rrified mother. "Begone, you
gypsy of hell!"

In a twinkling, La Esmeralda gathered up the unlucky letters, made a
sign to Djali, and went out through one door, while Fleur-de-Lys was
being carried out through the other.

Captain Phoebus, on being left alone, hesitated for a moment between the
two doors, then he followed the gypsy.

CHAPTER II. A PRIEST AND A PHILOSOPHER ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.

The priest whom the young girls had observed at the top of the North
tower, leaning over the Place and so attentive to the dance of the
gypsy, was, in fact, Archdeacon Claude Frollo.

Our readers have not forgotten the mysterious cell which the archdeacon
had reserved for himself in that tower. (I do not know, by the way be
it said, whether it be not the same, the interior of which can be seen
to-day through a little square window, opening to the east at the height
of a man above the platform from which the towers spring; a bare and
dilapidated den, whose badly plastered walls are ornamented here
and there, at the present day, with some wretched yellow engravings
representing the facades of cathedrals. I presume that this hole is
jointly inhabited by bats and spiders, and that, consequently, it wages
a double war of extermination on the flies).

Every day, an hour before sunset, the archdeacon ascended the staircase
to the tower, and shut himself up in this cell, where he sometimes
passed whole nights. That day, at the moment when, standing before the
low door of his retreat, he was fitting into the lock the complicated
little key which he always carried about him in the purse suspended to
his side, a sound of tambourine and castanets had reached his ear. These
sounds came from the Place du Parvis. The cell, as we have already said,
had only one window opening upon the rear of the church. Claude Frollo
had hastily withdrawn the key, and an instant later, he was on the top
of the tower, in the gloomy and pensive attitude in which the maidens
had seen him.

There he stood, grave, motionless, absorbed in one look and one thought.
All Paris lay at his feet, with the thousand spires of its edifices and
its circular horizon of gentle hills--with its river winding under its
bridges, and its people moving to and fro through its streets,--with
the clouds of its smoke,--with the mountainous chain of its roofs which
presses Notre-Dame in its doubled folds; but out of all the city,
the archdeacon gazed at one corner only