Quasimodo's ardor for ringing had grown cool.
Formerly, there had been peals for every occasion, long morning
serenades, which lasted from prime to compline; peals from the belfry
for a high mass, rich scales drawn over the smaller bells for a wedding,
for a christening, and mingling in the air like a rich embroidery of all
sorts of charming sounds. The old church, all vibrating and sonorous,
was in a perpetual joy of bells. One was constantly conscious of the
presence of a spirit of noise and caprice, who sang through all those
mouths of brass. Now that spirit seemed to have departed; the cathedral
seemed gloomy, and gladly remained silent; festivals and funerals had
the simple peal, dry and bare, demanded by the ritual, nothing more. Of
the double noise which constitutes a church, the organ within, the bell
without, the organ alone remained. One would have said that there was
no longer a musician in the belfry. Quasimodo was always there,
nevertheless; what, then, had happened to him? Was it that the shame and
despair of the pillory still lingered in the bottom of his heart, that
the lashes of his tormentor's whip reverberated unendingly in his soul,
and that the sadness of such treatment had wholly extinguished in him
even his passion for the bells? or was it that Marie had a rival in the
heart of the bellringer of Notre-Dame, and that the great bell and her
fourteen sisters were neglected for something more amiable and more
beautiful?

It chanced that, in the year of grace 1482, Annunciation Day fell on
Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of March. That day the air was so pure and
light that Quasimodo felt some returning affection for his bells. He
therefore ascended the northern tower while the beadle below was opening
wide the doors of the church, which were then enormous panels of stout
wood, covered with leather, bordered with nails of gilded iron, and
framed in carvings "very artistically elaborated."

On arriving in the lofty bell chamber, Quasimodo gazed for some time
at the six bells and shook his head sadly, as though groaning over some
foreign element which had interposed itself in his heart between them
and him. But when he had set them to swinging, when he felt that cluster
of bells moving under his hand, when he saw, for he did not hear it, the
palpitating octave ascend and descend that sonorous scale, like a bird
hopping from branch to branch; when the demon Music, that demon who
shakes a sparkling bundle of st