The screams were heart-rending. Throwing down the battering-ram on the dead bodies, they fled in complete panic —the boldest with the most timid—and for a second time the Parvis was emptied.
Every eye was now directed upward to the top of the church. They beheld an extraordinary sight. On the topmost gallery, higher up than the great rose-window, a huge flame ascended between the two steeples, throwing out whirlwinds of sparks and shooting tongues of fire into the smoke as it was caught by the wind. Below this flame, under the balustrade whose carved trefoils showed black against the glare, two gargoyles vomited incessantly that burning shower, the silvery stream of which shone out upon the darkness of the lower part of the fa?ade. As they neared the ground the two streams of liquid lead spread out into a spray, like water from the rose of a monster watering-can. Above the flame, the huge towers, of each of which two sides sharply outlined— one black, the other glowing red—were visible, seemed more enormous still by the immensity of the shadow they cast upon the sky. Their myriad sculptured devils and dragons assumed a sinister aspect. In the flickering radiance of the fire they appeared to move—vampires grinned, gargoyles barked, salamanders blew the fire, griffins sneezed in the smoke. And among these monsters, thus awakened from their stony slumber by all this flame and uproar, there was one that walked about and passed from time to time before the blazing front of the pile, like a bat before a torch.
Assuredly this strange beacon-light must have awakened the lonely wood-cutter on the far Bicêtre hills, startled to see the gigantic shadows of the towers of Notre-Dame wavering on his coppices.
The silence of terror now fell upon the truands; and through it they heard the cries of alarm of the clergy shut up in their cloister like frightened horses in a burning stable, the stealthy sound of windows opened quickly and still more quickly shut again, the stir inside the surrounding houses and the H?tel-Dieu, the roar and crackle of the fire, the groans of the dying, and the continuous patter of the shower of boiling lead upon the pavement.
Meanwhile the chief Vagabonds had retired under the porch of the Gondelaurier mansion and were holding a council of war. The Duke of Egypt, seated on a post, was contemplating with religious awe the phantasmagoric pile blazing two hundred feet aloft in the air. Clopin Trouillefou gnawed his great fists with rage.
“Impossible to make an entrance,” he muttered between his teeth.
“An enchanted church!” growled the old Bohemian, Mathias Hungadi Spicali.
“By the Pope’s whiskers!” said a grizzled truand who had seen active service, “but these two rain-pipes spit molten lead at you better than the loopholes of Lectoure.”
“Do you see that demon going to and from in front of the fire?” cried the Duke of Egypt.
“By God!” exclaimed Clopin, “ ’tis that damned ringer; ’tis Quasimodo!”
The Bohemian shook his head. “I tell you ’tis the spirit Sabnac, the great marquis, the demon of fortifications. He has the form of an armed soldier and a lion’s head. Sometimes he is mounted on a grewsome horse. He turns men into stones and builds towers of them. He has command over near on fifty legions. ’Tis he, sure enough. I should know him anywhere. Sometimes he has on a fine robe wrought with gold, after the fashion of the Turks.”
“Where is Bellevigne de l’étoile?” asked Clopin.
“Dead,” answered a truand woman.
“Notre-Dame is keeping the H?tel-Dieu busy,” said Andry le Rouge with a vacant laugh.
“Is there no way to force that door?” cried the King of Tunis, stamping his foot.
The Duke of Egypt pointed with a mournful gesture to the two rivulets of boiling lead which continued to streak the dark front of the building.
“Churches have been known to defend themselves thus,” he observed with a sigh. “Saint-Sophia in Constantinople, forty years ago, threw down the crescent of Mahomet three times running just by shaking her domes, which are her heads. William of Paris, who built this one, was a magician.”
“Are we then to slink away pitifully with our tails between our legs?” cried Clopin. “Leave our sister here for these cowled wolves to hang to-morrow?”
“And the sacristy where there are cart-loads of treasure!” added a Vagabond, of whose name, to our great regret, we are ignorant.
“By the beard of Mahomet!” exclaimed Trouillefou.
“Let’s have another try,” suggested the truand.
But Mathias Hungadi shook his head. “We shall never get in by that door. We must find some joint in the enchanted armour. A hole, a postern door, a chink of some kind.”
“Who’s with me?” said Clopin. “I am going back. By-the-bye, where’s the little scholar Jehan?”
“He’s dead, no doubt,” answered some one, “for one does not hear his laugh.”
The King of Tunis frowned gloomily.
“ ’Tis a pity. There was a stout heart under that rattling armour. And Master Pierre Gringoire?”
“Captain Clopin,” said Andry le Rouge, “he made off before we got as far as the Pont-aux-Changeurs.”
Clopin stamped his foot. “Gueule-Dieu! ’tis he that thrust us into this business, and now he leaves us in the very thick of it. A prating poltroon!”
“Captain Clopin,” announced Andry le Rouge, who had been looking down the Rue du Parvis, “here comes the little scholar.”
“Praised be Pluto!” said Clopin. “But what the devil is he dragging after him?”
It was, in truth, Jehan, coming along as quickly as his cumbrous paladin accoutrements would permit of, with a long ladder, which he tugged stoutly over the pavement, more breathless than an ant harnessed to a blade of grass twenty times her own length.
“Victory! Te Deum!” shouted the scholar. “Here’s the ladder from the Saint-Landry wharf.”
Clopin went up to him. “Little one,” said he, “what art thou going to do with that ladder, corne-Dieu?”
“I’ve secured it,” answered Jehan panting. “I knew where it was—under the shed of the lieutenant’s house. There’s a girl there whom I know—she thinks me a very Cupido for beauty. It was through her I managed to get the ladder, and here I am, Pasque-Mahom! The poor soul came out in her smock to let me in.”
“Yes, yes,” said Clopin, “but what wilt thou do with this ladder?”
Jehan gave him a sly, knowing look and snapped his fingers like castanets. He was sublime at this moment. He had on his head one of those overloaded helmets of the fifteenth century which struck terror to the heart of the foe by their monstrous-looking crests. Jehan’s bristled with ten iron beaks, so that he might have contended with the Homeric ship of Nestor for the epithet of dekemboloV.
“What do I mean to do with it, august King of Tunis? Do you see that row of statues with the faces of imbeciles over there above the three arches of the doorway?”
“Yes; what of them?”
“That is the gallery of the King of France.”
“Well, what’s that to us?” said Clopin.
“You shall see. At the end of that gallery there is a door that is closed with a latch; with this ladder I reach that door, and then I’m in the church.”
“Let me go up first, child.”
“No, comrade, the ladder’s mine. Come on—you shall be second.”
“Beelzebub strangle thee!” said Clopin sulkily. “I will be second to nobody.”
“Then, Clopin, go fetch thyself a ladder.” And Jehan set off running across the Place, dragging his ladder after him and shouting, “Follow, boys!”
In an instant the ladder was set up and placed against the balustrade of the lower gallery over one of the side doors. The crowd of beggars, shouting and hustling, pressed round the foot of it wanting to ascend; but Jehan maintained his right, and was the first to set foot on the steps of the ladder. The ascent was pretty long. The gallery of the kings is, at this day, about sixty feet from the ground; but at that period it was raised still higher by the eleven steps of the entrance.
Jehan ascended slowly, much encumbered by his heavy armour, one hand on the ladder, the other grasping his crossbow. When he was half-way up he cast a mournful glance over the poor dead Argotiers heaped on the steps. “Alas!” said he, “here are corpses enough for the fifth canto of the Iliad!” He continued his ascent, the Vagabonds following him, one on every step of the ladder. To see that line of mailed backs rising and undulating in the dark, one might have taken it for a serpent with steely scales rearing itself on end to attack the church, and the whistling of Jehan, who represented its head, completed the illusion.
The scholar at last reached the parapet of the gallery, and strode lightly over it amid the applause of the whole truandry. Finding himself thus master of the citadel, he uttered a joyful shout—and then stopped short, petrified. He had just caught sight, behind one of the royal statues, of Quasimodo crouching in the gloom, his eye glittering ominously.
Before another of the besiegers had time to gain a footing on the gallery, the redoubtable hunchback sprang to the head of the ladder, seized without a word the ends of the two uprights in his powerful hands, heaved them away from the wall, let the long and pliant ladder, packed with truands from top to bottom, sway for a moment amid a sudden outcry of fear, then suddenly, with superhuman force, flung back this living cluster into the Place. For an instant the stoutest heart quailed. The ladder thrust backward stood upright for a moment, swayed, then suddenly, describing a frightful arc of eighty feet in radius, crashed down upon the pavement with its living load more rapidly than a drawbridge when its chain gives way. There was one universal imprecation, then silence, and a few mutilated wretches were seen crawling out from among the heap of dead.
A murmur of mingled agony and resentment succeeded the besiegers’ first shouts of triumph. Quasimodo, leaning on his elbows on the balustrade, regarded them impassively. He might have been one of the old long-haired kings at his window.
Jehan Frollo found himself in a critical position. He was alone on the gallery with the redoubtable bell-ringer, separated from his companions by eighty feet of sheer wall. While Quasimodo was engaged with the ladder, the scholar had run to the postern which he expected to find on the latch. Foiled! The bell-ringer, as he entered the gallery, had locked it behind him. Thereupon Jehan had hidden himself behind one of the stone kings, not daring to breathe, but fixing upon the terrible hunchback a wide-eyed and bewildered gaze, like the man who courted the wife of a menagerie keeper, and going one evening to a rendezvous, scaled the wrong wall and found himself suddenly face to face with the polar bear.
For the first few moments the hunchback did not notice him; but presently he turned his head and straightened himself with a jerk—he had caught sight of the scholar.
Jehan prepared himself for a savage encounter, but his deaf antagonist did not move; only he kept his face turned towards him and regarded him steadily.
“Ho! ho!” said Jehan, “why dost thou glare at me so with that single surly eye?” And so saying, the young scamp began stealthily raising his cross-bow. “Quasimodo!” he cried, “I’m going to change thy nickname. Henceforth they shall call thee the blind bell-ringer.”
He let fly the winged shaft; it whistled and drove into the hunchback’s left arm. Quasimodo was no more disturbed by it than the effigy of King Pharamond by the scratch of a penknife. He took hold of the arrow, drew it out of his arm, and calmly broke it across his powerful knee. Then he dropped rather than threw the two pieces to the ground. But he did not give Jehan time to discharge another shaft. The arrow broken, Quasimodo with a snort leapt like a locust upon the boy, whose armour was flattened by the shock against the wall.
And now, in the half darkness, by the flickering light of the torches, a horrible scene was enacted.
In his left hand Quasimodo grasped both Jehan’s arms, who made no struggle, so utterly did he give himself up for lost; then, with his right, the hunchback proceeded to take off one by one, and with sinister deliberation, the several pieces of the scholar’s iron shell—sword, dagger, helmet, breastplate, armpieces—like a monkey peeling a walnut, and dropped them at his feet.
When Jehan found himself thus disarmed, divested of all shield and covering, naked and helpless in those formidable arms, he did not attempt to parley with his deaf enemy. Instead, he fell to laughing impudently in his face, and with all the careless assurance of a boy of sixteen, burst into a song at that time popular in the streets:
“The town of Cambrai is finely clad,
But Marafin has stripped her.”
He had not time to finish. Quasimodo was seen to mount the parapet of the gallery, holding the scholar by the feet in one hand only and swinging him over the abyss like a sling. Then came a sound like a box of bones dashing against a wall, and something came hurtling down that stopped halfway in its descent, caught by one of the projections of the building. It was a dead body bent double, the loins broken, the skull empty.
A cry of horror went up from the truands.
“Revenge!” yelled Clopin. “Sack! sack!” replied the multitude. “To the assault!”
An appalling uproar followed, in which every language, every patois, every conceivable accent was mingled. The death of the poor little scholar inspired the crowd with furious energy. They were torn with anger and shame at having been so long held in check by a miserable hunchback. Their rage found them ladders, multiplied their torches, and in a few minutes Quasimodo, to his consternation and despair, beheld the hideous swarm mounting from all sides to the assault of Notre-Dame. They who had no ladders had knotted ropes; they who had no ropes clambered up by the carvings, helping themselves up by one another’s rags. There was no means of forcing back this rising tide of frightful forms. Fury reddened the ferocious faces, sweat poured from the grimy foreheads, eyes glared viciously. It was as if some other church had sent out her gorgons, her dragons, her goblins, her demons, all her most fantastic sculptures to the assault of Notre-Dame—a coating of living monsters covering the stone monsters of the fa?ade.
Meanwhile a thousand torches had kindled in the Place. The wild scene, wrapped until now in dense obscurity, suddenly leapt out in a blaze of light. The Parvis was brilliantly illumined and cast a radiance on the sky, while the blazing pile on the high platform of the church still burned and lit up the city far around. The vast outline of the two towers, thrown far across the roofs of Paris, broke this brightness with a wide mass of shadow. The city appeared to be rousing itself from its slumbers. Distant tocsins uttered their warning plaints. The truands howled, panted, blasphemed, and climbed steadily higher, while Quasimodo, impotent against so many enemies, trembling for the gipsy girl as he saw those savage faces approaching nearer and nearer to his gallery, implored a miracle from heaven, and wrung his hands in despair.
