by Hugo, Victor
Then his fears came back. The idea of some attempt against the gypsy girl returned to his mind. He vaguely felt that he was approaching a violent situation. At that critical moment, he took counsel within himself, with a better and speedier line of reasoning than might have been expected of so ill-organized a brain. Should he rouse the gypsy? Help her escape? Which way? The streets were invested, the church backed on to the river. No boat! No way out!—There was only one option, fight to the death at the entrance to Notre-Dame, at least resist until help came, if help was to come, and not disturb la Esmeralda’s sleep. The unhappy girl would in any case be woken soon enough to die. Once he had taken that decision, he began to examine the enemy more calmly.
The crowd in the Parvis seemed to be growing thicker every moment. He assumed, however, that it must be making very little noise, since the windows in the streets and the square remained closed. Suddenly a light shone out, and in an instant seven or eight lighted torches cast their light over the heads, their tufts of flame flickering in the shadows. Then Quasimodo saw distinctly milling about in the Parvis a frightening flock of ragged men and women armed with scythes, pikes, billhooks, and partisans, their hundreds of points all sparkling. Here and there black pitchforks added horns to hideous faces. He vaguely remembered this popular mob, and thought he recognized all the heads which, a few months earlier, had hailed him Pope of Fools. A man with a torch in one hand and a cudgel in the other got up on to a marker-stone and seemed to be haranguing them. At the same time the strange army performed some manœuvres, as if taking up position round the church. Quasimodo picked up his lantern and went down on to the platform between the towers for a closer view and to work out some means of defence.
Clopin Trouillefou, having arrived before the lofty portal of Notre-Dame, had indeed formed his troops into battle order. Although he did not expect any resistance, as a prudent general, he wanted to maintain a formation which would allow him, if need arose, to stand up to any sudden attack by the watch or the men of the onze-vingts. Thus he had disposed his brigade in such a way that, seen from above and at a distance, it recalled the Roman triangle at the battle of Ecnoma,* Alexander’s pig’s head, or the famous wedge of Gustavus Adolphus. The base of the triangle rested on the far end of the square, so as to block the rue du Parvis; one side faced the Hôtel-Dieu, the other the rue Saint-Pierre-aux-Bœufs. Clopin Trouillefou had placed himself at the apex, with the Duke of Egypt, our friend Jehan, and the boldest of the sabouleux.
Such an enterprise as the truands were at that moment attempting against Notre-Dame was by no means rare in medieval towns. What we call ‘police’ today did not then exist. In populous, and especially capital, cities there was no one, central, regulating authority. Feudalism had constructed these great communes in the most peculiar way. A city was a collection of hundreds of lordships which divided it into compartments of every shape and size. Hence there were hundreds of contradictory forms of policing, that is to say none at all. In Paris, for example, independently of the hundred and forty-one lords claiming quit-rent, there were twenty-five claiming justice and quit-rent, from the Bishop of Paris, who had a hundred and five streets, to the prior of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, who had four. All these feudal justiciaries gave only nominal recognition to the paramount authority of the king. They all had rights over the public highway. They were all their own masters. Louis XI, that tireless workman who began the widespread demolition of the feudal edifice, continued by Richelieu and Louis XIV to the advantage of the monarchy, and completed by Mirabeau to the advantage of the people, Louis XI had indeed tried to break up this network of lordships which covered Paris, by forcibly imposing right across it two or three ordinances of general police. Thus, in 1465, the inhabitants were ordered at nightfall to light candles in their windows and keep their dogs shut in, under pain of the halter; the same year, came the order to close streets every evening with iron chains, and a prohibition on carrying daggers or offensive weapons at night in the streets. But in a short time all these attempts at communal legislation fell into disuse. The burghers let the wind blow out the candles in their windows, and let their dogs stray; the iron chains were only put up when the city was under siege; the prohibition on carrying daggers changed nothing but the name of the rue Coupe-Gueule which became the rue Coupe-Gorge,* an obvious sign of progress. The old framework of feudal jurisdictions remained standing; the huge accumulation of bailiwicks and lordships cutting across each other over the town, hindering, tangling, muddling each other, snarling up and encroaching on each other; a useless thicket of watches, under-watches, counter-watches, through which brigandry, rapine, and sedition passed by force of arms. In such a disorderly situation it was thus by no means unknown for part of the population to make such raids on a palace, a mansion, a house, in the most densely populated quarters. In most cases the neighbours became involved only if looting actually reached their doorstep. They blocked their ears to the shooting, closed their shutters, barricaded their doors, let the dispute be settled with or without the watch, and next day people in Paris would tell each other: ‘Last night they broke into Etienne Barbette’s house.’—‘The maréchal de Clermont was hauled off bodily’—and so on. Thus not only royal residences, the Louvre, the Palais, the Bastille, the Tournelles, but houses belonging simply to lords, the Petit-Bourbon, the Hôtel de Sens, the Hôtel d’Angouléme, etc., etc., had battlemented walls and machicolations over the doors. The churches had their sanctity to protect them. A few, however, which did not include Notre-Dame, were fortified. The abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés had battlements like a baron, and spent more on bronze for bombards than for bells. His fortress was still to be seen in 1610. Today barely his church remains.
To return to Notre-Dame.
When the first preparations were complete, and it must be said to the honour of truand discipline that Clopin’s orders were carried out in silence and with admirable precision, the worthy leader of the band climbed on to the parapet of the Parvis and raised his gruff, raucous voice, standing turned towards Notre-Dame and waving his torch, the light from which, blown about by the wind and continually obscured by its own smoke, made the reddish façade of the church alternately appear and disappear from sight.
‘To you, Louis de Beaumont, Bishop of Paris, counsellor in the court of Parliament, I, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Tunis, Grand Cœsre, Prince of Argot, Bishop of Fools, say: Our sister, wrongly convicted of magic, has taken refuge in your church; you owe her asylum and safekeeping; now the court of Parliament intends to take her thence, with your consent; with the result that she would be hanged tomorrow in the Grève were God and the truands not present. So we come to you, bishop. If your church is sacred, so is our sister; if our sister is not sacred, neither is your church. That is why we call on you to hand the girl over to us if you want to save your church, otherwise we shall take the girl and sack your church. Which will be quite right. In witness thereof I hereby set up my banner, and may God keep you, Bishop of Paris.’
Quasimodo was unfortunately not able to hear these words, pronounced with a kind of wild and sombre majesty. A truand presented the banner to Clopin, who solemnly set it up between two paving-stones. It was a pitchfork, with a quarter of bloody carrion hanging from its prongs.
That done, the King of Tunis turned round and ran his eyes over his army, a ferocious multitude whose eyes gleamed almost as brightly as their pikes. After a moment’s pause: ‘Forward, lads!’ he cried. ‘To work, bully boys!’
Thirty stalwart fellows, square-limbed, with the look of locksmiths, stepped out from the ranks with hammers, pincers, and iron bars on their shoulders. They made for the church’s main door, went up the steps and could all soon be seen squatting under the arch, working at the door with pincers and levers. A crowd of truands followed to provide help or simply to watch. The eleven steps up to the portal were packed with them.
However, the door stood firm: ‘Devil take it! It’s tough and stubborn!’ one man said. ‘It’s old, and its cartilages
have hardened,’ said another. ‘Don’t lose heart, comrades!’ Clopin went on. ‘I’ll wager my head against a slipper that you will have opened that door, taken the girl and stripped the high altar before even one of the beadles has woken up! I think the lock’s breaking.’
Clopin was interrupted by a fearful crash resounding at that moment behind him. He turned round. An enormous beam had just fallen from the skies, crushing a dozen truands on the steps up to the church, and rebounded on the pavement with the noise of a cannon going off, breaking another leg or two in the crowd of beggars, who were pulling back with cries of terror. In the twinkling of an eye the enclosed area of the Parvis was empty. The ‘bully boys’, though protected by the deeply recessed arches of the doorway, abandoned the door, and Clopin himself fell back to a respectful distance from the church.
‘That was a near thing!’ cried Jehan. ‘I felt the draught from it, tête-bœuf! But Pierre l’Assommeur [the Slaughterman] has been slaughtered!’
No words can describe the amazement mixed with fright which fell with this beam upon the bandits. They stood for some moments gazing upward, thrown into more dismay by this piece of timber than by twenty thousand of the King’s archers. ‘Satan!’ muttered the Duke of Egypt, ‘that smacks of magic!’
‘It was the moon that threw that log at us,’ said Andry the Red.
‘What’s more,’ went on François Chanteprune, ‘they say the moon is the Virgin’s friend!’
‘A thousand popes!’ exclaimed Clopin, ‘you are all a lot of idiots!’ But he could find no explanation for the timber falling.
Meanwhile there was nothing visible on the façade, the light from the torches not reaching as far as the top. The heavy baulk lay in the middle of the Parvis, and they could hear the groans of the wretches who had taken its first impact and had their bellies sliced in two against the sharp edges of the stone steps.
The King of Tunis, once his initial amazement was past, finally found an explanation which seemed plausible to his companions. ‘God’s teeth! are the canons defending themselves? Right then, sack the place! sack it!’
‘Sack it!’ the mob repeated with a frenzied cheer. And a salvo from crossbows and arquebuses was fired at the front of the church.
This detonation woke up the peaceful occupants of the houses round about, several windows could be seen opening, and nightcaps and hands holding candles appeared at the casements. ‘Shoot at the windows,’ cried Clopin. The windows closed again forthwith, and the poor burghers, who had scarcely had time to cast an appalled glance on this scene of flaring lights and uproar, went back to Îie sweating with fear beside their wives, wondering if the witches’ sabbath was being held now in the Parvis Notre-Dame, or if the Burgundians were attacking as in ’64. The husbands thought of rapine, the wives of rape, and they all trembled.
‘Sack it!’ the Argoteers kept repeating. But they did not dare to come closer. They looked at the church, they looked at the beam. The beam did not stir. The building maintained its calm, deserted air, but something froze the truands’ courage.
‘To work then, bully boys!’ cried Trouillefou. ‘Go on, force the door.’
No one moved.
‘Beard and belly!’ said Clopin, ‘here are men afraid of a joist.’
An old bully addressed him. ‘Captain, it’s not the joist that’s bothering us, it’s the door, laced all over with iron bars. The pincers don’t work on it.’
‘What do you need then to break it down?’ asked Clopin.
‘Oh! we’d need a battering ram.’
The King of Tunis ran boldly to the formidable beam and set his foot on it. ‘Here’s one,’ he cried; ‘sent to you by the canons.’ And making a derisive bow in the direction of the church: ‘Thank you, canons!’
This bravado had the right effect: the beam’s spell was broken. The truands took heart again; soon the heavy beam, picked up like a feather by two hundred strong arms, was hurled furiously against the great door which they had already tried to shift. Seen thus, in the half-light cast over the square by the truands’ few torches, the long beam carried by this mass of men running to hurl it against the church made one think of some monstrous beast with hundreds of feet charging head down against the giant of stone.
At the impact of the beam the half-metal door resounded like an enormous drum; it did not give way, but the entire cathedral shuddered, and rumblings could be heard from its hollow depths. At the same moment a shower of huge stones began dropping from the top of the façade on to the attackers. ‘The devil!’ cried Jehan, ‘are the towers shaking off their balustrades on to our heads?’ But the impetus had been provided, the King of Tunis setting an example—it was surely the bishop defending himself, and that only made them batter at the door the more furiously, despite the stones which were shattering skulls to right and left.
Remarkably enough these stones were all falling one after another; but they were falling in close succession. The Argoteers always felt two coming at once, one at their legs, the other on their heads. Few stones failed to strike a target, and already the dead and wounded lay bleeding and twitching in a wide layer under the feet of the attackers, who, now infuriated, constantly filled up their ranks afresh. The long beam continued to batter the door at regular intervals like the clapper of a bell, the stones to rain down, the door to boom.
The reader has no doubt already guessed that this unexpected resistance which had exasperated the truands came from Quasimodo.
Chance had unfortunately aided the deaf man.
When he came down on to the platform between the towers, his ideas were all mixed up in his head. For a few minutes he had run up and down along the gallery like a madman, seeing from above the packed mass of truands ready to rush upon the church, asking the devil, or God, to save the gypsy girl. It had occurred to him to climb the south tower and sound the tocsin; but before he could have got the bell swinging, before Marie’s voice could have rung out even once, would there not have been time for the door of the church to be broken down ten times over? This was at the precise moment when the ‘bully boys’ were advancing on it with their implements. What was he to do?
Suddenly he remembered that masons had been working all day to repair the wall, the timber framework and the roofing of the south tower. This was a ray of light. The wall was stone, the roofing lead, the framework timber—that prodigious framework, so dense and complex that it was called ‘the forest’.
Quasimodo hurried to that tower. The lower rooms were indeed full of materials. There were piles of building stones, sheets of lead in rolls, stout joists already notched by the saw, heaps of rubble. A complete arsenal.
Time pressed. The crowbars and hammers were working away below. With a strength increased tenfold by the sense of danger he raised one of the beams, the heaviest and longest, pushed it out through a window slit, then grasping it again from the outside of the tower, slid it along the edge of the balustrade running round the platform, and dropped it into the void. The enormous piece of timber, as it fell 160 feet, scraping the wall, breaking the carvings, turned over several times like a windmill sail spinning all by itself through space. Finally it hit the ground, a terrible cry went up, and the black beam, rebounding from the pavement, looked like a snake springing.
Quasimodo saw the truands scatter as the beam fell like ash blown by a child. He took advantage of their terror, and while they gazed superstitiously at the club fallen from the sky, and shot out the eyes of the stone saints in the portal with a volley of arrows and buckshot, Quasimodo silently went about piling up rubble, stones, building stone, even the masons’ tool bags, on the edge of the balustrade from which the beam had already been hurled.
So, as soon as they began battering the great door, the hail of stones began to fall, and it seemed to them as if the church was demolishing itself of its own accord upon their heads.
Anyone who could have seen Quasimodo at that moment would have been struck with terror. Independently of the missiles that he had piled up
on the balustrade, he had built up a heap of stones on the platform itself. As soon as the lumps of stone amassed on the outer edge were exhausted, he took more from the heap. Then he bent down, stood up, bent down, stood up again in incredible activity. His huge gnome’s head would lean out over the balustrade, then an enormous stone would fall, then another, then yet another. From time to time he would follow some fine big stone with his eye, and when it killed its man, would say: ‘Ha!’
However, the beggars were not losing heart. More than a score of times already the massive door which they were assaulting so furiously had shaken beneath the weight of their oaken battering ram multiplied by the strength of a hundred men. The panels cracked, the carvings flew in splinters, at each shock the hinges jumped on their hooks, the planks were dislodged, the wood was falling, ground into sawdust, between the iron ribbing. Fortunately for Quasimodo there was more iron than wood.
He sensed, however, that the great door was becoming shaky. Although he could not hear, every blow from the battering ram was echoed both in the cavernous church and in his own inner depths. From above he could see the truands, triumphant and furious, shaking their fists at the shadowy façade, and he envied, for the gypsy and for himself, the wings of the owls who were flying away in flocks over his head.
His shower of stones was not enough to repel the attackers.
At that moment of anguish he noticed, a little lower than the balustrade from whence he had been crushing the Argoteers, two long stone rainspouts which discharged immediately above the main door. The internal opening of these spouts was in the floor of the platform. An idea occurred to him. He ran to fetch a faggot from his bell-ringer’s cubby-hole, piled on to the faggot numerous bundles of lathes and rolls of lead, munitions which he had not yet employed, and having arranged this pyre right in front of the hole to the two spouts, set fire to it with his lantern.
