Chapter II: Hunchbacked, One Eyed, Lame

Every city during the Middle Ages, and every city in France down
to the time of Louis XII. had its places of asylum. These
sanctuaries, in the midst of the deluge of penal and barbarous
jurisdictions which inundated the city, were a species of islands
which rose above the level of human justice. Every criminal who
landed there was safe. There were in every suburb almost as many
places of asylum as gallows. It was the abuse of impunity by the
side of the abuse of punishment; two bad things which strove to
correct each other. The palaces of the king, the hôtels of the
princes, and especially churches, possessed the right of asylum.
Sometimes a whole city which stood in need of being repeopled was
temporarily created a place of refuge. Louis XI. made all Paris a
refuge in 1467.

His foot once within the asylum, the criminal was sacred; but he
must beware of leaving it; one step outside the sanctuary, and he
fell back into the flood. The wheel, the gibbet, the strappado,
kept good guard around the place of refuge, and lay in watch
incessantly for their prey, like sharks around a vessel. Hence,
condemned men were to be seen whose hair had grown white in a
cloister, on the steps of a palace, in the enclosure of an abbey,
beneath the porch of a church; in this manner the asylum was a
prison as much as any other. It sometimes happened that a solemn
decree of parliament violated the asylum and restored the
condemned man to the executioner; but this was of rare
occurrence. Parliaments were afraid of the bishops, and when
there was friction between these two robes, the gown had but a
poor chance against the cassock. Sometimes, however, as in the
affair of the assassins of Petit-Jean, the headsman of Paris, and
in that of Emery Rousseau, the murderer of Jean Valleret, justice
overleaped the church and passed on to the execution of its
sentences; but unless by virtue of a decree of Parliament, woe to
him who violated a place of asylum with armed force! The reader
knows the manner of death of Robert de Clermont, Marshal of
France, and of Jean de Châlons, Marshal of Champagne; and yet the
question was only of a certain Perrin Marc, the clerk of a
money-changer, a miserable assassin; but the two marshals had
broken the doors of St. Méry. Therein lay the enormity.

Such respect was cherished for places of refuge that, according
to tradition, animals even felt it at times. Aymoire relates that
a stag, being chased by Dagobert, having taken refuge near the
tomb of Saint-Denis, the pack of hounds stopped short and barked.

Churches generally had a small apartment prepared for the
reception of supplicants. In 1407, Nicolas Flamel caused to be
built on the vaults of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, a chamber
which cost him four livres six sous, sixteen farthings, parisis.

At Notre-Dame it was a tiny cell situated on the roof of the side
aisle, beneath the flying buttresses, precisely at the spot where
the wife of the present janitor of the towers has made for
herself a garden, which is to the hanging gardens of Babylon what
a lettuce is to a palm-tree, what a porter’s wife is to a
Semiramis.

It was here that Quasimodo had deposited la Esmeralda, after his
wild and triumphant course. As long as that course lasted, the
young girl had been unable to recover her senses, half
unconscious, half awake, no longer feeling anything, except that
she was mounting through the air, floating in it, flying in it,
that something was raising her above the earth. From time to time
she heard the loud laughter, the noisy voice of Quasimodo in her
ear; she half opened her eyes; then below her she confusedly
beheld Paris checkered with its thousand roofs of slate and
tiles, like a red and blue mosaic, above her head the frightful
and joyous face of Quasimodo. Then her eyelids drooped again; she
thought that all was over, that they had executed her during her
swoon, and that the misshapen spirit which had presided over her
destiny, had laid hold of her and was bearing her away. She dared
not look at him, and she surrendered herself to her fate. But
when the bellringer, dishevelled and panting, had deposited her
in the cell of refuge, when she felt his huge hands gently
detaching the cord which bruised her arms, she felt that sort of
shock which awakens with a start the passengers of a vessel which
runs aground in the middle of a dark night. Her thoughts awoke
also, and returned to her one by one. She saw that she was in
Notre-Dame; she remembered having been torn from the hands of the
executioner; that Phœbus was alive, that Phœbus loved her no
longer; and as these two ideas, one of which shed so much
bitterness over the other, presented themselves simultaneously to
the poor condemned girl; she turned to Quasimodo, who was
standing in front of her, and who terrified her; she said to
him,—

“Why have you saved me?”

He gazed at her with anxiety, as though seeking to divine what
she was saying to him. She repeated her question. Then he gave
her a profoundly sorrowful glance and fled. She was astonished.

A few moments later he returned, bearing a package which he cast
at her feet. It was clothing which some charitable women had left
on the threshold of the church for her.

Then she dropped her eyes upon herself and saw that she was
almost naked, and blushed. Life had returned.

Quasimodo appeared to experience something of this modesty. He
covered his eyes with his large hand and retired once more, but
slowly.

She made haste to dress herself. The robe was a white one with a
white veil,—the garb of a novice of the Hôtel-Dieu.

She had barely finished when she beheld Quasimodo returning. He
carried a basket under one arm and a mattress under the other. In
the basket there was a bottle, bread, and some provisions. He set
the basket on the floor and said, “Eat!” He spread the mattress
on the flagging and said, “Sleep.”

It was his own repast, it was his own bed, which the bellringer
had gone in search of.

The gypsy raised her eyes to thank him, but she could not
articulate a word. She dropped her head with a quiver of terror.

Then he said to her.—

“I frighten you. I am very ugly, am I not? Do not look at me;
only listen to me. During the day you will remain here; at night
you can walk all over the church. But do not leave the church
either by day or by night. You would be lost. They would kill
you, and I should die.”

She was touched and raised her head to answer him. He had
disappeared. She found herself alone once more, meditating upon
the singular words of this almost monstrous being, and struck by
the sound of his voice, which was so hoarse yet so gentle.

Then she examined her cell. It was a chamber about six feet
square, with a small window and a door on the slightly sloping
plane of the roof formed of flat stones. Many gutters with the
figures of animals seemed to be bending down around her, and
stretching their necks in order to stare at her through the
window. Over the edge of her roof she perceived the tops of
thousands of chimneys which caused the smoke of all the fires in
Paris to rise beneath her eyes. A sad sight for the poor gypsy, a
foundling, condemned to death, an unhappy creature, without
country, without family, without a hearthstone.

At the moment when the thought of her isolation thus appeared to
her more poignant than ever, she felt a bearded and hairy head
glide between her hands, upon her knees. She started (everything
alarmed her now) and looked. It was the poor goat, the agile
Djali, which had made its escape after her, at the moment when
Quasimodo had put to flight Charmolue’s brigade, and which had
been lavishing caresses on her feet for nearly an hour past,
without being able to win a glance. The gypsy covered him with
kisses.

“Oh! Djali!” she said, “how I have forgotten thee! And so thou
still thinkest of me! Oh! thou art not an ingrate!”

At the same time, as though an invisible hand had lifted the
weight which had repressed her tears in her heart for so long,
she began to weep, and, in proportion as her tears flowed, she
felt all that was most acrid and bitter in her grief depart with
them.

Evening came, she thought the night so beautiful that she made
the circuit of the elevated gallery which surrounds the church.
It afforded her some relief, so calm did the earth appear when
viewed from that height.