________________________________________________
_ When Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the
gypsy was no longer there, that while he had been defending
her she had been abducted, he grasped his hair with both
hands and stamped with surprise and pain; then he set out
to run through the entire church seeking his Bohemian,
howling strange cries to all the corners of the walls, strewing
his red hair on the pavement. It was just at the moment when
the king's archers were making their victorious entrance into
Notre-Dame, also in search of the gypsy. Quasimodo, poor,
deaf fellow, aided them in their fatal intentions, without
suspecting it; he thought that the outcasts were the gypsy's
enemies. He himself conducted Tristan l'Hermite to all
possible hiding-places, opened to him the secret doors, the
double bottoms of the altars, the rear sacristries. If the
unfortunate girl had still been there, it would have been he
himself who would have delivered her up.
When the fatigue of finding nothing had disheartened Tristan,
who was not easily discouraged, Quasimodo continued the search
alone. He made the tour of the church twenty times, length and
breadth, up and down, ascending and descending, running, calling,
sbouting, peeping, rummaging, ransacking, thrusting his head into
every hole, pushing a torch under every vault, despairing, mad. A
male who has lost his female is no more roaring nor more haggard.
At last when he was sure, perfectly sure that she was no
longer there, that all was at an end, that she had been
snatched from him, he slowly mounted the staircase to the
towers, that staircase which he had ascended with so much
eagerness and triumph on the day when he had saved her.
He passed those same places once more with drooping head,
voiceless, tearless, almost breathless. The church was again
deserted, and had fallen back into its silence. The archers
had quitted it to track the sorceress in the city. Quasimodo,
left alone in that vast Notre-Dame, so besieged and tumultuous
but a short time before, once more betook himself to the cell
where the gypsy had slept for so many weeks under his guardianship.
As he approached it, he fancied that he might, perhaps, find
her there. When, at the turn of the gallery which opens on
the roof of the side aisles, he perceived the tiny cell with its
little window and its little door crouching beneath a great
flying buttress like a bird's nest under a branch, the poor
man's heart failed him, and he leaned against a pillar to keep
from falling. He imagined that she might have returned
thither, that some good genius had, no doubt, brought her
back, that this chamber was too tranquil, too safe, too charming
for her not to be there, and he dared not take another step
for fear of destroying his illusion. "Yes," he said to himself,
"perchance she is sleeping, or praying. I must not disturb her."
At length he summoned up courage, advanced on tiptoe,
looked, entered. Empty. The cell was still empty. The
unhappy deaf man walked slowly round it, lifted the bed and
looked beneath it, as though she might be concealed between
the pavement and the mattress, then he shook his head and
remained stupefied. All at once, he crushed his torch under
his foot, and, without uttering a word, without giving vent to
a sigh, he flung himself at full speed, head foremost against
the wall, and fell fainting on the floor.
When he recovered his senses, he threw himself on the bed
and rolling about, he kissed frantically the place where the
young girl had slept and which was still warm; he remained
there for several moments as motionless as though he were
about to expire; then he rose, dripping with perspiration,
panting, mad, and began to beat his head against the wall
with the frightful regularity of the clapper of his bells, and
the resolution of a man determined to kill himself. At length
he fell a second time, exhausted; he dragged himself on his
knees outside the cell, and crouched down facing the door, in
an attitude of astonishment.
He remained thus for more than an hour without making a
movement, with his eye fixed on the deserted cell, more
gloomy, and more pensive than a mother seated between an
empty cradle and a full coffin. He uttered not a word; only
at long intervals, a sob heaved his body violently, but it was
a tearless sob, like summer lightning which makes no noise.
It appears to have been then, that, seeking at the bottom
of his lonely thoughts for the unexpected abductor of the
gypsy, he thought of the archdeacon. He remembered that
Dom Claude alone possessed a key to the staircase leading
to the cell; he recalled his nocturnal attempts on the young
girl, in the first of which he, Quasimodo, had assisted, the
second of which he had prevented. He recalled a thousand
details, and soon he no longer doubted that the archdeacon
had taken the gypsy. Nevertheless, such was his respect for
the priest, such his gratitude, his devotion, his love for this
man had taken such deep root in his heart, that they resisted,
even at this moment, the talons of jealousy and despair.
He reflected that the archdeacon had done this thing, and
the wrath of blood and death which it would have evoked in
him against any other person, turned in the poor deaf man,
from the moment when Claude Frollo was in question, into an
increase of grief and sorrow.
At the moment when his thought was thus fixed upon the
priest, while the daybreak was whitening the flying buttresses,
he perceived on the highest story of Notre-Dame, at the angle
formed by the external balustrade as it makes the turn of the
chancel, a figure walking. This figure was coming towards
him. He recognized it. It was the archdeacon.
Claude was walking with a slow, grave step. He did not
look before him as he walked, he was directing his course
towards the northern tower, but his face was turned aside
towards the right bank of the Seine, and he held his head
high, as though trying to see something over the roofs. The
owl often assumes this oblique attitude. It flies towards one
point and looks towards another. In this manner the priest
passed above Quasimodo without seeing him.
The deaf man, who had been petrified by this sudden
apparition, beheld him disappear through the door of the
staircase to the north tower. The reader is aware that this
is the tower from which the Hôtel-de-Ville is visible.
Quasimodo rose and followed the archdeacon.
Quasimodo ascended the tower staircase for the sake of
ascending it, for the sake of seeing why the priest was
ascending it. Moreover, the poor bellringer did not know what
he (Quasimodo) should do, what he should say, what he wished.
He was full of fury and full of fear. The archdeacon and the
gypsy had come into conflict in his heart.
When he reached the summit of the tower, before emerging
from the shadow of the staircase and stepping upon the
platform, he cautiously examined the position of the priest.
The priest's back was turned to him. There is an openwork
balustrade which surrounds the platform of the bell tower.
The priest, whose eyes looked down upon the town, was resting
his breast on that one of the four sides of the balustrades
which looks upon the Pont Notre-Dame.
Quasimodo, advancing with the tread of a wolf behind him,
went to see what he was gazing at thus.
The priest's attention was so absorbed elsewhere that he
did not hear the deaf man walking behind him.
Paris is a magnificent and charming spectacle, and especially
at that day, viewed from the top of the towers of Notre-
Dame, in the fresh light of a summer dawn. The day might
have been in July. The sky was perfectly serene. Some
tardy stars were fading away at various points, and there was
a very brilliant one in the east, in the brightest part of the
heavens. The sun was about to appear; Paris was beginning
to move. A very white and very pure light brought out
vividly to the eye all the outlines that its thousands of houses
present to the east. The giant shadow of the towers leaped
from roof to roof, from one end of the great city to the other.
There were several quarters from which were already heard
voices and noisy sounds. Here the stroke of a bell, there the
stroke of a hammer, beyond, the complicated clatter of a cart
in motion.
Already several columns of smoke were being belched forth
from the chimneys scattered over the whole surface of roofs,
as through the fissures of an immense sulphurous crater.
The river, which ruffles its waters against the arches of so
many bridges, against the points of so many islands, was
wavering with silvery folds. Around the city, outside the
ramparts, sight was lost in a great circle of fleecy vapors
through which one confusedly distinguished the indefinite
line of the plains, and the graceful swell of the heights. All
sorts of floating sounds were dispersed over this half-awakened
city. Towards the east, the morning breeze chased a few soft
white bits of wool torn from the misty fleece of the hills.
In the Parvis, some good women, who had their milk jugs
in their hands, were pointing out to each other, with
astonishment, the singular dilapidation of the great door of
Notre-Dame, and the two solidified streams of lead in the crevices
of the stone. This was all that remained of the tempest of
the night. The bonfire lighted between the towers by Quasimodo
had died out. Tristan had already cleared up the Place,
and had the dead thrown into the Seine. Kings like Louis
XI. are careful to clean the pavement quickly after a massacre.
Outside the balustrade of the tower, directly under the
point where the priest had paused, there was one of those
fantastically carved stone gutters with which Gothic edifices
bristle, and, in a crevice of that gutter, two pretty wallflowers
in blossom, shaken out and vivified, as it were, by the breath
of air, made frolicsome salutations to each other. Above the
towers, on high, far away in the depths of the sky, the cries
of little birds were heard.
But the priest was not listening to, was not looking at,
anything of all this. He was one of the men for whom there are
no mornings, no birds, no flowers. In that immense horizon,
which assumed so many aspects about him, his contemplation
was concentrated on a single point.
Quasimodo was burning to ask him what he had done with
the gypsy; but the archdeacon seemed to be out of the world
at that moment. He was evidently in one of those violent
moments of life when one would not feel the earth crumble.
He remained motionless and silent, with his eyes steadily
fixed on a certain point; and there was something so terrible
about this silence and immobility that the savage bellringer
shuddered before it and dared not come in contact with it.
Only, and this was also one way of interrogating the archdeacon,
he followed the direction of his vision, and in this way the
glance of the unhappy deaf man fell upon the Place de Grève.
Thus he saw what the priest was looking at. The ladder
was erected near the permanent gallows. There were some
people and many soldiers in the Place. A man was dragging
a white thing, from which hung something black, along the
pavement. This man halted at the foot of the gallows.
Here something took place which Quasimodo could not see
very clearly. It was not because his only eye had not
preserved its long range, but there was a group of soldiers
which prevented his seeing everything. Moreover, at that moment
the sun appeared, and such a flood of light overflowed the
horizon that one would have said that all the points in Paris,
spires, chimneys, gables, had simultaneously taken fire.
Meanwhile, the man began to mount the ladder. Then Quasimodo
saw him again distinctly. He was carrying a woman on his shoulder,
a young girl dressed in white; that young girl had a noose about
her neck. Quasimodo recognized her.
It was she.
The man reached the top of the ladder. There he arranged
the noose. Here the priest, in order to see the better, knelt
upon the balustrade.
All at once the man kicked away the ladder abruptly, and
Quasimodo, who had not breathed for several moments, beheld
the unhappy child dangling at the end of the rope two fathoms
above the pavement, with the man squatting on her shoulders.
The rope made several gyrations on itself, and Quasimodo
beheld horrible convulsions run along the gypsy's body. The
priest, on his side, with outstretched neck and eyes starting
from his head, contemplated this horrible group of the man
and the young girl,--the spider and the fly.
At the moment when it was most horrible, the laugh of a
demon, a laugh which one can only give vent to when one is
no longer human, burst forth on the priest's livid face.
Quasimodo did not hear that laugh, but he saw it.
The bellringer retreated several paces behind the archdeacon,
and suddenly hurling himself upon him with fury, with his huge
hands he pushed him by the back over into the abyss over which
Dom Claude was leaning.
The priest shrieked: "Damnation!" and fell.
The spout, above which he had stood, arrested him in his
fall. He clung to it with desperate hands, and, at the moment
when he opened his mouth to utter a second cry, he beheld
the formidable and avenging face of Quasimodo thrust over
the edge of the balustrade above his head.
Then he was silent.
The abyss was there below him. A fall of more than two hundred
feet and the pavement.
In this terrible situation, the archdeacon said not a word,
uttered not a groan. He merely writhed upon the spout,
with incredible efforts to climb up again; but his hands had
no hold on the granite, his feet slid along the blackened wall
without catching fast. People who have ascended the towers
of Notre-Dame know that there is a swell of the stone immediately
beneath the balustrade. It was on this retreating angle that
miserable archdeacon exhausted himself. He had not to deal with
a perpendicular wall, but with one which sloped away beneath him.
Quasimodo had but to stretch out his hand in order to draw
him from the gulf; but he did not even look at him. He was
looking at the Grève. He was looking at the gallows. He
was looking at the gypsy.
The deaf man was leaning, with his elbows on the balustrade,
at the spot where the archdeacon had been a moment before,
and there, never detaching his gaze from the only object which
existed for him in the world at that moment, he remained
motionless and mute, like a man struck by lightning, and a
long stream of tears flowed in silence from that eye which,
up to that time, had never shed but one tear.
Meanwhile, the archdeacon was panting. His bald brow
was dripping with perspiration, his nails were bleeding
against the stones, his knees were flayed by the wall.
He heard his cassock, which was caught on the spout, crack
and rip at every jerk that he gave it. To complete his
misfortune, this spout ended in a leaden pipe which bent under
the weight of his body. The archdeacon felt this pipe slowly
giving way. The miserable man said to himself that, when
his hands should be worn out with fatigue, when his cassock
should tear asunder, when the lead should give way, he would
be obliged to fall, and terror seized upon his very vitals.
Now and then he glanced wildly at a sort of narrow shelf formed,
ten feet lower down, by projections of the sculpture, and he
prayed heaven, from the depths of his distressed soul, that he
might be allowed to finish his life, were it to last two centuries,
on that space two feet square. Once, he glanced below him into
the Place, into the abyss; the head which he raised again had
its eyes closed and its hair standing erect.
There was something frightful in the silence of these two
men. While the archdeacon agonized in this terrible fashion
a few feet below him, Quasimodo wept and gazed at the Grève.
The archdeacon, seeing that all his exertions served only to
weaken the fragile support which remained to him, decided
to remain quiet. There he hung, embracing the gutter, hardly
breathing, no longer stirring, making no longer any other
movements than that mechanical convulsion of the stomach,
which one experiences in dreams when one fancies himself
falling. His fixed eyes were wide open with a stare. He
lost ground little by little, nevertheless, his fingers slipped
along the spout; he became more and more conscious of the
feebleness of his arms and the weight of his body. The curve
of the lead which sustained him inclined more and more each
instant towards the abyss.
He beheld below him, a frightful thing, the roof of Saint-
Jean le Rond, as small as a card folded in two. He gazed at
the impressive carvings, one by one, of the tower, suspended
like himself over the precipice, but without terror for
themselves or pity for him. All was stone around him; before
his eyes, gaping monsters; below, quite at the bottom, in the
Place, the pavement; above his head, Quasimodo weeping.
In the Parvis there were several groups of curious good
people, who were tranquilly seeking to divine who the madman
could be who was amusing himself in so strange a manner.
The priest heard them saying, for their voices reached
him, clear and shrill: "Why, he will break his neck!"
Quasimodo wept.
At last the archdeacon, foaming with rage and despair,
understood that all was in vain. Nevertheless, he collected
all the strength which remained to him for a final effort. He
stiffened himself upon the spout, pushed against the wall with
both his knees, clung to a crevice in the stones with his hands,
and succeeded in climbing back with one foot, perhaps; but
this effort made the leaden beak on which he rested bend
abruptly. His cassock burst open at the same time. Then,
feeling everything give way beneath him, with nothing but
his stiffened and failing hands to support him, the
unfortunate man closed his eyes and let go of the spout.
He fell.
Quasimodo watched him fall.
A fall from such a height is seldom perpendicular. The
archdeacon, launched into space, fell at first head foremost,
with outspread hands; then he whirled over and over many
times; the wind blew him upon the roof of a house, where
the unfortunate man began to break up. Nevertheless, he was
not dead when he reached there. The bellringer saw him still
endeavor to cling to a gable with his nails; but the surface
sloped too much, and he had no more strength. He slid rapidly
along the roof like a loosened tile, and dashed upon the
pavement. There he no longer moved.
Then Quasimodo raised his eyes to the gypsy, whose body
he beheld hanging from the gibbet, quivering far away beneath
her white robe with the last shudderings of anguish, then he
dropped them on the archdeacon, stretched out at the base of
the tower, and no longer retaining the human form, and he
said, with a sob which heaved his deep chest,--
"Oh! all that I have ever loved!" _
Read next: VOLUME II: BOOK ELEVENTH: Chapter 3 - The Marriage of Pinnbus
Read previous: VOLUME II: BOOK ELEVENTH: Chapter 1 - The Little Shoe
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