At length the priest, foaming with impotent rage and terror, felt that all was unavailing, but gathered what strength still remained to him for one final effort. He drew himself up by the gutter, thrust himself out from the wall by both knees, dug his hands in a cleft of the stone-work, and managed to scramble up about one foot higher; but the force he was obliged to use made the leaden beak that supported him bend suddenly downward, and the strain rent his cassock through. Then, finding everything giving way under him, having only his benumbed and powerless hands by which to cling to anything, the wretched man closed his eyes, loosened his hold, and dropped.

Quasimodo watched him falling. A fall from such a height is rarely straight. The priest launched into space, fell at first head downward and his arms outstretched, then turned over on himself several times. The wind drove him against the roof of a house, where the unhappy man got his first crashing shock. He was not dead, however, and the hunchback saw him grasp at the gable to save himself; but the slope was too sheer, his strength was exhausted: he slid rapidly down the roof, like a loosened tile, and rebounded on to the pavement. There he lay motionless at last.

Quasimodo returned his gaze to the gipsy girl, whose body, dangling in its white robe from the gibbet, he beheld from afar quivering in the last agonies of death; then he let it drop once more on the Archdeacon, lying in a shapeless heap at the foot of the tower, and with a sigh that heaved his deep chest, he murmured: “Oh! all that I have ever loved!”