Mahiette, whose utterance had been choked until then, now made an effort. "Wait a moment," said she; and then, putting her head to the window, "Paquette!" she cried; "Paquette-la-Chantefleurie!"

A child that should blow unsuspectingly upon the ill-lighted match of a petard, and make it explode in his face, would not be more frightened than Mahiette was at the effect of this name thus suddenly breathed into the cell of Sister Gudule.

The recluse was agitated in every limb; she rose erect upon her naked feet, and flew to the loophole with eyes so flaming, that Mahiette and Oudarde, their companion, and the child, all retreated as far as the parapet of the quay.

Meanwhile, the sinister visage of the recluse appeared close to the window-grate. "Oh, oh," she cried, with a frightful laugh, "it's the gypsy woman that calls me!"

At that moment a scene which was passing at the pillory arrested her haggard eye. Her forehead wrinkled with horror; she stretched out of her den her two skeleton arms, and cried out, with a voice that rattled in her throat: "So, it's thou again, daughter of Egypt; it's thou that call'st me, thou childstealer! Well, cursed be thou! cursed! cursed! cursed

CHAPTER IV.

A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER.

THE concluding words of the foregoing chapter may be described as the point of junction of two scenes which, until that moment, had been simultaneously developing themselves, each upon its particular stage: the one that which has just been related, at the Trou-aux-Rats; the other, now to be described, at the pillory. The former had been witnessed only by the three women with whom the reader has just now been made acquainted; the latter had had for spectators the whole crowd which we saw collect a little while before upon the Place de Grève, around the pillory and the gibbet.

This crowd, whom the sight of the four sergeants, posted from nine o'clock in the morning at the four corners of the pillory, led to expect a penal exhibition of some kind, - not, certainly, a hanging, but a flogging, a cutting off of ears, or something in that way, this crowd, we say, had so rapidly increased, that the four sergeants, finding themselves too closely invested, had more than once been under the necessity of forcing it back by the application of their whit-leather whips and their horses' cruppers.

The populace, however, well drilled to the waiting for this sort of spectacle, showed themselves tolerably patient. They amused themselves with looking at the pillory, - a very simple sort of structure, in truth, consisting of a cubical mass of stone-work, some ten feet high, and hollowed internally. A very steep flight of steps, of unhewn stone, called by distinction the échelle, gave access to the upper platform, upon which was to be seen a plain horizontal wheel made of oak wood. The custom was to bind the sufferer upon this wheel, on his knees, with his arms pinioned. An upright shaft of timber, set in motion by a capstan concealed within the interior of the small edifice, made the wheel revolve horizontally and uniformly, thus presenting the face of the culprit successively to every point of the Place. This was called "turning" the criminal.

It is clear that the pillory of the Grève was far from possessing all the attractions of the pillory of the Halles. There was nothing architectural, nothing monumental. There was no iron-cross roof, no octagonal lantern; there were no slender colonnettes, opening out against the border of the roof into capitals of foliage and flowers, no monsterheaded gutters, no carved woodwork, no bold and delicate sculpture. The spectator was obliged to content himself with those four faces of rough stone, surmounted by two side walls or parapets of stone still rougher, with a sorry stone gibbet, meagre and bare, standing beside them. The entertainment would have been pitiful enough for amateurs of Gothic architecture. But it is certain that none could be less curious in this way than the good cockneys of the Middle Ages, and that they took but little interest in the beauty of a pillory.

At last the culprit arrived, fastened at the tail of a cart; and as soon as he was hoisted upon the platform, so that he could be seen from every point of the Place, bound with cords and straps upon the wheel of the pillory, a prodigious hooting, mingled with laughter and acclamations, burst from the assemblage in the square. They had recognized Quasimodo.

As regarded himself, the turn of affairs was somewhat striking, - to be pilloried in that same square in which, the day before, he had been saluted and proclaimed pope and prince of the fools, in the train of the Duke of Egypt, the King of Tunis, and the Emperor of Galilee. Certain it is, however, that there was not one mind among the crowd - not even his own, though himself in turn the triumphant and the sufferer - that clearly drew this parallel. Gringoire and his philosophy were absent from this spectacle.

Anon, Michel Noiret, one of their lord the king's sworn trumpeters, after having silence cried to the populace, made proclamation of the sentence, pursuant to the ordinance and command of monsieur the provost. He then fell back behind the cart, with his men in their hacqueton uniform.

Quasimodo, quite passive, did not so much as knit his brow. All resistance was rendered impossible to him by what was then called, in the style of the criminal court, "the vehemence and

that is to say, that probably entered his

firmness of the bonds," the small straps and chains flesh. This, by the bye, is a tradition which is not yet lost; the manacles still happily preserving it among ourselves, - a people civilized, mild, and humane (the bagnio and the guillotine between parentheses).

Quasimodo had let them lead him, thrust him, carry him along, hoist him up, bind and rebind him. Nothing was distinguishable in his countenance but the astonishment of a savage or an idiot. He was known to be deaf; he might have been taken to be blind.

They set him upon his knees on the circular plank, and stripped him to the waist; he made not the least resistance. They bound him down under a fresh system of straps and buckles; he let them buckle and strap him. Only from time to time he breathed heavily, like a calf when its head hangs tossing about over the side of the butcher's cart.

"The dolt!" said Jehan Frollo du Moulin to his friend Robin Poussepain (for the two scholars had followed the sufferer, as in duty bound), "he understands no more about it than a cockchafer shut up in a box."

There was a wild laugh among the crowd when they saw, stripped naked to their view, Quasimodo's hump, his camel breast, his brawny and hairy shoulders. During all this merriment, a man in the Town livery, short and thick-set, ascended the platform, and placed himself by the culprit. His name was quickly circulated among the spectators, - it was

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