. The effort was powerful, prodigious, desperate; but the
provost's seasoned bonds resisted. They cracked, and that was all.
Quasimodo fell back exhausted. Amazement gave way, on his features, to
a sentiment of profound and bitter discouragement. He closed his single
eye, allowed his head to droop upon his breast, and feigned death.

From that moment forth, he stirred no more. Nothing could force a
movement from him. Neither his blood, which did not cease to flow, nor
the blows which redoubled in fury, nor the wrath of the torturer, who
grew excited himself and intoxicated with the execution, nor the sound
of the horrible thongs, more sharp and whistling than the claws of
scorpions.

At length a bailiff from the Chatelet clad in black, mounted on a black
horse, who had been stationed beside the ladder since the beginning
of the execution, extended his ebony wand towards the hour-glass. The
torturer stopped. The wheel stopped. Quasimodo's eye opened slowly.

The scourging was finished. Two lackeys of the official torturer bathed
the bleeding shoulders of the patient, anointed them with some unguent
which immediately closed all the wounds, and threw upon his back a sort
of yellow vestment, in cut like a chasuble. In the meanwhile, Pierrat
Torterue allowed the thongs, red and gorged with blood, to drip upon the
pavement.

All was not over for Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour of
pillory which Master Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to the
sentence of Messire Robert d'Estouteville; all to the greater glory
of the old physiological and psychological play upon words of Jean de
Cumene, _Surdus absurdus_: a deaf man is absurd.

So the hour-glass was turned over once more, and they left the hunchback
fastened to the plank, in order that justice might be accomplished to
the very end.

The populace, especially in the Middle Ages, is in society what the
child is in the family. As long as it remains in its state of primitive
ignorance, of moral and intellectual minority, it can be said of it as
of the child,--

'Tis the pitiless age.

We have already shown that Quasimodo was generally hated, for more than
one good reason, it is true. There was hardly a spectator in that crowd
who had not or who did not believe that he had reason to complain of the
malevolent hunchback of Notre-Dame. The joy at seeing him appear thus
in the pillory had been universal; and the harsh punishment which he had
just