Chapter VII: Chateaupers to the Rescue

The reader will, perhaps, recall the critical situation in which
we left Quasimodo. The brave deaf man, assailed on all sides, had
lost, if not all courage, at least all hope of saving, not
himself (he was not thinking of himself), but the gypsy. He ran
distractedly along the gallery. Notre-Dame was on the point of
being taken by storm by the outcasts. All at once, a great
galloping of horses filled the neighboring streets, and, with a
long file of torches and a thick column of cavaliers, with free
reins and lances in rest, these furious sounds debouched on the
Place like a hurricane,—

“France! France! cut down the louts! Châteaupers to the rescue!
Provostship! Provostship!”

The frightened vagabonds wheeled round.

Quasimodo who did not hear, saw the naked swords, the torches,
the irons of the pikes, all that cavalry, at the head of which he
recognized Captain Phœbus; he beheld the confusion of the
outcasts, the terror of some, the disturbance among the bravest
of them, and from this unexpected succor he recovered so much
strength, that he hurled from the church the first assailants who
were already climbing into the gallery.

It was, in fact, the king’s troops who had arrived. The vagabonds
behaved bravely. They defended themselves like desperate men.
Caught on the flank, by the Rue Saint-Pierre-aux-Bœufs, and in
the rear through the Rue du Parvis, driven to bay against
Notre-Dame, which they still assailed and Quasimodo defended, at
the same time besiegers and besieged, they were in the singular
situation in which Comte Henri Harcourt, _Taurinum obsessor idem
et obsessus_, as his epitaph says, found himself later on, at the
famous siege of Turin, in 1640, between Prince Thomas of Savoy,
whom he was besieging, and the Marquis de Leganez, who was
blockading him.

The battle was frightful. There was a dog’s tooth for wolf’s
flesh, as P. Mathieu says. The king’s cavaliers, in whose midst
Phœbus de Châteaupers bore himself valiantly, gave no quarter,
and the slash of the sword disposed of those who escaped the
thrust of the lance. The outcasts, badly armed foamed and bit
with rage. Men, women, children, hurled themselves on the
cruppers and the breasts of the horses, and hung there like cats,
with teeth, finger nails and toe nails. Others struck the
archers’ in the face with their torches. Others thrust iron hooks
into the necks of the cavaliers and dragged them down. They
slashed in pieces those who fell.

One was noticed who had a large, glittering scythe, and who, for
a long time, mowed the legs of the horses. He was frightful. He
was singing a ditty, with a nasal intonation, he swung and drew
back his scythe incessantly. At every blow he traced around him a
great circle of severed limbs. He advanced thus into the very
thickest of the cavalry, with the tranquil slowness, the lolling
of the head and the regular breathing of a harvester attacking a
field of wheat. It was Clopin Trouillefou. A shot from an
arquebus laid him low.

In the meantime, windows had been opened again. The neighbors
hearing the war cries of the king’s troops, had mingled in the
affray, and bullets rained upon the outcasts from every story.
The Parvis was filled with a thick smoke, which the musketry
streaked with flame. Through it one could confusedly distinguish
the front of Notre-Dame, and the decrepit Hôtel-Dieu with some
wan invalids gazing down from the heights of its roof all
checkered with dormer windows.

At length the vagabonds gave way. Weariness, the lack of good
weapons, the fright of this surprise, the musketry from the
windows, the valiant attack of the king’s troops, all overwhelmed
them. They forced the line of assailants, and fled in every
direction, leaving the Parvis encumbered with dead.

When Quasimodo, who had not ceased to fight for a moment, beheld
this rout, he fell on his knees and raised his hands to heaven;
then, intoxicated with joy, he ran, he ascended with the
swiftness of a bird to that cell, the approaches to which he had
so intrepidly defended. He had but one thought now; it was to
kneel before her whom he had just saved for the second time.

When he entered the cell, he found it empty.

BOOK ELEVENTH.