pires, stealers
of children! They devoured my little daughter, my child, my only child!
I have no longer any heart, they devoured it!"

She was frightful. The priest looked at her coldly.

"There is one in particular whom I hate, and whom I have cursed," she
resumed; "it is a young one, of the age which my daughter would be if
her mother had not eaten my daughter. Every time that that young viper
passes in front of my cell, she sets my blood in a ferment."

"Well, sister, rejoice," said the priest, icy as a sepulchral statue;
"that is the one whom you are about to see die."

His head fell upon his bosom and he moved slowly away.

The recluse writhed her arms with joy.

"I predicted it for her, that she would ascend thither! Thanks, priest!"
she cried.

And she began to pace up and down with long strides before the grating
of her window, her hair dishevelled, her eyes flashing, with her
shoulder striking against the wall, with the wild air of a female wolf
in a cage, who has long been famished, and who feels the hour for her
repast drawing near.

CHAPTER VI. THREE HUMAN HEARTS DIFFERENTLY CONSTRUCTED.

Phoebus was not dead, however. Men of that stamp die hard. When Master
Philippe Lheulier, advocate extraordinary of the king, had said to poor
Esmeralda; "He is dying," it was an error or a jest. When the archdeacon
had repeated to the condemned girl; "He is dead," the fact is that he
knew nothing about it, but that he believed it, that he counted on it,
that he did not doubt it, that he devoutly hoped it. It would have been
too hard for him to give favorable news of his rival to the woman whom
he loved. Any man would have done the same in his place.

It was not that Phoebus's wound had not been serious, but it had not
been as much so as the archdeacon believed. The physician, to whom the
soldiers of the watch had carried him at the first moment, had feared
for his life during the space of a week, and had even told him so in
Latin. But youth had gained the upper hand; and, as frequently happens,
in spite of prognostications and diagnoses, nature had amused herself by
saving the sick man under the physician's very nose. It was while he
was still lying on the leech's pallet that he had submitted to the
interrogations of Philippe Lheulier and the official inquisitors,
which had annoyed him greatly. Hence, one fine morning, feeling himself
better, he had left his golden spurs with the leech as payment, and