The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [259]
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, carpenter 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