Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

“Damnation!” he muttered, as he ground his teeth, “so that is how a man should be—he need only have
a handsome outside!”
Meanwhile she was still on her knees crying out in terrible agitation:
“Oh!—now he is dismounting from his horse—he is going into that house—Phœbus! He does not hear
me. Phœbus! The shameless woman, to be speaking to him at the same time that I do! Phœbus!Phœbus!”
The deaf man watched her. He understood her gestures, and the poor bell-ringer’s eye filled with tears,
though he let not one of them fall. Presently he pulled her gently by the hem of her sleeve. She turned
round. He had assumed an untroubled mien.
“Shall I go and fetch him?” he asked quietly.
She gave a cry of joy. “Oh, go! Go quickly—run! hasten! it is that officer! that officer—bring him to me,
and I will love thee!”
She clasped his knees. He could not refrain from shaking his head mournfully.
“I will bring him to you,” he said in a low voice; then, turning away his head, he strode to the
stair-case, suffocating with sobs.
By the time he reached the Place there was nothing to be seen but the horse fastened to the door of the
Gondelaurier’s house. The captain had gone in.
Quasimodo looked up at the roof of the Cathedral. Esmeralda was still in the same place, in the same
attitude. He made her a melancholy sign of the head, then established himself with his back against one
of the posts of the porch, determined to wait until the captain came out.
It was, at the Logis Gondelaurier, one of those gala days which precede a wedding. Quasimodo saw
many people go in, but nobody come away. From time to time he looked up at the church roof. The gipsy
never stirred from her post any more than he. A groom came, untied the horse and led him away to the
stables of the mansion.
The whole day passed thus. Quasimodo leaning against the post, Esmeralda on the roof, Phœbus, no
doubt, at the feet of Fleur-de-Lys.
Night fell at last—a dark night without a moon. Quasimodo might strain his gaze towards Esmeralda,
she faded into a mere glimmer of light in the gloaming—then nothing; all was swallowed up in darkness.
He now saw the whole façade of the Gondelaurier mansion illuminated from top to bottom. He saw one
after another the windows in the Place lit up, one after another also he saw the lights disappear from
them; for he remained the whole evening at his post. The officer never came out. When the last wayfarer
had gone home, when every window of the other houses was dark, Quasimodo, quite alone, remained lost
in the shadows. The Parvis of Notre Dame was not lighted in those days.
However, the windows of the Gondelaurier mansion blazed on even after midnight. Quasimodo,
motionless, and ever on the alert, saw a ceaseless crowd of moving, dancing shadows pass across the
many-coloured windows. Had he not been deaf, in proportion as the murmur of slumbering Paris died
away, he would have heard more and more distinctly from within the Logis Gondelaurier the sound of
revelry, of laughter, and of music.