Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

priest.
But Quasimodo, placing himself in front of the Archdeacon, brought the muscles of his brawny fists
into play and faced the assailants with the snarl of an angry tiger.
The priest, returned to his gloomy gravity, signed to Quasimodo and withdrew in silence, the hunchback
walking before him and scattering the crowd in his passage.
When they had made their way across the Place the curious and idle rabble made as if to follow,
whereupon Quasimodo took up his position in the rear and followed the Archdeacon, facing the crowd,
thick-set, snarling, hideous, shaggy, ready for a spring, gnashing his tusks, growling like a wild beast,
and causing wild oscillations in the crowd by a mere gesture or a look.
So they were allowed to turn unhindered into a dark and narrow street, where no one ventured to follow
them, so effectually was the entrance barred by the mere image of Quasimodo and his gnashing fangs.
“A most amazing incident!” said Grainier; “but where the devil am I to find a supper?”
IV. The Mishaps Consequent on Following a Pretty Woman through
the Streets at Night
AT a venture, Grainier set off to follow the gipsy girl. He had seen her and her goat turn into the Rue de
la Coutellerie, so he too turned down the Rue de la Coutellerie.
“Why not?” said he to himself.
Now, Grainier, being a practical philosopher of the streets of Paris, had observed that nothing is more
conducive to pleasant reverie than to follow a pretty woman without knowing where she is going. There
is in this voluntary abdication of one’s free-will, in this subordination of one’s whim to that of another
person who is totally unconscious of one’s proceedings, a mixture of fanciful independence and blind
obedience, an indefinable something between slavery and freedom which appealed to Grainier, whose
mind was essentially mixed, vacillating, and complex, touching in turn all extremes, hanging continually
suspended between all human propensities, and letting one neutralize the other. He was fond of
comparing himself to Mahomet’s coffin, attracted equally by two loadstones, and hesitating eternally
between heaven and earth, between the roof and the pavement, between the fall and the ascension,
between the zenith and the nadir.
Had Grainier lived in our day, how admirably he would have preserved the golden mean between the
classical and the romantic. But he was not primitive enough to live three hundred years, a fact much to be
deplored; his absence creates a void only too keenly felt in these days.
For the rest, nothing disposes one more readily to follow passengers through the streets—especially
female ones, as Grainier had a weakness for doing—than not to know where to find a bed.
He therefore walked all pensively after the girl, who quickened her pace, making her pretty little goat
trot beside her, as she saw the townsfolk going home, and the taverns—the only shops that had been open
that day—preparing to close.
“After all,” he thought, “she must lodge somewhere—gipsy women are kind-hearted—who knows…?”