But to return to Notre-Dame.
The first arrangements completed—and it must be said, to the honour of the truand discipline, that Clopin’s orders were carried out in silence and with admirable precision— the worthy leader mounted the parapet of the Parvis, turned his face to Notre-Dame, and raising his harsh and churlish voice while he shook his torch—the light of which flaring in the wind and veiled at intervals by its own smoke, made the dark front of the Cathedral vanish and reappear by turns—
“Unto thee,” he cried, “Louis de Beaumont, Bishop of Paris, Councillor in the Court of Parliament, thus say I, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Tunis, Grand Co?sre, Prince of Argot, Bishop of the Fools: Our sister, falsely condemned for witchcraft, has taken refuge in thy church. Thou art bound to accord her shelter and safeguard; but now the Parliament designs to take her thence, and thou consentest thereunto, so that she would be hanged to-morrow at the Grève if God and the truands were not at hand. We come to thee, then, Bishop. If thy church is sacred, our sister is so too; if our sister is not sacred, neither is thy church. Wherefore we summon thee to give up the maid if thou wouldst save thy church, or we will take the maid ourselves and plunder the church: which will most certainly happen. In token whereof I here set up my banner. And so God help thee, Bishop of Paris!”
Unfortunately Quasimodo could not hear these words, which were delivered with a sort of savage and morose dignity. A Vagabond handed Clopin his banner, which he gravely planted between two paving-stones. It was a pitchfork on which hung a gory piece of carrion.
This done, the King of Tunis turned about and cast his eye over his army, a ferocious multitude whose eyes gleamed almost as savagely as their pikes. After a moment’s pause —“Forward, lads!” he cried. “To your work, housebreakers!”
Thirty thick-set, strong-limbed men with hammers, pincers, and iron crowbars on their shoulders, stepped from the ranks. They advanced towards the main entrance of the church, ascended the steps, and immediately set to work on the door with pincers and levers. A large party of truands followed them to assist or look on, so that the whole flight of eleven steps was crowded with them.
The door, however, held firm. “The devil! but she’s hard and headstrong!” said one. “She’s old, and her gristle’s tough!” said another. “Courage, comrades!” said Clopin. “I wager my head against a slipper that you’ll have burst the door, got the maid, and stripped the high altar before ever there’s a beadle of them all awake. There—I believe the lock’s going.”
Clopin was interrupted by a frightful noise which at that moment resounded behind him. He turned round. An enormous beam had just fallen from on high, crushing a dozen truands on the steps of the church and rebounding on to the pavement with the noise of a piece of artillery, breaking here and there the legs of others among the Vagabond crowd, which fled in all directions with cries of terror. In a trice the enclosure of the Parvis was empty. The door-breakers, though protected by the deep arches of the doorway, abandoned it, and Clopin himself fell back to a respectful distance from the church.
“Tête-b?uf! I had a narrow escape!” cried Jehan. “I felt the wind of it; but Pierre the Feller is felled at last.”
It would be impossible to describe the mingled astonishment and alarm that fell with this beam upon the bandit crew. They remained for a few minutes gazing open-mouthed into the air, in greater consternation at this piece of wood than at twenty thousand King’s archers.
“Satan!” growled the Duke of Egypt, “but this smells of magic!”
“It’s the moon that’s thrown this log at us,” said Andry le Rouge.
“That’s it,” returned Francois Chanteprune, “for they say the moon’s the friend of the Virgin.”
“A thousand popes!” cried Clopin, “you’re a parcel of dunderheads, the whole lot of you!” But he knew no better than they how to account for the beam, for nothing was perceptible on the front of the building, to the top of which the light of the torches could not reach. The ponderous beam lay in the middle of the Parvis, and the groans of the poor wretches could be heard who had received its first shock and had been almost cut in two on the sharp edges of the stone steps.
At last the King of Tunis, his first surprise past, discovered an explanation which seemed plausible to his fellows.
“Gueule-Dieu! Can the clergy be making a defence? If that be so, then—to the sack! to the sack!”
“To the sack!” yelled the band with a furious hurrah, and discharged a volley of cross-bows and arquebuses against the fa?ade of the Cathedral.
Roused by the detonation, the peaceable inhabitants of the surrounding houses awoke, several windows opened, and nightcapped heads appeared at the casements.
“Fire at the windows!” shouted Clopin. The shutters closed on the instant, and the poor citizens, who had only had time to catch a bewildered glimpse of the scene of glare and tumult, returned in a cold perspiration of fright to their wives, wondering whether the witches now held their Sabbaths in the Parvis of Notre-Dame, or whether it was another assault by the Burgundians, as in ’64. The men thought of robbery; the wives, of rape; and all trembled.
“To the sack!” repeated the Argotiers; but they did not venture closer. They looked from the Cathedral to the mysterious beam. The beam lay perfectly still, the church preserved its peaceful, solitary aspect; but something froze the courage of the Vagabonds.
“To your work, lads!” cried Trouillefou. “Come—force the door!”
Nobody stirred a step.
“Beard and belly!” exclaimed Clopin; “why, here are men afraid of a rafter!”
An old Vagabond now addressed him:
“Captain, it’s not the rafter we mind, ’tis the door. That’s all covered with bars of iron. The picks are no good against it.”
“What do you want, then, to burst it open?” inquired Clopin.
“Why, we want a battering-ram.”
The King of Tunis ran boldly to the formidable piece of timber and set his foot on it. “Here’s one!” cried he, “and the reverend canons themselves have sent it you.” Then, making a mock salute to the Cathedral, “My thanks to you, canons!” he added.
This piece of bravado had excellent effect—the spell of the miraculous rafter was broken. The truands plucked up their courage, and soon the heavy beam, lifted like a feather by two hundred vigorous arms, was driven furiously against the great door which they had already endeavoured in vain to loosen. Seen thus in the dim light cast over the Place by the scattered torches of the truands, the vast beam borne along by that crowd of men and pointed against the church looked like some miraculous animal with innumerable legs charging head foremost at the stone giantess.
As the beam struck the half-metal door it droned like an enormous drum. The door did not give, but the Cathedral shook from top to bottom, and rumbling echoes woke in its deepest depths. At the same moment a shower of great stones began to fall from the upper part of the facade on to the assailants.
“Diable!” cried Jehan, “are the towers shaking down their balustrades upon us?”
But the impulse had been given. The King of Tunis stuck to his assertion that it was the Bishop acting on the defensive, and they only battered the door the more furiously for the stones that fractured the skulls right and left.
It was certainly curious that these stones fell one by one, but they followed quickly on one another. The Argotiers always felt two of them at once—one against their legs, the other on their heads. There were few that missed their mark, and already a heap of dead and wounded, bleeding and panting, lay thick under the feet of the assailants, who, now grown furious, renewed their numbers every moment. The long beam continued to batter the door at regular intervals like the strokes of a bell, the stones to rain down, and the door to groan.
The reader will doubtless have guessed ere this that the unexpected resistance which so exasperated the Vagabonds proceeded from Quasimodo.
Accident had unfortunately favoured the devoted hunchback. When he had descended to the platform between the towers, his ideas were in a state of chaos. He had run to and fro along the gallery for some minutes like one demented, looking down upon the compact mass of the beggars ready to rush the church, and calling upon God or the devil to save the gipsy girl. He thought of ascending the southern steeple and sounding the tocsin, but before he could have got the bell in motion, before the loud voice of Marie could have sent forth a single stroke, there would have been time to burst in the door ten times over. This was the instant at which the Vagabonds advanced with their lock-breaking instruments. What was to be done?
Suddenly he recollected that masons had been at work all day repairing the wall, the wood-work, and the roofing of the southern tower. This was a flash of light to him. The wall was of stone, the roofing of lead, the rafters of wood, and so enormous and close-packed that it was called the forest.
Quasimodo flew to this tower. The lower chambers in effect were full of building materials—piles of stone blocks, sheets of lead in rolls, bundles of laths, strong beams already shaped by the saw, several rubbish heaps—a complete arsenal.
Time pressed—the levers and hammers were at work below. With a strength multiplied tenfold by the consciousness of danger, he lifted an end of one of the beams—the longest and heaviest of all. He managed to push it through one of the loopholes; then, laying hold of it again outside the tower, he pushed it over the outer corner of the balustrade surrounding the platform and let it drop into the abyss below. In this fall of a hundred and sixty feet the enormous beam —grazing the wall and breaking the sculptured figures— turned several times on its own axis, like the sail of a windmill going round of itself through space. Finally it reached the ground, a horrid cry went up, and the black piece of timber rebounded on the pavement, like a serpent rearing.
Quasimodo saw the enemy scattered by the fall of the beam like ashes by the breath of a child; and while they fixed their superstitious gaze on this immense log fallen from the skies, and were peppering the stone saints of the doorway with a volley of bolts and bullets, Quasimodo was silently piling up stones and rubbish, and even the masons’ bags of tools, upon the edge of the balustrade from which he had already hurled the beam.
Accordingly, no sooner did they begin to batter the door, than the showers of stone blocks began to fall, till they thought the church must be shaking itself to pieces on the top of them.
Any one who could have seen Quasimodo at that moment would have been appalled. Besides the missiles which he had piled up on the balustrade, he had collected a heap of stones on the platform itself. As soon as the blocks of stones on the parapet were spent, he turned to this latter heap. He stooped, rose, stooped and rose again with incredible agility. He would thrust his great gnome’s head over the balustrade; then there dropped an enormous stone—then another and another. Now and then he followed a specially promising one with his eye, and when he saw that it killed its man, he grunted a “h’m!” of satisfaction.
Nevertheless the beggars did not lose courage. Twenty times already had the massive door which they were so furiously storming shaken under the weight of their oaken battering-ram, multiplied by the strength of a hundred men. The panels cracked, the carvings flew in splinters, the hinges at each shock danced upon their hooks, the planks were displaced, the wood smashed to atoms ground between the sheathings of iron. Fortunately for Quasimodo there was more iron than wood.
He felt, however, that the great door was giving way. Although he could not hear it, every crash of the battering-ram shook him to his foundation, as it did the church. As he looked down upon the Vagabonds, full of exaltation and rage, shaking their fists at the gloomy and impassive fa?ade, he coveted for himself and the gipsy girl the wings of the owls flitting away in terror over his head.
His shower of stones was not sufficient to repulse the assailants.
At this desperate moment his eye fell on two long stone rain-gutters which discharged themselves immediately over the great doorway, a little below the balustrade from whence he had been crushing the Argotiers. The internal orifice of these gutters was in the floor of the platform. An idea occurred to him. He ran and fetched a fagot from the little chamber he occupied, laid over the fagot several bundles of laths and rolls of lead—ammunition he had not yet made use of—and after placing this pile in position in front of the orifice of the gutters, he set fire to it with his lantern.
During this time, as the stones no longer fell, the truands had ceased looking upward. The bandits, panting like a pack of hounds baying the wild boar in his lair, pressed tumultuously round the great door, disfigured now and injured by the great battering-ram, but still erect. They waited, eager and trembling, for the grand stroke—the blow that should bring it crashing down. Each strove to get nearest to be the first, when it should open, to rush into that opulent Cathedral, that vast repository in which the riches of three centuries were heaped up. They reminded one another with roars of exultation and rapacity of the splendid silver crosses, the fine brocade copes, the silver-gilt tombs, of all the magnificence of the choir, the dazzling display on high festivals, the Christmas illuminations, the Easter monstrances glittering like the sun, and all the splendid solemnities in which shrines, candlesticks, pixes, tabernacles, and reliquaries crusted the altars with gold and diamonds. It is very certain that at this exciting moment every one of the truands was thinking much less about the deliverance of the gipsy girl than the plundering of Notre-Dame. Indeed, we can very well believe that to the majority of them Esmeralda was merely a pretext—if plunderers have any call for pretexts.
Suddenly, at the moment when they were crowding round the battering-ram for a final effort, each one holding his breath and gathering up his muscles to give full force to the decisive blow, a howl more agonizing than that which succeeded the fall of the great beam arose from the midst of them. Those who were not screaming, those who were still alive, looked and saw two streams of molten lead pouring from the top of the edifice into the thickest of the crowd. The waves of that human sea had sunk under the boiling metal which, at the two points where it fell, had made two black and reeking hollows, like hot water poured on snow. There lay dying, wretches burned almost to a cinder and moaning in agony; and besides the two principal streams, drops of this hideous rain fell from scattered points on to the assailants, penetrating their skulls like fiery gimlets, pattering on them like red-hot hailstones.
