Notre-Dame de Paris
“Praised be Pluto!” said Clopin. “But what the devil is he
dragging after him?”
It was, in fact, Jehan, who was running as fast as his heavy
outfit of a Paladin, and a long ladder which trailed on the
pavement, would permit, more breathless than an ant harnessed to
a blade of grass twenty times longer than itself.
“Victory! _Te Deum!_” cried the scholar. “Here is the ladder of
the longshoremen of Port Saint-Landry.”
Clopin approached him.
“Child, what do you mean to do, _corne-dieu!_ with this ladder?”
“I have it,” replied Jehan, panting. “I knew where it was under
the shed of the lieutenant’s house. There’s a wench there whom I
know, who thinks me as handsome as Cupido. I made use of her to
get the ladder, and I have the ladder, _Pasque-Mahom!_ The poor
girl came to open the door to me in her shift.”
“Yes,” said Clopin, “but what are you going to do with that
ladder?”
Jehan gazed at him with a malicious, knowing look, and cracked
his fingers like castanets. At that moment he was sublime. On his
head he wore one of those overloaded helmets of the fifteenth
century, which frightened the enemy with their fanciful crests.
His bristled with ten iron beaks, so that Jehan could have
disputed with Nestor’s Homeric vessel the redoubtable title of
δεκέμβολος.
“What do I mean to do with it, august king of Thunes? Do you see
that row of statues which have such idiotic expressions, yonder,
above the three portals?”
“Yes. Well?”
“’Tis the gallery of the kings of France.”
“What is that to me?” said Clopin.
“Wait! At the end of that gallery there is a door which is never
fastened otherwise than with a latch, and with this ladder I
ascend, and I am in the church.”
“Child let me be the first to ascend.”
“No, comrade, the ladder is mine. Come, you shall be the second.”
“May Beelzebub strangle you!” said surly Clopin, “I won’t be
second to anybody.”
“Then find a ladder, Clopin!”
Jehan set out on a run across the Place, dragging his ladder and
shouting: “Follow me, lads!”
In an instant the ladder was raised, and propped against the
balustrade of the lower gallery, above one of the lateral doors.
The throng of vagabonds, uttering loud acclamations, crowded to
its foot to ascend. But Jehan maintained his right, and was the
first to set foot on the rungs. The passage was tolerably long.
The gallery of the kings of France is to-day about sixty feet
above the pavement. The eleven steps of the flight before the
door, made it still higher. Jehan mounted slowly, a good deal
incommoded by his heavy armor, holding his crossbow in one hand,
and clinging to a rung with the other. When he reached the middle
of the ladder, he cast a melancholy glance at the poor dead
outcasts, with which the steps were strewn. “Alas!” said he,
“here is a heap of bodies worthy of the fifth book of the Iliad!”
Then he continued his ascent. The vagabonds followed him. There
was one on every rung. At the sight of this line of cuirassed
backs, undulating as they rose through the gloom, one would have
pronounced it a serpent with steel scales, which was raising
itself erect in front of the church. Jehan who formed the head,
and who was whistling, completed the illusion.
The scholar finally reached the balcony of the gallery, and
climbed over it nimbly, to the applause of the whole vagabond
tribe. Thus master of the citadel, he uttered a shout of joy, and
suddenly halted, petrified. He had just caught sight of Quasimodo
concealed in the dark, with flashing eye, behind one of the
statues of the kings.
Before a second assailant could gain a foothold on the gallery,
the formidable hunchback leaped to the head of the ladder,
without uttering a word, seized the ends of the two uprights with
his powerful hands, raised them, pushed them out from the wall,
balanced the long and pliant ladder, loaded with vagabonds from
top to bottom for a moment, in the midst of shrieks of anguish,
then suddenly, with superhuman force, hurled this cluster of men
backward into the Place. There was a moment when even the most
resolute trembled. The ladder, launched backwards, remained erect
and standing for an instant, and seemed to hesitate, then
wavered, then suddenly, describing a frightful arc of a circle
eighty feet in radius, crashed upon the pavement with its load of
ruffians, more rapidly than a drawbridge when its chains break.
There arose an immense imprecation, then all was still, and a few
mutilated wretches were seen, crawling over the heap of dead.
A sound of wrath and grief followed the first cries of triumph
among the besiegers. Quasimodo, impassive, with both elbows
propped on the balustrade, looked on. He had the air of an old,
bushy-headed king at his window.
As for Jehan Frollo, he was in a critical position. He found
himself in the gallery with the formidable bellringer, alone,
separated from his companions by a vertical wall eighty feet
high. While Quasimodo was dealing with the ladder, the scholar
had run to the postern which he believed to be open. It was not.
The deaf man had closed it behind him when he entered the
gallery. Jehan had then concealed himself behind a stone king,
not daring to breathe, and fixing upon the monstrous hunchback a
frightened gaze, like the man, who, when courting the wife of the
guardian of a menagerie, went one evening to a love rendezvous,
mistook the wall which he was to climb, and suddenly found
himself face to face with a white bear.
For the first few moments, the deaf man paid no heed to him; but
at last he turned his head, and suddenly straightened up. He had
just caught sight of the scholar.
Jehan prepared himself for a rough shock, but the deaf man
remained motionless; only he had turned towards the scholar and
was looking at him.
“Ho ho!” said Jehan, “what do you mean by staring at me with that
solitary and melancholy eye?”
As he spoke thus, the young scamp stealthily adjusted his
crossbow.
“Quasimodo!” he cried, “I am going to change your surname: you
shall be called the blind man.”
The shot sped. The feathered vireton[62] whizzed and entered the
hunchback’s left arm. Quasimodo appeared no more moved by it than
by a scratch to King Pharamond. He laid his hand on the arrow,
tore it from his arm, and tranquilly broke it across his big
knee; then he let the two pieces drop on the floor, rather than
threw them down. But Jehan had no opportunity to fire a second
time. The arrow broken, Quasimodo breathing heavily, bounded like
a grasshopper, and he fell upon the scholar, whose armor was
flattened against the wall by the blow.
Then in that gloom, wherein wavered the light of the torches, a
terrible thing was seen.
Quasimodo had grasped with his left hand the two arms of Jehan,
who did not offer any resistance, so thoroughly did he feel that
he was lost. With his right hand, the deaf man detached one by
one, in silence, with sinister slowness, all the pieces of his
armor, the sword, the daggers, the helmet, the cuirass, the leg
pieces. One would have said that it was a monkey taking the shell
from a nut. Quasimodo flung the scholar’s iron shell at his feet,
piece by piece. When the scholar beheld himself disarmed,
stripped, weak, and naked in those terrible hands, he made no
attempt to speak to the deaf man, but began to laugh audaciously
in his face, and to sing with his intrepid heedlessness of a
child of sixteen, the then popular ditty:—
“Elle est bien habillée,
La ville de Cambrai;
Marafin l’a pillée....”[63]
He did not finish. Quasimodo was seen on the parapet of the
gallery, holding the scholar by the feet with one hand and
whirling him over the abyss like a sling; then a sound like that
of a bony structure in contact with a wall was heard, and
something was seen to fall which halted a third of the way down
in its fall, on a projection in the architecture. It was a dead
body which remained hanging there, bent double, its loins broken,
its skull empty.
A cry of horror rose among the vagabonds.
“Vengeance!” shouted Clopin. “To the sack!” replied the
multitude. “Assault! assault!”
There came a tremendous howl, in which were mingled all tongues,
all dialects, all accents. The death of the poor scholar imparted
a furious ardor to that crowd. It was seized with shame, and the
wrath of having been held so long in check before a church by a
hunchback. Rage found ladders, multiplied the torches, and, at
the expiration of a few minutes, Quasimodo, in despair, beheld
that terrible ant heap mount on all sides to the assault of
Notre-Dame. Those who had no ladders had knotted ropes; those who
had no ropes climbed by the projections of the carvings. They
hung from each other’s rags. There were no means of resisting
that rising tide of frightful faces; rage made these fierce
countenances ruddy; their clayey brows were dripping with sweat;
their eyes darted lightnings; all these grimaces, all these
horrors laid siege to Quasimodo. One would have said that some
other church had despatched to the assault of Notre-Dame its
gorgons, its dogs, its drées, its demons, its most fantastic
sculptures. It was like a layer of living monsters on the stone
monsters of the façade.
Meanwhile, the Place was studded with a thousand torches. This
scene of confusion, till now hid in darkness, was suddenly
flooded with light. The parvis was resplendent, and cast a
radiance on the sky; the bonfire lighted on the lofty platform
was still burning, and illuminated the city far away. The
enormous silhouette of the two towers, projected afar on the
roofs of Paris, and formed a large notch of black in this light.
The city seemed to be aroused. Alarm bells wailed in the
distance. The vagabonds howled, panted, swore, climbed; and
Quasimodo, powerless against so many enemies, shuddering for the
gypsy, beholding the furious faces approaching ever nearer and
nearer to his gallery, entreated heaven for a miracle, and wrung
his arms in despair.
CHAPTER V. THE RETREAT IN WHICH MONSIEUR LOUIS OF FRANCE SAYS HIS
PRAYERS.
The reader has not, perhaps, forgotten that one moment before
catching sight of the nocturnal band of vagabonds, Quasimodo, as
he inspected Paris from the heights of his bell tower, perceived
only one light burning, which gleamed like a star from a window
on the topmost story of a lofty edifice beside the Porte
Saint-Antoine. This edifice was the Bastille. That star was the
candle of Louis XI. King Louis XI. had, in fact, been two days in
Paris. He was to take his departure on the next day but one for
his citadel of Montilz-les-Tours. He made but seldom and brief
appearance in his good city of Paris, since there he did not feel