Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

indefinite line of the plain and the soft undulation of the hills were faintly visible. All sorts of
indeterminate sounds floated over the half-awakened city. In the east, a few downy white flakes, plucked
from the misty mantle of the hills, fled across the sky before the morning breeze.
Down in the Parvis, some housewives, milk-pot in hand, were pointing out to one another in
astonishment the extraordinary condition of the great door of Notre Dame, and the two streams of lead
congealed between the fissures of the stones. This was all that remained of the tumult of the night before.
The pile kindled by Quasimodo between the towers was extinct. Tristan had already cleared the débris
from the Place and thrown the bodies into the Seine. Kings like Louis XI are careful to clean the
pavements with all expedition after a massacre.
Outside the balustrade of the tower, immediately underneath the spot where the priest had taken up his
position, was one of those fantastically carved gargoyles which diversify the exterior of Gothic buildings,
and in a crevice of it, two graceful sprigs of wall-flower in full bloom were tossing, and, as if inspired
with life by the breath of the morning, made sportive salutation to each other, while from over the
towers, far up in the sky, came the shrill twittering of birds.
But the priest neither saw nor heard anything of all this. He was one of those men for whom there are
neither mornings, nor birds, nor flowers. In that immense horizon spread around him, in such infinite
variety of aspect, his gaze was concentrated upon one single point.
Quasimodo burned to ask him what he had done with the gipsy girl; but the Archdeacon seemed at that
moment altogether beyond this world. He was evidently in one of those crucial moments of life when the
earth itself might fall in ruins without our perceiving it.
With his eyes unwaveringly fixed upon a certain spot, he stood motionless and silent; but in that silence
and that immobility there was something so appalling that the dauntless bell-ringer shuddered at the
sight, and dared not disturb him. All that he did—and it was one way of interrogating the priest—was to
follow the direction of his gaze, so that in this way the eye of the poor hunchback was guided to the Place
de Grève.
Thus he suddenly discovered what the priest was looking at. A ladder was placed against the permanent
gibbet; there were some people in the Place and a number of soldiers; a man was dragging along the
ground something white, to which something black was clinging; the man halted at the foot of the gibbet.
Here something took place which Quasimodo could not very distinctly see; not that his eye had lost its
singularly long vision, but that there was a body of soldiers in the way, which prevented him seeing
everything. Moreover, at that instant the sun rose and sent such a flood of light over the horizon that it
seemed as if every point of Paris—spires, chimneys, gables—were taking fire at once.
Now the man began to mount the ladder, and Quasimodo saw him again distinctly. He was carrying a
female figure over his shoulder—a girlish figure in white; there was a noose round the girl’s neck.
Quasimodo recognised her. It was She!
The man arrived with his burden at the top of the ladder. There he arranged the noose.
At this the priest, to have a better view, placed himself on his knees on the balustrade.
Suddenly the man kicked away the ladder with his heel, and Quasimodo, who for some minutes had not
drawn a breath, saw the hapless girl, with the feet of the man pressing upon her shoulders, swinging