There arose an immense imprecation, then all was still, and a few mutilated wretches were seen, crawling over the heap of dead.
A sound of wrath and grief followed the first cries of triumph among the besiegers.
Quasimodo, impassive, with both elbows propped on the balustrade, looked on.
He had the air of an old, bushy-headed king at his window.
As for Jehan Frollo, he was in a critical position.
He found himself in the gallery with the formidable bellringer, alone, separated from his companions by a vertical wall eighty feet high.
While Quasimodo was dealing with the ladder, the scholar had run to the postern which he believed to be open.
It was not.
The deaf man had closed it behind him when he entered the gallery.
Jehan had then concealed himself behind a stone king, not daring to breathe, and fixing upon the monstrous hunchback a frightened gaze, like the man, who, when courting the wife of the guardian of a menagerie, went one evening to a love rendezvous, mistook the wall which he was to climb, and suddenly found himself face to face with a white bear.
For the first few moments, the deaf man paid no heed to him; but at last he turned his head, and suddenly straightened up.
He had just caught sight of the scholar.
Jehan prepared himself for a rough shock, but the deaf man remained motionless; only he had turned towards the scholar and was looking at him.
“Ho ho!” said Jehan, “what do you mean by staring at me with that solitary and melancholy eye?”
As he spoke thus, the young scamp stealthily adjusted his crossbow.
“Quasimodo!” he cried, “I am going to change your surname: you shall be called the blind man.”
The shot sped.
The feathered vireton whizzed and entered the hunchback’s left arm.
Quasimodo appeared no more moved by it than by a scratch to King Pharamond.
He laid his hand on the arrow, tore it from his arm, and tranquilly broke it across his big knee; then he let the two pieces drop on the floor, rather than threw them down.
But Jehan had no opportunity to fire a second time.
The arrow broken, Quasimodo breathing heavily, bounded like a grasshopper, and he fell upon the scholar, whose armor was flattened against the wall by the blow.
Then in that gloom, wherein wavered the light of the torches, a terrible thing was seen.
Quasimodo had grasped with his left hand the two arms of Jehan, who did not offer any resistance, so thoroughly did he feel that he was lost.
With his right hand, the deaf man detached one by one, in silence, with sinister slowness, all the pieces of his armor, the sword, the daggers, the helmet, the cuirass, the leg pieces. One would have said that it was a monkey taking the shell from a nut.
Quasimodo flung the scholar’s iron shell at his feet, piece by piece.
When the scholar beheld himself disarmed, stripped, weak, and naked in those terrible hands, he made no attempt to speak to the deaf man, but began to laugh audaciously in his face, and to sing with his intrepid heedlessness of a child of sixteen, the then popular ditty:— “Elle est bien habillee, La ville de Cambrai; Marafin l’a pillee...”
He did not finish.
Quasimodo was seen on the parapet of the gallery, holding the scholar by the feet with one hand and whirling him over the abyss like a sling; then a sound like that of a bony structure in contact with a wall was heard, and something was seen to fall which halted a third of the way down in its fall, on a projection in the architecture.
It was a dead body which remained hanging there, bent double, its loins broken, its skull empty.
A cry of horror rose among the vagabonds.
“Vengeance!” shouted Clopin.
“To the sack!” replied the multitude. “Assault! assault!”
There came a tremendous howl, in which were mingled all tongues, all dialects, all accents.
The death of the poor scholar imparted a furious ardor to that crowd.
It was seized with shame, and the wrath of having been held so long in check before a church by a hunchback.
Rage found ladders, multiplied the torches, and, at the expiration of a few minutes, Quasimodo, in despair, beheld that terrible ant heap mount on all sides to the assault of Notre-Dame.
Those who had no ladders had knotted ropes; those who had no ropes climbed by the projections of the carvings.
They hung from each other’s rags.
There were no means of resisting that rising tide of frightful faces; rage made these fierce countenances ruddy; their clayey brows were dripping with sweat; their eyes darted lightnings; all these grimaces, all these horrors laid siege to Quasimodo. One would have said that some other church had despatched to the assault of Notre-Dame its gorgons, its dogs, its drees, its demons, its most fantastic sculptures.
It was like a layer of living monsters on the stone monsters of the facade.
Meanwhile, the Place was studded with a thousand torches.
This scene of confusion, till now hid in darkness, was suddenly flooded with light.
The parvis was resplendent, and cast a radiance on the sky; the bonfire lighted on the lofty platform was still burning, and illuminated the city far away.
The enormous silhouette of the two towers, projected afar on the roofs of Paris, and formed a large notch of black in this light.
The city seemed to be aroused.
Alarm bells wailed in the distance.
The vagabonds howled, panted, swore, climbed; and Quasimodo, powerless against so many enemies, shuddering for the gypsy, beholding the furious faces approaching ever nearer and nearer to his gallery, entreated heaven for a miracle, and wrung his arms in despair.
CHAPTER V. THE RETREAT IN WHICH MONSIEUR LOUIS OF FRANCE SAYS HIS PRAYERS.
The reader has not, perhaps, forgotten that one moment before catching sight of the nocturnal band of vagabonds, Quasimodo, as he inspected Paris from the heights of his bell tower, perceived only one light burning, which gleamed like a star from a window on the topmost story of a lofty edifice beside the Porte Saint-Antoine.