Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Victor Hugo

  At this point something took place which Quasimodo could not quite make out. Not because his one eye had not retained its great range, but there was a knot of soldiers which hindered him from seeing everything. Besides, at this instant the sun rose, and such a flood of light burst from the horizon that it seemed as if every pinnacle in Paris, spires, chimneys, and gables, were set on fire at once.

  Meantime, the man continued to climb the ladder. Then Quasimodo saw him again distinctly. He had a woman across his shoulder,—a young girl dressed in white; this girl had a knotted rope around her neck. Quasimodo recognized her.

  It was she!

  The man reached the top of the ladder. There he arranged the noose. Here the priest, to see the better, knelt upon the balustrade.

  All at once the man pushed the ladder quickly from him with his heel; and Quasimodo, who had scarcely breathed for some moments past, saw the unfortunate girl dangling from the end of the rope, a dozen feet from the ground, the man crouching above her, pressing his feet against her shoulders to weigh her down. The rope revolved rapidly several times, and Quasimodo saw a horrible shudder run through the gipsy’s frame. The priest, on his part, with outstretched neck and starting eyes, watched that dreadful group of man and girl,—of the spider and the fly.

  At the most awful moment a demoniac laugh—a laugh impossible to a mere man—broke from the livid lips of the priest. Quasimodo did not hear this laughter, but he saw it.

  The ringer shrank back a few paces behind the archdeacon, and then, suddenly rushing furiously upon him, with his huge hands he hurled Dom Claude into the abyss over which he leaned.

  The priest cried, “Damnation!” and fell.

  The gutter below arrested his fall. He clung to it with desperate hands, and, as he opened his mouth for a second shriek, he saw, looking over the edge of the balustrade, above his head, the terrible, avenging face of Quasimodo.

  Then he was silent.

  The abyss was beneath him. A fall of more than two hundred feet,—and the pavement.

  In this dreadful situation the archdeacon said not a word, uttered not a groan. He merely writhed about the gutter making incredible efforts to climb up it, but his hands had no grip upon the granite, his feet scratched the blackened wall without finding a foothold. Those who have visited the Towers of Notre-Dame know that the stone projects directly below the balustrade. It was against this swell that the wretched archdeacon exhausted himself in frantic struggles. He was working, not upon a perpendicular wall, but upon a wall which sloped away from beneath him.

  Quasimodo had only to stretch forth his hand to save him from the gulf; but he did not even look at him. He looked at the Place de Grève; he looked at the gibbet; he looked at the gipsy girl.

  The deaf man leaned his elbows on the railing, in the very place where the archdeacon had been the moment previous, and there, never removing his gaze from the only object which at this instant existed for him, he stood motionless and mute as if struck by lightning, and a river of tears flowed silently from that eye which until then had shed but a single tear.

  Meantime, the archdeacon gasped. His bald head streamed with perspiration, his nails bled against the stone, his knees were flayed against the wall.

  He heard his cassock, by which he hung to the spout, crack and rip at every jerk that he gave it. To complete his misfortunes, this spout terminated in a leaden pipe which was bending beneath the weight of his body. The archdeacon felt this pipe slowly giving way. The miserable creature said to himself that when his cassock was torn through, when the lead bent completely, he must fall; and terror took possession of him. Sometimes he gazed wildly at a sort of narrow platform some ten feet below him, formed by certain carvings which jutted out; and he implored Heaven, from the depths of his distressed soul, to permit him to end his life upon that space two feet square, were it to last a hundred years. Once he looked down into the abyss, into the square; when he raised his head his eyes were shut and his hair was erect.

  There was something frightful in the silence of the two men. While the archdeacon, a few feet beneath him, was agonizing in this horrible fashion, Quasimodo wept, and watched the Place de Grève.

  The archdeacon, seeing that all his struggles merely weakened the frail support which remained to him, resolved to move no more. He clung there, hugging the gutter, scarcely breathing, never stirring, his only movement being that mechanical heaving of the chest experienced in dreams when we think that we are falling. His eyes were fixed in a wide stare of anguish and amaze. Little by little, however, he lost ground; his fingers slipped from the spout; the feebleness of his arms and the weight of his body increased more and more. The bending lead which supported him, every moment inclined a notch nearer to the abyss.

  He saw below him a fearful sight,—the roof of Saint-Jean le Rond as small as a card bent double. He gazed, one after another, at the impassive sculptures on the tower, like him suspended over the precipice, but without terror for themselves or pity for him. All around him was of stone: before his eyes, gaping monsters; below, far down in the square, the pavement; above his head, Quasimodo weeping.

  Groups of curious citizens had gathered in the square, calmly trying to guess what manner of madman it might be who amused himself in so strange a manner. The priest heard them say,—for their voices reached him clear and shrill,—“But he will break his neck!”

  Quasimodo was weeping.

  At last the archdeacon, foaming with rage and fright, knew that all was in vain. However, he summoned up his remaining strength for a final effort. He braced himself against the gutter, set his knees against the wall, hooked his hands into a chink in the stones, and succeeded in climbing up perhaps a foot; but this struggle made the leaden pipe upon which he hung, bend suddenly. With the same effort his cassock tore apart. Then, feeling that everything had failed him, his stiffened and trembling hands alone retaining a hold upon anything, the unfortunate wretch closed his eyes and loosened his grasp of the gutter. He fell.

  Quasimodo watched him fall.

  A fall from such a height is seldom perpendicular. The archdeacon, launched into space, at first fell head downward, with outstretched arms; then he rolled over and over several times; the wind wafted him to the roof of a house, where the unhappy man broke some of his bones. Still, he was not dead when he landed there. The ringer saw him make another effort to clutch the gable with his nails; but the slope was too steep, and his strength was exhausted. He slid rapidly down the roof, like a loose tile, and rebounded to the pavement. There, he ceased to move.

  Quasimodo then raised his eye to the gipsy, whose body he could see, as it swung from the gibbet, quivering beneath its white gown in the last death-throes; then he again lowered it to the archdeacon, stretched at the foot of the tower, without a trace of human shape, and he said, with a sob which heaved his mighty breast, “Oh, all that I ever loved!”23

  CHAPTER III

  Marriage of Phœbus

  Towards evening of the same day, when the bishop’s officers came to remove the mangled body of the archdeacon from the pavement, Quasimodo had vanished from Notre-Dame.

  Many rumors were rife concerning the accident. No one doubted that the day had come when, according to their compact, Quasimodo—that is to say the devil—was to carry off Claude Frollo,—that is to say the sorcerer. It was supposed that he had destroyed the body in taking the soul, as a monkey cracks the shell to eat the nut.

  Accordingly the archdeacon was not buried in consecrated ground.

  Louis XI died the following year, in the month of August, 1483.

  As for Pierre Gringoire, he succeeded in saving the goat, and he achieved some success as a tragic author. It seems that after dipping into astrology, philosophy, architecture, hermetics, and all manner of follies, he returned to writing tragedies, the most foolish of all things. This he called “making a tragic end.” In regard to his dramatic triumphs, we read in 1483, in the Royal Privy Accounts. “To Jehan Marchand and Pierre Gringoire, carpen
ter and composer, who made and composed the mystery performed at the Châtelet in Paris, on the entry of the legate, ordered the personages, dressed and habited the same as the said mystery required, and likewise made the necessary scaffoldings for the same, one hundred pounds.”

  Phœbus de Châteaupers also came to a tragic end: he married.24

  CHAPTER IV

  Marriage of Quasimodo

  We have already said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre-Dame on the day of the death of the gipsy and the archdeacon. Indeed, he was never seen again; no one knew what became of him.

  During the night following the execution of Esmeralda, the hangman’s assistants took down her body from the gibbet, and carried it, as was customary, to the vaults at Montfaucon.

  Montfaucon, as Sauval states, was “the most ancient and most superb gibbet in the kingdom.” Between the suburbs of the Temple and Saint-Martin, about three hundred and twenty yards from the walls of Paris, a few cross-bow shots from the village of La Courtille, at the top of a gentle, almost imperceptibly sloping hill, yet high enough to be seen for a distance of several leagues, was a building of singular shape, looking much like a Celtic cromlech, and where human sacrifices were also offered up.

  Imagine, at the top of a chalk-hill a parallelopipedon of masonry fifteen feet high, thirty broad, and forty long, with a door, an outer railing, and a platform; upon this platform sixteen huge pillars of unhewn stone, thirty feet high, ranged in a colonnade around three of the four sides of the base which supported them, connected at the top by stout beams from which at intervals hung chains; from all these chains swung skeletons; round about it, in the plain, were a stone cross and two gibbets of secondary rank which seemed to spring up like shoots from the central tree; above all this, in the sky, a perpetual flight of ravens: such was Montfaucon.

  At the close of the fifteenth century the awful gibbet, which dated from 1328, was already very much decayed; the beams were worm-eaten, the chains rusty, the pillars green with mold; the courses of hewn stone gaped widely at the joints, and grass grew upon the platform where no foot ever trod: the structure cast a horrid shadow against the sky, particularly at night, when the moon shone feebly upon those white skulls, or when the breeze stirred chains and skeletons, and made them rattle in the darkness. The presence of this gibbet was enough to give the entire neighborhood an evil name.

  The stone base of the odious structure was hollow. It had been made into a vast vault, closed by an antique grating of battered iron, into which were cast not only the human remains taken from the chains at Montfaucon, but the bodies of all the unfortunates executed upon the other permanent gallows throughout Paris. In this deep charnel-house, where so many mortal remains and so many crimes rotted together, many of the great ones of the earth, many innocent beings, have laid their bones, from Enguerrand de Marigni, who was the first victim of Montfaucon, and who was an upright man, down to Admiral de Coligni, who was the last, and who was likewise a good man.

  As for the mysterious disappearance of Quasimodo, all that we have been able to discover is this:—

  Some two years or eighteen months after the events which close this story, when search was made in the vault at Montfaucon for the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days previous, and to whom Charles VIII had accorded permission to be buried at Saint-Laurent in better company, among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons were found locked in a close embrace. One of the two, which was that of a woman, still had about it some fragments of a gown, of stuff once white, and about its neck was a necklace made of beads of red seeds, with a little silk bag, adorned with green glass beads, which was open and empty. These articles were doubtless of so little value that the hangman had not cared to remove them. The other skeleton, which held this in so close an embrace, was that of a man. It was noticed that his spine was curved, his head close between his shoulder-blades, and one leg shorter than the other. Moreover, his neck was not broken, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. The man to whom these bones belonged must therefore have come hither himself and died here. When an attempt was made to loose him from the skeleton which he clasped, he crumbled into dust.25

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Added to the Definitive Edition

  It was through error that this edition was announced as enlarged by several new chapters. They should have been spoken of as unpublished ; for if by “new” we understand “recently made,” the chapters added to this edition are not new.26

  They were written at the same time as the rest of the work; they date from the same epoch, and came from the same idea; they have always been part of the manuscript of Notre-Dame de Paris. Furthermore, the author does not understand how any one can add new developments to a work of this character. That cannot be done at will. A novel, in his opinion, is born, in a way in a certain sense necessary, with all its chapters; a drama is born with all its scenes. Do not believe that there is anything arbitrary of which this whole is composed,—this mysterious microcosm that you call a drama or a novel. Grafting and soldering act unfortunately upon works of this nature, which should spring into being at a single leap and remain such as they are. Once the thing is done, do not revise or retouch it. Once the book is published, and its sex—virile or not—recognized and proclaimed, once the child has uttered its first cry, it is born; here it is; it is made thus; neither father nor mother can alter it; it belongs to the air and the sun; let it live or die as it is. Is your book immature? So much the worse. Never add chapters to an immature book. Is it incomplete? You should have completed it when you brought it forth. Is your tree crooked? Do not attempt to straighten it. Is your novel sickly; is your novel to be short-lived? You cannot give to it the breath which it lacks. Is your drama born limping? Believe me, you cannot give it a wooden leg.

  The author, then, attaches a particular value to this, that the public should know that the chapters added here have not been made expressly for this reprint. That they were not published in earlier editions of the book was for a very simple reason. At the time when Notre-Dame de Paris was printed for the first time, the package which contained these three chapters was lost. It was necessary to rewrite or omit them. The author concluded that the only two chapters which would have been important by their scope were those chapters on art and history whose loss would detract nothing from the drama and the novel; that the public would be none the wiser concerning their disappearance; and that he alone, the author, would be in the secret of this gap. He decided to go on without them; and besides—to tell the whole truth—his indolence recoiled before the task of re-writing the three lost chapters. He would have found it less work to write a new novel.

  Today the chapters are found, and he seizes the first occasion to replace them where they belong.

  Here, then, is his entire work, as he dreamed it, as he wrote it, good or bad, lasting or fleeting, but such as he wished it.

  Without doubt these recovered chapters will have little value in the eyes of persons, in other respects very judicious, who have sought in Notre-Dame de Paris only the drama, only the novel; but there are perhaps other readers who have not found it unprofitable to study the æsthetic and philosophic thought hidden in this book, who would have been glad, in reading Notre-Dame de Paris, to detect under the novel something besides novel, and to have followed, if we may be allowed somewhat ambitious expressions, the system of the historian and the object of the artist through the creation, such as it is, of the poet.27

  It is for such readers especially that the added chapters of this edition will complete Notre-Dame de Paris, if we admit that Notre-Dame de Paris is worth being completed.

  The author expresses and develops in one of these chapters the actual decline of architecture, and, according to him, the almost inevitable death today of this art king,—an opinion unfortunately very firmly rooted in him, and thoroughly reflected upon. But he feels the need of saying here that he eagerly desires that the future may prove him to have been in error. He knows that ar
t under all its forms may hope everything from the new generations whose genius, still in the bud, can be heard springing forth in our studios. The seed is in the ground; the harvest will certainly be fine. He fears only, and in the second volume of this edition one can see why, that the sap has been entirely withdrawn from the old soil of architecture which during so many ages has been the best garden for art.

  However, there is today so much life in our artistic youth, so much power, and, as it were, predestination, that in our architectural schools in particular, at the present time, the professors, who are detestable, make not merely unwittingly, but even in spite of themselves, scholars who are excellent,—the reverse of that potter of whom Horace speaks, who would have made amphoræ and produced only saucepans. Currit rota, urceus exit.ec

  But, at all events, whatever may be the future of architecture, in whatever way our young architects determine some day the question of their art, while waiting for new monuments, let us keep the ancient ones. Let us, if possible, inspire the nation with the love of national architecture. That, the author declares, is one of the principle objects of this book; that, one of the principal objects of his life.

  Notre-Dame de Paris has perhaps opened some true perspectives in the art of the Middle Ages, in that marvelous art not as yet understood by some, and, what is worse, misunderstood by others. But the author is far from considering as accomplished the task which he voluntarily assumed; he has already pleaded, upon more than one occasion, for our ancient architecture; he has already denounced loudly many of the profanations, many of the destructions, many of the impious alterations. He will never cease to do so. He has pledged himself to return often to this subject. He will re turn to it. He will be as indefatigable in defending our historic buildings as our iconoclasts of the schools and the academies are in attacking them; for it is a sad thing to see into what hands the architecture of the Middle Ages has fallen, and in what way the bungling plasterers of the present day treat the ruins of that great art. It is even a shame for us, intelligent men who see it done, and who content ourselves in crying out against it. And I am not speaking here only of what goes on in the provinces, but of what is done in Paris, at our gates, under our windows, in the great city,—this city of letters, of the press, of free speech, and of thought. We cannot resist pointing out as they deserve,—to end this note,—a few acts of vandalism which are every day projected, debated, begun, continued, and carried out peaceably under our very eyes, under the eyes of the artistic public of Paris, in face of criticism that is disconcerted by so much audacity. They have just pulled down the archbishop’s palace,—a building in poor taste, and the evil is not great; but at one blow with the archbishop’s palace they have demolished the bishop‘s, a rare ruin of the fourteenth century, which the demolishing architect could not distinguish from the rest. He has rooted up the wheat with the tares; it is all the same to him. They are talking of tearing down the admirable Chapelle de Vincennes, to make from its stones some sort of a fortification, I know not what, of which Daumesniled has no need whatever. While they repair at great expense the Bourbon Palace,—that hovel,—they allow the magnificent windows of the Sainte-Chapelle to fall in before the force of the equinoctial gales. There has been for some days past a scaffolding around the tower of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, and one of these days the pickaxe will be applied to it. There has been found a mason to build a small white house between the venerable towers of the Palace of Justice; another has been found to maim Saint Germain-des-Prés, the feudal abbey with the three bell-towers. There will be found, no doubt, another to lay low Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. All these masons pretend to be architects, are paid by the prefecture, or from the royal treasury, and wear green coats. All the evil that bad taste can inflict upon good taste they have done. At the moment we are writing,—deplorable sight!—one of them has possession of the Tuileries, another has made a deep gash directly across the beautiful face of Philibert Delorme; and it certainly is not one of the least scandals of our time to see with what effrontery the clumsy architecture of this gentleman has sprawled across one of the most delicate façades of the Renaissance.28