Notre-Dame de Paris
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,
shouting, 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.