Notre-Dame de Paris (Oxford World's Classics)

by Hugo, Victor

  During this time, since the stones had ceased to fall, the truands had stopped looking upwards. The bandits, panting like a pack of hounds hunting the boar down in his lair, were crowding tumultuously round the great door, battered out of shape by the ram, but still standing. They were waiting with a shudder of excitement for the ultimate blow, the one that would rip it open. Each of them was striving to be nearest so that they could be first to rush, once it was open, into this opulent cathedral, a vast repository in which the riches of three centuries had come to be accumulated. They reminded each other, with roars of greedy delight, of the fine silver crosses, the fine brocade copes, the fine silver-gilt tombs, the great splendours of the choir, the dazzling festivals, Christmas sparkling with torches, Easter brilliant with sunshine, all those spendid solemnities at which shrines, candlesticks, ciboria, tabernacles, reliquaries made the altars look as though embossed with a covering of gold and diamonds. At this fine hour, cagoux and malingerers, henchmen and rifodés were certainly thinking much less about freeing the gypsy than plundering Notre-Dame. We should even be willing to believe that for a good number of them la Esmeralda was merely a pretext, if robbers had any need of pretexts.

  Suddenly, as they were all grouping together round the battering ram for a final effort, each man holding his breath and flexing his muscles so as to lend his whole strength to the decisive blow, a screaming even more awful than that which had broken out and then expired beneath the beam, went up from their midst. Those who were not crying out, those who were still alive, looked—two streams of molten lead were falling from the top of the building on to the densest part of the crowd. This sea of men had just collapsed beneath the boiling metal, which, at the two points where it fell, had made two black, steaming holes in the crowd, like hot water falling on snow. The dying could be seen writhing, half charred to ashes, roaring with pain. Round the two main streams drops of this terrible rain were being sprinkled over the attackers, penetrating their skulls like gimlets of flame. It was heavy fire which riddled these wretches with a hail of countless burning drops.

  The clamour was heart-rending. They fled in disorder, throwing the beam on top of the corpses, the boldest and the most fearful alike, and the Parvis lay empty a second time.

  All eyes were raised to the top of the tower. What they saw was extraordinary. On the top of the highest gallery, higher than the central rose-window, rose a great flame between the two bell towers with swirls of sparks, a great, ragged, furious flame, from which at times the wind would snatch a strip into the smoke. Beneath this flame, beneath the sombre balustrade with its cut-out trefoils glowing with fire, two spouts in the form of monstrous gargoyles unceasingly spewed out this burning rain, whose silvery trickle stood out against the darkness of the lower part of the façade. As they came nearer the ground, the two jets of liquid lead spread out into showers of spray, like water spurting from the countless holes of a watering can. Above the flame, the enormous towers, each showing two sharply distinct faces, one all black, the other all red, seemed bigger still with the immensity of the shadow they projected right up to the sky. Their innumerable carvings of devils and dragons took on a macabre appearance. The restless brightness of the flame made them move before one’s eyes. There were wyverns which looked as though they were laughing, gargoyles which one seemed to hear yelping, salamanders blowing on to the fire, tarasques sneezing in the smoke. And among those monsters roused from their stone slumbers by the flame, by the noise, was one walking about, who could be seen from time to time passing across the blazing front of the pyre like a bat in front of a candle.

  No doubt this strange beacon would awaken in the distance the woodman of the Bicêtre hills, terrified at seeing the gigantic shadow of the towers of Notre-Dame wavering over his heath.

  A terrified silence fell upon the truands, during which all that could be heard were the cries of alarm from the canons shut up in their cloister, more scared than horses in a burning stable, the stealthy sound of windows opening quickly and closing more quickly still, the commotion inside the houses and the Hôtel-Dieu, the wind on the flame, the last gasps of the dying, and the continual crackling of the shower of lead on the pavement.

  Meanwhile the chief truands had withdrawn beneath the porch of the Gondelaurier mansion and were holding a council of war. The Duke of Egypt, sitting on a marker-stone, was gazing with religious dread at the fantastic bonfire blazing two hundred feet up in the air. Clopin Trouillefou was chewing his huge fists with rage. ‘No way to get in!’ he muttered between his teeth.

  ‘Old witch of a church!’ growled the old Bohemian Mathias Hungadi Spicali.

  ‘By the Pope’s whiskers!’ put in a grizzled old rogue who had served in the army, ‘those church waterspouts spit out molten lead better than the machicolations of Lectoure!’*

  ‘Do you see that demon going to and fro in front of the fire?’ exclaimed the Duke of Egypt.

  ‘By God,’ said Clopin, ‘it’s that damned bell-ringer, it’s Quasimodo.’

  The Bohemian shook his head. ‘I tell you, it’s the spirit Sabnac,* the great marquis, the demon of fortifications. He has the form of an armed soldier, and a lion’s head. Sometimes he rides a hideous horse. He turns men into stones and builds towers with them. He commands fifty legions. It’s him all right. I recognize him. Sometimes he’s dressed in a fine golden robe figured in the Turkish fashion.’

  ‘Where’s Bellevigne de l’Étoile?’ asked Clopin.

  ‘He’s dead,’ answered one of the truand women.

  Andry the Red was laughing like an idiot: ‘Notre-Dame is making work for the Hôtel-Dieu,’ he said.

  ‘So there’s no way to force that door?’ cried the King of Tunis, stamping his foot.

  The Duke of Egypt sadly pointed out to him the two streams of boiling lead which continuously streaked down the black façade, like two long distaffs charged with phosphorus. ‘It’s been known for churches to defend themselves like that,’ he observed with a sigh, ‘Saint Sophia in Constantinople, forty years ago now,* threw Mahomet’s crescent to the ground three times in succession by shaking its domes, which are like its heads. William of Paris, who built this one, was a magician.’

  ‘Does that mean we’ve got to beat a shameful retreat, like footboys* on the highway,’ said Clopin, ‘and leave our sister here for those wolves in their hooded robes to hang tomorrow?’

  ‘And the sacristy, where there is gold by the cartload,’ added a truand, whose name we regrettably do not know.

  ‘Mahomet’s beard!’ cried Trouillefou.

  ‘Let’s try once more,’ went on the truand,

  Mathias Hungadi shook his head. ‘We’ll never get in through the door. We must find some chink in the old witch’s armour. A hole, a false postern, some joint or other.’

  ‘Who’s for it?’ said Clopin. ‘I’m going back there—by the way, where’s that little student Jehan who had all that scrap-iron round him?’

  ‘He’s probably dead,’ someone replied. ‘We don’t hear his laugh any more.’

  The King of Tunis frowned. ‘That’s too bad. There was a stout heart under all that scrap-iron. And Maître Pierre Gringoire?’

  ‘Captain Clopin,’ said Andry the Red, ‘he dodged off when we’d only got as far as the Pont-aux-Changeurs.’

  Clopin stamped his foot. ‘God’s teeth! He’s the one who pushed us into it, and now he just walks out on us in the middle of the job! Cowardly blabbermouth, with a slipper for a helmet!’

  ‘Captain Clopin,’ cried Andry the Red, who was looking along the rue du Parvis, ‘here’s the little student.’

  ‘Pluto be praised!’ said Clopin. ‘But what the devil is he pulling behind him?’

  It was indeed Jehan, running up as fast as his heavy paladin’s costume and a long ladder, which he was valiantly dragging along the pavement, would allow, more out of breath than an ant harnessed to a blade of grass twenty times longer than itself.

  ‘Victory! Te Deum!’ cried the student. ‘Here’s t
he stevedores’ ladder from the Port Saint-Landry.’

  Clopin came up to him. ‘Boy! what are you intending to do, by God’s horn, with this ladder?’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ Jehan answered, panting. ‘I knew where it was—under the shed of the lieutenant’s house—I know a girl there who thinks I’m as handsome as Cupido—I used her to get the ladder, and now I’ve got the ladder, Pasque-Mahom!—The poor girl came to let me in just in her nightshirt.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clopin, ‘but what do you intend to do with this ladder?’

  Jehan gave him a knowing, capable look, and clicked his fingers like castanets. He was sublime at that moment. On his head was one of those overloaded fifteenth-century helmets, which would scare the enemy with the monsters on their peak. His bristled with ten iron beaks, so that Jehan could have challenged Nestor’s Homeric ship for the redoubtable epithet δεκέβoλos [ten-beaked].

  ‘What do I intend to do with it, august King of Tunis? Do you see that row of idiotic-looking statues there above the three doorways?’

  ‘Yes. Well?’

  ‘That’s the gallery of the kings of France.’

  ‘What do I care?’ said Clopin.

  ‘Wait a moment. At the end of that gallery is a door, which is only ever closed on the latch; with this ladder I climb up there, and I’m inside the church.’

  ‘Boy, let me be first to go up.’

  ‘No, comrade, the ladder’s mine. Come on, you’ll be second up.’

  ‘May Beelzebub strangle you!’ said Clopin, gruffly displeased, ‘I don’t want to come after anyone.’

  ‘All right, Clopin, go and find a ladder!’

  Jehan began running across the square, pulling his ladder and crying: ‘To me, lads!’

  In a moment the ladder was set up, resting on the balustrade of the lower gallery, above one of the side doorways. The crowd of truands, cheering loudly, pressed around its foot to go up. But Jehan maintained his right and was first to put his foot on the rungs. It was a rather long climb. The gallery of the kings of France today stands about sixty feet above the pavement. The eleven steps leading up to the door made it still higher then. Jehan climbed slowly, somewhat impeded by his heavy armour, holding the rungs with one hand and his crossbow with the other. When he was half-way up the ladder he cast a melancholy glance down on the poor dead Argoteers strewn over the steps. ‘Alas!’ he said, ‘there’s a heap of corpses worthy of the fifth canto of the Iliad!’ Then he went on up. The truands followed him. There was one on each rung. That line of armoured backs rippling upward in the dark looked like some steel-scaled serpent rising up against the church. Jehan whistling at its head completed the illusion.

  The student finally reached the balcony of the gallery, and swung over very nimbly to the applause of all the truandery. Thus master of the citadel, he let out a yell of joy, and suddenly stopped, petrified. He had just noticed, behind one of the royal statues, Quasimodo hiding in the darkness, his eye glittering.

  Before a second besieger could set foot on the gallery, the formidable hunchback sprang to the head of the ladder, without saying a word, grasped the end of the two uprights in his powerful hands, lifted them, pushed them away from the wall, for a moment, amid cries of anguish, balanced the long, flexible ladder, packed with truands from top to bottom, and suddenly, with superhuman strength, threw this cluster of men back down into the square. The ladder, hurled backwards, for an instant stayed straight and upright, seemed to waver, swayed, then suddenly, describing a terrifying arc 80 feet in radius, crashed down on the pavement with its load of bandits more swiftly than a drawbridge when its chains snap. There was an immense cry of imprecation, then everything went quiet, and a few unfortunate victims crawled mutilated from under the pile of dead.

  A murmur of grief and anger succeeded the besiegers’ earlier cries of triumph. Quasimodo looked on impassively, leaning with both elbows on the balustrade. He looked like a shaggy old king at his window.

  As for Jehan Frollo, he was in a critical situation. He found himself in the gallery with the fearsome bell-ringer, alone, separated from his companions by a vertical wall 80 feet high. While Quasimodo had been making sport with the ladder, the student had run to the postern which he thought was open. It was not. As the deaf man came into the gallery, he had locked it behind him. Then Jehan had hidden himself behind one of the stone kings, not daring to breathe, staring at the monstrous hunchback with a look of terror, like the man who, paying court to the wife of a menagerie keeper, went one night to keep a tryst, climbed over the wrong wall and suddenly found himself confronting a polar bear.

  To begin with, the deaf man paid no attention to him, but finally he turned his head and suddenly straightened up. He had just caught sight of the student.

  Jehan prepared for a violent clash, but the deaf man stayed motionless; he had simply turned towards the student and was looking at him.

  ‘Ho! ho!’ said Jehan, ‘why are you looking at me with your one eye so mournfully?’

  And as he spoke the young rascal was stealthily getting his crossbow ready. ‘Quasimodo!’ he cried, ‘I’m going to change your nickname. You’ll be called the blind man.’

  The shot went off. The feathered bolt whistled and stuck in the hunchback’s left arm. Quasimodo was no more affected by it than if it had scratched King Pharamond.* He put a hand on the arrow, tore it from his arm, and calmly snapped it over his huge knee. Then he dropped, rather than threw down, the two bits. But Jehan had no time for a second shot. When he had broken the arrow, Quasimodo gave a noisy snort, sprang like a grasshopper, and fell upon the student, whose armour was flattened against the wall by the blow.

  Then, in the half-light from the wavering torches something dreadful could be dimly seen.

  Quasimodo had gripped both Jehan’s arms in his left hand; Jehan felt so utterly lost that he did not struggle. With his right hand the deaf man removed, in silence and with sinister deliberation, one by one, every piece of his armour—sword, daggers, helmet, breastplate, brassards. He looked like a monkey peeling a nut. Quasimodo threw down at his feet, bit by bit, the student’s iron shell.

  When the student saw himself disarmed, stripped, weak, and naked in those redoubtable hands, he did not try to speak to the deaf man, but began laughing insolently in his face and singing in the carefree, dauntless way of a lad of 16, the currently popular song:

  The town of Cambrai,

  Is all in fine array.

  Marafin sacked it …

  He did not finish. They saw Quasimodo standing on the parapet of the gallery, holding the student by the feet in one hand and whirling him over the abyss like a sling. Then they heard a noise like a bone box bursting against a wall, and saw something fall, until it was caught a third of the way down on a projection of the architecture. It was a dead body which remained hanging there, bent in half, back broken, skull empty.

  A cry of horror went up from the truands. ‘Vengeance!’ cried Clopin. ‘Sack the church!’ answered the multitude. ‘Assault! assault!’ Then came a prodigious yell, in which every language, every dialect, every accent mingled. The poor student’s death filled the crowd with burning fury. They felt seized with shame, and anger, at having been kept in check for so long before the church by a hunchback. Their rage found them ladders, increased the number of torches, and after a few moments Quasimodo was distraught at the sight of this terrifying swarm of ants climbing up on every side to assault Notre-Dame. Those who did not have ladders had knotted ropes, those who did not have ropes used the reliefs of the sculptures to clamber up. They hung on to each other by their rags. There was no way to resist the rising tide of frightening faces. Fury made these savage faces gleam; their grubby foreheads streamed with sweat; their eyes flashed. Quasimodo was besieged by all these contorted faces, all this ugliness. It looked as if some other church had sent to the assault of Notre-Dame its gorgons, its mastiffs, its dragons, its demons, its most fantastic sculptures. It was like a layer of living monsters on top of the stone m
onsters of the façade.

  Meanwhile the square sparkled with a thousand torches. This scene of disorder, buried up till then in darkness, had suddenly flared up with light. The Parvis was resplendent and projected its radiance into the sky. The pyre alight on the platform still blazed, and lit up the town in the distance. The enormous silhouette of the two towers, extending far over the rooftops of Paris, scooped out of all this brightness a broad patch of shadow. The town seemed to be roused. Distant tocsins sounded their plaints. The truands yelled, panted, cursed, climbed, and Quasimodo, helpless against so many enemies, trembling for the gypsy girl, seeing the furious faces come ever closer to his gallery, asked heaven for a miracle, wringing his arms in despair.

  V

  THE PRIVATE RETREAT WHERE MONSIEUR LOUIS OF FRANCE SAYS HIS HOURS

  THE reader may not have forgotten that a moment before catching sight of the truands’ nocturnal band, Quasimodo, inspecting Paris from the top of his bell tower, had seen only one light still shining, twinkling like a star in a window of the top storey of a tall, gloomy building, near the Porte Saint-Antoine. That building was the Bastille. The star was Louis XI’s candle.

  King Louis XI had in fact been in Paris for two days. He was due to leave again in two days’ time to go back to his citadel of Montilz-les-Tours. His appearances in his good town of Paris were only ever brief and rare, because he did not feel that there were enough trapdoors, gallows, and Scottish archers around him there.

  He had come that day to spend the night at the Bastille. The grear bedchamber of 5 square toises* which he had in the Louvre, with its great chimney-piece, laden with twelve huge beasts and thirteen major prophets, and his great bed, measuring 11 by 12 feet, was not much to his liking. He felt lost amid all that grandeur. This good bourgeois king preferred the Bastille with a little bedroom and a little bed. Moreover, the Bastille was stronger than the Louvre.