Quasimodo had passively let himself be led, thrust, carried, hoisted up, bound and rebound. Nothing was to be discovered in his face but the bewilderment of the savage or the idiot. He was known to be deaf; he might also have been blind.

They thrust him on to his knees on the wheel, they stripped him to the waist; he made no resistance. They bound him down with a fresh arrangement of cords and leathern thongs; he let them bind and strap him. Only from time to time he breathed heavily, like a calf whose head swings and bumps over the edge of a butcher’s cart.

“The blockhead,” said Jehan Frollo of the Mill to his friend Robin Poussepain (for the two scholars had followed the culprit, as in duty bound), “he knows no more what it’s all about than a bumble-bee shut in a box!”

There was a great burst of laughter from the crowd when, stripped naked to their view, they caught sight of Quasimodo’s hump, his camel’s breast, his brawny, hairy shoulders. During the merriment a man in the livery of the Town, short of stature and of burly make, ascended to the platform and stationed himself beside the culprit. His name was quickly circulated among the spectators. It was Master Pierrat Torterue, official torturer to the Châtelet.

He first proceeded to deposit on a corner of the pillory a black hour-glass, the upper cup of which was filled with red sand, which ran into the lower receptacle; he then divested himself of his party-coloured doublet, and dangling from his right hand there appeared a scourge with long, slender, white thongs—shining, knotted, interlaced—and armed with metal claws. With his left hand he carelessly drew the shirt-sleeve up his right arm as high as the shoulder.

At this Jehan Frollo, lifting his curly, fair head above the crowd (for which purpose he had mounted on the shoulders of Robin Poussepain), shouted: “Walk up, walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and see them scourge Maître Quasimodo, bell-ringer to my brother the reverend archdeacon of Josas, a rare specimen of Oriental architecture, with a domed back, and twisted columns for legs!”

And the crowd roared again, especially the young people.

The torturer now stamped his foot; the wheel began to move. Quasimodo swayed under his bonds, and the amazement suddenly depicted on that misshapen countenance gave a fresh impulse to the peals of laughter round about.

Suddenly, at the moment when the wheel in its rotation presented to Master Pierrat Quasimodo’s enormous back, the torturer raised his arm, the thongs hissed shrilly through the air, like a handful of vipers, and fell with fury on the shoulders of the hapless wretch.

Quasimodo recoiled as if suddenly startled out of sleep. Now he began to understand. He writhed in his bonds, the muscles of his face contracted violently in surprise and pain, but not a sound escaped him. He only rolled his head from side to side, like a bull stung in the flank by a gadfly.

A second stroke followed the first, then a third, and another, and another. The wheel ceased not to turn, nor the lashes to rain down. Soon the blood began to flow; it trickled in a thousand streams over the dark shoulders of the hunchback, and the keen thongs, as they swung round in the air, scattered it in showers over the multitude.

Quasimodo had resumed, in appearance at least, his former impassibility. At first he had striven, silently and without any great external movement, to burst his bonds. His eye kindled, his muscles contracted, his limbs gathered themselves up. The effort was powerful, strenuous, desperate, and the cords and straps were strained to their utmost tension; but the seasoned bonds of the provostry held. They cracked, but that was all. Quasimodo desisted, exhausted by the effort, and the stupefaction on his face was