Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

Meanwhile night was coming on apace. The living creature still existing within him began confusedly to
think of return. He imagined himself far from Paris, but on looking about him he discovered that he had
but been travelling in a circle round the University. The spire of Saint-Sulpice and the three lofty
pinnacles of Saint-Germaindes-Prés broke the sky-line on his right. He bent his steps in that direction.
When he heard the “Qui vive?” of the Abbot’s guard round the battlemented walls of Saint-Germain, he
turned aside, took a path lying before him between the abbey mill and the lazaretto, and found himself in
a few minutes on the edge of the Pré aux-Clercs—the Students’ Meadow. This ground was notorious for
the brawls and tumults which went on in it day and night; it was a “hydra” to the poor monks of
Saint-Germain—Quod monachis Sancti Germani pratensis hydra fuit, clericis nova semper dissidionum
capita suscitantibus. 81
The Archdeacon feared meeting some one there, he dreaded the sight of a human face; he would not
enter the streets till the latest moment possible. He therefore skirted the Pré-aux-Clercs, took the solitary
path that lay between it and the Dieu-Neuf, and at length reached the water-side. There Dom Claude
found a boatman, who for a few deniers took him up the river as far as the extreme point of the island of
the City, and landed him on that deserted tongue of land on which the reader has already seen Gringoire
immersed in reverie, and which extended beyond the royal gardens parallel to the island of the
cattleferry.
The monotonous rocking of the boat and the ripple of the water in some degree soothed the unhappy
man. When the boatman had taken his departure, Claude remained on the bank in a kind of stupor,
looking straight before him and seeing the surrounding objects only through a distorting mist which
converted the whole scene into a kind of phantasmagoria. The exhaustion of a violent grief will often
produce this effect upon the mind.
The sun had set behind the lofty Tour-de-Nesle. It was the hour of twilight. The sky was pallid, the river
was white. Between these two pale surfaces, the left bank of the Seine, on which his eyes were fixed,
reared its dark mass, and, dwindling to a point in the perspective, pierced the mists of the horizon like a
black arrow. It was covered with houses, their dim silhouettes standing out sharply against the pale
background of sky and river. Here and there windows began to twinkle like holes in a brasier. The huge
black obelisk thus isolated between the two white expanses of sky and river—particularly wide at this
point—made a singular impression on Dom Claude, such as a man would experience lying on his back at
the foot of Strassburg Cathedral and gazing up at the immense spire piercing the dim twilight of the sky
above his head. Only here it was Claude who stood erect and the spire that lay at his feet; but as the
river, by reflecting the sky, deepened infinitely the abyss beneath him, the vast promontory seemed
springing as boldly into the void as any cathedral spire. The impression on him was therefore the same,
and moreover, in this respect, stronger and more profound, in that not only was it the spire of Strassburg
Cathedral, but a spire two leagues high—something unexampled, gigantic, immeasurable—an edifice
such as mortal eye had never yet beheld—a Tower of Babel. The chimneys of the houses, the
battlemented walls, the carved roofs and gables, the spire of the Augustines, the Tour-de-Nesle, all the
projections that broke the line of the colossal obelisk heightened the illusion by their bizarre effect,
presenting to the eye all the effect of a florid and fantastic sculpture.
In this condition of hallucination Claude was persuaded that with living eye he beheld the veritable
steeple of hell. The myriad lights scattered over the entire height of the fearsome tower were to him so
many openings into the infernal fires—the voices and sounds which rose from it the shrieks and groans
of the damned. Fear fell upon him, he clapped his hands to his ears that he might hear no more, turned