Part 44

The deaf man had leaned his elbows on the balustrade at the spot where the archdeacon had been but a moment before, and there, his gaze fixed upon the only object that existed for him in the world at that moment, he stood motionless and mute like a man struck by lightning, and a long stream of tears flowed silently from that eye which until then had shed but a single tear.

Meanwhile the archdeacon was gasping. His bald brow streamed with sweat, his nails bled against the stone, his knees were scraped raw on the wall.

He heard his cassock, caught on the gutter, crack and come unsewn at every jerk he gave it. To crown his misfortune, this gutter ended in a leaden pipe that bent under the weight of his body. The archdeacon felt the pipe slowly giving way. The wretch told himself that when his hands were broken with fatigue, when his cassock was torn, when this lead was bent, he must fall, and terror seized his bowels. Sometimes, with wild eyes, he looked at a kind of narrow ledge formed some ten feet below by accidents of the sculpture, and in the depths of his distressed soul he begged heaven to let him end his life on that two-square-foot space, though it should last a hundred years. Once he looked below him into the square, into the abyss; the head he raised again had closed eyes and hair standing straight up.

Something frightful was the silence of these two men. While the archdeacon a few feet from him was dying in this horrible fashion, Quasimodo wept and looked at the Grève.

The archdeacon, seeing that all his struggles served only to shake the fragile support that remained to him, had resolved to stir no more. He stayed there, embracing the gutter, scarcely breathing, no longer moving, having no other motion than the mechanical convulsion of the belly that one feels in dreams when one believes oneself falling. His fixed eyes were opened in a sickly and astonished manner. Yet little by little, however, he lost ground; his fingers slipped on the gutter, he felt more and more the weakness of his arms and the heaviness of his body, the curve of the lead that upheld him inclined at every moment a notch toward the abyss.

He saw below him, a dreadful thing, the roof of Saint-Jean-le-Rond small as a card folded in two. He looked one after another at the impassive sculptures of the tower, suspended like him over the precipice, but without terror for them or pity for himself. All was of stone around him, before his eyes, the gaping monsters, below, far at the bottom, in the square, the pavement, above his head, Quasimodo weeping.

There were in the Parvis some groups of stout curious folk who were tranquilly trying to guess what madman could be amusing himself in so strange a manner. The priest heard them say, for their voices reached him, clear and shrill: "But he will break his neck!"

Quasimodo wept.

At last the archdeacon, foaming with rage and dread, understood that all was useless. Yet he gathered all the strength left him for one last effort. He braced himself on the gutter, pushed off from the wall with both knees, clutched with his hands at a fissure in the stones, and managed to climb back perhaps a foot; but this jolt made the leaden spout on which he leaned suddenly bend. At the same moment the cassock tore open. Then feeling all give way beneath him, having nothing left but his stiff and failing hands that held to something, the unhappy man closed his eyes and let go the gutter. He fell.

Quasimodo watched him fall.

A fall from so great a height is rarely perpendicular. The archdeacon launched into space fell first head downward and arms outstretched, then turned over several times. The wind drove him against the roof of a house where the wretch began to be broken. Yet he was not dead when he reached it. The ringer saw him still try to cling to the gable with his nails. But the slope was too steep, and he had no strength left. He slid rapidly down the roof like a tile that comes loose, and went to bounce on the pavement. There he moved no more.

Quasimodo then lifted his eye to the Egyptian woman whose body he saw, suspended from the gibbet, shudder in the distance beneath her white robe with the last throes of agony, then he lowered it upon the archdeacon stretched at the foot of the tower and no longer having human shape, and he said with a sob that heaved his deep chest: "Oh! all that I have loved!"

III

PHOEBUS'S MARRIAGE

Toward evening of that day, when the bishop's judicial officers came to pick up from the pavement of the Parvis the dislocated corpse of the archdeacon, Quasimodo had disappeared from Notre-Dame.

Many rumors ran about this adventure. It was not doubted that the day had come when, according to their pact, Quasimodo, that is to say the devil, was to carry off Claude Frollo, that is to say the sorcerer. It was supposed that he had broken the body in taking the soul, like monkeys that crack the shell to eat the nut.

This is why the archdeacon was not buried in consecrated ground.

Louis XI died the following year, in the month of August 1483.

As for Pierre Gringoire, he managed to save the goat, and he obtained successes in tragedy. It appears that after having tasted of astrology, philosophy, architecture, hermeticism, all the follies, he returned to tragedy, which is the maddest of all. This he called having made a tragic end. Here is what one reads as early as 1483 in the accounts of the ordinary, concerning his dramatic triumphs: "To Jehan Marchand and Pierre Gringoire, carpenter and composer, who have made and composed the mystery performed at the Châtelet of Paris at the entrance of Monsieur the legate, ordered the characters, the same clothed and dressed as was required in said mystery, and likewise, for having made the scaffolds thereto necessary; and for so doing, one hundred pounds."

Phoebus de Châteaupers also made a tragic end, he got married.

IV

QUASIMODO'S MARRIAGE

We have just said that Quasimodo had disappeared from Notre-Dame on the day of the death of the Egyptian woman and the archdeacon. He was indeed not seen again, nor was it known what had become of him.

In the night following the execution of Esmeralda, the men of the lower works had untied her body from the gibbet and carried it, according to custom, into the vault of Montfaucon.

Montfaucon was, as Sauval says, "the oldest and most superb gibbet of the kingdom." Between the faubourgs of the Temple and Saint-Martin, at about a hundred and sixty toises from the walls of Paris, a few crossbow shots from the Courtille, one saw at the summit of a gentle, imperceptible rise, rather high to be perceived for some leagues around, a building of strange shape, which much resembled a Celtic cromlech, and where human sacrifices were also made.

Let one imagine, at the crown of a plaster hillock, a great parallelepiped of masonry, fifteen feet high, thirty wide, forty long, with a door, an outer ramp and a platform; upon this platform sixteen enormous pillars of rough stone, upright, thirty feet high, arranged in colonnade around three of the four sides of the mass that supports them, bound together at their summit by strong beams from which hang chains at intervals; upon all these chains, skeletons; around them in the plain, a stone cross and two second-order gibbets which seem to spring up as suckers around the central fork; above all that, in the sky, a perpetual flight of crows. Such was Montfaucon.

At the end of the fifteenth century, the formidable gibbet, which dated from 1328, was already much decayed. The beams were worm-eaten, the chains rusty, the pillars green with mold. The dressed-stone courses were all split at their joints, and grass grew on this platform where no feet trod. It was a horrible profile against the sky, that of this monument; at night especially, when there was a little moon on those white skulls, or when the evening breeze crumpled chains and skeletons and moved all that in the shadow. This gibbet present there sufficed to make all the surroundings sinister places.

The mass of stone that served as base to the odious edifice was hollow. There had been made in it a vast vault, closed by an old disordered iron grating, where were thrown not only the human remnants that detached themselves from the chains of Montfaucon, but the bodies of all the unfortunates executed at the other permanent gibbets of Paris. In this deep charnel-house where so much human dust and so many crimes have rotted together, many of the great of the world, many innocents came successively to bring their bones, from Enguerrand de Marigni, who inaugurated Montfaucon and who was a just man, to the admiral of Coligny, who closed it and who was a just man.

As for the mysterious disappearance of Quasimodo, here is all that we have been able to discover.

About two years or eighteen months after the events that end this story, when they came to search in the vault of Montfaucon for the corpse of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days before, and to whom Charles VIII granted the grace of being buried at Saint-Laurent in better company, there were found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons of which one held the other singularly embraced. One of these two skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had some shreds of a robe of a stuff that had been white, and one saw about her neck a necklace of grains of adrézarach with a little silken pouch, adorned with green glass beads, which was open and empty. These objects were of so little value that the executioner no doubt had not cared for them. The other, who held this one tightly embraced, was a man's skeleton. It was noticed that he had the vertebral column deviated, the head between the shoulder blades, and one leg shorter than the other. He had moreover no fracture of the vertebra at the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. The man to whom he had belonged had therefore come there, and there he had died. When they wished to detach him from the skeleton he embraced, he fell to dust.

NOTES

NOTE I.

On the title page, one reads in the manuscript of Notre-Dame de Paris the following note:

I wrote the three or four first pages of Notre-Dame de Paris on 25 July 1830. The July revolution interrupted me. Then my dear little Adèle came into the world (Blessed be she!). I took up Notre-Dame de Paris again on 1 September, and the work was finished on 15 January 1831.

Chapter I, the Grand'Salle, began thus in the manuscript:

"There is today, twenty-fifth July 1830, three hundred forty-eight years six months and nineteen days, etc."

The words twenty-fifth July 1830 have been crossed out.

The date 1st September, is found before the paragraph: "If it could be granted to us, to us men of 1830, etc."

At the bottom of the last page, one reads: 15 January 1831, 6:30 in the evening.

NOTE II.

The manuscript of Notre-Dame de Paris has almost no blots. There are hardly to be noted any variants except in some chapter titles.

The chapter History of a cake of maize leaven was at first entitled: History of the child of the loose woman.

The chapter That a priest and a philosopher are two, The married philosopher.

The chapter The little shoe, The goat is saved.

* * * * *

NOTES:

[1: Fate.]

[2: Henri Sauval, Histoire et Recherche des Antiquités de la Ville de Paris, Moette et Chardon (3 vol.), Paris, 1724.]

[3: The word gothic, in the sense generally employed, is perfectly improper, but perfectly established. We accept it therefore, and we adopt it, like everyone, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the middle ages, that whose principle is the pointed arch, which succeeds the architecture of the first period, whose generator is the round arch. (Note by Victor Hugo.)]

[4: Thibault, dice player.]

[5: Thibault aux dés. The rue Thibaut-aux-Dés is near the Louvre.]

[6: Martial, Epigrams, VII, 91, 2: "Here are Saturnalian nuts that we send you." The text is: "Saturnalicias".]

[7: "With their gray tunics!--Or furred with gray skins!"]

[8: "Or a fart."]

[9: Horace, Odes, III, 1, 40: "Behind the rider sits black care."]

[10: Horace, Art of Poetry, 191: "And let no god intervene."]

[11: "Applaud, citizens!" This call concluded all theatrical performances at Rome.]

[12: The Liar, II, 6.]

[13: Du Breul, Theatre of the Antiquities of Paris, To the Reader.]

[14: "Let us drink papal-wise."]

[15: "Cape full of wine!"]

[16: Matthew, VII, 6: "Pearls before swine". The following pun is based on the double meaning of the word Margarita, pearl or Marguerite: "Swine before Marguerite".]

[17: Virgil, Aeneid, I, 405: "The goddess revealed herself in her gait".]

[18: "Kisses for blows."]

[19: La Fontaine, Fables, II, 14, The Hare and the Frogs.]

[20: "All ways, roads and passages."]

[21: "Hail, star of the sea!"]

[22: "Good alms, lord! good alms!" (Italian.)]

[23: "Lord knight, to buy a piece of bread!" (Spanish)]

[24: "Give charity!" (Latin.)]

[25: "Where goest thou, man!" (Spanish.)]

[26: Sauval, I, 512.]

[27: "Man, take off thy hat" (Spanish.)]

[28: "All things are in philosophy, and all men in the philosopher."]

[29: Abel Hugo, Romances historiques, Paris, 1822:

"When the multicolored birds Are mute, and the earth..."]

[30: "Time devours and man even more." The expression tempus edax is found twice in Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV, 234, and Pontics, IV, 10, 7.]

[31: "Whose mass awakens the terror of those who look upon it". The chronicler invoked is Jacques Du Breul (The Theatre of the Antiquities of Paris, Paris, Chevalier, 1612).]

[32: Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 88: "the interrupted work hangs in suspense."]

[33: It is the same which is also called, according to places, climates and species, Lombard, Saxon and Byzantine. These are four sister and parallel architectures, each having its particular character, but deriving from the same principle, the round arch.

Facies non omnibus una, Non diversa tamen, qualem, etc.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, 13: "Appearance not unique in all, yet not diverse..."]

[34: This part of the spire, which was of timber, is precisely that which was consumed by the fire from heaven in 1823.]

[35: "The fidelity of citizens toward kings, though many times interrupted by seditions, procured them numerous advantages."]

[36: Sauval, I, 94.]

[37: "Prison of Glaucin."]

[38: Voltaire, Age of Louis XIV, Introduction: "Paris did not contain four hundred thousand men and was not adorned with four fine buildings."]

[39: The Glory of the Val-de-Grâce.]

[40: We have seen with a pain mixed with indignation that they were thinking of enlarging, of recasting, of reworking, that is to say of destroying this admirable palace. The architects of our day have too heavy a hand to touch these delicate works of the renaissance. We always hope they will not dare to. Besides, this demolition of the Tuileries now would not only be a brutal outrage of which a drunken Vandal would be ashamed, it would be an act of treason. The Tuileries are no longer simply a masterpiece of the art of the sixteenth century, it is a page of the history of the nineteenth century. This palace is no longer the king's, but the people's. Let us leave it as it is. Our revolution has marked it twice on the brow. On one of its two façades, it has the balls of 10 August; on the other, the balls of 29 July. It is holy.

Paris, 7 April 1831. (Note of the fifth edition.)]

[41: "To give blows and pull hair."]

[42: Jean de Roye, Scandalous Chronicle, Coppens, Brussels, 1706-1714.]

[43: "Altar of the idle."]

[44: "Keeper of a monstrous flock, and more monstrous himself." Imitated from Virgil, Bucolics, V, 44: "Formosi pecoris custos formosior ipse."]

[45: "The sturdy child is wicked."]

[46: "As pushed by the sounding of the trumpet."]

[47: "Brawl, whose first cause was that they had drunk very good wine."]

[48: "Where the circle failed." Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, V, 463.]

[49: Which is contrary to the divine will.]

[50: Hugo II de Bisuncio, 1326-1332.]

[51: "Some great ladies, whom one cannot remove without scandal."]

[52: Régnier, Satires, XII, 49-50. Read "Telles sortes" and not "Toutes"]

[53: "Ah! ah! Claudius and the limping one!"]

[54: "Abbot of the blessed Martin."]

[55: On predestination and free will.]

[56: Physicians.]

[57: "I believe in God.--Our Lord."]

[58: "You are mistaken, friend Claude."]

[59: "The abbot of the blessed Martin, that is to say the king of France, is canon according to custom and has the small prebend of Saint-Venant and must sit at the seat of the treasurer."]

[60: Exodus, XX, 25.]

[61: "Tortoise", attack formation of soldiers making a vault above their heads with joined shields.]

[62: This comet, against which Pope Calixtus, uncle of Borgia, ordered public prayers, is the same which will reappear in 1835. (Note by Victor Hugo)]

[63: "Dignity which is linked to a not negligible police power, as well as to numerous rights and prerogatives."]

[64: Accounts of the domain, 1383 (Note by Victor Hugo)]

[65: "The text of the law is harsh."]

[66: "Body of Christ!"]

[67: "By Hercules!"]

[68: "To the prejudice of a courtesan."]

[69: "With his great voice through the shadow." Cf. Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 619: "...et magna testatur voce per umbras".]

[70: "Be silent and hope."]

[71: "Strong shield, salvation of chiefs."]

[72: "It is to thee."]

[73: "Thou, pray."]

[74: "With unequal step." Cf. Virgil, Aeneid, II, 724.]

[75: "The deaf man is absurd."]

[76: "Feed thyself."]

[77: Lord.]

[78: "One will not believe that a man and a woman alone say the Our Father."]

[79: "Even as."]

[80: "But the truth is that."]

[81: "Truly these roasts are astounding things!" (Italian.)]

[82: "Breathe, hope."]

[83: "Whence? from there?"]

[84: "Man is a monster to man."]

[85: "Stars, camp, name, divinity."]

[86: Callimachus, Fragments, 359: "Great book, great evil."]

[87: "Dare to know."]

[88: "He breathes where he will."]

[89: "Forced regimen" (of food for athletes, cf. Aristotle, Politics, 1339a).]

[90: "Dominum the lord of Heaven, domnus that of the earth."]

[91: "Here and there."]

[92: "Fate."]

[93: "It is Greek, it is not read."]

[94: "He who does not work, let him not eat."]

[95: Interjection marking pain: "Alas! Alas!"]

[96: Plautus, Asinaria, 549-50: "Against goads, red blades, crosses, irons, bonds, chains, prisons, shackles, nooses, fetters."]

[97: Plautus, Asinaria, 301: "Naked and fettered, thou weigh'st a hundred pounds when thou hang'st by the feet." The comma should be read after es and not before.]

[98: "A strix or a mask!"]

[99: Dialogue on the energy and operation of demons.]

[100: "We praise thee, O God."]

[101: "Under the preservation of the specific form the soul is saved."]

[102: Montaigne, Essays, III, 13: "Unworthy who dwells among evil words."]

[103: Horace, Satires, I, 8, 1: "Once I was a fig-tree trunk"]

[104: Régnier, Satires, XI, 24.]

[105: "Wherefore, gentlemen, in presence of an avowed strix, the crime being patent, the criminal intent evident, in the name of the holy church of Notre-Dame of Paris, which is in seizin to have high and low justice of every sort in this spotless isle of the City, by the tenor of these presents we declare to require, firstly, some pecuniary indemnity, secondly, honorable amends before the great doors of Notre-Dame, cathedral church, thirdly, a sentence whereby this strix with her goat, either upon the square vulgarly called the Grève, or at the exit of the isle upon the river Seine, near the point of the king's garden, be executed!"]

[106: "Alas! low Latin!"]

[107: "I deny it."]

[108: Dante, Inferno, III, 9: "Abandon all hope." Phrase inscribed on the door of Hell.]

[109: La Fontaine, Fables, I, 18, The Fox and the Stork.]

[110: Psalms, III, 7-8: "I will not fear the myriads of people that have set themselves against me round about. Arise, O Lord! Save me, my God!" (rev. Segond trans.)

Psalms, LXIX, 2-3: "Save me, O God, for the waters are come in unto my soul. I am sunk in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me."]

[111: John, V, 24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life."]

[112: Jonah, II, 3-4: "Out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardst my voice. For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about."]

[113: "Go, double soul, and may God be merciful to thee!"]

[114: "Which was for the monks of Saint-Germain a hydra, the clerks ever raising new subjects of dispute."]

[115: "Happy old man!" (Cf. Virgil, Bucolics, I, 46 and 51.)]

[116: Job, IV, 12 and 15.]

[117: On the cutting of stones.]

[118: "That meats, drinks, sleep, love, all be moderate."]

[119: "Marriage made with those without."]

[120: "The doctrine of doctors, the discipline of disciples are lost."]

[121: "Populous transport of the people that transports itself."]

[122: "What canticles! what instruments! what songs! what melodies are sung here without end! the sweet instruments of hymns resound, the gentle melody of angels, the admirable songs of songs!"]

[123: "It is not given to everyone to have a nose."]

[124: "Luxurious thing is wine and tumultuous is drunkenness."]

[125: "Wine makes even the wise apostatize."]

[126: Armed with ten spurs.]

[127: "Without cutting squire or butler."]

[128: "Rapid pulse, blowing, crackling, irregular."]

[129: "From Turin at once besieging and besieged."]

[130: "As bees geometry."]

[131: Against avarice.]

“Stories of the world, in your language.”