Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

from the end of the rope, some feet from the ground. The rope made several turns upon itself, and
Quasimodo beheld horrible contortions jerking the body of the gipsy girl. The priest, meanwhile, with
out-stretched neck and starting eyeballs, contemplated this frightful group of the man and the girl—the
spider and the fly!
At the moment when the horror of the scene was at its height, a demoniacal laugh—a laugh that can
only come from one who has lost all semblance of humanity—burst from the livid lips of the priest.
Quasimodo did not hear that laugh, but he saw it. Retreating a few paces behind the Archdeacon, the
hunchback suddenly made a rush at him, and with his two great hands against Dom Claude’s back,
thrust him furiously into the abyss over which he had been leaning.
The priest screamed “Damnation!” and fell.
The stone gargoyle under the balustrade broke his fall. He clung to it with a frantic grip, and opened
his mouth to utter a cry for help; but at the same moment the formidable and avenging face of
Quasimodo rose over the edge of the balustrade above him—and he was silent.
Beneath him was the abyss, a fall of full two hundred feet and the pavement. In this dreadful situation
the Archdeacon said not a word, breathed not a groan. He writhed upon the gargoyle, making incredible
efforts to climb up it; but his hand slipped on the smooth granite, his feet scraped the blackened wall
without gaining a foothold. Those who have ascended the towers of Notre Dame know that the
stone-work swells out immediately beneath the balustrade. It was on the retreating curve of this ridge
that the wretched priest was exhausting his efforts. It was not even with a perpendicular wall that he was
contending, but with one that sloped away under him.
Quasimodo had only to stretch out a hand to draw him out of the gulf, but he never so much as looked
at him. He was absorbed in watching the Grève; watching the gibbet; watching the gipsy girl.
The hunchback was leaning, with his elbows on the balustrade, in the very place where the Archdeacon
had been a moment before; and there, keeping his eye fixed on the only object that existed for him at that
moment, he stood mute and motionless as a statue, save for the long stream of tears that flowed from that
eye which, until then, had never shed but one.
Meanwhile the Archdeacon panted and struggled, drops of agony pouring from his bald forehead, his
nails torn and bleeding on the stones, his knees grazed against the wall. He heard his soutane, which had
caught on a projection of the stone rain-pipe, tear away at each movement he made. To complete his
misfortune, the gutter itself ended in a leaden pipe which he could feel slowly bending under the weight
of his body, and the wretched man told himself that when his hands should be worn out with fatigue,
when his cassock should be rent asunder, when that leaden pipe should be completely bent, he must of
necessity fall, and terror gripped his vitals. Once or twice he had wildly looked down upon a sort of
narrow ledge formed, some ten feet below him, by the projection of the sculpture, and he implored
Heaven, from the bottom of his agonized soul, to be allowed to spend the remainder of his life on that
space of two feet square, though it were to last a hundred years. Once he ventured to look down into the
Place, but when he lifted his head again his eyes were closed and his hair stood erect.
There was something appalling in the silence of these two men. While the Archdeacon hung in agony
but a few feet below him, Quasimodo gazed upon the Place de Grève and wept.