Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

The gipsy raised her eyes to him to thank him, but she could not bring herself to utter a word. The poor
devil was in truth too frightful. She dropped her head with a shudder.
“I frighten you,” said he. “I am very ugly I know. Do not look upon me. Listen to what I have to say. In
the daytime you must remain here, but at night you may go where you will about the church. But go not
one step outside the church by day or night. You would be lost. They would kill you, and I should die.”
Touched by his words, she raised her head to answer him. He had disappeared. She found herself
alone, musing upon the strange words of this almost monster and struck by the tone of his voice—so
harsh, and yet so gentle.
She presently examined her cell. It was a chamber some six feet square, with a small window and a
door following the slight incline of the roofing of flat stones outside. Several gargoyles with animal
heads seemed bending down and stretching their necks to look in at her window. Beyond the roof she
caught a glimpse of a thousand chimney-tops from which rose the smoke of the many hearths of Paris—a
sad sight to the poor gipsy—a foundling, under sentence of death, an unhappy outcast without country,
or kindred, or home!
At the moment when the thought of her friendless plight assailed her more poignantly than ever before,
she was startled—everything frightened her now—by a shaggy, bearded head rubbing against her knees.
It was the poor little goat, the nimble Djali, which had made its escape and followed her at the moment
when Quasimodo scattered Charmolue’s men, and had been lavishing its caresses in vain at her feet for
nearly an hour without obtaining a single glance from her. Its mistress covered it with kisses.
“Oh, Djali!” she exclaimed, “how could I have forgotten thee thus? And dost thou still love me? Oh,
thou—thou art not ungrateful!”
And then, as if some invisible hand had lifted the weight which had lain so long upon her heart and kept
back her tears, she began to weep, and as the tears flowed all that was harshest and most bitter in her
grief and pain was washed away.
When night fell she found the air so sweet, the moonlight so soothing, that she ventured to make the
round of the high gallery that surrounds the church; and it brought her some relief, so calm and distant
did earth seem to her from that height.
III. Deaf
ON waking the next morning, she discovered to her surprise that she had slept—poor girl, she had so
long been a stranger to sleep. A cheerful ray from the rising sun streamed through her window and fell
upon her face. But with the sun something else looked in at her window that frightened her—the
unfortunate countenance of Quasimodo. Involuntarily she closed her eyes to shut out the sight, but in
vain; she still seemed to see through her rosy eye-lids that goblin face—one-eyed, broken-toothed,
mask-like. Then, while she continued to keep her eyes shut, she heard a grating voice say in gentlest
accents:
“Be not afraid. I am a friend. I did but come to watch you sleeping. That cannot hurt you, can it, that I
should come and look at you asleep? What can it matter to you if I am here so long as your eyes are
shut? Now I will go. There, I am behind the wall—you may open your eyes again.”