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Updated: June 16, 2025
To this spot we returned again and again, fascinated as much, perhaps, by the mystery in which it was enveloped, as by the majestic outline of this unknown mountain, to which, for want of a better, we gave the name of Notre Dame. For the old bellringer was not alone in his ignorance. Ask whom we would, we invariably received the same vague reply it was a mountain "on the Italian side."
But when the bellringer, dishevelled and panting, had deposited her in the cell of refuge, when she felt his huge hands gently detaching the cord which bruised her arms, she felt that sort of shock which awakens with a start the passengers of a vessel which runs aground in the middle of a dark night. Her thoughts awoke also, and returned to her one by one.
"Which mountain, Signora?" "That one yonder, like a cathedral front with two towers." The old bellringer shaded his eyes with one trembling hand, and peered down the valley. "Eh," he said, "it is some mountain on the Italian side." "But what is it called?" "Eh," he repeated, with a puzzled look, "who knows? I don't know that I ever noticed it before."
'Here, I've got the key in my pocket, says he, and with that he opened the door, the bell clang, clang, clanging from the tower all the time like as if the bellringer was drunk and had got a wager on to get more beats out of the bell in half an hour than the next man.
Some further consultation was now held among the party as to the propriety of leaving the prisoner in this chamber under the guard of the arquebusiers, but it was at last decided against doing so, and the old bellringer being called upon for the keys of the dungeon beneath, he speedily produced them.
He had become a few years previously the bellringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to his father by adoption, Claude Frollo, who had become archdeacon of Josas, thanks to his suzerain, Messire Louis de Beaumont, who had become Bishop of Paris, at the death of Guillaume Chartier in 1472, thanks to his patron, Olivier Le Daim, barber to Louis XI., king by the grace of God.
He was appointed "Bellringer to the World," and wrote every year a short dissertation on the owl, but by this means people did not become any wiser than they had been before. It was just confirmation-day.
They had to knock for some time against the stout oak door before any notice was taken of the summons. At length an old man, who acted as bellringer, thrust his head out of one of the narrow pointed windows above, and demanded their business.
He found himself in the gallery with the formidable bellringer, alone, separated from his companions by a vertical wall eighty feet high. While Quasimodo was dealing with the ladder, the scholar had run to the postern which he believed to be open. It was not. The deaf man had closed it behind him when he entered the gallery.
"Rider on a broom handle!" cried another. "What a fine tragic grimace," howled a third, "and who would make him Pope of the Fools if to-day were yesterday?" "'Tis well," struck in an old woman. "This is the grimace of the pillory. When shall we have that of the gibbet?" "When will you be coiffed with your big bell a hundred feet under ground, cursed bellringer?"
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