Part 36

All at once, as he scanned the great city with that eye which nature, by a sort of compensation, had made so piercing that it could almost supply the other organs wanting in Quasimodo, it seemed to him that the outline of the quay of the Vieille-Pelleterie had something singular about it, that there was a movement at that point, that the line of the parapet, standing out in black against the whiteness of the water, was not straight and still like that of the other quays, but undulated to the view like the waves of a river or the heads of a marching crowd.

This struck him as strange. He redoubled his attention. The movement seemed to be coming toward the Cité. No light, moreover. It lasted some time upon the quay, then gradually flowed away, as though what was passing entered the interior of the island, then it ceased altogether, and the line of the quay became straight and motionless again.

At the moment when Quasimodo was exhausting himself in conjectures, it seemed to him that the movement reappeared in the rue du Parvis, which extends into the Cité perpendicularly to the façade of Notre-Dame. At length, thick as the darkness was, he saw the head of a column emerge by that street, and in an instant a crowd spread over the square, of which nothing could be distinguished in the gloom save that it was a crowd.

This spectacle had its terror. It is probable that this singular procession, which seemed so anxious to conceal itself beneath a deep obscurity, kept no less deep a silence. Yet some sound must have escaped it, were it only the tramp of feet. But this sound did not even reach our deaf man, and that great multitude, of which he saw scarcely anything and heard nothing, stirring and marching nevertheless so near him, produced upon him the effect of a throng of the dead, mute, impalpable, lost in a mist. It seemed to him that a fog full of men was advancing toward him, that shadows were moving in the shadow.

Then his fears returned, the idea of an attempt against the Egyptian girl presented itself to his mind. He vaguely felt that he was approaching a violent situation. In this critical moment, he took counsel with himself with a reasoning better and quicker than might have been expected from a brain so ill organized. Should he awaken the Egyptian girl? have her escape? By what way? the streets were invested, the church was backed against the river. No boat! no outlet!—There was but one course, to be killed upon the threshold of Notre-Dame, to resist at least until help came, if any were to come, and not to disturb Esmeralda's sleep. The unhappy one would be awakened soon enough to die. This resolution once taken, he set himself to examine the enemy with more tranquillity.

The crowd seemed to swell every instant in the Parvis. Only he presumed that it could make but very little noise, since the windows of the streets and of the square remained shut. All at once a light shone, and in an instant seven or eight torches, lighted, moved over the heads, shaking in the shadow their tufts of flame. Quasimodo then saw distinctly, thronging in the Parvis, a frightful flock of men and women in rags, armed with scythes, pikes, pruning-hooks, partisans, whose thousand points glittered. Here and there black pitchforks made horns to those hideous faces. He vaguely called to mind that populace, and thought he recognized all the heads which, a few months before, had hailed him pope of fools. A man who held a torch in one hand and a mattock in the other mounted upon a boundary-stone and seemed to harangue. At the same time the strange army made some evolutions as if to take post around the church. Quasimodo picked up his lantern and descended to the platform between the towers to see more closely and devise means of defense.

Clopin Trouillefou, arrived before the high portal of Notre-Dame, had in fact drawn up his troop in battle array. Although he expected no resistance, he, being generally prudent, wished to preserve an order which might enable him to face a sudden attack of the watch or of the eleven-score. He had therefore disposed his brigade in such a fashion that, seen from above and afar, you would have said the Roman triangle of the battle of Ecnome, the boar's-head of Alexander, or the famous wedge of Gustavus Adolphus. The base of this triangle rested at the bottom of the square, so as to bar the rue du Parvis; one of its sides faced the Hôtel-Dieu, the other the rue Saint-Pierre-aux-Boeufs. Clopin Trouillefou had placed himself at the apex, with the Duke of Egypt, our friend Jehan, and the boldest of the sabouleux.

It was not a very rare thing in the cities of the middle ages to see an enterprise like that which the truands were attempting at that moment upon Notre-Dame. What we call today police did not then exist. In populous cities, especially in capitals, there was no single, regulating central power. Feudality had constructed these great communes in a bizarre fashion. A city was an assemblage of a thousand lordships which divided it into compartments of every shape and size. Hence a thousand contradictory polities, that is to say, no police. At Paris, for example, independently of the hundred and forty-one lords claiming censual rights, there were twenty-five claiming justice and censual rights, 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 recognized only nominally the suzerain authority of the king. All had right of way. All were at home. Louis XI, that indefatigable workman who so largely began the demolition of the feudal edifice, continued by Richelieu and Louis XIV for the benefit of the royalty, and completed by Mirabeau for the benefit of the people, Louis XI had indeed tried to burst this network of lordships which covered Paris, by violently throwing across it two or three ordinances of general police. Thus, in 1465, order to the inhabitants, when night came, to light their casements with candles, and to shut up their dogs, under pain of the halter; same year, order to close the streets at evening with iron chains, and prohibition to carry daggers or offensive arms in the streets at night. But, in a short time, all these attempts at communal legislation fell into disuse. The bourgeois let the wind extinguish their candles at their windows, and their dogs roam; the iron chains were drawn tight only in a state of siege; the prohibition to carry daggers brought no other change than the name of the rue Coupe-Gueule to the name of rue Coupe-Gorge, which is an evident progress. The old scaffolding of feudal jurisdictions remained standing; immense heap of bailiwicks and lordships crossing over the city, embarrassing, entangling, interlacing askew, notching one another; useless thicket of watches, under-watches and counter-watches, through which passed, sword in hand, brigandage, rapine and sedition. It was therefore, in this disorder, not an unheard-of event that these blows of hand of a part of the populace upon a palace, a hotel, a house, in the most populous quarters. In most cases the neighbors meddled with the affair only if the pillage reached as far as their own homes. They stopped their ears at the musket-shot, shut their shutters, barricaded their doors, left the quarrel to empty itself with or without the watch, and the next day they said in Paris: "This night, Étienne Barbette was forced." "The marshal of Clermont was taken in the body," etc.—Also, not only the royal dwellings, the Louvre, the Palais, the Bastille, the Tournelles, but the simply seigniorial residences, the Petit-Bourbon, the Hôtel de Sens, the Hôtel d'Angoulême, etc., had their crenellations on the walls and their machicolations above the doors. The churches guarded themselves by their sanctity. Some few, however, among which was not Notre-Dame, were fortified. The abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was crenellated like a baron, and there was spent in his house more copper in bombards than in bells. His fortress was still seen in 1610. Today there remains scarcely his church.

Let us return to Notre-Dame.

When the first dispositions were terminated, and we must say to the honor of truand discipline that Clopin's orders were executed in silence and with an admirable precision, the worthy chief of the band mounted upon the parapet of the Parvis and raised his rough and surly voice, standing turned toward Notre-Dame and shaking his torch whose light, tormented by the wind and veiled at every moment by its own smoke, made the reddish façade of the church appear and disappear to the eye.

"To thee, Louis de Beaumont, bishop of Paris, councillor in the court of parliament, I, Clopin Trouillefou, king of Thunes, grand coësre, prince of argot, bishop of fools, do say: 'Our sister, falsely condemned for magic, has taken refuge in thy church; thou owest her asylum and safeguard; now the court of parliament would retake her there, and thou consentest thereto; so that she would be hanged tomorrow at the Grève if God and the truands were not here. Therefore we come to thee, bishop. If thy church is sacred, our sister is so too; if our sister is not sacred, thy church is not so either. Wherefore we summon thee to render us the girl if thou wouldst save thy church, or that we retake the girl and that we pillage the church. Which will be well. In witness whereof, I plant here my banner, and God keep thee, bishop of Paris!'"

Quasimodo, unhappily, could not hear these words pronounced with a sort of dark and savage majesty. A truand presented his banner to Clopin, who planted it solemnly between two paving-stones. It was a pitchfork in whose teeth hung, bleeding, a quarter of carrion.

This done, the king of Thunes turned about and passed his eyes over his army, a fierce multitude where the glances shone almost as much as the pikes. After a pause of an instant: "Forward, sons!" he cried. "To work, ye hutins!"

Thirty robust men, with square limbs, with faces like locksmiths, came out of the ranks, with hammers, pincers and iron bars upon their shoulders. They directed themselves toward the principal door of the church, mounted the steps, and soon they were seen all crouched under the arch, working the door with pincers and levers. A crowd of truands followed them to help or to look on. The eleven steps of the portal were encumbered with them.

Meanwhile the door held firm. "Devil! it is hard and stubborn!" said one. "It is old, and its cartilages are shriveled," said another. "Courage, comrades!" resumed Clopin. "I wager my head against a slipper that you will have opened the door, taken the girl and stripped the high altar before there is a bedel awake. Come! I think the lock is giving way."

Clopin was interrupted by a frightful crash which resounded at that moment behind him. He turned round. An enormous beam had just fallen from the sky; it had crushed a dozen truands upon the step of the church, and, rebounding upon the pavement with the noise of a piece of cannon, was still breaking legs here and there in the crowd of knaves who drew back with cries of terror. In a twinkling the reserved enclosure of the Parvis was empty. The hutins, though protected by the deep vaultings of the portal, abandoned the door, and Clopin himself fell back to a respectful distance from the church.

"I had a narrow escape!" cried Jehan. "I felt its wind, bull-head! But Pierre l'Assommeur is slain!"

It is impossible to say what astonishment mingled with dread fell with that beam upon the bandits. They remained some minutes with eyes fixed aloft, more confounded by that piece of wood than by twenty thousand archers of the king.

"Satan!" growled the Duke of Egypt, "that smells of magic!"

"It is the moon who throws us this log," said Andry le Rouge.

"With that," resumed François Chanteprune, "who is said to be the friend of the Virgin!"

"A thousand popes!" cried Clopin, "you are all imbeciles!" But he knew not how to explain the fall of the main-beam.

Meanwhile nothing could be distinguished upon the façade, at the top of which the light of the torches did not reach. The heavy beam lay in the middle of the Parvis, and the groans were heard of the wretches who had received its first shock and whose bellies had been cut in two upon the angle of the stone steps.

The king of Thunes, the first astonishment past, found at length an explanation which seemed plausible to his companions.

"God's-mouth! can it be that the canons are defending themselves? Then to sack! to sack!"

"To sack!" repeated the mob with a furious hurrah; and there was a discharge of crossbows and hackbuts upon the façade of the church.

At this detonation, the peaceable inhabitants of the neighboring houses awoke; several windows were seen to open, and night-caps and hands holding candles appeared at the casements. "Fire at the windows!" cried Clopin. The windows closed instantly, and the poor bourgeois, who had scarcely had time to cast an affrighted glance upon that scene of gleams and tumults, came back to sweat with fear near their wives, asking themselves whether the sabbath was now held in the Parvis Notre-Dame, or whether there was an assault of Burgundians as in '64. Then the husbands thought of robbery, the wives of rape, and all trembled.

"To sack!" repeated the argotiers. But they dared not approach. They looked at the church, they looked at the beam. The beam did not stir. The edifice kept its calm and desert air, but something froze the truands.

"To work then, ye hutins!" cried Trouillefou. "Force the door."

No one made a step.

"Beard and belly!" said Clopin, "here are men who are afraid of a joist."

An old hutin addressed him.

"Captain, it is not the joist that annoys us, it is the door which is all sewn with iron bars. The pincers can do nothing there."

"What would you then need to break it in?" asked Clopin.

"Ah! we should need a ram."

The king of Thunes ran bravely to the formidable beam and set his foot upon it. "Here is one," he cried; "it is the canons who send it you." And making a derisive salute in the direction of the church: "Thanks, canons!"

This bravado had a good effect, the spell of the beam was broken. The truands took courage again; soon the heavy beam, lifted like a feather by two hundred vigorous arms, came to hurl itself with fury upon the great door which had already been tried to shake. To see thus, in the half-light which the rare torches of the truands spread over the square, that long beam borne by that crowd of men who precipitated it running upon the church, one would have thought he saw a monstrous beast with a thousand feet attacking head down the giantess of stone.

At the shock of the beam, the half-metallic door resounded like an immense drum; it did not burst, but the whole cathedral quivered, and the deep cavities of the edifice were heard to rumble.

At the same instant, a rain of large stones began to fall from the top of the façade upon the assailants.

"Devil!" cried Jehan, "is it that the towers are shaking their balustrades upon our heads?"

But the impulse was given, the king of Thunes led by example, it was decidedly the bishop who was defending himself, and they beat the door only with more rage, despite the stones which were bursting skulls right and left.

It is remarkable that these stones fell all one by one; but they followed close. The argotiers always felt two at a time, one upon their legs, one upon their heads. There were few who did not receive a blow, and already a wide layer of dead and wounded was bleeding and palpitating beneath the feet of the assailants who, now furious, renewed themselves without cease. The long beam continued to beat the door at regular intervals like the clapper of a bell, the stones to rain, the door to bellow.

The reader is no doubt not at a loss to guess that this unexpected resistance which had exasperated the truands came from Quasimodo.

Chance had, unhappily, served the brave deaf man.

When he had descended to the platform between the towers, his ideas were in confusion in his head. He had run some minutes along the gallery, going and coming, like a madman, seeing from above the compact mass of truands ready to rush upon the church, asking the devil or God to save the Egyptian girl. The thought had come to him to mount to the southern belfry and ring the tocsin; but before he could set the bell in motion, before the great voice of Marie could utter a single clamor, had not the door of the church time ten times over to be broken in? It was precisely the instant when the hutins were advancing toward it with their ironwork. What was to be done?

Suddenly he remembered that masons had worked all day to repair the wall, the framework and the roof of the southern tower. It was a flash of light. The wall was of stone, the roof of lead, the framework of wood. This prodigious framework, so thick-set, was called the forest.

Quasimodo ran to this tower. The lower chambers were in fact full of materials. There were piles of rough stones, sheets of lead in rolls, bundles of laths, strong beams already notched by the saw, heaps of rubble. A complete arsenal.

The moment pressed. The pincers and hammers were working below. With a strength redoubled by the sense of danger, he lifted one of the beams, the heaviest, the longest, made it issue from a dormer-window, then, seizing it again from outside the tower, made it slide upon the angle of the balustrade which surrounds the platform, and let it go into the abyss. The enormous timber, in that fall of a hundred and sixty feet, scraping the wall, breaking the sculptures, turned several times upon itself like a mill-wheel which should go alone through space. At length it touched the ground, the horrible cry arose, and the black beam, rebounding upon the pavement, resembled a serpent which leaps.

Quasimodo saw the truands scatter at the fall of the beam, like ashes at a child's breath. He profited by their fright, and while they fixed a superstitious gaze upon the club fallen from heaven, and while they put out the eyes of the stone saints of the portal with a discharge of arrows and swan-shot, Quasimodo silently heaped rubble, stones, rough blocks, even to the masons' bags of tools, upon the edge of that balustrade from which the beam had already launched.

Hence, as soon as they set to beating the great door, the hail of rough stones began to fall, and it seemed to them that the church was demolishing itself upon their heads.

Whoever could have seen Quasimodo at that moment would have been affrighted. Independently of what he had piled of projectiles upon the balustrade, he had amassed a heap of stones upon the platform itself. As soon as the rough blocks heaped upon the outer edge were exhausted, he took from the heap. Then he bent down, rose, bent and rose again, with an incredible activity. His big gnome's head leaned over the balustrade, then an enormous stone fell, then another, then another. From time to time he followed a fine stone with his eye, and, when it killed well, he said: "Hun!"

Meanwhile the knaves were not discouraged. Already more than twenty times the thick door upon which they were bent had trembled under the weight of their oak ram multiplied by the force of a hundred men. The panels cracked, the chasings flew in splinters, the hinges at each shock sprang in start upon their pins, the planks gave way, the wood fell in powder ground between the iron ribs. Happily for Quasimodo, there was more iron than wood.

He felt nevertheless that the great door was giving way. Though he heard not, each blow of the ram reverberated at once in the caverns of the church and in his entrails. He saw from above the truands, full of triumph and rage, shake the fist at the tenebrous façade, and he envied, for the Egyptian girl and for himself, the wings of the owls which fled above his head in flocks.

His rain of rough stones did not suffice to repulse the assailants.

In this moment of anguish, he remarked, a little lower than the balustrade from which he was crushing the argotiers, two long stone gutters which discharged immediately above the great door. The inner orifice of these gutters opened upon the pavement of the platform. An idea came to him. He ran to fetch a fagot in his bell-ringer's den, placed upon this fagot plenty of bundles of laths and plenty of rolls of lead, munitions of which he had not yet made use, and, having well disposed this pile before the hole of the two gutters, he set it on fire with his lantern.

During this time, the stones no longer falling, the truands had ceased to look up. The bandits, panting like a pack which forces the boar in his lair, pressed in tumult around the great door, all deformed by the ram, but still standing. They waited with a shudder for the great blow, the blow which was to disembowel it. It was who should hold himself nearest in order to be able to leap first, when it opened, into that opulent cathedral, vast reservoir where had come to amass the riches of three centuries. They reminded one another, with roarings of joy and appetite, of the fine silver crosses, the fine copes of brocade, the fine tombs of vermeil, the great magnificences of the choir, the dazzling feasts, the Noëls sparkling with torches, the Easters bursting with sun, all those splendid solemnities where shrines, candelabra, ciboria, tabernacles, reliquaries, embossed the altars with a crust of gold and diamonds. Certainly, at this fine moment, cagoux and malingreux, archisuppôts and rifodés, thought much less of the deliverance of the Egyptian girl than of the pillage of Notre-Dame. We should even willingly believe that for a good number of them the Esmeralda was but a pretext, if thieves needed pretexts.

All at once, at the moment when they grouped themselves for a last effort around the ram, each holding his breath and stiffening his muscles in order to give all his force to the decisive blow, a howl, more frightful still than that which had burst forth and expired beneath the beam, arose in their midst. Those who did not cry out, those who still lived, looked. Two jets of molten lead fell from the top of the edifice into the thickest of the mob. That sea of men had just sunk under the boiling metal which had made, at the two points where it fell, two black and smoking holes in the crowd, as hot water would in the snow. There were seen to stir half-calcined dying men bellowing with pain. Around these two principal jets, there were drops of that horrible rain which scattered over the assailants and entered the skulls like augers of flame. It was a heavy fire which riddled those wretches with a thousand hail-stones.

The clamor was rending. They fled pell-mell, throwing the beam upon the corpses, the boldest as well as the timidest, and the Parvis was empty a second time.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”