er
detaching his gaze from the only object which existed for him in the
world at that moment, he remained motionless and mute, like a man struck
by lightning, and a long stream of tears flowed in silence from that eye
which, up to that time, had never shed but one tear.

Meanwhile, the archdeacon was panting. His bald brow was dripping with
perspiration, his nails were bleeding against the stones, his knees were
flayed by the wall.

He heard his cassock, which was caught on the spout, crack and rip at
every jerk that he gave it. To complete his misfortune, this spout ended
in a leaden pipe which bent under the weight of his body. The archdeacon
felt this pipe slowly giving way. The miserable man said to himself
that, when his hands should be worn out with fatigue, when his cassock
should tear asunder, when the lead should give way, he would be obliged
to fall, and terror seized upon his very vitals. Now and then he glanced
wildly at a sort of narrow shelf formed, ten feet lower down, by
projections of the sculpture, and he prayed heaven, from the depths of
his distressed soul, that he might be allowed to finish his life, were
it to last two centuries, on that space two feet square. Once, he
glanced below him into the Place, into the abyss; the head which he
raised again had its eyes closed and its hair standing erect.

There was something frightful in the silence of these two men. While
the archdeacon agonized in this terrible fashion a few feet below him,
Quasimodo wept and gazed at the Greve.

The archdeacon, seeing that all his exertions served only to weaken the
fragile support which remained to him, decided to remain quiet. There he
hung, embracing the gutter, hardly breathing, no longer stirring, making
no longer any other movements than that mechanical convulsion of the
stomach, which one experiences in dreams when one fancies himself
falling. His fixed eyes were wide open with a stare. He lost ground
little by little, nevertheless, his fingers slipped along the spout;
he became more and more conscious of the feebleness of his arms and the
weight of his body. The curve of the lead which sustained him inclined
more and more each instant towards the abyss.

He beheld below him, a frightful thing, the roof of Saint-Jean le Rond,
as small as a card folded in two. He gazed at the impressive carvings,
one by one, of the tower, suspended like himself over the precipice, but
without terror for themselves or pity for