Chapter II

The Beautiful Creature Clad in White

When Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the gypsy was no longer there, that while he had been defending her she had been abducted, he grasped his hair with both hands and stamped with surprise and pain; then he set out to run through the entire church seeking his Bohemian. It was just at the moment when the king’s archers were making their victorious entrance into Notre-Dame, also in search of the gypsy. Quasimodo, poor, deaf fellow, aided them in their fatal intentions, without suspecting it; he thought that the outcasts were the gypsy’s enemies. He himself conducted Tristan l’Hermite to all possible hiding-places, opened to him the secret doors, the double bottoms of the altars, the rear sacristries. If the unfortunate girl had still been there, it would have been he himself who would have delivered her up.

After, Quasimodo continued the search alone. He made the tour of the church twenty times, running, calling, shouting, despairing, mad.

At last when he was sure, perfectly sure that she was no longer there, he slowly mounted the staircase to the towers. The church was again deserted, and had fallen back into its silence.

He went to the cell once more. 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.

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. At last, he dragged himself on his knees outside the cell, and crouched down facing the door.

He remained thus for more than an hour without making a movement. 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.

At the moment when his thought was fixed upon the priest, while the daybreak was whitening the building, he saw on the highest story of Notre-Dame, 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 deaf man saw him disappear through the door of the staircase to the north tower. 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 should do, what he should say.

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.

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. He was one of the men for whom there are no mornings, no birds, no flowers. In that immense horizon, his gaze 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 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.

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 better, knelt upon the balustrade.

All at once the man kicked away the ladder abruptly, and Quasimodo, who had not breathed for several moments, saw the unhappy child dangling at the end of the rope above the pavement, with the man squatting on her shoulders. The rope made several gyrations on itself, and Quasimodo saw horrible convulsions run along the gypsy’s body.

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 into the abyss over which Dom Claude was leaning.

The priest shrieked and fell.

The spout, above which he had stood, arrested his fall. He clung to it with desperate hands, and, at the moment when he opened his mouth to cry, he saw the Qasimodo’s face 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. 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 wall

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.

A long stream of tears flowed in silence from his eye which, up to that time, had never shed but one tear.

Meanwhile, the archdeacon was panting.

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.

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.

At last the archdeacon, foaming with rage and despair, understood that all was in vain. He collected all the strength which remained in 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, 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; 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. 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 saw 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.

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,– he returned to tragedy, vainest pursuit of all.

Phoebus de Châteaupers also came to a tragic end. He married.

Chapter IV

The Marriage of Quasimodo

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.”

The mass of masonry which served as foundation to the odious edifice was hollow. A huge cellar had been constructed there, closed by an old iron grating, which was out of order, into which were cast not only the human remains, which were taken from the chains of Montfaucon, but also the bodies of all the unfortunates executed on the other permanent gibbets of Paris.

About eighteen months or two years after the events which terminate this story, when search was made in that cavern for the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days previously, and to whom Charles VIII had granted the favor of being buried in Saint Laurent, in better company, they found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its embrace. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a garment which had once been white, and around her neck was to be seen a string of beads with a little silk bag ornamented with green glass, which was open and empty. The other, which held this one in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his shoulder blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust.