se who did not cry out, those who
were still alive, looked. Two streams of melted lead were falling from
the summit of the edifice into the thickest of the rabble. That sea of
men had just sunk down beneath the boiling metal, which had made, at the
two points where it fell, two black and smoking holes in the crowd, such
as hot water would make in snow. Dying men, half consumed and groaning
with anguish, could be seen writhing there. Around these two principal
streams there were drops of that horrible rain, which scattered over the
assailants and entered their skulls like gimlets of fire. It was a heavy
fire which overwhelmed these wretches with a thousand hailstones.

The outcry was heartrending. They fled pell-mell, hurling the beam upon
the bodies, the boldest as well as the most timid, and the parvis was
cleared a second time.

All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there an
extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery, higher than
the central rose window, there was a great flame rising between the two
towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a vast, disordered, and furious flame,
a tongue of which was borne into the smoke by the wind, from time to
time. Below that fire, below the gloomy balustrade with its trefoils
showing darkly against its glare, two spouts with monster throats were
vomiting forth unceasingly that burning rain, whose silvery stream stood
out against the shadows of the lower facade. As they approached the
earth, these two jets of liquid lead spread out in sheaves, like water
springing from the thousand holes of a watering-pot. Above the flame,
the enormous towers, two sides of each of which were visible in sharp
outline, the one wholly black, the other wholly red, seemed still more
vast with all the immensity of the shadow which they cast even to the
sky.

Their innumerable sculptures of demons and dragons assumed a lugubrious
aspect. The restless light of the flame made them move to the eye. There
were griffins which had the air of laughing, gargoyles which one fancied
one heard yelping, salamanders which puffed at the fire, tarasques*
which sneezed in the smoke. And among the monsters thus roused from
their sleep of stone by this flame, by this noise, there was one who
walked about, and who was seen, from time to time, to pass across the
glowing face of the pile, like a bat in front of a candle.

* The representation of a monstrous animal solemnly drawn about