ady cleared up the Place, and
had the dead thrown into the Seine. Kings like Louis XI. are careful to
clean the pavement quickly after a massacre.

Outside the balustrade of the tower, directly under the point where the
priest had paused, there was one of those fantastically carved stone
gutters with which Gothic edifices bristle, and, in a crevice of that
gutter, two pretty wallflowers in blossom, shaken out and vivified,
as it were, by the breath of air, made frolicsome salutations to each
other. Above the towers, on high, far away in the depths of the sky, the
cries of little birds were heard.

But the priest was not listening to, was not looking at, anything of all
this. He was one of the men for whom there are no mornings, no birds,
no flowers. In that immense horizon, which assumed so many aspects about
him, his contemplation was concentrated on a single point.

Quasimodo was burning to ask him what he had done with the gypsy; but
the archdeacon seemed to be out of the world at that moment. He was
evidently in one of those violent moments of life when one would not
feel the earth crumble. He remained motionless and silent, with his eyes
steadily fixed on a certain point; and there was something so terrible
about this silence and immobility that the savage bellringer shuddered
before it and dared not come in contact with it. Only, and this was also
one way of interrogating the archdeacon, he followed the direction of
his vision, and in this way the glance of the unhappy deaf man fell upon
the Place de Greve.

Thus he saw what the priest was looking at. The ladder was erected near
the permanent gallows. There were some people and many soldiers in
the Place. A man was dragging a white thing, from which hung something
black, along the pavement. This man halted at the foot of the gallows.

Here something took place which Quasimodo could not see very clearly. It
was not because his only eye had not preserved its long range, but there
was a group of soldiers which prevented his seeing everything. Moreover,
at that moment the sun appeared, and such a flood of light overflowed
the horizon that one would have said that all the points in Paris,
spires, chimneys, gables, had simultaneously taken fire.

Meanwhile, the man began to mount the ladder. Then Quasimodo saw him
again distinctly. He was carrying a woman on his shoulder, a young girl
dressed in white; that young girl had a noose about her neck. Quasimodo
recogniz