Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

his scourge in great drops on to the ground.
But all was not yet over for poor Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour on the pillory which
Maître Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to the sentence of Messire Robert d’Estouteville;
and all merely to prove the truth of John of Cumenes’s ancient physiological and psychological jeu de
mots: Surdus absurdus.
They accordingly turned the hour-glass, and left the hunchback bound to the wheel, that justice might
run its course to the end.
The people—particularly in the Middle Ages—are to society what the child is in the family; and as long
as they are allowed to remain at that primitive stage of ignorance, of moral and intellectual nonage, it
may be said of them as of childhood—“It is an age that knows not pity.”
We have already shown that Quasimodo was universally hated—for more than one good reason, it must
be admitted—for there was hardly an individual among the crowd of spectators but had or thought he had
some cause of complaint against the malevolent hunchback of Notre Dame. All had rejoiced to see him
make his appearance on the pillory; and the severe punishment he had just undergone, and the pitiable
plight in which it had left him, so far from softening the hearts of the populace, had rendered their hatred
more malicious by pointing it with the sting of merriment.
Accordingly, “public vengeance”—vindicte publique, as the jargon of the law courts still has it—being
satisfied, a thousand private revenges now had their turn. Here, as in the great Hall, the women were
most in evidence. Every one of them had some grudge against him—some for his wicked deeds, others
for his ugly face—and the latter were the most incensed of the two.
“Oh, image of the Antichrist!” cried one.
“Thou rider on the broomstick!” screamed another.
“Oh, the fine tragical grimace!” yelled a third, “and that would have made him Pope of Fools if to-day
had been yesterday.”
“Good!” chimed in an old woman, “this is the pillory grin. When are we going to see him grin through a
noose?”
“When shall we see thee bonneted by thy great bell and driven a hundred feet underground,
thrice-cursed bell-ringer?”
“And to think that this foul fiend should ring the Angelus!”
“Oh, the misbegotten hunchback! the monster!”
“To look at him is enough to make a woman miscarry better than any medicines or pharmacy.”
And the two scholars, Jehan of the Mill and Robin Poussepain, struck in at the pitch of their voices with
the refrain of an old popular song:
“A halter
For the gallows rogue,
A fagot
For the witch’s brat.”