ssailants, and fled in every direction, leaving the Parvis
encumbered with dead.

When Quasimodo, who had not ceased to fight for a moment, beheld
this rout, he fell on his knees and raised his hands to heaven; then,
intoxicated with joy, he ran, he ascended with the swiftness of a bird
to that cell, the approaches to which he had so intrepidly defended.
He had but one thought now; it was to kneel before her whom he had just
saved for the second time.

When he entered the cell, he found it empty.

BOOK ELEVENTH.

CHAPTER I. THE LITTLE SHOE.

La Esmeralda was sleeping at the moment when the outcasts assailed the
church.

Soon the ever-increasing uproar around the edifice, and the uneasy
bleating of her goat which had been awakened, had roused her from
her slumbers. She had sat up, she had listened, she had looked; then,
terrified by the light and noise, she had rushed from her cell to see.
The aspect of the Place, the vision which was moving in it, the disorder
of that nocturnal assault, that hideous crowd, leaping like a cloud of
frogs, half seen in the gloom, the croaking of that hoarse multitude,
those few red torches running and crossing each other in the darkness
like the meteors which streak the misty surfaces of marshes, this whole
scene produced upon her the effect of a mysterious battle between the
phantoms of the witches' sabbath and the stone monsters of the church.
Imbued from her very infancy with the superstitions of the Bohemian
tribe, her first thought was that she had caught the strange beings
peculiar to the night, in their deeds of witchcraft. Then she ran in
terror to cower in her cell, asking of her pallet some less terrible
nightmare.

But little by little the first vapors of terror had been dissipated;
from the constantly increasing noise, and from many other signs of
reality, she felt herself besieged not by spectres, but by human beings.
Then her fear, though it did not increase, changed its character. She
had dreamed of the possibility of a popular mutiny to tear her from her
asylum. The idea of once more recovering life, hope, Phoebus, who was
ever present in her future, the extreme helplessness of her condition,
flight cut off, no support, her abandonment, her isolation,--these
thoughts and a thousand others overwhelmed her. She fell upon her knees,
with her head on her bed, her hands clasped over her head, full of
anxiety and tremors, and, although a gypsy, an i