The presence of this extraordinary being sent, as it were, a breath of life pulsing through the whole Cathedral. There seemed to emanate from him—at least so said the exaggerating populace—a mysterious influence which animated the stones of Notre-Dame and made the ancient church thrill to her deepest depths. To know that he was there was enough to make them believe they saw life and animation in the thousand statues of the galleries and portals. The old Cathedral did indeed seem docile and obedient to his hand; she awaited his command to lift up her sonorous voice; she was possessed and filled with Quasimodo as with a familiar spirit. You would have said that he made the immense building breathe. He was everywhere in it; he multiplied himself at every point of the structure. Now the terrified beholder would descry, on the topmost pinnacle of a tower, a fantastic, dwarfish figure climbing, twisting, crawling on all-fours, hanging over the abyss, leaping from projection to projection to thrust his arm down the throat of some sculptured gorgon: it was Quasimodo crow’s-nesting. Again, in some dim corner of the church one would stumble against a sort of living chimera crouching low, with sullen, furrowed brow: it was Quasimodo musing. Or again, in a steeple you caught sight of an enormous head and a bundle of confused limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope: it was Quasimodo ringing for vespers or angelus. Often at night a hideous form might be seen wandering along the delicate and lace-like parapet that crowns the towers and borders the roof of the chancel: again the hunchback of Notre-Dame. At such times, said the gossips, the whole church assumed a horrible, weird, and supernatural air; eyes and mouths opened here and there; the stone dogs, the dragons, all the monsters that keep watch and ward, day and night, with necks distended and open mouths, round the huge Cathedral, were heard barking and hissing. And if it happened to be a Christmas-night when the great bell seemed to rattle in its throat as it called the faithful to the midnight mass, there was such an indescribable air of life spread over the sombre façade that the great doorway looked as if it were swallowing the entire crowd, and the rose-window staring at them. And all this proceeded from Quasimodo. Egypt would have declared him the god of this temple; the Middle Ages took him for its demon: he was its soul.

So much so, that to any one who knows that Quasimodo really lived, Notre-Dame now appears deserted, inanimate, dead. One feels that something has gone out of it. This immense body is empty—a skeleton; the spirit has quitted it; one sees the place of its habitation, but that is all. It is like a skull—the holes are there for the eyes, but they are sightless.