Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

“Thank you,” she replied; and while Monsieur the Captain was occupied in twirling his mustache à la
Burguignonne, she slid from the saddle like a falling arrow and was gone—no lightning could have
vanished more rapidly.
“Nombril du Pape!” swore the captain while he made them tighten Quasimodo’s bonds. “I would rather
have kept the girl.”
“Well, captain,” returned one of the men, “though the bird has flown, we’ve got the bat safe.”
V. Sequel of the Mishap
GRINGOIRE, stunned by his fall, lay prone upon the pavement in front of the image of Our Lady at the
corner of the street. By slow degrees his senses returned, but for some moments he lay in a kind of
half-somnolent state—not without its charms—in which the airy figures of the gipsy and her goat
mingled strangely with the weight of Quasimodo’s fist. This condition, however, was of short duration.
A very lively sense of cold in that portion of his frame which was in contact with the ground woke him
rudely from his dreams, and brought his mind back to the realities.
“Whence comes this coolness?” he hastily said to himself, and then he discovered that he was lying in
the middle of the gutter.
“Devil take that hunchback Cyclops!” he growled as he attempted to rise. But he was still too giddy and
too bruised from his fall. There was nothing for it but to lie where he was. He still had the free use of his
hands, however, so he held his nose and resigned himself to his fate.
“The mud of Paris,” thought he drowsily—for he now felt pretty well convinced that he would have to
put up with the kennel as a bed—“has a most potent stink. It must contain a large amount of volatile and
nitric acids, which is also the opinion of Maitre Nicolas Flamel and of the alchemists.”
The word alchemist suddenly recalled the Archdeacon Claude Frollo to his mind. He remembered the
scene of violence of which he had just caught a glimpse—that the gipsy was struggling between two
men, that Quasimodo had had a companion, and then the morose and haughty features of the Archdeacon
passed vaguely through his memory. “That would be strange,” thought he, and immediately with this
datum and from this basis began raising a fantastic edifice of hypothesis, that house of cards of the
philosophers. Then, returning suddenly to the practical, “Why, I am freezing!” he cried.
His position was indeed becoming less and less tenable. Each molecule of water in the gutter carried
away a molecule of heat from Gringoire’s loins, and the equilibrium between the temperature of the body
and the temperature of the water was being established in a rapid and painful manner.
Presently he was assailed by an annoyance of quite another character.
A troop of children, of those little barefooted savages who in all times have run about the streets of
Paris under the immemorial name of “gamins,” and who, when we too were young, would throw stones
at us when we came out of school because our breeches were not in rags—a swarm of these young
gutter-snipes came running towards the spot where Grainier lay, laughing and shouting in a manner that
showed little regard for the slumbers of their neighbours. After them they dragged some shapeless
bundle, and the clatter of their wooden shoes alone was enough to wake the dead. Grainier, who had not
quite reached that pass, raised himself up on his elbow.