raised, showing
his severe and almost august brow to the dumbfounded jeerers.

Both were in their quarter like "the poets" of whom Regnier speaks,--

"All sorts of persons run after poets,
As warblers fly shrieking after owls."

Sometimes a mischievous child risked his skin and bones for the
ineffable pleasure of driving a pin into Quasimodo's hump. Again, a
young girl, more bold and saucy than was fitting, brushed the priest's
black robe, singing in his face the sardonic ditty, "niche, niche, the
devil is caught." Sometimes a group of squalid old crones, squatting in
a file under the shadow of the steps to a porch, scolded noisily as the
archdeacon and the bellringer passed, and tossed them this encouraging
welcome, with a curse: "Hum! there's a fellow whose soul is made like
the other one's body!" Or a band of schoolboys and street urchins,
playing hop-scotch, rose in a body and saluted him classically, with
some cry in Latin: "_Eia! eia! Claudius cum claudo_!"

But the insult generally passed unnoticed both by the priest and the
bellringer. Quasimodo was too deaf to hear all these gracious things,
and Claude was too dreamy.

BOOK FIFTH.

CHAPTER I. _ABBAS BEATI MARTINI_.

Dom Claude's fame had spread far and wide. It procured for him, at about
the epoch when he refused to see Madame de Beaujeu, a visit which he
long remembered.

It was in the evening. He had just retired, after the office, to
his canon's cell in the cloister of Notre-Dame. This cell, with the
exception, possibly, of some glass phials, relegated to a corner, and
filled with a decidedly equivocal powder, which strongly resembled
the alchemist's "powder of projection," presented nothing strange or
mysterious. There were, indeed, here and there, some inscriptions on
the walls, but they were pure sentences of learning and piety, extracted
from good authors. The archdeacon had just seated himself, by the
light of a three-jetted copper lamp, before a vast coffer crammed with
manuscripts. He had rested his elbow upon the open volume of _Honorius
d'Autun_, _De predestinatione et libero arbitrio_, and he was turning
over, in deep meditation, the leaves of a printed folio which he had
just brought, the sole product of the press which his cell contained. In
the midst of his revery there came a knock at his door. "Who's there?"
cried the learned man, in the gracious tone of a famished dog, disturbed
over his bone.

A vo