Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

snorting and stamping, with its pillars for legs, its two towers for tusks, and the immense black drapery
for caparison.
Thus his delirium or his madness had reached such a pitch of intensity, that the whole external world
had become to the unhappy wretch one great Apocalypse—visible, palpable, appalling.
He found one minute’s respite. Plunging into the side aisle, he caught sight, behind a group of pillars,
of a dim red light. He ran to it as to a star of safety. It was the modest lamp which illumined day and
night the public breviary of Notre Dame under its iron trellis. He cast his eye eagerly over the sacred
book, in the hope of finding there some word of consolation or encouragement. The volume lay open at
this passage of Job, over which he ran his bloodshot eye: “Then a spirit passed before my face, and I felt
a little breath, and the hair of my flesh stood up.”
On reading these dismal words, he felt like a blind man who finds himself wounded by the stick he had
picked up for his guidance. His knees bent under him, and he sank upon the pavement thinking of her
who had died that day. So many hideous fumes passed through and out of his brain that he felt as if his
head had become one of the chimneys of hell.
He must have remained long in that position—past thought, crushed and passive in the clutch of the
Fiend. At last some remnant of strength returned to him, and he bethought him of taking refuge in the
tower, beside his faithful Quasimodo. He rose to his feet, and fear being still upon him, he took the lamp
of the breviary to light him. It was sacrilege—but he was beyond regarding such trifles.
Slowly he mounted the stairway of the tower, filled with a secret dread which was likely to be shared by
the few persons traversing the Parvis at that hour and saw the mysterious light ascending so late from
loophole to loophole up to the top of the steeple.
Suddenly he felt a breath of cold air on his face, and found himself under the doorway of the upper
gallery. The air was sharp, the sky streaked with clouds in broad white streamers, which drifted into and
crushed one another like river ice breaking up after a thaw. The crescent moon floating in their midst
looked like some celestial bark set fast among these icebergs of the air.
He glanced downward through the row of slender columns which joins the two towers and let his eye
rest for a moment on the silent multitude of the roofs of Paris, shrouded in a veil of mist and
smoke—jagged, innumerable, crowded, and small, like the waves of a tranquil sea in a summer’s night.
The young moon shed but a feeble ray, which imparted an ashy hue to earth and sky.
At this moment the tower clock lifted its harsh and grating voice. It struck twelve. The priest recalled
the hour of noon—twelve hours had passed.
“Oh,” he whispered to himself, “she must be cold by now!” A sudden puff of wind extinguished his
lamp, and almost at the same instant, at the opposite corner of the tower, he saw a shade—a something
white—a shape, a female form appear. He trembled. Beside this woman stood a little goat that mingled
its bleating with the last quaverings of the clock.
He had the strength to look. It was she.
She was pale and heavy-eyed. Her hair fell round her shoulders as in the morning, but there was no
rope about her neck, her hands were unbound. She was free, she was dead.