Chapter Chapter 55 · CHATEAUPERS TO THE RESCUE.

. 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.