Notre-Dame de Paris
could not doubt it; he was there, handsome, alive, dressed in his
brilliant uniform, his plume on his head, his sword by his side!
“Phœbus!” she cried, “my Phœbus!”
And she tried to stretch towards him arms trembling with love and
rapture, but they were bound.
Then she saw the captain frown, a beautiful young girl who was
leaning against him gazed at him with disdainful lips and
irritated eyes; then Phœbus uttered some words which did not
reach her, and both disappeared precipitately behind the window
opening upon the balcony, which closed after them.
“Phœbus!” she cried wildly, “can it be you believe it?” A
monstrous thought had just presented itself to her. She
remembered that she had been condemned to death for murder
committed on the person of Phœbus de Châteaupers.
She had borne up until that moment. But this last blow was too
harsh. She fell lifeless on the pavement.
“Come,” said Charmolue, “carry her to the cart, and make an end
of it.”
No one had yet observed in the gallery of the statues of the
kings, carved directly above the arches of the portal, a strange
spectator, who had, up to that time, observed everything with
such impassiveness, with a neck so strained, a visage so hideous
that, in his motley accoutrement of red and violet, he might have
been taken for one of those stone monsters through whose mouths
the long gutters of the cathedral have discharged their waters
for six hundred years. This spectator had missed nothing that had
taken place since midday in front of the portal of Notre-Dame.
And at the very beginning he had securely fastened to one of the
small columns a large knotted rope, one end of which trailed on
the flight of steps below. This being done, he began to look on
tranquilly, whistling from time to time when a blackbird flitted
past. Suddenly, at the moment when the superintendent’s
assistants were preparing to execute Charmolue’s phlegmatic
order, he threw his leg over the balustrade of the gallery,
seized the rope with his feet, his knees and his hands; then he
was seen to glide down the façade, as a drop of rain slips down a
window-pane, rush to the two executioners with the swiftness of a
cat which has fallen from a roof, knock them down with two
enormous fists, pick up the gypsy with one hand, as a child would
her doll, and dash back into the church with a single bound,
lifting the young girl above his head and crying in a formidable
voice,—
“Sanctuary!”
This was done with such rapidity, that had it taken place at
night, the whole of it could have been seen in the space of a
single flash of lightning.
“Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” repeated the crowd; and the clapping of
ten thousand hands made Quasimodo’s single eye sparkle with joy
and pride.
This shock restored the condemned girl to her senses. She raised
her eyelids, looked at Quasimodo, then closed them again
suddenly, as though terrified by her deliverer.
Charmolue was stupefied, as well as the executioners and the
entire escort. In fact, within the bounds of Notre-Dame, the
condemned girl could not be touched. The cathedral was a place of
refuge. All temporal jurisdiction expired upon its threshold.
Quasimodo had halted beneath the great portal, his huge feet
seemed as solid on the pavement of the church as the heavy Roman
pillars. His great, bushy head sat low between his shoulders,
like the heads of lions, who also have a mane and no neck. He
held the young girl, who was quivering all over, suspended from
his horny hands like a white drapery; but he carried her with as
much care as though he feared to break her or blight her. One
would have said that he felt that she was a delicate, exquisite,
precious thing, made for other hands than his. There were moments
when he looked as if not daring to touch her, even with his
breath. Then, all at once, he would press her forcibly in his
arms, against his angular bosom, like his own possession, his
treasure, as the mother of that child would have done. His
gnome’s eye, fastened upon her, inundated her with tenderness,
sadness, and pity, and was suddenly raised filled with
lightnings. Then the women laughed and wept, the crowd stamped
with enthusiasm, for, at that moment Quasimodo had a beauty of
his own. He was handsome; he, that orphan, that foundling, that
outcast, he felt himself august and strong, he gazed in the face
of that society from which he was banished, and in which he had
so powerfully intervened, of that human justice from which he had
wrenched its prey, of all those tigers whose jaws were forced to
remain empty, of those policemen, those judges, those
executioners, of all that force of the king which he, the meanest
of creatures, had just broken, with the force of God.
And then, it was touching to behold this protection which had
fallen from a being so hideous upon a being so unhappy, a
creature condemned to death saved by Quasimodo. They were two
extremes of natural and social wretchedness, coming into contact
and aiding each other.
Meanwhile, after several moments of triumph, Quasimodo had
plunged abruptly into the church with his burden. The populace,
fond of all prowess, sought him with their eyes, beneath the
gloomy nave, regretting that he had so speedily disappeared from
their acclamations. All at once, he was seen to re-appear at one
of the extremities of the gallery of the kings of France; he
traversed it, running like a madman, raising his conquest high in
his arms and shouting: “Sanctuary!” The crowd broke forth into
fresh applause. The gallery passed, he plunged once more into the
interior of the church. A moment later, he re-appeared upon the
upper platform, with the gypsy still in his arms, still running
madly, still crying, “Sanctuary!” and the throng applauded.
Finally, he made his appearance for the third time upon the
summit of the tower where hung the great bell; from that point he
seemed to be showing to the entire city the girl whom he had
saved, and his voice of thunder, that voice which was so rarely
heard, and which he never heard himself, repeated thrice with
frenzy, even to the clouds: “Sanctuary! Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”
“Noël! Noël!” shouted the populace in its turn; and that immense
acclamation flew to astonish the crowd assembled at the Grève on
the other bank, and the recluse who was still waiting with her
eyes riveted on the gibbet.
BOOK NINTH.
CHAPTER I. DELIRIUM.
Claude Frollo was no longer in Notre-Dame when his adopted son so
abruptly cut the fatal web in which the archdeacon and the gypsy
were entangled. On returning to the sacristy he had torn off his
alb, cope, and stole, had flung all into the hands of the
stupefied beadle, had made his escape through the private door of
the cloister, had ordered a boatman of the Terrain to transport
him to the left bank of the Seine, and had plunged into the hilly
streets of the University, not knowing whither he was going,
encountering at every step groups of men and women who were
hurrying joyously towards the Pont Saint-Michel, in the hope of
still arriving in time to see the witch hung there,—pale, wild,
more troubled, more blind and more fierce than a night bird let
loose and pursued by a troop of children in broad daylight. He no
longer knew where he was, what he thought, or whether he were
dreaming. He went forward, walking, running, taking any street at
haphazard, making no choice, only urged ever onward away from the
Grève, the horrible Grève, which he felt confusedly, to be behind
him.
In this manner he skirted Mount Sainte-Geneviève, and finally
emerged from the town by the Porte Saint-Victor. He continued his
flight as long as he could see, when he turned round, the
turreted enclosure of the University, and the rare houses of the
suburb; but, when, at length, a rise of ground had completely
concealed from him that odious Paris, when he could believe
himself to be a hundred leagues distant from it, in the fields,
in the desert, he halted, and it seemed to him that he breathed
more freely.
Then frightful ideas thronged his mind. Once more he could see
clearly into his soul, and he shuddered. He thought of that
unhappy girl who had destroyed him, and whom he had destroyed. He
cast a haggard eye over the double, tortuous way which fate had
caused their two destinies to pursue up to their point of
intersection, where it had dashed them against each other without
mercy. He meditated on the folly of eternal vows, on the vanity
of chastity, of science, of religion, of virtue, on the
uselessness of God. He plunged to his heart’s content in evil
thoughts, and in proportion as he sank deeper, he felt a Satanic
laugh burst forth within him.
And as he thus sifted his soul to the bottom, when he perceived
how large a space nature had prepared there for the passions, he
sneered still more bitterly. He stirred up in the depths of his
heart all his hatred, all his malevolence; and, with the cold
glance of a physician who examines a patient, he recognized the
fact that this malevolence was nothing but vitiated love; that
love, that source of every virtue in man, turned to horrible
things in the heart of a priest, and that a man constituted like
himself, in making himself a priest, made himself a demon. Then
he laughed frightfully, and suddenly became pale again, when he
considered the most sinister side of his fatal passion, of that
corrosive, venomous malignant, implacable love, which had ended
only in the gibbet for one of them and in hell for the other;
condemnation for her, damnation for him.
And then his laughter came again, when he reflected that Phœbus
was alive; that after all, the captain lived, was gay and happy,
had handsomer doublets than ever, and a new mistress whom he was
conducting to see the old one hanged. His sneer redoubled its
bitterness when he reflected that out of the living beings whose
death he had desired, the gypsy, the only creature whom he did
not hate, was the only one who had not escaped him.
Then from the captain, his thought passed to the people, and
there came to him a jealousy of an unprecedented sort. He
reflected that the people also, the entire populace, had had
before their eyes the woman whom he loved exposed almost naked.
He writhed his arms with agony as he thought that the woman whose
form, caught by him alone in the darkness would have been supreme
happiness, had been delivered up in broad daylight at full
noonday, to a whole people, clad as for a night of
voluptuousness. He wept with rage over all these mysteries of
love, profaned, soiled, laid bare, withered forever. He wept with
rage as he pictured to himself how many impure looks had been
gratified at the sight of that badly fastened shift, and that