Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

For some minutes the girl, absorbed in her own happy thoughts, had been dreaming to the sound of his
voice with out attending to his words.
“Oh, how happy you will be,” continued the soldier, and at the same time gently unfastening the gipsy’s
belt.
“What are you doing?” she said brusquely—this forceful proceeding had roused her from her dreams.
“Nothing,” answered Phœbus. “I was only saying that you would have to put away all this mountebank,
street dancer costume when you are going to be with me.”
“To be with you, my Phœbus.” said the girl fondly, and she fell silent and dreamy again.
Emboldened by her gentleness the captain clasped his arm about her waist without her offering any
resistance; he then began softly to unlace the pretty creature’s bodice, and so disarranged her
neckerchief, that from out of it the panting priest beheld the gipsy’s beautiful bare shoulder rise, round
and dusky as the moon through a misty horizon.
The girl let Phœbus work his will. She seemed unconscious of what he was doing. The captain’s eyes
gleamed. Suddenly she turned to him “Phœbus,” she said with a look of boundless love, “teach me your
religion.”
“My religion!” exclaimed the captain with a guffaw. “Teach you my religion! Thunder and lightning!
what do you want with my religion?”
“That we may be married,” answered she.
A mingled look of surprise, disdain, unconcern, and licentious passion swept over the captain’s face.
“Ah, bah!” said he, “who talks of marriage?”
The gipsy turned pale, and let her head droop sadly on her breast.
“Sweetheart,” went on Phœbus fondly, “what matters such foolery as marriage? Shall we be any less
loving for not having gabbled some Latin in a priest’s shop?”
And as he said this in his most insinuating tones, he drew still closer to the gipsy; his caressing arms
had resumed their clasp about that slender, pliant waist; his eye kindled more and more, and everything
proclaimed that Captain Phœbus was obviously approaching one of those moments at which Jupiter
himself behaves so foolishly that worthy old Homer is obliged to draw a cloud over the scene.
Dom Claude, however, saw everything. The door was merely of worm-eaten old puncheon ribs, and left
between them ample passage for his vulture gaze. This dark-skinned, broad-shouldered priest,
condemned hitherto to the austere chastity of the cloister, shivered and burned alternately at this
night-scene of love and passion. The sight of this lovely, dishevelled girl in the arms of a young and
ardent lover turned the blood in his veins to molten lead. He felt an extraordinary commotion within him;
his eye penetrated with lascivious jealously under all these unfastened clasps and laces. Any one seeing
the wretched man’s countenance pressed close against the worm-eaten bars would have taken it for the
face of a tiger looking through his cage at some jackal devouring a gazelle.
By a sudden, rapid movement Phœbus snatched the gipsy’s kerchief completely off her neck. The poor