“Why, we want a battering-ram.”

The King of Tunis ran boldly to the formidable piece of timber and set his foot on it. “Here’s one!” cried he, “and the reverend canons themselves have sent it you.” Then, making a mock salute to the Cathedral, “My thanks to you, canons!” he added.

This piece of bravado had excellent effect—the spell of the miraculous rafter was broken. The truands plucked up their courage, and soon the heavy beam, lifted like a feather by two hundred vigorous arms, was driven furiously against the great door which they had already endeavoured in vain to loosen. Seen thus in the dim light cast over the Place by the scattered torches of the truands, the vast beam borne along by that crowd of men and pointed against the church looked like some miraculous animal with innumerable legs charging head foremost at the stone giantess.

As the beam struck the half-metal door it droned like an enormous drum. The door did not give, but the Cathedral shook from top to bottom, and rumbling echoes woke in its deepest depths. At the same moment a shower of great stones began to fall from the upper part of the facade on to the assailants.

“Diable!” cried Jehan, “are the towers shaking down their balustrades upon us?”

But the impulse had been given. The King of Tunis stuck to his assertion that it was the Bishop acting on the defensive, and they only battered the door the more furiously for the stones that fractured the skulls right and left.

It was certainly curious that these stones fell one by one, but they followed quickly on one another. The Argotiers always felt two of them at once—one against their legs, the other on their heads. There were few that missed their mark, and already a heap of dead and wounded, bleeding and panting, lay thick under the feet of the assailants, who, now grown furious, renewed their numbers every moment. The long beam continued to batter the door at regular intervals like the strokes of a bell, the stones to rain down, and the door to groan.

The reader will doubtless have guessed ere this that the unexpected resistance which so exasperated the Vagabonds proceeded from Quasimodo.

Accident had unfortunately favoured the devoted hunchback. When he had descended to the platform between the towers, his ideas were in a state of chaos. He had run to and fro along the gallery for some minutes like one demented, looking down upon the compact mass of the beggars ready to rush the church, and calling upon God or the devil to save the gipsy girl. He thought of ascending the southern steeple and sounding the tocsin, but before he could have got the bell in motion, before the loud voice of Marie could have sent forth a single stroke, there would have been time to burst in the door ten times over. This was the instant at which the Vagabonds advanced with their lock-breaking instruments. What was to be done?

Suddenly he recollected that masons had been at work all day repairing the wall, the wood-work, and the roofing of the southern tower. This was a flash of light to him. The wall was of stone, the roofing of lead, the rafters of wood, and so enormous and close-packed that it was called the forest.

Quasimodo flew to this tower. The lower chambers in effect were full of building materials—piles of stone blocks, sheets of lead in rolls, bundles of laths, strong beams already shaped by the saw, several rubbish heaps—a complete arsenal.

Time pressed—the levers and hammers were at work below. With a strength multiplied tenfold by the consciousness of danger, he lifted an end of one of the beams—the longest and heaviest of all. He managed to push it through one of the loopholes; then, laying hold of it again outside the tower, he pushed it over the outer corner of the balustrade surrounding the platform and let it drop into the abyss below. In this fall of a hundred and sixty feet the enormous beam —grazing the wall and breaking the sculptured