Down in the Parvis a group of worthy citizens were staring curiously upward, and wondering what madman it could be amusing himself after so strange a fashion. The priest could hear them say, for their voices rose clear and shrill in the quiet air: “He will certainly break his neck!”
Quasimodo was weeping.
At length the priest, foaming with impotent rage and terror, felt that all was unavailing, but gathered what strength still remained to him for one final effort. He drew himself up by the gutter, thrust himself out from the wall by both knees, dug his hands in a cleft of the stone-work, and managed to scramble up about one foot higher; but the force he was obliged to use made the leaden beak that supported him bend suddenly downward, and the strain rent his cassock through. Then, finding everything giving way under him, having only his benumbed and powerless hands by which to cling to anything, the wretched man closed his eyes, loosened his hold, and dropped.
Quasimodo watched him falling. A fall from such a height is rarely straight. The priest launched into space, fell at first head downward and his arms outstretched, then turned over on himself several times. The wind drove him against the roof of a house, where the unhappy man got his first crashing shock. He was not dead, however, and the hunchback saw him grasp at the gable to save himself; but the slope was too sheer, his strength was exhausted: he slid rapidly down the roof, like a loosened tile, and rebounded on to the pavement. There he lay motionless at last.
Quasimodo returned his gaze to the gipsy girl, whose body, dangling in its white robe from the gibbet, he beheld from afar quivering in the last agonies of death; then he let it drop once more on the Archdeacon, lying in a shapeless heap at the foot of the tower, and with a sigh that heaved his deep chest, he murmured: “Oh! all that I have ever loved!”
Chapter 3 - The Marriage of Ph?bus
Towards the evening of that day, when the bishop’s officers of justice came to remove the shattered remains of the Archdeacon from the Parvis, Quasimodo had disappeared.
This circumstance gave rise to many rumours. Nobody doubted, however, that the day had at length arrived when, according to the compact, Quasimodo—otherwise the devil —was to carry off Claude Frollo—otherwise the sorcerer. It was presumed that he had broken the body in order to extract the soul, as a monkey cracks a nut-shell to get at the kernel.
It was for this reason the Archdeacon was denied Christian burial.
Louis XI died the following year, in August, 1483.
As for Pierre Gringoire, he not only succeeded in saving the goat, but gained considerable success as a writer of tragedies. It appears that after dabbling in astronomy, philosophy, architecture, hermetics—in short, every variety of craze—he returned to tragedy, which is the craziest of the lot. This is what he called “coming to a tragic end.” Touching his dramatic triumphs, we read in the royal privy accounts for 1483:
“To Jehan Marchand and Pierre Gringoire, carpenter and composer, for making and composing the Mystery performed at the Chatelet of Paris on the day of the entry of Monsieur the Legate; for duly ordering the characters, with properties and habiliments proper to the said Mystery, as likewise for constructing the wooden stages necessary for the same: one hundred livres.”
Ph?bus de Chateaupers also came to a tragic end—he married.
Chapter 4 - The Marriage of Quasimodo
We have already said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre-Dame on the day of the death of the gipsy girl and the Archdeacon. He was never seen again, nor was it known what became of him.
In the night following the execution of Esmeralda, the hangman’s assistants took down her body from the gibbet and carried it, according to custom, to the great charnel vault of Montfaucon.
Montfaucon, to use the words of Sauval, was “the most ancient and the most superb gibbet in the kingdom.” Between the faubourgs of the Temple and Saint-Martin, about a hundred and sixty toises from the wall of Paris and a few bow-shots from La Courtille, there stood on the highest point of a very slight eminence, but high enough to be visible for several leagues round, an edifice of peculiar form, much resembling a Celtic cromlech, and claiming like the cromlech its human sacrifices.
Let the reader imagine a huge oblong mass of masonry fifteen feet high, thirty feet wide, and forty feet long, on a plaster base, with a door, an external railing, and a platform; on this platform sixteen enormous pillars of rough hewn stone, thirty feet high, ranged as a colonnade round three of the four sides of the immense block supporting them, and connected at the top by heavy beams, from which hung chains at regular intervals; at each of these chains, skeletons; close by, in the plain, a stone cross and two secondary gibbets, rising like shoots of the great central tree; in the sky, hovering over the whole, a perpetual crowd of carrion crows. There you have Montfaucon.
By the end of the fifteenth century, this formidable gibbet, which had stood since 1328, had fallen upon evil days. The beams were worm-eaten, the chains corroded with rust, the pillars green with mould, the blocks of hewn stone gaped away from one another, and grass was growing on the platform on which no human foot ever trod now. The structure showed a ghastly silhouette against the sky—especially at night, when the moonlight gleamed on whitened skulls, and the evening breeze, sweeping through the chains and skeletons, set them rattling in the gloom. The presence of this gibbet sufficed to cast a blight over every spot within the range of its accursed view.
The mass of masonry that formed the base of the repulsive edifice was hollow, and an immense cavern had been constructed in it, closed by an old battered iron grating, into which were thrown not only the human relics that fell from the chains of Montfaucon itself, but also the bodies of the victims of all the other permanent gibbets of Paris. To that deep charnel-house, where so many human remains and the memory of so many crimes have rotted and mingled together, many a great one of the earth, and many an innocent victim, have contributed their bones, from Enguerrand de Martigny, who inaugurated Montfaucon, and was one of the just, down to Admiral de Coligny—likewise one of the just—who closed it.
As for Quasimodo’s mysterious disappearance, all that we have been able to ascertain on the subject is this:
About a year and a half or two years after the concluding events of this story, when search was being made in the pit of Montfaucon for the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days before, and to whom Charles VIII granted the favour of being interred at Saint-Laurent in better company, there were found among these hideous carcases two skeletons, the one clasped in the arms of the other. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, had still about it some tattered remnants of a garment that had once been white, and about its neck was a string of beads together with a small silken bag ornamented with green glass, but open and empty. These objects had been of so little value that the executioner, doubtless, had scorned to take them. The other skeleton, which held this one in so close a clasp, was that of a man. It was observed that the spine was crooked, the skull compressed between the shoulder-blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. There was no rupture of the vertebr? at the nape of the neck, from which it was evident that the man had not been hanged. He must, therefore, have come of himself and died there.
When they attempted to detach this skeleton from the one it was embracing, it fell to dust.
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