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NOTRE DAME DE PARIS
99
"What is your name?" Esmeralda asked, raising herself upright upon the officer's saddle; "I will remember it and you as long as I live."
"Captain Phoebus," he said, answering her fond glance with one of warm admiration.
"Thank you a thousand times," she murmured. Then she slipped down like a spent arrow falling to earth and vanished in a neighboring alley.
The sublime edifice of Notre Dame de Paris, that has looked down upon centuries of violence with impartial grandeur, never witnessed, even during the devastating revolutions, a more brutal sight than the punishment given to the bell-ringer for his attempted abduction. It occurred directly in front of the majestic cathedral. On a cube of masonry about six feet high, and hollow within for the accommodation of rude machinery, he was bound in a kneeling position, with his hands behind his back, to a horizontal wheel, so that his face could be turned to all quarters by a capstan concealed within the structure.
He was there flogged on his bare hump, in the sight of a vast multitude. The torment of the unfortunate man, writhing in his bonds, was a hideous sight, and became a sickening one when the blood began to flow, but the crowd only jeered and exchanged amusing comments on his appearance. After the whipping, he was subjected to every conceivable insult from those near him, and stoned by those far enough away not to be within reach of his vision. "Drink," said a spectator, flinging a broken jug into the deformed man's face — his parched tongue was now hanging out — but this act of inhumanity brought swift reaction when a merciful woman dared mount the steps and go to his aid. She approached him with splendid indifference to danger of injury, detached a gourd from her girdle and pressed the mouth of it to the famished lips of the sufferer. He looked up in amazement and tried, in mute gratitude, to kiss her hand. The only one who had dared to help him was Esmeralda.
The coarse brutality of that age, contrasting somewhat with the refined
CLAUDE FROLLO CAUSES ESMERALDA S ARREST