Notre-Dame de Paris
the Petit-Bourbon, the Hôtel de Sens, the Hôtel d’Angoulême,
etc., had battlements on their walls, and machicolations over
their doors. Churches were guarded by their sanctity. Some, among
the number Notre-Dame, were fortified. The Abbey of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés was castellated like a baronial mansion,
and more brass expended about it in bombards than in bells. Its
fortress was still to be seen in 1610. To-day, barely its church
remains.
Let us return to Notre-Dame.
When the first arrangements were completed, and we must say, to
the honor of vagabond discipline, that Clopin’s orders were
executed in silence, and with admirable precision, the worthy
chief of the band, mounted on the parapet of the church square,
and raised his hoarse and surly voice, turning towards
Notre-Dame, and brandishing his torch whose light, tossed by the
wind, and veiled every moment by its own smoke, made the reddish
façade of the church appear and disappear before the eye.
“To you, Louis de Beaumont, bishop of Paris, counsellor in the
Court of Parliament, I, Clopin Trouillefou, king of Thunes, grand
Coësre, prince of Argot, bishop of fools, I say: Our sister,
falsely condemned for magic, hath taken refuge in your church,
you owe her asylum and safety. Now the Court of Parliament wishes
to seize her once more there, and you consent to it; so that she
would be hanged to-morrow in the Grève, if God and the outcasts
were not here. If your church is sacred, so is our sister; if our
sister is not sacred, neither is your church. That is why we call
upon you to return the girl if you wish to save your church, or
we will take possession of the girl again and pillage the church,
which will be a good thing. In token of which I here plant my
banner, and may God preserve you, bishop of Paris.”
Quasimodo could not, unfortunately, hear these words uttered with
a sort of sombre and savage majesty. A vagabond presented his
banner to Clopin, who planted it solemnly between two
paving-stones. It was a pitchfork from whose points hung a
bleeding quarter of carrion meat.
That done, the King of Thunes turned round and cast his eyes over
his army, a fierce multitude whose glances flashed almost equally
with their pikes. After a momentary pause,—“Forward, my Sons!” he
cried; “to work, locksmiths!”
Thirty bold men, square shouldered, and with pick-lock faces,
stepped from the ranks, with hammers, pincers, and bars of iron
on their shoulders. They betook themselves to the principal door
of the church, ascended the steps, and were soon to be seen
squatting under the arch, working at the door with pincers and
levers; a throng of vagabonds followed them to help or look on.
The eleven steps before the portal were covered with them.
But the door stood firm. “The devil! ’tis hard and obstinate!”
said one. “It is old, and its gristles have become bony,” said
another. “Courage, comrades!” resumed Clopin. “I wager my head
against a dipper that you will have opened the door, rescued the
girl, and despoiled the chief altar before a single beadle is
awake. Stay! I think I hear the lock breaking up.”
Clopin was interrupted by a frightful uproar which re-sounded
behind him at that moment. He wheeled round. An enormous beam had
just fallen from above; it had crushed a dozen vagabonds on the
pavement with the sound of a cannon, breaking in addition, legs
here and there in the crowd of beggars, who sprang aside with
cries of terror. In a twinkling, the narrow precincts of the
church parvis were cleared. The locksmiths, although protected by
the deep vaults of the portal, abandoned the door and Clopin
himself retired to a respectful distance from the church.
“I had a narrow escape!” cried Jehan. “I felt the wind, of it,
_tête-de-bœuf!_ but Pierre the Slaughterer is slaughtered!”
It is impossible to describe the astonishment mingled with fright
which fell upon the ruffians in company with this beam.
They remained for several minutes with their eyes in the air,
more dismayed by that piece of wood than by the king’s twenty
thousand archers.
“Satan!” muttered the Duke of Egypt, “this smacks of magic!”
“’Tis the moon which threw this log at us,” said Andry the Red.
“Call the moon the friend of the Virgin, after that!” went on
François Chanteprune.
“A thousand popes!” exclaimed Clopin, “you are all fools!” But he
did not know how to explain the fall of the beam.
Meanwhile, nothing could be distinguished on the façade, to whose
summit the light of the torches did not reach. The heavy beam lay
in the middle of the enclosure, and groans were heard from the
poor wretches who had received its first shock, and who had been
almost cut in twain, on the angle of the stone steps.
The King of Thunes, his first amazement passed, finally found an
explanation which appeared plausible to his companions.
“Throat of God! are the canons defending themselves? To the sack,
then! to the sack!”
“To the sack!” repeated the rabble, with a furious hurrah. A
discharge of crossbows and hackbuts against the front of the
church followed.
At this detonation, the peaceable inhabitants of the surrounding
houses woke up; many windows were seen to open, and nightcaps and
hands holding candles appeared at the casements.
“Fire at the windows,” shouted Clopin. The windows were
immediately closed, and the poor _bourgeois_, who had hardly had
time to cast a frightened glance on this scene of gleams and
tumult, returned, perspiring with fear to their wives, asking
themselves whether the witches’ sabbath was now being held in the
parvis of Notre-Dame, or whether there was an assault of
Burgundians, as in ’64. Then the husbands thought of theft; the
wives, of rape; and all trembled.
“To the sack!” repeated the thieves’ crew; but they dared not
approach. They stared at the beam, they stared at the church. The
beam did not stir, the edifice preserved its calm and deserted
air; but something chilled the outcasts.
“To work, locksmiths!” shouted Trouillefou. “Let the door be
forced!”
No one took a step.
“Beard and belly!” said Clopin, “here be men afraid of a beam.”
An old locksmith addressed him—
“Captain, ’tis not the beam which bothers us, ’tis the door,
which is all covered with iron bars. Our pincers are powerless
against it.”
“What more do you want to break it in?” demanded Clopin.
“Ah! we ought to have a battering ram.”
The King of Thunes ran boldly to the formidable beam, and placed
his foot upon it: “Here is one!” he exclaimed; “’tis the canons
who send it to you.” And, making a mocking salute in the
direction of the church, “Thanks, canons!”
This piece of bravado produced its effects,—the spell of the beam
was broken. The vagabonds recovered their courage; soon the heavy
joist, raised like a feather by two hundred vigorous arms, was
flung with fury against the great door which they had tried to
batter down. At the sight of that long beam, in the half-light
which the infrequent torches of the brigands spread over the
Place, thus borne by that crowd of men who dashed it at a run
against the church, one would have thought that he beheld a
monstrous beast with a thousand feet attacking with lowered head
the giant of stone.
At the shock of the beam, the half metallic door sounded like an
immense drum; it was not burst in, but the whole cathedral
trembled, and the deepest cavities of the edifice were heard to
echo.
At the same moment, a shower of large stones began to fall from
the top of the façade on the assailants.
“The devil!” cried Jehan, “are the towers shaking their
balustrades down on our heads?”
But the impulse had been given, the King of Thunes had set the
example. Evidently, the bishop was defending himself, and they
only battered the door with the more rage, in spite of the stones
which cracked skulls right and left.
It was remarkable that all these stones fell one by one; but they
followed each other closely. The thieves always felt two at a
time, one on their legs and one on their heads. There were few
which did not deal their blow, and a large layer of dead and
wounded lay bleeding and panting beneath the feet of the
assailants who, now grown furious, replaced each other without
intermission. The long beam continued to belabor the door, at
regular intervals, like the clapper of a bell, the stones to rain
down, the door to groan.
The reader has no doubt divined that this unexpected resistance
which had exasperated the outcasts came from Quasimodo.
Chance had, unfortunately, favored the brave deaf man.
When he had descended to the platform between the towers, his
ideas were all in confusion. He had run up and down along the
gallery for several minutes like a madman, surveying from above,
the compact mass of vagabonds ready to hurl itself on the church,
demanding the safety of the gypsy from the devil or from God. The
thought had occurred to him of ascending to the southern belfry
and sounding the alarm, but before he could have set the bell in
motion, before Marie’s voice could have uttered a single clamor,
was there not time to burst in the door of the church ten times
over? It was precisely the moment when the locksmiths were
advancing upon it with their tools. What was to be done?
All at once, he remembered that some masons had been at work all
day repairing the wall, the timber-work, and the roof of the
south tower. This was a flash of light. The wall was of stone,
the roof of lead, the timber-work of wood. (That prodigious
timber-work, so dense that it was called “the forest.”)
Quasimodo hastened to that tower. The lower chambers were, in
fact, full of materials. There were piles of rough blocks of
stone, sheets of lead in rolls, bundles of laths, heavy beams
already notched with the saw, heaps of plaster.
Time was pressing, The pikes and hammers were at work below. With
a strength which the sense of danger increased tenfold, he seized
one of the beams—the longest and heaviest; he pushed it out
through a loophole, then, grasping it again outside of the tower,
he made it slide along the angle of the balustrade which
surrounds the platform, and let it fly into the abyss. The
enormous timber, during that fall of a hundred and sixty feet,
scraping the wall, breaking the carvings, turned many times on
its centre, like the arm of a windmill flying off alone through
space. At last it reached the ground, the horrible cry arose, and
the black beam, as it rebounded from the pavement, resembled a
serpent leaping.
Quasimodo beheld the outcasts scatter at the fall of the beam,
like ashes at the breath of a child. He took advantage of their
fright, and while they were fixing a superstitious glance on the