His bald brow was dripping with perspiration, his nails were bleeding against the stones, his knees were flayed by the wall.
He heard his cassock, which was caught on the spout, crack and rip at every jerk that he gave it.
To complete his misfortune, this spout ended in a leaden pipe which bent under the weight of his body. The archdeacon felt this pipe slowly giving way. The miserable man said to himself that, when his hands should be worn out with fatigue, when his cassock should tear asunder, when the lead should give way, he would be obliged to fall, and terror seized upon his very vitals.
Now and then he glanced wildly at a sort of narrow shelf formed, ten feet lower down, by projections of the sculpture, and he prayed heaven, from the depths of his distressed soul, that he might be allowed to finish his life, were it to last two centuries, on that space two feet square.
Once, he glanced below him into the Place, into the abyss; the head which he raised again had its eyes closed and its hair standing erect.
There was something frightful in the silence of these two men.
While the archdeacon agonized in this terrible fashion a few feet below him, Quasimodo wept and gazed at the Greve.
The archdeacon, seeing that all his exertions served only to weaken the fragile support which remained to him, decided to remain quiet.
There he hung, embracing the gutter, hardly breathing, no longer stirring, making no longer any other movements than that mechanical convulsion of the stomach, which one experiences in dreams when one fancies himself falling.
His fixed eyes were wide open with a stare.
He lost ground little by little, nevertheless, his fingers slipped along the spout; he became more and more conscious of the feebleness of his arms and the weight of his body.
The curve of the lead which sustained him inclined more and more each instant towards the abyss.
He beheld below him, a frightful thing, the roof of Saint-Jean le Rond, as small as a card folded in two.
He gazed at the impressive carvings, one by one, of the tower, suspended like himself over the precipice, but without terror for themselves or pity for him.
All was stone around him; before his eyes, gaping monsters; below, quite at the bottom, in the Place, the pavement; above his head, Quasimodo weeping.
In the Parvis there were several groups of curious good people, who were tranquilly seeking to divine who the madman could be who was amusing himself in so strange a manner.
The priest heard them saying, for their voices reached him, clear and shrill:
“Why, he will break his neck!”
Quasimodo wept.
At last the archdeacon, foaming with rage and despair, understood that all was in vain.
Nevertheless, he collected all the strength which remained to him for a final effort.
He stiffened himself upon the spout, pushed against the wall with both his knees, clung to a crevice in the stones with his hands, and succeeded in climbing back with one foot, perhaps; but this effort made the leaden beak on which he rested bend abruptly.
His cassock burst open at the same time.
Then, feeling everything give way beneath him, with nothing but his stiffened and failing hands to support him, the unfortunate man closed his eyes and let go of the spout.
He fell.
Quasimodo watched him fall.
A fall from such a height is seldom perpendicular.
The archdeacon, launched into space, fell at first head foremost, with outspread hands; then he whirled over and over many times; the wind blew him upon the roof of a house, where the unfortunate man began to break up. Nevertheless, he was not dead when he reached there. The bellringer saw him still endeavor to cling to a gable with his nails; but the surface sloped too much, and he had no more strength.
He slid rapidly along the roof like a loosened tile, and dashed upon the pavement.
There he no longer moved.
Then Quasimodo raised his eyes to the gypsy, whose body he beheld hanging from the gibbet, quivering far away beneath her white robe with the last shudderings of anguish, then he dropped them on the archdeacon, stretched out at the base of the tower, and no longer retaining the human form, and he said, with a sob which heaved his deep chest,—“Oh! all that I have ever loved!”
CHAPTER III. THE MARRIAGE OF PHOEBUS.
Towards evening on that day, when the judiciary officers of the bishop came to pick up from the pavement of the Parvis the dislocated corpse of the archdeacon, Quasimodo had disappeared.
A great many rumors were in circulation with regard to this adventure.
No one doubted but that the day had come when, in accordance with their compact, Quasimodo, that is to say, the devil, was to carry off Claude Frollo, that is to say, the sorcerer.
It was presumed that he had broken the body when taking the soul, like monkeys who break the shell to get at the nut.
This is why the archdeacon was not interred in consecrated earth.
Louis XI. died a year later, in the month of August, 1483.
As for Pierre Gringoire, he succeeded in saving the goat, and he won success in tragedy.
It appears that, after having tasted astrology, philosophy, architecture, hermetics,—all vanities, he returned to tragedy, vainest pursuit of all.
This is what he called “coming to a tragic end.”
This is what is to be read, on the subject of his dramatic triumphs, in 1483, in the accounts of the “Ordinary:”
“To Jehan Marchand and Pierre Gringoire, carpenter and composer, who have made and composed the mystery made at the Chatelet of Paris, at the entry of Monsieur the Legate, and have ordered the personages, clothed and dressed the same, as in the said mystery was required; and likewise, for having made the scaffoldings thereto necessary; and for this deed,—one hundred livres.”
Phoebus de Chateaupers also came to a tragic end.
He married.
CHAPTER IV. THE MARRIAGE OF QUASIMODO.
We have just said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre-Dame on the day of the gypsy’s and of the archdeacon’s death.
He was not seen again, in fact; no one knew what had become of him.
During the night which followed the execution of la Esmeralda, the night men had detached her body from the gibbet, and had carried it, according to custom, to the cellar of Montfaucon.
Montfaucon was, as Sauval says, “the most ancient and the most superb gibbet in the kingdom.”