Beadle's New York Dime Library, No. 144 — page 55: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

~<— « ‘ ¥ , ward the abyss. merely streal blackéned wall without findin, the least support. Atl who nage ever been a the’ mr know that the stone bellies ara ) we: of ks . ‘ oo | q immediately under the alustrade . It the retre ‘slope that the wretched ar ex- hausted himself in fruitless efforts. He had not to do with a wall, but a wall thad receded from him. Quasimodo might have withdrawn him from the gulf by merely reaching him his hand; but he did not so much as look at him. a looked at the Greve. He looked at the tian. He looked at the gibbet. The hunchback was ing upon the balustrade; at the —— spot which the archdeacon had just before occu- pied; and there, never turning his eye from the only object whi for him at that moment, he was motiénless and mute as one thunderstruck; whilst a stream flowed in silence from that eye, which till then had not shed a single tear. : The archdeacon meanwhile began to pant. The — trickled from «his broad brow, the blood eozed from his fingers’-ends; the skin was rubbed trom his knees against the. wall. He heard his cas- 3ock, which hung by the gutter, crack and rip at every movement that he . To crown his misery, that utter terminated in a leaden pipe which bent. with weight. The archdeacon felt it slowly giving way. The wretched man said to himself, that when his cas- sock shotld be rent, when the leaden pipe should yield, he must fall, and horror thrilled his entrails. At times he wildly eyed a sort of narrow ledye, formed about ten feet below him by the architectural embel- lishments of the church, and in his distress he prayed to Heaven, in the recésses of his soul, to permit himto end his life on this space of two square feet, were it even to last a hundred years. Once he see Se at the abyss beneath him ; when he raised his head his eyes were closed and his hair standing erect. There yee Aometbing frightful in the silence of these two persons. While the archdeacon, at the distance of a few teet, was experiencing the most horrible ago- ne Quasimodo kept his eye fixed on the Greve and wept. : " @ archdeacon, perceiving that all his exertions served but to shake the only frail met - sh was ere left him, determined to stir no more. clasping the gutter, scarcely breathing, absolutely motionless saye that mechanical convulsion of the abdomen which supervenes in sleep, when you dream that you are falling. His fixed — glared in a wild and ghastly manner. Meanwhile an to lose his hold; his ~— slipped down the gutter; he felt his arms becoming weaker and weaker, and his body heavier and heavier, The leaden pipe which sup- ported him bent more and more every movement to- Beneath him he beheld—horrid sight! the roof of St. Jean-le-Rond, diminutive as 4 eard bent in two. He eyed one after another the passionless sculptures the tower, suspended like himself over the abyss, but without fear for them- selves or pity for him. All about him was atone ; be. fore his eyes monsters; under him, at the bottom of the the pavements; over his head Quasimodo weeping. | In the Parvis several ups of curious spectators were calmly puzzling their brains to divine who could be the maniac that was amusing himself in this strange manner. The page heard them say, for their voices reached him, clear and sharp, “ By’r Lady, he must oi ean lb ge yy i uasimodo wept. ) ys ] the archdeacon ee, with rage and terror, became sensible that all was useless. He never- theless mustered all his rem strength for a last effort. Setting both his kneos against the wall, he oked his hands into s cleft in the stones, and suc- cdedod in reising himself about » foot; atrug- THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME, : | e414 , gle caused the leaden beak whi sorted him to} | give way sudden ‘ripped up trom | ancien nos the same a. g hil sink: i. We wecun, Between the faubourg | d St, his stiffened and crippled hands to hold by, the wretch- | about indred and sixty fathoms from the walls ed man closed his eyes ae preeently his fingers re- | Paris, and a tew cross-bow shots fi mts Gonstiiie laxed their grasp. Down @ fell |, ¢ seen at the top of @ gentle, imperceptible rise, yet Quasimodo watched him falling, sufficiently elevated be seen for several A fall from sucha height is rarely perpendicular. The archdeacon, launched into the abyss, fell at first head downward and with outstretched arms, and then whirled several times over and over; dropping upon the roof of a house, and breaking somo of his bones. He was not dead when he reachedit, for the bell-ringer saw him strive to grapple the ridge with his fingers; but the slope was too steep, aud his strength utterly falled him, Sliding rapidly down the roof, like a tile that has got loose, down he went and rebounded on the pavement. He never stirred more. Quasimodo then raised his eye to the Egyptian, dang- ling from the gallows. Atthat-distance he could see her quiver beneath her white robe in the last conyul- sive agonies of death; he then looked down at the archdeacon, stretched at the foot of the tower, with scarcely a vestige of the human form about him, and, — a deep sigh, he cried, “There is all Lever oved |’ ‘CHAPTER III, THE MARRIAGE OF CAPTAIN PHG@BUS. Towarp the evening of the same day, when the ju- dicial officers of the bishop came to remoye the mangl- ed corpse of the archdeacon from the pavement of the Parvis, Quasimodo was not to be found at Notre Dame, : ‘Many rumors were circulated respecting this affair. The generai opinion was that the day had arrived when, according to agreement, Quasimodo, or the. devil, was to carry away Claude Frollo, the sorcerer. It was pre- sumed that he had smashed the body to get at the soul, just as the monkeys crack the shell of a nut to get atthe kernel. For this reason the archdeacon was not interred in consecrated ground, Louis XI. died in the month of Aagust in the follow- ing year, 1489. As for Pierre Gringoire, he trived to save the goat, and to gain applause as a ftagic writer. It ap- ‘pears that after dabb in astrology, philosophy, ar- chitecture, alchemy, and all sorts of si Ape od he reverted to tragedy, which ts the stof all. ris he called ‘* having come to a tragie end,” In the accounts of the Ordinary for 1483 may he found the following entry relative to his dramatio trjumphs: — . ‘To Jehan Marchand aYM Pierre Gringoiré, carpen- ter and composer, who mado and composed the mystery enacted at the Chatelet of Parisat the entry of Monsieur the legate, and arranged the characters, habited and equipped as bythe said mystery was required; and also for having made the scaffolds which were neces- sary thereto, one hundred livres.” — Phebus de Chateaupers likewise ‘came to atragic end ;”" he married. CHAPTER IV. MARRIAGE OF QUASIMODO. . WE have just said that, on tho day when the Esyp- tian and the archdeacon died, Quasimodo not tv be found in Notre-Dame. He was never seen f nor was it ever known what became of him, In the night following the execution of La Esmeralda, yep coat ee he om the conveyed it, cus to the vault of Montfaucon. [THE END.| round, a building of strange form, nearly resemble @ Celtic anaes and where human victims were sacrifice Figure to yourself on the top of a mound of chalk a ‘clumsy parallelopipedon of masonry, fiiteen feet high, rail- forty long, and thirty wide, with « , an outer ing, and a platform! upon this platform sixteen mass- ive pillars of unhewn stone, thirty feet high, ranged in the form of a colonnade round three of the four sides of tho masonry which “ae them, connected at top by strong beams, from which at certain distances h chains, each having a skeleton dangling at theend of it; round about it in the plain a stone cross and two bets of secondary rank, which seem to spring up li shoots from the central stock; above all these the atmosphere crows perpetually flying—and you will have a picture of Montfaucon. ) At the conclusion of the fifteenth century, this for- midable gibbet, which dated from 1328, was already very decrepit; the beams were rotten; the chains eaten up with rust; the pillars green with moass ; there were wide interstices between the courses of the stone; and grass grew upon the untrodden plat- form. The profile of this edifice upon the sky wus a horrible one, especially at night, when the faint moon- light fell upon these bleachéd skulls, or when the night breeze, apenive the chains and the skeletons, made them rattle in the dark. The presence of this gibbet was sufficient to induce a belief that all the en- virons were haunted. . é The stone work which served as a base to the odious edifice was hollow. Here had been formed a vast vault, closed by an old crazy .iron gate, into which were thrown not only the human remains taken from the chains of Montfaucon, but the bodies of al] the wretches executed at the other permanen ts of Paris. In this vast charnel house, in which so many carcasses and so many crimes have moldered together, many of the great of the world, and many innocent persons, have successively laid their bones, from En- uerraud de Marigni, who made a present of Mont- ucon, and who was a good man, to Admiral de Co- lign!, with whom it was closed, and who was alse a ye nee h ecting the mysterious Aisappearance of Quasi- modo, all that we have been able to aetpres is this: About a year and a half two ‘after the events which this history concludes, when search was made in the vault of Montfaucon for the body of ‘tons Olivier le Daim, who had been h two days pre- viously,and towhom Charles VIII ted the favor to be Interred in better company at St. Laurent, among these hideous c were found two skele- & singular posture. One of these skeletons, which wasthat of a female, had still upon it some fragments of a dress that had which was open and empty. little value that the h worth his w to take this was elosely om male. It was remarked tha the head ad between leg shorter than the other. dent that the coy been hanged. en attempte was the once th had The o hero was, how rupturo of the vertebrm of the neck, and it to whom it belonge those who found white; and about the neck wasa necklace of the seeds of rag zarach, and a little silk bag braided with green beads, These were of 80 thought it by which U5 ae d one wet was had not ia te diosmenge te. Som that which ite grasp, it «a (E(@) JOO (E (E(o)