Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

“Ah,” said the priest, letting go her arm, “you have no mercy!”
“What has become of Phœbus?” she repeated stonily.
“Dead!” cried the priest.
“Dead?” said she, still icy and motionless; “then why talk to me of living?”
He was not listening to her.
“Ah, yes,” he said, as if speaking to himself, “he must be dead. The knife went deep. I think I reached
his heart with the point. Oh, my soul was in that dagger to the very point!”
The girl threw herself upon him with the fury of a tigress, and thrust him towards the steps with
supernatural strength.
“Begone, monster! Begone, assassin! Leave me to die! May the blood of both of us be an everlasting
stain upon thy brow! Be thine, priest? Never! never! no power shall unite us—not hell itself! Begone,
accursed—never!”
The priest stumbled against the steps. He silently disengaged his feet from the folds of his robe, took up
his lantern, and began slowly to ascend the steps leading to the door. He opened the door and went out.
Suddenly she saw his head reappear. His face wore a frightful expression, and he cried with a voice
hoarse with rage and despair:
“I tell thee he is dead!”
She fell on her face to the floor. No sound was now audible in the dungeon but the tinkle of the drop of
water which ruffled the surface of the pool in the darkness.
V. The Mother
I DOUBT if there be anything in the world more enchanting to a mother’s heart than the thoughts
awakened by the sight of her child’s little shoe—more especially when it is the holiday shoe, the Sunday,
the christening shoe—the shoe embroidered to the very sole, a shoe in which the child has not yet taken a
step. The shoe is so tiny, has such a charm in it, it is so impossible for it to walk, that it is to the mother
as if she saw her child. She smiles at it, kisses it, babbles to it; she asks herself if it can be that there is a
foot so small, and should the child be absent, the little shoe suffices to bring back to her vision the sweet
and fragile creature.
She imagines she sees it—she does see it—living, laughing, with its tender hands, its little round head,
its dewy lips, its clear bright eyes. If it be winter, there it is creeping about the carpet, laboriously
clambering over a stool, and the mother trembles lest it come too near the fire. If it be summer, it creeps
about the garden, plucks up the grass between the stones, gazes with the artless courage of childhood at
the great dogs, the great horses, plays with the shell borders, with the flowers, and makes the gardener
scold when he finds sand in the flower-beds and earth on all the paths. The whole world smiles, and
shines, and plays round it like itself, even to the breeze and the sunbeams that wanton in its curls. The
shoe brings up all this before the mother’s eye, and her heart melts thereat like wax before the fire.