e the sanctuary, and he fell back
into the flood. The wheel, the gibbet, the strappado, kept good guard
around the place of refuge, and lay in watch incessantly for their prey,
like sharks around a vessel. Hence, condemned men were to be seen whose
hair had grown white in a cloister, on the steps of a palace, in the
enclosure of an abbey, beneath the porch of a church; in this manner the
asylum was a prison as much as any other. It sometimes happened that
a solemn decree of parliament violated the asylum and restored the
condemned man to the executioner; but this was of rare occurrence.
Parliaments were afraid of the bishops, and when there was friction
between these two robes, the gown had but a poor chance against the
cassock. Sometimes, however, as in the affair of the assassins of
Petit-Jean, the headsman of Paris, and in that of Emery Rousseau, the
murderer of Jean Valleret, justice overleaped the church and passed on
to the execution of its sentences; but unless by virtue of a decree of
Parliament, woe to him who violated a place of asylum with armed force!
The reader knows the manner of death of Robert de Clermont, Marshal
of France, and of Jean de Chalons, Marshal of Champagne; and yet
the question was only of a certain Perrin Marc, the clerk of a
money-changer, a miserable assassin; but the two marshals had broken the
doors of St. Mery. Therein lay the enormity.

Such respect was cherished for places of refuge that, according to
tradition, animals even felt it at times. Aymoire relates that a
stag, being chased by Dagobert, having taken refuge near the tomb of
Saint-Denis, the pack of hounds stopped short and barked.

Churches generally had a small apartment prepared for the reception of
supplicants. In 1407, Nicolas Flamel caused to be built on the vaults of
Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, a chamber which cost him four livres six
sous, sixteen farthings, parisis.

At Notre-Dame it was a tiny cell situated on the roof of the side aisle,
beneath the flying buttresses, precisely at the spot where the wife of
the present janitor of the towers has made for herself a garden, which
is to the hanging gardens of Babylon what a lettuce is to a palm-tree,
what a porter's wife is to a Semiramis.

It was here that Quasimodo had deposited la Esmeralda, after his wild
and triumphant course. As long as that course lasted, the young girl
had been unable to recover her senses, half unconscious, half awake, no
longer feeling