ists, pick up the gypsy with one hand, as a child would
her doll, and dash back into the church with a single bound, lifting the
young girl above his head and crying in a formidable voice,--

"Sanctuary!"

This was done with such rapidity, that had it taken place at night,
the whole of it could have been seen in the space of a single flash of
lightning.

"Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" repeated the crowd; and the clapping of ten
thousand hands made Quasimodo's single eye sparkle with joy and pride.

This shock restored the condemned girl to her senses. She raised her
eyelids, looked at Quasimodo, then closed them again suddenly, as though
terrified by her deliverer.

Charmolue was stupefied, as well as the executioners and the entire
escort. In fact, within the bounds of Notre-Dame, the condemned girl
could not be touched. The cathedral was a place of refuge. All temporal
jurisdiction expired upon its threshold.

Quasimodo had halted beneath the great portal, his huge feet seemed
as solid on the pavement of the church as the heavy Roman pillars.
His great, bushy head sat low between his shoulders, like the heads of
lions, who also have a mane and no neck. He held the young girl, who was
quivering all over, suspended from his horny hands like a white drapery;
but he carried her with as much care as though he feared to break her
or blight her. One would have said that he felt that she was a delicate,
exquisite, precious thing, made for other hands than his. There were
moments when he looked as if not daring to touch her, even with his
breath. Then, all at once, he would press her forcibly in his arms,
against his angular bosom, like his own possession, his treasure, as
the mother of that child would have done. His gnome's eye, fastened upon
her, inundated her with tenderness, sadness, and pity, and was suddenly
raised filled with lightnings. Then the women laughed and wept, the
crowd stamped with enthusiasm, for, at that moment Quasimodo had a
beauty of his own. He was handsome; he, that orphan, that foundling,
that outcast, he felt himself august and strong, he gazed in the face
of that society from which he was banished, and in which he had so
powerfully intervened, of that human justice from which he had wrenched
its prey, of all those tigers whose jaws were forced to remain empty, of
those policemen, those judges, those executioners, of all that force of
the king which he, the meanest of creatures, had just broken, with