Part 37

All eyes had lifted toward the top of the church. What they saw was extraordinary. At the summit of the highest gallery, higher than the central rose window, there was a great flame rising between the two bell towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a great disordered and furious flame whose wind carried off at times a shred into the smoke. Below this flame, below the dark balustrade with trefoils of embers, two gutters in the shape of monster mouths ceaselessly vomited that fiery rain which detached its silvered stream against the darkness of the lower façade. As they neared the ground, the two jets of liquid lead widened into sprays, like water springing from the thousand holes of a watering can. Above the flame, the enormous towers, of each of which one saw two raw and sharp faces, one all black, the other all red, seemed yet greater by all the immensity of shadow they cast even into the sky. Their countless sculptures of devils and dragons took on a lugubrious aspect. The troubled light of the flame made them seem to move. There were wyverns that looked as though they laughed, gargoyles one believed one could hear bark, salamanders that blew into the fire, tarasques that sneezed in the smoke. And among these monsters thus awakened from their sleep of stone by that flame, by that noise, there was one that walked and that one saw from time to time pass across the burning brow of the pyre like a bat before a candle.

Doubtless this strange beacon was about to awaken afar the woodcutter of the hills of Bicêtre, terrified to see the gigantic shadow of the towers of Notre-Dame waver over his heather.

A silence of terror fell among the outcasts, during which was heard only the cries of alarm of the canons shut in their cloister and more anxious than horses in a burning stable, the furtive noise of windows quickly opened and more quickly closed, the internal bustle of the houses and of the Hôtel-Dieu, the wind in the flame, the last rattling of the dying, and the continual crackling of the rain of lead upon the pavement.

Meanwhile the chief outcasts had withdrawn under the porch of the Gondelaurier house, and were holding council. The Duke of Egypt, seated on a boundary stone, contemplated with religious dread the phantasmagorical pyre resplendent two hundred feet in the air. Clopin Trouillefou bit his thick fists with rage.

"Impossible to get in!" he muttered through his teeth.

"A fairy old church!" grumbled the old Bohemian Mathias Hungadi Spicali.

"By the pope's whiskers!" resumed a grizzled sneerer who had served, "here are church gutters that spit molten lead better than the machicolations of Lectoure."

"Do you see that demon who passes and repasses before the fire?" cried the Duke of Egypt.

"Pardieu," said Clopin, "it is the damned bell-ringer, it is Quasimodo."

The Bohemian shook his head. "I tell you, it is the spirit Sabnac, the great marquis, the demon of fortifications. He has the form of an armed soldier, a lion's head. Sometimes he rides a hideous horse. He changes men into stones with which he builds towers. He commands fifty legions. It is surely he. I recognize him. Sometimes he is dressed in a fine robe of gold figured in the Turkish fashion."

"Where is Bellevigne de l'Étoile?" asked Clopin.

"He is dead," answered an outcast woman.

Andry le Rouge laughed an idiot's laugh: "Notre-Dame gives work to the Hôtel-Dieu," said he.

"Is there then no way to force this door?" cried the King of Thunes, stamping his foot.

The Duke of Egypt sadly pointed to the two streams of boiling lead which never ceased to streak the black façade, like two long distaffs of phosphorus. "One has seen churches defend themselves thus of their own accord," he observed with a sigh. "Saint Sophia, of Constantinople, forty years ago, thrice in succession cast down the crescent of Mahomet in shaking her domes, which are her heads. Guillaume de Paris, who built this one, was a magician."

"Must we then go away shamefully like highwaymen's lackeys?" said Clopin. "Leave our sister here whom these hooded wolves will hang tomorrow!"

"And the sacristy, where there are cartloads of gold!" added an outcast whose name we regret not knowing.

"Beard-Mahom!" cried Trouillefou.

"Let us try once more," resumed the outcast.

Mathias Hungadi shook his head.

"We shall not enter by the door. We must find the flaw in the armor of the old fairy. A hole, a postern, some joint or other."

"Who will go?" said Clopin. "I am going back.—By the way, where is the little scholar Jehan who was so iron-clad?"

"He is no doubt dead," answered someone. "He is no longer heard laughing."

The King of Thunes frowned.

"So much the worse. There was a brave heart under that iron. And master Pierre Gringoire?"

"Captain Clopin," said Andry le Rouge, "he slipped away while we were still only at the Pont-aux-Changeurs."

Clopin stamped his foot. "God's mouth! it is he who pushes us hither, and he leaves us planted in the midst of the work!—Cowardly babbler, helmeted with a slipper!"

"Captain Clopin," cried Andry le Rouge, who was looking into the Parvis street, "there is the little scholar."

"Praised be Pluto!" said Clopin. "But what the devil is he dragging after him?"

It was Jehan, indeed, running as fast as his heavy paladin's garments allowed him, and a long ladder which he bravely trailed upon the pavement, more out of breath than an ant harnessed to a blade of grass twenty times longer than itself.

"Victory! Te Deum!" cried the scholar. "Here is the ladder of the longshoremen of the port Saint-Landry."

Clopin approached him.

"Child! what would you do, God's horn! with this ladder?"

"I have it," answered Jehan, panting. "I knew where it was.—Under the shed of the lieutenant's house.—There is a girl there whom I know, who thinks me handsome as a Cupid.—I made use of her to get the ladder, and I have the ladder, Pasque-Mahom!—The poor girl came to open to me in her shift."

"Yes," said Clopin, "but what would you do with this ladder?"

Jehan looked at him with a cunning and capable air, and made his fingers snap like castanets. He was sublime at that moment. He had on his head one of those helmets overloaded in the fifteenth century, which terrified the enemy with their chimerical crests. His was bristling with ten iron beaks, so that Jehan might have disputed the dread epithet of [126] with the Homeric ship of Nestor.

"What I would do with it, august King of Thunes? Do you see that row of statues with the air of imbeciles there above the three portals?"

"Yes. Well?"

"It is the gallery of the kings of France!"

"What is that to me?" said Clopin.

"Wait, then! At the end of that gallery there is a door that is never fastened but by a latch; with this ladder I climb up, and I am in the church."

"Child, let me climb first."

"Not so, comrade, the ladder is mine. Come, you shall be second."

"May Belzebuth strangle you!" said the surly Clopin. "I will be after no one."

"Then, Clopin, go look for a ladder!"

Jehan set off running across the square, dragging his ladder and crying: "To me, boys!"

In an instant the ladder was raised and leaned against the balustrade of the lower gallery, above one of the side portals. The crowd of outcasts, uttering great acclamations, pressed below to climb it. But Jehan maintained his right and set foot first upon the rungs. The journey was rather long. The gallery of the kings of France is elevated today about sixty feet above the pavement. The eleven steps of the perron raised it still higher. Jehan climbed slowly, much encumbered by his heavy armor, with one hand holding the rung, with the other his crossbow. When he was in the middle of the ladder he cast a melancholy glance upon the poor argotiers dead, with which the step was strewn. "Alas!" said he, "here is a heap of corpses worthy of the fifth canto of the Iliad!" Then he continued to climb. The outcasts followed him. There was one on each rung. To see that line of cuirassed backs rising in undulation in the shadow, one would have said a steel-scaled serpent rearing itself against the church. Jehan, who led the way and who whistled, completed the illusion.

The scholar at last reached the balcony of the gallery, and bestrode it lightly enough amid the applause of all the vagabondage. Master thus of the citadel, he gave a cry of joy, and suddenly stopped petrified. He had just caught sight, behind a king's statue, of Quasimodo hidden in the shadows, his eye gleaming.

Before a second assailant could set foot on the gallery, the formidable hunchback sprang to the head of the ladder, seized without a word the ends of the two uprights in his powerful hands, lifted them, drew them from the wall, balanced for a moment, amid cries of anguish, the long and bending ladder encumbered from top to bottom with outcasts, and suddenly, with superhuman strength, flung this cluster of men back into the square. There was an instant when the most determined palpitated. The ladder, thrown backward, remained for a moment upright and standing and seemed to hesitate, then oscillated, then all at once, describing a frightful arc of a circle of eighty feet radius, fell upon the pavement with its load of bandits more rapidly than a drawbridge whose chains break. There was an immense imprecation, then all was extinguished, and a few mutilated unfortunates withdrew crawling from beneath the heap of dead.

A murmur of grief and anger succeeded among the besiegers to the first cries of triumph. Quasimodo, impassive, both elbows leaning on the balustrade, looked on. He had the air of a hoary old king at his window.

Jehan Frollo was, himself, in a critical situation. He found himself in the gallery with the redoubtable bell-ringer, alone, separated from his companions by a vertical wall of eighty feet. While Quasimodo played with the ladder, the scholar had run to the postern which he thought open. Not at all. The deaf man, on entering the gallery, had closed it behind him. Jehan then had hidden behind a stone king, not daring to breathe, and fixing upon the monstrous hunchback a terrified countenance, like that man who, paying court to the wife of the keeper of a menagerie, went one evening to an assignation of love, mistook his wall in climbing, and found himself suddenly face to face with a white bear.

In the first moments the deaf man took no notice of him; but at last he turned his head and started up all at once. He had just caught sight of the scholar.

Jehan prepared for a rude shock, but the deaf man remained motionless; only he was turned toward the scholar, whom he looked at.

"Ho! ho!" said Jehan, "what have you to look at me with that one-eyed and melancholy eye?"

And while speaking thus, the young rogue slyly prepared his crossbow.

"Quasimodo!" he cried, "I am going to change your nickname. They shall call you the blind."

The shot went off. The feathered bolt whistled and came to stick in the left arm of the hunchback. Quasimodo was no more moved than by a scratch on King Pharamond. He put his hand to the arrow, tore it from his arm and broke it quietly upon his thick knee. Then he let fall, rather than threw to the ground, the two pieces. But Jehan had not time to shoot a second time. The bolt broken, Quasimodo blew noisily, bounded like a grasshopper and fell upon the scholar, whose armor flattened at the blow against the wall.

Then in that half-light where floated the light of the torches, there was glimpsed a terrible thing.

Quasimodo had taken in his left hand the two arms of Jehan, who did not struggle, so much did he feel himself lost. With the right the deaf man detached from him, one after another, in silence, with a sinister slowness, all the pieces of his armor, the sword, the daggers, the helmet, the cuirass, the vambraces. One would have said a monkey peeling a nut. Quasimodo threw at his feet, piece by piece, the iron shell of the scholar.

When the scholar saw himself disarmed, undressed, weak and naked in those redoubtable hands, he did not try to speak to this deaf man, but he began to laugh impudently in his face, and to sing, with his intrepid carelessness of a child of sixteen, the then popular song:

She is well dressed, The town of Cambrai. Marafin has pillaged it...

He did not finish. One saw Quasimodo standing on the parapet of the gallery, who with a single hand held the scholar by the feet, whirling him over the abyss like a sling. Then was heard a noise like that of a bony box bursting against a wall, and one saw something fall which stopped at a third of the way down at a projection of the architecture. It was a dead body that remained caught there, folded in two, the loins broken, the skull empty.

A cry of horror rose among the outcasts. "Revenge!" cried Clopin. "To sack!" answered the multitude. "Assault! assault!"

Then it was a prodigious howl in which mingled all languages, all patois, all accents. The death of the poor scholar cast a furious ardor into that crowd. Shame took hold of it, and anger at having been so long held in check before a church by a hunchback. Rage found ladders, multiplied torches, and at the end of a few minutes Quasimodo, distraught, saw that frightful anthill climb from all sides to the assault of Notre-Dame. Those who had no ladders had knotted ropes, those who had no ropes climbed the remnants of the sculptures. They hung from each other's rags. No means of resisting that ascending tide of frightful faces. Fury made those savage countenances glow; their earthy foreheads streamed with sweat; their eyes gave light. All those grimaces, all those uglinesses invested Quasimodo. One would have said that some other church had sent to the assault of Notre-Dame its gorgons, its dogues, its drées, its demons, its most fantastic sculptures. It was like a layer of living monsters upon the stone monsters of the façade.

Meanwhile, the square had become starred with a thousand torches. That disordered scene, until then buried in obscurity, had suddenly blazed with light. The Parvis shone and cast a radiance into the sky. The pyre lighted on the high platform still burned, and illuminated the city afar. The enormous silhouette of the two towers, spread afar over the roofs of Paris, made in that clarity a broad notch of shadow. The city seemed to have stirred. Distant tocsins complained. The outcasts howled, panted, swore, climbed, and Quasimodo, powerless against so many enemies, shivering for the Egyptian, seeing the furious faces draw nearer and nearer to his gallery, asked a miracle of heaven, and wrung his arms in despair.

V

THE RETREAT WHEREIN MONSIEUR LOUIS DE FRANCE TELLS HIS HOURS

The reader has perhaps not forgotten that, a moment before perceiving the nocturnal band of outcasts, Quasimodo, surveying Paris from the top of his bell tower, no longer saw shining there but one light, which starred a pane at the highest story of a tall and somber edifice, beside the Saint-Antoine gate. That edifice was the Bastille. That star was the candle of Louis XI.

King Louis XI was indeed at Paris for two days. He was to set out again the day after tomorrow for his citadel of Montilz-lès-Tours. He never made but rare and short appearances in his good city of Paris, not feeling around him there enough traps, gibbets and Scottish archers.

He had come that day to sleep at the Bastille. The great chamber of five square fathoms which he had at the Louvre, with chimney charged with twelve great beasts and the thirteen great prophets, and his great bed of eleven feet by twelve, pleased him little. He lost himself in all those grandeurs. This bourgeois-good king preferred the Bastille with a little chamber and a little bed. And then the Bastille was stronger than the Louvre.

This little chamber which the king had reserved himself in the famous state prison was still spacious enough and occupied the highest story of a turret engaged in the donjon. It was a retreat of round shape, hung with mats of shining straw, ceilinged with beams heightened with fleurs-de-lys of gilded pewter with colored spandrels, wainscoted with rich woodwork sown with rosettes of white pewter and painted a fine light green, made of orpin and fine flowering.

There was but one window, a long ogive trellised with brass wire and iron bars, moreover obscured by fine colored panes with the arms of the king and queen, whose panel came to twenty-two sols.

There was but one entrance, a modern door, with a surbased arch, furnished with tapestry within, and, without, with one of those porches of Irish wood, frail edifices of curious joinery, which were still to be seen in quantity in old dwellings a hundred and fifty years ago. "Although they disfigure and encumber the places," says Sauval with despair, "our old men nevertheless will not part with them and preserve them in defiance of everyone."

One found in this chamber nothing of what furnished ordinary apartments, neither benches, nor trestles, nor forms, nor common stools in the shape of a chest, nor fine stools supported by pillars and counter-pillars at four sols the piece. One saw there only a folding chair with arms, very magnificent: the wood of it was painted with roses on a red ground, the seat of vermilion cordovan, furnished with long fringes of silk and studded with a thousand gold nails. The solitude of this chair showed that but one person had the right to sit in the chamber. Beside the chair and close to the window, there was a table covered with a tapestry of bird figures. On this table a writing-case stained with ink, some parchments, some pens, and a chased silver goblet. A little further, a foot-warmer, a prie-Dieu of crimson velvet, raised with bosses of gold. Finally at the back a simple bed of yellow and incarnate damask, without tinsel or lace; the fringes plain. It is this bed, famous for having borne the sleep or the insomnia of Louis XI, that one could still contemplate, two hundred years ago, at the house of a councillor of state, where it was seen by old Madame Pilou, celebrated in the Cyrus under the name of Arricidie and of La Morale vivante.

Such was the chamber which was called "the retreat wherein Monsieur Louis de France tells his hours."

At the moment when we have introduced the reader thereto, this retreat was very dark. The curfew had rung an hour since, it was night, and there was but one wavering wax candle set upon the table to light five personages variously grouped in the chamber.

The first upon whom the light fell was a lord superbly clad in breeches and a jerkin of scarlet striped with silver, and a cassock of cloth of gold with black patterns. This splendid costume, wherein the light played, seemed glazed with flame at all its folds. The man who wore it had upon his breast his arms embroidered in vivid colors: a chevron accompanied in base by a passing deer. The escutcheon was supported on the right by a branch of olive, on the left by a deer's horn. This man wore at his belt a rich dagger whose vermilion hilt was chased in the form of a crest and surmounted by a comital crown. He had a bad air, a proud look and a high head. At the first glance one saw arrogance on his face, at the second, cunning.

He stood bareheaded, a long pike in his hand, behind the armchair on which was seated, his body ungracefully folded in two, his knees straddling one upon the other, his elbow on the table, a personage very ill clad. Let one picture, indeed, upon the opulent Cordovan leather, two knock-kneed kneecaps, two thin thighs poorly dressed in black woolen stockings, a torso wrapped in a fustian greatcoat with a fur of which one saw more leather than hair; finally, to crown all, an old greasy hat of the poorest black cloth bordered with a circular cord of leaden figurines. There, with a dirty skullcap that scarce let a hair pass, is all that one distinguished of the seated personage. He held his head so bent upon his chest that one perceived nothing of his face covered with shadow, save the tip of his nose upon which fell a ray of light, and which must have been long. From the thinness of his wrinkled hand one guessed an old man. It was Louis XI.

At some distance behind them conversed in low voices two men clad in the Flemish cut, who were not sufficiently lost in the shadow for someone who had attended the representation of Gringoire's mystery not to have recognized in them two of the principal Flemish envoys, Guillaume Rym, the sagacious pensionary of Ghent, and Jacques Coppenole, the popular hosier. It will be remembered that these two men were mixed up in the secret policy of Louis XI.

Finally, quite at the back, near the door, stood in the darkness, motionless as a statue, a vigorous man with squat limbs, military harness, and an armorial cassock, whose square face, pierced with eyes level with the head, split by an immense mouth, hiding his ears under two broad flaps of flat hair, without forehead, held at once of the dog and the tiger.

All were uncovered, except the king.

The lord who was near the king was reading him a sort of long memorial which His Majesty seemed to listen to with attention. The two Flemings whispered.

"Cross of God!" grumbled Coppenole. "I am weary of standing. Is there no chair here?"

Rym answered by a negative gesture, accompanied by a discreet smile.

"Cross of God!" resumed Coppenole, quite unhappy to be thus obliged to lower his voice, "the itch takes me to sit on the ground, cross-legged, as a hosier, in my shop."

"Beware of that, master Jacques!"

"Hum! master Guillaume! here one can then be only on one's feet?"

"Or on one's knees," said Rym.

At this moment the king's voice rose. They were silent.

"Fifty sols the robes of our valets, and twelve pounds the cloaks of the clerks of our crown! Is that it! pour gold by tunfuls! Are you mad, Olivier?"

While speaking thus, the old man had lifted his head. One saw gleam at his neck the gold shells of the collar of Saint-Michael. The candle lit fully his emaciated and morose profile. He tore the paper from the other's hands.

"You are ruining us!" he cried, passing his hollow eyes over the book. "What is all this? what need have we of so prodigious a household? Two chaplains at ten pounds a month each, and a clerk of the chapel at a hundred sols! A valet de chambre at ninety pounds a year! Four kitchen squires at six score pounds a year each! A larderer, a potager, a saucier, a cook, an armor-keeper, two bed-valets at ten pounds a month each! Two kitchen boys at eight pounds! A groom and his two helpers at twenty-four pounds a month! A porter, a pastrycook, a baker, two carters, each sixty pounds a year! And the master of the forge, six score pounds! And the master of the chamber of our moneys, twelve hundred pounds, and the controller, five hundred!—How should I know! it is a fury! The wages of our domestics put France to pillage! All the hoards of the Louvre will melt at such a fire of expense! We shall sell our plate there! And next year, if God and Our Lady (here he lifted his hat) lend us life, we shall drink our tisanes from a pewter pot!"

In saying this, he threw a glance upon the silver goblet which sparkled on the table. He coughed, and pursued:

“Stories of the world, in your language.”