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Updated: June 14, 2025
Know you not that yon iron bar is a swift conductor? Desist." "I will simply close the shutters, then, and call my boy to bring me a wooden bar. Pray, touch the bell-pull there. "Are you frantic? That bell-wire might blast you. Never touch bell-wire in a thunder-storm, nor ring a bell of any sort." "Nor those in belfries? Pray, will you tell me where and how one may be safe in a time like this?
"He changes the way he builds his house, does he not?" said the brown one. "So my family say," said the other. "They say he has changed of late." "They say he takes much to cities?" the brown one said. "My cousin who lives in belfries tells me so," said the black one. "He says he is much in cities." "And there he grows lean?" said the brown one. "Yes, he grows lean."
The darkened dwelling was wrapped in silence, broken only by the bells, by the chanting of the offices heard through the windows of the church, by the call of the jackdaws nesting in the belfries.
"And the two belfries fling up their spires; the old one carved in soft limestone, imbricated with scales, rising in one bold flight to end in a point, and send up a vapour of prayer among the clouds; the new one, pierced like lace, chiselled like a jewel, wreathed with foliage and crockets of vine, rises with coquettish dalliance, trying to make up for lack of the inspired flight and humble entreaty of its senior by babbling prayer and ingratiating smiles; to persuade the Father by childlike lisping.
This is a great moment not only for the spectator but for all Florence, for in myriad rooms mothers have been waiting, with their babies on their knees, for the first clang of the belfries, because if a child's eyes are washed then it is unlikely ever to have weak sight, while if a baby takes its first steps to this accompaniment its legs will not be bowed.
Behind us lay Rouen, the city of churches, with its Gothic belfries, sculptured like ivory trinkets; before us Saint Sever, the manufacturing suburb, whose thousands of smoking chimneys rise amid the expanse of sky, opposite the thousand sacred steeples of the old city.
The yard clock was striking the hour of ten; so was the big bell in the palace bell-tower; and, farther off, the belfries of the town. About the stable all else was silent but the stamping of stalled horses and the rattle of halters.
The monotonous chanting of the celebrants, the responses of the people to the priest, sometimes inarticulate, sometimes thunderous, the harmonious trembling of the painted windows, the organ, bursting forth like a hundred trumpets, the three belfries, humming like hives of huge bees, that whole orchestra on which bounded a gigantic scale, ascending, descending incessantly from the voice of a throng to that of one bell, dulled her memory, her imagination, her grief.
This forest of salmon-colored masts, with their maze of cordage and their yellowish-brown sails drying in the sun, these tarred sterns with apple-green decks, these lateen-yards threatening the windows of the neighboring houses, these derricks standing under plank roofs shaped like pagodas, these tackles lifting heavy packages out of vessels and landing them in houses, these bridges opening to give passage to vessels, these clumps of trees, these gables overtopped here and there by spires and belfries; all this bathed in smoke, traversed by sunlight and here and there returning a glitter of polished metal, the far-off distance blue and misty, and the foreground full of vigorous color, produced effects of the most brilliant and piquant novelty.
His loud, lusty lungs are two belfries, full of all manner of chimes; but you only hear his deepest bray, in the height of some tempest like the great bell of St. Paul's, which only sounds when the King or the Devil is dead.
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