This was all that remained of the tempest of the night.
The bonfire lighted between the towers by Quasimodo had died out.
Tristan had already cleared up the Place, and had the dead thrown into the Seine.
Kings like Louis XI. are careful to clean the pavement quickly after a massacre.
Outside the balustrade of the tower, directly under the point where the priest had paused, there was one of those fantastically carved stone gutters with which Gothic edifices bristle, and, in a crevice of that gutter, two pretty wallflowers in blossom, shaken out and vivified, as it were, by the breath of air, made frolicsome salutations to each other.
Above the towers, on high, far away in the depths of the sky, the cries of little birds were heard.
But the priest was not listening to, was not looking at, anything of all this.
He was one of the men for whom there are no mornings, no birds, no flowers.
In that immense horizon, which assumed so many aspects about him, his contemplation was concentrated on a single point.
Quasimodo was burning to ask him what he had done with the gypsy; but the archdeacon seemed to be out of the world at that moment.
He was evidently in one of those violent moments of life when one would not feel the earth crumble.
He remained motionless and silent, with his eyes steadily fixed on a certain point; and there was something so terrible about this silence and immobility that the savage bellringer shuddered before it and dared not come in contact with it.
Only, and this was also one way of interrogating the archdeacon, he followed the direction of his vision, and in this way the glance of the unhappy deaf man fell upon the Place de Greve.
Thus he saw what the priest was looking at.
The ladder was erected near the permanent gallows.
There were some people and many soldiers in the Place.
A man was dragging a white thing, from which hung something black, along the pavement.
This man halted at the foot of the gallows.
Here something took place which Quasimodo could not see very clearly.
It was not because his only eye had not preserved its long range, but there was a group of soldiers which prevented his seeing everything.
Moreover, at that moment the sun appeared, and such a flood of light overflowed the horizon that one would have said that all the points in Paris, spires, chimneys, gables, had simultaneously taken fire.
Meanwhile, the man began to mount the ladder.
Then Quasimodo saw him again distinctly.
He was carrying a woman on his shoulder, a young girl dressed in white; that young girl had a noose about her neck.
Quasimodo recognized her.
It was she.
The man reached the top of the ladder.
There he arranged the noose.
Here the priest, in order to see the better, knelt upon the balustrade.
All at once the man kicked away the ladder abruptly, and Quasimodo, who had not breathed for several moments, beheld the unhappy child dangling at the end of the rope two fathoms above the pavement, with the man squatting on her shoulders.
The rope made several gyrations on itself, and Quasimodo beheld horrible convulsions run along the gypsy’s body.
The priest, on his side, with outstretched neck and eyes starting from his head, contemplated this horrible group of the man and the young girl,—the spider and the fly.
At the moment when it was most horrible, the laugh of a demon, a laugh which one can only give vent to when one is no longer human, burst forth on the priest’s livid face.
Quasimodo did not hear that laugh, but he saw it.
The bellringer retreated several paces behind the archdeacon, and suddenly hurling himself upon him with fury, with his huge hands he pushed him by the back over into the abyss over which Dom Claude was leaning.
The priest shrieked: “Damnation!” and fell.
The spout, above which he had stood, arrested him in his fall. He clung to it with desperate hands, and, at the moment when he opened his mouth to utter a second cry, he beheld the formidable and avenging face of Quasimodo thrust over the edge of the balustrade above his head.
Then he was silent.
The abyss was there below him.
A fall of more than two hundred feet and the pavement.
In this terrible situation, the archdeacon said not a word, uttered not a groan. He merely writhed upon the spout, with incredible efforts to climb up again; but his hands had no hold on the granite, his feet slid along the blackened wall without catching fast.
People who have ascended the towers of Notre-Dame know that there is a swell of the stone immediately beneath the balustrade.
It was on this retreating angle that miserable archdeacon exhausted himself.
He had not to deal with a perpendicular wall, but with one which sloped away beneath him.
Quasimodo had but to stretch out his hand in order to draw him from the gulf; but he did not even look at him.
He was looking at the Greve.
He was looking at the gallows.
He was looking at the gypsy.
The deaf man was leaning, with his elbows on the balustrade, at the spot where the archdeacon had been a moment before, and there, never detaching his gaze from the only object which existed for him in the world at that moment, he remained motionless and mute, like a man struck by lightning, and a long stream of tears flowed in silence from that eye which, up to that time, had never shed but one tear.
Meanwhile, the archdeacon was panting.