succeeded by an expression of bitter and hopeless discouragement. He closed his single eye, dropped his head upon his breast, and gave no further sign of life.

Thenceforward he did not stir; nothing could wring a movement from him—neither the blood, that did not cease to flow, nor the strokes which fell with redoubled fury, nor the violence of the torturer, who had worked himself into a state of frenzy, nor the shrill and strident whistle of the scourge.

At length an usher of the Châtelet, clad in black, mounted on a black horse, and stationed at the foot of the ladder since the beginning of the chastisement, pointed with his ebony staff to the hour-glass. The torturer held his hand, the wheel stopped. Quasimodo slowly reopened his eye.

The scourging was over. Two assistants of the torturer bathed the lacerated shoulders of the culprit, applied to them some kind of unguent which immediately closed the wounds, and threw over his back a yellow cloth shaped like a chasuble; Pierrat Torterue meanwhile letting the blood drain from the lashes of his scourge in great drops on to the ground.

But all was not yet over for poor Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour on the pillory which Maître Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to the sentence of Messire Robert d’Estouteville; and all merely to prove the truth of John of Cumenes’s ancient physiological and psychological jeu de mots: Surdus absurdus.

They accordingly turned the hour-glass, and left the hunch-back bound to the wheel, that justice might run its course to the end.

The people—particularly in the Middle Ages—are to society what the child is in the family; and as long as they are allowed to remain at that primitive stage of ignorance, of moral and intellectual nonage, it may be said of them as of childhood—“It is an age that knows not pity.”

We have already shown that Quasimodo was universally hated—for more than one good reason, it must be admitted—for there was hardly an individual among the crowd of spectators but had or thought he had some cause of complaint against the malevolent hunchback of Notre-Dame. All had rejoiced to see him make his appearance on the pillory; and the severe punishment he had just undergone, and the pitiable plight in which it had left him, so far from softening the hearts of the populace, had rendered their hatred more malicious by pointing it with the sting of merriment.

Accordingly, “public vengeance”—vindicte publique, as the jargon of the law courts still has it—being satisfied, a thousand private revenges now had their turn. Here, as in the great Hall, the women were most in evidence. Every one of them had some grudge against him—some for his wicked deeds, others for his ugly face—and the latter were the most incensed of the two.

“Oh, image of the Antichrist!” cried one.

“Thou rider on the broomstick!” screamed another.

“Oh, the fine tragical grimace!” yelled a third, “and that would have made him Pope of Fools if to-day had been yesterday.”

“Good!” chimed in an old woman, “this is the pillory grin. When are we going to see him grin through a noose?”

“When shall we see thee bonneted by thy great bell and driven a hundred feet underground, thrice- cursed bell-ringer?”

“And to think that this foul fiend should ring the Angelus!”

“Oh, the misbegotten hunchback! the monster!”