Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

dimly discernible, and the tumble-down Hôtel-Dieu, with a wan face or two peering frightened from its
many windowed roofs.
At last the truands gave way. Exhaustion, want of proper arms, the alarming effect of this surprise, the
volleys from the windows, the spirited charge of the King’s men—all combined to overpower them.
Breaking through the line of their assailants, they fled in all directions, leaving the Parvis heaped with
their dead.
When Quasimodo, who had not for a moment ceased fighting, beheld this rout, he fell upon his knees
and lifted his hands to heaven. Then, frenzied with joy, he ran to the stairs, and ascended with the
swiftness of a bird to that cell, the approaches to which he had so intrepidly defended. He had but one
thought now—to go and fall on his knees at the feet of her whom he had saved for the second time.
He entered the cell—it was empty.
Book XI
I. The Little Shoe
AT the moment the truands attacked the Cathedral, Esmeralda was asleep.
But soon the ever-increasing uproar round the church, and the bleating of her goat—awakened before
herself—broke these slumbers. She sat up, listened, looked around; then, frightened at the glare and the
noise, hurried out of her cell to see what was the matter. The aspect of the Place, the strange visions
moving in it, the disorder of this nocturnal assault, the hideous crowd dimly visible through the darkness,
hopping about like a cloud of frogs, the hoarse croaking of the multitude, the scattered red torches
flitting to and fro in the storm like will-o’-the-wisps flitting over the misty face of a swamp—all seemed to
her like some mysterious battle between the phantoms of the witches’ Sabbath and the stone monsters of
the Cathedral. Imbued from her childhood with the superstitions of the gipsy tribe, her first idea was that
she had happened unawares on the Satanic rites of the weird beings proper to the night. Whereupon she
hastened back to cower in her cell, asking of her humble couch some less horrible nightmare.
But, by degrees, the first fumes of her terror cleared away from her brain, and by the constantly
increasing noise, and other signs of reality, she discovered that she was beset, not by spectres, but by
human beings. At this her fear changed; not in degree, but in kind. The thought of the possibility of a
popular rising to drag her from her place of refuge flashed into her mind. The prospect of once more
losing life, hope, Phœbus, who still was ever-present in her dreams of the future, her utter helplessness,
all flight barred, her abandonment, her friendless state—these and a thousand other cruel thoughts
overwhelmed her. She fell upon her knees, her head upon her couch her hands clasped upon her head,
overcome by anxiety and terror; and gipsy, idolatress, and pagan as she was, began with sobs and
tremblings to ask mercy of the God of the Christians, and pray to Our Lady, her hostess. For, even
though one believe in nothing, there come moments in life in which one instinctively turns to the religion
of the temple nearest at hand.
She remained thus prostrated for a considerable time, trembling, in truth, more than she prayed, frozen
with terror at the breath of that furious multitude coming ever nearer; ignorant of the nature of the