitch of their voices, “old Eustache Moubon, the ironmonger at the corner, is just dead. We’ve got his straw mattress, and we’re going to make a bonfire of it. Come on!” 
And with that they flung the mattress right on top of Gringoire, whom they had come up to without perceiving, while at the same time one of them took a handful of straw and lit it at the Blessed Virgin’s lamp. 
“Mort-Christ!” gasped Gringoire, “am I going to be too hot now?” 
The moment was critical. He was on the point of being caught between fire and water. He made a superhuman effort —such as a coiner would make to escape being boiled alive —staggered to his feet, heaved the mattress back upon the boys, and fled precipitately. 
“Holy Virgin!” yelled the gamins, “it is the iron-monger’s ghost!” 
And they too ran away. 
The mattress remained master of the field. Belleforêt, Father Le Juge, and Corrozet assert that next day it was picked up by the clergy of that district and conveyed with great pomp and ceremony to the treasury of the Church of Saint Opportune, where, down to 1789 the sacristan drew a handsome income from the great miracle worked by the image of the Virgin at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil, the which, by its mere presence, had on the memorable night between the sixth and seventh of January, 1482, exorcised the defunct Eustache Moubon, who, to balk the devil, had, when dying, cunningly hidden his soul in his mattress. 
Chapter 6 - The Broken Pitcher
After running for some time as fast as his legs could carry him without knowing whither, rushing head foremost into many a street corner, leaping gutters, traversing numberless alleys, courts, and streets, seeking flight and passage among the endless meanderings of the old street round the Halles, exploring in his blind panic what the elegant Latin of the Charters describes as “tota via, cheminum et viaria,” our poet suddenly drew up short, first because he was out of breath, and secondly because an unexpected idea gripped his mind. 
“It appears to me, Ma?tre Pierre Gringoire,” he apostrophized himself, tapping his forehead, “that you must be demented to run thus. Those little ragamuffins were just as frightened of you as you of them. If I mistake not, you heard the clatter of their sabots making off southward, while you were fleeing to the north. Now of two things one: either they ran away, and the mattress, forgotten in their flight, is precisely the hospitable bed you have been searching for since the morning, and which Our Lady conveys to you miraculously as a reward for having composed in her honour a Morality accompanied by triumphs and mummeries; or, on the other hand, the boys have not run away, and, in that case, they have set fire to the mattress, which will be exactly the fire you are in need of to cheer, warm, and dry you. In either case—good fire or good bed—the mattress is a gift from Heaven. The thrice-blessed Virgin Mary at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil has maybe caused Eustache Moubon to die for that identical purpose, and it is pure folly on your part to rush off headlong, like a Picard running from a Frenchman, leaving behind what you are seeking in front —decidedly you are an idiot!” 
Accordingly, he began to retrace his steps, and with much seeking, ferreting about, nose on the scent, and ears pricked, he endeavoured to find his way back to that blessed mattress —but in vain. It was one maze of intersecting houses, blind alleys, and winding streets, among which he hesitated and wavered continually, more bewildered and entangled in this network of dark alleys than he would have been in the real labyrinth of the Hotel des Tournelles. Finally he lost patience and swore aloud: “A malediction upon these alleys! The devil himself must have made them after the pattern of his pitchfork!” 
Somewhat relieved by this outburst, next moment his nerve was completely restored by catching sight of a red glow at the end of a long, narrow street. 
“Heaven be praised!” said he, “there it is—that must be the blaze of my mattress,” and likening himself to a pilot in danger of foundering in the night, “Salve,” he added piously, “Salve maris stella!” but whether this fragment of litany was addressed to the Virgin or to the mattress, we really are unable to say. 
He had advanced but a few steps down the narrow street, which was on an incline, unpaved, and more and more miry as it neared the bottom, when he became aware of a curious fact. The street was not deserted. Here and there he caught sight of vague and indeterminate shapes, all crawling in the direction of the light that flickered at the end of the street, like those lumbering insects which creep at night from one blade of grass to another towards a shepherd’s fire. 
Nothing makes one more boldly venturesome than the consciousness of an empty pocket. Gringoire, therefore, continued his way and soon came up with the last of these weird objects dragging itself clumsily after the rest. On closer inspection he perceived that it was nothing but a miserable fragment, a stump of a man hobbling along painfully on his two hands like a mutilated grasshopper with only its front legs left. As he passed this kind of human spider it addressed him in a lamentable whine: “La buona mancia, signor! la buona mancia!” 1 
“The devil fly away with thee!” said Gringoire, “and me too, if I know what that means.” And he passed on. 
He reached another of those ambulatory bundles and examined it. It was a cripple with only one leg and one arm, but so legless and so armless that the complicated system of crutches and wooden legs on which he was supported gave him all the appearance of a scaffolding in motion. Gringoire, who dearly loved noble and classical similes, compared him in his own mind to the living tripod of Vulcan. 
The living tripod greeted him as he passed by, lifting his hat to the height of Gringoire’s chin and holding it there like a barber’s basin while he shouted in his ear: “Senor caballero, para comprar un pedaso de pan!” 2 
“It appears,” said Gringoire, “that this one talks also; but it’s a barbarous lingo, and he is luckier than I if he understands it.” Then striking his forehead with a sudden change of thought—“That reminds me—what the devil did they mean this morning with their Esmeralda?” 
He started to quicken his pace, but for the third time something barred the way. This something, or rather some one, was blind, a little blind man with a bearded, Jewish face, who, lunging in the space round him with a stick, and towed along by a great dog, snuffled out to him in a strong, Hungarian accent: “Facitote caritatem!” 3 
“Thank goodness!” exclaimed Pierre Gringoire, “at last here’s one who can speak a Christian language. I must indeed have a benevolent air for them to ask alms of me, considering the present exhausted condition of my purse. My friend,” and he turned to the blind man, “last week I sold my last shirt, or rather, as you are acquainted only with the language of Cicero, ’Vendidi hebdomade super transita meum ultimuman chemisam.”’ 
So saying, he turned his back on the blind man and pursued his way. But the blind man proceeded to quicken his pace at the same time, and behold the cripple and the stump also came hurrying forward with great clatter and rattle of crutches and supports, and all three tumbling over one another at poor Gringoire’s heels, favoured him with their several songs. “Caritatem!” whined the blind man. “La buona mancia!” piped the stump, and the cripple took up the strain with “Un pedaso de pan!” 
Gringoire stopped his ears. “Oh, tower of Babel!” he cried, and set off running. The blind man ran, the cripple ran, the stump ran. 
And as he penetrated farther down the street, the maimed, the halt, and the blind began to swarm round him, while one-armed or one-eyed men, and lepers covered with sores, issued from the houses, some from little streets adjacent, some from the bowels of the earth, howling, bellowing, yelping, hobbling, and clattering along, all pressing forward towards the glow and wallowing in the mud like slugs after the rain. 
Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not at all sure of what would come of all this, walked on bewildered in the midst of this swarm, upsetting the halt, striding over the stumps, his feet entangled in that ant-hill of cripples, like the English captain who was beset by a legion of crabs. 
It occurred to him to attempt to retrace his steps, but it was too late. The herd had closed up behind him and his three beggars held him fast. He went on, therefore, compelled at once by that irresistible flood, by fear, and by a sensation of giddiness which made the whole thing seem like some horrible nightmare. 
At last he reached the end of the street. It opened into an immense square in which a multitude of scattered lights were flickering through the misty gloom. Gringoire precipitated himself into it, hoping by the speed of his legs to escape the three maimed spectres who had fastened themselves on to him. 
“Onde vas hombre?” 4 cried the cripple, tossing aside his complicated supports and running after him with as good a pair of legs as ever measured a geometrical pace upon the pavements of Paris; while the stump, standing erect upon his feet, bonneted Gringoire with the heavy iron-rimmed platter which served him as a support, and the blind man stared him in the face with great flaming eyes. 
“Where am I?” asked the terrified poet. 
“In the Court of Miracles,” replied a fourth spectre who had joined them. 
“Truly,” said Gringoire, “I see that here the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, but where is the Saviour?” 
Their only answer was a sinister laugh. 
The poor poet looked about him. He was, in fact, in that Cour des Miracles where never honest man penetrated at such an hour—a magic circle wherein any officer of the Chatelet or sergeant of the Provostry intrepid enough to risk entering vanished in morsels—a city of thieves, a hideous sore on the face of Paris; a drain whence flowed forth each morning, to return at night, that stream of iniquity, of mendacity, and vagabondage which flows forever through the streets of a capital; a monstrous hive to which all the hornets that prey on the social order return at night, laden with their booty; a fraudulent hospital where the Bohemian, the unfrocked monk, the ruined scholar, the good-for-nothing of every nation —Spaniards, Italians, Germans—and of every creed—Jews, Turks, and infidels—beggars covered with painted sores during the day were transformed at night into robbers: in a word, a vast green-room, serving at that period for all the actors in that eternal drama of robbery, prostitution, and murder enacted on the streets of Paris. 
It was a vast open space, irregular and ill-paved, as were all the squares of Paris at that time. Fires, around which swarmed strange groups, gleamed here and there. It was one ceaseless movement and clamour, shrieks of laughter, the wailing of babies, the voices of women. The hands and heads of this crowd threw a thousand grotesque outlines on the luminous background. The light of the fires flickered over the ground mingled with huge indefinite shadows, and across it from time to time passed some animal-like man or man-like animal. The boundary lines between race and species seemed here effaced as in a pandemonium. Men, women, beasts, age, sex, health and sickness, all seemed to be in common with this people; all was shared, mingled, confounded, superimposed, each one participated in all. 
The faint and unsteady gleam of the fires enabled Gringoire through all his perturbation to distinguish that the great square was enclosed in a hideous framework of ancient houses, which, with their mouldering, shrunken, stooping fronts, each pierced by one or two round lighted windows, looked to him in the dark like so many old women’s heads, monstrous and cross-grained, ranged in a circle, and blinking down upon these witches’ revels. 
It was like another and an unknown world, undreamt of, shapeless, crawling, swarming, fantastic. 
Gringoire, growing momentarily more affrighted, held by the three beggars as by so many vices, bewildered by a crowd of other faces that bleated and barked round him—the luckless Gringoire strove to collect his mind sufficiently to remember whether this was really Saturday—the witches’ Sabbath. But all his efforts were useless—the link between his memory and his brain was broken; and doubtful of everything, vacillating between what he saw and what he felt, he asked himself this insoluble question: “If I am I, then what is this? If this is real, then what am I?” 
At this moment an intelligible cry detached itself from the buzzing of the crowd surrounding him: “Take him to the King! Take him to the King!” 
“Holy Virgin!” muttered Gringoire, “the King of this place? He must be a goat!” 
“To the King! To the King!” they shouted in chorus. 
They dragged him away, each striving to fasten his claws on him; but the three beggars would not loose their hold, and tore him from the others, yelling: “He belongs to us!” 
The poet’s doublet, already sadly ailing, gave up the ghost in this struggle. 
In traversing the horrible place his giddiness passed off, and after proceeding a few paces he had entirely recovered his sense of reality. He began to adapt himself to the atmosphere of the place. In the first moments there had arisen from his poet’s head, or perhaps quite simply and prosaically from his empty stomach, a fume, a vapour, so to speak, which, spreading itself between him and the surrounding objects, had permitted him to view them only through the incoherent mist of a nightmare, that distorting twilight of our dreams which exaggerates and misplaces every outline, crowding objects together in disproportionate groups, transforming ordinary things into chimeras and men into monstrous phantoms. By degrees, this hallucination gave place to a less bewildered, less exaggerated state of mind. The real forced itself upon him—struck upon his eyes—struck against his feet —and demolished, piece by piece, the terrifying vision by which at first he had imagined himself surrounded. He now perforce was aware that he was walking not through the Styx, but through the mud; that he was being hustled not by demons, but by thieves; that not his soul, but in simple sooth his life, was in danger (since he was without that invaluable conciliator which interposes so efficaciously between the robber and the honest man—the purse); in short, on examining the orgy more closely and in colder blood, he was obliged to climb down from the witches’ Sabbath to the pot-house. 
And, in truth, the Court of Miracles was nothing more nor less than a huge tavern; but a tavern for brigands, as red with blood as ever it was with wine. 
The spectacle which presented itself to him when his ragged escort at last brought him to the goal of his march, was not calculated to incline his mind to poetry, even though it were the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal reality of the pot-house. Were we not writing of the fifteenth century, we would say that Gringoire had come down from Michael Angelo to Callot. 
Round a great fire which burned on a large round flagstone, and glowed on the red-hot legs of a trivet, unoccupied for the moment, some worm-eaten tables were ranged haphazard, without the smallest regard to symmetry or order. On these tables stood a few overflowing tankards of wine or beer, and grouped round them many bacchanalian faces reddened both by the fire and wine. Here was a man, round of belly and jovial of face, noisily embracing a thick-set, brawny trollop of the streets. Here a sham soldier, whistling cheerfully while he unwound the bandages of his false wound, and unstiffened his sound and vigorous knee, strapped up since the morning in yards of ligature. Anon it was a malingreux—a malingerer—preparing with celandine and oxblood his “jambe de Dieu” or sore leg for the morrow. Two tables farther on a coquillart with his complete pilgrim’s suit, cockle-shell on hat, was spelling out and practising the Plaint of Sainte-Reine in its proper sing-song tone and nasal whine. Elsewhere a young hubin was taking a lesson in epilepsy from an old sabouleux, who was teaching him how to foam at the mouth by chewing a piece of soap. Close by, a dropsical man was removing his swelling, while four or five hags at the same table were quarrelling over a child they had stolen that evening. All of which circumstances two centuries later “appeared so diverting to the Court,” says Sauval, “that they furnished pastime to the King, and the opening scene of the royal ballet, entitled ’Night,’ which was divided into four parts and was danced on the stage of the Petit-Bourbon.” “And never,” adds an eye-witness in 1653, “were the sudden metamorphoses of the Cour des Miracles more happily represented. Benserade prepared us for it with some very pleasing verses.” 
Loud guffaws of laughter resounded everywhere, and obscene songs. Each one said his say, passed his criticisms, and swore freely without listening to his neighbours’. Wine cups clinked and quarrels arose as the cups met, the smash of broken crockery leading further to the tearing of rags. 
A great dog sat on his tail and stared into the fire. A few children mingled in this orgy. The stolen child wept and wailed; another, a bouncing boy of four, was seated with dangling legs on too high a bench, the table reaching just to his chin, and said not a word; a third was engaged in spreading over the table with his fingers the tallow from a guttering candle. ly, a very little one was squatting in the mud, and almost lost in a great iron pot, which he scraped out with a tile, drawing sounds from it which would have made Stradivarius swoon. 
There was a barrel near the fire, and seated on the barrel a beggar. It was the King upon his throne. 
The three who had hold of Gringoire led him up to the barrel, and the pandemonium was silent for a moment, save for the caldron tenanted by the child. 
Gringoire dared not breathe or lift his eyes. 
“Hombre, quita tu sombrero, ”5said one of the three rogues in possession of him; and before he could understand what this meant, another had snatched off his hat—a poor thing, it is true, but available still on a day of sunshine or of rain. 
Gringoire heaved a sigh. 
Meanwhile the King, from his elevated seat, demanded: “What sort of a rascal is this?” 
Gringoire started. This voice, though speaking in menacing tones, reminded him of the one which that very morning had struck the first blow at his Mystery, as it whined in the middle of the audience, “Charity, I pray!” He looked up —it was indeed Clopin Trouillefou. 
Clopin Trouillefou, invested with the regal insignia, had not one rag the more or the less upon him. The sore on his arm had disappeared certainly, while in his hand he held one of those leather-thonged whips called boullayes, and used in those days by the sergeants of the guard to keep back the crowd. On his head he had a sort of bonnet twisted into a circle and closed at the top; but whether it was a child’s cap or a king’s crown it would be hard to say, so much did the two resemble one another. 
However, Gringoire, without any apparent reason, felt his hopes revive a little on recognising in the King of the Court of Miracles his accursed beggar of the great Hall. 
“Ma?tre,” he stammered, “Monseigneur—Sire—How must I call you?” he said at last, having reached the highest point of his scale, and not knowing how to mount higher nor how to descend. 
“Monseigneur, Your Majesty, or Comrade—call me what thou wilt, only make haste. What hast thou to say in thy defence?” 
“In my defence?” thought Gringoire; “I don’t quite like the sound of that. I am the one,” he stammered, “who this morning—” 
“By the claws of the devil,” broke in Clopin, “thy name, rascal, and nothing more! Hark ye! thou standest before three puissant sovereigns—myself, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Tunis, successor to the Grand Co?sre, Supreme Ruler of the Kingdom of Argot; Mathis Hunyadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and Bohemia, the yellow-vised old fellow over there with a clout round his head; Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat fellow who’s hugging a wench instead of attending to us. We are thy judges. Thou hast entered into the Kingdom of Argot without being an Argotier, and so violated the privileges of our city. Thou must pay the penalty unless thou art either a capon, a franc mitou, or a rifodè—that is to say, in the argot of honest men, either a thief, a beggar, or a vagabond. Art thou any one of these? Come, justify thyself—describe thy qualifications.” 
“Alas!” said Gringoire, “I have not that honour. I am the author—” 
“That’s enough,” resumed Trouillefou without letting him finish; “thou shalt go hang. A very simple matter, messieurs the honest burghers. We do unto you as we are done by. The same law that you mete out to the Truands, the Truands mete out to you again. You are to blame if that law is a bad one. No harm if now and then an honest man grin through the hempen collar—that makes the thing honourable. Come, my friend, divide thy rags cheerfully among these ladies. I am going to string thee up for the diversion of the Vagabonds, and thou shalt give them thy purse for a pour-boire. If thou hast any last mummeries to go through, thou wilt find down in that wooden mortar a very passable stone God the Father that we stole from Saint-Pierre-aux-B?ufs. Thou hast four minutes to throw thy soul at his head.” 
This was a formidable harangue. 
“Well said, by my soul!” cried the Emperor of Galilee, smashing his wine pot to prop up his table. “Clopin Trouillefou preaches like a Holy Pope!” 
“Messeigneurs the Emperors and the Kings,” said Gringoire coolly (for somehow or other his courage had returned to him and he spoke resolutely), “you fail to understand. My name is Pierre Gringoire. I am a poet, the author of a Morality which was performed this morning in the great Hall of the Palais.” 
“Ah! ’tis thou, Ma?tre, is it?” answered Clopin. “I was there myself, par la tête de Dieu! Well, comrade, is it any reason because thou weariedst us to death this morning that thou shouldst not be hanged to-night?” 
“I shall not get out of this so easily,” thought Gringoire. However, he had a try for it. “I see no reason why the poets should not come under the head of vagabonds,” he said. “As to thieves, Mercurius was one—” 
Here Clopin interrupted him: “Thou wastest time with thy patter. Pardieu, man, be hanged quietly and without more ado!” 
“Pardon me, Monsieur the King of Tunis,” returned Gringoire, disputing the ground inch by inch; “it is well worth your trouble—one moment—hear me—you will not condemn me without a hearing—” 
In truth, his luckless voice was drowned by the hubbub around him. The child was scraping his kettle with greater vigour than ever, and, as a climax, an old woman had just placed on the hot trivet a pan of fat, which made as much noise, spitting and fizzling over the fire, as a yelling troop of children running after a mask at Carnival time. 
Meanwhile, Clopin Trouillefou, after conferring a moment with his brothers of Egypt and of Galilee, the latter of whom was quite drunk, cried sharply, “Silence!” As neither the frying-pan nor the kettle paid any attention, but continued their duet, he jumped down from his barrel, gave one kick to the kettle, which sent it rolling ten paces from the child, and another to the frying-pan, upsetting all the fat into the fire; then he solemnly remounted his throne, heedless of the smothered cries of the child or the grumbling of the old woman, whose supper was vanishing in beautiful white flames. 
At a sign from Trouillefou, the duke, the emperor, the archisupp?ts, and the cagoux came and ranged themselves round him in a horse-shoe, of which Gringoire, upon whom they still kept a tight hold, occupied the centre. It was a semicircle of rags and tatters, of pitchforks and hatchets, of reeling legs and great bare arms, of sordid, haggard, and sottish faces. In the midst of this Round Table of the riffraff, Clopin Trouillefou, as Doge of this Senate, as head of this Peerage, as Pope of this Conclave, dominated the heterogeneous mass; in the first place by the whole height of his barrel, and then by virtue of a lofty, fierce, and formidable air which made his eye flash and rectified in his savage countenance the bestial type of the vagabond race. He was like a wild boar among swine. 
“Look you,” said he to Gringoire, stroking his unsightly chin with his horny hand. “I see no reason why you should not be hanged. To be sure, the prospect does not seem to please you; but that is simply because you townsfolk are not used to it—you make such a tremendous business of it. After all, we mean you no harm. But here’s one way of getting out of it for the moment. Will you be one of us?” 
One may imagine the effect of this suggestion on Gringoire, who saw life slipping from his grasp, and had already begun to loosen his hold on it. He clutched it again with all his might. 
“That will I most readily,” he replied. 
“You consent,” resumed Clopin, “to enrol yourself among the members of the ’petite flambe’ (the little dagger)?” 
“Of the Little Dagger—certainly,” answered Gringoire. 
“You acknowledge yourself a member of the Free Company?” went on the King of Tunis. 
“Of the Free Company.” 
“A subject of the Kingdom of Argot?” 
“Of the Kingdom of Argot.” 
“A Vagabond?” 
“A Vagabond.” 
“With heart and soul?” 
“Heart and soul.” 
“I would have you observe,” added the King, “that you will be none the less hanged for all that.” 
“Diable!” exclaimed the poet. 
“Only,” continued Clopin imperturbably, “it will take place somewhat later, with more ceremony, and at the expense of the city of Paris, on a fine stone gibbet, and by honest men. That’s some consolation.” 
“I am glad you think so,” responded Gringoire. 
“Then, there are other advantages. As a member of the Free Company you will have to contribute neither towards the paving, the lighting, nor the poor—taxes to which the burghers of Paris are subject.” 
“So be it,” said the poet. “I agree. I am a Vagabond, an Argotier, a Little Dagger—whatever you please. And, indeed, I was all that already, Monsieur the King of Tunis, for I am a philosopher and ’Omnia in philosophia, omnes in philosopho continentur’—as you are aware.” 
The King of Tunis knit his brows. “What do you take me for, my friend? What Jew of Hungary’s patter are you treating us to now? I know no Hebrew. It’s not to say that because a man’s a robber he must be a Jew. Nay, indeed, I do not even thieve now—I am above that—I kill. Cutthroat, yes; cutpurse, no!” 
Gringoire endeavoured to squeeze some extenuating plea between these brief ejaculations jerked at him by the offended monarch. “I ask your pardon, monsieur, but it is not Hebrew; it is Latin.” 
“I tell thee,” retorted the enraged Clopin, “that I’m not a Jew, and I’ll have thee hanged, ventre de synagogue! as well as that little usurer of Judea standing beside thee, and whom I hope to see some day nailed to a counter, like the bad penny that he is.” 
As he spoke, he pointed to the little bearded Hungarian Jew who had accosted Gringoire with “Facitote caritatem,” and who, understanding no other language, was much astonished that the King of Tunis should thus vent his wrath on him. 
At length Monseigneur Clopin’s wrath abated. 
“So, rascal,” said he to our poet, “you are willing to become a Vagabond?” 
“Willingly,” replied the poet. 
“Willing is not all,” said Clopin gruffly. “Good-will never put an extra onion into the soup, and is of no value but for getting you into Paradise. Now, Paradise and Argot are two very different places. To be received into Argot you must first prove that you are good for something, and to that end you must search the manikin.” 
“I will search,” said Gringoire, “anything you please.” 
At a sign from Clopin, several Argotiers detached themselves from the group and returned a moment afterward, bearing two posts ending in two broad wooden feet, which insured them standing firmly on the ground. To the upper end of these posts they attached a cross-beam, the whole constituting a very pretty portable gallows, which Gringoire had the satisfaction of seeing erected before him in the twinkling of an eye. It was quite complete, even to the rope swinging gracefully from the transverse beam. 
“What are they after now?” Gringoire asked himself with some uneasiness. The jingling of little bells, which at that moment sounded on his ear, banished his anxiety, for it proceeded from a stuffed figure which the Vagabonds were hanging by the neck to the rope, a sort of scarecrow, dressed in red and covered with little tinkling bells sufficient to equip thirty Castilian mules. The jingling of these thousand bells continued for some time under the vibration of the rope, then died slowly away and sank into complete silence as the figure hung motionless. 
Then Clopin, pointing to a rickety old stool placed beneath the figure, said to Gringoire, “Mount that.” 
“Death of the devil!” objected Gringoire, “I shall break my neck. Your stool halts like a distich of Martial: one leg is hexameter and one pentameter.” 
“Get up,” repeated Clopin. 
Gringoire mounted upon the stool and succeeded, though not without some oscillations of head and arms, in finding his centre of gravity. 
“Now,” continued the King of Tunis, “twist your right foot round your left leg, and stand on tip-toe on your left foot.” 
“Monseigneur,” remonstrated Gringoire, “you are determined, then, that I should break some of my limbs?” 
Clopin shook his head. “Hark ye, friend—you talk too much. In two words, this is what you are to do: stand on tip-toe, as I told you; you will then be able to reach the manikin’s pocket; you will put your hand into it and pull out a purse that is there. If you do all this without a sound from one of the bells, well and good; you shall be a Vagabond. We shall then have nothing further to do but belabour you well for a week.” 
“Ventre Dieu! I will be careful,” said Gringoire. “And what if I make the bells ring?” 
“Then you will be hanged. Do you understand?” 
“No, not at all,” declared Gringoire. 
“Listen once more. You are to pick the manikin’s pocket, and if a single bell stirs during the operation you will be hanged. You understand that?” 
“Yes,” said Gringoire, “I understand that. What next?” 
“If you succeed in drawing out the purse without sounding a single bell, you are a Vagabond, and you will be soundly beaten for eight days running. You understand now, no doubt.” 
“No, monseigneur, I do not understand. Hanged in one case, beaten in the other; where does my advantage come in?” 
“And what about becoming a rogue?” rejoined Clopin. “Is that nothing? It’s in your own interest that we beat you, so that you may be hardened against stripes.” 
“I am greatly obliged to you,” replied the poet. 
“Come, make haste!” said the King with a resounding kick against his barrel. “Pick the manikin’s pocket and be done with it. I warn you for the last time that if I hear the faintest tinkle you shall take the manikin’s place.” 
The whole crew of Argotiers applauded Clopin’s words, and ranged themselves in a circle round the gallows with such pitiless laughter, that Gringoire saw plainly that he was affording them too much amusement not to have cause to fear the worst. He had therefore no hope left, save perhaps in the faint chance of succeeding in the desperate task imposed upon him. He resolved to risk it, but he first addressed a fervent prayer to the man of straw whom he was preparing to rob, and whose heart he was more likely to soften than those of the rogues. These myriad bells with their little brazen tongues seemed to him like so many asps with mouths open ready to hiss and bite. 
“Oh,” he breathed, “can it be that my life depends on the faintest vibration of the smallest of these bells? Oh,” he added, clasping his hands, “oh, clashing, jingling, tinkling bells, be silent, I implore!” 
He made one more attempt with Trouillefou. 
“And if there should come a puff of wind?” 
“You will be hanged,” replied the other without hesitation. 
Realizing that there was no respite, no delay or subterfuge possible, he bravely set about his task. He twisted his right foot round his left ankle, rose on his left foot, and stretched out his hand; but as he touched the manikin, his body, being now supported but on one foot, swayed on the stool which had but three; he clutched mechanically at the figure, lost his balance, and fell heavily to the ground, deafened by the fatal clashing of the manikin’s thousand bells, while the figure, yielding to the thrust of his hand, first revolved on its own axis, and then swung majestically between the two posts. 
“Malediction!” exclaimed the poet as he fell, and he lay face downward on the earth as if dead. 
Nevertheless, he heard the terrible carillon going on above his head, and the diabolical laughter of the thieves, and the voice of Trouillefou saying: “Lift the fellow up and hang him double-quick!” 
Gringoire rose to his feet. They had already unhooked the manikin to make room for him. 
The Argotiers forced him to mount the stool. Clopin then came up, passed the rope round his neck, and clapping him on the shoulders, “Adieu, l’ami,” he said. “You don’t escape this time, not even if you were as cunning as the Pope himself.” 
The word “mercy” died on Gringoire’s lips. He looked around him—not a sign of hope—all were laughing. 
“Bellevigne de l’ètoile,” said the King of Tunis to a gigantic rogue, who at once stood forth from the rest, “climb up on to the top beam.” 
Bellevigne de l’ètoile clambered nimbly up, and the next instant Gringoire, on raising his eyes, saw with terror that he was astride the cross-beam above his head. 
“Now,” resumed Clopin Trouillefou, “when I clap my hands, do you, Andry le Rouge, knock over the stool with your knee; Fran?ois Chante-Prune will hang on to the rascal’s legs, and you, Bellevigne, jump on to his shoulders—but all three at the same time, do you hear?” 
Gringoire ddered. 
“Ready?” cried Clopin Trouillefou to the three Argotiers waiting to fall on Gringoire like spiders on a fly. The poor victim had a moment of horrible suspense, during which Clopin calmly pushed into the fire with the point of his shoe some twigs of vine which the flame had not yet reached. 
“Ready?” he repeated, and raised his hands to clap. A second more and it would have been all over. 
But he stopped short, struck by a sudden idea. “One moment,” he said; “I had forgotten. It is the custom with us not to hang a man without first asking if there’s any woman who will have him. Comrade, that’s your last chance. You must marry either an Argotiére or the rope.” 
Absurd as this gipsy law may appear to the reader, he will find it set forth at full length in old English law. (See Burington’s Observations.) 
Gringoire breathed again. It was the second reprieve he had had within the last half hour. Yet he could not place much confidence in it. 
“Holá!” shouted Clopin, who had reascended his throne. “Holá there! women—wenches—is there any one of you, from the witch to her cat, any jade among you who’ll have this rogue? Holá Colette la Charonne! Elisabeth Trouvain! Simone Jodouyne! Marie Pièdebou! Thonne-la-Longue! Bèrarde Fanouel! Michelle Genaille! Claude Ronge-oreille! Mathurine Girorou! Hullah! Isabeau la Thierrye! Come and look! A husband for nothing! Who’ll have him?” 
Gringoire, in this miserable plight, was doubtless not exactly tempting. The ladies seemed but little moved at the proposal, for the unfortunate man heard them answer: “No, no—hang him! Then we shall all get some enjoyment out of him!” 
Three of them, however, did come forward and inspect him. The first, a big, square-faced young woman, carefully examined the philosopher’s deplorable doublet. His coat was threadbare and with more holes in it than a chestnut roaster. The woman made a wry face. “An old rag,” she muttered, and turning to Gringoire, “Let’s see thy cloak.” 
“I have lost it,” answered Gringoire. 
“Thy hat?” 
“They took it from me.” 
“Thy shoes?” 
“The soles are coming off.” 
“Thy purse?” 
“Alas!” stammered Gringoire, “I haven’t a single denier parisis.” 
“Then be hanged and welcome!” retorted the woman, turning her back on him. 
The second, a hideous old beldame, black and wrinkled, and so ugly as to be conspicuous even in the Court of Miracles, came and viewed him from all sides. He almost trembled lest she should take a fancy to him. But she muttered between her teeth, “He’s too lean,” and went away. 
The third was a young girl, rosy-cheeked and not too ill-favoured. “Save me!” whispered the poor devil. She considered him for a moment with an air of pity, then cast down her eyes, played with a fold in her petticoat, and stood irresolute. Gringoire followed her every movement with his eyes—it was the last gleam of hope. 
“No,” she said at length, “no; Guillaume Longjoue would beat me.” So she rejoined the others. 
“Comrade,” said Clopin, “you’ve no luck.” 
Then, standing up on his barrel: “Nobody bids?” he cried, mimicking the voice of an auctioneer to the huge delight of the crowd. “Nobody bids? Going—going—” and, with a sign of the head to the gallows—“gone!” 
Bellevigne de l’ètoile, Andry le Rouge, Fran?ois Chante-Prune again approached Gringoire. 
At that moment a cry arose among the Argotiers: “La Esmeralda! la Esmeralda!” 
Gringoire started, and turned in the direction whence the shouts proceeded. The crowd opened and made way for a fair and radiant figure. It was the gipsy girl. 
“La Esmeralda?” said Gringoire, amazed even in the midst of his emotions how instantaneously this magic word linked together all the recollections of his day. 
This engaging creature seemed to hold sway even over the Court of Miracles by the power of her exceeding charm and beauty. The Argotiers, male and female, drew aside gently to let her pass, and their brutal faces softened at her look. 
She approached the victim with her firm, light step, followed closely by her pretty Djali. Gringoire was more dead than alive. She regarded him a moment in silence. 
“You are going to hang this man?” she asked gravely of Clopin. 
“Yes, sister,” replied the King of Tunis; “that is, unless thou wilt take him for thy husband.” 
She thrust out her pretty under lip. 
“I will take him,” said she. 
This confirmed Gringoire more than ever in his opinion that he had been in a dream since the morning, and that this was merely a continuation of it. The transformation, though pleasing, was violent. 
They instantly unfastened the noose and let the poet descend from the stool, after which he was obliged to sit down, so overcome was he by emotion. 
The Duke of Egypt proceeded without a word to bring an earthenware pitcher, which the gipsy girl handed to Gringoire, saying, “Throw it on the ground.” 
The pitcher broke in pieces. 
“Brother,” said the Duke of Egypt, laying hands on the two heads, “she is your wife; sister, he is your husband— for four years. Go your ways.” 
______________________
1 Charity, kind sir!
2 Kind sir, something to buy a piece of bread!
3 Charity!
4 Whither away, man?
5 Fellow, take off thy hat.
Chapter 7 - A Wedding-Night
A Few minutes afterward our poet found himself in a warm and cosy little chamber with a vaulted roof, seated in front of a table which seemed impatient to share some of the contents of a small larder hanging on the wall close by, having a good bed in prospect, and a tête-á-tête with a pretty girl. The adventure smacked decidedly of witchcraft. He began to take himself seriously for the hero of a fairy-tale, and looked about him from time to time to see whether the fiery chariot drawn by winged gryphons, which alone could have transported him so rapidly from Tartarus to Paradise, were still there. At intervals, too, he steadily eyed the holes in his doublet, in order to keep a firm hold on reality—not to let the earth slip away from him altogether. His reason, tossing on delusive waves, had only this frail spar to cling to. 
The girl paid apparently not the slightest heed to him, but came and went, shifting one thing and another, talking to her goat, making her little pouting grimace now and then just as if he had not been there. 
At last she came and seated herself near the table, so that Gringoire could contemplate her at his leisure. 
You have been young, reader—maybe, indeed, you are fortunate enough to be so still. It is impossible but that more than once (and for my part I have spent whole days —the best employed of my life—in this pursuit) you have followed from bush to bush, beside some running brook, on a sunny day, some lovely dragon-fly, all iridescent, blue and green, darting hither and thither, kissing the tip of every spray. Can you forget the adoring curiosity with which your thoughts and your eyes were fixed upon this little darting, humming whirlwind of purple and azure wings, in the midst of which floated an intangible form, veiled, as it were, by the very rapidity of its motion? The aerial creature, dimly discerned through all this flutter of wings, seemed to you chimerical, illusory, intangible. But when at last the dragon-fly settled on the end of a reed, and you could examine, with bated breath, the gauzy wings, the long enamel robe, the two crystal globes of eyes, what amazement seized you, and what fear lest the exquisite creature should again vanish into shadow, the vision into air. Recall these impressions, and you will readily understand Gringoire’s feelings as he contemplated, in her visible and palpable form, that Esmeralda, of whom, up till then, he had only caught a glimpse through a whirl of dance and song and fluttering skirts. 
Sinking deeper and deeper into his reverie: “So this,” he said to himself, as he followed her vaguely with his eyes, “this is what they meant by Esmeralda—a divine creature —a dancer of the streets. So high, and yet so low. It was she who dealt the death-blow to my Mystery this morning— she it is who saves my life to-night. My evil genius—my good angel! And a pretty woman, on my soul!—who must have loved me to distraction to have taken me like this. Which reminds me,” said he, suddenly rising from his seat, impelled by that sense of the practical which formed the basis of his character and his philosophy—“I’m not very clear how it came about, but the fact remains that I am her husband.” 
With this idea in his mind and in his eyes, he approached the girl with so enterprising and gallant an air that she drew back. 
“What do you want with me?” said she. 
“Can you ask, adorable Esmeralda?” responded Gringoire in such impassioned accents that he was astonished at himself. 
The gipsy stared at him wide-eyed. “I don’t know what you mean.” 
“What?” rejoined Gringoire, growing warmer and warmer, and reflecting that after all it was only a virtue of the Court of Miracles he had to deal with, “am I not thine, sweetheart; art thou not mine?” and without more ado he clasped his arms about her. 
The gipsy slipped through his hands like an eel; with one bound she was at the farther end of the little chamber, stooped, and rose with a little dagger in her hand before Gringoire had even time to see where she drew it from. There she stood, angry and erect, breathing fast with parted lips and fluttering nostrils, her cheeks red as peonies, her eyes darting lightning, while at the same moment the little white goat planted itself in front of her, ready to do battle with the offender, as it lowered its gilded but extremely sharp horns at him. In a twinkling the dragon-fly had turned wasp with every disposition to sting. 
Our philosopher stood abashed, glancing foolishly from the goat to its mistress. 
“Blessed Virgin!” he exclaimed as soon as his astonishment would permit him, “what a pair of spitfires!” 
The gipsy now broke silence. 
“You are an impudent fellow,” she said. 
“Pardon me, mademoiselle,” retorted Gringoire with a smile, “then why did you take me for your husband?” 
“Was I to let you be hanged?” 
“So that,” returned the poet, somewhat disabused of his amorous expectations, “was all you thought of in saving me from the gallows?” 
“And what more should I have thought of, do you suppose?” 
Gringoire bit his lip. “It seems,” said he, “that I am not quite so triumphant in Cupido as I imagined. But in that case, why have broken the poor pitcher?” 
All this time Esmeralda’s dagger and the goat’s horns continued on the defensive. 
“Mademoiselle Esmeralda,” said the poet, “let us come to terms. As I am not the recorder at the Chatelet I shall not make difficulties about your carrying a dagger thus in Paris, in the teeth of the ordinances and prohibitions of Monsieur the Provost, though you must be aware that Noel Lescrivain was condemned only last week to pay ten sols parisis for carrying a cutlass. However, that is no affair of mine, and I will come to the point. I swear to you by my hope of salvation that I will not approach you without your consent and permission; but, I implore you, give me some supper.” 
Truth to tell, Gringoire, like M. Depréaux, was “but little inclined to sensuality.” He had none of those swashbuckler and conquering ways that take girls by storm. In love, as in all other matters, he willingly resigned himself to temporizing and a middle course, and a good supper in charming tête-á-tête, especially when he was hungry, appeared to him an admirable interlude between the prologue and the dénouement of an amatory adventure. 
The gipsy made no reply. She pouted her lips disdainfully, tossed her little head like a bird, then burst into a peal of laughter, and the dainty little weapon vanished as it had appeared, without Gringoire being able to observe where the wasp concealed its sting. 
A minute afterward there appeared upon the table a loaf of bread, a slice of bacon, some wrinkled apples, and a mug of beer. Gringoire fell to ravenously. To hear the furious clatter of his fork on the earthenware platter you would have concluded that all his love had turned to hunger. 
Seated opposite to him, the girl let him proceed in silence, being visibly preoccupied with some other thought, at which she smiled from time to time, while her gentle hand absently caressed the intelligent head of the goat pressed gently against her knee. A candle of yellow wax lit up this scene of voracity and musing. Presently, the first gnawings of his stomach being satisfied, Gringoire had a pang of remorse at seeing that nothing remained of the feast but one apple. “You are not eating, Mademoiselle Esmeralda?” 
She replied with a shake of the head, and fixed her pensive gaze on the arched roof of the chamber. 
“Now, what in the world is she absorbed in?” thought Gringoire as he followed her gaze: “it can’t possibly be that grinning dwarf’s face carved in the keystone of the vaulting. Que diable! I can well stand the comparison!” 
He raised his voice: “Mademoiselle!” 
She seemed not to hear him. 
He tried again still louder: “Mademoiselle Esmeralda!” 
Labour lost. The girl’s mind was elsewhere and Gringoire’s voice had not the power to call it back. Fortunately, the goat struck in and began pulling its mistress gently by the sleeve. 
“What is it, Djali?” said the gipsy quickly, as if starting out of a dream. 
“It is hungry,” said Gringoire, delighted at any opening for a conversation. 
Esmeralda began crumbling some bread, which Djali ate daintily out of the hollow of her hand. 
Gringoire gave her no time to resume her musings. He hazarded a delicate question. 
“So you will not have me for your husband?” 
The girl looked at him steadily. “No,” she said. 
“Nor for your lover?” 
She thrust out her under lip and answered “No.” 
“For a friend, then?” continued Gringoire. 
She regarded him fixedly, then after a moment’s reflection, “Perhaps,” she replied. 
This perhaps, so dear to the philosopher, encouraged Gringoire. “Do you know what friendship is?” he asked. 
“Yes,” returned the gipsy. “It is to be like brother and sister; two souls that touch without mingling; two fingers of the same hand.” 
“And love?” proceeded Gringoire. 
“Oh, love,” she said, and her voice vibrated and her eyes shone, “that is to be two and yet only one—a man and a woman blending into an angel—it is heaven!” 
As she spoke, the dancing girl of the streets glowed with a beauty which affected Gringoire strangely, and which seemed to him in perfect harmony with the almost Oriental exaltation of her words. Her chaste and rosy lips were parted in a half smile, her pure and open brow was ruffled for a moment by her thoughts, as a mirror is dimmed by a passing breath, and from under her long, dark, drooping lashes there beamed a sort of ineffable light, imparting to her face that ideal suavity which later on Raphael found at the mystic point of intersection of the virginal, the human, and the divine. 
Nevertheless, Gringoire continued: “What must a man be, then, to win your favour?” 
“He must be a man!” 
“And I,” said he; “what am I, then?” 
“A man goes helmet on head, sword in hand, and gilt spurs on heel.” 
“Good,” said Gringoire, “the horse makes the man. Do you love any one?” 
“As a lover?” 
“As a lover.” 
She paused thoughtfully for a moment, then she said with a peculiar expression, “I shall know that soon.” 
“And why not to-night?” rejoined the poet in tender accents; “why not me?” 
She gave him a cold, grave look. “I could never love a man unless he could protect me.” 
Gringoire reddened and accepted the rebuke. The girl evidently alluded to the feeble assistance he had rendered her in the critical situation of a couple of hours before. This recollection, effaced by the subsequent adventures of the evening, now returned to him. He smote his forehead. 
“That reminds me, mademoiselle, I ought to have begun by that. Pardon my foolish distraction. How did you manage to escape out of the clutches of Quasimodo?” 
The gipsy ddered. “Oh, the horrible hunchback!” she exclaimed, hiding her face in her hands, and shivering as if overcome by violent cold. 
“Horrible indeed,” agreed Gringoire; “but how,” he persisted, “did you get away from him?” 
Esmeralda smiled, heaved a little sigh, and held her peace. 
“Do you know why he followed you?” asked Gringoire, trying to come at the information he sought by another way. 
“No, I do not,” answered the gipsy. “But,” she added sharply, “you were following me too. Why did you follow me?” 
“To tell you the honest truth,” replied Gringoire, “I don’t know that either.” 
There was a pause. Gringoire was scratching the table with his knife; the girl smiled to herself and seemed to be looking at something through the wall. Suddenly she began to sing, hardly above her breath: 
“Quando las pintades aves
Mudas estàn, y la tierra…”1
She stopped abruptly, and fell to stroking Djali. 
“That is a pretty little animal you have there.” 
“It is my sister,” she replied. 
“Why do they call you Esmeralda?” inquired the poet. 
“I don’t know.” 
“Oh, do tell me.” 
She drew from her bosom a little oblong bag hanging round her neck by a chain of berries. The bag, which exhaled a strong smell of camphor, was made of green silk, and had in the middle a large green glass bead like an emerald. “It is perhaps because of that,” said she. 
Gringoire put out his hand for the little bag, but she drew back. “Do not touch it! It is an amulet, and either you will do mischief to the charm, or it will hurt you.” 
The poet’s curiosity became more and more lively. “Who gave it you?” 
She laid a finger on her lips and hid the amulet again in her bosom. He tried her with further questions, but she scarcely answered. 
“What does the word Esmeralda mean?” 
“I don’t know.” 
“What language is it?” 
“Egyptian, I think.” 
“I thought as much,” said Gringoire. “You are not a native of this country?” 
“I don’t know.” 
“Have you father or mother?” 
She began singing to an old air: 
“Mon père est oiseau,
Ma mère est oiselle.
Je passe l’eau sans nacelle,
Je passe l’eau sans bateau.
Ma mère est oiselle,
Mon père est oiseau.”1
“Very good,” said Gringoire. “How old were you when you came to France?” 
“Quite little.” 
“And to Paris?” 
“ year. As we came through the Porte Papale I saw the reed linnet fly overhead. It was the end of August; I said, It will be a hard winter.” 
“And so it was,” said Gringoire, delighted at this turn in the conversation. “I spent it in blowing on my fingers. So you have the gift of prophecy?” 
She lapsed again into her laconic answers—“No.” 
“That man whom you call the Duke of Egypt, is he the head of your tribe?” 
“Yes.” 
“Well, but it was he who united us in marriage,” observed the poet timidly. 
She made her favourite little grimace. “Why, I don’t even know your name!” 
“My name? If you wish to know it, here it is—Pierre Gringoire.” 
“I know a finer one than that,” said she. 
“Ah, cruel one!” responded the poet. “Never mind, you cannot provoke me. See, perhaps you will like me when you know me better; besides, you have told me your story with so much confidence that it is only fair that I should tell you something of mine. You must know, then, that my name is Pierre Gringoire, and that my father farmed the office of notary in Gonesse. He was hanged by the Burgundians, and my mother was murdered by the Picards at the time of the siege of Paris, twenty years ago. So, at six years of age I was an orphan, with no sole to my foot but the pavement of Paris. How I got through the interval from six to sixteen I should be at a loss to tell. A fruit-seller would throw me a plum here, a baker a crust of bread there. At night I would get picked up by the watch, who put me in prison, where at least I found a truss of straw to lie upon. All this did not prevent me from growing tall and thin, as you perceive. In winter I warmed myself in the sun in the porch of the H?tel de Sens, and I thought it very absurd that the bonfires for the Feast of Saint-John should be reserved for the dog-days. At sixteen I wished to adopt a trade. I tried everything in turn. I became a soldier, but I was lacking in courage; friar, but I was not sufficiently pious—besides, I am a poor hand at drinking. In desperation I apprenticed myself to a Guild of Carpenters, but I was not strong enough. I had more inclination towards being a school-master: to be sure, I could not read, but that need not have prevented me. At last I was obliged to acknowledge that something was lacking in me for every profession; so, finding that I was good for nothing, I, of my own free will, turned poet and composer of rhythms. That is a calling a man can adopt when he is a vagabond, and is always better than robbing, as some young friends of mine, who are themselves footpads, urged me to do. One fine day I was fortunate enough to encounter Dom Claude Frollo, the reverend Archdeacon of Notre-Dame. He interested himself in me, and I owe it to him that I am to-day a finished man of letters, being well versed in Latin, from Cicero’s ’Offices’ to the ’Mortuology’ of the Celestine Fathers, nor ignorant of scholastics, of poetics, of music, nor even of hermetics nor alchemy—that subtlety of subtleties. Then, I am the author of the Mystery represented with great triumph and concourse of the people, filling the great Hall of the Palais de Justice. Moreover, I have written a book running to six hundred pages on the prodigious comet of 1465, over which a man lost his reason. Other successes, too, I have had. Being somewhat of an artillery carpenter, I helped in the construction of that great bombard of Jean Maugue, which, as you know, burst on the Charenton bridge the first time it was tried and killed four-and-twenty of the spectators. So, you see, I am not such a bad match. I know many very pleasing tricks which I would teach your goat; for instance, to imitate the Bishop of Paris, that accursed Pharisee whose mill-wheels splash the passengers the whole length of the Pont-aux-Meuniers. And then my Mystery play will bring me in a great deal of money, if only they pay me. In short, I am wholly at your service—myself, my wit, my science, and my learning; ready, damoselle, to live with you as it shall please you—in chastity or pleasure—as man and wife, if so you think good—as brother and sister, if it please you better.” 
Gringoire stopped, waiting for the effect of his long speech on the girl. Her eyes were fixed on the ground. 
“Ph?bus,” she murmured. Then, turning to the poet, “Ph?bus, what does that mean?” 
Gringoire, though not exactly seeing the connection between his harangue and this question, was nothing loath to exhibit his erudition. Bridling with conscious pride, he answered: “It is a Latin word meaning ’the sun.”’ 
“The sun!” she exclaimed. 
“And the name of a certain handsome archer, who was a god,” added Gringoire. 
“A god!” repeated the gipsy with something pensive and passionate in her tone. 
At that moment one of her bracelets became unfastened and slipped to the ground. Gringoire bent quickly to pick it up; when he rose the girl and her goat had disappeared. He only heard the sound of a bolt being shot which came from a little door leading, doubtless, into an inner room. 
“Has she, at least, left me a bed?” inquired our philosopher. 
He made the tour of the chamber. He found no piece of furniture suitable for slumber but a long wooden chest, and its lid was profusely carved, so that when Gringoire lay down upon it he felt very much as Micromegas must have done when he stretched himself at full length to slumber on the Alps. 
“Well,” he said, accommodating himself as best he might to the inequalities of his couch, “one must make the best of it. But this is indeed a strange wedding-night. ’Tis a pity, too; there was something guileless and antediluvian about that marriage by broken pitcher that took my fancy.” 
______________________
1 When the bright-hued birds are silent, And the earth… 
2 
My father’s a bird,
My mother’s another.
I pass over the water
Without boat or wherry.
My mother’s a bird,
And so is my father.
BOOK III
Chapter 1 - Notre-Dame
Assuredly the Cathedral of Notre-Dame at Paris is, to this day, a majestic and sublime edifice. But noble as it has remained while growing old, one cannot but regret, cannot but feel indignant at the innumerable degradations and mutilations inflicted on the venerable pile, both by the action of time and the hand of man, regardless alike of Charlemagne, who laid the first stone, and Philip Augustus, who laid the last. 
On the face of this ancient queen of our cathedrals, beside each wrinkle one invariably finds a scar. “Tempus edax, homo edacior,” which I would be inclined to translate: “Time is blind, but man is senseless.” 
Had we, with the reader, the leisure to examine, one by one, the traces of the destruction wrought on this ancient church, we should have to impute the smallest share to Time, the largest to men, and more especially to those whom we must perforce call artists, since, during the last two centuries, there have been individuals among them who assumed the title of architect. 
And first of all, to cite only a few prominent examples, there are surely few such wonderful pages in the book of Architecture as the fa?ades of the Cathedral. Here unfold themselves to the eye, successively and at one glance, the three deep Gothic doorways; the richly traced and sculptured band of twenty-eight royal niches; the immense central rose-window, flanked by its two lateral windows, like a priest by the deacon and subdeacon; the lofty and fragile gallery of trifoliated arches supporting a heavy platform on its slender columns; finally, the two dark and massive towers with their projecting slate roofs—harmonious parts of one magnificent whole, rising one above another in five gigantic storeys, massed yet unconfused, their innumerable details of statuary, sculpture, and carving boldly allied to the impassive grandeur of the whole. A vast symphony in stone, as it were; the colossal achievement of a man and a nation—one and yet complex—like the Iliades and the Romances to which it is sister—prodigious result of the union of all the resources of an epoch, where on every stone is displayed in a hundred variations the fancy of the craftsman controlled by the genius of the artist; in a word, a sort of human Creation, mighty and prolific, like the divine Creation, of which it seems to have caught the double characteristics—variety and eternity. 
And what we say here of the fa?ade applies to the entire church; and what we say of the Cathedral of Paris may be said of all the ministers of Christendom in the Middle Ages. 
Everything stands in its proper relation in that self-evolved art, is logical, well-proportioned. By measuring one toe you can estimate the height of the giant. 
To return to the fa?ade of Notre-Dame, as we see it to-day, when we stand lost in pious admiration of the mighty and awe-inspiring Cathedral, which, according to the chroniclers, strikes the beholder with terror—qu? mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus. 
Three important things are now missing in that fa?ade: the flight of eleven steps which raised it above the level of the ground; the lower row of statues occupying the niches of the three doorways; and the upper series of twenty-eight, which filled the gallery of the first story and represented the earliest Kings of France, from Childebert to Philip Augustus, each holding in his hand the “imperial orb.” 
The disappearance of the steps is due to Time, which by slow and irresistible degrees has raised the level of the soil of the city. But Time, though permitting these eleven steps, which added to the stately elevation of the pile, to be swallowed by the rising tide of the Paris pavement, has given to the Cathedral more perhaps than he took away; for it was the hand of Time that steeped its fa?ade in those rich and sombre tints by which the old age of monuments becomes their period of beauty. 
But who has overthrown the two rows of statues? Who has left the niches empty? Who has scooped out, in the very middle of the central door, that new and bastard-pointed arch? Who has dared to hang in it, cheek by jowl with Biscornette’s arabesques, that tasteless and clumsy wooden door with Louis XV carvings? Man—the architects—the artists of our own day! 
And, if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown the colossal St. Christopher, proverbial among statues as the Grande Salle of the Palais among Halls, as the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral among steeples? And the countless figures—kneeling, standing, equestrian, men, women, children, kings, bishops, knights, of stone, marble, gold, silver, brass, even wax—which peopled all the spaces between the columns of the nave and the choir—what brutal hand has swept them away? Not that of Time. 
And who replaced the ancient Gothic altar, splendidly charged with shrines and reliquaries, by that ponderous marble sarcophagus with its stone clouds and cherubs’ heads, which looks like an odd piece out of the Val de Grace or of the Invalides? And who was so besotted as to fix this lumbering stone anachronism into the Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV, in fulfilment of the vow of Louis XIII? 
And who put cold white glass in the place of those “richly coloured” panes which caused the dazzled eyes of our forefathers to wander undecided from the rose-window over the great doorway to the pointed ones of the chancel and back again? And what would a priest of the sixteenth century say to the fine yellow wash with which the vandal Archbishops have smeared the walls of their Cathedral? He would recollect that this was the colour the hangman painted over houses of evil-fame; he would recall the H?tel de Petit-Bourbon plastered all over with yellow because of the treason of its owner, the Connètable—“a yellow of so permanent a dye,” says Sauval, “and so well laid on, that the passage of more than a century has not succeeded in dimming its colour.” He would think that the Holy Place had become infamous and would flee from it. 
And if we ascend the Cathedral, passing over a thousand barbarisms of every description—what has become of the charming little belfry, fretted, slender, pointed, sonorous, which rose from the point of intersection of the transept, and every whit as delicate and as bold as its neighbour the spire (likewise destroyed) of the Sainte-Chapelle, soared into the blue, farther even than the towers. An architect “of taste” (1787) had it amputated, and deemed it sufficient reparation to hide the wound under the great lead plaster which looks like the lid of a sauce-pan. 
Thus has the marvellous art of the Middle Ages been treated in almost every country, but especially in France. In its ruin three distinct factors can be traced, causing wounds of varying depths. First of all, Time, which has gradually made breaches here and there and gnawed its whole surface; next, religious and political revolutions, which, in the blind fury natural to them, wreaked their tempestuous passions upon it, rent its rich garment of sculpture and carving, burst in its rose-windows, broke its necklets of arabesques and figurines, tore down its statues, one time for their mitres, another time for their crowns; and finally, the various fashions, growing ever more grotesque and senseless, which, from the anarchical yet splendid deviations of the Renaissance onwards, have succeeded one another in the inevitable decadence of Architecture. Fashion has committed more crimes than revolution. It has cut to the quick, it has attacked the very bone and framework of the art; has mangled, pared, dislocated, destroyed the edifice—in its form as in its symbolism, in its coherence as in its beauty. This achieved, it set about renewing—a thing which Time and Revolution, at least, never had the presumption to do. With unblushing effrontery, “in the interests of good taste,” it has plastered over the wounds of Gothic architecture with its trumpery knick-knacks, its marble ribbons and knots, its metal rosettes—a perfect eruption of ovolos, scrolls, and scallops; of draperies, garlands, fringes; of marble flames and brazen clouds; of blowzy cupids and inflated cherubs, which began by devouring the face of art in the oratory of Catherine de Medicis, and ended by causing it to expire, tortured and grimacing, two centuries later, in the boudoir of Mme. Dubarry. 
Thus, to sum up the points we have just discussed, the ravages that now disfigure Gothic architecture are of three distinct kinds: furrows and blotches wrought by the hand of Time; practical violence—brutalities, bruises, fractures—the outcome of revolution, from Luther down to Mirabeau; mutilations, amputations, dislocation of members, restorations, the result of the labours—Greek, Roman, and barbarian—of the professors following out the rules of Vitruvius and Vignola. That magnificent art which the Goths created has been murdered by the Academies. 
To the devastations of Time and of Revolutions—carried out at least with impartiality and grandeur—have been added those of a swarm of school-trained architects, duly licensed and incorporated, degrading their art deliberately and, with all the discernment of bad taste, substituting the Louis XV fussiness for Gothic simplicity, and all to the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is the kick of the ass to the dying lion; it is the ancient oak, dead already above, gnawed at the roots by worms and vermin. 
How remote is this from the time when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre-Dame at Paris with the far-famed Temple of Diana at Ephesus, “so much vaunted by the ancient pagans,” which immortalized Erostratus, considered the Gallican Cathedral “more excellent in length, breadth, height, and structure.”1 
For the rest, Notre-Dame cannot, from the architectural point of view, be called complete, definite, classified. It is not a Roman church, neither is it a Gothic church. It is not typical of any style of architecture. Notre-Dame has not, like the Abbey of Tournus, the grave and massive squareness, the round, wide, vaulted roof, the frigid nudity, the majestic simplicity of the edifices which have their origin in the Roman arch. Nor is it like the Cathedral of Bourges, the splendid, airy, multiform, foliated, pinnacled, efflorescent product of the Gothic arch. Impossible, either, to rank it among that antique family of churches—sombre, mysterious, low-pitched, cowering, as it were, under the weight of the round arch; half Egyptian, wholly hieroglyphical, wholly sacerdotal, wholly symbolical; as regards ornament, rather overloaded with lozenges and zigzags than with flowers, with flowers than animals, with animals than human figures; less the work of the architect than the Bishop, the first transformation of the art still deeply imbued with theocratic and military discipline, having its root in the Byzantine Empire, and stopping short at William the Conqueror. Nor, again, can the Cathedral be ranked with that other order of lofty, aerial churches, with their wealth of painted windows and sculptured work, with their sharp pinnacles and bold outlines; communal and citizen—regarded as political symbols; free, capricious, untrammelled—regarded as works of art. This is the second transformation of architecture—no longer cryptic, sacerdotal, inevitable, but artistic, progressive, popular—beginning with the return from the Crusades and ending with Louis XI. 
Notre-Dame is neither pure Roman, like the first, nor pure Gothic, like the second; it is an edifice of the transition period. The Saxon architect had just finished erecting the first pillars of the nave when the pointed arch, brought back by the Crusaders, arrived and planted itself victorious on the broad Roman capitals which were intended only to support round arches. Master, henceforth, of the situation, the pointed arch determined the construction of the rest of the building. Inexperienced and timid at its commencement, it remains wide and low, restraining itself, as it were, not daring to soar up into the arrows and lancets of the marvellous cathedrals of the later period. It would almost seem that it was affected by the proximity of the heavy Roman pillars. 
Not that these edifices showing the transition from Roman to Gothic are less worthy of study than the pure models. They express a gradation of the art which would else be lost. It is the grafting of the pointed arch on to the circular arch. 
Notre-Dame de Paris, in particular, is a curious specimen of this variety. Every surface, every stone of this venerable pile, is a page of the history not only of the country, but of science and of art. Thus—to mention here only a few of the chief details—whereas the small Porte Rouge almost touches the limits of fifteenth century Gothic delicacy, the pillars of the nave, by their massiveness and great girth, reach back to the Carlovingian Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près. One would imagine that six centuries lay between that door and those pillars. Not even the Hermetics fail to find in the symbols of the grand doorway a satisfactory compendium of their science, of which the Church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was so complete a hieroglyph. Thus the Roman Abbey—the Church of the Mystics—Gothic art—Saxon art—the ponderous round pillar reminiscent of Gregory VII, the alchemistic symbolism by which Nicolas Flamel paved the way for Luther—papal unity—schism—Saint-Germain-des-Près—Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie—all are blended, combined, amalgamated in Notre-Dame. This generative Mother-Church is, among the other ancient churches of Paris, a sort of Chimera: she has the head of one, the limbs of another, the body of a third—something of all. 
These hybrid edifices are, we repeat, by no means the least interesting to the artist, the antiquary, and the historian. They let us realize to how great a degree architecture is a primitive matter, in that they demonstrate, as do the Cyclopean remains, the Pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic Hindu pagodas, that the greatest productions of architecture are not so much the work of individuals as of a community; are rather the offspring of a nation’s labour than the outcome of individual genius; the deposit of a whole people; the heaped-up treasure of centuries; the residuum left by the successive evaporations of human society; in a word, a species of formations. Each wave of time leaves its coating of alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monuments, each individual contributes his stone to it. Thus do the beavers work, thus the bees, thus man. Babel, that great symbol of architecture, is a bee-hive. 
Great edifices, like the great mountains, are the work of ages. Often art undergoes a transformation while they are waiting pending completion—pendent opera interrupta—they then proceed imperturbably in conformity with the new order of things. The new art takes possession of the monument at the point at which it finds it, absorbs itself into it, develops it after its own idea, and completes it if it can. The matter is accomplished without disturbance, without effort, without reaction, in obedience to an undeviating, peaceful law of nature—a shoot is grafted on, the sap circulates, a fresh vegetation is in progress. Truly, there is matter for mighty volumes; often, indeed, for a universal history of mankind, in these successive layers of different periods of art, on different levels of the same edifice. The man, the artist, the individual, are lost sight of in these massive piles that have no record of authorship; they are an epitome, a totalization of human intelligence. Time is the architect—a nation is the builder. 
Reviewing here only Christo-European architecture, that younger sister of the great Masonic movements of the East, it presents the aspect of a huge formation divided into three sharply defined superincumbent zones: the Roman,2 the Greek, and that of the Renaissance, which we would prefer to call the Greco-Romanesque. The Roman stratum, the oldest and the lowest of the three, is occupied by the circular arch, which reappears, supported by the Greek column, in the modern and upper stratum of the Renaissance. Between the two comes the pointed arch. The edifices which belong exclusively to one or other of these three strata are perfectly distinct, uniform, and complete in themselves. The Abbey of Jumiéges is one, the Cathedral of Reims another, the Sainte-Croix of Orleans is a third. But the three zones mingle and overlap one another at the edges, like the colours of the solar spectrum; hence these complex buildings, these edifices of the gradational, transitional period. One of them will be Roman as to its feet, Greek as to its body, and Greco-Romanesque as to its head. That happens when it has taken six hundred years in the building. But that variety is rare: the castle-keep of ètamples is a specimen. Edifices of two styles are more frequent. Such is Notre-Dame of Paris, a Gothic structure, rooted by its earliest pillars in that Roman zone in which the portal of Saint-Denis and the nave of Saint-Germain-des-Près are entirely sunk. Such again is the semi-Gothic Chapter Hall of Bocherville, in which the Roman layer reaches half-way up. Such is the Cathedral at Rouen, which would be wholly Gothic had not the point of its central spire reached up into the Renaissance.3 
For the rest, all these gradations, these differences, do but affect the surface of the building. Art has changed its skin, but the actual conformation of the Christian Church has remained untouched. It has ever the same internal structure, the same logical disposition of the parts. Be the sculptured and decorated envelope of a cathedral as it will, underneath, at least, as germ or rudiment, we invariably find the Roman basilica. It develops itself unswervingly on this foundation and following the same rules. There are invariably two naves crossing each other at right angles, the upper end of which, rounded off in a half circle, forms the choir; there are always two lower-pitched side-aisles for the processions—the chapels—sort of lateral passages communicating with the nave by its intercolumnar spaces. These conditions once fulfilled, the number of chapels, doorways, steeples, spires, may be varied to infinity, according to the fancy of the age, the nation, or the art. The proper observances of worship once provided for and insured, architecture is free to do as she pleases. Statues, stained glass, rose-windows, arabesques, flutings, capitals, bas-reliefs—all these flowers of fancy she distributes as best suits her particular scheme of the moment. Hence the prodigious variety in the exterior of these edifices, in the underlying structure of which there rules so much order and uniformity. The trunk of the tree is unchanging; its vegetation only is variable. 
______________________
1 Histoire Gallicane, Book ii, period ii, fol. 130, p. 4.—Author’s note. 
2 This is also known, according to situation, race, or style, as Lombard, Saxon, or Byzantine: four sister and parallel architectures, each having its own peculiar characteristics, but all deriving from the same principle—the circular arch. Facies non omnibus una, non diversa tamen, qualem, etc.—Author’s Note. 
3 This part of the spire, which was of timber, was destroyed by lightning in 1823.—Author’s Note. 
Chapter 2 - A Vird’s-eye View of Paris
We have endeavoured to restore for the reader this admirable Cathedral of Notre-Dame. We have briefly enumerated most of the beauties it possessed in the fifteenth century, though lost to it now; but we have omitted the chief one—the view of Paris as it then appeared from the summits of the towers. 
When, after long gropings up the dark perpendicular stair-case which pierces the thick walls of the steeple towers, one emerged at last unexpectedly on to one of the two high platforms inundated with light and air, it was in truth a marvellous picture spread out before you on every side; a spectacle sui generis of which those of our readers can best form an idea who have had the good fortune to see a purely Gothic city, complete and homogeneous, of which there are still a few remaining, such as Nuremberg in Bavaria, Vittoria in Spain, or even smaller specimens, provided they are well-preserved, like Vitré in Brittany and Nordhausen in Prussia. 
The Paris of that day, the Paris of the fifteenth century, was already a giant city. We Parisians in general are mistaken as to the amount of ground we imagine we have gained since then. Paris, since the time of Louis XI, has not increased by much more than a third; and, truth to tell, has lost far more in beauty than ever it has gained in size. 
Paris first saw the light on that ancient island in the Seine, the Cité, which has, in fact, the form of a cradle. The strand of this island was its first enclosure, the Seine its first moat. 
For several centuries Paris remained an island, with two bridges, one north, the other south, and two bridge heads, which were at once its gates and its fortresses: the Grand-Chatelet on the right bank, the Petit-Chatelet on the left. Then, after the kings of the first generation, Paris, finding itself too cramped on its island home, where it no longer had room to turn round, crossed the river; whereupon, beyond each of the bridge-fortresses, a first circle of walls and towers began to enclose pieces of the land on either side of the Seine. Of this ancient wall some vestiges were still standing in the last century; to-day, nothing is left but the memory, and here and there a tradition, such as the Baudets or Baudoyer Gate—porta bagauda. 
By degrees the flood of dwellings, constantly pressing forward from the heart of the city, overflows, saps, eats away, and finally swallows up this enclosure. Philip Augustus makes a fresh line of circumvallation, and immures Paris within a chain of massive and lofty towers. For upward of a century the houses press upon one another, accumulate, and rise in this basin like water in a reservoir. They begin to burrow deeper in the ground, they pile storey upon storey, they climb one upon another, they shoot up in height like all compressed growth, and each strives to raise its head above its neighbour for a breath of air. The streets grow ever deeper and narrower, every open space fills up and disappears, till, finally, the houses overleap the wall of Philip Augustus, and spread themselves joyfully over the country like escaped prisoners, without plan or system, gathering themselves together in knots, cutting slices out of the surrounding fields for gardens, taking plenty of elbow-room. 
By 1367, the town has made such inroads on the suburb that a new enclosure has become necessary, especially on the right bank, and is accordingly built by Charles V. But a town like Paris is in a state of perpetual growth—it is only such cities that become capitals. They are the reservoirs into which are directed all the streams—geographical, political, moral, intellectual—of a country, all the natural tendencies of the people; wells of civilization, so to speak—but also outlets—where commerce, manufacture, intelligence, population, all that there is of vital fluid, of life, of soul, in a people, filters through and collects incessantly, drop by drop, century by century. The wall of Charles V, however, endures the same fate as that of Philip Augustus. By the beginning of the fifteenth century it, too, is overstepped, left behind, the new suburb hurries on, and in the sixteenth century it seems visibly to recede farther and farther into the depths of the old city, so dense has the new town become outside it. 
Thus, by the fifteenth century—to go no farther—Paris had already consumed the three concentric circles of wall, which, in the time of Julian the Apostate, were in embryo, so to speak, in the Grand-Chatelet and the Petit-Chatelet. The mighty city had successively burst its four girdles of wall like a child grown out of last year’s garments. Under Louis XI, clusters of ruined towers belonging to the old fortified walls were still visible, rising out of the sea of houses like hilltops out of an inundation—the archipelagoes of the old Paris, submerged beneath the new. 
Since then, unfortunately for us, Paris has changed again; but it has broken through one more enclosure, that of Louis XV, a wretched wall of mud and rubbish, well worthy of the King who built it and of the poet who sang of it: 
“Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.”1
In the fifteenth century Paris was still divided into three towns, perfectly distinct and separate, having each its peculiar features, speciality, manners, customs, privileges, and history: the City, the University, the Town. The City, which occupied the island, was the oldest and the smallest of the trio—the mother of the other two—looking, if we may be allowed the comparison, like a little old woman between two tall and blooming daughters. The University covered the left bank of the Seine from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle—points corresponding in the Paris of to-day to the Halles-aux-Vins and the Mint, its circular wall taking in a pretty large portion of that ground on which Julian had built his baths.2 It also included the Hill of Sainte-Geneviève. The outermost point of the curving wall was the Papal Gate; that is to say, just about the site of the Panthéon. The Town, the largest of the three divisions of Paris, occupied the right bank. Its quay, interrupted at several points, stretched along the Seine from the Tour de Billy to the Tour du Bois; that is, from the spot where the Grenier d’Abondance now stands to that occupied by the Tuileries. These four points at which the Seine cut through the circumference of the capital—la Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the left, the Tour de Billy and the Tour de Bois on the right bank—were called par excellence “the four towers of Paris.” The Town encroached more deeply into the surrounding country than did the University. The farthest point of its enclosing wall (the one built by Charles V) was at the gates of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, the situation of which has not changed. 
As we have already stated, each of these three great divisions of Paris was a town—but a town too specialized to be complete, a town which could not dispense with the other two. So, too, each had its peculiarly characteristic aspect. In the City, churches were the prevailing feature; in the Town, palaces; in the University, colleges. Setting aside the less important originalities of Paris and the capricious legal intricacies of the right of way, and taking note only of the collective and important masses in the chaos of communal jurisdictions, we may say that, broadly speaking, the island belonged to the Bishop, the right bank to the Provost of the Merchants’ Guild, and the left bank to the Rector of the University. The Provost of Paris—a royal, not a municipal office—had authority over all. The City boasted Notre-Dame; the Town, the Louvre and the H?tel-de-Ville; the University, the Sorbonne. Again, the Town had the Halles, the City the H?tel-Dieu, the University the Pré-aux-Clercs.3 Crimes committed by the students on the right bank, were tried on the island in the Palais de Justice, and punished on the right bank at Montfaucon, unless the Rector, feeling the University to be strong and the King weak, thought fit to intervene; for the scholars enjoyed the privilege of being hanged on their own premises. 
Most of these privileges (we may remark in passing), and there were some of even greater value than this, had been extorted from the kings by mutiny and revolts. It is the immemorial course: Le roi ne lache que quand le peuple arrache—the King only gives up what the people wrest from him. There is an old French charter which defines this popular loyalty with great simplicity: Civibus fidelitas in reges, qu? tamen aliquoties seditionibus interrupta, multa peperit privilegia.4 
In the fifteenth century the Seine embraced five islands within the purlieus of Paris: the Louvre, on which trees then grew; the ?le-aux-Vaches and the ?le Notre-Dame, both uninhabited except for one poor hovel, both fiefs of the Bishop (in the seventeenth century these two islands were made into one and built upon, now known as the ?le Saint-Louis); finally the City, having at its western extremity the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches—the cattle ferry—now buried under the foundations of the Pont Neuf. The City had, in those days, five bridges—three on the right: the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont-au-Change being of stone, and the Pont-aux-Meuniers of wood; and two on the left: the Petit-Pont of stone, and the Pont Saint-Michel of wood—all lined with houses. The University had six gates built by Philip Augustus, namely—starting from the Tournelle—the Porte Saint-Victor, the Porte Bordelle, the Porte Papale, the Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Saint-Michel and the Porte Saint-Germain. The Town also had six gates, built by Charles V, namely—starting from the Tour de Billy—the Porte Saint-Antoine, the Porte du Temple, the Porte Saint-Martin, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Porte Montmartre and the Porte Saint-Honoré. All these gates were strong, and at the same time handsome—which is no detriment to strength. A wide and deep fosse, filled during the winter months with a swift stream supplied by the Seine, washed the foot of the walls all round Paris. At night the gates were t, the river was barred at the two extremities of the town by the massive iron chains, and Paris slept in peace. 
From a bird’s-eye view, these three great divisions—the City, the University, and the Town—presented each an inextricably tangled network of streets to the eye. Nevertheless, one recognised at a glance that the three fragments formed together a single body. You at once distinguished two long, parallel streets running, without a break or deviation, almost in a straight line through all these towns from end to end, from south to north, at right angles with the Seine; connecting, mingling, transfusing them, incessantly pouring the inhabitants of one into the walls of the other, blending the three into one. One of these two streets ran from the Porte Saint-Jacques to the Porte Saint-Martin, and was called Rue Saint-Jacques in the University, Rue de la Juiverie (Jewry) in the City, and Rue Saint-Martin in the Town, crossing the river twice, as the Petit-Pont and the Pont Notre-Dame. The second—which was called Rue de la Harpe on the left bank, Rue de la Barillerie on the island, Rue Saint-Denis on the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel on one arm of the Seine, Pont-au-Change on the other—ran from the Porte Saint-Michel in the University to the Porte Saint-Denis in the Town. For the rest, under however many names, they were still only the two streets, the two thoroughfares, the two mother-streets, the main arteries of Paris, from which all the other ducts of the triple city started, or into which they flowed. 
Independently of these two principal streets, cutting diametrically through the breadth of Paris and common to the entire capital, the Town and the University had each its own main street running in the direction of their length, parallel to the Seine, and intersecting the two “arterial” streets at right angles. Thus, in the Town you descended in a straight line from the Porte Saint-Antoine to the Porte Saint-Honoré; in the University, from the Porte Saint-Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain. These two great thoroughfares, crossing the two first mentioned, formed the frame on to which was woven the knotted, tortuous network of the streets of Paris. In the inextricable tangle of this network, however, on closer inspection, two sheaf-like clusters of streets could be distinguished, one in the University, one in the Town, spreading out from the bridges to the gates. Something of the same geometrical plan still exists. 
Now, what aspect did this present when viewed from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame in 1482? 
That is what we will endeavour to describe. 
To the spectator, arrived breathless on this summit, the first glance revealed only a bewildering jumble of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, squares, spires, and steeples. Everything burst upon the eye at once—the carved gable, the high, pointed roof, the turret clinging to the corner wall, the stone pyramid of the eleventh century, the slate obelisk of the fifteenth, the round, stark tower of the donjon-keep, the square and elaborately decorated tower of the church, the large, the small, the massive, the airy. The gaze was lost for long and completely in this maze, where there was nothing that had not its own originality, its reason, its touch of genius, its beauty; where everything breathed of art, from the humblest house with its painted and carved front, its visible timber framework, its low-browed doorway and projecting storeys, to the kingly Louvre itself, which, in those days, boasted a colonnade of towers. But here are the most important points which struck the eye when it became somewhat accustomed to this throng of edifices. 
To begin with, the City. “The island of the City,” as Sauval observes—who, with all his pompous verbosity, sometimes hits upon these happy turns of phrase—“the island of the City is shaped like a great ship sunk into the mud and run aground lengthwise, about mid-stream of the Seine.” As we have already shown, in the fifteenth century this ship was moored to the two banks of the Seine by five bridges. This likeness to a ship had also struck the fancy of the heraldic scribes; for, according to Favyn and Pasquier, it was from this circumstance, and not from the siege by the Normans, that is derived the ship emblazoned in the arms of Paris. To him who can decipher it, heraldry is an algebra, a complete language. The whole history of the later half of the Middle Ages is written in heraldry, as is that of the first half in the symbolism of the Roman churches—the hieroglyphics of feudalism succeeding those of theocracy. 
The City, then, first presented itself to the view, with its stern to the east and its prow to the west. Facing towards the prow there stretched an endless line of old roofs, above which rose, broad and domed, the lead-roofed transept of the Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant with its tower, except that here the tower was the boldest, airiest, most elaborate and serrated spire that ever showed the sky through its fretted cone. Just in front of Notre-Dame three streets opened into the Cathedral close—a fine square of old houses. On the south side of this glowered the furrowed, beetling front of the H?tel-Dieu, with its roof as if covered with boils and warts. Then, on every side, right, left, east, and west, all within the narrow circuit of the City, rose the steeples of its twenty-one churches, of all dates, shapes, and sizes, from the low, wormeaten Roman belfry of Saint-Denis du Pas (carcer Glaucini) to the slender, tapering spires of Saint-Pierre aux B?ufs and Saint-Landry. Behind Notre-Dame northward, stretched the cloister with its Gothic galleries; southward, the semi-Roman palace of the Bishop, and eastward, an uncultivated piece of ground, the terrain, at the point of the island. Furthermore, in this sea of houses, the eye could distinguish, by the high, perforated mitres of stone which at that period capped even its topmost attic windows, the palace presented by the town, in the reign of Charles VI, to Juvénal des Ursins; a little farther on, the black-barred roofs of the market-shed in the Marché Palus; farther off still, the new chancel of Saint-Germain le Vieux, lengthened in 1458 by taking in a piece of the Rue aux Febves, with here and there a glimpse of causeway, crowded with people, some pillory at a corner of the street, some fine piece of the pavement of Philip Augustus—magnificent flagging, furrowed in the middle for the benefit of the horses, and so badly replaced in the middle of the sixteenth century by the wretched cobblestones called “pavè de la Ligue”; some solitary court-yard with one of those diaphanous wrought-iron stair-case turrets they were so fond of in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seen in the Rue des Bourdonnais. ly, to the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, westward, the Palais de Justice displayed its group of towers by the water’s edge. The trees of the royal gardens, which occupied the western point of the island, hid the ferry-man’s islet from view. As for the water, it was hardly visible on either side of the City from the towers of Notre-Dame: the Seine disappeared under the bridges, and the bridges under the houses. 
And when one looked beyond these bridges, on which the house-roofs glimmered green—moss-grown before their time from the mists of the river—and turned one’s gaze to the left towards the University, the first building which caught the eye was a low, extensive cluster of towers, the Petit-Chatelet, whose yawning gateway swallowed up the end of the Petit-Pont. Then, if you ran your eye along the river bank from east to west, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, it was one long line of houses with sculptured beams, coloured windows, overhanging storeys jutting out over the roadway—an interminable zigzag of gabled houses broken frequently by the opening of some street, now and then by the frontage or corner of some grand mansion with its gardens and its court-yards, its wings and outbuildings; standing proudly there in the midst of this crowding, hustling throng of houses, like a grand seigneur among a mob of rustics. There were five or six of these palaces along the quay, from the Logis de Lorraine, which shared with the Bernardines the great neighbouring enclosure of the Tournelle, to the Tour de Nesle, the chief tower of which formed the boundary of Paris, and whose pointed gables were accustomed, for three months of the year, to cut with their black triangles the scarlet disk of the setting sun. 
Altogether, this side of the Seine was the least mercantile of the two: there was more noise and crowding of scholars than artisans, and there was no quay, properly speaking, except between the Pont Saint-Michel and the Tour de Nesle. The rest of the river bank was either a bare strand, like that beyond the Bernardine Monastery, or a row of houses with their feet in the water, as between the two bridges. This was the domain of the washerwomen; here they called to one another, chattered, laughed, and sang, from morning till night along the river side, while they beat the linen vigorously—as they do to this day, contributing not a little to the gaiety of Paris. 
The University itself appeared as one block forming from end to end a compact and homogeneous whole. Seen from above, this multitude of closely packed, angular, clinging roofs, built, for the most part, on one geometrical principle, gave the impression of the crystallization of one substance. Here the capricious cleavage of the streets did not cut up the mass into such disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were distributed pretty equally over the whole, and were in evidence on all sides. The varied and charming roof-lines of these beautiful buildings originated in the same art which produced the simple roofs they overtopped, being practically nothing more than a repetition, in the square or cube, of the same geometrical figure. Consequently, they lent variety to the whole without confusing it, completed without overloading it—for geometry is another form of harmony. Several palatial residences lifted their heads sumptuously here and there above the picturesque roofs of the left bank: the Logis de Nevers, the Logis de Rome, the Logis de Reims, which have disappeared; also the H?tel de Cluny, which for the consolation of the artist still exists, but the tower of which was so stupidly shortened a few years ago. Near the H?tel Cluny stood the Baths of Julian, a fine Roman palace with circular arches. There was, besides, a number of abbeys, more religious in style, of graver aspect than the secular residences, but not inferior either in beauty or in extent. The most striking of these were the Bernardines’ Abbey with its three steeples; Sainte-Genevié ve, the square tower of which still exists to make us more deeply regret the rest; the Sorbonne, part college, part monastery, of which so admirable a nave still survives; the beautiful quadrilateral Monastery of the Mathurins;5 adjacent to it the Benedictine Monastery, within the wall of which they managed to knock up a theatre between the issue of the seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Abbey of the Cordeliers, with its three enormous gables in a row; that of the Augustines, the tapering spire of which was, after the Tour de Nesle, the second pinnacle at this side of Paris, counting from the west. The colleges, the connecting link between the cloister and the world, held architecturally the mean between the great mansions and the abbeys, more severe in their elegance, more massive in their sculpture than the palaces, less serious in their style of architecture than the religious houses. Unfortunately, scarcely anything remains of these buildings, in which Gothic art held so admirable a balance between the sumptuous and the simple. The churches (and they were numerous and splendid in the University quarter, illustrating every architectural era, from the Roman arches of Saint-Julien to the Gothic arches of Saint-Sèverin)—the churches dominated the whole, and as one harmony more in that sea of harmonies they pierced in quick succession the waving, fretted outline of the gabled roofs with their boldly cut spires, their steeples, their tapering pinnacles, themselves but a magnificent exaggeration of the sharp angles of the roofs. 
The ground of the University quarter was hilly, swelling in the southeast to the vast mound of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. It was curious to note, from the heights of Notre-Dame, the multitude of narrow and tortuous streets (now the Quartier Latin), the clusters of houses, spreading helter-skelter in every direction down the steep sides of this hill to the water-edge, some apparently rushing down, others climbing up, and all clinging one to the other. 
The inhabitants thronging the streets looked, from that height and at that distance, like a swarm of ants perpetually passing and repassing each other, and added greatly to the animation of the scene. 
And here and there, in the spaces between the roofs, the steeples, the innumerable projections which so fantastically bent and twisted and notched the outermost line of the quarter, you caught a glimpse of a moss-grown wall, a thick-set round tower, an embattled, fortress-like gateway—the wall of Philip Augustus. Beyond this stretched the verdant meadows, ran the great high-roads with a few houses straggling along their sides, growing fewer the farther they were removed from the protecting barrier. Some of these suburbs were considerable. There was first—taking the Tournelle as the point of departure—the market-town of Saint-Victor, with its one-arched bridge spanning the Bièvre; its Abbey, where the epitaph of King Louis the Fat—epitaphium Ludovici Grossi—was to be seen; and its church with an octagonal spire, flanked by four belfry towers of the eleventh century (there is a similar one still to be seen at ètampes). Then there was Saint-Marceau, which already boasted three churches and a convent; then, leaving on the left the mill of the Gobelins with its white wall of enclosure, you came to the Faubourg Saint-Jacques with its beautifully carved stone cross at the cross-roads; the Church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, then a charming Gothic structure; Saint-Magloire, with a beautiful nave of the fourteenth century, which Napoleon turned into a hayloft; and Notre-Dame-des-Champs, which contained some Byzantine mosaics. Finally, after leaving in the open fields the Chartreux Monastery, a sumptuous edifice contemporary to the Palais de Justice with its garden divided off into compartments, and the deserted ruins of Vauvert, the eye turned westward and fell upon the three Roman spires of Saint-Germain-des-Près, in the rear of which the market-town of Saint-Germain, already quite a large parish, formed fifteen or twenty streets, the sharp steeple of Saint-Sulpice marking one of the corners of the town boundary. Close by was the square enclosure of the Foire Saint-Germain, where the fairs were held—the present market-place. Then came the abbot’s pillory, a charming little round tower, capped by a cone of lead; farther on were the tile-fields and the Rue du Four, leading to the manorial bakehouse; then the mill on its raised mound; finally, the Lazarette, a small, isolated building scarcely discernible in the distance. 
But what especially attracted the eye and held it long was the Abbey itself. Undoubtedly this monastery, in high repute both as a religious house and as a manor, this abbey-palace, wherein the Bishop of Paris esteemed it a privilege to pass one night; with a refectory which the architect had endowed with the aspect, the beauty, and the splendid rose-window of a cathedral; its elegant Lady Chapel; its monumental dormitories, its spacious gardens, its portcullis, its drawbridge, its belt of crenated wall, which seemed to stamp its crested outline on the meadow beyond, its court-yards where the glint of armour mingled with the shimmer of gold-embroidered vestments—the whole grouped and marshalled round the three high Roman towers firmly planted on a Gothic transept—all this, I say, produced a magnificent effect against the horizon. 
When at length, after long contemplating the University, you turned towards the right bank—the Town—the scene changed its character abruptly. Much larger than the University quarter, the Town was much less of a united whole. The first glance showed it to be divided into several singularly distinct areas. First, on the east, in that part of the Town which still takes its name from the “marais”—the morass into which Camulogènes led C?sar—there was a great group of places extending to the water’s edge. Four huge mansions, almost contiguous—the H?tels Jouy, Sens, Barbeau, and the Logis de la Reine mirrored in the Seine their slated roofs and slender turrets. These four edifices filled the space between the Rue des Nonaindières to the Celestine Abbey, the spire of which formed a graceful relief to their line of gables and battlements. Some squalid, moss-grown hovels overhanging the water in front of these splendid buildings were not sufficient to conceal from view the beautifully ornamented corners of their fa?ades, their great square stone casements, their Gothic porticoes surmounted by statues, the bold, clear-cut parapets of their walls, and all those charming architectural surprises which give Gothic art the appearance of forming her combinations afresh for each new structure. Behind these palaces ran in every direction, now cleft, palisaded, and embattled like a citadel, now veiled by great trees like a Carthusian monastery, the vast and multiform encircling wall of that marvellous H?tel Saint-Pol, where the King of France had room to lodge superbly twenty-two princes of the rank of the Dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy with their retinues and their servants, not to mention the great barons, and the Emperor when he came to visit Paris, and the lions, who had a palace for themselves within the royal palace. And we must observe here that a prince’s lodging comprised in those days not less than eleven apartments, from the state chamber to the oratory, besides all the galleries, the baths, the “sweating-rooms,” and other “superfluous places” with which each suite of apartments was provided—not to mention the gardens specially allotted to each guest of the King, nor the kitchens, store-rooms, pantries, and general refectories of the household; the inner court-yards in which were situated twenty-two general offices, from the bake-house to the royal cellarage; the grounds for every sort and description of game—mall, tennis, tilting at the ring, etc.; aviaries, fish-ponds, menageries, stables, cattle-sheds, libraries, armouries, and foundries. Such was, at that day, a King’s palace—a Louvre, an H?tel Saint-Pol—a city within a city. 
From the tower on which we have taken up our stand, one obtained of the H?tel Saint-Pol, though half-hidden by the four great mansions we spoke of, a very considerable and wonderful view. You could clearly distinguish in it, though skilfully welded to the main building by windowed and pillared galleries, the three mansions which Charles V had absorbed into his palace: the H?tel du Petit-Muce with the fretted parapet that gracefully bordered its roof; the H?tel of the Abbot of Saint-Maur, having all the appearance of a fortress, with its massive tower, its machicolations, loopholes, iron bulwarks, and over the great Saxon gate, between the two grooves for the drawbridge, the escutcheon of the Abbot; the H?tel of the Comte d’ètampes, of which the keep, ruined at its summit, was arched and notched like a cock’s-comb; here and there, three or four ancient oaks grouped together in one great bushy clump; a glimpse of swans floating on clear pools, all flecked with light and shadow; picturesque corners of innumerable court-yards; the Lion house, with its low Gothic arches on short Roman pillars, its iron bars and continuous roaring; cutting right through this picture the scaly spire of the Ave-Maria Chapel; on the left, the left, the Mansion of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four delicately perforated turrets; and, in the centre of it all, the H?tel Saint-Pol itself, with its multiplicity of facades, its successive enrichments since the time of Charles V, the heterogeneous excrescences with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it during two centuries, with all the roofs of its chapels, all its gables, its galleries, a thousand weather-cocks turning to the four winds of heaven, and its two lofty, contiguous towers with conical roofs surrounded by battlements at the base, looking like peaked hats with the brim turned up. 
Continuing to mount the steps of this amphitheatre of palaces, rising tier upon tier in the distance, having crossed the deep fissure in the roofs of the Town which marked the course of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the eye travelled on to the Logis d’Angoulême, a vast structure of several periods, parts of which were glaringly new and white, blending with the rest about as well as a crimson patch on a blue doublet. Nevertheless, the peculiarly sharp and high-pitched roof of the modern palace—bristling with sculptured gargoyles, and covered with sheets of lead, over which ran sparkling incrustations of gilded copper in a thousand fantastic arabesques— this curiously damascened roof rose gracefully out of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice, whose massive old towers, bulging cask-like with age, sinking into themselves with decrepitude, and rent from top to bottom, looked like great unbuttoned waistcoats. Behind rose the forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles. No show-place in the world—not even Chambord or the Alhambra—could afford a more magical, more ethereal, more enchanting spectacle than this grove of spires, bell-towers, chimneys, weather-cocks, spiral stair-cases; of airy lantern towers that seemed to have been worked with a chisel; of pavilions; of spindle-shaped turrets, all diverse in shape, height, and position. It might have been a gigantic chess-board in stone. 
That sheaf of enormous black towers to the right of the inky Tournelles, pressing one against the other, and bound together, as it were, by a circular moat; that donjon-keep, pierced far more numerously with shot-holes than with windows, its drawbridge always raised, its portcullis always lowered—that is the Bastile. Those objects like black beaks projecting from the embrasures of the battlements, and which, from a distance, you might take for rain-spouts, are cannon. Within their range, at the foot of the formidable pile, is the Porte Saint-Antoine, crouching between its two towers. 
Beyond the Tournelles, reaching to the wall of Charles V, stretched in rich diversity of lawns and flower-beds a velvet carpet of gardens and royal parks, in the heart of which, conspicuous by its maze of trees and winding paths, one recognised the famous labyrinthine garden presented by Louis XI to Coictier. The great physician’s observatory rose out of the maze like a massive, isolated column with a tiny house for its capital. Many a terrible astrological crime was perpetrated in that laboratory. This is now the Place Royale. 
As we have said, the Palace quarter, of which we have endeavoured to convey some idea to the reader, though merely pointing out the chief features, filled the angle formed by the Seine and the wall of Charles V on the east. The centre of the Town was occupied by a congeries of dwelling-houses. For it was here that the three bridges of the City on the right bank discharged their streams of passengers; and bridges lead to the building of houses before palaces. This collection of middle-class dwellings, closely packed together like the cells of a honeycomb, was, however, by no means devoid of beauty. The sea of roofs of a great city has much of the grandeur of the ocean about it. To begin with, the streets in their crossings and windings cut up the mass into a hundred charming figures, streaming out from the Halles like the rays of a star. The streets of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable ramifications, went up side by side like two great trees intertwining their branches; while such streets as the Rue de la Platerie, Rue de la Verrerie, Rue de la Tixeranderie, etc., wound in tortuous lines through the whole. Some handsome edifices, too, thrust up their heads through the petrified waves of this sea of gables. For instance, at the head of the Pont-aux-Changeurs, behind which you could see the Seine foaming under the mill-wheels of the Pont-aux-Meuniers, there was the Chatelet, no longer a Roman keep, as under Julian the Apostate, but a feudal tower of the thirteenth century, and built of stone so hard that three hours’ work with the pick did not remove more than the size of a man’s fist. Then there was the square steeple of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, with its richly sculptured corners, most worthy of admiration even then, though it was not completed in the fifteenth century; it lacked in particular the four monsters which, still perched on the four corners of its roof, look like sphinxes offering to modern Paris the enigma of the old to unriddle. Rault, the sculptor, did not put them up till 1526, and received twenty francs for his trouble. There was the Maison-aux-Piliers, facing the Place de Grève, of which we have already given the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais, since spoilt by a doorway “in good taste”; Saint-Mèry, of which the primitive pointed arches were scarcely more than circular; Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial and twenty other edifices which disdained not to hide their wonders in that chaos of deep, dark, narrow streets. Add to these the carved stone crosses, more numerous at the crossways than even the gibbets; the cemetery of the Innocents, of whose enclosing wall you caught a glimpse in the distance; the pillory of the Halles, just visible between two chimneys of the Rue de la Cossonnerie; the gibbet of the Croix du Trahoir at the corner of the ever-busy thoroughfare; the round stalls of the Corn Market; fragments of the old wall of Philip Augustus, distinguishable here and there, buried among the houses; mouldering, ivyclad towers, ruined gateways, bits of crumbling walls; the quay with its myriad booths and gory skinning yards; the Seine, swarming with boats from the Port au Foin or hay wharf to the For-1’Evêque, and you will be able to form some adequate idea of what the great irregular quadrangle of the Town looked like in 1482. 
Besides these two quarters—the one of palaces, the other of houses—the Town contributed a third element to the view: that of a long belt of abbeys which bordered almost its entire circumference from east to west; and, lying just inside the fortified wall which encircled Paris, furnished a second internal rampart of cloisters and chapels. Thus, immediately adjoining the park of the Tournelles, between the Rue Saint-Antoine and the old Rue du Temple, stood the old convent of Sainte-Catherine, with its immense grounds, bounded only by the city wall. Between the old and the new Rue du Temple was the Temple itself, a grim of lofty towers, standing haughty and alone, surrounded by a vast, embattled wall. Between the Rue Neuve du Temple and the Rue Saint-Martin, in the midst of gardens, stood the Abbey of Saint-Martin a superb fortified church, whose girdle of towers and crown of steeples were second only to Saint-Germain-des-Près in strength and splendour. 
Between the two streets of Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis stretched the convent enclosure of the Trinitè, and between the Rue Saint-Denis and the Rue Montorgueil that of Filles-Dieu. Close by, one caught a glimpse of the mouldering roofs and broken wall of the Cour des Miracles, the only profane link in that pious chain. 
ly, the fourth area, standing out distinctly in the conglomeration of roofs on the right bank, and occupying the eastern angle formed by the city wall and the river wall, was a fresh knot of palaces and mansions clustered round the foot of the Louvre. The old Louvre of Philip Augustus, that stupendous pile whose enormous middle tower mustered round it twenty-three major towers, irrespective of the smaller ones, appeared from the distance as if encased within the Gothic roof-lines of the H?tel d’Alen?on and the Petit-Bourbon. This hydra of towers, this guardian monster of Paris, with its twenty-four heads ever erect, the tremendous ridge of its roof sheathed in lead or scales of slate and glistening in metallic lustre, furnished an unexpected close to the western configuration of the Town. 
This, then, was the town of Paris in the fifteenth century—an immense mass—what the Romans called insula—of burgher dwelling-houses, flanked on either side by two blocks of palaces, terminated the one by the Louvre, the other by the Tournelles, bordered on the north by a long chain of abbeys and walled gardens all blended and mingling in one harmonious whole; above these thousand buildings with their fantastic outline of tiled and slated roofs, the steeples—fretted, fluted, honeycombed—of the forty-four churches on the right bank; myriads of streets cutting through it; as boundary: on one side a circuit of lofty walls with square towers (those of the University wall were round); on the other, the Seine, intersected by bridges and carrying numberless boats. 
Beyond the walls a few suburbs hugged the protection of the gates, but they were less numerous and more scattered than on the side of the University. In the rear of the Bastile about twenty squalid cottages huddled round the curious stonework of the Croix-Faubin, and the abutments of the Abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs; then came Popincourt, buried in cornfields; then La Courtille, a blithe village of taverns; the market-town of Saint-Laurent with its church steeple appearing in the distance as if one of the pointed towers of the Porte Saint-Martin; the suburb of Saint-Denis with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre; outside the Porte-Montmartre, the Grange-Batelière encircled by white walls; behind that again, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which then had almost as many churches as wind-mills, but has only retained the wind-mills, for the world is now merely concerned for bread for the body. Finally, beyond the Louvre, among the meadows, stretched the Faubourg Saint-Honorè, already a considerable suburb, and the verdant pastures of Petite-Bretagne and the Marchè-aux-Porceaux or pig-market, in the middle of which stood the horrible furnace where they seethed the false coiners. 
On the top of a hill, rising out of the solitary plain between La Courtille and Saint-Laurent, you will have remarked a sort of building, presenting the appearance, in the distance, of a ruined colonnade with its foundation laid bare. But this was neither a Pantheon nor a Temple of Jupiter; it was Montfaucon. 6 
Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, brief as we have done our best to make it, has not shattered in the reader’s mind the image of old Paris as fast as we have built it up, we will recapitulate in a few words. In the centre, the island of the City like an immense tortoise, stretching out its tiled bridges like scaly paws from under its gray shell of roofs. On the left, the dense, bristling, square block of the University; on the right, the high semicircle of the Town, showing many more gardens and isolated edifices than the other two. The three areas, City, University, and Town, are veined with streets innumerable. Athwart the whole runs the Seine —“the fostering Seine,” as Peter du Breul calls it—encumbered with islands, bridges, and boats. All around, a vast plain checkered with a thousand forms of cultivation and dotted with fair villages; to the left, Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirarde, Montrouge, Gentilly, with its round and its square tower, etc.; to the right, a score of others from Conflans to Ville-l’Evêque; on the horizon, a border of hills ranged in a circle, the rim of the basin, as it were. Finally, far to the east, Vincennes with its seven square towers; southward, Bicêtre and its sharp-pointed turrets; northward, Saint-Denis with its spire; and in the west, Saint-Cloud and its castle-keep. Such was the Paris which the ravens of 1482 looked down upon from the heights of Notre-Dame. 
And yet this was the city of which Voltaire said that “before the time of Louis XIV it only possessed four handsome examples of architecture”—the dome of the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grace, the modern Louvre, and I forget the fourth—the Luxembourg, perhaps. Fortunately, Voltaire was none the less the author of Candide; and none the less the man of all others in the long line of humanity who possessed in highest perfection the rire diabolique—the sardonic smile. It proves, besides, that one may be a brilliant genius, and yet know nothing of an art one has not studied. Did not Molière think to greatly honour Raphael and Michael Angelo by calling them “the Mignards 7 of their age”? 
But to return to Paris and the fifteenth century. 
It was in those days not only a beautiful city; it was a homogeneous city, a direct product—architectural and historical—of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone. It was a city composed of two architectural strata only—the Romanesque and the Gothic—for the primitive Roman layer had long since disappeared excepting in the Baths of Julian, where it still pierced through the thick overlying crust of the Middle Ages. As for the Celtic stratum, no trace of it was discoverable even when sinking wells. 
Fifty years later, when the Renaissance came, and with that unity of style, so severe and yet so varied, associated its dazzling wealth of fantasy and design, its riot of Roman arches, Doric columns and Gothic vaults, its delicate and ideal sculpture, its own peculiar tastes in arabesques and capitals, its architectural paganism contemporary with Luther, Paris was perhaps more beautiful still though less harmonious to the eye and the strictly artistic sense. But that splendid period was of short duration. The Renaissance was not impartial; it was not content only to erect, it must also pull down; to be sure, it required space. Gothic Paris was complete but for a moment. Scarcely was Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie finished when the demolition of the old Louvre began. 
Since then the great city has gone on losing her beauty day by day. The Gothic Paris, which was effacing the Romanesque, had been effaced in its turn. But what name shall be given to the Paris which has replaced it? 
We have the Paris of Catherine de Mèdicis in the Tuileries; the Paris of Henri II in the H?tel-de-Ville, both edifices in the grand style; the Place Royale shows us the Paris of Henri IV—brick fronts, stone copings, and slate roofs—tricolour houses; the Val-de-Grace is the Paris of Louis XIII—low and broad in style, with basket-handle arches and something indefinably pot-bellied about its pillars and humpbacked about its domes. We see the Paris of Louis XIV in the Invalides—stately, rich, gilded, cold; the Paris of Louis XV at Saint-Sulpice—scrolls and love-knots and clouds, vermicelli and chicory leaves—all in stone; the Paris of Louis XVI in the Panthèon, a bad copy of Saint Peter’s at Rome (the building has settled rather crookedly, which has not tended to improve its lines); the Paris of the Republic at the School of Medicine—a spurious hash of Greek and Roman, with about as much relation to the Coliseum or the Panthèon as the constitution of the year III has to the laws of Minos—a style known in architecture as “the Messidor”; 8 the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vend?me—a sublime idea, a bronze column made of cannons; the Paris of the Restoration at the Bourse—an abnormally white colonnade supporting an abnormally smooth frieze—it is perfectly square and cost twenty million francs. 
To each of these characteristic buildings there belongs, in virtue of a similarity of style, of form, and of disposition, a certain number of houses scattered about the various districts easily recognised and assigned to their respective dates by the eye of the connoisseur. To the seeing eye, the spirit of a period and the features of a King are traceable even in the knocker of a door. 
The Paris of to-day has, therefore, no typical characteristic physiognomy. It is a collection of samples of several periods, of which the finest have disappeared. The capital is increasing in houses only, and what houses! At this rate, there will be a new Paris every fifty years. The historic significance, too, of its architecture is lessened day by day. The great edifices are becoming fewer and fewer, are being swallowed up before our eyes by the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will have a Paris of stucco. 
As for the modern structures of this new Paris, we would much prefer not to dilate upon them. Not that we fail to give them their due. The Sainte-Geneviève of M. Soufflot is certainly the finest tea-cake that ever was made of stone. The palace of the Légion d’Honneur is also a most distinguished piece of confectionery. The dome of the Corn Market is a jockey-cap set on the top of a high ladder. The towers of Saint-Sulpice are two great clarinets—a shape which is as good as any other—and the grinning zigzag of the telegraph agreeably breaks the monotony of their roofs. Saint-Roch possesses a door that can only be matched in magnificence by that of Saint Thomas Aquinas; also it owns a Calvary in alto-relievo down in a cellar, and a monstrance of gilded wood—real marvels these, one must admit. The lantern tower in the maze at the Botanical Gardens is also vastly ingenious. As regards the Bourse, which is Greek as to its colonnade, Roman as to the round arches of its windows and doors, and Renaissance as to its broad, low, vaulted roof, it is indubitably in purest and most correct style; in proof of which we need only state that it is crowned by an attic story such as was never seen in Athens—a beautiful straight line, gracefully intersected at intervals by chimney pots. And, admitting that it be a rule in architecture that a building should be so adapted to its purpose that that purpose should at once be discernible in the aspect of the edifice, no praise is too high for a structure which might, from its appearance, be indifferently a royal palace, a chamber of deputies, a town hall, a college, a riding-school, an academy, a warehouse, a court of justice, a museum, a barracks, a mausoleum, a temple, or a theatre—and all the time it is an Exchange. Again, a building should be appropriate to the climate. This one is obviously constructed for our cold and rainy skies. It has an almost flat roof, as they obtain in the East, so that in winter, when it snows, that roof has to be swept, and, of course, we all know that roofs are intended to be swept. And as regards the purpose of which we spoke just now, the building fulfils it to admiration: it is a Bourse in France as it would have been a Temple in Greece. It is true that the architect has been at great pains to conceal the face of the clock, which would have spoilt the pure lines of the fa?ade; but in return, we have the colonnade running round the entire building, under which, on high-days and holidays, the imposing procession of stock-brokers and exchange-agents can display itself in all its glory. 
These now are undoubtedly very superior buildings. Add to them a number of such handsome, interesting, and varied streets as the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris offering one day to the view, if seen from a balloon, that wealth of outline, that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that indescribable air of grandeur in its simplicity, of the unexpected in its beauty, which characterizes—a draught-board. 
Nevertheless, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to you, conjure up the Paris of the fifteenth century; rebuild it in imagination; look through that amazing forest of spires, towers, and steeples; pour through the middle of the immense city the Seine, with its broad green and yellow pools that make it iridescent as a serpent’s skin; divide it at the island points, send it swirling round the piers of the bridges; project sharply against an azure horizon the Gothic profile of old Paris; let its outline float in a wintry mist clinging round its numerous chimneys; plunge it in deepest night, and watch the fantastic play of light and shadow in that sombre labyrinth of edifices; cast into it a ray of moonlight, showing it vague and uncertain, with its towers rearing their massive heads above the mists; or go back to the night scene, touch up the thousand points of the spires and gables with shadow, let it stand out more ridged and jagged than a shark’s jaw against a coppery sunset sky—and then compare. 
And if you would receive from the old city an impression the modern one is incapable of giving, go at dawn on some great festival—Easter or Whitsuntide—and mount to some elevated point, whence the eye commands the entire capital, and be present at the awakening of the bells. Watch, at a signal from heaven—for it is the sun that gives it—those thousand churches starting from their sleep. First come scattered notes passing from church to church, as when musicians signal to one another that the concert is to begin. Then, suddenly behold—for there are moments when the ear, too, seems to have sight—behold, how, at the same moment, from every steeple there rises a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. At first the vibration of each bell mounts up straight, pure, isolated from the rest, into the resplendent sky of morn; then, by degrees, as the waves spread out, they mingle, blend, unite one with the other, and melt into one magnificent concert. Now it is one unbroken stream of sonorous sound poured incessantly from the innumerable steeples—floating, undulating, leaping, eddying over the city, the deafening circle of its vibration extending far beyond the horizon. Yet this scene of harmony is no chaos. Wide and deep though it be, it never loses its limpid clearness; you can follow the windings of each separate group of notes that detaches itself from the peal; you can catch the dialogue, deep and shrill by turns, between the bourdon and the crecelle; you hear the octaves leap from steeple to steeple, darting winged, airy, strident from the bell of silver, dropping halt and broken from the bell of wood. You listen delightedly to the rich gamut, incessantly ascending and descending, of the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; clear and rapid notes flash across the whole in luminous zigzags, and then vanish like lightning. That shrill, cracked voice over there comes from the Abbey of Saint-Martin; here the hoarse and sinister growl of the Bastile; at the other end the boom of the great tower of the Louvre. The royal carillon of the Palais scatters its glittering trills on every side, and on them, at regular intervals, falls the heavy clang of the great bell of Notre-Dame, striking flashes from them as the hammer from the anvil. At intervals, sounds of every shape pass by, coming from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, ever and anon, the mass of sublime sound opens and gives passage to the stretto of the Ave-Maria chapel, flashing through like a shower of meteors. Down below, in the very depths of the chorus, you can just catch the chanting inside the churches, exhaled faintly through the pores of their vibrating domes. Here, in truth, is an opera worth listening to. In general, the murmur that rises up from Paris during the daytime is the city talking; at night it is the city breathing; but this is the city singing. Lend your ear, then, to this tutti of the bells; diffuse over the ensemble the murmur of half a million of human beings, the eternal plaint of the river, the ceaseless rushing of the wind, the solemn and distant quartet of the four forests set upon the hills, round the horizon, like so many enormous organ-cases; muffle in this, as in a sort of twilight, all of the great central peal that might otherwise be too hoarse or too shrill, and then say whether you know of anything in the world more rich, more blithe, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes—this furnace of music, these ten thousand brazen voices singing at once in flutes of stone, three hundred feet high—this city which is now but one vast orchestra—this symphony with the mighty uproar of a tempest. 
______________________
1 This might be freely translated: The dam damming Paris, sets Paris damning. 
2 Portions of these Roman baths still exist in the H?tel de Cluny. 
3 The recreation and fighting ground of the students, the present Faubourg Saint-Germain. 
4 Fidelity to the kings, though broken at times by revolts, procured the burghers many privileges. 
5 An order formed in the twelfth century, specially vowed to the rescuing of Christians out of slavery. 
6 The place of execution, furnished with immense gibbets, the site of an ancient Druidical temple. 
7 Pierre Mignard (1610–1695), the well-known French painter, a contemporary of Molière. 
8 From that period of the French Revolution when this bad imitation of the antique was much in vogue. 
BOOK IV
Chapter 1 - Charitable Souls
Sixteen years before the events here recorded took place, early on Quasimodo or Low-Sunday morning, a human creature had been deposited after Mass on the plank bed fastened to the pavement on the left of the entrance to Notre-Dame, opposite the “great image” of Saint Christopher, which the kneeling stone figure of Messire Antoine des Essarts, knight, had contemplated since 1413. Upon this bed it was customary to expose foundling children to the charity of the public; any one could take them away who chose. In front of the bed was a copper basin for the reception of alms. 
The specimen of humanity lying on this plank on the morning of Quasimodo-Sunday, in the year of our Lord 1467, seemed to invite, in a high degree, the curiosity of the very considerable crowd which had collected round it. This crowd was largely composed of members of the fair sex; in fact, there were hardly any but old women. 
In front of the row of spectators, stooping low over the bed, were four of them whom by their gray cagoules—a kind of hooded cassock—one recognised as belonging to some religious order. I see no reason why history should not hand down to posterity the names of these discreet and venerable dames. They were: Agnès la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la Gaultière, and Gauchère la Violette—all four widows, all four bedes-women of the Chapelle étienne-Haudry, who, with their superior’s permission, and conformably to the rules of Pierre d’Ailly, had come to hear the sermon. 
However, if these good sisters were observing for the moment the rules of Pierre d’Ailly, they were certainly violating to their heart’s content those of Michel de Brache and the Cardinal of Pisa, which so inhumanly imposed silence upon them. 
“What can that be, sister?” said Agnès la Gauchère as she gazed at the little foundling, screaming and wriggling on its wooden pallet, terrified by all these staring eyes. 
“What are we coming to,” said Jehanne, “if this is the kind of children they bring into the world now?” 
“I am no great judge of children,” resumed Agnès, “but it must surely be a sin to look at such a one as this.” 
“It’s not a child, Agnès.” 
“It’s a monkey spoiled,” observed Gauchère. 
“It’s a miracle,” said Henriette la Gaultière. 
“If so,” remarked Agnès, “it is the third since L?tare Sunday, for it is not a week since we had the miracle of the mocker of pilgrims suffering divine punishment at the hands of Our Lady of Aubervilliers, and that was already the second within the month.” 
“But this so-called foundling is a perfect monster of abomination,” said Jehanne. 
“He bawls loud enough to deafen a precentor,” continued Gauchère. “Hold your tongue, you little bellower!” 
“And to say that the Bishop of Reims sent this monstrosity to the Bishop of Paris!” exclaimed Gaultière, clasping her hands. 
“I expect,” said Agnès la Herme, “that it is really a beast of some sort, an animal—the offspring of a Jew and a sow; something, at any rate, that is not Christian, and that ought to be committed to the water or the fire.” 
“Surely,” went on La Gaultière, “nobody will have anything to do with it.” 
“Oh, mercy!” cried Agnès, “what if those poor nurses at the foundling-house at the bottom of the lane by the river, close beside the Lord Bishop’s—what if they take this little brute to them to be suckled! I would rather give suck to a vampire.” 
“What a simpleton she is, that poor La Herme!” returned Jehanne; “don’t you see, ma s?ur, that this little monster is at least four years old, and that a piece of meat would be more to his taste than your breast?” 
And in truth “the little monster” (for we ourselves would be at a loss to describe it by any other name) was not a newborn babe. It was a little angular, wriggling lump, tied up in a canvas sack marked with the monogram of Messire Guillaume Chartier, the then Bishop of Paris, with only its head sticking out at one end. But what a head! All that was visible was a thatch of red hair, an eye, a mouth, and some teeth. The eye wept, the mouth roared, and the teeth seemed only too ready to bite. The whole creature struggled violently in the sack, to the great wonderment of the crowd, constantly increasing and collecting afresh. 
The Lady Alo?se de Gondelaurier, a wealthy and noble dame, with a long veil trailing from the peak of her head-dress, and holding by the hand a pretty little girl of about six years of age, stopped in passing and looked for a moment at the hapless creature, while her charming little daughter, Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, all clad in silks and velvets, traced with her pretty finger on the permanent tablet attached to the bed the words: “Enfants trouvés.” 
“Good lack!” said the lady, turning away in disgust. “I thought they exposed here nothing but babes.” 
And she went on her way, first, however, tossing a silver florin into the basin among the coppers, causing the eyes of the poor sisters of the Chapelle étienne-Haudry to open wide with astonishment. 
A moment afterward the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, protonotary to the King, came along, with an enormous missal under one arm, and on the other his wife (Dame Guillemette la Mairesse), having thus at his side his two monitors —the spiritual and the temporal. 
“Foundling!” said he, after examining the object. “Found evidently on the brink of the river Phlegethon.” 
“You can see but one eye,” observed Dame Guillemette. “There is a wart over the other.” 
“That is no wart,” returned Ma?tre Robert Mistricolle. “That is an egg containing just such another demon, which has a similar little egg with another little devil inside it, and so on.” 
“How do you know that?” asked Dame Guillemette. 
“I know it for a fact,” replied the protonotary. 
“Monsieur the protonotary,” asked Gauchère, “what do you predict from this pretended foundling?” 
“The greatest calamities,” returned Mistricolle. 
“Ah, mon Dieu!” cried an old woman among the by-standers, “and there was already a considerable pestilence last year, and they say that the English are prepared to land in great companies at Harfleur.” 
“Maybe that will prevent the Queen coming to Paris in September,” remarked another, “and trade is bad enough as it is.” 
“It’s my opinion,” cried Jehanne de la Tarme, “that it would be better for the people of Paris if this little wizard were lying on a bundle of fagots instead of a bed.” 
“And nice blazing fagots too,” added the old woman. 
“It would be wiser,” said Mistricolle. 
For some moments past a young priest, stern of face, with a broad forehead and penetrating eye, had stood listening to the argument of the Haudriette sisters, and the pronouncements of the protonotary. He now silently parted the crowd, examined the “little wizard,” and stretched a hand over him. It was high time, for these pious old women were already licking their lips in anticipation of the “fine blazing fagots.” 
“I adopt this child,” said the priest. 
He wrapped it in his soutane and carried it off, the by-standers looking after him in speechless amazement. The next moment he had disappeared through the Porte Rouge, which led at that time from the church into the cloister. 
The first shock of surprise over, Jehanne de la Tarme bent down and whispered in the ear of La Gaultière: “Did I not say to you, ma s?ur, that that young cleric, M. Claude Frollo, was a sorcerer?” 
Chapter 2 - Claude Frollo
In truth, Claude Frollo was no ordinary person. 
He belonged to one of those families which it was the foolish fashion of the last century to describe indifferently as the upper middle class or lower aristocracy. 
The family had inherited from the brothers Paclet the fief of Tirechappe, which was held of the Bishop of Paris, and the twenty-one houses of which had, since the thirteenth century, been the object of countless litigations in the Ecclesiastical Court. As owner of this fief, Claude Frollo was one of the “seven times twenty-one” seigneurs claiming manorial dues in Paris and its suburbs; and in that capacity his name was long to be seen inscribed between the H?tel de Tancarville, belonging to Ma?tre Franc?ois le Rez, and the College of Tours, in the cartulary deposited at Saint-Martin des Champs. 
From his childhood Claude Frollo had been destined by his parents for the priesthood. He had been taught to read in Latin; he had early been trained to keep his eyes downcast, and to speak in subdued tones. While still quite a child his father had bound him to the monastic seclusion of the Collége de Torchi in the University, and there he had grown up over the missal and the lexicon. 
He was, however, by nature a melancholy, reserved, serious boy, studying with ardour and learning easily. He never shouted in the recreation hour; he mixed but little in the bacchanalia of the Rue du Fouarre; did not know what it was to dare alapas et capillos laniare,1 and had taken no part in that Students’ riot of 1463, which the chroniclers gravely record as “The Sixth Disturbance in the University.” It rarely happened that he jibed at the poor scholars of Montaigu for their “cappettes,” from which they derived their nickname, or the exhibitioners of the Collége de Dormans for their smooth tonsure and their tricoloured surcoats of dark blue, light blue and violet cloth—azurini coloris et bruni, as the charter of the Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes puts it. 
On the other hand, he was assiduous in his attendance at the higher and lower schools of the Rue Saint-Jean de Beauvais. The first scholar whom the Abbé de Saint-Pierre de Val caught sight of, established against a pillar in the école Saint-Vendregesile, exactly opposite to his desk when he began his lecture on Canon Law, was invariably Claude Frollo, armed with his inkhorn, chewing his pen, scribbling on his threadbare knees, or, in winter, blowing on his fingers. The first pupil Messire Miles d’Isliers, doctor of ecclesiastical law, saw arrive breathless every Monday morning as the door of the Chef-Saint-Denis schools opened, was Claude Frollo. Consequently, by the time he was sixteen, the young cleric was a match in mystical theology for a Father of the Church, and in scholastic theology for a Doctor of the Sorbonne. 
Having finished with theology, he threw himself into canonical law and the study of the decretals. 
From the Magister Sententiarum he had fallen upon the Capitularies of Charlemagne, and in his insatiable hunger for knowledge had devoured decretal after decretal: those of Theodore, Bishop of Hispalis, those of Bouchard, Bishop of Worms, those of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; then the decretal of Gratian, which came after Charlemagne’s Capitularies; then the collection of Gregory IX; then the epistle Super specula of Honorius III. He thoroughly investigated and made himself familiar with that vast and stormy period of bitter and protracted struggle between Civil and Ecclesiastical Law during the chaos of the Middle Ages, a period which Bishop Theodore began in 618, and Pope Gregory closed in 1227. 
The decretals assimilated, he turned his attention to medicine and the liberal arts; studied the science of herbs and of salves; became an expert in the treatment of fevers and contusions, of wounds and of abscesses. Jacques d’Espars would have passed him as physician; Richard Hellain, as surgeon. He ran through the degrees of Licentiate, Master, and Doctor of Arts; he studied languages: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew —a thrice inner sanctuary of learning seldom penetrated at that time. He was possessed by a veritable rage for acquiring and storing up knowledge. At eighteen, he had made his way through the four faculties. Life for this young man seemed to have but one aim and object—knowledge. 
It was just about this time that the excessive heat of the summer of 1466 caused the outbreak of that great pestilence which carried off more than forty thousand people in the jurisdiction of Paris, among others, says Jean de Troyes, “Ma?tre Arnoul, the King’s astrologer, a right honest man, both wise and merry withal.” The rumour spread through the University that the Rue Tirechappe had been specially devastated by the malady. It was here, in the middle of their fief, that Claude’s parents dwelt. Much alarmed, the young student hastened forthwith to his father’s house, only to find that both father and mother had died the previous day. An infant brother, in swaddling-clothes, was still alive and lay wailing and abandoned in the cradle. This was all that remained to Claude of his family. The young man took the child in his arms and went thoughtfully away. Hitherto he had lived only in the world of Learning; now he was to begin living in the world of Life. 
This catastrophe was a turning point in Claude Frollo’s existence. An orphan, an elder brother, and the head of his house at nineteen, he felt himself rudely recalled from the reveries of the school to the realities of the world. It was then that, moved with pity, he was seized with a passionate devotion for this infant brother. How strange and sweet a thing this human affection to him, who had never yet loved aught but books! 
This affection waxed strong to a singular degree; in a soul so new to passion, it was like a first love. Separated since his childhood from his parents whom he had scarcely known; cloistered and immured, as it were, in his books, eager before all things to study, to learn; attentive hitherto only to his intellect which expanded in science, to his imagination which grew with his literary studies, the poor scholar had not yet had time to feel that he had a heart. This young brother, without mother or father, this helpless babe, suddenly fallen from the skies into his arms, made a new man of him. He perceived for the first time that there were other things in the world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne and the verses of Homer; that Man has need of the affections; that life without tenderness and without love is a piece of heartless mechanism, insensate, noisy, wearisome. Only, he imagined, being as yet at the age when one illusion is replaced merely by another illusion, that the affections of blood and kindred were the only ones necessary, and the love for a little brother was sufficient to fill his whole existence. 
He threw himself, therefore, into the love of his little Jehan with all the passion of a character already profound, ardent, and concentrated. The thought of this poor, pretty, rosy, golden-haired creature, this orphan with another orphan for its sole support, moved him to the heart’s core, and like the earnest thinker that he was, he began to reflect upon Jehan with a sense of infinite compassion. He lavished all his solicitude upon him as upon something very fragile, very specially recommended to his care. He became more than a brother to the babe: he became a mother. 
Little Jehan having still been at the breast when he lost his mother, Claude put him out at nurse. Besides the fief of Tirechappe, he inherited from his father that of Moulin, which was held of the square tower of Gentilly. It was a mill standing upon rising ground, near the Castle of Winchestre, the present Bicêtre. The miller’s wife was suckling a fine boy at the time; the mill was not far from the University, and Claude carried his little Jehan to her himself. 
Thenceforward, feeling he had a heavy responsibility on his shoulders, he took life very seriously. The thought of his little brother not only became his recreation from study, but the chief object of those studies. He resolved to devote himself wholly to the future of that being for whom he was answerable before God, and never to have any other spouse, any other child than the happiness and welfare of his little brother. 
He bound himself, therefore, still more closely to his clerical vocation. His personal merits, his learning, his position as an immediate vassal of the Bishop of Paris, opened wide to him the doors of the Church. At twenty, by special dispensation from the Holy See, he was ordained priest, and as the youngest of the chaplains of Notre-Dame, performed the service at the altar called, from the late hour at which the mass was celebrated there, altare pigrorum—the sluggards’ altar. 
After this, and because he was more than ever immersed in his beloved books, which he only left to hasten for an hour to the mill, this union of wisdom and austerity, so rare at his age, had speedily gained him the respect and admiration of the cloister. From the cloister his fame for erudition had spread to the people, by whom, as frequently happened in those days, it had been converted in some sort into a reputation for necromancy. 
It was just as he was returning on Quasimodo-Sunday from celebrating mass for the sluggards at their altar—which was beside the door in the choir leading into the nave, on the right, near the image of the Virgin—that his attention had been arrested by the group of old women chattering round the foundling. 
He accordingly drew nearer to the poor little creature, the object of so much abhorrence and ill-will. The sight of its distress, its deformity, its abandonment, the remembrance of his young brother, the horror that suddenly assailed him at the thought that if he were to die his beloved little Jehan might thus be miserably exposed upon the selfsame bed—all this rushed into his mind at once, and, moved by an impulse of profound compassion, he had carried away the child. 
When he took the child out of the sack, he found it was indeed ill-favoured. The poor little wretch had a great wart over the left eye, its head was sunk between its shoulders, the spine arched, the breastbone protruding, the legs bowed. Yet he seemed lively enough; and although it was impossible to make out the language of his uncouth stammerings, his voice evidenced a fair degree of health and strength. Claude’s compassion was increased by this ugliness, and he vowed in his heart to bring up this child for love of his brother; so that, whatever in the future might be the faults of little Jehan, this good deed, performed in his stead, might be accounted to him for righteousness. It was a sort of investment in charity effected in his brother’s name, a stock of good works laid up for him in advance, on which the little rogue might fall back if some day he found himself short of that peculiar form of small change—the only kind accepted at the Gate of Heaven. 
He christened his adopted child by the name of Quasimodo, either to commemorate thereby the day on which he found him, or to indicate by that name how incomplete and indefinite of shape the unfortunate little creature was. And, in truth, one-eyed, humpbacked, bow-legged, poor Quasimodo could hardly be accounted more than “quasi” human. 
______________________
1 Deal out cuffs on the head and fight. 
Chapter 3 - Immanis Pecoris Custos, Immanior IPSE1
Now, by 1482, Quasimodo had come to man’s estate, and had been for several years bell-ringer at Notre-Dame, by the grace of his adopted father, Claude Frollo—who had become archdeacon of Josas, by the grace of his liege lord, Louis de Beaumont—who, on the death of Guillaume Chartier in 1472, had become Bishop of Paris, by the grace of his patron, Olivier le Daim, barber to Louis XI, King by the grace of God. 
Quasimodo then was bell-ringer of Notre-Dame. 
As time went on a certain indescribable bond of intimacy had formed between the bell-ringer and the church. Separated forever from the world by the double fatality of his unknown birth and his actual deformity, imprisoned since his childhood within those two impassable barriers, the unfortunate creature had grown accustomed to taking note of nothing outside the sacred walls which had afforded him a refuge within their shade. Notre-Dame had been to him, as he grew up, successively the egg, the nest, his home, his country, the universe. 
Certain it is that there was a sort of mysterious and pre-existent harmony between this being and this edifice. When, as a quite young child, he would drag himself about with many clumsy wrigglings and jerks in the gloom of its arches, he seemed, with his human face and beast-like limbs, the natural reptile of that dark and humid stone floor, on which the shadows of the Roman capitals fell in so many fantastic shapes. 
And later, the first time he clutched mechanically at the bell-rope in the tower, clung to it and set the bell in motion, the effect to Claude, his adopted father, was that of a child whose tongue is loosened and begins to talk. 
Thus, as his being unfolded itself gradually under the brooding spirit of the Cathedral; as he lived in it, slept in it, rarely went outside its walls, subject every moment to its mysterious influence, he came at last to resemble it, to blend with it and form an integral part of it. His salient angles fitted, so to speak, into the retreating angles of the edifice till he seemed not its inhabitant, but its natural tenant. He might almost be said to have taken on its shape, as the snail does that of its shell. It was his dwelling-place, his strong-hold, his husk. There existed between him and the ancient church so profound an instinctive sympathy, so many material affinities, that, in a way, he adhered to it as a tortoise to his shell. The hoary Cathedral was his carapace. 
Needless to say, the reader must not accept literally the similes we are forced to employ in order to express this singular union—symmetrical, direct, consubstantial almost—between a human being and an edifice. Nor is it necessary to describe how minutely familiar he had become with every part of the Cathedral during so long and so absolute an intimacy. This was his own peculiar dwelling-place—no depths in it to which Quasimodo had not penetrated, no heights which he had not scaled. Many a time had he crawled up the sheer face of it with no aid but that afforded by the uneven surface of the sculpture. The towers, over whose surface he might often be seen creeping like a lizard up a perpendicular wall—those two giants, so lofty, so grim, so dangerous—had for him no terrors, no threats of vertigo or falls from giddy heights; to see them so gentle between his hands, so easy to scale, you would have said that he had tamed them. By dint of leaping and climbing, of sportively swinging himself across the abysses of the gigantic Cathedral, he had become in some sort both monkey and chamois, or like the Calabrian child that swims before it can run, whose first play-fellow is the sea. 
Moreover, not only his body seemed to have fashioned itself after the Cathedral, but his mind also. In what condition was this soul of his? What impressions had it received, what form had it adopted behind that close-drawn veil, under the influence of that ungentle life, it would be hard to say. Quasimodo had been born halt, humpbacked, half-blind. With infinite troubled and unwearied patience Claude Frollo had succeeded in teaching him to speak. But a fatality seemed to pursue the poor foundling. When, at the age of fourteen, he became a bell-ringer at Notre-Dame, a fresh infirmity descended on him to complete his desolation: the bells had broken the drum of his ears and he became stone-deaf. The only door Nature had left for him wide open to the world was suddenly closed forever. 
And in closing it cut off the sole ray of joy and sunshine which still penetrated to the soul of Quasimodo, and plunged that soul into deepest night. The melancholy of the unhappy creature became chronic and complete like his physical deformity. Besides, his deafness rendered him in some sort dumb; for, to escape being laughed at, from the moment he found he could not hear, he firmly imposed upon himself a silence which he rarely broke except when he was alone. Of his own free-will, he tied that tongue which Claude Frollo had been at such pains to loosen. And hence it was that when necessity constrained him to speak, his tongue moved stiffly and awkwardly like a door on rusty hinges. 
Were we to endeavour to pierce through that thick, hard rind and penetrate to Quasimodo’s soul; could we sound the depths of that misshapen organization; were it given to us to flash a torch into that rayless gloom, to explore the dark-some interior of that opaque structure, illumine its dim windings, its fantastic culs-de-sac, and suddenly throw a bright light on the Psyche chained in the innermost recesses of that cavern, we should doubtless find the hapless creature withered, stunted like those prisoners who grew old in the dungeons of Venice, bent double within the narrow limits of a stone chest too low and too short to permit of their stretching themselves. 
It is certain that the spirit wastes in a misshapen body. Quasimodo scarcely felt within him the feeble stirrings of a soul made after his own image. His impression of objects suffered a considerable refraction before they reached his inner consciousness. His mind was a peculiar medium; the ideas that passed through it issued forth distorted. The reflection born of that refraction was necessarily divergent and crooked. 
Hence his thousand optical illusions, hence the thousand aberrations of his judgment, the thousand vagaries of his thoughts, sometimes mad, sometimes idiotic. 
The first effect of this fatal organization was to blur his view of things. He scarcely ever received a direct impression of them; the external world seemed to him much farther off than it does from us. 
The second effect of his misfortune was to render him malevolent. He was malevolent really because he was uncivilized, and he was uncivilized because he was ill-favoured. There was method in his nature as well as in ours. 
Also his physical strength, which was extraordinarily developed, was another cause of his malevolence—“Malus puer robustus,” 2 says Hobbes. 
However, to do him justice, this malevolence was probably not inborn in him. From his very first experience among men, he had felt, and later he had seen, himself reviled, scorned, spat upon. For him human speech had ever been either a jibe or a curse. As he grew up, he had met nothing but disgust and ill-will on every side. What wonder that he should have caught the disease, have contracted the prevailing malice. He armed himself with the weapons that had wounded him. 
But, after all, he turned his face unwillingly towards mankind. His Cathedral was sufficient for him. Was it not peopled with kings, saints, and bishops of marble who never mocked at him, but ever gazed at him with calm and benevolent eyes? And the other stone figures—the demons and monsters—they showed no hatred of Quasimodo—he looked too much akin to them for that. Rather they scoffed at other men. The saints were his friends and blessed him, the monsters were his friends and protected him. So he would commune long and earnestly with them, passing whole hours crouched in front of a statue, holding solitary converse with it. If any one happened upon him, he would fly like a lover surprised in a serenade. 
And the Cathedral not only represented society; it was his world, it was all Nature to him. He dreamed of no other gardens but the stained windows ever in flower, no shade but that cast by the stone foliage spreading full of birds from the tufted capitals of the Roman pillars, no mountains but the colossal towers of the Cathedral, no ocean but Paris roaring round their base. 
But what he loved best of all in that material edifice, that which awakened his soul and set the poor wings fluttering that lay so sadly folded when in that dreary dungeon, what brought him nearest to happiness, was the bells. He loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them. From the carillon in the transept steeple to the great bell over the central doorway, they all shared in his affection. The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most. 
True, theirs were the only voices he could still hear. For this reason the great bell was his best beloved. She was his chosen one among that family of boisterous sisters who gambolled round him in high-days and holidays. This great bell was called Marie. She was alone in the southern tower with her sister Jacqueline, a bell of smaller calibre, hanging in a cage beside hers. This Jacqueline had been christened after the wife of Jean Montagu, who had given it to the church—a donation which had not prevented him from figuring at Montfaucon without his head. In the northern tower were six other bells, and six smaller ones shared the transept belfry with the wooden bell, which was only rung from the afternoon of Maundy Thursday till the morning of Easter eve. Quasimodo had thus fifteen bells in his seraglio, but big Marie was the favourite. What words shall describe his delight on the days when the full peal was rung? The moment the Archdeacon gave the word, he was up the spiral stair-case of the steeple quicker than any one else would have come down. He entered breathless into the aerial chamber of the great bell, gazed at her for a moment with doting fondness, then spoke softly to her and patted her as you would a good steed before starting on a long journey; sympathizing with her in the heavy task that lay before her. These preliminary caresses over, he called out to his assistants, waiting ready in the lower floor of the tower, to begin. These hung themselves to the ropes, the windlass creaked, and the huge metal dome set itself slowly in motion. Quasimodo, quivering with excitement, followed it with his eye. The first stroke of the clapper against its brazen wall shook the wood-work on which he was standing. Quasimodo vibrated with the bell. “Vah!” he shouted with a burst of insane laughter. Meanwhile the motion of the bell quickened, and in the same measure as it took a wider sweep, so the eye of Quasimodo opened more and more and blazed with a phosphorescent light. 
At length the full peal began; the whole lower wood-work and blocks of stone trembled and groaned together from the piles of the foundation to the trefoils on its summit. Quasimodo, foaming at the mouth, ran to and fro, quivering with the tower from head to foot. The bell, now in full and furious swing, presented alternately to each wall of the tower its brazen maw, from which poured forth that tempestuous breath which could be heard four leagues distant. Quasimodo placed himself in front of this gaping throat, crouched down and rose again at each return of the bell, inhaled its furious breath, gazed in turn at the teeming square two hundred feet below and at the enormous brazen tongue which came at measured intervals to bellow in his ear. It was the only speech he understood, the only sound that broke for him the universal silence. He revelled in it like a bird in the sunshine. 
Then, at a certain point, the frenzy of the bell would catch him; his expression grew strange and weird; waiting for the bell on its passage as a spider watches for the fly, he would fling himself headlong upon it. Then, suspended over the abyss, borne to and fro by the tremendous rush of the bell, he seized the brazen monster by its ears, pressed it between his two knees, dug his heels into it, and increased by the shock and the whole weight of his body the fury of the peal, till the tower rocked again. Meanwhile Quasimodo, shouting and gnashing his teeth, his red hair bristling, his chest heaving like a blacksmith’s bellows, his eye darting flames, his monstrous steed neighing and panting under him—it was no longer the great bell of Notre-Dame or Quasimodo, it was a nightmare, a whirlwind, a tempest; Vertigo astride of Clamour; a spirit clinging to a flying saddle; a strange centaur, half man, half bell; a sort of horrible Astolpho carried off by a prodigious living hippogriff of bronze. 
The presence of this extraordinary being sent, as it were, a breath of life pulsing through the whole Cathedral. There seemed to emanate from him—at least so said the exaggerating populace—a mysterious influence which animated the stones of Notre-Dame and made the ancient church thrill to her deepest depths. To know that he was there was enough to make them believe they saw life and animation in the thousand statues of the galleries and portals. The old Cathedral did indeed seem docile and obedient to his hand; she awaited his command to lift up her sonorous voice; she was possessed and filled with Quasimodo as with a familiar spirit. You would have said that he made the immense building breathe. He was everywhere in it; he multiplied himself at every point of the structure. Now the terrified beholder would descry, on the topmost pinnacle of a tower, a fantastic, dwarfish figure climbing, twisting, crawling on all-fours, hanging over the abyss, leaping from projection to projection to thrust his arm down the throat of some sculptured gorgon: it was Quasimodo crow’s-nesting. Again, in some dim corner of the church one would stumble against a sort of living chimera crouching low, with sullen, furrowed brow: it was Quasimodo musing. Or again, in a steeple you caught sight of an enormous head and a bundle of confused limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope: it was Quasimodo ringing for vespers or angelus. Often at night a hideous form might be seen wandering along the delicate and lace-like parapet that crowns the towers and borders the roof of the chancel: again the hunchback of Notre-Dame. At such times, said the gossips, the whole church assumed a horrible, weird, and supernatural air; eyes and mouths opened here and there; the stone dogs, the dragons, all the monsters that keep watch and ward, day and night, with necks distended and open mouths, round the huge Cathedral, were heard barking and hissing. And if it happened to be a Christmas-night when the great bell seemed to rattle in its throat as it called the faithful to the midnight mass, there was such an indescribable air of life spread over the sombre fa?ade that the great doorway looked as if it were swallowing the entire crowd, and the rose-window staring at them. And all this proceeded from Quasimodo. Egypt would have declared him the god of this temple; the Middle Ages took him for its demon: he was its soul. 
So much so, that to any one who knows that Quasimodo really lived, Notre-Dame now appears deserted, inanimate, dead. One feels that something has gone out of it. This immense body is empty—a skeleton; the spirit has quitted it; one sees the place of its habitation, but that is all. It is like a skull—the holes are there for the eyes, but they are sightless. 
______________________
1 The guardian of a terrific beast, himself more terrible. 
2 The strong youth is wicked. 
Chapter 4 - The Dog and his Master
There was, however, one human being whom Quasimodo excepted from the malice and hatred he felt for the rest of mankind, and whom he loved as much, if not more, than his Cathedral: and that was Claude Frollo. 
The case was simple enough. Claude Frollo had rescued him, had adopted him, fed him, brought him up. When he was little, it was between Claude Frollo’s knees that he sought refuge from the children and the dogs that ran yelping after him. Claude Frollo had taught him to speak, to read, to write. Finally, it was Claude Frollo who made him bellringer of Notre-Dame; and to give the great bell in marriage to Quasimodo was giving Juliet to Romeo. 
And in return, Quasimodo’s gratitude was deep, passionate, and boundless; and although the countenance of his adopted father was often clouded and severe, although his speech was habitually brief, harsh, imperious, never for one single moment did that gratitude falter. In Quasimodo the Archdeacon possessed the most submissive of slaves, the most obedient of servants, the most vigilant of watch-dogs. When the poor bell-ringer became deaf, between him and Claude Frollo there had been established a mysterious language of signs, intelligible to them alone. In this way, then, the Archdeacon was the sole human being with whom Quasimodo had preserved a communication. There were but two things in this world with which he had any connection: Claude Frollo and the Cathedral. 
The empire of the Archdeacon over the bell-ringer, and the bell-ringer’s attachment to the Archdeacon, were absolutely unprecedented. A sign from Claude, or the idea that it would give him a moment’s pleasure, and Quasimodo would have cheerfully cast himself from the top of Notre-Dame. There was something remarkable in all that physical force, so extraordinarily developed in Quasimodo, being placed by him blindly at the disposal of another. In it there was doubtless much of filial devotion, of the attachment of the servant; but there was also the fascination exercised by one mind over another; it was a poor, feeble, awkward organism standing with bent head and supplicating eyes in the presence of a lofty, penetrating, and commanding intellect. Finally, and before all things, it was gratitude—gratitude pushed to such extreme limits that we should be at a loss for a comparison. That virtue is not one of those of which the brightest examples are to be found in man. Let us then say that Quasimodo loved the Archdeacon as never dog, never horse, never elephant loved his master. 
Chapter 5 - Further Particulars of Claude Frollo
In 1482 Quasimodo was about twenty, Claude Frollo about thirty-six. The one had grown up, the other had grown old. 
Claude Frollo was no longer the simple-minded scholar of the Torchi College, the tender guardian of a little child, the young and dreamy philosopher, who knew many things, but was ignorant of more. He was a priest—austere, grave, morose—having a cure of souls; Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas; second acolyte to the Bishop; having the charge of the two deaneries of Montlhéry and Chateaufort, and of a hundred and seventy-four rural clergy. He was an imposing and sombre personage, before whom the chorister boys in alb and tunic, the brethren of Saint-Augustine, and the clerics on early morning duty at Notre-Dame, quailed and trembled, when he passed slowly under the high Gothic arches of the choir—stately, deep in thought, with folded arms, and his head bent so low upon his breast that nothing was visible of his face but his high bald forehead. 
Dom1 Claude Frollo, however, had abandoned neither science nor the education of his young brother—the two occupations of his life. But in the course of time some bitterness had mingled with these things he once had thought so sweet. With time, says Paul Diacre, even the best bacon turns rancid. Little Jehan Frollo, surnamed “of the Mill” from the place where he had been nursed, had not grown in the direction in which Claude would have wished to train him. The elder brother had counted on a pious pupil, docile, studious, and honourable. But the younger brother, like those young trees which baffle the efforts of the gardener, and turn obstinately towards that side from which they derive most air and sunshine—the younger brother increased and waxed great, and sent forth full and luxuriant branches only on the side of idleness, ignorance, and loose living. He was an unruly little devil, which made Dom Claude knit his brows, but also very droll and very cunning, at which the elder was fain to smile. Claude had consigned him to that same Collége de Torchi in which he himself had passed his earliest years in study and seclusion; and it grieved him sorely that this retreat, once edified by the name of Frollo, should be so scandalized by it now. He would sometimes read Jehan long and stern lectures on the subject, under which the latter bore up courageously—after all, the young rascal’s heart was in the right place, as all the comedies declare; but the sermon over, he calmly resumed the evil tenor of his ways. Sometimes it was a béjaune, or yellow-beak, as they called the new-comers at the University—whom he had thoroughly badgered as a welcome—a valuable custom which has been carefully handed down to our day; now he had been the moving spirit of a band of scholars who had thrown themselves in classical fashion on a tavern, quasi classico excitati, then beaten the tavern-keeper “with cudgels of offensive character,” and joyously pillaged the tavern, even to staving in the hogsheads of wine. And the result was a fine report drawn up in Latin, brought by the sub-monitor of the Torchi College to Dom Claude, with piteous mien, the which bore the melancholy marginal remark, Rixa; prima causa vinum optimum potatum.2 Finally, it was said—horrible in a lad of sixteen—that his backslidings frequently extended to the Rue de Glatigny.3 
In consequence of all this, Claude—saddened, his faith in human affection shaken—threw himself with frenzied ardour into the arms of science, that sister who at least never laughs at you in derision, and who always repays you, albeit at times in somewhat light coin, for the care you have lavished on her. He became, therefore, more and more erudite, and, as a natural consequence, more and more rigid as a priest, less and less cheerful as a man. In each of us there are certain parallels between our mind, our manners, and our characters which develop in unbroken continuity, and are only shaken by the great cataclysms of life. 
Claude Frollo, having in his youth gone over the entire circle of human knowledge, positive, external, and lawful, was under the absolute necessity, unless he was to stop ubi defuit orbis,4 of going farther afield in search of food for the insatiable appetite of his mind. The ancient symbol of the serpent biting its tail is especially appropriate to learning, as Claude Frollo had evidently proved. Many trustworthy persons asserted that, after having exhausted the fas of human knowledge, he had the temerity to penetrate into the nefas, had tasted in succession all the apples of the Tree of Knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had finished by eating of the forbidden fruit. He had taken his seat by turns, as the reader has seen, at the conferences of the theologians at the Sorbonne, at the disputations of the decretalists near the image of Saint-Martin, at the meetings of the Faculty of Arts near the image of Saint-Hilary, at the confabulations of the physicians near the benitier of Notre-Dame, ad cupam Nostr?-Domin?; all the viands, permitted and approved, which those four great kitchens, called the four Faculties, could prepare and set before the intelligence, he had devoured, and satiety had come upon him before his hunger was appeased. Then he had penetrated farther afield, had dug deeper, underneath all that finite, material, limited knowledge; he had risked his soul, and had seated himself at that mystic table of the Alchemists, the Astrologers, the Hermetics of which Averro?s, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicolas Flamel occupy one end in the Middle Ages, and which reaches back in the East, under the rays of the seven-branched candlestick, to Solomon, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster. 
So, at least, it was supposed, whether rightly or not. 
It is certainly true that the Archdeacon frequently visited the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, where, to be sure, his mother and father lay buried with the other victims of the plague of 1466; but he seemed much less devoutly interested in the cross on their grave than in the strange figures covering the tombs of Nicolas Flamel and Claude Pernelle close by. 
It is certainly true that he had often been seen stealing down the Rue des Lombards and slipping furtively into a little house which formed the corner of the Rue des Ecrivains and the Rue Marivault. This was the house which Nicolas Flamel had built, in which he died about 1417, and which, uninhabited ever since, was beginning to fall into decay, so much had the Hermetics and Alchemists from all the ends of the world worn away its walls by merely engraving their names upon them. Some of the neighbours even declared how, through a hole in the wall, they had seen the Archdeacon digging and turning over the earth in those two cellars, of which the door-jambs had been scrawled over with innumerable verses and hieroglyphics by Nicolas Flamel himself. It was supposed that Flamel had buried here the philosopher’s stone; and for two centuries the Alchemists, from Magistri to Père Pacifique, never ceased to burrow in that ground, till at last the house, so cruelly ransacked and undermined, crumbled into dust under their feet. 
Again, it is true that the Archdeacon was seized with a remarkable passion for the symbolical portal of Notre-Dame, that page of incantation written in stone by Bishop Guillaume of Paris, who is without doubt among the damned for having attached so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred poem eternally chanted by the rest of the edifice. The Archdeacon Claude was also credited with having solved the mystery of the colossal Saint-Christopher, and of that tall, enigmatical statue which stood then at the entrance of the Parvis of the Cathedral, and derisively styled by the people Monsieur le Gris—old curmudgeon. But what nobody could fail to observe, were the interminable hours he would sometimes spend, seated on the parapet of the Parvis, lost in contemplation of the statues; now looking fixedly at the Foolish Virgins with their overturned lamps, now at the Wise Virgins with their lamps upright; at other times calculating the angle of vision of that raven perched on the left side of the central door and peering at a mysterious point inside the church, where most certainly the philosopher’s stone is hidden, if it is not in Nicolas Flamel’s cellar. 
It was a singular destiny, we may remark in passing, for the Cathedral of Notre-Dame to be thus beloved in different degrees and with so much devotion by two creatures so utterly dissimilar as Claude Frollo and Quasimodo; loved by the one —rudimentary, instinctive, savage—for its beauty, its lofty stature, the harmonies that flowed from its magnificent ensemble; loved by the other—a being of cultured and perfervid imagination—for its significance, its mystical meaning, the symbolic language lurking under the sculptures of its fa?ade, like the first manuscript under the second in a palimpsest—in a word, for the enigma it eternally propounded to the intelligence. 
Furthermore, it is certain that in one of the towers which overlooks the Grève, close by the cage of the bells, the Archdeacon had fitted up for himself a little cell of great secrecy, into which no one ever entered—not even the Bishop, without his leave. This cell had been constructed long ago, almost at the summit of the tower among the crows’ nests, by Bishop Hugh of Besan?on,5 who had played the necromancer there in his time. What this cell contained nobody knew; but on many a night from the shore of the terrain, from which a little round window at the back of the tower was visible, an unaccountable, intermittent red glow might be seen, coming and going at regular intervals, as if in response to the blowing of a pair of bellows, and as if it proceeded rather from a flame than a light. In the darkness, and at that height, the effect was very singular, and the old wives would say, “There’s the Archdeacon blowing his bellows again! Hell-fire is blazing up there!” 
After all, these were no great proofs of sorcery; but still there was sufficient smoke to warrant the supposition of flame, and the Archdeacon therefore stood in decidedly bad odour. And yet we are bound to say that the occult sciences, that necromancy, magic—even of the whitest and most innocent—had no more virulent foe, no more merciless denouncer before the Holy Office of Notre-Dame than himself. Whether this abhorrence was sincere, or merely the trick of the pickpocket who cries “Stop thief!” it did not prevent the learned heads of the Chapter regarding him as a soul adventuring into the very fore-court of hell, lost among the holes and underground workings of the Cabala, groping in the baleful gloom of occult science. The people, of course, were not to be hood-winked for a moment—any one with a grain of sense could see that Quasimodo was a demon, and Claude Frollo a sorcerer; and it was patent that the bell-ringer was bound to the Archdeacon for a certain time, after which he would carry off his master’s soul in guise of payment. Consequently, in spite of the excessive austerity of his life, the Archdeacon was in bad repute with all pious people, and there was no devout nose, however inexperienced, that did not smell out the wizard in him. 
Yet, if with advancing years deep fissures had opened in his mind, in his heart they were no less deep. So, at least, they had reason to think who narrowly scanned that face in which the soul shone forth as through a murky cloud. Else why that bald and furrowed brow, that constantly bowed head, those sighs that forever rent his breast? What secret thought sent that bitter smile to his lips at the selfsame moment that his frowning brows approached each other like two bulls about to fight? Why were his remaining hairs already gray? Whence came that inward fire that blazed at times in his eyes, till they looked like holes pierced in the wall of a furnace? 
These symptoms of violent moral preoccupation had developed to an extraordinary degree of intensity at the period of our narrative. More than once had a chorister boy fled in terror when coming upon him suddenly in the Cathedral, so strange and piercing was his gaze. More than once, at the hour of service, had the occupant of the next stall in the choir heard him interspersing the plain song, ad omnem tonum, with unintelligible parentheses. More than once had the laundress of the terrain, whose duty it was to “wash the Chapter,” noticed with alarm the marks of finger-nails and clinched hands in the surplice of Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas. 
However, he grew doubly austere, and his life had never been more exemplary. By inclination, as well as by calling, he had always kept severely aloof from women; now he seemed to hate them more virulently than ever. The mere rustle of a silken kirtle was sufficient to make him bring his cowl down over his eyes. So jealous were his reserve and his austerity on this point, that when the King’s daughter, the Lady of Beaujeu, came in December, 1481, to visit the cloister of Notre-Dame, he earnestly opposed her admittance, reminding the Bishop of the statute in the Black Book, dated Saint-Bartholomew’s Eve, 1334, forbidding access to the cloister to every woman whatsoever, “young or old, mistress or serving-maid.” Upon which the Bishop had been constrained to quote the ordinance of the legate Odo, which makes exception in favour of “certain ladies of high degree, who might not be turned away without offence”—“aliqu? magnates mulieres, qu? sine scandale vitari non possunt.” But the Archdeacon persisted in his protest, objecting that the legate’s ordinance, dating from as far back as 1207, was anterior to the Black Book by a hundred and twenty-seven years, and thus practically abrogated by it, and he refused to appear before the princess. 
It was, moreover, noticed that, for some time past, his horror of gipsy-women and all Zingari in general had remarkably increased. He had solicited from the Bishop an edict expressly forbidding gipsies to dance or play the tambourine within the Parvis of the Cathedral; and simultaneously he was rummaging among the musty archives of the Holy Office, in order to collect all the cases of necromancers and sorcerers condemned to the flames or the halter for complicity in witchcraft with sows, he, or she-goats. 
______________________
1 Title attaching to a certain class of the priesthood, equivalent to “The Reverend.” 
2 A brawl, the immediate result of too liberal potations. 
3 A street of ill-fame. 
4 Where the world comes to an end. 
5 Hugo II de Bisuncio, 1326-1332.—Author’s Note. 
Chapter 6 - Unpopularity
The Archdeacon and the bell-ringer found, as we have said before, but little favour with the people, great or small, in the purlieus of the Cathedral. If Claude and Quasimodo went abroad, as occasionally happened, and they were seen in company—the servant following his master—traversing the chilly, narrow, and gloomy streets in the vicinity of Notre-Dame, many an abusive word, many a mocking laugh or opprobrious gibe would harass them on their passage unless Claude Frollo—though this was rare—walked with head erect and haughty bearing, offering a stern and well-nigh imperial front to the startled gaze of his assailants. 
The couple shared in the neighbourhood the fate of those poets of whom Régnier says: 
“Toutes sortes de gens vont après les poètes,
Comme après les hiboux vont criant les fauvettes.”1
Now some ill-conditioned monkey would risk his skin and bones for the ineffable pleasure of sticking a pin in Quasimodo’s hump, or some pretty wench, with more freedom and impudence than was seemly, would brush the priest’s black robe, thrusting her face into his, while she sang the naughty song beginning: 
“Niche, niche, le diable est pris!”2
Anon, a group of squalid old women, crouching in the shade on the steps of a porch, would abuse the Archdeacon and the bell-ringer roundly as they passed, or hurl after them with curses the flattering remark: “There goes one whose soul is like the other one’s body!” Or, another time, it would be a band of scholars playing at marbles or hopscotch who would rise in a body and salute them in classical manner, with some Latin greeting such as “Eia! Eia! Claudius cum claudo!”3 
But, as a rule, these amenities passed unheeded by either the priest or the bell-ringer. Quasimodo was too deaf, and Claude too immersed in thought to hear them. 
______________________
1 
All sorts of people run after the poets,
As after the owls fly screaming the linnets.
2 Hide, hide, the devil is caught! 
3 Ho! ho! Claude with the cripple! 
BOOK V
Chapter 1 - The Abbot of Saint-Martin’s
The fame of Dom Claude Frollo had spread abroad. To it, just about the time of his refusal to encounter the Lady of Beaujeu, he owed a visit which remained long in his memory. 
It happened one evening. Claude had just retired after the evening office to his canonical cell in the cloister of Notre-Dame. Beyond a few glass phials pushed away into a corner and containing some powder which looked suspiciously like an explosive, the cell had nothing noteworthy or mysterious about it. Here and there were some inscriptions on the walls, but they consisted purely of learned axioms or pious extracts from worthy authors. The Archdeacon had just seated himself at a huge oak chest covered with manuscripts, and lighted by a three-armed brass lamp. He leaned his elbow on an open tome: Honorius of Autun’s De pr?destinatione et libero arbitrio, 2 while he musingly turned over the leaves of a printed folio he had just brought over, the sole production of the printing-press which stood in his cell. His reverie was broken by a knock at the door. 
“Who’s there?” called the scholar in the friendly tone of a famished dog disturbed over a bone. 
“A friend—Jacques Coictier,” answered a voice outside. 
He rose and opened the door. 
It was, in fact, the King’s physician, a man of some fifty years, the hardness of whose expression was somewhat mitigated by a look of great cunning. He was accompanied by another man. Both wore long, slate-gray, squirrel-lined robes, fastened from top to bottom and belted round the middle, and caps of the same stuff and colour. Their hands disappeared in their sleeves, their feet under their robes, and their eyes under their caps. 
“God save me, messire!” said the Archdeacon, as he admitted them; “I was far from expecting so flattering a visit at this late hour.” And while he spoke thus courteously, he glanced suspiciously and shrewdly from the physician to his companion. 
“It is never too late to pay a visit to so eminent a scholar as Dom Claude Frollo of Tirechappe,” replied Doctor Coictier, whose Burgundian accent let his sentences trail along with all the majestic effect of a long-trained robe. 
The physician and the Archdeacon then embarked upon one of those congratulatory prologues with which, at that period, it was customary to usher in every conversation between scholars, which did not prevent them most cordially detesting one another. For the rest, it is just the same to-day; the mouth of every scholar who compliments another is a vessel full of honeyed gall. 
The felicitations addressed by Claude to Jacques Coictier alluded chiefly to the numerous material advantages the worthy physician had succeeded in extracting, in the course of his much-envied career, from each illness of the King—a surer and more profitable kind of alchemy than the pursuit of the philosopher’s stone. 
“Truly, Doctor Coictier, I was greatly rejoiced to learn of the promotion of your nephew, my reverend Superior, Pierre Versé, to a bishopric. He is made Bishop of Amiens, is he not?” 
“Yes, Monsieur the Archdeacon, it is a gracious and merciful gift of the Lord.” 
“Let me tell you you made a brave show on Christmas-day at the head of your company of the Chamber of Accountants, Monsieur the President.” 
“Vice-President, Dom Claude. Alas! nothing more.” 
“How fares it with your superb mansion in the Rue Saint-Andry des Arcs? It is in very truth a Louvre! And I am much taken by the apricot-tree sculptured on the door, with the pleasant play of words inscribed beneath it, ’A L’Abri-Cotier.”’ 
“Well, well, Ma?tre Claude, all this masons’ work costs me dearly. In the same measure as my house rises higher, my funds sink lower.” 
“Oho! Have you not your revenues from the jail, and the provostship of the Palais de Justice, and the rents from all the houses, workshops, booths, and market-stalls within the circuit of Paris? That is surely an excellent milch cow.” 
“My castellany of Poissy has not brought me in a sou this year.” 
“But your toll dues at Triel, Saint-James, and Saint-Germain-en-Laye—they are always profitable?” 
“Six times twenty livres only, and not even Paris money at that.” 
“But you have your appointment as Councillor to the King—that means a fixed salary surely?” 
“Yes, Colleague Claude, but that cursed Manor of Poligny, they make such a coil about, is not worth more to me than sixty gold crowns—taking one year with another.” 
The compliments which Dom Claude thus addressed to Jacques Coictier were uttered in that tone of veiled, bitter, sardonic raillery, with that grievous, yet cruel, smile of a superior and unfortunate man, who seeks a moment’s distraction in playing on the gross vanity of the vulgarly prosperous man. The other was quite unconscious of it. 
“By my soul!” said Claude at last, pressing his hand, “I rejoice to see you in such excellent health.” 
“Thank you, Ma?tre Claude.” 
“Speaking of health,” cried Dom Claude, “how is your royal patient?” 
“He does not pay his doctor sufficiently well,” said the physician with a side glance at his companion. 
“Do you really think that, friend Coictier?” said the stranger. 
These words, uttered in a tone of surprise and reproach, recalled the Archdeacon’s attention to the stranger’s presence, though, to tell the truth, he had never, from the moment he crossed the threshold, quite turned away from this unknown guest. Indeed, it required the thousand reasons Claude had for humouring the all-powerful physician of Louis XI to make him consent to receive him thus accompanied. Therefore, his expression was none of the friendliest when Jacques Coictier said to him: 
“By-the-bye, Dom Claude, I have brought a colleague, who was most desirous of seeing one of whom he has heard so much.” 
“Monsieur is a scholar?” asked the Archdeacon, fixing Coictier’s companion with a penetrating eye. But from under the brows of the stranger he met a glance not less keen or less suspicious than his own. 
He was, so far as one could judge by the feeble rays of the lamp, a man of about sixty, of middle height, and apparently ailing and broken. His face, although the features were sufficiently commonplace, had something commanding and severe; his eye glittered under the deep arch of his brow like a beacon-light far down a cavern; and under the cap, pulled down almost to his nose, one divined instinctively the broad forehead of a genius. 
He took upon himself to answer the archdeacon’s inquiry. 
“Reverend sir,” said he in grave tones, “your fame has reached me, and I was desirous of consulting you. I am but a poor gentleman from the provinces who takes the shoes off his feet before entering the presence of the learned. I must acquaint you with my name: they call me Compère2 Tourangeau.” 
“Singular name for a gentleman,” thought the Archdeacon. Nevertheless, he felt himself in the presence of something powerful and commanding. The instinct of his high intelligence led him to suspect one no less high beneath the fur-trimmed cap of Compère Tourangeau; and as he scrutinized that quiet figure, the sneering smile that twitched round the corners of his morose mouth as he talked to Coictier faded slowly away, like the sunset glow from an evening sky. 
He had seated himself again, gloomy and silent, in his great arm-chair, his elbow had resumed its accustomed place on the table, his head leaning on his hand. 
After a few moments of deep reflection, he signed to his two visitors to be seated, and then addressed himself to Compère Tourangeau. 
“You came to consult me, sir, and on what subject?” 
“Your Reverence,” answered Tourangeau, “I am sick, very sick. Rumour says you are a great ?sculapius, and I am come to ask your advice as to a remedy.” 
“A remedy!” exclaimed the Archdeacon, shaking his head. He seemed to consider for a moment, and then resumed: “Compère Tourangeau—since that is your name—turn your head. You will find my answer written on the wall.” 
Tourangeau did as he was bid, and read the following inscription on the wall, above his head: “Medicine is the daughter of dreams.—Iamblichus.” 
Doctor Jacques Coictier had listened to his companion’s question with a vexation which Dom Claude’s answer only served to increase. He now leaned over to Tourangeau and whispered, too low for the Archdeacon’s ear: “Did I not warn you that he was a crack-brained fool? You were set upon seeing him.” 
“But it might very well be that he is right in his opinion, this madman, Doctor Jacques,” returned his friend in the same tone, and with a bitter smile. 
“Just as you please,” answered Coictier dryly. “You are very quick in your decision, Dom Claude, and Hippocrates apparently presents no more difficulties to you than a nut to a monkey. Medicine a dream! I doubt if the apothecaries and doctors, were they here, could refrain from stoning you. So you deny the influence of philters on the blood, of unguents on the flesh? You deny the existence of that eternal pharmacy of flowers and metals which we call the World, created expressly for the benefit of that eternal invalid we call Man!” 
“I deny the existence,” answered Dom Claude coldly, “neither of the pharmacy nor the invalid. I deny that of the physician.” 
“Then, I presume it is not true,” Coictier went on with rising heat, “that gout is an internal eruption; that a shot-wound may be healed by the outward application of a roasted mouse; that young blood, injected in suitable quantities, will restore youth to aged veins; it is not true that two and two make four, and that emprosthotonos follows upon opisthotonos?” 
“There are certain matters about which I think in a certain way,” the Archdeacon replied unmoved. 
Coictier flushed an angry red. 
“Come, come, my good Coictier, do not let us get angry,” said Compère Tourangeau, “the reverend Archdeacon is our host.” 
Coictier calmed down, but growled to himself: “He’s a madman, for all that.” 
“Pasque Dieu!” resumed Tourangeau, after a short silence; “you put me in a very embarrassing position, Ma?tre Claude. I looked to obtaining two opinions from you, one as to my health, the other as to my star.” 
“Monsieur,” returned the Archdeacon, “if that is your idea, you would have done better not to waste your health in mounting my stairs. I do not believe in medicine, and I do not believe in astrology.” 
“Is that so?” exclaimed the good man in surprise. 
Coictier burst into a forced laugh. 
“You must admit now that he’s mad,” he said in low tones to Tourangeau; “he does not believe in astrology.” 
“How can any one possibly believe,” continued Dom Claude, “that every ray of a star is a thread attached to a man’s head?” 
“And what do you believe in then?” cried Tourangeau. 
The Archdeacon hesitated for a moment, then, with a sombre smile which seemed to give the lie to his words, he answered, “Credo in Deum.” 
“Dominum nostrum,” added Tourangeau, making the sign of the cross. 
“Amen,” said Coictier. 
“Reverend sir,” resumed Tourangeau, “I am charmed to my soul to find you so firm in the faith. But, erudite scholar that you are, have you reached the point of no longer believing in science?” 
“No!” cried the Archdeacon, grasping Tourangeau’s arm, while a gleam of enthusiasm flashed in his sunken eye; “no, I do not deny science. I have not crawled so long on my belly with my nails dug in the earth through all the innumerable windings of that dark mine, without perceiving in the far distance—at the end of the dim passage—a light, a flame, a something; the reflection, no doubt, from that dazzling central laboratory in which the patient and the wise have come upon God.” 
“And finally,” interrupted Tourangeau, “what do you hold for true and certain?” 
“Alchemy!” 
Coictier exclaimed aloud, “Pardieu, Dom Claude, there is doubtless much truth in alchemy, but why blaspheme against medicine and astrology?” 
“Null is your science of man, your science of the heavens null,” said the Archdeacon imperiously. 
“But that’s dealing hardly with Epidaurus and Chaldea,” returned the physician with a sneering laugh. 
“Listen, Messire Jacques. I speak in all good faith. I am not physician to the King, and his Majesty did not give me a Labyrinth in which to observe the constellations. Nay, be not angry, but listen to what I say: what truths have you extracted from the study—I will not say of medicine, which is too foolish a matte—but from astrology? Explain to me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon,3 or the treasures contained in the numeral ziruph, and in those of the numeral zephirod.” 
“Will you deny,” said Coictier, “the sympathetic influence of the clavicula, and that it is the key to all cabalistic science?” 
“Errors, Messire Jacques! None of your formulas have anything definite to show, whereas alchemy has its actual discoveries. Can you contest such results as these, for instance—ice, buried underground for two thousand years, is converted into rock crystal; lead is the progenitor of all metals (for gold is not a metal, gold is light); lead requires but four periods of two hundred years each to pass successively from the condition of lead to that of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to silver. Are these facts, or are they not? But to believe in the clavicula, in the mystic significance of the junction of two lines, in the stars, is as ridiculous as to believe, like the inhabitants of Cathay, that the oriole changes into a mole, and grains of wheat into carp-like fish.” 
“I have studied hermetics,” cried Coictier, “and I affirm—” 
The impetuous Archdeacon would not let him finish. “And I—I have studied medicine, astrology, and hermetics. Here alone is truth” (and as he spoke he took up one of those phials of glass of which mention has been made), “here alone is light! Hippocrates—a dream; Urania—a dream; Hermes—a phantasm. Gold is the sun; to make gold is to be God. There is the one and only science. I have sounded medicine and astrology to their depths—null, I tell you—null and void! The human body—darkness! the stars—darkness!” 
He sank into his chair with a compelling and inspired gesture. Tourangeau observed him in silence; Coictier forced a disdainful laugh, shrugging his shoulders imperceptibly while he repeated under his breath, “Madman.” 
“Well,” said Tourangeau suddenly, “and the transcendental result—have you achieved it? Have you succeeded in making gold?” 
“If I had,” answered the Archdeacon, dropping his words slowly like a man in a reverie, “the name of the King of France would be Claude and not Louis.” 
Tourangeau bent his brow. 
“Pah, what am I saying?” resumed Dom Claude with a disdainful smile. “What would the throne of France be to me when I could reconstruct the Empire of the East?” 
“Well done!” exclaimed Tourangeau. 
“Poor ass!” murmured Coictier. 
“No,” the Archdeacon went on, as if in answer to his own thoughts, “I am still crawling, still bruising my face and my knees against the stones of the subterranean path. Fitful glimpses I catch, but nothing clear. I cannot read—I am but conning the alphabet.” 
“And when you have learned to read, will you be able to make gold?” 
“Who doubts it?” answered the Archdeacon. 
“In that case—Our Lady knows I am in dire need of money—I would gladly learn to read in your books. Tell me, reverend master, is not your science inimical and displeasing to Our Lady, think you?” 
To this question of Tourangeau’s Dom Claude contented himself by making answer with quiet dignity, “Whose priest am I?” 
“True, true, master. Well, then, will it please you to initiate me? Let me learn to spell with you?” 
Claude assumed the majestic and saceidotal attitude of a Samuel. 
“Old man, it would require more years than yet remain to you to undertake this journey across the world of mystery. Your head is very gray! One emerges from the cave with white hair, but one must enter it with black. Science knows very well how to furrow and wither up the face of man without assistance; she has no need that age should bring to her faces that are already wrinkled. Nevertheless, if you are possessed by the desire to put yourself under tutelage at your age, and to decipher the awful alphabet of Wisdom, well and good, come to me, I will do what I can. I will not bid you, poor graybeard, go visit the sepulchral chambers of the Pyramids, of which the ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower of Babylon, nor the vast marble sanctuary of the Indian Temple of Eklinga. I have not seen, any more than you have, the Chaldean walls built in accordance with the sacred formula of Sikra, nor the Temple of Solomon which was destroyed, nor the stone doors of the sepulchres of the Kings of Israel which are broken in pieces. Such fragments of the Book of Hermes as we have here will suffice us. I will explain to you the statue of Saint-Christopher, the symbol of the Sower, and that of the two angels in the door of the Sainte-Chapelle, of whom one has his hand in a stone vessel, and the other in a cloud.” 
Here Jacques Coictier, who had been quite confounded by the Archdeacon’s tempestuous flow of eloquence, recovered his composure and struck in with the triumphant tone of one scholar setting another right: 
“Erras, amice Claudi—there you are in error. The symbol is not the numeral. You mistake Orpheus for Hermes.” 
“It is you who are in error,” returned the Archdeacon with dignity; “D?dalus is the foundation; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the edifice—the whole structure. Come whenever it please you,” he continued, turning to Tourangeau. “I will show you the particles of gold left in the bottom of Nicolas Flamel’s crucible which you can compare with the gold of Guillaume de Paris. I will instruct you in the secret virtues of the Greek word peristera. But before all things, you shall read, one after another, the letters of the marble alphabet, the pages of the granite book. We will go from the doorway of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond to the Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house of Nicolas Flamel in the Rue Marivault, to his tomb in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, to his two hospices in the Rue de Montmorency. You shall read the hieroglyphics with which the four great iron bars in the porch of the Hospice of Saint-Gervais are covered. Together we will spell out the fa?ades of Saint-C?me, of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents, Saint-Martin, Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie—” 
For some time past, Tourangeau, with all his intelligence, appeared unable to follow Dom Claude. He broke in now: 
“Pasque Dieu! but what are these books of yours?” 
“Here is one,” replied the Archdeacon; and opening the window of his cell, he pointed to the mighty Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the black silhouette of its two towers, its stone sides, and its huge roof sharply outlined against the starry sky, and looking like an enormous two-headed sphinx crouching in the midst of the city. 
For some moments the Archdeacon contemplated the gigantic edifice in silence; then, sighing deeply, he pointed with his right hand to the printed book lying open on his table, and with his left to Notre-Dame, and casting a mournful glance from the book to the church: 
“Alas!” he said. “This will destroy that.” 
Coictier, who had bent eagerly over the book, could not repress an exclamation of disappointment. “Hé! but what is there so alarming in this? Glossa in Epistolas Pauli. Norimberg?, Antonius Koburger 1474. That is not new. It is a book of Petrus Lombardus, the Magister Sententiarum. Do you mean because it is printed?” 
“You have said it,” returned Claude, who stood apparently absorbed in profound meditation, with his finger on the folio which had issued from the famous printing-press of Nuremberg. Presently he uttered these dark words: “Woe! woe! the small brings down the great; a tooth triumphs over a whole mass! The Nile rat destroys the crocodile, the sword-fish destroys the whale, the book will destroy the edifice!” 
The curfew of the cloister rang at this moment as Doctor Jacques whispered to his companion his everlasting refrain of “He is mad!” To which the companion replied this time, “I believe he is.” 
It was the hour after which no stranger might remain in the cloister. The two visitors prepared to retire. 
“Ma?tre,” said Compère Tourangeau, as he took leave of the Archdeacon, “I have a great regard for scholars and great spirits, and I hold you in peculiar esteem. Come tomorrow to the Palais des Tournelles, and ask for the Abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours.” 
The Archdeacon returned to his cell dumfounded, comprehending at last who the personage calling himself Compère Tourangeau really was: for he called to mind this passage in the Charter of Saint-Martin of Tours: Abbas, beati Martini, scilicet Rex Franci?, est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam pr?bendam quam habet sanctus Venantius, et debet sedere in sede thesaurii.4 
It is asserted that from that time onward the Archdeacon conferred frequently with Louis XI, whenever his Majesty came to Paris, and that the King’s regard for Dom Claude put Olivier le Daim and Jacques Coictier quite in the shade, the latter of whom, as was his custom, rated the King soundly in consequence. 
______________________
1 Of Predestination and Free-Will. 
2 Goodman, gossip. 
3 Writing from right to left and back again from left to right without breaking off the lines. 
4 The Abbot of Saint-Martin, that is to say the King of France, is canon, according to custom, and has the small benefice which Saint-Venantis had, and shall sit in the seat of the treasurer. 
Chapter 2 - This Will Destroy That
Our fair readers must forgive us if we halt a moment here and endeavour to unearth the idea hidden under the Archdeacon’s enigmatical words: 
“This will destroy That. The Book will destroy the Edifice.” 
To our mind, this thought has two aspects. In the first place it was a view pertaining to the priest—it was the terror of the ecclesiastic before a new force—printing. It was the servant of the dim sanctuary scared and dazzled by the light that streamed from Gutenberg’s press. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken and the written word quailing before the printed word—something of the stupefaction of the sparrow at beholding the Heavenly Host spread their six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the far-off roar and tumult of emancipated humanity; who, gazing into the future, sees intelligence sapping the foundations of faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off the yoke of Rome; the prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought volatilized by the press, evaporating out of the theocratic receiver; the terror of the besieged soldier gazing at the steel battering-ram and saying to himself, “The citadel must fall.” It signified that one great power was to supplant another great power. It meant, The Printing-Press will destroy the Church. 
But underlying this thought—the first and no doubt the less complex of the two—there was, in our opinion, a second, a more modern—a corollary to the former idea, less on the surface and more likely to be contested; a view fully as philosophic, but pertaining no longer exclusively to the priest, but to the scholar and the artist likewise. It was a premonition that human thought, in changing its outward form, was also about to change its outward mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would, in future, be embodied in a new material, a new fashion; that the book of stone, so solid and so enduring, was to give way to the book of paper, more solid and more enduring still. In this respect the vague formula of the Archdeacon had a second meaning—that one Art would dethrone another Art: Printing will destroy Architecture. 
In effect, from the very beginning of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era inclusive, architecture is the great book of the human race, man’s chief means of expressing the various stages of his development, whether physical or mental. 
When the memory of the primitive races began to be surcharged, when the load of tradition carried about by the human family grew so heavy and disordered that the word, naked and fleeting, ran danger of being lost by the way, they transcribed it on the ground by the most visible, the most lasting, and at the same time most natural means. They enclosed each tradition in a monument. 
The first monuments were simply squares of rock “which had not been touched by iron,” as says Moses. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. A stone was planted upright and it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and on every hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column. Thus did the primitive races act at the same moment over the entire face of the globe. One finds the “upright stone” of the Celts in Asiatic Siberia and on the pampas of America. 
Presently they constructed words. Stone was laid upon stone, these granite syllables were coupled together, the word essayed some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words—some of them, the tumulus in particular, are proper names. Occasionally, when there were many stones and a vast expanse of ground, they wrote a sentence. The immense mass of stones at Karnac is already a complete formula. 
 of all they made books. Traditions had ended by bringing forth symbols, under which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree under its foliage. These symbols, in which all humanity believed, continued to grow and multiply, becoming more and more complex; the primitive monuments—themselves scarcely expressing the original traditions, and, like them, simple, rough-hewn, and planted in the soil—no longer sufficed to contain them: they overflowed at every point. Of necessity the symbol must expand into the edifice. Architecture followed the development of human thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads, a thousand arms, and caught and concentrated in one eternal, visible, tangible form all this floating symbolism. While D?dalus, who is strength, was measuring; while Orpheus, who is intelligence, was singing—the pillar, which is a letter; the arch, which is a syllable; the pyramid, which is a word, set in motion at once by a law of geometry and a law of poetry, began to group themselves together, to combine, to blend, to sink, to rise, stood side by side on the ground, piled themselves up into the sky, till, to the dictation of the prevailing idea of the epoch, they had written these marvellous books which are equally marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Pyramids of Egypt, and the Temple of Solomon. 
The parent idea, the Word, was not only contained in the foundation of these edifices, but in their structure. Solomon’s Temple, for example, was not simply the cover of the sacred book, it was the sacred book itself. On each of its concentric enclosures the priest might read the Word translated and made manifest to the eye, might follow its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, till at last he could lay hold upon it in its final tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which yet was architecture—the Ark. Thus the Word was enclosed in the edifice, but its image was visible on its outer covering, like the human figure depicted on the coffin of a mummy. 
Again, not only the structure of the edifice but its situation revealed the idea it embodied. According as the thought to be expressed was gracious or sombre, Greece crowned her mountains with temples harmonious to the eye; India disembowelled herself to hew out those massive subterranean pagodas which are supported by rows of gigantic granite elephants. 
Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world—from the most immemorial temple of Hindustan to the Cathedral at Cologne—architecture has been the great manuscript of the human race. And this is true to such a degree, that not only every religious symbol, but every human thought, has its page and its memorial in that vast book. 
Every civilization begins with theocracy and ends with democracy. 
The reign of many masters succeeding the reign of one is written in architecture. For—and this point we must emphasize—it must not be supposed that it is only capable of building temples, of expressing only the sacerdotal myth and symbolism, of transcribing in hieroglyphics on its stone pages the mysterious Tables of the Law. Were this the case, then—seeing that in every human society there comes a moment when the sacred symbol is worn out, and is obliterated by the free thought, when the man breaks away from the priest, when the growth of philosophies and systems eats away the face of religion—architecture would be unable to reproduce this new phase of the human mind: its leaves, written upon the right side, would be blank on the reverse; its work would be cut short; its book incomplete. But that is not the case. 
Take, for example, the epoch of the Middle Ages, which is clearer to us because it is nearer. During its first period, while theocracy is organizing Europe, while the Vatican is collecting and gathering round it the elements of a new Rome, constructed out of the Rome which lay in fragments round the Capitol, while Christianity goes forth to search among the ruins of a former civilization, and out of its remains to build up a new hierarchic world of which sacerdotalism is the keystone, we hear it stirring faintly through the chaos; then gradually, from under the breath of Christianity, from under the hands of the barbarians, out of the rubble of dead architectures, Greek and Roman—there emerges that mysterious Romanesque architecture, sister of the theocratic buildings of Egypt and India, inalterable emblem of pure Catholicism, immutable hieroglyph of papal unity. The whole tendency of the time is written in this sombre Romanesque style. Everywhere it represents authority, unity, the imperturbable, the absolute, Gregory VII; always the priest, never the man: everywhere the caste, never the people. 
Then come the Crusades, a great popular movement, and every popular movement, whatever its cause or its aim, has as its final precipitation the spirit of liberty. Innovations struggled forth to the light. At this point begins the stormy period of the Peasant wars, the revolts of the Burghers, the Leagues of the Princes. Authority totters, unity is split and branches off into two directions. Feudalism demands to divide the power with theocracy before the inevitable advent of the people, who, as ever, will take the lion’s share—Quia nominor leo. Hence we see feudalism thrusting up through theocracy, and the people’s power again through feudalism. The whole face of Europe is altered. Very good; the face of architecture alters with it. Like civilization, she has turned a page, and the new spirit of the times finds her prepared to write to his dictation. She has brought home with her from the crusades the pointed arch, as the nations have brought free thought. Henceforward, as Rome is gradually dismembered, so the Romanesque architecture dies out. The hieroglyphic deserts the Cathedral, and goes to assist heraldry in heightening the prestige of feudalism. The Cathedral itself, once so imbued with dogma, invaded now by the commonalty, by the spirit of freedom, escapes from the priest, and falls under the dominion of the artist. The artist fashions it after his own good pleasure. Farewell to mystery, to myth, to rule. Here fantasy and caprice are a law unto themselves. Provided the priest has his basilica and his altar, he has nothing further to say in the matter. The four walls belong to the artist. The stone book belongs no more to the priest, to religion, to Rome, but to imagination, to poetry, to the people. From thenceforward occur these rapid and innumerable transformations of an architecture only lasting three centuries, so striking after the six or seven centuries of stagnant immobility of the Romanesque style. Meanwhile, Art marches on with giant strides, and popular originality plays what was formerly the Bishop’s part. Each generation in passing inscribes its line in the book; it rubs out the ancient Roman hieroglyphics from the frontispiece—hardly that one sees here and there some dogma glimmering faintly through the new symbol overlying it. The framework of religion is scarcely perceptible through this new drapery. One can scarcely grasp the extent of the license practised at that time by the architects, even on the churches. Such are the shamelessly intertwined groups of monks and nuns on the capitals of the Gallery of Chimney-Pieces in the Palais de Justice; the episode out of the history of Noah sculptured “to the letter” over the Cathedral door at Bourges; the bacchic monk, with ass’s ears and glass in hand, grinning in the face of a whole congregation, carved on a stone basin of the Abbey of Bocherville. For the thought written in stone there existed at that period a privilege perfectly comparable to the present liberty of the press. It was the liberty of architecture. 
And the liberty went far. At times a door, a fa?ade, nay, even an entire church, presents a symbolical meaning wholly unconnected with worship, even inimical to the Church itself. In the thirteenth century, Guillaume of Paris, and in the fifteenth, Nicolas Flamel wrote such seditious pages. Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was a complete volume of opposition. 
This was the only form, however, in which free thought was possible, and therefore found full expression only in those books called edifices. Under that form it might have looked on at its own burning at the hands of the common hangman had it been so imprudent as to venture into manuscript: the thought embodied in the church door would have assisted at the death agony of the thought expressed in the book. Therefore, having but this one outlet, it rushed towards it from all parts; and hence the countless mass of Cathedrals spread over all Europe, a number so prodigious that it seems incredible, even after verifying it with one’s own eyes. All the material, all the intellectual forces of society, converged to that one point—architecture. In this way, under the pretext of building churches to the glory of God, the art developed to magnificent proportions. 
In those days, he who was born a poet became an architect. All the genius scattered among the masses and crushed down on every side under feudalism, as under a testudo of brazen bucklers, finding no outlet but in architecture, escaped by way of that art, and its epics found voice in cathedrals. All other arts obeyed and put themselves at the service of the one. They were the artisans of the great work; the architect summed up in his own person, sculpture, which carved his fa?ade; painting, which dyed his windows in glowing colours; music, which set his bells in motion and breathed in his organ pipes. Even poor Poetry—properly so called, who still persisted in eking out a meagre existence in manuscript—was obliged, if she was to be recognised at all, to enroll herself in the service of the edifice, either as hymn or prosody; the small part played, after all, by the tragedies of ?schylus in the sacerdotal festivals of Greece, and the Book of Genesis in the Temple of Solomon. 
Thus, till Gutenberg’s time, architecture is the chief, the universal form of writing; in this stone book, begun by the East, continued by Ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages have written the last page. For the rest, this phenomenon of an architecture belonging to the people succeeding an architecture belonging to a caste, which we have observed in the Middle Ages, occurs in precisely analogous stages in human intelligence at other great epochs of history. Thus—to sum up here in a few lines a law which would call for volumes to do it justice—in the Far East, the cradle of primitive history, after Hindu architecture comes the Ph?nician, that fruitful mother of Arabian architecture; in antiquity, Egyptian architecture—of which the Etruscan style and the Cyclopean monuments are but a variety—is succeeded by the Greek, of which the Roman is merely a prolongation burdened with the Carthaginian dome; in modern times, after Romanesque architecture comes the Gothic. And if we separate each of these three divisions, we shall find that the three elder sisters—Hindu, Egyptian, and Roman architecture—stand for the same idea: namely, theocracy, caste, unity, dogma, God; and that the three younger sisters—Ph?nician, Greek, Gothic—whatever the diversity of expression inherent to their nature, have also the same significance: liberty, the people, humanity. 
Call him Brahmin, Magi, or Pope, according as you speak of Hindu, Egyptian, or Roman buildings, it is always the priest, and nothing but the priest. Very different are the architectures of the people; they are more opulent and less saintly. In the Ph?nician you see the merchant, in the Greek the republican, in the Gothic the burgess. 
The general characteristics of all theocratic architectures are immutability, horror of progress, strict adherence to traditional lines, the consecration of primitive types, the adaptation of every aspect of man and nature to the incomprehensible whims of symbolism. Dark and mysterious book, which only the initiated can decipher! Furthermore, every form, every deformity even, in them has a meaning which renders it inviolable. Never ask of Hindu, Egyptian, or Roman architecture to change its designs or perfect its sculpture. To it, improvement in any shape or form is an impiety. Here the rigidity of dogma seems spread over the stone like a second coating of petrifaction. 
On the other hand, the main characteristics of the popular architectures are diversity, progress, originality, richness of design, perpetual change. They are already sufficiently detached from religion to take thought for their beauty, to tend it, to alter and improve without ceasing their garniture of statues and arabesques. They go with their times. They have something human in them which they constantly infuse into the divine symbols in which they continue to express themselves. Here you get edifices accessible to every spirit, every intelligence, every imagination; symbolic still, but as easily understood as the signs of Nature. Between this style of architecture and the theocratic there is the same difference as between the sacred and the vulgar tongue, between hieroglyphics and art, between Solomon and Phidias. 
In fact, if we sum up what we have just roughly pointed out—disregarding a thousand details of proof and also exceptions to the rule—it comes briefly to this: that down to the fifteenth century, architecture was the chief recorder of the human race; that during that space no single thought that went beyond the absolutely fundamental, but was embodied in some edifice; that every popular idea, like every religious law, has had its monuments; finally, that the human race has never conceived an important thought that it has not written down in stone. And why? Because every thought, whether religious or philosophic, is anxious to be perpetuated; because the idea which has stirred one generation longs to stir others, and to leave some lasting trace. But how precarious is the immortality of the manuscript! How far more solid, enduring, and resisting a book is the edifice! To destroy the written word there is need only of a torch and a Turk. To destroy the constructed word there is need of a social revolution, a terrestrial upheaval. The barbarians swept over the Coliseum; the deluge, perhaps, over the Pyramids. 
In the fifteenth century all is changed. 
Human thought discovers a means of perpetuating itself, not only more durable and more resisting than architecture, but also simpler and more easy of achievement. Architecture is dethroned, the stone letters of Orpheus must give way to Gutenberg’s letters of lead. 
The Book will destroy the Edifice. 
The invention of printing is the greatest event of history. It is the parent revolution; it is a fundamental change in mankind’s mode of expression; it is human thought putting off one shape to don another; it is the complete and definite sloughing of the skin of that serpent who, since the days of Adam, has symbolized intelligence. 
Under the form of printing, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, intangible, indestructible; it mingles with the very air. In the reign of architecture it became a mountain, and took forceful possession of an era, of a country. Now it is transformed into a flock of birds, scattering to the four winds and filling the whole air and space. 
We repeat: who does not admit that in this form thought is infinitely more indelible? The stone has become inspired with life. Durability has been exchanged for immortality. One can demolish substance, but how extirpate ubiquity? Let a deluge come—the birds will still be flying above the waters long after the mountain has sunk from view; and let but a single ark float upon the face of the cataclysm, and they will seek safety upon it and there await the subsiding of the waters; and the new world rising out of this chaos will behold when it wakes, hovering over it, winged and unharmed, the thought of the world that has gone down. 
And when one notes that this mode of expression is not only the most preservative, but also the simplest, the most convenient, the most practicable for all; when one considers that it is not hampered by a great weight of tools and clumsy appurtenances; when one compares the thought, forced, in order to translate itself into an edifice, to call to its assistance four or five other arts and tons of gold, to collect a mountain of stones, a forest of wood, a nation of workmen—when one compares this with the thought that only asks for a little paper, a little ink, and a pen in order to become a book, is it any wonder that human intelligence deserted architecture for printing? 
Then observe too, how, after the discovery of printing, architecture gradually becomes dry, withered, naked; how the water visibly sinks, the sap ceases to rise, the thought of the times and of the peoples desert it. This creeping paralysis is hardly perceptible in the fifteenth century, the press is too feeble as yet, and what it does abstract from all-powerful architecture is but the superfluity of its strength. But by the sixteenth century the malady is pronounced. Already architecture is no longer the essential expression of social life; it assumes miserable classic air; from Gallican, European, indigenous, it becomes bastard Greek and Roman, from the genuine and the modern it becomes pseudo-antique. This decadence we call the Renaissance—a magnificent decadence nevertheless, for the ancient Gothic genius, that sun now sinking behind the gigantic printing-press of Mayence, sheds for a little while its last rays over this hybrid mass of Romanesque arches and Corinthian colonnades. 
And it is this sunset that we take for the dawn of a new day. 
However, from the moment that architecture is nothing more than an art like any other—is no longer the sum total of art, the sovereign, the tyrant—it is powerless to monopolize the services of the others, who accordingly emancipate themselves, throw off the yoke of the architect and go their separate ways. Each art gains by this divorce. Thus isolated, each waxes great. Stone-masonry becomes sculpture; pious illumination, painting; the restricted chant blooms out into concerted music. It is like an empire falling asunder on the death of its Alexander, and each province becoming an independent kingdom. 
For here begins the period of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina—those luminaries of the dazzling firmament of the sixteenth century. 
And with the arts, thought, too, breaks its bonds on all sides. The free-thinkers of the Middle Ages had already inflicted deep wounds on Catholicism. The sixteenth century rends religious unity in pieces. Before printing, the Reformation would merely have been a schism: printing made it a revolution. Take away the press, and heresy is paralyzed. Look on it as fatal or providential, Gutenberg is the fore-runner of Luther. 
But when the sun of the Middle Ages has wholly set, when the radiance of Gothic genius has faded forever from the horizon of art, architecture, too, grows slowly pale, wan and lifeless. The printed book, that gnawing worm, sucks the life-blood from her and devours her. She droops, she withers, she wastes away before the eye. She becomes mean and poor, of no account, conveying nothing to the mind—not even the memory of the art of other days. Reduced to her own exertions, deserted by the other arts because human thought has left her in the lurch, she has to employ the artisan in default of the artist. Plain glass replaces the glowing church window, the stone-mason the sculptor; farewell to vital force, to originality, life or intelligence; as a lamentabie beggar of the studios she drags herself from copy to copy. Michael Angelo, doubtless sensible of her approaching end, made one last despairing effort in her aid. That Titan of the world of art piled the Pantheon on the Parthenon and so made Saint-Peter’s of Rome—a gigantic work that deserved to remain unique, the last orginality of architecture, the signature of a mighty artist at the bottom of the colossal register of stone thus closed. But Michael Angelo once dead, what does this wretched architecture do, which only survives as a spectre, as a shade? She takes Saint-Peter’s and copies, parodies it. It becomes a mania with her, a thing to weep at: in the seventeenth century the Val-de-Grace, in the eighteenth, Sainte-Geneviève. Every country has its Saint-Peter’s. London has hers, St. Petersburg hers, Paris even two or three—a legacy of triviality, the last drivellings of a grand but decrepit art, fallen into second childhood before its final dissolution. 
If, instead of the characteristic monuments like those of which we have spoken, we examine the general aspect of the art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we shall find everywhere the same evidences of decrepitude and decay. From the time of Francis II the form of the edifice lets the geometrical outline show through more and more, like the bony framework through the skin of an emaciated body. The generous curves of art give place to the cold and inexorable lines of geometry. An edifice is no longer an edifice, it is a polyhedron. Architecture, however, is at infinite pains to cover her nakedness, and hence the Greek pediment set in the Roman pediment and vice versa. It is always the Pantheon on the Parthenon, Saint-Peter’s at Rome. Such are the brick houses with stone corners of the time of Henri IV, the Place Royale, the Place Dauphine. Such are the churches of Louis XIII, heavy, squat, compressed, with a dome like a hump. Thus, too, is the Mazarin architecture, the poor Italian pasticcio of the Quatre-Nations, the palaces of Louis XIV, mere court barracks, endless, frigid, wearisome; and finally, the style of Louis XV with its chicory-leaf and vermicelli ornaments, and all the warts and growths disfiguring that aged, toothless, demoralized coquette. From Francis II to Louis XV the malady progressed in geometrical ratio. The art is reduced to skin and bone, her life ebbs miserably away. 
Meanwhile, what of the art of printing? All the vital force taken from architecture streams to her. As architecture sinks, so printing rises and expands. The store of strength spent hitherto by human thought on edifices is now bestowed on books; till, by the sixteenth century, the press, grown now to the level of her shrunken rival, wrestles with her and prevails. In the seventeenth century she is already so absolute, so victorious, so firmly established on her throne, that she can afford to offer to the world the spectacle of a great literary era. In the eighteenth century, after long idleness at the Court of Louis XIV, she takes up again the ancient sword of Luther, thrusts it into Voltaire’s hand, and runs full tilt at that antiquated Europe whom she has already robbed of all architectural expression. Thus, as the eighteenth century ends she has accomplished her work of destruction; with the nineteenth century she begins to construct. 
Now which of these two arts, we ask, represents in truth the course of human thought during three centuries; which of the two transmits, expresses, not only its fleeting literary and scholastic fashion, but its vast, profound, all-embracing tendencies? Which of the two has fitted itself like a skin, without a crease or gap, over that thousand-footed, never-resting monster, the human race? Architecture or Printing? 
Printing. Let no one mistake: architecture is dead—dead beyond recall, killed by the printed book, killed because it is less durable, killed because it is more costly. Every Cathedral represents a million. Imagine now the sums necessary for the rewriting of that architectural tome; for those countless edifices to spread once more over the land; to return to the days when their abundance was such that from the testimony of an eye-witness “you would have thought that the world had cast off its old raiment and clad itself anew in a white raiment of churches.” Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, candidam ecclesiarum vestem indueret. (Glaber Rudolphus.) 
A book takes so little time in the making, costs so little, and can reach so far. What wonder that human thought should choose that path? Though this is not to say that architecture will not, from time to time, put forth some splendid monument, some isolated master-piece. There is no reason why, under the reign of printing, we should not, some time or other, have an obelisk constructed, say, by an entire army out of melted cannon, as, under the reign of architecture, we had the Iliads, the Romants, the Mahabahratas, and the Nibelungen, built by whole nations with the welded fragments of a thousand epics. The great good fortune of possessing an architect of genius may befall the twentieth century, as Dante came to the thirteenth. But architecture will never again be the social, the collective, the dominant art. The great epic, the great monument, the great masterpiece of mankind will never again be built; it will be printed. 
And even if, by some fortuitous accident, architecture should revive, she will never again be mistress. She will have to submit to those laws which she once imposed upon literature. The respective positions of the two arts will be reversed. Certainly, under the reign of architecture, the poems—rare, true—resemble the monuments of the time. The Indian Vyasa is strange, variegated, unfathomable, like the native pagoda. In Egypt the poetry shares the grand and tranquil lines of the edifices; in ancient Greece it has their beauty, serenity, and calm; in Christian Europe, the majesty of the Church, the simplicity of the people, the rich and luxuriant vegetation of a period of rebirth. The Bible corresponds to the Pyramids, the Iliad to the Parthenon, Homer to Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothic minster. 
Thus, to put it shortly, mankind has two books, two registers, two testaments: Architecture and Printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper. Doubtless, in contemplating these two Bibles, spread open wide through the centuries, one is fain to regret the visible majesty of the granite writing, those gigantic alphabets in the shape of colonnades, porches, and obelisks; these mountains, as it were, the work of man’s hand spread over the whole world and filling the past, from the pyramid to the steeple, from Cheops to Strassburg. The past should be read in these marble pages; the books written by architecture can be read and reread, with never-diminishing interest; but one cannot deny the grandeur of the edifice which printing has raised in its turn. 
That edifice is colossal. I do not know what statistician it was who calculated that by piling one upon another all the volumes issued from the press since Gutenberg, you would bridge the space between the earth and the moon—but it is not to that kind of greatness we allude. Nevertheless, if we try to form a collective picture of the combined results of printing down to our own times, does it not appear as a huge structure, having the whole world for foundation, and the whole human race for its ceaselessly active workmen, and whose pinnacles tower up into the impenetrable mist of the future? It is the swarming ant-hill of intellectual forces; the hive to which all the golden-winged messengers of the imagination return, laden with honey. This prodigious edifice has a thousand storeys, and remains forever incomplete. The press, that giant engine, incessantly absorbing all the intellectual forces of society, disgorges, as incessantly, new materials for its work. The entire human race is on the scaffolding; every mind is a mason. Even the humblest can fill up a gap, or lay another brick. Each day another layer is put on. Independently of the individual contribution, there are certain collective donations. The eighteenth century presents the Encyclopedia, the Revolution the Moniteur. Undoubtedly this, too, is a structure, growing and piling itself up in endless spiral lines; here, too, there is confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labour, a furious contest between the whole of mankind, an ark of refuge for the intelligence against another deluge, against another influx of barbarism. 
It is the second Tower of Babel. 
BOOK VI
Chapter 1 - An Impartial Glance at the Ancient Magistracy
A Mighty fortunate personage in the year of grace 1482, was the noble knight, Robert d’Estouteville, Sieur of Beyne, Baron of Ivry and Saint-Andry in the March, Councillor and Chamberlain to the King, and Warden of the Provostry of Paris. It was well-nigh seventeen years ago since he had received from the King, on November 7, 1465—the year of the comet1—this fine appointment of Provost of Paris, reputed rather a seigneurie than an office. Dignitas, says Joannes L?mn?us, qu?, cum non exigua potestate politiam concernente, atque pr?rogativis multis et juribus conjuncta est.2 It was indeed a thing to marvel at that in 1482 a gentleman should be holding the King’s commission, whose letters of appointment dated back to the date of the marriage of a natural daughter of Louis XI with Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon. On the same day on which Robert d’Estouteville had replaced Jacques de Villiers in the Provostry of Paris, Ma?tre Jehan Dauvet superseded Messire Hélye de Thorrettes as Chief President of the Court of Parliament, Jehan Jouvenel des Ursins supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of Chancellor of France, and Regnault des Dormans turned Pierre Puy out of the post of Master of Common Pleas to the royal palace. But over how many heads had that Presidency, that Chancellorship, and that Mastership passed since Robert d’Estouteville held the Provostship of Paris! It had been “given unto his keeping,” said the letters patent; and well indeed had he kept the same. He had clung to it, incorporated himself into it, had so identified himself with it that he had managed to escape that mania for change which so possessed Louis XI, a close-fisted, scheming king, who sought to maintain, by frequent appointments and dismissals, the elasticity of his power. Furthermore, the worthy knight had procured the reversion of his post for his son, and for two years now the name of the noble M. Jacques d’Estouteville, Knight, had figured beside that of his father at the head of the roll of the Provostry of Paris—in truth, a rare and signal favour! To be sure, Robert d’Estouteville was a good soldier, had loyally raised his banner for the King against the “League of the Public Weal,” and on the entry of the Queen into Paris in 14— had presented her with a wonderful stag composed of confectionery. Besides this, he was on a very friendly footing with Messire Tristan l’Hermite, Provost-Marshal of the King’s palace. So Messire Robert’s existence was an easy and pleasant one. First of all, he enjoyed very good pay, to which were attached and hanging like extra grapes on his vine, the revenues from the civil and criminal registries of the Provostry, the revenues, civil and criminal, accruing from the auditory courts of the Chatelet, not to speak of many a comfortable little toll-due from the bridges of Mantes and Corbeil, and the profits from the taxes levied on the grain-dealers, as on the measurers of wood and salt. Add to this, the pleasure of displaying on his official rides through the city—in shining contrast to the party-coloured gowns, half red, half tan, of the sheriffs and district officers—his fine military accoutrements, which you may admire to this day, sculptured on his tomb in the Valmont Abbey in Normandy, and his morion with all the bruises in it got at Montlhéry. Then, it was no mean thing to have authority over the constables of the Palais de Justice, over the warder and the Commandant of the Chatelet, the two auditors of the Chatelet (auditores Castelleti), the sixteen commissioners of the sixteen districts, the jailer of the Chatelet, the four enfeoffed officers of the peace, the hundred and twenty mounted officers of the peace, the hundred and twenty officers of the rod, the captain of the watch with his patrol, his under-patrol, his counter-and-night-patrol. Was it nothing to exercise supreme and secondary jurisdiction, to have the right of pillory, hanging, and dragging at the cart’s tail, besides minor jurisdiction in the first resort (in prima instantia, as the old charters have it) over the whole viscomty of Paris, so gloriously endowed with the revenues of seven noble bailiwicks? Can you conceive of anything more gratifying than to mete out judgment and sentence, as Messire Robert d’Estouteville did every day in the Grand Chatelet, under the wide, low-pitched Gothic arches of Philip Augustus; and to retire, as he was wont, every evening to that charming house in Rue Galilée, within the purlieus of the Palais Royal, which he held by right of his wife, Dame Ambroise de Loré, where he could rest from the fatigues of having sent some poor devil to pass the night on his part in that “little cell of the Rue de l’Escorcherie, which the provosts and sheriffs of Paris frequently used as a prison—the same measuring eleven feet in length, seven feet and four inches in width, and eleven feet in height?”3 
And not only had Messire Robert d’Estouteville his special jurisdictional offices as Provost of Paris, but also he had his seat, with power over life and death, in the King’s Supreme Court. There was no head of any account but had passed through his hands before falling to the executioner. It was he who had fetched the Comte de Nemours from the Bastille Saint-Antoine, to convey him to the Halles; he who had escorted the Comte de Saint-Pol to the Place de Grève, who stormed and wept, to the huge delight of Monsieur the Provost, who bore no love to Monsieur the Constable. 
Here, assuredly, was more than sufficient to make a man’s life happy and illustrious and to merit some day a noteworthy page in that interesting chronicle of the Provosts of Paris, from which we learn that Oudard de Villeneuve owned a house in the Rue des Boucherie, that Guillaume de Hangast bought the great and the little Savoie mansion, that Guillaume Thiboust gave his houses in the Rue Clopin to the Sisters of Sainte-Geneviève, that Hugues Aubriot lived in the H?tel du Porc-epic, and other facts of a domestic character. 
Nevertheless, in spite of all these reasons for taking life easily and pleasantly, Messire Robert d’Estouteville had risen on the morning of January 7, 1482; feeling as sulky and dangerous in temper as a bear with a sore head; why, he would have been at a loss to say. Was it because the sky was gloomy? because the buckle of his old sword-belt—another relic of Montlhèry—was clasped too tight, and girded up his fair, round, provostorial port in all too military a fashion? or because he had just seen a band of tattered varlets, who had jeered at him as they passed below his windows walking four abreast, in doublets without shirts, in hats without brims, and wallet and bottle hanging at their sides? Or was it the vague premonition of the loss of those three hundred and seventy livres, sixteen sols, eight deniers, of which in the following year the future King Charles VIII was going to dock the revenues of the Provostry? The reader may take his choice, but for our part we are inclined to the opinion that he was in a bad temper because—he was in a bad temper. 
Besides, it was the day after a holiday, a day distasteful to everybody, especially to the magistrate whose business it was to sweep up all the dirt—literally and figuratively—which a Paris holiday inevitably brings with it. Then, too, he was to sit that day at the Grand Chatelet; and we have noticed that the judges generally manage that their day of sitting shall also be their day of ill-humour, in that they may have some one on whom conveniently to vent their spleen in the name of the King, justice, and the law. 
The sitting, however, had begun without him. His deputies in civil, criminal, and private causes were acting for him as usual; and by eight o’clock in the morning, some scores of townsfolk, men and women, crowded up between the wall and a strong barrier of oak in a dark corner of the court of the Chatelet, were blissfully assisting at the varied and exhilarating spectacle of the law, civil and criminal, as administered by Ma?tre Florian Barbedienne, examining judge at the Chatelet, and deputy for Monsieur the Provost, an office he performed in a manner somewhat mixed and altogether haphazard. 
The hall was small, low, and vaulted, furnished at the far end with a table figured over with fleur de lis, a great, carved oak chair for the Provost, and therefore empty, and a stool at the left side for Ma?tre Florian. Lower down sat the clerk, scribbling fast. Opposite to them were the people; while before the door and before the table were stationed a number of sergeants of the Provostry, in violet woollen jerkins, with white crosses on their breasts. Two sergeants of the Common Hall in their “All-Saints” jackets—half red, half blue—stood sentinel at a low, closed door which was visible in the background behind the table. A solitary Gothic window, deeply embedded in the wall, shed the pale light of a January morning on two grotesque figures—the whimsical stone devil, carved on the keystone of the vaulted ceiling, and the judge sitting at the back of the Hall bending over the fleur de lis of the table. 
Picture to yourself that figure at the table, leaning on his elbows between two bundles of documents, his foot wrapped in the tail of his plain brown gown, the face in its frame of white lambskin, of which the eye-brows seem to be a piece —red, scowling, blinking, carrying with dignity the load of fat that met under his chin—and you have Ma?tre Florian Barbedienne, examining judge at the Chatelet. 
Now, Ma?tre Florian was deaf—rather a drawback for an examining judge—but none the less did he mete out judgment without appeal and with great propriety. Surely it is sufficient that a judge should appear to listen, and the venerable auditor the better filled this condition—the sole essential to the good administration of justice—in that his attention could not be distracted by any sound. 
However, he had among the onlookers a merciless critic of deeds and manners in the person of our friend, Jehan Frollo of the Mill, the little scholar of yesterday’s scenes, the little loafer one was certain to encounter anywhere in Paris, save in the lecture-room of the professors. 
“Look,” whispered he to his companion, Robin Poussepain, who sat beside him in fits of suppressed laughter at his comments on the scene before them, “why, there’s Jehanneton du Buisson, the pretty lass of that old lazy-bones at the Marché-Neuf! On my soul, he means to fine her, the old dotard! Fifteen sols, four deniers parisis for wearing two rosaries! That’s rather dear! Lex duri carminis—who’s this? Robin Chief-de-Ville, hauberk-maker, for being passed and admitted a master in the said craft. Ah! his entrance fee. What! Two gentlemen among this rabble! Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly, two squires! Corpus Christi! Oh, for throwing dice! When shall we see our Rector here, I wonder? A fine of a hundred livres parisis to the King! Barbedienne lays about him, like a deaf one—as he is. May I be my brother the archdeacon, if that shall hinder me from playing; from playing by day, and playing by night, living at play, dying at play, and staking my soul after I have staked my shirt! Holy Virgin! what a lot of girls! One at a time, my lambkins! Ambroise Lécuyère, Isabeau la Paynette, Bérarde Gironin! By heavens, I know them all! A fine! a fine! ten sols parisis; that’ll teach you minxes to wear gilded girdles! Oh, the ancient sheep’s-head of a judge, deaf and doting! Ah, Florian thou dolt! Oh, Barbedienne thou booby! Do but look at him there at table—he dines off the litigant—he dines off the case—he eats—he chews—he gobbles—he fills himself! Fines, unclaimed goods, dues, costs, expenses, wages, damages, torture, imprisonment, and pillory and fetters, and loss of right—all are to him as Christmas comfits and midsummer marchpane! Look at him, the swine! Good! it begins again. Another light o’ love! Thibaude-la-Thibaude, as I live! For having come out of the Rue Glatigny! Who’s this young shaver? Gieffroy Mabonne, cross-bowman. He blasphemed the name of God the Father. Thibaude a fine! Gieffroy a fine! A fine for both of them! The deaf old blockhead, he is sure to have mixed up the two. Ten to one that he makes the girl pay for the oath, and the soldier for the amour! Attention, Robin Poussepain! Who are they bringing in now? What a crowd of tip-staffs! By Jupiter, the whole pack of hounds! This must be the grand catch of the day. A wild boar at least. It is one Robin! it is—and a fine specimen too! Hercules! it is our prince of yesterday, our Pope of Fools, our bell-ringer, our hunchback, our grimace! It is Quasimodo!” 
It was indeed. 
It was Quasimodo, bound about with cords, tightly pinioned, and under a strong guard. The detachment of officers surrounding him was led by the Captain of the watch in person, with the arms of France embroidered on his breast, and those of the City of Paris on his back. However, apart from his ugliness, there was nothing about Quasimodo to warrant this show of halberds and arquebuses. He was moody, silent, and composed, only casting from time to time a sullen and angry glance out of his one eye at the cords that bound him. He cast this same glance at his surroundings, but it was so dazed and drowsy that the women only pointed him out in derision to one another. 
Meanwhile, Ma?tre Florian was busy turning over the pages of the charge drawn up against Quasimodo, handed to him by the clerk, and, having glanced at it, seemed to commune with himself for a moment. Thanks to this precaution, which he was always careful to employ before proceeding with his examination, he knew in advance the name, quality, and offence of the delinquent, made prearranged replies to foreseen questions, and contrived to find his way through all the sinuosities of the cross-examination without too openly betraying his deafness. The written charge was to him as the dog to the blind man. If it happened, now and then, that his infirmity became evident through some unintelligible address, or some question wide of the mark, it passed with some for profundity, and with others for imbecility. In either case, the honour of the magistracy underwent no diminution: better far that a judge should be reputed imbecile or profound rather than deaf. He therefore took such precautions to conceal his deafness from others, and usually succeeded so well, that he had come at last to deceive himself on the subject—an easier matter than one might suppose: for all hunchbacks walk with head erect; all stammerers are fond of talking; deaf people invariably speak in a whisper. For his part, he thought, at most, that perhaps his ear was a trifle less quick than other people’s. This was the sole concession he would make to public opinion in his rare moments of candour and self-examination. 
Having then ruminated well on Quasimodo’s case, he threw back his head and half-closed his eyes, by way of extra dignity and impartiality, with the result that, for the moment, he was both blind and deaf—a twofold condition without which no judge is really perfect. 
In this magisterial attitude he commenced his examination. 
“Your name?” 
Now here was a case which had not been “provided for by the law”—the interrogation of one deaf person by another in similar plight. 
Quasimodo, who had no hint of the fact that he was being addressed, continued to regard the judge fixedly, but made no reply. The judge, deaf himself, and unaware of the deafness of the accused, imagined he had answered, as accused persons generally did, and continued with his usual stupid and mechanical self-confidence: 
“Very good—your age?” 
Quasimodo made no answer to this question either, but the judge, fancying he had done so, went on: 
“Now, your calling?” 
Continued silence. The bystanders, however, began to whisper and look at each other. 
“That will do,” returned the imperturbable magistrate when he concluded that the accused had finished his third answer. “You stand charged before us, primo, with nocturnal disturbance; secundo, with unjustifiable violence to the person of a light woman, in prejudicium meretricis; tertio, of rebellion and contempt against the archers of our Lord the King. Explain yourself on these points.—Clerk, have you written down what the accused has said so far?” 
At this unlucky question there was an explosion of laughter, beginning with the clerk and spreading to the crowd—so violent, so uncontrollable, so contagious, so universal, that neither of the deaf men could help perceiving it. Quasimodo turned round and shrugged his high shoulders disdainfully, while Ma?tre Florian, as surprised as he, and supposing that the laughter of the spectators had been provoked by some unseemly reply from the accused, rendered visible to him by that shrug, addressed him indignantly: 
“Fellow, that last answer of yours deserves the halter. Do you know to whom you are speaking?” 
This sally was hardly calculated to extinguish the outburst of general hilarity. The thing was so utterly absurd and topsy-turvy, that the wild laughter seized even the sergeants of the Common Hall, a sort of pikemen whose stolidity was part of their uniform. Quasimodo alone preserved his gravity, for the very good reason that he had no idea what was occurring round him. The judge, growing more and more irritated, thought it proper to continue in the same tone, hoping thereby to strike such terror to the heart of the prisoner as would react on the audience and recall them to a sense of due respect. 
“It would seem, then, headstrong and riotous knave that you are, that you would dare to flout the auditor of the Chatelet; the magistrate entrusted with the charge of the public safety of Paris; whose duty it is to search into all crimes, delinquencies, and evil courses; to control all trades and forbid monopolies; to repair the pavements; to prevent the retail hawking of poultry and game, both feathered and furred; to superintend the measuring of firewood and all other kinds of wood; to purge the city of filth, and the air of all contagious distemper—in a word, to slave continually for the public welfare without fee or recompense, or hope of any. Know you that my name is Florian Barbedienne, deputy to Monsieur the Provost himself, and, moreover, commissioner, investigator, controller, and examiner, with equal power in provostry, bailiwick, registration, and presidial court—” 
There is no earthly reason why a deaf man talking to a deaf man should ever stop. God alone knows where and when Ma?tre Florian would have come to anchor, once launched in full sail on the ocean of his eloquence, had not the low door at the back of the hall suddenly opened, and given passage to Monsieur the Provost in person. 
At his entrance Ma?tre Florian did not stop, but wheeling half round, and suddenly aiming at the Provost the thunder-bolts which up to now he had launched at Quasimodo: 
“Monseigneur,” he said, “I demand such penalty as shall seem fitting to you against the accused here present for flagrant and unprecedented contempt of court.” 
He seated himself breathless, wiping away the great drops that fell from his forehead and splashed like tears upon the documents spread out before him. Messire Robert d’Estouteville knit his brows and signed to Quasimodo with a gesture so imperious and significant, that the deaf hunchback in some degree understood. 
The Provost addressed him sternly: “What hast thou done, rascal, to be brought hither?” 
The poor wretch, supposing that the Provost was asking his name, now broke his habitual silence and answered in hoarse, guttural tones, “Quasimodo.” 
The answer corresponded so little with the question that the former unbridled merriment threatened to break out again, and Messire Robert, crimson with anger, roared, “Dost dare to mock me too, arch-rogue?” 
“Bell-ringer of Notre-Dame,” continued Quasimodo, thinking that he must explain to the judges who he was. 
“Bell-ringer!” returned the Provost, who, as we know, had risen that morning in so vile a temper that there was no need to add fresh fuel to the fire by such unwarrantable impudence. “Bell-ringer indeed! They shall ring a carillon of rods on thy back at every street corner of Paris. Hearest thou, rascal?” 
“If it is my age you desire to know,” said Quasimodo, “I think I shall be twenty come Martinmas.” 
This was going too far; the Provost could contain himself no longer. 
“Ha, miserable knave, thou thinkest to make sport of the law! Sergeant of the rod, you will take this fellow to the pillory in the Grève and there flog him and turn him for an hour. He shall pay for this, tête-Dieu! And I command that this sentence be proclaimed by means of the four legally appointed trumpeters at the seven castellanies of the jurisdiction of Paris.” 
The clerk proceeded forthwith to put the sentence on record. 
“Ventre-Dieu! I call that giving judgment in good style!” said little Jehan Frollo of the Mill, from his secluded corner. 
The Provost turned and again transfixed Quasimodo with blazing eye. “I believe the rascal said ’Ventre-Dieu!’ Clerk, you will add twelve deniers parisis as a fine for swearing, and let one-half of it go to the Church of Saint-Eustache. I have a particular devotion for Saint-Eustache.” 
A few minutes later and the sentence was drawn up. The language was brief and simple. The legal procedure of the Provostry and bailiwick of Paris had not yet been elaborated by the President, Thibaut Baillet, and Roger Barmne, King’s advocate, and therefore not yet obscured by that forest of chicanery and circumlocution planted in it by these two lawyers at the beginning of the sixteenth century. All was still clear, rapid, and to the point. There was no beating about the bush, and straight before you, at the end of every path, you had a full view of the wheel, the gibbet, or the pillory. You knew, at least, exactly where you were. 
The clerk presented the sentence to the Provost, who affixed his seal to it and then departed, to continue his round through the several courts of law, in a frame of mind which seemed likely, for that day, to fill every jail in Paris. Jehan Frollo and Robin Poussepain were laughing in their sleeve, while Quasimodo regarded the whole scene with an air of surprise and indifference. 
Nevertheless, the clerk, while Ma?tre Florian was engaged in reading over the judgment before signing it in his turn, felt some qualms of compassion for the poor devil under sentence, and in the hope of obtaining some mitigation of his penalties, bent as near as he could to the examiner’s ear, and said, pointing to Quasimodo, “The man is deaf.” 
He hoped that the knowledge of a common infirmity would awaken Ma?tre Florian’s interest in favour of the condemned. But in the first place, as we have already explained, Ma?tre Florian did not like to have his deafness commented upon; and secondly, that he was so hard of hearing that he did not catch one word the clerk was saying. Desiring, however, to conceal this fact, he replied: “Ah! that makes all the difference. I did not know that. In that case, one more hour of pillory for him.” And, this modification made, he signed the sentence. 
“And serve him right too,” said Robin Poussepain, who still owed Quasimodo a grudge; “that’ll teach him to handle folks so roughly.” 
______________________
1 This comet, for deliverance from which, Pope Calixtus, uncle to Borgia, ordered public prayer, is the same which reappeared in 1835.—Author’s Note. 
2 A dignity to which is attached no little power in dealing with the public safety, together with many prerogatives and rights. 
3 Crown accounts, 1383.—Author’s Note. 
Chapter 2 - The Rat-hole
With the reader’s permission we will now return to the Place de Grève, which was quitted yesterday with Gringoire, to follow Esmeralda. 
It is ten in the morning, and everywhere are the unmistakable signs of the day after a public holiday. The ground is strewn with débris of every description, ribbons, rags, plumes, drops of wax from the torches, scraps from the public feast. A good many of the townsfolk are “loafing about”—as we would say to-day—turning over the extinguished brands of the bonfire, standing in front of the Maison aux Piliers rapturously recalling the fine hangings of the day before, and gazing now at the nails which fastened them—last taste of vanished joy—while the venders of beer and cider roll their casks among the idle groups. A few pass to and fro, intent on business; the tradespeople gossip and call to one another from their shop doors. The Festival, the Ambassadors, Coppenole, the Pope of Fools, are in every mouth, each vying with the other as to who shall make the wittiest comments and laugh the loudest; while four mounted officers of the peace, who have just posted themselves at the four corners of the pillory, have already drawn away a considerable portion of the idlers scattered about the square, who cheerfully submit to any amount of tediousness and waiting, in expectation of a little exhibition of Justice. 
If now, after contemplating this stirring and clamorous scene which is being enacted at every corner of the Place, the reader will turn his attention towards the ancient building—half Gothic, half Romanesque—called the Tour-Roland, forming the western angle of the quay, he will notice, at one of its corners, a large, richly illuminated breviary for the use of the public, protected from the rain by a small pent-house and from thieves by a grating, which, however, allows of the passer-by turning over the leaves. Close beside this breviary is a narrow, pointed window looking on to the square and closed by an iron cross-bar, the only aperture by which a little air and light can penetrate to a small, doorless cell constructed on the level of the ground within the thickness of the wall of the old mansion and filled with a quiet the more profound, a silence the more oppressive, that a public square, the noisiest and most populous in Paris, is swarming and clamouring round it. 
This cell has been famous in Paris for three centuries, ever since Mme. Rolande of the Tour-Roland, mourning for her father who died in the Crusades, had caused it to be hollowed out of the wall of her house and t herself up in it forever; retaining of all her great mansion but this one poor chamber, the door of which was walled up and the window open to the elements winter and summer, and giving the rest of her possessions to the poor and to God. The inconsolable lady had lingered on for twenty years awaiting death in this premature tomb, praying night and day for the soul of her father, making her bed on the cold ground without even a stone for a pillow, clothed in sackcloth, and living only upon such bread and water as the compassionate might deposit on the ledge of her window—thus receiving charity after bestowing it. At her death, at the moment of her passing to another sepulchre, she had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to women in affliction—mothers, windows, or maidens—who should have many prayers to offer up on behalf of others or of themselves, and should choose to bury themselves alive for some great grief or some great penitence. The poor of her time had honoured her funeral with tears and benedictions; but, to their great regret, the pious lady had been unable to receive canonization for lack of interest in the right quarter. Nevertheless, those among them who were not quite so pious as they should have been, trusting that the matter might be more easily arranged in heaven than in Rome, had frankly offered up their prayers for the deceased to God himself, in default of the Pope. The majority, however, had contented themselves with holding Rolande’s memory sacred, and converting her rags into relics. The town, for its part, had founded, in pursuance of the lady’s intention, a public breviary, which had been permanently fixed beside the window of the cell, that the passer-by might halt there for a moment, if only to pray; that prayer might suggest almsgiving, and thus the poor recluses, inheriting the stone cell of Mme. Rolande, be saved from perishing outright of hunger and neglect. 
These living tombs were by no means rare in the cities of the Middle Ages. Not infrequently, in the very midst of the busiest street, the most crowded, noisy market-place, under the very hoofs of the horses and wheels of the wagons, you might come upon a vault, a pit, a walled and grated cell, out of the depths of which a human being, voluntarily dedicated to some everlasting lamentation, or some great expiation, offered up prayer unceasingly day and night. But all the reflections that such a strange spectacle would awaken in us at the present day; that horrible cell, a sort of intermediate link between the dwelling and the grave, between the cemetery and the city; that living being cut off from the communion of mankind and already numbered with the dead; that lamp consuming its last drop of oil in the darkness; that remnant of life flickering out in the pit; that whisper, that voice, that never-ending prayer encased in stone: that eye already illumined by another sun; that ear inclined attentive to the walls of a tomb; that soul imprisoned in a body, itself a prisoner within that dungeon, and from out that double incarnation of flesh and stone, the perpetual plaint of a soul in agony—nothing of all this reached the apprehension of the crowd. The piety of that day, little given to analyzing or subtle reasoning, did not regard a religious act from so many points of view. It accepted the thing as a whole, honoured, lauded, and, if need be, made a saint of the sacrifice, but did not dwell upon its sufferings nor even greatly pity it. From time to time the charitable world brought some dole to the wretched penitent, peered through the window to see if he yet lived, was ignorant of his name, scarcely knew how many years ago he had begun to die, and to the stranger who questioned them respecting the living skeleton rotting in that cave, they would simply answer: “It is the recluse.” 
This was the way they looked at things in those days, without metaphysics, neither enlarging nor diminishing, with the naked eye. The microscope had not been invented yet for the examination either of material or spiritual objects. 
Examples of this kind of living burial in the heart of the town were, although they excited but little remark, frequently to be met with, as we have said before. In Paris there was a considerable number of these cells of penitence and prayer, and nearly all of them were occupied. It is true the clergy took particular care that they should not be left empty, as that implied lukewarmness in the faithful; so when penitents were not to the fore, lepers were put in instead. Besides the cell at the Grève, already described, there was one at Montfaucon, one at the charnel-house of the Innocents, another, I forget just where—at the Logis-Clichon, I fancy; and others at many different spots, where, in default of monuments, their traces are still to be found in tradition. The University certainly had one; on the hill of Saint-Germain a sort of medi?val Job sat for thirty years, singing the penitential psalms on a dung-heap at the bottom of a dry well, beginning anew as soon as he came to the end, and singing louder in the night-time—magna voce per umbras; and today the antiquary still fancies that he hears his voice as he enters the Rue du Puits-qui-parle: the street of the Talking Well. 
To confine ourselves here to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we confess that it had seldom lacked a tenant—since Mme. Rolande’s death it had rarely been vacant, even for a year or two. Many a woman had t herself up there to weep until death for her parents, her lovers, or her frailties. Parisian flippancy, which will meddle with everything, especially with such as are outside its province, declared that very few widows had been observed among the number. 
After the manner of the period, a Latin legend inscribed upon the wall notified to the lettered wayfarer the pious purpose of the cell. This custom of placing a brief distinguishing motto above the entrance to a building continued down to the middle of the sixteenth century. Thus, in France, over the gateway of the prison belonging to the Manor-house of Tourville, stands, Sileto et spera; in Ireland, under the escutcheon above the great gateway of Fortescue Castle, Forte scutum, salus ducum; and in England, over the principal entrance of the hospitable mansion of the Earls Cowper, Tuum est. For in those days every edifice expressed a special meaning. 
As there was no door to the walled-up cell of the Tour-Roland, they had engraved above the window in great Roman characters the two words: 
TU, ORA1
Whence it came about that the people, whose healthy common sense fails to see the subtle side of things, and cheerfully translates Ludovico Magno by Porte Saint-Denis, had corrupted the words over this dark, damp, gloomy cavity into Trou-aux-rats, or Rat-Holc—a rendering less sublime perhaps than the original; but, on the other hand, decidedly more picturesque. 
______________________
1 Pray thou. 
Chapter 3 - The Story of a Wheaten Cake
At the time at which the events of this story occurred, the cell of the Tour-Roland was occupied, and if the reader desires to know by whom, he has only to listen to the conversation of three worthy gossips, who, at the moment when we attracted his attention to the Rat-Hole, were directing their steps to that very spot, going along the river-side from the Chatelet towards the Place de Grève. 
Two of these women were dressed after the fashion of the good burgher wives of Paris; their fine white gorgets, striped red and blue woollen kirtles, white knitted hose with embroidered clocks, trimly pulled up over their legs, their square-toed shoes of tan-coloured leather with black soles, and above all, their head-dress—a sort of tinsel-covered horn, loaded with ribbons and lace, still worn by the women of Champagne, and the Grenadiers of the Russian imperial guard—proclaimed them to belong to that class of rich tradeswomen who hold the medium between what servants call “a woman” and what they call “a lady.” They wore neither rings nor gold crosses; but it was easy to perceive that this was owing not to poverty, but simply out of fear of the fine incurred by so doing. Their companion’s dress was very much the same; but there was in her appearance and manner an indefinable something which betrayed the wife of the country notary. Her way of wearing her girdle so high above her hips would alone have proved that it was long since she had been in Paris, without mentioning that her gorget was plaited, that she wore knots of ribbon on her shoes, that the stripes of her kirtle ran round instead of down, and a dozen other crimes against the prevailing mode. 
The first two walked with that air peculiar to Parisiennes showing the town to country cousins. The countrywoman held by the hand a chubby little boy, who in his hand held a big wheaten cake—and we regret to have to add that, owing to the inclemency of the weather, he was using his tongue as a pocket-handkerchief. 
The boy let himself be dragged along—non passibus ?quis, as Virgil says—with uneven steps, stumbling every minute, to the great annoyance of his mother. It is true that he looked oftener at the cake than on the ground. Some very serious reason must have prevented him from biting into the cake, for he contented himself with merely gazing at it affectionately. But the mother would have done better to take charge of the tempting morsel herself. It was cruel to make a Tantalus of poor chubby-cheeks. 
Meanwhile, the three “damoiselles” (for the title of “dame” was reserved then for the women of noble birth) were all talking at once. 
“We must hasten, Damoiselle Mahiette,” said the youngest of the three, who was also the fattest, to their country friend. “I fear me we shall be too late. They told us at the Chatelet that he was to be carried to the pillory immediately.” 
“Ah—bah! What are you talking about, Damoiselle Oudarde Musnier?” returned the other Parisienne. “He will be a good two hours on the pillory. We have plenty of time. Have you ever seen anybody pilloried, my dear Mahiette?” 
“Yes,” said Mahiette, “at Reims.” 
“Pooh! what’s your pillory at Reims? A paltry cage where they put nobody but clowns! That’s not worth calling a pillory!” 
“Nobody but clowns!” cried Mahiette. “In the Cloth-Market at Reims! Let me tell you, we have had some very fine criminals there—who had killed father and mother! Clowns indeed! What do you take me for, Gervaise?” 
And there is no doubt the country lady was on the point of flying into a rage for this disparagement of her pillory, but fortunately the discreet Damoiselle Oudarde Musnier turned the conversation in time. 
“By-the-bye, Damoiselle Mahiette, what think you of our Flemish Ambassadors? Have you any as grand at Reims?” 
“I must confess,” answered Mahiette, “that it’s only in Paris you see such Flemings as these.” 
“Did you see among the embassy that great Ambassador who’s a hosier?” asked Oudarde. 
“Yes,” said Mahiette, “he looks like a Saturn.” 
“And that fat one, with a face like a bare paunch,” Gervaise went on; “and the little one, with small, blinking eyes and red eye-lids with half the lashes pulled out like a withered thistle?” 
“But their horses are a treat to look at,” said Oudarde, “all dressed after the fashion of their country!” 
“Ah, my dear,” interrupted country Mahiette, assuming in her turn an air of superiority, “what would you have said then, if you had seen the horses of the Princess and the whole retinue of the King at the coronation at Reims in ’61—twenty-one years ago! Such housings and caparisons! Some of Damascus cloth, fine cloth of gold, and lined with sable fur; others of velvet and ermine; others heavy with goldsmith’s work and great tassels of gold and silver! And the money that it must all have cost! And the beautiful pages riding them!” 
“But for all that,” replied Damoiselle Oudarde dryly, “the Flemings have splendid horses; and yesterday a sumptuous supper was given them by Monsieur the Provost-Merchant at the H?tel-de-Ville, at which sweetmeats, and hippocras, and spices, and the like delicacies, were set before them.” 
“What are you saying, neighbour!” exclaimed Gervaise. 
“Why, it was with the Lord Cardinal, at the Petit-Bourbon, that the Flemings supped.” 
“Not at all! At the H?tel-de-Ville!” 
“No, it wasn’t—it was at the Petit-Bourbon.” 
“I know that it was at the H?tel-de-Ville,” retorted Oudarde sharply, “for the very good reason that Doctor Scourable made them a speech in Latin, with which they were very well satisfied. My husband told me, and he is one of the sworn booksellers.” 
“And I know that it was at the Petit-Bourbon,” responded Gervaise no less warmly, “for I can tell you exactly what my Lord Cardinal’s purveyor set before them: twelve double quarts of hippocras, white, pale, and red; twenty-four boxes of gilded double marchpanes of Lyons; four-and-twenty was torches of two pounds apiece; and six demi-hogsheads of Beaune wine, both white and yellow, the best that could be procured. I hope that’s proof enough! I have it from my husband, who’s Captain of the fifty guards at the Chatelet, who only this morning was making a comparison between the Flemish Ambassadors and those of Prester John and the Emperor of Trebizonde, who came to Paris from Mesopotamia and wore rings in their ears.” 
“So true is it that they supped at the H?tel de Ville,” replied Oudarde, quite unmoved by this string of evidence, “that never was seen so fine a show of meats and delicacies.” 
“I tell you they were served by Le Sec, the town sergeant at the Petit-Bourbon, and that is what has put you wrong.” 
“At the H?tel-de-Ville, I say.” 
“At the Petit-Bourbon, my dear! And what’s more, they lit up the word ’Hope,’ which stands over the great doorway, with fairy glasses.” 
“At the H?tel-de-Ville! At the H?tel-de-Ville!—for Husson le Voir played the flute to them.” 
“I tell you, no!” 
“I tell you, yes!” 
“I tell you, no!” 
The good, fat Oudarde was preparing to reply, and the quarrel would no doubt have ended in the pulling of caps, had not Mahiette suddenly made a diversion by exclaiming: 
“Look at those people gathered over there at the end of the bridge. There’s something in the middle of the crowd that they’re looking at.” 
“True,” said Gervaise. “I hear a tambourine. I think it must be little Esmeralda doing tricks with her goat. Quick, Mahiette, mend your pace and bring your boy! You came to see the sights of Paris. Yesterday you saw the Flemings; to-day you must see the gipsy.” 
“The gipsy!” cried Mahiette, turning round and clutching her boy by the arm. “God preserve us! She might steal my child! Come, Eustache!” 
And she set off running along the quay towards the Grève till she had left the bridge far behind her. Presently the boy, whom she dragged rapidly after her, stumbled and fell on his knees. She drew up breathless, and Oudarde and Gervaise were able to join her. 
“That gipsy steal your child!” said Gervaise. “What a very strange notion!” 
Mahiette shook her head thoughtfully. 
“The strange thing about it,” observed Oudarde, “is that the sachette has the same notion about the Egyptian women.” 
“The sachette?” asked Mahiette. “What is that?” 
“Why, Sister Gudule, to be sure,” answered Oudarde. 
“And who is Sister Gudule?” 
“It is very evident that you have lived in Reims not to know that!” exclaimed Oudarde. “That is the nun in the Rat-Hole.” 
“What?” said Mahiette, “not the poor woman we are taking this cake to?” 
Oudarde nodded. “Yes, the very one. You will see her directly at her window looking on the Grève. She thinks the same as you about these vagabonds of Egypt that go about with their tambourines and fortune-telling. Nobody knows why she has this abhorrence of Zingari and Egyptians. But you, Mahiette, why should you run away at the mere sight of them?” 
“Oh,” answered Mahiette, clasping her boy’s fair head to her bosom, “I would not have that happen to me that happened to Paquette la Chantefleurie.” 
“Oh, you must tell us that story, my good Mahiette,” said Gervaise, taking her arm. 
“Willingly,” returned Mahiette, “but it is very evident that you have lived in Paris not to know it! Well, you must know—but there is no need for us to stand still while I tell you the story—that Paquette la Chantefleurie was a pretty girl of eighteen when I too was one—that is to say, eighteen years ago—and has had only herself to blame if she’s not, like me, a buxom, hearty woman of six-and-thirty, with a husband and a fine boy. But there!—from the time she was fourteen it was too late! I must tell you, then, that she was the daughter of Guybertaut, a boat-minstrel at Reims, the same that played before King Charles VII at his coronation, when he went down our river Vesle from Sillery to Muison, and had Mme. la Pucelle—the Maid of Orleans—in the same boat with him. The old father died when Paquette was quite little, so she had only her mother, who was sister to M. Pradon, a master-brasier and tinsmith in Paris, Rue Parin-Garlin, and who died last year—so you see, she was of good family. The mother was a simple, easy-going creature, unfortunately, and never taught her anything really useful—just a little needlework and toy-making, which did not prevent her growing tall and strong, and remaining very poor. They lived together at Reims, by the river-side, in the Rue de Folle-Peine—mark that!—for I believe that is what brought trouble to Paquette. Well, in ’61—the year of the Coronation of our King Louis XI, whom God preserve!—Paquette was so gay and so fair that she was known far and wide as ’La Chantefleurie’—poor girl! She had pretty teeth, and she was fond of laughing, to show them. Now, a girl who is overfond of laughing is well on the way to tears; pretty teeth are the ruin of pretty eyes—and thus it befell Chantefleurie. She and her mother had a hard struggle to gain a living; they had sunk very low since the father’s death—their needlework brought them in barely six deniers a week, which is not quite two liards. Time was when Guybertaut had got twelve sols parisis at a coronation for a single song! One winter—it was that same year of ’61—the two women had not a log or a fagot, and it was very cold, and this gave Chantefleurie such a beautiful colour in her cheeks that the men all looked after her and she was ruined.—Eustache! just let me see you take a bite out of that cake!—We saw in a moment that she was ruined when one Sunday she came to church with a gold cross on her neck, At fourteen—what do you say to that? The first was the young Vicomte de Cormontreuil, whose castle is about three-quarters of a mile from Reims; then it was Messire Henri de Triancourt, the King’s outrider; then, coming down the scale, Chiart de Beaulion, a man-at-arms; then, still lower, Guery Aubergeon, king’s carver; then Macé de Frépus, barber to Monsieur the Dauphin; then Thévenin le Moine, one of the royal cooks; then, still going down, from the young to the old, from high to low birth, she fell to Guillaume Racine, viol player, and to Thierry de Mer, lamp-maker. After that, poor Chantefleurie, she became all things to all men and had come to her last sou. What think you, damoiselles, at the coronation, in that same year ’61, it was she who made the bed for the chief of the bawdies!—in that same year!” Mahiette sighed and wiped away a tear. 
“But I see nothing so very extraordinary in this story,” said Gervaise, “and there is no word either of Egyptians or children.” 
“Patience,” returned Mahiette; “as for the child, I am just coming to that. In ’66, sixteen years ago this month, on Saint-Paul’s day, Paquette was brought to bed of a little girl. Poor creature, she was overjoyed—she had long craved to have a child. Her mother, foolish woman, who had never done anything but close her eyes to what was going on, her mother was dead. Paquette had no one in the world to love or to love her. For the five years since she had fallen, poor Paquette had been a miserable creature. She was alone, all alone in the world, pointed at, shouted at through the streets, beaten by the sergeants, and jeered at by little ragged boys. Besides, she was already twenty, and twenty means old age for a courtesan. Her frailty now began to bring her in no more than did her needlework formerly: for every line in her face she lost a crown in her pocket. Winter came hard to her again, wood was growing scarce in her fire-place and bread in her cupboard. She could not work, because, by giving way to pleasure she had given way to idleness, and she felt hardships the more because by giving way to idleness she had given way to pleasure. At least, that is how Monsieur the Curé of Saint-Rémy explains why those sort of women feel cold and hunger more than other poor females do when they get old.” 
“Yes,” observed Gervaise, “but about these gipsies?” 
“Wait a moment, Gervaise,” said Oudarde, who was of a less impatient temperament; “what should we have at the end if everything was at the beginning? Go on, Mahiette, I pray you. Alas, poor Chantefleurie!” 
“Well,” Mahiette continued, “so she was very sad and very wretched, and her cheeks grew hollow with her perpetual tears. But in all her shame, her infamy, her loneliness, she felt she would be less ashamed, less infamous, less deserted, if only there was something or somebody in the world she could love, or that would love her. She knew it would have to be a child, for only a child could be ignorant enough for that. This she had come to see after trying to love a robber—the only man who would have anything to do with her—but in a little while she found that even the robber despised her. These light-o’-loves must needs always have a lover or a child to fill their hearts, or they are most unhappy. As she could not get a lover, all her desire turned towards having a child; and, as she had all along been pious, she prayed unceasingly to God to send her one. So God took compassion on her and sent her a little girl. I will. not try to describe to you her joy—it was a passion of tears and kisses and caresses. She suckled it herself, and made swaddling-bands for it out of her coverlet—the only one she had upon her bed, but now she felt neither cold nor hunger. Her beauty came back to her—an old maid makes a young mother—and poor Chantefleurie went back to her old trade and found customers for her wares, and laid out the wages of her sin in swaddling-clothes and bibs and tuckers, lace robes, and little satin caps—without so much as a thought for a new coverlet for herself. 
“Master Eustache, did I not tell you not to eat that cake? —In truth, the little Agnès, that was the child’s name—its baptismal name, for, as to a surname, it was long since Chantefleurie had lost hers—in very truth, the little one was more of a mass of ribbons and broideries than ever a dauphiness of Dauphiny! Among other things, she had a pair of little shoes such as King Louis himself never had the like. Her mother had stitched them and embroidered them herself, bestowing upon them all her art and the ornament that ought more properly to belong to a robe for Our Lady. In good sooth, they were the prettiest little rose-coloured shoes that ever were seen; no longer at most than my thumb, and unless you saw the babe’s little feet come out of them, you never would have believed that they could get in. To be sure the little feet were so small, so pretty, so rosy!—rosier than the satin of the shoes! When you have children of your own, Oudarde, you will know that there is nothing in the world so pretty as those little hands and feet.” 
“I ask nothing better,” said Oudarde with a sigh; “but I must await the good pleasure of M. Andry Musnier.” 
“However,” resumed Mahiette, “pretty feet were not the only beauty that Paquette’s child possessed. I saw her when she was four months old—a chuck!—with eyes bigger than her mouth, and beautiful soft, black hair that curled already. She would have made a fine brunette at sixteen! Her mother loved her more day by day. She hugged and kissed and fondled her, washed her, tricked her out in all her finery, devoured her—one moment half-crazed, the next thanking God for the gift of this babe. But its pretty rosy feet were her chief delight and wonder—a very delirium of joy! She was forever pressing her lips to them, forever marvelling at their smallness. She would put them into the little shoes, take them out again, wonder at them, hold them up to the light; she was sorry even to teach them to take a step or two on her bed, and would gladly have passed the rest of her life on her knees, covering and uncovering those little feet, like those of an Infant Jesus.” 
“The tale is all very well,” said Gervaise, half to herself; “but where is Egypt in all this?” 
“Here,” replied Mahiette. “One day there came to Reims some very outlandish sort of gentry—beggars and vagabonds—wandering about the country, led by their dukes and counts. Their faces were sun-burnt, their hair all curling, and they had silver rings in their ears. The women were even more ill-favoured than the men. Their faces were blacker and always uncovered, their only clothing an old woollen cloth tied over their shoulders, and a sorry rocket under that, and the hair hanging loose like a horse’s tail. The children that scrambled about between their feet would have frightened the monkeys. An excommunicated band! They had come direct from Lower Egypt to Reims by way of Poland. The Pope had confessed them, so they said, and had laid on them the penance of wandering for seven years through the world without ever sleeping in a bed. So they called themselves penitents and stank most horribly. It would seem they had formerly been Saracens, and that is why they believed in Jupiter, and demanded ten livres tournois from all Arch-bishops, Bishops, and Abbots endowed with crosier and mitre. It was a bull of the Pope that got them that. They came to Reims to tell fortunes in the name of the King of Algiers, and the Emperor of Germany. As you may suppose, that was quite enough for them to be forbidden to enter the town. Then the whole band encamped without demur near the Braine gate, upon that mound where there’s a wind-mill, close by the old chalk-pits. And of course all Reims was agog to see them. They looked in your hand, and prophesied most wonderful things—they were quite bold enough to have foretold to Judas that he would be Pope. At the same time, there were ugly stories about them—of stolen children, and cutpurses, and the eating of human flesh. The prudent warned the foolish, and said, ’Go not near them!’ and then went themselves by stealth. Everybody was carried away by it. In sober truth, they told you things to have amazed a Cardinal! The mothers made much of their children after the gipsy women had read in their hands all manner of miracles written in Pagan and in Turkish. One had an Emperor, another a Pope, a third a Captain. Poor Chantefleurie caught the fever of curiosity. She wanted to know what she had got, and whether her pretty little Agnès would not one day be Empress of Armenia or the like. So she carried her to the Egyptians, and the Egyptian women admired the child, fondled it, kissed it with their black mouths, and were lost in wonder over its little hands—alas! to the great joy of its mother. Above all, they were delighted with its pretty feet and pretty shoes. The child was not yet a year old, and was just beginning to prattle a word or two—laughed and crowed at her mother—was fat and round, and had a thousand little gestures of the angels in Paradise. The child was frightened at the black gipsy woman, and cried; but the mother only kissed her the more, and carried her away, overjoyed at the good fortune the prophetess had foretold to her Agnès. She would become a famous beauty—a wonder—a queen. So she returned to her garret in the Rue Folle-Peine, proud to bring back with her a queen. The next day she seized a moment when the child was asleep on her bed—for it always slept with her—left the door ajar, and ran to tell a neighbour in the Rue de la Séchesserie that the day would come when her daughter Agnès would be served at her table by the King of England and the Duke of Ethiopia, and a hundred other surprises. On her return, hearing no sound as she mounted her stair, she said, ’Good, the child is still asleep.’ She found the door more open than she had left it; she entered, and ran to the bed—poor mother!—the child was gone, the place empty. There was no trace left of the child, excepting one of its little shoes. She fled out of the room and down the stairs and began beating her head against the wall, crying: ’My child! Who has my child? Who has taken my child from me?’ The street was empty, the house stood by itself, no one could tell her anything. She hastened through the city, searching every street, running hither and thither the whole day, mad, distraught, terrible to behold, looking in at every door and every window like a wild beast robbed of its young. She was breathless, dishevelled, terrifying, with a flame in her eyes that dried her tears. She stopped the passers-by and cried, ’My child! my child! my pretty little girl! To him who will restore my child to me I will be a servant, the servant of his dog—and he may eat my heart if he will!’ She met Monsieur the Curé of Saint-Rémy, and to him she said: ’Monsieur the Curé, I will dig the earth with my nails, but give me back my child!’ Oudarde, it was heart-rending, and I saw a very hard man, Ma?tre Ponce Lacabre the attorney, shedding tears. Ah, the poor mother! At night she returned to her home. During her absence, a neighbour had seen two Egyptian women steal up her stair with a bundle in their arms, then come down again after closing the door, and hasten away. Afterward she had heard something that sounded like a child’s cry from Paquette’s room. The mother broke into mad laughter, sprang up the stair as if she had wings, burst open the door like an explosion of artillery, and entered the room. Horrible to relate, Oudarde, instead of her sweet little Agnès, so rosy and fresh, a gift from Heaven, a sort of hideous little monster, crippled, one-eyed, all awry, was crawling and whimpering on the floor. She covered her eyes in horror. 
“ ’Ah!’ she cried, ’can these sorceresses have changed my little girl into this frightful beast?’ They removed the misshapen lump as quickly as possible out of her sight; it would have driven her mad. It was a boy, the monstrous offspring of some Egyptian woman and the Foul Fiend, about four years old, and speaking a language like no human tongue, impossible to understand. La Chantefleurie had thrown herself upon the little shoe, all that remained to her of her heart’s delight, and lay so long motionless, without a word or a breath, that we thought she was dead. But suddenly her whole body began to tremble, and she fell to covering her relic with frantic kisses, sobbing the while as if her heart would break. I do assure you, we were all weeping with her as she cried: ’Oh, my little girl! my pretty little girl! where art thou?’ It rent the very soul to hear her; I weep now when I think of it. Our children, look you, are the very marrow of our bones.—My poor little Eustache, thou too art so beautiful!—Could you but know how clever he is! It was but yesterday he said to me, ’Mother, I want to be a soldier.’—Oh, my Eustache, what if I were to lose thee!—Well, of a sudden, La Chantefleurie sprang to her feet and ran through the streets of the town crying: ’To the camp of the Egyptians! to the camp of the Egyptians! Sergeants, to burn the witches!’ The Egyptians were gone—deep night had fallen, and they could not be pursued. Next day, two leagues from Reims, on a heath between Gueux and Tilloy, were found the remains of a great fire, some ribbons that had belonged to Paquette’s child, some drops of blood, and goat’s dung. The night just past had been that of Saturday. Impossible to doubt that the gipsies had kept their Sabbath on this heath, and had devoured the infant in company with Beelzebub, as is the custom among the Mahometans. When La Chantefleurie heard of these horrible things she shed no tear, her lips moved as if to speak, but no words came. On the morrow her hair was gray, and the day after that she had disappeared.” 
“A terrible story indeed,” said Oudarde, “and one that would draw tears from a Burgundian!” 
“I do not wonder now,” added Gervaise, “that the fear of the Egyptians should pursue you.” 
“And you were the better advised,” said Oudarde, “in running away with your Eustache, seeing that these, too, are Egyptians from Poland.” 
“No,” said Gervaise, “it is said they come from Spain and Catalonia.” 
“Catalonia? Well, that may be,” answered Oudarde. “Polognia, Catalonia, Valonia—I always confound those three provinces. The sure thing is that they’re Egyptians.” 
“And as sure,” added Gervaise, “that they’ve teeth long enough to eat little children. And I would not be surprised if La Esmeralda did a little of that eating, for all she purses up her mouth so small. That white goat of hers knows too many cunning tricks that there should not be some devilry behind it.” 
Mahiette pursued her way in silence, sunk in that kind of reverie which is in some sort a prolongation of any pitiful tale, and does not cease till it has spread its emotion, wave upon wave, to the innermost recesses of the heart. 
“And was it never known what became of La Chantefleurie?” asked Gervaise. But Mahiette made no reply till Gervaise, repeating her question, and shaking her by the arm, seemed to awaken her from her musings. 
“What became of Chantefleurie?” said she, mechanically repeating the words just fresh in her ear; then, with an effort, to recall her attention to their sense: “Ah,” she added quickly, “that was never known.” 
After a pause she went on: “Some said they had seen her leave the town in the dusk by the Fléchembault gate; others, at the break of day by the old Basée gate. A poor man found her gold cross hung upon the stone cross in the field where the fair is held. It was that trinket that had ruined her in ’61—a gift from the handsome Vicomte de Cormontreuil, her first lover. Paquette would never part with it, even in her greatest poverty—she clung to it as to her life. So, seeing this cross abandoned, we all thought she must be dead. Nevertheless, some people at the Cabaret des Vautes came forward and protested they had seen her pass by on the road to Paris, walking barefoot over the rough stones. But then she must have gone out by the Vesle gate, and that does not agree with the rest. Or rather, I incline to the belief that she did leave by the Vesle gate, but to go out of the world.” 
“I do not understand,” said Gervaise. 
“The Vesle,” replied Mahiette with a mournful sigh, “is the river.” 
“Alas, poor Chantefleurie!” said Oudarde with a dder, “drowned?” 
“Drowned!” said Mahiette. “And who could have foretold to the good father Guybertaut, when he was passing down the stream under the Tinqueux bridge, singing in his boat, that one day his dear little Paquette should pass under that same bridge, but without either boat or song!” 
“And the little shoe?” asked Gervaise. 
“Vanished with the mother.” 
“Poor little shoe!” sighed Oudarde; fat, tender-hearted creature, she would have been very well pleased to go on sighing in company with Mahiette; but Gervaise, of a more inquiring disposition, was not at an end of her questions. 
“And the little monster?” she suddenly said to Mahiette. 
“What monster?” 
“The little gipsy monster left by the black witches in the place of Chantefleurie’s little girl. What was done with it? I trust you had it drowned?” 
“No,” answered Mahiette, “we did not.” 
“What? burned, then? I’ faith, a better way for a witch’s spawn!” 
“Neither drowned nor burned, Gervaise. His Lordship the archbishop took pity on the child of Egypt, exorcised it, blessed it, carefully cast the devil out of its body, and then sent it to Paris to be exposed as a foundling on the wooden bed in front of Notre-Dame.” 
“Ah, these bishops,” grumbled Gervaise; “because they are learned, forsooth, they can never do anything like other folks! Think of it, Oudarde—to put the devil among the foundlings! for of course the little monster was the devil. Well, Mahiette, and what did they do with him in Paris? I’ll answer for it that no charitable person would have it.” 
“I know not,” answered the lady of Reims. “It was just at the time when my husband purchased the office of clerk to the Court of Justice at Beru, two leagues distant from the city, and we thought no further of the story, particularly that just in front of Beru are the two little hills of Cernay, which hide the towers of the Cathedral from view.” 
Meanwhile, the three worthy burgher wives had reached the Place de Grève. Absorbed in conversation, however, they had passed the public breviary of the Tour-Roland without noticing it, and were directing their steps mechanically towards the pillory round which the crowd increased from moment to moment. It is possible that the sight which at that instant drew all eyes towards it would have completely driven the Rat-Hole and the pious halt they intended making there from their minds, had not fat, six-year-old Eustache, dragging at Mahiette’s side, recalled it to them suddenly. 
“Mother,” said he, as if some instinct apprised him that they had left the Rat-Hole behind, “now may I eat the cake?” 
Had Eustache been more astute, that is to say, less greedy, he would have waited, and not till they had returned to the University, to Maitre Andry Musnier’s house in the Rue Madame-la-Valence, and he had put the two arms of the Seine and the five bridges of the city between the Rat-Hole and the cake, would he have hazarded this question. 
Imprudent though the question was on Eustache’s part, it recalled his mother to her charitable purpose. 
“That reminds me,” exclaimed she, “we were forgetting the nun! Show me this Rat-Hole of yours, that I may give her the cake.” 
“Right gladly,” said Oudarde; “it will be a charity.” 
This was quite out of Eustache’s reckoning. 
“It’s my cake!” said he, drawing up first one shoulder and then the other till they touched his ears—a sign, in such cases, of supreme dissatisfaction. 
The three women retraced their steps and presently reached the Tour-Roland. 
Said Oudarde to the other two: “We must not all look into the cell at once, lest we frighten the recluse. Do you two make as if you were reading Dominus in the breviary, while I peep in at the window. The sachette knows me somewhat. I will give you a sign when you may come.” 
Accordingly, she went alone to the window. As her gaze penetrated the dim interior, profound pity overspread her countenance, and her frank and wholesome face changed as suddenly in expression and hue as if it had passed out of the sunshine into moonlight. Her eyes moistened and her lips contracted as before an outbreak of tears. The next moment she laid her finger on her lips and signed to Mahiette to come and look. 
Mahiette advanced, tremulous, silent, on tip-toe, as one approaching a death-bed. 
It was, in truth, a sorrowful spectacle which presented itself to the eyes of the two women, as they gazed, motionless and breathless, through the barred aperture of the Rat-Hole. 
The cell was small, wider than it was deep, with a vaulted, Gothic ceiling, giving it much the aspect of the inside of a bishop’s mitre. Upon the bare flag-stones which formed its floor, in a corner a woman was seated, or rather crouching, her chin resting on her knees, which her tightly clasped arms pressed close against her breast. Cowering together thus, clothed in a brown sack which enveloped her entirely in its large folds, her long, gray hair thrown forward and falling over her face along her sides and down to her feet, she seemed, at the first glance, but a shapeless heap against the gloomy background of the cell, a dark triangle which the daylight struggling through the window divided sharply into two halves, one light, the other dark—one of those spectres, half light, half shade, such as one sees in dreams, or in one of Goya’s extraordinary works—pale, motionless, sinister, crouching on a tomb or leaning against the bars of a prison. You could not say definitely that it was a woman, a man, a living being of any sort; it was a figure, a vision in which the real and the imaginary were interwoven like light and shadow. Beneath the hair that fell all about it to the ground, you could just distinguish the severe outline of an emaciated face, just catch a glimpse under the edge of the garment of the extremity of a bare foot, clinging cramped and rigid to the frozen stones. The little of human form discernible under that penitential covering sent a dder through the beholder. 
This figure, which might have been permanently fixed to the stone floor, seemed wholly without motion, thought, or breath. In that thin covering of sackcloth, in January, lying on the bare stones, without a fire, in the shadow of a cell whose oblique loophole admitted only the northeast wind, but never the sunshine, she seemed not to suffer, not even to feel. You would have thought she had turned to stone with the dungeon, to ice with the season. Her hands were clasped, her eyes fixed; at the first glance you took her for a spectre; at the second, for a statue. 
However, at intervals, her livid lips parted with a breath and quivered, but the movement was as dead and mechanical as leaves separated by the breeze; while from those dull eyes came a look, ineffable, deep, grief-stricken, unwavering, immutably fixed on a corner of the cell which was not visible from without; a gaze which seemed to concentrate all the gloomy thoughts of that agonized soul upon some mysterious object. 
Such was the being who, from her habitation, was called the recluse, and from her sackcloth garment, the sachette. 
The three women—for Gervaise had joined Mahiette and Oudarde—looked through the window, and though their heads intercepted the feeble light of the cell, its miserable tenant seemed unaware of their scrutiny. 
“Let us not disturb her,” whispered Oudarde; “she is in one of her ecstasies, she is praying.” 
Meanwhile Mahiette gazed in ever-increasing earnestness upon that wan and withered face and that dishevelled head, and her eyes filled with tears. “That would indeed be strange!” she murmured. 
She pushed her head through the cross-bars of the window, and succeeded in obtaining a glimpse into that corner of the cell upon which the unfortunate woman’s eyes were immovably fixed. When she withdrew her head, her face was bathed in tears. 
“What do you call that woman?” she asked of Oudarde. 
“We call her Sister Gudule,” was the reply. 
“And I,” said Mahiette, “I call her Paquette la Chantefleurie!” 
Then, with her finger on her lips, she signed to the amazed Oudarde to look through the bars of the window in her turn. Oudarde did so, and saw in that corner, upon which the eye of the recluse was fixed in gloomy trance, a little shoe of rose-coloured satin covered with gold and silver spangles. Gervaise took her turn after Oudarde, after which the three women gazing upon the unhappy mother mingled their tears of distress and compassion. 
But neither their scrutiny nor their weeping had stirred the recluse. Her hands remained tightly locked, her lips silent, her eyes fixed, and to any one who knew her story that little shoe thus gazed at was a heart-breaking sight. 
None of the three women had uttered a word; they dared not speak, not even in a whisper. This deep silence, this profound grief, this abstraction, in which all things were forgotten save that one, affected them like the sight of the High Altar at Easter or at Christmastide. A sense of being in some holy place came upon them; they were ready to fall on their knees. 
At length Gervaise, the most inquiring of the three, and therefore the least sensitive, endeavoured to get speech of the recluse. “Sister Gudule! Sister!” she called repeatedly, raising her voice louder each time. 
The recluse never stirred. Not a word, not a glance, not a breath, not a sign of life. 
Oudarde, in a softer and more caressing tone, tried in her turn. “Sister!” she called; “Sister Gudule!” 
The same silence, the same immobility. 
“A strange woman indeed!” cried Gervaise; “no bombard would make her move.” 
“Perhaps she is deaf,” suggested Oudarde. 
“Or blind,” added Gervaise. 
“Perhaps she is dead,” said Mahiette. In truth, if the soul had not actually quitted that inert, motionless, lethargic body, at least it had withdrawn itself to such inaccessible depths that the perceptions of the external organs were powerless to reach it. 
“There remains nothing for us to do, then,” said Oudarde, “but to leave the cake on the ledge of the window. But then, some boy will be sure to take it away. What can we do to arouse her?” 
Eustache, whose attention up till now had been distracted by the passing of a little cart drawn by a great dog, now noticed that his three companions were looking at something through the window above him, and, seized in his turn with curiosity, he mounted upon a stone, stood on tip-toe, and stretched up his round, rosy face to the hole, crying, ”Mother, let me see too!” 
At the sound of the child’s clear, fresh, ringing voice the recluse started violently. She turned her head with the sharp and sudden motion of a steel spring, the two long, fleshless hands drew aside the veil of hair from her brow, and she fixed upon the child a pair of bewildered and despairing eyes. 
It was but a glance. “Oh, my God!” she cried, suddenly burying her face in her knees, and it seemed as if her hoarse voice tore her breast in passing, ”in pity do not Show me those of others!” 
“Good-morrow, dame,” said the child soberly. 
The shock had awakened the recluse from her trance. A long shiver ran through her from head to foot, her teeth chattered, she half raised her head, and pressing her arms to her sides, she took her feet in her hands as if to warm them. 
“Oh, the bitter cold!” she murmured. 
“Poor soul!” said Oudarde in deepest pity, “will you have a little fire?” 
She shook her head in token of refusal. 
“Then,” Oudarde went on, holding out a flask to her, “here is hippocras; that will warm you -- drink.” 
She shook her head again and looked fixedly at Oudarde. “Water,” she said. 
“No, sister,” Oudarde insisted, ”that is no drink for a January day. You must have a little hippocras, and eat this wheaten cake we have baked for you.” 
She pushed away the cake Mahiette held out to her, and said, “Some black bread.” 
“Come,” said Gervaise, seized with charity in her turn, and taking off her woollen cloak, “here is a cloak something warmer than yours. Put it round your shoulders.” 
But she refused this as she had done the flask and the cake. “A sack,” she answered. 
“But you must have something to show that yesterday was a holiday!” urged the good Oudarde. 
“I know it well,” answered the recluse; “these two days I have had no water in my pitcher.” 
After a moment’s silence she continued, “It is a holiday, so they forget me. They do well. Why should the world think of me, who think not of it? Cold ashes to a dead brand!” 
And as if exhausted by having said thus much, she let her head fall again upon her knees. The simple-minded, compassionate Oudarde gathering from these last words that the poor woman was still lamenting at the cold, said once more: 
“Then will you not have some fire?” 
“Fire!” answered the woman in a strange tone, “and will you make a fire for the poor little one that has been under the ground these fifteen years?” 
She trembled in every limb, her voice shook, her eyes gleamed, she had risen to her knees. Suddenly she stretched out a thin and bloodless hand and pointed to the child, who gazed at her round-eyed and wondering. “Take away that child,” she cried, “the Egyptian is coming by!” 
Then she fell on her face on the ground, her forehead striking the floor with the sound of stone upon stone. The three women thought her dead; but a moment afterward she stirred, and they saw her drag herself on her hands and knees to the corner where the little shoe lay. At this they dared look no longer; they saw her not, but they heard the sound of a tempest of sighs and kisses, mingled with heart-rending cries and dull blows as of a head being struck against a wall; then, after one of these blows, so violent that they all three recoiled in horror, deep silence. 
“Can she have killed herself?” asked Gervaise, venturing her head through the bars. “Sister! Sister Gudule!” 
“Sister Gudule!” echoed Oudarde. 
“Alas, she does not move!” cried Gervaise; “can she be dead? Gudule! Gudule!” 
Mahiette, whom deep emotion had rendered speechless, now made an effort. “Wait a moment,” said she; then going close to the window—“Paquette!” she cried—“Paquette la Chantefleurie!” 
A child blowing unsuspiciously on the half-lighted match of a petard, causing it suddenly to explode in his face, would not be more appalled than Mahiette at the effect of this name, thus unexpectedly launched into Sister Gudule’s cell. 
The recluse shook in every limb, then, rising to her feet, she sprang at the loophole with eyes so blazing that the three women and the child all fell back to the very edge of the quay. 
Meanwhile the terrible face of the recluse remained close to the grating. “Oh! oh!” she cried, with a horrible laugh, “it is the Egyptian woman calling me!” 
At that moment a scene which was taking place on the pillory caught her haggard eye. Her brow contracted with horror, she stretched her two skeleton arms through the cross-bars, and cried in a voice like the rattle in a dying throat, “’Tis thou again, daughter of Egypt! ’Tis thou calling me, stealer of children! Accursed be thou forever—accursed! accursed! accursed!” 
Chapter 4 - A Tear for a Drop of Water
The concluding words of the foregoing chapter may be described as the point of junction of two scenes which, till that moment, had been running parallel, each on its own particular stage; the one—which we have just been following—at the Rat-Hole; the other—now to be described—on the pillory. The former had been witnessed only by the three women with whom the reader has just been made acquainted; the latter had for audience the whole crowd which we saw gathering in the Place de Grève round the pillory and the gibbet. 
This crowd, in whom the sight of the four sergeants stationed since nine in the morning at the four corners of the pillory had roused the pleasing expectation of a penal exhibition of some sort—not, perhaps, a hanging, but a flogging, a cutting off of ears or the like—this crowd had increased so rapidly that the four mounted men, finding themselves too closely pressed, had more than once been under the necessity of “tightening” it, as they called it then, by great lashes of their whips and their horses’ heels. 
The populace, well accustomed to waiting for public executions, manifested but little impatience. They amused themselves by looking at the pillory, a very simple structure, consisting of a hollow cube of masonry some ten feet in height. A steep flight of steps of unhewn stone—called par excellence the ladder—led to the top platform, on which lay horizontally a wheel of stout oak. To this wheel the victim was bound kneeling and with his hands pinioned behind him; a shaft of timber, set in motion by a windlass concealed in the interior of the structure, caused the wheel to rotate horizontally, thus presenting the face of the culprit to every point of the Place in succession. This was called “turning” the criminal. 
It will be seen from the description that the pillory of the Grève was far from possessing the many attractions of that at the Halles. Here was nothing architectural, nothing monumental—no roof embellished with an iron cross, no octagon lantern tower, no slender pilasters blossoming out against the edge of the roof into acanthus-leafed and flowery capitals, no fantastic, dragon-headed gargoyles, no carved wood-work, no delicate sculpture cut deeply into the stone. 
One had to be content with the four rough-hewn sides of stone and an ugly stone gibbet, mean and bare, at the side of it. The show would have been a poor one to the amateur of Gothic architecture, but truly nobody could be more indifferent in the matter of architecture than the good burghers of the Middle Ages; they cared not a jot for the beauty of a pillory. 
At last the culprit arrived, tied to a cart’s tail, and as soon as he was hoisted on to the platform and, bound with cords and straps to the wheel, was plainly visible from every point of the Place, a prodigious hooting mingled with laughter and acclamations burst from the assembled crowd. They had recognised Quasimodo. 
It was indeed he. Strange turn of fortune’s wheel!—to be pilloried on the same spot on which, but the day before, he had been saluted, acclaimed Pope and Prince of Fools, and counted in his train the Duke of Egypt, the King of Tunis, and the Emperor of Galilee. One thing, however, is certain, there was no mind in that crowd, not even his own, though in turn the victor and the vanquished, that thought of drawing this parallel. Gringoire and his philosophy were lacking at this spectacle. 
Presently Michel Noiret, appointed trumpeter to our lord the King, after imposing silence on the people, made proclamation of the sentence, pursuant to the ordinance and command of the Lord Provost. He then fell back behind the cart with his men. 
Quasimodo, quite impassive, never stirred a muscle. All resistance was impossible to him by reason of what, in the parlance of the old criminal law, was described as “the strength and firmness of the bonds”—in other words, the cords and chains probably cut into his flesh. This tradition of the dungeon and the galleys has been handed down to us and carefully preserved among us civilized, tender-hearted, humane people in the shape of the manacles—not forgetting the bagnio and the guillotine, of course. 
Quasimodo had passively let himself be led, thrust, carried, hoisted up, bound and rebound. Nothing was to be discovered in his face but the bewilderment of the savage or the idiot. He was known to be deaf; he might also have been blind. 
They thrust him on to his knees on the wheel, they stripped him to the waist; he made no resistance. They bound him down with a fresh arrangement of cords and leathern thongs; he let them bind and strap him. Only from time to time he breathed heavily, like a calf whose head swings and bumps over the edge of a butcher’s cart. 
“The blockhead,” said Jehan Frollo of the Mill to his friend Robin Poussepain (for the two scholars had followed the culprit, as in duty bound), “he knows no more what it’s all about than a bumble-bee t in a box!” 
There was a great burst of laughter from the crowd when, stripped naked to their view, they caught sight of Quasimodo’s hump, his camel’s breast, his brawny, hairy shoulders. During the merriment a man in the livery of the Town, short of stature and of burly make, ascended to the platform and stationed himself beside the culprit. His name was quickly circulated among the spectators. It was Master Pierrat Torterue, official torturer to the Chatelet. 
He first proceeded to deposit on a corner of the pillory a black hour-glass, the upper cup of which was filled with red sand, which ran into the lower receptacle; he then divested himself of his party-coloured doublet, and dangling from his right hand there appeared a scourge with long, slender, white thongs—shining, knotted, interlaced—and armed with metal claws. With his left hand he carelessly drew the shirt-sleeve up his right arm as high as the shoulder. 
At this Jehan Frollo, lifting his curly, fair head above the crowd (for which purpose he had mounted on the shoulders of Robin Poussepain), shouted: “Walk up, walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and see them scourge Ma?tre Quasimodo, bell-ringer to my brother the reverend archdeacon of Josas, a rare specimen of Oriental architecture, with a domed back, and twisted columns for legs!” 
And the crowd roared again, especially the young people. 
The torturer now stamped his foot; the wheel began to move. Quasimodo swayed under his bonds, and the amazement suddenly depicted on that misshapen countenance gave a fresh impulse to the peals of laughter round about. 
Suddenly, at the moment when the wheel in its rotation presented to Master Pierrat Quasimodo’s enormous back, the torturer raised his arm, the thongs hissed shrilly through the air, like a handful of vipers, and fell with fury on the shoulders of the hapless wretch. 
Quasimodo recoiled as if suddenly startled out of sleep. Now he began to understand. He writhed in his bonds, the muscles of his face contracted violently in surprise and pain, but not a sound escaped him. He only rolled his head from side to side, like a bull stung in the flank by a gadfly. 
A second stroke followed the first, then a third, and another, and another. The wheel ceased not to turn, nor the lashes to rain down. Soon the blood began to flow; it trickled in a thousand streams over the dark shoulders of the hunchback, and the keen thongs, as they swung round in the air, scattered it in showers over the multitude. 
Quasimodo had resumed, in appearance at least, his former impassibility. At first he had striven, silently and without any great external movement, to burst his bonds. His eye kindled, his muscles contracted, his limbs gathered themselves up. The effort was powerful, strenuous, desperate, and the cords and straps were strained to their utmost tension; but the seasoned bonds of the provostry held. They cracked, but that was all. Quasimodo desisted, exhausted by the effort, and the stupefaction on his face was succeeded by an expression of bitter and hopeless discouragement. He closed his single eye, dropped his head upon his breast, and gave no further sign of life. 
Thenceforward he did not stir; nothing could wring a movement from him—neither the blood, that did not cease to flow, nor the strokes which fell with redoubled fury, nor the violence of the torturer, who had worked himself into a state of frenzy, nor the shrill and strident whistle of the scourge. 
At length an usher of the Chatelet, clad in black, mounted on a black horse, and stationed at the foot of the ladder since the beginning of the chastisement, pointed with his ebony staff to the hour-glass. The torturer held his hand, the wheel stopped. Quasimodo slowly reopened his eye. 
The scourging was over. Two assistants of the torturer bathed the lacerated shoulders of the culprit, applied to them some kind of unguent which immediately closed the wounds, and threw over his back a yellow cloth shaped like a chasuble; Pierrat Torterue meanwhile letting the blood drain from the lashes of his scourge in great drops on to the ground. 
But all was not yet over for poor Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour on the pillory which Ma?tre Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to the sentence of Messire Robert d’Estouteville; and all merely to prove the truth of John of Cumenes’s ancient physiological and psychological jeu de mots: Surdus absurdus. 
They accordingly turned the hour-glass, and left the hunch-back bound to the wheel, that justice might run its course to the end. 
The people—particularly in the Middle Ages—are to society what the child is in the family; and as long as they are allowed to remain at that primitive stage of ignorance, of moral and intellectual nonage, it may be said of them as of childhood—“It is an age that knows not pity.” 
We have already shown that Quasimodo was universally hated—for more than one good reason, it must be admitted—for there was hardly an individual among the crowd of spectators but had or thought he had some cause of complaint against the malevolent hunchback of Notre-Dame. All had rejoiced to see him make his appearance on the pillory; and the severe punishment he had just undergone, and the pitiable plight in which it had left him, so far from softening the hearts of the populace, had rendered their hatred more malicious by pointing it with the sting of merriment. 
Accordingly, “public vengeance”—vindicte publique, as the jargon of the law courts still has it—being satisfied, a thousand private revenges now had their turn. Here, as in the great Hall, the women were most in evidence. Every one of them had some grudge against him—some for his wicked deeds, others for his ugly face—and the latter were the most incensed of the two. 
“Oh, image of the Antichrist!” cried one. 
“Thou rider on the broomstick!” screamed another. 
“Oh, the fine tragical grimace!” yelled a third, “and that would have made him Pope of Fools if to-day had been yesterday.” 
“Good!” chimed in an old woman, “this is the pillory grin. When are we going to see him grin through a noose?” 
“When shall we see thee bonneted by thy great bell and driven a hundred feet underground, thrice-cursed bell-ringer?” 
“And to think that this foul fiend should ring the Angelus!” 
“Oh, the misbegotten hunchback! the monster!” 
“To look at him is enough to make a woman miscarry better than any medicines or pharmacy.” 
And the two scholars, Jehan of the Mill and Robin Poussepain, struck in at the pitch of their voices with the refrain of an old popular song: 
“A halter
For the gallows rogue,
A fagot
For the witch’s brat.”
A thousand abusive epithets were hurled at him, with hoots and imprecations and bursts of laughter, and now and then a stone or two. 
Quasimodo was deaf, but he saw very clearly, and the fury of the populace was not less forcibly expressed in their faces than in their words. Besides, the stones that struck him explained the bursts of laughter. 
At first he bore it well enough. But, by degrees, the patience that had remained inflexible under the scourge of the torturer relaxed and broke down under the insect stings. The Asturian bull that bears unmoved the attack of the picadors is exasperated by the dogs and banderillas. 
Slowly he cast a look of menace over the crowd; but, bound hand and foot as he was, his glance was impotent to drive away these flies that stung his wounds. He shook himself in his toils, and his furious struggles made the old wheel of the pillory creak upon its timbers; all of which merely served to increase the hooting and derision. 
Then the poor wretch, finding himself unable to burst his fetters, became quiet again; only at intervals a sigh of rage burst from his tortured breast. No flush of shame dyed that face. He was too far removed from social convention, too near a state of nature, to know what shame was. In any case, at that degree of deformity, is a sense of infamy possible? But resentment, hatred, and despair slowly spread a cloud over that hideous countenance, growing ever more gloomy, ever more charged with electricity, which flashed in a thousand lightnings from the eye of the Cyclops. 
Nevertheless, the cloud lifted a moment, at the appearance of a mule which passed through the crowd, ridden by a priest. From the moment that he caught sight of the priest, the poor victim’s countenance softened, and the rage that distorted it gave place to a strange soft smile full of ineffable tenderness. 
As the priest approached nearer, this smile deepened, became more distinct, more radiant, as though the poor creature hailed the advent of a saviour. Alas! no sooner was the mule come near enough to the pillory for its rider to recognise the person of the culprit, than the priest cast down his eyes, turned his steed abruptly, and hastened away, as if anxious to escape any humiliating appeal, and not desirous of being recognised and greeted by a poor devil in such a position. 
This priest was the Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo. 
And now the cloud fell thicker and darker than before over the face of Quasimodo. The smile still lingered for a while, but it was bitter, disheartened, unutterably sad. 
Time was passing: he had been there for at least an hour and a half, lacerated, abused, mocked, and well-nigh stoned to death. 
Suddenly he renewed his struggles against his bonds with such desperation that the old structure on which he was fixed rocked beneath him. Then, breaking the silence he had obstinately preserved, he cried aloud in a hoarse and furious voice, more like the cry of a dog than a human being, and that rang above the hooting and the shouts, “Water!” 
This cry of distress, far from moving them to compassion, only added to the amusement of the populace gathered round the pillory, who, it must be admitted, taking them in a mass, were scarcely less cruel and brutal than that debased tribe of vagabonds whom we have already introduced to the reader. Not a voice was raised around the unhappy victim save in mockery of his thirst. Undoubtedly his appearance at that moment—with his purple, streaming face, his eye bloodshot and distraught, the foam of rage and pain upon his lips, his lolling tongue—made him an object rather of repulsion than of pity; but we are bound to say that had there even been among the crowd some kind, charitable soul tempted to carry a cup of water to that poor wretch in agony, there hung round the steps of the pillory, in the prejudice of the times, an atmosphere of infamy and shame dire enough to have repelled the Good Samaritan himself. 
At the end of a minute or two Quasimodo cast his despairing glance over the crowd once more, and cried in yet more heart-rending tones, “Water!” 
Renewed laughter on all sides. 
“Drink that!” cried Robin Poussepain, throwing in his face a sponge soaked in the kennel. “Deaf rogue, I am thy debtor.” 
A woman launched a stone at his head—“That shall teach thee to wake us at night with thy accursed ringing.” 
“Ah-ha, my lad,” bawled a cripple, trying to reach him with his crutch, “wilt thou cast spells on us again from the towers of Notre-Dame, I wonder?” 
“Here’s a porringer to drink out of,” said a man, hurling a broken pitcher at his breast. “Tis thou, that only by passing before her, caused my wife to be brought to bed of a child with two heads!” 
“And my cat of a kit with six legs!” screamed an old woman as she flung a tile at him. 
“Water!” gasped Quasimodo for the third time. 
At that moment he saw the crowd part and a young girl in fantastic dress issue from it; she was accompanied by a little white goat with gilded horns, and carried a tambourine in her hand. 
Quasimodo’s eye flashed. It was the gipsy girl he had attempted to carry off the night before, for which piece of daring he felt in some confused way he was being chastised at that very moment; which was not in the least the case, seeing that he was punished only for the misfortune of being deaf and having had a deaf judge. However, he doubted not that she, too, had come to have her revenge and to aim a blow at him like the rest. 
He beheld her rapidly ascend the steps. Rage and vexation choked him; he would have burst the pillory in fragments if he could, and if the flash of his eye had possessed the lightning’s power, the gipsy would have been reduced to ashes before ever she reached the platform. 
Without a word she approached the culprit, who struggled vainly to escape her, and detaching a gourd bottle from her girdle, she raised it gently to those poor parched lips. 
Then from that eye, hitherto so dry and burning, there rolled a great tear which trickled down the uncouth face, so long distorted by despair and pain—the first, maybe, the hapless creature had ever shed. 
But he had forgotten to drink. The gipsy impatiently made her little familiar grimace; then, smiling, held the neck of the gourd to Quasimodo’s tusked mouth. 
He drank in long draughts; he was consumed with thirst. 
When, at last, he had finished, the poor wretch advanced his black lips—no doubt to kiss the fair hands which had just brought him relief; but the girl, mistrusting him perhaps, and remembering the violent attempt of the night before, drew back her hand with the frightened gesture of a child expecting to be bitten by some animal. Whereat the poor, deaf creature fixed upon her a look full of reproach and sadness. 
In any place it would have been a touching spectacle to see a beautiful girl—so fresh, so pure, so kind, and so unprotected—hastening thus to succour so much of misery, of deformity and wickedness. On a pillory, it became sublime. 
The people themselves were overcome by it, and clapped their hands, shouting, “No?l! No?l!” 
It was at this moment that the recluse, through the loophole of her cell, caught sight of the gipsy girl on the steps of the pillory, and launched her sinister imprecation: “Cursed be thou, daughter of Egypt! cursed! cursed!” 
Chapter 5 - The end of the Wheaten Cake
Esmeralda blanched and swayed as she descended the steps of the pillory, the voice of the recluse pursuing her as she went: “Come down! come down! Ah, thou Egyptian thief, thou shalt yet return there again!” 
“The sachette is in one of her tantrums,” murmured the people; but they went no further, for these women were feared, which made them sacred. In those days they were shy of attacking a person who prayed day and night. 
The hour had now arrived for releasing Quasimodo. They unfastened him from the pillory, and the crowd dispersed. 
Near the Grand-Pont, Mahiette, who was going away with her companions, suddenly stopped. “Eustache,” she said, “what hast thou done with the cake?” 
“Mother,” answered the child, “while you were talking to the dame in the hole a great dog came and took a bite of my cake, and so then I too had a bite.” 
“What, sir,” she cried, “you have eaten it all!” 
“Mother, it was the dog. I told him, but he would not listen; then I bit a piece too.” 
“ ’Tis a shocking boy!” said the mother, smiling fondly while she scolded. “Look you, Oudarde, already he eats by himself all the cherries in our little orchard at Charlerange. So his grandfather predicts he will be a captain.—Let me catch you at it again, Monsieur Eustache. Go, greedy lion!” 
BOOK VII
Chapter 1 - Showing the danger of Confiding one’s Secret to a Goat
Several weeks had elapsed. 
It was the beginning of March, and though Du Bartas,1 that classic ancestor of the periphrase, had not yet styled the sun “the Grand Duke of the Candles,” his rays were none the less bright and cheerful. It was one of those beautiful mild days of early spring that draw all Paris out into the squares and promenades as if were a Sunday. On these days of clear air, of warmth, and of serenity there is one hour in particular at which the great door of Notre-Dame is seen at its best. That is at the moment when the sun, already declining in the west, stands almost directly opposite the front of the Cathedral; when his rays, becoming more and more horizontal, slowly retreat from the flag-stones of the Place and creep up the sheer face of the building, making its innumerable embossments stand forth from the shadow, while the great central rose-window flames like a Cyclops’s eye lit up by the glow of a forge. 
It was at this hour. 
Opposite to the lofty Cathedral, now reddened by the setting sun, on the stone balcony over the porch of a handsome Gothic house at the corner formed by the Place and the Rue du Parvis, a group of fair damsels were laughing and talking with a great display of pretty airs and graces. By the length of the veils which fell from the tip of their pearl-encircled pointed coif down to their heels; by the delicacy of the embroidered chemisette which covered the shoulders but permitted a glimpse—according to the engaging fashion of the day—of the swell of the fair young bosom; by the richness of their under-petticoats, more costly than the overdress (exquisite refinement); by the gauze, the silk, the velvet stuffs, and, above all, by the whiteness of their hands, which proclaimed them idle and unemployed, it was easy to divine that they came of noble and wealthy families. They were, in effect, the Damoiselle Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her companions, Diane de Christeuil, Amelotte de Montmichel, Colombe de Gaillefontaine, and the little De Champchevrier—all daughters of good family, gathered together at this moment in the house of the widowed Mme. Alo?se de Gondelaurier, on account of Monseigneur the Lord of Beaujeu and Madame Anne, his wife, who were coming to Paris in April in order to choose the maids-in-waiting for the Dauphiness Margaret when they went to Picardy to receive her from the hands of the Flemings. So all the little landed proprietors for thirty leagues round were eager to procure this honour for their daughters, and many of them had already brought or sent them to Paris. The above-mentioned maidens had been confided by their parents to the discreet and unimpeachable care of Mme. Alo?se de Gondelaurier, the widow of a captain of the King’s archers, and now living in elegant retirement with her only daughter in her mansion in the Place du Parvis, Notre-Dame, at Paris. 
The balcony on which the girls were seated opened out of a room richly hung with tawny-coloured Flanders leather stamped with gold foliage. The beams that ran in parallel lines across the ceiling charmed the eye by their thousand fantastic carvings, painted and gilt. Gorgeous enamels gleamed here and there from the doors of inlaid cabinets; a wild boar’s head in faience crowned a magnificent side-board, the two steps of which proclaimed the mistress of the house to be the wife or widow of a knight banneret. At the further end of the room, in a rich red velvet chair, beside a lofty chimney-piece, blazoned from top to bottom with coats of arms, sat Mme. de Gondelaurier, whose five-and-fifty years were no less distinctly written on her dress than on her face. 
Beside her stood a young man whose native air of breeding was somewhat heavily tinged with vanity and bravado—one of those handsome fellows whom all women are agreed in adoring, let wiseacres and physiognomists shake their heads as they will. This young cavalier wore the brilliant uniform of a captain of the King’s archers, which too closely resembles the costume of Jupiter, which the reader has had an opportunity of admiring at the beginning of this history, for us to inflict on him a second description. 
The damoiselles were seated, some just inside the room, some on the balcony, on cushions of Utrecht velvet with gold corners, or on elaborately carved oak stools. Each of them held on her knees part of a great piece of needlework on which they were all engaged, while a long end of it lay spread over the matting which covered the floor. 
They were talking among themselves with those whispers and stifled bursts of laughter which are the sure signs of a young man’s presence among a party of girls. The young man himself who set all these feminite wiles in motion, appeared but little impressed thereby, and while the pretty creatures vied with one another in their endeavours to attract his attention, he was chiefly occupied in polishing the buckle of his sword-belt with his doeskin glove. 
From time to time the old lady addressed him in a low voice, and he answered as well as might be with a sort of awkward and constrained politeness. From the smiles and significant gestures of Madame Alo?se, and the meaning glances she threw at her daughter, Fleur-de-Lys, as she talked to the captain, it was evident that the conversation turned on some betrothal already accomplished or a marriage in the near future between the young man and the daughter of the house. Also, from the cold and embarrassed air of the officer, it was plainly to be seen than, as far as he was concerned, there was no longer any question of love. His whole demeanour expressed a degree of constraint and ennui such as a modern subaltern would translate in the admirable language of to-day by, “What a beastly bore!” 
The good lady, infatuated like many another mother with her daughter, never noticed the officer’s lack of enthusiasm; but gave herself infinite pains to call his attention in a whisper to the matchless grace with which Fleur-de-Lys used her needle or unwound her silk thread. 
“Look, little cousin,” said she, pulling him by the sleeve and speaking into his ear, “look at her now—now, as she bends.” 
“Quite so,” replied the young man; and he fell back into his former icy and abstracted silence. 
The next moment he had to lean down again to Madame Alo?se. “Have you ever,” said she, “seen a blither and more engaging creature than your intended? She is all lily-white and golden. Those hands, how perfect and accomplished! and that neck, has it not all the ravishing curves of a swan’s? How I envy you at times! and how fortunate you are in being a man, naughty rake that you are! Is not my Fleur-de-Lys beautiful to adoration, and you head over ears in love with her?” 
“Assuredly,” he replied, thinking of something else. 
“Speak to her, then,” said Madame Alo?se, pushing him by the shoulder. “Go and say something to her; you have grown strangely timid.” 
We can assure our readers that timidity was no virtue or fault of the captain. He made an effort, however, to do as he was bid. 
“Fair cousin,” said he, approaching Fleur-de-Lys, “what is the subject of this piece of tapestry you are working at?” 
“Fair cousin,” answered Fleur-de-Lys somewhat pettishly, “I have already informed you three times. It is the grotto of Neptune.” 
It was evident that Fleur-de-Lys saw more plainly than her mother through the cold and absent manner of the captain. He felt the necessity of pursuing the conversation further. 
“And who is to benefit by all this fine Neptunery?”he asked. 
“It is for the Abbey of Saint-Antoine-des-Champs,” answered Fleur-de-Lys, without raising her eyes. 
The captain picked up a corner of the tapestry. “And pray, fair cousin, who may be this big, puffy-cheeked gendarme blowing a trumpet?” 
“That is Triton,” she replied. 
There was still a touch of resentment in the tone of these brief answers, and the young man understood perfectly that it behooved him to whisper in her ear some pretty nothing, some stereotyped gallantry—no matter what. He bent over her accordingly, but his imagination could furnish nothing more tender or personal than: “Why does your mother always wear a gown emblazoned with her heraldic device, as our grandmothers did in the time of Charles VII? Prithee, fair cousin, tell her that is no longer the fashion of the day, and that these hinges and laurel-trees embroidered on her gown make her appear like a walking mantel-piece. Nobody sits on their banner like that nowadays, I do assure you!” 
Fleur-de-Lys raised her fine eyes to him reproachfully. “And is that all you have to assure me of?” she asked in low tones. 
Meanwhile the good Dame Alo?se, overjoyed to see them thus leaning together and whispering, exclaimed as she trifled with the clasps of her book of hours: “Touching scene of love!” 
The captain, more and more embarrassed, returned helplessly to the subject of the tapestry. “I’ faith, a charming piece of work!” he exclaimed. 
At this juncture Colombe de Gaillefontaine, another pink-and-white, golden-haired beauty, dressed in pale blue damask, ventured a shy remark to Fleur-de-Lys, hoping however that the handsome soldier would answer her. 
“Dear Gondelaurier, have you seen the tapestries at the H?tel de la Roche-Guyon?” 
“Is not that where there is a garden belonging to the Linenkeeper of the Louvre?” asked Diane de Christeuil with a laugh; for having beautiful teeth she laughed on all occasions. 
“And where there is a great ancient tower, part of the old wall of Paris?” added Amelotte de Montmichel, a charming, curly-haired, who had a trick of sighing, just as Diane laughed, without any valid reason. 
“My dear Colombe,” said Dame Alo?se, “do you mean the H?tel which belonged to M. de Bacqueville in the reign of King Charles VI? There are, in effect, some superb high-warp tapestries there.” 
“Charles VI—King Charles VI!” muttered the young officer, twirling his mustache. “Heavens! how far back does the old lady’s memory reach?” 
“Superb tapestries!” repeated Mme. de Gondelaurier. “So much so, indeed, that they are accounted absolutely unique.” 
At this moment Berangère de Champchevrier, a slip of a little girl of seven, who had been looking down into the Place through the carved trefoils of the balcony, cried out: “Oh, godmother Fleur-de-Lys, do look at this pretty girl dancing and playing the tambourine in the street in the middle of that ring of people!” 
The penetrating rattle of a tambourine rose up to them from the square. 
“Some gipsy of Bohemia,” said Fleur-de-Lys, turning her head carelessly towards the square. 
“Let us look—let us look!” cried her companions, eagerly running to the balustrade, while she followed more slowly, musing on the coldness of her betrothed. The latter, thankful for this incident, which cut short an embarrassing conversation, returned to the other end of the apartment with the well-contented air of a soldier relieved from duty. 
Yet it was an easy and pleasant service, that of being on duty at the side of the fair Fleur-de-Lys, and time was when he had thought it so. But the captain had gradually wearied of it, and the thought of his approaching marriage grew more distasteful to him every day. Moreover, he was of inconstant disposition, and, we are bound to confess, of somewhat vulgar proclivities. Although of very noble birth, he had with his uniform adopted many of the low habits of the common soldier. The tavern and all that belongs to it delighted him; and he was never at his ease but amid gross language, military gallantries, facile beauties, and easy conquests. Nevertheless, he had received from his family a certain amount of education and polish, but he had too early been allowed to run loose, had been thrust too young into garrison life, and the varnish of polite manner had not been sufficiently thick to withstand the constant friction of the soldier’s harness. Though still visiting her occasionally, from some last remnant of kindly feeling, he felt himself increasingly constrained in the presence of Fleur-de-Lys; partly because by dint of dividing his love so freely on all sides, he had very little left for her; partly because in the presence of these stiff, decorous, and well-bred beauties, he went in constant fear lest his tongue, accustomed to the great oaths of the guard-room, should suddenly get the better of him and rap out some word that would appal them. 
And yet with all this he combined great pretensions to elegance, to sumptuous dress, and noble bearing. Let the reader reconcile these qualities for himself. I am merely the historian. 
He had been standing for some moments, in silence, leaning against the chimney-piece, thinking of something or perhaps of nothing at all, when Fleur-de-Lys suddenly turning round addressed him. After all, it went very much against the poor girl’s heart to keep up any show of coldness towards him. 
“Cousin, did you not tell us of a little gipsy girl you had rescued out of the hands of a band of robbers about two months ago, when you were going the counter-watch at night?” 
“I believe I did, fair cousin,” answered the captain. 
“Well,” she resumed, “perhaps this is the very girl dancing now in the Parvis. Come and see if you recognise her, Cousin Ph?bus. 
A secret desire for reconciliation sounded through this gentle invitation to her side, and in the care she took to call him by his name. Captain Ph?bus de Chateaupers (for it is he whom the reader has had before him since the beginning of this chapter) accordingly slowly approached the balcony. 
“Look,” said Fleur-de-Lys, tenderly laying her hand on his arm, “look at the girl dancing there in the ring. Is that your gipsy?” 
Ph?bus looked. “Yes,” said he, “I know her by her goat.” 
“Oh, what a pretty little goat!” cried Amelotte, clapping her hands delightedly. 
“Are its horns real gold?” asked Berangère. 
Without rising from her seat, Dame Alo?se inquired: “Is that one of the band of Bohemians who arrived last year by the Porte Gibard?” 
“Lady mother,” said Fleur-de-Lys gently, “that gate is now called Porte d’Enfer.” 
Mlle. de Gondelaurier was well aware how much the captain was shocked by her mother’s antiquated modes of expression. Indeed, he muttered with a disdainful laugh: “Porte Gibard! Porte Gibard! That is to give passage to King Charles VI, no doubt!” 
“Godmother!” exclaimed Berangère, whose quick and restless eyes were suddenly attracted to the top of the towers of Notre-Dame. “Who is that man in black up there?” 
All the girls looked up. A man was leaning with his elbows on the topmost parapet of the northern tower which looked towards the Grève. It was a priest—as could be seen by his dress—and they could clearly distinguish his face, which was resting on his two hands. He stood as motionless as a statue, and in his gaze, fixed steadily on the Place beneath him, there was something of the immobility of the kite looking down upon the sparrow’s nest it has just discovered. 
“It is Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas,” said Fleur-de-Lys. 
“You must have good sight to recognise him at this distance,” observed La Gaillefontaine. 
“How he glares at the little dancer!” said Diane de Christeuil. 
“Then let the Egyptian beware,” said Fleur-de-Lys, “for he loves not Egypt.” 
“’Tis a pity he should look at her like that,” added Amelotte de Montmichel, “for she dances most bewitchingly.” 
“Cousin Ph?bus,” said Fleur-de-Lys impulsively, “since you know this gipsy girl, will you not beckon to her to come up here—it will divert us.” 
“Oh, yes!” cried the other girls, clapping their hands gleefully. 
“What a madcap idea!” replied Ph?bus. “Doubtless she has forgotten me, and I do not even know her name. However, as you wish it, mesdamoiselles, I will see what I can do.” And leaning over the balcony he called out, “Little one!” 
The dancing girl was not playing her tambourine at that moment. She turned her head towards the spot from which the voice came, her brilliant eyes caught sight of Ph?bus, and she suddenly stood still. 
“Little one,” repeated the captain, and he motioned to her to come up. 
The girl looked at him again, then blushed as if a flame had risen to her cheeks, and taking her tambourine under her arm, she made her way through the gaping crowd towards the door of the house whence Ph?bus called her, her step slow and uncertain, and with the troubled glance of a bird yielding to the fascination of a serpent. 
A moment later the tapestry was raised, and the gipsy appeared on the threshold of the room, flushed, shy, panting, her great eyes lowered, not daring to advance a step farther. 
Berangère clapped her hands. 
But the dancing girl stood motionless in the doorway. Her sudden appearance produced a curious effect on the group. There is no doubt that a vague and indistinct desire to please the handsome officer animated the whole party, and that the brilliant uniform was the target at which they aimed all their coquettish darts; also, from the time of his being present there had arisen among them a certain covert rivalry, scarcely acknowledged to themselves, but which was none the less constantly revealed in their gestures and in their remarks. Nevertheless, as they all possessed much the same degree of beauty, they fought with the same weapons, and each might reasonably hope for victory. The arrival of the gipsy roughly destroyed this equilibrium. Her beauty was of so rare a quality that the moment she entered the room she seemed to illuminate it with a sort of light peculiar to herself. In this restricted space, in this rich frame of sombre hangings and dark panelling, she was incomparably more beautiful and radiant than in the open square. It was like bringing a torch out of the daylight into the shade. The noble maidens were dazzled by her in spite of themselves. Each one felt that her beauty had in some degree suffered. Consequently they instantly and with one accord changed their line of battle (if we may be allowed the term) without a single word having passed between them. For the instincts of women understand and respond to one another far quicker than the intelligence of men. A common foe stood in their midst; they all felt it, and combined for defence. One drop of wine is sufficient to tinge a whole glass of water; to diffuse a certain amount of ill temper throughout a gathering of pretty women, it is only necessary for one still prettier to arrive upon the scene, especially if there is but one man of he company. 
Thus the gipsy girl’s reception was glacial in its coldness. They looked her up and down, then turned to each other, and all was said; they were confederates. Meanwhile the girl, waiting in vain for them to address her, was so covered with confusion that she dared not raise her eyes. 
The captain was the first to break the silence. “I’ faith,” he said, with his air of fatuous assurance, “a bewitching creature! What say you, fair cousin?” 
This remark, which a more tactful admirer would at least have made in an undertone, was not calculated to allay the feminine jealousy so sharply on the alert in the presence of the gipsy girl. 
Fleur-de-Lys answered her fiancé in an affected tone of contemptuous indifference, “Ah, not amiss.” 
The others put their heads together and whispered. 
At last Madame Alo?se, not the least jealous of the party because she was so for her daughter, accosted the dancer: “Come hither, little one.” 
“Come hither, little one,” repeated, with comical dignity, Berangère, who would have reached about to her elbow. 
The Egyptian advanced towards the noble lady. 
“Pretty one,” said Ph?bus, impressively advancing on his side a step or two towards her, “I know not if I enjoy the supreme felicity of being remembered by you; but—” 
She interrupted him, with a smile and a glance of infinite sweetness—“Oh, yes,” she said. 
“She has a good memory,” observed Fleur-de-Lys. 
“Well,” resumed Ph?bus, “but you fled in a great hurry that evening. Were you frightened of me?” 
“Oh, no,” answered the gipsy. And in the tone of this “Oh, no,” following on the “Oh, yes,” there was an indefinable something which stabbed poor Fleur-de-Lys to the heart. 
“You left in your stead, ma belle,” continued the soldier, whose tongue was loosened now that he spoke to a girl of the streets, “a wry-faced, one-eyed hunchback varlet—the Bishop’s bell-ringer, by what I can hear. They tell me he is an archdeacon’s bastard and a devil by birth. He has a droll name too—Ember Week—Palm Sunday—Shrove Tuesday—something of that kind—some bell-ringing festival name, at any rate. And so he had the assurance to carry you off, as if you were made for church beadles! It was like his impudence. And what the devil did he want with you, this screech-owl, eh?” 
“I do not know,” she answered. 
“Conceive of such insolence! A bell-ringer to carry off a girl, like a vicomte—a clown poaching on a gentleman’s preserves! Unheard-of presumption! For the rest, he paid dearly for it. Master Pierrat Torterue is the roughest groom that ever curried a rascal; and I can tell you, for your satisfaction, that your bell-ringer’s hide got a thorough dressing at his hands.” 
“Poor man!” murmured the gipsy, recalling at these words the scene of the pillory. 
The captain burst out laughing. “Corne de b?uf! your pity is as well-placed as a feather in a sow’s tail! May I have a paunch like a pope, if—” He drew up short. “Crave your pardon, mesdames! I believe I was on the point of forgetting myself.” 
“Fie, sir!” said La Gaillefontaine. 
“He speaks to this creature in her own language,” said Fleur-de-Lys under her breath, her vexation increasing with every moment. Nor was this vexation diminished by seeing the captain delighted with the gipsy girl, but still more with himself, turn on his heel and repeat with blatant and soldier-like gallantry: “A lovely creature, on my soul!” 
“Very barbarously dressed!” observed Diane de Christeuil, showing her white teeth. 
This remark was a flash of light to the others. It showed them where to direct their attack on the gipsy. There being no vulnerable spot in her beauty, they threw themselves upon her dress. 
“That is very true,” said La Montmichel. “Pray, how comest thou to be running thus barenecked about the streets, without either gorget or kerchief?” 
“And a petticoat so short as to fill one with alarm,” added La Gaillefontaine. 
“My girl,” continued Fleur-de-Lys spitefully, “thou wilt certainly be fined for that gold belt.” 
“My poor girl,” said Diane, with a cruel smile, “if thou hadst the decency to wear sleeves on thy arms, they would not be so burned by the sun.” 
It was a sight worthy of a more intelligent spectator than Ph?bus, to watch how these high-born maidens darted their envenomed tongues, and coiled and glided and wound serpent-like about the hapless dancing girl. Smiling and cruel, they pitilessly searched and appraised all her poor artless finery of spangles and tinsel. Then followed the heartless laugh, the cutting irony, humiliations without end. Sarcasm, supercilious praise, and spiteful glances descended on the gipsy girl from every side. One might have judged them to be those high-born Roman ladies who amused themselves by thrusting golden pins into the bosom of a beautiful slave, or graceful greyhounds circling with distended nostrils and flaming eyes round some poor hind of the forest, and only prevented by their master’s eye from devouring it piecemeal. And what was she after all to these high-born damsels but a miserable dancing girl of the streets? They seemed to ignore the fact of her presence altogether, and spoke of her to her face as of something degraded and unclean, though diverting enough to make jest of. 
The Egyptian was not insensible to these petty stings. From time to time a blush of shame burned in her cheek, a flash of anger in her eyes; a disdainful retort seemed to tremble on her lips, and she made the little contemptuous pout with which the reader is familiar. But she remained silent, motionless, her eyes fixed on Ph?bus with a look of resignation infinitely sweet and sad. In this gaze there mingled, too, both joy and tenderness; she seemed to restrain herself for fear of being driven away. 
As for Ph?bus, he laughed and took the gipsy’s part with a mixture of impertinence and pity. 
“Let them talk, child!” he said, jingling his gold spurs. “Doubtless your costume is somewhat strange and extravagant; but when a girl is so charming as you, what does it matter?” 
“Mon Dieu!” cried La Gaillefontaine, drawing up her swan-like neck, with a bitter smile. “It is evident that Messieurs the King’s archers take fire easily at the bright gipsy eyes.” 
“Why not?” said Ph?bus. 
At this rejoinder, uttered carelessly by the captain, as one throws a stone at random without troubling to see where it falls, Colombe began to laugh and Amolette and Diane and Fleur-de-Lys, though a tear rose at the same time to the eye of the latter. 
The gipsy girl, who had dropped her eyes as Colombe and La Gaillefontaine spoke, raised them now all radiant with joy and pride and fixed them again on Ph?bus. At that moment she was dazzlingly beautiful. 
The elder lady, while she observed the scene, felt vaguely incensed without knowing exactly why. 
“Holy Virgin!” she suddenly exclaimed, “what is this rubbing against my legs? Ah, the horrid beast!” 
It was the goat, just arrived in search of its mistress, and which, in hurrying towards her, had got its horns entangled in the voluminous folds of the noble lady’s gown, which always billowed round her wherever she sat. 
This caused a diversion, and the gipsy silently freed the little creature. 
“Ah, it is the little goat with the golden hoofs!” cried Berangère, jumping with joy. 
The gipsy girl crouched on her knees and pressed her cheek fondly against the goat’s sleek head, as if begging its forgiveness for having left it behind. 
At this Diane bent over and whispered in Colombe’s ear: “Ah, how did I not think of it before? This is the gipsy girl with the goat. They say she is a witch, and that her goat performs some truly miraculous tricks.” 
“Very well,” said Colombe; “then let the goat amuse us in its turn, and show us a miracle.” 
Diane and Colombe accordingly addressed the gipsy eagerly. 
“Girl, make thy goat perform a miracle for us.” 
“I do not know what you mean,” answered the gipsy. 
“A miracle—a conjuring trick—a feat of witchcraft, in fact.” 
“I do not understand,” she repeated, and fell to caressing the pretty creature again, murmuring fondly, “Djali! Djali!” 
At that moment Fleur-de-Lys remarked a little embroidered leather bag hanging round the goat’s neck. “What is that?” she asked of the gipsy. 
The gipsy raised her large eyes to her and answered gravely, “That is my secret.” 
Meanwhile the lady of the house had risen. “Come, gipsy girl,” she exclaimed angrily; “if thou and thy goat will not dance for us, what do you here?” 
Without a word the gipsy rose and turned towards the door. But the nearer she approached it, the more reluctant became her step. An irresistible magnet seemed to hold her back. Suddenly she turned her brimming eyes on Ph?bus, and stood still. 
“Vrai Dieu!” cried the captain, “you shall not leave us thus. Come back and dance for us. By-the-bye, sweetheart, how are you called?” 
“Esmeralda,” answered the dancing girl, without taking her eyes off him. 
At this strange name the girls burst into a chorus of laughter. 
“Truly a formidable name for a demoiselle!” sneered Diane. 
“You see now,” said Amelotte, “that she is a sorceress.” 
“Child,” exclaimed Dame Alo?se solemnly, “your parents never drew that name for you out of the baptismal font!” 
For some minutes past Berangère, to whom nobody was paying any attention, had managed to entice the goat into a corner with a piece of marchpane, and immediately they had become the best of friends. The inquisitive child had then detached the little bag from the goat’s neck, opened it, and emptied its contents on to the floor. It was an alphabet, each letter being written separately on a small tablet of wood. No sooner were these toys displayed on the matting than, to the child’s delighted surprise, the goat (of whose miracles this was no doubt one) proceeded to separate certain letters with her golden fore-foot, and by dint of pushing them gently about ranged them in a certain order. In a minute they formed a word, which the goat seemed practised in composing, to judge by the ease with which she accomplished the task. Berangère clasped her hands in admiration. 
“Godmother Fleur-de-Lys,” she cried, “come and see what the goat has done!” 
Fleur-de-Lys ran to look, and recoiled at the sight. The letters disposed upon the floor formed the word, 
P-H-O-E-B-U-S. 
“The goat put that word together?” she asked excitedly 
“Yes, godmother,” answered Berangère. It was impossible to doubt it; the child could not spell. 
“So this is the secret,” thought Fleur-de-Lys. 
By this time the rest of the party had come forward to look—the mother, the girls, the gipsy, the young soldier. 
The Bohemian saw the blunder the goat had involved her in. She turned red and white, and then began to tremble like a guilty creature before the captain, who gazed at her with a smile of satisfaction and astonishment. 
“Ph?bus!” whispered the girls in amazement; “that is the name of the captain!” 
“You have a wonderful memory!” said Fleur-de-Lys to the stupefied gipsy girl. Then, bursting into tears: “Oh,” she sobbed, “she is a sorceress!” While a still more bitter voice whispered in her inmost heart, “She is a rival!” And she swooned in her mother’s arms. 
“My child! my child!” cried the terrined mother. “Begone, diabolical gipsy!” 
In a trice Esmeralda gathered up the unlucky letters, made a sign to Djali, and quitted the room by one door, as they carried Fleur-de-Lys out by another. 
Captain Ph?bus, left alone, hesitated a moment between the two doors—then followed the gipsy girl. 
______________________
1 A popular French poet of the sixteenth century, whose poem on The Divine Week and Works was translated by Joa Sylvester in the reign of James I.
Chapter 2 - Showing that A Priest and A Philosopher are not the same
The priest whom the young girls had remarked leaning over the top of the north tower of the Cathedral and gazing so intently at the gipsy’s dancing, was no other than the Archdeacon Claude Frollo. 
Our readers have not forgotten the mysterious cell which the archdeacon had appropriated to himself in this tower. (By the way, I do not know but what it is the same, the interior of which may be seen to this day through a small square window, opening to the east at about a man’s height from the floor upon the platform from which the towers spring—a mere den now, naked, empty, and falling to decay, the ill-plastered walls of which are decorated here and there, at the present moment, by some hideous yellow engravings of cathedral fronts. I presume that this hole is jointly inhabited by bats and spiders, so that a double war of extermination is being carried on there against the flies.) 
Every day, an hour before sunset, the archdeacon mounted the stair of the tower and t himself up in this cell, where he sometimes spent whole nights. On this day, just as he reached the low door of his retreat and was preparing to insert in the lock the small and intricate key he always carried about with him in the pouch hanging at his side, the jingle of a tambourine and of castanets suddenly smote on his ear, rising up from the Place du Parvis. The cell, as we have said, had but one window looking over the transept roof. Claude Frollo hastily withdrew the key, and in another moment was on the summit of the tower, in that gloomy and intent attitude in which he had been observed by the group of girls. 
There he stood, grave, motionless, absorbed in one object, one thought. All Paris was spread out at his feet, with her thousand turrets, her undulating horizon, her river winding under the bridges, her stream of people flowing to and fro in the streets; with the cloud of smoke rising from her many chimneys; with her chain of crested roofs pressing in ever tightening coils round about Notre-Dame. But in all that great city the Archdeacon beheld but one spot—the Place du Parvis; and in that crowd but one figure—that of the gipsy girl. 
It would have been difficult to analyze the nature of that gaze, or to say whence sprang the flame that blazed in it. His eyes were fixed and yet full of anguish and unrest; and from the profound immobility of his whole body, only faintly agitated now and then by an involuntary tremor, like a tree shaken by the wind; from his rigid arms, more stony than the balustrade on which they leaned, and the petrified smile that distorted his countenance, you would have said that nothing of Claude Frollo was alive save his eyes. 
The gipsy girl was dancing and twirling her tambourine on the tip of her finger, throwing it aloft in the air while she danced the Proven?al saraband; agile, airy, joyous, wholly unconscious of the sinister gaze falling directly on her head. 
The crowd swarmed round her; from time to time, a man tricked out in a long red and yellow coat, went round to keep the circle clear, and then returned to a seat a few paces from the dancer, and took the head of the goat upon his knee. This man appeared to be the companion of the gipsy girl. Claude Frollo, from his elevated position, could not distinguish his features. 
No sooner had the Archdeacon caught sight of this individual, than his attention seemed divided between him and the dancer, and his face became more and more overcast. Suddenly he drew himself up, and a tremor ran through his whole frame. “Who can that man be?” he muttered between his teeth; “I have always seen her alone hitherto.” 
He then vanished under the winding roof of the spiral staircase, and proceeded to descend. As he passed the half-open door of the belfry, he saw something which made him pause. It was Quasimodo, leaning out of an opening in one of the great projecting slate eaves and likewise looking down into the Place, but so profoundly absorbed in contemplation that he was unaware of the passing of his adopted father. His savage eye had a singular expression—a mingled look of fondness and delight. 
“How strange!” murmured Claude. “Can he too be looking at the Egyptian?” He continued his descent, and in a few moments the troubled Archdeacon entered the Place by the door at the bottom of the tower. 
“What has become of the gipsy?” said he, as he mingled with the crowd which the sound of the tambourine had drawn together. 
“I know not,” answered a bystander; “she has just disappeared. They called to her from the house opposite, and so I think she must have gone to dance some fandango there.” 
Instead of the Egyptian, on the same carpet, of which the arabesques but a moment before seemed to vanish beneath the fantastic weavings of her dances, the Archdeacon now beheld only the red and yellow man; who, in order to earn an honest penny in his turn, was parading round the circle, his arms akimbo, his head thrown back, very red in the face, and balancing a chair between his teeth. On this chair he had fastened a cat which a woman in the crowd had lent him, and which was swearing with fright. 
“Notre-Dame!” cried the Archdeacon, as the mounte-bank, the perspiration pouring off his face, passed before him with his pyramid of cat and chair—“What does Ma?tre Pierre Gringoire here?” 
The stern voice of the Archdeacon so startled the poor devil that he lost his balance, and with it his whole erection, and the chair and the cat came toppling over right on to the heads of the spectators and in the midst of a deafening uproar. 
It is probable that Pierre Gringoire (for it was indeed he) would have had a fine account to settle with the owner of the cat, not to speak of all the bruised and scratched faces round him, had he not hastily availed himself of the tumult and taken refuge in the Cathedral, whither Claude Frollo beckoned him to follow. 
The Cathedral was already dark and deserted, the transepts were full of deepest shadow, and the lamps of the chapels were beginning to twinkle like stars under the black vault of the roof. The great central rose-window alone, whose thousand tints were flooded by a horizontal stream of evening sunshine, gleamed in the shadow like a star of diamonds and cast its dazzling image on the opposite side of the nave. 
When they had proceeded a few steps, Dom Claude leaned against a pillar and regarded Gringoire steadfastly. This look was not the one Gringoire had feared to encounter in his shame at being surprised by so grave and learned a personage in his merry-andrew costume. There was in the priest’s gaze no touch of disdain or mockery; it was serious, calm, and searching. The Archdeacon was the first to break silence. 
“Now, Ma?tre Pierre, you have many things to explain to me. And first, how comes it that I have seen nothing of you for the last two months, and then find you in the public street in noble guise i’ sooth!—part red, part yellow, like a Caudebec apple!” 
“Messire,” answered Gringoire plaintively, “it is in very truth a preposterous outfit, and you behold me about as comfortable as a cat with a pumpkin on its head. It is, I acknowledge, an ill deed on my part to expose the gentlemen of the watch to the risk of belabouring, under this motley coat, the back of a Pythagorean philosopher. But what would you, my reverend master? The fault lies with my old doublet, which basely deserted me at the beginning of winter under the protest that it was falling in rags, and that it was under the necessity of reposing itself in the ragman’s pack. Que faire? Civilization has not yet reached that point that one may go quite naked, as old Diogenes would have wished. Add to this that the wind blew very cold, and the month of January is not the season to successfully initiate mankind into this new mode. This coat offered itself, I accepted it, and abandoned my old black tunic, which, for a hermetic such as I am, was far from being hermetically closed. Behold me then, in my buffoon’s habit, like Saint-Genestus. What would you have?—it is an eclipse. Apollo, as you know, tended the flocks of Admetes.” 
“A fine trade this you have adopted!” remarked the Archdeacon. 
“I admit, master, that it is better to philosophize and poetize, to blow fire in a furnace or receive it from heaven, than to be balancing cats in the public squares. And when you suddenly addressed me, I felt as stupid as an ass in front of a roasting-pit. But what’s to be done, messire? One must eat to live, and the finest Alexandrine verses are nothing between the teeth as compared with a piece of cheese. Now, I composed for the Lady Margaret of Flanders that famous epithalamium, as you know, and the town has not paid me for it, pretending that it was not good enough; as if for four crowns you could give them a tragedy of Sophocles! Hence, see you, I was near dying of hunger. Happily I am fairly strong in the jaws; so I said to my jaw: ’Perform some feats of strength and equilibrium—feed yourself. Ale te ipsam.’ A band of vagabonds who are become my very good friends, taught me twenty different herculean feats; and now I feed my teeth every night with the bread they have earned in the day. After all, concedo, I concede that it is but a sorry employ of my intellectual faculties, and that man is not made to pass his life in tambourining and carrying chairs in his teeth. But, reverend master, it is not enough to pass one’s life; one must keep it.” 
Dom Claude listened in silence. Suddenly his deep-set eye assumed so shrewd and penetrating an expression that Gringoire felt that the innermost recesses of his soul were being explored. 
“Very good, Master Pierre; but how is it that you are now in company with this Egyptian dancing girl?” 
“Faith!” returned Gringoire, “because she is my wife and I am her husband.” 
The priest’s sombre eyes blazed. 
“And hast thou done that, villain!” cried he, grasping Gringoire furiously by the arm; “hast thou been so abandoned of God as to lay hand on this girl?” 
“By my hope of paradise, reverend sir,” replied Gringoire, trembling in every limb, “I swear to you that I have never touched her, if that be what disturbs you.” 
“What then is thy talk of husband and wife?” said the priest. 
Gringoire hastened to relate to him as succinctly as possible what the reader already knows: his adventure in the Court of Miracles and his broken-pitcher marriage. The marriage appeared as yet to have had no result whatever, the gipsy girl continuing every night to defraud him of his conjugal rights as on that first one. “ ’Tis mortifying, and that’s the truth,” he concluded; “but it all comes of my having had the ill-luck to espouse a virgin.” 
“What do you mean?” asked the Archdeacon, whom the tale gradually tranquillized. 
“It is difficult to explain,” returned the poet. “There is superstition in it. My wife, as an old thief among us called the Duke of Egypt has told me, is a foundling—or a lostling, which is the same thing. She wears about her neck an amulet which, they declare, will some day enable her to find her parents again, but which would lose its virtue if the girl lost hers. Whence it follows that we both of us remain perfectly virtuous.” 
“Thus, you believe, Ma?tre Pierre,” resumed Claude, whose brow was rapidly clearing, “that this creature has never yet been approached by any man?” 
“Why, Dom Claude, how should a man fight against a superstition? She has got that in her head. I hold it to be rare enough to find this nunlike prudery keeping itself so fiercely aloof among all these easily conquered gipsy girls. But she has three things to protect her: the Duke of Egypt, who has taken her under his wing, reckoning, may-be, to sell her later on to some fat abbot or other; her whole tribe, who hold her in singular veneration, like the Blessed Virgin herself; and a certain pretty little dagger, which the jade always carries about with her, despite the provost’s ordinances, and which darts out in her hand when you squeeze her waist. ’Tis a fierce wasp, believe me!” 
The Archdeacon pressed Gringoire with questions. 
By Gringoire’s account, Esmeralda was a harmless and charming creature; pretty, apart from a little grimace which was peculiar to her; artless and impassioned; ignorant of everything and enthusiastic over everything; fond above all things of dancing, of all the stir and movement of the open air; not dreaming as yet of the difference between man and woman; a sort of human bee, with invisible wings to her feet, and living in a perpetual whirlwind. She owed this nature to the wandering life she had led. Gringoire had ascertained that, as quite a little child, she had gone all through Spain and Catalonia, and into Sicily; he thought even that the caravan of Zingari, to which she belonged, had carried her into the kingdom of Algiers—a country situated in Achaia, which Achaia was adjoining on one side to lesser Albania and Greece, and on the other to the sea of the Sicilies, which is the way to Constantinople. The Bohemians, said Gringoire, were vassals of the King of Algeria, in his capacity of Chief of the nation of the White Moors. Certain it was that Esmeralda had come into France while yet very young by way of Hungary. From all these countries the girl had brought with her fragments of fantastic jargons, outlandish songs and ideas which made her language almost as motley as her half-Egyptian, half-Parisian costume. For the rest, the people of the quarters which she frequented loved her for her gaiety, her kindness, her lively ways, for her dancing and her songs. In all the town she believed herself to be hated by two persons only, of whom she often spoke with dread: the sachette of the Tour-Roland, an evil-tempered recluse who cherished an unreasoning malice against gipsies, and who cursed the poor dancer every time she passed before her window; and a priest, who never crossed her path without hurling at her words and looks that terrified her. This last circumstance perturbed the Archdeacon greatly, though Gringoire paid no heed to the fact, the two months that had elapsed having sufficed to obliterate from the thoughtless poet’s mind the singular details of that evening on which he had first encountered the gipsy girl, and the circumstance of the Archdeacon’s presence on that occasion. For the rest, the little dancer feared nothing; she did not tell fortunes, and consequently was secure from those persecutions for magic so frequently instituted against the gipsy women. And then Gringoire was at least a brother to her, if he could not be a husband. After all, the philosopher endured very patiently this kind of platonic marriage. At all events it insured him food and a lodging. Each morning he set out from the thieves’ quarter, most frequently in company with the gipsy girl; he helped her to gain her little harvest of small coin in the streets; and each evening they returned to the same roof, he let her bolt herself into her own little chamber, and then slept the sleep of the just. A very agreeable existence on the whole, said he, and very favourable to reflection. Besides, in his heart and inner conscience, the philosopher was not quite sure that he was desperately in love with the gipsy. He loved her goat almost as much. It was a charming beast, gentle, intelligent, not to say intellectual; a goat of parts. (Nothing was commoner in the Middle Ages than these trained animals, which created immense wonderment among the uninitiated, but frequently brought their instructor to the stake.) However, the sorceries of the goat with the gilded hoofs were of a very innocent nature. Gringoire explained them to the Archdeacon, who appeared strangely interested in these particulars. In most cases it was sufficient to present the tambourine to the goat in such or such a manner, for it to perform the desired trick. It had been trained to this by its mistress, who had such a singular talent for these devices that two months had sufficed her to teach the goat to compose, with movable letters, the word Ph?bus. 
“’Ph?bus!”’ said the priest; “why ’Ph?bus’?” 
“I do not know,” answered Gringoire. “Perhaps it is a word that she thinks endowed with some magic and secret virtue. She often murmurs it to herself when she believes herself alone.” 
“Are you sure,” rejoined Claude, with his searching look, “that it is only a word—that it is not a name?” 
“The name of whom?” said the poet. 
“How should I know?” said the priest. 
“This is what I imagine, messire. These Bohemians are something of Guebers, and worship the sun: hence this Ph?bus.” 
“That does not seem so evident to me as it does to you, Ma?tre Pierre.” 
“After all, it’s no matter to me. Let her mumble her Ph?bus to her heart’s content. What I know for certain is that Djali loves me already almost as much as her mistress.” 
“Who is Djali?” 
“That is the goat.” 
The Archdeacon leant his chin on his hand and seemed to reflect for a moment. Suddenly he turned brusquely to Gringoire: 
“And you swear to me that you have not touched her?” 
“Whom?” asked Gringoire; “the goat?” 
“No, this woman.” 
“My wife? I swear I have not.” 
“And yet you are often alone with her.” 
“Every night for a full hour.” 
Dom Claude frowned. “Oh! oh! Solus cum sola non cogitabuntur orare Pater Noster.”1 
“By my soul, I might say Paters and Ave Marias and the Credo without her paying any more attention to me than a hen to a church.” 
“Swear to me, by thy mother’s body,” said the Archdeacon vehemently, “that thou hast not so much as touched that woman with the tip of thy finger.” 
“I will swear it too by my father’s head, for the two things have more than one connection. But, reverend master, permit me one question in return.” 
“Speak, sir.” 
“What does that signify to you?” 
The Archdeacon’s pale face flushed like the cheek of a young girl. He was silent for a moment, and then replied with visible embarrassment: 
“Hark you, Ma?tre Pierre Gringoire. You are not yet damned, as far as I know. I am interested in you, and wish you well. Now, the slightest contact with that demon of a gipsy girl will infallibly make you a servant of Satanas. You know ’tis always the body that ruins the soul. Woe betide you if you come nigh that woman! I have spoken.” 
“I did try it once,” said Gringoire, scratching his ear. “That was on the first day, but I only got stung for my pains.” 
“You had that temerity, Ma?tre Gringoire?” and the priest’s brow darkened again. 
“Another time,” continued the poet, with a grin, “before I went to bed, I looked through her key-hole, and beheld the most delicious damsel in her shift that ever made a bedstead creak under her naked foot.” 
“To the foul fiend with thee!” cried the priest, with a look of fury; and thrusting the amazed Gringoire from him by the shoulder, he plunged with long strides into the impenetrable gloom of the Cathedral arches. 
______________________
1 A man and a woman alone together will not think of saying Pater Nosters. 
Chapter 3 - The Bells
Since his taste of the pillory, the neighbours in the vicinity of Notre-Dame thought they perceived a remarkable abatement in Quasimodo’s rage for bell-ringing. Before that time the smallest excuse set the bells going—long morning chimes that lasted from prime to compline; full peals for a high mass, full-toned runs flashing up and down the smaller bells for a wedding or a christening, and filling the air with an exquisite network of sweet sound. The ancient minster, resonant and vibrating to her foundations, lived in a perpetual jubilant tumult of bells. Some self-willed spirit of sound seemed to have entered into her and to be sending forth a never-ending song from all those brazen throats. And now that spirit had departed. The Cathedral seemed wilfully to maintain a sullen silence. Festivals and burials had their simple accompaniment, plain and meagre—what the Church demanded—not a note beyond. Of the two voices that proceed from a church—that of the organ within and the bells without—only the organ remained. It seemed as though there were no longer any musicians in the belfries. Nevertheless, Quasimodo was still there; what had come over him? Was it that the shame and despair of the pillory still lingered in his heart, that his soul still quivered under the lash of the torturer, that his horror of such treatment had swallowed up all other feeling in him, even his passion for the bells?—or was it rather that Marie had a rival in the heart of the bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, and that the great bell and her fourteen sisters were being neglected for something more beautiful? 
It happened that in this year of grace 1482, the Feast of the Annunciation fell on Tuesday, the 25th of March. On that day the air was so pure and light that Quasimodo felt some return of affection for his bells. He accordingly ascended the northern tower, while the beadle below threw wide the great doors of the church, which consisted, at that time, of enormous panels of strong wood, padded with leather, bordered with gilded iron nails, and framed in carving “very skilfully wrought.” 
Arrived in the lofty cage of the bells, Quasimodo gazed for some time with a sorrowful shake of the head at his six singing birds, as if he mourned over something alien that had come between him and his old loves. But when he had set them going, when he felt the whole cluster of bells move under his hands, when he saw—for he could not hear it—the palpitating octave ascending and descending in that enormous diapason, like a bird fluttering from bough to bough—when the demon of music, with his dazzling shower of stretti, trills, and arpeggios, had taken possession of the poor deaf creature, then he became happy once more, he forgot his former woes, and as the weight lifted from his heart his face lit up with joy. 
To and fro he hurried, clapped his hands, ran from one rope to the other, spurring on his six singers with mouth and hands, like the conductor of an orchestra urging highly trained musicians. 
“Come, Gabrielle,” said he, “come now, pour all thy voice into the Place, to-day is high festival. Thibauld, bestir thyself, thou art lagging behind; on with thee, art grown rusty, sluggard? That is well—quick! quick! let not the clapper be seen. Make them all deaf like me. That’s the way, my brave Thibauld! Guillaume! Guillaume! thou art the biggest, and Pasquier is the smallest, and yet Pasquier works better than thou. I warrant that those who can hear would say so too. Right so, my Gabrielle! louder, louder! Hey! you two up there, you sparrows, what are you about? I do not see you make the faintest noise? What ails those brazen beaks of yours that look to be yawning when they should be singing? Up, up, to your work! ’Tis the Feast of the Annunciation. The sun shines bright, and we’ll have a merry peal. What, Guillaume! Out of breath, my poor fat one!” 
He was entirely absorbed in urging on his bells, the whole six of them rearing and shaking their polished backs like a noisy team of Spanish mules spurred forward by the cries of the driver. 
Happening, however, to glance between the large slate tiles which cover, up to a certain height, the perpendicular walls of the steeple, he saw down in the square a fantastically dressed girl spreading out a carpet, on which a little goat came and took up its position and a group of spectators formed a circle round. This sight instantly changed the current of his thoughts, and cooled his musical enthusiasm as a breath of cold air congeals a stream of flowing resin. He stood still, turned his back on the bells, and crouching down behind the slate eaves fixed on the dancer that dreamy, tender, and softened look which once already had astonished the Archdeacon. Meanwhile the neglected bells suddenly fell silent, to the great disappointment of lovers of carillons who were listening in all good faith from the Pont-au-Change, and now went away as surprised and disgusted as a dog that has been offered a bone and gets a stone instead. 
Chapter 4 - Fate
One fine morning in this same month of March—it was Saturday, the 29th, St. Eustache’s Day, I think—our young friend, Jehan Frollo of the Mill, discovered, while putting on his breeches, that his purse gave forth no faintest chink of coin. “Poor purse!” said he, drawing it out of his pocket, “what, not a single little parisis? How cruelly have dice, Venus, and pots of beer disembowelled thee! Behold thee empty, wrinkled, and flabby, like the bosom of a fury! I would ask you, Messer Cicero and Messer Seneca, whose dogeared volumes I see scattered upon the floor, of what use is it for me to know better than any master of the Mint or a Jew of the Pont-au-Changeurs, that a gold crown piece is worth thirty-five unzain at twenty-five sous eight deniers parisis each, if I have not a single miserable black liard to risk upon the double-six? Oh, Consul Cicero! this is not a calamity from which one can extricate one’s self by periphrases—by quemadmodum, and verum enim vero!” 
He completed his toilet dejectedly. An idea occurred to him as he was lacing his boots which he at first rejected: it returned, however, and he put on his vest wrong side out, a sure sign of a violent inward struggle. At length he cast his cap vehemently on the ground, and exclaimed: “Be it so! the worst has come to the worst—I shall go to my brother. I shall catch a sermon, I know, but also I shall catch a crown piece.” 
He threw himself hastily into his fur-edged gown, picked up his cap, and rushed out with an air of desperate resolve. 
He turned down the Rue de la Harpe towards the City. Passing the Rue de la Huchette, the odour wafted from those splendid roasting-spits which turned incessantly, tickled his olfactory nerves, and he cast a lustful eye into the Cyclopean kitchen which once extorted from the Franciscan monk, Calatigiron, the pathetic exclamation: “Veramente, queste rotisscrie sono cosa stupenda!” But Jehan had not the wherewithal to obtain a breakfast, so with a profound sigh he passed on under the gateway of the Petit-Chatelet, the enormous double trio of massive towers guarding the entrance to the City. 
He did not even take time to throw the customary stone at the dishonoured statue of that Perinet Leclerc who betrayed the Paris of Charles VI to the English, a crime which his effigy, its face all battered with stones and stained with mud, expiated during three centuries at the corner of the streets de la Harpe and de Bussy, as on an everlasting pillory. 
Having crossed the Petit-Pont and walked down the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, Jehan de Molendino found himself in front of Notre-Dame. Then all his indecision returned, and he circled for some minutes round the statue of “Monsieur Legris,” repeating to himself with a tortured mind: 
“The sermon is certain, the florin is doubtful.” 
He stopped a beadle who was coming from the cloister. “Where is Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas?” 
“In his secret cell in the tower, I believe,” answered the man; “but I counsel you not to disturb him, unless you come from some one such as the Pope or the King himself.” 
Jehan clapped his hands. 
“Bédiable! what a magnificent chance for seeing the famous magician’s cave!” 
This decided him, and he advanced resolutely through the little dark doorway, and began to mount the spiral staircase of Saint-Gilles, which leads to the upper stories of the tower. 
“We shall see!” he said as he proceeded. “By the pangs of the Virgin! it must be a curious place, this cell which my reverend brother keeps so strictly concealed. They say he lights up hell’s own fires there on which to cook the philosopher’s stone. Bédieu! I care no more for the philosopher’s stone than for a pebble; and I’d rather find on his furnace an omelet of Easter eggs in lard, than the biggest philosopher’s stone in the world!” 
Arrived at the gallery of the colonnettes, he stopped a moment to take breath and to call down ten million cartloads of devils on the interminable stairs. He then continued his ascent by the narrow doorway of the northern tower, now prohibited to the public. A moment or two after passing the belfry, he came to a small landing in a recess with a low Gothic door under the vaulted roof, while a loophole opposite in the circular wall of the staircase enabled him to distinguish its enormous lock and powerful iron sheeting. Any one curious to inspect this door at the present day will recognise it by this legend inscribed in white letters on the black wall: “J’adore Coralie, 1823. Signé, Ugène.” (This signé is included in the inscription.) 
“Whew!” said the scholar; “this must be it.” 
The key was in the lock, the door slightly ajar; he gently pushed it open and poked his head round it. 
The reader is undoubtedly acquainted with the works of Rembrandt—the Shakespeare of painting. Among the many wonderful engravings there is one etching in particular representing, as is supposed, Doctor Faustus, which it is impossible to contemplate without measureless admiration. There is a gloomy chamber; in the middle stands a table loaded with mysterious and repulsive objects—death’s heads, spheres, alembics, compasses, parchments covered with hieroglyphics. Behind this table, which hides the lower part of him, stands the Doctor wrapped in a wide gown, his head covered by a fur cap reaching to his eyebrows. He has partly risen from his immense arm-chair, his clenched fists are leaning on the table, while he gazes in curiosity and terror at a luminous circle of magic letters shining on the wall in the background like the solar spectrum in a camera obscura. This cabalistic sun seems actually to scintillate, and fills the dim cell with its mysterious radiance. It is horrible and yet beautiful. 
Something very similar to Faust’s study presented itself to Jehan’s view as he ventured his head through the half-open door. Here, too, was a sombre, dimly lighted cell, a huge arm-chair, and a large table, compasses, alembics, skeletons of animals hanging from the ceiling, a celestial globe rolling on the floor, glass phials full of quivering gold-leaf, skulls lying on sheets of vellum covered with figures and written characters, thick manuscripts open and piled one upon another regardless of the creased corners of the parchment; in short, all the rubbish of science—dust and cobwebs covering the whole heap. But there was no circle of luminous letters, no doctor contemplating in ecstasy the flamboyant vision as an eagle gazes at the sun. 
Nevertheless the cell was not empty. A man was seated in the arm-chair, leaning over the table. Jehan could see nothing but his broad shoulders and the back of his head; but he had no difficulty in recognising that bald head, which nature seemed to have provided with a permanent tonsure, as if to mark by this external sign the irresistible clerical vocation of the Archdeacon. 
Thus Jehan recognised his brother; but the door had been opened so gently that Dom Claude was unaware of his presence. The prying little scholar availed himself of this opportunity to examine the cell for a few minutes at his ease. A large furnace, which he had not remarked before, was to the left of the arm-chair under the narrow window. The ray of light that penetrated through this opening traversed the circular web of a spider, who had tastefully woven her delicate rosace in the pointed arch of the window and now sat motionless in the centre of this wheel of lace. On the furnace was a disordered accumulation of vessels of every description, stone bottles, glass retorts, and bundles of charcoal. Jehan observed with a sigh that there was not a single cooking utensil. 
In any case there was no fire in the furnace, nor did any appear to have been lighted there for a long time. A glass mask which Jehan noticed among the alchemistic implements, used doubtless to protect the archdeacon’s face when he was engaged in compounding some deadly substance, lay forgotten in a corner, thick with dust. Beside it lay a pair of bellows equally dusty, the upper side of which bore in letters of copper the motto: “Spiro, spero.”1 
Following the favourite custom of the hermetics, the walls were inscribed with many legends of this description; some traced in ink, others engraved with a metal point; Gothic characters, Hebrew, Greek and Roman, pell-mell; inscribed at random, overlapping each other, the more recent effacing the earlier ones, and all interlacing and mingled like the branches of a thicket or the pikes in a mêlée. And, in truth, it was a confused fray between all the philosophies, all the schemes, the wisdom of the human mind. Here and there one shone among the others like a banner among the lanceheads, but for the most part they consisted of some brief Latin or Greek sentence, so much in favour in the Middle Ages, such as: “Unde? Inde?—Homo homini monstrum.—Astra, castra.—Nomen, numen.— Mega biblion, mega kakon.—Sapere aude.—Flat ubi vult,” etc.2 Or sometimes a word devoid of all meaning as 'Alagcofagia which perhaps concealed some bitter allusion to the rules of the cloister; sometimes a simple maxim of monastic discipline set forth in a correct hexameter: “C?lestem Dominum, terrestrem dicite domnum.”3 Here and there, too, were obscure Hebrew passages, of which Jehan, whose Greek was already of the feeblest, understood nothing at all; and the whole crossed and recrossed in all directions with stars and triangles, human and animal figures, till the wall of the cell looked like a sheet of paper over which a monkey has dragged a pen full of ink. 
Altogether the general aspect of the study was one of complete neglect and decay; and the shocking condition of the implements led inevitably to the conclusion that their owner had long been diverted from his labours by pursuits of some other kind. 
The said owner, meanwhile, bending over a vast manuscript adorned with bizarre paintings, appeared to be tormented by some idea which incessantly interrupted his meditations. So at least Jehan surmised as he listened to his musing aloud, with the intermittent pauses of a person talking in his dreams. 
“Yes,” he exclaimed, “Manou said it, and Zoroaster taught the same! the sun is born of fire, the moon of the sun. Fire is the soul of the Great All, its elementary atoms are diffused and constantly flowing by an infinity of currents throughout the universe. At the points where these currents cross each other in the heavens, they produce light; at their points of intersection in the earth, they produce gold. Light—gold; it is the same thing—fire in its concrete state; merely the difference between the visible and the palpable, the fluid and the solid in the same substance, between vapour and ice—nothing more. This is no dream; it is the universal law of Nature. But how to extract from science the secret of this universal law? What! this light that bathes my hand is gold! All that is necessary is to condense by a certain law these same atoms dilated by certain other laws! Yes; but how? Some have thought of burying a ray of sunshine. Averro?s—yes, it was Averro?s—buried one under the first pillar to the left of the sanctuary of the Koran, in the great Mosque of Cordova; but the vault was not to be opened to see if the operation was successful under eight thousand years.” 
“Diable!” said Jehan to himself, “rather a long time to wait for a florin!” 
“Others have thought,” continued the Archdeacon musingly, “that it were better to experiment upon a ray from Sirius. But it is difficult to obtain this ray pure, on account of the simultaneous presence of other stars whose rays mingle with it. Flamel considers it simpler to operate with terrestrial fire. Flamel! there’s predestination in the very name! Flamma! yes, fire—that is all. The diamond exists already in the charcoal, gold in fire— But how to extract it? Magistri affirms that there are certain female names which possess so sweet and mysterious a charm, that it suffices merely to pronounce them during the operation. Let us see what Manou says on the subject: ’Where women are held in honour, the gods are well pleased: where they are despised, it is useless to pray to God. The mouth of a woman is constantly pure; it is as a running stream, as a ray of sunshine. The name of a woman should be pleasing, melodious, and give food to the imagination—should end in long vowels, and sound like a benediction.’ Yes, yes, the sage is right; for example, Maria—Sophia—Esmeral— Damnation! Ever that thought!” 
And he closed the book with a violent slam. 
He passed his hand over his brow as if to chase away the thought that haunted him. Then taking from the table a nail and a small hammer, the handle of which bore strange, painted, cabalistic figures— 
“For some time,” said he with a bitter smile, “I have failed in all my experiments. A fixed idea possesses me, and tortures my brain like the presence of a fiery stigma. I have not even succeeded in discovering the secret of Cassiodorus, whose lamp burned without wick or oil. Surely a simple matter enough!” 
“The devil it is!” muttered Jehan between his teeth. 
“One miserable thought, then,” continued the priest, “suffices to sap a man’s will and render him feeble-minded. Oh, how Claude Pernelle would mock at me—she who could not for one moment divert Nicholas Flamel from the pursuit of his great work! What! I hold in my hand the magic hammer of Zechieles! At every blow which, from the depths of his cell, the redoubtable rabbi struck with this hammer upon this nail that one among his enemies whom he had condemned would, even were he two thousand leagues away, sink an arm’s length into the earth which swallowed him up. The King of France himself, for having one night inadvertently struck against the door of the magician, sank up to his knees in his own pavement of Paris. This happened not three centuries ago. Well, I have the hammer and the nail, and yet these implements are no more formidable in my hands than a hammer in the hand of a smith. And yet all that is wanting is the magic word which Zechieles pronounced as he struck upon the nail.” 
“A mere trifle!” thought Jehan. 
“Come let us try,” resumed the Archdeacon eagerly. “If I succeed, I shall see the blue spark fly from the head of the nail. Emen-Héten! That ns not it—Sigeani! Sigeani! May this nail open the grave for whomsoever bears the name of Ph?bus! A curse upon it again! Forever that same thought!” 
He threw away the hammer angrily. He then sank so low in his arm-chair and over the table that Jehan lost sight of him. For some minutes he could see nothing but a hand clenched convulsively on a book. Suddenly Dom Claude arose, took a pair of compasses, and in silence engraved upon the wall in capitals the Greek word: 
’ANáGKH. 
“My brother’s a fool,” said Jehan to himself; “it would have been much simpler to write Fatum. Everybody is not obliged to know Greek.” 
The Archdeacon reseated himself in his chair and clasped his forehead between his two hands, like a sick person whose head is heavy and burning. 
The scholar watched his brother with surprise. He had no conception—he who always wore his heart upon his sleeve, who observed no laws but the good old laws of nature, who allowed his passions to flow according to their natural tendencies, and in whom the lake of strong emotions was always dry, so many fresh channels did he open for it daily—he had no conception with what fury that sea of human passions ferments and boils when it is refused all egress; how it gathers strength, swells, and overflows; how it wears away the heart; how it breaks forth in inward sobs and stifled convulsions, until it has rent its banks and overflowed its bed. The austere and icy exterior of Claude Frollo, that cold surface of rugged and inaccessible virtue, had always deceived Jehan. The light-hearted scholar had never dreamed of the lava, deep, boiling, furious, beneath the snow of ?tna. 
We do not know whether any sudden perception of this kind crossed Jehan’s mind; but, scatter-brained as he was, he understood that he had witnessed something he ought never to have seen; that he had surprised the soul of his elder brother in one of its most secret attitudes, and that Claude must not discover it. Perceiving that the Archdeacon had fallen back into his previous immobility, he withdrew his head very softly and made a slight ffling of feet behind the door, as of some one approaching and giving warning of the fact. 
“Come in!” cried the Archdeacon, from within his cell. “I was expecting you, and left the key in the door on purpose. Come in, Ma?tre Jacques!” 
The scholar entered boldly. The Archdeacon much embarrassed by such a visitor in this particular place started violently in his arm-chair. 
“What! it is you, Jehan?” 
“A J at any rate,” said the scholar, with his rosy, smiling, impudent face. 
The countenance of Dom Claude had resumed its severe expression. “What are you doing here?” 
“Brother,” answered the scholar, endeavouring to assume a sober, downcast, and modest demeanour, and twisting his cap in his hands with an appearance of artlessness, “I have come to beg of you.” 
“What?” 
“A moral lesson of which I have great need,” he had not the courage to add—“and a little money of which my need is still greater.” The last half of his sentence remained unspoken. 
“Sir,” said the Archdeacon coldly, “I am greatly displeased with you.” 
“Alas!” sighed the scholar. 
Dom Claude described a quarter of a circle with his chair, and regarded Jehan sternly. “I am very glad to see you.” 
This was a formidable exordium. Jehan prepared for a sharp encounter. 
“Jehan, every day they bring me complaints of you. What is this about a scuffle in which you belaboured a certain little vicomte, Albert de Ramonchamp?” 
“Oh,” said Jehan, “a mere trifle! An ill-conditioned page, who amused himself with splashing the scholars by galloping his horse through the mud.” 
“And what is this about Mahiet Fargel, whose gown you have torn? ’Tunicam dechiraverunt,’ says the charge.” 
“Pah! a shabby Montaigu cape. What’s there to make such a coil about?” 
“The complaint says tunicam, not cappettam. Do you understand Latin?” 
Jehan did not reply. 
“Yes,” went on the priest shaking his head, “this is what study and letters have come to now! The Latin tongue is scarcely understood, Syriac unknown, the Greek so abhorred that it is not accounted ignorance in the most learned to miss over a Greek word when reading, and to say, Gr?cum est non legitur.” 
The scholar raised his eyes boldly. “Brother, shall I tell you in good French the meaning of that Greek word over there upon the wall?” 
“Which word?” 
“’ANáGKH.” 
A faint flush crept into the parchment cheeks of the Archdeacon, like a puff of smoke giving warning of the unseen commotions of a volcano. The scholar hardly noted it. 
“Well, Jehan,” faltered the elder brother with an effort, “what does the word mean?” 
“Fatality.” 
Dom Claude grew pale again, and the scholar went on heedlessly: 
“And the word underneath it, inscribed by the same hand, Anagneia signifies ’impurity.’ You see, we know our Greek.” 
The Archdeacon was silent. This lesson in Greek had set him musing. 
Little Jehan, who had all the cunning of a spoilt child, judged the moment favourable for hazarding his request. Adopting, therefore, his most insinuating tones, he began: 
“Do you hate me so much, good brother, as to look thus grim on account of a few poor scufflings and blows dealt all in fair fight with a pack of boys and young monkeys—quibusdam marmosetis? You see, good brother Claude, we know our Latin.” 
But this caressing hypocrisy failed in its customary effect on the severe elder brother. Cerberus would not take the honeyed sop. Not a furrow in the Archdeacon’s brow was smoothed. “What are you aiming at?” he asked dryly. 
“Well, then, to be plain, it is this,” answered Jehan stoutly, “I want money.” 
At this piece of effrontery the Archdeacon at once became the school-master, the stern parent. 
“You are aware, Monsieur Jehan, that our fief of Tirechappe, counting together both the ground rents and the rents of the twenty-one houses, only brings in twenty-nine livres, eleven sous, six deniers parisis. That is half as much again as in the time of the brothers Paclet, but it is not much.” 
“I want some money,” repeated Jehan stolidly. 
“You know that the Ecclesiastical Court decided that our twenty-one houses were held in full fee of the bishopric, and that we could only redeem this tribute by paying to his Reverence the Bishop two marks silver gilt of the value of six livres parisis. Now, I have not yet been able to collect these two marks, and you know it.” 
“I know that I want money,” repeated Jehan for the third time. 
“And what do you want it for?” 
This question brought a ray of hope to Jehan’s eyes. He assumed his coaxing, demure air once more. 
“Look you, dear brother Claude, I do not come to you with any bad intent. I do not purpose to squander your money in a tavern, or ruffle it through the streets of Paris in gold brocade and with my lackey behind me— cum meo laquasio. No, brother, ’tis for a good work.” 
“What good work?” asked Claude, somewhat surprised. 
“Why, two of my friends wish to purchase some swaddling-clothes for the infant of a poor widow of the Haudriette Convent. ’Tis a charity. It will cost three florins, and I would like to add my contribution.” 
“Who are your two friends?” 
“Pierre l’Assommeur4 and Baptiste Croque-Oison.”5 
“Humph!” said the Archdeacon; “these are names that go as fitly with a good work as a bombard upon a high altar.” 
It cannot be denied that Jehan had not been happy in the choice of names for his two friends. He felt it when it was too late. 
“Besides,” continued the shrewd Claude, “what sort of swaddling-clothes are they which cost three florins— and for the infant of a Haudriette? Since when, pray, do the Haudriette widows have babes in swaddling-clothes?” 
Jehan broke the ice definitely. 
“Well, then, I want some money to go and see Isabeau la Thierrye this evening at the Val-d’ Amour!” 
“Vile profligate!” cried the priest. 
“’Anagneia,” retorted Jehan. 
This quotation, selected by the boy no doubt in sheer malice from those on the wall of the cell, produced a singular effect upon the priest. He bit his lip, and his anger was lost in his confusion. 
“Get you gone!” said he to Jehan; “I am expecting some one.” 
The scholar made one last attempt. 
“Brother Claude, give me at least one little parisis to get some food.” 
“How far have you advanced in the Decretals of Gratian?” asked Dom Claude. 
“I have lost my note-books.” 
“Where are you in Latin classics?” 
“Somebody stole my copy of Horatius.” 
“And where in Aristotle?” 
“Faith, brother! what Father of the Church is it who says that the errors of heretics have ever found shelter among the thickets of Aristotle’s metaphysics? A straw for Aristotle! I will never mangle my religion on his metaphysics.” 
“Young man,” replied the Archdeacon, “at the last entry of the King into Paris, there was a gentleman named Philippe de Comines, who displayed embroidered on his saddle-cloth this motto— which I counsel you to ponder well: ’Qui non laborat non manducet.’ ”6 
The scholar stood a moment silent, his eyes bent on the ground, his countenance chagrined. Suddenly he turned towards Claude with the quick motion of a wagtail. 
“So, good brother, you refuse me even a sou to buy a crust of bread?” 
“Qui non laborat non manducet.” 
At this inflexible answer Jehan buried his face in his hands, like a woman sobbing, and cried in a voice of despair: 
“Otototototoi!” 
“What do you mean by this, sir?” demanded Claude, taken aback at this freak. 
“Well, what?” said the scholar, raising a pair of impudent eyes into which he had been thrusting his fists to make them appear red with tears; “it’s Greek! it is an anap?st of ?schylus admirably expressive of grief.” And he burst into a fit of laughter so infectious and uncontrolled that the Archdeacon could not refrain from smiling. After all, it was Claude’s own fault: why had he so spoiled the lad? 
“Oh, dear brother Claude,” Jehan went on, emboldened by this smile, “look at my broken shoes. Is there a more tragic buskin in the world than a boot that gapes thus and puts out its tongue?” 
The Archdeacon had promptly resumed his former severity. 
“I will send you new shoes, but no money.” 
“Only one little parisis, brother,” persisted the suppliant Jehan. “I will learn Gratian by heart, I am perfectly ready to believe in God, I will be a very Pythagoras of science and virtue. But one little parisis, for pity’s sake! Would you have me devoured by famine, which stands staring me in the face with open maw, blacker, deeper, more noisome than Tartarus or a monk’s nose— ?” 
Dom Claude shook his head— “Qui non laborat— ” 
Jehan did not let him finish. “Well!” he cried, “to the devil, then! Huzza! I’ll live in the taverns, I’ll fight, I’ll break heads and wine cups, I’ll visit the lasses and go to the devil!” 
And so saying, he flung his cap against the wall and snapped his fingers like castanets. 
The Archdeacon regarded him gravely. “Jehan,” said he, “you have no soul.” 
“In that case, according to Epicurus, I lack an unknown something made of another something without a name.” 
“Jehan, you must think seriously of amending your ways.” 
“Ah ?a!” cried the scholar, looking from his brother to the alembics on the furnaces, “everything seems awry here — tempers as well as bottles!” 
“Jehan, you are on a slippery downward path. Know you whither you are going?” 
“To the tavern,” answered Jehan promptly. 
“The tavern leads to the pillory.” 
“’Tis as good a lantern as any other, and one, may-be, with which Diogenes would have found his man.” 
“The pillory leads to the gibbet.” 
“The gibbet is a balance with a man at one end and the whole world at the other. It is good to be the man.” 
“The gibbet leads to hell.” 
“That’s a good big fire.” 
“Jehan, Jehan! all this will have a bad end!” 
“It will have had a good beginning.” 
At this moment there was a sound of footsteps on the stairs. 
“Silence!” said the Archdeacon, his finger on his lips, “here is Ma?tre Jacques. Hark you, Jehan,” he added in a low voice, “beware of ever breathing a word of what you have seen or heard here. Hide yourself quickly under this furnace, and do not make a sound.” 
The scholar was creeping under the furnace when a happy thought struck him. 
“Brother Claude, a florin for keeping still!” 
“Silence! I promise it you!” 
“No, give it me now.” 
“Take it, then!” said the Archdeacon, flinging him his whole pouch angrily. Jehan crept under the furnace, and the door opened. 
______________________
1 Blow, hope. 
2 Whence, whither?—Man is a monster unto men.—The stars, a fortress.—The name, a wonder.—A great book, a great evil.—Dare to be wise.—It bloweth where it listeth. 
3 Account the Lord of heaven thy ruler upon earth. 
4 The slaughterer. 
5 The rook. 
6 He who will not work shall not eat. 
Chapter 5 - The Two Men in Black
The person who entered wore a black gown and a morose air. What at the first glance struck our friend Jehan (who, as may be supposed, so placed himself in his retreat as to be able to see and hear all at his ease) was the utter dejection manifest both in the garments and the countenance of the new-comer. There was, however, a certain meekness diffused over that face; but it was the meekness of a cat or of a judge— a hypocritical gentleness. He was very gray and wrinkled, about sixty, with blinking eye-lids, white eye-brows, a pendulous lip, and large hands. When Jehan saw that it was nothing more— that is to say, merely some physician or magistrate, and that the man’s nose was a long way from his mouth, a sure sign of stupidity— he ensconced himself deeper in his hole, desperate at being forced to pass an indefinite time in such an uncomfortable posture and such dull company. 
The Archdeacon had not even risen to greet this person. He motioned him to a stool near the door, and after a few moments’ silence, during which he seemed to be pursuing some previous meditation, he remarked in a patronizing tone: 
“Good-day to you, Ma?tre Jacques.” 
“And to you greeting, Ma?tre,” responded the man in black. 
There was between these two greetings— the offhand Ma?tre Jacques of the one, and the obsequious Ma?tre of the other— the difference between “Sir” and “Your Lordship,” of domne and domine. It was evidently the meeting between master and disciple. 
“Well,” said the Archdeacon, after another interval of silence which Ma?tre Jacques took care not to break, “will you succeed?” 
“Alas, master,” replied the other with a mournful smile, “I use the bellows assiduously— cinders and to spare— but not a spark of gold.” 
Dom Claude made a gesture of impatience. “That is not what I allude to, Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue, but to the charge against your sorcerer— Marc Cenaine, you call him, I think — butler to the Court of Accounts. Did he confess his wizardry when you put him to the question?” 
“Alas, no,” replied Ma?tre Jacques, with his deprecating smile. “We have not that consolation. The man is a perfect stone. We might boil him in the pig-market, and we should get no word out of him. However, we spare no pains to arrive at the truth. Every joint is already dislocated on the rack; we have put all our irons in the fire, as the old comic writer Plautus has it: 
’Advorsum stimulos, laminas, crucesque, compedesque, Nervos, catenas, carceres, numellas, pedicas, boias.’ 
But all to no purpose. That man is terrible. ’Tis love’s labour lost!” 
“You have found nothing fresh in his house?” 
“Oh, yes,” said Ma?tre Jacques, fumbling in his pouch, “this parchment. There are words on it that we do not understand. And yet, monsieur, the criminal advocate, Philippe Lheulier, knows a little Hebrew, which he learned in an affair with the Jews of the Rue Kantersten, at Brussels.” So saying, Ma?tre Jacques unrolled a parchment. 
“Give it to me,” said the Archdeacon. “Magic pure and simple, Ma?tre Jacques!” he cried, as he cast his eyes over the scroll. “’Emen-Hétan!’ that is the cry of the ghouls when they arrive at the witches’ Sabbath. ’Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso!’ that is the conjuration which rebinds the devil in hell. ’Hax, pax, max!’ that refers to medicine— a spell against the bite of a mad dog. Ma?tre Jacques, you are King’s attorney in the Ecclesiastical Court; this parchment is an abomination.” 
“We will put him again to the question. Then here is something else,” added Ma?tre Jacques, fumbling once more in his bag, “which we found at Marc Cenaine’s.” 
It was a vessel of the same family as those which encumbered the furnace of Dom Claude. “Ah,” said the Archdeacon, “an alchemist’s crucible.” 
“I don’t mind confessing to you,” Ma?tre Jacques went on, with his timid and constrained smile, “that I have tried it over the furnace, but succeeded no better than with my own.” 
The Archdeacon examined the vessel. “What has he inscribed on his crucible? ’Och! och!’— the word for driving away fleas? Your Marc Cenaine is an ignoramus! I can well believe that you could not make gold with this! It will be useful to put in your sleeping alcove in the summer, but for nothing more.” 
“Since we are on the subject of errors,” said the King’s attorney, “before coming up I was studying the doorway down below; is your Reverence quite sure that the beginnings of Nature’s workings are represented there on the side towards the H?tel-Dieu, and that among the seven naked figures at the feet of Our Lady, that with wings to his heels is Mercurius?” 
“Yes,” answered the priest; “so Augustin Nypho writes — that Italian doctor who had a bearded familiar which taught him everything. But we will go down, and I will explain it to you from the text.” 
“Thank you, master,” said Charmolue, bending to the ground. “By-the-bye, I had forgotten! When do you wish me to arrest the little witch?” 
“What witch?” 
“That gipsy girl, you know, who comes and dances every day in the Parvis, in defiance of the prohibition. She has a familiar spirit in the shape of a goat with devil’s horns— it can read and write and do arithmetic— enough to hang all Bohemia. The charge is quite ready and would soon be drawn up. A pretty creature, on my soul, that dancing girl! — the finest black eyes in the world— two Egyptian carbuncles. When shall we begin?” 
The Archdeacon had grown deadly pale. 
“I will let you know,” he stammered in almost inaudible tones, then added with an effort: “Attend you to Marc Cenaine.” 
“Never fear,” answered Charmolue smiling. “As soon as I get back he shall be strapped down again to the leather bed. But it is a very devil of a man. He tires out Pierrat Torterue himself, who has larger hands than I. As says our good Plautus— 
‘Nudus vinctus, centum pondo, es quando pendes per pedes.’1 
The screw— that is our most effectual instrument— we shall try that.” 
Dom Claude seemed sunk in gloomy abstraction. He now turned to Charmolue. “Ma?tre Pierrat— Ma?tre Jacques, I should say— look to Marc Cenaine.” 
“Yes, yes, Dom Claude. Poor man! he will have suffered like Mummol. But what a thing to do— to visit the witches’ Sabbath!— and he butler to the Court of Accounts, who must know Charlemagne’s regulation: ’Stryga vel masca.’ 2As to the little girl— Smelarda, as they call her— I shall await your orders. Ah! as we pass through the door you will explain to me also the signification of that gardener painted on the wall just as you enter the church. Is that not the Sower? Hé! master, what are you thinking about?” 
Dom Claude, fathoms deep in his own thoughts, was not listening to him. Charmolue, following the direction of his eyes, saw that they were fixed blankly on the spider’s web which curtained the little window. At this moment a foolish fly, courting the March sunshine, threw itself against the net, and was caught fast. Warned by the shaking of his web, the enormous spider darted out of his central cell, and with one bound rushed upon the fly, promptly doubled it up, and with its horrible sucker began scooping out the victim’s head. “Poor fly!” said the King’s attorney, and lifted his hand to rescue it. The Archdeacon, as if starting out of his sleep, held back his arm with a convulsive clutch. 
“Ma?tre Jacques,” he cried, “let fate have its way!” 
Ma?tre Jacques turned round in alarm; he felt as if his arm were in an iron vice. The eye of the priest was fixed, haggard, glaring, and remained fascinated by the horrible scene between the spider and the fly. 
“Ah, yes!” the priest went on, in a voice that seemed to issue from the depths of his being, “there is a symbol of the whole story. She flies, she is joyous, she has but just entered life; she courts the spring, the open air, freedom; yes, but she strikes against the fatal web— the spider darts out, the deadly spider! Hapless dancer! Poor, doomed fly! Ma?tre Jacques, let be— it is fate! Alas! Claude, thou art the spider. But Claude, thou art also the fly! Thou didst wing thy flight towards knowledge, the light, the sun. Thy one care was to reach the pure air, the broad beams of truth eternal; but in hastening towards the dazzling loophole which opens on another world— a world of brightness, of intelligence, of true knowledge— infatuated fly! insensate sage! thou didst not see the cunning spider’s web, by destiny suspended between the light and thee; thou didst hurl thyself against it, poor fool, and now thou dost struggle with crushed head and mangled wings between the iron claws of Fate! Ma?tre Jacques, let the spider work its will!” 
“I do assure you,” said Charmolue, who gazed at him in bewilderment, “that I will not touch it. But in pity, master, loose my arm; you have a grip of iron.” 
The Archdeacon did not heed him. “Oh, madman!” he continued, without moving his eyes from the loophole. “And even if thou couldst have broken through that formidable web with thy midge’s wings, thinkest thou to have attained the light! Alas! that glass beyond— that transparent obstacle, that wall of crystal harder than brass, the barrier between all our philosophy and the truth— how couldst thou have passed through that? Oh, vanity of human knowledge! how many sages have come fluttering from afar to dash their heads against thee! How many clashing systems buzz vainly about that everlasting barrier!” 
He was silent. These last ideas, by calling off his thoughts from himself to science, appeared to have calmed him, and Jacques Charmolue completely restored him to a sense of reality by saying: “Come, master, when are you going to help me towards the making of gold? I long to succeed.” 
The Archdeacon shrugged his shoulders with a bitter smile. 
“Ma?tre Jacques, read Michael Psellus’s Dialogus de Energia et Operatione Damonum. What we are doing is not quite innocent.” 
“Speak lower, master! I have my doubts,” said Charmolue. “But one is forced to play the alchemist a little when one is but a poor attorney in the Ecclesiastical Court at thirty crowns tournois a year. Only let us speak low.” 
At this moment a sound of chewing and crunching from the direction of the furnace struck on the apprehensive ear of Ma?tre Jacques. 
“What is that?” he asked. 
It was the scholar, who, very dull and cramped in his hiding-place, had just discovered a stale crust and a corner of mouldy cheese, and had without more ado set to work upon both by way of breakfast and amusement. As he was very hungry, he made a great noise, giving full play to his teeth at every mouthful, and thus aroused the alarm of the King’s attorney. 
“It is my cat,” the Archdeacon hastily replied; “she must have got hold of a mouse in there.” 
This explanation entirely satisfied Charmolue. “True, master,” he said with an obsequious smile, “all great philosophers have some familiar animal. You know what Servius says: ’Nullus enim locus sine genio est.”’ 3 
Meanwhile, Dom Claude, fearing some new freak of Jehan’s, reminded his worthy disciple that they had the figures in the doorway to study together. They therefore quitted the cell, to the enormous relief of the scholar, who had begun to have serious fears that his chin would take root in his knees. 
______________________
1 Naked and bound thou weighest a hundred pounds when hung up by the feet. 
2 A witch or ghost. 
3 There is no place without its quardian spirit. 
Chapter 6 - Of the Result of Launching a String of Seven Oaths in a Public Square
“Te Deum laudamus!” exclaimed Master Jehan, crawling out of his hole; “the two old owls have gone at last. Och! och! Hax! pax! max!— fleas!— mad dogs!— the devil! I’ve had enough of their conversation. My head hums like a belfry. And mouldy cheese into the bargain! Well, cheer up! let’s be off with the big brother’s purse and convert all these coins into bottles.” 
He cast a look of fond admiration into the interior of the precious pouch, adjusted his dress, rubbed his shoes, dusted his shabby sleeves, which were white with ashes, whistled a tune, cut a lively step or two, looked about the cell to see if there was anything else worth taking, rummaged about the furnace and managed to collect a glass amulet or so by way of trinket to give to Isabeau la Thierrye, and finally opened the door, which his brother had left unfastened as a last indulgence, and which he in turn left open as a last piece of mischief, and descended the spiral staircase, hopping like a bird. In the thick darkness of the winding stairs he stumbled against something which moved out of the way with a growl. He surmised that it was Quasimodo, which circumstance so tickled his fancy that he descended the rest of the stairs holding his sides with laughter. He was still laughing when he issued out into the square. 
He stamped his foot when he found himself on level ground. 
“Oh, most excellent and honourable pavement of Paris!” he exclaimed. “Oh, cursed staircase, that would wind the very angels of Jacob’s ladder! What was I thinking of to go and thrust myself up that stone gimlet that pierces the sky, just to eat bearded cheese and look at the steeples of Paris through a hole in the wall!” 
He went on a few steps, and caught sight of the “two owls” lost in contemplation of the sculpture in the doorway. Approaching them softly on tip-toe, he heard the Archdeacon say in low tones to Charmolue: “It was Guillaume of Paris who had the Job engraven on the lapis-lazuli coloured stone. Job represents the philosopher’s stone, which also must be tried and tormented in order to become perfect, as Raymond Lulle says: ’Sub conservatione form? specific? salva anima.’ ”3 
“It’s all one to me,” said Jehan; “I’ve got the purse.” 
At that moment he heard a powerful and ringing voice behind him give vent to a string of terrible oaths: 
“Sang-Dieu! Ventre-Dieu! Bé-Dieu! Corps de Dieu! Nombril de Belzébuth! Nom d’un pape! Corne et tonnerre!” 
“My soul on it!” exclaimed Jehan, “that can be no other than my friend Captain Ph?bus!” 
The name Ph?bus reached the ear of the Archdeacon just as he was explaining to the King’s attorney the meaning of the dragon hiding its tail in a caldron from which issued smoke and a king’s head. Dom Claude started and broke off short to the great astonishment of Charmolue, then turned and saw his brother Jehan accosting a tall officer at the door of the Gondelaurier mansion. 
It was, in fact, Captain Ph?bus Chateaupers. He was leaning his back against a corner of the house of his betrothed and swearing like a Turk. 
“My faith, Captain Ph?bus,” said Jehan, taking his hand, “but you are a wonderfully spirited swearer!” 
“Thunder and devils!” answered the captain. 
“Thunder and devils to you!” retorted the scholar. 
“How now, my gentle captain, whence this overflow of elegant language?” 
“Your pardon, friend Jehan!” cried Ph?bus, shaking his hand, “a runaway horse can’t be pulled up short. Now I was swearing at full gallop. I’ve just been with those mincing prudes, and by the time I come away my throat’s so full of oaths that I must spit them out, or by thunder I should choke!” 
“Come and have a drink?” asked the scholar. 
This proposal calmed the young soldier. 
“With all my heart, but I’ve no money.” 
“But I have.” 
“Nonsense! let’s see.” 
With an air of good-natured superiority Jehan displayed the purse before his friend’s eyes. 
Meanwhile the Archdeacon, leaving Charmolue standing gaping, had approached the two and stopped a few paces off, observing them without their noticing him, so absorbed were they in examining the contents of the purse. 
“A purse in your pocket, Jehan!” exclaimed Ph?bus, “why, ’tis the moon in a pail of water— one sees it, but it is not there, it is only the reflection. Par Dieu! I’ll wager it’s full of pebbles!” 
“These are the pebbles with which I pave my breeches pockets,” answered Jehan coldly; and without further wasting of words he emptied the purse on a corner-stone near by, with the air of a Roman saving his country. 
“As I live!” muttered Ph?bus, “targes! grands blancs! petits blancs! deniers parisis! and real eagle pieces! ’Tis enough to stagger one!” 
Jehan preserved his dignified and impassive air. A few liards had rolled into the mud; the captain in his enthusiasm stooped to pick them up. But Jehan restrained him. 
“Fie, Captain Ph?bus de Chateaupers!” 
Ph?bus counted the money, and turning solemnly to Jehan: “Do you know, Jehan,” said he, “that there are twenty-three sous parisis here? Whom did you rob last night in the Rue Coupe-Gueule?” 
Jehan tossed his curly head. “How if one has a brother,” he said, narrowing his eyes as if in scorn, “an archdeacon and a simpleton?” 
“Corne de Dieu!” cried Ph?bus, “the worthy man!” 
“Let’s go and drink,” said Jehan. 
“Where shall we go?” said Ph?bus, “to the Pomme d’Eve?” 
“No, captain, let’s go to the Vieille-Science.” 
“A fig for your Vieille-Science, Jehan! the wine is better at the Pomme d’Eve; besides, there’s a vine at the door that cheers me while I drink.” 
“Very well, then— here goes for Eve and her apple,” said the scholar, taking Ph?bus by the arm. “By-the-bye, my dear captain, you spoke just now of the Rue Coupe-Gueule.1 That is very grossly said; we are not so barbarous now— we call it Rue Coupe-Gorge.” 2 
The two friends turned their steps towards the Pomme d’Eve. Needless to say they first gathered up the money, and the Archdeacon followed them. 
Followed them with a haggard and gloomy countenance. Was this the Ph?bus whose accursed name, since his interview with Gringoire, had mingled with his every thought? He did not know, but at any rate it was a Ph?bus, and this magic name was a sufficient magnet to draw the Archdeacon after the two thoughtless companions with stealthy step listening to all they said, anxiously attentive to their slightest gesture. For the rest, there was no difficulty in hearing all they had to say, so loudly did they talk, so little did they hesitate to let the passer-by share their confidences. Their talk was of duels, women, wine, folly of all sorts. 
As they turned a corner, the sound of a tambourine came to them from a neighbouring side street. Dom Claude heard the officer say to the scholar: 
“Thunder! let’s quicken our pace!” 
“Why, Ph?bus?” 
“I’m afraid the gipsy will see me.” 
“What gipsy?” 
“The girl with the goat.” 
“Esmeralda?” 
“That’s it, Jehan. I always forget her deuce of a name. Let us hurry past or she will recognise me, and I don’t want the girl to accost me in the street.” 
“Do you know her then, Ph?bus?” 
At first, the Archdeacon saw Ph?bus lean over with a grin and whisper something in Jehan’s ear. Ph?bus then burst out laughing, and threw up his head with a triumphant air. 
“In very truth?” said Jehan. 
“Upon my soul!” 
“To-night?” 
“To-night.” 
“Are you sure she’ll come?” 
“But you must be mad, Jehan. Is there ever any doubt about these things?” 
“Captain Ph?bus, you are a lucky warrior!” 
The Archdeacon overheard all this conversation. His teeth chattered. A visible dder ran through his whole frame. He stopped a moment to lean against a post like a drunken man; then he followed the track of the two boon companions. 
When he came up with them again they had changed the subject. They were singing at the top of their voices the refrain of an old song: 
“The lads, the dice who merrily throw,
Merrily to the gallows go.”
______________________
1 Cut-weasand. 
2 Cut-throat. 
3 By preserving it under a special form the soul is saved. 
Chapter 7 - The Spectre-Monk
The far-famed cabaret of the Pomme d’Eve was situated in the University, at the corner of the Rue de la Rondelle and the Rue du Batonnier. It consisted of one spacious room on the ground floor, the central arch of its very low ceiling supported by a heavy wooden pillar painted yellow. There were tables all round, shining pewter pots hanging on the walls, a constant crowd of drinkers, and girls in abundance. A single window looked on to the street; there was a vine at the door, and over the door a creaking sheet of iron having a woman and an apple painted on it, rusted by the rain and swinging in the wind— this was the sign-board. 
Night was falling; the street was pitch-dark, and the cabaret, blazing with candles, flared from afar like a forge in the gloom, while through the broken window-panes came a continuous uproar of clinking glasses, feasting, oaths, and quarrels. Through the mist which the heat of the room diffused over the glass of the door a confused swarm of figures could be seen, and now and then came a roar of laughter. The people going to and fro upon their business hastened past this noisy casement with averted eyes. Only now and then some little ragamuffin would stand on tip-toe until he just reached the window-ledge, and shout into the cabaret the old jeering cry with which in those days they used to follow drunkards: “Aux Houls, saouls, saouls, saouls!” 
One man, however, was pacing imperturbably backward and forward in forward in front of the noisy tavern, never taking his eye off it, nor going farther away from it than a sentry from his box. He was cloaked to the eyes, which cloak he had just purchased at a clothier’s shop near the Pomme d’Eve, perhaps to shield himself from the keen wind of a March night, perhaps also to conceal his dress. From time to time he stopped before the dim latticed casement, listening, peering in, stamping his feet. 
At length the door of the cabaret opened— this was evidently what he had been waiting for— and a pair of boon companions came out. The gleam of light that streamed out of the doorway glowed for a moment on their flushed and jovial faces. The man in the cloak went and put himself on the watch again under a porch on the opposite side of the street. 
“Corne et tonnerre!” said one of the two carousers. “It’s on the stroke of seven— the hour of my rendezvous.” 
“I tell you,” said his companion, speaking thickly, “I don’t live in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles— indignus qui inter mala verba habitat. My lodging is in the Rue Jean-Pain-Mollet— in vico Johannis-Pain-Mollet, and you’re more horny than a unicorn if you say the contrary. Everybody knows that he who once rides on a bear’s back never knows fear again; but you’ve a nose for smelling out a dainty piece like Saint-Jacques de l’H?pital!” 
“Jehan, my friend, you’re drunk,” said the other. 
His friend replied with a lurch. “It pleases you to say so, Ph?bus; but it is proved that Plato had the profile of a hound.” 
Doubtless the reader has already recognised our two worthy friends, the captain and the scholar. It seems that the man who was watching them in the dark had recognised them too, for he followed slowly all the zigzags which the scholar obliged the captain to make, who, being a more seasoned toper, had retained his self-possession. Listening intently to them, the man in the cloak overheard the whole of the following interesting conversation : 
“Corbacque! Try to walk straight, sir bachelor. You know that I must leave you anon. It is seven o’clock, and I have an appointment with a woman.” 
“Leave me then! I see stars and spears of fire. You’re like the Chateau of Dampmartin that burst with laughter.” 
“By the warts of my grandmother! Jehan, that’s talking nonsense with a vengeance! Look you, Jehan, have you no money left?” 
“Monsieur the Rector, it is without a mistake : the little slaughter-house— parva boucheria!” 
“Jehan! friend Jehan! you know I promised to meet that girl at the end of the Saint-Michel bridge; that I can take her nowhere but to La Falourdel’s, and that I must pay for the room. The old white-whiskered jade won’t give me credit. Jehan, I beseech you! Have we drunk the whole contents of the curè’s pouch?” 
“The consciousness of having employed the other hours well is a right and savoury condiment to our table.” 
“Liver and spleen! a truce to your gibberish! Tell me, little limb of the devil, have you any money left? Give it me, or, by Heaven, I’ll search you though you were as leprous as Job and as scabby as C?sar!” 
“Sir, the Rule Galiache is a street which has the Rue de la Verrerie at one end and the Rue de la Tixanderie at the other.” 
“Yes, yes, my good friend Jehan— my poor boy— the Rue Galiache— yes, you’re right, quite right. But for the love of Heaven collect yourself! I want but one sou parisis, and seven o’clock is the hour.” 
“Silence all round and join in the chorus: 
“ ‘When the rats have every cat devoured,
The king shall of Arras be the lord;
When the sea, so deep and wide,
Shall be frozen over at midsummertide,
Then out upon the ice you’ll see
How the men of Arras their town shall flee.’ ”
“Well, scholar of Antichrist, the foul fiend strangle thee!” cried Ph?bus, roughly pushing the tipsy scholar, who reeled against the wall and slid gently down upon the pavement of Philippe Augustus. Out of that remnant of fraternal sympathy which never wholly deserts the heart of a bottle companion, Ph?bus with his foot rolled Jehan to one of those pillows of the poor which Heaven provides at every street corner of Paris, and which the rich scornfully stigmatize with the name of rubbish-heap. The captain propped Jehan’s head upon an inclined plane of cabbage-stumps, and forthwith the scholar struck up a magnificent tenor snore. However, the captain still entertained some slight grudge against him. “So much the worse for thee if the dust-cart come and shovel thee up in passing,” said he to the poor, slumbering student; and he went on his way. 
The man with the cloak, who still dogged his footsteps, halted a moment as if struggling with some resolve; then, heaving a deep sigh, he went on after the soldier. 
Like them, we will leave Jehan sleeping under the friendly eye of heaven, and, with the reader’s permission, follow their steps. 
On turning into the Rue Saint-Andrè-des-Arcs, Captain Ph?bus perceived that some one was following him. Happening to glance behind him, he saw a sort of shade creeping after him along the wall. He stopped; he went on, the shade also moved forward. However, it caused him but little uneasiness. “Ah, bah!” he said to himself, “I haven’t a sou on me.” 
In front of the College d’Autun he made a halt. It was here that he had ffled through what he was pleased to call his studies, and from a naughty school-boy habit which still clung to him he never passed the College without offering to the statue of Cardinal Pierre Bertram, which stood to the right of the entrance, that kind of affront of which Priapus complains so bitterly in Horace’s satire: “Olim truncus eram ficulnus.” He therefore paused as usual at the effigy of the cardinal. The street was perfectly empty. As he was preparing to proceed on his way, he saw the shadow approaching him slowly; so slowly that he had the leisure to observe that it wore a cloak and a hat. Arrived at his side, it stopped and stood as motionless as the statue of the cardinal; but it fixed on Ph?bus a pair of piercing eyes which gleamed with the strange light that the pupils of a cat give forth at night. 
The captain was no coward, and would have cared very little for a robber rapier in hand; but this walking statue, this petrified man, froze his blood. Queer stories were going about at that time of a spectre-monk who nightly roamed the streets of Paris, and these stories now returned confusedly to his mind. He stood for a moment bewildered and stupefied, and then broke the silence. 
“Sir,” said he, forcing a laugh, “if you are a thief, which I trust is the case, you look to me for all the world like a heron attacking a nutshell. My good fellow, I am a ruined youth of family. But try your luck here— in the chapel of this College you will find a piece of the true cross set in silver.” 
The hand of the shade came forth from under its cloak and fell upon Ph?bus’s arm with the grip of an eagle’s talons, while at the same time it spoke. “Captain Ph?bus de Chateaupers!” it said. 
“The devil!” exclaimed Ph?bus; “you know my name?” 
“I know more than your name,” returned the cloaked man in sepulchral tones. “I know that you have a rendezvous to-night.” 
“Yes, I have,” answered Ph?bus in amazement. 
“At seven o’clock.” 
“In a quarter of an hour.” 
“At La Falourdel’s.” 
“Precisely.” 
“The old procuress of the Pont Saint-Michel.” 
“Of Saint-Michael the Archangel, as says the paternoster.” 
“Impious one!” growled the spectre. “With a woman?” 
“Confiteor— I confess it.” 
“Whose name is— ” 
“La Smeralda,” said Ph?bus lightly; all his carelessness returned to him. 
At this name the spectre’s grip tightened, and he shook the captain’s arm furiously. 
“Captain Ph?bus de Chateaupers, thou liest!” 
Any one beholding at that moment the flame of anger that rushed to the soldier’s face, his recoil— so violent that it relieved him from the other’s clutch, the haughty air with which he laid his hand upon the hilt of his sword, and, in face of that passionate resentment, the sullen immobility of the man in the cloak— any one beholding this would have been startled. It was like the combat between Don Juan and the statue. 
“Christ and Satan!” cried the captain, “that’s a word that seldom attacks the ear of a Chateaupers! Thou darest not repeat it!” 
“Thou liest!” said the shade coldly. 
The captain ground his teeth. Spectre-monk, phantom, superstitions— all were forgotten at this moment. He saw only a man and an insult. 
“Ha— very good!” he stammered, his voice choking with rage, and he drew his sword, still stammering— for passion makes a man tremble as well as fear. “Draw,” he cried, “here— on the spot— draw and defend yourself! There shall be blood upon these stones!” 
The other never stirred. Then, as he saw his adversary on guard and ready to run him through— “Captain Ph?bus,” said he, and his voice shook with bitterness, “you are forgetting your assignation.” 
The angry fits of such men as Ph?bus are like boiling milk of which a drop of cold water will stay the ebullition. These few words brought down the point of the sword which glittered in the captain’s hand. 
“Captain,” continued the man, “to-morrow— the day after— a month— ten years hence— you will find me ready to cut your throat; but now go to your rendezvous.” 
“Why, in truth,” said Ph?bus, as if parleying with himself, “a sword and a girl are two charming things with which to have a rendezvous; but I see no reason why I should miss the one for the sake of the other, when I can have them both.” And with that he put up his sword. 
“Go to your rendezvous,” repeated the unknown. 
“Sir,” said Ph?bus with some embarrassment, “thanks for your courtesy. You are right, there will be plenty of time to-morrow for us to mutually make slashes and buttonholes in father Adam’s doublet. I am obliged to you for thus permitting me to pass another agreeable quarter of an hour. I was indeed in hopes of laying you in the gutter, and yet arriving in time for the lady, all the more that it is not amiss to make women wait for you a little on such occasions. But you seem to be a fellow of mettle, so it will be safer to put it off till to-morrow. So now I will be off to my rendezvous; it is for seven o’clock, you know.” Here Ph?bus scratched his ear. “Ah, corne Dieu! I’d forgotten— I have not a sou to pay the hire of the garret, and the old hag will want to be paid in advance— she will not trust me.” 
“Here is the wherewithal to pay.” 
Ph?bus felt the cold hand of the unknown slip a large coin into his. He could not refrain from accepting the money and grasping the hand. 
“God’s truth!” he exclaimed, “but you are a good fellow!” 
“One condition,” said the man; “prove to me that I was wrong, and that you spoke the truth. Hide me in some corner whence I may see whether this woman be really she whom you named.” 
“Oh,” answered Ph?bus, “I have not the slightest objection. We shall use the ’Sainte-Marthe room,’ and you can see into it as much as you like from a little den at one side of it.” 
“Come, then,” said the shade. 
“At your service,” said the captain. “For all I know, you may be Messer Diabolus in person. But let’s be good friends to-night; to-morrow I will pay you all my debts— both of the purse and the sword.” 
They went forward at a rapid pace, and in a few moments the sound of the river below told them that they were on the Pont Saint-Michel, at that time lined with houses. 
“I will get you in first,” said Ph?bus to his companion, “and then go and fetch the lady, who was to wait for me near the Petit-Chatelet.” 
His companion made no reply. Since they had been walking side by side he had not uttered a word. Ph?bus stopped in front of a low door and knocked loudly. A light shone through the crevices of the door.” 
“Who’s there?” cried a quavering old voice. 
“Corps-Dieu! Tête-Dieu! Ventre-Dieu!” answered the captain. 
The door opened on the instant, revealing to the newcomers an old woman and an old lamp, both of them trembling. The old woman was bent double, clothed in rags, her palsied head, out of which peered two little blinking eyes, tied up in a kerchief, and wrinkles everywhere— her hands, her face, her neck; her lips were fallen in over her gums, and all round her mouth were tufts of white bristles, giving her the whiskered look of a cat. 
The interior of the hovel was no less dilapidated than herself— the plaster dropping from the walls, smoke-blackened beams, a dismantled chimney-piece, cobwebs in every corner; in the middle a tottering company of broken-legged tables and stools, in the cinders a dirty child, and at the back a stair-case, or rather a wooden ladder, leading to a trap-door in the ceiling. 
As he entered this den, Ph?bus’s mysterious companion pulled his cloak up to his eyes. Meanwhile the captain, swearing like a Saracen, hastened to produce his crown piece. 
“The ’Sainte-Marthe room,”’ he said as he presented it. 
The old hag treated him like a lord and t up the ècu in a drawer. It was the coin Ph?bus had received from the man in the cloak. No sooner was her back turned, than the little tousle-headed ragamuffin playing in the cinders stole to the drawer, adroitly abstracted the coin, and replaced it by a withered leaf which he plucked from a fagot. 
The old woman signed to the two gentlemen, as she entitled them, to follow her, and ascended the ladder. Arrived on the upper floor she set down her lamp upon a chest, and Ph?bus, as one knowing the ways of the house, opened a side door giving access to a small dark space. 
“In here, my dear fellow,” said he to his companion. The man in the cloak obeyed without a word. The door closed behind him; he heard Ph?bus bolt it, and a moment afterward return down the ladder with the old woman. The light had disappeared. 
Chapter 8 - The Convenience of Windows Overlooking the River
Claude Frollo— for we presume the reader, more intelligent than Ph?bus, has seen throughout this adventure no other spectre-monk than the Archdeacon— Claude Frollo groped about him for some moments in the darksome hole into which the captain had thrust him. It was one of those corners which builders sometimes reserve in the angle between the roof and the supporting wall. The vertical section of this den, as Ph?bus had very aptly termed it, would have exhibited a triangle. It had no window of any description, and the slope of the roof prevented one standing upright in it. Claude, therefore, was forced to crouch in the dust and the plaster that cracked under him. His head was burning. Groping about him on the floor, he found a piece of broken glass which he pressed to his forehead, and so found some slight relief from its coldness. 
What was passing at that moment in the dark soul of the Archdeacon? God and himself alone knew. 
According to what fatal order was he disposing in his thoughts La Esmeralda, Ph?bus, Jacques Charmolue, his fondly loved young brother, abandoned by him in the gutter, his cloth, his reputation perhaps, dragged thus into the house of the notorious old procuress— all these images— these wild doings? I cannot say; but it is very certain that they formed a horrible group in his mind’s eye. 
He had been waiting a quarter of an hour, and he felt that he had aged a century in that time. Suddenly he heard the wooden ladder creak. Some one was ascending it. The trap-door opened again, and once more the light made its appearance. In the worm-eaten door of his retreat there was a crack; to this he pressed his face and could thus see all that went on in the adjoining space. The old cat-faced hag came first through the trap-door, lamp in hand; then followed Ph?bus, twirling his mustaches; and lastly a third person, a beautiful and graceful figure— La Esmeralda. To the priest she issued from below like a dazzling apparition. Claude shook, a mist spread before his eyes, his pulses throbbed violently, everything turned round him, there was a roaring in his ears; he saw and heard no more. 
When he came to himself again, Ph?bus and Esmeralda were alone, seated upon the wooden chest beside the lamp, the light of which revealed to the Archdeacon the two youthful figures and a miserable pallet at the back of the attic. 
Close to the couch was a window, the casement of which, cracked and bulging like a spider’s web in the rain, showed through its broken strands a small patch of sky, and far down it the moon reclining on a pillow of soft clouds. 
The girl was blushing, panting, confused. Her long, drooping lashes shaded her glowing cheeks. The officer, to whom she dared not lift her eyes, was radiant. Mechanically, and with a ravishing coy air, she was tracing incoherent lines on the bench with the tip of her finger, her eyes following the movement. Her foot was hidden, for the little goat was lying on it. 
The captain was arrayed for conquest, with ruffles of gold lace at his throat and wrists— the extreme of elegance in those days. 
It was not without difficulty that Dom Claude could hear their conversation, so loudly did the blood beat in his ears. 
A dull affair enough, the conversation of a pair of lovers — one never-ending “I love you”; a musical phrase, but terribly monotonous and insipid to the indifferent listener. But Claude was no indifferent listener. 
“Oh,” said the girl, without lifting her eyes, “do not despise me, Monseigneur Ph?bus. I feel that I am doing very wrong!” 
“Despise you, pretty one!” returned the officer with an air of superior and princely gallantry, “despise you, Tête-Dieu, and what for?” 
“For having followed you.” 
“On that score, my charmer, we do not at all agree. I ought not to despise, but to hate you.” 
The girl looked up at him frightened. “Hate me! What have I done?” 
“Why, you have taken so much soliciting.” 
“Alas!” said she, “it is that I am breaking a vow— I shall never find my parents— the amulet will lose its virtue — but what of that?— what need have I of a father or mother now?” And she fixed on the soldier her large dark eyes, dewy with tenderness and delight. 
“The devil fly away with me if I know what you mean!” cried Ph?bus. 
Esmeralda was silent for a moment, then a tear rose to her eyes, and a sigh to her lips, as she murmured, “Oh, sir, I love you!” 
There was around the girl such a halo of chastity, such a perfume of virtue, that Ph?bus was not quite at his ease with her. These words, however, emboldened him. “You love me!” he exclaimed with transport, and threw his arm round the gipsy’s waist. He had only been on the lookout for an opportunity. 
The priest beheld this, and tried with his finger-tip the edge of the dagger which he kept concealed in his bosom. 
“Ph?bus,” the gipsy went on, at the same time gently disengaging her waist from the officer’s clinging hands, “you are good, you are generous, you are handsome. You saved me— me, who am but a poor wandering gipsy girl. I had long dreamed of an officer who should save my life. It was of you I dreamed before I met you, my Ph?bus. The officer of my dream wore a fine uniform like yours, a grand look, a sword. You are called Ph?bus; it is a beautiful name. I love your name; I love your sword. Draw your sword, Ph?bus, and let me look at it.” 
“Child!” said the captain, unsheathing his sword with an indulgent smile. 
The Egyptian looked at the hilt, at the blade, examined with adorable curiosity the monogram on the guard, and then kissed the sword. “You are the sword of a brave man,” she said. “I love my officer.” 
Here Ph?bus availed himself of the opportunity, as she bent over the sword, to press a kiss upon her fair neck, which made the girl flush crimson and draw herself up, while the priest ground his teeth in the darkness. 
“Ph?bus,” the gipsy resumed, “let me talk to you. But first, pray you, walk about a little that I may see you at your full height, and hear the ring of your spurs. How handsome you are!” 
The captain rose to please her, chiding her the while with a smile of satisfied vanity. “What a child it is! Apropos, sweetheart, have you ever seen me in gala uniform?” 
“Alas! no,” said she. 
“Ah, that’s worth looking at!” He reseated himself beside the gipsy, but much closer this time than before. “Listen, my sweet—” 
The gipsy girl gave two or three little taps of her pretty hand on his mouth with a playfulness that was full of child-like grace and gaiety. “No, no, I will not listen to anything. Do you love me? I want you to tell me if you love me.” 
“Do I love thee, angel of my life!” exclaimed the captain, sinking on one knee before her. “I am thine— body, blood, and soul; all, all would I give for thee. I love thee, and have never loved but thee.” 
The captain had so often repeated this sentence, on so many similar occasions, that he delivered it at one breath, and without a single blunder. At this passionate declaration the Egyptian raised to the dingy ceiling— which here took the place of heaven— a look full of ineffable happiness. “Oh,” she murmured, “this is the moment at which one should die!” 
Ph?bus found “the moment” more suitable for snatching another kiss, which went to torture the miserable Archdeacon in his hiding-place. 
“Die!” cried the amorous captain. “What are you saying, my angel? This is the time to live, or Jupiter is but a scoundrel! To die at the beginning of so delicious an occasion! Corne de b?uf— that were a poor joke indeed! No, indeed. Listen, my dear Similar, Esmenarda— Pardon me! but you’ve got a name so prodigiously Saracen that I can’t get it out properly— ’tis a thicket that always brings me up short.” 
“Alas!” said the poor girl, “and I used to like the name for its singularity. But since it displeases you, I would I were called Goton.” 
“Oh, ’tis not worth crying about, sweetheart! It’s a name one must get accustomed to, that’s all. Once I know it by heart, ’twill come readily enough. Listen, then, my Similar, I love you to distraction— it’s positively miraculous how much I love you. I know a little girl who is bursting with rage over it.” 
“Who is that?” the gipsy broke in jealously. 
“What does it matter to us?” answered Ph?bus. “Do you love me?” 
“Oh!” said she. 
“Well, that’s enough. You shall see how much I love you too. May the great demon Neptune stick me on his fork, if I don’t make you the happiest creature living. We’ll have a pretty little lodging somewhere. My archers shall parade before your windows. They are all mounted, and cut out those of Captain Mignon completely. There are bill-men, cross-bowmen, and culverin-men. I will take you to the great musters of the Paris men-at-arms at the Grange de Rully. That’s a very magnificent sight. Eighty thousand men under arms— thirty thousand in shining armour; the sixty-seven banners of the trade guilds; the standards of the Parliament, of the Chamber of Accounts, the Public Treasury, of the Workers in the Mint— in short, a devilish fine show! Then I’ll take you to see the lions at the King’s palace— beasts of prey, you know— women always like that.” 
For some minutes the girl, absorbed in her own happy thoughts, had been dreaming to the sound of his voice with-out attending to his words. 
“Oh, how happy you will be,” continued the soldier, and at the same time gently unfastening the gipsy’s belt. 
“What are you doing?” she said brusquely— this forceful proceeding had roused her from her dreams. 
“Nothing,” answered Ph?bus. “I was only saying that you would have to put away all this mountebank, street-dancer costume when you are going to be with me.” 
“To be with you, my Ph?bus,” said the girl fondly, and she fell silent and dreamy again. 
Emboldened by her gentleness the captain clasped his arm about her waist without her offering any resistance; he then began softly to unlace the pretty creature’s bodice, and so disarranged her neckerchief, that from out of it the panting priest beheld the gipsy’s beautiful bare shoulder rise, round and dusky as the moon through a misty horizon. 
The girl let Ph?bus work his will. She seemed unconscious of what he was doing. The captain’s eyes gleamed. Suddenly she turned to him. “Ph?bus,” she said with a look of boundless love, “teach me your religion.” 
“My religion!” exclaimed the captain with a guffaw. “Teach you my religion! Thunder and lightning! what do you want with my religion?” 
“That we may be married,” answered she. 
A mingled look of surprise, disdain, unconcern, and licentious passion swept over the captain’s face. “Ah, bah!” said he, “who talks of marriage?” 
The gipsy turned pale, and let her head droop sadly on her breast. 
“Sweetheart,” went on Ph?bus fondly, “what matters such foolery as marriage? Shall we be any less loving for not having gabbled some Latin in a priest’s shop?” 
And as he said this in his most insinuating tones, he drew still closer to the gipsy; his caressing arms had resumed their clasp about that slender, pliant waist; his eye kindled more and more, and everything proclaimed that Captain Ph?bus was obviously approaching one of those moments at which Jupiter himself behaves so foolishly that worthy old Homer is obliged to draw a cloud over the scene. 
Dom Claude, however, saw everything. The door was merely of worm-eaten old puncheon ribs, and left between them ample passage for his vulture gaze. This dark-skinned, broad-shouldered priest, condemned hitherto to the austere chastity of the cloister, shivered and burned alternately at this night-scene of love and passion. The sight of this lovely, dishevelled girl in the arms of a young and ardent lover turned the blood in his veins to molten lead. He felt an extraordinary commotion within him; his eye penetrated with lascivious jealousy under all these unfastened clasps and laces. Any one seeing the wretched man’s countenance pressed close against the worm-eaten bars would have taken it for the face of a tiger looking through his cage at some jackal devouring a gazelle. 
By a sudden, rapid movement Ph?bus snatched the gipsy’s kerchief completely off her neck. The poor girl, who had sat pale and dreamy, started from her reverie. She brusquely tore herself away from the too enterprising young officer, and catching sight of her bare neck and shoulders, blushing, confused, and mute with shame, she crossed her beautiful arms over her bosom to hide it. But for the flame that burned in her cheeks, to see her thus standing, silent and motionless, with drooping eyes, you would have taken her for a statue of Modesty. 
But this action of the captain’s had laid bare the mysterious amulet which she wore round her neck. 
“What is that?” he asked, seizing this pretext for once more approaching the beautiful creature he had frightened away. 
“Do not touch it,” she answered quickly, “it is my protection. 
Through it I shall find my parents again if I remain worthy of that. Oh, leave me, Monsieur le Capitaine! Mother! my poor mother! where art thou? Come to my aid! Have pity, Monsieur Ph?bus— give me back my kerchief to cover my bosom.” 
But Ph?bus drew back coldly. “Ah, mademoiselle,” he said, “I see very plainly that you do not love me!” 
“Not love him!” cried the poor unhappy child, clinging wildly to him and drawing him down to the seat beside her. “I do not love thee, my Ph?bus? What words are these, cruel, to rend my heart! Oh, come— take me! take all! do with me what thou wilt! I am thine. What matters the amulet! What is my mother to me now! Thou art father and mother to me now, since I love thee! Ph?bus, beloved, look at me— see, ’tis I— ’tis that poor little one whom thou wilt not spurn from thee, and who comes, who comes herself to seek thee. My soul, my life, myself— all, all belong to thee, my captain. Well, so be it— we will not marry, since it is not thy wish. Besides, what am I but a miserable child of the gutter, while thou, my Ph?bus, art a gentleman. A fine thing, truly! A dancing girl to espouse an officer! I was mad! No, Ph?bus, I will be thy paramour, thy toy, thy pleasure— what thou wilt— only something that belongs to thee— for what else was I made? Soiled, despised, dishonoured, what care I? if only I be loved I shall be the proudest and happiest of women. And when I shall be old and ugly, when I am no longer worthy of your love, monseigneur, you will suffer me to serve you. Others will embroider scarfs for you— I, the handmaid, will have care of them. You will let me polish your spurs, brush your doublet, and rub the dust from off your riding-boots— will you not, Ph?bus? You will grant me so much? And meanwhile, take me— I am thine— only love me! We gipsies, that is all we ask— love and the free air of heaven!” 
Speaking thus, she threw her arms round the soldier’s neck and raised her eyes to his in fond entreaty, smiling through her tears. Her tender bosom was chafed by the woollen doublet and its rough embroidery as the fair, half-nude form clung to his breast. The captain, quite intoxicated, pressed his lips to those exquisite shoulders, and the girl, lying back in his arms, with half-closed eyes, glowed and trembled under his kisses. 
Suddenly above the head of Ph?bus she beheld another head— a livid, convulsed face with the look as of one of the damned, and beside that face a raised hand holding a dagger. It was the face and the hand of the priest. He had broken in the door and stood behind the pair. Ph?bus could not see him. The girl lay motionless, petrified and speechless with terror at the appalling apparition, like a dove that raises her head and catches the terrible keen eye of the hawk fixed upon her nest. 
She was unable even to cry out. She saw the dagger descend upon Ph?bus and rise again, reeking. 
“Malediction!” groaned the captain, and fell. 
The girl swooned, but at the moment ere her eyes closed and she lost all consciousness, she seemed to feel a fiery pressure on her lips, a kiss more searing than the brand of the torturer. 
When she came to her senses she found herself surrounded by the soldiers of the watch; the captain was being borne away bathed in his blood, the priest had vanished, the window at the back of the room overlooking the river was wide open; they picked up a cloak which they supposed to belong to the officer, and she heard them saying to one another: 
“It is a witch who has stabbed a captain.” 
BOOK VIII
Chapter 1 - The Crown Piece changed into A Withered Leaf
Gringoire and the whole Court of Miracles were in a state of mortal anxiety. For a whole long month nobody knew what had become of Esmeralda, which greatly distressed the Duke of Egypt and his friends the Vagabonds— nor what had become of her goat, which doubled the distress of Gringoire. One evening the Egyptian had disappeared, and from that moment had given no sign of life. All searching and inquiries had been fruitless. Some malicious beggars declared that they had met her on the evening in question in the neighbourhood of the Pont Saint-Michel in company with an officer, but this husband á la mode de Bohème was a most incredulous philosopher, and, besides, he knew better than any one to what extent his wife was still a maid. He had had an opportunity of judging how impregnable was the chastity resulting from the combined virtues of the amulet and the gipsy’s own feelings, and he had mathematically calculated the power of resistance of the last-mentioned factor. On that score, therefore, he was quite easy. 
Consequently he was quite unable to account for this disappearance, which was a source of profound regret to him. He would have lost flesh over it had such a thing been possible. As it was, he had forgotten everything over this subject, even to his literary tastes, even to his great opus: Dc figuris regularibus et irregularibus, which he counted on getting printed as soon as he had any money. For he raved about printing ever since he had seen the Didascolon of Hugues de Saint-Victor printed with the famous types of Wendelin of Spires. 
One day, as he was passing dejectedly before the Tournelle Criminelle, he observed a small crowd at one of the doors of the Palais de Justice. 
“What is going on?” he asked of a young man who was coming out. 
“I do not know, sir,” replied the young man. “They say a woman is being tried for the murder of a soldier. As there would seem to be some witchcraft in the business, the Bishop and the Holy Office have interfered in the case, and my brother, who is Archdeacon of Josas, spends his whole time there. As it happened, I wished to speak with him, but I could not get near him for the crowd— which annoys me very much, for I want money.” 
“Alack, sir,” said Gringoire, “I would I had any to lend you, but though my breeches pockets are in holes, it is not from the weight of coin in them.” 
He did not venture to tell the youth that he knew his brother the Archdeacon, whom he had never visited since the scene in the church— a neglect which smote his conscience. 
The scholar went his way, and Gringoire proceeded to follow the crowd ascending the stairs to the court-room. To his mind, there was nothing equal to the spectacle of a trial for dissipating melancholy, the judges exhibiting, as a rule, such extremely diverting stupidity. The crowd with whom he mingled walked and elbowed one another in silence. After a protracted and uneventful pilgrimage through a long dark passage which wound through the Palais like the intestinal canal of the old edifice, he arrived at a low door opening into a court-room which his superior height enabled him to explore over the swaying heads of the multitude. 
The hall was vast and shadowy, which made it appear still larger. The day was declining, the long pointed windows admitted only a few pale rays of light, which died out before they reached the vaulted ceiling, an enormous trellis-work of carved wood, the thousand figures of which seemed to stir confusedly in the gloom. Several candles were already lighted on the tables, and gleamed on the heads of the law clerks buried in bundles of documents. The lower end of the hall was occupied by the crowd; to right and left sat gowned lawyers at tables; at the other extremity upon a raised platform were a number of judges, the back rows plunged in darkness— motionless and sinister figures. The walls were closely powdered with fleurs-de-lis, a great figure of Christ might be vaguely distinguished above the heads of the judges, and everywhere pikes and halberds, their points tipped with fire by the glimmering rays of the candles. 
“Sir,” said Gringoire to one of his neighbours, “who are all those persons yonder, ranged like prelates in council?” 
“Sir,” answered the man, “those on the right are the Councillors of the High Court, and those on the left the Examining Councillors— the ma?tres in black gowns, the messires in red ones.” 
“And above them, there,” continued Gringoire, “who is the big, red-faced one sweating so profusely?” 
“That is Monsieur the President.” 
“And those sheepsheads behind him?” Gringoire went on — we know that he had no great love for the magistrature, owing, may-be, to the grudge he bore against the Palais de Justice ever since his dramatic misadventure. 
“Those are the lawyers of the Court of Appeal of the Royal Palace.” 
“And that wild boar in front of them?” 
“Is the Clerk of the Court of Parliaments.” 
“And that crocodile to the right of him?” 
“Ma?tre Philippe Lheulier, King’s advocate extraordinary.” 
“And to the left, that big black cat?” 
“Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue, procurator in the Ecclesiastical Court, with the members of the Holy Office.” 
“And may I ask, sir,” said Gringoire, “what all these worthies are about?” 
“They are trying some one.” 
“Trying whom? I see no prisoner.” 
“It is a woman, sir. You cannot see her. She has her back turned to us, and is hidden by the crowd. Look, she is over there where you see that group of partisans.” 
“Who is the woman?” asked Gringoire; “do you know her name?” 
“No, sir, I have but just arrived. I conclude, however, from the presence of the Office that there is some question of witchcraft in the matter.” 
“Ah, ha!” said our philosopher, “so we shall have the pleasure of seeing these black gowns devouring human flesh! Well, it is a spectacle as good as any other.” 
“Do you not think, sir, that Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue has a very kindly air?” observed his neighbour. 
“Hum!” responded Gringoire. “I am somewhat distrustful of kindness that has such thin nostrils and sharp lips.” 
Here the bystanders imposed silence on the two talkers. An important deposition was being heard. 
“My lords,” an old woman was saying, whose face and shape generally was so muffled in her garments that she looked like an animated heap of rags; “my lords, the thing is as true as that I am La Falourdel, for forty years a householder on the Pont Saint-Michel, and paying regularly all rents and dues and ground taxes— the door opposite to the house of Tassin-Caillart, the dyer, which is on the side looking up the river. A poor old woman now, a pretty girl once-a-days, my lords! Only a few days before, they said to me: ’La Falourdel, do not spin too much of an evening, the devil is fond of combing old women’s distaffs with his horns. ’Tis certain that the spectre-monk who haunted the Temple last year is going about the city just now; take care, La Falourdel, that he does not knock at your door.’ I ask who’s there. Some one swears. I open the door. Two men come in— a man in black with a handsome officer. You could see nothing of the black man but his eyes— two live coals— all the rest hat and cloak. So they say to me: ’The Sainte-Marthe room’— that is my upper room, my lords, my best one, and they give me a crown. I t the crown in a drawer, and says I: ’That will do to buy tripe to-morrow at the slaughter-house of La Gloriette.’ We go upstairs. Arrived at the upper room, as I turn my back a moment, the man in black disappears. This astonishes me somewhat. The officer, who was handsome and grand as a lord, comes down again with me. He leaves the house, but in about the time to spin a quarter of a skein he returns with a beautiful young girl— a poppet who would have shone like a star had her locks been properly braided. Following her came a goat— a great goat— whether black or white I can’t remember. This set me to thinking. The girl— that does not concern me— but the goat! I don’t like those animals with their beards and horns— it’s too like a man. Besides, that smells of witch-craft. However, I say nothing. I had the crown piece. That is only fair, is it not, my lord judge? So I show the captain and the girl into the upper room and leave them alone— that is to say, with the goat. I go down and get to my spinning again. I must tell you that my house has a ground floor and an upper storey; the back looks out on to the river, as do all the houses on the bridge, and the groundfloor window and the window of the upper floor open on to the water. Well, as I was saying, I sat down again to my spinning. I don’t know why, but I began thinking about the spectre-monk whom the goat had brought to my mind, and that the pretty girl was dressed very outlandish, when all at once I hear a cry overhead and something fall on the floor, and then the window opening. I run to mine, which is just underneath, and see a black mass drop into the water— a phantom dressed like a priest. It was moonlight, so I saw it quite plainly. It swam away towards the city. Then, all of a tremble, I called the watch. The gentlemen of the guard came in, and at first, not knowing what was the matter, they made merry over it and began to beat me. I explained to them. We go upstairs, and what do we find? My unfortunate room swimming in blood, the captain stretched his whole length on the floor with a dagger in his neck, the girl making as if she were dead, and the goat in a fury. ’A pretty business,’ say I. ’’Twill be a fortnight’s work to clean up these boards. It must be scraped— a terrible job!’ They carried away the officer, poor young man, and the girl— halfnaked. But stay— the worst is to come. The next morning, when I went to take the crown to buy my tripe, I found a withered leaf in its place!” 
The old beldame ceased. A murmur of horror went round the place. “That phantom, that goat— all this savours of magic,” said one of Gringoire’s neighbours. “And that withered leaf,” added another. “There can be no doubt,” went on a third, “that it’s some witch who has commerce with the spectre-monk to plunder officers.” Gringoire himself was not far from thinking this connection both probable and alarming. 
“Woman Falourdel,” said the President with majesty, “have you nothing further to declare to the court?” 
“No, my lord,” answered the woman, “unless that in the report my house has been named a tumble-down and stinking hovel, which is insulting language. The houses on the bridge are not very handsome, because they swarm with people; but, nevertheless, the butchers live there, and they are wealthy men with handsome and careful wives.” 
The magistrate who reminded Gringoire of a crocodile now rose. “Peace!” said he. “I would beg you gentlemen not to lose sight of the fact that a dagger was found on the accused. Woman Falourdel, have you brought with you the withered leaf into which the crown was transformed that the demon gave you?” 
“Yes, my lord. I found it again. Here it is.” 
An usher handed the dead leaf to the crocodile, who, with a doleful shake of the head, passed it to the President, who sent it on to the procurator of the Ecclesiastical Court, so that it finally made the round of the hall. 
“’Tis a beech leaf,” said Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue, “an additional proof of magic!” 
A councillor then took up the word. “Witness, you say two men went up together in your house: the man in black whom you first saw disappear and then swimming in the Seine in priest’s habit, and the officer. Which of the two gave you the crown?” 
The hag reflected for a moment, then answered, “It was the officer.” 
A murmur ran through the crowd. 
“Ah,” thought Gringoire, “that somewhat shakes my conviction.” 
But Ma?tre Philippe Lheulier again interposed. “I would remind you, gentlemen, that in the deposition taken down at his beside the murdered officer, while stating that a vague suspicion had crossed his mind at the instant when the black man accosted him, that it might be the spectre-monk, added, that the phantom had eagerly urged him to go and meet the accused, and on his (the captain’s) observing that he was without money, had given him the crown which the said officer paid to La Falourdel. Thus the crown is a coin of hell.” 
This conclusive observation appeared to dissipate all doubts entertained by Gringoire or any other sceptics among the listeners. 
“Gentlemen, you have the documents in hand,” added the advocate as he seated himself, “you can consult the deposition of Ph?bus de Chateaupers.” 
At this name the accused started up. Her head was now above the crowd. Gringoire, aghast, recognised Esmeralda. 
She was deadly pale; her hair, once so charmingly braided and spangled with sequins, fell about her in disorder; her lips were blue, her sunken eyes horrifying. Alas! 
“Ph?bus!” she cried distraught, “where is he? Oh, my lords, before you kill me, in mercy tell me if he yet lives!” 
“Silence, woman!” answered the President; “that is not our concern.” 
“Oh, in pity, tell me if he lives!” she cried again, clasping her beautiful wasted hands; and her chains clanked as she moved. 
“Well, then,” said the King’s advocate dryly, “he is at the point of death. Does that satisfy you?” 
The wretched girl fell back in her seat, speechless, tearless, white as a waxen image. 
The President leaned down to a man at his feet who wore a gilded cap and a black gown, a chain round his neck, and a wand in his hand. 
“Usher, bring in the second accused.” 
All eyes were turned towards a little door which opened, and to Gringoire’s great trepidation gave entrance to a pretty little goat with gilded horns and hoofs. The graceful creature stood a moment on the threshold stretching her neck exactly as if, poised on the summit of a rock, she had a vast expanse before her eyes. Suddenly she caught sight of the gipsy girl, and leaping over the table and the head of the clerk in two bounds, she was at her mistress’s knee. She then crouched at Esmeralda’s feet, begging for a word or a caress; but the prisoner remained motionless, even little Djali could not win a glance from her. 
“Why— ’tis my ugly brute,” said old Falourdel, “and now I recognise them both perfectly!” 
“An it please you, gentlemen, we will proceed to the interrogation of the goat.” 
This, in effect, was the second criminal. Nothing was more common in those days than a charge of witchcraft against an animal. For instance, in the Provostry account for 1466 there is a curious specification of the expenses of the action against Gillet Soulart and his sow, “executed for their demerits” at Corbeil. Everything is detailed— the cost of the pit to put the sow into; the five hundred bundles of wood from the wharf of Morsant; the three pints of wine and the bread, the victims’ last meal, fraternally shared by the executioner; and even the eleven days’ custody and keep of the sow at eight deniers parisis per day. At times they went beyond animals. The capitularies of Charlemagne and Louis le Debonnaire impose severe penalties on fiery phantoms who had the assurance to appear in the air. 
Meanwhile the procurator of the Ecclesiastical Court exclaimed, “If the demon that possesses this goat, and which has resisted every exorcism, persist in his sorceries, if he terrify the court thereby, we forewarn him that we shall be constrained to proceed against him with the gibbet or the stake.” 
Gringoire broke out in a cold sweat. 
Charmolue then took from the table the gipsy’s tambourine, and presenting it in a certain manner to the goat, he asked: “What is the time of day?” 
The goat regarded him with a sagacious eye, lifted her gilded hoof, and struck seven strokes. It was in truth seven o’clock. A thrill of horror ran through the crowd. 
Gringoire could contain himself no longer. “She will be her own ruin!” he exclaimed aloud. “You can see for yourself she has no knowledge of what she is doing.” 
“Silence down there!” cried the usher sharply. 
Jacques Charmolue, by means of the same man?uvrings with the tambourine, made the goat perform several other tricks in connection with the date of the day, the month of the year, etc., which the reader has already witnessed. And by an optical illusion peculiar to judicial proceedings, these same spectators, who doubtless had often applauded Djali’s innocent performances in the public streets, were terrified by them under the roof of the Palais de Justice. The goat was indisputably the devil. 
It was much worse, however, when the procurator, having emptied on the floor a certain little leather bag full of movable letters hanging from Djali’s neck, the goat was seen to separate from the scattered alphabet the letters of the fatal name “Ph?bus.” The magic of which the captain had been a victim seemed incontrovertibly proven; and, in the eyes of all, the gipsy girl, the charming dancer who had so often dazzled the passer-by with her exquisite grace, was nothing more nor less than a horrible witch. 
As for her, she gave no sign of life. Neither Djali’s pretty tricks nor the menaces of the lawyers, nor the stifled imprecations of the spectators— nothing reached her apprehension any more. 
At last, in order to rouse her, a sergeant had to shake her pitilessly by the arm, and the President solemnly raised his voice: 
“Girl, you are of the race of Bohemians, and given to sorcery. In company with your accomplice, the bewitched goat, also implicated in this charge, you did, on the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, in concert with the powers of darkness, and by the aid of charms and spells, wound and poniard a captain of the King’s archers, Ph?bus de Chateaupers by name. Do you persist in your denial?” 
“Horrors!” cried the girl, covering her face with her hands. “My Ph?bus! Oh, this is hell!” 
“Do you persist in your denial?” repeated the President coldly. 
“Of course I deny it!” she answered in terrible tones; and she rose to her feet and her eyes flashed. 
“Then how do you explain the facts laid to your charge?” continued the President sternly. 
“I have already said,” she answered brokenly, “I do not know. It is a priest, a priest who is unknown to me; a devilish priest who persecutes me—” 
“There you have it,” interrupted the judge; “the spectre-monk.” 
“Oh, my lords, have pity! I am but a poor girl— ” 
“Of Egypt,” said the judge. 
Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue here interposed in his mildest tones: “In view of the painful obstinacy of the accused, I demand that she be put to the question.” 
“Accorded,” said the President. 
A dder ran through the frame of the hapless girl. She rose, however, at the order of the partisan-bearers, and walked with a tolerably firm step, preceded by Charmolue and the priests of the Office and between two lines of halberds, towards a masked door, which suddenly opened and t again upon her, seeming to the dejected Gringoire like a horrible maw swallowing her up. 
After she had disappeared a plaintive bleat was heard. It was the little goat. 
The sitting was suspended. A councillor having observed that the gentleman were fatigued, and that it would be a long time to wait till the torture was over, the President replied that a magistrate should be able to sacrifice himself to his duty. 
“The troublesome and vexatious jade,” said an old judge, “to force us to apply the question when we have not yet supped!” 
Chapter 2 - Sequel to the Crown Piece changed into A Withered Leaf
After ascending and descending several flights of steps leading to passages so dark that they were lighted by lamps at mid-day, Esmeralda, still surrounded by her lugubrious attendants, was thrust by the sergeants of the guard into a chamber of sinister aspect. This chamber, circular in form, occupied the ground floor in one of those great towers which, even in our day, pierces the layer of modern edifices with which the present Paris has covered the old. There were no windows to this vault; no other opening than the lowbrowed entrance, closed by an enormous iron door. Yet it did not want for light. A furnace was built into the thickness of the wall, and in it a great fire, which filled the vault with its crimson glow and entirely outshone a miserable candle flickering in a corner. The iron grating which closed the furnace being raised at that moment only showed, against the flaming orifice whose licking flames danced on the grim walls, the lower extremity of its bars like a row of sharp black teeth, giving the fire the appearance of a fire-breathing dragon of the ancient myths. By the light that streamed from it the prisoner beheld, ranged round the chamber, frightful instruments the use of which she did not understand. In the middle a leather mattress was stretched almost touching the ground, and over that hung a leather strap with a buckle, attached to a copper ring held in the mouth of a flat-nosed monster carved in the keystone of the vaulted roof. Iron pincers, tongs, great ploughshares were heaped inside the furnace and glowed red-hot upon the fire. The blood-red gleam of the fire only served to bring into view a confused mass of horrible objects. 
This Tartarus was known simply as the “Question Chamber.” 
Upon the bed sat with the utmost unconcern Pierrat Torterue, the official torturer. His assistants, two squarefaced gnomes in leathern aprons and linen breeches, were turning the irons in the fire. 
The poor girl might call up all her courage as she would; on entering that chamber she was seized with horror. 
The myrmidons of the law ranged themselves on one side, the priests of the Office on the other. A clerk, a table and writing materials were in a corner. 
Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue approached the Egyptian with his blandest smile. 
“My dear child,” said he, “do you persist in your denial?” 
“Yes,” she answered in an expiring voice. 
“In that case,” Charmolue went on, “it will be our painful duty to question you more urgently than we would otherwise desire. Have the goodness to seat yourself on this bed.— Ma?tre Pierrat, kindly make room for mademoiselle, and close the door.” 
Pierrat rose with a growl. “If I t the door,” he muttered, “my fire will go out.” 
“Well, then, my good fellow,” replied Charmolue, “leave it open.” 
Meanwhile, Esmeralda had remained standing. This bed of leather, on which so many poor wretches had writhed in agony, filled her with affright. Terror froze her to the marrow: she stood bewildered, stupefied. At a sign from Charmolue, the two assistants laid hold on her and placed her on the bed. They did not hurt her; but at the mere touch of these men, at the touch of the bed, she felt all her blood rush to her heart. She cast a distraught look round the chamber. She imagined she saw all these monstrous instruments of torture— which were, to the instruments of any kind she had hitherto seen, what bats, centipeds, and spiders are among birds and insects— come moving towards her from all sides to crawl over her body and pinch and bite her. 
“Where is the physician?” asked Charmolue. 
“Here,” answered a black gown she had not observed before. 
She ddered. 
“Mademoiselle,” resumed the fawning voice of the attorney of the Ecclesiastical Court, “for the third time, do you persist in denying the facts of which you are accused?” 
This time she only bent her head in assent— she was past speaking. 
“You persist?” said Jacques Charmolue. “Then, to my infinite regret, I must fulfil the duty of my office.” 
“Monsieur the King’s Attorney,” said Pierrat, “with which shall we begin?” 
Charmolue hesitated a moment with the ambiguous grimace of a poet seeking a rhyme. “With the boot,” he said at last. 
The unhappy creature felt herself so completely forsaken of God and man, that her head dropped upon her breast like a thing inert and without any power in itself. The torturer and the physician approached her together, while the two assistants began to search in their hideous collection. 
At the clank of these terrible irons the wretched child started convulsively, like a poor dead frog galvanized to life. 
“Oh!” she murmured, so low that no one heard her; “oh, my Ph?bus!” Then she sank again into her previous immobility and but her stony silence. The spectacle would have wrung any but the hearts of judges. It might have been some sin-stained soul being questioned by Satan at the flaming gate of hell. Could the miserable body on which this awful swarm of saws and wheels and pincers was preparing to fasten— could it be this gentle, pure, and fragile creature? Poor grain of millet which human justice was sending to be ground by the grewsome mill-stones of torture! 
And now the horny hands of Pierrat Torterue’s assistants had brutally uncovered that charming leg, that tiny foot, which had so often astonished the passers-by with their grace and beauty in the streets of Paris. 
“‘Tis a pity!” growled even the torturer at the sight of the slender and delicate limbs. 
Had the Archdeacon been present, he would certainly have recalled at this moment his allegory of the spider and the fly. 
Now, through the mist that spread before her eyes, the unhappy girl perceived the “boot” being brought forward, saw her foot, encased between the iron-bound boards, disappear within the frightful apparatus. Terror restored her strength. “Take it away!” she cried vehemently, starting up all dishevelled: “Mercy!” 
She sprang from the bed to throw herself at Charmolue’s feet, but her leg was held fast in the heavy block of oak and iron, and she sank over the boot like a bee with a leaden weight attached to its wing. 
At a sign from Charmolue they replaced her on the bed, and two coarse hands fastened round her slender waist the leather strap hanging from the roof. 
“For the last time, do you confess to the facts of the charge?” asked Charmolue with his imperturbable benignity. 
“I am innocent,” was the answer. 
“Then, mademoiselle, how do you explain the circumstances brought against you?” 
“Alas, my lord, I know not.” 
“You deny them?” 
“All!” 
“Proceed,” said Charmolue to Pierrat. 
Pierrat turned the screw, the boot tightened, and the victim uttered one of those horrible screams which have no written equivalent in any human language. 
“Stop!” said Charmolue to Pierrat. “Do you confess?” said he to the girl. 
“All,” cried the wretched girl. “I confess! I confess! Mercy!” 
She had overestimated her forces in braving the torture. Poor child! life had hitherto been so joyous, so pleasant, so sweet, the first pang of agony had overcome her! 
“Humanity obliges me to tell you,” observed the King’s attorney, “that in confessing, you have only death to look forward to.” 
“I hope but for that!” said she, and fell back again on the leather bed, a lifeless heap, hanging doubled over the strap buckled round her waist. 
“Hold up, my pretty!” said Ma?tre Pierrat, raising her. “You look like the golden sheep that hangs round the neck of Monsieur of Burgundy.” 
Jacques Charmolue raised his voice. “Clerk, write this down. Gipsy girl, you confess your participation in the love-feasts, Sabbaths, and orgies of hell, in company with evil spirits, witches, and ghouls? Answer!” 
“Yes,” she breathed faintly. 
“You admit having seen the ram which Beelzebub causes to appear in the clouds as a signal for the Sabbath, and which is only visible to witches?” 
“Yes.” 
“You confess to having adored the heads of Bophomet, those abominable idols of the Templars?” 
“Yes.” 
“To having had familiar intercourse with the devil under the form of a pet goat, included in the prosecution?” 
“Yes.” 
“Finally, you admit and confess to having, on the night of the twenty-ninth of March last, with the assistance of the demon and of the phantom commonly called the spectre-monk, wounded and assassinated a captain named Ph?bus de Chateaupers?” 
She raised her glazed eyes to the magistrate and answered mechanically, without a quiver of emotion, “Yes.” It was evident that her whole being was crushed. 
“Take that down,” said Charmolue to the clerk. Then, turning to the torturer, “Let the prisoner be unbound and taken back to the court.” 
When the prisoner was “unbooted,” the procurator of the Ecclesiastical Court examined her foot, still paralyzed with pain. “Come,” said he, “there’s no great harm done. You cried out in time. You could still dance, ma belle!” 
And turning to the members of the Office— “At length, justice is enlightened! That is a great consolation, messieurs! Mademoiselle will bear witness that we have used all possible gentleness towards her.” 
Chapter 3 - End of the Crown Piece changed into A Withered Leaf
When, pale and limping, she re-entered the Court of Justice, she was greeted by a general murmur of pleasure— arising on the part of the public from that feeling of satisfied impatience experienced at the theatre at the expiration of the last entr’ acte of a play, when the curtain rises and one knows that the end is about to begin; and on the part of the judges from the hope of soon getting their supper. The little goat, too, bleated with joy. She would have run to her mistress, but they had tied her to the bench. 
Night had now completely fallen. The candles, which had not been increased in number, gave so little light that the walls of the court were no longer visible. Darkness enveloped every object in a kind of mist, through which the apathetic faces of the judges were barely distinguishable. Opposite to them, at the extremity of the long hall, they could just see a vague white point standing out against the murky background. It was the prisoner. 
She had dragged herself to her place. When Charmolue had magisterially installed himself in his, he sat down, then rose and said, without allowing all too much of his satisfaction at his success to become apparent: “The prisoner has confessed all.” 
“Bohemian girl,” said the President, “you have confessed to all your acts of sorcery, of prostitution, and of assassination committed upon the person of Ph?bus de Chateaupers?” 
Her heart contracted. They could hear her sobbing through the darkness. “What you will,” she returned feebly, “only make an end of me quickly!” 
“Monsieur the King’s Attorney in the Ecclesiastical Court, the court is ready to hear your requisitions.” 
Ma?tre Charmolue drew forth an appalling document, and commenced reading with much gesticulation and the exaggerated emphasis of the Bar a Latin oration, in which all the evidences of the trial were set out in Ciceronian periphrases, flanked by citations from Plautus. We regret being unable to offer our readers this remarkable composition. The author delivered it with marvellous eloquence. He had not concluded the exordium before the perspiration was streaming from his brow and his eyes starting from his head. 
Suddenly, in the very middle of a rounded period, he broke off short, and his countenance, usually mild enough not to say stupid, became absolutely terrible. 
“Sirs!” he cried (this time in French, for it was not in the document), “Satan is so profoundly involved in this affair, that behold him present at our councils and making a mock of the majesty of the law. Behold him!” 
So saying, he pointed to the goat, which, seeing Charmolue gesticulate, thought it the right and proper thing to do likewise, and seated on her haunches was mimicking to the best of her ability with her fore-feet and bearded head the impressive pantomime of the King’s Attorney in the Ecclesiastical Court. This, if you will remember, was one of her most engaging performances. 
This incident— this final proof— produced a great effect. They bound the goat’s feet, and Charmolue resumed the thread of his eloquence. 
It was long indeed, but the peroration was admirable. The last sentence ran thus— let the reader add in imagination the raucous voice and broken-winded elocution of Ma?tre Charmolue: 
Ideo, domini, coram stryga demonstrata, crimine patente, intentione criminis existente, in nomine sanct? ecclesi? Nostr?-Domin? Parisiensis, qu? est in saisina habendi omnimodam altam et bassam, justitiam in illa hac intemerata Civitatis insula, tenore pr?sentium declaramus nos requirere, primo, aliquandam pecuniariam indemnitatem; secundo, amendationem honorabilem ante portalium maximum Nostr?-Domin?, ecclesi? cathedralis; tertio, sententiam, in virtute cujus ista stryga cum sua capella, seu in trivio vulgariter dicto ’la Grève,’ seu in insula exeunte in fluvio Sequan?, juxta pointam jardini regalis, execut? sint.”1 
He resumed his cap and sat down again. 
“Eheu!” groaned Gringoire, overwhelmed with grief. “Bassa latinitas.”2 
Another man in a black gown now rose near the prisoner. It was her advocate. The fasting judges began to murmur. 
“Advocate,” said the President, “be brief.” 
“Monsieur the President,” replied the advocate, “since the defendant has confessed the crime, I have but one word to say to these gentlemen. I bring to their notice the following passage of the Salic law: ’If a witch have devoured a man and be convicted of it, she shall pay a fine of eight thousand deniers, which makes two hundred sous of gold.’ Let the court condemn my client to the fine.” 
“An abrogated clause,” said the King’s Advocate Extraordinary. 
“Nego.”3 
“Put it to the vote!” suggested a councillor; “the crime is manifest, and it is late.” 
The votes were taken without leaving the court. The judges gave their votes without a moment’s hesitation— they were in a hurry. One after another their heads were bared at the lugubrious question addressed to them in turn in a low voice by the President. The hapless prisoner seemed to be looking at them, but her glazed eyes no longer saw anything. 
The clerk then began to write, and presently handed a long scroll of parchment to the President; after which the poor girl heard the people stirring, and an icy voice say: 
“Bohemian girl, on such a day as it shall please our lord the King to appoint, at the hour of noon, you shall be taken in a tumbrel, in your shift, barefoot, a rope round your neck, before the great door of Notre-Dame, there to do penance with a wax candle of two pounds’ weight in your hands; and from there you shall be taken to the Place-de-Grève, where you will be hanged and strangled on the town gibbet, and your goat likewise; and shall pay to the Office three lion-pieces of gold in reparation of the crimes, by you committed and confessed, of sorcery, magic, prostitution, and murder against the person of the Sieur Ph?bus de Chateaupers. And God have mercy on your soul!” 
“Oh, ’tis a dream!” she murmured, and she felt rude hands bearing her away. 
______________________
1 Therefore, gentlemen, the witchcraft being proved and the crime made manifest, as likewise the criminal intention, in the name of the holy church of Notre-Dame de Paris, which is seized of the right of all manner of justice high and low, within this inviolate island of the city, we declare by the tenor of these presents that we require, firstly, a pecuniary compensation; secondly, penance before the great portal of the cathedral church of Notre-Dame; thirdly, a sentence, by virtue of which this witch, together with her goat, shall either in the public square, commonly called La Grève, or in the island stretching out into the river Seine, adjacent to the point of the royal gardens, be executed. 
2 Oh, the monk’s Latin! 
3 I say No. 
Chapter 4 - Lasciate Ogni Speranza
In the Middle Ages, when an edifice was complete there was almost as much of it under the ground as over it. Except it were built on piles, like Notre-Dame, a palace, a fortress, a church, had always a double foundation. In the cathedrals it formed in some sort a second cathedral— subterranean, low-pitched, dark, mysterious— blind and dumb—under the aisles of the building above, which were flooded with light and resonant day and night with the music of the organ or the bells. Sometimes it was a sepulchre. In the palaces and fortresses it was a prison— or a sepulchre— sometimes both together. These mighty masses of masonry, of which we have explained elsewhere the formation and growth, had not mere foundations, but more properly speaking roots branching out underground into chambers, passages, and stairways, the counterpart of those above. Thus the churches, palaces, and bastilles might be said to be sunk in the ground up to their middle. The vaults of an edifice formed another edifice, in which you descended instead of ascending, the subterranean storeys of which extended downward beneath the pile of exterior storeys, like those inverted forests and mountains mirrored in the waters of a lake beneath the forests and mountains of its shores. 
At the Bastille Saint-Antoine, at the Palais de Justice, and at the Louvre, these subterranean edifices were prisons. The storeys of these prisons as they sank into the ground became even narrower and darker— so many zones presenting, as by a graduated scale, deeper and deeper shades of horror. Dante could find nothing better for the construction of his Inferno. These dungeon funnels usually ended in a tub-shaped pit, in which Dante placed his Satan and society the criminal condemned to death. When once a miserable being was there interred, farewell to light, air, life— ogni speranza— he never issued forth again but to the gibbet or the stake unless, indeed, he were left to rot there— which human justice called forgetting. Between mankind and the condemned, weighing upon his head, there was an accumulated mass of stone and jailers; and the whole prison, the massive fortress, was but one enormous complicated lock that barred him from the living world. 
It was in one of these deep pits, in the oubliettes excavated by Saint-Louis, in the “in pace” of the Tournelle— doubtless for fear of her escaping— that they had deposited Esmeralda, now condemned to the gibbet, with the colossal Palais de Justice over her head— poor fly, that could not have moved the smallest of its stones! Truly, Providence and social law alike had been too lavish; such a profusion of misery and torture was not necessary to crush so fragile a creature. 
She lay there, swallowed up by the darkness, entombed, walled, lost to the world. Any one seeing her in that state, after beholding her laughing and dancing in the sunshine, would have ddered. Cold as night, cold as death, no breath of air to stir her locks, no human sound to reach her ear, no ray of light within her eye— broken, weighed down by chains, crouching beside a pitcher and a loaf of bread, on a heap of straw, in the pool of water formed by the oozings of the dungeon walls— motionless, almost breathless, she was even past suffering. Ph?bus, the sun, noonday, the free air, the streets of Paris, dancing and applause, her tender love passages with the officer— then the priest, the old hag, the dagger, blood, torture, the gibbet— all this passed in turn before her mind, now as a golden vision of delight, now as a hideous nightmare; but her apprehension of it all was now merely that of a vaguely horrible struggle in the darkness, or of distant music still playing above ground but no longer audible at the depth to which the unhappy girl had fallen. 
Since she had been here she neither waked nor slept. In that unspeakable misery, in that dungeon, she could no more distinguish waking from sleeping, dreams from reality, than day from night. All was mingled, broken, floating confusedly through her mind. She no longer felt, no longer knew, no longer thought anything definitely— at most she dreamed. Never has human creature been plunged deeper into annihilation. 
Thus benumbed, frozen, petrified, scarcely had she remarked at two or three different times the sound of a trap-door opening somewhere above her head, without even admitting a ray of light, and through which a hand had thrown her down a crust of black bread. Yet this was her only surviving communication with mankind— the periodical visit of the jailer. 
One thing alone still mechanically occupied her ear: over her head the moisture filtered through the mouldy stones of the vault, and at regular intervals a drop of water fell from it. She listened stupidly to the splash made by this dripping water as it fell into the pool beside her. 
This drop of water falling into the pool was the only movement still perceptible around her, the only clock by which to measure time, the only sound that reached her of all the turmoil going on on earth; though, to be quite accurate, she was conscious from time to time in that sink of mire and darkness of something cold passing over her foot or her arm, and that made her shiver. 
How long had she been there? She knew not. She remembered a sentence of death being pronounced somewhere against some one, and then that she herself had been carried away, and that she had awakened in silence and darkness, frozen to the bone. She had crawled along on her hands and knees, she had felt iron rings cutting her ankles, and chains had clanked. She had discovered that all around her were walls, that underneath her were wet flag-stones and a handful of straw— but there was neither lamp nor air-hole. Then she had seated herself upon the straw, and sometimes for a change of position on the lowest step of a stone flight she had come upon in the dungeon. 
Once she had tried to count the black minutes marked for her by the drip of the water; but soon this mournful labour of a sick brain had discontinued of itself and left her in stupor once more. 
At length, one day— or one night (for mid-day and mid-night had the same hue in this sepulchre)— she heard above her a louder noise than the turnkey generally made when bringing her loaf of bread and pitcher of water. She raised her head, and was aware of a red gleam of light through the crevices of the sort of door or trap in the roof of the vault. At the same time the massive lock creaked, the trap-door grated on its hinges, fell back, and she saw a lantern, a hand, and the lower part of the bodies of two men, the door being too low for her to see their heads. The light stabbed her eyes so sharply that she closed them. 
When she opened them again the door was closed, the lantern placed on one of the steps, and one of the two men alone was standing before her. A black monk’s robe fell to his feet, a cowl of the same hue concealed his face; nothing of his person was visible, neither his face nor his hands— it was simply a tall black shroud under which you felt rather than saw that something moved. For some moments she regarded this kind of spectre fixedly, but neither she nor it spoke. They might have been two statues confronting one another. Two things only seemed alive in this tomb: the wick of the lantern that sputtered in the night air and the drop of water falling with its monotonous splash from the roof and making the reflection of the light tremble in concentric circles on the oily surface of the pool. 
At last the prisoner broke the silence. “Who are you?” 
“A priest.” 
The word, the tone, the voice made her start. 
The priest continued in low tones: 
“Are you prepared?” 
“For what?” 
“For death.” 
“Oh!” she exclaimed, “will it be soon?” 
“To-morrow.” 
Her head, raised with joy, fell again on her bosom. 
“’Tis very long to wait,” she sighed; “why not to-day? It could not matter to them.” 
“You are, then, very wretched?” asked the priest after another silence. 
“I am very cold,” said she. 
She took her two feet in her hands— the habitual gesture of the unfortunate who are cold, and which we have already remarked in the recluse of the Tour-Roland— and her teeth chattered. 
From under his hood the priest’s eyes appeared to be surveying the dungeon. “No light! no fire! in the water!— ’tis horrible!” 
“Yes,” she answered with the bewildered air which misery had given her. “The day is for every one, why do they give me only night?” 
“Do you know,” resumed the priest after another silence, “why you are here?” 
“I think I knew it once,” she said pressing her wasted fingers to her brow as if to aid her memory; “but I do not know now.” 
Suddenly she began to weep like a child. “I want to go away from here, sir. I am cold, I am frightened, and there are beasts that crawl over me.” 
“Well, then— follow me!” And so saying, the priest seized her by the arm. The unhappy girl was already frozen to the heart’s core, but yet that hand felt cold to her. 
“Oh,” she murmured, “’tis the icy hand of Death! Who are you?” 
The priest raised his cowl. She looked— it was the sinister face that had so long pursued her, the devilish head that she had seen above the adored head of her Ph?bus, the eye that she had last seen glittering beside a dagger. 
This apparition, always so fatal to her, which thus had thrust her on from misfortune to misfortune, even to an ignominious death, roused her from her stupor. The sort of veil that seemed to have woven itself over her memory was rent aside. All the details of her grewsome adventures, from the nocturnal scene at La Falourdel’s to her condemnation at La Tournelle, came back to her with a rush— not vague and confused as heretofore, but distinct, clear-cut, palpitating, terrible. These recollections, well-nigh obliterated by excess of suffering, revived at sight of that sombre figure, as the heat of the fire brings out afresh upon the blank paper the invisible writing traced on it by sympathetic ink. She felt as if all the wounds of her heart were reopened and bleeding at once. 
“Ah!” she cried, her hands covering her face with a convulsive dder, “it is the priest!” 
Then she let her arms drop helplessly and sat where she was, her head bent, her eyes fixed on the ground, speechless, shaking from head to foot. 
The priest gazed at her with the eye of the kite which after long hovering high in the air above a poor lark cowering in the corn, gradually and silently lessening the formidable circles of its flight, now suddenly makes a lightning dart upon its prey and holds it panting in its talons. 
“Finish,” she murmured in a whisper, “finish— the last blow!” And her head shrank in terror between her shoulders like the sheep that awaits the death-stroke of the butcher. 
“You hold me in horror then?” he said at last. 
She made no reply. 
“Do you hold me in horror?” he repeated. 
Her lips contracted as if she smiled. “Go to,” said she, “the executioner taunts the condemned! For months he has pursued me, threatened me, terrified me! But for him, my God, how happy I was! It is he who has cast me into this pit! Oh, heavens! it is he who has killed— it is he who has murdered him— my Ph?bus!” 
Here, bursting into tears, she lifted her eyes to the priest. “Oh, wretch! who are you?— what have I done to you that you should hate me so? Alas! what have you against me?” 
“I love thee!” cried the priest. 
Her tears ceased suddenly. She regarded him with an idiotic stare. He had sunk on his knees before her and enveloped her in a gaze of flame. 
“Dost thou hear? I love thee!” he cried again. 
“What love is that!” she ddered. 
“The love of the damned!” he answered. 
Both remained silent for some minutes, crushed under the load of their emotion— he distraught, she stupefied. 
“Listen,” the priest began at last, and a strange calm had come over him; “thou shalt know all. I am going to tell thee what have hitherto scarcely dared to say to myself when I furtively searched my conscience in those deep hours of the night, when it seems so dark that God himself can see us no longer. Listen. Before I saw thee, girl, I was happy.” 
“And I,” she faintly murmured. 
“Do not interrupt me— Yes, I was happy, or at least judged myself to be so. I was pure— my soul was filled with limpid light. No head was lifted so high, so radiantly as mine. Priests consulted me upon chastity, ecclesiastics upon doctrine. Yes, learning was all in all to me— it was a sister, and a sister sufficed me. Not but what, in time, other thoughts came to me. More than once my flesh stirred at the passing of some female form. The power of sex and of a man’s blood that, foolish adolescent, I had thought stifled forever, had more than once shaken convulsively the iron chain of the vows that rivet me, hapless wretch, to the cold stones of the altar. But fasting, prayer, study, the mortifications of the cloister again restored the empire of the soul over the body. Also I strenuously avoided women. Besides, I had but to open a book, and all the impure vapours of my brain were dissipated by the splendid beams of learning; the gross things of this earth fled from before me, and I found myself once more calm, serene, and joyous in the presence of the steady radiance of eternal truth. So long as the foul fiend only sent against me indefinite shadows of women passing here and there before my eyes, in the church, in the streets, in the fields, and which scarce returned to me in my dreams, I vanquished him easily. Alas! if it stayed not with me, the fault lies with God, who made not man and the demon of equal strength. Listen. One day— ” 
Here the priest stopped, and the prisoner heard sighs issuing from his breast which seemed to tear and rend him. 
He resumed. “One day I was leaning at the window of my cell. What book was I reading? Oh, all is confusion in my mind— I was reading. The window overlooked an open square. I heard a sound of a tambourine and of music. Vexed at being thus disturbed in my meditation, I looked into the square. What I saw, there were others who saw it too, and yet it was no spectacle meet for mortal eyes. There, in the middle of the open space— it was noon— a burning sun — a girl was dancing— but a creature so beautiful that God would have preferred her before the Virgin— would have chosen her to be His mother— if she had existed when He became man. Her eyes were dark and radiant; amid her raven tresses where the sun shone through were strands that glistened like threads of gold. Her feet were invisible in the rapidity of their movement, as are the spokes of a wheel when it turns at high speed. Round her head, among her ebon tresses, were discs of metal that glittered in the sun and formed about her brows a diadem of stars. Her kirtle, thick-set with spangles, twinkled all blue and studded with sparks like a summer’s night. Her brown and supple arms twined and untwined themselves about her waist like two scarfs. Her form was of bewildering beauty. Oh, the dazzling figure that stood out luminous against the very sunlight itself! Alas, girl, it was thou! Astounded, intoxicated, enchanted, I suffered myself to gaze upon thee. I watched thee long till suddenly I trembled with horror— I felt that Fate was laying hold on me.” 
Gasping for breath, the priest ceased speaking for a moment, then he went on: 
“Already half-fascinated, I strove to cling to something, to keep myself from slipping farther. I recalled the snares which Satan had already laid for me. The creature before me had such supernatural beauty as could only be of heaven or hell. That was no mere human girl fashioned out of particles of common clay and feebly illumined from within by the flickering ray of a woman’s soul. It was an angle!— but of darkness— of flame, not of light. At the same moment of thinking thus, I saw near thee a goat— a beast of the witches’ Sabbath, that looked at me and grinned. The midday sun gilded its horns with fire. ’Twas then I caught sight of the devil’s snare, and I no longer doubted that thou camest from hell, and that thou wast sent from thence for my perdition. I believed it.” 
The priest looked the prisoner in the face and added coldly: 
“And I believe so still. However, the charm acted by degrees; thy dancing set my brain in a maze; I felt the mysterious spell working within me. All that should have kept awake fell asleep in my soul, and like those who perish in the snow, I found pleasure in yielding to that slumber. All at once thou didst begin to sing. What could I do, unhappy wretch that I was. Thy song was more enchanting still than thy dance. I tried to flee. Impossible. I was nailed, I was rooted to the spot. I felt as if the stone floor had risen and engulfed me to the knees. I was forced to remain to the end. My feet were ice, my head was on fire. At length thou didst, mayhap, take pity on me— thou didst cease to sing— didst disappear. The reflection of the dazzling vision, the echo of the enchanting music, died away by degrees from my eyes and ears. Then I fell into the embrasure of the window, more stark and helpless than a statue loosened from the pedestal. The vesper bell awoke me. I rose— I fled; but alas! there was something within me fallen to arise no more— something had come upon me from which I could not flee.” 
Again he paused and then resumed: “Yes, from that day onward there was within me a man I did not know. I had recourse to all my remedies— the cloister, the altar, labour, books. Useless folly! Oh, how hollow does science sound when a head full of passion strikes against it in despair! Knowest thou, girl, what it was that now came between me and my books? It was thou, thy shadow, the image of the radiant apparition which had one day crossed my path. But that image no longer wore the same bright hue— it was sombre, funereal, black as the dark circle which haunts the vision of the imprudent eye that has gazed too fixedly at the sun. 
“Unable to rid myself of it; with thy song forever throbbing in my ear, thy feet dancing on my breviary, forever in the night-watches and in my dreams feeling the pressure of thy form against my side— I desired to see thee closer, to touch thee, to know who thou wert, to see if I should find thee equal to the ideal image that I had retained of thee. In any case, I hoped that a new impression would efface the former one, for it had become insupportable. I sought thee out, I saw thee again. Woe is me! When I had seen thee twice, I longed to see thee a thousand times, to gaze at thee forever. After that— how stop short on that hellish incline?— after that my soul was no longer my own. The other end of the thread which the demon had woven about my wings was fastened to his cloven foot. I became vagrant and wandering like thyself— I waited for thee under porches— I spied thee out at the corners of streets— I watched thee from the top of my tower. Each evening I returned more charmed, more despairing, more bewitched, more lost than before. 
“I had learned who thou wast— a gipsy— a Bohemian— a gitana— a zingara. How could I doubt of the witchcraft? Listen. I hoped that a prosecution would rid me of the spell. A sorceress had bewitched Bruno of Ast; he had her burned, and was cured. I knew this. I would try this remedy. First, I had thee forbidden the Parvis of Notre-Dame, hoping to forget thee if thou camest no more. Thou didst not heed it. Thou camest again. Then I had the idea of carrying thee off. One night I attempted it. We were two of us. Already we had thee fast, when that miserable officer came upon the scene. He delivered thee, and so began thy misfortunes— and mine— and his own as well. At length, not knowing what to do or what was to become of me, I denounced thee to the Holy Office. 
“I thought that I should thus be cured like Bruno of Ast. I thought too, confusedly, that a prosecution would deliver thee into my hands, that once in prison I should hold thee, that thou couldst not then escape me— that thou hadst possessed me long enough for me to possess thee in my turn. When one sets out upon an evil path, one should go the whole way— ’tis madness to stop midway in the monstrous! The extremity of crime has its delirium of joy. A priest and a witch may taste of all delights in one another’s arms on the straw pallet of a dungeon. 
“So I denounced thee. ’Twas then I began to terrify thee whenever I met thee. The plot which I was weaving against thee, the storm which I was brewing over thy head, burst from me in muttered threats and lightning glances. And yet I hesitated. My project had appalling aspects from which I shrank. 
“It may be that I would have renounced it— that my hideous thought would have withered in my brain without bearing fruit. I thought it would always depend on myself either to follow up or set aside this prosecution. But every evil thought is inexorable and will become an act; and there, where I thought myself all-powerful, Fate was more powerful than I. Alas! alas! ’tis Fate has laid hold on thee and cast thee in among the dread wheels of the machinery I had constructed in secret! Listen. I have almost done. 
“One day— it was again a day of sunshine— a man passes me who speaks thy name and laughs with the gleam of lust in his eyes. Damnation! I followed him. Thou knowest the rest—” 
He ceased. 
The girl could find but one word— “Oh, my Ph?bus!” 
“Not that name!” exclaimed the priest, grasping her arm with violence. “Utter not that name! Oh, wretched that we are, ’tis that name has undone us! Nay, rather we have all undone one another through the inexplicable play of Fate! Thou art suffering, art thou not? Thou art cold; the darkness blinds thee, the dungeon wraps thee round; but mayhap thou hast still more light shining within thee— were it only thy childish love for the fatuous being who was trifling with thy heart! while I— I bear the dungeon within me; within, my heart is winter, ice, despair— black night reigns in my soul! Knowest thou all that I have suffered? I was present at the trial. I was seated among the members of the Office. Yes, one of those priestly cowls hid the contortions of the damned. When they led thee in, I was there; while they questioned thee, I was there. Oh, den of wolves! It was my own crime— my own gibbet that I saw slowly rising above thy head. At each deposition, each proof, each pleading, I was present— I could count thy every step along that dolorous path. I was there, too, when that wild beast— oh, I had not foreseen the torture! Listen. I followed thee into the chamber of anguish; I saw thee disrobed and half-naked under the vile hands of the torturer; saw thy foot— that foot I would have given an empire to press one kiss upon and die; that foot which I would have rejoiced to feel crushing my head— that foot I saw put into the horrible boot that turns the limbs of a human being into a gory pulp. Oh, miserable that I am! While I looked on at this, I had a poniard under my gown with which I lacerated my breast. At thy cry I plunged it into my flesh— a second cry from thee and it should have pierced my heart. Look— I believe it still bleeds.” 
He opened his cassock. His breast was indeed scored as by tiger’s claws, and in his side was a large, badly healed wound. 
The prisoner recoiled in horror. 
“Oh, girl!” cried the priest, “have pity on me! Thou deemest thyself miserable— alas! alas! thou knowest not what misery is. Oh, to love a woman— to be a priest— to be hated — to love her with all the fury of one’s soul, to feel that for the least of her smiles one would give one’s blood, one’s vitals, fame, salvation, immortality, and eternity— this life and the life to come; to regret not being a king, a genius, an emperor, an archangel— God— that one might place a greater slave beneath her feet; to clasp her day and night in one’s dreams, one’s thoughts— and then to see her in love with the trappings of a soldier, and have naught to offer her but the unsightly cassock of a priest, which she will only regard with fear and disgust! To be present with one’s jealousy and rage while she lavishes on a miserable, brainless swashbuckler her whole treasure of love and beauty! To see the form that enflames you, that soft bosom, that flesh panting and glowing under the kisses of another! Dear heaven— to adore her foot, her arm, her shoulder, to dream of her blue veins, her sun-browned skin till one writhes whole nights upon the stones of one’s cell, and to see all those caresses, which one has dreamed of lavishing on her, end in her torture! To have succeeded only in laying her on the bed of leather! Oh, these are the irons heated in the fires of hell! Oh, blest is he who is sawn asunder, torn by four horses! Knowest thou what that torture, is, endured through long nights from seething arteries, a breaking heart, a bursting head— burying your teeth in your own hands— fell tormentors that unceasingly turn you as on a burning gridiron over a thought of love, of jealousy, and of despair! Have mercy, girl! One moment’s respite from my torment— a handful of ashes on this white heat! Wipe away, I conjure thee, the drops of agony that trickle from my brow! Child, torture me with one hand, but caress me with the other! Have pity, girl— have pity on me!” 
The priest writhed on the wet floor and beat his head against the corner of the stone steps. The girl listened to him— gazed at him. 
When he ceased, exhausted and panting, she repeated under her breath: “Oh, my Ph?bus!” 
The priest dragged himself to her on his knees. 
“I beseech thee,” he cried, “if thou hast any bowels of compassion, repulse me not! Oh, I love thee! I am a wretch! When thou utterest that name, unhappy girl, ’tis as if thou wert grinding every fibre of my heart between thy teeth! Have pity! if thou comest from hell, I go thither with thee. I have done amply to deserve that. The hell where thou art shall be my paradise— the sight of thee is more to be desired than that of God! Oh, tell me, wilt thou have none of me? I would have thought the very mountains had moved ere a woman would have rejected such a love! Oh, if thou wouldst— how happy we could be! We would flee— I could contrive thy escape— we would go somewhere— we would seek that spot on earth where the sun shines brightest, the trees are most luxuriant, the sky the bluest. We would love— would mingle our two souls together—would each have an inextinguishable thirst for the other, which we would quench at the inexhaustible fountain of our love!” 
She interrupted him with a horrible and strident laugh: 
“Look, holy father, there is blood upon your nails!” 
The priest remained for some moments as if petrified, his eyes fixed on his hand. 
“Well, be it so,” he continued at last, with strange claim; “insult me, taunt me, overwhelm me with scorn, but come— come away. Let us hasten. ’Tis for to-morrow I tell thee. The gibbet of La Grève— thou knowest— it is always in readiness. ’Tis horrible!— to see thee carried in that tumbrel! Oh, have pity! I never felt till now how much I loved thee. Oh, follow me! Thou shalt take time to love me after I have saved thee. Thou shalt hate me as long as thou wilt— but come To-morrow— to-morrow— the gibbet!— thy execution! Oh, save thyself! spare me!” 
He seized her by the arm distractedly and sought to drag her away. 
She turned her fixed gaze upon him. “What has become of Ph?bus?” 
“Ah,” said the priest, letting go her arm, “you have no mercy!” 
“What has become of Ph?bus?” she repeated stonily. 
“Dead!” cried the priest. 
“Dead?” said she, still icy and motionless; “then why talk to me of living?” 
He was not listening to her. 
“Ah, yes,” he said, as if speaking to himself, “he must be dead. The knife went deep. I think I reached his heart with the point. Oh, my soul was in that dagger to the very point!” 
The girl threw herself upon him with the fury of a tigress, and thrust him towards the steps with supernatural strength. 
“Begone, monster! Begone, assassin! Leave me to die! May the blood of both of us be an everlasting stain upon thy brow! Be thine, priest? Never! never! no power shall unite us— not hell itself! Begone, accursed— never!” 
The priest stumbled against the steps. He silently disengaged his feet from the folds of his robe, took up his lantern, and began slowly to ascend the steps leading to the door. He opened the door and went out. 
Suddenly she saw his head reappear. His face wore a frightful expression, and he cried with a voice hoarse with rage and despair: 
“I tell thee he is dead!” 
She fell on her face to the floor. No sound was now audible in the dungeon but the tinkle of the drop of water which ruffled the surface of the pool in the darkness. 
Chapter 5 - The Mother
I doubt if there be anything in the world more enchanting to a mother’s heart than the thoughts awakened by the sight of her child’s little shoe— more especially when it is the holiday shoe, the Sunday, the christening shoe— the shoe embroidered to the very sole, a shoe in which the child has not yet taken a step. The shoe is so tiny, has such a charm in it, it is so impossible for it to walk, that it is to the mother as if she saw her child. She smiles as it, kisses it, babbles to it; she asks herself if it can be that there is a foot so small, and should the child be absent, the little shoe suffices to bring back to her vision the sweet and fragile creature. She imagines she sees it— she does see it— living, laughing, with its tender hands, its little round head, its dewy lips, its clear bright eyes. If it be winter, there it is creeping about the carpet, laboriously clambering over a stool, and the mother trembles lest it come too near the fire. If it be summer, it creeps about the garden, plucks up the grass between the stones, gazes with the artless courage of childhood at the great dogs, the great horses, plays with the shell borders, with the flowers, and makes the gardener scold when he finds sand in the flower-beds and earth on all the paths. The whole world smiles, and shines, and plays round it like itself, even to the breeze and the sunbeams that wanton in its curls. The shoe brings up all this before the mother’s eye, and her heart melts thereat like wax before the fire. 
But if the child be lost, these thousand images of joy, of delight, of tenderness crowded round the little shoe become so many pictures of horror. The pretty embroidered thing is then an instrument of torture eternally racking the mother’s heart. It is still the same string that vibrates— the deepest, most sensitive of the human heart— but instead of the caressing touch of an angel’s hand, it is a demon’s horrid clutch upon it. 
One morning, as the May sun rose into one of those deep blue skies against which Garofalo loves to set his Descents from the Cross, the recluse of the Tour-Roland heard a sound of wheels and horses and the clanking of iron in the Place de Grève. But little moved by it, she knotted her hair over her ears to deaden the sound, and resumed her contemplation of the object she had been adoring on her knees for fifteen years. That little shoe, as we have already said, was to her the universe. Her thoughts were wrapped up in it, never to leave it till death. What bitter imprecations she had sent up to heaven, what heart-rending plaints, what prayers and sobs over this charming rosy toy, the gloomy cell of the Tour-Roland alone knew. Never was greater despair lavished upon a thing so engaging and so pretty. 
On this morning it seemed as though her grief found more than usually violent expression, and her lamentations could be heard in the street as she cried aloud in monotonous tones that wrung the heart: 
“Oh, my child!” she moaned, “my child! my dear and hapless babe! shall I never see thee more? All hope is over! It seems to me always as if it had happened but yesterday. My God! my God! to have taken her from me so soon, it had been better never to have given her to me at all. Knowest thou not that our children are flesh of our flesh, and that a mother who has lost her child believes no longer in God? Ah, wretched that I am, to have gone out that day! Lord! Lord! to have taken her from me so! Thou canst never have looked upon us together— when I warmed her, all sweet and rosy, at my fire— when I suckled her— when I made her little feet creep up my bosom to my lips! Ah, hadst thou seen that, Lord, thou wouldst have had pity on my joy— hadst not taken from me the only thing left for me to love! Was I so degraded a creature, Lord, that thou couldst not look at me before condemning me? Woe! woe is me!— there is the shoe— but the foot— where is it?— where is the rest— where is the child? My babe, my babe! what have they done with thee? Lord, give her back to me! For fifteen years have I worn away my knees in prayer to thee, O God— is that not enough? Give her back to me for one day, one hour, one minute— only one minute, Lord, and then cast me into hell for all eternity! Ah, did I but know where to find one corner of the hem of thy garment, I would cling to it with both hands and importune thee till thou wast forced to give me back my child! See its pretty little shoe— hast thou no pity on it, Lord? Canst thou condemn a poor mother to fifteen years of such torment? Holy Virgin— dear mother in heaven! my Infant Jesus— they have taken it from me— they have stolen it, they have devoured it on the wild moor— have drunk its blood— have gnawed its bones; Blessed Virgin, have pity on me! My babe— I want my babe! What care I that she is in paradise? I will have none of your angels— I want my child! I am a lioness, give me my cub. Oh, I will writhe on the ground— I will dash my forehead against the stones— I will damn myself, and curse thee, Lord, if thou keepest my child from me! Thou seest that my arms are gnawed all over— has the good God no pity? Oh, give me but a little black bread and salt, only let me have my child to warm me like the sun! Alas! O Lord my God, I am the vilest of sinners, but my child made me pious— I was full of religion out of love for her, and I beheld thee through her smiles as through an opening in heaven. Oh, let me only once, once more only, once more draw this little shoe on to her sweet rosy little foot, and I will die, Holy Mother, blessing thee! Ah, fifteen years— she will be a woman grown now! Unhappy child! is it then indeed true that I shall never see her more?— not even in heaven, for there I shall never go. Oh, woe is me! to have to say, There is her shoe, and that is all I shall ever have of her!” 
The unhappy creature threw herself upon the shoe— her consolation and her despair for so many years— and her very soul was rent with sobs as on the first day. For to a mother who has lost her child, it is always the first day— that grief never grows old. The mourning garments may wear out and lose their sombre hue, the heart remains black as on the first day. 
At that moment the blithe, fresh voices of children passing the cell struck upon her ear. Whenever children met her eye or ear, the poor mother would cast herself into the darkest corner of her living sepulchre, as if she sought to bury her head in the stone wall that she might not hear them. This time, contrary to her habit, she started up and listened eagerly, for one of them had said: “They are going to hang a gipsy woman to-day.” 
With the sudden bound of the spider which we have seen rush upon the fly at the shaking of his web, she ran to her loophole which looked out, as the reader knows, upon the Place de Grève. In effect, a ladder was placed against the gibbet, and the hangman’s assistant was busy adjusting the chains rusted by the rain. A few people stood round. 
The laughing group of children was already far off. The sachette looked about for a passer-by of whom she might make inquiries. Close to her cell she caught sight of a priest making believe to study the public breviary, but who was much less taken up with the lattice-guarded volume than with the gibbet, towards which, ever and anon, he cast a savage, scowling glance. She recognised him as the reverend Archdeacon of Josas, a saintly man. 
“Father,” she asked, “who is to be hanged there?” 
The priest looked at her without replying. She repeated her question. 
“I do not know,” he answered. 
“Some children passing said that it was an Egyptian woman,” said the recluse. 
“I think it is,” returned the priest. Paquette La Chantefleurie broke into a hyena laugh. 
“Listen,” said the Archdeacon, “it appears that you hate the gipsy women exceedingly?” 
“Hate them!” cried the recluse. “They are ghouls and stealers of children! They devoured my little girl, my babe, my only child! I have no heart in my body— they have eaten it!” 
She was terrible. The priest regarded her coldly. 
“There is one that I hate above the rest,” she went on, “and that I have cursed— a young one— about the age my child would be if this one’s mother had not devoured her. Each time that this young viper passes my cell my blood boils!” 
“Well, my sister, let your heart rejoice,” said the priest, stony as a marble statue on a tomb, “for ’tis that one you will see die.” 
His head fell upon his breast and he went slowly away. 
The recluse waved her arms with joy. “I foretold it to her that she would swing up there! Priest, I thank thee!” cried she, and she began pacing backward and forward in front of her loophole with dishevelled locks and flaming eyes, striking her shoulder against the wall with the savage air of a caged wolf that has long been hungry and feels that the hour of its repast draws near. 
Chapter 6 - Three Various Hearts of Men
Ph?bus, however, was not dead. Men of his sort are not so easily killed. When Ma?tre Philippe Lheulier, the King’s advocate extraordinary, had said to poor Esmeralda: “He is dying,” it was by mistake or jest. When the Archdeacon said to the condemned girl, “He is dead!” the fact is that he knew nothing about it; but he believed it to be true, he counted upon it, and hoped it earnestly. It would have been too much to expect that he should give the woman he loved good tidings of his rival. Any man would have done the same in his place. 
Not indeed that Ph?bus’s wound had not been serious, but it had been less so than the Archdeacon flattered himself. The leech, to whose house the soldiers of the watch had conveyed him in the first instance, had, for a week, feared for his life, and, indeed, had told him so in Latin. But youth and a vigorous constitution had triumphed, and, as often happens, notwithstanding prognostics and diagnostics, Nature had amused herself by saving the patient in spite of the physician. It was while he was still stretched upon a sick-bed that he underwent the first interrogations at the hands of Philippe Lheulier and the examiners of the Holy Office, which had annoyed him greatly. So, one fine morning, feeling himself recovered, he had left his gold spurs in payment to the man of drugs, and had taken himself off. For the rest, this had in no way impeded the course of justice. The law of that day had but few scruples about the clearness and precision of the proceedings against a criminal. Provided the accused was finally hanged, that was sufficient. As it was, the judges had ample proof against Esmeralda. They held Ph?bus to be dead, and that decided the matter. 
As to Ph?bus, he had fled to no great distance. He had simply rejoined his company, then on garrison duty at Queueen-Brie, in the province of ?le de France, a few stages from Paris. 
After all, he had no great desire to appear in person at the trial. He had a vague impression that he would cut a somewhat ridiculous figure. Frankly, he did not quite know what to make of the whole affair. Irreligious, yet credulous like every soldier who is nothing but a soldier, when he examined the particulars of that adventure, he was not altogether without his suspicions as to the goat, as to the curious circumstances of his first meeting with Esmeralda, as to the means, no less strange, by which she had betrayed the secret of her love, as to her being a gipsy, finally as to the spectre-monk. He discerned in all these incidents far more of magic than of love— probably a witch, most likely the devil; in fine, a drama, or in the language of the day, a mystery— and a very disagreeable one— in which he had an extremely uncomfortable part: that of the person who receives all the kicks and none of the applause. The captain was greatly put out by this; he felt that kind of shame which La Fontaine so admirably defines: 
“Ashamed as a fox would be, caught by a hen.” 
He hoped, however, that the affair would not be noised abroad, and that, he being absent, his name would hardly be mentioned in connection with it; or, at any rate, would not be heard beyond the court-room of the Tournelle. And in this he judged aright— there was no Criminal Gazette in those days, and as hardly a week passed without some coiner being boiled alive, some witch hanged, or heretic sent to the stake at one or other of the numberless “justices” of Paris, people were so accustomed to see the old feudal Themis at every crossway, her arms bar and sleeves rolled up, busy with her pitchforks, her gibbets, and her pillories, that scarcely any notice was taken of her. The beau monde of that age hardly knew the name of the poor wretch passing at the corner of the street; at most, it was the populace that regaled itself on these gross viands. An execution was one of the ordinary incidents of the public way, like the brasier of the pie-man or the butcher’s slaughter-house. The executioner was but a butcher, only a little more skilled than the other. 
Ph?bus, therefore, very soon set his mind at rest on the subject of the enchantress Esmeralda, or Similar, as he called her, of the dagger-thrust he had received from the gipsy or the spectre-monk (it mattered little to him which), and the issue of the trial. But no sooner was his heart vacant on that score, than the image of Fleur-de-Lys returned to it— for the heart of Captain Ph?bus, like Nature, abhorred a vacuum. 
Moreover, Queue-en-Brie was not a diverting place— a village of farriers and herd-girls with rough hands, a straggling row of squalid huts and cabins bordering the high-road for half a league— in short, a world’s end. 
Fleur-de-Lys was his last flame but one, a pretty girl, a charming dot; and so one fine morning, being quite cured of his wound, and fairly presuming that after the interval of two months the business of the gipsy girl must be over and forgotten, the amorous cavalier pranced up in high feather to the door of the ancestral mansion of the Gondelauriers. He paid no attention to a very numerous crowd collecting in the Place du Parvis before the great door of Notre-Dame. Remembering that it was the month of May, he concluded that it was some procession— some Whitsuntide or other festival—tied his steed up to the ring at the porch, and gaily ascended the stair to his fair betrothed. 
He found her alone with her mother. 
On the heart of Fleur-de-Lys the scene of the gipsy with her goat and its accursed alphabet, combined with her lover’s long absences, still weighed heavily. Nevertheless, when she saw her captain enter, she found him so handsome in his brand-new doublet and shining baldrick, and wearing so impassioned an air, that she blushed with pleasure. The noble damsel herself was more charming than ever. Her magnificent golden tresses were braided to perfection, she was robed in that azure blue which so well becomes a blonde— a piece of coquetry she had learned from Colombe— and her eyes were swimming in that dewy languor which is still more becoming. 
Ph?bus, who in the matter of beauty had been reduced to the country wenches of Queue-en-Brie, was ravished by Fleur-de-Lys, which lent our officer so pressing and gallant an air that his peace was made forthwith. The Lady of Gondelaurier herself, still maternally seated in her great chair, had not the heart to scold him. As for Fleur-de-Lys, her reproaches died away in tender cooings. 
The young lady was seated near the window still engaged upon her grotto of Neptune. The captain leaned over the back of her seat, while she murmured her fond upbraidings. 
“What have you been doing with yourself these two long months, unkind one?” 
“I swear,” answered Ph?bus, somewhat embarrassed by this question, “that you are beautiful enough to make an archbishop dream.” 
She could not repress a smile. 
“Go to— go to, sir. Leave the question of my beauty and answer me. Fine beauty, to be sure!” 
Well, dearest cousin, I was in garrison.” 
“And where, if you please? and why did you not come and bid me adieu?” 
“At Queue-en-Brie.” 
Ph?bus was delighted that the first question had helped him to elude the second. 
“But that is quite near, monsieur; how is it you never once came to see me?” 
This was seriously embarrassing. 
“Because— well— the service— and besides, charming cousin, I have been ill.” 
“Ill?” she exclaimed in alarm. 
“Yes— wounded.” 
“Wounded!” The poor girl was quite upset. 
“Oh, do not let that frighten you,” said Ph?bus carelessly; “it was nothing. A quarrel— a mere scratch— what does it signify to you?” 
“What does it signify to me?” cried Fleur-de-Lys, lifting her beautiful eyes full of tears. “Oh, you cannot mean what you say. What was it all about— I will know.” 
“Well, then, my fair one, I had some words with Mahé Fédy— you know— the lieutenant of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and each of us ripped up a few inches of the other’s skin— that is all.” 
The inventive captain knew very well that an affair of honour always sets off a man to advantage in a woman’s eye. And sure enough, Fleur-de-Lys looked up into his fine face with mingled sensations of fear, pleasure, and admiration. However, she did not feel entirely reassured. 
“I only hope you are completely cured, my Ph?bus!” she said. “I am not acquainted with your Mahé Fédy; but he must be an odious wretch. And what was this quarrel about?” 
Here Ph?bus, whose imagination was not particularly creative, began to be rather at a loss how to beat a convenient retreat out of his encounter. 
“Oh, how should I know?— a mere trifle— a horse— a hasty word! Fair cousin,” said he, by way of changing the conversation, “what is all this going on in the Parvis?” He went to the window. “Look, fair cousin, there is a great crowd in the Place.” 
“I do not know,” answered Fleur-de-Lys; “it seems a witch is to do penance this morning before the church on her way to the gallows.” 
So entirely did the captain believe the affair of Esmeralda to be terminated, that he took little heed of these words of Fleur-de-Lys. Nevertheless, he asked a careless question or two. 
“Who is this witch?” 
“I am sure I do not know.” 
“And what is she said to have done?” 
Again she shrugged her white shoulders. 
“I do not know.” 
“Oh, by ’r Lord!” exclaimed the mother, “there are so many sorceresses nowadays that they burn them, I dare swear, without knowing their names. As well might you try to know the name of every cloud in heaven. But, after all, we may make ourselves easy; the good God keeps his register above.” Here the venerable lady rose and approached the window. “Lord,” she cried, “you are right, Ph?bus, there is indeed a great concourse of the people— some of them even, God save us, on the very roofs! Ah, Ph?bus, that brings back to me my young days and the entry of Charles VII, when there were just such crowds— I mind not precisely in what year. When I speak of that to you it doubtless sounds like something very old, but to me it is as fresh as to-day. Oh, it was a far finer crowd than this! Some of them climbed up on to the battlements of the Porte Saint-Antoine. The King had the Queen on the crupper behind him; and after their highnesses came all the ladies mounted behind their lords. I remember, too, there was much laughter because by the side of Amanyon de Garlande, who was very short, there came the Sire Mate-felon, a knight of gigantic stature, who had killed the English in heaps. It was very fine. Then followed a procession of all the nobles of France, with their oriflammes fluttering red before one. There were some with pennons and some with banners— let me think— the Sire de Calan had a pennon, Jean de Chateaumorant a banner, and a richer than any of the others except the Duke of Bourbon. Alas! ’tis sad to think that all that has been, and that nothing of it now remains!” 
The two young people were not listening to the worthy dowager. Ph?bus had returned to lean over the back of his lady-love’s chair— a charming post which revealed to his libertine glance so many exquisite things, and enabled him to divine so many more that, ravished by that satin-shimmering skin, he said to himself, “How can one love any but a blonde?” 
Neither spoke. The girl lifted to him, from time to time, a glance full of tenderness and devotion, and their locks mingled in a ray of the vernal sunshine. 
“Ph?bus,” said Fleur-de-Lys suddenly, in a half-whisper, “we are to marry in three months— swear to me that you have never loved any woman but myself.” 
“I swear it, fairest angel!” returned Ph?bus; and his passionate glance combined with the sincere tone of his voice to convince Fleur-de-Lys of the truth of his assertion. And, who knows, perhaps he believed it himself at the moment. 
Meanwhile the good mother, rejoiced to see the two young people in such perfect accord, had left the apartment to attend to some domestic matter. Ph?bus was aware of the fact, and this solitude á deux so emboldened the enterprising captain that some strange ideas began to arise in his mind. Fleur-de-Lys loved him— he was betrothed to her— she was alone with him— his old inclination for her had revived— not perhaps in all its primitive freshness, but certainly in all its ardour— after all, it was no great crime to cut a little of one’s own corn in the blade. I know not if these thoughts passed distinctly through his mind; but at any rate, Fleur-de-Lys suddenly took alarm at the expression of his countenance. She looked about her and discovered that her mother was gone. 
“Heavens!” said she, blushing and uneasy, “I am very hot.” 
“I think, indeed,” replied Ph?bus, “that it cannot be far from noon. The sun is oppressive— the best remedy is to draw the curtain.” 
“No, no!” cried the girl; “on the contrary, it is air I need.” 
And like the doe which scents the hounds, she started up, ran to the window, flung it wide, and took refuge on the balcony. Ph?bus, not overpleased, followed her. 
The Place de Parvis of Notre-Dame, upon which, as the reader is aware, the balcony looked down, presented at that moment a sinister and unusual appearance, which forthwith changed the nature of the timid damoiselle’s alarm. 
An immense crowd, extending into all the adjacent streets, filled the whole square. The breast-high wall surrounding the Parvis itself would not have sufficed alone to keep it clear; but it was lined by a close hedge of sergeants of the town-guard and arquebusiers, culverin in hand. Thanks to this grove of pikes and arquebuses the Parvis was empty. The entrance to it was guarded by a body of the bishop’s halberdiers. The great doors of the church were closed, forming a strong contrast to the innumerable windows round the Place, which, open up to the very gables, showed hundreds of heads piled one above another like the cannon-balls in an artillery ground. The prevailing aspect of this multitude was gray, dirty, repulsive. The spectacle they were awaiting was evidently one that has the distinction of calling forth all that is most bestial and unclean in the populace— impossible to imagine anything more repulsive than the sounds which arose from this seething mass of yellow caps and frowzy heads, and there were fewer shouts than shrill bursts of laughter— more women than men. 
From time to time some strident voice pierced the general hum. 
“Hi there! Mahiet Baliffre! will they hang her here?” 
“Simpleton, this is the penance in her shift— the Almighty is going to cough a little Latin in her face! That is always done here at noon. If ’tis the gallows you want, you must go to the Grève.” 
“I’ll go there afterward.” 
“Tell me, La Boucanbry, is it true that she refused to have a confessor?” 
“So they say, La Bechaigne.” 
“Did you ever see such a heathen?” 
“Sir, ’tis the custom here. The justiciary of the Palais is bound to deliver up the malefactor, ready sentenced for execution— if a layman, to the Provost of Paris; if a cleric, to the official court of the bishopric.” 
“Sir, I thank you.” 
“Oh, mon Dieu!” said Fleur-de-Lys, “the poor creature!” 
And this thought tinged with sadness the look she cast over the crowd. The captain, much more interested in her than in this dirty rabble, had laid an amorous hand upon her waist. She turned round with a smile half of pleasure, half of entreaty. 
“Prithee, Ph?bus, let be! If my mother entered and saw your hand— ” 
At this moment the hour of noon boomed slowly from the great clock of Notre-Dame. A murmur of satisfaction burst from the crowd. The last vibration of the twelfth stroke had hardly died away before all the heads were set in one direction, like waves before a sudden gust of wind, and a great shout went up from the square, the windows, the roofs: “Here she comes!” 
Fleur-de-Lys clasped her hands over her eyes that she might not see. 
“Sweetheart,” Ph?bus hastened to say, “shall we go in?” 
“No,” she returned, and the eyes that she had just closed from fear she opened again from curiosity. 
A tumbrel drawn by a strong Normandy draught-horse, and closely surrounded by horsemen in violet livery with white crosses, had just entered the Place from the Rue Saint-Pierre aux B?ufs. The sergeants of the watch opened a way for it through the people by vigorous use of their thonged scourges. Beside the tumbrel rode a few officers of justice and the police, distinguishable by their black garments and their awkwardness in the saddle. Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue figured at their head. 
In the fatal cart a girl was seated, her hands tied behind her, but no priest by her side. She was in her shift, and her long black hair (it was the custom then not to cut it till reaching the foot of the gibbet) fell unbound about her neck and over her half-naked shoulders. 
Through these waving locks— more lustrous than the raven’s wing— you caught a glimpse of a great rough brown rope, writhing and twisting, chafing the girl’s delicate shoulder-blades, and coiled about her fragile neck like an earthworm round a flower. Below this rope glittered a small amulet adorned with green glass, which, doubtless, she had been allowed to retain, because nothing is refused to those about to die. The spectators raised above her at the windows could see her bare legs as she sat in the tumbrel, and which she strove to conceal as if from a last remaining instinct of her sex. At her feet lay a little goat, also strictly bound. The criminal was holding her ill-fastened shift together with her teeth. It looked as though, despite her extreme misery, she was still conscious of the indignity of being thus exposed half-naked before all eyes. Alas! it is not for such frightful trials as this that feminine modesty was made. 
“Holy Saviour!” cried Fleur-de-Lys excitedly to the captain. “Look, cousin! if it is not your vile gipsy girl with the goat!” 
She turned round to Ph?bus. His eyes were fixed on the tumbrel. He was very pale. 
“What gipsy girl with a goat?” he faltered. 
“How,” returned Fleur-de-Lys, “do you not remember?” 
Ph?bus did not let her finish. “I do not know what you mean.” 
He made one step to re-enter the room, but Fleur-de-Lys, whose jealousy lately so vehement was now reawakened by the sight of the detested gipsy— Fleur-de-Lys stopped him by a glance full of penetration and mistrust. She recollected vaguely having heard something of an officer whose name had been connected with the trial of this sorceress. 
“What ails you?” said she to Ph?bus; “one would think that the sight of this woman disconcerted you.” 
Ph?bus forced a laugh. “Me? Not the least in the world! Oh, far from it!” 
“Then stay,” she returned imperiously, “and let us see it out.” 
So there was nothing for the unlucky captain but to remain. However, it reassured him somewhat to see that the criminal kept her eyes fixed on the bottom of the tumbrel. It was but too truly Esmeralda. In this last stage of ignominy and misfortune, she was still beautiful— her great dark eyes looked larger from the hollowing of her cheeks, her pale profile was pure and unearthly. She resembled her former self as a Virgin of Masaccio resembles one of Raphael’s — frailer, more pinched, more attenuated. 
For the rest, there was nothing in her whole being that did not seem to be shaken to its foundations; and, except for her last poor attempt at modesty, she abandoned herself completely to chance, so thoroughly had her spirit been broken by torture and despair. Her body swayed with every jolt of the tumbrel like something dead or disjointed. Her gaze was blank and distraught. A tear hung in her eye, but it was stationary and as if frozen there. 
Meanwhile the dismal cavalcade had traversed the crowd amid yells of joy and the struggles of the curious. Nevertheless, in strict justice be it said, that on seeing her so beautiful and so crushed by affliction, many, even the most hard-hearted, were moved to pity. 
The tumbrel now entered the Parvis and stopped in front of the great door. The escort drew up in line on either side. Silence fell upon the crowd, and amid that silence, surcharged with solemnity and anxious anticipation, the two halves of the great door opened apparently of themselves on their creaking hinges and disclosed the shadowy depths of the sombre church in its whole extent, hung with black, dimly lighted by a few tapers glimmering in the far distance on the high altar, and looking like a black and yawning cavern in the midst of the sunlit Place. At the far end, in the gloom of the chancel, a gigantic cross of silver was dimly visible against a black drapery that fell from the roof to the floor. The nave was perfectly empty, but the heads of a few priests could be seen stirring vaguely in the distant choir-stalls, and as the great door opened, there rolled from the church a solemn, far-reaching, monotonous chant, hurling at the devoted head of the criminal fragments of the penitential psalms: 
“Non timebo millia populi circumdantis me. Exsurge, Domine; salvum me fac, Deus! 
“Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intraverunt aqu? usque ad animam meam. 
“Infixus sum in limo profundi; et non est substantia.” 
At the same time an isolated voice, not in the choir, intoned from the step of the high altar this impressive offertory: 
“Qui verbum meum audit, et credit ei qui misit me, habet vitam ?ternam et in judicium non venit; sed transit a morte in vitam.” 
This chant intoned by a few old men lost in the gloom of the church, and directed at this beautiful creature full of youth and life, wooed by the balmy air of spring, and bathed in sunshine, was the mass for the dead. 
The multitude listened with pious attention. 
The hapless, terrified girl seemed to lose all sight and consciousness in this view into the dark bowels of the church. Her white lips moved as if she prayed, and when the hang-man’s assistant advanced to help her down from the tumbrel, he heard a low murmur from her— “Ph?bus!” 
They untied her hands and made her descend from the cart, accompanied by her goat, which they had also unbound, and which bleated with delight at finding itself free. She was then made to walk barefoot over the rough pavement to the bottom of the flight of steps leading up to the door. The rope she had round her neck trailed after her like a serpent in pursuit. 
The chant ceased inside the church. A great cross of gold and a file of wax tapers set themselves in motion in the gloom. The halberds of the bishop’s guard clanked, and a few moments later a long procession of priests in their chasubles and deacons in their dalmatics advancing, solemnly chanting, towards the penitent, came into her view and that of the crowd. But her eye was arrested by the one who led the procession, immediately behind the cross-bearer. 
“Oh,” she murmured with a dder, “’tis he again— the priest!” 
It was the Archdeacon. On his left walked the sub-chanter, on his right the precentor, armed with his wand of office. He advanced with head thrown back, his eyes fixed and wide, chanting with a loud voice: 
“De ventre inferi clamavi, et exaudisti vocem meam. 
“Et projecisti me in profundum corde maris et flumen circumdedit me.” 
As he came into the broad daylight under the high Gothic doorway, enveloped in a wide silver cope barred with a black cross, he was so pale, that more than one among the crowd thought that it was one of the marble bishops off some tomb in the choir come to receive on the threshold of the grave her who was about to die. 
No less pale and marble than himself, she was scarcely aware that they had thrust a heavy lighted taper of yellow wax into her hand; she did not listen to the raucous voice of the clerk as he read out the terrible wording of the penance; when she was bidden to answer Amen, she answered Amen. 
The first thing that brought back to her any life and strength was seeing the priest sign to his followers to retire, and he advanced alone towards her. Then, indeed, she felt the blood rush boiling to her head, and a last remaining spark of indignation flamed up in that numbed and frozen spirit. 
The Archdeacon approached her slowly. Even in her dire extremity, she saw his lustful eye wander in jealousy and desire over her half-nude form. Then he said to her in a loud voice: 
“Girl, have you asked pardon of God for your sins and offences?” He bent over her and whispered (the spectators supposing that he was receiving her last confession): “Wilt thou be mine? I can save thee yet!” 
She regarded him steadfastly: “Begone, devil, or I will denounce thee!” 
A baleful smile curled his lips. “They would not believe thee. Thou wouldst but be adding a scandal to a crime. Answer quickly! Wilt thou be mine?” 
“What hast thou done with my Ph?bus?” 
“He is dead,” said the priest. 
At that moment the miserable Archdeacon raised his eyes mechanically, and there, at the opposite side of the Place, on the balcony of the Gondelaurier’s house, was the captain himself, standing by the side of Fleur-de-Lys. He staggered, passed his hand over his eyes, looked again, murmured a curse, and every feature became distorted with rage. 
“Then die thou too!” he muttered between his teeth. “No one shall have thee!” Then lifting his hand over the gipsy girl, he cried in a sepulchral voice: “I nunc, anima anceps, et sit tibi Deus misericors!” 
This was the awful formula with which it was customary to close this lugubrious ceremonial. It was the accepted signal from the priest to the executioner. 
The people fell upon their knees. 
“Kyrie eleison!” said the priests standing under the arched doorway. 
“Kyrie eleison!” repeated the multitude in that murmur that runs over a sea of heads like the splashing of stormy waves. 
“Amen,” responded the Archdeacon. And he turned his back upon the doomed girl, his head fell on his breast, he crossed his hands, rejoined his train of priests, and vanished a moment afterward with the cross, the tapers and the copes under the dim arches of the cathedral, and his sonorous voice gradually died away in the choir chanting this cry of human despair: 
“Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt!” 
The intermittent clank of the butt-ends of the guards’ pikes growing fainter by degrees in the distance, sounded like the hammer of a clock striking the last hour of the condemned. 
All this time the doors of Notre-Dame had remained wide open, affording a view of the interior of the church, empty, desolate, draped in black, voiceless, its lights extinguished. 
The condemned girl remained motionless on the spot where they had placed her, awaiting what they would do with her. One of the sergeants had to inform Ma?tre Charmolue that matters had reached this point, as during the foregoing scene he had been wholly occupied in studying the bas-relief of the great doorway, which, according to some, represents Abraham’s sacrifice, and according to others, the great alchemistic operation— the sun being figured by the angel, the fire by the fagot, and the operator by Abraham. 
They had much ado to draw him away from this contemplation; but at last he turned round, and at a sign from him, two men in yellow, the executioner’s assistants, approached the gipsy to tie her hands again. 
At the moment of reascending the fatal cart and moving on towards her final scene, the hapless girl was seized perhaps by some last heart-rending desire for life. She raised her dry and burning eyes to heaven, to the sun, to the silvery clouds intermingling with patches of brilliant blue, then she cast them around her, upon the ground, the people, the houses. Suddenly, while the man in yellow was pinioning her arms, she uttered a piercing cry— a cry of joy. On the balcony at the corner of the Place she had descried him— her love— her lord— her life— Ph?bus! 
The judge had lied, the priest had lied— it was he indeed, she could not doubt it— he stood there alive and handsome, in his brilliant uniform, a plume on his head, a sword at his side. 
“Ph?bus!” she cried, “my Ph?bus!” and she tried to stretch out her arms to him, but they were bound. 
Then she saw that the captain frowned, that a beautiful girl who was leaning upon his arm looked at him with scornful lips and angry eyes; whereupon Ph?bus said some words which did not reach her ear, and they both hastily disappeared through the casement of the balcony, which immediately closed behind them. 
“Ph?bus!” she cried wildly, “can it be that thou believest it?” 
A monstrous thought had just suggested itself to her— she remembered that she had been condemned for murder committed on the person of Ph?bus de Chateaupers. 
She had borne all till now, but this last blow was too heavy. She fell senseless to the ground. 
“Come,” said Charmolue impatiently, “lift her into the cart, and let us be done with it.” 
No one had yet remarked in the gallery of royal statues immediately over the arches of the doorway a strange spectator, who, until then, had observed all that passed with such absolute immobility, a neck so intently stretched, a face so distorted, that, but for his habiliments— half red, half violet— he might have been taken for one of the stone gargoyles through whose mouths the long rain-pipes of the Cathedral have emptied themselves for six hundred years. This spectator had lost no smallest detail of all that had taken place before the entrance to Notre-Dame since the hour of noon. At the very beginning, no one paying the least attention to him, he had firmly attached to one of the small columns of the gallery a stout knotted rope, the other end of which reached to the ground. This done, he had settled himself to quietly look on, only whistling from time to time as a blackbird flew past him. 
Now, at the moment when the executioner’s assistants were preparing to carry out Charmolue’s phlegmatic order, he threw his leg over the balustrade of the gallery, seized the rope with his hands, his knees and his feet, and proceeded to slide down the face of the Cathedral like a drop of water down a window-pane; ran at the two men with the speed of a cat just dropped from a house-top, knocked the pair down with two terrific blows of his fist, picked up the gipsy in one hand as a child would a doll, and with one bound was inside the church, holding the girl high above his head as he shouted in a voice of thunder: 
“Sanctuary!” 
This was all accomplished with such rapidity, that had it been night the whole scene might have passed by the glare of a single flash of lightning. 
“Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” roared the crowd, and the clapping of ten thousand hands made Quasimodo’s single eye sparkle with joy and pride. 
This shock brought the girl to her senses. She opened her eyes, looked at Quasimodo, then closed them suddenly as if in terror at the sight of her deliverer. 
Charmolue stood dumfounded, and the executioners and the whole escort with him; for once within the walls of Notre-Dame the criminal was inviolable. The Cathedral was a place of sanctuary; all human justice was powerless beyond the threshold. 
Quasimodo had halted within the central doorway. His broad feet seemed to rest as solidly on the floor of the church as the heavy Roman pillars themselves. His great shock head was sunk between his shoulders like that of a lion, which likewise has a mane but no neck. The trembling girl hung in his horny hands like a white drapery; but he held her with anxious care, as if fearful of breaking or brushing the bloom off her— as if he felt that she was something delicate and exquisite and precious, and made for other hands than his. At moments he seemed hardly to dare to touch her, even with his breath; then again he would strain her tightly to his bony breast as if she were his only possession, his treasure— as the mother of this child would have done. His cyclops eye, bent upon her, enveloped her in a flood of tenderness, of grief, and pity, and then rose flashing with determined courage. Women laughed and cried, the crowd stamped with enthusiasm, for at this moment Quasimodo had a beauty of his own. Verily, this orphan, this foundling, this outcast, was wonderful to look upon: he felt himself august in his strength; he looked that society from which he was banished, and against whose plans he had so forcefully intervened, squarely in the face; he boldly defied that human justice from which he had just snatched its prey, all these tigers now forced to gnash their empty jaws, these myrmidons of the law, these judges, these executioners— this whole force of the King which he, the meanest of his subjects, had set at naught by the force of God. 
Then, too, how affecting was this protection offered by a creature so misshapen to one so unfortunate— a girl condemned to death, saved by Quasimodo!— the extremes of physical and social wretchedness meeting and assisting one another. 
Meanwhile, after tasting his triumph for a few brief moments, Quasimodo suddenly plunged with his burden into the church. The people, ever delighted at a display of prowess, followed him with their eyes through the dim nave, only regretting that he had so quickly withdrawn himself from their acclamations. Suddenly he reappeared at one end of the gallery of royal statues, which he traversed, running like a madman, lifting his booty high in his arms and shouting “Sanctuary!” The plaudits of the crowd burst forth anew. Having dashed along the gallery, he vanished again into the interior of the Cathedral, and a moment afterward reappeared on the upper platform, still bearing the Egyptian in his arms, still running madly, still shouting “Sanctuary!” and the multitude still applauding. At last he made his third appearance on the summit of the tower of the great bell, from whence he seemed to show exultingly to the whole city the woman he had rescued, and his thundering voice— that voice which was heard so seldom, and never by him at all, repeated thrice with frenzied vehemence, even into the very clouds: “Sanctuary! Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” 
“No?l! No?l!” roared the people in return, till the immense volume of acclamation resounded upon the opposite shore of the river to the astonishment of the crowd assembled in the Place de Grève, and among them the recluse, whose hungry eye was still fixed upon the gibbet. 
BOOK IX
Chapter 1 - Delirium
Claude Frollo was no longer in Notre-Dame when his adopted son so abruptly cut the fatal noose in which the unhappy Archdeacon had caught the Egyptian and himself at the same time. On entering the sacristy, he had torn off alb, cope, and stole, had tossed them into the hands of the amazed verger, escaped by the private door of the cloister, ordered a wherryman of the “Terrain” to put him across to the left bank of the Seine, and had plunged into the steep streets of the University, knowing not whither he went, meeting at every step bands of men and women pressing excitedly towards the Pont Saint-Michel in the hope of “still arriving in time” to see the witch hanged— pale, distraught, confused, more blinded and scared than any bird of night set free and flying before a troop of children in broad daylight. He was no longer conscious of where he was going, what were his thoughts, his imaginations. He went blindly on, walking, running, taking the streets at random, without any definite plan, save the one thought of getting away from the Grève, the horrible Grève, which he felt confusedly to be behind him. 
In this manner he proceeded the whole length of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and at last left the town by the Porte Saint-Victor. He continued his flight so long as he could see, on turning round, the bastioned walls of the University, and the sparse houses of the faubourg; but when at last a ridge of rising ground completely hid hateful Paris from his view— when he could imagine himself a hundred leagues away from it, in the country, in a desert— he stopped and dared to draw a free breath. 
Frightful thoughts now crowded into his mind. He saw clearly into his soul and ddered. He thought of the unfortunate girl he had ruined and who had ruined him. He let his haggard eye pursue the tortuous paths along which Fate had driven them to their separate destinies up to the point of junction where she had pitilessly shattered them one against the other. He thought of the folly of lifelong vows, of the futility of chastity, science, religion, and virtue, of the impotence of God. He pursued these arguments with wicked gusto, and the deeper he sank in the slough the louder laughed the Satan within him. And discovering, as he burrowed thus into his soul, how large a portion Nature had assigned in it to the passions, he smiled more sardonically than before. He shook up from the hidden depths of his heart all his hatred, all his wickedness; and he discovered with the calm eye of the physician examining a patient that this same hatred and wickedness were but the outcome of perverted love— that love, the source of every human virtue, turned to things unspeakable in the heart of a priest, and that a man constituted as he was, by becoming a priest, made of himself a demon— and he laughed horribly. But suddenly he grew pale again as he contemplated the worst side of his fatal passion— of that corrosive, venomous, malignant, implacable love which had brought the one to the gallows and the other to hell— her to death, him to damnation. 
And then his laugh came again when he remembered that Ph?bus was living; that, after all, the captain was alive and gay and happy, with a finer uniform than ever, and a new mistress whom he brought to see the old one hanged. And he jeered sardonically at himself to think that of all the human beings whose death he had desired, the Egyptian, the one creature he did not hate, was the only one he had succeeded in destroying. 
From the captain, his thoughts wandered to the crowd of that morning, and he was seized with a fresh kind of jealousy. He reflected that the people, the whole population, had beheld the woman he loved— divested of all but a single garment— almost nude. He wrung his hands in agony at the thought that the woman, a mere glimpse of whose form veiled in shadows and seen by his eye alone would have afforded him the supreme measure of bliss, had been given thus, in broad daylight, at high noon, to the gaze of a whole multitude, clad as for a bridal night. He wept with rage over all these mysteries of love profaned, sullied, stripped, withered forever. He wept with rage to think how many impure eyes that ill-fastened garment had satisfied; that this fair creature, this virgin lily, this cup of purity and all delights to which he would only have set his lips in fear and trembling, had been converted into a public trough, as it were, at which the vilest of the populace of Paris, the thieves, the beggars, the lackeys, had come to drink in common of a pleasure— shameless, obscene, depraved. 
Again, when he sought to picture to himself the happiness that might have been his had she not been a gipsy and he a priest; had Ph?bus not existed, and had she but loved him; when he told himself that a life of serenity and love would have been possible to him too; that at that very moment there were happy couples to be found here and there on earth, whiling away the hours in sweet communings, in orange groves, by the brook-side, under the setting sun or a starry night; and that had God so willed it, he might have made with her one of those thrice-blessed couples, his heart melted in tenderness and despair. 
Oh, it was she! still and forever she!— that fixed idea that haunted him incessantly, that tortured him, gnawed his brain, wrung his very vitals! He regretted nothing, he repented of nothing; all that he had done he was ready to do again; better a thousand times see her in the hands of the hangman than the arms of the soldier; but he suffered, he suffered so madly that there were moments when he tore his hair in handfuls from his head to see if it had not turned white. 
At one moment it occurred to him that this, perhaps, was the very minute at which the hideous chain he had seen in the morning was tightening its noose of iron round that fragile and slender neck. Great drops of agony burst from every pore at the thought. 
At another moment he took a diabolical pleasure in torturing himself by bringing before his mind’s eye a simultaneous picture of Esmeralda as he had seen her for the first time— filled with life and careless joy, gaily attired, dancing, airy, melodious— and Esmeralda at her last hour, in her shift, a rope about her neck, slowly ascending with her naked feet the painful steps of the gibbet. He brought this double picture so vividly before him that a terrible cry burst from him. 
While this hurricane of despair was upheaving, shattering, tearing, bending, uprooting everything within his soul, he gazed absently at the prospect around him. Some fowls were busily pecking and scratching at his feet; bright-coloured beetles ran to and fro in the sunshine; overhead, groups of dappled cloud sailed in a deep-blue sky; on the horizon the spire of the Abbey of Saint-Victor reared its slate obelisk above the rising ground; and the miller of the Butte-Copeaux whistled as he watched the busily turning sails of his mill. All this industrious, orderly, tranquil activity, recurring around him under a thousand different aspects, hurt him. He turned to flee once more. 
He wandered thus about the country till the evening. This fleeing from Nature, from life, from himself, from mankind, from God, went on through the whole day. Now he would throw himself face downward on the ground, digging up the young blades of corn with his nails; or he would stand still in the middle of some deserted village street, his thoughts so insupportable that he would seize his head in both hands as if to tear it from his shoulders and dash it on the stones. 
Towards the hour of sunset, he took counsel with himself and found that he was well-nigh mad. The storm that had raged in him since the moment that he lost both the hope and the desire to save the gipsy, had left him without one sane idea, one rational thought. His reason lay prostrate on the verge of utter destruction. But two distinct images remained in his mind: Esmeralda and the gibbet. The rest was darkness. These two images in conjunction formed to his mind a ghastly group, and the more strenuously he fixed upon them such power of attention and thought as remained to him, the more he saw them increase according to a fantastic progression— the one in grace, in charm, in beauty, in lustre; the other in horror; till, at last, Esmeralda appeared to him as a star, and the gibbet as a huge fleshless arm. Strange to say, during all this torture he never seriously thought of death. Thus was the wretched man constituted; he clung to life— may-be, indeed, he saw hell in the background. 
Meanwhile night was coming on apace. The living creature still existing within him began confusedly to think of return. He imagined himself far from Paris, but on looking about him he discovered that he had but been travelling in a circle round the University. The spire of Saint-Sulpice and the three lofty pinnacles of Saint-Germain-des-Prés broke the sky-line on his right. He bent his steps in that direction. When he heard the “Qui vive?” of the Abbot’s guard round the battlemented walls of Saint-Germain, he turned aside, took a path lying before him between the abbey mill and the lazaretto, and found himself in a few minutes on the edge of the Pré-aux-Clercs— the Students’ Meadow. This ground was notorious for the brawls and tumults which went on in it day and night; it was a “hydra” to the poor monks of Saint-Germain— Quod monachis Sancti Germani pratensis hydra fuit, clericis nova semper dissidionum capita suscitantibus.1 The Archdeacon feared meeting some one there, he dreaded the sight of a human face; he would not enter the streets till the latest moment possible. He therefore skirted the Préaux-Clercs, took the solitary path that lay between it and the Dieu-Neuf, and at length reached the water-side. There Dom Claude found a boatman, who for a few deniers took him up the river as far as the extreme point of the island of the City, and landed him on that deserted tongue of land on which the reader has already seen Gringoire immersed in reverie, and which extended beyond the royal gardens parallel to the island of the cattle-ferry. 
The monotonous rocking of the boat and the ripple of the water in some degree soothed the unhappy man. When the boatman had taken his departure, Claude remained on the bank in a kind of stupor, looking straight before him and seeing the surrounding objects only through a distorting mist which converted the whole scene into a kind of phantasmagoria. 
The exhaustion of a violent grief will often produce this effect upon the mind. 
The sun had set behind the lofty Tour-de-Nesle. It was the hour of twilight. The sky was pallid, the river was white. Between these two pale surfaces, the left bank of the Seine, on which his eyes were fixed, reared its dark mass, and, dwindling to a point in the perspective, pierced the mists of the horizon like a black arrow. It was covered with houses, their dim silhouettes standing out sharply against the pale background of sky and river. Here and there windows began to twinkle like holes in a brasier. The huge black obelisk thus isolated between the two white expanses of sky and river— particularly wide at this point— made a singular impression on Dom Claude, such as a man would experience lying on his back at the foot of Strassburg Cathedral and gazing up at the immense spire piercing the dim twilight of the sky above his head. Only here it was Claude who stood erect and the spire that lay at his feet; but as the river, by reflecting the sky, deepened infinitely the abyss beneath him, the vast promontory seemed springing as boldly into the void as any cathedral spire. The impression on him was therefore the same, and moreover, in this respect, stronger and more profound, in that not only was it the spire of Strassburg Cathedral, but a spire two leagues high— something unexampled, gigantic, immeasurable— an edifice such as mortal eye had never yet beheld— a Tower of Babel. The chimneys of the houses, the battlemented walls, the carved roofs and gables, the spire of the Augustines, the Tour-de-Nesle, all the projections that broke the line of the colossal obelisk heightened the illusion by their bizarre effect, presenting to the eye all the effect of a florid and fantastic sculpture. 
In this condition of hallucination Claude was persuaded that with living eye he beheld the veritable steeple of hell. The myriad lights scattered over the entire height of the fearsome tower were to him so many openings into the infernal fires— the voices and sounds which rose from it the shrieks and groans of the damned. Fear fell upon him, he clapped his hands to his ears that he might hear no more, turned his back that he might not see, and with long strides fled away from the frightful vision. 
But the vision was within him. 
When he came into the streets again, the people passing to and fro in the light of the shop-fronts appeared to him like a moving company of spectres round about him. There were strange roarings in his ears— wild imaginings disturbed his brain. He saw not the houses, nor road, nor vehicles, neither men nor women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects merging into one another at their point of contact. At the corner of the Rule de la Barillerie he passed a chandler’s shop, over the front of which hung, according to immemorial custom, a row of tin hoops garnished with wooden candles, which swayed in the wind and clashed together like castanets. He seemed to hear the skeletons on the gibbets of Montfaucon rattling their bones together. 
“Oh,” he muttered, “the night wind drives them one against another, and mingles the clank of their chains with the rattle of their bones! May-be she is there among them!” 
Confused and bewildered, he knew not where he went. A few steps farther on he found himself on the Pont Saint-Michel. There was a light in a low window close by: he approached it. Through the cracked panes he saw into a dirty room which awakened some dim recollection in his mind. By the feeble rays of a squalid lamp he discerned a young man, with a fair and joyous face, who with much boisterous laughter was embracing a tawdry, shamelessly dressed girl. Beside the lamp sat an old woman spinning and singing in a quavering voice. In the pauses of the young man’s laughter the priest caught fragments of the old woman’s song. It was weird and horrible: 
“Growl, Grève! bark, Grève!
Spin, spin, my distaff brave!
Let the hangman have his cord
That whistles in the prison yard,
Growl, Grève! bark, Grève!
“Hemp that makes the pretty rope,
Sow it widely, give it scope;
Better hemp than wheaten sheaves;
Thief there’s none that ever thieves
The pretty rope, the hempen rope.
“Growl, Grève! bark, Grève!
To see the girl of pleasure brave
Dangling on the gibbet high,
Every window is an eye.
Growl, Grève! bark, Grève!”
And the young man laughed and fondled the girl all the while. The old woman was La Falourdel, the girl was a courtesan of the town, and the young man was his brother Jehan. 
He continued to look on at the scene— as well see this as any other. 
He saw Jehan go to a window at the back of the room, open it, glance across at the quay where a thousand lighted windows twinkled, and then heard him say as he closed the window: 
“As I live, it is night already! The townsfolk are lighting their candles, and God Almighty his stars.” 
Jehan returned to his light o’ love, and smashing a bottle that stood on a table, he exclaimed: “Empty, cor-b?uf!— and I’ve no money! Isabeau, my chuck, I shall never be satisfied with Jupiter till he has turned your two white breasts into two black bottles, that I may suck Beaune wine from them day and night!” 
With this delicate pleasantry, which made the courtesan laugh, Jehan left the house. 
Dom Claude had barely time to throw himself on the ground to escape meeting his brother face to face and being recognised. Happily the street was dark and the scholar drunk. Nevertheless he did notice the figure lying prone in the mud. 
“Oh! oh!” said he, “here’s somebody has had a merry time of it to-day!” 
He gave Dom Claude a push with his foot, while the older man held his breath with fear. 
“Dead drunk!” exclaimed Jehan. “Bravo, he is full. A veritable leech dropped off a wine cask— and bald into the bargain,” he added as he stooped. “’Tis an old man! Fortunate senex!” 
“For all that,” Dom Claude heard him say as he continued his way, “wisdom is a grand thing, and my brother the Archdeacon is a lucky man to be wise and always have money!” 
The Archdeacon then rose and hastened at the top of his speed towards Notre-Dame, the huge towers of which he could see rising through the gloom above the houses. 
But when he reached the Parvis, breathless and panting, he dared not lift his eyes to the baleful edifice. 
“Oh,” he murmured, “can it really be that such a thing took place here to-day— this very morning?” 
He presently ventured a glance at the church. Its front was dark. The sky behind glittered with stars; the crescent moon, in her flight upward from the horizon, that moment touched the summit of the right-hand tower, and seemed to perch, like a luminous bird, on the black edge of the sculptured balustrade. 
The cloister gate was t, but the Archdeacon always carried the key of the tower in which his laboratory was, and he now made use of it to enter the church. 
He found it dark and silent as a cavern. By the thick shadows that fell from all sides in broad patches, he knew that the hangings of the morning’s ceremony had not yet been removed. The great silver cross glittered far off through the gloom, sprinkled here and there with shining points, like the Milky Way of that sepulchral night. The windows of the choir showed, above the black drapery, the upper extremity of their pointed arches, the stained glass of which, shot through by a ray of moonlight, had only the uncertain colours of the night— an indefinable violet, white, and blue, of a tint to be found only in the faces of the dead. To the Archdeacon this half circle of pallid Gothic window-tops surrounding the choir seemed like the mitres of bishops gone to perdition. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he thought they were a circle of ghastly faces looking down upon him. 
He fled on through the church. Then it seemed to him that the church took to itself life and motion— swayed and heaved; that each massive column had turned to an enormous limb beating the ground with its broad stone paw; and that the gigantic Cathedral was nothing but a prodigious elephant, snorting and stamping, with its pillars for legs, its two towers for tusks, and the immense black drapery for caparison. 
Thus his de?irium or his madness had reached such a pitch of intensity, that the whole external world had become to the unhappy wretch one great Apocalypse— visible, palpable, appalling. 
He found one minute’s respite. Plunging into the side aisle, he caught sight, behind a group of pillars, of a dim red light. He ran to it as to a star of safety. It was the modest lamp which illumined day and night the public breviary of Notre-Dame under its iron trellis. He cast his eye eagerly over the sacred book, in the hope of finding there some word of consolation or encouragement. The volume lay open at this passage of Job, over which he ran his blood-shot eye: “Then a spirit passed before my face, and I felt a little breath, and the hair of my flesh stood up.” 
On reading these dismal words, he felt like a blind man who finds himself wounded by the stick he had picked up for his guidance. His knees bent under him, and he sank upon the pavement thinking of her who had died that day. So many hideous fumes passed through and out of his brain that he felt as if his head had become one of the chimneys of hell. 
He must have remained long in that position— past thought, crushed and passive in the clutch of the Fiend. At last some remnant of strength returned to him, and he be-thought him of taking refuge in the tower, beside his faithful Quasimodo. He rose to his feet, and fear being still upon him, he took the lamp of the breviary to light him. It was sacrilege— but he was beyond regarding such trifles. 
Slowly he mounted the stairway of the tower, filled with a secret dread which was likely to be shared by the few persons traversing the Parvis at that hour and saw the mysterious light ascending so late from loophole to loophole up to the top of the steeple. 
Suddenly he felt a breath of cold air on his face, and found himself under the doorway of the upper gallery. The air was sharp, the sky streaked with clouds in broad white streamers, which drifted into and crushed one another like river ice breaking up after a thaw. The crescent moon floating in their midst looked like some celestial bark set fast among these icebergs of the air. 
He glanced downward through the row of slender columns which joins the two towers and let his eye rest for a moment on the silent multitude of the roofs of Paris, shrouded in a veil of mist and smoke— jagged, innumerable, crowded, and small, like the waves of a tranquil sea in a summer’s night. 
The young moon shed but a feeble ray, which imparted an ashy hue to earth and sky. 
At this moment the tower clock lifted its harsh and grating voice. It struck twelve. The priest recalled the hour of noon— twelve hours had passed. 
“Oh,” he whispered to himself, “she must be cold by now!” A sudden puff of wind extinguished his lamp, and almost at the same instant, at the opposite corner of the tower, he saw a shade— a something white— a shape, a female form appear. He trembled. Beside this woman stood a little goat that mingled its bleating with the last quaverings of the clock. 
He had the strength to look. It was she. 
She was pale and heavy-eyed. Her hair fell round her shoulders as in the morning, but there was no rope about her neck, her hands were unbound. She was free, she was dead. 
She was clad in white raiment, and a white veil was over her head. 
She moved towards him slowly looking up to heaven, followed by the unearthly goat. He felt turned to stone— too petrified to fly. At each step that she advanced, he fell back— that was all. In this manner he re-entered the dark vault of the stairs. He froze at the thought that she might do the same; had she done so, he would have died of horror. 
She came indeed as far as the door, halted there for some moments, gazing fixedly into the darkness, but apparently without perceiving the priest, and passed on. She appeared to him taller than he remembered her in life— he saw the moon through her white robe— he heard her breathe. 
When she had passed by, he began to descend the stairs with the same slow step he had observed in the spectre— thinking himself a spectre too— haggard, his hair erect, the extinguished lamp still in his hand. And as he descended the spiral stairs he distinctly heard a voice laughing and repeating in his ears: “Then a spirit passed before my face, and I felt a little breath, and the hair of my flesh stood up.” 
______________________
1 Because to the monks of Saint-Germain this meadow was a hydra ever raising its head anew in the brawls of the clerks. 
Chapter 2 - Humpbacked, One-eyed, Lame
Down to the time of Louis XII, every town in France had its place of sanctuary, forming, in the deluge of penal laws and barbarous jurisdictions that inundated the cities, islands, as it were, which rose above the level of human justice. Any criminal landing upon one of them was safe. In every town there were almost as many of these places of refuge as there were of execution. It was the abuse of impunity side by side with the abuse of capital punishment— two evils seeking to correct one another. The royal palaces, the mansions of the princes, and, above all, the churches, had right of sanctuary. Sometimes a whole town that happened to require repeopling was turned temporarily into a place of refuge. Louis XI made all Paris a sanctuary in 1467. 
Once set foot within the refuge, and the person of the criminal was sacred; but he had to beware of leaving it— one step outside the sanctuary, and he fell back into the waters. The wheel, the gibbet, the strappado, kept close guard round the place of refuge, watching incessantly for their prey, like sharks about a vessel. Thus, men under sentence of death had been known to grow gray in a cloister, on the stairs of a palace, in the grounds of an abbey, under the porch of a church— in so far, the sanctuary itself was but a prison under another name. 
It sometimes happened that a solemn decree of parliament would violate the sanctuary, and reconsign the condemned into the hands of the executioner; but this was of rare occurrence. The parliaments stood in great awe of the bishops, and if it did come to a brush between the two robes, the gown generally had the worst of it against the cassock. Occasionally, however, as in the case of the assassination of Petit-Jean, the executioner of Paris, and in that of Emery Rousseau, the murderer of Jean Valleret, justice would overleap the barriers of the Church, and pass on to the execution of its sentence. But, except armed with a decree of parliament, woe betide him who forcibly violated a place of sanctuary! We know what befell Robert de Clermont, Marshal of France, and Jean de Chalons, Marshal of Champagne; and yet it was only about a certain Perrin Marc, a money-changer’s assistant and a vile assassin; but the two marshals had forced the doors of the Church of Saint-Méry— therein lay the enormity of the transgression. 
According to tradition, these places of refuge were so surrounded by an atmosphere of reverence that it even affected animals. Thus Aymoin relates that a stag, hunted by King Dagobert, having taken refuge beside the tomb of Saint-Denis, the hounds stopped the chase and stood barking. 
The churches usually had a cell set apart for these refugees. In 1407, Nicolas Flamel had one built in Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie which cost him four livres, six sous, sixteen deniers parisis. 
In Notre-Dame it was a cell constructed over one of the side aisles, under the buttresses and facing towards the cloister, exactly on the spot where the wife of the present concierge of the towers has made herself a garden— which is to the hanging gardens of Babylon as a lettuce to a palm tree, as a portress to Semiramis. 
There it was that, after his frantic and triumphant course round the towers and galleries, Quasimodo had deposited Esmeralda. So long as the course had lasted the girl had remained almost unconscious, having only a vague perception that she was rising in the air— that she was floating— flying— being borne upward away from the earth. Ever and anon she heard the wild laugh, the raucous voice of Quasimodo in her ear: she half opened her eyes and saw beneath her confusedly the thousand roofs of Paris, tile and slate like a red and blue mosaic— and above her head Quasimodo’s frightful and jubilant face. Then her eye-lids closed; she believed that all was finished. that she had been executed during her swoon, and that the hideous genio who had ruled her destiny had resumed possession of her soul and was bearing it away. She dared not look at him, but resigned herself utterly. 
But when the bell-ringer, panting and dishevelled, had deposited her in the cell of refuge, when she felt his great hands gently untying the cords that cut her arms, she experienced that shock which startles out of their sleep the passengers of a vessel that strikes on a rock in the middle of a dark night. So were her thoughts awakened, and her senses returned to her one by one. She perceived that she was in Notre-Dame, she remembered that she had been snatched from the hands of the executioner, that Ph?bus was living, and that Ph?bus loved her no more; and these last two thoughts— the one so sweet, the other so bitter— presenting themselves simultaneously to the poor creature, she turned to Quasimodo, who still stood before her, filling her with terror, and said: 
“Why did you save me?” 
He looked at her anxiously, striving to divine her words. She repeated her question, at which he gave her another look of profound sadness, and, to her amazement, hastened away. 
In a few minutes he returned, carrying a bundle which he threw at her feet. It was some wearing apparel deposited for her by some charitable women. At this she cast down her eyes over her person, saw that she was nearly naked, and blushed. Life was coming back to her. 
Quasimodo seemed to feel something of this modest shame. He veiled his eye with his broad hand and left her once more, but this time with reluctant steps. 
She hastened to clothe herself in the white robe and the white veil supplied to her. It was the habit of a novice of the H?tel-Dieu. 
She had scarcely finished when she saw Quasimodo returning, carrying a basket under one arm and a mattress under the other. The basket contained a bottle and bread and a few other provisions. He set the basket on the ground and said, “Eat.” He spread the mattress on the stone floor — “Sleep,” he said. 
It was his own food, his own bed, that the poor bell-ringer had been to fetch. 
The gipsy raised her eyes to him to thank him, but she could not bring herself to utter a word. The poor devil was in truth too frightful. She dropped her head with a dder. 
“I frighten you,” said he. “I am very ugly I know. Do not look upon me. Listen to what I have to say. In the daytime you must remain here, but at night you may go where you will about the church. But go not one step outside the church by day or night. You would be lost. They would kill you, and I should die.” 
Touched by his words, she raised her head to answer him. He had disappeared. She found herself alone, musing upon the strange words of this almost monster and struck by the tone of his voice — so harsh, and yet so gentle. 
She presently examined her cell. It was a chamber some six feet square, with a small window and a door following the slight incline of the roofing of flat stones outside. Several gargoyles with animal heads seemed bending down and stretching their necks to look in at her window. Beyond the roof she caught a glimpse of a thousand chimney–tops from which rose the smoke of the many hearths of Paris — a sad sight to the poor gipsy — a foundling, under sentence of death, an unhappy outcast without country, or kindred, or home! 
At the moment when the thought of her friendless plight assailed her more poignantly than ever before, she was startled — everything frightened her now — by a shaggy, bearded head rubbing against her knees. It was the poor little goat, the nimble Djali, which had made its escape and followed her at the moment when Quasimodo scattered Charmolue’s men, and had been lavishing its caresses in vain at her feet for nearly an hour without obtaining a single glance from her. Its mistress covered it with kisses. 
“Oh, Djali!”she exclaimed, “how could I have forgotten thee thus? And dost thou still love me? Oh, thou — thou art not ungrateful!” 
And then, as if some invisible hand had lifted the weight which had lain so long upon her heart and kept back her tears, she began to weep, and as the tears flowed all that was harshest and most bitter in her grief and pain was washed away. 
When night fell she found the air so sweet, the moonlight so soothing, that she ventured to make the round of the high gallery that surrounds the church; and it brought her some relief, so calm and distant did earth seem to her from that height. 
Chapter 3 - Deaf
On waking the next morning, she discovered to her surprise that she had slept — poor girl, she had so long been a stranger to sleep. A cheerful ray from the rising sun streamed through her window and fell upon her face. But with the sun something else looked in at her window that frightened her — the unfortunate countenance of Quasimodo. Involuntarily she closed her eyes to t out the sight, but in vain; she still seemed to see through her rosy eye–lids that goblin face — one–eyed, broken–toothed, mask–like. Then, while she continued to keep her eyes t, she heard a grating voice say in gentlest accents: 
“Be not afraid. I am a friend. I did but come to watch you sleeping. That cannot hurt you, can it, that I should come and look at you asleep? What can it matter to you if I am here so long as your eyes are t? Now I will go. There, I am behind the wall — you may open your eyes again.” 
There was something more plaintive still than his words, and that was the tone in which they were spoken. Much touched, the gipsy opened her eyes. It was true, he was no longer at the window. She ran to it and saw the poor hunchback crouching against a corner of the wall in an attitude of sorrow and resignation. Overcoming with an effort the repulsion he inspired in her, “Come back,”she said softly. From the movement of her lips, Quasimodo understood that she was driving him away; he therefore rose and hobbled off slowly, with hanging head, not venturing to lift even his despairing glance to the girl. 
“Come hither!”she called, but he kept on his way. At this she hastened out of the cell, ran after him, and put her hand on his arm. At her touch Quasimodo thrilled from head to foot. He lifted a suppliant eye, and perceiving that she was drawing him towards her, his whole face lit up with tenderness and delight. She would have had him enter her cell, but he remained firmly on the threshold. “No, no,”said he; “the owl goes not into the nest of the lark.” 
She proceeded, therefore, to nestle down prettily on her couch, with the goat asleep at her feet, and both remained thus for some time motionless, gazing in silence — he at so much beauty, she at so much ugliness. Each moment revealed to her some fresh deformity. Her eyes wandered from the bowed knees to the humped back, from the humped back to the cyclops eye. She could not imagine how so misshapen a being could carry on existence. And yet there was diffused over the whole such an air of melancholy and gentleness that she began to be reconciled to it. 
He was the first to break the silence. 
“You were telling me to come back?” 
She nodded in affirmation and said, “Yes.” 
He understood the motion of her head. “Alas!”he said, and hesitated as if reluctant to finish the sentence; “you see, I am deaf.” 
“Poor soul!”exclaimed the gipsy with a look of kindly pity. 
He smiled sorrowfully. “Ah! you think I was bad enough without that? Yes, I am deaf. That is the way I am made! ’Tis horrible, in truth. And you — you are so beautiful.” 
In the poor creature’s tone there was so profound a consciousness of his pitiable state, that she had not the resolution to utter a word of comfort. Besides, he would not have heard it. He continued: 
“Never did I realize my deformity as I do now. When I compare myself with you, I do indeed pity myself — poor unhappy monster that I am! Confess — I look to you like some terrible beast? You — you are like a sunbeam, a drop of dew, the song of a bird! While I am something fearsome — neither man nor beast — a something that is harder, more trodden underfoot, more unsightly than a stone by the wayside!”And he laughed — the most heart–rending kind of laughter in all the world. 
“Yes, I am deaf,”he went on. “But you can speak to me by signs and gestures. I have a master who talks to me in that manner. And then I shall soon know your will by the motion of your lips and by your face.” 
“Well, then,”she said, smiling, “tell me why you saved me.” 
He looked at her attentively while she spoke. 
“I understood,”he replied, “you were asking why I saved you. You have forgotten a poor wretch who tried to carry you off one night — a wretch to whom, next day, you brought relief on the shameful pillory. A drop of water — a little pity — that is more than my whole life could repay. You have forgotten — he remembers.” 
She listened to him with profound emotion. A tear rose to the bell–ringer’s eye, but it did not fall; he seemed to make it a point of honour that it should not fall. 
“Listen,”he said, when he had regained control over himself. “We have very high towers here; a man, if he fell from one, would be dead before he reached the ground. If ever you desire me to throw myself down, you have but to say the word — a glance will suffice.” 
He turned to go. Unhappy as the gipsy girl herself was, this grotesque creature awakened some compassion in her. She signed to him to remain. 
“No, no,”he returned, “I may not stay here too long. I am not at my ease while you look at me. It is only from pity that you do not turn away your eyes. I will go to a spot where I can see you without being seen in my turn. It will be better.” 
He drew from his pocket a little metal whistle. 
“Here,”he said, “when you have need of me, when you wish me to come, when you are not too disgusted to look at me, then sound this whistle; I can hear that.” 
He laid the whistle on the floor and hastened away. 
Chapter 4 - Earthenware and Crystal
The days succeeded one another. 
Little by little tranquility returned to Esmeralda’s spirits. Excess of suffering, like excess of joy, is a condition too violent to last. The human heart is incapable of remaining long in any extreme. The gipsy had endured such agonies that her only remaining emotion at its recollection was amazement. 
With the feeling of security hope returned to her. She was outside the pale of society, of life; but she had a vague sense that it was not wholly impossible that she should re–enter it — as if dead but having in reserve a key to open her tomb. 
The terrible images that had so long haunted her withdrew by degrees. All the grewsome phantoms — Pierrat Torterue, Jacques Charmolue, and the rest, even the priest himself — faded from her mind. 
And then — Ph?bus was living; she was sure of it, she had seen him. 
The fact of Ph?bus being alive was all in all to her. After the series of earthquake shocks that had overturned everything, left no stone standing on another in her soul, one feeling alone had stood fast, and that was her love for the soldier. For love is like a tree; it grows of itself, strikes its roots deep into our being, and often continues to flourish and keep green over a heart in ruins. 
And the inexplicable part of it is, that the blinder this passion the more tenacious is it. It is never more firmly seated than when it has no sort of reason. 
Assuredly Esmeralda could not think of the captain without pain. Assuredly it was dreadful that he too should have been deceived, should have believed it possible that the dagger–thrust had been dealt by her who would have given a thousand lives for him. And yet he was not so much to blame, for had she not confessed her crime? Had she not yielded, weak woman that she was, to the torture? The fault was hers, and hers alone. She ought rather to have let them tear the nails from her feet than such an avowal from her lips. Still, could she but see Ph?bus once again, for a single minute, it needed but a word, a look, to undeceive him, to bring him back to her. She did not doubt it for a moment. She closed her eyes to the meaning of various singular things, or put a plausible construction on them: the chance presence of Ph?bus on the day of her penance, the lady who stood beside him — his sister, no doubt. The explanation was most unlikely, but she contented herself with it because she wished to believe that Ph?bus still loved her, and her alone. Had he not sworn it to her? And what more did she need — simple and credulous creature that she was? Besides, throughout the whole affair, were not appearances far more strongly against her than against him? So she waited — she hoped. 
Added to this, the church itself, the vast edifice wrapping her round on all sides, protecting, saving her, was a sovereign balm. The solemn lines of its architecture, the religious attitude of all the objects by which the girl was surrounded, the serene and pious thoughts that breathed, so to speak, from every pore of these venerable stones, acted upon her unceasingly. Sounds arose from it, too, of such blessedness and such majesty that they soothed that tortured spirit. The monotonous chants of the priests and the responses of the people — sometimes an inarticulate murmur, sometimes a roll of thunder; the harmonious trembling of the windows, the blast of the organ like a hive of enormous bees, that entire orchestra with its gigantic gamut ascending and descending incessantly — from the voice of the multitude to that of a single bell — deadened her memory, her imagination, her pain. The bells in especial lulled her. A potent magnetism flowed from the vast metal domes and rocked her on its waves. 
Thus, each succeeding morn found her calmer, less pale, breathing more freely. And as the wounds of her spirit healed, her outward grace and beauty bloomed forth again, but richer, more composed. Her former character also returned — something even of her gaiety, her pretty pout, her love for her goat, her pleasure in singing, her delicate modesty. She was careful to retire into the most secluded corner of her cell when dressing in the mornings, lest some one from the neighbouring attics should see her through the little window. 
When her dreams of Ph?bus left her the leisure, the gipsy sometimes let her thoughts stray to Quasimodo — the only link, the only means of communication with mankind, with life, that remained to her. Hapless creature! she was more cut off from the world than Quasimodo himself. She knew not what to think of the singular friend whom chance had given her. She often reproached herself that hers was not the gratitude that could veil her eyes, but it was useless — she could not accustom herself to the poor bell–ringer. He was too repulsive. 
She had left the whistle he gave her lying on the ground; which, however, did not prevent Quasimodo from appearing from time to time during the first days. She did her very utmost not to turn away in disgust when he brought her the basket of provisions and the pitcher of water, but he instantly perceived the slightest motion of the kind, and hastened sorrowfully away. 
Once he happened to come at the moment she was caressing Djali. He stood a few minutes pensively contemplating the charming group, and at last said, shaking his heavy, misshapen head: 
“My misfortune is that I am still too much like a man. Would I were a beast outright like that goat!” 
She raised her eyes to him in astonishment. 
He answered her look. “Oh, I know very well why.”And he went away. 
Another time he presented himself at the door of the cell (into which he never entered) while Esmeralda was singing an old Spanish ballad, the words of which she did not understand, but which had lingered in her ear because the gipsy women had sung her to sleep with it when a child. At the sight of the hideous face appearing suddenly, the girl broke off with an involuntary gesture of fright. The unhappy bell–ringer fell upon his knees on the threshold, and with a suppliant look clasped his great shapeless hands. “Oh!”he said in piteous accents, “I conjure you to continue — do not drive me away!”Unwilling to pain him, she tremblingly resumed her song, and by degrees her fright wore off, till she abandoned herself wholly to the slow and plaintive measure of the air. He, the while, had remained upon his knees, his hands clasped as if in prayer — attentive, scarcely breathing — his gaze fixed on the gipsy’s radiant eyes. He seemed to hear the music of her voice in those twin stars. 
Another time again, he approached her with an awkward and timid air. “Listen,”said he with an effort, “I have something to say to you.”She signed to him that she was listening. He sighed deeply, opened his lips, seemed for a moment to be on the point of speaking, then looked her in the face, shook his head, and slowly withdrew, his forehead bowed in his hand, leaving the Egyptian wondering and amazed. 
Among the grotesques sculptured on the wall, there was one for which he had a particular affection, and with which he often seemed to exchange fraternal looks. Once the gipsy heard him say to it: “Oh! why am I not fashioned of stone like thee?” 
At length, one morning Esmeralda had advanced to the edge of the roof and was looking down into the Place over the sharp roof–ridge of Saint–Jean le Rond. Quasimodo stood behind her, as was his habit, that he might spare her as much as possible the pain of seeing him. Suddenly the gipsy started; a tear and a flash of joy shone together in her eyes; she fell on her knees, and stretching out her arms in anguish towards the Place: 
“Ph?bus!”she cried, “come! come to me! one word, one single word, for the love of heaven! Ph?bus! Ph?bus!” 
Her voice, her face, her gesture, her whole attitude had the heart–rending aspect of a shipwrecked mariner making signals of distress to some gay vessel passing on the distant horizon in a gleam of sunshine. 
Leaning over in his turn, Quasimodo perceived the object of this tender and agonizing prayer — a young man, a soldier, a handsome cavalier glittering in arms and gay attire, who was caracoling through the Place and sweeping his plumed hat to a lady smiling down on him from a balcony. The officer could not hear the unhappy girl calling to him. He was too far off. 
But the poor deaf ringer heard. A profound sigh heaved his breast. He turned away. His heart was swelling with the tears he drove back; his two clenched fists went up convulsively to his head, and when he drew them away they each held a handful of his rough red hair. 
The Egyptian paid no heed to him. 
“Damnation!”he muttered, as he ground his teeth, “so that is how a man should be — he need only have a handsome outside!” 
Meanwhile she was still on her knees crying out in terrible agitation: 
“Oh! — now he is dismounting from his horse — he is going into that house — Ph?bus! He does not hear me. Ph?bus! The shameless woman, to be speaking to him at the same time that I do! Ph?bus! Ph?bus!” 
The deaf man watched her. He understood her gestures, and the poor bell–ringer’s eye filled with tears, though he let not one of them fall. Presently he pulled her gently by the hem of her sleeve. She turned round. He had assumed an untroubled mien. 
“Shall I go and fetch him?”he asked quietly. 
She gave a cry of joy. “Oh, go! Go quickly — run! hasten! it is that officer! that officer — bring him to me, and I will love thee!” 
She clasped his knees. He could not refrain from shaking his head mournfully. 
“I will bring him to you,”he said in a low voice; then, turning away his head, he strode to the stair–case, suffocating with sobs. 
By the time he reached the Place there was nothing to be seen but the horse fastened to the door of the Gondelaurier’s house. The captain had gone in. 
Quasimodo looked up at the roof of the Cathedral. Esmeralda was still in the same place, in the same attitude. He made her a melancholy sign of the head, then established himself with his back against one of the posts of the porch, determined to wait until the captain came out. 
It was, at the Logis Gondelaurier, one of those gala days which precede a wedding. Quasimodo saw many people go in, but nobody come away. From time to time he looked up at the church roof. The gipsy never stirred from her post any more than he. A groom came, untied the horse and led him away to the stables of the mansion. 
The whole day passed thus. Quasimodo leaning against the post, Esmeralda on the roof, Ph?bus, no doubt, at the feet of Fleur-de-Lys. 
Night fell at last — a dark night without a moon. Quasimodo might strain his gaze towards Esmeralda, she faded into a mere glimmer of light in the gloaming — then nothing; all was swallowed up in darkness. 
He now saw the whole fa?ade of the Gondelaurier mansion illuminated from top to bottom. He saw one after another the windows in the Place lit up, one after another also he saw the lights disappear from them; for he remained the whole evening at his post. The officer never came out. When the last wayfarer had gone home, when every window of the other houses was dark, Quasimodo, quite alone, remained lost in the shadows. The Parvis of Notre–Dame was not lighted in those days. 
However, the windows of the Gondelaurier mansion blazed on even after midnight. Quasimodo, motionless, and ever on the alert, saw a ceaseless crowd of moving, dancing shadows pass across the many–coloured windows. Had he not been deaf, in proportion as the murmur of slumbering Paris died away, he would have heard more and more distinctly from within the Logis Gondelaurier the sound of revelry, of laughter, and of music. 
Towards one in the morning the guests began to depart. Quasimodo, crouching in the deep shadow, watched them all as they passed under the torch–lit doorway. The captain was not among them. 
He was filled with sadness; now and then he looked up into the air like one weary of waiting. Great black clouds, heavy and ragged, hung in deep festoons under the starry arch of night — the cobwebs of the celestial roof. 
At one of these moments he suddenly saw the folding glass door on to the balcony, the stone balustrade of which was dimly visible above him, open cautiously and give passage to a couple, behind whom it closed noiselessly. It was a male and female figure, in whom Quasimodo had no difficulty in recognising the handsome captain and the young lady he had seen that morning welcoming the officer from that same balcony. The Place was in complete darkness, and a thick crimson curtain which had fallen over the glass door as soon as it closed, intercepted any ray of light from the apartment within. 
The young couple, as far as our deaf spectator could judge without hearing a word of what they said, appeared to abandon themselves to a very tender tête–á–tête. The lady had evidently permitted the officer to encircle her waist with his arm, and was not too energetically resisting a kiss. 
Quasimodo witnessed this scene from below — all the more attractive that it was not intended for any strange eye. With bitterness and pain he looked on at so much happiness, so much beauty. After all, nature was not altogether mute in the poor wretch, and though his back was crooked, his nerves were not less susceptible than another man’s. He thought of the miserable share in life that Providence had meted out to him; that woman, and the joys of love, must forever pass him by; that he could never attain to being more than a spectator of the felicity of others. But that which wrung his heart most in this scene, and added indignation to his chagrin, was that the gipsy would suffer were she to behold it. To be sure, the night was very dark, and Esmeralda, if she still remained at her post (and he did not doubt it), was too far off, considering that he himself could barely distinguish the lovers on the balcony; this consoled him somewhat. 
Meanwhile the conversation above became more and more ardent. The lady appeared to be entreating the officer to solicit no more from her; but all that Quasimodo could distinguish were the clasped white hands, the mingled smiles and tears, the soft eyes of the girl uplifted to the stars, the man’s burning gaze devouring her. 
Fortunately for the girl, whose resistance was growing weaker, the door of the balcony opened suddenly, and an elder lady appeared; the fair maid seemed confused, the officer disgusted, and all three returned inside. 
A moment afterward a horse clattered under the porch, and the gay officer wrapped in his military cloak passed Quasimodo quickly. 
The bell–ringer let him turn the corner of the street, and ran after him with his ape–like nimbleness, calling, “Hè there! captain!” 
The captain drew up. “What does this rascal want with me?”said he, peering through the darkness at the queer, uncouth figure hobbling after him. 
Quasimodo came up to him, and boldly taking the horse by the bridle, said, “Follow me, captain; there’s one here would have speech of you.” 
“Horns of the devil!”growled Ph?bus, “here’s a villainous, ragged bird methinks I’ve seen somewhere before. Now, then, my friend, let go my horse’s rein, I tell thee — ” 
“Captain,”returned the deaf ringer, “are you not asking me who it is?” 
“I am telling thee to let go my horse,”retorted Ph?bus impatiently. “What does the fellow mean by hanging at my charger’s rein? Dost take my beast for a gallows?” 
Far from leaving hold of the horse, Quasimodo was preparing to turn him round. Unable to explain to himself the officer’s resistance, he hastened to say: “Come, captain, ’tis a woman awaits you,”and he added with an effort, “a woman who loves you.” 
“A droll rascal!”said the captain, “who thinks me obliged to run after every woman that loves me, or says she does; especially, if perchance she is anything like thee, owl–faced one! Go — tell her who sent thee that I am going to be married, and she may go to the devil!” 
“Hark you!”cried Quasimodo, thinking with a single word to overcome his hesitation; “come, monseigneur, ’tis the gipsy girl you wot of!” 
This word did indeed make a tremendous impression on Ph?bus, but not the kind the hunchback expected. It will be remembered that the gallant officer had retired from the balcony with Fleur–de–Lys a few minutes before Quasimodo saved the condemned girl out of Charmolue’s hands. Since then, in all his visits to the Gondelaurier mansion, he had taken good care not to mention the woman, the recollection of whom, after all, was painful to him; and Fleur–de–Lys, on her part, had not deemed it politic to tell him that the gipsy was alive. Consequently Ph?bus believed poor “Similar,”as he called her, to be dead, and what’s more, for a month or two. Added to which, the captain had been thinking for some moments past that the night was pitch dark; that, combined with the sepulchral voice and supernatural ugliness of the strange messenger, it was past midnight; that the street was as deserted as on the night the spectre–monk had accosted him, and that his horse had snorted violently at sight of the hunchback. 
“The gipsy girl!”he exclaimed, almost in fear. “How now, comest thou from the other world?”and his hand went to his dagger–hilt. 
“Quick, quick!”said the hunchback, trying to lead the horse on. “This way.” 
Ph?bus planted a vigorous kick in the middle of his chest. Quasimodo’s eye flashed. He made as if to throw himself on the captain, but checked himself suddenly. “Oh,”he exclaimed, “’tis well for you there’s some one that loves you!”He laid particular stress on the “some one,”then dropping the horse’s bridle, “Go your way!”he cried. 
Ph?bus put spurs to his horse and galloped off, swearing lustily. 
Quasimodo watched him disappear down the dark street. “Oh,”murmured the poor deaf hunchback, “to think of refusing that!” 
He returned to the Cathedral, lit his lamp, and mounted the stairs of the tower. As he had surmised, the gipsy was where he had left her. 
The moment she caught sight of him she ran to him. “Alone!”she cried, clasping her beautiful hands in despair. 
“I did not find him,”answered Quasimodo coldly. 
“You should have waited the whole night through!”she retorted vehemently. 
He saw her angry gesture and understood the reproach. “I will watch better another time,”he said, hanging his head. 
“Get you gone!”said she. 
He left her. She was displeased with him. But he had chosen rather to be misjudged by her than give her pain. He kept all the grief to himself. 
From that day forward the gipsy saw him no more; he came no more to her cell. At most, she would catch a glimpse now and then of the bell–ringer’s countenance looking mournfully down upon her from the summit of a tower, but directly she perceived him he would vanish. 
We must confess that she was not greatly affected by this voluntary withdrawal of the hunchback. In her heart she was grateful to him for it. Nor did Quasimodo delude himself upon the subject. 
She saw him no more, but she felt the presence of a good genius about her. Her provisions were renewed by an invisible hand while she slept. One morning she found a cage of birds on her window–sill. Above her cell there was a sculptured figure that frightened her. She had given evidence of this more than once in Quasimodo’s presence. One morning (for all these things were done in the night) she woke to find it gone. It had been broken away, and whoever had climbed up to that figure must have risked his life. 
Sometimes, in the evening, she would hear a voice, concealed under the leaden eaves of the steeple, singing, as if to lull her to sleep, a melancholy and fantastic song, without rhyme or rhythm, such as a deaf man might make: 
“Look not on the face,
Maiden, look upon the heart.
The heart of a fair youth is oft unsightly;
There be hearts that cannot hold love long.
Maiden, the pine’s not fair to see,
Not fair to see as the poplar is,
But it keeps its green the winter through.
“Alas, ’tis vain to speak like this!
What is not fair ought not to be;
Beauty will only beauty love;
April looks not on January. 
“Beauty is perfect,
Beauty can do all,
Beauty is the only thing that does not live by halves.
The raven flies only by day,
The owl flies only by night,
The swan flies day and night.” 
One morning when she rose she found two vases full of flowers standing at the window. One of them was of glass, very beautiful in shape and colour, but cracked; it had let all the water in it run out, and the flowers it held were faded. The other was of earthenware, rude and common, but it retained all the water, so that its flowers remained fresh and blooming. 
I know not if she acted with intention, but Esmeralda took the faded nosegay and wore it in her bosom all day. 
That day the voice from the tower was silent. 
She did not greatly care. She passed her days in caressing Djali, in watching the door of the Gondelaurier mansion, in talking to herself about Ph?bus, and crumbling her bread to the swallows. 
Besides, she had altogether ceased to see or hear Quasimodo. The poor bell–ringer seemed to have disappeared from the church. However, one night as she lay awake thinking of her handsome captain, she was startled by hearing the sound of breathing near her cell. She rose, and saw by the light of the moon a shapeless mass lying across her door. It was Quasimodo sleeping there upon the stones. 
Chapter 5 - The Key of the Porte Rouge
Meanwhile public talk had acquainted the Archdeacon with the miraculous manner in which the gipsy girl had been saved. He knew not what his feelings were when he learned this. He had reconciled himself to the thought of Esmeralda’s death, and so had regained some peace of mind — he had touched the depths of possible affliction. The human heart (and Dom Claude had meditated upon these matters) cannot hold more than a given quantity of despair. When the sponge is soaked, an ocean may pass over it without its absorbing one drop more. 
Now Esmeralda dead, the sponge was full; the last word had been said for Dom Claude on this earth. But to know her living, and Ph?bus too, was to take up his martyrdom, his pangs, his schemes and alternatives — in short, his whole life again. And Claude was weary of it all. 
When he learned the news, he t himself up in his cell in the cloister. He did not appear at the conferences of the chapter, nor at any of the services of the church, and closed his door to every one, even the bishop. He kept himself thus immured for several weeks. He was judged to be ill, as indeed he was. 
What was he doing while t up thus? With what thoughts was the unhappy man contending. Was he making a last stand against his fatal passion — combining some final plan of death for her and perdition for himself? 
His Jehan, his beloved brother, his spoiled darling, came once to his door and knocked, swore, entreated, told his name a dozen times over. The door remained closed. 
He passed whole days with his face pressed against his window, for from thence he could see the cell of Esmeralda, and often the girl herself with her goat, sometimes with Quasimodo. He remarked the deaf hunchback’s assiduities, his obedience, his delicate and submissive ways with the gipsy. He remembered — for he had a long memory, and memory is the scourge of the jealous — the peculiar look the bell–ringer had fixed upon the dancing girl on a certain evening, and he asked himself what motive could have urged Quasimodo to save her. He was witness of a thousand little scenes between the gipsy and the hunchback, the pantomime of which, seen at that distance and commented on by his passion, seemed very tender to him. He mistrusted the capricious fancy of woman. And presently he was vaguely conscious of entertaining a jealousy such as he never could have anticipated — a jealousy that made him redden with shame and indignation. 
“The captain,”thought he, “well, that might pass; but this one — !”The idea overwhelmed him. 
His nights were dreadful. Since ever he learned that the gipsy girl was alive, the cold images of spectres and the grave which had possessed him for a whole day, vanished, and the flesh returned to torment him. He writhed upon his bed to know the girl so near him. 
Each night his delirious imagination called up Esmeralda before him in all the attitudes most calculated to inflame his blood. He saw her swooning over the stabbed officer, her fair, uncovered bosom crimsoned with the young man’s blood — at that moment of poignant delight when the Archdeacon had imprinted on her pallid lips that kiss of which, half dead as she was, the unhappy girl had felt the burning pressure. Again he beheld her disrobed by the rude hands of the torturers, saw them lay bare and thrust into the hideous boot with its iron screws her tiny foot, her round and delicate leg, her white and supple knee. He saw that ivory knee alone left visible outside Torterue’s horrible apparatus. Finally, he pictured to himself the girl in her shift, the rope round her neck, her shoulders and her feet bare, almost naked, as he had seen her that last day, and he clenched his hands in agony, and a long shiver ran through him. 
At last one night these images so cruelly inflamed his celibate’s blood that he tore his pillow with his teeth, leaped from his bed, threw a surplice over his night garment, and left his cell, lamp in hand, haggard, half naked, the fire of madness in his eyes. 
He knew where to find the key of the Porte Rouge, the communication between the cloister and the church, and, as we know, he always carried with him a key to the tower stair–case. 
Chapter 6 - Sequel to the key of the Porte Rouge
That night Esmeralda had fallen asleep in her little chamber full of hope and sweet thoughts, the horrors of the past forgotten. She had been sleeping for some time, dreaming, as ever, of Ph?bus, when she seemed to hear some sound. Her slumbers were light and broken — the sleep of a bird; the slightest thing awoke her. She opened her eyes. The night was very dark. Nevertheless, she saw a face peering in at her through the window — a lamp shed its light on this apparition. The moment it found itself observed by Esmeralda the apparition extinguished the lamp. However, the girl had had time to recognise the features. She closed her eyes in terror. 
“Oh,” she murmured weakly, “the priest!” 
All her past misfortunes flashed like lightning through her mind. She fell back upon her bed frozen with horror. 
The next moment she felt something in contact with the whole length of her body which sent such a dder through her that she started up in bed, wide awake and furious. The priest had glided up beside her and clasped his arms about her. 
She tried to scream but could not. 
“Begone, monster! begone, assassin!” she said, in a voice hoarse with passion and dread. 
“Have pity! have pity!” murmured the priest, pressing his lips to her shoulder. 
She clutched his tonsured head by its scant remaining locks and strove to repel his kisses as if he had been biting her. 
“Have pity!” repeated the unhappy wretch. “Didst thou but know what my love for thee is! ’Tis fire! ’tis molten lead — a thousand daggers in my heart!” 
He held her arm fast with a superhuman grip. “Let me go!” she cried wildly, “or I spit in thy face!” 
He released her. “Vilify me — strike me — be angry — do what thou wilt; but in mercy, love me!” 
She struck him with the fury of a child. She raised her pretty hands to tear his face. “Away, demon!” 
“Love me! love me!” pleaded the unhappy priest, coming close to her again and answering her blows by caresses. 
Suddenly she felt that he was overpowering her. “There must be an end to this,” said he, grinding his teeth. 
She was vanquished, panting, broken, in his arms, at his mercy. She felt a lascivious hand groping over her, and making one supreme effort she screamed, “Help! help! a vampire! a vampire!” 
But no one came. Only Djali was awakened and bleating in terror. 
“Keep quiet,” panted the priest. Suddenly in her struggles the gipsy’s hand came against something cold and metallic. It was Quasimodo’s whistle. She seized it with a spasm of relief, put it to her lips, and blew with all her remaining strength. The whistle came clear, shrill, piercing. 
“What is that?” said the priest. Almost as he spoke he felt himself dragged away by vigorous arms; the cell was dark, he could not distinguish clearly who it was that held him, but he heard teeth gnashing with rage, and there was just sufficient light in the gloom to show him the glitter of a great knife–blade just above his head. 
The priest thought he could distinguish the outline of Quasimodo. He supposed it could be no one else. He recollected having stumbled, in entering, over a bundle lying across the outside of the door. Yet, as the new–comer uttered no word, he knew not what to think. He seized the arm that held the knife. “Quasimodo!” he cried, forgetting in this moment of danger that Quasimodo was deaf. 
In a trice the priest was thrown upon the floor and felt a knee of iron planted on his chest. By the pressure of that knee he recognised the hunchback. But what could he do — how make himself known to the other? Night made the deaf man blind. 
He was lost. The girl, pitiless as an enraged tigress, would not interfere to save him. The knife was nearing his head — it was a critical moment. Suddenly his adversary seemed to hesitate. “No blood near her!” he said under his breath. 
There was no mistaking — it was Quasimodo’s voice. 
On this the priest felt the huge hand dragging him out of the cell by the foot; he was to die outside. 
Fortunately for him the moon had just risen. As they crossed the threshold a pale ray fell across the priest’s face. Quasimodo stared at him, a tremor seized him, he relinquished his hold and shrank back. 
The gipsy girl, who had stolen to the door, was surprised to see them suddenly change parts; for now it was the priest who threatened and Quasimodo who entreated. 
The priest, overwhelming the deaf man with gestures of anger and reproof, motioned vehemently to him to withdraw. 
The hunchback hung his head, then went and knelt before the gipsy’s door. “Monseigneur,” he said in firm but resigned tones, “you will do as you think fit afterward, but you will have to kill me first.” So saying, he offered his knife to the priest. 
Claude, beside himself with passion, put out his hand to seize it, but the girl was too quick for him. She snatched the knife from Quasimodo and burst into a frantic laugh. “Now come!” she cried to the priest. 
She held the blade aloft. The priest faltered — she would most certainly have struck. “You dare not approach me, coward!” she cried. Then she added in a pitiless tone, and knowing well that she was plunging a thousand red–hot irons into the priest’s heart: “Ha! I know that Ph?bus is not dead!” 
The priest threw Quasimodo to the ground with a furious kick; then, trembling with passion, hurled himself into the darkness of the stair–case. 
When he was gone, Quasimodo picked up the whistle which had just been the means of saving the gipsy. “It was getting rusty,” was all he said as he handed it back to her; then he left her to herself. 
Overpowered by the violent scene, the girl sank exhausted upon her couch and broke into bitter sobs. Her outlook was becoming sinister once more. 
Meanwhile the priest had groped his way back to his cell. 
It had come to this — Dom Claude was jealous of Quasimodo. Lost in thought, he repeated his baleful words, “No one shall have her.” 
BOOK X
Chapter 1 - Gringoire has several bright ideas in succession in the Rue des Bernardins
Directly Gringoire had seen the turn affairs were taking, and that there was every prospect of the rope, the gallows, and various other disagreeables for the chief actors in this drama, he felt in nowise drawn to take part in it. The truands, with whom he had remained, considering them the best company in Paris — the truands continued to be interested in the gipsy girl. This he judged very natural in people who, like her, had nothing but Charmolue and Torterue to look forward to, and did not caracol in the regions of the imagination as he did astride of Pegasus. He had learned from them that his bride of the broken pitcher had taken refuge in Notre–Dame, and he rejoiced at it. But he was not even tempted to go and visit her there. He sometimes thought of the little goat, but that was the utmost. For the rest, he performed feats of strength during the daytime to earn a living, and at night he was engaged in elaborating a memorial against the Bishop of Paris, for he had not forgotten how the wheels of his mills had drenched him, and owed the bishop a grudge in consequence. He was also busy writing a commentary on the great work of Baudry le Rouge, Bishop of Noyon and Tournay, De Cupa Petrarum, which had inspired him with a violent taste for architecture, a love which had supplanted his passion for hermetics, of which, too, it was but a natural consequence, seeing that there is an intimate connection between hermetics and freemasonry. Gringoire had passed from the love of an idea to the love for its outward form. 
He happened one day to stop near the Church of Saint–Germain–l’Auxerrois, at a corner of a building called the For–l’évêque, which was opposite another called the For–le–Roi. To the former was attached a charming fourteenth century chapel, the chancel of which was towards the street. Gringoire was absorbed in studying its external sculpture. It was one of those moments of selfish, exclusive, and supreme enjoyment in which the artist sees nothing in all the world but art, and sees the whole world in art. Suddenly a hand was laid heavily on his shoulder. He turned round — it was his former friend and master, the Archdeacon. 
He stood gaping stupidly. It was long since he had seen the Archdeacon, and Dom Claude was one of those grave and intense men who invariably upset a sceptical philosopher’s equilibrium. 
The Archdeacon kept silence for some moments, during which Gringoire found leisure to observe him more closely. He thought Dom Claude greatly altered, pallid as a winter’s morning, hollow–eyed, his hair nearly white. The priest was the first to break this silence: 
“How fares it with you, Maitre Pierre?”he asked in a cold and even tone. 
“My health?”returned Gringoire. “Well, as to that, it has its ups and downs; but on the whole, I may say it is good. I am moderate in all things. You know, master, the secret, according to Hippocrates; ‘id est: cibi, potus, somni, venus, omnia moderata sunt.”’ Food, drink, sleep, love — all in moderation. 
“You have no care then, Maitre Gringoire?”resumed the priest, fixing Gringoire with a penetrating eye. 
“Faith, not I.” 
“And what are you doing now?” 
“You see for yourself, master; I am examining the cutting of these stones, and the style of this bas–relief.” 
The priest smiled faintly, but with that scornful smile which only curls one corner of the mouth. “And that amuses you?” 
“It is paradise!”exclaimed Gringoire. And bending over the stone carvings with the fascinated air of a demonstrator of living phenomena — “For example,”he said, “look at this bas–relief: do you not consider its execution a marvel of skill, delicacy, and patience? Look at this small column: where would you find a capital whose leaves were more daintily entwined or more tenderly treated by the chisel? Here are three round alto–relievos by Jean Maillevin. They are not the finest examples of that great genius; nevertheless, the childlike simplicity, the sweetness of the faces, the sportive grace of the attitudes and the draperies, and the indefinable charm which is mingled with all the imperfections, makes the little figures wonderfully airy and delicate — perhaps almost too much so. You do not find that diverting?” 
“Oh, yes,”said the priest. 
“And if you were to see the interior of the chapel!”continued the poet with his loquacious enthusiasm. “Carvings everywhere — leafy as the heart of a cabbage! The chancel is most devout in style and quite unique. Nowhere have I seen anything similar!” 
Dom Claude interrupted him: “You are happy, then?” 
“Upon my honour, yes!”returned Gringoire rapturously. “I began by loving women, and went on to animals; now I am in love with stones. It is quite as diverting as beasts or women, and less fickle.” 
The priest passed his hand across his brow. The gesture was habitual with him. “Say you so?” 
“Look you,”said Gringoire, “what joys are to be extracted from it!”He took the priest by the arm, who yielded passively, and led him into the stair turret of the For–l’Evêque. “Look at that stair! Every time I see it it makes me happy. The style of that flight of steps is the simplest and most rare in Paris. Each step is sloped underneath. Its beauty and its simplicity consist in the fact of the steps, which are about a foot broad, being interlaced, mortised, jointed, linked, interwoven, and fitting into one another in a manner truly both firm and elegant.” 
“And you long for nothing?” 
“No.” 
“And you have no regrets?” 
“Neither regrets nor desires. I have arranged my life to my satisfaction.” 
“What man arranges,”said Claude, “circumstances may disarrange.” 
“I am a Pyrrhonian philosopher,”returned Gringoire, “and I hold the equilibrium in everything.” 
“And how do you get your living?” 
“I still write an epopee or a tragedy now and then; but what brings me in the most is that industry in which you have already seen me engaged, master — carrying a pyramid of chairs in my teeth.” 
“A gross occupation for a philosopher.” 
“’Tis always a form of equilibrium,”returned Gringoire. “When one takes up an idea, one finds something of it everywhere.” 
“I know it,”answered the Archdeacon. Then after a pause he went on: “Nevertheless, you are very poor?” 
“Poor, yes; unhappy, no.” 
There was a clatter of horses’ hoofs, and the two friends saw a company of the King’s archers file past the end of the street, their lances high and an officer at their head. The cavalcade was brilliant, and the street echoed to their tread. 
“How you look at that officer!”said Gringoire to the Archdeacon. 
“It is because I seem to know him.” 
“What is his name?” 
“I think,”answered Claude, “it is Ph?bus de Chateaupers.” 
“Ph?bus! a curious name that! There is a Count of Foix called Ph?bus. I remember that a girl I once knew never swore by any other name.” 
“Come away,”said the priest, “I have something to say to you.” 
A certain degree of agitation was perceptible under the Archdeacon’s glacial manner since the passing of the troop of soldiers. He started off walking, Gringoire following, accustomed to obey like all who once came under the influence of that dominating personality. They proceeded in silence till they reached the Rue des Bernardins, which was well–nigh deserted. Here Dom Claude came to a standstill. 
“What have you to say to me, master?”asked Gringoire. 
“Do you not consider,”answered the Archdeacon with an air of profound reflection, “that the attire of those cavaliers is handsomer than yours or mine?” 
Gringoire shook his head. “Faith, I prefer my red and yellow cloak to those iron and steel scales. Where’s the pleasure of making a noise when you walk like the Iron Wharf in an earthquake?” 
“Then, Gringoire, you have never envied those fine fellows in their coats of mail?” 
“Envied them for what, Monsieur the Archdeacon? Their strength, their arms, their discipline? Nay, give me philosophy and independence in rags. I’d rather be the head of a fly than the tail of a lion.” 
“How singular!”mused the priest. “A fine uniform is, nevertheless, a fine thing in its way.” 
Gringoire seeing him immersed in thought, strolled away to admire the porch of a neighbouring house. He returned clapping his hands. 
“If you were less occupied with the fine habiliments of these warriors, Monsieur the Archdeacon, I would beg you to come and see this door. I have always declared that the house of the Sieur Aubry boasts the most superb entrance in the world!” 
“Pierre Gringoire,”said the Archdeacon, “what have you done with the little gipsy dancing girl?” 
“Esmeralda, you mean? You have very abrupt changes of conversation.” 
“Was she not your wife?” 
“Yes, by grace of a broken pitcher. It was a four years’ agreement. By–the–bye,”Gringoire went on in a half bantering tone, “you still think of her, then?” 
“And you — you think of her no longer?” 
“Not much — I have so many other things. Lord, how pretty the little goat was!” 
“Did not that Bohemian girl save your life?” 
“Pardieu — that’s true!” 
“Well, then, what has become of her? what have you done with her?” 
“I cannot tell you. I believe they hanged her.” 
“You believe?” 
“I am not sure. As soon as I saw there was any question of hanging I kept out of the game.” 
“And that is all you know about her?” 
“Stay; I was told that she had taken refuge in Notre-Dame, and that she was in safety, and I’m sure I’m delighted; but I was not able to discover whether the goat had escaped with her—and that is all I know about it.” 
“Then I am going to tell you more,”cried Dom Claude; and his voice, till then low, deliberate, and hollow, rose to thunder. “She did find sanctuary in Notre-Dame, but in three days hence the law will drag her out again, and she will be hanged at the Grève. There is a decree of Parliament.” 
“How very disappointing,”said Gringoire. In an instant the priest had resumed his cold, grave demeanour. 
“And who the devil,”continued the poet, “has taken the trouble to solicit a decree of reintegration? Why couldn’t they leave the Parliament alone? What harm can it do to any one for a poor girl to take shelter under the buttresses of Notre-Dame among the swallows’ nests?” 
“There are Satans in the world,”replied the Archdeacon gloomily. 
“Well, ’tis a devilish bad piece of work,”observed Gringoire. 
“So she saved your life?”the priest went on after a pause. 
“Yes, among my good friends the vagabonds. A touch more, a shade less, and I should have been hanged. They would have been sorry for it now.” 
“Will you then do nothing for her?” 
“I ask nothing better, Dom Claude; but what if I bring an ugly bit of business about my ears?” 
“What does it matter?” 
“Matter indeed? You are very good, my dear master! I have two great works just begun.” 
The priest smote his forehead. Despite the calm he affected, a violent gesture from time to time betrayed his inward struggles. “How is she to be saved?” 
“Master,”said Gringoire, “I can give you an answer; ‘Il padelt,’ which is the Turkish for ‘God is our hope.’ ” 
“How is she to be saved?”repeated Dom Claude, deep in thought. 
It was Gringoire’s turn to smite his forehead. “Hark you, master, I have imagination. I will find you a choice of expedients. What if we entreated the King’s mercy?” 
“Mercy? from Louis XI?” 
“Why not?” 
“Go ask the tiger for his bone!” 
Gringoire racked his brain for fresh solutions. 
“Well, then—stay: how would it be to draw up a memorial from the midwives of the city declaring the girl to be pregnant?” 
The priest’s sunken eyes glared savagely. “Pregnant? Rascal, knowest thou anything of such a matter?” 
Gringoire recoiled in alarm at his manner. He hastened to say, “Oh, not I indeed! Our marriage was a regular foris maritagium. I am altogether outside of it. But at any rate, that would secure a respite.” 
“Folly! Infamy! Hold thy peace!” 
“You are wrong to be angry,”said Gringoire reproachfully. “We get a respite which does harm to nobody, and puts forty deniers parisis into the pockets of the midwives, who are poor women.” 
The priest was not listening. “But she must be got out of there,”he murmured. “The decree has to be carried out within three days— That Quasimodo! Women have very depraved tastes!”He raised his voice. “Ma?tre Pierre, I have thought it well over; there is but one means of saving her.” 
“And what is that? For my part I can suggest nothing.” 
“Hark you, Ma?tre Pierre; remember that you owe your life to her. I will impart my idea frankly to you. The church is watched night and day; no one is allowed to come out who has not been seen to go in. Thus you can enter. You shall come; I will take you to her. You will change clothes with her. She will take your doublet, you will take her petticoats.” 
“So far so good,”observed the philosopher. “And after?” 
“After? Why, she will go out in your clothes, and you will stay there in hers. They will hang you, perhaps, but she will be saved.” 
Gringoire scratched his ear with a very serious air. “Now that,”said he, “is an idea that would never have occurred to me.” 
At Dom Claude’s unexpected proposal, the open and benign countenance of the poet became suddenly overcast, like a smiling landscape of Italy when a nasty squall of wind drives a cloud against the sun. 
“Well, Gringoire, what say you to this plan?” 
“I say that they will not hang me perhaps, but that they will hang me indubitably.” 
“That does not concern us.” 
“The plague it doesn’t!” 
“She saved your life. It is a debt you ought to pay.” 
“There is many another I don’t pay.” 
“Ma?tre Pierre, this must be done.”The Archdeacon spoke imperiously. 
“Hark you, Dom Claude,”returned the poet in consternation. “You cling to that idea, but you are wrong. I see no reason why I should hang instead of another.” 
“What is there to attract you so firmly to life?” 
“Ah, a thousand things!” 
“What, pray?” 
“What—why, the air, the sky, the morning, the evening, moonlight, my good friends the vagabonds, our pranks with the women, the fine architecture of Paris to study, three important books to write—one of them against the bishop and his mills; oh, more than I can say. Anaxagoras said that he was in the world merely to admire the sun. And besides, I enjoy the felicity of passing the whole of my days, from morning till night, in the company of a man of genius— myself, to wit—and that is very agreeable.” 
“Oh, empty rattle-pate!”growled the Archdeacon. “And who, prithee, preserved to thee that life thou deemest so pleasant? Whose gift is it that thou art breathing the air, looking at the sky, hast still the power to divert thy feather-brained spirit with folly and nonsense? But for her, where wouldst thou be? Thou wouldst let her die, then—her through whom thou livest? Let her die—that being so lovely, so sweet, so adorable—a creature necessary to the light of the world, more divine than God himself! whilst thou, half philosopher, half fool—mere outline of something, a species of vegetable that imagines it walks and thinks—thou wilt go on living with the life thou hast stolen from her, useless as a torch at noonday? Come, Gringoire, a little pity! be generous in thy turn; ’twas she that showed thee the way.” 
The priest spoke vehemently. Gringoire listened at first with an air of indecision; presently he was touched, and ended by making a tragic grimace which made his wan visage like that of a new-born infant with the colic. 
“You are in truth most pathetic,”said he, wiping away a tear. “Well, I’ll think on it—’tis an odd idea of yours, that. After all,”he pursued, after a moment’s silence, “who knows; may-be they would not hang me—’tis not every betrothal that ends in marriage. When they find me in my hiding-place thus grotesquely disguised in coif and kirtle, it is very possible they will burst out laughing. On the other hand, even if they do hang me—well, the rope is a death like any other—nay, rather it is not a death like any other— it is a death worthy of a sage who has swung gently all his life between the extremes—a death which, like the mind of the true sceptic, is neither flesh nor fish; a death thoroughly expressive of Pyrrhonism and hesitation, which holds the mean between heaven and earth, which holds you in suspension. ’Tis the death of a philosopher, and to which mayhap I was predestined. It is magnificent to die as one has lived!” 
The priest interrupted him. “So it is a bargain, then?” 
“When all’s said and done,”pursued Gringoire with exaltation, “what is death? An uncomfortable moment—a tollgate—the transit from little to nothing. Some one having asked Cercidas of Megalopolis whether he could die willingly, he replied, ‘Wherefore not? for after my death I should see those great men: Pythagoras among the philosophers, Hecat?us among the historians, Homer among the poets, Olympus among the musicians.’ ” 
The Archdeacon held out his hand. “It is settled, then? You will come to-morrow?” 
This action brought Gringoire down to the realities. 
“Faith no!”said he in the tone of a man who awakens. 
“Let myself be hanged?—’tis too absurd! I will not.” 
“God be with you, then!”and the Archdeacon muttered between his teeth, “We shall meet again!” 
“I have no desire to meet that devil of a man again,”thought Gringoire. He ran after Dom Claude. “Hark you, Monsieur the Archdeacon, no offence between old friends! You are interested in this girl—my wife I mean—that’s very well. You have devised a stratagem for getting her safely out of Notre-Dame, but your plan is highly unpleasant for me, Gringoire. If I only had another to suggest!—Let me tell you that a most luminous inspiration has this instant come to me. How if I had a practicable scheme for extricating her from this tight place without exposing my own neck to the slightest danger of a slip-knot, what would you say? Would not that suffice you? Is it absolutely necessary that I should be hanged to satisfy you?” 
The priest was tearing at the buttons of his soutane with impatience. “Oh, babbling stream of words! Out with thy plan!” 
“Yes,”said Gringoire, speaking to himself and rubbing his nose with his forefinger in sign of deep cogitation; “that’s it! The vagabonds are good-hearted fellows! The tribe of Egypt loves her. They will rise at a word. Nothing easier. A surprise—and under cover of the disorder, carry her off— perfectly easily! This very next night. Nothing would please them better.” 
“The plan—speak!”said the priest, shaking him. 
Gringoire turned to him majestically. 
“Let me be! see you not that I am composing?”He ruminated again for a few moments, then began to clap his hands at his thought. “Admirable!”he cried, “an assured success!” 
“The plan!”repeated Claude, enraged. 
Gringoire was radiant. “Hist!”said he, “let me tell it you in a whisper. ’Tis a counterplot that’s really brilliant, and will get us all clear out of the affair. Pardieu! you must admit that I’m no fool.” 
He stopped short. “Ah, but the little goat—is she with the girl?” 
“Yes—yes—devil take thee! go on!” 
“They would hang her too, would they not?” 
“What’s that to me?” 
“Yes, they would hang her. They hanged a sow last month, sure enough. The hangman likes that—he eats the beast afterward. Hang my pretty Djali! Poor sweet lamb!” 
“A murrain on thee!”cried Dom Claude. “ ’Tis thou art the hangman. What plan for saving her hast thou found, rascal? Must thou be delivered of thy scheme with the forceps?” 
“Gently, master. This is it.”Gringoire bent to the Archdeacon’s ear and spoke very low, casting an anxious glance up and down the street, in which, however, there was not a soul to be seen. When he had finished, Dom Claude touched his hand and said coldly: “ ’Tis well. Till to-morrow, then.” 
“Till to-morrow,”repeated Gringoire, and while the Archdeacon retreated in one direction, he went off in the other, murmuring to himself: “This is a nice business, M. Pierre Gringoire! Never mind, it’s not to say because one’s of small account one need be frightened at a great undertaking. Biton carried a great bull on his shoulders; wagtails and linnets cross the ocean.” 
Chapter 2 - Turn Vagabond
The Archdeacon, on returning to the cloister, found his brother, Jehan of the Mill, watching for him at the door of his cell, having whiled away the tediousness of waiting by drawing on the wall with a piece of charcoal a profile portrait of his elder brother enriched by a nose of preposterous dimensions. 
Dom Claude scarcely glanced at his brother. He had other things to think of. That laughing, scampish face, whose beams had so often lifted the gloom from the sombre countenance of the priest, had now no power to dissipate the mists that gathered ever more thickly over that festering, mephitic, stagnant soul. 
“Brother,”Jehan began timidly, “I have come to see you.” 
The Archdeacon did not even glance at him. “Well?” 
“Brother,”continued the little hypocrite, “you are so good to me, and you bestow upon me such excellent advice, that I always come back to you.” 
“What further?” 
“Alas, brother, you were very right when you said to me: ‘Jehan! Jehan! cessat doctorum doctrina, discipulorum disciplina. Jehan, be staid; Jehan, be studious; Jehan, spend not thy nights outside the college without lawful occasion and leave of the masters. Come not to blows with the Picards—noli, Joannes, verbe rare Picardos. Lie not rotting like an unlettered ass—quasi asinus illiteratus—among the straw of the schools. Jehan, let thyself be chastised at the discretion of the master. Jehan, go every evening to chapel and sing an anthem with verse and prayer in praise of Our Lady the Virgin Mary.’ Alas! how excellent was that advice!” 
“And then?” 
“Brother, you see before you a guilty wretch, a miscreant, a profligate, a monster! My dear brother, Jehan has used your counsel as mere straw and dung to be trodden under foot. Well am I chastised for it, and the heavenly Father is extraordinarily just. So long as I had money I spent it in feasting, folly, and profligacy. Ah, how hideous and vile is the back view of debauchery compared with the smiling countenance she faces us with! Now I have not a single sou left; I’ve sold my coverlet, my shirt, and my towel—no merry life for me any longer! The fair taper is extinguished, and nothing remains to me but its villainous snuff that stinks in my nostrils. The girls make mock of me. I drink water. I am harassed by remorse and creditors.” 
“The end?”said the Archdeacon. 
“Ah, best of brothers, I would fain lead a better life. I come to you full of contrition. I am penitent. I acknowledge my sins. I beat my breast with heavy blows. You are very right to desire that I should one day become a licentiate and sub-monitor of the Collège de Torchi. I now feel a remarkable vocation for that office. But I have no more ink left—I shall be obliged to buy some; I have no pens left— I must buy some; no more paper, no books—I must buy them. For that purpose I am sorely in need of the financial wherewithal. And I come to you, my brother, with a heart full of contrition.” 
“Is that all?” 
“Yes,”said the scholar. “A little money.” 
“I have none.” 
The scholar assumed an air of gravity and resolution: “Very good, brother, then I am sorry to have to inform you that I have received from other quarters very advantageous offers and proposals. You will not give me any money? No? In that case I shall turn Vagabond.”And with this portentous word he adopted the mien of an Ajax awaiting the lightning. 
The Archdeacon answered, unmoved: 
“Then turn Vagabond.” 
Jehan made him a profound bow, and descended the cloister stair-case, whistling. 
As he passed through the court-yard of the cloister under his brother’s window, he heard that window open, looked up, and saw the Archdeacon’s stern countenance leaning out of it. “Get thee to the devil!”called Dom Claude; “here is the last money thou shalt have of me.” 
So saying, the priest tossed down a purse to Jehan, which raised a large bump on his forehead, and with which he set off, at once angry and delighted, like a dog that has been pelted with marrow-bones. 
Chapter 3 - Vive La Joie
The reader may perhaps remember that a portion of the Court of Miracles was enclosed by the ancient wall of the city, a good many towers of which were beginning at that time to fall into decay. One of these towers had been converted by the truands into a place of entertainment, with a tavern in the basement, and the rest in the upper storeys. This tower was the most animated, and consequently the most hideous, spot in the whole Vagabond quarter—a monstrous hive, buzzing day and night. At night, when the rest of the rabble were asleep—when not a lighted window was to be seen in the squalid fronts of the houses round the Place, when all sound had ceased in the innumerable tenements with their swarms of thieves, loose women, stolen or bastard children— the joyous tower could always be distinguished by the uproar that issued from it, and by the crimson glow of light streaming out from the loopholes, the windows, the fissures in the gaping walls, escaping, as it were, from every pore. 
The tavern, as we have said, was in the basement. The descent to it was through a low door and down a steep, narrow stair. Over the door, by way of sign, hung an extraordinary daub representing new-coined sols and dead fowls, with the punning legend underneath, Aux sonneurs1 pour les trépassés!—The ringers for the dead. 
One evening, when the curfew was ringing from all the steeples of Paris, the sergeants of the watch, could they have entered the redoubtable Court of Miracles, might have remarked that a greater hubbub than usual was going on in the tavern of the Vagabonds; that they were drinking deeper and swearing harder. Without, in the Place, were a number of groups conversing in low tones, as when some great plot is brewing, and here and there some fellow crouched down and sharpened a villainous iron blade on a flag-stone. 
Meanwhile, in the tavern itself, wine and gambling formed so strong a diversion to the ideas that occupied the Vagabonds, that it would have been difficult to gather from the conversation of the drinkers what the matter was which so engaged them. Only they wore a gayer air than usual, and every one of them had some weapon or other gleaming between his knees—a pruning-hook, an axe, a broadsword, or the crook of some ancient blunderbuss. 
The hall, which was circular in form, was very spacious; but the tables were so crowded together and the drinkers so numerous, that the whole contents of the tavern—men, women, benches, tankards, drinkers, sleepers, gamblers, the able-bodied and the crippled—seemed thrown pell-mell together, with about as much order and harmony as a heap of oyster-shells. A few tallow candles guttered on the table; but the real source of light to the tavern, that which sustained in the cabaret the character of the chandelier in an opera-house, was the fire. This cellar was so damp that the fire was never allowed to go out, even in the height of summer; an immense fire-place with a carved chimney-piece, and crowded with heavy andirons and cooking utensils, contained one of those huge fires of wood and turf which in a village street at night cast the deep red glow of the forge windows on the opposite wall. A great dog, gravely seated in the ashes, was turning a spit hung with meat. 
In spite of the prevailing confusion, after the first glance three principal groups might be singled out, pressing round the several personages already known to the reader. One of these personages, fantastically bedizened with many an Oriental gaud, was Mathias Hungadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and Bohemia. The old rogue was seated cross-legged on a table, his finger upraised, exhibiting in a loud voice his skill in white and black magic to many an open-mouthed face that surrounded him. 
Another crowd was gathered thick round our old friend the King of Tunis, armed to the teeth. Clopin Trouillefou, with a very serious mien and in a low voice, was superintending the ransacking of an enormous cask full of arms staved open before him and disgorging a profusion of axes, swords, firelocks, coats of mail, lance and pike heads, crossbows and arrows, like apples and grapes from a cornucopia. Each one took something from the heap—one a morion, another a rapier, a third a cross-hilted dagger. The very children were arming, and even the worst cripples, mere torsos of men, all barbed and cuirassed, were crawling about among the legs of the drinkers like so many great beetles. 
And lastly, a third audience—much the noisiest, most jovial, and numerous of the lot—crowded the benches and tables, listening to the haranguing and swearing of a flutelike voice which proceeded from a figure dressed in a complete suit of heavy armour from casque to spurs. The individual thus trussed up in full panoply was so buried under his warlike accoutrements that nothing of his person was visible but an impudent tip-tilted nose, a lock of golden hair, a rosy mouth, and a pair of bold blue eyes. His belt bristled with daggers and poniards, a large sword hung at one side, a rusty cross-bow at the other, a vast jug of wine stood before him, and in his right arm he held a strapping wench with uncovered bosom. Every mouth in his neighbourhood was laughing, drinking, swearing. 
Add to these twenty minor groups; the serving men and women running to and fro with wine and beer-cans on their heads, the players absorbed in the various games of hazard—billes (a primitive form of billiards), dice, cards, backgammon, the intensely exciting “tringlet”(a form of spilikins), quarrels in one corner, kisses in another—and some idea may be formed of the scene, over which flickered the light of the great blazing fire, setting a thousand grotesque and enormous shadows dancing on the tavern walls. 
As to the noise—the place might have been the inside of a bell in full peal, while any intervals that might occur in the hubbub were filled by the spluttering of the dripping-pan in front of the fire. 
In the midst of all this uproar, on a bench inside the fireplace, a philosopher sat and meditated, with his feet in the ashes and his eyes fixed on the blaze. It was Pierre Gringoire. 
“Now, then, look alive, arm yourselves—we march in an hour!”said Clopin Trouillefou to his rascals. 
A girl sang a snatch of song: 
“Father and mother dear, good-night;
The last to go put out the light.”
Two card-players were disputing. “Knave!”cried the reddest-faced of the two, shaking his fist at the other, “I’ll so mark thee thou mightest take the place of knave of clubs in our lord the King’s own pack of cards!” 
“Ouf!”roared one, whose nasal drawl betrayed him as a Norman; “we are packed together here like the saints of Caillouville!” 
“Children,”said the Duke of Egypt to his audience in a falsetto voice, “the witches of France go to the Sabbaths without ointment, or broomsticks, or any other mount, by a few magic words only. The witches of Italy have always a goat in readiness at the door. All are bound to go up the chimney.” 
The voice of the young scamp armed cap-á-pie dominated the hubbub. 
“No?l! No?l!”he cried. “My first day in armour! A Vagabond! I’m a Vagabond, body of Christ! pour me some wine! My friends, my name is Jehan Frollo of the Mill, and I’m a gentleman. It’s my opinion that if the Almighty were a man-at-arms he’d turn robber. Brothers, we are bound on a great expedition. We are doughty men. Lay siege to the church, break in the doors, bring out the maid, save her from the judges, save her from the priests, dismantle the cloister, burn the bishop in his house—we’ll do all this in less time than it takes a burgomaster to eat a mouthful of soup. Our cause is a righteous one—we loot Notre-Dame, and there you are! We’ll hang Quasimodo. Are you acquainted with Quasimodo, fair ladies? Have you seen him snorting on the back of the big bell on a day of high festival? Corne du Père! ’tis a grand sight—you’d say it was a devil astride a gaping maw. Hark ye, my friends; I am a truand to the bottom of my heart, I am Argotier to the soul, I’m a born Cagou. I was very rich, but I’ve spent all I had. My mother wanted to make me an officer, my father a subdeacon, my aunt a criminal councillor, my grandmother a protonotary, but I made myself a Vagabond. I told my father so, and he spat his curse in my face; my mother, the good old lady, fell to weeping and spluttering like the log in that fire-place. So hey for a merry life! I’m a whole madhouse in myself. Landlady, my duck, some more wine—I’ve got some money left yet, but no more of that Suresnes, it rasps my throat. Why, corb?uf, it’s like gargling with a basket!” 
The crowd received his every utterance with yells of laughter, and seeing that the uproar was increasing round him, the scholar cried: “O glorious uproar! Populi debacchantis 
populosa debacchatio!”and set off singing, his eyes swimming in apparent ecstasy, in the tone of a canon chanting vespers: “Qu? cantica! qu? organa! qu? cantilen?! qu? melodi? his sine fine decantantur! sonant melliflua hymnorum or gana, suavissima angelorum melodia, cantica canticorum mira.”2 
He broke off. “Hey there—devil’s own landlady—give me some supper!” 
There was a moment almost of silence, during which the strident voice of the Duke of Egypt was heard instructing his Bohemians: 
“—The weasel goes by the name of Aduine, the fox is Bluefoot or Woodranger, the wolf, Grayfoot or Giltfoot, the bear, Old Man, or Grandfather. The cap of a gnome renders one invisible and makes one see invisible things. When a toad is baptized it should be clad in velvet—red or black—a bell at its neck, a bell on its foot. The godfather holds the head, the godmother the hinder parts. It is the demon Sidragasum that has the power of making girls dance naked.” 
“By the mass!”broke in Jehan, “I would I were a demon Sidragasum.” 
All this time the truands had been steadily arming themselves at the other side of the tavern, whispering to one another. 
“Poor Esmeralda!”said a gipsy. “She is our sister. We must get her out of that!” 
“Is she there still in Notre-Dame?”asked a Jewishlooking huckster. 
“Yes, by God!” 
“Well, comrades,”exclaimed the huckster, “to Notre-Dame, then! All the more because in the chapel of Saints Féréol and Ferrution there are two statues, one of Saint-John the Baptist and the other of Saint-Anthony, both of pure gold, weighing together seven gold marks and fifteen esterlins,3 and the pedestals of silver-gilt weigh seventeen marks five ounces. I know it—I am a goldsmith.” 
Here they served Jehan’s supper. He lolled on the bosom of the girl beside him. “By Saint-Voult-de-Lucques, called familiarly Saint-Goguelu, now I’m perfectly happy!”he cried. “Here in front of me I see a blockhead with the beardless face of an archduke. On my left is another with teeth so long they hide his chin. Body of Mahomet! Comrade! thou hast all the appearance of a draper, and hast the effrontery to come and sit by me! I am noble, my friend, and trade is incompatible with nobility. Get thee farther off. Holá, you there! no fighting! How now! Baptiste Croque-Oison, wouldst risk that splendid nose of thine under the gross fists of yonder bumpkin! Imbecile! Non cuiquam datum est habere nasum.4 Truly thou art divine, Jacqueline Rouge-Oreille! pity ’tis thou hast no hair. Holá! My name’s Jehan Frollo, and my brother’s an archdeacon—may the devil fly away with him! Every word I tell you is the truth. By turning Vagabond, I have cheerfully renounced the half of a house situate in paradise promised me by my brother—dimidem donum in paradiso—I quote the very words. I’ve a property in the Rue Tirechappe, and all the women run after me—as true as it’s true that Saint-Eligius was an excellent goldsmith, and that the five trades of the good city of Paris are the tanners, the leather-dressers, the baldrick-makers, the purse-makers, and the leather-scourers, and that Saint-Laurence was burned with hot egg-shells. I swear to you, comrades, 
‘For a full year I’ll taste no wine
If this be any lie of mine!’
“My charmer, ’tis moonlight; look through that loophole how the wind rumples the clouds—just as I do with thy kerchief. Girls, snuff the children and the candles. Christ and Mahomet! what am I eating now? Hey there, old jade! the hairs that are missing from the heads of thy trulls we find in the omelets! Hark ye, old lady, I prefer my omelets bald. May the devil flatten thy nose! A fine tavern of Beelzebub, in sooth, where the wenches comb themselves with the forks!” 
With which he smashed his plate on the floor and began singing in an ear-splitting voice: 
“By the blood of Christ,
I lay no store
By faith or law,
Neither hearth nor home
Do I call my own,
Nor God,
Nor King!”
By this time Clopin Trouillefou had finished distributing his arms. Approaching Gringoire, who seemed plunged in profound reverie, his feet on a log: 
“Friend Pierre,”said the King of Tunis, “what the devil art thinking about?” 
Gringoire turned to him with a melancholy smile. “I love the fire, my dear sir. Not for the trivial reason that it warms our feet and cooks our soup, but because it throws out sparks. Sometimes I pass whole hours watching the sparks. I discover a host of things in those stars that sprinkle the dark background of the fire-place. Those stars are worlds.” 
“The fiend take me if I understand thee,”said the Vagabond. “Dost thou know what’s o’clock?” 
“I do not,”answered Gringoire. Clopin went to the Duke of Egypt. 
“Comrade Mathias, the moment is ill-chosen. They say King Louis is in Paris.” 
“All the more need for getting our sister out of his clutches,”answered the old Bohemian. 
“You speak like a man, Mathias,”returned the King of Tunis. “Besides, it will be an easy matter. There’s no resistance to fear in the church. The priests are so many hares, and we are in full force. The men of the Parliament will be finely balked to-morrow when they come to fetch her! By the bowels of the Pope, they shall not hang the pretty creature!” 
Clopin then left the tavern. 
In the meantime Jehan was shouting hoarsely: “I drink —I eat—I’m drunk—I am Jupiter! Ah, Pierre l’ Assommeur, if thou glarest at me again in that manner, I’ll dust thy nose with my fist!” 
Gringoire, on his part, aroused from his meditations, was contemplating the wild scene of license and uproar around him, while he murmured to himself: “Luxuriosa res vinum et tumultuosa ebrietas.5 Ah, how wise am I to eschew drinking, and how excellent is the saying of Saint-Benedict: Vinum apostatare facit etiam sapientes!”6 
At this moment Clopin returned and shouted in a voice of thunder, “Midnight!” 
The word acted on the truands like the order to mount on a regiment, and the entire band—men, women, and children—poured out of the tavern with a great clatter of arms and iron. The moon was obscured. The Court of Miracles lay in utter darkness—not a single light was to be seen, but it was far from being deserted. A great crowd of men and women stood in the Place talking to one another in low voices. There was a continuous deep hum, and many a weapon flashed in the gloom. 
Clopin mounted on a great stone. “To your ranks, Argot!”cried he. “To your ranks, Egypt! To your ranks, Galilee!” 
A movement ran through the darkness. The vast multitude seemed to be forming in columns. After a few minutes the King of Tunis once more lifted up his voice: 
“Now, then, silence on the march through Paris! The password is ‘Dagger in pouch.’ Torches not to be lighted till we reach Notre-Dame! March!” 
Ten minutes later the horsemen of the night-watch were fleeing in terror before a long procession, black and silent, pouring down towards the Pont-au-Change through the tortuous streets that run in every direction through the dense quarter of the Halles. 
______________________
1 Slang term for ready money, hard cash. 
2 What chants! what instruments! what songs and melodies without end are sung here! Hymns from mellifluous pipes are sounding, sweetest of angels’ melodies, the most wonderful song of all songs. 
3 Obsolete goldsmith weight of 28 4/5 grains. 
4 It is not given to every one to have a nose. 
5 A dissolute thing is wine and leads to noisy intoxication. 
6 The avoiding of wine also makes a man wise. 
Chapter 4 - An Awkward Friend
Quasimodo on that night was not asleep. He had just gone his last round through the church. He had failed to remark that at the moment when he was closing the doors the Archdeacon had passed near him and evinced some annoyance at seeing him bolt and padlock with care the enormous iron bars which gave the wide doors the solidity of a wall. Dom Claude seemed even more preoccupied than usual. Moreover, since the nocturnal adventure in the cell, he treated Quasimodo with constant unkindness; but in vain he used him harshly, sometimes even striking him—nothing could shake the submissive patience, the devoted resignation of the faithful bell-ringer. From the Archdeacon he would endure anything—abuse, threats, blows—without a murmur of reproach, without even a sigh of complaint. The utmost that he did was to follow Dom Claude with an anxious eye if he mounted the stair of the tower; but the Archdeacon had of himself abstained from appearing again before the gipsy girl. 
That night, then, Quasimodo, after a glance at his poor forsaken bells, Jacqueline, Marie, Thibauld, had ascended to the top of the northern tower, and there, after setting down his dark-lantern on the leads, he fell to contemplating Paris. The night, as we have said, was very dark. Paris, which, speaking broadly, was not lighted at all at that period, presented to the eye a confused mass of black blots, cut here and there by the pale windings of the river. Quasimodo saw not a light except in the window of a distant edifice, whose vague and sombre outline was distinguishable high above the roofs in the direction of the Porte Saint-Antoine. Here, too, some one kept vigil. 
While his eye thus lingered over the dark and misty scene, the bell-ringer felt an indescribable sense of anxiety rising within him. For several days he had been on the watch. He had constantly noticed men of sinister aspect loitering round the church and never taking their eyes off the gipsy girl’s hiding-place. He feared lest some plot should be hatching against the unfortunate refugee. He conceived her to be an object of popular hatred, as he was himself, and that something might very well be going to happen in the immediate future. Thus he remained on his tower on the lookout—“Revant dans son revoir” —Musing in his musery— as Rabelais says, his eye by turns on the cell and on Paris, keeping safe watch, like a trusty dog, with a thousand suspicions in his mind. 
All at once, while he was reconnoitring the great city with that solitary eye which nature, as if by way of compensation, had made so piercing that it almost supplied the deficiency of other organs in Quasimodo, it struck him that there was something unusual in the appearance of the outline of the quay of the Veille Pelleterie, that there was some movement at this point, that the line of the parapet which stood out black against the whiteness of the water was not straight and still like that of the other quays, but that it appeared to undulate like the waves of a river or the heads of a crowd in motion. 
He thought this very peculiar. He redoubled his attention. The movement appeared to be coming towards the city —not a light, however. It lasted some time on the quay, and then flowed away by degrees, as if whatever was passing along was entering the interior of the island; then it ceased altogether, and the line of the quay returned to its wonted straightness and immobility. 
Just as Quasimodo was exhausting himself in conjectures, it seemed to him that the movement was reappearing in the Rue du Parvis, which runs into the city in a straight line with the front of Notre-Dame. At last, despite the great darkness, he could descry the head of a column issuing from that street, and the next instant a crowd spreading out into the square, of which he could distinguish nothing further than that it was a crowd. 
It was a fear-compelling spectacle. No doubt this strange procession, which seemed so anxious to cloak itself under the profound darkness, preserved a silence no less profound. Still, some sound must have escaped from it, were it only the tramp of feet. But even this sound did not reach the deaf hunchback, and the great multitude, which he could only dimly see, but which he heard not at all, moving so near him, seemed to him like an assemblage of the dead—mute, ghostly shapes, hovering in a mist—shadows in a shade. 
Then his former fears returned; the idea of an attempt against the gipsy girl presented itself once more to his mind. He had a vague premonition of some violent situation approaching. At this critical moment he held counsel with himself, reasoning with greater acumen and promptness than would have been expected from so ill-organized a brain. Should he awaken the gipsy girl?—help her to escape? Which way? The streets were blocked, the church was backed by the river—no boat—no egress. There remained but one thing therefore—to face death on the threshold of Notre-Dame; to hold them off at least until assistance came, supposing there were any to come, and not to disturb the slumbers of Esmeralda. The unhappy girl would always be awakened early enough to die. This resolution once taken, he proceeded to observe “the enemy” with greater calmness. 
The crowd in the Parvis appeared to be increasing momentarily; though, seeing that the windows of the streets and the Place remained closed, he concluded that they could not be making much noise. Suddenly a light shone out, and in an instant seven or eight torches were waving above the heads, tossing their plumes of flame through the darkness. By their light Quasimodo had a clear vision of an appalling band of tatterdemalions—men and women—flocking into the Parvis, armed with scythes, pikes, pruning-forks, partisans—their thousand blades glittering as they caught the fitful light— and here and there black pitchforks furnishing horns to these hideous visages. He had a confused remembrance of that populace, and thought to recognise in them the crowd which but a few months before had acclaimed him Pope of Fools. A man holding a torch in one hand and a birch rod in the other was mounted on a corner post and apparently haranguing the multitude, and at the same time the ghostly army performed some evolutions as if taking up a position round the church. Quasimodo picked up his lantern and descended to the platform between the towers to observe more closely and deliberate on the means of defence. 
Arrived in front of the great door of Notre-Dame, Clopin Trouillefou had in fact drawn up his troops in battle array. Though anticipating no resistance, yet, like a prudent general, he determined to preserve so much order as would, in case of need, enable him to face a sudden attack of the watch or the city guard. Accordingly, he had so disposed his brigade that, seen from above and at a distance, it might have been taken for the Roman triangle at the battle of Ecnoma, the boar’s head of Alexander, or the famous wedge of Gustavus Adolphus. The base of this triangle ran along the back of the Place in such a manner as to bar the Rue du Parvis, one side looked towards the H?tel-Dieu, the other towards the Rue Saint-Pierre aux B?ufs. Clopin Trouillefou had posted himself at the point with the Duke of Egypt, our friend Jehan, and the boldest of the beggar tribe. 
An enterprise such as the truands were now attempting against Notre-Dame was by no means an uncommon occurrence in the Middle Ages. What we now call “police” did not then exist. In the populous cities, particularly in the capitals, there was no united central power regulating the whole. Feudalism had shaped these great municipalities after an absurd fashion. A city was a collection of innumerable seigneuries, cutting it up into divisions of all shapes and sizes; hence its crowd of contradictory police establishments, or rather no police at all. In Paris, for instance, independently of the hundred and forty-one feudal lords claiming manorial dues, there were twenty-five claiming justiciary and manorial rights, from the Bishop of Paris, who possessed a hundred and five streets, to the Prior of Notre-Dame des Champs, who had only four. All these feudal justiciaries recognised only nominally the paramount authority of the King. All exercised right of highway, all were their own masters. Louis XI —that indefatigable workman, who commenced on so large a scale the demolition of the feudal edifice, continued by Richelieu and Louis XIV to the advantage of royalty, and completed by Mirabeau to the people—Louis XI had done his utmost to break up this network of seigneuries which covered Paris, by casting violently athwart it two or three ordinances of general police. Thus, in 1465, we find the inhabitants ordered to put lighted candles in their windows at nightfall, and to t up their dogs on pain of the halter; in the same year, the order to bar the streets at night with iron chains, and the prohibition against their carrying daggers or any other offensive weapon in the streets at night. But in a short time all these attempts at municipal legislation fell into disuse; the citizens let the candles at their windows be extinguished by the wind and their dogs roam at large; the iron chains were only stretched across the street in case of siege, and the prohibition against carrying weapons brought about no other changes than converting the Rue Coupe-Gueule into Coupe-Gorge; which, to be sure, is a clear evidence of progress. The old framework of the feudal jurisdictions remained standing—an immense accumulation of bailiwicks and seigneuries, crossing one another in all directions through the length and breadth of the city, embarrassing, entangling, overlapping one another—a useless thicket of watches, counter-watches, and out-watches, through the very midst of which stalked brigandage, rapine, and sedition, sword in hand. Under such condition of disorder, therefore, it excited no very great remark if a part of the populace laid violent hands on a palace, a mansion, or any ordinary dwelling-house in the most populated quarters of the city. In most cases the neighbours did not interfere in the matter unless the plundering extended to themselves. They stopped their ears to the report of the musketry, closed their tters, barricaded their doors, and let the struggle exhaust itself with or without the assistance of the watch, and the next day it would be quietly said in Paris: “ night étienne Barbette’s house was broken into,” or “The Marshal de Clermont was attacked,” etc. Hence, not only the royal residences, the Louvre, the Palais, the Bastille, the Tournelles, but the mansions of the nobility, such as the Petit-Bourbon, the H?tel de Sens, the H?tel d’Angoulême, and so on, had their battlemented walls and their fortified turrets over the entrances. The churches were protected by their sanctity. Some of them, nevertheless —among which was not Notre-Dame—were fortified. The Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was castellated like a baronial mansion, and more copper had been used there for bombards than for bells. These fortifications were still to be seen in 1610; now scarcely the church remains. 
But to return to Notre-Dame. 
The first arrangements completed—and it must be said, to the honour of the truand discipline, that Clopin’s orders were carried out in silence and with admirable precision— the worthy leader mounted the parapet of the Parvis, turned his face to Notre-Dame, and raising his harsh and churlish voice while he shook his torch—the light of which flaring in the wind and veiled at intervals by its own smoke, made the dark front of the Cathedral vanish and reappear by turns— 
“Unto thee,” he cried, “Louis de Beaumont, Bishop of Paris, Councillor in the Court of Parliament, thus say I, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Tunis, Grand Co?sre, Prince of Argot, Bishop of the Fools: Our sister, falsely condemned for witchcraft, has taken refuge in thy church. Thou art bound to accord her shelter and safeguard; but now the Parliament designs to take her thence, and thou consentest thereunto, so that she would be hanged to-morrow at the Grève if God and the truands were not at hand. We come to thee, then, Bishop. If thy church is sacred, our sister is so too; if our sister is not sacred, neither is thy church. Wherefore we summon thee to give up the maid if thou wouldst save thy church, or we will take the maid ourselves and plunder the church: which will most certainly happen. In token whereof I here set up my banner. And so God help thee, Bishop of Paris!” 
Unfortunately Quasimodo could not hear these words, which were delivered with a sort of savage and morose dignity. A Vagabond handed Clopin his banner, which he gravely planted between two paving-stones. It was a pitchfork on which hung a gory piece of carrion. 
This done, the King of Tunis turned about and cast his eye over his army, a ferocious multitude whose eyes gleamed almost as savagely as their pikes. After a moment’s pause —“Forward, lads!” he cried. “To your work, housebreakers!” 
Thirty thick-set, strong-limbed men with hammers, pincers, and iron crowbars on their shoulders, stepped from the ranks. They advanced towards the main entrance of the church, ascended the steps, and immediately set to work on the door with pincers and levers. A large party of truands followed them to assist or look on, so that the whole flight of eleven steps was crowded with them. 
The door, however, held firm. “The devil! but she’s hard and headstrong!” said one. “She’s old, and her gristle’s tough!” said another. “Courage, comrades!” said Clopin. “I wager my head against a slipper that you’ll have burst the door, got the maid, and stripped the high altar before ever there’s a beadle of them all awake. There—I believe the lock’s going.” 
Clopin was interrupted by a frightful noise which at that moment resounded behind him. He turned round. An enormous beam had just fallen from on high, crushing a dozen truands on the steps of the church and rebounding on to the pavement with the noise of a piece of artillery, breaking here and there the legs of others among the Vagabond crowd, which fled in all directions with cries of terror. In a trice the enclosure of the Parvis was empty. The door-breakers, though protected by the deep arches of the doorway, abandoned it, and Clopin himself fell back to a respectful distance from the church. 
“Tête-b?uf! I had a narrow escape!” cried Jehan. “I felt the wind of it; but Pierre the Feller is felled at last.” 
It would be impossible to describe the mingled astonishment and alarm that fell with this beam upon the bandit crew. They remained for a few minutes gazing open-mouthed into the air, in greater consternation at this piece of wood than at twenty thousand King’s archers. 
“Satan!” growled the Duke of Egypt, “but this smells of magic!” 
“It’s the moon that’s thrown this log at us,” said Andry le Rouge. 
“That’s it,” returned Francois Chanteprune, “for they say the moon’s the friend of the Virgin.” 
“A thousand popes!” cried Clopin, “you’re a parcel of dunderheads, the whole lot of you!” But he knew no better than they how to account for the beam, for nothing was perceptible on the front of the building, to the top of which the light of the torches could not reach. The ponderous beam lay in the middle of the Parvis, and the groans of the poor wretches could be heard who had received its first shock and had been almost cut in two on the sharp edges of the stone steps. 
At last the King of Tunis, his first surprise past, discovered an explanation which seemed plausible to his fellows. 
“Gueule-Dieu! Can the clergy be making a defence? If that be so, then—to the sack! to the sack!” 
“To the sack!” yelled the band with a furious hurrah, and discharged a volley of cross-bows and arquebuses against the fa?ade of the Cathedral. 
Roused by the detonation, the peaceable inhabitants of the surrounding houses awoke, several windows opened, and nightcapped heads appeared at the casements. 
“Fire at the windows!” shouted Clopin. The tters closed on the instant, and the poor citizens, who had only had time to catch a bewildered glimpse of the scene of glare and tumult, returned in a cold perspiration of fright to their wives, wondering whether the witches now held their Sabbaths in the Parvis of Notre-Dame, or whether it was another assault by the Burgundians, as in ’64. The men thought of robbery; the wives, of rape; and all trembled. 
“To the sack!” repeated the Argotiers; but they did not venture closer. They looked from the Cathedral to the mysterious beam. The beam lay perfectly still, the church preserved its peaceful, solitary aspect; but something froze the courage of the Vagabonds. 
“To your work, lads!” cried Trouillefou. “Come—force the door!” 
Nobody stirred a step. 
“Beard and belly!” exclaimed Clopin; “why, here are men afraid of a rafter!” 
An old Vagabond now addressed him: 
“Captain, it’s not the rafter we mind, ’tis the door. That’s all covered with bars of iron. The picks are no good against it.” 
“What do you want, then, to burst it open?” inquired Clopin. 
“Why, we want a battering-ram.” 
The King of Tunis ran boldly to the formidable piece of timber and set his foot on it. “Here’s one!” cried he, “and the reverend canons themselves have sent it you.” Then, making a mock salute to the Cathedral, “My thanks to you, canons!” he added. 
This piece of bravado had excellent effect—the spell of the miraculous rafter was broken. The truands plucked up their courage, and soon the heavy beam, lifted like a feather by two hundred vigorous arms, was driven furiously against the great door which they had already endeavoured in vain to loosen. Seen thus in the dim light cast over the Place by the scattered torches of the truands, the vast beam borne along by that crowd of men and pointed against the church looked like some miraculous animal with innumerable legs charging head foremost at the stone giantess. 
As the beam struck the half-metal door it droned like an enormous drum. The door did not give, but the Cathedral shook from top to bottom, and rumbling echoes woke in its deepest depths. At the same moment a shower of great stones began to fall from the upper part of the facade on to the assailants. 
“Diable!” cried Jehan, “are the towers shaking down their balustrades upon us?” 
But the impulse had been given. The King of Tunis stuck to his assertion that it was the Bishop acting on the defensive, and they only battered the door the more furiously for the stones that fractured the skulls right and left. 
It was certainly curious that these stones fell one by one, but they followed quickly on one another. The Argotiers always felt two of them at once—one against their legs, the other on their heads. There were few that missed their mark, and already a heap of dead and wounded, bleeding and panting, lay thick under the feet of the assailants, who, now grown furious, renewed their numbers every moment. The long beam continued to batter the door at regular intervals like the strokes of a bell, the stones to rain down, and the door to groan. 
The reader will doubtless have guessed ere this that the unexpected resistance which so exasperated the Vagabonds proceeded from Quasimodo. 
Accident had unfortunately favoured the devoted hunchback. When he had descended to the platform between the towers, his ideas were in a state of chaos. He had run to and fro along the gallery for some minutes like one demented, looking down upon the compact mass of the beggars ready to rush the church, and calling upon God or the devil to save the gipsy girl. He thought of ascending the southern steeple and sounding the tocsin, but before he could have got the bell in motion, before the loud voice of Marie could have sent forth a single stroke, there would have been time to burst in the door ten times over. This was the instant at which the Vagabonds advanced with their lock-breaking instruments. What was to be done? 
Suddenly he recollected that masons had been at work all day repairing the wall, the wood-work, and the roofing of the southern tower. This was a flash of light to him. The wall was of stone, the roofing of lead, the rafters of wood, and so enormous and close-packed that it was called the forest. 
Quasimodo flew to this tower. The lower chambers in effect were full of building materials—piles of stone blocks, sheets of lead in rolls, bundles of laths, strong beams already shaped by the saw, several rubbish heaps—a complete arsenal. 
Time pressed—the levers and hammers were at work below. With a strength multiplied tenfold by the consciousness of danger, he lifted an end of one of the beams—the longest and heaviest of all. He managed to push it through one of the loopholes; then, laying hold of it again outside the tower, he pushed it over the outer corner of the balustrade surrounding the platform and let it drop into the abyss below. In this fall of a hundred and sixty feet the enormous beam —grazing the wall and breaking the sculptured figures— turned several times on its own axis, like the sail of a windmill going round of itself through space. Finally it reached the ground, a horrid cry went up, and the black piece of timber rebounded on the pavement, like a serpent rearing. 
Quasimodo saw the enemy scattered by the fall of the beam like ashes by the breath of a child; and while they fixed their superstitious gaze on this immense log fallen from the skies, and were peppering the stone saints of the doorway with a volley of bolts and bullets, Quasimodo was silently piling up stones and rubbish, and even the masons’ bags of tools, upon the edge of the balustrade from which he had already hurled the beam. 
Accordingly, no sooner did they begin to batter the door, than the showers of stone blocks began to fall, till they thought the church must be shaking itself to pieces on the top of them. 
Any one who could have seen Quasimodo at that moment would have been appalled. Besides the missiles which he had piled up on the balustrade, he had collected a heap of stones on the platform itself. As soon as the blocks of stones on the parapet were spent, he turned to this latter heap. He stooped, rose, stooped and rose again with incredible agility. He would thrust his great gnome’s head over the balustrade; then there dropped an enormous stone—then another and another. Now and then he followed a specially promising one with his eye, and when he saw that it killed its man, he grunted a “h’m!” of satisfaction. 
Nevertheless the beggars did not lose courage. Twenty times already had the massive door which they were so furiously storming shaken under the weight of their oaken battering-ram, multiplied by the strength of a hundred men. The panels cracked, the carvings flew in splinters, the hinges at each shock danced upon their hooks, the planks were displaced, the wood smashed to atoms ground between the sheathings of iron. Fortunately for Quasimodo there was more iron than wood. 
He felt, however, that the great door was giving way. Although he could not hear it, every crash of the battering-ram shook him to his foundation, as it did the church. As he looked down upon the Vagabonds, full of exaltation and rage, shaking their fists at the gloomy and impassive fa?ade, he coveted for himself and the gipsy girl the wings of the owls flitting away in terror over his head. 
His shower of stones was not sufficient to repulse the assailants. 
At this desperate moment his eye fell on two long stone rain-gutters which discharged themselves immediately over the great doorway, a little below the balustrade from whence he had been crushing the Argotiers. The internal orifice of these gutters was in the floor of the platform. An idea occurred to him. He ran and fetched a fagot from the little chamber he occupied, laid over the fagot several bundles of laths and rolls of lead—ammunition he had not yet made use of—and after placing this pile in position in front of the orifice of the gutters, he set fire to it with his lantern. 
During this time, as the stones no longer fell, the truands had ceased looking upward. The bandits, panting like a pack of hounds baying the wild boar in his lair, pressed tumultuously round the great door, disfigured now and injured by the great battering-ram, but still erect. They waited, eager and trembling, for the grand stroke—the blow that should bring it crashing down. Each strove to get nearest to be the first, when it should open, to rush into that opulent Cathedral, that vast repository in which the riches of three centuries were heaped up. They reminded one another with roars of exultation and rapacity of the splendid silver crosses, the fine brocade copes, the silver-gilt tombs, of all the magnificence of the choir, the dazzling display on high festivals, the Christmas illuminations, the Easter monstrances glittering like the sun, and all the splendid solemnities in which shrines, candlesticks, pixes, tabernacles, and reliquaries crusted the altars with gold and diamonds. It is very certain that at this exciting moment every one of the truands was thinking much less about the deliverance of the gipsy girl than the plundering of Notre-Dame. Indeed, we can very well believe that to the majority of them Esmeralda was merely a pretext—if plunderers have any call for pretexts. 
Suddenly, at the moment when they were crowding round the battering-ram for a final effort, each one holding his breath and gathering up his muscles to give full force to the decisive blow, a howl more agonizing than that which succeeded the fall of the great beam arose from the midst of them. Those who were not screaming, those who were still alive, looked and saw two streams of molten lead pouring from the top of the edifice into the thickest of the crowd. The waves of that human sea had sunk under the boiling metal which, at the two points where it fell, had made two black and reeking hollows, like hot water poured on snow. There lay dying, wretches burned almost to a cinder and moaning in agony; and besides the two principal streams, drops of this hideous rain fell from scattered points on to the assailants, penetrating their skulls like fiery gimlets, pattering on them like red-hot hailstones. 
The screams were heart-rending. Throwing down the battering-ram on the dead bodies, they fled in complete panic —the boldest with the most timid—and for a second time the Parvis was emptied. 
Every eye was now directed upward to the top of the church. They beheld an extraordinary sight. On the topmost gallery, higher up than the great rose-window, a huge flame ascended between the two steeples, throwing out whirlwinds of sparks and shooting tongues of fire into the smoke as it was caught by the wind. Below this flame, under the balustrade whose carved trefoils showed black against the glare, two gargoyles vomited incessantly that burning shower, the silvery stream of which shone out upon the darkness of the lower part of the fa?ade. As they neared the ground the two streams of liquid lead spread out into a spray, like water from the rose of a monster watering-can. Above the flame, the huge towers, of each of which two sides sharply outlined— one black, the other glowing red—were visible, seemed more enormous still by the immensity of the shadow they cast upon the sky. Their myriad sculptured devils and dragons assumed a sinister aspect. In the flickering radiance of the fire they appeared to move—vampires grinned, gargoyles barked, salamanders blew the fire, griffins sneezed in the smoke. And among these monsters, thus awakened from their stony slumber by all this flame and uproar, there was one that walked about and passed from time to time before the blazing front of the pile, like a bat before a torch. 
Assuredly this strange beacon-light must have awakened the lonely wood-cutter on the far Bicêtre hills, startled to see the gigantic shadows of the towers of Notre-Dame wavering on his coppices. 
The silence of terror now fell upon the truands; and through it they heard the cries of alarm of the clergy t up in their cloister like frightened horses in a burning stable, the stealthy sound of windows opened quickly and still more quickly t again, the stir inside the surrounding houses and the H?tel-Dieu, the roar and crackle of the fire, the groans of the dying, and the continuous patter of the shower of boiling lead upon the pavement. 
Meanwhile the chief Vagabonds had retired under the porch of the Gondelaurier mansion and were holding a council of war. The Duke of Egypt, seated on a post, was contemplating with religious awe the phantasmagoric pile blazing two hundred feet aloft in the air. Clopin Trouillefou gnawed his great fists with rage. 
“Impossible to make an entrance,” he muttered between his teeth. 
“An enchanted church!” growled the old Bohemian, Mathias Hungadi Spicali. 
“By the Pope’s whiskers!” said a grizzled truand who had seen active service, “but these two rain-pipes spit molten lead at you better than the loopholes of Lectoure.” 
“Do you see that demon going to and from in front of the fire?” cried the Duke of Egypt. 
“By God!” exclaimed Clopin, “ ’tis that damned ringer; ’tis Quasimodo!” 
The Bohemian shook his head. “I tell you ’tis the spirit Sabnac, the great marquis, the demon of fortifications. He has the form of an armed soldier and a lion’s head. Sometimes he is mounted on a grewsome horse. He turns men into stones and builds towers of them. He has command over near on fifty legions. ’Tis he, sure enough. I should know him anywhere. Sometimes he has on a fine robe wrought with gold, after the fashion of the Turks.” 
“Where is Bellevigne de l’étoile?” asked Clopin. 
“Dead,” answered a truand woman. 
“Notre-Dame is keeping the H?tel-Dieu busy,” said Andry le Rouge with a vacant laugh. 
“Is there no way to force that door?” cried the King of Tunis, stamping his foot. 
The Duke of Egypt pointed with a mournful gesture to the two rivulets of boiling lead which continued to streak the dark front of the building. 
“Churches have been known to defend themselves thus,” he observed with a sigh. “Saint-Sophia in Constantinople, forty years ago, threw down the crescent of Mahomet three times running just by shaking her domes, which are her heads. William of Paris, who built this one, was a magician.” 
“Are we then to slink away pitifully with our tails between our legs?” cried Clopin. “Leave our sister here for these cowled wolves to hang to-morrow?” 
“And the sacristy where there are cart-loads of treasure!” added a Vagabond, of whose name, to our great regret, we are ignorant. 
“By the beard of Mahomet!” exclaimed Trouillefou. 
“Let’s have another try,” suggested the truand. 
But Mathias Hungadi shook his head. “We shall never get in by that door. We must find some joint in the enchanted armour. A hole, a postern door, a chink of some kind.” 
“Who’s with me?” said Clopin. “I am going back. By-the-bye, where’s the little scholar Jehan?” 
“He’s dead, no doubt,” answered some one, “for one does not hear his laugh.” 
The King of Tunis frowned gloomily. 
“ ’Tis a pity. There was a stout heart under that rattling armour. And Master Pierre Gringoire?” 
“Captain Clopin,” said Andry le Rouge, “he made off before we got as far as the Pont-aux-Changeurs.” 
Clopin stamped his foot. “Gueule-Dieu! ’tis he that thrust us into this business, and now he leaves us in the very thick of it. A prating poltroon!” 
“Captain Clopin,” announced Andry le Rouge, who had been looking down the Rue du Parvis, “here comes the little scholar.” 
“Praised be Pluto!” said Clopin. “But what the devil is he dragging after him?” 
It was, in truth, Jehan, coming along as quickly as his cumbrous paladin accoutrements would permit of, with a long ladder, which he tugged stoutly over the pavement, more breathless than an ant harnessed to a blade of grass twenty times her own length. 
“Victory! Te Deum!” shouted the scholar. “Here’s the ladder from the Saint-Landry wharf.” 
Clopin went up to him. “Little one,” said he, “what art thou going to do with that ladder, corne-Dieu?” 
“I’ve secured it,” answered Jehan panting. “I knew where it was—under the shed of the lieutenant’s house. There’s a girl there whom I know—she thinks me a very Cupido for beauty. It was through her I managed to get the ladder, and here I am, Pasque-Mahom! The poor soul came out in her smock to let me in.” 
“Yes, yes,” said Clopin, “but what wilt thou do with this ladder?” 
Jehan gave him a sly, knowing look and snapped his fingers like castanets. He was sublime at this moment. He had on his head one of those overloaded helmets of the fifteenth century which struck terror to the heart of the foe by their monstrous-looking crests. Jehan’s bristled with ten iron beaks, so that he might have contended with the Homeric ship of Nestor for the epithet of dekemboloV. 
“What do I mean to do with it, august King of Tunis? Do you see that row of statues with the faces of imbeciles over there above the three arches of the doorway?” 
“Yes; what of them?” 
“That is the gallery of the King of France.” 
“Well, what’s that to us?” said Clopin. 
“You shall see. At the end of that gallery there is a door that is closed with a latch; with this ladder I reach that door, and then I’m in the church.” 
“Let me go up first, child.” 
“No, comrade, the ladder’s mine. Come on—you shall be second.” 
“Beelzebub strangle thee!” said Clopin sulkily. “I will be second to nobody.” 
“Then, Clopin, go fetch thyself a ladder.” And Jehan set off running across the Place, dragging his ladder after him and shouting, “Follow, boys!” 
In an instant the ladder was set up and placed against the balustrade of the lower gallery over one of the side doors. The crowd of beggars, shouting and hustling, pressed round the foot of it wanting to ascend; but Jehan maintained his right, and was the first to set foot on the steps of the ladder. The ascent was pretty long. The gallery of the kings is, at this day, about sixty feet from the ground; but at that period it was raised still higher by the eleven steps of the entrance. 
Jehan ascended slowly, much encumbered by his heavy armour, one hand on the ladder, the other grasping his crossbow. When he was half-way up he cast a mournful glance over the poor dead Argotiers heaped on the steps. “Alas!” said he, “here are corpses enough for the fifth canto of the Iliad!” He continued his ascent, the Vagabonds following him, one on every step of the ladder. To see that line of mailed backs rising and undulating in the dark, one might have taken it for a serpent with steely scales rearing itself on end to attack the church, and the whistling of Jehan, who represented its head, completed the illusion. 
The scholar at last reached the parapet of the gallery, and strode lightly over it amid the applause of the whole truandry. Finding himself thus master of the citadel, he uttered a joyful shout—and then stopped short, petrified. He had just caught sight, behind one of the royal statues, of Quasimodo crouching in the gloom, his eye glittering ominously. 
Before another of the besiegers had time to gain a footing on the gallery, the redoubtable hunchback sprang to the head of the ladder, seized without a word the ends of the two uprights in his powerful hands, heaved them away from the wall, let the long and pliant ladder, packed with truands from top to bottom, sway for a moment amid a sudden outcry of fear, then suddenly, with superhuman force, flung back this living cluster into the Place. For an instant the stoutest heart quailed. The ladder thrust backward stood upright for a moment, swayed, then suddenly, describing a frightful arc of eighty feet in radius, crashed down upon the pavement with its living load more rapidly than a drawbridge when its chain gives way. There was one universal imprecation, then silence, and a few mutilated wretches were seen crawling out from among the heap of dead. 
A murmur of mingled agony and resentment succeeded the besiegers’ first shouts of triumph. Quasimodo, leaning on his elbows on the balustrade, regarded them impassively. He might have been one of the old long-haired kings at his window. 
Jehan Frollo found himself in a critical position. He was alone on the gallery with the redoubtable bell-ringer, separated from his companions by eighty feet of sheer wall. While Quasimodo was engaged with the ladder, the scholar had run to the postern which he expected to find on the latch. Foiled! The bell-ringer, as he entered the gallery, had locked it behind him. Thereupon Jehan had hidden himself behind one of the stone kings, not daring to breathe, but fixing upon the terrible hunchback a wide-eyed and bewildered gaze, like the man who courted the wife of a menagerie keeper, and going one evening to a rendezvous, scaled the wrong wall and found himself suddenly face to face with the polar bear. 
For the first few moments the hunchback did not notice him; but presently he turned his head and straightened himself with a jerk—he had caught sight of the scholar. 
Jehan prepared himself for a savage encounter, but his deaf antagonist did not move; only he kept his face turned towards him and regarded him steadily. 
“Ho! ho!” said Jehan, “why dost thou glare at me so with that single surly eye?” And so saying, the young scamp began stealthily raising his cross-bow. “Quasimodo!” he cried, “I’m going to change thy nickname. Henceforth they shall call thee the blind bell-ringer.” 
He let fly the winged shaft; it whistled and drove into the hunchback’s left arm. Quasimodo was no more disturbed by it than the effigy of King Pharamond by the scratch of a penknife. He took hold of the arrow, drew it out of his arm, and calmly broke it across his powerful knee. Then he dropped rather than threw the two pieces to the ground. But he did not give Jehan time to discharge another shaft. The arrow broken, Quasimodo with a snort leapt like a locust upon the boy, whose armour was flattened by the shock against the wall. 
And now, in the half darkness, by the flickering light of the torches, a horrible scene was enacted. 
In his left hand Quasimodo grasped both Jehan’s arms, who made no struggle, so utterly did he give himself up for lost; then, with his right, the hunchback proceeded to take off one by one, and with sinister deliberation, the several pieces of the scholar’s iron shell—sword, dagger, helmet, breastplate, armpieces—like a monkey peeling a walnut, and dropped them at his feet. 
When Jehan found himself thus disarmed, divested of all shield and covering, naked and helpless in those formidable arms, he did not attempt to parley with his deaf enemy. Instead, he fell to laughing impudently in his face, and with all the careless assurance of a boy of sixteen, burst into a song at that time popular in the streets: 
“The town of Cambrai is finely clad,
But Marafin has stripped her.” 
He had not time to finish. Quasimodo was seen to mount the parapet of the gallery, holding the scholar by the feet in one hand only and swinging him over the abyss like a sling. Then came a sound like a box of bones dashing against a wall, and something came hurtling down that stopped halfway in its descent, caught by one of the projections of the building. It was a dead body bent double, the loins broken, the skull empty. 
A cry of horror went up from the truands. 
“Revenge!” yelled Clopin. “Sack! sack!” replied the multitude. “To the assault!” 
An appalling uproar followed, in which every language, every patois, every conceivable accent was mingled. The death of the poor little scholar inspired the crowd with furious energy. They were torn with anger and shame at having been so long held in check by a miserable hunchback. Their rage found them ladders, multiplied their torches, and in a few minutes Quasimodo, to his consternation and despair, beheld the hideous swarm mounting from all sides to the assault of Notre-Dame. They who had no ladders had knotted ropes; they who had no ropes clambered up by the carvings, helping themselves up by one another’s rags. There was no means of forcing back this rising tide of frightful forms. Fury reddened the ferocious faces, sweat poured from the grimy foreheads, eyes glared viciously. It was as if some other church had sent out her gorgons, her dragons, her goblins, her demons, all her most fantastic sculptures to the assault of Notre-Dame—a coating of living monsters covering the stone monsters of the fa?ade. 
Meanwhile a thousand torches had kindled in the Place. The wild scene, wrapped until now in dense obscurity, suddenly leapt out in a blaze of light. The Parvis was brilliantly illumined and cast a radiance on the sky, while the blazing pile on the high platform of the church still burned and lit up the city far around. The vast outline of the two towers, thrown far across the roofs of Paris, broke this brightness with a wide mass of shadow. The city appeared to be rousing itself from its slumbers. Distant tocsins uttered their warning plaints. The truands howled, panted, blasphemed, and climbed steadily higher, while Quasimodo, impotent against so many enemies, trembling for the gipsy girl as he saw those savage faces approaching nearer and nearer to his gallery, implored a miracle from heaven, and wrung his hands in despair. 
Chapter 5 - The Closet where Monsieur Louis of France Recites his Orisons
The reader perhaps remembers that Quasimodo, a moment before catching sight of the nocturnal band of truands and scrutinizing Paris from the height of his steeple, saw but a single remaining light twinkling at a window in the topmost storey of a grim and lofty building beside the Porte Saint-Antoine. The building was the Bastille, the twinkling light was the taper of Louis XI. 
The King had, in fact, been in Paris these two days past, and was to set out again the next day but one for his citadel of Montilz-les-Tours. He made but rare and short visits to his good city of Paris, not feeling himself sufficiently surrounded there by pitfalls, gibbets, and Scottish archers. 
That day he had come to sleep at the Bastille. The great chamber, five toises square, which he had at the Louvre, with its splendid chimney-pieces bearing the effigies of twelve great beasts and thirteen great prophets, and his bed, eleven feet by twelve, were little to his taste. He felt lost amid all these grandeurs. The good homely King preferred the Bastille, with a chamber and bed of more modest proportions; besides, the Bastille was stronger than the Louvre. 
This chambrette which the King reserved for his own use in the famous prison was spacious enough, nevertheless, and occupied the uppermost storey of a turret forming part of the donjon-keep. It was a circular apartment hung with matting of shining straw, the rafters of the ceiling being decorated with raised fleurs de lis in gilt metal interspaced with colour, and wainscotted with rich carvings sprinkled with metal rosettes and painted a beautiful vivid green made of a mixture of orpiment and fine indigo. 
There was but one window, a long pointed one, latticed by iron bars and iron wire, and still further darkened with fine glass painted with the arms of the King and Queen, each pane of which had cost twenty-two sols. 
There was also but one entrance, a door of the contemporary style under a flattened arch, furnished inside with a tapestry hanging, and outside with one of those porches of Irish wood—delicate structures of elaborately wrought cabinet-work which still abounded in old mansions a hundred and fifty years ago. “Although they disfigure and encumber the places,” says Sauval in desperation, “our old people will not have them removed, but keep them in spite of everybody.” 
Not a single article of the ordinary furniture of a room was to be seen here—neither benches, nor trestles, nor forms; neither common box-stools, nor handsome ones supported by pillars and carved feet at four sols apiece. There was one folding arm-chair only, a very magnificent one, its frame painted with roses on a crimson ground, and the seat of crimson Cordova leather with a quantity of gold-headed nails. The solitary state of this chair testified to the fact that one person alone was entitled to be seated in the room. Beside the chair and close under the window was a table covered by a cloth wrought with figures of birds. On the table was a much-used inkstand, a few sheets of parchment, some pens, and a goblet of chased silver; farther off, a charcoal brasier and a prie-dieu covered with crimson velvet and ornamented with gold bosses. Finally, at the other end of the room, an unpretentious bed of red and yellow damask with no decoration of any sort but a plain fringe. This bed, famous as having borne the sleep or sleeplessness of Louis XI, was still in existence two hundred years ago in the house of a councillor of state, where it was seen by the aged Mme. Pilou, celebrated in Le Grand Cyrus under the name of Arricidie and of La Morale Vivante. 
Such was the room known as “the closet where Monsieur Louis of France recites his orisons.” 
At the moment at which we have introduced the reader into it, this closet was very dark. Curfew had rung an hour back, night had fallen, and there was but one flickering wax candle on the table to light five persons variously grouped about the room. 
The first upon whom the light fell was a gentleman superbly attired in doublet and hose of scarlet slashed with silver and a cloak with puffed shoulder-pieces of cloth of gold figured with black, the whole gorgeous costume appearing to be shot with flames wherever the light played on it. The man who wore it had his heraldic device embroidered in vivid colours on his breast—a chevron and a stag passant, the scutcheon supported by a branch of olive dexter and a stag’s horn sinister. In his girdle he wore a rich dagger, the silver-gilt hilt being wrought in the form of a helmet and surmounted by a count’s coronet. He had a venomous eye, and his manner was haughty and overbearing. At the first glance you were struck by the arrogance of his face, at the second by its craftiness. He stood bareheaded, a long written scroll in his hand, behind the arm-chair in which sat a very shabbily dressed personage in an uncouth attitude, his shoulders stooping, his knees crossed, his elbow on the table. Picture to yourself in that rich Cordovan chair a pair of bent knees, two spindle shanks poorly clad in close-fitting black worsted breeches, the body wrapped in a loose coat of fustian the fur lining of which showed more leather than hair, and to crown the whole, a greasy old hat of mean black felt garnished all round by a string of little leaden figures. This, with the addition of a dirty skull-cap, beneath which hardly a hair was visible, was all that could be seen of the seated personage. His head was bowed so low on his breast that nothing was visible of his deeply shadowed face but the end of his nose, on which a ray of light fell, and which was evidently very long. By his emaciated and wrinkled hands one divined him to be an old man. It was Louis XI. 
At some distance behind them, two men habited after the Flemish fashion were conversing in low tones. They were not so completely lost in the gloom but that any one who had attended the performance of Gringoire’s Mystery could recognise them as the two chief Flemish envoys: Guillaume Rym, the sagacious pensionary of Ghent, and Jacques Coppenole, the popular hosier. It will be remembered that these two men were concered with the secret politics of Louis XI. 
And finally, quite in the dim background near the door, there stood, motionless as a statue, a brawny, thick-set man in military accoutrements and an emblazoned coat, whose square, low-browed face with its prominent eyes, immense slit of a mouth, ears concealed beneath two wide flaps of smooth hair, seemed a cross between the bulldog and the tiger. 
All were uncovered except the King. 
The knightly personage standing behind the King was reading out items from a sort of long memorandum, to which his Majesty appeared to listen attentively. The two Flemings whispered together. 
“By the rood!” grumbled Coppenole, “I’m tired of standing. Is there never a chair here?” 
Rym replied with a negative gesture, accompanied by a discreet smile. 
“Croix-Dieu!” resumed Coppenole, sorely exercised at having to lower his voice, “I am devoured by the desire to plump myself down cross-legged on the floor as I do in my own shop.” 
“You had best beware of doing so, Ma?tre Jacques,” was the reply. 
“Heyday! Ma?tre Guillaume, may a man then be only on his feet here?” 
“Or on his knees,” said Rym. At that moment the King raised his voice and they ceased their talking. 
“Fifty sols for the gowns of our valets, and twelve livres for the mantles of the crown clerks! That’s the way! Pour out the gold by tons! Are you crazed, Olivier?” 
As he spoke the old man raised his head, and you could see the golden shells of the collar of Saint-Michael glittering round his neck. The candle shone full on his fleshless and morose countenance. He snatched the paper from the hands of the other. 
“You are ruining us!” he cried, casting his hollow eyes over the schedule. “What’s all this? What need have we of so prodigious a household? Two chaplains at ten livres a month each, and a chapel clerk at a hundred sols! A valetde-chambre at ninety livres a year! Four kitchen masters at a hundred and sixty livres a year each! A roaster, a soupdresser, a sauce-dresser, a head cook, an armourer, two sumpter men at the rate of ten livres a month each! Two turnspits at eight livres! A groom and his two helpers at four and twenty livres a month! A porter, a pastry-cook, a baker, two carters, each at sixty livres a year! And the marshal of forges a hundred and twenty livres! And the master of our exchequer chamber twelve hundred livres! And the comptroller five hundred livres! And God knows what besides! It’s raving madness! The wages of our domestics are simply stripping France bare. All the treasure of the Louvre would melt away before such a blaze of expense! We shall have to sell our plate! And next year, if God and Our Lady (here he raised his hat) grant us life, we shall have to drink our tisanes from a pewter pot!” 
At which he glanced at the silver goblet sparkling on the table, coughed, and went on: 
“Master Olivier, princes who reign over great realms as kings and superiors should not allow sumptuousness to be engendered in their households, inasmuch as that is a fire which will spread from thence to the provinces. And so, Master Olivier, make no mistake about this. Our expenses increase with every year, and the thing displeases us. Why, pasque-Dieu! up till ’79 it never exceeded thirty-six thousand livres. In ’80 it rose to forty-three thousand six hundred and nineteen livres. I have the figures in my head. In ’81 it was sixty-six thousand six hundred and eighty livres, and this year, faith of my body! it will come to eighty thousand livres. Doubled in four years! Monstrous!” 
He stopped to take breath, then resumed with vehemence: “I see none about me but people fattening on my leanness. Ye suck my money from me at every pore!” 
All kept silence. It was one of those fits of anger that must be allowed to run their course. He continued his complaints. 
“It is the same thing with that Latin memorial from the great lords of France requesting us to re-establish what they call the great offices of the Crown. Offices! call them rather burdens—burdens that crush us to the ground. Ah, messieurs! you tell us we are no King to reign dapifero nullo buticulario nullo!1 But we will let you see, pasque-Dieu! whether we are a King or no!” 
He smiled in the consciousness of his power, his ill-humour was allayed, and he turned to the Flemings: 
“Look you, Gossip Guillaume, the grand baker, the grand butler, the grand chamberlain, the seneschal are not worth the meanest valet. Bear this in mind, Gossip Coppenole, they are of no use whatever. Standing thus useless about the King, they put me in mind of the four evangelists that surround the face of the great clock of the palace, and that Philippe Brille has just renovated. They are gilded, but they do not mark the hour, and the clock hand could do excellently well without them.” 
He mused for a moment and added, shaking his old head: “Ho! ho! by Our Lady, I am not Philippe Brille, and I will not regild the great vassals of the crown. Proceed, Olivier.” 
The person thus addressed received the schedule-book from his hands and went on reading aloud: 
“To Adam Tenon, assistant keeper of the seals of the provostry of Paris, for the silver, workmanship, and engraving of the said seals which have had to be renewed, inasmuch as the former ones, being old and worn out, could no longer be used, twelve livres parisis. 
“To Guillaume Frére, the sum of four livres four sols parisis for his wages and trouble in having fed and maintained the pigeons of the two pigeon-houses at the H?tel des Tournelles during the months of January, February, and March of this year, for the which he has furnished seven sestiers of barley. 
“To a Franciscan for shriving a criminal, four sols parisis.” 
The King listened in silence. From time to time he coughed, and then raised the goblet to his lips and drank a mouthful with a wry face. 
“In this year have been made,” continued the reader, “by order of the law, by sound of trumpet, through the streets of Paris, fifty-six public proclamations. Account not yet rendered. 
“For search made in divers places in Paris and elsewhere after treasure said to be conceled in the said places, but nothing has been found, forty-five livres parisis.” 
“Burying a florin to dig up a sou,” commented the King. 
“—For putting in, at the H?tel des Tournelles, six panes of white glass, at the place where the iron cage stands, thirteen sols. For making and delivering on the day of the mustering of the troops, four escutcheons bearing the arms of our said lord, wreathed round with chaplets of roses, six livres. A pair of new sleeves to the King’s old doublet, twenty sols. A pot of grease to grease the King’s boots, fifteen deniers. A new sty for lodging the King’s black swine, thirty livres parisis. Several partitions, planks, and trap-doors, for the safe-keeping of the lions at the H?tel Saint-Paul, twenty-two livres.” 
“Costly beasts, these,” said Louis XI. “But no matter, it is a magnificence befitting a King. There is a great tawny lion that I love for his engaging ways. Have you seen him, Ma?tre Guillaume? It is fitting that princes should keep these marvellous animals. For dogs, we kings should have lions; and for cats, tigers. The great beseems a crown. In the days of the pagan worshippers of Jupiter, when the people offered a hundred bullocks and a hundred sheep in the churches, the emperors gave a hundred lions and a hundred eagles. That was very fierce and noble. The kings of France have always had these roarings around their throne. Nevertheless, to do me justice, it must be admitted that I spend less in that way than my predecessors, and that I am less ostentatious in the matter of lions, bears, elephants, and leopards.—Continue, Ma?tre Olivier. This was for the benefit of our friends, the Flemings.” 
Guillaume Rym bowed low, while Coppenole, with his surly face, looked much like one of the bears of whom his Majesty had spoken. The King paid no attention; he had just taken a sip from the goblet, and was spitting out the beverage again with a “Faugh! the nasty stuff!” 
The reader went on: “For the food of a rogue and vagabond kept locked up for the last six months in the cell at the Skinners’ yard until it should be known what was to be done with him, six livres four sols.” 
“What’s that?” interrupted the King. “Feeding what ought to be hanged! Pasque-Dieu! I’ll not give another sol for that food. Olivier, arrange this matter with M. d’Estouteville, and see to it that this very night preparations are made to unite this gallant with the gallows. Go on.” 
Olivier made a mark with his thumb-nail against the item rogue and vagabond, and proceeded: 
“To Henriet Cousin, chief executioner at the Justice of Paris, the sum of sixty sols parisis, to him adjudged and accorded by the Lord Provost of Paris for having purchased, by order of the said Lord Provost, a great broad-bladed sword, to be used for executing and decapitating the persons condemned by law for their delinquencies, and having it furnished with a scabbard and all necessary appurtenances; and similarly for the repair and putting in order of the old sword, which had been splintered and notched in executing justice on Messire Louis of Luxembourg, as can be plainly shown.” 
The King broke in: “Enough! I give order for that sum with all my heart. These are expenses I do not look at twice. I have never regretted that money. Proceed.” 
“For constructing a new cage—” 
“Ah!” said the King, grasping the arms of his chair, “I knew I had come to the Bastille for something special. Stop, Master Olivier, I will see that cage myself. You shall read over the cost of it to me while I examine it. Messieurs the Flemings, you must come and see this; it is curious.” 
He rose to his feet, leaned on the arm of his interlocutor, signed to the sort of mute standing beside the door to precede them, to the two Flemings to follow, and left the chamber. 
The King’s cortége was recruited at the door by a party of men-at-arms ponderous with steel, and slim pages carrying torches. It proceeded for some time through the interior of the grim donjon-keep, perforated by flights of stairs and corridors even to the thickness of the walls. The captain of the Bastille walked at its head, and directed the opening of the successive narrow doors before the bent and decrepit King, who coughed as he walked along. 
At each door every head was obliged to stoop, except that of the old man already bent with age. “Hum!” said he between his gums, for he had no teeth; “we are in excellent trim for the gate of the sepulchre. A low door needs a stooping passenger.” 
At length, after passing through the last door of all, so encumbered with complicated locks that it took a quarter of an hour to get them all open, they entered a lofty and spacious Gothic hall, in the centre of which they could discern by the light of the torches a great square mass of masonry, iron, and wood-work. The interior was hollow. It was one of those famous cages for state prisoners familiarly known as “Fillettes du roi” —little daughters of the King. There were two or three small windows in its walls, but so closely grated with massive iron bars that no glass was visible. The door consisted of a huge single slab of stone, like that of a tomb —one of those doors that serve for entrance alone. Only here, the dead was alive. 
The King began pacing slowly. round this small edifice, examining it with care, while Ma?tre Olivier, who followed him, read aloud the items of the account: 
“For making a great wooden cage of heavy beams, joists, and rafters, measuring nine feet in length and eight in breadth, and seven feet high between roof and floor, mortised and bolted with great iron bolts; which has been placed in a certain chamber situated in one of the towers of the Bastille Saint-Antoine; in the which said cage is put and kept by command of our lord the King a prisoner, who before inhabited an old, decayed, and unserviceable cage. Used in the building of the said new cage, ninety-six horizontal beams and fifty-two perpendicular, ten joists, each three toises long. Employed in squaring, planing, and fitting the same wood-work in the yard of the Bastille, nineteen carpenters for twenty days—” 
“Fine solid timber, that!” remarked the King, rapping his knuckles on the wood. 
“Used in this cage,” continued the other, “two hundred and twenty great iron bolts nine feet and eight feet long, the rest of medium length, together with the plates and nuts for fastening the said bolts; the said iron weighing in all three thousand seven hundred and thirty-five pounds; besides eight heavy iron clamps for fixing the said cage in its place, altogether two hundred and eighteen pounds; without reckoning the iron of the grating to the windows of the chamber and other items—” 
“Here’s a deal of iron to restrain the levity of a spirit!” 
“—The whole amounts to three hundred and seventeen livres, five sols, seven deniers.” 
“Pasque-Dieu!” exclaimed the King. This oath, which was the favourite one of Louis XI, apparently aroused some one inside the cage: there was sound of clanking chains being dragged across its floor, and a feeble voice that seemed to issue from the tomb, wailed: “Sire! Sire, mercy!” The speaker was not visible. 
“Three hundred and seventeen livres, five sols, seven deniers!” repeated Louis XI. 
The voice of lamentation which had issued from the cage chilled the blood of all present, even Ma?tre Oliver. The King alone gave no evidence of having heard it. At his command Olivier resumed his reading, and his Majesty coolly continued his inspection of the cage. 
“Besides the above, there has been paid to a mason, for making the holes to fix the window-grating and the flooring of the chamber containing the cage, forasmuch as the floor would not otherwise have supported the said cage by reason of its weight—twenty-seven livres, fourteen sols parisis—” 
The voice began its wailing again. “Mercy, Sire! I swear to you it was Monsieur the Cardinal of Angers who committed the treason—not I!” 
“The mason’s charge is exorbitant!” said the King. “Go on, Olivier.” 
Olivier went on: “To a joiner for window-frames, bed-stead, closet-stool, and other things—twenty livres, two sols parisis—” 
The voice also went on: “Woe is me, Sire! will you not hear me? I protest that it was not I who wrote that to the Duke of Guyenne, but Monsieur the Cardinal Balue!” 
“The joiner is dear,” observed the King. “Is that all?” 
“No, Sire. To a glazier for the windows of the said chamber, forty-six sols, eight deniers parisis.” 
“Have mercy, Sire!” cried the voice again. “Is it not enough that all my possessions have been given to my judges —my table service to M. de Torcy, my library to Ma?tre Pierre Doriolle, my tapestries to the Governor of Roussillon? I am innocent. Lo, these fourteen years have I shivered in an iron cage. Have mercy, Sire! and you shall find it in heaven!” 
“Ma?tre Olivier,” said the King, “the total?” 
“Three hundred and sixty-seven livres, eight sols, three deniers parisis—” 
“Notre-Dame!” cried the King. “ ’Tis an outrageous cage!” 
He snatched the paper from Olivier’s hand, and began to reckon it up himself on his fingers, examining the schedule and the cage by turns—while the prisoner was heard sobbing within it. It was a dismal scene in the darkness, and the bystanders paled as they looked at one another. 
“Fourteen years, Sire! It is fourteen years—since April, 1469. I conjure you in the name of the Holy Mother of God, listen to me, Sire! During all those years you have enjoyed the warmth of the sun; shall I, feeble wretch that I am, never see the light of day again? Mercy, Sire! Show mercy! Clemency is a noble virtue in a King, and turns aside the current of the wrath to come. Think you, your Majesty, that at the hour of death it will be a great satisfaction to a King to know that he has never let an offence go unpunished? Moreover, I never betrayed your Majesty—it was Monsieur of Angers. And I have a very heavy chain on my foot with a huge iron ball attached to it—far heavier than there is any need for. Oh, Sire, have pity on me!” 
“Olivier,” said the King, shaking his head, “I observe that they charge me the bushel of plaster at twenty sols, though it is only worth twelve. You will draw up this memorandum afresh.” 
He turned his back on the cage, and began to move towards the door of the chamber. The wretched prisoner judged by the withdrawal of the torchlight and by the sounds that the King was preparing to depart. 
“Sire! Sire!” he cried in anguish. 
The door closed. He saw nothing more, and heard nothing but the raucous voice of the turnkey singing close by: 
“Ma?tre Jean Balue
Has lost from view
His bishoprics all.
Monsieur de Verdun
Has now not got one;
They’re gone, one and all.”
The King returned in silence to his closet, followed by his train, all horror-struck at the last bitter cry of the prisoner. Suddenly his Majesty turned to the Governor of the Bastille. 
“By-the-bye,” said he, “was there not some one in that cage?” 
“Pardieu! yes, Sire!” answered the governor, dumfounded by the question. 
“And who?” 
“Monsieur the Bishop of Verdun.” 
The King knew that better than any one, but it was a way he had. 
“Ah,” said he blandly, with the air of remembering it for the first time, “Guillaume de Harancourt, the friend of Monsieur the Cardinal Balue. A good fellow of a bishop!” 
A few minutes later, the door of the closet had opened and closed again on the five persons whom the reader found there at the beginning of this chapter, and who had severally resumed their places, their attitudes, and their whispered conversation. 
During the King’s absence some despatches had been laid upon the table, of which he himself broke the seal. He then began reading them attentively one after another, motioned to Ma?tre Olivier, who seemed to fill the post of minister to him, to take a pen, and without imparting to him the contents of the despatches, began in a low voice to dictate to him the answers, which the latter wrote kneeling uncomfortably at the table. 
Guillaume Rym watched them. 
The King spoke so low that the Flemings could hear nothing of what he was dictating, except here and there a few isolated and scarcely intelligible fragments, such as: “Maintain the fertile tracts by commerce and the sterile ones by manufactures.—Show my lords the English our four bombards: the Londres, the Brabant, the Bourg-en-Bresse, the Saint-Omer.—It is owing to artillery that war is now more reasonably carried on.—To Monsieur de Bressuire, our friend.—Armies cannot be maintained without contributions,” etc. 
Once he raised his voice. Pasque-Dieu! Monsieur the King of Sicily seals his letters with yellow wax like a King of France! Perhaps we do wrong to permit this. My good cousin of Burgundy accorded no arms of a field gules. The greatness of a house is secured by upholding the integrity of its prerogatives. Note that down, friend Olivier.” 
Another time: “Oh, oh!” said he, “a big missive! What does our friend the Emperor demand of us now?” Then, running his eye over the despatch and interrupting the perusal now and again with brief interjections: “Certes, Germany is getting so grand and mighty it is scarcely credible. But we do not forget the old proverb: ‘The finest country is Flanders; the finest duchy, Milan; the finest kingdom, France.’ Is that not so, Messieurs the Flemings?” 
This time Coppenole bowed as well as Guillaume Rym. The hosier’s patriotism was tickled. 
The last of the batch made Louis XI knit his brows. “What have we here?” he exclaimed. “Complaints and petitions against our garrisons in Picardy! Olivier, write with all speed to Monsieur the Marshal de Rouault: That discipline is relaxed; that the men-at-arms, the nobles, the free archers, and the Swiss are doing infinite mischief to the inhabitants; that the military, not content with the good things they find in the dwellings of the husbandmen, must needs compel them with heavy blows of staves or bills to fetch them from the town wine, fish, spices, and other superfluous articles; that the King knows all this; that we mean to protect our people from annoyance, theft, and pillage; that such is our will, by Our Lady! That, furthermore, it does not please us that any musician, barber, or man-at-arms whatsoever, should go clad like a prince in velvet, silk, and gold rings; that such vanities are hateful to God; that we, who are a gentleman, content ourselves with a doublet of cloth at sixteen sols parisis the ell; that messieurs the varlets may very well come down to that price likewise. Convey and command this—To M. de Rouault, our friend.—Good.” 
He dictated this letter in a loud voice with a firm tone, and in short, abrupt sentences. As he spoke the last word, the door flew open and admitted a fresh person, who rushed into the chamber in breathless agitation, crying: 
“Sire! Sire! there is a rising of the populace of Paris!” 
The King’s grave face contracted, but such emotion as he displayed passed like a flash. He controlled himself. “Compére Jacques,” he said in a tone and with a look of quiet severity, “you enter very abruptly.” 
“Sire! Sire! there is a revolt!” gasped Ma?tre Jacques. 
Louis, who had risen from his seat, seized him roughly by the arm, and in a tone of concentrated anger and a side-long glance at the Flemings, said in his ear so as to be heard by him alone: “Hold thy peace, or speak low!” 
The newcomer grasped the situation and proceeded to tell his news in a terrified whisper, the King listening unmoved, while Guillaume Rym directed Coppenole’s attention to the messenger’s face and dress, his furred hood (caputia forrata), his short cloak (epitogia curta), his gown of black velvet, which proclaimed him a president of the Court of Accompts. 
Scarcely had this person given the King a few details, when Louis exclaimed in a burst of laughter: “Nay, in good sooth, speak up, Compére Coictier. What need to whisper thus? Our Lady knows we have no secrets from our good Flemish friends.” 
“But, Sire—” 
“Speak up!” said the King. 
Compére Coictier stood in mute surprise. 
“So,” resumed the King—“speak out, monsieur. So there is a rising of the populace in our good city of Paris?” 
“Yes, Sire.” 
“Which is directed, you tell me, against Monsieur the Provost of the Palais de Justice?” 
“It would seem so,” replied the man, who still found his words with difficulty, so confounded was he by the sudden and inexplicable change in the King’s manner. 
“Where did the watch encounter the mob?” asked Louis. 
“Advancing from the Great Truanderie towards the Pontaux-Changeurs. I met it myself on my way here in obedience to your Majesty’s orders. I heard some of them cry, ‘Down with the Provost of the Palais!” ’ 
“And what is their grievance against the provost?” 
“Oh,” said Jacques, “that he is their liege lord.” 
“In truth?” 
“Yes, Sire. They are rascals from the Court of Miracles. They have long been complaining of the provost whose vassals they are. They will not acknowledge him either as justiciary or as lord of the highway.” 
“So, so!” retorted the King, with a smile of satisfaction which he strove in vain to conceal. 
“In all their petitions to the Parliament,” continued Compére Jacques, “they claim to have only two masters—your Majesty and their God; who is, I believe, the devil.” 
“Hè, hè!” chuckled the King, rubbing his hands with that internal laugh which irradiates the countenance. He could not disguise his delight, though he made a momentary effort to compose himself. No one had the least idea what it meant, not even Olivier. He remained silent for a moment, but with a thoughtful and satisfied air. 
“Are they in force?” he asked suddenly. 
“They are indeed, Sire,” replied Coictier. 
“How many?” 
“Six thousand at the very least.” 
The King could not repress a pleased “Good!—Are they armed?” he went on. 
“With scythes, pikes, hackbuts, pickaxes—every description of violent weapon.” 
The King seemed in nowise disturbed by this alarming list. Compére Jacques thought it advisable to add: “If your Majesty sends not speedy succour to the provest, he is lost!” 
“We will send,” said the King with simulated earnestness. “Good! we will certainly send. Monsieur the Provost is our friend. Six thousand! These are determined rogues! Their boldness is extraordinary, and we are highly incensed thereat. But we have few men about us to-night. It will be time enough to-morrow morning.” 
Coictier gave a cry. “This moment, Sire! They would have time to sack the court-house twenty times over, storm the manor, and hang the provost himself. For God’s sake, Sire, send before to-morrow morning!” 
The King looked him full in the face. “I said to-morrow morning.” It was one of those looks to which there is no reply. 
After a pause, Louis again raised his voice. “My good Jacques, you should know that—What did—” he corrected himself—“what does the feudal jurisdiction of the provost comprise?” 
“Sire, the Rue de la Calandre as far as the Rue de l’Herberie, the Place Saint-Michel and places commonly called Les Mureaux situated near the Church of Notre-Dame des Champs,” —here the King lifted the brim of his hat—“which mansions are thirteen in number; further the Court of Miracles, further the Lazaretto called the Banlieue, further the whole of the high-road beginning at the Lazaretto and ending at the Porte Saint-Jacques. Of these several places he is reeve of the ways, chief, mean, and inferior justiciary, full and absolute lord.” 
“So, ho!” said the King, scratching his left ear with his right hand, “that comprises a good slice of my town! Ah, Monsieur the Provost was king of all this!” 
This time he did not correct himself. He continued cogitating and as if talking to himself: “Softly, Monsieur the Provost, you had a very pretty piece of our Paris!” 
Suddenly he burst out: “Pasque-Dieu! what are all these people that claim to be highway-reeves, justiciaries, lords and masters along with us! that have their toll-gates at the corner of every field, their gibbet and their executioner at every cross-way among our people, so that, as the Greek thought he had as many gods as he had springs of water, the Persian as many as the stars he saw, the Frenchman reckons as many kings as he sees gibbets. Pardieu! this thing is evil, and the confusion of it incenses me! I would know if it be God’s pleasure that there should be in Paris any keepers of the highways but the King, any justiciary but our Parliament, any emperor but ourself in this empire? By my soul, but the day must come when there shall be in France but one king, one lord, one judge, one headsman, just as in paradise there is but one God!” 
He lifted his cap again and went on, still deep in his own thoughts, with the look and tone of a huntsman uncoupling and cheering on his pack: 
“Good, my people! Well done! Pull down these false lords! Do your work! At them! At them! Pillage, hang, sack them! Ah, you would be kings, my lords! At them! my people, at them!” 
He stopped himself abruptly, bit his lips as if to regain possession of his escaping thoughts, bent his piercing eye in turn on each of the five persons around him, and suddenly taking his hat in both hands and regarding it steadfastly, he exclaimed: “Oh, I would burn thee, didst thou know what I have in my head!” 
Then casting around him the alert and suspicious glance of a fox stealing back to his hole—“No matter,” he said, “we will send help to Monsieur the Provost. Most unfortunately we have very few troops here at this moment to send against such a mob. We must wait till to-morrow. Order shall then be restored in the city, and all who are taken shall be promptly hanged.” 
“That reminds me, Sire,” said Coictier, “I forgot in my first perturbation, the watch have seized two stragglers of the band. If your Majesty pleases to see these men, they are here.” 
“If it be my pleasure!” cried the King. “What! Pasque-Dieu! canst thou forget such a thing? Run quick. Olivier, do thou go and bring them here.” 
Ma?tre Olivier went out and returned immediately with the two prisoners, surrounded by archers of the body-guard. The first of the two had a wild, imbecile face, drunken and wonder-struck. He was clad in rags and walked with one knee bent and dragging his foot. The other presented a pale and smiling countenance, with which the reader is already acquainted. 
The King scrutinized them a moment without speaking, then abruptly addressed the first prisoner: 
“What is thy name?” 
“Gieffroy Pincebourde.” 
“Thy trade?” 
“Truand.” 
“What wast thou doing in that damnable riot?” 
The truand gazed at the King, swinging his arms the while with an air of sottish stupidity. His was one of those uncouth heads in which the intellect is about as much at its ease as a light under an extinguisher. 
“Were you not going to outrageously attack and plunder your lord the Provost of the Palais?” 
“I know they were going to take something from somebody, but that’s all.” 
A soldier showed the King a pruning-hook which had been found on the truand. 
“Dost thou recognise this weapon?” demanded the King. 
“Yes, ’tis my pruning-hook. I am a vine-dresser.” 
“And dost thou know this man for thy companion?” added Louis, pointing to the other prisoner. 
“No, I do not know him.” 
“That will do,” said the King; and motioning to the silent figure standing impassively at the door, whom we have already pointed out to the reader: “Compére Tristan,” he said, “here’s a man for you.” 
Tristan l’Hermite bowed, then whispered an order to a couple of archers, who carried off the unlucky truand. 
Meanwhile the King had addressed himself to the other prisoner, who was perspiring profusely: “Thy name?” 
“Pierre Gringoire, Sire.” 
“Thy trade?” 
“Philosopher, Sire.” 
“How comes it, rascal, that thou hast the presumption to go and beset our friend Monsieur the Provost of the Palais, and what hast thou to say with regard to this rising of the populace?” 
“Sire, I was not in it.” 
“Go to, ribald; wast thou not taken by the watch in that bad company?” 
“No, Sire, there is a misapprehension; ’tis an unlucky mischance. I am a maker of tragedies, Sire. I beseech your Majesty to hear me. I am a poet. It is the craze of men of my profession to go about the streets at night. It was passing by, this evening; ’twas a mere chance. They took me without reason. I am innocent of this civil disturbance. Your Majesty sees that the truand did not know me. I conjure your Majesty—” 
“Hold thy tongue!” said the King, between two sips of his tisane; “thou wilt split our head.” 
Tristan l’Hermite approached, and pointing to Gringoire: “Sire, shall we hang this one at the same time?” 
It was the first word he had spoken. “Bah!” returned the King carelessly, “I see no objection.” 
“But I do—a great many,” said Gringoire. 
Our philosopher’s countenance at this moment rivalled the hue of the olive. He saw by the cold and indifferent air of the King that he had no resource but in something, excessively pathetic. He therefore threw himself at the feet of Louis XI, and, with gestures of despair, cried: 
“Sire, will your Majesty deign to listen to me? Sire, break not forth in thunders against so poor a thing as I— the bolts of God strike not the lowly lettuce. Sire, you are an august and mighty monarch; have pity on a poor honest man who would be more incapable of inflaming a revolt than an icicle of producing a spark. Most gracious Sire, magnanimity is the virtue of the lion and of the King. Alas! severity does but exasperate the spirit; the fierce blast of the north wind will not make the traveller lay aside his mantle, but the sun’s gentle rays, warming him little by little, cause him at last to strip himself gladly to his shirt. Sire, you are the sun. I protest to you, my sovereign lord and master, that I am no disorderly companion of truands and thieves. Revolt and brigandage go not in the train of Apollo. I am no man to throw myself headlong into those clouds that burst in thunders of sedition. I am a faithful vassal of your Majesty. The same jealousy which the husband has for his wife’s honour, the affection with which the son should requite his father’s love, a good vassal should feel for the glory of his King, should wear himself out for the upholding of his house, for the furtherance of his service. All other passions that might possess him were mere frenzy. These, Sire, are my maxims of state. Therefore judge me not as sedition-monger and pillager because my coat is out at elbows. Show me mercy, Sire, and I will wear out my knees in praying God for you day and night. Alas! I am not extremely rich, it is true—rather, I am somewhat poor; but for all that, I am not vicious. It is not my fault. Every one knows that great wealth is not to be acquired from belles-lettres, and that the most accomplished writers have not always a great fire to warm them in winter. The advocates alone take all the grain, and leave nothing but the chaff for the other learned professions. There are forty very excellent proverbs upon the philosopher’s threadbare coat. Oh, Sire, clemency is the only light that can illumine the interior of a great soul. Clemency bears the torch before all the other virtues. Without her they are blind, groping for God in the darkness. Mercy, which is the same as clemency, produces loving subjects—the most powerful body-guard that can surround a prince. What can it signify to your Majesty, by whom all faces are dazzled, that there should be one more poor man upon earth—a poor, innocent philosopher crawling about in the slough of calamity, his empty purse flapping upon his empty stomach? Besides, Sire, I am a man of letters. Great kings add a jewel to their crown by patronizing learning. Hercules did not disdain the title of Musagetes—leader of the Muses. Mathias Corvinus showed favour to Jean de Monroyal, the ornament of mathematics. Now ’tis an ill way of patronizing letters to hang the lettered. What a stain on Alexander had he hanged Aristotle! The act would not have been a beauty-spot upon the cheek of his reputation to embellish it, but a virulent ulcer disfiguring it. Sire, I wrote a very appropriate epithalamium for Mademoiselle of Flanders and Monsieur the most august Dauphin. That was not like a fire-brand of rebellion. Your Majesty can see that I am no dunce; that I have studied excellently, and that I have much natural eloquence. Grant me mercy, Sire! By so doing, you will perform an action agreeable to Our Lady, and I do assure you, Sire, that I am greatly frightened at the thought of being hanged!” 
So saying, the desperate Gringoire kissed the King’s shoe, whereat Guillaume Rym murmured low to Coppenole: “He does well to crawl upon the floor. Kings are like the Cretan Jupiter—they have ears on their feet only.” And Coppenole, unmoved by the peculiar attributes of the Cretan Jupiter, answered with a slow smile and his eye fixed on Gringoire: “Ah, that’s good! I could fancy I hear the Chancellor Hugonet begging mercy of me!” 
When Gringoire stopped at length, out of breath, he raised his head tremulously to the King, who was engaged in scratching off a spot on his breeches’ knee with his finger-nail, after which his Majesty took another mouthful from the goblet. But he said never a word, and this silence kept Gringoire on the rack. At last the King looked at him. 
“Here’s a terrible babbler!” said he. Then turning to Tristan l’Hermite: “Bah! let him go!” 
Gringoire, giddy with joy, suddenly sat flat on the floor. 
“Free?” growled Tristan. “Your Majesty will not even have him caged for a while?” 
“Compére,” returned Louis XI, “dost thou think it is for birds like this we have cages made at three hundred and seventy-seven livres, eight sols, three deniers apiece? Set him at liberty, the rascal, and send him off with a drubbing.” 
“Ouf!” cried Gringoire; “here indeed is a great King!” 
And, fearing a counter-order, he hurried to the door, which Tristan opened for him with a very bad grace. The soldiers went out with him, driving him before them with great blows of their fists, which Gringoire bore like a true Stoic. 
The good humour of the King, since the revolt against the provost had been announced to him, manifested itself at every point, and this unusual clemency was no insignificant sign of it. Tristan l’Hermite in his corner looked as surly as a dog that has seen much but got nothing. 
Meanwhile the King was gaily drumming the Pont Audemer march on the arms of his chair. He was a dissembling prince, but he was much better able to conceal his sorrow than his joys. These outward and visible signs of rejoicing at good news sometimes carried him great lengths—thus, at the death of Charles the Bold, to vowing balustrades of silver to Saint-Martin of Tours; on his accession to the throne, of forgetting to give orders for his father’s obsequies. 
“Hah, Sire!” suddenly exclaimed Jacques Coictier, “what of the sharp attack of illness for which your Majesty sent for me?” 
“Oh,” said the King, “truly I suffer greatly, Gossip Jacques. I have singings in the ear, and teeth of fire that rake my chest.” 
Coictier took the King’s hand and felt his pulse with a professional air. 
“Look at him now, Coppenole,” said Rym in a low voice. “There he is between Coictier and Tristan. That is his whole court—a physician for himself, a hangman for the others.” 
As he felt the King’s pulse, Coictier assumed a look of great alarm. Louis regarded him with some anxiety, while the physician’s countenance waxed gloomier every instant. The good man had no other means of subsistence but the King’s bad health; he accordingly made the most of it. 
“Oh, oh!” he muttered at last, “this is indeed serious.” 
“Yes, is it not?” said the King anxiously. 
“Pulsus creber, anhelans, crepitans, irregularis,” 2 continued the physician. 
“Pasque-Dieu!” exclaimed his Majesty. 
“This might carry off a man in less than three days.” 
“Notre-Dame!” cried the King. “And the remedy, Gossip?” 
“I am thinking of one, Sire.” 
He made Louis put out his tongue; then shook his head, pulled a long face, and in the midst of these antics—“Pardieu! Sire,” he remarked suddenly, “I must inform you that there is a receivership of episcopal revenues vacant, and that I have a nephew.” 
“I give the receivership to thy nephew, Gossip Jacques; but take this fire from my breast.” 
“Since your Majesty is so gracious,” the physician went on, “you will not refuse to assist me a little towards the building of my house in the Rue Saint-Andry des Arcs?” 
“H’m!” said the King. 
“I am at the end of my money,” continued the doctor, “and it would indeed be a pity that the house should be left without a roof—not for the sake of the house itself, which is plain and homely, but for the paintings of Jehan Fourbault which adorn the wainscotting. There is a Diana among them, flying in the air; but so excellently limned, so tender, so delicate, the attitude so artless, the hair so admirably arranged and crowned by a crescent, the flesh so white, that she leads those into temptation who regard her too closely. Then there is also another, a Ceres—another most admirable divinity— seated on sheaves of corn, and crowned with a garland of wheat-ears intertwined with salsify and other flowers. Never were more amorous eyes, or shapelier limbs, or a nobler mien, or more graceful folds of drapery. It is one of the most innocent and perfect beauties that ever brush produced.” 
“Tormentor!” growled Louis, “to what does all this tend?” 
“I require a roof over these paintings, Sire, and, although it be but a trifle, I have no money left.” 
“What will it cost, this roof of thine?” 
“Oh, well; a roof of copper-gilt and with mythological figures, two thousand livres at most.” 
“Ha! the assassin!” screamed the King. “He never draws me a tooth but he makes a diamond out of it!” 
“Am I to have my roof?” said Coictier. 
“Yes!—and go to the devil; but cure me first.” 
Jacques Coictier made a profound obeisance and said: “Sire, it is a repellent that will save you. We shall apply to your loins the great deterrent composed of cerade, clay of Armenia, white of egg, oil, and vinegar. You will continue the tisane, and we will answer for your Majesty’s safety.” 
A lighted candle never attracts one gnat only. Master Olivier, seeing the King in so liberal a mood, and judging the moment propitious, approached in his turn. 
“Sire—” 
“What do you want now?” asked Louis. 
“Sire, your Majesty is aware that Simon Radin is dead.” 
“Well?” 
“He was King’s Councillor to the Court of Treasury.” 
“Well?” 
“Sire, his post is vacant.” 
As he spoke, Ma?tre Olivier’s overbearing countenance changed its arrogance for cringing—the only alternation on the face of a courtier. The King looked him very straight in the face and answered dryly, “I understand.” 
“Ma?tre Olivier,” he went on, “the Marshal de Boucicaut says: ‘There is no good gift but from the King; there is no good fishing but in the sea.’ I see you share Monsieur de Boucicaut’s opinion. Now harken to this—we have a good memory. In ’68 we made you a groom of the chamber; in ’69, warder of the fort on the bridge of Saint-Cloud, with a salary of a hundred livres tournois (you wanted it parisis). In November, ’73, by letters patent given at Gergeole, we appointed you ranger of the forest of Vincennes in place of Gilbert Acle, squire; in ’75, warden of the forest of Rouvray-lez-Saint-Cloud, in place of Jacques le Maire; in ’78, we graciously settled upon you, by letters patent sealed with a double seal of green wax, an annuity of ten livres parisis, for yourself and your spouse, chargeable on the Place aux Marchands, near the School of Saint-Germain; in ’79, we made you warden of the forest of Senard, in the place of poor Jehan Diaz; then captain of the Castle of Loches; then Governor of Saint-Quentin; then captain of the Bridge of Meulan, of which you had yourself called count. Of the five sols fine paid by every barber who shaves on a holiday, you get three—and we get what you leave. We were pleased to change your surname of Le Mauvais as being too expressive of your mien. In ’74, we granted you, to the great umbrage of our nobility, armorial bearings of many colours, which enables you to display a peacock breast. Pasque-Dieu! are you not surfeited? Is not the draught of fishes abundant and miraculous enough? Are you not afraid that one salmon more will sink your boat? Pride will be your ruin, my Gossip. Ruin and shame tread ever close upon the heels of pride. Remember that, and keep still.” 
These words, pronounced with severity, brought back the insolence to Olivier’s face. 
“Good!” he muttered almost aloud; “’tis evident the King is sick to-day, for he gives all to the physician.” 
Far from taking offence at this piece of effrontery, Louis resumed in a milder tone: “Stay, I had forgotten too that I made you my ambassador at Ghent to Mme. Marie. Yes, gentlemen,” he added, addressing himself to the Flemings, “this man has been an ambassador. There, there, Gossip,” turning to Olivier, “let us not fall out—we are old friends. It is getting late. We have finished our business—shave me.” 
The reader has doubtless already recognised in Ma?tre Olivier the terrible Figaro whose part Providence—that master playwright—wove so skilfully into the long and sanguinary drama of Louis XI. We shall not attempt here to describe that baleful character. This barber to the King had three names. At Court they addressed him politely as Olivier le Daim; among the people he was Olivier le Diable. His real name was Olivier le Mauvais—the Miscreant. 
Olivier le Mauvais stood unmoved, sulking at the King, scowling at Jacques Coictier. 
“Yes, yes! the physician!” he muttered between his teeth. 
“Quite so; the physician!” repeated Louis with unwonted affability; “the physician has yet more influence than thyself. The reason is not far to seek—he has hold over our entire body; thou only of our chin. Come, come, my poor barber, all will be well. Now, Gossip, perform thy office, and shave me; go fetch what is needful.” 
Olivier, seeing that the King was determined to take the matter as a jest, and that it was useless even to try to provoke him, went out grumbling to execute his orders. 
The King rose and went to the window. Suddenly he threw it open with extraordinary excitement: 
“Oh, yes!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands, “there’s a glare in the sky over the city. It is the Provost of the Palais burning; it can be nothing else. Ha! my good people, so ye aid me at last in the overthrow of the feudal lords! Gentlemen,” and he turned to the Flemings, “come and look at this. Is that not the red glare of a conflagration?” 
The two Flemings approached. 
“A great fire,” said Guillaume Rym. 
“Oh!” added Coppenole, his face lighting up suddenly, 
“that reminds me of the burning of the Seigneur d’Hymber-court’s house. There must be a big revolt over there.” 
“Think you so, Ma?tre Coppenole?” and Louis’s face beamed even brighter than the hosier’s. “Do you not think it will be difficult to check?” 
“Croix-Dieu! Sire, it may cost your Majesty many a company of soldiers!” 
“Ah—cost me—that’s different,” rejoined the King. “If I choose—” 
“If this revolt be what I suppose,” continued the hosier boldly, “you will have no choice in the matter, Sire.” 
“My friend,” said Louis XI, “two companies of my bodyguard, and the discharge of a serpentine, are amply sufficient to put a mob of common people to the rout.” 
Regardless of the signs Guillaume Rym was making to him, the hosier seemed bent upon contesting the matter with the King. “Sire,” said he, “the Swiss were common people too. Monsieur the Duke of Burgundy was a great seigneur, and held the canaille of no account. At the battle of Granson, Sire, he shouted: ‘Cannoneers, fire upon these churls!’ and he swore by Saint-George. But the syndic Scharnachtal rushed upon the fine duke with his clubs and his men, and at the shock of the peasants with their bull-hides, the glittering Burgundian army was shattered like a pane of glass by a stone. There was many a knight killed there by the base-born churls, and Monsieur de Chateau-Guyon, the greatest lord in Burgundy, was found dead, with his great gray charger, in a little boggy field.” 
“Friend,” returned the King, “you are speaking of a battle. This is but a riot, and I can put an end to it the moment I choose to lift a finger.” 
To which the other replied unconcernedly, “That may be, Sire; but in that case, the hour of the people has not yet come.” 
Guillaume Rym thought it time to interfere. “Ma?tre Coppenole, you are talking to a great King.” 
“I know it,” answered the hosier gravely. 
“Let him speak his mind, friend Rym,” said the King. “I like this plain speaking. My father, Charles VII, used to say that truth was sick. For my part, I thought she was dead and had found no confessor. Ma?tre Coppenole shows me I am mistaken.” Then, laying his hand on Ma?tre Coppenole’s shoulder: “You were saying, Ma?tre Jacques—” 
“I said, Sire, that may-be you were right; that the people’s hour is not yet come with you.” 
Louis XI looked at him with his penetrating gaze. “And when will that hour come, Ma?tre?” 
“You will hear it strike.” 
“By what clock, prithee?” 
Coppenole, with his quiet and homely self-possession, signed to the King to approach the window. “Listen, Sire! There is here a donjon-keep, a bell-tower, cannon, townsfolk, soldiers. When the tocsin sounds, when the cannons roar, when, with great clamour, the fortress walls are shattered, when citizens and soldiers shout and kill each other—then the hour will strike.” 
Louis’s face clouded and he seemed to muse. He was silent for a moment, then, clapping his hand gently against the thick wall of the keep, as one pats the flank of a charger: 
“Ah, surely not,” said he; “thou wilt not be so easily shattered, eh, my good Bastille?” 
And turning abruptly to the undaunted Fleming: “Have you ever seen a revolt, Ma?tre Jacques?” 
“Sire, I have made one,” answered the hosier. 
“How do you set about it,” said the King, “to make a revolt?” 
“Oh,” answered Coppenole, “it is no very difficult matter. There are a hundred ways. First of all, there must be dissatisfaction in the town—that’s nothing uncommon. And next, there is the character of the inhabitants. Those of Ghent are prone to revolt. They ever love the son of the prince, but never the prince himself. Well, one fine morning, we will suppose, some one enters my shop and says to me: ‘Father Coppenole, it is thus and thus—the Lady of Flanders wants to save her favourites, the chief provost has doubled the toll on green food, or something of the kind—what you will.’ I throw down my work, run out of my shop into the street, and cry, ‘á sac!’ There is sure to be some empty cask about. I get upon it, and say in a loud voice the first thing that comes into my head—what’s uppermost in my heart—and when one is of the people, Sire, one has always something in one’s heart. Then a crowd gets together; they shout, they ring the tocsin, the people arm themselves by disarming the soldiers, the market people join the rest, and off they march. And so it will always be, so long as there are lords in the manors, citizens in the cities, and peasants in the country.” 
“And against whom do you rise thus?” asked the King; “against your provosts? against your lords?” 
“Sometimes; it all depends. Against the duke too, on occasion.” 
Louis returned to his chair. “Ah! here,” he said with a smile, “they have not got further than the provosts!” 
At the same instant Olivier le Daim entered the apartment. He was followed by two pages bearing the toilet necessaries of the King; but what struck Louis was to see him also accompanied by the Provost of Paris and the commander of the watch, who both appeared full of consternation. There was consternation, too, in the manner of the rancorous barber, but with an underlying satisfaction. 
He was the first to speak. “Sire, I crave pardon of your Majesty for the calamitous news I bring.” 
The King turned sharply round, tearing the mat under the feet of his chair. “What’s that?” 
“Sire,” replied Olivier, with the malevolent look of one who rejoices that he has to deal a violent blow, “it is not against the Provost of the Palais that this rising is directed.” 
“Against whom, then?” 
“Against you, Sire.” 
The aged King sprang to his feet, erect as a young man. 
“Explain thyself, Olivier! explain thyself! And look well to thy head, my Gossip; for I swear to thee by the cross of Saint-L?, that if thou speakest false in this matter, the sword that cut the throat of M. de Luxembourg is not so notched but it will manage to saw thine too.” 
It was a formidable oath. Never but twice in his life had Louis sworn by the cross of Saint-L?. 
Olivier opened his mouth to answer. “Sire—” 
“Down on thy knees!” interrupted the King vehemently. “Tristan, stand guard over this man!” 
Olivier went down on his knees. “Sire,” he said composedly, “a witch was condemned to death by your Court of Parliament. She took sanctuary in Notre-Dame. The people want to take her thence by main force. Monsieur the Provost and Monsieur the Commander of the Watch are here to contradict me if I speak not the truth. It is Notre-Dame the people are besieging.” 
“Ah! ah!” murmured the King, pale and shaking with passion. “Notre-Dame they besiege! Our Lady, my good mistress, in her own Cathedral! Rise, Olivier. Thou art right. I give thee Simon Radin’s office. Thou art right; it is me they attack. The witch is under the safeguard of the Church, the Church is under my safeguard. And I—who thought all the while that it was only the provost—and ’tis against myself!” 
Rejuvenated by passion, he began to pace the room with great strides. He laughed no more; he was terrible to look upon as he went to and fro—the fox was become a hyena. He seemed choking with rage, his lips moved, but no word came, his fleshless hands were clenched. Suddenly he raised his head, his sunken eyes blazed full of light, his voice range like a clarion: “Seize them, Tristan! Cut down the knaves! Away, Tristan, my friend! Kill! Kill!” 
This outburst over, he returned to his seat, and went on in a voice of cold and concentrated rage: “Hither, Tristan. We have with us in this Bastille fifty lances of the Vicomte de Gif, which makes three hundred horses; you will take them. There is also a company of the archers of our bodyguard, under Monsieur de Chateaupers; you will take them. You are provost-marshal, and have the men of your provostry; you will take them. At the H?tel Saint-Pol you will find forty archers of the new guard of Monsieur the Dauphin; take them, and with all these you will speed to Notre-Dame. Ah, messieurs, the commons of Paris, do you fly thus in the face of the crown of France, of the sanctity of Notre-Dame, and the peace of this commonwealth! Exterminate, Tristan! exterminate! and let not one escape for Montfaucon!” 
Tristan bowed. “Very good, Sire! And what am I to do with the witch?” he added after a moment’s pause. 
This question gave the King food for reflection. “Ah, to be sure,” said he, “the witch? M. d’Estouteville, what did the people want to do with her?” 
“Sire,” answered the Provost of Paris, “I imagine, that as the people were come to drag her out of sanctuary in Notre-Dame, it is her impunity that offends them, and that they desire to hang her.” 
The King appeared to reflect profoundly; then, addressing himself to Tristan l’Hermite: 
“Very well, Compére; exterminate the people and hang the witch.” 
“In other words,” whispered Rym to Coppenole, “punish the people for wanting to do a thing, and then do it yourself!” 
“Very good, Sire,” returned Tristan. “And if the witch is still inside the Cathedral, are we to disregard the sanctuary and take her away?” 
“Pasque-Dieu! the sanctuary,” said the King, scratching his ear; “and yet the woman must be hanged.” 
Then, as if an idea had suddenly occurred to him, he fell on his knees before his chair, took off his hat, laid it on the seat, and gazing devoutly at one of the little lead images with which it was encircled: “Oh!” he cried, clasping his hands, “Our Lady of Paris, my gracious patroness, give me pardon, I will do it only this once. This criminal must be punished. I do assure you, Madame the Virgin, my good mistress, that it is a sorceress, unworthy of your kind protection. You know, Madame, that many very devout princes have trespassed on the privileges of the Church for the glory of God and the necessity of the state. Saint-Hugh, Bishop of England, permitted King Edward to seize a magician in his church. My master, Saint-Louis of France, transgressed for the like purpose in the Church of Saint-Paul, and Monsieur Alphonse, son of the King of Jerusalem, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself. Pardon me, then, for this once, Our Lady of Paris! I will never again transgress in this manner, and I will give you a fair statue of silver, like that I gave last year to Our Lady of ècouys. So be it!” 
He made the sign of the cross, rose to his feet, replaced his hat, and turned to Tristan. “Make all speed, Compére. Take M. de Chateaupers with you. You will sound the tocsin, crush the people, hang the witch—that is all. You will defray all the charges of the execution and bring me the account. Come, Olivier, I shall not go to bed to-night. Shave me.” 
Tristan l’Hermite bowed and left. The King then dismissed Rym and Coppenole with a wave of the hand. “God keep you, my good Flemish friends. Go and take a little rest. The night is far advanced, and we are nearer the morning than the evening.” 
They both withdrew. On reaching their apartments under the escort of the captain of the Bastille, Coppenole remarked to Rym, “Hum! I’ve had enough of this coughing King. I have seen Charles of Burgundy drunk, but he was not near so wicked as Louis XI sick.” 
“Ma?tre Jacques,” returned Rym, “that is because kings are not half so bloodthirsty in their wine as in their medicine-cups.” 
______________________
1 Without steward or cup-bearer. 
2 Pulse rapid, full, jerking, irregular. 
Chapter 6 - The Pass-Word
On quitting the Bastille, Gringoire fled down the Rue Saint-Antoine with the speed of a runaway horse. Arrived at the Baudoyer Gate, he made straight for the stone cross in the middle of the square as if he discerned in the dark the figure of a man, clothed and hooded in black, sitting upon its steps. 
“Is that you, master?” said Gringoire. 
The figure rose. “Death and hell! you drive me mad, Gringoire. The watch on the tower of Saint-Gervais has just called the half after one.” 
“It is no fault of mine,” returned Gringoire, “but of the watch and the King. I’ve had a narrow escape. I always miss being hanged within an ace. It is my predestination.” 
“You miss everything,” retorted the other. “But come quickly now. Hast thou the pass-word?” 
“Only think, master, I have seen the King. I’ve just left him. He wears worsted breeches. It was an adventure, I can tell you!” 
“Oh, clappering mill-wheel of words! what’s thy adventure to me? Hast thou the truands’ pass-word?” 
“I have it. Make yourself easy. ‘Dagger in pouch.” ’ 
“Good! Without it we could not get through to the church; the truands block the streets. Luckily, they seem to have met with some opposition. We may yet arrive in time.” 
“Yes, master; but how are we to gain entrance into Notre-Dame?” 
“I have the key of the tower.” 
“And how shall we get out again?” 
“There is a small door at the back of the cloister opening on to the Terrain and the waterside. I have got the key, and I moored a boat there this morning.” 
“I had a near shave of being hanged,” repeated Gringoire. 
“Quick, then, let us be going!” said the other; and both started off at full speed towards the city. 
Chapter 7 - Chateaupers to The Rescue
The reader probably remembers the critical situation in which we left Quasimodo. The doughty hunchback, assailed on all sides, had lost, if not his courage, at least all hope of saving, not himself—for of that he took no thought—but the Egyptian. He ran distractedly along the gallery. Notre-Dame was on the point of being carried by the truands. Suddenly the thunder of galloping hoofs filled the adjacent streets, and with a long file of torches and a dense column of horsemen, lances down and bridles hanging loose, the furious sound swept into the Place like a hurricane. 
“France! France! Cut down the rabble! Chateaupers to the rescue! Provostry! Provostry!” 
These were, of course, the troops despatched by the King. 
The startled truands faced about. 
Quasimodo, though he heard nothing, saw the naked swords, the torches, the lances, the mass of cavalry, at the head of which he recognised Captain Ph?bus. He saw the confusion of the truands, the terror of some, the consternation of the stoutest-hearted among them, and the unexpected succour so revived his energy that he hurled back the foremost of the assailants who had already gained a footing on the gallery. 
The truands bore themselves bravely, defending themselves with the energy of despair. Attacked on the flank from the Rue Saint-Pierre-aux-B?ufs, and in the rear from the Rue du Parvis, jammed against Notre-Dame, which they were attacking and Quasimodo still defending—at once besiegers and besieged—they were in the peculiar position in which Count Henry d’Harcourt found himself at the famous siege of Turin in 1640, between Prince Thomas of Savoy, whom he was besieging, and the Marquis de Langane, who, in turn, was blockading him—Taurinum obsessor idem et obsessus1—as his epitaph expresses it. 
The mêlée was terrific. “To wolves’ flesh dogs’ teeth,” says Father Mathieu. The King’s horsemen, among whom Ph?bus de Chateaupers displayed great valour, gave no quarter, and they that escaped the lance fell by the sword. The truands, ill-armed, foamed and bit in rage and despair. Men, women, and children fastened themselves on the flanks and chests of the horses, clinging to them tooth and nail, like cats; others battered the faces of the archers with their torches; others, again, caught the horsemen by the neck in their iron bill-hooks, striving to pull them down. Those who fell, they tore to pieces. 
One among them had a long and glittering scythe, with which, for a long time, he mowed the legs of the horses. It was an appalling sight. On he came, singing a droning song and taking long sweeping strokes with his deadly scythe. 
At every stroke he laid around him a circle of severed limbs. He advanced in this manner into the thickest of the cavalry, calm and unhasting, with the even swing of the head and regular breathing of a reaper cutting a field of corn. It was Clopin Trouillefou. A volley of musketry laid him low. 
In the meantime the windows had opened again. The burghers, hearing the war-cry of the King’s men, had taken part in the affray, and from every storey bullets rained upon the truands. The Parvis was thick with smoke streaked with the flashing fire of the musketry. Through it the facade of Notre-Dame was dimly discernible, and the tumble-down H?tel-Dieu, with a wan face or two peering frightened from its many windowed roofs. 
At last the truands gave way. Exhaustion, want of proper arms, the alarming effect of this surprise, the volleys from the windows, the spirited charge of the King’s men—all combined to overpower them. Breaking through the line of their assailants, they fled in all directions, leaving the Parvis heaped with their dead. 
When Quasimodo, who had not for a moment ceased fighting, beheld this rout, he fell upon his knees and lifted his hands to heaven. Then, frenzied with joy, he ran to the stairs, and ascended with the swiftness of a bird to that cell, the approaches to which he had so intrepidly defended. He had but one thought now—to go and fall on his knees at the feet of her whom he had saved for the second time. 
He entered the cell—it was empty. 
______________________
1 Besieger of Turin and himself besieged. 
BOOK XI
Chapter 1 - The Little Shoe
At the moment the truands attacked the Cathedral, Esmeralda was asleep. 
But soon the ever-increasing uproar round the church, and the bleating of her goat—awakened before herself—broke these slumbers. She sat up, listened, looked around; then, frightened at the glare and the noise, hurried out of her cell to see what was the matter. The aspect of the Place, the strange visions moving in it, the disorder of this nocturnal assault, the hideous crowd dimly visible through the darkness, hopping about like a cloud of frogs, the hoarse croaking of the multitude, the scattered red torches flitting to and fro in the storm like will-o’-the-wisps flitting over the misty face of a swamp—all seemed to her like some mysterious battle between the phantoms of the witches’ Sabbath and the stone monsters of the Cathedral. Imbued from her childhood with the superstitions of the gipsy tribe, her first idea was that she had happened unawares on the Satanic rites of the weird beings proper to the night. Whereupon she hastened back to cower in her cell, asking of her humble couch some less horrible nightmare. 
But, by degrees, the first fumes of her terror cleared away from her brain, and by the constantly increasing noise, and other signs of reality, she discovered that she was beset, not by spectres, but by human beings. At this her fear changed; not in degree, but in kind. The thought of the possibility of a popular rising to drag her from her place of refuge flashed into her mind. The prospect of once more losing life, hope, Ph?bus, who still was ever-present in her dreams of the future, her utter helplessness, all flight barred, her abandonment, her friendless state—these and a thousand other cruel thoughts overwhelmed her. She fell upon her knees, her head upon her couch, her hands clasped upon her head, overcome by anxiety and terror; and gipsy, idolatress, and pagan as she was, began with sobs and tremblings to ask mercy of the God of the Christians, and pray to Our Lady, her hostess. For, even though one believe in nothing, there come moments in life in which one instinctively turns to the religion of the temple nearest at hand. 
She remained thus prostrated for a considerable time, trembling, in truth, more than she prayed, frozen with terror at the breath of that furious multitude coming ever nearer; ignorant of the nature of the storm, of what was in progress, what they were doing, what they wanted; but having the presentiment of some dreadful issue. 
In the midst of this agonizing uncertainty, she heard footsteps near her. She raised her head. Two men, one of whom was carrying a lantern, entered her cell. She uttered a feeble cry. 
“Fear nothing,”said a voice which sounded familiar to her, “it is I.” 
“Who?”she asked. 
“Pierre Gringoire.” 
The name reassured her. She raised her eyes and saw it was indeed the poet. But at his side stood a dark figure shrouded from head to foot which struck her dumb with fear. 
“Ah,”said Gringoire in reproachful tones, “Djali recognised me before you did.” 
In truth, the little goat had not waited for Gringoire to name himself. He had scarcely crossed the threshold before she began rubbing herself fondly against his knee, covering the poet with caresses and with white hairs, for she was casting her coat, Gringoire returning her endearments. 
“Who is that with you?”asked the Egyptian in a low voice. 
“Make yourself easy,”answered Gringoire, “it is a friend of mine.” 
Then, setting down his lantern, the philosopher seated himself on the floor, clasping Djali enthusiastically in his arms. “Oh, ’tis an engaging beast! More remarkable, no doubt, for its beauty and cleanliness than for its size; but ingenious, subtle, and lettered as a grammarian! Come, my Djali, let us see if thou hast not forgotten any of thy pretty tricks! How does Ma?tre Jacques Charmolue when—” 
The man in black did not let him finish. He went up to him and pushed him roughly by the shoulder. Gringoire got up again. “You are right,”said he, “I had forgotten that we were in haste. However, that is no reason, master, for hustling people so roughly. My dear pretty one, your life is in danger, and Djali’s too. They want to hang you again. We are your friends, and have come to save you. Follow us.” 
“Is that true?”she cried. 
“Yes, quite true. Come without delay!” 
“I will,”she faltered; “but why does not your friend speak?” 
“Ah,”said Gringoire, “that is because his father and mother were somewhat fantastical people, and endowed him with a taciturn disposition.” 
She had perforce to content herself with this explanation. Gringoire took her by the hand, his companion picked up the lantern and walked ahead of them. The poor girl was bewildered with fear and let herself be led, the goat came skipping after them, so overjoyed at seeing Gringoire once more that she made him stumble at every other step by thrusting her horns between his legs. 
“Such is life,”said the philosopher as he just missed falling flat; “it is often our best friends that occasion our fall!” 
They rapidly descended the stairs of the towers, crossed the church, which was dark and totally deserted but echoing with the frightful uproar without, and issued by the Porte Rouge into the court-yard of the cloister. The cloister was deserted, the clergy having taken refuge in the bishop’s house, there to offer up their prayers together. The court-yard was empty save for a few terrified lackeys crouching in the darkest corners. They made their way to the small door leading out of the court-yard to the Terrain. The man in black opened it with a key he carried with him. Our readers are aware that the Terrain was a tongue of land enclosed by walls on the side next the city, belonging to the chapter of Notre-Dame, and forming the end of the island on the east, behind the church. They found this enclosure perfectly solitary. Here, even the noise in the air was sensibly less, the clamour of the assault reaching their ears confusedly and deadened. They could now hear the rustling of the leaves of the solitary tree planted at the point of the Terrain as the fresh breeze swept up from the river. Nevertheless, they were still very close to danger. The buildings nearest them were the bishop’s residence and the church. There were visible signs of great confusion within the bishop’s residence. Its dark mass was streaked with lights flitting from window to window, just as after burning a piece of paper, bright sparks run in a thousand fantastic lines across the dark mound of ashes. Beside it, the huge black towers of Notre-Dame rearing themselves over the long nave, sharply outlined against the vast red glow which filled the Parvis, looked like the gigantic andirons of some Cyclopean fire-place. 
What was visible of Paris on all sides seemed to float in a mingled atmosphere of light and shadow, such as Rembrandt has in some of his backgrounds. 
The man with the lantern walked straight to the point of the Terrain where, at the extreme edge of the water, were the decaying remains of a fence of stakes interlaced with laths, on which a low vine had spread its few starveling branches like the fingers of an open hand. Behind it, in the shadow of the fence, a little boat lay moored. The man motioned Gringoire and his companion to enter, and the goat jumped in after them. The man himself got in last. He cut the rope of the boat, pushed off from the shore with a long boat-hook, and seizing a pair of oars, seated himself in the bow and rowed with all his might out into mid-stream. The Seine runs very strong at this part, and he had considerable difficulty in clearing the point of the island. 
Gringoire’s first care, on entering the boat, was to take the goat upon his knees. He settled himself in the stern, and the girl, whom the unknown man inspired with indefinable uneasiness, seated herself as close as possible to the poet. 
As soon as our philosopher felt the boat in motion, he clapped his hands and kissed Djali between her horns. 
“Oh!”he cried, “now we are safe, all four of us!”and added with the air of a profound thinker: “We are indebted sometimes to fortune, sometimes to strategy, for the happy issue of a great undertaking.” 
The boat was making its way slowly across to the right bank. The gipsy girl regarded their unknown companion with secret terror. He had carefully t off the light of his dark-lantern, and was now only dimly perceptible in the bow of the boat, like a shadowy phantom. His hood, which was still pulled down, formed a kind of mask to his face, and each time that in rowing he opened his arms, his long hanging black sleeves gave them the appearance of enormous bat’s wings. As yet he had breathed not a word. There was no sound in the boat but the regular splash of the oars and the rippling of the water against the sides of the skiff. 
“Upon my soul!”suddenly exclaimed Gringoire, “we are as lively as a company of horned-owls! We observe a silence of Pythagoreans or of fishes! Pasque-Dieu! my friends, I wish that some one would converse with me. The human voice is music in the human ear. That is not my own saying, but of Didymus of Alexandria, and an illustrious saying it is! Certes, Didymus of Alexandria was no mediocre philosopher. One word, my pretty one—only one word, I entreat you. By the way, you used to make a droll little grimace, peculiar to yourself; do you make it still? You must know, my dear, that the Parliament has full jurisdiction over all places of sanctuary, and that you were in great peril in that little cell of yours in Notre-Dame? The little trochilus builds its nest in the crocodile’s jaws. Master, here’s the moon appearing again. If they only do not catch sight of us! We are performing a laudable act in saving mademoiselle, and yet they would string us up in the King’s name if they were to catch us. Alas, that every human action should have two handles! They blame in me what they crown in thee. One man admires C?sar, and abuses Catiline. Is that not so, master? What say you to this philosophy? I possess the philosophy of instinct, of nature, ut apes geometriam. What, no answer from anybody? You are both, it seems, in a very churlish mood! 
“You oblige me to do the talking alone. That is what we call in tragedy a monologue. Pasque-Dieu!—I would have you know that I am just come from King Louis XI, and that I have caught that oath from him—Pasque-Dieu! they are keeping up a glorious howling in the city! ’Tis a bad, wicked old king. He is all wrapped in furs. He still owes me the money for my epithalamium, and he all but hanged me to-night, which would have greatly hindered my career. He is niggardly towards men of merit. He would do well to read the four books of Salvian of Cologne—Adversus Avaritiam. In good sooth, he is a king very narrow in his dealings with men of letters, and who commits most barbarous cruelties—a sponge laid upon the people, and sucking up their money. His thrift is as the spleen that grows big upon the wasting of the other members. And so the complaints against the hardness of the times turn to murmurs against the prince. Under this mild and pious lord of ours the gibbets are weighed down with corpses, the blocks rot with gore, the prisons burst like overfilled sacks. This king robs with one hand, and hangs with the other. He is the purveyor for Mme. Gabelle1 and M. Gibbet. The high are stripped of their dignities, and the low are increasingly loaded with fresh burdens. ’Tis an exorbitant prince. I like not this monarch. What say you, my master?” 
The man in black let the garrulous poet babble on. He was still struggling against the strong full current that separates the prow of the city from the poop of the ?le Notre-Dame, now called the ?le Saint Louis. 
“By-the-bye, master,”Gringoire began again suddenly; “just as we reached the Parvis through the raging crowd of truands, did your reverence remark the poor little devil whose brains that deaf ringer of yours was in the act of dashing out against the parapet of the gallery of kings? I am near-sighted, and could not recognise him. Who can it have been, think you?” 
The unknown answered not a word, but he ceased rowing abruptly; his arms fell slack as if broken, his head dropped upon his breast, and Esmeralda heard him sigh convulsively. 
She started violently; she had heard sights like that before. 
The boat, left to itself, drifted for a few moments with the stream; but the man in black roused himself at last, grasped the oars again, and set the boat once more up-stream. He doubled the point of the ?le Notre-Dame, and made for the landing-place at the hay wharf. 
“Ah!”said Gringoire, “we are passing the Logis Barbeau. Look, master, at that group of black roofs that form such quaint angles over there, just underneath that mass of low-hanging gray cloud, through which the moon looks all crushed and spread abroad like the yolk of an egg when the shell is broken. ’Tis a very fine mansion. It has a chapel crowned by a small dome which is wholly lined with admirably carved enrichments. Just above it, you can see the bell-tower, very delicately perforated. It also possesses a pleasant garden comprising a pond, an aviary, an echo, a mall, a labyrinth, and wild beast house, and many bosky paths very agreeable to Venus. Besides, there’s a very naughty tree which they call the ‘pander,’ because it cloaked the pleasures of a notorious princess and a certain Constable of France—a man of wit and gallantry. Alas! we poor philosophers are to a Constable of France as the cabbage or radish-bed to the garden of the Louvre. Well, what matters it after all? Life is a mixture of good and evil for the great even as for us. Sorrow is ever by the side of joy, the spondee beside the dactyl. Master, I must tell you that story of the Logis Barbeau some day; it had a tragical ending. It happened in 1319, in the reign of Philippe V, the longest reign of all the kings of France. The moral of the story is that the temptations of the flesh are pernicious and malign. Let our eyes not linger too long upon our neighbour’s wife, however much our senses may be excited by her beauty. Fornication is a very libertine thought. Adultery, a prying into the pleasant delights of another. Ohé! the noise grows louder over there!” 
In truth, the uproar was increasing round Notre-Dame. They listened. They were plainly shouts of victory. Suddenly a hundred torches, their light flashing upon the helmets of men-at-arms, spread themselves rapidly over the church at every height, over the towers, the galleries, under the buttresses, appearing to be searching for something; and soon the distant shouts reached the ears of the fugitives: “The gipsy! the witch! Death to the Egyptian!” 
The unhappy girl dropped her face in her hands, and the unknown began rowing furiously towards the bank. Meanwhile our philosopher cogitated rapidly. He clasped the goat in his arms, and edged gently away from the gipsy, who pressed closer and closer to his side as her only remaining protection. 
Certainly Gringoire was on the horns of a cruel dilemma. He reflected that the goat too, by the existing legislation, was bound to be hanged if retaken, which would be a sad pity, poor little Djali! that two condemned females thus clinging on to him were more than he could manage, and that finally his companion asked for nothing better than to take charge of the gipsy girl. Nevertheless, a violent struggle went on in his mind, during which, like the Jupiter of the Iliad, he weighed the gipsy and the goat by turns in the balance, looking first at one and then at the other, his eyes moist with tears, while he muttered between his teeth, “And yet I cannot save both of you!” 
The bumping of the boat against the landing-place shook him out of his musings. The sinister hubbub still resounded through the city. The unknown rose, advanced to the girl, and made as if to help her ashore; but she evaded him, and laid hold of Gringoire’s sleeve; whereat he, in turn, being fully occupied with the goat, almost repulsed her. She accordingly sprang ashore by herself, but in such a state of fear and bewilderment that she knew not what she did or whither she was going. She stood thus a moment, stupefied, gazing down at the swift flowing water. When she some-what recovered her senses, she found herself alone on the landing-stage with the unknown man. Gringoire had apparently availed himself of the moment of their going ashore to vanish with the goat among the labyrinth of houses of the Rue Grenier sur l’Eau. 
The poor little gipsy ddered to find herself alone with this man. She strove to speak, to cry out, to call to Gringoire, but her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth, and no sound issued from her lips. Suddenly she felt the hand of the unknown grasp hers—a cold, strong hand. Her teeth chattered, she turned paler than the moonbeams that shone upon her. The man said not a word, but strode away in the direction of the Place de Grève, still holding her firmly by the hand. At that moment she had a dim sense of the irresistible force of destiny. All power of will forsook her; she let him drag her along, running to keep pace with him: the ground at this part of the quay rose somewhat, but to her they seemed to be rushing down an incline. 
She looked on all sides—not a single passenger to be seen; the quay was absolutely deserted. She heard no sound, she perceived no sign of life save in the glaring and tumultuous city, from which she was only separated by an arm of the river, and from which her own name reached her coupled with shouts of death. All the rest of Paris lay around her shadowy and silent as the grave. 
Meanwhile the stranger was dragging her along in the same silence and at the same rapid pace. She had no recollection of any of the streets they traversed. Passing a lighted window she made a last effort, and stopping suddenly, screamed, “Help!” 
The citizen at the window opened it, and showing himself in his night-shirt and a lamp in his hand, looked out stupidly on to the quay, muttered a few words which she could not catch, and closed his tter once more. Her last ray of hope was extinguished. 
The man in black proffered no remark; he held her fast and quickened his pace. She offered no further resistance, but followed him limp and hopeless. 
From time to time she gathered sufficient strength to ask in a voice broken by the roughness of the pavement and the breathless haste of their motion: “Who are you? Who are you?”But there was no reply. 
In this manner they presently reached an open square of considerable size. The moon shone faintly out; a sort of black cross was dimly visible standing in the middle. It was a gibbet. She saw this, and in a flash knew where she was. It was the Place de Grève. 
The man stood still, turned towards her and lifted his hood. “Oh,”she stammered, petrified with horror, “I knew it must be he!” 
It was the priest. He looked like a wraith in the spectral moonlight. 
“Listen,”said he; and she shivered at the sound of the ill-omened voice that she had not heard for so long. “Listen,”he went on, speaking with that broken and gasping utterance which bespeaks the profoundest inward upheaval. “We have arrived at our destination. I would speak with thee. This is the Grève; we have reached the extreme limit. Fate has delivered each of us into the hand of the other. Thou shalt have the disposing of my soul; I, of thy life. Here is a place and an hour beyond which there is no seeing. Listen to me, then. I will tell thee—but first, name not thy Ph?bus to me. (And while he spoke thus he paced to and fro, like a man incapable of standing still, dragging her with him.) Speak not of him! Mark me, if thou utterest his name, I know not what I shall do, but it will be something terrible.” 
Having relieved his mind of this, he stood motionless, like a body finding its centre of gravity. But his agitation was in nowise diminished; his voice sank deeper and deeper. 
“Turn not away from me thus. Hear me; ’tis a matter of the utmost import. First, this is what has happened—’tis no laughing matter, I warrant! What was I saying? Remind me! Ah—there is a decree of Parliament delivering thee over to execution again. I have but now succeeded in rescuing thee out of their hands. But they are on thy track. Behold!” 
He stretched his arm towards the city, where, in truth, the search seemed to be eagerly prosecuted. The noise of it drew nearer. The tower of the lieutenant’s house opposite the Grève was full of lights and bustle, and they could see soldiers running about the opposite quay with torches in their hands, shouting, “The gipsy! Where is the gipsy? Death to her! death!” 
“Thou seest plainly,”resumed the priest, “that they are in pursuit of thee and that I lie not. Oh, I love thee. Nay, speak not, open not thy lips, if it be to tell me that thou hatest me. I am resolved not to hear that again. I have just saved thee. Let me finish what I have to say. I can save thee altogether; I have prepared everything. It remains for thee to desire it. As thou wilt, so I can do.” 
He interrupted himself vehemently. “No, that is not what I should have said!” 
With a hurried step, and making her hasten too, for he had retained his grasp of her arm, he walked straight to the gibbet, and pointing to it: 
“Choose between us,”he said coldly. 
She wrenched herself from his grasp and fell at the foot of the gibbet, clasping her arms round that grim pillar; and, half turning her beautiful head, gazed at the priest over her shoulder. It might have been a Madonna at the foot of the Cross. The priest had remained transfixed, his finger pointing to the gibbet, motionless as a statue. 
At last the gipsy spoke: “This is less abhorrent to me than you are.” 
He let his arm drop slowly, and bent his eyes upon the ground in deepest dejection. “If these stones could speak,”he murmured, “they would say, ‘Here is, indeed, a most unhappy man!”’ 
“I love you,”he resumed, and the girl, still kneeling at the gibbet, her long hair falling around her, let him speak without interrupting him. His tones were plaintive now and gentle, contrasting sadly with the harsh disdain stamped upon his features. “Yes, in spite of all, ’tis perfectly true. Is there then nothing to show for this fire that consumes my heart! Alas! night and day—yes, girl, night and day—does that deserve no pity? ’Tis a love of the night and the day, I tell you—’tis torture! Oh! my torment is too great, my poor child. ’Tis a thing worthy of compassion, I do protest to you. You see, I speak in all gentleness. I would fain have you cease to abhor me. Look you, when a man loves a woman, it is not his fault! Oh, my God! What! will you then never forgive me? will you hate me ever thus? And is this the end? That is what makes me wicked, look you, and horrible to myself. You will not even look at me. You are, may-be, thinking of something else while I stand here talking to you, and we both are trembling on the brink of eternity! But above all things, speak not to me of that soldier! What! I might fling myself at your knees, I might kiss, not your feet—for that you will not have, but the ground under your feet! I might sob like a child, might tear from my breast, not words, but my very heart, to tell you that I love you—and all would be in vain—all! And yet, there is nothing in your soul but what is tender and merciful. Loving kindness beams from you; you are all goodness and sweetness, full of pity and grace. Alas! your harshness is for me alone. Oh, bitter fate!” 
He buried his face in his hands. The girl could hear him weeping; it was the first time. Standing thus, and shaken by sobs, he made amore wretched and suppliant figure even than on his knees. He wept on for a while. 
“Enough,”he said presently, the first violence of his emotion spent. “I find no words. And yet I had well pondered what I would say to you. And now I tremble and shiver, I grow faint-hearted at the decisive moment. I feel that something transcendent wraps us round, and my tongue falters. Oh, I shall fall to the ground if you will not take pity on me, pity on yourself! Condemn us not both to perdition. Didst thou but know how much I love thee!—what a heart is mine! the desertion of all virtue, the abandonment of myself! A doctor, I mock at science; a gentleman, I tarnish my name; a priest, I make of my missal a pillow of wantonness—I spit in the face of my Redeemer! And all for thee, enchantress; to be more worthy of thy hell! And yet thou rejectest the damned! Oh, let me tell thee all—more than this, something still more horrible, more horrible—!” 
With these last words his manner became utterly distraught. He was silent a moment, then, in a stern voice and as if addressing himself: 
“Cain!”he cried, “what has thou done with thy brother?” 
There was a pause, and then he began again. “What have I done with him, Lord? I took him, I reared him, I nourished him, loved him, idolized him, and—I killed him! Yes, Lord, before my very eyes they dashed his head against the stones of thy house; and it was because of me, because of this woman, because of her—” 
Madness gleamed from his sunken eyes; his voice dropped away; two or three times he repeated mechanically, and with long pauses between, like the last prolonged vibrations of the strokes of a bell, “Because of her—because of her—”At last, though his lips still moved, no articulate sound came from them, then suddenly he fell in a heap like a house crumbling to pieces, and remained motionless on the ground, his head on his knees. 
A faint movement of the girl, drawing away her foot from under him, brought him to himself. He slowly swept his hand over his haggard cheeks, and gazed for some moments at his fingers, surprised to find them wet. “What,”he murmured, “have I been weeping?” 
He turned suddenly upon the gipsy with nameless anguish. 
“Woe is me! thou canst see me weep unmoved! Child, knowest thou that such tears are molten lava? Is it then indeed true, that in the man we hate nothing can melt us? Thou wouldst see me die and wouldst laugh. Oh, I cannot see thee die! One word, one single word of kindness! I ask not that thou shouldst say thou lovest me; tell me only that thou art willing I should save thee. That will suffice; I will save thee in return for that. If not—oh, time flies! I entreat thee, by all that is sacred, wait not till I turn to stone again like this gibbet, that yearns for thee also! Remember that I hold both our destinies in my hand; that I am frenzied—it is terrible—that I may let everything go, and that there lies beneath us, unhappy girl, a bottomless pit wherein my fall will follow thine to all eternity! One word of kindness! Say one word! but one word!” 
Her lips parted to answer him. He flung himself on his knees before her to receive with adoration the words, perchance of relenting, that should fall from them. 
“You are an assassin!”she said. 
The priest clasped her furiously in his arms and burst into a hideous laugh. 
“Good, then; yes, an assassin!”he cried, “and I will have thee. Thou wilt not have me for a slave; thou shalt have me for thy master. I will take my prey; I have a den whither I will drag thee. Thou shalt follow me; thou must follow me, or I will deliver thee up! Thou must die, my fair one, or be mine! belong to me, the priest, the apostate, the murderer! and this very night, hearest thou? Come! kiss me, little fool! The grave or my bed!” 
His eyes flashed with rage and lust. Froth stood on the lascivious lips that covered the girl’s neck with frenzied kisses. She struggled fiercely in his arms. 
“Bite me not, monster!”she shrieked. “Oh, the hateful, venomous monk! Let me go, or I tear out thy vile gray hairs and fling them in handfuls in thy face!” 
He turned red, then white, then loosed his hold on her with a darkling look. Thinking herself victorious, she went on: “I tell thee I belong to my Ph?bus; that it is Ph?bus I love; Ph?bus, who is fair to look upon. Thou, priest, art old, thou art frightful. Get thee gone!” 
He uttered a sudden scream, like some poor wretch under the branding-iron. “Die, then!”said he, grinding his teeth. She caught his terrible look and turned to fly; but he seized her, shook her, threw her on the ground, and walked rapidly towards the corner of the Tour-Roland, dragging her after him along the pavement by her little hands. 
Arrived at the corner of the Place, he turned round to her. “For the last time, wilt thou be mine?” 
“No!” 
The next moment, “Gudule! Gudule!”he cried in a loud voice, “here is the gipsy! take thy revenge!” 
The girl felt herself suddenly seized by the arm. She looked up, a skeleton arm was stretched through the window in the wall and was holding her in a grip of iron. 
“Hold her fast!”said the priest. “It is the Egyptian woman escaped. Do not let her go; I go to fetch the sergeants. Thou shalt see her hang.” 
A guttural laugh from the other side of the wall made answer to these bloodthirsty words. The gipsy saw the priest hurry away towards the Pont Notre-Dame, from which direction came the clatter of horses’ hoofs. 
The girl had recognised the evil-minded recluse. Panting with terror, she stove to free herself. In vain she writhed and turned in agony and despair, the other held her with incredible strength. The lean bony fingers that clutched her were clenched and met round her flesh—that hand seemed rivetted to her arm. It was more than a chain, more than an iron ring: it was a pair of pincers endowed with life and understanding, issuing from a wall. 
Exhausted at last, she fell against the wall, and the fear of death came upon her. She thought of all that made life desirable—of youth, the sight of the sky, all the varying aspects of nature, of love and Ph?bus, of all that was going from her and all that was approaching, of the priest who was even now betraying her, of the executioner he would bring, of the gibbet standing ready. Terror mounted even to the roots of her hair, and she heard the sinister laugh of the recluse as she hissed at her: “Ha! ha! thou art going to be hanged!” 
She turned her fading eyes towards the window and saw the wolfish face of the sachette glaring at her through the bars. 
“What have I done to you?”she gasped, almost past speaking. 
The recluse made no answer, but fell to muttering in a sing-song, rasping, mocking tone: “Daughter of Egypt! daughter of Egypt! daughter of Egypt!” 
The unfortunate Esmeralda let her head droop on her breast, understanding that this was no human being. 
Suddenly, as if the gipsy’s question had taken all this time to reach her apprehension, the recluse exclaimed: 
“What hast thou done to me, sayest thou? Ah, what hast thou done to me, gipsy! Well, listen. I had a child —I—hearest thou?—I had a child—a child, I tell thee! The fairest little daughter! My Agnes—”and she paused and kissed something distractedly in the gloom. “Well, seest thou, daughter of Egypt, they took my child from me; they stole my child! That is what thou hast done to me!” 
To which the poor girl answered, like the lamb in the fable: “Alas! perhaps I was not born then!” 
“Oh, yes,”rejoined the recluse, “thou must have been born then. Thou wert one of them. She would be about thy age—thou seest therefore! For fifteen years have I been here; fifteen years have I suffered; fifteen years have I been smiting my head against these four walls. I tell thee that they were gipsy women that stole her from me—dost thou hear?—and that devoured her with their teeth. Hast thou a heart? Picture to thyself a child playing, sucking, sleeping —so sweet, so innocent! Well, that—all that—was what they stole from me, what they killed! The God in heaven knows it! To-day it is my turn; I shall eat of the Egyptian! Oh, that these bars were not so close, that I might bite thee! But my head is too big. The poor, pretty thing! while she slept! And if they did wake her as they took her away, she might scream as she would; I was not there! Ah, you gipsy mothers that ate my child, come hither now and look at yours!”And she laughed again and ground her teeth —the two actions were alike in that frenzied countenance. 
Day was beginning to dawn. As the wan gray light spread gradually over the scene, the gibbet was growing more and more distinct in the centre of the Place. On the other side, in the direction of the Pont Notre-Dame, the poor girl thought she heard the sound of cavalry approaching. 
“Madame!”she cried, clasping her hands and falling on her knees, dishevelled, wild, frantic with terror; “Madame! have pity! They are coming. I never harmed you: will you see me die in this horrible manner before your very eyes? You have pity for me, I am sure. It is too dreadful. Let me fly; leave go of me, for pity’s sake! I cannot die like that!” 
“Give me back my child!”said the recluse. 
“Mercy! mercy!” 
“Give me back my child!” 
“Let me go, in Heaven’s name!” 
“Give me back my child!” 
Once again the girl sank down exhausted, powerless, her eyes already glazed, as if in death. 
“Alas!”she stammered, “you seek your child; I—I seek my parents.” 
“Give me back my little Agnes!”Gudule went on. “Thou knowest not where she is? Then die! I will tell thee. I was a wanton, I had a child, they stole my child. It was the gipsies. Thou seest plainly that thou must die. When thy mother the gipsy comes to seek for thee, I shall say to her, ‘Mother, behold that gibbet!’ Else give me back my child! Dost thou know where she is, my little girl? Here, let me show thee. Here is her shoe; ’tis all that’s left to me of her. Dost know where the fellow to it is? If thou knowest, tell me, and I will go on my knees to fetch it, even to the other end of the world.” 
So saying, she thrust her other hand through the window and held up before the gipsy girl the little embroidered shoe. There was just light enough to distinguish its shape and its colour. 
“Let me see that shoe!”said the gipsy with a start. “Oh, God in heaven!”And at the same time, with the hand she had free, she eagerly opened the little bag she wore about her neck. 
“Go to, go to!”muttered Gudule; “search in thy devil’s amulet—” 
She broke off suddenly, her whole frame shook, and in a voice that seemed to come from the innermost depths of her being, she cried: “My daughter!” 
For the gipsy had drawn from the amulet bag a little shoe the exact counterpart of the other. To the shoe was attached a slip of parchment, on which was written this couplet: 
“When thou the fellow of this shalt see, 
Thy mother will stretch out her arms to thee. 
Quicker than a flash of lightning the recluse had compared the two shoes, read the inscription on the parchment, then pressed her face, radiant with ineffable joy, against the cross-bars of the loophole, crying again: 
“My daughter! my daughter!” 
“Mother!”returned the gipsy girl. 
Here description fails us. 
But the wall and the iron bars divided them. “Oh, the wall!”cried the recluse. “Oh, to see her and not embrace her! Thy hand—give me thy hand!” 
The girl put her hand through the opening, and the mother threw herself upon it, pressing her lips to it, remaining thus lost to everything but that kiss, giving no sign of life but a sob that shook her frame at long intervals. For the poor mother was weeping in torrents in the silence and darkness of her cell, like rain falling in the night; pouring out in a flood upon that adored hand all that deep dark font of tears which her grief had gathered in her heart, drop by drop, during fifteen long years. 
Suddenly she lifted her head, threw back her long gray hair from her face, and without a word began tearing at the bars of her window with the fury of a lioness. But the bars stood firm. She then went and fetched from the back of her cell a large paving-stone, which served her for a pillow, and hurled it against them with such force that one of the bars broke with a shower of sparks, and a second blow completely smashed the old iron cross-bar that barricaded the hole. Then, using her whole force, she succeeded in loosening and wrenching out the rusty stumps. There are moments when a woman’s hands are possessed of superhuman strength. 
The passage cleared—and it had taken her less than a minute to do it—she leaned out, seized her daughter round the waist, and drew her into the cell. 
“Come,”she murmured, “let me drag thee out of the pit.” 
As soon as she had her daughter in the cell, she set her gently on the ground; then catching her up in her arms again, as if she were still only the baby Agnes, she carried her to and fro in the narrow cell, intoxicated, beside herself with joy, shouting, singing, kissing her daughter, babbling to her, laughing, melting into tears—all at the same time, all with frenzied vehemence. 
“My daughter! my daughter!”said she. “I have my daughter again—’tis she! God has given her back to me. Hey there! come all of you! Is there anybody to see that I’ve got my daughter? Lord Jesus, how beautiful she is! Thou hast made me wait fifteen years, oh, my God, but it was only that thou mightest give her back to me so beautiful. And the gipsy women had not eaten her! Who told me that they had? My little girl—my little one—kiss me. Those good gipsies! I love the gipsies. So it is thou indeed? And it was that that made my heart leap every time thou didst pass by. And to think that I took it for hatred! Forgive me, my Agnes, forgive me! Thou thoughtest me very wicked, didst thou not? I love thee. Hast thou then that little mark still on thy neck? Let me see. Yes, she has it still. Oh, how fair thou art! ’Twas from me you got those big eyes, my lady. Kiss me. I love thee. What is it to me that other women have children? I can laugh at them now! Let them only come and look. Here is mine. Look at her neck, her eyes, her hair, her hand. Find me anything as beautiful as that! Oh, I’ll warrant you she’ll have plenty of lovers, this one! I have wept for fifteen years. All my beauty that I lost has gone to her. Kiss me!” 
She said a thousand tender and extravagant things to her, the beauty of which lay in their tone, disarranged the poor child’s garments till she blushed, smoothed her silken tresses with her hand, kissed her foot, her knee, her forehead, her eyes, went into raptures over everything, the girl letting her do as she would, only repeating at intervals, very low and with ineffable sweetness the word “Mother!” 
“Hark thee, my little girl,”resumed the recluse, interrupting her words constantly with kisses, “hark thee, I shall love thee and take good care of thee. We will go away from here. We are going to be so happy! I have inherited somewhat in Reims—in our country. Thou knowest Reims, —thou canst not, thou wert too little. Couldst thou but know how pretty thou wert at four months old—such tiny feet that people came all the way from épernay, five leagues off, to see them. We shall have a field and a house. Thou shalt sleep in my own bed. Oh, my God! who would believe it? I have my daughter again!” 
“Oh, mother!”said the girl, finding strength at last to speak in her emotion, “the gipsy woman spoke true. There was a good gipsy woman among our people who died last year, and who had always taken care of me like a foster-mother. It was she who hung this little bag round my neck. She used always to say to me: ‘Child, guard this trinket well; ’tis a treasure; it will make thee find thy mother again. Thou wearest thy mother about thy neck!’ She foretold it—the gipsy woman.” 
Again the sachette clasped her daughter in her arms. “Come, let me kiss thee; thou sayest that so prettily. When we are back in our own home, we will put the little shoes on the feet of an Infant Jesus in a church. We owe so much to the dear Virgin. Lord, what a sweet voice thou hast! When thou wert speaking to me just now it was just like music. Oh, Father in heaven, have I found my child again? Could any one believe such a story? Surely, nothing can kill one, for I have not died of joy.”And she began clapping her hands and laughing as she cried: “Oh, we are going to be so happy!” 
At that moment the cell resounded to the clank of arms and the galloping of horses, coming apparently from the Pont Notre-Dame and hastening nearer and nearer along the quay. The girl threw herself in anguish into the sachette’s arms. 
“Save me! save me! Mother, they are coming!” 
The recluse grew pale. “Oh, heaven! what dost thou say? I had forgotten; they are pursuing thee. What hast thou done?” 
“I know not,”answered the unhappy girl, “but I am condemned to death.” 
“To death!”said Gudule, staggering as if struck by a thunder-bolt. “Death!”she repeated slowly, and fixed her daughter with wide staring eyes. 
“Yes, mother,”repeated the girl distractedly, “they want to kill me. They are coming to hang me. That gallows is for me. Save me! save me! Here they come; oh, save me!” 
The recluse stood for a moment as if petrified, then shook her head in doubt, and finally burst into a fit of laughter—the horrid laughter of her former days. 
“Oh, oh, no! ’tis a dream thou art telling me. What, I should have lost her for fifteen years, and then should find her, but only for a minute! And they would take her from me now—now that she is so beautiful, that she is a woman grown, that she speaks to me and loves me! And now they would come and devour her under my very eyes—who am her mother! Oh, no, such things are not possible. God would never permit it.” 
The cavalcade now apparently made a halt, and a distant voice could be heard saying: “This way, Messire Tristan! The priest told us we should find her at the Rat-Hole.”The tramp of horses commenced again. 
The recluse started up with a cry of despair: “Fly, fly, my child! It all comes back to me now. Thou art right. They seek thy death! Horror! Malediction!—Fly!” 
She thrust her head through the window, but drew it back again hastily. 
“Stay where you are,”she said in a quick, terrified whisper, convulsively pressing the hand of the girl, who was already more dead than alive. “Keep still, do not breathe, there are soldiers everywhere. Thou canst not go out. It is too late.” 
Her eyes were dry and burning. For a few moments she did not speak, but paced her cell with rapid steps, stopping at intervals to pluck out whole strands of her gray hair and tear them with her teeth. 
“They are coming,”she said suddenly; “I will speak to them. Do thou hide in that corner. They will not see thee. I will tell them that thou hast escaped—that I let thee go!” 
She carried her daughter to a corner of the cell which could not be seen from outside; made her crouch down; disposed her carefully so that neither foot nor hand came beyond the shadow; spread her long black hair round her to cover the white robe, and set up the pitcher and flag-stone, the only furniture she had, in front of her, trusting that they would conceal her. This done, finding herself calmer, she knelt down and prayed. The day, which was only just dawning, left abundant darkness still in the Rat-Hole. 
At this moment the voice of the priest—that voice from hell—sounded close to the cell, crying: “This way, Captain Ph?bus de Chateaupers!” 
At that name, uttered by that voice, Esmeralda, cowering in her corner, made a movement. 
“Do not stir!”murmured Gudule. 
She had scarcely spoken before a tumultuous crowd of men and horses stopped in front of the cell. The mother rose hastily and posted herself at the loophole to cover the aperture. She beheld a strong body of armed men, horse and foot, drawn up in the Grève. Their commander dismounted and came towards her. 
“Old woman,”said this man, whose face wore a repulsive expression, “we are seeking a witch to hang her. They tell us you had hold of her.” 
The poor mother assumed the most unconscious air she was able. 
“I do not quite take your meaning,”she answered. 
“Tête-Dieu! Then what was this story of the crazy Archdeacon’s?”said Tristan. “Where is he?” 
“My lord,”said one of the soldiers, “he has disappeared.” 
“Go to, old hag,”the commander went on; “lie not to me. A witch was given into thy hand. What hast thou done with her?” The recluse feared to deny altogether lest she should arouse suspicion, so she answered in a truthful but surly tone: 
“If you mean a strong young wench that they thrust into my hands a while ago, I can tell you that she bit me, and I let her go. That’s all I know. Leave me in peace.” 
The commander pulled a disappointed face. “Let me have no lies, old spectre!”he said. “My name is Tristan l’Hermite, and I am the King’s Gossip. Tristan l’Hermite, dost thou hear?”and he added, casting his eyes round the Place de Grève, “’tis a name that has echoes here.” 
“And if you were Satan l’Hermite,”retorted Gudule, gathering hope, “I would have nothing different to say to you, nor would I be afraid of you!” 
“Tête-Dieu!”exclaimed Tristan, “here’s a vixen! So the witch girl escaped! And which way did she go?” 
“Through the Rue du Mouton, I think,”answered Gudule carelessly. 
Tristan turned and signed to his men to prepare for resuming their march. The recluse breathed again. 
“Monseigneur,”said an archer suddenly, “ask the old beldame how it is that her window-bars are broken thus?” 
This question plunged the wretched mother back into despair. Still she did not lose all presence of mind. “They were always so,”she stammered. 
“Bah!”returned the archer, “only yesterday they made a fine black cross that inclined one to devotion.” 
Tristan glanced askance at the recluse. “The beldame seems uneasy,”he said. 
The unhappy woman felt that all depended on her keeping up her self-possession, and so, with death in her heart, she began to laugh at them. Mothers are capable of efforts such as this. 
“Bah!”said she, “the man is drunk. ’Tis more than a year since the back of a cart laden with stones ran against my window and burst the bars. I mind me well how I railed at the driver.” 
“It’s true,”said another archer, “I was there.” 
There are always people to be found in all places who have seen everything. This unlooked-for testimony revived the spirits of the recluse, to whom this interrogatory was like crossing an abyss on the edge of a knife. 
But she was doomed to a continual see-saw between hope and alarm. 
“If a cart had done that,”resumed the first soldier, “the stumps of the bars must have been driven inward, whereas they have been forced outward.” 
“Ha! ha!”said Tristan to the soldier, “thou hast the nose of a cross-examiner at the Chatelet! Answer what he says, old woman!” 
“Mon Dieu!”she exclaimed, reduced to the last extremity, and bursting into tears in spite of herself; “I swear to you, my lord, that it was a cart that broke those bars: you hear that man say he saw it. Besides, what has that to do with your gipsy?” 
“H’m!”growled Tristan. 
“Diable!”continued the soldier, flattered by the provost’s commendation; “the iron looks quite fresh broken.” 
Tristan shook his head. Gudule turned pale. “How long is it, say you, since the affair of the cart?” 
“A month; a fortnight may-be, my lord; I do not remember.” 
“At first she said above a year!”remarked the soldier. 
“That looks queer!”said the provost. 
“Monseigneur!”she cried, still filling the window, and trembling lest suspicion should prompt them to put their heads through and look into the cell; “monseigneur, I swear to you that it was a cart that broke this grating. I swear it by all the holy angels in paradise. If it was not a cart, may I go to everlasting perdition and deny my God!” 
“Thou art very urgent in that oath of thine!”said Tristan with his inquisitorial glance. 
The poor creature felt her assurance ebbing fast away. She was making blunders, and had a terrible consciousness that she was not saying what she should have said. 
Here another soldier came up, crying: “Monseigneur, the old wife lies. The witch cannot have got away by the Rue du Mouton, for the chain was across the street all night, and the watchman saw no one pass.” 
“What hast thou to say to that?”asked Tristan, whose countenance grew every moment more forbidding. 
She strove to offer a bold front to this fresh incident. “Why, monseigneur, I do not know; I must have made a mistake, I suppose. In fact, now I come to think of it, I believe she crossed the water.” 
“That’s at the opposite side of the Place,”said the provost. “And then it’s not very likely that she should want to return to the city where they were making search for her. Thou liest, old woman!” 
“Besides,”added the first soldier, “there’s no boat either on this side or the other.” 
“She will have swam across then,”said the recluse, fighting her ground inch by inch. 
“Do women swim?”said the soldier. 
“Tête-Dieu! old woman, thou liest, thou liest!”cried Tristan angrily. “I’ve a good mind to leave the witch and take thee instead. A little quarter of an hour’s question would soon drag the truth out of thy old throat. Come! Thou shalt go along with us!” 
She caught eagerly at these words. 
“As you will, my lord; do as you say. The question! I am quite ready to submit to it. Carry me with you. Quick! let us go at once!—and meantime,”thought she, “my daughter can escape.” 
“Mort-Dieu!”said the provost, “what a thirst for the rack! This crazy old wife’s quite beyond my comprehension.” 
A grizzled old sergeant of the watch now stepped out of the ranks and addressed the provost. “Crazy indeed, monseigneur! If she let the gipsy go, tis not her fault, for she has no love for gipsy women. For fifteen years I’ve held the watch here, and every night I hear her calling down curses without end on these Bohemian women. If the one we’re looking for is, as I believe, the little dancer with the goat, she hated her beyond all the rest.” 
Gudule gathered up her strength: 
“Yes, her beyond all the rest,”she repeated. 
The unanimous testimony of the men of the watch confirmed what the old sergeant had said. Tristan l’Hermite, despairing of getting anything out of the recluse, turned his back on her, and, with irrepressible anxiety, she saw him slowly return to his horse. 
“Come!”he growled between his teeth. “Forward! we must continue the search. I will not sleep till the gipsy has been hanged.” 
Nevertheless, he lingered a moment before mounting. Gudule hung between life and death as she saw him scanning the Place with the restless look of the hound that instinctively feels himself near the lair of his quarry, and is reluctant to go away. At last he shook his head, and sprang into the saddle. 
Gudule’s heart, so horribly contracted, now expanded, and she whispered, with a glance towards her daughter, whom she had not ventured to look at since the arrival of her pursuers, “Saved!” 
All this time the poor child had remained in her corner, without breathing, without moving a muscle, death staring her in the face. She had lost no word of the scene between Gudule and Tristan, and each pang of her mother’s had echoed in her own heart. She had heard each successive crack of the thread that held her suspended over the abyss, and twenty times she thought to see it snap. Only now did she begin to take breath and feel the ground steady under her feet. 
At this moment she heard a voice call to the provost: “Corb?uf! Monsieur the Provost, it’s none of my business as a man-at-arms to hang witches. The rabble populace is put down; I leave you to do your own work alone. You will permit me to return to my company, who are meanwhile without a captain.” 
The voice was that of Ph?bus de Chateaupers. What passed in her breast is impossible to describe. He was there, her friend, her protector, her safeguard, her refuge—her Ph?bus! She started to her feet, and before her mother could prevent her had sprung to the loophole, crying: 
“Ph?bus! To me, my Ph?bus!” 
Ph?bus was no longer there. He had just galloped round the corner of the Rue de la Coutellerie. But Tristan had not yet gone away. 
The recluse rushed at her daughter with a snarl of rage and dragged her violently back, her nails entering the flesh of the girl’s neck. But the mother turned tigress has no thought of careful handling. Too late. Tristan had seen it all. 
“Hé! hé!”he chuckled with a grin that bared all his teeth and made his face wolfish; “two mice in the trap!” 
“I suspected as much,”said the soldier. Tristan slapped him on the shoulder. “Thou are a good cat! Now, then,”he added, “where is Henriet Cousin?” 
A man, having neither the dress nor the appearance of a soldier, stepped out from their ranks. He wore a suit half gray, half brown, with leather sleeves, and carried a coil of rope in his great hand. This man was in constant attendance on Tristan, who was in constant attendance on Louis XI. 
“Friend,”said Tristan l’Hermite, “I conclude that this is the witch we are in search of. Thou wilt hang me that one. Hast thou thy ladder?” 
“There is one under the shed at the Maison-aux-Piliers,”answered the man. “Is it at the gallows over there we’re to do the job?”he continued, pointing to the gibbet. 
“Yes.” 
“So, ho!”said the man, with a coarse laugh more brutal even than the provost’s, “we shall not have far to go!” 
“Make haste,”said Tristan, “and do thy laughing afterward.” 
Since the moment when Tristan had seen her daughter, and all hope was lost, the recluse had not uttered a word. She had thrown the poor girl, half dead, into a corner of the cell and resumed her post at the window, her two hands spread on the stone sill like two talons. In this attitude she faced the soldiers unflinchingly with a gaze that was once more savage and distraught. As Henriet Cousin approached the cell, she fixed him with such a wild beast glare that he shrank back. 
“Monseigneur,”said he, turning back to the provost, “which must I take?” 
“The young one.” 
“So much the better; the old one seems none too easy.” 
“Poor little dancer!”said the sergeant of the watch. 
Henriet Cousin advanced once more to the window. The mother’s eye made his own droop. 
“Madame,”he began timidly— 
She interrupted him in a whisper of concentrated fury: 
“What wilt thou?” 
“It is not you,”he said, “but the other one.” 
“What other one?” 
“The young one.” 
She shook her head violently. “There is nobody! nobody! nobody!”she cried. 
“Yes, there is!”returned the hangman, “as you very well know. Let me take the girl. I mean no harm to you.” 
“Ah! ha!”she said, with a wild laugh; “you mean no harm to me?” 
“Let me take the other, good wife; ’tis the provost’s orders.” 
“There is nobody else,”she repeated distractedly. 
“But I tell you there is!”retorted the hangman. “We all saw the two of you.” 
“Thou hadst best look, then,”said the recluse with a mad chuckle. “Thrust thy head through the window.” 
The hangman considered the nails of the mother, and dared not. 
“Haste thee now!”cried Tristan, who had drawn up his men in a circle round the Rat-Hole, and stationed himself on horseback near the gibbet. 
Henriet returned to the provost in perplexity. He laid the coil of rope on the ground, and was twisting his cap nervously in his hands. 
“Monseigneur,”he asked, “how must I get in?” 
“By the door.” 
“There is none.” 
“Then by the window.” 
“It is too narrow.” 
“Widen it, then,”said Tristan impatiently. “Hast thou no pickaxes?” 
The mother, still on guard at the opening to her den, watched them intently. She had ceased to hope, ceased to wish for anything. All she knew was that she would not have them take her daughter from her. 
Henriet Cousin went and fetched the box of executioner’s tools from the shed of the Maison-aux-Piliers; also, from the same place, the double ladder, which he immediately set up against the gibbet. Five or six of the provost’s men provided themselves with crowbars and pickaxes, and Tristan accompanied them to the window of the cell. 
“Old woman,”said the provost in stern tones, “give up the girl to us quietly.” 
She gazed at him vacantly. 
“Tête-Dieu!”exclaimed Tristan, “why dost thou hinder us from hanging this witch as the King commands?” 
The wretched creature broke into her savage laugh again. 
“Why do I hinder you? She is my daughter.” 
The tone in which she uttered these words sent a dder even through Henriet Cousin himself. 
“I am sorry,”returned the provost. “But it is the good pleasure of the King.” 
Whereat she cried, her dreadful laugh ringing louder than before: 
“What is he to me—thy King? I tell thee it is my daughter.” 
“Break through the wall!”commanded Tristan. 
To do this it was only necessary to loosen a course of stone underneath the loophole. When the mother heard the picks and lever sapping her fortress, she uttered a blood-curdling cry, and then started running round and round her cell with startling quickness—a wild-beast habit she had learned from her long years of confinement in that cage. She said no word, but her eyes blazed. The soldiers felt their blood run cold. 
Suddenly she snatched up her stone in both hands, laughed, and hurled it at the workmen. The stone, ill-thrown, for her hands were trembling, touched no one, but fell harmless at the feet of Tristan’s horse. She gnashed her teeth. 
Meanwhile, though the sun had not yet risen, it was broad daylight, and the old, moss-grown chimneys of the Maison-aux-Piliers flushed rosy red. It was the hour when the windows of the earliest risers in the great city were thrown cheerfully open. A countryman or so, a few fruit-sellers, going to the markets on their asses, were beginning to cross the Grève, and halted for a moment to gaze with astonishment at the group of soldiers gathered about the Rat-Hole, then passed on their way. 
The recluse had seated herself on the ground close beside her daughter, covering her with her body, her eyes fixed, listening to the poor child, who, as she lay motionless, kept murmuring the one word, “Ph?bus! Ph?bus!” 
As the work of demolition seemed to advance, so the mother drew mechanically farther back, pressing the girl closer and closer against the wall. All at once she saw the stone, from which she had never taken her eyes, begin to give way, and hear the voice of Tristan urging on the men. At this she awoke from the kind of stupor into which she had fallen for a few moments, and cried aloud; and her voice as she spoke now lacerated the ear like the rasp of a saw, now faltered and choked as if every kind of execration crowded to her lips to burst forth at once. “Ho, ho, ho! but ’tis horrible! Robbers! brigands! Are ye truly coming to take my daughter from me? I tell you, ’tis my own child! Oh, cowards! oh, hangman’s slaves! miserable hired cut-throats and assassins! Help! help! Fire! And can they have the heart to take my child from me thus? Who is it then they call the good God in heaven?” 
Then, addressing herself to Tristan, foaming, glaring, bristling, on all-fours like a panther: “Now come and dare to take my daughter from me. Dost thou not understand when this woman tells thee ’tis her daughter? Dost thou know what it is to have a child, eh, thou wolf? Hast thou never lain with thy mate? Hast never had a cub by her? 
And if thou hast little ones, when they howl, is there never an answering stir within thee?” 
“Down with the stone,”said Tristan; “it is loose enough now.” 
The crowbars heaved the heavy block. It was the mother’s last bulwark. She threw herself upon it, trying to hold it in its place; she furrowed the stone with her nails—in vain; the great mass, displaced by half a dozen men, escaped her grasp and slid slowly to the ground along the iron levers. 
The mother, seeing the breach effected, then cast herself across the opening, barring it with her body, writhing, striking her head against the floor, and shrieking in a voice so hoarse with anguish and fatigue that the words were hardly articulate: 
“Help! Fire! Help!” 
“Now, then, take the girl,”said Tristan, imperturbably. 
The mother faced the soldiers with so menacing a glare that they seemed more fain to retreat than advance. 
“Forward!”cried the provost. “Henriet Cousin—you!” 
No one advanced a step. 
The provost rapped out an oath. “Tête-Christ! my soldiers afraid of a woman!” 
“Monseigneur,”ventured Henriet, “you call that a woman?” 
“She has a bristling mane like a lion,”said another. 
“Forward!”repeated the provost. “The gap is large enough. Enter three abreast, as at the breach of Pontoise. Let’s make an end of it, death of Mahomet! The first man that draws back, I cleave him in two!” 
Fixed thus between the devil and the deep sea, the soldiers hesitated a moment, then, deciding for the lesser evil, advanced upon the Rat-Hole. 
When the recluse saw this, she swept back her long hair from her eyes, struggled to her knees, and dropped her bleeding and emaciated hands upon them. Great tears welled up one by one to her eyes and rolled down a long furrow in her cheeks, like a torrent down the bed it has hollowed out. And then she began to speak, but in a voice so suppliant, so gentle, so submissive and heart-breaking that more than one hardened old fire-eater in Tristan’s company furtively wiped his eyes. 
“Good sirs,”said she, “messieurs the sergeants, one word. There is a thing I must tell you. This is my daughter, look you—my dear little child who was lost to me! Listen, ’tis quite a story. It may surprise you, but I know messieurs the sergeants well. They were always good to me in the days when the little urchins threw stones at me because I was a wanton. Look you; you will leave me my child when you know all! I was a poor wanton. The gipsies stole her from me—by the same token I have kept her shoe these fifteen years. Look, here it is. She had a foot like that. At Reims. La Chantefleurie! Rue Folle-Peine! Perhaps you knew of this? It was I. In your young days; then it was a merry time, and there were merry doings! You will have pity on me, won’t you, good sirs? The gipsies stole her, and hid her from me for fifteen years. I thought her dead. Picture to yourself, my good friends, that I thought her dead. I have passed fifteen years here, in this stone cave, without any fire in winter. That is hard. The poor, sweet little shoe! I cried so long to God that he heard me. You will not take her from me, I am sure. Even if ’twere me you wanted, I would not mind; but a child of sixteen! Leave her a little while longer to live in the sunshine! What has she done to you? Nothing at all. Nor I either. If you only knew—I have no one but her. I am old—this is a blessing sent me from the Holy Virgin! And then, you are all so good! you did not know that it was my daughter; but now you know. Oh, I love her! Monsieur the Chief Provost, I would rather have a stab in my body than a scratch on her little finger! You have the air of a kind gentleman! What I tell you now explains the whole matter, surely? Oh! if you have a mother, sir—you are the captain, leave me my child! See how I entreat you on my knees, as we pray to Jesus Christ! I ask not alms of any one. Sirs, I come from Reims; I have a little field from my uncle Mahiet Pradon. I am not a beggar. I want nothing—nothing but my child! Oh, I want to keep my child! The good God, who is master over all, has not given her back to me for nothing. The 
King!—you say the King! It cannot give him much pleasure that they should kill my daughter! Besides, the King is good! She is my daughter; mine, not the King’s! She does not belong to him! I will go away! we will both go. After all, just two women passing along the road—a mother and her daughter; you let them go their way in peace! Let us go; we come from Reims. Oh, you are kind, messieurs the sergeants. I have nothing to say against you. You will not take my darling; it is not possible! Say it is not possible! My child! My child!” 
We shall not attempt to convey any idea of her gestures, her accent, the tears that trickled over her lips as she spoke, her clasping, writhing hands, the heart-breaking smiles, the agonized looks, the sighs, the moans, the miserable and soul-stirring sobs she mingled with these frenzied, incoherent words. When she ceased, Tristan l’Hermite knit his brows, but it was to hide a tear that glistened in his tiger’s eye. He conquered this weakness, however, and said brusquely: “It is the King’s will.” 
Then leaning down to Henriet Cousin’s ear, he whispered hurriedly, “Do thy business quickly.”It may be that the redoubtable provost felt his heart failing him—even his. 
The hangman and the sergeant accordingly entered the cell. The mother made no attempt at resistance; she only dragged herself over to her daughter and threw herself distractedly upon her. 
The girl saw the soldiers advancing towards her, and the horror of death revived her senses. 
“Mother!”she cried in a tone of indescribable anguish; “oh, mother! they are coming! defend me!” 
“Yes, yes, dear love, I am defending thee!”answered the mother in expiring tones; and clasping her frantically in her arms, she covered her face with kisses. To see them together on the ground, the mother thus protecting her child, was a sight to wring the stoniest heart. 
Henriet Cousin took hold of the gipsy girl under her beautiful shoulders. At the touch of that hand she gave a little ddering cry and swooned. The executioner, from whose eyes big tears were dropping, would have carried her away, and sought to unclasp the mother’s arms, which were tightly coiled about her daughter’s waist, but she held on to her child with such an iron grasp that he found it utterly impossible to separate them. He therefore had to drag the girl out of the cell, and the mother along with her. The mother’s eyes, too, were closed. 
The sun rose at this moment, and already there was a considerable crowd of people in the Place looking from a distance at what was being dragged over the ground to the gibbet. For this was Tristan’s way at executions. His one idea was to prevent the curious from coming too near. 
There was nobody at the windows. Only, in the far distance, on the summit of that tower of Notre-Dame which looks towards the Grève, two men, their dark figures standing out black against the clear morning sky, appeared to be watching the scene. 
Henriet Cousin stopped with his burden at the foot of the fatal ladder, and with faltering breath, such a pity did he think it, he passed the rope round the girl’s exquisite neck. At the horrible contact of the hempen rope, the poor child opened her eyes and beheld the skeleton arm of the gibbet extended over her head. She struggled to free herself, and cried out in an agonized voice: “No! no! I will not! I will not!”The mother, whose head was buried in her daughter’s robe, said no word, but a long dder ran through her whole frame, and they could hear the frenzied kisses she bestowed upon her child. The hangman seized this moment to wrench asunder the arms clasped round the doomed girl, and whether from exhaustion or despair, they yielded. He then lifted the girl to his shoulder, where the slender creature hung limp and helpless against his uncouth head, and set foot upon the ladder to ascend. 
At this moment the mother, who had sunk in a heap on the ground, opened her eyes wide. A blood-curdling look came over her face; without a word she started to her feet, and in a lightning flash flung herself, like a wild beast on its prey, on the hangman’s hand, biting it to the bone. The man howled with pain; the others ran to his assistance, and with difficulty released his bleeding hand from the mother’s teeth. Still she uttered no sound. They thrust her back with brutal roughness, and she fell, her head striking heavily on the stones. They raised her up; she fell back again. She was dead. 
The hangman, who had kept his hold on the girl, began once more to ascend the ladder. 
______________________
1 The salt tax. 
Chapter 2 - La Creatura Bella Bianco Vestita.—Dante
When Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the gipsy girl was gone, that while he was defending her she had been carried off, he clutched his hair with both hands and stamped with surprise and grief; and then set off running, searching the Cathedral from top to bottom for his gipsy, uttering strange unearthly cries, strewing the pavement with his red hair. It was the very moment at which the King’s archers forced their victorious way into Notre-Dame, likewise on the hunt for the gipsy. Poor deaf Quasimodo, never suspecting their sinister intentions (he took the truands to be the enemies of the gipsy girl), did his utmost to assist them. It was he who led Tristan l’Hermite into every possible nook and cranny, opened secret doors, double bottoms of altars, hidden sacristies. Had the unhappy girl still been there, it would have been Quasimodo himself who betrayed her into the hands of the soldiers. 
When Tristan, who was not easily discouraged, gave up the search as hopeless, Quasimodo continued it alone. Twenty times, a hundred times over, did he go through the church, from end to end, from top to bottom; ascending, descending, running here, calling there, peering, searching, thrusting his head into every hole, holding up a torch under every vault, desperate, frenzied, moaning like a beast that has lost his mate. 
At length, when he had made himself sure—quite, quite sure—that she was gone, that it had come to the worst, that they had stolen her from him, he slowly reascended the lower stairs—those stairs which he had mounted so nimbly and triumphantly on the day he had saved her. He now went over the same ground with dejectedly drooping head, voiceless, tearless, with bated breath. The church was once more solitary and silent. The archers had quitted it to pursue their search for the sorceress in the city. Quasimodo, left alone now in the vast Cathedral, so thronged and tumultuous but a moment before, made his way to the cell where the gipsy girl had slept for so many weeks under his watchful protection. 
As he drew near it he tried to delude himself that he might find her there after all. When, on reaching the bend of the gallery that looks down on the roof of the side aisle, he could see the narrow cell with its little window and its little door, lying close under one of the great buttresses, like a bird’s nest under a bough, the poor creature’s heart failed him, and he had to lean against the pillar to save himself from falling. He pictured to himself that perchance she had returned; that some good genius had brought her back; that this little nest was too quiet, too safe, to cosy for her not to be there; and he dared not venture a step nearer for fear of dispelling his illusion. “Yes,” he said to himself, “may-be she sleeps, or she is at her prayers. I will not disturb her.” 
At last he summoned up courage, advanced on tip-toe, looked in, entered. Empty! The cell was still empty. Slowly the unhappy man made the tour of the little place, lifted up her pallet and looked beneath it, as if she could be hiding between it and the stone floor, shook his head, and stood staring stupidly. Suddenly he furiously stamped out his torch, and without uttering a word or breathing a sigh, he hurled himself with all his strength head-foremost against the wall and fell senseless to the ground. 
When he came to himself, he flung himself on the bed, rolling on it and pressing frenzied kisses on the pillow, which still bore the imprint of her head. Here he lay for some minutes, motionless as the dead, then rose, panting, crazed, and fell to beating his head against the wall with the appalling regularity of the stroke of a clock and the resolution of a man determined to break his skull. At length he dropped down exhausted, then crawled outside the cell, and remained crouching, motionless, opposite to the door for a full hour, his eyes fixed on the deserted cell, sunk in a gloomier, more mournful reverie than a mother seated between an empty eradle and a tenanted coffin. He spoke no word; only at intervals a deep sob convulsed his whole frame, but a sob that brought no tears, like the silent flashes of summer lightning. 
It was then that, striving amid his despairing memories to divine who could possibly have been the unforeseen ravisher of the gipsy girl, the thought of the Archdeacon flashed into his mind. He remembered that Dom Claude alone possessed a key of the stair-case leading to the cell; he recalled his nocturnal attempts upon Esmeralda, the first of which he, Quasimodo, had assisted, the second prevented. He called to mind a thousand various details, and soon was convinced that it was the Archdeacon who had taken the gipsy from him. Nevertheless, such was his reverence for the priest, so deeply were gratitude, devotion, and love for this man rooted in his heart, that they resisted, even at this supreme moment, the fangs of jealousy and despair. The moment that Claude Frollo was concerned, the bloodthirsty, deadly resentment he would have felt against any other individual was turned in the poor bell-ringer’s breast simply into an increase of his sorrow. 
At the moment when his thoughts were thus fixed upon the priest, as the dawn was beginning to gleam upon the buttresses, he beheld on the upper story of the Cathedral, at the angle of the balustrade that runs round the outside of the chancel, a figure advancing in his direction. He recognised it—it was the Archdeacon. 
Claude was moving with a slow and heavy step. He did not look before him as he walked, his face was turned aside towards the right bank of the Seine, and he held his head up as if endeavouring to obtain a view of something across the roofs. The owl has often that sidelong attitude, flying in one direction while it gazes in another. In this manner the priest passed along above Quasimodo without catching sight of him. 
The deaf spectator, petrified by this sudden apparition, saw the figure disappear through the door leading to the stair of the northern tower, which, as the reader is aware, commands a view of the H?tel-de-Ville. 
Quasimodo rose and followed the Archdeacon, mounting the stair after him to find out why the priest was going there. Not that the poor bell-ringer had any definite idea of what he himself was going to do or say, or even what he wanted. He was full of rage and full of dread. The Archdeacon and the Egyptian clashed together in his heart. 
On reaching the top of the tower, and before issuing from the shade of the stair-case, he cautiously investigated the position of the priest. The Archdeacon had his back towards him. An openwork balustrade surrounds the platform of the steeple; the priest, whose eyes were fixed upon the town, was leaning forward against that side of the square balustrade which faces the Pont Notre-Dame. 
With noiseless tread Quasimodo stole up behind him, to see what he was so intently gazing at, and the priest’s attention was so entirely absorbed elsewhere that he did not hear the step of the hunchback near him. 
It is a magnificent and enchanting spectacle—and yet more so in those days—that view of Paris from the summit of the towers of Notre-Dame, in the sparkling light of a summer’s dawn. It must have been a day early in July. The sky was perfectly serene; a few lingering stars, here and there, were slowly fading, and eastward, in the clearest part of the sky, hung one of great brilliancy. The sun was on the point of rising. Paris was beginning to stir, the endless variety of outline presented by its building on the eastern side showing up vividly in the singularly pure white light, while the gigantic shadow of the steeples crept from roof to roof, traversing the great city from one end to the other. Already voices and sounds were arising in several quarters of the town; here the clang of a bell, there the stroke of a hammer, elsewhere the complicated clatter of a cart in motion. The smoke from chimneys curled up here and there out of the mass of roofs, as if through the fissures of some great solfatara. The river, swirling its waters under its many bridges, round the points of innumerable islands, was diapered in shimmering silver. Around the city, outside the ramparts, the view melted into a great circle of fleecy vapour, through which the indefinite line of the plain and the soft undulation of the hills was faintly visible. All sorts of indeterminate sounds floated over the half-awakened city. In the east, a few downy white flakes, plucked from the misty mantle of the hills, fled across the sky before the morning breeze. 
Down in the Parvis, some housewives, milk-pot in hand, were pointing out to one another in astonishment the extraordinary condition of the great door of Notre-Dame, and the two streams of lead congealed between the fissures of the stones. This was all that remained of the tumult of the night before. The pile kindled by Quasimodo between the towers was extinct. Tristan had already cleared the débris from the Place and thrown the bodies into the Seine. Kings like Louis XI are careful to clean the pavements with all expedition after a massacre. 
Outside the balustrade of the tower, immediately underneath the spot where the priest had taken up his position, was one of those fantastically carved gargoyles which diversify the exterior of Gothic buildings, and in a crevice of it, two graceful sprigs of wall-flower in full bloom were tossing, and, as if inspired with life by the breath of the morning, made sportive salutation to each other, while from over the towers, far up in the sky, came the shrill twittering of birds. 
But the priest neither saw nor heard anything of all this. He was one of those men for whom there are neither mornings, nor birds, nor flowers. In that immense horizon spread around him, in such infinite variety of aspect, his gaze was concentrated upon one single point. 
Quasimodo burned to ask him what he had done with the gipsy girl; but the Archdeacon seemed at that moment altogether beyond this world. He was evidently in one of those crucial moments of life when the earth itself might fall in ruins without our perceiving it. 
With his eyes unwaveringly fixed upon a certain spot, he stood motionless and silent; but in that silence and that immobility there was something so appalling that the dauntless bell-ringer ddered at the sight, and dared not disturb him. All that he did—and it was one way of interrogating the priest—was to follow the direction of his gaze, so that in this way the eye of the poor hunchback was guided to the Place de Gréve. 
Thus he suddenly discovered what the priest was looking at. A ladder was placed against the permanent gibbet; there were some people in the Place and a number of soldiers; a man was dragging along the ground something white, to which something black was clinging; the man halted at the foot of the gibbet. 
Here something took place which Quasimodo could not very distinctly see; not that his eye had lost its singularly long vision, but that there was a body of soldiers in the way, which prevented him seeing everything. Moreover, at that instant the sun rose and sent such a flood of light over the horizon that it seemed as if every point of Paris—spires, chimneys, gables—were taking fire at once. 
Now the man began to mount the ladder, and Quasimodo saw him again distinctly. He was carrying a female figure over his shoulder—a girlish figure in white; there was a noose round the girl’s neck. Quasimodo recognised her. It was She! 
The man arrived with his burden at the top of the ladder. There he arranged the noose. 
At this the priest, to have a better view, placed himself on his knees on the balustrade. 
Suddenly the man kicked away the ladder with his heel, and Quasimodo, who for some minutes had not drawn a breath, saw the hapless girl, with the feet of the man pressing upon her shoulders, swinging from the end of the rope, some feet from the ground. The rope made several turns upon itself, and Quasimodo beheld horrible contortions jerking the body of the gipsy girl. The priest, meanwhile, with outstretched neck and starting eyeballs, contemplated this frightful group of the man and the girl—the spider and the fly! 
At the moment when the horror of the scene was at its height, a demoniacal laugh—a laugh that can only come from one who has lost all semblance of humanity—burst from the livid lips of the priest. 
Quasimodo did not hear that laugh, but he saw it. Retreating a few paces behind the Archdeacon, the hunchback suddenly made a rush at him, and with his two great hands against Dom Claude’s back, thrust him furiously into the abyss over which he had been leaning. 
The priest screamed “Damnation!” and fell. 
The stone gargoyle under the balustrade broke his fall. He clung to it with a frantic grip, and opened his mouth to utter a cry for help; but at the same moment the formidable and avenging face of Quasimodo rose over the edge of the balustrade above him—and he was silent. 
Beneath him was the abyss, a fall of full two hundred feet and the pavement. In this dreadful situation the Archdeacon said not a word, breathed not a groan. He writhed upon the gargoyle, making incredible efforts to climb up it; but his hand slipped on the smooth granite, his feet scraped the blackened wall without gaining a foothold. Those who have ascended the towers of Note-Dame know that the stone-work swells out immediately beneath the balustrade. It was on the retreating curve of this ridge that the wretched priest was exhausting his efforts. It was not even with a perpendicular wall that he was contending, but with one that sloped away under him. 
Quasimodo had only to stretch out a hand to draw him out of the gulf, but he never so much as looked at him. He was absorbed in watching the Grève; watching the gibbet; watching the gipsy girl. 
The hunchback was leaning, with his elbows on the balustrade, in the very place where the Archdeacon had been a moment before; and there, keeping his eye fixed on the only object that existed for him at that moment, he stood mute and motionless as a statue, save for the long stream of tears that flowed from that eye which, until then, had never shed but one. 
Meanwhile the Archdeacon panted and struggled, drops of agony pouring from his bald forehead, his nails torn and bleeding on the stones, his knees grazed against the wall. He heard his soutane, which had caught on a projection of the stone rain-pipe, tear away at each movement he made. To complete his misfortune, the gutter itself ended in a leaden pipe which he could feel slowly bending under the weight of his body, and the wretched man told himself that when his hands should be worn out with fatigue, when his cassock should be rent asunder, when that leaden pipe should be completely bent, he must of necessity fall, and terror gripped his vitals. Once or twice he had wildly looked down upon a sort of narrow ledge formed, some ten feet below him, by the projection of the sculpture, and he implored Heaven, from the bottom of his agonized soul, to be allowed to spend the remainder of his life on that space of two feet square, though it were to last a hundred years. Once he ventured to look down into the Place, but when he lifted his head again his eyes were closed and his hair stood erect. 
There was something appalling in the silence of these two men. While the Archdeacon hung in agony but a few feet below him, Quasimodo gazed upon the Place de Grève and wept. 
The Archdeacon, finding that his struggles to raise himself only served to bend the one feeble point of support that remained to him, at length resolved to remain still. There he hung, clinging to the rain-pipe, scarcely drawing breath, with no other motion but the mechanical contractions of the body we feel in dreams when we imagine we are falling. His eyes were fixed and wide in a stare of pain and bewilderment. Little by little he felt himself going; his fingers slipped upon the stone; he was conscious more and more of the weakness of his arm and the weight of his body; the piece of lead strained ever farther downward. 
Beneath him—frightful vision—he saw the sharp roof of Saint-Jean-le-Rond, like a card bent double. One by one he looked at the impassive sculptured figures round the tower, suspended, like himself, over the abyss, but without terror for themselves or pity for him. All about him was stone—the grinning monsters before his eyes; below, in the Place, the pavement; over his head, Quasimodo. 
Down in the Parvis a group of worthy citizens were staring curiously upward, and wondering what madman it could be amusing himself after so strange a fashion. The priest could hear them say, for their voices rose clear and shrill in the quiet air: “He will certainly break his neck!” 
Quasimodo was weeping. 
At length the priest, foaming with impotent rage and terror, felt that all was unavailing, but gathered what strength still remained to him for one final effort. He drew himself up by the gutter, thrust himself out from the wall by both knees, dug his hands in a cleft of the stone-work, and managed to scramble up about one foot higher; but the force he was obliged to use made the leaden beak that supported him bend suddenly downward, and the strain rent his cassock through. Then, finding everything giving way under him, having only his benumbed and powerless hands by which to cling to anything, the wretched man closed his eyes, loosened his hold, and dropped. 
Quasimodo watched him falling. A fall from such a height is rarely straight. The priest launched into space, fell at first head downward and his arms outstretched, then turned over on himself several times. The wind drove him against the roof of a house, where the unhappy man got his first crashing shock. He was not dead, however, and the hunchback saw him grasp at the gable to save himself; but the slope was too sheer, his strength was exhausted: he slid rapidly down the roof, like a loosened tile, and rebounded on to the pavement. There he lay motionless at last. 
Quasimodo returned his gaze to the gipsy girl, whose body, dangling in its white robe from the gibbet, he beheld from afar quivering in the last agonies of death; then he let it drop once more on the Archdeacon, lying in a shapeless heap at the foot of the tower, and with a sigh that heaved his deep chest, he murmured: “Oh! all that I have ever loved!” 
Chapter 3 - The Marriage of Ph?bus
Towards the evening of that day, when the bishop’s officers of justice came to remove the shattered remains of the Archdeacon from the Parvis, Quasimodo had disappeared. 
This circumstance gave rise to many rumours. Nobody doubted, however, that the day had at length arrived when, according to the compact, Quasimodo—otherwise the devil —was to carry off Claude Frollo—otherwise the sorcerer. It was presumed that he had broken the body in order to extract the soul, as a monkey cracks a nut-shell to get at the kernel. 
It was for this reason the Archdeacon was denied Christian burial. 
Louis XI died the following year, in August, 1483. 
As for Pierre Gringoire, he not only succeeded in saving the goat, but gained considerable success as a writer of tragedies. It appears that after dabbling in astronomy, philosophy, architecture, hermetics—in short, every variety of craze—he returned to tragedy, which is the craziest of the lot. This is what he called “coming to a tragic end.” Touching his dramatic triumphs, we read in the royal privy accounts for 1483: 
“To Jehan Marchand and Pierre Gringoire, carpenter and composer, for making and composing the Mystery performed at the Chatelet of Paris on the day of the entry of Monsieur the Legate; for duly ordering the characters, with properties and habiliments proper to the said Mystery, as likewise for constructing the wooden stages necessary for the same: one hundred livres.” 
Ph?bus de Chateaupers also came to a tragic end—he married. 
Chapter 4 - The Marriage of Quasimodo
We have already said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre-Dame on the day of the death of the gipsy girl and the Archdeacon. He was never seen again, nor was it known what became of him. 
In the night following the execution of Esmeralda, the hangman’s assistants took down her body from the gibbet and carried it, according to custom, to the great charnel vault of Montfaucon. 
Montfaucon, to use the words of Sauval, was “the most ancient and the most superb gibbet in the kingdom.” Between the faubourgs of the Temple and Saint-Martin, about a hundred and sixty toises from the wall of Paris and a few bow-shots from La Courtille, there stood on the highest point of a very slight eminence, but high enough to be visible for several leagues round, an edifice of peculiar form, much resembling a Celtic cromlech, and claiming like the cromlech its human sacrifices. 
Let the reader imagine a huge oblong mass of masonry fifteen feet high, thirty feet wide, and forty feet long, on a plaster base, with a door, an external railing, and a platform; on this platform sixteen enormous pillars of rough hewn stone, thirty feet high, ranged as a colonnade round three of the four sides of the immense block supporting them, and connected at the top by heavy beams, from which hung chains at regular intervals; at each of these chains, skeletons; close by, in the plain, a stone cross and two secondary gibbets, rising like shoots of the great central tree; in the sky, hovering over the whole, a perpetual crowd of carrion crows. There you have Montfaucon. 
By the end of the fifteenth century, this formidable gibbet, which had stood since 1328, had fallen upon evil days. The beams were worm-eaten, the chains corroded with rust, the pillars green with mould, the blocks of hewn stone gaped away from one another, and grass was growing on the platform on which no human foot ever trod now. The structure showed a ghastly silhouette against the sky—especially at night, when the moonlight gleamed on whitened skulls, and the evening breeze, sweeping through the chains and skeletons, set them rattling in the gloom. The presence of this gibbet sufficed to cast a blight over every spot within the range of its accursed view. 
The mass of masonry that formed the base of the repulsive edifice was hollow, and an immense cavern had been constructed in it, closed by an old battered iron grating, into which were thrown not only the human relics that fell from the chains of Montfaucon itself, but also the bodies of the victims of all the other permanent gibbets of Paris. To that deep charnel-house, where so many human remains and the memory of so many crimes have rotted and mingled together, many a great one of the earth, and many an innocent victim, have contributed their bones, from Enguerrand de Martigny, who inaugurated Montfaucon, and was one of the just, down to Admiral de Coligny—likewise one of the just—who closed it. 
As for Quasimodo’s mysterious disappearance, all that we have been able to ascertain on the subject is this: 
About a year and a half or two years after the concluding events of this story, when search was being made in the pit of Montfaucon for the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days before, and to whom Charles VIII granted the favour of being interred at Saint-Laurent in better company, there were found among these hideous carcases two skeletons, the one clasped in the arms of the other. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, had still about it some tattered remnants of a garment that had once been white, and about its neck was a string of beads together with a small silken bag ornamented with green glass, but open and empty. These objects had been of so little value that the executioner, doubtless, had scorned to take them. The other skeleton, which held this one in so close a clasp, was that of a man. It was observed that the spine was crooked, the skull compressed between the shoulder-blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. There was no rupture of the vertebr? at the nape of the neck, from which it was evident that the man had not been hanged. He must, therefore, have come of himself and died there. 
When they attempted to detach this skeleton from the one it was embracing, it fell to dust. 



-------------------
更多免费TXT书请到
BBS.4020.com.cn
-------------------
4020.com.cn收藏整理