When Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the gypsy was no longerthere, that while he had been defending her she had been abducted, hegrasped his hair with both hands and stamped with surprise and pain;then he set out to run through the entire church seeking his Bohemian,howling strange cries to all the corners of the walls, strewing his redhair on the pavement. It was just at the moment when the king's archerswere making their victorious entrance into Notre-Dame, also in searchof the gypsy. Quasimodo, poor, deaf fellow, aided them in their fatalintentions, without suspecting it; he thought that the outcasts were thegypsy's enemies. He himself conducted Tristan l'Hermite to all possiblehiding-places, opened to him the secret doors, the double bottoms ofthe altars, the rear sacristries. If the unfortunate girl had still beenthere, it would have been he himself who would have delivered her up.
When the fatigue of finding nothing had disheartened Tristan, who wasnot easily discouraged, Quasimodo continued the search alone. He madethe tour of the church twenty times, length and breadth, up anddown, ascending and descending, running, calling, shouting, peeping,rummaging, ransacking, thrusting his head into every hole, pushing atorch under every vault, despairing, mad. A male who has lost his femaleis 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 slowlymounted the staircase to the towers, that staircase which he hadascended with so much eagerness and triumph on the day when he hadsaved 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 totrack the sorceress in the city. Quasimodo, left alone in that vastNotre-Dame, so besieged and tumultuous but a short time before, oncemore betook himself to the cell where the gypsy had slept for so manyweeks 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 sideaisles, he perceived the tiny cell with its little window and its littledoor crouching beneath a great flying buttress like a bird's nest undera branch, the poor man's heart failed him, and he leaned against apillar to keep from falling. He imagined that she might have returnedthither, that some good genius had, no doubt, brought her back, thatthis chamber was too tranquil, too safe, too charming for her not tobe there, and he dared not take another step for fear of destroyinghis illusion. "Yes," he said to himself, "perchance she is sleeping, orpraying. 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 slowlyround it, lifted the bed and looked beneath it, as though she might beconcealed between the pavement and the mattress, then he shook his headand remained stupefied. All at once, he crushed his torch under hisfoot, and, without uttering a word, without giving vent to a sigh, heflung himself at full speed, head foremost against the wall, and fellfainting on the floor.
When he recovered his senses, he threw himself on the bed and rollingabout, he kissed frantically the place where the young girl had sleptand which was still warm; he remained there for several moments asmotionless as though he were about to expire; then he rose, drippingwith perspiration, panting, mad, and began to beat his head against thewall with the frightful regularity of the clapper of his bells, andthe resolution of a man determined to kill himself. At length he fella second time, exhausted; he dragged himself on his knees outside thecell, and crouched down facing the door, in an attitude of astonishment.
He remained thus for more than an hour without making a movement, withhis eye fixed on the deserted cell, more gloomy, and more pensive than amother seated between an empty cradle and a full coffin. He uttered nota word; only at long intervals, a sob heaved his body violently, but itwas a tearless sob, like summer lightning which makes no noise.
It appears to have been then, that, seeking at the bottom of his lonelythoughts for the unexpected abductor of the gypsy, he thought of thearchdeacon. He remembered that Dom Claude alone possessed a key to thestaircase leading to the cell; he recalled his nocturnal attempts onthe young girl, in the first of which he, Quasimodo, had assisted, thesecond of which he had prevented. He recalled a thousand details, andsoon 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 hisheart, that they resisted, even at this moment, the talons of jealousyand despair.
He reflected that the archdeacon had done this thing, and the wrathof blood and death which it would have evoked in him against any otherperson, turned in the poor deaf man, from the moment when Claude Frollowas in question, into an increase of grief and sorrow.
At the moment when his thought was thus fixed upon the priest, whilethe daybreak was whitening the flying buttresses, he perceived onthe highest story of Notre-Dame, at the angle formed by the externalbalustrade as it makes the turn of the chancel, a figure walking. Thisfigure was coming towards him. He recognized it. It was the archdeacon.
Claude was walking with a slow, grave step. He did not look before himas he walked, he was directing his course towards the northern tower,but his face was turned aside towards the right bank of the Seine, andhe held his head high, as though trying to see something over the roofs.The owl often assumes this oblique attitude. It flies towards onepoint and looks towards another. In this manner the priest passed aboveQuasimodo without seeing him.
The deaf man, who had been petrified by this sudden apparition, beheldhim disappear through the door of the staircase to the north tower. Thereader is aware that this is the tower from which the Hotel-de-Ville isvisible. Quasimodo rose and followed the archdeacon.
Quasimodo ascended the tower staircase for the sake of ascending it, forthe sake of seeing why the priest was ascending it. Moreover, the poorbellringer did not know what he (Quasimodo) should do, what heshould say, what he wished. He was full of fury and full of fear. Thearchdeacon and the gypsy had come into conflict in his heart.
When he reached the summit of the tower, before emerging from the shadowof the staircase and stepping upon the platform, he cautiously examinedthe position of the priest. The priest's back was turned to him. Thereis an openwork balustrade which surrounds the platform of the belltower. The priest, whose eyes looked down upon the town, was resting hisbreast on that one of the four sides of the balustrades which looks uponthe Pont Notre-Dame.
Quasimodo, advancing with the tread of a wolf behind him, went to seewhat he was gazing at thus.
The priest's attention was so absorbed elsewhere that he did not hearthe deaf man walking behind him.
Paris is a magnificent and charming spectacle, and especially at thatday, viewed from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame, in the fresh lightof a summer dawn. The day might have been in July. The sky was perfectlyserene. Some tardy stars were fading away at various points, and therewas a very brilliant one in the east, in the brightest part of theheavens. The sun was about to appear; Paris was beginning to move. Avery white and very pure light brought out vividly to the eye all theoutlines that its thousands of houses present to the east. The giantshadow of the towers leaped from roof to roof, from one end of the greatcity to the other. There were several quarters from which were alreadyheard voices and noisy sounds. Here the stroke of a bell, there thestroke of a hammer, beyond, the complicated clatter of a cart in motion.
Already several columns of smoke were being belched forth from thechimneys scattered over the whole surface of roofs, as through thefissures of an immense sulphurous crater. The river, which ruffles itswaters against the arches of so many bridges, against the points of somany islands, was wavering with silvery folds. Around the city, outsidethe ramparts, sight was lost in a great circle of fleecy vapors throughwhich one confusedly distinguished the indefinite line of the plains,and the graceful swell of the heights. All sorts of floating sounds wered
ispersed over this half-awakened city. Towards the east, the morningbreeze chased a few soft white bits of wool torn from the misty fleeceof the hills.
In the Parvis, some good women, who had their milk jugs in theirhands, were pointing out to each other, with astonishment, the singulardilapidation of the great door of Notre-Dame, and the two solidifiedstreams of lead in the crevices of the stone. This was all that remainedof the tempest of the night. The bonfire lighted between the towers byQuasimodo had died out. Tristan had already cleared up the Place, andhad the dead thrown into the Seine. Kings like Louis XI. are careful toclean the pavement quickly after a massacre.
Outside the balustrade of the tower, directly under the point where thepriest had paused, there was one of those fantastically carved stonegutters with which Gothic edifices bristle, and, in a crevice of thatgutter, two pretty wallflowers in blossom, shaken out and vivified,as it were, by the breath of air, made frolicsome salutations to eachother. Above the towers, on high, far away in the depths of the sky, thecries of little birds were heard.
But the priest was not listening to, was not looking at, anything of allthis. 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 abouthim, his contemplation was concentrated on a single point.
Quasimodo was burning to ask him what he had done with the gypsy; butthe archdeacon seemed to be out of the world at that moment. He wasevidently in one of those violent moments of life when one would notfeel the earth crumble. He remained motionless and silent, with his eyessteadily fixed on a certain point; and there was something so terribleabout this silence and immobility that the savage bellringer shudderedbefore it and dared not come in contact with it. Only, and this was alsoone way of interrogating the archdeacon, he followed the direction ofhis vision, and in this way the glance of the unhappy deaf man fell uponthe Place de Greve.
Thus he saw what the priest was looking at. The ladder was erected nearthe permanent gallows. There were some people and many soldiers inthe Place. A man was dragging a white thing, from which hung somethingblack, along the pavement. This man halted at the foot of the gallows.
Here something took place which Quasimodo could not see very clearly. Itwas not because his only eye had not preserved its long range, but therewas a group of soldiers which prevented his seeing everything. Moreover,at that moment the sun appeared, and such a flood of light overflowedthe horizon that one would have said that all the points in Paris,spires, chimneys, gables, had simultaneously taken fire.
Meanwhile, the man began to mount the ladder. Then Quasimodo saw himagain distinctly. He was carrying a woman on his shoulder, a young girldressed in white; that young girl had a noose about her neck. Quasimodorecognized her.
It was she.
The man reached the top of the ladder. There he arranged the noose. Herethe priest, in order to see the better, knelt upon the balustrade.
All at once the man kicked away the ladder abruptly, and Quasimodo, whohad not breathed for several moments, beheld the unhappy child danglingat the end of the rope two fathoms above the pavement, with the mansquatting 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 fromhis head, contemplated this horrible group of the man and the younggirl,--the spider and the fly.
At the moment when it was most horrible, the laugh of a demon, a laughwhich one can only give vent to when one is no longer human, burst forthon the priest's livid face.
Quasimodo did not hear that laugh, but he saw it.
The bellringer retreated several paces behind the archdeacon, andsuddenly hurling himself upon him with fury, with his huge hands hepushed him by the back over into the abyss over which Dom Claude wasleaning.
The priest shrieked: "Damnation!" and fell.
The spout, above which he had stood, arrested him in his fall. He clungto it with desperate hands, and, at the moment when he opened his mouthto utter a second cry, he beheld the formidable and avenging face ofQuasimodo 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 andthe pavement.
In this terrible situation, the archdeacon said not a word, uttered nota groan. He merely writhed upon the spout, with incredible efforts toclimb up again; but his hands had no hold on the granite, his feet slidalong the blackened wall without catching fast. People who have ascendedthe towers of Notre-Dame know that there is a swell of the stoneimmediately beneath the balustrade. It was on this retreating anglethat miserable archdeacon exhausted himself. He had not to deal with aperpendicular wall, but with one which sloped away beneath him.
Quasimodo had but to stretch out his hand in order to draw him from thegulf; but he did not even look at him. He was looking at the Greve. Hewas looking at the gallows. He was looking at the gypsy.
The deaf man was leaning, with his elbows on the balustrade, at thespot where the archdeacon had been a moment before, and there, neverdetaching his gaze from the only object which existed for him in theworld at that moment, he remained motionless and mute, like a man struckby lightning, and a long stream of tears flowed in silence from that eyewhich, up to that time, had never shed but one tear.
Meanwhile, the archdeacon was panting. His bald brow was dripping withperspiration, his nails were bleeding against the stones, his knees wereflayed by the wall.
He heard his cassock, which was caught on the spout, crack and rip atevery jerk that he gave it. To complete his misfortune, this spout endedin a leaden pipe which bent under the weight of his body. The archdeaconfelt this pipe slowly giving way. The miserable man said to himselfthat, when his hands should be worn out with fatigue, when his cassockshould tear asunder, when the lead should give way, he would be obligedto fall, and terror seized upon his very vitals. Now and then he glancedwildly at a sort of narrow shelf formed, ten feet lower down, byprojections of the sculpture, and he prayed heaven, from the depths ofhis distressed soul, that he might be allowed to finish his life, wereit to last two centuries, on that space two feet square. Once, heglanced below him into the Place, into the abyss; the head which heraised again had its eyes closed and its hair standing erect.
There was something frightful in the silence of these two men. Whilethe archdeacon agonized in this terrible fashion a few feet below him,Quasimodo wept and gazed at the Greve.
The archdeacon, seeing that all his exertions served only to weaken thefragile support which remained to him, decided to remain quiet. There hehung, embracing the gutter, hardly breathing, no longer stirring, makingno longer any other movements than that mechanical convulsion of thestomach, which one experiences in dreams when one fancies himselffalling. His fixed eyes were wide open with a stare. He lost groundlittle by little, nevertheless, his fingers slipped along the spout;he became more and more conscious of the feebleness of his arms and theweight of his body. The curve of the lead which sustained him inclinedmore 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, butwithout terror for themselves or pity for him. All was stone around him;before his eyes, gaping monsters; below, quite at the bottom, in thePlace, the pavement; above his head, Quasimodo weeping.
In the Parvis there were several groups of curious good people, who weretranquilly seeking to divine who the madman could be who was amusinghimself in so strange a manner. The priest heard them saying, for theirvoices reached him, clear and shrill: "Why, he will break his neck!"
Quasimodo wept.
At last the archdeacon, foaming with rage and despair, understood thatall was in vain. Nevertheless, he collected all the strength whichremained 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 thestones with his hands, and succeeded in climbing back with one foot,perhaps; but this effort made the leaden beak on which he restedbend abruptly. His cassock burst open at the same time. Then, feelingeverything give way beneath him, with nothing but his stiffened andfailing hands to support him, the unfortunate man closed his eyes andlet 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 uponthe roof of a house, where the unfortunate man began to break up.Nevertheless, he was not dead when he reached there. The bellringer sawhim still endeavor to cling to a gable with his nails; but the surfacesloped too much, and he had no more strength. He slid rapidly along theroof like a loosened tile, and dashed upon the pavement. There he nolonger moved.
Then Quasimodo raised his eyes to the gypsy, whose body he beheldhanging from the gibbet, quivering far away beneath her white robe withthe last shudderings of anguish, then he dropped them on the archdeacon,stretched out at the base of the tower, and no longer retaining thehuman 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.