Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

consciousness of danger, he lifted an end of one of the beams—the longest and heaviest of all. He
managed to push it through one of the loopholes; then, laying hold of it again outside the tower, he
pushed it over the outer corner of the balustrade surrounding the platform and let it drop into the abyss
below. In this fall of a hundred and sixty feet the enormous beam—grazing the wall and breaking the
sculptured figures—turned several times on its own axis, like the sail of a windmill going round of itself
through space. Finally it reached the ground, a horrid cry went up, and the black piece of timber
rebounded on the pavement, like a serpent rearing.
Quasimodo saw the enemy scattered by the fall of the beam like ashes by the breath of a child; and
while they fixed their superstitious gaze on this immense log fallen from the skies, and were peppering
the stone saints of the doorway with a volley of bolts and bullets, Quasimodo was silently piling up
stones and rubbish, and even the masons’ bags of tools, upon the edge of the balustrade from which he
had already hurled the beam.
Accordingly, no sooner did they begin to batter the door, than the showers of stone blocks began to fall,
till they thought the church must be shaking itself to pieces on the top of them.
Any one who could have seen Quasimodo at that moment would have been appalled. Besides the
missiles which he had piled up on the balustrade, he had collected a heap of stones on the platform itself.
As soon as the blocks of stones on the parapet were spent, he turned to this latter heap. He stooped, rose,
stooped and rose again with incredible agility. He would thrust his great gnome’s head over the
balustrade; then there dropped an enormous stone—then another and another. Now and then he
followed a specially promising one with his eye, and when he saw that it killed its man, he grunted a
“h’m!” of satisfaction.
Nevertheless the beggars did not lose courage. Twenty times already had the massive door which they
were so furiously storming shaken under the weight of their oaken battering-ram, multiplied by the
strength of a hundred men. The panels cracked, the carvings flew in splinters, the hinges at each shock
danced upon their hooks, the planks were displaced, the wood smashed to atoms ground between the
sheathings of iron. Fortunately for Quasimodo there was more iron than wood.
He felt, however, that the great door was giving way. Although he could not hear it, every crash of the
batteringram shook him to his foundation, as it did the church. As he looked down upon the Vagabonds,
full of exaltation and rage, shaking their fists at the gloomy and impassive façade, he coveted for himself
and the gipsy girl the wings of the owls flitting away in terror over his head.
His shower of stones was not sufficient to repulse the assailants.
At this desperate moment his eye fell on two long stone rain-gutters which discharged themselves
immediately over the great doorway, a little below the balustrade from whence he had been crushing the
Angotiers. The internal orifice of these gutters was in the floor of the platform. An idea occurred to him.
He ran and fetched a fagot from the little chamber he occupied, laid over the fagot several bundles of
laths and rolls of lead—ammunition he had not yet made use of—and after placing this pile in position in
front of the orifice of the gutters, he set fire to it with his lantern.
During this time, as the stones no longer fell, the truands had ceased looking upward. The bandits,
panting like a pack of hounds baying the wild boar in his lair, pressed tumultuously round the great
door, disfigured now and injured by the great battering-ram, but still erect. They waited, eager and
trembling, for the grand stroke—the blow that should bring it crashing down. Each strove to get nearest