Notre-Dame de Paris
Meanwhile, the man began to mount the ladder. Then Quasimodo saw
him again distinctly. He was carrying a woman on his shoulder, a
young girl dressed in white; that young girl had a noose about
her neck. Quasimodo recognized her.
It was she.
The man reached the top of the ladder. There he arranged the
noose. Here the priest, in order to see the better, knelt upon
the balustrade.
All at once the man kicked away the ladder abruptly, and
Quasimodo, who had not breathed for several moments, beheld the
unhappy child dangling at the end of the rope two fathoms above
the pavement, with the man squatting on her shoulders. The rope
made several gyrations on itself, and Quasimodo beheld horrible
convulsions run along the gypsy’s body. The priest, on his side,
with outstretched neck and eyes starting from his head,
contemplated this horrible group of the man and the young
girl,—the spider and the fly.
At the moment when it was most horrible, the laugh of a demon, a
laugh which one can only give vent to when one is no longer
human, burst forth on the priest’s livid face.
Quasimodo did not hear that laugh, but he saw it.
The bellringer retreated several paces behind the archdeacon, and
suddenly hurling himself upon him with fury, with his huge hands
he pushed him by the back over into the abyss over which Dom
Claude was leaning.
The priest shrieked: “Damnation!” and fell.
The spout, above which he had stood, arrested him in his fall. He
clung to it with desperate hands, and, at the moment when he
opened his mouth to utter a second cry, he beheld the formidable
and avenging face of Quasimodo thrust over the edge of the
balustrade above his head.
Then he was silent.
The abyss was there below him. A fall of more than two hundred
feet and the pavement.
In this terrible situation, the archdeacon said not a word,
uttered not a groan. He merely writhed upon the spout, with
incredible efforts to climb up again; but his hands had no hold
on the granite, his feet slid along the blackened wall without
catching fast. People who have ascended the towers of Notre-Dame
know that there is a swell of the stone immediately beneath the
balustrade. It was on this retreating angle that miserable
archdeacon exhausted himself. He had not to deal with a
perpendicular wall, but with one which sloped away beneath him.
Quasimodo had but to stretch out his hand in order to draw him
from the gulf; but he did not even look at him. He was looking at
the Grève. He was looking at the gallows. He was looking at the
gypsy.
The deaf man was leaning, with his elbows on the balustrade, at
the spot where the archdeacon had been a moment before, and
there, never detaching his gaze from the only object which
existed for him in the world at that moment, he remained
motionless and mute, like a man struck by lightning, and a long
stream of tears flowed in silence from that eye which, up to that
time, had never shed but one tear.
Meanwhile, the archdeacon was panting. His bald brow was dripping
with perspiration, his nails were bleeding against the stones,
his knees were flayed by the wall.
He heard his cassock, which was caught on the spout, crack and
rip at every jerk that he gave it. To complete his misfortune,
this spout ended in a leaden pipe which bent under the weight of
his body. The archdeacon felt this pipe slowly giving way. The
miserable man said to himself that, when his hands should be worn
out with fatigue, when his cassock should tear asunder, when the
lead should give way, he would be obliged to fall, and terror
seized upon his very vitals. Now and then he glanced wildly at a
sort of narrow shelf formed, ten feet lower down, by projections
of the sculpture, and he prayed heaven, from the depths of his
distressed soul, that he might be allowed to finish his life,
were it to last two centuries, on that space two feet square.
Once, he glanced below him into the Place, into the abyss; the
head which he raised again had its eyes closed and its hair
standing erect.
There was something frightful in the silence of these two men.
While the archdeacon agonized in this terrible fashion a few feet
below him, Quasimodo wept and gazed at the Grève.
The archdeacon, seeing that all his exertions served only to
weaken the fragile support which remained to him, decided to
remain quiet. There he hung, embracing the gutter, hardly
breathing, no longer stirring, making no longer any other
movements than that mechanical convulsion of the stomach, which
one experiences in dreams when one fancies himself falling. His
fixed eyes were wide open with a stare. He lost ground little by
little, nevertheless, his fingers slipped along the spout; he
became more and more conscious of the feebleness of his arms and
the weight of his body. The curve of the lead which sustained him
inclined more and more each instant towards the abyss.
He beheld below him, a frightful thing, the roof of Saint-Jean le
Rond, as small as a card folded in two. He gazed at the
impressive carvings, one by one, of the tower, suspended like
himself over the precipice, but without terror for themselves or
pity for him. All was stone around him; before his eyes, gaping
monsters; below, quite at the bottom, in the Place, the pavement;
above his head, Quasimodo weeping.
In the Parvis there were several groups of curious good people,
who were tranquilly seeking to divine who the madman could be who
was amusing himself in so strange a manner. The priest heard them
saying, for their voices reached him, clear and shrill: “Why, he
will break his neck!”
Quasimodo wept.
At last the archdeacon, foaming with rage and despair, understood
that all was in vain. Nevertheless, he collected all the strength
which remained to him for a final effort. He stiffened himself
upon the spout, pushed against the wall with both his knees,
clung to a crevice in the stones with his hands, and succeeded in
climbing back with one foot, perhaps; but this effort made the
leaden beak on which he rested bend abruptly. His cassock burst
open at the same time. Then, feeling everything give way beneath
him, with nothing but his stiffened and failing hands to support
him, the unfortunate man closed his eyes and let go of the spout.
He fell.
Quasimodo watched him fall.
A fall from such a height is seldom perpendicular. The
archdeacon, launched into space, fell at first head foremost,
with outspread hands; then he whirled over and over many times;
the wind blew him upon the roof of a house, where the unfortunate
man began to break up. Nevertheless, he was not dead when he
reached there. The bellringer saw him still endeavor to cling to
a gable with his nails; but the surface sloped too much, and he
had no more strength. He slid rapidly along the roof like a
loosened tile, and dashed upon the pavement. There he no longer
moved.
Then Quasimodo raised his eyes to the gypsy, whose body he beheld
hanging from the gibbet, quivering far away beneath her white
robe with the last shudderings of anguish, then he dropped them
on the archdeacon, stretched out at the base of the tower, and no
longer retaining the human form, and he said, with a sob which
heaved his deep chest,—“Oh! all that I have ever loved!”
CHAPTER III. THE MARRIAGE OF PHOEBUS.
Towards evening on that day, when the judiciary officers of the
bishop came to pick up from the pavement of the Parvis the
dislocated corpse of the archdeacon, Quasimodo had disappeared.
A great many rumors were in circulation with regard to this
adventure. No one doubted but that the day had come when, in
accordance with their compact, Quasimodo, that is to say, the
devil, was to carry off Claude Frollo, that is to say, the
sorcerer. It was presumed that he had broken the body when taking
the soul, like monkeys who break the shell to get at the nut.
This is why the archdeacon was not interred in consecrated earth.
Louis XI. died a year later, in the month of August, 1483.
As for Pierre Gringoire, he succeeded in saving the goat, and he
won success in tragedy. It appears that, after having tasted
astrology, philosophy, architecture, hermetics,—all vanities, he
returned to tragedy, vainest pursuit of all. This is what he
called “coming to a tragic end.” This is what is to be read, on
the subject of his dramatic triumphs, in 1483, in the accounts of
the “Ordinary:” “To Jehan Marchand and Pierre Gringoire,
carpenter and composer, who have made and composed the mystery
made at the Châtelet of Paris, at the entry of Monsieur the
Legate, and have ordered the personages, clothed and dressed the
same, as in the said mystery was required; and likewise, for
having made the scaffoldings thereto necessary; and for this
deed,—one hundred livres.”
Phœbus de Châteaupers also came to a tragic end. He married.
CHAPTER IV. THE MARRIAGE OF QUASIMODO.
We have just said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre-Dame on
the day of the gypsy’s and of the archdeacon’s death. He was not
seen again, in fact; no one knew what had become of him.
During the night which followed the execution of la Esmeralda,
the night men had detached her body from the gibbet, and had
carried it, according to custom, to the cellar of Montfaucon.
Montfaucon was, as Sauval says, “the most ancient and the most
superb gibbet in the kingdom.” Between the faubourgs of the
Temple and Saint Martin, about a hundred and sixty toises from
the walls of Paris, a few bow shots from La Courtille, there was
to be seen on the crest of a gentle, almost imperceptible
eminence, but sufficiently elevated to be seen for several
leagues round about, an edifice of strange form, bearing
considerable resemblance to a Celtic cromlech, and where also
human sacrifices were offered.
Let the reader picture to himself, crowning a limestone hillock,
an oblong mass of masonry fifteen feet in height, thirty wide,
forty long, with a gate, an external railing and a platform; on
this platform sixteen enormous pillars of rough hewn stone,
thirty feet in height, arranged in a colonnade round three of the
four sides of the mass which support them, bound together at
their summits by heavy beams, whence hung chains at intervals; on
all these chains, skeletons; in the vicinity, on the plain, a
stone cross and two gibbets of secondary importance, which seemed
to have sprung up as shoots around the central gallows; above all
this, in the sky, a perpetual flock of crows; that was
Montfaucon.
At the end of the fifteenth century, the formidable gibbet which
dated from 1328, was already very much dilapidated; the beams
were wormeaten, the chains rusted, the pillars green with mould;