Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

it in his turn, felt some qualms of compassion for the poor devil under sentence, and in the hope of
obtaining some mitigation of his penalties, bent as near as he could to the examiner’s ear, and said,
pointing to Quasimodo, “The man is deaf.”
He hoped that the knowledge of a common infirmity would awaken Maître Florian’s interest in favour
of the condemned. But in the first place, as we have already explained, Maître Florian did not like to
have his deafness commented upon; and secondly, that he was so hard of hearing that he did not catch
one word the clerk was saying. Desiring, however, to conceal this fact, he replied: “Ah! that makes all
the difference. I did not know that. In that case, one more hour of pillory for him.” And, the modification
made, he signed the sentence.
“And serve him right too,” said Robin Poussepain, who still owed Quasimodo a grudge; “that’ll teach
him to handle folks so roughly.”
II. The Rat-Hole
WITH the reader’s permission we will now return to the Place de Grève, which was quitted yesterday
with Gringoire, to follow Esmeralda.
It is ten in the morning, and everywhere are the unmistakable signs of the day after a public holiday.
The ground is strewn with débris of every description, ribbons, rags, plumes, drops of wax from the
torches, scraps from the public feast. A good many of the townsfolk are “loafing about”—as we would
say to-day—turning over the extinguished brands of the bonfire, standing in front of the Maison aux
Piliers rapturously recalling the fine hangings of the day before, and gazing now at the nails which
fastened them—last taste of vanished joy—while the venders of beer and cider roll their casks among the
idle groups. A few pass to and fro, intent on business; the tradespeople gossip and call to one another
from their shop doors. The Festival, the Ambassadors, Coppenole, the Pope of Fools, are in every mouth,
each vying with the other as to who shall make the wittiest comments and laugh the loudest; while four
mounted officers of the peace, who have just posted themselves at the four corners of the pillory, have
already drawn away a considerable portion of the idlers scattered about the square, who cheerfully
submit to any amount of tediousness and waiting, in expectation of a little exhibition of Justice.
If now, after contemplating this stirring and clamorous scene which is being enacted at every corner of
the Place, the reader will turn his attention towards the ancient building—half Gothic, half
Romanesque—called the Tour-Roland, forming the western angle of the quay, he will notice, at one of
its corners, a large, richly illuminated breviary for the use of the public, protected from the rain by a
small penthouse and from thieves by a grating, which, however, allows of the passer-by turning over the
leaves. Close beside this breviary is a narrow, pointed window looking on to the square and closed by an
iron cross-bar, the only aperture by which a little air and light can penetrate to a small, doorless cell
constructed on the level of the ground within the thickness of the wall of the old mansion and filled with
a quiet the more profound, a silence the more oppressive, that a public square, the noisiest and most
populous in Paris, is swarming and clamouring round it.
This cell has been famous in Paris for three centuries, ever since Mme. Rolande of the Tour-Roland,
mourning for her father who died in the Crusades, had caused it to be hollowed out of the wall of her
house and shut herself up in it forever; retaining of all her great mansion but this one poor chamber, the
door of which was walled up and the window open to the elements winter and summer, and giving the