ke thus, the young scamp stealthily adjusted his crossbow.

"Quasimodo!" he cried, "I am going to change your surname: you shall be
called the blind man."

The shot sped. The feathered vireton* whizzed and entered the
hunchback's left arm. Quasimodo appeared no more moved by it than by a
scratch to King Pharamond. He laid his hand on the arrow, tore it from
his arm, and tranquilly broke it across his big knee; then he let the
two pieces drop on the floor, rather than threw them down. But Jehan
had no opportunity to fire a second time. The arrow broken, Quasimodo
breathing heavily, bounded like a grasshopper, and he fell upon the
scholar, whose armor was flattened against the wall by the blow.

* An arrow with a pyramidal head of iron and copper spiral wings by
which a rotatory motion was communicated.

Then in that gloom, wherein wavered the light of the torches, a terrible
thing was seen.

Quasimodo had grasped with his left hand the two arms of Jehan, who did
not offer any resistance, so thoroughly did he feel that he was lost.
With his right hand, the deaf man detached one by one, in silence, with
sinister slowness, all the pieces of his armor, the sword, the daggers,
the helmet, the cuirass, the leg pieces. One would have said that it was
a monkey taking the shell from a nut. Quasimodo flung the scholar's
iron shell at his feet, piece by piece. When the scholar beheld himself
disarmed, stripped, weak, and naked in those terrible hands, he made no
attempt to speak to the deaf man, but began to laugh audaciously in his
face, and to sing with his intrepid heedlessness of a child of sixteen,
the then popular ditty:--

"_Elle est bien habillee,
La ville de Cambrai;
Marafin l'a pillee_..."*

* The city of Cambrai is well dressed. Marafin plundered it.

He did not finish. Quasimodo was seen on the parapet of the gallery,
holding the scholar by the feet with one hand and whirling him over
the abyss like a sling; then a sound like that of a bony structure in
contact with a wall was heard, and something was seen to fall which
halted a third of the way down in its fall, on a projection in the
architecture. It was a dead body which remained hanging there, bent
double, its loins broken, its skull empty.

A cry of horror rose among the vagabonds.

"Vengeance!" shouted Clopin. "To the sack!" replied the multitude.
"Assault! assault!"

There came a tremendous howl, in whi