“Revenge!” yelled Clopin. “Sack! sack!” replied the multitude. “To the assault!”

An appalling uproar followed, in which every language, every patois, every conceivable accent was mingled. The death of the poor little scholar inspired the crowd with furious energy. They were torn with anger and shame at having been so long held in check by a miserable hunchback. Their rage found them ladders, multiplied their torches, and in a few minutes Quasimodo, to his consternation and despair, beheld the hideous swarm mounting from all sides to the assault of Notre-Dame. They who had no ladders had knotted ropes; they who had no ropes clambered up by the carvings, helping themselves up by one another’s rags. There was no means of forcing back this rising tide of frightful forms. Fury reddened the ferocious faces, sweat poured from the grimy foreheads, eyes glared viciously. It was as if some other church had sent out her gorgons, her dragons, her goblins, her demons, all her most fantastic sculptures to the assault of Notre-Dame—a coating of living monsters covering the stone monsters of the façade.

Meanwhile a thousand torches had kindled in the Place. The wild scene, wrapped until now in dense obscurity, suddenly leapt out in a blaze of light. The Parvis was brilliantly illumined and cast a radiance on the sky, while the blazing pile on the high platform of the church still burned and lit up the city far around. The vast outline of the two towers, thrown far across the roofs of Paris, broke this brightness with a wide mass of shadow. The city appeared to be rousing itself from its slumbers. Distant tocsins uttered their warning plaints. The truands howled, panted, blasphemed, and climbed steadily higher, while Quasimodo, impotent against so many enemies, trembling for the gipsy girl as he saw those savage faces approaching nearer and nearer to his gallery, implored a miracle from heaven, and wrung his hands in despair.