Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

The girl saw the soldiers advancing towards her, and the horror of death revived her senses.
“Mother!” she cried in a tone of indescribable anguish; “oh, mother! they are coming! defend me!”
“Yes, yes, dear love, I am defending thee!” answered the mother in expiring tones; and clasping her
frantically in her arms, she covered her face with kisses. To see them together on the ground, the mother
thus protecting her child, was a sight to wring the stoniest heart.
Henriet Cousin took hold of the gipsy girl under her beautiful shoulders. At the touch of that hand she
gave a little shuddering cry and swooned. The executioner, from whose eyes big tears were dropping,
would have carried her away and sought to unclasp the mother’s arms, which were tightly coiled about
her daughter’s waist, but she held on to her child with such an iron grasp that he found it utterly
impossible to separate them. He therefore had to drag the girl out of the cell, and the mother along with
her. The mother’s eyes, too, were closed.
The sun rose at this moment, and already there was a considerable crowd of people in the Place
looking from a distance at what was being dragged over the ground to the gibbet. For this was Tristan’s
way at executions. His one idea was to prevent the curious from coming too near.
There was nobody at the windows. Only, in the far distance, on the summit of that tower of Notre Dame
which looks toward the Grève, two men, their dark figures standing out black against the clear morning
sky, appeared to be watching the scene.
Henriet Cousin stopped with his burden at the foot of the fatal ladder, and with faltering breath, such a
pity did he think it, he passed the rope round the girl’s exquisite neck. At the horrible contact of the
hempen rope, the poor child opened her eyes and beheld the skeleton arm of the gibbet extended over her
head. She struggled to free herself, and cried out in an agonized voice: “No! no! I will not! I will not!”
The mother, whose head was buried in her daughter’s robe, said no word, but a long shudder ran
through her whole frame, and they could hear the frenzied kisses she bestowed upon her child. The
hangman seized this moment to wrench asunder the arms clasped round the doomed girl, and whether
from exhaustion or despair, they yielded. He then lifted the girl to his shoulder, where the slender
creature hung limp and helpless against his uncouth head, and set foot upon the ladder to ascend.
At this moment the mother, who had sunk in a heap on the ground, opened her eyes wide. A
blood-curdling look came over her face; without a word she started to her feet, and in a lightning flash
flung herself, like a wild beast on its prey, on the hangman’s hand, biting it to the bone. The man howled
with pain; the others ran to his assistance, and with difficulty released his bleeding hand from the
mother’s teeth. Still she uttered no sound. They thrust her back with brutal roughness, and she fell, her
head striking heavily on the stones. They raised her up; she fell back again. She was dead.
The hangman, who had kept his hold on the girl, began once more to ascend the ladder.
II. La Creatura Bella Bianco Vestita—Dante
WHEN Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the gipsy girl was gone, that while he was defending
her she had been carried off, he clutched his hair with both hands, and stamped with surprise and grief;
and then set off running, searching the Cathedral from top to bottom for his gipsy, uttering strange
unearthly cries, strewing the pavement with his red hair. It was the very moment at which the King’s
archers forced their victorious way into Notre Dame, likewise on the hunt for the gipsy. Poor deaf