Shaking Bell Towers of Notre Dame and the Deluge of Boiling Lead . . . ‘Built by a Magician’ claims the Duc d’Égypte . . .

All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery, higher than the central Rose Window, there was a great flame rising between the two towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a vast, disordered, and furious flame, a tongue of which was borne into the smoke by the wind, from time to time. 

Below that fire, below the gloomy balustrade with its trefoils showing darkly against its glare, two spouts with monster throats were vomiting forth unceasingly that burning rain, whose silvery stream stood out against the shadows of the lower façade. As they approached the earth, these two jets of liquid lead spread out in sheaves, like water springing from the thousand holes of a watering-pot. Above the flame, the enormous towers, two sides of each of which were visible in sharp outline, the one wholly black, the other wholly red, seemed still more vast with all the immensity of the shadow which they cast even to the sky.

Their innumerable sculptures of demons and dragons assumed a lugubrious aspect. The restless light of the flame made them move to the eye. There were griffins which had the air of laughing, gargoyles which one fancied one heard yelping, salamanders which puffed at the fire, tarasques* which sneezed in the smoke. And among the monsters thus roused from their sleep of stone by this flame, by this noise, there was one who walked about, and who was seen, from time to time, to pass across the glowing face of the pile, like a bat in front of a candle.

Without doubt, this strange beacon light would awaken far away, the woodcutter of the hills of Bicêtre, terrified to behold the gigantic shadow of the towers of Notre-Dame quivering over his heaths.

The Duke of Egypt, seated on a stone post, contemplated the phantasmagorical bonfire, glowing at a height of two hundred feet in the air, with religious terror. Clopin Trouillefou bit his huge fists with rage.

    “Impossible to get in!” he muttered between his teeth.
    “An old, enchanted church!” grumbled the aged Bohemian, Mathias Hungadi Spicali.
    “By the Pope’s whiskers!” went on a sham soldier, who had once been in service, “here are church gutters spitting melted lead at you better than the machicolations of Lectoure.”
     “Do you see that demon passing and repassing in front of the fire?” exclaimed the Duke of Egypt.
     “Pardieu, ’tis that damned bellringer, ’tis Quasimodo,” said Clopin.
     
“Is there, then, no way of forcing this door,” exclaimed the King of Thunes, stamping his foot.
      The Duke of Egypt pointed sadly to the two streams of boiling lead which did not cease to streak the black facade, like two long distaffs of phosphorus.
     “Churches have been known to defend themselves thus all by themselves,” he remarked with a sigh. “Saint-Sophia at Constantinople, forty years ago, hurled to the earth three times in succession, the crescent of Mahom**, by shaking her domes, which are her heads. Guillaume de Paris, who built this one was a magician.***”

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

by Victor Hugo (1831)

*     The representation of a monstrous animal recognised in Tarascon and other French towns.

**   The Mohammedans.

*** Guillaume de Piedoue was the third Mayor of Paris whose family financed the second part of the construction of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral between 1250 and 1345.