Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

moment—with his purple, streaming face, his eye bloodshot and distraught, the foam of rage and pain
upon his lips, his lolling tongue—made him an object rather of repulsion than of pity; but we are bound
to say that had there even been among the crowd some kind, charitable soul tempted to carry a cup of
water to that poor wretch in agony, there hung round the steps of the pillory, in the prejudice of the times,
an atmosphere of infamy and shame dire enough to have repelled the Good Samaritan himself.
At the end of a minute or two Quasimodo cast his despairing glance over the crowd once more, and
cried in yet more heart-rending tones, “Water!”
Renewed laughter on all sides.
“Drink that!” cried Robin Poussepain, throwing in his face a sponge soaked in the kennel. “Deaf rogue,
I am thy debtor.”
A woman launched a stone at his head—“That shall teach thee to wake us at night with thy accursed
ringing.”
“Ah-ha, my lad,” bawled a cripple, trying to reach him with his crutch, “wilt thou cast spells on us again
from the towers of Notre Dame, I wonder?”
“Here’s a porringer to drink out of,” said a man, hurling a broken pitcher at his breast. “’Tis thou, that
only by passing before her, caused my wife to be brought to bed of a child with two heads!”
“And my cat of a kit with six legs!” screamed an old woman as she flung a tile at him.
“Water!” gasped Quasimodo for the third time.
At that moment he saw the crowd part a young girl in fantastic dress issue from it; she was
accompanied by a little white goat with gilded horns, and carried a tambourine in her hand.
Quasimodo’s eye flashed. It was the gipsy girl he had attempted to carry off the night before, for which
piece of daring he felt in some confused way he was being chastised at that very moment; which was not
in the least the case, seeing that he was punished only for the misfortune of being deaf and having had a
deaf judge. However, he doubted not that she, too, had come to have her revenge and to aim a blow at
him like the rest.
He beheld her rapidly ascend the steps. Rage and vexation choked him; he would have burst the pillory
in fragments if he could, and if the flash of his eye had possessed the lightning’s power, the gipsy would
have been reduced to ashes before ever she reached the platform.
Without a word she approached the culprit, who struggled vainly to escape her, and detaching a gourd
bottle from her girdle, she raised it gently to those poor parched lips.
Then from that eye, hitherto so dry and burning, there rolled a great tear which trickled down the
uncouth face, so long distorted by despair and pain—the first, maybe, the hapless creature had ever shed.
But he had forgotten to drink. The gipsy impatiently made her little familiar grimace; then, smiling,
held the neck of the gourd to Quasimodo’s tusked mouth.
He drank in long draughts; eh was consumed with thirst.
When, at last, he had finished, the poor wretch advanced his black lips—no doubt to kiss the fair hands