Part 78

All at once, at the moment when they were grouping themselves round the ram for a last effort, each one holding his breath and stiffening his muscles in order to communicate all his force to the decisive blow, a howl more frightful still than that which had burst forth and expired beneath the beam, rose among them. Those who did not cry out, those who were still alive, looked. Two streams of melted lead were falling from the summit of the edifice into the thickest of the rabble. That sea of men had just sunk down beneath the boiling metal, which had made, at the two points where it fell, two black and smoking holes in the crowd, such as hot water would make in snow. Dying men, half consumed and groaning with anguish, could be seen writhing there. Around these two principal streams there were drops of that horrible rain, which scattered over the assailants and entered their skulls like gimlets of fire. It was a heavy fire which overwhelmed these wretches with a thousand hailstones. The outcry was heartrending. They fled pell-mell, hurling the beam upon the bodies, the boldest as well as the most timid, and the parvis was cleared a second time. All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery, higher than the central rose window, there was a great flame rising between the two towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a vast, disordered, and furious flame, a tongue of which was borne into the smoke by the wind, from time to time. Below that fire, below the gloomy balustrade with its trefoils showing darkly against its glare, two spouts with monster throats were vomiting forth unceasingly that burning rain, whose silvery stream stood out against the shadows of the lower façade. As they approached the earth, these two jets of liquid lead spread out in sheaves, like water springing from the thousand holes of a watering-pot. Above the flame, the enormous towers, two sides of each of which were visible in sharp outline, the one wholly black, the other wholly red, seemed still more vast with all the immensity of the shadow which they cast even to the sky. Their innumerable sculptures of demons and dragons assumed a lugubrious aspect. The restless light of the flame made them move to the eye. There were griffins which had the air of laughing, gargoyles which one fancied one heard yelping, salamanders which puffed at the fire, tarasques[61] which sneezed in the smoke. And among the monsters thus roused from their sleep of stone by this flame, by this noise, there was one who walked about, and who was seen, from time to time, to pass across the glowing face of the pile, like a bat in front of a candle. Without doubt, this strange beacon light would awaken far away, the woodcutter of the hills of Bicêtre, terrified to behold the gigantic shadow of the towers of Notre-Dame quivering over his heaths. A terrified silence ensued among the outcasts, during which nothing was heard, but the cries of alarm of the canons shut up in their cloister, and more uneasy than horses in a burning stable, the furtive sound of windows hastily opened and still more hastily closed, the internal hurly-burly of the houses and of the Hôtel-Dieu, the wind in the flame, the last death-rattle of the dying, and the continued crackling of the rain of lead upon the pavement. In the meanwhile, the principal vagabonds had retired beneath the porch of the Gondelaurier mansion, and were holding a council of war. The Duke of Egypt, seated on a stone post, contemplated the phantasmagorical bonfire, glowing at a height of two hundred feet in the air, with religious terror. Clopin Trouillefou bit his huge fists with rage. “Impossible to get in!” he muttered between his teeth. “An old, enchanted church!” grumbled the aged Bohemian, Mathias Hungadi Spicali. “By the Pope’s whiskers!” went on a sham soldier, who had once been in service, “here are church gutters spitting melted lead at you better than the machicolations of Lectoure.” “Do you see that demon passing and repassing in front of the fire?” exclaimed the Duke of Egypt. “Pardieu, ’tis that damned bellringer, ’tis Quasimodo,” said Clopin. The Bohemian tossed his head. “I tell you, that ’tis the spirit Sabnac, the grand marquis, the demon of fortifications. He has the form of an armed soldier, the head of a lion. Sometimes he rides a hideous horse. He changes men into stones, of which he builds towers. He commands fifty legions ’Tis he indeed; I recognize him. Sometimes he is clad in a handsome golden robe, figured after the Turkish fashion.” “Where is Bellevigne de l’Étoile?” demanded Clopin. “He is dead.” Andry the Red laughed in an idiotic way: “Notre-Dame is making work for the hospital,” said he. “Is there, then, no way of forcing this door,” exclaimed the King of Thunes, stamping his foot. The Duke of Egypt pointed sadly to the two streams of boiling lead which did not cease to streak the black façade, like two long distaffs of phosphorus. “Churches have been known to defend themselves thus all by themselves,” he remarked with a sigh. “Saint-Sophia at Constantinople, forty years ago, hurled to the earth three times in succession, the crescent of Mahom, by shaking her domes, which are her heads. Guillaume de Paris, who built this one was a magician.” “Must we then retreat in pitiful fashion, like highwaymen?” said Clopin. “Must we leave our sister here, whom those hooded wolves will hang to-morrow.” “And the sacristy, where there are wagon-loads of gold!” added a vagabond, whose name, we regret to say, we do not know. “Beard of Mahom!” cried Trouillefou. “Let us make another trial,” resumed the vagabond. Mathias Hungadi shook his head. “We shall never get in by the door. We must find the defect in the armor of the old fairy; a hole, a false postern, some joint or other.” “Who will go with me?” said Clopin. “I shall go at it again. By the way, where is the little scholar Jehan, who is so encased in iron?” “He is dead, no doubt,” some one replied; “we no longer hear his laugh.” The King of Thunes frowned: “So much the worse. There was a brave heart under that ironmongery. And Master Pierre Gringoire?” “Captain Clopin,” said Andry the Red, “he slipped away before we reached the Pont-aux-Changeurs.” Clopin stamped his foot. “_Gueule-Dieu!_ ’twas he who pushed us on hither, and he has deserted us in the very middle of the job! Cowardly chatterer, with a slipper for a helmet!” “Captain Clopin,” said Andry the Red, who was gazing down Rue du Parvis, “yonder is the little scholar.” “Praised be Pluto!” said Clopin. “But what the devil is he dragging after him?” It was, in fact, Jehan, who was running as fast as his heavy outfit of a Paladin, and a long ladder which trailed on the pavement, would permit, more breathless than an ant harnessed to a blade of grass twenty times longer than itself. “Victory! _Te Deum!_” cried the scholar. “Here is the ladder of the longshoremen of Port Saint-Landry.” Clopin approached him. “Child, what do you mean to do, _corne-dieu!_ with this ladder?” “I have it,” replied Jehan, panting. “I knew where it was under the shed of the lieutenant’s house. There’s a wench there whom I know, who thinks me as handsome as Cupido. I made use of her to get the ladder, and I have the ladder, _Pasque-Mahom!_ The poor girl came to open the door to me in her shift.” “Yes,” said Clopin, “but what are you going to do with that ladder?” Jehan gazed at him with a malicious, knowing look, and cracked his fingers like castanets. At that moment he was sublime. On his head he wore one of those overloaded helmets of the fifteenth century, which frightened the enemy with their fanciful crests. His bristled with ten iron beaks, so that Jehan could have disputed with Nestor’s Homeric vessel the redoubtable title of δεκέμβολος. “What do I mean to do with it, august king of Thunes? Do you see that row of statues which have such idiotic expressions, yonder, above the three portals?” “Yes. Well?” “’Tis the gallery of the kings of France.” “What is that to me?” said Clopin. “Wait! At the end of that gallery there is a door which is never fastened otherwise than with a latch, and with this ladder I ascend, and I am in the church.” “Child let me be the first to ascend.” “No, comrade, the ladder is mine. Come, you shall be the second.” “May Beelzebub strangle you!” said surly Clopin, “I won’t be second to anybody.” “Then find a ladder, Clopin!” Jehan set out on a run across the Place, dragging his ladder and shouting: “Follow me, lads!” In an instant the ladder was raised, and propped against the balustrade of the lower gallery, above one of the lateral doors. The throng of vagabonds, uttering loud acclamations, crowded to its foot to ascend. But Jehan maintained his right, and was the first to set foot on the rungs. The passage was tolerably long. The gallery of the kings of France is to-day about sixty feet above the pavement. The eleven steps of the flight before the door, made it still higher. Jehan mounted slowly, a good deal incommoded by his heavy armor, holding his crossbow in one hand, and clinging to a rung with the other. When he reached the middle of the ladder, he cast a melancholy glance at the poor dead outcasts, with which the steps were strewn. “Alas!” said he, “here is a heap of bodies worthy of the fifth book of the Iliad!” Then he continued his ascent. The vagabonds followed him. There was one on every rung. At the sight of this line of cuirassed backs, undulating as they rose through the gloom, one would have pronounced it a serpent with steel scales, which was raising itself erect in front of the church. Jehan who formed the head, and who was whistling, completed the illusion. The scholar finally reached the balcony of the gallery, and climbed over it nimbly, to the applause of the whole vagabond tribe. Thus master of the citadel, he uttered a shout of joy, and suddenly halted, petrified. He had just caught sight of Quasimodo concealed in the dark, with flashing eye, behind one of the statues of the kings. Before a second assailant could gain a foothold on the gallery, the formidable hunchback leaped to the head of the ladder, without uttering a word, seized the ends of the two uprights with his powerful hands, raised them, pushed them out from the wall, balanced the long and pliant ladder, loaded with vagabonds from top to bottom for a moment, in the midst of shrieks of anguish, then suddenly, with superhuman force, hurled this cluster of men backward into the Place. There was a moment when even the most resolute trembled. The ladder, launched backwards, remained erect and standing for an instant, and seemed to hesitate, then wavered, then suddenly, describing a frightful arc of a circle eighty feet in radius, crashed upon the pavement with its load of ruffians, more rapidly than a drawbridge when its chains break. There arose an immense imprecation, then all was still, and a few mutilated wretches were seen, crawling over the heap of dead.