Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

to be the first, when it should open, to rush into that opulent Cathedral, that vast repository in which the
riches of three centuries were heaped up. They reminded one another with roars of exultation and
rapacity of the splendid silver crosses, the fine brocade copes, the silver-gilt tombs, of all the
magnificence of the choir, the dazzling display on high festivals, the Christmas illuminations, the Easter
monstrances glittering like the sun, and all the splendid solemnities in which shrines, candlesticks, pixes,
tabernacles, and reliquaries crusted the altars with gold and diamonds. It is very certain that at this
exciting moment every one of the truands was thinking much less about the deliverance of the gipsy girl
than the plundering of Notre Dame. Indeed, we can very well believe that to the majority of them
Esmeralda was merely a pretext—if plunderers have any call for pretexts.
Suddenly, at the moment when they were crowding round the battering-ram for a final effort, each one
holding his breath and gathering up his muscles to give full force to the decisive blow, a howl more
agonizing than that which succeeded the fall of the great beam arose from the midst of them.
Those who were not screaming, those who were still alive, looked and saw two streams of molten lead
pouring from the top of the edifice into the thickest of the crowd. The waves of that human sea had sunk
under the boiling metal which, at the two points where it fell, had made two black and reeking hollows,
like hot water poured on snow. There lay dying, wretches burned almost to a cinder and moaning in
agony; and besides the two principal streams, drops of this hideous rain fell from scattered points on to
the assailants, penetrating their skulls like fiery gimlets, pattering on them like red-hot hailstones.
The screams were heart-rending. Throwing down the battering-ram on the dead bodies, they fled in
complete panic—the boldest with the most timid—and for a second time the Parvis was emptied.
Every eye was now directed upward to the top of the church. They beheld an extraordinary sight. On
the top-most gallery, higher up than the great rose-window, a huge flame ascended between the two
steeples, throwing out whirlwinds of sparks and shooting tongues of fire into the smoke as it was caught
by the wind. Below this flame, under the balustrade whose carved trefoils showed black against the
glare, two gargoyles vomited incessantly that burning shower, the silvery stream of which shone out
upon the darkness of the lower part of the façade. As they neared the ground the two streams of liquid
lead spread out into a spray, like water from the rose of a monster watering-can. Above the flame, the
huge towers, of each of which two sides sharply outlined—one black, the other glowing red—were
visible, seemed more enormous still by the immensity of the shadow they cast upon the sky. Their myriad
sculptured devils and dragons assumed a sinister aspect. In the flickering radiance of the fire they
appeared to move—vampires grinned, gargoyles barked, salamanders blew the fire, griffins sneezed in
the smoke. And among these monsters, thus awakened from their stony slumber by all this flame and
uproar, there was one that walked about and passed from time to time before the blazing front of the pile,
like a bat before a torch.
Assuredly this strange beacon-light must have awakened the lonely wood-cutter on the far Bicêtre hills,
startled to see the gigantic shadows of the towers of Notre Dame wavering on his coppices.
The silence of terror now fell upon the truands; and through it they heard the cries of alarm of the
clergy shut up in their cloister like frightened horses in a burning stable, the stealthy sound of windows
opened quickly and still more quickly shut again, the stir inside the surrounding houses and the
Hôtel-Dieu, the roar and crackle of the fire, the groans of the dying, and the continuous patter of the
shower of boiling lead upon the pavement.