Notre-Dame de Paris
club which had fallen from heaven, and while they were putting
out the eyes of the stone saints on the front with a discharge of
arrows and buckshot, Quasimodo was silently piling up plaster,
stones, and rough blocks of stone, even the sacks of tools
belonging to the masons, on the edge of the balustrade from which
the beam had already been hurled.
Thus, as soon as they began to batter the grand door, the shower
of rough blocks of stone began to fall, and it seemed to them
that the church itself was being demolished over their heads.
Any one who could have beheld Quasimodo at that moment would have
been frightened. Independently of the projectiles which he had
piled upon the balustrade, he had collected a heap of stones on
the platform itself. As fast as the blocks on the exterior edge
were exhausted, he drew on the heap. Then he stooped and rose,
stooped and rose again with incredible activity. His huge gnome’s
head bent over the balustrade, then an enormous stone fell, then
another, then another. From time to time, he followed a fine
stone with his eye, and when it did good execution, he said,
“Hum!”
Meanwhile, the beggars did not grow discouraged. The thick door
on which they were venting their fury had already trembled more
than twenty times beneath the weight of their oaken
battering-ram, multiplied by the strength of a hundred men. The
panels cracked, the carved work flew into splinters, the hinges,
at every blow, leaped from their pins, the planks yawned, the
wood crumbled to powder, ground between the iron sheathing.
Fortunately for Quasimodo, there was more iron than wood.
Nevertheless, he felt that the great door was yielding. Although
he did not hear it, every blow of the ram reverberated
simultaneously in the vaults of the church and within it. From
above he beheld the vagabonds, filled with triumph and rage,
shaking their fists at the gloomy façade; and both on the gypsy’s
account and his own he envied the wings of the owls which flitted
away above his head in flocks.
His shower of stone blocks was not sufficient to repel the
assailants.
At this moment of anguish, he noticed, a little lower down than
the balustrade whence he was crushing the thieves, two long stone
gutters which discharged immediately over the great door; the
internal orifice of these gutters terminated on the pavement of
the platform. An idea occurred to him; he ran in search of a
fagot in his bellringer’s den, placed on this fagot a great many
bundles of laths, and many rolls of lead, munitions which he had
not employed so far, and having arranged this pile in front of
the hole to the two gutters, he set it on fire with his lantern.
During this time, since the stones no longer fell, the outcasts
ceased to gaze into the air. The bandits, panting like a pack of
hounds who are forcing a boar into his lair, pressed tumultuously
round the great door, all disfigured by the battering ram, but
still standing. They were waiting with a quiver for the great
blow which should split it open. They vied with each other in
pressing as close as possible, in order to dash among the first,
when it should open, into that opulent cathedral, a vast
reservoir where the wealth of three centuries had been piled up.
They reminded each other with roars of exultation and greedy
lust, of the beautiful silver crosses, the fine copes of brocade,
the beautiful tombs of silver gilt, the great magnificences of
the choir, the dazzling festivals, the Christmasses sparkling
with torches, the Easters sparkling with sunshine,—all those
splendid solemneties wherein chandeliers, ciboriums, tabernacles,
and reliquaries, studded the altars with a crust of gold and
diamonds. Certainly, at that fine moment, thieves and pseudo
sufferers, doctors in stealing, and vagabonds, were thinking much
less of delivering the gypsy than of pillaging Notre-Dame. We
could even easily believe that for a goodly number among them la
Esmeralda was only a pretext, if thieves needed pretexts.
All at once, at the moment when they were grouping themselves
round the ram for a last effort, each one holding his breath and
stiffening his muscles in order to communicate all his force to
the decisive blow, a howl more frightful still than that which
had burst forth and expired beneath the beam, rose among them.
Those who did not cry out, those who were still alive, looked.
Two streams of melted lead were falling from the summit of the
edifice into the thickest of the rabble. That sea of men had just
sunk down beneath the boiling metal, which had made, at the two
points where it fell, two black and smoking holes in the crowd,
such as hot water would make in snow. Dying men, half consumed
and groaning with anguish, could be seen writhing there. Around
these two principal streams there were drops of that horrible
rain, which scattered over the assailants and entered their
skulls like gimlets of fire. It was a heavy fire which
overwhelmed these wretches with a thousand hailstones.
The outcry was heartrending. They fled pell-mell, hurling the
beam upon the bodies, the boldest as well as the most timid, and
the parvis was cleared a second time.
All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there
an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery,
higher than the central rose window, there was a great flame
rising between the two towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a vast,
disordered, and furious flame, a tongue of which was borne into
the smoke by the wind, from time to time. Below that fire, below
the gloomy balustrade with its trefoils showing darkly against
its glare, two spouts with monster throats were vomiting forth
unceasingly that burning rain, whose silvery stream stood out
against the shadows of the lower façade. As they approached the
earth, these two jets of liquid lead spread out in sheaves, like
water springing from the thousand holes of a watering-pot. Above
the flame, the enormous towers, two sides of each of which were
visible in sharp outline, the one wholly black, the other wholly
red, seemed still more vast with all the immensity of the shadow
which they cast even to the sky.
Their innumerable sculptures of demons and dragons assumed a
lugubrious aspect. The restless light of the flame made them move
to the eye. There were griffins which had the air of laughing,
gargoyles which one fancied one heard yelping, salamanders which
puffed at the fire, tarasques[61] which sneezed in the smoke. And
among the monsters thus roused from their sleep of stone by this
flame, by this noise, there was one who walked about, and who was
seen, from time to time, to pass across the glowing face of the
pile, like a bat in front of a candle.
Without doubt, this strange beacon light would awaken far away,
the woodcutter of the hills of Bicêtre, terrified to behold the
gigantic shadow of the towers of Notre-Dame quivering over his
heaths.
A terrified silence ensued among the outcasts, during which
nothing was heard, but the cries of alarm of the canons shut up
in their cloister, and more uneasy than horses in a burning
stable, the furtive sound of windows hastily opened and still
more hastily closed, the internal hurly-burly of the houses and
of the Hôtel-Dieu, the wind in the flame, the last death-rattle
of the dying, and the continued crackling of the rain of lead
upon the pavement.
In the meanwhile, the principal vagabonds had retired beneath the
porch of the Gondelaurier mansion, and were holding a council of
war.
The Duke of Egypt, seated on a stone post, contemplated the
phantasmagorical bonfire, glowing at a height of two hundred feet
in the air, with religious terror. Clopin Trouillefou bit his
huge fists with rage.
“Impossible to get in!” he muttered between his teeth.
“An old, enchanted church!” grumbled the aged Bohemian, Mathias
Hungadi Spicali.
“By the Pope’s whiskers!” went on a sham soldier, who had once
been in service, “here are church gutters spitting melted lead at
you better than the machicolations of Lectoure.”
“Do you see that demon passing and repassing in front of the
fire?” exclaimed the Duke of Egypt.
“Pardieu, ’tis that damned bellringer, ’tis Quasimodo,” said
Clopin.
The Bohemian tossed his head. “I tell you, that ’tis the spirit
Sabnac, the grand marquis, the demon of fortifications. He has
the form of an armed soldier, the head of a lion. Sometimes he
rides a hideous horse. He changes men into stones, of which he
builds towers. He commands fifty legions ’Tis he indeed; I
recognize him. Sometimes he is clad in a handsome golden robe,
figured after the Turkish fashion.”
“Where is Bellevigne de l’Étoile?” demanded Clopin.
“He is dead.”
Andry the Red laughed in an idiotic way: “Notre-Dame is making
work for the hospital,” said he.
“Is there, then, no way of forcing this door,” exclaimed the King
of Thunes, stamping his foot.
The Duke of Egypt pointed sadly to the two streams of boiling
lead which did not cease to streak the black façade, like two
long distaffs of phosphorus.
“Churches have been known to defend themselves thus all by
themselves,” he remarked with a sigh. “Saint-Sophia at
Constantinople, forty years ago, hurled to the earth three times
in succession, the crescent of Mahom, by shaking her domes, which
are her heads. Guillaume de Paris, who built this one was a
magician.”
“Must we then retreat in pitiful fashion, like highwaymen?” said
Clopin. “Must we leave our sister here, whom those hooded wolves
will hang to-morrow.”
“And the sacristy, where there are wagon-loads of gold!” added a
vagabond, whose name, we regret to say, we do not know.
“Beard of Mahom!” cried Trouillefou.
“Let us make another trial,” resumed the vagabond.
Mathias Hungadi shook his head.
“We shall never get in by the door. We must find the defect in
the armor of the old fairy; a hole, a false postern, some joint
or other.”
“Who will go with me?” said Clopin. “I shall go at it again. By
the way, where is the little scholar Jehan, who is so encased in
iron?”
“He is dead, no doubt,” some one replied; “we no longer hear his
laugh.”
The King of Thunes frowned: “So much the worse. There was a brave
heart under that ironmongery. And Master Pierre Gringoire?”
“Captain Clopin,” said Andry the Red, “he slipped away before we
reached the Pont-aux-Changeurs.”
Clopin stamped his foot. “_Gueule-Dieu!_ ’twas he who pushed us
on hither, and he has deserted us in the very middle of the job!
Cowardly chatterer, with a slipper for a helmet!”
“Captain Clopin,” said Andry the Red, who was gazing down Rue du
Parvis, “yonder is the little scholar.”