Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

whose miracles this was no doubt one) proceeded to separate certain letters with her golden fore-foot,
and by dint of pushing them gently about arranged them in a certain order. In a minute they formed a
word, which the goat seemed practised in composing, to judge by the ease with which she accomplished
the task. Berangère clasped her hands in admiration.
“Godmother Fleur-de-Lys,” she cried, “come and see what the goat has done!”
Fleur-de-Lys ran to look, and recoiled at the sight. The letters disposed upon the floor formed the word,
P-H-O-E-B-U-S.
“The goat put that word together?” she asked excitedly.
“Yes, godmother,” answered Berangère. It was impossible to doubt it; the child could not spell.
“So this is the secret,” thought Fleur-de-Lys.
By this time the rest of the party had come forward to look—the mother, the girls, the gipsy, the young
soldier.
The Bohemian saw the blunder the goat had involved her in. She turned red and white, and then began
to tremble like a guilty creature before the captain, who gazed at her with a smile of satisfaction and
astonishment.
“Phœbus!” whispered the girls in amazement; “that is the name of the captain!”
“You have a wonderful memory!” said Fleur-de-Lys to the stupefied gipsy girl. Then, bursting into
tears: “Oh,” she sobbed, “she is a sorceress!” While a still more bitter voice whispered in her inmost
heart, “She is a rival!” And she swooned in her mother’s arms.
“My child! my child!” cried the terrified mother. “Begone, diabolical gipsy!”
In a trice Esmeralda gathered up the unlucky letters, made a sign to Djali, and quitted the room by one
door, as they carried Fleur-de-Lys out by another.
Captain Phœbus, left alone, hesitated a moment between the two doors—then followed the gipsy girl.
II. Showing That a Priest and a Philosopher Are Not the Same
THE PRIEST whom the young girls had remarked leaning over the top of the north tower of the
Cathedral and gazing so intently at the gipsy’s dancing, was no other than the Archdeacon Claude Frollo.
Our readers have not forgotten the mysterious cell which the Archdeacon had appropriated to himself in
this tower. (By the way, I do not know but what it is the same, the interior of which may be seen to this
day through a small square window, opening to the east at about a man’s height from the floor upon the
platform from which the towers spring—a mere den now, naked, empty, and falling to decay, the
ill-plastered walls of which are decorated here and there, at the present moment, by some hideous yellow
engravings of cathedral fronts. I presume that this hole is jointly inhabited by bats and spiders, so that a
double war of extermination is being carried on there against the flies.)
Every day, an hour before sunset, the Archdeacon mounted the stair of the tower and shut himself up in
this cell, where he sometimes spent whole nights. On this day, just as he reached the low door of his